Uncharted Territory (Look to the West Book 2)

by Tom Anderson

  The situation was complicated by 1816, the Year Without a Summer[160] when widespread crop failures meant that the links with America and Ireland and the transport network suddenly became hugely important again, though those two nations suffered from their own problems as well. Redistribution and ruthless rationing, as even The Ringleader conceded, served to mean that the shaky phoenix of Great Britain managed to scrape by, and helped consolidate Churchill’s position once more. When Conroy died in 1819, run over by a steam carriage, Churchill gave his position to his son Joshua, who had risen from his position as tyrannical Governor-General of Scotland to become Secretary at War in his own father’s titular government. ‘Bloody Blandford’ was also effective plenipotentiary leader in the Lords (Conroy himself had served in that role in the Commons, soon replaced by one of Wedgwood’s innumerable relatives, Thomas Darwin). This left Joshua in effective command of both the regular Army and the PSCs, while Arthur headed up the RCTFI. His third son, George (known as George Spencer-Churchill the Elder), on the other hand, shocked the nation by taking ship to the Empire of North America in 1813 (around the time of Charles Bone’s death) and then issuing polemics against his father and brothers from Philadelphia. In this he was backed by several important political figures in the Empire; Americans were deeply concerned by Churchill’s rule, and in particular the way he had hamstrung Frederick II, their Emperor and ultimate guarantor of American freedom. The Earl of Exmouth, an appointee of Henry IX, remained Lord Deputy of the ENA, but he was in his seventies and soon another would have to take his place – an appointee of Frederick II, which these days meant one of Churchill.

  Yet for all the oppression and the tension inherent in Churchill’s government, Britain did begin to recover, her economy rebuilt by the trade thrown open to the Empire, Ireland and the possessions of the British East India Company, boosted by the tithes extracted from the French at the Congress of Copenhagen. The scars of the invasion slowly began to heal, London rose from the ashes, and (as Bulkeley, once more, noted) “one knows that one’s kingdom is once more in the land of the living when its people can speak of something besides hardship.”

  In fact the problems would arise when Britain was on the cusp of regaining her pre-war prosperity; for it was then that she would question the need for the heavy-handed means that had brought her there…

  Chapter #90: Back in the U.P.S.A.

  “It is simply a crime against mankind for the two great nations of the Americas to be at each other’s throats. Let us now move on from the past and remember our shared quest for liberty. Remember our shared heritage. A land divided against itself cannot stand, and for we men of freedom, this is our land.”

  - Roberto Enrique Mateováron Domínguez,

  inaugural speed at the Meridian Embassy in Fredericksburg, December 14th, 1813

  *

  From: “Balancing on the Head of a Pin: The United Provinces in the Watchful Peace” by Juan Pablo Castillo y Franco (1939, English translation 1941)—

  Though many studies of the unrest and turmoil beneath the deceptive placidity of the period known as the Watchful Peace naturally tend to focus upon the nations of Europe, we should not forget that the name is equally applicable to other regions touched by the ravages of the Jacobin Wars and their peripheral fronts. Chief among these is the United Provinces of South America.

  In the 1810s the UPSA stood at a crisis point in its national self-image. The Partido Solidaridad, aping the revolutionaries of France, had led the nation in an attempt to topple the exilic Empire of New Spain (or rather, as it was known at the time, the Empire of the Indies). The move had backfired badly, partially thanks to a failure on the part of the New Spanish to fold so easily, but primarily because reckless policy on the part of President-General Castelli led to the entry of the Hanoverian Dominions,[161] and ultimately the Portuguese Empire, into the war on the New Spanish side. Rather than swelling to encompass all the Hispanophone lands in the Americas as Castelli had envisaged, the United Provinces had been forced to surrender Peru to the New Spanish Empire and had humiliatingly lost control of her home waters to the Anglo-American Royal Navy. Castelli had been killed by a mob for his mismanagement of the war and his attempt to flee from Buenos Aires, and the republic had come close to falling altogether.

  It had not come to that. New Spain remained weak and the Hanoverians were soon distracted by the invasion of Britain by Lisieux’s France. The UPSA was able to escape relatively lightly, save from the loss of Lower Peru and some minor border adjustments in favour of Portuguese Brazil, at the Treaty of Rio de Janeiro. With the Partido Solidaridad discredited, the country was initially dominated by the conservative Reagrupamiento por la Unión of Miguel Baquedano y Zebreros, which eventually evolved into the Amarillo Party. At the same time, the progressive remnants of the old Partido Solidaridad reformed into the Colorado Party, led by war hero Luis Jaime Ayala Santa Cruz.

  Baquedano inadvertently set a precedent when he promised to step down after three years and not seek re-election – which would have been unlikely in any case as he was hated as the man who had sought peace, even though there had been little alternative. The Amarillo Party won the first postwar election in 1810 with Roberto Mateovarón, who proceeded to make significant changes to the constitution, formalising some of the temporary provisions of Baquedano’s premiership. Instead of being elected for life, the presidency-general was subject to re-election every three years, although no formal limit to the number of terms was laid down. Elections to the Cortes Nacionales were set at every four years rather than being called at the whim of the President-General. The first of these was held in 1811 and it returned a substantial majority for the Amarillo Party, although Ayala’s Colorado Party retained a significant proportion of seats. This Cortes had fewer independents, the so-called informal Blanco Party, as for the moment the country appeared to be heading towards a polarised two-party system.

