If you search for “what if the confederacy won”, you’ll pretty much get only slavery related answers, some say that slavery would stay, some that it would get abolished, but whatever happens, what about everything else, for example who would be the international allies of the confederacy?
Would ww1 and ww2 still happen, what would be the probable stance of the confederacy in these wars if they happened,etc…?
Would the states look different on the map, what would be the government system,etc.
There’s so much possible answers that aren’t answered because everyone just focuses on the slavery aspect.
Well, the existence of another major country would have had some influence elsewhere in the world. Also, would it have encouraged other ‘reactionary revolutions’ (that being the best term I can come up with for a general concept under which the Civil War would have fallen; reactionaries revolting against the advancement of society in order to preserve their outdated way of life) elsewhere?
It is possible, and perhaps even likely, that the United States and the Confederate States would both have broken up further; once secession was established as something that is done, perhaps other states would have broken up over other disagreements too, but over what period of time?
If WW1 continues roughly how it did in our timeline, however, it’s possible the USA and the CSA both stay out of it - assuming they haven’t further broken up by this point, and assuming they haven’t been invaded by anyone else in the meantime - does Mexico try to regain Texas, perhaps? Does the British Empire look to reclaim some of its former colonies? Hard to say. In any case, they have more troubles at home to focus on, and there’s probably enough lingering hostility that both sides would fear that if they sent a significant part of their military to fight in an overseas war, the other might take advantage and launch an attack. Alternately, they might go to war on opposite sides of the conflict, and then there winds up a front of the war on the North American continent as the USA and the CSA fight again.
Without the USA tipping the scales in WW1, the treaty at the end of the war may not have been so onerous on the Germans, which may well have defused WW2 before it even began, since the terms of the treaty were a part of what stoked the nationalistic anger that helped bring about the rise of the Nazi party.
Not to mention that the end of WW1 is also what broke up the Ottoman Empire and what created the middle east as we know it today. If the war had not ended poorly for their side, the Ottoman Empire likely would have endured, or at least collapsed in a very different way, and we’d have a very different middle east. If the Ottoman Empire was still in existence when oil reserves were discovered all over the middle east, they may well have become the preeminent superpower of the world, given the massive economic and military boon it would have given them.
That’s the problem; there are too many possible answers! There isn’t any valid way of figuring out what “would have” happened, although it’s fun to look at events that have the most plausibility.
And slavery is the 800 pound gorilla in the living room. As a comparison, you could easily have had WWII without Nazis. Germany might have been a completely different political entity, and still invaded France. But you pretty much can’t have WWII without tanks. Tank warfare was WWII’s defining thing!
The CSA just couldn’t throw away slavery. There was some very tentative talk about freeing slaves and arming them, and putting them in the front lines. Went absolutely nowhere; the concept was anathema. It’s almost impossible to work up a plausible scenario in which the CSA gives up slavery.
(The concept of forcible repatriation – sending all the blacks back to Africa – is about the closest. Pretty horrible, but it was talked about seriously.)
I don’t know. What would WWII have looked like without all that Imperial Japanese and Nazi Germany stuff?
What would Nazi Germany have looked like without all that expansionist warmongering stuff? (This might actually be possible to answer, come to think of it. The Strassers and the Catholics had actual economic and social policy in back of their ideas, but the SS killed or exiled them and created the Nazi Party which would go on to fight the war.)
Without slavery, the CSA would never have existed. They attempted to secede to preserve slavery, and they fought the war to have an independent country where slavery would be written into the constitution as absolutely unchallengeable from day one. That’s simple, basic historical fact. So one answer is simple: Anyone who tried to abolish slavery in a victorious CSA would have been killed as a traitor, as someone who was striking at the very heart of the country.
There is no possible situation where, by 1900, the CSA is a nation. At absolute most, you might get a situation where Virginia, Georgia, etc. are nations. More likely, you’d just end up with anarchy as every county and township tried to secede from their states. The North might gradually re-absorb the pieces, if the loss hasn’t emboldened other separatist factions and fragmented it, too.
The Civil war is so devastating to both sides that after it finally ends both the USA and CSA are so weakened and bloody the European powers swoop in to take advantage and carve up what’s left of North America for themselves leaving the USA and CSA weakened and isolated. Neither country in North America becomes a major world player and European proxy wars end up getting fought here.
The other is the USA and CSA finish the war hurt but strong enough to be major world powers. Most likely Britain would align with the CSA as they were their number one customer of cotton and agriculture. France might have stuck with the USA. It’s almost certain that unless they somehow remerged into one nation the USA and CSA would have fought again at some point.
In the end though it is really hard to disentangle slavery since the war was fought over slavery. People who want to deny that reality can do so but they would be wrong it was the number one issue of the war and everything else was secondary. They can yell “States Rights” all they want but the State Right they fought for was the right to own slaves.
The big question, unaddressed in previous posts, is where the western states would have ended up. Assuming the north had abolished slavery, would MO, KS, and KY have seceded? What about NM, AZ and, of course, CA? This would have determined whether there was a big powerful US facing a small weak CSA or two behemoths dividing the lower 48.
Incidentally, the premise that there is no slavery is nonsense. Without slavery, there is no secession.
Some time around 1955, I took an American history course in college. The instructor (I think he was only a TA) argued that slavery would have collapsed as an economic institution by 1890. Mechanization would make slave labor unprofitable. Whatever the force of that argument (I am not in any position to argue either way), I don’t think household slaver would have gone away so quickly.
