Affiliated States of Boreoamerica thread
- Thread starter False Dmitri
- Start date
Thanks. I'm actually using all of that as a reference.
Also, as I was reading about the Carolina-Lower Virginia border, I noticed you set the border at the Neuse River, when much of the Albemarle Settlements (which were both populated by Virginians and were occupied by Virginia in this world) were mostly north of the Roanoke River (see map here
Is there a bit of justification for setting the border that far south (maybe Virginia's governor wanted to put a buffer zone between the settlements and Carolina) or maybe I should set the border at the Roanoke River instead.
EDIT: Here's the map showing the Roanoke and Neuse Rivers, with the approximate area of the Albemarle Settlements in that red circle (right around where Bertie County is) -
Thanks for the map, that's a good visual. Now I'll say that on the one hand, yes, the border is there for a reason. But on the other hand, I haven't personally put a ton of thought into that reason, so let's get to it.
The Albemarle settlements were the original justification when Virginia occupied that land. It was the 1690s and the colonies were in a rather chaotic state. The colonists there were more Virginian than Carolian, and especially during a time of war, they actually preferred the security of Virginian government to the uncertain, weak rule they were getting from Charleston. The two colonies wrangled legally over Albemarle for a good seventy years. Virginia remained in possession - not sure why, but I can certainly imagine the desires of the inhabitants being taken into account as reps of the two sides argued before various privy councilors. By then, the disputed area had expanded in size because the Albemarle settlers had multiplied somewhat.
So in the 1770s, they went to war with each other. Officially it was Virginia's war for independence, but on the ground it was basically indistinguishable from a civil war. There was fighting all along the border. It ended with an armistace rather than a treaty, so the century-old border issue was still unresolved. The next round of fighting broke out in 1802 and again saw England (with loyalist Carolina) on the opposite side of Virginia. But this time they did come to a final agreement, spurred on by antiwar allies on both sides in New England. Virginia had the upper hand in the fighting and had occupied a good deal of Carolian territory, though most of the territory in question was inhabited by people with Virginian ties.
I guess the question hinges on the military history of 1802-1808, and the diplomacy that followed. Would Virginia have to concede more land than that in order to secure peace? Is this land grab unrealistic for that era? But that's the key era, rather than the original settlements of the 17th century.\
I have actually mapped this border. I can't remember what I've shared publicly and what I haven't, so here's what I have.
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Gian
Banned
Seems reasonable-ish. (Then again ofc, anything in the ASB-world so far could be seen as reasonable-ish
)
Gian
Banned
Also @False Dmitri, are there any other subdivisions for the states that I should add, and maybe you can go create maps for them? (not going to try and do New England's towns though, since they'd be too small to depict properly)
You've caught all the subdivisions that have been defined so far. I have a Plan for what I want to do with Pennsylvania, but nothing concrete yet. Lower Virginia will be close to OTL and Upper Virginia will resemble that basic pattern. Actually, Upper Virginia will be a rather complex mishmash of counties, independent cities, and a couple of Regional governments covering larger areas than a county. Anything else is completely undefined. If you have ideas for any of them and you'd like to put them on this map, that's perfectly fine and I'd welcome the addition.
Gian
Banned
Well, managed to complete the hi-res map of the ASB:
BTW @False Dmitri, I think one of my main goals would be to replace much of the Q-BAMs with this better model (as well as provide a one-stop to view all of its subdivisions).
The first would be to start work on the Catholic dioceses map which would be easy to do, as well as the ethnic maps (one general, the other more focused on the Anglo-Celtic stocks)
BTW @False Dmitri, I think one of my main goals would be to replace much of the Q-BAMs with this better model (as well as provide a one-stop to view all of its subdivisions).
The first would be to start work on the Catholic dioceses map which would be easy to do, as well as the ethnic maps (one general, the other more focused on the Anglo-Celtic stocks)
Absolutely! A good general map is a springboard to a lot of additional discoveries, as I've seen many times. Can I make one minor correction and two questions?
