What if the American Revolution really had been about slavery?
The 1619 Project was social science fiction, but without the American Revolution it might not have been
Around 2021 a strange meme went around a lot of American public school systems, namely that the American Revolution had been fought to preserve slavery. (My youngest kid went to one of these schools.) That was nonsense in 2019 and it’s nonsense today.
In a parallel universe, however, you could have gotten an American rebellion that really was about preserving slavery. Imagine if 1776 had never happened or that the Patriots lost the war. In my previous post, I argued argued that the British Empire would never have abolished slavery as early as 1834 in a world where it still controlled North America. I also argued that if push came to shove, an early British attempt at Abolition — say around 1845 — would provoke a slaveowners’ revolt that the British would “probably” win. After all, Britain in 1845 is not Britain in 1775. It’s the world’s leading industrial economy, producing roughly 7% of global GDP and closing in on 20% of world manufacturing output. It has the world’s most powerful navy, the best global logistics network, and a financial system capable of mobilizing massive resources.
The only problem with my thesis that Britain would probably win is that it is incorrect.
A treasonous slaveholders’ rebellion would be near disastrous for the Crown. If it is just the southern colonies then the British might have a decent chance of victory if they could count on the active support of the northern colonies — but historical parallels make that less than likely. Without the North, the British will have a deucedly hard time invading and occupying territory. Infrastructure and technology mean that the British will have a much harder challenge in 1845 than the Union faced in 1861.
Moreover, if British missteps provoke the Northern colonies into joining the rebellion, then the game is up. Britain can’t win. Okay, that’s too strong a claim — but judging from the evidence, its chances will be bad.
Any British government in this alternative timeline will know what I am going to convince you of here. That knowledge will make them tread very lightly. It is, in fact, one of the many reasons why I think that the idea that continuing British rule would end slavery early is wishful thinking at best, and deliberate anti-Americanism at worst.
And if the British lose to this American rebellion rather than our own, then the results will be ugly. That would really be the America that the 1619 Project hallucinated, one born to protect human bondage.
(1) Slaver secession, “neutral” North
Here’s a fun map of British North America in the 1840s that is consistent with the story told in the last post:1
Since the argument against the American Revolution hinges on the early abolition of slavery, let’s assume that the war starts around 1845. Fifteen years is an entire human childhood, so ending slavery 15 years early is, I think, an uncontestably large gain for humanity.
Referring again to the last post, it is likely that Charlotina and Ohio allow slavery. That means that Ohio will come under pressure to secede along with the areas conforming to our “South,” although it is also possible that it would descend into internecine chaos, like our world’s prewar Kansas or wartime Missouri.
Either way, Ohio’s status means that the British will face bigger problems that our Union did. If Ohio joins the rebellion, then British forces will face a more formidable enemy, with better interior transportation and more industry. If Ohio fractures, as Missouri did, then the chaos will be a bigger headache for London simply because Ohio is more strategically-located than Missouri.
Charlotina poses less of an issue. It would be split between a pro-rebel far south and a Loyalist north, but it is underpopulated and the Great Lakes and river routes offer excellent strategic access to the West. It will likely be a strategically plus for the imperial forces as long as the guerrillas in downprovince Illinois Country can be neutralized.
If actual history is any parallel, the Indian Lands will allow slavery and almost certainly join the rebellion.2 Ironically, if the Indian Lands stay loyal it would help the secessionists, since they will provide a hard-to-police channel to launder cotton exports in the face of a British blockade.
As in our world, Maryland and Delaware are rebellion-curious but remain loyal. The Bahamas remain loyal for obvious geographical reasons.
The Casus Belli
What could get the South to secede without provoking the northern colonies? Well, the obvious answer is that the imperial parliament just up and abolishes slavery, no wait period, no subsidy to the enslavers. That would, of course, be the right thing to do, but it stretches the bounds of imagination to think that any plausible British parliament is going to do that in the 1840s.
Still, it’s not impossible. Just unlikely. And it is the one that most of the people bemoaning the tragedy of the American Revolution have in their head.
