Los Hijos del País v4: A Philippine TL

[Metempsychosis]

Hey guys, so I'm rebooting this again, again. Here's the previous iteration, if y'all are interested. The main Point of Divergence is 1823, but as I wrote before, little changes have made this world a bit different from ours. Many thanks to those who encouraged me from the beginning to write this story, and to @ramones1986 for making the original flags.

Los Hijos del Pais v4

The Revolutionary Period (1823 – 1827)

The year is 1824, and it is the day of Saint Valentine in the Philippine Islands. Tensions between the Filipino Criollos and the Spanish government have been boiling for years, with many of the former feeling bitterness at being replaced by Peninsulars who know not the first thing of life on these isles, who have done nothing to earn their positions beyond being born two oceans away and connected to men in high places. There is a rot in Philippine society, from the Church controlled by Peninsular friars to the Civil Guard and bureaucracy whose highest officers are no longer sons of the land born and bred but distant and paranoiac proconsuls appointed by ignorant courtiers from Spain, themselves appointed by the Bourbon Ferdinand VII of Spain, a selfish, grasping figure unworthy of the title 'king', a man who makes his many fawning courtiers look positively enlightened. The liberal Cadiz Constitution of 1812, with all the rights and liberties that he promised to all citizens of the Spanish empire, was betrayed to absolutist rule, and since the Felon King's abysmal restoration in 1813, most of the Americas were lost to him, with only Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the Philippines left by 1823.

Yet even these distant isles would be lost to the Bourbon king, for as the years of his reign continued and the Americas were torn apart by revolution and civil war, the East Indies too boiled in tension against the Spaniards. In the north, the Ilocanos led by Salarogo Ambaristo and Pedro Mateo revolted against the wine monopoly imposed by the Spanish government in 1807, continuing a tradition of dissent begun by Diego and Gabriela Silang back in the days of the British occupation of Manila in the 1760s, and though it is ultimately crushed by 1808, the people of the region remember and resent the Spanish yoke. In the hills of Bohol, the revolt begun by Francisco Sendrijas, known more widely as Francisco Dagohoy, continued to fester as it had for decades since before Silang's revolt, and the banners of its Bohol Free State continue to fly in secret. And in 1820, an outbreak of cholera had caused riots and a massacre of foreigners in Manila and Cavite. But above all, a movement had risen among the Filipino Criollos and Tagalogs in the 1810s, a movement inspired by the hope of the Cadiz Constitution and sparked into organization and action by the outrages inflicted by the Peninsulars upon them since the restoration of King Ferdinand. This movement, begun by the Filipino patriot Count Luis Rodiguez Varela, given shape in the weekly publications of the Ramilette Patriotico, and most succinctly expressed in the 1821 tract El Indio Agraviado, had by the beginning of the 1820s hardened into a secret political organization called the Sons of the Nation, Los Hijos del Pais.

And this group, composed of many disenchanted Criollos and mestizos such as the Palmeros, the Bayots, and the Aranetas, had become stronger as the Spanish government continued to replace its officials and military officers with Peninsulars, driving many into the arms of the Sons of the Nation even as the governor-generals tried to root them out. This came to a head with the demotion of the Filipino-Mexican criollo Captain Andres Novales in 1823, a man of honor born in 1800 who fought with distinction in the Napoleonic wars as a teenager – rising to the position of Captain – but was demoted and commanded to fight against the Moro pirates in the south with a diminished station. This particular betrayal of a loyal Criollo in favor of supposedly more loyal men from the motherland was a turning point for the young man who had fought for King and Country, and he fell in with the Sons of the Nation on the way to his new assignment, supposedly meeting with the Palmero brothers in the days before his assignment.

And so, we return to the 14th of February 1824. It is the feast day of Saint Valentine, a day of lovers, and the day the once more promoted Captain Novales returns from campaigning in the south alongside Juan Fermin de San Martin, brother of the Argentine liberator Jose de San Martin. He brings with him his fellow soldiers and officers to celebrate the recovery of his former station. Unbeknownst to the Spanish government, however, he has also sent ahead of himself a number of messages to the Sons of the Nation, messages to prepare for the happenings of that day. The troops and officers he had gathered with him were among the disgruntled by the changes in the government of the East Indies, and they too were preparing.

And in the early morning of that day, the conspirators began their movements, seizing control of the armories and military posts within Intramuros and arresting key members of the Spanish government, including the incumbent governor-general Juan Antonio Martinez himself, and blessedly for the Sons of the Nation, the Valentine’s Day Coup goes quite smoothly. By high noon of that day, Fort Santiago had fallen with the help of Novales' brother Antonio, Martinez was in chains, the Spanish civil government had found itself decapitated, and Novales was promptly acclaimed Emperor of the Philippines, with his first decrees of independence and the founding of an Insular Assembly sent across the archipelago.

In the next couple of weeks which would be known as Bloody February, Martinez is executed alongside a number of the prominent loyalists taken into custody by the revolutionaries. As the flag of Spain is taken down from the flagpoles of Manila and its suburbs, two new flags rise in its place: that of a silver merlion bearing a sword on a red field, the flag of the Empire of the Philippines; and that of the golden Sun of May on a bicolor field of blue and red, the flag of the newly declared Insular Assembly, the flag of the Sons of the Nation, the flag of what would be the Republic of the Philippine Islands.

Flag of the First Empire of the Philippines (1824 - 1826)

Flag of the First Republic of the Philippines (1826 - ????)

Novales appoints the skilled administrator Marcelo Palmero as his prime minister to assemble his government and cabinet as the Insular Assembly prepares to write a constitution based on the Cadiz Constitution and gathers members and delegates from across the archipelago, most of them criollos and mestizos, but many of them natives or representatives of the Chinese community. In the meanwhile, the newly acclaimed Emperor assembles his fellow officers and marches north with the bulk of his forces to establish control of the Tagalog-Pampango heartland and the Cagayan valley as he sends his subordinate Alfonso Ruiz to secure the city of Cavite, itself already in revolt. Over the course of the next few weeks and months and all over the archipelago, those who receive the decrees of Novales are divided between a few loyalists and a number of revolutionary factions gaining momentum. Juan Fermin begins a revolt in Zamboanga, establishing the Zamboanga Free State, but is driven out from the city itself, forcing him to decamp in the hills and build support in the countryside. The region of Ilocos, which had been pacified less than two decades ago, once more convulses under the flag of the Basi revolt. The chaos in Luzon leads to a surge of Boholano rebels taking over their whole island in the name of the First Republic of Bohol, even as a few other principalia families assemble in other regions to establish their own local assemblies and send delegates to Manila, even as peasant farmers build their own communes and fight loyalist principalia families. And while the various revolutionary factions secure their regions, mutinies begin on the various squadrons and fleets as some agitate to fight for the revolution and its forces, the most notable being the mutiny of Venancio Adlao, a humble Indio seaman from the Visayas who would come to establish the Revolutionary Fleet and be the most famed naval commander of the Philippine Revolution.

In the midst of this chaos, loyalist leaders rally their forces in a contested Bicol and on the Central Plains of Luzon, and the Imperial Revolutionary Army of Novales fights a campaign to grind the latter loyalist force down by driving it to the west into Tarlac, culminating in the Battle of Camiling, which ends in a revolutionary victory. The Revolutionary Army of Southern Luzon assembled by Ruiz, on the other hand, prepares for a long slog in Bicol. By the end of the year, the Empire of the Philippines effectively controls most of central and southwestern Luzon, and many of the various free states and republics established by revolutionary forces have sent delegates to help assemble the 1824-1825 Federal Articles, which serve as a draft for the formal 1826 Constitution which itself takes as its model the Cadiz Constitution promulgated by Spain a few years before, as well as the American Constitution of the late 18th century.

As the nation convulses and fights itself, Palmero and his cabinet turn to deal with the Church, which is divided between friars and bishops of Spanish blood and the native secular priests. Some of the secular priests, already ill-trained and suspected of sedition by the organized Church, end up abandoning their vocation and joining the revolutionaries. More of them end up establishing lay brotherhoods and confraternities to maintain order in the confusion. The higher-ups in the Church are themselves divided between the Peninsular friars who remain loyal to Spain and the bishops, criollos, and mestizos who fight to keep the nation Catholic through the chaos of the revolution. The chaos of revolution even leads some to unorthodox practices and beliefs, with a few isolated mobs killing friars and despoiling monasteries suspected of abuse. In the first weeks of the revolution, the ruling Archbishop of Manila, the Dominican Juan Antonio Zulaibar, had passed away, and though there were accusations of foul play thrown by Spanish loyalists, Emperor Novales and his prime minister Palmero allayed fears by attending Mass performed by the interim Archbishop and guaranteeing for now the rights of the bishops, especially against the friars who would become the main pillar of resistance against the revolutionaries.

As 1825 begins, Novales marches northeast into the Cagayan Valley after securing the Ilocano Republic's loyalty to the Insular Assembly with a few communications with their delegates, while Ruiz marches east into Bicol, where he fights a campaign against the loyalists, culminating in the Battle of Naga. In Cagayan Valley, on the other hand, the emperor clears out the loyalists, including the friar orders who lead the resistance against the revolutionaries, and seizes their land. By the middle of the year, the valley is secure, and the emperor returns to Manila alongside Ruiz where the two are acclaimed for their triumphs against the tyrannical Spaniards. And so, the emperor begins learning of all the dealings of Palmero and the Assembly since his campaigns against the Spaniards. Here he decrees more laws and proclamations with the advice of Palmero and the Bayot family.

While Luzon is fully secured, Juan Fermin continues to fight the loyalists in Zamboanga, eventually retaking the city in April, and the Revolutionary Fleet ferries soldiers and delegates around the archipelago where they are needed. Cebu remains contested territory, its Spanish loyalists rendered impotent by the chaos in the city, while the Aranetas of Iloilo secure Panay island's loyalty to the revolutionary cause.

In the midst of all this, the Spanish government had sent a squadron to the Philippines to reinforce the few loyalists who yet remained, and by September the squadron has reached Philippine waters, but by then Venancio Adlao, now admiral of a sizable Revolutionary Fleet, has learned enough and gathered enough resources to meet them in battle. Still, Adlao fights a few difficult battles against the somewhat formidable Spanish squadron, but as if inspired by Our Lady of La Naval de Manila, the Revolutionary Fleet is able to defeat the squadron in the Battles of La Naval and proves victorious. And though the Dominicans seem shocked by the defeat of the loyalists, the people of Manila are jubilant at the sight of the Sun of May triumphant, and Adlao and his men walk barefoot to the shrine of Our Lady of the Rosary in thanks.

After this display of piety, Palmero himself organizes a sort of triumphal parade for the Emperor, his general, and his admiral, the three marching in glorious procession down the Calle Real del Palacio to the Cathedral of Manila and the Hall of the Insular Assembly which had once been the Governor's Palace. And here in the dying days of October, the delegates of the Assembly and Palmero's cabinet once more meet with the military officers who had fought for the independence of the nation, with their Emperor at their head. And here, the Emperor gives up his sword to Palmero, symbolically offering up his victories and acclamations to the Insular Assembly and abdicating his place as Emperor. He swears his allegiance to the Assembly alongside Ruiz and Adlao, and so ends the Empire of the Philippines.

Palmero thus becomes the head of the Provisional Government of the Philippines, which lasts a few months as the delegates and representatives draft the new constitution in Spanish and Tagalog and reorganize the various provinces and free states of the Philippines into more rational regions. The Revolutionary Fleet of Adlao, now flying the Sun of May standard, splits into several squadrons which are sent in different directions: one squadron, ferrying a criollo embassy headed by the Ilonggo criollo Buenaventura Araneta y de Dios, is sent to Europe; another, ferrying an embassy with more indios, is sent south to accept the surrender of the remaining loyalist garrisons after the defeat of the Spanish squadron, as well as to parley with the southern sultanates on their ambiguous status; and the last is sent with a small force to subjugate the Spanish garrisons of the Marianas and pick up Filipino exiles to return them to Manila.

By the end of the year, the 1826 Constitution is written in Spanish and Tagalog and signed into law, establishing the Republic of the Philippines, with delegates from across the archipelago ratifying it. Marcelo Palmero, the head of the Provisional Assembly, is elected as the head of government, the first President of the Philippines, and his first decrees, made with the advice of his peers, involve the establishment of the new order on the islands, and the disestablishment of the old order. With the establishment of a Bill of Rights, many of the old systems of tribute and forced labor are abolished alongside religious restrictions once enforced by the Catholic Church, and free trade slowly introduces the Philippines to the world market. By the 15th of March 1827 and after a long journey and weeks of negotiation, the embassy sent to Europe signs the Treaty of London, where – among other important countries – Britain, France, and the United States formally acknowledge the independence of the Republic, alongside many other Latin American countries. The Araneta Embassy also hires a number of merchants, teachers, and technical experts in various fields to help reform and rebuild the Philippine economy and society in the wake of the war of independence, even getting assistance from the Pope to assemble a number of teachers for a new system of public education in the republic in exchange for reestablishing the erudite Company of Jesus (or the Jesuits) on the Philippine Islands to balance out the conservative friar orders that had long become corrupt and in need of correction by the Holy Father.

While the Araneta Embassy accomplishes these tasks over the course of 1826 to 1827, the squadron carrying the Embassy to the Moros is able to spread the news of the Spanish defeats in Manila Bay and gather the surrenders of many remaining Spanish garrisons, most notably that of Zamboanga, which was one of the two major holdouts against the revolutionaries, the other being Cebu. Following these surrenders, the embassy makes its way to the Muslim south, where they plan to negotiate with the two sultans, Jamalul Kiram of Sulu and Iskandar Qudrallah Muhammad Zamal Ul-Azam – or Untong – of Maguindanao. Though both have a history of signing treaties of friendship with the Spaniards, there are tensions between the representatives of the newly independent government of Manila and the Muslims of the south, thus beginning weeks of hard negotiation and drafting of treaties. In the end, however, fear of other foreign powers like the British and the Dutch trump fear of the old devil that is the Manila government, and the two sultanates agree to become protectorates of the new republic. With this came the end of revolutionary period and the beginning of the experiment that is the Philippine Republic.

 

[Metempsychosis]

The Régimen Patriótico (1826 – 1850)

The Administration of Marcelo Palmero (1826 – 1838)

“Mis metas siempre han sido el alma de la simplicidad: enriquecer el país, fortalecer al ejército - esto es todo lo que yo pretendo, para que no seamos tragados por los tiburones que nos rodean.” – Marcelo Palmero, Con Respecto a la Gobernación de la República

“My goals have ever been the soul of simplicity: to enrich the country, to strengthen the military – this is all I aim for, so that we are not swallowed by the sharks who encircle us.” – Marcelo Palmero, On the Governance of the Republic

Marcelo Palmero was born around the turn of the 19th century, the eldest son of his prominent Criollo family, and he was raised in a time of great change for the world as a whole. As the young Captain Novales spent his adolescent years fighting against the armies of Napoleon, the heir to the Palmero family spent his time learning the ways of administration and politics on the archipelago. Like many liberals who understood the Spanish language, he was overjoyed by the establishment of the 1812 Cadiz Constitution, and the Felon King’s revocation of his promises in 1814 had radicalized the man against Spain, bringing him to the side of the Sons of the Country by the late 1810s. Learning republican ideals from Count Varela himself, Palmero had risen to become almost a second leader of the nationalist movement, and after his fateful meeting with the cashiered Captain Novales in 1823, the stage was set for his meteoric rise to power. First appointed Prime Minister and Head of the Insular Assembly by the acclaimed Emperor Novales, Palmero worked hard to establish the 1826 Constitution alongside other prominent leaders of the revolution and members of the Insular Assembly, such as the military-minded brothers Juan and Joaquin Bayot. His work and his meetings with the members of the Assembly – from the humble Indio barangay heads to the leaders of the Chinese community – bore much fruit, as he was later elected by the assembly, first as the provisional head of the Philippine government, and later as its first president.

Thus, we return to the present. As the first president of the Philippines, Marcelo Palmero has his work cut out for him. Between the army and its officers who had nominally sworn to defend the republic from all enemies foreign and domestic, the numerous ethnicities of the newly built nation clamoring for their voices to be heard, the various vested interests of foreign nations, and the chaotic state of the various institutions of the newborn republic, the new president is forced into a complicated balancing act throughout his administration. For Palmero, it is a careful dance between the various factions and interest groups of the new republic, between the virulent conservatives and the radical liberals, the internal needs of the nation and the external interests of foreigners, to maintain the order of the newborn nation against those who seek to disrupt it.

Unlike George Washington, the president knows there is no escaping the difficulties of partisan politics, and so the president does what he can to establish a political party to promote the interests of the nation over both the radicalism of the liberals and the conservatives alike, using the many connections and political infrastructure he had cultivated to establish the Sons of the Country (Los Hijos del Pais) as a proper political party and himself as the head of a stable Patriotic Regime (El Régimen Patriótico), which he intends to maintain until such a time that people of the republic are educated and stable enough for truly free elections. Thankfully for the president’s goals, many allies abound, and many of the officers led by Novales are partial to Palmero’s cause even beyond their oaths to defend the republic.

Novales himself, now a rich man after taking over loyalist estates in the northern regions of Luzon, stands beside Palmero to support his party. Though a duty-bound and military-minded soldier with no interest in the office politics that make a nation run, the former emperor knows the importance of building a strong and stable regime, which is why he accepted the acclamations of his fellow officers and led the revolution in the first place, and why he passed on the torch of leadership to Palmero, a mature but relatively young man with an air of authority and many skills in administration and politics.

Novales made a wise choice, for as Palmero studied the necessities of the Philippine nation under the grey eminence Count Varela during the revolution, he had built up plans for how to establish and maintain the nation. Above all, Palmero’s policies involve the enriching of the nation and the strengthening of its military. Many projects are begun under Palmero’s regime, from the foundation of a public school system supported by the Jesuit order for boys and girls alike (even if women’s education is somewhat curtailed by the political necessities of compromise with conservatives) and the establishment of a number of higher educational institutions such as the Manila Athenaeum (Ateneo de Manila, founded in 1830) and the Military Academy of the Philippine Republic (Academia Militar del Republica Filipina, founded in 1832), to the subsidizing of nascent industrialists and merchants of the Tagalog regions (usually benefiting such enterprising middle class men of Chinese descent as the newly established Tiongsons and the obscenely wealthy Tuasons) and the expansion of transport infrastructure across the islands. Under the president’s administration, the development of the towns and cities are given priority, with the Manila being the queen of them all, and migrations from the rest of the former Spanish empire become common.

To manage foreign interests, Palmero also commissions another wave of diplomatic missions to China (the Tiongson Embassy), the southern sultanates and Chinese kongsi federations (the Ruiz Expedition), and the West (the Second Araneta Embassy, which is especially told to focus on the support of the Papacy and Great Britain), while a fourth expedition is assembled by the eccentric Venancio Adlao to chart Papua and other islands to the southeast (the Sol de Mayo Expedition). As for local interests, the chaos of the revolutionary period has created many strange bedfellows, with some of the Ifugao tribes of the Cordilleras having supported the armies of Novales in his campaign marching north. The confederation of Ifugao tribes (called the Bodong Ifugao) is recognized by the Palmero administration and given representation as observers in the Assembly, as were the sultanates of Sulu and Maguindanao. This recognition of Moros and Ifugaos having a shared stake in the early republic as Filipinos would have consequences later down the line, but for the moment, this move – though controversial to the conservatives – is a net positive for the order of the Philippine nation, allowing the president to see a diversity of perspectives and create informed policies regarding the development of the highlands and the south.

