Howdy all. Old veteran of the original alt.history.what-if here. Back to indulge the Vice in a particular way and for a particular purpose.
This is an AH I've been kicking around for some time. It's for an alternate Florida which stayed in the British Empire and, in the late 18th century, became the site of British attempts to resettle freed Africans. It will later draw considerable settlement through the American Colonization Society and other channels. Palmera initially will replace the roles played by Sierra Leone and Liberia IOTL. It will eventually grow into something far different.
The timeline will reach 2007, the point for which I have a possible novel planned. In the meantime I'd like to lay it out here and see if there are possibilities for the timeline I could be missing. So feedback and questions are appreciated.
I'm going to start with the early history up to the point of the colony achieving Home Rule and see how it goes.
Fair warning: these posts will be long. Warning also for occasional period-appropriate racial epithets.
_____
To come in the timeline:
The Lion's Cub, Part One. The Union of Palmera battles tides of unrest washing out from America after the Civil War, culminating in the traumatic rebellion called the Third Border War.
The Lion's Cub, Continued. The Gilded Age unfolds in Palmera in a mingling of glory and tragedy.
The Lion's Cub, Conclusion. The Union cautiously begins to carve out a place in the international orders of politics, finance and trade.
The Hinge of History, Pt. 1 ("Unseen Pressures Build"). On the eve of the Great War, new forces of nationalism, religion and activism are growing.
The Hinge of History, Pt. 2 ("We Shall Do What Must Be Done"). The Great War erupts, and the full cost in blood and moral compromise of Palmera's "lion's cub" aspirations becomes plain.
The Hinge of History, Pt. 3 ("Lift Every Voice and Sing"). Football, baseball and beach-side leisure provide windows onto three different episodes of postwar social change.
Resource Posts:
Palmera at the End of the Belle Epoque: A Snapshot. A map and a demographic summary of the Union of Palmera in the year 1914.
Glossary of Palmey English Terms. A glossary of Palmeyisms or otherwise unfamiliar language occurring in the text. Periodically updated as the timeline advances.
Story Posts:
The Deal. Tequesta County's rural isolation is set to make way for an age of development... but who will benefit?
Song of Songs. Though times are tough in the wake of the Great Tequesta Hurricane, little has changed in the rarified world of the social elite. Or has it?
The Spanish Period: By the 16th century and the earliest historical records, major Native American groups occupying the region now known as Palmera included the Apalachees, the Utina and Timucua, the Ais, the Tocobaga, the Calusa and the Tequesta. The peninsula acquired its modern name—and was henceforth known as either La Palmera or Las Palmeras (Palmera or The Palmeras)— when Spaniard Juan Ponce de Léon landed on a Palm Sunday in 1513*.
As Eurasian disease, wars and slave trading depopulated the region, it began to attract other forms of settler. Palmera drew free blacks looking for escape from servitude early in its modern history, and became the site of Fort Mose—a fortified town near St. Augustine where freed slaves were permitted to settle in exchange for militia service—in 1738. It was North America's first officially sanctioned free black settlement, though it was mostly abandoned during a later transition to British sovereignty when inhabitants decamped for Cuba.
(* Ponce de Leon arriving one day late is not the actual POD. It's just an excuse for the region to have a name that distinguishes it from OTL. Everything else described is as in OTL, and no butterflies are visible at this stage -- this AH is pretty conservative about butterflies generally, I want Palmera to fit into a history whose broad outlines are similar to ours.)
Early British Rule: After the British victory in the Seven Years' War in 1763, Palmera became a British colony. The British Crown divided and consolidated the Palmeras into East and West colonies and did its best to encourage English and other European settlers. These efforts had largely failed, and the Palmeras were almost totally depopulated by wars and disorders and had acquired the reputation of being an unprofitable tropical wilderness, by the time of Britain's defeat in the American Revolutionary War in 1783. Indeed the whole region might well have reverted to Spanish rule at this time, as British will to maintain it was flagging; popular legend has it that it only avoided doing so owing to a Spanish envoy's unfortunately-timed hangover during the negotiations of the Treaty of Versailles**.
(** This the POD right here.)
Circumstances made possible an experimental spirit that enabled Britain's first use of southern Palmera for the resettlement of Black freedmen in 1787. The project, championed by the Committee for the Black Poor in London, originally envisaged Sierra Leone in Africa as the site of choice, but Committee member Gustavus Vassa's choice of “the province of Calusa” narrowly carried the argument. The resulting colony, Eleutheria, managed to thrive sufficiently that it would recommend itself as a site of choice for the resettlement of Black Loyalists—who originally settled in New Brunswick but encountered hostility from the White populace there—starting in 1792.
By this time, the Santo Domingo Revolt (a.k.a. The Haitian Revolution) was underway and already sending shudders through the slave-holding territories around the Caribbean, and the British crown saw the value of a freedman's colony as an example of stability and loyalty in the region. Eleutheria became the heart of its own third Palmeran province, South Palmera, in 1794; and though still under the supervision of a White Governor-General it even acquired its own parliament, in parallel to those of East and West Palmera.
The “Black Syon” & The First Border War: Over the next decade, the awful consequences of the Santo Domingo Revolt and the traumatic destruction of French rule on that island brought home for some of Britain's gentry the full dangers of the slave trade. Haiti's revolution set the call for slavery's abolition more vigorously into motion than ever before, and inspired slaves elsewhere to make bids for freedom. It also cemented South Palmera—or Calusa—in its position as the anti-Haiti, a well-ordered settlement of loyalist freedmen symbolic of fealty to the Crown and harmony between free peoples.
