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Thread: Where Eagles Fly, 1845 Edition

  1. #1
    Barry Goldwater's Avatar Mr. Conservative
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    Default Where Eagles Fly, 1845 Edition


    What should ideally happen in a few years

    It's the year 1845.

    Fifty-seven years ago, the United States overcame one of the biggest hurdles to maintaining its unity when its forces suppressed the Whiskey Rebellion, and also began to take its first steps into the realm of trans-Atlantic warfare after brazen attacks on American shipping by Barbary corsairs. Since then, the young nation has seen its ups and downs: its first war with Britain since the Revolution - the War of 1812, a conflict that had its seeds in the British policy of impressment at sea but which quickly expanded in scope to an attempt at conquering Canada under the influence of Southern and Western-based 'War Hawks' - was an unmitigated disaster due to a crippling lack of preparation and competent leadership, for which the blame must fall on those very same War Hawks' optimistic (if not arrogant) belief in the distance between Canada & Britain and/or sheer patriotic fervor would make up for the lack of a decent navy (which was their largely fault in the first place) or strategic sense; yet just short of forty years later, what America could not achieve by the sword, she achieved by the pen, bringing Canada into the fold peacefully. Many smaller conflicts were fought with various Indian tribes, but far from sapping the strength of the USA, each such conflict usually freed up more land and resources for the fledgling power; by this point in time, most of the tribes east of the Mississippi have either been subjugated with force or diplomacy.

    With the days of British antagonism are behind both the United Kingdom and the United States (well, hopefully, there's still the Oregon dispute after all), and the Indians brought to heel, the United States must now focus on the brewing threat to the south. The Empire of Mexico, governed by the aged yet still formidable warlord-turned-Emperor Agustin de Iturbide, has made increasingly obvious moves to bring the Republic of Texas - a nation founded by American settlers, a good number of whom still consider themselves Americans, who seceded from Mexico during one of many civil wars between Agustin and his Republican rivals - and there are many, especially among America's own population of frontiersmen, who are pressing for American intervention to save Texas when (for it is now indeed a matter of when, not if) Mexico strikes again. Such a conflict will not be easy: it is true that the United States has a population of about 20 million to Mexico's 7 million, but Mexico is a large country with wide open deserts in the north that will prove a challenge for any army to traverse effectively, and it is also the Mexicans who have been fighting almost nonstop civil wars from the birth of their nation to mere months earlier, meaning Agustin is now at the head of a highly experienced army whose less capable officers have paid for their ineptitude with their lives via either bullet-induced natural selection or simple executions by the Emperor's will or hand (just ask Antonio Lopez de Santa Anna, for one). Yet a powerful lobby in the US government itself, spiritual if not literal blood-bound successors to the same people who pushed hardest for the War of 1812, believes the 'Texan Question' to hold the promise of great reward to balance out its great risks; a victory over Mexico could see America grabbing as much as its entire northern half, most importantly the wealthy Alta California.

    But it is not merely the hunger for more land, more resources, and a belief in Manifest Destiny - the idea that America is divinely ordained to rule everything between the Pacific and the Atlantic - that drives these men, and all who follow them. Since the late 1810s the internal dispute over slavery has become only more bitter as both the abolitionists, hailing largely from the North, and slaveowners who reign supreme down south grow increasingly radical and openly hateful toward each other, and the Missouri Compromise that decreed all of the vast old Louisiana Purchase north of the 36-38 parallel to be free territories and all territories south of it to be slaveholding areas has proven to be a bandaid solution; the proponents of slavery, at first exhilarated by the prospect of bagging Canada, have thus emerged as the fiercest supporters of a war of expansion to balance out the Canadian provinces, integrated as free states under the Union, with slave states to be carved out from as much Mexican territory as they can grab, if not the entire country and beyond into Central America - the more slave states, the merrier after all, for the votes of 3/5 of all slaves will be counted in their favor. For the abolitionists' part, many are opposed or at best ambivalent to the prospect of war with Mexico; they have no interest in sending their sons and brothers to die to expand the reach of Slave Power, something that even the anti-Mexican patriots among their ranks are keenly aware will happen in case of a victory over the Mexicans, and they also remember all too well that the War of 1812 ended with Northerners doing most of the dying (infamously in the case of the Army of Maine, due to the arrogance and stupidity of a Southern commander no less) despite being advocated most fiercely by Southerners (and adamantly opposed by the fathers & brothers of those dead Yankee troops). Might a victory over Mexico prove Pyrrhic for the Americans in the long run, winning them much land and resources but fanning the flames that are already beginning to consume the social fabric of the Republic?

    As the year 1845 opens, the task of guiding the young American republic in these trying times falls on your shoulders. Will you lead it to a glorious future, where its denizens enjoy unparalleled freedom and prosperity and even the Great Powers of Europe look upon it with envy and fear? Or will you lead it to disaster, to fall into disunity as the question of slavery tears it apart, so that it will become nothing more than an additional failed experiment on the already sketchy and much-derided record of democracy? Is it even possible to achieve the former without at least going halfway down the road to the latter? Only you can answer these questions with your own deeds and decisions...

  2. #2
    Barry Goldwater's Avatar Mr. Conservative
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    Default Re: Where Eagles Fly, 1845 Edition

    Political map

    Econ map

    Econo-political map
    Quote Originally Posted by Aggy's Readme
    It's basically the political map layered over the econ map and made half transparent, so it's easier to calc incomes. The only drawback is that when territory changes hands or econ values change you have to update both the regular map and the layered one, and at that point it's easier to make a new econopolitical map entirely. However, at least for game start, it's much easier. If you have GIMP, you can drag the opacity slider on the top layer (the political layer) to whatever you prefer, making this really easy. If you don't have GIMP, then I must first ask why because it's free, but I have included a PNG version of the tool that has the top layer preset to 50% opacity. It's not nearly as nice, but it's usable. Kind of.

    Railroad map
    Last edited by Barry Goldwater; June 18, 2014 at 10:28 PM.

  3. #3
    Barry Goldwater's Avatar Mr. Conservative
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    Default Re: Where Eagles Fly, 1845 Edition

    Economic rules
    Please check the economic map to discover how much each province makes. Note that all funds from your provinces go to the National Treasury, not your characters' pockets (unless you want to embezzle stuff), and your total national income is also affected by whatever tax rate you choose to set.

    Level 1 - Red: $500/turn
    Level 2 - Blue: $2,500/turn
    Level 3 - Olive: $6,000/turn
    Level 4 - Light green: $8,000/turn
    Level 4 - Dark Green: $15,000/turn

    You may sign mutually beneficial trade agreements with the European nations. They will bring in a turnly set income, plus an additional slice of $$$ depending on your tariff rates (for example, a 20k trading agreement with a 25% tariff rate = 25k total trade income, since a 1/4 of 20k is 5k). However, not only must you not be blockaded for trade to actually make you any money, but an overly high tariff rate may discourage other countries from trading with you in the first place.

    The United States of 1845 starts with trading agreements with the following nations:
    United Kingdom of Great Britain & Ireland (Base income: $60,000)
    Kingdom of France (Base income: $30,000)
    Kingdom of Spain (Base income: $15,000)
    Empire of Russia (Base income: $20,000)

    Railroad rules
    You'll see on the econ map that there are several lines running through certain provinces, representing the major railroads connecting them. Railroads will tremendously increase a moving army's speed - cutting travel time by half so that, for example, an eight-day journey from (for example) Boston to Concordia now takes only four days. Building a new railroad will cost $25,000/province and take one day/province, with a maximum of seven days (so for example, an eight-province railroad still takes 7 days to complete). You can either use government funds to directly build a railroad or invest those funds in a railroad company to get them to do it instead, effectively splitting the cost; you will of course need to summon a representative of said company to work out who's supposed to pay how much.

    Railroads can be damaged in accidents (a random event with a 1d6 chance of occurring every year) or by enemy action (which takes one day to execute after the enemy army has entered the target province). When this happens, obviously your troops will no longer get the speed bonus when traversing through the provinces with damaged railroads, although they can still use any undamaged rails between their present position and said broken links. Repairing a railroad will cost you $10,000 and 1 day per damaged section.
    Last edited by Barry Goldwater; June 03, 2014 at 10:31 PM.

  4. #4
    Barry Goldwater's Avatar Mr. Conservative
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    Default Re: Where Eagles Fly, 1845 Edition

    Military rules
    There's not much variety in units this time around - the States are less flamboyant and more frugal than the European Great Powers (and Mexico for that matter) so you won't find any flashy cuirassiers, lancers, Grenadier Guards, etc. here, but a versatile blend of professional soldiers with an operational emphasis on combined arms backed by mobs of overenthusiastic but ill-disciplined cannon fodder in the form of state militias and, to a lesser extent, volunteer forces.

    Maintenance costs will always be 1/2 of the unit's purchase price, as are retraining costs. Retraining a unit will also take up 1/2 of its normal buildtime. Oh, and volunteer units can be obtained through speeches, regulars always have to actually be trained; volunteer units can be retrained into regular units for 1/2 the building cost & time of their regular counterpart.

    Oh, and one last thing: units can gain extra quality stars as Experience. They have a low chance (5%, or 1d20) of gaining an extra experience-star just by actually participating in battle, but naturally these chances go up for units assigned to particularly risky missions like covering a rout (let's say 1d6), spearheading the assault on a fortified position (1d4) or capturing an enemy general (100% if successful).

    Unit types
    US Volunteer Infantry


    Strength: 1,000 men/regiment
    Quality: *
    Cost: $1,000
    Build time: 1 day

    As temporarily enlisted soldiers whose terms are usually set to end in a few months, these troops are equipped with a hodgepodge of M1816, '22, '35 and '40 flintlock muskets and a uniform similar to, but lighter in color than the M1833 regulars' uniform. Generally skilled marksmen, especially if they come from rural areas, and enthusiastic patriots regardless of whether they come from North or South, but utterly lacking in discipline & experience - even simple volunteer formations are prone to losing cohesion very quickly, and while their (over?)confidence and eagerness will drive them to open engagements, they may well lack the strength or discipline to finish them. Best used to support regular actions or to defend strongpoints; in less enlightened times these men would be little more than cannon fodder, but nowadays American public opinion will prevent commanders from carelessly throwing their lives away unless they want to lose their war.

    US Regular Infantry


    Strength: 1,000 men/regiment
    Quality: **
    Cost: $2,000
    Build time: 2 days

    The basic line infantry of the US Army, armed with Springfield M1842 percussion muskets and dressed in the peaked cap & deep blue jacket-and-trousers of the M1833 uniform. Reliable professional volunteer troops who are best deployed in lines of battle on open ground, capable of going toe to toe with their opponents (meaning, likely Mexicans) at both close & long ranges and repelling cavalry attacks with their bayonets. Unlike the volunteers, they can be relied on to not break ranks in favor of racing each other to the enemy lines or worse, and unless placed under especially heavy fire they'll generally be able to maintain cohesive formations as they advance, fight and/or retreat.

    US Volunteer Cavalry


    Strength: 500 men/regiment
    Quality: **
    Cost: $3,000
    Build time: 2 days

    Mounted volunteers can be distinguished from the regulars by the darker color of their uniforms, the distinct lack of revolvers (except in the cases of wealthier volunteers) and their inferior M1816 or '22 carbines. If one is unable to tell them apart just from their slightly different uniforms and equipment, then one should definitely be able to see who are the non-professional volunteers when these undisciplined horsemen blindly charge enemy positions without orders or when their formations disintegrate into a howling mob during an actual ordered assault. Like the regulars, these men are in truth better deployed as mounted infantry than Europe's lancers & cuirassiers.

    US Regular Cavalry


    Strength: 500 men/regiment
    Quality: ***
    Cost: $4,000
    Build time: 3 days

    The average troopers of the US Army's cavalry arm, dressed in the same M1833 uniforms worn by their foot-bound comrades & outfitted with sabers, M1841 carbines and caplock revolvers. Obviously a good deal more mobile than the infantry, but these troops are dragoons and should always remember that; they should not launch into a glorious cavalry charge into the teeth of the enemy with sabers flashing unless circumstances guarantee them a good chance of success, but rather dismount after riding to a favorable position and support the rest of the army from there. Alternatively, they can be sent to engage enemy horsemen in firefights, where they can also be expected to perform well.

    US Marines


    Strength: 800 men/regiment
    Quality: **, **** when participating in amphibious operations
    Cost: $4,000
    Build time: 3 days

    Elite soldiers easily distinguished from other soldiers by their shakos & white trousers, armed with M1842 percussion muskets and specially trained for amphibious operations. Whenever one wants to drop a surprise for one's enemies by sea, these men should be the first to hit the beaches and last to leave. Alternatively, they can also be deployed in riverine offensives or to defend crucial river crossings.

    US Horse Artillery


    Strength: 20 guns/regiment
    Quality: ****
    Cost: $6,000
    Build time: 4 days

    Popularly referred to as 'flying artillery', these units consist of light (usually 3- to 9-pound) bronze muzzle-loading cannons drawn by teams of horses. They are not meant to unlimber and then remain stationary on a fixed point somewhere along the battlefield or to bombard dedicated fortifications, but to provide close-range localized fire support to any units that might need it before limbering up again and moving elsewhere. They are still capable of switching between round, canister and carcass rounds on demand, but their shorter range and caliber in comparison to the heavy artillery means they'd still be better off working as fire support for the infantry/cavalry in pitched battles than in sieges.

    US Heavy Artillery


    Strength: 20 guns/regiment
    Quality: *****
    Cost: $7,500
    Build time: 5 days

    These massive, lumbering bronze cannons are the artillery arm's heavy hitters, as one can tell from their name. 12-pounders at the bare minimum, these guns really are meant to be unlimbered and then remain at a fixed point from where they can either offer the other elements of the army intensive fire support, or bombard enemy fortifications into rubble. Their superior range and higher caliber compared to the flying artillery make them ideal guns for manning defensive works, or siege guns if on the offensive. Like the horse artillery, they can switch between round, canister and carcass shot as necessary.

    Attachable companies
    These smaller formations can be instantly recruited, but they must be attached to a proper regiment to function. In turn, each regiment can have a maximum of one company attached to it.

    Sharpshooter company - $800, 200 men - A special company made up of the best marksmen the US can find, drawn from both veteran snipers and recruits who attain especially high scores in their marksmanship tests, and armed with M1819 or M1840 rifles. They can function as a cloud of elite skirmishers to cover the advance or retreat of whatever regiment they're attached to or, for the less sporting generals, assassinate enemy officers on the field of battle. Can only be attached to infantry regiments, +1 to the attached regiment.

