Alex Richards
Donor
Brilliant.
I think the Habsburgs are starting to run out of younger brothers to put on all these thrones.
I think the Habsburgs are starting to run out of younger brothers to put on all these thrones.
Look to the West -- Thread II
- Thread starter Thande
- Start date
- Status
Very good, but the situation is getting a bit chaotic, in my opinion. Of course, it's not like OTL wasn't...
Thande
Donor
I just realised when I do get to the Popular Wars, it's going to look stupidly derivative because of the current protests, given that the PWs are also basically a series of incoherent populist protests toppling corrupt governments like dominoes across national borders...I hate it when that happens, it's like the financial crisis after the gold vanishing from the Bank of England which I planned months before the real world financial crisis started.
We'll vouch for you! You've been dropping hints about the PW for what, two years now?
Not that we're impatient that you get on with posting about them...
But think, if you had done it sooner, then no one would question that your idea preceded and was not inspired by current events!
Just sayin'!
Not that we're impatient that you get on with posting about them...
But think, if you had done it sooner, then no one would question that your idea preceded and was not inspired by current events!
Just sayin'!
Thande
Donor
We'll vouch for you! You've been dropping hints about the PW for what, two years now?
Not that we're impatient that you get on with posting about them...
But think, if you had done it sooner, then no one would question that your idea preceded and was not inspired by current events!
Just sayin'!
Yes, but then I also wouldn't be about to get a PhD
Well we can excuse you for being a little selfish I suppose.Yes, but then I also wouldn't be about to get a PhD
Before I even READ this post, I noticed the title, so I'm saying this now:
I can't decide if that's the worst or best title ever for a LTTW chapter.
I wonder who the four would be for the game parody...
You do know there's a two-player version as well, right...
Interesting, I assume the Janissary Sultanate will be an independent trans-Balkan state? A pity about Sarajevo, I am sure crazy Frankie's depredations will be even worse than Eugene of Savoy's.
TheLoneAmigo
Donor
I'd definitely like to see a post about fashion, especially in Britain, as I've just been reading about the development of the modern suit. The events in Look to the West would totally change men's fashion, at the very least - the lack of Beau Brummell alone would change many things about 19th-century dress.
Max Sinister
Banned
Nice update, just one nitpick:
Why is the Shadow faction in Edirne, if the Balkan party already has Constantinople? Are we talking about the same Edirne?
Why is the Shadow faction in Edirne, if the Balkan party already has Constantinople? Are we talking about the same Edirne?
Hendryk
Banned
You should be more careful what you write. At least France hasn't been taken over by a sociopathic revolutionary yet, though we do have our version of an unscrupulous Hungarian nobleman.
Thande
Donor
Part 110: Empire of a Thousand Tears
“As the Good Book says, love thy neighbour; but be wary if thy brother loves thy neighbour even more.”
*
From: “The Americas in the Watchful Peace” by I. I. Denisov (1960)—
...need not concern ourselves with that here. Let us turn instead to the matter of the Empire of New Spain, or as it was also known at the time, the Empire of the Indies.
The Empire was founded in exile by the Infante Charles, eldest son of King Charles III of Spain, and four of his five brothers. Spain was being invaded by the Republican French and, though she had held her own for some years, a combination of a focus on that front by new leader Jean de Lisieux and a civil war meant that she soon fell. Charles III’s deathbed words—more of a scream in fact—were that he had been poisoned by the Infante Charles’ favourite Miguel Pedro Alcántara Abarca de Bolea the Count of Aranda, and that Charles should be disinherited in favour of the second son Philip. Yet there was ambiguity over whether the King’s words should be considered lucid, as the manner of his death had been through a fever. That was enough for Spain to break apart along political lines, with Charles and Aranda on one side—soon joined by the remaining Infantes, Anthony, Ferdinand, John and Gabriel—and Philip and his own favourite Francisco Saavedra de Sangronis on the other.[1]
The resulting scuffle between the ‘Carlistas’ and ‘Felipistas’, as the two sides were dubbed, served only to fatally weaken Spain at the worst possible moment as the Jacobins under Marshal Boulanger swarmed over the Pyrenees. In the end the French conquered Spain, subordinated ‘Philip VII’ to their will, and under Aranda’s advice the Carlistas commandeered a fleet and sailed into the west.[2] Resistance to the French in Spain then passed to Portugal and, later, Naples; though Spanish Kleinkriegers certainly played an important role in the eventual driving of the French from the country, their efforts were disorganised and local in nature, and at first at least tended to accept Portuguese or Neapolitan overlordship, with little loyalty to the vanished Carlistas or the collaborationist Felipistas. It is worth remembering that at this point it had only been around a century since the current Bourbon ruling house of Spain had been installed in the First War of Supremacy,[3] and its roots did not go deep. Spain was therefore divided once more into Castile and Aragon (although, technically, the two had never been politically united in the way England and Scotland, for instance, had been). Castile was placed under the rule of the boy king Alfonso XII, son of the murdered Philip VII, who was a puppet of the Portuguese King Peter IV, while Aragon was placed into personal union with Naples and Sicily.[4]
King Charles VI and VIII of Naples and Sicily thus also briefly became King Charles IV of Aragon before his death in 1811, after which he was succeeded by Gennaro I. The use of a new regnal name, though not without precedent among Neapolitan nobility, helped simplify matters and avoid the potential for confusion with the fact that the exiled Emperor of New Spain also claimed to be Charles IV. Naples-Sicily-Aragon, largely under the influence of its “Unholy Trinity” of Englishmen (Horatio Nelson, Richard Hamilton and John Acton) who dominated the court, also adopted several unitary policies intended to bring the constituents of the Neapolitan Bourbon possessions closer together. While they remained formally separate kingdoms, trade barriers were lowered, laws were standardised to some extent, a common currency (the Neapolitan piastra, although Spanish dollars remained concurrently in use in Aragon) and a single flag was used. For all these reasons, and because the Kingdoms of Naples and Sicily had informally been known before the war as “The Two Sicilies”,[5] Naples-Sicily-Aragon was sometimes known as the Kingdom of the Three Sicilies.
The division of Spain, recognised by the European powers at the Congress of Copenhagen, dashed the hopes of the Infantes for a quick triumphant return. But they had had business of their own. The Count of Aranda—swiftly elevated to Duke—was the exponent of a new model of government that had originally been devised by his father, Pedro Pablo Abarca de Bolea the 10th Count.[6] The ‘Arandite Plan’, as it was later known, would be one of the most influential innovations in monarchical government structure since the Renaissance. The Arandas, father and son, had devised their ideas in response to the Second Platinean War and the hard-won independence of the UPSA, as well as through observation of the Empire of North America. The Arandas argued that New World colonies had now grown too large, populous and self-contained to be treated as distant outposts or integral parts of the home country. They required devolved government of a type that would bind the people to their rulers in the same manner it did back in Europe. Aranda the Younger argued that the ENA was not a perfect model of government because it ultimately relied on an appointed Governor-General as head of state. He claimed that the ENA only remained so loyal to Great Britain because of the example of Prince Frederick living among the Americans, and as soon as the events of the 1740s passed from living memory, the ENA would start to grow restless, indeed saying this was already happening with the fractiousness between the Monroe and Fox Ministries across the Atlantic. Aranda’s thesis on this score remains furiously debated, but is difficult to consider as events, in the form of Le Grand Crabe, intervened and ensured that the Anglo-American relationship would in any case be utterly transformed beyond all recognition.
In any case, the Arandite Plan instead proposed giving each large colony not simply a Governor or Viceroy of some variety, as was the usual case under the Spanish Empire, but a full, hereditary monarch who would be able to establish the same relationship with his people as the King of Spain did with those in the Peninsula. In order to hold the Empire together, the King of Spain would be elevated to Emperor and would have both direct authority over Spain proper and higher authority over the lesser kings, controlling their foreign policy while their domestic policy remained their own. It is generally accepted that the Infante Charles had wanted to implement the plan on succeeding to the throne of Spain, and that his father Charles III had been sceptical of diluting his authority, perhaps influencing his distrust of Aranda. Now the Infantes were in exile, the Arandite Plan was fully implemented, with Charles becoming Emperor over a Spanish America divided into three kingdoms—Mexico, Guatemala and New Granada—and each assigned a king, Anthony, Ferdinand and John respectively. The fourth brother, Gabriel, was placed in charge of forming a new army, which soon became greatly important as the Solidaridad Party-led UPSA attacked. As every schoolchild knows, the Cherry Massacre and other events ensured that the UPSA, against the odds, lost the war and lost Lower Peru to the Empire, along with some border territory to the Portuguese in Brazil.