Another self-defeating factor was the denial of education to slaves. The trouble with that is that you have ignorant workers who can’t perform complex tasks, nor solve problems that arise. But the industrial revolution set up a situation where workers needed to be literate and have problem-solving skills.
(This is one of the things that helped bring down the Soviet Union. They wanted to have advanced sciences and technology…but that means having people who can think clearly and freely…and that leads to Andrei Sakharov and other dissidents. You can’t have a highly-educated servile class!)
I don’t think this is really true of the Soviet Union: they collapsed both because of inherent inefficiencies in the central planning, and due to Gorbachev’s ill-advised decisions that destabilized the system even further. China took a different route and although they’re no longer a communist state in any meaningful sense, they certainly demonstrate that you can be a scientific superpower with an authoritarian government.
As for slavery in the South I also disagree with you and I don’t see how educating slaves would undermine it. The reason slaves didn’t revolt wasn’t because they were denied literacy, it’s because they were denied access to weapons and because they would have been tortured and killed if they did resist. Slavery was kept in place by force and you could easily have done that with a literate and skilled population.
OK, explain to me why it’s unprofitable to have slaves work on an assembly line.
When I look at an assembly line, I see the perfect institution for people who must be kept watch over lest they revolt, much better than a plantation with wide, open fields surrounded by the great outdoors. Yet people seem absolutely convinced that machines kill slavery, and I’m not convinced that idea isn’t Lost Cause historiography unconsciously regurgitated. (“Oh, sure, the South would have kept slaves for a while, but it’s incontrovertible that it is incompatible with mechanization, and by incontrovertible I mean I have no arguments but I sound confident so accept it as fact.”)
I’ve wondered about this too, but the first mechanical cotton picker wasn’t invented until the 1940s. So that is an 80 year gap until a massive labor saving device was created.
And there would have been a demand for domestic slaves to cook, clean, care for children, etc. Plus a demand for slaves to work in construction, manufacturing or other areas.
In Nazi Germany about 20% of the labor force was slaves. So there was a demand for slaves.
Had the confederacy won, I wonder who they would’ve allied with.
To be sure, the cotton gin didn’t pick cotton—as Wesley Clark said, we had to wait until the 1940s for cotton-pickin’ machinery—it separated cotton fibers from their seeds, a labor-intensive process; by the Jevons Paradox, increasing the efficiency of slave labor increased demand for it.
My point is, mechanization wouldn’t necessarily have killed slave labor. Assuming it without even realizing it’s arguable is bad history.
The southern economy would have collapsed by 1865 even if they had won the war. Their economy was based on growing and selling cotton and buying pretty much everything else. They were the nineteenth century equivalent of Saudi Arabia.
And the war destroyed their market. When the European cotton consumers realized how vulnerable the supply of American cotton was, they responded by developing their own secure supply of cotton. Massive cotton fields were planted in Egypt, India, and Central Asia. Within a few years, Europe had all the cotton it needed without buying a single bale of American cotton.
So the CSA was doomed to failure even if it had won its independence. A lot of the economic hardship that the southern states faced after the war wasn’t due to war damage or reconstruction; it was due to the collapse of the cotton market.
There may have been a demand for slaves to do domestic work around the house. But you’ll note that most households managed to function without slaves.
Slaves cost money. You had to feed, clothe, and house them. So wanting to slave to do your housework meant your household had to produce enough money to support those slaves on top of your own family expenses.
A plantation that was selling cotton or some other agricultural product had that kind of money. Fifty slaves produced enough income to support themselves, a dozen domestic slaves, and the family that owned all of them. But if technology or market forces changed the situation and you weren’t selling your crops, you couldn’t afford to keep any of those slaves. Then you started doing the housework yourself.
Another reason Slavery would have ended is Europe was pressuring the US to end it. A CSA would have been even more dependent on Europe as a customer so they would have caved eventually. Not that it would have been great to be black in the CSA. There would have been almost certainly an Apartheid type set up like South Africa but worse.
This is not my area even a little bit. But I’m not sure I follow your point.
What do you suppose would cause the fragmentation if the CSA won the war or if the USA/CSA settled on a NK/SK style armistice near the pre-war borders in, say, 1866?
Clearly the tide of global history was moving away from primarily agrarian societies and away from slaver societies. But I don’t see how that forces the CSA to disintegrate state by state vs. it accommodating the slowly developing future in some other way.
The CSA would certainly be a laggard economically. But by and large the South was, and in many cases still is, a laggard within the USA as history actually unfolded. That reality hasn’t caused widespread political unrest nor a big turning away from so-called “Southern values” even into the 21st Century.
Specifically? I have no idea. But once the precedent for secession had been set, the next time any state disagreed with the CSA about anything, they’d have seceded. Secession is a genie that can’t be put back into the bottle.
Hari Seldon, it’s true but irrelevant that slavery would have been uneconomical in 1890. It was already uneconomical in 1860 and before, and yet the South continued to use it. Yes, they needed lots of cheap manpower, but free manpower is more efficient than slave manpower. They kept slavery in place for two reasons, neither of them economical: Because that’s the way they’d always done it, and because it gave them an excuse to call themselves superior to other people.
I didn’t say that the slaves didn’t revolt because they were kept illiterate.
I said that their value to their owners was minimized because they were kept illiterate. It made the significantly less productive. This meant that the institution is economically self-limiting, and thus would tend to marginalize itself.