Alex Richards
Donor
Maybe I'll accelerate Impressionism then
And now I have to come up with an in-timeline name for it...unless Makemakean beats me to it
Suggestive Art?
Look to the West: Thread III, Volume IV (Tottenham Nil)!
- Thread starter Thande
- Start date
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Suggestive Art?
Maybe I'll accelerate Impressionism then
And now I have to come up with an in-timeline name for it...unless Makemakean beats me to it
Please, good sir. A few months back, I believe I tried to influence you to name a filibuster in a particular way, but since then I've come to the conclusion that I prefer you to develop this timeline in a 100% Thande-manner. I do not want to tell you how to write your timeline. ...any longer.
...also, great chapter as always, and it touches upon a theme that I think is incredibly ignored on this forum, namely the impact of the psychological factor in warfare, and the extreme lack of information.
From having read a number of threads on this forums dedicated to the matter, I am quite convinced that had it not been for the fact that they happened, the American Civil War, World War I and World War II would have been ruled out as ASB by the collective membership. According to the methodology on this forum, if someone posited the the shooting of Franz Ferdinand, once news arrived in Berlin, the Kaiser would have sat down with his senior generals, admirals and other military officers, within an hour or so have concluded that there was no serious way that they could hope to win a war against Russian and French forces combined, certainly not if Britain joined in, since it was impossible to defeat the British Navy under any circumstances, that any war consequently would be so childishly foolish to get into that it was embarrassing even to consider it as an option, and have called for a grand Peace Conference at Potsdam within a few weeks time, and Christmas of 1914 would really have been no different an affair than Christmas of 1913.
In alternate history, people have made it into a dogma that historical characters would possess all knowledge at the event that is only ever available after the events for later analysis, that they are cold, calculating machines who never overvalue their own troops' strength and who never underestimate their enemies, and who certainly are always rational and are never idiots.
As such, this latest chapter was a most welcome contribution.
Maybe I'll accelerate Impressionism then
And now I have to come up with an in-timeline name for it...unless Makemakean beats me to it
Ha, then perhaps. Not that I'm incapable of doing very realistic work, it's just been a while for myself, and usually something I use graphite drawing for rather than painting (and then it tends to be still life on top of that).
That's something too I enjoyed, and have been trying to accomplish in my own TL. I found myself falling into that trap recently with one commander, and going, "Oh, that's just stupid he would do that with the forces arrayed against him," but then I remember the guy in particular was a risk taking blunt bastard who routinely turned potential allies against himself. So yeah, he would vastly overestimate his military capabilities.
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Thande
Donor
All that and the metalwork too! (There's a "Paul Merton on HIGNFY" punchline in there somewhere...)
Precisely, I'm glad you feel the same way. And of course it works both ways--sometimes you get a case where the rational response would be to give in, but a general or leader keeps fighting because they're too arrogant or stupid to stop, and end up winning because of lucky chances. I have for a while been of the opinion that the idea of the British Empire dominating the 19th century only exists because Lord Palmerston was one of these.
Lord Palmerston!!!
I believe you were the one who brought attention to the fact to me that Lord Palmerston is probably the single most reckless and impulsive Foreign Secretary Britain's ever had, who would regularly make commitments and extremely important foreign policy decisions with regard to France, the United States, the colonies, etc., without bothering to inform his own Prime Minister or Queen Victoria prior.
It reminds me of Adrian Goldsworthy's description of the aftermath of Cannae, actually. He points out that Maharbal almost certainly couldn't have stormed the city as he claimed, and they didn't have the resources for a siege, but that while if anyone could have fought on in that situation, it was the Romans, if anything could have brought them to the bargaining table, it was a Carthaginian army showing up straight after the news of Cannae.
He also argues the reason Rome ultimately won the first two Punic Wars was because their culture was essentially dedicated to turning out Palmerstons.
I have an idea for a fantasy story which has, at one point, the outcome of a medieval civil war effectively being decided by the fact a young hothead of a nobleman doesn't grasp the difference between one of his foraging parties having a fight with one from a neutral force over some piece of food or something, and said neutral force joining his opponents........ not quite the same thing, but does still involve the oft-overlooked human irrationality factor.
I certainly think this is an advantage of this sort of format; while (say) the Chaos TL is a great piece of work, it was all just so impersonal and vague. While we did meet some great characters in the later stories, all the world leaders and so on were always largely just.... there in the background.
He also argues the reason Rome ultimately won the first two Punic Wars was because their culture was essentially dedicated to turning out Palmerstons.
I have an idea for a fantasy story which has, at one point, the outcome of a medieval civil war effectively being decided by the fact a young hothead of a nobleman doesn't grasp the difference between one of his foraging parties having a fight with one from a neutral force over some piece of food or something, and said neutral force joining his opponents........ not quite the same thing, but does still involve the oft-overlooked human irrationality factor.
I certainly think this is an advantage of this sort of format; while (say) the Chaos TL is a great piece of work, it was all just so impersonal and vague. While we did meet some great characters in the later stories, all the world leaders and so on were always largely just.... there in the background.
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I've loved reading these posts.
So, from what I gather.... Virginians are pretty much pro-American precisely because:
1) northerners actually respected their neutrality, no matter how much teeth they gritted over it,
2) Carolinians clearly did not and thus permanently screwed up any pan-Southron feeling, and
3) Henry Frederick Owens-Allen is a complete d-bag and if the first two weren't enough to turn a majority to the ENA, HE did.
Poor Peter Martin though...
So, from what I gather.... Virginians are pretty much pro-American precisely because:
1) northerners actually respected their neutrality, no matter how much teeth they gritted over it,
2) Carolinians clearly did not and thus permanently screwed up any pan-Southron feeling, and
3) Henry Frederick Owens-Allen is a complete d-bag and if the first two weren't enough to turn a majority to the ENA, HE did.
Poor Peter Martin though...
And now I have to come up with an in-timeline name for it...unless Makemakean beats me to it
Actually, I just realized what I would name Impressionism in an ATL!
Myopicism.
Considering that I am incredibly near-sighted (-11 diopters on my left eye, -11.25 on my right eye), I only needed to briefly take off my glasses to see the obvious (pun totally intended).
Thande
Donor
That's an excellent way of putting it
Well, LTTW was originally planned to be more like that (hence why I planned back in 2007 that I would be writing this bit, well, less than 7 years in the future
) but I began to make it 'slower and deeper' because I think people are more willing to give the benefit of the doubt for plausibility than if you just describe things baldly in a short summary. To fall back on the good old hoary example of Mr Hitler's rise to power, that would probably sound a bit too...everything going one way if you just described it in bullet points.Not a bad idea.
Well, the northerners technically violated their neutrality right at the end, but by that point public opinion in Virginia had turned against Owens-Allen's policy and the Carolinians rather stupidly immediately deciding to invade while ranting about getting revenge and burning down a Virginian city meant that the Virginians are generally siding with the ENA, though there was a period of months of confusion while this was sorted out, hence why the Carolinians and Meridians were able to get as far as they did.I've loved reading these posts.
So, from what I gather.... Virginians are pretty much pro-American precisely because:
1) northerners actually respected their neutrality, no matter how much teeth they gritted over it,
2) Carolinians clearly did not and thus permanently screwed up any pan-Southron feeling, and
3) Henry Frederick Owens-Allen is a complete d-bag and if the first two weren't enough to turn a majority to the ENA, HE did.
Poor Peter Martin though...
