Part #191: The Darkest Hour
“Raúl has some curious notions about how the world might be governed when the last nation is cast into the furnace of history; I must say that I find his ideas of zones and rotations to be a little esoteric for my taste. It strikes me as being not unlike an artist planning his magnum opus while he is still a journeyman: surely it is better to focus on the process that one day, hope against hope, will bring us to a position where we may argue about such matters. Until that time it is merely a distraction. As for his argument that his ideas might be partially implemented
as part of that process, envisaging a world
divided between the blind and the sighted, well that is nonsense in my view. Surely the Last Revolution will be an act accomplished by men and women across the world as a single concerted movement. Indeed, if it were any other way, it would not truly be an end to division, and would be just another false start...”
– Pablo Sanchez, 1865 private interview
Original footnote: This text was not widely disseminated at the time and its veracity was questioned many times when it eventually surfaced, but sufficient evidence was eventually gathered to satisfy most doubters. Of course, one might argue that the best evidence the quote is real is how ruthlessly the Biblioteka Mundial sought to suppress it...
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From: “The Myth of America” by Colin Blaby and Myfanwy Hughes (1988)—
It is very easy for today’s armchair generals seated safely behind their ypologists to opine that Fredericksburg was never seriously threatened during the Great American War, to unveil a rack of balancesheets that ‘prove’ it was mathematically impossible for the Concordat forces even to make a protracted siege, much less to capture the American capital.[1] To make such an argument is to miss the point that in war and politics, as in life in general, perception is far more important than reality. History is littered with cases of cities that surrendered to conquering heroes who were, in fact, at the end of their tether and could not have afforded to fight another battle—or of leaders hailed at tactical geniuses who were simply too stubborn or stupid to recognise the
apparently superior position of their foe, and blundered on to see that foe shatter like glass before their continued resistance.
Such factors played an important role in this phase of the war. In early 1851 the view of the American public was that their soldiers and sailors had repeatedly humiliated the inferior Carolinian rebels and, despite a few setbacks like Cravenville and the broken First Siege of Ultima, were on course to achieve a great victory sooner or later. To be sure, the initial retreat from Ultima had been something of an embarrassment, particularly given how confidently the papers had expected surrender, and this poured fuel on the fires of the Pacific Society and the wider peace movement. However, it would not be until the end of Virginian neutrality and the Concordat[2] push into Virginia that the movement would transform from a faction within the parties in the Continental Parliament to actually seizing control of the Patriot Party. Shortly after Imperial forces were defeated by the Concordat at the Battle of Lunenburg—largely due to the poor cooperation and general friction between the Virginians and the rest of the Americans—Francis Bassett launched his coup to remove Simon Studholme from the leadership of the Patriot Party. Given the shadowy and informal nature of how the party’s traditional leadership selection method worked, this was a shock to everyone in Fredericksburg, not least Emperor Frederick himself. It is uncertain whether Bassett actually coined the phrase “Unconditional Imperialism” but he certainly popularised it in his speeches. Bassett was an apologist for the Carolinians, arguing that the catastrophe had come about because Carolinia had been put under such pressure that it saw no other option but to break away. From the start the Pennsylvanian advocated the rescindment of Clay’s Proclamation in the hope it would return the Carolinians to the Imperial fold via the negotiating table. This was strongly opposed not only by the War Government but also by the Emperor himself, barely bothering to disguise his failure to remain aloof from politics in this case.
Studholme, badly taken aback by the whole affair, reacted by formally quitting the party he had been part of all his life and sitting as a pro-government independent. Three other Patriots followed him. If this had been intended to undermine Bassett, however, it had the opposite effect—effectively transforming the remaining Patriot caucus into the ‘Peace Party’. As the Concordat forces continued to win victories, a trickle of MCPs from the other parties joined it (or more usually declared themselves ‘Pro-Peace Independents’ and sat on the opposition bench alongside the Patriots). Thus the apparent impossibility of a leveller like Mo Quedling and his supporters sitting alongside the crustiest aristocrats in the ENA was realised. Normal party politics was breaking down in favour of Peace vs War coalitions.
