TLIAD: Wabash's Green and Pleasant Land

[Expat]

Note: I didn't actually follow where the concept of a timeline in a day came from. If it's part of a game or has any rules (other than writing it within a day) I am unaware. I just logged on one day and there they were. So, apologies if I'm not playing by the rules here. Also apologies if I get the history wrong. This is nowhere near my area of expertise. I merely went to bed last night having watched this episode of Star Trek and woke up with the idea. Without further ado:



In Wabash’s Green and Pleasant Land


In 1774, William Blake was a young engraver; struggling with debts; struggling with questions about his faith. Perhaps most of all, he was struggling to get along with his fellow apprentices.

His master, in an effort to keep the peace, sent him on an indefinite assignment to Westminster Abbey to sketch and learn by observation. Blake spent close to a year in this work. It was during this time that his visions (a lifelong companion) began to grow more tangible. He saw a picture in his mind of the grandiose past and religious ecstasy of pre-Reformation Christianity that were the first hints of his future destiny.

The boys of the Westminster School often descended on the abbey and were known to taunt Blake most cruelly on many occasions. The incident upon which the axis of his life revolved arrived one day when Blake was sketching upon a scaffold above the abbey's nave. The boys found their usual target and began to pester him. Every man has his breaking point, and Blake found his that day, confronting the youth loudly and physically. The resulting struggle was witnessed by many of the boys, who all saw their friend disengage with Blake before taking that fatal step off the scaffold and plummeting to his death.

In the initial confusion, Blake was detained by the authorities on suspicion of murder. The boys of the school became shy under questioning, and it was nearly a month before Blake's innocence in the death was determined. This month was spent by Blake in a dank prison cell with all of his wits unraveling. His already fervent imagination became unmarred from the hazy bounds of civilized society and took direction of his psyche. It was here, according to his guards, that he began his lifelong habit of extemporaneous theological preaching (or ranting, if you prefer) on topics broad and uncommon to the staid pulpits of the Anglican mindset typical of Georgian London. This new propensity to speak his unique vision to the open-eared world would be the crucial characteristic defining his later life.

When the episode was over, Blake regained some of his composure and made a brief return to engraving in London. But mob sentiment cared little for official edicts, and there was a certain undercurrent of hostility Blake now had to deal with. Rumors of plots to bring Blake to harm were soon running through the streets. Family and friends urged Blake to flee. Resignedly, he made his way to the colonies.

 

[Incognitia]

Interesting start. You've broken the first rule of a TLIAD, which is that it must be about contemporary British politics, other than that I think you're hitting all the high notes!

 

[Expat]

Part 2:



Setting up shop in Providence, William Blake soon became an enthusiastic supporter of American independence. At the same time, he found within himself a growing commitment to pacifism. This mindset put him at odds with many in the colonies, and he struggled to find a way to support the new country without supporting what he considered senseless murder. This period saw Blake publish his first books of verse on fit subject matter for the times: love, sin, and especially freedom; but spiritual freedom as a concept irrevocably linked to corporeal freedom.

The post-war period saw Blake retreat from what he considered the gross mercantile mindset of coastal New England and the general scorn that greeted him there as both an artist and a lay preacher. He made his way to the Green Mountains of Vermont and began a period that his followers refer to as his Great Communion.

Blake lived in semi-isolation for almost five years in deep contemplation of god, humanity, and the wilderness. He wrote down everything.

Upon his emergence, he made his way to New York, blazing a trail across the state and preaching with a passion to all who would listen. There was a strange duality in Blake. His speeches contained not a blazing, righteous fire, but a tender flame of home and hearth. Meanwhile his verse and artwork were grandiose, revelatory, and often terrifying.

The crowds grew. A few early "disciples" joined him. While divergent in many ways from mainstream Christianity, he was initially shied away from any talk of similarities or differences. In fact, for a time he refused to speak of "labeling faith" at all, except to decry it. Then came his "New Zion" speech. Given at a revival outside Albany, Blake spoke with unsurpassed passion and eloquence about his belief in the redemption of man, and of America as a new Zion where the species could be elevated to a new plane of existence. One where science, art, and nature could exist in harmony through binds of love. His followers began to call his teachings and his faith the Church of the New Zion. Though it is said that Blake never once used this label himself.

