Race- Privilege, Relations, Racism, etc.

In real life the confederacy would face serious economic blockade due to its attachment to slavery, you could easily see several border states returning to the Union due to the harshness of the economic decline. On top of that Union politics would be watched carefully, fear of the Union invading would be constant, eith it being known at the top levels that if the Union ever did decide to remain the Confederacy they could win if they were willing to pay the human price.

Now if things are shown like that we could have an interesting series, but anything where the Confederacy isn't facing severe economic issues and terrified of the Union coming a callin' would just be a confederate fantasy.

I'm not exactly confident that this will turn out to be more than "Timeline-191 but worse".

And count me on the train that feels kind of iffy about how many of these "but what if the morally indefensible side won?" alternate history IPs are popping up at this exact moment. You can't have a miniseries dedicated to, say, British WWII Bomber Command or the makers of Sherman Neckties, but, sure, Nazis and Confederates succeeding, no problemo.

I know people said the Confederacy was have plans for invading other countries like Mexico and a lot of South America, I think they would have had their butts handed to them if they tried that. I mean if Canada whipped us hard, then I have a feeling that South America after it had it's own revolution wouldn't stand for being invaded by the Confederacy.

Also the Confederacy had abolitionists who would have taken question with the country's stance on slavery, so if it did succeeded it would have people questioning the aspect of promoting slavery.

Have you ever actually read the Cornerstone Speech? The Confederacy existed solely to perpetuate and expand slavery, according to it's own government.

And yeah I'm in the same boat as the timing of these things feels pretty damn sketchy.

I just can't take the show's premise seriously since it just comes off as a Darker and Edgier remake of the Confederate States of America mockumentary.

edited 24th Jul '17 10:12:15 AM by Eschaton

@Alley Oop: Questionable and inconsistent? We must not be watching the same show then, because GOT is probably the best one out there at the moment, unless you judge it by how closely it follows the books.

Back On-Topic, I see no reason for alarm on more entertainment pieces having a "What If?" scenario for the racist/fascist group winning. Most people will occasionally wonder about it out of curiosity, and as long as the show portrays the Confederacy as the truly awful thing it would be, there's no need for worries.

edited 24th Jul '17 10:17:11 AM by Grafite

I could buy an AU show, but now? With the team who brought us The Let's Add More Rape Show?

Yeah. No. I'm gonna stay far away from it.

@13928, A few rich assholes did try it after the war. Few ways to describe the whole affair other than goddamn weird. A loose collection of confederate fugitives and former slaves who for some reason thought they could make it better in life by siding with them, with a sprinkling of outcast mixed race peoples, Native Americans, and plantation owners going along for the ride. Brazil, Honduras, and Belize still have people who trace their ancestry back to them.

Many were dealt with by native insects and pestilences.

edited 24th Jul '17 10:24:40 AM by carbon-mantis

There were plans to annex Cuba to strengthen the slave holding powers. Abraham Lincoln puts it more poetically:

If they have to do this right, they should make both citizens of the Confederacy or even the heads of it Card Carrying Villains. Yeah, slavery would still be on in the Confederate states, but eventually even they would have to give it up due to how it was becoming less and less pragmatic to keep.

Also as I said there would still be abolitionists in the Confederate states who would fight against the institution of slavery and that would take a little bit longer than what historically happened.

@ carbon-mantis

Also little known tidbits like that would help reflect more on the fact that interesting enough there were Native Americans who did fight for the Confederacy. Although it would be historically right to portray a number of Confederates as racist, on the other hand there were tribes who did side with the CSA.

edited 24th Jul '17 10:40:52 AM by firewriter

@Grafite

Season 5 was a clusterfuck of bad ideas, including anything to do with the Sand Snakes, the early killing-off of Barristan Selmy, their portrayal of Stannis, and a good chunk of the Ramsay S(n)ue scenes. And before that was Talisa, Ros, all the Narmy sexposition in general, Doreah's betrayal, Season 2 Loras, and the Jaime/Cersei rape scene that "wasn't really" rape, It's certainly not the worst thing on television, largely on the strength of its source material, but I sure as hell won't call it the best either.

Given that Season 5, the one with the most deviation from the books and therefore the most exemplary of D&D's native showrunning skills, was also the worst season, it doesn't bode well for how Confederate will turn out.

edited 24th Jul '17 11:00:32 AM by AlleyOop

I do agree Season 5 was the worst season/a mess (but just that).

However, I'm going to watch at least the first episode of Confederate, because I am intrigued about how it will turn out to be. I will concede if it turns out to be racially insensitive, but I think it may have a lot of potential with good writing to back it.

