Look to the West: Thread III, Volume IV (Tottenham Nil)!
- Thread starter Thande
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Interestingly enough, they're probably the safest places in the entire soon-to-be kingdom. They're surrounded by allied New Spain, allied Louisiana, and neutral Virginia. However, the ENA has gotten to Santa Fe no problem, so it's possible that getting there won't be so hard after all.
In my opinion, the biggest threat is probably a slave revolt.
I thought the Cherokee had a little southern extension that took them to the sea (or nearly so). Wasn't that how the Seminole were incorporated in the first place?
I doubt there are that many slaves that far west.
As for how the ENA got to Santa Fe, I believe that's been covered. Virginia is neutral in the War between the Confederations, but is not and can not be so in the war on New Spain. So troops are free to march through, so long as they don't cross Virginia's border with Carolina.
Why is Mexico richer, though?
The Comanche? Yea, they weren't exactly on the best of terms with new Spain.
The addition of Californian wealth probably doesn't hurt, not to mention Mexico ITTL didn't have to fund a revolution and a slew of mini civil wars.
That certainly ought to have helped. Mainly though I reason backward from the fact that the Empire of New Spain still exists. The peoples of the USPA threw down the gauntlet of a bourgeois but plebeian-populist republic generations ago, and threw the monarchy out of the south half of South America--but that same dynasty has managed to hold on to the remainder of the old Spanish empire in the Americas (those parts of it not poached away by the ENA or Dutch or French anyway); nor is this a case of a European-based colonial power holding sway over a swathe of backward peoples impressive in area but not in depth of development; on the contrary the three American kingdoms are the base and center of the empire. The colonial peoples of Nuevo Granada, Guatemala and Mexico come from broadly the same background as the South Americans who founded the USPA, yet the latter holds little attraction as a revolutionary ideal. Nor would New Spain be able to resist the Meridians militarily unless the general economic and civil development of the northern realms kept pace with the enterprising, liberal Meridians--we've been told how the USPA attracted people like Joseph Priestly with broadly speaking the same ideological appeal the USA had OTL.
So the disparate subjects of the ENS may be more conservative, old-fashioned, less industrial and mercantile, more divided by caste and local ethnicities, and so forth, relative to the USPA, but relative to OTL they have to be more progressive in these directions than the post-colonial Latin America familiar to our history, or the monarchy would not have stood a chance at reinventing itself to stand on an American basis. The monarchs have to be fostering an entrepreneurial class, doubtless still biased toward the more Castilian-like creoles but probably somewhat inclusive of most native ethnicities as well; they preside over a more sophisticated monarchial bureaucracy that draws from the peoples of New Spain and has its finger on their pulse. The old Spanish Empire of the Indies of OTL was a thin layer of Castilian aristocrats over peoples kept subjugated by divide and rule tactics, and what impulse toward middle class development that might have taken root there was crowded out by the British of OTL seizing control of the maritime merchant trade, a pattern continued after the monarchy lost control due to Napoleon crushing the homeland--in Latin America, until the Yankees crowded them on wholesale after WWII, the norm was to be a quasi-colony of Britain instead of Spain.
With the discomfiture of England and the ENA concentrating mainly on digesting outright conquests such as Cuba, surely the new monarchy founded on the old dynasty ITTL has fostered indigenous New Spanish merchants and mariners to take all that back, or anyway the majority of it.
So actually I would not say the ENS, or even kingdom of Mexico, profits from Californian wealth--rather the other way round, the fact that the Mexican government has been able to project itself so deeply into California and so beyond it to the north is a reflection of the greater strength and cohesion of Latin America united under the dynasty. I've made my arguments for why I think the per capita average of wealth for the peoples under the New Spanish crown would be greater by a significant amount than the same territories in OTL by this date, and I'd argue further that the power of the state would be greater in more than linear proportion, and of course is centralized as well, so the New Spanish should be able to project something like an order of magnitude more power than some ASB federation of the OTL republics could have mustered--because even if by some alien space bat mesmermism those states and statelets had set aside all their quarrels and consolidated all the force each could raise, the dissipation of power that their division, until the magical handwaved unity happened, caused and represented meant that each was weaker and more backward than this great union allows.
So--even it it is still true that per capita, the subjects of New Spain are still poorer, less integrated, and generally backward than the peoples of either USPA or ENA, relative to OTL they should be rich and mighty, mainly on the basis of better improvement of the wealth they had when the old Spanish empire was reorganized on an American-centered basis, plus having avoided civil war and having freed themselves of foreign domination. And only secondarily from exploiting still wider resources than available to them collectively OTL--it isn't clear to me that California was showing a profit enough to offset the loss of Cuba for instance, yet.
They have their dissidents; a lot of the Californian Adamantines (including La Zorra herself for instance) are of New Spanish background. I'd think the monarchy still worries about the possible subversive influence of Meridian ideology; we know their armies engage in wars against the more rebellious Indians, suggesting broader discontent that does not dare risk the same treatment but does not love the Empire.
I'm just saying that if the Empire has its internal enemies and its weaknesses, it should still be stronger by an order of magnitude than the OTL nations occupying its territory, and this quantity doubtless includes quality as well.
Thande
Donor
No, they were always landlocked (which allowed Carolina to mostly control their foreign and trade policy) and the Seminole area was always an exclave. Note however that bits have been carved off all the Indian lands since the 1815 borders due to various purchases and cessions.
I believe I have covered the fact that the reasons why New Spain has not yet proved too susceptible to ideas of Meridian republicanism are:
1) The exilic Bourbons brought the Unifying Idea with them of a glorious return to grace in the future which galvanised the people behind them.
