by Tom Anderson
However, in analysing the result of the election of 1814 we should not ignore the problems Seymour faced in his ministry. Hamilton had pledged considerable support to Great Britain as the country struggled to find its feet after the ravages of Hoche and Modigliani. America sent food and gold bullion to help back up the New Royal Bank of Manchester, as well as holding debts in abeyance. This policy, after the initial burst of public generosity wore off, became increasingly unpopular among the American people, particularly thanks to the rumours of Churchill spending the money to arm his mobs of PSC bullyboys rather than to feed the hungry of Great Britain.[205] However, Seymour and the Patriots could not easily pull out of such a policy; too many Patriot MCPs and Lords and their high-profile supporters were making money off the back of the American support to Britain. They could not risk alienating such powerful men and starting a party civil war. To that end, the Patriots limped on until the election of 1814, with Seymour struggling to find another issue that might distract the voters and failing. The only other looming issue was, as always, slavery – and bringing that up would be just as damaging to the Patriots, who at this point still had a fair number of unrepentant slaveholders among their supporters.
Therefore the 1814 poll saw a swing to the Constitutionalists away from both the Patriots and the Radicals, and the Constitutionalists came to power with a majority of three. No sooner had Quincy taken power as Lord President, however, than the rifts in his party became clear. His appointment as leader had drawn votes from his home province (or ‘shire’) of South Massachusetts[206] along with other parts of New England, which wanted him to take a stance against slavery; the Constitutionalist heartland of Atlantic Carolina and Virginia wanted him to take a stance in favour of slavery; and the western frontiersmen, who voted Constitutionalist as they were seen as the more hawkish party on defence, often didn’t give two hoots about slavery but wanted more militiamen and regular army troops to protect them against Indians. It was the third cause Quincy seized upon, perhaps not surprisingly. He used it as an excuse to formally rename the Ministry of Domestic Regiments to the Ministry of War, and then to commission three new American regiments without asking Britain. He used the scandal of the massacre of a party of settlers in Wisconsin Territory[207] in late 1815 – following the path blazed by Morton and Lewis – to send in the troops. Most significantly the men, women and children had been killed by Attigneenongnahac Indians (normally abbreviated to Attignee), one of the French-allied Huron tribes that the Americans had fought against in the last century before they had been shattered with help from the Howden (Iroquois). It had been known by those versed in frontier affairs that two such tribes, the Attignee and Arendarhonon (abbreviated to Arenda), had fled west and joined with the Confederacy of Seven Council Fires, generally known as the Sioux. However this was a shock to the average citizen uninterested in such details, and an ill-informed but strident movement arose to punish these old enemies for daring to transgress against the white man once more.
The reality was of course more complex: Morton and Lewis had helped secure their own passage by arming the Isantee, one of the southern Sioux groups, with muskets; this had helped them stand against the Ojibwa, another displaced former French-allied tribe who had been attempting to conquer them. It had also provoked a split in the Confederacy, with a conservative faction rejecting all the ways of the white man, including his fire-sticks; the Isantee naturally being in favour of the weapons that had saved them from destruction; and the Attignee and Arenda and the more open-minded northern Sioux wanting to try to assimilate the Ojibwa and achieve peace with them, knowing that the white man was coming and their only chance for survival was to present a united front to him. The settlers from New York had been more caught in the crossfire than anything else, but that was unimportant; as with the Cherry Massacre, one blood-raising symbol could defeat a thousand inconvenient truths.
The Lakota War, as it was known, initially served to reunite Quincy’s party and indeed the nation in outrage. American regiments and militiamen were deployed and at first saw a string of victories against the divided and technologically inferior foe. This however disguised the fact that the direct attack had forced a political victory for the liberal faction in the Confederacy and, after suffering a defeat of their own from American troops who did not distinguish between Indian tribes, the Ojibwa ceased their conflict with the Isantee and joined the Confederacy themselves. In the winter of 1817 the whole conduct of the war changed, though the American troops shivering in their makeshift winter quarters did not yet realise it.
Back east, Quincy had other problems. The election of 1817 returned him to power with his majority increased to five, reflecting the fading but still present public outrage over the Stewart massacre (as it was called, after the leader of the settlers killed). However, the ageing Lord Deputy died two days before the last votes were counted; Quincy remained the incumbent Lord President but could not receive Imperial Assent for any of his bills. The constitutional crisis deepened, as the task of appointing a new Lord Deputy fell to King-Emperor Frederick II in London – which these days meant on Churchill’s say-so. Churchill was furious with Quincy for how the Lord President had slashed America’s assistance to Britain; money and goods still flowed, but debts were no longer written off. Furthermore, Quincy refused to supply Churchill with weapons or powder, ostensibly because of America’s need for them in its Indian conflicts but widely suspected to be because Quincy sympathised with the British people and was appalled by how Churchill had curtailed their liberty with his PSC squads. The Lord Deputy had imperial authority to refuse to appoint the current leader of a party, forcing the biggest party to pick a different leader, and could refuse to sign parliamentary bills into law. This power had not been used since the founding of the Empire thanks to the Lords President having a good relationship with the Lords Deputy, but now…
The crisis lasted eight months, whipped into a fury by Churchill’s exilic third son, George, who had fled to the Empire four years before and acted with the American Radical Party to condemn his father’s excesses of power. George, along with Radical leader Henry Tappan, publicly declared that the Empire should ignore any Lord Deputy proposed by King Frederick as ‘being made under duress’. Churchill was naturally incensed at such insolence, yet could not truly afford to antagonise the Americans as Britain was still dependent on imports from the Empire. Still, it was not in his nature to budge on the issue, and the young King-Emperor himself remained silent, afraid of tipping the balance by his word and potentially causing civil war within the Hanoverian Dominions. It was a far cry from his later career.
