by Tom Anderson
It soon became obvious to all well-informed Indians that the Empire was now powerful and populous enough to defeat any single Indian nation, even ones as great as the Howden and the Cherokee, and that began to inform Indian ideas of, for want of a better word, foreign policy…
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Roots have spread out from the Tree of the Great Peace, one to the north, one to the east, one to the south and one to the west. The name of these roots is The Great White Roots and their nature is Peace and Strength.
If any man or any nation outside the Five Nations shall obey the laws of the Great Peace and make known their disposition to the Lords of the Confederacy, they may trace the Roots to the Tree, and if their minds are clean and they are obedient and promise to obey the wishes of the Confederate Council, they shall be welcomed to take shelter beneath the Tree of the Long Leaves.
– from the Gayanashagowa, the Great Law of Peace which formed the original basis of the Constitution of the Howden Confederacy
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The Indians of America were much like the Indians of India in one way: both peoples conducted wars in alliance with France or Britain regardless of whether Britain and France themselves were at war at the time. President-Governor John Pitt of Calcutta once commented ‘I have fought more French soldiers while our countries were at peace than I have when we were at war!’ Those soldiers were, legally, in the service of the Tippoo of Mysore. In America a similar legal fiction meant they were formally independent warriors allied to the Indian nations that the French supported there, such as the Ojibwa and the Algonquins.
So it was that, while the Tennessee War overlapped with the wider First Platinean War in the 1760s, the Ohio War overlapped with both the Second Platinean War in the 1780s and then the Jacobin Wars in the 1790s. The Ohio War was fought between an alliance of the Howden Confederacy on one side, backed up by New York and Pennsylvania, and the tribes who had formerly received French support – and still occupied the Ohio Country and the lands around the Great Lakes – on the other. The war was instrumental in establishing American control of the Great Lakes, allowing the formation of the Susan-Mary penal colony a few years later. The Ottawa tribe north of the St Lawrence survived but were forced to migrate westward, to the lands north of Lake Huron. The powerful Hurons, on the other hand, allied to the Lenape, were finally broken by their longstanding Howden enemies.[179]
The Hurons had dominated both the Ohio Country and parts of Canada for so long that their defeat and fragmentation was another major shift in Indian politics. Pennsylvania and New York expanded and settled westward into the Ohio Country, while New York, the Howden and New England occupied the lands conquered in Canada. The Hurons lost their political unity (formerly being a confederacy like the Howden) and fragmented back into their constituent nations. What was left of the Arendarhonon and Attigneenongnahac nations moved westward and northward, where they would eventually join the Lakota Confederation of Seven Fires.[180] The Attignawantan nation migrated more to the west and south, eventually reaching the northern border of the rump French Louisiana. The possibility of the Attignawantan settling within French territory was rejected, as the displaced Canajuns from former French America were already hungry for the best land; however, the Attignawantan were permitted to settle north of the border and received French colonial assistance in return for providing a buffer state against other Indians. The Attignawantan were technically occupying British/Imperial land, but as almost no-one had even explored it yet, they had years in which to recover and rebuild their strength before any prospective Virginian colonists arrived.
It was the final Huron nation, the Tahontaenrat, who were destined to make history, when under the visionary chief Rontondee (War Pole), they approached the Howden with a view to being accepted into the Confederacy. The Tahontaenrat had not been at the forefront of the recent fighting, but their lands were now subject to being swallowed up to Pennsylvanian settlement. The situation was not unprecedented. The Howden had previously absorbed a Huron people, the neutral and separated Attawandaron, some years before – however, the Attawandaron were not acknowledged as a distinct nation in the Confederacy. However, after the Tuscoara had been expelled from Carolina, the Howden had accepted them as the Sixth Nation, increased from the ancestral five, though the Tuscoara had fewer voting rights than those five.
