What's the confederal justice system and local law enforcement of the ASB like? Does each state have its own police force?
Affiliated States of Boreoamerica thread
- Thread starter False Dmitri
- Start date
Congrats on finishing up all the states in the ASB!
This is super random, but this made me think of a question I've had about the ASB. In OTL, the U.S. (especially the early U.S.) had something of an obsession with Greco-Roman culture (one must only look at the architecture of Washington, D.C. to realize this). While the ASB is obviously far more based around local traditions, particularly those of native and colonial communities, does this fascination with emulating Greco-Roman culture exist in any capacity within the ASB?
https://loderunner.github.io/flagwaver/#?src=https://i.imgur.com/fCYhGUY.png
This is super random, but this made me think of a question I've had about the ASB. In OTL, the U.S. (especially the early U.S.) had something of an obsession with Greco-Roman culture (one must only look at the architecture of Washington, D.C. to realize this). While the ASB is obviously far more based around local traditions, particularly those of native and colonial communities, does this fascination with emulating Greco-Roman culture exist in any capacity within the ASB?
The Republican English states had a touch of that, for sure. There was maybe nothing like the ubiquitous Federal Style in architecture, but some government buildings were built with a neoclassical look as an homage to Athens and Rome. And with all the local languages, Latin historically continued to play a role as a common language and still has some vitality today, though far from where it was 200 years ago.
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Here is the full set of ASB flags. 51 states plus the Confederation and the Dominion of New England.
I don't know that there's much on the confederal judiciary. A few hints and sketches are out there, but not much. Most criminal law is at the state level, I believe, but the growth of confederal government means that there are certainly crimes that need to be tried at that level. More research needs to be done. I have a book here that's on my list. It's a dense legal history of colonial america. It has a lot of ideas buried inside, I know.
I don't know if Japan's history has been decided yet, but I had an idea regarding them that could be interesting.
I don't have a specific POD, but essentially Christian missionaries to Japan are more successful and manage to convert several of the southern daimyo to Christianity; I'm thinking Catholicism from Portuguese missionaries would be most popular, but Dutch Calvinism could also gain some converts. Anyway, rather than the Tokugawa ascending to the Shogunate, a clan more sympathetic towards Christianity (likely for its ties to Europe and the outside world) comes to power, and eventually the Shogun even converts to Christianity himself. This, rather predictably, leads to religious strife between the new Christians and the old Shinto/Buddhists (of which the Emperor is still a part of), and even among Christians there's some strife between Catholics and Protestants, although likely not as much as in Europe due to having a common enemy. Fighting goes on for a while until eventually an agreement is reached between the Christians and Shinto in which the daimyo would be able to choose whatever religion to follow (Catholicism, Protestantism, Shinto, or Buddhism) so long as they swore fealty to both the Shogun and the Emperor. Unlike in OTL, the Shogun is never deposed, as doing so would disrupt the balance of power between Christianity and Shinto, however as the years go by the Shogun has his power reduced until the Shogun basically becomes a constitutional monarch in the same vein as the Emperor by the 21st century, with most real power being held by a democratically elected legislature.
This was mostly inspired by reading about Christianity's interesting history in Japan and thinking about how to preserve it while also simultaneously preserving Japan's fascinating native religious traditions and culture. I admit that I'm not sure how plausible this idea would even be, but it's only a rough idea that could be refined a great deal. The main ideas I had when writing this were the preservation of a more widespread Christian culture in Japan (not the majority of Japan, but probably ~20-30% like in OTL South Korea, mostly concentrated in the south of Japan) and the idea of a "dual monarchy" of sorts with two monarchs, the Shogun and the Emperor.
I don't have a specific POD, but essentially Christian missionaries to Japan are more successful and manage to convert several of the southern daimyo to Christianity; I'm thinking Catholicism from Portuguese missionaries would be most popular, but Dutch Calvinism could also gain some converts. Anyway, rather than the Tokugawa ascending to the Shogunate, a clan more sympathetic towards Christianity (likely for its ties to Europe and the outside world) comes to power, and eventually the Shogun even converts to Christianity himself. This, rather predictably, leads to religious strife between the new Christians and the old Shinto/Buddhists (of which the Emperor is still a part of), and even among Christians there's some strife between Catholics and Protestants, although likely not as much as in Europe due to having a common enemy. Fighting goes on for a while until eventually an agreement is reached between the Christians and Shinto in which the daimyo would be able to choose whatever religion to follow (Catholicism, Protestantism, Shinto, or Buddhism) so long as they swore fealty to both the Shogun and the Emperor. Unlike in OTL, the Shogun is never deposed, as doing so would disrupt the balance of power between Christianity and Shinto, however as the years go by the Shogun has his power reduced until the Shogun basically becomes a constitutional monarch in the same vein as the Emperor by the 21st century, with most real power being held by a democratically elected legislature.
