What if the Confederacy had won the War?

[blue_zouave]

Harry Turtledove had the South win the war in "The Guns of the South" but it took space aliens (actually, visitors from the far future) to accomplish that.

It wasn't a bad book at all, aside from some extremely cliche characters. In fact, it gave me the best insight on Lee's personality of anything I've ever read.

Yeah, SOME Zouaves can read...

Zou

[hoosier]

I wouldn't want to try to project nearly as far ahead as the authors of the pieces on alternate websites have done.

My guess, though, is that if the South had been declared the official winner of the Civil War, the war would immediately have erupted again, this time in the Western territories. I have a feeling that there would have been a great deal of conflict between residents of those territories who wanted to stick with the Union and residents who wanted to become part of the new CSA, and many, if not most, of those territories would have turned into latter-day versions of Bleeding Kansas.

[unionblue]

Zou,

If you have read 'Guns of the South' it is a very interesting book and does make you think what may have been. I have just finished reading the 3 book series by Harry Harrison where the Civil War only lasts until the battle of Shiloh and then England enters the war by trying to conquer the US! The North & the South reunite (Under Lincoln with General Sherman as the overall commander of the combined armies of the North and South with the creation of a new cabinet position, a minister from the South) and proceeds to defeat the English and free Canada from English rule, and that is just in the first book!

Tommy, if you want it, I will try and find you some more alternate history books & sites for you to read. I too, get a big kick out of what might have been.

George, an interesting concept that I had not really considered, but you may want to check out a book from the library called 'How Few Remain' by Harry Turtledove, the first in a series of alternate history books where the South wins the 'first round' of the Civil War and gets involved in another war with the North over actions you describe above. Might be worth a look for you.

Unionblue

Just letting ya'll know I'm still working on this one but it is slow going.

Here is my attempt. Please bear in mind it is just a rough (very rough) hint of and outline. For me, to actually do this concept justice it would take a long long long time with a lot of very serious bouncing ideas off people.



March 9, 1862...CSS Virginia defeats the Monitor. The CSS Virginia uses solid shot rather than shells. The blockade is broken. And the CSS Virginia goes on to attack the enemy's fleet below Old Point, and proceeds to the York river and destroys McClellan's transports.

April 6 and 7, 1862, Shiloh, Drinking bad hillbilly whiskey the week before the battle, Grant goes blind.....The Confederates win a stunning victory.

All further military advances towards the south are met with stiff resistance and failure....

1864, Lincoln loses to McClellan. McClellan formulates “The Great Peace” with the Confederacy.

Kentucky and Missouri secede and join the Confederacy. Border wars in Kansas, Kentucky and Virginia persist until the turn of the century.

March 7 1866 Irish Republican Army under the command of John O’Neill and "General" Spier
invades Canada from the US. Despite the US’s declaration of innocence Great Britain declares war on the US. The Confederacy maintains neutrality while building it’’s naval power.

In 1868 Lincoln is elected to the US Senate. 1872 Lincoln is implicated in the Credit Mobilier scandal.

McClellan is assassinated by Thomas P. “Boston” Corbett during his 1872 reelection campaign. William Seward is named as an accomplice and hanged. Many question his guilt. John Surratt, believed to been agent for Great Britain, flees the country to live out his live in London.

1870 The British, with the aid of the Sioux, Blackfoot and Cheyenne invade the Dakotas, Minnesota and Wisconsin. British land troops north of Chicago.

October 8, 1871 Chicago is burned by the British while ransacking the city for beef.

1872 Germany allies with Britain.

1875 Confederate president Longstreet blockades and invades Cuba. Spanish soldiers put up stiff resistance until the defeat of the Spanish navy in the Battle of The Caribbean Sea

1874 A.P. Hill leads troops into Mexico. Annexing of portions of Mexico begin. Relationships with France become strained....Hill dies of unknown illness.

1876 California secedes and forms the Bear Republic. Agrees to a Peace treaty with Great Britain.

June 25, 1876 Gen A. Custer’s Division is wiped out by the joint forces of Chief Crazy Horse and Brevet Colonel Henry Grierson

September 7, 1876 The British are routed at The Battle of Northfield.


