Our Fair Country: The Commonwealth of New England
- Thread starter CosmicAsh
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This is my submission for the contest, the premise is the free states and territories of OFC 1864 US are ISOTed and in their place the equivalent OTL 1864 US states and territories are brought:
Columbus Confederal District, April, 1904. The Army marches by the streets of the capital in an attempt to display the military might of the Confederacy, not only to its citizens but to foreign ambassadors and military attachés. The Independence Celebration was usually a joyful theatre directed at the Confederate masses, to remind them that their nation was built upon the will of God and ease any doubts about the blessing of the 'peculiar institution' by which it stands. This year, however, the message is directed towards the exterior: amidst the growing tension in North America, the Beaumont Administration wants to show it has no quelms in fighting a war.
To international observers, the statu quo established by the Boston Conference of 1865 under the auspices of the United Kingdom will not last long. It managed to avoid bloodshed between the North and the South and the reconstitution of the federal government for the Orphaned States and Territories brought from the Other Side, although the price paid was huge: southern independence, the continuation of slavery, the option of the remaining Union states to enter or not the new Union, and the drop of every claim against Oregon and New England. The Orphaned States had it difficult to refuse, caught in a different world without understanding what had happened, having lost their federal government and their army, and exhausted by 3 years of a war they didn't want to repeat. And so, the Governors accepted the "Boston Humiliation".
40 years later, the Union is stronger than ever. As the profits of slavery increased and the price of slaves skyrocketed, the Border States of Delaware, Maryland, Virginia, Kentucky and Missouri which had refused to integrate in the new Union began selling slaves down South, with the unintended consequence of bolstering Unionist sentiment as the number of slaves diminished. In 1887, Delaware and Maryland outlawed slavery and petitioned for admission into the United States, followed by Missouri in 1899. By the dawn of the new century, Unionist nationalism and abolitionism were at its height in the United States, and the new National Union Party capitalized it with a belligerent rhetoric against the "slaver's republic, the rebel states and the British puppets".
On the other side of the border, Confederates responded with inflamed cries for war against the Union and to reinstate slavery to those places where it had been practised. Unionists and Confederates flocked into Virginia, trying to swing it to abolish slavery and return to the Union or to integrate in the Confederacy respectively. The result was the Virginian Civil War of 1901-02, a proxy that only avoided turning into a continental-wide war by British intervention. The Treaty of Fredericksburg partitioned the country, with the Commonwealth recognizing the slavery-free State of North Virginia and the prohibition of both of them and the Commonwealth of Kentucky to petition admission into either the Union or the Confederacy. Nobody is satisfied though, and the Confederacy has engaged in an arms-race against the Union it cannot win. The election of the bellicose National Unionist Theodore Roosevelt to the Presidency of the Union and the new Unionist mayority in Kentucky's legislature make the Confederate Government very anxious, with hawks arguing for preemptive strike before the difference in population and industrial might widens even more. In the north, New England and Canada feel increasingly threatened by the United States' revanchist rhetoric, and at the same time the accounts of the horrors of slavery in the Confederacy prevent any sort of approachment to them no matter how bound their destinies are. The United Kingdom, facing a rising Germany, is tired of policing North America, so as the world approaches the 40th year since the Orphaning (or the Blessing, if you follow Confederate myths), the drums of war sound in the distance.
To international observers, the statu quo established by the Boston Conference of 1865 under the auspices of the United Kingdom will not last long. It managed to avoid bloodshed between the North and the South and the reconstitution of the federal government for the Orphaned States and Territories brought from the Other Side, although the price paid was huge: southern independence, the continuation of slavery, the option of the remaining Union states to enter or not the new Union, and the drop of every claim against Oregon and New England. The Orphaned States had it difficult to refuse, caught in a different world without understanding what had happened, having lost their federal government and their army, and exhausted by 3 years of a war they didn't want to repeat. And so, the Governors accepted the "Boston Humiliation".
40 years later, the Union is stronger than ever. As the profits of slavery increased and the price of slaves skyrocketed, the Border States of Delaware, Maryland, Virginia, Kentucky and Missouri which had refused to integrate in the new Union began selling slaves down South, with the unintended consequence of bolstering Unionist sentiment as the number of slaves diminished. In 1887, Delaware and Maryland outlawed slavery and petitioned for admission into the United States, followed by Missouri in 1899. By the dawn of the new century, Unionist nationalism and abolitionism were at its height in the United States, and the new National Union Party capitalized it with a belligerent rhetoric against the "slaver's republic, the rebel states and the British puppets".
On the other side of the border, Confederates responded with inflamed cries for war against the Union and to reinstate slavery to those places where it had been practised. Unionists and Confederates flocked into Virginia, trying to swing it to abolish slavery and return to the Union or to integrate in the Confederacy respectively. The result was the Virginian Civil War of 1901-02, a proxy that only avoided turning into a continental-wide war by British intervention. The Treaty of Fredericksburg partitioned the country, with the Commonwealth recognizing the slavery-free State of North Virginia and the prohibition of both of them and the Commonwealth of Kentucky to petition admission into either the Union or the Confederacy. Nobody is satisfied though, and the Confederacy has engaged in an arms-race against the Union it cannot win. The election of the bellicose National Unionist Theodore Roosevelt to the Presidency of the Union and the new Unionist mayority in Kentucky's legislature make the Confederate Government very anxious, with hawks arguing for preemptive strike before the difference in population and industrial might widens even more. In the north, New England and Canada feel increasingly threatened by the United States' revanchist rhetoric, and at the same time the accounts of the horrors of slavery in the Confederacy prevent any sort of approachment to them no matter how bound their destinies are. The United Kingdom, facing a rising Germany, is tired of policing North America, so as the world approaches the 40th year since the Orphaning (or the Blessing, if you follow Confederate myths), the drums of war sound in the distance.
I suppose we’re soon coming up on the 2019 Chinese general election. How’s China doing.
@Kanan Was EuroDisney still built in France like OTL, or was it built somewhere else? And did it avoid the early financial troubles it faced OTL?
Uhhh what! This is like the Cuban Missile Crisis of the New Millennium, and it gets the lame name of '2002 European Flight Blackout'? I almost didn't read it because it sounded so lame, but I'm glad I did! This nearly started WWIII! Or I guess ITTL, WWII... please tell me there are some cooler alternative names for this awesome piece of history!
This incident probably makes up about 60% of all technothriller plots ITTL.
Woah, th was close, interesting to see the end of the Cold War, sad for louçã. Was there some pan-Europeans military coordination organisation (between the Zollverein, commonwealth and other countries like France) in the event of a war with the USSR?
But yeah i’ll Agree that it needs a more important name, this is like the Cuba missile crisis for the tension, mixed with the fall of the Berlin Wall for the historical significance in the end of the Cold War.
I would love to know what happened next? Obviously not WWIII but must of been a brief conflict?
It's part of the larger Baltic Crisis, this is just the name for the subsection of it.
There was, and still is, cooperation between the Zollverein and the Commonwealth in military matters. France, however, has no such mechanism and would have had to tried to integrate on the fly.
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