Also incidentally the new Patriot leader is from Delaware (though the text just notes him as a Pennsylvanian, as Delaware is part of Pennsylvania in TTL...)
That's an excellent way of putting it
Well, LTTW was originally planned to be more like that (hence why I planned back in 2007 that I would be writing this bit, well, less than 7 years in the future
Yeah, but you often do end up producing far more beautiful and novel timelines when you do go slower and deeper, because you inevitably end up stumbling across small historical curiosities and other things that could have gone another way, and when you start evaluating them, one at a time, you end up getting new and remarkable ideas that can work in wonderful ways.
More and more interesting. We haven't heard much about Louisiana and France in a while. I'm interested in what the ripples of the GAW in Europe look like; not to mention whatever new developments are happening in Italy, Germany, Spain and France that might lead to fronts in all those countries in the upcoming series of overlapping wars.
Aaaaah, I understand now. Poor Virginia. I thought they'd avoid the devastation of the War of 1812 and Civil War in this world, but apparently not...
At the least, with a Delawarean at the helm, the Patriot Party will surge back into control and the ENA will have nothing bad happen to it ever again.
Thande
Donor
Part #192: Mud and Smoke
“This terraqueous globe is home to a beautiful variety of landscapes--cities, forests, deserts, fields, hills, mountains, rivers, seas--that would serve as perfect tableaux for any number of the scenes that the human heart can give birth to: love, celebration, weddings, artistry, literature, funerals, tragedy, comedy. Yet the human race seems determined to focus on the one which not only reduces that backdrop to one of bleakness and despair, but despoils and destroys it in the process: that of warfare...”
*
From: “La belle époque, le beau royaume: France 1810-1910” by Jean Lagarde (1982, English translation 1984)—
The French general election of 1851, held in the middle of the Great American War and its concomitant conflicts in Europe,[1] produced a narrow majority for Raymond Dupuit’s Adamantine Party, helped into office by the ‘Threadbare’ demographic who had suffered as a consequence of the Sutcliffist policies of Georges Villon’s National Party.[2] Dupuit took office at a time when France was beset by conflicts or potential conflicts on all sides and had to walk a narrow tightrope to deal with them all. As a consequence, the Louisiana front naturally got short shrift as a conflict far from France’s metropole: losing Louisiana altogether would be nothing more than a foreign policy embarrassment and an economic blow, in contrast to the ramifications of seeing the European conflicts spilling over France’s borders. To that end, General Dufaux and Admiral Rivet found themselves deprived of reinforcements in their attempts to bring down the self-declared King Jean-Luc I and his rebel Kingdom of Louisiana.
The intervention had worn on for two miserable years at this point. Certainly optimistic French hopes that taking Nouvelle-Orléans would cause the rebels to crumble had proven to be unfounded. French power was secure in Nouvelle-Orléans, helped by declarations of emancipation and a resulting large number of freed slaves loyal to France and willing to work towards French war aims. Beyond that things became debatable badlands. Constant low-level skirmishes were fought in a largely unforgiving terrain in which field-guns and their steam-tractors would sink into mud or topple into bayous mistaken for solid ground by inexperienced French soldiers. The principal interior rebel strongholds were the cities of Baton Rouge and Rosalie.[3] The growth of the former in particular had been driven by the Canajun exiles who had been expelled from the Acadians and Canada following the Third War of Supremacy, and who nestled something of an ancestral grudge against ‘Paris’ for having abandoned them to such exile and discrimination after that conflict, preferring instead to regain France’s valuable West Indian sugar islands at the peace treaty. The Canajuns therefore proved strong supporters of Jean-Luc’s cause, and were particularly skilled at fighting silently in the difficult and idiosyncratic terrain of Louisiana. As the war wore on, French soldiers who would have implacably marched into a Saxon artillery barrage in Europe would wake up in the middle of the night in their sweat-soaked bunks in makeshift cabins, terrified at the thought that that small sound might be a Canajun slipping silently into the camp to draw his hunting snare around the necks of Frenchmen.
The French did have the advantage of the invincible armourclad Périclès, whose indifference to rebel fire had helped them take Nouvelle-Orléans at the start of the conflict, and remained an object of fear and terror to the rebels in turn. However, the Périclès’ usefulness in the interior conflict was limited by problems navigating the Mississippi River. Although Le Grand Fleuve was generally broad, it was often shallow in places and its course had often been altered both by nature and the hand of man (with many improvement projects under the Grand Dukes aimed both at altering navigation and redirecting for irrigation or waterwheel-powering purposes). Such changes were not well documented and the French found it difficult to find navigators willing to guide them through them, although there were many freed Negroes who had worked as stevedores on the great screw steamers and were willing to lend what knowledge of the river they had.[4] Most significantly, of course, the rebels made it more difficult to use the river. Torpedoes[5] were deployed at difficult points such as narrows, usually spotted in good time by the keen-eyed French lookouts and merely causing delays while they were defused or detonated from a safe distance. Once or twice, however, a bomb got through. Such a case was the July 1851 sinking of the Restauration, a second-rate wooden ship of the line which struck a torpedo near the town of Plaquemine, south of Baton Rouge. The ship was evacuated, but before it completely sank beneath the river’s surface, the rebels were quickly able to use rowboats to tow it into a lengthways position so that it effectively blocked the river for further attempts. While the French did make eventually successful attempts to remove the blockage (while being attacked by rebel snipers), it sufficiently slowed matters that Rivet took the decision to withdraw the Périclès for other matters. The rebels continued to hold the western Gulf coast of Louisiana (which had initially been seen as a low priority besides taking Nouvelle-Orléans and then taking out Jean-Luc) and the city of Beaumont[6] surrendered in its turn in September 1851 after seeing how much cannon fire the Périclès could effortlessly soak up.
Encouraged by this success, the French shifted to a policy of taking more readily available targets rather than trying to take the battle to Jean-Luc. The coastal settlement of Calcasieuville[7], between Beaumont and Nouvelle-Orléans, was taken in November 1851 and effectively cemented French control of most of the coast. It would not be until June 1852, after much bitter fighting in the summer heat, that the next target of St-Jean[8] was taken. This town was dominated by Canajun exiles, and its fall did a lot to take the wind out of the sails of the idea that the Canajuns were invincible elite fighters. Many of them were highly skilful warriors of course, but General Dufaux successfully punctured the larger-than-life reputation they had acquired and restored the morale of his troops.
These two victories led Jean-Luc, on the backstep, to decide he must stop fighting from the shadows and instead take the war to the enemy. The result was the so-called Bataille des Bayous, which despite the name was not one battle but a long series of skirmishes. In the end, though, October 1852 found ‘King’ Jean-Luc dead on the battlefield (if that term can be used when he began sinking as soon as he fell, a rifle bullet in his brain). This was trumpeted as a great victory not only by Dufaux but also by Dupuit at home in France, at a time when French government policy was coming under criticism for its judgement in interventionism. However, though the Kingdom of Louisiana was no more, the rebels remained and the French found it no easier to enforce their rule north of Baton Rouge, which finally surrendered at the end of 1852. The rebels in northern and western Louisiana were forced to make a choice: they were isolated bands and could no longer lay claim to serve a coherent alternative government, but had no stomach for surrendering to the French. The eventual result became clear when Rivet sent ships to take possession of the small western Gulf ports of LaSalle and Galvesville.[9] Both towns were flying the flags of the Empire of New Spain and the Kingdom of Mexico, having thrown in their lot with the New Spanish. Given that at this point the prospects of the New Spanish did not look good, with the final collapse of their position in Southern California thanks to the arrival of a new Russian fleet and the loss of Las Estrellas to an army of Corean mercenaries, it said a lot that the western Louisianans nonetheless preferred this to returning to the French fold. With the towns manned with Irish militiamen from eastern Texas, Rivet was unwilling to escalate the war to New Spain without express permission and retreated.
