WI: Complete and total British non-interference in the ACW

Saphroneth

Banned
Total, no-tricks non-interference, by either the governments or by private citizens.

Non-interference here means no selling of weapons, ships, powder or generally anything whatsoever that might be counted as blockade contraband... to either power.

That is, that a law ("Neutrality Act 1861"?) makes it illegal to sell any such to either power in the midst of a civil war.

Trade in things like cotton or grain continues as possible.


Obviously this would disadvantage the Union and the Confederacy both (and the British, who aren't getting all the money!).

Quite apart from anything else there's a lot of Enfield rifles which aren't being sold to either side, resulting in a deficit of 341,000 rifles for the Union and some hundred thousand plus for the Confederacy...


The impression I get is that the war has a spot of intensity at the start, then fades rapidly as ready stockpiles of weapons and powder are used up and there's no quick replacements. Both Union and Confederacy are armed with a hodge-podge of weapons to an even greater extent than historically, some of the slow-to-fulfil rifle manufacturers probably get quite badly shouted at, and it takes an extra year or two for things to work up to OTL potency.
 

TFSmith121

Banned
do the British close Nassau, Bermuda, etc

Do the British close Nassau, Bermuda, etc to rebel blockade runners?

Best,
 

TFSmith121

Banned
Then the likely course of the conflict

Yes. And also to Union blockade ships.

Then the likely course of the conflict is unaltered; the U.S. had more than a half million individual weapons in storage in the national arsenals in 1861, of which roughly one-fifth were captured by the rebels in the seceding states. Note these numbers are weapons in storage, not in the hands of troops (so add another ~15,000 for the regulars, plus thousands more for those in state militia hands, the Navy, Marines, and Revenue Service). An estimate of 500,000 - which matches the initial 1861 call for long service USVs - seems reasonable.

Springfield Armory manufactured more than 100,000 M1861s in the first 15 months of the war, another ~40,000 new weapons manufactured in the U.S. by civilian firms were purchased by Army Ordnance, and both the U.S. Government and the states purchased arms extensively on the Continent, so at least the historical purchases (in the hundreds of thousands) of Austrian, French, German, and Belgian designs would be available, along with whatever else is necessary, at which point the British arms merchants see money slipping through their fingers and presumably start asking Parliament why...

Best,
 

Saphroneth

Banned
Then the likely course of the conflict is unaltered; the U.S. had more than a half million individual weapons in storage in the national arsenals in 1861, of which roughly one-fifth were captured by the rebels in the seceding states. Note these numbers are weapons in storage, not in the hands of troops (so add another ~15,000 for the regulars, plus thousands more for those in state militia hands, the Navy, Marines, and Revenue Service). An estimate of 500,000 - which matches the initial 1861 call for long service USVs - seems reasonable.

Springfield Armory manufactured more than 100,000 M1861s in the first 15 months of the war, another ~40,000 new weapons manufactured in the U.S. by civilian firms were purchased by Army Ordnance, and both the U.S. Government and the states purchased arms extensively on the Continent, so at least the historical purchases (in the hundreds of thousands) of Austrian, French, German, and Belgian designs would be available, along with whatever else is necessary, at which point the British arms merchants see money slipping through their fingers and presumably start asking Parliament why...

Best,

Care to break down the types of those weapons, by the way? My understanding is that most of them are smoothbores, though admittedly at usual ACW firefight range the distinction is small.

More to the point, though, it'll take a while for the Union to manufacture enough rifles (of good quality) to match the 430,000 Enfields, and for the Confederacy (Harper's Ferry, for example) to manufacture enough to match their 100,000 or so historical imports.

My position on the matter of rifles and other small arms is that a deduction of 430,000 good quality rifles from the Union and 100,000 from the Confederacy is going to impair things somewhat.



That does also raise another issue, though. The issue of powder and priming caps.
The Union's extant muskets are pretty much all percussion weapons, and the Union imported tens of millions of percussion caps from the UK as well as a lot of powder.
I don't have numbers for the Confederacy, but I assume they did the same for at least millions of percussion caps and a fair portion of their own powder.


As to the issue of British arms merchants - well, of course they would. This WI is to address the issue of what if the British were completely neutral and didn't sell things to either side - OTL they were neutral and sold things to both sides.
It's intended to look at the extent of the imports both sides made from Britain. Would it be possible to look at numbers there?

I could see several outcomes of the Total British Neutrality. What I couldn't see is the Union (or Confederacy) reaching their historical level of capability as fast as historically.
I could see the Union doing not as well but the CSA doing more not as well, or vice versa (for example the Confederacy has more domestic saltpetre production) or everything going more or less as OTL but with a lag of a couple of years.
 
The USA has significant industrial capacity in 1861, the CSA has almost none. The USA can use its capacity to both build new machines/factories to make more war goods, and manufacture those goods simultaneously. The CSA at best can do one or the other, and that at a very low level. The USA has specie, the CSA has almost none. Assuming the Bahamas and Bermuda are closed to blockade runners (who OTL tended to concentrate on luxury goods), goods for the CSA have to come direct from Europe and these ships, unlike shorter range blockade runners, won't be able to outrun Union blockaders. The UK has access to a lot of capital it can loan to the CSA in exchange for cotton bonds or whatever, loss of this will hurt individuals not the UK economy as a whole. Those European countries that might want to advance credit to sell goods don't have as much capital they can put at high risk like that. Oh, and exactly whose ships are going to carry these goods?

