Glad everyone's enjoying it! (I hope you're still enjoying it after you get to the end of this next update.)
The U.S. isn't totally isolated, but (and this is their biggest problem as far as foreign policy goes) of all their allies, only one—France—might conceivably be able to help in time of war. That's the one they most want to keep happy.
Florida
At first glance, it appears that little has changed for the worse in this growing colony. Over a thousand immigrants came from India, Southeast Asia and China this year. Rice, honey, preserved fruit, Florida water, sugar grown by free labor (for a given value of “free”)—the market for these things hasn’t gone anywhere. But the pace of immigration and growth has slowed in the past two years, mostly because of the credit crunch. This has somewhat strengthened the position of the Creek and Seminole tribal organizations as lenders, even as those tribes await the next census knowing they’ll find they’re quite thoroughly outnumbered by the new immigrants.
There has been one change right at the top. Governor Charles MacCarthy turned 70 this year, and decided to tender his resignation and retire from Florida. Replacing him is the 51-year-old Joseph Wanton Morrison, who served with distinction as a general in the war in Burma—and before that as a lieutenant colonel in the War of 1812, inflicting an embarrassing defeat on the Americans during the invasion of Canada. His appointment to this post is a rather obvious message to their northern neighbors not to try anything stupid.
Governor Raffles divided Florida into seven provinces. In the northeastern province of Augustinia, blacks and Jews alike have learned from the Creeks how to plant the Three Sisters together, so the beans enrich the soil and the hairy squash leaves ward raccoons away from the corn. They’ve learned to soak the corn in limewater to make it safer and more nutritious. They’ve learned to care for the various wild fruit trees they find to increase their production. Above all, they’ve learned from Cantonese and Bengalis how to cultivate and prepare the rice that now grows in profuse abundance along the St. Johns River. The poorest people in Augustinia go to bed every night with bellies full of boiled rice and veggies.
David Levy Yulee and Judah P. Benjamin are not the poorest people in Augustinia. Both of them are bright young lawyers working in the provincial capital of St. Augustine. Yulee in particular is the son of Moses Levy, the most powerful and respected man in Florida’s Jewish community and the main driving force behind the existence of that community. He took the surname “Yulee,” the name of one of his Moroccan ancestors, as a way to literally make a name for himself rather than staying in his father’s shadow.[1] Benjamin is the guy whose account of his Spanish adventure was getting him free drinks for most of a year before it was eclipsed by Fed’s account of his escape from Savannah. Yulee and Benjamin both go to bed with bellies full of jerk chicken or fried fish, or beefsteak on special occasions (and there are still few Hindus in St. Augustine, so they don’t get any dirty looks for the steak) and the beds they go to are surrounded by drapes of scented cheesecloth to keep out the mosquitoes. The one drawback to their wealth and status is that even in Florida they’re expected to dress like they’re in London, and this time of year that’s almost comfortable.
Especially right now—Christmas is in two days and Hanukkah begins in four, but this Tuesday evening Yulee and Benjamin have gotten the last of their business wrapped up for the year, and are celebrating with sweet, fragrant lychee wine in a local pub, the Menorquín. They’re flirting with the waitress, a pretty Balinese girl from down the coast. And they’re keeping their ears open for gossip. The Menorquín draws a crowd of their fellow Jews, the Minorcan Spaniards who’ve been living in this town since long before it was British, the small handful of immigrants from the British Isles, the occasional Creek or Seminole on business, and even a few black people.
By the standards of 1834, St. Augustine is a model for racial harmony, but that’s saying almost nothing. The Jewish, Spanish and black parts of the city are practically separate towns with not a lot of socialization between them, and though the black part of town holds nearly half of its roughly 5,000 people, it holds a lot less than half of its wealth. But the Menorquín is one of the holy places where the races meet[2], which makes it a place where Yulee and Benjamin can tap the flow of information that goes up and down the southern Hidden Trail. The word they’re getting now is that up in Georgia, Governor Berrien is spending a lot of time in the company of Isaiah Hart, an American slaveholder who lived near what is now Sepharad before the war, and has never quite gotten over the loss of his land. That has to be bad news. Good thing Morrison is in charge.
