1841: The case of the Amistad, a Spanish slave ship bound for Cuba whose human cargo had taken over in a revolt and gotten the ship steered to New York by accident (they were hoping to return home but were tricked by the surviving crew) two years prior, is finally settled when the US Supreme Court ruled that since the slaves were taken illegally (as Spain had outlawed slavery in 1811, but allowed the keeping of slaves who were born slaves before 1820) they were all free. With the help of American abolitionists and missionaries, the Africans were returned home by 1844.
The Creole case breaks out as illegally-bought slaves aboard the Creole, bound for Charleston, revolt against the crew much as the Amistad did and steered the ship to British Nassau, where they were immediately considered free and the surviving crewmen, despite being American citizens, were condemned as pirates operating in violation of both British and American law (for both had long banned the slave trade). Southerners were outraged at this loss of property, while abolitionists from the North and West pressured the Federalist administration of X9 to let the case go.
The liberal, urban-based and heavily Protestant Radical Party takes a majority of seats in the Swiss Confederation's Tagsatzung (confederal council) and immediately tried to enact their agenda of centralizing power. They are opposed by the rural cantons, but most fiercely the Catholic and aristocratically-run cantons of Uri/Schwyz/Nidwalden/Obwalden/Lucerne/Zug/Fribourg/Valais, which joined forces to proclaim the Sonderbund ('separate alliance') to defend their interests. The Liberals obviously did not approve of this new coalition, and the country fell into civil war. Louis XVII, seeing a chance to restore some of his prestige after being forced out of Argentina by Britain, immediately declared support for the Sonderbund, moved troops to the Swiss border and warned the Liberals to back down. They were joined in this by Austria, whose Prime Minister & de-facto ruler Prince Metternich (due to Emperor Ferdinand being a mentally unstable wreck) was an arch-conservative statesman sympathetic to the aims of the Sonderbund. Britain warned Louis and Austria that they would intervene to support the Liberals if either power backed the Sonderbund, but while Metternich immediately developed second thoughts, the Winter King remained unmoved; as far as he was concerned, Argentina was a world away across oceans that Britain was rightly master of, but Switzerland was right in his backyard and the British had no right meddling there. He brokered an alliance with Prussia's Frederick William IV, yet another hard-nosed continental conservative; in exchange for his military intervention, France would recognize him as the rightful Prince of Neuchatel, where his monarchical position was threatened by the possibility of Switzerland becoming a federal state. When Louis called Britain's bluff and sent 50,000 Frenchmen to cross the border in support of the 40,000 Prussians who had freshly arrived at Neuchatel to bail out the crumbling Sonderbund, the Liberals - who had been winning up to that point - ended up decisively crushed beneath the Allied army at Murten and were forced to stand down. In a peace mediated jointly by Metternich and Britain's Foreign Secretary Lord Palmerston (as a minor face-saving concession Louis had allowed to the British) the Sonderbund was dissolved, but in the name of 'preventing further anarchy' no further amendments to the Swiss constitution were permitted, making the the 1815 Federal Treaty into Switzerland's permanent constitution in all but name.
Map of the Sonderbund War | |
On the other side of the planet, Rosas' army breaks the Unitarian siege of Cordoba in a surprise attack on the besiegers' camp, killing some 2,000 Unitarians on the field of battle and capturing 2,000 others (who were all immediately hanged, and left to rot from trees between Cordoba and Buenos Aires in true Rosista fashion); critical to the Rosista victory was the 'Regimiento de Halcones' (Regiment of Hawks), an elite 1500-man infantry unit personally drilled and commanded by the rapidly-promoted totally-not-a-French-officer Thierry Watteau 'Johnny Lamarck' & equipped with the contents of the last French shipment to arrive before the British blockade came down. While the Unitarians fled back to the Sierras Grande in disarray, with Bonaparte's cavalry acting as their rearguard, Rosas neglected to seriously pursue them - because now he was busy massing his forces for an invasion of Uruguay in support of the Blanco faction, which came to be in July. Quick-marching overland with 15,000 Rosista soldiers (including the Hawks) and 70 cannons, 'Lamarck' joined forces with Manuel Oribe to mount a head-on assault on Montevideo, which had withstood Blanco forces for three years by this point with the help of British supplies transported by sea. This time, not even their provably skilled and valiant defenders could withstand Rosas' attack, and the city fell in a three-day battle that left most of it a smoking ruin. President Rivera himself was killed in the fighting, but his right-hand man Joaquin Suarez managed to escape with the Royal Navy, the entirety of Uruguay's own fleet and about a thousand loyal Colorados. Manuel Oribe was now President of a heap of ashes, a wrecked country and a traumatized people; but like Rosas, instead of rebuilding the country he instead pledged himself a friend to France, and for his part the Winter King sent a convoy loaded with both relief goods and military supplies to Montevideo (much of which will find their way into Rosas' hands later) before ordering his ships to pass provocatively close to the British blockade of Buenos Aires on their return voyage.
