It's great this time of year. Much cooler than in the summer.
As for Los Angeles' fate under American rule: I have a feeling it'd be a backwater, and San Francisco would become the primary commercial center in American Alta California.
Maybe; some years ago, I recall Sobel talking about a state named "Colorado" that could have been placed South of the 36th parallel, but it didn't fit with his 50 State goal, though, so it was never done.
Maximiliano I outlawed child labor, abolished corporal punishment, got rid of debt peonage and broke up the Haciendas. Also, he didn't "shelter slaveowners" from BNA - they fled to Texas and practiced slavery illegally before trying to break away from Mexico when it became apparent that the Mexican government was not going to tolerate it.
OOC: I think you may have missed some of the other stuff I posted earlier. I think we can work with this, though.
IC: Yes, he basically did, sadly. In fact, slavery was only illegal in part of Tejas-Coahuila, namely, mainly San Antonio and the North Country. And guess where Jackson and company went? That's right, North Country. And Maximilian did nothing to stop them, either. In fact, the original Anglo settlers who'd come 20 years before partly started really outright revolting
en masse because they were being displaced by the renegade Anglo-American planters(it was bad enough that the government was ignoring their requests for better government but this drove many over the edge) . And then Maximilian gave the planters full rights to own slaves in those regions by law in return for helping him fight the revolt. He may not have been pro-slavery, per se, that is true, but he
did put unity before abolition(BTW, though, he did allow Mexico City legislators to ban slavery in that region in 1856, though it staggered on until 1875, when his son Max II approved the nationwide Abolition).
And as for the Native Americans, it may be true that the government did not actively persecute many societies(he did leave the Yaqui alone after the 1842 Treaty of Hermosillo). But the Apaches and the Comanches were victimized; Mexican citizens, particularly Sonorans, may remember the ambush & assassination of a young German cousin of Maximilian's while on a trip thru the area in 1844, just a few miles west of El Paso.....that's what drove him to persecute the remaining Apaches, Puebloans & Comanches. I will also admit that he did mellow out towards the end of his reign, but he did have that nasty streak to his policies for a good while, re: the Native Americans.
As for corporal punishment in the military, it was only abolished by the Congress in a very narrow vote in 1853 and this was despite Maximilian's reluctance to act on the matter. Debt peonage was abolished in Mexico City in 1847 but not nationwide until the 1890's, under Juan Pedro I; child labor, though banned in the nation's capital in 1857, that is true, still remained a problem in some areas until 1897.
Pedro II fought the slave trade tooth and nail, and was nearly overthrown because he abolished slavery and pissed off the slave owning elite.
Pedro II wasn't exactly bosom buddies of the remaining slavers, but he wasn't their enemy, either. In fact, it was the anti-slavery Reformists who asked him to abdicate.
I believe you're thinking of Andrew Jackson Donelson and his brother Daniel Smith Donelson. They defected to the royalist side after Maximiliano offered clemency to any Texan rebels who were willing to help him fight the secessionist California Republic. And while the first Battle of Los Angeles was a failure, the second Battle of Los Angeles resulted in a decisive Mexican victory.
Somewhat correct, but this was during the Arizona War 20 years later under Maximilian II. And I think you may have confused things with the Secession War; the First Battle of L.A. in the Arizona War was won by the Mexicans, but they lost the second when Colonel Fremont drove Donelson and company out.....though to be honest & fair, the exact opposite was true in the Secession War.....(o you were technically correct on that, just with the wrong war, that's all).
That is correct, but Los Angeles' population would be closer to around 5 million if the plebiscite to annex San Fernando hadn't failed.
Maybe so. It's still California's largest city, though, and perhaps if it had been made the country's new capital as had been proposed in the '70s(would have been tough to pull off, as Sacramento has held that position since 1892) it could have worked.
Certainly that was the case in the 80's, but Mexico has made a full recovery and is presently one of the world's fastest growing economies. Also,
Veracruz is just fine.
Mexico's doing better, yes, but the general population hasn't quite benefitted all that much from the recent recovery, though, compared to the wealthy. I've recently been to Mexico myself, btw, and a lot of people are still struggling, even close to Mexico City. And Veracruz may not be the slum-ridden Potemkin village it once was, but it still has yet to come back to where it was in the early '70s, though.
Although, since Jackson had been building up his support within his army, if the United States won the war (which would probably be very close, and thus leave them damaged and unstable), he probably would have tried to take over as dictator.
Hey, that could be the impetus for the slave-free split, Jackson taking the South into a dictatorship, with the north breaking away as its own republic or else joining Britain in some fashion.
Sounds mostly plausible to me, though in a scenario where Ernest Augustus becomes King, Jackson's South might very well remain a Dominion, I'd think.
OOC: BTW, I'd like to apologize if I unintentionally came off as a tad pushy in certain of my earlier IC postings. No hard feelings, I hope?
