What If Lee Won At Gettysburg?

It was no great secret the upper classes supported the confederacy they also controlled the newspapers.
But they didn't? At least, they can't be summed up in such a simple way.
There was a faction which was pro-Confederate, yes, but there was also a faction that was pro-Union - and there was a faction which was anti-slavery, some of whom probably felt more offended by Union anti-slavery measures being reversed than they did by the Confederates just going on with the system that already existed. And there was a significant part of the discussion around mediation which was associated with ending the bloodshed, including trying to avoid a servile uprising in the South (as this was seen as likely to cause massive bloodshed and be worse for the slaves than the continuation of the existing situation).
 
Freeman Morse was the US consul in London. These meetings were set up with great effort and paid for by US diplomats; they cannot be seen as spontaneous. Meanwhile the mass demonstrations and petitions in the Manchester and Lancaster area of a much less pro-Union slant largely were spontaneous.
And paid for by Mill owners and Merchants.

Not to mention nearly all the Newspapers were in confederate sympathizers hands.

Mill workers worked 6 days a week on the Sunday they would go to Church and I know for a fact they would pray for the Enslaved in the South and hope Lincoln would succeed.

Quote:

Such hardships, however, they endured calmly because they believed in the noble cause for which Lincoln was fighting, the freeing of the slaves of the southern plantation owners. From its peak in 1862/3, unemployment fell, but not until the end of the war, in April 1865, was normal working resumed. The cotton industry never regained the dominance it had once held in the British economy.
Although the cotton operatives had been calm up to now, in March 1863 several meetings were held. Serious riots broke out in the towns of Stalybridge, Ashton and Dukinfield, triggered by an attempt to reduce scales of relief and impose harsher conditions on recipients of it. This spread panic amongst the local magistracy who feared a return to the Chartist disturbances of the 1840s. "To riot or to rot" appeared to be the gloomy forecast of the future of Lancashire's demoralised cotton workers.

Len Ellison.

End Quote:

The riots were not about Lincoln or the North but about how the relief payments and food were being distributed.

Only 4 MPs out of 15 supported the North from the Cotton areas 6 supported the South the rest had no say.

Those MPs who supported the South were corrupt and its common knowledge in these parts they were taking money from Mill owners or at least gifts of some sort.
 
And paid for by Mill owners and Merchants.
Do you actually have a citation for that one? Given that for the pro-Union meeting you found we have a citation from the person who actually funded it, and a list of the people who were at it demonstrating it wasn't a lower-class meeting, I bid you good luck finding the same for the typical pro-Confederate meeting.

Quote:

Such hardships, however, they endured calmly because they believed in the noble cause for which Lincoln was fighting, the freeing of the slaves of the southern plantation owners. From its peak in 1862/3, unemployment fell, but not until the end of the war, in April 1865, was normal working resumed. The cotton industry never regained the dominance it had once held in the British economy.
Although the cotton operatives had been calm up to now, in March 1863 several meetings were held. Serious riots broke out in the towns of Stalybridge, Ashton and Dukinfield, triggered by an attempt to reduce scales of relief and impose harsher conditions on recipients of it. This spread panic amongst the local magistracy who feared a return to the Chartist disturbances of the 1840s. "To riot or to rot" appeared to be the gloomy forecast of the future of Lancashire's demoralised cotton workers.

Len Ellison.

End Quote:
I'm not sure if you actually read the whole article you were trying to take this from, but another instructive quote or two:


The crisis reached its peak in 1862/3. There were mill closures; short- time working and mass unemployment resulted. Originally most of the UK was of the opinion that the people of Lancashire supported the Union in the American Civil War because of the extreme deprivation in Lancashire. Mary Ellison demolished this myth in her book Support for Secession


Lancashire was not wholly sympathetic to the cause of the Northern states, even demanding British government action to break the blockade. Cotton operatives did not suffer in silence to free the Southern plantation slave.



In addition, the second half of your quote supports the idea that in 1863 there was a pro-Confederate (or anti-Blockade) movement in Lancashire.
 
