It could be that some or all of the confedarations (espiecally Virginia) come to be constituent kingdoms of a larger empire, New Spanish style. It could prove to be a popular system in the future, already proving successful in New Spain and Scandinavia. It would also be an ideal solution to Germany's roughly equal in size but Saxon-dominated states.
Look to the West: Thread III, Volume IV (Tottenham Nil)!
- Thread starter Thande
- Start date
- Status
Apologies for the bump but I just realised something. Given that Henry Frederick has gotten involved in southern politics ,Carolina looks likely to secede and we know he's going to be an important figure in the Great American War it looks increasingly likely that Henry Frederick is going to be king of Carolina/ some CSA type state. Now remember when Thande mentioned " the coronation of the hun- again " as one of the important upcoming events and it's the only one yet to be expanded upon...
Having started in September, and going through phases of storming through chapters across days or not reading it for weeks, I have finally got up to date. I have to say Thande, this is truly an epic TL in quality and quantity. Its very easy to see influences creeping into my TLs, which I have to work hard to avoid. I look forward in eager anticipation to the next installment.
Thande
Donor
Thanks very much. I hope to start updating this again in a couple of weeks once my busy period at work is past.
Admiral Matt
Gone Fishin'
I've been reading Debt, and it's cast this timeline in a good light in retrospect.
On the subject of the "delay" of the Wealth of Nations idea, I wonder how much was changed from the OTL version. Adam Smith used a lot of examples of "primitive" societies that would have been proven quite absurd in the interim. The Iroquois, for example, would be much better known by an American author in the 19th century than a Scottish one in the 18th.
I have been thinking that Societism would probably be "scientific." The modern world will still be a product of scientific progress, so it's the natural justification for a modern ideology.
I still have no idea how you make a (pseudo)science out of arguing that all societies are the same though.
On the subject of the "delay" of the Wealth of Nations idea, I wonder how much was changed from the OTL version. Adam Smith used a lot of examples of "primitive" societies that would have been proven quite absurd in the interim. The Iroquois, for example, would be much better known by an American author in the 19th century than a Scottish one in the 18th.
I have been thinking that Societism would probably be "scientific." The modern world will still be a product of scientific progress, so it's the natural justification for a modern ideology.
I still have no idea how you make a (pseudo)science out of arguing that all societies are the same though.
Thande
Donor
That's a good point.
Well, it's in the eye of the beholder - you can have the trappings of a "scientific" ideology, even have proper scientists who have made real discoveries defend it if they also happen to be ideological true believers, without it really standing up objectively. And there is a bit of a middle ground between a wholly rational ideology (if there is such a thing) and things like Fomenko and Lysenko (wait, new conspiracy theory: all pseudo-academia is made up by a secret society of people whose names end in -enko
).
Thande
Donor
I wanted to update LTTW earlier this week before I go on holiday, but I ended up being taken up by other writing projects with more urgent deadlines...I didn't want to leave it another week with no updates, so I slammed one out before I went. If there are any inconsistencies with dates etc., that's why, honest
Part #172: South by Southwest
“One group of humans claims kindship with a second group of humans and seeks to separate them from a third group of humans, while a fourth group of humans (which considers itself superior to a fifth group of humans) denies kinship with the first group of humans and seeks to separate itself from it. Shorn of context, this disagreement is shown to be as petty and pathetic as children throwing a tantrum. It would not be worth the expenditure of one cent of coinage or one drop of human blood. Yet it will consume far more than that before the matter is to be decided for now...likely to be entirely forgotten after an eyeblink of history, and those who fought on both sides might meet in a bar to share drinks and play cards afterwards.
An alienist tasked with diagnosing the human race would have no recourse but to charge us with clinical insanity and consign us to an asylum for all eternity. And perhaps that is precisely what the earth is.”
*
From: “America: History Written in Words of Blood” by Jane Salinger and B. D. Hughes (1974)—
Trying to assess the pre-war character of the Confederation of Carolina is an exercise fraught with frustration and, some might say, practically impossible and futile. The problem arises, of course, from the post-war historiography. Two separate waves of bias have washed over the identity of Carolina in its historical portrayal, both with roughly the same goal. The first, of course, had its peak immediately after the war (though it began before a shot was ever fired) in which Carolinians sought to emphasise the ‘special’ and ‘unique’ qualities of their homeland in contrast to what they regarded as the increasingly homogenous and alien character of the Empire to which they now reluctantly belonged. Uriah Adams was scarcely alone when he spoke in his speeches of Carolina only ending up with the ENA due to historical accident, and always being the odd one out, ruled by a distant government ignorant of her needs and uncaring of her values. In the wake of the war, it made sense to re-emphasise this once more and strike out a new path for what became the Kingdom of Carolina.
Throughout this period, the Empire vacillated between two portrayals of Carolina. The first criticised the Carolinian government while continuing to identify with its people, regarding them as true Americans held under bondage, either against their will or apparently of their own accord, but only because they had been systematically lied to. This view gradually faded, outcompeted by the more popular (in both senses of the word) depiction of Carolina as an evil land populated by men who real Americans should be ashamed to share a language with, and had always been a snake in the bosom undermining the Empire from within. The important point from our perspective, though, was that both Carolina and the Empire had a vested interest in portraying themselves as different from one another.
This aspect technically did not cease after the world was turned upside down in the early twentieth century and Carolina fell under what its exiles have euphemistically referred to as the National Coma. However, the Empire’s portrayal shifted character radically, effectively representing a synthesis of the former two apparently diametrically opposed views. Carolina continued to be portrayed as different, serving Diversitarian ends, but now it was romanticised and celebrated, its culture, literature and music becoming popular across the Empire in a way which would have seemed inconceivable only a generation before. This about-face is easier to understand if we remember that by its nature, Carolina was internally divided, and the Empire’s opinion of Carolina was based not on the nation as some homogenous whole, but on that division as it changed radically with the coming of the Coma. But to truly comprehend it, we must return to the Great American War and the dawn of independent Carolina.
