Gaius Julius Magnus
Gone Fishin'
That seemed based more about kneecapping a potential threat to their Empire than any lingering resentment from the American Revolution.
Why Did Britain Never Undertake a Revanchist War Against the Early U.S.?
- Thread starter JonasResende
- Start date
The rich aristocrats did. They liked the gentry focus of the South, while the common people preferred the Union. Supporting a bunch of slave owners against the people who got so many exports from Britain, sold so much grain to them, plus took their surplus Irish and their more adventurous English and Scottish... It would not go over well with the public. I remember the Union actually sent a shipment of grain to a textile city in England that had raised unemployment without cotton imports (though the British had stockpiled years worth of cotton), with the food meant to help the poor and hungry. The British instead auctioned it off and put the money into feeding the poor or something. The Americans got a biiit angry about that, and for the next free shipment British made sure to actually give the food to the poor, rather than letting someone profit off of it.
Also, we must never underestimate the urge to &!#% the French. No use risking Canada just so the French can move into Mexico.
Whoever settles them first probably gets them permanently. This idea of America holding a century long grudge over empty land is insane.
The issue is that there is no way the British can populate the land between the Blue Ridge/Alleghenies and the Mississippi sooner than the USA can. British forces can get there, after all they took their sweet time leaving the Old Northwest after the revolution, but that is something quite different from filling up the empty land. The Old Northwest already had a significant population by the War of 1812, and the UK did not have the resources to seize much of that area and hold it while it was engaged with Napoleon. In 1789, and forever after Canada between Toronto (York) was much much emptier than the USA of the Old Northwest.
Aside from the pride thing, there is also the reality that the UK would be seen as reneging on their treaty obligations. While this would not necessarily mean permanent enmity, it is worth noting that US-UK relations through most of the 19th century were often quite frosty occasionally near belligerent. This POD would make them much worse, and the reconciliation that occurred in the late 19th century OTL would be delayed at best and US favoritism towards the Entente versus the CP in WWI might very well be absent.
Aside from the pride thing, there is also the reality that the UK would be seen as reneging on their treaty obligations. While this would not necessarily mean permanent enmity, it is worth noting that US-UK relations through most of the 19th century were often quite frosty occasionally near belligerent. This POD would make them much worse, and the reconciliation that occurred in the late 19th century OTL would be delayed at best and US favoritism towards the Entente versus the CP in WWI might very well be absent.
Ohio was fairly full, and southern Indiana and Illinois were somewhat populated, but the northern sections along with Wisconsin and Michigan were very, very empty and pretty much just wilderness.
The detente between Britain and America happened immediately after the war ended and lasted for the following 200+ years.
I very much doubt that the Great War even happens as we know it with a PoD a hundred years back. And you're deliberately misinterpreting the Anglo-American relationship throughout the 19th century. The greatest threat of war occurred during the height of the Civil War, and every other potential conflict ended peaceably through mediation. All of the saver rattling on both sides of the Atlantic amounted to nothing because both sides were smart enough to realize that there was far more to lose than to win through conflict.
The modern Anglo-American friendship evolved in the last quarter of the 19th century, once the Alabama claims had been settled. Yes, between the War of 1812 and the ACW issues between the USA and the UK were settled with negotiation not conflict but relations would be best described as "correct". Had the UK decided to take a slice of what was internationally recognized as American territory, things would have been very frosty.
It was deemed after Yorktown the situation wasn't military unsalvageable, but that the government was fed up with spending money on the war to replace the loss of regulars. Wars are expensive and a revashinist war would imply no financial gain.
It won't be internationally recognized as America's if the territory is exchanged in a peace treaty. Relations might be frosty perhaps, but any adjustment will be met with shrugged shoulders after 20+ years.
The fact that there was a peace treaty ending any war where Britain seized US territory is not relevant. In 1871 there was a peace treaty ending the Franco-Prussian War which ceded large chunks of Alsace and Lorraine to Germany. Between 1871 and 1918 the statues representing Alsace and Lorraine in Paris were draped in black cloth, and "révanche pour Alsace et Lorraine" was a common theme in France. The Treaty of Versailles ceded parts of Germany to Poland, and we all know how the "Danzig Question" was utilized by a certain Austrian. Between Russia/USSR and Japan; Southern Sakhalin was transferred by treaty in 1905/6, and was a sore until 1945 when it was taken back by the USSR, the Northern Kuriles taken by the USSR in August, 1945 is still a sore point between Japan and Russia. The Israel/Palestinian/Arab problem based on who owns the land is now almost 70 years (and several wars) old. Don't even begin to talk about territorial squabbles in the Balkans based on shifting borders in wars hundreds of years ago.
