Union and Liberty: An American TL

[wilcoxchar]

Finally got another update finished. It will only include one bit, because I had no idea that this section would be as long as it turned out. Also, I don't know how plausible some of the parts of this are, most of this just sounded cool or interesting to me.

Part Twenty-One: The Adventures of William Walker

Adventures of William Walker:
In the 1850s, there were many in the southern United States who desired to extend slavery throughout the Caribbean and Central America. Scoieties such as the Knights of the Golden Circle advocated the idea, and helped encourage adventurous Americans to expand the reach of slavery themselves. The most successful and well known of these adventurers or 'filibusters' as they became known was William Walker.

In 1853, Walker went on a recruiting campaign in the southern states for expanding slavery in the Caribbean and possibly bringing the areas they conquered into the United States as slave states. Gathering only 70 men on the continent, Walker went to Cuba to gather more men. There he met with Narciso López, who joined him and helped to recruit over 200 more men into Walker's band. The next summer, Walker and López set off from Cuba to Haiti, where they landed on Tortuga. The men went to Port Paix on the mainland and set the town up as their base of operations, with Walker proclaiming he and López as President and Vice President of the Republic of Hispañola. After a few months, Walker and his men found they were running out of supplies, and after a skirmish with Haiti's emperor Faustin I, Walker and his accomplices returned to the United States, disgraced.

However, walker did not give up. Three years later, in late 1857, Walker decided to take advantage of the unrest in Nicaragua. Getting financing from Cornelius Vanderbilt after he promised Vanderbilt shipping rights along the Rio San Juan as well as the rights to build a canal across Nicaragua, Walker gather almost one thousand followers and settled in the Mosquito Coast on the eastern shore of Nicaragua. Proclaiming he was there to help the Liberal Party of Nicaragua win favor by annexing the Mosquito Coast. After driving out what little British soldiers there were at San Juan del Norte (now San Juan del Este) Walker continued up the coast until he reached Bluefields, and in early 1858 signed a treaty with the local Miskito recognizing Walker's sovereignty over the land.

Shortly after, Walker proclaimed the Mosquito Republic and claimed that the country was sovereign over all the coastline between Costa Rica and Honduras as well as some way inland, although it was never determined how far. With Nicaragua still in turmoil, Walker went with a group of men up the Rio San Juan to capture as much of the river as he could, as it was the planned route for the canal. With the two parties still fighting in the west, Walker easily reached the communities of El Castillo and Boca de Sábalos. However, the forest and disease had taken a toll on the men accompanying him.

Another concern was that the neighboring government of Costa Rica had become worried that Walker's exploits might spread into their country, and was also looking to gain land and resolve border disputes with its troubled neighbor that had arisen with the dissolution of the United Provinces of Central America. Costa Rica sent an army north and met Walker's force outside of San Carlos on Cocibolca[1]. Walker's camp was defeated, but Walker and his men were not executed since they agreed to fight with Costa Rica and cede his Mosquito Republic to the Costa Rican government. Fighting for Costa Rica, they soon defeated Nicaragua and reached Granada[2]. In the peace settlement, Costa Rica gained Rivas department and Rio San Juan department up to the Rio Camastro. Walker was made governor of the new Costa Rican Rio San Juan province and remained in Costa Rica for the rest of his life.

[1] Lake Nicaragua

 

[wilcoxchar]

Time for another update!

Part Twenty-Two: A Divided Union

Election of 1856:
With attacks directed toward Douglas late in his presidency over his age and his handling of the violence in Kearny Territory, the Democrats dumped Douglas and Davis from their ticket at the convention in Baltimore. After a month of deliberation, the Democrats went with an even more moderate position with their nomination of former Tejas governor Samuel Houston and senator James Bayard Jr. of Delaware. The moderate stance of the Democrats would help them much in the Upper South and the Mid-Atlantic states where the general opinion on slavery was still in flux.

By 1856, the Whigs had disappeared from the political scene and the remnants were now tasked with building new parties from the ashes. Out of these ashes, the former Whigs generally split into two camps; the northerners who were against slavery and the pro-slavery southerners. These two groups formed the Republican Party and the Liberty Party. The first Republican convention in Miami, Michigan, the first to be held outside the original thirteen colonies, ended with the nomination of New York senator William Seward and Ohio senator Samuel P. Chase. The Republicans were ardently against slavery and used the rising tide of abolitionism in the north to great effect. The Republicans also derided the Democrats' measures regarding the violence in Kearny and desired harsh measures in the territory to make sure that such violence was not repeated.

The Liberty Party[1], on the other hand, ran primarily on a platform of upholding slavery in the south and the preservation of states' rights, although some went further and advocated the expansion of slavery in the territories and to other countires in the Gulf and the Caribbean. At the convention, the Liberty Party nominated Joesph Brown of Georgia and Charles Magill Conrad of Louisiana. The party gained much of its support in the southern states, and gained popularity in Cuba and with immigrants from Mexico after the endorsement of Jackson governor Felipe Trájano de la Vega[2].

The campaign was a bitter affair with slavery now the main issue for most Americans. Ironically, both the Republican and the Liberty parties appealed to the American sense of freedom, with the Republicans talking about the freedom of man while the Liberty Party pushing the freedom of the states from the federal government. The Democrats advocated a central and moderate path, desiring to heal the sectionalism that had afflicted the nation in the last decade. Douglas and Davis, now disgraced, formed their own minor party in a hope to retain some supporters. After the votes were counted, Houston and the Democrats achieved a very narrow majority in the electoral college. Seward gained over twice as many electoral votes as Brown despite winning about the same number of states, showing the population difference between the north and the south. Douglas's party only managed to win the home states of the president and vice president, and the party withered shortly afterward.

Houston/Bayard: 158
Seward/Chase: 91
Brown/Conrad: 45
Douglas/Davis: 16


[1] Yes, there is a Liberty Party in OTL. No, this isn't them. And I'm not putting an asterisk every time they get mentioned.
[2] Another fictional person worth mentioning in the timeline.

 

[wilcoxchar]

Got another update finished. Here it is. Not sure what picture should go with it, so any suggestions would be great.

Part Twenty-Three: From the Mountains to the Sea

Colorado Gold Rush:
In 1855, a group of Spanish settlers had struck north from Santa Fe to find a place to settle in northern New Mexico Territory. The settlers followed the Rio Grande and then the foothills of the mountains until they came upon a series of rock formations consisting of uplifted sandstone slabs against the side of a mountain. It was here that they decided to set up their final camp, along a creek that ran through the area. Soon the settlers met with a local Arapaho band led by Chief Niwot. After securing a tentative peace with Niwot, the settlers set up camp. Soon they began traveling up the local canyon into the mountains, and the settlement started to grow. In the spring of 1856, one of the settlers, Lázaro Mendinueta, discovered some gold five miles up one of the canyons.

This discovery began what is now known as the Colorado Gold Rush. For almost a decade after the discovery, almost two hundred thousand settlers from the south and the east poured into the southern Rocky Mountains in search of gold and silver. New cities quickly sprang up in New Mexico Territory. While many of them were small mining towns in the mountains that were abandoned after the rush calmed down, a few on the eastern edge of the Rockies served as important depots and thrived even afterward. Some of these cities include Zeublon near the base of Pike's Peak, Ororio on the South Platte River, Pueblo on the Arkansaw River, and Ferroplano at the point where the Spanish first settled[1]. Ferroplano would come to prominence as the capital of the territory and later state of Colorado.


Houston, We Have Contact:
After the undersea cable from Nova Scotia to Newfoundland was completed, countries on both sides of the Atlantic were postulating a telegraph cable to connect the two continents. The quickest path was clearly Newfoundland to Ireland, and in 1855 the London and Acadia Telegraph Company was formed to try and link England with the Acadian Union, and through that, Europe and North America. In 1855 an attempt was made to connect the two sides but the project fell through when the United States Senate narrowly vetoed a funding bill due to the Anglophobe opinions of many senators[2].

After a series of meetings between representatives from the United States, the United Kingdom, and other Atlantic European countries, a compromise was made. In 1857, Congress passed a bill for the funding of a telegraph line to run from Nova Scotia to Lisbon. The London and Acadia Company worked with British companies to build the cable, and in 1857 the first laying of the cable began from Halifax. This attempt failed as the cable broke during the journey, but a successful laying was completed a year later starting in Lisbon. In July of 1858 the cable was completed, and President Houston and Queen Victoria sent the first telegrams across the Atlantic.

The title of this section refers not to the first message sent across the cable, as is commonly thought, but to the message sent to Washington from Halifax upon receiving the first message from Queen Victoria. In the first two telegrams sent across the cable, Queen Victoria on a visit to Lisbon wished that the communication line would help improve relations between the United States and the United Kingdom, while President Houston expressed his wish for further cooperation between the United States and Europe.

However, this first cable did not last long. A winter storm in Nova Scotia destroyed the cablehouse at Whitehead where it came up out of the Atlantic. During attempts to rebuild the cable house, it was found that the cable had deteriorated too much for continued use. Another cable was laid in 1859, and this sturdier line survived the next winter. After this first success, more cables were laid in the late 1860s and 1870s, from many different locations up and down both sides of the Atlantic coast.


