Part #170: Star-Cross’d Haters
“A
flag? Are you mad? Have you missed the point of all I have ever spoken of? You would have those human beings freed from the shackles of arbitrary division march under one of the very symbols of that division? No, sir! There shall be no rag on a stick flapping above the human race, not so long as I have breath in my body! If there is a situation in which the blinded, divided societies of the world would expect a flag, then make a statement by raising an empty flagstaff with no hoist. But none of this foolishness!”
– Pablo Sanchez, 1864 response to a letter from the Societist Club of Valdivida in which they mention the use of a black flag to represent Societism.
Editorial note: This quote is well attested to in the few surviving primary sources and few dispute its authenticity, though the Biblioteka Mundial has purged it from its own official histories for obvious reasons.
*
From: “America—From the Jacobin Wars to the Great American War” by Francis Kelham (1980):
The Flag War was one of those instances of history that seems astonishingly petty at first glance, but really conceals much deeper and more fundamental undercurrents of division, merely providing a visible outlet for them. Like much of the leadup to the Great American War, its origins can be traced back long before the Starry Question caught the American public’s attention. Under the Radical-Neutral coalition government of Lord President Mullenburgh (1832-39), an Imperial Commission was set up by the Continental Secretary,[1] George Lowell of North Massachusetts—one of the few Neutrals to hold significant sway in the coalition—to look into the future of the Drakesland colony in Oregon. In the short term, the most obvious impact of this Commission (led by Lord Hancock) was to push for defined borders with the New Spanish and Russian rival claimants for the region. At least as far as the coastline was concerned, this was established and was a significant foreign policy triumph for the government. In the longer term, all three claimants began pushing for increased immigration to the currently sparsely populated region in order to shore up their claims.[2] From the ENA, a plurality (not a majority, as is often assumed) of these colonists came from New England, despite the fact that New England already possessed much underused land suitable for colonists in its Canadian holdings. More significantly, the leadership of Drakesland for various reasons tended to be drawn mainly from New England stock and this informed the way the colonial government was set up, with a powerful elected common council rather than the Imperial-appointed Governor-General ruling as a dictator.
Something treated as a mere footnote to Lord Hancock’s report in 1839 was his remark that if Drakesland were to be admitted to the Empire as its sixth Confederation, the first new one since the Empire’s constitutional foundation in 1788, the flag might have to be changed. The ‘Jack and George’ flag with its five golden stars for the five Confederations had been in use since 1788, when it had replaced an earlier version without the stars but with the Cornubian bezants of Prince Frederick in the lower right quadrant instead. This fact was often conveniently ignored by the subsequent debate, in which conservatives acted as though Prince Frederick had hoisted the ‘Starry George’ rather than the original one when he had declared himself Emperor in 1748. Regardless, the Jack and George had become an omnipresent symbol of North America, both government and people. Two generations had grown up knowing no other flag, unless one counts the dwindling number of Union Jacks that occasionally flew alongside the Jack and George at Royal and Imperial occasions. Although the five stars symbolised the five Confederations, to many they were simply
there, and the idea of meddling with them rubbed a lot of people up the wrong way.
In the short term, though, this was a minor point—Mullenburgh died in the same year as the Commission’s report and attention was on more important matters such as Foreign Secretary Vanburen’s ascent to the presidency and his disastrous (at first) attempt to merge the Radical and Neutral Parties. In 1840 Nathaniel Crowninshield and the Patriots came to power, and the issue faded away, seeming rather irrelevant. After all, even with the increased immigration, the population of Drakesland was far less than any of the five existing Confederations: any kind of admission on a coeval level lay far in the future.
Except, that is, for the fact that Vanburen found this a useful cause to latch on to. Alarmed by the rise of the Supremacists in New England and their push for expansion, he saw raising the Oregon issue again as a way to steal their thunder and persuade back lost supporters of the Radicals and Neutrals to the Liberals. The New England connection to Drakesland meant that many intellectuals in New England regarded the future of the colony as part and parcel of both their own homeland and their ideals. Some dreamed of the idea of a ‘counterpart’ to New England in the northwest of the continent as opposed to the northeast, espousing Yankee notions of good government and economic values. And of course, one man’s dream is another man’s nightmare. It is no surprise that Carolina was virulently opposed to allowing the admission of another free Confederation to send more northern MCPs to Fredericksburg, but the idea of ‘two New Englands’ was controversial even to the other northern Confederations, who feared being outvoted and dominated. The Patriots simply cited the population disparity and declared the matter of no import at present. Vanburen was contented, having staked out a position that might win romantic voters over to his cause in New England who had been turned off by his own New York origins. However, another Liberal MCP, Thomas Whipple of New Hampshire, was unsatisfied and argued that America should consider changing its flag prematurely to send a signal to Russia and New Spain that it was the ENA’s “self-evident birthright” to bring Drakesland into its fold. Whipple drew up a version of the Jack and George with two rather than one star at the centre of the cross, a conservative change that would appeal to some while repelling those who liked the idea of the flag remaining eternally the same. Either way, though emotive to some, it was still not a major issue. Except that this opened the floodgates.
