And here it is
Part #159: No Representation Without Population
“It is possible to assemble a roomful of the great and the good from across a city or a region, task them to debate the problems of that region and come up with solutions, and end up with them taking three hours arguing about whether tea or coffee should be served at break time. The success (in their own eyes) of many rulers throughout history has rested upon ensuring there is always a choice of refreshments.”
– Pablo Sanchez, On Democracy, 1851
*
From: “America—From the Jacobin Wars to the Great American War” by Francis Kelham (1980):
The American election of 1832 was historic for many reasons. The first election ever to be delayed (thanks to the Virginia Crisis and the Superior War), it shifted the political landscape—which had already been turned upside down once by the 1825 election. In 1825 the Patriots had fragmented and the Whigs had risen, their support for Catholic emancipation expanding their appeal far beyond their southern voter base. But the intervening events reversed these trends. Andrew Eveleigh’s disastrous presidency had killed the Whigs’ nascent rise in Catholic areas of New England and Philip Hamilton’s leadership of the ‘Imperial Patriots’ faction had re-amalgamated much of the old party. The biggest shift, though, was that the Radical and Neutral Parties together now made up the largest group in the Continental Parliament. Though two seats short of a majority, the Radical-Neutral alliance was able to form a government with the aid of independents who either voted with them or abstained, and sometimes some lukewarm support from the Hamiltonian Patriots over certain important issues. Eric Mullenburgh[1] became Lord President—and for many, that was where the trouble started.
Much like their Whig enemies, Radical support had become more geographically polarised. The vast majority of their support could be found in either New England or Pennsylvania, and then chiefly on the east coast. The Radicals were viewed as an urbane party, in contrast to their rural Neutral allies. In 1832 it was Radical leader Mullenburgh, not Neutral leader Derek Boyd, who became Lord President, despite the Neutrals having half as many again MCPs as the Radicals and having a much broader geographic distribution. This has been attributed to many reasons, whether it be Boyd being a less powerful character and used to taking a subservient position to Mullenburgh, or Mullenburgh’s greater experience in Parliament (he had been leader of the Radicals since 1820) or the Neutrals’ caucus being more disorganised and harder to unite than the Radicals’. But whatever the reason, the tail definitely wagged the dog in the Radical-Neutral government.
Mullenburgh’s government coincided with the crisis of confidence in America popularly named ‘the National Gloom’ by Jethro Carter (who served as independent MCP for Williamsburg-I during the 1832-1837 parliament). The Gloom had many causes. The poet William Henry Davis suggested in his 1872 poem
My Father’s Shoes that it arose from a sense that the current generation of Americans had more or less re-lived the same history as their fathers’ generation, and had been found wanting. Much like the Jacobin Wars, Britain had been threatened by an oppressive regime (albeit now home-grown rather than invader), America had been called upon to intervene, and had...done nothing, until it was too late. Equally the nation had been threatened by hostile natives, as in the Lakota War, and the military response had too often been a damp squib. (The Lakota War had also been characterised by military incompetence, of course, but ironically the propaganda spin of a glorious victory put on it afterwards meant that it was now judged favourably in comparison to the Superior War). Finally, and perhaps most importantly, the image of America as a safe haven rising above the petty disputes of the Old World had been shattered. No longer was America viewed as a land of prosperity and peace in which the only conflict was against natives on the frontier. In the Virginia Crisis, brother had fought brother and blood had been spilt. And nothing would ever quite be the same again.
Of course, the importance of all this has been exaggerated in the popular imagination. America remained a popular destination for immigrants, especially since the passage of Catholic emancipation (although among Catholic immigrants she remained behind the UPSA as a destination choice). But perception is always more important than reality in politics, and the Gloom fuelled a call for reform and renewal in many quarters. The King-Emperor’s ploy in engineering Sir James Henry’s installation as a popularly elected governor had considerable unintended consequences: other confederations also began rumbling about getting such an office for themselves. The fact that Henry had been elected by universal suffrage[2] also led to calls for this franchise to be implemented for other offices in the ENA. The Radical-Neutrals were sympathetic to this cause and attempted to pass constitutional amendments that would require all MCPs to be elected by universal suffrage, rather than the current system of leaving the franchise requirements up to the Confederation as a decision.[3] However the move was too controversial, especially for those who relied upon a limited electorate and patronage, and the move was defeated by a coalition of Whigs and Patriots. The fact that a few Radicals—whose seats happened to rely on patronage—failed to turn up for the vote was noted by the papers.
