What if the Confederates won the Civil War ?

1. I am all in favor of a "Confederate History Month" on a personal level, but know that it would be offensive and hurtful to many people, and therefore will never come to be. I think that the Civil War has been too long regarded as a battle between good and evil, less a civil war than a fight between the USA and a malignant foreign power. Just as the French and British insisted on punishing Germany and Austria after World War I, treating the Versailles conference as vehicle for revenge, the Yankee-tinged history books with the help of hollywood movies have systematically and successfully demonized the South with a 150 year old propaganda campaign. There is nothing wrong with honoring dead Americans, many of them decent, hardworking, middle class and working class people who likely never owned slaves and fought against what they (rightly) viewed as an invading army. Historical revisionists seem very particular about which parts of history they choose to revise, and I think it is high time this chapter got a revision or two.

2/3. Here is my vision of a post-Civil War America if the South had won. The British would have allied with the South in 1861 to protect their cotton interests, using the abduction of two confederate envoys and their wives from the British vessel "Trent" as an excuse for war. The combined forces of the greatest industrial empire in the world and the American South would have overwhelmed the Union, and Lincoln would have been forced to abort the war. Britain and the confederacy would then have a strong, economic and military alliance to the mutual benefit of both. The impracticalities of slavery, together with pressure from highly abolitionist Britain would have fazed the system out. Britain would have helped the fledgling nation draft a new economic system that would better help both their interests. As a side project, Queen Victoria and the South would work together, using diplomacy or espionage, to smuggle her cousins Maximilian and Carlotta out of Mexico via Texas. Eventually, as was the case with Germany and Italy, it would behoove the Confederate states, and probably the Union states, to reunite, in an unofficial capacity at least, for common interest and a sense of national identity. People would make derogatory jokes, and drunkenly beat each other up when the South played the North in sporting events, but otherwise we would all consider ourselves more or less American, and perhaps be a better, stronger nation.

4. I think it is important to raise awareness about the Civil War in general, so "Civil War History Month" may be a more PC and not not unwise choice.

5. If Eleanor roosevelt could fly, Angela Lansbury would have played her in a short running musical sitcom in the late '60s, and the plot of the movie "Air Force 1" might be substantially different.