A pause in the TL to continue the review of British America.
God is a Frenchman: Central Provinces - 1830s
The
Central Provinces formed the urban core of the Dominion on an axis between New York City and Philadelphia and included the provinces of New York, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania. These provinces were diverse and varied in their histories, politics, and demographics but all shared similar economies centered around staple agriculture, animal husbandry, mercantile trade, and increasingly, manufacturing. Despite their relatively similar economies, the political systems and cultural development of the three central provinces greatly differed, contrary to the relative cultural unity of New England. In fact, strong resentments had developed between the three by the 1830s driven in part by the outcome of the French wars of previous decades.
The
Province of New York had gone through periods of intense economic distress in the late-18th and early-19th centuries, particularly after the closure of the frontier. Numerous military expeditions into Iroquois Country between the 1770s and 1810s were met with failure. The loss of the Iroquois trade and the inability to formally expand westward decimated the trade economy of the Hudson River Valley and Albany was abandoned as the provincial capital in the 1780s. With little trade coming from points north and west, New York City’s growth stalled for several decades even as the population increased. New York developed two distinct agricultural-based economies with the city as a nexus between them, the Hudson Valley and Long Island.
In the Hudson Valley life was dominated by massive estates owned chiefly by the great old families of the province, many of whom held at least one noble title since George III created an American peerage in the late-1770s. By the 1810s five families–the Rensselaers, Stuyvesants, Schuylers, Livingstones, and De Lancey’s–controlled over 40% of the real estate in the Hudson River Valley on their own. Likewise a majority of residents in the region were lessees in hock to one of the great families; those who owned their own property tended to be employed or hired in service of these same families. Few small independent farms existed in the Hudson Valley by the 1830s as they had been gobbled up by the real estate portfolios of major and minor families and leased back to former owners, often as a condition of debt settlements. This produced a culture in the Hudson Valley not dissimilar from many regions of England itself, with a local peer lording over a large underclass of tenants, servants, and other employees.
The most independent and free areas of the Hudson Valley were those towns dominated by a military presence. Albany and Schenectady were the headquarters and forward garrison of the Continental Army in New York and had economies driven by the needs of the soldiery. Known for smuggling and gambling, Schenectady was ironically a haven for outlaws alongside the Dominion garrison. By the mid-1830s the town was considered a major example of the decay and corruption of the Continental Army in the years since the end of Talleyrand’s War in 1817. Newburgh developed as a Navy town and boasted a sizable shipyard that had begun experimenting with iron-cladding on warships by 1834 with the launching of the HMDS New Jersey. Factories also began to develop on the Hudson’s tributaries. These factory towns were controlled by many of the same families that dominated the real estate of the province, and created a system not dissimilar from the Sears method in Massachusetts.
On Long Island, the landlord-tenant phenomenon also existed, but on a smaller scale, with less than 30% of the land controlled by a small number of great families. Long Island retained pockets of New England-like development with small farms centered around town squares that were hubs of economic activity and a turnpike connecting them to the city. The owner-operator towns of North Hempstead, Islip, and Brookhaven contrasted with landlord-tenant towns like Oyster Bay, Hempstead, and Huntington. This produced a strong political divide on the island and Suffolk County was a bastion of liberal discontent.
Long Island also boasted a healthy maritime industry of fishing and whaling. The industry took several decades to fully recover after King Louis’ War, but by 1830 a healthy fleet of trawlers and whalers operated on Long Island, particularly out of Sag Harbor and Montauk. The maritime industries were the most egalitarian in New York with many owner-operated firms. By mid-century several major players had developed in the whaling industry, such as the dominant Oatker family that owned the largest whaling fleet in the Dominion. In the 1830s, patriarch Jacob Walter Oatker’s power in the whaling industry was only contested by that of Ahab Coffin Swain of Nantucket.
The intersection of the Hudson Valley and Long Island were the twin cities of New York on Manhattan Island, and Brooklyn on far-western Long Island and they both dominated the economy and politics of the province. New York City–often called “York City” by inhabitants–housed over 90,000 residents by 1830. Growth on Manhattan Island crept northward as urban neighborhoods surrounded and bypassed fantastic estates and grounds. Much of the development in the first half of the 19th century was driven by Jacob Walter Oatker, a whaling magnate who also controlled Australis Wharf and Spanish Wharf, and was a major real estate investor. Oatker held no title and died in 1833, but his children built on his legacy and the Oatker family became one of the wealthiest in the Dominion by the 1860s. With its dominant role in both foreign and domestic trade, York City emerged as one of the Dominion’s key economic centers, along with Boston, Philadelphia, and Norfolk. York City also was among the most diverse cities in the northern provinces, with two large black neighborhoods developing by the mid-1830s known as “the Old Admiralty” and “Yanzon Village.”
