Cinco de Mayo

[KingSweden24]

"...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

 

[KingSweden24]

"...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!

 

[KingSweden24]

"...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

 

[KingSweden24]

"...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

 

[KingSweden24]

"...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

 

[KingSweden24]

"...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

 

[KingSweden24]

"...the status of Mexico compared to the European legacy empires never ceased to grate at Maximilian, though, and at no time was that more clear than during his younger brother Karl Ludwig's visit to Chapultepec in the fall and winter of 1875. With his son, the future Austrian Emperor Franz Ferdinand, in tow, Archduke Karl was feted with one of the largest banquets in Mexican history, an ostentatious and opulent display that was remarkably out of character for the typically modest Maximilian and also remarkably unpopular with the Mexican street. It was perhaps the first major misstep by Maximilian of reading the popular mood, and matters were exacerbated when a protest on the Zocalo over the expense of the three-month state visit by the Emperor's Austrian kin was broken up violently, overseen personally by Miramon's elite cavalry unit. Maximilian was devastated to learn that the protestors blamed him for the violence, in which two women were trampled under horses, adding to an already difficult year. His second biological son, Jose Francisco, had numerous congenital defects from birth and his health was continuing to suffer, though the poor child would live to the age of forty despite his numerous ailments. The handicaps of Jose Francisco took a toll on the over-doting Carlota, whose marriage with Maximilian had soured. Though the Emperor had taken lovers before, despite his political devotions to his wife, now for the first time Carlota was engaging in adultery of her own, and the rumor at court was that it was the ambitious Miramon himself she had taken to bed to spite her philandering husband..."

- Maximilian of Mexico

 

[KingSweden24]

“..the arrival of the conflict was as much based not just on the specific circumstances of Russia and the Ottoman Empire but also the inaction of the other Great Powers. In this sense, it was specifically France’s diplomatic and strategic coups in the aftermath of her embarrassing loss in the Third Unification War that isolated Germany and influenced Russia’s path to war.

Germany, and arraying a “Iron Triangle” against her to prevent an even worse loss in the future, was an obsession to the French political class composed primarily of veterans of the prior war. Germany, however, did not substantially concern itself with such aggressive moves - Bismarck was confident that there was no cassus belli that could thrust Germany into a three-front war, and was aggressively committed to a neutral pathway in dealing with other Great Powers. To this point, by 1876 he had a working relationship with Bazaine based on mutual respect even where it lacked trust, and he viewed Napoleon IV as substantially less belligerent than his father. To this extent - and due to his deep skepticism in Italy, home to fractious Cabinets flipping between staunch paternalist conservatives and anticlerical liberal radicals - he was satisfied with his relationship with Russia being purely defensive in case of Austrian aggression, and his bigger concern was diplomatic gambits to position Sweden-Norway against Denmark to outflank the Triangle.

Due to Germany’s inward focus and lack of interest in affairs to her East, Russia had one singular friend in Europe in a mere defensive alliance, and as the Bulgarian uprisings began she found herself joined in furor at the shocking Ottoman atrocities yet alone in her zeal to defend Orthodoxy in the Balkans...”

- The Gathering Storm: The Prelude to the Eastern Crisis 1856-1876

 

[KingSweden24]

"...the 1875-77 drought was easily the worst in the history of the region, and it plagued every statelet in Southern Africa from the Cape Colony to the youngest settlements north of the Transvaal. A minor skirmish between tribes on the Cape frontier led to a declaration of war by the hungry, aggressive Frere, egged on by the Colonial Office and, in particular, Carnarvon. Though the 9th Frontier War was a quick affair, Molteno still protested the escalating tensions in Southern Africa, particularly after learning that Frere had requested, and been granted, additional ships to station at Inhaca across from Delagoa Bay. The Cape's elected, liberal government remained an obstacle to Confederation with hostile states of both native kingdoms and the illiberal Free Republics.