After much consideration, the Howden Grand Council agreed to accept the Tahontaenrat and their lands into the Confederacy. Anything that would stave off the day when the Confederacy was surrounded by densely settled American country, a day when they might be forced back into the relationship of father and son rather than brothers…
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THE SEVEN NATIONS OF THE HOWDEN CONFEDERACY
(as of 1800)
SENECA or ONONDOWAHGAH, the People of the Great Hill
CAYUGA or GUYOHKOHNYOH, the People of the Great Swamp
ONONDAGA or ONUNDAGAONO, the People of the Hills
ONEIDA or ONAYOTEKAONO, the People of Upright Stone
MOHAWK or KANIENKEHAKA, the People of the Flint
TUSCOARA or SKARUHREH, the Shirt-wearing People
TAHONTAENRAT or SCAHENTOARRHONON, the People of the Deer
Interlude #6: State of the Empire
A summary of the Continental Parliament of North America as of 1800, including the number of MPs elected by each Confederation.
Confederation of New England
Province of Connecticut: 2 MPs
Province of Rhode Island: 1 MP
Province of South Massachusetts: 2 MPs
Province of North Massachusetts: 1 MP
Province of New Hampshire: 1 MP
Province of New Connecticut: 1 MP
Province of New Scotland: 2 MPs
Province of Wolfe: 1 MP
Province of Mount Royal: 1 MP
Province of Newfoundland: 1 MP
Borough of Boston: 2 MPs
Total: 15 MPs
Confederation of New York
Province of Amsterdam: 2 MPs
Province of Albany: 2 MPs
Province of East Jersey: 1 MP
Province of Niagara: 1 MP
Province of Portland: 1 MP
Borough of New York: 2 MPs
Total: 9 MPs
Confederation of Pennsylvania
Province of Philadelphia: 2 MPs
Province of West Jersey: 1 MP
Province of Delaware: 1 MP
Province of Pittsylvania: 1 MP
Province of Ohio: 1 MP
Province of Chichago: 1 MP[181]
Borough of Philadelphia: 2 MPs
Total: 9 MPs
Confederation of Virginia
Province of Richmond: 2 MPs
Province of Williamsburg: 2 MPs
Province of Maryland: 2 MPs
Province of Vandalia: 1 MP
Province of Transylvania: 1 MP
Province of Washington: 1 MP
Borough of Richmond: 1 MP
Borough of Williamsburg: 1 MP
Total: 11 MPs
Confederation of Carolina
Province of North Carolina: 2 MPs
Province of South Carolina: 2 MPs
Province of Georgia: 2 MPs
Province of West Florida: 1 MP
Province of East Florida: 1 MP
Province of Franklin: 1 MP
Province of Tennessee: 1 MP
Borough of Charleston: 1 MP
Total: 11 MPs
Total number of MPs in the Continental Parliament as of 1800 = 55
Breakdown:
33 Patriots (governing party, majority of 5)
18 Constitutionalists
4 Radicals
The American House of Lords has 26 members as of 1800, the majority of whom are either Patriots or crossbenchers.
Chapter 31: Enter the Bald Impostor
From George Spencer-Churchill’s ‘A History of Modern Warfare, Vol. III’ (1953)—
The Great Baltic War was a milestone in many ways. It was
the last war at sea to be fought primarily with oar- galleys. It decided the fate of the governance of Russia. It decided who would dominate Scandinavia out of Sweden and Denmark, both having risen from low points in the early 18th century to new relative zeniths of power at its end. And ultimately, perhaps, it decided the fate of the Ottoman Empire. The speculative romantics have often pointed out how different our world would be today if Emperor Peter III had simply executed Catherine on her coup attempt, rather than allowing her to plot and produce heirs (allegedly, at least) in Yekaterinburg. But the truth was that this would have been politically impossible. Throughout Peter’s reign, Catherine retained many supporters, indeed otherwise the brothers Potemkin, with their decidedly flimsy claim to the throne, would have got nowhere when they launched their bid.
