I somewhat agree. I really enjoyed this update focusing on alt-historiography, but I've been a bit disappointed by Thande's focus on ideological developments and parliamentary back-and-forths. This kind of detail is what makes LTTW unique and interesting, but it's simply not as interesting to read as more 'solid' updates about diplomatic and military aspects of TTL's history. I became a fan of LTTW because of the rich and divergent world it presents, but unfortunately most updates in recent memory have been mainly confined to Pablo Sanchez's journal and personal drama inside parliamentary buildings. Bring back LTTW's broad, detailed world of alternate religion, architecture, etc!
Look to the West: Thread III, Volume IV (Tottenham Nil)!
- Thread starter Thande
- Start date
- Status
I somewhat agree. I really enjoyed this update focusing on alt-historiography, but I've been a bit disappointed by Thande's focus on ideological developments and parliamentary back-and-forths. This kind of detail is what makes LTTW unique and interesting, but it's simply not as interesting to read as more 'solid' updates about diplomatic and military aspects of TTL's history. I became a fan of LTTW because of the rich and divergent world it presents, but unfortunately most updates in recent memory have been mainly confined to Pablo Sanchez's journal and personal drama inside parliamentary buildings. Bring back LTTW's broad, detailed world of alternate religion, architecture, etc!
I for one am enjoying the latest updates, skimming down the Sanchezesque story telling would leave us oblivious to what Societism is all about. And if the various hints are to be taken at face value, Societism is going to be at the core of the alt cold war.
Yeay! Implicit promises that we will revisit my obscure little corner of the planet again!
Thande
Donor
Part #186: Pee Dee Shames
“Can a man’s essential nobility of conduct be recognised even while acknowledging that his cause is loathsome? I would say no, if only because such arguments are too often applied to men of war, and in my view there can be no nobility in any man who would take up arms against his fellows.”
*
From: “A Biographical Dictionary of the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries” by Jacques DeDerrault (1956, authorised English translation):
‘Sir Alfred Stotts’ is a name for tombstones and memorials, a name that belies the character of the man who, in his lifetime, was more frequently dubbed “that horrible little man Stotts” by his ‘betters’ and ‘Our Alfie’ by his comrades. How differently a man is viewed when he can own one of the few genuine Carolinian triumphs of a war otherwise marked by reversals, defeats and poisoned chalices! Upon reading the tributes paid upon his death in 1860, few readers would guess that many of the writers of those tributes, not so many years previously, would have cheered on the other side in any battle involving Alf Stotts as a commander. He was a man who embodied the bourgeois and proletarian challenge to the aristocratic establishment of Carolina in the Democratic Experiment years, a trend almost entirely missed by northern observers.
Alf Stotts was born in Congaryton, South Province in 1799 to a poor family. His father, also named Alfred, worked as an overseer on a rice plantation that came into the hands of Douglas Eveleigh (father of Andrew Eveleigh) in 1804. Though Stotts was not the type to write diaries or memoirs, it is clear from well-attested oral histories that both the elder and younger Alf Stotts were not impressed with the young Andrew and his ‘head full of damnfool ideas’ that they regarded as getting in the way of trying to run the plantation efficiently. However, as the Eveleigh family rose to become more influential and politically significant, the Stotts’ protests were more easily quashed and Stotts was eventually removed from his position and dispossessed of the house and small bit of land he owned by a corrupt court. Alf Stotts senior died in a workhouse, from which only three of his four children would escape. Alf junior, the youngest, vowed revenge not only on the Eveleighs specifically but on the system that had allowed them to get away with such injustice.
Because history recognises Stotts’ greatest triumphs as being in the Great American War, he is seldom counted among the great adventurers such as Benyovsky or George Alexander (though after those same triumphs, some Carolinian aristocrats did unconvincingly attempt to claim he was an illegitimate adopted son of the Alexander family). However, his early career saw him seek his fortune abroad as a soldier of fortune. There were many such men in the Carolinian army of the Great American War, but most of them had gone no further afield than the Empire of New Spain, putting down rebellions for Ferdinand VII. Stotts on the other hand resolved to see the East. His earliest military experience was at the age of 15, as a drummer boy in the French Colonial forces intervening in the Maratha civil war in India. Exactly how he got there in the first place is still rather unclear and, as noted above, Stotts himself was not a man to make detailed comments about his life. Biographers have filled volumes with what amount to colourful wild guesses. Stotts went on to fight as a private in the Portuguese colonial army of the Philippine War; one possibly apocryphal story suggests that, as there were some Carolinians fighting for New Spain on the other side,[1] Stotts ended up in a swordfight with a man who had been the child on the next bench in the Congaryton workhouse. Whether this dramatic story is true or not, it is certainly the case that he met up with that person during the conflict, and Jack Barton became Stotts’ lifelong friend and ally in his struggle against the Carolinian establishment.
