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HBO plans "Confederate", a series where the US South successfully seceded

 
 
 
One major difference, Germany was occupied by foreign powers who had overwhelming dominance.

Also, besides a small portion of strong abolitionists who had complete convictions about racial equality and justice, didn't most white Americans really not care about blacks at all? They cared about the stain of slavery, but once it was over they just moved on mentally.

What political leverage did the North have and what motivation to keep the south to do the right thing?

What was the best case scenario? Keep in mind westward expansion, industrialization and lots of new immigrants competing for attention.
 
lpetrich said:
He continues much like Berneta Haynes, asking why not these possibilities?

What if John Brown had succeeded? What if the Haitian Revolution had spread to the rest of the Americas? What if black soldiers had been enlisted at the onset of the Civil War? What if Native Americans had halted the advance of whites at the Mississippi?

John Brown? Presumably of  John Brown's raid on Harpers Ferry. He wanted to provoke a slave revolt, but he failed.

Black soldiers in the beginning of the Civil War? That would likely have required endorsing abolition of slavery from the beginning of the war, and President Lincoln didn't want to make enemies of Union states with slaves, like Maryland. I don't know if he was willing to take that risk at the beginning of the war.

The Haitian Revolution spreading? Presumably becoming a major slave revolt in the Southern states. It would have been hard for it to get very far without outside help, I think. Like Spain wanting to hurt an Anglo nation.

As to halting the advance of European conquerors and settlers at the Mississippi, that would have been hard without doing a lot of catching up in advance. I suspect that it would have been helped by domesticating buffalo some millennia earlier, as I've described here.
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But at the same time, isn't the very idea of the Confederacy winning also far-fetched? They lacked resources, after all - the vast majority of wealth was in chattel slavery. It was really just the slavers refusing to accept the inevitable.
 
I think that the more interesting Alternative History would be one where the Civil War was avoided. But as the industrial capacity of the north and the upper midwest increased, slavery would be laughable in comparison. So adding to the moral sins of it, the economic benefit would be very low. It would probably lead to the South offering to end slavery and the North demanding fair labor laws for the newly released slaves and many other concessions.

Ironically, labor conditions in the US industrials centers were very dangerous.

Also, no one posted this yet?

 
I have low confidence in this being good. This is a genre where sociological and psychological realism are critical. Besides all the complex political and economic realities that the show is likely to ignore, the already manufactured outrage about the very idea of the show means the writers and producers will be way to focused upon trying not to offend rather than focused on trying to create a plausible world needed for an alt-history show to be engaging. Not to mention HBO fearing pissing off the millions of subscribers who live in those former Confederate states.
 
Mumbles said:
lpetrich said:
He continues much like Berneta Haynes, asking why not these possibilities?

What if John Brown had succeeded? What if the Haitian Revolution had spread to the rest of the Americas? What if black soldiers had been enlisted at the onset of the Civil War? What if Native Americans had halted the advance of whites at the Mississippi? ...
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But at the same time, isn't the very idea of the Confederacy winning also far-fetched? They lacked resources, after all - the vast majority of wealth was in chattel slavery. It was really just the slavers refusing to accept the inevitable.
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I agree. I think that their most likely "victory" would have been the sort of victory that North Vietnam and Afghanistan had had against the US and the Soviet Union -- the North losing interest in continuing the war.

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repoman said:
I think that the more interesting Alternative History would be one where the Civil War was avoided. ...
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See if you can think of a plausible scenario where that happens.
 
Could the Civil War Have Been Avoided? | The Beacon -- I am not impressed.

I doubt that President Lincoln or most other Northern politicians would have wanted to endorse unilateral secession. If states can do whatever they want without the approval of other states, then what is the point of having a nation? Furthermore, it would weaken the US and make it vulnerable to outside intervention and other nations turning the US into economic colonies, with all the wealth going to those nations.

But if the states that wanted secession had proposed it to Congress, then it would have been a different story.
 
I believe the South was itching for war, despite their protests. The attack on Fort Sumter was just one in a series of provocations. If it hadn't produced the war they wanted, they would have done something else.

For example, invading the Southwest, which was always part of the plan. They were preparing for it before Sumter, but the invasion didn't get underway until afterwards. Probably they would have waited until a provocation succeeded so they could engage in their war of conquest while swearing that all they wanted was to be left alone.

This show sounds like shit. What the hell is the point of it? Slavery would have been rendered economically unviable when the cotton harvester was invented. (1944) Lincoln was prepared to offer the South a gradual repeal of slavery (to 1900!) if they surrendered in 1863. Do these guys know any of these things? Do they care? Is this anything besides indulging in very dark fantasies? If I want that, I can watch Westworld.
 
I agree. Southern-state politicians could have proposed secession in Congress, and if enough Northern-state politicians agreed, they could have had a peaceful secession. But they didn't.


I concede that there is a problem with this scenario of domestication of American buffalo / bison. Which animals got domesticated first in our timeline ( List of domesticated animals).

The first animal to be domesticated was the dog, descended from a now-extinct population of gray wolves in Eurasia, and domesticated before agriculture. The first domestic dogs were likely semi-wild, living off of our scraps and leftovers. "Village dogs" and dingoes likely live much like these early dogs. Domestic dogs spread to North and Central America, where some people developed some distinctive breeds like the  Chihuahua (dog) and the  Salish Wool Dog. The latter was a breed of dogs developed in the Pacific Northwest to have woolly hair, like how sheep were bred for such hair in Eurasia.


The next one was the goat, in the Middle East about 12,000 years ago, roughly when Middle Easterners started agriculture. From Bezoar Goat | World Land Trust, wild goats' body weights are (male) up to 90 kg, (female) up to 55 kg.

