Redcoats on the Red Clay Soils: An America Without Washington

[G. MacClellan]

Oh? This history looks to be cooking up something good. Keep it up the good work, Bennett.

 

[Oliveia]

Chapter 11:
The Times That Try Men's Souls
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"If there is any man willing to fight, then I say let him."
- Continental General Artemas Ward
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​

The American Revolution was a war fought on the backs of poor laborers and farmers, invigorated by an ever-squabbling "Assembly of Demigods," and aided by the French and Spaniards -- both for their own forms of petty revenge. This is not to downplay the importance of the Revolution, nor to insult its mission, but rather to accurately visualize what a war it was.

The creation of a European trust system, a league of crown-wearing allies to support the amateurish American rebels was mainly the decision of Benjamin Franklin. Though most of the Founding Fathers knew the fledgling America needed some form of safety net, it was Franklin who took the initiative, and embarked to Europe in the mid-1770s to secure an alliance. In the streets of Paris, Franklin spoke like a drunkard, politic'd like a noble, and (according to his detractors) bedded as often as a rake. However, he was able to secure alliance through the exploitation of the centuries-long Anglo-French rivalry, as well as the French's salt-in-the-wound loss in the Seven Years' War.

Similarly, Franklin's alliance with Spain settled squarely on Spain's geopolitical position. She had fought with France against the bombastic John Bull in the Seven Years' War, and was still relatively close to France politically due to alliances crafted during the War. As such, the promise of British gold and the cession of las Floridas proved to be critical to the war effort. The Spanish Navy was able to easily batter British forts in Florida, while Spanish forces fought side-by-side with their French and American brothers in many key battles.

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August 17, 1780; Philadelphia, PA:
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"War is a miserable affair."
- John Burgoyne, "The Soldier"
View attachment 506606​

The red-coated battalions marched dutifully down creeks and rivers, sneakily through the end of the hot summer. Through the ranks of Loyalists, Brits, and Hessians, word spread that the Philadelphians might have caught wind of the planned invasion. General John Burgoyne, upon hearing this, sighed and nodded solemnly. "Yes, yes, I have heard much of this. Let me explain that, with no uncertain terms, that we will continue our attack. We go to cause as much distress as possible, and then flee as quickly as we could."

General John Burgoyne, major military figure in the Revolutionary War​

Burgoyne was a military figure of much prestige. A veteran of the Seven Years' War, he had been promoted to Major-General and sent off to Boston during the early stages of the war. There, he had failed to fight in any major conflicts and eventually retreated to Britain, disappointed by a lack of opportunities. In the disastrous Quebec campaign some years following, Burgoyne again found a position in the British military in the defense of several settlements across the Dominion. That's where Burgoyne had been most comfy: hunting either roving partisans or deer in the Canadian forests, drinking ale in a pub filled with fellow British regulars. Ever a playwright, he even had half-planned manuscripts or descriptions of the Canadian wilderness. It was a second home to him.

And he had just been handed his metaphorical eviction notice, now forced back into another useless front of a pointless war to contain a too-massive problem. He was marching to Philadelphia, and had escaped New York City just weeks before it had turned hands. The entire affair was miserable: the heat was unbearable; often the shade failed to even provide any cooling. The red backs of the regulars shone with the shine of sweat, the air rang with the hissing cries of cicadas. The march was nothing short of hellish, and the concepts of battling seemed a far-fetched fantasy. But, eventually, it settled onto them.

The road into Philadelphia was dusty, and the footfalls of the British regulars brought with it a great cloud of pebble and dirt, like smoke of a fire. The men muttered the lines of "The British Grenadiers" as they marched, one-two-three-and-four, one-two-three-and-four.

The patriots of Philadelphia soon roused to meet them, some already firing into the waves of brilliant vermillions, German greens and Torie blues. Burgoyne, having conducted himself as a major-general would in some glorious battle, finally dropped his facade. With a grimace on his face he shouted an order: "Shoot!"