Stotts was discharged from the Portuguese forces following the victorious war with a sergeant’s stripes to show for it. It would be in service to the Feng Dynasty in China that he would make his name, however. The Feng were recruiting any and all European officers they could find to train their modernising army and extend Haijing’s control to the whole of southern China. Stotts successfully bluffed his way into a lieutenancy, with Barton as his sergeant, and initially served in Guizhou province, part of the force defeating warlords and local rebels loyal to General Yu in order to make the authority of the Feng-appointed governors real. Stotts rapidly rose from his imagined rank to become a captain and then in 1825 a major. He invented an aristocratic upbringing and sometimes even pretended to be British rather than American, adjusting his story to what he felt would most impress the Feng officials he was dealing with at the time. It was already clear that, while Stotts was a decent soldier, his real skill lay in a form of military alienism [psychology], understanding the minds of both his opponents and those on his own side that he must deal with. This meant that he could well handle the political side of being an officer and wormed his way into greater influence with the Feng court and the European trading companies interlaced with it. In the process, he left a sufficient number of illegitimate gwayese children scattered across the southern provinces of China that his enemies in Carolina would later collectively dub them the ‘Stotts Dynasty’.[2]
His real big break came with the Anqing Incident in 1826. Although open war between Feng and Beiqing did not break out, the skirmishes in the disputed central provinces gave Stotts plenty of opportunity to rise to glory. In particular he was noted for how he employed new technology. At the time, some Feng Chinese officials and military officers were enthusiastic about using technology such as steam engines and balloons, but in a rather tokenistic way—in the words of Henry Watt, as though turning up to a battle with them was simply a way of engineering a favourable augury with the spirits to decide the outcome. Watt was rather unfairly chauvinistic with his words, probably reflecting his own frustrations with attempting to introduce steam power for civilian use to the city of Fuzhou at the time. Stotts, for the record, was asked about the subject not long before his death and wryly commented “The Fengmen? Yes, they didn’t understand how to use the engines and thought you could get miracles on the battlefield just by shouting the orders louder. Nearly as bad as Adams and Wragg, in fact.” Stotts was one of the few European officers to both understand the potential of the new technologies but also to recognise that the battlefields of China were often different, and tactics developed in the Jacobin Wars could not always be simply transposed to them. His use of steam-tractors to scatter a Beiqing force near Nanchang, driving them against Poyang Lake and forcing the enemy commander to surrender, won him particular plaudits during the course of the Incident.
Stotts went on to serve in the intervention in Yunnan after General Yu’s death in 1828 and in the early part of the First Sino-Siamese War (1832-1838). For the first time he faced another Asian force that had also modernised itself with European tactics, and acquitted himself fairly well but is recorded of speaking admirably of many of his Siamese opposite numbers. In the course of the war, Stotts ended up fighting a skirmish with the estate of a wealthy man in a town south of Yunnanfu as his battlefield. The gentleman in question was a former Yu loyalist and was slain in the course of the war, leading to Stotts appropriating his house and fortune, selling the former to increase the latter. Having achieved fame and riches, he resigned from Chinese service at the height of the war and decided to return to Carolina in 1836, accompanied by his faithful Barton.
Entirely intentionally, Stotts shocked ‘civilised’ Carolinian society by purchasing a fine house in the heart of the upper-class district of his home town of Congaryton, and then proceeding to hold loud and rambunctious parties to which he invited all his old friends from the workhouse and fellow overseers’ families, those who stil survived. He made himself an enemy of the Burdenists by constantly dismissing Andrew Eveleigh as ‘an idiot’, at a time when the Burdenists were seeking to make him a martyr to their cause. At the same time, he confused society by speaking approvingly of the Chinese and criticising Racist views against them—which was normally something the Burdenists did due to Eveleigh’s then-controversial opinion that the white, red and yellow races were all equal. Despite his skill in that general field, Stotts had no interest in attacking his enemies in the political arena, but used his wealth to buy himself an officer’s commission in the American army, making his way up to a colonelcy. It was not long afterwards that the purchase of commissions was more heavily regulated in America, and Carolina’s MCPs voted for the move against their previous defence of the practice—while this is usually attributed to the decline of aristocratic power in Carolina, it has sometimes been claimed that ‘the Outrageous Stotts’ was responsible for changing the minds of aristocrats that the purchase of commissions was a good thing. Certainly more stringent regulations came in in Carolina than in the rest of the ENA, which has led some military historians to attribute superior performance to the more meritocratically promoted Carolinian officers in contrast to those from the rest of the ENA on the other side.
Garbled and exaggerated tales of Stotts’ exploits flooded Carolina, with some sceptical members of society convinced that he was a charlatan. This view was exploded, however, with the tour of Harris Peters and Xu Lingzhi in 1841. Peters was a Virginian-born trade magnate whose chief enterprise was the trade of Appalachian ginseng to Feng China in exchange for silks and porcelain. In order to drum up increased public interest in his business, he paid for the Feng trade official Xu Lingzhi to come to America and tour the capitals of the five Confederations and some other locations, such as the ginseng plantations themselves—which Xu proceeded to redesign according to Chinese feng shui ideas to provide Peters with a new advertising claim for the Chinese end of his business. Charleston was one of the first stops on Peters’ and Xu’s tour, but during a welcome dinner hosted by Governor Alexander, Xu’s interpreter was taken ill. (A persistent theory claims that this was the result of a botched poisoning attempt, though whether it was aimed at Peters, Xu or Alexander depends on which theorists one asks). Stotts happened to be in Charleston at the time—though not invited to the dinner of course—and was roped in as interpreter, proceeding to do a better job than the man he had replaced. In fact Xu insisted that Stotts continue with him on the rest of his tour, particularly appreciating how Stotts managed to translate the mandarin’s wry humour into English. This tour made Stotts’ name throughout the other Confederations, and John Alexander was grateful for a Carolinian to have some positive press at a time when the divide between Carolina and the rest of the ENA was growing increasingly bitter. To that end, and much to the horror of Stotts’ opponents, Alexander recommended Stotts for a knighthood. The ageing Lord Fingall was obliging, having attended Xu’s visit to Fredericksburg, and ‘Our Alfie’ became Sir Alfred Stotts.
Though Stotts might achieve a generalship through these connections in 1845, his political enemies in the Army still managed to get him assigned to the most fever-ridden islands of the Carolinian West Indies for garrison duty. Stotts proved unkillable, though, and had soon managed to work his way back onto the continent. It is an accident of history, perhaps, that he found himself where he did when the Great American War came to Carolina, but if so it illustrates just how significant such ‘accidents’ can be...