Despite this failure, the attempt did encourage many Confederate assemblies to take matters into their own hands. Pennsylvania and New England had already used universal suffrage for many elections and adopted the elected Governor system, something many in New England had called for for many years (as several of the pre-merger colonies had had elected Governors). New York, a Patriot stronghold, dragged its heels and this frustration fuelled the growth of the Supremacist Party on a Confederate level. Virginia, which had led the way with its elected Governor, decided on that Governor’s urging to take steps towards the goal. Members of the Virginian House of Burgesses would be elected under universal suffrage, while Imperial-level MCPs would require a property voting requirement, but a smaller one than before.
Carolina, often dominated by aristocratic property-owning slaveholders, was unenthusiastic about the idea of broader popular participation in government, but the situation was changed by the passage of the Parliamentary Reapportionment Act (1836). This was a Radical-led move to address complaints about apportionment of seats in the Continental Parliament. When the constitutional groundwork of the Continental Parliament had been laid by the North Commission in the 1760s and 70s, it had been informed chiefly by taking the existing British system and then applying corrections to common (British) Radical complaints about its flaws. These flaws consisted chiefly of there being rotten boroughs with no or few voters that elected two MPs, while large cities were unrepresented due to a freeze on creating new boroughs from the early 18th century. The American corrected system made it easier to create new boroughs and seats as the nation expanded. However, the North Commission had failed to realise that this meant it was just as possible to create new rotten or pocket boroughs in areas that currently had few settlers, with the justification that you expected them to gain more people in the future. This had led to successive governments manipulating the petition system by which new boroughs were created, with the Patriots creating pocket boroughs in the west such as Chichago (then a small settlement in which an absentee Patriot candidate could bribe the few dozen eligible voters) and the Whigs creating them in the newly conquered southern Caribbean lands. Now, of course, the Radicals wanted to redress the balance. The bulk of Radical support was in the so-called ‘Arc of Power’, the east coast cities of Boston, New York, Philadelphia, Baltimore, Fredericksburg, Williamsburg and Norfolk. The current apportionment by petition system meant that typically the western and southern boroughs had as little as a tenth of the number of voters per seat as these big cities. The Radical-Neutrals (though with some misgivings from the Neutrals) therefore advocated a policy by which another 25 seats would be created (increasing the size of the Parliament from 128 to 153) and mostly distributed to these bigger cities, creating some boroughs with three or four MCPs rather than just two.[4] Some Radicals wanted these multi-MCP boroughs to elect their MCPs by some form of percentage representation rather than bloc vote, but this was still an esoteric idea at the time and was not seriously considered.
The biggest change made by the 1836 Act, however, was to explicitly set constitutional limits on the number of voters per seat. Existing seats with few voters were grandfathered in, as many of them were Neutral-held, having been created as Patriot pocket boroughs but not turned out that way. However, no new pocket boroughs could be created, and if a borough exceeded a certain threshold of voters, another seat would be added. It was decided that provincial rural districts would not be split or added to, maintaining them all at one or two MCPs: if a province exceeded its threshold of voters, a new borough would be carved out of it to retain parity. The most important part was the language used:
voters, not
persons or inhabitants. This was both an indirect way to fuel the universal suffrage movement (because confederations that used more restricted suffrage would gain fewer MCPs) and a subtle attack on slavery.[5] One of the old American Radical Party’s main raisons d’etre had been to try and abolish slavery, and now they had gained power on an Imperial level, the Virginia Crisis meant that actually trying to make constitutional moves towards that goal was impossible. It might have been possible for central government to decide the issue fifty years ago, but not now. Battle lines had been drawn and nobody wanted to light the fuse. So this represented as far as the Radicals were willing to go on the issue at present.
