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Thread: WEF 3.0 19th-Century Iteration Planning Thread

  1. #1
    Barry Goldwater's Avatar Mr. Conservative
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    Default WEF 3.0 19th-Century Iteration Planning Thread

    Well folks, it is two days to the enddate of our 1792 game. Which is fair enough, it's on crutches & an iron lung while also simultaneously stuck in a coma combined with severe internal bleeding But it is why I'm putting this thread up now. Hopefully we can get this planning stage done by late May (conveniently also when my summer starts up) so our next WEF can start in early June at the latest, when everyone will be more active and thus the game will be way more lively than now.

    (I'll still handle what little is left of 1792 while there's time btw, @EB I'll try to get your Indian battle up tonight when I get back to my desktop and thus, GE)

    So, first things first, we need a start date. I suggested 1828 already in the main thread, so you can read my posts there if you need a refresher on why I suggested it. Alternatively, we could forge ahead to an 1845 start date so you guys can fight the Mex-Am War, providing y'all with a decently long-lasting foreign conflict in addition to internal issues (the slavery debate and by extension the argument over free/slave territories will be nearing its fever pitch for one, we'd also still have Indians to deal with one way or another regardless of whether or not y'all pushed through with Indian Removal earlier in the timeline, etc.) Lastly, the good thing about an 1845 start is that it allows us to build right up to our ACW game, which can conceivably start a decade earlier than OTL and for which I've been building the new RB 1810-ish 'frontline commanders + VIPs' in the first place; presuming 1845 starts in late May/early June and lasts 7 to 11 turns (1852-1856) we'll be able to get the ACW rolling in late summer to early fall, which besides temporary drops in activity as we all return to school/college, is also a decently active time as Eagles 1450 has demonstrated. On the other hand, an 1828 game will probably push the ACW one back into next year, which is definitely no muy bueno for its survivability given IH's freshly demonstrated levels of activity in the spring. So without further ado, the vote:

    1828 start: 1 (Chesser)
    1845 start: 6 (Perry, Barry, Rose, Jacb, Aggy, Fred)

    The next thing we have to deal with is 'who gets to be an expy for X historical figure'. We'll need at least a John Quincy Adams (hardcore Federalist leader from the late 1810s to 30s, a staunch abolitionist & centralist, preferably from the Northeast), a Henry Clay (our Whig leader, a compromiser who can lean to either the centralist/nationalist or decentralizing/'states' rights' side but only slightly, preferably from the West), an Andrew Jackson (one of our Democrat leaders, a militant racist and nationalistic expansionist who preferably comes from common origins, can be from the West or South), and a John Calhoun (another Democrat, a more 'intellectual' and 'refined' racist - I don't want to Godwin this thread in its OP But I guess an effective comparison could be the 'Nazi aristocrat' to the 'SA goon' of the AJ? - slash states' rightist who preferably comes from higher origins, can be from the South). So again, the vote:

    JQA: T. Braxford (2 - Jacb, Perry)
    HC: F. Amsel (2 - EB, Perry), M. Braxford (1 - Jacb)
    AJ: M. Thompson (1 - Chesser), W. Bohannon (1 - Perry)
    JC: M. Thompson (1 - Chesser), J. Wallace (4 - Perry, Rose, Aggy, Jacb)

    (naturally, if we go with an 1845 start I will be happy to add more historical analogues for you guys)

    And finally, the Presidents. I've rolled all the elections from 1796 to 1824, the 1828 election will either be fought right out of the gate with a start date in that year or rolled for again with an 1845 start. Note that Presidencies formally only begin from their inauguration, so for example Poole would technically be POTUS from 1789 to 1797 and NOT 1788 to 1796 (unless he wants to run for a third term I guess). I've also set the date for the split of the Low Federalists & National Republicans from the Federalist & D-R parties at 1824 since that was when the historical D-R Party imploded, meaning that the Whigs will first start competing in the last election before an 1828 start date.

    1796 election: Federalist victory
    1800 election: Federalist victory
    1804 election: Democratic-Republican victory
    1808 election: Democratic-Republican victory
    1812 election: Federalist victory
    1816 election: Federalist victory
    1820 election: Federalist victory
    1824 election: Democratic victory

    So as you can see, we need three Federalist Presidents, two serving two full terms (1797-1805, 1813-1821) and one defeated in his bid for reelection/otherwise disabled in 1824, a two-termer D-R in 1805-1813 and his spiritual successor as the Democratic President who won the 1824 election (and will be President at the start of an 1828 game).

    EDIT: Oh yeah, one last thing. Technically speaking Presidents didn't have a term limit imposed on them yet (the 22nd Amendment wasn't passed until 1947 and ratified in '51) so I guess you could run for three or four terms apiece. That said, it's not going to be a very popular move for anyone to make (accusations of kingship ahoy) and the traditional two-term formula would also be more fair to other players who want an ancestor to have sat in Concordia's version of the White House (what's that called again?).

    WEF Presidents/Vice-Presidents to date:

    1789-1797: Hammitt Poole/Edward C. Lamberth (Non-Partisan/Pro-Administration)
    1797-1805: Federalist #1 (R. Braxford - 3, Jacb/Perry/Rose; E. Lamberth - 1, Watercress)
    1805-1813: Democratic-Republican (J. Eggers - 4, Agg/Rose/Jacb/Perry; J. Robertson - 1, Chesser)
    1813-1821: Federalist #2
    1821-1825: Federalist #3
    1825-: Democrat #1

    EDIT 2: The 1845 role votes:

    DW:
    WHH:
    JP: A. Wallace (1 - Perry)
    WLG: G. Braxford (2 votes - Jacb, Perry)
    JH:
    SH: S. Eggers (2 - Aggy, Perry)
    ML: J. Thompson (1 vote - Chesser)
    Last edited by Barry Goldwater; April 19, 2014 at 12:02 PM.

  2. #2
    Barry Goldwater's Avatar Mr. Conservative
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    Default Re: WEF 3.0 19th-Century Iteration Planning Thread

    And now, the timeline I've written up to 1811:

    TL
    1792: Two mobs of Whiskey Rebels converge on the Legion of the United States, the new nation’s first standing military since 1783, at their base in Legionville, PA. They are utterly defeated with over 700 casualties (291 KIA, 440 captured) and their leadership is decapitated with the capture of Shawn Bohannon & the death of his lieutenant Conan McKay. With this, the Whiskey Rebellion effectively collapsed.

    'Dawn over Legionville' by Christopher Symonds, 1794

    The French Revolution takes a turn for the worse as the Tuileries Palace (where the royal family had been living since their failed attempt at escaping to Montmedy the year prior) is stormed by a mob and the Swiss Guards massacred, Louis XVI is formally deposed and a republic proclaimed by the much more radical ‘National Convention’, and scores of aristocrats & non-juring (in other words, anti-revolutionary) priests are massacred in September. The reactionary Austro-Prussian army of the Duke of Brunswick is defeated at Valmy on September 20.

    1793: Louis XVI (now referred to as Citoyen Louis Capet by his jailors) is guillotined before a jeering mob at the order of the National Convention. His son Louis-Charles, now Louis XVII, survives however and is smuggled out of captivity with his older sister Marie-Therese in a plot hatched by the Baron de Batz, an avowed Royalist intriguer. The enraged radical factions in the Convention (most prominently the Jacobins and uh, the appropriately named Enragés) seize this opportunity to hijack the Convention, purge their more moderate Girondin rivals, and initiate a Reign of Terror with the Jacobin Maximilien Robespierre & his Committee of Public Safety at its head.

    1794: Whiskey Rebellion leader Shawn Bohannon is executed with his surviving lieutenants and 379 other prisoners after being convicted of treason by the Pennsylvanian courts.

    The Barbary Pirates seize several American merchant vessels and hold their crews for ransom. The United States declare war in response & begin building up their navy.

    The French Revolution takes another turn for the worse when the Jacobins are overthrown by Les Enragés, an even more viciously radical faction led by Jacques Roux, a populist ‘Red Priest’ from a poor background, and his ambitious second-in-command Jacques Hébert, a bloodthirsty ideologue of bourgeois origins who promoted an ‘atheistic religion’ (if such a thing can even exist) called the Cult of Reason. Hébert overthrew Roux & had him condemned to death two weeks later in an internal coup, after which he established a new ‘Committee of Revolutionary Defense’ with himself as Vice-Chairman and a reluctant Donatien de Sade (a notorious libertine and former Marquis turned Convention delegate best known for his shocking and blasphemous pornography, but who had previously opposed the excesses of the Terror) bullied into becoming its nominal head.

    Hébert intensified the Reign of Terror, but fell faster and harder than even Robespierre could have and ended up guillotined along with most of the Enragés in the ‘Messidorian Reaction’ on July 4th. The National Convention itself was dissolved by the troops they had called in to crush Hébert & friends a few days later, and a five-man Directory dominated by more conservative interests (such as Paul Barras) took the reins of the Revolution instead. Besides governing France in an even more corrupt & ham-handed but decidedly less brutal fashion than the Enragés, the Directory also pragmatically abolished slavery and reached an accord with the Haitian rebels of Toussaint L’Ouverture, leaving them free & in control of Saint-Domingue but still a people in service to France.

    Vendean rebels take the city of Granville in Manche with the support of the British fleet. Though they may have been thoroughly mauled down south in the Convention’s and now the Directory’s campaigns of repression, this final victory would allow the Royal Navy to evacuate 100,000 French Royalists off the mainland, only 30-40,000 of whom were actual combatants, between then and the final recapture of Granville by Republican forces in May the next year.

    The miserable end of the Whiskey Rebellion

    1795: The Eleventh Amendment to the United States Constitution is ratified.

    The French Republic overruns the Netherlands, driving Stadtholder William V & the House of Orange into exile, and raising up a puppet ‘Batavian Republic’ in their place. In addition, Sweden becomes the first monarchy in all Europe to recognize them as a legitimate government, to the outrage of more conservative powers.

    Napoleon Bonaparte leads the French army into Milan; he would later make it back to Paris in time for his triumphal reception – and to suppress a Royalist uprising on the 5th of October or ’13 Vendémiaire’. It is also at this time that Napoleon marries Thérésa Cabarrus, a highly fashionable socialite of lesser aristocratic origins who was noted for her great beauty, greater boldness (it was said she bathed in the juice of strawberries & she was confirmed to have appeared at the Paris Opera without undergarments) and still ever-greater ambition.

    Poland is torn apart between Russia, Prussia and Austria in the Third Partition.

