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"And the Lion said: come and see, I have brought Hell here. Every day I will bring Hell to the strong-girded men who you send me, and when I stack their corpses high enough, I will climb your walls and bring Hell inside."
-Record of the War of the Stones
Excerpt from: The Third Coalition, by Albrecht von Closen, 1921
Certain historians, no doubt cheeky figures who think themselves clever, have called the 3rd Coalitionary War the ‘Second War of the Spanish Succession.’ Such an appellation, of course, forgets the theaters of the war not primarily concerned with Iberia. Yet the wry nickname does contain a kernel of truth, for the War of the Third Coalition began with the question of who, exactly, should rule Spain?
This question, exacerbated by familial feuding, would spark a war with theaters on nearly every continent, and untold death on a massive scale. Had the Spanish Royal Family been less dysfunctional, perhaps the political situation in Spain could have been resolved, managed by the Coalition. Yet where similar Royal flights in Italy had produced Courts-in-exile on holdings that could be protected by the Royal Navy, a la the Sardinian Savoyards, the Spanish case was far more complicated. The Tumult had come about as a result of infighting between father and son, King and Heir. With the Madrid Putsch and the organization of a revolutionary militia (or, rather, a whipped-up radical mob), both men had fled from the capital to the North and the South, respectively. For the moment, legally, Ferdinand was the recognized King of Spain, having compelled his father to leave the throne.
Ferdinand, having fled to the port city of Alicante, enlisted the aid of the Royal Navy to ferry him to the Balearic islands and officially declared war on the French Republic, in tandem with the Coalition. Despite his safety on the Baleares, Ferdinand was nevertheless unpopular with the citizenry, particularly thanks to his decision to permit the landing of Royal troops in a number of Spanish cities to occupy them and hold against the threat of revolution. Already struggling to secure his legitimacy, Ferdinand was now seemingly under the sway of the British (protected largely by British troops, his islands protected by British ships), the long reviled protestant enemy of the Spanish, giving away more Gibraltars.
Ferdinand VII of Spain in his robes of state
Oil on Canvas, Francisco Goya, 1815
Over the protests and advice of the Portuguese and the British alike, King Charles took the opportunity to make his move. Full of bad blood for his treacherous son, Charles had fled to Galicia and had quickly cobbled together a loyal army. Now, with his son's popularity low, Charles declared he had been forced into abdicating under duress, and his son's current rule was declared naught but an interregnum between two non-consecutive reigns of Charles IV of Spain.
Further, Charles declared that his firstborn would be officially disowned, and that the heir to the throne would instead be the second-born, also named Charles. The junior Charles, known more popularly in English texts as Don Carlos, had fled across the Atlantic to New Spain. Close-minded, power hungry, bull-headed and ruthlessly stubborn, Don Carlos had long sought power and it now appeared to fall into his lap. In the coming days, Carlos' position far across the ocean would become immensely important to the politics of the metropole and the empire. What exactly was the state of politics in Spain proper? A Civil War, to put it bluntly.
The revolt in Madrid, anchored among the urban intelligentsia and the liberals of Madrid's salons, appealed to the common man more on the grounds of the monarchy's failure than any perceived alliance with France. While technically invited into the country by del Riego, to the average Spaniard the French were, at best, interlopers. The situation was worsened by the French strategy of peeling off sister republics, in this case encouraged by the Basques and Catalans who had ascended to positions of influence in the French Republic - in particular, Dominique Joseph Garat.
Garat, the last representative of Labourd and an unsuccessful advocate for the retention of Basque autonomy in the face of Jacobin centralism, found himself with a great degree of power over the fates of his brethren across the Pyrenees. Lazare Hoche may not have been the most astute political infighter, but knew how to best use the personnel at his disposal, and Garat was one of the first civilian officials sent across the border to begin establishing governing authorities along the Pyrenees. New Phoenicia, named for the ethnological theories of the time concerning the origin of the Basques (the Phoenicians, it was claimed, had made their way along the Iberian Coast. A ludicrous theory, yes, but one Garat believed), was established with Garat himself at its head as First Citizen. Garat was tasked with whipping up Basque nationalism as well as organizing the new Republic along modern lines - the young Republic would live or die by Garat’s hand, with a Sword of Damocles in the form of direct French annexation hanging over his head.
In Aragon and Catalonia, meanwhile, the French craftily played to both progress as well as tradition. Since the 1707-1716 Nueva Planta decrees, traditional Catalan and Aaragonese autonomy, including their respective parliaments, had been abolished in favor of absolutist centralisation in Madrid. Now, the invading French attempted to allay local concerns and discontent by re-establishing local administrations for Catalonia and Aragon, in Barcelona and Saragossa, respectively. Occupying authorities were careful not to state the exact nature of these governments, whether they were national or subnational within some future Spanish government, and the mandates for these parliaments were kept similarly hazy. In this way, the French could have their cake and eat it too.