Lower Peru was reformed into a Kingdom (often simply just called ‘Peru’, presumably because before the UPSA’s independence the Viceroyalty of Peru had covered the whole of the area and it was intended to imply an irredentist claim on the whole UPSA) and Gabriel became its king. While he embarked on bloody suppression campaigns of the Tahuantinsuya autonomous native state within Lower Peru, he was more cautious towards the people of the kingdom proper. He reinstated slavery, it is true, but under the Meridians the ban on slavery had barely been enforced in Peru, with its large population of rich slaveholders: the UPSA only grew strongly abolitionist after the loss of Peru by its nature removed dissenting pro-slavery voices. What surprised the Meridians, and somewhat appalled the rich Peruvians who had patiently been waiting more than twenty years for Spain to reclaim them, was that Gabriel was carefully vague on the issue of the Casta system. He did not formally accept the Meridians’ total abolition of the Casta divisions, but he ensured that Criollos used to enjoying the same rights as Peninsulares were unofficially allowed to continue to enjoy them. Gabriel was aware that to rule the country he needed the hearts and minds of all the important individuals, not just the minority of rich Peninsulares.
Throughout the rest of the Empire of New Spain, the new model of government was applied with at least an attempt at consistency. Aranda and the local liberals wanted some form of limited parliamentary representation. The Emperor Charles was not so keen, but decided to adopt a system that would give his brothers the headaches and prevent any interference with his own prerogative—or, less cynically, we can say that he believed the people should have a say in local domestic affairs but not in matters of foreign policy and war. A memorandum found in the diaries of the Emperor’s Criollo favourite Juan Joaquín de Iturbide supports this: “Ignore the people utterly and you will fall. My father should have learned this with the bread riots and the fiasco over the French fashions. But you cannot listen to them about everything, they cannot be allowed to rule a nation. France has ultimately survived because two evil men in succession seized control as dictators. If she had truly been governed by some revolutionary committee, she would have fallen long before she could think to invade us. The people will want to spend zero in taxes on the military until war comes, and then they will blame you for not having any soldiers. They cannot be entrusted with such matters.” The authenticity of this note remains hotly debated among scholars.
As the term “Cortes” had become somewhat tainted by association with the UPSA’s Cortes Nacionales, the term “Congreso” was used for the three new parliaments, which initially were set up in the capitals of the three kingdoms: San Francisco for Mexico, Léon for Guatemala and Santa Fe for New Granada. (Peru was not granted a Congreso due to concerns over how voting would work thanks to Gabriel’s ambiguity over the Casta system). Initially the plan was to restrict voting to Peninsulares, but it rapidly became obvious that this was unsustainable thanks to the separation between the Empire and Spain herself. The system eventually adopted granted the vote automatically to all Peninsulares and then also to Criollos who passed a property qualification. The electorates were thus small, and the resulting Congresos were typical of such limited-franchise assemblies, with little formalised partisanship as almost all the deputies were rich gentlemen. Nonetheless, this move did somewhat smooth the reform of New Spain, and reform was certainly needed—not simply out of the aims of the Arandite Plan, but because the world had changed.
The purpose of Spanish America, ever since Hernan Cortés proclaimed that he and his men suffered from a rare disease of the heart that could be cured only with gold, was to generate wealth. Treasure ship convoys crossed the Atlantic, carrying a seemingly inexhaustible supply of precious metals, perpetually tempting targets for pirates and privateers for centuries. In the sixteenth century, Sir Francis Drake had captured a ship off Lima carrying twenty-five thousand dollars[7] of Peruvian gold, yet that was just a drop in the ocean. Now, though, Spain was held by hostile powers and there was nowhere for the treasure fleets to go. The economy of the two Spanish states was necessarily affected by this sudden cutoff, but this was somewhat masked by the fact that, in the gold-poor environment of Europe in the Watchful Peace, other countries urgently wished to buy Castilian gold in order to rebuild their own stocks, especially Britain. Nonetheless, the Portuguese influence over Castile meant that these sales were generally conducted in such a way to benefit Portugal all the more, which stoked resentment among the Castilians.
New Spain, whose government was initially led by the Duke of Aranda and later by Bernardo O’Higgins (despite the latter’s chequered performance as a general in the Thrid Platinean War) had to reform to survive in this new world. This became particularly acute after she lost the Philippine War of 1817-21 with Castile and Portugal, meaning the Philippines were separated from Spanish America and ruled as a separate colony by Castile—which in practice meant by Portugal.[8] The war had also seen the New Spaniards raid Castile and Galicia (now Portuguese) in order to gauge support for them; unfortunately, this somewhat backfired when risings were promptly bloodily put down by the Castilian and Portuguese authorities. The New Spaniards did manage to retrieve the symbolic bells of the Church of Santiago de Compostela, but were forced to abandon them in the Rio Tambre while fleeing the Portuguese.[9]
It is generally considered to be the loss of this war which prompted a realignment of priorities in the Empire. Formerly she had been hostile to the UPSA and standoffish to the Empire of North America and the Grand Duchy of Louisiana, particularly since the latter’s settlers had encroached on her territory. Now it became clear that she could not afford to treat her neighbours as enemies, not when the Congress authority in Europe meant that by default she was regarded as a pretender and a pariah. The new O’Higgins ministry saw a more open-handed approach to the other nations of the Americas. It also helped that, thanks to the Portuguese’s role in the Third Platinean War, Portugal was now a common enemy of both the UPSA and New Spain. To quote Bulkeley, “when it comes to bringing together two mortal enemies, there is nothing—absolutely nothing in the world—no diplomatic initiative, no friendship between rulers, no religious conversion—that can possibly compare to the effects of a third party muscling in on their private enmity.” The rejoinder to the Societists is obvious.
1821 was also the year that New Spain’s capitals were shuffled. Fourteen years of painstaking rebuilding, off and on in the difficult conditions of the Vale of Mexico, ended with the final reconstruction of the City of Mexico, now a new city purpose-built as the capital of the Empire. The architecture of the government buildings was enormously symbolic and widely praised. Much of it was neo-Baroque, intended to evoke the lost Spain over the sea, but this was seamlessly blended with examples of native architecture, drawing attention to the way the Arandite Plan was intended to draw the component parts of the Empire closer together. Furthermore, the native architecture was not simply that of the Aztecs who had once occupied this site with their capital of Tenochtitlan, but of the pyramids of the Mayans of Guatemala, the palafitos of the peoples of New Granada, and the terraces of the Tahuantinsuya of Peru (even as Gabriel suppressed them). The disparate styles, taken from an area wider than the whole of Europe, were employed skilfully when they could easily have clashed. The most important architect involved in the project was, ironically, Portuguese—João de Sequeira.
The imperial court therefore moved from Veracruz to Mexico City. However, the governance of the Kingdom of Mexico had been in question for a while. The intention of governing the country from the distant northern outpost of San Francisco had been a deliberate attempt to shift the centre of gravity of the kingdom northwards and bring more settlers to California, the disputed Oregon Country and Texas. But San Francisco was nothing more than an outpost and King Ferdinand had struggled to govern from it. In practice, he had appointed a rather miserable viceroy and had governed either from Veracruz along with his brother, or increasingly living in the City of Mexico as it was rebuilt, helping to supervise the operation. The Mexican Congreso also met in Veracruz rather than San Francisco, and this was formalised when the Emperor moved to Mexico City. Veracruz became the new capital of Mexico. Ferdinand was acutely aware, though, of the importance of bringing settlers to the north, even more than before as gold had been found in California in 1818 and unauthorised foreign prospectors were flocking there.[10] Therefore he created a formal captaincy-general of California and appointed a full captain-general and government to rule autonomously in San Francisco, with the responsibility for managing the gold boom.
