A very unique butterfly, but yeah the typical Native vs Native conflict now amplified worse thanks the inmigrant support...yeah very nice update buddy
Cinco de Mayo
- Thread starter KingSweden24
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This is John T Hoffman right?
Look at the 'stache on this dude.
That is correct! The King of Moustache Game
The Land of Plenty: Southern Africa in the 19th Century
"...the arrival of Henry Bartle Frere as Governor of Cape Colony in 1875 was a move designed specifically by Carnarvon and his allies at the Colonial Office to increase pressure on the Free Republics for a favorable settlement, including - potentially - mineral leasing rights for British interests in the Kimberley as well as settling the Bahia de Lagoa dispute. Frere was aggressive, a supporter of Carnarvon's envisioned "Confederation of South Africa," and viewed his mission as having two prongs. The first was to settle the matter of Portugal's coziness with the Boers, to remind Lisbon of the ancient treaty they had with Britain. The second was to find a way to carve off the three African buffer kingdoms now supported by the Afrikaners, whether through direct incorporation or by offering them a better deal than what the Free Republics could..."
- The Land of Plenty: Southern Africa in the 19th Century
- The Land of Plenty: Southern Africa in the 19th Century
The Age of the Railroad
"...half a decade after the Panic, railroad construction in the Union had begun to recover, with three competing railroads headed west to challenge the Union Pacific Railroad now ramping up construction, buffeted primarily by Canton Chinese immigrants who toiled in near-slavery. A crucial difference in 1875, though, was that railwork in the West was now under siege by Indians stirred by the bloody campaigns of the infamous Custer and other Army officers under the guise of "clearances." An ugly massacre in what is today Idaho that spring left forty-seven Chinese dead and their unique queues scalped. Though the US Army didn't retaliate specifically over the deaths of mere Chinamen, the incident was one of many that led to one of the ugliest episodes in American history at the Missoula Massacre that autumn, where close to seven hundred Indians, mostly women and children rounded up over the summer campaigns, were summarily murdered over a weekend, with Custer's cavalrymen often competing for who could perform the most barbaric tasks.
Less grim, perhaps, was the story of the Central Pacific Railroad, which by the mid-1870s successfully connected all of California. Also built on the backs of poor Chinese laborers, as well as free blacks often fled from the Confederacy, the CPR ran from San Diego through Los Angeles, to its major interchanges in Oakland and Sacramento, and then north. By the early 1880s it would extend all the way through the Willamette Valley, connecting the West Coast north to south.
The most important event of the mid-1870s as far as railroads went, though, and perhaps one of the most important episodes of the incipient labor movement in the United States, was the Great Railroad Strike of 1875, which began with employees of the Baltimore and Ohio Rail Road [1] in Bellaire, Ohio [2] tipping over locomotives, blocking off the railyard and in one instance even ripping up tracks and ties and knotting the steel up. Word of the strike spread by telegram, an innovation that allowed news to rapidly cross the country and inspired thousands of other rail workers throughout the nation to go on strike.
Despite fears of a "Paris Commune" or a Hyde Park Riot as had occurred in Britain, President John Hoffman refused to use the army to crush the strikes as his predecessor Salmon Chase had nearly done, and told the Governors that their militias would have to keep peace if they so chose. In doing so, Hoffman was adhering to the Democratic Party's principle of state's rights - many of his Midwestern supporters had been lukewarm on the peacetime use of the Army during the Civil War, and this insurrection was nothing close to the rebellious secession of the Confederacy fifteen years earlier. Though economists now suggest that the work slowdowns, large strikes (though nothing on the scale of 1875, which stretched for five weeks before state militias and hired strikebreakers eventually broke them), and fear of labor unrest may have prolonged the Depression, the move was widely seen as being the first efforts at peaceable labor rights solutions in US history [3] and the beginnings of the ties of organized labor to the Democratic Party..."
- The Age of the Railroad
[1] Much like OTL
[2] Home of Buffalo Bill in Silence of the Lambs
[3] Obviously another huge butterfly
Less grim, perhaps, was the story of the Central Pacific Railroad, which by the mid-1870s successfully connected all of California. Also built on the backs of poor Chinese laborers, as well as free blacks often fled from the Confederacy, the CPR ran from San Diego through Los Angeles, to its major interchanges in Oakland and Sacramento, and then north. By the early 1880s it would extend all the way through the Willamette Valley, connecting the West Coast north to south.