Responding to the invasion, and to the Jacobin regime headquartered in Madrid, local juntas began to crop up wherever a local base of power could be carved out. As the war continued into 1808 and 1809, ambitious local generals and meek former bureaucrats alike began to declare themselves for either of the governing courts, when (to quote one angry Spaniard), the ‘disillusioned second son chose to stick his nose in where it didn’t belong.’ Don Carlos, declared by the senior Charles to be his heir, now declared (much as his brother had done) that his father was unfit to remain on the throne, and claimed the throne for himself. Suddenly the two-way civil war on the royalist side gained a third side!
Excerpt from: The Third Coalition, by Albrecht von Closen, 1921
[...] while the offensive South had yielded no small gains, French efforts to the East had been largely frustrated in the face of more concerted German defense. Institutional reform had reinforced the Holy Roman Empire’s ability to respond to invasion, though Prussia remained resentful and leaning towards Paris, and German troops found it impossible to make a real push back across the Rhine. Instead, the French-German border became something of a bloodbath, waves of troops throwing themselves against the defensive encampments each side had spent the past few years constructing.
To the South and East, the Ottoman and Polish fronts. An Austrian offensive into Bosnia and Southern Serbia, assisted by the Serbian legions long fostered in the Banat, had managed to capitalize against ineffectual and demoralized Turkish troops, still reeling from the Janissary uprisings that had rocked Constantanople over the past few years, and smaller local uprisings against Turkish suzerainty across the Balkans made conducting forward offensives difficult. Yet with force of numbers Ottoman troops had managed to prevent a rout, or a deeper push into the Turkish heartland.
Poland, meanwhile, benefitted from Prussian neutrality, leaving one long frontier militarily negligible. A two- or three-front war would prove more difficult, but with Austrian forces split between the French and Turks, Polish-Lithuanian troops could focus on the Russian border. The Commonwealth’s military leadership and their French tactical advisors determined that a push to the South could yield results: the territory of Ukraine and ‘the Wild Fields,’ still settled sparsely only by bands of Cossacks and former Ottoman dependencies, had been subject to increasing centralizing pressures of centralization since the last rounds of Turkish-Russian wars. Military and political leaders alike praised both the proud independent traditions of the Ukranians as well as the past ties between Poland and Ruthenia.
On the Italian front, the French and Italian forces decided on a ‘South-first’ strategy, designed to eliminate the last thorn in the side of Revolutionary control of the peninsula: the Kingdom of Naples. The Bourbons had briefly been pushed from the ‘boot’ of the peninsula in the 2nd Coalition War, yet a combined British-Sicilian naval-land counter-offensive had established the Bourbons in the city of Naples yet again. Yet nationalist fervor also desired the freeing of Venetia from the Habsburg yoke, conceded to the Austrians under difficult circumstances but lying right across the Padan Plain, ripe for the liberation. While the island of Sicily was largely protected by the still-unchallenged British navy, eliminating the hostile Bourbons from the Italian mainland was an achievable goal.
On The Extinction Of The Venetian Republic
Robert Anning Bell, 1907
While the British navy was defending the islands of the Mediterranean, they were also on the offensive among the islands of the East Indies. There were bright spots for the Revolutionary coalition, largely thanks to allies on the ground. For instance, a surprise attack by the growing Vietnamese fleet upon the Dutch navy resulted in one of the first outright naval victories by a non-European navy upon a European one since the dawn of modern imperialism. Yet this strategy had also been co-opted by the British, who could depend on native kingdoms in Southeast Asia and the wider East Indies to keep the Vietnamese contained and, chafing under unsettled Dutch rule, throw off the Batavian yoke.
Indeed, Britain remained largely unchallenged at sea and a constant threat to the North. Multiple French cities faced potential food shortages as grain shipments were made impossible along both the Mediterranean and the Atlantic, and the British had enacted a doctrine of naval harassment within nearly the entire Atlantic basin. Impressment became a key strategy for the Royal Navy, serving both to reinforce troop numbers and to restrict potential trade to France, and if a ship was seen flying the flag of any power not explicitly allied to the British Empire or the Third Coalition, it was under constant risk of capture. The other edge of this sword would prove to be the entrance of the United States into the war.
The United States and the United Kingdom had been engaged in an informal, off-and-on-again naval trade war, the so-called ‘Quasi War,’ for most of the first decade of the 19th century. The young country’s second President, Thomas Jefferson, was an ardent Francophile, and had praised even some of the greatest excesses of the French Revolution. His successor after two terms in office, James Monroe, was caught between the horns of a dilemma - a Virginia planter personally opposed to the excesses of the French revolution, Monroe had spent a great deal of his post-US-revolution career as Minister to France, and had inherited a simmering conflict between the United States and its erstwhile parent. Yet there was theoretically no need to enter a formal war with the United Kingdom, until Monroe was made an offer he simply could not refuse.