    Under pressure from the Coalition to stop underperforming & as a present for their King’s tenth birthday, the French émigrés merge their armies into one ‘Armée du Roi’ (Army of the King) numbering about 25,000 men, including about 15,000 Vendeans (the rest having been absorbed into the British Army itself). This force was placed under the supreme command of his younger uncle Charles Philippe, Comte d’Artois, with Prince Louis Joseph of Condé as his second-in-command, and would fight as part of the Coalition from now until the Restoration of their King.

    1796: X1 is elected to succeed Hammitt Poole in the USA’s first truly partisan election, as the Pro- and Anti-Administration cliques crystallize into formal parties calling themselves the ‘Federalists’ and ‘Democratic-Republicans’ respectively.

    Octavien Rondelle leads the newly-built US Navy and its attached army to victory over the Barbary pirates; needless to say, they have no intention of paying the ransom demanded of them, except in lead. After his inferior fleet was wiped out and the US Marines made landfall in Tripoli harbor, Pasha Yusuf Karamanli fled his capital; the victorious Americans went on to liberate all of the surviving captives and also razed Yusuf's citadel in retaliation for his corsairs' murder of several American hostages earlier. A final attempt by Karamanli to 'teach the American dogs a lesson' is stomped flat at Derne, and in the peace treaty signed later this year the Tripolitanians were forced to let their captives go without tribute in addition to swearing never to target American shipping ever again.

    'The Battle of Derne' by Christopher Symonds, 1803

    Napoleon Bonaparte gains his first victories as a full army commander at Montenotte, Lodi, Bassano and the Bridge of Arcole, all over the Austrians and d’Artois’ Armée du Roi. Spain also switches sides, abandoning the Coalition to instead become a French ally, in the Treaty of San Ildefonso.

    1797: The XYZ Affair, in which France refused to conduct diplomatic negotiations of any kind with the USA until they were paid hefty bribes, nearly leads to war between the two nations. The Federalists take advantage of the crisis to build up the American military.

    Doge Ludovico Manin of Venice resigns in the face of Napoleon Bonaparte’s armies, ending the Venetian Republic’s 1,100 years of independence. The Treaty of Campo Formio, by which Austria is knocked out of the war, marks the end of the First Coalition against France.

    1798: The French conquer the Papal States and the Swiss Confederacy, where they erect a puppet ‘Roman Republic’ and ‘Helvetic Republic’ respectively. However, their efforts to support an Irish uprising against the British, spearheaded by the Society of United Irishmen, end in failure after a French fleet carrying reinforcements and supplies for the badly-outgunned Irish is defeated at Tory Island.

    Napoleon attacks the Ottoman Empire, supposedly to safeguard French economic & scientific interests on top of undermining the Anglo-Indian trade. The French tear through the Turkish & Mamluk armies at Shubra Khit and the Pyramids, but their own fleet is obliterated in turn by the British under Horatio Nelson in the Battle of the Nile, stranding Bonaparte & friends in Egypt. There, they still managed to suppress a Muslim rebellion in Cairo towards the end of this year.

    Russia joins the new Coalition formed against France this year after French forces occupy Malta & evict the Order of St. John, of which Tsar Paul I was Grandmaster. Paul also secures the hand of Louis XVII for his most beautiful daughter, Elena as an additional precondition to join the war. To appease the Habsburgs, Louis XVII's twenty-year-old elder sister Marie-Therese is married off to her epileptic (but surprisingly competent) uncle Archduke Charles of Austria. With this, the First Coalition ends, and the Second Coalition rises.

    1799: Louis XVII, now fourteen years old, formally marries Grand Duchess Elena Pavlovna of Russia (from now on 'Queen Hélène of France' in the eyes of the Royalists & Coalition Powers) in a lavish ceremony at the Gatchina Palace. Almost immediately after the nuptials, the young King joins the émigrés’ Armée du Roi as an observer under his uncle the Comte d’Artois.

    Portraits of Louis XVII and his wife Elena Pavlovna of Russia c. 1800

    The Russians under Generalissimo Aleksandr Suvorov tear through the French forces in Italy, handily outdoing & outrunning their previously-beleaguered Austrian allies at every turn. The French Army of Italy was smashed at Cassano, Marengo, and the Trebia River before it was finally destroyed at Novi, where their commander Barthelemy Catherine Joubert was killed in action alongside 12,000 of his soldiers.

    Napoleon pushes into Syria-Palestine, starting with the capture of Jaffa. He then attacks Acre and succeeds in capturing it after the promised British flotilla under Commodore Sidney Smith failed to materialize to relieve the Turkish defenders, before moving on to seize Damascus. Unfortunately for Bonaparte, his army had reached the end of its logistical rope, and instead of going to Baghdad as he’d hoped, he was forced to withdraw back to the coast (while being harassed by Ottoman & Bedouin raiders all the way) while Egypt erupted in a new chain of rebellions against his undermanned garrisons. The entirety of the Near East is abandoned by Napoleon as a result (even though he had technically never been defeated on the field), though his greater-than-expected successes did make him a lasting enemy in the Ottoman Turks.

    Not long after returning home, Napoleon overthrows the corrupt & indolent Directory in the Coup of 18 Brumaire (November 9), after which he is acclaimed First Consul.

    The Rosetta Stone is discovered by French Captain Pierre Bouchard.

    1800: The Federalists win this year’s election, securing X1 a second term in office.

    Concordia, District of Columbia is finished! With a new Presidential Mansion for...(big surprise here) the President & First Family, a Capitol for Congress, a Library with which to archive all government documents of note, and a formidable protector in Fort Union all set up, the US government wastes no time in moving here.

    The new Presidential Mansion in Concordia

    Suvorov and his Russian host are diverted to Switzerland by Tsar Paul, who in turn was acting under the pressure of his increasingly envious & paranoid Coalition partners. Suvorov’s incompetent subordinate Aleksandr Korshakov was promptly trounced by French General Andre Massena at the Second Battle of Zurich, jeopardizing Suvorov’s own position, though he managed to outrun Massena’s army just in time to avoid total annihilation as expected.

    The British occupy Malta after its starving French garrison surrenders to them, just before the angry Maltese locals can tear them apart. This small island would soon become the epicenter of the Royal Navy’s power in the Mediterranean.

    Napoleon crosses the Alps and defeats the Austrians at Marengo – the same day that his wife Thérésa gave birth to their first child, named Marie Lætitia after her paternal grandmother. Meanwhile, his government reaches a Convention to soothe tensions with the Americans this year, and also restores the independence of the Papal States in hopes of reaching a favorable Concordat with Pope Pius VII next year.

    1801: House Speaker Matthew Thompson runs for a Senate seat for the first time and is promptly elected by the Virginia state legislature as the state's junior Senator. He will hold that seat for 15 years, moving up to Senior Senator from Virginia in 1809 after his predecessor's retirement.

    The eccentric Paul of Russia, after having first been a major Coalition member to the point of becoming Louis XVII’s father-in-law, backs out to instead lock the young King-in-exile out of the Russian Empire & founds a ‘League of Armed Neutrality’ to freely trade with France; Russia, Prussia, Sweden and Denmark-Norway are its founding members; from this point onward his daughter Elena Pavlovna/Queen Hélène would live on the move with her husband’s army instead of the Russian court, proving exactly where her loyalties now lay. After a British fleet approached Copenhagen, the Dano-Norwegians backed out of the deal, unintentionally placing themselves inside the British sphere of influence (at least in French eyes) by doing so.

    Napoleon signs a Concordat with Pope Pius VII; this agreement overrode the Civil Constitution of the Clergy and normalized Franco-Papal relations while still keeping the clerical-state balance of power tilted in favour of the latter. He also signs the Treaty of Luneville with Austria.

    1802: The United States Military Academy is opened at Legionville, former base of the Legion of the United States.

    Napoleon Bonaparte founds the Legion d’honneur. He also upholds the Directory-era accord reached with Toussaint L’Ouverture, recognizing him as Saint-Domingue’s Governor for life and maintaining the abolition of slavery in exchange for his continued loyalty to France, over the objections of the Creole planter lobby – but perhaps he may have listened more closely to them if he’d married one of them, like say one Josephine de Beauharnais. Finally, he signs the Treaty of Amiens with Britain, ending the War of the Second Coalition.

    As part of the treaty, Louis XVII is packed off to Malta (well, technically he was supposed to go to the Home Isles, Malta being just the first step in his journey) as a guest of honor of the Hanoverians but had to disband the Armée du Roi & stop intriguing to reclaim his rightful throne; he did grudgingly accede to the first two terms, if only because even his uncles were pressuring him and the alternative was to exist in legal limbo without foreign support in Germany, but almost immediately broke the third.

    Thérésa Bonaparte (nee Cabarrus) gives birth to Napoleon’s first son, named Napoleon Francois Bonaparte.

    Napoleon Francois Bonaparte in his infancy

    1803: Ohio gains statehood.

    The Supreme Court establishes the principle of judicial review in the landmark case of Marbury v. X1. Not long after however, X1 successfully purchases the massive Louisiana Territory from Napoleon, who in turn had just nabbed it from the Spanish a year prior and was hoping to forge an empire in the New World (something that seemed doubly plausible now that Saint-Domingue was content under L’Ouverture’s administration) when something happened to interrupt his grand designs yet again...

    ...namely, the Peace of Amiens breaks down after both France and Britain repeatedly violate its terms & those of the earlier Treaty of Luneville, with France annexing the Cisalpine Republic and marching troops into the Helvetic Republic when it looked like their puppet regime might fall apart at the seams while Britain continued to maintain a naval presence at Malta. Louis XVII jumps on the opportunity to rebuild the Armée du Roi, calling in as many of his newly-disbanded veterans as he could and securing British funds to hire mercenaries to bolster their ranks, before leaving Malta for Austria by sea early next year; this time, he claimed supreme command of the force while assigning his uncle the Count of Artois to serve as his right hand. Thus began the War of the Third Coalition...

    The franc formally replaces the hyperinflated assignat as France’s new currency.

    1804: Jack Eggers defeats the Federalists in this year’s American election, becoming the first Democratic-Republican President of America. The Lewis and Clark Expedition takes off this year and the 12th Amendment to the Constitution is ratified, as well.

    Napoleon Bonaparte is acclaimed Emperor of the French by the French Senate. He crowns himself and his wife in a lavish ceremony costing over 8 million francs on December 2nd this year, thereby hammering the last nail into the coffin of the First French Republic and inaugurating the French Empire. Though he would be sneered at by the older, more established dynasties of the other European states, who routinely boasted of their descent from ancient greats such as Rudolf of Habsburg or Michael I Romanov, the Emperor reportedly boasted in turn that ‘they [the other European monarchs] are only descendants, but I will be such an ancestor’.

