Mauritania

[Haggis]

The Kingdom of the Kongo had formed sometime around the year 1400 and had been close allies with the Portuguese for almost four hundred years, though the occasional war marred the relationship between the two powers.

When the first Portuguese ships in many years landed in Angola to try and retake the country as a colonial possession in 1860 the Mwenekongo Pedro VI was more than willing to lend guns and warriors to Portugal’s conquest. [1]

The Portuguese were armed with the finest rifles and were more than willing to use them on the rebellious locals. They quickly settled back into the swings of things and the mestiços took over the running of day to day operations.

The mestiços were sympathetic to the needs of most local tribes, specifically the Ovimbundu, which many mestiços were drawn from. The Ovimbundu had been influenced greatly by the Bakongo and so retained Catholicism and a Kikongo influenced Portuguese dialect. [2]

In fact many Ovimbundu had already begun to claim they were either the descendants of mestiços who had been stranded on the Bieh Plateau or Bakongo farmers that had gotten lost and had been absorbed by locals.

Though this time Portugal was out to make a larger impact in Africa and so did not stop when they had control of their formers territories but instead turned north to the Cassai River basin and the Kuba Federation within.

Pedro VI had no great love of the Kuba and supported the Portuguese against his rivals, even invading with several hundred war canoes from the north, all carrying knock offs of European cannonry, and close to seventy thousand musketeers.

It was a quick campaign and resulted in Portugal thinking they added the Cassai to their holdings and the Mwenekongo thinking he added Cassai to his holdings, the end result would be two nominal allies eyeing each other from the same piece of land for many, many years to come.

Though Pedro’s next big worry were the Baati. Foreigners with skins like Africans who had already taken a few coastal villages and insisted on adding his kingdom to theirs. [3]

Pedro’s agents reported back to him that they had learnt that the Baati were involved in a massive war in the north of Africa. This left Pedro in a strange position; if he sided with the enemies of the Baati he could not only extend the reach of his kingdom and drive these invaders out but also establish newer, stronger ties to the European continent.

So he took the chance. Mwenekongo Pedro VI sided with Egypt, Mauritania, Naples, the Papal States, Italy, and the Mtetwa Empire. An early treaty between Portugal and the Kingdom of the Kongo had also declared that should any nation attack the integrity of the other then the unaffected nation was supposed to lend its hand in whatever way it could.

While the Bakongo had been curiously absent during the Napoleonic Invasion of Portugal the Portuguese still upheld their bargain, it was only later that they’d realized they would not be taking on some small African state, not even a fledgling Caribbean “republic” but the Danish Empire, which in an act of blind anger declared war on Portugal as soon as it found out that Portugal had entered the war.

[1] Mwenekongo is basically King of the Kongo.

[2] Bakongo, people of the Kongo it also means Hunter, Kikongo, language of the Kongo

[3] Baati, People of Haiti, see what I did there?

 

[Haggis]

The still young Republic of the United States had elected the first non Democratic-Republican president in a long, long time. This caused problems primarily because when William King and J.F. Davis took office they saw themselves as representatives not of a national party but of an ever increasing regional delegation that had managed to foist some of their boys into the Presidential Palace.

The first order of business was securing the border. Pirates had been raiding the Falklands again and Haitian cargo ships had been appearing with an alarming frequency in waters off the coast of the District of Florida.

These problems were not as worrying as the developments in Texas. The increasing size of the Texan railways meant that a fast growing economy was developing within the Texan state. A willingness to deal with New Spanish authorities also meant that Texan investors would be able to move their goods with relative ease through the waters around Cuba and New Spain.

Compounding all of this was the announcement from New Spain that they would be making a canal in the Isthmus of Tehuantepec. This caused many American investors to urge military action against New Spain. It was claimed that this Tehuantepec Canal would destroy the stranglehold that the American presence in Cape Horn gave the United States regarding movement between the Pacific and Atlantic oceans.

Americans on the border with Canada’s western extremes were experiencing raids by well armed Indians and angry Canadians and William King was more than willing to threaten another war with America’s pugilistic neighbor to the north.

Though going to war with Canada, and by extension the last remnants of the British Empire, was not an attractive idea. It was well known that Canadians had been in and out of wars for the past sixty or so years, making them some of the most respected and most feared troops in the civilized world.