There is much more on this line. While both sides suffer from complete British "embargo", the Union is in better shape on day one to deal with this, and as time goes on will increase it's lead over the CSA.
 

Saphroneth

Banned
As far as I can see there's several discrete categories.



Shipping through the blockade - OTL this is not particularly difficult for the first year or so (Milne tested the historical blockade by lying off some ports and making smoke, and on some occasions the Union did not notice), after that it rapidly becomes harder as the blockade strengthens.
OTL the blockade made regular use of Bermuda and other such neutral bases as coaling ports, and here they don't have access to them so it is possible that the blockade will be more porous.

Conclusion: the Confederacy can buy weapons from the rest of Europe as much as the Union can, but has less money to do it with - though they have the money to buy things with the money they haven't spent TTL on the Enfields. Not a significant change in relative effectiveness - 80,000 less high quality Confed weapons, 436,000 less Union - but likely to mean it takes longer to build up the stand of good weapons required for major actions.


Powder - OTL the Union purchased a lot from Britain but rapidly made moves to become independent in powder supply, which took a couple of years. The Confederacy did source some powder from overseas, but also took cave deposits and locally created powder beds (and these work better in the warmer Southern climates).

Conclusion: This one, I think, harms the Union more. The Confederacy is better placed to source powder independently, and loses much less from total British non-intercourse than the Union does.


Percussion caps - the Union purchased at least 50 million percussion caps, I don't know how many the Confederacy did.

Tentative conclusion: It must be possible for the Confederacy to source percussion caps somewhere, but I'm not sure what it was if it was overseas. If it was domestic, then they and the Union can both presumably do this; if they imported the lot from Britain early in the war, they're comprehensively f*cked. We would need to know relative import numbers and relative production numbers to work out the totals.


Ships - the Union does not seem to have purchased many if any ships. The Confederacy did.

Conclusion: No ships aids the Union a good deal.


Machinery - I have no idea. But if this machinery includes rifle-manufacture machine tools then it makes things even worse on the weapons front.


Men - 54,000 British born men fought in the Union armies, I don't have numbers for the Confederacy.


These seem to be the main areas of question.
Other areas which might have caused a change:



1) Uniforms.
2) Iron and coal.
3) Artillery.
...anything else?

The conclusion I come to is that it's hard to find anything the Confederacy imported specifically from Britain which would completely cripple them early in the war to lack, but there's a couple of things which the Union imported specifically from Britain which it would take them time to make good the lack of.
There's one of three theoretical results.



1) The Union is weakened enough relative to the Confederacy that the Confederacy can do what they hoped for - hold out long enough to earn a "win".
2) The Confederacy is weakened enough relative to the Union that the Union can defeat the Confederacy's field armies earlier.
3) The two nations are weakened such that it takes them longer to get to grips with one another, but the war goes more or less the same way once it gets going.



I would expect (1) to be the case if - to straw-man - the Union was unable to get enough domestic powder for effective use relative to the Confederacy.
I would expect (2) to be the case if (straw-man) the Confederacy sourced all their artillery from Britain.
I would expect (3) to be the case barring any unexpected revelations that I'm not currently aware of.

I look forward to some hard numbers!


Oh, and a minor correction Sloreck - AFAIK the Confederacy had little industry outside some specific locations, mostly in Virginia. But they do have some local industrial capacity, like Tredegar.
 
I agree there was Tredegar - and not much else. OTL the CSA could produce rails for RRs, iron armor, or cannon but not enough of all three at once. They were really in a zero sum game. Outside of Tredegar and a few other places all industry was very small "cottage" industry. To the extent there were precision instruments in 1860, those manufactured in North America were made in the north. The south had no pharmaceutical industry, no manufacture of surgical instruments. On and on. Even in simple things the south came up short - remember Gettysburg was fought in part because the ANV thought there was a depot full of shoes there, and from early on the armies of the Confederacy relied on captured supplies including uniforms and blankets.

The Civil War was an industrial war and the south had next to no industry to sustain itself. It imported manufactured products from the north and from overseas - primarily the UK. Cut those two sources off, and the result is inevitable. That's the short answer.
 

Saphroneth

Banned
I agree there was Tredegar - and not much else. OTL the CSA could produce rails for RRs, iron armor, or cannon but not enough of all three at once. They were really in a zero sum game. Outside of Tredegar and a few other places all industry was very small "cottage" industry. To the extent there were precision instruments in 1860, those manufactured in North America were made in the north. The south had no pharmaceutical industry, no manufacture of surgical instruments. On and on. Even in simple things the south came up short - remember Gettysburg was fought in part because the ANV thought there was a depot full of shoes there, and from early on the armies of the Confederacy relied on captured supplies including uniforms and blankets.

The Civil War was an industrial war and the south had next to no industry to sustain itself. It imported manufactured products from the north and from overseas - primarily the UK. Cut those two sources off, and the result is inevitable. That's the short answer.
Right, but I'd really like to see the numbers and stuff. You know, Union muskets built/on hand/imported, Confederate muskets built/on hand/imported...


...I suppose part of my confusion comes from the Union blockade. I mean, either it was effective (in which case the Confederacy mostly supplied itself) or it wasn't.
 
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