That said, lesser actions could provoke secession. Parliament could, say, ban slave trading across provincial lines. Or vote for compensated abolition in the West Indies, scaring Southern elites. Or impose taxes on cotton exports to the U.K. Or even just elect a Prime Minister whose anti-slavery rhetoric alarmed the South — just as Lincoln’s election provoked secession in our history in 1860.
Why might the North stay out?
Northerners will certainly feel some loyalty to the British Crown. That does not necessarily mean that they want to fight to keep other colonies loyal to the British Crown. They might even have some mild grievances against the imperial government.
Sadly, abolitionism probably won’t have much claim on Northern hearts. New England’s anti-slavery sentiment might push it towards intervention, but only if London framed the war as a moral crusade. That, however, would alienate moderates in New York, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania. New York’s prosperity will be tied up with the cotton trade. In our world, Northern Democrats, including many New York merchants, notably including New York Mayor Fernando Wood, spent the 1850s opposing Abolition precisely because their fortunes were bound to cotton. There’s no reason to think that dynamic would shift in a world where Parliament rather than Lincoln’s election triggers secession. Moreover, many of the disputes that fueled anti-slavery sentiment in our world will be moot: there is no trans-Mississippi expansion to fight over and slavery will already have “won” the frontier, being legal in Ohio and Charlotina.3
It is reasonable to conclude that the North will view secession as an act provoked by British over-reaching, rather than as a rebellion against King and Country. In our world, Lincoln did nothing to provoke Southern secession other than win the election. But imagine if Lincoln had campaigned on immediate abolition, won election with only a plurality of Northern votes, and then somehow pushed through immediate emancipation after the inauguration. If the South waited for all that to happen before seceding, would Northern public opinion be all that eager to force them back into the Union?
What does “staying out” even mean?
It does not mean that the North is neutral in the dictionary sense.
The British Empire is still sovereign. British troops will operate freely. Many Americans will volunteer for a rapidly expanding group of “royal American regiments,” much as they did in our history. Northern provinces may even mobilize their militias to repel rebel incursions. Hundreds of thousands of Northern men will flock to join the British army as long as that army can feed, clothe, and arm them. And British authorities will likely be able to impose many of the same wartime exigencies as the federal government did in our timeline.
But the Northern provinces will not declare war. There will be no conscription and no new taxes. That is a big deal and an obvious problem for the British.
Still not convinced? Well, there is an example of a British settler colony that mostly “stayed out” of a colonial war right next door: the Cape Colony during the Second Boer War. In 1899-1902, the British Empire went to war with Transvaal and the Orange Free State. Defense spending by the Cape Colony government jumped from 1.5% to 3.9% of GDP in the first year of the war, but then rapidly fell back to normal. But 3.9% was only a little bit above late 1890s norms. Cape Colony men enlisted in the British army in droves, but nobody wanted to tax themselves much to pay for the war next door.
In short, in this scenario the U.K. bears the fiscal cost alone. If it wants to mount a U.S. Civil War-sized effort, then it will need to spend U.S. Civil War-sized resources. — roughly 8% of the country’s GDP — and even that might not be enough without conscription.
Manpower constraints?
Britain is simply not prepared to conquer such a vast swathe of territory in 1845.
Britain had fought successful campaigns in more remote theaters. North America, however, is on a different scale: geographically massive, industrially competent, technologically advanced, and ideologically liberal — at least for white people.
The British Army itself is thoroughly undermanned. It consisted of roughly 110,000 men by the end of the 1840s. 20,000 were tied down in Ireland. Another 70,000 were rotated between various colonies, where they were generally engaged in putting out fires of one sort or another. In general, Britain fought its nineteenth-century wars with a light footprint. During the War of 1812, the number of British combat effectives topped out a hair over 21,000 in January 1815.4 During the Napoleonic Wars, British overseas deployments peaked at 72,294 in May 1813, and the full Army itself peaked at roughly 3½ times that size.