Every missed shot hit the dusty roads, bringing up a brilliant brown-gray cloud that mingled in the air. The shots that hit littered the road with disheveled forms, some crying, some silent. Like a dance, neither party said what moves would be made, but there was almost an implied consent: when the patriots retreated into the city, the Redcoats followed their step. The battle moved into the simple houses of Germantown. The hamlet soon became bloodstained, with corpses strewn across the market squares, and bullets lodged into the dirt or into windowsills and doors. Eventually, the victor was declared: the waltz was over, and the Brits had tripped and fell. Upon Burgoyne's retreat, he was followed by only two-thirds of his original battalion.

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January 12, 1781; Long Island, NY
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"Long Island is the Colossus of the New World: she welcomes British Ships beautifully."
- Admiral Thomas Graves
.
"Perhaps once in a Lifetime, there is a War worth it's [sic] sacrifices. We are within one."
- Major Thomas Mifflin

​

Though most of New York itself, disregarding the land of the Iroquois and the scarcely-inhabited Adirondack, had been liberated by the Patriots and Hamilton's Corsicans, Long Island was an exception. Its position as a coastal entity made it a source of constant bombardment by the British navy. The Americans had tried on many occasions to break up the British control of the island, but each one was met with some failure or another: bombing runs failed to succeed, or a fledgling American boat getting demolished by a volley of cannonballs and gunpowder.

However, Major Thomas Mifflin wished to change the poor track record of Americans in Long Island.

Major Thomas Mifflin, instrumental in the so-called Mifflin Campaign
​

To the tune of war-flutes and drums, Mifflin roared into the Revolution. Born to a Quaker family of four generations, he was quickly disgraced and cast out of the Society for his joining of the Continental Army. He considered this a worthy sacrifice, and with a fervor he fought for liberty. "Liberty is a religion," he professed once, "and it is the sole religion I shall continue to adhere to."

He fought throughout the Northeastern Front, including his native Pennsylvania, from Trenton to Philadelphia and here, to Long Island. Knowing of the importance of Long Island for the security of New England and the Greater Northeast, he began to request naval aid for his plots to overthrow the British blockade. Admirals were generally hesitant to respond to Mifflin's request, until he met with French Admiral de Grasse. de Grasse was well-renowned for his resounding victories against several marauding British ships in the Caribbean, as well as an impressive track record in India during the Seven Years' War. He was a massively important French naval figure, and his meetings with Mifflin inspired the latter.

The clouds were gray and black across the night sky, like rolling banks of snow filling the sky. Stars peek through the occasional breaks in the clouded sky, though not enough to make anything beyond the darkest of blacks. The waters rolled like black satin, covered with chunks of ice floating across the Long Island Sound. The ships were but shadows, except for the lights within their chambers, in which many of those redcoated bastards drank and laughed, remembering their wives or their sons or their homes or their tales.

Soon, the ships wouldn't be the only ones that stood in the Sound. They were joined by a French ship, an old veteran of the Seven Years' War. It would make, the Major and the Admiral agreed, the perfect decoy. As the drunkard soldiers went to their positions, and began to open fire, the Americans entered rowboats. Silently, with blankets on their oars, the boats slipped through the darkness, settling comfortably next to one of the grand British ships. There, one patriot reached into his person, and removed a striker. Through the cold air, to the orchestra of cannon fire, he struck the metal instrument. Click, click, click. The patriot grumbled an irritated sigh, but is met with encouragement. "Easy does it," whispers Mifflin, "We cannot expect everything to go perfect yet. Try once more." A deep breath, a click, and a quick spark fill the air. "Good, good," continued Mifflin. "Aim for a rope. Drier. Easier to catch."

Through a minute's worth of time, eventually, a fire was kindled on a rope. It slowly spread upward, as the Americans retreated quickly, hesitantly. The spark danced wildly, as the fire began to make its way to the deck. By this point, unexpectedly, the French ship had been able to strike down one of the loitering British ships, though sustaining heavy damages. The decoy of a ship was swiftly abandoned, and the few French sailors on board reunited with the Americans. There were a fair amount more ships in the Sound, but many shrunk away from the sight of several sinking vessels and a burning one, and either docked or outright fled. The following weeks were ones of liberation, with coordination between Mifflin and de Grasse between water and land, they were able to take many prisoners and liberate much of the island.

