Sequel de Mayo (Cinco de Mayo, Vol. II)
- Thread starter KingSweden24
- Start date
Yep, it's stated that france was in search of a reason to dow germany as she feared that in a couple of years she will be unable to really pose a treath to berlin
Considering the state of the confederacy. Not ideal, But I can imagine him fleeing to New Orleans or something like that.
A royalty causing a major war because he attempted to rape an Princess of an opposing royalty sounds like some dark comedy sh*t
🙏
I can see that too, with an ending of a multiracial lynching after he did something terrible (maybe he rapes the daughter of some very powerful businessman with criminal ties, followed up by killing a Creole pastor after he tries to stop him, with it being followed up by killing of a might be a witness), an event which reduces the racial tensions in the city slightly.
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He lives, but is reviled for the rest of his life by both common folk and nobles alike for his stupidity.
It might have been a long time ago, so correct me if my memory serves wrong, but I believe there were "Munich assassinations", plural, mentioned in a past post. Is that retconed, or is that still in the future?
Other point, since the Quai d'Orsay archives are used by Germany and Italy after the war to establish French guilt, I take it that Paris will eventually be taken/occupied by German armies late in the war.
Other point, since the Quai d'Orsay archives are used by Germany and Italy after the war to establish French guilt, I take it that Paris will eventually be taken/occupied by German armies late in the war.
The first of those is highly likely to be resolved in some manner, good or not, that removes Austria from the table as a combatant. Probably within less than a year. Even France would be hard-pressed to believe it can take Germany with just Belgium onside, and the Italians would be more likely to join a one-front war too.
So there’s a pretty valid reason to think that Europe would have skated over the patch of thin ice and continued onward absent this incident.
IOTL it’s harder to say. Germany’s alliance with Austria wasn’t fragmenting to the same degree as TTL France’s…
Hard not to root for Germany here considering the abysmal record of France, Austria-Hungary and Belgium, to be honest.
As a matter of respect, please ask this question in the thread in question itself. I won't answer it there
A Freedom Bought With Blood: Emancipation and the Postwar Confederacy
TRIGGER WARNING
(This gets very dark at the end)
(This gets very dark at the end)
"...in 1943, WEB Dubois was asked to comment by an Irish journalist, on the occasion of both his 75th birthday as well as the 25-year anniversary of the Third Amendment of the Confederate Constitution, on the state of the Negro "a quarter century after slavery." Dubois' answers were, like usual, brilliant, succinct, and acerbic when they needed to be, and he made one very crucial point: "We must remember that the Third Amendment was done just as much to uplift as it was to punish, and that the Yankees came south as avengers, not as liberators." While Dubois was speaking with the benefit of more than two decades of hindsight, suffice to say his stance was shared even by many in 1918; apocryphally, the Black educator John Hope was told to his face, casually and ostensibly politely of course, by a White Yankee officer: "We didn't sign up after Baltimore to help niggers, we signed up after Baltimore to kill us some crackers." [1]
The behavior of the Yankee occupation forces belied as much; particularly in places such as northwestern Mississippi or central Georgia, once the war was over, the bands of freedmen militias often rarely saw American soldiers, and when they did they were typically ignored, though it varied from District to District; the more infamous Harbord had begun cracking down on the Negro paramilitaries by the end of 1918, whereas elsewhere they continued to enjoy free reign. With the passage of the Third Amendment, however, came a noticeable sea change in the tenor of the occupation; over the course of the autumn of 1918, Yankee soldiers began to end rural patrols almost altogether, first the horseback patrols that had seen so many mounts shot or injured, then the ones by car over Dixie's notoriously poor and underbuilt road network. In December, small towns not only rail networks in Georgia were evacuated of occupation forces, leaving them to local sheriffs and hillboy gangs; Alabama, Florida and South Carolina would follow suit in February the next year.
