1775: The American Revolution begins with the meeting of the Second Continental Congress and the defeat of a British column at Lexington & Concord. The Patriots show the world that they will not go quietly into the night at Bunker Hill, and that they may occasionally jump in over their heads after their expedition to conquer Canada ends in disaster. Congress sends the Olive Branch Petition in a last-ditch effort to end the war before it truly begins, but the British government turns it down.
1776: Congress issues the Declaration of Independence, and Charles Stanford of South Carolina is elected President by his peers. Under Commodore Hamitt Poole, the Continental Navy proves its worth at Nassau and Nantucket Shoals, even capturing British Admiral Peter Parker and his flagship the HMS Bristol at the latter. His subordinates do the same, with Captain Thomas Weaver occupying Bermuda and later striking out for Antigua while Captain Cato Armsby took control of Jamaica after defeating its colonial garrison & killing its governor, then fled back home with the island's slave population in tow - no doubt, with tremendous effects down the road.
The same cannot be said of the Continental Army, which faces defeat after defeat on land - General Samuel Haig withdrew from New York in the face of General William Howe's larger army, only to be decisively defeated at Trenton anyway; General James Amsel blew up his own trap at Collomsville, making it impossible for him to delay Howe's march to Philadelphia for more than thirty minutes; and General Micum McIntyre's Fabian strategy resulted in Howe occupying the capital and heart of Revolutionary America without having to fire a shot, while Congress retreated to Richmond. One of the few bright spots to the Army's record this year was General Wallace's successful repelling of a British attack on Charleston, in which his men even fatally wounded the last colonial Governor of South Carolina; for this, Wallace was appointed Commander-in-Chief by Congress.
Congress's last actions this year are to issue new recruitment orders and craft a new, hardline policy demanding the death of all Tories found to be taking up arms against America.
1777: 'Wily Willy' Howe kicks off this year by attacking Charleston, defeating the army of Commander-in-Chief Wallace and killing his opposite number in single combat, single-handedly crippling the Southern Department and assuming control of the three Southern states of Georgia & the Carolinas. That said, elsewhere the Revolution began to take a turn for the better: New York and Philadelphia are retaken by Generals McIntyre and Amsel, albeit from weakened garrisons left behind by Howe. However, McIntyre's refusal to take any prisoners, resulting in the slaughter of 5,000 British troops (at least some of whom must have tried to surrender in the face of his superior host), combined with the brutality exhibited by Lt. Col. Bohannon against captured Southern Tories, makes the war turn ugly fast - Howe executes an equal number of prominent Patriots in retaliation for Bohannon's (and by extension the Continental Congress's) atrocities, including the state's first post-colonial governor. In addition, General Charles Eggers (having just recently been appointed to head the Southern Department by Congress after Wallace's death over one Horatio Peterson) barged into their meeting hall to demand they 'take action' and ends up having his own soldiers sweep in to prevent their ceremonial guard from escorting him out; he is demoted almost immediately by a Congress that surely immediately regretted their decision to make him department general in the first place, and escapes the noose by one vote.
Cato Armsby washes up on the shores of Massachusetts with 200,000 Jamaican maroons (a third of them having died in the voyage), and Congress resolved to 'temporarily' resettle them between the New England states and the Western Frontier as per the Dyer-Lamberth-Weaver Resolution. France joins the war.
1778: Congress issues the Lamberth Memorandum to the Vermont Republic, allowing for their gradual integration into the Union under a number of conditions that included their acceptance of 20,000 maroons and a popular referendum, and Vermont accepts. Speaking of which, Edward Lamberth of Virginia is also elected President, succeeding Charles Stanford. A major battle is fought at Williamsburg between General McIntyre, now Commander-in-Chief of the Continental Army, and William Howe; the British held the field after McIntyre's morning surprise attack failed, but both sides took quite the beating. Howe executes his prisoners in retaliation for McIntyre's 'no prisoners' policy at Philadelphia and occupies Richmond, only to find that Congress had raced back to Philadelphia ahead of him.
The first French troops arrive in Boston.