As will be noted below, the collapse of domestic tranquility in Spain had disrupted the management of Spain’s vast New World empire. While one party to the civil war, Don Carlos, had hitched his metaphorical wagon to the resiliency of Spanish rule in Mexico, Spanish control over its colonies was made largely nonexistent by the presence of three royalist claims, each of whom jockeyed for the allegiance from individual juntas to beef up their legitimacy as well as their armies. The Madrid Government, meanwhile, cared very little for the faraway colonies when the priority was clearly to establish stable governance right at home. Colonies could be a matter of prestige, yes, but in the case of Spanish Louisiania, a colony could also be a useful bargaining chip.
Discovery of the Mississippi by De Soto
Oil on canvas, William H. Powell, 1853
The trade would be simple. The Madrid government, despite its insurrectionary nature, did benefit from the legitimacy of holding the Spanish capital, as well as presenting a more unified front as compared to the three-way split among the royalists. Thus, if the nascent Spanish Republic was to, say, agree to return the Louisiana territory to France, they could be well within their right to do so. And if the French Republic was to agree to sell the Louisiana territory to the United States for pennies on the dollar, giving a key ally control over the continent’s waterway and one of the most valuable ports in the world, New Orleans, they too would be justified. The 2nd Treaty of Fontainebleau would thus more than double the size of the United States - but not for long. Spain (or *a* Spain, in any case) may have consented, France may have consented, and the US may have consented, but Britain certainly did not. Thus, as the US began to move troops and officials over to New Orleans, they were greeted by British frigates in the harbor. Within just a few weeks, and just after a regency had been declared for King George III, the man who had lost the colonies, his son and regent would formally declare war on the United States.
The ‘second revolution,’ or ‘Mr. Monroe’s War,’ whipped up no small amount of nationalistic fervor at the outset. Not all within the boundaries of the United States agreed, of course - native Americans, drawn together by the pan-Indian movement led by Tenskwatawa (‘the Prophet’) and a Shawnee Chief named Tecumseh, had held a number of back-channel discussions with the British via the remaining British forts throughout the Great Lakes area (which were cited as well for a justification for war) and believed that the only way to prevent American settler expansionism was to ally with the British - but broadly speaking, the public was in favor of the war. Even the Federalists of New England, generally more Anglophilic, were whipped up in the momentum of events, with the growing importance of French trade to even New England playing no small part. The United States seemed entirely united against the British menace - little did they know the disaster this war would bring.
Author's Note: Since it's been a longer writing process than I'd wanted, I decided to split the 3rd Coalition War into two posts - background in this one, resolution in the next one. Next post should be far sooner, assuming the process works out well.
The World of Tricolors and Traditions: Human History Without Napoleon
- Thread starter Godot
- Start date
You could argue it's because war is going on but they also didn't object to France selling it to the US under Napoleon, not to mention the fact they're already fighting in Spain and sending their best troops there and the British army already wasn't much of a great thing during much of the Napoleonic wars, so the Americans will be fighting second rate troops in New Orleans but will get their assess kicked once they try and fight into Canada like OTL.
Will go into more detail on this; however they're theoretically intervening on behalf of the Spanish crown/contesting the Madrid gov't's ability to make such a sale/denying the Americans a valuable port
So Britain is doing more to preserve the Spanish Empire in this timeline than it was inclined to do in OTL under circumstances far more favorable to the Spanish monarchy?
Making a point to address this in the next update, but generally the move is largely driven by self-interest. American control of N.O. and the Mississippi is deemed an intolerable threat to British America and would make restricting American resupply of the French harder.
I think it would be pretty funny if the winning side of the Spanish Civil War renegades on both the Brits and French and just goes into general aloofness to deal with it's own troubles instead of dying for Republicans they see as dangerous or for the centuries old enemies in the British
Very much Spain, but without the SExcerpt from: The Third Coalition, by Albrecht von Closen, 1921
Certain historians, no doubt cheeky figures who think themselves clever, have called the 3rd Coalitionary War the ‘Second War of the Spanish Succession.’ Such an appellation, of course, forgets the theaters of the war not primarily concerned with Iberia. Yet the wry nickname does contain a kernel of truth, for the War of the Third Coalition began with the question of who, exactly, should rule Spain?
This question, exacerbated by familial feuding, would spark a war with theaters on nearly every continent, and untold death on a massive scale. Had the Spanish Royal Family been less dysfunctional, perhaps the political situation in Spain could have been resolved, managed by the Coalition. Yet where similar Royal flights in Italy had produced Courts-in-exile on holdings that could be protected by the Royal Navy, a la the Sardinian Savoyards, the Spanish case was far more complicated. The Tumult had come about as a result of infighting between father and son, King and Heir. With the Madrid Putsch and the organization of a revolutionary militia (or, rather, a whipped-up radical mob), both men had fled from the capital to the North and the South, respectively. For the moment, legally, Ferdinand was the recognized King of Spain, having compelled his father to leave the throne.