The northern border of the Upper Country extends beyond the main watershed boundary. Initially, I believe, this came from an error in the QBAM historical maps, but I decided to go with it when I made the more detailed Upper Country map. The reasons have to do with the general areas of Ojibwe versus Cree settlement, with more Ojibwe areas being Upper Country and more Cree areas being Rupertsland. And it also involved the general desire for a buffer zone up above Lake Superior. But I admit that may be unrealistic, and I may be grasping at straws to justify a border that, when I'm being honest, I prefer for aesthetic reasons. I'm open to arguments for the watershed border.
As for my two questions, the Carolina-Muscoguia and Ohio-Illinois borders look wonky to me. That may just be because I'm not used to seeing them at this projection. But in particular, I had thought that the Carolina-Muscoguia border started further west, starting at the same point as the internal provincial border inside East Florida. They make a "Four Corners" point on my East Florida map. Now that may well be inconsistent with what the QBAM indicates, and I can accept that.
Gian
Banned
That's a good argument, but I think it would be a tad unrealistic since
a) the aforementioned geographic concerns (the Hudson Bay vs. Great Lakes watershed)
b) the region is sparsely populated in our world (and will still be in this one)
c) Even when considering the Indian population there, the watershed border still works as a serviceable boundary between Cree north and Anishinaabe south
That may be because I had to adapt the Q-BAM map (more precisely this..) into the 8K-BAM map (which does show the county borders. The hardest for me was indeed that border, as well as the Cherokia/Muscogia border.
And the only answer I have to that is, "But look at how skinny and week the Algoma region looks now, and how strong and muscular it looks on the regional map." I had all those thoughts before. I actually saved a version of the local map that uses the more logical border, but the one I posted uses the one I consider more attractive... next chance I get (probably tomorrow), I'll post the Watersheds version and we can work out a final answer.
And that makes sense. The QBAM is more authoritative than the local Floridian map and is accurate with regard to OTL county boundaries, so your rendering must be correct.
Beautiful. On House names: the dynastic histories of Europe are both very important to this timeline, and still mostly uncharted. The PoD is 1600 and there is plenty of silly convergence from there; but there is also a lot of divergence. So:
Stuart and Bonaparte are certainly correct. They're important to the histories of their respective states.
Romanov is certainly incorrect. The name "Pseudodemetrian" is obviously a joke, but a while back I became convinced to just go for it and say that the ruling dynasty at a certain point acknowledged that they were not true Rurikids and openly used the name. That being said, there were also points in history when the imperial crown passed matrilineally, so the house name is something else. On my to-do list is working out just wat were the dynastic gymnastics that allowed the family to amass those territories. They include Zweibrücken, so it may be that the Wittelsbachs ended up inheriting the throne, albeit later than they did in OTL. And even that doesn't guarantee that there wasn't another matrilineal succession further down the line. The family was entering into royal marriages from Germany to Hawaii, and any of the offspring thus created had a chance to inherit. I would suggest House of Wittelsbach-Rurik as a placeholder, knowing it could change as more history comes to light.
Windsor is doubtful. Even if everything in English dynastic history goes the same as OTL, the particular political circumstances that led to the renaming of the House of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha would be different. If you put the House of Wettin, using the ancestral name rather than the current name, it would probably be all right, at least for now.
Bourbon could go either way. I've deliberately avoided naming the dynasty that split into Spanish and Floridian branches at the turn of the 20th century. There certainly was some kind of war over the Spanish succession, but it did not necessarily end exactly as it did in our world. Then again, maybe it did.
This all really does point to a need to sort this put better - at least the broad outlines of the dynastic histories through the early modern period. An awful lot of history depends on it.
For when I want the whole brevity thing, I've been using "Russian Imperial Commonwealth" also.
Gian
Banned
Wittlesbach-Rurik sounds nice as a placeholder (at least until we can come up with a better one)
Also, here's another piece (WIP) of that general ethnic map I've been teasing you about:
(NOTE: Chesapian is my generic neutral term for both Virginians and Marylanders; taken from the Chesapeake Bay and completely unrelated to the tribe of the same name that gave their name to said bay)
Chesapian is the very term I've been looking for - thank you!
