May 9, 1769 – Corsicans Drive out the French

After the collapse of the Roman Empire, in whose hands Corsica had rested for centuries, the island was conquered by Vandals. It traded hands through the Byzantines, Lombards, Tuscans, Pisans, Aragonese, and Genoans across the years. The eighteenth century was especially tumultuous when a peasant refused to pay his tax in 1729. The single act ignited a revolution against Genoa that lasted a generation until the Republic of Corsica was proclaimed in 1755 under President Pasquale Paoli. Even though it wasn’t recognized, Corsicans held onto their freedom, outlined in the first written constitution of the Enlightenment.

At the Treaty of Versailles of 1768, Genoa relinquished its claim to the island to France in exchange for forgiveness on its massive war-debts. France had already come into Corsican affairs with occupations of key harbors and forts during the Seven Years War, and in September they landed with more than one hundred thousand troops keen on establishing a new colony for the kingdom. Outgunned and outnumbered seven-to-one, the Corsican Republic vanished into the mountains, carrying on guerilla warfare. With only a few organized soldiers, the Corsicans fought viciously as irregulars, including the female company under lady-captain Serpentini. That October, Paoli led the Corsicans to victory at Borgo, reminding his troops, “Europe is watching you!”

The true turning point of the invasion was at the Battle of Ponte Novu. The French made landfall at Bastia and marched toward the heart of Paoli’s strength in Corte. The Corsicans’ Thermopylae was the bridge over the Golo River, built originally as part of the Genoan defenses. Paoli, who had been attempting recruitment, rushed to command the battle. Rather than holding the whole bridge with brave Corsicans at one side and placing hardened Prussian mercenaries at the far end, Paoli determined to hold only the far end of the bridge. Harriers kept French artillery from gaining ground, and French troops who attempted to cross were cut down.

Eventually the French attempted to maneuver around and ford the river, but their army fell into disarray. The Corsicans counterattacked, forcing the disorganized army into retreat all the way to Bastia. News of the Corsican victory flew across Europe. King Louis XV of France, who was already discouraged about the expedition after defeat at Borgo, announced its end despite the objections of the disgraced mastermind Duc de Choiseul.

Later that same year, a third son was born to the wealthy Buonaparte family and named Napoleone. The energetic boy was taught discipline by his mother, while his father engaged the young Napoleone in matters of state through his work as Paoli’s secretary. While studying in the new university at Corte, Napoleone received word that his father’s long illness with stomach cancer had finally brought his death. Napoleone compressed his final years of study into one, graduating with highest honors at age sixteen.About the same time, the French Revolutionary Wars began spilling out of the country, into the Lowlands and Italy.

Napoleone had found employment in Paoli’s government, but with the battles sweeping back and forth over northern Italy, he vowed to liberate other Italian communities on the mainland. He wrote to Paoli, "As the nation was besieged, I was born. Thirty thousand Frenchmen were vomited on to our shores, threatening the throne of liberty with waves of blood. Such was the odious sight which was the first to strike me." With Paoli’s endorsement, Napoleone soon became a mercenary officer in Austria’s army. There he rose quickly through the ranks, proving to be a very adaptable leader hailed as a hero by locals. His defense in Mantua raised eyebrows across Europe, as did his daring crossing of the Alps to reinforce Archduke Charles’s lines at the Rhine.

Meanwhile, France changed governments one after the other. Eventually the Republic was worn down and the Royalists restored the king, although it would continue to struggle with periodic revolutions across the nineteenth century. With the wars over, Napoleone found himself struggling in clerk jobs offered to him by the Austrian court. He finally quit, returning to Corsica across Austrian-dominated Italy. There he found his new calling, which was his first when he left Paoli’s employ: to liberate Italy.

For the next twenty years of his life, Napoleone fought in Italy. He was seen alternately as a folk hero and a brigand, the latter especially by Austria as he drove them out of Lombardy. His ideals of republicanism merged with views of constitutional monarchy, which brought together the rival bourgeoisie with his most ardent followers, the religious, royalist lower class. He oversaw the intertwining of the royal lines of the Kingdom of Sardinia and the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies, although his efforts toward unification stopped at confederation, giving no region the chance to rule over another. The Italian Confederation is infamous for its short-lived civil wars and haphazard economy, although it has an unquestionable military force for defense. Through the twentieth century, its foreign affairs have been colonial ambitions in Africa while neutrally avoiding the conflicts of the brutal First and Second World Wars.

