New England Secession plausibility question

During the lead up to the war of 1812, and during the war itself, New England was at odds with the course taken by the presidency and the national government. This culminated with the Hartford convention in 1814, and the sending of delegates to Washington to discuss terms with the Federal government.

With the success of the Battle of New Orleans and the treaty of Ghent, these delegates were ridiculed and the Federalist party was discredited, so much so that it essentially disappeared from the national stage entirely.

My question is, what if the Hartford convention ended up supporting secession, and what if the peace treaty had failed? Would New England have tried to secede from the Union, and how would that have worked out?

If New England had seceded, and the war had continued, I could see New England essentially becoming a British Client state, and the South controlling the USA for a long time.

How plausible/possible is New England seceding, and what happens afterward? I'd love to get some feedback.
 
This's actually the PoD for Jared's excellent Decades of Darkness timeline, in which New England becomes independent in alliance with Britain, and the United States falls under the sway of the Slave Power. He sets the whole thing out with horrendous plausibility, though I think he makes the remaining US stronger than it would actually be. I'd love to hear a discussion of this - thoughts?
 
I disagree. While New York is certainly a loss, New England certainly isn't the backbone of America. DoD"s America still had key parts of where the Union's majors industries were. Also, as history has shown, the Latin American countries were/are proportionally weaker than the US, even when slightly fragmented. Remember, the US got frustrated with its inability to take down New England/Canada, thus it focused on its far weaker neighbors to the south and west. The US still got California and Texas, the economic engines of our TL. They also got all the resource rich parts of Northern Mexico to exploit. Parts of that the new Central America land suddenly gives America a year round growing season, and thus a huge food advantage over the rest of the world.
 
I have to ask: would the remainder of the US necessarily have come under the thumb of the south? What about a sizable exodus of New Englanders who otherwise remained loyal to the US? I'm thinking in terms of a emigrant population led by Adams father and son, Daniel Webster, and the like: the intellectual and financial leadership that sided with the War Hawks in 1812 could perhaps find New England sufficiently uncomfortable that they'd migrate and settle in NJ, PA, DE, and MD, re-establishing themselves--and in the latter two instances, fostering a transmutation to non-slave states.

I could see a number of New Englanders leaving and re-establishing themselves in building mills along the Brandywine or Schuylkill, for example.
 
I have to ask: would the remainder of the US necessarily have come under the thumb of the south? What about a sizable exodus of New Englanders who otherwise remained loyal to the US? I'm thinking in terms of a emigrant population led by Adams father and son, Daniel Webster, and the like: the intellectual and financial leadership that sided with the War Hawks in 1812 could perhaps find New England sufficiently uncomfortable that they'd migrate and settle in NJ, PA, DE, and MD, re-establishing themselves--and in the latter two instances, fostering a transmutation to non-slave states.

I could see a number of New Englanders leaving and re-establishing themselves in building mills along the Brandywine or Schuylkill, for example.
Not enough to make a difference. Virginia used to be the most populous state... Though DoD has New York and New Jersey leaving as part of New England, so it won't be quite as Southern as the DoD *USA if they stay. But Southern dominated? You betcha.
 
About the only way New England would leave is if the war lasts an extra year.
They were pissed with Washington for destroying their trade, but they wanted peace not separation. If the war lasts an extra year and goes badly for the US then they might start looking for independence from the war mongers, but Britain will have to be very successfully and the US particularly incompetent.
 
How plausible/possible is New England seceding, and what happens afterward? I'd love to get some feedback.

The plausibility of New England seceding once the War of 1812 broke out is actually very, very low.

This is partly because, as you note, even the suggestion that the Federalists were proposing secession at the Hartford Convention [1] was enough to destroy the party as a political force once the war was over.

But it went deeper than that. Various elements within the Federalists had been grumbling about New England secession for a decade or more by then, but it never amounted to much. The problem was that it was hard to find people who were willing to actually do something about New England secession, as opposed to just grumbling about it.

Their fundamental concern was that New England's political weight was being diminished as the west opened up, and there was a fear that New England's special interests (trade-related, mostly) were being disregarded by other parts of the country. This led to discontent, but it still needed a more meaningful trigger to lead to even proposed secession.