2) The Meridians' invasion during the Third Platinean War made them (in the short term) a bugbear and copying their ideas makes you a traitor. (See British establishment attitudes to parliamentary reform in the wake of the American and French Revolutions).
3) Ferdinand VII pushes the idea that the colonial peoples of the Americas have a superior, go-getting strain compared to the 'stay-at-homers' of Europe, thus reversing the historical precedent in New Spain where Peninsulares were considered superior to everyone else by mere geographic accident of birth. So his regime is pretty popular with middle-class Criollos in New Spain, who are the group who the Meridian revolution was led by and would be required to pull a similar one in any of the New Spanish kingdoms.
Now, things have started to change, because...
1) Has turned out to be a damp squib, and now Old Spain has rebelled against the glorious return to grace, because history isn't neat and doesn't have a last page with a satisfying ending. So that's shattered the founding myth of New Spain.
2) Memories of the Third Platinean War have faded and the UPSA has built economic ties with New Spain that mean New Spaniards see Meridians all the time, know they aren't monsters and hear about their ideas of government.
3) Still applies for the moment though.
The UPSA doesn't have military ambitions on New Spain at the moment because its politics for the last ten years have been dominated by arguments about what to do with areas it conquered in the Brazilian War and then were spun off as puppet republics, whether to fully annex them or not, so that question has to be settled before any further expansion can be considered. There is also the point that the UPSA has already effectively economically subordinated New Spain so is fairly satisfied with the status quo. New Spain is not meant to be significantly richer than the corresponding regions in OTL. It has avoided the conflicts between new nations of OTL which will help, but it's still had a lot of localised rebellions to put down. And now one of them has gone from a rebellion to a revolution, influenced by those very Meridian ideas which are clearly no longer verboten.
Nice map, Doctor Thande.
The greater Native American state in the praries is f-ing huge! I guess that Superia will grow larger.
Also, is there supposed to be that line in the middle of Amsterdam-shire, New York, at the division between OTL greater NY City and Upstate NY State?
Why are the Cayman Islands part of Guatemala? Why are they not part of ENA? Oh, and wasn't Tobago supposed to be Brit/American rather than Dutch, and the former Danish West Indies Dutch rather than Brit/American?
Otherwise, coolness.
Thande
Donor
Although as I say I haven't really distinguished between claims, settlement, etc. It's really more of a "a big area in which are some Indians, Métis and former Superior Republic types can live without worrying about running into American frontier troops" rather than defining the borders of a coherent state.Nice map, Doctor Thande.
The greater Native American state in the praries is f-ing huge! I guess that Superia will grow larger.
That's a mistake on my part due to the base map I was working from. Will fix in future maps.
I was working from Nugax's map but he appears to have misread the line in part #25. I never explicitly said anything so I might just have it so that Tobago was ceded to the Dutch after the Third War of Supremacy, as it doesn't make much sense otherwise and I want it to end up with Guyana.
The Cayman Islands should indeed be part of the ENA seeing as they were considered part of Jamaica at the time they were ceded.
Those were sold to the Dutch in Part #25.
Thanks.Otherwise, coolness.
And I have just done the same. This has been a great read and I eagerly await the next chapter.
Thande
Donor
Thanks for the comments you two. I wanted to update this week but it's been too hot for me to concentrate on the complex series of events in the ENA. As I didn't want to leave you without anything before I go on holiday, I have done one slightly 'different' update for a change that tends to stand on its own. It comes with a longer prologue quote than usual, too...
Interlude #19: The Right and Left Hands
“No, I would not say that the war substantially changed my opinion of the UPSA’s system of government. I had already been quite disabused of any naive illusions I might have retained by the absurd campaign of ’43.[1] It was already clear to me that the democratic model {at least in its present form} was fundamentally flawed. Too many of the people being asked to make decisions of national importance were making them based on reasons that betrayed not only a lack of knowledge, which could theoretically be remedied, but a fundamental lack of interest. One can give a child or a grown man or woman additional knowledge, but only if they possess the key intellectual curiosity to recogise that additional knowledge is something they should desire to gain. Any classroom will illustrate that while knowledge can be conveyed to a willing mind, it may not be beaten into an unwilling one as anything more than briefly memorised parrot repetition. And converting an unwilling to a willing mind is a difficult process, and it should be recognised that it is not possible for all humans, no matter the resources, time and skill of the educator.
“This is not a bad thing. If the entire human race shared the same level of intellectual curiosity, we would either still all be living as hunter-gatherers, or else all have died out due to an inability to focus on the practical tasks immediately in front of us rather than spending our time dreaming with our heads in the clouds. For the human race to survive, it is necessary that we have both types of people – or rather the reality, of course, is that there is a range between the two extremes and a perfect society should ensure that everyone receives the place according to his own abilities and skills. The incurious man would do a poor job ruling, but the curious man would be just as ill-suited to a monotonous factory job. Both would make mistakes that would cost lives: perhaps on a different scale, but the loss of one human life is as big a tragedy as the loss of a thousand.
“The role of what men name ‘class’ is to make that very act of sortition, so that each man—or woman—may play the role to which they are suited. {Whether it is an idea that was dreamed up by one visionary at the dawn of human civilisation and passed down to every successor, or} >It is an intrinsic property of the human race, one that is simply recognised and codified by wise rulers across the world. But ‘class’ has become corrupted. The rot {, the Fall if you will,} crept in when class membership was made hereditary. The reasons for this are obvious. Historically, and inaccurately, classes have been seen as unequal. There are more peasants then there are kings and the king gives orders to the peasants, so therefore the king is superior. This is a piece of arrant nonsense—one might as well argue that it is the peasants who feed the king, so they are superior. Of course the reality is that neither is any use without the other. {But I digress.} Because it seemed that being a king {or a religious leader} was a superior position, kings sought to pass that position down to their children or others that they loved. Meanwhile, they punished others of an apparently ‘higher’ class by ‘demoting’ them to the peasantry.