[1] Colorado Springs, Auraria (now part of Denver), Pueblo, and Boulder, respectively.
[2] In OTL this anglophobia was in Congress as well, and the bill seeking funding from Congress only passed the Senate by a single vote.

 

[wilcoxchar]

And now...

Part Twenty-Four: Foreign Happenings

Liberian Independence:
After the American Colonization Society relinquished control of Liberia in 1847, the government took administration of the colony with the support of some of the Society's original founders. Over the next decade, the government encouraged emigration to Liberia. However, because of the danger of disease and native uprisings as well as distaste for the Colonization Society, only about ten thousand people migrated to Liberia, mostly from Maryland and Virginia. This meager population growth made the colony an economic burden during the 1850s.

The discussions in Congress over what to do about Liberia were relatively one-sided. The Congressmen arguing to keep hold of the colony and find a way to make it sustainable were vastly outweighed by those who sought to rid the colony of American responsibility. With this backing from Congress, President Houston relinquished American control of Liberia and established its independence in 1858. While Liberia was now independent, it was still relatively dependent on the United States to maintain its economy.

The political situation in Liberia would not be much better. Despite the framing of the Constitution based on that of the United States, Americans who had migrated to Liberia would continue to dominate politics and society for the next century. The country would also be plagued by civil wars and rebellions by the natives against what was perceived (and probably rightfully) as their foreign oppressors.

The Voortrekker Republiek:
After the British took control of the area around the Cape of Good Hope from the Dutch, many of the Dutch-speaking inhabitants of the region began searching for a new homeland away from the British. In 1835, they went east and inland, in what is known as the Great Trek. These Voortrekkers[1], as they came to be known, were mostly farmers and settled in the sparsely populated areas around the local Zulu and other tribes. Gradually over the next decade, the Voortrekkers led by Piet Retief and Gerhard Maritz established towns in and around the Zulu lands.

Despite the attempts to coexist with the native tribes, the amount of Boers that were migrating to the area meant that tensions were inevitable. In 1846 after the death of the Zulu chief Dingane, his successor and half brother Mpande was unhappy with Dingane's concessions to the settlers and attempted to expel the Boers from Zulu lands. The Voortrekkers resisted, and in two years the technologically superior Trekkers soundly defeated the more numerous Zulu. The two most distinguished generals, Andries Pretorius[2] and Hendrik Potgieter, led the creation of a new state in the Zulu lands and the land west in what became the Natal Republic.

By 1855, the land east of the British Cape Colony was dominated by three Voortrekker states; Transvaal, Oranje, and Natal. Despite being recognized by the United Kingdom, the three states still felt diplomatic pressure from Cape Town and London. Starting in the late 1850s, the process to unify the Voortrekker states began with a free trade area among them. The process accelerated in 1859 when land disputed between different families led to a unified court system. The unification was eventually completed in 1872 with the creation of the Zuid-Afrikaanishe Republiek (also known as the Voortrekker Republiek). A weak federal government was established and Matthew Pretorius, son of Andries, was elected the country's first stadtholder. The United States was one of the first countries to recognize the republic under president Grant, along with the Netherlands.

The Ganges Revolt:
In the early 1800s as the British East India Company gradually gained control over more and more of the subcontinent, the British government took steps to regulate the company. The British East India Company not only had its commercial functions removed save for trade in tea and opium, but the Crown in London began imposing regulations on it. Championed by William Wilberforce[3], the regulations were implemented in order to increase social freedoms for the local population. Such reforms in the Charter of 1833 included assisting with the codification of the laws so the populace would more easily understand them and mandating that no candidate for office under the East India Company be disallowed due to his religion, place of birth, or his race. Shortly after the 1833 charter was passed, Wilberforce died and the Company was mostly left to its own devices.

Wilberforce's reforms inspired others to either seek further reforms through Parliament or travel to the Indian subcontinent themselves. However, Wilberforce's advocacy of combining the reforms with Christian evangelism had lasting effects in the subcontinent. The evangelism was resented by many Indians who thought that the British were trying to convert them and cause them to lose their caste, and the outlawing of local practices such as Sari angered many local leaders. Other laws such as the Doctrine of Lapse, which mandated that if a feudal lord died without a male child, the land would be forfeited to the East India Company. The resentment was unknowingly fueled by some Chartists who fled to the subcontinent after the Chartist Uprisings in the 1840s by encouraging democratic reform.[4]

The tensions continued to mount between the local populace and Company authorities during the passage of the Charter of 1853. While some reforms were enacted in London by Prime Minister Palmerston including allowing Indians to serve in the Indian Civil Service, many higher caste Indians felt that this did not go far enough. The situation exploded into rebeliion in 1858, when the ruler of Awadh, one of the autonomous princely states, died without a direct heir to the throne. As the British East India Company attempted to seize the land, the local population rose up. The rebellion soon spread to other areas, as the native soldiers in Bengal and Gwailor rose up as well.

While the Ganges Revolt as it would be later known in Britain started out well with the rebels capturing the holy site of Varanasi in the east and the outskirts of Agra in the west, the rebellion soon ran out of steam as they faced royal troops from Delhi and British forces sent from Calcutta. The main turning point was the Siege of Patna, in which over four hundred rebelling Sepoys were killed or captured. The revolt was further demoralized by the participation of some Princely states, mostly Rajputana, against the rebels and the continued loyalty of the Sepoys in Bombay and Madras to the East India Company. The revolt was finally put down in early 1859. Afterward the area around Gwailor was granted to Rajputana, Awadh was put under control of the East India Company, and the reforms that were advocated by Wilberforce were scaled back. The revolt would leave a lasting impression on the British stay in the subcontinent and the local population for the remainder of the century and beyond.

[1] ITTL Voortrekkers or Trekkers is a more popular term than Boers, at least in the United States, because the pioneer idea appeals more to the American people.
[2] The guy that Pretoria is named after.
[3] Wilberforce was a big rights advocator in the early 1800s. He ended the slave trade in Britain and set up the world's first animal rights organization.
[4] Most of the root causes of the Ganges Revolt are the same as that of the Sepoy Mutiny in OTL, although I increased Wilberforce and the Chartists' involvement a bit.

 

[wilcoxchar]

Time for the next update. It's a bit short, but I couldn't think of more to add to the election.

Part Twenty-Five: Houston's Triumph

Kearny Statehood Act:
While the violence in Kearny Territory had generally died down when Houston entered into office, the tensions in the territory still ran high. Kearny continued to grow in population with settlers on their journey to the Rockies, and there were increasing calls for the territory to be admitted to the Union as a state. However, there was still struggle in both Kearny and in Washington over if it should be admitted as a free or a slave state.

In the summer of 1857, a solution was proposed by Indiana representative Joseph A. Wright. The bill would divide the territory of Kearny in two, with the two provisional governments serving as the state legislatures. This way, the balance of free and slave states would not be upset. After a census determined that the area was indeed populous enough to warrant the creation of two states from the territory, Congress spent the next months deciding where the boundary of the two states would fall. The southerners of course wanted the border to be as far north as possible while many northerners desired a border that included Council Grove in their state, which was then the seat of the freesoilers government in Kearny Territory. The border was soon agreed to be at 38 degrees 30 minutes north, and in October of 1857, President Houston admitted the states of Kearny and Calhoun into the Union.


Election of 1860:
The election of 1860 saw the Liberty Party struggle to retain its votes after the success of Houston in maintaining the middle-ground on the issue of slavery. After the votes were counted, they only kept votes in Georgia and South Carolina with Joseph Brown and South Carolina Congressman Andrew Bulter as their candidates. The Republicans, on the other hand, gained votes in much of the North as the idea of abolition became more widespread and people became more vocal about it.

While Fremont and his new running mate Horace Greeley were boosted by public sentiment and the use of Greeley's New York Tribune as a mouthpiece for the part, it was not enough to gain the Republicans the Presidency. Houston and Bayard kept their moderate stance, and achieved reelection based on the success of Houston's first term, despite losing the rest of New England to the Republicans. In March of 1861 Houston was inaugurated, and it seemed that the country would be truly united. However, many of the deep-rooted divisions in the United States were still unresolved. This was most evident in that if Pennsylvania, which had been a close-run affair in the election, had gone Republican, Fremont would have been the first Republican president.

Houston/Bayard: 161
Fremont/Greeley: 136
Brown/Bulter: 19

 

[wilcoxchar]

So you need someone to end the page?

Yes indeed. And for that, I give you the next update!

Part Twenty-Six: Demographic Effects

Reform from Religion: While the Second Great Awakening had mostly already run its course, the political ramifications of the movements it created were only beginning. During the middle of the 19th century, the idea that the world needed to be reformed to achieve the Second Coming of Christ spawned a number of unitopical movements[1]. One of the earliest movements was abolitionism, which was prominent in the 1840s and 1850s. Later in the century there would be many other campaigns surrounding particular issues, such as the moderation[2] movement that advocated banning the production and sale of alcohol that was moderately successful in the southern states. The 1870s and 1880s also saw a rise in nativism and anti-Catholicism as a reaction to the rise in immigration of Poles and Italians after the Piave War[3].