Increasingly over the first third of the 19th century, Calusa became a “Black Syon,” a lodestone for freedmen fleeing violence or repression, a controversial destination of choice for escaped slaves, and a site for the resettlement of slaves engaged in failed slave revolts elsewhere in the British Caribbean, or for those recovered from illegal traders after the Crown abolished the maritime trade in 1807.
As such it drew no small amount of hostility and fear from the White settlers who were then settling the United States' “deep South” and were effecting an immense movement of slave capital along with them; it could hardly be lost on slave traders which direction escaping slaves tended to strike out in. Nor was it just the African population. The still-defiant Seminole and Creek tribes on the edges of Calusa, East Palmera (Utina) and West Palmera (Appalachee) territory were of continued and fateful concern to the American government as the age of the Indian Wars moved into full swing.
The “Black Syon” was also bitterly resented and keenly feared by many Whites in the East and West Palmeras. Propaganda grew more and more inflammatory from this faction—who called themselves Whigs and Patriots after the revolutionary language—as to the degree to which the free Black colony was “in defiance of the natural order of God and Man” and a supposed harbour for radical Black abolitionists, maroons and brigands dreaming of wreaking Santo Domingo-style slaughter on the White man. These fears were grotesquely exaggerated, but exploited a grain of truth: in fact, though they were nowhere near so numerous and violent as White imagination made them, there were freeman brigands of the era with the intent of liberating slaves from the other Palmey colonies (or beyond), or of harassing the small number of would-be slave-holders in Calusa itself. One of the most famous of these, Titus Fox, was an ally of the Seminoles and would go on to become a folk legend.
These tensions led Appalachee (West Palmera) to revolt against the Crown in 1810, followed closely by Utina (East Palmera) in 1811. The Appalachee colony became an ally of the American republic during the war of 1812 and within two years had secured annexation to the States. The Whigs of Utina had harder luck: their revolt was stiffly opposed by a large and determined Loyalist population and put down by swift and resolute British action, with the participation of allied militias from both Calusa and Seminole country.
At first the Crown dealt generously with the Utina rebels, sparing many of their lives in exchange for pledges not to take up seditious arms again. The Whigs for their part were deeply embittered—in particular by the use of Black and Indian troops in suppressing them—and refused to give up the fight. For years afterward the north border country of Utina was a hotbed of banditry, race riots and opportunistic assaults on prominent Loyalists, abolitionists and free Blacks. Finally, after armistice drew America's war with the British to a close in 1814, the rebels sent an envoy to Washington to appeal for “Deliverance from the Scourges of Mad Old George along with his Followers, inimical to True Liberty one and all, and the various pet Savages and Niggers employed thereby.”
The envoy drew no official response from Washington, where the government was less than eager to be seen breaking the recent armistice so soon. But they did manage to excite interest in a filibustering expedition—led by no less a personage than Andrew “Old Hickory” Jackson, Revolutionary War hero and Saviour of New Orleans—that attacked Utina in 1816. The attack was repulsed in the famous Battle of Fort Campbell in which Jackson and several prominent members of the expedition were killed; British patience with the Whigs was finally exhausted and known ring-leaders of the movement were rounded up and hanged shortly thereafter. This concluded the First Border War.
There had been many attempts to launch filibustering expeditions against Palmera, but the Jackson Expedition was grander than any and its calamity cast a pall over further efforts; there would be no repeat attempt for another couple of decades thereafter. Thereafter the former Whigs and Patriots of Utina withdrew into a sullen silence, in many cases doing their best to ban coloured people from their towns and villages—efforts which the Crown officially deplored but expended no great effort to oppose, so long as they remained quiet. The Black Syon continued to be a lodestone for freedmen as the crescendo to the next great crisis built: the push for full abolition of slavery by the Crown.
The Second Border War & The Act of Union: Utina's peace in the wake of the First Border War (a.k.a. “Old Hickory's War”) was uneasy. Bitterness had driven a permanent wedge between rebels and Loyalists—who now dismissed their enemies simply as Crackers—and the existing tensions only grew. But matters grew more complicated yet.
The abolition of the slave trade had not abolished the addiction to free labour of the cotton planters in the North. Existing populations of slaves did not benefit from the freer hand in manumission that abolition of the trade had been expected to create; moreover, as the prohibition took hold and the illegal trade withered, a practice of debt peonage began to replace it. The importation of Asiatic “Coolie” labour had already begun as a replacement tactic for slavery as far back as 1807, but the peonage practice was still cheaper and easier; it took the guise of “redemption” of slaves from the southern States or points in the Caribbean, and their indenture to work off the price of that “redemption,” often at usurious interest rates which made the theoretical goal nearly impossible to attain.
Essentially slavery under another name, “redemption” drove a fresh wedge among the Loyalists—some traditional Tories saw it as perfectly justifiable—and affronted many of Calusa's freedmen. Calusa for its part affronted the old Whigs and worried many Tories as it blossomed; particularly in that having its tempting freedom near at hand made for heavy attrition from slave and bondsman flight from the plantations. Meanwhile over the border, more than a few Americans yet dreamt of laying Old Hickory's unhappy ghost to rest with a victory over the hated British outposts at Palmera.
It wasn't all hostility from the north, though. One group saw a great opportunity in Calusa: the American Colonization Society, founded by a New Jersey minister in 1816 to help freedmen emigrate to... well, the original idea was Africa, but mightn't the already functioning colony of freedmen nearer at hand in Palmera do just as well? After all, the Society's original scheme for repatriation—which proposed creating a new country in Montserrado up the coast from the Bight of Benin—had fallen largely on stony ground with American freedmen, most of whom seemed to find the ostensibly well-intentioned scheme an insult. John Randolph hoped to reap more enthusiastic response when he reached out to the Crown about settling freedmen at Calusa instead. At first the linkage would come to little... but in the fullness of time it would prove momentous.
