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

[naraht]

So the US is willing to support a 2nd ROT *without* a requirement that it give up Slavery...


The other question is whether the US troops going into DFW are 1) conducting "Civilized" war or 2) whatever rules the war is being fought in the east. It also means that the support for the 2ROT is stronger among the Tejanos would would *tend* to be the Texans least likely to own slaves. (If soldiers tipping their hats to the women of Dallas is helpful to splitting off Texas, they'll do it. )

I don't think the British/Canadians would be viewed by the Americans as overstepping their bounds to be curious, a 2ROT would border four nations (US,CS,MX,IT) and the next closest nations are Spain (western tip of Cuba) and Britain (Either Bahamas, Jamaica or Belize depending on how you measure)

I still think Mexico may be violating the letter of the treaty signed with the US by keeping troops in the Confederacy, but every Confederate that ends up fighting the Mexicans is one that Philadelphia doesn't have to worry about.

Yeah, basically this boils down to the Americans going "Declare independence and you *won't* get the post-war treatment that your fellow States in the Confederacy will get"
Also, is this the first posting set in early 1916?

 

[DanMcCollum]

So the US is willing to support a 2nd ROT *without* a requirement that it give up Slavery...


The other question is whether the US troops going into DFW are 1) conducting "Civilized" war or 2) whatever rules the war is being fought in the east. It also means that the support for the 2ROT is stronger among the Tejanos would would *tend* to be the Texans least likely to own slaves. (If soldiers tipping their hats to the women of Dallas is helpful to splitting off Texas, they'll do it. )

I don't think the British/Canadians would be viewed by the Americans as overstepping their bounds to be curious, a 2ROT would border four nations (US,CS,MX,IT) and the next closest nations are Spain (western tip of Cuba) and Britain (Either Bahamas, Jamaica or Belize depending on how you measure)

I still think Mexico may be violating the letter of the treaty signed with the US by keeping troops in the Confederacy, but every Confederate that ends up fighting the Mexicans is one that Philadelphia doesn't have to worry about.

Yeah, basically this boils down to the Americans going "Declare independence and you *won't* get the post-war treatment that your fellow States in the Confederacy will get"
Also, is this the first posting set in early 1916?

I suspect that the Union will come back with an offer and saying "Okay, you waited too long. Luckily, we are REALLY sympatheic, and we get it - it was a big step to take - but now you've got to abolish slavery too. But don't worry, you're still not going to have to pay a lot of reperations. And we suspect that Pa Ferguson's folks are going to be FAR more upset about losing their slaves than you are, anyway."

I actually wonder if the Mexicans step in and actually support the SRoT if that would make them effectively allies of the Union. It makes sense considering theyd want revenge against their former allies for attacking their retreating soldiers, and it might be a good bit of leverage Mexico can use to help negotiate down the, already, pretty good terms they got from the Union somewhere down the way. (Hey, we helped you out - even though we didn't have to)

 

[naraht]

I suspect that the Union will come back with an offer and saying "Okay, you waited too long. Luckily, we are REALLY sympatheic, and we get it - it was a big step to take - but now you've got to abolish slavery too. But don't worry, you're still not going to have to pay a lot of reperations. And we suspect that Pa Ferguson's folks are going to be FAR more upset about losing their slaves than you are, anyway."

I actually wonder if the Mexicans step in and actually support the SRoT if that would make them effectively allies of the Union. It makes sense considering theyd want revenge against their former allies for attacking their retreating soldiers, and it might be a good bit of leverage Mexico can use to help negotiate down the, already, pretty good terms they got from the Union somewhere down the way. (Hey, we helped you out - even though we didn't have to)

As long as the 2ROT gets out while it is still militarily advantageous to the US, I think the offer as written is still on the table. *But*, with the Confederacy broken and with the Brazilians probably headed for close to Civil War (with one side probably having getting rid of slavery as simply a way to screw their opposition), my guess is that Philadelphia and Mexico City (with the help of London?) can economically squeeze 2ROT into getting rid of Slavery.