American volunteers will help. Mass flight by the enslaved to Northern provinces or British lines would be inevitable, whether London liked it or not. Many of those former slaves will be angry and willing to fight.
But the problem won’t be a lack of people. The problem will be paying enough to get them to sign up. Without any fiscal support from its colonies across the sea, Britain will rapidly find itself cash-strapped. To mobilize an army as large as the Union’s during the U.S. Civil War, Britain would have to double its 1840s public spending, from about 9% of GDP to 17%. That is massive; on the order of British efforts at the end of the American Revolutionary War in our history.
And bigger problems await. 1845 is not 1861. Britain is going to face obstacles that will make the war much harder to win than it was for Grant and Sherman.
Transportation
The North American railway net was underdeveloped in 1845 compared to 1861:5
This creates a bunch of problems for the British. The first is that it limits their ability to take advantage of their superior productive capacity. Railroads traveled five times faster than mule trains, which in turn meant more round-trips in any given time. Moreover, shorter transit times meant that many supplies were much more likely to still be useful when they arrived. That in turn meant that armies could expand in size dramatically. Before the Civil War, the basic limit to the number of soldiers in any given offensive campaign was about 30,000 men — after that you hit the limits of wagon trains and your ability to live off the land. Conversely, General William T. Sherman supplied 100,000 men using just one single-track line from Atlanta to Louisville. No railroads and other constraints will hit British forces long before they run out of munitions and materiel.
The second is that railroads enabled true wars of attrition. Napoleonic armies would try to use “interior lines” to destroy enemy forces. That is, they would try to create a curved arc between them and the enemy, inside which they could easily mass and shift their attack to the enemy’s weakest points.
Well, that became much harder with railroads. In 1863, General James Longstreet mauled Union armies at Chickamauga with such an operational strategy. Except now the Union XI and XII corps could hop a railroad, travel 1,200 miles in a broad semicircle all the way from Virginia around Confederate troop concentrations, and reinforce the retreating Union army at Chattanooga before Longstreet could get there. Better railroads meant that Union forces moved 50% faster than the Confederates. You could be decisively beaten in battle and lose strategic ground, yet still be reinforced quickly enough. Put more broadly, railroads made it much easier to reinforce defeated armies before the victor could use their victory.
Finally, points 1 and 2 together meant that railroads favored the offense at the strategic level. They might make it harder to win a decisive victory in any given battle, but they also made it much easier to mount operations across huge areas. They also enabled troops to move faster over long distances. The British, quite obviously, will be on the offense against the slaver rebellion.
The British will certainly make a major effort to expand the railroad net. In our history, the Union built roughly 4,000 miles of new track during the war — the U.S. Military Rail Road (USMRR) even built 75 miles of new track (page 20) during Sherman’s March. The British will do at least as well. The problem is that they can only expand the net quickly from existing railheads — of which there are far fewer in 1845 than in 1861. Crash railroad building will be helpful but not transformative.
In short, going into the war with a patchy railroad net, Britain is going to have a much harder time bringing its industrial might to bear against the rebels. In the actual Civil War, the relative deficiencies of the Southern rail net weakened the Confederacy.6 They also served as a force multiplier for the North’s superior manufacturing capacity. In this world, the rebels are relatively much less deficient. So opportunities for Napoleonic-style strategically-decisive battlefield victories by the rebels will be much greater in this Mirror Universe war of independence.
The limits of naval supremacy
The Royal Navy will have no more (or less) success than the Union at blockading the South. It is true that the Royal Navy in 1845 was far larger than the Union Navy in 1861. The problem is that by 1865 the Union Navy had grown to British size — and specialized in intercepting blockade runners — yet it stopped no more smuggling in 1865 than in 1862 despite a precipitous drop in the number of runs.
In other words, the rebellious provinces will be in a decent position, despite the greater strength of the Royal Navy and Britain’s prodigious financial resources. In fact, if Louisiana is French then it offers a ready route for cotton smuggling and arms imports. Santiago Vidaurri of Mexico aided the Confederates in our world, but northeastern Mexico had lousy transport links with points east of Texas — New Orleans is much better endowed.