Brazil was proving to be a problem, it objected, on almost a daily basis, to the American presence in Cape Horn. Some of the most adamant objections coincided with a well publicized visit by J.F. Davis to Suriname; a visit which the Brazilians were certain was about American support for the Mosaic Kingdom. [1]

All these problems and more confronted King in his first few years in office. The Haitian issue would be resolved with a few harsh words, nobody was certain how to deal with Canada, a potential war would be devastating so the Americans just had to suck it up for now, the Texas and Tehuantepec issue would go unresolved until the election of 1846.

1846 rolled around soon enough and it was a bad year to be a Girondist. Brigham Young had led the charge against King and his upstart Girondist Party for four years now. Young had managed to campaign most heavily in the north and parts of the west, though he had become a popular, if polarizing figure in Virginia.

He preached about the evils of allowing the New Spanish to complete work on the Tehuantepec Canal and of the need to fight the FEM to a standstill. Many Americans weren’t even sure what the FEM was anymore, all they knew was that it harbored a lot of raiding Indians, though still managed to not appear on any known maps.

The FEM was the idea of the untamed West, and it damn sure had to be tamed. Brigham Young also found common cause with the more radical Sons of Moses, a pro-Suriname group, based out of an apartment building in New York, which supported a mass Jewish exodus to this “Southern Israel” the Sons of Moses were Young’s hardest campaigners which brought them into conflict with Southern interests, mostly in Missouri.

The Sons of Moses, at least the relatively small but increasingly violent Missouri Chapter, would end up being investigated for the murder of no less than seventeen Baptist preachers.

This negative backlash not only tarnished Young’s credibility in the South, so much so that he wasn’t even on the Democratic-Republican ticket in Orleans, Alabama, Georgia, Mississippi, Missouri, Tennessee, the Carolinas, West Florida, or Maryland. It also served to foment an ever increasing animosity towards Jews in the Southern United States.

The man who ran on the Southern Democratic-Republican ticket was James Hurt, a relatively mediocre politician from Kentucky who won both North and South Carolina, the Girondist ticket, which consisted once more of William King and J.F. Davis dominated Orleans, West Florida, and Alabama, with the remaining Southern states either exempting the vote or never returning the results.

Nevertheless, Brigham Young and his Vice Presidential candidate, Kevin Orbo Davids, took the Presidential Palace, carried almost entirely by the Massachusetts, New York, and Pennsylvania vote.

A division of American Marines, aboard a fleet headed by the USS Conqueror, USS West Florida, and USS Isaac Shelby were headed for Tehuantepec within a month.

The marines were led by the relatively capable, if unimaginative Major General John Mercy. After landing on February Fourteenth the General progressed to the canal site which was blown with half a ton of Kingston powder.

Up until this point Major General Mercy has assumed that they would face only light resistance, which was true, New Spanish skirmishers offered up token fire before falling back. However, once the word of this American invasion had reached the Viceroy then the nearest naval squadron was contacted.

Thanks to some turn of fate the nearest squadron was not on the Yucatan peninsula but doing maneuvers with their Istmeno counterparts near Jamaica.

This news meant that if the New Spanish were going to trap this American force and prove to their northern neighbors that invasion and destruction of New Spanish property was not allowed then local garrisons would have to delay the Americans from setting sail while no New Spanish squadrons were there to intercept them.

Mayan partisans were quickly offered immunity by the local governor, Mauricio Marche de Progreso. He used their impressive knowledge of guerilla tactics, honed mostly through attacking New Spanish outposts, to pin the Americans down a few kilometers from their ships.

Mauricio acted quickly once he had the Americans pinned and unloaded several cannon from merchant ships and outdated paddle wheel steamers to help keep the American pinned down.

John Mercy had a few options, he could try and fight his way through hills that all the sudden were swarming with Mayan riflemen and local militia and try to menace Oaxaca itself, but Oaxaca was 250 kilometers away and had no good natural ports.

So the American would break camp and try to fight their way to Salina Cruz, which was only fourteen kilometers away and had not yet been blocked to their exit by the troops of Mauricio de Progreso.

Twelve thousand American troops funneled their way towards Salina Cruz, where it was hoped they would be able to set up a camp, raid the country side for needed supplies, and wait to be picked up.

The plan worked well enough, though it took almost two years to evacuate all the Americans from Salina Cruz. In that time they had managed to pacify much of the local countryside and had even allied with several groups of partisans, be they Mayan, Protestant, or Republican.

In the two years that twelve thousand Americans called Salina Cruz home, fourteen hundred children were born within the American camp, though only two-hundred and seven marriages were performed.

