Separated at Birth: America and Drakia
- Thread starter Ephraim Ben Raphael
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He obviously didn't read the warning label, or else he would have known that was a step too far:
Ephraim Ben Raphael
Banned
Didn't plan on it, but that's how it's emerging- a symptom of more advanced technology and closer ties between America and Europe ITTL.
Well the only thing that kept Maryland from seceding OTL was the presence of US military forces in the state in order to protect Washington, D.C. ("I wish I was in Baltimore, I'd make secession traitors roar, etc."). The capital is in New York ITTL, so less of a military presence there. Kentucky is part of Virginia ITTL, Delaware stayed in the Union, and Missouri was affected by a greater sense of hostility towards slavery and by extension the southern identity connected to it as there are a lot more free states and the south has much more of a siege mentality ITTL.
At least one of those gambits was mine- I wasn't planning this.
Thank you.
It is, isn't it?
I love these sorts of geographic oddities.
Basically. If you're pro-Catholic, anti-Republic, and you wave the red flag then you can't be one of those dangerous radicals, which provides an opening to push for more representative government and the needs of the lower classes.
Given that in the OTL 1850s "conservative" meant "monarchist" these French conservatives are fairly progressive, but they're very much a conservative reaction to the more radical republicans who replaced Napoleon. Pro-religion, pro-tradition, pro-business now that wealthy private magnates are a thing in our more industrialized world, and loyal to the Republic.
I think it's honestly become a badge of pride for some people, a symbol of a system that has done a remarkably good job of preventing intracommunal violence (pay no attention to those riots in the 2000's when that Ethiopian priest moved his chair a foot in the wrong direction) for over a couple of centuries.
Yet they never seem to, do they?
The Yucatan is afraid of being reconquered by Mexico, or taken over by some other European power. They wanted to join the USA in order to secure guaranteed protection while maintaining control over their own lands and an ability to secure their own laws the way that the 5 Civilized Tribes and the Metis did. Only the biggest American defenders of Native Americans have until this point been the South, and so with the Union apparently not an option and with Mexico allied to the Confederacy joining the CSA seemed like the only option during a brief period when they seemed to have a good shot at independence. Being allied to Mexico protects them from Mexican reconquest, the weaker Confederate central government is a plus, and they're on the other side of the Gulf of Mexico from the war. All Ixcanha has to do is wait- if the CSA wins they're golden, if the CSA loses then they can either surrender to the Union and get what they want that way or re-assume their independence and make a separate peace with New York. It's not like the USA would ever help Mexico reconquer them given how the two countries are at war now.
Mmm.
It's the trap of connecting religion and politics- if the politics goes down then the religion can be dragged into the mud with it. Don't worry- the church won't be the bad guys here. But they are going to take a few bruises along the way.
That means a lot.
Might want to take a look at this:
A quick edit and this would fit the TL perfectly.
Is that Calhoun of this TL, or actually Calhoun of OTL?
Either way that feels weird to read
Great timeline! One thing I have to look agog at however- you have the Drakians taking on the Kingdom of Imerina and conquering Madagascar from fucking "line the impaled heads of her fallen enemies along the coast" Queen Ranavalona in a place that was still filled with army-eating diseases that Europeans would not be able to really breach until the cure for Malaria is found. At best they would have made Ranavalona spend more lives and treasures to keep everything in her iron grasp or they could have aided her in her massacres, but she would have remained her own creature until the end.
Apparently they didn't close their ports fast enough when a man coughed in Brazil.
So a massive three-way US civil war merged with a pan-European conflict/crusade.
This is going to get gruesome real fast.
This is going to get gruesome real fast.
As long as there is an adequate supply of quinine, malaria is a problem that can be controlled. OTL it wasn't until the late 1870s/early 1880s that the life cycle of the malaria parasite and the mosquito mode of transmission was elucidated. This may occur sooner, however synthetic quinine and its derivatives will wait until you get the advances in organic chemistry of the late 19th/early 20th century OTL. The effectiveness of quinine ("Jesuit bark") for malaria, well before the what and how of malaria was known.
