I mean, I don't think you're wrong!!! But having a Haiti with more territory, it's French debt erased (which didn't happen until 1947 in OTL. And in this ATL, being on a winning side, they might actually get some war payments FROM France when it's all said and done), politically stabilish and able to chase investment from the Union, Germany and Britain ... I mean, Haiti won't end up as a First World Nation all of a sudden, but it definitely sets it on the pathway to being much richer than in OTL.
Sequel de Mayo (Cinco de Mayo, Vol. II)
- Thread starter KingSweden24
- Start date
I mean, I don't think you're wrong!!! But having a Haiti with more territory, it's French debt erased (which didn't happen until 1947 in OTL. And in this ATL, being on a winning side, they might actually get some war payments FROM France when it's all said and done), politically stabilish and able to chase investment from the Union, Germany and Britain ... I mean, Haiti won't end up as a First World Nation all of a sudden, but it definitely sets it on the pathway to being much richer than in OTL.
Decades of Darkness has a worse fate for Haiti than OTL, but it takes work. It's not Utopian until Haiti is the first nation to get the A-bomb.
It’d retain its position as a tourist destination of choice it retained from the 1930s until the AIDS crisis OTL, that’s for sure
Must say, this is one of best TLs recently, only remark- you are writing way too fast, I can't keep up, I havent still read the first part...
So basically we've gotten to the point where both Havana *and* Port Au Prince are considered better Vacation spots than Miami as of 1980.
Just curious, how are you going to make Mogadishu a better vacation spot than Monaco?
Thank you! What can I say when I wanna get cranking I get cranking lol
Lol talk about a blursed outcome but, well, maybe each of the three has their own thing to offer. In the half-written novel that I pulled more than a few ideas from, the climax was to be set in a Confederate Miami Beach with legalized gambling that served as a Havana/Vegas analogue, so maybe you have that. My thinking on South Florida is more of something along the lines of the Riviera Maya, with the Miami Beach/Palm Beach corridor something amounting to the Cancun/Playa del Carmen/Tulum corridor of OTL.So basically we've gotten to the point where both Havana *and* Port Au Prince are considered better Vacation spots than Miami as of 1980.
Just curious, how are you going to make Mogadishu a better vacation spot than Monaco?
So as an American/Canadian/European/Mexican IOTL, you'd have a wealth of options across the Caribbean to pick from as your tourist spots
Prologue - Bound for Bloodshed
Prologue - Bound for Bloodshed
It was not a novel thought that the United States' unprecedented demographic, industrial and even territorial growth was creating a juggernaut that would dominate its hemisphere politically and economically, and thus required a joint response from its neighbors; some form of that idea dated back to the Pan-American Congress of 1893, held on the sidelines of the Columbian Exposition that year. But it was not until the late 1900s and early 1910s that that idea both took on an ideological shape and also began to formalize into a genuine power structure that eventually triggered the Great American War in September of 1913. Mexican Foreign, and later Prime, Minister Joaquan Baranda had proposed as early as 1900 the necessity of a "Bloc of the South" to resist a more muscular Continentalism from Washington; this idea would germinate and slowly put down roots across the lands south of the Ohio River over the next decade.
The powers that eventually consolidated into the informal Bloc Sud were perhaps not entirely without a point; the industrial capacity of the United States was growing rapidly and favorable demographics combined with mass immigration left them both a huge labor pool and an increasing consumer market. While Washington had long underfunded its Army, its Navy was emerging as one of the largest in the world in quick order and had already helped trigger a naval arms race with Mexico and the CSA in tandem with a parallel naval arms race in the Southern Cone between the ABC Powers. It was not merely economics that panicked the rest of the Americas, though that was a hugely important factor (particularly in Mexico, where American companies and individual investors were rapidly increasing their control of Mexican resources, particularly oil) - it was also in part ideology. The Democratic administration of William Randolph Hearst was avowedly progressive, supportive of mass democracy, labor rights and the regulation of the oligarchy; the opposition Liberals, for their part, were committed to the aggressive imposition of Continentalism as an geostrategic and economic strategy and the home of the most avowed enemies of the institution of chattel slavery in America. Combined, the American political system, while certainly fluid and with considerable internal differences, nonetheless on external matters seemed fairly unified around the country's values guiding its behavior abroad [1] and those values were increasingly anathema to the oligarchic leadership of the Confederacy, Chile, Mexico and Brazil, the first and last of which were two of the last chattel slave economies on earth and the latter two of which were firmly conservative Catholic monarchies.
