If The South Had Won?

[.22-5-40]

Hello, everyone.  Just wondering..If the south had won, where could the southern states have expanded too?  Texas was for the most part their farthest western border state...unless other states could have by their own choice joined the CSA after the war?  Facinating thought!  I wonder, if they would have set their sights on Mexico?  I probably should research this myself..but has their been anything written on this subject?  Thanks!

[SwampThing762]

If the south had won the war, the only direction they could expand would be South.   Mexico would not have been an option.  Why stop one war for yet another fight?    Perhaps, the Caribbean islands, but who knows?

The most likely scenario is that the South would be confined within its original borders.

ST762

[Swampman]

They would have simply rejoined the Union in a few years.

[reliquary]

I am a fan of alternative history novels.  Harry Turtledove is the master at that kind of speculative fiction and has written some with the idea in mind that the South won the war.
 
One is a standalone book called "Guns of the South". 
 
That apparently gave him the idea for an unrelated series called "Great War".  Great War carries forward for another century or so, through WWI and WWII.  Very interesting set.  The only problem is that the South winds up becoming another Nazi Germany and sends blacks to concentration camps...didn't like that part.  Good reading otherwise and "spot on" with his characterization of historical figures in his books. 
 
I think the South would have remained an independent nation...they would've had to replace their confederation with a more viable form of central government to do so.  The US tried that first, also, and confederations don't work well.  As a Texan, I think the Republic of Texas would have caught back on.  For the rest of the Confederate states, I can't speculate. 

[williamlayton]

Te EU is a confederation.
It is an unsteady realtionship.
I don't see the Union being so willing to let flow back and forth from the Union on a whim. There would have to have been great concessions by the Southern Confederacy for this to have happened. Can you not see the same condition as was in Europe at the end of WWI---no treaty/surrender, just a cease fire. The Union wanted everything to just fall back in line--did not happen.
Blessings

[Ga.windbreak]

I'm with Swampman on this one. Trying to freeze an era into some mythical Camelot was never going to work. They were chasing a dream that never truly was, sadly.

[wncchester]

"Just wondering..If the south had won, where could the southern states have expanded too?"
 
An expanded South?  Yes, but only internally, not likely outside the borders that existed in 1865.   
 
The South had some industrialization before the war and it expanded quite a bit during the war, largely due to the development of steam power to drive heavy machinery.  But the Northern public's desire to humiliate and injure the South, AND the desire of Northern industrialists wanting to prevent Southern competition, led to the Federal Army destroying those flegling industries after the war.  It took the South a full century to recover enough to really start over but our industrial growth continues to expand today; MUCH to the consternation of the 'rust-belt' North!
 
Anyone wanting an intelligent accessment of the likely result from an alternative victory should read the MacKinlay Kantor novel, "If the South Had Won the Civil War".  (Also read his "Andersonville" for a balanced view of that infamous prison.)

[williamlayton]

This is, of course, a mind game/monday morning quarterbacking thread, just as some view the civil war--and wanting it to be another way than the way it was/is.
The South had as much to do with their own self destruction as the North played in wanting to destroy the South. The persistant and Imoral coduct of the South in its attempts to keep freed men in their place helped to continue the war for a century and caused, as much as defended against, most of the hardship they experienced in reconstruction.
Blessings

[NickSS]

I have read a bunch of books that speculated what happened with a win for the south.  First and foremost I think the US would have broken up into several countries with the NE going one way the west another, the old south still another.  I think there would have been conflicts develop between the various groupings for one reason or another over territory to exploit as well and perhaps a break between the western CS states and the eastern ones again over territory.  With the right of Secession confirmed by the south's winning, The f ractioning of the rest of the union would almost be inevitable and with that wars for territory ect. inevitable.  North America could easily turned into another Europe.  As for slavery it might have survived another few years but with the entire world against it it would not have survived long as it was in the south.  The Souths trading partners would have forced a change as Britain and France were both rabidly anti slavery and becoming more so as time went on.  They had already forced and end to the slave trade with Africa and slavery in most of the rest of the civilized world was dead.

[wncchester]

IF the South had won we would have had some immigration laws to prevent Yankees from 'occupying' so much of our territory!   
 
That way we would have prevented the Northerner's love of big government from taking away so much of America's personal freedoms and money.  The slavery thing would have been taked care of peacefully within another 20-25 years and without all the blood, destruction and animosity that occured.  Meaning, at least in part, today's blacks would have been MUCH better off in every possible way; their dependance on government has been the biggest single factor in the destruction of black society.

