Posted on 07/05/2014 6:23:56 PM PDT by 2ndDivisionVet
The Fourth of July—a time we Americans set aside to celebrate our independence and mark the war we waged to achieve it, along with the battles that followed. There was the War of 1812, the War of 1833, the First Ohio-Virginia War, the Three States' War, the First Black Insurrection, the Great War, the Second Black Insurrection, the Atlantic War, the Florida Intervention.
Confused? These are actually conflicts invented for the novel The Disunited States of America by Harry Turtledove, a prolific (and sometimes-pseudonymous) author of alternate histories with a Ph.D. in Byzantine history. The book is set in the 2090s in an alternate United States that is far from united. In fact, the states, having failed to ratify a constitution following the American Revolution, are separate countries that oscillate between cooperating and warring with one another, as in Europe.
"They couldn't agree on how to set up the legislature," one character explains. "The big states wanted it based on population. The little ones wanted each state to have one vote no matter how many people it had. They were too stubborn to split the difference."
Turtledove told me that it was Richard Dreyfuss, the actor, who first gave him the idea of the American Revolution as a subject for alternate history. The two collaborated on a novel, The Two Georges, that is set in the 1990s and based on the premise that the Revolutionary War never happened. Instead, George Washington and King George III struck an agreement in which the United States and Canada (the "North American Union") remained part of the British Empire. The artist Thomas Gainsborough commemorated the deal in a painting, The Two Georges, that is emblazoned on money and made ubiquitous as a symbol of the felicitous "union between Great Britain and her American dominions."(continued)
(Excerpt) Read more at theatlantic.com ...
Correct.
Exactly, if they had treated us less like a colony and more like an integral part of the country? We might have been better off as a part of their empire. More like Australia. More homogenous. More British.
It’s my recollection that ‘Disunited States’ is one of a series aimed at the youth market. ‘Two Georges’ is aimed at adults.
The extra taxes were because the colonies would not defend themselves from the F&I’s but insisted that England do it for them. The ‘control’ was largely because the colonies wanted to expand westward and England wanted to stop them from that because of the extra forces and cost that would then be required to defend the longer perimeter.
If the colonies had stayed with Britain, Australia may not have become a Brit colony. After the successful American Secession, the Brits could no longer ship their criminals to Georgia and had to ship them much further, to Australia.
No French Revolution, no Napoleon. That would have to have huge effects on Europe, not even considering what was going on here. Great Briton would likely still be the empire on which the sun never sets.
Would WW I have occurred?
I read “The Two Georges”. It follows a colonel in the ‘Royal American Mounted Police’ after the painting of ‘The Two Georges” is stolen while on a tour of the ‘North American Union’.
The Governor-General of the NAU is ‘Sir Martin Luther King’.
One of the characters is a used-steamcar salesman known as “Honest” Dick Nixon.
All in all, it’s a fascinating book.
Turtledove also wrote another alt-history book called “The Guns Of The South”. It chronicles how some white separatists from South Africa use a time-machine to go back to 1861 and offer help to the Confederacy in their upcoming conflict with the North. They bring with them a weapon from the future...a gun that’s easy and cheap to mass-produce (with the separatist’s help)...the AK-47. With the help of the strangers and their “repeating rifle”, the South wins their war, capturing President Lincoln, who capitulates to the Confederacy’s demands.
If we lost, we would probably be a member of the Commonwealth playing cricket and having a Marxist dictator rule us in a one party state. Er...we do, the one party is the democrats and republicans and the dictator is Obama.
Or Germany or Japan....who knows, we might even be an offshoot of N. Korea...
Jesus probably would have already returned.
May have been worse for Europe. On the other side of the coin, in order to put down the rebellion here for good, England would have had to commit ships and men that they needed elsewhere to fight France and Spain. With their resources over here, England could have lost important wars on that side of the pond.
For practical purposes, all blacks in this country are descended from those here in 1807. So how would a British connection have cut down on the number here?
Because I don’t think the US vigorously enforced it. (If they did, I stand corrected.)
Actually, the Revolution to a considerable extent occurred because the French were no longer a threat, having been completely defeated in the French and Indian War. The Americans therefore no longer needed the protection of an imperial connection.
Actually, they did. The original charter of Carolina promulgated a bizarre system of government with a complete hierarchy of nobility, drawn up by John Locke, of all people.
Maryland was granted to the Earls of Baltimore, Georgia to James Oglethorpe.
Parts of Maine were handed out to proprietors.
The Duke of York was given New York and New Jersey. Also Massachusetts, which didn't take.
Pennsylvania and Delaware were famously given to William Penn
The institution of feudalism just never took root here. Conditions were just too different for it to be relevant.
Can't tell that from the actual actions of Germany and Austria at the time.They mostly saw an opportunity to aggrandize themselves at the expense of Russia.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treaty_of_Brest-Litovsk
Delusional, to be sure, on the part of the German government.
The first and, I believe, only slave trader executed was in NYC after Lincoln was president and war had broken out.
You bring up a really good point. How effective was the ban at preventing imports?
Turns out it's real difficult to find data. One source I ran across claimed 1.2M were imported from 1808 to 1860, which is ludicrous, as it would mean 2.5x more were imported after the ban than in the centuries it was legal.
It would also require an average of something like 500 to 1000 slave ships a year, which seems really, really high. Smuggling people isn't like smuggling cocaine, they're pretty bulky.
Crews of naval ships that captured slave traders got instantly rich, so they had a real incentive. Somebody who informed on a smuggler of 100 slaves would be paid $5000, which was something like 10x a year's income for most families. Pretty big incentive to rat a slaver out. OTOH, a cargo of 400 slaves in 1860 would have been worth something like $300l to $400k, which is nothing to sneeze at even in today's money.
Update: Found another source that claims that no more than 10,000 and probably many fewer slaves were smuggled in after the ban. Pretty good article.
http://abolition.nypl.org/print/us_constitution/
Interesting stuff. The fact that it was illegal makes it tough to get a hard number, so you have to rely on anecdotal and indirect evidence rather than commercial and other records, and you have to make a lot of inferences.
There would also be all kinds of problems with bills of sale and other methods of proving title. Under the law any owner, not just the slave importer, had to prove the slave in question had been brought into the country at least five years before the prosecution. Sounds like for many planters it would have been way too much trouble and risk.
Also seems very likely the British Empire would not have expanded as much as it did into India, Africa and other parts of the world. North America would have taken up a lot more of its energy, seems like.
Settlement would have probably occurred more rapidly. The internal US tensions would probably have been damped, to a considerable extent. Had the US been part of a much larger entity, southern slaveowners would have had a lot less relative power. A lot less likelihood of a major civil war about slavery, IMO.
Interesting stuff to speculate about. Most likely outcome would be a united North America, a much larger and more powerful Canada, if you will.
There are much worse fates for a nation.
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