Wrapped in Flames: The Great American War and Beyond

Reader mode
EnglishCanuck

EnglishCanuck

MonarchistCanuck said:
It seems EC is teasing future problems with the American West Coast, while I doubt we'll see a Pacific Republic it's not entirely off the cards (still remembering the statement "the map of North America will be drastically different). However currently I'm leaning towards California becoming the American Quebec (minus the ethno-linguistic dimension) at worst and at best becoming the American Alberta/Saskatchewan in terms of alienation
Click to expand...

I mean it looks different already! Could I possibly have more alterations in me?? ;) However, its not just California ticked off, Oregon and the putative Washington state are also not pleased with Washington. They have a (not entirely unfair, but not totally fair) view that they were left out to dry by the fighting in the East. No men or weapons were sent their way and they had to wage the war with the resources they had at hand, which proved to be unequal to the task! There's going to be a gulf of political and economic distances to cross to bridge that, not to mention a continent! The International Railroad has barely started laying track as of 1866!
 
EnglishCanuck

EnglishCanuck

AlexanderDragon said:
"Capital Guard that was viewed, until the 1910s, as one of the most prestigious but also least problematic postings"

oh god that's not good
Click to expand...

I wouldn't read anything into that as them plotting a coup (mostly) but they are effectively the most "elite" unit in the United States seen as the first line of defence against another invasion.
 

MonarchistCanuck

EnglishCanuck said:
I mean it looks different already! Could I possibly have more alterations in me?? ;) However, its not just California ticked off, Oregon and the putative Washington state are also not pleased with Washington. They have a (not entirely unfair, but not totally fair) view that they were left out to dry by the fighting in the East. No men or weapons were sent their way and they had to wage the war with the resources they had at hand, which proved to be unequal to the task! There's going to be a gulf of political and economic distances to cross to bridge that, not to mention a continent! The International Railroad has barely started laying track as of 1866!
Click to expand...
The International Railroad? How ambitious are you making postwar America?
 
EnglishCanuck

EnglishCanuck

MonarchistCanuck said:
The International Railroad? How ambitious are you making postwar America?
Click to expand...

Well if Manifest Destiny can't run politically from pole to pole, then by God we'll build a railroad! (or someone will propose it at least).

DarkAvenger said:
I'm pretty sure he means the Transcontinental Railroad.

By the way, it took about 6 years to lay down the first one from 1863 - 1869. I assume it would be finished by 1872 or later.
Click to expand...

I like the way you think!

Icedaemon said:
'International railroad' because that's what the people call it in the 'future' after the westernmost states secede?
Click to expand...

Well there's already a few of those. Anything built leading to the South before the war, the Grand Trunk to Portland Maine... but the Transcontinental Railroad will be a big step in the right direction. It's also going to set off a bit of a mania for railroads that connect to the Pacific. On two continents!
 

username5243

EnglishCanuck said:
Well there's already a few of those. Anything built leading to the South before the war, the Grand Trunk to Portland Maine... but the Transcontinental Railroad will be a big step in the right direction. It's also going to set off a bit of a mania for railroads that connect to the Pacific. On two continents!
Click to expand...
*Russian Empire has entered the chat*
 
Last edited:
The New World Order 1866 Part 3: The Confederate States
  • Index
    • EnglishCanuck

    EnglishCanuck

    The New World Order 1866 Part 3: The Confederate States​

    “Despite the Great Disturbance wracking the land, this hardly stopped the machinations in the halls of power in Richmond. Davis was only able to briefly exult in winning the nation peace before, as he wrote his supporter John Milton in Florida, “they come with their knives out for me again.”

    It was true that there was a committed cabal of anti-Davis legislators in Richmond who felt the president had been insufficiently harsh with the United States in their peace deal at Havana. However, most (even Toombs and Stephens) were realist enough to believe that they had come away well, but it was expedient to blame Davis for not allowing them to take more. Davis’s standing in Virginia had plummeted overnight through 1866 to the point that he was extremely unpopular in the capital and hoped for little more than to serve out the remainder of his term and retire to the Mississippi and live out the remainder of his days in relative seclusion. He often dealt with only cabinet matters, making few speeches and instead doing much correspondence by letter while meeting only with allies.