Only 4 MPs out of 15 supported the North from the Cotton areas 6 supported the South the rest had no say.
Correction: 4 supported the North, 13 supported the South, 5 had no opinion. Given the unrest in the area (which your own quote indicates was anti-blockade) and the plight of the workers at the time, and that one of those 4 pro-Union MPs was Bright (who was also against a war in the case of the Trent affair, which was more-or-less universally viewed as a just cause for war in the UK) it actually seems like the pro-South ones are the ones more in touch with their constituencies. Which makes labelling them specifically as corrupt:

Those MPs who supported the South were corrupt and its common knowledge in these parts they were taking money from Mill owners or at least gifts of some sort.
A bit of a reach.

Got any citations to that effect?
 
It was no great secret the upper classes supported the confederacy they also controlled the newspapers.

But what they really feared was an lower class uprising like what happened in France I would suggest you look up the Peterloo Massacre.

Manchester has always been a very radical city out of interest their are some who think the North should be a separate nation to the rest of the UK.

Okay, for one, you ignored the quote specifically about the lower classes being in favor of the Confederacy, not the way you present it but beyond that several of the British newspapers that turned on the North after the EP were explicitly Liberal; they weren't upper class rags to begin with nor did they sudden become so in September of 1862. If they were so out of step with the lower classes, then they would've been bankrupt since said lower classes were their readership.

As for the French, it should be pointed out that's a very bad comparison ignoring the cultural and economic differences starkly visible between the two nations in the 19th Century and earlier.
 
it actually seems like the pro-South ones are the ones more in touch with their constituencies. Which makes labelling them specifically as corrupt:
Are you kidding even modern day politicians are completely out of touch with their constituencies as we saw in the last general election.

MPs in mid 19th Century Britain were unaccountable not like the MPs we have today many were corrupt and were shall we say not shy to take bribes.

Correction: 4 supported the North, 13 supported the South, 5 had no opinion.
Yes you are correct it was off the top of my head.

Mary Ellison demolished this myth in her book Support for Secession
I don't give a fig what this Author says she is clearly not from Manchester has no ties to the City and her research is based on what? Speculation.

Another University Professor selling a book with some controversy I would like to see her come to Manchester and tell the people from the City that in 1862 Manchester was pro slavery I could imagine that would go down like a stone in the water I'm sure she would be welcomed with open arms by Andy Burnham the Mayor.

Might as well burn Lincolns letter to Manchester and scrap his statue.
 
Okay, for one, you ignored the quote specifically about the lower classes being in favor of the Confederacy,

Quote:

The aristocrats and the working class of British society supported The Confederacy. However, there were also many pro Northern groups. The support for The Union in Great Britain came from the radical lower class, anti-slavery groups, as well as industrial workers. Despite the majority of British citizens taking sides, a minority chose to remain neutral because they distrusted, disliked, or just simply wished for Great Britain to stay out of other country’s domestic affairs.

End Quote:

lower class could be defined as lower middle class in this era but industrial workers like cotton workers are 100% working class.

Working class is a very broad class.
 
I'm just going to put this topic of the Cotton workers to bed and their overwhelming support for the Union in fact lower class and working class support for the Union.

50,000 Britons fought in the war the vast majority for the Union Manchester itself has 1x MOH winner born and bred in Manchester British Confederates were rare but did exist.

I have no doubt some people in Britain supported the Confederacy especially in towns that benefitted financially like Birmingham and Liverpool , Liverpool being the exception in Northern England.

Here is the quote from Wiki.

Quote:

The British elite tended to support the Confederacy, but ordinary people tended to support the Union. Large-scale trade continued between Britain and the whole of the US. The US shipped grain to Britain, and Britain sent manufactured items and munitions to the US. Immigration continued into the US, with many Britons volunteering for its army.

Ill end on that as we have completely de railed the thread I'm sorry for that OP.
 
I'm just going to put this topic of the Cotton workers to bed and their overwhelming support for the Union in fact lower class and working class support for the Union.
But the quotes you produce keep indicating that there was pro-Confederate (/anti-blockade) sentiment in Manchester among the working class as well. You've done nothing to refute the core thesis of Mary Ellison to the effect that there was significant pro-Confederate support in the cotton towns; the fact you're down to quoting Wikipedia (in an article which is heavy on local Manchester websites but doesn't cite Support for Secession at all, despite that being a major academic work that has not been refuted or superseded) should indicate that.