    Shock company - $800, 200 men - A special company made up of especially hardened veterans and recruits picked for their strength & vitality, these companies are the spiritual successors of the grenadiers of old. They are prepared to lead assaults into the thick of the enemy's defenses and to overpower heavy resistance with bayonet & musket. Can only be attached to infantry regiments, +2 to the attached regiment only when attacking.

    Mounted rifle squadron - $1,200, 200 men - A special squadron of, you guessed it, cavalrymen armed with & specially trained to use M1819 or '40 rifles. These more accurate weapons may be more difficult to use than their traditional carbines, but provide their wielders with an invaluable edge in ranged combat. Can only be attached to cavalry regiments, +1 to the attached regiment only when fighting at a distance.

    Mounted shock squadron - $1,200, 200 men - A special squadron of experienced horsemen, provided with the fastest horses in the Army, who've swapped out their carbines for an extra revolver. They are less adept at long-range gunfights than most of their comrades, but their speed and elan make them especially formidable melee fighters capable of quickly closing in and butchering opponents. Can only be attached to cavalry regiments, +1 to the attached regiment only when fighting in melee.

    Flying artillery battery - $2,000, 5 guns - A special battery of light, horse-drawn guns designed to provide light, mobile fire support on the regimental level. The extra close-range low-level firepower will be absolutely invaluable for regiments assigned to spearhead offensives on the battlefield, but just as helpful on the defensive. +3 stars, can be attached to cavalry or infantry regiments.

    Heavy artillery battery - $3,000, 5 guns - A special battery of heavy guns designed to provide overwhelming fire support on a regimental level. The extra heavy firepower will prove critical to sustaining offensives targeted at field or city fortifications, but will still be just as helpful when deployed defensively. +4 stars, can be attached to cavalry or infantry regiments.

    US ship types
    Gunboat



    Quality: *
    Cost: $1,500
    Build time: 2 days

    Ah, the classic rowboat-with-cannons that lost the War of 1812. These gunboats are little more than undecked rowboats with a mast (thus, a favorable wind could provide the oarsmen with a momentary break) and one or two 24-pounder cannons slapped on them; the surprising power of these cannons provide the gunboat with the means to at least seriously damage a larger opponent that underestimates it, but the added weight also makes them more vulnerable than ever to capsizing should such an opponent ram them - an ignominious way to go for the unlucky oarsmen and crew assigned to the boat. All this said, gunboats are also unique in that they're small enough to navigate up rivers, allowing them to provide close-range fire support to troops fighting inland and to strike at enemy positions beyond the reach of the army & bigger ships.

    Sailing sloop


    Quality: **
    Cost: $3,000
    Build time: 3 days

    Small wooden vessels packing about 20 cannons and powered solely by sail, these are the second-weakest ships the US Navy has to offer. While obviously larger & more powerful than gunboats, they cannot sail up rivers, and as they lack a steam engine & paddle-wheel they are also wholly dependent on the strength & direction of the wind; a stiff breeze blowing against them will be sufficient to render them immobile until a more favorable wind comes in.

    Sailing frigate


    Quality: ****
    Cost: $8,000
    Build time: 5 days

    The largest and most powerful sailing vessel boasted by the US Navy of this time period, the classic frigate has changed little from 1812; outfitted with three square-rigged masts, double-decked and bearing 44 to 60 cannons varying from 18 to 42-pounders, in Europe these ships would normally be classed as fourth or fifth-rate ships of the line. Nevertheless, the advent of steam power is increasingly rendering them obsolete, as they remain bound to the direction and strength of the wind for movement.

    Steam gunboat


    Quality: **
    Cost: $4,000
    Build time: 3 days

    A relatively small wooden vessel combining both sails and a steam paddle, armed with 6-9 guns. Despite their fairly low firepower, these steam-powered warships are considerably faster than the older sailing vessels, and their small size also allow them to sail up rivers to bombard inland positions that are still out of the reach of other land troops, blockade cities or support amphibious assaults.

    Steam sloop


    Quality: ***
    Cost: $7,000
    Build time: 5 days

    Like its sailing counterpart, this ship is considerably larger and heavier than the gunboat, though it still only boasts one deck lined with 20-30 guns. Powered with a steam engine and paddle wheels, it is not nearly as bound to the direction of the wind as its predecessor (though that still helps of course, hence why it boasts several masts) and is also much faster. That said, they should take care not to damage their paddle-wheels, which really will leave them vulnerable to enemy attacks. These would ideally be the rank-and-file warship of the US Navy, Congress permitting.

    Steam frigate


    Quality: *****
    Cost: $12,000
    Build time: 7 days

    Every bit as powerful as the traditional sailing frigate and a good deal faster, steam frigates are the most powerful ships the US can boast of in this time. Triple-masted, double-decked and armed with 44 to 60 cannons ranging from 24 to 42-pounders in addition to their high-pressure steam engine and twin paddle-wheels, these vessels are swift - though still capable of sinking smaller vessels just by ramming them - as well as deadly and difficult to sink. However, like all steamships, though they are no longer beholden to the wind their paddle-wheels (mounted on the two sides of the ship) are still vulnerable to enemy attack and, if blasted into scrap, will leave these frigates as little more than expensive clones of their sailing predecessors.

    Next up, rules for Officer characters. As enlisted members of the US Army, these characters will have points to spend on their Command, Influence and Combat stats, with a maximum of 5 points; Command points will be added to rolls whenever you're trying to execute complicated and/or risky maneuvers (ex. switching formations while under heavy artillery fire or being threatened by a mass cavalry charge), Influence points will be added to rally rolls, and Combat points translate to the # of hitpoints your character will have when engaged in single combat by an opposing character as well as your chances of landing hits with both melee weapons & firearms. Characters gain 2 stat points for every 10 years of their life, so we aren't going to be seeing 20-year-old military geniuses anytime soon; a 30-year-old on the other hand can potentially be a well-rounded commander with balanced stats, or focus overwhelmingly on one or two categories. Oh, and of course you can gain more points from experience if your character does something relevant to one of those categories (so f'rex killing some Mexican officer won't get you additional Command points, but it does have a chance of bumping up your Combat stat). Finally, every officer-PC must pick a background & personality trait, which will have their own positive & adverse effects (thank you Vicky I/II binges )

    Officer traits
    Background
    Aristocrat:
    Benefit:
    Higher morale.
    Disadvantage: Unit's discipline (ability to maintain cohesive formations while doing basically anything under fire, not charge off or otherwise act without/contrary to orders when provoked, etc.) decreases.

    Armchair General:
    Benefit:
    Higher discipline.
    Disadvantage: Lower movement speed.

    Celebrity:
    Benefit:
    Sharply increased morale.
    Disadvantage: Sharply decreased discipline.

    Frontiersman:
    Benefit:
    Higher movement speed.
    Disadvantage: Unit's discipline decreases.

    Gifted Administrator:
    Benefit:
    Able to operate for longer periods of line without a supply line (that is, when cut off from other US forces & territories).
    Disadvantage: +25% maintenance costs.

    Innovator:
    Benefit:
    +1 to fighting at a distance.
    Disadvantage: -1 to fighting in melee.

    Mad Genius:
    Benefit:
    Random rolls will be made to provide a bonus/malus to every action taken.
    Disadvantage: Random rolls will be made to provide a bonus/malus to every action taken.

    Martinet:
    Benefit:
    Sharply increased discipline.
    Disadvantage: Sharply decreased morale.

    Old School:
    Benefit:
    +1 to fighting in melee.
    Disadvantage: -1 to fighting at a distance.

    Rising Star:
    Benefit:
    Higher chances to gain experience.
    Disadvantage: Lower morale.

    Self-Made Man:
    Benefit: Unit's discipline increases.
    Disadvantage: Lower morale.

    Tag-Teamer:
    Benefit: +1 to all stats when working with another specific character (feel free to work this out with other players).
    Disadvantage: -1 to all stats when separated from your chosen partner.

    Personalities
    Aggressive:
    Benefit: +1 to all offensive rolls.
    Disadvantage: -1 to all defensive rolls.

    Berserker:
    Benefit: +1 to melee rolls, enemies' morale decreases when faced with your unit.
    Disadvantage: Unit's discipline & morale decreases.

    Brash:
    Benefit: +1 to all offensive rolls, increased movement speed.
    Disadvantage: Unit's morale decreases, sharply decreased discipline.

    Cautious:
    Benefit: +1 to all defensive rolls.
    Disadvantage: Lowered movement speed.

    Calm:
    Benefit: Unit's discipline increases.
    Disadvantage: -1 to all offensive rolls.

    Craven:
    Benefit: Sharply increased movement speed.
    Disadvantage: Sharply decreased morale.

    Flamboyant:
    Benefit: +1 to all offensive rolls, increased movement speed.
    Disadvantage: -1 to all defensive rolls, sharply decreased discipline.

    Inspiring:
    Benefit: +1 to rally rolls.
    Disadvantage: Lower movement speed.

    Martyr:
    Benefit: +2 to rally rolls.
    Disadvantage: -1 to your combat stat.

    Meticulous:
    Benefit: +1 to all defensive actions, increased discipline.
    Disadvantage: Sharply lowered movement speed.

    Merciless:
    Benefit: Enemies' morale decreases when faced with your unit.
    Disadvantage: Unit's discipline decreases.

    Patient:
    Benefit: +1 to all defensive rolls.
    Disadvantage: -1 to all offensive actions.

    Pragmatic:
    Benefit: +1 to all defensive rolls, increased discipline.
    Disadvantage: Sharply decreased morale.

    Reckless:
    Benefit: +1 to all offensive rolls.
    Disadvantage: Unit's discipline decreases.

    Romantic:
    Benefit: +1 to all offensive rolls, increased morale.
    Disadvantage: Sharply decreased discipline.

    Shrinking Violet:
    Benefit: +1 to fighting at range, increased movement speed.
    Disadvantage: Unit's discipline & morale decreases.

    Wrathful:
    Benefit: +1 to all offensive rolls, unit's discipline increases.
    Disadvantage: Sharply decreased morale.

    And now, the starting US Army & Navy of 1845. It'll be up to the military players to organize these regiments into proper brigades and to decide who should command said brigades; note that the brigadier-general's bonuses & maluses will apply to those units under his command as well. However, regardless of PC/NPC control, only the regimental commander's (Colonel's/Lt. Colonel's) stats will count when the regiment is engaged unless they specifically name one of the characters under their command to take a leading role or (for the combat stat) if the PC gets into single combat with their opposite number in the enemy army. For example:

    Regiment A has a Colonel with 3/3/3 stats and two Lieutenants, one with 1/2/1 and another with 2/2/1. Regiment B is led by a Colonel with 2/3/3 stats and has a Major with 3/4/3 stats. Regiments A & B fight. 3 Command + a dice roll of 5 for Regiment A vs. 2 Command + a dice roll of 4 for B = A wins. However, if B's Colonel orders the Major to take a leading role in the battle (*insert RP here*), 2 Command + the Major's 3 command + that roll of 4 = B wins instead - unless A's Colonel orders both of his Lieutenants into standing by his side, then A's score of 1 + 1 + 3 + 5 = 10 narrowly beats B's score of 2 + 3 + 4 = 9. Also alternatively, B's Major could engage either of A's Lieutenants or even A's Colonel in single combat due to their newfound leading roles and should he kill any of them, B pretty much automatically wins.

    Note also that some units will either be commanded by NPCs (who may or may not follow your orders) or have NPC junior officers in their ranks (same). PCs can command any regiment without an NPC Colonel, or join either NPC or PC-commanded regiments if they're of a lower rank.

    US Army, 1845
    1st Regiment of Infantry - US Regular Infantry, shock company (incl. Lt. Leonidas Saker, 1/1/5, Rising Star/Calm)
    2nd Regiment of Infantry - US Regular Infantry
    3rd Regiment of Infantry - US Regular Infantry, sharpshooter company (Commander: Col. Jude Saker, 4/4/4, Innovator/Pragmatic)
    4th Regiment of Infantry - US Regular Infantry
    5th Regiment of Infantry - US Regular Infantry, flying artillery battery
    6th Regiment of Infantry - US Regular Infantry
    7th Regiment of Infantry - US Regular Infantry, flying artillery battery (Commander: Col. Reginald Drummond, 5/3/4, Aristocrat/Patient, incl. Capt. William Hogg, 1/3/5, Self-Made Man/Wrathful)
    8th Regiment of Infantry - US Regular Infantry
    1st US Marine Regiment - US Marines (incl. Maj. Constantine Dowd, 3/3/3, Aristocrat/Aggressive)
    2nd US Marine Regiment - US Marines

    1st Regiment of Dragoons - US Regular Cavalry (Commander: Col. Alexander Drummond, 3/5/4, Aristocrat/Romantic, incl. Capt. Edmund Rutledge, 2/2/4, Aristocrat/Berserker)
    2nd Regiment of Dragoons - US Regular Cavalry (incl. Capt. Jonathan Anderson, 3/3/3, Aristocrat/Calm; Lt. Richard Simons, 2/1/4, Old School/Merciless; Lt. Edgar Rutledge II, 2/2/3, Aristocrat/Romantic)
    Regiment of Mounted Riflemen - US Regular Cavalry, mounted rifle squadron

    1st Regiment of Artillery - US Heavy Artillery
    2nd Regiment of Artillery - US Heavy Artillery
    3rd Regiment of Artillery - US Horse Artillery
    4th regiment of Artillery - US Horse Artillery

    For a total standing strength of 13,200 men + 70 guns. (note that the commander roster is incomplete, more will be added as I work on the families)

    US Navy, 1845
    USS Massachusetts - Steam frigate (Commander: Capt. Claude Rondelle, 4/2/2, Innovator/Patient)
    USS Connecticut - Steam frigate
    USS Virginia - Frigate
    USS Maine - Frigate
    USS Nevisian - Steam sloop
    USS Messenger - Steam sloop
    USS Azure - Sloop
    USS Baltimore - Sloop
    USS Michigan - Steam gunboat
    USS Bermuda - Steam gunboat (Commander: Capt. Hadrian Dowd, 3/3/4, Martinet/Brash)
    USS Missouri - Gunboat
    USS Nantucket - Gunboat
    USS Philadelphia - Gunboat
    USS Detroit - Gunboat

    And finally, intelligence rules.

