Good old Blaine.
Between you and @KingSweden24 has made me love the Blaine Presidency.
Between you and @KingSweden24 has made me love the Blaine Presidency.
The American System: A Henry Clay TL
- Thread starter TheHedgehog
- Start date
He’s high on a list of “Best Presidents we Never Had”
Would have been a big improvement over a number of the late 19th century CTRL+V gang we actually wound up with
He's certainly an interesting character, and he certainly would have left a mark in a way that Rutherford "my only claim to fame is losing the popular vote" Hayes didn't.
Although, this Blaine by virtue of staying in Pennsylvania is a different Blaine from Cinco de Mayo or OTL...
38. A Rising Tide
38. A Rising Tide
“…little major legislation was passed under President Hendricks, nor did his cabinet garner significant controversy. What defined his presidency were either local controversies beyond his control like the Red Delta massacres, or unrest that he was forced to respond to. It was the latter that struck first, as a series of labor strikes rocked the Midwest during the spring and summer of 1878.
In response to a general economic slowdown that deepened into a recession in the fall of 1877 [1], businesses began cutting wages without a subsequent reduction in hours. This provoked the ire of their workers, who had no means of organizing as unions had yet to coalesce. Tensions boiled over in a number of locations across the United States as miners went on strike in Scranton and steel workers struck in Cleveland and Pittsburgh. A series of railroad strikes also swept the Midwest, including Harpers Ferry, Indianapolis, and Cincinnati.
After the strikers began destroying hardware, including burning a mine pump and destroying rolling stock, Hendricks responded by sending in federal troops to aid state governors in suppressing the unrest. After about 30 days, the army had successfully ended the strikes, but labor relations had become sour due to the violence, and the chaos combined with the poor economy to make President Hendricks deeply unpopular. The elections in November 1878 yielded greatly strengthened Whig majorities in both houses, while the populist Reform Party won three seats on a platform of anti-trust, pro-worker policies.
And then came the Red Delta, perhaps the most impactful event of Hendricks’ term…”
-From THE END OF THE STATUS QUO: PRELUDE TO ABOLITION by Michelle Watts, published 2017
Presidential Cabinet of Thomas Hendricks:
Vice President: Thomas H. Watts
Secretary of State: William Rosecrans
Secretary of the Treasury: William H. English
Secretary of War: Winfield S. Hancock
Attorney General: Joel Parker
Postmaster General: James W. Marshall
Secretary of the Interior: Edmund Pettus
Secretary of the Navy: James English
“New York Central College is a symbol of our American values in their purest form. This institute was the first co-educational, racially integrated college in the entire United States. Ever since its inception 150 years ago today, New York Central College has been a trailblazer for equality, not just equality of the law, but equality of opportunity.
The path forward for the first totally integrated, co-educational college in America was not easy. The town of McGrawville was once adamantly opposed to our campus. They were incensed when the state legislature appropriated public funds for the “African college” and an interracial relationship between two students [2] only increased the vitriol. We faced bankruptcy and only the arrival of John Brown to lead the college saved it. Brown was a shrewd businessman and was able to solicit large donations from abolitionist circles to sustain operations. Men like Thaddeus Stevens, Benjamin Wade, Frederick Douglass, and Charles Sumner were invited to give lectures, and the student body grew under Brown’s tenure. From just five graduates in 1855, Brown expanded our enrollment to 103 in 1863, bolstered by students coming from the closure of the Oneida Institute.
In 1865, Brown persuaded businessmen Ezra Cornell and Andrew Dickson White to, rather than found their own university, pool their resources with Central College and join the leadership of [3]. This was followed by the state senate designating Central College as a land-grant university, giving us public funds. Cornell and White enlarged the endowment with real estate transactions, while traveling extensively to recruit more faculty and students. By 1870, enrollment at Central College had shot up to 511 students and we were once more on solid footing. By the time John Brown retired the next year, New York Central College was not just one of the most progressive institutes of higher learning in the country, it was also one of the best managed. And because of that, we’re still here to provide quality education and a place for the free debate of all sorts of ideas…”
-From HISTORY on NYCC.uni, published 2003
“After Delaware became the first southern state to abolish slavery in 1871 and William Mahone won the governorship of Virginia on an anti-slavery platform, talk increased in other upper southern states of enacting a gradual abolition of slavery.
Maryland had seen an earlier abolition effort, spearheaded by Governor John Creswell, fail in 1866, and Creswell was defeated for a third term the following year. However, by 1871, the state was evolving. 49% of blacks in the state were free, urban areas had grown significantly, and Baltimore had shifted from a conservative, southern bastion to a more mixed and industrialized city. That year, Congressman Thomas Swann, a moderate Democrat, was elected governor. No mention of slavery was made during the campaign, but at his inauguration Swann urged the state legislature to “consider the final abolition of an institution already on the decline… I speak, of course, of slavery, which no longer has a place in a modern society.” Swann’s speech caused an uproar in conservative circles of the state, but he was convinced that slavery had to go.
The state legislature took up debate of the proposition. The debate was heated, and some Democrats fiercely opposed even the gradual 10-year compensated emancipation of the slaves. In the end, the amendment was approved by the General Assembly by the requisite 3/5 majority without a single vote to spare [4]. The next general election in the state was in 1875, and the emancipation amendment was submitted to the voters of Maryland as a referendum. While Governor Swann won reelection by 1,350 votes, the amendment was approved by just 574 votes. But it was enough – slaveowners in Maryland had 10 years to free their slaves, compensated by the state.
…abolition in Maryland opened the door for other reformist governors of southern states. In April 1877, Governor William Mahone called upon the General Assembly to convene a constitutional convention with the purpose of abolishing slavery. An earlier attempt by Mahone in 1874 to do the same had failed in the state senate. However, this time, the Whigs held an expanded majority in the senate, and Mahone’s proposal was approved. Upon the convening of the 1877 constitutional convention, it became clear that Mahone and his Whig machine intended to do far more than just ending slavery. Arthur Boreman, Harrison Riddleberger, and William Stevenson emerged as the leaders of the reformist faction. The reformist triumvirate they formed called for the state senate to be reapportioned to be solely on the basis of population, granting increased power to cities and the western portion of the state. This proposal was fiercely resisted by Democrats, who already were unenthusiastic about holding the convention.
By altering the basis of the senate to be on population alone rather than population and property and abolishing slavery, the political influence of the planter class would be severely curtailed. A proposal that the franchise be restricted to whites was easily adopted [5], but the questions of apportionment and abolition were more intractable. The majority of the convention was from cities and western Virginia, so it was agreed that the state senate would be apportioned solely based on population. However, some westerners worried that by counting blacks, the eastern Democrats could preserve their political power. Therefore, a clause was introduced that stated that anyone who was either enslaved at the time or whose ancestors had been enslaved would not be counted for apportionment. This effectively prevented blacks from being counted, enabling the heavily white western counties to massively increase their political power.
After a lengthy debate, the reformist apportionment proposals were narrowly adopted by the convention, and the delegates turned to the question of abolition. Given the results of the delegate elections, it was clear that slavery would be abolished in some form… ultimately, a plan of gradual, compensated emancipation, similar to the amendment adopted by Maryland, was agreed upon. Slaveowners would have a period of ten years to emancipate their slaves and receive compensation from the state government.
…the 1877 constitution was then put to the people in a referendum. Voting was held over three days in September, and the proposed constitution was adopted by a narrow margin of 52-48, with a margin of 5,000 votes. Governor Mahone celebrated the result, and it was indeed a tremendous step forward for the Commonwealth of Virginia, despite the reinforcement of white supremacy even with the abolition of slavery…”
From CHAINS BROKEN, CHAINS SHACKLED by Edward Northam, published 2011
[1] Similar causes to the Panic of 1873, but much less severe thanks to the National Bank and therefore no coinage act or problems with silver.
[2] OTL, it was a professor and a student, which was extra scandalous.
[3] OTL, these two men founded Cornell. Cornell managed New York’s land-grant land and made $2.5 million in 1860s money from land sales, or about $55 million in today’s money.
[4] I have no idea what the provisions of Maryland’s 1851 constitution were, so I’m going to assume that they were similar to their current one.
[5] There will be court cases about this in the 1900s, don’t worry.
“…little major legislation was passed under President Hendricks, nor did his cabinet garner significant controversy. What defined his presidency were either local controversies beyond his control like the Red Delta massacres, or unrest that he was forced to respond to. It was the latter that struck first, as a series of labor strikes rocked the Midwest during the spring and summer of 1878.
