Sequel de Mayo (Cinco de Mayo, Vol. II)

[Darth_Kiryan]

If he’s still born in this TL, he might go by the name Leslie King. Perhaps there will be a Confederate President named William Blythe.

There's a no OTL presidents rule, though, so even if Bill Blythe manages to become a notable Arkansas pol he won't make it to the presidency. While Leslie Lynch King being either Speaker or a little-known congressman who sponsors a bill to transition the US to the metric system seems more like TTL's roll.

FYI: william Blythe as in Bill Clinton's father, is born in texas in 1918 in OTL, to a farming family. His own father was also named William Blythe


That's a decent butterfly there with a now independent Texas and the mini-war between Texas and the CSA.

So William Blythe Jr may not even go to Alabama at all....if he's alive.

 

[theINQUISITOR]

And to end up, we have Elihu Root, who could fit the definition of (proto) technocratic president due to his long experience in government and the good government mantra of the Liberals. From there to imagine the Root administration could have pushed for a formalization of this de facto situation with a federal law, I don't think there is much.

I like this idea a lot. Metrication would be a very visible and obvious legacy of an administration that most people otherwise agree was pretty bad. It could be sort of a parallel to how one of the main reasons Carter is remembered today is for deregulating the beer industry and kick-starting the US microbrew scene

 

[Reisen Storm]

Metrication would be a very visible and obvious legacy of an administration that most people otherwise agree was pretty bad.

No wonder the democrats wins back the presidency and rolls that back.

 

[JustInThePhilippines]

mini-war between Texas and the CSA.

I don't see that happening in the near future, although, it's possible that Texas will be given the OTL Taiwan treatment by the confederates (Unless America forces them) and someone like Long will try to do that for resources and territory.

 

[JustInThePhilippines]

FYI: william Blythe as in Bill Clinton's father

Does the No OTL President rule apply only to US? Even if so, the author comment's make it clear that he's wants otherwise obscure and forgotten figures of OTL to be the center.

Although, I can see Bill becoming a figure in Independent Texas.

 

[Darth_Kiryan]

Does the No OTL President rule apply only to US? Even if so, the author comment's make it clear that he's wants otherwise obscure and forgotten figures of OTL to be the center.

Although, I can see Bill becoming a figure in Independent Texas.

he tries to avoid OTL PMs and Presidents being in the same role. Thats why you so far have different Emperor's of Germany (Frederich III to Henrich), Russia (Michael), France (Napoleon V), Italy, China and even the UK (even though George V is still King, he started about 20 years earlier than OTL. But after him is different. )

You also have completely different PMs of the UK than OTL.

Thats also why Roosevelt and Hearst swapped roles. Possibly having one of TR's kids as President instead. Herbert Hoover is dead back in Peiking. Thats why Woodrow Wilson is a History author instead of the cliche POTCS

Also bare in mind, Al Smith is one of the next three Presidents after Root. And we know we have Pershing as well. Both not successful in OTL, or didn't at all.

You also have LBJ's father as the Founding Father of Independent Texas.
I mean frankly I can also see LBJ as a President or PM of Texas. Bill in a different environment could possibly make him the same position.

But you'd have to totally check with @KingSweden24

 

[galileo-034]

I did lol at the idea of the CSA being left-hand drive out of spite, though. Haha

Well, see it like that:

Somewhere in the CSA, a US army convoy is stopped on a road by a single man standing on its path, a confederate sheriff from the look. The sheriff's car is parked on the side of the road... on the wrong side. Something is off.​

The American soldiers are very nervous, everyone has a rifle or a pistol ready to fire; all those ambushes... ​

Then, an American officer and his escort step out of the armored car leading the convoy.​

- What are you doing?! Get off my road !!​

- I'm sorry sir, I don't mean no disrespect to an officer of the United States army like you. It's just, you see, we have a new law that requires driving on the left side of the road. You understand, we would not want accidents to happen with all these people driving left now, would you?​