I don't give a fig what this Author says she is clearly not from Manchester has no ties to the City and her research is based on what? Speculation.

Another University Professor selling a book with some controversy I would like to see her come to Manchester and tell the people from the City that in 1862 Manchester was pro slavery I could imagine that would go down like a stone in the water I'm sure she would be welcomed with open arms by Andy Burnham the Mayor.
Mary Ellison is an expert on American Studies and runs programs in African-American history and culture (and her career was probably significantly more nuanced, but she's now 81 - Support for Secession was the setup for a long career, having been written when she was about thirty to thirty-five). Her book is based on years of research and well cited, and she went to the trouble of checking contemporary literature of all sorts (including newspapers and contemporary petitions, plus checking the purpose and genesis of all contemporary mass meetings) to discover the extent to which the "Lancashire was pro-Union" idea was based on fact.
What she found was that it was largely not. There was a distinct regional divide, with the agricultural western parts of Lancashire being more pro-Union and the cotton towns having a significant tendency to be pro-Confederate (or pro-intervention).

This does not mean they were pro slavery. It means they were in favour of intervention to stop the bloodshed in the ongoing war and to break the blockade.
 
Last edited:
Just one of the things Mary Ellison did was to look at the petitions sent from Lancashire to Parliament. She found the great majority were in favour of intervention to break the blockade.

This view can be easily understood by looking at the actual historical context of the late 1850s and early 1860s.
In 1854-6, the US President of the time (Pierce) had been arguing that UK blockades (of Russia) were not something that US merchants should have to follow.
In 1858, there was a Boarding Crisis where the Royal Navy was boarding suspected slave ships flying the US flag, and in response the US (including the north) went onto a war footing.
In 1860, the Anderson case saw Missouri attempt to extradite a runaway slave from Canada back to Missouri to be burned to death.
The cotton famine meanwhile caused massive disruption to the Lancashire economy to the extent that many had to rely on charity (famine relief boards etc) or outright starve to death.

This creates a situation where people could argue that the blockade should be broken or intervention take place, on any or all of these grounds:
- Personal wish to have their job back.
- Feeling that both the North and the South were pro-slavery anyway, as both had slaves, or that the North was simply indifferent to the suffering of slaves.
- Wanting the North to face the consequences of their own arguments about not respecting blockades.
- Not wanting the bloodshed in the war to continue.
- Supporting an intervention model which sees the South become independent but their emancipating their slaves (something which to the best of my knowledge was never even seriously offered, so they might have thought the South would accept it)
- A feeling that an independent South could then be pressured into abandoning slavery more easily.

And all of this is going on while their information about the war is imperfect.

Of course, what you don't seem to have considered is the consequences of your arguments about the newspapers being pro-Confederate and owned by the upper class. Because the only real avenue for Lancashire cotton workers to know about what's going on in the war is the newspapers...
 
Last edited:
See the Battle of Fort Fizzle in Ohio in 1863, the Detroit Race Riots of 1863, the Charleston Riot in March of 1864 in Illinois, the Fishing Creek Confederacy in Pennsylvania from July to November of 1864, and the occupation of New York City by the Federal Army in the Fall of 1864. You can also view the newspaper reporting in the Summer of 1864 in general, as the Northern public was shocked by the immense casualties taken by Grant and inflation in July of 1864 reached its war-time height. This all had a tangible effect on the war effort: Between July 1863 and December 1864, 161,224 men failed to report to service under the draft.

There was also elections in 1863, for the Governor's office in both Ohio and Pennsylvania. Given something like 90 regiments in the AotP were raised from the latter, a Copperhead Democrat in office could seriously impact the Union's ability to recover from such a defeat.
That's my point. There would have been an effect, but without it actually happening, it's speculation what sort of effect it would have had. Would it have caused the end of the war? Simply a headache for the Lincoln Administration? Recruiting efforts? I used 1864 as an example, but events happening in different times and places can have different effects. I have to think a major east coast city being occupied, even for a brief period of time, has serious implications, but how serious and what long-term effects can't really be known.
 