    The violent year of 1866 across the Confederacy was a considerable irritant to Davis who had expected that with the ratification of the treaty, peace would not be long coming. Instead, he felt he was living as though the war had not ended as fighting continued along the Mississippi and in South Carolina. Now governors who had eyed Davis recommendations at an enlarged post-war army with suspicion were suddenly begging Richmond for men and weapons when faced with what many feared was a general uprising. Davis would approve much, but used his new leverage, and importantly the august personage of General Lee, to lean on Congress to expand the provisional army which had been set up in 1861.

    Since the end of the war, many prominent voices had been calling for the rapid demobilization of the army. Some for practical reasons, hundreds of thousands of men could hardly stay in the ranks as the economy sought to get back to normal and peace returned. Others argued on ideological grounds that a large army was a force of tyranny, and Davis was the tyrant.

    Originally envisioned as a force of merely 15,000 men, the Great Disorder and violence of the late war had convinced at least a plurality of legislators of the ‘necessary evil’ of a larger standing force, especially of cavalry and artillery for the enlarged frontiers. Despite fiery denunciating speeches from men like Toombs and Rhett, the 1866 Army Act would expand the military of the Confederate States to a standing force of 27,000 men. Smaller than its Northern counterpart, but one which was judged sufficient to protect the coasts, frontiers, and patrol the interior in times of emergency like those experienced in 1866. Davis would regard it as his ‘one last great act’ for the Confederacy, even though his opponents would viciously denounce him for it.

    However, in one matter, Davis proved surprisingly reluctant to act. There had been no organizaton for a Supreme Court in the years between 1861-65, and many in government had merely taken it for granted that this would be a matter solved in the aftermath of the conflict. There was never any effort made by the Davis administration to begin organizing the administrative apparatus however, with Davis often leaning on his authority as President and the office of the Attorney General to legitimize his orders with wartime authority. In the peacetime Confederacy, many began to question this choice. It was a situation which clearly could not continue.

    Davis resisted though. He had grown comfortable with the powers of his office, and the need to defer to a court, when he could overrule one currently, seems to have struck him as the lesser of two evils. When challenged by critics Davis would cite “a concerning lack of men of means with which to propel the project” and would defer the matter to Congress. This hardly placated many who sought to challenge the president on his wartime acts, or those who felt that there were pressing legal concerns in the Confederacy that needed to be handled presently. Even his allies pointed out that he was the officer of state legally compelled to choose them, but Davis still demured.

    To some extent, Davis was correct that the Confederacy would have a contentious uphill battle to establish its high court. The legal factionalism between the states meant that officials would demand a place based on prominence, a fact borne out in the 1868 acrimonious debates to form the court. Ideological battles would be just as contentious. So to some extent, Davis may have simply wished to avoid the conflict going into the last year of his term, while also using his still unchecked powers to shape the future of the Confederacy as he saw fit. Which was a feat he broadly managed.

    Davis, unlike many of his contemporaries, seemed to have learned far more about the limits of the exercise of power during his time in Richmond. Quarrelsome state governors, ambitious senators, and generals who were perhaps dictators in waiting, Davis had seen, and insulted, them all. He had also come to see that by exercising top down power more had been done to guide the Confederacy to victory than the broad minded speeches and oratory flourishes of men like Toombs and Yancey. To that end, Davis wielded his office like a club, setting a precedent for future presidents. Though Davis was far more blunt, intervening in debates as meaningless as appointing county post masters and harbor fees at Savannah, he did however set the stage for powerful presidents to make their will known well outside of Richmond…” - Through Fire and Fury: The Davis Administration, William A. Davis, Random House, 1999

    “In 1866 the Confederacy was a nation both flourishing and disintegrating. The burgeoning industries of Nashville, Atlanta and Richmond had all seen some of the dangers of war, Nashville more than others, but were awkwardly transitioning to peace time economics. However, hundreds of thousands of men would never return home, and jobs would need men and fields would sit unploughed. Families were destitute and many would sell their homes for hardly the price they were worth and flock to the cities which had provided relief during the war.

