C'mon it's 19th century France. Stability was anathema to them
in this or any other timelineA House Divided: A TL
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C'mon it's 19th century France. Stability was anathema to them
in this or any other timeline
#22: Nations Not So Blest as Thee
A House Divided #22: Nations Not So Blest as Thee
"God has declared against us. He is manifestly for the Tories, and I fear the King also, which is much worse."
***
Selected points from “A Chronicle of the 19th Century”
(c) 1957 by Robert Weisberg (ed.)
Boston: Boston University Press
1837
Casimir-Pierre Perier resigns as President of the Council of Ministers of France, replaced by a caretaker ministry under Marshal Étienne Maurice Gérard. (May 18)
French legislative elections return a majority for the left. Louis-Mathieu Molé is appointed President of the Council of Ministers. (July 20)
1838
David “Davy” Crockett elected as the second President of the Republic of Texas, beating David Burnet in a lopsided contest. (September 3)
Louis-Mathieu Molé resigns as President of the Council of Ministers of France, replaced by Adolphe Thiers. (November 19)
1839
Anti-Corn Law League founded by Richard Cobden and John Bright. (February)
Chartist petition presented to Westminster and ignored by Parliament. (June)
Newport Rising: Chartists seize Westgate Hotel in Newport in protest of rejection. (November 4-5)
1840
Chartist Rising: Chartists in South Wales, Yorkshire, Lancashire take up arms in protest at execution of Newport Rising leaders, revolts put down by armed forces. (January-March)
Treaty of Scutari: Turkey cedes much of Levant and Hejaz to Egypt, Egyptian independence recognized. (August 4)
William Henry Harrison and Willie Person Mangum are re-elected as President and Vice President of the United States. (December 2)
1841
French legislative elections return a majority for the right. Adolphe Thiers is removed as President of the Council of Ministers, in favor of a conservative ministry under Marshal Jean-de-Dieu Soult. (August 6)
William Henry Harrison dies in office; Willie Person Mangum becomes 9th President of the United States. (October 27)
1842
Duke of Wellington resigns as Prime Minister; replaced by the Duke of Richmond. (March 21)
General election called. (April 3)
***
From "The Cambridge Encyclopaedia of British Politics"
(c) 1947 by Prof. Henry Goodwin (ed.)
Cambridge University Press
1842 GENERAL ELECTION: General election held in May-June 1842, shortly after the appointment of the 5th Duke of Richmond as Prime Minister. This penultimate election of the unreformed United Kingdom saw the Tory Government returned with an increased majority of the small electorate, eliminating the threat posed by a backbench rebellion of the surviving Canningites within the party. Attempts by Chartists and other radical groups to get working-class candidates elected came to nought, with groups outside the main two parties receiving less than a percent of the vote outside Ireland. However, a number of anti-Corn Law activists, including Richard Cobden, succeeded in getting elected under the Whig banner.
Tory: 383 (+28) (including approx. 40-50 “Canningites”)
Whig: 246 (-26)
Irish Repeal: 29 (-2)
***
Charles Gordon-Lennox, 5th Duke of Richmond, 5th Duke of Lennox
Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, 1842-1849
From “Great Britain 1830-1930: A Century of Upheaval”
(c) 1982 by Sophie Mathews
Oxford University Press
The years following the 1842 general election, while less chaotic than the periods immediately before or after, were a time of significant underlying tension. After the defeat of the Chartist Rising and the crackdowns that followed, the Wellington government began a move away from the open consensus of the 1830s and back toward the restrictive social legislation that had characterised the Liverpool years. [1] The time immediately after Waterloo had seen significant radical movements crop up, and the Tory government of the day had moved swiftly and decisively against them, passing the “Six Acts” restricting political activity [2] and sending in the army whenever things came to a head, most notoriously in the Peterloo massacre of 16 August 1819 when the cavalry charged into a crowd of protesters in Manchester, killing fifteen people and wounding several hundred. It is likely that Wellington saw parallels between those days and the Chartist Rising, and believed similar measures would solve the problem this time as well, thus the restoration of the Seditious Meetings Act, the Seizure of Arms Act and the Misdemeanours Act, quickly known collectively as the “Three Acts”. However, this failed to take into account two vital points.
Firstly, the situation was very different from that twenty years prior. Whereas the years after the fall of Napoleon were characterised by repression and conservatism all across Europe, and seemed to herald the return of the ancient social order that the French Revolution had done so much to disrupt, by the 1830s it was clear that the conservative experiment had failed, and liberalism seemed to be on the march across Europe. Indeed, so too in Britain up until the ascension of King Augustus. British radicalism, too, was a different beast in 1839 than in 1819. While groups such as the Hampden Clubs and the Spenceans displayed some degree of organisation and programmatic coherence, they never reached nearly the strength of the Chartists or the Anti-Corn Law League or the radicalism of the groups that succeeded them.
And secondly, while the Six Acts no doubt had a hand in quelling the unrest in the short term, they did not create governmental stability in the long term. For this, a far more important factor was the gradual liberalisation of Liverpool’s government in the 1820s, ultimately leading to the handover to Canning and the Reform Act. By opening up the body politic, however slowly and marginally, Liverpool and Canning were able to starve the radical movement of its middle-class support – a crucial factor in the success or failure of such movements, as simultaneous events in France show us.
This is where Wellington and Richmond failed in their calculations. The renewed Seizure of Arms Act 1840 was set to expire two years after its passage, as had the original, and the Richmond ministry made no attempt to renew it when the time limit was reached in August 1842. When they restored the Seditious Meetings Prevention Act, however, they did not append a time limit to it, but simply stated that it would remain in force “until such time as the Home Secretary may deem appropriate”. [3] The result of this was to repress the political life of Britain in a way unseen for a generation, and the act was righteously condemned across the country. But after the terrors of the previous years, there was little appetite for serious resistance, and so the Three Acts did in fact achieve their intended effect of staving off dissent in the short run.
The appointment of Charles Gordon-Lennox, 5th Duke of Richmond, previously Lord Chancellor, to the premiership was a sign that the King was moving his positions forward. While royal prerogative remained strong enough at the time to allow the monarch to personally choose a Prime Minister, it was a strongly established precedent for the monarch to listen to advice from senior figures in the governing party and choose a figure who was felt likely to keep the party together and lead a stable and effective ministry. [4] However, when Wellington announced his retirement in March 1842, Richmond was selected almost immediately and without consultation from any senior Tories except Richmond himself. To some extent the succession had been rumoured; the King, at the time sitting in the Lords as Duke of Cumberland, and Richmond had been allies in the “Ultra” grouping of the Canning era that opposed Catholic emancipation and the Reform Act, and while their personal relations were cordial at best (King Augustus was not known as a man who made friends easily), they were in fundamental agreement on the necessity of firm government.
The King and Richmond were equally in agreement on the other point that would come to dominate organised politics in the 1840s: the Corn Laws. [5] Inspired by Malthusian thinking, the Corn Laws were a series of import tariffs introduced under the Importation Act 1815, designed to keep prices up and prevent the flooding of the British food market; the laws set a maximum price of 80 shillings per quarter hundredweight [6] before foreign grain could be imported, but this was such a high ceiling that it never came to be exceeded in the time the Corn Laws were in force. The result of this was that wheat bread, the most basic staple of the English diet at the time, became expensive enough to starve a large number of people – the fact that the adoption of the Corn Laws coincided with the eruption of Mount Tambora and the subsequent “year without a summer” must not be discounted as a cause of the civil unrest that marked the following years.
The relative economic prosperity of the 1820s and 30s meant that the high price of grain became less and less of an issue, but from 1840 onward, most of Europe again entered hard times, with wages stagnating and several bad harvests, and thus the Corn Laws again became an issue. The Whigs were nominally supportive of free trade, but over their brief spell in government they were faced with a good economic outlook and devoted most of their energies to social reforms while leaving the Corn Laws in place. [7] Of course, the Whig party did not abandon its efforts when out of government, and from the 1837 election, the future Radical grandee Charles Pelham Villiers [8] represented Wolverhampton in the lower house where he eagerly championed the cause of free trade. He launched debates against the Corn Laws every year from 1838 until their repeal, and every year the motion was voted down by a large majority of the Commons. Even so, the cause of repeal was beginning to draw support around the country, as the Anti-Corn Law League was founded in February 1839 [9] by Richard Cobden and John Bright; Cobden joined Villiers in Parliament from 1842, and the two became close allies. Bright remained outside Parliament, because he served as the League’s chief organiser; originally he had led mass meetings around the country addressing crowds, taking advantage of his renowned oratorical skill, but after such meetings became politically impossible he restricted his talents to smaller indoor meetings of local Free Trade Clubs, whose numbers grew over the course of the decade…
***
Scene at an Irish workhouse during the Great Famine, ca. 1846
From “Éirinn go Brách: A History of Ireland in the United Kingdom”
(c) 1969 by Dr Cearbhall Ó Mairtín
Translation (c) 1971 by Pádraig Murphy
Dublin: Cló na Staire
With the possible exception of the campaigns of Cromwell, no event in the past five hundred years of history can be said to have affected our island as severely as an Gorta Mór, the Great Famine. While the exact death toll varies from source to source, the accepted figure is somewhere around a million, with some estimates as low as 800,000 and some as high as 1.5 million. [10] In addition, an equal or slightly greater number of Irish men and women emigrated in the wake of the famine, seeking fortune on new shores, often in what was then the United States, but large numbers also went to Britain, Canada and Australia…
…The causes of the Famine go back several decades at best, and several centuries at most – while Ireland’s population was overwhelmingly Catholic everywhere except Antrim and Down, the landowners were disproportionately Anglo-Irish Protestants, and the great mass of the people lived in tenancy under grim conditions. The vast majority of landlords lived in Dublin or England, and took no actual part in the running of their estates, merely collecting the income and leaving day-to-day management in the hands of middlemen. Because they were rewarded for lower running costs and higher yields, the middlemen were frequently harsh and cruel against the tenants, who were themselves left with barely enough to survive.