As for Mexican support of 2ROT, why not? A buffer state from the next 20 years of Chaos that will be the Confederacy is a good thing. And the idea of a war memorial in El Paso being established within the next 15 years and having both the Mexicans and Americans sending high ranking contingents to the opening is *quite* realistic (as opposed to Hilton Head)

On a *completely* different note, Has the author used 2ROT or SROT consistently (or at all)?

Randy

 

[KingSweden24]

1916 Chinese national elections​

Senate of the Republic of China (274 Seats)

Jinbudang (Progressive Party) - 149 (+7)
Guomindang (Nationalist Party) - 97 Seats (-5)
Multi-Party Candidates - 21 (+1)
Independents - 7 (-3)

House of Representatives of the Republic of China (596 Seats)

JBD - 283 Seats (-27)
GMD - 251 Seats (+17)
Multi-Party - 36 Seats (+1)
Independents - 26 Seats (+9)

---

"...violence even greater than three years prior, but in all the vote was generally still regarded as about as clean as an election in China could be. The polarization of South China against the central and northern parts of the country continued, with the Guomindang dominating in Guangdong, Guangshi, Yunnan and Fujian to the point that they often carried between seventy and eighty percent of seats, particularly in municipalities and villages with large Christian populations, and also took a comfortable majority in Shanghai despite the machinations of the patronage operation of Foreign Minister Wu Tingfang and Prime Minister Tang [Shaoyi]. Outside of that, though, the Jinbudang's resurgence caught many observers off-guard. In Hubei, it won a decisive supermajority of seats, and across the "burned belt" from Anhui to the Great Wall it's campaign professing stability, tradition and conservatism won out. Two very different Chinas were emerging politically, and the 1916 elections - which Sun had until the final week expected to be a landslide Guomindang triumph that would allow a Third Republic to be founded on the ashes of the Second - bore that out.

Historians debate exactly what happened. It is true that in the more volatile House of Representatives, the Guomindang did well (powered by its Bible Belt victories) [1] and reduced the government to a plurality, albeit a relatively strong one, but the two main parties went the opposite direction in the province-dependent Senate. Song Chiao-jen's advocacy of building up a Guomindang structure in the provinces rather than trying to run a national campaign as Sun had suggested seemed to have won out, and the conservative faction of the party came out of the elections looking vindicated and Sun's star as a political force, rather than an intellectual one, appeared to be fading.

Considering the Guomindang's single-party status in the Third Republic and thus its control over how history is interpreted, however, this GMD-centric view of 1916 is perhaps missing a different story - the ability of the much-maligned Jinbudang to re-sell itself to the limited Chinese electorate. Since China had last gone to the polls in January 1913, President Li and Prime Minister Tang had secured the Wu-Sazonov Treaty to end the war along the Wall after taking back the symbolic city of Peking and ended the insurgency in Kansu and elsewhere in the West by coming to an accommodation with the Mas. Since then, central and northern China had seen her most peaceful eighteen months since the Tiananmen Putsch. The radicalism of Guangdong and Fujian were luxuries afforded to a cosmopolitan, Westernizing South that had gone untouched by the wars of 1900-13; to the "burned belt" provinces north of the Huai He, Li had delivered what he promised, which was an end to bloodshed, disease and famine.

A number of other things had of course gone right for Li as well. While not a talented politician either as an operator, philosopher or orator, Li nonetheless had governed in a way that ruffled few feathers and made his conservative Cabinet satisfied. Tang, and his mentor Wu, dominated most discussions but it was clear that the intellectual force in the Assembly was Liang and Xu. Concerns that the "Yellow Caesar" Wang Zhanyuan would stage a putsch had been set aside when Li agreed to appoint Wang as Governor of Hubei, allowing him his own power base in Hankow where Wang may or may not have helped suppress the Guomindang vote. Wang, it turned out, was perhaps not as ambitions as Western observers had suspected, and the "Yellow Caesar" considered the Guomindang a greater threat than anything else and was loathe to do anything to destabilize the Second Republic and thrust Sun Yat-sen into power.