There were only 3 triggers which lead even to meaningful discussion of secession:

i) the Louisiana Purchase (1804)
ii) the Embargo Act (1807-9)
iii) the Hartford Convention (1814-5)

The reaction to the Louisiana Purchase involved a lot of grumbling over the supposed unconstitutionality of the Purchase, but despite some powerful speeches and letters, it wasn't enough to bring about a call for secession, or even close to it.

The Hartford Convention wasn't a big enough trigger in itself. The stigma of treason was one reason among many that it didn't lead to secession. Whether it might have done so with a longer war, well, I rather doubt it, since it would still be seen as treason.

Even if it might have led to proposed NE secession, the problem was that Britain by this point wasn't interested in a longer war either. Having finished with Napoleon, they just wanted to revert to status quo ante bellum (more or less) in North America. US finances being rather poor by this point, they didn't really want to continue either. So the Hartford Convention turns out to be quite difficult as a trigger for NE secession.

The Embargo Act is the one with the most promise. Indeed, this is the one I ended up using in Decades of Darkness. Even then, though, it required a considerably prolonged embargo, substantial federal government bungling (something which Madison was fortunately quite capable of), and some luck to get to the point where NE declared secession. Even after secession was declared, I depicted a _lot_ of foot-dragging in New England (much like Unionism in the South in the ACW, only worse), and the secession was only successful first because New York went neutral for a while (preventing invasion) and because Britain intervened.

So having the Embargo Act lead to NE secession would be more plausible, but even then requires a dose of luck.

[1] Which they weren't, by the way, or at least not as a whole. A few individuals may have suggested it, but the delegates as a whole didn't want to push for secession.

This's actually the PoD for Jared's excellent Decades of Darkness timeline, in which New England becomes independent in alliance with Britain, and the United States falls under the sway of the Slave Power. He sets the whole thing out with horrendous plausibility, though I think he makes the remaining US stronger than it would actually be. I'd love to hear a discussion of this - thoughts?

I disagree. While New York is certainly a loss, New England certainly isn't the backbone of America. DoD"s America still had key parts of where the Union's majors industries were. Also, as history has shown, the Latin American countries were/are proportionally weaker than the US, even when slightly fragmented. Remember, the US got frustrated with its inability to take down New England/Canada, thus it focused on its far weaker neighbors to the south and west. The US still got California and Texas, the economic engines of our TL. They also got all the resource rich parts of Northern Mexico to exploit. Parts of that the new Central America land suddenly gives America a year round growing season, and thus a huge food advantage over the rest of the world.

Heh, well, arguments about DoD's plausibility were a major reason that the timeline thread got to 187 pages.

Finding those arguments in such a long thread can be a bit intimidating, but I'd like to think that I've addressed most of them. Especially the perennial misconception that slavery was incompatible with industrialisation (er, what?) or that it was inextricably linked to agriculture.

That said, the key point is that the DoD USA indubitably had the natural resources to become a superpower. Everything from Pennsylvania to Costa Rica (ignoring later conquests, for these purposes) - it's all there. Texas, California, Monterrey, *Birmingham (Alabama), the works.

What it might have lacked is people to exploit those resources. You can make a case that having slavery would mean that the USA would be less productive per capita (although I'd dispute that it would be much less), but the *USA still needs plenty of people.

One thing I will mention is that I came to the conclusion about halfway through the timeline that I'd overestimated the likely population growth rates for the *USA - I'd thought that the rate of natural increase would be higher than it most likely would. I also underestimated the percentage of people who would become citizens in the conquered Mexican and Central American territories (it should have been closer to 30% than 20% - there would be more scope for loyal people to pass the citizenship test). This may have made the *USA more powerful than it would plausibly have been.

This can be resolved, and I'd worked out a plausible (hopefully!) retcon which would manage it. And, indeed, seemed like it was something which seemed like it would actually be natural for it to happen, given the features of the *USA and its geopolitical context.