*
From “The Great American War” by Alexander Jenkins (1972)—
Though June 1849 saw the entry of the UPSA into the war, it also success for the American forces in Carolina, with General Jones’ salient linking Whitefort with Charleston having cut off and pocketed the Carolinian troops in North Province. Gradually being supplemented by more troops arriving in Charleston under the watchful guns of the invincible armourclad Lord Washington, Jones proceeded to push north towards Charlotte, which would surrender after a brief siege on July 3rd. The situation for the pocketed Carolinian troops looked increasingly bleak. Their chain of command had been cut by the Whitefort salient and, though General Rutledge is often described as the ‘commander’ of this pocket, in reality he only had command and control over around three-quarters of the men at this point. Others had no orders and either deserted or milled around helplessly in defensible positions. Rutledge, an experienced but somewhat unimaginative commander, realised that his only hope was to try to take Jones’ forces in their flank at a weak point and try to break out. The only other options were to surrender or to be pressed against the Virginian border and either worn down or risk trying to escape into Virginia, which Rutledge knew could, and likely would, lead Virginia to turn away from neutrality and join the struggle against Carolina.
Rutledge’s problem was that he was struggling with an incomplete and imperfect mass of troops with little in the way of military intelligence. He had no information on where he might find the weak point he needed, or where Jones was at any time. Fortunately for him, the main group of Carolinian forces massing at Ultima were led by a man who understood Rutledge’s situation, a man who had spent most of his life surrounded by enemies trying to pull him down—Alfred Stotts.
Naturally, half of the Carolinian government hated the idea of Stotts leading the counter-offensive, but the increasing voice for working-class interests in the General Assembly helped Stotts, and many of his usual enemies were desperate enough to try anything at this point. Stotts was the right man in the right place at the right time. He used his alienistic skill in a twofold manner—to handle those politicians and superior officers who believed that one good offensive would shatter the Americans and allow Carolina to retake all its lost territories in one fell swoop, and as an offensive weapon against General Jones. As Stotts was well aware, ‘that bloody Welchman’ was a fine commander and one who would not easily be defeated. At the same time, Stotts himself and his life story were well known in the northern Confederations for his celebrated tour as a Chinese interpreter. He realised that he could use this to his advantage.
Stotts placed his majordomo Jack Barton in charge of an impromptu intelligence network similar to those he had used in China, where Feng-sympathising peasants might be under the rule of the Beiqing Dynasty or the Siamese Empire. There was a similar situation in Carolina due to the number of Carolinians now under what they regarded as occupation by Jones’ army. Some were openly becoming Kleinkriegers, but there were many who would balk at that but yet would slip information to Stotts’ agents and pass on orders to General Rutledge on the other side of the salient. At the same time, Stotts allowed some orders to fall into American hands, coupled with a persistent rumour campaign. These orders stated that Stotts was going to drive at Congaryton—which was after all the most obvious target—and the rumours talked about Stotts’ history of growing up in Congaryton as a poor child and then buying his big house there, now under American occupation, with his fortune. The rumours implied that Stotts was enraged at Jones for taking his prize from him and was determined to regain Congaryton from ‘the Yankees’ filthy fingers’ at the first opportunity. At the time, Jones was concerned that his forces were spread too thin and the reinforcements coming through Charleston harbour were thus far insufficient to stand up to a concerted attack in the right place. The intercepted orders thus seemed a Godsend to him. He built up the garrison in Congaryton while continuing to drive Rutledge further north and east. Rutledge, meanwhile, had orders to come southwards and eastwards in an arc as though trying to push for Congaryton, only to be blocked at every opportunity by Jones.
The final stage of Stotts’ plan required more complex and immediate communication with Rutledge, so he resorted to one of his trademark uses of technology. Balloons were already in use by both sides for observation and communication, but at this point artillerymen were growing more skilled at shooting them down, even though dedicated antidrome guns were still rare. Stotts could not risk such an encounter and he exploited the fact that the New York Register had audaciously sent its journalists in a large balloon painted with the neutral Virginian flag to deliver regular sketches of the battlefields of the war to their readers back up north. Stotts obtained a similar balloon and used it to signal to Rutledge’s forces at Kingston via heliograph.[3] By these means, though they were probably against the laws of war (admittedly rather vague on this particular point at the time), Rutledge knew when and where to push south through areas which Jones had stripped of troops to bolster Congaryton—which Stotts had no intention of going anywhere near. In Jones’ defence, he seems to have relied on the Pee Dee River as an obstacle to Rutledge rather than simply assuming Rutledge would not turn that way, but Stotts and Rutledge both knew the area well and where the usable fords were.[4] As Rutledge moved south, Stotts struck northwards with all his strength and retook not Congaryton, but the town of Cravenville to the east, cutting the salient in half.[5] Rutledge’s troops, exhausted from their long march fleeing the pursuing Jones, were able to cross the salient and were escorted back to Ultima by some of Stotts’ men.
When Jones realised his mistake he was furious, and taking his cavalry regiments he raced southwards in the hope of catching the Carolinians offguard—after all, Stotts had marched hard and fast to reach Cravenville in a guerre d’éclair fashion and had necessarily been forced to leave much of his support behind. The Battle of Cravenville was noted for initial strong tactics on both sides and might have been close, had not Jones been hit by a sniper early in the battle. He survived, taking the bullet in his shoulder, but was dragged back towards American-held Charleston against his protests to have the wound operated on lest it prove fatal. Jones is sometimes criticised for not providing a sufficient chain of command in this event, but it must be remembered that he had been forced to respond at short notice to Stotts’ audacious gamble. As it was, the American cavalry fought hard but were decisively defeated by Stotts and several cavalry officers were taken prisoner. Stotts benefited from the defences at Cravenville that the American garrison there had been in the process of building before they were pared down to defend Congaryton. After the battle was over, he had his military engineers destroy as much of the defences as they could; Stotts had no intention of trying to push onwards and upwards as some of his unrealistic superiors wanted. If he had done so, his own force would only have been surrounded in turn.