--

In reality, the Battle of Ponte Novu was a thorough French victory when Prussian mercenaries fired at the charging French through retreating Corsicans. Paoli, who was not at the battle, left for Britain, where he showed the holes in his coat made by French musket balls and tried to raise funds to liberate the island. During the many years of the Wars of the Coalitions, Britain did dispatch troops, but not until long after young Napoleon Bonaparte left for military school in Paris. Today Corsica remains a region of France.

Guest Post: Marco Polo introduces Opium to the West

Originally on Today in Alternate History

April 24, 1296 - Marco Polo captured by Genoans

Even if he had armed his Venetian galley equipped with a trebuchet, it was of course simply no good having an opium junkie for skipper, and so the Genoans had very little trouble capturing Marco Polo and his fellow sailors off the Anatolian coast between Adana and the Gulf of Alexandretta. They would spend over three long years in imprisonment until their eventual release in August 1296.
Oddly enough the whole sorry business had actually started with a ship. The Polos had meant to sail to China, but when they saw their shoddy ships were held together by coconut twine instead of nails, they set off on foot via the Silk Road. Young Marco contracted tuberculosis, and they were forced to rest up in the clean, pure air of Afghanistan, right next to the ruins of the Screaming City of Balkh that had been destroyed by the warriors of Genghis Khan.

Unfortunately the clean, pure air wasn't quite enough, and the medical usage of opium started a full blown addiction. The Polos finally returned to Venice filthy and ragged, but beneath their robes they carried a concealed fortune in Opium. Even children taunted the fabulous stories of "Marco Millions." They were dismissed as dangerous fantasies at least until the elite of the city-state also saw past the millions of lies and also became dangerously addicted. When they started to run out of stock, they ordered the Polos to open an Opium Road to Afghanistan. By the time the war came with Genoa, the drug addicted city state was in a terrible state of disarray.

Going cold turkey on the inside of a Genoan prison, the famous transcendental reflection Travels of Marco Polo was drafted, although he confessed to his cellmate Rustichello da Pisa that "I have only told the half of what I saw" alluding to the opiate-fueled nightmares of marauding Mongol troops. Centuries later, another opium addict, Samuel Taylor Coleridge would revisit these explorations of the mind, however he was also interrupted in the telling, in his case by the famous "Visitor from Porlock", although he was probably just his drug pusher.

In the great metropolis of Balkh did Genghis Khan a terrible slaughter decree:
Where Alph, the sacred river, ran through caverns measureless to man down to a sunless sea...

Author's Note: extracts detailed from Lives of the Explorers by Kathleen Krull and Kathryn Hewitt. Coleridge wrote about Kubla Khan, not Genghis Khan.

---

In reality, opium was not introduced to the West until 1527 as laudanum by Paracelsus.

Guest Post by Chris Oakley: "Singing A Different Tune"

On January 17, 1899, Alphonse Gabriel Capone, widely considered by music aficionados to be one of the first bona fide great American opera tenors of the 20th century, was born in the New York borough of Brooklyn to Italian immigrant parents. Growing up in one of Brooklyn's roughest neighborhoods, he could easily have been drawn into a life of crime, but shortly after his eighth birthday his family had a chance meeting with a former soprano that would radically change his destiny; recognizing the young Alphonse's latent singing ability, the soprano made arrangements with his parents to sponsor him as a student at one of New York's best schools of music.

By the time he was thirteen years old, he was a regular performer at the Metropolitan Opera House, and at sixteen he had five original arias to his credit. His musical career would be briefly interrupted when he was drafted into the U.S. Army in June of 1917 and served with the American Expeditionary Force in France, but less than a year later he would return to the U.S. and pick up with his singing right where he had left off; he celebrated his 20th birthday by performing for then-Chicago mayor William Hale Thompson at the mayor's residence.