And oof - I've attempted similar ethnic maps over the years and always given up. But there's a lot more known information out there now than when I last tried it. It's looking great so far!
Gian
Banned
That said, it'll be a lot more detailed including some blank spots for the (ethnically-diverse) major cities
History and flag of Illinois
This is an idea for a flag of Illinois, along with a more detailed history.
The three Capetian lilies had been known in Louisiana since the earliest times of French occupation. When Louisianan planters repudiated the Revolutionary regime in order to maintain slavery, they used royalist symbolism, though they did not specifically declare loyalty to the monarchy. In the early napoleonic era, the Louisianans were brought back into the imperial fold in exchange for legal autonomy and the assurance that they could keep their slave system. By then, the lilies had become a well-known symbol of the colony and remained in semi-official use during the imperial period. It was natural for Illinois to adopt a modified version of the symbol when it broke away from Louisiana and achieved self-government in 1828. A few years later, this became the official design. The lilies represent stalks of maize growing at the side of a river - the universal pattern of settlement in the state until the second half of the nineteenth century.
History of Illinois
The Ancestral Illinois
The Illinois Confederacy preceded the colony and is seen as the ancestor of the modern state. Unlike tribal confederations like the Iroquois, which were formed to unite disparate tribes, the Inoca began as a single tribe that divided into smaller units as it grew and prospered. The tribes had lived in Illinois since time immemorial, having no tradition of migration from elsewhere. The Illinois therefore believe that their ancestors built and ruled the great city of earthen pyramids called Cahokia. Archaeologists have estimated that Cahokia's age of greatness began around 1050, and many Illinois people today cite that date as the starting point for their society. Modern scholars are mostly silent on the question of when the Inoca tribe was founded.
However and whenever it began, by the time the French made contact, the Inoca confederacy was the dominant power in the present-day states of Illinois, Upper Louisiana, Arques, and nearby parts of Dakota and the Upper Country. The confederacy consisted of five large tribes and seven smaller ones. It had a class of great chiefs - "great captains," in the words of Father Marquette - who were recognized as having authority over the chiefs of individual tribes and villages.
A series of wars between the Iroquois and their neighbors brought many refugees into the region; the refugees created new alliances that threatened the rule of the Inoca. By the 1660s the confederation was still powerful, but its influence extended no further than the borders of the present-day state, and this influence was diminishing. During this time, the first French traders began to move through the Illinois country.
Emergence of the Illinois Métis
French habitants began to build farming villages around 1700, the first appearing next to the existing Inoca villages of Cahokia and Kaskaskia. By then, the confederation was facing serious threats from Iroquois raids, ongoing friction with newcomers to the region, and diseases brought by the French themselves. With their power and their numbers declining, the Illinois had to rely more on their alliance with the French. They became the most loyal ally in the region. Illinois villages that did not have adjoining French forts shrank or disappeared. The core of the confederacy shifted to the line of towns in the Mississippi Bottom, the ribbon of flat, fertile soil to the east of the river. The modern Illinois people came from the mixed settlements that took shape there.
Both the Illinois Indians and the French habitants contributed to the emerging culture. The French brought their language and the Catholic religion. The Indians brought styles of clothing and housing suited to life in the bottom lands and up on the prairie. A form of communal land ownership characterized the settlements, a practice known to the French and acceptable to the Indians. Such Illinois cultural elements as food, music, and dance styles truly were new combinations not seen elsewhere in America or Europe.
By the second half of the eighteenth century, the lines between French and Inoca were already blurring. A great many habitants had family from both cultures. Local leaders had dual roles, as French colonial magistrates and confederation chiefs. "Les Illinois" came to be recognized as a unique, mixed-blood, French-speaking ethnic group. Ethnic Illinois began to migrate across the Mississippi River and elsewhere, bringing a sense of Illinois identity with them.
