Look to the West Volume V: To Dream Again
- Thread starter Thande
- Start date
Well, this I welcome wholeheartedly!
So, it seems that it has taken all the way up to the 1890s for them to discover that light is carried by the electromagnetic field. Of course, as I never tire to point out, the story that light waves doesn't need a medium and that Michaelson and Morley disproved the existence of the Aether really is wrong, as light waves most definitely need a medium to travel in, as indeed all waves need a medium to travel in. The only difference is that the electromagnetic field (naturally) doesn't behave like a medium such as water or air, but it still is a medium.
Had the discoveries in the 19th century just happened in a slightly different order, it is not at all impossible that we would today still be talking about the Aether and how electric currents affects the Aether, etc. but unfortunately, we've ended up in a situation where thousands of kids are being taught that light are waves that doesn't need a medium.
Would this really be necessary? Surely parts of the Channel are narrow enough that an Optel tower with a good telescope could easily read signals from the other side.
Thande
Donor
That was a typo, though for thought (and the two technologies swapped by accident). Will fix.
In theory this is true, but if one actually goes to Dover or Calais, seeing the other shoreline is a very hit-or-mass proposition due to variable visibility, and you need pretty good visibility to be able to read an Optel shutterbox, even with a telescope.
Lots of money was put into it by the French due to a particular interest in new technologies after Boulanger used the Cugnot engines to win at the Battle of Lille. However, it's worth remembering that this is a forgotten area of history from OTL: the French had an extensive network in OTL for example. The electric telegraph came about a bit earlier in OTL though, in TTL it's been delayed due to several discoveries in the field of electricity not happening till later, which has given Optel a chance to become this world-changing technology with corporate interestss invested in it.
Ah, thanks for the reminder. It makes me want to mention that the Jacobin Wars segment of this TL was one of the most exciting things I have ever read, period. Even if you are planning to make the Pandoric War only a fraction as cool, you better make sure to publish it, because I'd throw huge amounts of money at it
Thande
Donor
Ah, thanks for the reminder. It makes me want to mention that the Jacobin Wars segment of this TL was one of the most exciting things I have ever read, period. Even if you are planning to make the Pandoric War only a fraction as cool, you better make sure to publish it, because I'd throw huge amounts of money at it
I'll do my best...
If I do ever publish it'll probably have to be self-publishing because I can't imagine any established publisher doing anything but running a mile if I told them "I have this history fanfiction that's longer than War and Peace..." (it actually is, too).
It seems that radio is coming.
I passed there just a few hours ago.
Edit: That square is in the parish of Belém. It can be deduced that TTL Bélem doesn't briefly become its own municipality, like it was between 1852 and 1885 in OTL.
Last edited:
Just give them volume one. Then hold the sequels without them knowing.
Thande, FYI, LTTW has surpassed the 800K mark in terms of words.
As of the last volume, that is. With the addition of this volume, you're going to pass 1M words.
That is, assuming this volume ends with a eight-word epilogue that only says 'Fuck you for reading this million-word shit!'.
Not without them knowing. This is the age of the multi-volume series. I've read quite a few authors blogging about how they got published, and one frequent comment is that "I've got the sequels already written" is something publishers (and agents) love to hear.
Admiral Matt
Gone Fishin'
Indeed.
I should think though that my meaning, and the distinction being made, would remain apparent.
Thande
Donor
Part #205: America Rises
“Of course I’ll try to make it for Peter’s play, but my meeting at Carruthers House is supposed to finish at five and you know how the Vitrai is running at the moment with the rail replacement works. I’ve heard it’s chaos trying to switch to the Vauxhall Line at Sloane Street South at the moment. So tell him I’ll be there and I’ll try to make sure I am. Thanks love – DBH xx.”
*
(Dr. David Wostyn)
Thank you for bearing with us, we’re onto the second shelf now, there are some meatier history books here—not sure if Mr Batten-Hale bought them because he’s interested in the topic or it’s relevant to his job, or just because several of them seem to have been written by his colleagues...anyway, apologies if we got a bit ahead of ourselves dates-wise, but now I think we can catch up on some of the nitty-gritty aftermath of the Great American War...
*
From “Emperor Fred’s Vulgar Notion: A Constitutional History of the Empire of North America” by Bes. Serena Menheniott (2008)—
In 1951 the American historian and social commentator Jane Douglas said “That four and a half years of ‘Peace Patriot’ rule [i.e. 1853-1857] was a time when the nation slept...no, I’ll say it, it was a Coma indeed...yes, if the Sanchezistas had been more anything than a book club with delusions of grandeur at the time, the country would have been no less neglected and despised under their rule than it was under Francis Bassett.” This bold statement, at a time when the ‘National Coma’ rhetoric about Carolina was reaching its height, shocked many and led to censure. Nonetheless, the heat of Douglas’ feeling was shared by many whose grandparents had spoken to them of that time. The Bassett presidency was a time when the Patriots, at the last gasp of their old strength, clung ever more strongly to their last principle: in the words of Michael Chamberlain, ‘Do As Little As Possible’. Having been elected on the vain hope that a united Empire could be preserved and ‘the old normalcy’ restored by the sheer power of wishful thinking, appeasement and not rocking the boat, the Patriots and their Peace Independent allies presided over nothing but stagnancy and decay, while the world looked upon the rising UPSA as the real power in the Americas. Indeed, it was at this time that some commentators said that the imprecise term ‘American’, which was used both specifically as a demonym for the ENA and to describe the peoples of both American continents, should be replaced, for it was unworthy for the UPSA to be called a name that might evoke its defeated rival. The suggested alternative demonym ‘Septentrian’ for citizens of the ENA was rejected with outrage by Americans and saw little uptake elsewhere: to this day, anyone using it is immediately marked out as a snippy critic of American policy who desires to deny the country even its name. The other alternative term, however, ‘Novamundine’ as a more neutral adjective to describe the Americans (or New World), has seen some (though not universal) popularity.
There were more humorous ways to describe the brief period, though. It was a boom time for satire and free speech with such a mockable government and memorable characters. Charles Petty, the de facto leader of the northern remnant Confederation of Carolina still titularly part of the Empire, was a popular choice for the ‘obviously evil in plain sight’ treacherous backstabbing advisor archetype. To this day his name often conjures an image of a scheming dwarf with a black goatee derived from that archetype, when the real Petty was tall and blond. Bassett was treated as wearing literal blinkers that shut out anything that didn’t fit with his worldview. The Meridians were interpreted in various ways, but a common example was to portray them as a sinister foreign bullyboy constantly being hampered by having his trousers tugged by a spoilt crying child representing royal Carolina, moaning that his little black dog had bit him and run away again.
