Confederation of Southern States

"A New Southern Empire, Forged by Cotton, Steam, and British Gold"

In 1851, the newly formed Confederation of Southern States has emerged as a thriving, ambitious power — a British-backed client state carved from the broken body of the original United States. No longer merely a rebellious offshoot, the Confederation sees itself as the true heir to Jeffersonian ideals — albeit twisted through the engines of steam, wealth, and rigid social hierarchy.

It is a land where plantation aristocracy and industrial innovation intertwine, where the old world of cotton and slavery merges uneasily with the new world of ironclads, railways, and computation.

---

Foundation and Structure

The Confederation was born out of British diplomacy and covert intervention during the 1830s and 1840s. With British naval and economic support, the Southern states seceded successfully from the Union, forming a new federation of independent but allied republics:

• Virginia
• North Carolina
• South Carolina
• Georgia
• Florida
• Alabama
• Mississippi
• Louisiana
• Tennessee
• Arkansas

Each state retains significant autonomy but is bound by treaties of mutual defense, trade, and governance. At the center of the Confederation stands the Council of Plantations and Manufactories — a legislature dominated by a coalition of planter aristocrats, industrialists, and British trade envoys.

The Confederation's constitution emphasizes:

• States' rights (especially in regard to the institution of slavery).
• Private enterprise and free trade (especially favoring British merchants).
• Defense of "traditional Southern culture", now blended with an emergent technological identity.

---

Economy and Technology

Economically, the Confederation thrives on a potent fusion of agriculture, industry, and steam technology:

• Cotton remains king, exported to British mills aboard Confederate steam clippers.
• Steam-powered gins, automated plantation equipment, and computational crop management systems increase plantation yields exponentially.
• Railroads stitched across the Confederacy link plantations, mills, and ports with astonishing speed, built with British engineers and Confederate labor.
• Slave labor persists and expands, with human beings often used alongside early agricultural automata, a grim blending of flesh and machine.

Confederate ports like Charleston, New Orleans, and Savannah are bustling centers of trade, bristling with British-built airships and Confederate steam fleets.

Society and Culture

Confederate society is profoundly hierarchical:

• At the top are the Planter-Technocrats, a new aristocracy of landowners who have embraced British steam technology and computation.
• Beneath them, white yeoman farmers and small industrialists enjoy modest prosperity and political representation.
• Slaves — overwhelmingly African and African-American — remain at the bottom, their status legally entrenched and reinforced through both law and machine.

Education in the Confederacy emphasizes practical sciences, agriculture, and mechanical engineering — but only for the white population. Slaves are forbidden literacy or technical knowledge.

A vibrant, though carefully managed, Southern cultural renaissance has emerged:

• Music blending traditional folk tunes with mechanical instrumentation.
• Steam-theater performances dramatizing Confederate victories.
• Celebrations of "Southern Ingenuity" alongside annual Industrial Fairs showcasing the latest advances in plantation machinery and steam technology.

---

Military and Foreign Policy

The Confederation, backed by British subsidies and advisors, maintains a formidable military:

• Confederate Steam Legions are professional, well-equipped, and mechanized.
• Privateer fleets, often indistinguishable from pirates, harass Union and independent shipping under Confederate commission.
• Military academies like the Savannah School of Mechanized Warfare produce officers skilled in both traditional tactics and the operation of mechanical war-engines.

In foreign affairs, the Confederation acts largely in alignment with British interests, but Confederate leaders are ambitious:

• They dream of expanding southward into the Caribbean, Central America, and even beyond.
• Talks of a “Golden Circle” — a ring of Confederate-aligned slave economies across the tropics — circulate among the elite.
• Relations with the fragmented United States are openly hostile, with frequent border skirmishes and covert operations.

---

The Confederate Vision

Confederate propaganda portrays their nation as the guardian of liberty, tradition, and technological progress — a society where reason and hierarchy coexist under the providence of steam and God.
But beneath the surface, tensions fester:

• Some fear overreliance on British support.
• Enslaved populations whisper of rebellion.
• Poor whites grow resentful of the untouchable Planter-Technocrat elite.

The Confederation of Southern States is powerful, wealthy, and dynamic — but also unstable, its future tied to the brutal contradictions of a society trying to straddle the old world and the new.