Shoot, this is reminding me of the war the latest version of What Madness is This? had in the 1860s...
Yeah, this is going to be seen as a precursor for future wars, and will take a few chapters, methinks...
Might want to take a look at this:
A quick edit and this would fit the TL perfectly.
What year is this from?
There is a lot of ancillary science and engineering that makes some of the modern medical procedures possible, not just the ability to use human subjects for experimentation. You can't test antibiotics until you come up with the germ theory and bacteriology as a start. A lot of surgical procedures, vascular repairs among others, require synthetic (nylon) suture as silk sutures and too "reactive" and your anastamoses will clot up, you also need to understand the clotting mechanism and have drugs like heparin. Having said that, you could see acceleration of some areas of medicine if the standard in Drakia becomes using serfs for experimentation. Big IF, you need to devise proper experimental protocols - absent these using humans instead of mice or dogs won't help because your data will be crap.
Wouldn't Prussia be more preoccupied with unifying Germany (ie. fighting France, Austria, and at some point Britain over Hannover), rather than overseas adventures ? Especially starting a rivalry with Britain over faraway colonial matters, when they need British support to counter all their bigger neighbors...
Chapter 9
Ephraim Ben Raphael
Banned
Chapter 9
The Last Crusade was a real mess of a war and it sucked for just about everyone involved.
In Europe you had Russia and Prussia trying to smash the Ottomans and Austria while Orthodox uprisings in both countries- the Hungarians got in on this too- undermined them from within. France fought to hold the Rhine while also deploying expeditionary forces to Italy, Austria, and the Sublime Porte in an effort to keep its allies in the fight. Britain still had the best navy in the world but France and America were strong enough at sea that they had to really work to maintain their supremacy and London was sending its own expeditionary forces all across the map- from Germany to Ottoman North Africa- trying to help the Alliance achieve victories wherever it could. In North America the United States had a stronger military than during the OTL 1850s, but struggled to fight the Confederacy and Mexico and the Mexican rebels and the Comanches and to disrupt if not stop British aid to its enemies.
Of course, everyone was more industrialized than OTL and technology considerably more advanced.
Multiple nations were already fielding ironclad warships when the fighting began, and the war started with repeating weapons similar to the OTL Agar Gun and the Gatling Gun were already in wide use. There was even an early recoil-operated repeater akin to Jacob Steubel’s OTL design that had been invented in Sweden, and weapons based on it would proliferate considerably by the war’s end. Various experimental airship projects were hastily developed for practical use- Britain had a major advantage there thanks to Drakia having employed airships for practical military purposes for several years before the war and sent a squadron of four ships with experienced crews and groundcrews to Europe. These airships remained vulnerable to bad weather and had not yet reached a point where they could carry bombs or cargo in useful amounts, but they rapidly demonstrated their value and there was not yet any practical way to shoot them down deliberately. Both the Brotherhood and the Alliance lionized their airship crews who risked their lives every time they went up in the still dangerous craft, turning them into heroes for the next generation. Steam powered mobile artillery and steam wagons went from being minor curiosities in the Canadian War to practical weapons… as long as there was either flat terrain or good roads and reliable sources of fuel. Different people experimented with submarines and spar-torpedoes. And of course, this was the war in which white phosphorus (even if it was being called yellow phosphorus) and poison gas saw their true debut.
American studies of the phenomenon of “Angel’s Glow” during the war would lead to the first breakthroughs in antibiotic research after its end.
American military airship being launched in Texas.
Trench warfare was common in Europe and the Old World.