The satirists’ pens were less vicious to the opposition, which spent the four and a half years of Parliament before the government’s inevitable fall plotting how to take advantage. With Vanburen’s defeat, the Liberals had had a brief power struggle between the ‘Two Doubleyous’, Thomas Whipple and Michael Webster, before the former emerged triumphant. Though Webster pledged to support his rival, their former close working relationship was gone and even when the two men themselves managed cordiality, their factional supporters often tore things apart behind the scenes. The Supremacists seemed more vulnerable to falling apart, with Clarke discredited, Martin dead and no obvious successor waiting in the wings. However, once again the party held a convention that produced a dark horse candidate none had expected. This time, his elevation would not be dogged by accusations of ill-informed voters having voted purely on the basis of name. Lewis Studebaker was a self-made man from Pennsylvania who had turned his father’s small steam-wagon parts company into a major corporation building entire wagons—helped of course by the war and its demand for such vehicles for both frontline military and support purposes.[1] His move into politics was largely driven by the falling demand with peace and his strident opposition to the Patriots’ failure to push ahead with internal improvements and expansion that would create new markets for his slowing factories. He had certainly had no intention of becoming leader of the Supremacists when he attended the convention—his only elected office being to the Pennsylvania General Assembly, and that treated as part-time—but a speech he gave so impressed the delegates that they voted him in over several candidates from the Supremacist parliamentary caucus. This caused some dissension and ruffled feathers at first, but Studebaker won over most of his detractors. He was an important symbol for the Supremacist Party, which had formerly been regarded (and not without reason) as an ‘Anglo-Saxons first’ movement that looked down upon even Protestants from immigrant communities. This had been partly driven by the party’s genesis in opposing the New York political establishment, which included a disproportionate number of old Dutch names from the days of Nieuw Amsterdam. Studebaker’s longstanding pedigree in the ENA, going back to the early eighteenth century, was a reminder that Germans and others had been there from the beginning and had as much right to call themselves American as anyone. This in turn helped broaden the party’s appeal without putting off the Orange Order/Trust Party tendency too much given that Studebaker’s rhetoric focused only on gaining the support of Protestant non-Anglo-Saxon communities.
Studebaker handed over frontline control of his business to his brother George and sought election to Parliament at a convenient by-election in 1856 when one of Pittsylvania Province’s two MCPs, the Patriot Robert Bingham, suffered what is now thought to be a minor stroke and was forced to retire. At the by-election, the Patriots displayed their character by simply selecting Bingham’s nephew Augustus, even though he had no personal connection to the area besides the shared family name. Studebaker and the Liberal candidate James Campbell both attacked the complacent Patriots over this. The by-election came at a time when the bell was already beginning to toll for the Patriots for those who had ears to hear. The Confederate assembly elections in New England and Pennsylvania had already battered the Patriots and their local affiliates down to lower numbers than they had had in decades (even during the party’s Imperial-level split under Solomon Carter, the local parties had done better). Only in Virginia did the ‘Whig-Patriots’ manage to stay in power, in part due to Governor Henry continuing to be controversial, while New York was consumed with the local issues of the Indian expulsions and its election was hardly fought on national issues. The joke that was rump imperial Carolina did theoretically elect an assembly to sit in Newton in 1854, but it was half Patriots in name only and half ‘certainly not Whigs, that’s a banned party’ independents, both of whom elected under suspicious circumstances, but that was alright as they barely had any power anyway thanks to the continuing military occupation. Other warning signs were visible, too: letters from the now elderly Philip Hamilton in Africa were intercepted and published by the Philadelphia Gazette, in which Hamilton expressed despair that his father’s party had been reduced to such a shameful body. Edmund Grey might have retired and passed away in 1855, but his daughter Isabel (known as Libby, and eventually punningly as ‘Liberty’), was not shy about sharing both his own prehumous opinions and her own. Her scathing attacks on the Patriots divided public opinion and were one of the heralds of the Cytherean age. Both Hamilton and the Greys particularly attacked how the Patriots seemed to be deliberately doing nothing on the imperial level and leaving the Confederate assemblies, increasingly unwieldy as they were forced to cover increasingly large areas and numbers of people, to govern alone. This was the absolute antithesis of what the Patriots had once stood for, a strong imperial government in contrast to the Confederal-first sympathies of Monroe’s Constitutionalist Party.
The result of the by-election was therefore perhaps not a surprise to those who had been paying attention to the way the wind was blowing, but the scale of it certainly was. Studebaker won, his Liberal rival Campbell came a respectable second, but Bingham the younger—who had only even visited the area to campaign once, and then only in the major settlements—did not even win 5% of the vote. The popular aphorism ‘Bob’s your uncle’, to describe an apparent guaranteed positive outcome turning sour, was born. Many observed that this had been Mo Quedling’s old seat, and the people of Pittsylvania Province who had once gladly backed him were now giving over 95% of their votes to the two ‘war parties’.
The result was a shock to the system for the Patriots, but even if there had been consensus on what response to take, it was too late. A few months later enough Peace Independents deserted the party—rats leaving a sinking ship, as the famous political cartoon in the New York Advertiser portrays them—that the government fell and a general election was held.
All but the most deluded expected the Patriots to lose, but once again, few truly appreciated the scale of their loss. The Patriots were reduced to a rump of just 27 MCPs out of 167, a humiliating fate for what had once been regarded as the natural ruling party of the ENA. Never again would they retake their former glory, and few shed a tear for their passing. Furthermore, a dozen of those 27 were Carolinian Patriots in name only who had won through questionable practices. The remaining 140 seats would determine the outcome of the contest. Barring seven independents, all the other MCPs elected were Liberals or Supremacists, and the outcome between those two parties was incredibly tight: 69 Supremacists and 64 Liberals. Neither was that close to a majority, by mutual agreement neither would work with the rump Patriots, and that left either a Supremacist minority or the reformation of another national government. Studebaker and Whipple hesitated over this, with the two parties agreeing on the need for Reform and a bolder foreign policy but not much else. On balance a Studebaker minority with occasional Liberal backing on those big issues seemed the most likely outcome: at least until, a few days later, the Newton Uprising broke out.
The imperial Carolinians—or as they mostly regarded themselves, the occupied Carolinians—had had no illusions about what was going to happen. Another Patriot government would have been questionable even without the party’s recent fortunes. Some sort of Supremacist or Liberal government was going to get in, and either way that meant an end to their rights and privileges and freedoms (...to own slaves). The Palmetto League, as the secret resistance styled themselves, knew that this was their last opportunity to break free, as they saw it. It should be noted that most imperial Carolinians (understandably, perhaps) dismissed reports of the Meridians increasingly riding roughshod over their southern brethren as nothing more than ‘Yankee propaganda’, and so they saw no potential negatives in trying to join them. The League included sympathisers in both the royal Carolinian government (including former Speaker Uriah Adams) and the Virginian House of Burgesses. When the new Continental Parliament met to form a government, there was a bomb attack by the League that killed three of the newly elected MCPs and damaged the Capitol, necessitating a rebuilding and redecoration project which saw the MCPs briefly take over the neighbouring Imperial Theatre instead—which, despite the tragedy that birthed it, the satirists had a lot of fun with. At the same time as the attack, the League’s supporters rose up across imperial Carolina, leading revolts (save in genuinely loyal areas like Franklin province), blowing up imperial soldiers in their barracks along with policemen and ‘collaborator’ political figures (the Petty brothers were both killed by radicals) and calling for intervention by royal Carolina. The latter came, thanks to the work of those such as Adams, but it was anaemic, half-hearted and quickly condemned and retracted by Beauchamp and Wragg after the Meridian occupiers (now led by General Julián Barboza) leaned on them. The Meridians were anxious not to renew the war, which had been fairly unpopular at home after the early stages and whose legacy dogging the Adamantines had been partly responsible for the election of the current Unionist President-General Alejandro Magaña in 1855.
