The Dead Skunk

[Lycaon pictus]

And here we go. I hope everyone thinks it was worth the wait.

* * *


Although David’s 25e Août (1819) is considered by many art historians to be the fifth in his celebrated series Les Garçons de Nancy, it differs from them markedly in its subject matter. Whereas the other paintings show ordinary soldiers in moments of repose or poised to attack, this painting captures the frenetic movement of combat as the emperor commands the artillery to fire on the dark figures of oncoming cavalrymen as they emerge from the swirling gunsmoke. Certainly, what the painting lacks in historical verisimilitude it more than makes up for in drama.
Spitzer & Chauncey, A History of Western Art of the 19th Century

August 25, 1815
11:15 a.m.
Nancy
Well, this was something I didn’t plan for, thought Wellington. The messengers from north and south had come within two minutes of each other. It seemed the French were pulling back on both fronts. The messenger from the north had come first, but he had had a shorter distance to ride.

Just to make things more complicated, instead of retreating west across the river, the French on that wing were falling back onto Custines. In other words, they were falling back onto the exact spot Wellington had planned to go through.

He wondered if Bonaparte was abandoning Nancy entirely. It would make sense — most of the defenses here had been taken already. In any case, he needed to come to a quick decision about which way his force should march.

“Count Colleredo?”

“Yes, Your Grace?”

“There is a change of plan. We will go northwest, taking advantage of the gap in the French line, and cross the Meurthe at Bouxiéres-aux-Dames. Send a messenger to Barclay de Tolly. Tell him — request, I should say” (damn, it was hard not being in command) “that he be prepared to take the offensive against any forces Napoleon might send to intercept us. And order Bull and Drummond north to support Wrede.” Without the artillery, the river could be forded quickly. Right now, the duke needed speed more than firepower.

* * *

This was one of the shallowest parts of the river. The spray kicked up by his horse’s hooves didn’t even touch the soles of Wellington’s boots. To his right, thousands of men were marching through it fifty abreast, stirring the silt into the water, turning the river a richer brown and giving it an earthy smell.

To his left, in the village of Champignuelles about a mile to the southeast, the Russians had formed a line of infantry that ran halfway up the hillside. The line was being attacked savagely by cavalry and field artillery, but showed no sign of retreating just yet. They only had to hold on a little longer — on the spit of land north of the village, where the river veered east and then west again, their compatriots were hastily digging ditches and raising breastworks.

Wellington couldn’t see what was happening around Custines, but the cannon-fire around there had a satisfyingly distant sound. As much as he had started to hate the leaders of this army for their timidity and infighting, he felt profoundly grateful to him at this moment. They were keeping the tyrant’s blade off his neck. Once he got his army over this river and up that hill, it would be time to repay them properly.

And now he was across the Meurthe. Before him lay two thousand feet of farmland — or rather, picked-over and trampled-down fields that afforded no cover for anything bigger than a mouse. The hillside beyond, on the other hand, was still fairly heavily wooded in spite of having been raided for firewood every night for about three weeks. Anything could be hiding in there.

He turned to his immediate left. Major General Kempt had just finished bringing the 8th Brigade across the river. His unit was the first — he was in a hurry to redeem his failure at Sackett’s Harbor. Wellington approached him.

“Sir James,” he said, “take your men up that hill ahead of the rest. If any Frenchmen are lurking in there planning to attack, I want their plans to go awry.”

While the 8th was going up the hill, like hunters beating the bushes for an unusually lethal variety of partridge, Wellington concentrated on
organizing his army on this side. He noted that Campbell’s Hanseatic contingent was bringing up the rear, and had a message sent to him.

“Tell Campbell that I have no intention of imitating Blücher’s fate here today,” he said. “Tell him that whatever happens, he must keep an escape route open to the east — or, if necessary, make one himself.”

* * *

As it turned out, there hadn’t been any Frenchmen lurking in the woods. The trek up the hillside was slow, but quiet. Wellington used the time to consider where Boney was likeliest to be lurking. The sheer number of soldiers on both sides had made scouting missions difficult, but the most obvious answer was that the tyrant was at the barracks some four miles west of the city. Wellington had already dispatched the Prince Consort’s Own to hunt down any French scout and messengers they saw going to and from the barracks.

The trouble was going to be getting to him. The reason Wellington had planned to move so far to the north or south was to take his army out of sight of Bonaparte’s scouts, so that when he attacked, it would be less obvious where. That part of the plan was already a casualty of war. However… He summoned Lord Uxbridge.

In about fifteen minutes, the Second Earl of Uxbridge arrived and stepped off his horse, giving Wellington a salute as polite and respectful as if he hadn’t cuckolded the duke’s brother Henry six years ago.

Without pausing for pleasantries, Wellington told him: “You will take every cavalryman in this army, proceed southwest about three miles, then turn southeast and attack the barracks west of Laxou and everything nearby.” He then turned to Colloredo.

“I want a general attack on this end of the French lines,” he said. “If we can roll up the army, so much the better, but at least we will draw them away from the center.”

* * *

It was… Wellington had no idea how long it was later. Days, surely… but judging by the position of the sun, probably not more than an hour. Less than that, likely. He was on his own feet. Three horses had been shot out from under him.

There was blood on his bayonet. He’d never seen the face of the man whose blood it was, but the man had been in a French uniform, so that was all right. There was a dull ache in his arms and shoulders. It would be a burning agony later. It had been a long time since he had been that close to the fighting. A squad of French grenadiers had blasted a path right through the line of Triple X’s that had been all that was between him and the enemy, and he had been forced to fight for his life before the army could re-form around him.

Tired as he was, distracted as he was, he still knew exactly where his army was and what it was doing. It was digging in on the hillside above Frouard. He had tried to make notes of regiments that had performed particular feats of valor — the Royal Welch Fusiliers driving two French regiments back a hundred yards, the Light Bobs charging through canister to capture a field-piece, the Orange Lillies rescuing a captured scout of the Prince Consort’s Own — but before long he had realized that everybody in his army was fighting like wild boars at bay.

Unfortunately, the French had fought like boarhounds. Finally, he had had to organize a fighting retreat. Otherwise, the retreat would have happened whether he ordered it or not, and might have turned into a rout. As it was, he’d only withdrawn half a mile before the Russians came to keep the French from pressing their advantage too hard. (Campbell was in Frouard right now. Poor sod, he’d been grazed by a Russian bullet. That was now the second time he’d been wounded by a Russian on French soil. War had a bad sense of humor.)

He had no idea how the rest of the battle was going. Apparently the fighting in the north had ended in stalemate. How things were going for Lord Uxbridge, let alone Württemberg… he just didn’t know.

* * *

It had taken Lord Uxbridge over an hour to get into position to attack. The woods were heavy in this part of Lorraine, and a horse galloping through deep forest — assuming you could persuade it to do such a foolish thing — was more likely to trip than a man was, and far more likely to injure itself in so doing. So they had moved at a walk.

The good news was that his men (more often leading their horses than riding them) had moved as quietly as men could, and, with a little help from the Prince Consort’s Own, had taken care of the few scouts. If Boney was ahead, he didn’t know they were coming.

The clearing around the barracks was well over a hundred yards wide, and full of tents. There seemed, from what Lord Uxbridge could tell, to be fewer guards than officers about — most of the fighting men were busy with one army or another. Whatever happened, he was about to do a lot of damage to the French officer corps.

There was sudden movement among the officers. Some of them were glancing toward the woods. One of them must have heard or seen something. Now or never.

He turned and nodded to the bugler.

The horn sounded.

As his horse charged out of the dark forest into the sunlit clearing, Uxbridge fought the urge to shut his eyes. The sudden light was blinding and agonizing, but his eyes would adjust to it soon enough.
In the meantime, there were running figures in dark blue coats all around, screaming and shouting in French. He slashed at them with his saber, wishing he had something longer, like a lance. He would save his firearms for when his vision returned.

A sword slashed at his horse’s side. He spurred it to keep moving. Speed was the only line of defense.

He hadn’t really had time to see what the rest of his force was doing. From what he could tell, they were doing the same thing — charging into the clearing, knocking down tents and killing anything that looked or sounded French.

Now they were at the barracks themselves. Some men who had grenades threw them through the windows. Uxbridge, whose sight had begun to come back, shot at the men who fled. He was pretty sure he’d killed one of them.

He looked around him. All was chaos and confusion and gunsmoke. He let out a yell that wasn’t part of any regiment’s official battle cry.

Then, from the south, came a fresh wave of cavalry. They were on his side, but they had the look of men fleeing rather than attacking.

“Sir!” one of them shouted. “Masséna is coming!”

Uxbridge took a moment to reflect on what he knew of the enemy’s tactical dispositions, then thought Oh, hell. The whole southern wing of the French army had to be folding up like a bear trap, with him in the middle.

It was time to get the hell out of here.

* * *

When Wellington heard the horses coming, he nearly ordered his men to open fire. Then he heard the sound of gunfire coming from somewhere behind them. Those had to be British, returning to him after achieving whatever it was they had done, and the enemy was hot on their heels.

Wellington shouted out a series of orders, creating a gap in his own lines that Uxbridge could charge through while ordering the rest of his men to be ready to throw back the French with volleys. He wished he hadn’t sent the artillery north — now would be a good time for canister.

And there, in the distance, he saw Lord Uxbridge’s head in profile. Just as the British cavalry were starting to make use of the gap, Uxbridge jerked violently… and fell off his horse, in that boneless, rag-doll way that could only mean he was already dead.

In that moment, Wellington couldn’t remember ever having borne a grudge against the man. Two ranks of riflemen were already poised to fire.

And in another moment, the cavalry (or what was left of it — they seemed to have taken some terrible losses along the way) was out of the way.

“FIRE!” shouted the duke.

There was a deafening thunderclap. The enemy disappeared behind a cloud of gunsmoke. The musketeers were already preparing another volley — their weapons were less accurate, but with everyone firing blind that wouldn’t really matter.

And then, a unit of French cavalry came out of the smoke.

It happened very quickly. Wellington dodged a horse as it came past, stuck his sword into the barrel of it, and the horse’s momentum ripped the sword out of his hands. And then… something happened. For the rest of his life Wellington would wonder what it was.

* * *

Wellington rose to his feet. He felt very sick, and his head was in terrible pain that only got worse as he tried to stand, but he was determined to at least see what was going on.

He looked around. He was surrounded by dead men — British and French — and horses. He looked down. His rifle was gone, his sword (wait — he remembered how that had happened) and some utter bastard had stolen his boots.

He touched the side of his head. It was wet and sticky. What had happened to him there? A kick from a horse? No. Men kicked in the head by horses generally didn’t get up again. Probably a blow from the butt of a rifle.

Two Imperial Guardsmen walked up to him. Even if he’d been armed, he was in no shape to resist. He let them take him into custody.

The next few minutes were a blur. He was walking with other prisoners, behind one of those little horse-drawn field ambulances that was carrying someone more badly hurt than he was. The creaking of the wheels was making his head hurt worse. There didn’t seem to be too many prisoners — not more than a thousand — and there hadn't been too many bodies on the ground in British uniforms. Thank you, Campbell, he thought.

In the distance, the French were chanting something. It sounded like bon Jon only not quite. Vengeant? Vengeons? It sounded… bad.

One thing Wellington had learned in a lifetime of war was that, no matter how bad things seemed, they could always get worse. He looked around at the prisoners around him, in case any of them had a notion what was going on.

He made eye contact with one, an officer in the 11th Light Dragoons — the “Cherry Pickers,” a reliable old unit from the Peninsula. The dragoon leaned in close and whispered three words, so quietly Wellington had to read his lips… “Bonaparte is dead.”

 

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The popular image of the Midnight Charge has largely been shaped by the incomparable prose of Victor Hugo. Chapters 49 through 52 of his epic novel Calvaire, in which a segment of the hero’s backstory is related, describe the Charge as a spontaneous outburst of inchoate wrath on the part of the French army, seeing the jubilation of the Germans and Russians at the news of the emperor’s death:

“Through the darkness they ran, heedless of obstacles, all thought of line, column or formation forgotten. The earth trembled beneath four hundred thousand boots. It was as though the forces that drive the wind and tide, that bring down the rain and give speed to the avalanche, had possessed and animated the bodies of all these men, transforming them into something vast and inexorable, a tidal wave with a crest of bayonets that shone in the light of the gibbous moon…”

Calvaire was published in 1868. Since then, many novels of varying quality and at least seven major K-graphs have depicted the Charge, all of them more or less following in Hugo’s footsteps.