- Wh... What? What law? When?​

- The governor signed it this very morning, sir.​

- Are you kidding ...​

In the distance, cars are seen approaching on the same lane... ​

The railroads are under the US army regulations and jurisdiction for now, but what of the roads? If they have not been explicitly put under their jurisdiction, such a loophole could enable the Confederates to annoy these 'damned right-hand driving Yankees' at every turn.
That's silly, but I read an anecdot about the German occupation of northern France in the Great War, where it was required to take off your hat in respect when in presence of Germans... and people just stopped wearing hats.
Silly spiting so, taken to a whole new level.
May be part of a wider strategy of making American occupation every bit as embarassing, annoying and frustrating as can be, like the Germans did when France and Belgium occupied the Ruhr in 1923.

I don’t think metric would be something Democrats would bother running against, but there may be some time where the federal government is purely metric by law but individual states take a while to get there.

I like this idea a lot. Metrication would be a very visible and obvious legacy of an administration that most people otherwise agree was pretty bad. It could be sort of a parallel to how one of the main reasons Carter is remembered today is for deregulating the beer industry and kick-starting the US microbrew scene

The Democrats don't have to be bothered opposing it.
But my point is more about the initial reaction from the public after. Precisely because it would be one of the most visible measures by the Root administration, it would be resented as technocratic overreach, even though metrication has been simmering for a couple decades now.
Said otherwise, if the metrication law was passed a few years later, during the 1920s, under the Democrats, noone would bother, and most people would say it makes great sense, it's a natural evolution. But make it pass under Root, and the same people would say, perhaps Roosevelt papers would title it like : "what's he doing bothering us with his meters, that damn Liberal technocratic snob?!!".

 

[naraht]

Between the fact that any Kentucky members of the Confederate House are going to be from the small unconquered area of Kentucky in the Southeast *and* the possibility that Texas may continue to have votes in the Confederate Legislature from those who fled Texas when the RoT left, Democracy in the CSA is going to have even more issues than just actually allow Negros to vote.

Hmm. at what point is a separate Negro Legislature proposed (aka OTL south africa)...

 

[galileo-034]

Just to be sure, how close is the canal to the border with Costa Rica? I'm not sure if it does or not follow the border on some length at least.
It might be, or not important. IOTL, both the Panama and Suez canals were well inside their respective nation's territory, except the period of Sinai's occupation by Israel. If Costa Rica is close to it, it stands to reason the canal would have a huge impact here too, economically as politically.

 

[Devoid]

Just to be sure, how close is the canal to the border with Costa Rica? I'm not sure if it does or not follow the border on some length at least.
It might be, or not important. IOTL, both the Panama and Suez canals were well inside their respective nation's territory, except the period of Sinai's occupation by Israel. If Costa Rica is close to it, it stands to reason the canal would have a huge impact here too, economically as politically.

The canal's Caribbean exit is straight-up in Costa Rica, and based on the arrangement it is generally considered the "German" section of the canal. So the question there is mostly one of how much does Germany force Costa Rica's pols to bend the knee? It's stated Costa Rica is German-aligned, but what exactly is Germany's policy towards Costa Rica? I'm assuming not as bad the US over Nicaragua, but the lack of a canal zone and control by a consortium does necessitate a higher level of government cooperation by Costa Rica for Germany than in Panama for the US IRL - which could drive Germany to still be a bit more controlling, versus the fact Costa Rica is an entire ocean away and Germany arguably has bigger fish to fry (though they will definitely still want their vassal, in any case).

Plus the Costa Rican borders are disputed - someone earlier in the thread pointed out Nicaragua and Costa Rica had border disputes until after the PoD, and Costa Rica's border with Panama/Colombia was also disputed IRL until we fought a war about it in the 1920's. Easy to see how this can cause problems with US-aligned Nicaragua or French-aligned Colombia (potential CEW spark?).