The most important event of the mid-1870s as far as railroads went, though, and perhaps one of the most important episodes of the incipient labor movement in the United States, was the Great Railroad Strike of 1875, which began with employees of the Baltimore and Ohio Rail Road [1] in Bellaire, Ohio [2] tipping over locomotives, blocking off the railyard and in one instance even ripping up tracks and ties and knotting the steel up. Word of the strike spread by telegram, an innovation that allowed news to rapidly cross the country and inspired thousands of other rail workers throughout the nation to go on strike.
Despite fears of a "Paris Commune" or a Hyde Park Riot as had occurred in Britain, President John Hoffman refused to use the army to crush the strikes as his predecessor Salmon Chase had nearly done, and told the Governors that their militias would have to keep peace if they so chose. In doing so, Hoffman was adhering to the Democratic Party's principle of state's rights - many of his Midwestern supporters had been lukewarm on the peacetime use of the Army during the Civil War, and this insurrection was nothing close to the rebellious secession of the Confederacy fifteen years earlier. Though economists now suggest that the work slowdowns, large strikes (though nothing on the scale of 1875, which stretched for five weeks before state militias and hired strikebreakers eventually broke them), and fear of labor unrest may have prolonged the Depression, the move was widely seen as being the first efforts at peaceable labor rights solutions in US history [3] and the beginnings of the ties of organized labor to the Democratic Party..."
- The Age of the Railroad
[1] Much like OTL
[2] Home of Buffalo Bill in Silence of the Lambs
[3] Obviously another huge butterfly
The Cradle: Social Democracy in Germany
"...as the first major social democratic party in a great power, the Social Democrats of Germany's unveiling of its Gotha Program in 1875 marked a watershed in leftist politics. Explicitly socialist, pressing for limits in working hours, universal suffrage and freedom of association as well as other means to end class exploitation, it began a shift into explicit policy programs rather than the revolutionary fervor of the Commune or Paris '68, or the white hot rage of the wage and suffrage riots that fueled the reaction and counter-reaction in Britain. In that sense, it was very German in its essence - orderly, authoritative and within the authoritarian structure [1], and pragmatic beneath its radical veneer. Indeed, Karl Marx, the leading light of revolutionary leftism both then and later, critiqued the Gotha Program for its lack of radicalism. And indeed, perhaps he had a point; within the decade, German conservatives from Bismarck on through his successors as Chancellor [2] adopted many of the ideas of the Gotha program, recast them as liberal and nationalist, and used them to cut off support for the nascent Social Democrats in a remarkable move of triangulation..."
- The Cradle: Social Democracy in Germany (University of Munich, 1975)
[1] Trying to sound academic here
[2] You read that right
- The Cradle: Social Democracy in Germany (University of Munich, 1975)
[1] Trying to sound academic here
[2] You read that right
The Gathering Storm: The Prelude to the Eastern Crisis 1856-1876
"...which of course, by the mid-1870s, found Moscow in being in the awkward position of having only Germany as their reliable friend in Europe. This stemmed mostly from a position less of anger at expansionism, as with the "Iron Triangle" arrayed against the Germans, than one of no particular interlining interests. Russia was Orthodox and backwards, her government totalitarian in a way that even autocrats in Berlin, Vienna and increasingly Istanbul found gauche. She was of Europe and not of Europe, isolated from the court of Paris where world diplomacy still seemed to orbit despite the decline in France's hard power since 1815. Britain feared Russian encroachment on India via Central Asia; Imperial Paris had romantic sympathies still for the plight of the Poles, crushed so ruthlessly in 1864; the Austrians and Ottomans feared Russian designs on the Balkans in the name of Pan-Slavism, the ideology du jour in the Tsar's inner circle; and as for Germany's Bismarck, he viewed Russia as a means to an end, a way to prevent Austria from getting any ideas about meddling in Catholic South Germany, a mutual guarantee against Polish nationalism and a way to begin pushing for his newest diplomatic balancing act in Scandinavia [1].