1779: The Iroquois Confederacy in upper New York rises up in favor of the British, as the USA had completely failed to even once vote to send an ambassador to them; General Amsel is thus preoccupied with suppressing them for the rest of the war, scuppering plans for an invasion of Canada. General John Burgoyne opens a third front by invading from Canada through the Ohio Country and the Appalachians, supported by a contingent of Shawnee warriors under Blue Jacket and Patrick Ferguson's elite rifle corps, and makes a beeline for Philadelphia to capture Congress while the Northern Department was distracted with the Indians & the Southern Department/McIntyre with Howe. Down south, Howe fights defensively and maintains his reputation as an undefeatable 'Field Tyrant' with victories at Bull Run (twice, in the summer & fall), Cedar Mountain and the Rappahannock, but fails to make any meaningful advances north either.
The German mercenary officer Isidore von Wolfe is hired by the Continental Congress to serve as their new Inspector-General, with his one duty being to whip their troops into shape, on the recommendation of the French court. However, Von Wolfe would not actually arrive in the United States until later next year.
1780: The French & Continental fleets work together with the Continental Army to land a force under General John Braxford in Virginia and attack Howe from the rear, but a crippling shortage of skilled marines (most of whom were captured in Charleston long ago), lack of coordination with local Patriot spies (who may have been British double-agents) and poor planning resulted in Howe hurling the Americans back into the sea with great loss at Yorktown; although Braxford's new maroon troops prove their bravery and willingness to die for the Revolution, even they are unable to win this battle thanks to the cards dealt to the American side here. Fortunately (kind of), the failed Yorktown Expedition distracted Howe from supporting General Henry Clinton's offensive into Maryland, which is itself halted at Chantilly by General McIntyre. The demoted General Eggers is defeated in a conventional battle with General Burgoyne at North Braddock, but manages to stop his advance towards a vulnerable Philadelphia - and thereby buys General McIntyre time to send troops up north - through a guerrilla campaign.
The Massachusetts State Constitution is ratified. Notably, besides recognizing the innate right of its citizens to life, property and happiness as well as enforcing religious tolerance throughout the colony & according considerable powers to its Governor, the constitution also unilaterally and 'eternally' abolished slavery. The other New England states would follow suit over the next few years, issuing progressive constitutions that disestablished their own state churches & in no uncertain terms immediately ended slavery within their borders. Under the influence of its large Quaker population and out of respect for the maroons' doomed heroism at Yorktown, Pennsylvania also immediately abolished slavery this year instead of adopting a gradual emancipation plan.
Isidore von Wolfe arrives in the United States sometime after the defeat at Yorktown, and immediately goes to work. Under his harsh but undeniably skilled hand, the Continental Army's militia formations approach something resembling respectability, and the Maroons in particular benefit from the addition of German discipline to their own bravery and the musketry training they had already received in Boston.
1781: General McIntyre splits his army in twain - one half to contain Howe, and the other to defeat Burgoyne in conjunction with Generals Braxford (now supported properly by his maroon soldiers and Inspector-general von Wolfe) and Eggers. Howe defeats the Americans yet again at Antietam, but is sufficiently delayed to ensure Burgoyne would be surrounded and forced to surrender to the Three Generals in Uniontown, Pennsylvania. At the same time, Richard Howe's fleet is decisively defeated by the French & Commodore Poole while shadowing his younger brother's advance at the Chesapeake. With these two major back-to-back defeats and countless commitments around the world to attend to, Britain is finally forced to sue for peace.
1782: As General Howe withdraws, still undefeated for all the good that did him in the long run, the Southern states are free to ratify their own constitutions. Notably, with the exception of the more moderate Virginia these constitutions are rather authoritarian in outlook and awarded considerable power to state Governors, in addition to fiercely protecting slavery, no doubt thanks to the influence of the planter lobby. Also, formal negotiations to end the war since the 1781 ceasefire begin.
1783: The Treaty of Paris ends the American Revolutionary War. Besides recognizing the independence of the Thirteen Colonies, Britain also had to recognize its loss of the Jamaican slaves, though the US had to provide free passage to Canada for all Loyalists remaining on American soil who did not wish to remain part of the new country & to recognize the property rights of those who do. The radically decentralizing Articles of Confederation, establishing the USA as a confederacy of sovereign states headed by the (severely limited) Continental Congress, are ratified as the governing document of the new country.