James Kincaid, Democratic MCP for Alaric,[3] opined that if they were talking about changing the flag, should they not consider the fact that it still contained the Union Jack in its old form? Kincaid, a supporter of the Populists’ policies in Great Britain, argued that America should show tribute to its mother country’s reforms by altering the Jack in the Jack and George to depict the purple Asterisk of Liberty symbol, added to the Union Jack by the Populists. This move managed to incense all quarters. Some conservative Patriots who still felt a connection to Great Britain struggled with the dichotomy of whether to follow Great Britain’s lead when it meant indirectly embracing policies that they strongly opposed. There was the irony that some British aristocrats who had come to America fleeing the Populist takeover strongly opposed Kincaid’s attempts to tie the Jack and George back to the British flag. In any case, the idea of adding the Asterisk of Liberty was not very popular either among politicians or people—but, once again, it broadened the debate. Samuel White, the appropriately named Whig MCP for Whitefort,[4] argued that since America had proclaimed its independence from Great Britain during the Popular Wars, rather than modifying its flag to ‘slavishly’ keep in line with the separated mother country, it should instead remove the Union Jack altogether and just leave a ‘Lonely George’. White’s position was less controversial than it might have been because ‘Lonely George’ flags had already seen some limited use in certain roles—for example, the American war ensign consisted of a modification of the old British white ensign (Union Jack in the canton of a St George’s cross) where the Union Jack was replaced with a Lonely George—the canton-in-canton of a Jack and George would have looked aesthetically displeasing. It was a reasonable argument that if a Lonely George could be said to symbolise America in that context, it should be enough for others. Some suggested moving the stars from the cross to the blank blue canton of White’s proposal, where they could more easily be rearranged and added to as necessary, but this idea did not gain much traction.
In a rare example of crossover between the two diametrically opposed parties, some Supremacists supported White’s idea—though they spoke of the need for America to have a racially pure Anglo-Saxon society (or at least ruling class) they also wanted the country to stand on its own two feet, abandon links with Great Britain and seize its destiny as a great world power in its own right. Tom Whipple had been consciously stealing from the Supremacists’ own rhetoric when he spoke of America’s ‘self-evident birthright’. However, the Supremacists differed from White on the number of stars. White came from Appalachian Franklin province, one of the few parts of Carolina in which slavery was almost absent, and was thus more reasonable on some issues than many of his contemporaries. However, he was still opposed to a Drakesland admission for the same reason many of his colleagues further north were, arguing it would destabilise the delicate balance of the Empire to have ‘two New Englands’, and so his Lonely George maintained the five stars (though some imitators with different views added a sixth). The Supremacists had yet another different view, the origins of which lay in the political struggles of the 1820s.
When the Patriots had split in 1825, Philip Hamilton (guided by Edmund Grey) had seized upon the issue of Imperial versus Confederate power as a way to establish a distinct identity for his faction, which became known as the Imperial Patriots as well as the Hamiltonians. The position was popular in the aftermath of the Superior War and Virginia Crisis, where there was public support for stronger central government intervention to prevent such debacles. However, it was the Radical-Neutrals rather than the Hamiltonian Patriots who succeeded the Whig-Carterite government, and they had a more nuanced position on the issue: boosting both the Imperial military
and assuaging Confederate-power advocates among the Neutrals by allowing confederations to independently raise more regiments, for example. In opposition the Patriots occasionally pushed the Imperial angle but it had ceased to be a major issue, and when Crowninshield won his remarkable majority in 1840, the very breadth of the resulting Patriot caucus prevented him from taking too firm a position on Imperial versus Confederate power. The caucus included everyone from strong Imperial-power supporters like David Shepler of Erie Province, Pennsylvania to Confederate-power holdouts like the Petty brothers from North Province, Carolina—the last remaining non-Whig MCPs in Carolina. The only option was to try and steer an inoffensive middle course. But the 1840s saw a revival of the issue as confederate governments sought to try and nullify laws concerning centrally imposed tariffs they opposed. Carolina, unsurprisingly, was the worst offender, but every confederation saw at least one legal challenge to a centrally imposed law. The economic plan of Treasury Minister Robert Sturgeon lay in ruins, the courts consumed by fights over the (annoyingly vague) 1788 constitution and what it said about Imperial versus Confederate power.
