I had this vague idea for a "Confederacy survives to become a dystopic failed state and eventually collapse" timeline that I've been gnawing on for a while. Obviously the only way to have a Confederate "victory" is to have the intervention of France and Britain in the Civil War, but fundamentally there is a hard deadline in how long that can remain viable before the Confederate-friendly elites are overwhelmed by the full contours of how the Civil War has changed everything and how the general public becomes increasingly militant in their solidarity and mass organization against slavery. Thus this alternate Civil War has a hard cap of like maximum two years and change before even Gladstone's ideas of a "humanitarian" intervention and an armistice to save all those poor slaveowners from a "Haitian servile insurrection" (i.e. a race war started by all those savages thirsty for white blood... yes they actually thought that was a believable sell). The immediate problem with this scenario is that when our actual Civil War started France had used the opportunity to leap into in an imperialist quagmire invading Mexico and correspondingly lost a great deal of diplomatic and military capital in the disastrous venture and (
extremely temporarily) discredited the idea of an European coalition protecting free trade and the laws of nations by sending gunboats wherever they pleased.
Thus any European pushed truce and quasi-colonial arbitration between the Union and Confederacy would only be possible in a
delayed Civil War, so that with a still, barely, united America Napoleon III never has the idle hands to make his Mexican devil's play. Plus this would put the response of the British government in the hands of something like the Russell ministry and "my father literally owned slaves" Gladstone for those critical couple years. Backtracking from how we want the Confederacy to be saving by Anglo-French interference how then can the outbreak of war be delayed? The actual beginning of the war proper was something that came as a surprise to many and was seemingly willed into existence by fate, regardless of all the countless moments various "conditional" unionists and moderate secessionists seemed like they would derail secession entirely and work out a final eleventh hour compromise with the lame duck Congress and the 1861 Peace Conference and just missed a solution again and again. In a way you could look at the opening confusion of the secession crisis in the same frame as the serial ball-dropping by all of European diplomacy that allowed WW1 to happen.
It seems to me that as events played out OTL you had
just enough hollowing out of the "peace and stability at all costs" centrists in favor of increasingly incompatible ideas of what democracy and liberty meant, that yet another stifling abolition-rejecting compromise could not be created. Logically then, if you had something approaching the seriousness of the secession crisis earlier before the American political classes ran out of ways to put out fires, then you might have had a er, "success", along the lines of the
Crittenden Compromise and/or the
Corwin Amendment, thus delaying full Civil War until like the aftermath of the 1864 elections. So how do you get an "oh shit South Carolina actually did it" moment in a truncated premature 1857-58 secession crisis? After all, in the start of Buchanan's term the United States were if not great, then at least spiraling down slow enough that people could convince themselves that this would all be just a little turbulence.
To my mind the best way to build some momentum to an early crisis would be to first swing the pendulum the other way. The best way to do that I think would be to have
William Rufus King never catch tuberculosis, for despite the romantic image there is no calm and dignified arrangement of affairs and it is only a very short time before your constant choking need for respites and sojourns to regions with "better airs" make you totally unable to really exert yourself in a high-intensity field like politics. With Buchanan's life partner instead able to fully participate in the arena and take up his long-awaited position as Vice-President, his brand of pro-Southern agreeability and civility and someone who MLK might say
'prefers negative peace that is the absence of tension to the positive peace which is the presence of justice' might just be the lid to put on this pot to get it
really boiling. If the veteran President pro tempore of the Senate and lifelong Alabamian planter is able to tamper down on a toxic Congressional environment in which things like the Caning of Charles Sumner would arise and generally force Abolitionists, and occasional Fire-Eaters, to make less waves (thus pissing everyone off and likely destroying his career) then some of the triggers for increasing radicalization might be moved up to some years later. With King taking on some of the heat for things like terribly unpopular Kansas-Nebraska Act and maybe something like a less inflammatory version of the Ostend Manifesto he's able to walk Pierre Soule back on like Buchanan (who was only Southern in spirit) never could, my thought was that he would end up being a scapegoat for America's sins and thus partially distract everyone from the growing rupture in Northern and Southern ideas of being a decent human being and not owning people, Jesus Christ.
Thus you could have things like
John Quitman's Filibustering Expedition to Cuba being delayed but not suspended and ending up as basically an Antebellum Bay of Pigs, and in the fallout of that failure earlier attempts at Abolitionist direct action by figures like John Brown could be undertaken and maybe even become a catalyst for others like
Moses Dickson's Knights of Liberty to try their hand. Thus you have a South that is having a repeat of it's Nat Turner freak out and increasingly convinced that Abolitionists are the Illuminati and thus you have a North repelled by the depths of Southern territorial ambitions and increasingly convinced that the slavers wish to prevent
any American soil from being free of its curse, and thus you have a semi-imploded Democratic Party presiding over South Carolina and maybe one or two more states holding conventions for secession and thus making one final compromise that crawls over the finish line to a Civil War starting in 1864.
Plus with a later Civil War the South would likely be somewhere in the beginning stages of their cotton bubble popping as the overheated market had been asking for since the later half of the 1850s. Though the Confederates are probably going to be able to shift the blame for the bust to sinister conspiracies by Northern banks and mills and push through the beginning of the war, not even the most delusion Fire-Eater is going to be able to trust entirely on King Cotton alone solving all their diplomatic goals, and so actual systematic effort by the Confederate leadership to bond with the French and English governments could only increase the pressure for European intervention in those crucial first moments when their sympathizing elites are still able to wag the dog and prod the majority to go along with it.
Any thoughts?