In response to a general economic slowdown that deepened into a recession in the fall of 1877 [1], businesses began cutting wages without a subsequent reduction in hours. This provoked the ire of their workers, who had no means of organizing as unions had yet to coalesce. Tensions boiled over in a number of locations across the United States as miners went on strike in Scranton and steel workers struck in Cleveland and Pittsburgh. A series of railroad strikes also swept the Midwest, including Harpers Ferry, Indianapolis, and Cincinnati.
After the strikers began destroying hardware, including burning a mine pump and destroying rolling stock, Hendricks responded by sending in federal troops to aid state governors in suppressing the unrest. After about 30 days, the army had successfully ended the strikes, but labor relations had become sour due to the violence, and the chaos combined with the poor economy to make President Hendricks deeply unpopular. The elections in November 1878 yielded greatly strengthened Whig majorities in both houses, while the populist Reform Party won three seats on a platform of anti-trust, pro-worker policies.
And then came the Red Delta, perhaps the most impactful event of Hendricks’ term…”
-From THE END OF THE STATUS QUO: PRELUDE TO ABOLITION by Michelle Watts, published 2017
Presidential Cabinet of Thomas Hendricks:
Vice President: Thomas H. Watts
Secretary of State: William Rosecrans
Secretary of the Treasury: William H. English
Secretary of War: Winfield S. Hancock
Attorney General: Joel Parker
Postmaster General: James W. Marshall
Secretary of the Interior: Edmund Pettus
Secretary of the Navy: James English
“New York Central College is a symbol of our American values in their purest form. This institute was the first co-educational, racially integrated college in the entire United States. Ever since its inception 150 years ago today, New York Central College has been a trailblazer for equality, not just equality of the law, but equality of opportunity.
The path forward for the first totally integrated, co-educational college in America was not easy. The town of McGrawville was once adamantly opposed to our campus. They were incensed when the state legislature appropriated public funds for the “African college” and an interracial relationship between two students [2] only increased the vitriol. We faced bankruptcy and only the arrival of John Brown to lead the college saved it. Brown was a shrewd businessman and was able to solicit large donations from abolitionist circles to sustain operations. Men like Thaddeus Stevens, Benjamin Wade, Frederick Douglass, and Charles Sumner were invited to give lectures, and the student body grew under Brown’s tenure. From just five graduates in 1855, Brown expanded our enrollment to 103 in 1863, bolstered by students coming from the closure of the Oneida Institute.
In 1865, Brown persuaded businessmen Ezra Cornell and Andrew Dickson White to, rather than found their own university, pool their resources with Central College and join the leadership of [3]. This was followed by the state senate designating Central College as a land-grant university, giving us public funds. Cornell and White enlarged the endowment with real estate transactions, while traveling extensively to recruit more faculty and students. By 1870, enrollment at Central College had shot up to 511 students and we were once more on solid footing. By the time John Brown retired the next year, New York Central College was not just one of the most progressive institutes of higher learning in the country, it was also one of the best managed. And because of that, we’re still here to provide quality education and a place for the free debate of all sorts of ideas…”
-From HISTORY on NYCC.uni, published 2003
“After Delaware became the first southern state to abolish slavery in 1871 and William Mahone won the governorship of Virginia on an anti-slavery platform, talk increased in other upper southern states of enacting a gradual abolition of slavery.
Maryland had seen an earlier abolition effort, spearheaded by Governor John Creswell, fail in 1866, and Creswell was defeated for a third term the following year. However, by 1871, the state was evolving. 49% of blacks in the state were free, urban areas had grown significantly, and Baltimore had shifted from a conservative, southern bastion to a more mixed and industrialized city. That year, Congressman Thomas Swann, a moderate Democrat, was elected governor. No mention of slavery was made during the campaign, but at his inauguration Swann urged the state legislature to “consider the final abolition of an institution already on the decline… I speak, of course, of slavery, which no longer has a place in a modern society.” Swann’s speech caused an uproar in conservative circles of the state, but he was convinced that slavery had to go.
The state legislature took up debate of the proposition. The debate was heated, and some Democrats fiercely opposed even the gradual 10-year compensated emancipation of the slaves. In the end, the amendment was approved by the General Assembly by the requisite 3/5 majority without a single vote to spare [4]. The next general election in the state was in 1875, and the emancipation amendment was submitted to the voters of Maryland as a referendum. While Governor Swann won reelection by 1,350 votes, the amendment was approved by just 574 votes. But it was enough – slaveowners in Maryland had 10 years to free their slaves, compensated by the state.
…abolition in Maryland opened the door for other reformist governors of southern states. In April 1877, Governor William Mahone called upon the General Assembly to convene a constitutional convention with the purpose of abolishing slavery. An earlier attempt by Mahone in 1874 to do the same had failed in the state senate. However, this time, the Whigs held an expanded majority in the senate, and Mahone’s proposal was approved. Upon the convening of the 1877 constitutional convention, it became clear that Mahone and his Whig machine intended to do far more than just ending slavery. Arthur Boreman, Harrison Riddleberger, and William Stevenson emerged as the leaders of the reformist faction. The reformist triumvirate they formed called for the state senate to be reapportioned to be solely on the basis of population, granting increased power to cities and the western portion of the state. This proposal was fiercely resisted by Democrats, who already were unenthusiastic about holding the convention.
By altering the basis of the senate to be on population alone rather than population and property and abolishing slavery, the political influence of the planter class would be severely curtailed. A proposal that the franchise be restricted to whites was easily adopted [5], but the questions of apportionment and abolition were more intractable. The majority of the convention was from cities and western Virginia, so it was agreed that the state senate would be apportioned solely based on population. However, some westerners worried that by counting blacks, the eastern Democrats could preserve their political power. Therefore, a clause was introduced that stated that anyone who was either enslaved at the time or whose ancestors had been enslaved would not be counted for apportionment. This effectively prevented blacks from being counted, enabling the heavily white western counties to massively increase their political power.
After a lengthy debate, the reformist apportionment proposals were narrowly adopted by the convention, and the delegates turned to the question of abolition. Given the results of the delegate elections, it was clear that slavery would be abolished in some form… ultimately, a plan of gradual, compensated emancipation, similar to the amendment adopted by Maryland, was agreed upon. Slaveowners would have a period of ten years to emancipate their slaves and receive compensation from the state government.
…the 1877 constitution was then put to the people in a referendum. Voting was held over three days in September, and the proposed constitution was adopted by a narrow margin of 52-48, with a margin of 5,000 votes. Governor Mahone celebrated the result, and it was indeed a tremendous step forward for the Commonwealth of Virginia, despite the reinforcement of white supremacy even with the abolition of slavery…”
From CHAINS BROKEN, CHAINS SHACKLED by Edward Northam, published 2011
[1] Similar causes to the Panic of 1873, but much less severe thanks to the National Bank and therefore no coinage act or problems with silver.
[2] OTL, it was a professor and a student, which was extra scandalous.
[3] OTL, these two men founded Cornell. Cornell managed New York’s land-grant land and made $2.5 million in 1860s money from land sales, or about $55 million in today’s money.
[4] I have no idea what the provisions of Maryland’s 1851 constitution were, so I’m going to assume that they were similar to their current one.
[5] There will be court cases about this in the 1900s, don’t worry.
Interesting stuff. Seems a pretty realistic take on how abolition would be handled by a Southern state in the late 1870s
And I’m impressed, you’ve made Hendricks even more of a goon than I did!
And I’m impressed, you’ve made Hendricks even more of a goon than I did!
Thanks! A lot of the stuff with abolition is kind of uncharted territory so I'm glad it seems plausible.
As for Hendricks, all of the anti-labor stuff I just took from his OTL term as governor and how Hayes handled the 1877 railroad strikes. My understanding of Hendricks is the worst thing about him was he was racist.
I don't plan for socialism to be much more influential than OTL in the USA, but I could se the ideology of Mazzini catching on in some American circles. Labor reform TTL will look a lot more like La Follette than Debs, though.
Socialism is going to be different ITTL in other ways, given the POD ahead of the 1848 revolutions and the ramifications that has on Marx's ideological trajectory. I wonder if Senator Lincoln is exchanging letters with Marx ITTL as well...
I was actually thinking that Bakunin's brand of communism is more influential for revolutionaries (especially in Brazil), while Mazzini appeals to bourgeoisie types who want reform and welfare but not violent upheavals and redistributionism.