Because of the Corn Laws, the common people of Ireland came to be shut out of the grain market, with the result that the main staple of the Irish diet was the potato. Most Irish tenant farmers of the time were cottiers, who leased a small cottage with a potato field connected to it and paid rent in the form of labour on the landlord’s estate, and for them the potato formed the cornerstone of life, providing the main or sole source of sustenance alongside well water. It is not hard to imagine, then, the effect wrought by the arrival in Ireland of the potato blight in the summer of 1845…
…The blight is now thought to have originated from Mexico, from where it spread north into the United States and then, carried unwittingly on merchant ships, east to Europe. It reached the British Isles in August 1845, when the Gardeners’ Gazette [11] reported that the potato crops of the Isle of Wight had been afflicted by a “blight of unusual character” which caused the leaves of the plants to turn brown and shrivelled and the tubers to rot from the inside. The blight took no more than two days to infect an entire crop, and there was no known way to prevent it. By the second week of September it was in Ireland, and upwards of a third of 1845’s potato crop was destroyed by it. In 1846, the figure would be 75%. The Great Famine had begun…
***
1847 poster of Daniel O'Connell as "The Champion of Liberty", made in Pennsylvania
From “Great Britain 1830-1930: A Century of Upheaval”
(c) 1982 by Sophie Mathews
Oxford University Press
The Irish Repeal Association was founded by Daniel O’Connell in 1830, shortly after the success of the campaign for Catholic emancipation. The goal of the Association was to repeal the Act of Union 1800 and create a separate Kingdom of Ireland with its own parliament, but retaining the British monarchy in a personal union; this, it was hoped, would create a more effective and responsive government for the country. [12] The cause of repeal was popular among the Irish Catholic population, and when the country went to the polls in 1833, O’Connell and several others stood as candidates under the banner of the Repeal Association. Thirty-two of them were returned, eleven of whom were unopposed, and O’Connell himself moved from Clare to Dublin City. Once in Parliament, they quickly dropped their unconditional demand for repeal, and several of them accepted appointments from the Lansdowne ministry; however, like the Lansdowne ministry itself, this arrangement was not long for the world, and the Duke of Wellington had no time for the Repealers. Although born and raised in Ireland, Wellington was an aristocratic Protestant and regarded himself as firmly British. Indeed, O’Connell is supposed to have once said of him that “to be sure, he was born in Ireland, but being born in a stable does not make a man a horse”. [13]
The return to the political wilderness did not disillusion O’Connell, who resolved to continue building up the Repeal Association, and when the Whigs offered him a pact for the 1837 election, he rejected the offer. [14] In the event, the party largely maintained its position, and O’Connell turned away from Parliamentary work and toward mass meetings, of which he organised six around Ireland between 1838 and 1840. His last and largest one was held at the Hill of Tara, the traditional seat of the High Kings of Ireland, where he addressed a crowd of over a hundred thousand supporters. [15] Occurring on the heels of the Chartist Rising, the meeting caused concern at Dublin Castle, and the next planned meeting at Clontarf was banned by the Home Department. O’Connell, ever the believer in moral-force protest, did not attempt to resist this, and nor did he resist his own imprisonment later in 1841. [16]
With their leader in captivity and their main form of activity made illegal, the Repeal Association changed nature once more. After some initial confusion, in 1842 the leadership fell to Thomas Osborne Davis, a figure quite unlike O’Connell. A Protestant, the son of a Welsh artillery officer and an Irish mother, Davis was not the stereotype of an Irish radical, but his commitment to an independent Ireland was beyond question. He wrote songs and poems with nationalist themes – the most famous being “A Nation Once Again” [17] – and firmly believed that Protestants and Catholics had a joint interest in ending British rule. In this he was more radical than O’Connell, and the group that formed around him came to be known as “Young Ireland”. [18]
Whereas previously the movement had been focused on O’Connell’s personality and its activity on O’Connell’s speeches, the imposition of the Seditious Meetings Act and the detention of O’Connell made this impractical to say the least. Instead, the Repeal Association adopted the same organisational form that came to be used by radical clubs in Britain, inspired by the Italian Carbonari and the French republican societies. It consisted of small local clubs, located around the island but chiefly in Dublin, each of which carefully kept its membership below 50, and a group of prominent men who travelled between clubs to give speeches, many of which were later reprinted in The Nation, the newspaper edited by Charles Gavan Duffy [19] which was considered the voice of Young Ireland. The circulation of The Nation was necessarily small because of the high stamp duty, but the clubs themselves were generally able to buy it, so that the speeches made were quickly circulated among all the different clubs, which numbered about a hundred by 1848… [20]
…It did not take long after the Chartist Rising before the first radical clubs were constituted in Great Britain. The London Working Men’s Association quickly adopted the system, as did the Birmingham Political Union, [21] and a number of workingmen’s clubs in Wales and the North of England were already small enough to continue operating essentially unchanged. The clubs in the major cities often chose new names, which makes them difficult for historians to distinguish from newly founded clubs. Among the most popular names were the Reform Clubs, the Working Men’s Clubs, the Hampden Clubs (named for the radical clubs of the 1810s that had spearheaded dissent at that time), and the name that would become most famous by far: the Peterloo Clubs…
***
From “The Cambridge Dictionary of 19th Century Politics”
(c) 1947 by Prof. Henry Goodwin (ed.)
Cambridge University Press
PETERLOO CLUBS: Network of Radical clubs active in England and Wales from 1841 (see Three Acts) until 1850. The clubs, which had no overall administration, were named in commemoration of the Peterloo Massacre of 1819. After the collapse of Chartism, the Peterloo Clubs came to be the main source of organisation for British Radicalism, and their members played a significant role in the events of 1849, including organising local support for the Provisional Authority… [22]
***
[1] IOTL, we tend to see the Liverpool era as a historical aberration and the times that came after it as the beginning of a long-term trend toward democracy and openness. ITTL, the historical consensus (at least among radical authors such as Mathews) is different to say the least.
[2] The acts were: The Training Prevention Act, which made it illegal to give or receive weapons training without government sanction; the Seizure of Arms Act, which gave local magistrates authority to search anyone’s home for weapons, seize the weapons and prosecute the owners; the Misdemeanours Act, which restricted bail and made the court process faster; the Seditious Meetings Prevention Act, which required approval from local magistrates to conduct public meetings of a religious or political nature; the Blasphemous and Seditious Libels Act, which increased penalties for blasphemous and seditious libel to a maximum of fourteen years transportation; and finally the Newspaper and Stamp Duties Act, which imposed stamp duty on almost all printed materials to make it harder to circulate anti-government information. By the 1830s, the only ones that remained in force were the Newspaper and Stamp Duties Act, whose charge was reduced from fourpence to a penny in 1836 and then abolished in the 1850s, and the Training Prevention Act (later renamed the Unlawful Drilling Act), which remains in force in Northern Ireland to this day IOTL with significant alterations.
[3] As alien as this may seem to modern British observers, harsh laws against “sedition” were in fact almost as common in Britain as in the rest of Europe in the decades preceding this, starting with the Sedition and Treason Acts passed in 1795 after George III was pelted with rocks on his way to Parliament and intensifying under the Liverpool-Sidmouth regime of the 1810s.
[4] This so-called “magic circle” system remained a staple of British politics through the Victorian era and up until the advent of organised party leadership in the early 20th century; in the case of the Conservative Party, it was not replaced by a leadership election system until 1965.
[5] “Corn” here is in the traditional sense meaning any type of cereal grain. The use of the word to refer specifically to maize is a latter-day American innovation, due to the plant originally being known as “Indian corn”.
[6] The quarter hundredweight being equivalent to two stone, 28 pounds, or in metric terms, roughly 12.7 kg. 80 shillings was roughly equivalent to £250 in OTL present-day currency. So in other words, just under £9 per pound of grain – you can imagine how hard it would be to exceed this.
[7] IOTL the Whigs were in power for eleven years from 1830 to 1841, but did nothing about the Corn Laws, partly because of factors mentioned above but also because a large section of the party were actually supportive of the laws. This factor is de-emphasised in the histories of TTL because the short, rushed nature of the Whig administration meant the issue simply never came up.
[8] Villiers (the second I in his name is silent) remains the longest-serving member of the House of Commons in the history of that body, sitting for Wolverhampton (alongside one other Liberal) and then Wolverhampton South (as sole member, elected unopposed at every election in which he stood) from 1835 until his death in 1898. He started out as a Whig, became a Liberal upon the formation of that party, served as President of the Poor Law Board under Palmerston and Russell, then switched to the Liberal Unionists for the last twelve years of his life.
[9] I wasn’t actually able to find specific information about the finding date of the League IOTL, but it was around that time or possibly a bit earlier; ultimately it’s not very important considering we’re a full twelve years out from the PoD.
[10] This is approximately the case IOTL as well. With a population of some five million before the famine, you can imagine why it’s such a huge part of Irish history.
[11] IOTL known as the Gardeners’ Chronicle, one of the most popular special interest periodicals in Britain in its time, founded in 1841 by Joseph Paxton, Wentworth Dilke and John Lindley. ITTL it’s fundamentally the same magazine, but because of butterflies the title is slightly different.
[12] The repeal movement was the predecessor of the later Home Rule movement, and had fundamentally the exact same goal, although it was termed differently. I’m not quite certain why, but I would presume it was for PR reasons – “Home Rule” simply sounded less inherently disloyal than “repeal of the union”.
[13] This quote is poorly attested, and usually attributed to Wellington himself in response to being told he was Irish. However, it is more likely that it was in fact O’Connell who said it about Wellington, although the number of variant phrasings means we can’t be sure that ever happened either. Nonetheless, I put it in here for reasons of fun.