Neither of these men is an abolitionist. Both of them grew up in the Caribbean—Yulee on St. Thomas, Benjamin on St. Croix. They don’t remember slavery as being all that bad, since their experience was more of the having-them than the being-one variety, and for a long time they felt like Florida was missing out by not having it. But they’ve been without slaves for some years now, and the majority of their neighbors in Sepharad never had any to begin with. And after the
Paixão de Cristo and Savannah, even they have a hard time arguing that Raffles made a mistake—especially since the Empire’s gradual emancipation program is causing Florida no disruption at all, unlike Jamaica or Guiana.
And there are other ways of getting work done. On the east bank of the St. Johns south of Sepharad, Jews from the Netherlands, Portugal, Morocco and what is now the Kingdom of Turkey own more acres of paddy than they can ever hope to cultivate, even with the help of the water buffaloes that someone brought over as calves and that are now big enough to be ready for work. But there are Muslim boys in Florida who already know how to grow rice, whose parents come from India, Malaya and Java and are willing to hire them out for a little money and—for the boys—a lot of education. Florida is not richly supplied with imams and has no madrassa, and most of the colony’s religious schools are Christian and inclined to proselytizing.
Florida is definitely a cultural mosaic—but right now it’s an abstract one, its various elements forming no obvious pattern. For example, if you ask Mani Jiya Menon of the Narinna district of the province of Tequesta, north of Lake Mayaca, she would tell you she’s a Travancoran woman living in Florida—and by the way, she’s
definitely of the menon caste. (Nobody in Florida can prove otherwise.) And, Jiya would say, the same is true of her 9-year-old daughter Teji (full name: Mani Teji Menon), who she insists is the child of her dear departed husband. Everyone agrees that judging by Teji’s appearance, said husband must have been a particularly handsome man—and must also have been much lighter-skinned than Jiya.
Jiya and Teji only speak Malayalam when they’re at home. The rest of the time they speak English, and Jiya makes Teji practice her English as carefully as she judges the ripeness of an ackee[3]. Jiya is one of the hardest workers on the Seminole-owned fruit orchards and apiaries in the district, where they grow a particularly delicious breed of lime, but she wants to make sure her daughter gets a ticket into a better life in Florida.
Likewise, Josie Shepherd thinks of herself as a black woman in Florida. She lives in the mostly-black village of Angola at the northwestern tip of the province of Charlottea[4]. Her husband of three years is named Akinwale, but everyone calls him Wally. He was one of the
Paixão de Cristo rebels, and only speaks a little English. They agreed on the surname “Shepherd” on account of their job, which is helping raise the expanding herds of meat and dairy sheep. Because these herds are still meant to be expanding, few sheep are slaughtered until they’re old enough to have gotten some breeding done. Local butchers run the tough, gamy mutton through grinders, hickory-smoke it, salt it and spice it, then pack it tight into the casings and smoke the sausages again. British sailors love this stuff—it lasts for months at sea, it goes well with the lime juice ration, and best of all, it
isn’t hardtack. Hindus, Muslims and Jews will also buy it because it’s guaranteed not to have any beef or pork in it, and it’s good with the fermented fish sauce they make in Zarazota a little ways south.
Already helping out in the fields is Josie’s 8-year-old son Gordon, who’s quite obviously not Wally’s son—where Wally is one of the darkest-skinned men in Angola, Gordon is several shades lighter than his mother. This, plus his precocious charm, are why he’s been nicknamed “Golden.” His biological father used to help out with money, but he passed away a couple of years ago.
Choi Ming lives in Trafalgar itself—in fact, she has a room in the governor’s mansion and works in the famous botanical gardens alongside a young man from India, who has taught her the art of fixing a good curry and whom she’ll marry next year. He’s agreed to adopt as his own her son, 6-year-old son Choi Yin, who’s already a bit tall for his age. Which is good—her own parents were far less accepting. Yin is due to have a Hindu stepfather, but as far as Ming is concerned he’s perfectly Chinese, even if his deep-set eyes, the subtly different texture of his hair, and his taste for clarified butter would stand out back in Canton. She’s taught him the bare handful of characters that she knows, but has made sure he also has a start in speaking and writing English.