To return to our original point, it becomes tricky to paint an unbiased picture of just what Imperial Carolina was like. Primary sources can only go so far. Yet it does seem that a certain paranoia had characterised the political life of Carolina for a long time, going back in some ways to the foundation of the Empire’s government in 1788. There were several reasons for this, and though slavery later became the most important, initially this was not the case. When the British colonies in America were originally founded, they sought to expand westward to the Pacific Ocean, then thought to be far closer than it actually is. As a consequence, the colonies claimed strips of the continent for westward expansion, later converted into claims by the new Confederations—which by the time of the Great American War had started to become unsustainable, as the westernmost settlements in the strips had more in common with each other than any of them did with the eastern seats of government. Carolina was the odd one out because its westward expansion was blocked by the Cherokee Empire and French Louisiana. Initially some thought that these might be swept aside eventually by a new war and a tide of colonists, but in the end this did not happen. In the short term, Carolina was initially sparsely populated and had plenty of land to expand into just in its then-present claims, but eventually benefited from the capture of Florida in the First Platinean War (1767), Cuba in the Second (1785) and Hispaniola in the Jacobin Wars (1805). All of these eventually became integral parts of Carolina and gradually changed its character. Due to Britain’s own troubles, the British West Indies eventually fell into Carolina’s sphere of control as well over the years.
These new possessions altered matters in Carolina. The horizons of its rulers, the planter class, previously often concerned solely with their own wealth and power, were forced to expand. Certainly, wealth and power remained a big part of it, but they were forced to see beyond their own plantation. The strategies needed to obtain that very wealth and power from places like Cuba and Jamaica were different from those which worked in Charles Town (officially renamed Charleston in 1790) or the Congaree lands. The result was that the more stick-in-the-mud conservative aristocrats tended to fall on rough times with the changing economy, and those who could adapt came to the fore. They were not alone, however. Self-made men challenged them for control and influence in the halls of power. Furthermore, such men disagreed amongst themselves about the future paths Carolina should take, whether to focus on one product or another, whether to pursue free trade or punitive tariffs. One thing united all of them, a fact they regarded as so self-evident that none would ever think to vocalise it: Carolina’s success was built on the back of the Negro. The traditionalist planters used slaves in their rice and tobacco plantations, and increasingly cotton plantations after the invention of the cotton-thresher; the self-made industrialists used them in their manufactories; the adventurous explorers used them to set up tropical fruit plantations in the West Indies and later, in collaboration with the New Spanish government, in Central America. In other lands there might have been an economic aspect to a debate over slavery: some men would grow poorer with the abolition, others would grow richer. There could never be any such debate in Carolina. It was true, as some northern abolitionists argued, that poor white men in Carolina had fewer employment opportunities because of slavery. But they would turn up their noses at such jobs precisely because they were ‘Negro work’.[1] The culture of separation was too ingrained. There was certainly no chance of, as some Mentians with Sanchezista views on race might contend, the poor whites and blacks teaming up to overthrow the rich white ruling class. Such an act seems to have been regarded as almost blasphemously inconceivable on the rare examples we have of it being discussed in print by contemporary Carolinians.
Views on race solidified in Carolina thanks to the rise of the Burdenist movement, which argued that blacks were only even semi-human due to their position as slaves, and would revert to animalism if the yoke of the white man was removed. Scare stories coming out of the Virginia Crisis in the 1830s reinforced this idea, in particular the activities of Caesar Bell’s men in the Wilderness of Spotsylvania.[2] Whipped up by media portrayals, even in the north these damaged the messages of that minority of abolitionists who argued that black and white men could live alongside each other as equals: northern opinion became firmly anti-slavery, but with the caveat that the Negro was dangerous and should be returned to Africa. Of course the fact that the Royal Africa Company was more than willing to take former slaves off America’s hands for use in its Jagun army certainly helped. In Carolina, the gory tales of Bell were regarded as confirming the Burdenist views of the black race, but the growth of the return to Africa colonism also stoked the fires of paranoia, that the northern government forces would eventually force every Carolinian slaveholder to give up his property. In the early nineteenth century, partly influenced by an increasing number of self-made men making their presence known at the Carolina General Assembly, laws shifted so that they no longer favoured the planters so much, and it became more economic for the growing white middle class to own one or two Negroes for domestic assistance. This also altered views on black education. Traditionally the planters had tried to deny education to Negroes because they regarded it (accurately) as being a tool that allowed the organisation of more successful slave rebellions. The Burdenists were more divided, with some claiming it would damage Negroes’ fragile minds but others saying it would be harmless, because it was only a neglected Negro given a taste of independence who would turn animalistic and rebel. Regardless of these views, many middle-class whites taught their Negro domestic servants basic literacy and numeracy, as it meant they could do more tasks to help out around the home and look after the children. (The use of Negroes as nannies and nurses is often claimed to be the origin of Carolina’s distinctive accent and its deviation of that from those in the rest of the ENA—even rich white Carolinians grew up hearing African-influenced cadences more often than their own parents’ voices).
Burdenism was often espoused as an excuse for slaveholding by those who did not truly believe its ideas, but there were plenty of true believers as well. Carolina initially adopted a Black Code in 1830 as the price for annexing the British West Indies, but these true believers continued to influence the Code, originally modelled on Louisiana’s. Whereas laws concerning Negroes had previously simply benefited the planter classes who held the power, the new Code had more of an ideological base to it. It made it a criminal act to use ‘excessive’ force to punish a recalcitrant slave (of course, judges had very varying views on what this was). In this it embodied Andrew Eveleigh’s view that a man who casually beat a slave until he could work no more was as idiotic as a man who would break his horse’s leg because he was in a mood, throwing a vast investment down the drain. If such a man was so lacking judgement in this field, what did it say about whether he should be trusted with the affairs of white men? The Black Code also kept Negro families together, as the French original did, and banned miscegenation. Previously the law had looked the other way when planters had children (consensually or otherwise) with their female slaves, but now several scandals ripped around the Confederation and toppled scions of old, powerful families.
