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by Intermountain States » Sat Jul 02, 2022 1:56 pm
by Sao Nova Europa » Sat Jul 02, 2022 1:58 pm
Intermountain States wrote:Reservation
Nation Name: Kingdom of Joseon
Territory: Historical borders of Korea
#AER (Do not delete this, it is used to keep track of the apps)
Main idea I have is a Korea that has Japan’s Rangaku policy but with Catholic missionaries and merchants.
by Great Confederacy of Commonwealth States » Sat Jul 02, 2022 2:05 pm
by Sao Nova Europa » Sat Jul 02, 2022 2:12 pm
Great Confederacy of Commonwealth States wrote:Alright! Posted! I will add some more to the post, because our third pov-character still needs to be adressed, but I did not want to wait until tomorrow to post.
by Khasinkonia » Sat Jul 02, 2022 3:42 pm
Nation Name: The French colonies in North America are officially known as New France when discussed as a collective, but individually, they are known as Canada, Baie d’Hudson, Acadie, Plaisance, Pays des Illinois (Formally known as Haute-Louisiane), and Louisiane (Formally known as Basse-Louisiane), with two larger entities emerging: Canada and Louisiana. Among the colonists, several collective names are well-attested to, but the most frequently used term with positive, fraternal connotations is the name “Les Fleuves-Frères,” a name which translates directly as “The Brother-Rivers,” referencing the Mississippi and St-Laurent rivers, which hold most of the major settlements of New France along their banks.
Culture(s):While somewhat more culturally homogenous than other colonies of similar size, the people of New France still can be divided into a number of groups, though these groups do not necessarily follow the strict caste system of the Iberian colonies, nor does it strongly resemble the race system of the English colonies.
Most politically important among these groups are the first-generation European settlers. Though backgrounds have historically varied greatly, these settlers generally hail from the French peasantry, especially in areas on the periphery of France, such as Normandy, Brittany, and the borderlands with the Germans, among others. A minority of first-generation European settlers come from higher classes, and generally serve in administrative positions or only become permanent inhabitants due to chance, rather than intent of settling, unlike their lower-class counterparts.
The second group, which composes a majority of the free population, is the descendants of settlers, collectively referred to in Louisiane as “Creoles.” In Canada, there is not any widely used term, but Creole has seen usage in some circles to refer to the same group. Among the Creoles, there are several subgroups, including Creoles of full European descent, Creoles of mixed ancestry, and the Métis, which refers to those of partial aboriginal descent. While Creoles of full European descent can be found throughout all of the colonies, the Creoles of mixed ancestry, some of whom are referred to as gens de couleur libres, are mostly found in Basse-Louisiane, descended from freed or escaped slaves, while Métis can be found most in Illinois, Canada, and Baie d’Hudson.
While a majority of European settlers and Creoles of partial or full European descent take their European descent from French settlers, there also exist populations, particularly near ports, hailing from other parts of Europe, such as those of Dutch, Portuguese, and Spanish descent in New Orléans, Germans to the north of New Orléans, and English and Irish in Plaisance.
While almost all major permanent European settlements are along the shores of the great rivers and the shores of the Atlantic, there are also significant aboriginal populations within the claimed borders of New France. Though they have little direct political influence, they are regarded as full French subjects by the colonial administration and are nominally subject to the same laws as their settler counterparts, and have had a significant impact on the development of the colonies, especially in the northern settlements. The colony of Illinois takes its name from the Illinois Confederation, a group of Algonquian tribes inhabiting the northern Mississippi river valley. There and further to the north as well, the fur trade thrives and was one of the driving factors in the early settlement of the area.
Concentrated mostly in Basse-Louisiane, there is a population of enslaved people of both African and aboriginal descent, mostly serving to fuel the plantation economy that has developed there. While not officially legal under French law, the southernmost colony has seen a steady rise in its slave population over the years regardless.
Finally, there exists one group that is generally universally disliked by the free citizens, from the aboriginal nations to the new settlers — the overmountain settlers coming from the British colonies to the east. While theoretically subjects of France just as all others who live in New France and then of the numerous tribes who inhabit these areas, the overmountainers rarely acknowledge either authority, and indeed may sometimes react with hostility to those who seek to enforce the will of the rightful government on them. To the people who already live on the land, these men are invaders. To the trappers and slavers, they are competitors. To the Catholic Church, most of them are heretics. And to the government itself, they are undesirable elements and potential usurpers who undermine its authority.
Territory: New France consists of all of the territories of France on the mainland North American continent, as well as several islands, most notable among them being Newfoundland. Borders between the administrative divisions are ill-defined, as are the outer borders of the colony. Officially, the territory extends to the Appalachian mountains in the east, but the viability of control remains in severe doubt, even to those with less than accurate perceptions of the situation in the colonies.
Capital City: Officially, the Governor-General, Intendant, and the Superior Council of New France reside in Québec City, but in practice, there is a sort of devolution to the territory of New France. Québec City serves as the hub for the northern colonies, while Louisiane is focused on its capital of New Orléans. Beneath these two lower capitals, Haute-Louisiane and Plaisance also have their own capitals—St-Louis and Plaisance. Baie d’Hudson, meanwhile, is largely a seasonal colony under nominally separate administration, and in practice has no real administrative centre.
Population: 1,761,400, consisting of 849,100 free Haute and Basse-Louisianais, 612,300 Canadiens, and an estimated 300,000 aboriginals who are legally considered citizens even if they may not regard themselves as such.
Government Type: New France follows a mechanically absolutist model, with supreme administrative power concentrated in the hands of the Intendant and his Superior Council, while the Governor-General represents the interests of the crown, which may overrule or make its own decisions for the colonies at any time and for any reason. In light of the constitutional reforms following the Seven Years War, a parliament of sorts has been formed, albeit with limited powers. It consists exclusively of what would be considered the Third Estate, as the clergy and the nobility are transient presences at best in much of the colonies.
Head of State: By the Grace of God, King of France and Navarre, His Majesty [TBD] reigns over all realms of the Kingdom of France, and has generously granted Governor-General Louis-Philippe de Rigaud, Marquis de Vaudreuil the right to represent His Majesty to the Superior Council and to the Intendant.
Head of Government: Intendant Jean-Marie Roland de la Platière is the head of the Superior Council, which consists of the Governor-General, the Intendant himself, the Bishops of Canada and Louisiana, the Captain-General of the Militia, and eleven additional councillors who serve as the Court of Appeals, of whom one serves as the Procurator General and one the Registrar.
Government Description:New France is composed of two superior constituent colonies, Canada and Louisiane. These two superior colonies are subdivided into five lesser colonies (Canada Proper, Acadie, Plaisance, Haute-Louisiane, and Basse-Louisiane) and one company (Baie d’Hudson). Mirroring France itself, New France’s government functions with an empowered executive branch. The Intendant heads the Superior Council and manages the realm, while the Governor-General represents the will of the king. In general, the civilian administrations present in New France closely resemble those of France proper, with little room for deviation.
Though the government of New France superficially appears to have a tight leash due to the rigidity of its government structure, a select few individuals at the top often are able to exercise their extensive powers with little concern for consequence—a practice for which numerous former Governor-Generals and later Intendants became infamous. Currently, the absolute power of the Intendant is wielded by a man of a humble and stolid man, which has made some figures quite pleased, while those who came to enjoy the corruption that power had brought some of his predecessors find Roland’s reluctance to move past his bounds to be a significant obstacle.
Under Roland’s tenure, the government has reformed to resemble the modern government present in France. Still in its nascent stages, the legislative branch — the New French parliament — lacks tenure and competence, only exercising its technical power very infrequently as a result. The executive branch further maintains the right to veto and replace any elected officials, though this rarely happens without a petition from the locals, as the Intendant’s concerns have been primarily economic in nature. From this concern, the Intendant has been keen to see the Parliament take a more active role in administering the realm. Currently, the parliament’s powers largely overlap with those of the Superior Council, and the Council and Intendant are able to overrule it at any time. This has not inspired great confidence in the institution, but there is hope among many urban populations that it may begin to take a comparable role to that of the motherland.
Even the Intendant, however, must yield to the institutions of France itself. If the French Parliament demands the colony jump, the Intendant may only ask “How high?” If it demands a tariff, a tariff there shall be. No matter what those in the colonies may desire, those back home may overrule their wishes. The democratic institutions of the homeland still can lord over the colonies like the king in Britain may rule over his colonies — absolutely and without question.
Majority/State Religion : Catholicism is generally dominant, due to its institutionalised position, but, particularly in areas where the authority of the colonial government is weak, there can be found a number of other faiths, both Christian and otherwise.
Economic Description: The economy of New France, thanks to its vast territory, is necessarily extraordinarily diverse for lands of comparable populations. The majority of the colonists practice subsistence farming, though in some areas fishing may take precedence over farming. The primary arteries of New France are its rivers. Even among the fur trappers, the rivers serve as important means to transport their goods. Unlike the British colonies to the east, almost all trade to the interior flows through one of two ports: Quebec and New Orleans. This has resulted in a very lopsided population distribution. Notably, a few areas around New Orleans in particular, though also Quebec, have begun to adopt manufactories like those in the homeland.
Development: While much of New France is firmly pre-industrial, a few areas around the busiest ports have begun to demonstrate trends that may indicate potential for industrialisation.
Army Description: The New France militias are relatively small for the amount of land they are tasked with defending, but they have seen similar reforms to those of the French army with regards to standards for morale and discipline. Notably, they have their own school of tactics which has taken a great deal of inspiration from their native counterparts, enabling them to punch well above their weight in the dense forests of the American interior. Similarly, generally cordial relations with tribes and strict conduct codes help to prevent internal sabotage.
Army Weakness: Compared to the British colonies to the east, the New French army may have more formal training and tactics better adapted to the environment of the interior, but, as proven by the Seven Years War, numbers can be just as important, and native allies can’t reasonably be expected to bolster the ranks of the New French militia in times of war.
Naval Description: The New France “navy,” if it can be called that, consists mostly of merchant ships and fishing boats which have previously been refitted with cannons and may be refitted once again if there is a need, though with the reforms in the homeland, this appears to be more of a backup plan than anything.
Naval Weakness: Lacking any kind of formal navy, the best New France can provide is coastal batteries around the major ports which may be used to buy time until reinforcements from the French navy can break a blockade.
National Goals: Further economic and population development, population of the interior, and pursue independent policies from France.
National Issues:
Les Mis: Like their counterparts to the east, New France is primarily populated by those who did not fit in well with the environment present in the homeland. While poverty is a more frequent driver of emmigration than religious or moral disagreements, there is still a growing notion of independence from the France of Europe. Among those in New France, there is a fairly common opinion that France proper may not have the interests of its colonies at heart, and so, despite strong notions of “Frenchness” still being common, the sense of alienation has led to an increasingly strong push for greater autonomy.
Land of Twin Rivers: New France has been endowed with both a blessing and a curse. The great waterways of the interior allow goods and people to travel out to port with great ease. However, this is only a one-way trip. Travelling downriver is significantly easier than travelling upriver, which has led to a very one-sided trade relationship and has complicated the settlement of the interior, as the great rivers serve as the main arteries of the colonies.
Reluctant Colonists: New France is rich in land and poor in people. Despite the best efforts of the administration and French government alike, getting people to populate the interior has always been an uphill battle. Beyond Fort St. Louis and Fort Rouillé, great swaths of land lay underused and open to the more zealous settlers from the east.
French, and?: Although bound by many common traits, the fundamental bond between those in the colonies ultimately boils down to being French in the New World. Any attempts at nation identity beyond the notion of sharing rivers inevitably returns to being French. The only notable distinction beyond these features is the overwhelming dominance of Catholicism, which is not reflected back home. However, as many in northern colonies especially descend from those fleeing the Wars of Religion, a difference in faith is not enough to motivate most to take up arms.
History :
New France in Canada
The history of New France is generally divided into two realms: Canada and Louisiana. The history of New France as a whole, however, begins with Canada. Seven years after he planted a cross in Gaspesia, the Breton-French explorer Jacques Cartier brought four hundred settlers to settle the land of Quebec City in 1541. Although the settlers experienced great difficulty during their first few years, they were able to endure despite all odds, and this initial success served to embolden French colonists in the future, though for many years, settlements remained small and limited in scope.
During the reign of Henry IV, new colonial charters were issued, and his reign saw the expansion of Quebec City, Montreal, and the establishment of numerous new villages. Until this period, however, New France was regarded as an exclusively economic venture, focused primarily on the procurement of furs. During the French Wars of Religion, Henry IV’s government came to treat New France as a sort of relief valve, encouraging peasants more unwilling to accept new government policies to emigrate.
New France in Louisiana
In 1671, the settlement of Bilocci was established, which initiated the French presence in previously claimed territories in Louisiana. Several years later, a new settlement was established on the lands of the Chitimacha, and was named New Orleans.
Though Lower Louisiana was initially appealing to many settlers for its potential as a sugar colony, like those of the Caribbean, the same issues of disease were present, which significantly bottlenecked its growth compared to that of Canada. After a few generations, however, the creolisation of the urban populations of New Orleans lessened the impact of disease on the local population. The reputation of Lower Louisiana to French peasantry, in the meantime, spread and established it as a more dangerous alternative to Canada, with potential for greater rewards.
Even though such a reputation was not necessarily repulsive to many willing to cross the Atlantic, many new immigrants who landed in New Orleans lasted only one summer — either dying from the frequent outbreaks, or pushing northwards to more favourable climates to European sensibilities.
Calls for Home Rule
In the aftermath of several major slave revolts, the governor of Louisiana placed limits on new slave imports in 1755, and introduced a moratorium on new imports in 1762 that ended slave imports in 1777. While Canadians and Upper Louisianians had been interested in greater autonomy for some time, this act served to galvanise the slaveholders of Louisiana into some of the most ardent supporters of local elections of governors. It was this growing pressure that led the crown to appoint a quiet, studious man as the Intendant, and establish a parliament. Only time will tell whether building a government of less bold individuals will soothe the growing discontent, or if further reforms will be needed.
RP Sample: Surely we know one another, right?