Adding to this, the Ruiz expedition establishes ties and entanglements with the Chinese kongsi federations and some of the southern sultanates such as the Sultanates of Ternate and Tidore, entanglements which would ultimately bring the republic into clashes with the Sultanate of Brunei and the Dutch East Indies, clashes exacerbated by the latter’s loss of Java to the Yogyakartan Prince Diponegoro (later crowned Hamengkubuwono VI) after a disastrous campaign which saw the Dutch commander Hendrik Merkus de Kock’s death in 1828 by ambush and the eventual seizure of Batavia by a Yogyakartan army. The entanglements with the kongsi republics in particular leads to hard negotiations and compromises between the Tiongson embassy and the Daoguang Emperor. Of course, the embassy, composed of prominent sangley Filipinos, knows well enough how to deal with the Qing court, and manages to keep the Qing flattered and pacified as it builds much-needed influence over the Chinese diaspora and gains certain concessions that would be useful to the building up of Philippine wealth. The humility and acuity with which the Chinese Filipinos under the diplomat Alberto Tiongson deal with Beijing is a far cry from the Macartney Embassy’s arrogance, and the Tiongson embassy wins far greater rewards in following Chinese court protocol, rewards which would deeply affect Chinese history in the future.

As for Adlao’s expedition, the mapping and claiming of the great island of Papua in the 1830s would also have future consequences, though for now, the republic cannot as of yet act on it.

“The people do not complain because they have no voice; do not move because they are lethargic, and the friars say that they do not suffer because they have not seen their hearts bleed.” – Mariano Gomes, 1835 testimony against the friars

In the midst of all these reforms and expeditions, many grassroots movements also develop, growing their roots beneath the notice of Manila and its bureaucrats. Among the native priests and seminarians, a movement begins to push for their rights as clerics of the Church, pushing against the friar orders, many of whom had stirred up vile slander against the native Indio in the name of maintaining the Spanish colonial order and were gutted by the purges of Spanish loyalists during the revolution. The loss of so many learned men also spurred the establishment of a number of lay brotherhoods and confraternities. The Bacoor parish priest Mariano Gomes de los Angeles and the young seminarians Pedro Pelaez y Sebastian and Apolinario de la Cruz are among those at the forefront of these movements, with Apolinario de la Cruz establishing the most popular of the lay brotherhoods (the Confraternity of Saint Joseph) after being rejected by the Dominicans. Gomes in particular becomes something of a leader and representative of the native priests, joining the Second Araneta Embassy to expose the corruption of the religious orders and the abuses made against the native priests to the Pope in Rome.

The 1835 audience with Pope Clement XV (previously Cardinal Giacomo Giustiniani), asking the Pope to restore the true spirit of the Christian faith against the corruption of its friars, was indeed a success, for whether it was a grudge against the Felon King (who had been murdered by rioters in the War of the Aggrieved in 1827 and was succeeded by his isolationist and arch-conservative brother Carlos V, to the chagrin of liberals who rallied around his younger brother Francisco de Paula) or simply being touched by the piety of the mixed-race priest who stood before him, he revoked the Patronato Real from the Spanish crown outside Spain itself, calling for a new concordat to be made with the Catholic Church in the former Spanish empire and to reestablish Papal control over the Church in Asia and the Americas, at least for those formerly under the Spanish crown. This would have far-reaching consequences beyond what any of them expect, but for the moment and for the Philippines, Mariano Gomes wins a great victory for his country’s independence and deals a heavy blow against the reactionary friars, bringing back with him a number of Papal officials to make an inquiry into the racist abuses and corruption of the religious orders.

“Walang kaluluwa ang bayang walang wika.” (A country without a language is a country without a soul.) – Francisco Balagtas (OTL quote in Gaelic by Padraig Pearse)

As for language and literature, the erudite old poet Jose de la Cruz (or Huseng Sisiw, as he was affectionately known) and his pupils Francisco Balagtas and Ananias Zorilla are engaged in a new literary movement, becoming for Tagalog and Filipino literature the first true generation of native authors, seeking to build in their songs and stories a new image and mythology for the newborn nation and its republic. As de la Cruz lay on his deathbed, writing hymns to freedom and God, Balagtas and Zorilla took on his mantle and began writing romances to inspire the people. Balagtas and Zorilla were not young men when the whispers of revolution grew louder and louder, but their poetry certainly grew bolder as the revolution progressed, embodying the hopes and voices of the new generation. Among the most popular works of Balagtas in this revolutionary period were the dramatic songs in his 1825 version of the Rape of Lucretia (La violacion de Lucrecia). The resonance many of the revolutionaries felt with the poetry and patriotism of this corrido was palpable, and leads Balagtas further down the road of the classics. Balagtas writes more episodes on ancient Rome (such as the 1827 Cincinnato, the 1829 Labanan sa Allia, and the 1832 Sumpa nang manga Horacio or Juramento de los Horacios), patronized by various prominent Tagalog indios, until finally he compiles his Roman poems into his definitive 1838 masterwork: Mga Ecsena galing sa Istoria nang Roma, Scenes from the History of Rome. From the tyranny of the priest-kings of Rome that culminates in the rape of the innocent Lucretia to the sack of the city and its rebuilding under Marcus Furius Camillus, Balagtas spends years building a mythical vista of early Roman history which would echo in the Filipino consciousness for decades after. Even the Criollos recognize his work to promote the national experiment among the Tagalogs, and he is given honors commensurate to his work.

As for Zorilla, though more obscure and never reaching the same heights as his fellow poet, his poetry also delves into the distant past to reinforce the new republican order, though the road he went down hearkens to more Old Testament themes, and his works reflect the popular stories of ancient Israel, dwelling on the defiance and sins of God’s appointed priests, such as in his poems The Sins of Aaron (Ang manga sala ni Aaron, published 1831) and The Children of Eli (Ang manga anac ni Eli, published 1833).

This said, Zorilla’s major contributions are less in writing proper and more leadership and patronage of Tagalog literature. He and Balagtas become leaders of a sort for this nativist movement, pushing as indios for the teaching of native dialects beside Spanish, though above all promoting the Tagalog language, using their reputation and connections to establish a federation of political clubs concerned with the promotion and patronage of native language and literature (the Liga Tagalo). These efforts ensure a foundation for the further development and prominence of the Tagalog language in the republic and archipelago.

Beyond this, the new Jesuits of the country (led by the Alsatian Anthony Kohlmann who was sent to the Philippines by one of Clement XV’s predecessors) also begin doing work to rebuild the absolute ruin that is the Catholic Church in the wake of the revolution and establish public education in the country alongside the Ministry of Education headed by the Tarlac-born mestizo de sangley Elias Ongsiaco. Supporting the lay brotherhoods and guiding them towards orthodox doctrine and worship, the Jesuits do much to reconcile the nation which had long been abused and used by the Spaniards with the Holy Mother Church. Among their projects is the establishment of Philippine Spanish as the standard language of instruction, and as the Palmero administration pushes onward, the state of public education in the Philippines is slowly but surely expanded, and the use of Spanish expanded with it. Though the Liga Tagalo manages to maintain the use of the Tagalog language and other native tongues in the region, Spanish gains a new prestige as men from Zamboanga to Vigan are taught a single common tongue. By 1838, the republic has established dozens of new schools with a number of benefits for the local communities, and hired hundreds of new teachers, all of whom can at least teach the basic curricula, from reading and writing in a number of languages (from the local language to Spanish to Latin) to basic mathematics and scientific concepts, with priests of the Company of Jesus managing moral instruction for the laity.

As for the already educated Criollos of the Philippines and emigres from Latin America (chief among them the Argentine patriot Jose de San Martin, who had settled in the region after attending his brother’s funeral shortly after the revolution’s end, and had become a teacher in the Philippine military academy), a new generation of writers in Spanish begin writing histories and other literature in the Spanish language. Chief among them is a Criollo soldier by the name of Agustin Balduino, who marries a Tagalog woman, establishes an early news publication (the Cronica Filipina), and writes many political and historical essays on the Philippines, eventually compiling his historical work into one of the first native histories of the Philippines (La Historia de las Islas Filipinas, published 1838).

All in all, many of Palmero’s reforms and policies are heavily top-down, almost to the point of dictatorial authoritarianism, but such is needed in the time of the first president, considering the massive lack of infrastructure. Palmero is heckled on both sides of the Assembly from time to time thanks to the partisan politics he has encouraged, and unrest is common in the first few years of Palmero’s administration, but it never builds up into a proper revolt (though a couple conspiracies are discovered and suppressed by such men as Novales, Adlao, and the Bayot brothers – named the Paladins of the Republic for their services – and a few minor riots spurred on by the remaining renegade friars disturb the peace of Palmero’s administration), and as projects are completed and businesses developed by native and foreign businesses alike, the unrest calms, and Palmero not only became president for three terms of four years, but he eventually leaves office in 1838 with a strong mandate for his chosen successor.

As Palmero finishes his third term, he announces his formal retirement from politics, passing the leadership of the regime and political party to his young protégé, the Ilonggo Criollo Hermenegildo Araneta y Estrella, son of the aged diplomat Buenaventura Araneta y de Dios. In his speeches and meetings with the Assembly, the president lays out the future of the country and what needs to be done to achieve a brighter future for the Philippine nation, and during his third term he mentors the young Araneta on the systems that have been built and the institutions yet to be built. Above all, Palmero stresses the need for national unity in the face of foreign and domestic opportunism and warns against the needless antagonizing of other interest groups, especially those of foreign interests. With the 1837 election of the younger Araneta by the Assembly, Palmero leaves office. He remains a grey eminence of his party until his somewhat untimely death by malaria in 1852. As the first president of the Philippines, and after a presidential administration of three terms totaling twelve years, Marcelo Palmero left a deep mark on the nation he helped build. Under his leadership, vast changes have been made to the institutions of the nation between the deals made with various nations and the establishment of many systems from education to religion, and the projects instituted by Palmero prove to be a stable foundation for what would come to be a player in the politics of the region and the world.

 

[ramones1986]

What happened to Andrés Novales after the proclamation of the republic?

 

[Metempsychosis]

What happened to Andrés Novales after the proclamation of the republic?

He's a prominent citizen and general of the republic, so he's probably helping Jose de San Martin train new Filipino officers. He's the Filipino Cincinnatus, and has been portrayed as a model of Filipino patriotism. He probably participates in the little wars and disputes of the republic all the way to the 1860s.

 

[ramones1986]

He's a prominent citizen and general of the republic, so he's probably helping Jose de San Martin train new Filipino officers. He's the Filipino Cincinnatus, and has been portrayed as a model of Filipino patriotism. He probably participates in the little wars and disputes of the republic all the way to the 1860s.

I see, as I understand that he abdicated his position as emperor after the proclamation of the republic.

 

[Metempsychosis]

The Administration of Hermenegildo Araneta (1838 – 1850)

“As Mother Spain once said in arrogance, so we – the sons of her daughter – now say in hope: Plus ultra!” – Hermenegildo Araneta y Estrella, final address to the Assembly, 1849

The first half of the Patriotic Regime, managed by Marcelo Palmero, was a period of rebuilding and the establishment of a new order for the Philippine islands, which had now become a newborn nation. The second half, run by the young and seemingly untested Ilonggo Criollo Hermenegildo Araneta y Estrella, takes something of a different turn.

Born in 1814 as one of the sons of the legendary Buenaventura Araneta, Hermenegildo was just a boy when the revolution began in 1824. Appointed gobernadorcillo of Iloilo by the Spanish government, the elder Araneta was conflicted on whether to support the rebels who had risen up in Manila and declared an Empire of the Philippines. He was a relatively old man, and he had sons and daughters to care for, so he had every reason to continue serving under Spain. And yet, whether it was his ambitions, his liberal leanings, his sympathy to the Sons of the Nation, or his observations of which way the wind was blowing, he made a decision. It was certainly risky, yet he ultimately threw in with the rebels, declaring Iloilo part of the Empire of the Philippines and gathering members of the local chapter of the Sons of the Nation to fight for the revolution, alongside any who would join them. He purged his government of Spanish loyalists and sent his brother Jose to fight against Spanish forces in the region while he reorganized the province of Iloilo. As the revolution wore on, Buenaventura became a member of the Insular Assembly, and Palmero appointed him head of the embassy to Europe, where he gained the attention and recognition of most of Western Europe for the Philippines by getting the Treaty of London signed by the Spaniards and British. Under Palmero’s regime, Buenaventura (already an old man by then) was sent again to the West to gather experts in various fields, as well as continue befriending the British and ask for the intervention of the Papal States regarding the corrupt and renegade religious orders. As the elder Araneta did all these things, his sons were studying, with Hermenegildo becoming a protégé of President Palmero himself. By the time the elder Araneta returned to the Philippines in 1837, he was a celebrity, and tied the Araneta name to the public face of the republic.

All this considered, it is clear that the younger Araneta stands in the shadow of his father, and though he was endorsed to the position of president by Palmero and elected by both houses of the Assembly, there is a sense of anxiety upon his succession to the presidency: not only is Hermenegildo a young and untested leader, he is also the son of a prominent politician and the nephew of another one. There are fears that Araneta will turn out to be a puppet of his family, or of Palmero, or an easily intimidated doormat. There are fears that such a young leader will tear the country apart. And yet, as the years come and go, these fears turn out not only to be unfounded, but utterly false, and many doubters see that Palmero’s choice was not made of arbitrary whim. President Araneta turns out to be a man of steel who leads the Philippines through difficult times to prosperity.

Of help to him of course was the advice and counsel of his ailing father, as well as the previous president. Though the fears were exaggerated, it is true that Araneta’s first term is spent weaning the Assembly from the leadership of Palmero and re-orienting the regime of the nation towards a younger leader. The years from 1838 to 1842 are a transitional period, and Araneta diverges little, if at all, from Palmero’s policies in these years, though even in these years, the president begins diverging from them to some extent.

For from the very beginning of his term in office, the sharks have been circling, and one shark in particular has been clashing particularly hard with Philippine interests: the Kingdom of the Netherlands, with its imperial aspirations in the region. The defeats in the Java War were a blow to the colonial aspirations of the Netherlands in the region, but even with the compromises made to the Javanese, the Dutch colonial government still holds on to Sumatra (now the center of Dutch control in the region after finally defeating its fundamentalist Padri clerics of Minangkabau in 1836, ending what was known as the Padri War) and Halmahera with their various Muslim protectorates and spice plantations. Yet control over the latter region drives the clashes between the Philippine republic and the Dutch colonial government which had moved to Medan after the taking of Batavia (renamed Jayakarta) in 1830. The move had caused the eastern sultanates of Celebes and the Moluccas to attempt to break free from the Dutch system, and in the power vacuum, the Philippines begins to move in, trying to establish control over the Halmaheran sultanates, which halfheartedly resist the Filipino takeover. This is not received well by the Medan regime, and a series of disputes and raids and proxy wars starting in 1840 would thus commence between the young republic and the Dutch colonial regime, ending only with the mediation of the British in 1847, which would create something of a détente between them in the Treaty of Saigon, formally delineating the spheres of influence in the region between the British in Singapore, the Dutch in Medan, and the Filipinos in Manado.

These Dutch Wars, as they would later be framed, are more low-key than one would expect from their later framing, being more a series of pirate raids and little proxy wars between Manila and Medan than a full-fledged war, yet the expansion of British and Philippine influence in the region at the expense of the Dutch would have far-reaching consequences, and even during the 1840s, Dutch and Muslim piracy – and the subsequent policies implemented by Araneta during the period – do affect the Filipino outlook on the south and on certain foreigners: though Protestant churches made their entrance into the religious makeup of the country in the 1830s, the Dutch Wars cause something of a backlash against some Protestant missionaries and Bible societies, who – though legally allowed to spread their religion, and though the British missionaries are received with a relatively warm welcome – are mostly restricted to the cities lest they be accused of working for the Dutchmen and deported to British territory.

This initial clash defining a traditional enmity and difference between Filipino Catholicism on the one hand and Dutch Protestantism and its willingness to ally with Muslim pirates on the other comes to be a running theme in the political sphere and the national mythology, especially in later administrations. Of course, this dichotomy simplifies the complexities of Philippine foreign policy in this period, which include the deep connections made with the (very Protestant) English-speaking world and with China, connections which prove vital in the rise of the country to prosperity. For that matter, both the Dutch and the Filipinos deal pragmatically with Muslims, with Sulu and Maguindanao – among many other protectorates in the coming decades – being deeply invested in the ventures of Manila.

In any case, expansion of Philippine soft power in the region beneath the wings of the West is also a running theme for the Araneta administration: the name of the president is associated with the wild and ambassadorial fame of his father, and even living beneath the shadow of the brave revolutionary and cunning envoy, the younger Araneta is not above exploiting this notoriety to his advantage, and the advantage of his country. Many Filipino veterans have become mercenaries and filibusters in this period, aiding regimes and leaders friendly to the Philippines and the West, such as in Vietnam, where the rigidly Confucian emperor Minh Mang is forced to abandon the southern half of his country to the Cham jihad of Katip Sumat and the rebels under Lê Văn Khôi, adopted son of the progressive eunuch and southern regent Lê Văn Duyệt. A son of the Bayot family aided the Lê family’s quest to place the son of the Catholic Crown Prince Canh on the throne of Vietnam in the early 1830s, leading a battalion of Filipino filibusters to train the rebel Vietnamese army, which proved victorious against the armies of old Vietnam. Sensing opportunity from the nascent Vietnamese civil war, the Thai kingdom under Rama III Nangklao sent an army to chip away at the Vietnamese periphery, starting with overthrowing the Cambodian king Ang Chan II and replacing him with his more pliable brother Ang Duong. In the anarchy of the 1830s, Minh Mang fell back from the traditional capital of Hue and tried to reestablish a stable kingdom in Hanoi, from where he sent envoys to the Daoguang Emperor asking for aid against the so-called tà đạo, or heretics against the Confucian way – the Christians, whom he was persecuting. The Qing court were anything but hasty in acting on the pleas of the Vietnamese king, dealing as they also did with the equally obsequious Tiongson embassy, and by the time they sent a legation to mediate the disputes in 1837, the hour was late and the south was lost to the Hanoi regime, with Saigon having become the center of a constitutional monarchy ruled by Mỹ Đường and established under the auspices of Bayot and the Lê family.

The Qing were having their own problems at this point under the Daoguang Emperor, between the British opium drug trade and the clamor of the Vietnamese. When the Qing did come for southern Vietnam, they did so at the worst possible time, for the British (still annoyed by perceived ‘Chinese arrogance’) and the French (looking to expand their influence in the region) came to support the Saigon clique. The ensuing Cochinchina War (1840 – 1843) was a brutal affair that exposed the weakness of the Qing in the face of Western industrial power, and saw the Western coalition act accordingly. In the end, the Qing were forced to sign the humiliating Treaty of Amoy, which reunited Vietnam under the modernizing Saigon regime and forced China to cede a number of small territories from which the Westerners would trade.

As for the Philippines, the Araneta regime remained publicly neutral to the whole affair as it focused on its disputes to the south, but in private deals the Filipino filibusteros and mercenaries did much to aid the war effort, even as the Tiongson embassy quietly allayed the fears of the Qing in court and withdrew from Beijing with as much as they could get away with.