As for Lincoln, it's possible he exchanged letters with Marx but I think he would also correspond with Mazzini, who's an actual head of state TTL.
I don't think Bakunin will be any more successful or influential ITTL than he was IOTL, considering that "radical reformism as the real revolution" is a stronger, not weaker argument against "violent revolution might still not be enough" from OTL.
The implications of an extant, successful and undeniably revolutionary government in one of Europe's most famous cities will have very intriguing butterflies.
Well it depends on the country -- democratic societies with strong civil liberties like the US or the UK would be less receptive to preachers of violent revolution, but a country like, say, Russia (IOTL) or Brazil (at least the way it'll turn out TTL) would be more open to the idea of a violent Bakuninist revolution. On a global scale, TTL will see less communism of any stripe.
The rise of the Roman Republic, despite its evolution from revolutionary government to moderate mercantilist government, has definitely inspired radical movements across europe -- a coming chapter will return to France and Germany (where an alternate version of the Gotha Program will be proposed)
39. The Killing Fields
39. The Killing Fields
“Nathan Bedford Forrest was one of the wealthiest men in the south, growing rich not only from the Mississippi plantations he owned, but also the slave trading business he founded in Memphis. The civil war interfered with his slave trading endeavors, and the fact that Mississippi and Tennessee were on opposite sides of the war didn’t help his finances. After the war, Forrest sold his trading business and moved south to Vicksburg, where he had purchased land next to Jefferson Davis’s Hurricane Plantation [1].
Forrest’s fortunes recovered as his network of plantations returned to profitability, and he took to improving his Vicksburg plantation, named Carnation. The main house was expanded into a mansion that Jefferson Davis once described in a letter as a “Moorish monstrosity”, and two guest houses were constructed. Forrest read journals on “scientific racism”, becoming particularly interested in the made-up condition of “drapetomania” that Samuel Cartwright claimed was a mental disorder that caused slaves to escape [2]. In 1877, Forrest decided that if he rebuilt his slave quarters at Carnation to model his idea of an “African village,” it would make his slaves feel at home and induce them to stay. This consisted of mud-brick huts with thatched roofs that were generally poorer shelter than even the previous wooden shacks [3]. Jefferson Davis found the endeavour “amusing” and replaced his own slave quarters with similar “African huts,” and the trend quickly spread throughout the plantations of the Mississippi delta.
The decision by Maryland to abolish slavery, as well as Virginia’s constitution that not only abolished slavery but sought to dismantle as thoroughly as possible the old plantocracy, troubled Forrest. “If even the Old Dominion and other noble southern states have moved towards radicalism, this bodes ill for our southern way of life in Mississippi,” he wrote to a friend. “I have no doubt that the negroes here will become restless – even if word doesn’t spread, the abolition up in Richmond will be a miasma, the stench of blacks rampaging about in the Tidewater will subconsciously infect the blacks here.”
This was the backdrop for the Red Delta.
On June 3rd, 1879, a warm and unusually dry day, one of the guest houses at Carnation caught fire and burned down, killing one of Forrest’s friends. Forrest, described as “generally mild-mannered unless provoked, flew into a rage when he heard of the fire. “His face was red with fury,” his son wrote. “He paced about in a frenzy.” The next day, Forrest assembled a posse of several dozen armed men and rode into the slave quarters. Each hut was ruthlessly searched as the confused and worried slaves looked on. “It was like a small army had invaded the village,” Forrest’s son recalled in his memoirs. “Negroes old and young milled about while the militiamen searched for weapons and evidence. There was a preponderance of it.” His son was lying, however – though Forrest loudly proclaimed from horseback that “kegs of powder, dozens of rifles, hundreds of bullets, all the trappings of a slave insurrection” were discovered, there is no evidence that any such plot or weapons cache existed.
Forrest and his men seized the male occupants of the hut where the weapons were discovered, as well as the male occupants of two neighbouring huts. “Here are the arsonists, the murders, the savage barbarians who seek to kill every last white man in the union,” Forrest declared, gesturing at the bound men with his sabre. Forrest decided that erecting gallows would take too long and, dragging the captives to a cotton barn, proceeded to hold a kangaroo court [4]. The “evidence” was presented and, without hearing from the defendants, Forrest sentenced them to death by firing squad. Before the slaves could properly protest, the militiamen were already dragging them outside. Forrest ordered their heads placed on pikes near the African village, saying “let this be a warning to all would-be insurrectionists: failure death is your only fate. We will not be replaced, our superior position cannot and will not be usurped.”
After the horrid display of violence, things seemed to have calmed down and Forrest’s son relates that he “had calmed considerably since that apoplectic fury.” Then, a week after the executions, an overseer at Jefferson Davis’s Hurricane plantation was found dead in the cotton fields. While his death was likely due to heatstroke, Davis claimed that it was clear evidence of a percolating slave insurrection. He quickly rode to Carnation with his family and three guards to warn Forrest. This time, Forrest did not fly into a rage. “His face was full of grim determination, and he was calm as he informed us: ‘it is us or them now.’” He sent out a call for volunteers for a “militia to restore tranquillity,” and hundreds answered the call. The militia that Forrest assembled was little more than a mob, hungering for violence. Forrest and his posse started at Hurricane plantation, where they surrounded the slave quarters [5]. From his horse, Forrest accused them of harboring insurrectionists, the killers of the overseer, and demanded that they be handed over. The confused and terrified slaves began to murmur among themselves. The murmur rose into a panic as some slaves pleaded for mercy while others ran around trying to find an avenue of escape.
Deciding that enough time had been wasted, one of Forrest’s men shot and killed a young man and wounded his wife and father. As some slaves tried to make a run for it, Forrest declared that they were “if not insurrectionists, sympathizers to the black barbarians and just as guilty.” He ordered them all seized, and his frenzied mob surged forward. One enslaved man attempting to flee was shot in the back, and then Forrest’s men opened fire, shooting their weapons indiscriminately. Some, worried about friendly fire, started hacking about with knives and axes. As the killing reached a crescendo, slaves sought refuge inside the huts. In response, Forrest ordered them burned down, with the slaves still inside. While a few managed to escape, most of the survivors were put through a kangaroo court and shot. Over 315 enslaved people were killed in the Hurricane massacre, but amid the chaos, rumors spread of a slave insurrection and other white mobs formed, going from plantation to plantation and killing innocent men, women, and children. By the end of June, nearly 800 enslaved people had been killed, their rotting bodies piled up beside the roads.
News of the massacres was broken in the north by the New-York Tribune, which published reports of “vicious murders of negroes in the Delta Country of Mississippi,” based on the account of a northern businessman who had stopped at the Vicksburg railway station. Further evidence was furnished by the Pennsylvanian Advocate, which relied upon the eyewitness testimony of two slaves at Hurricane. Isaiah Montgomery [6], and Benjamin T. Green. Montgomery, the only literate one of the pair, relayed to the Advocate the harrowing tale of the indiscriminate killings at Hurricane and throughout the Delta, and how he and Green managed to just barely elude Forrest’s posse. The article closed with the lines “this orgy of race-killing has drenched the delta in the blood of the innocent. Col. Forrest is little more than a barbarian blinded by bloodlust.” Days later, the Advocate also published photographs of Forrest and his mob standing by the burned slave quarters and corpses that were taken by a northern amateur photographer.
The north was outraged by the month-long killing spree. In the Senate, James Blaine furiously condemned slavery, claiming that “the pretension that the white man is superior to, and entitled to ownership of, the negro is a corrosive one. It reduces men to the level of beasts. Just as the bodies of the slain putrefy the wells of the Mississippi delta, the vitriol in their killers putrefy the values, the moral fiber, of our Republic. It is more than a crime; it is a stain on what we hold dear as Americans.” Others were even more blunt, with James Garfield calling Forrest “one of the worst, most savage bloodletters in civilization.” President Hendricks remained largely silent except to condemn the “unbecoming brutality” of Forrest’s mob. In a startling breach of decorum, Whig senators loudly booed Senator Edmund Pettus when he rose to defend Forrest as “acting swiftly and decisively to crush a real slave plot.” Roscoe Conkling yelled out “you lie! The blood of the slain is on your hands just as much as it is on theirs’!”
