Ok…enough of this politics stuff. Time for something fun. My guess is this subject has been dealt with before but as I’m currently reading Robert Conroy’s 1862 and as I didn’t want to resurrect some old thread I thought I’d start a new one.
Let’s say that the British decide to hold there collective noses and fully support the Confederacy in 1862 after the Trent incident. How would the course of history have been altered had this happened? Would the Confederacy have ended up winning the war and gaining independence? Would the combined might of the British and Confederacy have been enough to literally beat the Union and occupy it…and if so, who would have reaped the spoils, the Brits or the Confederacy? Or would they have split the difference with the far Northern states going to British Canada while the border states going to the Confederacy?
Or would the Union have been able to use it’s greater industrial might to eventually crush the Confederacy anyway, despite the British fleet and the inevitable blockade of Northern ports? Could the Union have invaded Canada and struck at the British empire that way and force them to beg off the war and sue for a separate peace? What effect would Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation have had on the British people and on the Queen if GB was supporting the slave owning South? And how would things have been different if the North would have had to rely much more heavily on black soldiers in order to finally defeat the Confederacy? Or if the Brits had put more pressure on the South to get rid of slavery in return for GB staying in the war?
Assuming the North DID take Canada, would we have given it back? Would the Canadians (who were a bit miffed at the Brits at the time due to the fact that they weren’t getting the representation they felt was there due in Parliament) have WANTED to go back to the Brits…and if so, would they have demanded more representation first?
I do hope you get some good responses in here, xtisme. And I hope it doesn’t devolve into northerners accusing Southerners of racism and all that. Sometimes these WBTS threads get pretty sticky. Good luck!
In his version, the Union forces – lacking a crucial misdirected Confederate despatch that saved the battle for them in OTL – are defeated at Antetiam. This forestalls Lincoln’s plan to issue the Emancipation Proclamation – which could change the moral character of the war, but only if issued from a position of strength, otherwise it would be perceived as a mere cri de coeur. Absent significant political pressure on the other side, Britain supports the Confederacy (and so does France, IIRC). The outcome is that the Confederacy becomes independent and the U.S. has a permanently hostile relationship with the CSA, the UK, and the British colony of Canada. It is inconceivable for large independent countries with a history of bad blood to share long borders on the same continent peacefully; more and more wars follow.
This is the part that was implausible to me - the long term existance of the Canada-US dispute. The border just struck me as too long with the population centers too close to it (unlike say Russia-China) for that situation to be rational or sustainable.
It hinges on one extremely incorrect conception. The British were never going to go to war or even blockade the North, and would have suffered bloody defeats (the Union could handily field ironclads). They might have been willing to go as far as recognizing the Confederacy. But this would have been of limited value, as it wouldn’t really improve their situation any.
Now, if you decide that Britain might have been willing to fight on behalf of the South, then we’ve gone much farther than a plausible alt-history can go, and anything might have happened.
I am not saying this would happen, but I am not going to post in a thread that asks *What if the British side with the Confederacy *by saying the British didn’t side with Confederacy. We all get that it didn’t happen and wasn’t going to happen.
If I have to come up with a “what if” I think one way to spin it in an Alt History is like this:
The British recognize the Confederacy and British merchants try to trade with the South. The Union intervenes and the British Navy makes short work of that.
Now maybe the British Navy takes some serious losses in this fight and things get testy and the U.K. goes apesh^t and hits the Union merchant ships wherever they be found all around the world? Maybe they start a little blockade of their own and loan the South Money?
The Northern Economy is weaker, New Orleans isn’t held anymore and Grant et al. need to work North to South. Maybe the sale or loan of equiptment, and horses etc. goes South and they have more of everything they need. Maybe there is a pants-browning scary big British ground force in Canada for protection and the U.S. needs to peel off troops from the War and send them to places like Michigan and Vermont or Maine to watch the border
All this maybe could in What if land happen.
… and Ultimately though I think this might actually have ended up strengthening the Great Emancipator or at least not weakening him enough to lose in 1864. I think this may have galvanized Northern opinion, support and allowed a larger and greater & wider conscription and changed it from a war for “Black rights” to use a politer term than those who detested it in the North might use, into a war about National sovereignty, pride and America’s place in the World. It would certainly change the War from a purely “Civil” war into a more traditional war.
I believe it would be bloodier and nastier and changed the World down timestream alot and would not have lasted a whole lot longer than it did, nor would the outcome in North America proper have been any different than it was in real life.
re Canada I believe it would be insane and unnecessary to invade Canada and the U.S. would not have
Timeline 191 hinges on McClellan NOT finding a copy of Lee’s Special Order 191 during the crossing of Maryland in early 1862. Thus Little Mac didn’t force the fight at Antietam and Lee rampaged through Pennsylvania eventually routing the Union at Camp Hill, PA. The British force Lincoln to negotiate simply by recognizing the CSA and telling him that they’re about to break the blockade and start one of US ports. Simple enough. Thing spiral out of control fifteen years later with another war and then WWI happens with both nations on different sides.
Let me recommend 1862 by Robert Conroy. It exactly focuses on British involvement spurred by the Trent incident.
In fact, all three of Conroy’s alt-history, 1862, 1901 and 1945 are very good if you like military alt-history.
You mean the book that xtisme said he is reading in the OP? The one that prompted him to start this thread? Is that the book you’re recommending to him?
That’s the one I’m reading…but I appreciate the thought. And you are right…it’s very good. I’ll probably pick up some additional titles by this guy after this. I haven’t read the Turtledove one yet, though I read his spin off series (I assume) that talks about the South winning the war and takes things from WWI through WWII. I haven’t read the last book in the series yet however.