Historiography of the time largely, and understandably, places most of the blame for the escalation of tensions on the Bloc Sud, though a closer look at the events of 1907-13 can help suggest why, exactly, tensions erupted the way they did. In South America, the 19th century social structure of Chile and Brazil was rapidly fraying under pressure from new immigrants and working class agitation, and in between the two of them emerged the activist, radical government of Argentina, whose pro-labor, urbanizing, secularist mien seemed directly aimed at exporting its soft-revolutionary policy abroad, especially as countries like Uruguay and Paraguay soon elected in the wake of bloody internal conflicts progressive governments of their own closely aligned with "Alemism." Argentina's political culture, which had overrun a stagnant and reactionary elite in short order in the early 1890s, struck Santiago and Rio de Janeiro as simply an updated and more intense version of what Hearst was selling, and the logical endpoint of the ideals of the American Revolution. In Brazil, men surrounding General Hermes da Fonseca and his chief civilian ally, Prime Minister Pinheiro Machado, came increasingly to view this struggle in religious terms, of a crusade against secularism being needed to purge South America of the progressive scourge. Thus when American Secretary of State Lindley Garrison signed America's first genuine co-equal treaty of alliance with Argentina in 1911, it seemed clear that a progressive, secular and democratic "Axis" was forming down the center of the Americas with Washington and Buenos Aires as its wheels and the Nicaragua Canal as its spoke. [2] The Canal was an immediate point of panic to Mexico, too; its Tehuantepec Railroad would become immediately worthless upon its completion and threaten the Mexican economy, and allow both of its coasts to be potentially blockaded by the United States in the future with Nicaragua as its pivot point - and that was before getting into the longstanding disputes between Mexico and the "sister republics" to her north about Centroamerica and to whom it sat in a sphere of influence.
It was the Confederacy more than anyone else that viewed the struggle with Washington increasingly not in terms of two powers trying to settle a dispute over spheres of interest and mutual benefits, as it had been in the 1890s, but as an existential crisis both in the perpetuation of its oligarchic political system and its slave-fueled racial caste society. This was driven by two separate factors - the rise of Tillmanism as the voice of both the yeoman farmer and increasingly the urban working class in all the small factory towns across the Confederacy, and said urbanization already beginning to challenge and erode the hierarchy of the planter class which resulted in a schism within the ruling Democratic Party in which Tillman initially seemed to come out ahead, and in control, after conservative elites exited the party rather than be purged internally but which destabilized the Longstreet Machine and meant that in foreign affairs Tillman and his chief protege, Joseph Johnston, could never be seen as giving any quarter to the hated Yankee, resulting in one of the biggest self-inflicted wounds in diplomatic history - Tillman's decision, riding high after "winning" the schism, to sink in the closing days of 1908 the Bliss-Blackburn Compromise which would have renewed the 1863 Treaty of Havana ahead of its expiration in just four and a half years and settle the questions inherent in it.
To say that Hearst and the rest of the United States was taken aback by this volte face would be an understatement; tensions spiked dramatically thereafter, with newspapers convinced that Hearst was about to declare war on the Confederacy in the summer of 1910, during what came to be known as the Kidnap Crisis. Evidence emerged that a ring of men in northern Kentucky were kidnapping Black Americans and selling them south, and while there was no evidence of Confederate government involvement or even awareness of this, the affair nonetheless brought relations to a new nadir and forced Hearst to remilitarize the Ohio River, placing gunboats along it and bringing the countries to the brink of war; following continued intransigence from Richmond over a compromise on the Havana provisions and dismissiveness over the Kidnap Crisis, Hearst with nearly lockstep Congressional support instituted aggressive tariffs against the Confederacy when a new compromise on the Havana provisions proved elusive, pushing both countries into recession but showing that the United States had completely run out of patience with "little sister" to the south and that it would not take much more to put Washington in a position where they went from economic warfare to the physical variety.
