Given that we know the US of 2020 looks a hell of a lot like OTL Sweden, I’m going to say no.
If by “finishes off,” you mean “stops further rapid change,” then maybe, but not “rolls back,” which is what you’ve implied.
Sequel de Mayo (Cinco de Mayo, Vol. II)
- Thread starter KingSweden24
- Start date
If by “finishes off,” you mean “stops further rapid change,” then maybe, but not “rolls back,” which is what you’ve implied.
I think a roll back, at least at some level, is likely. The Liberals elected in 1930/32 are likely going to be elected as a result of perceived Progressive/Democratic overreach, so there will be some effort to undo some of that overreach. Not saying Liberals will be willing or able to bring the US back to the 1890s but there will be some pushback once they take over. Then when Dems return in the 1940s they can enact their agenda as a pushback against the Liberal agenda of the 1930s and the wheel keeps spinning.
The Bourbon Restoration: The Confederate States 1915-33
"...the challenge ahead of Patton was, to put it mildly, daunting to the point of being potentially impossible. As a prerequisite for peace and the suspension of Yankee occupation, the Confederate States would have to abolish de jure slavery not only at the national level but in each individual state, a course of action that was not only effectively (though perhaps not explicitly, depending on how one interpreted the verbiage) banned by the Confederate Constitution's text, but also in practical terms required essentially rejecting what most of the founding generation's luminaries considered the raison d'etre of the country's institutions, as per Alexander Stephens' "Keystone Speech." To Yankees and, for that matter, most European diplomats, there was little sympathy for this position - the Confederacy had tested the patience of other powers with its belligerency, and it had gambled with incredibly high stakes in starting a war of choice with the United States and losing. [1] But as a matter of internal politics, it was a herculean task, and Patton was a strange and unlikely figure to accomplish it.
Patton was not, himself, a slave owner, and he came from a background of law rather than plantation. His ascent to the heights of Confederate politics had been wholly accidental by way of the alliance of convenience that produced the Martin-Vardaman alignment to in the short-term depose Tillman's hold on the Senate and then vault Vardaman into Heritage House; he was regarded as Martin's catspaw even as President, and seen not as his own man but as an even greater lightweight than Cotton Ed Smith had been as a Tillmanite stooge. Making matters worse, he had no natural political base for the huge undertaking ahead of him, and Bloody Wednesday and its rippling aftermath had revealed what the Confederate public thought of the imposed peace.
Luckily for Patton, however, the perception - for now - amongst the Confederate public was that the Yankees were imposing "Gunbarrel Amendments," as the proposed constitutional changes quickly became known, and this gave him space to maneuver as he prepared to call the Senate to pass the Treaty. Patton's diaries reveal that the Patton of spring 1917 was not a noble man persuaded of slavery's ills who whipped the Senate into passing its abolition but a craven man who agreed with Martin's take that the Treaty itself needed to be passed in order to appease the Yankees but suspected that there could be wiggle room on the slave question afterwards, and that if the Confederacy stalled long enough they could perhaps avoid forcing Confederate lawmakers to take what was essentially a suicidal vote - "signing our own death warrants," as Martin phrased it in a private memorandum to several colleagues.
That being said, Patton's view on slavery was more complicated than that, because his diaries also reveal that he had concluded that there was essentially no going back to the prewar society and that the utter destruction of the previous three years, and the abolition of close to four-fifths of the Confederacy's slaves by the US Army in the course of the war and the revolts of many of those who remained in the time since effectively meant that slavery had across most of Dixie been de facto ended. Patton's long-term idea, then, was to perhaps simply formalize this: acknowledging that those freed in the course of the war were now freedmen, while avoiding again having to acknowledge a de jure abolition.
These solutions were too cute by half, and in the end would not work, but Patton's optimism for such a stratagem was based more around persuading the angry and shocked Confederate political establishment to pass the draconian Mount Vernon Treaty and "accept that we overplayed our hand the last two times we rejected treaties with the Yankee," lest an even more punitive peace be imposed by force by the United States. In this endeavor he was helped by an unlikely ally, Oscar Underwood of Alabama.
Underwood's importance to the immediate postwar Confederate political scene cannot be understated. As the war drew to a close, one of the few genuinely reformist Tillmanites reorganized what was left of Pitchfork Ben's tattered party into the "Democratic Opposition," which viewed the National Alliance as something of a quasi-military hybrid regime and believed that even the more circumspect Patton augured a turn towards autocracy across Dixie. Underwood was a classically Confederate politician, a mix of conservative and liberal instincts that contradicted one another but nonetheless never quite seemed to work at crosswinds, an oxymoron to observers from outside the intricate, Byzantine political world in which he worked his way up but perfectly understandable to his peers in Charlotte. He was Patton's enemy, and a dogged one, but he was also perhaps the most powerful advocate for Patton's Treaty, if for no reason other than the pragmatic realization that the Confederacy could, in fact, be destroyed further than it already had been.