Census of 1860: Though the nation had been growing throughout its history, the United States census in 1860 showed many remarkable changes in the past decade. First was the sheer increase in the population of the United States. The first official national census in the state of Cuba since the state was added to the Union showed that the island held a population of over one million people. That population statistic led to an increase in seven electoral votes in Cuba, bringing the votes for Cuba to ten, the same number of votes as was given to Georgia and Maryland. Adding in the incorporation of Cuba, the population of the United States had grown by over ten million in a decade for the first time in its history. The country now held almost thirty-five million people.

With the increase in population, many cities had flourished. In the south, New Orleans and Pensacola continued to take in immigrants from South America, Further along the Mississippi, the area around the confluence of the Mississippi and Ohio rivers had greatly increased in population since 1850, with Saint Louis and Cairo doubling in population. Other cities in the Old Northwest including Chicago and Cincinatti also experienced large influxes of people.


California Gold Rush: In California, the population had grown to over one-hundred and fifty thousand by 1860. The majority of this growth was immigration, with the Mormon settlement in the east of the country and immigrants from Mexico in the south. However, California was not finished growing. The gold rush that occurred during the first half of the 1860s would almost double the population. Immigrants from not only the United States but South American countries such as Chile and Bolivia and a few from the Far East flocked to California.

In 1863, the Californio majority became worried about the number of Americans entering their country, claiming that the immigration was diluting California's religious and linguistic identity. The California legislature passed a bill restricting American-owned gold mines, and thus much of the American immigrants, to the eastern side of the Sierra Nevada. While there were some protests, few plots owned by American immigrants were west of those mountains, so there was not much displeasure among the Americans. Another consequence of the California Gold Rush in the 1860s would be the San Xavier Purchase, in which the remainder of what is now Colorado was purchased from California after the local population called for the area to join the United States.

[1] Single issue campaigns
[2] The temperance movement
[3] Not sure if this is what the war will be called, but La Guerra Piavare sounded nice in Italian

 

[wilcoxchar]

Time for another update. Probably will be a while before the next one, since I'm going back to DC for school on Friday and I'll need to get settled in.

Part Twenty-Seven: The Game is Afoot

Final Collapse of Mexico:
Mexico had been dealing with internal strife almost constantly since the revolts that sparked the Texas Rebellion in 1835 and 1836. Struggles continued between centralists and federalists and other divisions in the country through the following decades as the government changed hands a number of times. In the 1850s, the government in Mexico City began to lose authority over the edges of the country. In 1858, the northern cities of Tuscon and Chihuahua kicked out federal officials. This proved to be prophetic for the history of Mexico, and within five years the country fell into anarchy and a full scale collapse of authority from the capital.

The chaos in Mexico lasted the better part of a decade. The many rebelling groups were mostly in the south of the country, however, and did not affect the north as much. The northern states quickly organized into the republics of Sonora and Chihuahua. In the south, unrest continued as federal soldiers quickly lost to rebel groups and goberitos[1]. After almost five years, southern Mexico finally organized itself into a group of smaller nations, roughly corresponding with states or groups of states from before the collapse. In the aftermath nine countries were created from Mexico: Sonora, Chihuahua, Durango, Queretaro, Granidalgo, Tlaxcala, Jalisco, and Oaxaca. The federal government remained in Mexico City and retained control over the federal district as well as the states of Morelos, Mexico, and Guerrero. The short-lived Maya Republic of Chiapas was soon divided between Oaxaca and Guatemala, which annexed the region of Los Altos, which had been part of the Federal Republic of Central America before that country's breakup.

With all the confusion, a group of Southern filibusters took advantage of the situation and made a landing in the village of Rio Banderas outside of Veracruz. The filibusters, led by former vice president Jefferson Davis, moved north and captured Veracruz in two months. Davis soon proclaimed himself Alcalde-General and made Laurence T. Buford his Tenente-Alcalde[2]. Veracruz was later caught in a dispute between Oaxaca and Tlaxcala and after mediation by the United States, the city became independent, and continued to be an important port in the Gulf of Mexico.


Beginnings of Colonialism:
The 1860s saw the beginning of a new wave of colonialism and imperialism for many European nations, this time focused on Asia and Africa. While the United States did not get involved aside from its good relations with Liberia, many European nations did. The initial wave of colonialism was led by the Belgians, the French, and the British.

Belgium had a history of colonies almost since the country first gained independence. As Borneo had been ceded to Belgium upon peace with the Netherlands, during the first half of the nineteenth century Leopold I focused on obtaining safe shipping routes between Belgium and its East Indian colony. To secure the route, Leopold negotiated naval rights with the United Kingdom and annexed the region around Erasme Bay[3] as a waystation. These colonies were all Belgium had until the succession of Leopold's son as Ludwig I of Belgium in 1859. Ludwig came to power at a young age, and was eager to pursue expansion of Belgium's overseas possessions.

In the early 1860s, Belgium gradually moved in from Borneo to the mainland of southeast Asia. Belgian forces embarked from Borneo and in a two year struggle, entered the city of Saigon and conquered Quinam. Soon after, Belgium also took the port of Da Nang and the ancient city of Hue, causing unrest in the Tonkin lands. After the Tonkin lords collapsed, Belgium moved in to annex the entire area aside from a few isolated local tribes which held out for a few more decades. During this period, the Belgians also established the kingdom of Cambodia as a protectorate in exchange for defense against Siam, but this would turn into colonial domination in later decades.

Other colonization efforts were taken by the United Kingdom and France during the 1850s and 1860s. Great Britain expanded its presence in the Gold Coast and north of the Cape Colony. After the Ganges Revolt settled down, Britain also sent an expedition led by the Great Eastern, a grand steamship designed by Isambard Kingdom Brunel, to Japan. This expedition was ultimately successful at achieving diplomatic relations with Japan, and culminated with the Anglo-Japanese Friendship Treaty signed by Lord Elgin who accompanied the expedition and representatives of the Shogunate in 1861.

Meanwhile, the French also sought more colonies after the full annexation of Algeria and the accession of Louis-Napoleon to the French presidency. In 1856, France purchased the anchorage of Obock in the Gulf of Tajdoura. With concessions made by Sa'id Pasha of Egypt three years later, France's interest in the Red Sea grew. The French government soon expanded their colony in Obock to include the nearby town of Assab, and established a hold over the Hanish Islands in the Red Sea and the area surrounding the port town of Mocha on the Arabian Peninsula. Around 1865, the French government also sent a naval and trade expedition to Korea. This expedition obtained a French base in Ganghwa Island similar to the situation of the Dutch in Dejima, and allowed French missionaries limited freedoms in the city of Incheon.

[1] Warlords; the term comes from the shortening of the term for 'little governor'
[2] Mayor-General and Lieutenant Mayor, respectively
[3] Walvis Bay

 

[wilcoxchar]

There we go, got the update done. Again, I have no clue how plausible or constitutional this is, but it's a crisis, so constitutionality doesn't matter yet.

Part Twenty-Eight: A Constitutional Crisis

The Death of Samuel Houston:
While Houston had done well in reaching compromise during his first term in office, his second term was more divided as the southerners were desiring more concessions. Houston's refusal to intervene in the collapse of Mexico created a rift between him and many expansion-minded constituents in the south and led to Jefferson Davis goin on his own filibustering expedition. This rift continued to widen in the first year of his second term upon the death of Roger Brooke Taney. In his place, Houston appointed Abraham Lincoln of Illinois as the Chief Justice of the United States. During Lincoln's confirmation process, previous cases regarding slavery in Illinois were brought up, showing Lincoln arguing both for and against slavery. His exact position on slavery was never revealed at the nomination hearings, but he was narrowly nominated by Congress to the post.

In December 1861, Vice President James A. Bayard fell ill and caught pneumonia in the unusually harsh winter of that year. Only a few weeks later, President Houston was shot after a speech in Raleigh, North Carolina. With the President and the Vice President both incapacitated, Congress convened to determine what should be done. The Constitution at the time was unclear and conflicting in what to do in this situation. While Calhoun had taken the title of Acting President upon the death of Andrew Jackson, he did not take the title of President until his election in 1836. This left the succession rules open for debate. Some suggested that the succession be determined by the House of Representatives as it was in 1824, but there were no clear candidates and a system was not put in place to select candidates in the short time frame necessary. Others suggested that the President pro Tempore of the Senate take the office, but many Congressmen objected. After a month, Congress created a Joint Emergency Presidential Selection Committee. However, this committee would prove to be very controversial during the month of February and the course of selecting who would succeed Houston as President.

 

[wilcoxchar]

Next update done. Another short one, and I have no clue if this makes sense or not. Things probably moved too fast than would be realistic, but I wanted to have the limitation that if no president was chosen by March 4th, the usual inauguration day, the president pro tempore of the Senate would become the next President.

I'll probably post a few alt. speeches surrounding this event if I can come up with some good ones.