Freedmen paras didn't know it yet, but the United States had begun to shift the focus of its occupation to keeping cities secure as ports from which to bring in supplies - and export the raw materials which the Confederacy owed them as part of their severe war reparations - rather than the full-force direct securing of entire towns and rural counties across Dixie. There was a variety of reasons for this, the first being that part of the understanding at Mount Vernon had been that every concession the Confederate government acceded to and performed as promised would be met with a show of good faith by Philadelphia in turn; the passage of the Third Amendment through gritted teeth was nonetheless the Patton-Martin administration making good on its promise that it would do as it had been ordered and pursue the most serious and non-symbolic reform (even if in practical terms there were very few slaves left in actual held bondage by August 1918, though the threat of capture and re-enslavement remained high until then). As such, the Yankees would meet a promise kept with one of their own, and withdraw from major parts of the Confederate interior while keeping cities and rail lines in their hands, and stepping up airplane patrols in an attempt to flush out the NRO from its Tennessee and north Alabama hideaways.
There were other, less benign reasons for the gradual withdrawal starting in late 1918 as well, though. The passage of the Third Amendment may have been uncelebrated in the exhausted and polarized United States, but it did not go unnoticed, and more than a few voices began to ask why, exactly, the occupation was ongoing still, at least to the level it had been. A rumor that conscription agents from the Army were at the stadium caused a riot at the last St. Louis Browns game of the season as a rowdy crowd frustrated by their terrible baseball club nearly burned down two blocks of the city and the Missouri National Guard was called in to keep peace. While most Democrats had not turned on the occupation, questioning the conduct of the Root administration and its management thereof was a common theme on the campaign trail, and that trickled down to many voters who began agitating to "bring our boys back!", and the War Department certainly interpreted the results of the landslide defeat of Liberal candidates across the country as a referendum on the performance of the postwar Army, with the Independence Day Massacres a particular black mark. Ironically, hillboy attacks had, largely, dried up after the Massacres, in part because the Army's counterattacks against them had in fact been relatively successful, though men like Forrest and other NRO commandants remained at large. Still, July 1918 had been a turning of the tide, as had the August passage of the Amendment. By late 1919, it had emerged as bipartisan consensus in Philadelphia that the occupation should begin to wound up, even as many abolitionists and war hawks protested that there had been no movement on the critical Fourth and Fifth Amendments demanded by Mount Vernon, amendments that would actually guarantee the rights of freedmen after the end of bondage.
Filling the void of the American occupation was local state capacity, as county sheriffs and judges and state legislators began to regain some measure of ability to reconstitute their authority, with varying results; Louisiana and North Carolina had restored sophisticated and functional law enforcement and paramilitaries forces loyal to the government by the end of 1918, whereas states like South Carolina remained in a state of long-term anarchy and Virginia and Tennessee saw their legislators acting as little more than mouthpieces for the military administrations in Richmond and Memphis. This was never more on display than in an infamous even known as the Sandhills War, in which the state of North Carolina flexed its muscles and showed why it would be the dominant force in Confederate politics until the early 1930s.
The Sandhills are a region of the Carolinas east of Charlotte and south Raleigh on the approach to the coastal lowland, full of thick pine forests and notoriously poor for the kind of cash crop agriculture on which the state otherwise depended. It had been a popular haunt of runaways since the 1600s, and home to one of Dixie's largest remaining Native tribes in the Lumbee. The Lumbee and freedmen colonies had for years lived in relatively close proximity with some level of mutual assistance, and white power had generally not extended into the area out of respect for the Lumbee, who were known to respond violently to outsiders attempting to enforce state or national laws on their land. The war had broken this longstanding truce, however, what with a flood of freedmen to a swath of land in the Sandhills who, thanks to their proximity to US Marines in Wilmington, were extremely well-armed and equipped and had formed something of a state-within-a-state on both sides of the Carolina state lines and had become the primary enforcers in pursuing and killing hillboys, many of them Lumbee, across Carolina coastal plain. Finally, after months of mounting tensions, on November 25, 1918 a full-scale war broke out between the Lumbee and the so-called Army of the Sandhills, and the Lumbee forces immediately found themselves on the back foot, retreating northwards and suddenly finding a sophisticated Black militia led by a man named Arnold Woods in control of much of southeastern North Carolina.