Portuguese East Africa's Governor Guedes sent message by haste to Cape Verde, where his younger brother served as colonial governor [1], to lodge his express disapproval of British saber rattling on the Indian Ocean. As for the Boers, having established a robust presence now in Lourenco Marques and building their future seaport at Oostburg, they were already preparing for what they anticipated would be a life-or-death struggle to retain their independence, and even as the drought deepened, President Pretorius dispatched militia commanders to the frontier states of Basutoland and Zululand to discuss mutual strategies and arm and equip the natives..."

- The Land of Plenty: Southern Africa in the 19th Century

[1] This is factual

 

[KingSweden24]

"...the Battle of Nowood marked the effective end of the Sioux insurgency, with a crushing defeat exacted upon Crazy Horse's war parties and ending with the death of the war chief himself. As was Custer's wont, journalists dutifully took notes and photographs from the sidelines of the battle. Pulitzer's article about the victory was effusive and bordering on hagiographic, and when Custer returned from the frontier in 1878 when he was transferred to command the US Army post in Cincinnati, he had a new nickname granted him for his ferocity and the namesake of his state: "the White Wolverine." As for the Sioux deported to reservations where they were to be "civilized" in mission schools and encampments, stripped of their holy Black Hills, he had a different name: "the Great White Menace"..."

- The Wolverine in the White House: The Presidency of George Armstrong Custer at 100 (University of Michigan, 1992) [1]

[1] As you can see we're getting something of a look-ahead with this book title.

 

[KingSweden24]

"...Parnell's advantage, insofar as there was one, was that he was from a prominent Protestant Anglo-Irish landholding family. He was not some "dirty" tenant farmer, nor was he Catholic. When he spoke, there were many ears at Dublin Castle that listened, even if they later dismissed what he had to say. And more importantly, there were even some sympathetic ears in Whitehall. The Liberals, uncomfortable with the Church of Ireland and supporters of land and franchise reform in all of Britain, viewed the issue of Irish land tenancy as part and parcel of issues where they split with the increasingly ossified Tories. A mass riot on St. Patrick's Day in Cork and street brawls between Orangemen and Republican Brotherhood-affiliated mobs in Ulster had resulted in the deployment of the expanded British Army presence, in support of an increasingly radicalized and aggressive Royal Irish Constabulary, to "areas of minimal government control." The RIC in particular, by 1876, already a gendarmerie in all but name and an auxiliary of British military forces, was the spearpoint of the Carnarvon Cabinet's campaign of terror in the Irish countryside during that spring and summer, with the nearly uniformly-Protestant police force developing a network of spies and informants to turn up not just IRB agents and members, most of whom were utterly nonviolent, but increasingly harassing Land League activists.

It was against this backdrop that Parnell's merger of the Land League with Butt's Home Rule League occurred, combining the activist and constitutional wings of Irish nationalism under the "Irish Parliamentary Party" banner, and tying the issues of land tenancy reform and local rule for Ireland together in one for the first time. The reaction to this development in London was, to say the least, not ebullient..."

- Ireland Unfree

 

[KingSweden24]

"...the most critical problem for Hoffman in the lead-up to the Democratic Convention in St. Louis was that his successes had no substantial political constituencies and his shortfalls had alienated major ones. True to the spirit of his 1872 campaign and his career, he did indeed finally deliver in late 1875 the United States Civil Service Board, an appointed commission that would review all political appointments, theoretically on merit, with some (fairly toothless) legislation from Congress guiding what "merit" meant. The CSB was an important step to the modern civil service and administrative bureaucracy of the United States, one of the most professional and well-regarded in the world today [1], but in the mid-1870s it was viewed in some quarters as "centralism" of the Republican kind, in others as a way to cheat supporters out of patronage, and its supporters were a fairly niche subset of upper-class, do-gooder educated reformists who viewed patronage in the style of Boss Tweed as gauche and, in a form of highbrow elitism, saw civil service reform as a way to curb the influence of the unwashed masses, in particular the Irish. That prevailing view among the gentry class further hamstrung Hoffman, as many of those same elites - particularly in New York - pretended to be so appalled by the Tweed Affair that they defected to the young Liberals, particularly pushing for Governor Samuel Tilden to carry the Liberal banner into that fall's election on the success of "cleaning up the Tweed Ring." Though Hoffman was never implicated in any illegal activity, his once-closeness to the Tweed Ring continued to be broadcast in the New York papers and the Peckham prosecutions continued to produce embarrassing headlines in the crucial state. As such, despite his creditable efforts at reform, his guilt by association with Tweed gave him little credit with reformers in either the Democratic or Liberal parties.

