Look to the West: Thread III, Volume IV (Tottenham Nil)!
- Thread starter Thande
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Should be PA according to the earliest maps and entries - I pondered that too.
(stay PA....please...)
It could remain independent but be a client state of the UPSA or New Spain, or maybe even Virginia.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-...?!
Just to clarify - MGA means Member of the Georgia Assembly, or Member of the General Assembly, or something else?
Regarding the map (and by extension, regarding all maps of the Empire of North America), I must admit that this is my one exception to my rule of straight-line-borders-are-always-ugly. I love how the borders for the original charters being defined by different parallels and sea-to-sea clauses put up in the belief that North America was a very narrow continent has led to the wonderfully stripe-shaped Confederation of Virginia.
Now, a question I have is concerning the Great Plains and the mid-west. Has there been any update on the development there that I have missed? Because otherwise there seems to be an awful lot of land in the middle of the continent that is used claimed by the North American Empire and New Spain that otherwise seems to be unpopulated by people of European ancestry. Are the remaining natives de facto self-governing there, or...?
Now, a question I have is concerning the Great Plains and the mid-west. Has there been any update on the development there that I have missed? Because otherwise there seems to be an awful lot of land in the middle of the continent that is used claimed by the North American Empire and New Spain that otherwise seems to be unpopulated by people of European ancestry. Are the remaining natives de facto self-governing there, or...?
Thande
Donor
Thanks for pointing out the error, it is now fixed on the map.
The second one. As it happens (though it wasn't deliberately designed that way) all the Confederations' assemblies have different names, so they can get away with abbreviations that don't explicitly mention the names of the Confederations and it's still clear which one they mean.
That was the subject of the second but last update (#185).
Ah, I read that one as being entirely concerned with the large native confederacy up in the Canadian Prairies. I was thinking more about places such as OTL Kansas, Nebraska, Wyoming and Colorado.
Thande
Donor
Those areas are claimed by the ENA, with a small number of colonists so far, and obviously some resistance from the Indians there but not in as organised a fashion as from the Thirteen Fires (to use a name that is now slightly anachronistic). As in OTL, for now they are mainly regarded as passage to the west coast rather than being a major focus for settlement in their own right, but that is gradually changing. Remember that the Continental Parliament has dragged its heels on admitting new western provinces for a while, which is part of what the Constitutional Convention was trying to solve before the war broke out.
Fair enough. I'm curious to see what their future role will be in the aftermath of the Great American War, though, being as you say the passage to the west coast. I recently learned that in OTL, Brigham Young was a remarkably savvy administrator of what he and his followers called Deseret, and that the entire Mormon Corridor from Mexico all the way up into Alberta has its origins in a strategic and very ambitious move to have Mormon settlements planted near every major source of water in the path between the East and California. There was political and economic power to be had from controlling this route.
I finally caught up to LttW, the timeline that introduced me to ah.com. Good update, awesome map.
Thande
Donor
Part #187: Advance and Retreat
“The whole matter was quite ridiculous. On the stage it would have made a fair comedy—in reality it made for a bitter tragedy. All that fanfare about some grand intervention, the heroic murderers in blue[1] landing on so-called foreign shores to defend the cause of liberty or slavery or whatever it was this week...and by the end of the whole bloody mess, things were exactly the same as before they arrived. I certainly didn’t need any more examples of the futility of war after what I had seen in my youth, but I did notice that it made a distinct impression on a younger generation. Small wonder when so many of them grew up without fathers as a result...”
*
From: “Out of the Frying Pan: A History of the Kingdom of Carolina” by Kenneth Raine (1956)—
The Day Offensive was the culmination of the opening stages of the Great American War. After a brief period of confusion following the incapacitation of General Jones, General Sir George Day had obtained control in his place over the gradually growing American army occupying North and South Provinces. Day, so optimistically dubbed ‘Petit-Boulanger’, was a cautious man who has come in for much criticism over the years, not all of it well founded. His defenders point to the precarious position of the Americans. Certainly, they were successfully bringing in more troops over sea via Charleston, rendering Governor Owens-Allen’s position increasingly embattled as Virginian neutrality, circumvented, seemed irrelevant—but this was not so. Virginia’s closed southern border posed enormous logistical challenges for the Americans, particularly given the government’s understandable if inconsistent guerre de tonnere diktats on not living off the land. Of course, such attempts to avoid alienating the occupied populace were futile considering they were married to the slave confiscations that the Supremacists pushed through in an attempt to intimidate the rest of Carolina into surrendering—the idea being that American ultimatums would contain the carrot that the remaining Carolinian slaveholders would be compensated if they accepted the offer now, but not later. The plan was a double failure as it only hardened the resolve of the free Carolinians while encouraging those under occupation to rise up and fight the Americans in revenge for their lost property.[2] General Day therefore had to struggle to feed and supply his troops as they attempted to not only to hold down half of pre-war Carolina in the face of a restive populace, but also to continue pushing south and westwards towards Ultima.
It can be debated—it has been debated—whether a bolder approach would have yielded better results for the American cause, perhaps if General Jones had avoided his wound. It might just as easily have seen American troops outrun their supply lines and face collapse, however. The latter scenario is a favourite of speculative romantics [alternate historians] sympathetic to the ‘Good Old Cause’[3] who dream of a truly free, united Carolina (perhaps even joined by Virginia) resulting from Jones’ overextended army being crushed by Alf Stotts. Whether there is anything to this belief but wishful thinking lies beyond the scope of this work.