The 1840s see the active focus of Araneta’s government turn from internal affairs to foreign policy, where the president really shines. Though internal policies are never really neglected (Araneta spends some time establishing the Central Bank of the Philippines (Banco Central de las Filipinas) and other such institutions to shape Philippine economic policy in favor of the nation, as well as establishing the Philippine Civil Guard (Guardia Civil Filipina) to maintain domestic security, and internal policies are managed by competent bureaucrats appointed by both him and his predecessor), external pressures push and pull the president’s focus towards dealing with the Dutchmen and their allies, building influence and soft power on mainland Asia, and maintaining cordial relations with the greatest trading partners of the nation: the British, the Chinese, and the Americans. Gathering the right men for the job and presenting the best faces possible to each (Alberto Tiongson’s Chinese scholar friends to the Qing, deeply Catholic Criollo seminarians to the French and Papal courts, and liberal Criollo gentry to the British and Americans), the president sends off a third wave of envoys, this time to establish permanent embassies with London, Washington, Paris, Rome, and Beijing. With friends in high places, and with the looming specter of economic woes, Amsterdam ultimately caves in to the pressure of its fellow European powers, losing in the resulting treaty most of its influence in the East Indies east of Sumatra. And in the power vacuum left by the Treaty of Saigon, the Philippines begins to establish itself as a regional hegemon, though the Javanese of the newly liberated Jayakarta look to challenge this hegemony led by an infidel republic.

On the internal affairs side of things, the 1840s also see a vast increase in Chinese immigration. Ever since the foundation of the republic, the quotas on Chinese immigration that had been enforced by the Spanish government were lifted, the 1830s Tiongson embassy negotiated something of a lifting of emigration restrictions among the Qing (couching it as a relief of population pressures in China proper), and the ensuing flood of Chinese migrants into the country was incredibly helpful for the country’s economic development, increasing labor and capital in a country that had precious little of either (though enough to establish a shipbuilding industry and a network of trade and investment), yet it had also led to certain clashes in culture between those who already lived in the country – whether native or Criollo, mestizo or even earlier Chinese migrants – and the incoming flood of Chinese. As the years pass into the 1840s, this increased migration finally becomes big enough for the administration itself to notice and act upon. A few who have come to the country since 1826 are worked to death on the docks and shipyards by their richer fellow Chinese or become tenant farmers on the few surviving haciendas and are treated little better than slaves, and the Chinese community in the Philippines as a whole becomes increasingly bloated, forming into an increasing chunk of the country’s urban poor, whether it be in the Iloilo arrabal of Molo or the (increasingly crowded) Manila Chinatown of Binondo. Thankfully for the young nation and its cultural anxieties, and because of a number of social and cultural factors such as the originally low status of most of these migrants, most of them assimilate very quickly into Philippine society. By the 1840s a large portion of these immigrants are at least nominally Catholic, and many speak not only Philippine Spanish (if with some difficulty), but even the native tongues, such as Tagalog in Manila and Cavite, and Hiligaynon in Iloilo. The systems of public education established by the Manila government in tandem with the lay brotherhoods, the Liga Tagalo, and the Jesuits do much to assimilate these migrants and their children, many of whom become loyal citizens of the republic, with a few bringing interesting ideas back to their hometowns in the southern provinces of China such as Fujian and Guangdong.

Still, clashes do happen between the old Filipinos and the new immigrants, and unrest does begin to build up in the cities, with a couple riots during the worst parts of the Dutch Wars forcing the police and armed forces to disperse such disturbances of the peace. All these domestic problems do lead to calls for solutions to the increasing chaos. Among Araneta’s many attempts at a solution (and in truth, one of his more desperate attempts after trying more grounded solutions such as building more housing and infrastructure for the cities) is sending a large portion of them to the towns and cities of the south such as Manado on Celebes, to settle and develop the new territories of the nation, which many of them do splendidly. All in all, the 1840s see both massive economic growth and a host of unforeseen domestic issues which become much more manifest in the following decade (which also sees many changes in the wider world), leading to a coming political realignment in the country, for better or worse.

The 1840s, being this period of massive economic growth and its ensuing problems, also sees the rise of a kind of culture war, as the liberal, moderate, and conservative wings of the Sons of the Country begin clashing with one another. New publications beyond Balduino’s Cronica Filipina have been published over the years and new printing houses established, such as the sangley printer and writer Horacio Tiongson y Uy’s liberal-aligned Casa del Sol, the Xinhua Shuju or New China Publishing House (Nueva China Prensa) founded by the Chinese immigrant Felipe Chua (Ts’ai Ho-sen/Cai Hesen) and catering to the Chinese diaspora, the moderate nationalist publishing house Prensa Republica founded by Balduino’s mestizo friend Aurelio Ruiz, the Catholic newsletter Veritas and its associated conservative media, and many others. These media publishers and news outlets have hitherto been cautious on narratives, careful not to draw the ire of united government, but with both foreign and domestic issues cropping up between the Chinese immigrants and the Dutch Wars, and with cracks forming in the political landscape of the party and regime, the press is emboldened to dispute and argue with one another and with the government. The slight heckling of Palmero and the Patriotic Regime becomes a veritable flood of disputes and drama over the course of Araneta’s regime, though the president is able to keep his cool throughout and maintains his path against those who would disagree with his policies.

And still, Araneta manages to more or less keep the strong mandate Palmero left for him. After many years at the wheel, the Ilonggo president has matured into a strong leader, a leader any Filipino could be proud of. His policies have kept the Philippine nation growing richer, while at the same time securing its stability and influence across Southeast Asia. His focus beyond the local issues sees the region and the world change deeply over the course of his years in power, with Manila developing its own little empire in the region. As President Araneta’s third term winds down, and his deal with the Dutch seals the end of their empire in Asia, he leaves behind a legacy of greater strength and prosperity for the nation, though some problems have been left in need of solution. Araneta’s endorsed successor is a man around his own age, the 36-year-old budding industrialist Jose Bonifacio Rojas y Ubaldo, the son of an old and wealthy Criollo family on par with the Aranetas and among the president’s trusted subordinates regarding internal affairs. Though warning his experienced successor and allies of the increasing difficulties and complications of running the country, Araneta gives celebratory final addresses to the Assembly and to the people of the nation, endorsing Rojas as his successor and hoping for his success before finally leaving the office to Rojas after the 1849 election which naturally led to the election of Rojas to the presidency. Unfortunately for Rojas, however, he would end up the last of the presidents of the Patriotic Regime, and a new era would begin for the republic.

 

[Whiteshore]

Unfortunately for Rojas, however, he would end up the last of the presidents of the Patriotic Regime, and a new era would begin for the republic.

I'm not the only one both excited and worried about the implications of all this.

 

[Krueger]

Ooooooh, another TL where Philippines became independent in 1823!

Mind you, I might adapt some of your TL content if I ever make a part 2 of my own Novales TL.

 

[Metempsychosis]

Interlude: The Wider World in the Early 19th Century (1800s to 1850)

“All great events hang by a hair. The man of ability takes advantage of everything and neglects nothing that can give him a chance of success; whilst the less able man sometimes loses everything by neglecting a single one of those chances.” – Napoleon Bonaparte

The Philippine Revolution was the last of the Spanish American independence wars, the final fiery burst of revolution and reform against the rotting Spanish Empire and its Felon King. The years since the French Revolution had not been kind to Spain: a full generation of revolution and war, starting from 1789, had laid waste to continental Europe, and Spain in particular bore much of the damage and suffering from the wars of that Corsican ogre and titan of war Napoleon Bonaparte who was Emperor of the French, even as Great Britain rose and stood triumphant over all comers, having led and financed a number of coalitions against France and coming out of this generation of revolutions and wars as the undisputed master of the world. With the 1814-1815 Congress of Vienna headed by the cold-blooded diplomat Klemens von Metternich attempting to put in place a lasting peace, continental Europe was placed under a conservative but stable peace (the Concert of Europe) as the rest of the world convulsed under the technological and societal advancements made by the West and its captains of industry and business. Spain in particular fell into hard times from the scars of the Napoleonic wars, the bankruptcy of the crown, and the arbitrary and despotic nature of its absolutist monarchs, leading to the anarchy of the independence wars.

“Tell my guard that I have just declared the complete independence of Brazil. We are free from Portugal.” – Pedro I of Brazil

As the Philippines fought its revolution against Spain and transitioned into an ostensibly parliamentary republic run by leaders who bordered on being strongmen, the wider world continued to move, such as in the Iberian Peninsula and Europe. The bloody lynching of Ferdinand VII in 1827 by an angry mob of the Catalan Aggrieved (Agraviados) was a scandal, and the succession of the reactionary ultra-Catholic Don Carlos de Borbon as King Charles V of Spain led to a massive crackdown on liberals and liberalism as a whole, being scapegoated for the brutal incident. In vicious reaction to the Jacobin ideologies which seemed to have infested the empire, Charles V’s reign began with a fierce and aloof isolationism, exiling many prominent liberal thinkers and politicians from the country (including his own brother Infante Francisco de Paula, after he was implicated in a liberal conspiracy in 1830) and enforcing strictly absolutist laws, all actions which would come to haunt the new Spanish king in later years, such as in 1835, when the Spanish crown had its rights over the Church outside Spain itself (the patronato real) revoked by order of the Pope, to the consternation of Austria and France. Still, beyond this, Charles V ruled a peaceful land and a quiet people, though the peace was a façade hiding brutality, and the people were silenced rather than quiet of their own free will.

In the same year in neighboring Portugal, King Pedro IV of Portugal’s brother Miguel usurped the throne of Portugal as King Miguel I of Portugal while his brother ruled from Rio de Janeiro, having seen the way the mob deals with its rightful kings and feeling the mood of the realm and of Europe as a whole. Dom Pedro, weighing his options and finally seeing Portugal as a lost cause, chose to remain in Brazil as Emperor Pedro I of Brazil, instead waging a series of raids and disputes against his absolutist brother over the colonies of the Portuguese Empire. This War for the Colonies (1832 – 1836) ends with the arbitration of Britain in the 1836 Treaty of Bristol, where Brazil was recognized as an independent country and the Portuguese empire was partitioned in exchange for both sides renouncing their claims to each other’s territories. The House of Braganza was thus divided, and Brazil made free of the Portuguese system. Miguel made the remnants of the Portuguese empire (Madeira, the Azores, West Africa) into something of a hermit kingdom, committing to the same reactionary absolutism as his Spanish neighbor. As for the Brazilian emperor in the wake of these wars, Dom Pedro spent his time training his young son for rulership, reforming the empire and its army where he could, integrating East Africa and the Indian outposts into Brazil’s budding empire, selling Timor to the Philippines (the Timor Purchase of 1835) in exchange for a modest price and favorable trade agreements, forming diplomatic agreements with other countries, and pushing for the gradual phasing out of slavery to the worry of the planter oligarchy that controlled the Assembly. The tensions between the liberal Emperor and his conservative Assembly were palpable, and would eventually come to a head with the former’s assassination in the 1850s (the Recife Incident) and the ensuing Brazilian Civil War.

In any case, also of note was the treatment of the Malê revolt of 1835, some of whose leaders – exiled to West Africa as an intact force – came to affect the region deeply in the years after, inspired as they were by the Haitian revolution and the Islam that they practiced. Indeed, two of the exiles – the famed brothers Elias and Miguel Abacar – came to establish a foundation for further socio-religious and economic developments in the region with their short-lived Islamic republic in West Africa and their much more lasting literary legacy, between their poetry and their political and religious tracts.

Speaking of Africa as a whole, though the 19th century saw it mostly as the Dark Continent – mysterious and dangerous, savage and the source of slaves and other wealth – developments were occurring that would gradually change this perception: from the conquests and reign and conversion to Christianity of the far-seeing King Radama I (b. 1793, r. 1810-1861) of the Merina kingdom of Madagascar, to the splendor of the Sultanate of Oman and Zanzibar under Said bin Sultan and the messy final years of the Ethiopian Age of Princes which would see the eventual rise of Tewodros II as Emperor of Ethiopia, Africa itself was changing deeply. And in West Africa in particular, the rise of the Abacar brothers and their establishment of the Sokoto Republic along a strange mix of Islamic and Jacobin principles came to be a social and economic foundation for the region’s development, whether it be from those who agreed with them or those who wholeheartedly rejected their heterodox ideology in favor of a more mystical separation between politics and religion such as that preached by the deposed sultan of Sokoto Ali Babba bin Bello on his road to Mecca, or a more conventional and conservative interpretation of Islam as favored by the Tidjaniya Caliphate of Umar Tall.

“This world is not, as you may think,
A place of revelry:
Each rose within this garden is
A wine-cup filled with blood.” – Mir Taqi Mir

While the Iberian Peninsula slumbered under its absolutist monarchs, Brazil developed under its new liberal monarch, and West Africa started to react to European ideas, most of Europe returned to supposed stability under the management of its great powers, standing in armed concert against those who would break the peace between the great powers and those who would violate the spheres of influence the great powers had carved out for themselves across the continent, but always maintaining diplomatic options above all, at least for Christian Europe. Pointedly absent from the Concert was the Ottoman Empire, which had slowly fallen into decline since its height in the days of Suleiman the Magnificent. In the chaos of the Napoleonic era and its aftermath, the Albanian Muhammad Ali Pasha had risen high in Egypt, having retaken Egypt from Napoleon in the name of Sultan Mahmud II, purged the corrupt and disloyal Mamluks, radically reformed the military and domestic spheres of Egypt, and established his rule over the land like no one else since the Pharaohs. He had fought as an ostensibly loyal vassal to the Sultan in Istanbul who named him Wali over Egypt, even sending some naval support to the doomed effort to suppress the Greek war of independence, a war that saw the destruction of the token fleet he sent and the establishment of an independent Greece under Prince Karl Theodor of Bavaria (made Theodoros I of Greece in 1830 by the great powers of Europe and with the consent of the Greeks), yet the pasha had great ambitions to create a strong, independent, and modern Egypt with himself and his family at its head.

The 1830s thus saw Muhammad Ali Pasha declare his independence from the Ottomans after seeing Mahmud II’s indifference to his sacrifices for the empire since the beginning of his career. The ensuing Egyptian war of independence (1831 – 1833) saw the sultan’s attempts at modernizing his empire wither, his hopes for Tanzimat stillborn, his realm’s decline terminal. The intervention of the great powers made things worse for Mahmud II, as his weakness was exploited by the Russians, who took the opportunity to continue invading the Ottoman empire after a brief rest upon the coronation of Theodoros, and by the Austrians, who saw the Russian invasion and the various Balkan insurgencies of the time as an opportunity to strengthen themselves at the expense of an old rival. This Russian invasion eventually led to the intervention of the other great powers, and ultimately a settlement on the Eastern Question was made in 1833: the Convention of Istanbul saw a great reduction of the Ottoman realm, practically a partition as some of its Balkan provinces grew unstable and were thus either given to Austria or made independent (such as the Emirate of Bosnia, the Kingdom of Serbia and the Bulgarian Exarchate) to counterbalance Russian influence, Greece was given large new tracts of land including Thessaly, Smyrna, and the Ionian coast, the Kingdom of Armenia was established as an independent state including Lake Van (though in reality a Russian dependency), the Golden Horn made into an independent mandate (the Mandate of Constantinople) under the rule of an empowered and independent Ecumenical Patriarch of Orthodox Christendom, and Egypt recognized as a great power at least on par with the Ottomans, among other stipulations. Also of interest was the Qajar Persian legation at the convention, which pushed for and received the southern Iraq (including the city of Karbala), as well as Western military aid against the Wahhabi Saudi Emirate of Nejd, in exchange for a few concessions. The Turkish rump state left from all this rearranging left Mahmud II a broken man, being left with a capital in obscure Konya and a reputation in tatters as the man who lost the City of the World’s Desire, and his untimely death in 1838 was mourned by few. Indeed, his death was seen as the end of the unified Caliphate as a number of ulema across Dar al-Islam declared new caliphates, from the Javanese claim established in Yogyakarta to the various West African claims, from the Egyptians ostensibly maintaining their support for the Ottomans to the Saudis declaring their Emir and Imam the new caliph and waging jihad against the apostates and infidels, with some among the ulema even declaring that Mahmud II was the last legitimate caliph.

Beyond this, Europe saw little change and some light repression of liberal ideals outside of Britain after the Congress of Vienna, though something of a faux pas occurred in the middle of 1830, when the teenaged Napoleon II – young half-Austrian son of the first Napoleon and hostage against the Bonapartists – escaped his golden cage in the Hofburg and disappeared with little trace for the better part of a generation, causing a rush of speculation, numerous conspiracy theories, and sparking outright terror to the insecure and unstable Bourbon regime. The rest of the world, on the other hand, saw anarchy and chaos as the West – and principally the British – expanded its economic influence across the globe. The Americas, however, saw the most internal chaos: between the chaos of the Spanish American independence wars and the labyrinthine intrigues of the United States and its democratic experiment, the New World was indeed the New World, not only geographically, but socially, as the caudillos of New Spain established new governments and struggled with the new order of the world.

“Damn it, how will I ever get out of this labyrinth?” – Simon Bolivar

The chaos of the Spanish American independence wars saw such great generals as Agustin de Iturbide, Simon Bolivar, and Jose de San Martin liberate Spanish America from the mother country which had kept her daughters in darkness for so long. After the 1824 Battle of Ayacucho and the defeat of the last effective Spanish forces on the continent, Bolivar returned to his newly established Republic of New Granada to secure and stabilize the newborn country (breaking regional strongmen and establishing a strong central government with a competent successor based in Bogota by his death in 1834), leaving General Antonio de Sucre to finish off the Spaniards in Peru. General Sucre later established himself as the head of the Peruvian Federation, a republic composed of Lower and Upper Peru which eventually stood as a rival to New Granada after the death of Bolivar. San Martin (who had helped establish the Republic of Chile under his friend, the famed general Bernardo O’Higgins) also returned to his homeland, now the United Provinces of Rio de la Plata, to try stabilizing the regime in Buenos Aires, but found the increasingly tense partisan politics between the conservative rural Federalists and the modernizing urbanite Unitarians odious. After making a few valiant yet vain attempts at understanding peacetime politics, he ultimately left the country he liberated behind, moving with his family first to Europe (where he failed to settle in France and Britain), then by 1828 to the Philippine islands, to the country his brother fought for across the Pacific, and there the old Liberator was given honors and a teaching position in the Filipino Academia Militar, where the man developed a cordial friendship with his younger fellow libertador Andres Novales.

Rio de la Plata, later known as the Argentine Confederation, saw much strife after San Martin’s departure, with the partisan disputes between conservatives and liberals exploding into outright civil war after months of political gridlock, and the Brazilians took advantage of the strife between the departure of San Martin in 1827 and the ascension of Juan Manuel de Rosas as the dictatorial and ostensibly Federalist president of Argentina in 1835 to take territory from the Spanish-speaking republics and establish and fortify buffer states east of the Uruguay River, such as the newly established Uruguayan Republic, and the utopian experiment of Jose Gaspar Rodriguez de Francia’s Republic of Paraguay. Rosas waged bloody war against his enemies, whether they were the natives of Patagonia, the liberal Unitarians of Buenos Aires (the province that was his main base of power), or the Brazilians who by the 1840s had become his most urgent enemy thanks to the Uruguayan Civil War that had started in the beginning of the decade, notwithstanding the blockades of Britain and France in support of the liberals and the Brazilians.

