Part #189: The Turn of the Tide
“Archaeologists guess that the meaningless hieroglyphs decorating various obelisks and steles in Egypt are records of the great military victories of pharoahs of the past. But we have no way of even knowing whether they are right in this inference,[1] much less the details of such victories: who was the enemy? Where did the battle take place? What was the war about?
Whenever I see a newspaper or broadsheet trumpet the triumphs of ‘our’ allegedly brave soldiers, I picture a yellowed and faded remnant of that paper hanging in some museum three thousand years hence, when the very language the paper was written in is long forgotten, and doubtless archaeologists will debate what the unknown words describe. For all such victories are meaningless in the long term. All they achieve is a reduction of the human population, the removal of human lives that could go on to do so much more.
I picture that paper in a museum of the future, yes; but I have cause to hope that the archaeologists among our descendants may fail to draw the same inference as our own do with the Egyptian records. For it is my solemn hope that in such a time, the very concept of military conflict will be expunged from the human consciousness...”
– Pablo Sanchez, 1852 speech
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From “The Great American War” by Alexander Jenkins (1972)—
Though the disabling of the
Lord Washington and the retaking of Charleston was a key turning point of the Great American War, in the short term its impact was, perhaps, overestimated. Certainly it can be argued that Admiral Insulza, if not directly an architect of the disaster at Currituck, became overconfident in the leniency of his orders. On July 28th, 1850—with the Americans still reeling from the Charleston incident mere weeks before—Captain José Márquez of the UPS
Venganza, a second-rate frigate, brought northward both his own ship and three others under his overall command. Márquez’s intention was to further push the Americans out of Carolinian waters and support Meridian operations on land. Or so he claimed. In reality Márquez was a glory hound spoiling for a fight. As Captain Denison commented afterwards: “Well, he got one.”
The
Venganza had strayed too close to Virginian waters, a boundary which it turned out that the Virginians, despite the ongoing breakdown of their government, policed just as tenaciously as its counterpart on land. The Virginians’ Fort Bodie, a hastily-constructed outpost sitting on the Confederal border on Bodie Island (which makes up a substantial part of the Outer Banks) opened fire on Márquez’s force as they approached. Márquez initially closed with the intention of returning fire, and only broke off at the last moment when his lookout reported that the fort was flying the Virginian flag—he had previously believed it to be an American-held Carolinian fort. Márquez’s defence at his court-martial was that he was working from outdated charts that failed to recognise that the Currituck Inlet, which had formerly separated Carolina from Virginia, had closed up due to the ongoing evolution of the Outer Banks coastline.[2] Márquez had, he claimed, been looking for a gap that was no longer there as the border. The court decided he had simply been negligent and would have acted similarly with an up-to-date chart, but it is an open question.
Another open question is what would have happened to the war if Márquez had not stopped at the last moment, and an incident between the UPSA and Virginia had forestalled the events about to take place in the latter. But let us leave counterfactuals to the speculative romantics.
In any case, Márquez realised his mistake and swiftly fled from Virginian waters, allowing his small flotilla to become strung out as they sought to escape identification by the Virginians. And it was at this point that they ran straight into the four ships commanded by Captain Edward Denison of the Imperial Navy.
The Battle of Currituck—named after the nearest town on the Carolinian coast, though separated from it by the Outer Bank—was decisive. The Meridians were caught off guard and Denison saw them before they did in turn, having time to prepare. The four American frigates sent three of their Meridian counterparts to the bottom of the Atlantic and only the
Venganza herself escaped with heavy damage. The battle was not so great in the grand scheme of the war, but it played a significant role in perceptions of it. It was a huge boost to American morale—Emperor Frederick knighted Denison practically as soon as he stepped off the neutral loblolly boat that brought him through Virginian waters to Fredericksburg—and helped suppress the ‘Yellow Panic’ that had wracked America’s east coast since the Charleston incident. Without the
Lord Washington, many alarmists had become convinced that America was defenceless and that New York City and Boston were about to face coastal bombardment from the invincible
Antorcha. Denison’s victory provided a shot in the arm to those fighting against the increasingly powerful ‘Peace at any costs’ faction, soon to become known by the name Unconditional Imperialists.