Hugo was a novelist, not a historian. To pick the most obvious point, the French didn't have 200,000 troops in shape to fight (and not all of the ones they did have had a full set of boots). Moreover, the fact that separate French corps at varying distances struck the allied troops at virtually the same moment on a battlefield ten miles wide reveals that someone must have given fairly specific orders concerning timing.

The someone was Masséna, who by this point had taken overall command. As he later wrote, "I saw that the sudden rage of our men needed to be used this very night, before fear and despair could set in." And over the course of September and October, as the facts of that night came to light, the French Parliament and Regency Council cited over 400 French officers and sergeants for their efforts in coordinating and channeling the attack.

On the other side, the news of Napoleon’s death, which had indeed roused the French to vengeful fury, had been the cause not only of celebration, but — fatally — relaxation. The Coalition had technically won the engagement of the 25th. The French had virtually been driven from the environs of Nancy. Moreover, if the Seventh Coalition was indeed the “Coalition to Stop Bonaparte,” then the war was already won — the man had been stopped in the most thorough and literal sense.

Thus, the Coalition armies at the highest level viewed the results of the day with complacency and went to bed happy. As for the men who were soon to receive the brunt of the attack, they were physically exhausted to a degree that civilians cannot easily imagine, they had no great personal loyalty to the established order of Europe, let alone the House of Bourbon, and they had now been given the impression, not only that the battle was won, but that the war would soon be over. Many of them must already have been thinking of what they would do when they came home.

More importantly, they were hungry. The Coalition had been able to gather a mighty army in a matter of a few months, but preparing an adequate logistical train for that army was something else again. Poor planning, corruption in the ranks and Ney’s depredations combined to reduce the soldiers’ diet to a fraction of what it needed to be. Cibohistorian Michael Sidhu, reading the diaries of 76 Coalition front-line soldiers, has concluded that their daily caloric intake over the course of the battle varied from 1700 on a good day to as little as 800. On this, they were expected not only to live, but to fight.

And, in fact, many of them did fight. Contra Hugo and his followers, the Coalition armies were not simply “swept away.” Only Wrede’s Bavarian army crumbled completely, deserting en masse and finding their way home one by one. Although a number of Russian and Austrian regiments were taken by surprise so completely that they were routed from the battlefield, Barclay de Tolly, Colloredo-Mansfeld and Württemberg were able to organize a defensive line along the west bank of the Meurthe, behind which they could rally.

The next morning, Masséna and the Coalition generals arranged a cease-fire. Both sides had taken terrible casualties during the night, and the death of Napoleon had changed everything. It was time to await orders from, respectively, Paris and Kaiserslautern.

P.G. Sherman, “The Nancy Boys Revisited,” from Everything You Thought You Knew About History (Vol. 2)

 

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On August 24, the day before Napoleon’s death in battle, Lamarque entered Antwerp in triumph at the head of an army of Frenchmen and Walloon volunteers. The King’s German Legion had fought valiantly against him, but had been defeated.

This news was greeted in London with horror, and with questions from the opposition. For the second time this year, it seemed, Wellington and his army had been in exactly the wrong place at the right time. Was the fate of Antwerp not of greater importance to the Crown than whether France was ruled by House Bourbon or House Bonaparte? Castlereagh’s answer was simple — “We sent His Grace to Lorraine because Bonaparte was there. It was our intention to strike at the head of the snake, not its tail. Let the true king of France be restored, and all else can be set right.” Soon enough, they got word that the snake’s head had indeed been struck off. It remained to be seen whether the snake was a cobra or a Lernean Hydra…


The armies that fought in Lorraine at least had the honor of contending with the man Wellington himself called the greatest general “in this age, in past ages, in any age.” The Spaniard, at least at first, found the French to be less trouble then their own king.

After a force of hastily assembled conscripts under Decaen fought the Spanish to a draw at La Rhune (August 10) and a similar force under Clauzel outright defeated them at Font-Romeu (August 13) the capricious King Ferdinand grew suspicious of his army. Despite the later successes of the Spaniards in taking Bayonne and Perpignan, Ferdinand began sending political officers — Inquisitors in all but name — to hunt through the ranks of the officer corps for signs of liberalism and constitutionalism. Generals and colonels under suspicion were cashiered, imprisoned, or had their command stripped of vital units, which were sent to other officers deemed (for the moment) trustworthy.

There may well have been cadres of dissatisified liberal officers before Ferdinand began his purge of the officer corps. As the events of the next year would prove, there certainly were plenty afterward…


With the king of Saxony sending diplomatic missives to Austria, with the rebellions in Poland and Italy still underway, with the news that Murat himself had returned from Corsica to join the Italian rebels, all eyes were on Kaiserslautern, where King Louis was once more heeding the advice of Talleyrand — and Paris, where no one seemed to know who was in charge.
P.G. Sherman, 1815 And All That

 

[Lycaon pictus]

“Heaven has gained a citizen, and Earth has lost an emperor. Never shall we see his like again.”

With these words, in a letter to the heads of the Coalition nations dated September 4 (but, pointedly, not to Louis XVIII) the French Regency Council acknowledged the passing of Napoleon I. Said Council consisted of Napoleon’s surviving brothers (Joseph more or less first among equals, but not so much that he dared reach for the throne himself), the marshals of the French army and the leaders of the new Parliament.

In this missive, the Council also affirmed its desire for peace with the members of the Coalition, and called on those nations to respect the sovereignty of the French government within the “natural boundaries” of the French people — which included everything south and west of the Rhine and the Waal. (As Prince Joseph would later say, “When negotiations are about to begin, only a fool asks for less than he wants.”)

There was, however, some dispute as to whether negotiations were in fact to begin. Also on September 4, Louis XVIII devised a plan for the Coalition army. His plan was… to do nothing, and to wait for the illegitimate, ramshackle government in Paris to collapse into anarchy. “Soon enough, the thieves will fall out,” he said. The Coalition army withdrew to Karlsruhe in September.

To the British and the Dutch, the French occupation of Antwerp remained an insurmountable problem. The Spanish had a grudge against Prince Joseph, whom they had come to call “José de las Joyas” for his pilfering of the crown jewels before his flight from Madrid. The Austrians were at this moment fighting a rebellion in Italy to which the French were offering some small support… small support being all they could afford to offer at this point. They had no intention of making peace with France — in fact, they were solidifying their ties to the states of Baden and Württemberg.

The Prussians were another matter. Although the government of Frederick William III had lovingly stoked the fires of anti-French sentiment among its people, the fact remained that the kingdom was in a very bad way, and could not afford to have its soldiers languish through the winter in hastily made French prisoner-of-war camps while the estates of Prussian nobles burned. But to negotiate with France, even for mutual recognition of parole, it would first be necessary to recognize the French government, which would mean repudiating the Bourbon king.

Russia was in the opposite position from Prussia. As Tsar Alexander stated coolly, “The French could not conquer us when they had defeated all others. Should we fear them now?” His ministers had learned at Vienna how the rest of Europe feared the expansion of Russian power. Clearly there was no further reason for Russian blood to be spilled on behalf of the houses of Hapsburg or Bourbon. So it was that both Wilhelm von Humboldt and Count Nesselrode found themselves in Paris that October, negotiating with Caulaincourt.

The Treaty of 20 October was a simple one. France withdrew all claims to Prussian and Russian territory and paroled and released all prisoners from those nations, and Prussia and Russia both recognized the French government. Russia declared peace and withdrew from the Coalition entirely, while Prussia merely remained in a state of cease-fire. The important thing, from the Prussian king’s perspective, was that the Prussian POWs could now offer their parole to Paris, return home and save the kingdom. (Of course, their first act on returning to Prussia was to go to Berlin and crush the anti-French rioters who had taken to the streets on learning of this peace.)
P.G. Sherman, 1815 And All That

 

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James Madison was of a generation of men who’d had the extraordinary audacity to carve a new nation from the flanks of the mightiest empire on earth, and the intellect to devise an effective government for it. He himself had done as much to shape the Constitution as any other one man — perhaps more. To him, and to Congress, public opinion was something to lead, not to follow.
And they couldn’t have followed it very closely even if they’d wanted to. It’s easy, looking back from the modern age, to lose sight of the fact that in the early 19th century — before AEs, telephones or even the first differgins and telegraphs — nothing like modern opinion polling was remotely possible.
But when a sea change took place in national sentiment, there was no mistaking it…
Andrea Fessler, Rise of the Dead Rose

September 6, 1815
Washington, D.C.
House Speaker Henry Clay sat back in the chair facing the president.

“Help me to understand this, James,” he said. “Why are you so resistant to enlarging the navy?”

“Because the British have the unfortunate habit of incorporating captured ships into their own fleets,” said Madison. “God help us, if there is another war, I would rather not find that we had made our shipwrights work double shifts to build up the Royal Navy. If we can’t contend as equals with them on the open seas — which I see no prospect of at this time — we’ll be worse off than if we had never tried.”

“A point,” said Clay. “What about Mr. Fulton? They say he’s recovered from his bout of illness, and I’ve heard good things about his latest project — some sort of warship or floating battery, apparently.”

“I imagine you’re speaking of the Demologos,” said Madison. “And you’re quite right — it is a warship… or a floating battery. Apparently it depends on how well the engine is working on a given day. We’ll build a few more of them, but I wouldn’t care to base our whole defense around them. Although if it came to the worst, the British would have a very hard time sailing it back to London.” He sighed. “Henry, what we need is a new way of thinking, and… I haven’t thought of one yet.”

“We must be seen to be doing something,” said Clay. He looked at the heap of letters from constituents that half-covered president’s desk. “You can see the voters are still in a festive mood.”

“You should have seen it two months ago,” said Madison. “At least now I can see the desk. What I’m seeing more of is things like this.” He held up a copy of the New-York Evening Post, turned to an inside page. He pointed to an advertisement for a political meeting, rife with language like “restore the Honor and Glory of the Republic” and “avenge the Blood of Portland and the Shame of Rocksbury.”

“And notice which newspaper it is in,” Madison continued. “I must say, it’s been entertaining, in a grim sort of way, reading the Federalist newspapers this year.” The Boston Gazette, the Connecticut Mirror and the New-York Evening Post had all been against the war, the president and the Republicans right up until Keane chose to stay in New Orleans, at which point they had all abruptly changed course. The Boston Centinel, on the other hand, had remained staunchly anti-war until the day it was burned to the ground by an angry mob and its editor lynched, which had happened while Wellington’s army was outside the city.

“At times like this, Mr. President,” said the Speaker, “the only way to lead is to figure out where the people are going and get in ahead of them. We…” He repeated himself. “We must be seen to be doing something.”

“This proposal for a canal, linking the Tennessee and Tombigbee — do you call that nothing?” If it were completed, it would turn Mobile into an alternative outlet for the upper Mississippi trade.

“I call it a beginning, nothing more,” said Clay, but Madison was already pulling a large envelope out from under the pile.

“This looks promising,” said the president. “It’s from young Quincy Adams in London. I haven’t heard from him in months.”

Clay sat up a little. John Quincy Adams wasn’t exactly one of his favorite people, but news from the American embassy to the Court of St. James was bound to be important. He resisted the urge to get up and start reading over the president’s shoulder.

“He seems to have had something of an adventure,” said Madison. “He was in Paris when the emperor returned, and he had some trouble getting back to London. When he got there, he found that there had been an… unfortunate incident at Dartmoor, where American seamen were being held prisoner. A guard, probably drunk, had opened fire on American prisoners — killed five and wounded several more.”

Clay nodded. “I heard of this. Terrible business.”

“As you can well imagine, young Adams demanded justice. The British held an inquiry of sorts, but they concluded that the whole thing was simply the unfortunate outcome of a riot by those obstreperous dirty-shirt Yankees. No one was punished.”

“I wish I could say I was surprised,” said Clay.

“The long and short of it is that young Adams believes he can do us no more good where he is. He begs my permission to come home and to leave our affairs in London in the care of the consul, a Mr. Reuben G. Beasley… My inclination is to leave him there until my successor can appoint a replacement. I don’t want less than our best in London right now.”

