I’d known that during the Civil War, the Confederate States of American had a military draft. What I hadn’t known was the legal theory behind it. During the debate over enacting the draft Confederate senator Louis Wigfall of Texas said (my bolding): “No man has any individual rights, which come into conflict with the welfare of the country.”
Gee, not exactly a libertarian, was he?
So if somehow the Confederacy had won it’s independence, just what would things have been like for your average (non-rich) southern white male? On the one hand the South did have a sort of grass-roots respect for individual (white) freedoms, but on the other hand it had the planter oligarchy, with it’s undisguised contempt for the poor and landless.
Except for a state’s right to leave the Confederacy, I suspect rights of any kind would be nearly identical to the antebellum status quo. Their concept of property rights would be almost identical to that in the North except in the matter Of whether other human beings constitute property.
Forgive me if I break out my broad brush. Since we are dealing with a what-if, I have no way to back up my guess, but here goes.
Had the South managed to pull off independence, it would have been a land with a very weak central government and very strong, abusive local government. The local sheriff would say ‘you can’t do that here’ and no state or federal government would have told him otherwise.
The (US) Constitution is a check on the power of local bully boys. A weak central government cannot perform this function.
I’ve read the theory that the southern states had a distorted view of liberty. They didn’t see it as a situation where everyone had a set of rights and the conflicts between these competing rights had to be limited by compromise. Their sense of liberty was distorted by the presence of slavery - as they saw it you were either a Master or a Slave. If someone was infringing on your rights, they were asserting mastery over you and reducing you to slavery.
This was one reason why Virginia was such a center for Revolutionary spirit in the 1770’s - people in the northern colonies might accept some reasonable level of control by London as the price of doing business. But the Southerners could not accept the idea that they were being controlled by the British Parliament.
The South never developed an urban society prior to the war where large groups of people had to live and work together. Their society was rural and based around the household - there might be a small community in the household but there would be an undisputed head who set the rules.
So it’s hard to say how the Confederacy would have developed as a nation if it had won its independence. Obviously there would have been the wealthy aristocracy on top and the slaves on the bottom. But where would the white working class fit in? Would the planters have been able to accept them as political equals? I think it’s unlikely the planters would have been willing to surrender control to what they would regard as the common mob. I think you would have seen a more reactionary government with a restrictive franchise (akin to what existed in contemporary Britain) were the “right sort” ran the government and most people were essentially regarded as subjects not citizens.
One tendency that was seen in the antebellum South, and would have presumably been at least as strong in a hypothetical independent Confederacy, was that the free speech of even white males was curtailed–if it touched at all on the subject of slavery. From censorship of the mail to lynch mobs, by the outbreak of the war the South had grown increasingly intolerant of anything that could be seen as tending to incite “servile insurrection”. In an independent Confederate States, the open expression of even critiques of slavery that did not necessarily favor equal rights for the blacks (that, for example, slavery was harmful to white republicanism) would probably have been taboo, subject to both official disapproval and extralegal violence.
The South would have soon became a totalitarian state based upon some very antiquated rules of racial superiority and meritocracy.
Its ironic that right now, these southern conservatives see themselves as some kind of anti-liberal bastion of good against encroaching fascism but in reality, had they won, they would have become one.
Even with a strong central government blacks were terrorized in the south where they were lynched with impunity for nearly seventy years following the Civil War and disenfranchised for thirty years longer than that. While you can give some credit to the Feds for enfranchising black voters in the 20th century they don’t get any credit for putting a stop to Judge Lynch.
I wonder how long the Confederacy would have stayed together as one nation. I have a feeling before too long there would have been secessions from the South as well and you may have had thirteen separate fiefdoms.
I think it would look a lot like post-Redemption Dixie, with the proviso that slaveholders could probably prevent their slaves from being forcibly conscripted into chain gangs.
And there would have been constant threats of slave revolts, an Underground Railroad active for much longer, and incursions by latter-day John Brown types. No sleepy quiet South, they would have been at constant war with abolitionists.
That seems quite likely. In fact it was the point of the Gettysburg Address. The American experiment is if free people can rule themselves as a nation or self-destruct into atoms. Can a democracy impose discipline on the population while still being free.
Totalitarian? There is a difference between a dictatorship and a totalitarian regime-the former is your typical Latin American or African dictatorship while a totalitarian regimes was a 20th Century innovation and adopted only by the Nazis and Stalinists. In most cases it would resemble something like Apathreid South Africa. And how is meritocracy “antiquitated”?