[14] IOTL, O’Connell accepted a pact with the Whigs, which lasted through the 1835 and 1837 general elections.
[15] As with Jackson’s inauguration, it is of course completely impossible that all of those people would’ve heard O’Connell speak, but the fact that so many people showed up nonetheless is a testament to his enormous popularity.
[16] O’Connell’s “monster meetings” were actually curtailed by the Peel government in a similar fashion IOTL, although his prison sentence was annulled by the House of Lords after just three months.
[17] Far too good a song to butterfly, but expect its lyrics to be slightly different.
[18] Originally a pejorative by the “old guard” of O’Connellites, the term stuck, perhaps partly because it was helpfully analogous to similar movements elsewhere in Europe such as Junges Deutschland and La Italia Giovana.
[19] Duffy was a thoroughly fascinating character whose main political contribution was in the field of land reform, on which issue he was elected to Parliament in the 1850s; failing to achieve significant success, he emigrated to Australia in 1856, gaining a massive following among the Irish community there. He was almost immediately elected to the Victorian Legislative Assembly, and in 1871 briefly served as Premier, heading the unorganised liberal grouping in the legislature, before being forced out by a confidence vote motivated by sectarian concerns. He was nonetheless knighted and awarded the Order of St Michael and St George for his services to Victorian governance, dying in Nice in 1903 at the age of 86.
[20] This is quite a high figure, I’ll admit, but given that O’Connell was able to attract over a hundred thousand listeners to each of his “monster meetings”, I don’t think it’s unreasonable that even a more radical movement claiming his legacy would be able to attract five percent of that number of members. It’s also about the same number as belonged to the Society of the Rights of Man, whose reach did not extend far beyond Paris, at its height.
[21] The BPU was originally a club agitating for parliamentary reform, and IOTL it briefly disbanded after the Reform Act’s passage only to return in 1838 as the principal Birmingham section of Chartism. ITTL, quite rightly smelling a rat, its leaders keep it running after the Reform Act’s passage, but little about its make-up changes as a result of this.
[22] This entry uses the term “Peterloo Clubs” to refer to the entire network of Radical clubs active during the 1840s, which is a common usage by TTL’s present, largely thanks to the efforts of the governments under George V.
"God has declared against us. He is manifestly for the Tories, and I fear the King also, which is much worse."
***
Selected points from “A Chronicle of the 19th Century”
(c) 1957 by Robert Weisberg (ed.)
Boston: Boston University Press
1837
Casimir-Pierre Perier resigns as President of the Council of Ministers of France, replaced by a caretaker ministry under Marshal Étienne Maurice Gérard. (May 18)
French legislative elections return a majority for the left. Louis-Mathieu Molé is appointed President of the Council of Ministers. (July 20)
1838
David “Davy” Crockett elected as the second President of the Republic of Texas, beating David Burnet in a lopsided contest. (September 3)
Louis-Mathieu Molé resigns as President of the Council of Ministers of France, replaced by Adolphe Thiers. (November 19)
1839
Anti-Corn Law League founded by Richard Cobden and John Bright. (February)
Chartist petition presented to Westminster and ignored by Parliament. (June)
Newport Rising: Chartists seize Westgate Hotel in Newport in protest of rejection. (November 4-5)
1840
Chartist Rising: Chartists in South Wales, Yorkshire, Lancashire take up arms in protest at execution of Newport Rising leaders, revolts put down by armed forces. (January-March)
Treaty of Scutari: Turkey cedes much of Levant and Hejaz to Egypt, Egyptian independence recognized. (August 4)
William Henry Harrison and Willie Person Mangum are re-elected as President and Vice President of the United States. (December 2)
1841
French legislative elections return a majority for the right. Adolphe Thiers is removed as President of the Council of Ministers, in favor of a conservative ministry under Marshal Jean-de-Dieu Soult. (August 6)
William Henry Harrison dies in office; Willie Person Mangum becomes 9th President of the United States. (October 27)
1842
Duke of Wellington resigns as Prime Minister; replaced by the Duke of Richmond. (March 21)
General election called. (April 3)
***
From "The Cambridge Encyclopaedia of British Politics"
(c) 1947 by Prof. Henry Goodwin (ed.)
Cambridge University Press
1842 GENERAL ELECTION: General election held in May-June 1842, shortly after the appointment of the 5th Duke of Richmond as Prime Minister. This penultimate election of the unreformed United Kingdom saw the Tory Government returned with an increased majority of the small electorate, eliminating the threat posed by a backbench rebellion of the surviving Canningites within the party. Attempts by Chartists and other radical groups to get working-class candidates elected came to nought, with groups outside the main two parties receiving less than a percent of the vote outside Ireland. However, a number of anti-Corn Law activists, including Richard Cobden, succeeded in getting elected under the Whig banner.
Tory: 383 (+28) (including approx. 40-50 “Canningites”)
Whig: 246 (-26)
Irish Repeal: 29 (-2)
***
Charles Gordon-Lennox, 5th Duke of Richmond, 5th Duke of Lennox
Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, 1842-1849
From “Great Britain 1830-1930: A Century of Upheaval”
(c) 1982 by Sophie Mathews
Oxford University Press
The years following the 1842 general election, while less chaotic than the periods immediately before or after, were a time of significant underlying tension. After the defeat of the Chartist Rising and the crackdowns that followed, the Wellington government began a move away from the open consensus of the 1830s and back toward the restrictive social legislation that had characterised the Liverpool years. [1] The time immediately after Waterloo had seen significant radical movements crop up, and the Tory government of the day had moved swiftly and decisively against them, passing the “Six Acts” restricting political activity [2] and sending in the army whenever things came to a head, most notoriously in the Peterloo massacre of 16 August 1819 when the cavalry charged into a crowd of protesters in Manchester, killing fifteen people and wounding several hundred. It is likely that Wellington saw parallels between those days and the Chartist Rising, and believed similar measures would solve the problem this time as well, thus the restoration of the Seditious Meetings Act, the Seizure of Arms Act and the Misdemeanours Act, quickly known collectively as the “Three Acts”. However, this failed to take into account two vital points.
Firstly, the situation was very different from that twenty years prior. Whereas the years after the fall of Napoleon were characterised by repression and conservatism all across Europe, and seemed to herald the return of the ancient social order that the French Revolution had done so much to disrupt, by the 1830s it was clear that the conservative experiment had failed, and liberalism seemed to be on the march across Europe. Indeed, so too in Britain up until the ascension of King Augustus. British radicalism, too, was a different beast in 1839 than in 1819. While groups such as the Hampden Clubs and the Spenceans displayed some degree of organisation and programmatic coherence, they never reached nearly the strength of the Chartists or the Anti-Corn Law League or the radicalism of the groups that succeeded them.
And secondly, while the Six Acts no doubt had a hand in quelling the unrest in the short term, they did not create governmental stability in the long term. For this, a far more important factor was the gradual liberalisation of Liverpool’s government in the 1820s, ultimately leading to the handover to Canning and the Reform Act. By opening up the body politic, however slowly and marginally, Liverpool and Canning were able to starve the radical movement of its middle-class support – a crucial factor in the success or failure of such movements, as simultaneous events in France show us.
This is where Wellington and Richmond failed in their calculations. The renewed Seizure of Arms Act 1840 was set to expire two years after its passage, as had the original, and the Richmond ministry made no attempt to renew it when the time limit was reached in August 1842. When they restored the Seditious Meetings Prevention Act, however, they did not append a time limit to it, but simply stated that it would remain in force “until such time as the Home Secretary may deem appropriate”. [3] The result of this was to repress the political life of Britain in a way unseen for a generation, and the act was righteously condemned across the country. But after the terrors of the previous years, there was little appetite for serious resistance, and so the Three Acts did in fact achieve their intended effect of staving off dissent in the short run.
The appointment of Charles Gordon-Lennox, 5th Duke of Richmond, previously Lord Chancellor, to the premiership was a sign that the King was moving his positions forward. While royal prerogative remained strong enough at the time to allow the monarch to personally choose a Prime Minister, it was a strongly established precedent for the monarch to listen to advice from senior figures in the governing party and choose a figure who was felt likely to keep the party together and lead a stable and effective ministry. [4] However, when Wellington announced his retirement in March 1842, Richmond was selected almost immediately and without consultation from any senior Tories except Richmond himself. To some extent the succession had been rumoured; the King, at the time sitting in the Lords as Duke of Cumberland, and Richmond had been allies in the “Ultra” grouping of the Canning era that opposed Catholic emancipation and the Reform Act, and while their personal relations were cordial at best (King Augustus was not known as a man who made friends easily), they were in fundamental agreement on the necessity of firm government.
The King and Richmond were equally in agreement on the other point that would come to dominate organised politics in the 1840s: the Corn Laws. [5] Inspired by Malthusian thinking, the Corn Laws were a series of import tariffs introduced under the Importation Act 1815, designed to keep prices up and prevent the flooding of the British food market; the laws set a maximum price of 80 shillings per quarter hundredweight [6] before foreign grain could be imported, but this was such a high ceiling that it never came to be exceeded in the time the Corn Laws were in force. The result of this was that wheat bread, the most basic staple of the English diet at the time, became expensive enough to starve a large number of people – the fact that the adoption of the Corn Laws coincided with the eruption of Mount Tambora and the subsequent “year without a summer” must not be discounted as a cause of the civil unrest that marked the following years.
