In New Rome

Mr. and Mrs. Robert Todd Lincoln
request the honour of
Mr. Winston S. Churchill’s
presence at the announcement of the engagement of their son
Abraham
on Wednesday the first of November
at half after four o’clock
at Eight Hundred Sixteenth Street

R.s.v.p.

The Lincoln family has attained an almost sacred level of reverence in America, comparable to that in which the Japanese imperial family is held in their nation. “The blood of Father Abraham must not perish from the earth,” they say, and the most extraordinary measures are taken to ensure the continuance of the line.

The surviving son of the president, Mr Robert Todd Lincoln, had been dispatched upon many and varied special diplomatic missions on behalf of his country; he was granted precedence wherever he may have gone. At the same time, he was carefully kept from any real position of authority, whether a permanent diplomatic appointment or an office of trust and profit in the government.

His son, named after the illustrious grandfather, has been groomed to be his successor in that position of empty honour. His wedding was the social event of the season, honoured by the presence of all the commissioners, a substantial delegation from the American Congress, many of the governors of the several states, the administrators of the Military Districts, and commanders of the Army and the Coloured Troops, and the flower of the wealthy and noteworthy of the captains of industry and commerce.

The Lincoln Home is next to the Executive Mansion. The family lives out its existence in this gilded shell of vacant pomp. The family participates in the annual rituals of ceremony for their honoured ancestor, joining the Commissioners for the review of troops upon the Lincoln Memorial Tomb upon the great holidays; the anniversary of Lincoln’s birth, that of his death, and the date of the proclamation of American Independence.

The Comissioners associate themselves with the late President, as if to present themselves as his surrogates. Official parlance follows suit, not only in the formal records of the nation, but even in the petty ones. In school texts and in public speeches alike, Lincoln alone is granted the style of ‘President’, a title not given to any of the other persons who occupied the office prior to him.

From The United State of America by His Grace the Duke of Marlborough
 
“. . . commerce and industry flourish today. Liberated from the burden of slavocracy, empowered by the advance of science, promoted by the power of freedom, the American economy is the wonder and delight of the world.

“The vast mills of America pour forth largess, which goes to comfort the ease of the toiler, and to flood the world with its vastness. The smallest village in the remotest corner of the world has access to the output of American industry, and in turn has become the supplier of the raw stuffs from which such is provided.

“The farms burgeon with a rich harvest. Energized by the white-hot heat of science, American farmers employ the latest of farming machinery, the most productive of seed, the wonders of chemistry to produce crops that feed the country. Not one working American need starve; not one unfortunate suppliant need be pinched.

“In this country today, alone, for the first time ever in history, the mind of man has been turned powerfully to the progress of material well-being, and its effort has been richly recompensated.”

From Report of the Chamber of Commerce of America to the Fifty-Sixth Congress of the United States of America


Political economy is not an overly studied field in this nation. In America, it is disdained.

The American economy has been isolated, sheltered behind tariffs of substantial weight. Yet, these tariffs now provide the essential tax income of the Federal government. Their National Debt is transient, dedicated to specific products of national improvement; the income of the government is maintained at a slight advantage to its outgo.

Under this lack of a governmental regime, the standard of living of the populace has improved. The working-man is often subjugated to brutal and unsparing toil, yet should he avoid the welcoming pitfalls of drink and gambling, his income will enable him to support a family without having to set the other members thereof to labour.

By contrast, the rich, the so-called ‘Golden Pheasants’, flourish on a Lucullan standing. The wedding of a railroad magnate’s daughter for example will see expenditures in the tens of thousands of dollars. The couple will retire to a palace more lavish, and greater, than even that of my ancestors.

While the Press devotes its attention to these extremes, it is rather the intermediary that I must note. The expansion of industry and of administration has entailed the creation of a learned class, of men who work not at mill machinery, but with paper and pen. This group has grown and expanded substantially in the past thirty years.

Many of the veterans of the late war were drawn to this administration, being seen as reliable, orderly, and accustomed to a strict regimen. These men now enjoy a living which they could never have imagined. The statement of Commissioner James Garfield; “You never had it so good,” characterises their lives. The farm worker who enlisted in the ranks is now a middle manager, owning a house of not insubstantial size and convenience.

It is only fair to note the status of the labourer. It is among this class that radical views flourish. The toiler will toil six days a week for his wage, then on the seventh retire to a club and discuss the beliefs of arcane organisations of industry. Oftentimes these ponderings devolve into action, where some combination of workers mobilises to promote their idea, creating a conflict with the government. The militia, composed of the veterans, their associates, and now increasingly their children, is called upon to suppress these uprisings.

From The United State of America by His Grace the Duke of Marlborough
 
“. . . The territories of Alaska, the former Russian America, are the new frontier. In these white wastes, there lie rich mineral resources, abundant furs and fish, and above all a space wherein the American may into the wild, there to find his soul, unhindered by the trumpery lures of civilization.