    Intelligence rules
    The United States will start the game with an intelligence agency, the plainly but aptly named Office of Military Intelligence, geared exclusively toward operations on foreign soil - for now, at least - due to public pressure, at least until some great crisis can force them to reconsider the chance of a domestic intelligence service. So basically, think more CIA than FBI. This service isn't very well-developed just yet; there's no independent Director/Chairman/what have you of the OMI, so the President will be responsible for handing out the agency's orders until and unless Congress takes that authority away from him (and probably for themselves, unless they decidce to actually create the position of Director for someone to man). Players will be able to create Agents for the OMI, and once given a mission, you will be free to choose to either resolve the mission through dice rolls, or more actively RP it out in its individual thread. In case of the latter, you can expect to run into a variety of NPCs depending on your mission and how you're trying to accomplish it - sneak around to get your hands on some sensitive Mexican documents? Expect to have to deal with a number of guards, one way or another. Want to fool the commander into giving said documents up? Well, you'll have to actually speak with him face-to-face for a while, and put up a sufficiently convincing act before him. And so on. With this approach, you won't have to deal with dice rolls ifI find your RP sufficiently convincing that the other guy can automatically buy it, or if you've successfully created/stumbled into a situation where you can get away with one-hit-killing someone without them noticing.

    Whenever your Agent goes out on a mission, they'll have a Knife and a five-shot Colt M1836 Revolver with fifteen rounds, so you can fight for three full rounds with it. You can deploy them with unique alternate weapons of your own design - for example, a bladed parasol, a sword-cane or experimental explosives - since this is after all the early days of the agency where it's got little in the way of organization or standard equipment, but you can only ever carry a maximum of three items with you on missions (you can swap out the original knife & revolver for more tools of your own design) and you must tell me the exact details of whatever custom equipment you're bringing. Feel free to be creative, but don't create overpowered equipment; for example, don't expect me to approve of your guy bringing say, three revolvers with stats copied from from 1860s guns, with which he intends to storm a Mexican Army outpost and pilfer the documents off of the commander's corpse. If you want to play it safe, you can just stick to historical equipment as well. Note also that your choice of equipment & outfit may raise suspicions: don't expect the Mexican Imperial Guard to let you see Emperor Agustin while you're carrying a cavalry saber, a rifle and a crate of explosives on top of being dressed in a Russian uniform, for instance.

    In terms of hitpoints, well OMI agents really aren't supposed to singlehandedly assault enemy fortresses and go around stabbing guards in the face while dodging bullets with physically impossible acrobatics So your character will only have one hitpoint. That means that yes, one bullet or physical strike will be enough to kill you. The only exception is if you decide to bring a cuirass along as your custom equipment, which grants you an additional two HP; but that raises the new problem of how you're going to effectively disguise it, since if anyone bumps into you (back or front) the game is up immediately. This makes RPing your talks with the opposition, and/or sneaking around, will almost always be the preferable course of action over going in guns blazing; if you really want someone dead, better wait until (or engineer a situation where) they're alone and have their back turned to you so you can take them down with one hit from your knife (revolvers create much more noise after all). If something has gone dreadfully wrong and you do find yourself in a massive firefight with a dozen guards and their dogs or something, running for cover should be your first move, followed by coming up with ways to take out as many of your opponents as quickly as you can depending on your environment, like luring Mexican Army troops at that outpost you're raiding to an ammunition depot and then setting the place on fire. Your opponents are humans too + this is a time where few soldier still wore body armor, so unless you're going up against a cuirassier (at which point you're probably really screwed), they'll also all have one hitpoint.

    You'll be able to bring in up to five NPC agents with you on every mission as armed backup, though unlike PC agents they can't switch out or add on to their default equipment - the same old knife & revolver. That said, while they'll still be under your control and thus can still be used to sneak around or talk to your targets, too many cooks can spoil the soup - bringing all five agents with you can raise suspicion if they aren't deployed (and disguised) really carefully. So basically, it might be a better idea to only take one or two more agents with you, or even none at all, unless you're expecting a firefight and could really use the backup. Like PC agents, they'll always have one hitpoint.

    Congress can send out NPC agents in case no PC ones are available, but their missions will always be resolved via dice rolls.
    Last edited by Barry Goldwater; June 06, 2014 at 11:05 PM.

  5. #5
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    Default Re: Where Eagles Fly, 1845 Edition

    Timeline
    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: Robert P. Braxford of Massachusetts 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. Notably, due to the way the American Party System was set up at this time, to land himself in the top spot Braxford had to battle not only a slew of Democratic-Republican challengers but also his fellow (albeit more moderate) Federalist Edward C. Lamberth, Poole's Vice-President.

    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: Incumbent President Braxford defeats Jack Eggers of the Democratic-Republicans in this year's election to win 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 Lĉtitia 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. Braxford. Not long after however, Braxford 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 Lĉtitia 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 Bergenstrċhle. 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 Bergenstrċhle'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 Bergenstrċhle'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.

    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 boasted), 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 earlier this year, 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 State Department in order to avoid a weakening of the War Hawks). 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 killed 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? President Eggers had been coerced by his Southern backers into 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), 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 for usurping his 'rightful seat'.

    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 risking his men for his own glory. When some 800 British regulars and 4,000 Canadian militia pursued the battered Army of Maine over the border, Wilson overruled Saker's calls for a continued retreat to instead stand and fight a pitched battle, picking out Allagash as the site for their decisive clash: 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. Further 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 sounded the retreat & thereby left Wilson to die, justifying his potentially treasonous action with the argument that Wilson’s position had become unsalvageable (through his own fault no less) and that all he would have accomplished by sending in the reserve would be to get even more Americans killed or captured for no real gain.

    Needless to say, while Saker staged 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 (championed by James Lamberth, son of aged ex-Vice President Edward Lamberth, who was doubtlessly aiming to exceed his father's prior presidential ambitions by actually making it to the Presidential Palace) would recapture Concordia with the support of all the Northeastern states, the Mid-Atlantic states sans Maryland & North Carolina. Having run on a peace platform, Lamberth 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 Lamberth's administration for ending ‘this pointless little war’ and restoring lines of trade with the British Empire quickly, while many Southerners blasted him as a traitor to his own kind 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 Lamberth, 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 Lamberth 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.

    1817: Mississippi gains statehood, although Alabama Territory is split away from it at the demand of its settlers four months prior.

    President Lamberth capitalizes on Spain's losing efforts to control its old colonies to reach the Drummond-Onis Treaty, snapping up Florida in exchange for $5 million - thereby satisfying even the most hawkish Democratic-Republicans while simultaneously kicking one of the major planks in their foreign policy platform since the American defeat in 1812 out from underneath them with this bloodless victory. This latest acquisition was to prove difficult to handle; aside from the Spanish settlers along the coasts and the Americans living up on the northern and western border areas, Florida's inner marshes were home to the tenacious Seminoles and a large group of freedmen & runaway slaves, some of them former soldiers in the British or Spanish armies, who lived with their families in and around the so-called 'Negro Fort'.

    Once more, instead of turning to violence the Federalists would seek a negotiated solution; thus in an effort to secure peace in Florida while balancing the concerns of both Northern abolitionists, Southern slaveholders and all-American expansionist settlers, President Lamberth would first reach the Treaty of Moultrie Creek with the Seminole in August 1819, trading 24 million acres of Seminole land and recognition of the US federal government as the only legitimate government of Florida in exchange for a 4,000,000-acre reservation spanning from Kissimmee in deep central Florida to the southern Everglades and a steady stream of supplies and annual payments, and the Peace of Pensacola with the freedmen of the Negro Fort in December, recognizing them all as freedmen with exclusive settling rights to the Negro Fort and its immediate environs, as well as the right to elect their own Mayor (though they were still locked out of all other territorial elections and in time, state & national elections) issuing more annual cash compensations in exchange for their recognition of US authority and a cession to aid for new runaways from Georgia and Louisiana. An uneasy peace thus dawned over Florida as the Seminoles kept to themselves, the Negro Fort grew out into the community of 'Freetown' and white settlers quickly became a majority as more & more of them settled in the ceded Seminole lands - but the question on everyone's minds was, 'how long could this arrangement last'?

    Depiction of a black militiaman at the 'Negro Fort', 1821

    President Lamberth signs the Rogers-Bagot Treaty, partially demilitarizing the Great Lakes in an effort to cool tensions - and American tempers, as many Westerners and especially Southerners were still sore about losing the War of 1812.

    1818: Illinois gains statehood.
    Last edited by Barry Goldwater; June 17, 2014 at 09:58 AM.

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    Default Re: Where Eagles Fly, 1845 Edition

    TL, Pt. II
    1819: Alabama becomes a state.

    The continued existence of the Bank of the United States is found to be constitutional by the Supreme Court in McCulloch v. Maryland.

    The Panic of 1819 hits as the Bank of the United States attempts to rein in reckless speculation and forcing state-chartered banks to start backing their paper money with metals to curb the dramatic levels of inflation, which combined with the recovery of European agriculture since the Napoleonic Wars (and thus a decrease in their demand for American grain) resulted in widespread bankruptcies and fast-growing unemployment. Needless to say, the Democratic-Republicans just gained a ton of ammunition while the Federalists' domestic positions - high tariffs, a focus on internal improvements and the use of the Bank - took a hit, forcing them to rely on their largely solid foreign policy credentials as they geared up for next year's presidential election.

    The issue of whether to admit Missouri as a free or slave state crops up when in response to the Democratic-Republican-held House passing the acceptance of Missouri as a slave state, the nearly eighty-year-old Senator George Saker of Massachusetts - a known abolitionist - proposes the Saker Amendment in the Senate, which would have extinguished slavery in the new state within a generation by forbidding the import of new slaves to the region and declaring that any child born to slaves on Missourian soil would in truth be born free. The Senate promptly exploded into a round of fierce debates over the 'Peculiar Institution', in which men such as senior Georgia Senator Edmund Wilson (one of Saker's bitterest rivals since their sons' less than pleasant working relationship with each other in the War of 1812 finally went down in flames) dared utter words such as 'disunion' in their protest. However, the boldest of Saker's enemies would prove to not even be Wilson but rather his almost-as-elderly counterpart and occasional Governor of South Carolina then-Senator Roland Rutledge, who proclaimed:
    Quote Originally Posted by Senator R. Rutledge, SC
    Sir, you have kindled a fire that all the waters in the world's oceans cannot hope to put out, that only seas of blood can extinguish! Truly I must tell you, if you insist on pursuing this destructive course of action - if you and your fellow Yankees would insist on making war on this greatest and most peculiar of Southern institutions - then the Union shall, not can but shall, surely be dissolved, and rightly so for its government will have exceeded itself. ... The Negro whom you evidently love more than I, your brother in the white race, is not and will never be ready for freedom. He needs our chains to guide him down the right path, and our whips to keep him from harming himself or others. ... Must I remind you of the Ides of March, and the fate that befell Caesar when he sought to exceed his prerogative and behave in a most tyrannical manner? I caution you to not make such mistakes, Sir.
    Saker clearly did not take these less-than-subtle threats well, if his equally inflammatory response is anything to go by:
    Quote Originally Posted by Senator G. Saker, MA
    Sir, if dissolution of the Union must take place, let it be so! If civil war, which you gentlemen of the South have threatened so gravely must come, I can only say, let it come! I am already old, and so my hold on life is frailer than that of any man who now hears me; but while the hold lasts, it shall be devoted to the principles on which this great nation was founded - to the freedom of man. If blood is necessary to extinguish any fire which I have assisted to kindle, I can assure you gentlemen that I have no intention of spilling even one drop of mine own - but I have every intention to spill every drop belonging to those who would stand against me instead. ... The lowest Negro slave is more a brother to me than any of the men who hold him in bondage, in direct contravention to all laws natural and spiritual. ... You say I should cease from persisting in my current course, that I should bend the knee to the gentlemen of the South and seal my lips whenever the question of slavery arises? Then it is with extreme pleasure that I utter these words now, where all of you may hear: I declare, I proclaim, I define your Peculiar Institution to be a vile blight upon this fair nation, one that strips the Negro of his birthright to freedom and falsely declares him an infantile brute in need of your civilizing whips where in truth he already possesses the intelligence to know his rights, and will always have the spirit to maintain them no matter how often you scourge his back - and that I intend to oppose said Institution unto my dying breath, and beyond!
    Saker's motion eventually failed when even a number of other Federalists broke ranks with him to appease the Southern Senators and thereby preserve the Union, and though he angrily cursed them all as 'Cowards and traitors to the very notion of decency and the common human race' his efforts obviously didn't change their minds, if anything it got him dismissed as a crazy old man by even more of them.

    Senators Rutledge of South Carolina and Saker of Massachusetts

    At the same time, Southern Senators also lobbied for Maine's entry into the Union as a slave state, which was received about as well as one would expect by the Northern Senators (for one thing, Senator Saker actually rose from his seat to throttle Senator Wilson of GA and had to be forced back down by his fellow Northern statesmen, exhibiting surprising strength for a man of his age all the while).

    1820: Congress finally reaches the Missouri Compromise over objections from both extreme ends of the abolitionist-slavocratic spectrum, admitting Maine as a free state while guaranteeing Missouri's entry as a slave state next year and prohibiting slavery in all other territories north of the 36°30′ parallel.

    The Missouri Compromise Line

    The Federalist James Moore - a political nonentity from Connecticut (well OK, to be fair, a State Representative who had no real deeds of note to his name) drafted as the party's candidate exactly because he was willing to serve as a puppet to the Federalist bosses and great families, from the Sakers and Braxfords up north to the Lamberths and Simonses down south - is elected to succeed outgoing President Lamberth this year by a much narrower margin than his party had previously enjoyed, having barely eked out a majority of both electoral and popular votes after banking on the Missouri Compromise at home and foreign policy successes such as the Drummond-Onis Treaty. The Democratic-Republicans continued to hold the House while the Federalists majority in the Senate was weakened. Up North, this is notably the first election in which African-Americans participated on a large scale; the descendants of Maroons who could prove their ancestors had previously fought in the American Revolution or the War of 1812 were allowed the franchise in Massachusetts, Connecticut, Rhode Island and Vermont. By 1824, this limited enfranchisement of Maroon descendants would be extended in Maine and New Hampshire as well.

    Believing that the Coalition Powers would have no issue with them finishing off a Bonapartist-built state, the Ottoman Empire declares war on Greece. King Eugenios (Eugene de Beauharnais) rallies his subjects to defend their independence, and finds them willing to support him; though he had never converted away from Catholicism, he respected the Greeks' Orthodox beliefs and had worked with local elites to the point of permitting them to draft the national Constitution that he signed the year prior (though this did produce the odd side effect of making Greek Orthodoxy the state religion of a kingdom with a Catholic king).