Ferdinand, having fled to the port city of Alicante, enlisted the aid of the Royal Navy to ferry him to the Balearic islands and officially declared war on the French Republic, in tandem with the Coalition. Despite his safety on the Baleares, Ferdinand was nevertheless unpopular with the citizenry, particularly thanks to his decision to permit the landing of Royal troops in a number of Spanish cities to occupy them and hold against the threat of revolution. Already struggling to secure his legitimacy, Ferdinand was now seemingly under the sway of the British (protected largely by British troops, his islands protected by British ships), the long reviled protestant enemy of the Spanish, giving away more Gibraltars.
Ferdinand VII of Spain in his robes of state
Oil on Canvas, Francisco Goya, 1815
Over the protests and advice of the Portuguese and the British alike, King Charles took the opportunity to make his move. Full of bad blood for his treacherous son, Charles had fled to Galicia and had quickly cobbled together a loyal army. Now, with his son's popularity low, Charles declared he had been forced into abdicating under duress, and his son's current rule was declared naught but an interregnum between two non-consecutive reigns of Charles IV of Spain.
Further, Charles declared that his firstborn would be officially disowned, and that the heir to the throne would instead be the second-born, also named Charles. The junior Charles, known more popularly in English texts as Don Carlos, had fled across the Atlantic to New Spain. Close-minded, power hungry, bull-headed and ruthlessly stubborn, Don Carlos had long sought power and it now appeared to fall into his lap. In the coming days, Carlos' position far across the ocean would become immensely important to the politics of the metropole and the empire. What exactly was the state of politics in Spain proper? A Civil War, to put it bluntly.
The revolt in Madrid, anchored among the urban intelligentsia and the liberals of Madrid's salons, appealed to the common man more on the grounds of the monarchy's failure than any perceived alliance with France. While technically invited into the country by del Riego, to the average Spaniard the French were, at best, interlopers. The situation was worsened by the French strategy of peeling off sister republics, in this case encouraged by the Basques and Catalans who had ascended to positions of influence in the French Republic - in particular, Dominique Joseph Garat.
Garat, the last representative of Labourd and an unsuccessful advocate for the retention of Basque autonomy in the face of Jacobin centralism, found himself with a great degree of power over the fates of his brethren across the Pyrenees. Lazare Hoche may not have been the most astute political infighter, but knew how to best use the personnel at his disposal, and Garat was one of the first civilian officials sent across the border to begin establishing governing authorities along the Pyrenees. New Phoenicia, named for the ethnological theories of the time concerning the origin of the Basques (the Phoenicians, it was claimed, had made their way along the Iberian Coast. A ludicrous theory, yes, but one Garat believed), was established with Garat himself at its head as First Citizen. Garat was tasked with whipping up Basque nationalism as well as organizing the new Republic along modern lines - the young Republic would live or die by Garat’s hand, with a Sword of Damocles in the form of direct French annexation hanging over his head.
In Aragon and Catalonia, meanwhile, the French craftily played to both progress as well as tradition. Since the 1707-1716 Nueva Planta decrees, traditional Catalan and Aaragonese autonomy, including their respective parliaments, had been abolished in favor of absolutist centralisation in Madrid. Now, the invading French attempted to allay local concerns and discontent by re-establishing local administrations for Catalonia and Aragon, in Barcelona and Saragossa, respectively. Occupying authorities were careful not to state the exact nature of these governments, whether they were national or subnational within some future Spanish government, and the mandates for these parliaments were kept similarly hazy. In this way, the French could have their cake and eat it too.
Responding to the invasion, and to the Jacobin regime headquartered in Madrid, local juntas began to crop up wherever a local base of power could be carved out. As the war continued into 1808 and 1809, ambitious local generals and meek former bureaucrats alike began to declare themselves for either of the governing courts, when (to quote one angry Spaniard), the ‘disillusioned second son chose to stick his nose in where it didn’t belong.’ Don Carlos, declared by the senior Charles to be his heir, now declared (much as his brother had done) that his father was unfit to remain on the throne, and claimed the throne for himself. Suddenly the two-way civil war on the royalist side gained a third side!
Part 12: Welcome America
"The three greatest fools of history have been Jesus Christ, Don Quixote — and I!"
-Simon Bolivar
Excerpt from: The Foolish Fatherlands, by Óscar Amalfitano, 1985
[...] the collapse of Spanish authority let loose the seething, bubbling undercurrent of popular discontent which had gripped Spanish America since the conclusion of Túpac Amaru II’s revolt. That revolt, which had seen the successful capture of Lima by rebel forces and forced a general settlement between the rebels and the Viceroyalty, had fostered a highly autonomous neo-Incan elite led by Amaru II himself, his royal lineage recognized and much imperial land title restored.
That title had passed to Andrés Túpac Amaru, the II’s nephew, lately Amaru III. Amaru III was the de facto leader of a rising Aymaru and Quechua elite in the Viceroyalty of Peru, whose extensive influence among the indigenous peoples of Upper and Lower Peru made him and his advisors the real center of power in the region, not the Viceroy. The region had garnered a reputation for producing strong military leaders, many women among them, and Amaru III (through his local subordinates) could call upon an ad hoc army of many thousands - something he very well did following the Tumult in Spain. Headquartered in Cuzco, Amaru III’s army began to establish a government parallel to the legal authority emanating from Lima as early as 1808. With the collapse of the royalist side into feuding claims, the position of incumbent Viceroy José Fernando de Abascal y Sousa was made precarious - who, if anyone, should he declare for?