The 'Order of the Cincinnati' is organized as a hereditary society (in which membership is transmitted by primogeniture, even through female lines if the male line failed) to 'bind in perpetual friendship' the officers of the Continental Army/Navy as well as their French allies & the non-combatant signers of the Declaration of Independence...and it is almost immediately lambasted as an attempt to restore a titled nobility by more radically anti-centralist and anti-aristocratic notables, but even they fail to prevent its inception.
The following are the Governors of the various American states as of December 31st 1783, all former members of the Continental Congress to a man:
Massachusetts: Charles Dyer
Connecticut: Lewis Clark
New Hampshire: Thomas Grierson
Rhode Island: Paul Rogers
New York: David Lloyd
Pennsylvania: Benjamin Stark
New Jersey: Leonidas Dowd
Delaware: James Orwell
Maryland: Winston Beaton
Virginia: Edward Drummond
North Carolina: Walter Simons
South Carolina: Henry Short
Georgia: Roger Anderson
1784: The 13 states are more or less left to their own devices when it comes to handling their respective wartime debts.
In Massachusetts, the dominant merchant class had their lines of credit cut while their lenders demanded to be repaid with nothing but hard currency & their businesses faced a heavy hit thanks to the mercantilist policies of the European empires; as a result, they in turn demanded the same of their customers & called in their borrowers, primarily poorer farmers who couldn't afford to repay their debts at this time. Anyone who could not pay could well see their property seized by tax collectors with the backing of the courts, and yet others could get arrested on the demand of their former creditors, further inflaming popular outrage against the merchants. On top of all this, Governor Charles Dyer was left with little recourse but to ramp up taxes to pay off the state's war debt. In the fall of this year, a mob in Uxbridge stormed the office of a local constable to return some seized property to the former owners, but were dispersed after Governor Dyer dispatched the Sheriff - a sign of further trouble to come.
Down south, in hopes of following in Vermont's footsteps and escaping crushing debt-collection policies enforced by the harsh Governor Walter Simons, poor farmers in several of North Carolina's westernmost counties forcibly drove out Simons' tax-collectors, returned seized property to their old owners, and finally proclaimed the secession of a Republic of Waxhaws on September 3rd; a day later, the republic's self-styled 'Provisional President' Joseph Landon, a veteran of Shawn Bohannon's irregulars during the Revolutionary War, sent a (barely legible, considering that Landon himself was illiterate except when it came to signing his name) request to the Continental Congress for their integration into the USA. Simons and his fellow planters are decidedly unamused, and while his peers in the Continental Congress successfully lobbied for the rejection of Waxhaws' integration to the Union, the Governor declared martial law & began marshaling the state militia (on top of recruiting additional volunteers) to put down the rebellion.
1785: The Affair of the Diamond Necklace becomes public knowledge across France, tarnishing the reputation of the monarchy.
The 5,000-strong North Carolina militia (a mishmash of paupers with rifles, planter gentlemen who wore plumed helmets and clearly wanted to rode into battle like knights of old, and hired guns from out of state) into the eight counties of the 'Waxhaws Republic' under Governor Simons' son Edmund, known to be his ruthless and taciturn father in miniature. At this time, the Waxhawsites had foolishly gotten into a shooting war with Tennessean Indians in an effort to acquire their land, and were not at all ready for Simons' offensive; nevertheless, 'Vice-President' Roger Stephens led some a lynch mob militia of some 800 men to fight Simons before he could reach Waxhaws itself. The ensuing Battle of Jonesborough resulted in a rout of the Waxhaws 'army' (with 30 dead and 300 captured, in contrast to 7 dead and 39 wounded on the NC side) and Stephens' capture; Hiram W. Eggers, son of Charles Eggers, played a leading role in the bayonet charge that scattered the Waxhawsites & ensured a victory for the North Carolina government. Stephens was shot dead that night during a meeting with the younger Simons, though he insisted that the 'Vice-President' had armed himself with a knife and struck first; a pro-Waxhaws account would admit this much, but also claimed that the tyrannical Governor was looking for any excuse to kill the leaders of the Waxhaws Republic and had instructed his son to goad Stephens into attacking by repeatedly insulting his wife and late mother.