Therefore, General Day sacrificed the end of the 1849 campaign season in order to better build up his forces and only gradually pushed towards Ultima, giving the Carolinians more time to prepare. Despite this advantage, the Carolinian position was dire. With so much of their country and its budding industry under the American bootheel, it seemed only a matter of time to many (even Alf Stotts himself) before the final defeat. It was at this time, perhaps, that some of the misconceptions by American politicians about the Carolinian people came true for a time—the common people remembered the overly optimistic claims of brow-beaters before the war that Carolinian troops would be marching through Fredericksburg by Christmas, and they blamed their General Assembly, Speaker and Governor for getting them into this situation. Instead, Christmas would be spent watching the horizon and waiting for the time when the dithering Day would come (“That’ll be the Day” as the later folk song punningly put it). Ultima had a mild winter climate—as indeed the city which no longer bears that name still does—but in the hearts of its citizens that Christmas, there was a distinct chill.
The Carolinians did not waste their time, however. The passing of a proper draft began to swell the rebel army’s numbers, and the American troops in North and South Province failed to intercept most of the refugees fleeing south to join up. The railway network was used to the full advantage that it gave the Carolinians—the Americans generally being unable to use it due to a combination of sabotage and the different rail gauge and train design causing problems for their engineers. And Ultima of course was the heart of that train network, the hub—that was the whole reason that the city had grown up. It had never had even the cursory, outdated defences of Charleston, lying in the heart of a peaceful Carolina. Had the Americans managed to push through earlier on, Ultima would have been virtually defenceless. But with the time that winter bought, that began to change. The silver lining, as General Rutledge observed, was that at least they could start from scratch—there were no now-obsolete fortifications that would only get in the way and would have to be to dismantled first, as was often the case in Europe and even some older North American cities. The embarrassing and catastrophic reversals in the early stages of the war had resulted in a purge of the overly confident, old-fashioned officers who had previously dominated the Carolinian regiments, and the fledgeling new War Office benefited from being run by younger strategists who had carefully studied the battlefields of the Nightmare War between France and North Italy during the Popular Wars. They knew they were seeing a glimpse of the future, and accordingly Ultima was ringed with carefully constructed trenches and strongpoints equipped with (then) modern rubble bastions to house artillery—though concrete pillboxes would not be developed until some years later. The defences, known as the Alexander Line after the now-deceased Governor, were designed around allowing gaps for the train lines to operate as long as possible, only for them to then be destroyed to prevent them falling into enemy hands if necessary.
So it was that the anvil of a meticulously fortified city met the slow but firmly grasped hammer of General Day’s armies. The First Siege of Ultima is generally considered to have lasted from 13th March to 19th May 1850. During that time the city was almost surrounded, and more than once overly triumphalist papers in the ENA trumpeted the inevitable defeat of Carolina any day now. But green-clad American troops died on the bayonets of the new recruits in their hastily dyed butternut uniforms as they tried to storm the trenches, were blown to bits by the hailshot fired by the protected artillery, suffered from disease in their overcrowded camps surrounding the city. Day’s modern defenders point to the fact that he was able to deploy artillery of his own to silence some of the Carolinian guns and achieve breakthroughs in places, smashing the trenches—whereas a more direct attack might have proved entirely futile. Contrary to popular belief, it was realised by some forward-thinkers at the time that an armoured steam-wagon could possibly overcome the trenches of death (though in any case it would need a better engine and terrain capabilities than the models available at the time), but Virginian neutrality meant that steam-wagons could only be brought in by sea, and that was problematic at the best of times, even if the French did manage it in their own front of the Great American War.
The Siege was a bitter, bloody fight on both sides, and like many such episodes in history it spawned a considerable cultural impact—one only has to think of Ulysses Spencer’s novel When The Guns Sang (published 1883) or, from the other side, Lady Jane Bickersley’s painting The King in Winter. This title has seemed obscure to many considering the painting depicts a group of butternut-clad Carolinian troops crouched in their trench as shells burst overhead and the shadow of a steerable observation balloon is cast on them. According to the artist, it was intended to be a criticism of the eventual King of Carolina for failing to be present in the nation’s darkest hour.
Both sides came close to running out of ammunition and explosives at different times—more explosives were used in the Siege than had been used in all America’s previous wars put together, as every student of quotable statistics can parrot. And in the end it was this factor, together with a new round of recruits from southern Florida and free Cuba, that tilted the balance in favour of the Carolinians with their railway supply lines. Facing shortages despite his meticulous planning, General Day took the decision to fall back to Mildredville.[4] It was a choice typical of the man, skilled in his particular field but prone to reduce warfare to a matter of numbers and fail to see the significance of morale. The Americans were chastened by the retreat and the Carolinians were emboldened, with General Stotts leading several sorties against the Americans. None of these particularly accomplished anything in military terms, but they played well with the common folk in the remaining areas of free Carolina. The dissatisfaction and resentment the populace had briefly held for their rulers had passed, and any opportunity for the Americans to exploit it had gone also.
Naturally the lifting of the Siege became a national day of celebration in postbellum Carolina, all the more so when the shape of the eventual postwar settlement became apparent. Indeed, as the wit Douglas Hargreaves poignantly observed in 1872: “We celebrate our victory, and try to forget that it was followed by our defeat—though it didn’t seem that way at the time, of course.” Aside from Cravenville, the breaking of the First Siege of Ultima was the only other major land battle of the Great American War that can fairly be said to have been won by ‘the Carolinians’...