    Ferdinand VII of Spain is ousted in a coup sponsored by liberals and junior military officers, who were disgusted at his authoritarian and incompetent leadership and his reinstitution of the Jesuits. The King is kept under heavy guard by his captors and the Constitution of 1812 restored, to the great consternation of the Winter King ruling just across the border.

    Taking advantage of the weakness of the Caribbean planter lobby (which still had to recover fully from the Americans' liberation of the entire slave population of the island nearly fifty years prior), Britain's powerful abolitionist lobby manages to ram through the total abolition of slavery across the Empire, albeit with monetary compensation for slaveholders.

    1821: Missouri attains statehood.

    Mexico gains its independence from Spain, and is proclaimed an Empire by Generalissimo Agustin de Iturbide, a Criollo and career soldier of wealthy origins with conservative leanings. Needless to say, he was immediately opposed by committed republicans Guadalupe Victoria and Vicente Guerrero.

    1822: Ferdinand VII finally escapes his gaolers and appealed to the Congress of Vienna for help against the revolutionary cabal in control of Spain. Louis XVII practically jumps at this chance, and with the approval of the other Great Powers began to mobilize a mighty army on his side of the Pyrenees to obliterate the Spanish Liberal Junta.

    Brazil declares its independence from Portugal and names Pedro, Crown Prince of Portugal its Emperor. A war between father and son erupts as King John VI of Portugal sent his armies across the Atlantic to bring the rebellious prince & his colony to heel. While Louis XVII was busy mapping out his campaign against the Spanish liberals, Napoleon Francois Bonaparte (AKA L'Aiglon or 'Napoleon II') and his younger brother Charles-Napoleon were able to flee their admittedly comfortable prison on Madeira; however, instead of going to France, where Napoleon II rightly reasoned that Louis XVII's position was still too powerful to overcome, they instead sailed to Brazil, where they found refuge at the court of Pedro I and Napoleon II in particular joined the newborn Imperial Brazilian Army as an artillery officer - just like his old man.

    The twenty-two-year-old heir to the British throne, Prince George of Wales (b. 16 February 1800) marries Sophie Wilhelmine, Princess of Sweden. The Prince of Wales utterly loathed his father, who mistreated him and his mother all his life, and had by this time cultivated the persona of a stoic, prim and religiously devout gentleman in direct contrast to the elder George's womanizing, hard-drinking and obnoxious manners; no doubt this was why he picked the Swedish princess, a haughty and imperious aristocrat who, as befitting the daughter of the restored Gustav IV Adolf, was similarly firmly conservative.

    1823: At home, a high tariff promoted by the Federalists (who had just gained a majority in the House) is shot down - not just by Southern and Western-based Democratic-Republicans, but also by many of the newly elected Federalists, who hailed from the western ends of Pennsylvania and New York or Western states such as Ohio, Kentucky and Indiana.

    France launches its expedition into Spain in support of Ferdinand VII, called the 'Hundred Thousand Sons of Saint Louis': exactly one hundred thousand soldiers marching under the fleur-de-lys and the supreme command of Marshal de la Rochejacquelein, with orders to annihilate the liberal Cortes & all who supported it. Harassed by conservative guerrillas in the less liberal countryside, fraught with infighting between partisans of different strains of liberalism and strapped for resources, the Liberal army was unable to put up much resistance until the French had already taken Madrid and were marching on the gates of Cadiz, where they were utterly defeated anyway. Ferdinand VII was returned to full power and promptly unleashed his terrible vengeance upon the defeated Liberals, executing thousands without trial. Although De la Rochejacquelein was reportedly disturbed by these developments, and especially angered at the slaughter of prisoners whose safety he had personally guaranteed in exchange for their surrender, Louis XVII publicly declared his support of 'our Spanish cousins' righteous efforts to extirpate the taint of liberalism entirely from their kingdom'. Ferdinand's atrocities were a sign of what was to come - the next 10 years of his rule would not be called the Ominous Decade for no reason, to be sure.

    The French Army at Trocadero, 1823

    Agustin I of Mexico finds his position threatened when Victoria, Guerrero and the republicans joined forces with Antonio Lopez de Santa Anna, another career officer with high ambitions and whose sole concern was for #1. Santa Anna's reasons for joining the republicans are unclear; knowing what kind of man he was, he may have desired to overthrow Agustin and take the throne for himself, or set up a conservative republic with himself as President for life in an attempt to satisfy everyone (but especially himself). However, Santa Anna turned on the republicans at the last second and sold them all out to Agustin, who promptly squashed their undermanned and chaotic revolt before executing Guerrero (Victoria having fled into the countryside) & naming Santa Anna Governor of Veracruz as a reward for his timely shift of allegiance.

    1824: This year's election is fraught with infighting in the ranks of both the Federalists and Democratic-Republicans, particularly over the issues of slavery and tariffs. The ruling Federalists were the first to crack: at their party convention in February, the meeting hall in Manhattan was fraught with heated discussions and at least two major brawls before the staunchly abolitionist and protectionist 'High Federalist' faction narrowly won out, ensuring that incumbent President James Moore (who after all did whatever the majority of the party bosses told him to) would be running on a platform of total (though financially compensated) abolition, the institution of high tariffs, an expansion of the Bank's scope and powers, and continued national improvements that year. The 'Low Federalists' walked out en masse; Southerners such as the Simonses and Drummonds wanted nothing to do with an abolitionist party, and Westerners/Northerners detested the centralizing policies of the High Federalists. The Democratic-Republicans too fractured in May, as the dominant Southern faction's insistence on making the preservation of slavery and an immediate war of expansion against Mexico simply to snap up new slave states was unpopular with the party's western wing: when the Southerners prevailed anyway and nominated Charles Wilson, an outspoken supporter of their ideals, said Westerners and Northerners walked out as well.

    In this new vacuum, several ex-Democratic-Republicans would join the Federalists and vice-versa, but the majority of the defecting moderates joined forces to found their own party - the Whigs. Running on a moderate platform that abstained from discussing slavery and proposed medium tariff levels to support modest internal improvements, the Whigs proved their strength especially out West but still came in third, behind the Federalists. They did, however, damage the Federalist Party badly enough to sink President Moore's bid for reelection, resulting in a Democratic victory. For the first time in 12 years, America would have a non-Federalist President.

    The last Spanish army in the New World is decisively beaten at Ayacucho, ending Madrid's rule over the majority of their American colonies forever.

    1825: For his first act in office, newly-elected President Wilson immediately attempts to start a war with Mexico. Unfortunately for him, no matter how much they hated each other, most of the Whigs and Federalists dominating both Houses of Congress at this time could still agree that launching into a bloody war with the Mexicans for no real reason beyond extending the reach of Slave Power was a bad idea, and deny him the Congressional approval he needed.

    'The Sentinel of Liberty', the first ever African-American owned and published newspaper, is founded in Boston as a joint venture of 'native-born' blacks and Maroon descendants. Owned by Ohio native Cicero Halfhand, grandson of none other than the Hardtack Half-Hand, and featuring the educated Samuel Russwurm from Massachusetts as its chief editor, the paper agitated for abolition and was freely financed by the financial behemoth that was Saker Industries, a merger of the late George Saker's Saker Enterprises and the commercial empire of the now-extinct Dyer family that answered to Massachusetts Governor Matthew Saker (who had, after years of ceaselessly lobbying for and defending himself, gotten himself restored to US Army service in 1821, only to retire early the next year to run for his late father-in-law's seat).

    Toussaint L'Ouverture, the French Governor of Saint-Domingue since the 1791-4 Haitian Revolution, dies in office. He will be remembered as the man who proved most instrumental in getting the French to abolish slavery, in getting mulattoes into the government of Saint-Domingue alongside the white Creoles, and in trying to improve the lot of the freedman laborers on the island even if he could not get them into any positions of power under the reactionary Bourbon regime; upon hearing of his death Louis XVII reportedly said,
    Quote Originally Posted by Louis XVII
    I have come to respect exactly two liberals in my life: Hammitt Poole of America, and Toussaint L'Ouverture of the Africans - and now you mean to tell me that the latter is dead? I do not mourn for enemies of the Old Order, but he had proven to be no such thing; if anything he had shown himself to be a loyal and steadfast subject of France, more-so than a good number of white men if the Usurper's Marshals and soldiers were any indication, and would surely have made a worthy adversary had either of us chosen to stand against the other. Saint-Domingue is a poorer place without him.
    Such words were perhaps the highest compliment any liberal could get out of the Winter King. As his replacement, Louis nominated his distant cousin the Duke of Orléans, son of the very same Philippe Égalité who betrayed his noble roots during the French Revolution and voted for Louis XVI's execution only to be guillotined by the other revolutionaries anyway; in light of that, the Orleans Bourbons had unsurprisingly been treated coldly by Louis XVII even before the Hundred Days, and though he restored their noble dignities to them he had made sure to lock them out of any positions of importance and to keep them under close watch - until now, anyway. No doubt the King hoped that the Duke, with his established liberal credentials, would prove acceptable to the Haitians, and that by packing him off across the Atlantic he could also minimize the threat the slightly older man had posed to his throne; certainly, Orléans himself privately lamented 'My ever-so-dear cousin has seen fit to exile us for my father's crimes at last!' to his wife after receiving the news of his latest appointment. Upon assuming office, Orléans named Alexandre Pétion, a free-born mulatto who had been educated in France who became one of L'Ouverture's chief subordinates and was now one of the island's wealthiest landlords, his Lieutenant-Governor.

    The world's first modern railway opens in Britain.

    Tsar Nicholas I of Russia, having just succeeded his childless older brother Alexander, is forced to deal with a large mutiny of liberal-minded officers on the first day of his reign. The Tsar would turn out to be a leading conservative statesman in Eastern Europe, executing or exiling thousands of the defeated Decembrist rebels and organizing a secret police (the 'Third Section of His Majesty's Imperial Chancellery') to suppress dissent. All publications within Russia were subject to extensive state censorship, and Nicholas would officially embrace the 'Russian Trinity' of 'Orthodoxy, Autocracy and Nationality' (Pravoslaviye, Samoderzhaviye, Narodnost′) - demanding the unquestioning obedience of the Russian people to his absolute rule, the traditions of the Russian Orthodox Church and the Russian language - as the foundation of his regime. So it should come as absolutely no surprise to anyone that he would become fast friends with his brother-in-law Louis XVII, to the point where in 1827 Louis half-jokingly proclaimed himself the 'Steward of the West' and Nicholas, that of the East against a backdrop of Western and Eastern Roman imperial imagery.

    Napoleon II is injured in the Battle of Sarandi when the La Platan cavalry overran Brazil's artillery positions, though he evaded capture.

    1826: Despite having failed to start a war with the Mexicans, President Wilson remains undeterred in his efforts to realize the radical Democratic agenda. Taking advantage of a Democratic victory in this year's House elections (no doubt aided by his efforts to paint the anti-war Whigs & Federalists as effeminate un-American cowards), he vetoes an attempt by the Federalists to renew the charter of the Bank of the United States, knowing full well that between the Democrats and anti-Bank Whigs the pro-Bank forces wouldn't have the votes needed to overcome his will.

    The Greco-Ottoman War of 1821 comes to an end with the virtual destruction of the Ottoman navy at Lalaria off the island of Skiathos, for which the staggeringly inept leadership of Husrev Pasha must be credited even over the bravery and skill demonstrated by the Greeks; had someone else been in command, the Turks may well have still been defeated, but would likely have limped away with more than a sixth of their fleet and thus been in a position to continue the war. Nicholas of Russia began to pressure the Porte to give up on attempting to conquer its Orthodox brother to the south, and after news of Lalaria arrived (as well as reports that his armies had been unable to make much headway against Beauharnais' resolute defense on land) and the British withdrew all offers of support in further building & modernizing the Ottoman armed forces until after the Greek situation had been dealt with, Sultan Mahmud II finally grudgingly conceded defeat. At the Treaty of Constantinople that year, the Ottoman Empire had to recognize Greek independence & to cede Thessaly and the Arta area in Epirus to an elated King Eugene.

    1827: The death of the Bank of the United States triggers an economic meltdown, the rather blandly but accurately named 'Panic of 1827': reckless lending practices by smaller private banks (encouraged by the destruction of the BUS, which had been preventing them from doing exactly this while it was still around) to small farmers in the South & West who couldn't repay those loans, a decline in cotton prices, and the popping of a massive speculative land bubble west of the Appalachians all added up to a complete disaster. Prices and wages collapsed while unemployment surged as businesses and banks fell apart, countless urban workers found themselves out of a job, and farmers found that not only did they now have to default on their extravagant loans but demand for their crops was falling. President Wilson attempted to get a handle on the crisis by issuing the Specie Circular, which forbade anyone from paying for land with anything but gold or silver in a bid to curb the reckless speculation that caused the crisis; unfortunately for him, this act instead devalued paper currency even more and was also regarded as a potential overreach of federal power by elements of his own party.

    The Baltimore & Ohio Railroad becomes America's first incorporated railroad.

    A man in Pennsylvania begins transcribing the contents of some golden plates in his possession. Now where could this possibly lead?

    Napoleon II distinguishes himself in the Battle of Ituzaingo, where he successfully rallied his crewmen to defend their guns from a La Platan assault until other Brazilian units could relieve them. His younger brother, now nearly 19-year-old cavalry lieutenant Charles-Napoleon also made a name for himself despite this being his first battle, receiving injuries to his arm and leg while securing his assigned regiment's standard in the aftermath of a failed attack while managing to remain mounted the entire time. For this, despite the overall Brazilian defeat in the battle both brothers were later rewarded with the Order of Saint James of the Sword by Emperor Pedro I, no doubt to the annoyance of Louis XVII.

    After reports of piracy against French merchant vessels and the island of Corsica, as well as news that his emissary was struck by the Dey of Algiers with a fan for protesting, Louis XVII resolved to personally wipe the Algerian state off the face of the planet. Leaving Artois in charge of France, he sailed over to Algiers with some 500 ships and nearly 40,000 men. Landing at Sidi Ferruch in late April, the Winter King swept towards Algiers like the fiercest of snowstorms and occupied the city within a month. The city was sacked and thousands killed, and in the peace negotiations later that year Algiers was annexed by France, with the Comte de Bourmont appointed as its first French military governor. The invasion had proven popular in France, and a republican plot to overthrow the Bourbons was cancelled after the conspirators witnessed Louis XVII's triumphant return to Paris.