Capone had many admirers in the musical world, the most enthusiastic of them being noted Cleveland Plain Dealer music critic Eliot Ness, who declared him to be “untouchable” as the premier American opera singer of his generation. At the height of his popularity in the 1920s, Capone received an average of 10,000 fan letters per week, more than any other well-known American figure with the exception of baseball great Babe Ruth; one of the most frequent of his correspondents was fellow opera star Enrico Caruso, who would later introduce Capone when the then 27-year-old tenor gave his first performance at Milan's legendary La Scala in June of 1926. An admirer of Italian ruler Benito Mussolini in the early days of Mussolini's reign, Capone turned against the Duce after Mussolini's 1935 invasion of Ethiopia.

Perhaps the most famous--and certainly the most controversial--performance of Capone's career happened on Easter Sunday 1939 when he teamed up with African-American singer Marian Anderson for a concert at the Lincoln Memorial after Anderson's application to perform at Constitution Hall was denied by the Daughters of the American Revolution. Notorious radio personality and Catholic priest Father Charles Coughlin denounced Capone as a “traitor” to the Catholic Church for agreeing to participate in Anderson's concert; in response New York City mayor Fiorella LaGuardia issued a civic proclamation hailing Capone's role in the Lincoln Memorial concert and naming him honorary New York deputy mayor for arts and culture. In late 1940, just over a year before the United States formally entered the Second World War, Capone finally fulfilled a longtime dream by performing at the White House for another of his most famous fans, President Franklin Roosevelt.

While too old for military service by the time the U.S. declared war on the Axis in December of 1941, Capone still played a huge part in the American war effort, giving concerts at USO halls to boost soldiers' morale and donating thousands of dollars to the Red Cross. From the spring of 1942 until Mussolini's death in 1945, Capone gave weekly anti-Fascist radio speeches to the Italian people; when the war in Europe ended, he went to his ancestral homeland of Sicily to assist with the distribution of food and medical relief supplies.  At the invitation of Pope Pius XII, Capone came to the Vatican in Rome in July of 1946 to sing for the pontiff and the College of Cardinals in what would turn out to be Capone's last overseas appearance.

Shortly after his Vatican concert, Capone received devastating medical news when his doctor diagnosed him with inoperable lung cancer. Rather than endure costly radiation therapy that might damage his brain or his voice, Capone reluctantly chose to retire from opera and spend his final days at his seaside retreat in Florida; his farewell concert, held at New York's famous Carnegie Hall on September 27, 1946, and broadcast live throughout the world, attracted one  of the largest crowds in the hall's history and ended with the audience according him a fifteen-minute standing ovation. He died on January 25, 1947 at the age of 46; at the request of his widow, the former Mae Coughlin, he was buried in a cemetery plot directly adjactent to that of his old friend Fiorello LaGuardia.

                                                                    ******

In reality, Al Capone all too readily embraced the criminal life at an early age, becoming one of gangster Johnny Torrio's proteges when he was just fourteen and assuming the leadership of Torrio's syndicate in 1925 after a near-miss with assassins from a rival gang prompted Torrio to quit the underworld. Capone would eventually rise to become Chicago's undisputed top crime boss and rule the city's illegal liquor trade with an iron fist until he was arrested and convicted on tax evasion charges in 1932; he would be paroled in 1939 on medical grounds after being diagnosed by prison doctors as having serious neurological problems. Though Capone never had lung cancer, he did suffer from paresis and pneumonia in his later years and would in the end die of cardiac arrest. In the 1950s, FBI agents investigating organized crime activity in the Chicago area would discover that some of Capone's old associates had joined forces to start their own syndicate and used it to take over the post-World War II Chicago underworld.

May 8, 1516 – Le Tuong Duc Wins the Loyalty of his Guard

A zealous peasant rebellion in Vietnam rose up under the popular Tran Cao in the spring of 1516. Believed by some to be a Taoist sorcerer clad in his crimson robes, Tran Cao began gathering his warriors at the Quynh Lam Pagoda. He declared that he was the avatar of the god Indra, master of weather and warfare, and that this body was meant to rule as it had been born with links to both the ruling Le family and the previous dynasty, the Tran. His following expanded to form an army of ten thousand warriors that marched on the capital, Thang Long (later to be known as Hanoi).