#AER
by Inazumaa » Sat Jul 02, 2022 9:39 pm
Inazumaa wrote:Reservation
Nation Name: United Kingdom of Aragon
Territory: Catalonia, Aragon, Balearic Islands, Valencia, La rioja, Navarre, and the Basque country
Colonial holdings: The Philippines, The Moluccas, and southern Sulawesi (south and southeast sulawesi
#AER (Do not delete this, it is used to keep track of the apps)
by Intermountain States » Sun Jul 03, 2022 12:22 am
by Intermountain States » Sun Jul 03, 2022 12:31 am
by Great Confederacy of Commonwealth States » Sun Jul 03, 2022 2:20 am
by Pasong Tirad » Sun Jul 03, 2022 5:38 am
From left to right: the coat of arms of the Republics of Nice and Noli; the flag of the Most Serene Republic of Genoa
and the de facto flag of the United Republics; the coat of arms of the Republics of Genoa and Massa and Carrara
Nation Name: Officially, the nation's name is the United Republics of Genoa, Noli, Nice and Massa and Carrara. It is made up of four component republics - the Most Serene Republic of Genoa, the Republic of Noli, the Republice of Nice and the Republic of Massa and Carrara. Colloquially, it is referred to simply as Genoa or, a bit more formally, as the United Republics.
Culture(s): A vast majority of the people in the United Republics identify as Genoan or Ligurian (one of the many languages of Italy). The people of Massa and Carrara and Nice refer to themselves as Italians, Ligurians or by their republic of birth (Massani, Carrani, Nizzardi). In the Republic of Nice, there is a sizeable minority of French- and Occitan-speaking people, especially in the province of Frejus. Here, the people refer to themselves as Occitan, Nissarda or Nicoise. The Ligurian language is the language of administration, and Ligurian and Italian are the lingua francas of the United Republics.
Territory:The United Republics has divided itself into four republics that govern distinct administrative divisions made up of several regions, referred to administratively as provinces. Genoa, de jure only controls the provinces of Genoa and Savona, but as the dominant member of the United Republics it exerts a lot of influence over how the other members of the confederation govern themselves. Nice is made up of two provinces, the Nizzardi-dominated province of Nice and the province of Frejus, which has a sizeable French- and Occitan-speaking population. The Republic of Massa and Carrara controls just one province, over half of which is territory controlled by the many protectorates bound to it. Noli, surrounded entirely by Genoa in the province of Savona, is made up of just 61 square kilometers of territory, including the city and port that bears its name and some surrounding municipalities that it has held on to for centuries and was gifted to it by Genoa to properly house the city-state's expanding population.
The United Republics also includes 16 protectorates that are not full members of the confederation. These are close allies who are military protected by the United Republics, have some limited political representation in the Council of the Confederation and enjoy certain economic benefits. These 16 protectorates include several small principalities and marquisates, including the Principalities of Fivizzano, Masserano, Monaco, Montignoso and Pontremoli; and the Marquisates of Bagnone, Fosdinovo, Malaspina, Malgrate, Montereggio, Mulazzo and Castagnetoni, Olivola, Podenzana and Aulla, Tresana, Treschietto and Plumesana and Villafranca.
Of these states, only the Principality of Monaco is not considered a direct protectorate of the Republic of Massa and Carrara. The 15 client states of Massa and Carrara make up over two-thirds of the territory and over half the population of the province of Massa and Carrara and have willingly subjugated themselves to the republic – and, by extension, the confederation – due to Massa and Carrara's military might through a treaty known as the Treaty of the Fifteen.
The Principality of Monaco's alliance with the confederation is older than the United Republics itself, beginning in the early 16th century when, for the first – but not the last – time in history, a member of the old, influential and exceptionally wealthy House of Grimaldi was, at the same time, the sovereign prince of Monaco and the Doge of the Most Serene Republic. When Genoa established the United Republics with the Republics of Noli and Nice, the close economic and military alliance Monaco enjoyed with Genoa was extended to the confederation.
Capital City: The capital and largest city of the United Republics is Genoa, La Superba. Genoa is not only the capital and the nexus point of all political power in the confederation, but it is also the cultural capital of the United Republic, being the preferred destination of many aspiring artists and performers in Northwestern Italy, and the source of a majority of the confederation's economic prosperity thanks to the city's massive and busy ports and the presence of many wealthy and influential banking and merchant families, their connections, and their links to other ports all over the world. Genoa also serves as the capital of the Most Serene Republic. Other politically and economically important cities are Nice, Noli and the twin cities of Massa and Carrara, which alternate every year as the capital of the republic that bears both their names.
Population: The United Republics, including its over a dozen protectorates, have an estimated 1.5 million inhabitants. Of the constituent republics, the Republic of Genoa is the most populous with around 750,000 inhabitants. La Superba alone is home to around 75,000 people. The Republic of Nice is the next most populated with around 450,000 inhabitants and its capital has around 30,000 residents. The Republic of Massa and Carrara, excluding its many client states, has around 100,000 residents, with the twin cities having around 15,000 inhabitants each. The Republic of Noli has around 45,000 inhabitants within its approximately 61 square kilometers of territory.
Of the 16 protectorate states of the confederation, the Principality of Monaco is the largest with a population of around 15,000. Massa and Carrara's 15 protectorates have a combined population of around 140,000 inhabitants.
Government Type : A confederation of four self-governing republics with 16 protectorates
Head of State and Head of Government: First Councilor of the United Republics and Doge of Genoa Giacomo Maria Brignole
Government Description:De jure, the United Republics has a collective head of state in the form of the Council of the Confederation. This council is made up of 101 members known as councilors. The four constituent republics send 20 councilors each, chosen by their respective legislatures, and the confederation's 16 protectorates send one representative each, usually their ruling lord or a representative of the noble ruling family. The five heads of the four republics (Massa and Carrara have two heads of state) are ex officio members of the council, and one of them is chosen every two years to be the leader of the council and the confederation. This leader is bestowed the title of First Councilor upon his election, and he is only supposed to be regarded as first among equals.
Since the establishment of the Council of the Confederation, the position of First Councilor has almost always been given to the doge of Genoa. Due to the Most Serene Republic's outsized political and economic influence in the confederation, the principle of the First Councilor being first among equals is never followed.
Furthermore, the five heads of state of four constituent republics in practice are the only ones who wield executive authority in the United Republics. The rest of the council acts more as a legislature and a judiciary. Some of these councilors are also delegated executive tasks by their respective head of state when necessary.
The powers of the Council of the Confederation are limited by design. It meets several times a year in Genoa in the Palazzo Durazzo in Genoa. The Council's main responsibility is dealing with interregional affairs. When disputes or other negotiations need to be held between two or more republics, it is always brought before the Council which helps mediate and hand out rulings. If a dispute arises between two or more protectorates, the case is handled by the republic that holds dominion over the protectorates, in this case almost always Massa and Carrara, and is only brought before the Council upon the republic's request.
The Council of the Confederation is also responsible for international affairs and diplomacy, the overseeing, maintenance and expansion of the confederation's trade routes and trading outposts and the maintenance and training of the small regular army.
The Council is also responsible for financial concerns that affect more than one constituent republic of the confederation, including the maintenance and expansion of trade routes and trading outposts and the upkeep of the confederation's small regular army. To this end, a member of the Council is always appointed as the confederation's representative to the Bank of Saint Romulus, a state deposit bank modeled after the Republic of Genoa's Bank of Saint George, to make sure that confederal authorities and the regular army do not bankrupt the United Republics.
Every other aspect of governance in the United Republics, so long as it does not infringe upon the traditional liberties of the other republics, is handled by the confederation's constituent republics. The four republics have generally similar systems of government. They are oligarchic republics with legislatures made up – to varying degrees – of the territory's wealthiest and most influential citizens. The republics are led by a head of state elected to a term of two years – standardized to make meeting with the Council of the Confederation easier – by these legislatures filled almost entirely by members of the state's ruling classes.
Genoa is headed by the doge who is elected by the Great Council and Minor Council. The Great Council is made up of 400 individuals, 300 of whom are chosen by lot from a registry listing down the adult men of the most notable families of Genoa. The last 100 seats are chosen once again by lot by the Minor Council from among the most notable individuals in Genoa whose names are not on the registry. The Minor Council is made up of 48 individuals who represent the 48 families that have successfully gotten one of their number elected to be the doge of Genoa. These 48 families are responsible for choosing who in their family gets to represent them in the Minor Council.
Noli is headed by the podesta, who is elected by the Council of Consuls and the Council of Nobles. The Council of Consuls is made up of former podestas who, upon the end of their term, are immediately made members of the Council of Consuls for life. The Council of Consuls is currently made up of 16 members. The Council of Nobles is made up of the 120 most influential and notable individuals of Noli, with a majority of its members coming from aristocratic families. Like the Minor Council of Genoa, the Council of Nobles is responsible for choosing their replacements.
Massa and Carrara is headed by two Consuls – one from Massa and one from Carrara – who are elected by the Council of the Two Cities and the Council of the Fifteen. The Council of the Twin Cities is made up of 120 of the most notable men of property or wealth or who have performed exceptional services to the consuls, the republic or the confederation. They create a list of men from Massa and Carrara who they wish to be made consul. This list is then sent to the Council of the Fifteen, made up of the four princes and 11 marquises bonded to Massa and Carrara as protectorates. They whittle down the list until only the individuals acceptable to them are present. This list is sent back to the Council of the Two Cities, who then vote for the next co-consuls.
Nice is headed by the president, who is elected by the Nizzardi Senate among their number. The Nizzardi Senate is notable for being the only legislature in the United Republics elected by a form of – very restricted – popular vote. The franchise is extended only to men of property and a certain monetary value. Furthermore, the right to run for the Senate is restricted only to men with either double the property acreage or double the monetary value of eligible voters.
The 16 protectorates of the United Republics remain largely autonomous of the confederation, save for matters relating to the military, defense and external relations, which by treaty are handled by the Council of the Confederation. These protectorates have a standing invitation to join the United Republics as full members. All they have to do is to become republics, which the ruling nobility of the protectorates are unlikely to do.
Majority/State Religion :A majority of the inhabitants of the confederation are Catholics. The Republic of Nice has a significant minority of Protestant Christians who hold to the Reformed tradition. These people make up nearly 30 percent of the inhabitants in the province of Frejus and are the majority in the province's northwestern border region with France, and they are concentrated around the town of Barcellonetta which, without fail, sends Protestant Christian representatives to the Nizzardi Senate.
The capital cities of the confederation's component republics also host a small number of Jewish people who have been given special dispensation from laws that ban Jews from their respective states. These Jewish families, numbering no more than 2,000 people, are notable artists, physicians, scientists, merchants with invaluable trading connections with the Mediterranean and other people whose safety is guaranteed by the republic that houses them due to exceptional services they or their ancestors have provided. One such family is the HaKohen family of Sephardic Jews in Genoa, whose 16th-century progenitor, Joseph, was a highly regarded historian and physician who served as the personal doctor of several doges.
This guarantee of safety extends to the descendants of these Jewish families but can be revoked at will if they lose the favor of the rulers of the republics they reside in. Most of the 2,000 Jewish residents of the United Republics reside in Genoa.
Furthermore, in northwestern Frejus, there may be another 1,000 Jews whose presence is not officially sanctioned by the Republic of Nice. They are being allowed to unofficially reside in Frejus due to the desire of the local Protestant population to guarantee their safety, believing - perhaps rightly so - that a threat to one religious minority in the confederation could mean a threat to all religious minorities.
Economic Description:The strength of the United Republics lies in its massive ports. Genoa, Noli, Nice and Massa and Carrara all have ports that are filled with traders and their ships bringing in goods from all over the world, which the commercial families of the republics send on to other parts of Europe to trade.
The United Republics is also known for some high-value exports, such as Ligurian wine, flowers, olive oil and food products made through Genoa's massive imports of salts and spices. Marble from the quarries of Massa and Carrara which have been used for centuries on some of the most remarkable buildings and sculptures in Italy, including the Pantheon, Trajan's Column and Michelangelo's David.
The two parts of the United Republics' economy that have seen the most growth in recent years are its banking and mercenary industries.
The Genoese Bank of Saint George and the confederal Bank of Saint Romulus are known for their immense wealth and influence and the profitability of their possessions. The Bank of Saint George has lent considerable sums of money to many rulers in Europe throughout the centuries. The taxes it pays to Genoa make up a not insignificant amount of revenue for the republic. While the Bank of Saint Romulus is still relatively new and its only clients are the constituent states and protectorates of the United Republics (it is prevented from expanding due to the conflicting interest, its revenues nevertheless are able to keep the confederate government solvent.
For the past century, the United Republics has also been known for its Alberghi regiments. These are regiments of between 2,000 to 2,200 men each that are privately owned by the wealthiest Alberghi families of Genoa. These regiments regularly participate in conflicts throughout Europe as mercenaries, padding the number of troops in a nation's army when they desperately needed more experienced manpower and didn't have the time to train new recruits. The Alberghi families sign contracts with nations for large sums of money, a small portion of which is taxed by the Most Serene Republic. Although, due to the rise in regular armies outfitted with professional soldiers who serve through loyalty to home and country, the Alberghi regiments are starting to fall out of fashion.
Development: Pre-industrialized. The manufacturing capabilities of the United Republics are limited, but the confederation has expert shipbuilders and a fair amount of factories dedicated to the production of armaments for both the regular and private armies.
Army Description:The United Republics only has a small professional army of fewer than 10,000 soldiers, organized into three regiments of 2,000 men each from Genoa, Nice and Massa and Carrara, and a battalion of 1,000 men from Noli. The 16 protectorates of the United Republics are also obligated by treaty to maintain a company of between 100 to 150 men each for service in the confederal army. These units are different from the small regular units each protectorate employs for the defense of their noble houses and their properties and for maintaining public order.
The United Republics also hosts 28 Alberghi regiments. These privately-owned and funded regiments are seen as far more capable than the regular army because they are provided with better training and equipment and are better supplied and paid. They also have a lot more experience thanks to them being regularly employed by European powers, either as personal bodyguards or to augment their militaries in an ongoing conflict, or by the families that own them as garrisons for their far-flung trading outposts in the Americas, Africa and Asia.
