Oh yes, I remember that chapter. I just did't interpret it to mean that the majority of slaves had been free - though it was certainly moving in that direction. Certainly, there is a much larger Free Black population than at any other time prior in the history of the Confederacy and the South, but they were not yet majority free. Though if I am wrong in that @KingSweden24, please correct me!
Cinco de Mayo
- Thread starter KingSweden24
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Oh yes, I remember that chapter. I just did't interpret it to mean that the majority of slaves had been free - though it was certainly moving in that direction. Certainly, there is a much larger Free Black population than at any other time prior in the history of the Confederacy and the South, but they were not yet majority free. Though if I am wrong in that @KingSweden24, please correct me!
I haven't given it much thought tbh. It has a seven-member body rather than nine, that I know. My thinking is that ever since the SCotCS decided to Leroy Jenkins the '73 election between Isham Harris and John Breckinridge, Confederate Presidents have been very deliberate in their approach to "court-management." The Bourbons/Morganites would probably have been keen to appoint OTL justices like Edward D. White or Joseph Rucker Lamar to the Court (the latter in particular as his brother had been President) and we're nearing the point where the Tillmanites have enough power to start dictating men of their own mien get onto the bench. The enormous power state legislatures have in impeaching federal judges they don't like will certainly have had impact on lower-court rulings, though. I'd say that in terms of institutional power, the SCotCS is substantially weaker than its northern counterpart both because the federal government of the Confederacy is weaker and because pursuant Presidents and Congresses have preferred to keep it that way. It might not quite be a retirement home for prominent attorneys like in some countries, but it's close.
*tips hat* thank you good sir I do what I can
Heh. I can make that happen I think
I have a South Africa outfit planned for a little bit from now actually! It's a very different trajectory from OTL at the moment though may eventually wind up somewhere similar... stay tuned
Depends on how you define "Black liberation." Slavery is going to die by hook or by crook in some capacity; a losing CSA will have a lot of international pressure to abolish the practice de jure. That said, any white-Black cooperation, as we saw IOTL's South, is likely to be fleeting in most circumstances.
Salmon Chase, having shepherded the Abolition Amendments along, enjoys a similar place in public memory for African-Americans as the Great Abolitionist that Lincoln does IOTL
This is the correct read. Manumission is rising from "barely any" to "some," so there's a much larger Free Black population, but it's still a small proportion of the overall Confederate Black population. (Re-enslavement by fiat has largely vanished in practice even if it is on the books in some states, but being a Free Black south of the Ohio still is horrible and so those with the means to often move to the US, Canada or elsewhere in Latin America, so that Free Black population has good amounts of outmigration pressure, too)
WanderingProfessor
Banned
So we get an alternate version of the Great Migration but it resembles immigration from Southern and Eastern Europe, Asia and Latin America than OTL's version.I haven't given it much thought tbh. It has a seven-member body rather than nine, that I know. My thinking is that ever since the SCotCS decided to Leroy Jenkins the '73 election between Isham Harris and John Breckinridge, Confederate Presidents have been very deliberate in their approach to "court-management." The Bourbons/Morganites would probably have been keen to appoint OTL justices like Edward D. White or Joseph Rucker Lamar to the Court (the latter in particular as his brother had been President) and we're nearing the point where the Tillmanites have enough power to start dictating men of their own mien get onto the bench. The enormous power state legislatures have in impeaching federal judges they don't like will certainly have had impact on lower-court rulings, though. I'd say that in terms of institutional power, the SCotCS is substantially weaker than its northern counterpart both because the federal government of the Confederacy is weaker and because pursuant Presidents and Congresses have preferred to keep it that way. It might not quite be a retirement home for prominent attorneys like in some countries, but it's close.
*tips hat* thank you good sir I do what I can
Heh. I can make that happen I think
I have a South Africa outfit planned for a little bit from now actually! It's a very different trajectory from OTL at the moment though may eventually wind up somewhere similar... stay tuned
Depends on how you define "Black liberation." Slavery is going to die by hook or by crook in some capacity; a losing CSA will have a lot of international pressure to abolish the practice de jure. That said, any white-Black cooperation, as we saw IOTL's South, is likely to be fleeting in most circumstances.