Part Twenty-Nine: A House Divided

A House Divided: After a week of discussion, the Emergency Presidential Selection Committee narrowed the candidates down to three men: President pro tempore of the Senate David R. Atchison, Andrew Johnson, Speaker of the House, and Secretary of State William Seward. As the committee debated and drew ballots, speculation on who would be the new President of the United States spread across the nation. A rumor quickly grew in the southern states that Lincoln would veto the appointment if Seward did not get the presidency. Of course, this infuriated many southern slave-owners as Seward was a well known Republican and abolitionist. After the second week of debate, Francis W. Pickens of South Carolina, a member of the committee, walked out and refused to participate, and was quoted as calling the committee 'undemocratic' and 'and affront to the ideals of our republic'. It is not known what cause this outburst, but up until that moment the committee had met in secret, with the only news reaching the public being a statement at the end of each day's proceedings.

Two days after Pickens walked out, the situation escalated. A convention in South Carolina issued a declaration of secession similar to Declaration of Independence, listing the grievances the state held with the federal government. Georgia followed soon after. Upon news of the secession reaching Washington, the committee chastised the leaders of the secession movements for what was termed their hotheaded and rash action. That days ballot count saw a plummet in the support for Atchison, but still no majority had been reached. With the bid to maintain slavery in the United States and his own presidential bid closing fast, Atchison issued an executive order to allow slavery on the basis of the right to property. With many New England states now threatening to secede, this order was quickly challenged in the Supreme Court, and in a decision that took only two days of deliberation Chief Justice Lincoln published the decision declaring the order unconstitutional on the grounds that Atchison did not have the authority as he did not hold the office of President of the United States.

This decision by the Supreme Court tipped many other states over the edge. Mississippi and North Carolina seceded on the day after the decision was issued, with Florida following the next day. Reacting to the news that more states had seceded, the committee was prepared to vote Seward as President. However, still a majority could not be gained for Seward as some members of the committee from southern states still in the Union had abstained from that day's vote. As papers reported this, many people in the south assumed that Seward would become the President in a few days time. Violence soon erupted in many southern states and Louisiana, Alabama, and Virginia became the next states to secede. On the 26th of February, 1862, the independent states formed a loose federation, the Confederate States of America. Three days later, on March 1st, the committee confirmed Andrew Johnson as the next president of the United States. The day after, Arkansaw had defected to the CSA. On the 3rd, Virginian troops in Alexandria proclaimed that Alexandria was part of the state of Virginia and thus part of the CSA. One of the officers fired a shot across the Potomac to signify Virginia's sovereignty. This became known as the shot that broke the Union.

 

[wilcoxchar]

I now present to you, the first in the series of Great Men sections. These sections will chronicle the efforts of the people that shaped the Union throughout its history. The first such person is Henry Clay.

Great Men, Section 1: Henry Clay

Henry Clay was a great statesman and orator who served in the United States Senate. Born in Virginia in 1777, Clay's family moved to Kentucky soon after where he studied law. During the 1790s and early 1800s, Clay established a lucrative law practice in Kentucky including high profile cases such as successfully defending Aaron Burr in 1806 when he was indicted for planning an expedition into Spanish territory. Along with his success in his legal career, Henry Clay was also influential in Kentucky state politics. Clay was so influential that in 1806, he was selected by the Kentucky legislature to represent Kentucky in the United States Senate during the remainder of John Adair's term, despite being too young to constitutionally serve as a United States senator.

Henry Clay's political career was much more successful and lasted longer than his career practicing law. After his serving in the Senate in 1806, Clay was elected to the House of Representatives in 1811. The first day of his first session in Congress, Clay was elected Speaker of the House. Clay was reelected to the House and to the speakership five time during his fourteen year tenure in the House of Respresentatives. While Speaker, Clay transformed the position into a position of power and manipulated the committee memberships to give the War Hawks control of the important House committees during the War of 1812. Clay took the lead supporting the war as the head of the Democratic-Republican Party and served as a peace commissioner at the Treat of Ghent in 1814. During the remainder of his service in the House of Representatives, Clay was a founding member of the American Colonization Society, advocated the American System, and helped gain Congressional approval of the Missouri Compromise.

Probably Clay's defining moment while Speaker of the House was his manipulation of the results of the election of 1824. While Clay had gotten the fewest number of electoral votes, no candidate obtained a majority. Thus, the election went to the House of Representatives. While Jackson had won the most votes and the popular vote, Clay did not want to see Jackson become presdient. And Clay could not be elected as only the top three candidates were eligible in the House, and Clay had come in fourth. So as Speaker of the House, he gave his support to John Quincy Adams, who won the election. Adams appointed Clay as Secretary of State, which Jackson was enraged at and called a 'corrupt bargain'. This was a major point in the election of 1828, and was one of the reasons that Jackson defeated Adams for the presidency that year[1].

After this election, Henry Clay served as a senator off and on for much of the 1830s and 1840s. Clay was an influential voice during both the presidencies of John Calhoun and William Henry Harrison. Clay served as a moderating force to Calhoun and as internal competition to Harrison, although Harrison accepted some similar policies as Clay such as the American System and the Third National Bank. However, the two broke with each other during the election of 1844. Clay was frustrated by Harrison's increasing resistance to his influence, and after losing the Whig nomination to Harrison, Clay never supported Harrison. This led to Harrison's loss to James K. Polk, but it also led to the end of Clay's Congressional career. Still, Clay is considered one of the great orators of the Senate and along with Daniel Webster and John C. Calhoun form the Great Triumvirate which dominated the Senate in the 1830s and 1840s.

For the last years of his life, Henry Clay spent much of his time in Lexington where he set up a moderately successful realty office. In 1853, Clay visited Liberia, the product of the American Colonization Society, and caught yellow fever. Clay died two months after he returned to the United States. Henry Clay was the second person to lay in state in the Capitol Rotunda after Andrew Jackson.

[1] Everything up to about here is OTL.

 

[wilcoxchar]

Huh, after complaining about writer's block, an amazing thing happened. I actually wrote something! Here it is. This will probably be another update-as-I-write-it parts, so keep watching this post.


Part Thirty: Choosing Sides

Choosing Sides: Andrew Johnson was sworn into office on March 4th, 1862. Over the next week votes were held in many southern states on leaving the Union to join the Confederate States, but only Calhoun voted to secede. The initial military movements of both sides in the months following Johnson's accession to the presidency were primarily consolidation efforts. The United States moved troops into southern Missouri to discourage any local secessionist sentiment in the region, and reinforced the Union position in Washington DC.

Meanwhile, the Confederacy was organizing itself both militarily and politically. On March 17, representatives from the states making up the CSA met in Augusta, Georgia and elected Howell Cobb as the first president of the Confederate States of America. The Confederate constitution outline terms of two years for the president as opposed to four years in the Union, and delegated more explicit powers to the states, but in most other respects it was similar to the United States constitution. The main military movements of the Confederacy in these initial months of the war were the integration of Alexandria into Virginia which began the fighting, and the advancement of troops to secure the state of Jackson, which had not held a vote on secession and was nominally still a part of the Union.

Throughout March and April, not much fighting occurred on the borders of the United States and the Confederacy. There were a few minor advances on either side, such as the capture of Carthage, Missouri by a local pro-Confederate militia led by Claiborne Fox Jackson, but the majority of the fighting was smaller. However, on other fronts the war started quickly. Confederate troops massed and advanced into Jackson in an effort to capture the port at Pensacola before the Union could reach it and resupply the forts surrounding the bay.

The first major battle of the war was the main result of this campaign, the Siege of Pensacola. In mid March, Confederate general Braxton Bragg led 800 men to the outskirts of Pensacola. For three weeks, the siege of the city went on, with Confederate ships occasionally bombarding Fort Pickens on Santa Rosa Island. While the fort still stood, the city did not fare well. On April 2th, a regiment was sent to the other side of Santa Rosa island, and during a bombardment of Fort Pickens by supporting Confederate ships, the regiment attacked the fort and surprised the Union regiment. The Union force was defeated and the fort was taken[1]. After the fort was taken, Pensacola surrendered and the state of Jackson was officially admitted to the Confederacy on April 11th.

Opening Moves:
The summer of 1862 saw many developments in the war. In May, a diplomatic expedition led by Judah P. Benjamin to Veracruz brought the city into the Confederacy. Veracruz gave the Confederates another naval base in the Gulf of Mexico. This, along with the secession of Cuba in August, would put down all plans by the United States to trap the Confederate States through a naval blockade.

Also in the early months of the war, various shadow governments were set up either in the disputed regions or in a nearby city. In southern Missouri, Claiborne Jackson set up a Confederate shadow government based in Neosho. The Confederates also had sympathy in western Tennessee and Kentucky west of the Tennessee River, and a government was declared in Memphis claiming the area as its jurisdiction. A vote was held in towns cities over whether to secede after the other two governments stayed with the Union but few towns ever issued proclamations of secession. The Union also had a number of shadow governments sympathetic to them. The most notable are the Wheeling Legislature in what was then western Virginia and exiles from Jackson, who set up a base in Corpus Christi.