“The potential colonizer should present himself to the Military District Employment offices in Seattle or San Francisco. The applicant must have capital sufficient to purchase one year’s provisions, along with the tools for his intended trade.

“Only those of proven stability and morality will be considered for these labors. The north is to be subdued and assimilated by example; there is no place for dissipation or license in this rugged unsparing land. It is a land to match our people, and those of our people in this land must live up to the promise of that example.”

From North to Alaska! Go North, the Rush is On!, an official publication of the United States Department of War, Bureau of Military Districts, Administrative Office of Military District Seven


The blackest infamy that has ever stained a government was perpetrated in the former territories of Russian America, the American Military District Seven. These deeds contributed to the diplomatic isolation of the United States in the later years of this century, and continue as a vile blot on its history.

After the conclusion of the war, the senior officers of the former Confederate Army and Government were imprisoned in various military prisons and fortresses in the northern states. With the acquisition of Russian Alaska, it was purposed to transfer them to the facilities of that territory.

The continued resistance of the remnant Confederate armies of the Trans-Mississippi, and the unrest of the resistance clubs, led to a more drastic measure. The American General-in-Chief, General Frémont, authorised the creation of a Department of Corrective Labor Camps under the administration of the Military District.

Those prisoners were dispatched there. They were followed by all former Confederate soldiers, regardless of rank, who had been in the Federal military and had resigned to join the Confederate military. The next group of deportees were “troublemakers”, which category included a vast range of men, from a desperate or deluded few who harboured hopes of a new rebellion, through common criminals, to those who had offended some petty administrator.

In 1869, settlers in the westernmost portions of the former Hudson’s Bay Company territory rescued a dying man. Before his death, he recounted a story of having been confined in a camp which exceeded in cruelty and infamy the excesses of the former Confederate prison camps, and the Russian work camps of Siberia, combined. When the Foreign Office protested, the response of the American government was that the ravings of a dying, degenerate, dissolute man were of no validity, and that in any case, since the man had not given his name prior to his death, his assertions could not be verified.

In 1873, a patrol of the newly constituted Northwest Mounted Rifles rescued another fugitive, one Gideon Hannah, formerly of the former state of North Carolina. He made a statement before a magistrate describing the camp in which he was confined. In general, if not in detail, his statement confirmed the previous one.

The response of the American government was to describe the man as a fabulist, a drunkard, a slacker, a slavocrat, and in general of bad moral character and nonexistent reliability. A request by Her Majesty’s Government to have representatives visit the site of the alleged camp was declined on the grounds of security, since the prisoners were dangerous.

All subsequent requests have been rebuffed. The details of the Corrective Labour Camps may never be revealed.

From The United State of America by His Grace the Duke of Marlborough
 
“. . . I take the desperate chance of betrayal to send you this personal message by the most private of communications, lest the knowledge of my discoveries be utterly lost.”

Colonel Hickock looked at the dirty and crabbed note from Captain John Douglas, U.S.A. and War Department Federal Intelligence Service. The colonel’s hands shook as he read the horrifying words of the letter from his trusted secret agent and old friend, who had disappeared into the wilds of the South two years ago, on a mission to uncover the roots of a puzzling rumor. Now, by a chain of messengers and a string of secret post-offices, run by veterans of the heroic Underground Railroad, this dire message had come to him, secretly, privately, urgently. He read on:

“The chief of the secret rebel army, General Paul Robinson, has traveled the length and breadth of the Military Districts, organizing, mobilizing, and laying plans. In his guise as a wandering, itinerant musician, he seemingly poses no threat to any, yet his malevolent mind is ever working as he builds this terrifying network of evil. Indeed, he is rightly styled ‘the Universal Spider’ by his subordinates, in emulation of the French monarch, for the intricate webwork of his plan.

“His most trusted associates have concealed their Southron ancestry, and worked their way into the reaches of the military and the government. His most valued subordinate holds a high post in the Federal Intelligence Service, and has abused that trust to conceal the intelligence of the rebellion.

“Beneath him, some ten thousand men, each entrusted with only such knowledge as is needful, form a rebel army in being, of which they will be the leaders, while the common folk will flock to the colors once the word is given.

“The Knights of Power form a deadly infection in the body of this nation. I pray that the Federal Intelligence Service will rally the government to extirpate this carbuncle.

“Should I fall in the struggle, at the hands of my comrades, I shall accept my fate, for one who is what I have made myself seem to be is deserving of such a vile end. I pray you inform my beloved Ettie that her husband gave his life for his country.”

It was not so much that a desperate rebel army existed. The United States Marshals and the Federal Intelligence Service had unmasked many such plots, and strangled the rebellions in the cradle.