As the massive peasant-army approached, the young emperor Le Tuong Duc stood up to address his personal guard. Tuong Duc was the latest in a line of disappointing emperors since the golden age under his grandfather, Le Thanh Tong. Thanh Tong had come to power through invitation as a teenager in 1460 when a counter-coup knocked his half-brother from the throne. Through his thirty-seven year rule, Thanh Tong instituted Confucian ideals into government. He wrote the Hong-duc, a comprehensive and systematic law, ordered detailed maps and a census, and personally toured the empire to alleviate issues with corrupt local officials. While highly popular with the Vietnamese, Thanh Tong notoriously opposed to outsiders, instituting isolation against trade and repeatedly campaigning to conquer land to the south and west. Foreign sailors who washed ashore in storms were castrated and impressed into military service.

After Thanh Tong’s death, his son Le Hien Tong continued the Confucian kingship until 1504, but the cruel five-year rule of Le Uy Muc made the imperial family very unpopular with peasants and nobles alike. He pitted palace guards against one another like gladiators for his amusement while he studied martial arts. Uy Muc’s cousin Tuong Duc, just fourteen years old, organized the emperor’s assassination and seized power. He worked to bring back the golden days of his grandfather, chasing out Uy Muc’s violent favorites and filling the court with scholars. To emulate greatness, he began costly projects like artificial lakes, pleasure palaces, and building an enormous harem that included many of his father’s concubines (breaking both Confucian and Vietnamese law). Heavy taxes to fund the projects spawned rebellions, and Tran Cao was the latest in a series of disputes. Le Tuong Duc expected his soldiers to put them down. Anyone who tried to show their disapproval was whipped, including the captain of his guard, Trinh Duy San.

With only the river between the capital and the oncoming army of rebels, Le Tuong Duc was suddenly shown the obvious errors of his ways as his heavy taxes logically led to such rebellion. He broke down and confessed his failures as a Confucian and emptied his harem, granting the wives to his guard to make up for the pain he had caused them. If this infighting continued as people acted beyond their positions, he predicted a Vietnam of weakness on a national scale. If strength did not come from within, it would oppress them from without.

Trinh Duy San swore his loyalty, and he led the defense as a veteran of the 1511 rebellion, once fighting a battle down to the last thirty men. The defenders attacked wherever the peasants attempted to make a beachhead on the river, finally driving back their superior numbers with superior weapons. Tran Cao fell in the battle, and the leaderless rebels dispersed.

Le Tuong Duc made good on his word, adhering to the law of his grandfather and repealing taxes. As the economy recovered, he found resources to organize more campaigns into the south against the growing power of the Tai and maintain Vietnam’s independence from China. In Tuong Duc’s later reign, the great general Mac Dang Dung stormed the lands of the dying Khmer Empire, conquering huge swaths of which he was made governor. Children of major families were brought to court schools and imbued with Confucian ritual and teaching: most importantly, to uphold the emperor.

In the seventeenth century, European ships began to appear on the coast. Portuguese and Dutch traders attempted to broker deals with emperors, but the boarders remained largely closed. Some technology had to be proven useful, such as the printing press that was installed to decrease dependence on China. Firearms were strictly regulated. Foreign luxuries and religions were banned, despite the efforts of French Catholic missionaries to make inroads.

It was not until the nineteenth century that the warships of the Kaiser opened Vietnam for trade with Germany, following the example of the United States Navy in Japan. A flood of western technology and cheap manufactured goods caused reprisals from locals suddenly being undersold. The German-Vietnam War briefly turned the empire into a colony, but Germany’s collapse in World War I liberated the country thanks to Woodrow Wilson’s vote of confidence at Versailles. Japan similarly seized and lost control in WWII. Vietnam transitioned to a constitutional monarchy supported by a vocal parliament with members such as the outspoken Nguyen Ai Quoc, who gained his attitudes of anti-socialism while being educated in Germany. 

