THE DUTCH-AMERICAN WAR OF 1899
Not the be confused with the ABC War of 1850, nor the Amerikaaner Wars of the 1870s, the Dutch-American War of 1899 nevertheless could never have come about without those preceding conflicts to set the stage.
Background; the ABC War of 1850 - AKA the Edo Incident, AKA the Nippon Intervention, AKA the Edo Massacre.
Force and fraud are in war the two cardinal virtues.
Having side-stepped the conflagration that was the 'Springtime of Nations' due to progressive constitutional reforms, the Netherlands were thus free to pursue a more active overseas agenda than her European neighbors. Thus, the United East India Company (Vereenigde Oost-Indische Compagnie, or VOC) having previously endeavored to suppress native resistance in the Padri War, Java War, and Banjarmasin War, undertook three successive campaigns to bring Bali under Dutch control between 1846-1849. Into this general expansion in the Indies, Governor-General Jan Jacob Rochussen sought to achieve a far greater breakthrough. Fighting the multitude of tiny sultanates and kingdoms of the Indies was patchwork at best; better to bag a single, larger target, and let them sort out of the particulars with their own subjects. Achieving funding and reinforcements under the guise of "staunch resistance," he acquired the forces necessary. So it was that a 'diplomatic' force was dispatched some ways north...
At the same time, an expedition from the (American) Perpetual Union - heading to East Asia - had arrived in the Hawaiian islands to take on fresh supplies. This force of a dozen warships, 200 hundred marines, and four Congressmen - comprising the biggest and best the PU Navy had to offer - had sailed from Charles Town on the Atlantic the previous year with orders to secure diplomatic missions in the Orient. American ambitions concerning their God-given 'Manifest Destiny' - the term coined just a handful of years prior - all but guaranteeing a war with Mexico in the near future, President Fillmore was convinced that diplomatic actions in the Far East shouldn't wait. Later historians would describe this event as "operating in a classic gunboat diplomacy," the Perpetual Union expedition acquired a Treaty of Friendship from the Kuhina Nui of Hawaii. The Americans then remained in the islands for several weeks to ensure "cooperation and clarity" with the native government, reorganizing certain constitutional language in what would later be called the Great Mahele - a system of land redistribution and, more importantly, what entities could own Hawaiian lands. This delay allowed news of their arrival and agenda to spread, for sailors are not known for keeping secrets.
During this time, the Dutch force out of the Indies, 18 ships along with 3,000 marines, arrived in Japanese waters and began to patrol, ostensibly to 'protect Dutch shipping' in the region. The Japanese system of Sakoku, that of being a tightly restricted, or even "closed" country, would argue that there was very little in the way of Dutch outside of the port of Nagasaki. The Dutch flotilla disagreed and ranged considerably farther into Japanese waters. Insulted, the Japanese demanded the Dutch ships leave immediately, or the Dutch factory and access in Nagasaki would be revoked. The Dutch flatly refused and threatened armed retaliation should Dutch persons or property in Nagasaki be harmed. The Japanese, lacking any comparable naval power, could not hope to drive them off and could only grumble from behind their walls and make a show of closing off the Dutch access in Nagasaki, but making no move against the Dutch interests themselves. It was at this time the Dutch fleet learned of the approaching Americans and their recent arm-twisting in Hawaii.
Shortly thereafter, however, the PU fleet arrived in Japanese waters and began their approach to Edo. Unaware of the Dutch arrival or purpose the Americans were unprepared for battle when hailed and issued an ultimatum by the Dutch: turn back or face the consequences. The Americans, they argued, could not turn back for they were in need of fresh supplies, this it is and nothing more. The Dutch stood their ground, however, and fired a warning shot. The American commander, the controversial Commodore James Barron, ordered an attack. Poorly prepared and out of position, the Americans were further disadvantaged by being outnumbered and outgunned, for most of the Dutch ships were of heavier displacement than the Americans. The resulting Battle of the Izu Islands was a lopsided affair, with the Americans being thoroughly thrashed. Most of the Americans would eventually flee, bloodied and chastised, limping back to American-friendly ports to report on this incident.
With victory achieved, the Dutch fleet approached Edo and demanded immediate access. The Japanese, though somewhat grateful for the Dutch defeat of the Americans, steadfastly refused. The Dutch immediately commenced a naval bombardment of the seat of the Shogun before landing their marines in the city. Making straight for Edo Castle, where Shogun Tokugawa Ieyoshi resided, the Dutch marines stormed the castle's fortifications with powder and shot, reducing the samurai defenders quickly. With his guards dead and many of his attendants fled, the Shogun had little choice but to surrender to the marines, who summarily raised a Dutch flag over the palace. The Japanese, in the coming days, couldn't vent their frustration on the Dutch for fear of reprisal... but the shipwrecked Americans who found themselves washed up on her shores were fair game for imprisonment, torture, and possibly even execution.