Other comings-together wrought in the intervening twenty years were just as important. In Calusa, American freedmen still dominated the population but for many of them the fervour of Haitian inspiration that had burned hot decades before was cooling into the desire for stability and prosperity. In Utina, meanwhile, a Loyalist coalition of Whites, Latinos, free Blacks and Creoles who favoured general progress toward abolition—inclusive of debt peonage—was growing. These factions in both colonies formed Freedom Parties whose goal was a Dominion peopled by “loyal subjects of the Crown” with core commitments to Christian religious virtue, free trade, the abolition of slavery, the full emancipation of slaves and the importation of Asiatic Coolie labour as a necessity of development.
The Freedom Parties' membership went by Juckers or Jookers—meaning “fighters”—and were more than just electoral organizations. They raised funds for public works, outfitted militias, propagandized ceaselessly through their own papers (which wrote scathing articles about slavery and the white-only “sundown towns” in Utina), mobilized in great crowds and harried their Whig and Tory opponents at every turn. In Calusa their adversaries—a less violent animosity—were the Radicals or “Dooneys,” whose abolition programme was more ambitious by far than anything being debated in Britain.
Tension between the Juckers and their enemies reached a boil in 1833 when the British abolished slavery entirely. The legislation compensated slave owners and included a six-year “apprenticeship” for the emancipated as a transition into the normal workforce; neither proposition mollified the Whigs and the second outraged the Dooneys.
Soon the situation grew critical, especially in Utina as the pro-Whig White population, watching the onward march of full emancipation with terror and fury, formed alliances with Tories who feared it would bring the “redemption” economy to an end. By 1835 this loose alliance had organized around common ideals of nativism, White supremacy, “liberty” and anti-Asiatic sentiment into the American Party or the Brotherhood of Natives, colloquially called the Sutcheys; and eventually they organized a second attempt to revolt and join the U.S., again with the outside help of filibustering pro-slavery mercenaries, in this case to be led by the noted Far Eastern adventurer Josiah Harlan***.
(*** IOTL Harlan's adventures inspired Kipling's "The Man Who Would Be King." I couldn't resist including him.)
In the summer of 1836 riots erupted across the North and a number of Sutchey-affiliated towns rose up to proclaim the “Commonwealth of Utina and Greater Tallahassee.” Unfortunately the conspiracy proved leaky; some of the Sutcheys proved unable to overcome their former Loyalist instincts and go through with outright revolt. Harlan found the constabulary waiting for him—along with their own filibusters, a detachment of Bolivar's famous Albion Legion, and a formation of Calusian militia-men—when he thundered across the Alabama border into “Greater Tallahassee.” Unlike Old Hickory, Harlan escaped with his life, but his force was cut to pieces and the revolts bloodily suppressed. The Second Border War was over in a matter of months.
The Sutchey “sundown townsmen” who'd risen had their charters revoked and their land and property confiscated; it was used to compensate the Albion Legion and others of those who helped beat back the invader at the Battle of White Oak Landing. The victorious Juckers demanded that the whole Nativist movement be ripped up by the roots, but over their objections the Crown decided to spare those who had informed against the plot and leave intact those settlements that stayed peaceful, and reprisals were discouraged. Discontent at this decision would lead the Juckers into their own push for self-government in years to come.
The Second Border War did convince the British government that it would be easier to coordinate the defence of a unified colony (which would also be more commercially viable); at any rate the advent of abolition was deemed to have obviated the need for Calusa to be a separate self-governing enclave. An Act of Union created Palmera as a single colony, with its capital at Daltonville in the north, in 1837.
The March to Home Rule: The Juckers of north and south followed the Act of Union with a union of their own, forming the United Freedom Congress in 1841. (Sceptics in Utina broke away to form their own Liberal Party, which turned out not to amount to much. Dissenters in the Calusa Freedom Party split off and joined with the Dooneys to form the Liberty and Justice Party, who at first seemed like insignificant oddballs themselves.) The Utina party was far and away the larger faction but agreed, for symbolic reasons, to headquarter the united operation in Eleutheria; it was rumoured that party leader Prosper Hazeley, aside from celebrating his own rather diluted ancestral connection to the Black Loyalists, was glad of the chance to get away from Daltonville's brawling streets from time to time.
The years following the Second Border War held no respite from conflict. America's pro-slavery faction was growing steadily more violent and aggressive; and with aid from planter worthies of the “deep South,” in Palmey terms the "Marches" or the “Slavers' Pale,” The American Party recovered from catastrophe and grew as a threat in the north. It found fresh fuel beyond the core anti-Asiatic and pro-slavery sentiment in the rise of Irish immigration that followed the Great Famine in 1845, and poured its efforts into attracting the aid of another pro-slavery freebooter hero who might hope to overthrow Jucker rule.
Meanwhile, new ideologies outside the ambit of any Palmey party began to crop up: in particular a variant of socialism called Droverism, championed by a former Dooney firebrand named Ulysses Newbold. The Drovers held the unsettling idea that wherever property existed, slavery in some form must follow. They were pointed critics of the Coolie labour that Juckers took for granted—they counted it only a little less savage than slavery and peonage—and of Palmera's harsh justice system whose convicts' labour was regularly leased to private concerns. (“How many a slave,” Newbold declaimed, “has made his way to Calusa and 'freedom' only to find himself clapped back in irons for a four-year term after a bar-room brawl? How many a northron ketch has howled of how the Coloured Man wanted to enslave him, only to be proven right when he was set in chains for the self-same seditious act of howling?”)
