En la sombra de Morazán: A Central American AAR

[RustyHunter]

The Confederation Congress and its officers had no power to raise revenues themselves and any laws they passed could be nullified by the states. The confederal government had no army nor any way to enforce its will. The function of the Confederation government depended entirely upon cooperation and compromise between its member states.

Well, that's proving about as dysfunctional as I expected. Perhaps even worse.

President Lorenzo Zepeda was selected by his peers because he lacked the ability to effectively govern and was succeeded by a series of other dissolute leaders chosen for their weakness.

Another promising move.

Guatemalan opinion only changed when a boom in demand for lumber showed the Ayicenena family firsthand the fruits of integration into the regional economy.

I'm glad some of the members aren't totally without reason. And good old-fashioned bribery still works.

I'll be curious to see where the Confederation goes. It's clearly dysfunctional, but I wonder if more can be done within the broken system than from outside it.

 

[Zeogludon]

The World of the 1850s​

The Americas

Central America was a crucial part of the most substantial trends in the Caribbean during the 1840s and 1850s: the expansion of US influence. Having replaced Britain as the primary commercial power in the Caribbean in the 1840s, US commerce continued to expand in the 1850s, tying together the Caribbean in an export economy based on agricultural commodities such as sugar, tobacco, coffee, and cotton. The strength of this economic relationship was reinforced by diplomatic and security agreements binding Caribbean nations to the USA, principly the Havana Treaty. This economic-dominated commercial and political order in the Caribbean would remain unchallenged until the US Civil War and, in some form, survive that momentous conflict.

The 1850s were also when the modern state system in the Rio de la Plata region formed. Like much of the Americas, the rich lands around the Rio de la Plata were engulfed in civil wars upon gaining independence. In the Rio de la Plata, however, these civil wars between Buenos Aires and all the other cities of the plains continued until 1850, when Justo José de Urquiza y García won the latest round of the civil war within Argentina and forced the new government at Rosario to unilaterally end the decades of civil war by recognizing the sovereignty and independence of Buenos Aires, Montevideo, Corrientes, and Asunción. The end of these decades of civil war allowed the Rio de la Plata to develop economically and for settlement to expand southward.

Pictured: The Acuerdo de San Nicolas, in which the Argentine government agreed to recognize the sovereignty and independence of Buernos Aires, Uruguay, Corrientes, and Paraguay.​

Europe

For the Americas, the most important development in Europe of the 1850s was the rehabilitation of Spain. Initially ostracized by Britain, France, and Portugal — all of whom had backed the rival claimant to the Spanish throne, Queen Isabel — the rule of the House of Bourbon was gradually accepted as fact. By the 1850s, King Louis Philippe II of France had become an advocate for Spanish claims in Morocco and guarantor of what was now considered a fully legitimate regime. The rehabilitation of the Spanish government was unwelcome news in the Americas and served to draw many countries, including Central America, closer to the USA.

Austria suffered major setbacks in the 1850s, succumbing to the internal revolutions that it had barely survived in 1848. The causes of the initial 1848 revolutions remained pressing in Austria and, in 1853, armed riots in Vienna forced Emperor Franz Josef to promulgate the constitution that Emperor Ferdinand had refused to grant. Emperor Franz Josef also presided over a modification of that constitution, granting separate and autonomous rule to Hungary in 1856.

Throughout this period of internal upheaval and reform, Austria was beset by the aggression of King Vittorio Emanuele II of Sardinia and his French backers. Amidst the liberal revolts of 1853, King Vittorio Emanuele staged his own independent grab at Milan, taking the city for a few months until Austria’s internal crisis was resolved. Wishing to empower his Italian client state at the expense of the Austrians, King Louis Philippe II decided to assist King Vittorio Emanuele in accomplishing his ambitions and joined Sardinia in a second invasion to seize Lombardy from the Austrians in 1858. Assisted by the might of the French army, Sardinian forces captured Milan and forced an Austrian surrender. Coming into the 1860s, the rivalry between France and the Austro-Hungarian monarchy would be one of the core dynamics of European politics.

The longstanding tension between Britain and Russia erupted into armed conflict in 1855. In January 1855, Polish patriots staged a massive uprising across Congress Poland. The Russian campaign to crush the rebellion became a cause celebre in London and, in April 1855, Britain pledged soldiers to defend the Polish cause. Britain’s intervention was too late to make an impact, however, as British forces landed in Varna were still skirmishing along the Danube frontier when Russian Cossacks marched into Warsaw. In October 1855, with Polish leaders either dead or in Siberian exile, Britain admitted defeat and returned to its cold war with Russia.

Pictured: Fort. St George, Alaska, captued by Britain during the brief conflict with Russia. Britain continued to occupy Alaska after the war.​

Prussian authority over the other German principalities consolidated in the 1850s as the turmoil in Austria led the Germans to look to Prussia for stability and leadership. This included the German population of the Duchy of Schleswig-Holstein, who petitioned King Friedrich Wilhelm IV of Prussia to include them in the Norddeutscher Bund founded in 1857. The Norddeutscher Bund was begrudgingly accepted by the Austrians, who felt themselves too weak to intervene, and by the French, who appreciated that the Chancellor of the Bund, Otto von Bismarck, lacked the anti-French paranoia that had previously characterized Prussian policy and damaged its relations with France.


Asia

Chinese decline since its loss in the Opium War in the previous decade continued apace in the 1850s. The knock-on effects of that conflict — the decline in imperial authority, opium addiction among bureaucrats and officials, and widespread piracy — resulted in three major simultaneous uprisings against Qing rule. The largest of these was the Taiping Rebellion, whose leader, the self-proclaimed younger brother of Jesus Christ, briefly took over Nanjing and much of the rural south. Hearing of this revolt, the Yunnanese and the Uighurs of the Altishahr also threw off Qing rule. Facing the dissolution of their empire, the Qing secured agreements with France and Russia to supply them with modern weapons and mercenary units, all at great expense. Equipped with modern armament, Qing armies were able to put down the rebellions one by one. The roots of the revolt, administrative incompetence and rural lawlessness, however, remained in China.

The other major trend of the 1850s in Asia was the expansion of British and Netherlandish control over Southeast Asia. The Netherlands had long exercised influence over the East Indies, but in the 1850s the Netherlands moved to exercise direct rule over most of the islands. Netherlandish expansion here came into conflict with Britain’s own expansion into the Malay Peninsula. The intensity of this competition between Britain and Netherlands only expanded after 1857, when British Parliament voted to disband the East India Company and declared Queen Victoria to be Empress of India in the aftermath of a failed uprising by Indian soldiers in Delhi.