And back in St. Augustine, Ni Made Dewi has learned a lot she didn’t know in her childhood in Bali, or later in the fishing village of Tebanan[5]. She’s learned how to brew the strong rice beer called choo, how to flirt with young lawyers without making any promises and look graceful and self-possessed while dodging their hands, and how to hold her head high when talking about her 3-year-old daughter, Ni Wayan Suardika[6], whose father crossed the ocean two years ago and never returned. And yes, if you asked her, she’d say that she and her daughter are both perfectly Balinese.
Because nobody ever sets out to create a new ethnic group. Different tribes and nations can and do exchange ideas, skills, the odd strand of DNA, and even whole languages with each other, but as Anil Malakar will one day say, “Identity and pride—whether it be that of an army, a faith or a people—are forged by the Creator in the fires of shared travail.” British Florida is hardly a generation old, and apart from the bad hurricane back in ’28 and a couple of outbreaks of yellow fever, it’s not a place where much shared travail has happened… yet.
Louisiana
Some of the news is bad, and some of it is downright horrifying, so let’s start with the good news. John Keane (remember him? Soldier? Louisiana’s conqueror-turned-savior? Very model of a modern major-general?[7] Man who still has no idea how much he’s changed the world?) is back in New Orleans, and he’s been named Minister of War for the Republic of Louisiana.
The presence of all these British officials in their government is starting to become controversial. The stated rationale is that these guys are just better at what they do. After all, Louisiana has a population of just under a quarter of a million, of whom over forty percent are slaves. At last census, the UK had a population of 24 million people just in the British Isles. The men who come from London to serve New Orleans are drawn from a talent pool two orders of magnitude greater, and Louisiana should be grateful they’re here. Still, most people are well aware that this is the Crown’s protection turning, little by little, into domination.
But this is Keane—they can’t be mad at him. When he arrived last September after eighteen years away, the city outdid itself in revelry to celebrate his return. He went on a tour of the little republic, and was greeted as a hero in the border forts and the small but growing town named after him. The only sign of trouble was that people kept wanting more reassurance that Queen Charlotte wasn’t going to abolish slavery in Louisiana, and he kept having to tell them that the Crown could not and would not do that here.
As minister of war, Keane has already made one important decision—the Army companies that use rafts and pirogues as transportation will remain in the Grand Army of the Republic rather than being placed under the Navy’s jurisdiction. But the Navy isn’t complaining much, because Keane came with a gift for them, courtesy of their friends in the Royal Navy—24 long nines and enough inch-thick iron plate to allow them to complete a unique warship, the
Volonté de la République.
They’re calling the
Volonté “Louisiana’s demologos” but it isn’t really one. It’s smaller and lighter, with (as might be expected for a strictly brown-water vessel) a much shallower draft. It doesn’t have the monster columbiads that can fire a hundred-pound[8] cannonball through an enemy’s hull below the waterline. But it’s not like Robert Fulton is going to come to Louisiana and tell them it didn’t pass certification. When built, it will be fully armored above the waterline, able to fire 24-pound heated shot from its bow and stern chasers, and with the long nines the British were kind enough to provide, it will be able to steam up the middle of the Mississippi and kill invaders on both banks.[9]
Keane is hoping this formidable vessel never sees action. After the war, he was very happy to return to his wife, and she was very happy to have him back—so happy, in fact, that they had three sons in as many years.[10] The oldest of those sons is now in the Army, and the others are likely to follow suit. He’s proud of them for their choices, but he does not want war.
And things here are bad enough as it is right now. Where the global recession has touched Florida lightly, it’s smacked Louisiana hard. A lot of cotton brokerage firms are headquartered in New Orleans for tax reasons, but those lower taxes didn’t save them from this year’s collapse. Biddle’s attempt to corner the market is making it harder for them to get hold of cotton that doesn’t come from Louisiana itself. Trade in general has declined, which is bad for a number of reasons—the lower the volume of trade from the American frontier to the Gulf of Mexico, the higher a percentage of it can be funneled through the T&T Canal, meaning even less money for Louisiana tariff collectors, brokers and shippers. Land prices haven’t fallen as far as they have in Canada and the United States (this is one of the rare cases where being small and at the limits of possible growth is an advantage) but they’ve gone down enough to hurt the speculators. And of course the market in fur has collapsed, ruining those who depend on searching the bayou for muskrats and other hairy things to kill. The result is the same problems they’re having in New York and Charleston, and a government with no power to address them.