These 28 Alberghi regiments, made up of around 2,000 to 2,200 men each, outnumber the regular army of the United Republics by over six to one. At any given time, between a third to half of these regiments are currently employed in a European court or are garrisoned at a trading outpost. The rest are either stationed in Genoa, training themselves and training new recruits, or are sent on leave.
The training, arming and organization of the regular army is not seen as equal to what other major and regional European powers of the time receive. The Alberghi regiments are seen as more experienced, better trained, better equipped and better organized. What sets both the regular and private armies apart from most other European powers is an innovation introduced by the Alberghi regiments.
Due to the desire for their mercenary regiments to be seen as more attractive investments for potential clients, and to one-up their rivals such as the Swiss mercenary troops, the Alberghi regiments over the past century gradually introduced a system of combined arms into their forces. This system was later incorporated into the confederal army.
Each regiment, be it regular army or Alberghi, will also include among their number at least two companies of light infantry - one per battalion - and at least one company of saber-, pistol- and carbine-armed unit of dragoons. Being a form of medium horse company, this is the cheapest and easiest to recruit form of cavalry the Alberghi regiments can obtain. These companies are usually attached to the command staff of the regiment, and they are used to fulfill the duties of messengers, screening and reconnaissance and even frontal and flanking charges. Eight Alberghi regiments, those owned by Genoa's wealthiest, including the Grimaldi, Spinola and Durazzo families, have two companies of dragoons - one per battalion - in their regiments.
Both regular army and Alberghi battalions also have double the usual number of infantry battalion pieces found in other European armies. Where other powers would only attach two small, mobile artillery pieces - usually four- or three-pounders - the battalions of the United Republics have four. Furthermore, the three aforementioned wealthiest families of Genoa have a separate battery of artillery for their Alberghi regiments, made up of six horse-drawn four-pounder cannons.
Army Weakness: The regular army, while well trained and very professional, is not considered on par with other European powers. It also lacks any proper experience as the United Republics has not participated in a major war in over 30 years and has not kept up with any of the latest developments and innovations in military technology, tactics and organization. Furthermore, the size of the regular army and how much the United Republics spends on its upkeep is purposely kept small by Genoan elites who would prefer to rely on the Alberghi regiments for defense.
Naval Description:The navy of the United Republics is divided into three groups: the United Fleet, the Republic Fleet and the Private Fleet. The United Fleet is the smallest and it is made up of only six old ships of the line. Its main purpose is to fight in major battles and defend the ports of the United Republics in times of war. The Republic Fleet is made up of the state-owned and funded ships of the four republics, and its task is to safeguard shipping entering their ports and to conduct patrols in the Ligurian Sea. The Private Fleet - or fleets, to be specific - dwarfs both other fleets in size and is made up of the ships belonging to the various merchant families dominating the four republics. Their main task is to act as escorts for the merchant ships heading to Genoa's various trading outposts around the world.
In peacetime, the United and Republic Fleets are placed under the command of the Office of the High Admiral. The High Admiral is appointed by the First Councilor of the United Republics with the consent of the Council of the Confederation. In wartime, the Private Fleet is absorbed into the command structure of the admiralty.
Naval Weakness: The age of Genoa being able to compete with other naval powers in the Mediterranean has long passed. The confederation has given up its desire to be a supreme maritime power in favor of just maintaining a naval force strong enough to protect its interests in the Western Mediterranean, particularly in the Ligurian Sea. Even the task of protecting merchant vessels plying their trading routes around the world has been outsourced to the Private Fleet, where once it was the task of the state-owned fleets of the republics or of the confederation itself. This has resulted in less and less funding being provided to finance the construction of new ships for the United and Republic fleets, with the High Admiralty believing that, if necessary, they can just rely on absorbing private vessels into the fleets.
National Goals: Maintain - and, if possible, expand - the United Republics' status as a regional power, bring its army and military up to date, maintain - and, if possible, expand - the status of the banks as the supreme financial institutions of Europe, potentially expand the United Republics' trading outposts into full-fledged colonies. Prevent reformist and dissident elements from within the confederation from gaining power and influence.
National Issues:
- The Republic of Magnificents - The region's republics have been ruled by aristocrats since their inception. With the creation of the United Republics, the wealth gap between the elites and the rest of the populace, including the educated urban bourgeois of Genoa, has only widened. This alone was not enough to breed resentment among the rest of the populace, but the massive wealth of the oldest and most influential families of the confederation has led them to become detached. The tax burden is slowly being shifted to the middle and lower classes. Many more people are running out of opportunities to make a good living, especially if they have no interest in contracting themselves out to the Alberghi regiments or spending years at a time at sea or in a foreign port. Reform is desperately needed, perhaps by instituting a progressive form of taxation, perhaps by expanding democratic participation. Either way, if the Council of the Confederation is not swayed to budge even a little, the wave of resentment might build up and lead to a revolution.
- The Dominants - The United Republics, at least for a time, used to be able to compete with other regional powers in land and sea power. Now, the confederation is barely able to maintain its minuscule standing army, and its confederal fleet is composed only of a handful of aging ships and with no hope of it being provided with modernization funding. To maintain its position as a power that should not be messed with, the United Republics will need to overcome competing interests that are preventing the regular army from being upgraded to be at least on-par, if not better, than its neighbors.
- The Lords of War - While reformers within the United Republics would like to see more resources expended on strengthening the regular army, many others in the confederation, despite their misgivings about the outsized influence of the Alberghi regiments, understand that these mercenary regiments are still necessary due to the income they provide for Genoa and the confederation. As more and more of Europe relies more heavily on larger professional armies, the need for mercenary regiments is diminishing. The Alberghi regiments need to convince its regular clients that they are still a necessary addition to modern militaries. If they are unable to find new contracts to keep the money flowing, their future looks uncertain.
- Memories of the Bombardments - In 1684, due to the fledgling United Republics' financial ties with other European powers, the cities of Genoa, Nice and Noli were targeted by fleets that bombarded the cities non-stop. This left large swathes of the three cities severely damaged, and reconstruction would not be completed for decades afterwards. By 1746, the United Republics was once again brought into a war that left its five major cities and ports besieged, and Genoa itself ransacked. The confederation's people still have memories of the bombardments, the sieges and the ransacking. The people of the confederation remain anxious of a siege, and rightly so, as neither the confederal government nor the republics themselves have provided additional investments to strengthen the lucrative and very vulnerable port cities. From the last sieges nearly over 30 years ago, no shore batteries, no additional gun emplacements and no stronger walls were built. Additional storage spaces for supplying cities during sieges were built. Modernized logistical plans and networks were not created to help wait out long sieges and lengthy military campaigns. The people must be provided with relief for their anxiety, lest this resentment build up and boil over.
History :In 1625, war broke out between the Duchy of Savoy and the Republics of Genoa and Noli and its ally, the Duchy of Massa and Carrara. What in real life was a short conflict that didn't even last an entire year became a prolonged low-intensity war, one of many in the Thirty Years' War. Every summer, tens of thousands of men from Savoy, Genoa, Noli and Massa and Carrara would duke it out for control over the narrow strip of land between the Alps and the sea. This conflict wouldn't officially cease until the end of the continent-wide conflict in 1648, by which time Savoy, Genoa, Noli and Massa and Carrara would agree to a status quo ante bellum, with very little territory changing hands.
By 1672, the then-Duke of Savoy was once again gearing for war with Genoa, believing it to be an opportune time to strike and to take lucrative territory in Liguria, potentially including the Republic of Noli and its massive port. Unfortunately for him, the people of the County of Nice, who were the most devastated by the previous war and still remembered how a generation of their men were taken from them for no good reason, demanded that the Duke cease his preparations for war. The Duke retaliated by sending an army and attempting to subdue the rebellious province of Savoy. The provisional government created in the county, led by a newly-formed Senate of Nice, turned to Genoa, Noli and Massa and Carrara for aid. The three Italian states answered the call, and with what little military strength Nice could muster successfully beat back the Savoyard forces. In the ensuing peace treaty, the duke was forced to recognize the independence of Nice, which then declared the creation of the Republic of Nice.
By the war's end in 1673, the republics of Genoa, Noli and Nice, along with the Duchy of Massa and Carrara, and the 16 protectorates that rely on them for support and military aid, wanted to formalize their alliance through the creation of a confederation. Taking inspiration from the nearby Swiss, the four states and their protectorates signed the Pact of Confederation, creating the United Republics of Genoa, Noli and Nice and the Duchy of Massa and Carrara, and warning other regional powers that an attack on one would be seen as an attack on all of them.
By 1731, the Duchy of Massa and Carrara would enter a succession crisis following the death of Alderano I of the House of Cybo-Malaspina, the last Duke of Massa and Prince of Carrara. The only noble successor available, his daughter Maria Teresa, was married to the Duke of Modena and Reggio. To prevent Modena and Reggio from gaining legitimacy for his claim over Massa and Carrara, the Republics of Genoa, Noli and Nice invaded Massa and Carrara and established a republic. Massa and Carrara's 15 protectorates were bribed into supporting this fledgling republic through the promise of political representation, fewer taxes and better economic opportunities within the United Republics.
Throughout this whole time up to the present, the United Republics turned ever more inward. Genoa abandoned any colonies it had left, save for small trading outposts all over the world that helped it maintain its trading routes. The once formidable regular army of the confederation has diminished in size and now only numbers 10,000 men, if not less. The influence of the confederation's wealthiest families, almost all of whom are Genoan, has only grown, and with them the power of the Alberghi regiments, their private fleets and the confederation's financial institutions.
These private fleets and armies have continued to expand despite the regression of the republics and the confederation that they are supposed to support. The regiments continue to sign contracts with various lords and states and the private fleets continue to ply their trading routes and expand ever outward. Most of their wealth goes into the pockets of the aristocratic families that founded them, and little is left for the people who worked in their regiments and fleets as soldiers, seafarers and traders.
Resentment grows within the United Republics. Cracks are beginning to form and it won't be long before the oligarchs that hold all political, economic and military power in the confederation will have to contend with reality: A New Order is forming, and the ruling families of the United Republics need to rebuilt their state for the benefit of all, or the people will do it for them.
RP Sample: Link one. Link two.
#AER
by Reverend Norv » Sun Jul 03, 2022 6:54 am
Great Confederacy of Commonwealth States wrote:I am looking up British Republicanism, and reading those works leads you to realise that a British revolution would have profoundly different ideas than th French revolution. I will have to write some Hume-Smithian ideology in the future…
A great deal of democratic enthusiasm descends from the ideas of people like Rousseau, who believed in democracy because they thought mankind so wise and good that everyone deserved a share in the government. The danger of defending democracy on those grounds is that they’re not true. And whenever their weakness is exposed, the people who prefer tyranny make capital out of the exposure… The real reason for democracy is just the reverse. Mankind is so fallen that no man can be trusted with unchecked power over his fellows. Aristotle said that some people were only fit to be slaves. I do not contradict him. But I reject slavery because I see no men fit to be masters.
by Sao Nova Europa » Sun Jul 03, 2022 2:36 pm
New Luciannova wrote:Nation Name: Republic of Sicily
New Luciannova wrote:Government Type : Republic with Oligarchal and Monarchal Structures
Head of State: King Luciano Galiano
New Luciannova wrote:History : Overthrowing the bourbons, Luciano Galiano, an attorney, philosopher, and son of a merchant prince, marched on Palermo and Naples with a group of followers. They demanded a Republic, self-rule, and the right to create a true "Italian State." Similar nationalist movements under allies sprung up in Sardinia and Southern Italy leading to a large scale movement, and with Malta joined, the New Republic of Sicily was born.
by Khasinkonia » Sun Jul 03, 2022 3:29 pm
by New Luciannova » Sun Jul 03, 2022 10:26 pm
Sao Nova Europa wrote:New Luciannova wrote:Nation Name: Republic of Sicily
While the app has potential, I cannot accept it as it is right now. Two issues need to be addressed:
1)New Luciannova wrote:Government Type : Republic with Oligarchal and Monarchal Structures
Head of State: King Luciano Galiano
How can a Republic be led by a King? A Consul or Grand Magistrate or some other title perhaps?
2)New Luciannova wrote:History : Overthrowing the bourbons, Luciano Galiano, an attorney, philosopher, and son of a merchant prince, marched on Palermo and Naples with a group of followers. They demanded a Republic, self-rule, and the right to create a true "Italian State." Similar nationalist movements under allies sprung up in Sardinia and Southern Italy leading to a large scale movement, and with Malta joined, the New Republic of Sicily was born.
It is a bit early for such a nationalist uprising to take place.
I am willing to allow a republican revolt to take place against the Bourbons, however, but you need to explain why this revolt took place, why the Kingdom was unable to crush the rebels, why this Luciano guy became leader of the revolution. Your history does not need to be super detailed but I need some greater explanation.
by Of the Quendi » Mon Jul 04, 2022 3:57 am
Inazumaa wrote:-snip-
by Reverend Norv » Mon Jul 04, 2022 10:03 am
Nation Name: Britain's colonies on the American East Coast are officially known as The Thirteen Colonies. Internationally, they are frequently simply called America, as they constitute the most populous European settler society in the New World. As the colonies have forged closer cooperation in the face of rising tensions with Britain, the Continental Congress has declared the existence of a Continental Association: the first name for what may become a united American polity. Advocates for greater inter-colonial solidarity against Britain have even begun to refer to the United Colonies: and since "United" is a much stronger word than "Association," that terminology is often viewed as an implicit demand for some kind of devolved sovereignty.
Culture(s):The American colonies are already an ethnic melting pot: all over Europe, it is known that a poor man in America can own as much land as a lord in the Old World. Overall, a slim majority of Americans still consider themselves English in the ethnic sense. But large areas of eastern Pennsylvania are majority-Welsh, and large areas of western New York are majority-Scottish - including a Gaelic-speaking Highlander population. There is a significant German population in the uplands of North Carolina, Virginia, and Pennsylvania; there is a significant Swedish population in New Jersey. Many of the most prosperous South Carolina families are Huguenot French; much of eastern New York is of Dutch extraction. Georgia governs a population in Florida that is almost forty percent Spanish-speaking. The Overmountain Settlements west of the Appalachians are predominately Scots-Irish.
