What if the South successfully seceded?

Say Buchanan is in office when the South secedes, and he does nothing to stop the secession.

What happens then?

 

My name would be Altamash Kunar Mewasingh.

 

The rest of us have a party.

 

<Insert Harry Turtledove novel here>

 

If Buchanan were in office, what reason would the South have to secede?

Oh, THAT Buchanan.

 

You might as well ask how the world would be different if pigs could fly.

 

I'd party like its 1699.

 

The Slaveowners were Joooooooos!

 

We'd have fewer Civil War threads, which would be a bonus.

 

At this point in our history, a secession would lead to internal strife, with concentrated meddling by the rest of the world's emerging power nations, much like young males attacking the Alpha once they sense a weakness.

This is inevitable, our downfall, and sooner rather than later thanks to our hubris of the last decade or so. The only question is, who will take up the mantle of World power? The EU? Reformed soviet-style Russia? The middle Eastern oil bloc? China et al?

I'd see our so-called Blue states realigning with Canada in a survival bid if there were a secession, because a divided America would weaken the whole hemisphere, and Canada would like the influx of money such an alliance would bring. Might even see a re-imagining of USA borders that way...eventually leading to a reunified Western hemisphere with different ideals, and much more humble in the face of defeat. (See Rome, Italy and Rome, Empire for more)

 

Excuse me.

The South DID SECEDE while Buchanan was in office.

He did nothing. Except trying to resupply Ft. Sumter.

We had a massive Civil War.

 

I'd take that as a step further with a lot of the North that wasn't carpetbagged becoming very influenced by Britain, possibly joining Confederation in 1867. That in itself would've likely been pushed back a few years though in negotiating a looser tie to the Crown. Probably ceremonial only, with congress being folded into parliament. Allegiance would be to the Commonwealth rather than Queen. I'll figure out the map later. Shit like the Aroostock War never happens, So most of New England signs on as one big powerhouse province. The Capitol is in Kingston, On. Western Canadian development below the 49th is in smaller state sized territories around the great lakes and acrossto the Rockies.

The difference in commerce would eventually make it feasable to boycott the agricultural South over slavery by 1880, despite the lucrative cattle markets that have opened up since Texas just got bigger and bigger.

 

I think it's safe to assume slavery ends by the turn of the century regardless, pretty quickly if the U.S., Britain, and France boycott to force it.

I think the CSA would have expansionist eyes for Cuba and a lot of Northern Mexico (especially during the Maximillion era) and would try to claim the Western frountier below the Missouri Compromise line at least as far as the Colorodo River.

I see some possibility of the temptation to make common cause with Canada as Turk suggests, but I think national pride was such that this would have been perused more as an invitation to Canadians to unite with the USA more so than as a submerging of the US into the brand new country.

I think you may well have seen Kentucky come over to the CSA and probably a North-South split in Missouri. Without Lincoln's manipulation, you prob get Maryland and Delaware as well..

I'd Like to imagine Lee as the second President and that he would have led the congress to a plan for gradual elimination of slavery over the course of 25 years or so, but that's rank fantasizing - I have no proof the hawks in Congress would have messed with slavery - probably they wouldn't.

 

Motivated to do so by what?

 

Well, the assumption is that the South gets away with it, so perhaps the Union Army is broken?

Maryland and Delaware were very much pro-Confederate, but conquered before there was a shot. Missouri thinks it's half-Reb to this day, so fuck 'em, but Kentucky is a coin toss.

 

Well here's what a secession minded south would be dealing with today:

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/45/Census-2000-Data-Top-US-Ancestries-by-County.jpg

 

If the South had successfully seceded, there would have been no KKK, no racial segregation, Lincoln would not have been assassinated (impeached maybe), no war, half a million men would not have died, and we wouldn't be talking about it on wrodforge.

 

Well, 7 of the 11 did, before Lincoln was inaugurated.

The CSA didn't exist as of that time, IIRC.