    1828: In the wake of the Panic of 1827 and President Wilson's lackluster response to it, political veteran Frederick Amsel of New York is elected President of the United States, the first Whig to attain that position. Also, gold is discovered on Indian territory in Georgia, leading that state's population to place enormous pressure upon their already generally anti-Indian state government to evict or exterminate the Cherokee. In Alabama and Mississippi, similar cries were made of their state governments, as the Civilized Tribes living there happened to possess top-notch farmland or mineral deposits.

    Uruguay gains its independence as a 'buffer state' of sorts between Brazil and La Plata. At the same time, La Plata explodes into civil war when long-time General Juan Lavalle launched a coup in Buenos Aires and executed its governor with the support of his army of discontented Cisplatine War veterans. The young federation breaks down into a state of civil war between Lavalle's Unitarians, who wanted to create a powerful centralized government, and Federalists who wanted to keep the nation decentralized; the latter faction is championed by Juan Manuel de Rosas, who was ironically a far crueler tyrant than Lavalle could ever be.

    Dom Miguel of Portugal launches a coup d'etat against his young niece Maria II, for whom he was supposed to be Regent, with the backing of the conservative nobility and the Catholic Church; Miguel's reasoning was that as his older brother, Maria's father Pedro, had made war against Portugal and became Emperor of Brazil, he and his line lost all possible claim they could have had to the Portuguese crown. Unsurprisingly, Pedro of Brazil did not let this usurpation go unchallenged and began to marshal an expedition to lay waste to his brother, while a few remaining Portuguese liberals fled to the Azores with the young Queen in tow and proclaimed a government in exile. While Britain continued to support Maria as the legitimate Queen of Portugal and helped her forces secure the Azores & Madeira, France immediately recognized Miguel I as the true King - to the point where Louis XVII brokered a marriage between the young usurper and his niece Maria Antonia of Austria, only daughter of his elder sister Marie-Therese and the Duke of Teschen, leading the British to fear that he was out to pull Portugal into his sphere of influence. Thus began Portugal's own civil war...

    One Bourbon marriage: Miguel I of Portugal & Maria Antonia of Austria...

    Louis XVII arranges a marriage between his now-sixteen year old son Prince Louis Auguste Joseph & Maria Cristina of Sardinia-Savoy, a princess noted for her beauty but also her timidity. As the Dauphin was also shaping up to be a kind & gentle but weak-willed & shy young man who bent over backwards to appease his friends, it became apparent that the Winter King wanted to get him a wife who he could be sure would never become an additional puppet-master controlling his strings - and modest, deathly silent and easily frightened Maria Cristina fit that bill perfectly.

    ...and the other: The Dauphin Louis & Maria Cristina of Savoy

    1829: President Amsel's first act in office is to set up the Second Bank of the United States, something which he is able to force through quite easily due to Whig surges in both Houses of Congress and the backing of his old Federalist enemies. This new Bank was empowered to end the economic crisis as speedily as possible, and immediately got to work on that by cracking down hard on speculators, forcibly merging failing banks into its structure, restricting the circulation of paper money even further, and repossessing the belongings of defaulting farmers. While unpopular, to put it mildly - shootouts between angry farmers and the Bank's agents + local watchmen were not unheard of outside of the Northeast - the Bank's actions genuinely began to stabilize American finances and restore the confidence of foreign investors, setting the stage for a (painful, but still) national recovery.

    Brazil sends its first armed flotilla to the Azores with some 4,000 men and 20 cannons on board to support Maria of Portugal in her struggle with Miguel I. Also on board this flotilla are none other than Napoleon II and his brother Charles-Napoleon, who had been granted special permission to resign their commissions early by Emperor Pedro as soon as they made landfall on Terceira; they promptly disappeared off the face of the earth afterwards, causing Louis XVII to understandably panic. Worse yet, the Bonaparte boys' sisters and mother were all unaccounted for the day after, only to emerge in Rio de Janeiro under the protection of Emperor Pedro over a year later.

    1830: At the urging of the Whigs and Federalists, President Amsel attempts to impose a new heavy tariff to further quicken the nation's economic recovery. South Carolina reacts to this about as well as expected - Governor Edgar Rutledge defiantly attempted to 'nullify' the 'Tariff of Abominations', and the South Carolina plantocracy did a wonderful job in spinning (and buying into) a paranoid narrative painting Amsel as a pro-Jew, Negro-loving tyrant in the pockets of Yankee big business who was out to economically destroy Dixie. For his part, Amsel sat and waited for the South Carolinians to calm down and open their eyes to reality, even after Rutledge called out the South Carolina militia to defend his state's borders from the obvious Federal hordes that were obviously threatening them.

    Under pressure from the South to evict the Five Civilized Tribes from their lands and from the North to do no such thing, President Amsel does what all Whigs are expected to do: reach a compromise solution. Under the Indian Estates Act this year, Amsel dissolved the tribes' 'sovereign-nations-within-America' status to instead grant every Cherokee, Chickasaw, Choctaw, Creek and Seminole American citizenship, and oversaw the conversion of their tribal self-governments into crude corporations of a sort, empowered to rent out their lands to white settlers & workers with the help of specially-designated federal agents. In exchange for low (as mandated by the federal government) monthly or annual rent payments or by becoming sharecroppers, white settlers could then move on to these Indian lands and work them while the formal deeds would remain in the hands of the Indians, who in turn were allowed to practice their traditions (though, as one can guess from the very name of 'Five Civilized Tribes', they had assimilated quite well into American society already) and to obviously continue living on their ancestral lands.

    Outraged by this settlement, Georgia Governor Thomas Wilson (ex-President Charles Wilson's brother) declared the Indian Estates Act nullified and, before Amsel could do anything about it, mobilized the state militia with orders to forcibly evict the Indians from their land, in addition to 'exterminating every damn savage who won't give it up'. The Alabamans did the same, with Tuckahoe Governor John Bagby placing his own son Rufus in command of the Heart of Dixie's militia. In conjunction with the Alabamans and under the command of Josiah Harmon, a psychotically racist brute of a Cohee who had been spat upon by the likes of the Wilsons and Andersons until they needed him for this exact purpose, the Georgians burned, murdered and raped their way through the Cherokee and Creek lands, which (being the eastmost tribes) were their first targets. But the Five Civilized Tribes were well-off and well-armed, and they were not about to give in without a fight; the tribal chiefs thus led their own militia against the Alabamans and Georgians, striking at the former first and sending Bagby back to his father with his tail between his legs at Tallasee before he could link up with the latter, before springing an ambush on Harmon's forces at Horseshoe Bend. The Georgians fought hard, and Harmon in particular could be mistaken for a demon from hell for the berserk fury and bloodlust he exhibited in the battle, but having been caught with their pants down they were doomed from the beginning. Many of the militiamen drowned in the river or were shot dead during the rout, and after getting brained with a musket butt Harmon's corpse was dismembered by the (admittedly rightly, considering his atrocities) enraged Indians. With two heavy defeats in a row, and the South Carolinians too busy with the Nullification Crisis to help, the Deep Southern Governors grudgingly conceded the point and accepted the IEA as fact. The compromise was a barely functional one - disputes between the Indian rentiers and white settlers over payment or land borders could and did end in bloodshed, and many Indians themselves resented their loss of total tribal autonomy - but it did at least save the Indians from getting kicked off their land and sent on a death march to say, Oklahoma, while the settlers still had the lucrative mines and farmlands under the Five Tribes' authority opened to them.

    Joseph Smith publishes the Book of Mormon for the first time in northwest NY and sets up his 'Church of Christ'. These developments are not received by the locals, who begin to organize into mobs against the new religion, nor by then-Governor and prominent Northern Democrat John D. Lloyd, who in true Lloyd fashion dramatically condemned Smith & company as 'heretics, defilers of Holy Truth and Devil worshipers' in addition to being 'worse than the Papists'.

    The Polish Sejm leads a nationalist uprising against Tsar Nicholas, whose new Governor in Poland attempted to squelch their freedoms and revoke the Constitution they were granted under his predecessor Alexander.

    The assassination of Jean-Baptiste Gros, an infamous underground libelle (slanderous political cartoonist) who had spent the better part of the Restoration years attacking Louis XVII's regime at every turn and had most recently published pamphlets re-asserting the old libel that he was sexually involved with his mother, on June 27 by BTS agents provides the impetus for a republican revolution against the Restoration regime. The city, already plagued by high rates of unemployment and popular discontent due to an unforeseen economic downturn, exploded into rioting after a little over a week of increasingly frantic agitation, with mobs of angry workers and bourgeoisie attacking symbols & supporters of the Bourbons or else crying out "À bas les Bourbons!" (Down with the Bourbons!), "Mort au Roi!" (Death to the King!) and "À bas les aristocrates!" (Down with the aristocrats!). Several districts were barricaded by the republican mobs, and one in particular managed to occupy the Hotel de Ville as their predecessors had in 1789. Making things worse, Napoleon II and his brother emerged from hiding on the same day - after leaving the Azores last year, they had been hiding right under the BTS' collective noses in Paris itself, a move so suicidally stupid that Louis XVII had dismissed its very possibility, ironically just as Bernadotte dismissed the possibility of him attacking in the middle of a blizzard at Stora Hoga so long ago - and proclaimed "Paris! Vos retours empereur, une fois battus, mais toujours invaincu!" (Paris! Your Emperor returns, once beaten, but still unbowed!) to a crowd of supporters on the Champs-Élysées. Louis XVII, then residing at Saint-Cloud, had become used to cold receptions by the people of Paris whenever he went out to review his troops or conduct military parades, and thus had increasingly suspected a rebellion was in the works; nonetheless, contrary to his claims & those of Bourbon propagandists in later years he was apparently genuinely surprised when his loyal ministers brought in the first reports, though he quickly regained his composure. "Je ne tomberai pas comme mon père," (I will not fall as my father did) he was reported to have snarled at his government. "Il n'ya pas de place pour l'échec maintenant. Toute personne qui obtient dans notre façon doit périr, même les femmes et les enfants!" (There is no room for failure now. Anyone who gets in our way must perish, even women and children!) With these foreboding words, the Three Days' Rebellion truly took off...

    The protagonists of the Three Days in Paris, starting on July 6 1830
    Louis XVII 'the Winter King', age 45

    Napoleon Francois Bonaparte AKA 'Napoleon II' or 'L'Aiglon', age 28

    The Republicans, here seen storming the Hotel de Ville

    As of 11:59 PM on the sixth of July, the first day of these three fateful days, Louis XVII controlled Saint-Cloud, large parts of western Paris and the city's extreme outskirts; although he had his family flee to Orleans, he remained at his palace and personally directed the Royalist forces in their efforts to suppress the rebellion, and also issued orders for all of his nearby garrisons (at Saint-Denis, Vincennes, Lunéville and Saint-Omer) to quick-march to Paris. Napoleon II and his partisans had taken control of the Palais de l'Élysée, most of the critical Avenue des Champs-Élysées (including his father's enormously symbolic Arc de Triomphe) and most of central Paris. The Republicans were in control of the Hotel de Ville, the Tuileries Palace, the Bastille and large parts of eastern Paris. For the next six and a half hours there was surprisingly little violence as all three sides either tried to catch a good night's sleep or moved about to consolidate their positions & plot out their next moves, but as dawn broke the city would again be awash in blood.

    The first shots of the second day were fired not between the Royalists and Bonapartists or the Republicans, but between the Bonapartists and Republicans. Charles-Napoleon had stayed up all morning trying to convince his brother to ally with the Republicans against the Winter King, arguing that they could support the proclamation of a Second Republic and then slowly take over its institutions in order to muster popular support for his coronation as Emperor just as their father had done, but Napoleon II would have none of it; a handsome, confident and impetuous young man who made quite the contrast with his plain-faced, stern and reserved little brother, L'Aiglon was determined to either make sure France know that he gained his throne without the aid of non-Bonapartists and thus hog all the glory for himself, or else die a glorious death trying. That said, he wasn't totally stupid - he also sincerely feared that should he enter an alliance with the republicans, they would stab him in the back once the revolution was won and he was no longer strictly necessary to their success. Thus at daybreak, Bonapartist forces attacked the Tuileries and Louvre palaces in hopes of catching them by surprise and thus destroying them before they could jeopardize L'Aiglon's chances at the throne, but met heavy Republican resistance; the Republicans had clearly expected this exact ploy and made adequate preparations. The fighting dragged on past noon, and while the Bonapartists captured the Tuileries twice, the Republicans succeeded in retaking it both times.

    While the Bonapartists and Republicans were busy slugging it out with each other, Louis XVII directed Royalist assaults into central Paris. At the Arc de Triomphe, fanatical Bonapartist resistance threw back two attacks by the Swiss and Russian Guards; but Louis XVII and his Mousquetaires joined the third wave, and this time the outgunned and badly bloodied Bonapartists could not hold. Heavy fighting continued to rage down the Champs-Élysées for the better part of the day, but with the bulk of their strength already committed to breaking through Republican defenses to the east & more Royalist reinforcements pouring in from the countryside with every passing hour, the Bonapartists were doomed. By 6:30 PM Napoleon II was besieged in the Palais de l'Élysée, and seeing that the Winter King had brought a much larger complement of cannons with him than anything the Bonapartists had with every intention to shell the palace to ruin with him & his supporters still in it, surrendered in an attempt to save his followers' lives. However, Charles-Napoleon was unaccounted for; it would later become apparent that before surrendering, his brother had ordered him to flee in disguise with a handful of trusted retainers, so that the line of Napoleon I would survive. Upon meeting Louis XVII, L'Aiglon reportedly asked him, "Why are you so angry, oh King? We have much in common: our fathers were taken from us in a time of crisis, we were forced into exile by our enemies, and years later we returned to reclaim what should have been ours from the beginning by force. If you would kill me for daring to claim my birthright, be certain to end yourself for the same crime." At these bold words, the Winter King reportedly exploded into an uncharacteristic rage and shot the younger man in the face before regaining his cool and contemptuously remarking to the now very dead Napoleon II, "You have forgotten the greatest difference between us, Bonaparte: I am right, while you and your entire family are and forever shall be in the wrong."