And so as March turned to April, a number of Senators who had been held under American guard in various prison camps across North Carolina were gathered in Charlotte, including men such as Tillman, Hoke Smith, Thomas Hardwick and Furnifold Simmons, all of whom were marched into the temporary Senate chambers at the Charlotte Grand Theater wearing shackles. Yankee infantrymen stood in the back of the room, rifles slung casually over their shoulders, chatting quietly and smoking confiscated Carolina cigarettes as the Mount Vernon Treaty was debated. Their presence, though subtle, sent a clear message - there was only one way this treaty would be passed.
April 4th, 1917 was referred to in Confederate history books as the "Funeral for Old Dixie," the day that reality was, for a brief moment, broadly accepted by all corners of Confederate establishment. Patton sat in the gallery as a guest of Martin but chose not to speak; rather, the debate that unfolded was largely one in which Martin and Underwood, bitter foes otherwise, largely sang from the same songbook. "There are too few men left to fight this war should we reject this treaty," Martin said with clear dismay. "Dixie has been emptied of her people and her prosperity; it is time for us to swallow our pride, and save what little we can." Underwood concurred, remarking, "Have no doubt that this is the Yankee being generous, and this is the Yankee being kind. They have proven a tenacious foe, and a barbaric one - what barbarism will be revisited upon us with no Army left to fight them, and their soldiers in every corner of our land?"
Nonetheless, some such as Hoke Smith vowed angrily to defeat Mount Vernon, or at least to "resist it to fully capacity," a call that was very clearly heard not long thereafter by paramilitary forces across the Confederacy. Others made clear their decision to vote in favor of the Treaty, or to abstain, was done under duress. The old lion of the Senate, Pitchfork Ben Tillman, rose shaking and weak from his chair, struggling to support his own weight as his health was in terminal decline, and pointed at the soldiers at the back fo the room. "It is their vote in favor of this Treaty today, made by my hand," he growled. It would be the last time he addressed the Confederate Senate in his life.
After ten hours of debate, the Treaty was put to the floor, and the tension could have been cut with a knife as the Senators, including in absentia Texans, voted for or against it one by one, and it passed with seventeen ayes, and six nays. The Treaty of Mount Vernon was ratified - the Confederacy was, legally speaking, at peace at last. One wonders what may have happened had it been defeated on the floor of the Confederate Senate; would the soldiers there have simply arrested all the Senators, and started over again? Would Patton simply have advised the Senate that his administration viewed it as "ratified in practice," thus triggering a constitutional crisis in addition to a military one? Martin himself was of the view that the vote on April 4th, while indeed perhaps already funereal symbolically, was also an existential vote, and that the Confederacy would have been dissolved into multiple republics had it failed. As it was, the facts on the ground already suggested as much - wide swaths were under occupation by Yankee forces, and other parts were governed from Charlotte only in practice, held by either nobody or by local forces bandied together for mutual protection. Passing Mount Vernon, to Patton and Martin, was the first step on the long road to bringing those territories to heel.
They simply had no idea how long that road would be..."
- The Bourbon Restoration: The Confederate States 1915-33
[1] AKA they fucked around and found out
Patton was not, himself, a slave owner, and he came from a background of law rather than plantation. His ascent to the heights of Confederate politics had been wholly accidental by way of the alliance of convenience that produced the Martin-Vardaman alignment to in the short-term depose Tillman's hold on the Senate and then vault Vardaman into Heritage House; he was regarded as Martin's catspaw even as President, and seen not as his own man but as an even greater lightweight than Cotton Ed Smith had been as a Tillmanite stooge. Making matters worse, he had no natural political base for the huge undertaking ahead of him, and Bloody Wednesday and its rippling aftermath had revealed what the Confederate public thought of the imposed peace.