--

In reality, Trinh Duy San and others in the imperial guard assassinated Le Tuong Duc for his wasteful hedonism. They seized his nephew Chieu Tong as a puppet and retreated as the country fell into anarchy. Generals acted as warlords, looting as they pleased. Tran Cao was eventually defeated by a confederation of the two major houses, the Trinh in the north and the Nguyen in the south. While Vietnam would be united from time to time through the years, it would suffer a constant north-south division of power, even to the twentieth century when it was again united by Ho Chi Minh.

Guest Post from Chris Oakley: O God! It's All Over!

On August 11th,  1779, the American Revolutionary War came to an end with the signing of a peace treaty in Madrid between the British government and the American colonists. The pact officially recognized the United States as an independent nation, made provisions for the two sides to exchange their remaining prisoners of war, and mandated a complete withdrawal of all British military forces from American soil within six months after the treaty's ratification by the British House of Commons and the U.S. Continental Congress. American political leader and future President of the United States John Adams applauded the treaty signing as “a day of magnificent triumph”, while soon-to-be deposed British prime minister Lord Frederick North moaned “O God! It is all over”, a reference to North's fear that the British army's defeat by the colonists would mark the beginning of the British Empire's final collapse.

The chain of events leading up to the signing of the Madrid treaty actually began in the late autumn of 1775, when American colonial soldiers marched into Canada in hopes of fostering a revolt against British authority there. Although British troops eventually succeed in driving the invasion force back, the casualties they sustained in doing this would be catastrophically high; when King George III learned of just how many men had died repulsing the invasion of Canada, the shock was so great that, within forty-eight hours after receiving the battle report, he would himself be dead from a stroke. George III's passing triggered a political crisis within the British monarchy whose effects would still be reverberating througout the world decades after the American Revolution ended. The British throne would remain vacant till 1782, when the late George III's eldest son was coronated as King George IV.

The near-simultaneous entry of France and Spain into the Revolutionary War on the American side shortly after the signing of the Declaration of Independence in 1776 only served to further exacerbate an already very dire strategic situation for the British in North America. An attempt by the British Army to occupy New York City in the fall of 1776 ended in sheer disaster when a French naval flotilla off Long Island intercepted the Royal Navy ships carrying the occupation force and sank most of them in one of the most intense naval engagements fought to date in any war. By the spring of 1778, the question was less if the British would lose to the colonists than when and how; the failure of British forces to capture Savannah, Georgia in December of 1778 would mark the nadir of the conflict for Britain, and in January of 1779 final negotiations began for a peace treaty between Britain and the American rebels.

The Madrid pact was ratified by Parliament on August 23rd, 1779 and by the U.S. Continental Congress on September 10th of that year; by March of 1780 the last British Army regiment had withdrawn from American soil and was sailing home to London. The soldiers of that regiment found themselves returning to a Great Britain not only still reeling from King George III's death but teetering on the verge of its first internal conflict since the 1745-46 Jacobite Rebellion. It was only luck (and the political skills of future British prime minister William Pitt the Younger) that kept a fourth English Civil War from breaking out, yet even after the crisis was resolved hard feelings between Britain's rival factions would persist well into the 19th century. At least three British prime ministers would become the targets of assassination attempts during the seventy-plus years following the end of the American Revolution; the most infamous of these happened in May of1847 when a right-wing extremist tried to shoot Lord John Russell while Russell was leaving Buckingham Palace after a meeting with Queen Victoria. (The would-be assassin was himself shot by Russell's bodyguard and died two days later.)

While Anglo-American relations throughout much of the early 19th century had their moments of tension, they tended to be largely cordial, and after 1840 Britain was America's chief trade and diplomatic partner. British negotiators played a small but critical part in bringing about the final Confederate surrender at the end of the American Civil War in 1865; when Britain took its first population census of India in 1881, U.S. State Department bookkeepers helped to tally up the figures. In the Great European War of 1913-17 the United States allied with Britain against Kaiser Wilhelm II's expansionist Second Reich, and in the Pacific War of 1941-1944 the Royal Navy provided vital firepower and logisitcal support for the U.S armed forces' island-hopping campaign against Japan.