As such, despite looking like a government adrift just a year earlier, the Jinbudang was able to appeal to traditionalist bureaucrats and some more conservative merchants [2] to cobble together a victory once again, but even in the surprise results of 1916, there were already signs that Song's sophisticated political operation might not allow such a rabbit be pulled from a hat again..."

- An Unfinished Revolution: The Second Chinese Republic, 1912-1924

[1] Keep an eye on this term in relation to China
[2] This is a major fault line in China thanks to Confucianism

 

[Mayukh]

The Second Chinese Republic, 1912-1924

With Elections being Free and Fair and People genuinly having almost no greivances against Jinbudang, it seems like the rise of the Third Republic will be less October Revolution and more Weimar Germany.
The only problem that we now can now see that would make KMT ruse to power is a May 4th movement style movement with gripe on why Japan took Formosa and Hainan from French after CEW and not China. Also the alt 25 point might also come to okay, although they havent been accepted, the very fact that they have been demanded would seem to the Nationalists as China's weakness in world stage leading them to support the KMT into electoral victory.

 

[Curtain Jerker]

As someone who knows almost nothing on China before 1937, I appreciate all these names as springboards for me to learn more history about the place and time.

 

[DanMcCollum]

As someone who knows almost nothing on China before 1937, I appreciate all these names as springboards for me to learn more history about the place and time.

Completely agree. China is one of those blind spots for me with history - especially modern Chinese history. So I'm really enjoying learning more about some of the big players. It reminds me of what I used to say back in college - that I actually learn a LOT of history by reading AH

 

[KingSweden24]

@KingSweden24
Completely random question. But what is Jimmy Carter doing in the future, if you don't mind me asking? That is if you have anything planned? Do we stay in the navy, or do we end up being President of the Confederate States - just with a different political personality. I mean, cutthroat Jimmy Carter might be interesting...

You're assuming Jimmy Carter's dad isn't dying in a trench somewhere.

fair Point.

I have an idea of where I could fit Peanut in, and he was way more cutthroat as a state politician than he ever got credit for (see: his campaign against Carl Sanders), but as you say it’s a while until I have to decide if he was conceived or not

So the US is willing to support a 2nd ROT *without* a requirement that it give up Slavery...


The other question is whether the US troops going into DFW are 1) conducting "Civilized" war or 2) whatever rules the war is being fought in the east. It also means that the support for the 2ROT is stronger among the Tejanos would would *tend* to be the Texans least likely to own slaves. (If soldiers tipping their hats to the women of Dallas is helpful to splitting off Texas, they'll do it. )

I don't think the British/Canadians would be viewed by the Americans as overstepping their bounds to be curious, a 2ROT would border four nations (US,CS,MX,IT) and the next closest nations are Spain (western tip of Cuba) and Britain (Either Bahamas, Jamaica or Belize depending on how you measure)

I still think Mexico may be violating the letter of the treaty signed with the US by keeping troops in the Confederacy, but every Confederate that ends up fighting the Mexicans is one that Philadelphia doesn't have to worry about.

Yeah, basically this boils down to the Americans going "Declare independence and you *won't* get the post-war treatment that your fellow States in the Confederacy will get"
Also, is this the first posting set in early 1916?

bear in mind the Tejano patrones are a big part of Garner’s base and not huge fans of the eastern plantation/lumber bloc, that’s part of the dynamic

I suspect that the Union will come back with an offer and saying "Okay, you waited too long. Luckily, we are REALLY sympatheic, and we get it - it was a big step to take - but now you've got to abolish slavery too. But don't worry, you're still not going to have to pay a lot of reperations. And we suspect that Pa Ferguson's folks are going to be FAR more upset about losing their slaves than you are, anyway."