*
From: “Golden Sun and Silver Torch: A History of the United Provinces of South America” by Benito Carlucci (1976)—
Initial Meridian involvement in the Great American War was criticised at the time for being overly cautious, as though the government was reluctant to react to the near-assassination of Intendant Padilla. Though this may have been true of many of the Americophiles in the Adamantine Party, it was largely a kneejerk partisan criticism by the opposition papers, and in fact the delay in much direct action was a necessary consequence of the preparation required for an unexpected war. The conflict did not begin auspiciously for the UPSA—a Meridian frigate operating out of Demerara,[5] the Intrépida, was intercepted and captured by one of Admiral Warner’s ‘island hopper’ ships of the line, HIMS Chesapeake, before it had even heard of the Meridian declaration of war on the ENA. It seems likely that it was in order to overtake the embarrassment of this incident that President-General Luppi pushed for the timetable for the invasion of Falkland’s Islands (or as they were afterwards called, the Malvinas) to be accelerated. Fortunately for Luppi, this did not result in catastrophe—the American forces there, now under the command of Captain Alfred Benton, realised that they were outmatched and there was no point in trying to resist. Benton was wracked with guilt for his role in plunging the ENA and UPSA into war, and attempted to offer himself up to the Meridians while claiming that he had been operating independently and beyond his orders, but it was too late. Benton was killed by an angry Meridian Marine on the deck of the Aquiles when his insistence grew too heated and he tried to pull a copy of his orders from an inside pocket, which the Marine mistook for a weapon. This act was in full view of the four American ships from the Falkland base, whose commanders decided that it could not go unanswered. A few hours later, those four ships lay on the bottom of the Pacific Ocean – as did three of their Meridian counterparts. The Battle of the Malvinas effectively eliminated any American naval presence in the southern Atlantic and had the unintentional effect of cutting off the ENA from India and Cygnia—and at the time of the Great Jihad in the former land no less.
With the newly christened Malvinas won for the UPSA, Luppi smoothed over the Intrépida scandal by trumpeting the news that he had achieved a foreign policy aim that the UPSA had been pushing for since its very foundation. No longer need Meridians fear a foreign naval base on their doorstep, and Meridian control of the Cape Horn seaways was now absolute. Indeed, some would have been quite happy to leave Meridian involvement in the war there, having taken advantage of American distraction to obtain this aim. Luppi himself was more concerned with the plight of the Californian rebels, whose cause he had partly been elected upon, and this new war placed the UPSA opposite the country whose citizens were doing the most to help those rebels. Indeed, if the UPSA were to intervene more directly against the ENA, they would almost be forced to work with the Carolinians, who quite apart from being slavers were also almost the only ones fighting for the New Spanish side in California. The fact that this apparently nonsensical intervention nonetheless took place is, as Manfred Landau put it, a testament to ‘the power of the Church of the Almighty Dollar’.[6]
Almost from the beginning, the UPSA had been regarded as a land of opportunity for business interests started by vigorous young men who found themselves stifled by state control and punitive tax regimes in the Old World. The role of business in Meridian history is a complex and somewhat controversial one. The view advanced in this work is that while it is undoubtedly true that many powerful Meridian corporations such as Priestley Aereated Water were born from the brilliance of a few men acting alone, the general corporate structure that had come into being by the middle of the nineteenth century could not have existed without a certain level of state intervention. The UPSA was unique in that the two forces worked hand in hand fairly harmoniously, at least up to this point—in contrast to nations like Great Britain and to a lesser extent France, where industry suffered stop-start chaos due to excessive (and indecisive) state intervention, or the ENA (except Carolina) where the reverse was true, and too often industry ran amok regardless of the desires of the state. The UPSA model was a broadly paternalist one, in which the state acknowledged the brilliance of entrepreneurs and their right to be rewarded for their actions, but tried to steer them into a framework that would serve the national interest. This model was copied by antebellum Carolina when it had become clear that the Confederation needed to prevent industry being monopolised by the northern Confederations, and this was far from the last land to try to emulate the ‘Meridian Miracle’—though with decidedly varying degrees of success.
The Meridian model worked because breakthroughs such as Priestley’s to create new products were of little use without a means to distribute those products, which meant a strong transport infrastructure—and the UPSA was in a situation where unrestrained Carltonism[7] would not produce that infrastructure. Both Meridian businessmen and politicians were keen to embrace the possibilities offered by the steam engine, the steam-wagon and the railway almost as soon as they were invented—but the country suffered considerable disadvantages. The materials required to build steam engines and trains were in short supply in Platinea, and most significantly of all there was little in the way of the plentiful coal resources that nations like Great Britain enjoyed (albeit ones only intermittently tapped during the years of Populist and Regressive rule). To a certain extent this could be offset with carefully judged tariffs to encourage foreign imports of coal (particularly given the aforementioned mismanagement in Britain) and this approach certainly benefited from the establishment of Meridian trade with newly established coal-producing regions such as the Kingdom of New Granada and the Cape Republic. However, there was certainly an incentive to find alternatives. In the short term, this took the form of brilliant Meridian engineers producing more and more advanced and efficient steam engines that required less fuel than their European prototypes, as well as creating modified forms that would run on alternative fuels such as charcoal (derived from the plentiful forests of the New Territories), bagasse (a byproduct of sugar plantations) and even llama dung.[8] These Meridian innovations soon spread to the rest of the world.
Aside from this shortage of resources, though, the Platinean heart of the UPSA was otherwise well suited for the railway. British railway engineers who had been too close to the Marleburgensian regime fled there in large numbers after the Inglorious Revolution, and one famously remarked that ‘the ground is almost naturally ready to receive rails without preparation’.[9] The railway infrastructure was the lifeblood of Meridian trade, carrying salted (and eventually tinned) beef from the cattle ranches, sugar and wine from the new plantations, copper and tin from the mountains—as well, of course, the guano used to make fertilisers and explosives. The railway was not the only circulatory system of the UPSA, however—as Félix Ocampo was keen to prove...
*
From “12 Inventions that Changed the World” by Jennifer Hodgeson and Peter Willis (1990):
Compared to some of the world-changing innovations discussed in this book, the Standard Crate may seem rather dull and commonplace. But it is precisely the fact that we so take container transport for granted in the modern world that illustrates how huge an impact it had—it is difficult for us to even imagine a time in which the holds of ships powered only by sails were filled inefficiently with small, many-sized crates in a ramshackle fashion. Who first had the notion that there was a better way—or at least the first to be able to do something about it? The answer is Félix Ocampo.
