alternatehistory.com

Got another update finished. Rounding out the decade in the US before we take a look abroad and at the European Wars.


Part Fifty: Land of Liberty

Look to the West:
After the National War, a second wave of western movement and settlement occurred in the United States as people tired of the slumping economy and the wartorn regions of the country looked toward the Rocky Mountains and the Oregon Trail for hope at a new start and a better life. However, this migration was different. First, most of the people who moved west most often settled in already existing towns instead of founding new ones. Because of this, town and territory populations in the Rockies and on the Pacific coast exploded, resulting in the Northwest Territories being divided further in the early 1870s. The population boom also brought new states with Champoeg becoming a state in 1871 and Colorado being admitted in 1876. The second difference from the first wave of migration, was that this time, the people moving west were followed by railroads.

There were three main railroads that wove their way across the United States in the late nineteenth century. The longest of these was the first ever transcontinental railway in the Americas. Begun by the Union Pacific Railroad in the east, the railroad started by connecting three branches of the railway to Decatur, Demoine. These branches met in Decatur from Minneapolis and Duluth in the north, Chicago and Waterloo in the center, and Saint Louis in the south. Following roughly the route that had been planned out by Robert E. Lee, the transcontinental railway took over four years to complete and eventually made its first connection with the Pacific Ocean at Astoria. However, the main Pacific terminus of the railway soon shifted to the more northerly city of Tacoma after the completion of the Olympic Canal in 1903[2].

The lesser two of these railways did not stretch all the way to the Pacific Ocean, but instead stopped at the Rocky Mountains or along the border with California. The Missouri and South Platte Railway snaked west from Saint Louis along the Missouri and Platte rivers before reaching its western terminus at Ferroplano at the foothills of the Rockies. The more southerly Red River Western connected New Orleans and Galveston in the east with Santa Fe in the west. These railroads prompted a secondary boom in the southern Rockies during the 1880s as more deposits of precious metals were discovered in Colorado and New Mexico.


The Rule of Law:
The remainder of the 1860s also produced a number of developments in the way law was conducted in the country. In 1870, the Republican Congress and the states ratified the 13th amendment of the United States. This amendment achieved the goal that President Fremont had set out in the later years of the National War and officially banned slavery in all states in the United States. Several states which had joined the Confederacy or had not abolished slavery by the beginning of the National War had done so in the years following, but now it was ingrained in the nation's governing document. The first section of the amendment reads that "No person who is a citizen of these United States shall be subjected to any form of slavery or involuntary servitude, except as punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted.[1]" The following sections outline the United States government's ability to enforce the abolition of slavery.

Following the banning of slavery, several states in the former Confederacy tried to get around the amendment and cheat former slaves out of their freedom. One common method many plantation owners used during the 1870s was claiming that former slaves were not citizens of the United States and were thus eligible for slavery under the amendment. This rose to a national issue when a case was brought against the Supreme Court in 1873. The Lincoln court ruled that all former slaves are citizens of the United States as they were born in the country and are protected by the Constitution. Since then, this ruling has been expanded through interpretation to include all people born in the United States as citizens[3].

Elsewhere in the country, the territories had a rather different type of law. With the extent of the government involvement in the western territories being mostly limited to military outposts in many areas, the local and territorial governments became much more prominent in legal decisions. Local sheriffs like future Supreme Court justice Wyatt Earp attempted to maintain civility in the smaller towns while several gangs traveled around the western territories robbing and fighting with the local law enforcement as they went. Raids by native Americans were also troublesome, especially in the loosely settled Dakhota Territory. This status quo remained for the next few decades as the open range fostered cattle or bison drives similar to ones in the Pampas in Argentina and the Vaqueros in the Mexican countries. However, more western migration at the end of the century and parceling of the land in the territories caused the end of the frontier lifestyle[4].

[1] The part following the comma is copied from OTL's Thirteenth Amendment, the rest is my own.
[2] Is this too early for a canal across the Olympic Peninsula? I'm not sure.
[3] This was the sentiment of the Fourteenth Amendment in OTL, but here it's handled through a Supreme Court ruling.
[4] An update on the Wild West in TTL will be posted later, but for now here's a taste.