The Confederacy's future: an alternate historical guessing game

Great Debates
1

I call this a guessing game, because, obviously, we cannot say what might have happened. Or rathr we can, but rapidly reach the point where we can say *anything * might have happened. So, I’m keeping the question to a relatively limited one:

Could the Confederacy really have survived and thrived in the post civil war era?

Here is the scenario: in 1864, a war-weary union washes its hands of the Confederacy and says “Good Riddance.” Lincoln is not re-elected, and McClellan, on apeace platform, becomes president. Yes, I know McClellan came in a war platform in actual fact. Bear with me. The Union retains its grip on military bases around Confederate territory, as well as West Virginia and East Tennessee, which becomes the state of Appalachia.

Jeff Davis proclaims his victory, blah blah blah.

The Confederacy’s problem, however, is that in peacetime, each states proclaims itself a sovereign entity. It has and can have no unifying political force: its entire raison d’etre is against it. The central government doesn’t have any power to compel any state to do anything (and I just don’t see, say, Texas, going along with Richmond out of loyalty).

Economically, I don’t see the Confederacy matching up to the Union. It had lost far too many skilled workers to the North, and had by this time attracted a great deal of unfriendly eyes in Europe. It was behind in industrialization and capitalization and the econmic leaders would have wanted to return to the labor-and-capital-inefficient cotton economy.

Moreover, the Confederate government invites future conflict since it will almost certainly be forced to try to expand westward. But the Union already has a strong base in California and Colorado and will resist. The COnfederacy will either have to accept limited expansion in very unfavorable terrain (for plantation economies) or expand into Mexico, which will spark vicious wars, or attack the Union.

Politically, a great many leading Confederates, including General Lee and their Vice President, harbored deep ambiguities concerning the Confederacy, and remained in it by sectional loyalties rather than any ideological agreement.

All in all, I have a hard time seeing the Confederacy remaining intact for more than 50 years, except possibly through sheer inertia.

2

I’m not sure the war could have “ended”, at least not for many years. There might have been something like the situation in Korea: an cease-fire without a formal armistice. For political reasons, the Union would have kept on refusing to legally recognize the secession while claiming that it “temporarily” didn’t have the power to do anything about it. Virginia and any other southern state that lost territory to the Union would have demanded it back, the Union would have said “you be damned”, and the border regions would become a Kashmir-like situation. Slaves from the South would have been considered free under the Union’s Emancipation Proclamation; southern raiders would launch incursions to recover “escaped slaves” (any Negro unlucky enough to fall into their hands); “slave catchers” would be hanged, the south would conduct reprisal hangings, etc.

In fact, given the animosity between the sides and the near-total lack of common ground even for a permanent cease-fire, I can’t see a peace unless one or both sides were totally completely exhausted. IRL that meant a Union victory because the North had more resources.

3

I think the most apt comparison to real-world situations would be the Dominican Republic and Haiti, with the Confederacy being the absolutely unenviable Haiti to the Union’s somewhat better DR.

Slavery is a lynchpin of the Confederate economy (the others being the ability to grow cotton and tobacco and the ability to sell those cash crops overseas). If the slaves of 1865 (a year or so after armistice) can be radicalized by Northern Radical Republicans and their own native resistance movements into collective action, the CSA would find itself in a race war to make the worst excesses of the Reconstruction seem downright reactionary and pro-slavery in comparison. Getting guns to the slaves might be a problem, although don’t underestimate the power of both the underground railroad and covert foreign aid, but I would have great respect for a plantation’s worth of strong field slaves handy with machetes and big wooden clubs and whatever else comes readily to hand on a well-provisioned plantation. If that occurs, the CSA is done: Mexico or the Union or possibly a European power (Spain, maybe) would wait for the fighting to die down and gently scoop up the remains for itself.

The Union blockades would end, but the boycotts would not. England especially had Indian cotton by that time (IIRC) and there was political hay to be made by refusing to support (foreign) slavery. I’m pretty sure tobacco was being grown elsewhere as well, but I don’t really know. If this happened, the CSA would go from an agricultural nation to a dirt-farming nation without enough hard currency to buy rocks at market price. A country can starve for a long time if it doesn’t have to fight, however, so the CSA might last into the 20th century. Longer if it finds a new way to make money.

And then it might just be conquered outright. It would be friendless, exhausted, and without any real native industry. Given that it also sits on prime farmland and offers a foothold on the Mississippi River Basin, it would make a profitable colony.

4

The movie Confederate States of America postulates what might have happened if the Confederacy had won the Civil War. Fascinating to watch, it includes faux-commercials and TV shows that might have been made in this century.

According to their scenario, Lincoln tried to escape in blackface to Canada using Harriet Tubman’s underground railroad, NYC is sacked by Lee’s army, and CSA embarks on a continental conquest of South America. While some of this seems fanciful and farfetched, there really was a proposal of this kind by the Confederates in the heyday of the war.

5

Well, I agree with Lumpy that no lasting peace could ever really exist between the Confederacy and the Union.

But let’s assume a true “peace” did break out, just for the sake of this discussion. Economically I’m not entirely sold on the idea that the South would be hurt badly by splitting off from the union. The South’s economy was very much not interconnected with that of the North, in fact that was a big part of what really allowed secession to happen.

Since 1816 or so the North had successfully kept protective tariffs in place which hurt Southern export revenues and also forced Southerners to pay more for manufactured goods (which they primarily imported from the UK and Europe–not from the North.)

The second half of the 19th century very well could have been better for the South if the Civil War stops prior to or right around the time of Gettysburg. The South wouldn’t have been near as devastated by the war as it ultimately was (look at some pictures of Southern cities after the war, they look very much like bombed out European cities post-WWII.)