They were sharper yet about the newly united colony's largely White, Latin and Creole champions of “Freedom”—Newbold called them Janussaries, presenting as “men of Justice in Palmera and men of Whiteness in Europe”—who bought up estates around Eleutheria and yet invited only a tiny fraction of the Black men who formed “Freedom's true army” to the table of policy, party leadership and negotiation with the Crown; and who though they championed “the full franchise for all races” also just happened to propose property-based restrictions for office-holding and poll taxes and literacy tests for voting that would exclude the poor, and most particularly the Black poor, from full participation. (For the first time in Palmeran politics the Drovers also explicitly pushed the voting rights of women.)
Many of these arguments hit home in uncomfortable places. Still, Newbold excited more admiration than he did practical political support, and the Calusa Juckers reconciled their followers to much of what he critiqued as necessary exigencies of the day. His main contribution, aside from the Quaker-inspired socialist model communities his followers founded across the dominion, was in provoking thought and leavening of some of the Juckers' more high-handed tendencies, and especially in his influence on the policies of the emerging Liberty and Justice Party.
The Juckers otherwise commanded considerable multiracial popularity as they squared off against the many dragons facing them. Domestic threats ranged from large and vigorous criminal and smuggler syndicates to Sutchey sedition and terrorist plots, and the added threat of aggressive trade unionism which set some more radical Drovers—impatient with the pacifism of the movement's founder—in conflict with the dominion's business class. The Juckers formed an Active Militia in 1845 to provide policing and protection from all these threats, and they were supplemented by a profusion of private investigation companies and thief-catchers.
The Active Militia guarded against foreign threats, too; the freebooter invasion of William Walker in 1854 could easily have been the most serious attempt at external overthrow of the dominion since the First Border War had adverse weather and disorganization not diminished the advance landing party to some forty men. Walker was promptly made example—on the initiative of the Juckers, notably, who increasingly were acting as de facto government independent of the Crown—the Sutchey compatriots he named were run out of country and the remainder of his force, stranded in New Orleans, disbanded. The Governor-General reprimanded the Juckers for “over-eagerness” but took no further action.
When Civil War wracked America, it was the Juckers' turn to harry the Slavers' Pale. Unofficial parties of raiders and freebooters struck deep into Georgia and Alabama in nuisance slave rescues that, while small, were reputed to drive the Confederate leadership near to apoplexy and might have led to a direct retaliation had not fighting the Yankees been far more pressing. The Crown remained officially neutral and condemned the actions, but again did not exert any great effort in stopping or punishing them.
Of much greater significance to the war were smugglers' operations that sprung up in Utina in response to the Confederacy's urgent need for goods, even commodities as basic as salt. Palmera's Governor-General had announced a temporary embargo on trade with the Marches during the hostilities, it was later revealed due to pressure from Washington, who'd made a forceful case to Westminster that such a trade would materially contribute to the CSA's military capabilities and amount to a breach of neutrality. This in turn presented a large opportunity for less scrupulous operators, or those actively sympathetic to the cause of the Slavers' Pale, to flout the embargo and profit from the urgent demand. The Union blockaded Confederate ports but could not blockade Daltonville, which became a major centre for a now-illicit trade whose tendrils swiftly spread across the north.
These smugglers were the first individuals to wear the name of wildcatter, owing to the riskiness of their ventures and predating the term's application to oil wells by a solid decade. Not a few of them were women, and were also called hoop-skirters or hoop snakes after their practice of hiding goods and money under their crinoline skirts. These operations attracted directed attention from the Active Militia in concert with various Jucker vigilante groups, and led to ever-escalating strings of arrests and seizures of property**** until the "wildcatter trails" to the CSA out of Daltonville were all but completely shut down by 1863. The alternately famous and infamous Overton Security Agency was founded and achieved its first fame in anti-wildcatter operations.
(**** These property seizures, despite having been a clearly-announced consequence of flouting the embargo, led not a few of the wildcatters to denounce the campaign against them as being more akin to greed-motivated banditry than enforcement of the law. They would be among the major grievances behind the Third Border War.)
In the midst of it all, the negotiations for Home Rule continued. The main portion of the Juckers' energy was taken up in putting forward a cohesive plan for developing the colony's commercial potential, managing its defense and generally reassuring Britain that “responsible Home Rule” was possible (this was mostly code for convincing Westminster that not too many Blacks would be allowed to vote or be put in charge of things). The energetic business community in Palmera both reassured and worried the Crown: it was home to success stories like the wrecker turned respectable shipping magnate Israel Cuff, a Creole “tawney” by British standards but certainly more than able to pass; and it was also home to Jeremiah Hamilton—his foes in America and Britain alike simply called him “Nigger Hamilton”—the legendarily sharp Black mogul who walked in the grayest areas of law, divided his time between Daltonville and New York and was at home in the stock exchanges of either nation.
The unspoken question that hung over the Home Rule negotations was simply: would the spectre of “unnatural” figures like Hamilton win out over the rugged colonial charm of more “upright” figures like Cuff? The suspense was real, but the determining factor was that in the end, the Crown wanted to divest itself of Palmera and was already reasonably confident the colony could operate independently. Only the question of admitting this about the “Black Syon” was sticky, and fortunately the White Juckers and their allied “Janussaries” provided the perfect means of justifying the decision as passing the task of colonial tutelage to a sophisticated local caste capable of bearing the load. In 1867, the Home Rule Act was passed in Parliament, and the Union of Palmera achieved effective independence.