View of the Spanish troops’ entrance in the city of Quito in 1809
Oil on Canvas, Francisco Javier Cortés, 1810
An ardent absolutist monarchist, Sousa chose the senior Carlos, and was quickly “replaced” by candidates from each of the rival candidates (though neither of these replacements could actually make the trip). This move was generally smart, and necessary, and was likely responsible for Sousa’s ability to hang on (for dear life) in the coming years. Yet the declaration generated discontent in the ranks from the already-shaken Spanish armies of Peru, and limited the offensive military moves he could make against Amaru III. Largely in control of the Peruvian highlands and the Inca heartland, Amaru III moved to champion his late uncle’s cause, and officially declared the restoration of the Inca State. The State’s de jure claims were quite wide, yet de facto Tupac’s territory was hemmed in: to the South, the La Paz junta was locked in combat with loyalist forces, and a number of smaller juntas had been established, contributing to a general chaos. To the North, Sousa’s operationally limited yet tactically powerful force of royalists held Lima and much of lower Peru. Local authorities in Chile came out on the side of Sousa, yet even during the height of Spanish control over South America, control over Chile and its governance from Lima had long been hazy. The thin strip of mountainous territory slipped, too, into civil conflict between royalists, federalists, and centralists.
To the North were other declarations of independence. The first came from Caracas, soon bringing about the establishment of the First Republic of Venezuela, though much of the Republic’s claimed territory was in fact held by royalists of different shades. Complicating matters would be chaos in Bogota, the center of the Viceroyalty of New Granada. Fighting broke out between differing royalist factions, providing an opening for the establishment of the Junta de Santa Fe and its subsequent declaration of independence. Yet while this nascent state claimed possession of the entirety of the Viceroyalty, the area it held (known as Cundinamarca) was in reality quite limited. Other nationalistic juntas had arisen to the North and East, and much of the coasts remained in the hands of royalists. New Granada’s royalists were split between the rival claimants, yet the revolutionaries, too, were split between Federalists and Centralists. In this turbulent period, a number of distinct declarations of independence were passed by major juntas. To the West, the aforementioned unitary Free and Independent State of Cundinamarca was joined by the Federalist United Provinces of New Granada, which claimed the entirety of the former Viceroyalty. To the West, the First Republic of Venezuela was formally organized into the American Confederation of Venezuela, which itself would be overrun by Royalists, only to be re-established yet again in 1813 as the Second Republic of Venezuela, headed by creole patriot leader Simon Bolivar.
Simón Bolívar in La Paz
Oil on Canvas, José Toro Moreno, 1920
To the South, the May Revolution had outright removed the reigning Viceroy of the River Plate, bringing political chaos to the region. A new Viceroy was appointed in the city of Montevideo, while a series of wobbly juntas in and around Buenos Aires attempted to settle questions of regionalism or centralization through military force, sending out armies against both royalists as well as rival juntas being established in areas nominally within the Viceroyalty. One such area, the Guarani-dominated region later known as Paraguai, secured its independence fairly peacefully, with the local royalists largely too inept to prevent liberation. While nominally part of the Viceroyalty of Rio de la Plata, by 1814 authorities in Buenos Aires were unable to re-establish control. For by then the Viceroyalty was split in twain - to the West, the Liga Federal, formally the League of the Free Peoples, and to the East, the Centralist Congress of Tucuman. The former, headquartered in Montevideo and extending into the region known as Mesopotamia, while the latter controlled Buenos Aires and much of the sparsely populated hinterlands of the country.
The one bright region for royalism was the far North, the Viceroyalty of New Spain. Having relocated to Mexico City upon The Tumult, Don Carlos had carved out a base of support for himself among the powerful Creole landowners of Mexico, eventually gaining firm control of the entirety of the Mexican heartland. Yet control of the periphery evaded him, due in no small part to his priorities: Don Carlos, at the time, only saw himself as an exiled King, and his forces were largely concerned with planning trans-Atlantic landings upon the Iberian Peninsula. Don Carlos (a thoroughly thick-headed man) was generally unconcerned with the chaos unfolding in South America, and was even dismissive of the nascent revolts unfolding in Central America. The only real concern he had was a French-backed American invasion through Louisiana - a concern shared by the British, who obligingly intervened in Carlos’ stead (though this was mostly motivated by self-interest on the part of the Brits, who saw American control of the Mississippi as an existential threat to Prince Rupert’s Land and islands like Jamaica).