This decision has been much analysed and criticised. Some criticism, one feels, is simply aesthetic—the fact that Ferdinand had spoilt the neat two-level Arandite system by reinstating some of the confusing multiple levels of government of the old Spanish America. But on the other hand, Ferdinand did recognise that the situation in the California needed close attention, so his move may have delayed later events rather than hastening them.
On a third hand, of course, it also meant he was the first person to formally delineate the provinces of Old, New and California as possessing a common identity distinct of that from Mexico...
*
From: “An Economic History of the New World”, by Pablo V. de Almeida, 1920—
The claim for the world’s first non-national pseudopuissant corporation is a much disputed one.[11] If we may ignore the more ancient and fanciful suggestions, there are two main candidates: Priestley Aerated Water (PAW) of South America and the Tropical Fruit Company (TFC) of North America.[12] Both companies have a chequered history. PAW certainly predates TFC by some years, but took longer to reach the height of its power. Let us examine the origins of TFC.
Ultimately TFC originates from the consequences of political developments in three countries: the Empire of New Spain, the Empire of North America, and sandwiched between them the Grand Duchy of Louisiana. The latter enjoyed new and more organised leadership from 1814 onwards, as the pair of exiled coup planners the Duke of Aumont and the Vicomte de Barras were installed as Grand Duke and prime minister respectively. Both men, especially Barras, threw themselves into their work out of fear of Bonaparte and bitterness of their failure to stop him. Their chief goal was economic development. Louisiana was an oddity of history, the leftovers of British racial purging of the former French colonies in Acadia and Canada. She was made up of a combination of white French settlers who had originally come to New Orleans, the same such settlers from Canada and Acadia, or from Saint-Dominique [Haiti] or other places in the French West Indies (of which now only Guadaloupe and Martinique survived), French-supporting Indians who had settled within her borders such as the Attignawantan,[13] white Catholic settlers who immigrated there from other parts of Europe, and of course black slaves. Many had lived there all their lives, others had been brought out of French Saint-Dominique by French planters fleeing the revolutionaries. The economy of Louisiana was based largely on sugar plantations, with fisheries being a secondary aspect, and slavery was considered an economic necessity. It was thus that in 1685, King Louis XIV had issued the ‘Code Noir’, a decree defining proper colonial practices with an emphasis on slavery.
The Code Noir was retained with some minor modifications into Louisiana’s new status as a Grand Duchy, and had its part to play in TFC’s story. Although brutal by today’s standards, compared to the arbitrary practices used in the slave-holding parts of the ENA it was positively progressive. The Code enshrined the idea that slaves were community property, and while a master was permitted to beat his slave in punishment as he would his child, serious abuse or mistreatment would result in criminal proceedings—whereas in Virginia and Carolina the law regarded slaves as the personal property of the master to do with as he wished. The Code Noir also criminalised the practice of raping female slaves or using them as concubines, forbade the marriage of slaves without the slaves’ own consent, and made it the master’s responsibility to feed all their slaves, even those who could not work due to illness or age. The fines exacted on the masters went two-thirds to the government and one-third to the nearest hospital, therefore representing the first recorded state-provided health service in the Americas.
The TFC’s story really begins with the political realignment in the ENA following the election of 1819 and the breakup of the Constitutionalist Party. Celebrated war hero and planter in Cuba, John Alexander, led the southern faction as the Whigs, while the Quincyite remnant became the Neutrals. This had significant, unintended effects on the politics of Virginia and Carolina. Virginia, the so-called Old Dominion, had been at the heart of Prince Frederick’s plan to reclaim his throne and could be considered the epicentre of the original Patriot movement. Therefore, even when the Patriots came to be mainly seen as a northern-interests party, there was a hard core of Virginians, including influential aristocrats, who remained Patriots out of tradition. In Carolina, on the other hand, it had been the Constitutionalists who dominated the slaveholding aristocracy and the few Patriots represented an awkward choice by settlers in places like Arkensor and Cuba who didn’t want to vote Constitutionalist but were repelled by the American Radical Party.
This changed with the split of the Constitutionalists into the Whigs and Neutrals. While the Patriots benefited in the short term, their vote in the southern Confederations vanished. The planters could vote Whig, the settlers and commoners could vote Neutral, and the small number of progressives and abolitionists could vote Radical: the Patriots, whose electoral position had always been one of comfortable, vague Toryism, no longer had any appeal. The 1819 election had seen Artemas Ward Jr.’s Patriots elected with a relatively huge majority of 20, but 1822 would be a different story. In this time, both the Whig and Neutral leaders (John Alexander and Sir Robert Johnson respectively) strove to define their new parties’ identities beyond stereotype—rich slaveholding planters and wild lawless frontiersmen respectively. The Neutrals moved close to the Radicals, building on the relationship they had established in Pennsylvania, with the idea that the two would form an electoral pact—the Neutrals would run candidates in the rural constituencies and the Radicals in the urban ones. One sticking point was the matter of slavery, which grew to be a significant question across American politics at the time. The Radicals saw its abolition as their raison d’etre, while the Neutrals were—well—neutral on the subject, and keen not to alienate any of their minor-slaveholder constituents. The policy eventually put forward was ultimately the brainchild of Stephen Bartlett, Radical MCP for New Hampshire-Second. Inspired by the traditional town meetings of his native New England, where the entire population of a town would congregate to vote on a proposal, he suggested the same notion for entire provinces, Confederations, or even the Empire itself.
The Radicals and Neutrals fixed Bartlett’s proposal on a ‘Confederate Meeting’ which would see the question of whether to ban slavery put to the entire electorate of each Confederation. This was intended both to appease some of the more wavering Neutrals and as a slap in the face to the Whigs, who made much of their commitment to ‘Confederate Supremacy’, arguing that the confederations’ governments should enjoy more power than the imperial government. Therefore, the two parties agreed on a pledge that if serving together in government, they would propose such Meetings to the remaining slave-holding Confederations. Alexander and the Whigs condemned this as unconstitutional, a question that posed considerable headaches for the American Law Lords considering the vagueness of the Constitution on the issue of just what prerogatives the confederate governments had.
The Whigs sought to broaden their appeal in different ways. Much of Carolina’s population came from fiery anti-Catholic Scots or Ulster Scots, but the absorption of Florida, Cuba and Hispaniola led Alexander to spearhead an initially unpopular new position. Having successfully campaigned for the right of Spanish aristocrats in Cuba to keep their land and slaves in exchange for swearing a loyalty oath, Alexander further argued in favour of greater rights for Catholics and even perhaps Catholic emancipation. This position sent shockwaves through the American political establishment, where the latter had long assumed to be one of the Radicals’ ivory-tower ideas. Needless to say, the Salem Movement in New England promptly denounced Alexander as the devil, but few in New England voted Whig anyway. There was further method in Alexander’s madness as he argued for closer ties with New Spain and Louisiana, while the Radical-Neutrals favoured a more pro-UPSA position. In the end the 1822 election delivered a significant blow to the Patriots, with the party losing almost all their seats in the southern Confederations and the Radicals and Neutrals making important gains—but the Whigs also did well, dominating Carolina and winning most seats in Virginia.
The result was America’s first hung parliament, and the country was in uncharted territory: though the Continental Parliament was ultimately based on Britain’s, politics in Britain were as yet far less partisan and this idea had not really arisen. In the end inspiration was taken from the situation in Pennsylvania and it became clear that an alliance must be forged between the reduced Patriots and either the Radical-Neutrals or the Whigs. Artemas Ward Jr. resigned, with the party leadership passing (by the old boys’ network rather than a formal election) to Josiah Crane (West Jersey-First). Crane then negotiated with both parties. Through means many have called controversial, it was the Whigs who became the Patriots’ coalition partners. This is, however, perhaps inevitable; the Patriots were no longer competitive in the south, but the Radical-Neutrals had become their main foe in the northern three Confederations. A Patriot-Radical-Neutral coalition would therefore have excluded the south from almost any representation. The matter nonetheless produced immediate fallout, with Radical and Neutral-supporting newspapers lambasting the ‘corrupt bargain’. Under the informal agreement, the Whigs would support the Patriots’ general legislative programme in exchange for not standing in the way of pro-Catholic and pro-free trade moves on a Confederal level and recognising slavery as a southern institution. The latter also developed into the institution of an American version of Louisiana’s Code Noir, which Alexander admired, simply translated as the Black Code, which somewhat improved the lives of slaves and avoided the problem of what to do with mixed-race children by criminalising interracial copulation.