A similar choice was taken in northern Louisiana, where towns such as Rosalie, St-Pierre and Post-du-Rapides[10] went over to the Carolinian side—despite there being no titular Carolinian territory anywhere near them, illustrating how after suppressing the slave rebellion in the Cherokee Empire, in practice Carolina ruled the roost there. Some Carolinian traders remained in northern Louisiana, reflecting the trade links that had been built up over the years, though some of these had returned home to enlist in the army. Ironically it was often the auxiliary troops who took possession of northern Louisiana for Carolina, the same auxiliaries who were growing increasingly unpopular for their behaviour in Carolina itself: men recruited from places like Pernambuco and Guayana by the Meridians.
The French were naturally outraged by all this, but the end result of the Treaty of Recife in 1854 illustrated how impotent they had grown in the Americas. France might be a major power in Europe (indeed now possessing a level of power that many of her former ambitious monarchs could only have dreamed of) but she could do little beside the great ‘indigenous’ powers of the Americas.[11] In the end even the Empire of North America would end up with a slice of Louisiana, despite not being involved in that front of the conflict at all...
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From - Annum Septentrionalium: A History of North America, by Paul Withers (1978) –
The Manhattan Massacre of 16th June 1851 was an important turning point, not just of the Great American War, but of the history of native-colonial relations in North America: a history longer than any petty grievance over the internal structure of an empire which was only a century old. By the mid-nineteenth century it was clear that tensions which had lain dormant for some time were being stoked up again. If the Howden (recall at this point the name was used for all the Seven Nations people) and the Cherokee continued in their treaty arrangements with the Confederations of New York and Carolina respectively, the situation for Indians elsewhere seemed much less rosy. The ‘Tortolian Idea’ of a united Indian identity had never looked more distant, with other tribes continuing to be pushed westward by an expanding Empire of North America and the intermittent conflicts with the western confederation known variously as the Seven Fires, Thirteen Fires and then merely as ‘the Confederacy’ or ‘the Republic’. It was the latter entity which many radicals on the Tortolian side looked to as a hope for the future, for though the Confederacy had been pushed back into less comfortable lands around the Red River Valley and Lake Superior, it continued to resist American encroachment and was gradually building its own coherent, united government structure. However, the American public’s decidedly mixed reaction to the killing of Tortolian founding father John Vann in Spain in 1843[12] which prompted many Indians to confront the fact that relations even between long-established tribal nations and the Empire were deteriorating.
The situation in the Cherokee Empire was one of gradual Americanisation, or perhaps ‘Carolinisation’ is a more appropriate term to use even at an early stage, with the wide adoption of slaveholding and a plantation economy that rendered the Cherokee highly dependent on the Carolinians. At the same time, the growth of Burdenism in Carolina discouraged ‘old-fashioned’ ideas about appropriating Indian land (save as part of an equal treaty) and to some extent encouraged romantic celebrations of Cherokee culture—up to a point. Nonetheless, one European visitor to the area opined in an 1847 travel guide that he had failed to actually discern where the Carolina-Cherokee border was, for most of the people dressed, acted and spoke the same way. He exaggerated, for there were still many Cherokee traditionalists living in traditional ways, but they were a minority. In contrast to most of the Indian nations, there was relatively little friction between the two groups: in the Cherokee Empire that sort of thing was instead reserved for fractiousness between the ‘Cherokee proper’ and those other major tribes which had been absorbed over the years thanks to the Cherokee’s deals with the colonial Americans and then the Carolinians: the Creeks, the Choctaw and the Chickasaw. Only the Seminole were largely exempt from this, as they lived in an exclave in Florida far from the Cherokee heartland and were autonomous in many ways—though this also meant that they had more of a tendency to lose land to speculative Carolinian ventures in less-than-equal treaties in the first half of the nineteenth century.
In the Howden lands, the Confederacy of the Seven Nations, things were less cosy. Having secured valuable lands in the treaties following the Third War of Supremacy and the founding of the Empire of North America, the Howden were (understandably) paranoid about these being lost in a piecemeal fashion to New York. To that end, they were very reluctant to part with any of them, and the ceding of territory to found the city of Rowley [Toronto] was the exception rather than the rule—and even then it was in the form of an exclave. The Howden allowed the construction of roads, canals and eventually railways and Optel lines through their lands, but always imposed tariffs on them to assert their own independence. This sparked increasing resentment from ordinary New Yorkers over the years, and Stephen Martin’s American Supremacy in 1818 encapsulated this resentment by accusing New York’s ruling Patriot oligarchy of being in cahoots with the Howden and disadvantaging the common folk of New York as a result. Rumours circulated—some pure conspiracy theories, others grounded in reality—that young Howden men had gone off to fight with the Thirteen Fires and had even slain American soldiers on the battlefield. Tensions had been escalating for years by the time of the outbreak of the Great American War. If they had fed the creation of the Supremacist Party and its overthrow of the Patriot establishment in New York, so too did they have an effect on the Howden. Like many Indian nations, the Howden had a generational divide between the old, experienced ruling classes who knew from their experience that an outright conflict with Americans was an act of suicide in the long run, and the arrogant, dynamic youth who thought differently. Of course, to say this is to greatly simplify, for the Howden had many other political divides in their society (not helped by the complex interaction of the seven nations and the resentment on the part of the two ‘youngest’ nations, the Tuscarora and Tahontaenrat, that they still were not treated fully as equals).
The Howden also had the traditionalist/integrationist divide found in the Cherokee and other border nations, but unusually the older generations tended to be integrationists while the youth favoured romantic (and often error-prone) revivals of ‘the old culture’. In this they had allies in the form of Indian romantics among the New York middle and upper classes, although the position of such people is often misrepresented—many of them seemed to desire the return of a ‘golden age’ when the Howden had all lived in little villages away from such pesky modern innovations as vaccination and literacy. The young Howden were scarcely less misguided at times, idolising Dekanawida and Hiawatha while indulging in practices and making plans that would have horrified both. It was pointed out at the time the irony that these ‘angry young men’ who were determined to uphold the honour of the Haudenosaunee, the People of the Longhouse, were in fact usually the ones growing up in thoroughly Americanised cities and had barely seen a longhouse. But then perhaps that was the point: it is easy to romanticise something you have little experience of.
The problem was really that the Howden were victims of their own success. At the time of the Great American War, they had been at peace with New York for one hundred and sixty years, their Covenant Chain being older than the Empire of North America and only slightly younger than the British colonisation of New York. Therefore, the dark tales of the consequences of outright, unequal warfare with Americans that the elders told were not merely grandfather’s tales as they were elsewhere, but grandfather’s grandfather’s tales. Such vague warnings made little headway against the strongheaded youth, particularly when the Supremacists took over New York and began passing populist policies that attacked or matched Howden tariffs and placed a wedge between the peoples of New York and the Howden.
It was obvious to everyone that sooner or later something would happen, with either Howden hotheads or Supremacist stalwarts starting it. However, few foresaw how spectacular the end result would be...