As this was occurring, Mexico's political system was going through its own upheaval; the Union Popular, a similar agrarian-traditionalist ruling outfit to the Confederate Democrats, collapsed virtually at the same time as their counterparts in Richmond in 1907, seeing an Argentine-style radical outfit in the Union Radical dramatically grow its ranks under the leadership of Francisco Madero and paralleled by former UP dissidents representing the moderate urban bourgeoisie thought to be associated with powerful General Bernardo Reyes, who quite crucially was in favor of improved relations with Washington at Richmond's expense. A brief trade war with the United States plunged Mexico into a deep economic crisis that saw Madero elected in early 1911; however, Madero's fellow travelers in the UR were a great deal more revolutionary than their putative leader, who himself hailed from the Northern landowning class, and his appointment of soft-syndicalist Cabinet members in addition to midde-class reformers more in his own mold rapidly polarized Mexican society in addition to making his own Cabinet virtually ungovernable when he tried to take a more moderate, cautious approach. His efforts to thread the needle failed almost entirely with two autumns of massive industrial strikes punctuated by the eruption of a peasant revolt in Oaxaca led by Emiliano Zapata demanding land reform his unwieldy coalition was split on; conservatives smelled blood in the water, and by March of 1913 his government collapsed entirely and the Oligarcas were back with a vengeance, this time hiding behind the moderated facade of Francisco Leon de la Barra.
Hearst, concerned by the knife's-edge tensions with the Confederacy as well as severe labor agitation across the United States as part of the broader revolutionary atmosphere of 1912, made the controversial choice to pursue a third term as President despite misgivings from many of his co-partisans (that he was the youngest President in history and was anxious about what a post-Presidential career might look like was certainly a factor, as was the number of precedents he had already broken in reshaping American society). Despite a barnstorming campaign, Hearst was narrowly defeated in his historic campaign by Liberal nominee Charles Evans Hughes, himself also a former Governor of New York, who entered the White House with a divided Congress and dark storm clouds on the horizon.
Thus Hearst's leaving the Presidency in March of 1913 can be seen as an inflection point, as Mexico and Uruguay plunged into crisis not long thereafter, and the poor timing of an administration change so soon before the Treaty of Havana expired despite the efforts of Garrison to secure a deal in the dying hours of the Hearst Presidency. 1912 would close with the Americas on the brink...
[1] Unless you're a Chinese Boxer of Central American fruit plantation worker, in which case, tough luck
[2] A tortured, purple metaphor, but #sorrynotsorry
Prologue - The End of the Fuse
Prologue - The End of the Fuse
The half-century since the Treaty of Havana had seen the new North American order brought about by the annunciation of the Second Mexican Empire and the secession of the Confederate States consolidated; the Treaty's expiration on July 1, 1913, would see that order unwound with an orgy of violence unseen since the Napoleonic Wars and indeed in many ways unprecedented in history.
This was not to say that no effort was taken to stop the horrors that were to come. The British made a game attempt to intervene late and organized the Niagara Conference, in part in hopes to find a permanent settlement but more realistically to get all parties to agree by Havana's provisions indefinitely until a new compromise could be reached. Building off of the work done by Garrison, the Hughes administration attempted to reach an amicable settlement, but were rebuffed by the hardline Confederate chief diplomat Michael Hoke Smith, and days after the Conference concluded, Havana expired formally and it was now open season for revenue agents to harass American shipping on the Mississippi and Chesapeake bays. Whatever small recovery from the 1910-11 recession had begun in the United States rapidly ended, and the ensuing inflation crisis and humiliation at being spurned at Niagara stiffened American spines, from the White House on down. The time for compromise was over.
This was the biggest domino to fall, but the pieces were in place for chaos already. The Madero government's fall in Mexico and an ensuing spike in political violence triggered a run on Mexican investments by nervous foreigners, tipping Mexico's economy back into depression and suggesting to hardliners in Mexico City that the Americans were trying to force a firesale to snap up Mexico's assets on the cheap and re-initiate the trade war; this point of view split the Mexican elite down the middle, with many civilian conservatives increasingly pushing Richmond to take a stronger stance while the royalty, especially the heir Louis Maximilian, and much of the military was a fair deal more skeptical. It was out of this chaotic spring that Mexico's military commitments to the Confederacy were formalized. In South America, meanwhile, the Brazilian-backed Blancos in Uruguay had launched a massive uprising across the north of that country and were credibly marching on the capital; at the behest of the government in Montevideo, Argentina dispatched a small expeditionary force across the Rio de la Plata do protect the legitimate elected government, angering Brazil.