The prospect of abolishing slavery had seemed radical to many northerners before news of the Red Delta broke. But after, abolition was increasingly seen as the only way to end the violence and human rights abuses of black southerners. If only it were that simple…”
From CHAINS BROKEN, CHAINS SHACKLED by Edward Northam, published 2011
“And to those who say that the Red Delta massacre is who we are as a nation, that all of our sacred values and lofty ideals can be distilled down to the base, thuggish, contemptible savagery of a bunch of racists. To those who tar the entire country, your country, and my country, as no better than a vile tragedy from a hundred and fifty years ago, who claim that tragedy as grounds to erase every good thing that’s ever happened here, let me say this: regardless of the past, regardless of the suffering of generations past, we as a nation have taken great strides towards equality, towards justice, towards freedom. Perhaps the greatest testament to the greatness of this nation is that all that came before us is not who we are now [7].”
-Senator Thad Marshall (W-Neb.) delivering the keynote address at the 2020 WNC, July 14th, 2020
[1] OTL it belonged to his brother, TTL Jefferson inherits it after his brother’s death.
[2] This is both insane and 100% real. I couldn’t make this stuff up.
[3] This just seems like, amid lots of revivalist architecture, what slavers with too much ill-gotten money would do.
[4] Funnily enough, the term kangaroo court was mentioned in American newspapers as early as either 1853 or 1841.
[5] Similar to the opening of OTL’s Fort Pillow Massacre, where Forrest led troops in massacring Union POWs, many of whom were black.
[6] The son of Benjamin Montgomery, a slave of Joseph Davis who Davis taught to read and write and made him a trusted overseer/manager of the plantation. His son Isaiah was also taught to read and write.
[7] Taken from the (great) song this chapter’s title is taken from, The Killing Fields by Rosanne Cash.
“Nathan Bedford Forrest was one of the wealthiest men in the south, growing rich not only from the Mississippi plantations he owned, but also the slave trading business he founded in Memphis. The civil war interfered with his slave trading endeavors, and the fact that Mississippi and Tennessee were on opposite sides of the war didn’t help his finances. After the war, Forrest sold his trading business and moved south to Vicksburg, where he had purchased land next to Jefferson Davis’s Hurricane Plantation [1].
Forrest’s fortunes recovered as his network of plantations returned to profitability, and he took to improving his Vicksburg plantation, named Carnation. The main house was expanded into a mansion that Jefferson Davis once described in a letter as a “Moorish monstrosity”, and two guest houses were constructed. Forrest read journals on “scientific racism”, becoming particularly interested in the made-up condition of “drapetomania” that Samuel Cartwright claimed was a mental disorder that caused slaves to escape [2]. In 1877, Forrest decided that if he rebuilt his slave quarters at Carnation to model his idea of an “African village,” it would make his slaves feel at home and induce them to stay. This consisted of mud-brick huts with thatched roofs that were generally poorer shelter than even the previous wooden shacks [3]. Jefferson Davis found the endeavour “amusing” and replaced his own slave quarters with similar “African huts,” and the trend quickly spread throughout the plantations of the Mississippi delta.
The decision by Maryland to abolish slavery, as well as Virginia’s constitution that not only abolished slavery but sought to dismantle as thoroughly as possible the old plantocracy, troubled Forrest. “If even the Old Dominion and other noble southern states have moved towards radicalism, this bodes ill for our southern way of life in Mississippi,” he wrote to a friend. “I have no doubt that the negroes here will become restless – even if word doesn’t spread, the abolition up in Richmond will be a miasma, the stench of blacks rampaging about in the Tidewater will subconsciously infect the blacks here.”
This was the backdrop for the Red Delta.
On June 3rd, 1879, a warm and unusually dry day, one of the guest houses at Carnation caught fire and burned down, killing one of Forrest’s friends. Forrest, described as “generally mild-mannered unless provoked, flew into a rage when he heard of the fire. “His face was red with fury,” his son wrote. “He paced about in a frenzy.” The next day, Forrest assembled a posse of several dozen armed men and rode into the slave quarters. Each hut was ruthlessly searched as the confused and worried slaves looked on. “It was like a small army had invaded the village,” Forrest’s son recalled in his memoirs. “Negroes old and young milled about while the militiamen searched for weapons and evidence. There was a preponderance of it.” His son was lying, however – though Forrest loudly proclaimed from horseback that “kegs of powder, dozens of rifles, hundreds of bullets, all the trappings of a slave insurrection” were discovered, there is no evidence that any such plot or weapons cache existed.
Forrest and his men seized the male occupants of the hut where the weapons were discovered, as well as the male occupants of two neighbouring huts. “Here are the arsonists, the murders, the savage barbarians who seek to kill every last white man in the union,” Forrest declared, gesturing at the bound men with his sabre. Forrest decided that erecting gallows would take too long and, dragging the captives to a cotton barn, proceeded to hold a kangaroo court [4]. The “evidence” was presented and, without hearing from the defendants, Forrest sentenced them to death by firing squad. Before the slaves could properly protest, the militiamen were already dragging them outside. Forrest ordered their heads placed on pikes near the African village, saying “let this be a warning to all would-be insurrectionists: failure death is your only fate. We will not be replaced, our superior position cannot and will not be usurped.”
After the horrid display of violence, things seemed to have calmed down and Forrest’s son relates that he “had calmed considerably since that apoplectic fury.” Then, a week after the executions, an overseer at Jefferson Davis’s Hurricane plantation was found dead in the cotton fields. While his death was likely due to heatstroke, Davis claimed that it was clear evidence of a percolating slave insurrection. He quickly rode to Carnation with his family and three guards to warn Forrest. This time, Forrest did not fly into a rage. “His face was full of grim determination, and he was calm as he informed us: ‘it is us or them now.’” He sent out a call for volunteers for a “militia to restore tranquillity,” and hundreds answered the call. The militia that Forrest assembled was little more than a mob, hungering for violence. Forrest and his posse started at Hurricane plantation, where they surrounded the slave quarters [5]. From his horse, Forrest accused them of harboring insurrectionists, the killers of the overseer, and demanded that they be handed over. The confused and terrified slaves began to murmur among themselves. The murmur rose into a panic as some slaves pleaded for mercy while others ran around trying to find an avenue of escape.
Deciding that enough time had been wasted, one of Forrest’s men shot and killed a young man and wounded his wife and father. As some slaves tried to make a run for it, Forrest declared that they were “if not insurrectionists, sympathizers to the black barbarians and just as guilty.” He ordered them all seized, and his frenzied mob surged forward. One enslaved man attempting to flee was shot in the back, and then Forrest’s men opened fire, shooting their weapons indiscriminately. Some, worried about friendly fire, started hacking about with knives and axes. As the killing reached a crescendo, slaves sought refuge inside the huts. In response, Forrest ordered them burned down, with the slaves still inside. While a few managed to escape, most of the survivors were put through a kangaroo court and shot. Over 315 enslaved people were killed in the Hurricane massacre, but amid the chaos, rumors spread of a slave insurrection and other white mobs formed, going from plantation to plantation and killing innocent men, women, and children. By the end of June, nearly 800 enslaved people had been killed, their rotting bodies piled up beside the roads.
News of the massacres was broken in the north by the New-York Tribune, which published reports of “vicious murders of negroes in the Delta Country of Mississippi,” based on the account of a northern businessman who had stopped at the Vicksburg railway station. Further evidence was furnished by the Pennsylvanian Advocate, which relied upon the eyewitness testimony of two slaves at Hurricane. Isaiah Montgomery [6], and Benjamin T. Green. Montgomery, the only literate one of the pair, relayed to the Advocate the harrowing tale of the indiscriminate killings at Hurricane and throughout the Delta, and how he and Green managed to just barely elude Forrest’s posse. The article closed with the lines “this orgy of race-killing has drenched the delta in the blood of the innocent. Col. Forrest is little more than a barbarian blinded by bloodlust.” Days later, the Advocate also published photographs of Forrest and his mob standing by the burned slave quarters and corpses that were taken by a northern amateur photographer.
The north was outraged by the month-long killing spree. In the Senate, James Blaine furiously condemned slavery, claiming that “the pretension that the white man is superior to, and entitled to ownership of, the negro is a corrosive one. It reduces men to the level of beasts. Just as the bodies of the slain putrefy the wells of the Mississippi delta, the vitriol in their killers putrefy the values, the moral fiber, of our Republic. It is more than a crime; it is a stain on what we hold dear as Americans.” Others were even more blunt, with James Garfield calling Forrest “one of the worst, most savage bloodletters in civilization.” President Hendricks remained largely silent except to condemn the “unbecoming brutality” of Forrest’s mob. In a startling breach of decorum, Whig senators loudly booed Senator Edmund Pettus when he rose to defend Forrest as “acting swiftly and decisively to crush a real slave plot.” Roscoe Conkling yelled out “you lie! The blood of the slain is on your hands just as much as it is on theirs’!”