The Carolinian General Assembly was not composed of stupid men, regardless of how propaganda has presented them, and realised that failing to reform their suffrage would reduce their representation in the next Parliament and might threaten Carolina’s position as the Confederation that elected the most MCPs. Uriah Adams MGA made his famous ‘Call Their Bluff’ speech on the floor of the Capitol in Charleston (which would quicken his ascent to the Speakership) in which he supported the move to universal suffrage. “Ask yourselves, my honourable friends: do you really think that the good and honest folk of Carolina that you meet in the street every day harbour any private sympathies for those pestilential fanatics that the North has seen fit to elect to Fredericksburg? Is there any man who will insult our citizens by suggesting that they have anything more than the deepest contempt for those aliens wearing human flesh who seek to impose their disgusting views on us like some Roman dictator of old? Why, our Negroes themselves would cross to the other side of the street if they met a friend of Mr Mullenbergh’s coming the other way!” Adams’ speech reveals the depth of paranoid suspicion that was developing in Carolina towards the northern political establishment, and his rhetoric was among the most moderate deployed in the Charleston Capitol. The General Assembly also voted to create the position of an elected Governor, albeit with the unusually long term of seven years. The first election was held in 1837, contemporaneously with the national election, in which John Alexander—now in his sixties—was persuaded to return from his retirement on his plantation to run for Governor. Reflecting how the party he had founded had moved away from his original intentions thanks to Andrew Eveleigh, Alexander refused to run as a Whig and formally ran as an independent with Whig support. Alexander still had such broad support and respect in Carolina that he dominated the ensuing contest against three challengers and won more than 60% of the vote, even under universal suffrage. The parliamentary election saw some Neutrals and independents elected in Carolina, but for the most part Adams seemed to be proved right: the Carolinian people as a whole had begun to share their ruling classes’ suspicion of ‘northern’ parties and voted for the Whigs.
The 1837 election resulted in gains for the Radicals and Patriots thanks to the additional seats for the east coast urban centres. The split in the Patriots had now been entirely healed: Philip Hamilton had resigned to return to his African interests after the 1832 election, and Patriot eminence grise Edmund Grey had overseen the appointment of the charismatic Nathaniel Crowninshield as party leader. Crowninshield, a member of a prominent Boston political family of German immigrant origin,[6] represented Grey’s attempt to challenge the Radicals and Neutrals in New England. This worked, in that the Patriots made substantial gains in that Confederation, but it sparked additional resentment in New York, which was used to being at the centre of Patriot influence due to the Hamilton family and now felt hard done by. The fact that New York’s aristocratic establishment was also failing to join in the other Confederations’ electoral reform (which had reduced its influence in Parliament under the 1836 Act) meant that the home-grown Supremacist Party, fuelled by public anger, began to grow and in 1837 managed to elect its first three MCPs on Imperial level. Meanwhile, the Carterite Patriots had crumbled after the 1832 election, with some returning to Crowninshield’s main group and others joining the Whigs or sitting as independents. The Parliament of 1837 thus consisted of a Radical-Neutral government, now with a small majority of 2 and with the Neutrals still the larger of the two parties but by a smaller proportion; a large and reunited Patriot party; a large but geographically localised Whig party; and a handful of independents and the three Supremacists from New York. Over the course of the Parliament they would pick up several more members through defections.
Government policy remained largely the same both before and after the 1837 election, though it became more bold when the government gained a majority, however small. The Radical-Neutrals responded to the failures of the Superior War and Virginia Crisis by increasing funding for Imperial regiments (and the new Imperial Navy) while also giving Confederations more freedom to create their own Confederate-level regiments, rather than just disorganised militia groups. This was intended to ensure that any future conflicts with natives could be dealt with more swiftly. Of course, as was recognised even at the time, it could also have less intended consequences...