The summer of mounting crisis seemed to have no immediate resolution other than war, even if that was what everyone wanted to avoid, particularly in Britain, which was nonetheless occupied by its own spiraling crises. Despite having brokered amicable medium-term solutions to both the Monegasque and Serbian questions that spring at the Congress of Budapest, London was consumed by a burgeoning crisis in Ireland, where the Home Rule Act being pondered by the Haldane government had seen the Ulster Volunteer Force formed to defend the interests of Protestant-majority Ulster against what they perceived would be an Irish Catholic tyranny in the event of some kind of devolved assembly in Dublin being formed. That the Liberals themselves were divided on how to handle Ireland did not help matters; the final passage of the Government of Ireland Act 1914 despite months of protests and rioting saw several Army officers sympathetic to Loyalist concerns in the Curragh Mutiny refuse to fight the UVF directly, essentially ending the Haldane government then and there but failing to empower the new Tory regime of Hugh Cecil with a majority that could solve the crisis, especially after Ireland as a whole plunged into low-scale civil war over that ensuing summer. Ireland's woes distracted Britain from mounting problems in India after the death of Lord Hardinge, too - the Ishii Maru Incident in Vancouver, where Punjabi Indians on a boat were denied entry to Canada and then several of them were murdered, inflamed public opinion in the Subcontinent and in the first months of 1915 saw the Punjab Mutiny break out as directed by the Ghadarites, with tens of thousands of Punjabi rioters being joined by Indian Army units to quickly seize hold of cities such as Amritsar, Lahore and Rawalpindi and thus directly and credibly threaten British rule in India for the first time since 1857.
The fuse finally reached its end in the Americas in late July of 1913, though, when the Arcadia - a merchant vessel on the Mississippi - was seized and its captain shot by revenue agents. In the tense weeks immediately after the expiry of the Treaty of Havana, something like this was certainly inevitable and expected, and it was the last straw for the White House, which delivered an ultimatum with clear threat of force to Richmond. As Confederate politicians debated their response, President Johnston died suddenly of pneumonia, and mere days later the Speaker of the House John Sharp Williams was assassinated during a speech that his killer regarded as insufficiently belligerent. The unprepared new President, Ellison D. "Cotton Ed" Smith, sided instantly with war hawks around him and devised a plan to attack the United States before the Confederacy was attacked first, refusing to countenance the wound to precious Dixie pride that backing down at this moment would be. On the morning of September 9th, 1913, the Confederate Navy attacked the US Navy in dock at Baltimore at the same time that a declaration of war was delivered along with an offensive into Maryland; President Hughes was eating breakfast as shells started landing on the White House lawn, and he was barely evacuated to Philadelphia in time.
The long-predicted but previously eagerly-avoided Great American War thus opened with the United States on her back heels, a decade of Army expansions under multiple Presidencies nonetheless still leaving the country exposed. The Confederate Army looted Washington and occupied Baltimore, carrying out a great deal of atrocities, but their advances were arrested at the Susquehanna and the United States spent most of 1914 pressing them back across the Potomac into Northern Virginia on a stupendously bloody Eastern Front. In the West, things went somewhat better for the United States; they quickly captured the oilfields of the northeastern Indian Territory, established a beachhead in northern Kentucky that was dramatically expanded in February 1914 Kentucky River Offensive, and out in the Southwest, General John "Black Jack" Pershing marched rapidly through Yuma to Tucson and then to the Confederate-Mexican agglomeration of Los Pasos upon the Rio Bravo River.
Brazil was able to push deep into Argentina after throwing their enemy out of Uruguay, but an attempt to knock Buenos Aires out of the war was stopped navally at the Battle of the River Plate and Brazilian offensives always ran up against the Parana River, which was nearly uncrossable; they had little help from their Chilean allies, who within weeks of the war starting had to contend with the United States pulling in their old foes from decades ago of Bolivia and Peru. The United States, while more hesitant to anger European powers in the Atlantic, wasted little time establishing themselves in the Pacific, rapidly making moves to defend Nicaragua from a joint Mexican-Centroamerican offensive and destroying most of the Chilean Navy at the Battle of the Desventuradas in April 1914.