In the late summer of this year, the 300 prisoners from Jonesborough were judged by unsurprisingly unsympathetic planter-dominated courts and ended up mostly being sentenced to hang despite the pleas for amnesty from their families and more liberal-minded North Carolinian elites (as well as Georgia's then-governor, Henry Wallace, who sympathized with the cause of the rebels); the elder Simons in particular was determined to send a message to all those who would think of challenging his authority, and the eastern planters cared not for a bunch of born-from-dirt rabble who saw fit to challenge their collective genius. Thus the rebellion fell apart, though Landon would flee to the Appalachians & continue resisting Governor Simons' authority with a band of diehards for some time.
| The Battle of Jonesborough |  |
1786: The Treaties of Hopewell, normalizing relations between the Carolinas and the Cherokee/Chickasaw/Choctaw, are signed this year.
John Shays, a disgruntled Massachusetts veteran of the Continental Army who had lost his leg in the disastrous amphibious attack on Yorktown so long ago, capitalized on popular outrage at the ruinous economy and Governor Dyer's harsh tax-collecting policies to launch an uprising against the Massachusetts state government. His band of rebels swelled to some 4,000 men and split up into three armies, shutting down courts and driving away or killing government officials (especially tax collectors) wherever they went, and the county militias in the backwoods areas proven unreceptive to orders from Boston; as a result of this, as well as the lack of funds for a federal army, the mercantile elite was forced to pay for their own mercenary forces to suppress the revolt. While Governor Dyer's younger twin James & a garrison of some 200 men successfully defended Springfield Armory from a rebel attack in December with grapeshot, repeated musket volleys and a little help from a convenient blizzard, resulting in 8 dead and 35 wounded among the Shaysite ranks, Dyer himself declared martial law across the state and began organizing some 6,000 hired guns (including hundreds of maroons) in the capital under the command of none other than Hammitt Poole, former CIC of the Continental Navy...
1787: Commander Poole leads the Massachusetts militia to squash the Shaysites once and for all. The rebels had divided into three camps under Shays himself, his second-in-command (well, the closest thing he had to one anyway) Matthew Carpenter and the Vermonter immigrant Peter Keitt, all of whom agreed that their goal should be to oust the Boston government but who could not stand each other's presence any longer. Poole first attacked Keitt's 1,000-strong encampment near Concord, surprising the rebels while they slumbered; 26 men were killed, including Keitt himself, and some 200 captured while the rest dispersed, in contrast to only two loyalists killed and ten wounded. Shays himself marched to meet Poole in open battle with some 2,000 men at Worcester, but was utterly defeated; 47 rebels were killed, and Shays himself surrendered after Poole maneuvered his cannons into a perfect position to fire down his flank. Having heard of his former comrades' defeat, Carpenter disbanded his forces at Great Barrington & fled west into New York with his family, where they would live for the rest of their days. Under pressure from the Boston merchants to make an example of these rebels, and finding that Poole was perfectly willing to do the deed himself, Governor Dyer sentenced fifty of the captured rebels (including Shays and his two eldest sons, who had followed him to war and were captured at Worcester with him) to death, though he granted amnesty to the rest.
| Shays' Rebellion |  |
Further south, the Waxhaws Rebellion finally comes to an end when 'President' Landon of the now-defunct Waxhaws Republic came out of his hiding hole in the Appalachians and surrendered to Governor Simons' forces - no doubt only because Simons had taken his family hostage (well, technically they were captured by frontiersman & Revolutionary War veteran Charles Eggers, who was upset at the Waxhawsites' attacks on Indians in Tennessee & delivered them into Simons' hands in return for North Carolina reaching another peaceful accord with the Indians) and was threatening in no uncertain terms to hang them all, starting with the youngest of his children. The Governor promptly thanked him for 'finally ending this futile struggle', released his family as promised and had him sentenced to death by a totally-unbiased court made up of the planters who'd suffered the most at the hands of his raiders.