Into this vacuum entered the Supremacists. They were not the first to advocate a new constitutional convention to clarify and perhaps replace the 1788 constitution—Vanburen backed such a notion as early as 1843. However, rather than merely calling for a convention, Matthew Clarke also stated what he would support at such a convention: the rollback of Confederate-level institutions and centralisation of power in Fredericksburg, a stronger Army and Navy that would swear sole allegiance to the Continental Parliament. “No longer Five Confederations and One Empire, but rather One Empire in truth for the first time! Let us cast aside the inefficient divisions of the past and grasp the birthright that our nation, aye I say nation singular, has long deserved!”
Clarke’s rhetoric appalled many, but energised others, and its most obvious manifestation was the flag that the Supremacists proposed. Similar to the Lonely George of Samuel White, the Supremacists’ version removed the five stars altogether and added a single large star in the centre, outlined in a circle. “Not Five But One” became the chant of the Supremacists’ ‘Pumpkin’ supporters. When asked about what such a constitutional change would mean for the slavery question, Clarke’s answer was merely “I couldn’t say.” This became sufficiently repeated by other Supremacists to catch the imagination of satirists, and soon the Supremacists had received the nickname “Couldn’t-Says” (often phoneticised to “Cuddensez” or similar).
The Flag War consumed the nation for a few months, yet in terms of actual change it was a damp squib. The people seemed to share the opinion of Patriot Foreign Secretary Simon Studholme that “Can’t we just leave everything the way it was before and forget this whole business?”—to which Jethro Carter (independent MCP for Williamsburg) replied “I thank the honourable gentlemen for so succinctly summing up his party’s philosophy in a single sentence”. Regardless, the flag remained unchanged, leaving both Supremacists and Liberals to declare that it would be one of the issues raised at a constitutional convention if they were elected. Though the American people might be sick of the Flag War, they were also unimpressed with the Patriots’ governance—and as Edmund Grey had repeatedly warned Crowninshield to no avail, even if they would give the Patriots the same number of votes at the next election as they had in 1840, that would result in far fewer seats due to the opposition being less divided. In the end, Grey gave up in disgust and resigned his seat in February 1844.[5] He retired to write books about American wildlife, his private passion, and rarely discussed politics. Philip Hamilton once travelled from Africa to visit him in his old age and commented sadly “It is a shame to see that great mind, which could once determine by will alone the outcome of a perfectly free and fair election, accompanied by the clicking of abaci and the scratching of pencils, has now been consigned to such a place.” Grey died in 1867.
Grey’s resignation, of course, triggered a by-election in his seat of Albany Province. The single vacancy meant it was a rare first-past-the-post election in the province, which in a general election elected two MCPs by bloc vote. It was thus a straightforward fight in the Patriot heartland of New York. Yet it was Albany Province that had seen most of the difficulties and bitterness with the Howden Seven Nations and the canal projects. Grey had had a certain personal popularity that might have overruled the public outcry against Patriot policies in that area both on a Confederate and Imperial level. But he was no more, and the obvious bitterness of his resignation turned many of his supporters against the Patriots. It was only when the polls opened that preliminary results indicated just how much trouble the Patriots were in. President Crowninshield, kept informed by the Optel lines, frantically contacted New York Patriot bigwigs to go to the province and campaign, but the polls were only open for five days[6] and the damage was done. The Albany Province by-election was a wakeup call for the government, with the Patriots shockingly slipping to third place. The Liberals had a strong showing. But it was the Supremacists who came first. Their candidate, Reuben Wood, was of old Trust Party stock and used Biblical imagery in his maiden speech to the Continental Parliament, speaking of casting out the money-lenders from the temple, expelling the Canaanites from the Promised Land, a new covenant between government and people.