“I disagree,” said Clay. “I am not by any means blaming him for what happened, but I don’t see what the British government could do in his absence worse than what Their Lordships did in his presence. It is, of course, your decision.”

“I think you’re right,” said Madison.

 

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This ought to about do it for 1815… (crosses fingers)


Winter descended on Europe that year like the vengeance of an angry god. Sleet fell on London in the last week of November, followed by heavy snow in the first week of December, followed in turn by subzero temperatures under deadly clear skies. It was a warning of things to come.

Early in December, Prince Leopold of Saxe-Coburg arrived in London. Contrary to what certain feverish biographers and romantic K-graphs have claimed, Princess Charlotte Augusta did not in fact leave Weymouth at once, ride like a bat out of hell to London through the blizzard on the back of a white horse, and leap into her beloved’s arms in the middle of (the yet-to-be-built) Piccadilly Circus while the onlookers cheered. However, she lost no time in writing entreaties to her father the Prince Regent, who was beginning to understand that there was no point in trying to stop his daughter from doing whatever she set her mind to. This, too, was a sign of things to come.

In France — in what was now northern France — General Lamarque maintained his watch along the Waal while the bureaucracy set about organizing Mont-Tonnerre and the other new departments. In Paris, the government considered the foul weather, the blockade and the loss of St.-Pierre and Miquelon, which had cut them off from the Grand Banks fisheries, and what they might mean for the immediate future as far as keeping the nation fed went. “Unlike Louis the Last, I will not be caught flat-footed while the people riot for bread,” said Lanjuinais. “Plan for the worst.” Little did he realize how bad “the worst” would be.

In Karlsruhe, Talleyrand was spending half his time assuring King Louis of his loyalty, and the other half sniping against the king’s British allies in letters to various statesmen and crowned heads. “A week after Castlreagh left Vienna, General Wellington went off on a mission to America. And two weeks after that, Bonaparte returned to France,” he wrote to Metternich. “Of course, it may all be coincidence — but remember which nation was in charge of Elba and the waters around it.” To Tsar Alexander, he wrote: “It has long been British policy never to allow any one nation to dominate Europe. If there is a danger of that now, it does not come from France.”

In Spain, King Ferdinand seldom left the palace in Madrid. His attempted purge of liberals and constitutionalists had begun to spiral, as these things do. Now he was seeing Bonapartist — or perhaps post-Bonapartist would be a better word — agents and sympathizers under every bed. No one (certainly no one in the army) was calling him “the Desired One” any longer. And it was increasingly obvious to ministers and generals alike that Spain’s biggest problem was not the threat of a resurgent France, but the potential loss of New World colonies they had held for centuries. Something would have to be done.

In Italy, the late Emperor’s brother-in-law Joachim Murat — or, as he had now taken to calling himself, Gioacchino Murati — spent Christmas shivering in the midst of a rebel camp in the hills north of Genoa, a hunted man. He hadn’t been able to defeat the Austrians when he had real armies at his command, let alone this ragtag that barely followed his orders and called him “Your Majesty” half in jest. It seemed unlikely that the rebellion would even survive the next year.

In Vienna, on the other hand, Christmas was celebrated with peace and joy. More peace than usual — a new treaty had been signed between Emperor Francis I and the ambassadors from Baden, Württemberg, Saxony and Hesse. The rulers of the smaller states did not declare themselves the Emperor’s vassals, but they did abandon the week reed of the German Confederation and enter into permanent alliance with Austria. (Representatives of Bavaria were conspicuous by their absence.)

In Prussia and Poland, there was little joy, and the only peace was that which was enforced by Marshal Winter. The terrible blizzards of early December had bogged down both sides right where they were, leaving the Poles in control of the Posen area, Upper Silesia south and east of Oppeln and the free city of Krakow, whose government had tried to stay neutral. The revolt in Russian Poland had already been crushed, and in St. Petersburg, the tsar was writing to Metternich, suggesting that if Prussia failed to reconquer these lands by the end of next spring, Russia and Austria should do it instead. In the Sublime Porte, Mahmud II mourned the glory of Ottoman arms that had once been the terror of East and West alike, but were now proving inadequate to keep the Serbs in line.

The nations of Europe had begun the year united in purpose, and ended it mired in the opportunism and mutual suspicion that characterize most of human history. And yet, one imagines that throughout all Europe, the passing of the year must have been felt with a deep sense of relief. The crisis of 1815 was over. The crisis of 1816 was about to begin.

P. G. Sherman, 1815 And All That

 

[Lycaon pictus]

As we head into the Year Without a Summer, I'm going to try to pick up the pace a little.

To help you visualize this next update, this is Republican Purple. I did some back-of-the-envelope calculations involving hex triplet color values and the area of the various parts of the flag, and came up with this. God only knows what it would have looked like using Stabler's original dyes — probably like something you'd pull out of the lint filter of your dryer.

I should note, however, that at this point, light purple wasn't quite the same cultural signifier that it later became.

 

[Lycaon pictus]

This next update is dedicated to the courteous, knowledgeable and sexy staff of Gadsby's Tavern Museum.

* * *

When the War of 1812 ended, the Madison administration had a little less than two years left and no political capital to speak of.
In spite of that, it was not entirely idle. In September of 1816 the President ordered the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to begin surveying northeastern Mississippi Territory and western Alabama, charting the future course of the T&T canal. In January of 1816 the President signed the bill that outlined the Second Bank of the United States, to stabilize the currency and help pay off various debts. (As early as April of 1814, Madison had acknowledged the need for a national bank, but the urgency of the need had not become clear until Bloody May and its aftermath.) On some issues, such as the Northern Louisiana Question (see Chapter 4) or the persistent land disputes with the Cherokee and Choctaw, Madison chose not to take a position, considering these matters best resolved by Congress and the states. But for the most part, he continued carrying on his duties just as he had before the war and its disastrous end…

Meanwhile, in every city and town, the talk was all of what the next president should do. Should the militias be placed under federal authority? Should the army and navy be built up? How would all this be paid for? Everyone seemed to have an idea, and as Congress spent most of the latter half of ’15 out of session, they got an earful of the ideas of their constituents. John Sergeant, then a freshman representative from Pennsylvania and a former Federalist, described the election that put him in office as “like running in front of a stampede shouting ‘Follow me!’”…

When the high officials of Congress and the Madison administration arrived in Alexandria that March, they faced a very different party than the one that had caucused four years ago — and some of them were better prepared than others to turn the situation to their advantage.
Andrea Fessler, Rise of the Dead Rose

March 14, 1816
Alexandria, D.C.
4:15 p.m.
The punch bowl was hot, and filled the air with the smell of lemon, cinnamon and rum. James Monroe pressed his chilled hands against the side of the bowl, letting its warmth soak through his palms and fingers, and looked around the room. This year, it seemed, everyone who was anyone in politics had come to the Democratic-Republican caucus in Alexandria, in spite of the appalling weather, and regardless of whether or not they were actually congressmen.

For that matter, not all of them were Republicans. Monroe had seen a lot of Federalists in town, talking to the delegates. (The Federalists had spoken against the war — in fact, if one took the Hartford Convention at all seriously they had honestly considered secession. One might expect them to feel vindicated that the war had turned out so badly. Yet from what Monroe had heard, their party had effectively disbanded.)

And if you had to be in Alexandria in what was alleged to be March but felt like January, just about the best place to be was the taproom of Gadsby’s Tavern, in front of a steaming bowl of hot rum-punch with a couple of fellow Virginians, Senator James Barbour and Representative John Randolph of Roanoke. Better still, neither of them was wearing one of those strange cockades Monroe had been seeing around town (mostly on the hats and coats of the younger men), so he wouldn’t have to show his ignorance by asking what they signified.

Men couldn’t share a bowl of rum-punch without sharing at least a little conversation, but the three had confined themselves to pleasantries and a little talk of their families. Monroe struggled to think of something to say that wouldn’t sound like "so who’s going to be the next president?" (To which the only possible answer was "if you have to ask, it probably won’t be you.")

Monroe would have been the natural successor to Madison. Unfortunately, over the past two years he had served as both Secretary of War and now Secretary of State. No one exactly blamed him for the disasters that had befallen the republic in precisely those areas, but under the circumstances it was understandable that he was under a cloud. But Will Crawford, the likeliest alternative to him, was telling everyone he did not wish to be nominated this year. Now, the caucus was like a five-act play whose plot he’d long since lost the thread of but which he still had to keep watching. At this point, anything could happen.

“It frightens me, how angry the people have become,” said Barbour at last. “From what I hear, my own constituents are less riled than most. That seems hard to believe.”

Monroe could only nod. If he’d had a Spanish real for every time someone had stopped him on the street and asked him what he was going to do about Those Dreadful British, he could have bought New Orleans back.

“It’s not as thought we were ever in any danger of subjugation,” said Randolph.

Monroe nodded again. Wellington didn’t try to conquer us outright, he thought. He knew if he did, every man who could carry a gun would rise up to fight him. Never mind our army and navy — that was our true national defense. We thought it would be enough. We were wrong. We were wrong and now we don’t know what to do.

Randolph turned. “I say, John,” he said to a man in his early thirties, younger than Randolph himself.

“Yes?” Monroe had seen this man before. He was Representative Calhoun of South Carolina.

“What are those… curious decorations?” He pointed to the cockade on the hat tucked under Calhoun’s arm. It was, to Monroe’s eye, a dismal shade of faded purple even in natural sunlight, and looked worse by the light of lamps or candles. At last, thought Monroe, who had been waiting for someone else to ask this question.

For his part, Calhoun looked as though he’d been waiting for someone to ask him.

“This color is called ‘Republican Purple,’” he said proudly. “It is a symbol of national unity — Mr. Stabler, the apothecary who invented it, says it’s made up of the colors of the flag blended together in their proper proportions. We wear them to show our solidarity in this time of national crisis.”

“To me it looks rather like a wilted rose, but each to his own,” said Randolph.

Calhoun’s nostrils flared. His already fanatical face looked… more fanatical. Monroe stood up and lifted a hand in a calm-down gesture, trying not to display any sign of agreement with Randolph’s sentiment.

“No need for a quarrel over this,” he said. “It’s almost time for the speech anyway.” John Quincy Adams, son of the former president and lately returned from London, was scheduled to deliver some sort of address upstairs. Word had gotten around that he would have something important to say. (The ballroom in the hotel next door would have held more people, but it wasn’t quite somber enough for the occasion.)

Calhoun turned his back without another word and headed for the door. This bit of unconscious rudeness, directed at Monroe as much as Randolph, was yet another clue that whatever way the vote went, it wouldn’t be his way.

By this time, everyone else in the taproom was rising to their feet. In the hall, Monroe saw so many people coming in through the front door that it never had a chance to close, letting in a steady stream of cold air. Everyone seemed to want to hear what Quincy Adams had to say. (And why not? Did anyone else have any answers?)

The stairwell was narrow, and it took a little while for everyone to get up there. Monroe found himself standing in the hall next to William Henry Harrison, who was all too recognizable — the backblast from a Congreve at Roxbury had cost him his left eye and scarred that side of his face with powder burns. The ex-general was listening to Rep. Hardin of Kentucky, who was saying something about not conceding “one millimeter more” to British demands. (Along with Republican Purple, the younger DRP members seemed to have recently developed a peculiar fondness for the new system of measurement that had come out of France. It was “modern,” it was “advanced” and “scientific”… to Monroe it seemed wholly unnatural and ahistoric, but the French liked it and the British had no use for it, and apparently that was enough.)

The assembly room on the second floor of Gadsby’s Tavern could hold as many as three hundred people if they stood crowded together tightly enough, as they were doing now. Monroe saw the former presidents Jefferson and Adams standing side by side, both quite elderly but still sharp. The former Federalist, Senator Rufus King of New York, was at Adams’ right hand, his bald head framed by tufts of gingery hair. He was wearing a purple cockade on his wrist. In fact, at least a third of the people in this room, not all of them young men, had one of those things on or about their person somewhere.

A podium had been set up in the corner near the door. Already at the podium was Dan Tompkins, the governor of New York State. He was wearing a suit he must have borrowed from somebody, as it didn’t fit properly and everyone knew he’d bankrupted himself paying bills for the state militia out of his own pocket. The left sleeve hung empty — he had lost an arm below the elbow at Third Sackett’s Harbor.

Tompkins showed no inclination to speak, but stood there waiting, a box of cockades at his feet. It occurred to Monroe, at this point, to wonder how long the former president’s son had been planning this occasion, and how many others had joined him.