Pictured: Bahadur Shah, the last Mughal Emperor, being arrested by British Indian soldiers for his role in the revolt.​

Africa

The Boer republics that had established themselves in southern Africa solidified their rule in the 1850s and expanded to subjugate the surrounding African kingdoms. By the late 1850s, many of the villages between the Zambezi and Orange Rivers paid tribute to the Boer in either goods or slaves.

The European powers also began making trading inroads into West Africa in the 1850s, with both Britain and France setting up forts inland along the Gambia and Senegal Rivers. The commercial expansion here was driven by a new demand for palm oil in Europe as the most common industrial lubricant for factory machinery. These African trading networks continued to be the primary suppliers of industrial lubricant in Europe for decades.

Pictured: European trader inspecting palm oil at a depot along the Senegal River.​

 

[slothinator]

It seems that hard times are ahead for the Confederation. If its reticent members can't be convinced, there might be another split.
A nice overview of the world. I'm surprised by North Germany's cordial relations with France but we'll see how long that lasts

 

[RustyHunter]

Things don't look too far off from the real world, but I can definitely see hints of possibly serious changes to come. Thanks for the look at the rest of the world.

 

[Chilango2]

Hi!

I just wanted you to know that I've picked this up recently and have really been enjoying it. Central America tends to pass under the radar and its nice to see it get an AAR, especially one where the author has clearly dedicated a great deal of care and research.

In any case, I've been lucky enough to be in the position of awarding you this week's WritAAR of the Week.

 

[Zeogludon]

Things don't look too far off from the real world, but I can definitely see hints of possibly serious changes to come. Thanks for the look at the rest of the world.

Yeah, I was surprised by how (relatively) close things in the AAR are to actual history. I always try to play a few decades ahead of writing though, and things really start to diverge in the 1860s onward.

 

[Zeogludon]

Hi!

I just wanted you to know that I've picked this up recently and have really been enjoying it. Central America tends to pass under the radar and its nice to see it get an AAR, especially one where the author has clearly dedicated a great deal of care and research.

In any case, I've been lucky enough to be in the position of awarding you this week's WritAAR of the Week.

Wow! All I can say is that I am deeply honored. I am so glad to hear that you've enjoyed the AAR so far and pledge to continue writing something that you and others enjoy.

After seeing this I also took a look at your poetic AAR and I have to say that I am very impressed. I think its tough enough to write an interesting AAR, but to present it in the form of rhyme is taking it to another level.

 

[Zeogludon]

Gridlock and Rupture, 1860 to 1868​

In the few years following the creation of the Confederation, Central America experienced significant economic shifts and internal migration on an unprecedented scale. Economic growth in the early years of the Confederation was overwhelmingly concentrated in the textile industry of Honduras and the new lumber boom in Guatemala. Investment in modern sawmills allowed for a transformation of the lumber industry in Central America from exporting whole trees to exporting finished boards, as well as a doubling of the actual lumber output in weight. This commercial expansion was the start of a decades-long lumber boom in Guatemala that would eventually be one of the driving factors of conflict in the region as the lumbering frontier expanded north and west into Mayan lands in the late 1860s.

The engine of economic growth in the Confederation was the Honduran textile industry. Now able to access Salvadoran and Guatemalan indigo without tariffs, the Honduran textile industry continued its rapid expansion, with output growing by 45% between 1857 and 1860. The explosive growth of the Honduran textile industry alone accounted for half of total economic growth in Central America during the period. This economic expansion was accompanied and enabled by large-scale internal migration. Landless peasants, particularly from bordering El Salvador and Nicaragua, took advantage of the Confederation to move to Honduran cities in search of new opportunities in textile factories. Like Honduran peasants of the previous decade, these Nicaraguan and Salvadoran peasants built shacks in slums on the outskirts of Honduran cities. Over the course of the 1860s, tens of thousands of peasants migrated to Honduras, leaving it with a population roughly equal to that of El Salvador or Guatemala.

Pictured: New migrants to Trujillo in front of their shanty dwellings​

This internal migration produced two notable effects. The first was a further widening of the gap between the urban, industrial economy of Honduras and the rural, agricultural economy of the rest of Central America. By 1860, the roughly 20,000 factory workers of Honduras outnumbered the old urban populations of Trujillo, Tegucigalpa, and Comayagua. The factories into which these peasants moved were increasingly established and professionalized, equipped with modern machinery, implementing an advanced division of labor, organized into shifts, and run by a class of professional managers. Although the majority of the population remained rural, the economic life of the state was centered in the industrial cities and political power concentrated in the hands of an industrial capitalist class. In the rest of Central America, where landlords remained landlords alone, the commercial and industrial revolution had yet to take place.

The other major effect of this internal migration was the gradual absorption of the landless peasantry into the urban working class. During this period, most peasants across Central America, Ladino and Amerindian alike, owned their land collectively and worked plots rented from the village. Landless peasants constituted a minority of the peasant population and supplied labor on the haciendas. With the advent of the Honduran textile industry and ancillary factories in other states, landless peasants who would have been tenant farmers instead poured into urban factories, seeking a life free of hacendado despotism. This created a labor shortage among the haciendas, which increasingly had to depend on the seasonal labor of landed peasants. The effective disappearance of landless peasants as a class was instrumental in determining the pattern of commercial agriculture in Central America, as hacendados lacked the cheap source of labor upon which the expansion of their estates depended.

The corrupt deal that had ended the period of gridlock over internal improvements in the first years of the Confederation failed to provide lasting relief from the difficulties. The initial package of internal improvements passed in 1859 subsidized a rail line between Tegucigalpa and Ciudad Guatemala, passing through the major cities of El Salvador and eastern Guatemala on its route, and another line between Tegucigalpa and Leon. This was a major victory for most of the states of the Confederation, fulfilling the desire of Guatemala, El Salvador, and Nicaragua for incorporation into the commercial economy centered on Honduras.