As for Iturbide, the unfortunate general – made Emperor of Mexico by the conservatives of the country before being exiled after little less than a year in power – suffered the most unfortunate fate of the three most famous of the Libertadores of Spanish America: called back to take the throne of Mexico once again, he was captured and executed by firing squad in 1824 on the orders of the nascent First Mexican Republic, a poor death for one of the fathers of the nation. In any case, this ostensible republic formed in his wake was quickly coopted by a military junta led by Anastasio Bustamante, who formalized the rule of his moderate coalition with the formal establishment of the Interim Governing Junta in 1828, which would rule over the country as an oligarchical dictatorship in all but name until the Revolution of 1850 which would coincide with the Great North American War and the Great Exodus of the Ephraimite Covenant. In any case, the junta spent its first years waging a (relatively successful) war of conquest against the Federal Republic of Central America, and spent the rest of its existence suppressing separatist uprisings such as those in the Yucatan, Central America, and the Rio Grande. That the Texan Revolution in the 1830s was the only successful one was a testament to the relative effectiveness of the junta, but the fact that it was one of so many was also a testament to its tyranny and incompetence. And in the end, tensions with the liberals and conservatives alike built up and finally exploded by 1850.

All in all, the generation following the Spanish American independence wars was one of state-building and caudillos fighting to build their nations, each one with different ideas and abilities. Some among the caudillos succeeded in establishing stable regimes, and some failed in various ways, leading to more intrigue and civil strife.

“The United States appear to be destined by Providence to plague America with misery in the name of liberty.” – Simon Bolivar

In the United States, on the other hand, partisan politics under the divisive, popular, and borderline authoritarian Andrew Jackson and his successors led to an increasingly fractured country and increasingly corrupt republic infested by autocratic demagoguery and vicious populism. From the Nullification Crises of the late 1820s and early 1830s made bloody by Jackson’s personal interventions that saw the deaths of protesting civilians, to the spoils system and the various corrupt bargains made on both sides of the political establishment, the American experiment took a dangerous turn, exacerbating already existing tensions between the agricultural, semi-feudal South and the industrializing, modernizing North. The corruption and partisan polarization of the government, the bloody wars waged on the Native Americans, the hunger for land and expansion, the increasing cruelty of American slavery: all these issues continued to fester and grow, left to do so by a government whose politicians felt these issues suited their agendas. William Henry Harrison, elected as president in the 1840 election, trying and mostly failing to resolve these problems, quoted Louis XV, summarizing the situation of the country by the 1840s: “After me comes the flood.” With the chaotic 1844 election, where a number of candidates and minor parties rose to challenge the indecisive political establishment of the time, and the Virginia planter Henry Clay was elected as president, Harrison was not wrong: political violence had by then become increasingly common, as abolitionists fought to end slavery, slavers to preserve it, and ordinary folk were caught in the bloody crossfire.

And this was not the only bloody controversy of the time: there were some on both sides who saw the United States and its increasingly tyrannical yet ineffective government – trapped between the conflicting interests of the states, the abolitionists of New England on one side and the slaver aristocracy of the South on the other – as impossible to work with, and so sought to leave it behind in secession. The southern states in particular were becoming restive, seeing that their political hegemony over the government would not last forever. News of the radical abolitionist Abacar brothers, filtered through the insular sensationalism of American journalism, only increased the sense of their sense of urgency to implement their plans. The planter oligarchies in these states thus prepared for secession as the government remained divided and indecisive, and their plans came to a head with the 1848 election, which saw even more presidential candidates and factions fighting to be elected and the end of the first Clay’s impotent administration. As the unlikely establishment candidate Cassius Marcellus Clay of Kentucky – a former slaveowner turned moderate abolitionist (in favor of the gradual abolition of slavery) and a cousin of the previous president – was elected president after a long and vicious slog, the Southern planters put their plans into motion and began the secession of a number of states, beginning with the Carolinas. Within three months of the new president’s inauguration, half of the United States had seceded, and the Confederation of Columbian Republics was established by the seceding states of the South with a new capital in Montgomery, Alabama. This new polity, declaring its opposition to the federal tyranny of the United States, both invited the newborn state of Texas (at the time left in an ambiguous and fractious state by the chaos of America’s federal government) to join them and began a march to Washington and the Rio Grande, beginning the Great North American War, a war which spread even unto Mexico. The United States as a whole fell into chaos then, as various sides and factions, volunteer brigades and renegade units such as the radical abolitionist Brotherhood of Freedom and the Southern nationalist Knights of the Golden Circle, fought either in the name of the Union or for the Columbians. Only time would tell how this war would turn out, though with the British Whigs and the Bourbon regime in Paris both favoring the Columbian secessionists, it did not seem likely that the Union would come out of the conflict very well.

In their favor, however, were the rumblings of a religious movement among the enslaved: a fiery black preacher of mysterious origins began his ministry just before the chaos of the 1840s, preaching of a time of deliverance and judgement, a time of liberation and exodus. The slavers were spooked and feared the ghost of Nat Turner and his rebellion but a few years prior, yet even as this mysterious preacher worked his way all across the South, sowing discord and the seeds of escape, they could not find a trace of his movements at all. And upon the outbreak of war, with all things set in place for war between Montgomery and Washington, the preacher Ephraim – who wore many faces and hid his tracks so well that no one living knew his previous identity, if he had one at all – began his great plan. It was no slave revolt like any slaver in the South would have expected: it was the Great Exodus, as vast numbers of slaves rose up, took what they needed for their journey, and fled west, hearing the hour of liberation was at hand from the hidden messages of the prophet. Ephraim and his captains – among them fierce Deborah, honey-tongued Joshua, and burning-eyed Gideon; and all of whom had abandoned their old names as Ephraim did – had long prepared for this great escape, preparing way-stations and refuges in the wilderness on the way west. Thousands upon thousands of slaves made their way across the estates and battlefields of the South; many died, some horribly, but many more who took the chance escaped, first to the territories of the wild West where they broke the estates of Texan slavers and built the temporary encampment in the Mexican province of New Mexico which they called Shiloh, then on to California, at the time a Mexican state under a liberal regime led by the renegade indio governor Benito Juarez, who found these people useful in his quest to overthrow the military junta that had established itself in Mexico City, allowing them to settle in California and practice their religion, so long as they helped him in his quest. Juarez had already spent the past decade gathering many peoples beyond his own core of liberal dissidents exiled to California in a grand Northern Coalition to build a true democracy in Mexico, gathering support from everyone he could, from Native American tribes such as the Diné and the Nʉmʉnʉʉ peoples, to Asian migrants and foreign volunteers. Juarez also fought the slavers where he could, trying to maintain the ban on slavery established by the founding fathers of Mexico, and so the Washington regime found him and the newly christened Ephraimite Covenant useful enough allies against Montgomery. Thus the war became a messy many-sided slog, with Washington and the Tejanos and the Northern Coalition roughly on one side, the Columbian Montgomery regime and the white Texans on another, the dictatorial Mexican Republic on yet another, conservative royalists propped up by Bourbon France on a fourth side, and – as the country fell into chaos with the invasion of a Southern army – a fifth group of pragmatic Iturbide supporters rising up in the name of Josefa de Iturbide and her mysterious mercenary husband Captain Francisco del Aguila, who finally revealed himself publicly as the runaway prince turned adventurer and foreign volunteer Napoleon II, son of the Corsican ogre himself.

“This Being is one,
truth by name,
creator,
fearless, without hatred,
of timeless form,
unborn, self-existent,
and known by the Guru's grace.” – Mul Mantar

“大道废
有仁义
智慧出
有大伪
六亲不和
有孝慈
国家昏乱
有忠臣”
"When the great Dao is in decline,
Benevolence and loyalty appear.
As wisdom arises, so does hypocrisy.
Only in a feuding family do filial piety and parental doting become conspicuous.
Loyal ministers emerge whenever the country is in chaos." – Daodejing, Chapter 18

As the New World burned with the fires of revolution, the Old saw the fires of war and conquest burn across the land. In 1826, as the Philippines declared its independence from Spain, Great Britain stood at the pinnacle of the world order, and its myriad hands stretched across the world, from its colonies in the Americas to its control over the economy and trade of the Old World. India and China in particular saw their lowest points in the early parts of this century: the British East India Company ruled Bengal with an iron fist and used its wealth to take over the rest of the subcontinent, and the Cochinchina War of the early 1840s (also called the First Opium War by Chinese observers who saw through the façade of a Vietnamese proxy war) broke Chinese isolation in the most humiliating way possible for the Qing court with the Treaty of Amoy. Even so, in India there were holdouts that were able to maintain a form of independence and freedom from the global system that Britain’s financiers had begun to establish: the Sikh Empire, ruled by the dynamic young ruler Nau Nihal Singh, maintained a guarded and cordial alliance (almost a vassalage) with the British as it quietly courted the Tsars of the north; and in the capitals of the various presidencies of the BEIC, Indian men from all walks of life talked and debated, presaging the beginnings of a nationalist movement that would in time spur the whole region to action. As for China, the 1840s saw the humble beginnings of a mass movement that would shatter the very foundations of Chinese civilization and establish a new order, all inspired by the very traders and missionaries that Europe had sent.

As the two great pillars of Asia felt the humiliation of conquest, the many nations orbiting them also dealt with the encroachment of the West in different ways. As Nau Nihal Singh ruled Sindh and the Punjab, Afghanistan and its various feuding clans – though ostensibly united under the Emir Dost Muhammad Khan who was a proud son of the Barakzai clan – suffered the chaos and depredations of civil war side by side with the Great Game between Britain and Russia, the khanates of the northern steppe having fallen to the latter in the centuries before (though the Kazakhs of the 1830s rose up in a doomed last-ditch attempt at freedom from the Tsar). Burma too suffered the expansionism of British capitalism, with the utter humiliation of the Konbaung dynasty and the horrible suffering inflicted against their realm in the First Anglo-Burmese War in the 1820s, but as King Bagyidaw spent the remainder of his reign conflicted between a deep depression and the needs of the realm, his son Setkya Min pushed to rebuild the country and maintain confidence in himself as a crown prince and his father as the king of Burma.

In Japan, news of the Cochinchina War spooked the shogunal government, and when the 1844-1845 British-Filipino diplomatic expedition headed by Captain James Brooke and Commodore Andres Adlao (usually known as the Brooke Expedition) finally broke through to the shogunal government with force, humiliating the bakufu with the Treaty of Hamamatsu and shaking confidence in the Tokugawa’s hold on power, the situation in Japan became complicated very quickly. Between the resentment of the disfavored nobility and the exacerbation of poverty and other societal tensions by the external factors of the free market, Japan had become a ticking time bomb. The opening up of Japan to the rest of the world began the period known as the Bakumatsu, which for Japan was the end of the old shogunal order and the beginning of a new one, though the new order’s shape remained to be seen, as various groups pushed in different directions and the West continued to encroach upon the cities of Japan for more trade. The proximity of the modernizing and deeply Westernized Philippines proved something of a complicating factor in dealings with the West for the Japanese government and people alike: fears of losing the “national spirit” were very much real, and the existence of the Spanish-speaking republic to the south exacerbated them, especially with the rediscovery of the crypto-Catholic Kakure Kirishitan and the rise of subversive groups curious about the ideas and methods of the outside world such as the Western-leaning Touhoukai, or Society of the East, that would be born in the 1850s from a number of political clubs that began in those heady first years. The establishment of the treaty port quarters as refuges from persecution and places where the subversive Kirishitan could practice their religion freely seemed to set a dangerous precedent to the bakufu, and the extraterritoriality of foreign agents – especially from the nearby Philippines – became a vicious bone of contention in the shogunal and imperial courts. Still, the early Bakumatsu was a period of deep introspection and societal change as the shogunate was forced to open up more and more and the Western world demanded more and more, leading to even more resentment on the part of the enemies of the Tokugawa.

In Joseon Korea, the Treaty of Amoy was also received with unmitigated horror as the Middle Kingdom of all the world was forced to bow to the demands of barbarians from a far and misty land, and the kingdom of the Yi dynasty was also forced into deep introspection. King Sunjo (b. 1790, r. 1800-1848) saw his realm edge towards chaos and corruption from the beginning, and seeing this, the king of Joseon and his son Crown Prince Hyomyeong (later King Munjo, b. 1809, r. 1848-1871) began pushing for political reforms against the rigidity and metaphysical navel-gazing of Korean Neo-Confucianism as it had developed in the previous centuries. Indeed, the Treaty of Amoy spurred the royal family into action to restore the kingdom of Joseon to effectiveness, purging yangban clans that had previously opposed political reform and throwing their support wholeheartedly to the reformist and realist Silhak scholars. The 1840s thus saw the rise of disputes between the conservative yangban and old Confucian scholars on the one hand, and the Silhak scholars patronized by an increasingly absolutist and reformist royal court on the other. These came to a head with the attempted coup d’états and assassinations of Sunjo and his son in 1845 and 1847, and the ensuing bloody purges of anti-reformists starting from the ascension of Hyomyeong as King Munjo in 1848. By the time the king of Joseon was done, the yangban class had been gutted, and the radical Silhak scholars who survived the bloody purges began pushing for many reforms, among them the ending of Christian persecutions and the sending of scholars to study foreign technical methods. The former would take time and effort to implement, but by 1850 the first Korean scholars were sent to the Philippines and to Europe.

Finally, in the Pacific, the kingdom of Hawai’i – chief among the Polynesian kingdoms of the Pacific – stood relatively strong under its young king Kamehameha III Kauikeaouli (b. 1814, r. 1825 – 1885) who dealt as fairly as he could with the various interests that surrounded him. Between the continuing encroachment of the haole and the arrival of ships from men who looked far more similar to his own race, the latter began to ingratiate themselves with him as brothers. Unbeknownst to him, the Sol de Mayo expedition led by the old captain Adlao had come as yet another player in the game, and though he and his were less overtly vicious and voracious than the Europeans, the presence of a new faction would cause chaos to the delicate balance of European plans for the region.

Thus was the situation of much of the world in the middle of the 19th century, on the eve of revolution and a new order.

 

[Metempsychosis]

The Rise of the Liberal Ascendancy (1850 – 1858)

The Roots of the Liberal Party (late 1840s to 1854)

Et si domus super semetipsam dispertiatur, non potest domus illa stare. – Marcus 3:25, Biblia Vulgata
And if a house be divided against itself, that house cannot stand. – Mark 3:25, Douay-Rheims

Of all the political parties of the First Republic, the Partido Liberal is the one most full of drama and historical intrigues, changing the course of the country for better or worse. Emerging from the cracks and fissures of the old Sons of the Country party, the Liberal Party has always been a radical group pushing for the rights of man and the changes of modern society. From their radical populist policies such as land reform and the support of national industries to their culture war fracturing the Catholic supremacy of the nation, from their changing policies on social and physical infrastructure to their restructuring of Philippine foreign policy, the Liberals do much to reorient the Philippines, affecting the nation to its core. Of course, one cannot speak of the Liberal Party’s history without discussing the pivotal role and career of the controversial and polarizing Marcelino Florentino, the fiery anticlerical Ilocano firebrand himself, the man who perhaps singlehandedly shattered the consensus of the Patriotic Regime into a number of political parties fighting for different interests, a chaotic situation that establishes for a decade the so-called Liberal Ascendancy (El Ascenso Liberal) and would eventually coalesce into the Big Three Parties of the First Republic, one of them being the Liberal Party.

Before we can delve into this, however, we must delve into the background and political atmosphere of the country at the time the Liberal Party (alongside a number of others) emerged, and to do this, we must return to the administration of President Araneta and the political climate of the 1840s.

Though Araneta enjoyed a strong reputation and political mandate to the end of his administration in 1850, his second and third terms in office saw the increasing desire from various sectors of Philippine society to break away from the authoritarian one-party system of the Patriotic Regime established in the days of Palmero. Thanks to the radical changes within the republic’s society over the last few years, the various wings of the Sons of the Country were beginning to coalesce into separate and mutually hostile factions with opposing visions for the future of the country, their representatives pushing for opposing policies in the name of their local constituents as they dealt with Chinese migration into the country, the spread of Protestant sects in the various cities, and dealing with the power of the Catholic Church and its vital role in managing public education alongside the Ministry of Education. As has been said before, the mild heckling of Palmero’s semi-authoritarian regime had become a veritable flood of criticism and disputes by the late 1840s, what with the ridiculously overwrought compromises made to establish the government’s control and maintain the party’s dominance. Chief among the petty and messy disputes made during the period were the series of policies dealing with surnames made during the second term of Araneta, a series of mandates (finally completed and ratified with the Assembly-approved Alphabetic Catalogue of Surnames (Catalogo alfabetico de apellidos) in 1847) that caused shouting matches among the members of the Assembly and formed many petty grudges that would contribute to the shattering of the Sons of the Country, all over the implementation of standardized surnames. The surnames disputations (las disputas de los apellidos), with all the feuds and intra-party fissures born of it, put on full display the problems of the one-party Patriotic Regime with its inefficiency and the difficulties of expressing dissent within it. This and other disputes became the subjects of the first Filipino political satires, such as the debut work of the notorious Protestant convert Osias Buenaventura (1821-1900), the explosively popular novella La Hidra Filipina (1847), written in tandem with the political cartoonist Alejandro Dimagiba (1821-1888) whose illustration of a many-headed hydra devouring itself remained a stock image and rhetorical idea in Filipino politics.

All in all, there was much in the increasing inefficiency of the Patriotic Regime to criticize and satirize for both the conservatives who ran the Ang Dating Daan (The Old Way) publishing house and the Veritas newsletter, and the liberals who ran publishing houses such as the Casa del Sol and Prensa Civitas, and newspapers such as Ang Bagong Filipino (The New Filipino) and La Solidaridad (Solidarity). The political cartoonist Alejandro Dimagiba, though later associated with the Prensa República’s associated newspaper Diariong Maynila and the Partido Nacionalista (Nationalist Party), summarized the situation with his iconic 1847 cartoon of the HdP hydra, with its heads labeled with a number of prominent surnames. Among the labeled heads were the liberal Florentino and his eventual arch-conservative adversary, the resourceful and cunning Venancio Zamora. The message Buenaventura and Dimagiba made was clear: the Patriotic Regime had begun to outlive its usefulness, and if the country was to move forward, the political gridlock needed to be broken.

By the time Araneta handed the presidency over to his successor, the fissures in the old party were starting to form deep cracks in the party, though this would take the administration of Rojas to become clear and permanent.

The Administration of Jose Bonifacio Rojas (1850 – 1854)

"Let him work for it." – Jose Bonifacio Rojas, 1853, on learning of his successor Florentino's proposed reforms

Araneta’s successor Jose Bonifacio Rojas y Ubaldo is a Criollo industrialist and statesman, a son of the Capiz-born businessman Domingo Rojas y de Ureta and his mestizo de sangley wife Maria Saturnina Ubaldo y Vicente, born in 1814 Manila to the elite of the new Filipino society. A boy during the revolution, he grew up and matured during the rise of the republic (during which his father’s generation chose to fight for and serve under Palmero’s new regime) and saw his father establish the Casa Rojas – one of the many companies that came to dominate the Philippine economy beside such trading houses as the Batangas-based Casa Catigbac, the Casa Tuason of Mariquina, and the newly-established Casa Tiongson – alongside the liberal Peninsular of Basque descent turned earnest Filipino patriot Antonio de Ayala y de Urbina. First learning the ropes of business and management under the wings of Ayala, his father, and his haciendero uncle Antonio Rojas y de Ureta, Rojas worked hard to establish and grow his own clothing business in the 1830s (said business was absorbed into the greater Casa Rojas upon Rojas’ entrance into politics), and in 1838 he eventually married Elena Chua, the daughter of a Chinese immigrant. In the 1840s, Rojas turned from the world of business to the chaos of politics. With his family’s connections to the Araneta family, the man rose high in the Patriotic Regime, making policies that were friendly to the growth of business and the economy of the country. Despite his elite status and his usage of connections to establish himself on his Assembly seat, Rojas was not a puppet of elite interests: indeed, his time in the Assembly was spent expediting bills and laws cracking down on corruption (though pointedly not political dynasties, which was to be expected for such an elite as he) and establishing more meritocratic systems for the civil service of the country. The decade ends with him having a reputation for effective policy and reliability regarding legislating and executing laws. Unfortunately, this reputation is built upon blunt and almost authoritarian measures which have made him a number of enemies in the Assembly, enemies who would come to haunt him through his administration.