My point is that transfer of territory from the loser of a war to the winner, formalized in a peace treaty, does not mean acceptance or "peace".
My point is that transfer of territory from the loser of a war to the winner, formalized in a peace treaty, does not mean acceptance or "peace".
I think Alsace-Lorraine was pretty much the exception, even in the 19th century in Europe. Did Denmark seek revenge for its lost territories of 1864? Or Austria-Hungary for its losses to Italy around 1860? The two states were nominal allies by the 1890s! That Italy later attacked A-H rather than vv suggests revanchism was not a big motive! Similarly, look at all the colonial swaps done by European powers, with the US involved in a couple of cases. Spain probably sulked after the American-Spanish war but didn't join Germany in WW2 to get Cuba or the Philippines back.
Now, you may well be right that giving up US claims to part of the North-West territories or Maine in 1812, or at some later time when border disputes occurred, would be such an intolerable blot on US honour that it needs wiped out by another, later, war. But it needs more evidence. Do you know of any relevant articles in peer-reviewed journals that discuss this type of issue?
ps
For FWIW I agree that the reason the UK never sought revanche or to be harsher in border disputes was that there was no commercial advantage to it. Mainly for its elite, but the profits they made on income from trade, trade-related services and investments and the boost to the Uk economy and public finances far outweighed any possible advantages from gaining territory that would require public money to exploit and defend, if necessary.
For FWIW I agree that the reason the UK never sought revanche or to be harsher in border disputes was that there was no commercial advantage to it. Mainly for its elite, but the profits they made on income from trade, trade-related services and investments and the boost to the Uk economy and public finances far outweighed any possible advantages from gaining territory that would require public money to exploit and defend, if necessary.
If there had been no French Revolutionary Wars, maybe they would have? But OTL, they had to focus too much on the conflict with France to consider a serious invasion of America, and by 1815 they were exhausted and had no appetite for another long war. Also, the colonization of Australia had gotten off the ground by then.
RodentRevolution
Banned
Has anyone mentioned that in a Britain where politics was often a rehashing of arguments from the English Civil War in particular and the Wars of the Three Kingdoms in general albeit with words and votes being substituted for swords and muskets, the expressed views of the American rebels were just not that unpopular? That there never was a nearly unified consensus that an independent America was a bad thing for a Government to be confident of any parliament voting it the funds for a war to remedy that?
Ideologically the American Revolution well fitted the notions of several Whig and even I suspect some Tory political philosophers. Defeat for the British was seen merely as God's (or for freethinkers: history's) hint that the British needed to be more British not as a call for revanche Brittania.
Ideologically the American Revolution well fitted the notions of several Whig and even I suspect some Tory political philosophers. Defeat for the British was seen merely as God's (or for freethinkers: history's) hint that the British needed to be more British not as a call for revanche Brittania.
All of those are heavily populated areas with the exception of Sakhalin, but even they never erupted into open conflict even when Russians and Japanese soldiers were killing each other in 1936-38.
The area I'm talking about had some 7,500 whites, half of whom were French and another minority of whom were British. This isn't national territory that has belonged to one side for centuries, this is territory that was seen as somewhat disputed since the end of the Revolution.
If Britain did something silly and annex New England, then there probably would be revanchism because the people there identified as American and would chafe under British rule. The northern portion of the old Northwest wouldn't, because there's virtually nobody to chafe under new rule, and because America's hold over the area would have been seen as largely theoretical in the event that it swaps hands at Ghent.
If the defeat is convincing enough, and the postwar conditions are tolerable enough, North America may be a region harboring resentments against Britain and nostalgia for the rebellion, but North American political elites may elect to act out this out by means short of rebellion, that end up not being horribly expensive for the British Empire.
This is what happened in the ex-Confederate states during and after reconstruction. They had a distinct regional identity, they had a streak of nostalgia and defiance, they struck out against individual people deemed more loyal to federal than state interests, but they never found it worth it to rebel again.
Similarly, in South Africa, the Afrikaaners harbored resentments and nostalgia, but with the exception of the small, weak uprising quickly squashed in 1914, they did not do future uprisings. They instead bided their time organizing politically for a couple generations before winning power at the ballot box in 1948.
I would agree
Does not make it likely, but makes it minimally possible.