The prospect of abolishing slavery had seemed radical to many northerners before news of the Red Delta broke. But after, abolition was increasingly seen as the only way to end the violence and human rights abuses of black southerners. If only it were that simple…”
From CHAINS BROKEN, CHAINS SHACKLED by Edward Northam, published 2011
“And to those who say that the Red Delta massacre is who we are as a nation, that all of our sacred values and lofty ideals can be distilled down to the base, thuggish, contemptible savagery of a bunch of racists. To those who tar the entire country, your country, and my country, as no better than a vile tragedy from a hundred and fifty years ago, who claim that tragedy as grounds to erase every good thing that’s ever happened here, let me say this: regardless of the past, regardless of the suffering of generations past, we as a nation have taken great strides towards equality, towards justice, towards freedom. Perhaps the greatest testament to the greatness of this nation is that all that came before us is not who we are now [7].”
-Senator Thad Marshall (W-Neb.) delivering the keynote address at the 2020 WNC, July 14th, 2020
[1] OTL it belonged to his brother, TTL Jefferson inherits it after his brother’s death.
[2] This is both insane and 100% real. I couldn’t make this stuff up.
[3] This just seems like, amid lots of revivalist architecture, what slavers with too much ill-gotten money would do.
[4] Funnily enough, the term kangaroo court was mentioned in American newspapers as early as either 1853 or 1841.
[5] Similar to the opening of OTL’s Fort Pillow Massacre, where Forrest led troops in massacring Union POWs, many of whom were black.
[6] The son of Benjamin Montgomery, a slave of Joseph Davis who Davis taught to read and write and made him a trusted overseer/manager of the plantation. His son Isaiah was also taught to read and write.
[7] Taken from the (great) song this chapter’s title is taken from, The Killing Fields by Rosanne Cash.
Yeah one of the things I feel I haven't gone into until now is the horrors of slavery. Focusing on the efforts of abolitionists is only half of the story, the violence inherent in slavery is the other half.
Yeah that is about the expected result of a looming spectre of end of slavery, but no real power pushing it that way across the South given the unusual* level of concern about what the former slaves would then do.
*I say unusual because it feels to me that while other places with racism based slavery talked much of the same points there was a sort of wide-spread assumption the ex-slaves wouldn't amount to anything, so just releasing them all and moving on settled everything, where (Southern) Americans of the time tended to argue what blacks would do afterwards as one of the key points of maintaining slavery.
Hum... Maybe the Old Republic is more of a disaster and even the terrible government they eventually built never materializes, so you get a bunch of bad regional governments limping along for decades until someone gets into power(probably in the most theoretically powerful parts), decides to get centralization going again, is powerful enough to disrupt the other governments, then botches it so badly it all just collapses?
A rather unlikely set of circumstances either ITTL or OTL, but it could plausibly happen and is the most likely scenario I can think of for violence to become widespread.
*I say unusual because it feels to me that while other places with racism based slavery talked much of the same points there was a sort of wide-spread assumption the ex-slaves wouldn't amount to anything, so just releasing them all and moving on settled everything, where (Southern) Americans of the time tended to argue what blacks would do afterwards as one of the key points of maintaining slavery.
That is curious, can't think of anything in this TL that would cause such massive cultural change as to allow widespread violence of that level.
Hum... Maybe the Old Republic is more of a disaster and even the terrible government they eventually built never materializes, so you get a bunch of bad regional governments limping along for decades until someone gets into power(probably in the most theoretically powerful parts), decides to get centralization going again, is powerful enough to disrupt the other governments, then botches it so badly it all just collapses?
A rather unlikely set of circumstances either ITTL or OTL, but it could plausibly happen and is the most likely scenario I can think of for violence to become widespread.
Yeah, southerners where terrified out of their minds about a slave insurrection and even Unionists like Frank Blair went around warning that blacks would rise up and kill the white people if they were freed. Here that paranoia boils over into mass murder.
My test thread has a rough sketch of how Brazil ends up, but the empire survives under an unpopular son of Pedro II, who gets into a war with Argentina that destabilizes the country. There are some very loose parallels to Russia there, I guess. The outcome, an anarcho-communist federation, is rather different from Russia.
40. Geopolitical Shifts
40. Geopolitical Shifts
“While Mazzini had long desired to incorporate the Two Sicilies into the Republic, the Liberals were less keen on the idea. They still wanted to annex Lombardy and Venice, but those were mercantile, industrial regions. The Two Sicilies was seen as a backwards agrarian country (it had a literacy rate of 13%, compared to the Republic’s literacy rate of 49%), and while the Liberals made noises about fully unifying the peninsula, they viewed incorporating a “barbaric” land like the Two Sicilies as a difficult task that wasn’t worth the effort.
The Two Sicilies, meanwhile, was in a period of upheaval. The global economic downturn that began in 1877 hit the country’s agrarian economy hard. The peasantry, already saddled with much of the tax burden and high rent, were forced further into poverty. As agricultural exports dried up and taxes raised to keep the government solvent, peasant strikes broke out in eastern Sicily. Peasants formed associations known as Fasci to coordinate their protests, following the example of urban trade unions. In June of 1878, a peasant conference issued a series of demands to the landowners in the form of a contract. When the landowners refused to negotiate, the peasants went on strike and also refused to pay their onerous tax burden. The Fasci also petitioned King Francis II, with the understanding that these injustices were only happening because the King did not know about them, and he would rectify them upon learning of them. In reality, Francis refused to act and demanded that the payment of taxes resume. The next month, miners in Agrigento went on strike.
The Sicilian ruling elite became terrified that the much-feared “upheaval” had arrived. King Francis II ordered troops to suppress the strikes and force the strikers back to work. This only intensified the struggle and by the end of August, much of Sicily was in rebellion. Into the chaos stepped Menotti Garibaldi, who was almost as talented as his illustrious father, and equally as ardent a believer in Italian nationalism. Garibaldi assembled a force of some 750 in Genoa and departed for Marsala with a tacit French escort. On September 24th, Garibaldi captured the town of Salemi and declared himself the provisional leader of Sicily in the name of Rome’s Mazzinist consul Giovanni Nicotera. Nicotera was aware of Garibaldi’s expedition and had tacitly supplied him with arms and ships for the undertaking. Garibaldi also received support from the government of the Piedmontese Republic [1].
After defeating a company of Sicilian troops at Calatafimi, Garibaldi proceeded east quickly, as the greatest unrest was in the east. His plan was to take much of the restive countryside and then besiege Palermo. His proclamations promising land reform and the easement of the tax burden won his army thousands of volunteers from the Fasci. The defending garrison of Palermo was weakened from troops being reassigned to suppressing the peasant revolts, leaving just 6,000 men to hold the city. Over the course of four days, Garibaldi steadily advanced through the city, forcing its defenders into a steady retreat. By October 11th, much of Palermo was taken and Garibaldi declared the King’s authority deposed. Sicilian troops were hastily moved from the east to Palermo to try and retake it, but this only allowed the Fasci to seize control of the countryside. Garibaldi recruited brigands with promises of land reform, further growing his army.
As the government in Naples lost control of Sicily, Consul Nicotera, with the approval of the nationalist-majority Assembly, demanded that Francis II accept Sicilian independence. Francis II refused, confident that the United Kingdom would support him against the radical nationalists. Nicotera, meanwhile, was confident that President Ollivier of France would support him. Thus, on June 2nd, 1879, Roman troops crossed the border into the Two Sicilies. The weakened border guards were quickly overwhelmed as the invaders bore down on Naples.
The Roman intervention sparked an international crisis. The United Kingdom had positioned itself as the Two Sicilies’ main ally [2], and Prime Minister Gladstone dispatched the Royal Navy to blockade Palermo and warn the Republic against further advances. Austria too mobilized its forces along the border with the Republic. President Ollivier intervened on behalf of the Roman Republic, warning Austria against invading. Amid the crisis, King Frederick III of Prussia offered to mediate a peaceful resolution in Berlin, with the conference set for June 17th.