    The Hero of the Republic at work

    1805: Napoleon has his three-year-old son Napoleon Francois, now styled the Prince-Imperial, crowned 'King of Italy', with the explicit instruction that this new crown was to be merged into the French one upon the child’s future ascension to the throne. Eugene de Beauharnais, his young aide-de-camp and son of his wife’s widowed friend Josephine de Beauharnais, is named Regent for the boy-king. His elder daughter Marie Lætitia is given the slightly less impressive title of ‘Princess of Marengo’, in commemoration of one of his earlier great victories.

    The allied armies of Austria and Russia, formally led by their own Emperors Francis II and Alexander I, meet Napoleon at Austerlitz on December 2nd this year, exactly one year after his coronation. Present with the Coalition is Louis XVII, now a strikingly beautiful & confident twenty-year-old who had assumed full command of the 14,000-strong Armée du Roi; prior to leaving Russia, he famously bragged to his wife that he would make her ‘a Queen in more than just name’ before New Year’s Day. Despite their superior numbers, the Coalition Powers are unable to coordinate their movements properly and make a fatal mistake when they failed to reinforce the tactically-vital Pratzen Heights before an overwhelming French attack, resulting in their utter defeat. The Russian Imperial Guard hurled itself at French General Dominique Vandamme’s positions in a desperate attempt to save the day, but despite capturing a French eagle standard these elite forces were too driven from the field when Joachim Murat’s heavy cavalry counterattacked. Louis XVII personally led his own 4,000-strong Garde du Corps in support of the Russians, only to be unhorsed and wounded in Murat’s counterattack – but to the surprise of even his Bonapartist enemies, he kept on fighting with saber and pistol until several of his own Musketeers of the Guard had to drag him from the field, howling and delirious from his injuries.

    With the Coalition losing nearly fifteen times the men he did, this battle came to be considered Napoleon’s greatest, and to celebrate the Emperor would proclaim his then-four month old second daughter Thérésa (named after her mother, naturally) Princess of Austerlitz upon getting the news twenty-three days later – that is to say, Christmas Day. Also as a direct consequence of this crushing defeat, Francis II had to sign the humiliating Treaty of Pressburg on December 26, thereby knocking Austria out of the war. The wounded Louis XVII raced to the safety of Prussia with the remains of his army, where Frederick William III had viewed these recent developments as a massive security threat to the safety of his kingdom and had thus begun to plan to strike at Napoleon.

    'Louis XVII under attack at Austerlitz' (Royalist propaganda painting, c. 1810)

    That said, this year wasn’t totally successful for Napoleon. At sea, a massive Franco-Spanish fleet was annihilated at Trafalgar by the Royal Navy under Horatio Nelson, who however was also mortally wounded in the battle. This victory confirmed Britain’s supremacy at sea and scuppered any plans the Emperor might have had of attacking the Home Isles directly.

    1806: The Lewis & Clark Expedition returns to Missouri in September after exploring the vast American hinterland, having made it all the way to the Pacific in March.

    The Holy Roman Empire comes to an end nearly 900 years after its foundation by Charlemagne with the forced abdication of Francis II, now reduced to merely being the Emperor of Austria. Napoleon upgrades Bavaria to a kingdom and makes his brother Louis the new King of Holland, ending the puppet Batavian Republic entirely.

    Prussia joins the war effort against Napoleon. However, their armies are a far cry from the nigh-unstoppable legions of Frederick the Great, and ended up being miserably crushed into the dirt at Jena-Auerstadt on 14 October. At this battle the Duke of Brunswick (the very same one defeated at Valmy so long ago) is killed, the Prussian army shattered, and Louis XVII’s Armée du Roi (which, like its King, had barely recovered from Austerlitz) was similarly crippled – its strength had dropped from 12,000 men prior to the battle, to just short of 5,000 after all of its dead/wounded/captured had been counted. Napoleon enters Berlin in glory ten days later, though the Hohenzollerns had by this time fled to Russia and Louis XVII to Lubeck. There, Prussian General Gebhard von Blucher surrendered the last Prussian field army to the French, though not before delaying long enough to allow Louis XVII to cross over into neutral Denmark.

    The Prussian army in ruins after Jena-Auerstadt, 1806

    Empress Thérésa of the French gives birth to her and Napoleon’s third daughter, named Mathilde, in November. In commemoration of his crushing victory at Jena-Auerstadt, Napoleon proclaims her Princess of Jena and Duchess of Auerstadt. Also in November, Napoleon issues the Berlin Decree, setting up the Continental System that forbade continental states from trading with Britain.

    1807: Britain abolishes the slave trade. For that matter, so does the United States, where President Eggers' influence proved invaluable in bringing together the Federalists and moderate Democratic-Republicans in passing the act prohibiting 'the importation of slaves into any port or place within the jurisdiction of the United States from any foreign kingdom, place, or country'.

    The Treaties of Tilsit end the War of the Fourth Coalition. Half of Prussia is lost to the French Empire, which carved out a puppet Kingdom of Westphalia & Duchy of Warsaw from its share of the loot, and Russia joins forces with Napoleon. Only Prussia’s Queen Louise defiantly attempted to persuade her thoroughly beaten husband to not sign such a ‘disgraceful little slip of paper’, to no avail; for this she was mockingly declared ‘the only real man left in Prussia’ by Napoleon. With the Continent now nearly secure, only four thorns remained in Napoleon’s side at this time: Britain (of course), Sweden, Louis XVII (now on Danish soil) and the Ottomans.

    'The only real man left in Prussia' - Napoleon on Queen Louise, 1807

    The Emperor first teamed up with the Russians to destroy the Turkish threat, which after all had been at war with Alexander I since the year before and whose strategic victories in Egypt & Syria presented the only real black marks on Napoleon’s otherwise spotless military record. While the Russians pushed through Moldavia & Armenia and demolished the Ottoman navy at Athos, the French would march to attack through Bosnia, Serbia (where he hoped to court Dorde Petrovic’s rebels) and Wallachia, while the Austrians dared not refuse them passage. Within this year Dalmatia would be overrun, the Eyalet of Bosnia would be conquered and annexed to the nascent Serbian Principality as a token of French goodwill, and the pro-Ottoman Hospodar Alexandros Soutzos of Wallachia evicted to make way for a pro-French puppet, native Romanian boyar Grigore Brancoveanu. Needless to say, this French interference in a state Russia wished to claim as part of its sphere of influence was not welcomed by St. Petersburg, and it strained their alliance almost as soon as it had begun.

    Elsewhere, Napoleon demanded Denmark-Norway surrender Louis XVII to his custody. Prince-Regent Frederick, who had been governing in his mentally ill father’s stead since 1784 and wished to preserve Dano-Norwegian neutrality, refused such a clear act of war with the Coalition; the French thus invaded in the autumn and quickly overran the Jutland Peninsula, but the grateful British sent the Royal Navy to aid their Danish counterparts in defending Copenhagen (instead of say, bombarding it), and Louis XVII also did what little he could with his battered army of under 5,000 to support his latest foreign protectors.

    A small French army, backed by the Spanish, conquers mainland Portugal; the House of Braganza is forced to flee to Brazil. The French wouldn’t exactly repay the Spanish fairly for their aid, however...

    While the Spanish King Carlos IV and his heir Ferdinand were being feted in Paris at Napoleon’s invitation, their kingdom (having long languished under the corrupt & inefficient administration of Manuel de Godoy, a royal favorite and possible lover of the Spanish Queen) was easily invaded by the French army.

    Catalan militiamen desperately attempt to stop the surprise French invasion

    1808: Jack Eggers of the Democratic-Republicans is re-elected for a second term as President.

    Under intense pressure from his subjects & Royal Guard, Charles IV of Spain abdicates in favour of his son, who assumes the throne as Ferdinand VII. An ardent conservative and anti-French voice at the Spanish court, Ferdinand’s rise to power is viewed with great consternation by the French, which only mounts when the population of Madrid rioted against the French garrison on the 2nd of May. The brutal French response ignites a popular rebellion against them all across Spain, soon joined by the British and what was left of the regular Spanish army, and guerrillas made life hell for the French even if they could smash the regulars’ faces in every time they met. Still, this year was a poor one for the Spanish overall, as they sustained serious defeats at Medina de Rioseco and later Somosierra; the Spanish central government surrendered to France and proclaimed Napoleon’s older brother Joseph King after the latter, but resistance continued in the form of local juntas that coordinated guerrilla attacks on the French forces and held out for British aid.

    On the other side of the Mediterranean, Napoleon hurried to defeat the Ottomans so he would be free to properly focus on Spain. At Nis, Vidin, Vratsa, Gorna Oryahavitsa and finally Haskovo the Emperor demolished Ottoman forces in Serbia & Bulgaria before the year was even half-over. While Serbian and Bulgarian volunteers flocked to support him, Napoleon handily captured Thessalonica with the aid of Greek plotters in June, and a month later he wiped the floor with the last Ottoman field army worth the name at Adrianople; the once-elite Janissaries proved to all the world just how far they had fallen from their glory days when they were committed to the battle as their Sultan Mustafa IV’s last reserve, only to be miserably routed (and thus leave their boss to be captured) within ten minutes of fighting.

    The humiliated Mustafa was brought before Napoleon as a captive and forced to sign away most of his Balkan possessions in the Peace of Adrianople within a week of the defeat; Serbia, Greece and Bulgaria all gained their independence as states under French protection with Karadorde Petrovic becoming Prince of the first, Eugene de Beauharnais named as King of the second (he was replaced by Napoleon’s sister Elisa, already Princess of Lucca and Piombino, as Regent for the now six-year-old King Napoleon Francois of Italy), and Napoleon’s notoriously brutal brother-in-law Charles Leclerc made Grand Prince of the third. Mount Lebanon was also formally annexed into France, and the Romanian principalities were recognized as parts of the French sphere of influence. Meanwhile, Russia annexed Bessarabia and even more of Ottoman Armenia. With this done, Napoleon raced back to Spain to fight the Peninsular War.

    'Mustafa IV humbles himself before Napoleon' by Baron Antoine-Jean Gros, 1809

    Russia invades Swedish Finland, igniting the Finnish War. The badly outnumbered, outgunned and overall outclassed Swedish army put up a surprisingly good fight at first, but given the odds their chances of victory were already slim at best from the beginning, and by the end of this year all of Finland would be occupied by the Imperial Russian Army.