However, the involvement of the League in the attacks in Virginia (and a few sporadic further attacks by their small number of Virginian sympathisers) put the American response on the back foot, not helped by the Patriots’ neglect of the army over the past four and a half years. As a result, Barboza let his ambition get the better of him and did allow sufficient intervention to return the remaining imperial-occupied parts of South Province and Georgia to royal Carolinian hands, while acting against any further penetration to the north by the League or their sympathisers. Barboza ostensibly claimed to merely be ‘restoring the peace’ according to the Treaty of Charleston, which of course predated the informal uti possidetis arrangement following the botched plebiscite. All of this naturally enraged the American government, which swiftly crushed the remaining rebels in North Province (west of Franklin, the rebellion had been much more half-hearted). Studebaker and Whipple were uncertain exactly what ultimatum to deliver, however, given that merely demanding the return of the formerly American-occupied parts of South Province and Georgia would effectively be officially recognising the aforementioned informal plebiscite outcome, which neither was willing to do. At the same time, following through with their theoretical position to demand the return of all Carolina and the withdrawal of Meridian forces would obviously be rejected and lead to a renewal of the war. Whipple toyed with the idea, but he was in a minority; Studebaker spoke of the reluctance of people at the convention that had elected him to restart the war, and the outcomes of the by-elections to replace the three deceased MCPs showed suspicious spikes for ‘Peace Patriot’ and ‘Peace Independent’ candidates, even if they didn’t win: people feared the war would resume.
In the end Barboza, acting on orders from Cordoba, did his best to prevent a renewal of hostilities by arresting numerous Palmetto League agents and sympathisers (many of whom, purely coincidentally of course, were also among the loudest voices criticising the Meridians’ role in Carolina) and handing them over to the Americans to stand trial. The biggest fish in the catch was unquestionably Uriah Adams, whose treason trial was watched avidly by the whole country through the papers and Optel updates, and who was finally hanged in Brentwood Square in 1859—ironically in the same place where Mo Quedling had once given a speech condemning the death penalty.[2]
Of course, the Americans were not willing to merely accept a few scalps in exchange for the Meridians’ antics. “We’re not willing to go to war in our backyard,” Studebaker mused, “and I’m sure they feel the same way...” Though he did not have any concrete ideas, when the attacks persuaded him to form a national government again with Whipple as Foreign Secretary, the sentiment prevailed. Thanks to his strained relations with his rival and former Foreign Secretary Michael Webster, Whipple was determined to embark on a bolder foreign policy to distinguish himself, and this coupled to Studebaker’s vague idea eventually resulted in the Caracas Intervention of 1860. Though war was never quite renewed between the UPSA and ENA, the following decade—which came about at the same time as the geologist Devaux was coining the term—naturally became known as the Glacial Aeon[3] in terms of Meridian-American relations. It would not be until the ‘Seventies Thaw’ that intra-Novamundine politics could be viewed as anything other than two opposing armed camps.
In the shorter term, Studebaker and Whipple were determined to pursue Reform. Some called for Bassett (who had lost his seat of Delaware Province) to be given a taste of his own medicine and for the government to undo his undoing of the Constitutional Convention of 1848. This was not done (in the words of Jethro Carter, perhaps ‘just because it would become too damn’ confusing’) but instead a new Convention was called, with the same election of delegates as before. One difference was that the confederal assemblies had less of a voice than before, partly driven by continued suspicion over Virginia’s House of Burgesses. Imperial Carolina, such as it was, had only a few token representatives; even the paper assembly in Newton had had most of its membership killed by the Palmetto League as ‘collaborators’.
History repeated itself, deliberately so. Once again, the Clay Proclamation was made (by Clay himself, a decade older and considerably more bitter) but this time it was pushed through regardless of any dissenting opinions. There was no appetite for giving any compensation to those imperial Carolinians losing their ‘property’, and indeed anyone convicted of supporting treasonous activity (often in rather questionable courts) was barred from voting. Voting reform was also passed nationally, riding roughshod over the old attitudes that such things were a confederal matter: even the voting for confederal bodies would be dictated by the imperial government. The reform passed harmonised voting across the nation to that of universal male suffrage, with a purely token taxpayer requirement put in by the Supremacists to try to exclude any Indians who did not ‘integrate into civilised society’. The status of the country’s free Negro population exercised a few tempers but ultimately the Supremacists’ (and not a few Liberals’) distate for them as people was outweighed by the common belief that anything that would make the Carolinians shriek was automatically a good thing, and (male) Negroes for the first time received the universally accepted right to vote. The franchise had been granted to them before in some confederations and provinces, but it had always been scattershot and shaky, prone to being withdrawn or changed without warning, and often variable, only applying for certain offices. For the first time the right was universally acknowledged. It was not enforced terribly effectively across the nation but there were typically enclaves where enough of the white population held sympathetic views to do so, and the Negro population tended to congregate there, not always without controversy. In 1863 the government took action against renewed terrorist activity in Raleigh Province in Virginia (see below) by creating a special police force dedicated to preserving the Negro right to vote (and other rights) but only in that province, which effectively ensured that many Negroes from these enclaves in other parts of the ENA would move there and drown out the disenfranchised white Carolinians there. For decades, escaped Negroes from royal Carolina would flee there via the Great Dismal Swamp. The province would not officially be renamed Africa Nova until 1889.