                                                                   ******

In reality the British got off fairly lightly in repulsing the American colonial invasion of Canada; in fact the combined total number of British and American KIA's for the enitre Revolutionary War amounted to just 11,000, a paltry sum especially when compared to the number of troops killed in a single hour in some modern wars. The American War for Independence ended with the signing of the Treaty of Paris in 1783.

Cooperative Post: Ships of Fate

A story a bit ago, Cromwell boarding the Lyon, spurred a fascinating line of what-ifs on Today in Alternate History for a world where, in the absence of Cromwell’s devotion, the Commonwealth became a kleptocracy. Three instances of this world give hints at the twisted timeline of revolution against a system driven by profit.
13th February, 1755

Hannah Waterman King was the person most directly responsible for the Martian Colony ship HMS Benedict Arnold blasting off from the launch pad of Scapa Flow Space Centre to the sound of trumpets playing "Let Liberty Ring Out.”

She had stubbornly refused permission for her fifteen-year-old son to enlist in the provincial militia for service against the French. Young Arnold had yet been captivated by the sound of a drummer and with the undeniable echoes of glory ringing in his ears, and so he fled to Connecticut.

A month past his fifteenth birthday, Arnold boarded the HMS Canterbury and set sail for the majestic heart of Empire where his destiny awaited him. He was to be desperately disappointed by the absence of trail-blazing grandeur in the bustling city of London. Instead of streets paved with gold, he found that, beneath the trappings of crisp uniforms and military band music, it was little more than a counting house, and the small-minded xenophobic English were really just interested in business.

In the century since the Commonwealth had come to power in Great Britain, it had come under the ever-growing authority of the Company. Originally chartered as the East India Company in 1600 under the approval of Queen Elizabeth, the Company weathered the Civil War. Once the Commonwealth proved to be a council of manipulable men, the Company began exerting more control inward, taking London much as it had Madras and Bombay.

From there, the British Empire had spread its tentacles across the world. Benedict Arnold found nothing to admire at the centre, and certainly not the utopian visions that Company propaganda had spread. Rather, it was the insipid leadership of a toothless royal family, a moribund Parliament and a central government locked in the mind-set of accountants. Inside their sadistic mercantilism, they couldn't care less whether it was enslaved Irish or Africans harvesting sugar in the Caribbean or what suffering happened in Indian factories as long as it brought goods to British markets. Something was missing from this tableau of sadistic mercantilism, and that of course was Liberty. In some distant future, the Empire would cost more to upkeep, and the English would tire of their global ambitions. Arnold’s brilliant mind could perceive that from the outbreak of the French and Indian War.

Fortunately, Arnold had a great vision in which the British Empire was much more than a cash-cow. Of course he was still young and struggling to establish himself, but tales of Arnold’s naval heroics through the war brought him fame. When the war ended, Arnold entered Parliament and set the galleries afire with his grand dream of an Empire of Liberty: a great Imperium of Nations that god willing shall not perish from this earth.

--

15th February, 1819

The aptly-named mother ship HMS Hannah Waterman King might never have transported the British colonists to Mars if not for the great works of the liberator Abraham Lincoln.

Heart-broken by his mother's recent death and refusing to give his new step-mother a chance, ten-year-old Abraham Lincoln ran away from home. Wielding a forged letter of introduction, he boarded the HMS Fisgard and set sail for London to retrace the transatlantic voyage of his famous countryman, Benedict Arnold.


His was a hard life in London as an immigrant from the colonies, but Abe Lincoln was used to hardship on the frontier. His grandfather had been killed in an Indian raid witnessed by the family, and his father Thomas worked odd jobs for years as land disputes wrenched one farm after another away from him. Abe was famously labeled “lazy” among those who knew him, always wanting to write and read and bemoaning hard labor, but the mental dedication paid off as he became a lawyer.