The Radical-Neutrals also boosted funding for internal improvements such as large infrastructure projects. The best known of these is of course the Great National Canal Plan advocated by the Radical Minister for Internal Affairs, Robert Sturgeon, under which existing confederate-created canal projects would be unified under a single national authority and linked to create a national network with an imperial-set toll system to bypass any attempts by the Confederations to undercut each other. The fact that one of the proposed linker canals happened to connect Sturgeon’s own constituency of Harrisburgh to the Atlantic via the Susquehanna and Delaware rivers was, of course, pure happenstance. The plan was controversial and met with considerable opposition in many quarters, with Confederate-power advocates arguing it represented the actions of a tyrannical government. Fortunately, most such advocates were in Carolina, and Carolina was not actually part of the plans. Despite opposition, the plan was implemented. The Patriots hoped they could have their cake and eat it by making a token complaint and then quietly going along with it, as they recognised the economic improvement the plan could bring. However, the nature of how they went about the complaint led to the Ontario Controversy, of which more is said elsewhere and went on to change the political landscape of the region.
The other major move of the Radical-Neutral government was in relation to the Drakesland colony, which had been founded by Captain North and the
Enterprize in 1803 and then effectively left to run its own affairs under the Imperial Drakesland Company ever since. On paper, the colony looked hemmed in by the Russians from the north and the New Spanish from the south, who had founded the neighbouring forts of Baranovsk and Fort San Luis to stake their own claims.[7] However, this ignored the fact that the total population of the disputed Oregon country from Russian Alyeska to New Spanish Far California was only about twelve thousand. Mullenburgh decided to sort out the border disputes in part to give his presidency a foreign policy triumph, negotiating with both the New Spanish government in the City of Mexico and the Russian government—which turned out to mean discussions with the Tsar’s envoys to the Russo-Lithuanian Pacific Company in Fyodorsk, formerly Niigata. Although this was before the RPLC formally moved its central administration to the Yapontsi city, the fact that it was the winter months meant that Okhotsk’s harbour was blocked. Mullenburgh’s ambassador extraordinary, Michael Webster, recorded his thoughts on witnessing a transformative period in Yapontsi history, and his journal is an oft-cited source by Yaponologists.
While the Oregon negotiations ultimately proved successful (in the short term at least) they proved more difficult and trying than Mullenburgh had hoped, and probably quickened his death from a heart condition in 1839. In particular the New Spanish government found the tone of Mullenburgh’s ambassadors to be arrogant and entitled in character, and contrasted it unfavourably with the more cordial negotiations they commonly had with the Carolinian confederate government on a regular basis. The Carolinians were also suspicious of the Radicals’ intentions in Drakesland and suspected that they intended to try and formally add it to the Empire along with parts of the Hudson’s Bay Company lands, which would mean yet more non-slave regions electing MCPs. This made the Carolinians sympathise with the New Spanish and try to disrupt the negotiations. For now, though the Hudson’s Bay Company had been formally nationalised by the Proclamation of Independence as the Drakesland Company already was, it remained under the authority of the Imperial government and there were no attempts by New England to claim its territory for their own.
In the end, borders were drawn in the Oregon Country that displeased everyone equally, and all three factions quietly began encouraging immigration to the region. New Spain was already paranoid due to the levels of foreign immigration into New California that had followed the 1820s goldrush, of which more is told elsewhere. But, as mentioned above, the negotiations coupled with other difficult government business proved to be the death of Mullenburgh. Derek Boyd temporarily took over as Lord President while the Radicals elected a new leader, infuriating many Neutrals who said he should demand the presidency himself as leader of the larger party in the coalition. In the end the Radicals (ironically using a system copied from the Whigs) voted in John Vanburen of New York City as the new leader, who took back the presidency from the meek Boyd. Vanburen came from an old New Amsterdam Dutch family that had lived in the New World since the seventeenth century. He was controversial for many reasons, but primary among them was the fact that as soon as he was elevated, he began to advocate that the Radicals and Neutrals shift from their current electoral pact towards deeper integration as a single party. Although the Neutrals still outnumbered the Radicals, the more organised and coherent Radical caucus would naturally dominate over the Neutrals, who came from across the country and often lacked a common agenda. Indeed, this was how the Radicals had controlled the government up to now. Vanburen’s move alienated many Neutrals who had become unhappy with how the government had seemed much more concerned with the ‘eastern’ or ‘urban’ causes of the Radicals at the expense of their chief support demographic of western settlers, and it was the last straw. When Vanburen held a formal vote on a merger under the new name Liberal Party, only half the Neutrals joined him. The other half initially sat as a rump Neutral Party. Derek Boyd resigned as leader and retired from Parliament, and a by-election was held in his seat of Tennessee. Both the new Liberals and the rump Neutrals stood candidates, and the vote split, allowing the Whigs to come up through the middle and win. This Whig triumph in a western seat illustrated how total Whig power was becoming in Carolina.