The level of political upheaval in Carolina in this period was often underestimated in the northern Confederations, both at the time and afterwards. All the northerners could see was that Carolina voted increasingly consistently for the Whig Party that John Alexander had founded in 1819, initially simply as a way to topple Matthew Quincy from the presidency. Northerners saw the Whigs as a ‘slavers’ party’, but Carolinians increasingly regarded it—particularly following the Virginia Crisis and the formation of the Radical-Neutral government of Eric Mullenbergh—as the Carolinian Party. As in, not merely the only party that looked out for Carolinian interests, but the only one that ‘real’ Carolinians should vote for. This view was encouraged by the planters who still mostly controlled the party apparatus, and was responsible for the Whigs’ increasing irrelevance outside Carolina, even in Virginia where there were still many people bitter over the end of slavery. The Carolinian invasion of Virginia in 1832 had shattered any sense of southern solidarity. As far as the Carolinians were concerned, Virginia had become northern. And they were left alone, unique.
On the General Assembly level, the old Patriots mostly dropped the label after Alexander Hamilton became leader of the national party and joined with the Whigs. A couple of wealthy Patriots on the imperial level in North Province,[3] the Petty brothers, kept the label out of sheer conservatism and continued to receive loyal votes, but even they would eventually cross the aisle for the 1844 election. Opposition to the Whigs in the General Assembly initially took the form of the Neutral Party, but when Mullenburgh’s government associated them with the Radicals (and of course when Vanburen eventually destroyed the party altogether with his Liberal merger) that was no longer possible. Opponents to the aristocratic planter Whigs therefore stood mostly as Independents or vague, unconnected ‘Opposition Party’ labels, receiving large personal votes. This hampered the aristocrats’ attempts to reverse the aspects of the Black Code and other laws which impinged on what they regarded as their God-given right to do whatever they wanted to their slaves and half of what they wanted to poor whites as well.
It was Whig imperial party leader Wade Hampton II—or rather his son Wade Hampton III and his clerks—who conceived a plan to shut out the opposition and regain total control for the aristocrats in the General Assembly. Hampton introduced a bill to change the voting system for the General Assembly, ostensibly responding to complaints by reformists (they rejected the label Radical for obvious reasons) that the Assembly was heavily malapportioned, with counties receiving equal representation despite vastly different populations. The introduction of universal (white male) suffrage in 1837 had only exacerbated this problem by increasing the disparity. Hampton declared that henceforth elections would instead by organised on the provincial level (ignoring the boroughs and counting them as part of the province they resided in) with each province being assigned a certain number of MGAs based on its voting population by census data. Rather than being elected in single-member constituencies, the MGAs would all be elected all at once on a ‘general ticket’ chosen by a party.[4] Because the Whigs were far more organised than the divided opposition, Hampton thought that this would allow them to sew up nearly all the seats on a plurality.
The bill passed the Assembly surprisingly easily, and at the first election under the new rules in 1843, Hampton discovered he had been both right – and very wrong. The Whigs indeed swept nearly every province and won every seat in the House save for a couple of independents. However, it turned out that the planters had been outmaneouvred when it came to drawing up the general tickets, and both the Burdenists and middle-class reformers had influenced the local conventions behind the process. The result was that the aristocrats were left worse off than when they had started. The Assembly was divided between the Whig factions, and eventually a government was formed based on an alliance between Burdenists and some of the bourgeois reformists. At its head was a man who was reasonably acceptable to all the factions, a man from what was originally an aristocratic background but whose family had fallen on hard times and he had had to build their fortunes up again from scratch. Uriah Adams had first shot to prominence from his speeches as new MGA during the Virginia Crisis, and now he would be the man to lead Carolina into the Great American War, even as its Governor John Alexander increasingly sickened.
These subtleties were largely missed by northern commentators, who regarded the whole affair as a power grab by ‘the Whigs’, being unaware that ‘the Whigs’ now basically meant ‘everyone in Carolina’. The misinterpretation of events undoubtedly contributed to the increasing divisions in the leadup to the war. Meanwhile, some wondered what would happen after Alexander died. Would Adams succeed him as Governor? He seemed more comfortable in his present role as Speaker.[5] Others believed that Alexander’s son would succeed him, making it a hereditary dynasty. Some criticised that idea as inappropriate for an elected position, but it was true that—unlike with the Mornington Controversy around this time in Ireland—the son was a worthy successor in his own right. George Washington Alexander had served in the Army like his father, but more intermittently, being an adventurer and writer whose tales of exotic Mexico and Guatemala had encouraged many more Carolinians to become involved in the fruit trade with the Empire of New Spain. He had married an aristocratic Cuban lady, putting the seal on the way that his father had successfully overseen the assimilation of Cuba and Hispaniola by co-opting their former ruling classes and fighting for Catholic rights. The successes of both Alexander generations had become clear by the 1840s: Carolina, a colony originally founded largely by virulently anti-Catholic Ulster Scots, had become the most Catholic-friendly place in the ENA. Without diminishing the Alexanders’ successes, this was undoubtedly helped by two factors: the growth of Jansenist Catholicism as a ‘thinking man’s’ alternative to Roman Catholicism (which came with all the baggage of a superstitious primitive populace in thrall to their priest in the old Carolinian imagination), and the fact that the Louisianans and New Spanish maintained slavery as the other confederations of the ENA abandoned it. If the defence of slavery was regarded by many as a core part of the Carolinian identity, did that not mean that the Carolinians were now closer to their Papist neighbours to the west than their Protestant so-called brethren to the north?