After a few more minutes, two men marched up the stairs and entered the room. The first was John Quincy Adams himself, bald and grim-looking. The cockade on the collar of his black coat looked oddly festive. Apart from nodding a little in his father’s direction, he walked up to the podium without acknowledging anyone else. There was probably a Bible on his person somewhere.

The second man, to Monroe’s utter astonishment, was Henry Clay, Speaker of the House of Representatives, also with a cockade on his collar. He and Quincy Adams had famously rubbed each other the wrong way at Ghent. Yet here he was, blond hair gleaming in the light of the chandelier, catching everyone’s eye, smiling and nodding, seemingly the opposite of the stern and unsociable Adams.

Quincy Adams stood at the podium, Clay and Tompkins behind him, straight-backed and stern-faced in postures of rectitude that, in Clay’s case, suited him not at all. The political implications of all these goings-on were easy to see. Tompkins represented New York State, while Clay represented the west and some of the south. What Quincy Adams was trying to show was that support for whatever it was he was proposing extended beyond New England.

Then Adams began to speak.

“My fellow Americans,” he said. “My friends and countrymen. Before we turn to the solemn business at hand, let us in our hearts acknowledge the Universal Giver of All Good, by whose beneficence our beloved nation has passed through darker times than this.” There was a long moment of silence.

“We know that without the blessing of Divine Providence our best efforts on behalf of our people will not be adequate; yet in all cases our best efforts are required of us. This is of particular import here, in Alexandria now, where we are assembled not merely to choose a candidate for the presidency, but to chart a course for the future — a course that we pray will lead our beloved republic out of the difficult straits in which we presently find ourselves.

“We have long known that the crowned heads of the earth — in particular those who pride themselves on their lineage rather than on their accomplishments — despise our government and its democratic and republican ideals.” Monroe had to admire the way Adams exempted the late Napoleon and France’s current crew of regents from this criticism without actually mentioning them by name.

“We have seen how the Crown impressed our seamen, seizing them like enslaved Africans from their life and work and dragging them into a fight not their own. We have seen how the British chose to make war on us, sacking and burning our coastal towns like so many Barbary pirates — even destroying our very capital merely for the sake of the doing. Henry and I witnessed at Ghent how the King’s ministers of state sent their lowest underlings to treat with us, and we heard the extravagant and importunate demands they made.” Behind him, Clay nodded.

“Now we have all tasted the full measure of their contempt. Having at last signed a peace treaty negotiated in good faith, His Majesty George III and his ministers tore it into pieces the very instant they thought they could gain an advantage by doing so. Then they sent the best of their cutthroats across the seas to wring a different agreement out of us by force.”

And there it was. Quincy Adams had just put his finger on the very reason the Federalists were in town, flaunting those hideous cockades and trying to pretend they couldn’t so much as find Hartford on a map. It wasn’t the defeat that stung — it was the insult. New Englanders, Southerners and westerners alike felt it.

The British had signed the Treaty of Ghent, and then broken it right away… because they could. Wellington’s “treaty” had been less cruel than it might have been, but if the Prince Regent and Lord Liverpool decided to wipe their fundaments with that one as well and to annex a few more square miles of American soil, who was going to stop them? If they decided to return to impressing sailors, or to just steal whole ships as they had stolen the Danish fleet at Copenhagen not ten years ago, who would stand up for the people and their property?

“And why should they not?” Adams continued, twisting the knife a little. “When they can take from us what they will without fear, what check have they on their appetites, save their own dubious consciences?” He stopped and drew a breath.

“Since then, until last autumn, I served as ambassador to the Court of St. James. I shall tell you what they think of us in three words — they do not. Our French allies hold the bulk of their attention. As to us, they have not the least notion of why we ever went to war against them in the first place, nor any curiosity to learn. If they consider the matter at all, it is only to congratulate themselves on having ‘put us in our place’.

“Which in some cases is apparently the grave. In April of last year, as many of you have heard, American prisoners of war — merchant seamen, for the most part — were massacred out of hand at Dartmoor Prison. His Majesty’s government disavowed responsibility.” What is he trying to do — start a riot? Monroe thought.

“What, then, is to be done? The easiest thing to do would be to do nothing, to answer the wrath of our people by counseling them to patience, to accept the indignity as weak nations must and move on with the business of state.

“If we do this, the passage of time will ease our current sense of outrage. If we do this, we may comfort ourselves with the thought that if our government lacks the power to protect us, it also lacks the power to tyrannize over us.” This was an argument that a good many people in this room, and especially John Randolph, would have agreed with.

“But if we do this, before long we shall know a tyranny of a different sort. We shall have a government that responds to the will of its people only when it dares, one that out of sheer necessity obeys the commands of the King of England as surely as if its members had been appointed by him and drew salaries from his treasury. We shall not, in any meaningful sense, have a republic any longer.

“I say this in bitterness — no weak and helpless nation can call itself a republic. Not while it has a strong neighbor with a mind to dictate terms.” The room was silent. No one cried out in protest. No one even muttered. But Monroe was sure he could feel the rage and hate radiating off the listeners like heat from one of the late Mr. Franklin’s stoves.

“There is hope,” said Adams. “There is a way forward. By the grace of Divine Providence there is a path to true freedom, but it requires great courage. Not the courage of the battlefield, of which Americans (many in this very room) have already shown a sufficiency, but courage of another kind. We must have the courage to trust one another, to overcome our ingrained fear of the very institutions we have built to enable us to rule ourselves…”

Monroe could already see where this was headed. A bigger army and navy, with wartime conscription “if necessary.” State militias fully subordinated to the federal army. Schools to train officers for the army and navy. Canals dug across the south, to replace the lost outlet on the Mississippi. More and better roads. Tariffs and taxes to pay for all this.

Sure enough, this was the plan Quincy Adams proposed. As he spoke, Monroe admired the way he wove the Federalist advocacy of internal improvements into the Democratic-Republican agenda. And truth to tell, there were a good many of Adams’ ideas, such as support for domestic manufacture that he favored. It would mean a rise in the power of Washington at the expense of the states, but at this point there seemed to be no way to avoid that. He had some questions about the constitutionality of internal improvements at the federal level, but a carefully worded amendment should safely resolve that issue. And from the expressions and sounds of approval that the crowd in the room made, few people had even as many reservations as Monroe.

Few, but not none. Out of the corner of his eye, Monroe saw John Randolph stalk out of the room and down the stairs. What would you have us do, if not what he proposes? Monroe wished he could ask the man. How do you answer his reasoning? Adams simply went on with his speech.

“It may seem impossible, now,” Adams continued, “that our republic should ever have the strength to resent such insults as have been given to it. But let us remember that a journey of a thousand mi— kilometers begins with a single step.

“In the past generation, our territory has expanded and our population has more than doubled. With war and hunger in Europe, many more immigrants will come to our shores in search of peace and freedom. As we grow in numbers, so shall we also grow in industry and finance, which are the bone and blood that sustain any modern military force. One day — perhaps not in my lifetime, but one day — we will have the strength to defend our own against the British Empire, or any other power that cares to try us. It remains for us to make our government fit to employ such strength.

“Yes, this work must be undertaken with care and forethought. The greater the power wielded by the people’s representatives in this district, the surer must be their accountability. The rights of the people must be kept safe and secure, and they shall.

“Indeed, if we do our work correctly they shall be all the safer. We do not fear the strength of the horse that pulls our plow, nor the ferocity of the dog that guards our gate at night. Rather, we cherish these qualities, so long as these creatures are governed by our will. So shall the newfound might of our government be at the service of our will.

“What I propose, then, is not a revolutionary change by any means. It is simply the next step in the long process that began forty years ago this coming summer — the process by which we, the people of the United States, take charge of our common destiny.”

There was a long moment of silence.

Then, as one, the men in the room began to applaud.

“ADAMS FOR PRESIDENT!” someone shouted.

“QUINCY ADAMS FOR PRESIDENT!” shouted someone else, more precisely. Out of the corner of his eye Monroe saw that it was Congressman Webster of New Hampshire, a young ex-Federalist who not two years before had made a name for himself with his eloquent speech denouncing the very concept of conscription. Up at the podium, Clay was lighting a cigar.

Monroe was a moderate man by nature. The emotions in the room — in the nation as a whole — frightened him a little. He knew that it was at just such a moment as this that the Israelites had forsaken the godly rule of the judges and appealed to Samuel for a king. It was in such a dark hour that the Romans had cast aside their republic and embraced the false glories of empire. What he had never understood until now was that there was a reason men made such foolish choices. If a Saul, or a Caesar, or a Napoleon came before the people right now, they would follow him and never look back, he thought. And one may yet come, if we cling too hard to the status quo. Thank God, for now, we have this man instead. He is no tyrant in the making.

The listeners were already gathering in front of the podium. Everyone who didn’t have a cockade, it seemed, was getting one now. Monroe worked his way through the crowd, summoning the will to say what he had to say. Finally, he stood in front of Adams.

“I shall withdraw my name from consideration directly, and endorse you for the presidency in my place,” he said. There. It was that easy.

“Thank you,” said Adams. “That is most gracious of you, but you needn’t withdraw entirely. It occurs to me that even now, sectional loyalties remain strong enough that it might be wise for me to have a Virginian on the ticket.”

Tompkins extended the box of cockades. Adams reached down and pinned one onto Monroe’s lapel.

 

[Lycaon pictus]

Thank you. It seems he may end up being a power player in this new regime. Perhaps Adams' man in the South?

Calhoun and Adams will be allies at first… but I don't think it's giving much away to say that the issue of slavery will eventually come between them.

In the meantime, let's check in on Spain, bearing in mind that nothing called "A People's History" is going to be completely unbiased.


The decision that would lead to the birth of a new and ghastly tyranny seemed at the time like a perfect compromise, and a relief to the April Crisis.

Some historians have claimed that Ferdinand VII’s decision in January of 1816 to send ten battalions of his armies to reinforce his loyalists in the New World was motivated by national interest, not by self-interest. This ignores most of what we know about the man and the state of mind he was in at this point. “Ferdinand the Desired” desperately desired to give his most competent (and therefore threatening) officers duties that carried them as far away from him as possible.

Yet it was also very much in the interest of the nation that he do so. Spain’s overseas possessions had not been so valuable since the days of the treasure ships. The grain and salted meat they provided was already a national asset, and would soon be keeping Spain alive and providing it with hard currency.

So the battalions assembled in the south of Spain, and on April 1 they made their move… against their own king. Within three weeks, this army was marching on Madrid. Only once, at Andújar, did it even face opposition, and Col. Rafael del Riego organized an attack that won that battle in less than 90 minutes. Ferdinand retreated to the Escorial, hoping that his own loyalists would put down the munity. He did not realize that for all intents and purposes, he had no loyalists left.

So it was that the Escorial Agreement was reluctantly hammered out. The Constitution would be reinstated. The Cortes General would convene. The ten battalions would remain in Madrid, making sure these things happened on schedule. Ten more battalions would be raised for the original purpose of subjugating the American rebels.

The new armies were accompanied (and, on paper, led) by Ferdinand’s brothers Charles and Francisco. Even at this stage, his writings reveal that Ferdinand was planning on the political settlement that (he hoped) would tie his American possessions more closely to the Spanish crown while at the same time keeping his brothers safe from any France-like outbreak of revolutionary violence. Before leaving, Charles famously said “I will return.”

Diego Marquez Rodriguez, A People’s History of the Virreinato

 

[Lycaon pictus]

do you mean what I think you mean? lol also the TL is good so far

THIS IS AMAZING- if I had known this was here, I would have put off making my own thread until I had finished reading this. A plausible tl presented in an interesting story. Awesome job.

Thanks, everybody.

As for the "cultural signifier" remark, I just thought somebody would want an explanation for why all these guys were willing to go around wearing a badge that's basically mauve. I probably didn't need to worry.

(Republican Purple is strictly a Democratic-Republican party symbol. So I won't be putting it on the flag or in the world map.)

Now then…



What historians have come to call the “Other Peninsular War” was really several separate conflicts. The first took place from March to May of 1815, when the Kingdom of Naples, under the leadership of Napoleon’s brother-in-law, declared war on Austria. That phase of the war ended in Austrian victory and the restoration of a Bourbon king to the Neapolitan throne, although the city of Gaeta was never taken by the Austrians. (To this day, Gaeta is called “the unconquered town.”)