To say the government of the Perpetual Union under President Millard Fillmore was mad would be an understatement as they declared war on the Netherlands weeks later once word of the Battle of the Izu Islands reached the floors of Congress. Immediately after the declaration of war, the Perpetual Union issued statements in newspapers throughout Europe that they had first-hand accounts of the "massacre" of their sailors, that all debts owed to the Dutch Republic were forfeit, and that all Dutch properties within the Perpetual Union would be seized. American citizens took the streets in an outpouring of anger; shops were ransacked, civilians attacked in the street, and worse. Many Dutch, and German, populations in the Perpetual Union were attacked by such mob violence. This caused... shall we say consternation, and the hope to gain the moral superiority backfired as most European courts regarded the battle as a mere colonial skirmish, and between two
republics at that, and this declaration of seizure as a gross overreaction. Thus unable to convince any Europeans to assist, the Americans set about tackling those Dutch holdings close by to "send a message" that the Americans weren't going to just lie down and take it.
Thus the American fleet that arrived at the Caribbean islands of St Maarten, Sint Eustatius, and Saba found... really no defenders. The Dutch had not kept proper 'garrisons' on those islands for decades, and the only civil defense were the police who weren't about to tangle with vengeful American marines. No true fighting occurred, but the population remained hostile to the US occupation. Moving on to Aruba, however, the Americans found that the Dutch were actually waiting for them as news had reached the Netherlands sooner than it had reached America; Governor-General Rochussen was quietly praised but formally relieved of command... and granted a very tidy retirement package. At Aruba, the Americans found themselves in a fierce firefight for Fort Zoutman, delaying any further conquest for several days.
Eventually the ruined shell of Zoutman would fall, and with it the island, and a few days later so too would Bonaire fall without much similar fighting at Fort Oranje, but by the time the remaining US forces arrived at Curacao, the Dutch Caribbean Fleet of 15 warships had concentrated to face them. The resulting battle lasted several hours as the US ships, like at the Izu Islands, outnumbered and outgunned. Attempting to retreat proved disastrous as the prevailing wind was against them, allowing the larger guns of the Dutch to outrange the Americans, slowly whittling their numbers and ability to fight. Within days all American gains had been reversed, and their entire coastline was at the mercy of the Dutch. However, the Netherlands quickly dispatched negotiators, obviously agitated at the tenor of the American response, but on the whole understanding that this entire scenario boiled down to a colonial misunderstanding, however unfortunate. And so closed the ABC War, named for the trio of islands where the conflict was decided.
Terms were remarkably light in the Treaty of Copenhagen, but it didn't halt the frightful fall from grace for President Fillmore, and by extension the whole Democratic-Republican Party. Having served only half of his second term, Fillmore resigned and, due to the stresses of heavy work and the war, passed away within a few months. This entire ordeal sent shockwaves through the American political psyche and accounted for no less than three constitutional crises. The question of succession of the President of the Congress would be corrected in the fourth amendment, portions of the Democratic-Republican Party would break away to form their own Freehold Party under a little-known Martin van Buren, and the status of slavery would face new and violent threats following a
massive slave uprising in Carolina. While debating this Georgia Senator Anthony Thomas of the Whig Party, on the floor of Congress, would shoot and kill fellow New York Senator Joseph Carmichael. The divinely ordained Manifest Destiny was apparently dead, strangled in the crib.
...or was it?
The Boer Voortrekkers & the Amerikaaner Wars.
We will only have peace with the Boer when they love their children more than they hate us.
Due to the assault on Dutch communities during the war, both the loss of life and economic opportunities closed to them, a general exodus began before the war was over. There were long-established routes to follow as well, particularly disaffected Dutch from New England over the abolition of the Patroon System, and from the Pennsylvania Commonwealth where the 'Pennsylvania Dutch' Anabaptists had struck out West for greater religious freedom last century, and from the (formerly Spanish Habsburg) province of New Philippines, where exiled Dutch Calvinists from the Southern Netherlands had briefly played an essential role in the rise of the Dutch West Indies Company (
Geoctrooieerde Westindische Compagnie, GWC), but eventually emigrated further inland during the Mexican War of Independence decades gone amid anti-Protestant pogroms. As both of these groups were of agrarian roots, and would eventually form partnerships in the West, collectively they were known as the "boer" which means "farmer" in Dutch. It wasn't just the Dutch descendants who were migrating during this time, but instead all manner of persons seeking better opportunities all along the frontier, including former and escaped slaves, themselves having a very unique relationship vis a vis the Dutch migrants.
