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talkpoliticsThere are a very few alternate history points of divergence that literally need intervention by God or a sufficiently-minded alien from the Q Continuum to bring them about. Sure, anything is possible but for some things improbability is far too overwhelming to make a decent story about them.
The first of these is a Nazi invasion of England via Operation Sealion. The Germans had no way in Hell to pull that off, they had no navy, their air force was not designed for that purpose, and the British were rather more formidable than the Germans realized. Sealion is as mythical as a polka-dotted unicorn drinking from Russell's Teapot.
The second of these is the Confederacy winning the US Civil War. It has a very, very narrow timeframe to do that in if we're assuming a recognizable scenario. Once the Confederacy resorts to conscription the South will weaken every year no matter how well its armies do on the battlefield, while Northern strength is ever-increasing by comparison. Any long war scenario and the only question is when and how the Union defeats the Confederacy. For that matter the South could only win the war in the East but it lost it in the West due to the Union's three best generals being up against the Confederate General Failures.
Another irritating thing one sees in alternate history are borders that are the same as our world's without sufficient logic. Kazakhstan, and a unified India and China are obvious examples. For that matter a unified China including Tibet and Xinjiang is another obvious example. Then there's that the potentiality of a late Medieval Chinese industrial state is always overlooked in favor of steampunk Victoriana, with the problem that an industrial China's a lot more interesting because Britain was two tiny islands. A unified and industrialized Chinese Empire would be a juggernaut on the US scale.
On the other side of things, Japan *always* ends up being the only non-Western power to industrialize and overtakes China in the process despite that Japan was traditionally a backwards backwater of the Chinese dynasties. This is no doubt due to ignorance and people being unwilling or unable to spin a tale about super-Korea or super-*Vietnam. Then there's the question about why nobody ever postulates worlds where William Henry Harrison never attacks Prophetstown which makes the War of 1812 very interesting.
The other major vexation in alternate history series is a tendency to uber-wank societies like the Confederacy and the Nazis. Timeline-191, despite being one of the lengthiest timelines gets really, really ridiculous. Not only does the Confederacy get a handwaved emancipation but it lasts too long in World War I and ends up with both an atomic bomb and the ability to run World War II and a Holocaust analogue at the same time, which would be rather beyond anything realistic. And the tendency for Man in the High Castle-type timelines where the Nazis end up more like Sauron than they do a society more inefficient than Stalinism that burned out in 12 years is both annoying and has a lot of unfortunate implications. The ones with the Confederacy do, too, but then the Confederacy and its crimes are regularly overlooked by of all parties the party of Lincoln and Grant so WTF do I know.
Then there's the converse tendency where some societies are *never* allowed to go anywhere. The most egregious example is the Ottoman Empire where points of divergence include things like a successful Treaty of Sevres (*shudder*) or the Greeks taking over successfully the parts of Ottoman Anatolia where most Turks lived, leaving aside that in real life they showed that had they done so Turks would be as numerous as Cherokees today. Or alternately one never sees Amerindians having their own version of a Meiji Restoration despite the length of things like the Auracao War or the Zapatista Revolt. Nor does one see Soviet-wanks the way one sees Nazi-wanks even though logically the one should be more plausible than the other (given the USSR lasted into the 1990s where Nazi Germany lasted barely over a decade).
The first of these is a Nazi invasion of England via Operation Sealion. The Germans had no way in Hell to pull that off, they had no navy, their air force was not designed for that purpose, and the British were rather more formidable than the Germans realized. Sealion is as mythical as a polka-dotted unicorn drinking from Russell's Teapot.
The second of these is the Confederacy winning the US Civil War. It has a very, very narrow timeframe to do that in if we're assuming a recognizable scenario. Once the Confederacy resorts to conscription the South will weaken every year no matter how well its armies do on the battlefield, while Northern strength is ever-increasing by comparison. Any long war scenario and the only question is when and how the Union defeats the Confederacy. For that matter the South could only win the war in the East but it lost it in the West due to the Union's three best generals being up against the Confederate General Failures.
Another irritating thing one sees in alternate history are borders that are the same as our world's without sufficient logic. Kazakhstan, and a unified India and China are obvious examples. For that matter a unified China including Tibet and Xinjiang is another obvious example. Then there's that the potentiality of a late Medieval Chinese industrial state is always overlooked in favor of steampunk Victoriana, with the problem that an industrial China's a lot more interesting because Britain was two tiny islands. A unified and industrialized Chinese Empire would be a juggernaut on the US scale.