Hoffman further engendered little endearment in the Midwest. His lack of enthusiasm for free silver in the midst of the still-depressed economy, despite returning the US Mint to acceptance of silver at a fairly limited rate, more than offset his sympathy for working laborers, whom he hoped to carve away from the collapsing, increasingly socialist-sounding Republicans. The inciting incident, though, was the case of Freeman vs. Illinois, in which the Davis Court held that under the 14th Amendment, laws banning free blacks from residing within the borders of a state were unconstitutional violations of their privileges and immunities they enjoyed as American citizens. The backlash was fierce in the seven states where such absolute laws were in force and in ten additional states with moderate versions of such laws - 1876 saw the most lynchings in the United States in a decade. The anger at the imposition of "Republican morals" on the entire country by a 7-2 margin with only Clifford and Church (both Democratic appointments) in dissent, was the final straw for the delegates in St. Louis. Rufus Peckham attempted to whip support for the Hoffman ticket at the convention, but the President had at this point gravely alienated the Midwest and West, held out as a stooge of "bankers and n***ers." There was a brief surge for Senator George Pendleton, among the most extreme of the party's reactionary wing; many Hoffman supporters, seeing the writing on the wall, backed Vice President Cox instead, helping deny Pendleton enough of his home state delegation. Hoffman was informed via telegram that he was not going to be renominated and urged his convention manager to see to it that if Cox, whom he had become close friends with, did not get the nomination, to see to it that Pendleton did not either. Cox, who was present in St. Louis, threw the convention into disarray when to make sure that Pendleton did not earn the nomination, cut a deal with supporters of Thomas Hendricks, Governor of Indiana who had moderated in his years in executive office from the more reactionary posture he had held in the Senate in the 1860s. Hendricks emerged on the ninth ballot as the nominee, and was informed of this while lunching at the State Capitol in Indianapolis. The delegates, to provide geographic balance, nearly appointed James Kelly of Oregon to the Vice Presidential spot, but instead went with the surprise choice of Supreme Court Justice Sanford Church of New York, to make sure that that crucial state stayed in the fold out of concerns that Governor Tilden was to easily win the Liberal nomination the following week, which he indeed did..."

- Youth and Vigor: The Presidency of John T. Hoffman

[1] Say what you will about the US government, "well-regarded" is not the term I would use for our bureaucracy at the federal level IOTL

 

[KingSweden24]

"...as Senator Reagan famously remarked, "anyone who knew the man could have foreseen the incompetence of a President Harris." Indeed, it was so - while none of his predecessors as Presidents of the Confederacy had been towering figures, Davis had managed to deliver independence, Forrest had had the sense to be quiet and delegate to trusted lieutenants for the first four years of his shortened Presidency until the potential prize of Cuba wowed him, and Breckinridge was a man so rigorous in his attempts at mastering administrative minutiae it undid him. Not Isham Harris, though, who spent more time throwing cocktail parties in Richmond and enriching himself and his Tennessee Clique, sending port inspectors to harass foreign ships and demanding bribes at the point of guns held by Klansmen from chapters loyal to him. It was only due to the decentralized, weak nature of the Confederate government that he could get away with such to begin with - the planter oligarchy chugged along despite the deepening depression, the poor white tenant farmers continued to grow destitute and clash with one another and state governments did as they pleased, even as foreign investment in the Confederacy declined sharply. Most prominently was North Carolina, which had reelected two time Presidential nominee Zeb Vance to the Governorship. As head of the Conservative Party of North Carolina, he ran the state as a personal fiefdom with rigorous defenses of civil law and a stubborn refusal to engage in any patronage whatsoever. By the time Vance ascended to the Senate in the early 1880s, North Carolina had Dixie's most robust public school system, the port of Wilmington thrived despite the presence of grumpy Harrisite customs officials taking their cut and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill began to emerge as one of the premier law schools in North America..."