“So vocations came to men with no aptitude for them, one way or the other, and the result is the strife that we have seen afflict our world for far too long. Men and women know this fact in their bones, though they mistake their disquiet for other reasons, projecting it onto other causes. Why, it must be because their king is unjust! Let us overthrow him and replace him by rule by the peasants? Yet if a king is unfit for rule, how much more so is his peasantry? Or so it would seem. In reality we find men such as Cromwell or Robespierre, alleged overthrowers of royalty and aristocracy who in reality were disgraced minor nobility, no less born to rule than those they overthrew. The muddled and intermixed nature of the chaotic modern class system has given birth to such tragedy. So too the conflict between imagined ‘nations’, with invented differences to justify the shedding of blood. Surely the unease will go once the evil foreigners are defeated! But no. Fundamentally the human race is damaged, and the only solution is to tear down the modern corrupted class system and start all over again.
“{Well, on second thoughts, perhaps yes. Perhaps t} >That great farcical conflict of the Fifties did {at least} solidify this in my mind. Kings cannot do the jobs of peasants, and peasants cannot make the decisions of kings...”
*
From: “The Truth and Other Lies – A History of Historiography” by Professor Rory O’Leary (1987) –
Together, the Popular Wars and the Great American War represent a set of bookends for one of the most confused and distorted periods of history to exist. These two conflicts and the Democratic Experiment era in between represent a battlefield of a different kind, the scarred and pitted aftermath of a war waged with pens and tongues and words, much of it taking place after everyone who had actually lived through that time was long dead. It is a wonder that any of the historical record survives uncorrupted for we moderns to peruse—assuming, of course, that what we consider to be pure in fact is.
The first and most obvious historiographic issue concerns nomenclature. Nobody who lived through the Popular Wars, the Democratic Experiment and the Great American War named them that at the time. No soldier was aware that he was fighting in the Great American War—not the American marching on Ultima, not the New Spaniard digging trenches around Las Estrellas, not the Meridian staring sceptically at his army’s newfangled cyclogun where it lay disassembled in the hold of his transport ship. Much less the North Italian and Neapolitan as they clashed in Romagna or the Billungian as he fought the Dane. Yet this is the banner under which modern historiography has seen fit, for a variety of ideological reasons befitting both sides of the Quiet War, to place them under.
Now it is not so remarkable for a war or an entity to be named after the fact. Certainly no-one used the term ‘Byzantine Empire’ until after that empire was already gone, and obviously no-one could have known they were fighting in the Thirty Years’ War until it had concluded. But there is a deeper and more sinister aspect to the retrospective treatment of the period under discussion, one that betrays the deliberate action of latter-day human intervention as if an occult hand had reached down from above and moved the players like pawns upon some giant chessboard. ‘Great American War’ seemed a suitable term to those tainted with the hindsight of knowing the central place that the American continent would play in the future, to the extent that the hugely important European conflicts taking place at the same time were demoted to a mere ancillary planet in the orrery of global warfare. But the forcing of a global perspective, as though all the wars of the 1840s and 50s were part of the same grand clash, ultimately stems from the Societist interpretation, even though it is now treated equally as gospel truth by the most strident opponents of Sanchez. It was after all this era that is thought to have been the most influential on Sanchez’s own views.
For the record, the term ‘Great American War’ technically dates from 1873, although baldly stating a date obscures the background of a more complex process. The term ‘Great War’ was first used as an all-encompassing term—taking in the Californian rebellion against New Spain, the Louisiana uprising and Carolina’s break with the ENA—by the New York Daily Register in 1868. As is frustratingly often the case with attempting to track the textual history of neologisms, the term was however used in a manner that implied it was already a common and well-understood phrase. The phrase then pops up three years later in 1871 used by the Manchester Herald, which refers to ‘the Americans’ Great War’. Finally in 1873 it mutated to its final form in the Birmingham Star, and throughout the 1870s and 1880s became used in translated form by various European papers and writers. Crucially, however, it is readily apparent from context that none of these writings used the term to describe anything other than the conflicts that had taken place in the American sphere. Indeed, the German and Italian papers specifically referred to the Great American War in contrast to their own more homegrown conflicts (in at least one case the context was a journalist wryly dwelling on American florin bloodies and how a war story sounds so much more romantic and less miserable when it comes from an exotic clime).
The expansion of this name to a far more all-encompassing meaning came later, in the aftermath of the Pandoric War (itself, of course, not named that at the time either) when it became apparent that the future history of the world had ultimately been determined by the Great American War and therefore historians of all ideological stripes were keen to link all other contemporaneous conflicts to it. This factor is shared with the periods proceeding it, the Popular Wars and the Democratic Experiment. At the time, the more common name used (if any) for the Popular Wars was ‘the Democratic War’, and at one point it was not uncommon to describe all or some of the fronts of the Great American War as ‘the Second Democratic War’. Paradoxically it was as these terms fell away that the term Democratic Experiment, itself taken from an obscure letter by Sanchez, came into prominence. It had once been in the interests of the dispossessed aristocracies of the European powers to describe their enemies as Democrats, but even as the aftermath of the Great American War saw a retreat from the democracy of the Experiment in many quarters—the ‘Federalist Backlash’ as it is now more euphemistically termed—that word was becoming increasingly mainstream. Though ‘Ochlocrat’ was occasionally used instead, the clumsiness of that word meant that ‘Populist’, after the political party in Great Britain, took its place, hence the (First) Democratic War became the Popular Wars. The Populists’ chaotic history nicely summed up the black picture of democracy that established interests wished to paint; even in the absence of ‘democracy’ becoming less of a negative term in the public imagination, it would have been advantageous. ‘Democracy’ could mean a lot of things, but ‘Populism’ was irrevocably bound to the Populists’ trouble, the inability to hold together a party based on squabbling working-class interests once their strongman had died. This is, of course, a crass oversimplification at best, but it served the interests of the ruling classes with ultimately deadly results.