The Patriot-Whig coalition, sometimes called Blue-Red after the party colours, proved reasonably stable but provoked anger not only within the ENA but also abroad. Freedonia was disgusted. One Freedish artist, Pueblo Jonas, famously painted In Memorium, an image of a gravestone bearing the words “AMERICAN LIBERTY: 1751-1822”. But if trade with the Royal Africa Company grew more strained, with New Spain and Louisiana it boomed, with trade barriers that the Spaniards had always been reluctant to lower finally being fully removed. It was in this economic climate that new companies grow, and TFC was simply the most successful of them.
Simeon Wragg had been one of the American soldiers who had conquered Florida in 1764. Settling there afterwards, he owned a cattle plantation near the land eventually given over to the Seminoles as part of the Cherokee Empire. Through this proximity his son, Jehoshaphat Wragg, became noted for his close contacts and good relations with the Indians, sometimes being called in to settle disputes. His fame and wealth grew, his farming diversifying. Jehoshaphat had three sons of his own who, continuing the Biblical theme, he named Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego. Abednego Wragg, the youngest, went off to join the Church where he comes little further into this story, save for some correspondence with Macallister. Shadrach, as the eldest, inherited his father’s wealth and land. Meshach decided to join the army, and fought in the Seigneur Offensive, being slightly wounded in the shoulder in Normandy in 1799. He recovered from a serious fever and was invalided home. Shadrach was initially concerned, as his brother had changed in temperament from his experiences and he was worried he might be resentful of Shadrach’s ownership of the family property. But Meshach Wragg did not covet his brother’s ox (literally) and after his recovery swiftly became bored. He became an adventurer, at one point even considering joining the Morton and Lewis expedition. Instead, though, he spent some time with the Cherokee, following in his father’s footsteps, and travelled throughout Louisiana, the West Indies and Mexico. He seemed to have a talent for ending up in the most unlikely scrapes, such as being present in Hispaniola during the revolution AND in Mexico City during the burning; his memoirs would be published some years later and described as being ‘in the Munchhausen tradition’.
After the Third Platinean War, Meshach Wragg returned home once more, buzzing with ideas. The brothers knew from their friendship with Colm Macallister, a Linnaean researcher formerly of Ulster who had studied at William and Mary College, that the southern Confederations had serious problems with crop failures and low yields. Meshach, having picked up a little Linnaean training himself, had recognised several potential crops that could do well on Virginian and Carolinian plantations—which were often dependent solely on tobacco and, to a lesser extent, cotton.[14] Since the cutoff of the slave trade, Virginian planters in particular seemed to concern more of their time selling slaves to one another than what they did with said slaves once they had them.
The Wraggs—and Macallister—changed all that. Bringing Macallister and others with him on a return tour of the relevant areas, they brought back (among other products) peanut pods from New Orleans[15] and tropical fruit from Mexico and Guatemala, from which the company got its name. Both were cultivated successfully, primarily peanuts in Georgia and West Florida and fruit in East Florida. Macallister, along with other scientists, showed that the cultivation of peanuts in a crop-rotation system with cotton would reinvigorate soil that had previously given lamentable yields of cotton.[16] The Wragg family fortunes boomed just in time for the liberalisation of trade under the Patriot-Whig government, and fully free trade opened up with New Spain and Louisiana as well as Europe (which was always hungry for exotic foods). TFC was incorporated and floated on the New York Stock Exchange in 1823, and the rest is history.
TFC has had its fair share of morally questionable moments, like most companies. Yet it is most often attacked for the—perhaps inadvertent—role it played in the development of ideological views that would cause endless problems throughout the world. Ultimately stemming from Macallister’s published observations on the slave plantations used by TFC for its peanut production, The Burden was published in 1824 and sparked immediate controversy. Its cover depicted a representation of Christian from The Pilgrim’s Progress bowed under the weight of his titular Burden, but Christian was a generic white man and the Burden was shown as a generic black slave, his eyes closed and his mouth an O of snores. The book was the first scientific defence of slavery, based on a new approach to Linnaean Racism. It criticised the French Jacobins for their beliefs about the superiority of one white race over the other, and it also condemned Linnaeus himself for placing the white race too obviously over the yellow, red and black. “It should be obvious to any man who has visited the Cherokee Empire that those people are just as much human beings as you or I. They have been disadvantaged by the lottery of history, just as the Welch and Irish were before them, but there is nothing intrinsically superior about the Anglo-Saxon race, or else there would be no Scotch[17] identity left. And of course they keep Negroes just as satisfactorily as any white man. The yellow man is more mysterious, but to-day we see him grasp the future and throw off his foreign Tartar oppressors in the south of his country, and one may even occasionally see him on the decks of ships at New York or Philadelphia. Is this a man of inferior quality as Linnaeus alleges? Surely not! His own lack of participation in the Burden is only thanks to the fact that he has not had an opportunity to do so, being too concerned with release from his own bondage: and what is a blessed state of affairs for a Negro is a monstrous torment for a human being, be he white, red or yellow.”
This small extract gives a flavour of the content. The Burden claimed that blacks were an intrinsically inferior people not merely to whites, but to all other the peoples of the world, arguing them to be a separate subspecies while elevating Orientals and native American Indians to the same level as whites—at the time, the second part was often the more controversial. This came on the back of the publishing of Erasmus Darwin III’s theory that primates such as the chimpanzee represented a ruined, decayed form of man[18] and The Burden used this to claim that Negroes were a halfway stage, half-men on the way to animalistic ruination, and only the institution of slavery under a benevolent human (i.e., white) master could prevent them from slipping further. After all, why else were chimpanzees found only in Africa?
In the past The Burden might have remained a local phenomenon, but the existence of Freedonia prompted many counterblasts from the educated blacks of that colony, with Jethro Carter describing the pamphlets and letters criss-crossing the Atlantic as ‘a war of words’. Many accused Macallister himself of writing it, which he always denied, though he undoubtedly supplied some scientific material. It did not come out until 1828 that the true author was Andrew Eveleigh, a rice planter from South Province, Carolina.[19]
This was a rather unfortunate time for him to be unmasked. For by this point he had already become leader of the Whig Party. And thus it was that the ENA would not be spared the Popular Wars...
[1] See Part #48.
[2] See Part #49.
[3] I.e. the War of the Spanish Succession.
[4] See Part #71.
[5] OTL, the entity formally known as the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies did not exist until after the Napoleonic Wars, when it was agreed at the Congress of Vienna that the two kingdoms would be permanently joined into one unit. However, the nickname was used years before that, as early as the mid-eighteenth century, and survives in TTL. Compare, for example, how James I and VI, an enthusiast for the idea of an Anglo-Scottish union, sometimes called himself ‘monarch of Great Britain’, even though in actuality he was simply King of England and Scotland in a personal union.
[6] Historical, and did devise the plan recounted here, but in OTL had no sons.
[7] Spanish dollars, that is. In OTL money of 2011, about 7 million British pounds or 11.4 million US dollars.
[8] Prior to this the Philippines were ruled as a captaincy-general from Mexico City, and after the implementation of the Arandite Plan, as a part of the Kingdom of Guatemala.
[9] See Part #90.
[10] See Part #98.
[11] Pseudopuissant corporation = megacorp. Basically, the term means any corporate entity that has powers on the same level as a nation state. ‘Non-national’ to exclude things like the East India Companies.
[12] If you think it’s unlikely that PAW would still bear Priestley’s name after two hundred years...in OTL, Priestley sold his soda water idea to a German named Johann Jacob Schweppe.
[13] The Attignawantan, a Huron tribe, actually settled north of the border of French Louisiana, but it is here counted as part of the same entity.