    Napoleon II directs his supporters against a Royalist flanking maneuver, July 7 1830

    With Napoleon II dead, his brother (hastily acclaimed Napoleon III) on the run and the Bonapartists fast collapsing, Louis XVII now turned his attention to the Republicans to the east. At the Tuileries, the same vigorous defense that had thrown back the Bonapartists now threatened to do the same for the Royalists starting at 8:00 PM on the 7th; but disregarding Marshal Marmont, the only Napoleonic Marshal to remain in Bourbon service to date, when he urged waiting for Marshal Cadoudal to arrive and attack the rebels from behind with a confident remark of "Pourquoi un roi doit avoir à entrer dans son palais par la porte de derrière?" (Why should a King have to enter his palace through the back door?), he brazenly stepped forward and cried out to the republican snipers as they reloaded their weapons, "Reposez vos yeux sur votre Roi pour la dernière fois, traîtres! Si l'un de vous oserait tirer lui maintenant, tirer!" (Rest your eyes upon your King for the last time, traitors! If any of you would dare shoot him now, shoot!). After getting over their shock at the Winter King's sheer audacity, the Republicans did indeed rise to open fire on him - only for Louis to throw himself back into his lines while his elite Musketeers stepped forward to shoot the exposed Republicans. From this point onward to the morning of the 8th the Republicans resisted, flying the tricoleur or a pure red banner from their barricades and forcing the Royalists to fight house to house, street to street, national symbol to national symbol; but with the Bonapartists crushed, the Tuileries lost and the elderly Cadoudal closing in from the east with his fanatical all-Vendean regiments, they too were now destined to fail. Once Cadoudal actually did arrive around 3:00 in the morning, he ordered his artillery to fire incendiaries into the poor districts of eastern Paris, which combined with the hot & dry spell that had been hanging over Paris all summer predictably started massive fires, before sending in his troops with orders to kill anyone they so much as suspect of being a Republican without questions; many of the republicans killed at this time were no longer even resisting, but rather struck down while trying to save their families and homes.

    Upon actually meeting Louis XVII at the heavily damaged Tuileries about an hour later, Cadoudal advised him to let the fires keep burning until the entirety of eastern Paris was a ruin and every single one of its inhabitants lay dead: "Que ces sans-culottes, qui ont toujours été le premier à appeler à la tête de votre famille, tous périssent: vie qu'ils peuvent vous apporter aucun avantage, et les morts - ainsi, leur mort aurait pas de perte pour la France." (Let these sans-culottes, who have always been the first to call for your family's heads, all perish: alive they can bring you no benefit, and dead - well, their deaths would be no loss to France) were his words to the Winter King. Reportedly, the King - the very same man who had executed Napoleon II with a shot to the face only a few hours earlier - was horrified at Cadoudal's suggestion, remarking "Voici un homme plus royaliste que le roi" (Here is a man more Royalist than the King) at his fanaticism, and ordered his men to help put out the fires. When the sun rose over a devastated Paris on the 8th of July, Louis XVII still stood victorious, though some 17,000 Parisians (both Bonapartists and Republicans as well as unarmed civilians) had been killed along with hundreds of Royalist soldiers, his capital was a wreck and he was condemned as a murderous tyrant who could only rule through the bayonet & whiffs of grapeshot even by some moderate Royalists. Still, for the time being - with the Bonapartist heir on the run and the Republicans slaughtered or forced back underground in a massive show of force - his rule was as secure as it had been in 1815.

    Some of the last Republican rebels fleeing before Cadoudal's advance, July 8 1830

    A month after the Three Bloody Days, Catholic Walloons in the Southern Netherlands launch their own revolution against the Dutch. Although these developments were of prime strategic interest to Louis XVII, the Winter King was too busy trying to clear up the fallout from the July Rebellion to do much beyond declaring his moral support for the Belgians. Not that they needed anything more - the Belgians handled themselves quite well, and secured the recognition of not just France but also the other Great Powers by the year's end.

    King George IV, a selfish and free-wheeling hedonist, dies at the age of 67. He is succeeded as King of Great Britain & Ireland as well as Hanover by the only child his hated wife ever bore him - now twenty-nine-year-old Prince George of Wales. Refusing to continue bearing the same name as his loathed old man, the new King would take up the regnal name 'Victor', and worked tirelessly to both maintain a frugal (his critics say humorless and puritanical) court that reflected his own dignified, pious stoicism & to ram through a conservative, deeply religious agenda in Hanover (where he was an absolute monarch, unlike the Home Isles where to his unending frustration, his efforts at determining policy were constantly stonewalled by Parliament). Thus begins the Victorian Era...

    Victor of the United Kingdom - God save the King!

    1831: (WLG Expy) begins publishing (The Liberator expy), which fast became the leading abolitionist paper in the States.

    Gabriel Boxley, an escaped slave who knew how to read and write, leads a rebellion with some 100 other slaves in Virginia. The rising is suppressed by the state militia; Boxley was killed along with most of his followers, though they took some 60 whites down with them, and while his body was flayed and quartered other livid whites massacred up to 500 slaves, few if any of whom had anything to do with the rebellion. In the eyes of many planters, Boxley's rising was proof that if let off their leashes, the slaves would unleash a whirlwind of rapine and mass murder upon them, so they had best redouble the strength and length of their whips.

    Artist's depiction of Boxley approximately two seconds before he was killed, c. 1834

    Belgium is now a kingdom without a king, and its parliament moved to elect one; their first candidate was the young Duke of Nemours, then residing in Paris while his father governed Saint-Domingue an ocean away, but though his distant cousin Louis XVII supported this choice the British did not, out of fear that Belgium would become a French puppet. Britain's preferred candidate, Leopold of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha was considered unacceptable by Louis XVII in turn. In the end, the Great Powers settled for the Duke of Teschen: as a Habsburg (the last rulers of the Southern Netherlands prior to the French Revolution), a prominent general of the Napoleonic Wars, and Louis XVII's brother-in-law (yet one known to be so firm that his wife could not conceivably control him very much) he was the only man Britain & France could agree on.

    Charles I of Belgium and his Queen, Marie Thérèse

    Charles-Napoleon Bonaparte, AKA Napoleon III, emerges from hiding - all the way in the streets of New York, having barely escaped hundreds of assassins (to whom he lost most of his entourage) along the way. He doesn't even make it out of the harbor before a BTS agent tried to assassinate him for the umpteenth time, firing at his head with a rifle from a second-storey window, but narrowly missed and killed a nearby seagull instead. Later this year he would survive another BTS agent's attack, this time in Philadelphia, with a bomb that wounded him but destroyed the carriage behind his and killed five Americans. In light of this, President Amsel & Congress authorize the creation of the Office of Military Intelligence to defend American citizens from the shadier depredations of foreign powers.
    Last edited by Barry Goldwater; June 09, 2014 at 11:17 PM.

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    Default Re: Where Eagles Fly, 1845 Edition

    TL, pt. III
    1832: The Democrats win this year's presidential election by capitalizing on Southern outrage over the Indian Estates Act and the Federalists' continued presence in the North sucking away crucial votes from Amsel & the Whigs, returning Charles Wilson to power for a second non-consecutive term. Unfortunately for him, Wilson found his agenda blocked at every corner by a dominant Whig-Federalist coalition in both Houses of Congress, which only grew more powerful as time wore on and Amsel's fiscal policies bore their fruit - thereby convincing the masses that the Second Bank was a good thing, at least in the short term, and torpedoing the Democrats' efforts to destroy it for the time being.

    Joseph Smith, having moved from New York into Ohio last year in the face of growing persecution, is tarred and feathered by a mob in Hiram.

    Louis XVII regains enough strength and resources to confidently stride back into the international area after the July Revolution. His first act? Besides continuing to guarantee Belgian independence, he began shipping arms and supplies to support the Miguelists in Portugal; the Winter King blamed Pedro of Brazil for letting the Bonaparte brothers return to France on top of ferrying their mother & sisters to Brazil, and had sworn to ensure that his line would never again rule on the Continent in retaliation. A French fleet set out from Brest to the mouth of the Tagus River in Lisbon, sparking a war scare with Britain (who still supported the Liberals loyal to Maria II). Although the French withdrew at the sight of British warships, Louis did not stop running supplies to Miguel for the rest of the year.

    1833: A British expedition to the Falklands/Malvinas re-asserts their rule over the small islands. Among the British ships present, the HMS Beagle carried aboard her one Charles Darwin, whose experiences here and on the return voyage would give rise to his theory of evolution years later...

    Ferdinand VII of Spain dies, but not before issuing a 'Pragmatic Sanction' to allow his infant daughter Isabella to succeed him. This development is not at all well-received by his fiercely conservative and devout younger brother Carlos, Count of Molina and his heir-presumptive, who leads a reactionary rebellion against his niece. The Spanish army was thrown into chaos - the generally educated and liberal-leaning officer corps mostly supported the regency of the Queen-Mother, the rank-and-file either didn't care much either way or were sympathetic to Carlos - and the regency in Madrid was both corrupt and unstable, with little support outside of the capital and wherever they had posted a loyal garrison; in particular, the Basques and Catalans supported Carlos' hopes for an absolute monarchy because they would paradoxically be freer under his rule than that of the liberal Regency, for he had promised to respect their traditional autonomy. In light of these developments, Louis XVII jumped at the chance to finally extinguish liberalism in Iberia; by the end of the year he had not only recognized Carlos as the true King of Spain and entered a formal alliance with him, but had also sent 50,000 Frenchmen under Marshal Cadoudal over the Pyrenees to support his claim.

    The competitors for the Spanish throne: Carlos, Count of Molina and Isabella II

    Charles-Napoleon leaves his temporary residence at Philadelphia in January after surviving yet another attempt on his life (this time, a BTS agent poisoned his tea but did not count on a visitor mistakenly drinking it & promptly dropping dead before his very eyes instead). He would emerge in Montevideo in October, only to learn that he had been banned from reentering Brazil (much less taking up his old commission in its army) by a government fearful of provoking further French opposition in Portugal; after his efforts to convince the Brazilian government that Louis XVII was going to intervene against them in Portugal no matter whether he was at Montevideo or Rio de Janeiro failed, he crossed over into Argentina to offer his services to the government of Juan Manuel de Rosas at Buenos Aires. De Rosas seemingly agreed to make him a Major in the Argentine army, only to send men to arrest him in hopes of turning him over to Louis XVII for the bounty on his head; warned ahead of time by Unitarian spies loyal to Juan Lavalle, who hoped to recruit him instead, Bonaparte was able to flee into the Argentinian countryside, where he joined Lavalle's army on December 30.

    Le Van Khoi leads a revolt against the staunchly traditionalist and isolationist government of Emperor Minh Mang, who had dishonored the grave of his father Le Van Duyet despite the man's loyal service to his father Gia Long. Backed by Vietnamese Catholics, Chinese settlers, a few French missionaries and the Kingdom of Siam to the west, Van Khoi wrested control of six southern provinces and proclaimed his intent to restore the line of Prince Canh, Minh Mang's late elder half-brother and original heir to the Vietnamese throne, to their birthright.

    1834: A nativist mob destroys a new Ursuline convent in Charlestown, Boston. Notably, both the mob and its detractors included many blacks, descendants of the Maroons quartered at Charlestown during the Revolutionary War, showing how divided that community was over nativism; some Maroons argued that Catholic immigrants could only compete with them for jobs and make things harder for them in general, while others (including community elder Benjamin Marley) argued in turn that 'enemies of our [their] people' were always on the lookout for opportunities to put them down and that if they did not stand with the Catholics, they would have no allies when the slavocrats 'do unto our people what you an' your fellow natives have just done to the convent'. For his part, Governor Matthew Saker made it abundantly clear where he stood on the matter when he ordered the ringleaders of the mob (regardless of race) to pay the Archdiocese of Boston for the damage they had caused, and in response to nativist propaganda branding him as an anti-American traitor who would sell the country out to the Pope proclaimed that 'the only anti-American swine here are those who would deny others their rights to practise their religion freely, as protected by the First Amendment of the Constitution they claim to hold so dear to their hearts, with the torch and rifle'. This moment, among others, would prove crucial to the Federalists' efforts to secure the support of primarily urban Irish Catholic immigrants in years to come.

    From January to April, Cadoudal's French army obliterates the haphazard and ill-motivated Isabelino resistance as surely as the Marquis de la Rochejacquelein did with the Spanish Liberals 11 years earlier. After General Vicente de Quesada's last-ditch attempt to stop the Franco-Carlist forces at the Ebro River resulted in the virtual annihilation of the Spanish regular army due to incompetence, treachery and a lack of supplies, Queen-Regent Maria Christina abandoned Madrid for Cadiz on March 27 with her daughter in tow before abdicating entirely on April 1st. The Count of Molina would be crowned King Carlos VII of Spain a few months later, formally ending the Carlist War.

    However, Cadoudal and his 50,000 Frenchmen would not be present to witness that occasion. Instead, operating under Louis XVII's orders they made an unannounced entry into Portugal to support the Miguelists, who at this point were steadily losing control of northern Portugal to the Liberals and Brazilians. At Asseiceira the French vanguard, led by the Count of Ghaisnes and Bourmont, surprised the Liberal forces and sent them fleeing in disarray. By the year's end, the Miguelists had retaken the entirety of the Portuguese mainland, with the Liberal stronghold of Porto falling to a massive Franco-Miguelist assault on November 30 in spite of the bravery of its defenders. France and Britain now came to an impasse; France could not be beaten on the mainland with the resources Britain was willing to commit here, but the Royal Navy was still invincible on the high seas, and outright war between the two could only ruin them both. Thus, after exhaustive negotiations the two reached a secret agreement in Porto: Britain would withhold recognition of Miguel until April 1st 1835; a Royal Navy squadron would protect the Azores until March 1st; and Maria II's supporters were to be given until then to negotiate a 'peace with honor' with the Miguelist government. Louis XVII had succeeded in installing/saving absolutist regimes in Iberia, but earned the eternal enmity and suspicion of Britain in turn; whatever dreams he might have had of intervening overseas to restore more Ancient Regimes were now dashed.

    Le Van Khoi decisively defeats pro-government General Truong Minh Giang outside Hue, the imperial capital of Vietnam, and marches in shortly after Emperor Minh Mang fled the country. Prince Canh's son An Hoa was proclaimed Emperor; his first edicts were to re-issue tolerance for Vietnamese Christians and reopen ties with France, though Louis XVII was too busy to do much beyond congratulating him on his ascension and reopening lines of trade into Cochin at this time.

    1835: George Braxford publishes a letter laying out the typical conditions faced by a slave on a Georgia plantation and condemning efforts to justify the Peculiar Institution written by Emily Anderson of Georgia, youngest daughter of former Governor Peter Anderson and granddaughter of Founding Father Thomas Anderson, in The Liberator. Together with her older sister Catherine, she had witnessed a slave being whipped in her childhood and expressed a desire to run away to someplace where there was no slavery; now, at age 29 she could finally make good on that promise with her beloved elder sister, showing up in New York weeks after the letter was first published. The Anderson sisters quickly became celebrities in the North, and were damned as female Judases across the South.