That summer also saw the beginning of battle in many theaters. The Confederacy attacked important border towns such as Kansas City and Memphis. An uprising by Confederate sympathizers was put down in the small town of Dallas in northeastern Houston. But the main fighting during the summer was the Tennessee Valley campaign launched by the Army of Georgia in July 1862. The first main battle of the campaign was the taking of Chattanooga. The Army of Georgia divided into two groups and positioned them on Lookout Mountain and Moccasin Point in the west and along the Missionary Range in the east. After the artillery regiment led by John Pemberton[2] bombarded the Union works, the army advanced on the city from both sides. The Confederacy won the battle with upwards of 600 casualties, and gave the army an auspicious beginning to the campaign. Over the next week, the Army of Georgia trekked north along the Tennessee River aimed for Knoxville. They reached as far as Fort Loudoun before being rebuked and having to turn back. Despite this defeat, however, the capture of Chattanooga and Cleveland secured a vital rail link for future campaigns in Tennessee.

The final event of the summer of 1862 was the Chesapeake Offensive and the First Potomac Offensive by the Union Army. The Chesapeake Offensive secured the portion of the Delmarva Peninsula in Virginia. The First Potomac Offensive attempted to reach Richmond with the thought that Virginia could be taken out of the war with a quick capture of the capital. General McClellan's plan was for the army to sail to Fort Monroe which was still Union-controlled and drive up the peninsula between the James and York rivers to Richmond, bypassing much of the Confederate Army of Northern Virginia's defenses. The Army of the Potomac was sent to Fort Monroe and began operations on July 4th. While McClellan did have some early success in the campaign, the majority of the Army of Northern Virginia led by Joseph Johnston were at Bowling Green, not further northward as expected. After a month, the forces under McClellan had established a line at the eastern bank of the Chickahominy River. This would be as far as the campaign would reach, as within two weeks later Johnston had forced the Army of the Potomac back to a line following Queen Creek and College Creek near Williamsburg.

With the campaign on the Virginia Peninsula stalled, McClelland launched one last summer offensive in mid-August. A few brigades of the Army of the Potomac landed at Currioman's Landing on the Virginia Neck with the intent of moving west to cut Fredericksburg off from the rest of Virginia. The brigades managed to secure the area but did not advance very far before they were stalled by Confederate forces on the north bank of the Rappahannock River. Whille the Union soldiers won the short battle, they could not continue the offensive. By the end of August, however, the Army of the Potomac had gotten control of much of eastern Westmoreland County including the county seat of Montross. This had a larger than expected effect on the proceedings of the war, because not only did this victory assist with Union control of the Potomac, but the news of it also caused former Chief Engineer Robert E. Lee to decide to stay loyal to hte United States. In explaining his decision, Lee commented that "with my boyhood home and my greatest ahievement under the control of the United States of America, I will protect the things most important to me and remain loyal to this government"[3]. By now Lee had become a popular figure in Virginia, and influenced the popular opinion of the war and the Confederate cause. Lee's decision also encouraged Union loyalist movements in the far western and northern portions of Virginia.

[1] This battle is loosely based on the Battle of Santa Rosa Island which took place in OTL in October of 1861. Except this time, the CSA had the naval advantage and won.
[2] Yes, this is the John Pemberton who invented Coca-Cola in OTL.
[3] Lee lived at the Stratford Hill Plantation on the Potomac north of Montross until he was eleven, and ITTL he designed and oversaw the construction of Fort Monroe, which is how he quickly rose in his army engineering career.

 

[wilcoxchar]

New update time!

Speaking to History, Section 1: War Between the States

A House Divided:
After the opinion was released regarding Atchison's slavery proposal during the Interregnum of 1862, Chief Justice Abraham Lincoln made a speech in an attempt to calm the spiraling tensions in the southern United States. While the speech was not regarded very well at the time, over the decades it has become one of the most famous speeches of the era. This is mostly because of Lincoln's lines which repeated a portion of Samuel Houston's first Inaugural Address[1].

"As the late president stated when he first entered the office of President half a decade ago, 'A house divided against itself cannot stand.' Our nation now stands at the precipice of destruction. This house, where God conceived the noble ideals of freedom and liberty, is on the verge of violent discord ... By the grace of God, our nation is fully capable of surmounting the challenges that face it. We must look to what Unites us instead of that which separates us in order for the Union to be preserved and remain prosperous." Lincoln's speech was futile in preventing the division of the nation, and his words remain a solemn reminder of the perils facing the United States at that time.


Andrew Johnson's First State of the Union:
The words spoken in Andrew Johnson's first State of the Union address in December of 1862 are the most well known of any State of the Union. While the address to Congress normally focuses on the issues facing the nation at that time and would not usually remain in the minds of the public over a century and a half later, Johnson's First as it is now known has stayed on through the years. The most memorable part of his address was the beginning. "As Houston was laid to rest, the troubles of our nation awoke. Now not a year has passed, and these troubles have boiled over. Gentlemen, our country has now entered a state of war. However, it is not an honorable war. Brother fights against brother."

[1] The 'house divided' line most often attributed to Lincoln was first spoken in OTL by Sam Houston in a speech on the Compromise of 1850

 

[wilcoxchar]

Huh. Just got another short update finished, while watching the Rockies game and procrastinating on my homework.

Part Thirty-One: Ending the War's First Year

The Winter of 1862: The final months of 1862 saw a lull in the conflict as the two sides settled in for winter. In September, President Johnson authorized the creation of the Provisional Texan Army[1]. This army was an autonomous organization under the authority of the states of Tejas and Houston, and was created with the precedent of the Champoeg Provisional Government. The legislatures of Tejas and Houston met in San Antonio and chose Juan Seguín as Commander of the Texan Army. In late October, Seguín led a small contingent in an offensive which captured the southwestern corner of Arkansaw bound by the Red River. The force moved south along the river but was stopped shortly after crossing the Louisiana border and was unable to reach Shreveport.

The first year of the war also revealed how divided the individual states were. In the western territories, Ferroplano and Oregon Territory declared neutrality in the conflict. In addition, Northern New Mexico Territory had a large population increase during the war, as pro-Union supporters, many of them Dutch immigrants, traveled west after Calhoun joined the Confederacy. Some of these settlers founded the city of Nederland[2] in Colorado in the mountains west of Ferroplano. Mines near Nederland would later launch the Colorado silver boom in the 1880s and 1890s.

The war also brought the first income tax in United States history. In the Revenue Act of 1862 passed by Congress in November, the federal tax was set at 5% for all citizens who earned more than one thousand dollars per year. This tax would help pay for the war and while it was repealed by the Hancock administration in the early 1880s as the country's need for money lessened, the tax paved the way for future income tax laws passed in the 20th century.

[1] Locally, the army was referred to as the Army of the Second Texan Republic due to the greater autonomy granted to Tejas and Houston during the war.
[2] Same place as the Nederland in Colorado in OTL.

 

[wilcoxchar]

Time for another update! This will be a pretty big update, so I'll keep adding stuff as it gets done. Thought I'd be done by now, but it turns out it's taking me longer to fully finish it. As a bonus, once I'm done with it I'll get a map of the full campaign up.


Part Thirty-Two: The Cumberland Campaign

Cumberland Campaign: In 1863, the Confederates launched their most successful campaigns of the war. The most prominent of these was the Cumberland Campaign, which took place from February to July of 1863. The campaign began with the Army of the Carolinas moving west from Charlotte across the Appalachians into Tennessee. Combined with another offensive by the Army of Georgia northward, Knoxville became threatened once again. While the Union won the Battle of Knoxville, it was at great cost and there were many casualties on both sides. The Army of Georgia turned back, but the Army of the Carolinas instead moved northeast. The army soon reached Greeneville, hometown of President Johnson. General James Longstreet ordered the burning of Greeneville, and much of the town's population fled west to nearby Morristown.

After the Greeneville Massacre, Longstreet and the Army of the Carolinas went north then west toward the Cumberland Gap, reaching the gap on April 10th. As the army entered Kentucky, a message was sent to Lieutenant General Nathan Bedford Forrest and the Second Corps of the Army of Northern Virginia, which was waiting in Charleston. Upon receiving the message, Forrest began moving the Second Corps west following the Kanawha River and the Teays Valley, reaching Huntingon and the Ohio River on May 3rd.

As Forrest went west, Longstreet continued travelling north. On April 14th, the Army of the Carolinas reached Williamsburg, Kentucky but was prevented from continuing north by the Army of the Wabash. Over the next three days, Longstreet managed to defeat General Carlos Buell and the Army of the Wabash but it was a close affair. Longstreet and the army continued north almost unopposed over the next three weeks along the route of the Batlimore and Ohio railroad that ran through central Kentucky. However, Buell managed to catch up to Longstreet at Danville on May 5th. Buell defeated Longstreet on this occasion and diverted the Army of the Carolinas from its path toward Frankfort. But this only made Longstreet swing toward Lexington and continue north after a few days of reorganizing.

Meanwhile, Forrest moved the Second Corps west along the Ohio River, and attempted to cross it several times. The first attempt was at Scunthorpe[1], a major iron town along the northern bank of the Ohio. Forrest failed to achieve a crossing of the river at Furnace on May 5th and was blocked by the Union Army of the Ohio, and decided to continue moving the corps along the southern bank. Forrest attempted further crossings at Portsmouth and Manchester, but had no luck. After another failed crossing at Aberdeen, Forrest had the Second Corps rest for a few days in Dover, Kentucky on May 18th.