*
From “Nothing New Under the Sun: A History of Terrorism” by B. P. Lawson (1978)—
Two of the more famous terror attacks before the modern age are England’s Gunpowder Plot in 1605 and America’s Manhattan Massacre in 1851. These two attacks have several similarities, in particular how the lives of the perpetrators have been endlessly analysed over the years and yet their motivations are still debated. The Massacre is much closer to living memory and rouses more emotions of course: it was merely a recognition of the de facto situation when the ASN designated it a Heritage Point of Controversy on its one hundred and tenth anniversary in 1961. Indeed, the only criticism of this decision was that it seemed churlish to merely refer to it as one point of controversy considering the blizzard of conspiracy theories surrounding the events that took place on that fateful night of June 16th, 1851.
The ringleader of the plotters was, of course, David Johnson—to use his European birth name and the one he is known to by history. He was born with a Howden name as well of course, but this remains a matter of debate due to his own skill in expunging it from records. He claimed the name Skaniadaio[13] after the Seneca religious leader who had famously criticised the growth of Christianity in the Howden and fought to revive traditional Howden religion, despite Johnson himself being Oneida. He is mainly known to history by his European name though, in part due to a tug-of-war later on between ideological Supremacists and Liberals over how the history of Indian relations in New York should be presented.
Johnson and his like-minded young guns plotted some sort of spectacular demonstration aimed at taking revenge for New York’s increasingly anti-Howden policies. That much is agreed on by everyone, but that is about all that is. Genuine scholarly debate is still maintained over whether Johnson was influenced by Tortolianism or not—the rhetoric coming not only out of New York but many other places aimed at the slaveholding Cherokee and hoping they were all slain by their revolting slaves (and then perhaps we can have their land), for example. It is possible, but at least some of the plotters are on record as being Howden supremacists (if one will pardon the use of the term!) first and foremost and not particularly inclined to think about other Indian nations one way or the other. Aside from such genuine debates, of course, the conspiracy theories have fuzzed the issue. It is manifestly absurd to believe claims made through the prism of the most sympathetic of biases that Johnson’s men had no intention of killing any Americans, merely making a statement. Even the most distorted analysis of Johnson’s plan will show that this is impossible: killing at least a dozen Americans would be necessary for them to take possession of the ship, and probably more. At the same time it does not seem likely, as the flip side of the biased theorists have opined, that Johnson always intended to achieve what turned out to be the end result of the attack: there is enough evidence to the contrary.
In any case, Johnson’s plan should be briefly analysed. The germ of his idea might be traced to a speech he is recorded giving to a mob in 1850 where he spoke of how ‘the white man delights in crushing hopes, whether they be those of the Negro in bondage, the men of distant kingdoms across the seas, or we ourselves’. (It is worth noting Johnson’s clear position of sympathy with black slaves, which was not a particularly mainstream position either of Howden or of white New Yorkers at the time). In any case, if Johnson had made this observation, it seemed natural that his revenge for the Supremacists taxing his grandparents into penury as the result of their tariffs, or trading with Rowley by sea to cut off the Howden towns around it and condemn them to economic collapse, would be in turn to crush the white man’s hopes. He acted at a time when the temporary turnaround of the Great American War was already doing so, but evidently he hoped to drive the men of the Empire into the true despair many Howden had known.
He was probably inspired by Elias Watson’s spectacular attack on HIMS Lord Washington a year earlier. Up till that point, everyone had thought of the armourclad as being invincible, and even sufficient damage to take it out of the war temporarily had been a blow to morale. The Meridians ruled the waves at present, though Admiral Insulza did not take his own armourclad Antorcha de la Libertad into Virginian territorial waters or further north—ostensibly because of orders from Cordoba, but as those did not arrive until some months after he began the practice, that was clearly not the original reason. It was not discovered until after the war that a lucky hit from a Virginian coastal battery had blown away one of the Antorcha’s looser armour plates and killed three of his crew. Insulza was canny enough to realise that the armourclads’ reputation of invulnerability was worth far more to the war effort in the form of morale than their actual presence on a naval battlefield, and therefore hushed up the incident and had makeshift repairs made at sea—after which point he was far more cautious about where he would send the Antorcha. It appears that although the Virginian battery in question had a modern rifled cannon, there was nothing particularly special about it—one lucky gunner just happened to find a flaw with his shot.
While the Meridians would therefore not bring their own armourclad north, the Americans did not know this and many living in coastal towns fled their homes at the mere rumour of the Antorcha being sighted. New York however had a symbol of hope for these fearful families: under construction in the shipyards of Brooklyn was a second American armourclad, the Lord Hamilton. While intermittent repairs stalled on the Lord Washington due to its threatened position in Norfolk harbour, the Lord Hamilton had no such quandaries and New York workmen raced to complete it in time for it to be sent into battle. Nonetheless they were not there every hour of the day, and there was a small window of opportunity where the armourclad was deserted save for a dozen or so guards. In June 1851 the ship was finally ready to be commissioned and had already been equipped with some of its armaments.
It was at this point that Johnson’s men struck. They dressed in traditional Howden garb as a symbolic gesture (something that has fed conspiracy theories that in fact the attack was made by blatantly disguised Supremacists creating an excuse to condemn the Howden) and slew the guards protecting the Lord Hamilton. Exactly what happened next is somewhat debatable, as few of the plotters survived what came next and told confused tales. It seems that Johnson wanted to do something to destroy the Lord Hamilton or at the very least delay its commissioning. Possibly he had hoped to detonate her magazine, but the Howden plotters found that little powder had been brought onto the ship yet: they had miscalculated. There was coal in the bunker but the engine had never been used, so there was not much chance of them being able to drive the ship out to sea and sink it or run it aground. Instead Johnson opted to seal up the valves on the engine and try to burst the boiler, but there was a significant chance that this would be spotted by somebody and stopped before it could do too much damage. While achieving this, one of his lieutenants noticed that while not many guns and powder were on board, for some reason another weapon had already been installed. The Lord Hamilton was equipped with a new design of rocket pod at her stem whose launch rack was based on a swivel mount with a built-in fire control system for superior aiming. Johnson realised that many valuable wooden ships were docked opposite the shipyard where the Lord Hamilton was based, and hitting them with rockets could send them to the harbour floor and choke it. Perhaps even if his boiler plan failed, the Lord Hamilton would be unable to sail for a while as a result of this blockage.
However, even if Johnson’s men had been able to work the new rocket guidance system perfectly (which is debatable), they did not realise that it had been installed but not yet calibrated. Fatefully however rockets were already present in the secondary magazine so they only needed to be loaded in place on the rack—rather imperfectly so, analysts believe. With the boiler sealed up and building pressure, Johnson himself aimed the rocket pod at the ships and lit the master fuse.