Even though the slave trade, indeed the whole institution of slavery, had been abolished through the heroic political efforts of Benedict Arnold, Abe discovered that liberty was still very much a work-in-progress. His experiences of hard work among immigrants from all over the world had taught him the struggles of race and class. Dedicated to the proposition that “all men are created equal,” he took up the burden of a great task which he saw before him - to usher in a new birth of freedom across the whole British Empire.

In time, Lincoln would become the greatest ever Prime Minister, and his work under God would ensure that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.

--

23rd February, 1943

One of the main components of the mother ship HMS Hannah Waterman King was the lander HMS Abraham Lincoln, the first ship to transport children to the red planet. This expedition, and of course the first manned craft to travel to Mars, the HMS Benedict Arnold, were the lasting legacy of John Fitzgerald Kennedy.

Despite a bad back that would require spinal surgeries the rest of his life, twenty-five-year-old Lieutenant John F. Kennedy stepped aboard PT-109 as his first command. He had been born to a wealthy Irish family that had built itself up through the British Empire’s transatlantic trade.

The Empire had become the pillar of the world, delicately balancing law and order with fairness and progress. Yet it had its rivals in other nations grown out of wanton imperialism. Although Britain survived the collapse of the German, Austrian, Ottoman, and Russian Empires, a new generation of empires had grown up to challenge British Authority. Most notorious was the Japanese invasion of British-protected China, which finally sparked all-out war.

JFK used his family’s connections to override his medical release from service and join officer training. He refused a desk job and volunteered for service in the Pacific Theater. After the death of his older brother Joe in Europe, John took up his position as patriarch and soon joined politics. His popularity and service record made him a potent leader in the years of Cold War between Britain and powerful Soviet Union. He would become Britain’s first Catholic Prime Minister since the establishment of the Anglican Church.

Much of his political career was dedicated to the Space Race. In a speech to young scientists graduating from Cambridge, he said, “We choose to go to the Moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard.” Among his “other things” included the groundwork for colonization of other planets, spreading the British Empire beyond even the earth.

May 7, 1763 – Pontiac Seizes Fort Detroit

Britain’s victory in the Seven Years War allowed it to strip France of its colonial claims. The huge swath of North America known as New France was broken up with Canada going to Britain while Spain received control of Louisiana in exchange for losing Florida. The local theater of conflict had been dubbed the “French and Indian War” by the British colonists who eagerly moved west from the Eastern seaboard. While the French colonization had largely been economic with trading posts and working alongside natives, British colonists were more interested in building permanent settlements that exploited the land, already pushing tribes like the Delaware across the Appalachians. Many Native Americans preferred an alliance with France but now found themselves under British authority as French troops left fortifications at Detroit and Niagara to their former enemies.

Relations between the British and the Native Americans quickly soured. The French had followed Native American customs by bearing gifts of firearms, tools, and tobacco in goodwill. Commander-in-Chief in North America General Jeffrey Amherst opposed the custom as a form of bribery. Beyond his ethical sense, Amherst was in a budget crunch following a very expensive war. Discontinuing gifts saved a few pounds, and he determined that he could prevent a Native American uprising by suppressing the trade of gunpowder and putting quotas that checked the amount of ammunition traders could disperse. Native Americans took his actions as an insult and a display of distrust. Already scathed by British encroachment, tribes began to consider war. Even the mighty Iroquois Confederacy was beginning to break down with the Senecas in the west calling for uprising while the other tribes respected the Covenant Chain treaties with Britain. Amherst remained confident and, out of the 8,000 men under his command, sent only 500 to the western forts.

Chief Obwandiyag of the Ottawa, known to the British as Pontiac, was the first to act. Pontiac had held numerous councils through the years to form a federation of tribes that would counter any colonial aspirations. At the beginning of May, Pontiac and fifty warriors called on the nearby Fort Detroit, appearing friendly but in fact testing the defenses. Major Henry Gladwin, who had about 120 men under his command, welcomed them. Upon seeing the fort undermanned, Pontiac held a council of tribes including the Potawatomi and Ojibwas, telling them, “My brothers, we must all swear their destruction and wait no longer. Nothing prevents us; they are few in numbers, and we can accomplish it.”