    Empress Thérésa gives birth to her and Napoleon’s fifth child/second son, named Charles-Napoleon, in late June. Napoleon did not receive the news until he had Sultan Mustafa brought before him, and to celebrate both the boy’s birth and his latest decisive victory he named the infant Prince of Adrianople.

    1809: Austria declares war on France, thereby becoming a member of the Fifth Coalition. The Austrian army, rebuilt and modernized by the Archduke Charles over the last four years, scored an upset victory over the French at Aspern-Essling on May 21. Unfortunately for the Austrians, they would be decisively defeated at Wagram two months later. The following Treaty of Schönbrunn saw Austria lose even more territory to France & her allies, and to add insult to injury Francis was forced to betroth his second-youngest daughter Maria Carolina to the Prince-Imperial & King of Italy, Napoleon Francois.

    Gustav IV Adolf of Sweden is overthrown in a palace coup, and the conspirators raised his uncle (and former regent) Charles to the throne as Karl XIII. A weak-willed and decrepit old man, Karl quickly gave in to the peace faction and signed away Finland to the Russians within the first month of his reign before moving to align with France under the pressure of St. Petersburg and pro-French intriguers at court; this now meant that in addition to having to defend their waters against French assaults, the Coalition-aligned Denmark-Norway also had to watch out for a Swedish invasion from the East. French Marshal Jean-Baptiste Bernadotte was hastily shuttled over to Sweden with a French army to bring the Dano-Norwegians to heel.

    Despite initial victories against the undermanned Dano-Norwegian garrisons at Hvaler and Kongsvinger however, Bernadotte was delivered an unexpected defeat at Lier when the Dano-Norwegian army pinned him down while Louis XVII’s Armée du Roi (having undergone extensive rebuilding, retraining and resupplying, it boasted 7,000 well-armed and motivated soldiers as of this battle) successfully rushed his flank. As the French Royalists’ first meaningful field victory under their young warrior-king, Lier was hyped up as Louis XVII’s own ‘Arsuf Moment’ (after one of Richard the Lionheart’s most famous victories) by the British and a ‘second Orléans’ by the émigré community, even if it didn’t actually matter all that much in the long run.

    Left to right: The Dano-Norwegians and Louis XVII (with the reborn, all-Vendean Gardes Françaises) at Lier, 1809

    1810: American settlers in West Florida proclaim the independence of a ‘Republic of West Florida’, with St. Francisville as their capital and the Bonnie Blue Flag as their banner. Not long afterwards, they are annexed by President Eggers. The Spanish aren’t happy, but with the Peninsular War still raging at home, there was precious little they could do besides swearing vengeance.

    Napoleon, frustrated with his brother Louis' incompetence in defending his assigned kingdom from British attacks and enforcing the Continental System, annexes Holland into the French Empire proper. Less fortunately for him, his army in Portugal, led by Marshal Massena, retreats back into Spain.

    A citizen militia drives out the Spanish Viceroy of Rio de la Plata and proclaimed a ‘Primera Junta’ to govern the colony, supposedly in the name of Ferdinand VII. This would mark the beginning of the Argentine War of Independence, the first of many Latin American wars of independence against Spain, though the Primera Junta would continue to claim they were acting in the interests of Ferdinand VII for some time yet. Mexico also begins its own national revolution when the priest Miguel Hidalgo instigates an uprising at Guanajuto.

    Swedish King Karl XIII’s adopted heir Charles August dies. The Swedish Riksdag elected Jean-Baptiste Bernadotte to fill his shoes, much to Napoleon’s and his own surprise, after the Marshal defeated the Danes a third time at Fredrikstad. However, days afterward, Louis XVII defeated him in turn at Eidskog and Matrand in rapid succession, driving him back across the border into Sweden. Against the advice of his uncle the Comte d'Artois, Louis gives chase in the dead of winter with the Armée du Roi and 4,000 Dano-Norwegians under Colonel Andreas Krebs at his back.

    1811: 200 slaves revolt against their masters in Louisiana’s ‘German Coast Uprising’ this year, led by the mulatto Charles Deslondes. The planters, whether they came from long-established Catholic French families or were new Anglo-American Protestant arrivals, swiftly allied to smash the rebellion with great force & cruelty. The rebels killed two whites over the span of two days; the planter militia killed ninety-five slaves, some of whom were probably not involved in the revolt in the first place.

    The US Army under former Inspector-General and longtime career soldier Isidore von Wolfe defeats an Indian confederacy led by Tecumseh and his brother Tenskwatawa (‘The Prophet’) at Tippecanoe.

    Louis XVII pursues Marshal-turned-Crown-Prince Bernadotte into Sweden, and defeats him again at Lysekil. However, as he pursued the Bonapartist-Swedish army further inland, Bernadotte whirled around and defeated him at Ljungskile. The young King-in-exile was forced to withdraw to Lysekil again, while Bernadotte continued his retreat unimpeded until he linked up with additional Swedish reinforcements led by Count Gustaf Armfelt, after which he turned back around to engage Louis once more. Making things worse, a second Swedish army of 3,600 men was closing in from the northeast under Colonel Johan Bergenstråhle. Although the Comte d'Artois advised calling it a day & retreating back to Norway, Louis XVII had grander plans. He quick-marched his and Krebs' army to launch an unexpected attack on Bergenstråhle's force, crushing the Swedes utterly (out of 3,600 men, some 500 were killed and two thousand captured, including the Colonel himself) before turning southwest and bullrushing Bernadotte's own much larger army at Stora Hoga before he could learn of Bergenstråhle's defeat. There, the King attacked Bernadotte and Armfelt in the middle of a massive blizzard - and against all logic & even the ever-cautious d'Artois' predictions, he won. Evidently, Bernadotte had agreed with the Comte d'Artois when the man told his nephew that only a fool would attack in this weather against such odds, and so had left his larger force strung out in several long marching columns while the snowstorm left even his better scouts & sentries nearly blind until it was too late; in the resulting slaughter Bernadotte and Armfelt had both fallen (the former was killed by Royalists before he could identify himself, the latter fell through some ice and froze to death), some 3,200 Bonapartist French and Swedes were also dead, and nearly 9,000 prisoners had been taken.

    Bernadotte's army on the eve of Stora Hoga, 1811

    Though Stora Hoga was rightly regarded as his true 'Orléans moment', Louis XVII would not stop even there. Through the sheer strength of his own charisma, he was able to smooth-talk and impress the late Bernadotte's captured troops into swearing their allegiance anew to him, and now moved to finish off the Swedish Crown with the help of additional Dano-Norwegian reinforcements under Colonel Sejersted. After defeating Colonels Cronstedt and Cederstrom at Kungslena, Algaras and Hova between March and June, Louis had a clear shot at Stockholm with half of the Swedish army dead, recovering from injuries or rotting in Norwegian prisons. For their part, the pro-French Empire faction at the Swedish court had more or less collapsed in the wake of all of these stunning defeats, and Karl XIII himself was a tired old man who had no interest in fighting an increasingly hopeless battle with the ascendant Coalition. On June 30, the elderly King abdicated and caught a boat to French-controlled Lubeck, leaving the capital in chaos until Louis XVII marched in without resistance on July 20 to restore Gustav IV Adolf to power. Besides embarking on a purge of as many radicals and pro-Napoleon notables as he could still find, Gustav IV immediately flipped Sweden back into the Coalition's camp, though thanks to the same young man who'd returned him to power its army was in no condition to fight.

    As usual, I'm open to any edits the community would suggest, as well as any insertions of player characters into any point in this TL. You'll notice stuff like 'X1' or 'X2' up there; those are placeholders for the names of whoever becomes President in those years. Some stuff, like the Barbary Wars, the resolution of the Genet Affair and the historical abolition of the slave trade in 1808 are also missing; I'll leave it to you guys to decide whose characters should play a role in these events or, in cases like the latter, if their guy would even enact such policies in the first place.
    Last edited by Barry Goldwater; April 16, 2014 at 07:36 PM.

  3. #3
    EmperorBatman999's Avatar I say, what, what?
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    Default Re: WEF 3.0 19th-Century Iteration Planning Thread

    I'm going to volunteer Amsel to be Clay. I feel like he is a pretty good cooperator until things get to family matters.

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    Barry Goldwater's Avatar Mr. Conservative
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    Default Re: WEF 3.0 19th-Century Iteration Planning Thread

    Wouldn't he be too old by 1824, when the Whigs become active? IIRC he'd be pushing 70-80 by then, so his son or nephew might be a better bet. I also need the guy's full name & your vote for a starting year, btw.

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    Default Re: WEF 3.0 19th-Century Iteration Planning Thread

    Well, as Barry knows, I plan to have Sebastian Rondelle be the first governor of Louisiana for a term before dying in 1816/7, while Octavien Rondelle would be admiral during the Barbary and Quasi wars before retiring to become a merchant tycoon from eventually New Orleans, with his family relocating there as well. Laurent, Sebastian's other son will likely go fight in the Napoleonic Wars under Louis XVII and may not return after the wars are over, otherwise his family would remain in Maryland as a more conservative branch of the Rondelles, while the New Orleans one is moderate. Events wise I dunno what they can do yet.

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    Default Re: WEF 3.0 19th-Century Iteration Planning Thread

    Quote Originally Posted by Barry Goldwater View Post
    Wouldn't he be too old by 1824, when the Whigs become active? IIRC he'd be pushing 70-80 by then, so his son or nephew might be a better bet. I also need the guy's full name & your vote for a starting year, btw.

    Well, he's I think 40 now. In the 1820's he'd be late 60s or early 70s so he'd be around...barely.

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    Barry Goldwater's Avatar Mr. Conservative
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    Default Re: WEF 3.0 19th-Century Iteration Planning Thread

    I've just looked at the signup thread, with a birth date of 1751 he's already over 70 as of 1824 (if you meant his younger brother, he'd be 64 by this time with a birthdate of 1760). I guess it's doable if you want it, JQA was a Congressman in his late 70s to the day of his death after all, but Amsel Sr dying in the mid to late 1830s could leave the Whigs without a leader to rally around too early after their formation, unless anyone else wants to pick up the slack as the William Henry Harrison expy (and also doesn't die from stupidity-induced pneumonia ).

    Bunch of images added to the timeline btw, as well as a section regarding the Barbary War in 1796.

