Takimag
Steve Sailer writes:
“Every Fourth of July, a heretical question nags: Would it have been so bad if America hadn’t won its independence from Britain?”
How’s this for an alternative history?
The American Revolution divided the slave colonies exactly in two: Maryland, Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Georgia became independent, chained to the Union with the Yankees, whereas Jamaica, Barbados, the Windward Islands, and the Leeward Islands remained loyal to Britain.
The Revolution paved the road to abolition in the West Indies by cutting the number of slaves in the British Empire in half. It paved the road to abolition in the United States by cutting the number of slave states in half and bringing us into the Union with the Yankees on the basis of various worthless constitutional guarantees.
Suppose the Southern colonies had refused to join the American Revolution like the British West Indies: the pro-slavery forces within the Empire would have been twice as strong, probably even stronger because slavery would have expanded across the Appalachians and along the Gulf Coast.
(1) Abolition would have been defeated within the British Empire.
(2) A Southern superstate would have emerged that would have included the British West Indies and probably other conquests in Latin America and the Caribbean.
(3) In between British Canada and Greater Dixie, the Yankee could have been contained to the Northeast, and the spread of liberal democracy would have been checkmated in North America.
I’m not sure the British would have allowed Dixie to conquer the southwest from Mexico. I remember that the French colonials hated Napoleon III in Algeria because he tried to make peace with the locals at the colonists’ expense. The same thing happened with the American Revolutionary War. The colonists wanted to go over the Appalachians but George III’s government wanted peace with the Amerindians.
I think maybe a Republic of Greater Texas would have driven Mexico out of the southwest and then the US would have been 3 countries. Maybe later, the Kingdom of Deseret would have created a fourth (along with the USA, Dominion of Dixieland, and Greater Texas).
“(1) Abolition would have been defeated within the British Empire.”
This strikes me as a highly doubtful proposition. In the long run, slavery was doomed, n’importe quoi, due to technological, economic, and social factors. It would not have been possible for slavery to persist in the West over a long span of time. What happens when your Southern-Caribbean superstate attempts to split off from the British Empire over the slavery issue, then gets its ass kicked by the world’s then-greatest military power, seeing as how you have no help from the greater numbers, greater industry, and greater ingenuity of the North?
It’s 1865 all over again, except probably even messier, as your conquering Imperial overlords would have even less fellow-feeling for you than the yankees you profess to hate so much. Ask the Irish. Or the Hindus. Or the Sudanese. Or…
Not so. Banastre Tarlton actually was a Confederate in all but name.
Palmerston wouldn’t have lifted a finger. It would have been as amicable as the split from Australia or Canada as a matter of law.
There are only two places where violence was required to end slavery: Haiti and the US. Britain had nothing to do with either.
The British wisely chose compensated emancipation as an alternative to violent emancipation. They had no desire to “trample out the vintage where the grape of wrath are stored” or any other such nonsense.
Deo Vindice
Banastre was a bigwig in Liverpool and made a fortune as a slaver.
Though he died before the civil war I’m certain he would have sympathized with the South. His 800 strong Legion was as far as a know raised entirely in the South among aristocratic horsemen.
Well let’s take a look @ how the Limeys treated their white kindreds in Rhodesia and South Africa and recalculate this revision of history.