Brooklyn became the provincial capital in 1782 after the closure of the frontier in the Treaty of Exmouth. The New York government abandoned interior trade and expansion into the upper reaches of the Hudson Valley and refocused on maritime trade. The government of New York was based on that of England, with high minimum land-holding requirements for suffrage in provincial and Dominion elections. The suffrage issue had great political salience in New York, especially on Long Island. Before emancipation, Brooklyn had the highest density of slaves north of Baltimore. In the late-1820s those emancipated people largely dispersed, with many moving to York City, Long Island seaside towns, and factory towns in the Hudson Valley. Still several thousand former slaves became tenants to lordly estates in western Long Island, mirroring those along the Hudson.
The Provincial Assembly met at the Province House, designed in the Dominion Style in 1798 by Jacob Shagen. The Assembly was composed of 63 seats elected by voters in each county. Living in the Governor’s Mansion, the governor was selected by the Assembly every four years and he appointed an Executive Council that served as an upper house of the legislature and high judicial court. The Council met in the Heights House, also designed by Shagen and built in 1801. This government structure allowed a relatively small cadre of notable families to cycle power between them, essentially creating an informal oligarchy. Several electors opted to hold their own private elections among their tenants to survey attitudes and Simon Van Nuys even instituted a Tenancy Board, a quasi-municipal advisory body for the Lord’s various estates and holdings. Such benevolent attitudes were not the norm in New York, however, and tenant rights continued to lead to periodic uprisings and protests through the mid-19th century.
The
Province of New Jersey was among the most highly developed and wealthiest provinces in the Dominion by the 1830s. The roots of this prosperity were rooted in the aftermath of the 18th century wars against France where New Jersey suffered little and made out as a creditor for other colonies, particularly New York, which allowed New Jersey to claim Staten Island and secure the sea approach to Newark. New Jersey developed a diverse economy in the early-19th century. Northern New Jersey developed with a combination of small farms and country estates growing staple crops and raising livestock. Manufacturing became increasingly important from the 1820s onward contributing to the population boom in New Jersey in the first half of the 19th century. The government spent increasing resources to develop a sizable port to compete with New York at the mouth of the Raritan River at Perth Amboy. By the mid-1830s, Perth Amboy processed the same amount of shipping as Portsmouth, New Hampshire and by 1838 was connected to New Brunswick via railway.
Politically New Jersey was more egalitarian than New York, but maintained minimum landholdings of ten acres for suffrage in provincial and Dominion elections. The capital in Trenton stood on the turnpike between York City and Philadelphia. This wealthy and heavily developed corridor in middle New Jersey included Princeton, and New Brunswick. These small but growing cities were centers of trade, industry, and education. The New Jersey Central Railway Company opened a trunk line between Newark and Camden in 1837, swiftly becoming one of the most profitable railway companies in North America.
In Trenton, the General Assembly and the Provincial Council together served as the legislature, and the Council also advised the Governor and acted as the top judiciary in the province. The Governor was elected by the voters of New Jersey every four years. The Government Block in Trenton was designed and laid out by British architect Samuel Pepys Cockerell from 1804-1811 in a neoclassical style with grand avenues bracketing commons that connected various government buildings. The grandiosity of the Government Block was a hallmark of New Jersey’s wealth and prosperity in the early-1800s.
Southern New Jersey by 1835 was a patchwork medium and large farms that were dominated by grand estates. This region was strongly Tory in its politics and was quite similar to the Hudson Valley. Despite this, southern Jersey landholders were unable to dominate the provincial government in New Jersey as they were in New York. The combination of both the political balance and prosperity in New Jersey helped to make it one of the most stable provinces in the British Dominion.
The
Commonwealth of Pennsylvania struggled greatly to find its feet after King Louis’ War in the 1770s and considerable social unrest occurred in the province in the late-18th century. Multiple attempts to secure French territory beyond the Allegheny Mountains invariably ended in failure or negotiated retreat. The gradual withering of Pennsylvania’s will to expand westward was a messy process involving insurrection, pacification, and emigration. Additionally, the conversion of Pennsylvania from a proprietary colony to a royal colony in the 1780s contributed to making the provincial government more effective and responsive. By the 1830s Pennsylvania was largely settled and prosperous, thanks in part to large amounts of Dominion support for internal improvements. The Dominion government had a clear incentive to support stability in Pennsylvania given that Philadelphia hosted the central government.