The second conflict ran from August of that year to August of 1816, when the people of northern Italy rose up against Austrian rule. The uprisings spread throughout Italy (relieving the siege of Gaeta). In the chaos, Gioacchino Murato returned to northern Italy at the head of a band of followers. Over the course of the next six or seven months, he succeeded mainly in forcing the Austrians to send an ever-increasing number of soldiers into the peninsula, taking them away from the fight against House Bonaparte in France. What he did not succeed in doing was driving them out.

And then the weather changed.

Historians call 1816 “the year without a summer.” We now know that the bad weather of that year was caused by a series of volcanic eruptions over the previous four years, culminating in the Mount Tambora blast of 1815. These eruptions created a tremendous accumulation of volcanic ash and aerosolized sulfides in the upper atmosphere, which drifted poleward and built up in the skies over the Northern Hemisphere, reflecting sunlight back into space and lowering temperatures from China to New England. As a result, subnormal temperatures plagued Europe and northern North America throughout the year, destroying crops, causing widespread hunger — even famine — and severely limiting the ability of the affected nations to support armies in the field.

France was particularly hard-hit, with average summer temperatures lowered by over three degrees centigrade over most of the nation’s territory. Despite the best efforts of the new government (mindful of what the bread shortage had done to the last Bourbon king) to purchase and distribute food as broadly as possible, the nation teetered on the edge of famine all that year. Two things only saved the nation from collapse — a temporary interruption in the British blockade of the French ports (so that food could be shipped to British POWs in French prison camps) and the importation of (very expensive) grain and dried meat from Spain via the New World.

The result of all this was that for most of the year, France’s logistical capacity was not even half what it had been in 1815 — and what capacity it did have was tied down around Bruxelles and Anvers, fighting the Anglo-Dutch invasion, or running around the south fighting royalist rebels. When Murato asked the Regency Council for military aid to keep the Italian rebellion alive, they could afford to send him only a few companies of artillerymen. (As Prince Joseph put it, “A cannon does not need bread.”)

To the Austrians, this looked like an opportunity to crush the rebellion once and for all. Unfortunately, they had the same problem France did — they could deploy an army, but not feed it. The sensible solution would have been to disband the army in Baden, on the east bank of the Rhine — but Baden had only recently entered into permanent alliance with the Hapsburg, and Francis I had hopes of winning their vassalage. Abandoning them would not do.

Instead, on August 20, 1816 (coincidentally the first anniversary of the death of Napoleon) Francis gave a simple order to his armies in Italy:

“Live off the land.”

It was hardly unprecedented. The armies of the various Coalitions had done it often enough before, and the late Napoleon (and his brother-in-law) had done it on almost every campaign. Perhaps someone in the Emperor’s court tried to tell him that this was no normal year, and that such an order would plunge Italy into the depths of famine and earn him the everlasing hatred of its people.

If so, it only made things worse. In what he seems to have thought was a gesture of mercy, Francis I called upon all Italian rulers (other than the pope, whom even he didn’t dare strong-arm) to contribute towards feeding the Austrian army. This was perhaps intended to spread the burden as far as possible, so that no one part of Italy would suffer too much. But as a young Guillaume Georges Elmar would say some twenty years later, “The level of corruption in any transactional relationship increases according to the cube of the number of intermediaries.” At a time when well nigh everyone was desperate for food, every petty monarch and local lord from the King of the Two Sicilies on down had just been given permission — indeed, virtually commanded — to steal all the food they could and blame it on the Austrians.

Count Nugent would later say that “no one could have predicted” what happened next…

Robert W. Derek, Great Blunders of World History

 

[Lycaon pictus]

June 30, 1816
9:45 a.m.
Bois de la Vente, central France
Today was shaping up to be a good day for Arthur Wellesley, First Duke of Wellington. He was hungry and chilly, but he had a hard time remembering what it was like not to be. Considering that this was a prisoner-of-war camp in a country where food was desperately short, he was doing surprisingly well. It gave him a feeling of pride that the French didn’t quite dare allow British prisoners to starve to death.

More importantly, he actually had something to do right now — a rare treat in this place of soul-killing boredom. He had obtained a rag too worn and threadbare to use as clothing. He had coated it with mud. Now he was going to hunt down that damned draft in the side of his cabin, and when he found it, by God he would plug it. (Not even a year ago he had been leading armies in battle. Now his definition of excitement was… this. Being a prisoner of war greatly altered one’s perspective on life.)

The duke stooped over and rolled up his left sleeve, exposing the sensitive skin of his wrist to the air. There was a good breeze blowing outside, in almost the right direction… he moved his arm a little closer to the wall… aha! An inch above the floor, where he could barely see it from above, one of the boards had shrunk! Wellington lay down on the floor and with great care wedged the muddy cloth into the crack. One more enemy vanquished.

To celebrate, Wellington decided to read a couple of letters. To a literate man in this camp, anything with writing on it was a treasure on a par with warm, dry stockings. The guards had allowed six letters through — three of them from his wife, one from Lord Castlereagh, and one each from Sir Neil Campbell and a former aide. He went outside and wiped his fingers on the dead grass, removing every last trace of the mud, before handling any of the precious correspondence.

Campbell’s letter revealed, among other things, that he had been appointed governor of what had once been French Guiana and was now British Cayenne — or would be, as soon as the Portuguese had left. (By now they almost certainly had. The letter was a few months old.) Cayenne was something of a backwater, but it was a sign that the Crown still trusted the man.

“Whenever I have been tempted to bewail the Mistakes and Misfortunes of my life, I have reflected upon you and the Example you set in your daily life, and have cast aside self-pity,” wrote Campbell. “I pray that you may soon return to receive the Encomia of the Nation you have served so bravely.” Which was heartening, even if the first sentence was the sort of thing one said to a man if one never expected to see him again this side of Heaven.

The other letter was from James Morriset, his aide-de-camp from the American campaign and a man who Wellington thought could have taught Campbell the true meaning of misfortune. He wrote to say that he had been promoted to lieutenant colonel and reunited with the 80th Foot, which had been posted to Sicily to help the local authorities keep order. (Wellington knew little of what had passed in the outside world, but apparently the situation in Italy had completely gone to hell.) Morriset was trying to learn enough Italian to communicate with the locals, or at least enough to learn what “orco-viso” meant.

Wellington was imagining Morriset, with his impeccable clothing and his distorted nightmare of a face, terrorizing his soldiers in the midst of a sunny Mediterranean climate, when two people approached him — a guard and someone he didn’t know, carrying a large valise.

“M’sieur Wellesley,” said the guard, too much the republican to acknowledge anyone’s dukehood, let alone a British prisoner’s.

“Your Grace,” said the man with him in what was unquestionably an English voice. “Sir Richard Croft, at your service.” He had short, rumpled hair and looked well-dressed and, if not corpulent, certainly without the gauntness that Wellington saw on guards and prisoners alike. The duke’s hand went to the eleven months’ growth of beard on his face. He wished someone had warned him he would have visitors.

“You will come with us, please,” said the guard. Wellington wondered what he had done to earn a visit from the royal physician.

As they approached the guardhouse, Wellington noted the air of ingrained, well-nigh permanent sorrow that Croft had about him. The last man Wellington had seen in this state was Campbell, when they had met at Nancy. It was the look of a man who felt that he had, in some deep and profound way, failed.

“How goes the war?” said Wellington.

“It could be worse,” said Croft. “The weather held Beresford in place for most of the spring. Last month, he tried to force a crossing near the coast with the help of the Royal Navy. It was a disaster — two first-rates and five frigates lost to French fireships in the Waal. But he tried again further east, and the last I heard, he had taken Nijmegen. How far he'll go from there, given the weather… that I cannot say.”

The guardhouse had an iron stove that had recently been filled. It was warm, and growing warmer. Which was just as well, since Croft was asking Wellington to strip naked. The duke took off his shirt and trousers and then unwrapped, one by one, the strips of rags that were wrapped around his limbs like bandages — not tightly, as some poor fools had done and cut off their circulation, but with great care so as to stay in place and offer an extra layer of protection against the cold.

“You’ve gotten rather thin, of course, but there are no obvious signs of ill health,” said the doctor. “You have an excellent constitution, Your Grace.” When he got to Wellington’s left foot, and noticed that the outermost toe was gone, he turned to the guard and said “How did this happen?” as though the guard might have personally lopped it off.

“My own carelessness and nothing else,” said Wellington. “I was on a wood-chopping detail around… January or February, I believe it was… and the rag I was using for a shoe was threadbare in that place. I was quite engrossed in my work, and by the time I noticed, the damage was done.”

“I see,” said the doctor. “Well, given that all France is on short commons, I can report that you have not been ill-treated. I hope to find the rest of our men in similar fettle. I dare say you will be glad of this, however.” He opened his valise.

A new, clean greatcoat of good English wool.

A new, clean shirt. Linen.

New, clean trousers. Linen.

New, clean stockings and underdrawers. Linen.

And a pair of boots. Not just any boots, but the kind he had specially made by Hoby of St. James’.

Wellington could not remember the last time his eyes had filled with tears. With each article of clothing he put on, he felt a little of his old dignity return. The only thing that troubled him was the thought of how much better off he was than everyone else in camp.

And then he saw what was on the desk before him.

It was a parole. If he signed it, he would be bound by honor, not to mention self-preservation, not to bear arms against France or her Italian allies for the duration of the war.

“You heard what happened to Louis?” said Croft glumly.

“I heard rumors of it,” said Wellington. “I dismissed them as lies cooked up by Lanjuinais and his crew.”

“If only they were,” said Croft. “Your Grace, the King of France is dead.” Wellington remembered that Croft had been assigned to take care of the man. No wonder he was so downcast.

“It happened in Marseilles,” the doctor continued before Wellington could ask. “Lowe still holds the city… for now, at least. It’s become something of a royalist stronghold. The King was to make a speech… a great crowd of them had assembled… a cold, foggy day with heaven only knows what foul miasmas in the air… And after he spoke, he came to greet his people.”

“Was there an assassin among them?”

“No. Or at least, not a deliberate one. But so many of them were ill…” Croft shook his head.

“The King took ill,” said Wellington.

“I did everything in my power. I bled him again and again, but the humours would not come out and he became weaker and weaker…” Wellington had seen enough sick and wounded men to suspect that the attentions of doctors were more likely to kill than cure, but he had no plans to say so.

“The line has not ended — there is a brother, Charles — but…” Croft’s voice trailed off.

“But the Crown has decided to abandon the Bourbon cause and recognize this Regency Council as the legitimate government of France, so that we may give them our parole and be of use to their Lordships somewhere, if not the Low Countries.”

“Yes,” said Croft. “The war continues — for now, at least — but recognizing the French government will make peace easier, come the day.”

“And so here you are to assess our condition and arrange our freedom,” said Wellington. “I trust this means the royal family is in good health?”

“Yes. They have not dismissed me — the Prince Regent and his brothers still have some trust in me. Princess Charlotte is another story. She already favors the Prince Consort’s German doctor, Baron Stockmar. I pray no harm will come to her as a consequence.”

Wellington nodded, then signed the paper. So that was that. His sojourn here was at an end, as was his part in the war on France. Perhaps there would be work for him in India.

 

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In May of 1816, James Brown and Thomas B. Robertson were two men with a problem. They were senator and representative of a state which was now half gone from the Union. (The other Louisiana senator, Eligius Fromentin, had the previous spring made his apologies to his colleagues and departed with his family for the new Republic of Louisiana. He had yet to be replaced.)

To make matters worse, the rump of Louisiana that was left held considerably less than half of the state’s population and not even a trace of any government above the county level. Was it even a state any longer? This was the Northern Louisiana Question, in its simplest form.

As far as can be determined, no one — not one newspaper editorial, not one congressman — actually proposed formally reducing northern Louisiana to territory status, even if such a thing were permitted under the Constitution. Most people seemed to favor the simplest solution, which was to leave it as a state and let it form a new government in its own time. Given the way the nation’s population was expanding, before too long it would be at least as well populated as, say, Delaware or Rhode Island. No one found this solution very satisfying, however — it raised the question of just how small and lightly populated a state could be and still qualify, a question the Constitution had never addressed.

