Chapter 7
Gold changes everything.
For whatever reason the human fascination with gold is sufficient to trigger a mad rush of people leaving their old homes for new territory, desperate for a chance at that famous yellow metal. Gold rushes transform local economies, demographics, and the balance of politics. They can lead to the displacement of native peoples from ancient traditional hands (the OTL Georgia Gold Rush caused the Trail of Tears, the California Gold Rush triggered less dramatic but still deeply unpleasant consequences for Californian Natives) and fights between prospectors and even foreign governments.
There’s no particular reason why the gold rushes in Georgia, South Africa, and California should all happen early in this timeline other than *plot*, but happen early they did- even if only by a few years. ITTL the 1842 discovery of gold in California would prove a pivotal event in the history of this version of Mexico. Nicolas Bravo presided over a deeply authoritarian Republic of Mexico that had successfully reunified itself a little over a decade before, not merely reacquiring the lands of the equally oppressive Kingdom of Mexico but also those of formerly New Spanish Central America. The decision to conquer Central America saw Mexico struggling with a bloody and ongoing occupation that left it even less able to settle or police its northern territories than it was OTL. This was not as fatal to Mexican sovereignty in the north as one might think- the Mexican government had opened up Texas to settlement mostly by conservative French colonists fleeing Napoleonic oppression and Irish looking to escape British rule, leaving American filibusterers who moved into Texas illegally (they insisted that it was part of Louisiana and therefore the United States) a visible but clear minority. The majority-Francophone Tejaneaux largely governed themselves, but generally had few issues with the Mexican government and the primary challenge to Mexico’s control in its northern territories came from
Comancheria whose control over large parts of OTL Texas and New Mexico was so secure that most Mexican authorities in the area deferred to the tribes.
Comancheria is one of those native states/tribal thingies that I really ought to cover with my US history students.
The discovery of Californian gold rapidly disrupted the delicate balance of Mexican influence over the northern half of its country. Large numbers of new foreign settlers and prospectors began to migrate into California, the largest number (a plurality but not a majority) originating from neighboring America- some by sea, others via the American presence in Oregon. Bravo’s regime now had immediate and powerful reasons to start exercising their authority over the north, both to control California’s gold and to control the growing number of non-Mexican inhabitants. Nervous over the presence of the new immigrants who were now a majority in California, the Mexican government limited their influence by creating complex bureaucratic hurdles to prevent them from gaining Mexican citizenship and through a combination of taxes, tariffs, and regulations over the gold industry. The increasingly established non-Mexican community- including emerging business owners- began to agitate for a greater say over their own political and economic fates. The large American segment of the Californian population was used to federal democracy and pushed back against the Mexican dictatorship, demanding the rights to freely elect their own provincial government and federal representatives, and demanding a justice system whose judges were, y’know, at least semi-impartial and not puppets of the regime. They were joined in these calls by many other immigrants from democratic or semi-democratic countries in Europe and South America, and universally the newcomers wanted the taxes on gold and mining equipment that they paid to be spent on internal Californian improvements instead of being sent back to Mexico City to be used elsewhere in the country.
America, meanwhile, was increasingly looking at Mexico as a target for further expansion following the Compromise of 1839 and the admission of Canada and Quebec as free states. The South wanted to carve new slave states out of Mexico (particularly Texas and California), the North wanted new territory for nationalist and Manifest Destiny reasons, and everyone agreed that California with its valuable gold-fields and majority English-speaking population would be an excellent addition to the United States. The South was particularly concerned as the growth of the northern population had finally broken southern dominance in the House of Representatives. Southerners had been reduced to a minority in that chamber after the Census of 1830 but Virginia had remained the state with the most seats and greater party unity in the southern states allowed the South to control the House anyway. The Census of 1840 made this impossible however, with ever more seats given to northern states and New Yorkers replacing Virginians (remember Virginia still has West Virginia and Kentucky) as the largest delegation. As opposition to slavery became increasingly ardent in the North and fears mounted in the South that an attempt to make them abandon slavery by force was in the offing, regionalism began to tear apart the American party system. The external threat of Britain had enforced a degree of unity, but fear of invasion had abated following the American victory in the Canadian War.
For President Jeremiah Sherman (an ATL grandson of Founding Father
Roger Sherman) of the Great State of Ohio, a war with Mexico offered an excellent tool to rally Americans of all stripes together and distract fraying tempers from the slavery debate.
Some of our fine American prospectors hunting for gold in California.
In 1844 the United States government dispatched a strongly worded protest to the government of Mexico on behalf of the American community living in California, demanding greater rights and freedoms for the immigrants living there. As a protest by a foreign government in the name of a domestic group within Mexico mandating changes to internal Mexican government policies, it was a deliberate provocation and Nicolas Bravo denounced it in no uncertain terms, stoking outrage in California and the United States (and to a lesser extent in Texas where the Tejaneaux majority and the Anglophone minority resented the assertion of long-absent Mexican authority). American newspapers ran lurid accounts of the mistreatment of American prospectors in California and President Sherman found the excuse he needed in the execution of three American citizens by Mexican authorities in California on charges of inciting insurrection.