Salmon Chase, having shepherded the Abolition Amendments along, enjoys a similar place in public memory for African-Americans as the Great Abolitionist that Lincoln does IOTL
This is the correct read. Manumission is rising from "barely any" to "some," so there's a much larger Free Black population, but it's still a small proportion of the overall Confederate Black population. (Re-enslavement by fiat has largely vanished in practice even if it is on the books in some states, but being a Free Black south of the Ohio still is horrible and so those with the means to often move to the US, Canada or elsewhere in Latin America, so that Free Black population has good amounts of outmigration pressure, too)
WanderingProfessor
Banned
Regarding Uncle Tom's Cabin, the story is probably still popular in America and a couple of other countries, especially among blacks but banned in the Confederacy for fairly obvious reasons. In it's place is the pro-slavery Anti-Tom literature some of which becomes popular enough to be made into movies by Confederate movie studios in Jacksonville or another large city with enough resources to support a film industry.
This is something that is touched on in a few places like "Captain Confederacy". How do you do media (in the broadest sense) with Negro roles in a situation like a victorious confederacy? Blackface? Actual negros showing they are happy on screen. (*really* good acting, etc.)
Pitchforks, Peasants and Palmetto Politics: The Rise and Fall of Benjamin Tillman
"...textile strike that roiled Upstate South Carolina in the spring and summer of 1908. Thankfully for the mill owners and for the ability of the South Carolina State Militia to clamp down on the worst of the violence, the strikes rolled from west to east over the course of four wild months, as a mill would strike out, demands would be met, and then unruly workers at the next town over would walk out to demand the same. Had a general textile strike broken out all at once, it would have broken South Carolina's economy for much of the year and perhaps put wind in the sails of workers elsewhere in the Confederacy.
The strikes were a confluence of a number of factors. Twenty years earlier, at the start of the great agricultural depression of the 1890s that made South Carolina one of the few polities in North America to shed population, there had been less than two dozen textile mills in the entire Palmetto State; by 1908, there were over a hundred and twenty, heavily concentrated in the hill towns of the near-Appalachian Upstate. This changing economy posed a unique threat to Tillmanism, which had always been centered upon breaking the political reliance of the yeomanry upon the paternalist patronage of the planter class in return for pliancy; now, there was a new constituency of downscale white men who were up for grabs and for whom the agrarian reformism and agitations of Tillman seemed a throwback to a bygone era. The Agrarian Apostle, at the zenith of his power in Richmond, was now at risk of being outfoxed at home by an enemy from within - Coleman Livingston Blease.
"Coley," as he was known by both his partisans and detractors, had come up in the Tillman organization and, even in the hot summer of1908, remained a partisan Democrat who cheered Pitchfork Ben's successful dispatching of the Bourbon element in the previous year's elections. But Blease was a canny, ambitious and ruthless operator in his own right, a former state legislator who had failed twice to secure the governorship and now bided his time as mayor of his hometown of Newberry, midway on the railroad from Columbia to Greenville and widely regarded as the gateway to the Upstate from the Low Country. He had always courted textile workers as his base and the strike turned him from obscure demagogue to folk hero in the textile mills; Tillman's prevarications and indecisiveness in returning from Richmond to attend to the matter left a large opening for Blease to exploit and spur his public image. He was not definitively anti-Tillmanite enough to be a clear threat to the legions of Pitchforkers in South Carolina who could have otherwise disposed of him (and who coveted his phalanxes of loyal textile laborers), but also enough of his own man to differentiate himself for those who had begun to tire of Tillman's machine.
Remarkably, Blease was perhaps one of the few men in the Confederacy outside of perhaps James K. Vardaman who could have made Tillman look like a moderate in the mold of President Jones. Though they shared many of the same enemies - the planter aristocracy and Charleston businessmen, for one, but also the newspapers and freedmen - Tillman's platform of agrarian reform, education and deliberately working to de-institutionalize the control of the oligarchy over the levers of state power was one of consideration and careful planning. Blease, on the other hand, was an erratic man, his ideas incoherent other than mere inchoate rage and whipping up resentment for his benefit without any particular end to his demagogy. Where Tillman had walked a transparently insincere tightrope on lynching, neither condemning nor condoning the practice even as he shrugged it off as a necessary reality of Confederate life in dealing with freedmen who did not understand their place, Blease actively and eagerly encouraged it, declaring in a speech before a mill that every "free Negro laborer should be driven from this factory to make space for a white man; we shall demand they leave in peace, and those who do not may leave at the end of a noose!" (Blease's most notorious paean to the lynch mob would of course come in the violent postwar years, after Tillman had died, when he suggested, "Let there be no case in which a ride through the South Carolina Upstate results in a man passing by a tree from which at least one Negro has not been hung.") [1]
Blease was a wildcard Tillman could not contain as easily as he had dispatched first his enemies to his left, to his center and now to his right; he was a Pitchforker taken to the ideology's logical conclusion, and in many ways represented the future, what with being two decades his junior and, as it turned out, in much more vigorous health. At the height of the 1908 textile strike Tillman suffered a moderate stroke that left him bedridden for weeks and noticeably feebler in its aftermath. Though it would not be until after his death that it was understood that he'd actually had a stroke - the people who knew definitively were limited to his private doctor and Sallie [2] - the episode could not have occurred at a more critical time. Tillman's family suggested that he had suffered a much more minor ailment to explain away his convalescence in Edgefield, but the sharks could smell blood in the water; Blease, in a move of surprising political chess, elected not to seek the Democratic nomination for Governor again in 1908, rather issuing statements of wishing good health for Tillman to earn significant chits with men inside the state's political machine that he could instead cash in at a time of his choosing and instead building up his own operation buoyed by his celebrity as one of the sole Democratic leaders to solely stand in solidarity with the strikers.
