StarDestroyer.Net BBS

In 1844, James K. Polk is nominated by the split Democratic Party to the American Presidency. In OTL, he beat Henry Clay. In this ATL, after his nomination he became ill and died before the election. The result completely upset all of the Democrats' hopes and Henry Clay won the Presidency. Clay was more interested in internal development than expansion and the Mexican-American War did not happen as historic; nor did the Oregon Treaty. Instead Britain and the US decided on another joint occupation treaty to decide the status of Oregon at a later date, while it remained open to settlement from both.

Fast forward to 1862. Despite the changes to the issue of Texan annexation and no expansion into New Mexico, the US Civil War still broke out over the issue of slavery in federal territories and other issues that put the Republicans on the map. At Shiloh, General Grant is injured severely in the first day of the fighting around, and on the second day the Union counter-attack falters and the Union Army is lucky to escape partially intact. This alters Lee's invasion of the North - due to the changed strategic situation - and the Lost Orders are never found, leading to Lee inflicting such a severe defeat on McClellan that the Army of the Potomac is nearly destroyed. Washington falls, and Confederate cavalry raiders attacking trains leaving the capital get a lucky shot... and mortally wound Abraham Lincoln.

Lincoln's death plunges the Union into despair and ensures an even greater Democratic victory in the 1862 midterms. Lord Russell's recommendations, and those of William Gladstone, Chancellor of the Exchequer, lead HM Government into recognizing the Confederacy, and Britain and France move to impose arbitration on the two sides.

Further acrimony between McClellan and Radical Republicans explodes into open social discontent. Anti-abolitionist and anti-black riots and demonstrations shake the North.

The South gets major Victory Disease and starts demanding excessive concessions from the North, concessions that even the British Government considers too much. Realizing that a Northern collapse would leave the Confederacy powerful enough to pursue an expansionist policy, one directly contradictory to British interests (including the renewed interest in restoring the trans-Atlantic Slave Trade in the South), Lord Palmerston engages in another maneuver. He offers the Union superior terms, and support against the Confederacy should they be rejected, in exchange for the Union agreeing to turn Oregon into an independent country. Britain would withdraw all but a small force to maintain a leased base at Esquimalt and the new nation, to be called Cascadia, would be under American and British protection. With the country's situation worsening and a Confederate army ready to march on Philadelphia should the Union not bow to the imperious demands of Richmond, the agreement is made. The Confederacy howls in defiance initially, but the sudden arrival of British squadrons off of key Confederate ports and the drying up of arms shipments from Europe allow Richmond moderates to prevail. The War Between the States ends in a compromise peace. West Virginia is restored to Virginia, but Maryland, Missouri, and Kentucky remain in the Union.

Meanwhile the new state of Cascadia works to found itself. The government seat is intentionally planned for the region of Puget Sound, but eventually Portland is made into the new Federal District, a triangle of territory between the Willamette and Columbia Rivers. The new nation's political system is a merger of the two countries; a President, elected by an Electoral College of internal Cascadian provinces, is Head of State and Government, but with an Executive Cabinet overseen by the Secretary of State in a watered down Prime Minister position with all Secretaries of the Federal Administration drawn from the Cascadian Parliamentary members of the Senate or the House of Representatives. A brief conspiracy by British royalist settlers attempts to seize the constitutional delegates and demand the acceptance of a monarchy - Victoria's third child and second son Prince Alfred was the preferred candidate, the OTL Duke of Edinburgh and of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha - but are foiled by the timely intervention of the Royal Navy and Marines under Admiral Baynes.

Cascadia gets an influx of settlers through the decade as abolitionists and black Americans flee the Union and the social unrest there. Unionists from Virginia and Tennessee also make their way to the west, either Cascadia or sparsely-protected Mexican California, while a Presidency under Clement L. Vallandigham continues to work to placate the South with concessions in hopes of restoring the Union.

Cascadia is barely given the chance to organize its fledgling forces when opportunity knocks. Emperor Maximilian and his French backers are mostly victorious in Mexico. With the Republican cause collapsing, the older and newer Anglo-American settlers in California, and local Republican officialdom, decide to turn to Cascadia for what support they can get. Recognizing the boon this would be, and with the okay from British authorities leery of French designs in North America, the Cascadian Army and militia sail with ships bought from Great Britain into San Francisco Harbor. The authorities in both Californias begin negotiation for joining the Cascadian Republic. Maximilian sends an army to oppose this effort. After early victories near Bakersfield and around Los Angeles, the Mexican Army ultimately meets its end at the Battle of the San Joaquin River, where the Cascadian troops - led by former Union officer General WIlliam Sherman - prevail. The Mexican Pacific Squadron sails north in an effort to support the army from the sea, where they in turn are defeated by the fledgling Cascadian Navy at the Battle of San Francisco Bay.