For Costa Rica, the passage of the internal improvements bills sparked a political firestorm. The landed electorate was enraged by the blatant corruption and bribery that had allowed the Costa Rican treasury to be saddled with debts of no benefit to the state. While fearful of revolution and unable under the state’s authoritarian constitution to impeach or recall the corrupt congressmen or president, the Costa Rican voters vented their anger in the elections of 1861, voting out corrupt members and electing a state congress even more defensive of Costa Rica’s particular interests and more stridently opposed to compromise with the other members of the Confederation. The venal President Manuel Bonilla was replaced with the arch-conservative José Manuel Quirós y Blanco, a former general and vehemently opposed to internal improvement or social reform of any kind. The new Costa Rican delegates to the Confederal Congress of 1862, that year meeting in Ciudad Guatemala, made it clear that Costa Rica would oppose any future spending, setting in another period of extended gridlock.

Pictured: José Manuel Quirós y Blanco, President of Costa Rica between 1862 and 1870​

The two new railroads financed in 1859 both finished construction by 1861 and had an immediate and transformatory effect upon Guatemala, El Salvador, and western Nicaragua. The first major change was the further integration of these regions into the commercial economy. Nicaraguan ranchers and Salvadoran and Guatemalan hacendados had already exported through Honduran ports or to Honduran factories, but the expansion of the rail network multiplied the scale of exportation. Moreover, the effect of the railroads was felt beyond the haciendas. As in Honduras, Salvadoran, Guatemalan, and Nicaraguan peasants realized the commercial opportunities presented by the railroads and increasingly grew cash crops — such as coffee, bananas, and tobacco — for export.

The creation of the railroads also allowed for the growth of industry in El Salvador and Nicaragua. The small primitive factories along the border, mainly transforming Honduran fabrics into clothes for domestic markets, took full advantage of the new railroads to import modern industrial equipment and transform these pre-modern workshops into professionalized modern factories, as existed in Honduras. This clothes industry, made possible by the introduction of modern sewing machines, exploded in size during the 1860s, consuming the vast majority of fabric produced by Honduran textile mills and, by the end of the decade, even requiring the import of US and British fabrics to meet the demand for raw materials. The rise of the clothing industry in El Salvador and Nicaragua was important in further tying together the core states of the Confederation. Not only were the Honduran, Salvadoran, and Nicaraguan economies mutually dependent, but they all shared the same permanent urban working class and in all states the domination of a single and unified ruling class of landlords—cum—industrialists was cemented.

The benefits of internal improvements were obvious to the emerging bourgeois of Central America. In the absence of any confederal funding or subsidy post-1862, the merchants and capitalists of Central America began organizing means of privately funding internal improvements. While private banking had existed since the colonial period, the size of financing greatly increased during the 1860s as wealthy landlords, industrialists, and merchants pooled their funds to finance the internal improvements that the state was politically incapable of underwriting. The move toward private investment in infrastructure began in eastern Nicaragua, whose mercantile community was aware and envious of the benefits that a rail connection had provided to Leon. The first such project funded was a canal between Lake Nicaragua and Lake Managua, facilitating the passage of goods from Rivas and Granada to nearby the Leon railhead. It was completed in 1864. Similar projects, particularly aimed at the improvement of existing rail lines, continued throughout the 1860s. Funding limitations hobbled construction, however. Despite considerable advances in technology, fewer miles of track were laid between 1862 and 1868 than had been laid in Honduras alone during the 1850s.

Pictured: Mill next to a lock on the Lago Nicaragua canal​

Internationally, Centroamerican foreign policy was dominated by the outbreak of the US Civil War. Following the election of Abraham Lincoln, a Republican who opposed the expansion of slavery to the western territories, the slaveholding states of the South seceded from the USA to form their own Confederate States of America (CSA) to protect and advance the cause of African slavery. The two governments, the Union and Confederacy, stared each other down for several months until April 1861, when Confederate troops fired on the Union fort overlooking Charleston, South Carolina: the first shot of the US Civil War.

Pictured: The US fort at the mouth of Charleston harbor being bombarded by the CSA, the first shot of the US Civil War​

The Centroamerican leadership was divided on whether to extend recognition to the CSA. On one hand, the Centroamerican economy was intimately tied to that of the South; Centroamerican products were purchased by merchants operating out of Mobile and New Orleans and the Centroamerican textile industry ran on Southern cotton and coal. These were pressing economic reasons to retain a strong relationship with the CSA, cemented by diplomatic recognition. On the other hand, it was the Union government of Abraham Lincoln that was the guarantor of the Havana Treaty and, therefore, Central America’s protector against Mexican or Colombian aggression. Any recognition of the CSA was bound to upset the Union. This diplomatic calculus was complicated by uncertainty over the outcome of the conflict. Scared of losing favor with either Washington or Richmond, Central America sat on the sidelines, refusing recognition of the CSA while still keeping diplomatic channels open with the CSA government.

Initially, the US Civil War loomed as a Sword of Damocles over the economy, as the embassy in Washington D.C. reported rumors that President Lincoln planned to embargo the entire Southern coast. This plan, had it been put into action, would have cut off Central America from Southern cotton and coal, killing off its textile industry and causing a massive economic crisis. Fortunately, these rumors also reached the ears of Richard Lyons and Friedrich von Gerolt, the British and Prussian ambassadors to the USA, respectively. The British and German textile industries of the time were every bit as dependent upon Southern cotton as was Central America and the British and German governments moved to kill the US plan for an embargo on the South. In May 1861, before the planned naval embargo could be implemented, Britain and Prussia both extended diplomatic recognition to the CSA and informed President Lincoln that any attacks upon British or German vessels engaging in trade with the South would be considered an act of war. This British and German intervention prevented the embargo and saved the Centroamerican economy.

Taking advantage of the situation created by British and German diplomatic intervention, Central America joined many other states in maintaining strong commercial ties with the South while denying it official recognition to remain on Washington’s good side. The refusal of the American states, bar Mexico, to shun the CSA infuriated US Secretary of State William Stewart but, as the Union had shied away from ever declaring an embargo of the South, President Lincoln’s government was forced to accept the easy relations between the Havana allies and the insurrectionary government in Richmond. This uncomfortable diplomatic situation remained in place until September 1867, when US President George McClellan agreed to a truce with the South.

As civil war raged across the USA, representatives of the European powers met in Geneva to discuss the future of warfare. The First Geneva Convention, meeting in March 1862, was the brainchild of Henry Dunant and Gustave Moynier, two Swiss citizens who founded the Red Cross in 1861 after Dunant witnessed the horrific condition of the wounded during the 1858 Battle of Solferino. The Convention bound its signatories to protect wounded soldiers and give immunity to the Red Cross in providing medical aid to these soldiers. These humanitarian ideals were quickly endorsed and the Geneva Convention was signed by all the civilized nations of Europe and the Americas within a year of its creation, including the Confederation of Central America. The lone exceptions were the North American republics, with the USA becoming a signatory in 1868 following the end of its civil war, and the CSA becoming a signatory only after receiving widespread international recognition in 1873.