Or that was how it seemed at the time, in any case. What was unclear to the populace at the time—which was just as well or it might have pushed them into full-scale panic—was that Lord President Martin quietly approached the Emperor at this time and baldly stated that he did not believe himself up to his job. His selection as leader by the Patriot conventions had been an accident of history and he had never expected to become Lord President, particularly not in the time of the greatest trial the country had ever faced. Frederick privately agreed with Martin’s self-assessment: his lack of charisma and strong leadership had been part of the problem behind some of the confused and erratic nature of the early American response to the Carolinian breakaway, at a time when decisive action might have nipped the revolt in the bud. But the Emperor lacked options. Clarke was the only other feasible Supremacist leader and he would be too divisive after the Charleston incident. The Liberals Whipple and Webster were more plausible, but the Supremacists would not accept leadership from the minority party. Frederick proposed that Vanburen might return from the backbenches to be Lord President again, but was persuaded at that point that he would alienate too many both within the Supremacists and the Liberals. Nonetheless, the idea continued to circulate.
In practice, with the benefit of hindsight, we can see that the Concordat forces were already at the end of their tether by the time they reached the Wilderness of Spotsylvania (accompanied of course by campfire stories about Caesar Bell’s men still lurking in the woods to kill any slaveholders they could find). Rutledge and Flores (the latter already consumed with misgivings) were running out of steam (literally in some cases). Lacking sufficient troops and hampered by the different rail gauge in Virginia, they had been forced to bypass Williamsburg and encircle Richmond without taking it in order to drive at the imperial capital. It was a quixotic strategy, one born of the same vague Jacobin misconceptions as Clarke and Barker’s attack on Charleston, alloyed to the Carolinian prejudice that the Empire of North America had become a rotten edifice that would crumble to dust if its capital was seized. The reality was very different, of course. The brief period of confusion borne from how Virginia’s neutrality had ended was rapidly wiped away by the Carolinian incursion: few Virginians were willing to be apologists for the neighbour that had just invaded them for the second time in a generation. More reinforcements from the northern Confederations were arriving all the time, being able to use the same Virginian railways that were hampering the Concordat.
Modern observers can be forgiven for raising their eyebrows at this description. Who has not seen a reproduction of Gawsley’s famous painting
Enemy at the Gates, depicting a troubled-looking Emperor Frederick and his cabinet in silhouette as they look at the horizon south of Fredericksburg burning with artillery fire? But the painting is an artistic fiction, Gawsley having taken the decision to invoke artistic license and depict the landmarks of Fredericksburg and the ongoing skirmishes to the south as being within sight of each other. In fact nothing more than advance scouts of the Concordat armies reached any point more northerly than the Wilderness itself, and most of the large-scale battles were fought in and around Powhatan and Amelia counties.[3] This was the realisation of what Owens-Allen and Quedling had long warned of—the return of warfare to Virginian soil, and on a larger scale than in the Virginia Crisis not so many years before. But the people were by now resigned to it. The period of neutrality had felt like one of bated breath, one day to be released. Thomas C. Lee, having returned to grace at the head of a militia force, said that it almost felt like a relief when it came. Lee was not the only one to redeem himself by means of a small-scale victory over Concordat forces, leading troops into battle: Maryland nationalist and perennial candidate George H. Steuart III responded to the end of neutrality (which his late run had substantially complicated) by raising troops in Maryland and successfully leading them to a victory at the Battle of Goochland in August 1851 (by which time the Concordat was already in retreat). This success likely saved Steuart from the gaol, if not the gallows, and he continued to be a fixture of Virginian politics for years to come (much to the annoyance of many).
The 'Darkest Hour' idea was furthermore reinforced by the fact that it was at this point that the Manhattan Massacre (q.v.) occurred, further increasing both paranoia about attacks from within by cryptic reservists [fifth columnists] and the sense of helplessness that America lay defenceless before the unstoppable Meridian war machine.