The resulting spray of rockets certainly suggests something had gone wrong with the loading process, but the spread of them also implies that the targeting was imperfect as well—only two of the twelve rockets actually hit anything in the intended region, and only one of those actually hit a ship. The rest arced in a far higher parabola than intended—it is likely Johnson underestimated the range of these brand-new Wellingborough Mark III rockets—and detonated in a series of explosions between Madgeborough[14] in Brooklyn and Broadway in Manhattan, aside from two further rockets which simply fell in the river. The eight explosions only killed a small number of people in themselves but started a fire which consumed several neighbourhoods and, by the time the Firemen of the City of New York[15] put the blaze out, the death toll stood at 2,700. A persistent story about the attack is that a fire-and-brimstone preacher giving a haranguing street service by oil lamp in George Parade was interrupted by a rocket landing behind him and setting a bank on fire, only for him to seamlessly segue into quoting Revelation: “For in one hour so great riches is come to nought. And every shipmaster, and all the company in ships, and sailors, and as many as trade by sea, stood afar off, and cried when they saw the smoke of her burning, saying, What city is like unto this great city! And they cast dust on their heads, and cried, weeping and wailing, saying, Alas, alas that great city, wherein were made rich all that had ships in the sea by reason of her costliness! For in one hour is she made desolate!”[16]
Several of Johnson’s men were killed in the backblast from the rockets. The sound and fury meant that the remainder were discovered before they could escape. Many were slain by an angry mob in the streets of Brooklyn, while three were taken alive and questioned: soon the police and government knew the whole story, or at least as much as those three footsoldiers had known (hence the continued debate today). As a result, the boiler explosion plan failed, with it being caught in time and the Lord Hamilton not suffering anything like as much damage as Johnson had hoped.
And as for Johnson himself? Perhaps his sympathy with the Negro stemmed from reading of the exploits of Caesar Bell in the Virginia Crisis. Certainly, Bell became a larger-than-life figure to generations of a resentful and displaced people precisely because they never found his body after he led a last battle in Freedonia in 1846 against hostile natives. He might one day return, after all.
Whether that was his inspiration or no, Johnson flung himself into the flame-lit waters of the East River, and was never seen again by mortal eye.
[1] This represents an anachronistic, historiographic (but dominant) view in the late 20th century that all the conflicts around the middle of the nineteenth century can be considered a broader part of the Great American War.
[2] See Part #166. Note that some sources refer to the parties mainly by their nicknames Rouge and Vert, while others such as this one use their ‘official’ names preferentially.
[3] OTL Natchez, Mississippi – it was founded by the French as Fort Rosalie in 1716, before the POD.
[4] One perhaps unfortunate consequence of TTL’s technological progress is that, because it was found that screw propulsion was far superior to paddle wheels early on, there are no paddle steamers to romantically ply the Mississippi in TTL.
[5] Remember this refers to stationary mines in TTL (and indeed did so in OTL at this point).
[6] OTL Baytown, Texas.
[7] OTL Lake Charles, Louisiana.
[8] OTL Lafayette, Louisiana. The suburb of St Martin was settled by displaced Acadians in OTL as well as TTL, incidentally.
[9] OTL Port Lavaca, Texas and Galveston, Texas, respectively.
[10] The last two are OTL Vicksburg, Mississippi and Alexandria, Louisiana respectively.
[11] In inverted commas because the author means empires based in the Americas, but ‘indigenous’ is a misleading term because the countries in question are obviously mainly of colonial origin.
[12] See Part #158.
[13] AKA Sganyadaiyo, Sganyodaiyo, etc. in different transliterations and different Iroquoian languages. The literal English translation is Handsome Lake.
[14] OTL Vinegar Hill, Brooklyn. In TTL it was settled by German rather than Irish immigrants, and the name is an anglicisation of ‘Magdeburg’.
[15] This organisation was founded in 1737 in both OTL and TTL. In OTL its name was changed to the New York City Fire Department in 1798, which didn’t happen in TTL.
[16] Specifically Revelation 18:17-19.
“This terraqueous globe is home to a beautiful variety of landscapes--cities, forests, deserts, fields, hills, mountains, rivers, seas--that would serve as perfect tableaux for any number of the scenes that the human heart can give birth to: love, celebration, weddings, artistry, literature, funerals, tragedy, comedy. Yet the human race seems determined to focus on the one which not only reduces that backdrop to one of bleakness and despair, but despoils and destroys it in the process: that of warfare...”
–Pablo Sanchez, Unity Through Society (1841)
*
From: “La belle époque, le beau royaume: France 1810-1910” by Jean Lagarde (1982, English translation 1984)—
The French general election of 1851, held in the middle of the Great American War and its concomitant conflicts in Europe,[1] produced a narrow majority for Raymond Dupuit’s Adamantine Party, helped into office by the ‘Threadbare’ demographic who had suffered as a consequence of the Sutcliffist policies of Georges Villon’s National Party.[2] Dupuit took office at a time when France was beset by conflicts or potential conflicts on all sides and had to walk a narrow tightrope to deal with them all. As a consequence, the Louisiana front naturally got short shrift as a conflict far from France’s metropole: losing Louisiana altogether would be nothing more than a foreign policy embarrassment and an economic blow, in contrast to the ramifications of seeing the European conflicts spilling over France’s borders. To that end, General Dufaux and Admiral Rivet found themselves deprived of reinforcements in their attempts to bring down the self-declared King Jean-Luc I and his rebel Kingdom of Louisiana.
The intervention had worn on for two miserable years at this point. Certainly optimistic French hopes that taking Nouvelle-Orléans would cause the rebels to crumble had proven to be unfounded. French power was secure in Nouvelle-Orléans, helped by declarations of emancipation and a resulting large number of freed slaves loyal to France and willing to work towards French war aims. Beyond that things became debatable badlands. Constant low-level skirmishes were fought in a largely unforgiving terrain in which field-guns and their steam-tractors would sink into mud or topple into bayous mistaken for solid ground by inexperienced French soldiers. The principal interior rebel strongholds were the cities of Baton Rouge and Rosalie.[3] The growth of the former in particular had been driven by the Canajun exiles who had been expelled from the Acadians and Canada following the Third War of Supremacy, and who nestled something of an ancestral grudge against ‘Paris’ for having abandoned them to such exile and discrimination after that conflict, preferring instead to regain France’s valuable West Indian sugar islands at the peace treaty. The Canajuns therefore proved strong supporters of Jean-Luc’s cause, and were particularly skilled at fighting silently in the difficult and idiosyncratic terrain of Louisiana. As the war wore on, French soldiers who would have implacably marched into a Saxon artillery barrage in Europe would wake up in the middle of the night in their sweat-soaked bunks in makeshift cabins, terrified at the thought that that small sound might be a Canajun slipping silently into the camp to draw his hunting snare around the necks of Frenchmen.
The French did have the advantage of the invincible armourclad Périclès, whose indifference to rebel fire had helped them take Nouvelle-Orléans at the start of the conflict, and remained an object of fear and terror to the rebels in turn. However, the Périclès’ usefulness in the interior conflict was limited by problems navigating the Mississippi River. Although Le Grand Fleuve was generally broad, it was often shallow in places and its course had often been altered both by nature and the hand of man (with many improvement projects under the Grand Dukes aimed both at altering navigation and redirecting for irrigation or waterwheel-powering purposes). Such changes were not well documented and the French found it difficult to find navigators willing to guide them through them, although there were many freed Negroes who had worked as stevedores on the great screw steamers and were willing to lend what knowledge of the river they had.[4] Most significantly, of course, the rebels made it more difficult to use the river. Torpedoes[5] were deployed at difficult points such as narrows, usually spotted in good time by the keen-eyed French lookouts and merely causing delays while they were defused or detonated from a safe distance. Once or twice, however, a bomb got through. Such a case was the July 1851 sinking of the Restauration, a second-rate wooden ship of the line which struck a torpedo near the town of Plaquemine, south of Baton Rouge. The ship was evacuated, but before it completely sank beneath the river’s surface, the rebels were quickly able to use rowboats to tow it into a lengthways position so that it effectively blocked the river for further attempts. While the French did make eventually successful attempts to remove the blockage (while being attacked by rebel snipers), it sufficiently slowed matters that Rivet took the decision to withdraw the Périclès for other matters. The rebels continued to hold the western Gulf coast of Louisiana (which had initially been seen as a low priority besides taking Nouvelle-Orléans and then taking out Jean-Luc) and the city of Beaumont[6] surrendered in its turn in September 1851 after seeing how much cannon fire the Périclès could effortlessly soak up.