Another event abroad with massive repercussions within Central America was the 1864 revolution in Paraguay. In May 1864, the corrupt and dictatorial regime of Francisco Solano López was overthrown by a group of liberal and socialist revolutionaries, primarily composed of students and junior military officers and inspired by the writings of the late Esteban Echeverría. The new Paraguayan government, organized into the Revolutionary Mayista Party, announced that democratic elections on the basis of universal manhood suffrage would be held in 1867. In the meantime, the revolutionary government limited work hours, legalized labor unions, and initiated land redistribution. With each piece of news coming back from Paraguay, the Centroamerican elite shuddered in horror. The past several decades had massively enriched the ruling class of Central America and that newfound wealth had its joint origins in land ownership and domination of the urban working class. Socialism threatened the continuance of both.

Central America reacted to the newfound socialist threat by increasing censorship and building the foundations of a repressive police state. All the states of Central America had extensive censorship of print as well as strict limits on any kind of political clubs or mass gatherings. The Centroamerican state of the 1850s did not, however, have the capacity to actually enforce these laws. The repressive turn in the 1860s was the creation of this capacity. The greatest threat to social stability appeared to come from the universities, where radical ideas might be spread, and from the urban working class itself. To monitor universities, state governments founded networks of secret police and informants, whose presence crushed what little freedom of expression existed there. To control the urban slums, which had previously had virtually no police presence, state and local governments turned to factory owners themselves. As the group with the greatest interest in policing urban workers, Centroamerican industrialists recruited their own private police forces in the 1860s. These private police forces served as both an unofficial branch of law enforcement, guarding the factory and cooperating with the municipal police to apprehend criminals in the urban slums; and as a means of social control, rewarding those who reported on radical coworkers and using violence against those who discussed any form of worker organization.

Pictured: Private policemen guard the approaches to a factory in Leon during an attempted strike, concerned family members look on​

The creation of new repressive systems in Central America was mirrored by a hardening of views among the Centroamerican ruling class. Prior to the 1860s, Central America’s small enfranchised elite expressed a plurality of political views in print, with a significant minority even favoring the expansion of suffrage and promulgation of basic civil rights. By the late 1860s, such liberal views had virtually disappeared from the written record. Voting records show that 1864 and news of revolution in Paraguay was the clear turning point, with the slate of politicians elected that year being much more conservative and hardline. A broad consensus developed among the Centroamerican elite that societal stability could only be maintained by a heavily restricted electorate, broad censorship, and harsh penalties for those who tried to disrupt the social order.

Central America was not the only American state to impose new repressive measures following the 1864 revolution in Paraguay and similar restrictions were passed by other dictatorial republics. With the exception of private police in factories — which improved workplace discipline and suppressed dissent — these repressive measures were largely ineffectual. Even if they could not be printed in one country, liberal and progressive pamphlets were printed elsewhere and smuggled in. Rebellious students traveled to Europe for their education. In Central America and elsewhere, a lack of coordination between cities and virtually no government presence in the countryside doomed any attempts to effectively monitor or crush dissent. This was shown through the collapse of the Peruvian government following the 1868 Arica earthquake. The Peruvian government, which had in place some of strictest censorship laws and broadest police powers on the continent, was powerless to face down a rural socialist movement and rapidly lost control of the countryside.

The tensions within the Confederation came to a boiling point in August 1868, caused by a multifaceted dispute over the Confederation’s relationship with Colombia. The rupture of the union did not come out of nowhere. The gridlock that had set in with the Costa Rican election of 1862 continued, fueling deepening resentment against Costa Rica, and the summer of 1868 had seen yet another potential deal fall through.

The latest attempt to salvage the Confederation was a Salvadoran proposal to offer confederal funding to expand Costa Rican ports in exchange for Costa Rica underwriting railroad debt elsewhere. The Costa Rican delegates to Congress were open to the proposal and it looked like progress might finally be made, when the deal was torpedoed by Nicaragua’s congressmen. The Nicaraguans had long felt neglected within the Confederation, despite their legitimate security concerns over the Miskitu, and bore particular resentment against Costa Rican obstructionism. Unwilling to see Costa Rican bad behavior rewarded, Nicaragua’s congressmen refused to support the deal unless confederal funds were also provided to improve defenses along the Rio San Juan. The Costa Rican delegates rejected the idea that Costa Rica would ever subsidize another state’s defense, sinking the whole deal and leaving every member of the Confederation with bitter feelings.

The proximal cause for the crisis was a charm offensive from Colombia’s new elected president, Pedro Justo Berrío Rojas. Both of Central America’s neighbors had tried to repair their frayed relations with the Confederation, to considerable success on the part of Colombia. The issue was that Colombia was allied to Mexico, which still occupied Guatemalan territory. The thinking was that friendly relations with Colombia was tantamount to accepting Mexican annexation of Los Altos, something which Guatemala was totally unwilling to accept. The newest Colombia deal included a settlement of its long-disputed border with Costa Rica, a deal which Costa Rica was eager to make. Over Costa Rican objections and to the bitter grumbling of the other congressmen, Guatemala’s representatives voted down the Colombian proposal in August 1868. They were joined by one of Nicaragua’s representatives, Fernando Chamorro y Alfaro, seemingly to spite the Costa Ricans.

Pictured: Colombian soldiers occupy Pueblo Nuevo de Coto, one of the disputed villages on the eastern side of the Golfo Dulce​

The rejection of the Colombian offer precipitated a crisis along the border. Unable to achieve a diplomatic settlement, President Berrío had decided to resolve the border dispute with Costa Rica by force and had several towns around the Golfo Dulce occupied. Costa Rica’s President Quirós blamed the Colombian aggression on Guatemala and Nicaragua having purposefully ruined the country’s relations with Colombia, knowing that only Costa Rica would pay the price. Declaring that Costa Rica had no choice but to come to its own settlement with Colombia, the most nationalist figures in Costa Rican Congress submitted a bill declaring Costa Rica’s secession from the Confederation. The bill received President Quirós’s endorsement on October 5th, 1868. Perhaps unsurprisingly, Costa Rican secession triggered no civil war or internal dissension; the general response to news of Costa Rican secession was ‘good riddance’. By leaving, Costa Rica had solved the gridlock it had itself created and its secession marked a new epoch in the Confederation of Central America.