It’s weird that you would make the two systems our to be mutually exclusive. The Nazis ran a totalitarian system AND they were run by a dictator. The same for Stalinist Russia. I don’t think the two systems completely overlap, but they overlap enough.
I have no problem imagining that the Confederacy itself would have had such a weak central government that states would be pretty much free to do whatever the hell they wanted, as long as monies flowed and the “powers that were” remained contented. Poorer states would be more dependent on Virginia for direction and leadership, while wealthier states (like Virginia itself) would have had no one but itself to answer to. I could see industry displacing agriculture in states as soils become less productive, and that would have shaped the dynamic between rich and poor whites. If all those “good” industrial jobs are just going to be handed over to blacks, then who’s left to tend what’s left on the plantations? Poor whites? Well, that’s nigra work! So perhaps it would have been poor whites who would have filled the factory laborer niche, gradually turning into skilled and semi-skilled workers, leaving blacks to toil on unproductive land and to do the nastier jobs associated with industry.
Also, the wealthy planter class would have eventually realised that having a demoralized poor white class would not lend itself to a sustainable society,
especially if upward mobility for poor whites was looking a lot more possible in the Union states. So I’m imagining that Confederate leadership would eventually lose some of their feudal mentality and try to make their world a bit more egalitarian…for white men, at least. They would have a vested interest in looking “good” in front of the world so that they would have international business partners and their own set of European immigrants. Which would have been vital in states like South Carolina and Mississippi, where the blacks-to-whites ratio was so dangerously high.
maybe they would have invented border checkpoints. If Saudi Arabia and Israel can use a mix of fences and border guards to deal with terrorist infiltration, then so can the hypothetical Confederacy. All the more so since nobody will hold UN meetings over the routine hangings of such hostis humani generis people back in the day.
I don’t buy extensive slave revolts in the South without active white support. Black slaves in the South are not white slaves in Roman Sicily v2.0. And even if some revolts would happen, as in IRL, they would have been crushed about as easily and quickly as the IRL ones.
In any event, they would have probably ended up abolishing slavery at around the same time as Brazil and then proceeded to run a society along similar lines, with blacks reclassified as low wage free labor.
On the other hand, the CSA might have suffered a Communist revolution due to the blacks and/or the poor whites. In an AH scenario I’ve written, a Communist CSA ends up being led by Colonel Paul Pott.
On paper the CSA would enshrine all the important freedoms of the U.S. Constitution. In practice I think each State would be held only moderately accountable to the central government and local powers would rule in most places. I think that the planter class had become a dangerous cancer on Southern society by this point in time and the only way they could really continue their existence in the manner they preferred would be by actively subjugating free non-slaveowning whites (which were something like 9 out of 10 white households.) I don’t know that I agree with monstro that the planters would see the light of day and make concessions to the poorer whites. I wouldn’t be shocked if various local ordinances effectively disenfranchised all but the wealthy.
I think there was great potential for social unrest in the South in a hypothetically independent CSA.
Really it’s not totally dissimilar from situations you may have seen in some Latin American countries, where a small aristocracy controlled almost all of the good land traditionally. You end up having Marxist rebellions, forced land redistributions and things of that nature.
My guess would be the planter class would try to control the country with various laws that restricted the political power of the lower class whites. There’d be lip service to the idea that all white people were in it together but the lower classes would notice they were getting the short end.
But the wild card would be the slaves. Unlike most contemporary societies where there was a clear class based divide, the CSA would also have a racial divide. The upper class would be focusing its attention on what it perceived as the bigger threats - the United States and the slaves and wouldn’t be paying enough attention to the lower classes which it thought were “safe”.
So when the lower classes started calling for their rights and organizing strikes, the government would be caught by surprise and wouldn’t have any idea what to do. My guess is they’d stick with the reactionary solution and try to suppress any dissent by force. Qin’s communist revolution scenario is certainly a possibility.
The DC area wouldn’t be the major metropolitan area it is today. The real DC area would be DC and the Maryland suburbs only. On the other side would be an international border, and there would be customs checkpoints on the 14th Street Bridge and Chain Bridge. The Wilson Bridge and Legion Bridge might never have been built because there would be no big reason to have a beltway, what with two separate border crossings on it.