Back in Richmond, meanwhile, Vardaman began insinuating that the 60-year old Tillman was ailing and started planning for his own usurpation of the seat of pro tempore to take advantage of the expected coming power vacuum. Tillman returned to Virginia once it seemed like the strikes were winding down before autumn, politically bloodied but not beaten. It was an old adage in Confederate politics that one was only as powerful in Richmond as one was back home, and despite ostensibly being at the zenith of his power, Tillman looked genuinely weakened, though enough veterans of the past fifteen years of Senate power plays knew better than to count Pitchfork Ben out - he had, after all, seemed much more vulnerable before, only to roar back and maul his opposition like a cornered lion.
What the episode did do, however, was underline for good for Tillman that transitioning to a capstone Presidency in 1909 as many of his supporters and detractors in the Senate hoped (for the sake of their own ambitions, of course) was likely to be too politically fraught for him to successfully pull off. Having effectively neutered the office already, he was skeptical that he would enjoy the same influence and was certain that the Vardamans of the world, and now cretins like Blease back in South Carolina, were licking their chops at using his health care to portray him as weak and thus begin the process of toppling the man who built the grand edifice of the new Democratic Party so they could stand atop the parapet in his place. With no desire to see his enemies become the Caesar to his Sulla, Tillman instead committed himself to rebuilding his political standing. Back home, it came through further ingratiating himself with the Naval League, which was now increasingly concentrated in Norfolk and Charleston, and through whom he had helped steer enormous largesse to the Charleston Shipyards; in Richmond, it came through his tried-and-true process of whipping up nationalist and anti-Yankee sentiment, redeploying his followers against the external enemy less they begin to be tempted by his would-be successors, and training his ire in particular on the efforts of Secretary of State Blackburn to negotiate an amicable renewal of the Treaty of Havana with the United States..."
- Pitchforks, Peasants and Palmetto Politics: The Rise and Fall of Benjamin Tillman
[1] These quotes are my creation, but I feel they are a fairly accurate representation of Coleman L. Blease's worldview.
[2] Sallie Tillman, his wife
The strikes were a confluence of a number of factors. Twenty years earlier, at the start of the great agricultural depression of the 1890s that made South Carolina one of the few polities in North America to shed population, there had been less than two dozen textile mills in the entire Palmetto State; by 1908, there were over a hundred and twenty, heavily concentrated in the hill towns of the near-Appalachian Upstate. This changing economy posed a unique threat to Tillmanism, which had always been centered upon breaking the political reliance of the yeomanry upon the paternalist patronage of the planter class in return for pliancy; now, there was a new constituency of downscale white men who were up for grabs and for whom the agrarian reformism and agitations of Tillman seemed a throwback to a bygone era. The Agrarian Apostle, at the zenith of his power in Richmond, was now at risk of being outfoxed at home by an enemy from within - Coleman Livingston Blease.
"Coley," as he was known by both his partisans and detractors, had come up in the Tillman organization and, even in the hot summer of1908, remained a partisan Democrat who cheered Pitchfork Ben's successful dispatching of the Bourbon element in the previous year's elections. But Blease was a canny, ambitious and ruthless operator in his own right, a former state legislator who had failed twice to secure the governorship and now bided his time as mayor of his hometown of Newberry, midway on the railroad from Columbia to Greenville and widely regarded as the gateway to the Upstate from the Low Country. He had always courted textile workers as his base and the strike turned him from obscure demagogue to folk hero in the textile mills; Tillman's prevarications and indecisiveness in returning from Richmond to attend to the matter left a large opening for Blease to exploit and spur his public image. He was not definitively anti-Tillmanite enough to be a clear threat to the legions of Pitchforkers in South Carolina who could have otherwise disposed of him (and who coveted his phalanxes of loyal textile laborers), but also enough of his own man to differentiate himself for those who had begun to tire of Tillman's machine.