The man excited passions across the state with his vision. He preached a strange game, borrowing from Unitarianism, Arianism, the burgeoning Free Love movement, and his native Dissenter faith. He preached of God's forgiveness of man, of the boundlessness of love, and man's evil attempt to constrain that love with law and the marriage contract. He preached of communion with nature, of the desired communion with his blessed brother, American Indian, of the endless opportunity of this new homeland. Early on his followers declared him to be a messiah-figure, a label he always demurred. Whenever directly confronted with the issue, he would promote a kind of communal messianism; that mankind would- and already had- saved itself. In this way Zionism can be seen as a post-millennial counter-point to the many doomsday sects gaining popularity at the time. It was perhaps this "going against the grain" that contributed more than anything else to the early persistence of Zionism.

While willing to do all of his preaching himself, a few of Blake's more devout followers began to plead with him for training in his ideas, so that they might spread the word. In the Spring of 1797, Blake took a group of 7 men and 7 women into the relative wilderness of Upstate New York. The group underwent six months of daily study of Blake's teachings, after which Blake sent them out in isolation to commune with nature for a further six months. The group of 14 reemerged the following spring to a great celebration of ordination (though Zionist Speakers are generally seen as lay preachers, the Year of Peace is still considered a symbolic transition to spiritual authority for Zionists today.) This was the first "Class of 14." Blake would eventually conduct five more over the course of his life. The new Speakers began to spread the word throughout the country and even across the Atlantic.

 

[Expat]

Part III:


As the 19th century dawned, Blake's followers rose in numbers to the point where others started to take notice, with predictably incendiary results. Harassment was frequent. Violence not uncommon. Blake's home in the Hudson River Valley was burned to the ground in 1804. Luckily, Blake was off preaching in Philadelphia at the time. Nevertheless, he got the message, and called on his followers to join him on a journey west to the Indiana Territory. More than 7,000 made the journey.

Blake's writings set down his ideas for the ideal religious community. It would maintain its ties with and venerate God's natural world. It would promote an open acceptance of love in all its consensual forms. The group were ardent abolitionists but also took the concept of racial harmony a step further by asserting racial equality, not just for blacks but also Indians. Blake was also a staunch opponent of industrialization. He accepted certain advances as beneficial to humanity, but kept as his litmus test a scorn for "all that darkens the sky and blighteth the land."

These principles would evolve into the tenets of faith for the burgeoning religion as well as the foundation of life in Blake’s New Jerusalem, founded on the Ohio River[1]. Abiding by Blake's teachings frequently caused his followers no end of trouble, especially in the early days. Their ideas on love earned them the name, "adulterers," or, "fornicators," though Zionists also prized modesty of conduct. Their ideas on the brotherhood of man saw them called, "race traitors," both north and south alike. Their insistence on agrarianism, protection of the wild, and anti-industrialism were perhaps seen as the craziest beliefs of the Zionists by outsiders. Two decades before Transcendentalism and nearly a century before the founding of the non-religious Conservation Movement, people just didn't know what to make of the "naturalism" of Blake.

While all of these principles were taught by Blake and his first generation of Speakers, the main focus of the New Jerusalem settlement in Indiana was on gaining the favor of the territory's tribes. Tensions were high along the frontier as squatters pushed into the territory of the Shawnee, Miami, and other local tribes.

The Zionists, while not generally seen as a communitarian sect, did pool their funds to make an initial- and quite substantial- land purchase along the Ohio River. Upon reaching their land, they heard rumblings of discontent from settler and native alike. There was talk of a religious movement among the Indians that called for the murder of Christian Indians and the driving out of the whites. After nearly a week of solitary contemplation, Blake told his followers that God wanted him to bring a lasting peace between white and Indian.

Traveling with a small group, Blake was greeted with cool suspicion by the harried natives. Some listened, some sent him on his way. It wasn't until he fell in with the Mecoce, and their chief, Black Hoof, that his journey took a turn for the better. Blake and Black Hoof developed a quick and easy rapport. Black Hoof listened to Blake's ideas and saw a great vision for the future. He gave Blake advice on how his message could be spread through the territory and told him of other natives who might agree with him and told him where to find them.

Blake tried his best to use this time to grow in his understanding native culture, in addition to spreading his message- a message of peace and goodwill, not of conversion. He is said to have spoken little of his personal faith during this time.

Blake traveled throughout much of the eastern Indiana Territory, from village to village and camp to camp. The message of racial harmony espoused by the Zionists was quickly spread through the territory. Though met with more than its share of skepticism by the natives, many were pleased with their new neighbors. What is more, the personal relationship between Blake and Black Hoof developed quickly into open friendship. Blake left a personal "ambassador" with Black Hoof and returned to New Jerusalem content with the strength of this new bond.



[1] Roughly Evansville, Indiana.