This was mostly inspired by reading about Christianity's interesting history in Japan and thinking about how to preserve it while also simultaneously preserving Japan's fascinating native religious traditions and culture. I admit that I'm not sure how plausible this idea would even be, but it's only a rough idea that could be refined a great deal. The main ideas I had when writing this were the preservation of a more widespread Christian culture in Japan (not the majority of Japan, but probably ~20-30% like in OTL South Korea, mostly concentrated in the south of Japan) and the idea of a "dual monarchy" of sorts with two monarchs, the Shogun and the Emperor.
On the question of languages, I believe it's been established that French is still the language of government in the PIC, at least at the parliamentary level? With that, as well as French being widely spoken in the ASB, and France itself having more influence in TTL's 19th century, would it be correct to assume that French is still the language of international diplomacy ITTL?
That's a correct assumption. Well it might not be fair to call it the language of diplomacy, since other common languages certainly are used, but looking at the setting so far it's quite clear that French is going to be the default language between diplomats from different language backgrounds. Now French isn't stronger in all parts of the world compared to OTL - its role in West Africa is likely minimal, for example - but quite well established in many places.
Looking again at the North American borders, French is well placed to be the language of continental diplomacy there, too. Just about all of the ASB's land border regions are French-speaking, meaning that its neighbors got used to using French in cross-border business. Both Rupertsland and Oregon have populations of French-speaking Canadiens and Métis, and of course Oregon will already use French for the Imperial Commonwealth institutions. All this suggests that the Académie Boréoaméricaine in Chicagou has an influence that extends beyond the borders of the ASB.
The US and Canada both have varying approaches on organizing their law enforcement agencies, but both of them generally empower the municipal PDs to do the brunt of the work in populated areas. Outside of that, there's a lot of variation; in the US, state law enforcement generally only covers highways, with county sheriff offices often covering cases outside of municipal jurisdictions. In Canada, provincial law enforcement exists only for Ontario and Quebec, with the other provinces relying on the RCMP for most matters aided by provincial offices with varying levels of authority.
I imagine in the ASB, the situation would be similar to Canada, where municipalities do their own policing and less-populated areas are covered by a hodgepodge of regional, state, and confederal offices, the exact responsibilities of each changing from state to state and sometimes from county to county, where county-equivalents even exist.
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Back again with another guest post, this one on two episodes in the history of New Netherland, both of which help give an outline of the colony's 19th-century political history.
Part 1: Slavery and abolition in New Netherland: 1700-1804
New Netherland, in the 18th century, saw two very different social systems in an uneasy coexistence. In the valley of the Hudson River, the patroons ruled their vast estates, or patroonships, with near-total autonomy, including the power to establish criminal and civil law. Unlike the southern planter classes, to whom they are frequently compared, the patroons did not practice wide-scale plantation slavery. Although agricultural slavery did exist in New Netherland, the climate was wrong for the sort of cash crops that were grown in the Boreoamerican south. The patroons’ income came from rents paid by tenant farmers working on their lands- frequently the descendants of those farmers originally brought over by the patroons as indentured servants or contract labourers. [1] Meanwhile, the capital, New Amsterdam, with its excellent harbour and connections to the Dutch colonial empire, was a growing mercantile centre, rivalling other east coast cities like Boston, Philadelphia, Baltimore, and Charleston. Slavery was very widespread in New Amsterdam and the surrounding region- in the early eighteenth century more than 42 percent of households in New Amsterdam had held slaves [2], a percentage higher than any other east coast city save Charleston. Slaves worked in all sorts of jobs, including domestic work, agricultural work in the surrounding region, and work in the city’s all-important ports. The slave trade and the trade in goods produced by slave labour in the southern colonies were important parts of the city’s mercantile economy.
Slaves in New Netherland had some basic rights: the right to marry and have children, the right to earn wages or sell goods in their “free” time to earn an income, the right to own some basic “moveable” property such as clothing and cooking utensils, and most notably, the right to sue any other person in the colony, whether black or white. They were barred, however, from owning real estate, and they were of course still subject to their masters’ wishes and whims. Although it had no legal basis, it had been common practice, in the early days of the colony, to grant slaves who had performed several decades of loyal service a status of “half-free,” in which they would be allowed to own land and earn a wage from their master, on the condition of “good behaviour” [3]. A large group of these half-free people were settled north of the then-city limits of New Amsterdam, creating a buffer between the white settlers of the colony and the indigenous Lenape of the island of Manhattan [4].
As the number of slaves in New Amsterdam grew exponentially, the presence of this half-free community working beside them would inspire the slave population to demand more rights for themselves. This culminated in the Slave Revolt of 1720, in which a group of around 20 slaves set fire to a building on Maiden Street, then attacked the white colonists who attempted to stop the fires, killing several [5]. In the wake of this revolt, the colony’s governor would pass a series of edicts which would redefine slavery in the colony. Slaves were now forbidden to carry firearms and subjected to the death penalty for a number of offences. The existence of the half-free class was also officially recognized for the first time, although recognizing the potential risk of having such a population in close proximity to the large slave population of the capital, the existing half-free community was offered full freedom in exchange for agreeing to relocate to land far away in the Mohawk River valley, on the frontier between the colony and Iroquoia. Most would accept the offer, and in time their descendants would intermarry into the emerging Dutch-Mohawk Mixed culture of the valley. Many families in Canajoharie and Tiononderoga can trace their descent to these freemen.