Britain and Austria demanded that the Republic cease its invasion and that Garibaldi retreat from Sicily. This was rebuffed by the Republic, who insisted that Garibaldi was simply helping end “gross abuses” of the Sicilian peasantry. As tensions mounted, France began to waver in their support for Rome, and Ollivier attempted to persuade Nicotera to back down. After another failed round of negotiation on the 20th, Nicotera met privately with Ollivier with a proposed compromise: Rome would end its intervention in the Two Sicilies in exchange for being allowed to annex the Piedmontese Republic. To secure French support, Nicotera promised to cede Savoy to France. Sicily would be run by a joint Sicilian-Roman council of eight men, with Garibaldi as Rome’s chief delegate to said council. The land reform promises made by Garibaldi would be carried out, but not in the rest of the Kingdom. The German Confederation would provide a neutral security apparatus and act as a tiebreaker, while all Sicilian ports would be completely demilitarized. Britain and France could each send observer delegates to the Sicilian council. When this compromise was proposed to the conference, it was reluctantly accepted, and the Treaty of Berlin made the agreement official.
Garibaldi, using his volunteer army, quickly carried out the promised land reform, with only occasional violence. He was popular with many peasants and loathed as a conquering radical by the now-diminished landowner class. Despite the land reform, rule by international council proved ineffectual, and brigandage remained a festering problem. The chaos left by the Roman invasion of Neapolitan Sicily, meanwhile, caused brigandage to surge and plunge much of the countryside into violence. As a result, a massive wave of emigration began, with most of the 1.2 million emigrants going to Argentina [3]. Thus, King Francis was left with little control of his kingdom outside of the large mainland cities, while the enlarged Roman Republic, renaming itself the Italian Republic, stood as the dominant power on the peninsula…”
-From THE GRAND CONSENSUS: EUROPE 1815-1898 by Rebecca Gardner, published 2001
“The long streak of moderate governance in France had generated enormous economic growth, but the expanding industrial working class began to chafe under the pro-business outlook of both the Moderate Republicans and the Party of Order. The global recession had collapsed the French railroad bubble, leading to a general stock market crash in the summer of 1878 and the failure of L’Union Generale bank. The depression left thousands unemployed, and industrial concerns began to cut wages to stay open. While the unemployed protested a lack of government assistance, workers protested wage cuts. These protests often deteriorated into riots, such as when Paris and Lyon were rocked by three days of labor unrest in August.
By 1880, the poor economy had yet to let up, and the strikes and riots continued sporadically. Fed up with the inaction of his party, Moderate Republican deputy Leon Gambetta formed a splinter party in 1879, the Radical Union. Joined by supporters from within the Moderates as well as the socialist and radical minor parties, Gambetta formed a formidable left-wing coalition with which to contest the 1880 elections. The weakened Moderate Republicans selected Charles de Freycinet, the able prime minister. However, Freycinet’s moderate politics did little to appeal to the departed Radicals. The Party of Order was in decline due to the rightward shift of the Moderates, and nominated the aged monarchist Frederic de Falloux, a supporter of religious education.
Gambetta ran on a sweeping platform: the legalization of trade unions, a ten-hour workday, a national pension scheme and workplace injury fund, and the direct election of mayors and some civil servants. Against two uninspiring, conservative opponents, Gambetta won a strong victory in December, defeating Freycinet and Falloux 51-34-11. In the legislative elections, the Radical Union won a majority of 378 seats out of 705. Operating under Gambetta’s Belleville Program, the new government set about implementing its far-reaching agenda. The legalization of trade unions, the implementation of a ten-hour workday, and the passage of the National Pension Program set France at the fore of the European nations.”
-From THE REPUBLIC: A HISTORY OF MODERN FRANCE by Eric Young, published 2003
“Under Frederick III, Prussian society continued to gradually modernize. The Landtag took on greater influence in crafting the budget, including a string of military budgets that greatly modernized the army [4] and funded an expansion of the Prussian Baltic fleet [5]. Dominated by the German Progress Party during the 1860s, the House of Representatives generally got along with Minister-President Karl Anton von Hohenzollern-Sigmaringen (who returned to the office in 1863). As the country industrialized, the old, landowner-dominated Conservative Party lost ground. Though it often formed the single largest party, the Conservatives were frequently outvoted by broad coalitions of the more numerous liberal and left-wing parties. In 1870, National Liberal Party, led by Max von Forckenbeck, secured 124 seats to the Conservatives’ 94. The left-wing German Progress Party won 51 seats, while the Conservatives bled votes to the industrialist-conservative Free Conservatives, who sided with the Liberals on matters of free trade and industrial development.
The new House had a nearly two-thirds majority of liberal parties, and shortly after the new Landtag convened, Minister-President von Hohenzollern-Sigmaringen announced his retirement from the position that he had held for a decade.
Frederick, who harbored his own liberal inclinations, appointed the moderate Liberal leader Max von Forckenbeck as Minister-President. The former mayor of Breslau, Forckenbeck had worked to improve the education system and develop local infrastructure. His ascension to Minister-President was welcomed by many of his colleagues, and he sought to strengthen Prussian industry, and Prussian influence in the Zollverein customs union. One of the first acts of his ministry was the consolidation of Prussia’s myriad Notenbanken (Note Banks) into a central Reichsbank, which issued a single national currency, the Goldmark. He also implemented another crucial element of German monetary policy when, in 1874, he successfully renegotiated the 1857 Vienna Coinage Treaty. Forckenbeck secured the assent of Austria and the other minor states of the German Confederation to tying the three currencies within the Zollverein to the gold standard. This eased currency exchanges and provided greater monetary stability. He also negotiated the entry of Hamburg and Bremen into the Zollverein, placing all of the German states within the customs union.
During the depression of the late 1870s, the Liberals refused to implement tariffs, temporarily harming their popularity. However, as the European economy recovered during the mid-1880s, Prussia used its surviving free-trade agreements to flood newly eager European markets with Prussian-made industrial goods, establishing Prussia and the Zollverein as a whole as economic titans, rivalling Britain, and France. By the time Forckenbeck retired in 1886, Prussia was rising as the dominant power within the Confederation and the Zollverein, as the increasingly intertwined German economy drew the disparate states within closer together, and closer to Prussia…”
-From THE PRUSSIAN MODEL by John Harper, published 1998
“…prevalent anti-Catholic sentiment in the United States often focused in on the Irish. As a result, Argentine recruiters were able to steer many Irish seeking to emigrate towards Argentina. Irish community leaders helped by encouraging Argentina as an emigration destination. Under President Roca, immigration fueled a large economic boom that was slowed but not halted by the worldwide downturn [6]. Between 1830 and 1890, over 750,000 Irish immigrated to Argentina [7], helping fuel its eventual rise as a leading regional power…”
-From ARGENTINA: A MODERN HISTORY by Jessica Harvey, published 2011
“…the 1876 arrest and execution of 57 American citizens aboard the Habana [8], a fast merchant ship hired by Cuban rebels. The Habana had been stopped and searched by a Spanish corvette and, upon discovering a hold full of weapons bound for the rebels, seized the ship, and charged its crew with piracy. 57 of the crewmen were executed amid growing international outrage. Many newspapers in the United States called for war with Spain, while the Hendricks administration tried to find a diplomatic solution. Secretary of State Rosecrans [9] was highly inexperienced and demanded the return of the ship and surviving crew, $10,000 in reparations per executed crewman, a salute from Spain of the American flag, and “harsh punishment” for the perpetrators. Negotiations grew heated and Spain refused to budge. The Spanish government found that the American ambassador to Spain, Daniel Sickles, was equally belligerent.
Amid public frenzy in both the United States and Spain, President Hendricks, on the recommendation of Rosecrans, ordered the Spanish legation in Washington closed until American demands were met [10]. Finally, after almost a month of growing tension, Hendricks dismissed Sickles and replaced him with Thomas Bayard, who proved a much better negotiator. Bayard dropped the demands for a salute and the return of the Habana but reiterated that the surviving crew had to be returned. He was willing to accept $6,000 per executed crewman in place of $10,000, however. This proved acceptable to the Spanish, and the crisis ended a month after it began. But public anger in both countries did not dissipate entirely, and the United States and Spain would clash again two decades later…”
-From TO THE BRINK: AMERICA AND SPAIN by Llewellyn Carroll, published 2003
[1] As mentioned in chapter 22, the kingdom was overthrown.
[2] OTL, Britain backed the Italians because the Two Sicilies were too friendly to Russia. TTL, without a war with Russia and with time, the Two Sicilies come under British influence.
[3] More on this once we get to the late 1880s and early 1890s.
