How do you think the world would be different if the Union had not survived the Civil War? Would the USA be more liberal and the CSA more conservative? Would anyone have been to the moon?
Well, it all depends on the results of the alternate World War I and World War II and which sides the CSA and USA joined. Or if an independent CSA would be able to survive into the 20th Century.
The best fictional alternate-history treatment of that idea to date is Harry Turtledove’s “Great War Multi-Series”: http://www.uchronia.net/bib.cgi/label.html?id=turtgreatw#20 His basic premise: If the South had won the Civil War, then there would have been more wars between the USA and CSA – two great powers, with a history of bad blood, on the same continent sharing a long border – further conflict would be inevitable. The CSA emancipates its slaves in the late 19th Century, in response to diplomatic pressure from its European allies, but blacks remain second-class noncitizens, as in South Africa under Apartheid (with passbooks and everything). In the USA, the “more liberal” side of your question plays itself out, somewhate – the Socialist Party (led in the early days by Abraham Lincoln) supplants the Republicans as the principal opposition to the Democrats, but even when in power the Socialists do very little to change the country’s economic and social makeup. The more important change in the USA is that it becomes a highly militaristic society, in response to the Confederate threat.
This is one of my favorite “what if” questions. IMHO, slavery survives much longer, at least into the 1930s, when the Western world finally repudiates the right-of-conquest. In other words, I think it occurs parallel to Gandhi in India. In the likely scenario - where the North simply decides after a few months that the fight isn’t worth the candle - there isn’t much bad blood. On the other hand, the South gets confined to its corner of the continent and reaps comparitively little of the economic boom that makes the North a world power by turn of the century. Whether the two countries reunite after the slavery problem is resolved is the biggest open question. At a guess, yes, because it simplifies trade and resolves what probably were sustained difficulties about use of the Missiissippi river. But I also can easily see it going the other way
I have a much longer answer to the question. That’s the highlights.
And now that we are into the next series it looks like a repeat of WWII with the CSA playing the part of Nazi Germany (lightning war, death camps for the blacks, etc) and the USA getting the crap beaten out of them. It looks like the Socialist government in the US is going to go down because of this as well.
Its a good series. I second the recommendation. Turtledove is the master of alt history IMHO.
-XT
Thanks for the tip on the Turtledove series- looks like my cup of tea. I think eventually reunification would have happened. The CSA would have given up slavery by 1900 easily. Perhaps being on the same side in WW I would have brought the two together.
Would they have been? Britian and France supported the CSA after all, and Britian at least still had a rather large chip on its shoulder against the North. Perhaps the US would have sought other European allies to counter balance Britian/Frances support of the CSA (like, oh, Germany).
Ok, I’m getting that from Turtledove as well…but it DOES seem plausable. I’m not sure what forces would have brought the USA and CSA back together. I doubt whether the CSA merely abolishing slavery would have meant the two nations would have automatically gotten back together…in fact I’m highly doubtful. There would have been a lot of bad blood between the two nations after the Civil War after all.
-XT
Who knows. It’s complicated by the fact that you wouldn’t have had Wilson as President.
And UK-USA relations probably would have been poisoned for generations due to UK support for the CSA. With the US on the ropes what would the British in Canada be up to? Would the Oregon Territory border remain settled? The USA probably wouldn’t be able to purchase Alaska from Russia, maybe the British could buy it, or maybe it would remain Imperial Russian territory until the 1900s.
And what would have become of the westward expansion, the western states, then native americans…and Utah?
-XT
A lot of it depends on exactly how the Confederacy secured its independence. A scenario where the North basically just tells the South “OK, don’t let the door hit ya where the good Lord split ya” from the get-go will likely play out very differently from one where the CSA wins its independence from the USA on the battlefield in a long and bloody war. The first scenario might eventually produce more than two American states; if secession were established as a relatively painless option, both Union and Confederacy might be pretty fragile, with states or groups of states (Texas, New England, etc.) apt to strike out on their own, and secession proposed as the solution to most political differences. If the CSA wins a bloody war, you might get two much more cohesive and likely more militarized federal republics.
Lemur866 alluded to this, but the breakup of the USA, particularly if it were more along the lines of the first scenario, could have resulted in a great deal of European meddling or even outright imperialism in North America. At the time of or during the Civil War, Canada was still part of the British Empire–in fact, Canada took a major step towards nationhood just a few years after the Civil War, with Confederation in 1867; Mexico under Emperor Maximilian was a puppet of the Second French Empire; the Russians were still in Alaska; and even Spain still had colonial outposts (Cuba). There were also still-recent border disputes or conflicts between the American states and both Canada and especially Mexico which could have been exploited by expansionist European powers. The question of the South’s slave population and the possibility of uprisings, race wars, and Haiti-style ex-slave republics would also have been a big question mark. In 1860 democracy or representative government was far from taking root in most of the world–the revolutions of 1848 had been generally suppressed; France had gone back from republic to (neo-Bonapartist) monarchy; Russia was still despotic; Austria-Hungary and the German and Italian states were monarchies. Liberal ideas of representative government had made considerable strides in Britain and the Low Countries, but the disintegration of the world’s first modern constitutional republic would certainly have been a major setback for the whole idea of democracy, especially if North America wound up being balkanized into warring states, complete with the possibility of slave insurrections and racial conflicts.
“Fourscore and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation, conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal. Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation or any nation so conceived and so dedicated can long endure.”
But Britain and France didn’t support the CSA. The fact is that they leaned that way in the beginning, but when the Union abolished slavery in 1863, it became politically impossible for them to continue this support. There was some anxiety that Britain and France might join the war or at least lend a little support to the Confederacy, but as of 1863, this threat was neutralized.