The Royal Navy will be able to land small raiding forces at will. That is not good for the rebellion, but it is also not a strategically-decisive disadvantage. (If it had been, then the Americans would not have won the actual Revolutionary War.)
Britain is at a disadvantage
The costs of fighting in the 1840s will be immense. The territory to be occupied is enormous. Supply will depend on rivers and canals, but the Royal Navy cannot access the latter and geography means that the former aren’t always in the correct places. The rebels will enjoy tactical and operational advantages that the Confederacy did not. Foreign aid would be easy to channel to the rebels via French territories. Northern support— weakest in New York and New Jersey — will be squishy and fragile.7 And the Midwest, stoutly pro-Union and resolute in our world, will be either French, chaotic, or on the side of the slavers. Even if we assume that Louisiana starts the war as a British province, smuggling will continue via Nueva España, whereas Britain would inherit the burden of retaking a hostile territory covering the current states of Louisiana, Arkansas, and Missouri.8
The slavers could lose, of course. London will strangle their exports, raid their coastlines, recruit northern soldiers, and mount major offensives. The mountainous parts of Vandalia may resist a slaveowner-led secession. And the rebellion faces serious resource constraints, not least saltpeter and a (probable) lack of firearm manufactories. I would bet against a British victory but still give them decent odds. Say 5/3, meaning that if you bet $5 on a British victory in 1845 you’d get a payout of $10 if they win ($5 in winnings plus your original $5 stake, of course) and lose it all if they lose. That indicates a risky bet — the chance of winning is about 38% — but not a crazy one.
How does that compare with the odds of a Union victory in our history? I’ll discuss this in more detail in the next section, but the short version is that the financial markets gave the Union a 58% chance of victory in 1862. It only went up from there. In other words, my feeling is that the probability of the British beating a slaver-led rebellion in 1845 is about two-thirds of the probability that the USA would beat the CSA in our world.
The end result, therefore, is likely to be an independent American republic that reaches from the Great Lakes to the Gulf of America, born in bondage and dedicated to the proposition that some men have the right and duty to enslave others.
But what if Britain wins?
The irony is that the American Constitution, with all its flaws, offered fewer exits to compromise with slavery during the Civil War than the famously flexible British Empire. The U.S. was either going to win or lose. Confederate states were either going to re-enter or become independent. The country’s republican Constitution meant that halfway houses really weren’t available without going through the arduous amendment process. Support for Reconstruction eventually flagged and the U.S. acceded to white supremacist regimes with horrible results, but it never lost its authority over the South. That power meant little without the unrelenting pressure of the Civil Rights Movement in the 1950s and 1960s, which finally forced Washington to act, but Black activism would have been far less effective had the federal government lacked the ability to act.
The British Empire, however, was much more likely to accept a negotiated peace. For example, during the American Revolution the 1778 Carlisle Peace Commission offered to concede a permanent exemption from imperial taxation and some form of American representation in Parliament.9 More than a century later, in South Africa, the British defeated the Boers and then conceded the essentials of what the Boers wanted with the creation of the Union of South Africa in 1910: Dominion status meant that Britain lost any real say over domestic policy.
Imagine, then, that Britain finds the war is a slog. The costs are mounting, public support is dropping, they are going to have to tax the North but nobody wants to risk that. So London offers a compromise. Slavery is abolished de jure and the Southern provinces receive the equivalent of Dominion status, either separately or under a deliberately weak North American union. They receive de facto independence sometime in the late 1840s and continue developing on their own thereafter.
In the Mirror Universe, something like our Reconstruction followed by “Redemption” would be the best possible postwar outcome. We can expect at least the horrors of our Jim Crow to follow a British victory against the Treasonous Slaveowners’ Rebellion. It is hard to imagine what “worse than Redemption and Jim Crow” would mean, but humanity has shown almost unlimited creativity in devising means to exploit and degrade our fellow humans.
What about the institutions?
