Uncharted Territory (Look to the West Book 2)

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Uncharted Territory (Look to the West Book 2) Page 40

by Tom Anderson


  At present, then, it seemed that the UPSA might still take New Granada, or at least half of it, and though its coastal ports had been damaged and its navy sunk, the country would leave the war at worst at a state of status quo ante bellum.

  Then two hammer blows struck the Meridian cause, two blows which ultimately defined the country’s national character for years later, the characteristic uncharitably described as a victim mentality. For, indeed, everything seemed to go wrong all at once.

  The first was more predictable. The city of Lima had always chafed under Meridian rule. The former capital of the Viceroyalty of Peru, Lima had resented this role being pulled out from under its feet and given to the young city of Córdoba when the Viceroyalty became independent as the United Provinces of South America. Furthermore, as a home for conservative political thinking and continued sympathy with the Spanish, Lima had been deliberately persecuted and treated as a backwater, both in the early years of the UPSA but especially since the Partido Solidaridad came to power. Very minor uprisings had been dealt with over the years, helped by the fact that other inhabitants of Upper Peru – chiefly of course the Tahuantinsuya Indians – had a vested interest in keeping the land under Meridian control.

  Things had changed. The exilic Spanish had been sending agents in for months trying to stoke a rebellion, yet while the people of Lima generally had a grudge against the U.P. government, they were also laid-back and cynical about the possibility of any uprising doing better than those in the past. Paradoxically it was not any Spanish agent sneaking in via fishing boat which raised the eventual rebellion, but the Manila galleon that Fernández had captured and sent south. Rumours soon abounded of the galleon’s rich cargo – the UPSA had thus far failed to make much of an inroad into Asian trade thanks to the Spanish managing to block them out. A heist was promptly staged while the galleon was taking on fresh water. That was not the remarkable part. The remarkable part was that the local mayor’s constables tracked Miguel García’s criminal gang to the warehouse where they had stashed the stolen goods, attacked them – and lost.

  True, García’s thugs were tough, yet in the past, the U.P. authorities would simply have called in the troops in this situation. But the troops were all elsewhere and tied down by military commitments, stripped from the province by Ayala to drive off the British elsewhere. The fact that the option had been lost and the local authorities were helpless sent an important message …

  The rebellion ignited on August 2nd 1807, partly stoked by Spanish and British agents, partly a purely anarchic expression of public anger that was as much an excuse to loot and pillage as to strike against government authority. Regardless, by the sixth of that month the uprising was out of control. The authorities evacuated and hoped to use the Tahuantinsuya as shock troops to subdue the rebellion, but all the soldiers the Indians could spare had long since gone off to the north to support Pichegru in his mountain warfare. So Lima broke away, and two weeks later the fleet of Admiral “Yankee Chris” Perry landed an Anglo-American army in the rebellious province. Suddenly Pichegru was cut off in New Granada.

  The second hammer blow finished matters. On August 26th, Portugal declared war on the UPSA. The causes of this shocking development remain debated given the destruction of key Portuguese government documents in later events. There is some evidence that British or Spanish spies had captured and leaked Partido Solidaridad committee agendas calling for the conquest of Brazil. Whether this was true or not, the Portuguese deal was certainly sweetened by the Kingdom of New Granada adjusting its borders to favour Brazil in a promised treaty. Regardless of the cause, the missive was delivered by the Portuguese Ambassador in Córdoba and soon reached Castelli in Buenos Aires.

  This changed everything. It was almost unnecessary for the Viceroyalty of Brazil[110] to actually do anything; it was enough to know that any attempt to prevent Buenos Aires from being surrounded was now doomed, and that all bets were off. Upon receiving the document, Castelli decided he must return to Córdoba. Yet he had invested so much in standing with the slowly starving people of Buenos Aires that he felt he had to do it in secret. Whether his ensuing carriage crash was an accident or a conspiracy remains debated, but he was caught in the act and stoned to death by angry, betrayed porteños.

