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a_more_perfect_union:the_stars_and_stripes_forever_a_more_perfect_fourth_of_july_special

​ The American victory in the Canadian War, while in its day unprecedented and unexpected, makes perfect sense when viewing it from the lenses of 1976. Under the excellent leadership of President Alexander Hamilton, who had been in office since 1808 and remained so until 1824, winning four consecutive elections in a row, the country was united in its goal to take all of Canada. When war was declared in 1812, the nation did just that, and captured Montreal and Québec City with relative ease. Ottawa fell soon after, and the United Kingdom of Great Britain, cut off from its last colonial holdings in North America, ceded all Canada to the Union. Hamilton, hungry for more, turned around and almost instantly declared war on Spain, whose empire was collapsing all around it. The Spanish-American War was just as easy as the Canadian War, and the U.S. annexed the Floridas, Cuba, Puerto Rico, all of New Spain from the Sabine to the Rio Grande, and the Philippines in one fell swoop.

All good things must come to an end, though, and Hamilton announced he would not be seeking a fifth term, though he certainly would have won one. In response, Southern hero Andrew Jackson was elected president. Jackson, however, didn't play by the South's rules, and when he began implementing Hamiltonian economic policies in force, South Carolina raised a huge stink. They seceded from the Union on April 16, 1826, and were followed by the rest of the Deep South, with Maryland, Delaware, Virginia, Kentucky, and Missouri all refraining from doing so. The newly-independent states decided to band together to form the Confederation of American States, and essentially re-adopted the old Articles of Confederation, the only notable change being that slavery and segregation were integral parts of the new Southern government. Jackson was not happy about such a turn of events, and began mustering an army to put down the CAS. And so began the Civil War.

The war was, just as the Canadian and Spanish-American Wars before it, unsurprisingly swift and easy. Andrew Jackson and the United States Army utterly crushed the Confederation, all the while the Federalists back in Washington had a field day passing laws with no opposition. When the Stars and Stripes once more flew over Charleston, the CAS capital, the Confederation surrendered on July 4, 1830, to the President-Major General Andrew Jackson. In that moment, the Old South and its ways were confined to the trashbin of history. For the next few decades, during a period known as 'The Great Southron Healing,' the entire region was transformed. During the Civil War, Congress had passed sweeping reforms thanks to the rise of the Second American Enlightenment and Revolutionary Spirit. Slavery was no more, and racial equality was mandated at a federal level by a series of Constitutional amendments all Southern states had to ratify to rejoin the Union and have Northern troops leave the state. Not that this mattered very much–the South had undergone a rapid transformation during the Great Southron Healing, when the region emptied of its whites and was populated by a majority of blacks and Hispanics.

When America involved itself in the Second Brazilian Revolution of 1836, President Henry Clay was overjoyed when the Brazilians revealed their intense desire to become a part of the Union. The US handily agreed. But this acquisition was not enough to satisfy the public, who demanded their Manifest Destiny be fulfilled. In 1846, Clay bent to their wishes and declared war on Mexico. The war was through by Christmas. Seeing no sense in stopping, the American forces in Central America decided to keep on going, and steamrolled into Honduras and El Salvador. While on their campaign through Nicaragua, however, the unthinkable happened, and Major General Winfield Scott was shot dead. Luckily, chaos did not follow, for Brigadier General Robert E. Lee, Scott's right hand man, stepped up to the plate and easily filled Scott's shoes. Lee began leading the US Army in the summer of 1850, and took them to victory in conquering the rest of South America. They arrived in Cape Horn, the southernmost point of South America, in 1860, after a decade of successful warfare. By this point, the Union had learned how to train birds of prey to strike down their enemies. Hawks and falcons were used, but bald eagles were particularly prefered. Legend has it, on July 4, 1858, as the Americans advanced on Buenos Aires, the last major city in the Western Hemisphere not held by the United States, Robert E. Lee called down a bolt of lightning from the sky to fry the city. Indeed, the scorch marks on much of the city's buildings are undeniably from an American Zeus smiting its foes.

With the West taken, Manifest Destiny called for setting sights on the east, the Far East, specifically. In 1862, Commodore Matthew Perry and nearly the entirety of the United States Navy arrived on the doorstep of Japan. They demanded the isolated island nation submit to their might and be annexed into the Union as they had previously done with the Kingdom of Hawai'i, or be destroyed. The Shogun selected to be annexed.

Wars of glory and of Manifest Destiny came thick and fast after that. The US gladly annexed Korea, Formosa, and Manchuria, who had broken away from China proper during the chaos resulting from the Taiping Rebellion. At the World Congress in London in 1888, the rest of the unknown world was divided up between the major powers, with the United States of America holding a seat equal to Great Britain and France. Due to its presence in the region with Liberia, the Union was granted sovereignty over a large swath of West Africa. Similarly, due to the proximity of Formosa and the Philippines, the US took ahold of Indochina.

For the next few decades, America remained at peace with its neighbors, quietly looking inward and cutting through the miles and miles of red tape that came with controlling almost half of the world's land area. Then, conflict around the globe came to a head in 1912. Theodore Roosevelt had just been elected president as Europe devolved into all-out war, tearing the continent apart. The US joined up with Germany and the Danubian Union to take down Britain, France, Russia, and Scandinavia. At the negotiating table, America made off with Britain's holdings in the Pacific, including Australia, and South Africa, as well as Russian Alyaska and Scandinavian Greenland and Denmark.

Today, on the Bicentennial of the Founding of the United States, America stands tall as the most powerful nation on Earth. Its economy is more than triple that of the Republic of China, its nearest competitior. Its culture is widespread, well known from Siberia to the Congo Kingdom.

For all the Union has done, no one can quite define the world's most American moment. Was it when George Washington triumphed at Yorktown? When Alexander Hamilton fought valiantly at the Battle of Washington? Was it when Andrew Jackson triumphed over the South, standing on the top step of the South Carolina State Capitol? It was none of these. The greatest contender to the role was when President Theodore Roosevelt, at dawn of the Great War, delivered his famous “America the Invincible” speech to a crowd of half a million on the steps of the Capitol Building on the Fourth of July in 1916. As he spoke, a bald eagle soared down from on high and perched itself on Teddy's shoulder, as the President raised Old Glory into the air with his other hand.

a_more_perfect_union/the_stars_and_stripes_forever_a_more_perfect_fourth_of_july_special.txt · Last modified: 2020/02/17 21:29 by george_washington

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