This is an AH I've been kicking around for some time. It's for an alternate Florida which stayed in the British Empire and, in the late 18th century, became the site of British attempts to resettle freed Africans. It will later draw considerable settlement through the American Colonization Society and other channels. Palmera initially will replace the roles played by Sierra Leone and Liberia IOTL. It will eventually grow into something far different.
The timeline will reach 2007, the point for which I have a possible novel planned. In the meantime I'd like to lay it out here and see if there are possibilities for the timeline I could be missing. So feedback and questions are appreciated.
I'm going to start with the early history up to the point of the colony achieving Home Rule and see how it goes.
Fair warning: these posts will be long. Warning also for occasional period-appropriate racial epithets.
_____
To come in the timeline:
The Lion's Cub, Part One. The Union of Palmera battles tides of unrest washing out from America after the Civil War, culminating in the traumatic rebellion called the Third Border War.
The Lion's Cub, Continued. The Gilded Age unfolds in Palmera in a mingling of glory and tragedy.
The Lion's Cub, Conclusion. The Union cautiously begins to carve out a place in the international orders of politics, finance and trade.
The Hinge of History, Pt. 1 ("Unseen Pressures Build"). On the eve of the Great War, new forces of nationalism, religion and activism are growing.
The Hinge of History, Pt. 2 ("We Shall Do What Must Be Done"). The Great War erupts, and the full cost in blood and moral compromise of Palmera's "lion's cub" aspirations becomes plain.
The Hinge of History, Pt. 3 ("Lift Every Voice and Sing"). Football, baseball and beach-side leisure provide windows onto three different episodes of postwar social change.
Resource Posts:
Palmera at the End of the Belle Epoque: A Snapshot. A map and a demographic summary of the Union of Palmera in the year 1914.
Glossary of Palmey English Terms. A glossary of Palmeyisms or otherwise unfamiliar language occurring in the text. Periodically updated as the timeline advances.
Story Posts:
The Deal. Tequesta County's rural isolation is set to make way for an age of development... but who will benefit?
Song of Songs. Though times are tough in the wake of the Great Tequesta Hurricane, little has changed in the rarified world of the social elite. Or has it?
The Spanish Period: By the 16th century and the earliest historical records, major Native American groups occupying the region now known as Palmera included the Apalachees, the Utina and Timucua, the Ais, the Tocobaga, the Calusa and the Tequesta. The peninsula acquired its modern name—and was henceforth known as either La Palmera or Las Palmeras (Palmera or The Palmeras)— when Spaniard Juan Ponce de Léon landed on a Palm Sunday in 1513*.
As Eurasian disease, wars and slave trading depopulated the region, it began to attract other forms of settler. Palmera drew free blacks looking for escape from servitude early in its modern history, and became the site of Fort Mose—a fortified town near St. Augustine where freed slaves were permitted to settle in exchange for militia service—in 1738. It was North America's first officially sanctioned free black settlement, though it was mostly abandoned during a later transition to British sovereignty when inhabitants decamped for Cuba.
(* Ponce de Leon arriving one day late is not the actual POD. It's just an excuse for the region to have a name that distinguishes it from OTL. Everything else described is as in OTL, and no butterflies are visible at this stage -- this AH is pretty conservative about butterflies generally, I want Palmera to fit into a history whose broad outlines are similar to ours.)
Early British Rule: After the British victory in the Seven Years' War in 1763, Palmera became a British colony. The British Crown divided and consolidated the Palmeras into East and West colonies and did its best to encourage English and other European settlers. These efforts had largely failed, and the Palmeras were almost totally depopulated by wars and disorders and had acquired the reputation of being an unprofitable tropical wilderness, by the time of Britain's defeat in the American Revolutionary War in 1783. Indeed the whole region might well have reverted to Spanish rule at this time, as British will to maintain it was flagging; popular legend has it that it only avoided doing so owing to a Spanish envoy's unfortunately-timed hangover during the negotiations of the Treaty of Versailles**.
(** This the POD right here.)
Circumstances made possible an experimental spirit that enabled Britain's first use of southern Palmera for the resettlement of Black freedmen in 1787. The project, championed by the Committee for the Black Poor in London, originally envisaged Sierra Leone in Africa as the site of choice, but Committee member Gustavus Vassa's choice of “the province of Calusa” narrowly carried the argument. The resulting colony, Eleutheria, managed to thrive sufficiently that it would recommend itself as a site of choice for the resettlement of Black Loyalists—who originally settled in New Brunswick but encountered hostility from the White populace there—starting in 1792.
By this time, the Santo Domingo Revolt (a.k.a. The Haitian Revolution) was underway and already sending shudders through the slave-holding territories around the Caribbean, and the British crown saw the value of a freedman's colony as an example of stability and loyalty in the region. Eleutheria became the heart of its own third Palmeran province, South Palmera, in 1794; and though still under the supervision of a White Governor-General it even acquired its own parliament, in parallel to those of East and West Palmera.
The “Black Syon” & The First Border War: Over the next decade, the awful consequences of the Santo Domingo Revolt and the traumatic destruction of French rule on that island brought home for some of Britain's gentry the full dangers of the slave trade. Haiti's revolution set the call for slavery's abolition more vigorously into motion than ever before, and inspired slaves elsewhere to make bids for freedom. It also cemented South Palmera—or Calusa—in its position as the anti-Haiti, a well-ordered settlement of loyalist freedmen symbolic of fealty to the Crown and harmony between free peoples.
