Minority Rights in a Victorious Confederacy?

[Delta Force]

I'm not so sure about enslaving Latinos or Catholic Irishmen.....but legalizing peonage for them might not be so far-fetched, especially in the more reactionary states, like S.C. and Mississippi.....

It historically happened in the South after the Civil War, but it wasn't based on ethnicity or religion and more on class. Poor people became sharecroppers.

The issue with the "one drop" rule is that one could end up with an endless series of "Puddnhead Wilson" type incidents across the South, and the realities of a litigious honor culture based on mastery would be, um, noisy...

I could see whites denouncing each other as "colored" right left and sideways to settle any number of old scores, with all the impact on civil society one would expect.

Make the Hatfields and McCoys look downright peaceable...

Best,

It could see the development of a South African style hierarchy, or alternatively the whole thing could be quashed when a prominent family or two discovers something inconvenient in their family history.

 

[TheYoungPretender]

My experience of human nature is that people and cultures who are utter shits following a defeat, will tend to be horrorshows when they get their hands on victory.

Essentially, an asshole is an asshole, a dysfunctional culture remains dysfunctional. The Confederate South was a society so psychopathically wedded, both ideologically, commercially and politically to racial superiority and oppression that they started a war over it. Having lost that war, they simply re-instituted oppression in any way they could. I don't think that winning would make them better people. It would just make them more confident and unrestrained in their brutality.

Well said. While the "Freedom movement" has been eager to take up the banner and be this generation's apologists for the Lost Cause(1), the facts remain the facts. The South of 1860 cannot be cabined in with the doubts that Jefferson and the other Founders had about; they were supremely confident in their racial supremacy, and viewed their position at the top of a slave aristocracy as not just divinely ordained, but as the natural order of their highly scientific 19th Century. They published papers on breeding human beings like animals, they defended their chattel slavery as the natural order of things.

Here's the thing though: you can't really call them backward. Their rationale for slavery had a good amount of (now dreadfully outdated) biology. Alexander Stephans Cornerstone speech, aside from its occasionally quoted bits on White supremacy, also had a good deal to say about the failings of any democracy that let just any mongrel vote; whereas of course the slave aristocracy was the pinnacle of society guiding the course, without any interference from their lessers.(2) So what we have here is a society with elites totally committed not only to chattel slavery but to an ideology of white supremacy behind.

In short, the OTL South's elites regularly corrupted every cultural stream that came their way to support their ideology. They embraced it with a great deal of vigor, and while every generations Lost Cause trys to airbrush it, a real enthusiasm and a tightly argued racial supremacy that was it own raison d'etre. There's a reason that immigrants came in through the North, went to the Mid-West (and often marched South again, from Iowa, Wisconsin, Minnesota, and Michigan in blue), and generally avoided the South. What says more is that less than practicing Jew who married a Christian and raised his children Christian is heralded as a sign of the South's tolerance; as much as the willingness of the South to grant commissions to its Cherokee slave-catchers.


(1) With some reason; after all, who was more free to get in touch with their inner Galt than an 1860 Georgia plantation owner? But I digress.

(2) The parallels with the first footnote go without saying...

 

[TFSmith121]

Yep - has sort of a "Darkness at Noon" vibe as well

like the Red Scare to the Nth degree

Yep - has sort of a "Darkness at Noon" vibe as well.

Imagine Stalinist purges crossed with the Hatfields-McCoy feud...

Best,

 

[TFSmith121]

Probably be more than "a family or two," though...

It could see the development of a South African style hierarchy, or alternatively the whole thing could be quashed when a prominent family or two discovers something inconvenient in their family history.

Probably be more than "a family or two," though...

There was a lot of doth protesting too much among whites in the south at times...

Best,

 

[usertron2020]

South Carolina is something of a special case, as it had an reactionary extremist streak to it for much of its early history. South Carolina provoked the first and second secession crises, the second of which of course led to the Civil War. It was also the last state to allow direct election of presidential electors, sometime in the 1860s after the Civil War.

South Carolina was the only state in the Union that had a Black majority. I don't remember if the ratio was 3:2 or 2:1, but it was high. If Santo Domingo and Nat Turner was on the minds of every White Southerner, then White South Carolinians had such visions in their nightmares. I don't know this for a fact, but it wouldn't surprise me at all if SC was the first state in the Antebellum South to make legally mandatory that all adult White males carry firearms at all times when traveling.

In some cases being a smaller minority group leads to less discrimination. The United States around the time of the Civil Rights movement might not be the best comparison, but I've heard that racism wasn't really the typical North and South divide that people often think of. Some people have said that they experienced worse racism in the North than in the South, mostly in areas with large minority populations, while it wasn't that bad in smaller towns where they might be only ethnic or religious minority.

