Chapter 4
Events were in progress in the Americas.
Most of the Spanish colonies asserted their independence through revolution and civil war as the
de facto independence that they had assumed during the French Revolutionary Wars became
de jure in the face of an unacceptable French client in Madrid and an incompetent asshole at the head of the Spanish government-in-exile. Cuba remained under King Ferdinand VII who reigned from Havana and Puerto Rico was preserved for the French puppet
Carlos V, but everywhere else went its own way. In the Viceroyalty of the Rio de la Plata members of the Creole upper class overthrew the colonial junta in a revolution inspired by the United States, proclaiming a federal republic that they dubbed the
United Provinces of the Rio de la Plata . They successfully strangled an attempted Paraguay in the cradle, retained control over the southern part of the
Banda Oriental, and persuaded Chile to join their loose union voluntarily. They lost
Upper Peru to forces of the Lower Peruvian junta however, which simply renamed itself the Union of Peru and ruled as an independent autocracy. In New Granada liberal elements led by
Antonio Narino fought a civil war against loyalists to King Ferdinand VII, ending the with the creation of the
Republic of Colombia, a federal republic uniting the former Viceroyalty of New Granada and the Presidency of Quito.
Mexico was where Ferdinand and his Royalists attempted to make their stand and after a brutal civil war with an ephemeral republic led by
Jose Maria Morelos and different iterations of Royalist administrations ultimately losing out to a short-lived Mexican Empire under
Augustin Iturbide. Iturbide’s empire lasted for a mere two years before his death and the division of Mexico between a northern Republic of Mexico under
Vicente Guerrero and a southern Mexican State under the dictator
Anastasio Bustamante. Bustamante proclaimed himself King of Mexico after only a year and Guerrero transformed himself into President-for-Life of the Republic in 1825.
Nicolas Bravo followed Guerrero as dictator of Mexico after his death in 1830, reunifying Mexico under an authoritarian government that defeated Bustamante’s kingdom and launched a bloody invasion and occupation of Mexico’s former Central American provinces who had separated from Mexico earlier and formed a brief
Federal Republic of Central America. Far northern Mexico remained weakly under the control of the distracted central government which invited immigrants from Ireland and France (a large portion of the same wave French conservative refugees who were settling to Drakia) settle in Tejas as a counter to American filibusterers who had been trying to move into the area illegally.
Iturbide, Emperor of Mexico. He lasted a little longer IOTL.
Haiti got by under the rule of
Toussaint Louverture who died at the ripe old age of eighty ITTL, the authoritarian President of a French-style republic with a tame opposition. He successfully liberated Haiti, beat back a French attempt to conquer it, conquer/liberated neighboring Santo Domingo, normalized relations with America and the European powers, and established a stable (if somewhat oppressive) foundation for the Haitian Republic. His successor
Joseph Brunel retained his Republic with its nature essentially unchanged, aligning Haiti with Britain in opposition to Haiti’s former colonial oppressor France and the slave-holding United States.
Not that America was entirely slaveholding.
In OTL the South tended to dominate American politics in the early years- the first President and three of the next four were Southerners and deals like the 3/5ths Compromise and the Compromise of 1820 ensured at minimum equal Southern and Northern representation in the House and Senate. Effectively this meant that control over the American government was impossible without some degree of Southern support prior to the election of Abraham Lincoln.
ITTL this was reversed. The first President was the New Englander Artemas Ward and the greater importance of northern Founding Fathers such the explicitly abolitionist John Jay, plus the inclusion of Jefferson’s anti-slavery clause in the Declaration of Independence, and the existence of Georgia as a black-governed Southern state, gave America of the Separate-verse a much less racist, much more antislavery outlook from its founding. The absence of the 3/5th’s clause gave the South control over the House of Representatives but the unwillingness of Virginia and North Carolina to surrender OTL Kentucky and Tennessee to a northern-dominated Federal Government left the smaller, more numerous Northern states in control of the Senate. The Compromise of 1822 came about during the disintegration of Spanish-America when American settlers in western Florida declared independence as the Second Republic of West Florida and Ferdinand VII agreed to sell all of Florida (plus Spain’s claim to Oregon). Unlike the OTL
Compromise of 1820 TTL’s Compromise of 1822 agreed only to maintain more than a third of the Union as slave states so that the Constitution could not be amended without Southern agreement and the admission of both East and West Florida as slave states to help balance out the more numerous northern ones.