Increasingly over the first third of the 19th century, Calusa became a “Black Syon,” a lodestone for freedmen fleeing violence or repression, a controversial destination of choice for escaped slaves, and a site for the resettlement of slaves engaged in failed slave revolts elsewhere in the British Caribbean, or for those recovered from illegal traders after the Crown abolished the maritime trade in 1807.
As such it drew no small amount of hostility and fear from the White settlers who were then settling the United States' “deep South” and were effecting an immense movement of slave capital along with them; it could hardly be lost on slave traders which direction escaping slaves tended to strike out in. Nor was it just the African population. The still-defiant Seminole and Creek tribes on the edges of Calusa, East Palmera (Utina) and West Palmera (Appalachee) territory were of continued and fateful concern to the American government as the age of the Indian Wars moved into full swing.
The “Black Syon” was also bitterly resented and keenly feared by many Whites in the East and West Palmeras. Propaganda grew more and more inflammatory from this faction—who called themselves Whigs and Patriots after the revolutionary language—as to the degree to which the free Black colony was “in defiance of the natural order of God and Man” and a supposed harbour for radical Black abolitionists, maroons and brigands dreaming of wreaking Santo Domingo-style slaughter on the White man. These fears were grotesquely exaggerated, but exploited a grain of truth: in fact, though they were nowhere near so numerous and violent as White imagination made them, there were freeman brigands of the era with the intent of liberating slaves from the other Palmey colonies (or beyond), or of harassing the small number of would-be slave-holders in Calusa itself. One of the most famous of these, Titus Fox, was an ally of the Seminoles and would go on to become a folk legend.
These tensions led Appalachee (West Palmera) to revolt against the Crown in 1810, followed closely by Utina (East Palmera) in 1811. The Appalachee colony became an ally of the American republic during the war of 1812 and within two years had secured annexation to the States. The Whigs of Utina had harder luck: their revolt was stiffly opposed by a large and determined Loyalist population and put down by swift and resolute British action, with the participation of allied militias from both Calusa and Seminole country.
At first the Crown dealt generously with the Utina rebels, sparing many of their lives in exchange for pledges not to take up seditious arms again. The Whigs for their part were deeply embittered—in particular by the use of Black and Indian troops in suppressing them—and refused to give up the fight. For years afterward the north border country of Utina was a hotbed of banditry, race riots and opportunistic assaults on prominent Loyalists, abolitionists and free Blacks. Finally, after armistice drew America's war with the British to a close in 1814, the rebels sent an envoy to Washington to appeal for “Deliverance from the Scourges of Mad Old George along with his Followers, inimical to True Liberty one and all, and the various pet Savages and Niggers employed thereby.”
The envoy drew no official response from Washington, where the government was less than eager to be seen breaking the recent armistice so soon. But they did manage to excite interest in a filibustering expedition—led by no less a personage than Andrew “Old Hickory” Jackson, Revolutionary War hero and Saviour of New Orleans—that attacked Utina in 1816. The attack was repulsed in the famous Battle of Fort Campbell in which Jackson and several prominent members of the expedition were killed; British patience with the Whigs was finally exhausted and known ring-leaders of the movement were rounded up and hanged shortly thereafter. This concluded the First Border War.
There had been many attempts to launch filibustering expeditions against Palmera, but the Jackson Expedition was grander than any and its calamity cast a pall over further efforts; there would be no repeat attempt for another couple of decades thereafter. Thereafter the former Whigs and Patriots of Utina withdrew into a sullen silence, in many cases doing their best to ban coloured people from their towns and villages—efforts which the Crown officially deplored but expended no great effort to oppose, so long as they remained quiet. The Black Syon continued to be a lodestone for freedmen as the crescendo to the next great crisis built: the push for full abolition of slavery by the Crown.
The Second Border War & The Act of Union: Utina's peace in the wake of the First Border War (a.k.a. “Old Hickory's War”) was uneasy. Bitterness had driven a permanent wedge between rebels and Loyalists—who now dismissed their enemies simply as Crackers—and the existing tensions only grew. But matters grew more complicated yet.
The abolition of the slave trade had not abolished the addiction to free labour of the cotton planters in the North. Existing populations of slaves did not benefit from the freer hand in manumission that abolition of the trade had been expected to create; moreover, as the prohibition took hold and the illegal trade withered, a practice of debt peonage began to replace it. The importation of Asiatic “Coolie” labour had already begun as a replacement tactic for slavery as far back as 1807, but the peonage practice was still cheaper and easier; it took the guise of “redemption” of slaves from the southern States or points in the Caribbean, and their indenture to work off the price of that “redemption,” often at usurious interest rates which made the theoretical goal nearly impossible to attain.
Essentially slavery under another name, “redemption” drove a fresh wedge among the Loyalists—some traditional Tories saw it as perfectly justifiable—and affronted many of Calusa's freedmen. Calusa for its part affronted the old Whigs and worried many Tories as it blossomed; particularly in that having its tempting freedom near at hand made for heavy attrition from slave and bondsman flight from the plantations. Meanwhile over the border, more than a few Americans yet dreamt of laying Old Hickory's unhappy ghost to rest with a victory over the hated British outposts at Palmera.
It wasn't all hostility from the north, though. One group saw a great opportunity in Calusa: the American Colonization Society, founded by a New Jersey minister in 1816 to help freedmen emigrate to... well, the original idea was Africa, but mightn't the already functioning colony of freedmen nearer at hand in Palmera do just as well? After all, the Society's original scheme for repatriation—which proposed creating a new country in Montserrado up the coast from the Bight of Benin—had fallen largely on stony ground with American freedmen, most of whom seemed to find the ostensibly well-intentioned scheme an insult. John Randolph hoped to reap more enthusiastic response when he reached out to the Crown about settling freedmen at Calusa instead. At first the linkage would come to little... but in the fullness of time it would prove momentous.
