Cinco de Mayo

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Fish: America's First Realpolitik Diplomat
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    • KingSweden24

    "...though unemployment had peaked a year ago (by modern measurements at least), the Depression was still deep and fierce and it was plain to most that President Chase could not win another election. But as he looked ahead to what would be a grim and contested convention with members of his broken, badly divided Republican Party, Chase had at least one major long-term foreign policy accomplishment in addition to his ushering in formal de jure abolition, a new National Bank and the Naval Act, for starters - a policy of Rapprochement not with the Confederacy, as his predecessor had haphazardly pursued, but with the Empire of Mexico. Meeting with Maximilian the previous fall had led to envoys beginning discussions of a trade agreement, and in a sign of thawing relations, Secretary of State Hamilton Fish personally attended the baptism of Maximilian's daughter, Maria Carlota, on May 2 1872. In the view of Chase and Fish, supporting Mexico's interests were crucial to surrounding the Confederacy with liberal and anti-slave powers, and a deeper relationship with Chapultepec would have the added benefit of reducing French or British influence on the continent..."

    - Fish: America's First Realpolitik Diplomat
     
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    • Happy Cinco de Mayo! (Update)
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    • KingSweden24

    Happy Cinco de Mayo everyone! We've now reached not only the day that this TL gets its name from but the exact 10 year mark from the POD ITTL as well. So let's recap some of the things we've seen so far...

    • The French intervention leads to a Confederate States victory and Lincoln not seeking reelection
    • Benito Juarez and Porfirio Diaz both killed over the course of the war with Max's Empire, the latter by a posse including Nathan B. Forrest and the proto-Klan
    • Queen Victoria's two eldest sons have died, and one of the deaths was a Fenian assassination that has aggressively hardened the British line against Ireland and made the Tories much more reactionary in their government (we're on our third Tory PM since 1866 at this point)
    • Germany united on a quicker timetable than OTL, but with a less dominating victory. Oh, and it also absorbed Luxembourg rather than Alsace-Lorraine
    • Napoleon III and the French Empire thus survived their tussle with Germany
    • The Pope is in exile in Malta and the Sistine Chapel burned down
    • Maximilian is actually a really good Emperor and Mexico is doing pretty okay, one of the main features is a major foreign investment in build a Trans-Isthmus Railroad across the Tehuantepec
    • The Confederacy, not so much, its an economic basketcase and Nathan Forrest is elected President over states' rights decentralist Zeb Vance in an ugly, paramilitary-violence marred election
    • Horatio Seymour loses reelection as US President because he wasn't aggressive enough on building a shiny new Navy (and greasing contractor palms in tandem with that)
    • Slavery abolished with a whimper rather than a bang in the US since there aren't all those slave states to contest it, then President Salmon Chase - the Great Abolitionist - decides to go along with immediately deflating the US currency supply, causing a global depression
    • The Boers got the Kimberley diamond fields and Canada was nudged into Confederating by the Colonial Office, though PEI keeps holding out
    • France invades Korea to punch down on some natives across the world after being pissed about losing to Germany, and opens its economy while making it a pseudo-protectorate. Oh, and Cambodia is a German protectorate too
    • Spain appoints the Catholic Hohenzollern Leopold of Sigmaringen to its crown and he obeys the liberal constitution, only to be greeted by a simmering uprising in Cuba joined by a second uprising when the Cortes abolishes slavery
    • For their troubles abolishing slavery, the Spanish also get the new fun problem of a 60,000 man Confederate expedition to Cuba, led personally by President Forrest, with it being pretty clear that Dixie wants to annex the island once they drive Spain out and put down the rebellion
    • The King of the Netherlands had his throat ripped out by a dog, and his successor dies six months later from typhoid while partying with Prince Albert of Britain (who also dies)
    Thanks everybody for reading! You're all the reason I update so prodigiously and often
     