 

[KingSweden24]

I like this idea a lot. Metrication would be a very visible and obvious legacy of an administration that most people otherwise agree was pretty bad. It could be sort of a parallel to how one of the main reasons Carter is remembered today is for deregulating the beer industry and kick-starting the US microbrew scene

Huh, learn something new every day. Had no idea Carter had a role in that.

Makes me like him even more! Lol.

I don't see that happening in the near future, although, it's possible that Texas will be given the OTL Taiwan treatment by the confederates (Unless America forces them) and someone like Long will try to do that for resources and territory.

Probably not a full Taiwan situation but definitely a bilateral relations sticking point for some time

Does the No OTL President rule apply only to US? Even if so, the author comment's make it clear that he's wants otherwise obscure and forgotten figures of OTL to be the center.

Although, I can see Bill becoming a figure in Independent Texas.

he tries to avoid OTL PMs and Presidents being in the same role. Thats why you so far have different Emperor's of Germany (Frederich III to Henrich), Russia (Michael), France (Napoleon V), Italy, China and even the UK (even though George V is still King, he started about 20 years earlier than OTL. But after him is different. )

You also have completely different PMs of the UK than OTL.

Thats also why Roosevelt and Hearst swapped roles. Possibly having one of TR's kids as President instead. Herbert Hoover is dead back in Peiking. Thats why Woodrow Wilson is a History author instead of the cliche POTCS

Also bare in mind, Al Smith is one of the next three Presidents after Root. And we know we have Pershing as well. Both not successful in OTL, or didn't at all.

You also have LBJ's father as the Founding Father of Independent Texas.
I mean frankly I can also see LBJ as a President or PM of Texas. Bill in a different environment could possibly make him the same position.

But you'd have to totally check with @KingSweden24

@Darth_Kiryan more or less outlines it (though Italy has had the same kings, just Umberto got iced a few years earlier). That being said, which countries I apply it to are a bit arbitrary. You'll notice some countries have the same PMs as OTL, for instance, if it makes it easier for my research and my writing. As an American, it is easier for me to swap people around in the Anglosphere at will than in, say, Nicaragua (hence Zelaya having a similar, if boosted career); the No OTL rule is more of an ambition than a hard and fast rule, though in some countries (USA, CSA, Canada and UK) I apply it fastidiously.

Well, see it like that:

Somewhere in the CSA, a US army convoy is stopped on a road by a single man standing on its path, a confederate sheriff from the look. The sheriff's car is parked on the side of the road... on the wrong side. Something is off.​

The American soldiers are very nervous, everyone has a rifle or a pistol ready to fire; all those ambushes... ​

Then, an American officer and his escort step out of the armored car leading the convoy.​

- What are you doing?! Get off my road !!​

- I'm sorry sir, I don't mean no disrespect to an officer of the United States army like you. It's just, you see, we have a new law that requires driving on the left side of the road. You understand, we would not want accidents to happen with all these people driving left now, would you?​

- Wh... What? What law? When?​

- The governor signed it this very morning, sir.​

- Are you kidding ...​

In the distance, cars are seen approaching on the same lane... ​

The railroads are under the US army regulations and jurisdiction for now, but what of the roads? If they have not been explicitly put under their jurisdiction, such a loophole could enable the Confederates to annoy these 'damned right-hand driving Yankees' at every turn.
That's silly, but I read an anecdot about the German occupation of northern France in the Great War, where it was required to take off your hat in respect when in presence of Germans... and people just stopped wearing hats.
Silly spiting so, taken to a whole new level.
May be part of a wider strategy of making American occupation every bit as embarassing, annoying and frustrating as can be, like the Germans did when France and Belgium occupied the Ruhr in 1923.



The Democrats don't have to be bothered opposing it.
But my point is more about the initial reaction from the public after. Precisely because it would be one of the most visible measures by the Root administration, it would be resented as technocratic overreach, even though metrication has been simmering for a couple decades now.
Said otherwise, if the metrication law was passed a few years later, during the 1920s, under the Democrats, noone would bother, and most people would say it makes great sense, it's a natural evolution. But make it pass under Root, and the same people would say, perhaps Roosevelt papers would title it like : "what's he doing bothering us with his meters, that damn Liberal technocratic snob?!!".