Ultimately however something bad would happen to the Confederacy economically because of the fact that the plantation system was ultimately not an economically sound business system and was actually holding the South back economically. The large percentage of Southerners who did not own slaves were definitely being hurt by the plantation systems, and the smaller percentage of Southerners who owned 1-2 slaves on family operated farms also were hurt by the plantation system. Eventually too, I think slavery would have ended even in the Confederate States, there would just eventually be too much ostracization globally.

Eventually new areas get settled where the world at large can get cotton for cheaper than they can from the South, the South was by and large a one-crop economy (despite significant tobacco, sugarcane, and even rice plantations cotton was overwhelmingly king in the South.) Thus meaning that development creates a disaster for the South, possibly a genuine depression.

I think eventually the CSA and the USA would reunite, but a lengthy period of CSA independence could have far-reaching effects as to the United States’ development as a superpower.

Since the CSA was so decentralized by and large I think you’d see a gradual reunification as some states sympathies to the “cause” start to wane.

6

Ultimately I think any union government willing to radicalize the slaves is still going to be up for a outright shooting war, ultimately I think the truth of the matter is the leaders in the North by and large weren’t willing to accept a divided union. Some were, but the men who actually held power were not.

If somehow the CSA and USA coexist up until the turn of the century I see a major part of Theodore Roosevelt’s presidency involving the conquest of the South.

7

I have my doubts about the movie’s positions, but the trailer creeped me out.

8

The North’s economy was a strong mixture of Industry & Agriculture.
The South’s, almost exclusively Agriculture.

And the North was expanding. Fast!

I can’t see the South being able to wrest control of California & it’s goldfields, or Nevada’s gigantic Comstock Lode Silver mine from the Union. And the North was already in control of the Washington/Oregon area. This means the North had access to the Pacific, & therefore Asian markets & trade.

The North would have achieved a booming economy, with or without the South. And, arguably, it could have grown faster without the South, by focusing resources more intensely on developing the Great Plains & the Northwest.

The British Empire was breeding a strain of cotton that could be grown in India during the Civil War. The market was about to drop out of the South principal cash crop.

Within 25 years, the South would be well down the road to ruin.

Within 50, the North could have invaded, using WW1-level technology, and faced an essentially unimproved South.

Any Confederacy was doomed.

9

Doubtful, in my opinion, mainly because of the economic issue touched on by Derleth and Martin Hyde: The Confederacy’s dependence on cotton exports made it a one-trick pony in economic terms, and its main market found an alternate source of supply.

10

“The South has nothing but cotton and arrogance, neither of which makes a nation.” -Rhett Butler

11

I liked the scenario put forth in a book some decades back that the South would add Cuba and Puerto Rico to their fold because of common Spanish colonial links with Louisana, Texas, and Florida.

12

Because the Confederacy was so decentralized, I tend to think parts of the South would suffer greatly while other parts, not as much. I think this would lead to various changes in the South, for example how would an impoverished. While King Cotton definitely ruled the South, parts of the South weren’t near as dependent on cotton or even slavery as was the rest of the South.

In Virginia roughly 32% of the population in 1860 were slaves, and Virginia itself was still a major producer of tobacco as opposed to cotton. South Carolina by contrast had more slaves than whites (402,406 to 291,300) and was extremely dependent on cotton.

13

That’s what is examined in the movie CSA.

Willmott’s movie’s extras section claims that the premise of much of the movie is based on fact. Of course, extrapolation makes it fantasy, but apparently there was talk at one time of such a southern expansion. Considering the westward expansion which was ongoing at the time, turning southward doesn’t seem so far-fetched to me. Remember “manifest destiny”?

(Italics mine)

And many of the faux 21st-century TV ads were based on actual products and actual names of products that existed not long ago, some into the mid-20th century, like “Darkie Toothpaste”. The producers point out we have some products on the shelves today that have an antibellum origin (at least in their name, if not product), like Uncle Ben and Aunt Jemima food brands.

14

Harry Turtledoves The Great War series explores this very question. If you are interested in his take, I highly recommend the series (though I haven’t picked up the latest book dealing with the North/South continuing war set in WWII yet). Its very good and has a lot of detail.

-XT

15

I never postulated any government giving official support to the people arming the slaves. I postulated the most radical anti-slavery elements in America getting covert support from foreign powers eager to do business with a new, non-slave CSA or simply eager to conquer a fully defeated CSA shorn of even the rudiments of its economy.

This sounds reasonable, however.

16

I haven’t seen the movie, and it might well be very entertaining… but the concept is idiotic. “Victory” for the South would have meant only the survival of the Confederacy. There was never the slightest chance that the South could conquer the North.

Imagine a documentary that said, “What if George Washington had conquered England” or “What if Ho chi Minh had conquered the USA?” The concepts are ridiculous. Washington COULDN’T have conquered England and the Viet Cong COULDN’T have conquered the USA. They didn’t want to, and didn’t have to. All they wanted to do was hang tough until their stronger opponent decided the fight just wasn’t worth the effort.

17

Ah, well, I tend to think that foreign governments wouldn’t get involved. I really don’t think France or England has that compelling an interest in ending slavery to start funding anti-slavery covert ops in the CSA. At least not til the mid-20th century, before then, that just doesn’t jive with the kind of governments the UK and France had.

18

What does Republican imperialism under McKinley and Roosevelt have to do with the South? The GOP was incredibly unpopular in the South, and never won any elections there once Reconstruction ended up until the Civil Rights movement.

19

I don’t really understand what that has to do with possible expansionism of a theoretical CSA. Republican imperialism in the late 19th/early 20th century had absolutely nothing to do with the South, and the GOP was extremely unpopular in the South, routinely losing pretty much every election in the South up until the end of the Civil Rights era when the Democrats lost their traditional hold on the South.

20

Accidental double post :rolleyes: