Dev Diary #43 - The American Civil War

[luxfelix]

Peaceful abolition was extremely unlikely to occur in the United States. The reason White southerners and especially White slave owners fought so hard over slavery was their interest in the power and prestige that came with it. Money was important for the planters, but it doesn't explain the entirety of slavery's importance to them, and it certainly doesn't explain the willingness of poor Whites to form political alliances with planters. (White southerners' wages were actually depressed by slavery, particularly in cities where enslaved Blacks were sometimes rented out as day laborers for wages below the market rate.)

In simplest terms, the Civil War happened because White southerners feared an erosion of their political power more than they valued membership in the United States. The antebellum fights over slavery almost always centered on its expansion rather than on shoring up its economic and legal viability. The political and actual fighting over the status of slavery in the Great Plains came despite slave labor being unprofitable in cereal crop agriculture. The pro- and anti-slavery camps weren't fighting over land and money; they were fighting over future votes and future seats in Congress.

This motivation is also evident in White southerners' interest in annexing Cuba: it was perennial and intense prior to the Civil War, and evaporated almost immediately after the war. Southern Whites were interested primarily in political power and only secondarily in economic profit, so much so that when the Dominican Republic petitioned the Grant administration to annex it, Congress voted against the annexation because the population of the new territory would have been majority non-White. In other words, expansion into the Caribbean was only desirable when it would have reinforced America's racial caste system, not when it would have undermined it.


The Republican Party's 1860 platform didn't even call for the abolition of slavery; it only called for slavery to be maintained where it was already legal and preemptively outlawed in territories that weren't yet states. Since slavery would have been ludicrously unprofitable in the arid lands of the American Southwest and the western Great Plains, neither of which were suitable for growing cash crops, slavery as an economic system would have been nearly unaffected.

The Republican Party's victory with support exclusively from states where slavery was illegal, though, clearly spelled the beginning of the end for slavery as a political and cultural force in America. White southerners (correctly) saw no viable route to increasing the proportion of the national vote willing to support pro-slavery platforms. Even though they could have profited off of slavery for decades longer, they decided to cast the die and secede because they had decisively lost the (often violent) culture war over the moral and social acceptability of human bondage.

With power and prestige as their aim, were there alternative sources of power and prestige that could swap places with slavery (like Indiana Jones swapping the golden idol with a bag of sand)?

-- Or --

If they received no legal pushback on the expansion of slavery (but, in return, could not force others to search for and return their slaves), would the economic infeasibility of slavery (and demographic changes) eventually catch up with the immorality of slavery?

In other words, was slavery a fire that would burn out eventually as it becomes obsolete by industrialization/expansion, or is the industrial revolution blocked by holding on to slavery?

(It sounds like time was not on the slaveholders' side and that avoiding a civil war would mean a gradual abolition by market forces.)

 

[great lakes]

With power and prestige as their aim, were there alternative sources of power and prestige that could swap places with slavery (like Indiana Jones swapping the golden idol with a bag of sand)?

-- Or --

If they received no legal pushback on the expansion of slavery (but, in return, could not force others to search for and return their slaves), would the economic infeasibility of slavery (and demographic changes) eventually catch up with the immorality of slavery?

In other words, was slavery a fire that would burn out eventually as it becomes obsolete by industrialization/expansion, or is the industrial revolution blocked by holding on to slavery?

(It sounds like time was not on the slaveholders' side and that avoiding a civil war would mean a gradual abolition by market forces.)

I think AT BEST that if the south had simply not rebelled, slavery would have been contained and slowly chipped away at by ideological rather then market forces. the planter class gave a lot of thought to how they could industrialize (after a hypothetical confederate victory) replacing immigrants and the urban poor with the enslaved. if PtY is right, and i think he rings true, the outcome of no war after Lincoln's election would have been free soil (no new slave states, and no slavery in the territories) becoming government policy. from there, the planter class would over time grow less and less important, with northern capitalists becoming more and more the sole US ruling class. with the Missouri compromise already broken, new free states wound be admitted throughout the west, and it would grow harder and harder to maintain the political will to defend slavery, even against a hard-to-pass Constitutional amendment. or, of course, slavery becomes "that thing the south does," without reconstruction we never have a reckoning about race, and it staggers on to the present day. Boy, that was lovely reading </sarcasm>

 

[PtY]

With power and prestige as their aim, were there alternative sources of power and prestige that could swap places with slavery (like Indiana Jones swapping the golden idol with a bag of sand)?

-- Or --

If they received no legal pushback on the expansion of slavery (but, in return, could not force others to search for and return their slaves), would the economic infeasibility of slavery (and demographic changes) eventually catch up with the immorality of slavery?

In other words, was slavery a fire that would burn out eventually as it becomes obsolete by industrialization/expansion, or is the industrial revolution blocked by holding on to slavery?

(It sounds like time was not on the slaveholders' side and that avoiding a civil war would mean a gradual abolition by market forces.)

Power and prestige were only part of the calculus. Perhaps the most important motivation for Whites nationwide in maintaining slavery was keeping enslaved Blacks far away, both geographically and socially. One of the earlier "solutions" to slavery in the United States was colonization - sending free or newly freed Blacks "back" to Africa. There was, however, no economic, political, or logistical way of scaling this up to accommodate the relocation of millions of people, never mind that most enslaved people had never seen Africa after the slave trade was outlawed, or that "Africa" isn't a single, monolithic place.

I bring this up because the motivations to expand slavery were power and prestige, but the popular motivation to preserve slavery was maintaining the existing social order in the South and, to a lesser extent, the North. Above all, preserving the social order meant preventing real and imagined "mixing" of the races, and preventing real and imagined economic competition between Whites and free Blacks.

I doubt economics alone would have done much to alter the situation because slavery as a social-legal regime was more important than slavery as an economic paradigm.

I think AT BEST that if the south had simply not rebelled, slavery would have been contained and slowly chipped away at by ideological rather then market forces. the planter class gave a lot of thought to how they could industrialize (after a hypothetical confederate victory) replacing immigrants and the urban poor with the enslaved. if PtY is right, and i think he rings true, the outcome of no war after Lincoln's election would have been free soil (no new slave states, and no slavery in the territories) becoming government policy. from there, the planter class would over time grow less and less important, with northern capitalists becoming more and more the sole US ruling class. with the Missouri compromise already broken, new free states wound be admitted throughout the west, and it would grow harder and harder to maintain the political will to defend slavery, even against a hard-to-pass Constitutional amendment. or, of course, slavery becomes "that thing the south does," without reconstruction we never have a reckoning about race, and it staggers on to the present day. Boy, that was lovely reading </sarcasm>

Taking your starting assumption at face value - no civil war - I think that's about right. The racial caste system was deeply entrenched in the South and the likeliest outcome of any change was an alteration or reinvention of that system.

However, I have a lot of trouble finding a historically plausible off ramp in the decades-long escalation to war. It's hard for me to imagine an amicable ending to the fragile system of compromises that began in 1820 with the Missouri Compromise. The only uncontroversial federal policy concerning slavery that I can think of was the end of the international slave trade in 1808. The Transatlantic slave trade was already in decline by then, though, and the policy was seen as a foregone outcome, the product of an earlier compromise at the Constitutional Convention in 1787.

Every other dispute over slavery in federal politics, and eventually in American society as a whole, was fraught and left critical masses of people dissatisfied. Furthermore, every time a dispute occurred, even when it was "resolved," the mutual agitation of pro- and anti-slavery groups tended to both increase and persist through the next dispute.

 

[great lakes]

Power and prestige were only part of the calculus. Perhaps the most important motivation for Whites nationwide in maintaining slavery was keeping enslaved Blacks far away, both geographically and socially. One of the earlier "solutions" to slavery in the United States was colonization - sending free or newly freed Blacks "back" to Africa. There was, however, no economic, political, or logistical way of scaling this up to accommodate the relocation of millions of people, never mind that most enslaved people had never seen Africa after the slave trade was outlawed, or that "Africa" isn't a single, monolithic place.

I bring this up because the motivations to expand slavery were power and prestige, but the popular motivation to preserve slavery was maintaining the existing social order in the South and, to a lesser extent, the North. Above all, preserving the social order meant preventing real and imagined "mixing" of the races, and preventing real and imagined economic competition between Whites and free Blacks.

I doubt economics alone would have done much to alter the situation because slavery as a social-legal regime was more important than slavery as an economic paradigm.


Taking your starting assumption at face value - no civil war - I think that's about right. The racial caste system was deeply entrenched in the South and the likeliest outcome of any change was an alteration or reinvention of that system.

However, I have a lot of trouble finding a historically plausible off ramp in the decades-long escalation to war. It's hard for me to imagine an amicable ending to the fragile system of compromises that began in 1820 with the Missouri Compromise. The only uncontroversial federal policy concerning slavery that I can think of was the end of the international slave trade in 1808. The Transatlantic slave trade was already in decline by then, though, and the policy was seen as a foregone outcome, the product of an earlier compromise at the Constitutional Convention in 1787.

Every other dispute over slavery in federal politics, and eventually in American society as a whole, was fraught and left critical masses of people dissatisfied. Furthermore, every time a dispute occurred, even when it was "resolved," the mutual agitation of pro- and anti-slavery groups tended to both increase and persist through the next dispute.

oh, I agree. about the only path I can find would be that the southern political class realizes before fort sumpter that war with the north is unwinnable, as no one outside of the US will care enough to intervene. some southerners did understand this, but the majority were nowhere near that strategically minded - a key issue with confederate leadership throughout the war.

 

[PtY]

oh, I agree. about the only path I can find would be that the southern political class realizes before fort sumpter that war with the north is unwinnable, as no one outside of the US will care enough to intervene. some southerners did understand this, but the majority were nowhere near that strategically minded - a key issue with confederate leadership throughout the war.

There's some interesting historiography on that subject. Southern politicians made a habit of demonizing Northern politicians in the years leading up to the war, hoping to get their speeches printed in newspapers for their constituents to read. Afterwards, they'd often apologize privately to the targets of those speeches, claiming they were all for show - I doubt they were entirely sincere here - thus contributing to a xenophobic siege mentality in the South.

After the raid on Harpers Ferry, things got so bad that most Northern businesses recalled their representatives from the South because so many feared they'd be lynched for being from the North. In that environment, it's hard to imagine anyone, "rational" or not, going too strongly against the wishes of the public.

 

[Vandimire]

I have to say that my sense is, in the admittedly already ahistorical scenario where you have an abolitionist movement that kicks off the civil war rather than the pro-slavery movement, that their goals would be to change the laws of the US rather than secession. That is, it should use ordinary revolution mechanics in that case, rather than the hybrid revolution/secession mechanics that happen when the slave states secede.

After all, the free states were already, well, free states. If they broke free, there would be two countries instead of one but all the parts of the former US that had slavery would still have slavery and the parts that didn't wouldn't. Yes, no fugitive slave law, but hardly worth going to war for that end state.

What would cause the non-slave states to secede would be if the southern states tried to impose slavery throughout the US, but that's not an abolitionist movement. That is, in game terms it's not a movement to ban slavery that gets radicalized, but a movement to preserve Legacy Slavery against Slave Trade that gets radicalized. Of course, it's hard to imagine that happening, and if things ever did come to that I would expect the UK to get involved.

But the whole point of a movement to ban slavery is to ban slavery in the parts of the US that had slavery. If the abolitionist states split off and form their own country, they haven't actually achieved their stated aims!

Well in OTL it makes sense for them to want to ban it everywhere as they had the federal government aiding them but thats the same reason in an alternative timeline where slavery won the civil war that aomeone would say what you said but with slavery instead of abortionist states. In this theoretical route the federal goverment is supporting slave states and most likely has been shutting down any pro-abolition compromises etc and possibly even started expanding it north or something ethier way abolitionists end up in the CSA shoes with a pro slavery government. Also maybe someone already replied only 3 pages into comments reading.

 

[thedarkendstar]

What would you call people from the US besides "American"? For people from other countries in North or South America you can say Canadian, Mexican, Panamanian, Cuban, Bolivian, Chilean, Brazilian, Colombian, Argentinian etc.

The only possible thing I can think of is a Unionist?

 

[Revolution 11]

The only possible thing I can think of is a Unionist?

That would be really weird and inaccurate. Unionist is a term that describes support for a political arrangement, like a Union .

Using it to describe a national identity like the Spanish or the Germans is silly. That is like saying that a Communist, a Republican, a Monarchist, a Fascist, a Royalist, an Anarchist, are all terms you can assign to a single national or ethnic identity INSTEAD of using them correctly as descriptors and labels for supporters of broad and universal political schools of thought.

 

[hazard151]

Well in OTL it makes sense for them to want to ban it everywhere as they had the federal government aiding them but thats the same reason in an alternative timeline where slavery won the civil war that aomeone would say what you said but with slavery instead of abortionist states. In this theoretical route the federal goverment is supporting slave states and most likely has been shutting down any pro-abolition compromises etc and possibly even started expanding it north or something ethier way abolitionists end up in the CSA shoes with a pro slavery government. Also maybe someone already replied only 3 pages into comments reading.

Actually, if the US Civil War had ended the same year it started, it is incredibly likely that abolition would not have been imposed by the federal government on the slave holding states. Early in the war the North's reason for fighting the war wasn't to forcefully stop the practice of slavery; it was to forcefully undo the secession of the CSA. It's only later, when the North started pushing into the CSA and thousands of young men wrote home about the abject conditions and the horrors imposed by slavery that abolition became a goal of its own.

It is highly likely that a federal government backing the slavers would suppress the abolitionist movement after the war, though.

 

[Azhcristokos]

I like your work and I hope that victoria 3 comes out as well as possible, but speaking on behalf of the Spanish-speaking community that awaits your game, I would like you to please not refer to America as the United States America, is all the countries that are in it American continent is as if, for example, they only considered France as European and if a Swede was asked "hey, where are you from" and he answered, "Well, I'm European", the one who asked automatically said "ooo and maybe you live in paris or lyon", things like that, well, maybe they won't understand thanks to the fact that you mainly communicate with people from the United States or English, things like "American market" could be changed to "USA market" or things like that, and well, if you can't Change then, please, could you do it in the translation into Spanish and that in events or in the view of markets people from the United States do not put American or Americans , because in Spanish we have a demonym for people who live in the United States, it's "Estadounidence or estadounicences".
It's just that if it sounded a bit hateful or something like that, because that wasn't my intention, I just wanted to let you know thanks to the fact that being one of an American country and Consider or call the United States as America is ugly and feels ugly for the people who live in the america and is not part os USA.
Thank you for your attention and I hope you are well .

psd: sorry for my english Ñ.

Ignoring that it makes no sense to use Spanish-language naming conventions in the English version of the game, I honestly am so confused what you mean. You are saying here that we shouldn't use the name "United States of America," but that is the official name of the country, and English speakers uncomfortable with the term "American" being used exclusively to refer to US citizens....prefer the term "United States." So if we can't use America or United States (of America)...what do we use?

Naturally, the Spanish version of Vic3 should use Spanish conventions, but that has no bearing on the English version.

 

[FleetingRain]

I don't think there's any other decent denonym for US inhabitants besides "American" at this time. IIRC the country only started seeing itself as "America" by the New Deal, but it was already the "United States of (North) America" by then. No one in their right mind would call themselves a "unitedstatian" (or lol "usonian").

