In the waning days of the American Revolution, conflicts that started out as merely the symptoms of newfound independence would become intertwined with one another to twist the newborn nation founded on beliefs for equality and freedom into something unrecognizable. In its place is Freedonia, a name that arose out of how liberated its citizens were and forever would be. A place where the common people rule. Where the will of the people can never be dismissed and will
always be carried out.
Shunned (and occasionally invaded) by the nations of Europe for its total disregard for social classes, the massive shortcomings and errors that would befall the nation would be attributed to an innate inferiority of the Fredes. The Degeneracy Thesis became very popular to explain this. It was believed that humidity, extreme climates, and other conditions in the atmosphere led to an overall setting that physically and mentally weakened those who lived there. The Fredes were perceived as well as the Irish or Native Americans.
The first conflict to lead to the metamorphosis started in the summer of 1775. Guy Carleton was in a stressful position. The Americans were invading Quebec, having just seized Forts Ticonderoga and Crown Point and raided Fort Saint-Jean. With tensions rising, he had sent most of the regulars stationed at Quebec to New York to help fight the inevitable war. This left him with 800 British regulars for Quebec’s defense. He tried to recruit native Quebecois and Englishmen in a militia to beat them back but met little success. He did find recruits eager to fight the Patriots, but they were the local Native Americans tribes who were particularly savage in warfare. He didn’t want a repeat incident of Jane McCrea but the Crown was pressuring him to use them and he faced a possible annihilation, one that could prevent by use of Native Americans. So he reluctantly chose to use the Native Americans for defense.*
When the Americans started besieging Fort Saint Jean for an actual capture, Carleton was there at the time trying to prepare its defenses. When the fort fell, he was captured trying to leave escape the base disguised as a commoner.**
With Guy Carleton captured, morality during the siege of Montreal plummeted and it did not take long for it to fall into Patriot hands. Even as the remaining regulars surrendered, the fighting did not stop, for Carleton’s Huron, Iroquois, and Ojibwa allies continued to raid the American militiamen and the new Canadian regiments.
While there was initial animosity between the loyalists and their patriot occupiers, the loyalist feelings in Quebec would eventually eroded thanks to the loyalist Native Allies’ indiscriminate massacring of loyalist and patriot-supporting civilians alike. This would only get worse during the British reclamation of Canada in May 1776, as the British essentially gave them free range to punish American collaborators, so they frequently attacked and burnt down towns of those known for collaborating.
Ojibwa attacking civilians.
Even though the Americans were forced to evacuate from Canada, they took with them many Quebecois recruits. Several regiments worth of them were to be folded into the Continental Army as the esteemed Canadian Division. Divisions had only existed at this point as a successful experiment carried out by Victor-Francois de Broglie during the Seven Years’ War. Knowing of Broglie’s success with them, it was decided after hesitation that it would be best to group all the Canadian regiments together. The existence of the Canadian Division would turn out to be key to the formation of Freedonia.
Meanwhile in Nova Scotia, a permanent patriot outpost had managed to be settled in Fort Cumberland. During the siege, one of John Eddy’s Maliseet warriors had snuck in and finally managed to open the gate to the fort.*** Eddy’s men rolled in and eventually captured the fort. From there, they had managed to spark off the pre-existing patriot sentiment into open rebellion against the heavily loyalist administration on the island. With American privateers and eventually the French navy using Nova Scotia as a base, the Royal Navy could not establish the naval supremacy needed to take back Nova Scotia.
In 1783 during the peace negotiations of the Treaty of Paris, Franklin had managed to convince the British to cede both Quebec and Nova Scotia to the United States****, as the former was now swelled with patriot feeling whilst the latter was no longer under British control. Representatives from both would be sent to sign the Declaration of Independence. The Quebec Act would be constricted to the de facto borders of Quebec, rather than into areas that the Quebecois had never really settled in.
*IOTL, Guy chose not to
**IOTL, he managed to escape while disguised as a commoner
***IOTL, the Maliseet was stopped at the last possible moment
****IOTL, Benjamin Franklin almost had the UK cede all of North America to the US. The British actually accepted the proposal at first but later rejected it.