    Richmond in particular burst at the seams with an influx of soldiers and refugees. Though many of the soldiers were leaving, the refugees remained, competing for scarce labor. Tens of thousands of women had lost husbands in the war and were without a means of income, leading to a spate of prostitution in the South’s leading cities, and often accompanied by a crackdown from authorities. However, some canny women would pool meager resources and enlist themselves in what limited industry they could get. Richmond in particular became the home of ambitious war brides who settled in to the manufacturing of garments, an industry previously moribound, but which had seen an uptick as the war gave a boost to local industries.

    These ‘widow weavers’ as they would become known would become an important economic tool in the Richmond and Petersburg area post 1866, while smaller groups would flourish in Nashville and Atlanta, depending on pre-existing economic conditions and the access the railroads gave their products to other towns. Though it clashed with the pre-existing yeoman farmer nature of the rural south, this urban labor would be sold, initially cheap, to those who had money after the war, which was an increasing portion of the Southern middle class as compared to many soldiers who went home destitute. Even laborers and farmhands found themselves buying ‘widow weaves’ to support widows as a moral gesture, but soon to simply clothe themselves as single men and widowers could not provide in the cities and were joined by families suddenly shorn of the means to make their own clothes.

    The stout yeoman farmer of the antebellum, much lauded by Southern intellectuals, had disappeared in places like Arkansas, Kentucky, Tennessee and Virginia. The Upper South found itself with a crisis as many slaves escaped and properties burned or abandoned. The cities were the only source of succor, and though many dreamed of returning to farms, others sold what property they had to plantation owners just to survive in regions of West and Middle Tennessee, while land was worthless in many places in Kentucky, so burned over was it. Though small, this trickle off the land in 1866 would set the course to change the way much of the Upper South looked…” - A Cotton Goliath, The Confederate Economy from 1866, Roger Ransom, University of Sacramento, 2012
     
  • Index
    • HMS St.Lawrence

    HMS St.Lawrence

    EnglishCanuck said:
    Is it possible to construct a Trans-Siberian Railroad in the late 19th century? Someone means to find out! But I am getting a little ahead of myself...
    Click to expand...
    If the Russians throw enough money at the thing, I don't think there's anything preventing it, at least from an engineering point of view.

    The real concern would be China and the inevitable Mandchurian part if the railroad. But again, misusing a quote that has not been huttered yet... Whatever happens, the *insert European power* have got the [Gatling/Maxim/Nordenfelt] gun and they have not.
     
    EnglishCanuck

    EnglishCanuck

    HMS St.Lawrence said:
    If the Russians throw enough money at the thing, I don't think there's anything preventing it, at least from an engineering point of view.

    The real concern would be China and the inevitable Mandchurian part if the railroad. But again, misusing a quote that has not been huttered yet... Whatever happens, the *insert European power* have got the [Gatling/Maxim/Nordenfelt] gun and they have not.
    Click to expand...

    Ah but that assumes that the new dynasty does not itself pursue the Maxim gun! And I can assure you, a new China with a deep understanding of Western tech and a deep grudge to boot will not quite be so moribund in the tech field as the Qing were in our time!
     
    SultanArda

    SultanArda

    EnglishCanuck said:
    Ah but that assumes that the new dynasty does not itself pursue the Maxim gun! And I can assure you, a new China with a deep understanding of Western tech and a deep grudge to boot will not quite be so moribund in the tech field as the Qing were in our time!
    Click to expand...
    Until Zeng Guofang dies and his extremely stubborn and very arrogantly Chinese supremacist son comes to power.
    Though, even he seems to recognise the power of technology, so maybe China is not as doomed as Qing Era China.
     