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October 2, 1781
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"Any Slave who wishes for Freedom, if he so chooses, will be Granted it so long as he joins in arms against the British."
- The Charleston Proclamation

The Moultrie -- or Liberty -- Banner of South Carolina
​

Charleston may have been the Jerusalem of Slavery, but it was far from a heavenly place. The British ruled the city (and, indeed, most of South Carolina) as lax as they had started the war. British regulars roamed the streets, waltzing about in the sticky summer air, or shivering in the wintery breezes. On the rare occurrence of snow filling the streets, the redclad Brits stayed warm in bars and inns, or else were pelted with snowballs filled of ice and glass from rambunctious kids. Much like Hamilton's Corsicans, an incognito branch of Patriots continued operation in the solidly British South. They never crafted a name for themselves, and rather stuck to an old classic: The South Carolinian Chapter of the Sons of Liberty. At their head stood William Moultrie.

William Moultrie, prominent South Carolinian and prominent member of the Sons of Liberty.
​

At the surface, Moultrie was an average socialite in the Southern colonies. He was a man with minor war experience, fighting against the Cherokee in the early 1760s, and also a man of minor political standing, being an assemblyman within the legislature of South Carolina (a legislature whose voice had long ago been silenced by the rough voice of martial law). However, for some reason or another, the planter and slaver felt personally attached to the ideals of freedom. Perhaps he did it out of loyalty to South Carolina, or perhaps he was fueled by wrongs dealt to him by British hands. Regardless of reason, Moultrie was a dedicated fighter.

By the 1780s, the war effort had fully focused itself with ending the brutal half-decade long war. The Spanish stormed from newly reconquered forts from the Floridas, or from huge ships, likewise the French. From the North came Virginians and Chesapeakers, New Englanders and other such Yanks. They all relied heavily on the network of liberty-loving Patriots to coordinate strikes or to set up forts. However, this all culminated within the month-long siege of Charleston.

​

The Battle was fought by men of all colors -- the tanned skins of Spaniards, the pale skins of Anglos and Frenchmen and Scotsmen, the darker skins of the stray Native, and even a battalion of Free Blacks from Saint-Domingue. They were met by an equally colorful coalition of redcoated Brits, green-coated Germans, and the odd blue of a Torie. Perhaps even a ragamuffin Black joined in their ranks. The battle was long and hard, with neither side refusing to retreat. It was a brutal war of attrition, with no side seeming to gain nor lose land as the long winter months loomed overhead.

Though it is unknown who proposed it, it was often claimed that, on one morning, Colonel Moultrie huffed by his camp: "Damn it all!" he roared, "it is impossible for us to make any ground in this position. They fight from the city, and we fight outside it. We cannot reverse this fate!" To this, a soldier chuckled quietly: "Let the slaves fight," he retorted jokingly, "and this war could be over in but a moment." And though Moultrie was opposed to such an idea, other soldiers on the front were not. In fact, word spread across the battalions of the joking proposal, and letters were sent to the Continental Congress, and, though with heavy debate, the green-light was given, with the express understanding that such a declaration would apply only to slaves in Charleston. As word again poured through the ranks that a declaration would be given.

It was night when the drummer-boy snuck into Charleston. His name was Henri Christophe, a gens de couleur, he was from Saint-Domingue. In his later memoirs, he wrote that he was possessed by "a near overwhelming desire to speak of this resolution with my own lips -- to let such a message of freedom and emancipation not be sullied over by white hands and slaver minds, but instead in the voice of the slave." He wrote pamphlets in French, with another soldier who wrote them in English, and distributed them across the city. Soon, they were in the outskirts, yelling the potentials of liberation to the sleeping-houses of dozens upon dozens of slaves.

In the morning, Colonel Moultrie looked out of his camp to first smell the smell of ash, and then see the sight of smoke. It rose and twisted among the buildings of Charleston, contorting as it faded into the clouds. With a triumphant roar, the combined Patriot-French-Spanish forces charged to the British lines. The Redcoats tried to fire back, but were soon distracted by the shuffling of hordes of slaves, emerging from smoke and ash bravely with pitchforks and shovels, some even holding stolen muskets, as they charged the vermillion-wearing Brits.

