Beck Reilly said:
Chrispi, is your timeline available anywhere online?
Here's a ROUGH timeline:
25 Dec 1776: Washington and the Continental Army are captured at Trenton by the Hessians.
1777: Howe moves the bulk of his forces to the right bank of the Hudson. Burgoyne stays in Canada. New England rebels attack Howe but are defeated at West Point. Loyalist militias in the South take control, with Cornwallis' backing. Colonial governments are dissolved, the Continental Congress scatters to the four winds.
1778-1780: Parliament debates what to do with the Americans: Punishment or reconciliation? Lord North favors re-arrangment of the colonies; hard-core Tories favor punative taxes and restrictions while the Whigs favor complete independence from Britain. At first, North's agenda is passed and the colonies are re-arranged into military districts: New England, Pennsylvania, Virginia and Florida. The punitive impulse stops there, however. The Tories cannot pass the rest of their new Intolerable Acts. The Whigs take this as a sign of weakness and gain the majority of the Commons. North is forced out. Charles Fox becomes PM.
1780s: John Adams is in Holland, Thomas Jefferson is in France. Most staunch Rebels, however, are in Spanish Louisiana. The British Parliament passes the Amnesty Act, allowing reconciliation with the Rebels.
1790s: Pitt the Younger becomes PM, designs to reform the 13 Colonies into five fully self-governing Dominions within the Empire. Controversy rages in America but revolution is mooted. British control at this point includes Florida and Transappalachia as well as Canada and the Thirteen.
Having not financed the American Revolution, the French are spared from their own--at least temporarily; likewise Holland avoids fiscal crisis. These countries re-direct their energies into more extensive colonization--and shipping malcontents to the other end of the world, particularly Australia and New Zealand (Thomas Paine settles in the Dutch settlement of Flushing (Auckland) in the North Island while Georges Danton founds an eponymous colony near our Nelson.)
1800s: On July 1, 1801, the British North America Act takes effect and four new nations are established:
* New England (east of the Hudson, including NYC)
* Pennsylvania (west of the Hudson, i.e. most of upstate NY, NJ, Del and Md.)
* Virginia (and North Carolina)
* Florida (Georgia and South Carolina)
The Dominion of the West Indies is created in separate legislation two years later. The BNA is amended in 1806 and the Dominion of Canada is formed.
Europe is aflame. The French, British, Spanish and Prussians are at each other's throat in what will be called the Ten Years' War. Americans send only a token force in Britain's aid and even that is naval. One of the consequences of this is that the Republic of Louisiana (one of whose founders is Thomas Jefferson) is formed, a buffer state between two hostile empires.
In 1807, the British Parliament outlaws slavery in all crown colonies but cannot outlaw slavery in the Dominions. But to vex the Colonials, the British Parliament separates each Dominion by what is called a King's Chain, a strip of land 66 ft wide total atop the border, as Crown land.
1810s: The King's Chain Rebellion starts in Virginia after John Marshall of the Crown Court of Richmond finds that Dory Jones, a slave from Florida, crossed the King's Chain before entering Virginia, and thus stepped into British territory, where slavery is illegal. Riots ensue, Marshall (not to mention Dory Jones) hide from the lynch mobs. The Virginia and Florida Parliaments claim the King's Chain and set up a possible war with Britain.
The King's Chain Rebellion sends shockwaves through the rest of the Dominions and even the Imperial Parliament itself. Mobs from Virginia and Florida "dismiss" HM Customs from controlling the border and the Dominion Parliaments form a customs union. The Court of Appeal in Virginia reverses Marshall's original ruling and Dory Jones is legally a slave again--although he fled to Pennsylvania in the meanwhile, where he is legally free. Reprecussions are felt in Appalachia, where slavery is illegal and there is much settlement from Virginia and Florida--the Wilberforce Act is difficult to enforce.
Attempts to pass legislation to control the rebellion fail in the British Parliament, and the Americans win a great victory when the Jones v. Rex appeal is dismissed in the Privy Council in London.
1814: Lord Liverpool, Prime Minister of Great Britain, sends middle-class settlers from England's north-west on ships to colonize the north-west of North America: Oregon. After rounding the Horn the colonists build a new settlement at the junction of the Oregon (Columbia) and Dee (Willamette) rivers that they named, unsurprisingly, Liverpool.
Not to be outdone, in 1816 the Whig PM of New England, John Quincy Adams, facing the Year Without a Summer, also sends a colonial party to Oregon. Their settlement, Quincy (Tacoma) lies at the feet of Mt. Vancouver (Rainier.) Further settlements are made by the Scots (Dunedin, on the Fraser river) and the Welsh (Carlisle on Vancouver Island.) Further settlements are made by the Scots (Dunedin, on the Fraser river) and the Welsh (Carlisle on Vancouver Island.)
1820:
Slavery is legal in Virginia and Florida, but illegal in Appalachia, a crown colony. The last slaves in the "North" (Penn, NE, and Canada) are manumitted and Manumission Acts are passed in Virginia and Florida as well.
In the 1820s slavery is a dying institution, even in the South and the West Indies. The failure of slave power to expand into the west (the free British crown colony of Appalachia) ensures the pernicious institution's doom. Manumission acts are passed in these Dominions, paying slave owners for the slaves' freedom, thus avoiding an economic collapse. Some former slave owners become factory owners, though most become sharecroppers. The fertile fields of the Mississippi Delta are tilled by free blacks.
More to come...
) so I had tobacco-rich NC annexed to the tobacco-rich Dominion of Virginia, and the cotton-rich SC annexed to the cotton-rich Dominion of Florida (Georgia).