by James Devine
The Dominion’s Dilemma:
_________________________
The United States of British America
James F. Devine III
© 2013 by James F. Devine III
All rights reserved
No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual living persons is coincidental, unless noted in the Acknowledgements.
ISBN-13: 978-1481150354
ISBN-10: 1481150369
LCCN:2013903431
To my beloved grandfather, James F. Devine I, who instilled
in me his love of history, and, hopefully, a bit of his enormous writing talent.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
This novel originated from dinner party table talk some years ago: an acquaintance and his wife were discussing the American Revolution with friends. “What would have happened,” she asked, “if we had lost the Revolution?” In the gym the next morning, he posed the same question to me. “It would have been bloody, vicious and barbaric. A better question, though, is: ‘what would have happened if there had not been an American Revolution?’”
This book offers and explores one possibility as an attempt at serious alternate history.
The project has extended more than six years. Encouragement and enablers have come…and gone. The late Barry Connell of Haworth, NJ, was vital in the early going, along with his wife, Eileen. Anita Boyle of Northvale, NJ produced much-needed research on the careers of some early 19th century statesmen, both American and British. Newton Scherl, MD of Tenafly, NJ and Clifford Gold, P.E. of Fort Lee, NJ offered insightful commentary and critique. John Giorgio of Demarest, NJ knows his assistance was vital. As was that of my sister and her husband, Mary Beth and Gerry Quirk of Bergenfield, NJ.
Wendy Lawrence of Dumont, NJ noted contradictions, confusions and historical/cultural impossibilities as she patiently waded through each chapter as it emerged from the computer.
Having banged my head repeatedly against the Catch-22 of first-time authors---to interest publishers you must have an agent; but to interest agents you must be published---I thank Bart Zoltan of Old Tappan, NJ for encouraging me to step into the quagmire of self-publishing. Bart again came to the rescue when it appeared this project would flounder in the self-publishing minutia: formatting; legal arrangements and dealings with the printer/distributor.
Likewise, Cathy Ann Fasano, also of Old Tappan, appeared in the nick of time when the original illustrator suddenly withdrew.
My thanks to Mary Riskind, director of the Bergenfield Public Library, and her staff, especially head research librarian John Capps. With the sole exception of an 1836 Washington, DC map obtained from the New York Public Library, all other important research and maps were found under their direction and supervision in Bergenfield.
All battlefield descriptions are based on the U.S. Military Academy’s West Point Atlas of American Wars project, Volume I. The complete series is available for reference at the Bergenfield Library and, naturally, at The Point. The photographs of the historical figures are also courtesy of the USMA Museum, West Point, NY.
The America of 1833 was a country whose stock was primarily of English, Scotch-Irish and Dutch decent, with a sprinkling of French and Germans. The major ethnic immigration waves of the 19th and early 20th centuries---Irish, Italians, Germans, Eastern Europeans and Armenians---were yet to arrive. Therefore, the fictional characters had to bear names so corresponding. Those of a certain age who grew up in Bergenfield may recognize certain Anglo-Saxon-ish names. I have taken the liberty of borrowing those names, of old friends and teammates. For better or worse, there were few Bowlins, Hurleys, Giordanos, DiMaggios, Germakians, Oceaks or Greenbergs. Or even Pepitones… I trust those old friends whose names I have borrowed will be pleased with the portrayals of their fictional counterparts.
Finally, without the unwavering support of my love, Lucille, and her mother, Mrs. Angelina Pepitone, this book would still be resting quietly in the documents section of my computer.
___________________
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual living persons is coincidental, unless noted in the Acknowledgements.
___________________
.
AUTHOR’S NOTE
The alternate history genre comes in two brands: serious and science fiction/fantasy. This book is an attempt to tell a story---what might have happened in the year 1833 (when the British Empire abolished slavery) in an America that had settled in as a prosperous dominion of that Empire---in a serious but readable, adult manner.
That is to say: there are no time travelers; alien invaders; vampires; climatological cataclysms or offended gods in this tale.
Instead, the reader is offered a glimpse of a Jacksonian America in many ways identical with the one familiar in most history books. The major difference is that the question of final allegiance is not to the Stars and Stripes…but to the Union Jack. For this imagined world is populated by the same leadership---Clay, Calhoun, Webster, Van Buren, General Scott---as actually was in office at that time. Joined by a---hopefully---colorful cast of fictional characters, both male and female. All citizens of the United States of British America and all therefore owing, presumably, final allegiance to the Union Jack…and the Crown.
Both historical characters and fictional characters are offered participating in the constructed drama as human beings actually would participate: the historical characters acting much as they did in real life; the fictional ones as ordinary people of the time, both groups caught in an extraordinary situation.
There are no superheroes in this tale (though some might consider a certain plantation mistress as such). The actions of the historical characters are based on exploits and episodes of their actual careers. For instance, a senior military figure of the time is offered as surrendering a major military post to rebels in exchange for a general’s commission in the insurgent forces. That same individual did in fact surrender the U.S. Military District of Texas in exchange for a full general’s commission in the Confederates States Army.