Thus ended the Battle of Charleston, the last major conflict of the American Revolution. The peace treaties in Paris, signed between America and Britain and between Spain, France, and Britain, were all signed around 1782-1783, though fighting continued sporadically as the ink was scrawled onto parchment, crossed off, and then written to dry once more. America got all the land it could have desired -- the border went as north as Massachusetts' Department of Maine, New Hampshire, and Vermont, with the northern border continuing straight until it cleared the Ontario Peninsula. From there, America owned everything east of the Mississippi, "excepting the lands of the Dominion of Quebec, and the colonies of East- & West-Florida." These borders, though gracious in size and scope, did create a number of null spaces that would become troublesome over the early years of the United States of America.

But, to the average commoner, that did not seem important. It seemed that God had smiled down on the newly born United States of America that day, and that they would be a country filled of great men. Soon, they would have their first President, even: the ever-honorable Benjamin Franklin.

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A/N: Thank fuck this is finally done! The Revolution was a bit of a pain to write, but now we're into Part 2: The Hundred-Dollar President, as I like to call it. Thank you to @G. MacClellan for his help suggesting ideas for this chapter, and I'll definitely fix some details in this tomorrow. Can't right now, though. Thanks again, all of you!!

 

[HonestAbe1809]

Hopefully, Benjamin Franklin can establish a solid foundation for the newly-independent country in the nine years* he has left on his mortal coil.

*That's assuming he dies in 1790 like in OTL and the stress of the job doesn't shorten that time.

 

[Oliveia]

Hopefully, Benjamin Franklin can establish a solid foundation for the newly-independent country in the nine years* he has left on his mortal coil.

*That's assuming he dies in 1790 like in OTL and the stress of the job doesn't shorten that time.

Franklin will only go for one four-year term, beginning in 1784 (two years to deal with treaties, some minor internal squabbles, etc.). However, the two-term principals would still be set.

 

[Odinson]

Franklin will only go for one four-year term, beginning in 1784 (two years to deal with treaties, some minor internal squabbles, etc.). However, the two-term principals would still be set.

By Light Horse Harry Lee I'm assuming?

 

[Oliveia]

By Light Horse Harry Lee I'm assuming?

Franklin proposes the whole "If I were in better health, I would be fine with two terms," but you're correct in assuming that President Lee is the first two-term president.

 

[Wolttaire]

hmmm intresting this mean while a larger us of a in the beggining it may be harder to keep control and have the indian tribes unite faster or form defesinve pacts possbily slowing american expansion

 

[Oliveia]

hmmm intresting this mean while a larger us of a in the beggining it may be harder to keep control and have the indian tribes unite faster or form defesinve pacts possbily slowing american expansion

Yes. Though the United States is bigger from the start, it will end up smaller than our real-life United States.

 

[Wolttaire]

Yes. Though the United States is bigger from the start, it will end up smaller than our real-life United States.

and perhaps better with race relations with slave being allowed to join the right and help win the war but that a dim hope.

 

[Oliveia]

and perhaps better with race relations with slave being allowed to join the right and help win the war but that a dim hope.

Race relations will be better in the long run, but it won't begin improvement until after Jackson's Revolution.

 

[Odinson]

W

Yes. Though the United States is bigger from the start, it will end up smaller than our real-life United States.

Will there be more independent republics, or just larger neighbors?

 

[HeX]

Yes. Though the United States is bigger from the start, it will end up smaller than our real-life United States.

I predict they'll lose most (if not all) of the Oregon Country (fingers for an independent Republic of Oregon), and might even retain the pleasantly squiggly borders of the Louisiana Purchase with Canada. However, I can't really see TTL America wanting to leave a lot of the land they took from Mexico IOTL to Mexico, especially once word of gold in California is heard back east.