What finally put the wheels in motion then, in 1875, was the twin defaults that spring [2] of the Ottoman and Egyptian governments, a watershed moment in the Middle East that threw the Tanzimat reforms into question and had a dramatic effect on the balance of power. It was Societe Generale that parachuted in on both effects, buying the remaining shares of the Suez Canal Company from the bankrupt Khedive Ismail of Egypt and then shortly thereafter agreed to purchase and restructure much of the Ottoman sovereign debt. In one fell swoop, this made the large Parisian bank the biggest creditor of the Middle Eastern governments (in 1876 the bank would extend its influence in Tunis and Tripoli as well) and secured French interests near-total ownership of the strategically critical Suez Canal, leaving British banks with a miniscule minority interest [3]. In London, the incident was an outrage - as one Liberal politician notably put it, "Carnarvon is too busy drawing lines on maps in South Africa, shooting Irishmen and having bobbies knock textile workers' heads together to notice Bonaparte turn the Mediterranean Sea into a bloody French lake!" [4] By now tying the fortunes of Istanbul inextricably to Paris, and giving France - and by extension, the rapidly expanding French Navy - decisive control of the most important seaway to the East, the geopolitical calculations of Europe changed effectively overnight. For Russia, their desires of expanding Balkan influence were essentially evaporating before their eyes, for now it would be France, and her ally Austria, that dictated the fate of Christian Southeast Europe, especially with a vice on the Ottoman purse. London may have been sailing into the fog in 1875, but it was Moscow that reeled and suddenly faced the threat of being boxed out of Europe entirely..."
- The Gathering Storm: The Prelude to the Eastern Crisis 1856-1876 (Columbia University Press, 1991)
[1] More on this later
[2] Timetable moved up due to earlier Great Depression
[3] Huge butterfly of no Disraeli
[4] Who knew reactionary assholes made poor long-term strategic thinkers
What finally put the wheels in motion then, in 1875, was the twin defaults that spring [2] of the Ottoman and Egyptian governments, a watershed moment in the Middle East that threw the Tanzimat reforms into question and had a dramatic effect on the balance of power. It was Societe Generale that parachuted in on both effects, buying the remaining shares of the Suez Canal Company from the bankrupt Khedive Ismail of Egypt and then shortly thereafter agreed to purchase and restructure much of the Ottoman sovereign debt. In one fell swoop, this made the large Parisian bank the biggest creditor of the Middle Eastern governments (in 1876 the bank would extend its influence in Tunis and Tripoli as well) and secured French interests near-total ownership of the strategically critical Suez Canal, leaving British banks with a miniscule minority interest [3]. In London, the incident was an outrage - as one Liberal politician notably put it, "Carnarvon is too busy drawing lines on maps in South Africa, shooting Irishmen and having bobbies knock textile workers' heads together to notice Bonaparte turn the Mediterranean Sea into a bloody French lake!" [4] By now tying the fortunes of Istanbul inextricably to Paris, and giving France - and by extension, the rapidly expanding French Navy - decisive control of the most important seaway to the East, the geopolitical calculations of Europe changed effectively overnight. For Russia, their desires of expanding Balkan influence were essentially evaporating before their eyes, for now it would be France, and her ally Austria, that dictated the fate of Christian Southeast Europe, especially with a vice on the Ottoman purse. London may have been sailing into the fog in 1875, but it was Moscow that reeled and suddenly faced the threat of being boxed out of Europe entirely..."