[williamlayton]

Blacks would have been transported to the Indies--not set free.
better off----???
It was the South that kept them down for a 100 years.
Blessings

[Duke0313]

If the South had won and the USA and CSA had remained antagonistic toward each other, how would the two world wars have played out? How about the Cold War? I'll take things the way they are, thank you very much!

[jlwilliams]

  I think it may have ended more like the Northern/Southern Ireland dispute.  Years of back and forth violence.  Years of negotiations, agreements, breaking and remaking promises untill eventually those with the most animosity got old and died off.  Look at Ireland today and you see some people who won't let go of The Troubles but a majority who just seem to have moved on.  If the South had won the war we'd be dealing with them just like we do with Canada.  Just another neighbor.
 
  France and Germany get along well enough today.  No reason CSA and USA wouldn't.

[subdjoe]

If the South had won and the USA and CSA had remained antagonistic toward each other, how would the two world wars have played out? How about the Cold War? I'll take things the way they are, thank you very much!

You're making the assumption that nothing else would have changed in the rest of the world.  Would the US have bought Alaska, or would the Brits have taken it from Holy Mother Russia?  How would that have changed world politics? What about the Spanish-American War? 

Too many "what ifs" just here in North America, much less global politics.

[Larry L]

The Confederacy would have expanded westward and north. They already had CSA troops in New Mexico and Oklahoma. Missouri would have come on board and the independent States along the border with Mexico would have jumped on board for the security which would have included Arizona and California. The Confederacy would have survived quite well as the supplier of grown goods to the world. The South was the major supplier to the world of cotton and other agricultural goods. The economy would have only gotten better as the world grew from steam power to fossil fuel power. One thing is for sure, we wouldn't be buying a lot of our oil from China that they are taking out of the ground just off our shores. The South would have adjusted just fine and like any new Gov't, it would have growing pains. It probably would have been more like the Founding Fathers had envisioned for the 13 Colonies with Sates Rights being paramount but a union for protection from foreign invaders.


I think slavery would have become politically wrong and not lasted long. Like with any cultures, old habits die hard but there is no place for an economic power to have slavery. It also costs money to support slaves. Texas didn't have many slaves as Texas was just getting over Indian Wars and the Mexican army. Texas land grants were a way to get folks just to move there and those that did move to Texas pretty much had nothing but a big dreams. It was a hard and unforgiving country at the time. I have records of my family that moved here right after Texas Independence and have 2 ancestors that were CSA, one a foot soldier and the other a surgeon. Their diaries and letters are incredible. For those that have the interest, here's one of the letters from my Great, Great, Great Grandmother to her mother that tells of their lives traveling with the Confederate Army with her husband, a surgeon that had defected to the South when the Union Army burned their plantation in Maryland. He was a surgeon in the Union Army when it happened.
http://falcon.tamucc.edu/wiki/TOGS/JenniferSnyder

[Swampyankee25J]

I recall doing some reading on this years ago.  As I recall the thinking back then was, their economy would have been cotton based with England being thier primary customer.  However, England was planting cotton in India and would have dropped them as suppliers once thier crop had taken hold.   So perhaps they would have to rejoin the union, but maybe with a better barganing position than the one they were delt.

[gstewart44]

The CSA winning the war presents some interesting thought.   Remember a couple of things though,  at that time the HUGE economy of the South was built upon slave labored cotton production.    Main buyer was England.     Also the Political Powermakers in the South were the 10% uber wealthy slave owners.   
 
I believe that the Politicians would have been full of themselves after winning the war and pushed to expand slavery.   this may have occurred until modernization of the industrial revolution.    Machines would make slaves unprofitable......slaves would have to go somewhere.....either sold in the Caribbean to recoup some of the investment or possibly deported back to Africa (as Lincoln wanted).   
 
Bottom line is a huge economy based on a single method of production, with limited buyers is ripe for collapse.  Seems like an economic recession/depression would have occurred soon after with the changes in the latter 1800s in mechanization.   Britain had already outlawed slavery by this time,  and I believe they entered into trade with the CSA in order to weaken the USA...... greater plans for a reconquest perhaps?
 
If somehow the slaves were set free to their own means in the CSA then likely a form of Confederate Apartheid would have been developed.    Either way I don't believe the CSA could have sustained its Antebellum economy and prosperity for very long. 