 

[J_Master]

The two most interesting developments here are of course the independence of the CSA and the exit of Costa Rica. Both are a upset for the conditions in which the Confederation was forged, and whilst I may be a bit premature, it seems the benefits of the Confederation are strong enough for it to last. Coming back to a previous prediction of mine, it was that during the ACW the peripheries would break away (and should be let go) for the core to pursue further integration, it seems that that peripheries is only Costa Rica, and that Guatemala has come about to the economic benefits and the other states are willing to back her up in her running territorial dispute with Mexico. As for the future, the strategic status quo will be upset immensly by the CSA, especially if they, or organisations independent from the government, start to pursue expansionist goals. A invasion of Cuba (of course harder due to being a independent, internationally recognized monarchy) or filibusters come to mind

 

[Chilango2]

It's intersting because, politically, this is a pretty bleak time. The Liberal project has, strangely, never seemed more dead. And yet you can see the possibilities.

I like how the changed dynamics of the growing USCA economy butterfly into a dragged on ACW.
I've never had the ACW drag on at all in any of my games, the Union will just stomp the CSA flat in a year at most.

 

[J_Master]

I've never had the ACW drag on at all in any of my games, the Union will just stomp the CSA flat in a year at most.

Oh, this reminds me, even outside of the AAR, I would like to see some screenshots on the general state of the game. How's the Confederation exactly represented in game terms? How's the rest of the world doing?

 

[slothinator]

The loss of Costa Rica doesn't seem too bad if it solves the gridlock that has dominated recent years. We'll see how it plays out!

 

[RustyHunter]

I must echo the others, that surviving CSA is quite surprising! I'll be curious how they develop, especially since they are disrupting the balance of power in the Americas.

Costa Rica leaving is probably for the best since industrialization seems to be working quite well for the other states. I look forward to a new decade of progress!

 

[Zeogludon]

It's intersting because, politically, this is a pretty bleak time. The Liberal project has, strangely, never seemed more dead. And yet you can see the possibilities.

I like how the changed dynamics of the growing USCA economy butterfly into a dragged on ACW.
I've never had the ACW drag on at all in any of my games, the Union will just stomp the CSA flat in a year at most.

I was also very surprised by this. I've never had the South be victorious in any of my games. I've written an explanation I tried to make plausible in the upcoming 'world of the 1860s' update, but I wasn't paying enough attention to the US to see it happen beyond one month the USA was victorious and the next it had only 6k soldiers in the field.

Oh, this reminds me, even outside of the AAR, I would like to see some screenshots on the general state of the game. How's the Confederation exactly represented in game terms? How's the rest of the world doing?

Sorry about the lack of screenshot. I keep forgetting to take them. I'll try to remember to include one of the CSA in the 'world of the 1860s' update, that way everyone will get to see its in-game borders. I definitely promise some maps for the Scramble for Africa a few decades ahead too.

I must echo the others, that surviving CSA is quite surprising! I'll be curious how they develop, especially since they are disrupting the balance of power in the Americas.

Costa Rica leaving is probably for the best since industrialization seems to be working quite well for the other states. I look forward to a new decade of progress!

I'm glad you're enjoying the story. I must ask, though, progress to what end? Progress for who?

 

[Zeogludon]

The New Confederation, 1868 to 1871​

The Confederation of Central America did not suffer for the loss of Costa Rica, but, in many ways, came out of 1868 a stronger and more united nation.

Costa Rica had always been skeptical of the federal project in Central America, dating back to the struggles against Spanish rule in the 1820s. It had joined the Confederation only reluctantly, under US pressure, and its elites were never convinced of the benefits of unification. The momentous economic transformation that seized the rest of Central America in the 1860s had missed out distant and geographically isolated Costa Rica. As a result of this lack of political or economic connections, Costa Rican interests diverged from those of the other members of the Confederation and, in a constitutional system that demanded consensus, fuelled resentment among the states. Costa Rica’s estrangement had been long in the making and its secession ultimately unsurprising.

International conditions also enabled the secession of Costa Rica. Costa Rica and Guatemala had only joined the Confederation because of coercive diplomacy by the USA, whose ruling Democratic Party desired a stable and unified commercial partner in the Caribbean. While Guatemalans had since become convinced of the benefits of union, Costa Rica was kept in only by a combination of inertia and US diplomatic pressure. With the advent of the US Civil War, this diplomatic pressure evaporated. Not only was the USA now too preoccupied to worry about the Caribbean, but the rationale behind US support for unification had also vanished. The US ‘commercial empire’ in the Caribbean, of which Central America was a part, had been a distinctly Southern initiative and, with the South in revolt, no longer interested the USA. For its part, the CSA government was both weak and internationally unrecognized: incapable of exercising any sway over San José. Costa Rica thus left the Confederation without any objection from North America.

Without Costa Rica and its veto, the Confederation government began to, for the first time, function as intended. All four remaining states had shared in the commercial boom brought on by railroads and eagerly passed bills subsidizing the expansion and improvement of the rail network in El Salvador and Nicaragua. This construction, financed by debt underwritten by the confederal government, was mainly branch lines into the countryside, connecting haciendas and rural market towns to commercial export markets via the railroad.

The consensus on internal improvements should not, however, overshadow the real and substantial differences that still existed between the states.

The first major issue was over the Confederation’s relationship with Mexico. Since overthrowing the centralist dictatorship in 1849, liberal governments in Mexico — particularly the long-standing foreign minister, Melchor Ocampo — had tried to soothe relations with Central America without actually giving up control of Tapachula and Quetzaltenango. Although these conciliatory overteurs had done little to restore relations in the 1850s, the fact that no revolutionary armies had poured forth from Mexico did much to convince the Centroamerican leaders of the 1860s that Mexico was no longer a hostile power. Generally, by 1868, the Centroamerican states favored restoring diplomatic ties with Mexico. The exception was Guatemala, the state from whom Mexico had ‘stolen’ Los Altos. As a result, Central America and Mexico continued to lack any formal diplomatic ties into the 1870s, complicating trade relations and irritating El Salvador, Honduras, and Guatemala.