If by the Civil Rights Movement you mean the 1950s and 60s, you didn't see public lynchings in the North using carefully posed photographs with everyone facing the camera so that there would be no doubt as to who participated in the murders. That was the South's way of saying that the Law had no place for the White Man exercising his Aryan Rights over the Black Man.

Murder is a state charge without a statute of limitations. Meaning that they were fully confident that if they lived to be a hundred they would never face justice for their crimes. They were right. No real civil rights laws in those days. About the only thing Eisenhower's anemic Civil Rights Law of 1956 accomplished (even only partly, with Ike still president and J. Edgar Hoover as head of the FBI) was to enable the US government to at least investigate such crimes.

Then you consider that the Confederacy is going to be focused on keeping down a large portion of its population that is enslaved or (later on) free but threatening to their continued dominance of the situation, and some of the racism might be relaxed. When you look at the history of colonies and even South Africa, the ruling elite (ironically in the Confederacy, African-Americans might be the majority) tends to expand membership to other groups, even some members of the majority group that is being oppressed. It might go from the WASP elite to the elite in general, then WASPs in general, and then perhaps out to ethnic and religious minorities in general.

The South African Whites are a bad example. The Afrikaners were overwhelmingly outnumbered by Black Africans, "Coloureds" of partial African descent, and Asian Indians. You also have to factor in among South African Whites a 35% British descended population who favored some kind of accommodation with the non-Whites of South Africa and enjoyed the same political voting rights as the Afrikaners while lacking their pathology about what they called "kaffirs".

Even in South Carolina you wouldn't have faced as bad a situation for SC Whites as the Afrikaners did.

I don't see too much reenslavement or enslavement occurring, because that could kick off something akin to the South African embargoes decades earlier. Enslavement of Catholics and white people certainly won't win the Confederacy favor among the European or Union public.

I just want to interject this: My own total rejection of the TL-191 Turtledovian argument of the CSA's longterm survival against a hostile USA, with the agrarian South repeatedly whipping (or at least surviving against) the industrialized and eventually even mechanized North using just "Southern Guts And Steel".

So talk of the Confederacy lasting well into the 20th century is interesting from an intellectual POV, but IMVHO such an idea is one step removed from Hitler conquering the whole of the British Empire.

Probably be more than "a family or two," though...

There was a lot of doth protesting too much among whites in the south at times...

Best,

Accusations of One Drop violations lasted far far beyond the ACW.

Babe Ruth was constantly heckled by unfriendly crowds for having "N----- Lips".

In one ball game, a player was accused of being "part-N-----" by a heckler in the stands. This, in a time that was extremely racist, the early 1900s, and made against a player, Ty Cobb, considered to be supremely racist even by the standards of the day! Cobb proceeded to jump into the stands, and started beating up the fan. When nearby fans pointed out to Cobb that the man he was pummeling mercilessly had no hands, Cobb angrily shot back: "That's right, and after what he called me if he had no feet I'd be kicking him too!". And he wore sharpened steel cleats.

Ty Cobb was easily the most hated man in baseball in his day, a true shit of a human being whose signature style was to slide into base with those steel cleats raised to try to spike (and possibly cripple) the player at the base or home plate. This was no secret to anyone, but being Ty Cobb in an era that preceded even Babe Ruth he got away with it.

When the baseball audience at the stadium realized what was happening, and what Cobb had been "accused of", they started cheering him.

EDIT: Based on what DNA analysis is telling us today, with your average White American (of long term US ancestry) having some 15% Subsaharan ancestry, I'd say that the whole "One Drop Rule" would be headed for destruction eventually anyway. Even in an USM world where the CSA not only wins the ACW but is somehow allowed to survive to the present day. IMO most people who have claimed to have "a little Indian in them", even if they were not lying themselves, probably had an ancestor or two who "Jumped the Fence".

 

[TFSmith121]

Nice post...there's also the whole issue of passing;

Nice post...there's also the whole issue of passing;

Showboat was not entirely fictional.

Best,

 

[Demothenes]

Considering some of the Southern leaders were talking about enslaving poor whites, I doubt anyone else would get a better deal.

 

[Space Oddity]

Ty Cobb was easily the most hated man in baseball in his day, a true shit of a human being whose signature style was to slide into base with those steel cleats raised to try to spike (and possibly cripple) the player at the base or home plate.

To be fair to Ty Cobb here--and God help me, I never thought I'd be writing those words--the whole reason he started doing that was because those basemen were very, VERY fond of positioning themselves to stop you as violently as possible, and hurtling the ball--if they had it--at you so as to not only get an out, but to make sure you required medical attention and couldn't return to play for a while. If ever.