From confederation to colony
In the 18th century, the French administration officially called Illinois Haute-Louisiane, treating it as a northern extension of their colony in Louisiana. But Illinois had broad de facto autonomy. For one thing, there was the sheer distance between Illinois and the centers of French power in New Orleans and Quebec. In addition, local administrators' roles were merging with the roles of confederation chiefs, encouraging them to have a "national" outlook often different from the colonial French point of view. Finally, Illinois was able to exploit rivalry between Louisiana and Canada to win more local control over its affairs.
In the 1760s France built Saint-Louis on the other side of the Mississippi River to be a new center of trade and administration, one that would be more subservient to colonial rule than the precocious Illinois. The city became the focus of subsequent French settlement, and a division emerged between the reliable colony to the west, and the rather unruly Mixed society to the east. Some settlements further away from the Mississippi, most notably Peoria, came to be dominated by Franco-Illinois and allied Indians from other groups such as the Pottawatomi.
Fort de Chartres, the largest French military installation, remained important as the center of defense and local administration east of the river Increasingly, the fort and its environs took on a more local Illinois character as French attention shifted to Saint-Louis.
From colony to state
The foundations for the modern state of Illinois were laid in the early 19th century. Neighboring peoples began to deal with the Illinois as an entity separate from both Louisiana. The formal institutions of statehood began to take shape. In the war of 1802, command of Fort de Chartres was entrusted for the first time to a local, François Godin, rather than to an official from France or Lower Louisiana. Godin ably defended the Illinois Country when it was raided by English and Swedish forces. After the war, as a magistrate and diplomat he was an advocate for Illinoisan self-government within the French empire. Godin is honored as the "founder of modern Illinois;" ancient Illinois having no founder figure in recorded or oral history.
Another key event was the Kishwauki War of 1822-1825. The war concerned the border between Illinois, still a part of Louisiana, and the Upper Country, which was a Canadian dependency. Illinois was the aggressor in the war, posting its militia in the disputed region in order to charge tolls on the route from Chicagou to the lead mines of the Aux-Fèves. But it did so in large part at the behest of the Louisianan merchants who dominated the river trade and who wanted to block a possible competing trade route.
The war forced all Illinois people to reckon with the question of where their sympathy and loyalty lay. An aging Godin again led troops to the fighting, though he was not the principal commander, deferring to a younger officer, the Anglophone Alexander Harper. But Godin was important in rallying the Illinois to the fight. After he was badly wounded by a stray skirmisher's bullet, he penned a famous letter to friends in Kaskaskia urging Illinois to disentangle itself from Louisiana and pursue its own course. The letter was published after his death. It gave force to the rising general support for peace and autonomy. Illinois and Upper Country officials sought mediation among the chiefs of western Ohio, and Illinois abandoned the Kishwauki in exchange for some economic privileges in the disputed area.
After the war, events moved quickly. Illinois began to petition the king of New France, Jerome Bonaparte, to separate from Louisiana and become a coequal part of the kingdom. Jerome granted the request in 1828. His decree defined Illinois's borders and lay the foundation for its eventual statehood.
In 1833, the French Emperor Napoleon II died, and a republican government seized power in Paris. All four components of New France - Canada, Louisiana, Saint-Domingue, and Illinois - took the opportunity to declare independence almost as soon as the news arrived. Among all the breakaway states, Illinois was the most enthusiastic supporter of Confederation with its neighbors. As an inland state, Illinois had no hope of a fully independent existence, and it already enjoyed close ties with Ohio and other states. Illinois joined the Congress of the Nations at Pavonia, New Netherland, in 1834, the first French state to do so. The others followed its lead not long after.
Illinois's state government developed concurrently with these events. A new influx of English settlers, largely Virginians, acted as a catalyst for the growth of civil government in Illinois. Already by 1818, so many Virginians lived around the confluence of the Mississippi and Ohio that they had convinced Louisiana to cede a lot of that area to Virginia. But others continued to come north of the border, establishing important towns at Belleville and Vandalia. Belleville was close to the old core settlements of Illinois and was easy for the French to control, but Vandalia was quite distant and seemed positioned to defect to Virginia.