George Alexander’s connections with New Spain were all the more remarkable considering that not so many years ago, New Spain had still been sore about the loss of Cuba. Along with businessmen like the Wraggs, he had built a new relationship between Carolina and New Spain. He had gone to California with the gold rush in the 1820s and had some minor success to add to his father’s wealth, and he returned several times to renew his great friendship with the aristocrats who had grown up in Monterey during its quixotic few years as the theoretical capital of all of New Spain. But by the late 1840s, things were different in California. If Carolina now considered itself intrinsically different in character to the rest of the ENA, so too did California compared to the rest of the ENS. Spanish was only the most common language by a plurality in California now. Men—and not a few women—from all over the world had come seeking their fortune, and some of them had even found it. The largest immigrant groups were from the ENA, of course, English-speakers and Protestants who made a mockery of the New Spaniards’ laws about religious quotas for immigration. The immigrants from the UPSA might speak the right language and have something approaching the right religion, but if anything were even more disruptive with their dangerous views about what constituted good governance. And then there were the Russians and their mob of exotic tagalong sidekicks: Lithuanians, Poles, Yakuts, Nivkhs, Yapontsi, Chinese, Coreans. And through all this, rich and populous California was still being run as three obscure provinces from the City of Mexico. Petitions to King-Emperor Ferdinand VII to split California off as a new Kingdom in its own right fell on deaf ears. Ferdinand might have been somewhat sympathetic, but by 1849 his attention was at last consumed by the one part of his realm he had always cared little for: the Second Spanish Revolution had begun.
In 1849 California was therefore a powder keg, and it was one George Alexander who would be the unwitting fuse...
[1] Usually with a slightly different choice of words...
[2] See Part #144.
[3] I.e. North Carolina.
[4] An American invention in OTL as well, though in OTL it was devised by the Pennsylvanians in 1788 to try and shut any Anti-Federalist Representatives out of the first House election.
[5] In the American sense, i.e. more like a prime minister or minister-president.
Part #172: South by Southwest
“One group of humans claims kindship with a second group of humans and seeks to separate them from a third group of humans, while a fourth group of humans (which considers itself superior to a fifth group of humans) denies kinship with the first group of humans and seeks to separate itself from it. Shorn of context, this disagreement is shown to be as petty and pathetic as children throwing a tantrum. It would not be worth the expenditure of one cent of coinage or one drop of human blood. Yet it will consume far more than that before the matter is to be decided for now...likely to be entirely forgotten after an eyeblink of history, and those who fought on both sides might meet in a bar to share drinks and play cards afterwards.
An alienist tasked with diagnosing the human race would have no recourse but to charge us with clinical insanity and consign us to an asylum for all eternity. And perhaps that is precisely what the earth is.”
– Pablo Sanchez on the Great American War, 1852
Note: Although most of this quote is well attested, many of the earlier records do not have the final sentence, and there is disagreement about whether it was part of the original quote or added later, either by Sanchez himself or by another.
Note: Although most of this quote is well attested, many of the earlier records do not have the final sentence, and there is disagreement about whether it was part of the original quote or added later, either by Sanchez himself or by another.
*
From: “America: History Written in Words of Blood” by Jane Salinger and B. D. Hughes (1974)—
Trying to assess the pre-war character of the Confederation of Carolina is an exercise fraught with frustration and, some might say, practically impossible and futile. The problem arises, of course, from the post-war historiography. Two separate waves of bias have washed over the identity of Carolina in its historical portrayal, both with roughly the same goal. The first, of course, had its peak immediately after the war (though it began before a shot was ever fired) in which Carolinians sought to emphasise the ‘special’ and ‘unique’ qualities of their homeland in contrast to what they regarded as the increasingly homogenous and alien character of the Empire to which they now reluctantly belonged. Uriah Adams was scarcely alone when he spoke in his speeches of Carolina only ending up with the ENA due to historical accident, and always being the odd one out, ruled by a distant government ignorant of her needs and uncaring of her values. In the wake of the war, it made sense to re-emphasise this once more and strike out a new path for what became the Kingdom of Carolina.
Throughout this period, the Empire vacillated between two portrayals of Carolina. The first criticised the Carolinian government while continuing to identify with its people, regarding them as true Americans held under bondage, either against their will or apparently of their own accord, but only because they had been systematically lied to. This view gradually faded, outcompeted by the more popular (in both senses of the word) depiction of Carolina as an evil land populated by men who real Americans should be ashamed to share a language with, and had always been a snake in the bosom undermining the Empire from within. The important point from our perspective, though, was that both Carolina and the Empire had a vested interest in portraying themselves as different from one another.
This aspect technically did not cease after the world was turned upside down in the early twentieth century and Carolina fell under what its exiles have euphemistically referred to as the National Coma. However, the Empire’s portrayal shifted character radically, effectively representing a synthesis of the former two apparently diametrically opposed views. Carolina continued to be portrayed as different, serving Diversitarian ends, but now it was romanticised and celebrated, its culture, literature and music becoming popular across the Empire in a way which would have seemed inconceivable only a generation before. This about-face is easier to understand if we remember that by its nature, Carolina was internally divided, and the Empire’s opinion of Carolina was based not on the nation as some homogenous whole, but on that division as it changed radically with the coming of the Coma. But to truly comprehend it, we must return to the Great American War and the dawn of independent Carolina.