Most of the Balkans was rapidly overrun by the Alliance as Russia swept through Ottoman territory with the help of the Romios (remember TTL’s Greeks use a different name), the Bulgarians, and the Serbians while Austria was still struggling to deal with the Hungarians and France had not yet delivered its forces where they needed to be. Russia’s goal was to capture Istanbul while a separate Russian army advanced through the Caucuses and Armenia (where the Armenians were launching their own Ladder Revolution) and into the Turkish heartland of Anatolia. If the Ottoman Empire was knocked out early then it would be difficult for the Brotherhood to manage much of any victory at all. Of course, this didn’t happen- a series of defensive lines across the narrowing neck of Thrace stopped the Alliance long enough for French reinforcements to arrive and bolster the heroic Turkish defense, and the mountains of Anatolia proved more difficult to press through than Moscow had imagined. Meanwhile Prussia threw the newly formed Combined German Army (mostly Prussian, but with the armed forces of the other German Confederation allies integrated into a single command structure) at the Rhine, combining weapons that were just as good if not better than France’s with tactics that had failed to keep pace. Early machine guns and dug-in entrenchments kept the Combined German Army across the Rhine. France remained on the defensive on its own border and in the Ottoman Empire, focusing its available forces on helping the Italians push south into Naples where another series of defensive lines- mostly erected and defended by Britain- struggled to keep them out. Things were more fluid in Central Europe, but you still had pretty bad sieges of major cities where Russia, the Hungarians, and the Combined German Army fought to defeat the Austrians, Bavarians, and Poles.
Spain continually aggravated both sides with its failure to totally commit one way or the other. Because Britain wasn’t sinking Spanish ships, they were able to play a major role in providing soldiers and supplies to the expeditionary force in Istanbul, whilst simultaneously refusing to attack Gibraltar or allow France through their territory to do so. Nor would they contribute to French efforts to cut off Britain’s forces in southern Italy- part of the mad tangle of naval warfare in the Mediterranean as both France and Britain tried to support their respective forces overseas and cut the other side’s supply lines. Both the Alliance and the Brotherhood hated Spanish indecision, but neither felt confident enough to risk driving Spain into the arms of the opposing coalition wholesale.
Part of the Brotherhood trenches in Thrace.
In North America on the other hand, the war was far more mobile. Union airships scanned the relatively wide expanses of the New World from the air, spotting enemy positions and signaling to forces on the ground via heliograph. Various armies chased each other in a war of maneuver or assaulted fortified positions. Mexico’s strategy relied on numbers- they had little else- with large, poorly trained and equipped armies overwhelming Union forces with help from rebels in former Mexican territory and trying to survive off of foraging in place of barely extant supply lines. The Confederacy occupied Georgia and then tried to offer Georgia back in exchange for peace, when that failed they struck north into Pennsylvania and Illinois in an attempt to make the war too bloody for the Union for it to be worth it. Most of the British aid to the South actually came from Drakia- Britain needed its resources for the fight in Europe and so it was Drakian guns, ammunition, and steam wagons that were delivered from Africa to help the South (actual Drakian soldiers didn’t make an appearance, most of their professional army fought instead in the conquest of Egypt and Ottoman North Africa). The value of this foreign aid is questionable- it also cost the Confederacy legitimacy in the eyes of many as the Union condemned the government in Richmond (as it was OTL) as a puppet of London and Capetown. More important was the defection of just over half of the pre-war career soldiers in the US Army to the CS Army when the civil war began. In the Caribbean British, Spanish, Drakian, American, and French ships tangled while a Spanish expeditionary force supported Hispanophone rebels in the eastern half of Haiti.
Despite a variety of advantages for the Union the American Civil War was longer and bloodier than OTL, beginning with major Federal defeats in the Mexican Cession, Georgia, and the Upper South. The tide began to turn with President Mackenzie’s deal with Comancheria- he sat down personally with Chief Pawuurasumununu and worked out a deal by which Comancheria would join the Union as the State of Sookobitʉ, similar to Red River and Jefferson (when it wasn’t in rebellion), and thus the tribes would keep control over their land and retain their own independent government. In exchange the Comanches would have to cede some territory and would commit to becoming “civilized. Pawuurasumununu himself was baptized under the name “Luke Johnson” and sent his son to the prestigious New England boarding school St. Matthews to be educated alongside the sons of Senators and business leaders.