Other comings-together wrought in the intervening twenty years were just as important. In Calusa, American freedmen still dominated the population but for many of them the fervour of Haitian inspiration that had burned hot decades before was cooling into the desire for stability and prosperity. In Utina, meanwhile, a Loyalist coalition of Whites, Latinos, free Blacks and Creoles who favoured general progress toward abolition—inclusive of debt peonage—was growing. These factions in both colonies formed Freedom Parties whose goal was a Dominion peopled by “loyal subjects of the Crown” with core commitments to Christian religious virtue, free trade, the abolition of slavery, the full emancipation of slaves and the importation of Asiatic Coolie labour as a necessity of development.
The Freedom Parties' membership went by Juckers or Jookers—meaning “fighters”—and were more than just electoral organizations. They raised funds for public works, outfitted militias, propagandized ceaselessly through their own papers (which wrote scathing articles about slavery and the white-only “sundown towns” in Utina), mobilized in great crowds and harried their Whig and Tory opponents at every turn. In Calusa their adversaries—a less violent animosity—were the Radicals or “Dooneys,” whose abolition programme was more ambitious by far than anything being debated in Britain.
Tension between the Juckers and their enemies reached a boil in 1833 when the British abolished slavery entirely. The legislation compensated slave owners and included a six-year “apprenticeship” for the emancipated as a transition into the normal workforce; neither proposition mollified the Whigs and the second outraged the Dooneys.
Soon the situation grew critical, especially in Utina as the pro-Whig White population, watching the onward march of full emancipation with terror and fury, formed alliances with Tories who feared it would bring the “redemption” economy to an end. By 1835 this loose alliance had organized around common ideals of nativism, White supremacy, “liberty” and anti-Asiatic sentiment into the American Party or the Brotherhood of Natives, colloquially called the Sutcheys; and eventually they organized a second attempt to revolt and join the U.S., again with the outside help of filibustering pro-slavery mercenaries, in this case to be led by the noted Far Eastern adventurer Josiah Harlan***.
(*** IOTL Harlan's adventures inspired Kipling's "The Man Who Would Be King." I couldn't resist including him.)
In the summer of 1836 riots erupted across the North and a number of Sutchey-affiliated towns rose up to proclaim the “Commonwealth of Utina and Greater Tallahassee.” Unfortunately the conspiracy proved leaky; some of the Sutcheys proved unable to overcome their former Loyalist instincts and go through with outright revolt. Harlan found the constabulary waiting for him—along with their own filibusters, a detachment of Bolivar's famous Albion Legion, and a formation of Calusian militia-men—when he thundered across the Alabama border into “Greater Tallahassee.” Unlike Old Hickory, Harlan escaped with his life, but his force was cut to pieces and the revolts bloodily suppressed. The Second Border War was over in a matter of months.
The Sutchey “sundown townsmen” who'd risen had their charters revoked and their land and property confiscated; it was used to compensate the Albion Legion and others of those who helped beat back the invader at the Battle of White Oak Landing. The victorious Juckers demanded that the whole Nativist movement be ripped up by the roots, but over their objections the Crown decided to spare those who had informed against the plot and leave intact those settlements that stayed peaceful, and reprisals were discouraged. Discontent at this decision would lead the Juckers into their own push for self-government in years to come.
The Second Border War did convince the British government that it would be easier to coordinate the defence of a unified colony (which would also be more commercially viable); at any rate the advent of abolition was deemed to have obviated the need for Calusa to be a separate self-governing enclave. An Act of Union created Palmera as a single colony, with its capital at Daltonville in the north, in 1837.
The March to Home Rule: The Juckers of north and south followed the Act of Union with a union of their own, forming the United Freedom Congress in 1841. (Sceptics in Utina broke away to form their own Liberal Party, which turned out not to amount to much. Dissenters in the Calusa Freedom Party split off and joined with the Dooneys to form the Liberty and Justice Party, who at first seemed like insignificant oddballs themselves.) The Utina party was far and away the larger faction but agreed, for symbolic reasons, to headquarter the united operation in Eleutheria; it was rumoured that party leader Prosper Hazeley, aside from celebrating his own rather diluted ancestral connection to the Black Loyalists, was glad of the chance to get away from Daltonville's brawling streets from time to time.
The years following the Second Border War held no respite from conflict. America's pro-slavery faction was growing steadily more violent and aggressive; and with aid from planter worthies of the “deep South,” in Palmey terms the "Marches" or the “Slavers' Pale,” The American Party recovered from catastrophe and grew as a threat in the north. It found fresh fuel beyond the core anti-Asiatic and pro-slavery sentiment in the rise of Irish immigration that followed the Great Famine in 1845, and poured its efforts into attracting the aid of another pro-slavery freebooter hero who might hope to overthrow Jucker rule.
Meanwhile, new ideologies outside the ambit of any Palmey party began to crop up: in particular a variant of socialism called Droverism, championed by a former Dooney firebrand named Ulysses Newbold. The Drovers held the unsettling idea that wherever property existed, slavery in some form must follow. They were pointed critics of the Coolie labour that Juckers took for granted—they counted it only a little less savage than slavery and peonage—and of Palmera's harsh justice system whose convicts' labour was regularly leased to private concerns. (“How many a slave,” Newbold declaimed, “has made his way to Calusa and 'freedom' only to find himself clapped back in irons for a four-year term after a bar-room brawl? How many a northron ketch has howled of how the Coloured Man wanted to enslave him, only to be proven right when he was set in chains for the self-same seditious act of howling?”)