Even the wages of sin are getting low. Prostitutes aren’t doing as badly as fur traders[11], but they have had to lower their prices, which is hell on their self-esteem. Most of the gamblers still coming to the casinos are either addicted or desperate. They’re the sort who are pretty reliable about losing their money, but don’t have much money to lose.
When most people think of the little republic, they think of the city of New Orleans, but only one in five of Louisiana’s people lives there. Much of the rest of the country is dominated by the cotton and sugar industries. It’s the familiar pattern—big farmers can devote more of their land to growing cash crops, so they make more money and buy land from their neighbors, grow more cash crops and so on. And they need that land, because cotton and sugar are both hard on the soil. But there’s a limit to how far this expansion can go. Louisiana is (it bears repeating) small, and much of its land is wetland which can’t be drained because it’s at sea level or because it’s haunted by small semi-legal communities of runaway slaves which it would take a war to get rid of. Then there’s the fact that in Britain, one of Louisiana’s two biggest trade partners, slave-grown sugar is out of fashion. So even as food production was going down, cotton and sugar were already running into trouble. The, of course, the economy went south—which in Louisiana means it sank into the Gulf of Mexico.
And as elsewhere, voters are starting to look angrily at their government. Louisiana has had less of a political monopoly than the U.S., but the Conservatives have been in power since 1824. If Jacques Villeré were still alive, they’d probably make him president again.[12] Since he isn’t, last year they chose his oldest son, René Philippe Gabriel Roy Villeré, mostly as a sort of placeholder until Bouligny can step in again. He has no idea how to handle this situation.
He is getting some suggestions. André B. Roman, leader of the opposition, is of the opinion that what Louisiana needs is debt relief for farmers and small businessmen and tax breaks for the production of food. Like the Populist Party in the U.S., his main concern is keeping people alive and in business. The Conservative party whip, a young up-and-comer named Alexandre Mouton, is of the opinion that Louisiana should just ride this out and not do much of anything.
And then there’s what’s happening in foreign affairs—specifically the United States. A number of newspaper editors and Tertium Quid politicians have been putting forward the idea that Louisiana should cast off British protection and rejoin the United States. This would accomplish two goals—protecting slavery in Louisiana from the abolitionism of the British Empire, and give American slaveholders domestic allies to protect slavery within the United States.
This suggestion is not going over very well, and the person doing the most to sabotage it is Thomas Hart Benton, U.S. Secretary of War. He still remembers Andrew Jackson fondly, and he thinks of the Louisianans as the people who betrayed and murdered him. He wants to conquer Louisiana by force, and has no problem saying so.
As it happens, Louisianans also remember Andrew Jackson. For those in their thirties, who were born around the turn of the century and are just getting into politics, one of the defining memories of their adolescence was learning that the general they trusted to defend their city was trying to burn it to the ground.
And no one born after 1810 has any clear memories of life under the United States. The younger generation—especially those connected in some way with trade—think of Louisiana as the northern edge of the Caribbean as much as the southern edge of North America. They look to New Spain, Florida, Spanish Cuba and Tehuantepec, and beyond them to a great variety of places, especially the French-speaking Guadeloupe, Martinique and Cayenne. (Quite a few whites from Guadeloupe and Martinique are moving to Louisiana in response to the abolition of slavery there.) They think of Louisiana as a unique and special place in the world, and they don’t want to trade that uniqueness for two senators and four representatives in Congress[13].
One of these young people is Corporal Augustin-Frejus Toutant-Beauregard[14], youngest of the Beauregard children, whose father was killed at the Battle of Pearl River before he was born. He’s nineteen years old and has been in the Army for the last two years. He’s too young to have taken part in the Ichacq War, and in fact has spent his entire service in a unit stationed near the capital to protect it from a potential slave revolt. Since there hasn’t been a slave revolt, you’d think his service would be pretty forgettable. In fact, he will never forget his service, no matter how much he wants to.