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    Default Re: WEF 3.0 19th-Century Iteration Planning Thread

    Sorry, I did mean Senator Amsel. James will be a bit of dinosaur by the time 1824 rolls around.

    Anyway, a descendent of either James or Fredrick could also be done, taking on the traits of his father and uncle.

    I could always use James as one of those tag-alongs on some military expedition for comic relief I suppose...will you join me, Kip?

  9. #9
    Barry Goldwater's Avatar Mr. Conservative
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    Default Re: WEF 3.0 19th-Century Iteration Planning Thread

    Alright, fixed it in the OP. At 64 in 1824 he might be too old to run in the 1844 election as Clay did (provided we go for an 1845 start ofc) but that's what his descendants are for.

  10. #10

    Default Re: WEF 3.0 19th-Century Iteration Planning Thread

    Barry, I know you didn't post Borodino yet, but what do you think of this being used for a picture?

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    Barry Goldwater's Avatar Mr. Conservative
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    Default Re: WEF 3.0 19th-Century Iteration Planning Thread

    Sure, that one would work pretty well.

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    Barry Goldwater's Avatar Mr. Conservative
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    Default Re: WEF 3.0 19th-Century Iteration Planning Thread

    And here we go, my proposal for 1812-1816:

    1812-1816
    1812: Louisiana attains statehood, and elects former Maryland Senator & diplomat to Louis XVI's France Sebastien Rondelle as its first Governor.

    War fever among the Democratic-Republicans leads President Eggers to declare war on Britain with the support of a majority in both Houses of Congress, ostensibly to conquer Canada (‘a mere matter of marching’ one Democratic-Republican Senator reportedly said), suppress the British-backed Indian Confederacy of Tecumseh, and end British impressments of American sailors (which technically had happened with the repeal of the Orders in Council, news of the British announcement just didn’t reach the States quickly enough...that, or it did, and was suppressed by the Democratic-Republican-controlled Secretariat of State). The Federalists are firmly opposed to the war, which they saw as both bad for business and a pointlessly quixotic enterprise that was going to get thousands of Americans simply to satisfy ‘the bloodlust of Southern so-called gentlemen and Western brutes’, but lacked the numbers to oppose it.

    The war thus begins on June 18, right in the middle of election season. Unfortunately for them, the United States was definitely not prepared for the war thanks to the Democratic-Republicans’ gutting of the US military to save funds (and/or empower local state militias) since they first gained the White House in 1804, meaning that they would have to rely mostly on inexperienced state militias while rebuilding the regular army almost from scratch. Although there was a large Maroon population present across the Northwest Territory and Ohio to help, the racism exhibited by American commanders and a total lack of coordination between white & Maroon units usually meant that the participation of Maroon formations would only mean adding African-American deaths and captives to the casualty lists. As early as two months after the declaration of war, the Americans sustained heavy defeats at Brownston, Fort Schoolcraft, Detroit (where the Territorial Governor of Michigan, Anthony Steele was captured with over 2,000 of his men and all thirty of the fortress-town’s defensive guns) and the Action of 19 August (where the USS Leo, a frigate – indeed one of the last of its kind left in the US Navy – named after the first ship lost by then-Commodore Poole at Nantucket Shoals in 1776, was defeated by the HMS Guerriere).

    As a result of these early defeats, as well as a British blockade of South Carolina and Georgia, the US went into September banking on two campaigns to turn the tide of war in their favor; the Indian Campaign in the northwest, and the Northeastern Campaign in Maine and southern Quebec. The former was off to a decent start with the relief of the Siege of Fort Amsel in Indiana, but it was the latter that got everybody’s attention. In hopes of driving a wedge between Lower Canada/Quebec from the Maritimes and enabling an attack on Halifax and Quebec City both in the future, the US sent 500 regulars backed by 6,000 militia drawn from the various New England states (who had to appear patriotic even despite their opposition to the war, after all) into the Bas-St-Laurent area. On paper, they should have at least had a decent chance at success.

    But the reality on the ground? The President had insisted in appointing a Southerner to command this army, and picked one of the worst possible men for the job – hastily-promoted Brigadier General Sydney Smith Wilson, third son of Georgia Senator and ex-Continental Congressman Edmund Wilson (whom the President owed for helping keep Georgia a purely Democratic-Republican state, which explains why he of all people was chosen), an inexperienced officer – he had graduated from Legionville in 1804, but had very much been a ‘desk jockey’ and never actually saw battle until now – whose arrogance and aristocratic condescension toward his Yankee troops, combined with outright hostile racism towards the under-200 Maroon soldiers under his command (whom he immediately relegated to the role of field laborers, though he did grudgingly allow them to continue bearing arms ‘for self-defense’ under pressure from his Yankee subordinates) made sure he was the most hated man in the ‘Army of Maine’ before they even set out in late August. Of course, it didn’t help matters that his right-hand man was Colonel Matthew Saker, son of Senator George Saker and son-in-law of the elderly Governor Charles Dyer of Massachusetts, who felt that as a native Bay Stater he had a greater right to command of the Army of Maine and deeply resented Wilson as a result.

    The dueling commanders of the Army of Maine: left to right, Brig. Gen. Sydney S. Wilson & Col. Matthew Saker

    What followed was a two-month tragicomedy of errors fraught with heavy infighting, vague or contradictory orders, several cases of outright disobedience, ‘friendly fire’ incidents and generally incompetent leadership within the Army of Maine (of course, having the legendary William Howe as the leader of their Anglo-Canadian opponents couldn't have helped the Americans any). After a very brief initial success in capturing Pohenegamook on September 2, the Army of Maine more or less imploded once General Wilson sent Colonel Saker and Majors Thomas Dearborn, Alexander Smith and Lewis Goodman out into the northeast with very vague orders to ‘push until they reach the Saint Lawrence’, which they did while barely keeping in contact (much less coordinating their movements) with each other or Wilson's HQ. After Smith’s detachment was routed and the Major himself killed in a Canadien ambush on September 17, the other three commanders withdrew and began building forts at Auclair (Saker), Biencourt (Goodman) and Lac-des-Aigles (Dearborn). A particularly notorious piece of evidence pointing to Wilson's staggering incompetence (not that his subordinates were much better...well, they were, but not by that much) can be found in his orders to Saker, regarding Canadien insurgents who were harassing his men as they set up their fortifications around Auclair:
    Quote Originally Posted by Brigader-General Sydney Smith Wilson to Colonel Matthew Saker
    Colonel,

    I require you to destroy these troublesome insurgents, who in your and Major Goodman's last reports claimed were murdering your Negro laborers and stealing your supplies, with as much force as you can muster but also in such a fashion that you do not harm a hair on an innocent, thereby seeing to it that not one non-combatant is slain while every single combatant posing as a non-combatant is felled in such a way that people a thousand years from now will believe they were struck down by the Hand of God. Furthermore, I have seen fit to divert your weekly train of rations and ammunition to Major Dearborn's position, and so I require you and your men to also live off the land until we receive the next shipment of supplies from Boston. That said, though I fully expect you to have to liberate poultry and stores of grain from the locals in the near future due to these unfortunate circumstances, I also require you to remain on good terms with the Canadians so that not one man more will resolve to fight for the British tyrant across the sea, a task whose manner of completion I leave completely to your discretion.
    When Biencourt fell to Anglo-Canadien assaults before the month’s end anyway due to Wilson refusing to send Goodman any reinforcements (supposedly because he accidentally spilled some wine on his favorite coat on their last day together), thereby caving in the American defensive line, Saker withdrew from Auclair without orders even after defeating the force assigned to drive him out while Dearborn suffered an unfortunate accident involving an exploding cannon immediately after ordering his men to defend Lac-des-Aigles to the bitter end (after which said men also withdrew under his successor, Captain Reginald Weston), forcing an enraged Wilson to follow suit.

    The American’ retreat back into Maine was marred by vicious arguments and at least two duels as Wilson accused Saker of disobedience before moving to charges of outright treason, while Saker in turn accused Wilson of criminal incompetence and glory-hounding. When some 800 British regulars and 4,000 Canadian militia pursued the battered Army of Maine over the border, Wilson decided to stand and fight them, picking out Allagash as the site for their decisive battle: there, his scouts had reported 500 British regulars and about the same number of militia moving independent of the rest of the Anglo-Canadian army, surely no match for his remaining force of about 4,000 if they were to attack in full force. In addition to his seemingly superior numbers, the temptation to add 'defeating the undefeated William Howe' to his resume was no doubt too strong for a man like Wilson to resist. Disregarding Saker’s warning that this was most likely a trap, Wilson engaged Howe anyway and assigned the Colonel to lead his reserve of 1,400 (200 regulars, 1,200 militia) ‘just to get [him] out of the way’. When Saker’s warning turned out to be prophetic and the rest of the Anglo-Canadian army fell upon Wilson’s flank with the aged Howe in the lead, instead of advancing to pull his superior’s bacon out of the fire Saker ordered his reserve to retreat, justifying his potentially treasonous action with the argument that Wilson’s position had become unsalvageable and that all he would accomplish by sending in the reserve was getting his own men killed or captured for no real gain.

    Needless to say, while Saker made a fighting retreat out of the Aroostook area Wilson was captured along with the majority of the American force left behind at Allagash, and unsurprisingly never forgave him. Saker did turn around to defeat some 300 pursuing Canadian cavalrymen around Fort Amity on October 19, and made it back to a hero’s welcome in Maine. It didn’t last long; he was soon court-martialed for disobedience, misconduct and treason, found guilty of the first two charges, and cashiered from the Army, despite the arguments of the New England governments and his own defense that Wilson had walked into his own demise and that what he had done at Allagash was a necessary evil to salvage what little of the Army of Maine he could. Many New Englanders and a good number of other Northerners felt the court martial was a politically motivated ploy on the part of the Southern-based Democratic-Republicans to deflect any blame that might’ve rightly fallen on their ‘native son’ S. S. Wilson onto the Yankee Saker, and combined with the near-annihilation of the American invasion force assigned to Canada at Queenston Heights on 13 October, in this year’s election the Federalists would recapture Concordia with the support of all the Northeastern states & North Carolina. President X4, having first run on a peace platform, immediately tried to arrange a ceasefire and open negotiations with Britain.