From that point on, the spring of 1914, the strategic table was largely set; the United States would have to grind down its enemies piece by piece, utilizing its considerable economic and demographic advantages as industrial war made its debut. Gas warfare, aerial bombardment, setpiece battles between dreadnoughts - all the capabilities of total national war were laid bare for the world to see. The Americans saw for the next year successes in fits and starts: they achieved a breakthrough in Kentucky and at Memphis only to be stopped at a vast series of defenses in Middle Tennessee that set up the Siege of Nashville for ten months, and their first attempt to land in Chile was repulsed, while Pershing's mission to circumvent Los Pasos' defenses and knock Mexico out of the war came to depend on local brigands such as Pancho Villa.
But in the end, the erosion of the Bloc Sud escalated into early 1915. Chile came first, as a political crisis saw its leadership resign with the news of American-Peruvian landings in Antofagasta and Iquique, and the ensuing chaos would see three new Presidents in the course of as many months and a conservative redoubt formed in the south of the country as the liberal successor government agreed to a peace deal with the Axis. Mexico, with Pershing's armies approaching Chihuahua and a massive, sophisticated uprising of syndicalist labor unions in the Revolt of the Red Battalions, began to wonder why exactly it was still fighting this war. Brazil had little success in crossing the Parana and seemed to have reached the limits of what it could achieve, having successfully pushed Argentina from Uruguay, and voices to pocket this strategic victory and go home grew louder and louder in Rio de Janeiro.
But it was the Confederacy that would suffer worst in the spring of 1915, as the vengeful Americans scored their two largest victories within hours of each other. On May 5, 1915, the final breakthrough at Nashville occurred, securing the end of a major defensible point and former industrial hub for the enemy; meanwhile, hundreds of miles away, the United States finally put an end to the CSN's commerce raiding campaign in the Caribbean at the Battle of Hilton Head, where most of the Confederate Navy was cornered and sunk in a coup de main within sight of the South Carolina coast, essentially ending their ability to defend their ports any longer no matter what European powers might think. The high tide of the Bloc Sud had come and gone - the war's inevitable conclusion was now simply a matter of time.
End of "Prologue"
And with that, we are all caught up to where things ended in the previous thread. If you're new to Cinco de Mayo, hopefully you now feel at least a little more up to speed; many of the TL's memes, stupid jokes, and background color will come with time I'm sure. If you've been along for the ride, this was (also) hopefully a good refresher on some things from way back when in the story.
Part X: The Eye of the Hurricane
Part X: The Eye of the Hurricane
"...war did not end on May 5th, 1915, unfortunately for the hundreds of thousands of souls still to perish - but the war, for all intents and purposes, was from there on out over but for the fighting..."
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Well, there's Evil Belgium and its royal family, for one.
There was also a bit of a minor meme where any time the US failed to succeed or took disproportionate casualties, one poster would inevitably start going on about how the "Damnyankees" didn't know what they were doing and should sign a ceasefire.
There was also a bit of a minor meme where any time the US failed to succeed or took disproportionate casualties, one poster would inevitably start going on about how the "Damnyankees" didn't know what they were doing and should sign a ceasefire.
Oh, don't forget me always going off about the Upper Midwest being the most important part of the timeline and demanding to see more of Wisconsin and LaFollette
And cursing New York every presidential election!
A Freedom Bought With Blood: Emancipation and the Postwar Confederacy
"...while not dissimilar to the broader reactionary movement that defined the Catholic Bloc Sud's opposition to the United States and, perhaps to an even greater extent, the culturally and religiously similar Argentina that was viewed as a cousin who had "gone astray," has some important differences.
It has been noted quite frequently by historians of the Great American War the awkwardness with which the Confederate States of America fit with her allies. She was not a monarchy, quite the opposite, nor was Dixie a centralized state, with her powerful state legislatures and governors who though much less contemptuous of Richmond's authority by the 1910s still were regarded as in many ways supreme. Though Confederate citizens were on the whole deeply devout Christians, they were overwhelmingly Protestant outside of the Acadian Catholic belt of southern Louisiana, and though lacking the demographic anxieties about Catholicism that plagued Canadian Anglicans and even a great many American Protestants (particularly in New England), most of its society regarded Roman Catholicism, and thus by proxy their staunchly Catholic Mexican and Brazilian allies, with skepticism if not genuinely-held suspicion.