To return to our original point, it becomes tricky to paint an unbiased picture of just what Imperial Carolina was like. Primary sources can only go so far. Yet it does seem that a certain paranoia had characterised the political life of Carolina for a long time, going back in some ways to the foundation of the Empire’s government in 1788. There were several reasons for this, and though slavery later became the most important, initially this was not the case. When the British colonies in America were originally founded, they sought to expand westward to the Pacific Ocean, then thought to be far closer than it actually is. As a consequence, the colonies claimed strips of the continent for westward expansion, later converted into claims by the new Confederations—which by the time of the Great American War had started to become unsustainable, as the westernmost settlements in the strips had more in common with each other than any of them did with the eastern seats of government. Carolina was the odd one out because its westward expansion was blocked by the Cherokee Empire and French Louisiana. Initially some thought that these might be swept aside eventually by a new war and a tide of colonists, but in the end this did not happen. In the short term, Carolina was initially sparsely populated and had plenty of land to expand into just in its then-present claims, but eventually benefited from the capture of Florida in the First Platinean War (1767), Cuba in the Second (1785) and Hispaniola in the Jacobin Wars (1805). All of these eventually became integral parts of Carolina and gradually changed its character. Due to Britain’s own troubles, the British West Indies eventually fell into Carolina’s sphere of control as well over the years.
These new possessions altered matters in Carolina. The horizons of its rulers, the planter class, previously often concerned solely with their own wealth and power, were forced to expand. Certainly, wealth and power remained a big part of it, but they were forced to see beyond their own plantation. The strategies needed to obtain that very wealth and power from places like Cuba and Jamaica were different from those which worked in Charles Town (officially renamed Charleston in 1790) or the Congaree lands. The result was that the more stick-in-the-mud conservative aristocrats tended to fall on rough times with the changing economy, and those who could adapt came to the fore. They were not alone, however. Self-made men challenged them for control and influence in the halls of power. Furthermore, such men disagreed amongst themselves about the future paths Carolina should take, whether to focus on one product or another, whether to pursue free trade or punitive tariffs. One thing united all of them, a fact they regarded as so self-evident that none would ever think to vocalise it: Carolina’s success was built on the back of the Negro. The traditionalist planters used slaves in their rice and tobacco plantations, and increasingly cotton plantations after the invention of the cotton-thresher; the self-made industrialists used them in their manufactories; the adventurous explorers used them to set up tropical fruit plantations in the West Indies and later, in collaboration with the New Spanish government, in Central America. In other lands there might have been an economic aspect to a debate over slavery: some men would grow poorer with the abolition, others would grow richer. There could never be any such debate in Carolina. It was true, as some northern abolitionists argued, that poor white men in Carolina had fewer employment opportunities because of slavery. But they would turn up their noses at such jobs precisely because they were ‘Negro work’.[1] The culture of separation was too ingrained. There was certainly no chance of, as some Mentians with Sanchezista views on race might contend, the poor whites and blacks teaming up to overthrow the rich white ruling class. Such an act seems to have been regarded as almost blasphemously inconceivable on the rare examples we have of it being discussed in print by contemporary Carolinians.
Views on race solidified in Carolina thanks to the rise of the Burdenist movement, which argued that blacks were only even semi-human due to their position as slaves, and would revert to animalism if the yoke of the white man was removed. Scare stories coming out of the Virginia Crisis in the 1830s reinforced this idea, in particular the activities of Caesar Bell’s men in the Wilderness of Spotsylvania.[2] Whipped up by media portrayals, even in the north these damaged the messages of that minority of abolitionists who argued that black and white men could live alongside each other as equals: northern opinion became firmly anti-slavery, but with the caveat that the Negro was dangerous and should be returned to Africa. Of course the fact that the Royal Africa Company was more than willing to take former slaves off America’s hands for use in its Jagun army certainly helped. In Carolina, the gory tales of Bell were regarded as confirming the Burdenist views of the black race, but the growth of the return to Africa colonism also stoked the fires of paranoia, that the northern government forces would eventually force every Carolinian slaveholder to give up his property. In the early nineteenth century, partly influenced by an increasing number of self-made men making their presence known at the Carolina General Assembly, laws shifted so that they no longer favoured the planters so much, and it became more economic for the growing white middle class to own one or two Negroes for domestic assistance. This also altered views on black education. Traditionally the planters had tried to deny education to Negroes because they regarded it (accurately) as being a tool that allowed the organisation of more successful slave rebellions. The Burdenists were more divided, with some claiming it would damage Negroes’ fragile minds but others saying it would be harmless, because it was only a neglected Negro given a taste of independence who would turn animalistic and rebel. Regardless of these views, many middle-class whites taught their Negro domestic servants basic literacy and numeracy, as it meant they could do more tasks to help out around the home and look after the children. (The use of Negroes as nannies and nurses is often claimed to be the origin of Carolina’s distinctive accent and its deviation of that from those in the rest of the ENA—even rich white Carolinians grew up hearing African-influenced cadences more often than their own parents’ voices).
Burdenism was often espoused as an excuse for slaveholding by those who did not truly believe its ideas, but there were plenty of true believers as well. Carolina initially adopted a Black Code in 1830 as the price for annexing the British West Indies, but these true believers continued to influence the Code, originally modelled on Louisiana’s. Whereas laws concerning Negroes had previously simply benefited the planter classes who held the power, the new Code had more of an ideological base to it. It made it a criminal act to use ‘excessive’ force to punish a recalcitrant slave (of course, judges had very varying views on what this was). In this it embodied Andrew Eveleigh’s view that a man who casually beat a slave until he could work no more was as idiotic as a man who would break his horse’s leg because he was in a mood, throwing a vast investment down the drain. If such a man was so lacking judgement in this field, what did it say about whether he should be trusted with the affairs of white men? The Black Code also kept Negro families together, as the French original did, and banned miscegenation. Previously the law had looked the other way when planters had children (consensually or otherwise) with their female slaves, but now several scandals ripped around the Confederation and toppled scions of old, powerful families.