Finally, facing renewed Republican opposition in the heart of Mexico, Maximillian and Napoleon III agree to British arbitration, and in the Treaty of Guadalupe-Hidalgo Mexican territories north of the Gila and west of the Colorado are recognized as Cascadian territory. New Mexico becomes an independent country under joint protection in an effort to protect it from the aggressive Confederacy, which has already compelled Maximillian to accept the Texan claim of the Rio Grande up to El Paso as the southern border. He is further humiliated when the discoveries of valuable minerals in Nevada and California spar further immigration to Cascadia's newest territories, and provide the gold and silver to fund the Cascadian Miracle of the last quarter of the 19th Century.

Vallindigham's Presidency becomes a mockery after repeated Southern provocations go unchecked. At their apex the Southern fire-eaters, emboldened by their victory in the war, by Vallindigham's continued insistence that concessions to the South will eventually restore the Union, even go as far as to demand Kansas be turned over, that the Union by treaty allow slave-hunters into Union territory, while slave-traders plan slaving expeditions to Hispaniola. Resentment against the South overtakes the anti-abolitionist surge immediately after the war, and by 1872 the people of the Union have had enough. The Copperheads are crushed in the election and face severe popular discontent and a new, more aggressive Union government comes into being under Republican moderate Ulysses S. Grant, who is able to play up his part as the most successful Union general. The death of President Robert E. Lee to his age and infirmities removes a necessary moderating voice in Southern affairs in 1871.

In the late 1870s, Cascadia is in an economic boom as significant settlement continues and the population provides wildly fecund. Troubles with the Natives culminate in treaties that, while they do rob the Native Tribes of their autonomy and large sections of their land, nevertheless provide them with continued land rights better than anything they could get from the US Government. The economic boom helps fund the Riker-Gorchakov Treaty that sees Russian North America sold to Cascadia as the territory (and later province) of Alaska.

In 1880 the war breaks out, starting in New Mexico. The Confederacy, asserting Indian raids in Texas as provocation, invade New Mexico and overrun the Cascadian and Mexican defensive garrisons. Cascadia declares war and marches its armies into New Mexico. Seizing the opportunity, a provocation in Kentucky gives Grant's successor, James Garfield, pretext to deliver an ultimatum to the South. When it is refused, war is declared.

The Great North American War rages through the 1880s. Cascadia, after recovering New Mexico, swiftly integrates it into the Cascadian nation (the Mexican Empire, which failed to help protect the small state, is too wrought with internal divisions to protest effectively - a new Treaty of Sinaloa in 1886 sees the new borders recognized, with Cascadia getting a strip of land beyond the Giza down to the Gulf of California) and spends the rest of the war supporting Union forces in a slow, steady conquest of the South. The South's armies prove more show than effectiveness, their gallant martial charges and proud stands losing to the brutal arithmetic of artillery and the arrival of Sir Hiram Stevens Maxim's guns on the Union and Cascadian sides. With the Third French Republic and British Empire now hostile to the Confederacy, and the rest of Europe ambivalent, the Confederacy doesn't receive the necessary materials to resist the industrialized North and the heavily-industrializing Cascadians. By 1887, the South is conquered utterly and the Union declares the re-establishment of Federal authority. This sparks over a decade of vicious guerrilla warfare by Southern firebrands, supported by Cuban slave-owners, which inevitably results in the Spanish-American War.

In the meantime, Cascadian Marines had intervened on behalf of King David of Hawai'i in resisting his planters' attempts at a "Bayonet Constitution", the Cascadian officials reasoning that the planters would be a greater threat to Cascadian security in the east Pacific than a friendly monarch. The Treaty of Ford Island grants that island and neighboring naval portages to the Cascadian Navy in exchange for Cascadian military support for the Kingdom of Hawai'i and its independence.

In the south Pacific, Cascadian interests in Samoa, supporting King David and then Queen Lili'uokalani in their attempts at Polynesian political unity, yield a protectorate over Samoa, one fiercely opposed by the German Empire's growing desire for weltmacht.