A great meeting had begun to occur in Peoria in the late 18th century that brought together administrators, leaders of Illinois habitants, allied village chiefs, and representatives of English settlers. This meeting evolved into a government, partly in order to include the English settlers in the state and prevent their secession. In 1839, Peoria became the sole capital of the state when most functions of government ceased in Kaskaskia (the French center) and Vandalia (the English center).
Plowing the prairies
The population of Illinois grew slowly and steadily, mainly as a result of organic growth among the Métis inhabitants. Most of the people lived along the Mississippi and Illinois Rivers and some of their tributaries, working the soft bottomlands in ways that combined French and indigenous traditions. The Chicagou Canal of 1853 opened up the Illinois River as a major shipping route. Seemingly overnight, Peoria grew from a modest government and farming town to a major regional commercial center.
The shipping route and the availability of new plow technology positioned Illinois to exploit its prairies for commercial farming after around 1860. The area of land under cultivation greatly expanded. By the turn of the century, Illinois had transformed from a backwater Métis state into the most productive food producer of the ASB. Land ownership became a thorny issue. Many of the big new farms ended up in the hands of well-to-do members of the older Illinois villages, while others were bought up by major landowners from out of state. As in so many other states, class divisions followed racial ones; the most prosperous commercial farmers tended to have largely European French ancestry, while those with more Indian blood tended to stay in the old villages scraping a living from their small communal plots of soil.
Industry grew as a sector of the economy starting around 1900, and it provided new opportunities for paid work. Peoria was the main center, but manufacturing changed the face of some other cities as well. Newly discovered coal deposits across the state provided fuel to the growing factories. The factories and mines drew workers not just from Illinois itself, but also from other states, from Mexico, and from Europe. By this time, Illinois identity was robust enough to absorb all these new elements, and they contributed their own ideas and lifeways wherever they settled.
Political development
All this growth gave Illinois newfound political weight in the confederal institutions. It is no surprise that the most influential Chief Minister of the nineteenth century, Armand Linville, came from the state that had become the champion of confederation. Linville had begun his political career in the heady days when Illinois was forming its first modern and democratic government, and he envisioned the entire ASB doing the same thing on a continental scale. During his tenure as Chief Minister, he managed to transfer a great deal of power, including control of the Chief Ministry itself, from the Congress of the Nations to the much newer, popularly elected confederal Parliament. He also changed the voting rules for members of Parliament, requiring all elections to be open to members of the middle class in every state. Linville died unexpectedly in 1871, but he had done as much as anyone to make the ASB into a permanent confederal government.
The turn of the century saw new agrarian and trade unionist reform movements sweep through the state. These trends happened elsewhere, too, but Illinois was always an important political battleground. With its mix of traditional farms, commercial farms, and growing industrial towns, Illinois was something of an economic microcosm of the ASB, and it played host to many of the Confederation's ongoing class and political struggles. Major mining and railroad strikes in Illinois in the early twentieth century drew the attention of labor activists and anti-labor activists across the Confederation. The trade unionism of Chief Minister Jack Reagan in the late twentieth century grew out of this context.
The three Capetian lilies had been known in Louisiana since the earliest times of French occupation. When Louisianan planters repudiated the Revolutionary regime in order to maintain slavery, they used royalist symbolism, though they did not specifically declare loyalty to the monarchy. In the early napoleonic era, the Louisianans were brought back into the imperial fold in exchange for legal autonomy and the assurance that they could keep their slave system. By then, the lilies had become a well-known symbol of the colony and remained in semi-official use during the imperial period. It was natural for Illinois to adopt a modified version of the symbol when it broke away from Louisiana and achieved self-government in 1828. A few years later, this became the official design. The lilies represent stalks of maize growing at the side of a river - the universal pattern of settlement in the state until the second half of the nineteenth century.