The Confederacy would never give up slavery, literally the only reason it existed was to perpetuate and expand it.

That'd be like saying Nazi Germany would give up the Holocaust when it got too expensive.

Slavery was the underlying ideology and the cornerstone of Confederate policy both foreign and domestic, it wasn't just some weird system of economics they had.

I swear I once flipped through an alternate history book that depicted WWI but with a frozen US Civil War thrown in the midst. Instead of abstaining from the global conflict for the first few years as in Real Life, trench warfare breaks out along the Mason-Dixon Demarcation Line as the US allies with the Entente while the CS joins the Central Powers.

edited 24th Jul '17 11:29:30 AM by FluffyMcChicken

Given the nature of the Zimmermann telegram, would the potential Germany-Mexico alliance as well as the fact that it has the most to lose from it make it more likely to push the CSA towards siding with the Entente?

edited 24th Jul '17 11:33:53 AM by AlleyOop

The thing about Indian tribes allying with the Confederacy has less to do with the latter's race policies and more to do with a common enemy. The Confedeacy couldn't afford to waste men on the frontier fighting Indians while the war was going on so they established new treaties to keep the pressure off themselves while goading the native nations to continue their fights with the US. Worth noting that these treaties generally had provisions about maintaining slavery, so the Confederacy's real intentions are here too.

Given that pro slavery statesmen were very outspoken about settling the west with slavery, it's also a reasonable to assume that the Confederacy would break those treaties and push out the Indians in a heartbeat.

While in the first two decades of the CSA slavery would influence their policies, but then eventually they would give it up like Brazil did around the end of the 19th century. I think the CSA would still enact Jim Crow after slavery is abolished, and it would be like what the segregation era in history was like.

Also slavery was getting too expensive, which is one of the reasons why people gave it up.

edited 24th Jul '17 11:39:12 AM by firewriter

I really can't see them doing that. They'd tear themselves apart before they let slavery die. It wasn't just about hating black people it was specifically slavery.

An excerpt from the infamous Cornerstone Speech given by CSA Vice President Alexander Stephens.

This was a nation that planned to invade Cuba and South America for the express purpose of expanding slavery. Specifically slavery.

They'd die before they gave it up.

Nations don't stay static, which is often a problem with Alternate History fiction. They would be stubborn about giving it up, but on the other hand saying that the CSA would have it forever is not logical at all. Also as I said before America has tried to invade other countries, and it never ended up successful except for the Mexican War. The CSA if they tried their whole imperialism thing they would be whipped.

The idea being that the principles a country is founded on don't necessarily guide what they do a hundred years later.

The CSA was not a rational actor is the problem. They were driven by a very specific ideology that formed the foundation of their society and reason for existing.

Again, it's sole purpose for existing was, in the government's own words, to perpetuate and expand slavery. Literally everything the Confederate government ever did was to work towards that end. And that government likely would have destroyed itself before it ever accepted abolition.

@firewriter. In urban areas of the day there was an odd sort of evolution of it. In cities like Nashville, Charlotte , and Atlanta you saw affluent slave owners retiring more and more into their city dwellings (per the norm of the day a rich family often had a city house to entertain guests alongside the plantation house) and moving slaves into traditionally white lower-middle class commercial positions.

Since this sometimes required basic knowledge of reading and mathematics (and thus gave the captives a bit of of an edge against their captors than a farmworker may have had) there was a sort of hostage/indenturing system forming just before the outbreak of the war. Towns in Canada had been forming over the years composed of escaped slaves and abolitionists, so quite a few traveled there rather than risking it in the States. So Southern business owners would take a slave family to run their stores and shops, and use the promise of freedom to Canada for say, one child after x-years of labor plus y amount of dollars, to keep them in line. The birthrate of the day meant there was no shortage and one child every decade or so cost them less than wages would have for a white employee in the same span. One wonders, if the war hadn't thrown a wrench into their plans, if the Southern aristocracy would have succeeded in eventually eliminating the working class and establishing a slave-based feudal system of sorts.

edited 24th Jul '17 11:51:48 AM by carbon-mantis

Those people would be long dead though. And their descendants would be able rationalize anything as an "interpretation" of the founders.

Also if they did succeeded, they couldn't go through with their plans to invade Cuba and South America, because they still would have money problems.

edited 24th Jul '17 12:04:44 PM by firewriter

Yeah, it will be in short, a "lost cause" for the winners, nations move in decades asn centuries, so motives get lost all the damn times, if anything it will prove their double think and moral emptiness with a "oh you see, it wasnt about slavery"....

hell, people already do that.