President Rojas inherits a political situation more complicated than the one inherited by his predecessor between the various issues foreign and domestic that have come up and the deluge of crises that would sweep the whole world during his administration. And unfortunately, he is not equipped for it, with his skillset more focused on decisive but blunt action than a unifying diplomacy and compromise. With this in mind, it is no wonder that Rojas is considered a complicated figure, between the Nationalists alternately praising his decisiveness and castigating his blunt actions against dissent, the Conservatives condemning his compromise with the Liberals, the Liberals alternately praising his humanitarian actions and hating his actions against dissent, and all attacking his perceived out-of-touch ivory tower elitism.

Above all, however, his reputation is polarizing because of his policies regarding the Chinese refugees from the Taiping Revolution, and for that matter, the Taiping Revolution itself. The tensions between Filipinos and unassimilated Chinese migrants are reaching a fever pitch, and accepting so many Chinese fleeing from the rising madness across the sea seems madness to more than a few, seeing the difficulties of sustaining their needs and harboring or assimilating them into the country’s society, especially in the wake of the 1851 economic panic weakening the global market and causing problems for the country. Still, Rojas knew he had to act on these crises no matter the cost, and so he did, charging into the issues of the country like a bull, opening immigration up and pushing his administration to its limits to keep these refugees both pacified and productive for the country, building infrastructure to assimilate these immigrants as swiftly as possible and sending a fleet to Taiwan to deal with the headaches of the developing political crisis occurring in his backyard. This issue kills his presidency, though his efforts are appreciated by the unfortunate: his administration begins with a strong mandate and a lot of political capital between his elite connections and his reputation for decisiveness; but by the end of his term, the strong mandate is gone, the elite connections are strained, and the reputation for decisiveness has become a liability with the shattering of the Hijos del Pais into a number of political parties over the years of 1851 and 1852, such as the Partido Liberal (nicknamed the Colorados) made up of the urban middle class and the educated liberal-minded classes and headed by Marcelino Florentino, and the Liga de los Piadosos (League of the Pious, forerunners of the Conservative Party and nicknamed the Blancos) made up of conservative peasants and gentry and elites and headed by Venancio Zamora. The rump coalition that remained under Rojas – made up of Chinese immigrants, pragmatic moderates from all walks of life, and loyalists to Palmero and Araneta – rebrands itself the Partido Nacionalista (nicknamed the Azules) and limps on after this shattering, though even they see the backlash and learn to be more pragmatic and not take future political dominance for granted.

By the 1853 elections, Rojas is tired and prematurely aged by his four years in office, eager to leave national politics well enough alone after the headaches and pains of managing an entire country and its various opinions. Ultimately, the man withdraws to his family’s businesses and does his best to avoid entering the arena of public scrutiny again. He gives what advice he can to the new generations of Nationalist politicians, but even this he gives sparingly. Above all, he does not dispute the ending of the Patriotic Regime, nor does he argue against the ascension of the radical Marcelino Florentino as president. On the contrary, Rojas is eager to go, seeing and knowing Florentino after years of working with him. There are disagreements between them, and Rojas could declare martial law and re-establish the Patriotic Regime and its one-party dominance (even with the strained relations and connections, Rojas remains a man of respect, and the army supports him), but part of the politics of a republic is sharing power and allowing for change. A consummate businessman, Rojas knows this, and thus lets go of power and retires, even knowing the reforms the iconoclastic Ilocano wants to unleash. “Let him work for it”, was the remark of the retired president upon being informed of Florentino’s agenda.

 

[Metempsychosis]

The Administration of Marcelino Florentino (1854 – 1858)

“There is one thing more despicable than a tyrant— it is a nation of slaves.” – Maximilien Robespierre

Of all the presidents of the First Republic, none are more polarizing nor more controversial than Marcelino Florentino, the man that would come to be known as the Ilocano Robespierre. A charismatic firebrand, a radical iconoclast, a demagogue claiming the mandate of the people and a brutal tyrant enforcing his laws without mercy in one, the new president stands in 1854 as the head of the republic, with a surprisingly strong mandate from the Assembly and people of the country,

Born in 1815 to a relatively obscure cousin of the main branch of the wealthy Florentinos of Vigan, Marcelino Florentino y Quema (named after his elder cousin, the more conservative family head Marcelino Florentino y Pichay) was eight years old in those heady early months of 1824 and thus – like many of his later peers – too young to participate directly in the Revolution, but the boy imbibed the atmosphere of radical change eagerly. His father Demetrio Florentino y Angco was a liberal and a believer in the revolution, calling upon his cousin to rise up against the Spaniards directly. And though the elder Marcelino – having much to lose in a revolution as a major landowner in Vigan but also holding dear his ties to his cousin – was not convinced to rise up directly against the Spanish government, Demetrio at least convinced his cousin to stay ostensibly neutral and avoid the damage that would be caused by the coming armies of Novales and his allies. As for himself, Demetrio had a young family (at the time, Marcelino was the youngest of three sons and a daughter), but also made his choice after keeping his family secure with the elder Marcelino, assembling a militia to harass Spanish forces in the region and join up with the army of Novales that was marching north. Questionable though the results of his raids against the Spanish were, the man succeeded in the latter, supporting the revolutionary armies of Novales and the gradual transition from military to civilian rule. For his efforts, Demetrio – who had made a favorable impression on Novales – became one of the chief representatives of Ilocos in the Assembly, where he quickly established himself as one of the leaders of the liberal wing of the Sons of the Country, even as his policies were opposed by the wealthy of Vigan who threw their support behind Demetrio’s far more affluent cousin, the elder Marcelino.

As Demetrio’s young son, the younger Marcelino saw – and was deeply affected by – the constant tension and antagonism between the two branches of his family, an antagonism caused by political differences that the boy also inherited. Even so, he ended up almost an aide of his father in Manila as he grew up and studied over the course of the early 1830s, accompanying his father as he worked as a member of the Assembly and watching the various debates and speeches that took place on the floor of the Lower Chamber. He came to be known as a sociable and charismatic young man, connecting easily with people from all walks of life, though especially making friends with those who would come to support him as a political ally in later years. The young Marcelino – after getting his degree in 1834 and serving for roughly a year in the military – eventually entered the Athenaeum to take up law in 1836, where he gained a reputation as a lively and formidable debater among the students, even as he wrote a number of poems and stories, and numerous essays and letters addressed to various sectors of society. In his native tongue of Ilocano, he tried to help his father by writing biting and explosively popular letters decrying the state of affairs in the region of Ilocos and its vast unused estates run by a few wealthy families, which was both ironic – considering his own initially affluent position in life – and ominous, considering his later actions.

In any case, by the time Florentino obtained his license to practice law (licenciado en jurisprudencia) in the early 1840s, he was deeply enmeshed in the political affairs of the Republic. His father had grown old, and by his son’s graduation in 1841, Demetrio was ready to retire from public life. He did what he could to position his son in government, and between his own reputation as a patriot, his son’s personal charisma, and their connections to the liberal wing of the dominant party, the younger Marcelino was able to gain the seat of his father and a junior leadership role. Around the same time, he married a Chinese mestiza, Elena Chua y Ongsiaco, with whom he had five children and a strong partnership, even considering the events of the 1850s.

With Florentino’s entrance into politics in 1842, he immediately began building a reputation for radical politics and incorruptibility as he pushed for reforms against the perennial problems of the country, between the vast estates in the provinces inflating the influence of certain families and the continuing dominance of the friar orders of the Catholic Church in government, both of which inflated the influence of the conservatives. The man made his share of enemies as he works to limit the power of the hacienderos and the still-influential friar orders, but by the same vein also gained a number of strong allies from the other major cities of the country, forming the beginnings of a liberal coalition within the Patriotic Regime. Among the more surprising allies of Florentino were the lay brotherhoods, who had certain issues with the lingering racism of such groups as the Dominicans and Benedictines, both of whom still treat the “new friars” as a second class. In any case, the alliances of Florentino were relatively flexible and broad, even as he pushed for better laws and robust amendments to the constitution of 1826, only some of which were treated as law. Eventually, he realized that the so-called Patriotic Regime was built on a single party that compromised far too often for effective policy to be implemented, and so by 1850, Florentino stood at the head of a movement to break apart the wings of the old one-party system into separate political parties. Between the economic panic caused by revolutions around the world and the bull-headed policies of Rojas draining the political capital built up over the course of the administrations of Palmero and Araneta, the early 1850s saw a breaking apart of the Sons of the Country, and among those leading the exodus from the one-party system was Florentino himself, who used his connections with the liberal student leaders to stage demonstrations against the Patriotic Regime, and used his connections with his liberal allies to separate from the Sons of the Country. He was followed by the conservatives forming their League of the Pious, and between the two splitting away from the governing party alongside a few other smaller splinters, they shattered the old order and began competing for control of the government. By the elections of 1853, the Liberal coalition stood ascendant. Between Florentino’s own force of personality pushing for reform and the mood of the people turning against authoritarian rule and towards liberalism (reflected in the various journals and newspapers hailing him and other liberal leaders for bringing the freedoms originally instituted by the constitution), the newly formed Partido Liberal gained a strong mandate to implement its reforms.

Marcelino Florentino thus begins his presidency with a strong and popular mandate. Holding the will of the people as a hammer to crush his enemies, he proceeds to begin a number of radical reforms to the government, chief among them being curtailing the role of the Catholic Church in public education, pushing for land reform, and expanding the rights enshrined in the Constitution with the 1854 Bill of Rights. Still, his predecessor Rojas would not make his job easy after the bloody betrayal that allowed the existence of more than one political party, and of the big reforms, only the Bill of Rights is an unmitigated success, being put into effect immediately. The rest of his agenda is resisted to some degree by the Blancos and the Azules, and even a few among his own party are reluctant to push the opposition too far. Thus the government falls into something of an impasse for a few months, and seeing this, Florentino begins engaging in somewhat authoritarian moves, pushing forth executive decrees to break apart the great estates of the friar orders that yet remained, manipulating and threatening the Assembly to do his will, using his connections with the military to strike against his political opponents, and other such acts of political overreach that cause dissent even among his own ranks. His culture war against the Catholic Church in particular – between his decrees deposing a number of Jesuit and other religious education supervisors, his allowing Protestant missionaries to move beyond the cities, and above all the land reform decrees breaking up many of the remaining Church estates – causes some of the radical conservatives in the provinces to rise up against the government, beginning in 1856 the first Cristero insurgency as bands of Catholic bandits raid the broken-up Church lands and hinder government officials where they can. These bandits, though fading in importance after the deposition of Florentino, continue to haunt the mountains of the country throughout the rule of the Liberal Party, never fully fading away until the end of the Ascenso Liberal in 1870. Still, Florentino’s policies are effective, if heavy-handed, and the first Philippine Cristeros did not succeed in toppling the Liberals from power, or even in rolling back their policies.

As all these domestic problems manifested in the Florentino regime, he continued the foreign policies of Rojas and the Patriotic Regime before him, allowing the expedition sent by Rojas to continue doing its thing in the wake of the utter anarchy of the Taiping Revolution, and maintaining a façade of business as usual to the outside world. He cannot maintain this façade forever, however, and to keep the country from being manipulated by outside powers, Florentino enforces martial law in the provinces in 1856, which is incredibly unpopular, and lasts only a year and a half at most, with most provinces returning to civilian rule within a year.

The Liberal Party after all these actions is left shaken, its momentum halted by the brash, authoritarian actions of its leader, and there is a worry among its other leaders that the country will fall apart or fall to foreign intervention if something is not done. Thus the party leadership ousts Florentino, pushing for a more flexible and diplomatic candidate. In the 1857 elections, Florentino is defeated by his former ally – the Mariquina-born Jose Aurelio Tuason y Florentino, a moderate liberal who ostensibly stands for rule of law.

Florentino takes his defeat with grace. Though he continues to push against the dominance of the Church and for policies that would benefit the common people of the country, he knows his defeat, and he moves towards less political affairs, though he feels in his bones that he will not survive long, having the enemies he has. So for a time, it even seems that he would reconcile with his conservative cousins in Vigan, as he travels in 1861 by land to Ilocos. It is an unfortunate time for him to travel by land. In June 12 of 1861, as his carriage travels north from the Central Plains, he is accosted in Pangasinan by a band of Cristeros and assassinated.

In the end, Marcelino Florentino leaves a complicated legacy. To liberals, he is a champion of the common man, a breaker of the Catholic Church’s vast estates and effective monopoly on education at the time of his administration, the man who broke the tyranny of the Patriotic Regime and the tight grip of various regional dynasties in the name of freedom. To conservatives, he is indeed an heir of the Jacobin Robespierre, being a godless atheist, a persecutor of priests and the Catholic Church, a rabble-rouser and troublemaker who breaks the peace of the Old Party and the concords with the Catholic Church in the name of his mad vision of progress under his tyranny. To the loyalists of the Old Party, he is a fiery demagogue who shattered Palmero’s system in the name of petty self-aggrandizement, while more moderate nationalists see positively his advancement of the national interest and the strength of his foreign and domestic reforms, though also seeing the cost of his bloody culture war that haunts the First Republic to its end. All this suits Florentino, for this man of many talents has always been a complicated person, both a deep idealist and a harsh realist, and his death at the hands of the Cristeros in 1861 elevates him almost to the status of a martyr in the eyes of many.

“Voy donde no hay esclavos, verdugos ni opresores,
Donde la fe no mata, donde el que reina es Dios.”
“I’ll go where there are no slaves, hangmen nor oppressors,
Where faith doesn’t kill, where the one who reigns is God.” – Marcelino Florentino, 1861 (OTL quote from the poem Mi Ultimo Adios by Jose Rizal)

 

[Metempsychosis]

Interlude: The Great North American War (1849 – 1853)

Where now the city on the hill that stood astride the Potomac?
Where now the speeches ringing in those marble halls of state?
How desolate now lies the hill and broken dome of Capitol;
How silent now the town and streets in this dark hour so late. – Potomac Lamentations, Anonymous

While the Philippines quietly imploded over partisan politics about the direction of the country, the United States violently exploded over the same, falling into a brutal and bloody civil war after the impotent administrations of William Henry Harrison and Henry Clay which saw near-constant tensions and political violence between various sections of American society. With Cassius Marcellus Clay’s election in 1848 after a messy contest that saw the collapse of political situation into the establishment and various anti-government radicals, the planter oligarchs put their long-held plans of secession into action, unilaterally declaring their independence from the Union, establishing a new union called the Confederation of Columbian Republics, electing as their president the fiery radical secessionist Robert Barnwell Rhett of South Carolina, and preparing the establishment of a capital in the defensible location of Montgomery in Alabama despite some calling for the capital to be placed somewhere in Virginia. Upon his election, Rhett sent an invitation to the government of the Texas Republic to join the Columbian union in exchange for military aid in their territorial disputes with the Mexican government. The president of Texas accepted the exchange, becoming its governor, and the state of Texas formally joined the Columbian Republics. The Columbian Republics assembled its armies, and prepared for war.

The younger Clay was ill-equipped to deal with this sudden secession of half the country within months of his heavily contested election, though he made a valiant effort to manage the chaos, declaring martial law and attempting to rally the United States behind him. Fortunately for the Union, the northern states responded to the call to break the secessionist rebels, and some dissenters from the southern states caused some chaos in the places claimed by the Columbians. Unfortunately for the Union, on the other hand, a number of its ambassadors from the South turned traitor against the Union and began working on persuading the powers of Europe to support the secessionists, such as the conservative side of the British oligarchy, the increasingly reactionary House of Bourbon in France, and the Russian court. These turncoats were roughly successful in slowly convincing Europe to recognize their independence from the Union, with British and Russian negotiating with the CCR from 1851 and embassies being sent to Montgomery after the war (France, on the other hand, would encounter problems with acknowledging the Columbians due to later issues).

As all of this politics and diplomacy happened in the background, the political violence that had already been ongoing – especially on the frontier – finally exploded into outright war: Missouri’s government fell into a civil war as abolitionist volunteer brigades (chief among the recently formed society called the Brotherhood of Freedom) came to overthrow the slavers in government, while the Kansas Territory – already a heated and disputed region – saw Northern settlers prepare for a fight against the Columbians who were certain to claim the area for their plantations. Among those leading the abolitionist insurgency in Missouri and the Kansas Territory were the fiery abolitionist preacher John Brown and his five sons, and such was their prominence in the struggle for the West that they were dubbed “the American Maccabees”. Also of note during this period were the activities of the Mormons under Joseph Smith, who narrowly survived the angry mobs of Illinois attempting to murder him in 1844: from Illinois, Smith and his followers also began to move west soon after his close encounters with death, moving down the Oregon Trail in 1846 and ultimately building themselves up as an increasingly strong presence in Willamette Valley (renamed the Vale of Bashan by the Mormons who had come with Smith) after much strife and peril. As the war began and the Bashan communities were firmly established, Smith and some of his followers returned east (attempting to bring the rest of the Latter-Day Saints west) to find the country split in half and fighting itself. Considering the chaos, he called upon his remaining followers in the east to come with him.

Flag of the proposed State of Bashan, as hoped for by Joseph Smith

In any case, as the paramilitary violence escalated and various sections of society began moving in the chaos, formal hostilities began in the summer of 1849 as the regimes in Washington and Montgomery prepared for war, with Clay still attempting to reason with the secessionists for a time before steeling himself for the battles to begin. General Winfield Scott led the Union forces, and led them as well as he could, considering the circumstances. He concocted a strategy to strangle the Columbian economy, which was ultimately not followed thanks to diplomatic problems across the board. Above all, General Scott knew that the war either needed to end quickly or the Montgomery regime would be able to force the Union to the table, and he struggled hard to maintain order amongst his command over a number of relatively untested officers with big egos.

“Entre los Individuos, como entre Las Naciones, El respeto al derecho ajeno es la paz.”
“Among individuals, as among nations, respect for the rights of others is peace.” – Benito Juarez

As the United States saw the chaos of civil war tear their nation apart, the Mexicans saw their own period of bloody anarchy as separatist and liberal movements across its provinces rose up against the military junta in Mexico City. The successful example of Texas in 1836 spurred on more attempts to overthrow the junta or establish their own republics separate from the junta in the capital such as the unstable Second Yucatan Republic which rose up in the mid-1840s, causing many purges and exiles of liberals from the central provinces. Among those exiled was the liberal Zapotec-descended lawyer Benito Juarez, who saw himself uprooted from his career in 1839, exiled from Oaxaca, and sent to administrate the distant, empty Californias in the name of a government he hated alongside a bunch of other liberals. Naturally, he began building the province up into a de facto independent republic and prosperous region, and searched for what allies he could find. He formed alliances and treaties with the Diné and the Nʉmʉnʉʉ peoples, welcomed the immigration of Chinese and other Asians to California (facilitated by Filipinos sympathetic to the liberals), took in the runaway slaves and renegade black abolitionists who eventually formed the Ephraimite Covenant, and tried getting the help of New Granada against the Mexican junta to mixed success. By the 1840s, Juarez had established in Los Angeles a country and regime that was what Mexico could be, and it was in the end of that decade that the junta began to call him back to the capital because of the growing crisis.