Therefore, he withdrew, abandoning North and South provinces to the Americans for now and buying time for the recovered troops to be reintegrated into the army that would have to defend Ultima. At the same time, he sent some troops to Savannah—the city which the injured Jones had warned his own superiors about leaving untouched—and, commanded by Barton with his unconventional ideas, they proceeded to use it as a base to strike at the Americans with almost Kleinkrieger-style raids. If the Carolinian Navy could not overcome the Lord Washington by conventional means, Barton sought to undermine Charleston’s use as a port by attacking from the land instead. Warehouses were burnt, cranes sabotaged, soldiers knifed in their beds. The brutality and ruthlessness of Barton’s methods made him a major enemy for the Americans, who offered outrageous rewards for his capture and effectively only succeeded in making him even more of a florin bloody terror in the night than he was already. For now they would just have to suffer his attacks, for the government was intent in throwing everything at Ultima and felt that Savannah could be ignored. Of course, in the end the most audacious triumph of Barton’s dirty campaign would have been impossible without ‘Mr Watson’s Marvellous Innovation’, but that is another story...
*
From: “A Biographical Dictionary of the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries” by Jacques DeDerrault (1956, authorised English translation):
The Battle of Cravenville was trumpeted by the papers in Carolina as a great victory, considerably annoying both Stotts’ enemies and the man himself, who felt it was overstated. When the MGA Albert Payne dismissively said “wars are not won by evacuations”, Stotts is recorded as uncharacteristically agreeing with him. Stotts was still concerned that the war was not winnable, but felt that he had to fight and keep Carolina going for as long as possible and to the best of his ability. It is curious to consider precisely why he felt such a sense of loyalty, considering his enmity with the old ruling class and the fact that he had exploited his own lack of feeling for Congaryton as a tactic against General Jones. He certainly does not appear to have expressed any particular hatred for the Americans, unlike many of his contemporaries, and after all he had worked as an interpreter across the other Confederations. Given how taciturn Stotts was, it is a frustrating puzzle for biographers.
Cravenville was certainly a success of a sort, preserving what would otherwise have been a lost army—General Cushing, who took over for the injured Jones after a brief period of confusion, proceeded with the planned tactics but only succeeded in trapping a few scattered remnants against the Virginian border. In consequence, the planned notion of forcing Owens-Allen and Virginia to take a side did not come off—there was no outrage of a huge Carolinian army being pushed against the border and perhaps desperately fleeing northward into Virginia. This forced the rethink of several political schemes, but in military terms it did nothing to prevent Cushing and Admiral Barker from gaining control over all of North Province and most of South, as well as part of Tennessee thanks to the support of the Nickajackites around Whitefort. Close to half of continental Carolina was now in American hands, and Cravenville was treated as only a minor setback in most American circles as they watched for the planned drive on Ultima and the final defeat of the rebels. At the time, this view seems like the most sensible one. It is only with the benefit of hindsight that we can recognise that Stotts’ action effectively determined Carolina’s survival.
It is also worth remembering, of course, that Cravenville was one of only two battles in the Great American War that can be said unambiguously to have been won by Carolina with no caveats. Given what followed the war, it is perhaps unsurprising that, despite Stotts’ previous controversial reputation, Carolinian histories were eager to remember a time when, if for only a moment, their budding country actually stood on its own two feet.
[1] Though not that many, as this is before the better relations and trade connections between Carolina and New Spain that kicked off in the late 1820s. The author is perhaps being disingenuous in implying a longer connection—there were a few Carolinian mercenaries fighting for New Spain, but not that many more than there were New Yorkers or Pennsylvanians etc.
[2] The author is anachronistically using gwayese in its later sense, meaning Chinese-European mixed race people – at the time gwayese tended to mean ethnic fully-Chinese people who had been ostracised from Chinese society and took up European service (see part #104).
[3] This Kingston is an OTL abandoned settlement in South Carolina on the Pee Dee River. Not to be confused with the other Kingston in South Carolina which became Conway in OTL.
[4] The Pee Dee River was dammed in OTL for hydroelectric power during the Depression—at this point in TTL the resulting lakes naturally do not exist and there are more fords available.
[5] Cravenville is OTL Sumter, South Carolina.
“Can a man’s essential nobility of conduct be recognised even while acknowledging that his cause is loathsome? I would say no, if only because such arguments are too often applied to men of war, and in my view there can be no nobility in any man who would take up arms against his fellows.”
– Pablo Sanchez, Pax Aeterna, 1845
*
From: “A Biographical Dictionary of the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries” by Jacques DeDerrault (1956, authorised English translation):
‘Sir Alfred Stotts’ is a name for tombstones and memorials, a name that belies the character of the man who, in his lifetime, was more frequently dubbed “that horrible little man Stotts” by his ‘betters’ and ‘Our Alfie’ by his comrades. How differently a man is viewed when he can own one of the few genuine Carolinian triumphs of a war otherwise marked by reversals, defeats and poisoned chalices! Upon reading the tributes paid upon his death in 1860, few readers would guess that many of the writers of those tributes, not so many years previously, would have cheered on the other side in any battle involving Alf Stotts as a commander. He was a man who embodied the bourgeois and proletarian challenge to the aristocratic establishment of Carolina in the Democratic Experiment years, a trend almost entirely missed by northern observers.
Alf Stotts was born in Congaryton, South Province in 1799 to a poor family. His father, also named Alfred, worked as an overseer on a rice plantation that came into the hands of Douglas Eveleigh (father of Andrew Eveleigh) in 1804. Though Stotts was not the type to write diaries or memoirs, it is clear from well-attested oral histories that both the elder and younger Alf Stotts were not impressed with the young Andrew and his ‘head full of damnfool ideas’ that they regarded as getting in the way of trying to run the plantation efficiently. However, as the Eveleigh family rose to become more influential and politically significant, the Stotts’ protests were more easily quashed and Stotts was eventually removed from his position and dispossessed of the house and small bit of land he owned by a corrupt court. Alf Stotts senior died in a workhouse, from which only three of his four children would escape. Alf junior, the youngest, vowed revenge not only on the Eveleighs specifically but on the system that had allowed them to get away with such injustice.