In the UPSA, of course, there was the opposite reaction. President Luppi’s government was heavily criticised by the opposition Unionists and Colorados, and if Márquez’s court-martial conviction was a formality, a show trial, then Admiral Insulza only barely escaped the same, never mind his great victories earlier on. It was at this point that the Meridian government took the decision to become more closely involved in the command of the war, particularly at sea, which is generally considered to have had an adverse effect on the overall Meridian war effort (if not to the same extent as the short-termist political meddling in the ENA). However, given the distances involved, there was a substantial delay before this policy change took any noticeable effect.
Despite Meridian embarrassment at sea, however, a different story was told on land. The ENA would need all the propaganda victories they could get...
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From “12 Inventions that Changed the World” by Jennifer Hodgeson and Peter Willis (1990):
The history of firearms is a long and complex one, and it is rare that any innovation altered the world overnight in a radical, game-changing way. Certainly the earliest gunpowder weapons were not particularly more powerful or effective than their older counterparts of bows, arrows and catapults. Improvements over the years changed this, from matchlock to flintlock to compression-lock ignition, from muzzle-loading to breech-loading, from smoothbore to rifled barrels. But these were usually slow and gradual, and it was rare that a small number of soldiers with newer guns would have that much of an advantage over the same number of equally-skilled men with older ones. It was generally only over the large numbers of an old-fashioned battlefield that superior technology began to make its superiority clear through statistics.
There are exceptions, though, either when an improvement is objectively a game-changer or when it comes at the correct ‘alienistic moment’ at which point the world is ready to accept it as one. Pierre Boulanger’s genius was in knowing how to exploit such a moment at the Battle of Lille with weapons that, objectively, did not make an enormous difference to the battlefield. The oft-cited example of the Great American War, on the other hand, is more ambiguous: certainly an exploitation of a similar moment was part of General Flores’ plan, but it is also possible to argue that his cycloguns genuinely did make an objective difference to the battlefield, early and crude though they were compared to later efforts.
Ever since the invention of firearms, it had been obvious that one of the chief limitations of most was the fact that only one bullet could be fired at a time, often followed by a lengthy reloading procedure which initially restricted the application of firearms to the battlefield—requiring pikemen or other defenders to protect the gunners while they reloaded. The reloading method became swifter over time, but the basic limitation remained. There were, of course, many attempts to get around it. A cannon loaded with canister fire functioned like a volley of musket fire in itself, but was rather short-ranged. The hailshot developed for the Jacobin Wars improved the range, but in any case other attempts at tackling the problem took a different tack. These mostly came under the general title of ‘volley gun’, whether it be a single weapon with multiple barrels (generally suffering from recoil problems) or a single barrel with a rotating cylinder drum. The latter was first demonstrated in the Puckle Gun invented in 1718 by James Puckle, which was effectively a flintlock revolving pistol scaled up to the size of a small artillery piece.[3] Though technically impressive in retrospect, the Puckle Gun was limited by the technology of its time and was not a practical weapon for its day.
By the late 1840s, there were several attempts at similar designs, exploiting the superior compression-lock technology of the period which had already made small-scale revolving pistols far more reliable and useful (as, of course, famously demonstrated by Jacques Drouet in his 1824 ‘duel’ with Pierre Artaud).[4] Most of these cyclogun designs were still experimental and controversial: notably they failed to make much impact in the Unification War despite early models being fielded by certainly the Saxons and Belgians, and possibly some other participants (the evidence is unclear). The French were the first to recognise the import of the weapons’ effective use in the Great American War and the French Ministry of War would go on to invest heavily in them during the Long Peace.
The original Meridian cyclogun was developed in 1842 by Anibal Vélaz, a mechanically-minded Jansenist Catholic priest who accompanied new colonists into the Patagonian steppes. The colonists were often attacked by native Indians, in particular the Mapuche and the Tehuelche—who, largely unbeknownst to most of the Meridian colonists, were engaged in periodic conflicts of their own which the colonists ended up in the middle of.[5] The colonists had firearms, but that often made little difference, and in any case the Indians had often acquired firearms of their own by black market trade. What the colonists could not afford to do was lose any of their able-bodied men to such skirmishes: they needed a weapon that could make the Indians back off before battle would be joined. Vélaz somewhat naively imagined that a cyclogun firing a continuous stream of bullets would ultimately save lives, as no-one would dare to approach anyone wielding one.