The Sonderbund War and now the ascendancy of the pro-French bloc of Rosas & Oribe in Latin America greatly worried the British, whose resources were increasingly being strained by their commitments to Ottoman Empire, pro-British Latin American states like Peru-Bolivia and the ongoing Afghan & Opium Wars. Their ability to control the restive population of the Canadas was now becoming extremely limited - thereby presenting just the opportunity President X9 had been hoping for. Moving troops over to the northern border to create some pressure, he secretly contacted Westminster to request they sell Canada to him, pointing out that since the Rebellions of 1837 were suppressed far too harshly and responsible government denied to the locals they had lost popular support among both French and Anglo-Canadians - and that it would be awfully expensive to contain not just fast-mounting Canadian dissent but also American forces with so many other commitments around the world to attend to and their position as the planet's top dog in peril. Britain conceded the point after Louis XVII's latest provocations, but warned that it would only let its last major colony on the North American continent go if the people of both Canadas truly rejected Westminster's rule in favor of Concordia's, and a referendum was organized with the Americans' agreement. The results came in Christmas Week that year, showing that 53% of Upper Canadians favored joining the United States and 65% of Lower Canadians as well as 55% of Maritime Canadians did as well - with the caveat that not only would the Canadian provinces be integrated speedily as states and that their cultural and (barring the monarchy for obvious reasons) political traditions, from the French-Canadians' Catholicism to their seigneurial system and the Church lands in Upper Canada, be respected. Thus on New Year's Eve, President X9 had the extreme pleasure of announcing that the Federalists had accomplished with the stroke of a pen (and some 15 million dollars, plus five million extra for Prince Rupert's Land) what their ancient Democratic-Republican rivals utterly failed to do with military force in the Rogers-Ashburton Treaty of 1841 - get Canada to join the United States. Celebrations broke out all over the country as even Southerners showed their joy at finally controlling 2/3rds of the North American continent, from the freezing Arctic to the hot Gulf down south, and in their joy few noticed the Federalist administration quietly dropping the Creole case as another part of its deal with Britain.
1842: As per their agreements with the Canadians, the former Canadian provinces are placed on the fast track to statehood by X9's administration. Upper and Lower Canada are first to join the Union as the free states of Canada (yes, just Canada) and Quebec, respectively. The realization that all of the former Canadian provinces would join as free states immediately puts a damper on the Southerners' celebrations of this latest great acquisition, and they began lobbying for an invasion and conquest of all of Mexico & in some cases, even the rest of Central America to balance out the slave state-free state ratio. As far as the South was concerned, Canada becoming a bunch of free states was an unfortunate development, but would easily be balanced out by the inclusion of the much more populous Mexican and Central American provinces as slave states (what with being south of the Missouri Compromise line and all).
Commonwealth v. Hunt results in unions and strikes being found as legitimate organizations and tactics.
General Jesus Huerta raids Texas with 1,000 cavalrymen on orders from Emperor Agustin, who believed that the Texans were supporting republican insurgents in the Rio Grande area (some private citizens were indeed crossing the border to volunteer their services to the Republican cause, although the Texan government itself may or may not have actually backed them), and ends up burning down San Antonio before going home. Texas reacted by X. Although the Southern lobby called for a US annexation of Texas and invasion of Mexico in the aftermath of this raid, X9 remained unmoved, leading Southern leaders to accuse the Federalists of only being interested in expanding when they could get free states out of the deal.
The near-total annihilation of a British Army column of 16,000 in Afghanistan, save for exactly one survivor, is not at all welcome news in a Britain that had just lost Canada plus massive amounts of prestige in Switzerland and Argentina. To reassert their primacy, the British not only launched an 'Army of Retribution' to lay waste to Afghanistan, raze Kabul to the ground and kill thousands of Afghans in retaliation before immediately vacating the devastated country, but also began to tighten their grasp in Argentina. The squadrons blockading Buenos Aires bombarded the city's port facilities and sank the entire Argentinian navy in port without warning in May, killing some 800 Rosistas and civilians, days before before the Foreign Office told Rosas that they had done what they did as payback for his surprise invasion of Uruguay...a year late. Finally, British Major John Darling came with a batch of supplies shuttled through Peru-Bolivia to join Lavalle's Unitarians as a military advisor in Salta; by the end of the year, 60 more British officers would follow (with Lieutenant-Colonel James Gordon assuming formal command of the mission) to help train the Unitarian army along European lines, advise their commanders on how to fight the war, and paradoxically work together with the son of their nation's archnemesis earlier in the century to make sure the pro-Bourbon Rosas wouldn't survive the decade. Louis XVII protested this blatant British hypocrisy, considering that they had demanded he stop doing this exact thing a few years ago, but did nothing else as he still believed Argentina to not be worth a military confrontation.