[reliquary]

I say again, read Harry Turtledove's "Great War" series.  WWI and WWII are fought in North America as well as overseas and the CSA (unfortunately) is depicted as turning into Nazi-ism, including death camps for Negroes.  Very interesting reading; really makes one think.

[jackruff]

Just my opinion, but I don't think slavery would have survived long, surely not until 1900.  And I think the CSA and the USA would have been reunited, if not by 1900 then surely by World War I.  Something that I had not realized until some fairly recent reading was that a very large number of people in the South were opposed to secession.  I'm not talking about just in Tennessee and other states outside the Deep South, but also even in my own home state of Mississippi.  Mississippian Jefferson Davis opposed secession before it became inevitable. 

[blackpowderbill]

Just my opinion, but every scenerio I have seen assumes a war has been faught. There was no reason to have had a war. There is no part of any of our founding documents that declares the concept of union to be holy and inviolate. Those elleven states had and have the right to secede as they see fit, as do all other states. Each and every state is sovereign and has a government capable of running its affairs, if it does not, then that is that states problem.
  Had the CSA been allowed to leave as they wanted, there is no reason to believe that the US and CS would not eventually be allied in their mutual defence. A present day example of this would be the Czech Republic and the Slovak Republic.

[lgm270]

A good thread with some good thoughtful posts.

What if the South had won? Well what do you mean by that?

If the  South had won, by which I mean a negotiated peace with the Union rather than a crushing military invasion and conquest of the northern states,   a lot that happened after that would depend on the contents of the treaty. 

There were a number of issues, among the most important of which would have been trade relations between the two countries and the issue of the spread of slavery to the Western states.  The desire to spread slavery westward could have been  the seed of another war, in very short order so any negotiated treaty of the Civil War would have been doomed from the start  without some attempt to resolve this thorny issue.

I think the CSA would have been well advised to have surrendered  any claims of the right  to spread slavery  outside the boundaries of the existing CSA in exchange for Northern recognition of the CSA.   I think the Southerners realized that  they were on the wrong side of history on the slavery issue, if for no other reason than they had not received diplomatic recognition of  by a single other country and this sends a message that their position  is very precarious.   After peace and recognition by the Union it's possible that some European powers would have recognized the CSA, and that would have strengthened the CSA hand. 

What happens to slavery after a negotiated peace and recognition by the Union? 

The fugitive slave issue would be a point of contention.  There is no  question but that the South would have to yield on this issue.  Any slave who crosses into the US is free because the Northern states would not return him and the  southern slave owner would have no legal ability to do so.

I think slavery would have wound down within a generation or so.  It's hard to say because slavery was a creature of  the  laws  of each state and different states had different circumstances.  It's possible slavery  could have been abolished in some Southern states and `maintained in others.  Kind of a mess.  How do you deal with the fugitive slave issue of Tennessee is a free state and bordering Mississipp, Alabama and Georgia still have slaves running way?   

I think there would have been political and historical  forces exerting  tremendous pressure on the CSA.   One was what to do with emacipated slaves?  Obviously some kind of apartheid set up.   I do think that if peace had been made fairly early in the war, such as before Sherman's destruction of Georgia and South Carolina, a lot of bitterness and hard feelings would have been avoided.  Southern whites would have been more tractable on the issue of slavery and race relations in the absence of the anger over Northern war crimes, atrocities and destruction. 

The huge march toward industrialism, mechanized agriculture, electricity and other  science and technologies would have had the effect of eroding the traditional southern slave hierarchy.

Another good thing is that the  independent CSA would have operated as a check on the imperialistic tendencies of the Union and the Spanish American war as well as other American military adventures in WW1 and WW2 might have been avoided. This would have resulted in less destruction in both world wars sine the European combatants would have been under pressure to negotiate instead of rely on the US forces to tip the balance of power.



   

[mechanic]

I think if we had remained separate nations, we might well have fallen victim to some other country's imperialism......but then again, we might have prospered.  Slavery as an institution was wrong all the while, and had become too expensive a way to farm.  Machinery was quickly replacing labor.
 
The South needed industry to balance it's agrarian background.  In truth, we can never know.
 
I believe sometimes God works His will whether we can see it or not.  Perhaps He saved us from ourselves in the long run....
 
Ben

[FPH]

Mute point.......we lost.

