As I understand it, the biggest problems with the third-day attack on Cemetery Ridge were the issue of ammunition and, more importantly, issues with Lee's command structure, which was much too hands-off. Alexander's bombardment was fairly well conducted as far as it went - failing to correct for high shots balanced out by the utter destruction the bombardment on the lower slopes of the ridge - but it was necessarily limited because basically everybody, from Lee to Longstreet to Pendleton to Alexander, screwed up and left the ammunition train for the artillery miles to the rear. The plan had been for the bombardment to have been more or less kept up by artillery pieces that rolled forward with the troops up to the Emmitsburg Road, but this was impossible on any real scale due to the critically low stocks of Confederate ammunition.
Realistically, though, I dunno about the possibility of cracking Cemetery Ridge that day. After all, there were plenty of Federal troops on hand, and if Meade and co. had demonstrated anything on the previous day, they were very adept at shuffling troops between various sections of the battlefield to where they were needed and plugging holes. The Army of the Potomac's soldiers were simply employed
much more efficiently than the Confederate troops, due in large part to the magic of interior lines. Hunt's artillery still outnumbered the Southern guns and the Federals were much better trained and organized.
Antietam is the best bet if you ask me (although, being Dachs I assume you already have well thought out reasons why Antietam also doesn't work). Personally the way I look at that particular divergence from a plausibility angle is that either the Confederacy occupies Washington by the end of '62 and gains international recognition, or the Confederacy loses the war.
Of course, almost all AH, by its nature, is less probable than what actually happened, they aren't all "for want of a nail" situations, least of all this DP, which is you have to admit one of the most common.
Interestingly enough I was working on a similar timeline regarding the effects of secession on German unification and the Great War, I was doing it with a Southron though, and he kept insisting that not only would the CSA have remained a viable nation, he went so far as to assume they would have pushed their economy to industrialize without Northern assistance and "racism would never have existed," so things were getting a little out of hand. He also kept shouting about Vicksburg to which I kept arguing that Vicksburg was too late, that it was all over at that point anyways. Which brings up another interesting aspect of this particular divergence, is it really any fun for people who don't live in the South and are not trying to use it to paint a deeper picture of the population of that region, let alone the arguments regarding that character which it will inevitably provoke in a southerner.
Right, so the South had a few problems.
The biggest one is that the Confederacy had to win the war on its own, a daunting task. Even in the face of Lee's greatest victories, Russell and Palmerston refused to actually fight against the Federals - doing so, they feared, would prolong the war and make it even messier than it already was for everybody involved. Seward encouraged this by threatening to unleash a "race war" in the event of intervention and claiming, with excellent reason, that a British intervention would only strengthen American resolve to fight on. Even when the British thought that Lee
had won at Antietam, nothing moved except for a continued effort to build a coalition to back an offer of mediation,
a step that occurred anyway when the news of the battle's true result came out and a move that, Palmerston and Russell steadfastly claimed, did not mean that the British were even remotely interested in backing the Confederacy by force of arms. Indeed, nothing brought up the issue of British intervention so dramatically as did the fact that Antietam was inconclusive, and when Gladstone made his Newcastle speech, it immediately became clear what intervention would actually mean, even if Lee had captured Washington (and it's not clear he could have done, even if he had scored a victory in Maryland): full-scale Anglo-American war. Without a negotiated or dictated peace in hand, Davis, Benjamin, Mason, and Slidell had little to no chance of attracting the aid of the United Kingdom.
Changing the late-1862 Confederate grand offensive into Kentucky and Maryland from bloody stalemate to dramatic victory requires a great deal more than "for want of a nail"-type stuff. Lee's special order's importance is greatly overexaggerated by Turtledove types, for one thing. But regardless of the actual outcome of the Battle of Antietam itself, one would need to then get Lee to crack the Washington fortifications to capture the city (that may not even have been his goal, much less a military possibility), and Bragg would need to win big in Kentucky, something I think we can agree was pretty unlikely,
and Lincoln and Seward and all the rest would actually have to have given up, and I honestly can't see that happening either. I mean, if you really wanted to, you could write a timeline that featured successive Confederate victories through the fall of 1862 culminating in a capture of New York or Philadelphia in the spring of the following year, with all Federal comers vanquished, but such an occurrence would be so dramatically improbable as to be something of a . One runs into similar problems in 1864 during the election. Even McClellan distanced himself from the Copperheads, and may have found himself impeached had he won the election following on drastic Union defeats on the battlefield and subsequently gone beyond his campaign promises in offering peace (he only would commit to negotiation, not a serious action on that negotiation, in his 1864 platform).
So whatever: assume the Confederacy somehow manages to secure its independence following an improbable run of victories on the battlefield. Okay: so what? The interest of Britain in supporting such a state is going to dramatically decline in the following years as Europe heats up (one way or another) and it becomes unprofitable to spend on the defense of Canada from a hostile United States, just as Britain began to draw down its Asiatic and Mediterranean commitments in the next few decades in OTL (and, in all probability, TTL). And France may make for a worse neighbor than the United States in Mexico, as Confederate diplomats had realized as early as the fall of 1862 in OTL. The overall American superiority in manpower, cash, industry, and the like is not going to be dented. By the 1880s at the latest the Americans are going to make another go at it, and it's hard to see the outnumbered and friendless Confederacy triumphing yet again.
Out of curiosity, and a bit of stupidity, how exactly do you think the German Unification Wars would have been changed or altered. Also, what do you think would have happened to the Confederacy?
For the Confederates, I always figured that essentially, the only areas that would remain Confederate truly, would be the deep-South areas, like South Caroline, Alabama, etc. I feel as though the various other states, such as Texas might break away and try to forge their own nations. Just a thought.
EDIT: Course' you could always respond in the alt-history discussion thread. Since this is delving into that area.
Well, France's commitments are going to be drastically altered from OTL if the Confederate experiment succeeds and Mexico becomes a French puppet. At the same time, the UK and France are going to be increasingly estranged, although they were historically. Now, the 1864 war is probably going to happen more or less the same way with few variations except for the course of the war itself and the dates. Butterflies aren't going to be enough on that time-scale to impact things like the composition and tactical instrument of the Habsburg army, for instance, but they could very well lead to an Austro-Prussian explicit partnership against an overweening France instead of the enmity that developed historically in 1865. A Franco-Italian alliance against Prussia and Austria is certainly a potential scenario for war in the late 1860s. Alternatively, Bismarck might decide that a France that is more distracted by the New World might make a better partner than it was historically, and continue on more or less the same path (probably winning the Austro-Prussian War equivalent anyway, although messing with that could make for lulsome second-order butterflies) but with slightly less risk of a Franco-Prussian War equivalent.
The pressure on the Confederacy to split apart would be very intense, but I think that, save in the eyes of modern Old South romantics and pro-traitor libertarians, a utopian states' rights Confederacy with various states going more or less their separate ways won't happen. The power of the central government in the CSA was explicitly stronger in their Constitution than was the American federal government, and Richmond only got stronger as the war went on. Resistance to Richmond would be crushed bloodily like it was historically in northern Alabama, Knoxville, and North Carolina. Besides, the ever-present threat of Washington would be quite the incentive to hang together, lest they all hang separately. And I think that they would be consigned to the gallows together - just a decade or two later than they ought to have done historically, and doubtless under the eye of a president much less interested in reconciliation than was Lincoln.
I agree that the discussion is better suited to the alternate history thread, and it'd be nice to have most of it
moved there. :3