Born in the UPSA to a second-generation Spanish immigrant family, Ocampo made his money as a steam shipping magnate. While his competitors like Enrique Franco might be content to run their service off the back of the innovations of others, Ocampo was determined to blaze his own path. Legend tells of Ocampo laughing at a joke about a Cisplatine village idiot (the Cisplatineans being the traditional butt of (trans)Platinean jokes at the time) who struggled to carry a massive armful of many-sized empty boxes, being unaware that he could simply place one inside the other to reduce the scale of his problem. Though this was not quite the same issue as cargo transport faced, it nonetheless got Ocampo thinking. He commissioned a study by Dr Hugo Navarro, a mathematician from the University of Buenos Aires, to study the stacking and loading of crates in his ships. Navarro’s findings showed that much of the space was inefficiently wasted, both because of the lack of standardisation of crate size and also because the shape of a seagoing ship’s hull dictated that of its cargo hold. Navarro suggested that more of the deck should become available for cargo storage, as was used by riverine barges, which would require oceanic ships to abandon the use of an auxiliary sailing rig in case the steam engines failed. Many captains and trade magnates were leery of this step, being unconvinced by the growing reliability of steam engines. It would remain a controversy for a couple of decades before Navarro was proved right and sails began to disappear from the oceans.
However, Ocampo made more of his money from riverine transport within the UPSA, where flat-topped barges were the norm in any case. He introduced crates of standardised size and invested in engineering projects to produce better cranes that could stack a larger number of crates on deck, as well as improvements to the barge design to allow the greater water displacement of this load without sinking. Concerned by the possibility of crates being crushed under the weight of those above them, Navarro and the engineer Víctor Tejada showed that this problem could be reduced by stacking them in an offset fashion similar to bricks in a wall, though this required the sacrifice of a small amount of space. A different problem was the tendency for a stack of crates to overbalance and slide off if a wave disturbed a ship. This was not so much of a problem for the riverine barges, but plagued early experiments with stacking standardised crates on Navarro’s Barco sin velas seagoing prototypes. Tying down the stacks with ropes helped to some extent, but not enough. Ocampo began to fear that they had hit the limit of what was capable, at least with their current level of technology.
Enter Jens Christiansen. Though Denmark had come out of the Popular Wars on a high, many among its people had not been dissuaded from seeking a better life elsewhere. The ENA remained a more popular destination (at least until Supremacist rhetoric began putting some immigrants off) but Christiansen had been one of the smaller group of Danes to choose the UPSA. A minor engineer and inventor, Christiansen was employed by Tejada as one of his assistants. Legend tells that Christiansen originally invented his enclavamiento de carga (‘cargo interlock’) while making toys for his brother-in-law’s children, but both he and Tejada quickly saw the relevance of the system of interlocking nubs and holes to wider applications. The true Standard Crate was born, capable of being interlocked with others into a rigid stack that would not slip or slide. As Ocampo himself pointed out, the invention would not have been possible even twenty years before—it was only the increasing precision of measurement and standardised part production driven by the Industrial Revolution that allowed each crate to be constructed to a pattern so identical that the interlock was never compromised.
Like all great innovations, the Standard Crate was ridiculed at first, called “Señor Ocampo’s Lumpy Blocks” by La Lupa de Córdoba for example. Ocampo himself was undaunted. When asked by a journalist what he saw the Standard Crate as accomplishing, he replied: “Nothing more or less than list—a widening of the road, a broadening of the pipe. Whereas once six travellers bearing gold and spices could walk abreast along that road, soon twelve will. Whereas once that pipe could bring in enough fresh water to support ten families, soon it will bring twenty. Men do not see the road, the pipe is there, because it consists of ships traversing the vast ocean—but it is nonetheless there. Just as new innovations in the semaphore mean we can send more messages, so this will mean we can send more cargo. And that will change everything, just as the semaphore has.”
Ocampo was proved right in the end, of course—but even in his lifetime, the truth of his words would become apparent. By the time of the Great American War in the middle of the nineteenth century, Navarro’s sailless steamships with their stacked Standard Crates—along with the knockoffs from other companies that swiftly followed—had helped create a new trade network that inextricably linked the UPSA to both its client republics and the Empire of New Spain. And, because New Spain also traded extensively with the Confederation of Carolina (as it then was) by that point, the trade networks became interlocked as readily as two Standard Crates themselves.
Which had the important consequence that in the year 1850, when the UPSA geared up to intervene in the Great American War, there were powerful established interests close to the Meridian government keen to ensure that the trade links they had just established with New Spain and Carolina would not be cut off...
[1] Ever since the country’s birth following the Second Platinean War, Meridian troops have worn blue uniforms—thought to be because they originally clothed them in uniforms captured from the Duc de Noailles’ army and these were then copied. However, by the 1840s, the movement towards all-rifle armies with an emphasis on skirmishing rather than the columns and lines of musket warfare means that Meridian blue is now a subdued camouflage-friendly shade, similar to the French army’s ‘Horizon Blue’ from OTL WW1.
[2] As you can probably tell, this is from a writer rather sympathetic to the Carolinian rebels, which as mentioned before is not that unusual a position to take in the mid-twentieth century ENA.
[3] In OTL this phrase generally refers to the republican cause in the English Civil War, and more specifically those who continued to romantically support it years after the Restoration. In TTL it was reapplied to the cause of Carolinian independence and the former usage is mainly forgotten save in England itself.
[4] Mildredville is OTL Augusta, Georgia.
[5] In TTL this name has come to be applied to the capital city of Guyana, on the site of OTL Georgetown (which in OTL was founded differently and previously named Longchamps and Stabroek under French and Dutch rule respectively). In OTL it refers more generally to a region and a former Dutch colony, as well of course as the eponymous sugar that that colony produced.
[6] The UPSA currency is named the dollar after the old colonial Spanish dollar. Ironically enough, of course, America does not use dollars in TTL.