- Dixieland

 

[KingSweden24]

"...it was obvious by the hot summer of 1876 that First Minister Santiago Vidaurri's health was in serious decline, and six months before his resignation the following January he deputized members of the Cabinet to carry on without him as he went to native Nuevo Leon to convalesce and hopefully recover. The power vacuum in Mexico City, where Vidaurri had aggressively held sway for nearly a decade, began to swirl with new intrigues. The Emperor refused to sack his most loyal lieutenant and, true to his nature, considered himself above such matters; he was Emperor, and his word went. The key figure in the coming game of musical chairs was Miramon, who had spent six months in an unofficial internal exile "reviewing" military units across the country as Vidaurri hoped to turn down the heat after the Zocalo Stampede. His return to the city on July 17th was met with crowds both cheering and condemning him, and von Benedek remarked that he seemed to be riding into the city like a returning conqueror, a "miniature Napoleon." As for Benedek, he was content to continue to serve in his current role as a military advisor, but had built a substantial power base among emigre nobility from Europe. Crucially, he was in constant correspondence with officials back in the Old World about finding them "opportunities" in the Americas - in particular, he viewed the exiled Bourbons in France as potential bargaining chips for new monarchies to replace planter republics to Mexico's South. The last new player on the scene was retired General Tomas Mejia, who had left the military some years earlier to serve as the Emperor's chief voice in the rubberstamp assembly. Mejia was seen as an obvious choice to succeed Vidaurri, as he was from the Altiplano, part-Native but a Conservative beyond reproach, and quite crucially was not rumored to be bedding the Emperor's wife and had not scattered protestors with armed cavalry during a lavish state dinner. Carlota, for her part, preferred finding a First Minister from outside the capital, perhaps one of the state caudillos, as a transition figure, primarily in order to start influencing power herself and not potentially turn power over to her adopted son, Admiral Salvador de Iturbide, whom she had come to despise. Eventually, her preferred candidate became Pelagio Antonio de Labastida, Mexico's ultraconservative Archbishop..."

- Maximilian of Mexico

 

[KingSweden24]

"...by late 1876, Napoleon IV had consolidated his power enough - and France, being the first nation to emerge from the Great Depression and in an era of optimism and expansion of trade and industry, loved him for it - to present a new, "modern" constitution for the Second Empire, meant to both decentralize power away from Paris to the rural regions under a semi-federal model and thus also defang the Parisian radicalism that so dominated the National Assembly, make conscription equal-opportunity, and create a bicameral Parliament, the lower house indirectly elected by provinces (again, to reward rural Catholic France where the Emperor was held in high regard) and an upper House of Peers. Each of the 18 regions was to have its own budget and elect her own governor-general; the Cabinet was to remain appointed by the Emperor, but make most day-to-day decision making. Only in foreign policy would Napoleon IV's word be absolute, and there there was promise that his Anglophilia and skepticism of Germany would continue the Empire on the path set out by Bazaine over the previous decade. He presented a referendum to the country on this new constitution over protests of some of his opponents in the National Assembly, to be held in the coming spring..."

- The Eaglet Takes Flight: The Reign of Napoleon IV 1874-1905

(The ideas sketched out in this update stem from information I gleaned in a 7 year old thread on Napoleon IV that I will link as my source)

Emperor Napoleon IV?

IOTL, Napoleon IV was killed by the Zulus in 1879, while serving in the British Army. He was twenty-three and had been in exile from France since the fall of the Second Empire. Suppose the Franco-Prussian War never broke out and the Second Empire had never fallen. Napoleon III likely would...

www.alternatehistory.com

 

[KingSweden24]

"...the crises of 1876 began to build; the deposition and suspicious suicide of Sultan Abdulaziz led to one of his courtiers attempting to assassinate a number of Cabinet officers, stopped only just in time by one of the guards in the room [1]. His nephew Murad V sat on the throne only 93 days until his deposition on grounds of mental illness. It seemed that suddenly all at once the optimism of the Tanzimat Reforms and the First Constitution were being stifled, especially as the atrocities in Bulgaria were reported in the West, flagged most aggressively by William Gladstone in the United Kingdom. The world seemed paralyzed when Serbia suddenly declared war on its suzerain, followed the next day by the Principality of Montenegro. Despite their differences, Russia and Austria made a secret agreement to divide the Balkans, viewing the Ottoman collapse as inevitable, and Austria was unconcerned about her French allies protesting so long as they kept their influence in the Levant and, more crucially, Egypt.