1843: The Indiana gubernatorial election features a rematch between Democratic incumbent Alexander Dunning and re-running Whig candidate Benjamin Pugh. Dunning, noting that Pugh had recreated the exact same coalition that nearly brought him to victory three years earlier, figured he should do one better than what he also did last time and have his goons burn down some Maroon communities to really hammer home the message of 'don't think you can vote, Negro scum'. But Pugh was ready for his dirty tricks this time, and so were the Maroons - in a portentous speech in late September, Maroon leader Scipio Halfhand (another descendant of the Hardtack Half-Hand, this time through his seventh son's second son) thundered to his fellow Maroons, "Why should we, whose ancestors won their and our freedom out of the barrel of a gun, run and hide like rats when Dunning's bastards come around again? Did our ancestors run from the British? Perhaps the first time, and the second, but eventually they stopped running - and so shall we. Now; now, we are done running."
On the night of September 10th, some 400 'Coal Burners' (as Dunning's men started calling themselves, since their job was to burn 'black stuff') marched into Indianapolis's Maroontown, which they expected to only be the first stop on their campaign of terror - only to run into prepared barricades manned by armed Maroons, given weapons by Pugh's Whigs or New England companies, and trained by their fathers and grandfathers who had fought against the Northwest Indians and in the War of 1812 (and who, in some cases, stood with them). The Coal Burners were unable to break through, and ended up surrendering after they were attacked from behind and the flanks by three columns of 'Ragheads' (Pugh's own mob of armed white supporters, so nicknamed after their candidate's poor origins); 7 Coal Burners, 13 Maroons and 6 Ragheads died in the chaos, and up to 100 injuries total were reported. All over the state the same incident played out in other towns and cities as Coal Burners and Ragheads battled for access to the polls, and when the ballots were counted, Pugh had finally defeated Dunning with 54.8% of the vote; in the months to come, Dunning was arrested and found guilty of charges of embezzlement and murder, and his fate was sealed when his former hitmen came out to testify against him (totally without Pugh offering them generous amounts of his own money in secret, how could you think that). Though in the end this was only one gubernatorial election, and the Maroons (as all blacks) continued to face intensive discrimination across the other Midwestern states excepting Ohio (which permitted a limited black franchise, again restricted to descendants of Maroon soldiers in the Revolution) the 'Night of the Barricades' had sent a message from the Maroons to the rest of America - they were truly done 'running' into the West or New England just to escape racial violence, and they were indeed willing to fight for their freedoms and rights, to the last man if need be.
Nova Scotia and New Brunswick gain statehood.
Now backed by British supplies and advisors, and reinforced with freshly-trained volunteers and conscripts alike, the Argentine Unitarians sally forth again from the Sierras Grande. Cordoba is taken after a shorter, more successful siege personally directed by Lavalle and Gordon, while Bonaparte was able to defeat Rosista relief columns at Rio Ceballos and La Para. As the war had by now raged for 12 years, Lavalle challenged Rosas to fight a single decisive battle, with the loser surrendering all of his forces and leaving the country; Rosas, always one with a penchant for flamboyant stunts that could go down in history, agreed and concentrated his surviving field armies with a swarm of fresh conscripts called up in the last few months into an army of 21,000 men (many of whom were inexperienced conscripts given dated uniforms and substandard equipment, due to the economic damage caused by Britain's lengthy blockade) and 65 cannons, with which he meant to fight the smaller but much more experienced Unitarian army of 17,000 and 90 guns (most of them provided by Britain or Peru-Bolivia) at Miramar. The battle was a complete disaster for Rosas: the Rosista infantry attack was a disorganized mess that started to fall apart even before it got blown to pieces by the Unitarian artillery and sharpshooters, their cavalry was routed by Bonaparte's gauchos and especially his brand-new lancer corps, and the chief Rosista commander Lucio Mansilla (also Rosas' brother-in-law) was killed by his own routing conscripts while trying to exhort them to keep fighting. The only Rosista unit to fight reasonably well were the 'Regimiento de Halcones'; the 'Hawks' withstood two cavalry charges (one directed by Bonaparte himself) and a heavy artillery bombardment atop their hill before withdrawing in good order once 'Lamarck' saw that they were running low on ammunition and that the battle could not be won no matter how hard they fought now, but even they lost half of their members in the chaos. 5,000 Rosistas were killed and 10,000 were captured, including all of their artillery, while the Unitarian casualties amounted to 600 dead and 1,100 wounded. Despite his defeat however, Rosas refused to resign from his leadership of the Argentine Confederation in direct violation of his oath with Lavalle, outraging both the Unitarians and his own supporters.