No, they probably wouldn’t have…which is why it didn’t happen, ehe? However, they COULD have.
BTW, the Brits had more and bigger steam powered ships than the Union did (who mostly had steam sloops at the start of the war and mainly relied on older sail powered ships). I think at the start of the war (recall, the Monitor wasn’t built yet and it wasn’t really a blue water ship in any case) the Union navy wasn’t all that powerful…while the Brits pretty much still ruled the waves. And would for some time to come.
I wonder… if Britain and France had sided with the Confederacy, wouldn’t the Northern leaders spun this as “outsiders trying to interfere in our bidness”?
Would this have generated more support in the north amongst it’s population, in terms of Army volunteers and monetary support?
True, the states bordering Canada would have withheld some of those troops to hold the border, and the Union Navy would have had a heck of a time keeping Boston and New York open…
In real life, the north eventually overpowered the south through sheer numbers. What is the comparison of the number of potential soldiers available to Great Britain and France?
In WW2, the US had a huge amount of manpower available compared to the Axis. (And the efforts of the USSR in this regard is staggering.) How much different was the ratio in the 1860’s?
I think Great Britain was further along in the Industrial Revolution, compared to the US, at start. It’s production of iron and coal was higher than anyone elses, wasn’t it? This may mean that GB could have produced more rifles, cannon, and ships than the North, at least in the first couple of years… but GB would be more sensitive to trade disruption, compared to the North, which would have been a tad more self sufficient.
In the 1850’s, the steam powered Line of Battle Ship was the premier warship. These were the classic three decked 90-100 gun wooden sailing ships, but with auxiliary steam power. Both GB and France built these. Also, they had some smaller steam frigates (including some older LoB ships “cut down” and converted to auxiliary steam/screw propulsion. These would have been the early opponents the US faced.
In the 1860’s, both France and Great Britain engaged in a little bit of an ironclad arms race. In these ships, they were wooden-hulled warships with belts (or boxes) of iron armor, like the HMS Warrior. (Warrior was completed in 1861, and her sister Black Prince in 1862.)
Neither of those two nations built many all-metal hulled ships until the 1870’s that I can recall, although I guess if there was a dire need, production might have appeared little earlier.
In real life, construction of these ships (in the RN) was slow. (A couple a year slow.)
But I thought Britain DID have some armored and steam powered battle ships (with rifled long range guns), while the US essentially started the war with some steam powered sloops of war. That’s why we built the monitor, wasn’t it?
(man, no idea what’s up with the board tonight. Warrior and those were exactly what I was thinking of…by the time my post got through you had already posted again)
I think the British would have had a problem. The United States wouldn’t have been able to attack Britain but Britain would have taken some blows.
The Royal Navy would have quickly taken control of the seas, broken the Union blockade of the Confederacy, and established a blockade of American ports. But the United States owned a sizable percentage of the world’s merchant shipping in 1862 (about a third) and exported a lot of grain to the United Kingdom. And British merchant ships would be subject to attack by American raiders. So the closing of American trade would hurt the British almost as much as it would the Americans.
The British would then have to figure out how to project its power into an American conflict. If they tried to bring their navy in to shell American cities, they’d face American coastal defenses (which were fairly strong) including the ironclads coming into service. The alternative would be an expeditionary force to fight on the Confederate side.
But 1862 was not a good time to call up the British Army. The Crimean War (1853-1856) had shown how outdated the British Army was for modern war and also how poor its command system was. The Indian Mutiny of 1857 had called into question whether England could rely on its Indian troops. And what troops there were were already involved in ongoing wars in China, New Zealand, and East Africa. To give an example, Britain managed to put 250,000 troops into the field for the Crimean War (and this was before the Mutiny). The United States put 2,200,000 troops into the field during the Civil War. Rather than launching offensive operations from the South, Britain would probably have been forced to use whatever troops it could find to defend Canada from an American attack.
Then there’s the political issue. Many Americans in the north questioned the justification for the war; they figured that if the Southern states wanted to leave, we should let them go. There would have been no similar division in the face of a war with Britain; this would have united the country.
War with America, on the other hand, would have created a massive divide in Britain. The upper classes still ruled British politics in the 1862. The lower classes had been calling for political reform and an opening of the political system for a couple of decades. And one of the arguments they used was how the United States was able to function despite not being run by the upper classes. So the outcome of the American Civil War was seen as a big issue in Britain; the upper classes hoped that the Union would fail and thus demonstrate that the common people couldn’t maintain a stable government, the lower classes were hoping for a Union triumph that would demonstrate that such a government could handle a crisis.
So British intervention would have created a political crisis in Britain. The lower classes would see it as an upper class attempt to make them fight and die on behalf of a cause that was opposed to their own best interest. British commoners would be getting wiped out in battles to protect the privileges of the upper classes. Meanwhile the trade war would send the price of food in Britain on a sharp and steady rise. British progressives, who were pushing for political reform, were also the people who were most opposed to slavery. British politics would be a tinderbox waiting for a spark to set it on fire.
Plus, IIRC, the queen was very much opposed to slavery. I’m unsure how much power the queen actually wielded at this period in history, but surely she wouldn’t be to happy.
However, perhaps the Confederacy would have done better with the pressure off? I’m sure the breaking of the Unions blockade would have had a positive effect on their economy…plus IIRC the Confederacy was always strapped for the materials of war…which I assume the Brits would have been able to supply.
Too funny! Definitely post that in the right thread Liberal.