A persistent falsehood that continues to circulate to this day is that America was only saved because Flores received (obviously by that point outdated) orders from Cordoba not to proceed north of the Virginia-Carolina border but only to hold that border and call for the Americans to come to the negotiating table. While Flores did receive such an order, sadly the idea of a neat symmetry to the rather more commonplace hamstringing of generals by the American government’s edicts is a fabrication: by the time he received it, he had already taken the decision to retreat. Rutledge would stubbornly fight on for a week more before the abject realisation set in that, without the Meridians’ superior training and Boulangiste[4] terror weapons like the steam cyclogun, the Carolinians were no match for the Imperial forces massing around Fredericksburg. As Carolinian soldiers were slaughtered by American hailshot , it was General Stotts who finally forced Rutledge to back down—by means of a left hook according to some rumours.
In all of this there was only a few weeks in July 1851 where fighting had stalled to the point that it might seem that Fredericksburg might be threatened. It was this moment of terror, not a real threat, that was captured in
Enemy at the Gates—and reinforced of course by the almost immutable association of George Spencer-Churchill’s speech with the conflict and the period as a whole...
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From: “A Biographical Dictionary of the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries” by Jacques DeDerrault (1956, authorised English translation):
George Spencer-Churchill, today sometimes named George Spencer-Churchill the Elder due to his modern namesake, is an example of a man who played a key role in a period of history as a young man only to apparently vanish for years and then reappear in quite a different role. Obviously the truth is rather different, but the eye of history is a finicky one and may not choose to rest on a gentleman in the intervening period. The youngest son of John Churchill, 4th Duke of Marlborough and effective dictator of Great Britain for almost twenty years, George was an opponent of his father and a more earnest one of his older brother when Joshua ‘Bloody Blandford’ Spencer-Churchill seized control of the country and plunged it into blood and darkness. George fled to America in 1813 at the age of just 18 and campaigned there to bring attention to the excesses of his father and the crimes of his brother.
Like the man he had been named for, King George III, he reckoned himself more American than British and declined to return after his brother’s downfall. His political sympathies inclined to the Radical and he was first elected to the Continental Parliament as a Radical in 1825: the fact that the Radicals were willing to take him demonstrated that they had moved past their desire to avoid being associated with British intellectuals by their political opponents at all costs. He played some role in the Virginia Crisis but otherwise remained a fairly quiet backbencher for a number of years, becoming fairly popular in his constituency of Erieport.[5] He initially opposed but later supported John Vanburen’s plan to merge the Radical and Neutral parties to form the Liberals: perhaps because of this hedging meaning that he alienated many people, he came close to losing his seat in 1840. Unlike many Liberals he held on, though, and being part of a much reduced caucus in 1840-44 meant that he rose in prominence in the party afterwards.
However, he is of course best known for the defiant speech he gave in 1851 (having become Deputy Secretary at War) when Fredericksburg seemed on the verge of being overrun by the Carolinians and Meridians...
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“We stand on the brink of a precipice. The future of the Empire of North America and all it stands for hangs by a thread. But I myself have full confidence that if all do their duty, if nothing is neglected, we shall prove ourselves once again able to defend our continental home, to ride out the storm of war, and to outlive the menace of tyranny. If necessary, alone.
“Shall we tarnish the luster of this nation by an ignominious surrender of its rights and fairest possessions? Shall this great nation, that has survived, whole and entire, the French and Indian wars, the Spanish revolutions, the madness of Robespierre and Lisieux—that has stood the threatened civil war of the Virginia Crisis, now fall prostrate before the grandsons of those who perpetrated the Cherry Massacre and now seek to outdo their grandsires? Shall a people that so few years ago was the envy of the world now stoop so low as to tell our ancient inveterate enemy “Take all we have, only give us peace?” It is impossible!
“No. We shall go on to the end. We shall fight in Virginia, we shall fight on the seas and oceans, we shall fight with growing confidence and growing strength in the air, we shall defend our Empire, whatever the cost may be. We shall fight on the fields, we shall fight in the streets, we shall fight in the hills, we shall fight in the cities and the forests and the mountains; WE SHALL NEVER SURRENDER, and if we must fall, LET US FALL LIKE MEN!”
