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Some vague ideas percolated through my mind earlier when I should have been concentrating on not being run over.

I was thinking about the whole Draka conceit of a "Counter-America" from the start (1770s) and connecting it with the idea of a USA living alongside a CSA of considerable if not equal power, as in Turtledove et al. I started wondering how you could combine these so that we have a separate USA and CSA - not using those names of course - from the beginning (1770s/80s).

Here were my two ideas:

1) South remains British and revolts later. One WI that occasionally pops up is the idea of the British doing better in the southern campaigns of the ARW and end up keeping the Carolinas, Georgia etc after the war (though you'd be pushing it to include places like Virginia). Say this happens, we have say 25 years of a British South alongside a United States analogue in the north, then the south eventually rebels, perhaps taking advantage of British defeats in the alt-French Revolutionary Wars. The south never joins the USA-analogue for various reasons - they were apart for too long, without so many Jeffersonian voices the USA-analogue is too federalist for their tastes, slavery, etc. - and instead becomes an independent confederacy and rival to the USA-analogue.

2) Articles of Confederation/Constitutional Convention fail, but then. Another common WI is 'what if the Articles of Confederation fail?' and most seem to interpret it as each state going its separate way (except perhaps New England). But what if the Convention fails, but then they call another one say 10 years later, excluding the states most opposed to federalism (ie the south) and we end up with a Northern United States and then independent southern colonies vaguely tied to it. Eventually the southern states drift apart from this ever-closer-union and end up banding together in a looser way for economic reasons.

Thoughts?
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