Ultimately the view of the period that grew to predominate discourse, promoted by both Societists and Diversitarians for different reasons, is that the Great American War ‘proved’ that democracy was flawed or an inappropriate system of government. Nowadays of course this view is often edited and softened by Diversitarians due to their newfound commitment to democracy—sometimes if only because Societists are against it—who instead prefer to make vague paternalistic pronouncements to the effect that ‘the people were not yet ready’. Whether there is any truth to any of this is another matter. To hear some treatments of the matter, one might imagine that the people of certain nations solemnly nodded in understanding that their votes had ruined their country’s fortunes and they proceeded to hand their rights back with cap in hand and bashful expressions. The reality was that this was simply a convenient scapegoat for established interests, at least for the most part, and there is plenty of historical evidence that a more limited franchise did not prevent changes of government as equally catastrophic as some of the many that took place during the Great American War. Certainly the sheer number of these shifts may have helped cement the idea of flawed democracy in the public mind (or at least some facets of it) so they are worthy of examination.
The American example is perhaps overanalysed, so let us start with some of the others . France arguably already had a neat system for avoiding problems of this type—it simply was not employed. Villon, who never had that much focus on foreign affairs in his government, regarded the intervention in the West Indies and Louisiana as being a minor affair and elected not to form a national government and appoint a Dictateur as had been the case during the Popular Wars. Of course, it did not help that with Bonaparte buried and Malraux indisposed (he would pass away in 1850) there were no elder statesmen who could fill the role. Villon may also have been leery at the idea of including the extremist Noirs in government, as did Dupuit after he won the election in 1851. Despite only possessing a strong minority, he continued to govern alone in time of war. It is the shift from Villon to Dupuit that is often blamed for France’s embarrassing failures in the Louisiana intervention, but a close examination of the record reveals this for the myth it is. Indeed, if anything Dupuit placed more emphasis than Villon on trying to bring the matter to a close. It is true that Dupuit refused to send troops and ships to General Dufaux that could have turned the tide, but he had good reason for this. France effectively faced a war zone on every one of her continental borders by the time Dupuit became Prime Minister, and Dupuit quite reasonably felt that she could not afford to tie down her military (itself rather reduced under the last Rouge government) when any one of those conflict zones might spill over into her territory. The fact that none of them did so except by France’s own desire does not mean Dupuit made the wrong decision—it is easy to judge with hindsight, but one can easily accept that the stationing of French troops on the Italian and Belgian borders was the reason why the Patrimonial and Unification Wars did not intrude upon France’s citizens. If those troops had gone to Louisiana, it might have been a different situation. Dupuit acknowledged as such in his memoirs—“I do not think it unreasonable to say that I would rather have rebels raising their flag over Beaumont than Saxons raising theirs over Nancy.” The latter choice of city might perhaps have been influenced by some of the extremist Schmidtist rhetoric doing the rounds once again during the Unification War.[2]
Yet is it not immediately obvious how this course of events was so easily twisted to fit the picture that established interests wanted to portray? THE PEOPLE, hoi polloi, the unwashed masses, had stupidly changed course in the middle of a war and ruined France’s strategy by destroying continuity of government. It helped immensely that the election of 1851 had largely been decided by domestic issues, the horde of ‘Threadbare’ voters after the economic reversals of Villon’s time in government. How would the ignorant populace possibly understand the importance of foreign policy, they could not see beyond their next meal, etc. In France itself representative government, if not quite democracy, was too ingrained for there to be much of a reversal. The Federalist Backlash limited itself to the creation of new provincial governments with a limited landowner franchise under the next Vert government, taking some powers away from the more liberally elected Grand-Parlement, and legal tinkering to slow the rate at which Malraux’s laws would bring in more and more people into the voting franchise over time. However, while France itself did not turn its back on the idea of democracy, it was an oft-cited example for those who wished to present such a view, despite France’s successes closer to home in what would eventually be described as part of the Great American War.
The same was the case in Great Britain. William Wyndham’s Regressive Party had been re-elected in 1849 to a more comfortable position, albeit still short of a majority. It is believed by many that Wyndham had planned to retire before long, having set the country on the path he wanted, and was only looking for a suitable successor. However, the intrusion of the Great American War meant that Wyndham was suddenly forced into a position of making foreign policy decisions he was uncomfortable with. Wyndham was loyal to his King-Emperor and broadly agreed with the idea of helping the Americans put down their rebellion, but at heart he shared the same misgivings of many of the people he represented (however reluctantly in some cases) that Britain was being asked to do for the Americans what the Americans had failed to do for them not so long ago. What the people did not know, and Wyndham did, was that the ‘ask’ part was increasingly replaced with what sounded like orders. But so long as the King-Emperor agreed, Wyndham was forced to comply in the face of public opinion.