  The situation deteriorated further, with Buenos Aires surrendering to the Americans on September 17th and, throughout the rest of that month and August, Pichegru being driven back through New Granada. The Frenchman found himself beset not simply by Gabriel’s Nuevo Ejército of similar numbers, but also Portuguese colonial forces out of Fort São Joaquim and Anglo-American forces having landed in Santiago de León de Caracas. These mostly consisted of Virginian troops formerly in Haiti, Pennsylvanian regiments from the mainland ENA, and British West Indian regiments. The force was small, as most of the ENA’s forces were at that time being sent across the Atlantic to fight the French in Britain. Nonetheless, it was enough to tip the balance. Pichegru found himself trapped between this hammer and the anvil of the Americans in Lower Peru, and in the end was forced to surrender to the Portuguese General Paulo Alfredo de Oliveira near San Francisco de Quito on Christmas Day 1807. By this point, though, things had already gone to hell closer to home.

  The Anglo-Americans were held back from Córdoba thanks to General Ayala drawing together all remaining forces to defend the capital. Yet the Cortes Nacionales was in a panic. The Partido Solidaridad was shedding deputies at an alarming rate. Many who had joined the party had done so out of pragmatism or personal ambition, recognising its meteoric rise. Now just as swiftly the Party fell, soon losing its majority as fair-weather friends defected. The conservative opposition banded together, calling itself Reagrupamiento por la Unión (“Rally for the Union”) and claiming that the UPSA could soon be wiped out and reduced back to being a Spanish colony if Solidarity mismanagement continued. With no time to hold a new election for President-General and no constitutional guidelines present for how to select one in the absence of this, the Cortes eventually voted one of their own in as leader in an attempt to calm the angry masses now running riot through the streets of Córdoba.

  This deputy was one of the Reagrupamiento’s leaders, Miguel Baquedano y Zebreros. Baquedano, a native of Santiago de Chile who had condemned the Party for “allowing” the attacks on his home city by the British, immediately consolidated power and cracked down on popular unrest. He issued a proclamation stating that he would hold power for a maximum of three years before calling new elections, setting a precedent for the later Constitutional Convention. He also sought terms with the enemy, believing that matters would only grow worse if the Portuguese were allowed to surge across the long border and take on the UPSA’s divided armies.

  Baquedano and his negotiators sought to divide the allies from one another, never too difficult a task with such disparate and mutually suspicious nations as the British/Americans, Spanish and Portuguese. The Treaty of Rio de Janeiro, though condemned as punishing and inequitable by generations of Meridians, was nonetheless a lot less severe than it could have been. The Meridians were forced to concede the province of Lower Peru – including the Tahuantinsuya lands – to the Empire of the Indies, later known as the Empire of New Spain. The new Kingdom of Peru was given the Infante Gabriel as its King and Lima as its capital; Gabriel soon embarked on a vengeful attack on the restored Inca state in the mountains. By 1820 the Tahuantinsuya, lacking support from the UPSA, were conquered and their leaders fled to the Aymara state in Upper Peru, still under U.P. auspices.

  The British were confirmed in their control of Falkland’s Islands, but besides that and some financial reparations and trade deals, the UPSA surrendered nothing. While the British remained furious that the war had drawn their forces away from the homeland and allowed the French invasion, Baquedano was capable of calling the Anglo-American bluff – Britain simply could not afford to spend much more time and money prosecuting the war when her economy had been destroyed by Lazare Hoche and she was concentrating on
winning the war in Europe. Therefore, the British were successfully talked down from trying to claim the island of Tierra del Fuego as well, which would have given her control over the Straits of Magellan and Cape Horn. It was this demand, so alarming the Meridians, that led to the postwar ‘Scramble for Patagonia’ and of course the later events surrounding the island and its new inhabitants.

  The Portuguese received several border adjustments in their favour, including most of the old Seven Missions territory which had ultimately stoked the First Platinean War and led to Meridian independence in the first place. Soon afterwards, the Viceroyalty of Brazil was granted greater autonomy by the Portuguese state. This was partly copying the British in America and the Spanish in the new Empire, and partly because Peter IV and his government wished to concentrate on colonial affairs elsewhere, continuing to pay the debt incurred by rebuilding Lisbon after the earthquake of 1755. As part of this, a Brazilian Cortes was created in Salvador de Bahia – as with the Empire of New Spain, this was not elected but simply consisted of the most powerful families in each province agreeing on whom to send as a representative. Nonetheless, it allowed for more representation of the vast unitary Viceroyalty and also stood as a trial for instituting a similar system in Portugal herself, as the kingdom was beginning to move away from the kind of enlightened absolutism that Carvalho had preached. It is certainly interesting to speculate on whether such apparent hopeful signs could have continued, for the fate of Portugal and her empire was certainly far from inevitable.