The state government in Raleigh quickly rallied the Tar Heel Guard, a nickname for the state's militia, and deployed it south first to Fayetteville and then to Lumberton, the heart of Lumbee country. On December 1, they linked up with the Lumbee National Guard, the tribe's chief paramilitary, and struck southeast to break the Army of the Sandhills in two. Hundreds of freedmen fled into Wilmington, but the weight of Woods' forces had the Tar Heels between them and the city. Quick, tactical jabs led by the Guard's commander, Cameron Morrison, [2] kept the freedmen Sandhills Army away from the coast and pincered between his forces and a smaller screening brigade out of Goldsboro, harassing and haranguing the retreating rebels all the way to the shores of Pamlico Sound. All the while, the Marines stayed in their barracks in Wilmington, never once deploying even so much as a group of scouts to observe what was going on.
A survivor of the mass murder of the Sandhills Army on December 13th - a Friday - near New Bern described the ten days leading up to it as "not unlike how cowboys wrangle herds of cattle across a wide range, corralling them into a group, closing of their paths of escape; and in the end, that's what we were, cattle." Chased through the vast, swampy coastal woods between New Bern and Jacksonville, stragglers who were caught by Tar Heels had their hands and feet nailed to trees, so that if they survived - which almost none did - their captors would know where to find them when they came back, if ever. Men on horseback opened fire on fleeing women and children who had been part of Woods' makeshift army and in 1997 a mass grave was found in the Croatan State Forest where twelve young boys, none likelier older than twelve, had been shot several times and buried under a thin layer of dirt and pine needles, lost for eighty years.
Finally, on that infamous "Wet Friday," the remnants of the Sandhills Army was cornered where the Neuse River widened as it turned into the Pamlico Sound. Morrison ordered his men to lower their rifles and instead tightened the noose around the two hundred men and thirty women, some still clasping their babes, stuck on the riverbank, and nudged closer and closer in. Fighting was ended with beatings and shootings, and finally all two hundred were pushed into the river or held under in it, with Morrison shouting at his charges not to "waste a bullet on a nigger!" It was one of the largest mass drownings in North American history not to involve a ship being sunk, and as few as five men survived after pretending to have died and floating ashore downstream.
News of the Sandhills Massacre did not reach the United States for weeks, but when it did, it engendered little but a shrug; it was just another slaughter after two full years of them going on across Dixie. The US Marines had been under strict orders not to engage official agents of the state of North Carolina, and that was the excuse bandied around for their non-intervention in the massacre. But as a first chapter, it was an ominous one; the state capacity of the Confederacy was still extraordinarily limited, and would be for years, but as early as late 1918, in the shadow of the Third Amendment, it was already being returned to doing what it had done best since the War of Secession - being used to suppress the liberty and physical safety of peope of color and enforcing the strict hierarchies of white supremacy..."
- A Freedom Bought With Blood: Emancipation and the Postwar Confederacy
[1] I felt censoring out half of the offending word here would deprive this quote of its power, so my apologies.
[2] One of the chief perpetrators of the OTL 1898 Wilmington massacre/putsch
Now we’re talking
I promised an arch villain and I deliver on my promises!
Thank you!
Yeah, I feel like it’s highly unlikely he actually survives the war, considering his notoriety, for exactly these reasons
Online is edgelords probably consider him a TTL patron Saint
Retconned. That was the plank of the original plan.
That implication was not necessarily intentional but the defense of the Ile de France is much more difficult for France here sans British support and an eastern front
Good points
It’d dark that we somehow got Imperial Germany and the Prussians to be in the right here
Stay tuned!
Just by curiosity, what was the original plan on these Munich assassinations, if that is not spoiling anything coming?
Interesting list, mainly for its omissions.
I wonder what might be occurring in MS and AL, for instance… (whistles innocently)