It would be Carlos’ illusionary control over the periphery that would doom him, though. His reign was from the start not particularly popular among the criollos and the emerging American-born middle class, who regarded the young pretender as an unwelcome usurper. Others still, beginning to dream of a distinct Mexican identity, found the Iberian hegemony he directly represented to be a threat to their aspirations. They, however, found it difficult to act out as some were doing in South America, though a number of informal Congresses were organized, and Mexican equivalences of the Stater ‘Committees of Correspondence’ began to build up an intellectual tradition, as well as a deep bench of patriots - figures like the pastor Miguel Hidalgo, wealthy businessman Vicente Guerrero, army captain Ignacio Allende, and many others. Yet while Carlos counted upon the support of Conservative landowners, on the edges of the Viceroyalty those who had begun to stake their claim to the vast stretches of land found themselves increasingly left out to dry. It was at this time, with the Brits and Spanish alike wholly distracted, that the Comanche began more concertedly to consolidate their hold over New Mexico and the plains of Spanish Texas.
The Comanche economy, at this time, relied heavily on raids and what trade could be conducted through the Comanchero trading class. Raiding and the capture of European or Creole settlers had gradually grown the Comanche population, though central political institutions were fairly ephemeral. In the 1780s, a number of Comanche chiefs had decided upon a single figure to represent them at peace negotiations with the Spanish. This man, a chief named Ecueracapa, had died around 1793, and had been followed by Encanaguané, whose death in 1810 brought a man named Tahuchimpia to the position of war chief. Generally speaking there was little need to negotiate with the Comanche before war erupted in North America. After hostilities began, though, the Comanche were recognized as important regional stakeholders.
For any campaign into Louisiana, and any control over the territory, relied heavily on how permissive the Comanche were feeling. Don Carlos, characteristically, was largely uninterested in anything that did not concern Europe. The British, though, saw the Comanche as a distinct threat to the stability of the Louisiana territory, and thus their campaign against the United States. Additionally, it was clear to anyone with half a brain (thus excluding Don Carlos) that the British in fact held ambitions towards the Louisiana territory, particularly in regards to the Mississippi River and the extraordinarily valuable port of New Orleans. To work with the Comanche would be to cement British control over this contested land. To this end, intermediaries who spoke English and Comanche (as well as Spanish) were recruited to put out feelers. Yet again, the Comanche were faced with the need for some sort of central political figure, a role that would be filled by the young Tahuchimpia.
War on the Plains
Oil on Canvas, George Catlin, 1834
The place that was chosen for negotiations would be the central watering hole of Comancheria, an area later known as Big Spring. A small permanent post would soon be established there, creating a permanent European ‘embassy’ in Comancheria for the first time. Negotiations would prove fruitful, both sides walking away mostly happy - the Comanche would continue to receive European manufactured goods, particularly firearms, as well as fine riding horses. The British were comfortable turning a blind eye to Comanche raids, as long as they were directed to the South and West, away from Louisiana. Thus, the British were comfortable with the knowledge that the British rear would not be raided or harassed by Comanche war bands, and additionally knew that if a permanent British presence were established in the Louisiana country, there would be a healthy trade of Comanche furs, meats, and goods waiting for them.
As the War of the Third Coalition progressed, British interests turned more and more to the re-establishment of significant British influence in North America. In mid 1811, the Red River Colony was founded by Thomas Douglas, 5th Earl of Selkirk, creating an agricultural colony that extended civilian settlement further into the Great Prairie. Without an active player in Central America, the British moved to secure their claims in Belize, opening a new fort and naval base on the island of St. George's Caye, solidifying British control over the contested area. Just to the South, an uprising by the Miskito people, a long-time British ally along the coast of Honduras and Nicaragua, rose up in revolt and expelled the Spanish from the capital of Bluefields, re-establishing the Miskito Kingdom under George Frederic Augustus I, himself largely guided by the newly-reappointed British superintendent, the physical representation of the re-established British protectorate.
The invasion of Spain helped bring about a new dawn for the ailing French navy. For many years, dating back to the burning of the old navy in Toulon, France had been pressed in on all coasts by the Royal Navy, and found it eternally difficult to resupply foreign holdings in the Indies, Australia, or the Caribbean. Yet the interbellum period had provided a useful reprieve, and a valuable time for construction. Adding to this was the capture of the Port of Cartagena by Revolutionary forces, where a sizable share of the Spanish Armada had been located. The rejuvenation of France's naval strength could not have come at a better time. Île-de-France, in the Southwest Indian Ocean, had been seized in an ambitious British naval raid by 1812, and the growing port of St Aloüarn in Western Australia was only barely hanging on with the assistance of local native allies. Critical to French naval success was the entry of the United States to the war, providing pressure upon the British Atlantic Fleets that France’s other allies, Poland and Turkey, could not provide on their own.
On that note, a brief aside, to examine one of the stranger episodes of naval history. In 1811, a Stater sailor, unsuccessful pirate, and recreational seal hunter founded his own country. Yes, really. Landing on the uninhabited island of Tristan da Cunha, Mr. Jonathan Lambert of Salem, Massachusetts, became the first man to permanently settle upon the desolate rock. Accompanying him was an Italian man named Tomasso Corri, an Englishman named William Stukeley, and a fourth named Andrew Millet - as well as Mr. Stukeley’s wife. The five began to busy themselves growing grain and raising pigs (and, in the case of the Stukeleys, children). Lambert, displaying more than a little of the grandiose insanity he would gain so much prominence for, declared the island, less than half a dozen people large, to be an independent princedom under his reign as Lambert I.