    Taking advantage of the disorder plaguing the Mexican Empire, Texan settlers in the town of Anahuac stopped paying their taxes. When Mexican officials came by to collect the money, they were driven off at gunpoint; Governor Joaquin Cos, an authoritarian and bloodthirsty commander who was disliked even by the Emperor who appointed him in the first place, sent 800 men to burn the settlement to the ground, loot everything that wasn't nailed down and shoot all the men & boys in retaliation in August. The resulting Anahuac Massacre sparked a rebellion among the Texans, who began to stockpile munitions and form 'Committees of Correspondence' by which to secretly coordinate their efforts. Upon realizing what was happening, Governor Cos issued orders across the state demanding all Texans turn in their weapons at once, warned that anybody who failed to do so immediately would be killed, and sent 200 dragoons to the village of Gonzales to begin the arms-seizing operation; but the settlers resisted and in fact prevailed, driving the Mexican cavalry away after several hours of inconclusive skirmishing. At Austin, the Texan Committees of Correspondence gathered to proclaim the independence of a Republic of Texas and elected Hiram Eggers (son of famous/infamous frontiersman and Revolutionary War general Charles M. Eggers) their first President.

    At first, the Mexican government felt that Cos already possessed sufficient forces to control the rebellion, and in any case Emperor Agustin had his hands full with a republican rebellion that had occupied Puebla and were moving into striking distance of Mexico City. This inaction gave the Texans invaluable time to secure loans from American banks, steal provisions and train themselves into soldiers capable of matching the Imperial Mexican Army's regulars in a head-on fight. The Texans took the Mexican fortress overlooking Goliad by force in October, acquiring for themselves a vast hoard of gunpowder, muskets and rations; later, along the Nueces River President Eggers defeated a Mexican column sent by Governor Cos to retake Goliad. Finally, the Texans slowly encircled Cos's headquarters at San Antonio de Bexar; he realized what they were doing too late, and his attempts to break out were defeated at the Mission Concepción and the so-called 'Grass Fight'. Now besieged in Bexar, Cos held out with some 300 men and 4 cannons for a month before finally succumbing to a surprise Texan assault at midnight, December 20th, decided by the detonation of the fort's powder magazine by a lucky Texan cannonball. Legend has it that Cos attempted to surrender to a Texan survivor of the Anahuac Massacre, who shot him in the face instead.

    The first flag flown by the Texan rebels, early to late 1835

    In light of these defeats, and having recently knocked Guadalupe Victoria back on his heels at the Battle of Queretaro, Emperor Agustin marches into Texas at the head of an army of 7,000 men. Coming along with him is General Santa Anna, who had been dismissed from his office as Governor of Veracruz in 1833 after suffering a chain of humiliating defeats at the hands of Republican rebels (whom the Emperor destroyed in three weeks after his removal, no less) and had again been dismissed from his new post as commander of Mexico City's garrison after his plot against the Emperor was uncovered; it was rumored that Agustin only took him along with the hope that a Texan skirmisher would plant a bullet between the unreliable and utterly inept (but politically still quite influential) general's eyes and thereby do his dirty work for him.

    1836: Arkansas gains statehood.

    While the Whigs and Democrats slugged away at each other throughout this year's election campaign, the Federalists took a novel approach - they began to organize political machines in the big cities such as New York; funded by the elites controlling the Federalist Party, these 'machines' provided patronage to poor, primarily Irish Catholic immigrants in the form of aid packages (consisting of food, drinks, coal, rent money and in winter time, warm clothing), setting up jobs with local businesses and factories owned by card-carrying Federalists, organizing 'naturalization committees' that would help put immigrants on the fast track to becoming citizens by filling out their paperwork, providing witnesses & bribing judges for them, and representing immigrants in the courts. Under pressure from the abolitionists who now made up a majority of the party's leading figures, these machines also allocated resources to back up African-Americans; most famously, in July their New York known affiliates of their political machine, called 'The Pearl' after the location of its headquarters on Pearl Street, bought the rights to some 120,000 acres of land in Essex County, near Lake Placid, which they then divided into 50-acre lots and distributed to African-Americans with further support in the form of more supplies & trained architects, agriculturalists and engineers from as far as Boston to help the blacks learn to farm & build their homes in the years to come. This show of generosity, besides securing the Federalists African-American support, also conveniently got many thousands of blacks out of the way of Irish immigrants in the big cities, reducing tensions between both communities and making it easier for the Federalists to bind their alliance ever closer. The result was that Thomas Moore of Connecticut, son of former one-term President Moore, was elected America's first Federalist President in 12 years with an estimated 90% of the black and immigrant votes, something foreshadowed when these two groups carried political upstart Theodore Fanning to the Governor's office in New York over Democrat Damian Lloyd and Whig Abraham Van Rensselaer just ahead of the presidential elections in November.

    Emperor Agustin of Mexico defeats Texan forces at San Patricio, Agua Dulce, Refugio and most decisively at Coleto within the span of two months. While this was happening, he detached 2,000 men from his army and sent them to attack the Alamo mission, where the defenders of Bexar (under 200 men in strength by this time) had withdrawn with President Eggers; but despite his hopes that not even Santa Anna could mess up such an easy mission, the general did indeed bungle his attacks, and after his first assaults were repulsed with great loss of life - mostly because for some unfathomable reason he did not deploy any of his plentiful artillery in support - he was reduced to essentially camping around the besieged fort and shooting anyone who tried to escape. When Emperor Agustin returned with 300 prisoners in tow from his great victory at Coleto, he reportedly had to be restrained from punching Santa Anna in the jaw for his ineptitude and immediately assumed command of the combined Mexican army. After his offer to honorably surrender was rejected by President Eggers, the Emperor ordered his artillery to shell the fortress into rubble instead of throwing any more lives away in unnecessary frontal assaults on March 26: one cannonball struck the Texans' enormous powder magazine and detonated it in a fittingly enormous explosion that killed everyone inside the fort, including Hiram Eggers.

    News of Guadalupe Victoria's triumph over his generals down south and a republican takeover of Zacatecas forced Agustin to return to Mexico City yet again, and lacking any other high-ranking general at the time he gave command of the Texan suppression force to Santa Anna, drily remarking that 'not even Santa Anna can possibly bungle the obliteration of these Yanqui rabble now that I have done most of his work for him'. Unfortunately for him, as was the case at the Alamo Santa Anna again snatched defeat from the jaws of victory by walking right into a desperate Texan ambush at San Jacinto (led by Hiram Eggers' son Samuel, who had seized command of the remaining Texan forces in the chaotic fallout left by the death of his father & many other Texan notables at the Alamo), where he was captured and his army mauled beyond repair. Despite having no authority to sign treaties, Santa Anna did so anyway to save his own skin, swearing to withdraw all Mexican troops from Texas and lobby for the recognition of Texan independence. Before leaving Texas, Santa Anna also attempted to find volunteers to help him take over Mexico, promising that he would be Texas' greatest friend should he succeed in overthrowing the Emperor Agustin.

    With this, Santa Anna was released and sent to Mexico City, where he was greeted by an irate Emperor Agustin; having received word of his usurpation of authority via the Peace of Velasco, and receiving reports of his latest intrigues to overthrow him, Agustin calmly greeted the disgraced general before shooting him in the back of the head. Twice. When his advisers warned him that his summary execution of Santa Anna risked the support of the man's home state of Veracruz, Agustin darkly responded "The loss of Veracruz will harm our cause less than a living Santa Anna." That said, as he had persistent republican uprisings and now the prophesied rebellion in Veracruz to deal with, the Emperor did grudgingly recognize Texan independence and withdraw all Mexican soldiers still on Texan soil for the time being.

    The new Texan Republic would elect their first Congress of 14 Senators and 29 Representatives by September. Two political factions were fast rising in the newborn country; 'Unionists', those who favored joining the United States and maintaining harmonious relationships with the local Indians, and 'Nationalists' who favored maintaining Texan independence and war with the Indians. They were led by Samuel I. Eggers and Jake Thompson, respectively. The former won the presidency of Texas in this year's election, but the latter secured a majority in the Texan Congress, deadlocking the Texan government.

    First official flag of the Republic of Texas, 1836-9


    1837: Michigan becomes a state.

    An American boat is turned away from Japanese ports with cannon fire while trying to return survivors of a shipwreck off of the Chinese coast.

    Owen Abbey, an abolitionist preacher then living in Missouri, is lynched by a pro-slavery mob that went on to burn down his home & printing press. Northerners are outraged at his murder, and he becomes a martyr for the fast-swelling abolitionist movement.

    The death of the Reverend Abbey

    Two highly destructive rebellions break out in Lower & Upper Canada, both agitating for an independent Canada and both backed by several hundred American sympathizers. The British fell upon these rebels like the hammer of God, declaring martial law before sending in the troops, and ironically caused more damage in their reprisals than the rebels ever did prior to their suppression. The Lower Canadian rebellion, which was widely supported by all sectors of the majority French-Canadian populace, drew an especially harsh response up to and including future attempts by the new British military government to assimilate French-Canadians into Anglo-Canadian society, fueling popular resentment.

    In Mexico, the 'Santa Anna Rebellion' (where the state of Veracruz revolted against Emperor Agustin's authority following his summary execution of General Santa Anna) reaches its climax when the city of Veracruz, defended by 4,000 militiamen and some 40 guns, is besieged by 9,000 soldiers of the Imperial Mexican Army backed by 60 cannons and the entire Mexican fleet under Agustin's personal command. Governor Anastasio Carranza swore to fight to the last man 'in memory of our martyred Santa Anna', reportedly leading the Emperor to shake his head and rhetorically ask his command staff "Is Veracruz truly so willing to burn for such a serpent?"

    In Argentina, Juan Lavalle's Unitarians score their first news-worthy victory over the armies of Juan Manuel de Rosas (nominally still the 'Federalists', but increasingly called 'Rosistas' as it became clear even to them that Rosas had no interest in giving up his absolute power under a federal system) near Salta, where an all-cavalry thousand-strong army under Charles-Napoleon Bonaparte stopped a Federalist force three times their own size from encircling their positions to the south. Bonaparte became especially notable for putting the skills he learned as a Brazilian cavalry officer to use in training his gauchos (Argentine cowboys) for the last three years in the valleys west of Salta, and it paid off massively in this engagement; the Unitarians easily drove back the Rosista cavalry and rode rings around their infantry, kept them off-balance with hit-and-run attacks concentrated at the weakest points in the Federalist lines until they retreated, and ended up capturing their entire artillery train. For this glorious victory, Bonaparte was made a full general in the Unitarian army by a grateful Lavalle.

    1838: In response to ongoing violence between the Mormon community (which moved to avoid persecution in NY & IL) and non-Mormon Missourians, Missouri Governor Oliver Armistead issues an extermination order against the Latter-Day Saints. When this unsurprisingly results in the slaughter of ~20 Mormon men, women and children, the Mormon community began to pack their bags and leave for Illinois, and the property they left behind in Missouri is swiftly confiscated and redistributed to the envious locals.

    The infamous 'Mormon extermination order' issued by Armistead, 1838

    The year-long Siege of Veracruz comes to an end when Mexican Imperialists storm the city head-on, burning down entire districts and killing over a thousand civilians as they battled the insurgents street to street, home to home. In the chaos, a French-owned pastry shop was leveled by one side's artillery, and though they could not confirm that it was the fault of the Imperialists, the French government called upon Emperor Agustin to cough up 600,000 pesos in reparations. Knowing that French intervention could severely mess up his plans, and having already seen Louis XVII's willingness to launch military actions with little to no provocation in Spain and Portugal, the Emperor agreed - and to provide the lion's share of the indemnity he would confiscate the entirety of Veracruz's state treasury on top of snapping up a third of all the loot his troops gathered from the city, all as punishment for their rebellion, thereby leaving the once prosperous port a destitute ruin for at least another 20 years. Well, at least Mexico avoided a ruinous war with France...

    Charles-Napoleon Bonaparte makes a risky crossing of the Sierras de Cordoba/Sierras Grande with his cavalry in January before embarking on an extensive raid into the central Argentine provinces of Cordoba (occupied by the Federalists since the defeat of General Jose Maria Paz in 1835) and Santa Fe. Living off the land, destroying infrastructure and evading large Rosista armies with the help of Unitarian agents & sympathizers, he and his gauchos defeated smaller garrisons and/or Rosista cavalry battalions sent to collect their heads at Tuclame, Ascochinga (skirting the fortified state capital of Cordoba itself, no less), Morteros (where they defeated three uncoordinated Rosista detachments sent to pursue them one by one in the span of two days), near Tostado (where they killed almost a thousand Federalist recruits in a surprise attack on their boot camp), and finally Ceres before capturing and holding the city of Santa Fe itself for three days. After securing a ransom of 300,000 pesos from the state governor for the safe release of his family, Bonaparte promptly vacated Santa Fe in the face of an approaching 6,000-man Federalist army under General Facundo Quiroga and crossed not back west, but over the Parana River to the east to attack Rosas himself while he relaxed on his estanchia (large ranch) north of Buenos Aires. The legendary 'Night Attack' of July 19th resulted in all but two of Rosas' guards being killed, his manorial estate being plundered & burned down by the ecstatic gauchos, and the tyrant himself forced to flee in his nightclothes; had Bonaparte actually killed or captured Rosas, as he came within inches of doing, the war would have been won for Lavalle right then and there.