The relative economic prosperity of the 1820s and 30s meant that the high price of grain became less and less of an issue, but from 1840 onward, most of Europe again entered hard times, with wages stagnating and several bad harvests, and thus the Corn Laws again became an issue. The Whigs were nominally supportive of free trade, but over their brief spell in government they were faced with a good economic outlook and devoted most of their energies to social reforms while leaving the Corn Laws in place. [7] Of course, the Whig party did not abandon its efforts when out of government, and from the 1837 election, the future Radical grandee Charles Pelham Villiers [8] represented Wolverhampton in the lower house where he eagerly championed the cause of free trade. He launched debates against the Corn Laws every year from 1838 until their repeal, and every year the motion was voted down by a large majority of the Commons. Even so, the cause of repeal was beginning to draw support around the country, as the Anti-Corn Law League was founded in February 1839 [9] by Richard Cobden and John Bright; Cobden joined Villiers in Parliament from 1842, and the two became close allies. Bright remained outside Parliament, because he served as the League’s chief organiser; originally he had led mass meetings around the country addressing crowds, taking advantage of his renowned oratorical skill, but after such meetings became politically impossible he restricted his talents to smaller indoor meetings of local Free Trade Clubs, whose numbers grew over the course of the decade…
***
Scene at an Irish workhouse during the Great Famine, ca. 1846
From “Éirinn go Brách: A History of Ireland in the United Kingdom”
(c) 1969 by Dr Cearbhall Ó Mairtín
Translation (c) 1971 by Pádraig Murphy
Dublin: Cló na Staire
With the possible exception of the campaigns of Cromwell, no event in the past five hundred years of history can be said to have affected our island as severely as an Gorta Mór, the Great Famine. While the exact death toll varies from source to source, the accepted figure is somewhere around a million, with some estimates as low as 800,000 and some as high as 1.5 million. [10] In addition, an equal or slightly greater number of Irish men and women emigrated in the wake of the famine, seeking fortune on new shores, often in what was then the United States, but large numbers also went to Britain, Canada and Australia…
…The causes of the Famine go back several decades at best, and several centuries at most – while Ireland’s population was overwhelmingly Catholic everywhere except Antrim and Down, the landowners were disproportionately Anglo-Irish Protestants, and the great mass of the people lived in tenancy under grim conditions. The vast majority of landlords lived in Dublin or England, and took no actual part in the running of their estates, merely collecting the income and leaving day-to-day management in the hands of middlemen. Because they were rewarded for lower running costs and higher yields, the middlemen were frequently harsh and cruel against the tenants, who were themselves left with barely enough to survive.
Because of the Corn Laws, the common people of Ireland came to be shut out of the grain market, with the result that the main staple of the Irish diet was the potato. Most Irish tenant farmers of the time were cottiers, who leased a small cottage with a potato field connected to it and paid rent in the form of labour on the landlord’s estate, and for them the potato formed the cornerstone of life, providing the main or sole source of sustenance alongside well water. It is not hard to imagine, then, the effect wrought by the arrival in Ireland of the potato blight in the summer of 1845…
…The blight is now thought to have originated from Mexico, from where it spread north into the United States and then, carried unwittingly on merchant ships, east to Europe. It reached the British Isles in August 1845, when the Gardeners’ Gazette [11] reported that the potato crops of the Isle of Wight had been afflicted by a “blight of unusual character” which caused the leaves of the plants to turn brown and shrivelled and the tubers to rot from the inside. The blight took no more than two days to infect an entire crop, and there was no known way to prevent it. By the second week of September it was in Ireland, and upwards of a third of 1845’s potato crop was destroyed by it. In 1846, the figure would be 75%. The Great Famine had begun…
***
1847 poster of Daniel O'Connell as "The Champion of Liberty", made in Pennsylvania
From “Great Britain 1830-1930: A Century of Upheaval”
(c) 1982 by Sophie Mathews
Oxford University Press
The Irish Repeal Association was founded by Daniel O’Connell in 1830, shortly after the success of the campaign for Catholic emancipation. The goal of the Association was to repeal the Act of Union 1800 and create a separate Kingdom of Ireland with its own parliament, but retaining the British monarchy in a personal union; this, it was hoped, would create a more effective and responsive government for the country. [12] The cause of repeal was popular among the Irish Catholic population, and when the country went to the polls in 1833, O’Connell and several others stood as candidates under the banner of the Repeal Association. Thirty-two of them were returned, eleven of whom were unopposed, and O’Connell himself moved from Clare to Dublin City. Once in Parliament, they quickly dropped their unconditional demand for repeal, and several of them accepted appointments from the Lansdowne ministry; however, like the Lansdowne ministry itself, this arrangement was not long for the world, and the Duke of Wellington had no time for the Repealers. Although born and raised in Ireland, Wellington was an aristocratic Protestant and regarded himself as firmly British. Indeed, O’Connell is supposed to have once said of him that “to be sure, he was born in Ireland, but being born in a stable does not make a man a horse”. [13]
The return to the political wilderness did not disillusion O’Connell, who resolved to continue building up the Repeal Association, and when the Whigs offered him a pact for the 1837 election, he rejected the offer. [14] In the event, the party largely maintained its position, and O’Connell turned away from Parliamentary work and toward mass meetings, of which he organised six around Ireland between 1838 and 1840. His last and largest one was held at the Hill of Tara, the traditional seat of the High Kings of Ireland, where he addressed a crowd of over a hundred thousand supporters. [15] Occurring on the heels of the Chartist Rising, the meeting caused concern at Dublin Castle, and the next planned meeting at Clontarf was banned by the Home Department. O’Connell, ever the believer in moral-force protest, did not attempt to resist this, and nor did he resist his own imprisonment later in 1841. [16]
With their leader in captivity and their main form of activity made illegal, the Repeal Association changed nature once more. After some initial confusion, in 1842 the leadership fell to Thomas Osborne Davis, a figure quite unlike O’Connell. A Protestant, the son of a Welsh artillery officer and an Irish mother, Davis was not the stereotype of an Irish radical, but his commitment to an independent Ireland was beyond question. He wrote songs and poems with nationalist themes – the most famous being “A Nation Once Again” [17] – and firmly believed that Protestants and Catholics had a joint interest in ending British rule. In this he was more radical than O’Connell, and the group that formed around him came to be known as “Young Ireland”. [18]
Whereas previously the movement had been focused on O’Connell’s personality and its activity on O’Connell’s speeches, the imposition of the Seditious Meetings Act and the detention of O’Connell made this impractical to say the least. Instead, the Repeal Association adopted the same organisational form that came to be used by radical clubs in Britain, inspired by the Italian Carbonari and the French republican societies. It consisted of small local clubs, located around the island but chiefly in Dublin, each of which carefully kept its membership below 50, and a group of prominent men who travelled between clubs to give speeches, many of which were later reprinted in The Nation, the newspaper edited by Charles Gavan Duffy [19] which was considered the voice of Young Ireland. The circulation of The Nation was necessarily small because of the high stamp duty, but the clubs themselves were generally able to buy it, so that the speeches made were quickly circulated among all the different clubs, which numbered about a hundred by 1848… [20]
…It did not take long after the Chartist Rising before the first radical clubs were constituted in Great Britain. The London Working Men’s Association quickly adopted the system, as did the Birmingham Political Union, [21] and a number of workingmen’s clubs in Wales and the North of England were already small enough to continue operating essentially unchanged. The clubs in the major cities often chose new names, which makes them difficult for historians to distinguish from newly founded clubs. Among the most popular names were the Reform Clubs, the Working Men’s Clubs, the Hampden Clubs (named for the radical clubs of the 1810s that had spearheaded dissent at that time), and the name that would become most famous by far: the Peterloo Clubs…
***
From “The Cambridge Dictionary of 19th Century Politics”
(c) 1947 by Prof. Henry Goodwin (ed.)
Cambridge University Press
PETERLOO CLUBS: Network of Radical clubs active in England and Wales from 1841 (see Three Acts) until 1850. The clubs, which had no overall administration, were named in commemoration of the Peterloo Massacre of 1819. After the collapse of Chartism, the Peterloo Clubs came to be the main source of organisation for British Radicalism, and their members played a significant role in the events of 1849, including organising local support for the Provisional Authority… [22]
***
[1] IOTL, we tend to see the Liverpool era as a historical aberration and the times that came after it as the beginning of a long-term trend toward democracy and openness. ITTL, the historical consensus (at least among radical authors such as Mathews) is different to say the least.
[2] The acts were: The Training Prevention Act, which made it illegal to give or receive weapons training without government sanction; the Seizure of Arms Act, which gave local magistrates authority to search anyone’s home for weapons, seize the weapons and prosecute the owners; the Misdemeanours Act, which restricted bail and made the court process faster; the Seditious Meetings Prevention Act, which required approval from local magistrates to conduct public meetings of a religious or political nature; the Blasphemous and Seditious Libels Act, which increased penalties for blasphemous and seditious libel to a maximum of fourteen years transportation; and finally the Newspaper and Stamp Duties Act, which imposed stamp duty on almost all printed materials to make it harder to circulate anti-government information. By the 1830s, the only ones that remained in force were the Newspaper and Stamp Duties Act, whose charge was reduced from fourpence to a penny in 1836 and then abolished in the 1850s, and the Training Prevention Act (later renamed the Unlawful Drilling Act), which remains in force in Northern Ireland to this day IOTL with significant alterations.
[3] As alien as this may seem to modern British observers, harsh laws against “sedition” were in fact almost as common in Britain as in the rest of Europe in the decades preceding this, starting with the Sedition and Treason Acts passed in 1795 after George III was pelted with rocks on his way to Parliament and intensifying under the Liverpool-Sidmouth regime of the 1810s.
[4] This so-called “magic circle” system remained a staple of British politics through the Victorian era and up until the advent of organised party leadership in the early 20th century; in the case of the Conservative Party, it was not replaced by a leadership election system until 1965.
[5] “Corn” here is in the traditional sense meaning any type of cereal grain. The use of the word to refer specifically to maize is a latter-day American innovation, due to the plant originally being known as “Indian corn”.
[6] The quarter hundredweight being equivalent to two stone, 28 pounds, or in metric terms, roughly 12.7 kg. 80 shillings was roughly equivalent to £250 in OTL present-day currency. So in other words, just under £9 per pound of grain – you can imagine how hard it would be to exceed this.