Ah, yes, I see what you mean.

Between the fact that any Kentucky members of the Confederate House are going to be from the small unconquered area of Kentucky in the Southeast *and* the possibility that Texas may continue to have votes in the Confederate Legislature from those who fled Texas when the RoT left, Democracy in the CSA is going to have even more issues than just actually allow Negros to vote.

Hmm. at what point is a separate Negro Legislature proposed (aka OTL south africa)...

The conditions of the Black South Africans being natives to the land with their own chieftain structures (which apartheid took advantage of in a variety of ways) creates a wholly different paradigm than the freed chattel slaves of the CSA.

SA comparisons are thematic rather than apples to apples, after all.

Just to be sure, how close is the canal to the border with Costa Rica? I'm not sure if it does or not follow the border on some length at least.
It might be, or not important. IOTL, both the Panama and Suez canals were well inside their respective nation's territory, except the period of Sinai's occupation by Israel. If Costa Rica is close to it, it stands to reason the canal would have a huge impact here too, economically as politically.

The canal's Caribbean exit is straight-up in Costa Rica, and based on the arrangement it is generally considered the "German" section of the canal. So the question there is mostly one of how much does Germany force Costa Rica's pols to bend the knee? It's stated Costa Rica is German-aligned, but what exactly is Germany's policy towards Costa Rica? I'm assuming not as bad the US over Nicaragua, but the lack of a canal zone and control by a consortium does necessitate a higher level of government cooperation by Costa Rica for Germany than in Panama for the US IRL - which could drive Germany to still be a bit more controlling, versus the fact Costa Rica is an entire ocean away and Germany arguably has bigger fish to fry (though they will definitely still want their vassal, in any case).

Plus the Costa Rican borders are disputed - someone earlier in the thread pointed out Nicaragua and Costa Rica had border disputes until after the PoD, and Costa Rica's border with Panama/Colombia was also disputed IRL until we fought a war about it in the 1920's. Easy to see how this can cause problems with US-aligned Nicaragua or French-aligned Colombia (potential CEW spark?).

@Devoid has it right - the San Juan River between Nic and Costa Rica forms a most of the eastern leg of the Canal, with all the clusterfuck that entails, and Costa Rica is from where Germany enforces its own claims on the Canal. So Costa Rica, along with the ABC Islands Berlin bought from the Dutch, is essentially the German outpost in the new world along with its close ally/satrap in Venezuela. This is... not great for the French position in Colombia, to say the least.

One can see how this creates future issues between CR and Nic if the latter would have any, shall we say, Nasserist ideas around the Canal, or perhaps the opposite - it could even act as a boon for them if CR/Germany are onboard with knocking the US down a peg...

 

[Devoid]

One can see how this creates future issues between CR and Nic if the latter would have any, shall we say, Nasserist ideas around the Canal, or perhaps the opposite - it could even act as a boon for them if CR/Germany are onboard with knocking the US down a peg...

Easy to see a Suez Crisis-style situation where Nicaragua is Egypt, the US is the UK/France, and Germany is the US, with Costa Rica having the option of being an Israel analogue or something completely different.

Nicaragua: *overthrows the Zelayas in 1969 and nationalizes the canal a la Nasser*
US: Wait no that's illegal. We're invading.
Germany: No you aren't.
US: Costa Rica can you give me a casus belli?
Costa Rica, totally not being puppeted by Germany: ...no.
US: ...fuck.

 

[KingSweden24]

Easy to see a Suez Crisis-style situation where Nicaragua is Egypt, the US is the UK/France, and Germany is the US, with Costa Rica having the option of being an Israel analogue or something completely different.

Nicaragua: *overthrows the Zelayas in 1969 and nationalizes the canal a la Nasser*
US: Wait no that's illegal. We're invading.
Germany: No you aren't.
US: Costa Rica can you give me a casus belli?
Costa Rica, totally not being puppeted by Germany: ...no.
US: ...fuck.

