WI: Confederate-Spanish War

Say the South wins the US Civil War and the Union leaves it alone and the US and the CS are two separate countries , The Confederacy builds up its military and wants Cuba, Do you think we would have a Spanish-American War with the Confederacy instead of the Union ?
 
Say the South wins the US Civil War and the Union leaves it alone and the US and the CS are two separate countries , The Confederacy builds up its military and wants Cuba, Do you think we would have a Spanish-American War with the Confederacy instead of the Union ?

Possibly. Does the Confederacy stand a chance? No.
 
Say the South wins the US Civil War and the Union leaves it alone and the US and the CS are two separate countries , The Confederacy builds up its military and wants Cuba, Do you think we would have a Spanish-American War with the Confederacy instead of the Union ?

I doubt it. I doubt the Confederacy would have as intense overseas ambitions as the United States in OTL during the 1890's. Support for this war would be limited in the CSA, as it may not reap many tangible benefits for the less industrial nation. Also, it depends on the leadership of the time. OTL having McKinley as president made the war much more likely, and it DID happen.
 
There would be a Spanish-Confederate War only if the hotheaded fire-eaters remain in charge of the CSA, which by the 1890s is doubtful. Their only real chance is during the 1870s, when Spain was fighting both the first Cuban war of independence and the last of the Carlist civil wars at home -- and the CSA in this decade will be too busy worrying about Union revanchism, consolidating its independence, and quashing slave revolts to consider territorial expansion.
 
Why would the US want to help the CSA build up its military? Even if its not hostile, that's unusually friendly.

Both see Cuba as symbolic? Or the US establishes a foothold off the continent after the defeat, to win back morality. Just a thought.
 
Both see Cuba as symbolic? Or the US establishes a foothold off the continent after the defeat, to win back morality. Just a thought.

If the US has a problem with Spanish controlled Cuba, it's much more likely to go after it itself than help the CSA acquire it.

Even if relations are better than hostile, why would the USA want a stronger CSA?
 

NothingNow

Banned
Might want to lay off the Crack-pipe there Lammers. These are Americans we're discussing. Seeing the USA and CSA that close ever is gonna require several very impossible things to happen.


Say the South wins the US Civil War and the Union leaves it alone and the US and the CS are two separate countries , The Confederacy builds up its military and wants Cuba, Do you think we would have a Spanish-American War with the Confederacy instead of the Union ?

We've been over this before. Several Times (this is a particularly fun one.) Any attempt by the CSA would end hilariously.

Especially since the CSA would not be able to cross the Florida strait with even a modicium of strength. Oh, and it won't have any Allies on the Island, since the Nationalists, like OTL's Mambises are most likely staunch Abolitionists.
 
Not sure why the CSA would want Cuba. If I recall the reason why Southerners demanded the US go to war for Cuba in the first place was because they wanted another slave state to balance out the Northern ones.

Once the CSA is independent the rationale for Cuba goes away. Even if they really, really wanted to expand slavery elsewhere there are better people to pick on, e.g. any one of the Latin American nations, Haiti etc.

Would be interesting though if a CSA invasion triggered off some European intervention. How would the US take this violation of the Monroe Doctrine?
 
The CSA's ability to invade Cuba simply does not exist. An independent CSA, already a dubious proposition, has limited industrial resources and a set of feuding and powerful state governments. Hard to put together the resources for a fleet out of that. I mean, look at the battles: the battle between the USS Monitor and the Virginia is a fight between a sizable chunk of the South's naval resources, and a special USN project specifically to defeat that one ship - while still maintaing a blockade. Similar with the fact that the USN could have several ships like the USS Kearsarge combing the seas for the Alabama.

Secondly, populations size. When one third of your population are chattel slaves who know they missed being free by which ever razor thin margin the PoD is, you keep your bayonets at home. Doubly so when you consider that aside from white supremacy and chattel slavery, keeping the lower orders in their place is a big part of the CSA's secession (Seriously, as should be required reading on these boards, read the bl**dy Cornerstone Speech). You've got a fair number of people through the 1870 and 1880s, in this alternate South, getting a lot poorer than their counterparts in the North, because all myth-making aside, the CSA would have been a rigidly hierarchal society with most means of both agricultural and urban production firmly in the hands of a planter elite.

The TL:DR here is it takes a lot for a hierarchical slave society (which the ante-bellum South most certainly was) to sustain a large military force in the field. Look at the South's travails during the war. It's even harder for them to maintain a naval fleet. You need both to conquer Cuba, especially when about the one thing the Spanish and the Cuban Nationalists agree on is that your slave-driving assholes.
 

Anaxagoras

Banned
Not sure why the CSA would want Cuba. If I recall the reason why Southerners demanded the US go to war for Cuba in the first place was because they wanted another slave state to balance out the Northern ones.

Once the CSA is independent the rationale for Cuba goes away.

It takes a long, long time for deeply entrenched ideological ideas to adjust to new realities.
 

frlmerrin

Banned
Paid for how?

Export earnings, banking and finance, minerals, fishing, mercantile marine, slave based industry. All those things that were benef its for the OTL USA post-war are benefits for the CSA in this scenario with very few of the deficits. The CSA possibly even the rumpest CSA is going to be filthy rice ten years after the ACW here. Wealth distribution will alas leave something to be desired.
 
If they fight, they will lose. In my Communist CSA TL, I use this is a major plot detail - Confederate troops are butchered on the beaches or picked off one by one in guerrilla warfare. The CSA gets let off easy by owing reparations to Spain, but the blow discredits the Confederate government in the eyes of many poor whites, who see it as poor men dying for a rich mans war.
 
Might want to lay off the Crack-pipe there Lammers. These are Americans we're discussing. Seeing the USA and CSA that close ever is gonna require several very impossible things to happen.

We've been over this before. Several Times (this is a particularly fun one.) Any attempt by the CSA would end hilariously.

Especially since the CSA would not be able to cross the Florida strait with even a modicium of strength. Oh, and it won't have any Allies on the Island, since the Nationalists, like OTL's Mambises are most likely staunch Abolitionists.

Of course anything is possible. Doesn't matter if we've been over this before, new people ask new questions and then there are other's that have nothing to offer but their repeated old tripe.
 
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