The level of political upheaval in Carolina in this period was often underestimated in the northern Confederations, both at the time and afterwards. All the northerners could see was that Carolina voted increasingly consistently for the Whig Party that John Alexander had founded in 1819, initially simply as a way to topple Matthew Quincy from the presidency. Northerners saw the Whigs as a ‘slavers’ party’, but Carolinians increasingly regarded it—particularly following the Virginia Crisis and the formation of the Radical-Neutral government of Eric Mullenbergh—as the Carolinian Party. As in, not merely the only party that looked out for Carolinian interests, but the only one that ‘real’ Carolinians should vote for. This view was encouraged by the planters who still mostly controlled the party apparatus, and was responsible for the Whigs’ increasing irrelevance outside Carolina, even in Virginia where there were still many people bitter over the end of slavery. The Carolinian invasion of Virginia in 1832 had shattered any sense of southern solidarity. As far as the Carolinians were concerned, Virginia had become northern. And they were left alone, unique.
On the General Assembly level, the old Patriots mostly dropped the label after Alexander Hamilton became leader of the national party and joined with the Whigs. A couple of wealthy Patriots on the imperial level in North Province,[3] the Petty brothers, kept the label out of sheer conservatism and continued to receive loyal votes, but even they would eventually cross the aisle for the 1844 election. Opposition to the Whigs in the General Assembly initially took the form of the Neutral Party, but when Mullenburgh’s government associated them with the Radicals (and of course when Vanburen eventually destroyed the party altogether with his Liberal merger) that was no longer possible. Opponents to the aristocratic planter Whigs therefore stood mostly as Independents or vague, unconnected ‘Opposition Party’ labels, receiving large personal votes. This hampered the aristocrats’ attempts to reverse the aspects of the Black Code and other laws which impinged on what they regarded as their God-given right to do whatever they wanted to their slaves and half of what they wanted to poor whites as well.
It was Whig imperial party leader Wade Hampton II—or rather his son Wade Hampton III and his clerks—who conceived a plan to shut out the opposition and regain total control for the aristocrats in the General Assembly. Hampton introduced a bill to change the voting system for the General Assembly, ostensibly responding to complaints by reformists (they rejected the label Radical for obvious reasons) that the Assembly was heavily malapportioned, with counties receiving equal representation despite vastly different populations. The introduction of universal (white male) suffrage in 1837 had only exacerbated this problem by increasing the disparity. Hampton declared that henceforth elections would instead by organised on the provincial level (ignoring the boroughs and counting them as part of the province they resided in) with each province being assigned a certain number of MGAs based on its voting population by census data. Rather than being elected in single-member constituencies, the MGAs would all be elected all at once on a ‘general ticket’ chosen by a party.[4] Because the Whigs were far more organised than the divided opposition, Hampton thought that this would allow them to sew up nearly all the seats on a plurality.
The bill passed the Assembly surprisingly easily, and at the first election under the new rules in 1843, Hampton discovered he had been both right – and very wrong. The Whigs indeed swept nearly every province and won every seat in the House save for a couple of independents. However, it turned out that the planters had been outmaneouvred when it came to drawing up the general tickets, and both the Burdenists and middle-class reformers had influenced the local conventions behind the process. The result was that the aristocrats were left worse off than when they had started. The Assembly was divided between the Whig factions, and eventually a government was formed based on an alliance between Burdenists and some of the bourgeois reformists. At its head was a man who was reasonably acceptable to all the factions, a man from what was originally an aristocratic background but whose family had fallen on hard times and he had had to build their fortunes up again from scratch. Uriah Adams had first shot to prominence from his speeches as new MGA during the Virginia Crisis, and now he would be the man to lead Carolina into the Great American War, even as its Governor John Alexander increasingly sickened.
These subtleties were largely missed by northern commentators, who regarded the whole affair as a power grab by ‘the Whigs’, being unaware that ‘the Whigs’ now basically meant ‘everyone in Carolina’. The misinterpretation of events undoubtedly contributed to the increasing divisions in the leadup to the war. Meanwhile, some wondered what would happen after Alexander died. Would Adams succeed him as Governor? He seemed more comfortable in his present role as Speaker.[5] Others believed that Alexander’s son would succeed him, making it a hereditary dynasty. Some criticised that idea as inappropriate for an elected position, but it was true that—unlike with the Mornington Controversy around this time in Ireland—the son was a worthy successor in his own right. George Washington Alexander had served in the Army like his father, but more intermittently, being an adventurer and writer whose tales of exotic Mexico and Guatemala had encouraged many more Carolinians to become involved in the fruit trade with the Empire of New Spain. He had married an aristocratic Cuban lady, putting the seal on the way that his father had successfully overseen the assimilation of Cuba and Hispaniola by co-opting their former ruling classes and fighting for Catholic rights. The successes of both Alexander generations had become clear by the 1840s: Carolina, a colony originally founded largely by virulently anti-Catholic Ulster Scots, had become the most Catholic-friendly place in the ENA. Without diminishing the Alexanders’ successes, this was undoubtedly helped by two factors: the growth of Jansenist Catholicism as a ‘thinking man’s’ alternative to Roman Catholicism (which came with all the baggage of a superstitious primitive populace in thrall to their priest in the old Carolinian imagination), and the fact that the Louisianans and New Spanish maintained slavery as the other confederations of the ENA abandoned it. If the defence of slavery was regarded by many as a core part of the Carolinian identity, did that not mean that the Carolinians were now closer to their Papist neighbours to the west than their Protestant so-called brethren to the north?