  The end of the war saw an economic depression in the UPSA. A new Constitutional Convention in Córdoba instituted the idea of the President-General running only for three-year terms rather than for life. A limit for the number of terms served was suggested but not for the moment incorporated. Baquedano did not seek re-election, recognising his unpopularity for ending the war on such terms among the people (who generally did not grasp the subtlety that it could have been much worse). With the Partido Solidaridad now in disarray – by the time the election was held in 1810, there was no longer a Republican France to have solidarity with – Reagrupamiento candidates took most of the Cortes Nacionales seats and a Reagrupamiento man, the relatively young Roberto Mateovarón, won the Presidency.

  As expected, the very loose conservative alliance that was the Reagrupiamiento soon fell apart without much serious opposition to unite against. Mateovarón’s allies rallied the movement’s more coherent core as the Amarillo Party, so called after the yellow colour in the UPSA’s flag and the ‘Sun of Cordobá’ national symbol. The Amarillo Party’s policies called for national reawakening and settlement of grievances, not striking out for reflexive revanchism. Amarillo candidates favoured reaching out to the country’s neighbours and trying to re-establish trade and prosperity rather than letting ideology dictate policy.

  The rump of the Partido Solidaridad was reconstituted by General Ayala, now a deputy in the Cortes, as the Colorado Party. In opposition to the Amarillos, the Colorados took their name from the red colour of the flag, sometimes paired with the Silver Torch of Liberty which was the country’s other main national symbol. The remainder of the deputies, chiefly moderates unwilling to join either side, were unofficially referred to as the Blanco Party after the third, white colour. That term was never officially used, though by coincidence, it was partly from these undecideds that the UPSA’s own Adamantine Party arose some years later…

  Chapter #83: Hairline Cracks

  “…the modern philosopher finds it easy to provide a lazily constructed challenge to any proposition by turning it on its head. Nonetheless, we should not therefore automatically dismiss any such counter-proposal, for occasionally their results are worthy of consideration.

  An example: conventional wisdom and common sense would suggest that a period of prosperity and good governance is a good thing for a nation, and thus a period of division and dissatisfaction is a bad thing. Yet those taking a longer perspective may conclude that the latter is, if not desirable at the time, nonetheless necessary for a country to develop and adapt and change, lest it fall into stagnancy and decay.

  Would Great Britain have launched her culture across a continent without the failures of James II to provoke the Glorious Revolution and a renaissance? Could France have still steered a middle moderate path to prosperity if the Ancien Régime and the Republic had not shown her the consequences of extremism in either political direction? But let us not be so euro-fixated. Let us turn our attention to China…”

  - From Reflections on Hypercontemporism, by Dieter Böhner (1978; English translation 1982)

  *

  From: “Invasion, Consolidation, Degradation: The Qing Dynasty” by James P. Collingwood (1960)—

  The Manchu invasion and conquest of China in the seventeenth century was an event which astonished the world. The dawning powers of Europe had grown used to the idea of the Ming Empire as a powerful alien civilisation and the source of exotic but respected culture. Some scholars (see P. Woolney and A.V. de Lancie, Orientalist Letters (1949) vol. 21, pp 1289-1301) contend that it was the destruction of the glories of the Ming, along with the contemporary slow decline of the Mughal Empire, which created the European worldview of the eighteenth century. No longer were the great empires of the east the object of European awe for their mysterious produce and intricate if ruthless systems of governance. For all that Nadir Shah’s exploits briefly revived an Alexandrine fascination in Europe, the image of Asia as a whole went from being the home of vast, ancient civilisations to be admired, to the home of decadent and decaying oligarchies to be exploited. It is comparable to how West Africa’s cities of gold and powerful kings were forgotten by Europe after a Moroccan invasion smashed the Songhai Empire and reduced the region to petty feuding warlords and, in European eyes, of interest only as a source of slaves (ibid.).