Remarkably, Blease was perhaps one of the few men in the Confederacy outside of perhaps James K. Vardaman who could have made Tillman look like a moderate in the mold of President Jones. Though they shared many of the same enemies - the planter aristocracy and Charleston businessmen, for one, but also the newspapers and freedmen - Tillman's platform of agrarian reform, education and deliberately working to de-institutionalize the control of the oligarchy over the levers of state power was one of consideration and careful planning. Blease, on the other hand, was an erratic man, his ideas incoherent other than mere inchoate rage and whipping up resentment for his benefit without any particular end to his demagogy. Where Tillman had walked a transparently insincere tightrope on lynching, neither condemning nor condoning the practice even as he shrugged it off as a necessary reality of Confederate life in dealing with freedmen who did not understand their place, Blease actively and eagerly encouraged it, declaring in a speech before a mill that every "free Negro laborer should be driven from this factory to make space for a white man; we shall demand they leave in peace, and those who do not may leave at the end of a noose!" (Blease's most notorious paean to the lynch mob would of course come in the violent postwar years, after Tillman had died, when he suggested, "Let there be no case in which a ride through the South Carolina Upstate results in a man passing by a tree from which at least one Negro has not been hung.") [1]
Blease was a wildcard Tillman could not contain as easily as he had dispatched first his enemies to his left, to his center and now to his right; he was a Pitchforker taken to the ideology's logical conclusion, and in many ways represented the future, what with being two decades his junior and, as it turned out, in much more vigorous health. At the height of the 1908 textile strike Tillman suffered a moderate stroke that left him bedridden for weeks and noticeably feebler in its aftermath. Though it would not be until after his death that it was understood that he'd actually had a stroke - the people who knew definitively were limited to his private doctor and Sallie [2] - the episode could not have occurred at a more critical time. Tillman's family suggested that he had suffered a much more minor ailment to explain away his convalescence in Edgefield, but the sharks could smell blood in the water; Blease, in a move of surprising political chess, elected not to seek the Democratic nomination for Governor again in 1908, rather issuing statements of wishing good health for Tillman to earn significant chits with men inside the state's political machine that he could instead cash in at a time of his choosing and instead building up his own operation buoyed by his celebrity as one of the sole Democratic leaders to solely stand in solidarity with the strikers.
Back in Richmond, meanwhile, Vardaman began insinuating that the 60-year old Tillman was ailing and started planning for his own usurpation of the seat of pro tempore to take advantage of the expected coming power vacuum. Tillman returned to Virginia once it seemed like the strikes were winding down before autumn, politically bloodied but not beaten. It was an old adage in Confederate politics that one was only as powerful in Richmond as one was back home, and despite ostensibly being at the zenith of his power, Tillman looked genuinely weakened, though enough veterans of the past fifteen years of Senate power plays knew better than to count Pitchfork Ben out - he had, after all, seemed much more vulnerable before, only to roar back and maul his opposition like a cornered lion.
What the episode did do, however, was underline for good for Tillman that transitioning to a capstone Presidency in 1909 as many of his supporters and detractors in the Senate hoped (for the sake of their own ambitions, of course) was likely to be too politically fraught for him to successfully pull off. Having effectively neutered the office already, he was skeptical that he would enjoy the same influence and was certain that the Vardamans of the world, and now cretins like Blease back in South Carolina, were licking their chops at using his health care to portray him as weak and thus begin the process of toppling the man who built the grand edifice of the new Democratic Party so they could stand atop the parapet in his place. With no desire to see his enemies become the Caesar to his Sulla, Tillman instead committed himself to rebuilding his political standing. Back home, it came through further ingratiating himself with the Naval League, which was now increasingly concentrated in Norfolk and Charleston, and through whom he had helped steer enormous largesse to the Charleston Shipyards; in Richmond, it came through his tried-and-true process of whipping up nationalist and anti-Yankee sentiment, redeploying his followers against the external enemy less they begin to be tempted by his would-be successors, and training his ire in particular on the efforts of Secretary of State Blackburn to negotiate an amicable renewal of the Treaty of Havana with the United States..."
- Pitchforks, Peasants and Palmetto Politics: The Rise and Fall of Benjamin Tillman
[1] These quotes are my creation, but I feel they are a fairly accurate representation of Coleman L. Blease's worldview.
[2] Sallie Tillman, his wife
There's examples of "happy negroes" in stuff like Gone with the Wind from OTL; probably something along those lines, just for way, way longer I imagine
(And televised minstrel shows, too)
WanderingProfessor
Banned
And for the Confederate entertainment industry, Jacksonville would be it's capital because of it's warm climate allowing directors to film movies all year round. Also, it was a favorite place for American filmmakers who didn't want to work with Thomas Edison in New Jersey in OTL. Jacksonville will basically be to the Confederates what Los Angeles is to the American film/television industry.