As the preceding paragraph implies, the other significant change made at the Constitutional Convention involved the status of the Confederations and their provinces. The Supremacists in particular had long advocated that the increasingly elongated east-west Confederations—ultimately an unintended legacy of borders having been set to lines of latitude back when it was thought North America was a much narrower continent—was becoming increasingly farcical and unwieldy. We must remember that this was an era when Optel was the only major means of telegraphy (Lectel new and suspicious for being a Carolinian invention) and Optel communication from the eastern seaboard to the western parts of a Confederation was not cheap or easy. Things might well have changed if Reform had been delayed until Lectel had come in, for this linked east and west far more easily than before, but as things stood the westerners were fed up with being neglected by the eastern aristocratic establishment—and not a few easterners were fed up with often being outvoted by uppity western frontiersmen. The Supremacists had drawn up fairly detailed proposals before the election and regarded themselves winning the most seats as a mandate to implement them. The Liberals did not agree on all of these and did win some compromises, such as New England not having a separate Confederation of Canada split off. To a certain extent, as this implies, the decisions were influenced by partisan factors: New York, whose western regions mostly supported the Supremacists, only lost Cismissisippia to the new Confederation of Michigan. Pennsylvania kept Erie province, which many might have expected to go to Michigan. Only Virginia, regarded with much suspicion after the Newton Uprising and being the place where many of the remaining Patriots had been elected, was treated (as well as there being residual anger over Henry Frederick’s neutrality ploy in the Great American War) was treated harshly. Indeed, it was only through desperate negotiation that the eastern rump kept Vandalia province, which a generation or two ago would certainly have been regarded as ‘western’. Virginia was however ‘compensated’—as the Supremacists and Liberals said with a straight face—by being given Raleigh and Charlotte provinces, the two new provinces carved out of what had once been North (Carolina) Province, as well as the remaining imperial parts of the former Carolinian West Indies, whose status would provoke some controversy in years to come. Matthew Clarke, now relegated to the backbenches for his failures, nonetheless spoke for many when he said ‘We cannot embrace the new America until we have burned out all the remaining sickness and rot of the old. Let the name of the traitors be expunged from the map’. The remaining imperial Confederation of Carolina was destroyed, North Province being split and going to Virginia as said above, while most of the more loyal western provinces were tied together with the former Virginian western provinces to form the new Confederation of Ohio (named for the river). Carolina now only existed as a name to the southern rebel kingdom.
The new Convention’s ambition did not end there. Longstanding arguments were flattened as Drakesland was admitted as a Confederation, as was Cygnia, despite its small current population. Territories that had been left vague and debated for decades were definitively carved up. This was, as Clarke had said, a new America, one that stretched not only from sea to shining sea but to the other side of that second shining sea, too, thanks to Cygnia.
The provincial composition of the new Confederations was as follows:
New England
As before barring some defining of formerly ambiguous territories...
Algonkia
Connecticut
Mount Royal
Newfoundland
New Connecticut
New Hampshire
New Scotland
North Massachusetts
Rhode Island
South Massachusetts
Wolfe
Territories:
Cloudsborough Territory (applied unsuccessfully at that time for provincial admission)
Greenland Territory
New Britain Territory
Not including: Hudson’s Bay Territory, Menominee Territory; the latter both defined as federal imperial territories (with a proper structure of governance for the first time) save for the Susan-Mary region which was split off from Menominee Territory and created as a province of Michigan.
New York
Albany
Amsterdam
Chersonesus (annexed former Howden land)
East Jersey
Huron (annexed former Howden land)
Long Island (split off from Amsterdam)
Niagara (including the exclave of Rowley)
Ontario (annexed former Howden land)
Portland
Territories: None
Not including: Cismississipia Province, ceded to the Confederation of Michigan; Wisconsin Territory, split - area east of the Missouri created as Dakota Province, area west of the Missouri maintained as a reduced federal imperial controlled Wisconsin Territory.
Pennsylvania
Former Philadelphia Province: split into Susquehanna in the south and Alleghenia in the north
Delaware
Erie
Pittsylvania
West Jersey
Territories: None
Not including: Chichago, Linneway, Britannia provinces (all ceded to Michigan); Othark Territory (converted to a federal Imperial controlled territory under the same name).
Virginia (AKA ‘Old Virginia’, ironically to distinguish it from the former larger version as much as the New Virginia province of Cygnia)
Former North (Carolina) Province: split into Raleigh in the east and Charlotte in the west
Former Richmond Province: split into Chesapeake in the east and Piedmont in the west
Cuba (AKA East Cuba)
Hispaniola
Maryland (predictably applied to become a Confederation in its own right, predictably rejected)
Vandalia
Williamsburg
Territories:
Bahamas
Bermuda
Leeward Islands
Windward Islands
Michigan
Britannia (from Pennsylvania)
Chichago (from Pennsylvania)
Cismississipia (from New York)
Dakota (from New York, formerly part of Wisconsin territory)
Linneway (from Pennsylvania)
Susan-Mary (ultimately from New England or possibly the imperial government – formerly ambiguous status – created from Menominee Territory)
Territories: Mesopotamia (created from Menominee Territory)
Ohio
Franklin (from Carolina)
Tennessee (from Carolina)
Transylvania (from Virginia)
Washington (from Virginia)
Territories: None
Westernesse
Arkensor (from Carolina)
Gualpa (from Carolina)
Missouri (from Virginia)
Ruddiland (ultimately from Carolina or possibly the imperial government – formerly ambiguous status – created from Louisiana Territory)
Verdigris (split off from Ugapa Territory, originally from Virginia)
Territories:
Hamilton (renamed from New Mexico, from the imperial government)
Osajee (from Carolina)
Trinity (the other half of the former Louisiana Territory)
Ugapa (less Verdigris)
Drakesland
Drake (less Noochaland)
Maltinomack (admitted as a province at this time)
Noochaland (split off from Drake)
Skellish (admitted as a province at this time)
Territories:
Montana
Tiesville
Cygnia
New Kent
New Virginia
Territories:
Aururia
The remaining territories – taking in Othark and Timpanogos, the remaining parts of Ugapa, Wisconsin and Menominee, and the Hudson’s Bay Territory – became imperial federal entities under the control of the formally split off Ministry for Imperial Territorial Affairs. The status of areas that had been allowed to lie vague and fallow under eastern-focused governments, ever since the Neutral Party collapsed, would finally see coherent governance with an eye towards eventual accession as provinces.
It was certainly true, as Chamberlain observed that ‘all Confederations are equal, but some are more equal than others’. New York and New England dominated the new America with its typically smaller Confederations . Westernesse—deliberately named for its Anglo-Saxon connotations following the popularisation of the name by the publication of a new translation of the Middle English romance King Horn—was a ramshackle affair that required almost as much Imperial federal power behind it as the territorial holdings. Drakesland and Cygnia were underpopulated compared to their fellows. Nonetheless, most objective observers would agree that biased as it was, the post-Reform settlement was nonetheless a better deal for the vast majority of Americans. The expanded and harmonised voting franchise was married to the creation of many new parliamentary seats, increasing the size of the Parliament to almost 300, though having so many multi-member seats tended to lead to some chaotic results. It was at this time that the academic Dr Adrian Cooke of the University of Harvard published his famous Account of American Elections, in which he collated the national voting numbers for the last few elections and proved that the total votes cast often bore no resemblance to which party ended up on top: for example in the then most recent contest of 1857, the Liberals had won more votes than the Supremacists but ended up with fewer seats. Cooke’s point and suggested solutions were dismissed or ignored by the mainstream political establishment at the time, but they captured the imagination of some New England intellectuals...