  Yet, just as the Royal Africa Company slowly changed that image, China recovered to some extent after its reconstitution under Manchu emperors as the Qing dynasty.[111] The Taizu, Taizong and Shunzhi Emperors[112] crushed Ming restorationists, rebels and opportunists to consolidate their reign. Perhaps the greatest of these opposition movements was the Revolt of the Three Feudatories, in which Wu Sangui (the Ming general who had treacherously allowed the Manchus through the Great Wall in the first place) turned on the Qing and proclaimed himself Emperor of a new Zhou dynasty. After his defeat, the Qing then turned their attention to the Ming-sympathising Kingdom of Tungning established on Taiwan by the Ming general Koxinga (Zheng Chenggong), eventually defeating and absorbing Taiwan by the end of the seventeenth century. These displays of vigour on the part of the conquerors demonstrated to the world that China was not about to collapse into anarchy, but had instead simply transitioned from one dynasty to the next. It was such that English travellers of the 1680s mildly referred simply to “the new Tartar regime in Peking”.

  The Qing victories over such pretenders were so crushing that subsequent Ming sympathisers kept their opposition to their Manchu overlords quiet and plotted in secret. One important organisation was the Tiandihui, the Heaven and Earth Society, better known today as the Sanhedui (Three Harmonies Society). This secret society was founded by men of Fujian Province and drew most of its support from southern China. European traders often called its members “the Chinese Freemasons”, though a better comparison might be the Jacobites in Great Britain in much the same time period.[113] Other anti-Qing organisations were more religious in sentiment, such as the White Lotus Society (Bailianjiao) which advocated a heterodox form of Buddhism and faced persecution by the more conservative Chinese dynasties. The White Lotus sect had been around for centuries, arising in the thirteenth century when the Mongols had ruled China as the Yuan dynasty; the White Lotus had in fact been involved in the ejection of the Yuan and the creation of the Ming dynasty. Thus the White Lotus were obvious sympathisers with Ming restorationism and enemies of this new barbarian horde to come off the steppes and dress itself in the trappings of civilisation (as they saw i
t). Again, like the Sanhedui, most of their support was in the southern provinces – though they enjoyed some presence throughout most of China proper.

  Yet while the Qing Emperors prospered, such opposition languished and at times the various societies kept going more out of social habit and tradition than for any serious attempt to stand against the ruling dynasty. The Shunzhi Emperor was followed by the great Kangxi Emperor, whose long reign was significant in restoring China’s image abroad. Kangxi’s armies defeated Peter the Great’s Russians in their attempt to expand into the Far East. This delayed Russian expansionism for a century and established Chinese control over the Amur valley, along with favourable trade arrangements with the Russians. It was Kangxi who defeated the Three Feudatories’ Revolt and quenched the last embers of Ming-restorationist and other native Han Chinese rebellions. More importantly in some ways, he won over the Chinese aristocracy by having a new dictionary drawn up and encouraging Chinese ways among the Manchu ruling classes. Just as had happened to the Jurchen Jin and the Mongol Yuan dynasties, Chinese culture reasserted itself and within a few generations, it seemed, invaders would find they had forgotten who they once were…

  The Kangxi Emperor was followed (by questionable constitutional arrangements)[114] by the Yongzheng Emperor, who enjoyed a reign of 42 years, not so long as his father’s, yet still sufficient for several major achievements.[115] Yongzheng continued the cultural assimilation of the Manchus, drove the Dzungars from Tibet to quell the civil war there, and installed a Qing resident to extend Chinese control over that mountainous land. He sent armies to attempt to defeat the Dzungars in open combat and prevent them from raiding Xinjiang, but these were defeated and the treasury was considerably depleted by the expeditions. Yongzheng’s generals concluded that defeating the nomadic people on their own turf, where their tactics were superior, was impossible. For this reason, Yongzheng decided instead to pay the local Khalkha tribe to fight the Dzungars for him. More importantly, he considerably reformed the Keju, the system of imperial examinations by which Chinese civil servants (popularly called mandarins in Europe) achieved their ranks and positions. This setup had grown corrupt and untrustworthy thanks to the chaos of the previous century, but was now straightened out to a large extent. Taxation was also reformed, and save for the expenditures on the failed expeditions against the Dzungars, Yongzheng presided over an expansion in Chinese prosperity.

 

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