WI: Entente CSA

Yes, US can win by attrition, if it enters war in 1914, by 1917-1918, but they need to secure Canada until 1915 Christmas, or they are screwed.
 
I won't think so. CSA would have same army, although with 35-39.000.000 of population only. And don't forget about Canada. 2-front war is quite risky

How on Earth can that be true?

In any scenario,t he USA is going to be larger, richer, better organized, more modern and better positioned logistically. How is a slave owning, ramshackle CSA going to compete in modern industrial warfare with a giant like the Union?
 
How on Earth can that be true?

In any scenario,t he USA is going to be larger, richer, better organized, more modern and better positioned logistically. How is a slave owning, ramshackle CSA going to compete in modern industrial warfare with a giant like the Union?
They can make push into Maryland, if they're declared war first, as preemptive strike, in order to reach Phily...
 
Less than 20 years after the war? There is no way the CSA could amend their constitution that soon. Way too many veterans still around. Way too many people asking, 'What did my son/husband/father/brother die for?' Way too much capital tied up in slaves.

Amen. The failure of Reconstruction, the Terror, the economics of sharecropping and prison labor were part and parcel of the Souths business leadership being unable to move away from the slave or plantation model. The same uber wealthy who led the South into the disaster of Secession, kept the South crippled in a attempt to preserve a business model that was obsolete, and had limited success in the first place. Were the Confederacy to achieve success in Secession its problematic that the business leaders at the top could move away from their beloved ideal. For the top 1% its a really seductive vision. OTL it took 80+ years to break away from it.
 
They can make push into Maryland, if they're declared war first, as preemptive strike, in order to reach Phily...

I like TL-191. I really do, I own all the books, have read them several times. But they aren't very plausible, for a few reason. The main problem is that Turtledove wanted his Great War to be patterned off WW1, including the exact same length of time, regardless of in-universe factors. This is good for his narrative (not least that each year could be one book, or so) but bad for actual Alternate History.

The Union is going to have very sizable institutional advantages, and the CSA very severe disadvantages, that are never really addressed in the book. I mean,t he CSA fights off a huge internal revolt AND holds off the Union at the same time? Crazy.

In any reasonable TL, the Union is probably going to own much of the CSA anyway, due to economic advantages. The South is going to be a very poor, backward nation due to outdated means of production, lack of immigration, a desolate educational system and a ramshackle central government. In a war that resembles anything like WW1, industrial output and manpower are key and the Union will have that in spades. Canada would fall in months, not years. Turtledove, somehow, has Canada home to trench warfare? Have you seen Canada? It is gigantic and barely populated. The Union would crash over it like a tidal wave. The CSA too, has a vast and indefeasible border with the Union, and a interior riddled with people who would probably jump at the chance to join the North (both white and black).
 
I like TL-191. I really do, I own all the books, have read them several times. But they aren't very plausible, for a few reason. The main problem is that Turtledove wanted his Great War to be patterned off WW1, including the exact same length of time, regardless of in-universe factors. This is good for his narrative (not least that each year could be one book, or so) but bad for actual Alternate History.

The Union is going to have very sizable institutional advantages, and the CSA very severe disadvantages, that are never really addressed in the book. I mean,t he CSA fights off a huge internal revolt AND holds off the Union at the same time? Crazy.

In any reasonable TL, the Union is probably going to own much of the CSA anyway, due to economic advantages. The South is going to be a very poor, backward nation due to outdated means of production, lack of immigration, a desolate educational system and a ramshackle central government. In a war that resembles anything like WW1, industrial output and manpower are key and the Union will have that in spades. Canada would fall in months, not years. Turtledove, somehow, has Canada home to trench warfare? Have you seen Canada? It is gigantic and barely populated. The Union would crash over it like a tidal wave. The CSA too, has a vast and indefeasible border with the Union, and a interior riddled with people who would probably jump at the chance to join the North (both white and black).
I have a question then. Theoretically, South can industrialise rapidly between 1862 and 1914?
 
Confederacy abolished slavery in 1881.

There is quite literally no possible way this would happen. Some radical liberal politican could TRY, but I have no doubt it would end with him literally being murdered in the Confederate Senate or some such by a plantation owner. I doubt you'd see slavery being abolished by 1901, though that is a bit more likely to be honest.
 
Canada would fall in months, not years. Turtledove, somehow, has Canada home to trench warfare? Have you seen Canada? It is gigantic and barely populated. The Union would crash over it like a tidal wave. T

According to popular history every general who has invaded Canada was incompetent except for Wolfe who got killed. Canada sometime during the 1920s once motor transport is sufficiently available is very vulnerable to US invasion, though even there the possibility of holding out for years given OTL force proportions exists. Until armies have a means of advancing beyond the railhead and beachheads supported by motive means superior to the horse and wagon invading Canada is going to be a real struggle. Further but the actual viable invasion routes into Canada are far more restricted than most folks seem to realise, hence trench warfare in those narrow corridors becomes highly likely.