  President-General Mateovarón faced serious challenges in his premiership, and it a measure of his success in dealing with them that it is he, rather than Simón Riquelme de la Barrera Goycochea[162] or Baquedano, who is often considered the founding father of the UPSA in a recognisable form. A well-known example is the problem of refugees from Lower Peru, who flooded into still-Meridian Upper Peru and Chile after the New Spanish took over the administration of their home province and proclaimed it the Kingdom of Peru under the Infante Gabriel, commander of the Nuevo Ejército (New Army). A limeño[163] uprising had played a key role in New Spain’s victory, and now was the time for reprisal attacks against those loyal citizens of Lower Peru that had sided with the Meridian message. Liberal Bajaperuanos fled the new Kingdom in large numbers, joined by many Tahuantinsuya as the restored Inca Empire was crushed by the New Spanish by 1820. Most of the Tahuantinsuya preferred to dwell with their fellow natives in the Aymara Kingdom – where the Inca Tupac Amaru IV would also dwell in exile after the death of his father at the hands of the New Spanish in 1817 – but some joined the Bajaperuanos as they attempted to settle in Chile and Upper Peru.

  While the UPSA was still relatively sparsely populated, this upset many of the locals, who were having a hard enough time feeding themselves given the ravages of the war, the fact that the farm labour force had been depleted by going off to soldier, and that the British had wrecked numerous seaports and destroyed or confiscated fishing boats. Riots soon broke out, and it was up to Mateovarón to solve the problem. He did so in a unique way which also addressed a contemporaneous issue, that of Patagonia. Britain had tried to claim Tierra del Fuego at the Treaty of Rio de Janeiro, but had backed down after her bluff had been called, and now the Meridians were paranoid about losing their strategically valuable control over Cape Horn and the Straits of Magellan. To that end, while the island itself remained undisturbed for the moment, Mateovarón had the Bajaperuano refugees relocated on government expense to Confluencia, the northernmost part of uncolonised Patagonia and later forming the western part of La Frontera province.[164]r />
  After initial success from the scheme, both Mateovarón and his successors as President-General suggested new economic laws to the Cortes that would lower taxes in the frontier regions and provide other incentives to encourage people to settle there, similar to policies used by the various Confederations of the ENA in Canada and the West Indies. Although some adventurers came from all across the UPSA, after those displaced from Lower Peru the second largest group consisted of refugees from the lands that had been transferred to Portuguese Brazil at the Treaty of Rio de Janeiro. This group included many Guarani Indians. The colonists often employed the Guarani and Tahuantinsuya in attempts to negotiate with the local Tehuelche tribes; while this might appear naïve or even insulting to modern eyes (of course the very distant groups of natives had no tongue in common) the fact that some visibly native Americans were comfortable living alongside and working with the Meridians did appear to reassure the Tehuelche. While there were some conflicts between natives and colonists, these were a far cry from the violent clashes with the expansionist Mapuche people seen in the (then) far less successful attempts to expand into Araucanía.[165]

  This tactic, a clear case of killing two birds with one stone, helped take the pressure off Meridian communities closer to the nation’s Platinean-Chilean core as the economy recovered. Mateovarón enjoyed considerable popularity, and surprised the nation by not seeking re-election when his term expired in 1813. Though Ayala put in a strong performance as the Colorado candidate in the resulting election and won a respectable vote share, there was little surprise when the new President-General turned out to be the Amarillo candidate, José Jaime Carriego López. Ayala’s failure resulted in him being kicked upstairs, and while continuing in name as leader and chairman of the Colorado Party, in practice he was reduced to a figurehead while younger men less associated with the toxic heritage of the Partido Solidaridad took over.

  President-General Carriego could scarcely be anything other than a disappointment of some kind after the successes of Mateovarón’s premiership, but he nonetheless failed to live up even to lowered expectations. Whereas Mateovarón had been a moderate figure among the Amarillo Party, Carriego was more strongly conservative, objecting to several reforms the Partido Solidaridad had passed that Baquedano and Mateovarón had left in place. However, the Amarillo deputies in the Cortes were divided on these issues and, aside from a few minor laws, Carriego was unable to have the reforms reversed. In what is widely considered to be his best political move (though probably on the prompting of others), Carriego appointed the semi-retired, but still quite young, former President-General Mateovarón as Ambassador to the Empire of North America. The purpose of this was both pragmatic and symbolic: pragmatic, because the UPSA urgently needed to repair relations with the ENA after the disastrous Third Platinean War, and the skilled politician and orator Mateovarón would be the right man for the job; symbolic, because appointing their former head of state as ambassador to the ENA would be a conciliatory gesture and one which expressed how important the Meridians considered their links with the American Empire.