History of Illinois
The Ancestral Illinois
The Illinois Confederacy preceded the colony and is seen as the ancestor of the modern state. Unlike tribal confederations like the Iroquois, which were formed to unite disparate tribes, the Inoca began as a single tribe that divided into smaller units as it grew and prospered. The tribes had lived in Illinois since time immemorial, having no tradition of migration from elsewhere. The Illinois therefore believe that their ancestors built and ruled the great city of earthen pyramids called Cahokia. Archaeologists have estimated that Cahokia's age of greatness began around 1050, and many Illinois people today cite that date as the starting point for their society. Modern scholars are mostly silent on the question of when the Inoca tribe was founded.
However and whenever it began, by the time the French made contact, the Inoca confederacy was the dominant power in the present-day states of Illinois, Upper Louisiana, Arques, and nearby parts of Dakota and the Upper Country. The confederacy consisted of five large tribes and seven smaller ones. It had a class of great chiefs - "great captains," in the words of Father Marquette - who were recognized as having authority over the chiefs of individual tribes and villages.
A series of wars between the Iroquois and their neighbors brought many refugees into the region; the refugees created new alliances that threatened the rule of the Inoca. By the 1660s the confederation was still powerful, but its influence extended no further than the borders of the present-day state, and this influence was diminishing. During this time, the first French traders began to move through the Illinois country.
Emergence of the Illinois Métis
French habitants began to build farming villages around 1700, the first appearing next to the existing Inoca villages of Cahokia and Kaskaskia. By then, the confederation was facing serious threats from Iroquois raids, ongoing friction with newcomers to the region, and diseases brought by the French themselves. With their power and their numbers declining, the Illinois had to rely more on their alliance with the French. They became the most loyal ally in the region. Illinois villages that did not have adjoining French forts shrank or disappeared. The core of the confederacy shifted to the line of towns in the Mississippi Bottom, the ribbon of flat, fertile soil to the east of the river. The modern Illinois people came from the mixed settlements that took shape there.
Both the Illinois Indians and the French habitants contributed to the emerging culture. The French brought their language and the Catholic religion. The Indians brought styles of clothing and housing suited to life in the bottom lands and up on the prairie. A form of communal land ownership characterized the settlements, a practice known to the French and acceptable to the Indians. Such Illinois cultural elements as food, music, and dance styles truly were new combinations not seen elsewhere in America or Europe.
By the second half of the eighteenth century, the lines between French and Inoca were already blurring. A great many habitants had family from both cultures. Local leaders had dual roles, as French colonial magistrates and confederation chiefs. "Les Illinois" came to be recognized as a unique, mixed-blood, French-speaking ethnic group. Ethnic Illinois began to migrate across the Mississippi River and elsewhere, bringing a sense of Illinois identity with them.
From confederation to colony
In the 18th century, the French administration officially called Illinois Haute-Louisiane, treating it as a northern extension of their colony in Louisiana. But Illinois had broad de facto autonomy. For one thing, there was the sheer distance between Illinois and the centers of French power in New Orleans and Quebec. In addition, local administrators' roles were merging with the roles of confederation chiefs, encouraging them to have a "national" outlook often different from the colonial French point of view. Finally, Illinois was able to exploit rivalry between Louisiana and Canada to win more local control over its affairs.
In the 1760s France built Saint-Louis on the other side of the Mississippi River to be a new center of trade and administration, one that would be more subservient to colonial rule than the precocious Illinois. The city became the focus of subsequent French settlement, and a division emerged between the reliable colony to the west, and the rather unruly Mixed society to the east. Some settlements further away from the Mississippi, most notably Peoria, came to be dominated by Franco-Illinois and allied Indians from other groups such as the Pottawatomi.
Fort de Chartres, the largest French military installation, remained important as the center of defense and local administration east of the river Increasingly, the fort and its environs took on a more local Illinois character as French attention shifted to Saint-Louis.
From colony to state
The foundations for the modern state of Illinois were laid in the early 19th century. Neighboring peoples began to deal with the Illinois as an entity separate from both Louisiana. The formal institutions of statehood began to take shape. In the war of 1802, command of Fort de Chartres was entrusted for the first time to a local, François Godin, rather than to an official from France or Lower Louisiana. Godin ably defended the Illinois Country when it was raided by English and Swedish forces. After the war, as a magistrate and diplomat he was an advocate for Illinoisan self-government within the French empire. Godin is honored as the "founder of modern Illinois;" ancient Illinois having no founder figure in recorded or oral history.