Far more likely than Britain and the Confederacy being friends. Possible allies of convenience in a Trent War scenario but even that would be politically fraught.

Given the urge to have access to British and French Empire markets an Entente leaning USA (rather like OTL) is a distinct possibility and given the likelihood that anything a surviving Confederate elite would do is going to be informed by opposing the "Damn Yankees" a CP leaning Confederacy is possible. Also note the expansionist fever dream that was Southern politics both ante and post bellum. That track record of trying to expand into what for a long while was regarded as a British sphere (Latin America and the Caribbean) is not likely to do other but sour relations.

All of this of course assumes that the Confederates have not already been humiliated in the Spanish-Confederate War of ITL or similar.

edit: the French escaped
 
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I have a question then. Theoretically, South can industrialise rapidly between 1862 and 1914?

In theory, yes; if Britain is willing to fund it, the South does have the resources needed to industrialize. Slaves can work the factories, there's adequate rivers and ports for trade, a railroad network can be built, etc. A Confederacy that holds Kentucky, as postulated here, has access to coal.

In reality, no. The people in charge of the Confederacy were too deeply wedded to the plantation system to abandon it on the scale needed for rapid, mass industrialization.
 
It has Kentucky and Oklahoma territory. Western Virginia still seceded and joined to Union.

So this is pretty much like TL-191. However, the U.S. will probably do much better here since it won't be led by an author who wants to stretch things out for three books. If the U.S. really wanted to, and had built up enough, it would crush the CSA by 1916 at the latest.
 
ATL US has 73-75.000.000 population, 70-80% of GDP of OTL USA

Using the Maddison Project's stats, at 73 million people and 70% OTL GDP you come up with a US GDP of 245.2 billion, which is comparable to that of Britain and Germany in the early 1910s. As for the CSA, Mexico is a decent comparison, given they'll be relying on oil and agriculture (and maybe some mining here and there) as the main pillars of their economy. So plugging in Mexico's GDP per capita with the CSA population (I'll use your 73 million number and give the CSA 26 million people, since total US population in 1914 was only 100 million), that gives 45.3 billion, which is slightly more than Canada or Spain...and 1/5 that of the US. Using your 39 million number, then that's 68 billion, so about the same as Japan. Unlike Japan, a significant amount of those people are an oppressed minority class which won't be trusted with much other than forced labour, and even worse, it isn't an island.

Yes, US can win by attrition, if it enters war in 1914, by 1917-1918, but they need to secure Canada until 1915 Christmas, or they are screwed.

How? The situation isn't getting better for the Entente in 1916. Lack of food/oil in the UK/France and the US gearing up even more for war and more and more US ships coming online making supplying/importing from Canada and the CS even harder is what's going to be happening come Christmas 1915, assuming they aren't holding victory parades in Toronto and Montreal which is highly probable. The odds are very good the war is as good as over in North America by the end of 1915, and by 1916, there will be nothing but rebels to mop up.
 
Like others, I doubt very much that in a CSA-wins world, the next fifty-odd years would leave European politics completely unchanged so that the World War breaks out with the same belligerents at the same time, etc.

But let's assume that somehow it does. There is no reason to think the CSA would join the Entente. Like Yankees, Southrons would want to stay out of that bloody business overseas. The notion that gratitude to the British for helping them win their independence (if indeed Britain does so) is going to guide their foreign policy a half century later is unrealistic. Quite likely they will have had quite a few quarrels with the British--for example the UK may try to stop Confederate expansion into Latin America. FWIW, in OTL Southern opinion during 1914-15 in OTL was quite anti-British--as I wrote in soc.history.what-if some years ago: "There *was* considerable anger among Southerners over the blockade preventing cotton from reaching Germany. In 1915 it was thought that Southerners might join with German- and Irish-Americans in Congress to demand an arms embargo in retaliation for the British suppression of the cotton trade with Central Europe. John Sharp Williams, the pro-British Senator from Mississippi, spoke truthfully when he said that every politician in the South had to be anti-British. On June 28, 1915 the Georgia state legislature petitioned President Wilson to take every measure "diplomatic if possible, retaliatory if necessary" to open American trade in cotton with neutral European ports. However, the British defused this problem by a secret agreement for the British government to buy enough cotton to stabilize the price at ten cents a pound. See the discussion in Arthur S. Link, *Woodrow Wilson and the Progressive Era 1910-1917* (Harper Torchbooks edition 1963), pp. 170-2."

The CSA may eventually join the war against Germany but probably only at about the same time and for the same reason the USA did: the German resort to unlimited submarine warfare--including killing Confederate citizens on Confederate ships.
 
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