[wncchester]

"I think slavery would have wound down within a generation or so.  It's hard to say because slavery was a creature of  the  laws  of each state and different states had different circumstances.  It's possible slavery  could have been abolished in some Southern states and `maintained in others.  Kind of a mess.  How do you deal with the fugitive slave issue of Tennessee is a free state and bordering Mississipp, Alabama and Georgia still have slaves running way?"
 
Slavery was intiated by northern shippers who saw the need for labor for the huge southern plantations and exploited the need; slaves didn't have to be paid a salary but they sure weren't free nor was their care and provision free (few small time whites could care for their families as well as the slave families were cared for!)  Southern land owners desperately needed field hands to make their land worth anything and there simply wasn't enough whites to hire nor money to pay them.  Most of the early slave owners mortaged their land to buy the help they needed to survive in an agricultural economy but no alternative seemed available in 1865 and northern politicians were determined to dominate the southern economy so the south chose to bow out. 
 
Thing is, after Appomatox the newly freed slaves had no value.  No land owner could afford to pay them anyway so they became wandering bands of thieves and pick-up labors; that build a lot of animosity in whites so things got worse for the blacks for a long time. 
 
IF the north had allowed the rapidly growing industrial revolution to grow at it's own speed the south would have freed the slaves within a decade or so and replaced their efforts with more efficent machinery.  The perceived threat of selling them off to other countries is hollow, the whole civilized world saw the evils and inefficency of slavery so it would have soon been a dead issue and hundreds of thousands of men and vast quaities of property, north and south, wouldn't have been sacrificed for the benefit of rich northern industralists.
 
It's quite likely Texas would have seceeded but it's also likely all three nations would have allied for WWI and by WWII we would have combined to make us about what we were in 1942, except for a much stronger economy.  And the massive over-expansion of debt driven socialistic Federal powers would likely not have occured, debts which will soon drag us all over a financial cliff no matter what spend crazy politicians do over the next few weeks.
 
IMHO.

[subdjoe]

Thing is, after Appomatox the newly freed slaves had no value.  No land owner could afford to pay them anyway so they became wandering bands of thieves and pick-up labors; that build a lot of animosity in whites so things got worse for the blacks for a long time. 

I snipped out a bunch of really good stuff and just want to address the points here.  While I'm not saying that none took to robbery to survive, I would like to see some doc on that statement. 

As to the animosity, a lot of that came down from the north with the occupation troops and "Reconstruction."   From what I have read in letters and editorials of the era, as well as the Slave Narratives, race relations in the South were pretty good.  They had to be, what with the high percentage of blacks in the South.  Take a look at the chart here:  http://www.bowdoin.edu/~prael/lesson/tables.htm

[wncchester]

Joe: "While I'm not saying that none took to robbery to survive, I would like to see some doc on that statement."
 
No documentation is necessary, your first sentence recognises what happened and why it happened.  And I didn't say "robbery", I said 'theft'; there is a difference.
 
Fact is, "race relations" on the plantations were much better than many suppose, most former slaves remained in place and continued to work the same fields - without pay - to produce the needed food to live.  Starvation driven southern whites became 'share croppers'  to survive and many of them lived in worse quarters than the slaves had. 
 
The history of unnecessary, unhelpful vengeful government actions forced severe hardships on both whites and blacks in the South long after 1865.   Those blacks who went north for relief expected but rarely found a welcome or even a living chance so many died from starvation and exposure.  That led to some really murdeous anomosity in the North and the worst of it, black and white, is still centered up there.  But history books are written by the winners so the residual cancer of northern racism is largely unknown and firmly ignored by most of modern society but it won't go away.

[subdjoe]

Joe: "While I'm not saying that none took to robbery to survive, I would like to see some doc on that statement."
 
No documentation is necessary, your first sentence recognises what happened and why it happened.  And I didn't say "robbery", I said 'theft'; there is a difference.

The way you stated it originally, "No land owner could afford to pay them anyway so they became wandering bands of thieves and pick-up labors" carries the implication that ALL of them became "thieves and pick-up labor."  That is what I wanted doc on.   As I said, no question that SOME took to thieving ways (which could include robbery), your implication that all did  stretches things.  About like saying that all former Confederate soldiers took up thieving ways.  No doubt that some did, but not any great percentage. 
 
Fact is, "race relations" on the plantations were much better than many suppose, most former slaves remained in place and continued to work the same fields - without pay - to produce the needed food to live.  Starvation driven southern whites became 'share croppers'  to survive and many of them lived in worse quarters than the slaves had. 
 