Despite Serbia's clear disadvantages against the Ottomans as the fighting started, the popular support for the ideology of Pan-Slavism had begun to affect the normally cautious court of Alexander, and it was now understood in Moscow that Germany, her reinsurance partner, and Austria, her erstwhile rival in the Balkans, would not intervene and indeed may be supportive of Russian expansionism. With the twenty-year anniversary of the Paris Peace Agreement having come and gone, Alexander acquiesced to the views of his Chancellor Gorchakov and began ad-hoc outfitting merchant vessels with cannons, to build a littoral fleet presence in the Black Sea without alerting the Ottomans - or perhaps more crucially, Britain and France - that they were violating the sea's demilitarization..."

- The Gathering Storm: The Prelude to the Eastern Crisis 1856-1876

[1] This is a gigantic butterfly, BTW

 

[KingSweden24]

"...Carnarvon's focus on South African intrigues and crushing Irish nationalism left him blind to the atrocities in Bulgaria, which the Liberals capitalized on and made his government only more unpopular. The Grand Old Man, Gladstone himself, wrote furiously about the Ottoman barbarism and left Britain in a position where it had little choice, in order to keep its focus where Cabinet sought it, to defer to the accelerating Russian war machine. Spies in the Crimea reported of a miniature Black Sea Fleet being reconstituted out of the merchant marine, and the War Ministry reacted with but a shrug. Salisbury, like most others in Cabinet, was indifferent to the Eastern Question, and would rather Russia's eyes be turned towards the Balkans and her Christian minorities whom London empathized with than potentially threaten India via the Great Game in Central Asia. It was Salisbury and Bazaine who intervened to end the brief and inconclusive Serbian War, which returned to the status quo ante bellum in late 1876, but within a year war would break out again..."

- The Age of Questions: Britain in the Gauntlet of Change and Upheaval

 

[KingSweden24]

Full Results: US Elections 1876

165 electors needed to win

Thomas Hendricks of Indiana/Sanford Church of New York (Democratic) - 40.5% of the popular vote, 212 electoral votes

Pennsylvania 39
Ohio 29
Missouri 20
Indiana 19
Iowa 14
Michigan 14
Wisconsin 13
New Jersey 12
Maryland 10
California 8
Minnesota 7
West Virginia 6
Kansas 6
Oregon 3
Delaware 3
Nebraska 3
New Mexico 3
Nevada 3

Samuel Tilden of New York/George F. Edmunds of Vermont (Liberal) - 40.4% of the popular vote, 104 electoral votes

New York 47
Illinois 28
Connecticut 8
Maine 8
Vermont 5
New Hampshire 5
Colorado 3

Benjamin Butler of Massachusetts/Zachariah Chandler of Michigan (Republican) - 21 Electoral Votes, 19.1% of the popular vote

Massachusetts 17
Rhode Island 4

1876 Senate Results

A fairly uneventful election for Senators, as no seats were lost by the ruling Democrats and the only switches occurred both from Republicans becoming Liberals during the 44th Congress or being replaced by Liberals as the Republican caucuses collapsed in many state legislatures.