As is generally typical of American historiography, there is a certain navel-gazing and delusional exceptionalism when it comes to the Great American War and its aftermath that defined until recent decades scholarship on the subject. In the traditional American account, one embraced across the ideological, political and pedagogical spectrum, the Bloc Sud was part of a loose conspiracy by conservative elements panicking about the rise of America's dynamic, industrial economy and progressive worldview that collaborated to defeat it before they had no chance to resist it and saw "American values" exported into their staid, socially and financially backwards countries. [1] Said line of thinking continues on to suggest that the rise of the United States to dominate its hemisphere as its rightful backyard for the next century was inevitable, and the frequent tensions and occasional conflicts between her and her neighbors from 1917 to the present day are simply "aftershocks" of the defeated failing to reconcile themselves to their rightful place, and that the question was settled with the blood spilled in the war. This chauvinistic point of view around the United States' peaceful and then violent rise reserves its particular contempt for the Confederacy, which it holds beyond all others responsible as the Eve that tempted with the apple of war the Adams of Mexico and Brazil.
Scholarship around the anxieties of the Mexican and Brazilian aristocracies and church hierarchies, and a better appreciation in the American academy for the social issues of their Latin neighbors preceding the war, has helped this singular and exceptionalist point of view step aside for a more nuanced understanding of Latin resistance to American soft imperialism along its much-referenced "Axis of Liberty" from the Arctic to Antarctic. But the view of the Confederacy as uniquely responsible for the war itself has not died, thanks in part to the longstanding ebb and flow of tension between the two countries and, in part, a newer appreciation of Dixie's intellectual project.
One cannot understand the Confederate path to war without understanding the context of its secession in the first place; its entire society was built top-to-bottom on a peculiar institution, that of chattel slavery and a hierarchy dependent on its preservation. White Anglo-Americans in both the United States and Canada were certainly no strangers to racial and cultural resentment (in the latter, particularly when it came to contesting control of the country's institutions with the Catholic Quebecois minority) but they did not structure their entire worldview around a uniquely pernicious example of white supremacy as the keystone of their culture and nationhood. Indeed, a great many Confederates went much further than that - the works of the sociologist George Fitzhugh, who suggested in the 1850s [2] a slave society that did not purely rely on racial castes, had a great many admirers and this trickled through to the contempt in which many of the planter oligarchy held the poor White citizenry of the country, on whose labor their society relied on just as much as the Negro slave and whom they gladly fed into the Yankee cannons while they remained behind on their estates.
What the Confederacy represented from top-to-bottom, then, in its politics and culture was a world of strict hierarchies, a rigid place where the lessors knew who their betters were and power was reserved for the worthy few. Its political anxiety should be understood perhaps not exclusively but largely through this lens; everything about the Confederate States was organized in 1913 around this worldview. Even internally, the idea that this might be challenged somehow drove much of the political disputes. The "National Consensus" of the oligarchy viewed Tillman's smallholders and emerging labor-farmer coalition as forgetting their place, while Tillman - a wealthy planter himself - saw the elite has having foregone their perch at the top of the hierarchy through corruption and mismanagement. To both, however, the egalitarian liberal ideal of the United States was not just appalling but a direct threat to their order. It simply could not be possible that a Black man could integrate himself with broader society and be a functional part of it; while in the United States the ideal of pluralist civic nationalism presented by Democrats and the push for the assimilation of immigrants into an American super-culture by Liberals were a key point of contention if not the biggest difference between the parties' cultural worldviews, to the Confederate eye they were virtually indistinguishable affronts to the natural racial, patriarchal and societal order which the Confederacy was founded upon and, as the war crept closer, saw itself as being the only state on Earth willing to still defend. The siege mentality, the impossibility of compromise, the almost rabid enthusiasm to march off to die in the first months of the war - everything flowed from a culture that took it as a given that they were the lonely noble heroes of the Anglo-Saxon race standing against the hordes.
