Peach Wine and Those Who Drink It:
An Independent Georgia, 200 Years Later
I'm too busy with school to really be doing any alt history writing (sorry to those waiting on an update to my timeline), but I did have time today for a quick little map series to scratch the itch. ITTL, the United States falls apart during the Constitutional Convention. I know, I know, incredibly original. But, while what's going on elsewhere sounds pretty interesting, we're focusing in on Georgia. Specifically, Georgia as it exists almost 200 years after said Convention, and the collapse of the Union.
Georgia struggled, at first. Struggling to build its own native industry, and increasingly becoming an exporter of raw agricultural goods, like tobacco, rice, and cotton, its experiment in Jeffersonian democracy began to falter. The rise of the centralized slave plantation and flight of the yeoman farmer to the growing cities (especially near the coast) only worsened the situation. One losing war with Mexico for Georgia's southwestern claims— with its associated economic crisis, of course— and Augusta spiraled into a dictatorship. For the latter half of the nineteenth century and then for most of the twentieth, the Republic of Georgia was ruled by revolving door of planter elites. Though the British Empire trained its guns on the Republic and forced it to abolish slavery in 1929, the Georgian elite clawed back to the past whenever it could.
The now post-slavery government had to industrialize its nation— and what better way than through British and Virginian Union investment? The VU and Britain (especially Britain) together owned almost all of Georgia' industry, pumping Indian and Egyptian cotton into textiles, and rolling cigars at a worldwide scale. However, between the rapid and often-inhumane industrialization, the disruption of small personal farms, the unfair treatment of native Georgian wannabe entrepreneurs, and the general racial animus still underpinning Georgian society, violence was inevitable. Sure enough, in 1969, a band of socialist guerilla fighters known as the 'Pauly Boys' sparked revolution when they assassinated the Vice President and President of the Assembly, John Charlie Riemann. The war was long, protracted, and interfered with from many foreign countries as part of global geopolitics— the secession of South Seminola from the Republic of Seminola occurred simultaneously, and was wrapped up together with it. Eventually, Georgia, South Seminola, and the Trans-National Revolutionary Bloc won out— in 1977, Paul Carter of the Pauly Boys, war hero and revolutionary, installed himself Temporary President. In 1978, the newly-established Social Commonwealth of Georgia had its first elections, as promised. Paul Carter's Popular Movement won handily, though opposition seemed real, much to many onlooker's surprise. The Devolution movement, especially, was gaining traction; mostly made up of majority-minority counties, the movement wished for the creation of constitutional protections for citizens and for county governments, "devolving" power into the people's and localities' hands.
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But after securing his first victory, Carter moved quickly to centralize power. The Devolution movement was shafted from government, and after mass demonstrations the party was banned for counter-revolutionary activity. The Farmers' Party, a state-sanctioned (if defanged) alternative rose in its stead. Carter moved to synchronize Congressional and Presidential elections, creating a government unified under a strong executive. And, in what would become typical Carterist fashion, he began to quickly de-democratize the government, much like in Riemann's clique's old status quo. Presidential terms, for one thing, were lengthened to ten years, due to the state of "border emergency" in the south. As another matter of business, the informal "one county one vote" system of the Preliminary Election (likely meant to ensure Carter a victory) was enshrined as constitutional law. Before his first term was up, Carter's government had worked with South Seminola to reunify Seminola, annexing much of the land that had traditionally passed hands between the two governments along the way. Though the unrest in the New South would be an ulcer in the Carterist regime's side for the rest of its existence, the war— successfully passed off as defensive in the wake of a particularly bad border skirmish— had made him even more of a national hero. The Popular Movement won a landslide victory, and the more conservative Alternative Unity party was crushed.
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So crushed, in fact, that it would find itself banned a few short years later. By the 1998 election, Carter was frail, feeble, and suffering from dementia. While Carter was kept away in his office by his aides, a mad rush for succession had long since begun. The problem was, Carter himself was in no state to appoint a successor even as his administration was clenching the party's fist around the state, and had failed to do so before reaching his dying days. After his youthful wartime comrade Bobby Arera's untimely death due to stroke, the next best bet was the just-as-elderly lifetime politician Luke Steele. Steele, a holdover from the Riemann administration and agricultural expert, was responsible for the modestly successful state-led Central Industrialization Drive, and was currently serving by Carter's right hand as Speaker of the Popular Congress. Unfortunately for everyone else, Luke would be assassinated by a disgruntled revolutionary veteran from Marthasville just a few short years from the 2008 election; and just two days before Carter himself died.
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The turn of the century is a time of great uncertainty for Georgia. With the death of Carter and death of Carter's successor, and with the Pink Youth Movement's demonstrations and growing unrest in the streets, infighting in the Popular Movement came to a head. The party split into two factions: the left faction retaining the old party apparatus, while a liberalizing party with a goal to privatize industry and open itself up to inter-American trade in wake of the collapse of the Trans-National Bloc's central international power base in France. This new party, taking up much of the branding of the old Alternative Unity, won in a landslide, focusing most of its campaign on rural areas. Times are changing in Georgia, and only time can tell where things are heading. There's even talk among many of the yankees about re-establishing something akin to the old United States...
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(EDIT: I came up with these names while sleepy. Just now noticing that there's a pretty famous Georgian named "Carter." Oops. That wasn't intentional, lol. I just wanted to do a "Cold War banana republic Georgia" scenario).
