Confederacy

>>2409124
>If the Confederacy won the Civil War, would it have been able to conquer areas like Cuba, Mexico, Central America, etc

No.

> would the Union make an attempt at reconquering it given the Union's superior industry?


Of course. Especially given that the most likely method for a Confederacy "victory", i.e. to hold on a bit better, hope that McClellan wins the election, and negotiate with him, still leaves an enormous chunk of the confederacy occupied by Union troops, which I doubt even McClellan would feel inclined to give back.


>Also, what steps could the Confederacy have taken to actually been successful in seceding?

Long term, none, really. At least in the short term, if they can hold up better in the west, they've got a chance to wear down the Union will to fight this time around.

>would it have been able to conquer areas like Cuba, Mexico, Central America

There were plans to establish Confederate colonies in South America.

>would the Union make an attempt at reconquering it given the Union's superior industry?

probably. I wouldn't put it past them.

>what steps could the Confederacy have taken to actually been successful in seceding?

I think the plan was to keep the war going until Britain or France got involved on the CSA's side. There were talks of that in Parliament and Britain did make a few ships for the confederacy.

>>2409140
But doesn't the development of Cotton production in Egypt and India disprove the argument that the Confederacy was essential to Britain? The longer the war goes on, the more developed these areas become.

>>2409133
If Sherman's assault on Atlanta had stalled, couldn't they have made the case that the war wouldn't end and the Emancipation Proclamation was a bad idea. McClellan wanted to make peace with the Confederacy and the only way to do that would be to let them go, right?

>>2409150

The Emancipation proclamation is a complicated issue, but the rest of it, that there is a likelihood of McClellan winning the election on a peace platform, is good.

But consider that. By the time McClellan enters office in Mark of 1865, our slightly behind historical schedule Union has already overrun all of the border states, the entire Mississippi river, pretty much all of Tennessee, parts of northern Virginia, most of Alabama, and maybe has made inroads to Georgia, depending on whether or not Sherman could ever break through.


McClellan might offer the CSA peace and let what they have go, but I can't see him actually giving back the areas under occupation. Why would he? And a shrunken, weakened CSA invites further invasion down the line.

>>2409172
Couldn't they easily steamroll some place like Cuba or the Dominican Republic? If the Confederates were really threatened with defeat in the war, couldn't they just offer a territorial concession to the Union, like Santo Domingo, which Ulysses S. Grant wanted to annex as president to help them out? Why wouldn't the Union, especially as America starts to enter an imperial phase in the 1890s?

>>2409124
>would the Union make an attempt at reconquering it

Had the Confeds won the ACW, there would be no Union or Confederacy within a few generations. Once the legal precedent for succession existed, every po-dunk state would go for it, imagining themselves better off with self-rule. America's history would have become a lot more like Europe's, with near constant wars between its various states.

>>2409124
>would it have been able to conquer areas like Cuba, Mexico, Central America, etc. or would the Union make an attempt at reconquering it given the Union's superior industry?

Short answer: No

Long answer: The Confederacy, on top of racking up a large debt, had a very weak economy even disregarding the Union Embargo. The Confederate president didn't have the full ability to wage war without the individual states consent, and even then many states threatened to secede DURING the civil war when things didn't go there way. It was an unsustainable confederation that surely would have broken down in time, hence the term "Lost Cause".

>>2409185
Cuba was still a Spanish possession. While Spain was very weak during this time, it wasn't the pushover that it would become during the Spanish American War. Not to mentioned the Confederacy would essentially become a pariah state for still having legal slavery.

>>2409235
But the Confederacy was not every state and it probably would be easier to knock out Wisconsin rather than taking on one third of the national populace.

In the case of the Confederacy surviving, wouldn't the presence of slavery unite the states to a certain extent? Considering the influence large slaveholders had on Southern politics, if a Texan slave family wanted to expand into Mexico, they'd need the support of the other slave states to back them up.

>>2409262
Didn't Brazil maintain slavery in the 1880s? I'm not familiar with Brazilian history, but were they treated as a pariah state for not abolishing it sooner?