As the warriors assembled, a young woman who had fallen in love with Gladwin stole away to warn him. She arrived at the fort as Gladwin was having dinner, reading aloud a letter from his wife, Frances Beridge Gladwin, whom he had married the year before. Seeing a love unrequited and impossible, the young woman told him that she wished he would be happy the rest of his life, knowing how short it would be.

Pontiac led a force of three hundred men to Fort Detroit, hiding their weapons under blankets. Gladwin again welcomed the visitors, who erupted at Pontiac’s call and massacred the unprepared soldiers. The arsenal was captured nearly intact, giving Pontiac’s army ample weapons. A few British escaped, warning settlers to flee. Those that stayed were massacred, except for children, who were adopted into native tribes. Following local ritual, one the fallen soldiers was cannibalized.

Word spread of the uprising in the Great Lakes more quickly to the tribes than the British military. Through May and into June, other tribes seized Fort St. Joseph, Fort Sandusky, and more through the Ohio. By the end of June, Delawares attacked Fort Pitt in western Pennsylvania. While they did not have the numbers to take the fort, which had been packed with more than five hundred people fleeing the onslaught, the Delawares laid a siege that opened up the whole countryside to extensive raids by the Shawnee and themselves. In early July, Pontiac arrived with an army of over 1,000 warriors and assisted the Delaware in destroying the fort. Taking upon a mantle as chief of chiefs, Pontiac continued to march eastward on Fort Ligonier and Fort Bedford.

Amherst panicked, hoping to use biological warfare through smallpox-infected blankets, but he was recalled that August. Major General Thomas Gage, Governor of Montreal, replaced him that October. By then the tribes were beginning to retreat and consolidate in the west for winter. Settlers had all retreated east, well past the line set forth by the unrelated Royal Proclamation of 1763, which determined to restrict settlement to the Appalachians to prevent encroachment that London feared would cause such altercations with the Native Americans. It seemed to be a suitable line now as all settlers had been chased out of the area, but Gage refused to leave Pontiac and his confederation as victors.

That winter, Gage had no problem raising up volunteers from local militias. Groups of men formed up gangs, such as the Paxton Boys that were ready to fight any Indian, including those who had been Christianized and lived as British citizens. The Paxtonians had marched on Philadelphia in pursuit of eastern Native Americans who fled there seeking asylum from their scourge. Benjamin Franklin, leader of one of the local militias, was able to stop them from completing their raid. Gage absorbed the Paxtonians into his own forces and promoted Franklin to a general of militia.

In the spring, Gage launched two expeditions: one in the north to quell the Seneca besieging Fort Niagara and one in the south marching from Pennsylvania to alleviate the assaults there and in Virginia. Western New York was soon settled with the Treaty of Fort Niagara, which turned the rest of the Iroquois against the warring Seneca and made them fast allies with the British. The Ohio Campaign dragged on for another five years. By the end, Pontiac had grown despotic, leading increasingly desperate raids from Illinois where he scrounged munitions from French settlers. Gage and Franklin were able to use Pontiac’s extremism against the federation, breaking off tribes willing to sign independent treaties. After Pontiac’s assassination in 1769, the broken warriors fled across the Mississippi rather than accede to British authority.

The war had been a costly one, but North American colonials seemed willing to accept taxes on stamps and tea to pay for their safety. With the Ohio Valley seized by military action and largely depopulated except for narrow reserves for defeated tribes, the Royal Proclamation of 1763 was overturned. Instead, colonists were encouraged to head west, and land sales helped pay much of the massive war debt. Speculation led to the Panic of 1776 and an uprising of disenfranchised, which was settled by Gage's harsh crackdown. Upon his recall and extensions of dominion status for peaceful colonies like Virginia, North Americans quietly returned to the Empire.

--

In reality, although the story of the Indian woman may be legend, Major Gladwin did receive word of Pontiac’s sneak attack and had his men prepped and armed. Pontiac retreated and soon returned to besiege the fort. Other forts fell to Native Americans, but their progress was stopped at the Battle of Bushy Run. After the war, Gage turned his unsympathetic policies on the colonists, who were outraged by the Proclamation of 1769 and increased taxes, leading to the Declaration of Independence.