The crisis was finally resolved by Richard Wesley, the Duke of Mornington and Lord Deputy of Ireland, who invoked an obscure legal interpretation of his powers: if he was the King’s representative in the Kingdom of Ireland, then it followed that he could serve in lieu of the King in any role requiring his approval – including the appointment of a Lord Deputy to America. This questionable idea presented, Wesley (a man quite equal to Churchill in sheer mule-headedness) proposed James Arthur Plunkett, the 8th Earl of Fingall. Fingall was certainly not a man Churchill would have chosen, being quite removed from what he thought of as respectable society and thus more or less guaranteed to be free from Churchill’s influence. However, he was also one of the few remaining Irish peers to be marked out in another way. He was a Catholic.
After a moment’s thought, this compromise was immediately endorsed by Churchill, who had an impish sense of humour that he rarely displayed in public. America would get a Lord Deputy free from his influence, but Churchill would still get to torment his enemy Quincy. The prejudiced Quincy himself was horrified, of course, but had no way to block Fingall’s appointment; the American Radical Party, which had often spoken up for Catholic rights in Canada and the new southern provinces, was delighted, while many Constitutionalists were not exactly ecstatic but were willing to take any compromise that would end the grinding political stalemate. Furthermore, while
Parliament had been suspended, things had turned sour out west. The Sioux had attacked the American forces in their bivouac in the spring of 1817, before the planned offensive had begun. The remaining troops were forced to endure a grinding retreat to Chichago, constantly harried by Ojibwa and Attignee horsemen, which became known as the “Marsh of Icy Death” and was immortalised by Cagney in his 1820 painting American Niflheim. It was clear that new regiments needed to be called up to replace the men lost to the Indian attacks, yet that could not be authorised until the new Lord Deputy arrived to reopen Parliament, and the result was that the offensive did not resume until early 1818. By this point Quincy almost seemed an unelected leader, it had been so long since the election that had reconfirmed him as Lord President. He was detached from public opinion, floundering to cope with the distant war in the west on its long supply line. He was, in the words of one of his most steadfast critics, a political zambee [zombie].
That critic was none other than John Alexander. The controversial veteran of the latter Jacobin Wars had returned to the Empire in 1812 and had served for two years holding down a desk job and training troops, but the death of his father to yellow fever in 1814 meant that he had taken over his estates. Simeon Alexander had not been from a rich family; like many Carolinians he was descended from Ulstermen, or ‘Scotch-Irish’ as the local term was, as fiercely anti-Papist as Quincy and of a poor but proud background. Simeon had built his fortune from the ground up, partly through hard work and partly through marrying into money. He had bought large estates in Cuba and then Hispaniola and had had much more success than many other planters who attempted to expand into the new provinces of Carolina, but had worked himself to death, becoming vulnerable to the many tropical diseases there. His son John reluctantly resigned from his Army career and took over the plantations, soon bettering even his father’s record despite his lack of economic background. The former General naturally had a good mind for logistics after his experiences in Britain and France, and the latter had taught him that not all Papists were fire-breathing demons. This attitude convinced him to compromise with the Spanish and Mestizo kleinkriegers who often raided American plantations in Cuba from their strongholds in the interior. Despite being a firm believer in slavery himself, he even worked out extremely unofficial agreements with the black fighters of Hispaniola who had inflicted several gruesome attacks on white planters there. Alexander used the carrot and the stick, paying what he called ‘latter-day Danegeld’ to the kleinkriegers to avoid his land, then hitting them hard with his militia if they dared transgress anyway. In his own way he therefore paved the way for radically changing Carolina’s relationship with Catholicism.
Alexander was a member of the Constitutionalist Party by default, but became a strong critic of Quincy during his second ministry. “This man who would have everything, be all things to all men and nothing,” wrote A Concerned D—n Commoner (an obvious reference to Churchill’s old alias) in the Charleston Gazette. “This man who would stir up old troubles in the Papists whilst trying to prosecute a war at arm’s length in the virgin West; this man who will run his bulls through our civilisation and leave us still treading in his excrescences for decades to come.” And that was one of Alexander’s more mild attacks. Initially content to remain a pundit, concerned solely with his family holdings, Alexander was convinced by senior Constitutionalists dissatisfied with Quincy to run for the Carolinian General Assembly as a provincial MGA in 1818.[208] Alexander soon found himself made Speaker[209] and used the position to propose continuous legislation with little purpose except to frustrate Quincy, mostly altering Carolinian Confederate laws to prevent Quincy’s new bills, regardless of content, from taking effect within the Confederation. This somewhat petty act helped lay the seeds for the rising issue of Confederal versus Imperial distribution of power.