[7] Laissez-fair free-market capitalism.
[8] Amazingly, all of this is true of South America in OTL, although much of it did not happen until a century later than TTL due to the fact that South American railways were mostly foreign-built at first. In particular the Argentine railway engineer Livio Dante Porta produced several remarkable steam engine innovations in the 1950s that have seen little use in OTL due to them coming at a time when most countries were abandoning steam for most purposes—earlier and cruder versions of his ideas have come about in TTL’s South America.
[9] The same was said in OTL by a British engineer about Argentina in 1863.
“The whole matter was quite ridiculous. On the stage it would have made a fair comedy—in reality it made for a bitter tragedy. All that fanfare about some grand intervention, the heroic murderers in blue[1] landing on so-called foreign shores to defend the cause of liberty or slavery or whatever it was this week...and by the end of the whole bloody mess, things were exactly the same as before they arrived. I certainly didn’t need any more examples of the futility of war after what I had seen in my youth, but I did notice that it made a distinct impression on a younger generation. Small wonder when so many of them grew up without fathers as a result...”
– Pablo Sanchez, Twilight Reflections, 1866
*
From: “Out of the Frying Pan: A History of the Kingdom of Carolina” by Kenneth Raine (1956)—
The Day Offensive was the culmination of the opening stages of the Great American War. After a brief period of confusion following the incapacitation of General Jones, General Sir George Day had obtained control in his place over the gradually growing American army occupying North and South Provinces. Day, so optimistically dubbed ‘Petit-Boulanger’, was a cautious man who has come in for much criticism over the years, not all of it well founded. His defenders point to the precarious position of the Americans. Certainly, they were successfully bringing in more troops over sea via Charleston, rendering Governor Owens-Allen’s position increasingly embattled as Virginian neutrality, circumvented, seemed irrelevant—but this was not so. Virginia’s closed southern border posed enormous logistical challenges for the Americans, particularly given the government’s understandable if inconsistent guerre de tonnere diktats on not living off the land. Of course, such attempts to avoid alienating the occupied populace were futile considering they were married to the slave confiscations that the Supremacists pushed through in an attempt to intimidate the rest of Carolina into surrendering—the idea being that American ultimatums would contain the carrot that the remaining Carolinian slaveholders would be compensated if they accepted the offer now, but not later. The plan was a double failure as it only hardened the resolve of the free Carolinians while encouraging those under occupation to rise up and fight the Americans in revenge for their lost property.[2] General Day therefore had to struggle to feed and supply his troops as they attempted to not only to hold down half of pre-war Carolina in the face of a restive populace, but also to continue pushing south and westwards towards Ultima.
It can be debated—it has been debated—whether a bolder approach would have yielded better results for the American cause, perhaps if General Jones had avoided his wound. It might just as easily have seen American troops outrun their supply lines and face collapse, however. The latter scenario is a favourite of speculative romantics [alternate historians] sympathetic to the ‘Good Old Cause’[3] who dream of a truly free, united Carolina (perhaps even joined by Virginia) resulting from Jones’ overextended army being crushed by Alf Stotts. Whether there is anything to this belief but wishful thinking lies beyond the scope of this work.
Therefore, General Day sacrificed the end of the 1849 campaign season in order to better build up his forces and only gradually pushed towards Ultima, giving the Carolinians more time to prepare. Despite this advantage, the Carolinian position was dire. With so much of their country and its budding industry under the American bootheel, it seemed only a matter of time to many (even Alf Stotts himself) before the final defeat. It was at this time, perhaps, that some of the misconceptions by American politicians about the Carolinian people came true for a time—the common people remembered the overly optimistic claims of brow-beaters before the war that Carolinian troops would be marching through Fredericksburg by Christmas, and they blamed their General Assembly, Speaker and Governor for getting them into this situation. Instead, Christmas would be spent watching the horizon and waiting for the time when the dithering Day would come (“That’ll be the Day” as the later folk song punningly put it). Ultima had a mild winter climate—as indeed the city which no longer bears that name still does—but in the hearts of its citizens that Christmas, there was a distinct chill.
The Carolinians did not waste their time, however. The passing of a proper draft began to swell the rebel army’s numbers, and the American troops in North and South Province failed to intercept most of the refugees fleeing south to join up. The railway network was used to the full advantage that it gave the Carolinians—the Americans generally being unable to use it due to a combination of sabotage and the different rail gauge and train design causing problems for their engineers. And Ultima of course was the heart of that train network, the hub—that was the whole reason that the city had grown up. It had never had even the cursory, outdated defences of Charleston, lying in the heart of a peaceful Carolina. Had the Americans managed to push through earlier on, Ultima would have been virtually defenceless. But with the time that winter bought, that began to change. The silver lining, as General Rutledge observed, was that at least they could start from scratch—there were no now-obsolete fortifications that would only get in the way and would have to be to dismantled first, as was often the case in Europe and even some older North American cities. The embarrassing and catastrophic reversals in the early stages of the war had resulted in a purge of the overly confident, old-fashioned officers who had previously dominated the Carolinian regiments, and the fledgeling new War Office benefited from being run by younger strategists who had carefully studied the battlefields of the Nightmare War between France and North Italy during the Popular Wars. They knew they were seeing a glimpse of the future, and accordingly Ultima was ringed with carefully constructed trenches and strongpoints equipped with (then) modern rubble bastions to house artillery—though concrete pillboxes would not be developed until some years later. The defences, known as the Alexander Line after the now-deceased Governor, were designed around allowing gaps for the train lines to operate as long as possible, only for them to then be destroyed to prevent them falling into enemy hands if necessary.