>>2409274
What about areas in Central America or Northern Mexico? The Confederates could easily have filibusters and offer the Pacific Coast of Mexico to the Union or territories along the Pacific in exchange for helping them spread slavery. Now that those territories are entering as free states in the Union and the slave states are going to the Confederacy, everybody wins, so you don't encounter a situation like the Mexican-American War where there is a debate over whether slavery gets to spread into the territories.

Proxy war between CSA backed by British Empire, and the Union backed by France?

>>2409124
I think what most people say is there was no chance for there ever to be two separate unions, the winning side, be it the north or the south, would've always absorbed the other. The two hate each other but need each other for dominance over the region; the south providing a large portion of the manpower and officers for armies along with plantation crops and raw resources, while the north provided the factories and production of equipment.

It's likely the biggest changes long term if the south won would've been the central government would've been moved to the south, slavery would've lasted another century or so, and states would have less say in what goes on in other states. There'd probably be a lot of bureaucracy and deadlock in deciding what the nation as a whole does, and something like WW1 would've probably been only entered in to via a coalition of states that were willing to send aid (IE, New York, Kentucky, and Ohio to just pick names out of a hat would work together and send troops and aid while everyone else remained neutral.).

Some would say the south would industrialize like the north, but I don't think that'd ever be the case; if the south loses, we'd get what we have today, with the region becoming exceptionally poor due to loss of their main income, if they won, they'd continue to hold on to the plantation traditions and still fail to industrialize. What the south needed was a larger and denser population of people to bring about the advent of large scale cheap labor throughout the middle class (Slaves could've theoretically been used, but their lack of basic education would make this difficult).

>>2409492
>CSA backed by the British Empire
Why would the British Empire support the Confederacy when they had previously worked to abolish the slave trade and also had competitive markets in Egypt and India to replace Southern cotton?

If the Confederacy truly won independence from the Union, there would definitely be a faction wanting to re-open the transatlantic slave trade, just as how the Fire-Eaters had advocated secession when the Confederacy was in the Union.

Also, why would the Union be backed by France when Millard Fillmore opposed the expansion of French influence under Napoleon III into Hawaii? The Monroe Doctrine would've been invoked against the French if they tried to colonize the Pacific and, if we're talking about later more towards the 1880s-1900s, the United States would want Hawaii more than the French and probably be willing to fight them for it (if the Spanish-American War is any model).

>>2409528
Had the Confederacy stayed in the Union and not seceded, if for instance, Douglas and Breckinridge united the Democrats by some miracle, and they had an expanded ruling on what Taney said in Dred Scott that basically allowed slaveholders to take their slaves into the North, what would be the likelihood of a Northern secession?

You can read Lincoln's text of the Alton Debates and it's very clear that this is what he was appealing to when he comments on the Dred Scott Decision.

>>2409479
>Didn't Brazil maintain slavery in the 1880s? I'm not familiar with Brazilian history, but were they treated as a pariah state for not abolishing it sooner?

Brazil went through a process of gradual emancipation whic was facilitated by British diplomatic efforts. By the time it was abolished, 3/4ths of Brazil's Afro-Brazilian population was free. The British threatened to embargo slave produced Brazilian sugar in the 1870's if it did not bar the practice in its entirety.

>>2409479
>What about areas in Central America or Northern Mexico?
Unlikely considering France and Britain had interests in the area, with France proposing up the Mexican monarchy and Britain having their colonies of Belize and British Nicaragua.

>The Confederates could easily have filibusters and offer the Pacific Coast of Mexico to the Union or territories along the Pacific in exchange for helping them spread slavery.

It's highly unlikely that the Union would cooperate with them after just waging war against them. Also where are you going to find the extra slaves to populate these new plantations in Mexico/South America? You're not going to enslave Mexicans if you know what's good for you, and restarting the transatlantic slave trade from Africa would have resulted in war with Britain, who pledged to confescate any ships that carried slaves on the high seas regardless of origin.

>>2409492
France was even more gung ho for the confederacy than Britain was. That was part of why they invaded Mexico during the civil war. It would have been a proxy war between Britain/France and the Russian Empire.

>>2409547
>Monroe doctrine
>Pacific
u wot
The Monroe doctrine only applied to the Americas and France did colonize the pacific.

Not to mention the US was absolutely toothless about enforcing it prior to the Spanish-American war. And Spain was an absolute weakling by that point whilst France was a major world power.

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