 

[Expat]

Part IV:



A serious test to the burgeoning relationship between the Zionists and the Native Americans came in 1805 with the death from smallpox of a prominent chief among the Lenape[1]. Tenskwatawa, a fierce holy man and advocate for the murder of all encroaching whites, used the death to promote a witch-hunt and campaign of extermination to drive the evil disease from the land. William Blake was the perfect target. Tenskwatawa sent a band led by his brother, Tecumseh, to bring Blake to his village at what is now Greenville, Ohio. Tecumseh's band violated the treaty line in late September, 1805, and made a beeline for New Jerusalem.

Evading the militia hastily-raised by Governor Harrison, Tecumseh arrived at the Zionist settlement where he himself was surprised by what he found. Expecting a confrontation, Tecumseh was instead greeted by Blake himself, dressed for traveling and eager to accompany the warrior, in the interest of maintaining peace in New Jerusalem.

Unlike most other periods of his life, there is little direct documentation of Blake's captivity among the Shawnee. Blake was un-customarily closed-mouthed about this period, and historians are forced to rely on what are most assuredly exaggerated accounts from the natives who initially imprisoned him. Nevertheless, so many legends have been built around this time, and so much of import can be seen to follow Blake's captivity, that it behooves us to include the incident here.

Tecumseh's band again snuck past the militia and made its way to Greenville. In the words of one witness, the meeting of Tenskwatawa and Blake was, "greeted by the heavens with a great silence. All was still in the world as its two greatest spirit-talkers came face-to-face." All accounts agree that the two spoke in public, in front of a great crowd, for some time (between an hour and "all day.") A young man, formerly of Black Hoof's band and friendly to Blake, provided the translation. A great debate ensued, along with a number of tests designed to prove Blake's guilt. Whatever Tenskwatawa intended either failed, or faded as he continued to confront Blake. As his calm reason and appeal to brotherhood and love was met with mounting hatred, the crowd's resolve began to crack. By the time Tenkskwatawa called for Blake's death, no consensus from the village could be reached. When Tecumseh attempted to attack Blake, many men stood up to stop him, enraging Tecumseh and goading him to further action. The village was forced to subdue Tecumseh, who died from wounds received at the hands of the crowd. Tenkskwatawa and his followers fled the village.

After a few days held in semi-captivity Blake was rescued by members of the Miami tribe, allies of Black Hoof, to whom they now traveled. In the meantime, Harrison had invaded Indian territory and began pushing the natives back before him in reprisal for Tecumseh's raid on New Jerusalem. Now, Blake was consumed with a single purpose: to stop the Indiana War before it began in earnest.



[1] This basically happened IOTL and set off Tecumseh's rise to power. It goes against my principles to ignore the butterfly effect to this degree, but if you look at the odds of a native in close proximity to whites getting smallpox at any time in 1805, they are non-negligible.

 

[Expat]

Part V:



The details of the Indiana War are not the focus of this work. The primary concerns vis a vis the war are its beginning and its end, as Blake was directly involved in both. However, it is worth pointing out that Tenkskwatawa was killed in one of the larger skirmishes of the war before Blake was able to bring both sides to the negotiating table. With his brother, Tecumseh also gone, the war party among the natives quickly found itself on the defensive as Harrison's militia advanced, uprooting communities as he went.

Blake spent the months of the war traveling through native territory with Black Hoof, organizing a peace party by everything short of main force. Eventually both sides agreed to a meeting (somewhat reluctantly on the part of Harrison, who had seen the war as his chance to push the natives much further back than the Grouseland Treaty line.)

The new treaty did see the settlement border shift significantly further north. But it also put an end to the purchase of land from the natives and ended the rights of squatters on native land (at least for the time being.) Blake acted as a mediator during the negotiations, something that incensed Harrison and the country at-large at the time. More than one senator called him a traitor, and a paper in Baltimore went so far as to put a bounty on his head (they were quickly forced to print a retraction.) Nevertheless, Harrison was able to spin the treaty as a victory for settlement as new lands were opened up.

The borders of modern-day Indiana and Wabash were set by the treaty. The new Territory of Indiana was native-only and predicated on the principle that land was held by all tribes. Therefore in order to seize more land, the US government would have to gain the permission of all tribes in the territory. It was hoped by Blake (and many others at the time) that this would represent the end to treaty abrogation by the US government. Unfortunately, it was not to be. The wording of the treaty made it clear that only the territory of Indiana could be treated as common to all tribes. To further salt the wound, this interpretation was used as the legal basis for the Indian Removal Act of 1832, wherein tens of thousands of natives (mostly in the southeast) were forced to relocate to Indiana as part of a general policy of removal east of the Mississippi River.