There were indeed legitimate reasons to believe the junta’s calls to return to Mexico City: with the regime in Washington in flames, Montgomery absorbing Texas to conquer large tracts of Mexican land, and General Joseph E. Johnston defeating a significant Mexican force in the First Battle of Corpus Christi, the junta needed able administrators and soldiers. Yet Juarez was not a fool, and Iturbide’s death still stood like a towering ghost haunting the country and its leaders. He had kept tabs on the political situation in the capital, and he knew the junta wanted his death just as much as they needed his abilities. He would not die as Iturbide died, and he would certainly not fall for the tricks of a junta that burned the province of Zacatecas. He indeed intended to return to Mexico City, but he did not intend to go there to save a corrupt regime of military officers high on their own petty victories while treating the threat of the Columbian Republics as smaller that the threat posed by their own people. Considering all this, Juarez made his final diplomatic move: he sent an envoy to Washington, offering an alliance. Washington accepted, and Juarez marched towards Mexico City at the head of an army, and with him were all the hopes of free Mexico and the Union alike, for he was the leader of the Northern Coalition, which would prove to be a decisive factor on the western front of the war.

For as Juarez marched south, so too did the Columbians, who had sent a comparatively small force to secure the western frontier all the way to the Rio Grande, in not beyond. Augmented by Texans and led by Johnston, this army saw little resistance from the Mexican junta’s forces, exhausted and demoralized as they were from years of fighting their own people and crushing separatists with mixed success. Still, High General Antonio Lopez de Santa Anna – who had positioned himself as Bustamante’s successor and had become the effective head of the junta in Mexico City after Bustamante’s retirement shortly before the war – prepared for a defense of the Mexican heartland against both the Northern Coalition of Juarez and the Texans under Johnston, building fortifications against the northern armies and significantly slowing their southward advances. Unfortunately for Santa Anna, his downfall – and the downfall of the First Mexican Republic and its Interim Junta – came not from either of them, but from the conservatives, who had invited the intervention of the French Bourbons. In April of 1850, a clique of conservative officers and other notables attempted to overthrow Santa Anna’s junta with the support of a French fleet stationed at Veracruz. This coup was partially successful, seeing the purge of a number of key notables in Santa Anna’s government and the state of Veracruz placed under French control, but this French intervention caused chaos as the Columbian forces defeated Santa Anna yet again in the Battle of Monterrey in June, and the forces of Juarez took over the governance of Sonora and Sinaloa, deposing the junta’s representatives in those provinces. The generalissimo, with two defeats under his belt and a rebellion in Veracruz weakening his position, decided to turn to the Columbians for support, guaranteeing the full demands of the CCR in exchange for helping him restore order to the country. Johnston accepted Santa Anna’s request, making the so-called High General a puppet of the Columbians, but the Southern general was hampered by a number of factors as he led an army of Southerners and Texans augmented by Santa Anna’s remaining loyalists, chief of which was the final blow to Santa Anna’s government: another coup d’état, but this time from Mexico City itself. For the enigmatic mercenary captain named Francisco del Aguila had risen up in September alongside a number of notables to restore the throne of the House of Iturbide under Francisco’s brother-in-law Agustin Jeronimo de Iturbide y Huarte whom he called Agustin II, Emperor of Mexico. And then, within weeks, came the reveal of Captain del Aguila’s true identity: Napoleon II Bonaparte, son of the Corsican Ogre himself. This not only caused further chaos in Veracruz (where more than a few liberal-leaning military officers defected to the Bonapartist pretender and sent news), but in France itself, where Napoleon’s return becoming a possibility caused the repression and resentment of the past few decades to explode.

In any case, Bonaparte was the one who led the defense of Mexico City against the Columbians and the remaining junta loyalists, and he pulled off a surprising victory in the highlands between Monterrey and Mexico City, where his guerrilla tactics against the Columbians drove them off. But later came the Northern Coalition forces of Juarez to square off against the Iturbide restorationists, and after a few brief skirmishes in Jalisco, the indio lawyer called for a brief truce with the son of a man who once made the world tremble. At the town of Tepic in Jalisco they met, and there the two discussed many things, speaking in a Spanish accented by their mother tongues. In the end, the Tepic Conference (La Conferencia de Tepic) near the end of 1850 was as enigmatic as the one between San Martin and Bolivar at Guayaquil a generation prior, but the results were as similar as they were surprising: Bonaparte and Juarez struck an accord to fight together against the Columbians and to reunite Mexico, and when they were done, the Iturbide family would be allowed to return home and be compensated for their estates, while also abandoning their claim to the throne of Mexico. In exchange, Mexico would make certain concessions to the conservatives and support Bonaparte and his supporters in their endeavors, so long as they left Mexico behind after its liberation.

With that, Juarez and his forces entered Mexico City alongside Napoleon in the first days of 1851, to the jubilation of the many who were tired of the authoritarian death grip of the Interim Junta and long hoped for the return of the House of Iturbide and the freedoms won in the days of Agustin I. The two, alongside Agustin II and a number of other notables, signed into law the new Mexican Constitution of 1851, a moderate document with its fair share of compromises that became the foundation of the Second Mexican Republic, a polity that – if far from perfect – would at least be stable and free enough to survive the coming decades. And Napeoleon’s own experiences in Mexican statesmanship later served him well in his later struggles across the Atlantic.

Before the coming decades, however, the duumvirate of Juarez and Bonaparte moved to throw out the invading Columbians. Thankfully for the Second Republic, Johnston had stalled in Monterrey after his battles with Bonaparte and being harassed by the guerrilla forces of Juarez, and though the Columbian general had fortified the province of Nuevo Leon against the forces of the Second Republic, his support of Santa Anna had not won many allies. Indeed, the Second Yucatan Republic began negotiations to reunite with the greater Second Mexican Republic upon hearing the return of Juarez to the capital, and the Mayan rebels also sent representatives to the capital to air out their grievances to Juarez, who had decided to remain in the capital to reestablish democracy while the military man Bonaparte marched north with one of the president’s trusted military aides. Santa Anna was swiftly becoming a liability, and even more swiftly fell from the good graces of Johnston, who quickly decided to send him back north to New Orleans, from where Santa Anna was shipped off to Montgomery, where he remained after the end of the war. Yet even this was only enough to barely keep the province from rising up against the Columbians.

In any case, the heavy defeats inflicted by the relatively small Columbian forces against the First Mexican Republic needed to be taken seriously, and negotiation with them was not an option: though the CCR had been contained to the north by General Scott’s Union Army in titanic battles of defense stretching from Missouri (Battle of Sainte Genevieve, Battle of Bird’s Point) and Kentucky (Battle of Bowling Green) to Virginia (the Chesterfield campaign), and the alliance between Juarez and the US government remained in place, both Union and Mexican forces were tied up by their respective fronts, and the capitulation of one would lead to likely defeat for the other. Thus, Bonaparte and Juarez needed to be crafty, and Johnston on the alert for their tricks. Something had to give.

Stand fast therefore in the liberty wherewith Christ hath made us free, and be not entangled again with the yoke of bondage. – Galatians 5:1, KJV

And in the end, it was the Columbians who blinked on the Mexican front, with the help of the Ephraimite Covenant. Going back to the beginning of the war, the enigmatic preacher called Ephraim had long planned for his Great Exodus from the “Egypt” that was the Deep South, sowing the seeds for at least as long as the fire-eaters were planning secession. He had gathered a circle of captains (whom he called to abandon their old names in favor of the names of the old Israelites) and allies to aid his quest, and he had organized a network of safehouses and refuges on the trail to California where he convinced Juarez to prepare places for his flock. Ephraim had sent men ahead of him in the years leading up to the war to secure the already unsettled trails to freedom, and when the secessions began, so too did Ephraim begin his plan.

The first escapes went unnoticed as the secessionists prepared for battle and tried to advance northward, gaining ground against the Union. As the weeks and months passed and the Columbians advanced across the various fronts, however, reports trickled into Montgomery of missing slaves and somewhat lower productivity on the estates of various prominent families. Then the trickle slowly increased, until 1851, when the trickle of issues with the plantations became a flood of urgent reports of violent incidents and tales of whole estates (especially on the disputed border areas of the United States) seeing mass escapes as their slave populations evaporate into the wilderness along with supplies and animals and even a few weapons. In truth, the runaways – many among them already contacts of Ephraim – had used the chaos of civil war to begin their escape from bondage, and though a number of the runaways were massacred as they trekked through the battlefields of the borderlands, the majority were able to flee to safety. Thus went the Great Exodus, and in 1851, the Rhett government reached something of a soft economic turning point which forced them to withdraw Johnston’s forces from Mexico in order to crack down on the mass escapes. With this, the Mexicans pushed north, liberating Monterrey, harassing the retreating Columbian forces, and marching across the Rio Grande, inflicting a defeat against the Columbians in the Second Battle of Corpus Christi, after which Bonaparte heard news of revolt in France and thanked the Mexicans before leaving for Europe.

Even with this, however, the government of Cassius Clay was slowly falling apart. General Scott’s methodical strategies did not lend themselves well to flashy victories which won popular support and moral victories against the Columbians, and Clay’s own moderate politics did not mesh well with the radicals, many of whom were on the front lines fighting to free the slaves. As late as 1850, President Clay still made attempts to reconcile the Columbians to the Union, and only near the end of that year – with the abolitionist control over Missouri and the Kansas territory and the victories of Juarez – did he finally realize the moral imperatives of the war. Even then, he failed to take advantage of Mexican and Ephraimite momentum in 1851. There were few real victories for the Union at the time: on the Virginia front, the Columbians had a firm advantage and strengthening momentum, and it was becoming increasingly untenable for the government to stay in Washington itself; and despite the valiant defenses on other fronts, especially on the other side of the Mississippi where Missouri and the Kansas territory took up the flag of the Union and the broken chain banners of John Brown (who was killed in battle and whose son took up the banners as Judah the Maccabee took up the standard of Mattathias), Scott’s blockades of the major ports of the CCR were not as effective as planned (indeed, the Columbians were quite successful at sea, and kept trade flowing in and out of Charleston and New Orleans) and the Union forces across most other fronts were just barely holding back the offensives of the Columbian generals.

1851 was a hard year for the Union, and Clay’s administration took a beating in the midterm elections which saw the collapse of his wartime political coalition into factional infighting, between the establishment which desired to restore the Union to what it was and the radicals who wanted radical reforms, among them the complete abolition of slavery. The lack of clear and decisive victories under General Scott and his commanders sapped the president’s political capital as Clay and his government prepared to move north to Boston or New York. As the year drew to a close, Washington had become practically deserted and emptied of its important documents and treasures which were moved to New York, with only the president and essential staff remaining in the city. It was an ominous feeling to celebrate Christmas in 1851 Washington. It felt like the end.

And in 1852, the hammer came. Scott’s subordinates led a desperate defense on the road to Washington against the forces of the newly-appointed Columbian general-in-chief Robert Edward Lee. The Arlington campaign was a brutal affair for both sides which brought into question the ability of the Columbian forces to advance anywhere else, but this did not matter, for Lee’s decisive victory at Arlington ultimately sounded the death knell of the Old Union. With the decisive defeat of the Union forces in Virginia and the Fall of Washington in the first days of the autumn of 1852, the Clay government was left demoralized enough to begin peace negotiations with Montgomery. The armistice took a few months to realize, however, for the armies in Kentucky (which had become more and more sympathetic to the Union since Bowling Green) and far southern Missouri (which had definitively become a free state after the uprising against the slaver government and the ensuing battles at Sainte Genevieve and Charleston) continued to fight. Though demoralized by the fall of Washington, some among the Union army had become increasingly radicalized against slavery: even if the South went free, the Union Army would not let the rest of the country fall into the hands of slavers. And so the Union Army drove the Columbians out of Kentucky and Missouri even after news of the fall of Washington had come. By the early months of 1853, all sides of this war were exhausted, and the Clay government surrendered to the demands of the South for independence, though with a number of stipulations thanks to the aid of the Mexicans. The Treaty of Alexandria was signed in April, with delegates from the United Kingdom, the Republic of New Granada, the Second Mexican Republic, the newly established Second French Empire, and even a number of Native American tribes from Indian Territory joining the proceedings. The conference was a dramatic affair, and most of the French delegates left before signing anything, along with a number of Mexicans. Still, one French diplomat remained to calm tensions, and in the end, the independence of the CCR was recognized, though Missouri, Kentucky, and a newly formed state called West Virginia remained part of the Union, the Texan borders confined to the Nueces River, and the Indian Territory was given full independence as well. The Columbians could not demand anything more than this, for though they were victorious, onerous demands upon the Union would cause a longer and blooder civil war, which might well have bled the South dry.

Even so, the Great North American War was a sordid and bloody affair which consigned millions to a continuing slavery, divided a budding power in half, and brought both halves into internal strife for years to come. Such was the horror of the Treaty of Alexandria that the Ephraimite Covenant became divided, with the leader Ephraim and the greater part of his flock settling down in California with the support of President Juarez, while his radical captains Joshua and Gideon taking the lesser part to continue waging a shadow war on the Columbians. Gideon’s followers, branding themselves the True Covenant of Ephraim (though more popularly known as the Gideonites), thus scattered from the Texan borderlands to the Caribbean, where they wreaked havoc on the economy of the Columbians, which was already exhausted by the chaos of the war and brought to its brink by the Great Exodus.

The “lasting peace and brotherhood” of Alexandria was anything but lasting, nor did it foster peace or brotherhood. Indeed, the betrayal of the civil war and the image of Washington burning – not due to foreign invasion, but due to the treachery of slavers – caused a lasting scar on the hearts and minds of the northerners. Reforms would come in time, as the ruin caused by the bitter strife heals over the years, but the bitterness of treachery and defeat would remain for a much longer time: some might blame the British for their perfidy (and indeed, the American government would take its vengeance on Britain), but above all the rump Union would fester with grievances against the South.

 

[Metempsychosis]

Interlude: The European Spring (1850s)

"If any of you will shoot his Emperor, here I am." – Napoleon Bonaparte, 1815

The reveal of Napoleon II in Mexico, fighting for his wife’s family against slavers and tyrants alike, caused more than just a stir across the Atlantic. After years of the Bourbons attempting to snuff out the flames of liberalism and the Revolution, years of suppressing revolts and attempts at reform, France exploded upon hearing the strange tales and rumors around the incognito years of the Bonapartist heir, and Paris burned once again with revolution. And this was just the beginning, for with the 1850 Revolution in France began a wave of revolts and revolutions against the old order all across Europe which would once again leave the continent in chaos for a decade: the European Spring, as it was called.

It started with mutinies led by soldiers disgruntled by the sluggish French economy and the oppression of the Bourbon regime, and spurred on by republicans of various stripes who had returned to the country incognito. Raising up the tricolor and declaring the Second French Republic against the regime of King Henry V of France and his key advisors such as the dowager Queen Marie-Caroline, Princess of the Two Sicilies and the Prime Minister Jules, Prince of Polignac, the soldiers and the people of Paris began an uprising that would finally succeed in throwing the royalists out of Paris before falling into infighting by the dying days of 1850 between the more moderate liberals led by Alphonse de Lamartine and a coalition of radical socialist groups led by Louis Blanc.

In the midst of this struggle came wild reports of a revolt led by a certain enigmatic Captain Francisco del Aguila in the name of the son of Agustin de Iturbide. Francisco was a supposedly half-French captain of a company of European mercenaries hired by the Mexican junta to keep unrest to a minimum in the capital and to defend it against the French who had begun to occupy Veracruz. This captain had built up something of a professional reputation over the years of fighting across the Americas for any cause, so long as it brought rewards for his men. Of course, then he moved on to Mexico, where the Interim Junta was struggling to maintain its control over its various provinces. He married a Mexican expatriate in the United States a few years prior, and wondered what he could do to help her country’s situation. It was said he served under the junta for a time and built connections with those dissatisfied with the junta’s rule, even as he acted the part of a loyal mercenary, until finally del Aguila built up an anti-junta coalition and rose up. He declared his loyalty to the Iturbide family and revealed that his wife was a daughter of Agustin I himself. His rebellion spread, and an uprising led him to travel to Veracruz to rally the men of Mexico against the junta and the Columbians alike, yet he was silent on the matter of the French.

Why he was silent became clear when he met with the French forces in Veracruz. The French forces there were led by men dissatisfied with the ultra-conservative regime of the Legitimist Bourbons, who had reigned since the Congress of Vienna and had only clamped down harder on liberalism over the years, falling into the same policies as their cousins across the Pyrenees: from the 1830 and 1832 revolts against the arch-conservative Charles X, to the disturbances caused by the penance of Carlos V of Spain in 1835 and the succession of Henry V’s uncle Louis XIX in 1836, the Legitimist regime became increasingly paranoid against even moderate liberals, and so dealt with an increasing number of French dissenters of various stripes against the increasingly authoritarian regime, whether by execution due to their treason against the crown, exile, or by sending these dissenters off to distant posts where they would supposedly do the least damage.

Among the officers in charge of the force taking over Veracruz were just such a group of disgraced unofficial exiles, Bonapartists to their core though ostensibly still loyal to France. These officers had been in touch with Charles Louis Napoleon Bonaparte, another man exiled from France in the chaos of the 1830s and the ostensible head of the Bonapartist cause, and their correspondence proved fateful to the Bourbon regime. For Louis-Napoleon had spent his time fighting to establish the Bonapartist movement from his exile in Britain, and he made oblique references to his long missing cousin, once named King of Rome and once a prisoner in the gilded cage of the Habsburg court. In truth, the two cousins had been in contact since their meeting in Italy in the 1830s, and with the revolt of Francisco del Aguila came a thrill of hope to the liberal and Bonapartist officers among the French forces in Veracruz. The meeting between Captain del Aguila and the French army confirmed their suspicions, for he revealed himself as Napoleon II, known once as King of Rome, known once as Franz, Duke of Reichstadt, known now as Captain Francisco del Aguila of the Eagle Company, husband of the Mexican Imperial Princess Josefa de Iturbide y Huarte and father of three sons and two daughters (Alexandre, b. 1841; Roland, b. 1843; Josephine, b. 1846; Augustin, b. 1846; Hélène, b. 1848). As his father once spoke, so too did he, saying the infamous words of his father as he marched to Paris: "If any of you will shoot his Emperor, here I am."

The commander of the forces, though a loyal Legitimist and reaching for his pistol, was forced to back down as the Frenchmen around him chanted “Long live the Emperor! Long live Bonaparte!” and took him and the few true Legitimists in the French army in Mexico down in a munity. Word spread across the province, and many withdrew from their posts to acclaim Napoleon as Emperor of the French and declare their allegiance to him. News spread quickly from there, and by the beginning of 1851, news had spread of “the heroic Napoleon II, son of the French eagle” and his war against the slavers of the American south and the tyrants of the Mexican junta. Rumors had spread of his career in the Americas, of his moderate liberal inclinations and his ability in statesmanship as he dealt with the leaders of the various powers of Latin America. Between this and the increasing economic and social crises across the world, the former culminating in the economic panic of 1851, the revolution took a turn as a rising faction of the increasingly turbulent Second Republic – led by Louis-Napoleon and other Bonapartists – threw in their support for the return of Napoleon II and the restoration of the Empire of the French.