[1] Ironton, Ohio

 

[wilcoxchar]

Not DC, but a city perhaps just as important to the nation. And since I can't edit part 32 anymore, the second section of the Cumberland Campaign will be a new part.

Part Thirty-Three: The Battle of Cincinatti

After being diverted at Danville, Longstreet swung the Army of the Carolinas to the east and back north. Longstreet reached Lexington on the 11th of May, and after a day in the city, continued north. General Buell and the Army of the Wabash continued to trail behind. Buell lost Longstreet after Lexington when the Army of the Carolinas continued north along the railroad line but Buell led the Army of the Wabash along the right bank of the Kentucky River. After a week and a half of marching, Longstreet met up with Forrest south of Covington and Newport in Kentucky on the 24th of May. While the meetup of the two forces was unanticipated, Buell was able to relay the general direction of Longstreet's army up to the Union and a set of fortifications were hastily set up south of the two cities.

The Army of the Carolinas had followed the Licking River north and met up with Forrest at Leitch's Station[1]. The Union defenses south of the Ohio River were weak, but there was still a string of forts in the way. On the 27th of May, Forrest and the third corps of the Army of the Carolinas took Fort Whittlesey[2] in the east. Meanwhile, the first corps of Longstreet's army sneaked across the Licking River once more and surprised the battery at Fort Wright. By June, the two nearest forts had been taken and Longstreet and Forrest were free to advance the final miles to the Ohio River. Covington and Newport, then the second and third largest cities in Kentucky, were taken in days as many had already fled across the river to Cincinnati.

On June 4th the final battery south of the Ohio in Ludlow was captured by the Confederates, and Longstreet and Forrest began planning to cross north into Cincinnati. On the 7th, they crossed the two bends in the River on either side of Cincinnati and encircled the city. The city militia lasted for five days with the toughest fighting east of the city at Mount Adams before Cincinnati was taken by the Confederacy. Cincinnati was only held for three days before the Army of the Wabash and the Army of the Ohio reached the outskirts of the city.

Longstreet and Forrest set up quick fortifications and batteries along the edges of Cincinnati, specifically on Mount Adams and Mount Auburn in the east and along Mill Creek in the west and north. Buell's forces were encamped at the bluffs to the west of Mill Creek while the Army of the Ohio led by Ulysses S. Grant was positioned to the northeast of Mount Auburn in Walnut Hills. On the 12th of June, Buell began using the artillery to bombard the Confederate lines across Mill Creek, using the higher ground to his advantage. In the afternoon, Buell's forces charged the Confederate positions as Grant moved the Army of the Ohio south toward Mount Auburn. While Longstreet managed to hold back the Union forces from crossing Mill Creek, Grant successfully took Mount Auburn. Grant's forces were about to cut off the fortifications at Mount Adams when Longstreet diverted some of his northern flank to distract Grant's army while Forrest was able to move into the center of Cincinnati.

The battle wore on for the next six days in the city, but the Union was slowly gaining ground. On June 20th, it became clear that the Confederates could not hold the city for much longer. Longstreet and Forrest gave orders to evacuate across the Ohio while ransacking as much of the city as possible. In the end, the devastation caused by the battle would affect Cincinnati for decades. The population of the city was reduced from 170,000 in 1860 to less than 100,000 in 1870[3]. Longstreet and Forrest continued a spirited defense at the southern bank of the Ohio, and were only pushed back by the end of July after Forrest had to return to Virginia after a Union offensive there.

[1] Wilder, KY
[2] Fort Thomas, KY
[3] Not sure if these are realistic figures for the Civil War era

 

[wilcoxchar]

Well, huh. There's been a slight break in my workload and I've managed to get another update finished!


Part Thirty-Four: Johnson's Revenge

Johnson's Revenge: Word of the Greeneville Massacre reached President Johnson on April 13th, 1863. Johnson was appalled that the Confederacy would allow such a devious action to take place, but quickly recovered from the shock. On the 22nd of April, Johnson decided that he would personally lead an offensive into Virginia to reciprocate the events at Greeneville. The constitutional authority on this matter had been ambiguous. However, as Washington had been in the battlefield while President and Madison had briefly commanded a naval battery during the Anglo-American War of 1812 [1], Johnson asserted his authority as commander-in-chief. For the next two months, Johnson studied military texts and maps to decide the best course of action against the Confederate forces in Virginia.

The threat of Longstreet's forces against Cincinnati launched President Johnson's plan into action. Johnson began the offensive on June 9th when he took over the Army of the Potomac from McClellan. Johnson led the Army of the Potomac ten miles west before they crossed the Potomac River. Leading the army south, Johnson led his first skirmish at the town of Ayrhill [2] north of Fairfax. Under Johnson's command with assistance from Brigadier General Ambrose Burnside, the Army of the Potomac quickly routed the Confederate Army of Northern Virginia with the aid of the field artillery following Napoleonic style tactics. The Army of the Potomac captured Fairfax on the 11th of June, and curved southwest along the Chesapeake and Ohio railway. Johnson also did his best to ensure a constant telegraph link with Washington during the campaign so he could be updated as soon as possible on any movements or information regarding the Confederate positions.

Johnson advanced the Army of the Potomac south to Fredericksburg and took the city easily. The Army of Northern Virginia, now led by George S. Pickett, continued its retreat toward Richmond, and Johnson continued in pursuit after Pickett. After another rout of the Army of Northern Virginia at Spotsylvania on the 20th of June, Johnson stalled his offensive to wait for word from McClellan about the readiness of his forces on the Virginia Peninsula. Johnson planned an offensive by both his and McClellan's forces toward Richmond, mimicking the Confederate attack on Knoxville. On July 4th, 1863, McClellan began a push up the Virginia Peninsula. Johnson knew that the peninsula was well defended and so allowed for a delay between McClellan's advance and the beginning of the Army of the Potomac's move south.

Once again, however, McClellan's advance was stopped at Williamsburg and McClellan did not move further for the next two weeks. Despite this, Johnson decided to go ahead with his advance on the 16th of July, and found Pickett and the Army of Northern Virginia at a dip in the South Anna River two miles north of Ashland. By positioning the Confederate force with their backs to the river, Pickett ensured that the Army of Northern Virginia would not simply retreat yet again. Three days into the battle, it appeared that the Army of Northern Virginia was going to retreat and that Richmond would soon be captured. But by a pure coincidence, Forrest's cavalry corps arrived from the west in the early afternoon of July 19th. Forrest pinned a quarter of the Union forces between his cavalry and the main Confederate army, and the Army of the Potomac were routed later that evening. Johnson gave control over the Army of the Potomac to Burnside as the army left for Fredericksburg, and President Johnson returned to Washington. While Richmond was not captured during the offensive, much ground was gained in Virginia and the campaign was an overall success for the Union.

[1] The only source I could find for Madison was Wiki, but it seems good enough. And I figured the name of the War of 1812 would be changed since there have been multiple wars between the US and Britain.
[2] OTL Vienna, VA. As an example of how influential minor events are, in OTL Ayrhill only changed its name to Vienna to get a doctor to move there.

 

[wilcoxchar]

This isn't dead! I've finally got this update finished.

Part Thirty-Five: Fighting in the West

Western Theatre:
The other main Union movements in 1863 occurred in the Western theatre under the movements of the Provisional Texas Army. On July 7th, Juan Seguin and the First Texas Corps began heading northeast from Texarkana. They marched for five days until they met the Confederate Arkansaw Corps on the plains southwest of the town of Hope, Arkansaw. The skirmish went on for much of the afternoon. However, as the First Texas Corps was composed of mostly cavalry and larger than the Arkansaw Corps, it was soon clear to the Confederates that Hope was lost. The Arkansaw Corps retreated to the east and Seguín took the town. Seguín and his men continued northeast on the 15th of July. They kept northeast for another fifty miles until they reached the town of Arkadelphia. While the First Texas Corps took the town easily, they were harassed by citizens of the Confederacy in the hills north and west of the town. It took another three days for the rebels to be rooted out, and the First Texas Corps did not leave Arkadelphia until the end of July. At this point, Seguín pushed the men to reach Little Rock as soon as possible and they reached the edge of the capital on August 8th.

The First Texas Corps entered the city, but two days later Seguín was caught by the Confederate Army of Mississippi coming up from the south. The Army of the Mississippi camped themselves in the hills southeast of Little Rock and cornered the First Texas Corps between those mountains and the Arkansaw River. While they were pinned, Seguín and his men fought bravely in the Battle of Little Rock and after brutal fighting for five days, they managed to push the Army of the Mississippi out of the hills. Another three days saw the Confederate force retreating back across the Arkansaw. After this battle, the First Texas Corps stayed in Little Rock for the remainder of the year and was unable to fully cut the state of Calhoun off from the rest of the Confederate States.

The other main movement by the Provisional Army of Texas during the remainder of 1863 was an attempt to reach New Orleans with naval support and set up a siege and blockade of the city. This attack did not get very far on land, however, due to the marshy terrain in the area. The naval launch was able to get further along before an encounter with Confederate ships in Athafalaya Bay resulted in the ships turning around and going back to Galveston. The Texan Army was able to capture Shreveport in the final months of 1863 though. Additionally, there was more skirmishing around Kansas City between militia forces from both the Union and Confederate sides which resulted in the loss of some ground for the Confederacy.