Despite this diversity, most white Americans do feel American: while the average Virginian thinks of himself as a Virginia citizen whose country is Virginia, he nevertheless recognizes a cultural-national kinship to citizens of the other colonies. That kinship is founded in a shared Protestant faith, a shared tradition of republican government, and a shared experience of living on the frontier. John Jay analogized this separation of political and cultural identity to Ancient Greece, "wherein men of Athens, Sparta, Corinth, &cetera all took the highest pride in the name of Hellene."
Here are a few gross generalizations about that shared culture. Americans think of themselves as a new people: idealistic, self-reliant, hardworking, godly, inventive. They despise cynicism and resignation. They believe in the restraining power of law and virtue, but not in shackles of dogma or of force. They are reflexively suspicious of hierarchies of birth (except, of course, for that of race), but they have great faith in hierarchies of hard-earned virtue and wisdom. They are the most literate society in the world: every colony has established public primary schools, and the northern colonies also educate women. The colonies have more newspapers and pamphlets per capita than anywhere else on Earth. Americans believe deeply in reason, and feel that reason goes hand-in-hand with their zealously literate Protestantism. They imagine virtue as a unique combination of frontier self-reliance and intellectual sophistication: Benjamin Franklin, America's greatest celebrity, is a brilliant scientist and inventor who once met the King of France in a backwoods coonskin cap. And finally, Americans possess what Toqueville will some day describe as a genius for self-organization. To a European visitor, it seems that every American belongs to a committee of safety, a debate society, a church vestry or board of elders, a boycott association, and a town militia - all organized spontaneously from the bottom up. It is this phenomenon, more than anything else, that distinguishes American culture from its European antecedents: the average American considers himself both entitled and qualified to participate in every facet of his community's affairs, from business to politics to war. It is a culture of mass participation, and mass dignity.
But not all Americans are white. Roughly three in every twenty Americans are of African descent. Of these, the majority are two or three generations removed from Africa, but tens of thousands are first-generation slaves: kidnapped from Africa and brought across the Atlantic. Eight in ten African Americans live in slavery; two in ten are free, overwhelmingly in the northern colonies. One in every twenty Americans is a Native American; while the organized native nations have been largely pushed beyond the borders of the British colonies, many Indian villages remain in rural areas east of the Appalachians. And in the contested lands west of the Appalachians, the great native confederations of the Iroquois, Cherokee, and Miami have more practical power than France, Britain, or any colony. In Florida, the colonial government has even been obliged to reach a fragile modus vivendi with the Seminole: a composite people formed by escaped slaves and the shattered remains of Florida's native nations. Few of these subaltern groups would identify with the prevailing American culture, whose treatment of them taints its ethos of equal participation with hypocrisy.
Territory: The Thirteen Colonies of Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Connecticut, Rhode Island, New York, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Delaware, Maryland, Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Georgia encompass all of eastern North America from the border of New France to the Atlantic Ocean. Modern Florida is part of the colony of Georgia; modern Maine is part of the colony of Massachusetts; modern Vermont is part of the colony of New York, albeit that it has refused to accept New York's authority and is de facto self-governing. Legally, the Appalachian Mountains mark the border between the colonies and New France, but almost half a million Americans have settled west of the border and have formed illegal societies in the Ohio and Tennessee Valleys, the Cumberland Mountains, and the coastal plain of Alabama. Some of these "Overmountain Settlements" consider themselves an extension of a colony to their east; others are wholly self-governing. They are one component of a chaotic borderland of French trading posts and forts, powerful native nations, and American settlements.
Capital City: There is no single capital, because there is no single American polity. New York and Philadelphia are the most populous cities in the colonies; the Continental Congress meets in Philadelphia, while New York is the continent's biggest commercial hub. Boston is the third-largest city, the oldest and most prestigious city of the colonies, and widely considered America's cultural and intellectual capital. Charleston is the largest city in the South, and the main slave port.
Population: 3,129,214; of whom about 375,000 are enslaved, and about 156,000 are tribal Indians; these groups are excluded from citizenship. While white women and the very poor cannot vote or serve on juries, they are legal citizens entitled to the protection of the law.
Government Type: Thirteen colonial republics, plus dozens of self-governing illegal "Overmountain Settlements," all joined in a loose Continental Association directed by the Continental Congress.
Head of State: His Imperial Britannic Majesty, James IV and IX, Emperor of Britain, King of England, France, Scotland, Ireland, Jerusalem. Americans generally can't quite bring themselves to call the Emperor "Defender of the Faith." But to declare a different head of state would be to declare independence - a step that no colony has thus far been willing to take.
Head of Government: Mr. John Hancock, President of the Continental Congress. Despite his title, the President is not an executive. He is merely the presiding officer of a legislative body, and a weak officer of a weak body at that: the President cannot set the agenda or make committee appointments. His main job is to keep the squabbling delegates from turning debates into screaming matches. Each colony also has its own head of government: de jure a governor appointed by the crown, but de facto usually the president of the colony's Provincial Congress.
Government Description:America has two systems of government: a colonial system, and a de facto independent system that has grown up in its shadow. Formally, each colony's chief executive is a royal governor, appointed by the crown, whose legal powers are largely limitless. The governor is advised by a colonial council, comprised of the colony's richest and most powerful men, who also serve as the final court of appeal. An elected legislature has power of the purse, though the governor can override this in emergencies to raise taxes or allocate funds. Suffrage extends to adult free men who meet a variety of property requirements, varying from colony to colony: the two most common threshholds are an estate worth 40 shillings annually, or 25 acres of cultivated land. Most colonies have alternative standards for merchants and craftsmen, who can vote based on ownership of a home or payment of a tax. In total, roughly 70 percent of American freemen are enfranchised - more than three times the rate in England.
The colonies' shadow government operates alongside this system. It is strongest at the local level, where it is spontaneously self-organized from the bottom up. Patriots form local Committees of Safety, which are usually selected by vote or consensus at a gathering of all the adult men in a given town. (They usually meet in the town church.) This committee is responsible for managing the town's collective business, including the passage of regulations; the resolution of political disputes; and the training and equipment of the town militia. Each Committee of Safety then sends a delegate to the colony's Provincial Congress, or Provincial Conference - terminology varies. This is, in effect, a shadow legislature for the colony as a whole. It has less day-to-day business than the Committees of Safety, but it can make larger policy decisions: like whether to commit to a boycott, or how to respond to British provocations. It can require contributions of funds or arms from the Committees of Safety. Finally, each Provincial Congress is a member of the Continental Association, and names three or four delegates to the Continental Congress. The Congress claims to speak on behalf of the American people as a whole, but its powers are starkly limited: it cannot compel contributions of funds, arms, or militia. Nevertheless, as members of the Continental Association, the Provincial Congresses have theoretically promised to follow the policy direction set by the Continental Congress. To ensure consensus, each colonial delegation has one vote, regardless of its colony's size or wealth. In summary, the Continental Congress serves less as a real government, and more as a forum to facilitate coordinated action by the various members of the Continental Association.
Notably, this shadow system operates quite openly at all levels, because it never formally claims to be a government. The Committees of Safety characterize themselves as local public-order organizations of the sort that colonial townships have always maintained: they are political clubs, or mutual aid societies. The Provincial Congresses are likewise akin to colony-wide political parties or civil society organizations, whose decisions are "resolutions" rather than "laws." Even the Continental Congress, while it claims to represent the American people, affirms its loyalty to the Crown; it is in the nature of a cultural and political committee, lobbying the government on behalf of a disadvantaged community. This legal ambiguity is inherent in the structure of the Committees and Congresses. To the European mind, a claim of sovereignty entails the right to organize society from the top down. But the Committees and Congresses are spontaneously self-organized from the bottom up. Therefore, they do not make European sense as governments, no matter how many governmental functions they assume in practice.
As a result, these two systems involve many of the same individuals. Each colony is small: none has more than 700,000 people, and the smallest are closer to 50,000. This means that the leading men of each colony - ministers, merchants, intellectuals, landowners - are known to the public by name, and tend to know each other personally. In most colonies, these leading men are elected to the colonial legislature, and they are often selected by the governor to sit on the colonial council - while at the same time they openly serve in Committees of Safety or the Provincial Congress. Most Americans see no conflict between those two roles: these are public officials who are also involved in political activism. This is particularly pronounced in the judiciary, where the majority of judges in most colonies also sit on a local Committee of Safety - which means that the colonial courts are an essential part of both the overt government and the shadow government at the same time. English common law is the law both of the colonial governor and of the Committees of Safety.
The common law of the colonies, admittedly, is largely English in name only. While it is unmistakably derived from English common law, American law represents an evolution of the Whig legal tradition that was crushed in England in the seventeenth century, after which many of its champions fled to the American colonies. That tradition is characterized by a firm belief in the limited powers of government, derived ultimately from Calvin's Doctrine of the Lesser Magistrates: political authority is legitimate only insofar as it is exercised consistent with the law of God and the ancient traditions of English law. Though Whig jurists tend to point to Magna Carta as the ultimate fountainhead of those traditions, many Whig principles are actually derived from the writings of seventeenth-century radicals like John Lilburne and Thomas Rainsborough: including jury trial, the rule against general warrants, freedom of the press, and general (if not universal) manhood suffrage. While most Americans regard these principles - and the texts from which they are derived - as fundamental to the English legal tradition, most English jurists regard them as sedition: the intellectual inheritance of a failed revolution. But because there is no written code of English law, both English and American jurists can claim to represent the true essence of England's ancient law. Even English judges must admit that American law is English law - at least in colonial courts.
Finally, it is important to note that in the Overmountain Settlements, the local shadow government is the only government: in legally French territory, no colonial government can exercise any authority, and so the local Committee of Safety is the settlement's only government. As a result, each Overmountain Settlement is wholly self-governed, and there is no Provincial Congress for the settlements as a whole; instead, the larger and more influential settlements send delegates directly to the Continental Congress, where they share a single vote as the Overmountain delegation. (This is true even if the settlement considers itself to be an extraterritorial outpost of one of the Thirteen Colonies.) Here is another reason why the Congress is careful not to claim any kind of sovereignty: because it would then be asserting a claim over American settlements inside de jure French territory.
Majority/State Religion:The majority religion in every colony is Reformed Protestantism, instantiated through a variety of Presbyterian and Congregationalist churches. The crushing defeat of Reformed and republican English revolutionaries over the course of the seventeenth century resulted in a mass exodus of the Calvinist population of the British Isles, initially to New England, but thereafter to the Mid-Atlantic and Southern colonies as well. This flood of migration radically altered the religious character of most of the colonies. In 1640, only New England was majority-Reformed, and the other colonies had Anglican, Quaker, or Catholic majorities. By 1720, the Reformed Church predominated in twelve of the thirteen colonies, and it is now the established church in nine of them. Only in Maryland, Virginia, and North Carolina do Catholic and Anglican elites retain a measure of their original power; everywhere else, America is a resolutely Puritan society.
Reformed dominance deeply informs American culture and identity. The tradition of individual Bible-reading and reflection is the source of Americans' reverence for education, and their unique commitment to public schooling. Puritan ideals of companionate marriage have led to relatively more egalitarian gender attitudes - a wife is her husband's friend, not his servant - and allowed women a measure of access to education and public debate. The close association of Puritan religious identity and bourgeois class identity means that most Americans view hard work as a Christian virtue, and they see nothing wrong with making or investing money. They do, on the other hand, see flaunting money as a sign of ungodly pride. There is much truth to the stereotype of wealthy American merchants dressed in drab blue clothes, devoid of the normal embroidery or gilded buttons, and indeed most American men do not even wear wigs or powder their hair. Finally, most Americans see the Puritan religion and republican politics as two sides of the same coin. The Doctrine of the Lesser Magistrates insists that no king has any right to rule except in accordance with God's law; Reformed doctrine teaches that the Catholic faith of the English crown is Antichrist; and the unhealed wounds of the English Civil War have left a strong association between the Reformed faith and the cause of Parliament. This comparatively egalitarian and meritocratic tradition has deeply shaped American culture, and it is the most commonly cited basis for Americans' widespread moral discomfort with their own practice of slavery. Even in Southern colonies, most slaveholders find it difficult to reconcile the use of slave labor with the principles that are preached from their pulpits every Sunday.
The colonies have a number of religious minorities. Some of these - especially the powerful Dutch Reformed community of New York and the French Huguenot community of South Carolina - belong to the same broad Reformed tradition as English Puritans, and are widely regarded as part of the Calvinist mainstream of colonial religion. Others are more unusual. Many of the Pennsylvania landowning elite are still Welsh and English Quakers, whose pacifism and mysticism - both somewhat blunted by bourgeois respectability - are regarded by Reformed Americans with much bemusement. Maryland - founded as an attempt to create a Catholic royalist bastion among Calvinist republicans - remains just over fifty percent Catholic, but Catholic communities elsewhere in the colonies are small and face great hostility and prejudice. The largest religious minority is the Anglican Church, which was once the majority everywhere but New England. The fact that the English monarchy is now Catholic has left Anglicans - for whom the king is traditionally the head of the church - in a painfully sensitive position. American Anglicans have largely split into a High Church wing - aligned with the crown, and characterized by Catholic practice and rite - and a Low Church wing, which is more Puritan in practice and tends to support a constitutional, Protestant monarchy. Finally, about five thousand Jews live in the colonies: mostly Sephardim who initially settled in the Netherlands after their expulsion from Iberia, before moving on to the New World. The Reformed churches have always been unusually hospitable toward the Jewish community - Calvin had a remarkable affection for the Jews - and America is well-known as a safe refuge for Jews afflicted by persecution.
For most Americans, the Enlightenment has not appeared as a challenge to the Reformed faith; if anything, it has provided a secularized version of Reformed values that is accessible to all Americans. Reformed theologians, after all, have always taught that rational analysis of the Scriptures and the natural world is the path to truth; while Reformed theologians may disagree with some Enlightenment philosophers' conclusions, they have no quarrel with their methods. And there is a great deal of overlap between Reformed values and Enlightenment values: rationality; intellectual integrity; an austere prioritization of the mind over the senses; self-control and reflection; hard work; suspicion of arbitrary authority; reverence for learning; ruthless honesty. For most Americans, the Enlightenment has not undermined the Reformed faith; rather, the Enlightenment has confirmed it as a cornerstone of American culture.