  • Index
    • 1870 United States Census Results
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    • KingSweden24

    1870 United States Census Results

    (Figures shown: 1870 Pop, Change from 1860 for states and DC, not territories)

    New York - 4,471,819 (+591,084)
    Pennsylvania - 3,688,902 (+782,687)
    Ohio - 2,715,718 (+376,207)
    Illinois - 2,601,417 (+889,466)
    Missouri - 1,771,295 (+589,283) (passed Massachusetts and Indiana)
    Indiana - 1,730,981 (+380,553)
    Massachusetts - 1,507,031 (+275,965)
    Iowa - 1,244,020 (+569,107)
    Michigan - 1,234,059 (+484,946)
    Wisconsin - 1,104,670 (+328,789)
    New Jersey - 1,006,096 (+334,061)
    Maryland - 790,894 (+103,845)
    Maine - 636,915 (+8,636)
    California - 610,247 (+230,253)
    Connecticut - 557,454 (+97,037)
    Minnesota - 449,706 (+277,683)
    West Virginia - 442,331 (n/a)
    Kansas - 394,399 (+287,193)
    Vermont - 330,551 (+15,453)
    New Hampshire - 328,300 (+2,236)
    Rhode Island - 227,353 (+52,733)
    District of Columbia* - 151,700 (+76,620)
    Delaware - 135,015 (+22,799)
    Nebraska - 122,993 (+94,152)
    Oregon - 104,930 (+52,465)
    New Mexico Territory - 101,532
    Utah Territory - 96,336
    Colorado Territory - 49,134
    Nevada - 42,516 (+35,668)
    Washington Territory - 33,415
    Montana Territory - 25,617
    Idaho Territory - 21,516
    Dakota Territory - 18,181
    Wyoming Territory - 11,415

    Total US Population (including territories) - 28,758,458

    The 1870 census saw a boom in the Midwest states, with some states around the country even doubling their populations, and a rush to the Western territories. Indian clearances, as they became known [1] helped clear the path for new homesteads opening up along railroads snaking across the Plains and untamed lands of North America. The boom in immigration started in 1860 and exacerbated by war in Europe made its impact by 1870, with close to 50% of New York City's population being foreign born [2].

    [1] More on this in future updates
    [2] Thought about doing city pop totals but elected not to... for this census at least

    (BTW - anybody have a good suggestion on how to recalculate Electoral Votes for a Southless USA post-1870 based on the numbers I posted?)
     
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    • KingSweden24

    So I'm trying to figure out how to best divvy up Congressional seats/EVs for the United States with the 1870 census numbers... basically I decided to just keep the # of Congressmen fixed at 283 like it was in OTL but not distributed to Southern states (62 Senators for 31 states in ITTL). Would I subtract the territorial population from the total pop figure I came up with or keep that in as I figure out what the average size of a Congressional district would be on the 1870 map?
     

    Nivek

    KingSweden24 said:
    So I'm trying to figure out how to best divvy up Congressional seats/EVs for the United States with the 1870 census numbers... basically I decided to just keep the # of Congressmen fixed at 283 like it was in OTL but not distributed to Southern states (62 Senators for 31 states in ITTL). Would I subtract the territorial population from the total pop figure I came up with or keep that in as I figure out what the average size of a Congressional district would be on the 1870 map?
    Click to expand...
    The thing is senate is fixed in USA constitution, 2 per state, that is a hard number unless the congress allow it to change, representatives are trickier but managable, some border ones would benefit of now migrant black fully count so got a chance of a extra representative or two.
     