New Netherland felt the force, albeit indirectly, of the revolutions rocking the Atlantic world in the late 18th century. The revolutions in the English colonies would cause a new wave of Yankee migration to New Netherland- loyalists and revolutionaries alike fleeing persecution in Republican and Tory New England, respectively, as well as those who just wanted to escape the violence. The post-revolutionary atmosphere in Massachusetts and New Hampshire saw the abolition of slavery in those states, which had few remaining slaves to begin with, and slavery would be declared illegal in Vermont from the very start. Rhode Island and the Vineyards also abolished slavery early on, and most of the remaining provinces of the Dominion of New England followed soon afterwards, although a Dominion-wide ban was delayed for some decades by the reticence of Saybrook, the most conservative New England state, and the one with the largest slave population. Nevertheless, Yankees in New Netherland, whatever their political outlook, tended to oppose slavery in the colony.
Although New Netherland was, by the late 18th century almost completely autonomous from the Dutch Republic, many in the colony still paid close attention to political developments in the metropole, and the integration of the Netherlands into the French revolutionary republican system was viewed by some with horror, and by others with curiosity, or even enthusiasm. The latter, who tended to identify as Radicals (radicalen), who drew their inspiration from the Patriotten who had opposed the rule of the Stadholder and the Orange family in the Netherlands, and from the French radical republicans. These Radicals would be among the first batavophone abolitionists in New Netherland.
These Dutch and Yankee currents of abolitionism were joined in the founding of the New Amsterdam Manumission Society (Nieuw Amsterdam Vrijlatingmaatschappij) in 1784. The Society was similar to other political clubs of its day, in that it was largely an informal social club through which powerful men of the societal elite could influence politics. In fact, more than half of its members themselves owned slaves. Nevertheless, it would see some success in lobbying the state’s government for changes in the status quo. Political power, in this time, was largely in the hands of the patroon class, who dominated the state’s parliament and governorship, in addition to their great autonomy on their estates, which they jealously guarded. They had already come to see the rising power of New Amsterdam’s mercantile elite as a potential threat to their own. Emancipation would be a serious blow to the interests of this rival elite faction, and as such, although many patroons owned some slaves themselves, they came to support the Manumission Society’s calls for gradual emancipation.
The result of this partnership between the Manumission Society and the colony’s landed gentry was the Gradual Abolition Act of 1804. This act decreed that the children of slaves born henceforth in New Netherland would attain the status of half-free. Their own children, in turn, would be considered fully free. This was a very gradual emancipation, and the final abolition of the half-free class would not come until 1866, when many in that generation were quite elderly. Many slaveowners, however, seeing the writing on the wall, would begin to sell their slaves to the southern colonies of Virginia and Carolina, leading to an overall decline of the practice of slavery in the state. Many in New Amsterdam’s merchant class greatly resented the passage of the act, which they felt was an unjust imposition by a feudal aristocratic class upon their property rights. From this resentment, as well as the Radical impulse to challenge the patroons anti-democratic power, calls for reform would emerge.
Part 2: Democracy and Land Reform in New Netherland:
By the 1830s, New Amsterdam, although not yet the undisputed centre of Boreoamerica’s northeastern urban corridor, was clearly rising above competitors like Boston, Philadelphia, and Baltimore as a centre of commerce, as a result of the construction of canals between the Hudson River and the Great Lakes. Their rising influence, however, did not extend to the state’s governmental structure, which was dominated by the patroons. Each patroonship was represented in the state’s Parliament, on equal footing with the capital and other rising urban centres like Breuckelen, leaving these urban centres highly underrepresented and the patroons correspondingly overrepresented. This state of affairs rankled the cities’ rising bourgeoisie, but they had little ability to redress the situation, given the patroons’ combined political influence. Their grievances were expressed by the reformist Liberal Party, the first true political party in New Netherland’s history. The patroons, meanwhile, jealously guarded their privileges and autonomy. The situation could not last forever, and indeed change would come, although from a source neither side was likely expecting.
In 1839, Stephen Van Rensselaer III, one of the wealthiest patroons in the state, died. Van Rensselaer had been regarded as a “lenient and benevolent landowner,” willing to accept partial payments from struggling tenants and preferring to allow rents to accumulate over time. However, he also required his tenants who sold their leases to pay him one quarter of the sale price or one year’s rent. These “quarter-sale” payments had allowed the Van Rensselaer family to maintain control of a large region surrounding the manor of Rensselaerwyck. Van Rensselaer’s will required his heirs to collect the outstanding rents and quarter-sale payments he had allowed to accumulate in his lifetime. The tenant farmers, unable to pay these debts which were suddenly being called in all at once, attempted first to secure a payment schedule from Van Rensselaer’s heirs, and then to resolve the matter in court, both unsuccessfully. Left with no legal options available to them, the tenants resolved to resist the collections by force. In a mass meeting held atop the Helderberg Escarpment, a plateau with a commanding view of the surrounding countryside, the tenants issued a proclamation calling for “the final consummation of freedom and independence for the masses,” with the abolition of the exploitative rents and feudal privileges which the patroons used to maintain their power. With this dramatic declaration, the Anti-Rent Movement was born [6].
