Hello everyone! First post, so I thought I'd jump right in!
I'm starting a new novel, and I'd like some input on the timeline it is based on. Basically the first three big differences from our time line are as follows: the United States Constitution is not ratified to replace the Articles of Confederation after no compromise can be reached. Thus the AoC is left in place, and the nation limps along for barely a decade until it devolves into individual states quibbling over Western land cessions. Second, the Louisiana Purchase never leaves the grasp of France, who avoids the Yellow Fever epidemic that helped the Haitians during the uprising. Third, during the end of the Napoleonic Wars, Napoleon has a bout of realism and accepts the Frankfurt Peace Proposal. This leaves an enlarged France that includes Belgium, Savoy and the western bank of the Rhine.
The main focus of my story is the Union of Columbia, which consists of Virginia, Maryland, Delaware, modern Kentucky, the Northwest territories minus the bit that would be in modern Minnesota, the far west of the Ohio Valley and the "Thumb" of Michigan (Saginaw River down to Detroit). These last two bits would have been taken in a previous war a few decades earlier than the story starts, the Ohio Valley going to Pennsylvania and the Thumb going to Canada. Columbia is in a state of flux by the turn of the century. New immigrants from the petty German and Italian states, a united but poor Scandinavia and Ireland take the journey to most of the disparate American states. Other nations here in play would be New York (may or may not include Vermont, includes northern New Jersey [Pennsylvania gets the other half]), a New England Confederation, North Carolina that stretches to the Mississippi, South Carolina, and the Kingdom of Georgia which is Georgia plus modern Alabama, Mississippi and Florida. Between Louisiana and British Canada is a broad Native American nation made up of displaced Plains tribes and later those ethnically cleansed from the East.
A few points I'm trying to hammer out are where technology would be here - some things would be farther along than others, of course. Maybe penicillin is dispersed a few decades earlier than OTL, as it maybe could have been even in our timeline. Maybe aviation lags. Not sure about automation and combustion engines, or electricity, but perhaps without the joint effort of the Erie Canal rail systems are greatly developed in the rest of the the Great Lakes region. Another aspect is race relations. Georgia, North and South Carolina quickly fall under British influence (however long the latter two stay there is up in the air), so slavery may be forced out earlier. All depends on when the cotton gin is developed, but it's conceivable race relations in this Columbia could be thirty or forty years ahead where they were IOTL?
I'm posting this so people can maybe examine my ideas here to give advice on what should and could happen. The broader world will be hinted at in the story if not the central focus; I'd just like to have a fuller picture.