Pennsylvania’s economy was centered around Philadelphia, which for a time served as the capital for both the provincial and the Dominion governments. Its population grew to nearly 100,000 by 1835 making it the largest city in British America just over New York City. Pennsylvania’s General Assembly met in Philadelphia until 1808 when the provincial capital was moved to Lancaster. As the Dominion government became more established, the city became the American hub for culture and arts. In 1822 the first Dominion Exhibition of British Industry was held in Philadelphia and attracted travelers from across British America to observe the latest in technological and industrial inventions and developments. While the Dominion’s presence had a strong cultural impact, its physical impact on the city was relatively minor. The loose confederation created by the Dominion politically wanted to be portrayed as unthreatening and unobtrusive; its architectural impact was stately but hardly grandiose, particularly when compared to provincial capitol buildings like in New Jersey and New York.
Philadelphia’s built environment and municipal government remained heavily swayed by Quaker ideals. Relatively demure, functional buildings dominated the streetscape. The most impressive architecture in Philadelphia were the grand homes of important families such as the Shippen, Dallas, and Willing clans. The intersection of the merchant class with the Quaker political elites often produced considerable conflict within the city, but Philadelphia Quaker ideals remained dominant in Pennsylvania politics through the 19th century. For example, Quaker lobbying was instrumental in the push against slavery on both sides of the Atlantic, while their instinct for pacifism gave more leeway to the rowdy Appalachian settlers than they received in other provinces such as Virginia. Following Massachusetts' example, the Quaker-dominated legislature officially labeled the colony as a "commonwealth," to reflect that the provincial government was meant to represent and provide for all. In Yorktown the assembly and the governor were elected by nearly all freeholders with very low minimum land holding, while the House of Notables was among by the largest freeholders.
Outside of Philadelphia the province’s development followed similar patterns throughout. From the Lehigh Valley to the Alleghenies, patchworks of small farms, country estates, and merchant towns dotted the landscape. Through the early decades of the 1800s settlers flooded into Pennsylvania towns. Many came from New England as family farms became overcrowded; the Scots-Irish arrived from Ulster, bringing with them a strong independent streak that differed from the communitarian ideals of the Quakers and New Englanders. Many New Englanders settled in northeastern Pennsylvania, a result of Connecticut’s long-standing legal claims over the region that were bitterly fought until the Dominion Congress settled the matter in 1795. They brought with them that particular flavor of Yankee idealism and created communities not dissimilar from those they left behind. The largest towns founded by New Englanders were Pittsfield (OTL Wilkes-Barre), Billingston (OTL Scranton), and Collierton (OTL Carbondale).
The Scots-Irish converged on western Pennsylvania, which had long been the settlement pattern of Ulster immigrants since the mid-18th century. The border region with Quebec had been particularly rough for decades with crisis after crisis due to tax resistance and a lack of sufficient land. This commonly manifested in resentment towards the American peerage, some of whom controlled vast landholdings in western Pennsylvania and were invariably of well-bred English stock. This led more recent arrivals in the 1800s to have four basic options: marry into a landed family, lease land from an estate holder, settle in a town center and find labor work, or move south out of Pennsylvania to try your luck elsewhere. Despite stabilizing conditions in the western province by the 1820s societal tensions between new and established settlers, between the west counties and the east, and between the greater province and Philadelphia simmered just below the surface.
While many new arrivals and grown children opted to move south along the mountain valleys into the Carolinas and Georgia, others chose to settle in rapidly growing towns and cities in Pennsylvania’s interior. Major ironworks were established in Northampton (OTL Allentown), Lancaster, Harrisburg, and Pittsfield by 1840. The population of Pittsfield quadrupled from 1820-1860 due to the heavy mining of anthracite coal in the Wyoming Valley. The Wyoming Fell Mining Company was founded in 1817 and would grow to be one of the preeminent coal companies in British America. Yorktown hosted the headquarters of the Central Pennsylvania Railway Company as well as the Christlich Papermaking Company. The capital at Lancaster was littered with railway lines by 1850 fanning out in seemingly every direction from the central location. Pastoral farmlands surrounded the city and penned in its growth, leading to the densification of outlying towns to absorb housing needs for the capital region. The town of Gettysburg grew from a market town to an important railway crossing linking Maryland to the Pennsylvania railway network by the late-1840s. Shippensburg was the largest city in the Alleghenies. It had a reputation for lawlessness and the county militia were regularly called up to maintain order, particularly as gang violence began to develop after the arrival of the railway in 1841. This periodic unrest occasionally bled into neighboring Quebec as outlaws sought refuge among the Shawnee, Lenape, or Mingo Seneca peoples, which led to several incidents that required government intervention.
An update on the main timeline is coming soon! Some big developments incoming...