    In any case, apparently not content with risking a brutal death 'merely' half a dozen times, Bonaparte crossed the Parana again to the south - within sight of Buenos Aires' outer forts, no less - and staged his long retreat west across south-central Argentina to San Luis, on the Unitarian side of the Sierras Grande. Rosista cavalry detachments were sent from Buenos Aires to pursue him, but one was ambushed and routed early on at Junin (where most of their casualties came from drowning in the Rio Salado, not Unitarian bullets) and the second & third attempted to work with Quiroga's army to trap Bonaparte in Santa Fe, only to be outwitted at Olaeta where the gauchos blew up their ammunition stores to mislead the Rosistas. Bonaparte returned to a hero's welcome in San Luis on December 2nd, and his raid - in which over a third of his 1,100 men were lost, but took down some 2,000 Federalists and stole/destroyed millions of pesos' worth in federal property - became legendary. When a shocked but overjoyed Lavalle asked him what he was thinking when he embarked on such a seemingly suicidal mission in the middle of celebrations, Bonaparte jokingly responded, "Je suppose que les fantômes de mon père et mon frère m'ont possédant de ces douze derniers mois." (I suppose the ghosts of my father and brother have been possessing me for these last twelve months)

    Juan Pablo Dali: 'Bonaparte's Ride', 1842

    In response to 'Bonaparte's Ride', Juan Manuel de Rosas redoubled his repressive policies. Unitarian spies and sympathizers behind the lines had proven instrumental in permitting Bonaparte to get as far as he did, pointing his men in the right direction and providing them with supplies or outright saddling up to join his ranks while misdirecting the pursuing Federalists; the Popular Restorer Society, nominally a political group composed of Rosas's supporters, was transformed into his secret police complete with its own paramilitary death squads (the so-called mazorqueros, selected from the cruelest and most loyal elements of the regular army) with orders to ride into the countryside and torture or summarily execute anyone who they even suspect to be a Unitarian agent. In addition, he intensified his cult of personality - this meant spinning the Night Attack from an embarassing defeat into a harrowing raid that he escaped with literal divine intervention, forcing all men to wear sideburns and mustaches in his style, ordering his subjects to wear red (the color of the Federalist Party) everywhere and even ordering churches to venerate his portrait on their altars; when the Jesuit Order staunchly refused, he had them thrown out of the country. Most critically, Rosas invited Louis XVII to intervene in his favor, pointing out that Bonaparte was working with the Unitarians and that they would probably fund his return to France if they triumphed; Louis XVII agreed, and on top of sending BTS agents to help train the SPR and selling arms at below market value through private intermediaries controlled by his allies (so as to avoid British suspicion) he also secretly deployed military advisers and elements of the French Foreign Legion, disguised as civilians or independent mercenaries, in tiny 100-man detachments spread out over multiple civilian chartered vessels starting on New Year's Eve this year.

    Westminster rejects the Durham Report suggesting the creation of a united 'Province of Canada' from Lower & Upper Canada with responsible government, outraging both Anglo- and Franco-Canadians. A riot breaks out in Montreal as Canadian opinion of British rule falls sharply, no doubt to the joy of many Americans.

    1839: The Peru-Bolivian Confederation decisively defeats Chile in the Battle of Yungay, guaranteeing its survival. Although Rosas had been unable to intervene against Peru-Bolivia due to Lavalle's and Bonaparte's successes last year and the year before that, he had made statements supporting Chile in its war against the Confederation, and as a result Supreme Protector Andres de Santa Cruz declared his support for the Unitarians - starting with generous shipments of war-surplus supplies across their border.

    Britain launches into an Opium War against China to defend their merchants' right to...keep selling opium and thus fuel the crippling addiction of Chinese peasants everywhere. Truly, the most heroic cause any redcoat could ever dream of dying for.

    With the help of the French Foreign Legion and the 'military advisor' 'Jean de Pommeroux' (totally not a disgraced military commander whom Louis XVII had offered a shot at redemption if he would but go to Argentina in the disguise of a mercenary officer, how could you possibly think that), the Federalist Army began pushing back the Unitarians, who had taken advantage of the chaos created by Bonaparte's Ride to push as far as the fortifications of Cordoba, to the Sierras Grande starting in May. In June, Federalist forces under General Quiroga smashed through Unitarian defenses in the mountains and laid siege to San Luis for three months until they were forced to retreat to avoid a surprise Unitarian encirclement; Charles-Napoleon again played a major role here, launching a decisive raid into the Federalist camp in late August and securing documents that proved exactly where these mysterious, seemingly invincible new Federalist 'mercenaries' were coming from and who was really giving them their orders. Lavalle immediately made the documents public, and Britain was so incensed that the Winter King was interfering in Latin America that they sent several squadrons to blockade Buenos Aires. Unable to send any more troops or supplies to Rosas, who was also cut off from international trade entirely as a result, and unwilling to go to war with Britain over Argentina Louis XVII grudgingly relented and ordered the withdrawal of high-ranking 'mercenary advisers' and the Legion's ~500 men on the ground in October, though he secretly continued to keep junior totally-not-French-officers such as Captain Thierry Watteau, a 29-year-old decorated veteran of the Algerian War whose ability to produce miraculous victories in the face of all logic led to him being nicknamed the 'Disaster Artist', in Rosas' service along with the BTS agents and to fund blockade runners based out of Brazil to keep smuggling supplies into Buenos Aires.

    Around this time Louis XVII also reached an agreement with Uruguayan President Manuel Oribe to harbor blockade runners in Montevideo, driving Britain to sponsor a coup by Oribe's rival Fructuoso Rivera and plunging that country into civil war. Although Oribe's faction, the conservative Blancos (Whites) enjoyed support from Argentina & France and quickly seized control of the Uruguayan countryside, Rivera's liberal Colorados (Reds) continued to control the capital with British backing and were recognized as the legitimate government of Uruguay by Lavalle's Unitarians in Argentina.

    An illustration of Montevideo's defenders, the 'Colorados'

    1840: Moore wins a second term in this year's presidential election, banking on not just the immigrant-black alliance but also promises of expansion to carry the day; when it was pointed out that the Federalists were traditionally the pro-peace party, Federalist propagandists responded that in no way did that preclude peaceful expansion - after all, the Louisiana Purchase was done under a Federalist Presidency. Many wondered whether they would try to purchase northern Mexico or Canada, though to be sure an attempt of his to purchase the latter was rejected out of hand by the British earlier this year.

    In Indiana, a long-time battleground state torn between the Democratic and Whig Parties, Whig candidate Benjamin Pugh - an eccentric abolitionist and logger who had immigrated to the state many years earlier - manages to take a page from the Federalist Party's books and weld together an alliance of immigrant workers, middle- and upper-class abolitionists, and the state's Maroon community (granted full franchise by Indiana's last Whig Governor, Noah Sables in mid-1837), the largest in the Midwestern states in fact. His Democratic opponent, established landowner and notoriously corrupt incumbent Governor Alexander Dunning, panicked and kickstarted a campaign lambasting him as the 'candidate of miscegenation' whose 'misrule' would result in Indiana transforming into a 'state of mules' (mixed-race children). When even this proved only partially successful in unraveling Pugh's coalition, Dunning resorted to hiring militiamen to physically stop blacks from voting, stuff the ballot boxes and torch some abolitionist presses to intimidate that crowd as well, and thus he won a lopsided victory in October. Pugh, whose brother was killed by Dunning's thugs while defending his printing press, swore revenge come the next gubernatorial elections in 1843.

    Britain, rightly suspecting the French of not having totally given up on Rosas yet, begins supplying the Argentine Unitarians through overland routes and intermediaries in Peru-Bolivia & Chile. With British arms and supplies, Lavalle and Bonaparte are able to not only smash through Rosista defenses in the Sierras Grande, but also sustain their offensive as far as the fortifications of Cordoba. General Quiroga is captured by Bonaparte's cavalry on the road to Cordoba and is later executed by Lavalle before the year's end, dealing a heavy blow to the Rosas regime.

    Charles-Napoleon Bonaparte, AKA 'Napoleon III', as a full General in the Unitarian Army (and after shaving the glorious beard he grew during his legendary 1838 Ride), c. 1840
    Last edited by Barry Goldwater; June 13, 2014 at 02:08 PM.

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    Default Re: Where Eagles Fly, 1845 Edition

    TL, Pt. IV
    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, including pressure from President Moore, 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 Thomas Moore to let the case go, which he eventually did.

    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 Moore 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 Moore 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 Moore'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.

    Suspecting the Texan President Thompson of supplying Republican rebels and allowing them to camp out on the Texan side of the border in an effort to place a more Texas-friendly government in Mexico, an irate Emperor Agustin sends 500 Imperial Mexican Army dragoons under the command of Colonel Rafael Delgado into Texas with orders to ride as deep into the young republic as they can, loot everything that isn't nailed down and burn everything that is, and shoot anyone who gets in their way in retaliation; unknown to even his most trusted councilors, Agustin was also attempting to probe Texan defenses in preparation for a new offensive campaign to reconquer the country. In any case, Delgado's raid is a glorious success, as he and his merry band of brothers burned and pillaged their way across southwest Texas before returning home with only light casualties, eluding efforts by the Texas Rangers and militia to stop him all the while; the only time Delgado faced any actual resistance was when about 50 Texan cavalry militiamen under a Lieutenant Harry Mosby, backed by another ~100 mounted volunteers, lucked into an encounter with him. As it turned out, Delgado deliberately exposed his forces to them because he wanted to have at least one actual fight before going home, and had planned to ambush the Texan cavalry column the moment they engaged his feinting force. The resulting 8-minute cavalry battle did not end well for the Texans, to put it mildly. Mosby was killed along with 30 of his men before most of the surviving Texans surrendered, only to be executed when one of them made the mistake of spitting in Delgado's eye while he was busy taunting them; five survivors were sent home with the heads of their comrades to break the news.

    Needless to say, the Mosby Massacre was not received well by the Texan public, who demanded vengeance. Many men volunteered to participate in retaliatory attacks on Mexican soil, unaware that that was exactly what Agustin wanted as justification for a renewed full-force invasion of Texas. President Thompson, keenly aware of the dismal chances any such raid would have against the battle-hardened Imperial Mexican Army and (like most Texan politicians, really) that Agustin was up for any excuse to attack again, refused to heed the public and instead began to promote the construction of new forts on the border in addition to heightened settlement of the frontier, including the disputed territories with Mexico (which was a subtler way of poking Agustin right back). Unfortunately for him, the Texans are outraged at what appears to be a show of weakness on his part, and soon enough they're calling him a coward and worse not only in bars or behind closed doors but in the streets.

    Although the Southern lobby called for a US annexation of Texas and invasion of Mexico in the aftermath of this raid, President Moore 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.

    This year's Texan election pits returning ex-President Sam Eggers of the Unionist Party against Jake Thompson of the Nationalists. Already derided as a coward for taking what was arguably the intelligent course of action following Delgado's Raid two years earlier, Thompson's already dim hopes of reelection - initially seeming brighter after the passage of legislation designed to mollify his racist supporters, such as the 'perpetual' denial of the franchise to non-whites and the sustained requirement of Congressional approval for the manumission of one's own slaves - were finally squashed come election day; too many Texans feared he wasn't doing enough to protect and advance their interests & that their best chance to not die rested with the United States, with even a few vocal racists finally deciding (no doubt after months of agonizing) that they'd rather live alongside a few more blacks and Indians over dying at the hands of angry Mexican troops. Thus, Eggers is returned to office with 52% of the vote, a narrower victory than the Unionists would have liked but a victory all the same.

    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.
    Last edited by Barry Goldwater; June 13, 2014 at 02:09 PM.

  9. #9
    Barry Goldwater's Avatar Mr. Conservative
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    Default Re: Where Eagles Fly, 1845 Edition

    Intelligence rules up, check the military rules post.

  10. #10
    Agamemnon's Avatar Comes Limitis
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    Default Re: Where Eagles Fly, 1845 Edition

    Hey Barry, I can polish up the political map and make an Econ map if it's helpful, just shoot me a PM with specifics (mainly for Central and South America, I know the history of the US well enough to do that much).

  11. #11
    Agamemnon's Avatar Comes Limitis
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    Default Re: Where Eagles Fly, 1845 Edition

    Apologies for the double post, but I wanted to make sure this got flagged as new. Here are your maps, please read the Readme, and I'd rather not do the railroad map to be honest, but I can if nobody else will.
    Maps.zip

  12. #12
    Barry Goldwater's Avatar Mr. Conservative
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    Default Re: Where Eagles Fly, 1845 Edition

    Thanks a ton & +rep Aggy, maps are now up on the second post. I'll also try to get the registration thread up tonight. I'll also try to do the railroad map myself if Paint.NET isn't too laggy, but no promises.

  13. #13
    Barry Goldwater's Avatar Mr. Conservative
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    Default Re: Where Eagles Fly, 1845 Edition

    Timeline's up, I've filled in the empty presidential slots with NPCs. As per the earlier vote, Braxford got the 1797-1805 presidency and Lamberth got the 1813-1821 presidency. In case Lamberth is actually dead by that time, @MMM feel free to give me his replacement's name

  14. #14
    Barry Goldwater's Avatar Mr. Conservative
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    Default Re: Where Eagles Fly, 1845 Edition

    Railroad map up, I hope it's legible to you guys. I've cropped it to cover just the US/Canada/Mexico/Central America b/c I highly doubt the USA of 1845, even under the more viciously racist and jingoistic Democrats of WEF (which is saying something considering just how bad their OTL counterparts were already) are going to go gallivanting in Venezuela or the Andes anytime soon I've also asked Aggy to create a numbered map, akin to what we had for 1776.

    I'll respond to the pre-game RP thread when more folks have signed up btw, chief among them the Lamberths as the guests of honor. MMM told me he's going to have them up soon (GMT ofc).

  15. #15
    Agamemnon's Avatar Comes Limitis
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    Default Re: Where Eagles Fly, 1845 Edition

    I once saw a movie called "The Confederate States of America" where the South won and then annexed everything except Canada. And then joined Hitler. And then fought a cold war with Canada. It was odd.

  16. #16
    Barry Goldwater's Avatar Mr. Conservative
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    Default Re: Where Eagles Fly, 1845 Edition

    You mean this? I'm pretty sure it was meant to be a parody. In any case, even if it wasn't the writers clearly fell into the same trap Turtledove did - completely & utterly failing to account for the butterfly effect, what with Hitler & the Soviets (among others) still existing as pretty much the exact same people doing the same stuff as they were IRL.

    Edit: To clarify, I have no problem with the butterfly effect being disregarded if it's meant as a parody, because the CSA teaming up with a Hitler identical to our Hitler is so absurd that it's funny and therefore works as a parody. OTOH, trying to make having the CSA & Real!Hitler team up a serious thing just feels dumb, not funny
    Last edited by Barry Goldwater; June 19, 2014 at 12:50 PM.

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    Default Re: Where Eagles Fly, 1845 Edition

    Considering it's classified as a mockumentary, I'd say it's a parody.

  18. #18
    Barry Goldwater's Avatar Mr. Conservative
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    Default Re: Where Eagles Fly, 1845 Edition

    Oh, and apparently Spike Lee was the producer. Thanks to that revelation combined with the film's contents, I think I can safely change my 'pretty sure' to a 'definitely sure' now

  19. #19
    chesser2538's Avatar Senator
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    Default Re: Where Eagles Fly, 1845 Edition

    Barry
    Just wondering, but shouldn't this conversation be moved to the bar?

    Under the Patronage of the venerable General Brewster

  20. #20
    Agamemnon's Avatar Comes Limitis
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    Default Re: Where Eagles Fly, 1845 Edition

    I dunno, I found it all hilarious. But I'm the sort that finds offensive things hilarious.

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