Thus these successive waves of migrants with their Puritanical work ethic were instrumental in trailblazing and, inadvertently, contributing to the spread of slavery - a tense topic in the Perpetual Union. These routes west would also host later pioneers and contribute to the general American notion of their Manifest Destiny. Not without conflict, of course, often uprooting those who didn't wish to conform to the Perpetual Union's notion of liberty and authority. Predominately Dutch settlements dotted the landscape with increased frequency as one moves West, and by the 1850s, nascent states had sprung up, particularly the Zoutmeer Republiek (Salt Lake Republic) of the Great Salt Lake Valley, and the Orange Free State, named after Orange River (in turn named for the Dutch ruling family, the House of Orange) that flows south into the Colorado River. Other such entities were coalescing around this same time: the Zoutmeer 'Charter' - a sort of proto-constitution - was signed in 1837, but the Republic itself wasn't declared until 1852; the OFS constitution was signed in 1853, modeled closely on that of the Zoutmeer; the clandestinely GWC-funded Nieuw-Guelders, operating almost as the physical manifestation of GWC politics, signed in 1856; and the sole black free state in the Western Hemisphere, the oddly-tongued Negerduits ("Negro Dutch," many having arrived via the West Indies) founded the Stât f'n Täusplänti in 1857; as well as smaller freeholds such as Lydenburg, Simonstad, and Sijstalen.
This would lead to other adventurers attempting to carve out their own little kingdoms and republics, or just exercising a particular agenda. This included such varied folk as the freebooter William Walker who briefly overthrew Mexican authority in Tejas and declared an independent republic there for the sole purpose of legalizing slavery in that place, or John Burr, the grandson of deceased Perpetual Union President Aaron Burr and his Haitian governess, who led the Grand United Order of Odd Fellows in America into becoming the most militant, and best trained militia of the Perpetual Union to range up and down the frontier protecting African Americans and meting out justice on racist slavers. The 'Wild West' was fast becoming something of high adventure and legend, drawing more and more interest from Americans back East. Steadily the creeping claws of American Authority were taming the wild lands, eradicating Indian resistance, and pushing against the borders of those free republics.
The Boer Republics had few allies in the Perpetual Union, but one was the Senator Martin van Buren, leader of the Freehold Party. Though never achieving much in the way of power, the fact that van Buren had harnessed enough of the vote to act as a tie-breaker allowed for some political leverage within the raucous Perpetual Union Congress. With the rising tensions of the West, vis a vis the various range wars with the Boer kommandos and American cowboys, the elder statesman was able to push through legislation regarding the republics that led to trade deals, rights pertaining to railways, and general cooperation in the West. The Americans still dreamed of a Pacific coast, and the politicians generally regarded these small republics as nothing more than a preamble to voluntary annexation into the Perpetual Union. But the Boer would prove to be a very stubborn people, and for every two steps forward in relations, there was always one step back.
After the death of van Buren, the Boer no longer had a powerful and friendly voice in the Congress, but rather many unfriendly, greedy voices. Industrialists were aching to get legal rights to the mountains and valleys that the Boer - silly farmers - refused to exploit and mine to their full potential. Industrialists who contribute heavily to political campaigns. Cooperation with the Boer Republics began to sour, first on tariffs, then on grazing rights, and finally what about those bloody Injuns, eh? Clearly the Boer were selling firearms to the Sioux who continued to give American pioneers much grief north of the Boer Republics. (It would later be revealed to be the British Canadians supplying arms to the natives in hopes of delaying any meaningful negotiations with the Americans on the status of Oregon.) Pouncing upon this "conspiracy" to undermine the Perpetual Union, President Abraham Lincoln - an aggressive, nigh-undefeated champion wrestler in his day - ratcheted up tensions with the Boer by ordering the 7th Cavalry to "pursue the murderers to the ends of the earth." While not declaring war, or an invasion, it authorized the American military to disregard the sovereign borders of the Boer Republics at will.
