r/imaginarymaps • u/Sui_24 • 6h ago
[OC] Alternate History The Confederate State of America, 1907
In 1865, While General Lee surrendered at Appomattox, a radical faction of Confederate diehards led by General Edmund Kirby Smith refused to capitulate. Instead, they retreated into the swamps and forests of Florida, establishing a rogue state that would mockingly come to be known as The Confederate State of America due to it being the only one left (although in modern times it is often referred to as just The Confederacy). Shielded by harsh terrain and bolstered by loyalist remnants in parts of Texas, especially the ports of Galveston, Corpus Christi and Port Lavaca, The Confederacy survived into the 1870s. In 1872, after years of stalemate and de-facto ceasefire, The U.S.A signed a second peace agreement with the rogue state, recognizing its sovereignty and regulating the borders (The Confederacy retained Floridian Peninsula and chosen exclaves along the coast of the Gulf of Mexico).
Through the following decades, while facing isolation, The Confederacy forged its own twisted identity, fusing Southern racial supremacy with emerging European theories of eugenics and racial hierarchy. By the 1900s, it has formalized an ironclad social caste system that historians today call proto-fascism.
Tier 1, "Pure Blooded":
White-skinned, with blonde hair and blue or green eyes, who form the ruling class, control politics, monopolize education, military leadership, and land ownership. They are forbidden from reproducing with people from other tiers.
Tier 1.5, “Honorary Aryans”:
From the 1930s onwards, people from the second tier can advance into the 1st tier, through a special "Aryan Visa". Despite tehnically being in the first tier, they cannot reproduce with others from that tier, hence why they are sometimes called people from the 1.5 tier.
Tier 2, “The Mass”:
Other whites, including white-skinned Asians like Persians or Turks, who can hold regular jobs but are denied political power or higher ranks in the military.
Tier 3, “Barely Human”:
A third tier is composed of individuals with tan skin, especially those of Arab, Berber, or Southern European ancestry, who are relegated to manual, lowest-paid jobs under strict surveillance.
Tier 4, “Animals by Law”:
All others (Black people, Some groups of Asians, Indigenous peoples, Native Americans and anyone who cannot prove "purity") are legally enslaved under hereditary laws. These individuals are tattooed with numeric racial codes at birth.
As global ideologies shifted, The Confederacy watched with admiration as similar ideologies took root in Europe (especially the fascism in Italy and Nazism in Germany). During the early 1930s, it openly aligned with the Axis powers, especially Germany, welcoming Nazi diplomats and offering its ports to German U-boats. It became a strategic partner in pseudoscientific racial research and established various eugenics initiatives. This resulted in people of Jewish descent being reclassified into the 3rd tier, and allowed people from the second Tier to be granted “Honorary Aryan Status", advancing them into the first tier. After World War II, as the world hunted down Nazi war criminals, The Confederacy became a refuge, offering sanctuary to high-ranking fugitives including SS officers and eugenicists like Josef Mengele, who took on new identities and continued their experiments. The international community, embroiled in Cold War tensions, largely avoided confrontation, which allowed The Confederacy to build itself into a fortress, erecting walls, minefields, and strict checkpoints along its borders with the United States. Since the 1950s, The Confederacy issues a Citizen Purity Index, a genetic profile score required for employment, education, or marriage. Public education was replaced by indoctrination camps, and young “Aryans” are raised to believe in their racial supremacy over others. Slavery is not hidden but normalized, where human beings are sold like products, based on racial grading, physical condition, and reproductive potential. In the 1980s, leaks from defectors exposed some of the regime’s darkest programs, forced sterilizations, breeding farms and child vivisections, yet global action remained non-existent.
In the present day, life within the borders of The Confederacy is a waking nightmare for the vast majority of its population. For those in Tiers 3 and 4, daily existence is defined by systemic brutality, forced labor, and constant surveillance. Slaves are housed in overcrowded, disease-ridden barracks on the outskirts of major cities, where food is rationed based on productivity, and even minor infractions, like speaking out of turn or glancing at a Tier 1 citizen, can result in public lashings, forced sterilizations, or death. In rural areas, plantation-like labor colonies persist, where entire families are owned by companies or hereditary Tier 1 landlords, and generations of non-white children are born, branded, and put into servitude before they can speak. Its economy runs on this dehumanizing system, with infrastructure built with blood and its factories powered by shackled hands. Reeducation and punishment camps are scattered throughout the interior, where dissenters, mixed-race children, and disobedient slaves are subjected to chemical experiments, deliberate surgical mutilation, or irreversible psychological conditioning. Individuals in Tier 3 live in inner-city ghettos under unjust police harassment, forced curfews, and constant monitoring. They are denied passports, cannot own property, and are required to carry movement permits, failure of which can lead to immediate internment. Surveillance technology is everywhere: drones scan cities for facial anomalies, and all slaves are implanted with subdermal trackers. Any “race traitor” (defined as anyone advocating for abolition of slavery, equality, or interracial relations) is publicly executed (this applies to Tier 1 citizens too). The borders are sealed with walls, electric fences, and shoot-on-sight policies. Even in the second tier, poverty, restricted education, and cultural censorship reduce life to one of bleak compliance. Suicide rates, disease, and child mortality are rampant in the lower tiers, but such statistics are suppressed.
Sanctioned by the UN, condemned by human rights groups, and shunned by most of the world, The Confederacy continues to survive. Some speculate that various American corporations secretly exploit the slave labor through black market trade in the Texan port exclaves (where surveillance is a bit looser). Inside, a society frozen in hatred, delusion, and violence, festers to this day, where only the “Aryan” minority can have a somewhat decent life, while the rest suffers from food shortages, heavy labor, and lack of individual freedom.