As for DW Griffith, he could become the Confederacy's most prominent filmmaker since he is in Kentucky and had ancestors who fought in the gray and butternut.
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Hispania, Hispania!
"...Antonio Maura still strikes historians today as a strange figure to build a cult of personality around, though perhaps it stemmed less from anything he himself did so much as the symbolic nature of his government - that of the first Cabinet definitively of the Spanish Right since the Glorious Revolution had turned the country's political debates into a contest between big-tent liberalism and radicalism. Maura rejected this surrender to liberalism while contenting himself with being a figurehead simply for the forces of orderly royalism in the wake of the chaotic collapse of Spanish political norms in the wake of the humiliation of the Philippines; beneath him, however, a movement was birthed, albeit one that failed to maintain any semblance of staying power.
What plagued the Spanish Right was that maurismo, as a movement, was utterly incoherent. It was a movement of aristocracy and the wealthy middle classes first and foremost but quickly devolved into factions. What bound the movement together was a push to use conservatism as a modernizing force; it deviated substantially from the paleo-Bourbonism of men like the slain Canovas and his protege, Eduardo Dato, by staunchly standing in support not only of the modernizing Catholic monarchy of the Hohenzollern royalty but still centering their worldview in traditionalist Catholic thinking and philosophy. This was not a recipe for cohesion but for myopic flailing. Maura and his son, Gabriel, stood in favor of liberal-conservative (emphasis on the "conservative") reform to appeal to the bourgeois' backlash to the debacle against Japan and pry away the right wing of Serranistas to build a new power bloc that would run the gamut from center to hard right and block out progressives and radicals for the foreseeable future. They were hamstrung in such efforts by twin efforts to their right to take a different course; first, by the social Catholic movement of Angel Ossorio y Gallardo, whose views pointed to a Christian democratic future for Spanish conservatism but which demanded the complete and total abandonment of the "secular truce" struck by Liberals and the Church for the past forty years in order to entirely reorient Spanish politics around a "National Contract"-style conservatism, and secondly the authoritarian corporatist conservatism of Jose Calvo Sotelo and Antonio Goicoechea which while not explicitly politically Catholic still maintained a top-down view of society with "Church and crown" as two of its key pillars, along with a rigid hierarchical idea of "organic democracy" around which politics would be organized. It was this "street maurista" strain of the Spanish right that lent itself most to political violence, thuggery and intimidation - and which would provide the model for similar trends around Europe in the early 1920s when other Great Powers were suffering from similar economic and political indignities in their own postwar era.
Maura did little to synthesize these views, many of which were in their early gestation; aloof and needing to coddle the National Liberals of Canalejas who supported his Cabinet, he held little control over the day-to-day aspects of the Conservative Party and was neither authoritarian nor activist in party management. This seemed to serve him just fine with his detached personality, but it began to strain his diverse coalition in unexpected ways and though the Spanish economy gradually recovered over the back half of his single term as a Prime Minister, his government showed little for its paeans to reform and the cracks were clearly showing within the movement that would for years bear his name as the 1910 elections approached..."
- Hispania, Hispania!
What plagued the Spanish Right was that maurismo, as a movement, was utterly incoherent. It was a movement of aristocracy and the wealthy middle classes first and foremost but quickly devolved into factions. What bound the movement together was a push to use conservatism as a modernizing force; it deviated substantially from the paleo-Bourbonism of men like the slain Canovas and his protege, Eduardo Dato, by staunchly standing in support not only of the modernizing Catholic monarchy of the Hohenzollern royalty but still centering their worldview in traditionalist Catholic thinking and philosophy. This was not a recipe for cohesion but for myopic flailing. Maura and his son, Gabriel, stood in favor of liberal-conservative (emphasis on the "conservative") reform to appeal to the bourgeois' backlash to the debacle against Japan and pry away the right wing of Serranistas to build a new power bloc that would run the gamut from center to hard right and block out progressives and radicals for the foreseeable future. They were hamstrung in such efforts by twin efforts to their right to take a different course; first, by the social Catholic movement of Angel Ossorio y Gallardo, whose views pointed to a Christian democratic future for Spanish conservatism but which demanded the complete and total abandonment of the "secular truce" struck by Liberals and the Church for the past forty years in order to entirely reorient Spanish politics around a "National Contract"-style conservatism, and secondly the authoritarian corporatist conservatism of Jose Calvo Sotelo and Antonio Goicoechea which while not explicitly politically Catholic still maintained a top-down view of society with "Church and crown" as two of its key pillars, along with a rigid hierarchical idea of "organic democracy" around which politics would be organized. It was this "street maurista" strain of the Spanish right that lent itself most to political violence, thuggery and intimidation - and which would provide the model for similar trends around Europe in the early 1920s when other Great Powers were suffering from similar economic and political indignities in their own postwar era.