Vélaz’s weapon was only a partial success. When it worked, it was very impressive; however, it often jammed. The weapon utilised multiple barrels with an innovative rotation system (leading to the later name ‘cyclogun’ by which we now know it) which allowed the barrels to cool in between shots and loaded each new barrel as the last ejected its spent cartridge. The real innovation of the weapon was not this rotation but the fact that it worked with a simple gravity feed system for each new cartridge, allowing the cyclogun to be operated by relatively unskilled and untrained men—such as the colonists of Patagonia. Well, that was the theory—in practice it needed a trained mechanic to perform maintenance on it, and objectively was not practical. However, as is often the case it was the perceived reality that was different—after a few lucky runs of the cyclogun operating correctly and inflicting hideous losses on Mapuche war parties, the Indians learned to fear the weapon’s distinctive rattling roar and indeed avoided the colonial parties that Vélaz had protected with his invention.
The incident was well publicised in the Meridian papers and the Fuerzas Armadas became interested. They bought Vélaz’s patent from him for a substantial sum which he donated to missionary efforts aimed at bringing the Indians into what was considered civilised behaviour by the Meridians: Vélaz hoped that they would become another semi-autonomous Indian state like Aymara which would preserve its own language and culture rather than having it destroyed by the colonists. The basic cyclogun was worked on by Carlos Giménez, and many historians now attempt to link his name with the gun rather than the better-known Vélaz, arguing that it was only Giménez’s improvements that turned the cyclogun from a fair-weather friend into a war-winning weapon. One limitation of Vélaz’s weapon was that it required hand-cranking, which substantially restricted the rate of fire.[6] This made sense for the purpose that Vélaz had had in mind, use by isolated colonial parties who had by necessity to do everything by hand. However, Giménez realised that the crank could instead be turned by that tireless source of external power that was revolutionising everything in the nineteenth century—steam. His early experiments in pairing the cyclogun with a small steam engine were disappointing, and his superiors were sceptical—unlike European countries or indeed the ENA, the UPSA was not blessed with coal reserves to the point that it made sense to apply steam more widely than necessary to military technology.
Giménez nonetheless persevered, and if the cyclogun retained its hand-crank and that officially remained its sole source of power, in practice he improved his mechanisms to the point that the guns could easily be converted over to steam power if the opportunity arose. And arose it did. Orlando Flores had observed Giménez’s experiments, and took the decision to give over some of the Meridian transport fleet’s valuable cargo space to a dozen of the guns, trained crews, and Giménez himself to advise in the weapons’ operation and assess their performance in a combat situation. Such a decision could have easily backfired, but to Giménez’s delight he found that Carolina (though also not particularly blessed in coal reserves) had carefully stockpiled them in the years before the war and his steam option was available for use.
The early performance of the cycloguns was such that Flores controversially turned the plans over to Carolina’s machinists and gunmakers andsoon had Carolinian manufactories turning out copies. While aware of the danger of the patent getting out, he realised that the weapons would be required in a substantial number if they were to make a real difference. This therefore tends to support the argument that the guns made a real, objective difference and were not merely a propaganda weapon in the Boulanger mode. Initially the cycloguns were mounted on small artillery carriages and towed by Carolinian artillery steam-tractors, requiring dismount and the reattachment of the steam-tractor’s engine to the cyclogun before their use. However, the Carolinian Major Julius Beauregard swiftly realised that they would be superior mounted atop the steam artillery platforms produced by the ENA under the official name Pioneer, which the Carolinians had produced before the war and continued to do so. The Pioneers more often mounted small cannon that could fire as they were approaching the enemy under steam power rather than merely using that power to travel helplessly from one firing site to the next. This was a powerful alienistic weapon that had been understood since the days of Boulanger, though making an effective application of it had always been a more problematic proposition (mobile guns tended to either break down a lot or be vulnerable to enemy fire enroute). For 1850 the Pioneer was a decent, modern application of the idea, but by replacing the cannon with a cyclogun and hooking up one of the Pioneer’s two steam engines while using the other for propulsion, Beauregard realised that it could be turned into a truly deadly killing machine. Rather than firing individual shots at a relatively distant foe, it could demolish an infantry column in seconds.