The by-election loss both neutralised the government majority even if the Liberals and rump Neutrals had stayed together, and meant the rump Neutrals crumbled. The government fell soon afterwards, with an early election being called for 1840. The Neutrals scattered; some fought for re-election as independents, but others fled for two other parties. The first was the Supremacists, whose nativist message became increasingly powerful now that both Patriots and Radicals/Liberals were run by men with foreign names and ancestry. The second grew out of the ‘Magnolia Coalition’ that Governor Henry had created in Virginia during the Virginia Crisis, which had since amalgamated on a confederate level into the Magnolia Democrats. Henry founded a national Democratic Party for the 1840 election and several Neutrals won re-election on that party line, holding to many of the principles that the Radicals had seemed rather careless of once they gained power. The Patriots won the 1840 election largely thanks to the ‘Richmond Strategy’ of Edmund Grey, so called because their campaign headquarters was based in that city. Grey realised that the new Democrats would split the vote with the Liberals in Virginia, while the Whigs had become discredited after the Crisis and their increasing association solely with Carolinian interests, which would allow the Patriots to win through the middle just as the Whigs had in Tennessee. The result was that the Patriots won many seats in Virginia, which they had not had much power in since Josiah Crane, and battled the Radicals to a standstill in New England. The Patriots’ majority of 4 was sufficient for them to govern, and meant that fewer questions were asked about their alarming drop of support in New York to the benefit of the Supremacist Party. In any case the Patriots largely continued the former government’s policies, especially regarding the Grand National Canal Plan, and regained their old reputation of the ‘do nothing, for good or for ill, party’. This did not mean the ensuing period was uneventful. Although the issue had occasionally been raised during Mullenburgh’s presidency, it was that of Lord President Vanburen in which the Flag War would come to a head.
This was also the era in which two of the most familiar figures of American history rose to prominence. Moritz Wilhelm Quedlinburger had been born in Prussian Poland in the 1790s and had lived through the Second War of the Polish Succession and the Jacobin Wars as a child as his family desperately tried to escape the conflict. Of mixed Prussian and Polish birth and of Catholic religion, he was used to persecution. The horrors of war, in which he had lost several friends and family members, had had a profound effect on his beliefs and he became one of history’s best known advocates of pacifism. Moving, along with so many other German immigrants, to the ENA in the Watchful Peace period, his name had been anglicised by the customs staff to ‘Maurice William Quedling’, the latter possibly being the result of a typographical error. In any case he usually went by the nickname ‘Mo’, and in his political career was popularly known as ‘Silent Mo’ for his habit of remaining tactiturn for long periods or giving very brief concise answers, before occasionally rising to deliver a powerful speech marked by rhetorical flourish when the debate came to an issue about which he cared passionately. He was first elected to the Pennsylvania General Assembly[8] at the 1819 confederate election as a Radical and was involved in the formation of the first Radical-Neutral alliance by Baldwin and Purdon. He was then elected as a Radical member for Pittsylvania Province to the Continental Parliament at the 1832 election, in which he was noted for his speeches calling for the abolition of the death penalty as a punishment in American law. Though unsuccessful in this, he helped inspire the formation of the Human League, an international society aimed at opposing the death penalty, in 1845. Quedling’s pacifist beliefs also led him to strongly oppose his own party over the expansion of the Imperial and confederate-level military. The latter led to the party withdrawing their whip just prior to the 1837 election, but Quedling fought for re-election as an independent and won, then won again in 1840. His personal popularity with his rural constituents was such that the other parties eventually gave up any prospect other then finishing a distant second to win Pittsylvania Province’s other seat. In this era he was nicknamed ‘the Conscience of the Continental’ by the
Philadelphia Gazette, a name which stuck.[9] Of course, his greatest fame—or infamy, depending on who one asks—was yet to come.