Luckily for Patton, however, the perception - for now - amongst the Confederate public was that the Yankees were imposing "Gunbarrel Amendments," as the proposed constitutional changes quickly became known, and this gave him space to maneuver as he prepared to call the Senate to pass the Treaty. Patton's diaries reveal that the Patton of spring 1917 was not a noble man persuaded of slavery's ills who whipped the Senate into passing its abolition but a craven man who agreed with Martin's take that the Treaty itself needed to be passed in order to appease the Yankees but suspected that there could be wiggle room on the slave question afterwards, and that if the Confederacy stalled long enough they could perhaps avoid forcing Confederate lawmakers to take what was essentially a suicidal vote - "signing our own death warrants," as Martin phrased it in a private memorandum to several colleagues.
That being said, Patton's view on slavery was more complicated than that, because his diaries also reveal that he had concluded that there was essentially no going back to the prewar society and that the utter destruction of the previous three years, and the abolition of close to four-fifths of the Confederacy's slaves by the US Army in the course of the war and the revolts of many of those who remained in the time since effectively meant that slavery had across most of Dixie been de facto ended. Patton's long-term idea, then, was to perhaps simply formalize this: acknowledging that those freed in the course of the war were now freedmen, while avoiding again having to acknowledge a de jure abolition.
These solutions were too cute by half, and in the end would not work, but Patton's optimism for such a stratagem was based more around persuading the angry and shocked Confederate political establishment to pass the draconian Mount Vernon Treaty and "accept that we overplayed our hand the last two times we rejected treaties with the Yankee," lest an even more punitive peace be imposed by force by the United States. In this endeavor he was helped by an unlikely ally, Oscar Underwood of Alabama.
Underwood's importance to the immediate postwar Confederate political scene cannot be understated. As the war drew to a close, one of the few genuinely reformist Tillmanites reorganized what was left of Pitchfork Ben's tattered party into the "Democratic Opposition," which viewed the National Alliance as something of a quasi-military hybrid regime and believed that even the more circumspect Patton augured a turn towards autocracy across Dixie. Underwood was a classically Confederate politician, a mix of conservative and liberal instincts that contradicted one another but nonetheless never quite seemed to work at crosswinds, an oxymoron to observers from outside the intricate, Byzantine political world in which he worked his way up but perfectly understandable to his peers in Charlotte. He was Patton's enemy, and a dogged one, but he was also perhaps the most powerful advocate for Patton's Treaty, if for no reason other than the pragmatic realization that the Confederacy could, in fact, be destroyed further than it already had been.
And so as March turned to April, a number of Senators who had been held under American guard in various prison camps across North Carolina were gathered in Charlotte, including men such as Tillman, Hoke Smith, Thomas Hardwick and Furnifold Simmons, all of whom were marched into the temporary Senate chambers at the Charlotte Grand Theater wearing shackles. Yankee infantrymen stood in the back of the room, rifles slung casually over their shoulders, chatting quietly and smoking confiscated Carolina cigarettes as the Mount Vernon Treaty was debated. Their presence, though subtle, sent a clear message - there was only one way this treaty would be passed.
April 4th, 1917 was referred to in Confederate history books as the "Funeral for Old Dixie," the day that reality was, for a brief moment, broadly accepted by all corners of Confederate establishment. Patton sat in the gallery as a guest of Martin but chose not to speak; rather, the debate that unfolded was largely one in which Martin and Underwood, bitter foes otherwise, largely sang from the same songbook. "There are too few men left to fight this war should we reject this treaty," Martin said with clear dismay. "Dixie has been emptied of her people and her prosperity; it is time for us to swallow our pride, and save what little we can." Underwood concurred, remarking, "Have no doubt that this is the Yankee being generous, and this is the Yankee being kind. They have proven a tenacious foe, and a barbaric one - what barbarism will be revisited upon us with no Army left to fight them, and their soldiers in every corner of our land?"
Nonetheless, some such as Hoke Smith vowed angrily to defeat Mount Vernon, or at least to "resist it to fully capacity," a call that was very clearly heard not long thereafter by paramilitary forces across the Confederacy. Others made clear their decision to vote in favor of the Treaty, or to abstain, was done under duress. The old lion of the Senate, Pitchfork Ben Tillman, rose shaking and weak from his chair, struggling to support his own weight as his health was in terminal decline, and pointed at the soldiers at the back fo the room. "It is their vote in favor of this Treaty today, made by my hand," he growled. It would be the last time he addressed the Confederate Senate in his life.