Early 20th century baseball was NASTY. Cobb may have been one of its nastiest, but he was hardly the wild bull rampaging through a world of gentlemen that he sometimes gets depicted as.

 

[David T]

Considering some of the Southern leaders were talking about enslaving poor whites, I doubt anyone else would get a better deal.

If you're thinking of George Fitzhugh, though the Republicans loved to quote him ("The principle of slavery is in itself right, and does not depend on difference of complexion") as representative of the South, he was in fact an eccentric, and his views on that subject were very much his own.

 

[TFSmith121]

Not that eccentric, actually - he just said it aloud:

If you're thinking of George Fitzhugh, though the Republicans loved to quote him ("The principle of slavery is in itself right, and does not depend on difference of complexion") as representative of the South, he was in fact an eccentric, and his views on that subject were very much his own.

Not that eccentric, actually - he just said it aloud:

See:

http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.co...-faces-of-slavery/?_php=true&_type=blogs&_r=0

The term "High Yaller" existed for a reason.

Best,

 

[TFSmith121]

There's a reason Christy Mathewson stood out...

To be fair to Ty Cobb here--and God help me, I never thought I'd be writing those words--the whole reason he started doing that was because those basemen were very, VERY fond of positioning themselves to stop you as violently as possible, and hurtling the ball--if they had it--at you so as to not only get an out, but to make sure you required medical attention and couldn't return to play for a while. If ever.

Early 20th century baseball was NASTY. Cobb may have been one of its nastiest, but he was hardly the wild bull rampaging through a world of gentlemen that he sometimes gets depicted as.

There's a reason Christy Mathewson stood out...

Best,

 

[Delta Force]

I just want to interject this: My own total rejection of the TL-191 Turtledovian argument of the CSA's longterm survival against a hostile USA, with the agrarian South repeatedly whipping (or at least surviving against) the industrialized and eventually even mechanized North using just "Southern Guts And Steel".

So talk of the Confederacy lasting well into the 20th century is interesting from an intellectual POV, but IMVHO such an idea is one step removed from Hitler conquering the whole of the British Empire.

People have been predicting the demise of the DPRK for decades now, and it hasn't happened yet. If the Confederacy does well on its own, it would have no reason to return to the United States, and would only go back through war. If it turned into a disaster, as it likely would, America's desire to see the Confederacy return would be tempered by the realization that massive rebuilding would have to occur.

 

[usertron2020]

Nice post...there's also the whole issue of passing;

Showboat was not entirely fictional.

Best,

Showboat?

To be fair to Ty Cobb here--(1) and God help me, I never thought I'd be writing those words--the whole reason he started doing that was because those basemen were very, VERY fond of positioning themselves to stop you as violently as possible, and hurtling the ball--if they had it--at you so as to not only get an out, but to make sure you required medical attention and couldn't return to play for a while. If ever. (2)

Early 20th century baseball was NASTY. Cobb may have been one of its nastiest, but he was hardly the wild bull rampaging through a world of gentlemen that he sometimes gets depicted as. (3)

1) Banned, on General Principles.

2) I know that Ty Cobb played most if not all of his career in the Dead Ball Era, but did he play so far back in time that hitting a runner with a thrown ball was considered an out? I know that that was true in the 19th century, but I didn't think it survived to 1900.

3) Maybe because he was so personally nasty, lived so much longer than his contemporaries, and drew tremendous jealousy due to his great wealth? For those who don't know, he got in on the ground floor and became both the national spokesman of (and major investor in) a tiny soft drink company from his native Georgia called...Coca-Cola

If you're thinking of George Fitzhugh, though the Republicans loved to quote him ("The principle of slavery is in itself right, and does not depend on difference of complexion") as representative of the South, he was in fact an eccentric, and his views on that subject were very much his own.

But it didn't get him tarred and feathered, as would happen to a Southern Abolitionist.

There's a reason Christy Mathewson stood out...

Best,

People have been predicting the demise of the DPRK for decades now, and it hasn't happened yet. If the Confederacy does well on its own, it would have no reason to return to the United States, and would only go back through war. If it turned into a disaster, as it likely would, America's desire to see the Confederacy return would be tempered by the realization that massive rebuilding would have to occur.

The USA needed the egress of the Mississippi. The South would have been taken back if it were the Sahara Desert.

 

[TFSmith121]

The good ship Cotton Palace

Showboat?.

The good ship Cotton Palace; Edna Ferber's novel, notably the Julie Dozier subplot.

Fairly daring for 1926...

