Spain could do the same as well. What would stop them? Again, those notions about CSA becoming a superpower is as random as doing the same with Brazil, Mexico or whatever the country just for the sake of it. There is absolutely nothing special about CSA.
What really is the future of the CSA?
- Thread starter EasternRomanEmpire
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Spain could do the same as well. What would stop them? Again, those notions about CSA becoming a superpower is as random as doing the same with Brazil, Mexico or whatever the country just for the sake of it. There is absolutely nothing special about CSA.
Making it even worse is that this is likely going to be seriously personal for the United States. Something that hasn't been mentioned in here are things like Andersonville Prison - a prisoner of war camp run by the Confederacy, whose commander was hanged after the war in our timeline because the place was basically a death camp. In this timeline, Henry Wirz is still alive, and any peace would see an exchange of prisoners, who are going to be heading back to the Union with tales of this horror show. The Wikipedia page is rather detailed, so I can just quote that instead of writing it up myself:
When Union troops come back home, they're going to be bringing back stories of conditions like those - these men are brothers, husbands, sons, uncles, fathers, and news of their horrific mistreatment in the South during the war is only going to stoke up genuine hatred...and since the Confederacy got out of the war, so too did the men responsible. It isn't hard at all to see this used as a battle cry in the remainder of the Union, and it presents easy ammunition for those who are against reconciliation with the Confederacy. It'll be a festering wound, slowly rotting its way along in the background - this happened, it happened to us, and the people responsible for it are free and honored in their country. Combine it with things like the Great Hanging at Gainesville, the Lawrence Massacre, and other incidents throughout the war (and you'd have the same on the other side of the coin - the Confederates aren't going to be happy about some of the stuff the Union got up to, either), and the aftermath of this American divorce is going to be far, far from amicable. On its own it might not be enough to restart hostilities (unless the Union is really sporting for a second match, in which case this can go down like Jenkin's ear), but it'll definitely shape the post war narrative of what had happened and what needs to be done next. Civil wars are horrific affairs that can bring a lot of bad blood, tearing whole families apart as one brother goes for one side and the other to the opposite, and that animosity is now written on a national scale. They can be deeply personal wars, and combined with things like Andersonville, will stoke sufficient anger and fury on the homefront as to put the CSA and the US on a collision course. There'll be those that want peace and to avoid another war, sure, but there'll be those who want to avenge their fallen brothers, their national honor, the loss of a war that the Union on paper should've been able to win (something unexplored in this thread - how did the Union lose? That'll have massive implications for both the Confederates and the Union as to what happens next. A Union version of the "stab in the back" mythos could be born, and only serve as fuel for a second round), and they'll meet those who want peace in debate.
And you already know what they'll say.
"Remember Fort Sumter! Remember Andersonville, Lawrence, Gainesville!"
That kind of fury feels like it could make round two not just inevitable, but a very bloody, very bitter affair. You'd need either a war fought ot absolute exhaustion (in that case, how do you get there?), a very successful peace movement (meaning a lot of mothers and wives going "when will it end" rather than being furious their loved ones just got gunned down in the civil war), or the result is just going to be a second war some years after the first, fought with the fury that can only come from a serious grudge.
On the plus side, it means that Dr. Arliss Loveless can build his giant spider machines in the comfort of the Confederacy...
...and we might get to have the coolest of all time lines: a steampunk civil war rematch. This part might be less serious than the rest of the post above, but c'mon, it'd be fun for ASB at least
Hitler is another story, most Germans didn't believe in the Final Solution or the Lebensraum
The number of slaves there is mind-blowing. CSA enthusiasts (and there are so many of them) don't realize how messed up such society is.
Brazil, the last country to abolish slavery on the hemisphere, also had 10 million inh. on their first Census (1872). Out of those, 3.8 million were White, 5.8 million Mixed/Black and 400k Indigenous. Slaves were 1.5 million. "Only" 1/4 of the non-White population as opposed to virtually 100% in CSA.
Slavery was a dying institution at this point in Brazil while CSA was fighting a total war to keep it intact. If they were successful, slavery would never be abolished voluntarily. Or it would last forever or it would end by a collapse there.
And that's the society people keep arguing that would proceed to conquer the whole Latin America because they're supposedly superior.
I didn't say how because I don't see that happening in a realistic way.
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Do you think that it's completely impossible they abandon slavery? Wouldn't it simply become unprofitable and the old elites are taken over by another one who relies on something else than cash crops?
Possible? Yes. Likely? No.
The Southern elites had a lot in comon with the russian nobility. They both sticked with archaic economic systems just to preserve their status and privileges
I said that plenty of Germans signed up for the newest round of war with France. You didn't respond to that.
Are you saying Franco-Prussian War and they then enlisted for WW1? In that case it's very different, first not many died and second nobody knew what an industrial war would be like
Why would they do it? They fought a total war to keep it going. And even after losing it, they engaged in horrible acts of violence against Black population and only abandoned segregation 100 years later due pressure coming from federal government.
The question should be the opposite: why do you think such backward society would change all the sudden?
The ones who did act of violence against blacks were people convinced of racial superiority, the elite class of land-owners would never bother doing that.
Not all of a sudden but the class of land-owners who desires to maintain slavery will slowly but surely lose power and influence to another kind of business who won't rely on cash crops who are on their way out, the CS would certainly change over time.
And why this CSA would turn out more progressist than OTL US South?
Any country could improve: Congo, Mali, Saudi Arabia and become a powerhouse. I just don't see why CSA would be better positioned for that.
And never forget that those factory jobs paid higher wages than what they got back in Europe.
That isn't what I said, in the post I was answering to you were saying that the land-owners were the ones doing violence against blacks
I'm just saying that I'm convinced that the CS wouldn't remain the same state it was in 1860 for the rest of its existence.