So it was that the anvil of a meticulously fortified city met the slow but firmly grasped hammer of General Day’s armies. The First Siege of Ultima is generally considered to have lasted from 13th March to 19th May 1850. During that time the city was almost surrounded, and more than once overly triumphalist papers in the ENA trumpeted the inevitable defeat of Carolina any day now. But green-clad American troops died on the bayonets of the new recruits in their hastily dyed butternut uniforms as they tried to storm the trenches, were blown to bits by the hailshot fired by the protected artillery, suffered from disease in their overcrowded camps surrounding the city. Day’s modern defenders point to the fact that he was able to deploy artillery of his own to silence some of the Carolinian guns and achieve breakthroughs in places, smashing the trenches—whereas a more direct attack might have proved entirely futile. Contrary to popular belief, it was realised by some forward-thinkers at the time that an armoured steam-wagon could possibly overcome the trenches of death (though in any case it would need a better engine and terrain capabilities than the models available at the time), but Virginian neutrality meant that steam-wagons could only be brought in by sea, and that was problematic at the best of times, even if the French did manage it in their own front of the Great American War.
The Siege was a bitter, bloody fight on both sides, and like many such episodes in history it spawned a considerable cultural impact—one only has to think of Ulysses Spencer’s novel When The Guns Sang (published 1883) or, from the other side, Lady Jane Bickersley’s painting The King in Winter. This title has seemed obscure to many considering the painting depicts a group of butternut-clad Carolinian troops crouched in their trench as shells burst overhead and the shadow of a steerable observation balloon is cast on them. According to the artist, it was intended to be a criticism of the eventual King of Carolina for failing to be present in the nation’s darkest hour.
Both sides came close to running out of ammunition and explosives at different times—more explosives were used in the Siege than had been used in all America’s previous wars put together, as every student of quotable statistics can parrot. And in the end it was this factor, together with a new round of recruits from southern Florida and free Cuba, that tilted the balance in favour of the Carolinians with their railway supply lines. Facing shortages despite his meticulous planning, General Day took the decision to fall back to Mildredville.[4] It was a choice typical of the man, skilled in his particular field but prone to reduce warfare to a matter of numbers and fail to see the significance of morale. The Americans were chastened by the retreat and the Carolinians were emboldened, with General Stotts leading several sorties against the Americans. None of these particularly accomplished anything in military terms, but they played well with the common folk in the remaining areas of free Carolina. The dissatisfaction and resentment the populace had briefly held for their rulers had passed, and any opportunity for the Americans to exploit it had gone also.
Naturally the lifting of the Siege became a national day of celebration in postbellum Carolina, all the more so when the shape of the eventual postwar settlement became apparent. Indeed, as the wit Douglas Hargreaves poignantly observed in 1872: “We celebrate our victory, and try to forget that it was followed by our defeat—though it didn’t seem that way at the time, of course.” Aside from Cravenville, the breaking of the First Siege of Ultima was the only other major land battle of the Great American War that can fairly be said to have been won by ‘the Carolinians’...
*
From: “Golden Sun and Silver Torch: A History of the United Provinces of South America” by Benito Carlucci (1976)—
Initial Meridian involvement in the Great American War was criticised at the time for being overly cautious, as though the government was reluctant to react to the near-assassination of Intendant Padilla. Though this may have been true of many of the Americophiles in the Adamantine Party, it was largely a kneejerk partisan criticism by the opposition papers, and in fact the delay in much direct action was a necessary consequence of the preparation required for an unexpected war. The conflict did not begin auspiciously for the UPSA—a Meridian frigate operating out of Demerara,[5] the Intrépida, was intercepted and captured by one of Admiral Warner’s ‘island hopper’ ships of the line, HIMS Chesapeake, before it had even heard of the Meridian declaration of war on the ENA. It seems likely that it was in order to overtake the embarrassment of this incident that President-General Luppi pushed for the timetable for the invasion of Falkland’s Islands (or as they were afterwards called, the Malvinas) to be accelerated. Fortunately for Luppi, this did not result in catastrophe—the American forces there, now under the command of Captain Alfred Benton, realised that they were outmatched and there was no point in trying to resist. Benton was wracked with guilt for his role in plunging the ENA and UPSA into war, and attempted to offer himself up to the Meridians while claiming that he had been operating independently and beyond his orders, but it was too late. Benton was killed by an angry Meridian Marine on the deck of the Aquiles when his insistence grew too heated and he tried to pull a copy of his orders from an inside pocket, which the Marine mistook for a weapon. This act was in full view of the four American ships from the Falkland base, whose commanders decided that it could not go unanswered. A few hours later, those four ships lay on the bottom of the Pacific Ocean – as did three of their Meridian counterparts. The Battle of the Malvinas effectively eliminated any American naval presence in the southern Atlantic and had the unintentional effect of cutting off the ENA from India and Cygnia—and at the time of the Great Jihad in the former land no less.
With the newly christened Malvinas won for the UPSA, Luppi smoothed over the Intrépida scandal by trumpeting the news that he had achieved a foreign policy aim that the UPSA had been pushing for since its very foundation. No longer need Meridians fear a foreign naval base on their doorstep, and Meridian control of the Cape Horn seaways was now absolute. Indeed, some would have been quite happy to leave Meridian involvement in the war there, having taken advantage of American distraction to obtain this aim. Luppi himself was more concerned with the plight of the Californian rebels, whose cause he had partly been elected upon, and this new war placed the UPSA opposite the country whose citizens were doing the most to help those rebels. Indeed, if the UPSA were to intervene more directly against the ENA, they would almost be forced to work with the Carolinians, who quite apart from being slavers were also almost the only ones fighting for the New Spanish side in California. The fact that this apparently nonsensical intervention nonetheless took place is, as Manfred Landau put it, a testament to ‘the power of the Church of the Almighty Dollar’.[6]
Almost from the beginning, the UPSA had been regarded as a land of opportunity for business interests started by vigorous young men who found themselves stifled by state control and punitive tax regimes in the Old World. The role of business in Meridian history is a complex and somewhat controversial one. The view advanced in this work is that while it is undoubtedly true that many powerful Meridian corporations such as Priestley Aereated Water were born from the brilliance of a few men acting alone, the general corporate structure that had come into being by the middle of the nineteenth century could not have existed without a certain level of state intervention. The UPSA was unique in that the two forces worked hand in hand fairly harmoniously, at least up to this point—in contrast to nations like Great Britain and to a lesser extent France, where industry suffered stop-start chaos due to excessive (and indecisive) state intervention, or the ENA (except Carolina) where the reverse was true, and too often industry ran amok regardless of the desires of the state. The UPSA model was a broadly paternalist one, in which the state acknowledged the brilliance of entrepreneurs and their right to be rewarded for their actions, but tried to steer them into a framework that would serve the national interest. This model was copied by antebellum Carolina when it had become clear that the Confederation needed to prevent industry being monopolised by the northern Confederations, and this was far from the last land to try to emulate the ‘Meridian Miracle’—though with decidedly varying degrees of success.