No, it was Douglas’s discovery that troubled him. Who among his trusted underlings had betrayed the nation? Hickock’s keen mind and deep insights, honed in his early days at the card-table, would now be turned to a more desperate measure.

From The Knights of Power: A Colonel Wild Bill Hickock Adventure by “Noname”


During their War of the Rebellion, the Federal armies developed an intelligence service. Its most effective leader was the private investigator Lafayette C. Baker, who rose from lieutenant to Brigadier-General during the conflict.

General Baker had been in eclipse at the time of the assassination of President Lincoln, and it is sometimes believed that his reinstatement and promotion were founded in a belief that his methods of investigation would have been more successful in exposing the plot prior to its completion. His efforts at unearthing the conspirators earned him promotion to Brigadier-General, though he spent much time and the efforts of many agents trying in vain to determine the identity of the mysterious “Cassius”, the Confederate agent who murdered the Sewards, and of the unidentified conspirators who killed President pro tempore of the Senate Foster and Speaker of the House Colfax.

After the dire events of the “Ku-Klux” conspiracy of 1866, General Baker was named chief of the U.S. Marshals Service, which was by legislation converted into a national police force. He was already chief of what was then officially styled “Federal Intelligence Service”, and remained head of both during his lifetime.

By the time of Baker’s death in 1884, the Marshals Service had become the police force not only of the Southern Military Districts, but also had authority and responsibility throughout the country. It had absorbed the function of the former U.S. Secret Service, which in spite of its name was but a force investigating counterfeiting. Offices of the U.S. Marshals were established throughout the states.

The Federal Intelligence Service established stronger rules. The names of its personnel were kept most strictly secret. Any neighbour might be an officer of the FIS. An officer of the FIS could assume any field-grade or lower rank in the military in the pursuit of his investigations, particularly among the troops. Indeed every regiment is believed to have at least one FIS officer in its ranks, guarding against the possibility of “Seceshsymp” or “Slavocracy”.

It should be noted that the American legations and embassies in other countries do have FIS officers posing as legitimate diplomats, and others working without diplomatic status. The Special Branch has caught and expelled a number of these in the United Kingdom, increasing tensions between this country and the United States.

From The United State of America by His Grace the Duke of Marlborough
 
“. . . American literature now focuses on the moral, the inculation of a patriotic, Christian, social ethos in the reader. The vulgar novels of foreign lands, with their vile emphasis on meaningless action, on the sordid recounting of outrages and odious deeds, have no place in the culture of our land.

“The literary arts have flourished here in America since the end of the War of the Rebellion. Noble and noteworthy works are available for all ages, from the child first learning his letters to the aged grandsire desiring to recall his days of honor.

“Under the governance of the Christian churches of the land, under the wise governing hand of our Federal leadership, a noble, uplifting ethos inspires our writers and promotes the moral improvement of our people as it displays the greatness of our country.”

From On the State of Literature in America by William Taylor Adams


The most searing indictment of the horrors of American government may be found in the literary works of the distinguished Samuel L. Clemens, D. Litt.(Oxon.), the noted writer and lecturer. Himself a refugee from the United States, Dr. Clemens has contributed immensely to the literary field in Britain, whether evaluated for his contributions to Punch or his more serious works, such as The Private Papers of the Adam Family.

As I write, the United States Government is demanding his extradition on the grounds of a charge of “Seceshsymp”, asserting that during service in the rebel gangs, he had promoted the capture and re-enslavement of freedmen. The actual reason for this legal action is the publication of the ostensibly anonymous A Pen Warmed Up In Hell, a fiery critique of American domestic policy.

Dr. Clemens has by various means collected accounts of the exactions of American officialdom in the former Russian America, in Liberia, and in Mexico, describing crimes against humanity. His unique and inimitable literary style has made his portrayal of these actions one that is seared into the mind of the reader.

In his lectures, and in his personal communications, he has laid great stress upon the conformity and blandness of American literature. ‘It is all Sunday-go-to-meeting’ literature, about Good Little Boys living noble uplifting lives, dying, and going to Heaven, and Bad Little Boys acting like normal children, and going to Hell,’ he has written.

‘I could never have a chance of being allowed to violate the refined gentility of this literary scene with my vulgar incursion of reality,’ is his description of the world of American literature.

His description of the blandness and vacuity of American literature is all too pointed. A nation which has spread itself across a continent and raised itself in a lifetime from a backwoods to a great power, a financial and political titan, is the place for greatness in the literary field. But no greatness is forthcoming.

Publishers work with the government and with the great Christian denominations of the land to produce works of fiction that are instructive, rather than exciting.