He was at least helped by a divided opposition. The Populists were still split into feuding groups. It seemed that the true opposition to the Regressive Party would instead come from the most unlikely of marriages. The Green Radicals—the more bourgeois remnant of the old supporters of David Attwood who had followed David Thompson into exile when Llewelyn Thomas became leader of what had been previously considered to be a vague but singular group of Radicals—were reaching out to what remained of the Phoenix Party, the old supporters of the Duke of Marlborough. At least the Phoenix members currently in Parliament were not those who had supported Blandford—those had all fled or faced the noose whether at the hands of civic power or the mob—but it was still a shocking moment for the press. Joseph Hartington, the Green Radical who had become increasingly embittered with Thomas and the Populists, openly declared that he now felt he had more in common with ‘that old bully Marlborough’ than ‘this mob of Bedlamites on their day off doing their best to try to bring this country to its knees’. Outrage notwithstanding, the new alliance took in about 220 Representatives and presented what could either be considered a powerful third force in British politics or else the only second force worthy of the name, given the Populists’ continued failure to agree on anything. Though the Green Radicals and Phoenix Party disagreed on much, they shared a view that Britain required a new voice that would support both ‘modernism’ – by which they mostly meant industry, in the face of the Regressives’ Sutcliffist views—and ‘sensible balanced policies’—by which they meant not allowing the ‘mob’ to decide how things were run.
A crucial question was who should lead this new alliance, along with what name it should have. Both questions were answered in Stephen Watson-Wentworth, the man who on paper was still Marquess of Rockingham. He had abandoned the title, as had many politicians of noble extraction, when it became apparent how little they meant under the new Populist-penned constitution. Indeed, Watson-Wentworth had had that fact particularly cruelly brought home to him when the Populists had invented a trumped-up story of coal seams being discovered under his home of Wentworth Woodhouse and torn up half its grounds to dig mines—never mind that Populist employment laws already meant that there were more mines than miners (or, to be more precise, man-hours) to work them. The action had been purely one of class warfare and revenge, and one that had shocked many of the local Populists in Sheffield who remembered Watson-Wentworth’s father fighting heroically against the browncoats. Watson-Wentworth had sat as Representative for Rotherham and Maltby in Parliament for several years, always elected by a huge majority over any Populist challenger. He was on the books as an Independent, but referred to himself as ‘the last Whig’, a party title now considered either dreadfully old-fashioned or associated with the slaveholders in the ENA. It was his other common phrase to describe himself, ‘a voice for moderation amid Scylla and Charybdis’ that instead gave its name for the new united party he was asked to lead – the Moderates.
It is difficult to say whether the results of the 1852 British election can be attributed to the reversals of the Hanoverian alliance in the Great American War, continental events, the economic situation (which partly stemmed from the first two factors, of course) or simply the fact that this new party had intruded on the political landscape. In any case, the Regressives lost many seats, though the Moderates remained a way short of a majority. To the surprise of many, Watson-Wentworth was able to convince some of the more small-m moderate Populist groups to join his side and support the government—helped by a controversy that the Moderates had engineered a few months before, tabling a licensing law that they knew would divide the Populists starkly between drinkers and supporters of temperance. Those who joined the Moderates were predominantly the pro-drinkers, meaning that the temperance supporters now dominated the rump Populist Party. It was this, coupled to the shock of being reduced to third place in Parliament, that ultimately led to the Populists being reinvented in the late 1850s and 1860s by Matthias Richardson. But for now, Britain had a new Lord President. Did Watson-Wentworth do anything differently to what Wyndham would have done in the sphere of foreign policy? It is difficult to say, as an exhausted Wyndham passed away only months after leaving office, but not before making Edward Cavendish his successor as party leader. The Regressives would not suffer the same period of indecision after the death of their leader that the Populists had. And those Regressives—in particular the Reactivist strain born of John Greville’s pen[3]—had no problem painting a picture of the war going to pot as soon as Watson-Wentworth got his hands on it.
It was many more acts like these, whether on this fairly petty scale or on the grander revisionism of the Patriots in the ENA and the Unionists in the UPSA, which drove what is now termed the Federalist Backlash. But one wonders that if any of these people had been able to see the ends that their casual rewriting of history would bring the world to, would they have still done the same—knowing that any security they bought for their class would barely outlast their lifetime?
A man need not have to have Sanchezist views to conclude that the answer may, depressingly, be ‘yes’.
[1] See Part #162.
[2] Probably referring to things like the chant quoted at the start of Part #77.
[3] See Part #101.
Interlude #19: The Right and Left Hands
“No, I would not say that the war substantially changed my opinion of the UPSA’s system of government. I had already been quite disabused of any naive illusions I might have retained by the absurd campaign of ’43.[1] It was already clear to me that the democratic model {at least in its present form} was fundamentally flawed. Too many of the people being asked to make decisions of national importance were making them based on reasons that betrayed not only a lack of knowledge, which could theoretically be remedied, but a fundamental lack of interest. One can give a child or a grown man or woman additional knowledge, but only if they possess the key intellectual curiosity to recogise that additional knowledge is something they should desire to gain. Any classroom will illustrate that while knowledge can be conveyed to a willing mind, it may not be beaten into an unwilling one as anything more than briefly memorised parrot repetition. And converting an unwilling to a willing mind is a difficult process, and it should be recognised that it is not possible for all humans, no matter the resources, time and skill of the educator.
“This is not a bad thing. If the entire human race shared the same level of intellectual curiosity, we would either still all be living as hunter-gatherers, or else all have died out due to an inability to focus on the practical tasks immediately in front of us rather than spending our time dreaming with our heads in the clouds. For the human race to survive, it is necessary that we have both types of people – or rather the reality, of course, is that there is a range between the two extremes and a perfect society should ensure that everyone receives the place according to his own abilities and skills. The incurious man would do a poor job ruling, but the curious man would be just as ill-suited to a monotonous factory job. Both would make mistakes that would cost lives: perhaps on a different scale, but the loss of one human life is as big a tragedy as the loss of a thousand.