Either fortunately or unfortunately depending on one’s perspective, fear of the dangerous threat of Britain and greater national unity kept Southern grumbling to a minimum. Control of congress usually required support in both halves of the country and the two main parties- the Jeffersonian Republican Party and the Hamiltonian Patriot Party- both had northern and southern wings and neither took a hard stance on slavery. Instead they were distinguished by their attitudes towards the alliance with France, the power of the Federal government, and the ongoing immigration by English, Irish, and Polish Catholics fleeing either British anti-Catholicism or Prussian oppression. Sectionalism was also calmed by the willingness of Northerners to make concession to the South, as was the case in the Dahlonenga War.
The Dahlonenga War was triggered by the
discovery of gold in northwestern Georgia near Dahlonenga. Gold-seekers flooded into the area, triggering a conflict between the new arrivals and the pre-existing inhabitants- most of whom were members of the
Cherokee Nation. Further conflict emerged between Georgian gold-seekers who were mostly black and had state land grants (which completely disregarded Cherokee land claims) and gold seekers from elsewhere in the Union who were mostly white and had no land grants whatsoever. When the State of Georgia began attempting to evict white squatters without land grants and tried to forcibly remove the Cherokee to make room for black settlers it set off a national crisis with black settlers and Georgia State Militia squaring off against white squatters, Cherokee fighters, and the North and South Carolina State Militias that threatened to cross the border and invade Georgia.
Poor Cherokee. Don't worry, he'll get better.
At this point the Federal Government (stronger than it was at this point in time OTL) stepped in. The South might not regard Native Americans as equal to whites, but when asked to pick between the slave-owning Cherokee who had converted to Christianity and adopted many
European Cultural Practices and the black Georgians they came down firmly on the side of the Cherokee, and the North (despite outrage from the Midwestern states over the government siding with “red savages” instead of men whose families had fought with Ward for independence) let them. The Supreme Court recognized Cherokee ownership over the land in question and the State of Georgia was forced to back down in the face of threatened Federal intervention to protect their right to property. In the end Georgia came under tremendous pressure to cede its western territory and folded, giving up the mostly Native American lands that in OTL would have become northern Alabama and Mississippi, plus the northwestern corner of OTL Georgia itself.
Four of the Five Civilized Tribes- the Cherokee, Creek, Choctaw, and Chickasaw- lived entirely or almost entirely within the new Yazoo Territory and they came together in 1831 in the Congress of New Echota. Hoping not to have to rely indefinitely on the support of friendly whites advocating on their behalf to a foreign government in order to preserve their lands and sovereignty, the four tribes formally applied for statehood. Their goal was to acquired the constitutionally protected powers and rights of an American state.
Their request triggered a flood of controversy, but eventually testimony from experts as to how “civilized” the tribes in question had become plus lobbying by the South which wanted another slave state, carried the day. The new Native American-majority slave state was named Jefferson, for the Founding Father who had insisted that natives were the equal to whites and called for their assimilation, and its representatives in Congress generally sat as Southern Republicans who voted for Southern interests. Georgia’s former goldfields mostly ended up owned by former white squatters.
The admission of the State of Jefferson to the Union had two major impacts. One was that it directly led to the downfall of the black aristocracy that had controlled Georgia since Jay’s Rebellion as its failure to achieve such basic goals as the abolition of Georgian slavery and the preservation of their territorial integrity delegitimized them in the eyes of Georgia’s emerging middle class. The other impact was the message that it sent to Native Americans. IOTL the Trail of Tears and the forced relocation of the Five Civilized Tribes sent a message that no matter what religion they adopted, what clothes they worse, or what language they spoke, no native would ever have rights that the United States government or the governments of its several states were required to respect. The message of the State of Jefferson- particularly the public debates in Congress over whether the natives there were civilized enough to grant them a say in America’s political process- was that if a tribe assimilated and became “civilized” it could use American laws and courts to protect itself from outright ethnic cleansing at the very least. This was not an entirely positive message as it demanded cultural suicide on the part of Native Americans as the price for human rights, but it was a more positive message than OTL (and boy isn’t that a low bar).
The locations of the Five "Civilized" Tribes at this point in time, plus how they were removed OTL.