Likewise, there actually was a full-blown European crisis in 1833 brought on by the Ottoman Sultan’s invitation to the Czar to land an army in Syria to turn back an invasion of the Anatolian heartland by a rebellious Egyptian pasha. British fury at the possible implications for their Indian trade route and desired Suez canal---Czarist, Communist
or modernist, Russia never relinquishes occupied land without a fight---almost started a major European war.
The fortuitous advent of that totally unexpected crisis, coming in the same year as Parliament debated the abolition of slavery throughout the British Empire, makes plausible the series of imagined events in North America: Britain’s comparatively small standing army, on alert to deal with a possible Near Eastern war versus a major European power, could not have simultaneously been available to put down a potential insurrection in the USBA.
CHAPTER ONE
Lexington, Virginia
October 20, 1870
This pagentry, Thomas Wilder thought, would have embarrassed Robert. In fact, if anything could penetrate that marble façade of his, an elaborate funeral ceremony---his funeral
ceremony---would do the trick. Tom momentarily brightened at the thought of his old West Point roommate, Robert E. Lee, looking down from the great parade ground in the sky.
‘Course, ol’ Scott must be loving it. Tom grinned. Betcha he's busting Robert, too:
“Well, Mr. Lee. A fine ceremony. If somewhat smaller, you’ll agree, than the one they threw for me at The Point four years ago.” Those blue eyes, which could drill through you like they were penetrating butter, would be twinkling at Robert’s obvious discomfort.
Thomas, who had risen to colonel in the Dominion forces under Winfield Scott which had defeated the Confederate States of America in the British American Civil War some 36 years prior, was standing outside the spacious President's House on the Washington College campus. The trustees had built it after Robert had returned from conquering Mexico to become the college's president.
Nearby stood Maj. Gen. (ret.) Thomas J. Jackson, as cold and rigid as he had been when he won his famous nickname at Santa Cruz in ‘62. Jackson insisted that Stonewall was really meant to describe the brigade he led in the second Mexican conflict. That was Jackson's conceit; everyone knew General Bee had uttered the famous "look at Jackson: standing like a stone wall" during that stunning British American victory, just before a Frenchman ran his cavalry sword through poor Bee's neck.
Stonewall was standing, erect and expressionless, a few feet away from Colonel Wilder at the bottom of the Lee home’s steps, along with the rest of the honorary pallbearers. Who included Wilder's other West Point friend, Maj. Gen. Joseph Johnston (ret.); former Governor-General Jefferson Davis and another hero of both Mexican conflicts, Pete Longstreet.
Tom Wilder didn’t know Brig. Gen. James Longstreet well. In fact, they had only met a few times at formal events in Georgetown and Richmond. But now Longstreet grinned at Tom.
"Good morning, Colonel Wilder. Hope you slept well last night? The Lee boys think we’re too old to actually carry the General’s casket over to the chapel. But take a look at Johnston and Davis. They look ready to pound each other right now.”
They both laughed. Pete was Class of ’42, 14 years after Johnston, Robert and Tom had graduated West Point. Thanks, in Tom's case, in large part to Lee, as Wilder's aversion to engineering principles nearly ended his military career on the banks of the Hudson. But Lee had drilled him like an NCO. And I barely survived to graduate. Only time I ever saw Robert lose his temper, though they tell me he gave that young pup Jeb Stuart the dressing down of a lifetime after Stuart took his cavalry joyriding round the French army before Second Cerro Gordo back in ’63…
A generation younger or not, Pete, like every other West Pointer, knew the enduring legend:
Cadet Johnston had challenged Cadet Davis, whose sense of self-importance and righteousness was already fully developed at age 22, to step outside Bennie Haven’s tavern one cold night in Highland Falls in the winter of ’26-’27. Davis was a year ahead, but since Bennie Haven’s was off-limits to all West Point cadets, rank didn’t matter, in or out of the big circle they drew outside:
Johnston chopped Davis down like a big skinny sapling. Then, Joe went back inside to enjoy the fruits of his victory: the undivided attention of Dora, Bennie’s buxom daughter…
The whole Regular Army---and most of Georgetown---could recite the tale by heart.
The Lee boys, Rooney and the rest, were coming down the steps now. With them came their wild cousin, Fitzhugh Lee, who had been with Stuart when a Frog bullet ended the Last Cavalier’s life near the outskirts of Mexico City. Staff aides said Robert had cried silent tears when they brought him the news; Stuart had been his favorite since Lee’s stint as Point Superintendent after the original Mexican War.
As Governor-General, Jeff Davis had almost single-handedly talked Her Majesty’s Government into that second Mexican adventure. Basically by assuring London that the Royal Army, still reeling from the Indian Mutiny and already caught up in the Second Opium War in China, wouldn’t be needed to throw the French and their puppet emperor, Maximilan of Austria, out of Mexico.
The hardcore anti-war Whigs had accused Davis of being “disingenuous, hypocritical and cynical” by arguing that the Dominion had experience fighting wars without the RA’s help. Considering that Davis fought on the losing side in that bloody, futile gamble by old Calhoun, Polk, Taylor and some others to make the South an independent Dominion…or maybe an independent country, thought Colonel Wilder, I could see some validity in the Whig argument. Since the whole point of the damn rebellion had been to hold on to the South's “peculiar institution." Slavery, to be more precise.