I actually wonder if the Mexicans step in and actually support the SRoT if that would make them effectively allies of the Union. It makes sense considering theyd want revenge against their former allies for attacking their retreating soldiers, and it might be a good bit of leverage Mexico can use to help negotiate down the, already, pretty good terms they got from the Union somewhere down the way. (Hey, we helped you out - even though we didn't have to)

Effectively? Absolutely, at least in Confederate eyes. Reyes needs way more control over northern Mexico to make that work, though.

With Elections being Free and Fair and People genuinly having almost no greivances against Jinbudang, it seems like the rise of the Third Republic will be less October Revolution and more Weimar Germany.
The only problem that we now can now see that would make KMT ruse to power is a May 4th movement style movement with gripe on why Japan took Formosa and Hainan from French after CEW and not China. Also the alt 25 point might also come to okay, although they havent been accepted, the very fact that they have been demanded would seem to the Nationalists as China's weakness in world stage leading them to support the KMT into electoral victory.

There’s definitely plenty of land mines ahead for the JBD, that’s for sure, but no there’s definitely no October 1917 style collapse awaiting them

As someone who knows almost nothing on China before 1937, I appreciate all these names as springboards for me to learn more history about the place and time.

1911-28 is the especially batshit period of Chinese history I encourage everyone to read about (and the period we’re covering most intensely here with its myriad players)

Completely agree. China is one of those blind spots for me with history - especially modern Chinese history. So I'm really enjoying learning more about some of the big players. It reminds me of what I used to say back in college - that I actually learn a LOT of history by reading AH

I learn most of my history researching for this TL 😂

 

[naraht]

Both Mexico and the US have a bit of difficulty exerting pressure in Texas between the destruction of Northern Mexico by the Americans and the fact that the Americans have to go *through* the IT to get to any of the major cities in Texas. Both can be handled though.

Honestly, China is doing better than I expected given the clues that it would by the 1980s end up as a collection of competing Narco(Opium)-States.
Feels like we've gotten to the point where any Texan who speaks Spanish Fluently supports the 2ROT...

 

[Mayukh]

clues that it would by the 1980s end up as a collection of competing Narco(Opium)-States.

Less Fracture into Narco (Opium ) States than more or less have Mexican Drugs Wars under PRI(KMT).

 

[traveller76]

Less Fracture into Narco (Opium ) States than more or less have Mexican Drugs Wars under PRI(KMT).

As long as the local government receives a cut the opium plantations will be left alone. Or the local government and military may be the owner of the plantations.

 

[KingSweden24]

Less Fracture into Narco (Opium ) States than more or less have Mexican Drugs Wars under PRI(KMT).

Exactly

As long as the local government receives a cut the opium plantations will be left alone. Or the local government and military may be the owner of the plantations.

This guy Yunnans

 

[naraht]

Exactly

This guy Yunnans

So Yunnan province is the standard, not the exception.

 

[KingSweden24]

So Yunnan province is the standard, not the exception.

Idk if I'd go that far, but it's certainly something more of a guide than a niche, and there's plenty of "spillover" across both internal and external borders...

 

[naraht]

Idk if I'd go that far, but it's certainly something more of a guide than a niche, and there's plenty of "spillover" across both internal and external borders...

So less specifically to Yunnan, and more that the Golden Triangle will spread farther...

 

[KingSweden24]

So less specifically to Yunnan, and more that the Golden Triangle will spread farther...

Exactly

 

[KingSweden24]

TRIGGER WARNING​

"...levels of denial about how bad conditions were actually getting. Miserable as they may have been in cold trenches, especially the men huddled together in the frigid "Red Snow" around Chattanooga, Yankee soldiers received fresh and warm bread every day, soup with beef, chicken and vegetables, and when on leave on the Eastern Front had Baltimore and Philadelphia to visit for a week. Across the no man's land that separated the armies was a bleaker picture - skinny, emaciated Confederate soldiers eating bread composed mostly of sawdust and soup that was often little more than broth and whatever the cooks could find on hand that day, and they were rarely if ever granted leave for more than a few days, and then demanded to stay proximate, out of concern from the upper ranks that they would desert and go home. Dixie's forces were hungrier, more exhausted, and less respected by their superiors than the enemy, and as the war entered its final year it was beginning to become glaringly obvious.