The Anti-Rent movement soon spread to neighbouring patroonships along the Hudson River valley. The movement had little hope of winning a military victory against the patroon’s militias, but with hit and run tactics, they could avoid a direct confrontation, and keep the insurrection alive for years. Some Anti-Renters took advantage of kinship ties with the Mohawk nation to go to ground in neighbouring Iroquoia, while others simply melted into the countryside. Finally, the patroons were forced to conclude that crushing the Anti-Renters would require more manpower than they could muster on their own. For the Liberal Party, this was the perfect opportunity to extract concessions. In exchange for the militia units that the cities could provide, the Liberals demanded a much greater role in the state’s governance. The result of this was the General Reform Act of 1848.
The General Reform Act was a seismic shift in the balance of power between the patroons and the urban reformers. It had two main provisions: first, that new seats be created in the cities to represent their population more proportionately; and second, that the property qualifications for the franchise be significantly lowered. Both of these provisions would resound to the benefit of the Liberals, and in the state’s first elections held with the General Reform Act in place, the Liberals would win a resounding majority, propelling the party’s leader, Maarten Van Buren of Kinderhoek, into the governorship. Van Buren’s election in 1849 would mark the beginning of almost a century of dominance by the Liberal Party in New Netherland’s political life.
Van Buren was a consummate politician, at home with the glad-handing and patronage-building that was the major function of a nineteenth century political party. A flamboyant figure with a taste for fine clothing, Van Buren’s political cunning is reflected in the nicknames he collected over his career, which included “the Little Magician,” in reference to his short stature, and “the old fox of Kinderhoek”. He moved quickly to suppress the Anti-Renters’ insurrection, dispatching militia units drawn up from the cities to the affected regions. However, he also recognized that they would need to be reintegrated into New Netherland society. Van Buren, a leader of the Liberal Party’s anti-slavery wing, had a deep and abiding horror of the chattel slavery practiced in southern Boreoamerica, although he declined to abolish the system of half-free labour still in place in New Netherland. Some historians have suggested his views on slavery made him more inclined to be sympathetic to the tenant farmers’ plight.
In 1854, guided by governor Van Buren, the Liberals amended the General Reform Act to do away with property qualifications altogether. Every male citizen of New Netherland over the age of 21 would now have the vote. Another amendment strictly curtailed the Patroons’ autonomy, while a third abolished their hereditary representation in Parliament, although it preserved the patroonships’ seats. Now, if the patroons wished to maintain their voice in government, they would need their tenants’ votes to do so. Van Buren’s hope was that this would curb any egregious abuse by the patroons of their feudal powers, and that it would give the tenant farmers a way to voice their displeasure within the political system.
Indeed, the tenant farmers wasted very little time in organizing. They still sought an end to the feudal privileges the patroons enjoyed, and they mistrusted the Liberals, who had after all, cooperated with the patroons to crush their movement. By 1860, a new political party, the Farmers’ Union (Boerenverbond in Dutch) had won its first seats, among them that of the patroonship of Rensselaerwyck. The Farmers Union never rose above the status of a third party, although at times it rivaled the Conservative Party which had been organized by the remaining patroons in seat count. Despite its third-party status, the Farmers’ Union was able to decide the balance of power between the Liberals and Conservatives on several occasions, most notably following the election of 1876, in which the Liberals were reduced to a minority by voters’ dissatisfaction of their handling of a recent economic downturn. The Liberals needed the confidence of the Farmers to govern, and the Farmers, in turn, had a list of demands, which included subsidies and tariffs to protect New Netherland’s farmers, as well as a comprehensive land reform package which would see the state purchase the patroons’ estates and divide them among the former tenants.
Tariffs proved to be a non-starter, given that free movement of goods was a bedrock principle of the emerging confederal institutions of the ASB, and subsidies, when given, were often difficult to distinguish from bribes for the leading tenants of particular patroonships. Land reform, though, was one area where the Farmers refused to compromise. Over the following decade, New Amsterdam bought up the patroons’ estates, offering generous prices for those who sold early, and less generous ones for holdouts. The estates were then divided into family-sized plots and given to the tenant farmers. By 1886, the vast estates of the patroon class were no more, and the following year, their special status was revoked, transforming them into regular municipalities. Some patroons would use their fortunes to become prominent investors in New Netherland’s growing commercial empire in California and the Pacific; the Farmer’s Union would produce some of the strongest critics of New Netherlander imperialism, although the party never adopted a formal anti-imperialist position.