What I had in mind was the realisation that the *USA had two problems:
i) its northern inland frontiers were empty and vulnerable to interlopers from New England and Canada
ii) it doesn't have a codified way for immigrants to be assured of citizenship, which given some of the rumours about slavery, would be a barrier to immigration.

For i), this is actually the reverse of what happened to Canada in OTL - they were fearful of US immigrants flooding the Canadian prairies and trying to annex it to Canada. So they did their best to fill them up. This response was coordinated by an interesting character called Sir Clifford Sifton, who became the Canadian Minister of the Interior, and who set up immigration offices in Europe (especially Eastern Europe) to encourage immigrants. This program succeeded rather well.

For ii), the *USA did not plan to turn white immigrants into peons. (Well, not until Alvar O'Brien, and even then only in rare circumstances). Foreigners and rumour, however, won't buy that. And the *USA needs to tidy up its citizenship laws anyway to clarify their view of peons.

In the DoD TL (original version) I'd had an analogue to Sifton arise in the *USA - the historical John Marshall Harlan set up a similar program in the 1880s and 1890s, which filled up much of the northern *USA (ie the empty bits which haven't been settled by farmers, since there isn't much call for plantations there).

Looking back, though, I think that *American paranoia over filling up the northern prairies would have started much earlier. (After about 1837, in fact). So I was planning to retcon in an equivalent to Harlan a couple of decades earlier, starting in around 1860 rather than 1880.

This would have been linked to the concern over citizenship, and also to an *Homestead Act. The Homestead Act in OTL was opposed by the South who feared that it would be used to create more free-soil states. That isn't the case in TTL - after 1837 it's a given that any new state will not be admitted unless it has an unalterable clause in its constitution protecting the rights of slavery and peonage.

So, ITTL the citizenship rules are rewritten sometime around 1850-1855, establishing a rule where white immigrants will be designated 'candidate' citizens who are automatically eligible for citizenship after a certain number of years (about 7, if I remember right). In 1860 or so, *Harlan gets going and links this to the *Homestead Act, encouraging white immigrants from Russia and some of the Habsburg Slavic lands to come to the *USA, with free land and accelerated citizenship if you live on it.

This land-hunger is a powerful pull for immigrants (as it was in OTL in Canada, and to a degree in the USA too), and you end up with a lot more immigrants to the *USA. All as white as the *USA could want. While a lot of them end up on the northern prairies, as happened in OTL, most immigrants stopped off in a US city first, and some of them decided to stay there.

This would solve the nagging problems of how the *USA had the population to sustain its imperial ambitions, and also explain how it found it easier to hold down the new conquests (30% citizens makes it a lot easier to hold a place down than 20%).

The big drawback was that working all of this into the published timeline would have been a major piece of work. I did start changing the names of some of the states to reflect the slower settlement of the interior (a bit of a continuity problem, if you read parts of the timeline) and I stopped publishing any more population data, since I figured that this would only make things worse.

I'd planned to get around to revising DoD to fix all of this up (and some other changes I'd had in mind), but rewriting a 700,000+ word timeline is not something which can be done overnight. What with other commitments, I've never gotten around to it. I will get to it if it comes to the point where DoD gets published (the timeline or the novels), but probably not before.
 

Thande

Donor
It's good to see you've been thinking about it, Jared. Although not in such hard-numbers terms I did get the impression when reading DoD properly recently that there didn't seem to be much of an impetus to fill up the north-west of the *USA, especially given the country being a less attractive destination for immigrants. In my head I thought it would be more plausible for the northern border of the *USA to be based on drawing the southern point of the Canadian province of Wisconsin and propagating it westwards. However, I suppose you could argue that the state of Wilkinson is quite well populated with difficult types and the US/Canadian border was drawn up on propagating that border westwards by default.
 
Though tangential to the discussion, an easy possibility is if Vermont joins Québec before it became part of the Union. Whilst that might not make sense (as it's not really a secession per se), it could serve as one potential impetus.
 

Skokie

Banned
New England was a well-oiled machine for conquest and capitalism. There was no way they would be relegated to their corner of the continent. They would have probably conquered the portions of the continent that they ended up settling in OTL—namely, New York, the Great Lakes and westward straight to the Willamette in Oregon.
 