But, at least, the command economy imposed by the Confederate War Department starting in early 1915 and dominated by the logistics-obsessed Ordnance chief John Taliaferro saw to it that the Confederate Army actually had food. If the dark days of the Lean Winter of 1914-15 had not already impressed upon Confederate policymakers the dire conditions in the countryside, the Hunger Winter of 1915-16 ended any such pretensions. The year before, at least, the Confederacy enjoyed open trade through a variety of ports with the outside world, but after Hilton Head and Florida Straits the blockade had tightened like a vice and no food got in or out of Confederate Gulf ports in particular. While the Confederacy had always enjoyed ample, high-quality farmland for agriculture, many plantations were still growing large quantities of cotton or other cash crops (though at a reduced level compared to the antebellum years) out of some misguided belief that, sooner or later, the markets for cotton would recover and pent-up demand would reimburse them after several hard years. The Army requisitioned tens of thousands of pounds of food per day, meaning that after a mediocre harvest in late 1915 there was barely anything left for the civilians in charge of growing it.

Compounding problems was the importation of slaves into factories to do the work that white laborers would have done prior to the war thanks to extreme shortages, thus leaving farmland even less sufficiently worked than it had already, and the conditions that these slaves were subjected to in the increasingly strained factories of central Alabama, Georgia and the Carolinas were the stuff of horror films. An estimated one in six bonded men who were sent to the factories or pit mines died from abuse, exhaustion or attacks by white labor uneasy about its work; crematoria were set up on many factory grounds in late 1916 to burn the corpses of those who had simply collapsed and expired on the job. Race and food riots plagued multiple cities across the Confederate industrial belt, most famously in Macon, Georgia on February 2nd, 1916, to the point that in February 1916 the Army internally circulated a "semi-secret" memorandum effectively questioning the security of the Presidential transition due by the 22nd when Ellison Smith would hand power over to James Vardaman.

But most slaves, being an investment and significant outlay of capital by their owners, were decently fed, at least compared to the yeomanry of the rural Confederacy, which in the Hunger Winter essentially titled into near-anarchy. A British diplomat who toured the Appalachian foothills of North Carolina described conditions as "pre-industrial" in a note back to Britain that inspired the British government to attempt to sponsor Red Cross humanitarian aid for civilians. Horses, despite their value, were slaughtered for meat, and famed Confederate writer William Faulkner, having lost a leg at Nashville and recuperating at home in Mississippi, recalled gangs of children wandering the woods searching for squirrels, rats and even cats to kill and bring home for at least a morsel of meat. Prices of all goods spiked as wartime scarcity created a thriving black-market economy, and the informal, totally unregulated Home Guard either participated in it and killed rivals or took the law into their own hands and violently lynched smugglers alongside accused deserters, who were seldom if ever given a chance to explain and sometimes included soldiers on leave. Anywhere between a hundred and fifty to two hundred thousand civilians, more than quadruple the number of the winter before, starved or froze to death in the Confederacy during those dark months, and spring offered little to no respite from the horrors of the slow-moving final collapse of Dixie ahead of the armistice. [1]

The government was largely inured to these problems; despite his base coming from the yeomanry, Vardaman haughtily dismissed those complaining of hunger as simply insufficiently motivated to fight for the Confederacy, despite increasingly alarmed missives from the War Department and various governors describing what was actually happening on the ground. The government had commandeered the production side of the Confederate economy but financed it exclusively with bonds predicated on victory; unlike the United States, where the income tax’s original base rate had been doubled in the space of two years from fifteen to thirty percent despite the reservations of the Hughes administration (which had ironically campaigned on maintaining the base tax rate at fifteen percent in perpetuity) [2] in order to finance the war, and even then the United States left the conflict in the end with a huge load of new debt to be serviced. The Confederacy had not even levied an income tax at all, and European banks were starting to ask very pointedly where, exactly, Richmond expected to scrounge together the money to keep paying for their campaigns. Vardaman, to be sure, was open to such a tax, but his new Bourbon allies in Congress were not, and the fragile finances of Dixie thus started to come unglued along with its war machine and civilian infrastructure as the Hunger Winter delivered a body blow from which it could not recover..."