This scenario has assumed that there is no overarching governing structure for British America and no integration between America and Britain. But that does not have to be the case. The most likely alternative is a united North American federation under the monarchy, Albany Plan of Union style. Would such institutions make it more likely for the Northern provinces to fully mobilize against the slaveholders?
Probably not. We have two very similar proposals for a continental federation, so we have some idea of what it would look like. The 1754 Plan of Union would have created a continental legislature, called the Grand Council, elected every three years. The Union’s legislature would have the power to impose direct taxes and duties, requisition funds from colonial treasuries, create ground and naval forces, commission military officers, regulate interactions with Indian nations, and govern all British American lands outside the boundaries of the various colonies (including the ability to grant and to tax such lands) unless the Crown established new colonies. The Crown would appoint a “President-General” with a veto, although he would govern with “the advice and consent” of the Grand Council … which in British practice meant that the legislature would appoint a prime minister equivalent to actually govern. Parliament would have three years to veto any American laws.
The 1774 Galloway Plan made explicit two characteristics left implicit in Ben Franklin’s 1754 proposal. First, it made it clear that the Grand Council would have the power to “exercise all the legislative rights, powers, and authorities, necessary for regulating and administering all the general police and affairs of the colonies, in which Great Britain and the colonies, or any of them, the colonies in general, or more than one colony, are in any manner concerned, as well [sic] civil and criminal as commercial.” Second, it made explicit that the Grand Council would have a veto over any American laws issued by Parliament. (The Crown, of course, would retain a veto over both legislatures.)
The initial proposal gave Maryland, Virginia, and the two Carolinas 40% of the seats. When Georgia would inevitably be admitted, Southern representation would likely increase to 48%. It is hard to say exactly what would have happened as more provinces joined the Union, but the share of delegates from slaveholding provinces would probably not fall below 40% and could easily become a majority, even if Canada and Nova Scotia were admitted.
The chance of such a legislature acceding to a radical abolitionist proposal in the 1840s is left as an exercise for the reader.
It is easy to imagine an anti-slavery Parliament antagonizing the slavers enough to provoke secession. The problem is that such actions would also likely antagonize Northerners, who would see Britain trampling over the long-standing privileges of the American Union. The best outcome in such a case is that the Union fractures and the North responds piecemeal and half-heartedly, as described above. The worst outcome is that Britain pushes the issue and tries to force the North to mobilize for a war that many Northerners do not want to fight, for a cause about which they do not care, on behalf of an authority that they do not respect.
And that leads to our second, far darker, scenario.
(2) Full American secession
It is painfully easy to imagine abolitionist Britain provoking separatism across North America. The most obvious scenario is one where London decides to tax the colonies in order to subsidize the slaveowners. This could easily be the final straw in a string of British political missteps.10 But there are others. For example, as we discussed above, if there is a continental federation then some Northern elites will be angered if Abolition is pushed down their throats from the other side of the Atlantic, even if they have no love for slavery as an institution.
In this case, the British now face a massive manpower deficit unless they resort to mass conscription, which is not going to happen. The Americans enjoy good interior lines of communication and enough of an industrial base to supply a million-man army. They can expand weapons and munition production with none of the input shortages that crippled the Confederacy. The Royal Navy can’t fully blockade North America — the coastline is just too big — but even if they could it wouldn’t do much damage to the North American war effort. The Royal Navy could raid the coastline, but that won’t be as effective as you might think. The Admiralty is not going to risk its fleet by navigating through complex coastlines against shore batteries where ships could easily be bottled up and destroyed. And whereas in our first scenario it’s the British building railroads deep into rebel territory, now it’s the rebels building railroads to make their interior lines faster and more robust.
The British are now much more likely to lose. But how much more likely?
In our world, the Confederacy issued bonds on European markets from 1862 onwards. From the price of those bonds, you can back out how likely the market thought it was that the bonds would pay zero — that is, the probability of a total Confederate defeat.