    EnglishCanuck

    EnglishCanuck

    SultanArda said:
    Until Zeng Guofang dies and his extremely stubborn and very arrogantly Chinese supremacist son comes to power.
    Though, even he seems to recognise the power of technology, so maybe China is not as doomed as Qing Era China.
    Click to expand...

    Oh his arrogance, stubborness and sense of Chinese supremacy isn't going away. However, soon he will be more exposed to the outside world, and he will have a vast appreciation for Western technology and other methods. Not to say he won't be a bit high handed when dealing with the outside world still...
     

    basileus

    EnglishCanuck said:
    The New World Order 1866 Part 3: The Confederate States​

    “Despite the Great Disturbance wracking the land, this hardly stopped the machinations in the halls of power in Richmond. Davis was only able to briefly exult in winning the nation peace before, as he wrote his supporter John Milton in Florida, “they come with their knives out for me again.”

    It was true that there was a committed cabal of anti-Davis legislators in Richmond who felt the president had been insufficiently harsh with the United States in their peace deal at Havana. However, most (even Toombs and Stephens) were realist enough to believe that they had come away well, but it was expedient to blame Davis for not allowing them to take more. Davis’s standing in Virginia had plummeted overnight through 1866 to the point that he was extremely unpopular in the capital and hoped for little more than to serve out the remainder of his term and retire to the Mississippi and live out the remainder of his days in relative seclusion. He often dealt with only cabinet matters, making few speeches and instead doing much correspondence by letter while meeting only with allies.

    The violent year of 1866 across the Confederacy was a considerable irritant to Davis who had expected that with the ratification of the treaty, peace would not be long coming. Instead, he felt he was living as though the war had not ended as fighting continued along the Mississippi and in South Carolina. Now governors who had eyed Davis recommendations at an enlarged post-war army with suspicion were suddenly begging Richmond for men and weapons when faced with what many feared was a general uprising. Davis would approve much, but used his new leverage, and importantly the august personage of General Lee, to lean on Congress to expand the provisional army which had been set up in 1861.

    Since the end of the war, many prominent voices had been calling for the rapid demobilization of the army. Some for practical reasons, hundreds of thousands of men could hardly stay in the ranks as the economy sought to get back to normal and peace returned. Others argued on ideological grounds that a large army was a force of tyranny, and Davis was the tyrant.

    Originally envisioned as a force of merely 15,000 men, the Great Disorder and violence of the late war had convinced at least a plurality of legislators of the ‘necessary evil’ of a larger standing force, especially of cavalry and artillery for the enlarged frontiers. Despite fiery denunciating speeches from men like Toombs and Rhett, the 1866 Army Act would expand the military of the Confederate States to a standing force of 27,000 men. Smaller than its Northern counterpart, but one which was judged sufficient to protect the coasts, frontiers, and patrol the interior in times of emergency like those experienced in 1866. Davis would regard it as his ‘one last great act’ for the Confederacy, even though his opponents would viciously denounce him for it.

    However, in one matter, Davis proved surprisingly reluctant to act. There had been no organizaton for a Supreme Court in the years between 1861-65, and many in government had merely taken it for granted that this would be a matter solved in the aftermath of the conflict. There was never any effort made by the Davis administration to begin organizing the administrative apparatus however, with Davis often leaning on his authority as President and the office of the Attorney General to legitimize his orders with wartime authority. In the peacetime Confederacy, many began to question this choice. It was a situation which clearly could not continue.

    Davis resisted though. He had grown comfortable with the powers of his office, and the need to defer to a court, when he could overrule one currently, seems to have struck him as the lesser of two evils. When challenged by critics Davis would cite “a concerning lack of men of means with which to propel the project” and would defer the matter to Congress. This hardly placated many who sought to challenge the president on his wartime acts, or those who felt that there were pressing legal concerns in the Confederacy that needed to be handled presently. Even his allies pointed out that he was the officer of state legally compelled to choose them, but Davis still demured.

