Four historical wars made the United States what it is today: the Revolutionary War, the Mexican-American War, the Civil War, and World War Two. You could argue that each war America has entered has shaped its national history, but I think we can all agree that these four have had the biggest impact. The Revolution made us a nation. The Mexican-American war gave us control of the continent (don't say it, Canada). The Civil War made us a nation of free men. And World War Two made us a global superpower. For today's purposes, I'll be discussing the Civil War.
As it was in 1860, when Lincoln was elected president and the Southern states were outraged, the South had no chance of winning the war in the sense that the North won it - invading and dominating the land occupied by the other nation. Right off the bat, the Confederacy lacked the resources and the manpower to conquer the Union. You can argue that the Confederate commanders were superior strategists to their Union counterparts - I would certainly argue that Robert E. Lee was a better general than Ulysses S. Grant. However, Grant's army was better-trained, better-supplied, and much better-staffed than Lee's army. The fact of the matter is, the South did not have the industrial capacity to keep up with the North.
But what if it had?
What if, in the days after the War of 1812, the Southern cities had industrialized as their Union counterparts did, while the slaveholding agrarian society continued beyond the city borders? What if Atlanta, Nashville and Charleston had become industrial centers to rival New York, Detroit and Boston? What if Southern Congressmen had worked harder to pass legislation for better infrastructure within the Southern states?
If this had happened, the Civil War would have played out very differently.
Robert E. Lee's assault on Gettysburg was part of a planned invasion of the North. The North won the battle through a mix of manpower, individual resilience, better weapons, and quite a bit of luck. Southern miscommunications and miscalculations during the battle proved invaluable to the Union's triumph. But in my alternate scenario (let's call it "the Industrial South"), Gettysburg may have happened even sooner. With better supply lines, the Confederates would have found it easy to transport men and supplies to battlefields on the border with - and even within - the Union, as the Union did in our time. With better training and more recruits (after all, urban environments do tend to produce more people and attract more migrants than their rural counterparts), it's feasible that Grant's army would have fallen, and Confederate troops would have made their way through the Union, conquering as they did.
So how would American history, and today's America, be different? It obviously would be different, but I'd argue it wouldn't be as different as you might think. And here's my rationale:
When the Confederacy won the war, the hero wouldn't be President Jefferson Davis. No, the hero would be Robert E. Lee. Lee would be seen as the Confederacy's equivalent of George Washington. And, as Grant became president in our timeline, it stands to reason that Lee would have become president in this alternate timeline. Here we must examine Robert E. Lee, the man who rejected Grant's position in the Union army because he suspected his home state of Virginia would secede. A fact often forgotten by today's Americans would have shaped President Lee's America: Lee despised the institution of slavery. In one of American history's greatest ironies, General Grant owned slaves at the end of the Civil War. General Lee did not. It seems unlikely that Lee would have abolished slavery if he were elected president. But it also seems unlikely that he would simply allow slavery to continue. What seems to me the most likely scenario is that Lee would put in place steps to gradually reduce slavery in the South, and beyond it. Perhaps under disguise of mending the relationship with the North, he would likely ban slavery in the western territories. It would sound a lot better to southerners coming from Lee, their hero, than it did coming from Lincoln. Especially if the South was industrial - after all, industry played a role in eliminating northern dependence on and use of the practice. It stands to reason that Industrial Southerners would be better inclined to abolishing slavery than agrarian southerners. Given the international community's abhorrence for the practice by the late 19th Century and the lack of logic for its continuation once America entered the Gilded Age, it stands to reason that American slavery would have died out by the early 20th Century. That's not to say we would have anything resembling racial equality, though.
What would today's America look like if the South had won? Well, the Deep South would most likely resemble the Deep South of our 1920's - racial segregation, lynchings, and other acts of brutality and oppression against black Americans. The north would be better, but we probably wouldn't be the most politically correct of people. In this sort of a society, the less extreme of the n-words (the Spanish for black, if I'm not mistaken), would be used by white Americans as a sign that they respected black Americans as human beings, not as a derogatory term. America might also have been/would be more of an imperial power than it was in our timeline. Some evidence suggests that the Confederate leaders planned to create an empire in the New World. Were that the case, we would probably have quite a few more possessions, and quite a few more states. Latin America would probably be incorporated into the American sphere of influence, either through economic ties or direct American control. Castro's government, if it had ever been created, wouldn't have lasted long. The American Empire would be a very real thing, not just some idea or concept. And the government would be an entirely different animal. And lastly (for the sake of our purposes, of course, because there would be too many differences for me to begin to address here), state governments would have more power than they do in our America, and the federal government would be weaker. Lincoln's actions in strengthening the federal government during the war years had an enormous influence on the strength of the federal government. Similarly, it was out of respect of and desire for states' rights that many Southerners who were against slavery (Lee being the most notable case) threw their lot with the Confederate cause. It would be a very different America from the one we know today, at any rate. But it wouldn't be unlike the America of the past. And that isn't a good thing. So let's be thankful Lee's luck ran out at Gettysburg.
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