George Alexander’s connections with New Spain were all the more remarkable considering that not so many years ago, New Spain had still been sore about the loss of Cuba. Along with businessmen like the Wraggs, he had built a new relationship between Carolina and New Spain. He had gone to California with the gold rush in the 1820s and had some minor success to add to his father’s wealth, and he returned several times to renew his great friendship with the aristocrats who had grown up in Monterey during its quixotic few years as the theoretical capital of all of New Spain. But by the late 1840s, things were different in California. If Carolina now considered itself intrinsically different in character to the rest of the ENA, so too did California compared to the rest of the ENS. Spanish was only the most common language by a plurality in California now. Men—and not a few women—from all over the world had come seeking their fortune, and some of them had even found it. The largest immigrant groups were from the ENA, of course, English-speakers and Protestants who made a mockery of the New Spaniards’ laws about religious quotas for immigration. The immigrants from the UPSA might speak the right language and have something approaching the right religion, but if anything were even more disruptive with their dangerous views about what constituted good governance. And then there were the Russians and their mob of exotic tagalong sidekicks: Lithuanians, Poles, Yakuts, Nivkhs, Yapontsi, Chinese, Coreans. And through all this, rich and populous California was still being run as three obscure provinces from the City of Mexico. Petitions to King-Emperor Ferdinand VII to split California off as a new Kingdom in its own right fell on deaf ears. Ferdinand might have been somewhat sympathetic, but by 1849 his attention was at last consumed by the one part of his realm he had always cared little for: the Second Spanish Revolution had begun.
In 1849 California was therefore a powder keg, and it was one George Alexander who would be the unwitting fuse...
[1] Usually with a slightly different choice of words...
[2] See Part #144.
[3] I.e. North Carolina.
[4] An American invention in OTL as well, though in OTL it was devised by the Pennsylvanians in 1788 to try and shut any Anti-Federalist Representatives out of the first House election.
[5] In the American sense, i.e. more like a prime minister or minister-president.
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Alex Richards
Donor
Lots of lovely hints dropping there. I suspect the '49ers will have a rather different meaning ITTL.
It seems that Carolinian slavery has moved in some ways toward the OTL Brazilian model, with families being recognized and slave ownership becoming widespread throughout the white population (I've referred to this as "the democratization of slavery" in my more cynical moments). Of course, Carolina won't have the casual tolerance for racial mixing that Brazil did, nor will it have large free black and mulatto populations, especially with the Burdenists so influential.
Is manumission allowed in Carolina, or has it been banned or restricted as some American slave states did in OTL? What is the position of free blacks in Charleston, or of the gens libres du couleur of Louisiana and Hispaniola? Have the Carolinians assimilated any Caribbean attitudes toward the local mixed-race populations or has it gone mostly the other way?
Also, Yakuts in California is indescribably cool. I'd kind of like to see them find their way to Hudson's Bay, though.
Is manumission allowed in Carolina, or has it been banned or restricted as some American slave states did in OTL? What is the position of free blacks in Charleston, or of the gens libres du couleur of Louisiana and Hispaniola? Have the Carolinians assimilated any Caribbean attitudes toward the local mixed-race populations or has it gone mostly the other way?
Also, Yakuts in California is indescribably cool. I'd kind of like to see them find their way to Hudson's Bay, though.
There's only like 500 000 Yakuts today. I'm guessing we're probably talking like 2 000 maximum.
True enough, they'd be very minor players in California, but they could be a lot more influential up north where populations are thinner.
Thande
Donor
Interesting comparison and good points.
I don't think I ever explicitly said, but my thinking was that it would get banned like the OTL slave states (though for somewhat different reasons) around the 1830s due to Burdenist ideology.
All of this is rather unpleasant to write about, though hopefully the foreshadowing is clear that this will all end one day.
I'd have thought Nivkhs in California has an even higher "AH hipster" rating
That's actually based on an OTL theory about where the Southern accent came from.
It lives!
The immediate future of Carolina seems rather grim; indeed the Great American War as a whole seems to be shaping up as a whole new level of unpleasantness for this TL. With the Whigs in Carolina, the Supremacists in the ENA, a revolution in Spain and the Hapsburgs literally going to war with the Pope... That said, we now know how the Great American War winds up with a European theatre.
I also think this is the farthest ever we've had something foreshadowed up until now - and what foreshadowing! 'National Coma', 'the world turned upside down'... now where ITTL have we heard that kind of rhetoric before?
The immediate future of Carolina seems rather grim; indeed the Great American War as a whole seems to be shaping up as a whole new level of unpleasantness for this TL. With the Whigs in Carolina, the Supremacists in the ENA, a revolution in Spain and the Hapsburgs literally going to war with the Pope... That said, we now know how the Great American War winds up with a European theatre.
I also think this is the farthest ever we've had something foreshadowed up until now - and what foreshadowing! 'National Coma', 'the world turned upside down'... now where ITTL have we heard that kind of rhetoric before?
I've got a sneaking suspicion from that update that Carolina is going to go societist along with the UPSA. The apparent lack of records suggest that either a violent revolution has occurred or that somebody has been deliberately tampering. (Both suggest a societist or some kind of revolution). Then there is the fact that the (presumably) Diversertarian Empire of North America is hailing Carolina's difference from the rest of the ENA, which seems odd... That might explain the slave holding angle of the Combine, although I expect that societist slavery will be very different from normal chattel slavery.
One question that the recent updates have raised is why is the Great American War called the Great American War? It doesn't even seem to begin in America and there are several conflicts in Europe and probably conflicts in Africa, India and the east as well. Compared to the very aptly named Popular Wars and Jacobin Wars, the Great American War seems out of place.
teg
I think that the reference to Carolinian exiles talking of a 'National Coma', in addition to the ENA's support for Carolinian nationalism, are enough of a hint to make Societist Carolina pretty much certain. How it develops, on the other hand, is more of a mystery; it's difficult to imagine a society that's likely under threat of American revanchism would drop its nationalism easily.
