Uncharted Territory (Look to the West Book 2)

by Tom Anderson

  However, the idea of a radical black Republic was about as alarming to most Americans as it was to both sets of French – ironically, even the Freedish leaders condemned the Republic’s Robespierre-inspired institutions, while only Fox actually praised it. Something had to be done, and that something was the Treaty of Baton Rouge (1805). Another coup for Pinckney, this was signed between the ENA and Louisiana, and saw the following exchanges:

  1. Louisiana abandons all sovereignty over Santo Domingo, which is now considered Imperial territory (New Spanish assent was received informally and later added via amendment).

  2. Otherwise, Louisiana’s territorial integrity is recognised and respected by the ENA (with precise borders defined somewhat later on).

  3. The ENA’s Preventive Cutter Service will defend shipping from the remaining French/Louisianan islands such as Guadeloupe, in exchange for a share in the trade profits.

  This was basically an acknowledgement by the Royal French and exilic Spanish of Imperial American power over the whole West Indian Sea, which had become an American lake. At least for the present.

  And in August 1805, an American force – Carolinian-dominated, but including representatives from all the Confederations – landed on Santo Domingo and prepared to embark on one of the most controversial operations ever fought…

  Chapter # 63: Borussia Delenda Est

  “Ah, Prussia…what speculative romantic has not considered that tragedy? It runs against all narrative imperative, the plucky underdog being slapped down so many times by a conjunction of circumstances, only to rise again…and fail utterly. Some instinct tells us this should not be, and so we try to correct it, often in ever wilder and more desperately implausible fashion. A reminder that the ultimate reality is crueller than even the unthinking, uncaring morass that is the universe of the ultra-Jacobin…”

  - Henri Poulet, forward to the speculative romance anthology Hohenzollerns Triumphant, published 1980

  *

  From: “Breaking the Eagle’s Wings: Decline and Fall of the Holy Roman Empire (And What Came After)” by Dr Piet Nieuwenhuis (Dutch original 1938; English translation 1941)—

  It is debatable when the fate of Prussia was sealed. The eastern Hohenzollern state certainly bounced back from many previous blows that might have permanently devastated other kingdoms. In the Second and Third Wars of Supremacy, specifically the front known as the Silesian Wars, Prussia repeatedly attempted to take Silesia from Austria while knocking out Saxony, succeeding to some extent in the short term before ultimately failing. This failure was certainly not due to lack of force of arms, courage, or tactics; the Prussian army was justly acknowledged as the finest in Europe, and attempts by other states – German and otherwise – to emulate its practices had begun as early as the 1740s. Frederick II, Elector of Brandenburg and King in Prussia,[47] was accurately recognised as both the chief architect of this strategic success and a great tactical battlefield general. His revolutionary tactics, principally the use of enfilading fire in artillery placement, defined European military thinking for a generation. Most importantly, they ensured that, for as long as Prussia’s enemies struggled to adapt to and copy such innovations, Prussia’s outnumbered army possessed what would in modern military jargon be known as a force multiplier.

  This was just as well, for it was certainly something that Prussia required. Despite being, in the words of Voltaire, ‘an army which happens to possess a country’, the Prussians nonetheless commonly faced enemies which critically outmanned them. For example, in the Third War of Supremacy she faced France, Austria and Russia, three of the greatest powers of Europe at the time, along with Saxony and other lesser states. Prussia’s only real ally was Britain, and Britain’s small army was concerned solely with repelling any attempted French invasion and fighting abroad in the Empire of North America, Africa and India. The British government, whose eminence grise was William Pitt, was firmly opposed to landing troops on the continent – whether to support the Prussians directly or land in France to distract the French from attacking Prussia. British support came only in the form of the ‘cavalry of St George’, millions of pounds’ worth of gold sovereigns.