Economic Description:The economy of the American colonies is the opposite of Europe: where Europe is overpopulated and underresourced, America is underpopulated and overresourced. An average farmer in America can own as much land as a feudal lord; there is enough iron and copper and timber and other natural resources to support a titanic economy; and there are simply not enough people in the colonies to take full advantage of the land's economic potential. America is also handicapped by British mercantilist policies, which restrict its manufacturing and exports, and make it artificially reliant on imports. These policies, alongside fundamental religious and political disputes, account for much of the tension between Britain and its American colonies.
In total, the economic output of the Thirteen Colonies is slightly more than thirty percent the size of Britain's economy. It relies primarily upon agriculture, logging, and mining. Wheat and corn are the staple crops. Coastal America's plentiful rivers power a multitude of gristmills, producing cornmeal and flour; the latter is mostly for export, and cornbread remains the staple of the American diet. Rice is the most common crop in South Carolina, and is a staple across the South. Virginia and Maryland have the colonies' only true cash-crop agriculture, which is focused on tobacco; while most tobacco is exported, enough is retained for smoking to be cheaper in America than anywhere else on Earth, and even the poorest farmer can enjoy a pipe. Fishing is a major industry across the colonies, and dried or salted fish is both consumed locally and exported in large quantities. Indigo is grown and refined into dye in South Carolina and Georgia; this makes it cheaper than any other dye for the American colonists, and explains the stereotype of Americans wearing mostly blue clothes. The backcountry is a crucial source of furs, including beaver pelts - an expensive luxury good. Much of the fur trade is actually fueled by the Overmountain Settlements, and therefore rests upon dubious legal footing: the pelts are being exported from illegal settlements inside de jure French territory.
The colonies' main extractive industries are logging and iron mining. The two are related: while America's iron reserves are not remarkable either for quantity or quality, its forests are outstanding for both. The colonists have access to an entire continent of primeval, old-growth, hardwood forest for logging. This means that they can produce charcoal in enormous quantities, and high-quality charcoal is the single most important prerequisite for refining iron and steel. (The alternative was coke, which hardwood shortages forced most of Europe to use, and which produced inferior iron and steel.) Another crucial use for lumber is the production of potash, which is made from hardwood ashes. It is an important fertilizer, as well as a component of soap and glass; American potash supplies both the colonies and most of Britain. Pig iron, steel, charcoal, and potash are the colonies' most important industrial products.
Beyond these, American manufacturing has been sharply limited by British mercantilist policies. British law makes it exceptionally difficult for the colonies to import almost anything from anywhere except Britain, or to export almost anything to anywhere except Britain. Foreign vessels cannot even transport goods between ports within the Britannic Empire, which has had the unintended effect of stimulating American shipbuilding: after all, someone has to transport American goods to British ports. To ensure a stable market for British exports, the colonies are even barred from manufacturing a long list of enumerated goods, which has sharply retarded American industry.
However, the crown does permit American manufacturing of certain products that are strategically vital to keep imperial forces supplied; it does not wish to depend entirely on supply lines from Britain. These local industries include the production of turpentine, hempen rope, rosin, tar, and pitch - all of which are essential to keep the Royal Navy afloat in the Western Hemisphere. Likewise, Americans are permitted to maintain their own shipbuilding industry, which is essential for naval repairs. But it has also allowed the colonies to construct quite large merchant fleets of their own, which are vital for the transportation of goods across the British Empire, and which regularly travel as far afield as China. Notorious as smugglers, American merchant ships sail under a variety of flags to transport a variety of goods, in violation of mercantilist policies the world over, and they bring back great wealth to New York, Charleston, and Boston. Even so, America remains reliant on imports for many finished and exotic goods, including paper, linen, silk, tea, coffee, dyes, felted hats, cotton, and more.
Among the paradoxes of the American economy is this: while more than eighty percent of Americans are technically subsistence farmers, free Americans also have the highest standard of living in the world. This is due mostly to the remarkable availability of land and the low price of timber and iron, which are locally produced in abundance. A typical American farm has enough land and resources for a comfortable house; a number of livestock; a large kitchen garden; and fields of grain that exceed the household's needs, so that the excess can be sold and exported. American households are famously self-reliant: they raise and shear sheep, spin the wool, weave it into cloth, and cut and sew that into clothes and curtains and bedclothes. Farmers build their own homes and barns, cast simple tools and bullets, brew their own beer and cider, and fire their own ceramics. And because of the colonies' public education policies, it is not unusual to find these ordinary yeomen farmers reading Milton, Virgil, or Homer by the fireside after a long day's work.
The roughly fifteen percent of Americans who live in larger towns and cities have created, despite imperial policies, a dynamic free-market system. It is easy to secure credit and start a business in most colonies, and colonial public education contributes to labor specialization and the high wages that come with it. Relatively egalitarian Puritan attitudes about gender mean that women can work and earn money as schoolteachers, weavers, and tailors, among other professions. The "English" common law applied in American courts includes very strong protections for property rights and contract enforcement, which means that the colonies are an easy place to invest money and a safe place to take entrepreneurial risks. Colonial governments generally impose very few taxes, mostly because the majority of public services are handled at the local level by Committees of Safety, which collect funds informally and by consensus. Towns serve as crucial centers for trade, land speculation, immigration, law, medicine, and education; and most towns have basic poorhouses and other early welfare systems, typically run by the local Committee of Safety. Significantly, towns are also home to a self-conscious skilled-labor class of artisans, apprentices, and craftsmen: literate men of modest but reliable means, who tend to be exceedingly active in politics and the militia, and who are the demographic base for the most radical republican elements of the Patriot cause.
Slavery still plays an important role in the Southern colonies, and a minor role in the Mid-Atlantic colonies. But it is on the wane. The British imperial monopoly on the slave trade has made it exceedingly expensive to bring new slaves from Africa. Because the cotton gin will not be invented for decades, slave labor is primarily used to cultivate crops like tobacco, indigo, and rice - none of which produce the same profits as cotton. As a result, most plantation owners die in debt, because slave plantations cost more to run than they earn in profits. And slavery is widely regarded, even by its own practitioners, as shameful: it is a relic of the original Anglican culture of the South, which has since largely been displaced by a Reformed and republican culture fueled by the mass exodus of English Puritans. While vicious racial prejudice is widespread, there is a growing consensus that actual chattel slavery is both immoral and uneconomical, and should gradually be abolished in favor of more efficient economic models.
Finally, the American economy is the primary battlefield between the Patriots and the mother country. Most Americans regard British mercantilist policies and taxes - imposed by the Crown, not by the elected colonial assemblies - as a violation of God's law and of the colonists' ancient rights as Englishmen. They have retaliated by refusing to pay Crown taxes, and by refusing to cooperate with the mercantilist system: boycotting the Crown companies that have a monopoly on imports, and withholding crucial exports like potash, iron, and grain. At the same time, Patriots have flouted British law by establishing illegal manufactories and conducting illegal trade directly with foreign powers. The essential strategy is to cut off Britain from America's consumer markets and raw materials, in the hope that American self-sufficiency will blunt the resulting economic pain for the colonies. These increasingly effective boycott efforts are the most visible rupture between the Crown and its colonial subjects.
Development:The American colonies are broadly undeveloped even by pre-industrial standards: Americans' high standard of living depends upon the wealth of land and resources available to individual homesteads, not on a sophisticated or integrated economy. What infrastructure exists - roads, supply depots, and so on - largely exists because the British Army has constructed it during recurring wars with France. As a result, roads tend to run east-west - connecting ports to the frontier - rather than north-south, connecting colonies to each other. For most coastal dwellers, travel by sea is both cheaper and more efficient than travel by land, especially given the powerful American shipbuilding industry. Even further inland, the main arteries of travel and transportation are the rivers, and most Americans live within twenty-five miles of a river: to travel any farther by wagon would be somewhere between difficult and impossible. Nevertheless, several colonies and most local Committees of Safety have invested in a gradual improvement of roads, bridges, and especially inns and ferries; this is gradually building a network of subsidized barges and inns that will connect major towns rapidly and affordably by water.
British mercantilist policies have prevented the colonies from developing many industries, especially paper, textiles, and other highly refined products. As a result, most manufacturing in America remains at the level of cottage industry, and is mostly water-powered: sawmills, grist mills, iron mills, salt works, glassworks. The exceptions are the potash industry and the naval supplies industry: potash mills are common, and turpentine, hempen rope, rosin, tar, and pitch are all produced on a semi-industrial scale. One could fairly describe the American shipbuilding industry as semi-industrialized as well. In other fields, Americans have responded to their enforced underdevelopment in two ways. First, they have defied British rules and constructed some manufactories covertly: larger-scale gunpowder mills are known to be hidden in the backwoods of Pennsylvania, New York, Virginia, and western Massachusetts. This effort is aided by the notorious ingenuity of American inventors like Benjamin Franklin, who regularly devise new and simpler production methods. Second, Americans have boycotted the British goods that they are forced to buy in lieu of developing their own industries: paper, textiles, coffee, tea, and so on. Instead, Americans have either relied on smugglers, or they have simply developed homemade substitutes for proto-industrial products, because products made at home for personal use do not violate the manufacturing bans - hence the justified stereotype of Americans dressing in plain blue homespun rather than patterned linens or cottons. The conflict brewing between Britain and its colonies, to a real extent, concerns how developed America will be allowed to become.
Army Description:The expansion of Stuart tyranny in Britain has conclusively convinced most Americans that standing armies are the very Devil's work. By creating a class of career soldiers separate from the common people and beholden only to the sovereign, standing armies incentivize soldiers to oppress their brethren. They are mercenary forces by another name: inherently the tool of aristocrats and tyrants.
Instead, the colonies have always relied upon the militia. Every colony has a militia ordinance, requiring every able-bodied free man and lad to maintain military readiness. This is an obligation of citizenship, not a job, and militia members are not paid - even when they are called up and sent into battle. In principle, every militia-eligible man in the colonies must by law possess a rifle or musket, a hundred rounds of powder and ball, and a pack or bedroll with a week's supplies for living off the land. Militia members spend two Saturdays a month - or every Saturday in times when the risk of war is high - in training; most militias also hold more intensive two-week trainings in January, when there is little work to be done on the farm and men have more time available. This training is totally unlike that of a European army. Militia do not train to stand in lines, fight in formation, march in step, or charge with the bayonet. They train to move rapidly and quietly across country, avoiding roads; to fire accurately from cover behind fences or trees; and to launch ambushes at close range using tomahawks and rifle butts. Militia do not generally wear uniforms, and they prefer the American long rifle to the musket.
In principle, militias are authorized by the colonial government, and the colonial governor can call them into service; this indeed happened during the French and Indian War. But in practice, militias are locally organized: the male population of a given village, plus its surrounding homesteads, represents one militia company. The company's captain and officers are chosen by election or consensus at town meetings, usually from men with previous experience in the British Army or who had wartime militia service. And the local Committee of Safety takes up a collection to make sure that poorer men can still afford rifle, powder, and ball. As a result, no colonial governor considers the militia politically reliable; its loyalty belongs to the Committees of Safety, and through them to the Provincial and Continental Congresses - not to the crown.
Rising tensions with Britain have provoked some reforms in the militia system. While there are still no true professional soldiers in America (except for the British Army), some Committees of Safety have organized militia units with more stringent training and readiness requirements. These "Minutemen" - so-called because they are expected to keep their weapons so close to hand that they can respond to an alert on a minute's notice - are generally younger, fitter, and more aggressive than the average militiaman. They train much more frequently - often daily, if only for a few hours. They study British tactics, actively develop battle plans to defend their communities, and even build rudimentary fortifications. They are overwhelmingly drawn from the artisan or merchant classes - the stereotypical Minuteman is an apprentice - and are typically radical republicans. Royal governors tend to regard Minuteman companies as borderline treasonous, because their real purpose is impossible to miss: every single day, Minutemen are preparing for war with Britain.
Though European officers usually regard them as rustic amateurs, colonial militias have real strengths. They are trained to move cross-country, which allows them great mobility in a country with very few decent roads. They are intimately acquainted with their local terrain, and they are trained to use it intelligently to screen their movements and provide cover. They can usually travel longer distances, faster, on fewer supplies than European regulars - because they can expect shelter and resupply from local homesteads. While they lack skill in formation fighting, they are experts at waging a war of the raid and the ambush - tactics to which European troops struggle to respond effectively. Their effectiveness as irregulars is amplified by extensive experience with fighting native tribes - experience that has been transformed into an oral tradition passed down in each militia company. They mostly use long rifles rather than muskets: while these take longer to reload, they are much more accurate, and allow deliberate targeting of officers, buglers, and other key personnel. Finally, militiamen are considerably better-motivated than most European infantry: they are not conscripts, nor are they considered the dregs of society. They are are the people in arms.
Army Weakness: The colonial militias are not professional armies. They have never faced European regulars in battle. They have inadequate training with formation fighting. They have no experience of heavy casualties; they will not stand their ground in the face of repeated devastating volleys. They lack artillery almost completely, because the colonies have no manufacturing base with which to produce it. They lack true cavalry; while many militia companies use horses, they fight as mounted infantry, and they are incapable of true shock action with the sword. Most militia officers are amateurs of varying talent; many possess military experience from the French and Indian War, but few have professional training in logistics, tactics, or planning. And most importantly, the militia is a local institution, intended to protect local communities. Militia companies resent service away from their homes, even within the same colony; service outside the colony altogether is often regarded as a form of tyranny, tearing men from their farms and families to fight faraway wars. If there is a final break with Britain, convincing more than 4,200 local militia companies to fight as a single army will be among the greatest challenges facing the Continental Congress.