The second major issue concerned the Confederation’s stance toward the Miskitu Kingdom and its sponsor, Britain. The Miskitu King, William Henry Clarence, ruled over Nicaragua’s entire Caribbean coast and controlled forts at the mouth of the Rio San Juan, Lake Nicaragua’s only connection to the sea. Conflict with the Miskitu had long been Nicaragua’s most pressing security concern and one of the principle reasons behind its entry into the Confederation. To the other states, however, the Miskitu posed no threat and, on the contrary, these states saw value in maintaining a good relationship with the Miskitu’s protector, Britain. The lack of confederal funding for forts along the Rio San Juan or even diplomatic action against the Miskitu embittered Nicaraguan politicians and reinforced the perception that the Confederation was a vehicle of convenience, not a true ‘nation’.

Pictured: Modern day, one of the forts controlled by the Miskitu overlooking the Rio San Juan
​

Both of these disputes underscore a lack of common identity among the Centroamerican states. Even excluding Costa Rica, the states of Central America did not feel that they shared a commonwealth nor that issues affecting one state impinged on them all. No politician of the 1860s advocated for the interests of the Confederation rather than those of his own state and, very often, advanced only those of his city. This essential lack of cohesion or common identity is the background for the crisis of 1871 and helps explain why the confederal response was so utterly insufficient.

At the state level, the political climate of the late 1860s was consumed by a paranoid fear of socialism. After the initial shock of Paraguay’s May 1864 revolution, Centroamerican elites continued to receive news of socialist insurrections across the Americas. The utter failure of Peru’s despotic government to suppress a socialist peasant rebellion, leading to its overthrow in the summer of 1869, led many Centroamerican politicians to the conclusion that similar events could occur in their own country. This fear was reinforced by news of the massive and extremely violent strikes, centered in Scranton and Pittsburgh, that roiled the US state of Pennsylvania in 1868 and 1869. These strikes, which saw pitched combat between strikers and the army as well as the brief declaration of a socialistic ‘Scranton Commune’, were the most shocking to Central Americans. If the most prosperous republic in the hemisphere could experience turmoil like that which occurred in Pennsylvania, then it was really true that no country was safe.

Pictured: Striking workers in Allentown exchange rifle fire within the US Army as part of violent labor dispute
​

The sense of imminent crisis and constant threat that pervaded Centroamerican politics manifested in a narrowing of political thought and a reactionary siege mentality among many of the elite. Discussion of moderate reforms, such as the lowering of property requirements for suffrage, virtually disappeared during this period and a record number of individuals, including enfranchised active citizens, were arrested for political crimes. Civil rights in the Centroamerican states were already heavily restricted, but arguments were put forth in the press and state congresses in the late 1860s took aim at even those limited freedoms as sources of instability. Hard right-wing politicians of the period argued that even the smallest concession would be exploited by radicals in their quest to destroy every aspect of civilization. Voting records and private papers would indicate that these fears were shared by a large plurality of enfranchised Central Americans and encouraged extreme reactions to any perceived challenge to the social or political order.

Economically, one of the defining trends of the late 1860s in Central America was the ‘labor shortage’ experienced by the ruling class of enfranchised landlords-cum-industrialists. The ruling capitalist class had traditionally depended on the landless peasants to work both their factories and their latifundia estates. The number of landless peasants, however, was limited and, by the late 1860s, there were not enough landless peasants to both fill the textile factories and work the fields of the haciendas. Presented by a condition of labor scarcity, Centroamerican landlords were forced to become more selective about where and how they employed the limited pool of labor available to them.

This perception of ‘labor scarcity’ as experienced by the Centroamerican elites should not be taken at face value. It is not that there were an insufficient number of people available to work — in fact, the Centroamerican population continued to expand, reaching 1.8 million by 1870 — but that smallholding peasants were not poor or desperate enough to work for the low wages and under the grueling conditions offered by the hacendado industrialists. The expansion of railroads and Central America’s integration into the global economy had not only benefited the upper classes, but also given peasants access to a global market that offered much higher prices than they could obtain locally. Given access to these markets, peasants grew highly profitable cash crops, such as sugar, bananas, citrus fruits, tobacco, and pineapples. Although Centroamerican haciendas were undoubtedly massive, most land remained owned collectively by villages and managed by peasants; likewise, most Centroamerican produce was grown on peasant smallholdings. As a result, peasants reaped considerable windfalls from Central America’s integration into the commercial economy of the Caribbean and were much wealthier in 1870 than they had been in 1850. Consequently, most peasants had no desire and little incentive to seek wage labor.

Pictured: A group of Salvadoran peasants wait at a train station with their banana crop. Cash crops like bananas provide Centroamerican peasants with a relatively high income.​

One real consequence of the ‘labor shortage’ was a large-scale shift in industry towards more profitable markets. Before the tightening of the labor market in the 1860s, most Centroamerican capitalists appear to have given no thought to comparative advantage. This explains why the relatively low-profit textile mills of Honduras continued to be the focal point of the Centroamerican economy for decades, even as a much more profitable clothes industry developed in the 1860s. This changed as factory-owners now experienced a shortage of available workers. Seeking to increase profits with their existing workforce, Honduras’s textile barons pivoted heavily towards the clothes industry. While the textile mills still remained, they took a backseat to clothes manufacturing. By 1870, finished clothes had not only replaced fabrics as Central America’s top export, but the union was a net importer of raw fabric to feed this industry. Looking at the account books of companies that made this transition from textile production to clothes manufacturing, this switch allowed Centroamerican capitalists to realize almost 15% profit gains with the same labor pool.

Another response to the perceived labor shortage, particularly in Guatemala, was the use of violence to coerce peasants into wage labor. Guatemalan haciendas had been hit particularly hard by the shortage of workers, as tens of thousands of landless Guatemalans had emigrated to El Salvador or Honduras. Furthermore, the young men who usually accepted seasonal work on haciendas were instead concentrated in the booming lumber industry, depriving Guatemalan hacendados of another important labor pool. In response to demands by Guatemalan hacendados, the Guatemalan Congress passed a series of laws in the late 1860s that increased the penalties for many crimes, particularly property crimes, to a period of judicial enslavement. The alcaldes presiding in local criminal cases were usually landowners themselves and, consequently, judicial enslavement almost always meant unpaid work on a hacienda. This practice of judicial enslavement was extremely unpopular and fell most heavily on those who were least equipped to contest a court decision, particularly the Maya. The reintroduction of this practice in Guatemala and its disproportionate effect on the Maya was one of the major triggers for the First Maya War that would break out in 1871.