Paramount Chief Pawuurasumununu of the Comanche Nation, later the first Governor of the State of Sookobitʉ.
With Comancheria no longer a distraction, the Union adopted a stance of containing the Mexican Empire and focused on defeating the Confederacy- there was also an ill-conceived attempt to invade Newfoundland that was probably America’s biggest disaster of the war. The fighting wasn’t quiet or easy- the South had to be ground down over the course of a hundred battles and the war with Mexico took on characteristics of ethnic cleansing as the Mexicans attempted to kill or expel Anglo and African American civilians from the areas they occupied and the American Army took revenge on Hispanic civilians when they counterattacked. But ultimately the North had industry and numbers that the South lacked, and the huge, slow, low-quality forces fielded by Mexico lacked the logistics to challenge professional, front line US Army regiments. President Mackenzie arranged for the passage of the 13th Amendment (same number as OTL- there weren’t really any butterflies capable of derailing the first twelve) banning slavery permanently, counting three-fourths of the states not in secession as the necessary number to get it passed. He also set aside large tracts of the Mexican Cession (in OTL northern Mexico) to be granted as free land to former slaves (this both provided restitution to freed slaves and planted a reliable population in former Mexican territory) and established a Freedman’s Bureau to help ease the transition of slaves to free citizenship. Mackenzie was also the driving force behind the desegregation of the US Army in a return to the mixed-race units of the old Continental Army.
It was important, he said, that Americans of different backgrounds and different races fight side-by-side.
When it became clear that the Confederacy was doomed the State of Ixcanha reached out to New York and offered to surrender and abolish slavery in exchange for admission to the Union. As Ixcanha had never been in rebellion against the United States by virtue of not having been part of the United States before the war, their offer was accepted with no putative punishments for its leaders or inhabitants. The Native Mayan state had largely sat out the war in any case, beyond a few minor battles with the Union-allied Federation of Central America.
In Europe victory came by way of technology. British and Drakian phosphorus grenades were horrible, but not horrible enough to force a breakthrough- that required a far crueler weapon. It was deployed at a time when the war seemed to be shifting against the Alliance. France and Italy had defeated Naples in the Italian Peninsula, the Combined German Army had bled itself white trying to break through the Rhine, the French and Austrian Armies (plus the Croats who did not want to be part of an independent Hungary) were winning the battle in Austria, and a new Prime Minister in Madrid hinted that Spain was on the verge of breaking with Britain for real- threatening to challenge Britain’s ability to keep its force in the Balkans supplied. Desperate to break the siege at Istanbul before the war could irreparably turn against them, King Earnest I of Great Britain authorized the first use of modern chemical weapons.
(This was proposed but turned down in OTL’s Crimean War)
Britons release chlorine gas on the Franco-Ottoman lines protecting Istanbul.
They experimented initially with cacodyl cyanide but settled on Chlorine gas, only one major use of which was required to break through the French and Ottoman lines around Istanbul as soldiers unaccustomed to gas broke and ran in the face of an unprecedented weapon. With Istanbul and Jerusalem in British hands (Britain had conquered most of Turkish North Africa with the co-operation of local rulers who were interested in dumping Ottoman authority- not that British authority would prove much of an improvement in the long run, and then invaded the Holy Land) the war seemed won by the Alliance. Additional attempts to defeat France and Austria using chlorine produced some initial victories that were turned around when the Brotherhood discovered that you could protect yourself from Chlorine gas with nothing less than a wet rag over your mouth and nose. Faced with a choice between giving up and trying to push through the Balkans to liberate Istanbul as what remained of the Ottoman Empire rapidly collapsed, the Brotherhood of Nations reluctantly agreed to peace negotiations in Copenhagen.
After three grueling years the Last Crusade was over.