Our tale so far stands at May 1797, when all the players in the war – save one – were committed. The brothers Potemkin had defeated Paul Romanov, though hardly decisively, at Smolensk and Vitebsk, and the Romanovians had retreated into Lithuania, which Paul had ruled as Grand Duke Povilas I for years and was now under the rule of his son Peter as Petras I. The Potemkinites held Moscow, Vitebsk and everything in between, though they had failed to take St Petersburg after their siege train was torn up by General Mikhail Kamenski. The Russian possessions in former Polish Ruthenia had yet to be decided one way or the other, though it was assumed that they would eventually fall in line with whichever house could convincingly claim victory.
Sweden, seeing the Potemkinites on the up but not yet in place to win a decisive victory, declared war on the Romanovians and Lithuania. The Hat Party hoped to expand Sweden’s Baltic power and to subordinate or at least seriously weaken Russia, avoiding the nightmare of a war with both Russia and Denmark at the same time. However, this hope was dashed when Denmark proceeded to declare war in May. Prussia was busy putting down a Polish revolt which soon expanded into a wider war, and so was not directly involved with the Great Baltic War – contrary to all the Prusso-Russian friendship treaties of the mid-18th century.
So in May 1797 things looked bleak, though not yet hopeless, for the Romanovians. Peter and Paul raised a new army in Lithuania under General Michael Andreas Barclay de Tolly, a Scottish-Lithuanian who had previously taken Russian service and fought the Turks. European commentators – or, at least, those not consumed with covering the far more urgent Jacobin Wars – compared the act to that of Maria Theresa raising Hungarian levies during the Second War of Supremacy, which had perhaps prevented Austria from collapse in that war.
The naval war for control of the Baltic was now met in earnest. The vast bulk of the Royal Swedish Navy had been dispatched to defeat the smaller Lithuanian Patriotic Fleet and seize control of the Baltic port—which left Sweden herself with only secondary forces when Denmark unexpectedly declared war. The first victory in the naval war, therefore, was an easy one for the Romanovian allies, as the Danes defeated the Swedes at the Battle of Anholt (in reality taking place in the sea fairly distant from the island) and seizing control of the Kattegat. A second Swedish fleet remained in port at Malmö, Admiral Johan Cronstedt[182] being too canny to risk his small force in direct combat with the full power of the Royal Danish Navy. By being able to sortie at any time, however, he created headaches for the Danes’ plans to land troops in Scania across the Oresund. Despite their early dramatic victory at Anholt, the Danes’ war plans stalled.
Meanwhile, on June 7th 1797 the Swedes made a descent upon Klaipeda in an attempt to seize the port and burn the Ducal Lithuanian Navy’s fleet in harbour. The Swedes’ descent in itself was remarkably successful, with Klaipeda being crushed between the marines from the north and the regular Swedish army moving in from Swedish Prussia to the south. The town was immediately renamed once more, to Karlsborg (after King Charles XIII). However, the Lithuanian fleet sortied under Admiral Vatsunyas Radziwiłł and escaped the ship-burners. The main Swedish fleet, led by Admiral Carl August Ehrensvärd in his flagship HMS Kristersson, were blockading the port, so it seemed as though the Lithuanians would be trapped.
Admiral Radziwiłł, however, proceeded to create a tactic which has been debated by naval historians ever since, and would come to greater prominence with the invention of the steam-galley by Surcouf and Cugnot a few years later in France. The admiral made the decision to sacrifice his slow-moving galleys that made up perhaps a quarter of the fleet, as they would be unable to keep up with the sailships anyway. The galleys, capable of moving independently without the wind, were used to hammer a gap in the Swedish line along a specific angle. This would allow the Lithuanians, sailing to the east away from Klaipeda, to have the wind abaft the beam, while the Swedes would be forced to tack. Ehrensvärd had of course anticipated this and made his blockade strongest in that area, but Radziwiłł’s sacrifice of his galleys – which went to the bottom of the Baltic but took a number of Swedish men-o’-war with them – meant that the bulk of the Lithuanian Patriotic Fleet was able to escape.