And then, the collapse of the Nashville defense and the sinking of the Confederate Navy at Hilton Head occurred virtually simultaneously, and not just a whole government and army but an entire society stared collectively into the abyss together, with everyone collectively thinking the same thing that would define the postwar Confederacy up to present day:
"What if we lose everything? What becomes of us? What if the Negro turns around upon us to seek vengeance for what we have done to them for centuries? What if we were wrong? And what does it say about us if we are?:..." [3]
- A Freedom Bought With Blood: Emancipation and the Postwar Confederacy
[1] While I and I'm sure many of this story's readers would rather live in ITTL's United States for a variety of reasons (most of them involving "No South"), in seeking to avoid a pure wank it bears mentioning that this alt-USA is not unequivocally a "good guy," and there are very solid reasons for her neighbors to dislike her for this fairly chauvinistic attitude that winning the GAW will only seek to make much worse.
[2] I wanted to lead off with this because it was A) fresh in my mind due to B) an interesting conversation @dcharleos and @SWS were having about Fitzhugh's particularly horrifying brand of Confederate proto-fascism as early as the 1850s over in the former's brand new "Nothing to Apologize For" TL, which I look forward to seeing develop
[3] As with anybody who wants to avoid unflattering answers to difficult questions, I'm sure postwar Confederates will handle the aftermath of the complete uprooting and collapse of their society both economically and culturally with thought and care /s
It has been noted quite frequently by historians of the Great American War the awkwardness with which the Confederate States of America fit with her allies. She was not a monarchy, quite the opposite, nor was Dixie a centralized state, with her powerful state legislatures and governors who though much less contemptuous of Richmond's authority by the 1910s still were regarded as in many ways supreme. Though Confederate citizens were on the whole deeply devout Christians, they were overwhelmingly Protestant outside of the Acadian Catholic belt of southern Louisiana, and though lacking the demographic anxieties about Catholicism that plagued Canadian Anglicans and even a great many American Protestants (particularly in New England), most of its society regarded Roman Catholicism, and thus by proxy their staunchly Catholic Mexican and Brazilian allies, with skepticism if not genuinely-held suspicion.
As is generally typical of American historiography, there is a certain navel-gazing and delusional exceptionalism when it comes to the Great American War and its aftermath that defined until recent decades scholarship on the subject. In the traditional American account, one embraced across the ideological, political and pedagogical spectrum, the Bloc Sud was part of a loose conspiracy by conservative elements panicking about the rise of America's dynamic, industrial economy and progressive worldview that collaborated to defeat it before they had no chance to resist it and saw "American values" exported into their staid, socially and financially backwards countries. [1] Said line of thinking continues on to suggest that the rise of the United States to dominate its hemisphere as its rightful backyard for the next century was inevitable, and the frequent tensions and occasional conflicts between her and her neighbors from 1917 to the present day are simply "aftershocks" of the defeated failing to reconcile themselves to their rightful place, and that the question was settled with the blood spilled in the war. This chauvinistic point of view around the United States' peaceful and then violent rise reserves its particular contempt for the Confederacy, which it holds beyond all others responsible as the Eve that tempted with the apple of war the Adams of Mexico and Brazil.
Scholarship around the anxieties of the Mexican and Brazilian aristocracies and church hierarchies, and a better appreciation in the American academy for the social issues of their Latin neighbors preceding the war, has helped this singular and exceptionalist point of view step aside for a more nuanced understanding of Latin resistance to American soft imperialism along its much-referenced "Axis of Liberty" from the Arctic to Antarctic. But the view of the Confederacy as uniquely responsible for the war itself has not died, thanks in part to the longstanding ebb and flow of tension between the two countries and, in part, a newer appreciation of Dixie's intellectual project.
One cannot understand the Confederate path to war without understanding the context of its secession in the first place; its entire society was built top-to-bottom on a peculiar institution, that of chattel slavery and a hierarchy dependent on its preservation. White Anglo-Americans in both the United States and Canada were certainly no strangers to racial and cultural resentment (in the latter, particularly when it came to contesting control of the country's institutions with the Catholic Quebecois minority) but they did not structure their entire worldview around a uniquely pernicious example of white supremacy as the keystone of their culture and nationhood. Indeed, a great many Confederates went much further than that - the works of the sociologist George Fitzhugh, who suggested in the 1850s [2] a slave society that did not purely rely on racial castes, had a great many admirers and this trickled through to the contempt in which many of the planter oligarchy held the poor White citizenry of the country, on whose labor their society relied on just as much as the Negro slave and whom they gladly fed into the Yankee cannons while they remained behind on their estates.
