Re: Help design the ideal Presidential candidate

Tim McDaniel <tmcd@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> wrote:
> David Friedman  <ddfr@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> wrote:
> > archmage@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
 (Nate Edel) wrote:
> >Has anyone done an alternate history using that version--not the
> >South won, or the South fought the North to a standstill, but the
> >South seceded in a fa****on that made forcible opposition politically
> >unviable?
>
> "Let our erring sister go in peace" and all that.

Yep.  It does also assume that Lincoln was not belligerent enough to start
a
war even absent provocation (and while I think that's correct, it's far
from
certain, and his administration - hardly united - ended up taking a course
that definitely fanned the flames with an already-bellicose South.)

> - Southerners had been bellicose for years, applauding the savage
>   caning in Congress, sup****ting filibusters in Cuba and Central
>   America (c.f. the Ostend Manifesto), and sup****ting bushwhackers in
>   Bloody Kansas.
> - The Confederacy laid claim to "Oklahoma" and New Mexico.

Indeed (although this is jumping ahead), it's far from clear that the
issues
of the territories would have been settlable peacefully, even if the core
issue of secession was uncontested.

Attempts to grab Cuba, etc etc are another matter (and ignore the amusing
thought of a war between Spain and the Confederacy in the case of Cuba) -
I
don't think the US would be likely to end up in a war in North America
over
Confederate violations of the Monroe doctrine, especially if they were
smart
enough to do their fighting through local proxies and filibusters.  OTOH,
wars that start being fought by proxies can get pretty nasty.

> - The state government of Missouri was pro-Confederate; Kentucky was
>   divided.

OTOH, when did those move that way?  Would the border states have followed
a
peacefully-seceding Confederacy out of the union, or would they have
stayed
(at least for a while) in the absence of the war?

Indeed, I could see a somewhat farfetched but not wholly impossible case
where you got three nations: if the deep south secedes peacefully, but the
border states remain, could you get enough frustration regarding the
remaining slave states that New England and perhaps a few of the more
radical states of the upper midwest split off from the core US (border
states, mid atlantic, and California.)

> Therefore, even if the Federal forts at Charleston and Fort Pickens
> were evacuated, other Southern Federal facilities abandoned without
> discussion, Union control of most naval ****ps unquestioned, and the
> share of the national debt unresolved, I am inclined to think it more
> likely than not that shooting would have started over some issue.
> Whether the Union would have then opened the issue of reversing
> secession, I'm less certain of.

I'm inclined to think you're right.  The later it goes, though, the odds
of
the Union being able to reverse secession entirely seems to go down...
assuming they even want to.  If the war aim is to secure a better
settlement
of dividing the territories, it seems a lot more likely that one side will
achieve enough early gains that the other one will likely back off.

-- 
Nate Edel                               http://www.cubiclehermit.com/
 preferred email  | 
 is "nate" at the | "I do have a cause, though. It is obscenity.
 posting domain   |  I'm for it." - prologue to "Smut" by Tom Lehrer