  What is miraculous is that Prussia held out for so long in that war. Frederick’s generalship and the Prussians’ ability to concentrate their small but powerful army as power at a point meant that they defeated numerically superior forces several times. Finally, at the Battle of Kunersdorf in 1759 – an annus mirabilis for Britain, but an annus horribilis for Prussia – a combined Austro-Russian force defeated Frederick. The elector, always something of a manic depressive, virtually committed suicide by failing to quit the field and was cut down by Austrian cavalry. In the wake of his death, his young son received the electorate as Frederick William II and Frederick’s brother Prince Henry acted as regent. The new regime immediately sought peace as the only option. The harshness of that peace stripped the Prussians of territory in the Germanies, chiefly going to Saxony – which at the time was seen as being in the pocket of the Hapsburgs and thus a safe way for the Holy Roman Emperor (then Francis I) to try and reassert Austria’s dominance over Germany without doing so in such a direct way as to encourage other states to band together against him. Most significantly, the original Prussian powerhouse of Ducal Prussia, outside the Holy Roman Empire’s borders, was divided between Sweden and Poland-Lithuania. The former rising star of European warfare was reduced to Brandenburg alone, and seemed finished.

  However, careful diplomacy on the part of Frederick William II (helped by the existence of the Germanophile Peter III on the throne of Russia) slowly pushed Prussia back to a position of at least regional power. Rather than trying to regain territory in Germany, Frederick William’s policies focused on building power outside the Holy Roman Empire’s borders. Thus in 1767, with Prussia’s army shrunken by the territorial losses (and thus a smaller population to conscript) but still trained to a peak of fighting fitness, the country joined Russia in the War of the Polish Partition. The Prusso-Russian alliance neatly defeated the Austrians, who were not joined by minor German allies for a conflict which only concerned issues outside the Empire’s borders. Austria was placated with Krakow (Krakau) and the Russians gained Ruthenia and placed the Tsarevich on the throne of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, but the Prussians were able to take back the Poles’ half of Ducal Prussia and force the resulting rump Poland into a personal union. Although sometimes beset by rebellion, this acquisition helped build up Prussian power once more. Frederick William also annexed Poland’s Baltic coast to Prussia; although the Prussians lacked the spare funds to create much of a fleet, he correctly foresaw the coming of a Baltic confrontation involving Sweden, Russia and Denmark, and knew that simply possessing ports such as Danzig would be an important bargaining chip that might be rewarded with territorial revisions (such as Sweden returning northern Ducal Prussia) or alliance membership.

  In the end Prussia proved to be a nonentity when the Great Baltic War came. The opponent she would face on land would not be Austria, but Saxony. In 1797 Frederick William II died, succeeded by his eponymous son, and the Poles used this opportunity of transition in government to launch their most well-coordinated rebellion yet, known as the Confederation of Lublin. The Polish rebels convened their Sejm – abolished by the Prussians – and elected the new Elector of Saxony, John George V, as their King. This was, of course, merely a formalisation of what had been accomplished in weeks of secretive negotiations with the Wettins, the Hapsburgs and all the other potential candidates who would bring significant military force to the table. John George V, widely viewed as a maverick compared to his staid brother and predecessor Frederick Christian II, seized the opportunity.

  Both Prussia and Saxony withdrew their troops from the united German force that the Empire had painstakingly assembled – leading to a domino effect that would hamstring the Hapsburgs’ offensive against Republican France and help turn the tables in that war – and engaged each other in a war for both the status
of Poland and the future of Germany. It was a battle to see which of the two states would be the dominant power in the Germany of tomorrow. By now the two were evenly matched as the Saxons copied Prussian practices with increasing competency and drew upon their new provinces for more levies.

  The Hapsburgs, on the other hand, had lost credibility. After a brief resurgence during Prussia’s period of humiliation, a brief attempt to at least symbolically reunite Germany under their rule, the Hapsburgs had ruined themselves in the eyes of German public opinion. The Hapsburgs had chosen to fight the Turks over Bosnia and Dalmatia rather than try to throw the French, particularly Lascelles’ murderous regime in Bavaria, out of Germany. Ferdinand IV might have proclaimed the Empire dead in the Reichstag of Regensburg, but it was his successor Francis II who made that proclamation a reality. The Hapsburgs of the past were gone, finished, no matter how much military power they might rebuild.