House of Lords reform would have to wait until after the 1862 election, but that aside, a new America had indeed been born, rising from the ashes of the old. A Third Empire had been created, and like the previous two (1751-1788 and 1788-1857) it would come with a change of flag. The old perpetual disagreement of the Flag War was swept aside with the characteristic bullishness and vigour of the new Empire, and a new design was simply imposed, the old Jack and George later coming to symbolise hidebound Patriot sympathisers who couldn’t move with the times. The five gold stars on the red cross were left to symbolise the original Confederations (some early versions changing one star to black, turning it upside down, or removing it altogether to symbolise Carolina’s treachery). The Union Jack was removed to reflect America having broken all political ties with the mother country save the shared monarchy, and replaced with a number of stars befitting the new number of Confederations – with legislation passed to ensure it would be updated every time a new Confederation was created, for this was explicitly not considered to be the end. Nine stars, two circles of four and five, were placed on the blue canton. The Union Jack would still be used for old ceremonial occasions when the shared heritage would be remembered, but now the Empire spread her own wings under her own flag, her own Starry George.
America rose.
[1] This may sound amazingly convergent, but in fact the Studebaker (anglicised from Studebecker) family first arrived in America in 1736, only seven years after the POD, and were recorded as being involved with the wagon-making business as early as the eighteenth century.
[2] It’s actually not ironic at all, the reason why Quedling was protesting there was because that was where high-profile public executions were carried out in the first place.
[3] I.e. ‘ice age’. The general idea of the theory dates back to the eighteenth century, but the OTL term was not coined until a century after the POD, being a translation of German Eiszeit.
“Of course I’ll try to make it for Peter’s play, but my meeting at Carruthers House is supposed to finish at five and you know how the Vitrai is running at the moment with the rail replacement works. I’ve heard it’s chaos trying to switch to the Vauxhall Line at Sloane Street South at the moment. So tell him I’ll be there and I’ll try to make sure I am. Thanks love – DBH xx.”
—From the Correspondence of Bes. David Batten-Hale (New Doradist Party--Croydon Urban)
*
(Dr. David Wostyn)
Thank you for bearing with us, we’re onto the second shelf now, there are some meatier history books here—not sure if Mr Batten-Hale bought them because he’s interested in the topic or it’s relevant to his job, or just because several of them seem to have been written by his colleagues...anyway, apologies if we got a bit ahead of ourselves dates-wise, but now I think we can catch up on some of the nitty-gritty aftermath of the Great American War...
*
From “Emperor Fred’s Vulgar Notion: A Constitutional History of the Empire of North America” by Bes. Serena Menheniott (2008)—
In 1951 the American historian and social commentator Jane Douglas said “That four and a half years of ‘Peace Patriot’ rule [i.e. 1853-1857] was a time when the nation slept...no, I’ll say it, it was a Coma indeed...yes, if the Sanchezistas had been more anything than a book club with delusions of grandeur at the time, the country would have been no less neglected and despised under their rule than it was under Francis Bassett.” This bold statement, at a time when the ‘National Coma’ rhetoric about Carolina was reaching its height, shocked many and led to censure. Nonetheless, the heat of Douglas’ feeling was shared by many whose grandparents had spoken to them of that time. The Bassett presidency was a time when the Patriots, at the last gasp of their old strength, clung ever more strongly to their last principle: in the words of Michael Chamberlain, ‘Do As Little As Possible’. Having been elected on the vain hope that a united Empire could be preserved and ‘the old normalcy’ restored by the sheer power of wishful thinking, appeasement and not rocking the boat, the Patriots and their Peace Independent allies presided over nothing but stagnancy and decay, while the world looked upon the rising UPSA as the real power in the Americas. Indeed, it was at this time that some commentators said that the imprecise term ‘American’, which was used both specifically as a demonym for the ENA and to describe the peoples of both American continents, should be replaced, for it was unworthy for the UPSA to be called a name that might evoke its defeated rival. The suggested alternative demonym ‘Septentrian’ for citizens of the ENA was rejected with outrage by Americans and saw little uptake elsewhere: to this day, anyone using it is immediately marked out as a snippy critic of American policy who desires to deny the country even its name. The other alternative term, however, ‘Novamundine’ as a more neutral adjective to describe the Americans (or New World), has seen some (though not universal) popularity.
There were more humorous ways to describe the brief period, though. It was a boom time for satire and free speech with such a mockable government and memorable characters. Charles Petty, the de facto leader of the northern remnant Confederation of Carolina still titularly part of the Empire, was a popular choice for the ‘obviously evil in plain sight’ treacherous backstabbing advisor archetype. To this day his name often conjures an image of a scheming dwarf with a black goatee derived from that archetype, when the real Petty was tall and blond. Bassett was treated as wearing literal blinkers that shut out anything that didn’t fit with his worldview. The Meridians were interpreted in various ways, but a common example was to portray them as a sinister foreign bullyboy constantly being hampered by having his trousers tugged by a spoilt crying child representing royal Carolina, moaning that his little black dog had bit him and run away again.
The satirists’ pens were less vicious to the opposition, which spent the four and a half years of Parliament before the government’s inevitable fall plotting how to take advantage. With Vanburen’s defeat, the Liberals had had a brief power struggle between the ‘Two Doubleyous’, Thomas Whipple and Michael Webster, before the former emerged triumphant. Though Webster pledged to support his rival, their former close working relationship was gone and even when the two men themselves managed cordiality, their factional supporters often tore things apart behind the scenes. The Supremacists seemed more vulnerable to falling apart, with Clarke discredited, Martin dead and no obvious successor waiting in the wings. However, once again the party held a convention that produced a dark horse candidate none had expected. This time, his elevation would not be dogged by accusations of ill-informed voters having voted purely on the basis of name. Lewis Studebaker was a self-made man from Pennsylvania who had turned his father’s small steam-wagon parts company into a major corporation building entire wagons—helped of course by the war and its demand for such vehicles for both frontline military and support purposes.[1] His move into politics was largely driven by the falling demand with peace and his strident opposition to the Patriots’ failure to push ahead with internal improvements and expansion that would create new markets for his slowing factories. He had certainly had no intention of becoming leader of the Supremacists when he attended the convention—his only elected office being to the Pennsylvania General Assembly, and that treated as part-time—but a speech he gave so impressed the delegates that they voted him in over several candidates from the Supremacist parliamentary caucus. This caused some dissension and ruffled feathers at first, but Studebaker won over most of his detractors. He was an important symbol for the Supremacist Party, which had formerly been regarded (and not without reason) as an ‘Anglo-Saxons first’ movement that looked down upon even Protestants from immigrant communities. This had been partly driven by the party’s genesis in opposing the New York political establishment, which included a disproportionate number of old Dutch names from the days of Nieuw Amsterdam. Studebaker’s longstanding pedigree in the ENA, going back to the early eighteenth century, was a reminder that Germans and others had been there from the beginning and had as much right to call themselves American as anyone. This in turn helped broaden the party’s appeal without putting off the Orange Order/Trust Party tendency too much given that Studebaker’s rhetoric focused only on gaining the support of Protestant non-Anglo-Saxon communities.
