Another Small Twist on The Road to Quebec

Updated Sunday 15 May, 2011 12:18 PM

©Final Sword Productions LLC

I personally see the Montgomery-Arnold campaign into Canada in late 1775 as on of the defining moments of US history. The main point, which I addressed in a prior AH, was that Canada would not be part of the US. I feel that this underfunded pair of expeditions mark a better chance for the US to take and keep Canada than 1812-14 for a variety of reasons.

However, there was another road not taken. As an adjunct to this campaign the Iroquois Confederacy threw in its lot with the British. Now this was by far the more likely result. With the French and their Algonquin-Huron allies defeated, the greatest threat to the Iroquois was the Yankee settlers lusting for their land and their most probable protector the British Crown.

However I am going to take the unlikely tack that the Iroquois see the British as losers and decide to do a deal. The colonials were desperate for allies. So the Iroquois become the 14^th state, being granted what is now western New York state plus large tracts of Ontario and Quebec. The Iroquois in turn send tribal militia and supplies for the Canadian campaign. As near a run thing as Arnold’s attack on Quebec was, a few hundred Indian militia and the supplies they could have brought would probably have given him victory.

To recapitulate from my Georgia AH, taking Canada changes the war completely. France immediately begins war preparations and declares war as soon as they are mobilized. The French were thirsting for revenge and only needed proof that the colonial revolt was serious. Quebec replaces Saratoga as such proof. French entry makes the US a minor theater to the British – behind India, the West Indies, the Channel and the Med.

The highline probability is some British attempts to bring back Dixie to allegiance instead of the New York – New Jersey –Philadelphia campaigns of OTL. Only here we will introduce a 2^nd change – seeing the Iroquois having pulled off a successful deal with the new US, the Cherokee do the same. Their help keeps Dixie in the US and allows the US with French aid to take Florida. In turn the US owning the Floridas leads the French to sell us Louisiana at the peace. France was broke. With the US in Mobile, Kentucky, Tennessee, Ohio and Ontario, the demographic facts on the ground would make the area effectively American in a generation. So better to take the money. The US just floats a larger loan in Amsterdam than they did in OTL for the Revolutionary War peace [essentially the money we borrowed in 1803 only 20 years earlier].

So the Philadelphia Convention in 1787 has two Indian nations participating as equals. There are many who chafe at this for racial reasons but precedent has been established. Dealing with Quebec’s Catholicism and the need for a revenue stream to pay the loan of 1783 rates MUCH higher on everyone’s objectives. So the two Indian confederacies are admitted to the Union as founding states, including normal representation in Congress.

This totally changes US – Indian relations. Our sole template in OTL was the treaty which would be speedily be broken. Beyond ill will and racism lay the fact that before the 20^th century the US government lacked any effective local enforcement mechanism. The fugitive slave laws failed because northern sheriffs and courts would not enforce them. Reconstruction failed because once restored to home rule the locals again would not enforce the 14^th and 15^th Amendments.

In this ATL the two Indian nations are taken in as states. Their court decisions have full faith and credit under the US constitution. The Indian states can enforce their land claims against white intruders under a template that fits what everybody else does. There will still be local squatters revolts, riots, vicious little wars, but the power of legality will be on the side of legitimate authority and established property rights.

The second twist is that with Louisiana in and the British out, the greater Mississippi-Ohio-Missouri basin opens to white settlement MUCH sooner. With those fertile bottomlands open the relatively infertile uplands occupied by the two Indian states simply do not get the rush of settlers they got in OTL. Why farm rocks in western NYS when you can farm bottomland in the big river valleys.

Now demographic replacement will still take place, but it will be via intermarriage and land purchase instead of war, eviction, and removals. So by 1828 when Andy Jackson is elected President there are now four such Indian states,[the 3^rd being a rump in the old southeast of the Chickasaws, Cree and Seminoles which we will arbitrarily center on the current Mississippi-Alabama border and a 4^th in Michigan plus northern Indiana for the remaining Northwestern tribes]. In all 4 the Indians will in the main be prosperous landowners intermarried into the dominant Anglo culture. Andy will still be the same hater he was. However he will now be up against 8 Senators and perhaps 14 members of the House to whom the Indian vote matters. Stealing Indian land will be seen in the context of favoring squatters over formal land title in general, which will arouse more political opposition than Jackson would have the power to deal with. He will also find these four states VERY useful during the South Carolina nullification crisis as they would tend to be reverent Unionists. Their power would be based on being part of that Union.

So you have a society that however reluctantly recognizes Indian blood as politically acceptable even if not socially so. Say Indians would rate on a par with white Catholics, Jews and Mormons - less than Anglo Saxon whites but better than the perpetual bottom of the US ladder, blacks. However a black descended ‘Indian’ with property would emphasize his Indian heritage which put him socially ahead of a black freedman. This will also create a new class of black who ‘pass’ as Indians in the same manner as President Harding is alleged to have ‘passed’ as white.

This doesn’t help the Plains or other Western Indians in the 19^th century. The gap in ‘civilization’ was just too great. However it might have offered a template whereby the Western Indians could have been consolidated into a state instead of reservations. Humans reason by analogy. Adopting an existing template is a MUCH easier sell than inventing one.

The USCW still happens. The two southern Indian states would probably have tried Kentucky’s course of neutrality. Whatever happened, it would not change the end result. The change comes post-war when the Indian states would in all probability not have been as anti-black as the rest of Dixie. There is also the outside chance of the Indian template being adopted for American blacks. The vast bulk of the blacks were in two ‘black belts’, one along the Atlantic seaboard and the other up the Mississippi valley. Had the states of Lincoln and Liberty with capitals at Memphis and Charleston respectively been carved out a lot of pain may have been avoidable. I will concede this one is a long shot on top of a long shot.

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