That's my point. There would have been an effect, but without it actually happening, it's speculation what sort of effect it would have had. Would it have caused the end of the war? Simply a headache for the Lincoln Administration? Recruiting efforts? I used 1864 as an example, but events happening in different times and places can have different effects. I have to think a major east coast city being occupied, even for a brief period of time, has serious implications, but how serious and what long-term effects can't really be known.
Well, one thing we do know is that if the Army of the Potomac has been badly mauled then it's going to need reconstruction to be able to fight effectively once more. This process could take a long time and until it's done the Army of the Potomac can't take the field safely, and if it's fallen back into Washington then the process can't really begin until Lee's decided he's done with rampaging around Pennsylvania and Maryland and has gone back south of the Potomac.
If on the other hand it's fallen back behind the Susquehanna then you have a real risk to Washington - the Washington defences are significant but not impregnable, not if a large army gets to properly invest them and find the weak points.


Of course, there is a distinct other point here, which is that there's real potential for a backfire effect. What exactly ends up happening if Lincoln decides to bring in the only man who can restore the confidence of the Army of the Potomac in this dire time...George McClellan... :tongue:
 
I kind'a doubt it unless that major rebel victory was in Ohio or Illinois. I think the western Yankees expected the easterners to get whipped.

Anyway, the Army of the Cumberland had it's wedge in pretty deep at the time and had the rebels on the run. Well, moving back anyway.
Yeah. Guess you're right. The Tullahoma campaign would most likely be successful.
 
I kind'a doubt it unless that major rebel victory was in Ohio or Illinois. I think the western Yankees expected the easterners to get whipped.

Anyway, the Army of the Cumberland had it's wedge in pretty deep at the time and had the rebels on the run. Well, moving back anyway.
If Longstreet's two divisions are stuck in Pennsylvania longer, Generals Rosecrans and Thomas know they have an excellent opportunity to drive Bragg's force deep into Georgia. They can block and flank just like Thomas and Sherman did in 1864. The US had an enormous force available as soon as the siege at Vicksburg concluded. The US railroad industry was fully recharged by July 1863 and the US was capable of reinforcing Burnside's Cumberland Gap expedition and in expanding the NC enclave until Richmond was cut off from the rest of the Confederacy.
When Vicksburg fell, and Rosecrans was deep into central Tennessee, the US already had control of the far west.
Any embarrassment to the administration probably brings Grant east faster and he bestowed with nearly autocratic power to bypass the administration and win the war.
Grant's original plan in the east was to cut into North Carolina and cut the Richmond/Wilmington RR. Because the US had control of the Atlantic coast, there was not much the Confederates could do to stop that if Lee was marching around in Pennsylvania.
 
The US army of Tennessee was badly beaten at Chickamauga, but the Confederate army was severely damaged too. The US army retreated to the TN/GA border and there it was reinforced by divisions from two other armies. The Chattanooga result is evidence that by 1863 the US was unbeatable.
 
Not to take the thread back off track, but with regards to European involvement -

Napoleon III was ambitious but it was pretty clear he would not act unilaterally without British support. After January 1863 and especially February 1864 there was no chance Europe would intervene. In January 1863 there was a Polish uprising that some feared would spark off a larger European war (Crimean War 2.0 in terms of who's fighting who). Russia sent its navy to America actually after the Polish January Uprising to prevent it being frozen into their ports should another war break out. Then in February 1864 the Second Schleswig War broke out and European focus was decidedly not on American affairs. All of that is not to mention the ongoing conflict in Italy.

Basically, European nations had enough going on on their doorstep by the time of Gettysburg for them to not have any desire to sail armies across the Atlantic. So if the South was going to win it was going to have to do so on its own.
 
Basically, European nations had enough going on on their doorstep by the time of Gettysburg for them to have any desire to sail armies across the Atlantic. So if the South was going to win it was going to have to do so on its own.
There's a lot that European nations could do to impair the Union war effort without sailing armies across the Atlantic, though. Things which would be perfectly plausible for Napoleon III to do (with the British telling him they wouldn't intervene against him) include:

- selling the Confederates a modern ironclad warship complete with weapons.
- allowing the formation of a French force of what are basically Confederate mercenaries.
- giving good loan terms for the Confederates.
- selling artillery.