The question here is, why didn't the British harbor deep and abiding revanchism determined to do the USA every bad turn they could, and take the first, second, and third opportunity that came along to crush the Yankees once and for all. That was answered early on--primarily because the political resolution to crush the original 1775 rebellion turned out not to be that strong, in view of distractions and the spectrum of interests prevailing in the influential classes (including I think a nervous eye to the less influential classes that were stirring about looking for influence). OTL the War of 1812 was from their point of view an egregious provocation, and to a lesser degree the Democrat-Republican faction's flirtations with alliances with France were as well, and there were some moves to limit American influence spreading but they were tentative, deniable and very possibly not active government policy at all--mainly the business of arming Native peoples to the west of the settlement zones. Which the War of 1812 was largely about.
Before this thread someone had a thread going stipulating, without giving a POD or plausible reason, that the Americans refuse to make peace in 1814 and go on fighting "two or three years longer." If we behaved that way, I think perhaps British resolve to undertake to break US power once and for all might have been summoned. Again if in the crisis of the late 1840s, which Polk diverted into a war on Mexico instead, US Anglophobe hotheads had prevailed and turned on British North America once again, perhaps, depending on how things went, a more powerful Britain would undertake to crush a more powerful USA. I think a British intervention against the USA while we were distracted with the Civil War would be less likely to end in British victory, because of the moral factor, unless it was the US government, as might have happened had Seward had his way more, that egregiously attacked Canada for no suitable reason. There were provocations on both sides, but the governments involved reined them in and defused them. Who holds the moral high ground in an ATL where "for some reason" an Anglo-American war breaks out instead depends on what the "reason" was, and I think between the democratic control of the US Union government and the quasi-democracy evolving toward real democracy of Britain, the moral high ground will make a difference--especially because a Britain fighting the Union at the same time as the Union fights the secession is de facto allying with a slave regime, even if they scrupulously avoid formal alliance, avoid recognizing the Confederacy, and fail to coordinate military strategy. To avoid being entangled in the moral morass of an alliance with the Confederates would be to fail to use force available most effectively, and call into question the justness of the British cause as much as openly allying with the slavocracy cause would, again unless what the Union did to provoke it was so outrageous dissent is muted. I'm talking about a lot more than sinking an RN ship or three here; it would have to be something like attacking Canada unprovoked.
And beyond that point I don't think Britain has the power to destroy the USA at all, and it would be doubtful in the 1860s.
But yes, if Americans were to behave far more irrationally than we have, or if some seductive opportunity misled us into something outrageous like conquering most but not quite all of Canada, I think British resolve to first rectify the balance and then persevere in putting down a mad dog rival might suffice as late as the 1840s.
Even then dealing some heavy blows, like cutting us off from access to the Pacific, would probably be sufficient and they'd probably stop at "sufficient," if Americans would accept seriously adverse terms. We might not want to accept seriously adverse terms, forcing their hand into more drastic action either until we did accept them or until the USA is no more. Breaking us up into several rival nations at least some of which are British aligned would do the job, rather than occupying the whole nation.
The earlier the better for the scenario of British re-conquest of the whole Union and would require some major provocation even as early as the 1810s. Say the War of 1812 went very differently, with early Union military successes in invading and apparently conquering most of Canada--say Quebec City and Montreal fell quickly, cutting Upper Canada off from help, and then a more gradual campaign broke loyalist armed power there. But the Maritimes remain unconquered. A situation like that might leave the British unable to face making peace without restoration of Upper and Lower Canada, while encouraging Union attempts to double down and take the Maritimes including reducing Halifax, and perhaps even attempt to muster enough naval force to take the islands off the US coast, Bermuda and the Bahamas--the next logical target being Jamaica I guess. That is the sort of circumstance that might keep the War of 1812 going longer. These might be the kind of circumstance that bring larger publics into the fight, that convince British investors who had been profiting from investing in the USA that they cannot count on remuneration from the Americans and must impose British rule to redeem their investments.
Then perhaps, if we can account for sufficient Redcoats and commitment of RN force to get the job done, there might be your "sullen but compliant" scenario.
But reasonable people did not act this way OTL, and it took blowing on all the dice and making them come up double sixes several rolls in a row in the US 1812 campaign to set up a halfway plausible scenario. Even then the British might simply sue to cut their losses and let the Canadas go--such action would at least put Oregon in jeopardy though; getting there overland was not easy for the USA and with enough priority Britain might be able to land so much force from across the Pacific to rout out the limited US toehold on the Pacific coast. Surely the Louisiana Purchase itself did not extend to the coast, being essentially a claim on the watershed of the Mississippi/Missouri river complex. But having struck such a heavy blow against the US future, Britain might sue for terms allowing them to retain the Maritimes at least.