Having won major concessions from the Liberals, the Farmers’ Union soon found its position in Parliament threatened from another direction entirely. Beginning in the 1880s, trade unionists and socialists had begun to contest elections in a variety of small parties. In the 1890s, several of these parties as well as affiliated trade unions agreed to unite, forming the Labour Party, which would prove to be a major player in New Netherland’s politics in the 20th century. Although their initial base was among the urban working class, they also drew from what had been the left wing of the Farmers’ Union. Defections from Farmers’ to Labour left the remaining party more conservative, and the ideological differences between the two would make a Farmer-Labour merger an unlikely proposition. Labour made inroads slowly among the Farmers’ Union’s base, but by the onset of the Great Desolation in 1929 it was the votes of farmers in the Hudson valley as well as workers in the cities which propelled Labour leader Augustijn Classen to the governorship for the first time. By the 1940s, the contest between Labour and the Liberals had come to dominate New Netherland politics. This two-party system threatened to squeeze the Farmer’s Union out of the picture entirely, unless something drastic was done. In the 1950s, the Farmers’ Union agreed to merge with the Conservative Party, which was similarly struggling to maintain relevance. Uniting with the party of the patroons would have been unthinkable to the Farmers’ Union’s founders, but by this point the two parties agreed more often than not, sharing a moderately conservative, agrarian outlook. The merger between the two parties was the genesis of the Green Alliance, which remains New Netherland’s third largest party to this day.
[1] OTL recruitment of agricultural workers from the Netherlands to become tenant farmers in the colony largely failed- the white settlers who did emigrate generally preferred to make their fortunes in the fur trade, instead of serving the patroon class as, essentially, serfs. As a result, enslaved agricultural labour was more commonly used by the patroons. ITTL, the adoption of Adriaen van der Donck’s plan for the colony’s government leads the Dutch government to sponsor the passage of poor settlers, most of whom end up as tenants. A large number of these settlers came not from the Netherlands themselves, but from Germany, which was still recovering from the devastation of years of religious war fought on its soil. Some also came from as far abroad as the Baltic.
[2] This is an OTL figure.
[3] This half-free class, which, as noted, had no statutory basis, ceased to exist upon the assumption of English rule in the colony OTL.
[4] This was an OTL settlement, called the “Land of the Blacks,” the “Free Negro Lots” or the “Negro Frontier”, around the area of OTL Washington Square Park.
[5] OTL this revolt took place in 1712, after the English takeover.
[6] This paragraph essentially describes the OTL beginning of the Anti-Rent movement.
Part 1: Slavery and abolition in New Netherland: 1700-1804
New Netherland, in the 18th century, saw two very different social systems in an uneasy coexistence. In the valley of the Hudson River, the patroons ruled their vast estates, or patroonships, with near-total autonomy, including the power to establish criminal and civil law. Unlike the southern planter classes, to whom they are frequently compared, the patroons did not practice wide-scale plantation slavery. Although agricultural slavery did exist in New Netherland, the climate was wrong for the sort of cash crops that were grown in the Boreoamerican south. The patroons’ income came from rents paid by tenant farmers working on their lands- frequently the descendants of those farmers originally brought over by the patroons as indentured servants or contract labourers. [1] Meanwhile, the capital, New Amsterdam, with its excellent harbour and connections to the Dutch colonial empire, was a growing mercantile centre, rivalling other east coast cities like Boston, Philadelphia, Baltimore, and Charleston. Slavery was very widespread in New Amsterdam and the surrounding region- in the early eighteenth century more than 42 percent of households in New Amsterdam had held slaves [2], a percentage higher than any other east coast city save Charleston. Slaves worked in all sorts of jobs, including domestic work, agricultural work in the surrounding region, and work in the city’s all-important ports. The slave trade and the trade in goods produced by slave labour in the southern colonies were important parts of the city’s mercantile economy.
Slaves in New Netherland had some basic rights: the right to marry and have children, the right to earn wages or sell goods in their “free” time to earn an income, the right to own some basic “moveable” property such as clothing and cooking utensils, and most notably, the right to sue any other person in the colony, whether black or white. They were barred, however, from owning real estate, and they were of course still subject to their masters’ wishes and whims. Although it had no legal basis, it had been common practice, in the early days of the colony, to grant slaves who had performed several decades of loyal service a status of “half-free,” in which they would be allowed to own land and earn a wage from their master, on the condition of “good behaviour” [3]. A large group of these half-free people were settled north of the then-city limits of New Amsterdam, creating a buffer between the white settlers of the colony and the indigenous Lenape of the island of Manhattan [4].