Maura did little to synthesize these views, many of which were in their early gestation; aloof and needing to coddle the National Liberals of Canalejas who supported his Cabinet, he held little control over the day-to-day aspects of the Conservative Party and was neither authoritarian nor activist in party management. This seemed to serve him just fine with his detached personality, but it began to strain his diverse coalition in unexpected ways and though the Spanish economy gradually recovered over the back half of his single term as a Prime Minister, his government showed little for its paeans to reform and the cracks were clearly showing within the movement that would for years bear his name as the 1910 elections approached..."
- Hispania, Hispania!
Hartington: Britain's First Modern Prime Minister
"...in passing on the 24th of March, 1908, seventy-four years aged.
In the weeks that followed Devonshire's death his legacy was reevaluated yet again. His turn to a more conservative Whiggery as his party charged headlong into the Radicalism of Chamberlain, Dilke and their fellow travelers had conspired to permanently cast him among younger, modern Liberal reformers as a reactionary, a creature of the Gladstonian classicalism that dominated the latter Victorian era and had failed miserably at the ballot box against autocratic Toryism until the aggressive, decisive Radicals had rescued the party out of its doldrums. To many of them, the Prime Minister once known as "Hartington" may as well have joined the Conservatives, because there was little daylight in between. This was in part because so many of them had come up in the ranks of the NLF when Chamberlain was using it as his own pressure vehicle and only entered the Commons in a time of landslides and endless victories, not understanding the difficult position Liberals found themselves in before their watershed victory in the spring of 1878. Without Hartington's modest extension of the franchise, universal manhood suffrage in 1895 would have been impossible; without his transformation of the Local Government Board (spearheaded in part by Chamberlain), the land reform of 1896 would never have occurred. It was he who disestablished the Church in Ireland and ended religious tests for universities, he who overhauled education, and he who moderated British colonial policy to avoid future embarrassments like the Basuto War while finding an honorable temporary compromise in Ireland that turned down the temperature in Dublin for some time and for which he lost his majority.
Chamberlain, who had sparred with Devonshire in his Premiership to the point that he had worked tirelessly to find colonial governorships (including India) to semi-exile him to, made one of his last major speeches at his funeral. Though soft-voiced and staggering with a cane, he praised the Duke for his modernizing ethos and compared him to John the Baptist [1] for setting the stage for the victories of the Nineties. "He was a moderate man, with an easy temperament and a calm demeanor, and our beloved Britain owes him a great debt for the sacrifices he made for it without thought to his own ambitions," Chamberlain concluded, and from him that was a tremendous compliment.
The towering shadow of Chamberlain looms large over the Liberal Party for obvious reasons; even Devonshire himself acknowledged as much, feeling his Ministry forgotten even in life. Nevertheless, the modern Britain owes a tremendous amount to Spencer Compton Cavendish; in the half century between 1856 and 1906, only three Prime Ministers served more than four years in office; all three of them were Liberals. But while Lord Palmerston died in office and Chamberlain was forced into retirement when a stroke accelerated his political decline, Hartington was the only one to resign. That he landed in the middle, in the transition from the classical liberalism embodied by Palmerston and his Moses in the Desert, Gladstone, to Chamberlain and the New Radicalism, can explain why history has forgotten him, as well as what is still seen as his hesitancy in Egypt costing Britain the keys to Africa. But it was the man who went by so many names - Cavendish, Hartington, and finally the Duke of Devonshire - who remains the key to understanding the Liberal ascendancy of the second half of the 19th century and how it transformed Britain into the state it is today..."
