Sequel de Mayo (Cinco de Mayo, Vol. II)
- Thread starter KingSweden24
- Start date
I also thought it was from something OTL, I tried googling several phrases.
I wonder if this is sort of like Ireland, where there are towns/villages that *still* haven't reached the same population that they had prior to the Potato Famine.
Without slaves, I wonder if there are crops which simply aren't cost effective to grow in certain areas any more leading to areas being functionally abandonned.
Buh buh buh if only we had reincarnated Robert E Lee, we would've hwipped the miscegenating, mongrelised Yankee!
After the Mourning will come Hatred.
And Caesar’s spirit, ranging for revenge,
With Ate by his side come hot from hell,
Shall in these confines with a monarch’s voice
Cry “Havoc!” and let slip the dogs of war,
That this foul deed shall smell above the earth
With carrion men, groaning for burial.
‘Cry Havoc’ speech, spoken by Antony, Act 3 Scene 1
Copium is in fact the South's number one export!
I'll take it as a compliment so many thought this was a real stanza and not something I came up with on my commute home yesterday haha
Now this is what I should have used to kick off the GAW!
Thank you!
Well, he is the author; so if anyone is capable of assuming there isn't going to be a rematch between the US and CS, he would be the one
And he has said as such in the past: partially to avoid the Turtledove trope and also because the South is so spent after this, as much as they may not particularly like the damnyankees, they aren't stupid enough to try something like the GAW every again.
Considering that the Confederates would have other issues for years I’d say that the Americans could cut the Gordian knot and insist that Free Kentucky be given the state’s pre-war territory. The problems that such a blunt solution would cause would also be interesting to read about.
The Root of the Problem: The Tumultuous Term of America's 29th President
"...sense of awkwardness. It was clear to Root immediately what the new paradigm of the Patton administration was, as it was a defeated general, George Bolling, who was the chief representative of the Confederate government to Philadelphia rather than a seasoned diplomat. In part, Root suspected throughout November and December of 1916 as the parameters for the peace conference to come began to take shape, this was because the Confederate Army understood at a level that civilian leadership perhaps did not that the war was lost and that there was no fight left in Dixie whatsoever.
This supposition immediately sparked a push for triumphant maximalism, especially from Lodge, who had taken the liberty, not unnoticed by Root and others, of having his preferred deputies at State already sitting in on meetings during the transition despite them having no formal power or responsibilities. Hawkish Democrats such as Turner or Baker were of the same view, though; if the Confederate Army was the chief driver for peace, then an intransigent civilian leadership would suffer a putsch if they resisted, and it thus behooved Philadelphia to push for as harsh as terms as they possibly could rather than negotiate against themselves from the beginning.
Root's priorities were at crosswinds, however. On the one hand, he sympathized with the hawks who were quick to point out that the Confederacy had built to war over a full decade of escalatory provocations and had indeed launched the surprise attack of September 9th in a fashion that seemed designed to maximize civilian casualties. The importance of the Mississippi alone demanded that a "hard peace" be pursued in which the Confederate States could never again, under any circumstances, represent a threat to America. At the same time, Root was well aware that vast swaths of the Confederacy believed that the American victory represented a genuinely apocalyptic scenario and that as 1916 closed paramilitary violence had already taken thousands of lives since Armistice; if occupation of the Confederacy became a necessity, then a brutal insurgency beckoned if peace terms were too draconian. It was also the fact that he was personally invested in being able to place his hand on the Bible on March 4th as a peacetime President, and to be able to say in his inaugural address that he was the Secretary of State who had won that same peace; while this was in part a symbolic hope to allow Hughes to leave office with the war formally over, there was also a fair dash of personal pride and ambition as well as Root being genuinely worried that Lodge would take over from him only to detonate the peace process.
The first task was to set a time and place for the negotiations to begin. Hughes, with an eye on history, was keen to hold the peace discussions on American soil - "the defeated shall negotiate at the pleasure of the victorious," he boasted in his final annual letter to Congress - with the negotiations beginning on December 20, a symbolic date as it was the day that South Carolina seceded from the Union, fifty-six years earlier. To that end, Chicago, Philadelphia and New York were suggested as sites for such a summit. As his views often would over the next several months and years, however, Hughes lost out; Root was swayed by Turner, who proposed that the negotiations be held instead at Mount Vernon, the home of George Washington, in part to "reclaim" Washington from the Confederacy (whether Turner, a Washingtonian, was thinking of this in terms of the name of his home state remains unclear). Root strongly preferred his idea also because it had a proximity to the ruins of the other Washington, which had been destroyed in the opening hours and days of the war, thus placing the solemn end of the war precisely beside its beginning, and meant that the Confederates would have to negotiate the terms of their permanent peace under the guns of an army on their own soil. While Hughes was ambivalent, he acquiesced, and agreed to push the negotiations into the new year after British representatives asked to involve themselves as observers and potential mediators, which Democrats fumed at but Root readily agreed to, damaging his capital with men like Turner who had otherwise liked him before his term even began.