As the number of slaves in New Amsterdam grew exponentially, the presence of this half-free community working beside them would inspire the slave population to demand more rights for themselves. This culminated in the Slave Revolt of 1720, in which a group of around 20 slaves set fire to a building on Maiden Street, then attacked the white colonists who attempted to stop the fires, killing several [5]. In the wake of this revolt, the colony’s governor would pass a series of edicts which would redefine slavery in the colony. Slaves were now forbidden to carry firearms and subjected to the death penalty for a number of offences. The existence of the half-free class was also officially recognized for the first time, although recognizing the potential risk of having such a population in close proximity to the large slave population of the capital, the existing half-free community was offered full freedom in exchange for agreeing to relocate to land far away in the Mohawk River valley, on the frontier between the colony and Iroquoia. Most would accept the offer, and in time their descendants would intermarry into the emerging Dutch-Mohawk Mixed culture of the valley. Many families in Canajoharie and Tiononderoga can trace their descent to these freemen.
New Netherland felt the force, albeit indirectly, of the revolutions rocking the Atlantic world in the late 18th century. The revolutions in the English colonies would cause a new wave of Yankee migration to New Netherland- loyalists and revolutionaries alike fleeing persecution in Republican and Tory New England, respectively, as well as those who just wanted to escape the violence. The post-revolutionary atmosphere in Massachusetts and New Hampshire saw the abolition of slavery in those states, which had few remaining slaves to begin with, and slavery would be declared illegal in Vermont from the very start. Rhode Island and the Vineyards also abolished slavery early on, and most of the remaining provinces of the Dominion of New England followed soon afterwards, although a Dominion-wide ban was delayed for some decades by the reticence of Saybrook, the most conservative New England state, and the one with the largest slave population. Nevertheless, Yankees in New Netherland, whatever their political outlook, tended to oppose slavery in the colony.
Although New Netherland was, by the late 18th century almost completely autonomous from the Dutch Republic, many in the colony still paid close attention to political developments in the metropole, and the integration of the Netherlands into the French revolutionary republican system was viewed by some with horror, and by others with curiosity, or even enthusiasm. The latter, who tended to identify as Radicals (radicalen), who drew their inspiration from the Patriotten who had opposed the rule of the Stadholder and the Orange family in the Netherlands, and from the French radical republicans. These Radicals would be among the first batavophone abolitionists in New Netherland.
These Dutch and Yankee currents of abolitionism were joined in the founding of the New Amsterdam Manumission Society (Nieuw Amsterdam Vrijlatingmaatschappij) in 1784. The Society was similar to other political clubs of its day, in that it was largely an informal social club through which powerful men of the societal elite could influence politics. In fact, more than half of its members themselves owned slaves. Nevertheless, it would see some success in lobbying the state’s government for changes in the status quo. Political power, in this time, was largely in the hands of the patroon class, who dominated the state’s parliament and governorship, in addition to their great autonomy on their estates, which they jealously guarded. They had already come to see the rising power of New Amsterdam’s mercantile elite as a potential threat to their own. Emancipation would be a serious blow to the interests of this rival elite faction, and as such, although many patroons owned some slaves themselves, they came to support the Manumission Society’s calls for gradual emancipation.
The result of this partnership between the Manumission Society and the colony’s landed gentry was the Gradual Abolition Act of 1804. This act decreed that the children of slaves born henceforth in New Netherland would attain the status of half-free. Their own children, in turn, would be considered fully free. This was a very gradual emancipation, and the final abolition of the half-free class would not come until 1866, when many in that generation were quite elderly. Many slaveowners, however, seeing the writing on the wall, would begin to sell their slaves to the southern colonies of Virginia and Carolina, leading to an overall decline of the practice of slavery in the state. Many in New Amsterdam’s merchant class greatly resented the passage of the act, which they felt was an unjust imposition by a feudal aristocratic class upon their property rights. From this resentment, as well as the Radical impulse to challenge the patroons anti-democratic power, calls for reform would emerge.
Part 2: Democracy and Land Reform in New Netherland:
By the 1830s, New Amsterdam, although not yet the undisputed centre of Boreoamerica’s northeastern urban corridor, was clearly rising above competitors like Boston, Philadelphia, and Baltimore as a centre of commerce, as a result of the construction of canals between the Hudson River and the Great Lakes. Their rising influence, however, did not extend to the state’s governmental structure, which was dominated by the patroons. Each patroonship was represented in the state’s Parliament, on equal footing with the capital and other rising urban centres like Breuckelen, leaving these urban centres highly underrepresented and the patroons correspondingly overrepresented. This state of affairs rankled the cities’ rising bourgeoisie, but they had little ability to redress the situation, given the patroons’ combined political influence. Their grievances were expressed by the reformist Liberal Party, the first true political party in New Netherland’s history. The patroons, meanwhile, jealously guarded their privileges and autonomy. The situation could not last forever, and indeed change would come, although from a source neither side was likely expecting.