On the other side of things, Japan *always* ends up being the only non-Western power to industrialize and overtakes China in the process despite that Japan was traditionally a backwards backwater of the Chinese dynasties. This is no doubt due to ignorance and people being unwilling or unable to spin a tale about super-Korea or super-*Vietnam. Then there's the question about why nobody ever postulates worlds where William Henry Harrison never attacks Prophetstown which makes the War of 1812 very interesting.
The other major vexation in alternate history series is a tendency to uber-wank societies like the Confederacy and the Nazis. Timeline-191, despite being one of the lengthiest timelines gets really, really ridiculous. Not only does the Confederacy get a handwaved emancipation but it lasts too long in World War I and ends up with both an atomic bomb and the ability to run World War II and a Holocaust analogue at the same time, which would be rather beyond anything realistic. And the tendency for Man in the High Castle-type timelines where the Nazis end up more like Sauron than they do a society more inefficient than Stalinism that burned out in 12 years is both annoying and has a lot of unfortunate implications. The ones with the Confederacy do, too, but then the Confederacy and its crimes are regularly overlooked by of all parties the party of Lincoln and Grant so WTF do I know.
Then there's the converse tendency where some societies are *never* allowed to go anywhere. The most egregious example is the Ottoman Empire where points of divergence include things like a successful Treaty of Sevres (*shudder*) or the Greeks taking over successfully the parts of Ottoman Anatolia where most Turks lived, leaving aside that in real life they showed that had they done so Turks would be as numerous as Cherokees today. Or alternately one never sees Amerindians having their own version of a Meiji Restoration despite the length of things like the Auracao War or the Zapatista Revolt. Nor does one see Soviet-wanks the way one sees Nazi-wanks even though logically the one should be more plausible than the other (given the USSR lasted into the 1990s where Nazi Germany lasted barely over a decade).
(no subject)
Date: 29/11/10 18:53 (UTC)- Kenneth Hite, "An Alternate-Historical Alphabet," January 14, 2000.
(no subject)
Date: 29/11/10 20:40 (UTC)Roughly paraphrased, it would mean: concerning the different textures of various historical period's divergent visions of the future.
The Jetsons, as well as Walt Disney's "Land of Tomorrow", have a definitive "50's future feel" (or early 60's, same thing), in the same way that Flash Gordan and Rocketman have a "30's future feel", and in a way that, I presume, Blade Runner and Neromancer will eventually mean "the 80's future feel"
(no subject)
Date: 29/11/10 20:45 (UTC)And William Gibson famously has progressed from writing stories set in the future during the '80s, to the near-future during the '00s, to the present now. One wonders if a decade from now, he'll be writing about the recent past a decade or two from now ...
(no subject)
Date: 29/11/10 21:45 (UTC)Then there's the reality that Southern plantation slavery of the 1850s was an innovation due to the cotton gin and hence had surprised damned near everyone in the USA, which was why the issue of what states slavery would or would not spread to mattered as it did.
(no subject)
Date: 29/11/10 22:41 (UTC)Had the cotton gin not been invented, the pernicious form that slavery took in the US would not have developed. It's hard to guess what forms the political and cultural conflict between the agrarian South and industrial North would have taken in the absence of slavery. Would the split have been less, or just different?
(no subject)
Date: 30/11/10 02:26 (UTC)The consequences of Stalin thereby seeing a lot more reason to trust his spies would be quite profound for the war, possibly enough that the Soviets win a lot sooner and inflict much earlier victories on Germany in excess of what they did in real life. A Bagration-level defeat by late 1942/early 1943 changes the war in all kinds of funky fun ways.
What might probably happen is US industrialism might come to depend on wool or something like that instead of cotton. Cotton agriculture would never come to exist here, and that means paradoxically on the one level blacks would have a life of extreme fail during the generations where slavery disappears and then on another level by the mid-19th Century blacks are assimilated in ways that have never been tried in real life.
Essentially the Frederick Douglass/MLK group of black leaders is both vindicated and the consequence of blacks being less numerous but also more assimilated would be quite interesting. Certainly Northern industrialism will take an entirely different form, where Southern society as freeholder farmers might actually industrialize in its own way itself given that there's little to stop it getting the necessary capital as happened in real life.
(no subject)
Date: 29/11/10 19:19 (UTC)Confederacy point; Are you a Harry Turtledove fan?