As such, the start of the Mount Vernon Congress was slated for January 9, 1917 - the symbolic date upon which Mississippi had become the second state to secede - in Virginia, with Root, Lodge and Turner the chief American representatives along with outgoing Speaker Clark (it was initially felt that Hughes' presence would potentially put the President's safety at risk, though Turner in his memoir cast doubt on this considering the heavy Army presence in Mount Vernon and suspected that Root and Lodge simply did not want to be upstaged) arriving two days earlier to prepare as the meetings that would shape North America forever began..."
- The Root of the Problem: The Tumultuous Term of America's 29th President
This supposition immediately sparked a push for triumphant maximalism, especially from Lodge, who had taken the liberty, not unnoticed by Root and others, of having his preferred deputies at State already sitting in on meetings during the transition despite them having no formal power or responsibilities. Hawkish Democrats such as Turner or Baker were of the same view, though; if the Confederate Army was the chief driver for peace, then an intransigent civilian leadership would suffer a putsch if they resisted, and it thus behooved Philadelphia to push for as harsh as terms as they possibly could rather than negotiate against themselves from the beginning.
Root's priorities were at crosswinds, however. On the one hand, he sympathized with the hawks who were quick to point out that the Confederacy had built to war over a full decade of escalatory provocations and had indeed launched the surprise attack of September 9th in a fashion that seemed designed to maximize civilian casualties. The importance of the Mississippi alone demanded that a "hard peace" be pursued in which the Confederate States could never again, under any circumstances, represent a threat to America. At the same time, Root was well aware that vast swaths of the Confederacy believed that the American victory represented a genuinely apocalyptic scenario and that as 1916 closed paramilitary violence had already taken thousands of lives since Armistice; if occupation of the Confederacy became a necessity, then a brutal insurgency beckoned if peace terms were too draconian. It was also the fact that he was personally invested in being able to place his hand on the Bible on March 4th as a peacetime President, and to be able to say in his inaugural address that he was the Secretary of State who had won that same peace; while this was in part a symbolic hope to allow Hughes to leave office with the war formally over, there was also a fair dash of personal pride and ambition as well as Root being genuinely worried that Lodge would take over from him only to detonate the peace process.
The first task was to set a time and place for the negotiations to begin. Hughes, with an eye on history, was keen to hold the peace discussions on American soil - "the defeated shall negotiate at the pleasure of the victorious," he boasted in his final annual letter to Congress - with the negotiations beginning on December 20, a symbolic date as it was the day that South Carolina seceded from the Union, fifty-six years earlier. To that end, Chicago, Philadelphia and New York were suggested as sites for such a summit. As his views often would over the next several months and years, however, Hughes lost out; Root was swayed by Turner, who proposed that the negotiations be held instead at Mount Vernon, the home of George Washington, in part to "reclaim" Washington from the Confederacy (whether Turner, a Washingtonian, was thinking of this in terms of the name of his home state remains unclear). Root strongly preferred his idea also because it had a proximity to the ruins of the other Washington, which had been destroyed in the opening hours and days of the war, thus placing the solemn end of the war precisely beside its beginning, and meant that the Confederates would have to negotiate the terms of their permanent peace under the guns of an army on their own soil. While Hughes was ambivalent, he acquiesced, and agreed to push the negotiations into the new year after British representatives asked to involve themselves as observers and potential mediators, which Democrats fumed at but Root readily agreed to, damaging his capital with men like Turner who had otherwise liked him before his term even began.
As such, the start of the Mount Vernon Congress was slated for January 9, 1917 - the symbolic date upon which Mississippi had become the second state to secede - in Virginia, with Root, Lodge and Turner the chief American representatives along with outgoing Speaker Clark (it was initially felt that Hughes' presence would potentially put the President's safety at risk, though Turner in his memoir cast doubt on this considering the heavy Army presence in Mount Vernon and suspected that Root and Lodge simply did not want to be upstaged) arriving two days earlier to prepare as the meetings that would shape North America forever began..."
- The Root of the Problem: The Tumultuous Term of America's 29th President
Well now that the war is over, we can hopefully start transitioning away from the Americas and back to Europe and Asia again.
Oh almost certainly! Haha
We’ll def get a lot more European content in particular soon
in the GAW, the next three largest Economies (CSA, Mexico and Brazil) in the Americas took on the USA and lost. The Mexicans recognize that they got off easy....
Yeah, absolutely! Super excited for the start of this chapter. Just wanted to ask, since it's something I'm pretty interested in, what's going on with Arthur C. Townley and the NPL?
I believe that the NPLers either migrated into the more Populist Democrats or helped build of the state branch of the Socialist Party (which has elected members to the Dakotan congressional delegation)
I'd love to see Townley in the Senate in this ATL (he came close to running in OTL but preferred to stay the organiser behind the scenes - a decision which bit him in the ass eventually and let Wild Bill Langer overshadow him).
Yeah, really did bite him in the ass. Would be really cool to see him be a socialist political leader.
Agreed (on the Mount Vernon part at least, 🤐 for the rest)
Townley was a Socialist Representative from Dakota, Dan is correct
Is Mexico in third?
IOTL Argentina was, with a GDP per capita well over twice that of Mexico and a population well over half as large in 1914, so the overall figure was close to 1.5x as large.
Mexico is less of a basketcase ITTL but I doubt enough less. And Argentina is also doing better ITTL…