Kris Mitchener, Kim Oosterlinck, Marc Weidenmier, and Stephen Haber did just that in 2015. When British investors first offered to buy Confederate bonds in December 1862, the price they offered implied a 58% chance of total defeat—or, conversely, a 42% chance of victory. In August 1863 a Dutch newspaper began quoting daily prices for the bonds. Using that data, they found that the perceived Confederate chance of victory had declined a bit to 35%. After Gettysburg, however, Southern chances evaporated, save for a brief period in June 1864 when the combination of Grant’s loss at Petersburg and Early’s raid into Maryland briefly raised hopes:11
that it was just a quick decline all the way through the 1864 election, with some dead-cat bounces thereafter.
If the entire North American continent revolts against the British then the rebels have massive advantages. They have technology favoring the defense. They have geography, with endless strategic depth. They have manpower reserves, with a total population of 17.1 million. The U.K. may have a population almost twice as large — 30.3 million — but it can’t mobilize a particularly large army without taking some very unpalatable actions. It is remotely possible that London will bring in Indian troops, but I doubt that they would, and further doubt that they would be effective were they deployed.
If the Union had a hair under 60% chance of winning in our world, whereas the British alone in the counterfactual a roughly 40% chance of defeating the South (including, possibly, Ohio), then what are their odds of reoccupying the entire North American continent? 5/2? 3/1? I think 4/1 odds are very generous … roughly a 20% ex ante chance of victory.
An 80% chance of an American republic explicitly founded in order to preserve slavery — even if some Northerners will try to tell themselves that it was actually about the rights of Englishmen — is not good for human freedom. It is far worse than the republic we live in. It is a world in which the best case scenario is one where the British offer the American rebels a compromise that divides the continent into two autonomous dominions, one de facto slave and one free.
But worse still is a world where the new republic stays together. Slavery might not be legal everywhere, but preserving it will have been the actual stated reason why the nation was founded, even if many Northerners will try to deny it. But at the end of the day, they will have revolted in order to avoid paying for the end of slavery.
Whether through compromise or collapse, the counterfactuals all point in the direction of a North America more committed to slavery, not less.
The Revolution Mattered
The American Revolution did not fulfill the ideals of the Declaration of Independence. What it did accomplish, however, was continental unity under a constitutional order. That order abolished slavery in the Northeast and kept it out of the Midwest. When the slaveowners broke that order in 1860 and 1861, its existence created the opportunity to forcibly reintegrate them and abolish their right to make other people into property. And when the nation backslid after 1877, it provided the framework through which African Americans could demand their political rights.
There is no world in which continuing British rule leads to better conditions for the enslaved or formerly enslaved. In fact, it is only marginally possible that it would lead to faster Abolition. Everything would need to go right: Parliament would have to vote to abolish, finance a massive war effort, avoid riling the Northern colonies, and then quickly win the subsequent conflict. In the best case, a very British compromise ends the war early and brings us Jim Crow under another name. That would be a little better than in our world, but not a lot. In the worst case, the British lose and slavery lasts into the 1880s or beyond.
The 1619 Project falsely claimed that protecting slavery was one of the causes of the American Revolution. It insisted on that claim in the face of objections from historians. Gordon Wood, James McPherson, Sean Wilentz, Victoria Bynum, and James Oakes wrote to The New York Times asking for corrections. In regards to the claim about slavery, they bluntly stated: “This is not true.” James Oakes, writing in Jacobin, said, “The Times got the relationship between slavery and the revolution completely backward.” Leslie Harris had been contracted by the project and told them that the Revolution wasn’t fought to protect slavery: “Despite my advice, the Times published the incorrect statement about the American Revolution anyway, in Hannah-Jones’ introductory essay.”
It filtered into grade-school classrooms in D.C. — my daughter’s included — where teachers were told to present as fact what professional historians had already debunked.12
The counterfactual sketched here leads as often as not to a world where North America does see a republic born explicitly to protect slavery. That republic won’t look anything like our own. It’s constitution will explicit protect human bondage in the state where it exists. The free states will be hemmed into the northeast and marginalized. The governing structures will be even more conservative than our own, designed to prevent a future federal government from doing what the British Empire tried to do.