Of course, Davis hadn’t been alone: Lee and Johnston had also served the so-called “Confederate States of America.” And they might have gotten away with it, if not for "Old Fuss and Feathers”: Winfield Scott, the greatest general in Dominion history.
Of course, time heals all wounds…that and prosperity. The dawning of the mechanized age had made the South, or at least the white South, prosperous again by 1845. The former slaves, however, were a different story: their condition continued to be the Dominion’s gravest problem…as well as its biggest embarrassment…
The Southerners had gradually worked their way back to positions of authority, due, chiefly, to the First Mexican War. And to General Scott. Wilder's old boss had argued successfuly for the inclusion of former Rebel officers in the USBA forces organizing to battle Santa Anna. Their successes, including Lee's as chief engineer of Scott's own campaign to capture Mexico City, had led to their regaining influence in Dominion military and political affairs. Colonel Lee, for instance, went from Mexico City to The Point as superintendent, before going west to fight Comachees. Eventually, in 1862, he had been promoted to lead the USBA Army's second conquest of Mexico.
Now former Rebs were spread out throught the Army and the government. Davis' victory in the '60 election had seemed, to many, the symbolic, formal reuniting of the Dominion.
The “honorary” pallbearers formed up now and followed the Lees across campus to the chapel. Mary Lee---after all these years she still hasn’t forgiven me; blames me personally for the loss of Arlington House back then---riding behind in a carriage. Open, despite the cold, nasty late October western Virginia weather, with her daughters, Mary, Mildred and Agnes. The procession quickly picked up other mourners along the way, so that the line snaked back virtually to the Lee home by the time the coffin finally reached the chapel.
There was a pause before entering and the Lee boys gratefully lowered the casket. Which, to Tom's relief at least, was covered solely by the Stars and Stripes of the United States of British America. Not that the old Rebel Stars and Bars aren’t visible damn near everyplace else…
Word came down that the cause of the delay was Sam Grant---Ulysses Simpson Grant himself---17th Governor-General of the USBA. The G-G's train had finally arrived at Lexington Station. He would be appearing any minute. That Grant, who 10 years prior was clerking in his father’s Galena, Ill. dry goods store, was G-G was something most people still found difficult to believe.
But Sam had been asked to organize and command a regiment of Illinois volunteers to fight the French-backed Royalists in Mexico, based on his service in the First Mexican War. And off he went, like one of those rockets whose red glare Francis Scott Key described so poetically in the Dominion anthem. The ones that illuminated Fort McHenry when a Frog fleet bombarded it back during the Napoleonic wars.
Grant moved quickly up the chain of command in the northern theatre along the Rio Grande. And there won everlasting fame for defeating a significantly larger Franco-Royalist army at Ciudad Aquna, across from the dusty Texas town of Del Rio. This, while Lee was simultaneously replicating Scott’s march to Mexico City.
The Whigs, who had restored their party’s original name, “Republican,” in the patriotic hoopla that followed the new war's outbreak, nominated William Seward of New York to run against Davis in ’64, while the war still raged. The mendacious Davis' insistence on personally overseein
g all aspects of government, including the war, had left him the most reviled man in Georgetown---and the Dominion---by election day. Looking to balance the ticket with a Westerner, who also happened to be a war hero, the Republicans plucked Grant from the Army to run for Vice G-G.
No one, of course, thought Seward would have the bad manners to die late in his term, leaving Sam in charge…
Official mouners and the public alike began shivering as the wind grew stronger, the clouds darkened and the wait lengthened. Grumbling at the delay, Maj. Gen. William T. Sherman, Grant’s No. 2 in Mexico and now commander of the USBA Army, marched over to Wilder.
“Colonel Wilder, sir!” I haven’t put on a uniform since shortly after the end of the Rebellion. But people insist on using my military title. Hell, if it makes them happy…
“Quite a turnout, right Colonel? Looks like the whole South is here.” Sherman looked at Tom shrewdly. “But you, Sam and I seem to make up the majority of the Northern contingent. Once Sam gets here, of course…” The laugh came from deep down Sherman’s throat and the red head shook with the effort.
“Good to see you, Cump.” Wilder had known Sherman forever, or at least since the General's step-father, former G-G Ewing, brought Cump and his brother John to Georgetown in the late ‘30s. Before Cump, too, disappeared into The Long Gray Line…
“How’s things on the Plains?” Cump’s major duty was protecting the settlers, miners, ranchers, trappers and various persons of lesser repute from the increasingly angry Indians. Who have the audacity to think a treaty with the USBA is worth more than the scrap of paper they had made their mark on...
“Damn tough, Colonel.” Sherman took off his uniform hat and wiped his brow, which, despite the chilly weather, looked remarkably moist. “The Plains Indians are the best light cavalry in the world. We have our hands full. And these damn miners and wagon masters! They sneak on or across Indian land. Some make it, some don’t. But it’s the Army’s fault if we don’t protect them all!” The high cheek-boned face was now almost as red as the hair. Or those fearsome Sioux the newspapers keep screaming about.