Radziwiłł led the remainder of hus fleet to St Petersburg. Paul by now had heard of the heroic defence of the capital by Kamenski and had both promoted him and made Prince Alexander Kurakin, a long-held Petersburger ally and correspondent of his, the new Governor of the city. Paul’s emissaries, along with Kamenski and Kurakin, had succeeded in achieving total control over the Russian Navy in port there, purging all suspected Potemkin sympathisers. In truth the Petersburgers were quite disposed to be loyal to Paul in any case, having had the city’s importance increase further under Paul’s father Peter, who – like his namesake Peter the Great – wanted Russia to have a European face, and that face was St Petersburg. For much the same reason, the former capital Moscow tended to support the Potemkins even before they marched into the city.
The outcomes of the initial Baltic engagements were therefore somewhat misleading. The Danes had beaten the Swedes in home waters, but were unable to capitalise on that victory, while the Swedes had failed their objective of actually destroying the Lithuanian fleet, yet still had the immediate naval dominance they required to shift armies into their Baltic possessions. Troops flowed into Lithuania from Courland and Swedish Prussia, but rather than aiming straight for Vilnius, the Swedes instead turned northward in an attempt to regain Livonia, which they had lost to the Russians after the Treaty of Nystad in 1721. This more than anything illustrated how the Swedes did not so much favour the Potemkins (or oppose the Romanovs) as simply desire to regain as much power over Russia as they could—by whatever means necessary.
The focus on Livonia was also a strategic error, giving the Lithuanians enough time to organise their new levies under Barclay and integrate them with the loyalist Russian remnant army led by Nikolai Saltykov. The Russo-Lithuanians defeated three Swedish armies in quick succession at Seinai, Alytus and Trakai, expelling the Swedes from the Trakų Vaivadija (Vojvodship of Trakai) but leaving them in undisputed control of Žemaičių seniūnija (the Eldership of Samogita), which lay between the Swedes’ holdings of Courland and Swedish Prussia. Nonetheless, this repulsion of the too-thinly-spread Swedish forces encouraged the Swedish army to focus on regaining Livonia rather than attacking Lithuania. The Swedes were unable to commit as many troops as they would have liked, as a large part of the army was either slowly pushing east from Finland or holding the frontier in the west against any Danish attack from Norway.
By August 1797 the war had almost stagnated, with the Romanovians having built up a new army but, with the Swedes hanging over their heads, unwilling to commit it to regaining Russian cities from the Potemkinites. Meanwhile, the Potemkinites were unwilling to move against Lithuania until they had taken St Petersburg, and were gearing up for another attempt. The war still hung in the balance, but what tilted it came not from any of the current players, but quite another source…
One interesting feature of Peter III’s reign was that, given his Germanophilia, he had encouraged the settlement of Germans in Russian territory. In some ways this was akin to how the British American colonists
worked, accepting German refugees fleeing religious persecution but then promptly putting them down on a frontier between British (or in this case Russian) colonists and some dangerous natives. The Caucasus was a particularly common area for Germans, often Prussians, to migrate to; another common area was the Volga, where German farmers were used as a buffer against the eastern khanates.[183]
The story of the Bald Impostor has been told and retold so many times after the event that, by now, it has become confused by legend and myth. Nonetheless, the story goes that one of the German families who made the decision to move to the northern Caucasus were a certain Herr and Frau Kautzman. The Kautzmans made the journey early in Peter’s reign, in 1764. They had a child, a son, only months after settling on a farm near Stavropol. However, barely three years later, the farm was attacked by (as they thought at the time) nomads, and their son Heinrich vanished, presumably lost. The Kautzmans grieved for many years, but went on to have other children and vanished from history.
However, the attack on the farm had in fact been the work of rogue Don Cossacks, who supplemented their official employment with the Tsar with the occasional raid, particularly on the German settlers who often had no way to report the attacks to the Russian authorities. Peter III’s reign had been a relatively peaceful one, something that was positive for many Russians but not for the Cossack mercenaries. Heinrich had not been killed, but carried away by a Cossack who thought that the little boy ‘had spirit’ when he protested loudly in broken Russian about the Cossacks’ attack on the house and attempted to bite the Cossack in the ankle. That Cossack was named Yemelyan Ivanovich Pugachev, and he adopted the young Heinrich Kautzman.[184]