And then, in May, a minor land dispute between the state and a landowner (Louisiana v. Gibson) made its way to the U.S. Supreme Court, which regretfully ruled that the State had seceded and was de facto no longer a state in the Union, that what was left was “unorganized territory,” and that the state’s attorney represented no one but himself. This carried the disturbing implication that states could secede, which at other points in U.S. history might have been welcome news, but not in this time of national unity.

Meanwhile, across the river, David Holmes had a bigger problem. John Quincy Adams was talking about giving the Cherokees and Choctaws guarantees of land in, respectively, West Florida and Mississippi Territory — near the borders with British territory, where they could serve as a buffer. Holmes, the governor of Mississippi Territory, was fiercely opposed to this, but could not prevent it from happening unless Mississippi were a full-fledged state. (Also opposed to this, as it happened, was Choctaw chief Pushmataha, who had long since learned that white men’s promises were worth their weight in gold and intended to retain every inch of what his people already claimed.)

And so, Holmes, Claiborne, Brown, Robertson and a dozen Louisiana legislators who had chosen the U.S. over the Republic got together in Natchez and pulled off a sort of coup. They applied for Mississippi to become a state, with its territory comprising both Mississippi Territory and northern Louisiana and its capital in Natchez (where it would remain until 1822, when it would be moved to Coffeesburg[1]). Although this could not be acted upon until Congress reconvened in December, it was welcomed at the time as a welcome solution to a thorny problem. (It says something about the spirit of the time that it would not occur to Calhoun and the other representatives of the slave states until later that they had just reduced their potential vote in the Senate by two.)
Andrea Fessler, Rise of the Dead Rose


[1] OTL Vicksburg

 

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Louisiana, Florida, the T&T canal, the election and the latest from the Other Peninsular War… I picked a great time to get sick.


August 30, 1816
6:45 a.m.
Tampa Bay area

The government of British Florida was a triumvirate of sorts. Admiral Cochrane was in charge of the fleet protecting it, while Major General Gibbs was in charge of the regiments stationed there. Then there was the newly-arrived colonial governor, Thomas Stamford Bingley Raffles. All three men were standing on the tip of the lip of land between Tampa Bay and Hillsborough Bay, observing the construction of what Cochrane had humbly named “Fort Cochrane” while Raffles sketched out a plan for the streets of the port that would hopefully arise here, a city they had already named “Trafalgar.”

“How did you come by this posting?” said Cochrane.

“I was serving as lieutenant-governor of Java before we returned it to the Dutch,” said Raffles. “I returned to London and was told directly that I was wanted here. The Crown desires a colony here that can at least support a few squadrons of the navy.”

“But who would move here of their own free will?” said Cochrane. “Malaria, yellow jack, monstrous reptiles…”

"A few are coming," said Gibbs. "There is already a small community of Jews in the northeast, near St. Augustine. Whether it will amount to anything no one can say just yet.”

“Perhaps we could send transported prisoners here,” said Cochrane. “Easier than sailing them clear to Australia.”

“And have them run away to America the first chance they got?” said Gibbs.

“Plantations, I suppose,” said Cochrane. “God knows it feels hot enough to grow sugarcane.” There was a reason they were out and about this early — later in the day it would become truly miserable.

Raffles shook his head. “There’ll be no slavery in Florida under my jurisdiction,” he said.

“You are an abolitionist, I take it?” said Cochrane.

“Do you remember what Fouché said of the murder of the Duc d’Enghien?” said Raffles. “That it was ‘worse than a crime, it was a blunder’?”

“I thought it was Talleyrand who said that,” said Cochrane.

Raffles shook his head. “Talleyrand said many clever things, but I’m sure it was Fouché who said this. In any event, slavery is worse than an evil — it is a liability, at least in a colony under any sort of military threat. It amounts to little more than importing a fifth column of spies and saboteurs for the enemy to make use of.”

“Then who is to build the port?”

“We will recruit labourers from India and the Far East,” he said. “I imagine there’ll be Hindu untouchables only too happy to settle a land where no one cares about caste. And poor Bengalis, Javanese and Balinese… I assure you, these swamps will hold no terrors for them, and rice should grow well here. Possibly Chinese as well. A period of indentured servitude to pay off the cost of transportation, followed by land grants… If more workers are wanting, I dare say there are Haitians and Jamaican freedmen looking for employment.”

“Land grants?” said Gibbs. “I think the Seminoles and Creeks may have something to say about that.”

“How many of them are there?” said Raffles.

“I haven’t done a precise census,” said Gibbs. “I would estimate there are about 20,000 Creeks and 5,000 Seminoles. But they are our allies — in fact, I plan to organize their warriors into regiments.”

“I dare say we can work something out,” said Raffles.

“If you hold to your plans, this will become a very… strange colony,” said Cochrane.

“I do not imagine that Florida is destined to become a land of Saxon blood and Anglican creed,” said Raffles. “But I will see it become a loyal and valued part of the British Empire.”

 

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Now for some news about the election.


…given his history, it was, perhaps, inevitable that Randolph’s followers would come to be called the “Tertium Quids,” even though the Federalists had merged with the Democratic-Republicans, and therefore the name no longer made any sense whatsoever.

A question I am more often asked is “why didn’t he ever run for president?” To understand this, you must understand the man. Behind all his eccentricities, this rambling and disjointed speaker was intelligent, observant, a believer in the value of planning ahead and one of the most deeply principled men ever to serve in American public life. As he would say in 1819 in a speech to Congress opposing federal involvement in the planning of the Great Southern Canal, “The moment a man leaves the path of religion or virtue to ascertain how far he may go on the border line of villainy without overstepping it, that man is lost.”

Compromise was anathema to Randolph — but as a man who had served in Congress for some years, he had seen the necessity of it in any government that was not an absolute tyranny. This was part of the reason for his desire to keep the reach of said government as small as possible. And yet — here is a paradox that has bedeviled conservative politicians since Edmund Burke — in order to achieve his goal of limiting the government’s power, he himself had to seek power within that government.

And in 1816 he became a man on a mission — to oppose the “Dead Roses” (a term he had coined in derision, but which the Democratic-Republicans themselves self-applied without shame) and the incoming Adams-Monroe administration with every fiber of his being. “It is my duty to leave nothing undone that I may lawfully do, to pull down this administration,” he said. “Our situation is awful beyond conception. We are going the road that has ruined nations before us. I must be dead before I could refrain at a call like this.”

But to run for president against this ticket seemed an exercise in futility. (This is, of course, exactly what it was. In November the TQ ticket of John Taylor of Caroline and Nathaniel Macon received the vote of only one faithless Delaware elector.) More to the point, Randolph could not run for president and representative at the same time. To pursue the presidency would have been to abandon his own seat. At least in Congress, he would continue to have the opportunity to continue to put forward his thoughts, offer his opinion pieces to the newspapers, and generally combat what he called “the meddling, obtrusive, intrusive, restless, self-dissatisfied spirit” of the DRs.

So it was that the man of courage found himself, not once but several times, holding back while others carried the banner of his ideas onto the primary battlefield of American politics — the Presidential election. In doing so, however, Randolph proved that the Tertium Quid party was more than just his personal hobbyhorse. He showed that others shared his ideals. At the same time, while one TQ electoral standard-bearer after another rose and fell, Randolph, the nation’s “unofficial Leader of the Opposition,” was able to hold sway over the nation’s second party for a dozen years — years which saw it rise from utter irrelevance to at least a regional power base.
Andrea Fessler, A Voice in the Wilderness: The Life of John Randolph of Roanoke

(The quotes are all things J.R. of R. said IOTL, taken slightly out of context.)

 

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I'd like to thank bm79 for his assistance.

The Assembly of the Republic of Louisiana was noteworthy for the simplicity of its structure. Unlike the U.S. Congress, it was not a compromise between popular and provincial representation. Nor was it a compromise between democracy and aristocracy, unlike the British Parliament. It was designed by men who were not afraid of a government that could (at least in theory) engage in quick and decisive action when necessary. That, after all, was how they had come to secede in the first place.

The Assembly was comprised of one chamber. Elections were held every three years on the first Saturday in August. Each parish sent at least one representative to the Assembly. If it had between 1,000 and 2,000 residents, it had two representatives. Between 2,000 and 3,000 residents meant three representatives. And so on. Although this might seem to weight the Assembly in favor of the more heavily populated Orleans Parish, it also gave greater influence to the votes of large slaveholders, whose slaves could not vote but were nonetheless counted in the census.

The first order of business of each new Assembly was to choose a president and vice-president. In the case of the 1815-1818 session, these were Jacques Villeré and Jean Noel Destréhan. No one could serve two consecutive terms in either office — indeed, a president or vice-president who had completed one term was obliged to wait two election cycles before having his name put forward again. This was intended to reduce the danger of a single individual dominating the government.

It had, however, a (possibly) unintended effect. Presidents were, with the consent of the Assembly, allowed to appoint ministers who could serve until they died or were replaced. The intention was to allow the Assembly to benefit at all times from the greatest expertise available in a given field. However, it was soon noted that there was no requirement for a minister to be an Assemblyman — or even a citizen of the Republic. The result was the slow growth of a permanent cabinet of “expert advisors” sent from London…
Aaron Penright, The Autoëmendence[1] of Republican Institutions in the Nineteenth Century

[1]A word that will be coined ITTL to describe biological evolution, and will later be used as a metaphor for technological and institutional change.

 

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While we're all waiting for me to finish the real updates, I'd like to introduce a little feature of this TL: People Born This Year Who Will Show Up Later. I'm not going to tell you too much about them just yet — just a little bit about their early childhoods.

Here's the Class of 1816, so to speak:


March, born a slave on a cotton and tobacco plantation in southern South Carolina. His exact birthdate will never be known, but he was named after the month he was born in, as slave children sometimes were. He will be known as a quiet child. When he is three, a five-year-old white girl will teach him the alphabet, partly as a way of showing off her own mastery of it. Having learned this much, March will quickly work out the basics of reading for himself.

William Burch, born Aug. 4 on a farm in eastern Georgia. He will establish himself as popular with other children, but a notorious and incurable prankster.

Adolf Rasmussen, born Dec. 18, son of a fisherman on the southwest coast of Denmark. In the wake of the Baltic Straits War, his family will move to the United States — specifically, to Gloucester, Massachestts. As a child, he will have very little interest in fishing, but will show a fondness for taking things apart and putting them back together again.

 

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And another little nugget of information:

THE (JOHN QUINCY) ADAMS ADMINISTRATION​

PRESIDENT: John Quincy Adams
VICE PRESIDENT: James Monroe

ATTORNEY GENERAL: Smith Thompson (1817-1823), William Wirt (1823-1825)
SECRETARY OF DOMESTIC AFFAIRS: Rufus King
SECRETARY OF THE NAVY: Benjamin William Crowninshield
SECRETARY OF STATE: Henry Clay
SECRETARY OF THE TREASURY: William H. Crawford
SECRETARY OF WAR: Daniel D. Tompkins

 

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SHAMELESS SELF-PROMOTION ALERT: Vote for "The Dead Skunk" here.
And now, back to our story.

The sun is shining brightly in the Alabama sky
With my hand upon the tiller, none are happier than I
For my wife lives up in Cairo, down in Mobile I’ve a pal
And there’s many a friend and neighbor on the T&T Canal
- “On the T&T Canal,” Classic American Folk Songs for Young People

The sun is shining brightly in the Alabama sky
With my money in my pocket, none are happier than I
For my wife is back in Cairo, down in Mobile I’ve a gal
And there’s many a lovely lady on the T&T Canal
- “On the T&T Canal” (the original lyrics)

All things considered, the preliminary work on the Tennessee and Tombigbee Canal was completed with surprising speed — or perhaps not so surprising, considering how important it was for the republic to have an outlet on the Gulf that it controlled. The fact that there were relatively few (white) property owners along the intended route also helped — both because there was little need to buy anyone out and because the project was not delayed by major landowners seeking to alter the route for their own advantage, as happened often during the planning of the Erie Canal.

The canal route was surveyed over the course of late 1815 and early 1816. The Southern Inland Navigation Company was incorporated in April of ’16, before surveying was even completed. The actual digging began on July 4 of that year — precisely one year before work began on the Erie Canal, which had suffered many delays from political infighting in New York State. Yet, although the T&T Canal was nearly two hundred kilometers shorter than the Erie, it was finished in the same month.