In 1839, Stephen Van Rensselaer III, one of the wealthiest patroons in the state, died. Van Rensselaer had been regarded as a “lenient and benevolent landowner,” willing to accept partial payments from struggling tenants and preferring to allow rents to accumulate over time. However, he also required his tenants who sold their leases to pay him one quarter of the sale price or one year’s rent. These “quarter-sale” payments had allowed the Van Rensselaer family to maintain control of a large region surrounding the manor of Rensselaerwyck. Van Rensselaer’s will required his heirs to collect the outstanding rents and quarter-sale payments he had allowed to accumulate in his lifetime. The tenant farmers, unable to pay these debts which were suddenly being called in all at once, attempted first to secure a payment schedule from Van Rensselaer’s heirs, and then to resolve the matter in court, both unsuccessfully. Left with no legal options available to them, the tenants resolved to resist the collections by force. In a mass meeting held atop the Helderberg Escarpment, a plateau with a commanding view of the surrounding countryside, the tenants issued a proclamation calling for “the final consummation of freedom and independence for the masses,” with the abolition of the exploitative rents and feudal privileges which the patroons used to maintain their power. With this dramatic declaration, the Anti-Rent Movement was born [6].
The Anti-Rent movement soon spread to neighbouring patroonships along the Hudson River valley. The movement had little hope of winning a military victory against the patroon’s militias, but with hit and run tactics, they could avoid a direct confrontation, and keep the insurrection alive for years. Some Anti-Renters took advantage of kinship ties with the Mohawk nation to go to ground in neighbouring Iroquoia, while others simply melted into the countryside. Finally, the patroons were forced to conclude that crushing the Anti-Renters would require more manpower than they could muster on their own. For the Liberal Party, this was the perfect opportunity to extract concessions. In exchange for the militia units that the cities could provide, the Liberals demanded a much greater role in the state’s governance. The result of this was the General Reform Act of 1848.
The General Reform Act was a seismic shift in the balance of power between the patroons and the urban reformers. It had two main provisions: first, that new seats be created in the cities to represent their population more proportionately; and second, that the property qualifications for the franchise be significantly lowered. Both of these provisions would resound to the benefit of the Liberals, and in the state’s first elections held with the General Reform Act in place, the Liberals would win a resounding majority, propelling the party’s leader, Maarten Van Buren of Kinderhoek, into the governorship. Van Buren’s election in 1849 would mark the beginning of almost a century of dominance by the Liberal Party in New Netherland’s political life.
Van Buren was a consummate politician, at home with the glad-handing and patronage-building that was the major function of a nineteenth century political party. A flamboyant figure with a taste for fine clothing, Van Buren’s political cunning is reflected in the nicknames he collected over his career, which included “the Little Magician,” in reference to his short stature, and “the old fox of Kinderhoek”. He moved quickly to suppress the Anti-Renters’ insurrection, dispatching militia units drawn up from the cities to the affected regions. However, he also recognized that they would need to be reintegrated into New Netherland society. Van Buren, a leader of the Liberal Party’s anti-slavery wing, had a deep and abiding horror of the chattel slavery practiced in southern Boreoamerica, although he declined to abolish the system of half-free labour still in place in New Netherland. Some historians have suggested his views on slavery made him more inclined to be sympathetic to the tenant farmers’ plight.
In 1854, guided by governor Van Buren, the Liberals amended the General Reform Act to do away with property qualifications altogether. Every male citizen of New Netherland over the age of 21 would now have the vote. Another amendment strictly curtailed the Patroons’ autonomy, while a third abolished their hereditary representation in Parliament, although it preserved the patroonships’ seats. Now, if the patroons wished to maintain their voice in government, they would need their tenants’ votes to do so. Van Buren’s hope was that this would curb any egregious abuse by the patroons of their feudal powers, and that it would give the tenant farmers a way to voice their displeasure within the political system.
Indeed, the tenant farmers wasted very little time in organizing. They still sought an end to the feudal privileges the patroons enjoyed, and they mistrusted the Liberals, who had after all, cooperated with the patroons to crush their movement. By 1860, a new political party, the Farmers’ Union (Boerenverbond in Dutch) had won its first seats, among them that of the patroonship of Rensselaerwyck. The Farmers Union never rose above the status of a third party, although at times it rivaled the Conservative Party which had been organized by the remaining patroons in seat count. Despite its third-party status, the Farmers’ Union was able to decide the balance of power between the Liberals and Conservatives on several occasions, most notably following the election of 1876, in which the Liberals were reduced to a minority by voters’ dissatisfaction of their handling of a recent economic downturn. The Liberals needed the confidence of the Farmers to govern, and the Farmers, in turn, had a list of demands, which included subsidies and tariffs to protect New Netherland’s farmers, as well as a comprehensive land reform package which would see the state purchase the patroons’ estates and divide them among the former tenants.
Tariffs proved to be a non-starter, given that free movement of goods was a bedrock principle of the emerging confederal institutions of the ASB, and subsidies, when given, were often difficult to distinguish from bribes for the leading tenants of particular patroonships. Land reform, though, was one area where the Farmers refused to compromise. Over the following decade, New Amsterdam bought up the patroons’ estates, offering generous prices for those who sold early, and less generous ones for holdouts. The estates were then divided into family-sized plots and given to the tenant farmers. By 1886, the vast estates of the patroon class were no more, and the following year, their special status was revoked, transforming them into regular municipalities. Some patroons would use their fortunes to become prominent investors in New Netherland’s growing commercial empire in California and the Pacific; the Farmer’s Union would produce some of the strongest critics of New Netherlander imperialism, although the party never adopted a formal anti-imperialist position.