Encouraged by this success, the French shifted to a policy of taking more readily available targets rather than trying to take the battle to Jean-Luc. The coastal settlement of Calcasieuville[7], between Beaumont and Nouvelle-Orléans, was taken in November 1851 and effectively cemented French control of most of the coast. It would not be until June 1852, after much bitter fighting in the summer heat, that the next target of St-Jean[8] was taken. This town was dominated by Canajun exiles, and its fall did a lot to take the wind out of the sails of the idea that the Canajuns were invincible elite fighters. Many of them were highly skilful warriors of course, but General Dufaux successfully punctured the larger-than-life reputation they had acquired and restored the morale of his troops.
These two victories led Jean-Luc, on the backstep, to decide he must stop fighting from the shadows and instead take the war to the enemy. The result was the so-called Bataille des Bayous, which despite the name was not one battle but a long series of skirmishes. In the end, though, October 1852 found ‘King’ Jean-Luc dead on the battlefield (if that term can be used when he began sinking as soon as he fell, a rifle bullet in his brain). This was trumpeted as a great victory not only by Dufaux but also by Dupuit at home in France, at a time when French government policy was coming under criticism for its judgement in interventionism. However, though the Kingdom of Louisiana was no more, the rebels remained and the French found it no easier to enforce their rule north of Baton Rouge, which finally surrendered at the end of 1852. The rebels in northern and western Louisiana were forced to make a choice: they were isolated bands and could no longer lay claim to serve a coherent alternative government, but had no stomach for surrendering to the French. The eventual result became clear when Rivet sent ships to take possession of the small western Gulf ports of LaSalle and Galvesville.[9] Both towns were flying the flags of the Empire of New Spain and the Kingdom of Mexico, having thrown in their lot with the New Spanish. Given that at this point the prospects of the New Spanish did not look good, with the final collapse of their position in Southern California thanks to the arrival of a new Russian fleet and the loss of Las Estrellas to an army of Corean mercenaries, it said a lot that the western Louisianans nonetheless preferred this to returning to the French fold. With the towns manned with Irish militiamen from eastern Texas, Rivet was unwilling to escalate the war to New Spain without express permission and retreated.
A similar choice was taken in northern Louisiana, where towns such as Rosalie, St-Pierre and Post-du-Rapides[10] went over to the Carolinian side—despite there being no titular Carolinian territory anywhere near them, illustrating how after suppressing the slave rebellion in the Cherokee Empire, in practice Carolina ruled the roost there. Some Carolinian traders remained in northern Louisiana, reflecting the trade links that had been built up over the years, though some of these had returned home to enlist in the army. Ironically it was often the auxiliary troops who took possession of northern Louisiana for Carolina, the same auxiliaries who were growing increasingly unpopular for their behaviour in Carolina itself: men recruited from places like Pernambuco and Guayana by the Meridians.
The French were naturally outraged by all this, but the end result of the Treaty of Recife in 1854 illustrated how impotent they had grown in the Americas. France might be a major power in Europe (indeed now possessing a level of power that many of her former ambitious monarchs could only have dreamed of) but she could do little beside the great ‘indigenous’ powers of the Americas.[11] In the end even the Empire of North America would end up with a slice of Louisiana, despite not being involved in that front of the conflict at all...
*
From - Annum Septentrionalium: A History of North America, by Paul Withers (1978) –
The Manhattan Massacre of 16th June 1851 was an important turning point, not just of the Great American War, but of the history of native-colonial relations in North America: a history longer than any petty grievance over the internal structure of an empire which was only a century old. By the mid-nineteenth century it was clear that tensions which had lain dormant for some time were being stoked up again. If the Howden (recall at this point the name was used for all the Seven Nations people) and the Cherokee continued in their treaty arrangements with the Confederations of New York and Carolina respectively, the situation for Indians elsewhere seemed much less rosy. The ‘Tortolian Idea’ of a united Indian identity had never looked more distant, with other tribes continuing to be pushed westward by an expanding Empire of North America and the intermittent conflicts with the western confederation known variously as the Seven Fires, Thirteen Fires and then merely as ‘the Confederacy’ or ‘the Republic’. It was the latter entity which many radicals on the Tortolian side looked to as a hope for the future, for though the Confederacy had been pushed back into less comfortable lands around the Red River Valley and Lake Superior, it continued to resist American encroachment and was gradually building its own coherent, united government structure. However, the American public’s decidedly mixed reaction to the killing of Tortolian founding father John Vann in Spain in 1843[12] which prompted many Indians to confront the fact that relations even between long-established tribal nations and the Empire were deteriorating.
The situation in the Cherokee Empire was one of gradual Americanisation, or perhaps ‘Carolinisation’ is a more appropriate term to use even at an early stage, with the wide adoption of slaveholding and a plantation economy that rendered the Cherokee highly dependent on the Carolinians. At the same time, the growth of Burdenism in Carolina discouraged ‘old-fashioned’ ideas about appropriating Indian land (save as part of an equal treaty) and to some extent encouraged romantic celebrations of Cherokee culture—up to a point. Nonetheless, one European visitor to the area opined in an 1847 travel guide that he had failed to actually discern where the Carolina-Cherokee border was, for most of the people dressed, acted and spoke the same way. He exaggerated, for there were still many Cherokee traditionalists living in traditional ways, but they were a minority. In contrast to most of the Indian nations, there was relatively little friction between the two groups: in the Cherokee Empire that sort of thing was instead reserved for fractiousness between the ‘Cherokee proper’ and those other major tribes which had been absorbed over the years thanks to the Cherokee’s deals with the colonial Americans and then the Carolinians: the Creeks, the Choctaw and the Chickasaw. Only the Seminole were largely exempt from this, as they lived in an exclave in Florida far from the Cherokee heartland and were autonomous in many ways—though this also meant that they had more of a tendency to lose land to speculative Carolinian ventures in less-than-equal treaties in the first half of the nineteenth century.
In the Howden lands, the Confederacy of the Seven Nations, things were less cosy. Having secured valuable lands in the treaties following the Third War of Supremacy and the founding of the Empire of North America, the Howden were (understandably) paranoid about these being lost in a piecemeal fashion to New York. To that end, they were very reluctant to part with any of them, and the ceding of territory to found the city of Rowley [Toronto] was the exception rather than the rule—and even then it was in the form of an exclave. The Howden allowed the construction of roads, canals and eventually railways and Optel lines through their lands, but always imposed tariffs on them to assert their own independence. This sparked increasing resentment from ordinary New Yorkers over the years, and Stephen Martin’s American Supremacy in 1818 encapsulated this resentment by accusing New York’s ruling Patriot oligarchy of being in cahoots with the Howden and disadvantaging the common folk of New York as a result. Rumours circulated—some pure conspiracy theories, others grounded in reality—that young Howden men had gone off to fight with the Thirteen Fires and had even slain American soldiers on the battlefield. Tensions had been escalating for years by the time of the outbreak of the Great American War. If they had fed the creation of the Supremacist Party and its overthrow of the Patriot establishment in New York, so too did they have an effect on the Howden. Like many Indian nations, the Howden had a generational divide between the old, experienced ruling classes who knew from their experience that an outright conflict with Americans was an act of suicide in the long run, and the arrogant, dynamic youth who thought differently. Of course, to say this is to greatly simplify, for the Howden had many other political divides in their society (not helped by the complex interaction of the seven nations and the resentment on the part of the two ‘youngest’ nations, the Tuscarora and Tahontaenrat, that they still were not treated fully as equals).