The Istmeno based naval squadrons had already dispersed the American fleet and forced them to set up a temporary station at Isla de Pinos, where they managed to refuel their coal supplies and tried to wait out the Istmenos that had driven them to seek refuge there.

When Brigham Young heard this news he immediately sought to rescue to the navy men who were trapped on Isla de Pinos, after all they were right next to Cuba and several landings had already been made to try and capture the Americans.

It was too little too late on the part of President Young, the Americans on Isla de Pinos had already been captured when the relief arrived, along with three state of the art American ships.

The American navy men were returned as was the USS Conqueror but the USS Isaac Shelby and the USS West Florida stayed in New Spanish hands.

And the last Americans left Salina Cruz in 1849; they were transported on the USS Conqueror.

For the rest of Brigham Young’s presidency he mostly avoided the public eye, the shame and humiliation was too great.

As such the Girondist party, under J.F. Davis and with the Vice Presidential pick of James Hurt, who had represented the Southern branch of the Democratic-Republicans in 1846, came to power again in the election of 1850 and already trouble was brewing.

In the District of Florida the mistreatment of the Indians and blacks, along with more than a few white penal colonists, by the American government caused a rebellion that would result in hostilities continuing on and off for close to twenty years.

Virginia caused a backlash when, in 1851, the abolitionist groups in the western extremes of the state managed to get an emancipation bill passed, resulting in the first Southern state to outlaw slavery.

Combined with Virginia’s ever present march towards industrialization many in the South saw what was once their greatest fellow Southern state moving more and more towards becoming a solid member of the perceived Northern bloc.

Now, West Florida and Kentucky had already passed general manumission bills the previous year, in 1850, which stated that by 1870 if all slave owners had not already been compensated for their slaves then every those remaining slaves could be held until the deaths. Those bills hadn’t really caused too much anguish because those states produced remarkably little cotton or anything, really.

Though Virginia was taking a step in the right direction, the slave economy was no longer profitable, Egypt and Denmark had cornered the European markets so Southern cotton ended up being sold primarily in the United States, which resulted in a lot of surplus and ever plummeting cotton prices.

What happened next was almost predictable, thanks to a higher tariff passed by a mostly Democratic-Republican congress several Southern states realized that if they paid this new tariff on top of other tariffs and taxes then most of their people would be so far in debt that they’d never come out.

So in December of 1851 the states of Tennessee, Orleans, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, West Florida, and Alabama each sent representatives to Memphis, Tennessee where it was decided that they would refuse to pay any and all tariffs deemed “irresponsible and negligent that could lead to the destruction of Southern economies” by the first Southern Economic Congress. (SEC)

The SEC terrified many Northerners who immediately swamped the Presidential Palace with pleas that this “traitorous organization” be purged from the face of the Earth.

J.F. Davis was ill equipped to handle this sudden loss of income, on the one hand the states in question still paid most of the taxes and tariffs that had been bankrupting them before, especially the tariffs as these were almost impossible to get around without smuggling or forcing price controls.

But the taxes that the states had decided not to pay were affecting the government and so President Davis was forced to try and find an alternative means to try and get these states to pay. Everything failed though, increasing tariffs only made them angrier and doubling any taxes in the North or West would serve to create just another potential threat.

So Davis did what he had to and used the Federal City of New Orleans as a base from which he landed many, many troops in the South and increased the amount of government patrol boats on the Mississippi River.

This troop increase ended up failing miserably, when the troops in question where ordered to break up mobs or take an arsenal that was under the supervision of a military commander that sympathized with their fellow Southerners and so refused to pay the “Criminal Tax” the troops would often times refuse to do so because they did not want to act against their fellow Americans.

Western states like Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois were also starting to feel the squeeze and were threatening to form a Northwestern Economic Conference if the Congress did not repeal the Criminal Tax.

In the end a Girondist Congress was voted in, in 1852 and their first action was to repeal the tariffs and the few taxes that had caused so much difficulty.

Their second action was to admit the territory of Arkansas as a state; revealingly Arkansas came in as a slave state that already had a general manumission date of 1870 planned.

[1] Because of the almost critical mass of European Jews residing in Suriname it got the nickname of the Mosaic Kingdom.

 

[Haggis]

The first global conflict of the 19th Century had received its spark in northern Africa. Achille I of Naples had been forcing the Italian states in the palm of his hand for some time and had grown to think that with their backing he had the power to force Egypt, al-Jazair, and someday all of the Mediterranean under his thumb.