Beauregard’s idea swiftly proved highly effective both objectively and as a demoralising terror weapon. The Pioneer and cyclogun was physically small enough to conceal on all but the flattest battlefields, and its sudden appearance from cover, hissing like a great serpent as the roaring gun was rotated to turn its surroundings into a killing field, was a horror that American soldiers had never faced before. The cyclogun had cemented its place as the iconic weapon of the Great American War, perhaps even more so than the armourclad warship.
In practice, of course, cycloguns remained vulnerable to the same problems that faced any mobile gun. They were not true protguns: the soldiers operating them had some coverage from an armour plate but they were nonetheless easily picked off by snipers. Crucially, however, every time an American sharpshooter killed a cyclogun operator, his place could be taken by almost any infantryman: as Vélaz had intended, the weapons were easy to operate (if not to maintain in the long run). The real vulnerability of cycloguns was to artillery: rifled cannon in particular could explode the boiler and destroy gun, carriage and crew in one deadly hit. However, there weren’t enough rifled cannon, and the smoothbores were too unreliable. It is worth noting the argument has been made that American forces dealt far more effectively with cycloguns in the final days of the war, when Major Arnold Garnet’s improvements to rapid ballistics calculation had started to assist American artillery fire—but by that time it was too late.
If cycloguns were vulnerable to artillery, they were death on infantry and especially cavalry: one American veteran of the war, Eliot Stanley, wrote his famous poem
Equus R.I.P. as a despairing take on how horses were not only being rendered obsolete by the steam engine in civilian life, but had been slaughtered into irrelevance by it on the battlefield. The city of Crosscreek in North Province[7] faced starvation in the winter of 1850 after its fields were torched by both Americans and Meridians in turn, and is said to have only survived because of the vast quantities of horsemeat available following nearby battles. A tradition was established and the town was noted for its peculiar use of horsemeat in cookery right up until the 1940s, when the tradition was officially eradicated by the Cultural Homogenisation Authority...
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From: “The Myth of America” by Colin Blaby and Myfanwy Hughes (1988)—
The impact of the cyclogun on the war is, of course, widely exaggerated—not least owing to the effects of taking Meridian propaganda too literally. Nonetheless, the Meridian entry into the land war had an immediate effect. The American forces had been at the end of a long supply line before the failure of the attack on Ultima, and it is not surprising that those supply lines began to collapse following the fall of Charleston. Though other ports such as Newton remained in American hands, too much had been dependent on that bottleneck. As events in Virginia accelerated towards the cataclysm, the American Army found itself on the back foot. The small number of Meridian troops, superior in training and equipment to the Carolinians and also to many (though not all) of the Americans, were used to spearhead Carolinian counterattacks heading northwards. Crucially, General Flores refused to sign off on every planned attack that Belteshazzar Wragg and Uriah Adams demanded. After a number of small-scale defeats by Carolinian forces who attempted to pursue the retreating Americans alone—accompanied by a few ‘I told you so’s from General Stotts—the Carolinian rebel government reluctantly accepted its position as cobelligerent and bowed to Flores’ strategy. “It was at that point,” Michael Chamberlain later wrote, “that it was clear that the war was won—by the Meridians. And, just as clearly, it had been lost by the Carolinians. It didn’t seem that way at the time, but in the end the most important conflict was not the one between Carolina and the ENA.”
Flores decided on two major axes of advance, one ultimately aimed at Salisbury and the other at Tarborough.[8] This might be thought rather ambitious given that a substantial slice of South Province still remained in American hands at the time, but there was method in Flores’ madness, which became clear as 1850 wore on. As the Americans fell back—in increasingly good order as General Jones recovered enough to take back overall command (at the Continental Parliament’s insistence) and was wise enough to continue to use General Phelps’ logistical genius in combination with his own charisma—they naturally did so with two ultimate fallback positions in mind. The first of these was the inland province of Franklin, whose Imperialist and anti-slavery sympathies made it a firm outpost of control for the Americans and their loyalist allies, no matter its isolation with Virginia to the north and a debatable secondary combat zone to the west. The second was the port of Newton, where new supplies began to arrive as convoys were redirected and the port was hastily expanded. General Flores took command of the eastern axis aimed at pursuing the Americans towards Newton, in which he was assisted by the Carolinian General Stotts and his irregular allies under Jack Barton, while the western axis was commanded by Flores’ subordinate Fernando Delibes and the Carolinian General Rutledge.