The First Mexican-American War was billed in the United States as a war of liberation- akin to the Canadian War- but it was also very much a war of conquest and for the first time an anti-war movement (albeit a small one) made itself heard in opposition to a major American war. A majority of the inhabitants of California might have welcomed the arrival of a small American militia from Oregon (swelling its ranks through an uprising of their own that proclaimed a brief Republic of California inspired by the Republic of Canada that promptly requested annexation) but Texas’ reaction was far more lukewarm. The American community in Texas supported the invasion of course, and the Irish generally viewed it positively, but the Tejaneaux did not, and when a Republic of Texas (drawing the same inspiration and existing for the same purpose as the Republic of California) was proclaimed by supporters of annexation from among the Anglophone community, Tejaneaux landowners convened and declared the independence of the “Republic of Tejas” to seek true independence (General Linfield B. Patterson of the US Army ordered it dissolved). Of course, the other inhabitants of northern Mexico- whether Mexican or Native- had little desire to be part of the United States either.
The war was fortunately short and victorious for New York (TTL’s US capital, remember?) as America was objectively stronger and more advanced than it had been at this point IOTL, while Mexico’s military- though more experienced thanks to its occupation of Central America- had not improved over OTL to the same degree. When Bravo withdrew his forces from Central America to face the Americans the subcontinent erupted in rebellion, and when the Mexican Army began to repeatedly lose battles in the face of multiple enemies in different directions a group of conspirators seized control of Mexico City and killed him. Initially they attempted to inaugurate a new democratic government, until a general who had sided with the conspirators- General Jose Gutierrez- overthrew them and proclaimed himself president. He was in office for only a month during which he vainly attempted to reach a deal with the United States, until the
Ejercito de Enfermos- a revolutionary group of political dissidents under the aged hero of the Mexican War of Independence (at least ITTL) General
Jose Alvarez de Toledo y Dubois – overthrew him and installed General Toledo as President. Following the fall of Mexico City, Toledo surrendered to the United States.
Poor Mexico, so far from god, so close to the United States.
It is a fact insufficiently acknowledged (probably cause it’s embarrassing) that many of the staunchest opponents of American Imperialism in OTL were in fact enormous racists.
The annexation of Hawaii was opposed the most strongly not by liberal individuals who sympathized with Hawaiian sovereignty and the cause of Liliuokalani, but by southern racists who didn’t want to add a bunch of Asians and Pacific Islanders to the United States. When Hawaii was finally annexed during the Spanish-American War, once again many of the loudest voices against annexing the Philippines were not those who recognized that the Philippines deserved to exercise its own self-determination but again racist assholes who didn’t want a bunch of non-whites in America. When the All-Mexico Movement called for President Polk to annex all of Mexico their most determined opponents were… well John C. Calhoun said it best when he observed that;
“To incorporate Mexico, would be the first departure of the kind; for more than half of its population are pure Indians, and by far the larger portion of the residue mixed blood. I protest against the incorporation of such a people. Ours is the Government of the white man.”
While I have generalized (there were indeed some quite dedicated decent Americans opposed to imperialism IOTL) it is an uncomfortable fact that a less racist United States is also a more imperialistic United States. ITTL the prospect of absorbing such a large number of non-whites was less intolerable to Americans who were more concerned with culture than race, although the racists and sane people were still influential enough that America did not actually annex all of Mexico.
Instead it annexed California to its rightful borders, Texas, New Mexico, Sonora, Chihuahua, Coahuila, Nuevo Leon, Tamaulipas, Durango, Sinaloa, most of Zacatecas, and about half of San Luis Potosi. On top of that
the Republic of the Yucatan that had broken away from Mexico during the war was overthrown by a native Mayan
revolution that proclaimed the State of Ixcanha and applied to join the United States out of fear of a Mexican reconquest. Ixcanha offered to become slave state and their application was endorsed by the South.
In OTL the Treaty of Guadeloupe-Hidalgo striped Mexico of 55% of the its territory and some 3% of its population, leaving America with 80,000 Hispanic Mexicans to assimilate. ITTL the territory that President Sherman saw transferred from Mexico to the United States (not including the Yucatan) was closer to two-thirds of OTL Mexico with 15% of its population- not counting Central America which had been part of Mexico ITTL before the war and was also lost to the country. The United States was left with 850,000 Hispanic Mexicans to assimilate, although as there would be 25.6 million Americans living outside of TTL’s Mexican Cession when the Census of 1850 was completed that wasn’t an entirely unmanageable number.
Note the fleeing Native Americans as the United States symbolically pushes west into the Mexican Cession.