GundamZero

Banned
During the lead up to the war of 1812, and during the war itself, New England was at odds with the course taken by the presidency and the national government. This culminated with the Hartford convention in 1814, and the sending of delegates to Washington to discuss terms with the Federal government.

With the success of the Battle of New Orleans and the treaty of Ghent, these delegates were ridiculed and the Federalist party was discredited, so much so that it essentially disappeared from the national stage entirely.

My question is, what if the Hartford convention ended up supporting secession, and what if the peace treaty had failed? Would New England have tried to secede from the Union, and how would that have worked out?

If New England had seceded, and the war had continued, I could see New England essentially becoming a British Client state, and the South controlling the USA for a long time.

How plausible/possible is New England seceding, and what happens afterward? I'd love to get some feedback.

Completely possible if the war lasted a few years longer. A certainity if a decade longer.
 
Completely possible if the war lasted a few years longer. A certainity if a decade longer.

The idea of the War of 1812 lasting until 1825 is unlikely in the extreme, however. The only reason it lasted three years in the first place was that Britain was fighting Napoleon for virtually the entire time. Even if Britain was losing, you can bet they would look for a reason to end the war after it had been dragging on a bit too long: I don't think the War of 1812 lasting 13 years is likely under any circumstances really.
 
In my head I thought it would be more plausible for the northern border of the *USA to be based on drawing the southern point of the Canadian province of Wisconsin and propagating it westwards. However, I suppose you could argue that the state of Wilkinson is quite well populated with difficult types and the US/Canadian border was drawn up on propagating that border westwards by default.

What I had in mind (if I remember right; it has been a few years) was that the whole of the Louisiana Purchase remained in US hands after the War of 1811. Most of the upper parts weren't settled, of course; but the *USA had access to the interior via the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers (which it controlled). So a few settlers, forts etc were built along the Mississippi, including in what would become Wilkinson Territory.

This didn't make for a large population, but then Canadian and Yankee settlement mostly went into the Michigan Country (as it then was) further east. Only a relative handful of settlers went in what would become the province of Wisconsin, and they were mostly along Lake Michigan. So both places were relatively empy during the War of 1837.

After the war, it became a question of how much territory that New England and Britain were going to take off the USA. I figured that with both areas with a few people, that the 46th parallel would be a reasonable compromise. No *US settlement to speak of was north of that line, but Britain could argue that they were taking considerable territory off the USA. Without getting many obstreperous Jackals to try to turn into loyal subjects.
 
A separate New England Republic would be interesting, certainly. As long as the rest of the USA doesn't balkanize, I do not see them taking any expansion westwards. However, I also can see the Canadian border ending up a few latitudes southwards, maybe the Columbia River as a boundary, and then the 46th up to Lake Michigan.

I do not see the rest of the US being dominated by the South much more than OTL. The balance will shift some day so that North and South might clash. Maybe this occurs one or two decades later and it happens under more difficult circumstances for the North.

What this thread should, IMHO opinion, also explore is what New England might look like today?
 
For those with an interest, there is World War II story set in a post-secession Hartford Convention world at

http://warships1discussionboards.yuku.com/forums/67/t/The-Naval-Fiction-Board.html

Its up to 56 chapters now and IMO is one of the best AH timelines I've read in years. The basic structure is a British-oriented New England (plus the Maritimes) led by an Adams family monarchy, a USA that includes New York and dominates the central swath of the continent, a CSA that extends to the Southwest, and the tiny country of Delaware/Maryland. Quebec is independent, but western Canada is still British.
 
The basic structure is a British-oriented New England (plus the Maritimes) led by an Adams family monarchy,

I just got a mental image of Gomez Adams sitting on a throne wearing a gaudy crown, with his family in front dressed in black Victorian clothing, Lurch holding a bottle of wine for him, and Thing holding a scepter.

cast.jpg

cast.jpg
 
I just got a mental image of Gomez Adams sitting on a throne wearing a gaudy crown, with his family in front dressed in black Victorian clothing, Lurch holding a bottle of wine for him, and Thing holding a scepter.


LOL!! Unintentional on my part, but love the image!
 
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