- The Gathering Storm: The Prelude to the Eastern Crisis 1856-1876 (Columbia University Press, 1991)
[1] More on this later
[2] Timetable moved up due to earlier Great Depression
[3] Huge butterfly of no Disraeli
[4] Who knew reactionary assholes made poor long-term strategic thinkers
The Shadow of the Hickory Tree: The Reinvention of the Postbellum Democratic Party
"...one consistent thread in the Democratic Party during the strange transition years in the aftermath of abolition, depression and the tug-pull of liberalism and authoritarianism around the world was the tension between her aristocratic wing, perhaps best exemplified in the "youth and vigor" of President Hoffman and later by personalities such as newspaper baron Theodore Roosevelt [1], and the rural, anti-centralism wing. Both laid claim to the legacy of Jacksonian democracy - of a vigorous executive, seeking to better the conditions of the "common man" against the bankers, the industrialists, and the "fossils" of Congress, particularly Republican Senators, really anyone who sneered down their nose at the dreamers and pioneers who truly embodied the democratic ethos of American republicanism. The Anti-Centralists, who included both former War Democrats like Indiana Governor Thomas Hendricks and outright Copperheads like former Vice President and now Senator George Pendleton, lay claim to Jackson's legacy (and Jefferson before him) through their odes to the farmer, to the great settlement of the West and Manifest Destiny, having shed the slaveholding South as the party's backbone and turning instead to the homesteader as the symbol of American purity. The same thread emerged from the Northeast, where Democrats - particularly in New York - who chafed at the railroad barons and bankers who had supported the Republicans and now the Liberals saw the embodiment of the American pioneer spirit in the hardscrabble industrial laborer and the immigrant (particularly the Irishman), who needed to be molded and taught republicanism so to be civilized, ideally while voting Democratic. In both these veins lay a certain Jacksonian swagger, from the skeptical populism of Hendricks and Pendleton to the noblesse oblige of Hoffman and the urban machines that were forming in the mid-1870s, despite the Tweed Ring's ignonimous defeat. Arrayed against them were the Republicans - who, despite the slow moving collapse, were still painted by both competing wings of the Democratic Party as the impotent tyrants of the wartime era and the corrupt instigators of the still-lingering Depression - and now the Liberals, painted in Democratic circulations as obsessive servants of the banker class who would do little to defend the working man from exploitation in their quest to replace "governance of the people by governance by stock certificate." In this sense, the seeds of a left-wing party were already being sown, even with reactionaries like Hendricks becoming ever-prominent in the party; for despite this, it was the conservatives who disliked Hoffman who supported free silver and even paper currency, were skeptical of Hoffman continuing the Republican Naval program, and other policies that aligned them with the strange quirky left wing parties of the 1870s such as the Greenback Party, the Anti-Monopoly Party and the Grangers..."
- The Shadow of the Hickory Tree: The Reinvention of the Postbellum Democratic Party (University of San Diego, 2001)
[1] This was such a great idea, and better than what I had in mind originally, that I've committed to it. Thanks Honest Abe!
- The Shadow of the Hickory Tree: The Reinvention of the Postbellum Democratic Party (University of San Diego, 2001)
[1] This was such a great idea, and better than what I had in mind originally, that I've committed to it. Thanks Honest Abe!
The Age of Questions: Britain in the Gauntlet of Change and Upheaval
"...perhaps uniquely within the Carnarvon ministry, it was Salisbury - appropriately, as Foreign Minister - who was keen to the slow-moving crisis in the East. Uprisings over onerous tax collection and sectarian tensions in Herzegovina began in July of 1875, fueled by Serbian and Montenegrin nationalist volunteers, and by autumn it was spreading into Bosnia as it appeared the Porte may be on the brink of losing control of the province. Bucharest-based revolutionaries tried to foment a similar uprising in Bulgaria, which failed, but it was perhaps only a matter of time before something more organized would follow. As Salisbury would write in his diary in the summer of 1875, "the Eastern Question finally demands an answer."
Britain's position was difficult, as both Tories and Liberals were generally opposed to the Ottoman government - partially due to the coziness of Istanbul with Paris, and partially due to lingering frustration over the lack of British influence in the Middle East despite their supporting Istanbul in the Crimean War. Massacres of Christians, and the complicated diplomatic situation caused by hosting Pope Pius on Malta, further left the Cabinet flatfooted and unsure of what to do, a tendency that would linger all the way through the Russo-Turkish War two years later. France would slowly begin to raise the rates on the Suez Canal beginning that summer as well, as they were entitled to do ("France" being a loose term here, but it was well understood that the Suez Canal Company operated essentially at the pleasure of the Tuileries), and Britain's economy entered a second, even harsher period of its Great Depression the following spring. World events were moving faster than the aristocrats of the Cabinet could respond to, and even though the Cabinet was young, they seemed to belong to a different generation, one unsure of its place in a world of strange diplomatic intrigues, of a resurgent France under "the Eaglet" where less than a decade before they had been thought to be defenestrated at Germany's hands, where a band of Calvinist farmer republics allied with African tribes were styming Britain's glorious imperial ambitions in the south of the Dark Continent, and where the deepening societal tensions at home seemed to only push Carnarvon and his compatriots further into the path of angry backlash, most prominently with the tripling of the British Army garrison in Dublin that fall..."
