Surviving "Walkerist" state in Central America?

[Coiler]

Granted this is already in "soft AH that'd be a lot better for a story than claimed as plausible" territory, but I'm wondering just how out-there a sort of "Walkerist" pro-CSA rump state named after this guy in Central America enduring some time after the Union victory in the real ACW would be.

The plot justification would be that the Union Navy's shrinking back postwar gave it less ability to intervene combined with the Walkerist state as a whole being little comparative threat. The question remains if such a thing, even if propped up by plot, would be anything other than a weak state focused entirely on survival.

 

[Steve Brinson]

Granted this is already in "soft AH that'd be a lot better for a story than claimed as plausible" territory, but I'm wondering just how out-there a sort of "Walkerist" pro-CSA rump state named after this guy in Central America enduring some time after the Union victory in the real ACW would be.

The plot justification would be that the Union Navy's shrinking back postwar gave it less ability to intervene combined with the Walkerist state as a whole being little comparative threat. The question remains if such a thing, even if propped up by plot, would be anything other than a weak state focused entirely on survival.

I think the problem with a “Walkerist” state (as in one actually run by Confederados) is less the diplomatic aspect (certainly, the United States isn’t going to like it, but I don’t know how big of a priority it would be - how much does a Confederate Honduras or wherever actually matter compared to the South itself?) than the domestic stability: if the Confederados align themselves with local criollo elites, sheer numbers would seem to put the local elites in the driver’s seat, and if they don’t, it’s hard to see any path forward for the regime (if there is any kind of government that’s going to have a problem getting lower-caste support, it’s this one). You could maybe have a country that claims Confederate heritage, but it seems difficult to see that country ending up much different from OTL in any sense except the cosmetic.

 

[JesterBL]

I think the problem with a “Walkerist” state (as in one actually run by Confederados) is less the diplomatic aspect (certainly, the United States isn’t going to like it, but I don’t know how big of a priority it would be - how much does a Confederate Honduras or wherever actually matter compared to the South itself?) than the domestic stability: if the Confederados align themselves with local criollo elites, sheer numbers would seem to put the local elites in the driver’s seat, and if they don’t, it’s hard to see any path forward for the regime (if there is any kind of government that’s going to have a problem getting lower-caste support, it’s this one). You could maybe have a country that claims Confederate heritage, but it seems difficult to see that country ending up much different from OTL in any sense except the cosmetic.

I think you're actually overestimating the population of some Central American states. Nicaragua had a population of 300,000 in 1860. If you could get the 10-20K Confederados that went to Brazil to go to Nicaragua instead, that is a sizeable enough group that they could form a power bloc in their own way. (I can't seem to find an 1860-1870 number for Honduras from a cursory search but by 1910 it was only 550K per US estimates.)

 

[Steve Brinson]

I think you're actually overestimating the population of some Central American states. Nicaragua had a population of 300,000 in 1860. If you could get the 10-20K Confederados that went to Brazil to go to Nicaragua instead, that is a sizeable enough group that they could form a power bloc in their own way. (I can't seem to find an 1860-1870 number for Honduras from a cursory search but by 1910 it was only 550K per US estimates.)

That’s a good point, and depending on where you draw the line they might actually outnumber the criollo elite.

 

[Stikfigur]

How many Southerners are willing to leave towards central America? I don't think this is going to be like settling towards the west like it happened in the Antebellum era.

 

[Von Callay]

How many Southerners are willing to leave towards central America? I don't think this is going to be like settling towards the west like it happened in the Antebellum era.

Not many in OTL, certainly. Those who did leave for Brazil were a select handful, ten or twenty thousand not really being that many people when we're talking about millions. And those that went to Brazil weren't exactly of the filibustering mindset. They didn't emigrate to Brazil to take it over and wage war for their ideals, they went because the government there was accommodating to them in peace, and they felt they didn't have a future in the United States. There were also the regular economic limitations on travelling to another country and setting up a meaningful livelihood there, made worse by the economic devastation of the war.

I think it's less of an idea that works on its own, and more one that makes sense as flowing from some other POD before that point. A worse post-war environment in the United States might have provoked more emigration - continuing guerilla war and a harsher Reconstruction enforcing exile on large numbers, for example. Or perhaps things could even have changed before the Civil War, if Cuba had been annexed to the US and become a slave state, there might have been a larger population there which considered themselves more suited to leaving for Central America.

Of course, the more emigration there is from the southern states - forced or voluntary - and the more this becomes a hostile activity perpetrated by the emigrants on a country in Central or South America, the more it becomes a diplomatic issue for the United States, vomiting up the refuse of the Civil War onto someone else's shores. A really successful filibuster republic might itself eventually induce a hostile response from the United States.

 

[Charles EP M.]

I think it's all dependent on how many Confederates show up, as @JesterBL says, and probably too if they can win over/dragoon X number of the criollos. Then it'd be dependent on how much they fuck with the other local countries, if it's enough to piss off the US/Britain/a bigger Latin American country or gets them a war they lose. And if they can avoid that, you could fudge them being in power into the early 20th century, a weird little Central American Rhodesia, before it eventually falls to something (like Rhodesia et al).

 

[Gary Oswald]

There was of course New Richmond in Belize, which didn't go well, but best will in the world the British Empire is probably slightly harder to overthrow from the inside than Nicaragua.

 

[Coiler]

I think it's all dependent on how many Confederates show up, as @JesterBL says, and probably too if they can win over/dragoon X number of the criollos. Then it'd be dependent on how much they fuck with the other local countries

They would have an "advantage" in that their structure (having a very small pool of actually trustworthy manpower) would lend them to being very timid and casualty-averse, putting them in a defensive survival crouch from the get-go.