Yet the little islet became the center of military controversy when a frigate and a merchant vessel, British and Stater, respectively both sought to resupply there. Whichever side he chose would surely incur the wrath of the other! Caught between the horns of a dilemma, Lambert was saved by what he declared in his memoirs to be an “Act of the Lord,” though in reality it was an act of booze. On the night of January 14th, 1812, a drunk sailor on the British vessel knocked a cigar (stolen from the captain’s supply), stumbled and lit up an unsecured powder supply on the ship’s lower decks. The resulting explosion flung burning rubble far and wide, which quickly set the Stater merchant vessel alight! Suddenly, Lambert found himself the de facto leader of a straggling band of British and Stater survivors, hundreds and hundreds of miles away from homelands which did not yet know what would happen…
[...]
The story above is, no doubt, an amusing anecdote, with individual men and single vessels playing their roles like actors in a play. Yet the confrontation in the seas around the Islands of Refreshment (as the islands had been named by Lambert) also works as an encapsulation and simplification of the Anglo-Stater theater of the War of the Third Coalition: namely, a British frigate destroying a United Stater trade ship, with no small amount of sheer luck playing an important role.
The Stater land forces had achieved some minor success in the wars’ early days, advancing past the St. Lawrence into British North America and Quebec. Yet years of cuts and mismanagement under successive Jeffersonian administrations had left the army, and especially the navy, in poor shape for conflict. The Royal Navy quickly asserted naval supremacy along much of the US’s coast (though the move required diverting some ships from the mission of harassing French shipping, thus fulfilling one of Paris’s goals when it brought the US into the war in the first place!), and had thus staved off the threat of the Canadian Maritime Colonies being cut off by land with largely unchallenged resupply missions by sea.
Combat between USS Constitution and HMS Guerriere
Oil on Canvas, 1813, Michel Felice Corne
Early Stater land successes were further undercut by the overstretching of their lines and the difficulties of resupplying through a largely hostile hinterland. Enemy tribes continually launched hit-and-run guerrilla attacks on Stater convoys and harassed the Stater rear whenever a larger-scale push was attempted into British-held territory. Any military movement around the Great Lakes ran the risk of coordinated Native-British guerrilla strikes on supply lines, leaving the initial successes of the invasion high and dry - literally, with a wave of dysentery at one point spreading through the Stater ranks thanks to contaminated water supplies.
By the Spring of 1814, Stater offensives had generally stalled and in many places had been forced to retreat for lack of adequate supplies. British forces, some still stationed in de jure US territory in a number of Midwest forts, proved implacable to the militias raised against them, and by the end of the season the Brits had taken Fort Detroit. Yet worse humiliations were yet to come, and at the height of summer, August 1814, the British marched (largely unopposed) through the streets of Washington D.C., and sacked the US capital. The Presidential Mansion and the Congress were both torched, with British soldiers infamously taking possession of the meal left in the Mansion (for the President and his wife had fled on very short notice), and toasting to the health of Mr. Madison. The spectacular occupation of Washington, D.C., though lasting only a few days before torrential rain forced the British out, was a complete and utter humiliation. Worse yet, and oft-overshadowed by the rout at Washington, was the subsequent occupation of Baltimore and the sacking of that city as well.
Worse yet would be the ill-fated battle of New Orleans. Acting without authorization from Washington (or, by then, Philadelphia), Major General Andrew Jackson led an army of some six thousand recruits, militiamen, and allied Natives, into the Old French Quarter of New Orleans, having severely underestimated the number of British troops occupying that city. Nearly the entirety of the Stater contingent, including Jackson himself, would be surrounded and slaughtered by a British defending force a size and a half larger than what the young Major General had mustered. While the destruction of the capital city had been a serious blow, the abject failure to take New Orleans (whose theoretical purchase had been the entire basis for the war!) convinced a number of influential Stater politicians that the conflict was largely in vain. For opposed to the war from the start had been the Federalist Party, long-unsuccessful yet highly influential, who garnered more and more support as the ill-prepared military foundered.
Battle of New Orleans
Oil on Canvas, 1815, Jean Hyacinthe de Laclotte
The United States would fall largely into a defensive posture for the remainder of the war, and British forces began a push into the Northwest Territory and across the Eastern Seaboard (at one stage seriously threatening New York City, though such a landing was dissuaded by poor weather). The 1814 election was a rout for the Jeffersonians, as the Federalist Party seized control of both houses of Congress for the first time. Yet the circumstances and the conduct of the election were quickly called into question.