[7] IOTL the Whigs were in power for eleven years from 1830 to 1841, but did nothing about the Corn Laws, partly because of factors mentioned above but also because a large section of the party were actually supportive of the laws. This factor is de-emphasised in the histories of TTL because the short, rushed nature of the Whig administration meant the issue simply never came up.
[8] Villiers (the second I in his name is silent) remains the longest-serving member of the House of Commons in the history of that body, sitting for Wolverhampton (alongside one other Liberal) and then Wolverhampton South (as sole member, elected unopposed at every election in which he stood) from 1835 until his death in 1898. He started out as a Whig, became a Liberal upon the formation of that party, served as President of the Poor Law Board under Palmerston and Russell, then switched to the Liberal Unionists for the last twelve years of his life.
[9] I wasn’t actually able to find specific information about the finding date of the League IOTL, but it was around that time or possibly a bit earlier; ultimately it’s not very important considering we’re a full twelve years out from the PoD.
[10] This is approximately the case IOTL as well. With a population of some five million before the famine, you can imagine why it’s such a huge part of Irish history.
[11] IOTL known as the Gardeners’ Chronicle, one of the most popular special interest periodicals in Britain in its time, founded in 1841 by Joseph Paxton, Wentworth Dilke and John Lindley. ITTL it’s fundamentally the same magazine, but because of butterflies the title is slightly different.
[12] The repeal movement was the predecessor of the later Home Rule movement, and had fundamentally the exact same goal, although it was termed differently. I’m not quite certain why, but I would presume it was for PR reasons – “Home Rule” simply sounded less inherently disloyal than “repeal of the union”.
[13] This quote is poorly attested, and usually attributed to Wellington himself in response to being told he was Irish. However, it is more likely that it was in fact O’Connell who said it about Wellington, although the number of variant phrasings means we can’t be sure that ever happened either. Nonetheless, I put it in here for reasons of fun.
[14] IOTL, O’Connell accepted a pact with the Whigs, which lasted through the 1835 and 1837 general elections.
[15] As with Jackson’s inauguration, it is of course completely impossible that all of those people would’ve heard O’Connell speak, but the fact that so many people showed up nonetheless is a testament to his enormous popularity.
[16] O’Connell’s “monster meetings” were actually curtailed by the Peel government in a similar fashion IOTL, although his prison sentence was annulled by the House of Lords after just three months.
[17] Far too good a song to butterfly, but expect its lyrics to be slightly different.
[18] Originally a pejorative by the “old guard” of O’Connellites, the term stuck, perhaps partly because it was helpfully analogous to similar movements elsewhere in Europe such as Junges Deutschland and La Italia Giovana.
[19] Duffy was a thoroughly fascinating character whose main political contribution was in the field of land reform, on which issue he was elected to Parliament in the 1850s; failing to achieve significant success, he emigrated to Australia in 1856, gaining a massive following among the Irish community there. He was almost immediately elected to the Victorian Legislative Assembly, and in 1871 briefly served as Premier, heading the unorganised liberal grouping in the legislature, before being forced out by a confidence vote motivated by sectarian concerns. He was nonetheless knighted and awarded the Order of St Michael and St George for his services to Victorian governance, dying in Nice in 1903 at the age of 86.
[20] This is quite a high figure, I’ll admit, but given that O’Connell was able to attract over a hundred thousand listeners to each of his “monster meetings”, I don’t think it’s unreasonable that even a more radical movement claiming his legacy would be able to attract five percent of that number of members. It’s also about the same number as belonged to the Society of the Rights of Man, whose reach did not extend far beyond Paris, at its height.
[21] The BPU was originally a club agitating for parliamentary reform, and IOTL it briefly disbanded after the Reform Act’s passage only to return in 1838 as the principal Birmingham section of Chartism. ITTL, quite rightly smelling a rat, its leaders keep it running after the Reform Act’s passage, but little about its make-up changes as a result of this.
[22] This entry uses the term “Peterloo Clubs” to refer to the entire network of Radical clubs active during the 1840s, which is a common usage by TTL’s present, largely thanks to the efforts of the governments under George V.
Events of 1849, Temporary Authority, now you're just a tease
I've mentioned the events of 1849 in previous updates, always in passing, and I'm afraid you'll get no more out of me this time. They will be expanded on in the next British update, which is currently slated to be update #27, although I reserve the right to change the schedule as we get closer to that point.
Indeed, and as I explain in the update, heavy-handed repression wasn't something Britain was unused to either.
Quibble: the Chartists as such don't exist anymore ITTL, they were pretty much destroyed in 1840.
Ah. In the latest update it sounded like those individual revolts were crushed but not necessarily the movement itself.
Well, it's tricky. Certainly a lot of people who were Chartists are now active in the Peterloo Clubs and other groups like them. But Chartism as such, the actual struggle for the adoption of the People's Charter, is effectively dead.
Filthy republican! Learn to respect our revered monarchy! LONG LIVE THE KING.Well, the mention of "penultimate election of the unreformed United Kingdom" also suggests some level of major change as well.
Here's hoping that things eventually get radical enough to see true republicans finish upon the Commonwealth's glorious promise of regicide
in the name of cromwell, imam of the occultation, i will never accept the legitimacy of kings!
I've just finished reading through this TL, and I want to just say it's magnificent and I'm looking forward to more.
I believe I can shed light on this. Trade in China, as you've noted in the update, was done entirely in silver; what you've missed is the form of that silver. Chinese merchants would theoretically accept any sort of silver, but the only currency that they trusted absolutely, without any compunctions, was the Spanish dollar, which had been the standard for trade the world over before the gold-based pound sterling began taking its place - but not in China. Spanish dollars, or, by this time, Mexican dollars - the same coins minted in the same mints, but now in Mexico - were the basis of nearly all trade with China in this period, which meant that anyone who wanted to trade with China not only had to get silver, but had to get it from Mexico, which was really good for the Mexicans. Chinese silver dragons, the standard silver coin in China, was made to the exact specifications of the Mexican dollar.
In the 1850s, the Mexicans made a drastic error in changing the basic design of the dollar, which rendered it worthless to the Chinese, who no longer trusted it and demanded weighing even the new ones, which opened the door for other countries to start minting standard trade dollars of the standardized weight, most notably the United States, British Hong Kong, French Indochina and Japan, that broke the monopoly of the Spanish/Mexican dollar on trade with China and sent Mexico spiraling further into the economic weakness that allowed their near-conquest in the 1860s.
I believe I can shed light on this. Trade in China, as you've noted in the update, was done entirely in silver; what you've missed is the form of that silver. Chinese merchants would theoretically accept any sort of silver, but the only currency that they trusted absolutely, without any compunctions, was the Spanish dollar, which had been the standard for trade the world over before the gold-based pound sterling began taking its place - but not in China. Spanish dollars, or, by this time, Mexican dollars - the same coins minted in the same mints, but now in Mexico - were the basis of nearly all trade with China in this period, which meant that anyone who wanted to trade with China not only had to get silver, but had to get it from Mexico, which was really good for the Mexicans. Chinese silver dragons, the standard silver coin in China, was made to the exact specifications of the Mexican dollar.
In the 1850s, the Mexicans made a drastic error in changing the basic design of the dollar, which rendered it worthless to the Chinese, who no longer trusted it and demanded weighing even the new ones, which opened the door for other countries to start minting standard trade dollars of the standardized weight, most notably the United States, British Hong Kong, French Indochina and Japan, that broke the monopoly of the Spanish/Mexican dollar on trade with China and sent Mexico spiraling further into the economic weakness that allowed their near-conquest in the 1860s.
That's very interesting, thanks. Gives me some ideas about where to take Mexico, too...