 

[wilcoxchar]

Alright, I have the first half of the update finished. This'll be another edit-as-I-write updates.

Part Thirty-Six: The Turning Point

The Virginia Campaign:
After the advances by the Union into Virginia and Arkansaw, the Confederate army went into a defensive position in the following spring. The Army of the Mississippi took back the Arkansaw capital from Seguín in April and restored the transportation link between Calhoun and the remainder of the Confederacy. The Army of the Carolinas retreated slightly from the Ohio River toward the hills of the Appalachians but maintained its presence in Kentucky. Seeing the ease with which the Provisional Army of Texas had moved into Arkansaw and Louisiana, the Confederate military also moved some corps from the eastern theatre to strengthen their position in the western theatre.

For the majority of the spring, there was a lull in Union movements and offensives. The only major action was an attempted landing and raid in Cuba, which was spotted early by a Confederate naval patrol. The Union was attempting to land at Daiquirí, east of Santiago on the southeastern end of the island. The cavalry corps stationed in Santiago was alerted and under Colonel Joesph Wheeler the landing party was driven back and forced to retreat[1]. Unfortunately, this small victory in the spring would not be much consolation for the Confederacy by the end of the year.

In early June, the Union began another offensive to capture Richmond and bring Virginia out of the war. This offensive, unlike previous attempts by the Union, was a two-pronged assault aimed with taking both Richmond in the east and the city of Charleston in the west. The Army of the Ohio captured Charleston on June 20th and the Wheeling Legislature moved to Charleston on the 24th. The state of Vandalia was proclaimed and by the end of the year, Vandalia became an official state of the United States. However, at the time of admission to the United States, not all the state had come under Union control.

After the fall of Charleston, the Confederacy dispatched Forrest to the west once again to take back the city. However, this proved to be a regretful decision by the Confederacy. Forrest was in control of a larger force than the one which he accompanied in the raid on Cincinnati and this left a smaller garrison in Richmond and the surrounding area. The weaker force at Williamsburg allowed McClellan to break through the Confederate defense line while Burnside advanced south from Fredericksburg. Continuing along the northern bank of the James River, McClellan was able to take Petersburg on July 15th cutting off the main rail link going south from Richmond. As McClellan was moving toward Petersburg, Burnside, now commanding the larger force in the Army of the Potomac, began the offensive south from Fredericksburg and reached Ashland on July 19th. The two parts of the Army closed in on Richmond and the city surrendered after a four day siege on July 27th. With Richmond and Charleston in Union hands, Virginia was for the most part knocked out of the war and Robert E. Lee was made military governor of the state.


The Confluence Campaign:
With the Union gaining ground in the eastern theatre, the Confederacy became desperate and in the summer of 1864 launched a large offensive in the western theatre up the Mississippi. With the Confederate purchase of a few small armored ships from the British navy, they had an advantage and sailed up the Mississippi from Memphis. Accompanied by the Army of Mississippi, the Confederates took many towns in western Tennessee and helped Chickasaw officially secede from the Union and join the Confederacy on July 2. Ten days later, the Confederacy defeated a contingent of Union gunboats in the Battle of the Confluence near the confluence of the Mississippi and Ohio rivers near Cairo, Illinois. Admiral Gustavus T. Beauregard, leader of the Mississippi Squadron, claimed victory at the battle[2].

After the victory at the Battle of the Confluence, the Army of the Mississippi divided, with one corps led by Edmund Kirby Smith moving up the west bank of the Mississippi and the rest of the army now led by Braxton Bragg moving east along the south bank of the Ohio. Smith's corps was joined by Claiborne Fox Jackson's Ozark Militia as they marched toward Saint Louis. The newly formed Ozark Corps went up the river and entered Cape Girardeau on July 15th, and continued north on the west bank of the Mississippi to Sainte Genevieve. As the Ozark Corps left Sainte Genevieve on July 20th heading for Saint Louis, the Union Army of Missouri crossed the river near Kaskaskia, Illinois using converted steamers provided by Cornelius Vanderbilt at the beginning of the war. The Army of Missouri cut off the supply lines to the Ozark Corps and began march toward Saint Louis following the Ozark Corps. Claiborne Jackson pushed the Ozark Corps north, and through a series of exceptionally hot days starting two days after leaving Sainte Genevieve. The corps was weakened through a wave of hyperthermia, and when the Army of the Missouri caught up with the Ozark Corps just south of Herculaneum, the Army of the Missouri easily routed the Ozark Corps. The ships that were sent with the Ozark Corps ran into trouble when the ironclad CSS Pensacola wrecked and ran aground on a sandbar in the middle of the river. The remainder of the naval contingent was forced back downriver by the Army of Missouri and Vanderbilt's steamers, and the CSS Pensacola was captured by Union forces.

In the east, Bragg and the remainder of the Army of the Mississippi reached Paducah, Kentucky by July 15th and found support there from the local population, who were sympathetic to the Confederate cause and had joined Chickasaw in its secession. Bragg attempted to push on from Paducah but were frequently stopped by the series of forts the Union had built on the edges of the Tennessee and Ohio rivers. Bragg finally managed to force the Army of the Mississippi across the Tennessee River fifteen miles upriver from Paducah on the 24th of July. Two days later the Army of the Mississippi took Cadiz, Kentucky and set up fortresses on the left bank of the Tennessee River. Afterward, Bragg focused his offensives on smaller raids further east and north. The higher scale raids took place on Hopkinsville and Smithland in Kentucky, and Cairo and Metropolis in Illinois. Cairo and Smithland were held for a few months by the Confederates, and one long-term raid in October reached Evansville, Indiana, over hundred miles into the Union. These may seem like great victories for Bragg and the Army of the Mississippi but the overall goal of reaching Lousiville, Kentucky shows how poor the offensive turned out to be from a strategic perspective.

The year of 1864 can be seen as the turning point of the war in military terms. The Union achieved their first major tactical victory capturing Richmond and bringing all of Virginia back to the United States, and the Confederacy became desperate in their offensives to the north. The failure to capture either Saint Louis or Louisville shows that the United States began adapting to southern war strategies and showed how cautious General Bragg was during the war. In addition, the inability of the Confederacy to push far up the Mississippi River or hold the confluence of the Mississippi and Ohio rivers for long exemplified the end of the naval advantage that the Confederacy had at the start of the war.

[1] There's a subtle reference here. See if you can figure out what it is.
[2] We know him by the name P. G. T. Beauregard, but he didn't use Pierre in his correspondences in the OTL Civil War.

 

[wilcoxchar]

Special election update! And it's interactive. I now beseech you, my readers, to select the presidents of the United States and the Confederate States of America!

The Poll

Part Thirty-Seven: The Elections of 1864

For Union:
The year 1864 was an election year for both sides of the War Between the States. In the Union, Andrew Johnson stood for reelection alongside New York senator Walt Whitman[1]. Johnson's platform involved the continuation of the war until the Confederacy surrendered. Johnson also stated that while he did oppose slavery on a personal level, he would not support bringing up the question of abolition until the Confederate rebellion had been put down and the Union was preserved. His appointment of New York senator Walt Whitman, a moderate abolitionist and eloquent speaker, gained Johnson approval among many citizens in the north. Johnson and Whitman also supported a quick transition of the Confederate states back into the Union should they surrender, which garnered support from the Texas region and the Appalachian states.

The Republicans renominated John C. Fremont and continued their staunch abolitionist platform and renominated John C. Fremont for president. Along with Fremont, the Republicans put David Wilmot of Pennsylvania as their vice presidential candidate. Wilmot had made a name for himself in the 1830s when he was elected to the House of Representatives and spoke out against president Calhoun's admittance of Tejas and Houston into the Union as slave states. Over the next decades, Wilmot had gained support from many abolitionists in Philadelphia and served over a decade as a Senator before the War Between the States broke out. Fremont and Wilmot called for harsh punishment of the Confederate states for their secession and the immediate emancipation of all slaves in the United States and the Confederacy.

A small splinter group of both Republicans and Democrats formed the Perfect Union Party, which advocated for reconciliation with the Confederacy and a cessation of hostilities between the two sides. Led by Charles P. Bush of Michigan and Oren Cheney of Maine, the Perfect Union Party did not gain much traction but served as a reminder that support for the war was not completely universal in the north. The general election in November of 1864 was heated, with both major parties struggling for the position to decide not just the fate of the Union, but the fate of the Confederacy and the people within.


For Liberty:
In the Confederacy, fully fledged parties had not been formed yet in the first two years in the country's existence. However, separate factions of the Liberty Party vied for control over the state legislatures and the Confederate Congress. The incumbent president, Howell Cobb, led the movement to continue the war and fight for the country's right to be independent. While the military offensives by the Confederacy were not seeing much success, Cobb felt that the Confederacy was slowly gaining ground on the Union and that with enough pushing, they could capture and hold a few important Union cities and force the Union to come to the negotiation table.