What the Confederacy represented from top-to-bottom, then, in its politics and culture was a world of strict hierarchies, a rigid place where the lessors knew who their betters were and power was reserved for the worthy few. Its political anxiety should be understood perhaps not exclusively but largely through this lens; everything about the Confederate States was organized in 1913 around this worldview. Even internally, the idea that this might be challenged somehow drove much of the political disputes. The "National Consensus" of the oligarchy viewed Tillman's smallholders and emerging labor-farmer coalition as forgetting their place, while Tillman - a wealthy planter himself - saw the elite has having foregone their perch at the top of the hierarchy through corruption and mismanagement. To both, however, the egalitarian liberal ideal of the United States was not just appalling but a direct threat to their order. It simply could not be possible that a Black man could integrate himself with broader society and be a functional part of it; while in the United States the ideal of pluralist civic nationalism presented by Democrats and the push for the assimilation of immigrants into an American super-culture by Liberals were a key point of contention if not the biggest difference between the parties' cultural worldviews, to the Confederate eye they were virtually indistinguishable affronts to the natural racial, patriarchal and societal order which the Confederacy was founded upon and, as the war crept closer, saw itself as being the only state on Earth willing to still defend. The siege mentality, the impossibility of compromise, the almost rabid enthusiasm to march off to die in the first months of the war - everything flowed from a culture that took it as a given that they were the lonely noble heroes of the Anglo-Saxon race standing against the hordes.
And then, the collapse of the Nashville defense and the sinking of the Confederate Navy at Hilton Head occurred virtually simultaneously, and not just a whole government and army but an entire society stared collectively into the abyss together, with everyone collectively thinking the same thing that would define the postwar Confederacy up to present day:
"What if we lose everything? What becomes of us? What if the Negro turns around upon us to seek vengeance for what we have done to them for centuries? What if we were wrong? And what does it say about us if we are?:..." [3]
- A Freedom Bought With Blood: Emancipation and the Postwar Confederacy
[1] While I and I'm sure many of this story's readers would rather live in ITTL's United States for a variety of reasons (most of them involving "No South"), in seeking to avoid a pure wank it bears mentioning that this alt-USA is not unequivocally a "good guy," and there are very solid reasons for her neighbors to dislike her for this fairly chauvinistic attitude that winning the GAW will only seek to make much worse.
[2] I wanted to lead off with this because it was A) fresh in my mind due to B) an interesting conversation @dcharleos and @SWS were having about Fitzhugh's particularly horrifying brand of Confederate proto-fascism as early as the 1850s over in the former's brand new "Nothing to Apologize For" TL, which I look forward to seeing develop
[3] As with anybody who wants to avoid unflattering answers to difficult questions, I'm sure postwar Confederates will handle the aftermath of the complete uprooting and collapse of their society both economically and culturally with thought and care /s
These are in fact the memes that came to mindOh, don't forget me always going off about the Upper Midwest being the most important part of the timeline and demanding to see more of Wisconsin and LaFollette
Dumb jokes, meanwhile, can usually be found in the footnotes lol
With the mention of both the Confederacy and Brazil having Chattel Slavery, what is the situation with Slavery in Brazil. Is it still at a child born of a slave is still a slave, or have some of the OTL changes between 1860 and 1885(?) actually occurred? (And can slaves be traded between Brazil and the CSA? (Note, a *lot* of the end of Brazilian slavery could be loopholed by trading a slave of a certain age or ready to bear a child to the CSA) (see first two paragraphs of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lei_Áurea for more infomation)
Given that even in the original/first thread I am a diehard Woodrow Wilson being a historian and revisionist , is it wrong that somehow I really want him to end up being a proto-abolitionist on his deathbed?
Thats like some really evil shit.
Thats like some really evil shit.
I figure this can occur regardless of whether Key West has American warships or not.
Another weather event that *might* make a revision or intermediate chapter iTTL.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Freeze (Pushed the production of Oranges south from North Florida to Central and Southern Florida and was responsible for the growth of Central and Southeast Florida.)