All this considered, it was a wonder than Napoleon II did not return earlier to take advantage of the rising momentum, yet the captain knew he could not return to the country too early, lest the tide turned once again against the House of Bonaparte. Besides, the man who would be emperor had commitments to fulfill with the Mexicans and with his wife’s family. Thus he continued his campaign in Mexico as the chaos in France turned into a four-way civil war between the radical socialists, the liberal republicans, the ultra-conservative royalists, and the heterogeneous coalition of Bonapartists who had declared the Second French Empire. Bonaparte led a mix of Frenchmen, mercenaries, and Mexican liberals against the Texans and Columbian slavers who had occupied the country, until finally he defeated them at the Second Battle of Corpus Christi. By then, the Bonapartists were still alive – indeed, they were becoming the dominant force in French politics after the flight of Henry V to London – and increasingly eager to see their emperor once more. Indeed, upon the conclusion of the battle, Napoleon II rode swiftly south to meet with Juarez, bidding him farewell and preparing to sail back to France. From Veracruz, Bonaparte and his men sailed across the Atlantic and arrived at La Rochelle by August of 1851. His entrance into the town was met with applause, and its people acclaimed him emperor. The French Revolution of 1850-1851 was almost over, and Paris was held by the Bonapartes once more. Upon Napoleon II’s entrance into Paris and his meeting with his cousin Louis-Napoleon in September 1851, the leaders of the royalists and republicans alike had surrendered.

Assembling his family and his men, Napoleon II stood before his supporters and declared the beginning of a new era, crowning himself as his father did before him and appointing his cousin as Prime Minister and head of a committee to draft a new and truly republican constitution to rebuild France. Despite taking on his father’s legacy and using the language and symbols of the Empire to appeal to his hardcore supporters, Napoleon II was not a conqueror, nor even an authoritarian: his youth spent in the anarchy of the Americas learning politics and military command had taught him the cost of conquest and dictatorship, and he did not seek to reshape the continent according to his will alone. He sought to restore the liberties of his people and the prosperity of his nation, and with his cousin and other allies beside him, he would fight tooth and nail to make France great again.

 

[Whiteshore]

Vive L'Empereur!

 

[Metempsychosis]

“Fifty years of anarchy await you, and you will emerge from it only by the power of some dictator who will arise- a true statesman and patriot. O prating people, if you did but know how to act!” – Jean-Paul Marat, L’ami du people, vol. 7

Despite the somewhat smaller ambitions and more modest foreign policy of Napoleon’s heir, however, the 1850 French Revolution and its overthrow of the old order sparked a fire in the nations and empires of Europe which would not be extinguished by the Austrian system once established by Metternich, and the Bonaparte regime would not stand idle as the European Spring spread across Europe. First to rise up alongside the French were the Austrian puppets in northern Italy, where Giuseppe Mazzini and other leaders of the Italian nationalist movement organized a series of demonstrations and uprisings against the puppet kingdoms of the Habsburgs, such as in the Grand Duchy of Tuscany under Leopold II and the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies under King Ferdinand II, both of whom were deposed alongside the princes of most of the other Italian states in the chaos of early 1851 amidst calls for a united Italian nation against Habsburg and Bourbon domination. Pope Pius IX (formerly Cardinal Giovanni Maria Mastai Ferretti, successor of Pope Clement XV (1831 – 1841) after the Conclave of 1841) was wary of the uprisings, but between Tuscany and other principalities in the north, the Two Sicilies rebelling against the Bourbons in the south, and Napoleon’s heir making overtures to the Holy See, he and his appointed prime minister – the moderate liberal Pellegrino Rossi – sided with the liberal uprisings, though calling for moderation and the establishment of an Italian federation as opposed to a unitary nationalist state based in Rome as some like Mazzini wanted. There were a couple of assassination attempts against both the Pope and of Rossi by some of the radical groups, but neither succeeded, and these attempts only further galvanized the establishment of a conservative nationalist faction among the Italian nationalists, a faction that wanted to open negotiations with Austria.

The liberal Sardinian monarchy under Charles Albert’s son Victor Emmanuel II and his somewhat conservative prime minister Camillo Benso, Count of Cavour, on the other hand, had long prepared for this day and this struggle for Italian sovereignty, and with the support of Napoleon II, the kingdom took up arms to join their cause. Indeed, they were joined by an old friend and comrade of the new Bonaparte emperor: Giuseppe Garibaldi, a fellow mercenary captain who earned his spurs in Latin America alongside “Captain del Aguila” and built up a force of Italian volunteers to fight for the unification of Italy, the famed Garibaldini Redshirts who helped overthrow the Bourbons in the Two Sicilies and led a guerrilla campaign against the Austrians in the north.

As the puppet courts of northern Italy were driven into exile and the Austrian soldiers propping them up were thrown out by the revolutionaries in all Italian states but the increasingly unstable Kingdom of Lombardy-Venetia desperately held by Governor-General Josef von Radetzky against the Redshirt insurgency, Austria itself fell into chaos alongside a number of other German states, for German nationalists rose up in Vienna itself, calling for a single German state as Hungarians in Budapest and Czechs in Prague and a number of insurgencies in the south all rose up with them, calling for reform or even independence from the “Habsburg yoke” of the Hofburg. The prime minister of Austria at the time, the Bohemian Prince Felix of Schwarzenburg, died of a stroke as the various nations of Austria began rising up, and the arch-conservative Metternich himself was forced to flee in the night to Britain as various revolutionaries sought his head. The overwhelmed Habsburg government sought foreign support against the uprisings which had spread across their realm from Italy to Polish Galicia, but with Prussia and Russia both dealing with their own problems, Emperor Ferdinand I of Austria and his heir Archduke Francis Joseph von Habsburg-Lothringen were forced to make a number of concessions to the revolutionaries, among them the abdication of Ferdinand, the loss of Lombardy to the House of Savoy and Venice to independence after the Battle of Rovigo, and the autonomy of the Poles under the Kingdom of Galicia-Lodomeria, the Magyars under the Kingdom of Hungary, the Czechs under the Kingdom of Bohemia, and the south Slavs under the Kingdom of Croatia as separate from the Germans and other ethnicities under the Imperial Crown of Austria, which itself had established a government of liberals trying to reform the German Confederation. The resulting and brief Quintuple Crown of the Danube under the arch-conservative Francis Joseph I was a chaotic mess that forced the Habsburg emperor to make hard choices in the next months as the Diets of the various kingdoms fought for ever more autonomy at the expense of the crown and against one another over their spheres of influence, and it did not help that the collapse of the Ottomans in the prior generation had led to the rise of new powers in the Balkans ready to exploit the chaos, such as the Kingdom of Greece, the Kingdom of Bulgaria, the United Emirates of Bosnia and Albania, and the Kingdom of Serbia, all of which began wars against each other and against the Turks without the intervention of the great powers.

Speaking of the reforms in the German Confederation, the German states outside of Austria also began falling to their own uprisings as France reorganized itself under Napoleon II and Italy rose up against its masters. The German nationalist movement called for the establishment of a stronger, more liberal, and more effective pan-German government, and the various member states of the Confederation convulsed as their subjects rose up to establish a liberal government and a binding constitution for the whole region. From Baden and Bavaria to the Palatine and Saxony, various little princedoms were overthrown and the region between Prussia and Austria saw a New German Federal Diet (Neues Deutscher Bundestag) established in Frankfurt, where delegates from Vienna also came to negotiate for and establish a new Constitution for the German nation. The main hurdle was Prussia and its military government, which was initially ambivalent on the revolution. Indeed, the Prussians were inclined to crush the revolution underfoot were it not for a cadre of young military officers pulling a coup on the military in the name of the German nation, the June Revolution of 1851 which established the Berlin junta. Frederick William IV, King of Prussia, was thus suddenly left in the middle of his reign with little leverage against the revolutionaries. The Parliament in Frankfurt asked the king then if he would become the monarch and head of the movement, but he refused, not wanting to usurp the ancient prerogatives of the Habsburgs and instead suggesting the compromise of Francis Joseph being made Emperor of the Germans while he himself would take the title of Reichsfeldmarschall, or Grand Marshal of the Realm. The Parliament in Frankfurt accepted this compromise but worked alongside the Berlin junta to put hard limits on the powers of both the Habsburg emperor and the Prussian king, as well as integrate the Prussian army into a true German army with loyalty above all to the nation. As this was happening, the Quintuple Crown that was established as a compromise began to fall apart as the revolutionaries pushed for true independence, and the government in Vienna was forced to decide between Frankfurt and Budapest. Ultimately, Francis Joseph chose the former and declared his intention to become Kaiser, though he intended to rule as one. In the meanwhile, he sent his brother Maximilian to Budapest to become King of Hungary and sending his other brother Karl Ludwig to become King of Bohemia, while Galicia-Lodomeria left the union to fight alongside the Prussian and Russian Poles to fight a war of Polish independence against the Russians and Croatia remained loyal to the Austrian crown as it fought its own battles against the Bosnians and Serbs.

To study the meaning of man and of life — I am making significant progress here. I have faith in myself. Man is a mystery: if you spend your entire life trying to puzzle it out, then do not say that you have wasted your time. I occupy myself with this mystery, because I want to be a man. – Fyodor Dostoyevsky, 1839

As for Russia, the rise of a number of Orthodox nation-states in Eastern Europe would have been advantageous, if Tsar Nicholas I were not himself forced to deal with a number of revolutionary movements in his own country, between the nationalist uprisings of the Poles in concert with other Polish nationalist movements and the rise of a unified Russian liberal movement which spread like wildfire among the junior military officers even after the Decembrist Revolt of 1825. Indeed, the latter assembled behind three men (later called the Angelic Triumvirate because of the coincidence of their names) to take over the Russian government and establish a more liberal-democratic system. The military officers led by the aristocratic Mikhail Konstantinovich Tolstoy, the intellectual Gavril Ilyich Chomsky, and the charismatic peasant-descended Rafail Mikhailovich Kalashnikov planned for some years against their superiors, and marched on Moscow and Saint Petersburg in September.

The September Revolution of 1851 saw some key loyalist generals assassinated, most of the House of Romanov taken into house arrest, and the empire placed under the control of a military junta ostensibly ruling in the name of the Tsar and a newly declared Imperial Duma which was only formally convened in 1852 to establish a formal constitution for the country. The September Revolution was not bloodless and would indeed commit many atrocities in the name of a new order, for as the Triumvirate established control over the heartland, other dissenters rose up on its peripheries, between the remaining loyalists to the Tsar and his supremacy who fought on as the White Army in various regions of the empire, and exiled radicals who had established their Siberian Black League in the wake of the coup. The Poles too rose up in the west, coordinating with the Galicians and Prussian Poles to restore an independent Polish state, and with them rose other ethnic minorities, such as the Kazakhs and Turkmen of Central Asia. Still, among the Triumvirate’s key supporters were some bishops of the Russian Orthodox Church, whose independent Patriarchate was restored by their command, ostensibly in the name of the Tsar, who was a “prisoner in the Kremlin” and whose son, the future Tsar Alexander II, was also cloistered by the junta upon the death of Nicholas. Alexander II’s children, on the other hand, were allowed more freedoms than their father, though they were increasingly guided and tutored by the Triumvirate and their supporters on liberal ideas. Indeed, with the September Revolution and the freeing of a number of political prisoners and other dissenters, the intellectual atmosphere which had long been repressed in Russia bloomed as Russian writers and artists struggled to bring a new national consciousness into being, among them the radical yet deeply religious Orthodox Christian Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoyevsky, an exiled dissenter who was recalled to Moscow alongside a number of other political prisoners. Dostoyevsky became something of a social critic as he established his career as a writer, and his stories and novels and other publications resonated with the anxiety-ridden heart of the Russian nation, struggling as they were between the old world dying and the new world fighting to be born.

By the death of Tsar Nicholas in 1855, the Triumvirate had firmly established itself as the main force in Russian politics by mediating between the increasingly powerful Duma and the House of Romanov, and it was aiding the Qing remnants in Manchuria against the newly emergent and increasingly powerful Taiping Tianguo, or Taiping Heavenly Kingdom. By then, the Russian junta had crushed the White Army units and had come to an accord with the Catholic Poles, giving them their independence in exchange for their neutrality on Russia’s other fronts. Thus the Triumvirs marched on the steppe and on Siberia, reestablishing order against the last khans and the radical anarchists.

As all of this was happening, Great Britain under the young Queen Victoria and her government continued to stand mostly apart from the chaos that had engulfed the rest of Europe, though the overturning of the system established by the Congress of Vienna back in 1815 was a cause for concern for the aristocrats of the old order, to put it lightly, and the influx of exiled royalty and nobility did not help matters. Indeed, Britain itself did see some instability due to the unpopular policies of its aristocratic government, between its inaction when it came to the Irish potato famine and its support of the slave-owning Columbian Federation, and were it not for a number of factors including the little reforms the government had given the working class as concessions and the continuing prosperity of Britain itself, the working-class Chartist movement might have erupted into outright violence as the rest of Europe had. Even then, the Chartists did cause some havoc against the establishment and the fall of at least two unpopular governments over the course of the 1850s, though this chaos was not enough for the government to bring down its hammer on the movement.

As the dust settled on the decade, the European Spring had begun a new order across the continent, between the establishment of the Second French Empire, the unification of Italy and Germany, and the fragmentation of Eastern Europe into a number of new powers. The order established by the great powers of Europe was overturned, and the shape of the coming world was yet to be determined.

 

[Metempsychosis]

Interlude: The Taiping Revolution (1840s to 1861)

手握乾坤殺伐權，
斬邪留正解民懸。
眼通西北江山外，
聲振東南日月邊。
璽劍光榮存帝賜，
詩章憑據誦爺前，
太平一統光世界，
威風快樂萬千年。- 洪秀全《斬邪留正詩》

In my hand I wield the Universe and the power to attack and kill,
I slay the evil, preserve the righteous, and relieve the people's suffering.
My eyes see through beyond the west, the north, the rivers, and the mountains,
My voice shakes the east, the south, the Sun, and the Moon.
The glorious sword of authority was given by the Lord,
Poems and books are evidences that praise Yahweh in front of Him.
Taiping [Perfect Peace] unifies the World of Light,
The domineering air will be joyous for myriads of millennia. – Hong Xiuquan, Poem on Executing the Evil and Preserving the Righteous

It was 1837 and deep into in the reign of the Daoguang Emperor when the young Hakka scholar-aspirant Hong Huoxiu (courtesy name Renkun) broke down in utter despair, collapsing in agony and anxiety after years and years of preparing for and failing the imperial civil service examinations. This was the third attempt he made to pass through the formal provincial examinations. He had once placed first in the preliminary shengyuan examinations, but even after studying as hard as he could under the circumstances of his life and family, he had already failed twice in the provincial examinations at Guangzhou, where he had spent some time and was given some pamphlets and texts – including the tract Quànshì Liángyán (Good Words to Admonish the Age) by the Chinese Christian Liang Fa – by a Protestant missionary while on the way to the provincial examinations. In any case, now he had failed a third time, a crushing defeat and misfortune for a man aspiring to lift himself and his family up from their modest circumstances at great cost.

Unable to breathe, the broken young man fainted from exhaustion and failure, and was brought home to convalesce by his family of somewhat humble (though comparatively well-to-do) circumstances, for his family had begun to fear for his life. And it was in convalescence from this mental breakdown that the man had visions of a family he had in Heaven, a heavenly father who lamented the demon worship and idolatry that had become so commonplace across the Middle Kingdom, gave him a new name after considering that his old one seemed to break ancient taboos, and gave him a great golden sword to slay the demons of the earth. His heavenly brother spoke to him with words of encouragement, and swore to fight alongside him when it came time to break the dominion of the false gods who ruled the earth.

When he awakened, the revived Huoxiu renamed himself Xiuquan, and instead of aspiring towards the madness of an examination system that rejected all but a vanishingly small and likely connected elite, he sought to be a schoolteacher instead, and began teaching in several schools across his local county, where he became known for his authoritative air and his skill at teaching. When time came in the early 1840s to take the examinations, he expected failure, for he saw then the suffering and the depravity of the world and realm in which he lived, and saw the brutal defeat of his country at the hands of the so-called foreign devils shortly before his exams. He was not broken by this fourth failure as he was with the third, and indeed his discussions with his Christian cousin Li Jingfang sparked a memory of the visions he had, visions which began to make sense as he read the Quanshi Liangyan and the other Christian tracts given to him so many years ago. Soon, the man understood his mission and his true heritage, the call of his Heavenly Father who was God the Father himself, and his Heavenly Brother who was Jesus Christ: All Under Heaven had long fallen into the hands of demons like the Manchus and false teachers like Confucius, and now – in this age of sin and depravity, of famine and poverty, of over-proud scholars and cruel landlords, of tyrannical rulers and a broken people – it was the time of reckoning.

Commissioning a pair of giant iron swords, Xiuquan came down upon the idols within his house and destroyed them, breaking the statues of the Buddha and the ancestral gods, and burning the scrolls of Confucius and the sutras. Like Gideon he stood before the pyres as his family watched on, transfixed in horror and awe at the sacrilege of their son. This was a new beginning for Hong Xiuquan, and the first step to revolution.

The years following the Treaty of Amoy were quiet for the realm but fruitful for the so-called Son of God and would-be revolutionary as he preached to the people and broke their idols. The latter caused the ire of many among the established, but his authority and charisma were such that he often found a willing audience and a number of connections with some who would be his key followers over the course of his ministry across the hills and valleys of the south. Eventually, in the late 1840s, he returned to Guangzhou and looked for one of the missionaries to baptize him. It seemed for a time that none were willing to baptize such a radical dissident, but one emerged, a former Chinese Catholic convert to a radical American Protestant sect that had sent missionaries to Asia in the 1840s. The name of the man who directly baptized and anointed Hong Xiuquan was lost to history though remembered by the Taiping Christians as Master Zhang (張師父) and Hong Xiuquan’s own John the Baptist (though the name of the American missionary who taught this Zhang, Issachar Jacox Roberts, was remembered), but the point was that he did so by 1848 after a year or so of tutelage and discussion on the Bible with other missionaries. Master Zhang commissioned Hong then to spread the Good News across the nations. It was said that soon after, the Chinese missionary was killed in 1849 by the Qing for his religion and subversive activities, and upon hearing of the torturous death of his spiritual mentor, Hong swore to avenge him and free his people from the bondage of demons.

Xiuquan was back in the countryside by then, preaching more and more to the discontent masses as they suffered under the dying days of the reign of the Daoguang Emperor and the ominous and desolate opening years of the reign of the Xianfeng Emperor, and with the so-called Younger Son of God were a number of his relatives and friends who had come to his side and joined his cause, along with his two demon-slaying swords which had become as a standard to Hong’s followers. Indeed, Xiuquan had commissioned the forging of thirteen smaller swords as symbols of his mandate, and – keeping one for his personal use – he distributed each of the remaining twelve to his so-called Apostles, his most trusted friends and advisors and the men and women who would cleanse All Under Heaven with fire and sword.

First, however, would start the Nian Rebellion and the uprisings of the more Buddhist-inclined Red Turbans, who had once brought the Ming dynasty into power. The final years of the Daoguang Emperor were filled with misfortune as the effects of the Cochinchina War’s humiliation became more and more apparent, and the ascension of the prince Yizhu of the imperial Aisin-Gioro clan as the Xianfeng Emperor in 1850 was ominous, and the ceremonies of his investiture were filled with missteps that portended ill for his reign. It was clear that the empire needed change, and it was equally clear to the people that change would not be forthcoming from on high. Thus, as Xiuquan built up his following in the south and the people of China starved, the bandits and rebels of northern China rose up in greater and greater numbers, assembling behind charismatic and cunning bandit leaders to cause havoc to the empire of the Qing, while the Red Turbans and other secret societies caused havoc in the south and the various cities of the Chinese coast, with the cells of such societies as the Tiandihui (or the Heaven and Earth Society) and the Xiaodaohui (or Small Swords Society) rising up and establishing the independence of their provinces, ostensibly in the name of the Ming or new dynasties claiming the Mandate of Heaven. Each group had their own vague vision of the future of All Under Heaven, and each wholeheartedly rejected the Qing government, which was itself embroiled in court intrigue.