- Total Mobilization: The Economics of the Great American War

[1] We've arrived at the Full Cold Mountain
[2] It's enormously funny to me Hughes has basically had to backtrack on every campaign promise he made thanks to the war

 

[Curtain Jerker]

​

Across the no man's land that separated the armies was a bleaker picture - skinny, emaciated Confederate soldiers eating bread composed mostly of sawdust and soup that was often little more than broth and whatever the cooks could find on hand that day, and they were rarely if ever granted leave for more than a few days, and then demanded to stay proximate, out of concern from the upper ranks that they would desert and go home. Dixie's forces were hungrier, more exhausted, and less respected by their superiors than the enemy, and as the war entered its final year it was beginning to become glaringly obvious.

I see we've reached full "autumn of 1918 in the German trenches."

​

A British diplomat who toured the Appalachian foothills of North Carolina described conditions as "pre-industrial" in a note back to Britain that inspired the British government to attempt to sponsor Red Cross humanitarian aid for civilians. Horses, despite their value, were slaughtered for meat, and famed Confederate writer William Faulkner, having lost a leg at Nashville and recuperating at home in Mississippi, recalled gangs of children wandering the woods searching for squirrels, rats and even cats to kill and bring home for at least a morsel of meat.

Holy shit, when the British National government of Hugh Cecil is looking at you and saying "man, we gotta help out!" you know you are in a pathetic situation. These guys aren't exactly bleeding hearts or anything close. Also, glad to see Faulkner make it. Always been meaning to get around to his stuff.

​

[2] It's enormously funny to me Hughes has basically had to backtrack on every campaign promise he made thanks to the war

I mean, sure, "funny" is one word, but Hughes's campaign in 1912 was essentially "vote for me, I'm not Hearst!" and he made a killing on telling audiences exactly what they wanted to hear, "often tailoring his message to a conservative or progressive audience depending on who he was speaking to." Plus, he had already started the flip-flopping before the guns fired, as "Hughes himself became infamous for doing such as his defending his passage of limits on working hours or the country's first worker's compensation law to be found constitutional by having the state pay for it out of the general revenues but suggesting that Congress should have no role to do the same."

So trying to pin down what he actually thinks vs what he says (do we take him "seriously but not literally" or "literally but not seriously" lol) is a bit of a fools errand.

 

[Dragonboy]

Great chapter as always!

 

[KingSweden24]

Great chapter as always!

Thank you!

I see we've reached full "autumn of 1918 in the German trenches."


Holy shit, when the British National government of Hugh Cecil is looking at you and saying "man, we gotta help out!" you know you are in a pathetic situation. These guys aren't exactly bleeding hearts or anything close. Also, glad to see Faulkner make it. Always been meaning to get around to his stuff.


I mean, sure, "funny" is one word, but Hughes's campaign in 1912 was essentially "vote for me, I'm not Hearst!" and he made a killing on telling audiences exactly what they wanted to hear, "often tailoring his message to a conservative or progressive audience depending on who he was speaking to." Plus, he had already started the flip-flopping before the guns fired, as "Hughes himself became infamous for doing such as his defending his passage of limits on working hours or the country's first worker's compensation law to be found constitutional by having the state pay for it out of the general revenues but suggesting that Congress should have no role to do the same."

So trying to pin down what he actually thinks vs what he says (do we take him "seriously but not literally" or "literally but not seriously" lol) is a bit of a fools errand.

Mmm fair fair.

Yeah we’re rapidly into All Quiet territory here (another grim, formative piece of my thinking on late stage CSA alongside Cold Mountain). Bear in mind, too, that 1916 is when the Confederacy will stand alone for the first time…