Naval Description: The American colonies, of course, possess no formal navy. But they do have a considerable shadow navy: the armed merchant marine. The colonies' shipbuilding and naval supplies industries - intended to support the Royal Navy - have in practice allowed the colonies to produce a merchant fleet of almost 200 vessels. Most of these are legitimately intended for trade: fast-moving, and armed only enough to resist pirates. The average American merchant ship is therefore fairly close to a British sloop-of-war in armament and complement. But the China trade requires larger vessels capable of rounding Cape Horn and crossing the Pacific, and in recent years those vessels have become noticeably more heavily armed: big tumblehome ships that carry twenty-eight or even thirty guns, often twelve-pounders. These ships - which sail mostly from Boston and New York - are fully equal to most Royal Navy frigates. The level of seamanship on American ships is usually high - sailors are professionals, not press-ganged conscripts - as is the level of naval experience: many a tarpaulin captain of the Royal Navy has retired to command an American merchantman, bringing with him knowledge of gun handling and experience of frigate actions. (Indeed, ties between Royal Navy officers and American merchants and seamen are so close as to be politically suspect.) Plenty of American merchants have also tried their hand at smuggling, and they have learned a great deal about how to evade, flee, and even fight Royal Navy patrols. In training and skill, at least, the American merchant marine is the equal of any European navy. And while they still could not possibly face a European fleet in open battle - the Americans possess not a single true ship of the line - American ships are ideally suited to take up commerce raiding, blockade-running, and frigate-hunting in the event of war.
Naval Weakness: Just as the American militia is not truly a single army, the American merchant marine is not truly a single navy - or, indeed, a navy at all. While its ships are unusually heavily armed for merchantmen, most of them are still equal only to a sloop-of-war - a ship that, in the Royal Navy, is considered so unimportant that it is not even commanded by a full captain. No American merchantman is larger or heavier-gunned than a British frigate. While American crews have a surprising amount of combat experience - fighting pirates and running blockades - they have never fought a true fleet action. And most importantly, the American merchant marine is privately owned by a multitude of merchants in Massachusetts, New York, Pennsylvania, Virginia, and South Carolina. While many of these merchants built their ships with an eye to potential military use in future, American merchants also need their ships to make money. Their political principles may not overcome their profit motive. And any attempt to seize ships - especially by the Continental Congress, but even by the Provincial Congresses - would risk resentment at best and outright refusal at worst. As with the militia, the great challenge facing Congress will be persuasion: somehow to convince dozens of powerful merchants to turn their hard-earned trading fleets into a single navy.
National Goals: The colonists have reached a very widely-shared consensus on the need for dramatic reforms in their relationship with Britain. They want to eliminate the mercantilist restrictions that stifle their trade and manufacturing, and to require the consent of a colony's elected legislature for British taxes in that colony. Most would also like to reduce the powers of the imperial governors. Some Americans are more radical: considering themselves a new nationality that is entitled to self-determination, they hope for complete and irrevocable independence. And for a small but vocal minority, even this is not enough. For these men, America is the inheritor of Britain's Whig tradition, and Americans must not rest until the Good Old Cause triumphs on both sides of the Atlantic - until Stuart tyranny is overthrown, Parliament is restored, the Protestant religion is triumphant, and the English-speaking peoples of the world stand as equals in republican brotherhood.
National Issues:
- A HOUSE DIVIDED: The American colonies, while they share a common religious and political culture, remain thirteen separate polities - each answerable to the Crown, but not to each other. There is no single American army, navy, treasury, law code, or executive. While the colonies share certain common interests - an end to taxes and mercantilist restraints, greater devolution of power to colonial legislatures, and so on - in other ways their interests are frequently in tension. New York and Boston compete for control of lucrative imperial trade routes; Pennsylvania and New Jersey squabble over fishing rights. Georgia relies for much of its security on British troops, while British troops in New Hampshire are pelted with dung; the Massachusetts Assembly passed an official resolution declaring the Pope to be Antichrist, but half of Marylanders are Catholic. The Continental Congress, America's first attempt to reconcile these differences, is more of a coordinating committee than a true government-in-waiting; it is powerless to enforce its resolutions, and must rely upon persuasion. This typically means that Congress requires unanimity for any significant action, and unanimity is in decidedly short supply across all thirteen colonies.
- THE PRICE OF LIBERTY: Thus far, the main colonial opposition to British rule has been economic: Americans have refused to buy imports from imperial monopoly companies, and have refused to export goods that they are required to sell only to Britain. These Covenants of Nonimportation and Nonexportation, adopted and enforced by local Committees of Safety and by some Provincial Congresses, have created real economic costs for Britain. But they have caused equal or greater economic suffering in the colonies, which must now improvise alternatives to a vast array of imports, from paper to tea. And Americans reliant on the British export market, like indigo planters in South Carolina or ropemakers in Connecticut, find themselves unable to sell their goods to British buyers lest they be tarred and feathered by Patriot militia. For most Americans, the struggle against British taxes and trade restrictions has come at a serious cost, and it has put traditional American self-sufficiency to the test as never before.
- THE SIN OF CAIN: Slavery haunts the American conscience. Its immorality is broadly accepted as both rational fact and religious doctrine; it is incompatible both with Reformed values and with their Enlightenment cognates. It is antithetical to the ideals of liberty, reason, meritocracy, and diligence by which Americans define themselves. Most colonists consider it the legacy of an earlier, darker time in their history, before the Puritan Exodus reshaped American culture and society. Few Americans would dare defend slavery on its merits; at best, it is claimed as an unfortunate economic necessity, the abolition of which would be intolerably costly and disruptive. Even then, slavery is swiftly becoming more of a burden than an asset to the economies of the Southern colonies: most plantations cost more to run than they earn in income. The real reason for slavery's endurance is racism: the emancipation of 375,000 African Americans would transform Southern society overnight, and most Southerners still take it for granted that white and black men will never be able to coexist peacefully upon equal terms. But the result is that slavery continues, even though most Americans find it increasingly unacceptable and unaffordable: a collective source of shame and guilt for which American society has failed to find a solution.
#AER (Do not delete this, it is used to keep track of the apps)
by Reverend Norv » Mon Jul 04, 2022 10:03 am
History:DIVERSE BEGINNINGS: 1607-1642
The history of Britain's colonies in America has been defined by a process of gradual homogenization - a process caused by the transfer of much of England's Puritan and Whig population from the Old World to the New. Before the Puritan Exodus of the late 17th century, however, the eastern seaboard of America was home to a wide variety of colonial experiments, and was characterized by diversity: of religion, language, purpose, and even nationality. Not until the Exodus would this diversity give way to something approaching a single coherent national character.
The first successful English colony in America was Jamestown, founded in 1607. By 1780, this was rarely discussed in America outside Virginia, because much of Jamestown's history and ethos had been implicitly repudiated after the Exodus. Jamestown was a joint-stock colony intended strictly to make money. Its settlers were overwhelmingly single men. Drunkenness and crime were epidemic. The colony was so badly mismanaged that three-quarters of its population died by the spring of 1610. Only after an alliance with the Powhatan Confederacy in 1614 did the colony flourish - so much so that in 1622, the colonists rejected the alliance and massacred the Powhatan. By 1619, the Jamestown settlers had expanded to cover much of the Chesapeake area; they had also begun bringing slaves from Africa to work their lands, after efforts to enslave the Powhatan proved fruitless. They called their new colony Virginia, after Elizabeth I - the Virgin Queen. But it was never profitable. In 1624, the Virginia Company collapsed, and the English crown assumed responsibility for the colony. Venal, brutal, and bankrupt Jamestown has gone down in Puritan historiography as an embarrassment to America: the origin of the country's shameful compromise with slavery. But it did bequeath the colonies one crucial inheritance: in 1619, the Virginia colonists first convened an elected legislature, the House of Burgesses. In 1639, King Charles I even formally recognized the House of Burgesses as a lawful representative of the colony's people; by that time, Virginia had grown to almost 100,000 souls. America's republican tradition had been born.
But the true cradle of American republicanism - and of what would become America's predominant religious and political culture - lay several hundred miles to the north. In 1620, the Pilgrim Fathers - a small group of Puritan families who had despaired of reforming the Anglican Church - left their temporary refuge in the Netherlands and established the Plymouth Bay colony in what would become Massachusetts. Like the Jamestown colonists, they survived only with the help of local natives. Unlike the Jamestown colonists, they migrated in families and with the goal of establishing an orderly, godly society. They were religious utopians, not fortune-seekers. And they were fairly successful. By 1629, amid rising tensions between the crown and the Puritan bourgeoisie, John Winthrop and other English Puritan leaders had petitioned the crown to charter a new, much larger settlement north of Plymouth. Eager to get rid of Puritan troublemakers, King Charles I obliged. By the end of 1630, ten new Puritan towns - including Boston - has joined Plymouth along the Massachusetts coast. Accustomed to congregational church government, the settlers adopted a similar political structure: electing representatives to the Massachusetts General Court, a republican legislature for the whole colony.
Massachusetts was a self-consciously radical experiment: an intentional attempt to design a new and better society from the ground up. Because it formed the blueprint for New England, and later for the post-Exilic American identity, it was perhaps the most consequential such experiment in world history. It was founded on distinctive values: profound suspicion of royal and ecclesiastical power, which could so easily veer into idolatry; reverence for individual Bible-reading belief, and the education and reflection that made it possible; a concomitant commitment to reason and the written word; a love of virtue, understood in terms of self-control and self-sacrifice; and deep anxiety about the unknowable mystery of predestined salvation, expressed through desperate efforts to demonstrate the work ethic and moral fortitude that supposedly characterized a redeemed soul. The result was a society that valued education above wealth, hard work above birth, and self-effacement above splendor. It was also a society in which every Bible-reading believer had a vaunted sense of his or her own individual worth. As early as 1632, the residents of Watertown refused to pay taxes for a palisade at Cambridge unless they received a representative in the Massachusetts General Court. Two years later, when Massachusetts received a royal charter, the General Court unanimously required that it be printed and made available to the public, so that everyone could reach a rational opinion about it.
By 1634, Puritan settlers had expanded to the Connecticut River Valley, and in 1636 the Connecticut Colony received its own royal charter; King Charles saw the value in encouraging the emigration of his religious and political adversaries. That same year, the General Court chartered Harvard University: the first university in the New World, and the chief center of American intellectual life forever afterward. Led by Massachusetts, the New England colonies were rapidly transforming their radical experiment into a functioning, largely self-sufficient society.
But Massachusetts also established darker features of what would become the American character: moral absolutism, and violence. Roger Williams, a Puritan minister whose heterodox ideas included full freedom of religion, found himself exiled from Massachusetts; he would ultimately found the colony of Rhode Island. Anne Hutchinson, who claimed to receive direct divine revelations, was likewise banished from Massachusetts. The Puritans felt deeply that because their society depended on individual virtue, their liberty paradoxically required the zealous extirpation of vice. That tension would remain at the heart of American struggles over civil liberties. Likewise, New England was an aggressively expansionist settler society: in 1637, just seventeen years after the founding of Boston, New England militias all but annihilated the Pequot people of Connecticut. In the absence of English troops, militia service became an obligation of every adult man, and so violence became a fundamental responsibility of citizenship. For a man to be a full member of New England society, he had to be educated and godly - but also a killer.
While Jamestown and Massachusetts exemplified the ideological diversity of the early colonial period, other colonies reflected cultural and even national diversity. In 1624, the Dutch West India Company founded New Netherland (which later became New York). Located just to the south of New England, the Dutch enjoyed fairly good relations with their Puritan neighbors, thanks to shared Reformed religion and republican ideology. In 1641, inspired by the Massachusetts General Court, the burghers of New Netherland convened their own colonial legislature. Further south, an underfunded Swedish enterprise in the Delaware Valley became known as New Sweden; after less than twenty years, it would be absorbed into New Netherland. Much of this local distinctiveness would be lost after the Puritan Exodus defined American identity in more narrow political and religious terms. But some of it would remain, ensuring that even as America grew more homogenous in its ideological identity, it would always be home to a variety of linguistic and ethnic identities.* * *
THE GOOD OLD CAUSE: 1642-1665
In 1642, the English Civil War broke out, and the American colonies were likewise plunged into chaos. Neither material support nor legal authority any longer flowed from the other side of the Atlantic; no help or reason could be sought from a homeland drowning in blood. In America, too, the deep cultural and religious conflict between Parliamentarians and Royalists would first divide and then redefine American society. Ultimately, Parliamentary forces would consolidate both power and legitimacy in America to a far greater extent than they ever managed to do in England - and in the process, they would demonstrate that Americans were capable of governing themselves. In England, Charles II regained his throne in 1660; but in America, it would take royal forces five years to wrest control from Parliamentary colonial governments. Ultimately, the damage was irreversible. Most Americans would never again consider themselves loyal subjects of the crown. Instead, they cherished the memory of the Good Old Cause, and waited for the march of history to vindicate the cause of godliness and liberty.
At the outbreak of war, the colonies were abruptly cut off from most British trade and resupply. They also lost direction: governors and magistrates no longer received instructions from London. It was as if the mother country had abruptly ceased to exist and left the colonies to fend for themselves. In New England, the Puritan colonies immediately pledged their allegiance to Parliament - but in the chaos of the early war, Parliament did not seem to know or care what New England did. Left to their own devices, in 1643 the Puritan colonies formed a defensive alliance - the New England Confederacy - to defend against the native nations, the Dutch in New Amsterdam, and the recent French settlement at Quebec. Over the objections of Puritan hardliners, the Confederacy eventually grew to include Rhode Island, which received a charter from Parliament in 1644. In 1648, without any authorization from London, the Confederacy adopted the Cambridge Platform: a written constitution that provided for a merged religious and political regime. Local congregations chose representatives to colonial legislatures, and the colonial legislatures sent delegates to the governing council of the Confederacy. The Cambridge Platform was hugely influential: over the next few centuries, the same basic confederal model would inspire every attempt at colonial unity. It also proved effective at forcing the Confederacy to deal sensibly with its precarious position. Puritan values remained, but religious extremism yielded to a need for capital. In 1656, the first Quakers were allowed to settle in New England; in 1657, the first Jews followed suit. By 1660, the Confederacy was collecting its own taxes, drafting its own laws, fighting its own wars to expand the frontier, and even minting its own currency: the "Pine Tree Shilling." For more than a decade, it had functioned as a de facto independent polity.