With all these rebellions, the Qing were slow to respond, though the gentry began to assemble militias and Western mercenaries to protect their property against the rising chaos. The empire bled from a thousand cuts, and all that was needed was a single unified force against the Manchu of Beijing.

In the midst of all this, Hong Xiuquan’s God Worshiping Society had spread like wildfire across the south, with the Second Son of God preaching heterodox Christian ideas (such as an odd interpretation of Divine filiation which allowed the leaders of the society to claim divine lineage) alongside the iconoclasm and bitter rage against the Qing for which he and his had become infamous, and when authorities discovered him in and attempted to apprehend him in 1852 after long delays in searching for its leaders, the society proper had around a hundred thousand people, and their ensuing uprisings across multiple provinces in the south of China was joined by the already disillusioned masses. Indeed, with the uprisings of 15 March 1852 came Xiuquan’s declaration of the Taiping Tianguo, the Heavenly Kingdom of Great Peace, with himself as its Heavenly King. From Jiangsu and Zhejiang to Guangxi and Guizhou, the God Worshippers and their allies rose up to cleanse the land, enforce the justice of Heaven, and slay the demons who ruled the land. Of note is the fact that women as well as men fought under the banners of the Taiping, with the women soldiers of the Taiping being disproportionately from the lower classes and the Hakka ethnicity due to the foot binding that had become commonplace over the centuries of Confucian and patriarchal rule.

Royal Seal of the Taiping Tianguo

The epicenter of the revolution was Jintian in Guangxi province, but as news of the Taiping spread across the south and its armies began to absorb various minor rebellions and societies, the movement was pulled north towards Nanjing, which was eventually taken and made the capital of the Heavenly Kingdom after a brutal assault and sack in 5 April 1853 which saw massacres and mass expulsions of Manchus. This said, however, the Taiping leaders had decided on a more fluid and amorphous campaign than was expected by many Qing loyalists, its leaders spreading across the countryside and winning the hearts and minds of the people before aiming at the cities. This strategy – cultivated by some of the veterans of the Cochinchina War who had turned to the Taiping movement and risen high within it – was successful, and allowed the Heavenly Kingdom’s forces to establish themselves beyond their southern center, even making more contact with the Nian movement, who had been fought to a near standstill by the forces of the Qing and their loyal landlord cronies. In addition, the Taiping also tried to establish some connections with the Westerners in the treaty ports, and not all these attempts to reach out were unsuccessful. Indeed, where a few adventurers in the region fought on the side of the Qing and the gentry with whom they had formed connections, a few others joined the Taiping rebels and rallied support for them.

Over the course of 1852 and into 1853, the Nian slowly became closer and closer allies to the Taiping, with whom they began integrating their forces, and thus the Qing and their gentry were driven back from Nian-held lands in the north. It did not help that the civil war in America and liberal revolutions in Europe kept the Westerners for being able to actively intervene in the deepening chaos, nor was the neutral and opportunistic stance of most foreigners helpful to the Qing dynasty’s ailing position.

With the fall of Nanjing (renamed Tianjing, or Heavenly Capital) to the Taiping in 1853, the Hui Muslims of Yunnan province also rallied behind leaders such as Du Wenxiu and the scholar Ma Dexin to establish their own polity (the Dali sultanate) as an ally of the revolutionaries against the Qing. The Dali sultanate managed to establish some connections with the British and the Burmese as well, and this connection proved vital in deciding the aftermath of the revolution.

While all this was happening in China proper, Tibet and other western protectorates of the Qing saw their own unrest as some agitated for independence, further adding to the stakes of the Great Game between the British and Russian empires. Tibet under its secular Kashag council and religious diarchy of Dalai Lama and Panchen Lama turned towards Britain, while Chinese control over Xinjiang slipped away, with the Turkic peoples and little polities of the region rebelling against the weakening Qing and attempting to reclaim their independence, even as the Angelic Triumvirate and its forces took control from the Tsar and put its own boots on the ground in the region.

As the civil war in China rose to a fever pitch and the tide of refugees across the sea became a flood, the Philippine Republic launched an expedition to Taiwan and the relatively calm oasis of Fujian province, ostensibly to maintain the security of the region and its people as well as to stem the flood of refugees and provide a neutral ground, but in truth to establish a stronger hold on the island of Formosa (long called Taiwan by the Chinese) and the Western concessions which looked towards a protector in the wake of the revolutions in Europe and the civil war in America, and found the Philippines friendly enough. The Philippine Republic also saw its own political shifts over the decade, but its foreign policy regarding China – as directed by the famous ambassador to the Qing Alberto Tiongson and his cunning brother Francisco Tiongson – remained the same: to maintain the trade with China, secure Philippine (and for now by extension Western) interests in the region, and keep the damage caused by the civil war to a minimum. The officials of the province were divided on how to deal with the interlopers, but with the central government in turmoil, the Qing loyalist warlords put on the backfoot by the Taiping and other forces, and a flood of refugees entering the province, Fujian’s government looked towards the Chinese Filipinos with less antipathy than one would have expected. They gave a frosty reception, perhaps, but ultimately Francisco Tiongson and the military officers sent with him managed to at least gain the cooperation of the province in keeping both rebels and Qing officials away and managing the tide of refugees.

有弟皆分散
無家問死生
寄書長不達
況乃未休兵
My brothers are spread all throughout the land,
No home to ask if they are living or dead.
The letters we send always go astray,
And still the fighting does not cease.
– Thinking of my brothers on a moonlit night, Du Fu

With all this happening around them, the Taiping movement seized more control over the provinces of China proper and prepared for a final push against the Qing. However, as the Heavenly Kingdom triumphed more and more against the Qing, and as the Taiping were increasingly recognized as the new Chinese dynasty, its leadership was becoming unstable, between the power struggles of the Apostles and the increasing withdrawal of the Son of God himself from secular politics. Still, as the armies of the Taiping marched on Beijing and the cities of the empire fell one by one, their leadership at least maintained the façade of unity for the final push.

The taking of Beijing in 12 October 1853 by the integrated Nian-Taiping army was a brutal affair, with the Forbidden City ransacked and its inner courts seized, its eunuchs and princes and officials slaughtered and many of its women given over to the victorious army. The city saw the Manchu population massacred or expelled, and the central government essentially destroyed in the chaos. Bloody and somewhat incomplete was the victory: the Qing armies that remained on the road to the city were among the elite, and their brutal defense of the city allowed the emperor time to escape north beyond the Great Wall alongside a portion of the imperial court, alongside a few of the princes and princesses of the Aisin-Gioro clan. Cold comfort that was to the Xianfeng Emperor, that he survived the bloody purges of the Taiping where so many of his clan and harem had not, that he escaped death where his dynasty and empire seemingly had not.

It was said by the people of Manchuria that as the last emperor of the Qing looked back on the road south to his home, he wept, and he contemplated ending his own life as his dynasty fell before his eyes, like the Chongzhen Emperor of the Ming dynasty. Then one of his young concubines – the Noble Lady Lan, among the few of the harem who escaped the Rape of Peking – rebuked him for his self-loathing, reminding him of the people who still relied upon him north of the Great Wall. Though he had failed as an emperor and was unable to save his dynasty or most of his realm, he was still needed by his people, many of whom had already been expelled from the rest of China by the Taiping.

Thus, Yizhu picked himself up and looked towards the north, where the border soldiers yet remained loyal, and with them he fortified the Great Wall against the south. He settled in the city of Mukden, where the Aisin-Gioro clan had started and where they had built an imperial palace worthy of the name, and it was from there that the former Xianfeng Emperor sent missives for aid to the Russians and other Europeans, asking for their protection against the heretical and violent Taiping.

 

[Metempsychosis]

煮豆燃豆萁，
豆在釜中泣。
本是同根生，
相煎何太急！
Beans, in flame that beanstalks feed,
Out from the pan cry,
“Sprung from the same stalk,
What need each the other fry?”
– The Seven-Step Quatrain, attributed to Cao Zhi

In the meanwhile, the triumph of the Taiping over the hated Qing was a shining moment for the former, and the fall of both imperial capitals in the same year brought prestige and recognition to the Taiping. However, beneath the surface of a China free of Manchu tyranny, the once amorphous movement had become volatile as it struggled to establish a solid government, with the Apostles of the increasingly reclusive and paranoid Heavenly King and other prominent leaders of the movement plotting and struggling against one another to enforce their own vision of China. The victories of commanders with such different visions as the relatively pragmatic moderates Yang Xiuqing and Zhang Lexing, the radical warrior poet Shi Dakai, the women soldiers Su Sanniang and Yang Yunjiao (widow of Xiao Chaogui, another early prominent Taiping leader), the Western-influenced modernizer Hong Rengan (a kinsman of Xiuquan who had spent more time under the missionaries and had risen high with his plans to bring Western ideas into China), the Hui Muslim leaders of the Dali sultanate, and many others gave them all authority and power in the chaos of the revolution, and with this authority and power came the formation of cliques and factions which began power struggles against one another almost before the fires of Beijing grew cold.

And even as the Qing were dealt mortal blows with the fall of both imperial capitals, the gentry yet stood with their militias (their organization inspired by the strategies of the late Zeng Zicheng, who had killed himself after his many defeats at the hands of Shi Dakai and the death of his brother Zeng Guoquan in one of those defeats) against the victorious Taiping armies, and themselves began an insurgency of their own, ostensibly fighting to restore the Qing and protect the traditions of China against the iconoclastic revolutionaries, and it was here that the victorious Taiping diverged in their interests, between the more conciliatory faction of Yang Xiuqing and Zhang Lexing that dominated the north and looked to form a détente with the gentry, the more radical populist faction led by Shi Dakai which gathered its support from the south and pushed to purge the country of the more egregious Qing collaborators who stood as traitors to the Han nation, and the Western-looking faction of Hong Rengan which got its support from the cities and looked on with ambiguity regarding the wealthy of the rural regions but pushed for closer relations with – and closer theology to – mainline Christians. Other factions also pushed for their own reforms and agendas, such as the Dali sultanate and other Hui groups pushing for protection of Muslims and other “Peoples of the Book”, some of the secret societies and cults who had been allies of the Taiping fighting to protect themselves in the face of a hostile atmosphere against idolatry from the central government, and the newly empowered women soldiers who had fought against the Qing pushing to ban foot binding and strengthen laws protecting women. With All Under Heaven turned upside down and the fall of the old Imperial ways that had stood for centuries, everything was up in the air, and many hands grasped for everything and anything they could reach for. The death throes of the old order and the birth pangs of the new were a period of increasing violence and intrigue, with the court of the Heavenly King struggling to maintain a sense of order and unity.

From the fall of Beijing in 1853 through 1854 to 1855, the Taiping at least maintained a semblance of unity as they consolidated their control over the country, crushed the gentry armies, and took over their estates for land redistribution. In the midst of these transformations, they even tried to send expeditions to regain control over the northern and western regions of the former Qing empire, but as the months passed, the cracks and fault lines between the three major factions began to widen more and more. The Mongol commander Sengge Rinchen, last of the prominent Qing commanders, had little in the way of military resources, but his stalwart defense against the Taiping campaign to Manchuria secured the survival of the Manchu state and widened the gap between the moderates who had less of an axe to grind against the Manchus and the Confucian system and the radicals who raged against both. It did not help that Yang Xiuqing was the commander of the forces against the Qing at the time, and his failure to end the Manchu permanently in 1854 sent rumors spinning of the Eastern King’s treason, or at least of his unwillingness to carry out to completion his lord’s orders. In any case, the tensions between the radicals and moderates rose to a fever pitch, with violence on the streets of the cities becoming more and more common.

All this came to a head in the last months of 1855, with Hong Xiuquan coming out in favor of the radicals and seeking to regain power after being quietly sidelined and ignored by his over-mighty vassals such as the former Nian leader Zhang Lexing and the powerful Eastern King. From Tianjing, the Heavenly King began a period called the Cleansing, decreeing the purging of Confucian and other “iniquitous” ideologies to restore the pure religion of the Heavenly Father, called Yahweh in the West and Shangdi in the East. The decrees included the purging of those who collaborated with the Qing government and seizing their property to be held in common by the people. For months, much that had not already been destroyed in the chaos of the civil war was burned or taken as loot, with many Confucian works and artifacts that had not been smuggled out to Manchuria or the Philippines being destroyed.

This Cleansing caused a wave of unrest across the empire that brought the Taiping movement to the brink and led to pushback from the elements of the Taiping movement that were not the original core from the God Worshipping Society, with even a few of the Taiping leaders such as the former landlord Zhang Lexing and the more Confucian-sympathetic Yang Xiuqing avoiding the carrying out of these later decrees from the Heavenly King. Thus, the northern provinces and the coastal cities avoided the brunt of the damage caused by the Heavenly King’s decrees, though even they did not come out of the iconoclasm and cultural revolution pushed by Xiuquan and his isolated clique in Tianjing unscathed.

As the months passed, the central government noticed the tense silence from the provinces of the former Nian leaders and others affiliated with the Eastern King, as well as the ambiguously worded missives from Hong Rengan and those affiliated with him. The tension finally reached a breaking point with Hong Xiuquan’s decree to depose “the defiant traitor and heretic” Yang Xiuqing, and the truly radical leaders such as Shi Dakai, the Northern King Qin Rigang, the Loyal Prince Li Xiucheng, and Xiuquan’s brother Hong Renfa answered the call to arms, while Yang made a call of his own “to depose the evil ministers who had brought the Heavenly King to madness”, to which a number of factions rallied, among them the Hui leaders of the Dali sultanate (which had by this time become the autonomous Duchy of Pingnan). Hong Rengan and others of the westernizing faction looked on in worry and stood for a time on the sidelines, using the excuse of maintaining order and beginning innovations in the regions they were pacifying. And indeed, Rengan built up his own faction over the months and years to prepare for the coming confrontation, ruling the regions under his command with acuity and carrying out reforms to modernize the provinces put under his command.

Among Rengan’s moves was to negotiate the peaceful reclamation of Fujian province from the Philippine expedition to Chinese hands, an act of hard diplomacy in the middle of 1856 that saw the release of Taiwan as the Western (and de facto Philippine) Mandate of Formosa and the security of the treaty ports as safe havens for asylum seekers and foreigners in exchange for the province as a whole to be given over to the Taiping. Fujian being given over to the Taiping was a terrifying prospect to the gentry and other prominent citizens of the province, and so Francisco Tiongson at least negotiated for them to be given asylum in the Philippines, allowed to bring their wealth, and compensated for their estates. This was not completely satisfactory to Rengan and his faction of the Taiping, but he had little choice as his compatriots prepared to destroy each other in the name of God and a new China.

And indeed, the beginning of 1857 saw blood spilled on the streets of Tianjing as Yang Xiuqing marched on the capital with an army composed of Hui and Nian behind him, and Hong Xiuquan’s radical partisans prepared a defense of the city while waiting for reinforcements from the south. The Tianjing Incident of March 1857 was a bloody battle, a coup within a civil war that saw key leaders of the movement killed or placed under house arrest, shifting the direction of the movement. The incident also coincided with a Qing loyalist offensive from the north, which tied up some of the Eastern King’s forces and forced him to ask for Rengan’s aid.

Ultimately, the Eastern King came out of the chaos triumphant after his army defeated the reinforcements of Shi Dakai and Qin Rigang. Key military leaders of the radical faction were killed, Hong Renfa and others of the Hong family confined to the new Imperial Palace, and Xiuquan himself made to recant the more radical decrees and retire to house arrest while the sons of the Heavenly King – among them Hong Tianguifu, his eldest son who was bethrothed to a daughter of the Eastern King – were raised in a less isolated environment. Yang Xiuqing himself became regent over Xiuquan and the young princes alongside Rengan, who had finally picked Yang’s side after seeing the danger posed by Xiuquan’s Cleansing for himself and wanting to maintain a united front against the outsiders for as long as it took to create a functioning and secure realm. Rengan was also made to oversee the education of the young princes while their father fell into a quiet despondence, his fire quenched by the collapse of his final bid to regain power and his subsequent confinement. Despite this despondence and confinement, however, the Heavenly King wrote many poems and other works until his death, works which in later years would become scripture in the eyes of the Taiping.

In any case, with the damage of the Cleansing done, the more radical leaders of the Taiping realm purged alongside the remaining Qing loyalists within the kingdom after the Qing offensive was defeated on the outskirts of Beijing, and the Taiping government stabilized by the efforts of Hong Rengan and Yang Xiuqing, the restructuring and reconstruction of China proper began in earnest, though minor military operations continued over the next few years, with skirmishes continuing between the Qing remnant in Manchuria and Inner Mongolia, as well as a Taiping military campaign pushing to retake the de facto independent regions of East Turkestan with mixed success. Both of these efforts pushing to the north were hindered by the Russians, who alone of the powers of Europe pushed to intervene in favor of the Qing against the “vile heresies of the so-called younger Son of God”. Even then, the Russians did not push too hard, what with their own problems with the Siberian Black League (named so for their rough black caps and coats). Still, they brought the Manchurian kingdom under their wing and pushed for their own interests in Turkestan, both of which clashed with the Taiping forces.

In the midst of all these northern skirmishes, a stable government had finally been established in the center and began sweeping reforms. As Hong Rengan commissioned the building of both civil and military infrastructure and the establishment of various essential institutions to catch up with the West, the ever-cunning Yang Xiuqing built compromises with the remaining gentry to pacify the land and began to sift through the early decrees of Hong Xiuquan to establish a new and proper code of laws for the country with the help of his brilliant female secretary Fu Shanxiang, banning foot binding and other vices while making provisions for women and the lower classes. The resulting Legal Code of the Heavenly Kingdom – built on Western legal innovations and the Heavenly King’s edicts alongside Biblical statutes and old Chinese legal traditions – was a robust code that was to be the new law of the land after its promulgation by the regent and his secretary.

In any case, with the situation of the Taiping finally stabilized around the same time as the cooling down of Europe’s first wave of revolutionary fervor, and after nearly a decade of chaos that had killed or displaced millions and devastated some of China’s wealthiest regions, the Heavenly Kingdom finally sought peace with its enemies, even if it were to be a simple armistice. With the help of the British contacts from the Duchy of Pingnan and Philippine contacts to the rest of the world, the Taiping began calling for peace in the dying months of the 1850s, welcoming even the Russians and Manchus to the peace negotiations. The 1861 Convention of Shanghai finally saw the Taiping Tianguo recognized by most of the West as the legitimate successor to the overthrown Qing dynasty, while Tibet under the Kashag (a de facto British protectorate) and Manchuria under the Aisin-Gioro clan (a de facto Russian protectorate) were recognized as independent states and the Mandate of Formosa was confirmed as a joint protectorate of the West (though a de facto Philippine client state that was to be molded into a republic). Though somewhat diminished in territory, Taiping China had established itself as a new force, and time would tell how the new regime would handle the years and decades ahead.

 

[Krueger]

Do they have plans though to reconquer Manchuria, Tibet and Formosa in the near future? I think Chinese nationalism in this period would define the borders of China as the borders of the Qing at its greatest extent.

 

[Metempsychosis]

Do they have plans though to reconquer Manchuria, Tibet and Formosa in the near future? I think Chinese nationalism in this period would define the borders of China as the borders of the Qing at its greatest extent.

For the moment, they're trying to focus on rebuilding and continuing stability. In the long term, they do have plans for expansion, but we'll see how those plans go.

 

[Whiteshore]

What happens to Mongolia here, on that note? It would be low-key appropriate if the rump Qing have more or less the borders of the Liao Dynasty IOTL.