  Equally, though, it was obvious that the French offensives of Lascelles and Ney were petering out. The future Germany would not be a Jacobin republic (or a collection of them), whose inhabitants were ruled by French overlords believing themselves to be racially superior. What the French had succeeded in doing was demonstrating that there were no more rules, something Frederick II of Prussia had tried to do and failed at. Now it all came down to one war, one confrontation, one battle. Prussia against Saxony.

  In truth the conflict was rather long and drawn-out, one of the most miserable and grinding wars of the whole Jacobin period, for all that it had scarcely any ideological component. On paper, the Prussians should have won. For all the Saxons’ attempts to catch up and their increased levies, the Prussian army was still one of the best in Europe, and arguably it had been honed by continuous suppression activity against the endemic Polish rebels and outlaws. However, the Poles had judged rightly when they saw Frederick William III’s succession as an appropriate time to rebel en masse. The young elector had not had particularly good relations with his father, even by the standards of German royalty, and they had had differences of opinion over Poland. Rather ironically, Frederick William III had advocated a less confrontational policy, hoping to restore the Sejm (albeit as a rubber-stamp), allow the Polish language to be used officially and Poles to serve as officers in the Prussian army, and other concessions. It was his hope that this would discourage further Polish rebellions and allow Prussia to use Poland as a source of manpower and other resources rather than a distraction. This plan might possibly have worked if it could have been tried ten years earlier, but by this point the Poles had lost all faith in even the most potentially reformist Prussian regime. All Frederick William III’s political differences served to do was hamper the Prussian government as he fired his father’s experienced ministers and installed his own favourites.

  Furthermore, Frederick William’s belief in the importance of Poland, the key to Prussia’s rebirth in his view, meant that the war was strategically mishandled. His grandfather Frederick II would have turned in his grave. Rather than focusing the Prussian army at a point to defeat enemies in turn, troops were divided between fighting the Saxons and suppressing the Polish rebellion, and Prussia lacked enough forces to do both decisively at once. The Saxons were generally on the defensive and lost territory in a series of slow, grinding campaigns commanded by the Prussian General Wilhelm Friedrich von Lützow, but not at a rate which significantly threatened Dresden or any key position. Simultaneously, the Poles were always defeated when they tried to stand against the Prussians in open combat, but there were insufficient Prussian troops deployed to completely suppress the rebellion when it devolved to kleinkrieger strategies, either.

  This state of affairs continued for three years, after which both sides were becoming exhausted. The Prussians were about to take Cottbus but their occupation forces had been driven out of Lodz by a Polish irregular army led by the soldier-leader of the Lublin Confederation, Kazimierz Pulaski. A state of irony prevailed, not lost on either side. The Wettins and Hohenzollerns’ hopes for future dominance within Germany had been fixed upon the fact that the Hapsburgs had been seen to view a Turkish problem as more important than liberating Germany from the French – but now most Germans viewed the Prusso-Saxon conflict over Poland as being just as much of an arrogant distraction. Meanwhile, the formation of the Mittelbund and the Alliance of Hildesheim suggested that the smaller German states were willing to band together against the French if none of the more powerful ones were willing to offer leadership. Saxony signed an agreement with the Mittelbund in 1800 which meant the latter recognised Saxon overlordship over Thuringia (whose patchwork of duchies mostly had rulers of Wettin descent) but this only emphasised the fact that Saxony could not simply order around the Mittelbund member states by superior force anymore. Dreams of German domination were dead or dying, and now this would simply be a fight to the death, the culmination of a conflict that stretched back fifty years and more. Only one state would survive, and the world wondered which it would be.

  The war hung in the balance, a balance that was tilted by the Conference of Hagenow in October 1800. This was ultimately derived from the Danish King Johannes II’s ambitious plan to dominate the Baltic Sea, turning it into a ‘Danish Lake’ via possession of key seaports and coastlines. Having already acquired Oldenburg, the former Swedish Pomerania and Sweden itself, he then turned his attention to the two Mecklenburgs. The Mecklenburgs’ rulers rejected his government’s initial crude threats and were backed by Saxony. Hagenow resolved these differences, thanks to a brilliant piece of diplomacy by John George V’s foreign minister Gerhard von Stephanitz. In response, both the Danes and the two Mecklenburgs declared war on Prussia.