“The role of what men name ‘class’ is to make that very act of sortition, so that each man—or woman—may play the role to which they are suited. {Whether it is an idea that was dreamed up by one visionary at the dawn of human civilisation and passed down to every successor, or} >It is an intrinsic property of the human race, one that is simply recognised and codified by wise rulers across the world. But ‘class’ has become corrupted. The rot {, the Fall if you will,} crept in when class membership was made hereditary. The reasons for this are obvious. Historically, and inaccurately, classes have been seen as unequal. There are more peasants then there are kings and the king gives orders to the peasants, so therefore the king is superior. This is a piece of arrant nonsense—one might as well argue that it is the peasants who feed the king, so they are superior. Of course the reality is that neither is any use without the other. {But I digress.} Because it seemed that being a king {or a religious leader} was a superior position, kings sought to pass that position down to their children or others that they loved. Meanwhile, they punished others of an apparently ‘higher’ class by ‘demoting’ them to the peasantry.
“So vocations came to men with no aptitude for them, one way or the other, and the result is the strife that we have seen afflict our world for far too long. Men and women know this fact in their bones, though they mistake their disquiet for other reasons, projecting it onto other causes. Why, it must be because their king is unjust! Let us overthrow him and replace him by rule by the peasants? Yet if a king is unfit for rule, how much more so is his peasantry? Or so it would seem. In reality we find men such as Cromwell or Robespierre, alleged overthrowers of royalty and aristocracy who in reality were disgraced minor nobility, no less born to rule than those they overthrew. The muddled and intermixed nature of the chaotic modern class system has given birth to such tragedy. So too the conflict between imagined ‘nations’, with invented differences to justify the shedding of blood. Surely the unease will go once the evil foreigners are defeated! But no. Fundamentally the human race is damaged, and the only solution is to tear down the modern corrupted class system and start all over again.
“{Well, on second thoughts, perhaps yes. Perhaps t} >That great farcical conflict of the Fifties did {at least} solidify this in my mind. Kings cannot do the jobs of peasants, and peasants cannot make the decisions of kings...”
– Pablo Sanchez, Twilight Reflections, 1866
Note: This is believed to be an original unexpurgated copy of Sanchez’s words, but the edits later made for the Biblioteka Mundial’s public release version are indicated as {deletion} and >addition.
Note: This is believed to be an original unexpurgated copy of Sanchez’s words, but the edits later made for the Biblioteka Mundial’s public release version are indicated as {deletion} and >addition.
*
From: “The Truth and Other Lies – A History of Historiography” by Professor Rory O’Leary (1987) –
Together, the Popular Wars and the Great American War represent a set of bookends for one of the most confused and distorted periods of history to exist. These two conflicts and the Democratic Experiment era in between represent a battlefield of a different kind, the scarred and pitted aftermath of a war waged with pens and tongues and words, much of it taking place after everyone who had actually lived through that time was long dead. It is a wonder that any of the historical record survives uncorrupted for we moderns to peruse—assuming, of course, that what we consider to be pure in fact is.
The first and most obvious historiographic issue concerns nomenclature. Nobody who lived through the Popular Wars, the Democratic Experiment and the Great American War named them that at the time. No soldier was aware that he was fighting in the Great American War—not the American marching on Ultima, not the New Spaniard digging trenches around Las Estrellas, not the Meridian staring sceptically at his army’s newfangled cyclogun where it lay disassembled in the hold of his transport ship. Much less the North Italian and Neapolitan as they clashed in Romagna or the Billungian as he fought the Dane. Yet this is the banner under which modern historiography has seen fit, for a variety of ideological reasons befitting both sides of the Quiet War, to place them under.
Now it is not so remarkable for a war or an entity to be named after the fact. Certainly no-one used the term ‘Byzantine Empire’ until after that empire was already gone, and obviously no-one could have known they were fighting in the Thirty Years’ War until it had concluded. But there is a deeper and more sinister aspect to the retrospective treatment of the period under discussion, one that betrays the deliberate action of latter-day human intervention as if an occult hand had reached down from above and moved the players like pawns upon some giant chessboard. ‘Great American War’ seemed a suitable term to those tainted with the hindsight of knowing the central place that the American continent would play in the future, to the extent that the hugely important European conflicts taking place at the same time were demoted to a mere ancillary planet in the orrery of global warfare. But the forcing of a global perspective, as though all the wars of the 1840s and 50s were part of the same grand clash, ultimately stems from the Societist interpretation, even though it is now treated equally as gospel truth by the most strident opponents of Sanchez. It was after all this era that is thought to have been the most influential on Sanchez’s own views.
For the record, the term ‘Great American War’ technically dates from 1873, although baldly stating a date obscures the background of a more complex process. The term ‘Great War’ was first used as an all-encompassing term—taking in the Californian rebellion against New Spain, the Louisiana uprising and Carolina’s break with the ENA—by the New York Daily Register in 1868. As is frustratingly often the case with attempting to track the textual history of neologisms, the term was however used in a manner that implied it was already a common and well-understood phrase. The phrase then pops up three years later in 1871 used by the Manchester Herald, which refers to ‘the Americans’ Great War’. Finally in 1873 it mutated to its final form in the Birmingham Star, and throughout the 1870s and 1880s became used in translated form by various European papers and writers. Crucially, however, it is readily apparent from context that none of these writings used the term to describe anything other than the conflicts that had taken place in the American sphere. Indeed, the German and Italian papers specifically referred to the Great American War in contrast to their own more homegrown conflicts (in at least one case the context was a journalist wryly dwelling on American florin bloodies and how a war story sounds so much more romantic and less miserable when it comes from an exotic clime).