From The United State of America by His Grace the Duke of Marlborough
 

katchen

Banned
Grimdark like Tsarist Russia at the same time. Easy to believe this happening. Censorship. Alaska functioning as America's equivalent of Siberia complete with "khatorga" camps. A Federal Intelligence Service functioning as the equivalent of an Okhrana, yet undoubtedly more efficiently in the service of America's Gilded Age elite. Very believable and very scary contemporary.:eek:
Well done Major Major!
 
From The United State of America by His Grace the Duke of Marlborough

Since the composition of this volume, some forty years ago, the world has changed greatly. The tendencies I have seen in the unfortunate United States have continued their historical progression, for good and for ill.

Many here in Britain, and in other nations, were heartened by the events of the World War. The ill-conceived Jagow Message, from the German Foreign Secretary to the adventurer Emiliano Zapata, who in early 1916 controlled a significant area in the unoccupied regions of Mexico, provoked outrage in the American government.

Jagow’s offer of German support to Zapata for a liberation of the Mexican military districts, along with the territories previously ceded by Mexico, was decidedly unsound, as the testimony of the German defector Franz von Papen, sometime military attaché to the United States, conclusively proved. The campaign of the American general Funston against Zapata in Mexico was short and decisive, the prelude to the greater mobilisation of American troops for the concurrent war against Germany.

After the conclusion of the war, the American dominions were expanded solely by the annexation of Kamerun and Togo. The American walkout from the peace negotiations in Paris, over the refusal of the Allied powers to grant them an occupation zone in Germany, signaled a return to the traditional American policy of “Splendid Isolation”.

The American economy continues its path. The divergence between the richest and the poorest has only grown, filled admittedly by a larger and wealthier middle class. American technology has grown, though hampered by a lack of appreciation of pure science. The traditional American tinkerer, unimpressed by the abstract theorist’s reasonings, produces new goods that improve on older ones by slight increments.

The status of the original Military Districts, the former American States that formed the former Confederacy, is as lamentable as ever. The indigenous population in them is by now disproportionately negro; yet they are ever portrayed as a pesthole of plots for the restoration of chattel slavery and the recreation of the Confederate nation. The biennial justification for the postponement of the presidential election is now reduced to citing individual murders and unexplained building fires as proofs of a conspiracy.

The current conflict between America and the Empire of Japan is likely to produce a further expansion of this system to the other islands of the Pacific. It is to be hoped that the Americans will not create themselves overlords over the vast masses of the Japanese or even Chinese populations.
 

Deleted member 14881

When America beats Japan, I could see them annexing Taiwan and Okinowa or more.
 

katchen

Banned
I'm sure America must be producing a bumper crop of expatriate dissidents ITTL. People of the ilk of Jack London, John Dos Passos, Lillian Hellman, Emma Goldman, Alice B. Toklas, Gertrude Stein, Sinclar Lewis, Upton Sinclar, Edna St. Vincent Millay, even musicians like Duke Ellington, Josephine Baker, Ella Fitzgerald and Woody Guthrie. Can any of these people survive in this America? I doubt it.
How easy is it to escape across the border to Canada?
 
I'm sure America must be producing a bumper crop of expatriate dissidents ITTL. People of the ilk of Jack London, John Dos Passos, Lillian Hellman, Emma Goldman, Alice B. Toklas, Gertrude Stein, Sinclar Lewis, Upton Sinclar, Edna St. Vincent Millay, even musicians like Duke Ellington, Josephine Baker, Ella Fitzgerald and Woody Guthrie. Can any of these people survive in this America? I doubt it.
How easy is it to escape across the border to Canada?

Some, of course, have not been born. Others hold petty jobs with no idea that they might be famous. Some are under the ever open eye of the FIS.

The border with Canada has become less closed than it was -- there was much talk in the eighteen-eighties about liberating the oppressed people of Canada, and much dissent since some Indians had managed to make it across the border, the U.S. Army in hot pursuit. The ones in Canada are now Canadians.


As for "what about the Southern Unionists?" no one fate fell to their lot. Some were recruited into the lower ranks of the Military Districts, though distrusted since they had not done more to oppose slavocracy. The repression of the "Slavocratic Conspiracy of Jones County" did much to dampen any support, as Jones County Mississippi had been pro-Unionist before the war, but had turned against the Union after being treated like the rest of the rebels.

Some Unionists moved to Tennessee and Missouri, where they assimilated. Others were resettled in Military District Seven, the former Russian America, as guards or sometimes as inmates.

There is no legacy of Unionism in the southern Military Districts.
 

katchen

Banned
I'm sure Canada must be operating as it does IOTL as a safety valve for American dissidents and deviants, since Tory times. It might not hurt to talk about some of them, whether they would have been famous IOTL or not. And what about Canada? Does Canada have a higher standard of living ITTL because it is freer? Does Canada maintain strong defenses against the US, just in case?
 
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