The Dreams End

"'When the legends die, the dreams end; there is no more greatness.'" -attributed to Tecumseh.

On October 5th, 1813, an American army under William Henry Harrison defeated an allied force of British and Native Americans at the in Upper Canada. Native leader Tecumseh was killed in battle, causing the collapse of his tribal confederacy, assembled by dint of long effort. With this defeat, the longstanding British goal of forging a Native American buffer state in the Midwest to help defend their Canadian colonies and preserve their influence in the vast fur-trading lands of central North America was rendered impossible. So was any serious military challenge to American westward expansion to Oregon; never again would Native American tribes pose such a serious threat to continued American territorial growth as they did during the.

Harrison's triumph was not inevitable. In the spring of 1813, Harrison was besieged in northwestern Ohio by a British-Native force at Fort Meigs. In May, a substantial relief force of Kentucky militiamen led by Brigadier Green Clay reached the fort and a successful sortie allowed the garrison to spike many of the besiegers' cannon. The fort held out and Harrison was able to lead the offensive that would lead to the victory at the Thames.

ATL, the capture of a scout warns the besiegers about the approaching relief force. They ambush and defeat it, preventing the garrison's reinforcement. Without the distraction provided by its advance, the sortie also fails. Consequently, Harrison, lacking reinforcements and facing effective artillery fire, is forced to surrender Fort Meigs in early June.

This has profound consequences. Without control over the, the US is forced to recognize the independence of Tecumseh's Confederacy in modern-day Indiana, Illinois, and southern Michigan at the Treaty of Ghent. Although the War of 1812 progresses much as it did OTL, including decisive American victories at New Orleans and Baltimore, American expansion into the Midwest is delayed and impeded while expansion by the slaveholding South progresses more rapidly. This creates a sectional imbalance with devastating consequences: by 1820, the South secures a sectional majority in the United States Senate. Eventually, with the aid of the, designed to boost slaveholders' political representation, it also does so in the House of Representatives. The future course of westward expansion thus strengthens the South while relatively weakening the North. This alteration in the domestic sectional balance of the United States drastically alters its future political direction from the beginning of the era of popular politics in the : rather than moving towards abolition and a free-labour industrial economy as it did OTL, it moves toward slaveholding, repressive agrarianism and a brutally revanchist, nakedly imperialistic form of Manifest Destiny - a combination of Calhounism and Jacksonian popular politics at its worst.

Key Pages

 * To come...

A Few Notes

 * In general, this timeline is meant to provide an antidote to all of the admiring, Turtledove-y, "empire of liberty" portrayals of the US in TLs I've seen. It's intended to show a very different - and much, much nastier - version of the US, driven by a lot of the same tendencies, which exerts a generally negative influence on the world as a whole, rather than a generally positive one as it did OTL.
 * It definitely does not reflect the views of its author. Indeed, the alternate world I'm trying to portray is intended to be a worse one in most respects.

Differences from OTL

 * To come...