Because history recognises Stotts’ greatest triumphs as being in the Great American War, he is seldom counted among the great adventurers such as Benyovsky or George Alexander (though after those same triumphs, some Carolinian aristocrats did unconvincingly attempt to claim he was an illegitimate adopted son of the Alexander family). However, his early career saw him seek his fortune abroad as a soldier of fortune. There were many such men in the Carolinian army of the Great American War, but most of them had gone no further afield than the Empire of New Spain, putting down rebellions for Ferdinand VII. Stotts on the other hand resolved to see the East. His earliest military experience was at the age of 15, as a drummer boy in the French Colonial forces intervening in the Maratha civil war in India. Exactly how he got there in the first place is still rather unclear and, as noted above, Stotts himself was not a man to make detailed comments about his life. Biographers have filled volumes with what amount to colourful wild guesses. Stotts went on to fight as a private in the Portuguese colonial army of the Philippine War; one possibly apocryphal story suggests that, as there were some Carolinians fighting for New Spain on the other side,[1] Stotts ended up in a swordfight with a man who had been the child on the next bench in the Congaryton workhouse. Whether this dramatic story is true or not, it is certainly the case that he met up with that person during the conflict, and Jack Barton became Stotts’ lifelong friend and ally in his struggle against the Carolinian establishment.
Stotts was discharged from the Portuguese forces following the victorious war with a sergeant’s stripes to show for it. It would be in service to the Feng Dynasty in China that he would make his name, however. The Feng were recruiting any and all European officers they could find to train their modernising army and extend Haijing’s control to the whole of southern China. Stotts successfully bluffed his way into a lieutenancy, with Barton as his sergeant, and initially served in Guizhou province, part of the force defeating warlords and local rebels loyal to General Yu in order to make the authority of the Feng-appointed governors real. Stotts rapidly rose from his imagined rank to become a captain and then in 1825 a major. He invented an aristocratic upbringing and sometimes even pretended to be British rather than American, adjusting his story to what he felt would most impress the Feng officials he was dealing with at the time. It was already clear that, while Stotts was a decent soldier, his real skill lay in a form of military alienism [psychology], understanding the minds of both his opponents and those on his own side that he must deal with. This meant that he could well handle the political side of being an officer and wormed his way into greater influence with the Feng court and the European trading companies interlaced with it. In the process, he left a sufficient number of illegitimate gwayese children scattered across the southern provinces of China that his enemies in Carolina would later collectively dub them the ‘Stotts Dynasty’.[2]
His real big break came with the Anqing Incident in 1826. Although open war between Feng and Beiqing did not break out, the skirmishes in the disputed central provinces gave Stotts plenty of opportunity to rise to glory. In particular he was noted for how he employed new technology. At the time, some Feng Chinese officials and military officers were enthusiastic about using technology such as steam engines and balloons, but in a rather tokenistic way—in the words of Henry Watt, as though turning up to a battle with them was simply a way of engineering a favourable augury with the spirits to decide the outcome. Watt was rather unfairly chauvinistic with his words, probably reflecting his own frustrations with attempting to introduce steam power for civilian use to the city of Fuzhou at the time. Stotts, for the record, was asked about the subject not long before his death and wryly commented “The Fengmen? Yes, they didn’t understand how to use the engines and thought you could get miracles on the battlefield just by shouting the orders louder. Nearly as bad as Adams and Wragg, in fact.” Stotts was one of the few European officers to both understand the potential of the new technologies but also to recognise that the battlefields of China were often different, and tactics developed in the Jacobin Wars could not always be simply transposed to them. His use of steam-tractors to scatter a Beiqing force near Nanchang, driving them against Poyang Lake and forcing the enemy commander to surrender, won him particular plaudits during the course of the Incident.
Stotts went on to serve in the intervention in Yunnan after General Yu’s death in 1828 and in the early part of the First Sino-Siamese War (1832-1838). For the first time he faced another Asian force that had also modernised itself with European tactics, and acquitted himself fairly well but is recorded of speaking admirably of many of his Siamese opposite numbers. In the course of the war, Stotts ended up fighting a skirmish with the estate of a wealthy man in a town south of Yunnanfu as his battlefield. The gentleman in question was a former Yu loyalist and was slain in the course of the war, leading to Stotts appropriating his house and fortune, selling the former to increase the latter. Having achieved fame and riches, he resigned from Chinese service at the height of the war and decided to return to Carolina in 1836, accompanied by his faithful Barton.
Entirely intentionally, Stotts shocked ‘civilised’ Carolinian society by purchasing a fine house in the heart of the upper-class district of his home town of Congaryton, and then proceeding to hold loud and rambunctious parties to which he invited all his old friends from the workhouse and fellow overseers’ families, those who stil survived. He made himself an enemy of the Burdenists by constantly dismissing Andrew Eveleigh as ‘an idiot’, at a time when the Burdenists were seeking to make him a martyr to their cause. At the same time, he confused society by speaking approvingly of the Chinese and criticising Racist views against them—which was normally something the Burdenists did due to Eveleigh’s then-controversial opinion that the white, red and yellow races were all equal. Despite his skill in that general field, Stotts had no interest in attacking his enemies in the political arena, but used his wealth to buy himself an officer’s commission in the American army, making his way up to a colonelcy. It was not long afterwards that the purchase of commissions was more heavily regulated in America, and Carolina’s MCPs voted for the move against their previous defence of the practice—while this is usually attributed to the decline of aristocratic power in Carolina, it has sometimes been claimed that ‘the Outrageous Stotts’ was responsible for changing the minds of aristocrats that the purchase of commissions was a good thing. Certainly more stringent regulations came in in Carolina than in the rest of the ENA, which has led some military historians to attribute superior performance to the more meritocratically promoted Carolinian officers in contrast to those from the rest of the ENA on the other side.