The Patriots had suffered a shock defeat, but they retained a knife-edge majority and had enough time before the election was due in 1845 to reorganise their campaign according to Grey’s warnings. However, they were overtaken by events. In July 1844, the Great Eastern Railway opened, joining the ‘Arc of Power’ capitals of Boston, New York City, Philadelphia, Williamsburg and of course Fredericksburg itself. Charleston was the only confederate capital not included, ostensibly because of its distance, though of course there was far more to it than that: for one thing, the Carolinian railways used a different gauge to the Great Eastern Railway’s choice, which became the established universal gauge in the rest of the Confederations. Several MCPs attended the opening and rode some of the first trains without incident—though, influenced by an inaccurate film depiction in 1922, the public on the whole remains convinced that the Georgetown Tragedy happened on the railway’s inaugural trip. In reality it was in September that a train derailed (for reasons still disputed to this day) near the small settlement of Georgetown on the border between Maryland and Williamsburg provinces, Virginia.[7] Several people were killed and others were injured; among the former were three MCPs returning to Fredericksburg for a vote after attending a series of public meetings in their shared constituency of Philadelphia Province. The three were William Forrest and Lewis Hester of the Patriots, and John Allerdyce of the Liberals. The tragedy plunged all of eastern Pennsylvania into mourning, with popular Pittsylvania Province Independent MCP Mo Quedling giving a speech in which he criticised the pell-mell drive for further railway construction: “Perhaps now that the human cost of such mistakes has become apparent in our very halls of power, we may look back and see the damage we have inflicted both upon our fellow man and on the world in which we live. Shall our grandchildren read of this tragedy in their history books and react in puzzlement to the suggestion that the accident might have been caused by a treetrunk on the line—when they have never seen such a thing as a tree in their life, for all America from the Atlantic to the Mississippi shall be paved over in man’s lust for domination over all that lives?” Quedling’s Sutcliffist tone struck a chord with many, but met with strong opposition from others, with Reuben Wood in particular stating that “If the honourable gentleman wishes to return to the days of our peasant forefathers, scratching out a living on an unforgiving earth beneath the watchful eye of a brutal feudal overlord, then he may; but I say that if a man is to give his life for any cause, the march of progress is a sweeter one than even courage in battle or defiance to an oppressor.” Regardless of the argument and public feeling, railway penetration of America continued apace.
The deaths of the three MCPs led to a second by-election in October, this time for three empty seats elected by bloc vote. The Patriots threw everything they had at this election, yet their problems were tacitly acknowledged when, halfway through the campaign, Crowninshield reluctantly agreed to focus attention on two out of the three Patriot candidates and give up on the third. In the end holding two seats proved to be two optimistic. One seat went to the Liberals, one to the Supremacists and only one to the Patriots. The Supremacists had proved that they could win outside of the heartland they had built. And, more importantly, the government had lost its majority. It still possessed a strong minority and might have survived, but in November the opposition parties sensed weakness and united to defeat a confidence bill—a rarity to see Supremacists, Liberals, Whigs and miscellaneous all voting the same way. All the parties knew that public dissatisfaction with the Patriots was such that anyone had an opportunity to break through.
Nonetheless, the results of the 1844 election were a shock to many…
[1] Equivalent to Home Secretary / Minister for the Interior etc. An Imperial Commision is the ENA version of the Royal Commission inquiries used in the UK and derivative monarchies in OTL.
[2] See Part #159.
[3] Alaric is a town on the site of OTL Parkersburg, West Virginia, which in TTL sits just east of the border between the Virginian provinces of Transylvania and Vandalia. The name is a slightly misjudged reference by its founders to the latter—Alaric was a king of the Visigoths, not the Vandals.
[4] OTL Knoxville, Tennessee. Whitefort or White’s Fort is the older OTL name of the settlement: though the circumstances were obviously different as there was no American Revolutionary War, its foundation was still spearheaded by James White in TTL.
[5] One thing that the writers of the 1788 constitution
did think of was providing a means by which an MCP could resign, thus avoiding the British workaround (still used in OTL) where MPs, technically forbidden to resign, must be formally appointed to a sinecure Crown office of profit and thus be expelled from the House as no longer qualified to sit. In any case, this legal fiction has become obsolete in Great Britain itself in TTL under the new Populist constitutional settlement.
[6] As was common in this era, considering votes have to be held across a large province with a limited number of polling places and many voters would have to travel to vote.
[7] In OTL Georgetown was subsumed into Washington DC, which of course has not been founded in TTL.
)) be just as disgustingly racist as the slavers ITTL. This of course suggests that the GAW does not go as well for the north as the OTL civil war...