#23: From This Valley, They Say We Are Going
A House Divided #23: From This Valley, They Say We Are Going
“Mexicans, at the cry of war
Make ready the steel and the bridle
And may the earth tremble at its core
At the resounding roar of the cannon”
***
From “The Mexican War”
(c) 1999 by Spencer Gage III
Athens: University of Georgia Press
The Rio Grande Front
Although the trigger for the Mexican War was the declaration of the California Republic, it is very likely that war would’ve broken out at roughly the same time even without that event, because fighting on the Rio Grande began several days before the actual declaration of war. Tension, indeed, had been a permanent fixture of life in the disputed area since the overthrow of Herrera in September 1844. With the annexation of Texas imminent, Congress had dispatched Zachary Taylor with an army “of observation”, 2,500 strong, to secure positions south of the Nueces for the war that was widely expected to break out, and he encamped at Corpus Christi just south of the river mouth, the largest settlement in the disputed area. [1] In the event, no Mexican army came for some time, as Bustamante tried to consolidate his power and the generals who opposed him were busy making pronunciamientos that failed because of disunity in the ranks. [2]
By late 1848, however, Bustamante’s authority had largely been consolidated, and in December he sent General Pedro de Ampudia [3] north at the head of a force of 2,000. Ampudia’s orders were to retake Corpus Christi and then march north toward Austin, then the state capital of Texas, [4] from where it was hoped that the state could be restored to Mexican control. This was the obvious move to make at that stage of the conflict, and it was for precisely that reason that it failed – Taylor had prepared to defend from exactly such an attack, and when Ampudia arrived in February 1849, the Army of Observation readily beat him back. Taylor took up the chase, and pursued Ampudia’s force to Matamoros, on the Rio Grande, where he stopped, partly as it was the claimed border and partly because Ampudia received reinforcements and was able to fortify his position in the town…
…The state of the United States Army before 1877 was much different from that of the Army we know today. The norm in Europe at the time of the Revolution was for armies to be recruited individually by officers who purchased commissions and raised regiments from their feudal subjects or through standard recruitment; in France before 1789, the parlance was of buying and selling entire regiments between noblemen who desired to lead them, and while the British maintained less of a standing land army, it too used similar methods to select its leadership. Officers would purchase their commissions, and promotions were carried out largely based on seniority and social status rather than merit. While the United States had no formal nobility, many of the practices of the British Army were carried on after independence; officers’ commissions were still available for purchase, and the officer class remained largely drawn from the upper echelons of society, such as they were. However, the small size of the Army in peacetime meant that it was a life that carried less attraction than it did in Europe, and most of the senior officers in 1849 were either people who had joined the Army for the War of 1812 and stayed around or West Point graduates from the 1820s. Congress made legislation in August of 1849 to double the number of infantry regiments in the Army from eight to sixteen, but it would take until October for these units to be available for service. [5]
In the meantime, the gap was filled by masses of state volunteer regiments, raised by order of the relevant state legislature and usually commanded by a local political figure. For instance, the Massachusetts Volunteers were led by Congressman Caleb Cushing, and the 2nd Kentucky Volunteers were led by Henry Clay Jr., son of the great Republican statesman. The quality of these “hobby colonels” varied greatly, but the quality of the troops under their command did not; they were almost invariably far worse soldiers than the regulars, who despised them thoroughly and often showed it in combat. The volunteers had poor skill in combat, and even worse discipline outside it; they were drunk and rowdy, they fought with the local civilians, they stole cattle and used fence posts for firewood, and unceremoniously drove locals out of their homes when quarters were needed. A particularly unfit volunteer company from Louisiana, under the command of a Captain Gaines, was sent back to its home state by General Taylor, who regarded its state to be such as to make it unfit for service; the expression “as useless as Gaines’ army” came to be used for years after the war… [6]
…As Taylor and Ampudia traded blows across the Rio Grande, things were beginning to move further to the north. The newly-promoted Brigadier General Ethan Allen Hitchcock [7] was given command of the “Army of the West”, a force of roughly 1,700 men stationed at Fort Leavenworth on the Missouri River, and ordered to occupy the principal settlements in New Mexico, then march west to link up with Frémont and the California Republic’s fledgling volunteers and work with them to secure a hold on Alta California. Marching along the Santa Fe Trail, Hitchcock’s army reached Santa Fe itself at the beginning of June, and captured the city without a fight. The local governor, Manuel Armijo, [8] had asked Mexico City for troops to defend the city, and receiving no such assistance, together with being aware of the poor state of the local militia, decided to surrender the city and spare its inhabitants the trauma of an open battle. Armijo and Hitchcock met outside the city June 10, and after formally surrendering the city, the governor was allowed to depart for Chihuahua. Hitchcock set up positions in Santa Fe and around New Mexico, leaving Colonel Alexander Doniphan in charge of the occupation army as Military Governor, while a force of some 800 men under Sterling Price was sent south to capture El Paso, and Hitchcock himself moved west along the Gila River trail toward California. [9] The United States had captured New Mexico with ease, but as would soon be known, holding it would not be as easy…
***
From “A History of the Native Americans”
(c) 2001 by Arthur Lewis
Talikwa: Cherokee Publishers
The Mexican War brought hundreds of Native nations into the United States, most of whom had no experience with American rule, and it did not take long before this caused significant tension – indeed, the first armed revolt occurred while the war was still going on…
…When Hitchcock departed for California, he left behind Colonel Alexander Doniphan and some 800 troops to maintain order in the occupied towns. Charles Bent, a trader of twenty years standing based out of Taos, in the far north of the territory, was made provisional Governor of New Mexico. While Bent had extensive experience dealing with the New Mexican people, he thought very little of them, and they generally knew as much; as such, what was meant to be a tactful gesture turned into a source of concern for the inhabitants of the territory. The actions of Doniphan’s troops did little to help; most of them were fresh recruits and volunteers from Missouri, who, in Bent’s words, “as other occupation troops at other times and places have done, undertook to act like conquerors”. In addition, most of them eagerly supported American expansionism and freely boasted of how they’d take over all the land between the Atlantic and Pacific, and this naturally did little to ease the worries of the New Mexicans about their place once the war was over. In short, New Mexico in 1849 was a powder keg waiting to explode, and in September, it did.
The initial rising took place at Taos, late in the evening of September 12, and involved mainly the local Puebloan Natives, who rose up under the leadership of Tomasito Romero, a leader of the local Native community, and descended upon the homes of those who had accepted office under the occupation, who were dragged out of bed, scalped alive and then killed in front of their families. The occupation force was taken completely by surprise at the extent, and the brutality, of the rising – Charles Bent, who had been in Santa Fe at the time, was attacked two days later, spared only by the timely intervention of a nearby group of soldiers, and Colonel Doniphan found himself with no option but to order his men to retreat from Taos and abandon the town to the revolt. [10] In the following days, as Doniphan gathered his men to march north, several settlements around Taos were raided by the rebels and their American inhabitants killed; it’s estimated that some fifteen men were killed in total during these actions. [11]
Doniphan arrived in Taos with three hundred men on the 29th, and the insurgents retreated into the church of the Taos pueblo, built of adobe thick enough to withstand small arms fire. A siege ensued for the next 48 hours, with Doniphan’s men bringing up a 6-pounder cannon and shelling [12] the walls of the church persistently until they were breached. Once a hole had been made, grapeshot was fired into the church and infantry sent in to defeat the insurgents, which they did, killing some 150 men, women and children in the process. The U.S. forces sustained no more than a dozen casualties… [13]
***
From “The Mexican War”
(c) 1999 by Spencer Gage III
Athens: University of Georgia Press
The march of Sterling Price and the First Missouri Volunteers has become the stuff of legend. Nine hundred American volunteer cavalrymen marched for eight months through the southwestern desert with only frontier equipment and good old American ingenuity, defeating Mexican forces three or four times their size, and adding three states to the Union in the process – is the narrative most of us have learned in school and from the legendary kinema drama What Price Destiny (1923, KCA). In fact, the situation was somewhat less heroic than the popular memory holds. As previously discussed, the volunteers were generally the worst U.S. troops in terms of respecting civilian rights, and Price’s men were no exception to this. The distance between Price’s army and any other U.S. detachment or supply line meant that there was little to no possibility of resupply, and so Price and his army sustained their long march through “living off the land”, according to contemporary accounts. This is a side of the march that rarely gets mentioned in popular histories of the war, but primary sources indicate that “living off the land” rarely meant “foraging” and much more frequently meant “poaching cattle and pillaging crops from local villages”. Indeed, it’s not unlikely that the hardships suffered by the people of Chihuahua and New Leon states in the 1850s was at least partly due to the effects of Price’s march on local agriculture… [14]
…Price left Santa Fe on August 2nd, and by mid-September he was at Doña Ana, about thirty miles from El Paso. Here, his force was attacked by roughly one thousand Mexicans, half of them regular army and the other half El Paso militiamen. The Mexican force appeared in the afternoon of the 21st, and battle was joined before Price’s men were fully prepared. There was some confusion as a result of this, and three American cavalrymen were cut down by a Mexican howitzer shell, but the battle was decided as soon as Price was able to restore order and send his center column to charge the howitzer, which was successfully captured with no loss of life. Shortly thereafter, the Mexicans retreated, and the path to El Paso lay open… [15]
…The great climax of Price’s march, the event that formed the core of his legend post-war, was the Battle of the Sacramento River, north of Chihuahua City. By December, the Mexicans were more than well aware of Price and his force, and the governor of Chihuahua, José María Irigoyen de la O, [16] had prepared defenses for the city. On a hill overlooking Hacienda Sacramento, the only river crossing allowing entry into the city from the north, a redoubt had been constructed, containing six fortified artillery positions. In addition, Irigoyen had a force of some 2,500 men, half infantry and half cavalry, which included another ten field guns, and roughly one thousand local ranchers could be called to arms on short notice. Needless to say, Price discovered this in advance of the battle, and drew up a plan whereby the covered wagons brought by his army would be formed into an impromptu fortification and the Mexican positions attacked by artillery, after which the cavalry would charge the Mexicans and hopefully send them into panic.
On the morning of the 9th of December, Price approached the Mexican positions. As planned, the Americans constructed defensive works out of their wagons, and Meriwether Lewis Clark’s guns [17] opened fire on the Mexican cavalry, which was forced off the field. Soon enough, Price felt confident ordering a charge on the Mexican positions, which was accompanied by further artillery fire, and although the Americans took significant casualties, they succeeded in taking the redoubt and forcing the Mexican army off the field. On the 13th, the First Missouri Volunteers marched into Chihuahua, and after securing what supplies the city held, they continued on toward Saltillo, where they were to join General Taylor’s main force. The most important military lesson of the 19th century had proven itself once more: numbers are useless against artillery supremacy…
***
From “The Californias: A History”
(c) 1991 by Earl Brantham
San Pedro: University of South California Press
The California Republic held its constitutional convention in Monterey in February of 1850, two months after Hitchcock’s arrival in the republic. The convention seated delegates from as far north as Mount Shasta and as far south as Ensenada, and included many Californios as well as the American settlers, who nearly unanimously supported the republic. Some controversy erupted when some of the American delegates called for the convention to take the form of a statehood convention, and for the constitution to be sent to Washington; this, however, met little support from the convention, and it was soon agreed that California would be a sovereign republic, although the preamble as eventually written explicitly recognized California’s “peculiar bond” to the United States. The borders of the republic were left up to negotiation with Washington, although provision was made for including Lower as well as Upper California in its government…
…The legal system of the republic would be based on American common law rather than Roman law as practiced in Mexico, but some significant holdovers remained from the Mexican legal system – married couples would jointly hold community property, and the constitution made provision for a single level of municipal government rather than two levels as in most of the U.S. Both of these were common to California and Texas, and would ultimately come to be implemented in most of the states in areas formerly held by Mexico…
…Vallejo, as one of the convention’s most powerful figures, was able to secure a provision guaranteeing the land holdings of the Californios, although this did not apply to previously unsettled lands. This provision would become extremely important as soon as the following year, when gold was discovered at Sutter’s Mill, setting the scene for the largest migration of Americans into California to that date…
***
[1] Taylor was dispatched to the disputed area IOTL, but proceeded south to the location of modern-day Brownsville once the annexation went through. There he built a fort which was almost immediately attacked by Mexico, prompting the start of the war. ITTL he’s more cautious, and of course Mexico is if possible even more unstable at the moment.