The Meridian model worked because breakthroughs such as Priestley’s to create new products were of little use without a means to distribute those products, which meant a strong transport infrastructure—and the UPSA was in a situation where unrestrained Carltonism[7] would not produce that infrastructure. Both Meridian businessmen and politicians were keen to embrace the possibilities offered by the steam engine, the steam-wagon and the railway almost as soon as they were invented—but the country suffered considerable disadvantages. The materials required to build steam engines and trains were in short supply in Platinea, and most significantly of all there was little in the way of the plentiful coal resources that nations like Great Britain enjoyed (albeit ones only intermittently tapped during the years of Populist and Regressive rule). To a certain extent this could be offset with carefully judged tariffs to encourage foreign imports of coal (particularly given the aforementioned mismanagement in Britain) and this approach certainly benefited from the establishment of Meridian trade with newly established coal-producing regions such as the Kingdom of New Granada and the Cape Republic. However, there was certainly an incentive to find alternatives. In the short term, this took the form of brilliant Meridian engineers producing more and more advanced and efficient steam engines that required less fuel than their European prototypes, as well as creating modified forms that would run on alternative fuels such as charcoal (derived from the plentiful forests of the New Territories), bagasse (a byproduct of sugar plantations) and even llama dung.[8] These Meridian innovations soon spread to the rest of the world.
Aside from this shortage of resources, though, the Platinean heart of the UPSA was otherwise well suited for the railway. British railway engineers who had been too close to the Marleburgensian regime fled there in large numbers after the Inglorious Revolution, and one famously remarked that ‘the ground is almost naturally ready to receive rails without preparation’.[9] The railway infrastructure was the lifeblood of Meridian trade, carrying salted (and eventually tinned) beef from the cattle ranches, sugar and wine from the new plantations, copper and tin from the mountains—as well, of course, the guano used to make fertilisers and explosives. The railway was not the only circulatory system of the UPSA, however—as Félix Ocampo was keen to prove...
*
From “12 Inventions that Changed the World” by Jennifer Hodgeson and Peter Willis (1990):
Compared to some of the world-changing innovations discussed in this book, the Standard Crate may seem rather dull and commonplace. But it is precisely the fact that we so take container transport for granted in the modern world that illustrates how huge an impact it had—it is difficult for us to even imagine a time in which the holds of ships powered only by sails were filled inefficiently with small, many-sized crates in a ramshackle fashion. Who first had the notion that there was a better way—or at least the first to be able to do something about it? The answer is Félix Ocampo.
Born in the UPSA to a second-generation Spanish immigrant family, Ocampo made his money as a steam shipping magnate. While his competitors like Enrique Franco might be content to run their service off the back of the innovations of others, Ocampo was determined to blaze his own path. Legend tells of Ocampo laughing at a joke about a Cisplatine village idiot (the Cisplatineans being the traditional butt of (trans)Platinean jokes at the time) who struggled to carry a massive armful of many-sized empty boxes, being unaware that he could simply place one inside the other to reduce the scale of his problem. Though this was not quite the same issue as cargo transport faced, it nonetheless got Ocampo thinking. He commissioned a study by Dr Hugo Navarro, a mathematician from the University of Buenos Aires, to study the stacking and loading of crates in his ships. Navarro’s findings showed that much of the space was inefficiently wasted, both because of the lack of standardisation of crate size and also because the shape of a seagoing ship’s hull dictated that of its cargo hold. Navarro suggested that more of the deck should become available for cargo storage, as was used by riverine barges, which would require oceanic ships to abandon the use of an auxiliary sailing rig in case the steam engines failed. Many captains and trade magnates were leery of this step, being unconvinced by the growing reliability of steam engines. It would remain a controversy for a couple of decades before Navarro was proved right and sails began to disappear from the oceans.
However, Ocampo made more of his money from riverine transport within the UPSA, where flat-topped barges were the norm in any case. He introduced crates of standardised size and invested in engineering projects to produce better cranes that could stack a larger number of crates on deck, as well as improvements to the barge design to allow the greater water displacement of this load without sinking. Concerned by the possibility of crates being crushed under the weight of those above them, Navarro and the engineer Víctor Tejada showed that this problem could be reduced by stacking them in an offset fashion similar to bricks in a wall, though this required the sacrifice of a small amount of space. A different problem was the tendency for a stack of crates to overbalance and slide off if a wave disturbed a ship. This was not so much of a problem for the riverine barges, but plagued early experiments with stacking standardised crates on Navarro’s Barco sin velas seagoing prototypes. Tying down the stacks with ropes helped to some extent, but not enough. Ocampo began to fear that they had hit the limit of what was capable, at least with their current level of technology.