  While Carriego’s rule went from bad to worse, Mateovarón was a great success as Ambassador. He had already learned fluent English, having a working knowledge while he was President-General and refining it while in “retirement”. He used this to address a crowd of curious Fredericksburg dignitaries upon taking up his post, declaring that he thought it natural that the two freedom-loving nations of the Americas (a pointed jab at the Empire of New Spain) should look on each other as brothers. “And brothers may sometimes have disagreements, and even come to blows, but in the end they will always be of the same blood,” Mateovarón said. His speech, given in the Spanish style that seemed overly flamboyant to Anglophone ears, seemed to appeal to and appall roughly equal percentages of Americans, but his very presence sparked a renewal of debate about the ENA’s relations with the UPSA and the Empire of New Spain – which had been Mateovarón’s intention. He also laid a wreath for the crew of the Cherry on the tenth anniversary of the Massacre in 1815 and gave a formal apology on the part of the UPSA, which further encouraged those political forces in Fredericksburg who felt that a rapprochement with the liberal UPSA would be a far more appropriate foreign policy than cosying up to absolutist Catholic nations like the Empire of New Spain.

  At the same time, however, President Carriego was hit by a serious scandal. In early 1815 it emerged that before the war he had participated in the illegal slave trade out of Lima. Initially the government tried to brush this over by saying it was all in the past, but they were made to look like fools when El Tribuno Meridiano, one of Cordóba’s biggest newspapers, broke the story that Carriego had continued his involvement even after the end of the war, and had been involved in the purchase and handover of South Sea Islander slaves via Valdivia as recently at 1812. The reconstruction of Valdivia, along with the other western ports attacked and burned by the Anglo-Americans during the war, was a project that naturally needed plenty of workers and didn’t ask too many questions about from where it obtained them.

  At this point we should perhaps digress to consider the state of slavery in the Americas (or ‘Novamund’) at this time. The slave trade had been banned by the northern Confederations of the ENA as attitudes changed there, then by Britain and her Royal Africa Company in 1802. Slavery itself was still legal in the Confederations of Virginia and Carolina, and Pennsylvania and New York’s system of manumission meant there were still plenty of Negroes who remained enslaved in all but name. Slaves were also very common in French Louisiana, Portuguese Brazil, the West Indies, and of course the Empire of New Spain; France, Spain and Portugual had never seen any need to reconsider their slave trade.[166] The UPSA, as part of its own formative ideological agenda to attack the casta system, tended to take a more sceptical view of the institution. Even under the fairly conservative early rule of President-General Riquelme, there was a policy of confiscating slaves and freeing them (though typically the freedmen were only considered to have a status suitable for menial labour). This began as more of a policy of attacking the rich, slave-holding peninsulares rather than motivated for the good of the slaves themselves, and escalated under the Partido Solidaridad. Finally in 1804, not long before the start of the Third Platinean War, the Cortes Nacionales formally abolished slavery (the slave trade had been abolished as early as 1791). This was a move that stoked anger among the limeños and arguably helped power the uprising there, but it also gave more credence to the UPSA’s claims of egalitarianism and helped the Meridians gain some support from the locals in New Granada – not that this mattered except in the very long run.

  In any case, and particularly after the border adjustments of the Treaty of Rio de Janeiro, many black slaves fled across the border from Brazil and sought sanctuary in the UPSA. While the vast majority indeed went on to live as freemen – poor and of low social status, but free – a few were taken by slavers (sometimes in confidence tricks) and taken to projects requiring cheap labour, such as the port reconstructions. The anti-slavery laws had never been very enthusiastically enforced, with the result that many of the gleaming cities of Chile were ultimately built on the yoke stained with black blood. And indeed the reconstruction proceeded at such a pace that the conned refugees could not make up the whole work force, with the result that privateers such as the ones Carriego had helped finance instead raided the South Sea Islands[167] for workers.

  This scandal helped highlight the issue of slavery and reminded many of how the laws were not being enforced. Carriego was forced by his own party into signing several laws which intensified the legal regime (made much easier by the empty seats formerly filled by conservative deputies from Lower Peru, many of whom had been secret slaveholders themselves). The Cortes election of 1815 saw the Amarillo Party lose control of the Cortes for the first time, and finally in 1816 Carriego committed political suicide when he insisted on trying to run again, only splitting the vote between himself and the Party-at-large’s preferred
candidate, Alfredo Fernando Vallejo y García. The result was that the Colorado candidate, Pablo Portillo de Insaurralde, swept to power on a plurality (39%) as the first progressive President-General since the collapse of the Partido Solidaridad.

  Portillo was particularly well qualified to serve as a figure of reconciliation, considering the fact that despite his own progressive views, he had been fiercely opposed to the Partido Solidaridad in his youth, writing in the bonaerense[168] paper La Capital “our fathers fought a long, bitter war for freedom so that we would not be someone’s colony; now Señor Castelli would have us spread our legs and be reduced to the simpering handmaiden of the bloodstained France.” Portillo had sided with the Reagrupamiento after Castelli’s assassination, and while he joined the Colorado Party when Mateovarón took power he had argued fiercely with Ayala, and was only able to rise to a position of power when Ayala lost the election of 1813 and his frontline influence with it.