Best,

 

[sloreck]

You would not have seen enslavement of whites, this would run 100% contrary to the racial basis of slavery. There were significant segments of the southern political elite who were considering re-establishment of property qualifications for the franchise so that only the "right elements" would vote. Since even the poorest, least educated white would be far above the highest black on the economic and social ladders, it was expected a restricted franchise would be tolerated well. IMO maybe yes maybe not.

No doubt that free blacks would be history - re-enslaved or expelled. Given that free blacks from the CSA might not be too welcome in the USA, getting to Canada might be their only shot. OTL restrictions on blacks such as not being taught to read, not allowing blacks to purchase freedom of family members, or even the right to be free became more severe and prevalent as one got closer to 1861. A victorious CSA would see its philosophy vindicated and things could get worse, not better.

 

[Fiver]

If you're thinking of George Fitzhugh, though the Republicans loved to quote him ("The principle of slavery is in itself right, and does not depend on difference of complexion") as representative of the South, he was in fact an eccentric, and his views on that subject were very much his own.

George Fitzhugh's view might not have been mainstream in the slaveholding south, but he was far from a lone voice crying in the wilderness.

"His Sociology profited much from the wholehearted endorsement and several notices it received from George Frederick Holmes, foremost reviewer in the South. De Bow and other Southern editors gave it space and frequent notice, and the first printing of the book was almost sold out in a few months. Fitzhugh complained of "the affectation of silent contempt" by the Northern press, and such attention as he got in that quarter was in the main hostile. Among Southern writers who revealed the influence of the Sociology, whether admitted or not, Professor Wish mentions Edmund Ruffin (who did acknowledge the impact of Fitzhugh's "novel and profound views"), Albert Taylor Bledsoe, William J. Grayson, James D. B. De Bow, George D. Armstrong, and Thornton Stringfellow. The response to Cannibals All! was also flattering in the South, though some of its critics in that quarter were troubled by its concession to socialism and by its carelessness and inconsistencies. Even De Bow thought the author "a little fond of paradoxes, a little inclined to run a theory into extremes, and a little impractical." But on the whole the Southern reception was enthusiastic. "

 

[TFSmith121]

Sloreck - again, there WAS enslavement of whites;

You would not have seen enslavement of whites, this would run 100% contrary to the racial basis of slavery. There were significant segments of the southern political elite who were considering re-establishment of property qualifications for the franchise so that only the "right elements" would vote. Since even the poorest, least educated white would be far above the highest black on the economic and social ladders, it was expected a restricted franchise would be tolerated well. IMO maybe yes maybe not.

No doubt that free blacks would be history - re-enslaved or expelled. Given that free blacks from the CSA might not be too welcome in the USA, getting to Canada might be their only shot. OTL restrictions on blacks such as not being taught to read, not allowing blacks to purchase freedom of family members, or even the right to be free became more severe and prevalent as one got closer to 1861. A victorious CSA would see its philosophy vindicated and things could get worse, not better.

Sloreck - again, there WAS enslavement of whites; the reality of the one drop rule was just that, as witness the NYT piece linked above, and quite a bit more besides...

Add in the pathologies of an honor society based on mastery and the liklihood of "denunciation" becoming a practice in civil disputes, and the realities of sharecropping, and it hardly seems such would only become more prevalent in a victorious CSA.

And Fiver has linked to some of Fitzhugh's fellow travelers...

Best,

 

[DG Valdron]

I think that the point was that some whites could be legally redefined into being black, based on things like the 'one drop rule'

 

[Sulemain]

What minority rights? The Confederacy was explicitly anti-rights.

 

[sloreck]

I agree that there were "white" slaves, however they weren't "white", they were "black" legally (one drop of blood rule). I was specifically saying that you would not see "legal whites" as chattel slaves - as sharecroppers, always in debt miners or other forms of debt peonage or social oppression sure. You might even see indebted whites becoming indentured for limited time periods.

If you have whites as chattel slaves, with the same status as blacks, you'll inevitably have whites and blacks in close proximity with no "barriers" between them. This will lead to the ultimate nightmare of southern whites, especially southern white men - black men having sex with white women!

Philosophically the slave system, and the racial component of it, was based on the idea that blacks and whites were distinct racially, and that blacks were inherently inferior/subservient and no amount of "civilizing" or education could close the gap between them and whites. If whites can be made permanent chattel slaves (as opposed to temporary indenture or servitude as a criminal punishment) then the bright line between black and white disappears. For the system to be sustainable you cannot have exceptions to the rule that "any white>any black". The any drop of blood rule took this to the extreme to proclaim that even a drop of "black blood" would pollute and render inferior "white blood".