Studebaker handed over frontline control of his business to his brother George and sought election to Parliament at a convenient by-election in 1856 when one of Pittsylvania Province’s two MCPs, the Patriot Robert Bingham, suffered what is now thought to be a minor stroke and was forced to retire. At the by-election, the Patriots displayed their character by simply selecting Bingham’s nephew Augustus, even though he had no personal connection to the area besides the shared family name. Studebaker and the Liberal candidate James Campbell both attacked the complacent Patriots over this. The by-election came at a time when the bell was already beginning to toll for the Patriots for those who had ears to hear. The Confederate assembly elections in New England and Pennsylvania had already battered the Patriots and their local affiliates down to lower numbers than they had had in decades (even during the party’s Imperial-level split under Solomon Carter, the local parties had done better). Only in Virginia did the ‘Whig-Patriots’ manage to stay in power, in part due to Governor Henry continuing to be controversial, while New York was consumed with the local issues of the Indian expulsions and its election was hardly fought on national issues. The joke that was rump imperial Carolina did theoretically elect an assembly to sit in Newton in 1854, but it was half Patriots in name only and half ‘certainly not Whigs, that’s a banned party’ independents, both of whom elected under suspicious circumstances, but that was alright as they barely had any power anyway thanks to the continuing military occupation. Other warning signs were visible, too: letters from the now elderly Philip Hamilton in Africa were intercepted and published by the Philadelphia Gazette, in which Hamilton expressed despair that his father’s party had been reduced to such a shameful body. Edmund Grey might have retired and passed away in 1855, but his daughter Isabel (known as Libby, and eventually punningly as ‘Liberty’), was not shy about sharing both his own prehumous opinions and her own. Her scathing attacks on the Patriots divided public opinion and were one of the heralds of the Cytherean age. Both Hamilton and the Greys particularly attacked how the Patriots seemed to be deliberately doing nothing on the imperial level and leaving the Confederate assemblies, increasingly unwieldy as they were forced to cover increasingly large areas and numbers of people, to govern alone. This was the absolute antithesis of what the Patriots had once stood for, a strong imperial government in contrast to the Confederal-first sympathies of Monroe’s Constitutionalist Party.
The result of the by-election was therefore perhaps not a surprise to those who had been paying attention to the way the wind was blowing, but the scale of it certainly was. Studebaker won, his Liberal rival Campbell came a respectable second, but Bingham the younger—who had only even visited the area to campaign once, and then only in the major settlements—did not even win 5% of the vote. The popular aphorism ‘Bob’s your uncle’, to describe an apparent guaranteed positive outcome turning sour, was born. Many observed that this had been Mo Quedling’s old seat, and the people of Pittsylvania Province who had once gladly backed him were now giving over 95% of their votes to the two ‘war parties’.
The result was a shock to the system for the Patriots, but even if there had been consensus on what response to take, it was too late. A few months later enough Peace Independents deserted the party—rats leaving a sinking ship, as the famous political cartoon in the New York Advertiser portrays them—that the government fell and a general election was held.
All but the most deluded expected the Patriots to lose, but once again, few truly appreciated the scale of their loss. The Patriots were reduced to a rump of just 27 MCPs out of 167, a humiliating fate for what had once been regarded as the natural ruling party of the ENA. Never again would they retake their former glory, and few shed a tear for their passing. Furthermore, a dozen of those 27 were Carolinian Patriots in name only who had won through questionable practices. The remaining 140 seats would determine the outcome of the contest. Barring seven independents, all the other MCPs elected were Liberals or Supremacists, and the outcome between those two parties was incredibly tight: 69 Supremacists and 64 Liberals. Neither was that close to a majority, by mutual agreement neither would work with the rump Patriots, and that left either a Supremacist minority or the reformation of another national government. Studebaker and Whipple hesitated over this, with the two parties agreeing on the need for Reform and a bolder foreign policy but not much else. On balance a Studebaker minority with occasional Liberal backing on those big issues seemed the most likely outcome: at least until, a few days later, the Newton Uprising broke out.
The imperial Carolinians—or as they mostly regarded themselves, the occupied Carolinians—had had no illusions about what was going to happen. Another Patriot government would have been questionable even without the party’s recent fortunes. Some sort of Supremacist or Liberal government was going to get in, and either way that meant an end to their rights and privileges and freedoms (...to own slaves). The Palmetto League, as the secret resistance styled themselves, knew that this was their last opportunity to break free, as they saw it. It should be noted that most imperial Carolinians (understandably, perhaps) dismissed reports of the Meridians increasingly riding roughshod over their southern brethren as nothing more than ‘Yankee propaganda’, and so they saw no potential negatives in trying to join them. The League included sympathisers in both the royal Carolinian government (including former Speaker Uriah Adams) and the Virginian House of Burgesses. When the new Continental Parliament met to form a government, there was a bomb attack by the League that killed three of the newly elected MCPs and damaged the Capitol, necessitating a rebuilding and redecoration project which saw the MCPs briefly take over the neighbouring Imperial Theatre instead—which, despite the tragedy that birthed it, the satirists had a lot of fun with. At the same time as the attack, the League’s supporters rose up across imperial Carolina, leading revolts (save in genuinely loyal areas like Franklin province), blowing up imperial soldiers in their barracks along with policemen and ‘collaborator’ political figures (the Petty brothers were both killed by radicals) and calling for intervention by royal Carolina. The latter came, thanks to the work of those such as Adams, but it was anaemic, half-hearted and quickly condemned and retracted by Beauchamp and Wragg after the Meridian occupiers (now led by General Julián Barboza) leaned on them. The Meridians were anxious not to renew the war, which had been fairly unpopular at home after the early stages and whose legacy dogging the Adamantines had been partly responsible for the election of the current Unionist President-General Alejandro Magaña in 1855.
However, the involvement of the League in the attacks in Virginia (and a few sporadic further attacks by their small number of Virginian sympathisers) put the American response on the back foot, not helped by the Patriots’ neglect of the army over the past four and a half years. As a result, Barboza let his ambition get the better of him and did allow sufficient intervention to return the remaining imperial-occupied parts of South Province and Georgia to royal Carolinian hands, while acting against any further penetration to the north by the League or their sympathisers. Barboza ostensibly claimed to merely be ‘restoring the peace’ according to the Treaty of Charleston, which of course predated the informal uti possidetis arrangement following the botched plebiscite. All of this naturally enraged the American government, which swiftly crushed the remaining rebels in North Province (west of Franklin, the rebellion had been much more half-hearted). Studebaker and Whipple were uncertain exactly what ultimatum to deliver, however, given that merely demanding the return of the formerly American-occupied parts of South Province and Georgia would effectively be officially recognising the aforementioned informal plebiscite outcome, which neither was willing to do. At the same time, following through with their theoretical position to demand the return of all Carolina and the withdrawal of Meridian forces would obviously be rejected and lead to a renewal of the war. Whipple toyed with the idea, but he was in a minority; Studebaker spoke of the reluctance of people at the convention that had elected him to restart the war, and the outcomes of the by-elections to replace the three deceased MCPs showed suspicious spikes for ‘Peace Patriot’ and ‘Peace Independent’ candidates, even if they didn’t win: people feared the war would resume.