1881 Brazil joins the Confederacy.

1881 French Guiana sold to the Confederacy for 6,000,000, known as Hampton’s folly.

1881 Washington and Oregon Secede and join the Bear Republic.


1882 US-UK War ends with the Richmond Accords.

1895 Venezuela joins the Confederacy. Work begins on the Nicaraguan Canal.

1900 Great Depression.

1901 The Bear Republic signs The Pacific Trade agreement with Japan. Secretly finances revolutionaries to help delay the completion of the Nicaraguan Canal.

1902 The Bear Republic and the Confederacy agree to help co-finance the building of the Trans America Railroad from San Francisco to Rio de Janeiro.


1963 Future president of the world Tommy is born.



(Message edited by aphillbilly on June 18, 2003)

[unionblue]

Tommy,

I like your turning point of this 'alternate history' the defeat of the Monitor by the Virginia. I have never seen it used before and I like it as it brings up a great point about a new type of navel warfare bringing about an unexpected victory for the South.

I have a problem though (surprise) with all those South American countries 'joining' the Confederacy after fighting so hard to be free from other countries from across the ocean. Don't you think they might be a tad resistive to the idea of 'joining' those gringos up North even if they are from the South?

Unionblue

Neil,
I based the voluntary inclusion into the Confederacy by The South American countries on two things. First was the fact it was a confederacy of sovereign states. If they did not benefit from it they could leave. The fact the South American countries were almost totally based on Aristocracy and still are had a lot to do with it.

The other reason, and I confess the most influential one, was the ties the Confederates had with Brazil. From the international incident caused by the attack and capture on the CCS Florida in 64 to the (very interesting) confederate enclaves formed there after the war.

For info on these topics

http://www.srmason-sj.org/council/jo...n01/klein.html
http://docsouth.unc.edu/csacommittees/foreign.html
http://patsabin.com/lowcountry/confederados.htm

[unionblue]

Tommy,

Excellent sources to base your conclusion on, but it is, in my opinion, a long way from being friendly to a people and giving up your own national identity to join a country. But, I must admit once more, I get where you base your idea and who knows? If things had went according to your proposed time-line, maybe?

Good work and a neat idea.

Sincerely,
Unionblue

Neil,
Yeah I agree. I was angling to tie in S American countries voluntarily joining the confederacy as a consequence of the aftermath of the CSA'a war with Spain. I had a germ of an idea for it but I got lazy. It is a failing of mine. The thought of Brazil joining after the war without being part connected it was quicker but I think if it resulted from a Brazilian Confederate alliance during a war and the trade that resulted etc is more plausable. I was going to turn Delaware into a form of Veitnam too...but as I said. I got lazy lol


You know you really showed you was a yankee in your last post. You feel you have to give up your national identity to join a country. That was the one big reason the south seceded. Soveriegnty. My confederacy is just that. A confederacy. I know is a hard idea for a federalist to grasp. grin

Actually doing the thing was fun. I took the concept that history has a way of making itself happen. The belief from sci fi books that if you time travel, you can try to change the past but things happen anyway. Just in other ways and for other reasons. Hence all the events that have specific dates did occur after a fashion. i.e. the Chicago fire, Custer's death, the invasion of Canada in 66, The Northfeild raid, all events that I just explained anew. Like I said, it was fun.

YMOS
tommy

[unionblue]

Friends,

Another view of what history might have been, if the South had gotten its wish of 'peaceable secession.'

Peaceful secession would not only have indefinitely delayed the freeing of US slaves but would have thwarted the antislavery movement everywhere else in the world. It would also very likely have slowed down the struggle to extend suffrage and other democratic rights to the lower classes in Europe, and it might have eroded whatever rights had already been granted to them in both Europe and North America. Since the forces of reaction everywhere would have been greatly encouraged, and those of democracy and reform demoralized, it is likely that the momentum for liberal reform would have been replaced by a drive for aristocratic privilege under the flags of paternalism and the preservation of order.