 

[Wolttaire]

I predict they'll lose most (if not all) of the Oregon Country (fingers for an independent Republic of Oregon), and might even retain the pleasantly squiggly borders of the Louisiana Purchase with Canada. However, I can't really see TTL America wanting to leave a lot of the land they took from Mexico IOTL to Mexico, especially once word of gold in California is heard back east.

bet they lose Alaska since it was highly contigent on otl events and a lot of america pacific posssiens and puerto rico and panama as well

 

[Oliveia]

Will there be more independent republics, or just larger neighbors?

A mixture of both, depending. Let me put it this way: One of those independent republics will rear its head soon.

I predict they'll lose most (if not all) of the Oregon Country (fingers for an independent Republic of Oregon), and might even retain the pleasantly squiggly borders of the Louisiana Purchase with Canada. However, I can't really see TTL America wanting to leave a lot of the land they took from Mexico IOTL to Mexico, especially once word of gold in California is heard back east.

Whether or not it retains squiggly borders is up in the air (but I like it so they probably will!). No independent Oregon, unfortunately, but you're right in assuming that they only have a sliver of the Oregon Coast they won all of IRL.

bet they lose Alaska since it was highly contigent on otl events and a lot of america pacific posssiens and puerto rico and panama as well

No Alaska and no Pacific possessions, you're right, but America might still come into possession of at least some of the Spanish Caribbean.

 

[HeX]

bet they lose Alaska since it was highly contigent on otl events and a lot of america pacific posssiens and puerto rico and panama as well

This exactly. I'll break down my own territorial predictions here:

Loss of OTL Washington at the least, with the complete annexation of the Oregon Country (present day British Columbia, Vancouver, Washington, Oregon, and Idaho) a likely possibility.

Far fewer overseas possessions. This means no Hawai'i, no Alaska, and less territory in general in the Pacific. The fate of the Caribbean, Guam, and the Philippines are reliant on what happens to Spain in the future, but I do think an American Cuba, Puerto Rico, or even a filibustered Dominican Republic could be on the table (though only one of those would happen, with the other two left alone).

More of Mexico. The US is gonna have an inferiority complex if they can't fulfill Manifest Destiny, so in a hypothetical Mexican-American War, I can see them sweeping up Baja California and Sonora with it alongside Tejas, Nuevo Mexico, and Alta California. Maybe even Chihuahua or Coahuila/Nuevo León/Tamaulipas could be taken, though that's stretching things a bit.

 

[Oliveia]

This exactly. I'll break down my own territorial predictions here:

Can't confirm or deny too much, but you're close at the very least. What happens in Mexico is a bit of a mystery for me right now, but I'll figure that out soon!

 

[Odinson]

Seeing as there will be a "Jackson Revolution," I'm predicting a Winfield Scott presidency. Military heroes in early America often became presidents, and Scott was one of the USA's best generals (even earing the praise of the Duke of Wellington as the greatest general), and will likely be the one to put down Jackson.

 

[Oliveia]

Seeing as there will be a "Jackson Revolution," I'm predicting a Winfield Scott presidency. Military heroes in early America often became presidents, and Scott was one of the USA's best generals (even earing the praise of the Duke of Wellington as the greatest general), and will likely be the one to put down Jackson.

I won't reveal too much, but you're right in that a military hero is going to be President during Jackson's Revolution. Winfield Scott isn't a bad choice, but Jackson's Revolution is happening a lot sooner than the Civil War of real-life. It's only about a decade away, actually. Next chapter (The Great American Jigsaw) will hopefully be up soon (either later tonight or tomorrow!)

 

[farmerted555]

No Alaska and no Pacific possessions, you're right, but America might still come into possession of at least some of the Spanish Caribbean.

So ITTL I'm either British, Canadian or Russian? No thanks.

 

[Odinson]

I won't reveal too much, but you're right in that a military hero is going to be President during Jackson's Revolution. Winfield Scott isn't a bad choice, but Jackson's Revolution is happening a lot sooner than the Civil War of real-life. It's only about a decade away, actually. Next chapter (The Great American Jigsaw) will hopefully be up soon (either later tonight or tomorrow!)

Hooray!
Though to be fair, Scott was an important commander in ever war between the ARW and the ACW