Another key event was the Kishwauki War of 1822-1825. The war concerned the border between Illinois, still a part of Louisiana, and the Upper Country, which was a Canadian dependency. Illinois was the aggressor in the war, posting its militia in the disputed region in order to charge tolls on the route from Chicagou to the lead mines of the Aux-Fèves. But it did so in large part at the behest of the Louisianan merchants who dominated the river trade and who wanted to block a possible competing trade route.
The war forced all Illinois people to reckon with the question of where their sympathy and loyalty lay. An aging Godin again led troops to the fighting, though he was not the principal commander, deferring to a younger officer, the Anglophone Alexander Harper. But Godin was important in rallying the Illinois to the fight. After he was badly wounded by a stray skirmisher's bullet, he penned a famous letter to friends in Kaskaskia urging Illinois to disentangle itself from Louisiana and pursue its own course. The letter was published after his death. It gave force to the rising general support for peace and autonomy. Illinois and Upper Country officials sought mediation among the chiefs of western Ohio, and Illinois abandoned the Kishwauki in exchange for some economic privileges in the disputed area.
After the war, events moved quickly. Illinois began to petition the king of New France, Jerome Bonaparte, to separate from Louisiana and become a coequal part of the kingdom. Jerome granted the request in 1828. His decree defined Illinois's borders and lay the foundation for its eventual statehood.
In 1833, the French Emperor Napoleon II died, and a republican government seized power in Paris. All four components of New France - Canada, Louisiana, Saint-Domingue, and Illinois - took the opportunity to declare independence almost as soon as the news arrived. Among all the breakaway states, Illinois was the most enthusiastic supporter of Confederation with its neighbors. As an inland state, Illinois had no hope of a fully independent existence, and it already enjoyed close ties with Ohio and other states. Illinois joined the Congress of the Nations at Pavonia, New Netherland, in 1834, the first French state to do so. The others followed its lead not long after.
Illinois's state government developed concurrently with these events. A new influx of English settlers, largely Virginians, acted as a catalyst for the growth of civil government in Illinois. Already by 1818, so many Virginians lived around the confluence of the Mississippi and Ohio that they had convinced Louisiana to cede a lot of that area to Virginia. But others continued to come north of the border, establishing important towns at Belleville and Vandalia. Belleville was close to the old core settlements of Illinois and was easy for the French to control, but Vandalia was quite distant and seemed positioned to defect to Virginia.
A great meeting had begun to occur in Peoria in the late 18th century that brought together administrators, leaders of Illinois habitants, allied village chiefs, and representatives of English settlers. This meeting evolved into a government, partly in order to include the English settlers in the state and prevent their secession. In 1839, Peoria became the sole capital of the state when most functions of government ceased in Kaskaskia (the French center) and Vandalia (the English center).
Plowing the prairies
The population of Illinois grew slowly and steadily, mainly as a result of organic growth among the Métis inhabitants. Most of the people lived along the Mississippi and Illinois Rivers and some of their tributaries, working the soft bottomlands in ways that combined French and indigenous traditions. The Chicagou Canal of 1853 opened up the Illinois River as a major shipping route. Seemingly overnight, Peoria grew from a modest government and farming town to a major regional commercial center.
The shipping route and the availability of new plow technology positioned Illinois to exploit its prairies for commercial farming after around 1860. The area of land under cultivation greatly expanded. By the turn of the century, Illinois had transformed from a backwater Métis state into the most productive food producer of the ASB. Land ownership became a thorny issue. Many of the big new farms ended up in the hands of well-to-do members of the older Illinois villages, while others were bought up by major landowners from out of state. As in so many other states, class divisions followed racial ones; the most prosperous commercial farmers tended to have largely European French ancestry, while those with more Indian blood tended to stay in the old villages scraping a living from their small communal plots of soil.