The above may seem a bit farfetched in our present world and our known history, but consider a few historical facts of the time before we go further in our possible history.

During the 1850's and 1860's democracy as we now know it, and lower-class rights generally, hung in the balance throughout the Western world. In Great Britain the great majority of workers were disfranchised, trade unions were illegal, strikes were criminal acts, and quitting a job without an employer's permission was a breach of contract punishable by stiff fines and years of imprisonment. The legacy of serfdom was heavy in Portugal, Spain, Italy, eastern Prussia, Russia, Hungary, the Balkans, Turkey, and umch of South America, while slavery flourished in Cuba, Brazil, Surinam, Africa, the Middle East, and numerous other places. Even in the North, strikes were proscribed, property qualifications for voting were widespread until the 1820's (and were still enforced against free blacks in New York and other states in the 1860's), and vagrancy laws were a powerful club against workers. The movement for the disfranchisement of the foreign born was partially successful in some northern states during the 1850's, and in Virginia a referendum to reinstitute a property qualification for voters was approved on the eve of the Civil War.

If the Confederacy had been allowed to establish itself peacefully, to work out economic and diplomatic policies, and to develop international alliances, it would have emerged as a major international power. Although its population was relatively small, its great wealth would have made it a force to be reckoned with. The Confederacy would probably have used its wealth and military power to establish itself as the dominant nation in Latin America, perhaps annexing Cuba and Puerto Rico, Yucatan, and Nicaragua as well as countering Britain's antislavery pressures on Brazil. Whether the Confederacy would have sought to counter British antislavery policies in Africa or to form alliances with the principal slave-trading nations of the Middle East is more uncertain, but these would have been options.

The Confederacy could have financed its expansionist, proslavery policies by exploiting the southern monopoly of cotton production. A five cent sales tax on cotton not only would have put most of the burden of such policies on foreign consumers, but would have yielded about $100 million annually during the 1860s--50 percent more than the entire federal budget on the eve of the Civil War. With such a revenue the Confederacy could have emerged as one of the world's strongest military powers, maintaining a standing army several times as large as the North's rapidly developing a major navy, and conducting an aggressive foreign policy. Such revenues would also have permitted it to covertly or overtly finance aristocratic forces in Europe who were vying with democratic ones for power across the Continent.

Shrewd manipulation of its monopoly of raw cotton would have permitted the Confederacy to reward its international friends and punish its enemies. Embargoes or other restrictions on the sale of raw cotton could have delivered punishing blows to the economies of England and the Northeast, where close to 20 percent of the nonagricultural labor force was directly or indirectly engaged in the manufacture and sale of cotton textiles. The resulting unemployment and losses of wealth would have disrupted both the labor and capital markets in these regions, and probably speeded up the emergence of a large textile industry in the South. The West would also have been destabilized economically, since the decline of the Northeast would have severely contracted the market for western agricultural products. As the Confederacy shifted more of its labor into manufacturing, trade, and the military, it would probably have developed an increasing deficit in food, making it again a major market for the grain, dairy, and meat surpluses of the Northwest.

Such economic developments would have generated strong political pressures in the North for a modus vivendi with the Confederacy. Northern politics would have been further complicated by any border states, such as Maryland, Kentucky, and Missouri, that might have remained inside the Union. Attempts to appropriate their slave property would have run a high risk of further secessions. The Republicans not only would have borne the responsibility for the economic crisis created by the rise of the Confederacy, but would have lost the plank on which the party had risen to power. With the bulk of slaveowners prohibited from entry into northern territories because of secession, the claim that the victory by the Republican party was the only way of saving these lands for free labor would have been an empty slogan to farmers and nonagricultural workers who were suffering from the effects of a severe and extended depression. Moreover, the failure of the North to act against the slaveholders who remained within the Union would have undermined its credibility with democratic forces abroad. Such developments would probably have delivered both a lasting blow to antislavery politics and an enormous fillip to nativist politics.

Interesting, No?

Unionblue

(Message edited by Unionblue on November 15, 2003)