[2] Again, it’s a good idea to take what American authors write about Mexico with a few grains of salt.
[3] Ampudia was a Cuban criollo who moved to Mexico after it gained independence and served in its army for many years. He was a conservative at the time of the OTL Mexican-American War, which meant he was sidelined early on in favor of liberal (and future president) Mariano Arista, a bitter rival of his whom he criticized sharply. However, he returned to lead the Mexican forces at the pivotal Battle of Monterrey in September 1846, and despite being forced to retreat, the managed nature of the defeat made him one of the few popular generals of the war on the Mexican side. He later moved to the left and briefly served as Secretary of National Defense under Juárez in 1860.
[4] “Austin” ITTL refers to the town we know as San Felipe (de Austin), which was the original capital of the Republic of Texas but was burned down in 1836 to keep Mexico from capturing it. ITTL this doesn’t happen, and the Republic’s government doesn’t move inland to what was then the settlement of Waterloo but soon became known as Austin.
[5] IOTL this was done in February of 1847, with the regiments entering service in late April and early May.
[6] This is all per OTL. The change wrought upon the US Army by the Civil War was almost as great as that of the Second World War.
[7] Not to be confused with his nephew of the same name, who served as Secretary of the Interior under Theodore Roosevelt. The elder Hitchcock was a reasonably fascinating character, mostly in light of his peculiar hobbies; he was an avid flautist, and in addition to this he amassed one of the world’s largest collections of literature about medieval alchemy, which he believed was actually euphemistically expressed religious philosophy.
[8] Yes, it is a bit convergent for Armijo to be in charge three years later with a completely different Mexican government, but his role in restoring order there after the 1837 revolt was such that I believe he’d be kept around regardless of who was in power in Mexico City. That and I struggle to imagine a harder topic to find suitable information on from here than New Mexican administration officials of the early 19th century.
[9] IOTL, it was Doniphan who was sent south and Price who was left in New Mexico.
[10] IOTL they discovered the first plot, and imprisoned several of its leaders, but the uprising nevertheless occurred in January 1847 (a month later than had been planned), and managed to claim the life of Governor Bent in addition to a number of other officials.
[11] This is roughly the same as IOTL.
[12] Well, they probably used shot rather than shells (the shrapnel shells of the time only really being useful as anti-personnel weaponry), so the terminology isn’t strictly accurate, but this isn’t a military history book, so.
[13] Aside from the dates and so on, this isn’t that different from OTL’s Taos Revolt, but I include it here anyway because it’s an episode in the war that gets very little attention.
[14] Paul von Lettow-Vorbeck’s long march through German East Africa during the First World War caused a famine that is estimated (alongside the Spanish flu) to have killed 365,000 civilians. That was a much longer campaign in much more heavily populated country, but it’s nonetheless likely that Price’s march would have an effect on the areas it passed through.
[15] This is mostly analogous to the Battle of El Brazito IOTL, but the Americans do slightly worse all told (IOTL, as far as I can make out, they sustained no fatalities whatsoever in the battle whereas the Mexicans lost between a dozen and fifty men depending on your source).
[16] Yes, his full second surname really was “de la O”.
[17] The son of William Clark, of continent-crossing fame, and named for Clark’s partner in that venture. He was also nearly a brother-in-law of Stephen W. Kearny, who was married to Clark’s stepdaughter. IOTL he would go on to serve as an officer in the American Civil War on the Confederate side, in common with more than a few other Mexican War commanders.
“Mexicans, at the cry of war
Make ready the steel and the bridle
And may the earth tremble at its core
At the resounding roar of the cannon”
***
From “The Mexican War”
(c) 1999 by Spencer Gage III
Athens: University of Georgia Press
The Rio Grande Front
Although the trigger for the Mexican War was the declaration of the California Republic, it is very likely that war would’ve broken out at roughly the same time even without that event, because fighting on the Rio Grande began several days before the actual declaration of war. Tension, indeed, had been a permanent fixture of life in the disputed area since the overthrow of Herrera in September 1844. With the annexation of Texas imminent, Congress had dispatched Zachary Taylor with an army “of observation”, 2,500 strong, to secure positions south of the Nueces for the war that was widely expected to break out, and he encamped at Corpus Christi just south of the river mouth, the largest settlement in the disputed area. [1] In the event, no Mexican army came for some time, as Bustamante tried to consolidate his power and the generals who opposed him were busy making pronunciamientos that failed because of disunity in the ranks. [2]
By late 1848, however, Bustamante’s authority had largely been consolidated, and in December he sent General Pedro de Ampudia [3] north at the head of a force of 2,000. Ampudia’s orders were to retake Corpus Christi and then march north toward Austin, then the state capital of Texas, [4] from where it was hoped that the state could be restored to Mexican control. This was the obvious move to make at that stage of the conflict, and it was for precisely that reason that it failed – Taylor had prepared to defend from exactly such an attack, and when Ampudia arrived in February 1849, the Army of Observation readily beat him back. Taylor took up the chase, and pursued Ampudia’s force to Matamoros, on the Rio Grande, where he stopped, partly as it was the claimed border and partly because Ampudia received reinforcements and was able to fortify his position in the town…
…The state of the United States Army before 1877 was much different from that of the Army we know today. The norm in Europe at the time of the Revolution was for armies to be recruited individually by officers who purchased commissions and raised regiments from their feudal subjects or through standard recruitment; in France before 1789, the parlance was of buying and selling entire regiments between noblemen who desired to lead them, and while the British maintained less of a standing land army, it too used similar methods to select its leadership. Officers would purchase their commissions, and promotions were carried out largely based on seniority and social status rather than merit. While the United States had no formal nobility, many of the practices of the British Army were carried on after independence; officers’ commissions were still available for purchase, and the officer class remained largely drawn from the upper echelons of society, such as they were. However, the small size of the Army in peacetime meant that it was a life that carried less attraction than it did in Europe, and most of the senior officers in 1849 were either people who had joined the Army for the War of 1812 and stayed around or West Point graduates from the 1820s. Congress made legislation in August of 1849 to double the number of infantry regiments in the Army from eight to sixteen, but it would take until October for these units to be available for service. [5]
In the meantime, the gap was filled by masses of state volunteer regiments, raised by order of the relevant state legislature and usually commanded by a local political figure. For instance, the Massachusetts Volunteers were led by Congressman Caleb Cushing, and the 2nd Kentucky Volunteers were led by Henry Clay Jr., son of the great Republican statesman. The quality of these “hobby colonels” varied greatly, but the quality of the troops under their command did not; they were almost invariably far worse soldiers than the regulars, who despised them thoroughly and often showed it in combat. The volunteers had poor skill in combat, and even worse discipline outside it; they were drunk and rowdy, they fought with the local civilians, they stole cattle and used fence posts for firewood, and unceremoniously drove locals out of their homes when quarters were needed. A particularly unfit volunteer company from Louisiana, under the command of a Captain Gaines, was sent back to its home state by General Taylor, who regarded its state to be such as to make it unfit for service; the expression “as useless as Gaines’ army” came to be used for years after the war… [6]
…As Taylor and Ampudia traded blows across the Rio Grande, things were beginning to move further to the north. The newly-promoted Brigadier General Ethan Allen Hitchcock [7] was given command of the “Army of the West”, a force of roughly 1,700 men stationed at Fort Leavenworth on the Missouri River, and ordered to occupy the principal settlements in New Mexico, then march west to link up with Frémont and the California Republic’s fledgling volunteers and work with them to secure a hold on Alta California. Marching along the Santa Fe Trail, Hitchcock’s army reached Santa Fe itself at the beginning of June, and captured the city without a fight. The local governor, Manuel Armijo, [8] had asked Mexico City for troops to defend the city, and receiving no such assistance, together with being aware of the poor state of the local militia, decided to surrender the city and spare its inhabitants the trauma of an open battle. Armijo and Hitchcock met outside the city June 10, and after formally surrendering the city, the governor was allowed to depart for Chihuahua. Hitchcock set up positions in Santa Fe and around New Mexico, leaving Colonel Alexander Doniphan in charge of the occupation army as Military Governor, while a force of some 800 men under Sterling Price was sent south to capture El Paso, and Hitchcock himself moved west along the Gila River trail toward California. [9] The United States had captured New Mexico with ease, but as would soon be known, holding it would not be as easy…
***
From “A History of the Native Americans”
(c) 2001 by Arthur Lewis
Talikwa: Cherokee Publishers
The Mexican War brought hundreds of Native nations into the United States, most of whom had no experience with American rule, and it did not take long before this caused significant tension – indeed, the first armed revolt occurred while the war was still going on…
…When Hitchcock departed for California, he left behind Colonel Alexander Doniphan and some 800 troops to maintain order in the occupied towns. Charles Bent, a trader of twenty years standing based out of Taos, in the far north of the territory, was made provisional Governor of New Mexico. While Bent had extensive experience dealing with the New Mexican people, he thought very little of them, and they generally knew as much; as such, what was meant to be a tactful gesture turned into a source of concern for the inhabitants of the territory. The actions of Doniphan’s troops did little to help; most of them were fresh recruits and volunteers from Missouri, who, in Bent’s words, “as other occupation troops at other times and places have done, undertook to act like conquerors”. In addition, most of them eagerly supported American expansionism and freely boasted of how they’d take over all the land between the Atlantic and Pacific, and this naturally did little to ease the worries of the New Mexicans about their place once the war was over. In short, New Mexico in 1849 was a powder keg waiting to explode, and in September, it did.