    KingSweden24

    Nivek said:
    The thing is senate is fixed in USA constitution, 2 per state, that is a hard number unless the congress allow it to change, representatives are trickier but managable, some border ones would benefit of now migrant black fully count so got a chance of a extra representative or two.
    Click to expand...

    well, right, but what I’m trying to calculate is how to allocate the 283 HOR seats among the 31 states. The Senate is easy. Do I only base it on total pop or total pop - territorial pop? I’m super OCD about this kind of thing haha
     
    War By Another Name: American Elections in the 19th Century
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    • KingSweden24

    "...the divides within the Republican Party had, by that spring, become too large to effectively overcome. Salmon Chase was a "centralist" who supported the designs of his more radical counterparts of a larger, more activist federal government, but he was also a supporter of a deflationary, sound money fiscal policy, aligning him more with the liberal wing of the party that viewed the federal government's role more as a last resort defender of rights and liberties than as an active promoter and pursuer of them. His skepticism of tariffs aligned him more with the liberals as well, though even they preferred a higher tariff than Chase did; his policy made him virtually indistinguishable from most Democrats. The only uniting factor for Republicans by 1872 was their support of homesteading and the Naval Act, and even there friction had emerged; liberals were leery of complaints from prospective homesteaders that the Chase administration was giving preference to freedmen, escaped slaves from South in particular, and some Radicals felt as if the Naval Department was not requisitioning new fleet ships quickly enough.

    The taint of scandal also hung over Chase's Cabinet and the radical wing, though the President himself was never implicated (it has been suggested in later years that Chase's poor historical rankings despite his remarkable achievements stems from perceptions at the time that Chase was, himself, corrupt). The Credit Mobilier scandal [1] had claimed a number of prominent Republicans in Congress, most notably former Speaker of the House Schuyler Colfax, effectively ending his political career. The Chase administration was harried by Democratic investigations from Congress and hostile newspapers in critical swing states, and the Great Depression had made the President deeply unpopular with the working class, his closeness to bankers and the Treasury in particular creating a caricature of him as a heartless capitalist.

    The result was the splitting of the Republicans in 1872 - Chase, adamant that he would seek reelection despite being aware that he had a good chance of not succeeding, now had to compete against a convention of close to half the party known as the "Liberal Republicans," who met in Cincinnati while the Chase-aligned Republicans (dismissed as "the Radical Party" by Democrats and many Liberal Republican-sympathetic newsletters, most prominently Horace Greeley's [2]     New-York Tribune) met in Philadelphia.

    Both conventions were chaotic affairs. The Liberal Republicans failed to put together a coherent platform, charting something of a muddled "middle course." They supported lowering the tariff, but not as low as Democrats wanted; they supported continuing the pace of Naval Act requisitions rather than speeding or slowing contracts for new vessels; they supported "sound money" but were open to extending the Specie Purchase Act's deadline in order to keep inflationary greenbacks in circulation longer; they opposed the twin "sirens" of isolationism and territorial expansion pushed by the Democrats, but also were skeptical of Hamilton Fish's activist foreign policy. Representative James G. Blaine of Maine, who had emerged as a sort of informal leader for Liberal Republicans in the House (they split in 1872 only on the Presidential ticket - not until 1874 would the new Liberal Party run its own candidates downballot), quipped "we sail not between Scylla and Charybdis here, exactly." The favorite entering the convention was Charles Francis Adams of Massachusetts, an ambassador in both the Lincoln and Chase administrations and a member of the famed Adams family of Massachusetts. However, Greeley's play for the nomination and a split in Eastern delegates thanks to the presence of Pennsylvania Governor Andrew Curtin on the first two ballots stalled Adams' momentum, and instead the Midwestern delegations, fearing a potential Chase renomination the next week or a Midwestern candidate for the Presidency, instead rallied around Illinois Senator Lyman Trumbull, who was nominated on the 9th ballot, with former President Abraham Lincoln giving a speech in favor of his fellow Illinoisian to help break the deadlock [3]. Despite a play by Greeley for the Vice Presidential nomination, Trumbull lobbied aggressively for the vanquished Adams to be the Vice Presidential nominee, and Adams was nominated on the second ballot [4].