No. People signed up for WW2 knowing full well how bad WW1 was and how 700k people starved because the government used all copper for military use and didn't leave any to be used to kill phytophora.
No, I didn't say that. I said Blacks suffered brutal acts of violence up to the 1960's by Whites. I didn't mention their social status. And needless to say land-owners were incredibly violent during slavery. It's not like they had any kind of consciousness. They were brutal beyond words.
No, but they would certainly be much worse than the OTL South which was bad enough.
I really don't understand where this idea of CSA becoming a prosperous and good place out of the blue.
Alsace-Lorraine becoming pro-German in the early 20th century didn't stop the French from pressing their claims on the region up to WWI.
You still haven't explained how the French humiliation is somehow less than the American humiliation given the higher casualties and more land lost.
How is diplomatic isolation relevant? We're talking solely about nationalist sentiment, which has very little to do with international relations. Even if isolation did play a role, the US has always had an isolationist bent anyways.
Doing business != handing over a client state that had abolished slavery decades ago to the CSA.
They established a tenuous hold on the central part of Mexico for four years that collapsed the second foreign troops withdrew. The sparse population doesn't mean much given the insane geography of the mountains in the North and the jungles of South that are a guerilla's dream. Many guerillas, like the ones in Cuba, often did retreated into sparsely populated lands, with significant success. So either the CSA needs to continuously prop up an increasing quagmire that's guaranteed to escalate to the Mexican Revolution covertly, or the entire region turns independent once the soldiers leave.
In name, sure. In practice, no. It'll just be sharecropping or some other form of forced labor (like prison labor).
The decline of the plantation economy may be inevitable, but it takes decades, and the political elite controlling the transition still remains in power. Again, Brazil and Argentina from the late 19th century until Vargas/Peron are textbook examples of what happens when an agrarian elite is in charge of industrialization and modernization.
The CSA doesn't have decades because of the boll weevil, whose introduction would be accelerated by ventures into Mexico and the rest of Latin America.
As you point out, the CS needs to be willing to become a naval and military power. Jeff Davis and Lee had massive issues trying to pull every single bit of power from the states to even create a slightly functional state of waging a civil war. The South is also historically been extremely anti-navy in Congress, so good luck trying to have them militarize in central manner without a threat of war.
The KKK was founded by aristocratic officers.
Also, who do you think created the ideology of racial superiority in the first place? It certainly wasn't the poor white farmer more concerned about the bad weather this month than trying to justify his neighbor's plantation slaves. Even if the elites weren't getting their hands dirty, they were certainly fanning the flames of racial superiority.
bguy
Donor
The question is why would the United States even want reintegration? It's one thing to try and keep the existing Union from being broken, but what exactly is the benefit to the US of trying to reintegrate the Confederate States after 10/20/30 years of Confederate independence? (And especially if the Confederate States prove as dysfunctional as so many people in this thread expect.) At a certain point isn't the US likely to just adopt the attitude of "good riddance"?
I don't know if that is accurate. Southern views on economic diversification were not necessarily that rigid but instead seem to have fluctuated depending on what the price of cotton was. (The decade before the 1850s saw increased focus on cotton production in the south, but that seems to have largely occurred because cotton prices exploded in that decade, making it ludicrously profitable. In times when cotton prices were lower, the southerners were much more open to economic diversification.
"Many planters did invest in railroads and factories of course and these enterprises expanded in the 1850s. But the trend seemed to be toward even greater concentration in land and slaves. While per capita southern wealth rose 62 percent from 1850 to 1860, the average price of slaves increased 70 percent and the value per acre of agricultural land appreciated 72 percent, while per capita southern investment in manufacturing increased only 39 percent. In other words, southerners had a larger portion of their capital invested in land and slaves in 1860 than in 1850.
Although the persistence of Jeffersonian agrarianism may help explain this phenomenon, the historian can discover pragmatic reasons as well. The 1850s were boom years for cotton and for other southern staples. Low cotton prices in the 1840s had spurred the crusade for economic diversification. But during the next decade the price of cotton jumped more than 50 percent to an average of 11.5 cents per pound. The cotton crop consequently doubled to four million bales annually by the late 1850s. Sugar and tobacco prices and production similarly increased. The apparent insatiable demand for southern staples caused planters to put every available acre into these crops. The per capita output of the principal southern food crops actually declined in the 1850s, and this agricultural society headed toward the status of a food-deficit region.
Although these trends alarmed some southerners, most expressed rapture over the dizzying prosperity brought by the cotton boom. The advocates of King Commerce faded; King Cotton reigned supreme."
-Battle Cry of Freedom by James McPherson, pgs. 99-100
If McPherson is correct then it seems that the South's commitment to cotton production was not so much out of ideology but more because cotton production was extremely profitable in the 1850s and if that starts to change then there will be renewed support in the South for economic diversification.
(Also, the idea that the Confederate Constitution would have prohibited economic development is somewhat overstated. While it is true that the Confederate Constitution prohibited protective tariffs (for any purpose other than revenue) and most spending on internal improvements, it is also true that the Confederate Constitution was significantly easier to amend than the US Constitution was. (The Confederate Constitution only required 2/3 of the states to approve an amendment while the US Constitution requires 2/3 of both houses of Congress and then 3/4 of the states.)
The other question is would the Confederates even want to take Cuba? Much of the Knights of the Golden Circle ideology was about getting extra slave states to maintain a balance with free states in the United States Senate. Once the Confederates are an independent nation that issue no longer exists for them, so there is much less need for southern expansionism. (And at least as long as the Spanish maintain slavery in Cuba, the Confederates may see diplomatic benefits in continued Spanish control of the island, since the Confederates will be much less diplomatically isolated if there is a European power that is still practicing slavery.)