Back in January, when everyone was still talking about Savannah and afraid that something like that was going to happen here, a couple of city gendarmes came to the barracks accompanied by an emaciated, terrified-looking slave woman. This woman reported that there was a revolt being planned in the slave quarters of the LaLaurie mansion on Rue Royale, they had weapons, and someone had to go there and stop them
right now. The gendarmes figured they’d need some backup for this one. They didn’t even have time to obtain permission from the mansion’s owner, Dr. Leonard LaLaurie, who claimed to be able to treat hunchbacks and was out arranging a shipment of drugs from Virginia.
Beauregard, who had never seen any real action before, figured he was ready for anything as he led the charge to the mansion, shouldering the door open as soon as someone answered it. When he glanced in the kitchen and saw the cook chained to the stove, he wrote it off as a case of harsh discipline, and he assumed the gauntness and heavy scarring of the other slaves was due to unusual cruelty and parsimoniousness on the part of the LaLauries. Like anyone who grows up in a place where slavery is widespread, he’d gotten used to a certain background-noise level of horror… but it didn’t prepare him for the slave quarters, which were basically a Hieronymus Bosch painting made out of people.
There was an old woman with an open head wound, somehow still alive. There was a bedridden man whose arms and legs had been stretched as if on a rack, to the point where they no longer functioned. There were women hanging from the ceiling, alive but tied up, with their limbs forced into positions that a professional contortionist would have had a hard time duplicating. There was a man chained to the wall, with an iron collar around his neck lined with spikes on the inside, trying to keep awake for as long as possible so as not to cut himself.
Suspicion immediately fell on Dr. LaLaurie—some of the things that had been done to the slaves looked vaguely like some sort of medical experiments, and he didn’t help his case when he insisted that what went on in his house was his own business. But as the authorities interviewed the slaves, they learned that the perpetrator was his wife Delphine.
That made it worse. Delphine LaLaurie was a beautiful and popular socialite who’d always seemed perfectly pleasant, and the slaves she brought out in public with her had been in perfect health—she’d even freed a couple. There had been rumors about her for a long time, and she’d been investigated more than once due to rumors of cruelty beyond what the republic’s laws allow. Louisianans have always taken pride in having a legal structure to protect slaves and limit what their masters can do. They might have expected this sort of thing to happen in some backwoods plantation in America, but not on Rue Royale. And as they dug up the garden and found the bodies, it became clear to everyone in the city that their trusted institutions had failed.
And to top it off, Beauregard and his men had the thankless job of guarding this woman-shaped thing through the trial, so that an angry mob didn’t decorate a lamppost with her before the court could enforce its own justice. Her lawyer and son-in-law, Auguste Delassus, tried to make a case that she was insane. It didn’t work. She was found guilty and hanged. The family was busy slinking off in various directions, so the corpse was sold to anatomists—the Edinburgh Phrenological Society bought the head and had it defleshed so they could examine the skull structure and try to work out where the evil bits are.
So at least in one small way, Delphine LaLaurie did boost the local economy.
[1] He did the same thing IOTL when he converted, but for different reasons.
[2] h/t Leonard Cohen
[3] A fruit, originally from West Africa and ITTL imported to Florida via Jamaica, parts of which are toxic when unripe.
[4] Named not after the current queen ITTL, but after Charlotte Harbour, which in turn was named after George III’s wife.
[5] OTL Fort Lauderdale
[6] This makes sense in the context of the Balinese naming system.
[7] IOTL by this time he’d been promoted to lieutenant-general.
[8] Supplying ammunition for pre-1815 artillery pieces are an area where the U.S. still uses traditional weights and measures.
[9] Designers anticipate that as a riverine vessel, the
Volonté will be more likely to confront other vessels to fore and aft, and land-based armies to port and starboard.
[10] As IOTL.
[11] Because those who’ve purchased sexual favors in previous years don’t usually turn around and sell them to others at a lower price.
[12] Here's the list:
- 1815-18 Jacques Villeré
- 1818-21 Bernard de Marigny, Radical
- 1821-24 Armand Beauvais, Radical
- 1824-27 Jacques Villeré, Conservative
- 1827-30 Charles D.J. Bouligny , Conservative
- 1830-33 Jean-Baptiste Labatut, Conservative
[13] By my calculations.
[14] IOTL an older brother of P.G.T. Beuaregard.