[14] Unlike OTL, cotton has remained only one of several significant crops, with none of the OTL cotton boom of this period. This is because the cotton gin (or as it is known in TTL, the cotton-thresher) has not yet been invented in TTL.
[15] 1870s OTL.
[16] OTL this would be demonstrated by George Washington Carver some decades later.
[17] Scotch and Welch were generally used in this period rather than Scottish and Welsh.
[18] OTL theory, though by someone else.
[19] I.e. OTL South Carolina. Still technically called South Carolina Province, Confederation of Carolina, but this redundancy has led Carolinians to shorten it to ‘South Province’. Rice was a major crop in OTL South Carolina up until the cotton gin brought the cotton boom, and it has continued in TTL.
“As the Good Book says, love thy neighbour; but be wary if thy brother loves thy neighbour even more.”
—American proverb, attributed to Jethro Carter (1795-1866)
*
From: “The Americas in the Watchful Peace” by I. I. Denisov (1960)—
...need not concern ourselves with that here. Let us turn instead to the matter of the Empire of New Spain, or as it was also known at the time, the Empire of the Indies.
The Empire was founded in exile by the Infante Charles, eldest son of King Charles III of Spain, and four of his five brothers. Spain was being invaded by the Republican French and, though she had held her own for some years, a combination of a focus on that front by new leader Jean de Lisieux and a civil war meant that she soon fell. Charles III’s deathbed words—more of a scream in fact—were that he had been poisoned by the Infante Charles’ favourite Miguel Pedro Alcántara Abarca de Bolea the Count of Aranda, and that Charles should be disinherited in favour of the second son Philip. Yet there was ambiguity over whether the King’s words should be considered lucid, as the manner of his death had been through a fever. That was enough for Spain to break apart along political lines, with Charles and Aranda on one side—soon joined by the remaining Infantes, Anthony, Ferdinand, John and Gabriel—and Philip and his own favourite Francisco Saavedra de Sangronis on the other.[1]
The resulting scuffle between the ‘Carlistas’ and ‘Felipistas’, as the two sides were dubbed, served only to fatally weaken Spain at the worst possible moment as the Jacobins under Marshal Boulanger swarmed over the Pyrenees. In the end the French conquered Spain, subordinated ‘Philip VII’ to their will, and under Aranda’s advice the Carlistas commandeered a fleet and sailed into the west.[2] Resistance to the French in Spain then passed to Portugal and, later, Naples; though Spanish Kleinkriegers certainly played an important role in the eventual driving of the French from the country, their efforts were disorganised and local in nature, and at first at least tended to accept Portuguese or Neapolitan overlordship, with little loyalty to the vanished Carlistas or the collaborationist Felipistas. It is worth remembering that at this point it had only been around a century since the current Bourbon ruling house of Spain had been installed in the First War of Supremacy,[3] and its roots did not go deep. Spain was therefore divided once more into Castile and Aragon (although, technically, the two had never been politically united in the way England and Scotland, for instance, had been). Castile was placed under the rule of the boy king Alfonso XII, son of the murdered Philip VII, who was a puppet of the Portuguese King Peter IV, while Aragon was placed into personal union with Naples and Sicily.[4]
King Charles VI and VIII of Naples and Sicily thus also briefly became King Charles IV of Aragon before his death in 1811, after which he was succeeded by Gennaro I. The use of a new regnal name, though not without precedent among Neapolitan nobility, helped simplify matters and avoid the potential for confusion with the fact that the exiled Emperor of New Spain also claimed to be Charles IV. Naples-Sicily-Aragon, largely under the influence of its “Unholy Trinity” of Englishmen (Horatio Nelson, Richard Hamilton and John Acton) who dominated the court, also adopted several unitary policies intended to bring the constituents of the Neapolitan Bourbon possessions closer together. While they remained formally separate kingdoms, trade barriers were lowered, laws were standardised to some extent, a common currency (the Neapolitan piastra, although Spanish dollars remained concurrently in use in Aragon) and a single flag was used. For all these reasons, and because the Kingdoms of Naples and Sicily had informally been known before the war as “The Two Sicilies”,[5] Naples-Sicily-Aragon was sometimes known as the Kingdom of the Three Sicilies.
The division of Spain, recognised by the European powers at the Congress of Copenhagen, dashed the hopes of the Infantes for a quick triumphant return. But they had had business of their own. The Count of Aranda—swiftly elevated to Duke—was the exponent of a new model of government that had originally been devised by his father, Pedro Pablo Abarca de Bolea the 10th Count.[6] The ‘Arandite Plan’, as it was later known, would be one of the most influential innovations in monarchical government structure since the Renaissance. The Arandas, father and son, had devised their ideas in response to the Second Platinean War and the hard-won independence of the UPSA, as well as through observation of the Empire of North America. The Arandas argued that New World colonies had now grown too large, populous and self-contained to be treated as distant outposts or integral parts of the home country. They required devolved government of a type that would bind the people to their rulers in the same manner it did back in Europe. Aranda the Younger argued that the ENA was not a perfect model of government because it ultimately relied on an appointed Governor-General as head of state. He claimed that the ENA only remained so loyal to Great Britain because of the example of Prince Frederick living among the Americans, and as soon as the events of the 1740s passed from living memory, the ENA would start to grow restless, indeed saying this was already happening with the fractiousness between the Monroe and Fox Ministries across the Atlantic. Aranda’s thesis on this score remains furiously debated, but is difficult to consider as events, in the form of Le Grand Crabe, intervened and ensured that the Anglo-American relationship would in any case be utterly transformed beyond all recognition.
In any case, the Arandite Plan instead proposed giving each large colony not simply a Governor or Viceroy of some variety, as was the usual case under the Spanish Empire, but a full, hereditary monarch who would be able to establish the same relationship with his people as the King of Spain did with those in the Peninsula. In order to hold the Empire together, the King of Spain would be elevated to Emperor and would have both direct authority over Spain proper and higher authority over the lesser kings, controlling their foreign policy while their domestic policy remained their own. It is generally accepted that the Infante Charles had wanted to implement the plan on succeeding to the throne of Spain, and that his father Charles III had been sceptical of diluting his authority, perhaps influencing his distrust of Aranda. Now the Infantes were in exile, the Arandite Plan was fully implemented, with Charles becoming Emperor over a Spanish America divided into three kingdoms—Mexico, Guatemala and New Granada—and each assigned a king, Anthony, Ferdinand and John respectively. The fourth brother, Gabriel, was placed in charge of forming a new army, which soon became greatly important as the Solidaridad Party-led UPSA attacked. As every schoolchild knows, the Cherry Massacre and other events ensured that the UPSA, against the odds, lost the war and lost Lower Peru to the Empire, along with some border territory to the Portuguese in Brazil.
Lower Peru was reformed into a Kingdom (often simply just called ‘Peru’, presumably because before the UPSA’s independence the Viceroyalty of Peru had covered the whole of the area and it was intended to imply an irredentist claim on the whole UPSA) and Gabriel became its king. While he embarked on bloody suppression campaigns of the Tahuantinsuya autonomous native state within Lower Peru, he was more cautious towards the people of the kingdom proper. He reinstated slavery, it is true, but under the Meridians the ban on slavery had barely been enforced in Peru, with its large population of rich slaveholders: the UPSA only grew strongly abolitionist after the loss of Peru by its nature removed dissenting pro-slavery voices. What surprised the Meridians, and somewhat appalled the rich Peruvians who had patiently been waiting more than twenty years for Spain to reclaim them, was that Gabriel was carefully vague on the issue of the Casta system. He did not formally accept the Meridians’ total abolition of the Casta divisions, but he ensured that Criollos used to enjoying the same rights as Peninsulares were unofficially allowed to continue to enjoy them. Gabriel was aware that to rule the country he needed the hearts and minds of all the important individuals, not just the minority of rich Peninsulares.