They were sharper yet about the newly united colony's largely White, Latin and Creole champions of “Freedom”—Newbold called them Janussaries, presenting as “men of Justice in Palmera and men of Whiteness in Europe”—who bought up estates around Eleutheria and yet invited only a tiny fraction of the Black men who formed “Freedom's true army” to the table of policy, party leadership and negotiation with the Crown; and who though they championed “the full franchise for all races” also just happened to propose property-based restrictions for office-holding and poll taxes and literacy tests for voting that would exclude the poor, and most particularly the Black poor, from full participation. (For the first time in Palmeran politics the Drovers also explicitly pushed the voting rights of women.)
Many of these arguments hit home in uncomfortable places. Still, Newbold excited more admiration than he did practical political support, and the Calusa Juckers reconciled their followers to much of what he critiqued as necessary exigencies of the day. His main contribution, aside from the Quaker-inspired socialist model communities his followers founded across the dominion, was in provoking thought and leavening of some of the Juckers' more high-handed tendencies, and especially in his influence on the policies of the emerging Liberty and Justice Party.
The Juckers otherwise commanded considerable multiracial popularity as they squared off against the many dragons facing them. Domestic threats ranged from large and vigorous criminal and smuggler syndicates to Sutchey sedition and terrorist plots, and the added threat of aggressive trade unionism which set some more radical Drovers—impatient with the pacifism of the movement's founder—in conflict with the dominion's business class. The Juckers formed an Active Militia in 1845 to provide policing and protection from all these threats, and they were supplemented by a profusion of private investigation companies and thief-catchers.
The Active Militia guarded against foreign threats, too; the freebooter invasion of William Walker in 1854 could easily have been the most serious attempt at external overthrow of the dominion since the First Border War had adverse weather and disorganization not diminished the advance landing party to some forty men. Walker was promptly made example—on the initiative of the Juckers, notably, who increasingly were acting as de facto government independent of the Crown—the Sutchey compatriots he named were run out of country and the remainder of his force, stranded in New Orleans, disbanded. The Governor-General reprimanded the Juckers for “over-eagerness” but took no further action.
When Civil War wracked America, it was the Juckers' turn to harry the Slavers' Pale. Unofficial parties of raiders and freebooters struck deep into Georgia and Alabama in nuisance slave rescues that, while small, were reputed to drive the Confederate leadership near to apoplexy and might have led to a direct retaliation had not fighting the Yankees been far more pressing. The Crown remained officially neutral and condemned the actions, but again did not exert any great effort in stopping or punishing them.
Of much greater significance to the war were smugglers' operations that sprung up in Utina in response to the Confederacy's urgent need for goods, even commodities as basic as salt. Palmera's Governor-General had announced a temporary embargo on trade with the Marches during the hostilities, it was later revealed due to pressure from Washington, who'd made a forceful case to Westminster that such a trade would materially contribute to the CSA's military capabilities and amount to a breach of neutrality. This in turn presented a large opportunity for less scrupulous operators, or those actively sympathetic to the cause of the Slavers' Pale, to flout the embargo and profit from the urgent demand. The Union blockaded Confederate ports but could not blockade Daltonville, which became a major centre for a now-illicit trade whose tendrils swiftly spread across the north.
These smugglers were the first individuals to wear the name of wildcatter, owing to the riskiness of their ventures and predating the term's application to oil wells by a solid decade. Not a few of them were women, and were also called hoop-skirters or hoop snakes after their practice of hiding goods and money under their crinoline skirts. These operations attracted directed attention from the Active Militia in concert with various Jucker vigilante groups, and led to ever-escalating strings of arrests and seizures of property**** until the "wildcatter trails" to the CSA out of Daltonville were all but completely shut down by 1863. The alternately famous and infamous Overton Security Agency was founded and achieved its first fame in anti-wildcatter operations.
(**** These property seizures, despite having been a clearly-announced consequence of flouting the embargo, led not a few of the wildcatters to denounce the campaign against them as being more akin to greed-motivated banditry than enforcement of the law. They would be among the major grievances behind the Third Border War.)
In the midst of it all, the negotiations for Home Rule continued. The main portion of the Juckers' energy was taken up in putting forward a cohesive plan for developing the colony's commercial potential, managing its defense and generally reassuring Britain that “responsible Home Rule” was possible (this was mostly code for convincing Westminster that not too many Blacks would be allowed to vote or be put in charge of things). The energetic business community in Palmera both reassured and worried the Crown: it was home to success stories like the wrecker turned respectable shipping magnate Israel Cuff, a Creole “tawney” by British standards but certainly more than able to pass; and it was also home to Jeremiah Hamilton—his foes in America and Britain alike simply called him “Nigger Hamilton”—the legendarily sharp Black mogul who walked in the grayest areas of law, divided his time between Daltonville and New York and was at home in the stock exchanges of either nation.
The unspoken question that hung over the Home Rule negotations was simply: would the spectre of “unnatural” figures like Hamilton win out over the rugged colonial charm of more “upright” figures like Cuff? The suspense was real, but the determining factor was that in the end, the Crown wanted to divest itself of Palmera and was already reasonably confident the colony could operate independently. Only the question of admitting this about the “Black Syon” was sticky, and fortunately the White Juckers and their allied “Janussaries” provided the perfect means of justifying the decision as passing the task of colonial tutelage to a sophisticated local caste capable of bearing the load. In 1867, the Home Rule Act was passed in Parliament, and the Union of Palmera achieved effective independence.
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