1818 was indeed an annus horribilis for Quincy. Besides Alexander proving to be a thorn in his side, the renewed army sortying from Chichago was well-nigh wiped out by the Sioux at the Battle of the Horns of the Bull in October. The army – this time with better provisions for logistics, knowing they would be bivouacing in enemy territory – inflicted several defeats on the Indians and chased the fleeing foe deeper into Wisconsin Territory until reaching the titular location of the battle. There they found what the commanding General, Vincent Walker, assumed to be an old French fort that the Indians had inherited, and laid siege. He only had small cannon, as it had not been known that the Sioux possessed such fortifications, but it was enough to chew a small breach in the walls. There were plenty of volunteers for the Forlorn Hope; muskets or no, the Indians could have no expertise in siege warfare. That arrogance was shattered – along with everything else – when the Forlorn Hope was hit with grapeshot and crude cannonballs soon began ploughing bloody tracks through the American troops, who found themselves unable to reply. Unbelievably, inconceivably, the Sioux had artillery. Very crude and primitive artillery by the modern standards of the British Army, but artillery nonetheless, and – with their own small cannons’ ammunition expended against the fort – artillery the Americans could not reply to. A second retreat followed after Walker was killed by enemy musket fire. This one was in good order and shepherded by American cavalry, but it was nonetheless a retreat.
A round of finger-pointing ensued, with Robert Morton being descended upon by the authorities and somewhat absurdly accused of selling a fort and some heavy artillery to the Isantee along with muskets. Morton was exonerated when an investigative commission headed by Indian expert Lewis Thresher concluded that the knowledge of siege warfare had been communicated to the liberal movement within the Sioux by escaped prisoners from the neighbouring Susan-Mary penal colony. A comparison to how La Pérouse’s men had so overturned the established tactical order in Autiaraux is inevitable. This scandal caused Susan-Mary to be taken over directly by the Fredericksburg government, which replaced the system of lacklustre guards (many disgraced soldiers scarcely distinguishable from their charges) with American army troops, sent there for their first breath of frontier warfare. This scheme, which most histories ignore was in fact Quincy’s idea, was perhaps his most positive legacy given the effects it had on American troop training.
This loss of face for America produced a rash of poke-the-tottering-rattlesnake-with-a-stick moments among her enemies.[210] Minor Canajun rebellions broke out in the hinterland of New Britain territory, where the French Catholics had not been diluted out by New England settlers or forced into quiescence. More serious uprisings occurred in the Floridas, Cuba and Hispaniola – in part crushed by none other than Alexander and his lieutenants, giving him even more political capital against Quincy. The Empire of New Spain, which had been annoyed at Quincy’s alarmist Anti-Papism for years, chose this moment to quietly drop most of the free-trade provisions it had been forced to adopt when America had come to its aid during the Third Platinean War. Louisiana equally quietly encouraged its Attignawantan allies to do a bit of low-level raiding of Carolina’s Arkensor province and western Osajee Territory. All of this culminated for a devastating loss for the Constitutionalists in the 1819 election, with the ‘Southron Movement’ led by Alexander and several planter aristocrats running ‘Constitutionalist Whig’ candidates against Quincy’s own men. This split the vote and caused Patriot victories even in Constitutionalist heartlands such as Vandalia, and the result was an unprecedented Patriot majority of 20.
The new Patriot government, led by Lord President Artemas Ward (Jr.), took the decision of reinforcing Chichago while quietly sending a delegation led by Lewis Thresher, Henry Lewis and John Vann to negotiate with the Seven Fires Confederacy. It is likely the matter would have failed without Vann; during the late period of American weakness the Cherokee had chosen this moment to publicly let slip their intentions of forming a webwork of interconnected Indian states across America to preserve their cultural identity against the white man. Vann, who had already negotiated with the Indians of Drakesland, was able to explain to the Sioux that w
hile they might have defeated the white man once, sooner or later his numbers would crush them unless they worked with him and preserved themselves within the system, as the Howden and the Cherokee had. The Sioux remained largely unconvinced, but at least agreed that they needed to buy time; despite American public perceptions, the two Imperial armies sent against them had badly weakened their forces – the 1820s were known among the Sioux as the Years of Tearful Silence for the number of young men who had died. To that end, they agreed to allow passage of white settlers along a corridor in the south of Wisconsin Territory, providing they did not attempt to settle within the Confederacy’s lands.
While this successful negotiation might nonetheless seem like an admission of weakness, Lord President Ward was able to cover it with triumphs elsewhere, such as the defeat of the rebellions and the formal handover of the American Squadron to Fredericksburg’s control from London. Britain’s treasury was too bare to resist this offer. Already having been staffed mainly by Americans since before the Third Platinean War, a nickname for the separate force was soon circulating, a nickname that would not become reality for some years to come: His Majesty’s Imperial Navy.