    To some extent, Davis was correct that the Confederacy would have a contentious uphill battle to establish its high court. The legal factionalism between the states meant that officials would demand a place based on prominence, a fact borne out in the 1868 acrimonious debates to form the court. Ideological battles would be just as contentious. So to some extent, Davis may have simply wished to avoid the conflict going into the last year of his term, while also using his still unchecked powers to shape the future of the Confederacy as he saw fit. Which was a feat he broadly managed.

    Davis, unlike many of his contemporaries, seemed to have learned far more about the limits of the exercise of power during his time in Richmond. Quarrelsome state governors, ambitious senators, and generals who were perhaps dictators in waiting, Davis had seen, and insulted, them all. He had also come to see that by exercising top down power more had been done to guide the Confederacy to victory than the broad minded speeches and oratory flourishes of men like Toombs and Yancey. To that end, Davis wielded his office like a club, setting a precedent for future presidents. Though Davis was far more blunt, intervening in debates as meaningless as appointing county post masters and harbor fees at Savannah, he did however set the stage for powerful presidents to make their will known well outside of Richmond…” - Through Fire and Fury: The Davis Administration, William A. Davis, Random House, 1999

    “In 1866 the Confederacy was a nation both flourishing and disintegrating. The burgeoning industries of Nashville, Atlanta and Richmond had all seen some of the dangers of war, Nashville more than others, but were awkwardly transitioning to peace time economics. However, hundreds of thousands of men would never return home, and jobs would need men and fields would sit unploughed. Families were destitute and many would sell their homes for hardly the price they were worth and flock to the cities which had provided relief during the war.

    Richmond in particular burst at the seams with an influx of soldiers and refugees. Though many of the soldiers were leaving, the refugees remained, competing for scarce labor. Tens of thousands of women had lost husbands in the war and were without a means of income, leading to a spate of prostitution in the South’s leading cities, and often accompanied by a crackdown from authorities. However, some canny women would pool meager resources and enlist themselves in what limited industry they could get. Richmond in particular became the home of ambitious war brides who settled in to the manufacturing of garments, an industry previously moribound, but which had seen an uptick as the war gave a boost to local industries.

    These ‘widow weavers’ as they would become known would become an important economic tool in the Richmond and Petersburg area post 1866, while smaller groups would flourish in Nashville and Atlanta, depending on pre-existing economic conditions and the access the railroads gave their products to other towns. Though it clashed with the pre-existing yeoman farmer nature of the rural south, this urban labor would be sold, initially cheap, to those who had money after the war, which was an increasing portion of the Southern middle class as compared to many soldiers who went home destitute. Even laborers and farmhands found themselves buying ‘widow weaves’ to support widows as a moral gesture, but soon to simply clothe themselves as single men and widowers could not provide in the cities and were joined by families suddenly shorn of the means to make their own clothes.

    The stout yeoman farmer of the antebellum, much lauded by Southern intellectuals, had disappeared in places like Arkansas, Kentucky, Tennessee and Virginia. The Upper South found itself with a crisis as many slaves escaped and properties burned or abandoned. The cities were the only source of succor, and though many dreamed of returning to farms, others sold what property they had to plantation owners just to survive in regions of West and Middle Tennessee, while land was worthless in many places in Kentucky, so burned over was it. Though small, this trickle off the land in 1866 would set the course to change the way much of the Upper South looked…” - A Cotton Goliath, The Confederate Economy from 1866, Roger Ransom, University of Sacramento, 2012
    Click to expand...
    It seems like the recipe for an intra-Confederate civil war of their own down the line, as the Upper South tends to get more "Northernized" in economy and mentality.
     
    Reader mode
    You must log in or register to reply here.
    Top
    Top