What slowed it down? Two things:
• Construction was shut down for much of 1817 by the war against the Choctaws and Chickasaws. Although Pushmataha and his followers lacked the numbers and firepower to meet the U.S. regular army in the open field, they were experts at irregular attacks against civilians and militiamen. Eventually, however, the Choctaws and Chickasaws were driven into Louisiana.
• Malaria and yellow fever were far more prevalent in the south than in the north. Although the milder winters made it easier to work late in the year, the outbreaks of pestilence made work in the summer nearly impossible. To make matters worse, the coolest part of the day — the time otherwise best suited for work — was the time when mosquitoes were most active, although the connection between mosquitoes and these diseases had not yet been made.

The SINC dealt with this second problem by buying slaves — particularly those deemed too recalcitrant to be of much value elsewhere. Normally, so many willful slaves in the same place at the same time would have been a perfect recipe for disaster. However, on the firm advice of President Adams and Secretary King, the company gave its slaves salaries equal to those of its free workers, which it placed in manumission funds. Slaves who had survived and earned money equal to $10 (later raised to $20) more than their purchase price were freed and rehired as regular salaried workers.

For most of the year, however, the work was shared with large numbers of Italian immigrants fleeing famine and chaos in their homeland. Although many of these men would return to Italy in the 1820s, when they were richer and Italy was at peace, some of them would remain with their families in America, often with anglicized names. Many Venetian gondoliers found ways to apply their skills to the growing network of canals in the American South.

Relations between the Negro and Italian workers were often tense — blacks resented the better working conditions of Italians, while Italians soon realized the quickest route to being accepted as equals by the local English-speaking, Protestant white majority was not to accept the Negro as an equal. In addition, the managers of SINC soon found that an easy way to get a stretch of canal dug quickly was to set a team of Negroes and a team of Italians in competition with one another.

There were, however, some surprising moments of cultural interchange. For example, composer J. F. F. Green[1] would later cite Negro spirituals and work songs as being among his earliest influences. More to the point, Italian-Americans who had been Carbonari in Italy found themselves in sympathy with the plight of the slave — and were only too happy to make common cause with abolitionists, whether they were based in the north or in Florida…
Charles Cerniglia, The Road to The Troubles: The American South, 1800-1840

[1] Joseph Fortune Francis Green, the greatest American composer of the 19th century. His Ode to Freedom (something like a reworked version of the "Anvil Chorus") became the national anthem. (Just to clear up one possible point of confusion, he definitely did not write “On the T&T Canal.”)

 

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Once again, a shout-out to bm79 for expert advice.



The last act of the old provisional government — in large part the former state government — had been to order that a census be conducted. On October 2, 1815, when the first Assembly of the Republic met for the first time, the census had not yet been compiled, so the seats in the Assembly were apportioned according to the state census of 1810. Nonetheless, as the population of Louisiana was growing steadily, it became the policy of the Republic to hold a census once every five years, and to reapportion seats in the next Assembly accordingly.

Once Villeré and Destréhan had been named as President and Vice-President, the next major item on the Assembly’s agenda was to decide Louisiana’s immigration policy. This was vital to the future of the Republic — without immigrants the tiny nation would never prosper, and there were many Creoles still living north of the U.S. border, but the second-worst nightmare of every Assemblyman was a hundred thousand anglophone Americans moving into Louisiana, then voting to rejoin the United States. (The worst nightmare involved free blacks from Haiti moving in en masse.)

Ultimately the Assembly voted to limit immigration to 5,000 per year for the next ten years, and to place a five-year residency requirement on individuals applying to become citizens, with citizenship expedited to six months for those who were at least three-fourths white and showed proficiency in French… or (on the advice of British ambassador William Huskisson) who came from Great Britain.

Next, the Assembly set about planning and building a new home for itself. L'Hôtel de Gouvernement, where they were meeting, was aging, cramped and unworthy of a hopeful young republic. For the new seat of government, the Assembly chose the block across R. de Toulouse, between R. de Chartres and R. de la Levée[1], facing the Place d’Armes.[2]

The next question was who should design and build it. The competition came down to two choices — the architect and town planner Barthelemy Lafon, or the team of Arsène Latour and Hyacinthe Laclotte. Months of debate passed before the Assembly chose Latour and Laclotte. (According to some accounts, the defeated Lafon considered going into piracy before moving to Florida to assist Governor Raffles in planning and building the city of Trafalgar.)

While they were discussing plans for the new capitol building, the Assembly also discussed how to pay for it — which led, inevitably, to the issue of tariffs. How best to exploit the fortuitous geographic position of the Republic? In 1815, the Assembly voted to place a duty of 20 percent on all goods entering the republic from the United States or parts of the Spanish Empire, but none on goods entering from the British Empire. This decision would be revisited before the next election…


…J. Q. Adams’s famous speech in Alexandria, and his subsequent campaign, were studied with great interest by President Villeré. His rhetoric was chiefly aimed at Britain rather than Louisiana, and he made it clear that he had no intention of declaring war until the United States was ready to fight and win. Nonetheless, it was clear that there would be trouble from the north one day, although not necessarily next year or even next decade.

Along with news of the rising power of the “Dead Roses” came word of the groundbreaking of the Tennessee and Tombigbee Canal. Obviously, a 12-meter-wide canal could not possibly steal more than a fraction of the volume of traffic that the Father of Waters carried, and it would have to charge its users in order to pay off its own investors. Nonetheless, news of the canal was in its way even more disquieting than any speech by Adams or Monroe.

The government’s response? At the end of 1816, they voted to increase the tariff to 25 percent. The canal would not be finished until some time in the 1820s. Best, then, to make the most of the current situation…


…At first glance, the negotiations over the border had an element of farce to them. Whatever the governments might have claimed, the border country was in fact a lawless no-man’s-land inhabited by pirates, smugglers and the so-called “Redbones” — a tribe of refugees with white, black and Native American blood. These people held themselves accountable to neither New Orleans nor Mexico City, and certainly not to Madrid. In fact, since 1806 an area of unspecified boundaries mostly east of the Sabine had been declared “neutral ground” by the local commanders of the U.S. and New Spain, and this had worked well enough for ten years.

For two years, neither New Spain nor Old could be bothered to return to the question. The authorities in Mexico City were preoccupied with rebellion, and King Ferdinand VII was more worried about the French over the border and the liberals and constitutionalists within his own country. So, as a steady stream of Royalists fleeing Lanjuinais and the French Regency entered the Port of New Orleans, the Republic began, as quietly as possible, gradually extending its authority in the direction of the Sabine.

But early in 1817, a new government was installed in Mexico City. Calleja del Rey was recalled, and the king’s 23-year-old brother Francisco de Paula was named Prince-Viceroy of the land. The Prince-Viceroy, seeing the need to create the appearance of strength and mindful of Spain’s a long and proud tradition of symbolically claiming dominion over millions of square miles of land where its writ did not run, reasserted Spanish authority over all lands west of the Calcasieu, which the Spanish called the Arroyo Hondo.

Villeré’s foreign minister, the recent immigrant Hyde de Neuville, called upon the Republic’s British protectors to mediate the dispute. This put Huskisson in something of an awkward position, as Spain was an ally and its new government was loosening trade restrictions in those New World ports it controlled. Moreover, his government did indeed have a stake in the dispute — the Crown would not tolerate a pirate haven so close to a friendly port, and the government of Spain had proven itself incapable of policing the area. (On the other hand, many of the pirates were themselves Frenchmen with connections to Louisiana.)

So it was that Huskisson wrote back to London with a proposal. The Bank of England would loan the Republic 100,000 pounds sterling to simply buy the entire stretch of coastline. The new border would run northwest along the line of the Brazos to the 30th parallel, and from there along a straight line to the intersection of the 31st parallel and the Sabine River. Spain, which was still rebuilding after the Peninsular War while struggling to reconquer its New World empire, would lose a little ungoverned land and gain some useful cash. The tiny Republic of Louisiana would double in size at a stroke. Interest payments would make Louisiana a source of income for the Bank of England for many years to come. Everyone would win. Castlereagh, de Neuville, the Spanish foreign minister José García de Leon y Pizarro and Francisco de Paula’s right-hand men, Apodaca and Iturbide, all agreed to this.

Then it was simply a matter of conquering this new land for the Republic. The “Western Expedition,” as it was called, was commanded by the irreplaceable Major General Keane, accompanied by General de la Ronde of the “Grand Army of the Republic,” the Lafitte brothers (pirates themselves, but ones who could see which way the wind was blowing), warriors of the Chacta and Chicacha[3] tribes who had been displaced from the U.S. and were desperate for a new home, and Ambassador Huskisson, whose job (according to some historians) was as much to keep an eye on Keane as it was to keep an eye on the Assembly.

The only organized resistance to the expedition came at Galvezville on September 8, 1817, where Keane defeated and killed the pirate Commodore Aury. His fleet moved into the bay beyond, on which the Republic bestowed the official named of “Baie des Guérisseurs” in honor of Alvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca, the Spanish explorer who had visited the area nearly three hundred years previously. (Cabeza de Vaca and the other survivors of his expedition had been believed by many of the natives to possess healing powers.)…


…By late 1817 and early 1818, it had become clear that the tariff was reaping rich rewards. Even with the loan from London to pay back, l’Hôtel de la République to build and the lost revenue from providing free use of the port to the Royal Navy, there was plenty of money left over. What to do with it? Ironically enough, it was this seemingly happy question that finally brought the serpent of party and faction into the Eden of Louisiana politics.

Bernard de Marigny, one of the Orleans representatives, argued that the money should be spent on public amenities — better roads, expanded port facilities, state-run lycées and a grande école, and so on. “New Orleans could become the jewel of the hemisphere, if we have the will and imagination to make it so,” said de Marigny in a speech to the Assembly which drew a standing ovation from many of his colleagues.

Jean Noel Destréhan, who spoke for St. Charles Parish, had a simpler answer, and one nearly as popular — cut taxes. He and many of his followers were of the landed, slaveholding gentry. The burden of the Republic’s property taxes fell disproportionately on them, and they were eager for an excuse to ease it.

After years of relative harmony, the dispute proved far more acrimonious than anyone could have expected. The breaking point came when Destréhan insinuated that the younger, high-living Marigny had ambitions to spend the tariff money personally on “gambling and loose women.” It took the intervention of several Assemblymen of both factions to prevent a duel.

President Villeré, his term nearly at an end, decided that this would be a good time to increase his prestige by putting forward a solution that neither side had thought of, but that both could agree to. His first thought was to use the extra money to pay back the debt to London a little faster, but Huskisson urged him not to do this. (The ambassador well knew that from the point of view of the Bank of England, debt paid off too soon meant lost interest.)

Villeré’s second idea was to place the money in a rainy-day fund in the Bank of Louisiana. Marigny and Destréhan agreed, however, that this would merely delay and compound the question.

Finally, the President proposed to split the money three ways — one part to go into the rainy-day fund, another part towards road improvement and establishing an experimental lycée in New Orleans, and one part to be returned to the taxpayers in the form of remittances. (This last was a stroke of genius — a tax cut would have been hard to reverse, whereas a remittance might or might not be granted in any given year.) Both sides, reluctantly, agreed to this on May 30, 1818, the last day of the session.

But the damage had been done. When the Assemblymen ran for re-election, they did so as members of the Radical and Conservative parties…
-Michel Beauregard, A History of the Republic of Louisiana

[1] OTL Decatur Street.
[2] OTL, but certainly not TTL, Jackson Square. (For those of you looking on Google Maps, Wilkinson Street doesn’t exist yet and ITTL never will.)
[3] Choctaw and Chickasaw

 

[Lycaon pictus]

The scars left on the Italian soul by the so-called “Other Peninsular War” can be seen in many places. For example, nearly every home built in Italy in the 19th century has not only a basement, but a hidden sub-basement, excavated extra room, or sometimes just a largish hole chipped out of the bedrock. Although seldom used for anything but junk, these were originally intended for storing extra food.

In culture, the two dominant styles in Italian opera, poetry, painting and sculpture between 1820 and 1850 — the Neo-Pastoral style with its deliberate innocence and sense of reassurance, and the infamous trucescuro (literally “grim-dark”) style — both arose as a response to the horrors of the war. One fulfilled the need to forget, the other the need to remember.