After ten hours of debate, the Treaty was put to the floor, and the tension could have been cut with a knife as the Senators, including in absentia Texans, voted for or against it one by one, and it passed with seventeen ayes, and six nays. The Treaty of Mount Vernon was ratified - the Confederacy was, legally speaking, at peace at last. One wonders what may have happened had it been defeated on the floor of the Confederate Senate; would the soldiers there have simply arrested all the Senators, and started over again? Would Patton simply have advised the Senate that his administration viewed it as "ratified in practice," thus triggering a constitutional crisis in addition to a military one? Martin himself was of the view that the vote on April 4th, while indeed perhaps already funereal symbolically, was also an existential vote, and that the Confederacy would have been dissolved into multiple republics had it failed. As it was, the facts on the ground already suggested as much - wide swaths were under occupation by Yankee forces, and other parts were governed from Charlotte only in practice, held by either nobody or by local forces bandied together for mutual protection. Passing Mount Vernon, to Patton and Martin, was the first step on the long road to bringing those territories to heel.
They simply had no idea how long that road would be..."
- The Bourbon Restoration: The Confederate States 1915-33
[1] AKA they fucked around and found out
Very true
From what I’ve gleaned based on my research Hughes was neither friend nor foe of the Irish community, unlike many of his contemporaries who were outright hostile, but I still doubt a bunch of Irish Democrats would go out of their way to have him speak at most events; though, maybe, something locally in New York.Huzzah!!!!!!! Glad I could be of help
I imagine the Liberal aristocracy is looking at these protests with more than a little bit of distaste and a dash of panic (at least the ones with foresight. The rest probably nervously laugh it off)
I wonder if Hughes was asked to speak in New York - can't imagine he'd turn down a chance to snub Britain's nose a bit and also, you know, TALK. At length. While reveling in the sound of his own voice
(I say this as a fan of good ol President Hughes!!!!)
A sound prediction and excellent point on how conditions change even as men stand still, though Pershing’s inspiration isn’t Harding but rather a mix of Ike and Grant
None
A cycle which is the case in places other than just the US, of course, which hopefully I’ve captured a bit ITTL
I was kind of figuring that's what you were going for. The Ike one is telling, as that implies a president who acquiesces by and large to the reforms brought in by their predecessors but just touches up a few things at most and is more concerned with other matters.
Exactly. One big difference with Pershing and Ike or, especially, Grant is the length of time between the GAW and his election, but they’re the model for the reasons you describe
Except Canada - there everything is bad always lol.
Also, just stumbled upon this in my reading about Harding: Albert Fall was born in Kentucky and raised in Tennessee. Having him be a Bourbon or post-Bourbon could be fun. He certainly fits the "wildly corrupt" aspect of post-war CSA politics.
Just as a check, the only confederate state *completely* occupied at the end of the war was Alabama, with a stretch still under confederate control running from Kentucky to South Carolina along the Appalachians, from Vicksburg to New Orleans and east into half of Mississippi as well as most of the southern Panhandle of Florida. (How close did the USA get to Orlando?)
It would be ironic if Root decides to rebuild the CSA Army from it's remnants because of the insurgency despite hating them with a passion
America is not going to fight them all by itself, so a rebuilt CS army will cooperate to crush it. This assumes that the remaining high ranking and solders are loyal to Patton (If not, they are doomed)
America is not going to fight them all by itself, so a rebuilt CS army will cooperate to crush it. This assumes that the remaining high ranking and solders are loyal to Patton (If not, they are doomed)
Unless the new Confederate army/state militias are made up entirely of freedmen I don’t see them voluntarily going to war against their own compatriots. And if it did, it would probably fail to attract those volunteers it has to rely on for manpower; men who want to fight will probably join one of the many paramilitaries that will undoubtedly spring up in the so-called Great Resistance
True, but I think white paras fighting black paras and vice versa is not a recipe for stability and Patton goal is to reasert authority.
There will be some who would be happy to join - paramilitaries have a nasty habit of attacking their own side, or letting innocents get caught in the cross-fire. So there will certainly be some veterans who are motivated to remain in the army and help restore order. Though I doubt they will be beloved figures either. Basically, its going to be a cluster-f*ck. You'll have white paramilitaries against the US occupation force, black paramilitaries and the CS army. The CS army against both white and black paramilitaries and allied with the US occupation but hating them. Black paramilitaries against white paramilitaries and the CS army (and, potentially, against the occupation - though they will be very sparce and infrequent). Basically its going to resemble Afganistan or Vietnam in many ways. Just a complete and utter mess of tortured personal loyalties, politics and the like.
On the bright side (if there can be one) its going to produce some fantastic literature and art after the guns stop firing - this is probably the defining moment of the modern Confederacy and is going to be mulled over for decades to come.
@KingSweden24, what's the status of metrication in the US ITTL? With the abolition of the EC, what's one little radical change more?