Throughout the rest of the Empire of New Spain, the new model of government was applied with at least an attempt at consistency. Aranda and the local liberals wanted some form of limited parliamentary representation. The Emperor Charles was not so keen, but decided to adopt a system that would give his brothers the headaches and prevent any interference with his own prerogative—or, less cynically, we can say that he believed the people should have a say in local domestic affairs but not in matters of foreign policy and war. A memorandum found in the diaries of the Emperor’s Criollo favourite Juan Joaquín de Iturbide supports this: “Ignore the people utterly and you will fall. My father should have learned this with the bread riots and the fiasco over the French fashions. But you cannot listen to them about everything, they cannot be allowed to rule a nation. France has ultimately survived because two evil men in succession seized control as dictators. If she had truly been governed by some revolutionary committee, she would have fallen long before she could think to invade us. The people will want to spend zero in taxes on the military until war comes, and then they will blame you for not having any soldiers. They cannot be entrusted with such matters.” The authenticity of this note remains hotly debated among scholars.
As the term “Cortes” had become somewhat tainted by association with the UPSA’s Cortes Nacionales, the term “Congreso” was used for the three new parliaments, which initially were set up in the capitals of the three kingdoms: San Francisco for Mexico, Léon for Guatemala and Santa Fe for New Granada. (Peru was not granted a Congreso due to concerns over how voting would work thanks to Gabriel’s ambiguity over the Casta system). Initially the plan was to restrict voting to Peninsulares, but it rapidly became obvious that this was unsustainable thanks to the separation between the Empire and Spain herself. The system eventually adopted granted the vote automatically to all Peninsulares and then also to Criollos who passed a property qualification. The electorates were thus small, and the resulting Congresos were typical of such limited-franchise assemblies, with little formalised partisanship as almost all the deputies were rich gentlemen. Nonetheless, this move did somewhat smooth the reform of New Spain, and reform was certainly needed—not simply out of the aims of the Arandite Plan, but because the world had changed.
The purpose of Spanish America, ever since Hernan Cortés proclaimed that he and his men suffered from a rare disease of the heart that could be cured only with gold, was to generate wealth. Treasure ship convoys crossed the Atlantic, carrying a seemingly inexhaustible supply of precious metals, perpetually tempting targets for pirates and privateers for centuries. In the sixteenth century, Sir Francis Drake had captured a ship off Lima carrying twenty-five thousand dollars[7] of Peruvian gold, yet that was just a drop in the ocean. Now, though, Spain was held by hostile powers and there was nowhere for the treasure fleets to go. The economy of the two Spanish states was necessarily affected by this sudden cutoff, but this was somewhat masked by the fact that, in the gold-poor environment of Europe in the Watchful Peace, other countries urgently wished to buy Castilian gold in order to rebuild their own stocks, especially Britain. Nonetheless, the Portuguese influence over Castile meant that these sales were generally conducted in such a way to benefit Portugal all the more, which stoked resentment among the Castilians.
New Spain, whose government was initially led by the Duke of Aranda and later by Bernardo O’Higgins (despite the latter’s chequered performance as a general in the Thrid Platinean War) had to reform to survive in this new world. This became particularly acute after she lost the Philippine War of 1817-21 with Castile and Portugal, meaning the Philippines were separated from Spanish America and ruled as a separate colony by Castile—which in practice meant by Portugal.[8] The war had also seen the New Spaniards raid Castile and Galicia (now Portuguese) in order to gauge support for them; unfortunately, this somewhat backfired when risings were promptly bloodily put down by the Castilian and Portuguese authorities. The New Spaniards did manage to retrieve the symbolic bells of the Church of Santiago de Compostela, but were forced to abandon them in the Rio Tambre while fleeing the Portuguese.[9]
It is generally considered to be the loss of this war which prompted a realignment of priorities in the Empire. Formerly she had been hostile to the UPSA and standoffish to the Empire of North America and the Grand Duchy of Louisiana, particularly since the latter’s settlers had encroached on her territory. Now it became clear that she could not afford to treat her neighbours as enemies, not when the Congress authority in Europe meant that by default she was regarded as a pretender and a pariah. The new O’Higgins ministry saw a more open-handed approach to the other nations of the Americas. It also helped that, thanks to the Portuguese’s role in the Third Platinean War, Portugal was now a common enemy of both the UPSA and New Spain. To quote Bulkeley, “when it comes to bringing together two mortal enemies, there is nothing—absolutely nothing in the world—no diplomatic initiative, no friendship between rulers, no religious conversion—that can possibly compare to the effects of a third party muscling in on their private enmity.” The rejoinder to the Societists is obvious.
1821 was also the year that New Spain’s capitals were shuffled. Fourteen years of painstaking rebuilding, off and on in the difficult conditions of the Vale of Mexico, ended with the final reconstruction of the City of Mexico, now a new city purpose-built as the capital of the Empire. The architecture of the government buildings was enormously symbolic and widely praised. Much of it was neo-Baroque, intended to evoke the lost Spain over the sea, but this was seamlessly blended with examples of native architecture, drawing attention to the way the Arandite Plan was intended to draw the component parts of the Empire closer together. Furthermore, the native architecture was not simply that of the Aztecs who had once occupied this site with their capital of Tenochtitlan, but of the pyramids of the Mayans of Guatemala, the palafitos of the peoples of New Granada, and the terraces of the Tahuantinsuya of Peru (even as Gabriel suppressed them). The disparate styles, taken from an area wider than the whole of Europe, were employed skilfully when they could easily have clashed. The most important architect involved in the project was, ironically, Portuguese—João de Sequeira.
The imperial court therefore moved from Veracruz to Mexico City. However, the governance of the Kingdom of Mexico had been in question for a while. The intention of governing the country from the distant northern outpost of San Francisco had been a deliberate attempt to shift the centre of gravity of the kingdom northwards and bring more settlers to California, the disputed Oregon Country and Texas. But San Francisco was nothing more than an outpost and King Ferdinand had struggled to govern from it. In practice, he had appointed a rather miserable viceroy and had governed either from Veracruz along with his brother, or increasingly living in the City of Mexico as it was rebuilt, helping to supervise the operation. The Mexican Congreso also met in Veracruz rather than San Francisco, and this was formalised when the Emperor moved to Mexico City. Veracruz became the new capital of Mexico. Ferdinand was acutely aware, though, of the importance of bringing settlers to the north, even more than before as gold had been found in California in 1818 and unauthorised foreign prospectors were flocking there.[10] Therefore he created a formal captaincy-general of California and appointed a full captain-general and government to rule autonomously in San Francisco, with the responsibility for managing the gold boom.
This decision has been much analysed and criticised. Some criticism, one feels, is simply aesthetic—the fact that Ferdinand had spoilt the neat two-level Arandite system by reinstating some of the confusing multiple levels of government of the old Spanish America. But on the other hand, Ferdinand did recognise that the situation in the California needed close attention, so his move may have delayed later events rather than hastening them.
On a third hand, of course, it also meant he was the first person to formally delineate the provinces of Old, New and California as possessing a common identity distinct of that from Mexico...
*
From: “An Economic History of the New World”, by Pablo V. de Almeida, 1920—
The claim for the world’s first non-national pseudopuissant corporation is a much disputed one.[11] If we may ignore the more ancient and fanciful suggestions, there are two main candidates: Priestley Aerated Water (PAW) of South America and the Tropical Fruit Company (TFC) of North America.[12] Both companies have a chequered history. PAW certainly predates TFC by some years, but took longer to reach the height of its power. Let us examine the origins of TFC.
Ultimately TFC originates from the consequences of political developments in three countries: the Empire of New Spain, the Empire of North America, and sandwiched between them the Grand Duchy of Louisiana. The latter enjoyed new and more organised leadership from 1814 onwards, as the pair of exiled coup planners the Duke of Aumont and the Vicomte de Barras were installed as Grand Duke and prime minister respectively. Both men, especially Barras, threw themselves into their work out of fear of Bonaparte and bitterness of their failure to stop him. Their chief goal was economic development. Louisiana was an oddity of history, the leftovers of British racial purging of the former French colonies in Acadia and Canada. She was made up of a combination of white French settlers who had originally come to New Orleans, the same such settlers from Canada and Acadia, or from Saint-Dominique [Haiti] or other places in the French West Indies (of which now only Guadaloupe and Martinique survived), French-supporting Indians who had settled within her borders such as the Attignawantan,[13] white Catholic settlers who immigrated there from other parts of Europe, and of course black slaves. Many had lived there all their lives, others had been brought out of French Saint-Dominique by French planters fleeing the revolutionaries. The economy of Louisiana was based largely on sugar plantations, with fisheries being a secondary aspect, and slavery was considered an economic necessity. It was thus that in 1685, King Louis XIV had issued the ‘Code Noir’, a decree defining proper colonial practices with an emphasis on slavery.