Where did you get the Chinese Empire would be a juggernaut on the US scale? That sounds like a good read.
(no subject)
Date: 29/11/10 21:48 (UTC)I've read a lot of his works. The main thing he's done for the AH genre is quantity which has not really a lot of quality to call his own, all his works replicate the US Civil War, World War II, or both at once.
It's not been done as a novel though there have been a couple of takes on it as Internet timelines. Essentially in the Song Empire the Chinese were on the verge of an industrial revolution, and Genghis Khan's defeat of the Song ended that. If China industrializes instead due to say, Genghis having an unfortunate accident in a power squabble among the Mongols the Chinese were already the most "modern" state at that time. With an industrial economy they would not have been a small island limited in manpower, they would have been much more something like an autocratic USA.
(no subject)
Date: 29/11/10 19:36 (UTC)Consolidation rather than desperation....no Uncle Adolph and perhaps no USSR, but a German dominated Europe and London and Berlin competing for dominance. Don't quite know what would need to change, perhaps too much, but I've an idea for a novel lurking somewhere in there.
(no subject)
Date: 29/11/10 20:16 (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 29/11/10 20:24 (UTC)I was once nice about Ferguson....then I read a smidgen more of his work, the overall thrust of which I found not quite to my taste, though not completely without merit of any kind.
[Tips Hat.]
(no subject)
Date: 29/11/10 20:57 (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 29/11/10 21:56 (UTC)If anything the *starting* coalition would have been a much more militarized United States and United Kingdom, and perhaps a fascist/communist (depends on who does what in the Russian Civil War) Russia against Imperial Germany. Germany would win a Pyrrhic victory. Whether or not Japan decides for war is an open question in this scenario. Who they side with would be even more interesting given they were an Ally in World War I. And in this scenario they're technically on the losing side and would have had to return Tsingtao and some of their Polynesian conquests gained before 1931.
(no subject)
Date: 29/11/10 21:59 (UTC)I have no idea what this means. And I'm not sure that's factually correct. Do you have any citations or other sources to illuminate me?
(no subject)
Date: 29/11/10 22:04 (UTC)Essentially what we consider "Ukrainians and Belarusians" in the era were a small literate class, as the distinction between those two languages and Russian was a primarily written one at that time (and of course most *Russians* were illiterate, that was one of the only good things the USSR left behind). The German attempts to create things like the Hetmanate were a disaster waiting to happen. It wouldn't have been on par with Reichscommisariat Ukraine but then some fences are so low any cow can jump over them.
(no subject)
Date: 29/11/10 21:53 (UTC)The bigger problem with the Russian Revolution also was not the Germans but the Ottomans deciding to enter the war and cutting off the Russians from arms imports and food exports. That did more to create the Soviet Union than any German battlefield victory did.
(no subject)
Date: 29/11/10 21:52 (UTC)Germany also had no chance to win World War I in any serious sense because its military plan adopted in the 1890s guaranteed an invasion of Belgium, whose neutrality in theory was to be protected by everyone in Europe. Essentially World War I was a scenario where Failure Is The Only Option for everyone involved. The really interesting question would be what if the Ottomans never got involved as that would have all kinds of potential for the 20th Century (no Arab nationalism along with no Islamism would be just the start).
Essentially the Germans would be defeated with or without Britain, as their plan would draw in the British no matter what, where if they have a different Emperor than Wilhelm II that's not the kind of Germany that would start World War I in 1914 in the first place.
(no subject)
Date: 29/11/10 20:21 (UTC)"The first of these is a Nazi invasion of England via Operation Sealion. The Germans had no way in Hell to pull that off, they had no navy, their air force was not designed for that purpose, and the British were rather more formidable than the Germans realized. Sealion is as mythical as a polka-dotted unicorn drinking from Russell's Teapot. "
SO, lack of a navy and insufficient airforce were merely problems of timing. In order for Sea Lion to be plausable one merely need postulate 2 changes to history. First that the Germans actually destroyed the RAF in the Battle of Brittan rather than switching to bombing of civilian centers at the critical moment in the battle. Second that one somehow keeps the US out of the war in Europe for 18 - 24 months. Without active US involvement the combination of total air superiority and submarine warfare on shipping would have done a very good job of starving England and weakening their armies while Germany built a navy.