Most of all, the war left a deep and bitter hatred in Italy toward all things Austrian…
Iliescu et al., A History of Ethnic Relations in Europe


December 20, 1816
5:30 p.m.
Cernobbio, Kingdom of Lombardy-Venetia
Lake Como was frozen over. A heavy snow was falling on the Villa d’Este. At least it was in season, and white rather than rust-red, as it had been for much of the year.

Princess Caroline of Brunswick, the extremely estranged wife of the Prince Regent of the United Kingdom, looked out her window and wondered what the hell she had been thinking, returning to Italy. Not just returning to Italy, but returning to her estate. She could have stayed in Rome. Even now, she might be taking a carriage ride through the city, or at the Teatro Argentina delighting in Rossini’s latest work. The Papal States were said to be getting crowded with refugees, but… where she was now was one of the places the refugees were running away from. And with good reason.

Coming here hadn’t seemed like such a terrible idea at the time. It had been August, with hardly any snow on the ground. The Austrians had been winning the war. (Come to think of it, they still weren’t exactly losing.) Rome had been as safe as any place on earth. If nothing else, if the place seemed at all dissatisfactory she could leave again. For heaven’s sake, she had visited Tunis without being sold into slavery, and sailed the Greek isles unmolested by pirates. Bad things simply weren’t allowed to happen to visiting royals, no matter what their husbands thought of them. So she decided to return to her villa.

Hardly had she crossed the border between the Papal States and Tuscany when the Austrian army started trying to feed itself entirely off the land, and the land (or rather, pretty much all the people on it) rose up against them, and against anybody trying to help them. In Tuscany, Modena, Parma and here in Lombardy, the tax collectors sent to squeeze food out of their own people had been driven out by angry mobs if they were lucky, hanged from the nearest tree if they weren’t. The Austrians had tried to use force to re-establish local authority, but their armies were harried wherever they went.

Not that she didn’t understand. To steal stores of food in a year like this, when no one had anything to spare… if you and your family were doomed to starve, why not use whatever strength you had left to hunt down the nearest soldier and shoot him in the back? What were they going to do — kill you?

Caroline was privately sure the rebels were as quick to steal food as the Austrians — they had to eat too, and they did nothing to grow crops or earn money. But when the Austrians did it, the rebels made sure everyone heard about it. This was especially true of Murat, who had learned the art of demagogy from Bonaparte and the Jacobins. She had met him before, in Naples. In her judgment, he was not a good man, but certainly one to be reckoned with. The Austrians, on the other hand… it didn’t seem to have occurred to them yet that this was a war for the hearts of the people, not simply control of the land. Public opinion was something they weren’t used to worrying about. They were even worse than the British court in this regard.

None of which did her any good. The Grand Duke of Tuscany and the Duke of Modena hadn’t even been able to spare any soldiers to protect her. Passing through their lands, she had been guarded by some very unofficial-looking local men from “citizens’ committees.” Her majordomo, Bartolomeo Pergami, had talked the committees into this somehow or other. This hadn’t been the first time she had come perilously close to a war zone, but it had been the worst.

Finally, in Parma (which was being governed from Milan since Marie Louise had gone to France) Archduke Anton Victor had finally arrived with a detachment of Austrian and Lombard troops to guard her as she returned to the villa. (The “citizens’ committee” men had fled at word of his approach.) The archduke had made it very clear that this was a distraction from important duties, and that he was only doing it as a courtesy to the royal family of Austria’s ally, Britain. Just to compound the irony of this, no sooner was she at the villa than Pergami had discovered that that little rat Ompteda was a spy for her husband. She had dismissed him and every servant he had suborned.

She had considered moving on to Vienna, or to Switzerland. (Correction — she should have gone to Vienna, or to Switzerland, or to anywhere other than here.) But since dear Pergami had gone to all the trouble of rooting out the spies, she had decided to stay a little longer. Wherever else she went, it wouldn’t be long before Prinny had every secret agent manqué he could hire sneaking into her apartments, filching and copying the keys and sniffing her underclothes for signs of adultery. She had had her fill and more of this since… really, since about a year after baby Charlotte was born. (How was her daughter? Was she happy? Caroline had heard she’d gotten married. Was there a grandchild on the way?)

So — Caroline had used the last of their money to buy food from Switzerland, which was as hungry as Italy but still orderly. She and her household had settled down here, in this nice out-of-the-way spot safely close to the Swiss and Austrian borders and almost completely under the Hapsburg emperor’s control, to wait. She had written a few letters to friends back in England, to assure them that she was all right. Surely things would get better.

They had gotten worse. As of November, the cities of Milan, Turin and Novara were in the hands of the “Provisional Government” of either the “Republic of Lombardy,” the “Republic of Italy” or the “Kingdom of Italy,” depending on which of the various factions you asked. Caroline suspected that the only thing holding them all together was their mutual hatred of the Hapsburgs and any ruler who accepted Hapsburg support.

Still, she had enough food to last for a while, and next year the weather would return to normal and her allowance would come again — Prinny couldn’t possibly be so petty as to block it. (Well, actually he could, but Parliament was another matter.) All she and her household had to do was fort up here and survive until then. And if worst came to worst, the Swiss border and the well-garrisoned town of Chiasso were a mere two miles to the west. Even with blizzards every week and bandits in the mountains, she liked the odds of surviving that journey.

And then it had happened. Yesterday, Count Colloredo-Mansfeld had come to call. He had brought ten thousand unexpected guests with him.

He had been very polite, but firm. He was headed to Milan to help the archduke retake the city. He was planning a surprise attack. Under the circumstances, he could allow no one to leave the village or the estate.

Oh, and he needed their food. All of it. Down to the very last loaf of bread.

There was nothing to be done. The Austrian army had gotten very good at finding hidden stores of food. The only things Bartolomeo had been able to conceal were Angelica and every other female in the household.

Though they hadn’t said as much, everyone had been afraid of worse than rape. Her attendants had many contacts among the Italians. From what they said, the armies of the Austrian Empire had moved beyond what (God help this world) everyone had come to think of as “normal” wartime atrocities against any who resisted them or tried to hide food or valuables. Men’s bodies and parts of bodies were being found impaled on tree branches. The stories of what was being done to women and children…

They must have grown in the telling, Caroline thought. It’s not as though I’m hearing both sides of the story. Only a year ago the Austrians were a nation like any other — they can’t possibly have all turned to devils, no matter what Bartolomeo and Angelica may think. But at times like this, ordinary men could do just such terrible things. She had heard stories of the Peninsular War.

And this Peninsular War looked to be even worse. Whenever the bodies of the Austrians’ victims were found (when they were found at all) pieces were missing — arms, legs, hearts, livers, slabs of flesh cut from the side. It was said that the Austrians were no longer content with starving and murdering the people — they had turned cannibal. Caroline’s own suspicion was that some of the more desperate peasants were taking advantage of the ready availability of corpses, but everyone was ready to believe the worst of anyone who followed the Emperor Francis.

So… it was almost Christmas, and she and all her servants (and their children, to make things worse) were trapped here with not so much as a raw onion to eat. The question of whether they should stay or go had been well and truly settled — they would go to Switzerland and live on credit until Parliament sent their allowance. But there was no prospect of leaving until Colloredo had won or lost his battle.

On top of everything else, it was dark outside and her majordomo Pergami was missing, along with the Neapolitan Theodore Majocchi. Italy right now wasn’t a good place to go missing in. If somebody wasn’t in line of sight, a part of you couldn’t help wondering if you’d ever see him again.

A thread of cold air brushed her skin, a little draft from the window’s edge. The wind had picked up again. It howled in the distance, sounding like screams and volley-fire…

No. That wasn’t the wind. It was battle… somewhere to the south, but much closer than Milan. She had heard such noises before, on her journey to London to meet her husband.

For the next half hour, she simply sat there, listening. Trying to decide if the noise was getting closer or farther away. If it was dying down or getting worse. If musket-balls were about to start crashing through the windows. She said several prayers.

Finally, the noise of battle faded.

She kept sitting there anyway. There was nothing much else to do right now. Nothing to eat. No one to talk to. Books to read, but not enough light to read by. Nothing to do but sit, and wait, and worry.

Then there was noise near the side door. It sounded like… not more than a few men. Whatever else might be happening, the villa wasn’t being invaded. Caroline went to see what it was.

In the hall, she saw Pergami leaning on her secretary’s shoulder. Hownam was a strong man, but Pergami was very tall and it was all he could do to get the majordomo into a chair. There was still unmelted snow sticking to his muttonchop whiskers.

“Majocchi… is dead,” Pergami gasped, rubbing his hands and blowing on his fingers to warm them. “Shot through the heart. A patrol. I only just got away myself.”

“Are you wounded?”

Pergami gave a bitter little chuckle. “Nothing so honorable,” he said. “I slipped on a patch of ice… twisted my ankle.”

“Please tell me you are not a part of this… this…” She waved her hand. She couldn’t think of a word that did justice to all the horrors Italy was going through.

“I am sorry,” he said. “I once served the Hapsburgs myself, as you know, but… enough is enough. Those bastards don’t care if we live or die anymore. If they ever did. I couldn’t let Milan suffer for the sake of Austria’s power. I had to warn them.”

“If Colloredo finds out what you’ve done, he’ll kill you,” said Caroline. “He might kill us all.” It would be so easy. He could blame it on the rebels. Castlereagh would issue formal diplomatic denunciations. Prinny would probably throw a party to celebrate. Why did I leave England? she thought. Why did I leave my daughter?

“He has very little time to find out,” said Pergami. “Our king is coming.”

* * *

It was with some dread that Caroline heard the knock on the front door.

“I’ll answer it,” said Hownam. (The dear man had actually challenged Ompteda to a duel. Ompteda had responded by fleeing very far away.)

At first, Caroline didn’t recognize the man who entered. He was tall, lean and weathered, with a scrubby beard. He was dressed in a civilian greatcoat over the patched-up remains of a French uniform.

“We meet again, Your Majesty,” he said in French. “As one unfortunate and slandered monarch to another, I greet you. You’re looking well.”

And then she recognized him.

“Murat,” she said. “No — forgive me — King Joachim.” Caroline had no problem acknowledging this murderous bandit chief as the rightful King of Italy. She’d met other kings.

“I don’t look much like myself, do I?” he chuckled.

“I am afraid my house is in no state to entertain visiting royalty,” she said. “Colloredo took all our food.”

“I am afraid my entire kingdom is in no state to entertain visiting royalty, suffering as it is from a foreign invasion and pretenders to local rule,” said Joachim.

“So I have seen,” said Caroline. “It was my intention to go to Chiasso as soon as the battle was over and the roads were open again. I gather, from Your Majesty’s appearance, that this is the case?”

“It is indeed. The sons of Italy — properly warned by a certain patriot — have won a great victory over the oppressor. Colloredo is dead, and what is left of his army is fleeing north along the lakefront. I will arrange at once for Your Majesty to have an escort to Chiasso. More than that — I will write to my in-laws in France and request that they take you in as a guest.” At this point, a messenger came in.

“Your Majesty,” he said, “forgive the interruption — we’ve burned our own dead just as you said, but the Austrian dead — the peasants are demanding…” His mouth worked silently, as though he could not find the words.

“I can guess,” said Joachim. “Chop them up as small as you can. That way, everyone for miles around will get a share.”


…Another traditional Italian holiday favorite is “austriaco” — pork shoulder marinated in wine overnight, boiled and then baked. To make it, you’ll need a large pot and a roasting pan.

Ingredients:
1½-2 kilos boneless pork shoulder, cut into inch-thick slices with minimal fat
6 cloves garlic, chopped
2 tbsp fennel seed
salt
A ¾-kilo jar of your favorite pasta sauce

Marinating the meat is traditional, but not really necessary. If you want to make the extra effort, put it in a sealable plastic bag with 2 cups of cooking sherry.
In the pot, place the pork and 2 tsp salt. Add water to cover. Bring to a boil. Reduce heat, cover and simmer for 2 hours, longer if necessary. The meat should pull apart easily when this step is completed.
Preheat oven to 450 degrees. Remove the pork from the liquid and place it in the roasting pan in an even layer, mixed with the garlic and fennel seed. (Remember — fresh garlic really does make a difference!) Bake for 30 minutes, or until the pork is well caramelized.
Pour sauce over pork. Serve over noodles or rice, or just as it is!
Velaine Richardson, 250 Simple Recipes for a Magnificent Christmas Dinner