ironically if anyone's the heir to the
historical Whigs it's the Rad-Libs (not that those terms mean much since the parties only solidified after the Second War in my headcanon): despite the name
sounding like it might be considered fighting words in the South, they're two political currents that we'd call right-wing today--
Latin radicalism was more about mandatory secular education[1], White immigration and ballot access (to vote for
them, not for any worker party), the
colonial "civilizing mission," obliteration of local cultures, no special protections since everyone's equal before the law and in the tender hands of the free market, and
a taste for strongman dynasties;
British Liberalism was
free-trader but also industrialist (which wouldn't work out in the highly-peripheral CSA), but would fit the merchants and judges of the CSA who have time to read something other than the exhausting diaries of some minor ancestor in the 18th c.[2]
this proto-Entente is cultivating more relations with one another than TTL, and the CSA's no more embarrassing to trade with post-Manumission than Brazil[3]: so a lot of Europeanised[4] Southrons will want to present a picture of finishing schools on the Loire or preppies taking in the marbles of Italy[5]--rather than a hee-hawing bushwhacker who spits baccy on the rug and chases off rival suitors with a Bowie knife
so the R-Ls would have a good shot in OTL swing states like Upland Kentucky[6] (ironically a stronghold of the prewar Whigs, though I see the two parties as more structural than regional), and backed by the NCO up-and-comers in the Army[7] who realize even massive industrialization and every European Power combined couldn't actually stop the North
[1] to produce military engineers, chemists, and trigonometrists for the artillery rather than someone with violent opinions about the seed of Cain or who can speak Homeric Greek with all the correct archaisms--this was actually a debate in prewar Britain since the French and Germans were teaching students science while Churchill recalls being caned for daring to pipe up and ask why he'd ever need to learn the Latin interrogative case to ask a question to a
table
[2] the Whigs don't reject "foreign" influence at all, holding up the Deep South as the most English of ex-colonies, with not even the Borderers and Scots-Irish of the Uplands: they look back not just to Britain, but to a Britain of the 17th c.
[3] though I have the CSA as
the most awkward possible ally except maybe Tippu Tip 19th c.: London will be favoring the
North until the Great-Power shuffles of the 1900s and 10s, just as OTL it was drawing closer to Germany than France before Fashoda and Agadir: in my revision the RN "offered" to maintain the 1862 blockade and neutrality in all the North American waters '82, which got it sucked into actual combat at the San Francisco Mint, Seattle, Buffalo, and the Atlantic
[4] the reforms of that Yankee sumbitch Webster were gone even by 1880
[5] there's even schools for Negro butlers in declining rural towns in England, where the freedmen will feel a
new sort of freedom they'll bring home with them (or to the Canadian free population)
[6] I personally have Kentucky Union but "neutralized" after 1863, the truckling Democrats agreeing to keep the US Army out, hunting "contraband," and throwing money at it, which just makes Frankfort into a huge brat that uses the '81 Sonora Crisis to seize Ohio ships and defect
anyway; unlike the canon, that gives the two republics some
really intense casus belli
[7] this military cohort produces a lot of "military reformers," but also the biggest reactionaries