Having won major concessions from the Liberals, the Farmers’ Union soon found its position in Parliament threatened from another direction entirely. Beginning in the 1880s, trade unionists and socialists had begun to contest elections in a variety of small parties. In the 1890s, several of these parties as well as affiliated trade unions agreed to unite, forming the Labour Party, which would prove to be a major player in New Netherland’s politics in the 20th century. Although their initial base was among the urban working class, they also drew from what had been the left wing of the Farmers’ Union. Defections from Farmers’ to Labour left the remaining party more conservative, and the ideological differences between the two would make a Farmer-Labour merger an unlikely proposition. Labour made inroads slowly among the Farmers’ Union’s base, but by the onset of the Great Desolation in 1929 it was the votes of farmers in the Hudson valley as well as workers in the cities which propelled Labour leader Augustijn Classen to the governorship for the first time. By the 1940s, the contest between Labour and the Liberals had come to dominate New Netherland politics. This two-party system threatened to squeeze the Farmer’s Union out of the picture entirely, unless something drastic was done. In the 1950s, the Farmers’ Union agreed to merge with the Conservative Party, which was similarly struggling to maintain relevance. Uniting with the party of the patroons would have been unthinkable to the Farmers’ Union’s founders, but by this point the two parties agreed more often than not, sharing a moderately conservative, agrarian outlook. The merger between the two parties was the genesis of the Green Alliance, which remains New Netherland’s third largest party to this day.
[1] OTL recruitment of agricultural workers from the Netherlands to become tenant farmers in the colony largely failed- the white settlers who did emigrate generally preferred to make their fortunes in the fur trade, instead of serving the patroon class as, essentially, serfs. As a result, enslaved agricultural labour was more commonly used by the patroons. ITTL, the adoption of Adriaen van der Donck’s plan for the colony’s government leads the Dutch government to sponsor the passage of poor settlers, most of whom end up as tenants. A large number of these settlers came not from the Netherlands themselves, but from Germany, which was still recovering from the devastation of years of religious war fought on its soil. Some also came from as far abroad as the Baltic.
[2] This is an OTL figure.
[3] This half-free class, which, as noted, had no statutory basis, ceased to exist upon the assumption of English rule in the colony OTL.
[4] This was an OTL settlement, called the “Land of the Blacks,” the “Free Negro Lots” or the “Negro Frontier”, around the area of OTL Washington Square Park.
[5] OTL this revolt took place in 1712, after the English takeover.
[6] This paragraph essentially describes the OTL beginning of the Anti-Rent movement.
It's a good plan. It also suggests a more decentralized state.
Then there should be one. I'm loving this so far and I love learning about the lore, culture, and history of Boreoamerica.
Fascinating change. Does this give New Netherland a German-Dutch culture, or did that difference fade? I could easily see the more worker/tenant population have German characteristics with Dutch being considered upper class.
They mostly assimilate within a generation or two, although some German-speaking enclaves persist quite a bit longer, although I'm unsure if they last up to the present day.
This new information also implies that some German elements will be woven into the culture of New Netherland, depending on the region. As for where surviving enclaves of the German language might be found, the outskirts seem most likely. The middle Mohawk Valley was once known as the German Flats in OTL because of how many lived there. The place-name Herkimer is present in TTL and attests to this heritage. Some surviving communities in that region are possible, though it's already rather complicated there with all the interaction between Dutch and Iroquois people. The upper Delaware valley, and the wider Katskill region, is another possibility. It faces a part of Poutaxia that has a known German speaking community. Maybe there's a continuous "Belsnickel Belt" spanning that border.
On the one hand, I think it's fair to say that there will definitely be regions that will prefer to use another language (Like OTL West Africa has preferred French over English) - such as Mesoamerica using Spanish/Nahuatl depending on context.
On the other hand though, I think it's safe to say that French pretty much is the de facto lingua franca of TTL. Just with the PIC alone (a free trade/movement zone of hundreds of millions I presume) - the successful use of French as an ethnically neutral second language for trade, business, science, government, and probably a large chuck of PIC Pop culture should have a massive effect in encouraging the rest world to adopt French as a second language for all truly global matters. Adding the tens of millions who use French as a First or second language in Western Europe/Boreoamerica is just icing on the cake.
Without a primarily French-Speaking juggernaut equivalent to OTL America/Britain pumping out loads of pop culture though, the use of French as a second language might have a more "formal" vibe to it, but in the end, I definitely think French ITTL (at minimum) won't be far behind OTL English in terms of global reach.
I wonder if German (among others) immigration to New Netherland could lead to a cultural divergence between Old and New Netherland that parallels the way that American (with its many cases of German/Other immigration) and English/British cultural diverged IOTL?
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