But for the meantime, back in 1806, the future looked somewhat rosy. Zionist converts were making their way into the state by the wagonload, swamping the non-Zionist population by a factor of 2::1. Most of the new Zionist settlers relocated close to the new treaty line as a sort of symbolic defense of the border. Interactions between Zionists and natives were frequent. Though instances of native conversion were relatively rare during this early period, inter-marriage (or cohabitation, as the Zionists preferred) were more common. The most successful treaty between natives and whites in the United States had been established, and the Zionists were responsible.



I am also not a map-maker, and apparently didn't check the file before uploading it so please forgive the poor attempt below. Differences from OTL:
1) The state of Wabash, incorporating OTL southern Indiana and Southern Illinois.
2) The state of Indiana, incorporating OTL northern Indiana and part of western Michigan.
3) The state of Illinois, incorporating OTL northern Illinois and most of Wisconsin.

 

[Expat]

Part VI:



As Blake and his followers settled into their new home, fresh converts continuously flowed in from the east. Blake’s new-found celebrity was not a blessing to him, however, and he was forced to appear in court no less than sixteen times during the remainder of his life to defend his church against accusations ranging from bigamy (which was at least partially true) to sedition. As much an effort to clear the air as to formalize his message, Blake published his definitive work, which came to be called The Book of Zion after his death. It, along with a number of his earlier works, would become the tome of faith for the new religion. In it, he condemned marriage in general, saying (in effect) that a state contract joining three individuals was just as bad- perhaps worse- than a state contract joining two. This did not stop the process of de facto polygamy among the Zionists. A practice that was joined, as the 19th century wore on, by de facto group marriage, and even the first cases of open, accepted homosexual relationships. Add to this the codification of racial equality, the repudiation of original sin, and the insistence upon the maintenance of the natural world, and it becomes easy to see why the book rightly claims the title of most controversial publication of the 19th century (certainly until the Communitarian doctrine was laid out in 1871 by Mssr. Ledoux.)

Blake died peacefully in 1825. He would not live to see the great backlash against the Treaty of Wabash, nor the harshest trials of the Church of the New Zion. Efforts to found both an eastern and western bastion for Zionism floundered due to the overwhelming prejudice of the nation at-large. But within Wabash the non-Zionist population began to calm down and accept the status quo. Incidents of violence dropped off as the Zionist majority became insurmountable (approximately 85% of the population by 1830, but closer to 65% today.) While the influx of converts slowed, there is some evidence that the strength of the religion in Wabash was itself a deterrent to non-Zionist settlers, thus maintaining their majority in the state.

In time, Wabash and the Zionists would settle into the rich fabric of the United States, forming another unique corner of that great nation. Even as the tenets of Zionism remained unique to that religion, certain aspects of the faith came to be more acceptable in the public eye as time wore on. Certainly following the Civil War (1856-1859) attitudes on race came much more in line with the Zionist norm. The Church’s financial and spiritual support helped more than 30,000 former slaves resettle in Wabash.

Meanwhile, Zionist teachings and (much more significantly) the successful admittance of Indiana as a state in 1858 were slowly changing opinions on Native Americans in the United States. While not as forward-thinking as the Zionists (or indeed the Indianans, to say nothing of the tribes affected) would have preferred, two new large Indian territories were carved out of the northern Idaho Territory and the western New Mexico/eastern Arizona Territory.

A more important- and more direct- contribution made by the Zionists in regards to the nation can be seen in their efforts to help conserve the West's dwindling bison herds beginning in 1869. The project was championed by Wabash's congressional delegation, among others, as well as the Zionist church at-large. While nowhere near the original strength, bison are today a common sight on the open ranges from South Idaho through Alberta, Canada. It was the first large-scale land preservation scheme of its kind, and led directly to the birth of the National Park System.

A thriving community of 9 million active practitioners, including 65% of the population of Wabash, Zionism remains a dynamic part of America in the modern era. The unique tenets of this faith have resulted in Wabash remaining at the forefront of sustainable development for nearly 200 years- more than 150 years before the issue became a general concern to the country. William Blake’s commitment to art, science, tolerance, and personal freedom have left an example to the world that continues to inspire today. More than any other religious figure, Blake seems to provide a connection to our modern times. Those who revere the planet; those who work to constantly push the threshold of tolerance; those who are constantly in awe of the creative spirit of the human mind; all of modern humanity- even if they do not follow his faith- owe a great debt to William Blake.


The Angel that presided o'er my birth
Said, "Little creature, formed of joy and mirth,
Go love without the help of any thing on earth."

 

[Expat]

Well, that's the end!

A very mini-TL. Any questions about the world, let me know.

Thanks for reading!

 

[kichinichini]

Thanks for posting, I enjoyed reading it.