But of course they seceded because Buchanan was going out and Lincoln was coming in.

The question is what would have happened if the South seceded a year earlier, before they knew there was a change of president, and the Union officially recognized the secession - a policy Buchanan likely would have followed if he hadn't been a lame duck, as he was on record saying he didn't believe the North had the right to stop the South from leaving the Union.

There, happy now?

 

Boy the Krauts sure did fill in the midwest.

 

Curious, why do people say that slavery was on it's way out in the South at the time period. I've heard this repeated over and over again, but I have a hard time seeing a cause they were willing to secede and to kill hundreds of thousands over just simply fading away. There wasn't any new technological replacement, investment in infrastructure was largely that of the tenets of slavery, and the ideology of racial inferiority would have if anything been further enforced by it's incorporation into a new government - as evidenced by the Cornerstone Speech of the VP of the Confederacy, Alexander Stephens, which stated that the cornerstone of the Confederacy was the realization of the truth that the white man was superior to the black man and his condition of slavery was a natural one.

 

Well, yes. And they do comprise the largest single group in the vast majority of states. But they aren't majorities in all of those counties, just the plurality. If Swedes and Danes could be counted together with the Norwegians as Scandinavians, a huge swath of the light blue counties in the Upper Midwest would switch to light green.

Dominicans are the single biggest ethnic group in Manhattan, but no group (including them) is higher than the single digits percentage-wise. There's just that many different ethnic groups in New York County.

 

It was not on the way out, quite the contrary. By 1860, it was an institution in the south, not only what kept the ruling elite filthy rich, but also a part of Southern Aristocracy.

 

Slavery was on its way out because attitudes were changing, even in the South. "Freemen of color" was one of the fastest growing demographics in the South. France and England, whose markets the South needed, were also applying pressure.

Slavery would have been gone very soon without the war, in not much longer than it took to fight the war.

 

Still problems.

The South knew more than 3 years before 1860 that there would be a new president.

Why?

During his inauguration in 1857, Buchanan announced that he would not run for reelection.

So Buchanan was a lame duck long before secession fervor reached its heights.

For that matter,

After the 1858 off year Congressional elections, Republican victory in 1860 looked very likely given that the brand new Republican Party kicked ass in the heavily populated northern states.

The Republican victory in the presidential election was very predictable long before it happened.

 

Even if slavery had ended peacefully, chances are that black Americans would've never gained voting, citizenship, and civil rights on the level they have today.

There would've probably been widespread oppression of black Americans to this day that dwarfed the Jim Crow era.

 

Utter bullshit. You're once again applying post-Reconstruction thinking to an antebellum situation.

 

I can't agree.

The 13th, 14th, & 15th amendments were key to giving black Americans their rights.

Multiple amendments have never been passed after the Bill of Rights aside from this time just after the Civil War.

They were passed in no small part NOT because the north was out to help blacks, but to use as a club to punish the south and to help ensure Republican domination in the post Civil War era.

No Civil War, no push for the three amendments.

 

Maryland and Delaware were only kept in the Union in our timeline by Lincoln's manipulation of events. Missouri had a similar internal conflict that had them on the precipice. My understanding of Kentucky is that they basicly only stayed in because they did not want to be a battle ground. Once it became clear there was no war coming, they would not have wanted to be the only state left clinging to slavery. conceivably they could have given it up instead,I'm simply supposing it would be more natural to gravitate to the folks who shared your views.

 

All true, but on the other hand, they discussed offering to abandon it if they could get England and France to recognize them.

I don't think it was "on the way out" exactly, but I think that had all their main buyers boycotted the cotton crop to force a change, then this would have undermined the economic argument for slavery. Potentially, at length, to the point that they could see the handwriting on the wall and make plans to phase it out.

I also think that the freed slaves would have either made haste to move north, or been repatriated to the Caribbean or Africa so that the current black population in the south would be less than half what it is now.

 

Mexico takes drastic measures to stop illegal immigrant invaders from the CSA.