– George Spencher-Churchill, speech in the Continental Parliament’s House of Commons, July 16th, 1851
“Fine words. Let’s see you wash the blood off your hands with them.”
– Maurice “Mo” W. Quedling, response in the Continental Parliament’s House of Commons, July 16th, 1851
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From: “The Myth of America” by Colin Blaby and Myfanwy Hughes (1988)—
...Spencer-Churchill collapsed after his speech, and some might have preferred if he had died, but he impatiently recovered in his sickbed even as the doomsday scenario he had spoken of grew ever more distant. The Meridians retreated, the Americans nipping at their heels. Flores covered his retreat by implementing a plan of Insulza’s that had been concocted as part of a far more ambitious scheme now rendered obsolete: Williamsburg, which had become a fortress city defended by naval forces including the partially-repaired
Lord Washington, was stunned when none other than Henry Frederick Owens-Allen resurfaced there at the end of August. Owens-Allen had clearly managed to escape to Carolina and then been smuggled back, and he declared himself the legitimate Governor of Virginia and called upon the House of Burgesses to order Virginian forces to cease attacking the Carolinians and act against the Americans instead. Predictably by this point the Virginians were in no mood to hear such things, and if Owens-Allen was merely thrown out of the Capitol by the Serjeant-at-Arms, he was then set upon by a mob in the street, being shot and slightly wounded in the leg. History repeated itself as the longsuffering William Trenck and the remaining Prussians once again had to extract the wounded Owens-Allen as he swore furiously in German at his former voters. Despite having to dodge a lynch mob and American soldiers, they were able to escape once again to Carolina—and managed to create enough panic and confusion to cover the Concordat retreat.
There was a muted atmosphere of success and celebration in Fredericksburg as the Concordat were pushed out of Virginia, though many were still in shock that they had come as close as they had. On October 1st 1851 Emperor Frederick finally received an Optel message stating that the last Carolinian troops had been driven over the border: the involvement of the First Imperial Aerial Legion in this relatively minor skirmish has tended to elevate the importance of the new steerables to the conflict in the public imagination (not helped by Spencer-Churchill’s speech also mentioning the dawn of the war in the air). Anxious to share the good news, he naturally called on the Lord President first—and his bodyguard Sergeant Jonas Cryer is reported to have said that the change in Frederick’s expression after emerging from Peter Martin’s chambers in the palace was like the difference between summer and winter. As the major danger appeared to have passed from the Empire but there seemed no greater prospect for a succession, Martin had taken matters into his own hands. His mental state at the time has, of course, become the subject for endless monogrammes by alienists who know no more about it than the rest of us: it is Martin’s very obscurity, the fact that he had been plucked almost from the Supremacist rank and file because of the accident of his surname and little is known of his early life, that severely hampers attempts to understand the crucial role he played in history.
After Andrew Eveleigh, Peter Martin therefore has the dubious distinction of being the second Lord President of the Empire of North America to hang himself, though the first to do so while in office. The government was thrown into confusion, but Frederick was swift to realise the importance of maintaining decisive action and a strong chain of command at this time while the Concordat was on the back foot. Some advisors even suggested he seize executive power himself, but he was too canny to risk the huge controversy that would bring, even if he had been the most capable leader available—which was debatable. Instead, Frederick turned to the ‘least worst option’ and indeed asked Vanburen to return from the backbenches to form the government—and therefore set the tone for the remainder of the conflict...
[1] Ypologist = TTL term for computer (from the Greek word meaning to calculate; the OTL modern Greek word for computer is similar). Balancesheet = spreadsheet.
[2] Note that these writers rather anachronistically use ‘Concordat’ to refer generically to the Carolinians and any allies of theirs, including the Meridians, who at this point were certainly not a party to the treaty in question.
[3] Note that these were founded around the same time as the POD and the names have been retained in TTL.
[4] This term is being used to describe weapons whose effectiveness is more due to their shock novelty value, as Boulanger pioneered with the use of steam-tractors at Lille.
[5] OTL Cleveland.
) returned to Fredericksburg only to see it burn. All his former colleagues and friends either dead or already fled. Something broke inside him. And it was then, when his third life - as the King of ******* - began."