The ensuing series of skirmishes and battles would come to be known to the Boer simply as the Amerikaaner War and it would drag on for four long years of raid and counterraid, scorched earth, and mass confinement. The Americans waged indiscriminate warfare against all the Republics at once, assuming - probably rightly - that they would support one another unofficially, so instead opted to simply speed along the process. Women and children were not spared, as the Americans had spent years fighting the Native Americans without mercy, these new foes would be treated just as harshly. Indeed, there were some few allied Native American tribes who joined the Boer in their fight, but for every allied tribe, there was another with a blood vengeance against the Boer - ready allies for the Americans. Tens of thousands would die, a huge number of them from being confined in walled reservations, those miserable camps the Americans used to break the Natives and the Boer.
Eventually the Boer were forced to sue for peace and submit, their small republics collapsing under the weight of the war effort and American depredations. In the end, they would all be absorbed into the Perpetual Union in accordance with the Treaty of Wierdapark. It was discovered shortly thereafter that the now-defunct Nieuw-Guelders had been receiving funding from the GWC. The resultant short, sharp diplomatic spat with the Dutch Republic over this resulted in revisions to the Treaty of Copenhagen and an embarrassing public censure of the Company from the Hague (and a private audit which still hasn't been fully declassified).
The wider implications of this conflict and subsequent annexations was the simple fact that considerable swathes of this territory was technically Mexican, and they had never recognized the Boers as anything other than alien, slave-holding vagrants. The four years of warfare, however, had transformed the Perpetual Union. Gone were the days of patchwork armies comprised of volunteer militias; those had met with disaster in the early days of the conflict. Now the Union State Army was an increasingly regulated, organized, and funded enterprise that was quickly outgrowing its
raison d'etre. The century-old fear of a too-powerful central authority and a bloated military had finally come home to roost in the Perpetual Union, and the confrontations in Congress were growing especially heated. The breaking point came when the Union State Army confronted a Mexican patrol in Tejas (formerly New Philippines), and soldiers died.
The next several years would see a war with Mexico to validate the American conquests of the Boers, a Boer uprising and resultant reprisals, and finally an actual civil war as the Commonwealth of Virginia resisted the governmental overreach of President Schuyler Colfax. Other commonwealths rallied around Virginia, declaring the Confederated American States, who even won unofficial British backing, as well as official recognition by the Dutch Republic. These conflicts were often overlapping affairs and belligerents came and went as the situation evolved. By the end of the series of wars, the United Mexican States underwent its own revolution declaring the Unitary Republic of Aztlan, short the latest Perpetual Union state of Yucatan, and the Republic of Pueblo in the north, and the Confederated American States were thoroughly thrashed and reabsorbed into the PU and suffered much material destruction that would retard their local economies for decades. A military confrontation with the British was narrowly avoided, finally resolving the disputed Oregon territory, and securing a broad pacific coastline for the Perpetual Union. Relations with the Dutch Republic remained frosty, however, and occasional diplomatic barbs were hurled between New York and the Hague.
Dutch-American War of 1899, or Why I Learned to Love the Big Stick.
War is God's way of teaching Americans geography.
These barbs were not random moments of animosity or blithe contempt. No, they were thorns sharpened for purpose and attached to a winding, strangling vine, slowly choking any threat to the Perpetual Union, to Democracy itself (though what counted as democracy was very much questionable in the PU these days). It is safe to say that the coming war was both a mere extension of Imperialist Aggression, but also Personal Pride. You see, following the years of war, the recalibration of the economy, and the acquisition of new lands, the Perpetual Union's economic prowess rose. No. It soared. Industry exploded seemingly in every corner of the PU, and the ports of Europe disgorged millions of migrants to fill those industries. Granted, this may not be the most commendable thing... For never in the course of human events has so much wealth been generated by so many for the benefit of so few.
Where the American economy roared, the Dutch economy had contracted. Between poor management of assets like the GWC (and their controversial funding of New Guelders), increasing military/occupation endeavors in the East Indies, and being inexorably caught in the endless tug-of-war that was the developing alliance system in Europe, the Dutch had found themselves in a liquidity crisis. Beginning with the New Guelders Debacle, and the subsequent audit, public opinion had begun to push back against the oligarchic tendencies of the Dutch Republic's machinery of power. These growing criticisms of exploitative practices and bureaucratic cronyism - not just in the East Indies which was a well-known institution, but in the halls of the Binnenhof! - evolved into protests beginning in 1879 with the formation of the Nieuwe Plooi ("New Crew"), a faction opposed to the Orangists stanglehold on stadtholder authority, and harkening back to the Patriotten movement of a century before. Although the Provincial States of each province could assign their own stadtholder, most stadtholders held appointments from several provinces at the same time, a policy ensured by Orangist allies in the States General, and a further concentration of wealth and power.