- Hartington: Britain's First Modern Prime Minister
[1] Chamberlain is, of course, the Christ in this analogy, because of course he is
(Hartington/Devonshire is a bit of a throwback to earlier in this TL but I felt it was important to ponder his contributions in setting up for Chamberlain's success with his own reforms and mainstreaming of the Liberals as an electoralist force)
In the weeks that followed Devonshire's death his legacy was reevaluated yet again. His turn to a more conservative Whiggery as his party charged headlong into the Radicalism of Chamberlain, Dilke and their fellow travelers had conspired to permanently cast him among younger, modern Liberal reformers as a reactionary, a creature of the Gladstonian classicalism that dominated the latter Victorian era and had failed miserably at the ballot box against autocratic Toryism until the aggressive, decisive Radicals had rescued the party out of its doldrums. To many of them, the Prime Minister once known as "Hartington" may as well have joined the Conservatives, because there was little daylight in between. This was in part because so many of them had come up in the ranks of the NLF when Chamberlain was using it as his own pressure vehicle and only entered the Commons in a time of landslides and endless victories, not understanding the difficult position Liberals found themselves in before their watershed victory in the spring of 1878. Without Hartington's modest extension of the franchise, universal manhood suffrage in 1895 would have been impossible; without his transformation of the Local Government Board (spearheaded in part by Chamberlain), the land reform of 1896 would never have occurred. It was he who disestablished the Church in Ireland and ended religious tests for universities, he who overhauled education, and he who moderated British colonial policy to avoid future embarrassments like the Basuto War while finding an honorable temporary compromise in Ireland that turned down the temperature in Dublin for some time and for which he lost his majority.
Chamberlain, who had sparred with Devonshire in his Premiership to the point that he had worked tirelessly to find colonial governorships (including India) to semi-exile him to, made one of his last major speeches at his funeral. Though soft-voiced and staggering with a cane, he praised the Duke for his modernizing ethos and compared him to John the Baptist [1] for setting the stage for the victories of the Nineties. "He was a moderate man, with an easy temperament and a calm demeanor, and our beloved Britain owes him a great debt for the sacrifices he made for it without thought to his own ambitions," Chamberlain concluded, and from him that was a tremendous compliment.
The towering shadow of Chamberlain looms large over the Liberal Party for obvious reasons; even Devonshire himself acknowledged as much, feeling his Ministry forgotten even in life. Nevertheless, the modern Britain owes a tremendous amount to Spencer Compton Cavendish; in the half century between 1856 and 1906, only three Prime Ministers served more than four years in office; all three of them were Liberals. But while Lord Palmerston died in office and Chamberlain was forced into retirement when a stroke accelerated his political decline, Hartington was the only one to resign. That he landed in the middle, in the transition from the classical liberalism embodied by Palmerston and his Moses in the Desert, Gladstone, to Chamberlain and the New Radicalism, can explain why history has forgotten him, as well as what is still seen as his hesitancy in Egypt costing Britain the keys to Africa. But it was the man who went by so many names - Cavendish, Hartington, and finally the Duke of Devonshire - who remains the key to understanding the Liberal ascendancy of the second half of the 19th century and how it transformed Britain into the state it is today..."
- Hartington: Britain's First Modern Prime Minister
[1] Chamberlain is, of course, the Christ in this analogy, because of course he is
(Hartington/Devonshire is a bit of a throwback to earlier in this TL but I felt it was important to ponder his contributions in setting up for Chamberlain's success with his own reforms and mainstreaming of the Liberals as an electoralist force)
Seems more like Hartington is Moses - he doesn't get to see the Promised Land himself, dying in sight of it on the slopes of Mount Nebo. The next generation of Israelites/Liberals are the ones who get to dwell in the land of milk and honey.
EDIT: and that's what I get when I skim on a conference call instead of read...you've already used the Moses analogy 😂
EDIT: and that's what I get when I skim on a conference call instead of read...you've already used the Moses analogy 😂
I have *high* doubts on this one. There is no way that Blease would have used the word Negro in these types of speeches. (Of course neither would Tillman)
WanderingProfessor
Banned
Negro is the standard term for blacks in the United States and the Confederate States so they would use it but not in an affectionate way.
Think of it as an... editorial decision by the textbook publisher
(A lot of the quotes from the two men I've found use "Negro" at least for their more formal speeches, for what its worth. Also, I like this website and I don't really want to invite the wrath of CalBear or Ian by writing the actual phrase out, even if its more historically proper)
A Bavarian Daughter in the House of Bonaparte
"...with the birth of Caroline Eugenie, the imperial couple's second child and daughter. Physically, Caroline Eugenie took much more after her father than mother; it would be the last child of theirs whom anybody would say that of, probably one of the sources of the sordid rumors that plagued Helmtrud during her years in Paris. [1] Caroline's birth occurred during a particularly tense spring in France, and Helmtrud was glad to be spirited away with her daughters to an Alpine chalet near Annecy, a town which reminded her of home and would become one of her favorite haunts whenever she desired to avoid the intrigues of Paris or the toxic personalities of the Dowager Eugenie's private court at Biarritz.