Enter Jens Christiansen. Though Denmark had come out of the Popular Wars on a high, many among its people had not been dissuaded from seeking a better life elsewhere. The ENA remained a more popular destination (at least until Supremacist rhetoric began putting some immigrants off) but Christiansen had been one of the smaller group of Danes to choose the UPSA. A minor engineer and inventor, Christiansen was employed by Tejada as one of his assistants. Legend tells that Christiansen originally invented his enclavamiento de carga (‘cargo interlock’) while making toys for his brother-in-law’s children, but both he and Tejada quickly saw the relevance of the system of interlocking nubs and holes to wider applications. The true Standard Crate was born, capable of being interlocked with others into a rigid stack that would not slip or slide. As Ocampo himself pointed out, the invention would not have been possible even twenty years before—it was only the increasing precision of measurement and standardised part production driven by the Industrial Revolution that allowed each crate to be constructed to a pattern so identical that the interlock was never compromised.
Like all great innovations, the Standard Crate was ridiculed at first, called “Señor Ocampo’s Lumpy Blocks” by La Lupa de Córdoba for example. Ocampo himself was undaunted. When asked by a journalist what he saw the Standard Crate as accomplishing, he replied: “Nothing more or less than list—a widening of the road, a broadening of the pipe. Whereas once six travellers bearing gold and spices could walk abreast along that road, soon twelve will. Whereas once that pipe could bring in enough fresh water to support ten families, soon it will bring twenty. Men do not see the road, the pipe is there, because it consists of ships traversing the vast ocean—but it is nonetheless there. Just as new innovations in the semaphore mean we can send more messages, so this will mean we can send more cargo. And that will change everything, just as the semaphore has.”
Ocampo was proved right in the end, of course—but even in his lifetime, the truth of his words would become apparent. By the time of the Great American War in the middle of the nineteenth century, Navarro’s sailless steamships with their stacked Standard Crates—along with the knockoffs from other companies that swiftly followed—had helped create a new trade network that inextricably linked the UPSA to both its client republics and the Empire of New Spain. And, because New Spain also traded extensively with the Confederation of Carolina (as it then was) by that point, the trade networks became interlocked as readily as two Standard Crates themselves.
Which had the important consequence that in the year 1850, when the UPSA geared up to intervene in the Great American War, there were powerful established interests close to the Meridian government keen to ensure that the trade links they had just established with New Spain and Carolina would not be cut off...
[1] Ever since the country’s birth following the Second Platinean War, Meridian troops have worn blue uniforms—thought to be because they originally clothed them in uniforms captured from the Duc de Noailles’ army and these were then copied. However, by the 1840s, the movement towards all-rifle armies with an emphasis on skirmishing rather than the columns and lines of musket warfare means that Meridian blue is now a subdued camouflage-friendly shade, similar to the French army’s ‘Horizon Blue’ from OTL WW1.
[2] As you can probably tell, this is from a writer rather sympathetic to the Carolinian rebels, which as mentioned before is not that unusual a position to take in the mid-twentieth century ENA.
[3] In OTL this phrase generally refers to the republican cause in the English Civil War, and more specifically those who continued to romantically support it years after the Restoration. In TTL it was reapplied to the cause of Carolinian independence and the former usage is mainly forgotten save in England itself.
[4] Mildredville is OTL Augusta, Georgia.
[5] In TTL this name has come to be applied to the capital city of Guyana, on the site of OTL Georgetown (which in OTL was founded differently and previously named Longchamps and Stabroek under French and Dutch rule respectively). In OTL it refers more generally to a region and a former Dutch colony, as well of course as the eponymous sugar that that colony produced.
[6] The UPSA currency is named the dollar after the old colonial Spanish dollar. Ironically enough, of course, America does not use dollars in TTL.
[7] Laissez-fair free-market capitalism.
[8] Amazingly, all of this is true of South America in OTL, although much of it did not happen until a century later than TTL due to the fact that South American railways were mostly foreign-built at first. In particular the Argentine railway engineer Livio Dante Porta produced several remarkable steam engine innovations in the 1950s that have seen little use in OTL due to them coming at a time when most countries were abandoning steam for most purposes—earlier and cruder versions of his ideas have come about in TTL’s South America.
[9] The same was said in OTL by a British engineer about Argentina in 1863.
Thande
Donor
A belated thanks for this comment, I'm always humbled when people say this is the TL that led them to sign up to the site (and there have been a few).
Hopefully it's considered a better reason than the one I signed up for (someone being wrong on the internet about the borders in Turtledove's In the Presence of Mine Enemies)
Alex Richards
Donor
I'm sorry, have you just put all commercial shipping cargos in Lego blocks
Also from the looks of those hints, it seems that Carolina may end up split up. Possibly the Americans are able to keep the North and South provinces but not anything else, possibly it's a later division. Either way the independent bit may be heavily propped up by the Societists in Meridia.
Also from the looks of those hints, it seems that Carolina may end up split up. Possibly the Americans are able to keep the North and South provinces but not anything else, possibly it's a later division. Either way the independent bit may be heavily propped up by the Societists in Meridia.
This is the only timeline I can think of in which Lego would turn up as a solution to cargo transportation.
EDIT: That said, TTL's version of Tetris is going to be awesome (and probably even more maddening).
EDIT: That said, TTL's version of Tetris is going to be awesome (and probably even more maddening).
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I'm sorry, have you just put all commercial shipping cargos in Lego blocks
I think he has. That is AWESOME (as is everything in LTTW)
I have to join in the gushing here. This continues to be awesome, and I have no idea how the upcoming Meridian intervention is going to play out...
What-... The-... Whatidi-... What?!
Extensive counter-factual historiographical digital-network-archeological excavations had allowed me to find this eight-year old map from the old Map Thread:
...and I thought I finally had figured out the resolution to this bloody mess, but if Carolina is not to be joined with Virginia, then that means you've bloody gone and changed everything since! Why?!
It's actually interesting to note that Lego in fact is used by engineers these days when making models and stuff. Of course, this has to do with the different pieces being mass-produced and cheap than it has to do with anything else.
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