  The Mecklenburgs’ military contribution was negligible and the Danish army was not particularly powerful, but once more Frederick William III’s enemies hit him with the same lessons he should have learned from his grandfather: power at a point. Specifically, what the Danes brought to the table was domination of the seas. The Prussians’ Baltic fleet was, as noted before, a joke, and the Danes swept it aside easily enough. The Danes made an amphibious descent on Danzig in April 1801, taking and holding the fortified seaport. Meanwhile, having secured Baltic dominance (at least so long as Russia and Lithuania remained neutral) the Danes also began transporting troops from Sweden. This was at least partly, perhaps even primarily, an internal political move; the Danish government was still nervous about Swedish rebellions and thought that removing trained native troops from the country was an excellent idea. In the event, however, this worked quite well as a strategy in itself – some of the Swedish soldiers had been fighting in nearby Lithuanian Prussia a few years before, and knew the local terrain well. The Swedes were essentially cut loose from resupply by the Danes, who saw this as a problem resolved. The Swedes generally failed in direct combat with the local Prussians, who were still well-led and disciplined, but many drove south in bands of variable integrity and joined up with the Polish rebels. The most famous of these Swedes who joined the Poles was, however, not a member of these often ragtag bands, but the commander of a Swedish force which managed to stand up to a (small) Prussian conventional army and defeat it in an aggressive action near Torun. Only later did he retreat in the face of overwhelming Prussian reinforcements and go to Warsaw, covered by Polish irregular horsemen.

  His name was Gebhard Leberecht von Blücher.[48]

  The Prussians did not immediately collapse, of course, but Frederick William III continued to divide his forces rather than seeking a decisive blow. He sent sufficient troops to bottle up the Danes in Danzig, for example, but not quite enough (or with the necessary siege artillery) to drive them out of the key port. And the siege was increasingly pointless as the Danes’ control of the Baltic meant they could easily resupply their troops in the city by sea. In fact by this point the Danish merchant navy had enough spare capacity to feed all the local Danzigers as well, discouraging much support for Prussia.

  This lack of focus meant that the Saxons drove back v
on Lützow from the gates of Dresden in February 1801 and relieved Cottbus in October of that year. The twelve months that followed showed a general Prussian decline on all fronts. Recognising that the elector’s dithering policies had caused this – Prussia could probably have knocked out Saxony within a year if the army had focused on it and ignored the Polish rebellion, quashing it later – sedition and murmurs began to focus into the so-called Berlin Plot. Things came to a head in April 1802 when Lützow (having been shifted in command to the western front) failed to relieve the Saxon siege of Magdeburg, which subsequently surrendered. Lützow was called back to Berlin and severely reprimanded by the young and mercurial Frederick William III, who then attainted his peerage and warned him he was lucky not to be summarily executed. Incensed, for he knew that he had done everything he could at Magdeburg and had failed due to the elector sending pointless reinforcements to Danzig and Poland, Lützow joined the conspiracy.

  The plotters struck in September with the news that all Prussian territory west of the Elbe had been lost to the allies. Worse, Lützow’s toadying replacement General Albrecht von Gessler had been attacked by the Saxons while trying to evacuate his army over the river near Wittenberge. That Prussian army had been virtually destroyed, pounded by Saxon artillery (ironically using the same enfilading tactics that Frederick II had developed) with its back to the river. Knowing that it was now or never, the plot came off. Frederick William III was shot while on parade, officially by ‘a misfiring cavalry carbine’. He was taken to his doctors by a group of ‘loyal’ retainers, who ensured he lived only long enough to name his six-year-old son Henry Frederick as his heir and Lützow as his regent (the latter name being somewhat indecipherably scribbled on the letter patent, but of course the elector was dying, was he not?).