Slavery was America’s original sin, but the Revolution was not fought to preserve it and its destruction was far from foreordained under Britain. What the Revolution did do was create the conditions under which equal freedom could be achieved. I am no Whig — I think there are many turning points after 1783 that could have led to a better world than the one we inhabit. But without 1776 you don’t get a precocious 1865 — and you certainly don’t get 1965.
But I could be wrong! Please tell me where my argument is off the rails in comments.
I have some doubts about a few parts of this map. The border between West Florida and Louisiana is misplaced. The Erie Triangle should be part of New York, not Ohio. The rationale behind the boundaries of the Indian Lands is a little unclear. My gut feeling is that New Yorkers would move west into Upper Canada faster than Quebeckers would move South. And “Quebec” will likely still be called “Canada.” But generally, amazing work! I want to know what Vincent Geloso thinks.
The map implicitly assumes that the British displaced the Cherokee and Muskogee Creek but respected the more western territories of the Chickasaw and Choctaw. Presumably the former tribes were displaced to the latter territory.
And probably Quebec as well, although enslaved population will be near nonexistent.
These number do not include officers, NCOs, or musicians.
It is reasonable to assume that the pace of railroad development would be about the same. The endowments of raw materials haven’t changed. Population centers would still be in more or less the same place. American independence didn’t impede the arrival of British capital, so reversing it wouldn’t make it flow faster. If anything, development might be a bit slower should British rule slow the creation of a continental common market or impede manufacturing growth. The assumption is that U.S. manufacturing would expand more slowly if British rule leads to lower tariffs or makes it harder to sell goods across state lines.
See Christopher Gabel, Rails to Oblivion: The Decline of Confederate Railroads in the Civil War (Fort Leavenworth, Kansas: Combat Studies Institute, 2002).
In our world, Lincoln lost the popular vote in Jersey twice and only squeaked by in New York, I’m ashamed to say.
In 1815, during the War of 1812, Britain was unable to take New Orleans despite a major effect. By 1845, the city would be even better protected. It is extremely difficult to mount an offensive through the swampy, disease-ridden approaches to the city. Moreover, even if Britain succeeded in retaking the city, it would then need to advance north to Cairo to be able to use the Mississippi to supply major offensives. In practice, the British wouldn’t get past the city, leaving open the ability to smuggle materiel overland from Nueva España.
It is worth noting that it is quite likely that there is a majority of Anglo settlers in Tejas. In our history, Spain encouraged Anglo settlement in what became Missouri and Texas with offers of free land, tax exemptions, and religious freedom. These settlers would support the rebellion even if they were still de jure part of the Spanish empire.
The phrasing was quite vague: “To perpetuate our union, by a reciprocal deputation of an agent or agents from the different states, who shall have the privilege of a seat and a voice in the Parliament of Great Britain, or if sent from Britain, to have, in that case, a seat and a voice in the assemblies of the different states to which they may be deputed respectively in order to attend to the several interests of those by whom they are deputed.”
To be fair, it is easy to imagine a deal in which the North agrees to protective tariffs in return for fighting the South. But it’s also easy to imagine a deal like that falling apart in
At the start of 1862, the markets believed that the CSA faced about 3/2 odds — bet $2, get $5 if you win and nothing if you lose. That is a 40% chance of victory. After Gettysburg the odds decline to 3/1 — for purely political reasons — and after Chickamauga they fall to 6/1 as the South’s precarious strategic position becomes clear. Gettysburg was a political event rather than a military one. A victory would have done little to help the Confederacy resist future Union offensives or degrade Union capabilities but it would have demoralized Union forces and made Lincoln’s re-election harder. Chattanooga was the opposite: it had little political effect, but the Union victory demonstrated the immense advantages that railroads brought the Union forces.
I was mildly active in protesting the new curriculum in D.C., to no avail. Sometimes I think that I should have fought harder: among other things, my daughter had an unpleasant experience pushing back against a teacher.