The initial rising took place at Taos, late in the evening of September 12, and involved mainly the local Puebloan Natives, who rose up under the leadership of Tomasito Romero, a leader of the local Native community, and descended upon the homes of those who had accepted office under the occupation, who were dragged out of bed, scalped alive and then killed in front of their families. The occupation force was taken completely by surprise at the extent, and the brutality, of the rising – Charles Bent, who had been in Santa Fe at the time, was attacked two days later, spared only by the timely intervention of a nearby group of soldiers, and Colonel Doniphan found himself with no option but to order his men to retreat from Taos and abandon the town to the revolt. [10] In the following days, as Doniphan gathered his men to march north, several settlements around Taos were raided by the rebels and their American inhabitants killed; it’s estimated that some fifteen men were killed in total during these actions. [11]
Doniphan arrived in Taos with three hundred men on the 29th, and the insurgents retreated into the church of the Taos pueblo, built of adobe thick enough to withstand small arms fire. A siege ensued for the next 48 hours, with Doniphan’s men bringing up a 6-pounder cannon and shelling [12] the walls of the church persistently until they were breached. Once a hole had been made, grapeshot was fired into the church and infantry sent in to defeat the insurgents, which they did, killing some 150 men, women and children in the process. The U.S. forces sustained no more than a dozen casualties… [13]
***
From “The Mexican War”
(c) 1999 by Spencer Gage III
Athens: University of Georgia Press
The march of Sterling Price and the First Missouri Volunteers has become the stuff of legend. Nine hundred American volunteer cavalrymen marched for eight months through the southwestern desert with only frontier equipment and good old American ingenuity, defeating Mexican forces three or four times their size, and adding three states to the Union in the process – is the narrative most of us have learned in school and from the legendary kinema drama What Price Destiny (1923, KCA). In fact, the situation was somewhat less heroic than the popular memory holds. As previously discussed, the volunteers were generally the worst U.S. troops in terms of respecting civilian rights, and Price’s men were no exception to this. The distance between Price’s army and any other U.S. detachment or supply line meant that there was little to no possibility of resupply, and so Price and his army sustained their long march through “living off the land”, according to contemporary accounts. This is a side of the march that rarely gets mentioned in popular histories of the war, but primary sources indicate that “living off the land” rarely meant “foraging” and much more frequently meant “poaching cattle and pillaging crops from local villages”. Indeed, it’s not unlikely that the hardships suffered by the people of Chihuahua and New Leon states in the 1850s was at least partly due to the effects of Price’s march on local agriculture… [14]
…Price left Santa Fe on August 2nd, and by mid-September he was at Doña Ana, about thirty miles from El Paso. Here, his force was attacked by roughly one thousand Mexicans, half of them regular army and the other half El Paso militiamen. The Mexican force appeared in the afternoon of the 21st, and battle was joined before Price’s men were fully prepared. There was some confusion as a result of this, and three American cavalrymen were cut down by a Mexican howitzer shell, but the battle was decided as soon as Price was able to restore order and send his center column to charge the howitzer, which was successfully captured with no loss of life. Shortly thereafter, the Mexicans retreated, and the path to El Paso lay open… [15]
…The great climax of Price’s march, the event that formed the core of his legend post-war, was the Battle of the Sacramento River, north of Chihuahua City. By December, the Mexicans were more than well aware of Price and his force, and the governor of Chihuahua, José María Irigoyen de la O, [16] had prepared defenses for the city. On a hill overlooking Hacienda Sacramento, the only river crossing allowing entry into the city from the north, a redoubt had been constructed, containing six fortified artillery positions. In addition, Irigoyen had a force of some 2,500 men, half infantry and half cavalry, which included another ten field guns, and roughly one thousand local ranchers could be called to arms on short notice. Needless to say, Price discovered this in advance of the battle, and drew up a plan whereby the covered wagons brought by his army would be formed into an impromptu fortification and the Mexican positions attacked by artillery, after which the cavalry would charge the Mexicans and hopefully send them into panic.
On the morning of the 9th of December, Price approached the Mexican positions. As planned, the Americans constructed defensive works out of their wagons, and Meriwether Lewis Clark’s guns [17] opened fire on the Mexican cavalry, which was forced off the field. Soon enough, Price felt confident ordering a charge on the Mexican positions, which was accompanied by further artillery fire, and although the Americans took significant casualties, they succeeded in taking the redoubt and forcing the Mexican army off the field. On the 13th, the First Missouri Volunteers marched into Chihuahua, and after securing what supplies the city held, they continued on toward Saltillo, where they were to join General Taylor’s main force. The most important military lesson of the 19th century had proven itself once more: numbers are useless against artillery supremacy…
***
From “The Californias: A History”
(c) 1991 by Earl Brantham
San Pedro: University of South California Press
The California Republic held its constitutional convention in Monterey in February of 1850, two months after Hitchcock’s arrival in the republic. The convention seated delegates from as far north as Mount Shasta and as far south as Ensenada, and included many Californios as well as the American settlers, who nearly unanimously supported the republic. Some controversy erupted when some of the American delegates called for the convention to take the form of a statehood convention, and for the constitution to be sent to Washington; this, however, met little support from the convention, and it was soon agreed that California would be a sovereign republic, although the preamble as eventually written explicitly recognized California’s “peculiar bond” to the United States. The borders of the republic were left up to negotiation with Washington, although provision was made for including Lower as well as Upper California in its government…
…The legal system of the republic would be based on American common law rather than Roman law as practiced in Mexico, but some significant holdovers remained from the Mexican legal system – married couples would jointly hold community property, and the constitution made provision for a single level of municipal government rather than two levels as in most of the U.S. Both of these were common to California and Texas, and would ultimately come to be implemented in most of the states in areas formerly held by Mexico…
…Vallejo, as one of the convention’s most powerful figures, was able to secure a provision guaranteeing the land holdings of the Californios, although this did not apply to previously unsettled lands. This provision would become extremely important as soon as the following year, when gold was discovered at Sutter’s Mill, setting the scene for the largest migration of Americans into California to that date…
***
[1] Taylor was dispatched to the disputed area IOTL, but proceeded south to the location of modern-day Brownsville once the annexation went through. There he built a fort which was almost immediately attacked by Mexico, prompting the start of the war. ITTL he’s more cautious, and of course Mexico is if possible even more unstable at the moment.
[2] Again, it’s a good idea to take what American authors write about Mexico with a few grains of salt.
[3] Ampudia was a Cuban criollo who moved to Mexico after it gained independence and served in its army for many years. He was a conservative at the time of the OTL Mexican-American War, which meant he was sidelined early on in favor of liberal (and future president) Mariano Arista, a bitter rival of his whom he criticized sharply. However, he returned to lead the Mexican forces at the pivotal Battle of Monterrey in September 1846, and despite being forced to retreat, the managed nature of the defeat made him one of the few popular generals of the war on the Mexican side. He later moved to the left and briefly served as Secretary of National Defense under Juárez in 1860.
[4] “Austin” ITTL refers to the town we know as San Felipe (de Austin), which was the original capital of the Republic of Texas but was burned down in 1836 to keep Mexico from capturing it. ITTL this doesn’t happen, and the Republic’s government doesn’t move inland to what was then the settlement of Waterloo but soon became known as Austin.
[5] IOTL this was done in February of 1847, with the regiments entering service in late April and early May.
[6] This is all per OTL. The change wrought upon the US Army by the Civil War was almost as great as that of the Second World War.
[7] Not to be confused with his nephew of the same name, who served as Secretary of the Interior under Theodore Roosevelt. The elder Hitchcock was a reasonably fascinating character, mostly in light of his peculiar hobbies; he was an avid flautist, and in addition to this he amassed one of the world’s largest collections of literature about medieval alchemy, which he believed was actually euphemistically expressed religious philosophy.
[8] Yes, it is a bit convergent for Armijo to be in charge three years later with a completely different Mexican government, but his role in restoring order there after the 1837 revolt was such that I believe he’d be kept around regardless of who was in power in Mexico City. That and I struggle to imagine a harder topic to find suitable information on from here than New Mexican administration officials of the early 19th century.
[9] IOTL, it was Doniphan who was sent south and Price who was left in New Mexico.
[10] IOTL they discovered the first plot, and imprisoned several of its leaders, but the uprising nevertheless occurred in January 1847 (a month later than had been planned), and managed to claim the life of Governor Bent in addition to a number of other officials.
[11] This is roughly the same as IOTL.
[12] Well, they probably used shot rather than shells (the shrapnel shells of the time only really being useful as anti-personnel weaponry), so the terminology isn’t strictly accurate, but this isn’t a military history book, so.
[13] Aside from the dates and so on, this isn’t that different from OTL’s Taos Revolt, but I include it here anyway because it’s an episode in the war that gets very little attention.
[14] Paul von Lettow-Vorbeck’s long march through German East Africa during the First World War caused a famine that is estimated (alongside the Spanish flu) to have killed 365,000 civilians. That was a much longer campaign in much more heavily populated country, but it’s nonetheless likely that Price’s march would have an effect on the areas it passed through.
[15] This is mostly analogous to the Battle of El Brazito IOTL, but the Americans do slightly worse all told (IOTL, as far as I can make out, they sustained no fatalities whatsoever in the battle whereas the Mexicans lost between a dozen and fifty men depending on your source).
[16] Yes, his full second surname really was “de la O”.
[17] The son of William Clark, of continent-crossing fame, and named for Clark’s partner in that venture. He was also nearly a brother-in-law of Stephen W. Kearny, who was married to Clark’s stepdaughter. IOTL he would go on to serve as an officer in the American Civil War on the Confederate side, in common with more than a few other Mexican War commanders.
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Really? Wow.
I guess that says something about the effects of foraging on local populations, and explains why occupying forces of all stripes are often hated by local populations.