The Waxhaws fiasco and now Shays' Rebellion had shown a pressing need for the creation of a strong federal government. Even some small-government advocates had changed their tune - bereft of a federal army and court, state governments had taken to sending in their own militia & augmented their ranks with local mercenaries-in-all-but-name, who dealt with the uprisings most ruthlessly and delivered any captives into courts controlled by vengeful local elites; thus they hoped that a distant, impartial federal government would manage these crises better. The four-month-long Philadelphia Convention held this year produced a Constitution that laid out how the nation should be governed from now on: it created a federal government split into legislative, executive and judicial branches (Congress, itself divided into a lower House of Representatives and an upper Senate/the Presidency/the Supreme Court respectively), mandated elections for the Presidency every four years, and most controversially allowed Southern planters to count 3/5ths of their slaves as legitimate voters (whose votes would conveniently always match their masters', of course). To prevent the New England delegations from walking out, their right to run their businesses even as they sat in government was also afforded constitutional protection. This Constitution is ratified by all thirteen states in time for next year's election, despite stringent opposition from the likes of ex-Georgian Governor Wallace (who would be returned to office too late to stop his state's ratification of the document, in 1789).
The Northwest Ordinance, also ratified this year, consolidated the Northern states' claims in the Ohio Country - at this point inhabited by a scattered mishmash of white settlers, some 150,000 Maroon migrants and the native Indian tribes - into a single 'Northwest Territory' under the authority of a federally-appointed Governor. Slavery was prohibited in this new territory, effectively setting the Ohio River as the boundary between free & slave territories between the Appalachians and the Mississippi.
1788: The United States holds its first presidential election. Hammitt Poole of Massachusetts, the respected former CIC of the Continental Navy, wins a handy victory by banking on his 'law and order' credentials - his swift and decisive suppression of Shays' Rebellion, without descending to the excesses shown by the Simonses of North Carolina in their treatment of the Waxhaws Rebellion, made him out to be the exact kind of man who would make sure ambitious governors and wannabe rebels took the Constitution seriously; 'strict but fair, and undefeated on the seas' was basically his campaign slogan. The man in second place, former President of the Continental Congress Edward Lamberth, would become the first Vice-President of the United States alongside him.
| The 1789 election | 
Blue = Poole |
1789: President Poole and Vice-President Lamberth are inaugurated.
The French Revolution begins with the storming of the Bastille & the lynching of its commandant by an angry mob, backed by disgruntled French Army regulars, one month after the National Assembly had sworn its Tennis Court Oath.
1790: Louis XVI accepts constitutional limitations on his power, as demanded by the French National Assembly. Said Assembly went on to legislate the Civil Constitution of the Clergy, banning all monasteries and convents in France.
The Austrian Netherlands revolt against Habsburg rule and proclaim a 'United States of Belgium', which is universally condemned by the older powers of Europe.
Secretary of the Treasury Elon Massie of Connecticut presents his 40,000-word 'First Report on the Public Credit' to the newly-elected first Congress of the United States, where he recommended the federal government take on the debts of individual states ('Assumption') and repay them at full face value as quickly as possible ('Redemption') before it borrowed any more money. These two steps, Massie argued, would wipe the Americans' messy financial slate and allow them to build a sound economic system with good credit, which could be taken seriously by foreign nations while retaining the confidence of creditors at home. As part of a compromise with less stringent Southern opponents of the report, the 'Pro-Administration' clique that backed Massie and Poole would agree to set up a new national capital in Maryland, which turned a special district (the 'District of Columbia') over to federal control for the purpose of building said capital city in the Residence Bill later this year; in exchange, these Southerners would stop opposing Massie's financial measures. To start things off, Massie proposed and Congress passed several increases to import duties until they had reached a point where the Secretary believed any further raises would be actively damaging to the American economy.
The US holds its first census and lays down its first patent laws.
Vermont successfully settles its territorial issues with New York more quickly than the other states expected, and joins the Union as its 14th state.
1791: The United States of Belgium are squashed by Austrian forces.
Louis XVI attempts to flee France and join his in-laws in Austria, whom he expected would restore him to full power. The Bourbons are intercepted at Varennes however, and Louis' credibility with the French public collapses.