In opposition to Cobb in the Liberty Party was Judah P. Benjamin. Benjamin argued that the Confederacy was slowly losing its edge against the Union and that if the state and its ideals wished to survive, it should seek a peaceful solution to the war as soon as possible. Benjamin could see the fractious nature of the structure of the Confederacy with the great autonomy given to the individual states and was concerned that once the Union began gaining major victories, the individual states would attempt to break away and reconcile on their own. With the Confederacy choosing its president in March of 1864, the Union victory in Virginia later that year would serve as a strong vindication for Benjamin's warnings.

[1] Walt Whitman is only 9 at the time of the POD. ITTL, he goes into politics instead of becoming a writer and poet.

 

[wilcoxchar]

Alright. I wrote this as a in-timeline story that would be published sometime around the 1910s or 1920s. There is some license to be taken with this, but since it's in-universe I feel it's okay. And apologies to catboy for being unable to fit in the phrase "I'm Teddy Roosevelt, bitch!"


The Undisclosed Adventures of Theodore Roosevelt

Theodore Roosevelt stood at the window in the Oval Office polishing his spectacles. He was admiring the greenery of Lafayette Park, with the domed structure of the National War Memorial in the center. The Secretary of the Interior ran up to Roosevelt holding a letter.

"Mr. President, Mr. President!" the aide yelled. Roosevelt turned.

"Yes, Mister Muir, what is it? Did Taft get stuck in that damned bathtub again?"

"No, sir. It is more worrisome than that. Nikola Tesla has been kidnapped!"


Roosevelt grabbed his hat and strolled south from the White House to the waiting airship moored at the top of the Washington Monument. The President rushed into the airship and it took off for Central America. Upon nearing the isle of Omotepe in Lake Cocibolca, Roosevelt told the gondolier to hover there until he was given the go-ahead to leave. Taking out the grappling hook that Tesla had designed for him, Roosevelt launched it at the mountain below. It sped through the air and stuck into the side of the mountain just above a large pane of glass. Theodore connected the other end of the rope to the cabin, wrapped a sock around the line, and jumped.

"BULLY!" Roosevelt screamed as he slid down the line.


Cornelius Vanderbilt was pacing the main room of his lair. He smiled wickedly at Tesla in a hold on the far side of the room.

"Now then, let's get down to business. You will assist me in finishing my doomsday device or I will end your life!"

"That depends. What is the nature of your device?" Tesla said defiantly.

"The device that you are going to build for me will harness the natural electric fields in the Earth's atmosphere and generate an electric charge of tremendous capacity that can be directed anywhere in the world! Once the device is built, I can use it from this island to destroy whole buildings half the world away! The governments of all nations will be at my bidding, forever!" Vanderbilt threw his head back and began laughing maniacally.

"Never! I'll never help you, you capitalist pig!" cried Tesla.

Suddenly, there was a loud crash of shattering glass. Vanderbilt turned around to see Roosevelt standing up.

"You can lift off now!" Roosevelt yelled back toward the gondolier.

"Roosevelt! Curse you, do you know how much it costs to get a pane of glass that size?

"Well, considering how I read in the papers about some idiot venture-capitalist starting up a glass factory every week or so I would think it would be pretty cheap."

"It may seem inexpensive at first, but the shipping costs are enormous! And installing it in a volcano just drives the cost up even more."

"Well maybe you should have thought about that when you set up shop here." Roosevelt picked up a shard of the window and threw it with alarming precision at Vanderbilt. Vanderbilt expertly jumped out of the way and ran over to a control board. He flipped a switch and a door in the floor opened up. Rising up out of the floor came a large sparking orb mounted on a steel construction. As it dwarfed Roosevelt, Vanderbilt, and Tesla, Vanderbilt cackled.

"Ha! I was going to wait until your friend here finished scaling the device up for me to give a demonstration of its power, but I suppose it has enough power now to reach Rivas or San Carlos."

"But won't that ruin the trade going through the San Juan Canal?" Tesla wondered.

Vanderbilt turned to the hold. "That's exactly the point! Now shut up while I deal with Mister Roosevelt."

As Vanderbilt turned his attention back toward the President, Roosevelt asked, "Then why did you so graciously fund the construction of the canal Cornelius? If there were to be any disruptions of service in the canal or the lake through the use of your doomsday device, you would lose millions."

Vanderbilt responded, "Ah, the canal was simply a diversion; a front, a ruse if you will. Whether it succeeds or not does not concern me. And if you object to using it on the canal so much, killing the President of the United States can always serve as an adequate demonstration."

Cornelius flipped a switch on the machine and got into a chair mounted on the steel structure. He maneuvered the orb so that it was pointing at Roosevelt and pushed a button. The orb began glowing with a whirring noise emitting from it, and static charges cackled on the orb.

"Now Mister Roosevelt, prepare to die!"

A directed charge of electricity burst from the orb toward Roosevelt. The President jumped to the side and somersaulted as the charge hit where he was standing and left a scorch mark on the stone floor.

Vanderbilt swung the machine to where Roosevelt had stood up. He fired again and Roosevelt dodged in turn, rolling over to a stack of crates. Seeing a crowbar, Roosevelt quickly grabbed it and climbed to the top of the crates as another blast of electricity surged from the orb. While Vanderbilt kept maneuvering the machine, Roosevelt leapt from the crates and lifted the crowbar over his head. As he fell through the air, the President brought the end of the crowbar down, piercing the orb. A large explosion threw Vanderbilt and Roosevelt to opposite sides of the room. The President staggered to his feet.

The smoke cleared, revealing Vanderbilt standing between Roosevelt and the cage holding Tesla. "You think you've won, Roosevelt. But I've still got Tesla and the plans for my machine. I will build another; you can't stop me!"


Theodore grimaced. He quickly drew the pistol at his side and pointed it toward Vanderbilt. "Yes I can."

Roosevelt fired. Vanderbilt flinched as the bullet whizzed past his shoulder.

"Ha! You missed." Vanderbilt sneered at the president.

"Oh, did I?" Roosevelt smirked and pointed past Vanderbilt to the far side of the room. Vanderbilt turned to see that the bullet had hit the lock on Tesla's hold. The door swung open slowly and Tesla stepped out.

"You know, Cornelius, you really should get stronger locks on those cages if you want to keep prisoners in them for very long." Roosevelt said, lowering his pistol to his side.


Vanderbilt staggered backward and began stammering; "What? No, this cannot be! You have foiled my plan! But...but I am invincible! Why - why you - I'll get you yet! You haven't heard ze laast oof me. I'll be ba-"

Thump!

Vanderbilt's body slumped over in a heap on the floor. As he fell unconscious, he revealed Tesla standing behind him holding an iron bar.

"I could not stand his blathering any longer. And he had started to slip into that horrible German accent. He would always do that when he got angry."

"More of a Dutch accent actually," Roosevelt responded. "But let's not discuss these trivialities now. We need to get out of here."

Roosevelt and Tesla ran toward the edge of Vanderbilt's lair as lava began flowing into the room. Spotting the airship hovering above the island, Roosevelt turned around to Tesla and grabbed his hand as they continued running.

"Jump!" Roosevelt yelled above the roar of the volcano. As they reached the ledge, Tesla and Roosevelt jumped off of the edge of Vanderbilt's lair. As they fell, Roosevelt caught a rope hanging down from the airship and helped Tesla latch onto it as well. They swung on the rope as the airship rose into the sky. As they flew away, the volcano on Cocibolca erupted spewing smoke and a cloud of ash over the island and into the lake.

-----------------
Keep your eye out for next month's issue featuring "The Undisclosed Adventures of Theodore Roosevelt", in which Roosevelt must stop Queen Victoria from discovering the Fountain of Youth! Here's a sneak peek!

Roosevelt and the rest of the expedition cut through the jungle on Saint-Domingue. In the afternoon, they finally broke through and arrived at a vast lake with three islands in the middle.

"There it is, Lake Enriquillo. The lowest point in all of the Caribbean, just like in the description." Roosevelt said in awe. The water was almost clear and the biggest of the three islands was teeming with lush forests. Looking to his right along the beach, Roosevelt scowled. The tents on the beach meant that the British had already arrived. A tall lanky man in a pith helmet was sitting at a table, alone. The President walked up to the man who looked up at him casually.

"Where is Victoria!" Roosevelt demanded. The man broke into a smile.

"Oh, Teddy." The man's voice was condescending. "You're so naive for a world leader. You can't just barge in on a British expedition and throw your weight around willy-nilly. That's why you'll never win. You lack the finesse requi-"

The man was cut off as Roosevelt picked him up and threw him into the sand. As the man looked up and began to scramble for his pith helmet, he froze on his elbows as his nose almost met with the end of Roosevelt's machete.

"I can do whatever I damn well please. Now tell me, where is your Queen!"

"She- the expedition went to the island," the man said pointing across the water. "There is a pyramid of the Mesoamerican style that was covered by the forest."

"Thank you," the President smiled and began walking away. The man struggled to his knees.

"Oh," Roosevelt said turning around, "and don't call me Teddy." Suddenly there was a glint of the sun off metal and the man found a coattail pierced by Roosevelt's machete. The President lightly tipped his campaign hat to the man, picked up his machete, and walked back to the waiting expedition.