Annecy proved a perfect respite from the near-revolutionary atmosphere that roiled Paris in the angry months of 1908, sixty years since the revolutions of 1848 and forty years to the date after the Paris Commune and replete with strikes, protests, and mob violence throughout the capital. Boulanger dispatched the Army to put the strikes down with a force previously unseen since those heady days of May '68, despite the current uprising being a fraction as large. In addition to the violent crackdown, Boulanger's pliant Assembly promulgated one of the harshest acts of censorship and political repression France had seen since the Bourbon Restoration - the complete and total ban on "the advocacy of Republicanism and atheism," and a complimentary ban on "the organization of public societies or Republican and atheistic parties that advocate anti-monarchism." This quite broadly affected not only the remaining radical Republican opposition but also, naturally, the SFIO, which was driven underground; only "monarchist socialism" was to be tolerated moving forward. [2] The Speech Code's dramatic update and the explicit banning of certain political parties was a stunning step that promised only more autocracy; to many opponents of the regime, it was taken not as a show of strength but as a sign of weakness by the aging and increasingly reclusive Boulanger and the young, spineless Emperor, while to its supporters, it was a half-measure that would only be rectified when Parliamentarianism itself was destroyed.
France, unexpectedly after the liberal-conservatism of the Young Eagle, seemed to be charging further and further from any pretense of constitutional government..."
- A Bavarian Daughter in the House of Bonaparte
[1] This passage is meant to be heavy with several implications, yes.
[2] It goes without saying that most moderate and conservative OTL Republicans in France have reconciled themselves to soft-monarchism
Annecy proved a perfect respite from the near-revolutionary atmosphere that roiled Paris in the angry months of 1908, sixty years since the revolutions of 1848 and forty years to the date after the Paris Commune and replete with strikes, protests, and mob violence throughout the capital. Boulanger dispatched the Army to put the strikes down with a force previously unseen since those heady days of May '68, despite the current uprising being a fraction as large. In addition to the violent crackdown, Boulanger's pliant Assembly promulgated one of the harshest acts of censorship and political repression France had seen since the Bourbon Restoration - the complete and total ban on "the advocacy of Republicanism and atheism," and a complimentary ban on "the organization of public societies or Republican and atheistic parties that advocate anti-monarchism." This quite broadly affected not only the remaining radical Republican opposition but also, naturally, the SFIO, which was driven underground; only "monarchist socialism" was to be tolerated moving forward. [2] The Speech Code's dramatic update and the explicit banning of certain political parties was a stunning step that promised only more autocracy; to many opponents of the regime, it was taken not as a show of strength but as a sign of weakness by the aging and increasingly reclusive Boulanger and the young, spineless Emperor, while to its supporters, it was a half-measure that would only be rectified when Parliamentarianism itself was destroyed.
France, unexpectedly after the liberal-conservatism of the Young Eagle, seemed to be charging further and further from any pretense of constitutional government..."
- A Bavarian Daughter in the House of Bonaparte
[1] This passage is meant to be heavy with several implications, yes.
[2] It goes without saying that most moderate and conservative OTL Republicans in France have reconciled themselves to soft-monarchism
So, off the top of my head, Britain, Mexico, Spain, Germany, and France are heading rightward in some form or fashion. Can probably add the CSA to that list as well but thier politics aren't so much "left" vs "right" as they are a hodgepodge of everyone knifing everyone else.
More formal, sure. But neither quote by Blease is in a formal setting. (This being a man who read "N****rs in the White House" on the Senate Floor) (Figuring out whether Blease or Tillman is more racist is like trying to keep track of mountain heights on the Himalayan plateau)
In regards to Calbear from the "Rules regarding racially insensitive language." from 2013.
In terms of an in Universe reason, would such a textbook be produced in the Union or Canada (phrasing seems too North American to be from elsewhere)?
Does make me wonder what nations are at or ahead of their OTL counterparts when it comes to women getting the right to vote...
That's a good question. The Tillman book, in my view, is not a product of the Confederacy; I've aimed to write it as a book that takes its subject seriously in his own context but clearly has some editorial skepticism of him and his program. It's definitely not hagiographic in the vein of an Eaglet Takes Flight or American Charlemagne, or even favorable-but-fair biography such as Citizen Hearst; Palmetto Politics I've at least tried to have be modestly critical of Tillman, the man.
Accurate description of CS politics! I'd add Canada to that list. In terms of countries moving the other direction, off the top of my head I have the USA, Argentina (the big one), Italy, the Ottoman Empire (sort of), Russia (yes, even with Alexander III as Tsar, there's slow improvement in working conditions/rights), and of course China.
The Philippines are an ultimate YMMV - they threw off their colonial masters in a revolutionary fervor but their politics are a clusterfuck
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