The expansion of this name to a far more all-encompassing meaning came later, in the aftermath of the Pandoric War (itself, of course, not named that at the time either) when it became apparent that the future history of the world had ultimately been determined by the Great American War and therefore historians of all ideological stripes were keen to link all other contemporaneous conflicts to it. This factor is shared with the periods proceeding it, the Popular Wars and the Democratic Experiment. At the time, the more common name used (if any) for the Popular Wars was ‘the Democratic War’, and at one point it was not uncommon to describe all or some of the fronts of the Great American War as ‘the Second Democratic War’. Paradoxically it was as these terms fell away that the term Democratic Experiment, itself taken from an obscure letter by Sanchez, came into prominence. It had once been in the interests of the dispossessed aristocracies of the European powers to describe their enemies as Democrats, but even as the aftermath of the Great American War saw a retreat from the democracy of the Experiment in many quarters—the ‘Federalist Backlash’ as it is now more euphemistically termed—that word was becoming increasingly mainstream. Though ‘Ochlocrat’ was occasionally used instead, the clumsiness of that word meant that ‘Populist’, after the political party in Great Britain, took its place, hence the (First) Democratic War became the Popular Wars. The Populists’ chaotic history nicely summed up the black picture of democracy that established interests wished to paint; even in the absence of ‘democracy’ becoming less of a negative term in the public imagination, it would have been advantageous. ‘Democracy’ could mean a lot of things, but ‘Populism’ was irrevocably bound to the Populists’ trouble, the inability to hold together a party based on squabbling working-class interests once their strongman had died. This is, of course, a crass oversimplification at best, but it served the interests of the ruling classes with ultimately deadly results.
Ultimately the view of the period that grew to predominate discourse, promoted by both Societists and Diversitarians for different reasons, is that the Great American War ‘proved’ that democracy was flawed or an inappropriate system of government. Nowadays of course this view is often edited and softened by Diversitarians due to their newfound commitment to democracy—sometimes if only because Societists are against it—who instead prefer to make vague paternalistic pronouncements to the effect that ‘the people were not yet ready’. Whether there is any truth to any of this is another matter. To hear some treatments of the matter, one might imagine that the people of certain nations solemnly nodded in understanding that their votes had ruined their country’s fortunes and they proceeded to hand their rights back with cap in hand and bashful expressions. The reality was that this was simply a convenient scapegoat for established interests, at least for the most part, and there is plenty of historical evidence that a more limited franchise did not prevent changes of government as equally catastrophic as some of the many that took place during the Great American War. Certainly the sheer number of these shifts may have helped cement the idea of flawed democracy in the public mind (or at least some facets of it) so they are worthy of examination.
The American example is perhaps overanalysed, so let us start with some of the others . France arguably already had a neat system for avoiding problems of this type—it simply was not employed. Villon, who never had that much focus on foreign affairs in his government, regarded the intervention in the West Indies and Louisiana as being a minor affair and elected not to form a national government and appoint a Dictateur as had been the case during the Popular Wars. Of course, it did not help that with Bonaparte buried and Malraux indisposed (he would pass away in 1850) there were no elder statesmen who could fill the role. Villon may also have been leery at the idea of including the extremist Noirs in government, as did Dupuit after he won the election in 1851. Despite only possessing a strong minority, he continued to govern alone in time of war. It is the shift from Villon to Dupuit that is often blamed for France’s embarrassing failures in the Louisiana intervention, but a close examination of the record reveals this for the myth it is. Indeed, if anything Dupuit placed more emphasis than Villon on trying to bring the matter to a close. It is true that Dupuit refused to send troops and ships to General Dufaux that could have turned the tide, but he had good reason for this. France effectively faced a war zone on every one of her continental borders by the time Dupuit became Prime Minister, and Dupuit quite reasonably felt that she could not afford to tie down her military (itself rather reduced under the last Rouge government) when any one of those conflict zones might spill over into her territory. The fact that none of them did so except by France’s own desire does not mean Dupuit made the wrong decision—it is easy to judge with hindsight, but one can easily accept that the stationing of French troops on the Italian and Belgian borders was the reason why the Patrimonial and Unification Wars did not intrude upon France’s citizens. If those troops had gone to Louisiana, it might have been a different situation. Dupuit acknowledged as such in his memoirs—“I do not think it unreasonable to say that I would rather have rebels raising their flag over Beaumont than Saxons raising theirs over Nancy.” The latter choice of city might perhaps have been influenced by some of the extremist Schmidtist rhetoric doing the rounds once again during the Unification War.[2]
Yet is it not immediately obvious how this course of events was so easily twisted to fit the picture that established interests wanted to portray? THE PEOPLE, hoi polloi, the unwashed masses, had stupidly changed course in the middle of a war and ruined France’s strategy by destroying continuity of government. It helped immensely that the election of 1851 had largely been decided by domestic issues, the horde of ‘Threadbare’ voters after the economic reversals of Villon’s time in government. How would the ignorant populace possibly understand the importance of foreign policy, they could not see beyond their next meal, etc. In France itself representative government, if not quite democracy, was too ingrained for there to be much of a reversal. The Federalist Backlash limited itself to the creation of new provincial governments with a limited landowner franchise under the next Vert government, taking some powers away from the more liberally elected Grand-Parlement, and legal tinkering to slow the rate at which Malraux’s laws would bring in more and more people into the voting franchise over time. However, while France itself did not turn its back on the idea of democracy, it was an oft-cited example for those who wished to present such a view, despite France’s successes closer to home in what would eventually be described as part of the Great American War.