The continued use of Cuba by Southern partisans finally explodes into a controversy and then, with the loss of the Maine in Havana Harbor, a war. Again Cascadia sided with the United States, although not without significant domestic discomfort and the clear antipathy of the British. The Cascadian Navy, now fielding state-of-the-art armored cruisers (the Defiant and her sisters Reliant and Intrepid) and under the command of Admiral Garrett, future Chief of Naval Procurement and then Chief of Naval Operations (Read: My in-game PC), sails against the Spanish Empire in the Pacific while the Union invades Cuba and Puerto Rico. At the Battle of Manila Bay the Spanish Pacific squadron is destroyed. A small reinforcement fleet flees with the aid of a storm instead of giving battle. Filipino insurgents join Cascadian troops taking Manila and destroying Spanish power in the Philippines.

In the Treaty of Paris of 1898, Cascadia presents its bill to Spain and the US; control of the Caroline Islands and recognition of the Philippine Republic. The United States annexed Spain's Caribbean holdings.

While some Cascadian leaders believed that the Philippines should be taken over, Ambrosio Rianzares Bautista and Emilio Aguinaldo had made it clear that the Philippines would fight Cascadia if it tried to assume dominion over the islands. The Cascadian government, under President John McGraw, recognized that it could not afford a prolonged war with the Filipinos and negotiated. In the end, the Treaty of Manila provided Cascadia basing rights in Manila Bay and authority to fortify the Bay and surrounding islands, in exchange providing military security to the new Republic.

In the aftermath of the war, there was an attempt to raise money through British banks to purchase the rest of the Spanish Pacific Empire. But an economic downturn spooked the British investors and the Spanish sold the Marianas to the German Empire instead.

Today Cascadia rules much of the Western third of North America, from the Arctic south to the Gila River and the Gulf of California. The eastern frontier of the country rises north from the US city of El Paso through the RL states of New Mexico and Colorado (Denver, Albuquerque, and Santa Fe are all in Cascadia), then along the US-held territory of Wyoming over to the 108th west meridian, then north along that meridian straight to the Arctic (with it being a border with Canada north of the 49th parallel). Cascadia also directly rules the islands of the Caroline chain directly, including naval bases at Chuuk Lagoon and Palau. The Kingdom of Hawai'i and the Republic of the Philippines are allies with military assistance and basing treaties. They are not full protectorates, but for the moment their governments find it easier to run foreign diplomacy in lock-step with Portland. Samoa is ruled by the Queen of Hawai'i.

Steve wrote:There are some... familiar names there.

U.P. Cinnabar wrote:

Steve wrote:There are some... familiar names there.

What, no Aurora?!

Raesene wrote:I've never heard of this game before - looking forward to seeing more of the game mechanics (ship design interface looks a bit like a mixture of springsharp and a drawing program I lost when my last PC died).

You might get me interested enough to buy it

Your link to Kaisertreu is broken, btw.

Eternal_Freedom wrote:I'm curious about that as well...could you go the full on HMS Incomparable route and have a battlecruiser with 20" guns, 35 knot speed but utterly pathetic armour?

Eternal_Freedom wrote:Familiar names indeed. Though if you build a Superb and it happens to get torpedoed...Orion had nothing to do with it!

Also, sure, I'm up for being a ship captain, that's I wanted to do with my life anyways.

Eternal_Freedom wrote:I was hoping you'd get it, though I suspect everyone else is wondering what the devil I'm on about.

That'd be Philip Wallace, reporting for duty. Descended from the Wallace clan of "Braveheart" fame (that much is true IRL actually, though I don't wear a kilt I do have the family crest tattooed on my arm).

Cruiser or Battleship please

Steve wrote:And Simon, I actually don't recall the name "Simon Jester" from period novels. Although for your chosen surname I would almost think you were implying a different Holmes. Who may come up in conversation about the good Admiral's favorite reading.

Simon_Jester wrote:

Steve wrote:And Simon, I actually don't recall the name "Simon Jester" from period novels. Although for your chosen surname I would almost think you were implying a different Holmes. Who may come up in conversation about the good Admiral's favorite reading.

[le sigh]

To be clear, I got this pseudonym, indirectly, from the fact that I was much taken with the novel The Moon is a Harsh MIstress, by Robert Anson Heinlein, originally written in 1966. "Simon Jester" is itself a pseudonym adopted by an artificial intelligence who also uses a number of others, among them "Mycroft Holmes."

While "Simon Jester" is not a remotely plausible name in an English-speaking country, "Simon Holmes" is. Hence my suggestion. No other last name adopted by the AI would do the job.

That is the sum total of my reasoning.