[4] The Landtag wasn’t opposed to the reforms that Wilhelm I proposed, but the fact that they hadn’t been consulted. Here, having a role in the process makes them more supportive of military modernization.
[5] After getting shown up by the Danes, the Prussians want a proper navy.
[6] Without many of the causes of the OTL Long Depression, TTL’s depression is bad but less severe, especially in less industrialized countries.
[7] TTL, most Irish immigrants stay in Argentina rather than go back home or continue to the United States.
[8] OTL the Confederate commerce raider CSS Sumter
[9] OTL, Hamilton Fish was SecState and brokered a quicker end to the standoff.
[10] OTL, President Grant and his cabinet agreed to do this if there was no reparation. Here, with a more drawn-out crisis, Hendricks goes forward with it.
“While Mazzini had long desired to incorporate the Two Sicilies into the Republic, the Liberals were less keen on the idea. They still wanted to annex Lombardy and Venice, but those were mercantile, industrial regions. The Two Sicilies was seen as a backwards agrarian country (it had a literacy rate of 13%, compared to the Republic’s literacy rate of 49%), and while the Liberals made noises about fully unifying the peninsula, they viewed incorporating a “barbaric” land like the Two Sicilies as a difficult task that wasn’t worth the effort.
The Two Sicilies, meanwhile, was in a period of upheaval. The global economic downturn that began in 1877 hit the country’s agrarian economy hard. The peasantry, already saddled with much of the tax burden and high rent, were forced further into poverty. As agricultural exports dried up and taxes raised to keep the government solvent, peasant strikes broke out in eastern Sicily. Peasants formed associations known as Fasci to coordinate their protests, following the example of urban trade unions. In June of 1878, a peasant conference issued a series of demands to the landowners in the form of a contract. When the landowners refused to negotiate, the peasants went on strike and also refused to pay their onerous tax burden. The Fasci also petitioned King Francis II, with the understanding that these injustices were only happening because the King did not know about them, and he would rectify them upon learning of them. In reality, Francis refused to act and demanded that the payment of taxes resume. The next month, miners in Agrigento went on strike.
The Sicilian ruling elite became terrified that the much-feared “upheaval” had arrived. King Francis II ordered troops to suppress the strikes and force the strikers back to work. This only intensified the struggle and by the end of August, much of Sicily was in rebellion. Into the chaos stepped Menotti Garibaldi, who was almost as talented as his illustrious father, and equally as ardent a believer in Italian nationalism. Garibaldi assembled a force of some 750 in Genoa and departed for Marsala with a tacit French escort. On September 24th, Garibaldi captured the town of Salemi and declared himself the provisional leader of Sicily in the name of Rome’s Mazzinist consul Giovanni Nicotera. Nicotera was aware of Garibaldi’s expedition and had tacitly supplied him with arms and ships for the undertaking. Garibaldi also received support from the government of the Piedmontese Republic [1].
After defeating a company of Sicilian troops at Calatafimi, Garibaldi proceeded east quickly, as the greatest unrest was in the east. His plan was to take much of the restive countryside and then besiege Palermo. His proclamations promising land reform and the easement of the tax burden won his army thousands of volunteers from the Fasci. The defending garrison of Palermo was weakened from troops being reassigned to suppressing the peasant revolts, leaving just 6,000 men to hold the city. Over the course of four days, Garibaldi steadily advanced through the city, forcing its defenders into a steady retreat. By October 11th, much of Palermo was taken and Garibaldi declared the King’s authority deposed. Sicilian troops were hastily moved from the east to Palermo to try and retake it, but this only allowed the Fasci to seize control of the countryside. Garibaldi recruited brigands with promises of land reform, further growing his army.
As the government in Naples lost control of Sicily, Consul Nicotera, with the approval of the nationalist-majority Assembly, demanded that Francis II accept Sicilian independence. Francis II refused, confident that the United Kingdom would support him against the radical nationalists. Nicotera, meanwhile, was confident that President Ollivier of France would support him. Thus, on June 2nd, 1879, Roman troops crossed the border into the Two Sicilies. The weakened border guards were quickly overwhelmed as the invaders bore down on Naples.
The Roman intervention sparked an international crisis. The United Kingdom had positioned itself as the Two Sicilies’ main ally [2], and Prime Minister Gladstone dispatched the Royal Navy to blockade Palermo and warn the Republic against further advances. Austria too mobilized its forces along the border with the Republic. President Ollivier intervened on behalf of the Roman Republic, warning Austria against invading. Amid the crisis, King Frederick III of Prussia offered to mediate a peaceful resolution in Berlin, with the conference set for June 17th.
Britain and Austria demanded that the Republic cease its invasion and that Garibaldi retreat from Sicily. This was rebuffed by the Republic, who insisted that Garibaldi was simply helping end “gross abuses” of the Sicilian peasantry. As tensions mounted, France began to waver in their support for Rome, and Ollivier attempted to persuade Nicotera to back down. After another failed round of negotiation on the 20th, Nicotera met privately with Ollivier with a proposed compromise: Rome would end its intervention in the Two Sicilies in exchange for being allowed to annex the Piedmontese Republic. To secure French support, Nicotera promised to cede Savoy to France. Sicily would be run by a joint Sicilian-Roman council of eight men, with Garibaldi as Rome’s chief delegate to said council. The land reform promises made by Garibaldi would be carried out, but not in the rest of the Kingdom. The German Confederation would provide a neutral security apparatus and act as a tiebreaker, while all Sicilian ports would be completely demilitarized. Britain and France could each send observer delegates to the Sicilian council. When this compromise was proposed to the conference, it was reluctantly accepted, and the Treaty of Berlin made the agreement official.
Garibaldi, using his volunteer army, quickly carried out the promised land reform, with only occasional violence. He was popular with many peasants and loathed as a conquering radical by the now-diminished landowner class. Despite the land reform, rule by international council proved ineffectual, and brigandage remained a festering problem. The chaos left by the Roman invasion of Neapolitan Sicily, meanwhile, caused brigandage to surge and plunge much of the countryside into violence. As a result, a massive wave of emigration began, with most of the 1.2 million emigrants going to Argentina [3]. Thus, King Francis was left with little control of his kingdom outside of the large mainland cities, while the enlarged Roman Republic, renaming itself the Italian Republic, stood as the dominant power on the peninsula…”
-From THE GRAND CONSENSUS: EUROPE 1815-1898 by Rebecca Gardner, published 2001
“The long streak of moderate governance in France had generated enormous economic growth, but the expanding industrial working class began to chafe under the pro-business outlook of both the Moderate Republicans and the Party of Order. The global recession had collapsed the French railroad bubble, leading to a general stock market crash in the summer of 1878 and the failure of L’Union Generale bank. The depression left thousands unemployed, and industrial concerns began to cut wages to stay open. While the unemployed protested a lack of government assistance, workers protested wage cuts. These protests often deteriorated into riots, such as when Paris and Lyon were rocked by three days of labor unrest in August.
By 1880, the poor economy had yet to let up, and the strikes and riots continued sporadically. Fed up with the inaction of his party, Moderate Republican deputy Leon Gambetta formed a splinter party in 1879, the Radical Union. Joined by supporters from within the Moderates as well as the socialist and radical minor parties, Gambetta formed a formidable left-wing coalition with which to contest the 1880 elections. The weakened Moderate Republicans selected Charles de Freycinet, the able prime minister. However, Freycinet’s moderate politics did little to appeal to the departed Radicals. The Party of Order was in decline due to the rightward shift of the Moderates, and nominated the aged monarchist Frederic de Falloux, a supporter of religious education.
Gambetta ran on a sweeping platform: the legalization of trade unions, a ten-hour workday, a national pension scheme and workplace injury fund, and the direct election of mayors and some civil servants. Against two uninspiring, conservative opponents, Gambetta won a strong victory in December, defeating Freycinet and Falloux 51-34-11. In the legislative elections, the Radical Union won a majority of 378 seats out of 705. Operating under Gambetta’s Belleville Program, the new government set about implementing its far-reaching agenda. The legalization of trade unions, the implementation of a ten-hour workday, and the passage of the National Pension Program set France at the fore of the European nations.”