The same was the case in Great Britain. William Wyndham’s Regressive Party had been re-elected in 1849 to a more comfortable position, albeit still short of a majority. It is believed by many that Wyndham had planned to retire before long, having set the country on the path he wanted, and was only looking for a suitable successor. However, the intrusion of the Great American War meant that Wyndham was suddenly forced into a position of making foreign policy decisions he was uncomfortable with. Wyndham was loyal to his King-Emperor and broadly agreed with the idea of helping the Americans put down their rebellion, but at heart he shared the same misgivings of many of the people he represented (however reluctantly in some cases) that Britain was being asked to do for the Americans what the Americans had failed to do for them not so long ago. What the people did not know, and Wyndham did, was that the ‘ask’ part was increasingly replaced with what sounded like orders. But so long as the King-Emperor agreed, Wyndham was forced to comply in the face of public opinion.
He was at least helped by a divided opposition. The Populists were still split into feuding groups. It seemed that the true opposition to the Regressive Party would instead come from the most unlikely of marriages. The Green Radicals—the more bourgeois remnant of the old supporters of David Attwood who had followed David Thompson into exile when Llewelyn Thomas became leader of what had been previously considered to be a vague but singular group of Radicals—were reaching out to what remained of the Phoenix Party, the old supporters of the Duke of Marlborough. At least the Phoenix members currently in Parliament were not those who had supported Blandford—those had all fled or faced the noose whether at the hands of civic power or the mob—but it was still a shocking moment for the press. Joseph Hartington, the Green Radical who had become increasingly embittered with Thomas and the Populists, openly declared that he now felt he had more in common with ‘that old bully Marlborough’ than ‘this mob of Bedlamites on their day off doing their best to try to bring this country to its knees’. Outrage notwithstanding, the new alliance took in about 220 Representatives and presented what could either be considered a powerful third force in British politics or else the only second force worthy of the name, given the Populists’ continued failure to agree on anything. Though the Green Radicals and Phoenix Party disagreed on much, they shared a view that Britain required a new voice that would support both ‘modernism’ – by which they mostly meant industry, in the face of the Regressives’ Sutcliffist views—and ‘sensible balanced policies’—by which they meant not allowing the ‘mob’ to decide how things were run.
A crucial question was who should lead this new alliance, along with what name it should have. Both questions were answered in Stephen Watson-Wentworth, the man who on paper was still Marquess of Rockingham. He had abandoned the title, as had many politicians of noble extraction, when it became apparent how little they meant under the new Populist-penned constitution. Indeed, Watson-Wentworth had had that fact particularly cruelly brought home to him when the Populists had invented a trumped-up story of coal seams being discovered under his home of Wentworth Woodhouse and torn up half its grounds to dig mines—never mind that Populist employment laws already meant that there were more mines than miners (or, to be more precise, man-hours) to work them. The action had been purely one of class warfare and revenge, and one that had shocked many of the local Populists in Sheffield who remembered Watson-Wentworth’s father fighting heroically against the browncoats. Watson-Wentworth had sat as Representative for Rotherham and Maltby in Parliament for several years, always elected by a huge majority over any Populist challenger. He was on the books as an Independent, but referred to himself as ‘the last Whig’, a party title now considered either dreadfully old-fashioned or associated with the slaveholders in the ENA. It was his other common phrase to describe himself, ‘a voice for moderation amid Scylla and Charybdis’ that instead gave its name for the new united party he was asked to lead – the Moderates.
It is difficult to say whether the results of the 1852 British election can be attributed to the reversals of the Hanoverian alliance in the Great American War, continental events, the economic situation (which partly stemmed from the first two factors, of course) or simply the fact that this new party had intruded on the political landscape. In any case, the Regressives lost many seats, though the Moderates remained a way short of a majority. To the surprise of many, Watson-Wentworth was able to convince some of the more small-m moderate Populist groups to join his side and support the government—helped by a controversy that the Moderates had engineered a few months before, tabling a licensing law that they knew would divide the Populists starkly between drinkers and supporters of temperance. Those who joined the Moderates were predominantly the pro-drinkers, meaning that the temperance supporters now dominated the rump Populist Party. It was this, coupled to the shock of being reduced to third place in Parliament, that ultimately led to the Populists being reinvented in the late 1850s and 1860s by Matthias Richardson. But for now, Britain had a new Lord President. Did Watson-Wentworth do anything differently to what Wyndham would have done in the sphere of foreign policy? It is difficult to say, as an exhausted Wyndham passed away only months after leaving office, but not before making Edward Cavendish his successor as party leader. The Regressives would not suffer the same period of indecision after the death of their leader that the Populists had. And those Regressives—in particular the Reactivist strain born of John Greville’s pen[3]—had no problem painting a picture of the war going to pot as soon as Watson-Wentworth got his hands on it.
It was many more acts like these, whether on this fairly petty scale or on the grander revisionism of the Patriots in the ENA and the Unionists in the UPSA, which drove what is now termed the Federalist Backlash. But one wonders that if any of these people had been able to see the ends that their casual rewriting of history would bring the world to, would they have still done the same—knowing that any security they bought for their class would barely outlast their lifetime?
A man need not have to have Sanchezist views to conclude that the answer may, depressingly, be ‘yes’.
[1] See Part #162.
[2] Probably referring to things like the chant quoted at the start of Part #77.
[3] See Part #101.
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Alex Richards
Donor
Loving the ironic echoing of Atlee's own policy towards Wentworth-Woodhouse there.
You know, given that we are in the middle of perhaps the pivotal war(s) of the TL and that very little actually happened in this update to develop that, it still managed to be absolutely fascinating.
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