    The Republican nomination a week later was wilder. Chase broke party custom by attending the convention in Philadelphia personally to lobby for his renomination, and even amongst his friendlier radical and institutionalist allies there was much dissent, including shouts of "thief" and "baron" from the crowd as he gave a long speech rattling off his accomplishments. When it came time for nominations, Chase came in fourth on the first ballot, behind his own Vice President John Fremont. Fights broke out between delegates, Senator Roscoe Conkling of New York excoriated the Liberal Republicans and Democrats as "the twin standard bearers of annulment, secession and depression!" and by the time the 10th inconclusive ballot came about Chase had to throw in the towel and accept that he would not be nominated. A fellow Ohioan - former Senator Benjamin Wade - was instead elevated to the nomination, and as his running mate Senator Henry Wilson of Massachusetts was chosen on the fourth ballot for the second slot, with Wilson long viewed as a pragmatic reformer and well known to desire the position of Vice President as a capstone to his long career [5].

    And so, the Republican Party had split into two factions, similar and dissimilar, and the eyes of Trumbull (a former Democrat) and Wade (the most Radical Republican of them all, perhaps) turned towards the Democratic convention to be held in July in New York..."

    - War By Another Name: American Elections in the 19th Century

    [1] Just like OTL
    [2] Ironically Greeley was a Radical IOTL before splitting from Grant due to corruption; party identity was pretty fluid back then, as was ideology
    [3] Remember - Abe Lincoln was actually pretty moderate by Republican standards, to the point that some were unenthusiastic about him in 1860 and a small group of Radicals tried to dump him in 1864. He and Chase never really cared for each other so I'm also presuming a break between the two men during their Presidency; Lincoln may even have viewed the abolition amendments as going too far in a world where the South successfully left the Union
    [4] Should note that a big reason that Chase - an ideological fluid climber - was interested in the Liberal Republican nomination IOTL was that he really really wanted to be President and was cool with any vehicle that granted him his wish. Here, he'd probably view the existing party infrastructure as his best bet and he's been a good ally to the Radical Republican wing already anyways
    [5] This was the case IOTL, for whatever reason, considering how worthless the office was back then.
     
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    • The German on the Spanish Throne: The Reign of Leopold I
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    • KingSweden24

    "...the Carlists were severely beaten at Orokieta, with nearly a hundred men dead and close to a thousand captured [1]. The victory made Serrano once again a national hero and the man of the hour, and forced Carlos to flee back to France. However, it was not the end of the war, despite the Basque Province Carlists being disorganized for the rest of the year; fighting continued throughout much of Navarre and Catalonia, and small Carlist war parties continued to regroup across much of the north and east of the country. Prominent as a leader of the war parties was the Mad Priest, Manuel Santa Cruz, who aggressively denounced the liberal constitution and rallied poor peasants angry about the end of the fueros to his side. In June, as King Leopold reviewed troops under General Arsenio Martinez-Campos, recently returned from Cuba, gunfire rang out and the king was grazed while Martinez-Campos was struck in the shoulder, losing most use of the arm for the rest of his life. Though some modern historians believe that Andalusians belonging to the nascent Spanish anarchist movement may have been the perpetrators, Leopold blamed Carlists squarely and solely and resolved doubly to crush the insurrection, instructing Serrano to intensify his efforts and to execute Carlist commanders on the spot.

    The war was profoundly inopportune for Leopold's government. The Prime Minister continued to encourage the King to abandon Cuba - where Havana had been under siege by land for some weeks, though Spain's Navy outclassed the Confederate one so decisively that Dixie made no efforts to blockade the harbor or force a decisive naval battle and both sides could resupply their forces by sea - in order to focus his entire attention on crushing the Carlist threat to his crown. Serrano continued to convey that two wars could be fought at once, especially after another critical victory later that month at Torello, where a Carlist party was crushed and its leadership eliminated, returning government control over most of northern Catalonia and pincering holdouts in Navarre. A lull in the fighting for much of the rest of 1872 gave Leopold the opening he needed to dispatch more soldiers to Cuba and Santo Domingo to continue his pacification campaign..."