Sindh becomes a province of British India after a decisive British victory over the Talpur Emirs at Hyderabad.
1844: Prince Edward Island and Newfoundland gain statehood, the last Canadian states to do so.
The Canadian states as of 1844 |
Red - Canada
Blue - Quebec
Light green - New Brunswick
Dark green - PEI
Cyan - Nova Scotia
Salmon - Newfoundland
Purple - Unorganized 'Northern Territories'
Note: As a holdover from their British days, the Canadian states insist on being formally called 'Provinces' instead. That doesn't stop people from calling them states in informal conversation any more than Virginia's full name of 'Commonwealth of Virginia' does, of course. |
In this year's presidential election, Manifest Destiny allows the Democrats to rise to victory by accusing the Federalists of alternately being too slow in expanding the USA or only being interested in acquiring free states, and the Whigs of not being able to unite around a platform of expansion (which was true, as they too were badly divided over the issue). To the enormous relief of the South's leaders, not even the brand-new Canadian free states could swing the election in favor of the Federalists (who captured literally every single said state) - at least this time, when they were able to secure the support of many of the Midwestern states and even Vermont over in New England with their promises of expansion.
A great flood hits the Upper Mississippi. The state of Missouri is especially hard hit.
The followers of William Miller, a Baptist preacher who predicted the Second Coming would happen on October 22 this year, are disappointed when the world does not, in fact, end on that exact date. Those among his flock who manage to retain their faith would go on to become the Seventh-Day Adventists.
The Unitarians drive home in Argentina, bulldozing the increasingly disorganized and ill-motivated Rosista resistance at Devoto, Ataliva and Cululu within the first three months of the year. Santa Fe's Governor is deposed and executed in a coup by Rosista defectors, and his replacement immediately surrenders to Lavalle's advancing forces. At the fortified border town Cepeda between Santa Fe and Buenos Aires, 'Lamarck' successfully held off the 3,000-strong Unitarian vanguard under Gabriel Maria Solis with the Regimiento de Halcones in a grueling nine-hour battle, but the Hawks in turn were effectively destroyed as a fighting force with 757 casualties (222 of them expiring due to mortal injuries) out of their remaining 800 men; realizing that the fight was over in all but name, Watteau promptly fled with a few of his remaining expatriate French officers to Brazil, where they caught a cruise back to France and quietly resumed their old identities by the year's end. On July 18th, Rosas ordered the garrison of Buenos Aires to sally forth and make a last stand against the Unitarians at Caseros, which they did - while he surrendered to the British blockade of Buenos Aires in hopes of being allowed to live in exile, only to be handed over to the victorious Lavalle and executed after a five-minute trial for treason anyway.
With the Rosistas finally defeated, Lavalle promptly declared the dissolution of Rosas' Argentine Confederation and its replacement with the 'Union of Argentina', with a(n almost immediately ignored) Constitution founded on Unitarian principles and imposed from the top down. His regime would be...almost identical to that of Rosas, with a few key differences: 1) he had a beard, and 2) he was slightly less egotistical and repressive than Rosas. While it was true that Lavalle did not demand people venerate his portraits in churches, that he invited the Jesuits back into Argentina, and that he definitely didn't require all Argentinian men to wear a beard like he does, the fact remained that criticism of his regime was illegal, the old Rosista red flags had vanished only to be replaced with Unitarian blue banners instead, the promised elections were definitely not forthcoming, and that the only difference between Rosas's time as its Governor and Lavalle's as the first President of Argentina under the new constitution regarding the central government at Buenos Aires is that now it's one in name as well as fact. When the Federalist governors of Entre Rios and Corrientes, who had stayed loyal to Rosas to the bitter end, continued to revolt against his dictatorship, Lavalle named Bonaparte and Solis the Unitarian Governors of the two states, respectively and sent them to subdue the rebels with 8,000 men apiece. While Solis gladly accepted his appointment, Bonaparte did so only because with the Winter King still alive and out for his blood, there was no way he could return to France at this time.
Meet the new boss, (almost the) same as the old boss: A comparison of Argentina under Rosas and under Lavalle | The Argentine Confederation of Juan Manuel de Rosas | |
The Argentine Union of Juan Lavalle | |
|
1845: Game start. |