More on the Battle of Antietam and the Civil War

Let us suppose for a few minutes that the battle of Antietam, fought in September, 1862, had ended differently than it did in fact. What might have been the consequences for our United States of America?

First, let's eliminate the implausible: Robert E. Lee's army was in no position to annihilate the Union forces at Antietam. But suppose he did manage to check George McClellan's army and force it  to  retreat, say into the Washington defenses? Western Maryland, inhabited mostly with Union sympathizers, would have been open to him. Lee had ordered his soldiers to pay for anything they took from local people, but the pay was in Confederate paper money, already losing value rapidly in 1862, so the difference between purchases and confiscation didn't seem very great to the farmers there.

In any case, Lee could have replenished his food supplies, made off with hundreds - maybe thousands - of horses, and, after being resupplied with ammunition, continued into Pennsylvania, or approached Washington from the northwest. Either way, the result would have been a disastrous defeat for President Lincoln. If the Union could not even hold its own territory, its prospects for victory would be slim indeed.

Without a victory, the Emancipation Proclamation would have languished in President Lincoln's desk drawer. And without the Proclamation, there would be little to prevent the English and French from intervening in the American war.

Cotton was in short supply after a year without imports from the south, unemployment was increasing among textile workers and civil unrest was being threatened. The Foreign Minister was quietly in favor of a call for an armistice between the two sides, to be followed by a conference which would lead to southern independence.

The French emperor, the slippery Napoleon III, was eager to go further, ready to send warships to break the Union blockade of southern ports, which would have been intolerable to the Lincoln administration. But Napoleon was not willing to act without English leadership.

If Lincoln rejected the British offer, as he would have had to, Napoleon might have had his war with the United States.

And now we have the Republicans in Washington, still a smaller political party than the Democrats, facing the electorate in the Congressional elections of November, losing the civil war and embroiled in an international crisis against what were widely felt to be the two most powerful countries in the world. To say the Lincoln men would have been rebuffed is an understatement.

Lincoln had vowed to continue the war against rebellion until victory, or his death, or until the northern states compelled him to quit. But here he would be, beset on all sides, his policy rejected by the voters, with a hostile Congress ready to take office in December 1863. (In those days the new Congress didn't take office until more than a year after it was elected.)

He would have been forced to negotiate independence for the Confederate States.

Aside from independence, the peace conference would have determined the size of the new nation. Would Kentucky have been part of it? Or Missouri? Would Virginia have insisted that the counties of what is now West Virginia be returned to her? Would the Confederacy have included western lands, what is now Oklahoma, New Mexico and Arizona?

Once the civil war was ended, there would be no real reason for the USA to fight England and France, so concluding that war might have been comparatively easy.

Some alternative history writers like to claim a defeated north would have attacked Canada, trying to gain "compensation" for the loss of the southern states. I can't see that. England would never have stood for it, and neither would the northern people, sick of war and skeptical of the abilities of their generals after they were so recently beaten by the south.

Wherever the boundary between the United States and the Confederate States was drawn, it would have been a wary peace between them. Both sides would fortify the border areas, spending mountains of  money on weapons and soldiers. Trade between them would have only resumed slowly and very guardedly. The economies of both nations would have suffered, but the south would have suffered more. Ironically, the economic deprivation in the south would have spurred the industrialization the south had always deplored, and a part of the "southern way of life" would have disappeared.

And what of slavery and the slaves? Only the most abject and defeatist northern government would allow southern slave catchers to enter the United States in search of runaways. The task of keeping the slaves in bondage would have overwhelmed the south. The slaves would have freed themselves by escaping to the north.

As years passed would there have been any chance of reconciliation? Frankly, I don't think so. Secession had been a watershed event, there was no way the white southerners would have retracted it except under compulsion. The question is whether the south would have diversified enough to become a viable nation or would they have become a client state for the Europeans, supplying cotton at low prices and buying finished goods at much higher cost, if most Americans could afford to buy at all.

The truncated United States would still have emerged as a great power, would still have played a great part in world affairs, but would have been in constant anxiety about relations with the CSA. Perhaps a second war would have erupted at some time between the two.

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