The Code Noir was retained with some minor modifications into Louisiana’s new status as a Grand Duchy, and had its part to play in TFC’s story. Although brutal by today’s standards, compared to the arbitrary practices used in the slave-holding parts of the ENA it was positively progressive. The Code enshrined the idea that slaves were community property, and while a master was permitted to beat his slave in punishment as he would his child, serious abuse or mistreatment would result in criminal proceedings—whereas in Virginia and Carolina the law regarded slaves as the personal property of the master to do with as he wished. The Code Noir also criminalised the practice of raping female slaves or using them as concubines, forbade the marriage of slaves without the slaves’ own consent, and made it the master’s responsibility to feed all their slaves, even those who could not work due to illness or age. The fines exacted on the masters went two-thirds to the government and one-third to the nearest hospital, therefore representing the first recorded state-provided health service in the Americas.
The TFC’s story really begins with the political realignment in the ENA following the election of 1819 and the breakup of the Constitutionalist Party. Celebrated war hero and planter in Cuba, John Alexander, led the southern faction as the Whigs, while the Quincyite remnant became the Neutrals. This had significant, unintended effects on the politics of Virginia and Carolina. Virginia, the so-called Old Dominion, had been at the heart of Prince Frederick’s plan to reclaim his throne and could be considered the epicentre of the original Patriot movement. Therefore, even when the Patriots came to be mainly seen as a northern-interests party, there was a hard core of Virginians, including influential aristocrats, who remained Patriots out of tradition. In Carolina, on the other hand, it had been the Constitutionalists who dominated the slaveholding aristocracy and the few Patriots represented an awkward choice by settlers in places like Arkensor and Cuba who didn’t want to vote Constitutionalist but were repelled by the American Radical Party.
This changed with the split of the Constitutionalists into the Whigs and Neutrals. While the Patriots benefited in the short term, their vote in the southern Confederations vanished. The planters could vote Whig, the settlers and commoners could vote Neutral, and the small number of progressives and abolitionists could vote Radical: the Patriots, whose electoral position had always been one of comfortable, vague Toryism, no longer had any appeal. The 1819 election had seen Artemas Ward Jr.’s Patriots elected with a relatively huge majority of 20, but 1822 would be a different story. In this time, both the Whig and Neutral leaders (John Alexander and Sir Robert Johnson respectively) strove to define their new parties’ identities beyond stereotype—rich slaveholding planters and wild lawless frontiersmen respectively. The Neutrals moved close to the Radicals, building on the relationship they had established in Pennsylvania, with the idea that the two would form an electoral pact—the Neutrals would run candidates in the rural constituencies and the Radicals in the urban ones. One sticking point was the matter of slavery, which grew to be a significant question across American politics at the time. The Radicals saw its abolition as their raison d’etre, while the Neutrals were—well—neutral on the subject, and keen not to alienate any of their minor-slaveholder constituents. The policy eventually put forward was ultimately the brainchild of Stephen Bartlett, Radical MCP for New Hampshire-Second. Inspired by the traditional town meetings of his native New England, where the entire population of a town would congregate to vote on a proposal, he suggested the same notion for entire provinces, Confederations, or even the Empire itself.
The Radicals and Neutrals fixed Bartlett’s proposal on a ‘Confederate Meeting’ which would see the question of whether to ban slavery put to the entire electorate of each Confederation. This was intended both to appease some of the more wavering Neutrals and as a slap in the face to the Whigs, who made much of their commitment to ‘Confederate Supremacy’, arguing that the confederations’ governments should enjoy more power than the imperial government. Therefore, the two parties agreed on a pledge that if serving together in government, they would propose such Meetings to the remaining slave-holding Confederations. Alexander and the Whigs condemned this as unconstitutional, a question that posed considerable headaches for the American Law Lords considering the vagueness of the Constitution on the issue of just what prerogatives the confederate governments had.
The Whigs sought to broaden their appeal in different ways. Much of Carolina’s population came from fiery anti-Catholic Scots or Ulster Scots, but the absorption of Florida, Cuba and Hispaniola led Alexander to spearhead an initially unpopular new position. Having successfully campaigned for the right of Spanish aristocrats in Cuba to keep their land and slaves in exchange for swearing a loyalty oath, Alexander further argued in favour of greater rights for Catholics and even perhaps Catholic emancipation. This position sent shockwaves through the American political establishment, where the latter had long assumed to be one of the Radicals’ ivory-tower ideas. Needless to say, the Salem Movement in New England promptly denounced Alexander as the devil, but few in New England voted Whig anyway. There was further method in Alexander’s madness as he argued for closer ties with New Spain and Louisiana, while the Radical-Neutrals favoured a more pro-UPSA position. In the end the 1822 election delivered a significant blow to the Patriots, with the party losing almost all their seats in the southern Confederations and the Radicals and Neutrals making important gains—but the Whigs also did well, dominating Carolina and winning most seats in Virginia.
The result was America’s first hung parliament, and the country was in uncharted territory: though the Continental Parliament was ultimately based on Britain’s, politics in Britain were as yet far less partisan and this idea had not really arisen. In the end inspiration was taken from the situation in Pennsylvania and it became clear that an alliance must be forged between the reduced Patriots and either the Radical-Neutrals or the Whigs. Artemas Ward Jr. resigned, with the party leadership passing (by the old boys’ network rather than a formal election) to Josiah Crane (West Jersey-First). Crane then negotiated with both parties. Through means many have called controversial, it was the Whigs who became the Patriots’ coalition partners. This is, however, perhaps inevitable; the Patriots were no longer competitive in the south, but the Radical-Neutrals had become their main foe in the northern three Confederations. A Patriot-Radical-Neutral coalition would therefore have excluded the south from almost any representation. The matter nonetheless produced immediate fallout, with Radical and Neutral-supporting newspapers lambasting the ‘corrupt bargain’. Under the informal agreement, the Whigs would support the Patriots’ general legislative programme in exchange for not standing in the way of pro-Catholic and pro-free trade moves on a Confederal level and recognising slavery as a southern institution. The latter also developed into the institution of an American version of Louisiana’s Code Noir, which Alexander admired, simply translated as the Black Code, which somewhat improved the lives of slaves and avoided the problem of what to do with mixed-race children by criminalising interracial copulation.
The Patriot-Whig coalition, sometimes called Blue-Red after the party colours, proved reasonably stable but provoked anger not only within the ENA but also abroad. Freedonia was disgusted. One Freedish artist, Pueblo Jonas, famously painted In Memorium, an image of a gravestone bearing the words “AMERICAN LIBERTY: 1751-1822”. But if trade with the Royal Africa Company grew more strained, with New Spain and Louisiana it boomed, with trade barriers that the Spaniards had always been reluctant to lower finally being fully removed. It was in this economic climate that new companies grow, and TFC was simply the most successful of them.
Simeon Wragg had been one of the American soldiers who had conquered Florida in 1764. Settling there afterwards, he owned a cattle plantation near the land eventually given over to the Seminoles as part of the Cherokee Empire. Through this proximity his son, Jehoshaphat Wragg, became noted for his close contacts and good relations with the Indians, sometimes being called in to settle disputes. His fame and wealth grew, his farming diversifying. Jehoshaphat had three sons of his own who, continuing the Biblical theme, he named Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego. Abednego Wragg, the youngest, went off to join the Church where he comes little further into this story, save for some correspondence with Macallister. Shadrach, as the eldest, inherited his father’s wealth and land. Meshach decided to join the army, and fought in the Seigneur Offensive, being slightly wounded in the shoulder in Normandy in 1799. He recovered from a serious fever and was invalided home. Shadrach was initially concerned, as his brother had changed in temperament from his experiences and he was worried he might be resentful of Shadrach’s ownership of the family property. But Meshach Wragg did not covet his brother’s ox (literally) and after his recovery swiftly became bored. He became an adventurer, at one point even considering joining the Morton and Lewis expedition. Instead, though, he spent some time with the Cherokee, following in his father’s footsteps, and travelled throughout Louisiana, the West Indies and Mexico. He seemed to have a talent for ending up in the most unlikely scrapes, such as being present in Hispaniola during the revolution AND in Mexico City during the burning; his memoirs would be published some years later and described as being ‘in the Munchhausen tradition’.