The Howden also had the traditionalist/integrationist divide found in the Cherokee and other border nations, but unusually the older generations tended to be integrationists while the youth favoured romantic (and often error-prone) revivals of ‘the old culture’. In this they had allies in the form of Indian romantics among the New York middle and upper classes, although the position of such people is often misrepresented—many of them seemed to desire the return of a ‘golden age’ when the Howden had all lived in little villages away from such pesky modern innovations as vaccination and literacy. The young Howden were scarcely less misguided at times, idolising Dekanawida and Hiawatha while indulging in practices and making plans that would have horrified both. It was pointed out at the time the irony that these ‘angry young men’ who were determined to uphold the honour of the Haudenosaunee, the People of the Longhouse, were in fact usually the ones growing up in thoroughly Americanised cities and had barely seen a longhouse. But then perhaps that was the point: it is easy to romanticise something you have little experience of.
The problem was really that the Howden were victims of their own success. At the time of the Great American War, they had been at peace with New York for one hundred and sixty years, their Covenant Chain being older than the Empire of North America and only slightly younger than the British colonisation of New York. Therefore, the dark tales of the consequences of outright, unequal warfare with Americans that the elders told were not merely grandfather’s tales as they were elsewhere, but grandfather’s grandfather’s tales. Such vague warnings made little headway against the strongheaded youth, particularly when the Supremacists took over New York and began passing populist policies that attacked or matched Howden tariffs and placed a wedge between the peoples of New York and the Howden.
It was obvious to everyone that sooner or later something would happen, with either Howden hotheads or Supremacist stalwarts starting it. However, few foresaw how spectacular the end result would be...
*
From “Nothing New Under the Sun: A History of Terrorism” by B. P. Lawson (1978)—
Two of the more famous terror attacks before the modern age are England’s Gunpowder Plot in 1605 and America’s Manhattan Massacre in 1851. These two attacks have several similarities, in particular how the lives of the perpetrators have been endlessly analysed over the years and yet their motivations are still debated. The Massacre is much closer to living memory and rouses more emotions of course: it was merely a recognition of the de facto situation when the ASN designated it a Heritage Point of Controversy on its one hundred and tenth anniversary in 1961. Indeed, the only criticism of this decision was that it seemed churlish to merely refer to it as one point of controversy considering the blizzard of conspiracy theories surrounding the events that took place on that fateful night of June 16th, 1851.
The ringleader of the plotters was, of course, David Johnson—to use his European birth name and the one he is known to by history. He was born with a Howden name as well of course, but this remains a matter of debate due to his own skill in expunging it from records. He claimed the name Skaniadaio[13] after the Seneca religious leader who had famously criticised the growth of Christianity in the Howden and fought to revive traditional Howden religion, despite Johnson himself being Oneida. He is mainly known to history by his European name though, in part due to a tug-of-war later on between ideological Supremacists and Liberals over how the history of Indian relations in New York should be presented.
Johnson and his like-minded young guns plotted some sort of spectacular demonstration aimed at taking revenge for New York’s increasingly anti-Howden policies. That much is agreed on by everyone, but that is about all that is. Genuine scholarly debate is still maintained over whether Johnson was influenced by Tortolianism or not—the rhetoric coming not only out of New York but many other places aimed at the slaveholding Cherokee and hoping they were all slain by their revolting slaves (and then perhaps we can have their land), for example. It is possible, but at least some of the plotters are on record as being Howden supremacists (if one will pardon the use of the term!) first and foremost and not particularly inclined to think about other Indian nations one way or the other. Aside from such genuine debates, of course, the conspiracy theories have fuzzed the issue. It is manifestly absurd to believe claims made through the prism of the most sympathetic of biases that Johnson’s men had no intention of killing any Americans, merely making a statement. Even the most distorted analysis of Johnson’s plan will show that this is impossible: killing at least a dozen Americans would be necessary for them to take possession of the ship, and probably more. At the same time it does not seem likely, as the flip side of the biased theorists have opined, that Johnson always intended to achieve what turned out to be the end result of the attack: there is enough evidence to the contrary.
In any case, Johnson’s plan should be briefly analysed. The germ of his idea might be traced to a speech he is recorded giving to a mob in 1850 where he spoke of how ‘the white man delights in crushing hopes, whether they be those of the Negro in bondage, the men of distant kingdoms across the seas, or we ourselves’. (It is worth noting Johnson’s clear position of sympathy with black slaves, which was not a particularly mainstream position either of Howden or of white New Yorkers at the time). In any case, if Johnson had made this observation, it seemed natural that his revenge for the Supremacists taxing his grandparents into penury as the result of their tariffs, or trading with Rowley by sea to cut off the Howden towns around it and condemn them to economic collapse, would be in turn to crush the white man’s hopes. He acted at a time when the temporary turnaround of the Great American War was already doing so, but evidently he hoped to drive the men of the Empire into the true despair many Howden had known.
He was probably inspired by Elias Watson’s spectacular attack on HIMS Lord Washington a year earlier. Up till that point, everyone had thought of the armourclad as being invincible, and even sufficient damage to take it out of the war temporarily had been a blow to morale. The Meridians ruled the waves at present, though Admiral Insulza did not take his own armourclad Antorcha de la Libertad into Virginian territorial waters or further north—ostensibly because of orders from Cordoba, but as those did not arrive until some months after he began the practice, that was clearly not the original reason. It was not discovered until after the war that a lucky hit from a Virginian coastal battery had blown away one of the Antorcha’s looser armour plates and killed three of his crew. Insulza was canny enough to realise that the armourclads’ reputation of invulnerability was worth far more to the war effort in the form of morale than their actual presence on a naval battlefield, and therefore hushed up the incident and had makeshift repairs made at sea—after which point he was far more cautious about where he would send the Antorcha. It appears that although the Virginian battery in question had a modern rifled cannon, there was nothing particularly special about it—one lucky gunner just happened to find a flaw with his shot.
While the Meridians would therefore not bring their own armourclad north, the Americans did not know this and many living in coastal towns fled their homes at the mere rumour of the Antorcha being sighted. New York however had a symbol of hope for these fearful families: under construction in the shipyards of Brooklyn was a second American armourclad, the Lord Hamilton. While intermittent repairs stalled on the Lord Washington due to its threatened position in Norfolk harbour, the Lord Hamilton had no such quandaries and New York workmen raced to complete it in time for it to be sent into battle. Nonetheless they were not there every hour of the day, and there was a small window of opportunity where the armourclad was deserted save for a dozen or so guards. In June 1851 the ship was finally ready to be commissioned and had already been equipped with some of its armaments.