The failures of the past decade and a half had only served to enlarge Hamilton’s influence, and worsen his distrust of the “rabble” and the masses. In response, a somewhat shadowy elite began to cultivate power behind the scenes. Some especially paranoid Jeffersonians began to decry the influence of Freemasons over the proceedings, yet it could not be denied that outside organizations, particularly the Society of the Cincinnati, the country’s premier hereditary military order (and, as some believed, aristocratic society). With most popular elections held under threat of British military incursion, and a general state of mayhem having set in both on the coast and in the periphery, the election of much of the House of Representatives and many State offices were dubious, at best. Chapters of the Society of the Cincinnati, along with Federalist grassroots organizations like the Washington Benevolent Societies, largely selected the winners from among their own ranks. Tellingly, the winner of the 1816 Presidential election would be Charles Cotesworth Pinckney, influential Federalist and chairman of the Society of the Cincinnati. Even before the election, the United States had sent out peace feelers to London, a process which accelerated with Pinckney’s victory as well as with the general process of peacemaking that brought the War of the Third Coalition to a close.
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I wonder what's the treaty between the Americans and Brits will look like, probably a revision of the border between the US and Canada in the latter's favor as well the renouncing of New Orleans and the surrounding territory to Britain, westward expansion will still happen but I do wonder how a US without a New Orleans and with a clear defeat in the war will look like.
Also, I imagine that with the chaos in Spanish America, two powers are taking advantage of it: the first being Portugal and Brazil who always had massive ambitions of "natural borders" in the Plata Region and are most likely preparing to invade and annex Uruguay and Mesopotamia region ASAP and considering the chaos in the region they won't have much trouble doing it, especially since their British ally is busy and can't "act as a mediator", upper north we'll have Haiti who most likely at this point has annexed Santo Domingo and given their much better relationship with France, are most likely trying to inspire revolts in other Caribbean nations.
Also, I imagine that with the chaos in Spanish America, two powers are taking advantage of it: the first being Portugal and Brazil who always had massive ambitions of "natural borders" in the Plata Region and are most likely preparing to invade and annex Uruguay and Mesopotamia region ASAP and considering the chaos in the region they won't have much trouble doing it, especially since their British ally is busy and can't "act as a mediator", upper north we'll have Haiti who most likely at this point has annexed Santo Domingo and given their much better relationship with France, are most likely trying to inspire revolts in other Caribbean nations.
Indeed. wish nothing but the best for them as they inspire slave uprisings in the Caribbean that sees the Euros expelled and slavery destroyed as they cooperate with one another to develop the region, even if it doesn't happen like that, having a free and unified Hispaniola that doesn't get screwed up by the French Invasion as well as other factors is ideal, especially if they act like OTL haven for Spanish independence leaders like Bolivar
The Portuguese will be examined next update, particularly their position in Brazil. For now Uruguay remains Spanish, though controlled by the Montevideo junta/Federal League.
Haïti will be examined a bit as well, namely their state under the French. They have seized Santo Domingo - it was passed to France after the 2nd Coalition and annexed to Haiti.
It will be, yes. This'll be examined in the next update, which will concern the European theatres of the war.
Some hints laid in the latest update - keep an eye on the Midwest. Working on a map of the postwar state of America, though I may kick it down the road a bit until things settle, 1820 or so? We'll see.
Hopefully the latest update addresses this adequately. Really it's barely disguised British ambition to control Mississippi and trade out of New Orleans. Hopefully I haven't flanderized Don Carlos too much but he's basically willing to let the Brits do as they please in the New World, he's got blinders on for everything but control over Madrid.
Catalonia will be a notable sticking point going forward, though no spoilers on how the war in Spain proceeds! That'll be examined next time. I will say though that I hope to examine the economics and industrialization of France and it's sister republics soon.
Thank you! Crazily enough quite a bit of what's going on is barely more complicated than how the wars of independence proceeded IOTL. The phrase 'La Patria Boba,' aka 'the foolish fatherland' is a real term used in Colombian historiography to describe the chaotic and occasionally nonsensical early years of the independence struggle. However, while OTL had basically a single central junta in Spain to pledge support for, ITTL there are 3. Much much messier.
Good catch, thanks.
The situation is insanely messy for the US, yeah. Without too many hints I'll say that the US and Brazil *kinda* switch roles here? To some extent, anyway.
Portugal and the UK are taking their chances for sure, but we'll soon see more powers dive in. The Russians, the French, and even the Dutch still have a role to play in the Americas. As noted above (sorry for not addressing your first question on it!) Haiti does indeed control Santo Domingo, under L'Ouverture's watchful eye. Exporting revolution to the rest of the Caribbean was made difficult by the weak state of the French navy, and even though the situation on that front has improved, the winding down of slavery in the British colonies has defused tensions a little there.
However significant issues do still stand there, and the creole cultures emerging are creating distinct cultural makeups as they did IOTL. The Maya to the North of Belize will be very important in a decade or two as well.
Indeed. Hope to examine this over the next few updates, some of which will be less concerned with war and diplomacy, and more concerned with the internal governance and society of France, it's outlying holdings, and the economics of the world at this stage. As seen a few updates ago, L'Ouverture lives to a ripe old age, and his wit and political tact will be crucial for Haiti going forward.