Civil War Thread

Kantor's book posited that a couple major reversals shifted the tone of several key battles, mainly allowing the South to take Gettysburg, cut off Washington, make a run in the direction of Philadelphia, which then throws the entire Union into panic, resulting in the flipping of the border states Maryland and Kentucky which had previously remained in the fold, and things go to hell rapidly after that.

He also has Grant getting killed in a horse riding accident in 1862 IIRC, never rising to command, and the Union Army being commanded by dithering indecisive defeatists looking for a way out.

 

I'm not a buff by any means, but the rotating narrative -- focusing on this group of guys who all vied to be president, lost to Lincoln and then agreed to serve in his cabinet -- is pretty fascinating. Highly recommend it.

 

Hard to say. Even if Gettysburg had been a Southern win, Vicksburg fell at the same time, giving the Union control of the Mississippi River and free access to the heart of Confederate territory.

 

I could see it happening in that time frame IF (big if) the Confederacy's supporting powers (Great Britain & France) were to put enough pressure on the South that slavery became an economic liability. It also would depend on how much industrial development progressed in an independent Confederacy. Could slavery have made a transition from a largely agrarian institution to one that would have been able to man industrial jobs? Interesting questions. Even if the South had acted to end slavery in that 15-20 year time frame, though, any "freeing" of the slaves in the South would have been a token gesture at best.

 

Yeah, I think Kantor's book also had CSA recognition by the European powers coming quickly after the fall of Gettysburg, which contributes to the snowball effect.

Kantor has Grant dying in the riding accident long before Vicksburg, so no big Union victory there.

 

Then as now, white Southerners were fiercely opposed to taxation and big government projects (internal improvements in the vernacular of the day). With no Merrill Act to provide for broad-based agricultural education, soil exhaustion and the boll weevil eventually would have combined to leave the economy utterly ruined.

 

I find the idea that industrial/ manufacturing economies were somehow fundamentally incompatible with slavery laughable.

As the industrial revolution and the rise of sweatshops demonstrated, factory owners were always willing to pay workers dirt dog cheap wages. How much of a jump would it have been to go from 10 cents an hour to nothing?

Ridiculous. Factory owners and big industrialists would have been thrilled for the workforce to work for nothing beyond bare subsistence. A dream come true even today.


Also, the Nazis/Soviets certainly showed in the 20th century that involuntary workers could be put to work in factories. Sure, maybe productivity and quality control might not be up to snuff, but effective labor costs of close to zero makes up for that.

 

Yeah, and a fat lot of good it did 'em, too.

 

Which they figured out after it was all
over.

 

Barring some collapse of political will in the North, there was no way the South was going to win that war. It's not generally realized just how poor the South was -- per-capita GDP in the North has been estimated at up to twice that of the South. During the Civil War the North took on any number of wholly unrelated initiatives. The first Homestead Act, for example, was enacted in 1862; the transcontinental railroad was begun in 1863.

It's an interesting intellectual exercise to think of critical moments in the Civil War -- say, when Grant stumbled damn-near into his undoing at Champion Hill, or when Chamberlain saved the day on Little Round Top -- as actual tipping points. They really weren't. The South as it was was doomed to die. The only question was how and when.

 

It wasn't much different from the Revolutionary War in that respect, or really any revolution. The Colonies were never going to bring the British Empire to its knees, but they could make it painful both financially and politically to continue a war that seemed to offer no tangible benefits to the general public. The South's main goal was always to break away, not conquer, the North. The reason Lee pushed north into Pennsylvania was to give the farmers in Virginia a breather and hopefully scare Northern politicians into a peace treaty. Even if he'd taken Washington I doubt the USA would have become the CSA. At most, the new U.S. capital becomes New York or Philadelphia and the border between the two countries is the Potomac or Delaware Bay.

 

Considering that the West was largely unsettled at the time, I think we might have ended up a lot more balkanized than that.
Oklahoma and a lot of lands west of the Missouri probably remain Indian territory, since the U.S. would be licking its wounds still. So many of those states were settled in the 1870s and 1880s that it could have even reignited the Civil War as the USA and CSA feuded over the new territory.
California, split apart from the rest of the country and with a potentially hostile CSA and Indian territory between, might have become its own country.
Alaska might have remained in Russia's hands. It wasn't purchased until after the Civil War, and if Seward is run out of office in the wake of the war who knows if the U.S. buys it?