It's also the case that if Napoleon III wanted to intervene, the scale of intervention we're talking about wouldn't exactly need to be on the scale of a hundred thousand men. A complete corps of French troops with artillery and cavalry in proportion (on the order of 30,000 men, very roughly) is the kind of thing the French could ship to the Crimea with a couple months' notice, and their training is good enough that they'd be able to have a very significant impact on the Civil War in the east.
 
If events in Pennsylvania had occurred differently, the outcome of the war could have been different. But by July 1863 the US was in control of Missouri, the Mississippi River and the far west. A period of armistice could have existed. But its easy to envision the US renewing the war on more favorable terms once it had consolidated its armament industry, deployed dynamite for demolition purposes and trained up heavy cavalry units with their mountain howitzers.
Improved telegraph transmission, steel and petroleum products were coming.
Even without germ theory, medical science was observing the linkage between cleanliness and better outcomes.
Gettysburg might have helped the Confederates, but its hard to see how the industrial giants would have tolerated an independent Confederacy for very long.
 
Things which would be perfectly plausible for Napoleon III to do (with the British telling him they wouldn't intervene against him) include

His concern wasn't over going to war with Britain, it was over going to war with the Union. He felt that a war with the Union in which he had no allies would be disastrous. I've read that he told a British diplomat in late November 1863 that war with the Union, "would spell disaster to the interests of France and would have no possible object."

He was already acting antagonizing enough with the whole Mexico debacle. In fact, in the long run, Napoleon was willing to sell out the Confederacy if it meant Union recognition of Emperor Maximilian. For reasons that were baffling to some, Napoleon III absolutely took the threats of William Seward that French intervention would lead to open war to heart. Once the civil war was over, Napoleon largely abandoned his Mexico project because it was proving an utter disaster and he didn't want to face the US Army.

We can see this indecisiveness again when the French government blocked the sale of the CSS Stonewall to the Confederacy, sending it to the Danish instead (who turned around and sold it to the Confederates anyways). Napoleon III had only agreed to build the ship in the first place if its destination remained a secret; as soon as that secret was blown, he gave up.

In fact, this hunt for allies by Napoleon III can be seen with Mexico as well. He essentially lied to Britain and Spain in order to get them to join the initial expedition. As soon as Britain and Spain realized the truth (that they were not collecting debt but instead building a new French Empire) they went home.

In short - I don't think Napoleon III had the will to do any of the things you outlined alone without an ally.

Plus,

Source:
https://books.google.com/books?id=gVvZb5oeVtwC&pg=PA183#v=onepage&q&f=false
 
There's a lot that European nations could do to impair the Union war effort without sailing armies across the Atlantic, though. Things which would be perfectly plausible for Napoleon III to do (with the British telling him they wouldn't intervene against him) include:

- selling the Confederates a modern ironclad warship complete with weapons.
- allowing the formation of a French force of what are basically Confederate mercenaries.
- giving good loan terms for the Confederates.
- selling artillery.

It's also the case that if Napoleon III wanted to intervene, the scale of intervention we're talking about wouldn't exactly need to be on the scale of a hundred thousand men. A complete corps of French troops with artillery and cavalry in proportion (on the order of 30,000 men, very roughly) is the kind of thing the French could ship to the Crimea with a couple months' notice, and their training is good enough that they'd be able to have a very significant impact on the Civil War in the east.

No need to even send a Corps, honestly; the French Navy alone could probably deal a death blow by breaking the blockade of the South and forcing the evacuation/surrender of coastal Union positions. That would free up a lot of Confederate manpower, allow for all of the above and general trade (increasing the diplomatic chance of general recognition), and, finally, would prevent things like the Overland Campaign given the French and C.S. Navies would prevent the logistics needed for it. Whether or not they could've instituted a blockade of their own upon the Union is possible, although I am not sure.
 
Back
Top