I like where your mind is at

 

[HonestAbe1809]

I’d say that the Free Commonwealth of Kentucky is more likely to be the one in the position of the Taiwan analogue than Texas. Texas is too important to have the Confederates loudly reject dealing with them. Kentucky is much more likely, especially with the Confederacy’s racist sentiments making the loss of most of a state worse in popular opinion.

 

[JustInThePhilippines]

I’d say that the Free Commonwealth of Kentucky is more likely to be the one in the position of the Taiwan analogue than Texas.

Also True, but texas I think is more valuable here.

 

[KingSweden24]

"...no official British ambassador in Austin, but rather an emissary from the British Colonial Office in Jamaica by the name of Sir William Horton Smythe-Johnson. Smythe-Johnson was a career civil servant with no diplomatic experience but his mission to Texas was nonetheless the equivalent, because the Foreign Office declined to send a formal emissary as that would "imply" recognition, and that was impossible for Her Majesty's Government, already extraordinarily unpopular over a mediocre British economy and the Irish conflict, as British public opinion was firmly against slavery and the British government had just acceded to American conditions of not arriving at a peace with the Confederacy sans abolition.

It thus became that Texas, though recognized now by Mexico, Colombia, Venezuela, and a host of other smaller Latin countries including the American ally Nicaragua (to Philadelphia's chagrin), was still unrecognized as a formally independent and sovereign polity by not only the United States but all of the European states that mattered, which quietly consolidated behind Britain's position. How much of this was the doing of the Yankees was unclear; evidence leans in favor of light pressure from Lodge's State Department, but not overwhelming, and it is generally accepted by most scholars that Britain's right-wing government took the lead on making Texan independence conditional on abolition much in the way that the United States did.

This was an enormous headache for the Texan administration, because the internal splits on abolition were starting to threaten the cohesiveness of the Republican Party as elections loomed in September for the State House. Gore and Garner shared one priority - to consolidate the control of their party over the machinery of government, and to see the United States evacuated from Texan soil before voters went to the polls. While there was no particularly organized opposition yet, the situation in Texas was highly fluid, and many sympathizers of the old Ferguson machine were willing to protest the Gore administration with their ballot rather than with rifles, such as many in the Piney Woods were doing. This slow-burn insurgency was already enough of a problem for Gore, with the Texas Republican Army successfully keeping it at bay in the east but failing to sufficiently crush it, and attacks launched from northern and southwestern Louisiana meant that Texas could not respond without triggering a broader response from powerful forces in the New Orleans area who had one of the most cohesive standing forces in the Confederate States.

Garner, hailing from arid South Texas and having built his political career with the support of hacendados who typically did not use slave labor, was ambivalent about slavery itself but understood the deep emotional ties many Texans had to it; Texas had after all revolted against central governments over the question both in 1836 and 1861, and it was a key pillar of the state's heritage and culture. That being said, tens of thousands of Texan slaves had been evacuated by their owners eastwards, especially as the plantation economy of East Texas had collapsed in the last year of the war and the rebellion had advanced out of Laredo, meaning that the economic power base most tied to slavery's perpetuation had largely vanished, making abolition now purely a question of how sympathetic the government in Austin could be to freedmen and potential freedmen without inviting a backlash from a white majority that often did not personally own slaves, or if they did only one or two at most, but which viewed abolition as a Yankee project.

This position was made worse for the Speaker due to Gore's staunch support of abolitionism and Sheppard's vehement opposition to it. As such, a compromise would need to be crafted, and Smythe-Johnson proposed one: London would be willing to formally recognize the Second Republic of Texas if it were to pass a "Law of Free Birth", as had been done in Brazil, as well as a guarantee that freedmen once freed could not be "re-enslaved." Garner liked the idea and viewed it as half a loaf, a stance with which Sheppard reluctantly agreed. Gore, not wanting to be caught isolated and be made a lame duck over the next two years of his Presidency, begrudgingly acquiesced shortly thereafter.