Which is why the country should have been called Columbia, but Bolívar ruined that possibility /s

 

[thedarkendstar]

That would be really weird and inaccurate. Unionist is a term that describes support for a political arrangement, like a Union .

Using it to describe a national identity like the Spanish or the Germans is silly. That is like saying that a Communist, a Republican, a Monarchist, a Fascist, a Royalist, an Anarchist, are all terms you can assign to a single national or ethnic identity INSTEAD of using them correctly as descriptors and labels for supporters of broad and universal political schools of thought.

Yes which is why I said its the only thing I can think of I never said it was a good one.

 

[$ilent_$trider]

United Statesian

I don't think there's any other decent denonym for US inhabitants besides "American" at this time. IIRC the country only started seeing itself as "America" by the New Deal, but it was already the "United States of (North) America" by then. No one in their right mind would call themselves a "unitedstatian" (or lol "usonian").

Which is why the country should have been called Columbia, but Bolívar ruined that possibility /s

Unitedstatian no, but United Statesian was already suggested, though.
And it's clearly the right answer:
Honduras -> Honduran
Equator - Equatorian
By this logic, United States should be United Statesian.
Other options would be: United Statese, similar to Portuguese or United Statesish, similar to Swedish

 

[great lakes]

I don't think there's any other decent denonym for US inhabitants besides "American" at this time. IIRC the country only started seeing itself as "America" by the New Deal, but it was already the "United States of (North) America" by then. No one in their right mind would call themselves a "unitedstatian" (or lol "usonian").

Which is why the country should have been called Columbia, but Bolívar ruined that possibility /s

all things considered, I think "unitedstates-ian" just sounds terrible. If we conclude that "American" in reference to the US is unacceptable (a fringe viewpoint in the US, but common outside of Anglo-America) I think the Germans have this one right. in German the terms US-Amerikaner and US-amerikanisch are common, and I think calques of them are a reasonable resolution to the point at issue. that said, I would also say that Paradox should follow rather then lead on this point. the English version of vic iii should use the names and Adjectives common in English for countries. that said, I don't think its too controversial for Paradox to describe US stuff as "united states." A United States market, or what have you. might grow awkward sometimes, though.

 

[Thure]

Unitedstatian no, but United Statesian was already suggested, though.
And it's clearly the right answer:
Honduras -> Honduran
Equator - Equatorian
By this logic, United States should be United Statesian.
Other options would be: United Statese, similar to Portuguese or United Statesish, similar to Swedish

Republic of Honduras > Republican
Republic of Ecuador > Republican
United States of America > United Statesian
United Mexican States > United Mexican or United Statesian

or

Republic of Honduras > Honduran
Republic of Ecuador > Equatorian
United States of America > American
United Mexican States > Mexican

Your exemple doesn't make sense, this is how it would be correctly, if you want to compare the USA to Equador or Honduras for naming conventions.

 

[UnenthusiasticClownJob]

This comment has been reserved by the community team to gather up dev responses in for ease of reading.

So are we just not doing this anymore, or...?

 

[TemirFe26]

So are we just not doing this anymore, or...?

Yeah, apparently you have to search for Ofaloaf's name in the "Who Replied?" filter for this DD for some reason, which would lead you to a single post that answers some questions in bulk. Here, I'll link it for you and others.

 

[T.j. Arnold]

Why no dev responses?

 

[thedarkendstar]

Why no dev responses?

I wonder what could have possibly happened this last week that would be keeping the devs busy or making them hesitant to share more info after the game how elusive the answer.

 

[UnenthusiasticClownJob]

I wonder what could have possibly happened this last week that would be keeping the devs busy or making them hesitant to share more info after the game how elusive the answer.

What, they think that if they answer questions in the forum of the dev diaries, they'll somehow accidentally type out the entire source code to Victoria 3 and leak it again? You really figure that's the reason they're not answering questions?

Anyways they did answer a number of questions, as Temir helpfully pointed out, they just weren't compiled into the reserve post.