-From THE REPUBLIC: A HISTORY OF MODERN FRANCE by Eric Young, published 2003
“Under Frederick III, Prussian society continued to gradually modernize. The Landtag took on greater influence in crafting the budget, including a string of military budgets that greatly modernized the army [4] and funded an expansion of the Prussian Baltic fleet [5]. Dominated by the German Progress Party during the 1860s, the House of Representatives generally got along with Minister-President Karl Anton von Hohenzollern-Sigmaringen (who returned to the office in 1863). As the country industrialized, the old, landowner-dominated Conservative Party lost ground. Though it often formed the single largest party, the Conservatives were frequently outvoted by broad coalitions of the more numerous liberal and left-wing parties. In 1870, National Liberal Party, led by Max von Forckenbeck, secured 124 seats to the Conservatives’ 94. The left-wing German Progress Party won 51 seats, while the Conservatives bled votes to the industrialist-conservative Free Conservatives, who sided with the Liberals on matters of free trade and industrial development.
The new House had a nearly two-thirds majority of liberal parties, and shortly after the new Landtag convened, Minister-President von Hohenzollern-Sigmaringen announced his retirement from the position that he had held for a decade.
Frederick, who harbored his own liberal inclinations, appointed the moderate Liberal leader Max von Forckenbeck as Minister-President. The former mayor of Breslau, Forckenbeck had worked to improve the education system and develop local infrastructure. His ascension to Minister-President was welcomed by many of his colleagues, and he sought to strengthen Prussian industry, and Prussian influence in the Zollverein customs union. One of the first acts of his ministry was the consolidation of Prussia’s myriad Notenbanken (Note Banks) into a central Reichsbank, which issued a single national currency, the Goldmark. He also implemented another crucial element of German monetary policy when, in 1874, he successfully renegotiated the 1857 Vienna Coinage Treaty. Forckenbeck secured the assent of Austria and the other minor states of the German Confederation to tying the three currencies within the Zollverein to the gold standard. This eased currency exchanges and provided greater monetary stability. He also negotiated the entry of Hamburg and Bremen into the Zollverein, placing all of the German states within the customs union.
During the depression of the late 1870s, the Liberals refused to implement tariffs, temporarily harming their popularity. However, as the European economy recovered during the mid-1880s, Prussia used its surviving free-trade agreements to flood newly eager European markets with Prussian-made industrial goods, establishing Prussia and the Zollverein as a whole as economic titans, rivalling Britain, and France. By the time Forckenbeck retired in 1886, Prussia was rising as the dominant power within the Confederation and the Zollverein, as the increasingly intertwined German economy drew the disparate states within closer together, and closer to Prussia…”
-From THE PRUSSIAN MODEL by John Harper, published 1998
“…prevalent anti-Catholic sentiment in the United States often focused in on the Irish. As a result, Argentine recruiters were able to steer many Irish seeking to emigrate towards Argentina. Irish community leaders helped by encouraging Argentina as an emigration destination. Under President Roca, immigration fueled a large economic boom that was slowed but not halted by the worldwide downturn [6]. Between 1830 and 1890, over 750,000 Irish immigrated to Argentina [7], helping fuel its eventual rise as a leading regional power…”
-From ARGENTINA: A MODERN HISTORY by Jessica Harvey, published 2011
“…the 1876 arrest and execution of 57 American citizens aboard the Habana [8], a fast merchant ship hired by Cuban rebels. The Habana had been stopped and searched by a Spanish corvette and, upon discovering a hold full of weapons bound for the rebels, seized the ship, and charged its crew with piracy. 57 of the crewmen were executed amid growing international outrage. Many newspapers in the United States called for war with Spain, while the Hendricks administration tried to find a diplomatic solution. Secretary of State Rosecrans [9] was highly inexperienced and demanded the return of the ship and surviving crew, $10,000 in reparations per executed crewman, a salute from Spain of the American flag, and “harsh punishment” for the perpetrators. Negotiations grew heated and Spain refused to budge. The Spanish government found that the American ambassador to Spain, Daniel Sickles, was equally belligerent.
Amid public frenzy in both the United States and Spain, President Hendricks, on the recommendation of Rosecrans, ordered the Spanish legation in Washington closed until American demands were met [10]. Finally, after almost a month of growing tension, Hendricks dismissed Sickles and replaced him with Thomas Bayard, who proved a much better negotiator. Bayard dropped the demands for a salute and the return of the Habana but reiterated that the surviving crew had to be returned. He was willing to accept $6,000 per executed crewman in place of $10,000, however. This proved acceptable to the Spanish, and the crisis ended a month after it began. But public anger in both countries did not dissipate entirely, and the United States and Spain would clash again two decades later…”
-From TO THE BRINK: AMERICA AND SPAIN by Llewellyn Carroll, published 2003
[1] As mentioned in chapter 22, the kingdom was overthrown.
[2] OTL, Britain backed the Italians because the Two Sicilies were too friendly to Russia. TTL, without a war with Russia and with time, the Two Sicilies come under British influence.
[3] More on this once we get to the late 1880s and early 1890s.
[4] The Landtag wasn’t opposed to the reforms that Wilhelm I proposed, but the fact that they hadn’t been consulted. Here, having a role in the process makes them more supportive of military modernization.
[5] After getting shown up by the Danes, the Prussians want a proper navy.
[6] Without many of the causes of the OTL Long Depression, TTL’s depression is bad but less severe, especially in less industrialized countries.
[7] TTL, most Irish immigrants stay in Argentina rather than go back home or continue to the United States.
[8] OTL the Confederate commerce raider CSS Sumter
[9] OTL, Hamilton Fish was SecState and brokered a quicker end to the standoff.
[10] OTL, President Grant and his cabinet agreed to do this if there was no reparation. Here, with a more drawn-out crisis, Hendricks goes forward with it.
Interesting to see how M. Gambetta has held together enough of his followers while at the same time consolidating support among the Radicals to obtain a legislative mandate and enact his policies. If I was to guess; the Party of Order will over time evolve into something like the Progressists (sans the followers of Waldeck Rousseau) and move further to the right.
There won't be much of an anticlerical influence due the presence of a large number of monarchist liberals. But I suspect that the party or at least what ever it becomes will consolidate more firmly on the defense of the existing social order (probably won't touch the religious question to avoid rifts with the moderate republicans). At the same time I believe that Gambetta's faction will splinter (if he dies in 1881 IOTL) ; the radicals will form a separate block in the legislature but they'll cooperate enough with the Radical Union to push through many of the turn of the century reforms passed by the governments of Combes, Waldeck Rousseau and so forth much sooner.
Much will depend though on whether the socialist movement is able to gain enough traction and so possibly weaken the left's momentum as time wears on. Maybe it might be the road to rapprochement between the followers of Gambetta (i.e. Poincare, Barthou) and so forth with those of Meline, Freycinet and Ferry; especially seeing as I think ITOL the Democratic-Republican Alliance became more tied to business interests and became more hostile to socialism.
There won't be much of an anticlerical influence due the presence of a large number of monarchist liberals. But I suspect that the party or at least what ever it becomes will consolidate more firmly on the defense of the existing social order (probably won't touch the religious question to avoid rifts with the moderate republicans). At the same time I believe that Gambetta's faction will splinter (if he dies in 1881 IOTL) ; the radicals will form a separate block in the legislature but they'll cooperate enough with the Radical Union to push through many of the turn of the century reforms passed by the governments of Combes, Waldeck Rousseau and so forth much sooner.
Much will depend though on whether the socialist movement is able to gain enough traction and so possibly weaken the left's momentum as time wears on. Maybe it might be the road to rapprochement between the followers of Gambetta (i.e. Poincare, Barthou) and so forth with those of Meline, Freycinet and Ferry; especially seeing as I think ITOL the Democratic-Republican Alliance became more tied to business interests and became more hostile to socialism.
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Pretty much, yeah. Gambetta's much smarter about courting the Left than OTL. And you're right about the Party of Order, the Moderates end up losing most of their membership to either the insurgent Radical Union or the PofO.
From what I've read Gambetta died of an intestinal inflammation (possibly caused by cancer) so if it's not cancer, it's pretty easy to push the guy's death back a decade or so. Probably not more, as he suffered from chronic intestinal ailments but long enough to at least somewhat entrench his party. After his death though, the socialists will split off and form their own party while still, as you said, supporting RU reforms.
And anticlerical laws will be delayed slightly, but once Gambetta dies and his movement splits, the cause will be taken up again. With the Second Republic over 30 years old in 1880, monarchism has largely faded from the mainstream though.
The center-right of the Moderate Republicans leaves after Gambetta's death, as he was what welded them to the radicals. I think something like the DRA would emerge much earlier TTL, possibly around 1890 or so. Combes would likely be the heir to Gambetta's center-left followers.