    General Isaac Brock directs the decisive Anglo-Canadian charge at Queenston Heights, 1812

    On the other side of the world, outraged over Russia’s unwillingness to enforce the Continental System in their own waters Napoleon invaded his unreliable former ally with a ‘Grande Armée’ of 600,000 men drawn from not just French ranks but also those of their allies and puppets all over Europe, initially meant to take out Britain until his defeat at Trafalgar scuppered those plans. Though they departed in June, Napoleon’s army chronically suffered from a lack of supplies (foraging having been rendered a non-option by the Russians’ scorched earth strategy), disease (mostly typhus), desertion and lengthy communication lines. After an early victory at Smolensk, the French went on a long march to Moscow, during which Louis XVII also raced to support his in-laws and attracted large numbers of Russians to his Armée du Roi.

    On September 7 1812, Napoleon’s battered Grande Armée came to blows with a massive concentration of Russian troops under Generalissimo Mikhail Kutuzov at Borodino, backed by Louis XVII’s now 22,000-strong Armée du Roi (having been swelled by the addition of Dano-Norwegian, Russian, Swedish and ex-British Vendean formations between Stockholm and Moscow). The day was long and bloody, but near its end the French had thrown the Russians back from their defensive works thanks to Kutuzov’s poor positioning and now had victory in their grasp. At the advice of his desperate commanders and against his own better judgment, Napoleon committed the 18,500-strong Imperial Guard in an effort to land the knockout blow, which he would have – if Louis XVII hadn’t moved his own fresh Armée du Roi, which had been sitting in reserve this entire time, to stop him. Alas, even now the Armée du Roi could not outright prevail against Napoleon’s best of the best; whenever they had the Young and Middle Guards on the ropes (already a difficult task in and of itself) the Old Guard would throw them back, and Louis himself was wounded in the shoulder while directing his cuirassiers – but they did stiffen the rest of the Russian line enough to stop Napoleon’s final attack in its tracks. That night, Napoleon decided to withdraw without taking Moscow, thus beginning his long retreat home through the Russian winter. Ironically, Kutuzov had himself seriously contemplated withdrawing from Moscow as well, but was successfully lobbied to stay and fight the next day by General Barclay de Tolly and Louis XVII.

    The last, successful attack of the Russians & French Royalists at Borodino

    For having scored his first meaningful victories in the Scandinavian winter and on the onset of the Russian one, Louis XVII was now increasingly referred to as the ‘Winter King’ (‘Le Roi d’un Hiver’) by allies and enemies alike. Personality-wise however, he was still known to be a jovial and passionate young man filled with boundless energy – in other words, completely ill-suited to his new epithet – leading him to jokingly coin the nickname ‘the Lukewarm King’ for himself.

    In another twist of irony, Napoleon’s sixth child and fourth daughter Alexandrine was born on the same day as Borodino – and Louis XVII’s only son, named Louis Auguste Joseph after the grandfather and uncle he would never meet. The sickly Queen Hélène had produced only miscarriages and stillborn infants prior to this date, and so the Dauphin Louis was immediately acclaimed as ‘Dieudonné’ (‘God-given’) by his overjoyed parents & supporters. Less fortunately, doctors advised the young royal couple that a second pregnancy would likely kill the Queen-in-exile, meaning the Bourbon dynasty’s hopes for the future were now pinned on this ‘Miracle Prince’.

    1813: The British and the United States reach the Peace of Concord (usually referred to as the ‘Concordian Concord’ by jokers from the latter in years to come), restoring the status quo ante bellum. The end of impressments was formally made permanent and for their part, the United States repealed the Embargo Act of 1807. Although the United States had feared the danger of at least having to cough up crippling reparations, not only was Britain still too busy fighting Napoleon, but they were not interested in incurring American enmity for generations to come by imposing an overly humiliating peace. All this said, the United States Army under William 'Willie' Bohannon, a son of former Revolutionary War and Whiskey Rebel commander Shawn Bohannon, did land an unexpectedly crushing defeat on the forces of Tecumseh’s Confederacy and his British advisers at Wildcat Creek, Indiana (even killing Tecumseh himself) after the peace treaty was signed but before either of them heard of it; the British obviously weren't pleased, but with Tecumseh already dead and his confederacy shattered they were forced to accept this fait accompli. In light of all this, Northerners would praise X4’s administration for ending ‘this pointless little war’ and restoring lines of trade with the British Empire quickly, while Southerners blasted them for ‘stabbing America in the back’ and pointed to Wildcat Creek as an example of how they totally could’ve won the war if only they were allowed to keep fighting (nevermind that it required the Americans violating the ceasefire arranged by President X4, thereby catching Tecumseh & the Indians completely off guard, to win) for oh, let’s say one to three more years.

    The death of Tecumseh, as depicted in the US Capitol Rotunda

    Across the Atlantic, the French Empire staggers under a multitude of heavy blows from the Sixth Coalition this year. First, Napoleon crawled out of Russia with less than half of the Grande Armée – some 400,000 men had died in Russia, whether in battle or from disease, exposure to the elements and starvation. Needless to say, Austria and Prussia were both ecstatic over the news and immediately threw their lots in with the Coalition once more. Secondly, his brother Joseph was decisively defeated at Vitoria by an Anglo-Portuguese-Spanish army led by Arthur Wellesley, Marquess of Wellington, thereby putting his ambitions to rule as the first Bonaparte King of Spain in the dust for good.

    After Marshal Nicolas Oudinot’s attempt to capture Berlin failed in the face of intense Prussian and Dano-Norwegian resistance at Großbeeren, Napoleon made his ‘Hail Mary’ pass at Leipzig, where he stood with some 225,000 men against a Coalition force of over 400,000 – Russians, Austrians, Prussians, Dano-Norwegians and of course that most implacable political nemesis of his, Louis XVII (ironically, like the Grande Armée only half of his now 28,000-strong Armée du Roi were actually Frenchmen, whether hardened old veterans of the Vendee/Austerlitz/Jena or recruited deserters from the Grande Armée). Surrounded from the north and south, the Emperor attempted to break out over the course of three days, only to be frustrated by the sheer numbers arrayed against him and the betrayal of his Saxon & Wurttemburger contingents.

    The fighting was bloodiest around the village of Probstheida, where the Prusso-Russian forces of general de Tolly initially gained hard-fought ground from the French before being pushed back by the Imperial Guard, but were rallied by and ended up prevailing with the support of Louis XVII by the end of 18 October. The Armée du Roi had never defeated the Imperial Guard before – at Austerlitz and Jena-Auerstadt they were miserably routed off the field, and at Borodino they would have been crushed again had it not been for the rest of the Russian Army – but here and now, at this small Saxon village, they had undeniably carried the day against one of Europe’s most formidable elite forces. Although the Winter King was unhorsed in the fighting and many feared he had been killed, he leaped to his feet and swept off his helmet to reveal his iconic dark-golden locks before shouting “Votre roi vit encore, les Français! Voulez-vous le voir à combattre l'usurpateur Bonaparte lui tout seul?” (Your King still lives, Frenchmen! Do you wish to see him to fight the usurper Bonaparte all by himself?) to his troops, saving the Armée du Roi from a third rout in the face of Napoleon’s finest. After the fall of Probestheida (soon followed by the loss of Paunsdorf and Schonefeld) and the defection of his German troops, Napoleon’s army began to unravel and rout across the Eister in an undignified mess. The ‘Battle of Nations’ had concluded with over 120,000 casualties, but despite the heavy cost in blood it was still undeniably a decisive victory for the Coalition, and left Napoleon’s once proud army in tatters for good.

    'The defense of Probstheida' by Edouard Bara, 1816

    Down south, the Ottoman Empire finally committed to the Sixth Coalition after Leipzig and made war against Napoleon’s Balkan puppets with an army that had recently been retrained and modernized as quickly as possible with the help of British advisers; the Janissaries had attempted to resist these modernization efforts, but were suppressed and their barracks destroyed with much bloodshed all without a single sympathetic ear opened to them in the capital, having lost all popular support after their miserable showing at Adrianople some years ago. Charles Leclerc, Grand Prince of Bulgaria, was defeated at Sozopol and Yambol, dying at the latter; his kingdom thus collapsed and was re-absorbed by the Turks. In Serbia, after a defeat at the Battle of Kosovo (under circumstances eerily similar to what befell their ancestors in 1389, no less) Prince Karadorde Petrovic was assassinated in a palace coup led by his Coalition-sponsored rival Milos Obrenovic, who agreed to return Bosnia to the Turks and become a vassal of the Porte in exchange for recognition of his dynasty as the legitimate Princes of Serbia; thanks to the convenient deaths of most of his rivals at Kosovo his rule would be largely uncontested for now, but he and his line would now and forever be damned as traitors to Serbia by future generations of Serbs.

    1814: Napoleon is chased back to France proper by the armies of the Sixth Coalition; the Russians, Prussians, Austrians, Dano-Nowegians and French Royalists moved in from freshly-liberated (or reoccupied, depending on your perspective) Germany, while the British, Portuguese and Spanish attacked from the south. Despite landing upset victories such as those of the Six Days’ Campaign in northeastern France, Napoleon’s defeat had become a matter of ‘when’ and not ‘if’ at this point. His Empire finally fell to pieces after Marshal Auguste Marmont betrayed him at Montmartre and Paris fell before a Prusso-Russo-Royalist onslaught formally led by Louis XVII (who reportedly boasted “Parisiens! Votre roi légitime retourne!” or ‘Parisians! Your true King returns!’ upon passing through the shattered barricades at Clichy), at which point the Emperor abdicated unconditionally after his offer to abdicate in favor of his now twelve-year-old son Napoleon Francois was rejected out of hand.

    Imperial troops attempt to halt the Royalist attack on Clichy's barricades, 1814

    Elsewhere, a year of spirited Romanian resistance against the Turks came to an end with the defeat of the joint Moldavian-Wallachian armies at Snagov. Moldavia remained under Russian protection (though of course Bessarabia remained part of Russia) but Wallachia was restored to the Turkish sphere of influence, and Voivode Brancoveanu was deposed in favour of a new Phanariote Greek puppet appointed by the Porte. Finally, the Greeks lost Thessalonica and with it their Macedonian & Thessalian possessions, but a desperate defense at Thermopylae combined with nascent Philhellenism within the Coalition Powers’ elite circles allowed King Eugene de Beauharnais to keep his kingdom (now reduced to Attica, the Peloponnesus, Euboea and the Cyclades) on the condition that he break all ties with Napoleon ‘forever’. Napoleon’s Marshal Joachim Murat, King of Naples since 1808, was also allowed to hold on to his throne under similar terms, to the frustration of the Sicilian House of Bourbon.