After the Third Platinean War, Meshach Wragg returned home once more, buzzing with ideas. The brothers knew from their friendship with Colm Macallister, a Linnaean researcher formerly of Ulster who had studied at William and Mary College, that the southern Confederations had serious problems with crop failures and low yields. Meshach, having picked up a little Linnaean training himself, had recognised several potential crops that could do well on Virginian and Carolinian plantations—which were often dependent solely on tobacco and, to a lesser extent, cotton.[14] Since the cutoff of the slave trade, Virginian planters in particular seemed to concern more of their time selling slaves to one another than what they did with said slaves once they had them.
The Wraggs—and Macallister—changed all that. Bringing Macallister and others with him on a return tour of the relevant areas, they brought back (among other products) peanut pods from New Orleans[15] and tropical fruit from Mexico and Guatemala, from which the company got its name. Both were cultivated successfully, primarily peanuts in Georgia and West Florida and fruit in East Florida. Macallister, along with other scientists, showed that the cultivation of peanuts in a crop-rotation system with cotton would reinvigorate soil that had previously given lamentable yields of cotton.[16] The Wragg family fortunes boomed just in time for the liberalisation of trade under the Patriot-Whig government, and fully free trade opened up with New Spain and Louisiana as well as Europe (which was always hungry for exotic foods). TFC was incorporated and floated on the New York Stock Exchange in 1823, and the rest is history.
TFC has had its fair share of morally questionable moments, like most companies. Yet it is most often attacked for the—perhaps inadvertent—role it played in the development of ideological views that would cause endless problems throughout the world. Ultimately stemming from Macallister’s published observations on the slave plantations used by TFC for its peanut production, The Burden was published in 1824 and sparked immediate controversy. Its cover depicted a representation of Christian from The Pilgrim’s Progress bowed under the weight of his titular Burden, but Christian was a generic white man and the Burden was shown as a generic black slave, his eyes closed and his mouth an O of snores. The book was the first scientific defence of slavery, based on a new approach to Linnaean Racism. It criticised the French Jacobins for their beliefs about the superiority of one white race over the other, and it also condemned Linnaeus himself for placing the white race too obviously over the yellow, red and black. “It should be obvious to any man who has visited the Cherokee Empire that those people are just as much human beings as you or I. They have been disadvantaged by the lottery of history, just as the Welch and Irish were before them, but there is nothing intrinsically superior about the Anglo-Saxon race, or else there would be no Scotch[17] identity left. And of course they keep Negroes just as satisfactorily as any white man. The yellow man is more mysterious, but to-day we see him grasp the future and throw off his foreign Tartar oppressors in the south of his country, and one may even occasionally see him on the decks of ships at New York or Philadelphia. Is this a man of inferior quality as Linnaeus alleges? Surely not! His own lack of participation in the Burden is only thanks to the fact that he has not had an opportunity to do so, being too concerned with release from his own bondage: and what is a blessed state of affairs for a Negro is a monstrous torment for a human being, be he white, red or yellow.”
This small extract gives a flavour of the content. The Burden claimed that blacks were an intrinsically inferior people not merely to whites, but to all other the peoples of the world, arguing them to be a separate subspecies while elevating Orientals and native American Indians to the same level as whites—at the time, the second part was often the more controversial. This came on the back of the publishing of Erasmus Darwin III’s theory that primates such as the chimpanzee represented a ruined, decayed form of man[18] and The Burden used this to claim that Negroes were a halfway stage, half-men on the way to animalistic ruination, and only the institution of slavery under a benevolent human (i.e., white) master could prevent them from slipping further. After all, why else were chimpanzees found only in Africa?
In the past The Burden might have remained a local phenomenon, but the existence of Freedonia prompted many counterblasts from the educated blacks of that colony, with Jethro Carter describing the pamphlets and letters criss-crossing the Atlantic as ‘a war of words’. Many accused Macallister himself of writing it, which he always denied, though he undoubtedly supplied some scientific material. It did not come out until 1828 that the true author was Andrew Eveleigh, a rice planter from South Province, Carolina.[19]
This was a rather unfortunate time for him to be unmasked. For by this point he had already become leader of the Whig Party. And thus it was that the ENA would not be spared the Popular Wars...
[1] See Part #48.
[2] See Part #49.
[3] I.e. the War of the Spanish Succession.
[4] See Part #71.
[5] OTL, the entity formally known as the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies did not exist until after the Napoleonic Wars, when it was agreed at the Congress of Vienna that the two kingdoms would be permanently joined into one unit. However, the nickname was used years before that, as early as the mid-eighteenth century, and survives in TTL. Compare, for example, how James I and VI, an enthusiast for the idea of an Anglo-Scottish union, sometimes called himself ‘monarch of Great Britain’, even though in actuality he was simply King of England and Scotland in a personal union.
[6] Historical, and did devise the plan recounted here, but in OTL had no sons.
[7] Spanish dollars, that is. In OTL money of 2011, about 7 million British pounds or 11.4 million US dollars.
[8] Prior to this the Philippines were ruled as a captaincy-general from Mexico City, and after the implementation of the Arandite Plan, as a part of the Kingdom of Guatemala.
[9] See Part #90.
[10] See Part #98.
[11] Pseudopuissant corporation = megacorp. Basically, the term means any corporate entity that has powers on the same level as a nation state. ‘Non-national’ to exclude things like the East India Companies.
[12] If you think it’s unlikely that PAW would still bear Priestley’s name after two hundred years...in OTL, Priestley sold his soda water idea to a German named Johann Jacob Schweppe.
[13] The Attignawantan, a Huron tribe, actually settled north of the border of French Louisiana, but it is here counted as part of the same entity.
[14] Unlike OTL, cotton has remained only one of several significant crops, with none of the OTL cotton boom of this period. This is because the cotton gin (or as it is known in TTL, the cotton-thresher) has not yet been invented in TTL.
[15] 1870s OTL.
[16] OTL this would be demonstrated by George Washington Carver some decades later.
[17] Scotch and Welch were generally used in this period rather than Scottish and Welsh.
[18] OTL theory, though by someone else.
[19] I.e. OTL South Carolina. Still technically called South Carolina Province, Confederation of Carolina, but this redundancy has led Carolinians to shorten it to ‘South Province’. Rice was a major crop in OTL South Carolina up until the cotton gin brought the cotton boom, and it has continued in TTL.
Interesting. That title is just begging for unfortunate implications.
Though I wonder how the Empire of New Spain will do in the long run.
Though I wonder how the Empire of New Spain will do in the long run.
Hmm, with the Cherokee acceptance and Catholic tolerance, it seems the American South may be shaping up to be a better place than it is OTL. Though this concept of the White, Red and Yellow races beating up on the Black is a cause for concern, though at the same time oddly progressive.
I have to say, the Baroque-Nativist architecture of Mexico City has the potential to be ghastly, though I can see why it would be appealing to people in timeline, especially Mestizos.
I have to say, the Baroque-Nativist architecture of Mexico City has the potential to be ghastly, though I can see why it would be appealing to people in timeline, especially Mestizos.
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I smell a Californian independence movement brewing in that last section of the Spanish America bit. Perhaps it will flare up during the Popular Wars? I don't think so, as California will have far too little population to be a viable nation in the 1830s, but maybe later....
The fact that everyone seems to be piling on top of the blacks us worrying, but I hope the existence of Freedonia would be enough to refute that theory.
The fact that everyone seems to be piling on top of the blacks us worrying, but I hope the existence of Freedonia would be enough to refute that theory.
So will the Popular Wars in the ENA be about slavery? Possibly a slave revolt supported by abolitionists?
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