There was also a second crucial figure to make his appearance on the American scene during the Democratic Experiment period. Though even in his degraded state no customs officer would likely dare to anglicise his name without his permission, he chose to do so himself, leaving his former life behind him. Henry Frederick Owens-Allen, once King in Prussia, arrived in America in 1834, having been smuggled out of his captivity at the hands of the Schmidtists and choosing the ENA as his destination. With the last remnants of his fortune he purchased a townhouse in Fredericksburg and reinvented himself as a man of society, choosing to be as contemptuous of the Old World that had rejected him as Ferdinand VII of Spain. The addition of the former monarch to Fredericksburg society did not go without controversy. The
Norfolk Inquirer, a Virginian newspaper of Magnolia Democratic sympathies and an irreverent attitude towards the monarchy, famously published a political cartoon that depicts a bedraggled Hendry Frederick washed up on the Virginian beach in full royal regalia, his crown rolling away from his head, as two fishermen look on:
1st Fisherman: I say! Is that
another German king who has washed up on our shores?
2nd Fisherman: Indeed it is—that’s the third, you know; I blame the way the tides are turning.
Despite this, Henry Frederick became a fixture of society in Fredericksburg, often hosting great gala parties and becoming a patron to several political figures, seeking to gain some level of influence. One MCP who refused to be in the same room as Henry Frederick was none other than the aforementioned Mo Quedling, whose family had suffered greatly under the Hohenzollerns in his youth. When a friend pointed out that others might think him a coward for leaving the room as soon as Henry Frederick appeared, Quedling replied: “Let them. I would sooner let them enjoy that thought at my expense than have my own mind invaded by unpleasant thoughts of what our lesser bestial nature would have me do to that man.” Yet in the end they would bump elbows in at least one place: the list of household names of the Great American War...
[1] A scion of Pennsylvania’s Muhlenberg family, active in American politics in OTL as well. As in OTL, Heinrich Mühlenberg immigrated to Pennsylvania in 1742 and founded both the political dynasty and the Lutheran Church in America as an institution. However, whereas in OTL he anglicised his name to ‘Henry Muhlenberg’, in TTL due to more enthusiastic anglicisation prescriptivism policies in the mid-18th century he opted for the Scottish-sounding ‘Henry Mullenburgh’.
[2] By which they mean universal
white male suffrage of course.
[3] This is a slight variation on the unreformed British system, in which the franchise for the counties was set by central government in London, but the franchise for the boroughs was determined by the boroughs themselves. Here, American federalism means that the Confederate governments can decide both.
[4] Traditionally only the City of London in Britain had four MPs, although for a brief period in the 1820s Yorkshire was given four rather than two MPs. In the 1867-1885 period, some cities in Britain had three MPs, but this suffered because people still only had two rather than three votes to cast, so the result did not reflect popular will very well.
[5] Of course in OTL the ‘three-fifths compromise’ and so on are well known and the issue was far from ‘subtle’: the difference is because the OTL USA had from the start the idea that seats should be apportioned based on some number based on population, whereas the early ENA retained the older British idea of ‘this place needs seats because it is important’ rather than being based on how many people live there. So because the idea of number population or voters = power is so new, the notion of whether slaves should be counted towards population or not hasn’t really come up for debate.
[6] Prominent in OTL as well.
[7] See Part #86.
[8] Which is actually the upper house of the Pennsylvania confederate government, due to Pennsylvania’s odd system (inherited from its colonial predecessor) in which a 72-man Council proposes legislation and a General Assembly of 500 approves it, rather than the other way around.
[9] This only works because ‘the Continental’ was a common nickname among the political classes for the Continental Parliament, as opposed to the confederate assemblies or any other nation’s Parliament.