New England's unity rested primarily on its Puritan identity: its people had fled England to avoid the Stuarts' economic and religious policies, and so they were more than ready to swear allegiance to Parliament. In Virginia, loyalties were more divided: while the laboring classes (including many indentured servants and some runaway slaves) and the Puritan bourgeoisie backed Parliament, the landowners who dominated the House of Burgesses stood by the king. The result was the New World's first civil war: Bennett's Revolt, a pro-Parliamentary uprising that defeated royalist forces and drove the royal governor, William Berkeley, into exile on Bermuda. The Parliamentary leader, Richard Bennett, then presided over what Virginians remember as the Anarchy: powerful planters established private fiefs, bands of marauders wandered the colonies, relations with the natives descended into tit-for-tat massacres, and slave uprisings through the whole colony into turmoil. When Oliver Cromwell died in 1658 - still two years before the Restoration - William Berkeley returned from Bermuda and swept back into power in an almost bloodless coup, causing Bennett to flee to Boston. Between 1658 and 1660, Virginia alone in the English-speaking world recognized Charles II as king of England.
For Berkeley, the Restoration mean that no English army would invade to restore Virginia to the fold. For the New England Confederacy, the Restoration made such an invasion almost certain. Parliamentary leaders - including dozens of the regicides who had signed the death warrant of Charles I - streamed across the Atlantic seeking refuge. In time, they would become crucial underground leaders in the northern colonies, keeping the republican dream alive. In 1661, four King's Messengers arrived in Boston, and arrested the regicide Edward Whalley upon a charge of high treason. The Boston militia promptly freed Whalley and arrested the Messengers, who were convicted by a Massachusetts court of trespass upon the person. In defense, they raised their royal authority. The chief judge, the Reverend Edward Leighton, famously replied: "the king's authority must end where the law's authority begins." Leighton's Maxim has been repeated by American Whigs ever since.
This, of course, meant war - at a time when there were fewer than 70,000 people in all of the New England Confederacy, compared to five million in England. The Confederacy's hopes were briefly buoyed by the arrival of troops from New Netherland, where the colonial assembly saw a chance to weaken the English crown and defend its coreligionists. The Dutch had erred. In 1662, George Monck sailed into Boston harbor with six regiments and occupied the town. Puritan leaders, both English and American, fled into the wilderness of the frontier. Monck marched south to New Amsterdam, which promptly surrendered as well; the Dutch government would formally surrender its claim five years later, at the end of the Second Anglo-Dutch war, and New Netherland would become New York. In the meantime, sporadic resistance by New England militia continued until 1664, when a frustrated Monck declared the rebels outside the protection of the Crown and offered native nations a bounty for the scalps of any Puritans found bearing arms. On December 5, Wampanoag warriors massacred virtually every man, woman, and child in the frontier settlement of Hadley. In March of the following year, the survivors of the Confederacy council offered Monck their surrender. The First Revolution was over.
Most Puritan leaders escaped with their lives; Charles II extended the Indemnity and Oblivion Act to the colonies, pardoning all but the regicides. He did, however, dismantle the New England Confederacy: placing each of the northern colonies under a royal governor, with the powers of their legislatures sharply constrained. Though the bulk of Monck's army departed, a strong garrison remained; the Stuarts would never again trust New England to police itself. Still, in church halls and militia muster-grounds across the colonies, men spoke of the Good Old Cause and toasted the memory of the Confederacy. And though royal troops searched for fifty years, not a single Parliamentary leader who fled to New England was ever recaptured.* * *
EXODUS AND EXPANSION: 1665-1740
The end of the New England Confederacy - and what many in America would come to call, with ominous foreshadowing, the First Revolution - appeared to be a victory for the forces of reaction. But the triumph of crown and altar over Assembly and pulpit would prove illusory. The Restoration - and the Abortive Revolution twenty-eight years later - provoked one of the largest mass migrations in European history: the Puritan Exodus. Between 1665 and 1740, more than eight percent of the English population migrated to the New World: including almost ninety percent of England's Congregationalists and Presbyterians, and close to half of the nation's nascent middle class. This enormous transfer of population, expertise, and capital caused fundamental, permanent changes in the demographics and culture of the Mid-Atlantic and Southern colonies. By the waning of the Exodus around 1740, America had become New England writ large: a Puritan, republican, bourgeois society defined in increasingly explicit opposition to the politics, religion, and economy of the new Britannic Empire.
With the colonies finally restored to obedience, Charles II turned in 1666 to restoring them to profitability. His chosen tool was the first of the Navigation Acts: a restraint on colonial trade that ensured America's wealth would flow exclusively to English ports. Between 1666 and 1780, a total of nine Navigation Acts would restrain American commerce, manufacturing, imports, and exports: promoting economic dependence on the mother country, and artificially retarding the colonies' development and self-sufficiency. Ironically, these exploitative measures only fanned the flames of the Good Old Cause, as Reformed religion and republican politics became inseparably linked to ideals of free trade and free enterprise.
At the same time, Charles sought to create new royalist bastions in the New World. He began in the South: Virginia, after all, had returned to the Stuart fold even before England itself. In 1670, hand-picked loyalists founded the colony of Carolina along the coast south of Virginia. The vast majority of the land went to Baron Thomas Colepeper and to the Earl of Arlington, who set about creating a quasi-feudal society of slave plantations growing rice and indigo, which were both introduced in 1693. The colony's capitol, Charleston, quickly became the most significant slave port in North America. It would remain so even after the colony's partition in 1712 into North Carolina and South Carolina. North of Virginia, Charles II launched an even more radical effort to establish a royal bastion: at the prodding of his brother James, in 1675 the king granted a charter to a group of English Catholics. The charter authorized them to establish a new colony known as Maryland, where the Catholic Church would have full rights and privileges. When word of the Maryland charter reached Boston, the city erupted in two weeks of riots. But the succeeding decades would assuage Puritan anxieties: as the Catholic Church grew ever more accepted in England, fewer and fewer English Catholics would emigrate to Maryland. Instead, the supposedly Catholic colony swelled with Puritan refugees, until by 1740 fully half of Maryland's population was Protestant - mostly Reformed. As a bastion of throne and altar, Maryland left much to be desired.
A very different experiment in royal control unfolded along the Delaware River north of Maryland. The Society of Friends, or Quakers, were regarded as heretics by both the Anglican Church and its Puritan dissenters. But the Puritans were substantially more vehement in their opposition, and prior to the New England Confederacy's 1656 Act of Toleration, nine Quakers had actually been executed in Massachusetts. Hoping to create a bastion against New England's expansion, King Charles granted the Quaker leader William Penn a charter for a new colony: Pennsylvania. The colony's Quaker character was most pronounced in the area around Philadelphia, where a cosmopolitan, pacifist, broadly tolerant, artistically inclined society developed. But there were never enough Friends for the rest of Pennsylvania to be a truly Quaker society. The former New Sweden soon broke away, and its Swedish-Dutch-Puritan mélange gave rise to the new colony of New Jersey. And even within Pennsylvania proper, Scots-Irish migration to the backcountry, German Pietist migration to the Delaware Valley, and Puritan migration to the cities eroded Quaker dominance.
Meanwhile, New England flourished in the midst of constant crisis. When George Monck's army left America, the native allies he had enlisted did not. Rallying behind the Wampanoag sachem Metacomet - known to the colonists as King Phillip - a tribal coalition attacked Puritan settlements still weakened by the First Revolution. Over the next year, one in twenty citizens of Massachusetts would be killed, and Metacomet's forces at times came close to driving the colonists back into the sea. Ultimately, in 1676, an alliance of forces from Massachusetts and Connecticut would kill Metacomet and bring the war to an end. But although King Phillips' War devastated New England for the second time in a decade, the Puritan colonies were also growing faster than ever before: each year convinced more English Puritans and republicans that the mother country was a lost cause, and new colonists poured by the thousands into Boston and Plymouth. New England's population doubled between 1673 and 1683; in 1680, so many Puritans had already settled along the coast north of Boston that Charles II bowed to reality and recognized their settlements as the colony of New Hampshire.
Increasingly, Puritan settlement was not limited to New England, either. In almost every colony, growing numbers of Puritan merchants settled, formed Congregationalist churches, and organized political clubs. In New York and Pennsylvania, these Puritan associations acquired substantial influence; in 1683, the New York assembly adopted a Charter of Liberties drafted mostly by Puritan exiles who had fought for Parliament forty years earlier. Southern colonies proved more resistant, and Puritan agitators were blamed - sometimes spuriously, but often fairly - for a wave of unrest that moved across the South after 1675. Baron Colpeper, the largest landowner in Carolina, was almost killed in a tenant uprising in 1677; plant cutters in Virginia rioted in 1682, demanding "freeborn rights" and brandishing Parliamentarian tracts. The Puritan Exodus was beginning to reshape society in every colony.
This fact was not lost upon the new king James II, who took the throne in 1685. The crown drew up articles of misdemeanour against Rhode Island, Connecticut, and Massachusetts; their legislatures were abolished, and the colonies were placed under the exclusive control of a single governor: Edmund Andros, the newly-appointed Governor General of New England, and a man whose name would remain a profanity in America for the next century. It was not Andros' policies that inspired such hatred; really, he only continued the taxation that the old colonial legislatures had authorized. Rather, it was what he represented: absolute control from London, by an Anglican royal appointee, not subject to any democratic limitation by the local Puritan population. In Ipswich, the Reverend John Wise became famous for preaching that "rebellion to tyrants is obedience to God." While no actual unrest ever ensued, in 1687 Andros nevertheless had Wise arrested and jailed, with only the barest semblance of a trial. When Wise objected that his detention violated his rights as an English subject, Andros replied that every American had left his rights as an Englishman behind by leaving England. "Mr. Wise," the governor infamously declared, "you have no more privileges Left you than not to be Sold for Slaves."
Matters came to a head the next year. The plotters of the Abortive Revolution had deep ties to New England, and widespread support amid the growing Puritan population elsewhere in America. Smugglers based in Newport carried messages back and forth to the Netherlands in violation of the Navigation Acts, giving Parliamentarian die-hards across America advance notice of the planned coup. Soon, they hoped, Parliament would choose the English king, and the American colonies would be treated as brothers in godly liberty rather than as money-making enterprises. So close was the trans-Atlantic coordination that Whig leaders in America knew that William of Orange had planned his invasion for the first week in November, 1688. That very week, without waiting for confirmation from Europe, Puritan legislators in New York, Pennsylvania, and New Jersey called out colonial militias and removed royal governors by force - asserting that the king who had appointed them no longer reigned in London, and that a new Protestant king would soon choose new and godly governors. In New England, where the various colonial legislatures had been dissolved, the surviving leaders of the New England Confederacy marched to Boston Common. They announced that James II had been overthrown, and called for the militia - "the people of this city, all in arms" - to arrest Governor Andros. A mob stormed the Boston town-hall and clapped Andros in irons. Remarkably, he would receive a three-week trial, and he was finally acquitted: the jury found that all his crimes had been under cover of royal law, and that while James II was guilty of trespass upon the rights of his colonial subjects, Andros had lacked the requisite intent to commit any crime. The most hated man in New England was allowed to flee America with his life, and the New England colonies set about restoring the Confederacy.
In early March of 1689, the catastrophic news arrived with the first ships from Europe: James II had not been overthrown after all. Fully half the colonies had overthrown duly appointed royal governors, and sided with a revolt that had already been crushed. Pennsylvania's legislature promptly released its colonial governor from prison and restored him to office, demanding a universal amnesty in exchange. New York sent a desperate plea to William of Orange, seeking the restoration of Dutch rule to New Amsterdam; William replied with an encouraging letter, two cannons, and no troops whatsoever. The New Englanders, having learned their lesson in the First Revolution, did not contemplate another uprising. Instead, they used the three months before the arrival of royal troops to move their leaders, printing presses, stores of arms, and remaining currency reserves to hidden refuges deep within the Berkshires and the Green Mountains. These secret "Caves of Adullam" - named for the hiding-place of the biblical King David - would become significant again, almost a century later, as armories and bases for the Sons of Liberty.
In August of 1689, the expected British army arrived. Only New York attempted organized resistance, and the colony's old Dutch Reformed elite was decimated for its efforts. The Reverend John Wise was hanged, drawn, and quartered on Boston Common - becoming the founding martyr of American resistance. Royal tribunals issued death warrants in absentia for Whig leaders in New England and Pennsylvania, ignoring the amnesty that the Pennsylvania governor had already proclaimed. Edmund Andros, restored to Boston, provided the tribunals with a detailed list of the men who had deposed him. The remaining Puritan die-hards retired to the Caves of Adullam, and waited once again for the wheel of history to turn.
It did, albeit not how anyone expected. King James, like Charles before him, turned to the Navigation Acts to pacify the colonies by reducing them to economic dependence. But he was unnerved by growing Puritan population and power across the country, including in the South, and he was not selective in his restrictions. The 1698 Slave Trade Act shut American merchants out of the slave trade, and reduced the number of Africans brought across the Atlantic by almost two-thirds. Where slavery was firmly established, it stalled; where it had only recently encroached, it retreated. Southern planters quickly complained of labor shortages. The next year, the King banned the export of colonial woolens and paper, and the nascent cottage industries of New England and New York promptly collapsed. The royal tribunals remained operational in New England until 1701, hunting the few remaining regicides and Confederacy leaders, and hideously torturing anyone suspected of harboring them.
But even as the Crown squeezed the colonies, its actual influence continued to wane. The 1690 Act of Toleration convinced most English Puritans that all hope of meaningful reform was finally lost, and that England had fallen fully under the yoke of Rome. Many Scots and Ulster-Scots Presbyterians came to the same conclusion when the Imperial Acts were passed in 1705, erasing any notion that their own nations would be insulated from Catholic absolutism. The coronation of James III in Rome, and the declaration of the 1712 Legislative Acts that "the king and emperor are appointed by God as the Vicar of Christ," dashed any hope that Parliament would provide a meaningful check on the Stuarts. Puritan officers were purged from the Army after the 1691 mutinies; Puritan reverends withdrew from the Church of England after the Act of Toleration; Puritan parliamentarians resigned their seats after the Legislative Acts. "There is no longer aught in England worth protecting," John Somers wrote plainly in 1715. "Magna Carta is dead, and all our ancient liberties with it. We shall be ruled no longer according to law, but by the Whore of Babylon."