Industry grew as a sector of the economy starting around 1900, and it provided new opportunities for paid work. Peoria was the main center, but manufacturing changed the face of some other cities as well. Newly discovered coal deposits across the state provided fuel to the growing factories. The factories and mines drew workers not just from Illinois itself, but also from other states, from Mexico, and from Europe. By this time, Illinois identity was robust enough to absorb all these new elements, and they contributed their own ideas and lifeways wherever they settled.
Political development
All this growth gave Illinois newfound political weight in the confederal institutions. It is no surprise that the most influential Chief Minister of the nineteenth century, Armand Linville, came from the state that had become the champion of confederation. Linville had begun his political career in the heady days when Illinois was forming its first modern and democratic government, and he envisioned the entire ASB doing the same thing on a continental scale. During his tenure as Chief Minister, he managed to transfer a great deal of power, including control of the Chief Ministry itself, from the Congress of the Nations to the much newer, popularly elected confederal Parliament. He also changed the voting rules for members of Parliament, requiring all elections to be open to members of the middle class in every state. Linville died unexpectedly in 1871, but he had done as much as anyone to make the ASB into a permanent confederal government.
The turn of the century saw new agrarian and trade unionist reform movements sweep through the state. These trends happened elsewhere, too, but Illinois was always an important political battleground. With its mix of traditional farms, commercial farms, and growing industrial towns, Illinois was something of an economic microcosm of the ASB, and it played host to many of the Confederation's ongoing class and political struggles. Major mining and railroad strikes in Illinois in the early twentieth century drew the attention of labor activists and anti-labor activists across the Confederation. The trade unionism of Chief Minister Jack Reagan in the late twentieth century grew out of this context.
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That would be a slightly longer process to draw, though not crazy long. Most of Illinois's borders are easy to trace from state-level maps that already exist. I can say that Illinois's divisions don't have the storied past that you see in some other states. No captured chiefdoms or would-be states here: they are simply administrative units created by the state government.
Here's the map I mentioned earlier - the Upper Country with the scrawny little northern section.
Attachments
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Upper Country watershed border jpeg.jpg
This is going well.So here's the latest update (also I'd imagine that there might be a Great Migration-equivalent somewhere down the line, so jsyk about those Afro-English splotches in the major cities)
Coming along very nice! I see how the subdivisions are helping. I have a map going for Illinois and I'd like to get going on Upper Virginia. Two things so far:
1. Madawaska (the little enclave to the north of New Hampshire) is VERY proud of its Acadian heritage. Probably some adjacent parts of Canada are also quite Acadian by ethnicity.
2. I see that you've followed my language map for Christiana (the oldest map for the entire project that's still valid, if I'm not mistaken). But I'm fairly sure that they see themselves as part of a single Christianer ethnicity, one with a Mixed identity that can also be found in some parts of Poutaxia, Ohio, and possibly some places further west. They are considered a trilingual ethnic group, since people who identify with the culture might speak Swedish, Lenape, or English. Kind of like how the Pennamites are actually a bilingual group speaking both English and German. No worries about it, of course - I never did finish writing up the revised history of Christiana and its society. It's on the Weebly in outline form.
The Christianer ethnic group ended up absorbing quite a lot of the Swedes who immigrated in the 19th century. There are Swedish areas in Dakota and the Upper Country where the people identify as at least part-Christianer. The item in the outline says, "New waves of Swedish immigration; many move through to the plains of Dakota and the Upper Country. They are accompanied by a core of "old Swedish" settlers - actually Swedish-Lenape." So it probably varies by region and even by locality, but a lot of Swedish Americans think of themselves as being at least part Christianer-Lenape.
There are other Lenape in parts of Poutaxia, Allegheny, and Ohio who stayed separate from the Christianer. These would include the Moravian Lenape and some other western branches as well.
... These sorts of things are why I never got very far with my attempts to do ethnic maps. I'm not even sure what would be the best way to show that kind of "rainbow ethnicity" on a map.
Keep it up though
. I love seeing this.
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