The final settlement saw the Status Quo restored in the Holy Land, minus the parts of holy sites administered by the Catholic Church that were transferred instead to the Anglican Church. (A new copy of the ladder was placed back beneath the window of the Church of the Holy Sepulcher.) A tripartite commission composed of representatives of Russia, Britain, and the German Confederation took over administration of the country holy to Christians, Jews, and Muslims. The Ottoman Empire was reduced to an Anatolian rump-state with its capital in Ankara, while Ottoman North Africa became part of the British Empire and Armenia, part of Kurdistan, and most of Mesopotamia sans a small portion that Persia grabbed fell under Russian patrimony. Hungary secured its independence from Austria (without Croatia which gained its own parliament and autonomy within the Austrian Empire) and Serbia, Bulgaria, and “Rhomania” (Greece, not to be confused with “Rumania” the name of the now united countries of Wallachia and Moldavia) gained theirs from the Ottoman Empire. Albania and the Hejax remained at least nominally part of the Turkish Sultanate and Syria became a colony of the German Confederation- still a confederation of sovereign countries, but with an increasingly powerful Confederal Government. Russia acquired former Austrian Galicia and the city of Istanbul/Czargrad itself. The Kingdom of Naples (minus Sicily), the Papal States, and the Kingdom of Italy became the Italian Federation with sub-national monarchies persisting in its different members and the Pope as Italy’s ceremonial head of state. They included Sicily but not Sardinia- which remained in Britain’s sphere- and retained a claim on Austrian Venice.
Basil I of Rhomania, First Citizen and Autocrat of the Romios proclaims the restoration of the Roman Empire.
No one was left satisfied with their gains after the heavy sacrifices of the war. The Brotherhood at least could blame their enemies for the Last Crusade’s bloody legacy with little accomplished, the Alliance was faced with the challenge of explaining to its people how what it had acquired was worth what it had lost.
For America however, the only flies in the ointment of its victory were the failure to invade Newfoundland and the loss of the eastern half of Haiti which was restored to Spain as a colony- in fact all of Haiti was occupied by Spain and it only regained its independence at the bargaining table. The fighting in North America dragged on after the conclusion of the Last Crusade in Europe and the Middle East, but by that point there was no question who would win. Georgia was liberated, friendly Whig governments installed in black-majority South Carolina and Louisiana, and the Confederate government that had fled to West Florida after the loss of Virginia ultimately surrendered. Juan I was overthrown when the US Army approached Mexico City and the Mexican Empire surrendered unconditionally. Concerned that a peace agreement similar to the last one would lead to another round of instability and another war with Mexico in a few years, President Mackenzie dissolved the Mexican government and placed what remained of the country under military occupation. Two possibilities were advanced with regards to the country’s fate; either an American-style democracy should be established before restoring some degree of independence to Mexico, or it should undergo an “Americanization” project prior to being annexed. Neither was terribly attractive.
Mexico probably suffered the most of any of the combatants- military tactics including frontal assaults on fortified positions had killed large numbers of men, but many more died from hunger or disease in the large under-supplied army groups that Juan I fielded, followed by additional deaths among prisoners-of-war who were placed by the Americans in poorly provisioned POW camps. So many men were conscripted by the Emperor that a labor shortage disrupted the harvesting of crops and triggered a famine followed by epidemics of cholera and typhoid. Ultimately Mexico suffered demographic losses similar to (although not as bad as) Paraguay in the OTL War of the Triple Alliance, its population falling from approximately 6.8 million in 1850 to 4.9 million by the war’s end in 1855 (not counting the Mexican population in neighboring Ixcanha, the Mexican Cession of the United States, or parts of the Federation of Central America), of which under two-fifths were men. The dead were predisposed towards the lower classes, as the Creole elites had been better able to avoid conscription. President Mackenzie successfully restrained some of the worse impulses that the American Army had engaged in while pushing back the Mexican Empire, keeping the war crimes north of the border, and Mexico settled down into a numbed exhaustion under military rule.
A much greater dying was about to begin in Sub-Saharan Africa, however.
Free internet points to whoever can guess what's about to happen in Africa. Here's a hint- the Drakians didn't do it deliberately.
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