- The Age of Questions: Britain in the Gauntlet of Change and Upheaval
Britain's position was difficult, as both Tories and Liberals were generally opposed to the Ottoman government - partially due to the coziness of Istanbul with Paris, and partially due to lingering frustration over the lack of British influence in the Middle East despite their supporting Istanbul in the Crimean War. Massacres of Christians, and the complicated diplomatic situation caused by hosting Pope Pius on Malta, further left the Cabinet flatfooted and unsure of what to do, a tendency that would linger all the way through the Russo-Turkish War two years later. France would slowly begin to raise the rates on the Suez Canal beginning that summer as well, as they were entitled to do ("France" being a loose term here, but it was well understood that the Suez Canal Company operated essentially at the pleasure of the Tuileries), and Britain's economy entered a second, even harsher period of its Great Depression the following spring. World events were moving faster than the aristocrats of the Cabinet could respond to, and even though the Cabinet was young, they seemed to belong to a different generation, one unsure of its place in a world of strange diplomatic intrigues, of a resurgent France under "the Eaglet" where less than a decade before they had been thought to be defenestrated at Germany's hands, where a band of Calvinist farmer republics allied with African tribes were styming Britain's glorious imperial ambitions in the south of the Dark Continent, and where the deepening societal tensions at home seemed to only push Carnarvon and his compatriots further into the path of angry backlash, most prominently with the tripling of the British Army garrison in Dublin that fall..."
- The Age of Questions: Britain in the Gauntlet of Change and Upheaval
"Splendid isolation" works if you do it smartly. Here, we're seeing what happens when you don't do it smartly, and France gets her act together.
Well, that’s a lot of updates! Fast and nice chapters. Interesting developments…
Almost like watching an incoming train crash.
"THIS IS GOING TO END SO WELL." - Carnarvon (probably).
Almost like watching an incoming train crash.
"THIS IS GOING TO END SO WELL." - Carnarvon (probably).
Old Bull: Francisco Serrano and Modern Spain
"...having delivered decisive victories in Cuba and then against the Carlists, and having expanded worker's rights at home in a burgeoning economy, the National Liberals were rewarded with a gargantuan landslide, winning 64% of the votes and thanks to the efficiency of their voting patterns, and the concentration of the opposition in a handful of regional constituencies, 77% of the seats in the Cortes. Supporters waved flags with the party's red bull in the streets for days, and with the new majority cemented and essentially all opposition sidelined, Serrano could proceed with his grand project of trying to become Spain's answer to Bismarck and Bazaine, and make his homeland the great power he knew it was destined to be..."
- Old Bull: Francisco Serrano and Modern Spain
- Old Bull: Francisco Serrano and Modern Spain
The Dragon Stirs: The Qing Dynasty under the Guangxu Emperor
"...though only 4 years old upon his accession to the throne in 1875, the Guangxu Era would become one of the most critical in Chinese history, and even though he was but a child, court officials saw his enthronement under the watchful eye of Dowager Empress Cixi as auspicious and one of potential good fortune..."
-The Dragon Stirs: The Qing Dynasty under the Guangxu Emperor
-The Dragon Stirs: The Qing Dynasty under the Guangxu Emperor
Tried to make this passage sound like something a Chinese courtier would actually say, glad it worked haha
The Father of Confederation
"...MacDonald's retirement that November then, having secured another majority for his Conservatives and consolidating influence further to Ottawa, left the new Prime Minister Charles Tupper [1] at the head of an electorally successful Cabinet, that had secured a bicoastal Canadian Confederation in less than 10 years as a self-governing nation, and was making breakneck progress on its transcontinental railroad despite Canada's dismal fiscal situation and the worldwide Depression. Louis Riel had retreated - for now - and relations between Catholics and Protestants, a major flashpoint in the age of Fenian Raids, were quiet. And so MacDonald could ride into the sunset into retirement as the true father of his country, untarnished by scandal or controversy in his early years, a figure as titanic in Canadian history as Washington was in the United States..."
- The Father of Confederation
[1] MacDonald's preferred successor in the 1870s
- The Father of Confederation
[1] MacDonald's preferred successor in the 1870s
Can't believe I didn't get notifications on any of the updates. I'm really liking the French resurgence, and Britain's slow fall. I'm looking forward to everything in this story
The wild thing is that it's not too far off what could have happened IOTL for France to see this resurgence. Disraeli beating them to the punch and buying all the Egyptian shares of the Suez Canal was a close run thing - Societe Generale was drawing up their offer when he did it. And it's not hard to see a more myopic aristocratic Britain bungling some of its foreign and domestic policy decisions in a world where Dizzy and Gladstone didn't come to power.
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