Whether it be by the propaganda glory of the cyclogun or, more likely, the simple impact of superior logistics and panic in the American ranks as their gains of the previous year were rolled up, all of South Province returned to Carolinian hands (on paper) and the two axes pushed further on into North Province. For the most part they were welcomed as liberators, though there were controversial cases of appropriations. These are often blamed solely on the Meridians in sympathetic histories, but in reality the Carolinians were also not too shy about turfing their former occupied comrades out of their houses and inventing the excuse that they were clearly collaborators. There was an aspect of conflict between classes to such matters, with many Carolinian commoners taking the opportunity for revenge against vulnerable aristocrats who could be tarred with the brush of at least passive collaboration.
Even without such depredations, many of the aristocrats had lost much of their wealth thanks to the American enforcement of Clay’s Proclamation and the freeing of the Negroes. Some former slaves had already fled northwards (though, tellingly of the political nature of the proclamation, most of the Americans soldiers—with some honourable exceptions—made no particular effort to protect them from reprisals as they did so). Others still remained in the area and complicated the situation as they sought to avoid being re-enslaved, either by their former masters or by others. Some took the Caesar Bell route and established themselves as bands of outlaws in forests or other inaccessible regions, while others attempted to flee northwards—likely too late to do anything but choke the roads for the retreating Americans—or in a few rare cases, actually fled southwards. Some of these were aimed at fighting in the dwindling but still existent Negro rebel bands fighting in the Cherokee Empire, but others acquired false documentation and offered themselves to Georgian slaveholders to escape reprisals as the lesser of two evils. This last desperate, monstrous option is the subject of the famous Meridian novel
La Maldición de Cáin by Manuel Saramago, a veteran of the conflict. Saramago felt deeply ashamed that his country, known for being anti-slavery and being ruled by a party whose roots lay in the condemnation of slavery, had taken foreign policy action that had ultimately resulted in such bleak consequences. Though Saramago himself did not strictly express Societist views in his lifetime, his works were one of the substantial secondary influences on the ideology that, in the words of George Spencer-Churchill the Younger, ensured that the eventual practice of Societism would be ‘something that Sanchez would barely have recognised, and certainly wouldn’t have approved of’.
By November 1850, the Meridian-Carolinian force had taken Raleigh—though it, like many North Province cities, had been reduced to ruins by a scorched-earth policy by individual American commanders (for the record, Jones and Phelps attempted fruitlessly to discourage this panicked behaviour). The two axes of advance had effectively cut North Province in three, but the American forces in the centre portion were swift to flee either east or westward to avoid being pocketed. This left a major American force in Franklin and a second in northwestern North Province around Newton. The Americans were on the back foot, but events were about to come to a head in Virginia and more supplies and men were flooding into the expanded port facilities of Newton.
What happened next would ultimately determine the outcome of the war.
[1] Recall that in TTL, France never invaded Egypt and the Rosetta Stone was never found, so as of 1850 Egyptian hieroglyphs are still untranslatable.
[2] This happened in OTL as well.
[3] The Puckle Gun predates the 1727 POD.
[4] See Part #115.
[5] The Tehuelche or Patagon people were (broadly speaking) the original inhabitants of Patagonia, but in this era in both OTL and TTL were being both conquered and culturally absorbed by the Mapuche, who were driven south by European colonial expansion. In TTL this process is accelerated by the UPSA colonising Patagonia at a more rapid pace than OTL Argentina and Chile.
[6] Up to now, the cyclogun is similar to the OTL Gatling gun.
[7] OTL Fayetteville, North Carolina.
[8] Both in OTL North Carolina and with effectively the same 1700s names retained in OTL, although Tarborough has the OTL American spelling alteration of Tarboro.