The one risk to this of course being that the worsening condition on the Eastern Front would have prevented Germany from having a large enough army left in the west to pull off the invasion by the time enough landing ships had been constructed.
"The second of these is the Confederacy winning the US Civil War. It has a very, very narrow timeframe to do that in if we're assuming a recognizable scenario. Once the Confederacy resorts to conscription the South will weaken every year no matter how well its armies do on the battlefield, while Northern strength is ever-increasing by comparison. Any long war scenario and the only question is when and how the Union defeats the Confederacy. For that matter the South could only win the war in the East but it lost it in the West due to the Union's three best generals being up against the Confederate General Failures."
This is true if one restricts ones views to the military field of battle, there are ways that the South could have achieved a political victory had they had the insight to recognize that a military victory was unachievable. Even just assassinating Lincoln *BEFORE* it was too late might have won them the war.
Another way is to assume that England decided that a Puppet regieme in the American South was more valuable to them than a unified America or the pesky issue of slavery and actively intervened on the South's behalf.
"Another irritating thing one sees in alternate history are borders that are the same as our world's without sufficient logic."
This is true and I can see why it might be irritating but why would you expect it to be any different? Honestly most writers do not have the time to become an expert in every political situation through out history before they can even begin to write a story, their goal is to write a story not get multiple history PHD's. Further even if they did you have the problem of needing to write an entire companion book explaining to the reader how each currently non existent political entity came into being before they can even begin to understand what is going on in the story.
In order for readers to follow a story one must be able to put it in a background which they can grasp, sure altering the lines on the map as a result of your changes might be more "realistic" but given that the reader will not understand that it is easier to just leave them where they are and stick to only the first order changes to history that you are making to create the setting for the story.
In other words, good history says the lines on the map would have to change, good storytelling says they shouldn't and if you want people to actually read the damn thing you're better off sticking with the dictates of good storytelling.
(no subject)
Date: 29/11/10 22:19 (UTC)No, for Sealion to be remotely possible Germany needs something like Higgins Boats and fighters that were able to maintain a long-range strategic campaign. It had a tactical air force, the Allies had a strategic one. That's why Bomber Harris did successfully what Marshal Goering failed abysmally to do.
The other part of it is that Germany needs to do the air battle as early as remotely possible before the British had a chance to recover. As it was they dithered for a few weeks and the British rightfully won one of the most epic victories of World War II.
The Germans had real chances to win the war against the Soviet Union, but by the same token the Soviets also had opportunities to win the war earlier and at much less cost to themselves, which would have huge impacts on any alternate Cold War. Several million more living Soviets would be akin to a shorter World War I, which might mean for instance that Wilfred Owen has a postwar career in poetry.
The South had a fairly limited definition of victory, simple independence. The North had to conquer a region the size of European Russia, something two successive German regimes failed at but the North succeeded at. The twisted irony is that the 1860 Confederacy was like 1914 Russia: its best hopes were a short offensive campaign and all its industrial centers were at the crust of the South, while it had a self-inflicted starvation crisis that won the war more than the other side's army did.
True, but if someone's going to make a series out of something there's plenty of popular histories that offer well-rounded looks at what they'd be writing about. Not everyone should be able to get away with Lucas-level chicanery about bad story-writing even if they have cool scenes. *Some* research is preferable.
Alternate Histories
Date: 29/11/10 20:31 (UTC)As for me, I always liked The Years of Rice and Salt by Kim Stanly Robinson (who can really do no wrong in light of his Red Mars, Green Mars, Blue Mars, trilogy)
It's divergent thesis is "imagine that the black death decimated 99% of Europe rather than one or two thirds."
So, virtually no Christian influence on the world stage, for starters, and a world mostly dominated by China and an Islam that repopulates Europe, as well as some side notes of unlikely bedfellows like Samurai fleeing the destruction of their dynasties and making alliances with Native Americans, while disseminating information about primitive small pox cures (so the remaining Amerindian population a century post-new world discovery is far more significant than in our own world)
You mentioned borders....
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:The_Years_of_Rice_and_Salt_Map.PNG
Re: Alternate Histories
Date: 29/11/10 22:12 (UTC)B) And that's a fair point. It can make for a good dystopia, but people should not mistake a dystopia for a realistic scenario.
The elephant in the room is that the Black Death's first outbreaks were in China, which would mean that this would be a world dominated by Indigenous Australians and Native Americans.
Re: Alternate Histories
Date: 29/11/10 22:42 (UTC)> were in China
Did China loose between a third and two thirds of its population to the Black Death?