However, the  Aurochs was much bigger at 700 kg, and the  American bison at (male) 460 - 988 kg, (female) 360 - 544 kg -- very close. The aurochs was domesticated some 10,000 years ago in the Middle East, after Middle Easterners had domesticated not only goats, but also pigs and sheep. So starting with buffalo would have been like starting with aurochsen -- more difficult because of their size.
 
How about the peccary?

Dog->peccary->sheep->bison
 
Sarpedon said:
How about the peccary?

Dog->peccary->sheep->bison
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Except that peccaries live in central and south America and also southwest North America. They'd be poor candidates for domestication in the Mississippi Valley, though they might have been domesticated in Central America.
 
What if domestication starts somewhere else, and is introduced to the Mississippi civilization? As I said earlier, the Pueblo civilizations could have been good candidates for that sort of thing. They would have access to both the peccary and sheep.
 
Never heard of a peccary before. Learn something new yadda yadda yadda.
 
Sarpedon said:
What if domestication starts somewhere else, and is introduced to the Mississippi civilization? As I said earlier, the Pueblo civilizations could have been good candidates for that sort of thing. They would have access to both the peccary and sheep.
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Bighorn sheep? They prefer hilly and mountainous areas. But then again, so do most wild sheep and goats (Caprinae).

Peccaries? That's the northern end of their range. So it would more likely be Central Americans, I think. In South America, there are tapirs, a relative of horses and rhinos that converged on a piglike body form.

The mountain goat is another possibility, but it likes mountains.
 
The alternate history I am interested in is one in which Malcolm X and George Linciloln Rockwell cooperated (and were not murdered) and also the 1965 immigration act did not happen.
 
Virtually all domesticated animals have been brought far from their natural range. The only thing that matters is access to them to begin with. Once domesticated, changing the range is just a matter of breeding.


Sent from my iPad using Tapatalk
 
bilby said:
LordKiran said:
I'm not overly interested in 'alternative history' as a subject matter. To me it's the ugly step-sibling of speculative fiction. I just can't buy the core premises! To me, the confederacy winning is as laughable as the The Schlieffen plan actually working as intended.

Now if there was a show based on history's "What if?"s and confined them to their immediate historical contexts....
Click to expand...

Well it all comes down to the individual consumer and how much they are prepared to suspend disbelief. All fiction is to some extent implausible; I find that Turtledove in particular manages to conjure alternative history worlds which are not so jarringly implausible to me as to render them unentertaining, but that's likely in part a reflection of my ignorance of some of the salient details.

I recently was quite annoyed by a SciFi story I was reading*, in which our heroes end up building a base in the Cretaceous, to avoid leaving archaeological traces that might be found by their 21st century adversaries. The idea that they could have a maguffin that allowed them to move freely in time and space I found easy to accept; But the story was ruined for me when their bunker was described as being a partially buried concrete structure, difficult to see from a distance, because of the thick grass that had grown over it.

Grass? In the Cretaceous? Grasses didn't evolve until the last dinosaur had been dead for 30 million years! The way the scene was described made it clear that the author thought the grass was native, not something brought back by the time travelers. It really annoyed me, by taking me out of the story.

In the second book of the trilogy, he changes the description to say that the overgrowth is 'at first sight like grass, but different, with much thicker stems and tiny leaves', which I presume was a response to reader complaints about this faux pas. It was a trivial detail that was in no way required for the storyline or plot. But it was enough to significantly reduce my enjoyment of the tale (but not enough to stop me from buying book two when I finished book one)


*https://www.amazon.com.au/Extracted-Trilogy-Book-1-ebook/dp/B01HIKCA52
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Story sounds interesting what's the name of the story?
 
Lunawalk said:
bilby said:
LordKiran said:
I'm not overly interested in 'alternative history' as a subject matter. To me it's the ugly step-sibling of speculative fiction. I just can't buy the core premises! To me, the confederacy winning is as laughable as the The Schlieffen plan actually working as intended.

Now if there was a show based on history's "What if?"s and confined them to their immediate historical contexts....
Click to expand...

Well it all comes down to the individual consumer and how much they are prepared to suspend disbelief. All fiction is to some extent implausible; I find that Turtledove in particular manages to conjure alternative history worlds which are not so jarringly implausible to me as to render them unentertaining, but that's likely in part a reflection of my ignorance of some of the salient details.

I recently was quite annoyed by a SciFi story I was reading*, in which our heroes end up building a base in the Cretaceous, to avoid leaving archaeological traces that might be found by their 21st century adversaries. The idea that they could have a maguffin that allowed them to move freely in time and space I found easy to accept; But the story was ruined for me when their bunker was described as being a partially buried concrete structure, difficult to see from a distance, because of the thick grass that had grown over it.

Grass? In the Cretaceous? Grasses didn't evolve until the last dinosaur had been dead for 30 million years! The way the scene was described made it clear that the author thought the grass was native, not something brought back by the time travelers. It really annoyed me, by taking me out of the story.

In the second book of the trilogy, he changes the description to say that the overgrowth is 'at first sight like grass, but different, with much thicker stems and tiny leaves', which I presume was a response to reader complaints about this faux pas. It was a trivial detail that was in no way required for the storyline or plot. But it was enough to significantly reduce my enjoyment of the tale (but not enough to stop me from buying book two when I finished book one)


*https://www.amazon.com.au/Extracted-Trilogy-Book-1-ebook/dp/B01HIKCA52
Click to expand...
Story sounds interesting what's the name of the story?
Click to expand...

Extracted by R. R. Haywood.

There's a link to it on Amazon at the bottom of my post...
 
So is the Confederacy tv show dead? I haven't heard much about it after the initial backlash.
 
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