General Toledo was overthrown as President of Mexico a mere eleven months after having assumed the office and the new government under General
Pedro de Ampudia who also lasted less than a year before being his liberal policies prompted his overthrow by a cabal of wealthy Mexican landowners who elevated General Manuel Chavez to replace him, but Chavez refused to be a pliant puppet and was assassinated again after less than a year. A
civil war between conservatives and liberals began that would spill into the early 1850s and end with the nominal victory of the liberals, although their leader Juan Jose Perez would then betray the revolution and proclaim himself Emperor Juan I, beginning the Second Mexican Empire.
America had still bitten off rather more than it expected to be chewing.
The United States immediately found itself in conflict with Comancheria and the Pueblo and Navajo peoples of the western desert. An uprising among the Mexican inhabitants of Coahuila and Nuevo Leon ended up having to be suppressed in 1847 and another one in Zacatecas in 1848. Both saw large numbers of Mexicans forcibly expelled to Mexico by American troops. New American settlers streaming into the Mexican Cession triggered conflicts with the people who already lived there. The Republic of California had claimed all of Las Californias and when it became a state it maintained those claims over areas that it didn’t and couldn’t actually control.
The biggest problem however, was slavery.
The First Mexican-American War briefly drew the country together against a common enemy as President Sherman had envisioned, but once it ended the debate over slavery erupted back to the fore. The South wanted to admit Texas, California, and Ixcanha at the very least as slave states, helped by the fact that the Republic of Texas had asked to be a slave state and Ixcanha had indicated its willingness to be one as the price of admission. But most actual inhabitants of Texas- the Francophone Tejaneaux- were opposed to slavery, Ixcanha was at best ambivalent, and California’s government was actively hostile. On top of that abolitionists in Congress had gained enough influence that they were able to block not only the admission of new slave states from the Mexican Cession but also the admission of Cimarron (Oklahoma) whose admission as a slave state had been agreed to in the 1839. In the election of 1848, the northern Republicans split with the party (remember the Republicans are the Jeffersonian party) when it nominated a southern slave owner and instead endorsed the Whig candidate Robert M. Butler, while the southern Whigs broke off and formed the National Party. Butler- a moderate abolitionist who was openly opposed to slavery but believed that its abolition had to happen on the state level- won the election with the help of Canada and Quebec.
After the census of 1850 further increased Northern control over the House of Representatives and the election that year saw a number of abolitionist candidates win victories across the North Butler had the votes to admit California, Texas, and Canaan (Tamaulipas and Nuevo Leon) as free states. He also oversaw the purchase of Rupert’s Land from Britain after the Metis Rebellion and pressured the Red River Republic to join the United States as yet another free state, both in 1851.
And this is the point at which the center cannot hold.
I'll let you know when I figure out whether or not this is pro- or anti- slavery.
Northern/anti-slavery dominance over the federal government has reached a point at which it can effectively legislate without any southern input or agreement needed at all. Compromises are no longer needed. The government is making no serious attempts to abolish slavery in the South, but the free states now have the numbers that they can amend the constitution to outlaw slavery should they ever choose to do so. External threats have kept the South in the Union thus far, but we have reached a point where it is no longer realistic to keep American sectionalism under control.
So, what happens now?
You, dear reader, are assuming that there will be a civil war. After all there is always some version of an American Civil War over slavery or race relations in an AH TL- particularly in ones that deal with America. Thande’s LTTW has a version of the ACW, so does HeX’s More Perfect Union, and Napoleon’s Madness-verse, and Stirling’s vanilla Drakaverse, and Turtledove’s Atlantis, and Barnes’ Lion’s Blood, and plenty of my own works. Perhaps it is that the experience of the ACW is so central to the American identity and experience that we cannot imagine a world without it? Certainly, it makes sense at this point in our TL to have one, but I don’t know that it is quite so inevitable as all of that. The South is clearly outnumbered and outmatched and it may be a bit more realistic in its assessment of its chances. The odds of British intervention are certainly higher than OTL given the absence of a Canada that would need defending which could encourage the different parties to try harder for peace (or it might convince the South that foreign help is more likely). For that matter, with France certain to support the Union and Britain more likely to back the South, what are the odds of a civil war- if it happens- becoming international?
Hmm. I wanted the Last Crusade to be a European and Middle Eastern conflict but now one of my readers has been giving me ideas. Let us ask that
other Author what he thinks.
First, we inquire whether there should even be a civil war at all. Let us say that any number on the D20 below 10 indicates a smaller conflict than OTL with 5 or below indicating no war at all. Anything above ten is a larger conflict than OTL and above 15 means it spills over into war in Europe and merges with an early version of the Last Crusade. Second, we shall ask how successful the alt-CSA should be- I think a DC of 18 should be required for victory given how much the deck is stacked against it. If it falls below 15 then some of the slave states will remain in the Union. Lastly I’d like to know what European intervention will look like- over 15 means we see British/Drakian/other troops fighting with the South in North America and every two points above ten the die achieves will add 1 point to the second roll for the CSA’s success.
Unfortunately my dice were left in the bungalow, but Google has a lovely dice simulation if you search for it. Let’s see;
Question 1:
Question 2:
Question 3:
*Battle Cry of Freedom intensifies*