He was a clear headed man, he had the backing of the Pope, and he practically owned all of the Italian Peninsula, Ibrahim Pasha did what he was told, everything seemed to be going fine for Naples.

And then the war just grew. It blew up from a small conflict involving a few Arab and a few European states to a mess that had most of the African continent up in arms, the world’s newest global empire, Denmark, would do battle against Portugal.

The world waited to hear the most important news though. Which side would the true juggernauts of the world France and Russia support? The answer surprised nobody. France came down on the side of Naples and Russia decided to just sit this one out.

1860 that was the year that the world changed, the war in North Africa had been raging for over a decade Bakongo and Portuguese warriors reinforced the Egyptians, Neapolitan and Papal and Italian soldiers fell to Jazairi and Moroccan snipers, the French behemoth was starting to stir, ready for the first taste of war in a long, long time.

Denmark realized that if either France or the Confederation of the Rhine decided to invade then the Danish would be sitting ducks, so they would have to put them both on the defensive, immediately. Many plans were discussed, should they try a naval strike, would mining the Rhine itself slow down the German supply trains, could Denmark do the unthinkable and come out of this war truly on top?

Probably not, but they were in it now and so they would have to try something, suing for peace this early would just mean becoming a French vassal and the Danes would not have that.

They would have to invade France itself. This would take equal parts daring, luck, tactical skill, and overwhelming firepower. This overwhelming firepower would come from an unlikely source, a Peruvian ambassador named Horatio Leon. Horatio had, like all Peruvians since 1840, spent a lot of time at target practice and Horatio had come to appreciate the feel of recoil when a rifle slapped against his shoulder.

There was so much potential energy there, so many untapped possibilities. Well, he had spent most of his free time tapping into them. And in 1859 he demonstrated a new type of gun, a gun that would revolutionize warfare.

The Lion Gun, named so because the Danes could not pronounce Horatio’s last name properly, worked off the idea that recoil could be used to eject a spent cartridge and load the next one, he had designed a belt to be used with it and initial tests pegged the Lion Gun at 400 rounds per minute.

It was put into production immediately; Danish controlled factories were told to secretly produce this new weapon and it was tested in combat by the Asante against the last vestige of resistance from Hawaiians in the Pacific and bandits in California.

Horatio Leon was suitably impressed with the efficiency of the new weapon and sent several detailed sketches of it back home to Peru.

The wolf was at the door; French troops had decided to bypass fighting in the harsh conditions of North Africa and the Pacific and were preparing to go straight at the throat of the Danish Empire, instead the Danish Empire would hit France where it hurt the most, its breadbasket.

France had only managed to grow so quickly since 1814 because it owned an important agricultural and economic asset in The Netherlands. Indeed, it was Groningen that kept bacon on the table and it was Amsterdam that kept French revenues from trade and tax so high.

If Denmark could cripple the Dutch then the French would be forced to try and retake it and their weapons and tactics had not improved much since the first Napoleon whereas the soldiers of Denmark, be they Danish or Asante, had spent a lot of time up to their knees in the blood of those that deserved the light of civilization and their new guns were the shiniest.

More than half a million Asante were called to battle, the Kris Asekan were ready to bring the light of Jesus to these French infidels. Almost all Danish units were armed with the Lion Gun and the Asante shock troops carried a slightly smaller version which would still had a devastating impact on the Dutch troops sent to face them. [1]

The relatively flat land of Groningen Province made for easy marching. The Danish cavalry wreaked havoc on the open plains and in four days time tales of dark and demonic warriors that seemed to carry hundreds of rifles each had spread through The Netherlands. To accentuate the affect white Danes would often smear their face with soot or black paint so that they would look as terrifying to the Dutch as their Asante brethren.

French garrisons were overrun, the Fleur-de-Lis burnt, Dutch partisans gunned down by the Lion Gun, the advance was constant, Siisi Nkrumah, fresh from his victories in Hawaii, led the charge. He and his soldiers lived off the land and often forced thousands of Dutch to flee further into France or east into the Confederation of the Rhine.

Friesland was surrounded just as quickly and overrun, the famous Friesian cattle made a fine meal for the advancing tides. North Holland saw that it was next and already the price of food had skyrocketed, refugees flooded daily into Haarlem and Amsterdam.

The only recourse was to try and stop Danish troop movements by utilizing the Dutch fleet to lock the marauders into Friesland. It worked well enough; Danish fleets were turned back by everything from French warships to local Dutch reders, private ship owners, who operated as privateers, receiving letters of marque from Paris.