Thus, the Free Birth Act of 1917 was passed by the Congress of Texas by surprisingly narrow margins in each house, retroactively declaring that any person born after January 1, 1915 was born free, and then subsequently passed the Freedmen Guarantee of 1917, which made re-enslavement of "any person" illegal, while declining to define what exactly re-enslavement was. In this sense, it was a preview of the abolition acts to come across the Confederacy, which would have loopholes wide enough to sail a dreadnought through, but it satisfied for the time being British and thus European public opinion and a swell of recognitions flowed in over the spring and, thus, diplomatic emissaries to Austin.

This, predictably, put the United States in a bind. It had no formal peace treaty with Texas but per Mount Vernon was now at peace with the Confederacy, meaning that it was occupying in Philadelphia's eyes Confederate clay that simply did not recognize the formal authority of the Patton government in Charlotte. How precisely to resolve this was unclear, though American soldiers evacuated from Dallas in late April towards railheads at Texarkana and Wichita Falls, signalling their disinterest in a lengthy, enforced occupation even as their soldiers in Amarillo, Lubbock and El Paso remained where they were.

Garner and Gore celebrated this remarkable turn of events and, indeed, were rewarded for it in September as the Republicans slightly increased their supermajorities in both Houses; the question of how to bilaterally deal with the United States and the Confederate States, however, were not about to go away anytime soon..."

- Republic Reborn

(Special thanks to those who gave me the idea for how to square the circle a bit with Texas in the immediate postwar on the abolition question, even if broader matters remain unresolved)

 

[SultanArda]

"...no official British ambassador in Austin, but rather an emissary from the British Colonial Office in Jamaica by the name of Sir William Horton Smythe-Johnson. Smythe-Johnson was a career civil servant with no diplomatic experience but his mission to Texas was nonetheless the equivalent, because the Foreign Office declined to send a formal emissary as that would "imply" recognition, and that was impossible for Her Majesty's Government, already extraordinarily unpopular over a mediocre British economy and the Irish conflict, as British public opinion was firmly against slavery and the British government had just acceded to American conditions of not arriving at a peace with the Confederacy sans abolition.

It thus became that Texas, though recognized now by Mexico, Colombia, Venezuela, and a host of other smaller Latin countries including the American ally Nicaragua (to Philadelphia's chagrin), was still unrecognized as a formally independent and sovereign polity by not only the United States but all of the European states that mattered, which quietly consolidated behind Britain's position. How much of this was the doing of the Yankees was unclear; evidence leans in favor of light pressure from Lodge's State Department, but not overwhelming, and it is generally accepted by most scholars that Britain's right-wing government took the lead on making Texan independence conditional on abolition much in the way that the United States did.

This was an enormous headache for the Texan administration, because the internal splits on abolition were starting to threaten the cohesiveness of the Republican Party as elections loomed in September for the State House. Gore and Garner shared one priority - to consolidate the control of their party over the machinery of government, and to see the United States evacuated from Texan soil before voters went to the polls. While there was no particularly organized opposition yet, the situation in Texas was highly fluid, and many sympathizers of the old Ferguson machine were willing to protest the Gore administration with their ballot rather than with rifles, such as many in the Piney Woods were doing. This slow-burn insurgency was already enough of a problem for Gore, with the Texas Republican Army successfully keeping it at bay in the east but failing to sufficiently crush it, and attacks launched from northern and southwestern Louisiana meant that Texas could not respond without triggering a broader response from powerful forces in the New Orleans area who had one of the most cohesive standing forces in the Confederate States.

Garner, hailing from arid South Texas and having built his political career with the support of hacendados who typically did not use slave labor, was ambivalent about slavery itself but understood the deep emotional ties many Texans had to it; Texas had after all revolted against central governments over the question both in 1836 and 1861, and it was a key pillar of the state's heritage and culture. That being said, tens of thousands of Texan slaves had been evacuated by their owners eastwards, especially as the plantation economy of East Texas had collapsed in the last year of the war and the rebellion had advanced out of Laredo, meaning that the economic power base most tied to slavery's perpetuation had largely vanished, making abolition now purely a question of how sympathetic the government in Austin could be to freedmen and potential freedmen without inviting a backlash from a white majority that often did not personally own slaves, or if they did only one or two at most, but which viewed abolition as a Yankee project.