If not, then we already have a situation where the epidemic was disproportionately deadly in Europe, as opposed to China. All the author's premise asks of us is to pretend that it was even more disproportionately deadly.
Re: Alternate Histories
Date: 29/11/10 22:48 (UTC)Re: Alternate Histories
Date: 29/11/10 23:34 (UTC)Very unlikely. Nearly impossible.
Re: Alternate Histories
Date: 30/11/10 02:21 (UTC)Re: Alternate Histories
Date: 30/11/10 02:26 (UTC)Wouldn't have happened under any alternative world history, Q or no Q, if the only variable is the Black Death. Extremely unlikely. Nearly impossible.
Re: Alternate Histories
Date: 30/11/10 02:28 (UTC)Re: Alternate Histories
Date: 30/11/10 02:35 (UTC)Re: Alternate Histories
Date: 30/11/10 02:50 (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 29/11/10 20:32 (UTC)Not necessarily. On paper, Great Britain should have utterly annihilated their thirteen rebellious colonies. The United States should have subdued North Vietnam without breaking a sweat. There's more to winning a war than who has the most men or the most guns. I would agree the South had no chance of winning by force of arms alone after Gettysburg and Vicksburg. But there was a real possibility that Lincoln might have lost the election of 1864, which could have resulted in a negotiated settlement of the war.
Nor does one see Soviet-wanks the way one sees Nazi-wanks
The Nazis are a convenient trope for fiction since everyone agrees they were evil. There isn't as much accord on the nature and the scale of the Soviets evil (though there ought to be.)
(no subject)
Date: 29/11/10 21:39 (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 29/11/10 22:09 (UTC)The thing is that the Confederacy's cotton embargo willfully removed one of their key aces in the hole due to sheer hubris on the part of the Confederacy's leaders. That coupled with the Confederacy's string of strategic defeats at the hands of one Ulysses S. Grant, a real-life http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/MaryTzu if ever there was one. Essentially Grant won every single strategic victory for the Union, while the Confederates never won any strategic or tactical victories in the West except Perryville (strategically meaningless) and Chickamauga (due to one of Rosecrans' rare mistakes in the war).
The Confederacy's leaders in 1860 also faced the elephant in the room that the 1/3 of their population that knew Confederate victory meant slavery and believed fully Confederate fearmongering about Lincoln were hardly likely to just let the Confederates win unchallenged. That they didn't was the biggest reason the Union had a switcheroo on whether or not emancipation was constitutional.
(no subject)
Date: 29/11/10 22:20 (UTC)The Dutch also provided a great deal of money. And you're agreeing with with what I've said-- the Revolutionary War was untypical in many ways, and Washington waited the Brits out, taking good advantage of British screw ups, and winning some time for overseas help the gorilla war he was waging against the British, preventing an outright victory for them.
The Confederate losses in the West could have been no big deal in the same way the Brits "won" the battle for large cities in the colonies. Had there been a settlement after 1864 with no Lincoln in the White House, I'm sure Union troops would have left all territory in the South, much in the same way the Brits left the colonies after the Treaty of Paris. But yes, I think the Confederates had a much smaller window of winning than the colonies did though for a variety of reasons.
The South could have won a huge victory but failed to follow up an early key win at the Battle of Manassas, and when Stonewall Jackson was killed, it was a major loss. Had Grant been killed in battle, imagine the impact of THAT death on the final outcome.
(no subject)
Date: 29/11/10 22:27 (UTC)And you're right, but this requires a general a *lot* better than Lee winning a battle in the North, Lee was stomped by one of the worst Union generals of the war in his first engagement and got an even bloodier nose from Meade in the second. This neglects that by 1864 the Union's held parts of the South since the earliest days of the war and that by 1864 the slave system the South began the war for would be dead regardless of victory or defeat.
If Grant is dead, the Union's defeated because he was perhaps the greatest general of the war bar none. His two epic fuck-ups at Cold Harbor and Shiloh....one was a defeat in the pure sense, the other was actually a Union victory on the second day and a major embarrassment for the Confederacy. Where Jackson varied between competent (Valley) and completely incompetent (Seven Days'). The reality also is that the Union had several very good generals killed on the battlefield like the Confederacy did (Reynolds, McPherson) but that did not disrupt the Union military.