Garbled and exaggerated tales of Stotts’ exploits flooded Carolina, with some sceptical members of society convinced that he was a charlatan. This view was exploded, however, with the tour of Harris Peters and Xu Lingzhi in 1841. Peters was a Virginian-born trade magnate whose chief enterprise was the trade of Appalachian ginseng to Feng China in exchange for silks and porcelain. In order to drum up increased public interest in his business, he paid for the Feng trade official Xu Lingzhi to come to America and tour the capitals of the five Confederations and some other locations, such as the ginseng plantations themselves—which Xu proceeded to redesign according to Chinese feng shui ideas to provide Peters with a new advertising claim for the Chinese end of his business. Charleston was one of the first stops on Peters’ and Xu’s tour, but during a welcome dinner hosted by Governor Alexander, Xu’s interpreter was taken ill. (A persistent theory claims that this was the result of a botched poisoning attempt, though whether it was aimed at Peters, Xu or Alexander depends on which theorists one asks). Stotts happened to be in Charleston at the time—though not invited to the dinner of course—and was roped in as interpreter, proceeding to do a better job than the man he had replaced. In fact Xu insisted that Stotts continue with him on the rest of his tour, particularly appreciating how Stotts managed to translate the mandarin’s wry humour into English. This tour made Stotts’ name throughout the other Confederations, and John Alexander was grateful for a Carolinian to have some positive press at a time when the divide between Carolina and the rest of the ENA was growing increasingly bitter. To that end, and much to the horror of Stotts’ opponents, Alexander recommended Stotts for a knighthood. The ageing Lord Fingall was obliging, having attended Xu’s visit to Fredericksburg, and ‘Our Alfie’ became Sir Alfred Stotts.
Though Stotts might achieve a generalship through these connections in 1845, his political enemies in the Army still managed to get him assigned to the most fever-ridden islands of the Carolinian West Indies for garrison duty. Stotts proved unkillable, though, and had soon managed to work his way back onto the continent. It is an accident of history, perhaps, that he found himself where he did when the Great American War came to Carolina, but if so it illustrates just how significant such ‘accidents’ can be...
*
From “The Great American War” by Alexander Jenkins (1972)—
Though June 1849 saw the entry of the UPSA into the war, it also success for the American forces in Carolina, with General Jones’ salient linking Whitefort with Charleston having cut off and pocketed the Carolinian troops in North Province. Gradually being supplemented by more troops arriving in Charleston under the watchful guns of the invincible armourclad Lord Washington, Jones proceeded to push north towards Charlotte, which would surrender after a brief siege on July 3rd. The situation for the pocketed Carolinian troops looked increasingly bleak. Their chain of command had been cut by the Whitefort salient and, though General Rutledge is often described as the ‘commander’ of this pocket, in reality he only had command and control over around three-quarters of the men at this point. Others had no orders and either deserted or milled around helplessly in defensible positions. Rutledge, an experienced but somewhat unimaginative commander, realised that his only hope was to try to take Jones’ forces in their flank at a weak point and try to break out. The only other options were to surrender or to be pressed against the Virginian border and either worn down or risk trying to escape into Virginia, which Rutledge knew could, and likely would, lead Virginia to turn away from neutrality and join the struggle against Carolina.
Rutledge’s problem was that he was struggling with an incomplete and imperfect mass of troops with little in the way of military intelligence. He had no information on where he might find the weak point he needed, or where Jones was at any time. Fortunately for him, the main group of Carolinian forces massing at Ultima were led by a man who understood Rutledge’s situation, a man who had spent most of his life surrounded by enemies trying to pull him down—Alfred Stotts.
Naturally, half of the Carolinian government hated the idea of Stotts leading the counter-offensive, but the increasing voice for working-class interests in the General Assembly helped Stotts, and many of his usual enemies were desperate enough to try anything at this point. Stotts was the right man in the right place at the right time. He used his alienistic skill in a twofold manner—to handle those politicians and superior officers who believed that one good offensive would shatter the Americans and allow Carolina to retake all its lost territories in one fell swoop, and as an offensive weapon against General Jones. As Stotts was well aware, ‘that bloody Welchman’ was a fine commander and one who would not easily be defeated. At the same time, Stotts himself and his life story were well known in the northern Confederations for his celebrated tour as a Chinese interpreter. He realised that he could use this to his advantage.
Stotts placed his majordomo Jack Barton in charge of an impromptu intelligence network similar to those he had used in China, where Feng-sympathising peasants might be under the rule of the Beiqing Dynasty or the Siamese Empire. There was a similar situation in Carolina due to the number of Carolinians now under what they regarded as occupation by Jones’ army. Some were openly becoming Kleinkriegers, but there were many who would balk at that but yet would slip information to Stotts’ agents and pass on orders to General Rutledge on the other side of the salient. At the same time, Stotts allowed some orders to fall into American hands, coupled with a persistent rumour campaign. These orders stated that Stotts was going to drive at Congaryton—which was after all the most obvious target—and the rumours talked about Stotts’ history of growing up in Congaryton as a poor child and then buying his big house there, now under American occupation, with his fortune. The rumours implied that Stotts was enraged at Jones for taking his prize from him and was determined to regain Congaryton from ‘the Yankees’ filthy fingers’ at the first opportunity. At the time, Jones was concerned that his forces were spread too thin and the reinforcements coming through Charleston harbour were thus far insufficient to stand up to a concerted attack in the right place. The intercepted orders thus seemed a Godsend to him. He built up the garrison in Congaryton while continuing to drive Rutledge further north and east. Rutledge, meanwhile, had orders to come southwards and eastwards in an arc as though trying to push for Congaryton, only to be blocked at every opportunity by Jones.