    The Treaty of Fontainebleau, signed on 11 April and ratified by Napoleon two days later, finally ended the War of the Sixth Coalition. Louis XVII was restored to his rightful throne in more than just name, France had to return to its 1789 borders, and Napoleon was granted the tiny island of Elba to rule for the rest of his life as a French vassal; as he was also allowed to keep his imperial dignity, many jokes were made about ‘an Emperor kneeling to a King’ at his expense. Although he insisted on being anointed at Reims in the tradition of pre-Napoleon French monarchs, the Winter King did agree to limit his own royal prerogative by issuing a liberal Charter this year, facilitating the creation of an appointed upper ‘Chamber of Peers’ and an elected lower ‘Chamber of Deputies’ in addition to keeping most of the Napoleonic Code. Louis took a merciful line on those who had fought for Napoleon, discouraging reprisals against known Bonapartists and openly welcoming his surviving Marshals into Bourbon service. The French army was also demobilized, as was the Armée du Roi, though about 10,000 of its veterans (half of them French, the rest organized into Russian/Swiss/Scandinavian/German regiments) stayed on board as the Winter King’s new Royal Guard.

    Napoleon bids goodbye to his Imperial Guard at Fontainebleau, 1814

    On a side note, upon personally meeting Napoleon off the battlefield for the first time at Fontainebleau, Louis XVII reportedly asked the Comte d’Artois “Oncle, est-ce vraiment le petit homme qui a commencé ces grandes guerres?” (Uncle, is this really the little man who started these great wars?) It was said that Napoleon (who was actually of average height) was so angered that he nearly broke off the negotiations - and the Winter King's nose - right then and there.

    1815: The Congress of Vienna, held since November the year prior, seemed on the verge of collapsing due to the rival ambitions of all of the Coalition Powers. Tsar Alexander of Russia desired the absorption of Poland into his empire; Prussia wanted to chew up Saxony and recover its Partition gains in Poland; Austria wanted to keep Galicia and claim Northern Italy as part of its sphere of influence; and Britain backed France, represented by the ever-fickle Charles Maurice de Talleyrand-Perigord, who wanted to keep the other European powers as weak as possible. Matters nearly exploded into war when Alexander boasted that he had 450,000 Russians sitting on Poland, and that the rest of Europe ‘was welcome to try to remove them, if they can’, followed immediately by British representative Lord Castlereagh approaching Frederick William III of Prussia with an offer to support the annexation of Saxony if he would only support an independent Poland.

    However, the intrigues of the Coalition Powers were interrupted when Napoleon capitalized on their apparent distraction with each other to escape his ‘gilded cage’ at Elba and retake power in France. Louis XVII and his Queen Hélène had strived to win the support of the French people by embarking on a tour of their kingdom since last year, where Louis’ willingness to rub shoulders with the commons and wartime reputation as the ‘Winter King’ combined with his Russian wife’s beauty and gentle manners had done much to restore the Bourbon dynasty’s respectability in the eyes of their people; but Napoleon was still remembered as the man who got French boots as far as the outskirts of Moscow, Constantinople and Damascus, and the liberal-minded bourgeois in particular still considered Louis a foreign-imposed reactionary puppet even despite his adherence to La Charte. Thus, after Napoleon slipped through the Alps (to avoid heavily Royalist Provence) he found a generally welcome reception, to the point where he was able to convince two Bourbon regiments to join him at Lyon simply by opening his coat and crying out to them, Si l'un de vous aura tirer votre empereur, lui tirer dessus maintenant (‘If any of you will shoot at your Emperor, shoot him now’). Many of Napoleon’s old Marshals also defected back into his service from the Bourbon ranks.

    Louis XVII was visiting (of all places) Montmédy, where he had attempted to flee with his family before being intercepted at Varennes so long ago, when the news of Napoleon’s return reached him. He raced back to Paris at once after sending his wife and entourage into the relative safety of the Prussian Rhineland, only to find most of his army had defected to Napoleon and he himself had been locked out of his own capital – his 10,000-strong Royal Guard, led by Vendean veteran-turned-long time Armée du Roi officer and Marshal Marquis Henri de la Rochejacquelain, had withdrawn from the city as Napoleon closed in and the people’s mood turned against them, and met him at Reims to give him the bad news. Marshal Georges Cadoudal, another Chouan & Vendean leader who had fought for the Bourbons from 1792 onward and sat on the Armée du Roi’s staff from 1804 until he was badly injured at Leipzig in 1813, raised a pro-Bourbon rebellion in the Vendee yet again but obviously could not be joined by Louis, while his cousin the Duke of Angoulême raised a second Legitimist revolt in Provence but was crushed by Marshal Grouchy at Valence. With no other viable option left to him, Louis was forced to march to the Dutch border with his Royal Guards, collecting as many loyalists as he could on the way north. His first act upon reaching Ghent was to burn the original copy of La Charte that he carried with him, and his company noted that his demeanor had changed from upbeat and energetic to grim, determined and withdrawn (indeed, far better suited for somebody carrying the moniker of ‘the Winter King’) after these betrayals.

    While the Seventh Coalition was formed by the powers present at the Congress of Vienna and Louis XVII awaited reinforcements in Belgium, Napoleon decided to strike first and strike hard. He swept into Belgium with about 70,000 men and most of his loyal Marshals in tow as the ‘Armée du Nord’, having dispatched good-sized detachments under Marshal Lamarque to deal with Cadoudal in the Vendee and to safeguard Paris under Marshal Berthier. Also attached to his army was the thirteen-year-old Prince-Imperial and former King of Italy Napoleon Francois, nicknamed L’Aiglon or ‘The Eaglet’ by the Bonapartists, who was to sit on his father’s command staff as an observer. Opposing them were three scattered Coalition armies; an Anglo-Dutch one commanded by the Duke of Wellington that numbered some 93,000 and was encamped at Brussels, the Prussian host of Gebhard von Blucher that numbered 116,000 and was still marching to join the others, and Louis XVII’s third Armée du Roi of about 30,000 (almost all inexperienced new troops drawn during his retreat north, save for the 10,000 Royal Guards under La Rochejacquelein) marching from Ghent to join the British at Brussels.

    Marshal Ney engaged elements of Wellington’s force first at Quatre Bras, but was unable to score a meaningful victory. At Ligny, Napoleon kept Blucher’s forces off-balance but was similarly unable to land a serious defeat on the Prussians, and in the meantime Louis XVII had joined Wellington. Having strategically failed to meaningfully defeat any of his opponents, Napoleon thus resolved to bet everything on a speedy defeat of the much larger Anglo-Dutch-Royalist army, pulling even Grouchy’s forces into the final battle of the war at Waterloo instead of attempting to stop the Prussians’ maneuvers. Thus on June 8, 1815 the last decisive battle of the Napoleonic Wars was fought...

    The French kicked things off with an attack on the fortified Chateau d’Hougoumont. Although the attack was intended to sucker Wellington into committing his reserves early, the hard fighting quickly escalated to an all-day battle that forced Napoleon to commit his own reserves instead. Napoleon followed up by ordering Marshal D’Erlon to lead a massive infantry attack to punch in several gaps in the Coalition lines, and indeed seemed so very close to succeeding when Lieutenant-General Sir Thomas Picton (then dressed in civilian clothes, having had no time to change into his uniform before battle was joined) was killed trying to rally his men for a counterattack.

    Thomas Picton, here depicted in the uniform he wasn't wearing to Waterloo

    However, it was at this point that Wellington committed his two brigades of heavy cavalry, one of Household Guards and another of heavy dragoons under the supreme command of the Earl of Uxbridge, backed by one of Louis XVII’s elite cuirassier brigades (the Gendarmes of his Royal Guard, active since Jena-Auerstadt) and one of light cavalry; they proceeded to bowl over D’Erlon’s dispersed cuirassiers and destroyed several French brigades, breaking D’Erlon’s attack entirely. At this crucial junction the inexperienced and overconfident British cavalry could have overreached, but with some effort from their officers and the example set by the Royalist heavy horse (who knew full well what would happen if they allowed themselves to get carried away, some from experience at Austerlitz no less) managed to maintain cohesion, and together with their Royalist allies began to claw their way back to their lines – just in time to avoid the worst of a counterattack consisting of yet more French cuirassiers and lancers. Worse yet for the French, Blucher’s Prussians emerged on his right, forcing Napoleon to spend the last of his reserves (except for the Imperial Guard, of course) under Grouchy, Lobau & Davout in an attempt to hold them back.

    Well, this could have been worse

    Around the time of the Prussians’ arrival, Marshal Ney directed a grand cavalry charge against Wellington’s and Louis XVII’s forces, hoping to succeed where D’Erlon and his infantry failed by sweeping the Coalition forces away through shock & cold steel. That done, the entirety of the French army could then focus on the Prussians. However, even after the French artillery disrupted several of the Coalition squares and allowed Ney’s horsemen to overrun their positions, his efforts were ultimately in vain; the enemy was simply too vast in number, their retaliatory musketry and cannonades too devastating. The French cavalry eventually lost momentum and were driven back by a Coalition counterattack, at the same time that Grouchy and Berthier’s forces were beginning to crack under the weight of Blucher’s assaults no less (Lobau having been wounded badly enough to take him out of the action).

    With his chance at victory fast disintegrating before his eyes, Napoleon made the fateful decision to commit the Imperial Guard to battle for the last time. Though they were heavily outnumbered, the Imperial Guard still fought heroically, pushing their way past repeated musket and canister volleys to engage the Coalition forces at La Haye Sainte. Seeing that the British Foot Guards stationed there were now hard-pressed by what remained of the Old and Middle Guard’s might, Louis XVII launched into action with his own Garde du Corps, having previously made clear his hopes of meeting and slaying Napoleon in single combat. These hopes would be in vain, as Napoleon was actually still standing around the inn of La Belle Alliance with two battalions of the Old Guard, but together with the British 52nd Light Infantry Regiment Louis’ Garde du Corps did succeed in hurling the Imperial Guard into full retreat. Making things worse, Grouchy and Berthier’s corps fell apart as the full might of the Prussian army came down upon them, and not even the Young Guard could save the day. Now came the infamous panicked cry of many a Frenchman on the field, as the Armée du Nord began to melt away: "La Garde recule. Sauve qui peut!" (‘The Guard retreats. Save yourselves if you can!’)