That it did the Confederate one was a sign of why the South lost: it didn't have a system that could survive the loss of individuals, where the one individual for the North whose death would have cost them the war won the war in the theater Confederate leaders neglected until it was too late.
And as far as First Bull Run was concerned, the Confederate army was as disorganized in victory as the Northern one was by defeat.
(no subject)
Date: 29/11/10 22:55 (UTC)That it did the Confederate one was a sign of why the South lost.
That's true of any key battle or war though, including the Revoltionary War: e.g. Washington was nearly shot leaving the Battle of the Brandywine by British Captain Patrick Ferguson, one of the Brits best sharpshooters. Ferguson didn't shoot because it was considered ungentlemanly to shoot another officer in the back. Fateful decision on Ferguson's part. And Americans weren't so kind-- they deliberately targeted British officers and shot them whenever they had the chance. The British lost the Battle of Saratoga, and the tide of the war was ultimately changed because of an lowly illiterate sharpshooter from Ireland named Tim Murphy, who assassinated the British Brigadier-General Simon Fraser.
(no subject)
Date: 29/11/10 23:01 (UTC)To clarify my point here-the Union lost multiple good generals to bullets on the battlefield, but in no case did this imperil the Union war effort as a whole. Instead subordinate generals got promoted to higher ranks and the campaigns simply continued. For the Confederacy the loss of an individual general like Albert Sidney Johnston, JEB Stuart, or Stonewall Jackson imperiled the Confederate war effort because an army that needs charismatic individuals as leaders and loses one is a snake with its head cut off.
(no subject)
Date: 29/11/10 22:01 (UTC)The United States also was not at war with North Vietnam in the earliest phase of the Second Indochina War, the Viet Cong were indigenous Southern communists who the NVA ensured were wiped out at the Tet Offensive.
There was a real chance Lincoln could have lost the 1864 election so a War Democrat would have taken charge to impose peace without a 13th Amendment but with the war continuing. How McClellan would have interacted with Grant is a good question. There was also, however, a chance for the Union to defeat the Confederacy in June of 1864 by seizing Petersburg and drawing the ANV into the battle Grant wanted all along, which would have ended the US Civil War in June of 1864.
For that matter a Union victory at Chickamauga (the defeat was due to a miscommunication, not Bragg's skill as a general) would have given the winter 1863 campaigns a very different character.
The persistence of the Confederacy was due to the sheer ability of modern wars to last quite a bit longer than the people who start them predict they would. By the same token after the Battle of Atlanta the Confederacy was essentially Richmond and the Army of Northern Virginia. Just like Germany had lost the war well before May 1945 and Imperial Japan lost World War II at Leyte Gulf, over a year before it had no choice but to acknowledge defeat.
Oh mon dieu.....
Date: 30/11/10 02:34 (UTC)Oh that's so historically wrong. As a native of Virginia-- I can tell you there are plenty of roads and streets named for Count Rochambeau, who had 5 battalions of infantry in Rhode Island, and his contributions at Yorktown were a very big deal in the ultimate victory over the British there. Washington gave complete credit of the strategy used in Yorktown to Count Rochambeau, as well French Admiral DeGrasse, who effectively blocked relief efforts from British forces reaching Yorktown. Never mind the munitions and clothing and money the French provided.
Re: Oh mon dieu.....
Date: 30/11/10 02:50 (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 29/11/10 21:11 (UTC)Eric Flint's 1632 series is pretty good stuff. But it can't escape needing to spend a lot of pages explaining just what was going on in Europe in the early 17th century.
Though to his credit Flint does much better in his books about an AU War of 1812.
Second, the CSA winning isn't as out there as you make it out to be. Lincoln had to cut a deal on slavery with Maryland just to keep DC from being surrounded by the CSA from the start. And I do recall once seeing a book where the UK allied with the CSA and the Union found itself in deep trouble PDQ.
(no subject)
Date: 29/11/10 22:21 (UTC)If the war lasts into 1862 recognizably, the South will have to go to conscription which was the major spur of "unionism" as that meant a lot of Southerners decided they didn't want a "rich man's war and a poor man's fight." So the longer that war goes, the more risk that Confederate battlefield victories increase the numbers of this faction, and the more that happens the North just gets stronger and stronger. And any postwar scenario would be bitter in the extreme to an extent that the postwar Soviet Union after WWII would be like a Sunday stroll in the park.
(no subject)
Date: 30/11/10 03:09 (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 30/11/10 06:10 (UTC)