It worked too well perhaps. Nkrumah, the top tactician and general of his day, realized that the Danes could never smash through the Franco-Dutch at sea and the only way to immobilize the navy was to attack it while at port.

So the Danish withdrew from smaller ports in Friesland and the Franco-Dutch took the bait, it was at Harlingen that the Danes struck. In one fell swoop the largest and most powerful ship were confiscated while refueling, the sailors offered the generous ultimatum of surrender or death, and Danish sailors in French uniforms put on board.

The French flag flew from these vessels and French made guns would later fire on French made ships filled with Dutch soldiers, at the First Meeting as it came to be known, the large Danish force successfully drew rather close to a group of reders and actual Franco-Dutch ships and began combat. It was a complete massacre.

This new fleet allowed the Danes to move out of Friesland and ransack what was left of The Netherlands. In less than half a month Denmark had gained the upper hand in the war, capturing almost untold wealth and gaining the ability to openly enter French ports.

And enter them they did. With an entire French fleet under their command they decided that they should just go ahead and capture another one. But where would the largest fleet be located? Why at Le Havre of course.

It was a lightning raid, quick and flexible, a beautiful thing to behold, a second French fleet was in Danish hands, fifty ships of different sizes, all with skeleton crews, sailing back to ports in the recently conquered Netherlands and at home in Denmark.

The excitement was short lived though. The main French armies were massing at the border, ready to strike back at Denmark and retake The Netherlands.

Now, one might ask, why did it take so long for the French to get their troops north?

The answer is three-fold. The soldiers sitting in the Confederation of the Rhine could not be moved, they were there to intimidate the princes of the Confederation into acting in accordance with French wishes. It was a drain on the national budget to be sure. Secondly, so many Dutch refugees had been flooding into France that almost all roads were too congested to move along and such a large army needs a lot of space. The size of the army is the third reason, though they may have been hard marching men they were inevitably stopped by the fact that their supply trains would fall behind or on occasion be ransacked by hordes of the starving Dutchmen.

Eventually though the banners appeared in the distance and the trenches were fixed, the time had come to fight the true professionals. To throw soldier against soldier and hope that the massive French force, a million man army, made up mostly of civilian reserves would fall before the die hard six hundred thousand Danes waiting in the Low Country.

1861 would be a starving year, Danish troops had food and the French that faced them would run out by July. The Netherlands had been stripped to the bone of anything worth value and just the canals and dams remained. Belgium, though technically part of the Netherlands, had remained French and was capable of supplying the army with enough to keep it standing, once the army pushed too far into The Netherlands proper, it would lose what little it for from the Belgians.

The first real battle had been at the Maas River. General Nkrumah had ordered the Asante to fall back and let the enemy come to them. The enemy came at Maas, twenty thousand French soldiers marching north to see what would lie ahead while their compatriots camped all across Belgium. The Lion Gun came out again, two hundred and fifty six of them, well positioned in front of three thousand Ga soldiers. [2]

As the French were crossing the Ga let all hell loose, in addition to their Lion Guns they had artillery and the Cannonade of Maas would go down in history as a battle winning moment. Massive wooden rafts were used to ferry the French across and they expected to be fired upon, but not by this new weapon.

After five attempts at crossing hundreds of French soldiers had already stained the river red with their blood, the General in charge of the operation, a portly fellow named Mardonne, ordered his men to fall back out of the range of the Lion Gun and unpack the artillery.

At this moment a young Ga officer named Bors ordered the artillery to fire. The Cannonade of Maas did turn the tide of battle, mainly by disabling in a single volley the entirety of the French artillery. Soldiers began to desert. Mardonne ordered a retreat, and then the fourteen makeshift bridges that the Ga had crafted before the battle came out.

They were almost sturdy and designed to get soldiers across quickly. They worked well enough, only two bridges collapsed with men and supplies on them. The other twelve allowed over a thousand Ga to get most of the Lion Guns across the river quickly and fire on the French as they retreated.

Five thousand French soldiers were counted dead that day, one fourth of the force sent against well armed and well trained Danish colonial troops perished against the Lion Gun and against Danish strength of arms.

[1] Kris Asekan, still means the Knives of Christ and Danish officials would often pump up the Asante before battle by telling them that they were facing heathens.

[2] The other main African ethnic group employed by the Danes, just in case you didn’t remember.

 

[YLi]

Awesome. Keep going.