    As the last few cohesive Guard units rallied around Napoleon at La Belle Alliance, the Emperor resolved to try to rally his collapsing forces and make his last stand. His men were able to form a total of four squares before the pursuing Coalition forces crashed against them, and threw the first wave back; but upon the second, the Emperor himself was shot in the chest as he directed the square immediately left of La Belle Alliance. He died almost immediately in the arms of his young son, and his last words were reportedly either “Est-ce que mon histoire se termine?” (Is this how my story ends?) according to the boy, “Vengez-moi!” (Avenge me!) according to the Imperial Guardsmen near him, or just sputtering and coughing blood for a few moments before expiring, according to the British troops closest to his position. Whatever the Emperor’s last words were though, it clearly wasn’t enough to save the day, as the French army continued on its miserable rout. The battered remains of the Old Guard fought as hard as they could to protect the newly-ascended Napoleon II’s withdrawal with his personal guards and to defend their fallen Emperor’s body, defiantly crying out La Garde meurt, elle ne se rend pas! (The Guard dies, it does not surrender!) when invited to stand down, and were killed almost to a man by the Coalition forces. Upon viewing the dead Napoleon, Louis XVII reportedly expressed disappointment that he didn't get to kill the Emperor himself.

    An idealized depiction of the fallen Napoleon by exiled Bonapartist painter Jacques-Louis David, 1819

    Following Waterloo, the Armée du Nord effectively ceased to exist as a fighting force of any note. As virtually nobody was interested in dying for the relative nonentity that was Napoleon II, the French government in Paris surrendered to the Coalition and passed a motion deposing L’Aiglon upon receiving news of the Emperor’s crushing defeat and death a week later. On 3 August 1815, the Treaty of Paris definitively ended the Napoleonic Wars by restoring Louis XVII to the throne a second time, banishing Napoleon’s widow Thérésa Cabarrus Bonaparte and their children to the tiny Portuguese island of Madeira, and installing a 150,000-strong Coalition army in fortresses across France for up to a year, something Louis tolerated only in hopes of being able to hunt down his enemies on his allies’ dime. To his credit however, besides assenting to the Bonaparte family's exile to Madeira instead of lobbying for their arrest and execution to permanently end the threat their line posed to his own ('What manner of King cowers at the shadows of little children?' he reportedly asked Lord Castlereagh on the subject) Louis also argued for the inclusion of an anti-slavery clause and, noting that the elderly Governor L'Ouverture of Haiti had failed to support Napoleon during his Hundred Days, gracefully kept the institution abolished in French domains.

    Needless to say, aside from these bits of generosity, after the Hundred Days Louis XVII was not in a forgiving mood. Gone was the dashing young man who fantasized about riding across Europe as a knight in shining armor who would surely reclaim his birthright with God’s help and who believed, perhaps naively, that not only would the French people welcome him after overthrowing & killing his parents but that if he forgave those who once bore arms against him all would be well – this boy died when news of Napoleon’s return reached Montmédy, replaced by a cold and grim statesman who believed that the Enlightenment was a mistake, that only the death of all of his enemies could save him and his family from their own brutal deaths in turn, and that the only reason his father fell in the first place was that he wasn’t ruthless enough. In September Louis issued a new Charte, disbanding the popularly-elected Chamber of Deputies entirely and reducing the Chamber of Peers to a largely advisory body chaired by his uncle the Comte de Provence while concentrating all legislative and executive power in his hands, and mandating the creation of the ‘Bureau des Travaux Spéciales’ (BTS, Bureau of Special Works), equal parts intelligence agency/internal security bureau/secret police, which he staffed with the most skilled and ruthless agents (of both sexes) he could afford from across France and later, all of Europe.

    Between late August and December, those Napoleonic Marshals unfortunate enough to have fallen into the Winter King’s hands were all swiftly tried and executed for treason; Augereau (who had tried to rejoin Napoleon earlier but was rebuffed, not that this saved him), Ney, Davout, Berthier, Grouchy, Lobau (captured by the Prussians at Waterloo after being wounded, but turned over to Louis) and Mortier were all thereby shot in rapid succession. Suchet fled to Switzerland and was later invited back into the country with an offer of amnesty, only to be seized and shot for treason as well in October. Jourdan and Lefebvre fled the country, but both ended up becoming the first notable victims of the BTS; Jourdan had his throat slit in Switzerland on New Year’s Eve and Lefebvre killed the first BTS agent to strike at him, only to fall to a second assassin in Italy in 1817. Lamarque had already been killed by Cadoudal's men in the Vendee during the Hundred Days. Due to his considerable popularity Louis XVII grudgingly ‘only’ exiled Soult, but the BTS saw to it that he suffered a tragic accident in the summer of 1816 as well. Only those Marshals who avoided following Napoleon into his Hundred Days – MacDonald, Marmont, Moncey, Oudinot, Masséna and Pérignon – were spared. Reportedly, when the Marquis de La Rochejacquelein advised him to accept these Marshals into his service and make use of their skills instead of trying to purge them all, Louis icily replied 'They will serve me far better in death than they ever could in life'.

    The Winter King at age 30-31, shortly before or after Waterloo

    1816: With the nation at peace, trade lines to all European countries restored since the end of the Napoleonic Wars and businesses booming everywhere, Federalist President X4 handily wins reelection this year. Also, Indiana gains statehood.

    Senator Matthew Thompson is elected Governor of Virginia, and will serve a full three-year term before returning to the Senate.

    The British and Dutch bombard Algiers in an attempt to force the Dey to stop raiding European shores for slaves and to release all Christians in their custody. The Algerians concede the second point and promise to uphold the first, but break their word as soon as they came to feel it was safe.

    Again, comments are welcome, and if you want your character to get a mention somewhere just tell me.
    Last edited by Barry Goldwater; April 16, 2014 at 07:39 PM.

  13. #13
    chesser2538's Avatar Senator
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    Default Re: WEF 3.0 19th-Century Iteration Planning Thread

    I vote for an 1828 start, my Richardson character would be dead by then, but my Thompson character should still be 66; young enough to be in politics. Barry could you mention Richardson retiring somewhere in the 1800's he would be 70 in 1810, maybe have him leave as VP,POTUS, or some other high office.

    I would like for my Matthew Thompson character to receive some mention to validate his rise to power. in 1794 he is the speaker of the house, after this I'd like for him to start ascending the political ladder so that by the time we hit 1828 he would be 66 and hold one of the top political spots. I think he would make a good John Calhoun or an Andrew Jackson, especially with him being from Virginia. I'm leaning Calhoun, but i'll take whatever is available.

    Lastly I would like for one of Thompson's sons to be an up and coming member of the House. I think he would be about 40 by 1828. I'm still planning but he will be Robert Thompson of Virginia.

    If anyone has any suggestions or improvement, i'm open to suggestion.

    Under the Patronage of the venerable General Brewster

  14. #14
    Barry Goldwater's Avatar Mr. Conservative
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    Default Re: WEF 3.0 19th-Century Iteration Planning Thread

    Thanks, votes noted. Robertson could be POTUS 1805-1813 if you want & if the community supports it, since that was the D-R Presidency after all, but it would mean he'd go down with 'started the War of 1812 and got clobbered' on his record (a much clearer chain of American defeats with fewer victorious breaks here is needed to propel the clearly anti-war Federalists to victory in that year's election as rolled for, since there's not much reason for anyone except New Englanders to vote for them if the US looks like it's winning or at least has a chance at victory)

    Also, do you have any ideas as to what Matt Thompson would be up to in the intervening years? If he becomes Calhoun I imagine he'd at least switch parties from the Federalists to the Democrats.

  15. #15
    Pericles of Athens's Avatar Vicarius Provinciae
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    Default Re: WEF 3.0 19th-Century Iteration Planning Thread

    I obviously haven't had much time for IH these days, but I believe (for rather obvious reasons) that Wallace's son would make a good John Calhoun for the series. He comes from a line of avid supporters of states' rights/slavery/Dixie and was raised by the founder of the Arch-Democrats.


  16. #16
    Barry Goldwater's Avatar Mr. Conservative
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    Default Re: WEF 3.0 19th-Century Iteration Planning Thread

    What's his name, I kinda need that before I can add him to the poll Though I thought you were angling for the AJ spot? Either one's fine by me ofc, but I'd like players to limit their families to one major role (unless we go for an 1845 start, then we'd have more spots to fill - I'd have to add at least William Henry Harrison, Stephen Douglas, William Lloyd Garrison and James Polk to that list) for the sake of fairness to others.

  17. #17
    Pericles of Athens's Avatar Vicarius Provinciae
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    Default Re: WEF 3.0 19th-Century Iteration Planning Thread

    John Wallace. Yeah, I've decided to drop the Bohannon name in the continuation of the series so no AJ angle for me. Also an 1845 start would be preferable.


  18. #18
    Barry Goldwater's Avatar Mr. Conservative
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    Default Re: WEF 3.0 19th-Century Iteration Planning Thread

    Thanks, OP updated. Anything notable you want the Wallaces to do in the intervening years btw? JW's uncle (your Representative) could well be a rival with Robertson for the position of D-R POTUS in 1805-1813 if you want, for example.

  19. #19
    chesser2538's Avatar Senator
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    Default Re: WEF 3.0 19th-Century Iteration Planning Thread

    I'm fine with Robertson being in the running for the 1805-1813 POTUS slot. Regarding Matt Thompson i'm thinking that he could go from speaker of the house to US senator, and then Governor, and now VP if available. This way he has a clean political rise to power with a chance of being elected to POTUS following the end of whoever is president.
    add whatever events you think sound good to his political record. With a Calhoun like character I want for him to be strong in his beliefs without being seen as a raving radical racist. He should be more of an enlightened democrat with the interests of the proper southern gentleman in mind.

    (if you think that VP is too uneventful of a position. Cast him as Sec of State)

    Under the Patronage of the venerable General Brewster

  20. #20

    Default Re: WEF 3.0 19th-Century Iteration Planning Thread

    I'll vote for Perry's guy as Calhoun and abstain from the 28/45 vote for now.

    As for what my characters will be doing in 1828/45
    -28
    Octavien will be 62, so perhaps he could be governor of Louisiana or a Senator from the state as probably a Whig. Perhaps he also could be Head of the Naval Department post-Wo1812 to restore the fleet from being a frigate and cannon armed rowboats small ships.
    Laurent, Sebastian's other son if he returns from Bourbon France would be 56 so perhaps he could be a General or Federalist Senator from Maryland.
    Alexander, Octavien's son would be 31 so if his father is not a Senator, he could be. Or an Admiral.
    Charles, Laurent's son is an alternative to his father, but as he is only 27, he would be a Representative instead.
    -45
    Alexander : Senator from Louisiana or Governor of the State.
    Charles : General.

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