In the end Barboza, acting on orders from Cordoba, did his best to prevent a renewal of hostilities by arresting numerous Palmetto League agents and sympathisers (many of whom, purely coincidentally of course, were also among the loudest voices criticising the Meridians’ role in Carolina) and handing them over to the Americans to stand trial. The biggest fish in the catch was unquestionably Uriah Adams, whose treason trial was watched avidly by the whole country through the papers and Optel updates, and who was finally hanged in Brentwood Square in 1859—ironically in the same place where Mo Quedling had once given a speech condemning the death penalty.[2]
Of course, the Americans were not willing to merely accept a few scalps in exchange for the Meridians’ antics. “We’re not willing to go to war in our backyard,” Studebaker mused, “and I’m sure they feel the same way...” Though he did not have any concrete ideas, when the attacks persuaded him to form a national government again with Whipple as Foreign Secretary, the sentiment prevailed. Thanks to his strained relations with his rival and former Foreign Secretary Michael Webster, Whipple was determined to embark on a bolder foreign policy to distinguish himself, and this coupled to Studebaker’s vague idea eventually resulted in the Caracas Intervention of 1860. Though war was never quite renewed between the UPSA and ENA, the following decade—which came about at the same time as the geologist Devaux was coining the term—naturally became known as the Glacial Aeon[3] in terms of Meridian-American relations. It would not be until the ‘Seventies Thaw’ that intra-Novamundine politics could be viewed as anything other than two opposing armed camps.
In the shorter term, Studebaker and Whipple were determined to pursue Reform. Some called for Bassett (who had lost his seat of Delaware Province) to be given a taste of his own medicine and for the government to undo his undoing of the Constitutional Convention of 1848. This was not done (in the words of Jethro Carter, perhaps ‘just because it would become too damn’ confusing’) but instead a new Convention was called, with the same election of delegates as before. One difference was that the confederal assemblies had less of a voice than before, partly driven by continued suspicion over Virginia’s House of Burgesses. Imperial Carolina, such as it was, had only a few token representatives; even the paper assembly in Newton had had most of its membership killed by the Palmetto League as ‘collaborators’.
History repeated itself, deliberately so. Once again, the Clay Proclamation was made (by Clay himself, a decade older and considerably more bitter) but this time it was pushed through regardless of any dissenting opinions. There was no appetite for giving any compensation to those imperial Carolinians losing their ‘property’, and indeed anyone convicted of supporting treasonous activity (often in rather questionable courts) was barred from voting. Voting reform was also passed nationally, riding roughshod over the old attitudes that such things were a confederal matter: even the voting for confederal bodies would be dictated by the imperial government. The reform passed harmonised voting across the nation to that of universal male suffrage, with a purely token taxpayer requirement put in by the Supremacists to try to exclude any Indians who did not ‘integrate into civilised society’. The status of the country’s free Negro population exercised a few tempers but ultimately the Supremacists’ (and not a few Liberals’) distate for them as people was outweighed by the common belief that anything that would make the Carolinians shriek was automatically a good thing, and (male) Negroes for the first time received the universally accepted right to vote. The franchise had been granted to them before in some confederations and provinces, but it had always been scattershot and shaky, prone to being withdrawn or changed without warning, and often variable, only applying for certain offices. For the first time the right was universally acknowledged. It was not enforced terribly effectively across the nation but there were typically enclaves where enough of the white population held sympathetic views to do so, and the Negro population tended to congregate there, not always without controversy. In 1863 the government took action against renewed terrorist activity in Raleigh Province in Virginia (see below) by creating a special police force dedicated to preserving the Negro right to vote (and other rights) but only in that province, which effectively ensured that many Negroes from these enclaves in other parts of the ENA would move there and drown out the disenfranchised white Carolinians there. For decades, escaped Negroes from royal Carolina would flee there via the Great Dismal Swamp. The province would not officially be renamed Africa Nova until 1889.
As the preceding paragraph implies, the other significant change made at the Constitutional Convention involved the status of the Confederations and their provinces. The Supremacists in particular had long advocated that the increasingly elongated east-west Confederations—ultimately an unintended legacy of borders having been set to lines of latitude back when it was thought North America was a much narrower continent—was becoming increasingly farcical and unwieldy. We must remember that this was an era when Optel was the only major means of telegraphy (Lectel new and suspicious for being a Carolinian invention) and Optel communication from the eastern seaboard to the western parts of a Confederation was not cheap or easy. Things might well have changed if Reform had been delayed until Lectel had come in, for this linked east and west far more easily than before, but as things stood the westerners were fed up with being neglected by the eastern aristocratic establishment—and not a few easterners were fed up with often being outvoted by uppity western frontiersmen. The Supremacists had drawn up fairly detailed proposals before the election and regarded themselves winning the most seats as a mandate to implement them. The Liberals did not agree on all of these and did win some compromises, such as New England not having a separate Confederation of Canada split off. To a certain extent, as this implies, the decisions were influenced by partisan factors: New York, whose western regions mostly supported the Supremacists, only lost Cismissisippia to the new Confederation of Michigan. Pennsylvania kept Erie province, which many might have expected to go to Michigan. Only Virginia, regarded with much suspicion after the Newton Uprising and being the place where many of the remaining Patriots had been elected, was treated (as well as there being residual anger over Henry Frederick’s neutrality ploy in the Great American War) was treated harshly. Indeed, it was only through desperate negotiation that the eastern rump kept Vandalia province, which a generation or two ago would certainly have been regarded as ‘western’. Virginia was however ‘compensated’—as the Supremacists and Liberals said with a straight face—by being given Raleigh and Charlotte provinces, the two new provinces carved out of what had once been North (Carolina) Province, as well as the remaining imperial parts of the former Carolinian West Indies, whose status would provoke some controversy in years to come. Matthew Clarke, now relegated to the backbenches for his failures, nonetheless spoke for many when he said ‘We cannot embrace the new America until we have burned out all the remaining sickness and rot of the old. Let the name of the traitors be expunged from the map’. The remaining imperial Confederation of Carolina was destroyed, North Province being split and going to Virginia as said above, while most of the more loyal western provinces were tied together with the former Virginian western provinces to form the new Confederation of Ohio (named for the river). Carolina now only existed as a name to the southern rebel kingdom.
The new Convention’s ambition did not end there. Longstanding arguments were flattened as Drakesland was admitted as a Confederation, as was Cygnia, despite its small current population. Territories that had been left vague and debated for decades were definitively carved up. This was, as Clarke had said, a new America, one that stretched not only from sea to shining sea but to the other side of that second shining sea, too, thanks to Cygnia.
The provincial composition of the new Confederations was as follows:
New England
As before barring some defining of formerly ambiguous territories...
Algonkia
Connecticut
Mount Royal
Newfoundland
New Connecticut
New Hampshire
New Scotland
North Massachusetts
Rhode Island
South Massachusetts
Wolfe
Territories:
Cloudsborough Territory (applied unsuccessfully at that time for provincial admission)
Greenland Territory
New Britain Territory
Not including: Hudson’s Bay Territory, Menominee Territory; the latter both defined as federal imperial territories (with a proper structure of governance for the first time) save for the Susan-Mary region which was split off from Menominee Territory and created as a province of Michigan.