As Northern attitudes swung increasingly in favor of black rights and equality the South emerged as the advocate for Native Americans- particularly if the tribe in question was “civilized” and if it occupied a territory that was likely to become a free state if settled and admitted to the Union.
What united Americans regardless of region however, was a mutual fear of Britain and a desire to wash out the stain of their defeat in the Anglo-American War. Through the early 19th century the young republic went to great lengths to build up a modern, disciplined, professional standing army with the help of French advisors (one legacy of which was truly glorious uniforms for the American military). There were national
programs geared towards building infrastructure and a
National Bank that offered easy loans to spur industrial development. By 1835 the United States had a military that matched the best European standards and a national economy noticeably larger than OTL.
British war planners continued to assume that America’s primary role in a future war would be as a distraction from the important fighting in Europe. The British experience in the Anglo-American War and the American Revolution had confirmed the opinion that while America could effectively defend itself from invasion it had little ability to project power and was only dangerous in conjunction with its French ally. Their war plans mostly revolved around defending Canada as the bulk of Britain’s military might focused on France.
The war that Americans dubbed the “Canadian War” and Europeans either the “War of Liberation” or the “The War of Subjugation” depending on their loyalties began with a riot in the Upper Canadian town of York.
Upper Canada was home to the
United Empire Loyalists- the descendants of 40,000-odd Loyalists who had fled the 13 Colonies for the Canadas at the end of the American Revolution (this is about half the number from OTL) rather than Drakia. A small association UEL judges, politicians, businessmen and religious leaders known as the
Family Compact dominated Upper Canada socially and politically to the exclusion of the “Later Loyalists”- immigrants from America who had moved to Canada after the Revolution to take advantage of cheap land grants. The originally apolitical Later Loyalists were distrusted by the UEL’s who suspected them of Republican tendencies. The Later Loyalists were a majority of the population of Upper Canada OTL, ITTL they were a much larger majority and therefore prompted much more fear among the United Empire Loyalists. Repressive measures silenced reform-minded newspapers, arrested outspoken proponents of reform, and ultimately dissolved the elected Provincial Legislature- which while powerless had been used by the Later Loyalist-majority as a platform to call for change. The Family Compact employed the
Orange Order to violently suppress the opposition, which organized its own “Vigilance Committees” to protect the Later Loyalist community. Lower Canada was similarly dominated by the
Chateau Clique composed mostly of Protestant British immigrants and their descendants, despite the fact that Lower Canada was predominantly inhabited by Francophone Catholics. In a world with fewer Anglophone inhabitants in Canada and the legacy of a French invasion of England during the French Revolutionary Wars, the Quebecois faced considerably worse oppression than OTL including laws designed to suppress the use of the French language, suppress the practice of Catholicism, and force them to assimilate, coupled with the same political disenfranchisement as the Later Loyalists.
The Canadas were primed to for a conflagration and the spark came with a clash between the Orange Order and the Vigilance Committee of York, Upper Canada on November 27, 1835. The fighting grew rapidly into a riot and from there into a general
uprising in Upper and Lower Canada.
William Lyon Mackenzie proclaimed the independence of the
Republic of Canada in Upper Canada and
Louis-Joseph Papineau proclaimed the independence of the
Republic of Lower Canada only days later. Unlike in OTL the uprising had popular support in both Upper and Lower Canada (as opposed to just Lower Canada) and a far higher number of actual participants among its supporters. The rebels were able to seize York and a few other towns, but it still looked like Britain would probably be able to put the rebellion down once reinforcements arrived from the mother country.
Flag of the Republic of Canada
Enter President
Richard Rush of the United States of America (an ATL brother of the OTL Richard Rush with the same name and parents but different life experiences and personality). Rush sent a single letter to Napoleon Bonaparte and the First Consul sent him a single letter in reply.
Tensions with Britain had been inching towards war for a while- particularly in Europe where Britain had been openly sponsoring the Red Armies in Spain and Germany. Napoleon was done tolerating British provocations and America felt ready to avenge its humiliation in the last fight. Why wait for a war they all knew was coming when there was a situation to be taken advantage of in Canada? Besides the First Consul had long harbored a disappointment over his failure to successfully invade the British Isles. He was ready for another round.
The world at the end of 1835.