But what should have been celebration for the Continental Army that the killing was over was instead met with discontent. The Confederation Congress had all soldiers would receive a lifelong pension of half their army pay while in 1782, pay was stopped altogether to save costs. None of the soldiers had yet to receive their pensions and now that the war was coming to an end with the dissolution of Continental Army that they would never receive them. All their sacrifices and killing for the values of liberty and equality would be rewarded with absolutely nothing.
Many officers came together under the leadership of General Henry Knox to voice their anger at Congress. In December 1782, they had sent a memorial to Congress about their concerns of not being payment and offered instead to receive a lump of pay now and no pension whatsoever. They also threatened that “any further experiments on their patience may have fatal effects.”
Over the next several months, arguments went back in forth over the debate of military pay to basically no effect other than angering even more of the soldiers. Many officers were now gravitating away from George Washington to the leadership of Horatio Gates, as he was also discontent with the situation in Congress. Among them was the Canadian Division encamped near Newburgh, who, being Canadian, did not have the same admiration and regard the colonials had. Not to mention the fact that Washington was resistant against the formation of the division, thinking it would be clunky and awkward to command.
On March 10, 1783, it was evident that the troops’ anger had reached its limit. A letter secretly written by the aide to Gates had gone around the camp at Newburgh calling for the army to give Congress an ultimatum. Washington immediately decried the letter and angrily denounced those behind it for threatening to “deluge our rising empire in blood”.* This managed to cool down a large number of officers, especially those who knew him personally, but also managed to furthermore anger many others.
The conspirators knew that they could not hold Congress hostage if Washington held supporters at the camp. But they were not resigned to give up and accept no pension. Washington made copies of the letter he received and passed them to Congress, prompting Horatio and his followers to pick up and leave camp, marching North to rendezvous with the Canadian Division whom he correctly guessed would follow him rather than Washington. Then he traveled east to fight for a “legitimate” rebellion.
A dramatization of Horatio's March north. Horatio (shown as the mounted figure on the left) did not actually meet Washington (shown as the mounted figure on the right). It was commonly thought that this last meeting did occur where they exchanged pleasantries before heading off in opposite directions.
You see, with Governor James Bowdoin’s** heavy tax burden and unmerciful collection of back taxes and raised ire in the rural parts (western and central) of Massachusetts. The government was based mostly in the merchant class of coastal Massachusetts and were rather unsympathetic to the woes of farmers who could not keep up with overburdening taxes. In early 1783, this fierce resentment turned into open rebellion, headed by influential members of the rural community such as Job Shattuck, Daniel Shays, Eli Parsons, and Luke Day.
Most of the Continental soldiers posted in Massachusetts in fact came from those rural communities and thus were hesitant to thwart their attempt to make the lives for farmers (a profession most of them would return to) better. They might have acted eventually had Horatio Gates not arrived from New York claiming to “shed blood for the fairness and liberty”.
Grumblings turned to protests turned to riots turned to rebellions as the insurrection quickly expanded to Great Barrington, Concord, and Taunton. James Warren wrote to John Adams in August, 1783: We are now in a state of Anarchy and Confusion bordering on Civil War.”***
Gates' forces are shown at the back with their blue uniforms. It was crucial for the rebellion to not be seen as a infighting between the Continental Army but as a legitimate populist rebellion as to give it some sense of public support.
*IOTL, Washington said nothing in regard but called for a meeting on the 15th. He was mistaken as silently supporting the move and was not expected at the meeting. He showed up anyway and gave an impassioned speech for the army to stop. It was so strong, that many men were moved to tears and the plan immediately folded in. Here, instead of the “caring father” approach to the soldiers in person, he acted angrily denounced the letter.
**IOTL, John Hancock was elected Governor in 1780 with 90% of the vote against Bowdoin. He was very sympathetic to the farmers and tried as hard as he could to ease their burdens. However, here, John Hancock left office as president of Congress two years later than OTL (1779), thus not giving him ample time to get in the race for governor of Massachusetts. So this left Bowdoin to win the Governorship.
***During the OTL Shays Rebellion, John Warren did write exactly this. Here, he writes it around four years earlier.