This position was made worse for the Speaker due to Gore's staunch support of abolitionism and Sheppard's vehement opposition to it. As such, a compromise would need to be crafted, and Smythe-Johnson proposed one: London would be willing to formally recognize the Second Republic of Texas if it were to pass a "Law of Free Birth", as had been done in Brazil, as well as a guarantee that freedmen once freed could not be "re-enslaved." Garner liked the idea and viewed it as half a loaf, a stance with which Sheppard reluctantly agreed. Gore, not wanting to be caught isolated and be made a lame duck over the next two years of his Presidency, begrudgingly acquiesced shortly thereafter.

Thus, the Free Birth Act of 1917 was passed by the Congress of Texas by surprisingly narrow margins in each house, retroactively declaring that any person born after January 1, 1915 was born free, and then subsequently passed the Freedmen Guarantee of 1917, which made re-enslavement of "any person" illegal, while declining to define what exactly re-enslavement was. In this sense, it was a preview of the abolition acts to come across the Confederacy, which would have loopholes wide enough to sail a dreadnought through, but it satisfied for the time being British and thus European public opinion and a swell of recognitions flowed in over the spring and, thus, diplomatic emissaries to Austin.

This, predictably, put the United States in a bind. It had no formal peace treaty with Texas but per Mount Vernon was now at peace with the Confederacy, meaning that it was occupying in Philadelphia's eyes Confederate clay that simply did not recognize the formal authority of the Patton government in Charlotte. How precisely to resolve this was unclear, though American soldiers evacuated from Dallas in late April towards railheads at Texarkana and Wichita Falls, signalling their disinterest in a lengthy, enforced occupation even as their soldiers in Amarillo, Lubbock and El Paso remained where they were.

Garner and Gore celebrated this remarkable turn of events and, indeed, were rewarded for it in September as the Republicans slightly increased their supermajorities in both Houses; the question of how to bilaterally deal with the United States and the Confederate States, however, were not about to go away anytime soon..."

- Republic Reborn

(Special thanks to those who gave me the idea for how to square the circle a bit with Texas in the immediate postwar on the abolition question, even if broader matters remain unresolved)

So, from what I see, Texas pretty much decided to go for half-" kick the can for few more years" and half-Brazilian-style abolition with even more vagueness to it.
I can already see the remaining slave-owning plantation owners give their slaves "wages", which are probably promptly taken away as rent and food expenditures, to claim that they are workers, with many more loopholes to come.

 

[KingSweden24]

"...since the bulk of Kentucky fell under the United States' control in mid-1914, there was perhaps no figure whom the U.S. Army had been as interested in capturing or, preferably, killing as Nathan Bedford Forrest II, who quickly surpassed his ancestor in infamy through his command of the Irregulars Division, which by the end of the war was not so much a division as a loose network of fireteams spread across the Midlands and central Alabama who conducted acts of sabotage, ambush, and assassination against not only Yankees but freedmen and even suspected collaborators. Their abilities to dynamite bridges and railroad tracks had dwindled as the war continued but their numbers grew, as did their access to considerably cheaper rifles, pistols and bullets. As the Confederate Army declined as a cohesive force, the intentionally decentralized Irregulars swelled to replace them as the closest thing to state authority that existed in certain parts of Dixie, interwoven with the increasingly brutal Home Guard that suspected everyone as a deserter and carried out a horrifying campaign of not only intimidation but rape, torture and murder against the civilian population.