    -     The German on the Spanish Throne: The Reign of Leopold I [2]

    [1] Higher than the OTL numbers
    [2] This book title is an homage to Tocomocho's TL from 10+ years ago featuring Leopold Hohenzollern as King of Spain
     
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    • The Wizard of the Saddle: The Life of Nathan Forrest
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    • KingSweden24

    "...three events complicated matters for the CEF in the spring of 1872. Despite encircling Havana with the I and III Corps, and holding the roads near Cienfuegos to defend against Spanish troops advancing from the east of the island, the city had not cracked and the Navy's fear of a decisive battle to their detriment against Spain had led to Havana becoming a fortified citadel, not starving and with the closest battalions of Confederate men still more than six miles from the harbor. The difficulty of importing horses for Forrest's preferred cavalry operations had forced him to patiently wait and hold his territory while sending men to support and train Salcedo rebels, hoping to grow the pro-slavery movement in the sugarcane plantations until Spain agreed to treat.

    The yellow fever outbreak that June, however, tore through the Confederate forces, killing one in four men by some high estimates and leaving large parts of the army, though having survived, too weak to fight. Next, the withdrawal of the conservative and cautious Spanish commander in chief Martinez-Campos back to Madrid had left Cuba's ruthless governor Blas Villate entirely in charge. Villate, who had conducted ugly ethnic cleansing campaigns against the Republic at Arms for much of the first four years of the war, now turned his attention to the Confederates, dispatching raiding parties against CSA scouting parties. Those intercepted were typically kidnapped, with Villate offering the return of the oldest and weakest for ransom while he brutally tortured the others, leaving their bodies out in macabre displays as a show of force. The third complication was the slow-moving collapse of the Republic at Arms. The Confederate invasion and Spanish abolition of slavery, and Leopold's offer to impose the liberal constitution on the island as a compromise that would meet many objectives of the     Grito de Yara, severely changed the calculus for many rebels in Oriente. Suddenly, a Spanish loss likely meant not a liberal free republic of Cuba but a slaveholding protectorate or worse, colony, of the Confederacy, an Anglophone, white supremacist and decisively Protestant government alien to the Cuban people. The Maceo brothers in particular defected, accepting an amnesty from the Spanish crown, and Maximo Gomez - a Dominican general most famous for organizing the machete charges that so terrified the Spanish and who had cleared Guantanamo of the enemy only years before - declared that he viewed the Confederacy as the true enemy now and he would lead his men against them instead. For Agramonte and Cespedes, this was a disaster; as much as four in ten of their men defected and threw down their arms against Spain, only to turn them against the Confederates as they marched on Cienfuegos. Should the Republic at Arms accept the amnesty now and assess the settlement to the war later?

    Forrest, for his part, began to wonder if sailing several screw sloops into Havana Harbor and shelling the city's fortifications while pushing his infantry forward may not be the worst idea. The plans were drawn up and ready, when he himself began feeling ill. He encouraged his lieutenants to make preparations even as he spent most days inside his tent, half-delirious, sometimes only half-awake. On June 27th, 1872, his aide-de-camp entered the tent to wake the President, only to find that he had expired. Nathan Bedford Forrest, taken by the yellow fever while on campaign in Cuba, was fifty years old. [1]"

    -     The Wizard of the Saddle: The Life of Nathan Forrest

    [1] I was tempted to have this end with a machete charge courtesy of Max Gomez but Forrest is west of Havana to begin with and martyring him gallantly in battle was something I found myself to be a bit uncomfortable with. Also, blew my mind that he was that young. He would have been only 46 when inaugurated as President which was pretty young for that time! (And for any time. That's younger than Obama and same age as Clinton, who were both pretty damn young when elected all things considered).
     
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