CO: Henry M. Teller APPOINTED and Elected to full term (Liberal Gain)
CO: Jerome B. Chaffee APPOINTED (Liberal Gain)
DE: Eli Saulsbury Re-Elected (Democratic Hold)
IL: John Logan (R) Re-Elected as Liberal (Liberal Gain)
IA: George G. Wright (R) Retired; Samuel Kirkwood (L) ELECTED (Liberal Gain)
KS: David P. Lowe (L) ELECTED (Liberal Gain)
ME: James G. Blaine (L) APPOINTED and elected to full term (Liberal Gain)
MA: George Frisbie Hoar (R) Elected (Republican Hold)
MI: Byron Stout (D) Re-Elected (Democratic Hold)
MN: Henry Hasting Sibley (D) Re-Elected (Democratic Hold)
NE: Experience Estabrook (D) Re-Elected (Democratic Hold)
NH: Aaron Cragin (L) Re-Eelcted (Liberal Hold)
NJ: Joel Parker (D) RETIRED; John R. McPherson (D) ELECTED (Democratic Hold)
NM: Samuel Beach Axtell (D) Re-Elected (Democratic Hold)
OR: James K. Kelly (D) RETIRED; La Fayette Grover (D) ELECTED (Democratic Hold)
RI: Henry B. Anthony (L) Re-Elected (Liberal Hold)
WV: Henry Gossaway Davis (D) Re-Elected (Democratic Hold)

1876 House Results

The Democrats lose 18 seats from their caucus and the Republicans lose 60% of theirs as they are reduced to a mere 20 seats - the Liberal Party of the United States for the first time has more than 100 members of the United States House of Representatives. Liberals do especially well in the Midwest, outside of their traditional heartland.

45th Congress of the United States

Senate: 30D-17L-6R-1AM

President of the Senate: Samuel Cox (D)
Senate President pro tempore: Henry Mower Rice of Minnesota (D)

California
1. Newton Booth (A-M) (1875-)
3. John S. Hager (D) (1873-)

Colorado

2. Henry M. Teller (L) (1876-)
3. Jerome B. Chaffee (L) (1876-)

Connecticut
1. William W. Eaton (D) (1875-)
3. Orris Ferry (L) (1867-)

Delaware
1. Thomas Bayard (D) (1869-)
2. Eli Saulsbury (D) (1871-)

Illinois
2. John Logan (L) (1871-)
3. Richard Oglesby (R) (1873-)

Indiana
1. Joseph E. McDonald (D) (1875-)
3. Daniel Voorhees (D) (1873-)

Iowa
2. Samuel Kirkwood (L) (1877-)
3. William Allison (L) (1873-)

Kansas
2. David P. Lowe (L) (1877-)
3. John Ingalls (R) (1873-)

Maine
1. Hannibal Hamlin (R) (1869-)
2. James G. Blaine (L) (1877-)

Maryland
1. William Pinkney Whyte (D) (1869-)
3. George Dennis (D) (1873-)

Massachusetts
1. Henry Dawes (R) (1875-)
2. George Frisbie Hoar (R) (1877-)

Michigan
1. Isaac Christiancy (L) (1875-)
2. Byron G. Stout (D) (1865-)

Minnesota
1. Henry Mower Rice (D) (185
2. Henry Hastings Sibley (D) (1865-)

Missouri
1. Francis Cockrell (D) (1875-)
3. Lewis Bogy (D) (1873-)

Nebraska
1. Thomas Tipton (L) (1869-)
2. Experience Estabrook (D) (1871-)

Nevada
1. William Sharon (D) (1875-)
3. John P. Jones (D) (1873-)

New Hampshire
2. Aaron Cragin (L) (1865-)
3. Bainbridge Wadleigh (L) (1873-)

New Jersey
1. Theodore Fitz Randolph (D) (1875-)
2. John R. McPherson (D) (1871-)

New Mexico

1. William A. Pile (L) (1875-)
2. Samuel Beach Axtell (D) (1875-)

New York
1. Francis Kernan (D) (1875-)
3. William Evarts (R) (1873-)

Ohio
1. Allen Thurman (D) (1869-)
3. George Pendleton (D) (1873-)

Oregon
2. La Fayette Grover (D) (1871-)
3. James Nesmith (D) (1873-)

Pennsylvania
1. Charles Buckalew (D) (1863-)
3. Asa Parker (D) (1873-)

Rhode Island
1. William Sprague (L) (1863-)
2. Henry B. Anthony (L) (1859-)