Inspired by revolutionary ideals, the escape of the Jamaican maroons and a few charismatic leaders such as Dutty Boukman and Touissant L'Ouverture, a slave rebellion erupts on the French colony of Saint-Domingue...
Sebastian Rondelle, former US commissioner to France in the Revolutionary War, is appointed chief architect of the new capital city (named Concordia, or 'agreement between peoples') by Congress.
The Bank of the United States is chartered for a term of twenty years by Congress.
Out in the Northwest Frontier, Brigadier-General Josiah Darke leads 1,100 militiamen from Fort Recovery, Ohio to bring down the Shawnee chief Blue Jacket, a long-time adversary of American settlers who had previously led the resistance against General Eggers' brief foray into the Ohio Country alongside Britisher Patrick Ferguson. The militia walked right into Blue Jacket's ambush at the Wabash River and were utterly routed, with some 200 men killed or wounded (including Darke himself, who bolted on horseback and abandoned his men to their fate in an attempt to save himself but was killed by a Shawnee sniper anyway) and ~600 captured. The survivors, rallied by a Major Aaron Custer, were hounded by elements of the Indian warband until they reached the walls of Freetown, a major maroon settlement further up the river that was run by the renowned Hardtack Half-Hand; there, the Indians were forced to retire after a brief firefight with Half-Hand's own militia. In response to this disaster, Congress mandated the formation of the 'Legion of the United States', a professional 2000-strong mixed formation of line and light infantry, dragoons and artillery that answered solely to the federal government.
Having raised import duties as high as he believed feasible, Secretary Massie next proposes an excise tax on domestically-produced distilled spirits, which he expected would generate plenty of additional revenue; he also had the support of a few social reformers who hoped the new tax would drive down the demand for booze without requiring the formal outlawing of alcoholic beverages. For his part, though it pained him to have to add a new burden onto the shoulders of Western settlers, President Poole was adamant about enforcing the tax - the US really needed the tax money to pay off its debt, and the easterners had already done their part when they accepted new import duties. Nevertheless, this new tax proves immensely unpopular in the Western Frontier, where whiskey was popular and many settlers came to feel that they had traded one tyrant in London for 300 in Philadelphia. Settler committees broadcasted their refusal to pay the new tax & their intent to 'do whatever is necessary' to drive away those sent to enforce it; as a result, sporadic attacks on tax collectors and anyone who worked with them, who faced everything from death threats and burnings-in-effigy to tarring & feathering to outright lynching in a few special cases, erupted from Western Pennsylvania to the Georgian frontier. Efforts by the federal government to negotiate with the tax resisters, including pointing out that there was a difference between Britain's taxation of the 13 Colonies without representation and taxation as mandated by an American Congress of elected representatives as well as an offer of a 1-cent decrease in the whiskey tax, went nowhere as the frontiersmen would settle for nothing less than a total repeal of the whiskey tax.
Matters first came to a head in the backwoods of Georgia, where tax collector Abram Cade got federal marshal Orville Lang to help him enforce the tax; Lang's posse got into a firefight with some sixteen tax-resisting settlers in Campbell County and prevailed, killing six men and forcing the other ten to surrender, but without waiting for orders from above (or indeed from even Cade himself) they decided to hang their captives on the spot 'as a warning to the rest'. As news of the incident spread, the frontier exploded into violence as thousands of settlers (now convinced that the federal government had become just as oppressive if not more-so than the British) mobilized to attack Philadelphia, force Congress to repeal the whiskey tax at gunpoint and hang 'King Hammitt' with 'Duke Elon'; the government sent out peace commissioners, but they were fired upon in Allegheny County, Pennsylvania and tarred & feathered in Waxhaws, North Carolina. Shawn Bohannon, a Revolutionary War veteran known for his brutal conduct against the Tories and his guerrilla war against Howe in the South 1778-81, was one of the first to join the rebellion after hearing of the Campbell Incident, and was elected as the rebellion's de-facto leader by a 'revolutionary council' in southwest Tennessee. So begins the Whiskey Rebellion...
1792: Game start. |
Where Eagles Fly 3.0 - The 1792 Edition
Originally Posted by Barry Goldwater