It was at this point that Johnson’s men struck. They dressed in traditional Howden garb as a symbolic gesture (something that has fed conspiracy theories that in fact the attack was made by blatantly disguised Supremacists creating an excuse to condemn the Howden) and slew the guards protecting the Lord Hamilton. Exactly what happened next is somewhat debatable, as few of the plotters survived what came next and told confused tales. It seems that Johnson wanted to do something to destroy the Lord Hamilton or at the very least delay its commissioning. Possibly he had hoped to detonate her magazine, but the Howden plotters found that little powder had been brought onto the ship yet: they had miscalculated. There was coal in the bunker but the engine had never been used, so there was not much chance of them being able to drive the ship out to sea and sink it or run it aground. Instead Johnson opted to seal up the valves on the engine and try to burst the boiler, but there was a significant chance that this would be spotted by somebody and stopped before it could do too much damage. While achieving this, one of his lieutenants noticed that while not many guns and powder were on board, for some reason another weapon had already been installed. The Lord Hamilton was equipped with a new design of rocket pod at her stem whose launch rack was based on a swivel mount with a built-in fire control system for superior aiming. Johnson realised that many valuable wooden ships were docked opposite the shipyard where the Lord Hamilton was based, and hitting them with rockets could send them to the harbour floor and choke it. Perhaps even if his boiler plan failed, the Lord Hamilton would be unable to sail for a while as a result of this blockage.
However, even if Johnson’s men had been able to work the new rocket guidance system perfectly (which is debatable), they did not realise that it had been installed but not yet calibrated. Fatefully however rockets were already present in the secondary magazine so they only needed to be loaded in place on the rack—rather imperfectly so, analysts believe. With the boiler sealed up and building pressure, Johnson himself aimed the rocket pod at the ships and lit the master fuse.
The resulting spray of rockets certainly suggests something had gone wrong with the loading process, but the spread of them also implies that the targeting was imperfect as well—only two of the twelve rockets actually hit anything in the intended region, and only one of those actually hit a ship. The rest arced in a far higher parabola than intended—it is likely Johnson underestimated the range of these brand-new Wellingborough Mark III rockets—and detonated in a series of explosions between Madgeborough[14] in Brooklyn and Broadway in Manhattan, aside from two further rockets which simply fell in the river. The eight explosions only killed a small number of people in themselves but started a fire which consumed several neighbourhoods and, by the time the Firemen of the City of New York[15] put the blaze out, the death toll stood at 2,700. A persistent story about the attack is that a fire-and-brimstone preacher giving a haranguing street service by oil lamp in George Parade was interrupted by a rocket landing behind him and setting a bank on fire, only for him to seamlessly segue into quoting Revelation: “For in one hour so great riches is come to nought. And every shipmaster, and all the company in ships, and sailors, and as many as trade by sea, stood afar off, and cried when they saw the smoke of her burning, saying, What city is like unto this great city! And they cast dust on their heads, and cried, weeping and wailing, saying, Alas, alas that great city, wherein were made rich all that had ships in the sea by reason of her costliness! For in one hour is she made desolate!”[16]
Several of Johnson’s men were killed in the backblast from the rockets. The sound and fury meant that the remainder were discovered before they could escape. Many were slain by an angry mob in the streets of Brooklyn, while three were taken alive and questioned: soon the police and government knew the whole story, or at least as much as those three footsoldiers had known (hence the continued debate today). As a result, the boiler explosion plan failed, with it being caught in time and the Lord Hamilton not suffering anything like as much damage as Johnson had hoped.
And as for Johnson himself? Perhaps his sympathy with the Negro stemmed from reading of the exploits of Caesar Bell in the Virginia Crisis. Certainly, Bell became a larger-than-life figure to generations of a resentful and displaced people precisely because they never found his body after he led a last battle in Freedonia in 1846 against hostile natives. He might one day return, after all.
Whether that was his inspiration or no, Johnson flung himself into the flame-lit waters of the East River, and was never seen again by mortal eye.
[1] This represents an anachronistic, historiographic (but dominant) view in the late 20th century that all the conflicts around the middle of the nineteenth century can be considered a broader part of the Great American War.
[2] See Part #166. Note that some sources refer to the parties mainly by their nicknames Rouge and Vert, while others such as this one use their ‘official’ names preferentially.
[3] OTL Natchez, Mississippi – it was founded by the French as Fort Rosalie in 1716, before the POD.
[4] One perhaps unfortunate consequence of TTL’s technological progress is that, because it was found that screw propulsion was far superior to paddle wheels early on, there are no paddle steamers to romantically ply the Mississippi in TTL.
[5] Remember this refers to stationary mines in TTL (and indeed did so in OTL at this point).
[6] OTL Baytown, Texas.
[7] OTL Lake Charles, Louisiana.
[8] OTL Lafayette, Louisiana. The suburb of St Martin was settled by displaced Acadians in OTL as well as TTL, incidentally.
[9] OTL Port Lavaca, Texas and Galveston, Texas, respectively.
[10] The last two are OTL Vicksburg, Mississippi and Alexandria, Louisiana respectively.
[11] In inverted commas because the author means empires based in the Americas, but ‘indigenous’ is a misleading term because the countries in question are obviously mainly of colonial origin.
[12] See Part #158.
[13] AKA Sganyadaiyo, Sganyodaiyo, etc. in different transliterations and different Iroquoian languages. The literal English translation is Handsome Lake.
[14] OTL Vinegar Hill, Brooklyn. In TTL it was settled by German rather than Irish immigrants, and the name is an anglicisation of ‘Magdeburg’.
[15] This organisation was founded in 1737 in both OTL and TTL. In OTL its name was changed to the New York City Fire Department in 1798, which didn’t happen in TTL.
[16] Specifically Revelation 18:17-19.
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Excellent update as usual Thande !
Strangely , I don't mind that France lost territory in America ITTL . More and more , the modern version of the New World with the Sanchez Societist quotes is beginning to seriously scare me . And now we have terrorist acts ; and we are just in the middle of the nineteenth century !. There is no Monroe Doctrine for the moment , but I could see perfectly the inverse of OTL : European nations wanting to stay away from the American continent !
Otherwise , very nice job with the armourclads , proving once more than perception is more important than the reality . With the American war coming in its final stages , will the situation in Europe come next ?
!Strangely , I don't mind that France lost territory in America ITTL . More and more , the modern version of the New World with the Sanchez Societist quotes is beginning to seriously scare me . And now we have terrorist acts ; and we are just in the middle of the nineteenth century !. There is no Monroe Doctrine for the moment , but I could see perfectly the inverse of OTL : European nations wanting to stay away from the American continent
!Otherwise , very nice job with the armourclads , proving once more than perception is more important than the reality . With the American war coming in its final stages , will the situation in Europe come next ?
Kaiphranos
Donor
Interesting! That was not my guess for what the Manhattan Massacre would be--I was expecting something more like OTL's New York conscription riots...
I too was expecting something low-key. Like a few men with guns. 2700 civilians dead and relations between the ENA and the Howden probably permanently soured is not what I thought.
Not to mention fuel for the Supremacist fire, so to speak. I have a feeling that the northern Confederations are going to take a decidedly nasty turn ideologically.
I'm still fuzzy about the territorial outcome of the war. The ENA and New Spain are apparently both getting slices of Louisiana, which probably means that the western Carolinian provinces are also going to the ENA.
That being said, whether or not Carolina holds the parts of Louisiana that IT occupies is very ambiguous in the update. I guess that depends on whether Carolina even survives as an independent state or not, which I still can't determine from the text yet.
Alex Richards
Donor
Good grief. I think we might see the Cherokee Empire accede as a full province after the war there- much to the detriment of the Indians later on when their culture would surely be a Prime Societist target- contrasted with a forcibly taken/severely reduced Howden province that sees the natives last longer as a separate identity.
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