The final stage of Stotts’ plan required more complex and immediate communication with Rutledge, so he resorted to one of his trademark uses of technology. Balloons were already in use by both sides for observation and communication, but at this point artillerymen were growing more skilled at shooting them down, even though dedicated antidrome guns were still rare. Stotts could not risk such an encounter and he exploited the fact that the New York Register had audaciously sent its journalists in a large balloon painted with the neutral Virginian flag to deliver regular sketches of the battlefields of the war to their readers back up north. Stotts obtained a similar balloon and used it to signal to Rutledge’s forces at Kingston via heliograph.[3] By these means, though they were probably against the laws of war (admittedly rather vague on this particular point at the time), Rutledge knew when and where to push south through areas which Jones had stripped of troops to bolster Congaryton—which Stotts had no intention of going anywhere near. In Jones’ defence, he seems to have relied on the Pee Dee River as an obstacle to Rutledge rather than simply assuming Rutledge would not turn that way, but Stotts and Rutledge both knew the area well and where the usable fords were.[4] As Rutledge moved south, Stotts struck northwards with all his strength and retook not Congaryton, but the town of Cravenville to the east, cutting the salient in half.[5] Rutledge’s troops, exhausted from their long march fleeing the pursuing Jones, were able to cross the salient and were escorted back to Ultima by some of Stotts’ men.
When Jones realised his mistake he was furious, and taking his cavalry regiments he raced southwards in the hope of catching the Carolinians offguard—after all, Stotts had marched hard and fast to reach Cravenville in a guerre d’éclair fashion and had necessarily been forced to leave much of his support behind. The Battle of Cravenville was noted for initial strong tactics on both sides and might have been close, had not Jones been hit by a sniper early in the battle. He survived, taking the bullet in his shoulder, but was dragged back towards American-held Charleston against his protests to have the wound operated on lest it prove fatal. Jones is sometimes criticised for not providing a sufficient chain of command in this event, but it must be remembered that he had been forced to respond at short notice to Stotts’ audacious gamble. As it was, the American cavalry fought hard but were decisively defeated by Stotts and several cavalry officers were taken prisoner. Stotts benefited from the defences at Cravenville that the American garrison there had been in the process of building before they were pared down to defend Congaryton. After the battle was over, he had his military engineers destroy as much of the defences as they could; Stotts had no intention of trying to push onwards and upwards as some of his unrealistic superiors wanted. If he had done so, his own force would only have been surrounded in turn.
Therefore, he withdrew, abandoning North and South provinces to the Americans for now and buying time for the recovered troops to be reintegrated into the army that would have to defend Ultima. At the same time, he sent some troops to Savannah—the city which the injured Jones had warned his own superiors about leaving untouched—and, commanded by Barton with his unconventional ideas, they proceeded to use it as a base to strike at the Americans with almost Kleinkrieger-style raids. If the Carolinian Navy could not overcome the Lord Washington by conventional means, Barton sought to undermine Charleston’s use as a port by attacking from the land instead. Warehouses were burnt, cranes sabotaged, soldiers knifed in their beds. The brutality and ruthlessness of Barton’s methods made him a major enemy for the Americans, who offered outrageous rewards for his capture and effectively only succeeded in making him even more of a florin bloody terror in the night than he was already. For now they would just have to suffer his attacks, for the government was intent in throwing everything at Ultima and felt that Savannah could be ignored. Of course, in the end the most audacious triumph of Barton’s dirty campaign would have been impossible without ‘Mr Watson’s Marvellous Innovation’, but that is another story...
*
From: “A Biographical Dictionary of the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries” by Jacques DeDerrault (1956, authorised English translation):
The Battle of Cravenville was trumpeted by the papers in Carolina as a great victory, considerably annoying both Stotts’ enemies and the man himself, who felt it was overstated. When the MGA Albert Payne dismissively said “wars are not won by evacuations”, Stotts is recorded as uncharacteristically agreeing with him. Stotts was still concerned that the war was not winnable, but felt that he had to fight and keep Carolina going for as long as possible and to the best of his ability. It is curious to consider precisely why he felt such a sense of loyalty, considering his enmity with the old ruling class and the fact that he had exploited his own lack of feeling for Congaryton as a tactic against General Jones. He certainly does not appear to have expressed any particular hatred for the Americans, unlike many of his contemporaries, and after all he had worked as an interpreter across the other Confederations. Given how taciturn Stotts was, it is a frustrating puzzle for biographers.
Cravenville was certainly a success of a sort, preserving what would otherwise have been a lost army—General Cushing, who took over for the injured Jones after a brief period of confusion, proceeded with the planned tactics but only succeeded in trapping a few scattered remnants against the Virginian border. In consequence, the planned notion of forcing Owens-Allen and Virginia to take a side did not come off—there was no outrage of a huge Carolinian army being pushed against the border and perhaps desperately fleeing northward into Virginia. This forced the rethink of several political schemes, but in military terms it did nothing to prevent Cushing and Admiral Barker from gaining control over all of North Province and most of South, as well as part of Tennessee thanks to the support of the Nickajackites around Whitefort. Close to half of continental Carolina was now in American hands, and Cravenville was treated as only a minor setback in most American circles as they watched for the planned drive on Ultima and the final defeat of the rebels. At the time, this view seems like the most sensible one. It is only with the benefit of hindsight that we can recognise that Stotts’ action effectively determined Carolina’s survival.
It is also worth remembering, of course, that Cravenville was one of only two battles in the Great American War that can be said unambiguously to have been won by Carolina with no caveats. Given what followed the war, it is perhaps unsurprising that, despite Stotts’ previous controversial reputation, Carolinian histories were eager to remember a time when, if for only a moment, their budding country actually stood on its own two feet.
