Would the USA and the CSA reunite?

Morty Vicar

Banned
I see Brazil and CSA holding on slavery until the uk embargos them. I could see it becoming a state right to own slaves though which qould prolong it.


On another note I do not think they would rejoin. As someone else said ason it becomes more and more unlikely. I would place a timeframe of rejoining from 1890-1939 before or after that it would be unlikely.

I have a question though. Do you think the the csa would ever war with the us again? who they joint the axis?

Thats a possibility, given the earlier scenario of a peaceful secession, ww2 could then become a modern era cvil war if you will. The North would certainly make a claim to the southern states if they won, Japan meanwhile would be left to its own devices to a greater extent and could possibly overrun the whole of east asia. If its pearl harbour thats attacked then the USA would join the allies.

I'll put it more bluntly than that. Sooner or later, regardless of whatever agreements accompanied the rather unlikely event of a CSA independence, the Union WILL be coming south to settle the issue once and for all. If the CSA doesn't collapse economically and politically in the meantime (though I think they will), the map will be rectified (form the Union perspective) by force of arms.

Yes the north always seemed to have the attitude that the south 'belonged' to them whether they like it or not.
 
For a certain fashion of reunited, yes. The CSA is politically unstable and is likely to fall apart at the seams when either the demands of CS democracy and slavery are unworkable and nothing replaces that concept of the CS state or alternately what is the most workable option to replace it also starts collapsing and thus either way a spiraling tide of violence and anarchy in the CSA leads to an unplanned US reconquest. Given even I, a professional pessimist on the CSA, give it two generations with my particular views on what it'd turn into, two generations of separate development in this regard would make any reunification a pain in the ass for the USA. And this is less reunification and more political chaos leading to a reconquest that would not be planned and leaving the USA with all manner of unpleasant dilemmas when it gets into the mess and almost no means to get out of the mess.
 
If the CSA falls apart or the US wins big in a major war by the time of this TL's WWI then perhaps. But unless the Confederacy falls apart and some states like Tennessee petition to return to the Union or the Confederacy pulls something so incredibly egregious as to warrant its total destruction (a la TL-191), I don't see the two nations getting back together. Too much time will have passed and each nation will have formed its own national identity. Why would an almost certainly rather socially liberal Union want to bring a bunch of almost certainly very socially conservative states into the fold?

Benjamin

If it is after 1863 at the latest TN is gone. Why would they want a bunch of socially conservative states back? Why did Germany and France battle for A/L or India and Pakistan over Kashmir? Why did North and South Vietnam fight? Or North and South Korea? It is the same thing. War is all but guaranteed.
 
If it is after 1863 at the latest TN is gone. Why would they want a bunch of socially conservative states back? Why did Germany and France battle for A/L or India and Pakistan over Kashmir? Why did North and South Vietnam fight? Or North and South Korea? It is the same thing. War is all but guaranteed.

Yeah the Union will likely always be waiting for the south to show weakness so they could finally snatch up the old states if for nothing else then out of pure Revanchism.
 
As soon as oil is discovered in Texas the USA will do whatever they can to get a hold of it. The administration will look out for a casus belli and find one, something akin to the "Maine"-incident and with kind support of W.R. Hearst. If not, than the CSA will stabilize after that due to petro-dollars rolling in.
 
As soon as oil is discovered in Texas the USA will do whatever they can to get a hold of it. The administration will look out for a casus belli and find one, something akin to the "Maine"-incident and with kind support of W.R. Hearst..

Like the later US invasion of Mexico?
 
If it is after 1863 at the latest TN is gone. Why would they want a bunch of socially conservative states back? Why did Germany and France battle for A/L or India and Pakistan over Kashmir? Why did North and South Vietnam fight? Or North and South Korea? It is the same thing. War is all but guaranteed.

These are all problematic examples. United Germany and France spent most of the time from 1871-1914 getting along, not sparring over La Revanche. India and Pakistan have fought a number of limited wars and have developed a 21st Century version of ritual warfare and the military version of a rivalry game. North and South Korea have never signed a peace treaty so they're still fighting, they're just not in a renewal of the big war. North and South Vietnam fought because South Vietnam was legally never supposed to exist and the RVN lasted so long as it did because the USA got involved in a war with North Vietnam and Hanoi for a long time lost sight of Saigon in its focus on Washington.

In this case the USA's not entirely going to *want* the CSA back given what an unstable economic basketcase it will be and the kind of politics all too likely to characterize it. Of course if a disintegrating CSA starts shooting at US citizens and launching full-fledged warfare, such questions would be....academic.

Yeah the Union will likely always be waiting for the south to show weakness so they could finally snatch up the old states if for nothing else then out of pure Revanchism.

I doubt that, an independent CSA being absorbed will wind up being the ROK absorbing the DPRK, and the only way the USA would re-absorb it is if the CSA starts collapsing and the USA winds up drawn into what turns into a re-absorption of the Confederacy but was planned to be in all likelihood something much smaller than that.
 
Snake just made a very good point regarding France and Germany.

At the beginning of both world wars guess which was each country's top trading partner? Alas, commerce did not deter war.
 
Snake just made a very good point regarding France and Germany.

At the beginning of both world wars guess which was each country's top trading partner? Alas, commerce did not deter war.

Not to mention that North Korea and South Korea remain officially at war but the last major large-scale fighting between the two was in 1953. It might potentially be possible for a de facto peace like that between the USA and CSA to happen but that in the 19th Century is inviable. The USA is also not going to be the Hanoi to the CSA's Saigon, not least due to the inevitable need to retool its own society after the CSA manages to split off. I can see the USA reconquering the CSA if or when its internal contradictions cause it to start disintegrating, if for no other reason than to prevent foreign powers absorbing the CSA and thus having European colonies for neighbors again. I can't see the two reuniting voluntarily as the USA would have progressively less reason to do so and the CSA would do so only if Jesus Himself descended from Heaven and tried to solder the two states back together personally, and maybe not even then.
 
Pride and a desire to render the earlier war moot, the price be damned.

Exactly and if it was won by the South due to foreign interference there would be at least two things on top of that 1) The feeling if it wasn't for that interference it would have won. 2) The desire to show said foreign power that their efforts were in vain and meddling in the affairs of the US is going to cost them FAR MORE than what they gain. The next time there is a big war in Europe look for round 2.
 
In this case the USA's not entirely going to *want* the CSA back given what an unstable economic basketcase it will be and the kind of politics all too likely to characterize it. Of course if a disintegrating CSA starts shooting at US citizens and launching full-fledged warfare, such questions would be....academic.

Having complete control of the Mississippi River would be an important objective. if western Virginia is not in the Union, the coal mines there would be important as would Texan oil. The long term economic advantages would be great for the US. The South was more or less a basketcase economy anyway IOTL for decades after the war. How much worse would it be under the CSA? The costs for economic integration would basically just be infrastructure rebuilding. Northern capital would provide any private investment. Eliminating any remaining tariffs or trade policy uncertainty would do much to improve the economy. The cost of reunification may not be that high in the period of the late 1800s or early 1900s.

If things are that bad in the CSA, there would no doubt be a lot of potential unionists in it. You have legacy unionists which never wanted to be in the CSA, and now nostalgia that things were much better when there was one country. Pro-union sentiment could possibly be even the majority opinion in some of the states like Tennessee. So besides the economic and strategic reasons, national honor would come to the forefront. How could the USA let loyal Americans suffer under such conditions?
 
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