Pictured: Mayan women found guilty of petty theft are auctioned off to local hacendados as part of their penalty of judicial enslavement. Periods of enslavement often lasted years even for small offenses.
​

The last major precedent to that conflict was the expansion of the lumbering frontier northward and westward into Mayan lands. The ‘lumber boom’ triggered by the introduction of mechanized lumber mills into Guatemala was the primary economic activity in the state, accounting for the majority of its exports. By the end of the decade, Guatemalan lumber was Central America’s second largest single export, behind only clothing. Naturally, as forests became exhausted, lumber camps to other locations. In Guatemala, this meant movement north and west into Mayan lands. As they moved into Mayan land, lumber camps ignored Mayan village’s title to the forests, refusing to compensate the villages. Moreover, when these disputes were taken to court, the Guatemalan state usually dismissed Mayan title and, in the rare cases when the lumberjacks were found guilty, the verdicts were never enforced. Most Guatemalan officials and politicians considered the Maya and other Amerindians ‘uncivilized’ and undeserving of the same legal rights accorded Whites and Ladinos. These racist attitudes had always been dominant in Guatemalan politics, but the distance between the center of state authority in eastern Guatemala and where most Mayans lived shielded them from many forms of persecution. That comfortable distance between the Guatemalan state and the Maya disappeared with the advance of the lumber frontier.

 

[slothinator]

It seems that the Confederation is in for a rocky period. I'm curious to hear more about the Maya war, with enslavement still rampant I expect that a reckoning is coming

 

[Chilango2]

Real mixture of things going on here between the rising fortunes of small farmers, encroachment on Maya territory, and the wonderful leaders of Central America responding with their usual flair for the absolutely terrible only occasionally alleviated by incompetence or short sightedness.

 

[Zeogludon]

The World of the 1860s​

The Americas

Like the revolutions in Paraguay and Peru, the US Civil War had a direct impact on Central America and was covered in the main narrative. The importance of the USA to Central America, however, calls for a more detailed discussion of that conflict.

Pictured: The United States and Confederate States of America in April 1861. The shaded areas mark slave states that remained in the Union.​

The USA was initially successful in the war that broke out in April 1861, mobilizing a larger number of volunteers and using superior armament to push back CSA lines and capture the Confederate capital of Richmond in January 1862, followed by the rest of Virginia and the Carolinas coast. The Union war effort, however, then became a victim of its own success, as the easy victory convinced many voters that harsh war measures and high taxes were unnecessary. Feeding on this public sentiment, The Democrats won a majority in the US Congressional elections of 1862 and Democratic challenger George McClellan defeated Abraham Lincoln in the 1864 presidential race.

President McClellan then made the disastrous decision to halt all operations in the east while he conducted ceasefire negotiations with the South. While the majority of Union forces sat on their hands in Virginia, the CSA repositioned its army in the Western Theater and, in November 1866, struck north across the Ohio River, capturing parts of Illinois, Indiana, and Ohio. These battlefield successes masked deep weaknesses in the South, however, as opposition to taxation and conscription continued to grow. In the summer of 1867, a tax revolt kicked the CSA government out of much of central Alabama. Under threat from within, the CSA agreed to a peace with President McClellan in September 1867, wherein the USA agreed to withdraw its army from the CSA but only on the condition that the states of Missouri, Arkansas, Kansas, Illinois, Indiana, and all the territories were returned to Union control.

In the end, neither side got what they wanted: the South did not receive the Western territories necessary for slavery’s expansion, and the USA failed to restore the Union. The US Civil War was devastating for both sides and severely weakened North American presence across the hemisphere. Far from becoming the seat of its own ‘Southern Empire’, the CSA was a weak and heavily indebted state reeling from its wartime losses. For its part, the USA was falling apart at the seams. The massive influx of refugee slaves into the North outraged public opinion, fueling both secessionist conspiracies and labor unrest. The scale of this unrest frequently required military intervention, such as during the 1868 Baltimore Riots and the labor unrest/race riots/socialist insurrection that consumed Pennsylvania between the fall of 1868 and February 1869. As a result, the army was too hamstrung to effectively safeguard the western frontier from brutal raids by Amerindian nations. While still the greatest power in the hemisphere, the USA of the late 1860s was a shadow of its former self and increasingly absent from the Caribbean.

One sign of this declining US influence in the Caribbean was the overthrow of the US-aligned Haitian government of President Fabre-Nicolas Geffrard in June 1867. What may have triggered a US intervention before the Civil War received no response during the conflict nor in its aftermath. Nor did the USA do more than issue a diplomatic complaint when the new government of Emperor Lysius I of Haiti failed to recognize the validity of loans taken out by the previous government.

Outside of North America, the most consequential political change was the democratic political thaw across the Rio de la Plata. The dictators of both Corrientes and Paraguay were overthrown in the early 1860s and, fearing similar turmoil, the ruling oligarchy in Buenos Aires agreed to satisfy liberal demands by permitting free elections to a national parliament. Whereas the Argentine government in Parana had been the only democracy in 1860, by 1870 it was dictatorial Montevideo that stood alone along the Rio de la Plata.


Europe

French power on the European continent reached a highpoint in the early 1860s. Having successfully assisted its Sardinian client in becoming the premier power in the Italian Peninsula, France was also able to cement formal alliances with King Leopold I of Belgium and King Luís I of Portugal. The reorientation of these two states, long in the British orbit, were the most visible signs of French preeminence in Europe.

The greatest challenge to a France-led order on the continent was its most powerful client, King Vittorio Emanuele II of Sardinia, who was consumed with the ambition to rule all of Italy. Assuming that he would again be supported by the French should Austria-Hungary intervene, Vittorio Emanuele invaded the Duchy of Parma in the summer of 1863 and, joined by Italian patriots led by Giuseppe Garibaldi, swept south across Italy. When his victorious armies reached Naples, Vittorio Emanuele declared the creation of the Kingdom of Italy, with himself its first monarch.

Vittorio Emanuele’s first act as King of Italy was to provoke an international crisis by demanding that Pope Pius IX cede control of Rome. When the Pope refused, Vittorio Emanuele seized Rome by force, prompting international outrage. King Louis Philippe II, himself a devout Catholic, was appalled by Italian behavior and, in 1864, gave tacit permission for Austria-Hungary to intervene in Italy. Without French assistance, the Italian army was crushed by the Austro-Hungarians, who restored control of Rome to the Pope. By the 1865 Treaty of Rome, the city was placed under the joint protection of France and Austria-Hungary. The episode marked out Italy as a European pariah and put France and Austria-Hungary on the path to mending their relationship, as both recognized Vittorio Emanuele as a common threat.