New York
Albany
Amsterdam
Chersonesus (annexed former Howden land)
East Jersey
Huron (annexed former Howden land)
Long Island (split off from Amsterdam)
Niagara (including the exclave of Rowley)
Ontario (annexed former Howden land)
Portland
Territories: None
Not including: Cismississipia Province, ceded to the Confederation of Michigan; Wisconsin Territory, split - area east of the Missouri created as Dakota Province, area west of the Missouri maintained as a reduced federal imperial controlled Wisconsin Territory.
Pennsylvania
Former Philadelphia Province: split into Susquehanna in the south and Alleghenia in the north
Delaware
Erie
Pittsylvania
West Jersey
Territories: None
Not including: Chichago, Linneway, Britannia provinces (all ceded to Michigan); Othark Territory (converted to a federal Imperial controlled territory under the same name).
Virginia (AKA ‘Old Virginia’, ironically to distinguish it from the former larger version as much as the New Virginia province of Cygnia)
Former North (Carolina) Province: split into Raleigh in the east and Charlotte in the west
Former Richmond Province: split into Chesapeake in the east and Piedmont in the west
Cuba (AKA East Cuba)
Hispaniola
Maryland (predictably applied to become a Confederation in its own right, predictably rejected)
Vandalia
Williamsburg
Territories:
Bahamas
Bermuda
Leeward Islands
Windward Islands
Michigan
Britannia (from Pennsylvania)
Chichago (from Pennsylvania)
Cismississipia (from New York)
Dakota (from New York, formerly part of Wisconsin territory)
Linneway (from Pennsylvania)
Susan-Mary (ultimately from New England or possibly the imperial government – formerly ambiguous status – created from Menominee Territory)
Territories: Mesopotamia (created from Menominee Territory)
Ohio
Franklin (from Carolina)
Tennessee (from Carolina)
Transylvania (from Virginia)
Washington (from Virginia)
Territories: None
Westernesse
Arkensor (from Carolina)
Gualpa (from Carolina)
Missouri (from Virginia)
Ruddiland (ultimately from Carolina or possibly the imperial government – formerly ambiguous status – created from Louisiana Territory)
Verdigris (split off from Ugapa Territory, originally from Virginia)
Territories:
Hamilton (renamed from New Mexico, from the imperial government)
Osajee (from Carolina)
Trinity (the other half of the former Louisiana Territory)
Ugapa (less Verdigris)
Drakesland
Drake (less Noochaland)
Maltinomack (admitted as a province at this time)
Noochaland (split off from Drake)
Skellish (admitted as a province at this time)
Territories:
Montana
Tiesville
Cygnia
New Kent
New Virginia
Territories:
Aururia
The remaining territories – taking in Othark and Timpanogos, the remaining parts of Ugapa, Wisconsin and Menominee, and the Hudson’s Bay Territory – became imperial federal entities under the control of the formally split off Ministry for Imperial Territorial Affairs. The status of areas that had been allowed to lie vague and fallow under eastern-focused governments, ever since the Neutral Party collapsed, would finally see coherent governance with an eye towards eventual accession as provinces.
It was certainly true, as Chamberlain observed that ‘all Confederations are equal, but some are more equal than others’. New York and New England dominated the new America with its typically smaller Confederations . Westernesse—deliberately named for its Anglo-Saxon connotations following the popularisation of the name by the publication of a new translation of the Middle English romance King Horn—was a ramshackle affair that required almost as much Imperial federal power behind it as the territorial holdings. Drakesland and Cygnia were underpopulated compared to their fellows. Nonetheless, most objective observers would agree that biased as it was, the post-Reform settlement was nonetheless a better deal for the vast majority of Americans. The expanded and harmonised voting franchise was married to the creation of many new parliamentary seats, increasing the size of the Parliament to almost 300, though having so many multi-member seats tended to lead to some chaotic results. It was at this time that the academic Dr Adrian Cooke of the University of Harvard published his famous Account of American Elections, in which he collated the national voting numbers for the last few elections and proved that the total votes cast often bore no resemblance to which party ended up on top: for example in the then most recent contest of 1857, the Liberals had won more votes than the Supremacists but ended up with fewer seats. Cooke’s point and suggested solutions were dismissed or ignored by the mainstream political establishment at the time, but they captured the imagination of some New England intellectuals...
House of Lords reform would have to wait until after the 1862 election, but that aside, a new America had indeed been born, rising from the ashes of the old. A Third Empire had been created, and like the previous two (1751-1788 and 1788-1857) it would come with a change of flag. The old perpetual disagreement of the Flag War was swept aside with the characteristic bullishness and vigour of the new Empire, and a new design was simply imposed, the old Jack and George later coming to symbolise hidebound Patriot sympathisers who couldn’t move with the times. The five gold stars on the red cross were left to symbolise the original Confederations (some early versions changing one star to black, turning it upside down, or removing it altogether to symbolise Carolina’s treachery). The Union Jack was removed to reflect America having broken all political ties with the mother country save the shared monarchy, and replaced with a number of stars befitting the new number of Confederations – with legislation passed to ensure it would be updated every time a new Confederation was created, for this was explicitly not considered to be the end. Nine stars, two circles of four and five, were placed on the blue canton. The Union Jack would still be used for old ceremonial occasions when the shared heritage would be remembered, but now the Empire spread her own wings under her own flag, her own Starry George.
America rose.
[1] This may sound amazingly convergent, but in fact the Studebaker (anglicised from Studebecker) family first arrived in America in 1736, only seven years after the POD, and were recorded as being involved with the wagon-making business as early as the eighteenth century.
[2] It’s actually not ironic at all, the reason why Quedling was protesting there was because that was where high-profile public executions were carried out in the first place.
[3] I.e. ‘ice age’. The general idea of the theory dates back to the eighteenth century, but the OTL term was not coined until a century after the POD, being a translation of German Eiszeit.
Last edited:
Alex Richards
Donor
Fantastic cameo there for Andy, and dear god you weren't joking about the Supremacists redrawing everything. Expect a PM soon.
Oh, and since it wasn't mentioned, I assume that little bit of the old Cherokee Empire was still retained by the ENA and the border in Cuba hasn't shifted.
.Oh, and since it wasn't mentioned, I assume that little bit of the old Cherokee Empire was still retained by the ENA and the border in Cuba hasn't shifted.
Another update, another expansion of Meridian influence.
What happened to the remaining Caribbean territories of Imperial Carolina (East Cuba, Hispaniola, the Bahamas, the Leeward and Windward Islands)?
Unlike the Imperial Carolinian provinces on the North American mainland, they were not mentioned at all.
What happened to the remaining Caribbean territories of Imperial Carolina (East Cuba, Hispaniola, the Bahamas, the Leeward and Windward Islands)?
Unlike the Imperial Carolinian provinces on the North American mainland, they were not mentioned at all.