As such, the postwar Irregulars and Home Guard formed the nucleus of a massive paramilitary active in almost all states but with no central authority to control them and, unlike the regular infantrymen who were so shell-shocked from the horrors of frontline combat that they had simply lost the will to fight, were convinced that the "Holy Confederacy" had failed to repel the Yankee because, in the words of one anonymous commander, "we had insufficiently matched their savagery." It was simply taken for granted amongst the ex-Irregulars that the Yankees mutilated white women and encouraged freedmen to do the same, and that massacres - that nobody actually ever saw evidence of - were happening across the Confederacy simply because that was what they believed was necessary to justify their worldview.

The Treaty of Mount Vernon thus offended the opinions of the Irregulars more than anybody else in the Confederacy, and it was such ex-Irregulars and Home Guardsmen who were often most involved in the Bloody Wednesday Riots and similar actions. News of the treaty's passage "under duress" and the emerging debate over how to proceed with the "Gunbarrel Amendments" broke the dam, and Forrest - who had been careful to control his movements for years, aware that Yankee assassins were looking for him eagerly - emerged in public near Anniston, Alabama on April 10, 1917 [1] to denounce the Treaty's passage but also go one step further.

The Anniston Declaration, also known as the Appeal of April 10th, marked an important chapter in the postwar Confederacy as it was an all-out call to arms by Forrest. The Declaration included a document which Forrest signed in the presence of several of his commanders and asked be photographed and then published which called upon "all Confederates of ability - man, woman and child alike - to with their whole spirit and body embark in a total and unyielding resistance to Yankee barbarism and the threat of the abolition." In the speech he gave, Forrest was considerably less legalistic. Waving the signed Declaration over his head, Forrest announced, "I call forth today The Great Resistance, the most potent rising in human history of free men, to drive from our lands the Yankee through immeasurable bloodshed, and to never yield to the nigger!" With those words, the Red Summer of 1917 had effectively begun.

Forrest was fortunate in that he had commanded the Irregulars for three years and was regarded as nearly a god amongst men by his subordinates, and this translated to his ability to rapidly reorganize his vast force into what he titled "the National Resistance Organization," as the Confederate Army, in his view, no longer represented the people through its deposition of Vardaman and acquiescence to Mount Vernon. The Anniston Declaration formed the NRO's founding document, and proclaimed that it would "resist the Yankee occupation in all areas by force, politics and commerce," opening the door to it serving as an alternative government in certain parts of the Confederacy as opposed to the now vehemently-unpopular Congress run by what was left of the Bourbon and Tillmanite movements.

While the National Resistance served as the formal underpinning of the mass rejection by White Dixie of what Mount Vernon represented, in reality it was much more of an incoherent force than its detractors and proponents alike made it out to be. Forrest was wily and good at avoiding being caught but he had exaggerated his own capabilities as a guerilla commander frequently and his notoriety was as much myth as it was based on actual results. Rather, what was so important about not just his new organization but also the Appeal of April 10th was that it inspired the dozens of small, localist paramilitaries across the Confederacy that his men were famously bad at incorporating under their wings, paramilitaries that quickly took on the colloquial and romantic name "hillboys" who formed the much more lethal and successful auxiliary component of the Great Resistance and before long chafed just as much at Forrest's personalist project as they did the Patton-Martin government in Charlotte that they dismissed as Yankee stooges, thus maintaining operational independence.

There was not one 'Great Resistance' of White Dixie rejecting peace and abolition - there were several of them, all in different states, with different leaders, agendas and campaigns, and that would only exacerbate the bloodshed to come as the Red Summer began..."

- A Freedom Bought With Blood: Emancipation and the Postwar Confederacy

[1] This date chosen as an homage to "The Death of Russia"

 

[Gman]

How many people are going to die over the next several years in the CSA in this orgy of free-for-all, paramilitary violence?

 

[Gman]

Also, I'm curious as to whether integralism has spread beyond France at this point, seeing as Action Francaise has effectively created it and has seen a decent degree of success, especially relative to OTL.?
They got 73 seats in the 1915 TTL French election, but never got more than a few seats OTL and did not have an organised party/parliamentary group to my knowledge.