Pictured: Italian soldiers storm Rome through a breach in the Porta Pia in March 1864. In response to the attack on the city, the Pope excommunicated King Vittorio Emanuele and his entire government.
​

In Germany, the dominance of Prussia through the Norddeutscher Bund was challenged by the rise of Bavaria, which had rapidly developed in the late 1850s and 1860s to become the 5th largest economy in Europe. Fearing that Bavaria could ally itself to Austria-Hungary and challenge Prussia for control over Germany, King Wilhelm I of Prussia demanded that Bavaria join the Deutscherbund and surrender its independent foreign policy. After years of failed diplomatic pressure and Bavarian possessions on the Rhine, Prussia invaded Bavaria in January 1868. The trauma of the invasion caused King Ludwig II of Bavaria to experience a mental break and, without an effective executive, the Bavarian government surrendered in less than a month. In the subsequent negotiations, Prussia demanded that Bavaria dismantle the fortifications along its northern border, effectively leaving it at the mercy of future Prussian invasions. Unsurprisingly, this intimidation had the effect of driving a wedge between Berlin and Vienna and alienating the southern Germans from Prussia.


Asia

The 1860s saw the further encroachment of European colonialism into Asia. In Southeast Asia, this was part of a continual expansion of colonial boundaries, as both Britain and the Netherlands sought to prevent the other power from controlling the region’s resources. In other parts of the world, however, the British Empire expanded under humanitarian pretexts, particularly the abolition of the slave trade. Under the strident abolitionist, Prime Minister Henry John Temple (Lord Palmerston), abolitionism became a goal of British foreign policy: in Asia, this involved a more active role in the affairs of Yemen and the Trucial States; in Africa, Britain seized control of the port city of Lagos in 1863; in the Americas, Britain forced Venezuela to enact gradual emancipation by threatening to withhold necessary loans. Contemporary opinion did not perceive a contradiction in spreading abolitionism through colonialism, but endorsed the idea of an liberal and enlightened empire.

Russia began its own imperial expansion into Central Asia during the 1860s, forcing Emir Muzaffar bin Nasrullah of Buxoro to accept the status of a Russian protectorate in 1865 and establishing outposts at the base of Persia’s Kopet Dag mountains. Although the Russian campaign was carried out as part of a ‘civilizational conflict’ between Orthodox Russia and its Muslim neighbors, particularly Persia and the Ottomans, it also positioned Russia to strike against British possessions in India should the empires again clash.

Pictured: Russian soldiers occupying Buxoro after breaching its ancient walls​

Although not considered a major event at the time, the Boshin War in Japan, a multisided civil war that raged throughout the 1860s, concluded with the restoration of direct imperial rule in 1867 under the Meiji Emperor. This was the beginning of a series of profound changes in Japanese society that, by the 1870s, resulted in rapid industrialization under a centralized and authoritarian imperial state.


Africa

When the Spanish King Carlos VI died in 1861, Sultan Muhammed IV of Morocco still refused to recognize Spanish claims along the northern coast. The newly crowned King Juan III sought to end his late brother’s war and, in the summer of 1864, Spanish forces attacked Moroccan forts in the valleys of the Rif and pushed inland. The superior Spanish army was able to surround Fes and capture Sultan Muhammed IV. The captive king was then forced to sign a treaty recognizing not only Spanish dominion over Ceuta and Melilla, but the north of his country inland as far as Taza.

Africa was the origin of a series of crises that rattled the Ottoman Empire to its foundations in the 1860s. The first crisis was triggered in February 1863, when the Bey of Tunis, Muhammad III, proclaimed that he would not longer recognize the Ottoman Sultan as sovereign. As Sultan Abdulaziz scrambled to send troops to the western Mediterranean, Russia chose this moment to demand extraordinary rights to intervene in Ottoman affairs regarding Orthodox Christians, allegedly conferred under the 1774 Treaty of Küçük Kaynarca. Pulled in all directions, the Ottoman army lost on all fronts and Sultan Abdulaziz was forced to come to humiliating terms with both Russia and now-independent Tunis.

Pictured: Orthodox priests assembled in Jerusalem, c.1868. Under its interpretation of the Treaty of Küçük Kaynarca, Russia had the right to intervene in any Ottoman policy that impacted the millions of Orthodox Christians who resided in the Middle East
​

The Ottoman concessions to Russia in 1864, effectively recognizing Russia’s right to unlimited intervention in the Ottoman Empire, worried the other European powers, particularly France — whose King Louis Philippe II worried about the treatment of Ottoman Catholics — and Russophobic Britain. Thus, both countries chose to intervene against Russia in the next crisis within the Ottoman Empire, which broke out in October 1869, when Khedive Ismail of Egypt was killed in a palace coup orchestrated by Ahmed Urabi, an army officer who denounced Turkish rule and called for an ‘Egypt for the Egyptians’. When Tsar Aleksandr II announced Russian intervention in the conflict under the pretext of protecting the Copts, Britain and France demanded that Russia relinquish its rights within the Ottoman Empire. When the Tsar refused, Britain and France declared war and sent a massive expeditionary force to Suxumi in the Caucasus, an expedition that is now famous primarily for horrendous battlefield conditions and pointless bloodshed.

 

[RustyHunter]

This is a very interesting world. The weak USA seems like the biggest change, but I suspect they'll be able to bring the CSA back into the fold once the truce ends. I like how you explained the CSA victory since it was more luck that they won.

Europe is also interesting because Prussia is starting to take power but hasn't quite gotten there, and Italy has managed to alienate everyone against them.

Thanks for updating on the world at large, it's been interesting.

 

[Zeogludon]

This is a very interesting world. The weak USA seems like the biggest change, but I suspect they'll be able to bring the CSA back into the fold once the truce ends. I like how you explained the CSA victory since it was more luck that they won.

Europe is also interesting because Prussia is starting to take power but hasn't quite gotten there, and Italy has managed to alienate everyone against them.

Thanks for updating on the world at large, it's been interesting.

Yeah, I really enjoy writing these posts. I was shocked that the South actually 'won' the Civil War because, looking at real life, the Union would have to screw up pretty bad to let that happen. Heck, even a negotiated peace was out of the question in the real world. After all, the timeworld would have to diverge before 1864 because otherwise you get McClellan running as a war democrat.