It might be just a matter of which sources we're getting. We're reading things in the English language, and even those in other languages are translated to English and thus their terms for the war might well be translated to the English term that refers to the same war even if it's not a literal translation of the foreign-language term. If the British Isles were uninvolved in the war, the overwhelmingly vast majority of English-language viewpoints on the war will be from an American (that is, ENA) perspective, in which case for it to be called the 'Great American War' (because it was a very great war in the ENA's history) makes just as much sense as the Seven Years' War being called the 'French and Indian War' simply because those were the opponents that the Americans were fighting.
Looks like my predictions of the ENA staying together were wrong after all... I concede! Kingdom of Carolina, oh my. Makes me wonder if it somehow stays loyal to the Hanoverian monarchy somehow. If I may, I wish to praise him on a certain area.
Thande has really outdone himself IMO of getting both the historical and modern-day feel and culture of the different American regions and states translated into the Confederations and this update is where it's begun to shine. The Confederation of Virginia - clearly the real-world 'Upper South' - IS undoubtedly southern to me and a ton of others, yet he's made an accurate call in older entries and this one especially on how it's NOT just lumped in with the Deep South proper (ably represented the Confederation of Carolina, natch) in many peoples' eyes but also how it is more integrated to the northern-settled parts of the country. Heck, this was shown in the Civil War of OTL with much of the Appalachian-descended parts of the USA staying loyal to the Union (or attempting to counter-secede like East Tennessee did) or Chesapeake areas being kept (see: Maryland).
To say nothing of other places. He's made a point that New England was quite regionally proud and assimilist on its own accord with the Supremacist Party doing well there, and that the Pennsylvanians/Quaker-settled lands were ultimately clearly 'northern' in culture (being pro-abolitionist and liberal) but also able to be literal middlemen in not just ways of life but politics, what with the Virginia Crisis being mostly quelled with the Pennsylvanian Confederation's troops and explicitly under a name of 'restoring order' (and middle America loves nothing if not a status quo or a return to one).
And of course, he has deftly woven in TTL's differences into this. Southerners were ardent expansionists but to be hemmed in by Amerindians and rival European-descended powers (and French, to boot! They're still Anglo in roots) have clearly made Carolinians howl, yet he also solved a Civil War issue Dixie had by giving it the Greater Antilles to settle - by default a supremely wealthy area since the timeline's beginning, no British abolition act allowing it to stay rich and add to Carolinian diversity in economy and profit, and (I figure) a Carolinian fleet and seaman experience that could have a potentially better time fighting off any Imperial blockade in both direct battles and with all those extra ports and islands to keep an eye on.
To say nothing of the Carolinians being surprisingly accepting of Catholicism and at least the white elites of the West Indies if flooding the islands with Anglo commoners and settlers. That's an interesting yet logical twist for a group of people that was traditionally America's most aristocratic and cynical in acceptance - acceptance if rich and white, and not poor or especially, black.
I grew up in Delaware (Quaker-settled), currently live in Maryland (Chesapeake/Upper Southern-settled), and have been stationed in the Deep South for my military days, as well as extensive visits to Boston and Chicago (ultimately a Yankee-settled city). Thande has captured the feel and roots of these many American areas and adapted it wonderfully for the sake of his TL. It's been a very good read that has paid off well in this update and my anticipation to see the inevitable culture shock that will happen postwar.
Thande has really outdone himself IMO of getting both the historical and modern-day feel and culture of the different American regions and states translated into the Confederations and this update is where it's begun to shine. The Confederation of Virginia - clearly the real-world 'Upper South' - IS undoubtedly southern to me and a ton of others, yet he's made an accurate call in older entries and this one especially on how it's NOT just lumped in with the Deep South proper (ably represented the Confederation of Carolina, natch) in many peoples' eyes but also how it is more integrated to the northern-settled parts of the country. Heck, this was shown in the Civil War of OTL with much of the Appalachian-descended parts of the USA staying loyal to the Union (or attempting to counter-secede like East Tennessee did) or Chesapeake areas being kept (see: Maryland).
To say nothing of other places. He's made a point that New England was quite regionally proud and assimilist on its own accord with the Supremacist Party doing well there, and that the Pennsylvanians/Quaker-settled lands were ultimately clearly 'northern' in culture (being pro-abolitionist and liberal) but also able to be literal middlemen in not just ways of life but politics, what with the Virginia Crisis being mostly quelled with the Pennsylvanian Confederation's troops and explicitly under a name of 'restoring order' (and middle America loves nothing if not a status quo or a return to one).
And of course, he has deftly woven in TTL's differences into this. Southerners were ardent expansionists but to be hemmed in by Amerindians and rival European-descended powers (and French, to boot! They're still Anglo in roots) have clearly made Carolinians howl, yet he also solved a Civil War issue Dixie had by giving it the Greater Antilles to settle - by default a supremely wealthy area since the timeline's beginning, no British abolition act allowing it to stay rich and add to Carolinian diversity in economy and profit, and (I figure) a Carolinian fleet and seaman experience that could have a potentially better time fighting off any Imperial blockade in both direct battles and with all those extra ports and islands to keep an eye on.
To say nothing of the Carolinians being surprisingly accepting of Catholicism and at least the white elites of the West Indies if flooding the islands with Anglo commoners and settlers. That's an interesting yet logical twist for a group of people that was traditionally America's most aristocratic and cynical in acceptance - acceptance if rich and white, and not poor or especially, black.
I grew up in Delaware (Quaker-settled), currently live in Maryland (Chesapeake/Upper Southern-settled), and have been stationed in the Deep South for my military days, as well as extensive visits to Boston and Chicago (ultimately a Yankee-settled city). Thande has captured the feel and roots of these many American areas and adapted it wonderfully for the sake of his TL. It's been a very good read that has paid off well in this update and my anticipation to see the inevitable culture shock that will happen postwar.
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