[1] Though not that many, as this is before the better relations and trade connections between Carolina and New Spain that kicked off in the late 1820s. The author is perhaps being disingenuous in implying a longer connection—there were a few Carolinian mercenaries fighting for New Spain, but not that many more than there were New Yorkers or Pennsylvanians etc.
[2] The author is anachronistically using gwayese in its later sense, meaning Chinese-European mixed race people – at the time gwayese tended to mean ethnic fully-Chinese people who had been ostracised from Chinese society and took up European service (see part #104).
[3] This Kingston is an OTL abandoned settlement in South Carolina on the Pee Dee River. Not to be confused with the other Kingston in South Carolina which became Conway in OTL.
[4] The Pee Dee River was dammed in OTL for hydroelectric power during the Depression—at this point in TTL the resulting lakes naturally do not exist and there are more fords available.
[5] Cravenville is OTL Sumter, South Carolina.
Yet another great post by Thande.
Great, now you have me confused as to whether Carolina will actually be an independent state by the end of the war or not, or whether it will be a more Austria-Hungary style arrangement, or at least a looser association of sorts with the ENA. Damn you Thande!!!p)
Now I want to see what the good Mr Watson invented.
It looks like, at this rate, Sir Alfred is a bit like a Carolinan Paul von Lettow-Vorbeck - someone who keeps the enemy at bay for a long time, by deviousness, against a technically (though not, in this case, numerically) superior force.
Great, now you have me confused as to whether Carolina will actually be an independent state by the end of the war or not, or whether it will be a more Austria-Hungary style arrangement, or at least a looser association of sorts with the ENA. Damn you Thande!!!
p)Now I want to see what the good Mr Watson invented.
It looks like, at this rate, Sir Alfred is a bit like a Carolinan Paul von Lettow-Vorbeck - someone who keeps the enemy at bay for a long time, by deviousness, against a technically (though not, in this case, numerically) superior force.
Wait, what...?! Are you trying to imply that Carolina won't survive the war? Because-... How is that possible? I mean, it's been given in Part 139 that Henry Frederick Owens-Allen will be crowned king again no later than 1853:
So, if Carolina doesn't survive, and is kept a part of the Empire of North America, then how can suddenly neutral Virginia of which Owens-Allen is currently governor all of a sudden become independent and remain independent in the middle of-...?!
Wait, what...?! Are you trying to imply that Carolina won't survive the war? Because-... How is that possible? I mean, it's been given in Part 139 that Henry Frederick Owens-Allen will be crowned king again no later than 1853:
So, if Carolina doesn't survive, and is kept a part of the Empire of North America, then how can suddenly neutral Virginia of which Owens-Allen is currently governor all of a sudden become independent and remain independent in the middle of-...?!
Unless he becomes king of somewhere else.
Maybe, if the Unification Wars spread over into Poland, the Saxons may force them to hand back Prussia, and Henry Frederick gets to become king, under the Saxon Emperor. Oh irony of ironies...
EDIT: Or he becomes king of Poland himself.
Wait, what...?! Are you trying to imply that Carolina won't survive the war? Because-... How is that possible? I mean, it's been given in Part 139 that Henry Frederick Owens-Allen will be crowned king again no later than 1853:
So, if Carolina doesn't survive, and is kept a part of the Empire of North America, then how can suddenly neutral Virginia of which Owens-Allen is currently governor all of a sudden become independent and remain independent in the middle of-...?!
The language is very ambiguous, particularly the "with no caveats" bit. My take is that the Carolinians will be like the Vietnamese during the Indochina Wars. They don't win many battles but the political costs of beating them prove to be crippling for the ENA. It could also mean that Carolina doesn't win many battles on its own, with latter ENA historiography declaring that the UPSA and ENA did most of the heavy lifting.
teg
Unless he becomes king of somewhere else.
Maybe, if the Unification Wars spread over into Poland, the Saxons may force them to hand back Prussia, and Henry Frederick gets to become king, under the Saxon Emperor. Oh irony of ironies...
EDIT: Or he becomes king of Poland himself.
But he needs to become king of a country that has only had one other monarch by the name of Henry, and in Poland they have had Henry I the Bearded, Henry II the Pious, Henry III the White, Henry IV the Righteous, and then there was Henryk Walezy, whom we refer to otherwise as Henry III of France.
But then again, considering that only Henryk Walezy was the only one ever elected King of Poland, the other Henrys being High Dukes, I guess you could get away with it...
Thande
Donor
Nah, that wasn't deliberate in this case.
I'm glad the ambiguous wording had the desired effect...
I blame you, Thande.
EDIT: I've just thought of another way for Henry Frederick to become a king, not that I like it much. The ENA goes the same way as the ENS (Arandite) - each confederation has its own (sub-)king, under the Emperor. Thus Henry Frederick might become king of Carolina or Virginia under this system. It may even be a popularly-elected post in some places.
Last edited:
Lycaon pictus
Donor
I took "on its own two feet" to mean that Carolina will end up nominally independent but under the protection of other powers, such as New Spain or the UPSA.
The map is very helpful. I hope each update will change it a little as I have been beginning to find the amount of ENA politicking a bit tedious. Sorry, had to get it out. Will we get a glimpse of what's going on outside the Americas soon?
My guess is that the "poisoned chalices" in the first bit means that Carolina is going to find out the hard way that just because someone (the UPSA in this case) is fighting on the same side as you doesn't stop them from having hostile intent as well.
My guess is that the "poisoned chalices" in the first bit means that Carolina is going to find out the hard way that just because someone (the UPSA in this case) is fighting on the same side as you doesn't stop them from having hostile intent as well.
It's a good day when LTTW updates.
It's a great day when that update includes maps.
It's a great day when that update includes maps.
- Status