The history of unnecessary, unhelpful vengeful government actions forced severe hardships on both whites and blacks in the South long after 1865.   Those blacks who went north for relief expected but rarely found a welcome or even a living chance so many died from starvation and exposure.  That led to some really murdeous anomosity in the North and the worst of it, black and white, is still centered up there.  But history books are written by the winners so the residual cancer of northern racism is largely unknown and firmly ignored by most of modern society but it won't go away.

And, again, as I said, race relations in the south had been pretty good.  With such a large percentage of the population being black, it had to be.  The stereotype of southerners being brutal racists is just wishful thinking on the part of northerners...maybe even projection of their own feelings.  Yes, there was discrimination.  Yes, blacks were treated as second class citizens (or residents without citizenship), but that was true in the north as well.  And, of course, poor whites were not really any better off.   

[wncchester]

"Bottom line is a huge economy based on a single method of production, with limited buyers is ripe for collapse. "
 
Actually, while cotton was the largest Southern cash crop it was by no means the only one.  Tobacco, rice, sugar cane were all large and getting larger.  Other food stuffs were coming on strong, largely due to the introduction of machinery that was much more efficent and less costly to maintain than slaves.  Machines didn't need to be housed, clothed, medicated or fed; machines had already killed slavery in Europe and it would certainly have soon happened here too.  And further south too, without war, as it did within a few more years.
 
The varoious state laws defending slavery had no power to support what was unsupportable. Machinery WAS coming and plantation owners had no resistance to doing things more efficently.  Soon large slave labor forces would be a finacial liability.  After that, the general distaste of humanity for the instituion would have led to the abolishment of slavery just as it had in Europe (but not all of the North!). 
 
So, why was a war fought to 'free the slaves'?  There really was no such war.  The South seceeded and then fought the federal government to save its economy from domination by the North's rich who had bought and paid for the politicians then running DC (nothing's changed).  The Northern politicians pushed the Northern industrialist's efforts to speed the South's change to expensive farm machinery faster than the South could afford to accomplish it.  The North's war to 'save the Union' then became the default position of the weathy and they did indeed get richer feeding the war machine, often with shoddy goods at high prices.  How did the rich accomplish that change of focus in the North without breaking stride?  Again, money.  Money was used to control the 'news' media to suppress the "rebellion" (which was effectively identical to the rebellion of the 1780s) and they supported every notable zealot who could effectively speak against both slavery and secession well enough to get people's guts in an uproar.  Nothing's changed about that either; we still allow the rich to use the media and other demagogues to lead a majority of us around by the nose.

[mannyrock]

Guys,
 
    I cannot help but think that had the South won the war, it would have just become another Banana Republic, like Argentina or Columbia.  A huge agricultural economy, ruled by a very small number of rich people, with little or no industry.    An entire people dependent on either subsistence farming, or the returns of mass plantation growth of cotton and tobacco.
 
     Inasmuch as the South could barely make a cannon during the Civil War, does anybody believe that just 35 years later, they would have had the industry, engineering skills or wealth to built  the fleets of huge dreadnaught battleships that dominated world power and affairs in the 1890s?   The northern U.S., England, Spain, Germany, France and even heck Japan had such fleets.  The South plainly would not.
 
   Accordingly, they would at best have been a second or third rate world power, such as Argentina, with their future tied through trading treaties to one of the true world powers.  The slave population, freed or not, would have been a major economic drag.
 
   The North would have gone on to become the England of the Western Hemisphere.  There is nothing, cotton included, that they could not have bought on the world market.
 
   The South would have gone on to become, at best, the poverty stricken Ireland of the Western Hemisphere.
 
   Mannyrock

[mechanic]

The South's ability to produce was only limited by it's ability to get supplies.  The South built the first ironclad ship, and the first submarine.  We had sword factories and firearms factories.  Were they the equal of the North?  No but in the few short years of the war, and with limited supply, they had come a long way.  It was not lack of ability that caused the South's shortfall.
 
You notice one of the things the North concentrated on as Sherman moved South was to destroy the manufacturing that had sprung up.
 
The truth still remains that slavery was an abomination, but it was legal at the time.  And had Lincoln not sent a ship to Charleston, perhaps that first shot might have been averted, and reasonable dialog would have been restored.
 
That war almost destroyed our country, and with Lincoln's foray into usurping the constitution, (even in the North), it began a downward spiral of presidents usurping power they did not posess that continues to our detriment.
 
Ben