Demonstrations in Haarlem, Utrecht, and Limburg grew to such an extent that local militias were routed or coopted when confronted. Events quickly outpaced the Orangists as the Patriotten swept through the countryside, finding ample support from the working poor feeling disenfranchised and disillusioned by the continued dominance of the rentier-class. An old and common complaint in the Netherlands; socialist underpinnings to this sort would fizzle just below the surface for years to come. By 1883 the stadtholder of Zeeland, Groningen, and Friesland, Maarland T. van Höek joined the cause, standing down from his position. Under increasing pressure in the coming months, more stadtholders stepped down, some not always willingly. The Defenestration of Jülich sent Stadtholder Aeneas van Tienhoven through a 14th Century stained glass window to be unceremoniously impaled upon wrought-iron fencing below. Further conflict throughout the 1880s would result in the Second Stadtholderless period - the first such time since the 1670s - causing such destabilizing effects as to collapse the GWC, and nearly the Bank of Amsterdam, the second largest center of foreign direct investment in Europe behind the Bank of England, thus evaporating hundreds of millions of guilders.
Spiraling faster and faster to insolvency and possible civil war - beyond the brawling that had been wracking the streets for years at this point - the Dutch Republic... spasmed. Political deadlock and in-fighting would lead to the Southern Netherlands breaking away in the vacuum to form the Republic of Flanders. With the collapse of the GWC, export prices for sugar and coffee rose, causing an economic crisis throughout the Caribbean and Brazil. VOC interests were all but forced to pick up the slack, causing market contractions from South Africa to Ceylon, and they were forced to open the East Indies up to private enterprise and investment. By 1895, the government share of exports had dropped to a mere 10%. The reformed States General of the new and improved United Provinces of the Netherlands, a consociationalist bicameral creation, nationalized the VOC by 1897, removing it as an independent entity and taking direct control of her assets to offset total insolvency.
This period of radicalization all but guaranteed the Netherlands to be a pariah state amongst the Congress of Europe... at least outside the cafes and slums of Paris, Vienna, and a few other areas where such wild theory was bandied about by bored, romantic intellectuals. Of the Dutch Revolution, a young Austrian political-pathologist Sigmund Freud remarked, "Unexpressed or repressed emotions will never die; they are buried alive and will come forth later in uglier ways. Revolution, where progress is repressed, is the natural result." A close associate of Karl Marx and Freidrich Engels, Freud would play a major role in the evolution of the Maximalist Movement in the coming years.
For the moment, however, it was the round of nationalization efforts which most disturbed the international community. While most of her neighbors were able to secure diplomatic guarantees, the Perpetual Union didn't, uh... didn't want to bother with any of that. The sitting President Theodore Roosevelt was a veteran of the embarrassing war back in the '50s and now found a perfect excuse to right those old wrongs. Announcing a new facet of international relations, it would be America's duty to secure peace and liberty in the Western Hemisphere, and should any foreign powers have contentions in the Western Hemisphere, then it was America's purview to undertake those endeavors personally. You know, as a responsible member of the international community.
And that's why, dear reader, no goddamn socialists were allowed to exist in the Dutch Caribbean, for obviously if the metropole is some kind of socialist nonsense, then it would only seep out into the wider world. American marines returned to the shores visited in the ABC War and this time the weight class of the combatants had shifted dramatically. While the Perpetual Union would find power projection to Europe a more difficult endeavor, snapping up Dutch assets in the Caribbean and even the Gold Coast was easy enough, especially with the Netherlands still righting its rather troubled house. The East Indies, however, were another matter entirely, and while no few warhawk congressman suggesting taking the WHOLE of the Dutch Empire, more practical voices came to the fore.
Instead, the PU's Pacific Fleet (bigger, better, faster, stronger) returned to Japan, where it all began, and 'freed' the island from any meddling Socialist interests, and of course stuck around to ensure no one else got any ideas. The naked landgrab was lost on absolutely no one, and while folks thought poorly of the Perpetual Union... have you seen their economy?
And what could the Dutch do? Due to the financial strain, half of the fleet had been sold off, and the other half was busy helping put down a fresh round of revolts in the East Indies, with the bulk of the Netherlands' veterans and officers, and most of them, being Company men for most of their careers, had no great love for the new government back home. In the end, they did very little beyond protest, then negotiate debts, and here in about 12 years get eaten by the meteoric rise of the German Empire.
Het Einde.
...
United Federation of African Republics
