Alternate Destinies (Napoleon's World)

This page explores the fates and destinies of real-life people who we know in our world, and how their lives were different in the timeline shaped by Napoleon's victory in 1815 over England. In many cases, figures who went into politics in OTL never entered that arena and people who are in the entertainment or sporting industries did. The timeline assumes some real-life persons never existed, and that some existed who never would have. The following list is alphabetical.

John Adams
(1735-1824) Adams, following a term as the 2nd President of the United States, spent the latter half of the Canadian War grooming his son John Quincy Adams to one day ascend to the Presidency. As his age caught up to him, Adams wrote stern warnings of the coming centuries of tension with France; he, like most educated Americans at the time, recognized a frightening new world order emerging with the victory of Napoleonic France.

John Quincy Adams
(1767-1846) The younger Adams made his name in politics as a diplomat before, during and after the Canadian War; in 1816, William Crawford asked Adams to be his Secretary of State, seeing a need to have a skilld diplomat with a dangerous, powerful France occupying a colony (Quebec) on the nation's doorstep. Adams ran in the 1820 election as Crawford's health suffered for the Presidency only to be upset in a stunning and narrow electoral loss to William Clark. Adams returned to native Massachusetts and served on the Senate, establishing himself early on as an enemy of William Clark and part of the quickly forming National Party's conservative faction.

Bill Cosby
(1937-1991) Cosby was born in Philadelphia to a working-class mother and a father serving in the United States Navy. He grew up in one of the larger black neighborhoods in Philadelphia and went to an almost all-black school up until high school. When he was eleven, he met Prescott Bush, then President of the United States, while campaigning for reelection. He would be the first of many Presidents to meet Cosby. In the 1950's, Cosby attended Temple University in Philadelphia, but in 1959 a race riot occurred on campus and all African-Americans were immediately expelled, even though Cosby was not a participant.

Cosby would finish his degree at Temple in 1961 after working as a gas station attendant for two years, but he was died several positions in the insurance industry with multiple firms because he was black. "The racism was unbelievable," Cosby said in an interview shortly before his death. "You'd go in for an interview having talked to these fellas on the phone, and the second they see you were black, they said, 'Job's taken.' I had a bachelor of arts from Temple University, I was an intellectual person. But I sure as hell wasn't white, and that was the prerequisite for getting a real job."

Cosby worked as a bartender in Philadelphia until 1966, when he finally bought his own restaurant in a richer part of the city and moved himself and his young family in. Managing a restaurant made Cosby a great deal of money and his place, West Philly Ribs, made him one of the richest and most well-known African-Americans in Philadelphia. In 1970, during the Philly race riots, Cosby famously grabbed a megaphone from Chief of Police Earl Snooker and tried to get the mob to calm down. Finally, after his famous words "Fighting whites ain't gonna get us their respect," Cosby used his connections in the community to help the police and then-Mayor Adam Eisler, who was preparing for his gubernatorial race, call a ceasefire in the most destructive race riot in American history.

Cosby's work as a mediator won him great praise, and throughout the Seventies he became a well-known figure in the burgeoning civil rights movement inspiring by the writings of Martin Luther King. King and Cosby met in 1974, when King passed the proverbial torch on to the younger civil rights leader, telling him, "I have written about what we must do for twenty years, now it's time for you to do it." After that point, Cosby was effectively the national leader of the civil rights movement, once he had the admired King's movement.

Cosby continously campaigned, rose funds, and used his charm to build a powerful black coalition that peacefully, but firmly, demanded action. When his friend Adam Eisler was elected on the Democratic ticket in 1976, Cosby seemed guaranteed of honest results in the coming years. Eisler, however, still had to appeal to the powerful Southern Democrats who wanted the progress being made during the previous two Nationalist presidents to be stymied, and Eisler's priority was social welfare and health care - and anyways, he was assassinated in 1978. The new President Neill Wallace met with Cosby on several occasions to encourage him to continue his work, but implied that he would receive little or no help from the federal government.

The Brazilian War and slumping economy caused even more strife in America, and the progress Cosby had made seemed all but lost.