Vermont
1. George F. Edmunds (L) (1866-)
3. Justin Morrill (L) (1867-)

West Virginia
1. Joseph Sprigg (D) (1869-)
2. Henry Gassaway Davis (D) (1871-)

Wisconsin
1. James Rood Doolittle (D) (1857-)
3. Matthew Carpenter (D) (1873-)

House: 155D-105L-20R

Speaker of the House: Samuel Marshall of Illinois (D)

 

[KingSweden24]

"...the Republicans were effectively a non-factor other than in siphoning votes away from the Liberals in crucial states. Despite high unemployment and disquiet in the centennial year, and Tilden running on his career as an aggressive opponent of gross patronage and public corruption, the declining Republican Party still kept him from capitalizing on the unpopularity of the incumbent Hoffman administration. Though Hendricks won the popular vote by only 0.1%, he won a comfortable majority in the electoral college thanks to a strong base in the Midwest and West. The conservatives, locked out of power since before the War of Southern Independence, were back in power..."

- Hendricks: America's 20th President

 

[KingSweden24]

"...the Great Powers had hoped to impose some semblance of enforceable requirements of reform upon the Ottomans at the Constantinople Conference, but the Ottomans summarily rejected the push for autonomous provinces. In the eyes of Istanbul, and later historians, it was a remarkable overreach by the Concert of Europe, to attempt to dictate special privileges within Turkish borders and carve out exclusively and uniquely governed provinces for (invariably Christian) ethnic minorities. To Huseyin Pasha [1], the grizzled Defense Minister who angrily rejected the terms of the Conference, it was clearly a pretext to an eventual stripping of the most valuable and industrialized territories of the Empire. The machinations were complex - Salisbury of Britain led the charge, his skepticism of Turkish intentions overwhelming the longstanding British skepticism about Russian intentions about the Dardanelles and accessing the Mediterranean. In that sense, the Conference devolved into an effort for Britain and Russia to hash out their differences in Central Asia as well as their mutual suspicion of increasing French influence in Istanbul and Paris's control of Suez... while all the while, Germany sat on the sidelines as a "neutral" arbiter weighing how best to flex her muscle and Austria watched Russia suspiciously, particularly worried about Moscow's intentions regarding all Slavic subjects in the Balkans and a potential loss of influence in the Ottoman border suzerainties.

It was all for naught, though, as Abdulhamid revealed the new Ottoman Constitution, modelling the country on Western constitutional monarchies with the soft help of France. While France and Britain were resolved not to start a general war in Europe over the Balkan Crisis, it was clear that the two nations would not be joining to defend Istanbul this time around. Even Marshal Bazaine of France, the most important man in the room at Constantinople, made clear to Grand Vizier Midhat Pasha that fundamental reform and further economic integration was the price of France refusing to demand adherence to the Conference's terms, and that beyond that there was to be no expectation of "ships flying the tricolor" appearing in case Russia had other plans. While peace was made with Serbia at that table, the stubborn rejection of the Conference's demands shocked and angered many European diplomats. France was the only power satisfied with the religious equality clause of the Ottoman Constitution - Austria moved to quickly sign its Reichstadt Agreement with Russia that it would remain benevolently neutral in any coming conflict, Britain (where the Carnarvon Cabinet was embarrassed by Salisbury's failure, contentious politics at home and were soon to be badly humiliated in Southern Africa) made clear through diplomatic channels that it would abandon its support of the Ottomans and that control of the Dardanelles was its only red line, essentially leaving Russia a free hand to defend the Orthodox faith in Southeast Europe. When Russia announced that the Ottoman rejection of diplomacy voided the Peace of Paris and - most crucially - the ban on a militarized Black Sea, few objected and Germany even offered her vocal support of Moscow's position as leverage for its Scandinavian project [2]. Most crucially, London sat silent. Turkey had officially run out of friends in Europe as she careened towards war with Russia..."

- The Eastern Question

[1] It is really important that this man did not die as in OTL
[2] Okay I've procrastinated this enough I swear this will be the next update