The result was the third and final stage of the Puritan Exodus, a population transfer that dwarfed any previous period of migration to the colonies. In East Anglia and other majority-Puritan areas, entire villages emigrated together, en masse, leaving ghost towns in their wake. Between 1690 and 1740, a total of more than 400,000 men, women, and children would make the crossing. Within a generation, nearly every colony was transformed. Maryland's Catholic majority evaporated. First-generation Puritans suddenly acquired an overwhelming majority in the Pennsylvania legislature, rejected William Penn's frame of government, and reorganized the colony's government along republican and Congregationalist lines. By 1705, the Virginia House of Burgesses - that one-time pillar of royalism - had a Puritan majority, which refused to pass a proposed Slave Code that would enshrine chattel slavery as an organizing principle of Virginia law. In 1732, Puritan entrepreneurs founded the colony of Georgia with the goal of building a New England-style society in the heart of the South, free of slavery and planter aristocrats. A generation after the Slave Trade Act largely choked off the colonies' ability to kidnap more Africans, the Georgia experiment had considerable appeal to many Southerners struggling to adapt to an ever more pressing labor crisis.
Everywhere, the Exodus remade America. Every colony's population quadrupled between 1690 and 1740. The population of Massachusetts grew sixfold. The new arrivals were disproportionately educated and bourgeois, and their influx meant an unprecedented proliferation of banks, craftsmen, trading companies, lawyers, and physicians. In 1700, Harvard was still the only university in America; by 1740, there were more than a dozen, and most were teaching religious and political ideas that were banned outright in England. Population pressure pushed many of the new arrivals to the frontier, and colonial militias waged a series of undeclared wars to expand the territory available to settlers. By 1750, with very little support from the British Army, the colonists had pushed their borders all the way to the Appalachians. As Walpole rose and fell, and Stuart kings came and went, an entire new civilization was emerging on the other side of the Atlantic. When the Puritan Exodus began to wane after 1740 - mostly because very few Puritans or republicans remained in England - America's population had passed 1 million. Slavery's expansion had been halted, every colony but Maryland had a substantial Reformed majority, and public education systems had been established by every colonial assembly. For the first time, people talked about themselves not only as New Englanders or Virginians, but as Americans; after the Exodus, the colonies shared enough in common for that term to mean something.
In 1630, Massachusetts had been a radical experiment. A century later, it had become the blueprint for a distinctively American society.* * *
SONS OF LIBERTY: 1740-1780
With hindsight, the march toward confrontation with the crown that unfolded between 1740 and 1780 would seem inevitable. By 1740, America had become a society defined in opposition to the Britannic regime, and peopled by people who had fled that regime. It was only a matter of time before Americans refused to be ruled by the very system they had fled across the ocean to escape.
But at the time, the growth of tensions seemed a great deal more contingent on the choices of individuals. The first of those individuals was Jonathan Edwards, a Puritan minister from Connecticut whose preaching - to the apparent initial surprise of everyone, including himself - provoked in 1741 an extraordinary emotional response in his Northampton congregation. Men stood up in church and confessed their most private sins to their neighbors; women sold their silverware and china to give the proceeds to the poor. Allegedly, two people killed themselves out of despair at their own spiritual inadequacy. As Edwards began to tour the colonies, the religious revival spread. In Britain, this Great Awakening was perceived mostly as mass hysteria. But in America, it was felt to be the direct intervention of the Holy Spirit, purifying American society and preparing Americans for a higher purpose. Religious revivals would remain a feature of American life for decades to come, even as Enlightenment ideas spread. Most Americans saw no contradiction between the two: as Edwards himself preached, what reason made clear to the eyes of the mind, grace revealed to the eyes of the soul. What the Great Awakening really bequeathed to America was a rediscovery of early Puritan society's audacity: its flat unwillingness to compromise its values, its belief that God was calling it to a completely new kind of communal life. After the disappointments and disillusionments of two failed revolutions, the Great Awakening gave back to Americans a faith worth dying for.
As a result, American republicanism retained a distinctly religious character, and this increasingly distinguished it from what remained of English Whiggism. The separation was accelerated by James III's alignment with the Whigs, which resulted in three more Navigation Acts restricting American commerce and manufacturing in favor of British merchants. One of these, the Currency Act, abolished the colonies' longstanding currency systems (New England's pine tree shilling went back to the Confederacy), and required colonial trade to be conducted with the pound sterling. For many Americans, this was a categorical betrayal: men who had once sworn to Parliament and liberty now staffed a Commerce Board that oppressed their former comrades and usurped the role of Parliament. At Harvard, Yale, and Princeton, it became widely accepted that British law was no longer really law at all, in the traditional English sense, it was a mere "decree, an act of force," as Yale president Ezra Stiles put it. And so, of course, Americans commenced to violate it. From Boston to Charleston, smuggling became regarded as a completely respectable profession. America's shipbuilding industry, designed to provide repair and refit for the Royal Navy, began to produce a fleet of heavily armed merchantmen that sailed - often under French or Genoese colors - as far as China. And on the frontier, settlers (mostly the children of Presbyterian Scots-Irish who had emigrated during the Exodus) began trekking in their thousands over the Cumberland Gap and into the wilderness of the Ohio River Valley. There they established new towns, most of which recognized the authority of neither the British crown nor the French Parliament: "a perfect Anarchy," wrote Thomas Walker, the leader of one of the earliest Overmountain Settlements, "which for free and godly men holds no terrors."
The Overmountain Settlements, alongside the unification of Germany, provided one essential cause of the Seven Years War. In fact, the war began in America in 1754, two years before it reached Europe, when the Shawnee, Lenape, and Huron attacked American settlements west of the Appalachians. The colonists retaliated, and militia companies from neighboring settlements east of the mountains joined them. This provoked skirmishes with French militia, after which the Governor-General in Quebec called for reinforcements to be sent to the Ohio area. In response to that, colonial legislatures in New York, Pennsylvania, and Virginia called out the militia, and pressured their royal governors to commit British troops. For the next nine years, the Overmountain Settlements witnessed ferocious, inconclusive wilderness fighting: a brutal war of raid and massacre that left no one covered in glory. But it did teach the colonists a valuable lesson: deep in the woods, far from roads and open fields, British regulars were often less effective than Native warriors or colonial militia. The slaughter of the Braddock Expedition in 1755, followed by the slaughter of a crack Highland regiment at Fort Dusquesne in 1758, taught Americans that the British Army was far from invincible. And the eventual capture of Fort Dusquesne - by Virginia militia under the command of Colonel George Washington, who slipped into the fort at night and killed the French garrison with knives and tomahawks - revealed that colonial ways of war could succeed where European might failed.
Inflamed by the Great Awakening and emboldened by the lessons of the war, Americans in the 1760s and 1770s came into increasingly direct political conflict with London. In a 1763 crackdown on smugglers, royal governors in a number of American ports turned to writs of assistance - documents allowing authorities to enter any home, at any time, without giving any reason. In Massachusetts and Pennsylvania, courts applying local evolutions of English common law held the writs of assistance void, obliging customs officers to suspend their use for almost a year until the Court of King's Bench heard the cases on appeal and overruled the colonial judges. Similar legal wrangling ensued after James III issued several decrees aimed at preventing the establishment of additional Overmountain Settlements; the Overmountain settlers not only ignored the decrees, but fought and won a war against a French-backed coalition of tribes led by the Shawnee.
But the most fundamental confrontation involved an entirely new phenomenon: goods and sales taxes imposed on the colonies directly by the crown. That these taxes were issued without the consent of Parliament was bad enough, because it showed that King James had entirely ceased to regard the colonists as Englishmen. That they were justified as reparations for the crown's protection during the late war was intolerable, since the colonists had seen firsthand exactly how ineffective British regulars had been. With the exception of Charles III's brief reign between 1766 and 1768, the twenty years after the 1763 Treaty of Paris were dominated by the colonists' consistently hardening refusal to pay taxes directly to the crown. Once again, Edmund Andros was burned in effigy, and the Reverend John Wise was praised as the father of his country.
The first of these taxes, levied in the immediate aftermath of the war to pay outstanding costs, were the Sugar Act and the Stamp Act. For most Americans, the former was obnoxious, but the latter was pernicious: it required printed materials - including newspapers, broadsheets, pamphlets, and even Bibles - to bear a tax stamp. This was a tax on knowledge, on Scripture, on Puritan society's deepest values. In New England, merchants and Reformed ministers and other radicals began forming informal associations to promote subversion and defiance of the taxes; by the end of 1766, these associations had begun issuing illegally printed statements and broadsheets under the name of the Sons of Liberty. New chapters of the Sons of Liberty were soon organizing across the colonies. Though they were not yet communicating or coordinating, each new chapter still exercised a powerful local influence. In Virginia, the House of Burgesses adopted a formal resolution declaring that Virginians had lost none of their rights as Englishmen, and that "every Attempt to vest the Tax Power in any person or persons whatsoever other than the General Assembly of this Colony has a manifest Tendency to destroy British as well as American Freedom."
The death of James III and ascension of Charles III brought a temporary reprieve. Ambitious for further conquest in America, sympathetic to the Overmountain Settlers, and independent of the Commerce Board, Charles valued the loyalty of the colonies and tried to rebuild it. in 1767, he repealed the Stamp Act, and tensions in the colonies appreciably relaxed; while the Sons of Liberty continued meeting, the tone of their publications softened considerably. And then, in March of the following year, Charles III died, and it became clear that James IV was not at all his father's son.
The Townshend Acts imposed duties on glass, lead, painters' colors, paper, and tea. They stripped colonial courts of jurisdiction over smuggling, entrusted smuggling enforcement to a new Customs Board of Catholic functionaries, and assigned jurisdiction over customs evasion to military courts subordinate to the Royal Navy's generals-at-sea. Any goodwill that Charles III had restored evaporated, and the Sons of Liberty began organizing committees of correspondence: writing (often on homemade paper) to each other, and developing shared strategies of coordinated resistance across all the colonies. In 1770, it became clear just how much overlap (in values and even membership) there was between the colonial legislatures and the Sons of Liberty. The Massachusetts General Court sent a circular letter to the other colonial assemblies, asking them to join in developing coordinated plans to defend their rights against imperial infringements. The next year, the Sons of Liberty in Boston called a town meeting, where the city's citizens voted to adopt a nonimportation agreement: they would not buy any goods subject to royal taxes, and would therefore starve the crown of the revenue that the taxes were intended to supply. To enforce this agreement, Bostonians formed a Committee of Safety - whose members were mostly already leaders in the Sons of Liberty and members of the Massachusetts General Court. The model spread like wildfire, and by 1772 every major town and most villages in America had their own Committees of Safety enforcing their own nonimportation agreements.
Aggressive enforcement of the Navigation Acts also backfired. When the new military customs courts in Charleston attempted to seize a vessel belonging to Edward Rutledge, a prominent Patriot lawyer and smuggler, a mob of dockworkers gathered. As the British troops approached Rutledge's ship, the mob attacked at point-blank range with bats and cudgels, and it forced first the soldiers and then many of the court officials to flee by boat to Castle James at the mouth of Charleston Harbor. In response, the Emperor issued a Bill of Attainder against the entire Rutledge family, declaring them guilty without trial. A regiment of British troops occupied Charleston, seized the Rutledges, and hanged them in front of the old Huguenot church. The next week, the Charleston Commitee of Safety wrote to the other committees of safety in South Carolina, asking them to send delegates to a Provincial Congress: a new body that would have authority to coordinate Patriot activity for the whole colony. Through the committees of correspondence, the new South Carolina Provincial Congress encouraged the committees of safety in other colonies to adopt similar centralizing measures. By 1774, every colony had done so.
This was an unmistakable step toward consolidating a power structure outside the imperial government altogether. The Emperor, typically, responded with force: the 1775 Quartering Act required Americans to provide British troops room and board in their own homes, free of charge. Virtually every colonial legislature refused to implement it, and the British Army largely did not attempt to actually quarter troops; individual soldiers did not want to be separated from their comrades and isolated in the homes of hostile colonials. But the message of the Quartering Act was clear enough: the Emperor intended to reduce the colonies to obedience by overwhelming, pervasive force of arms. In response, the New York Provincial Congress called for each colony's Provincial Congress to send delegates to a new Continental Congress in Philadelphia, there to consider how the colonies could protect themselves from the looming threat of military occupation.
The Continental Congress convened in 1776, but it proved ineffective. While the Puritan Exodus had forged a fairly consistent American culture, the different colonies still had starkly different interests. The Congress's structure, which all but required unanimity, left it hamstrung. In the meanwhile, events accelerated on their own. A brawl between soldiers and dockworkers in Newport ended with a charge of British cavalry into the mob, leaving dozens of men dead or maimed from saber blows. After the 1777 Newport Massacre, the local committees of safety in towns where British troops were stationed began to form new, more combat-ready militias: Minutemen, intended as a first line of defense against the British Army. Those new formations received their first test the next year, when the Minutemen of an overmountain settlement called Harrodsburg fought off a small company of French militia sent to evict them and return them to Virginia. In the port cities of America, the Minutemen increasingly became the enforcers of the various colonies' nonimportation agreements; two merchants in New Haven, who had imported British paint, died after local Minutemen immersed them in boiling tar.
In the final months of 1779, the Continental Congress took its first substantial action: adopting uniform nonimportantion and nonexportation rules, which essentially called for Britain to be cut off from American consumer markets and American exports of raw materials, until the Crown abandoned its efforts to tax the colonies and to restrict their trade. The Provincial Congresses and committees of safety began enforcing the new rules around the start of 1780. John Adams wrote to his wife Abigail: "I have come to consider that perhaps there is no stark line between Peace and War, as there is between Earth and Heaven. Perhaps we have been waging war by stages, and spoken all the while of peace. With each successive outrage, we have armed ourselves against the next; and if the Emperor does not yield, I fear we will awaken all too soon to find ourselves very far beyond the point of no return."
RP Sample: I believe you know me.
#AER (Do not delete this, it is used to keep track of the apps)
by Reverend Norv » Mon Jul 04, 2022 10:04 am
by New Luciannova » Mon Jul 04, 2022 1:18 pm
by Pasong Tirad » Tue Jul 05, 2022 4:18 am
by Sao Nova Europa » Tue Jul 05, 2022 5:56 am
Khasinkonia wrote:Nation Name: The French colonies in North America
Reverend Norv wrote:Nation Name: Britain's colonies on the American East Coast are officially known as The Thirteen Colonies
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