OMG Togo Versus the Rooskies

What Up Nerds?


My wonderful brilliant beautiful girlfriend has been traveling with her family eastwards across Siberia. She traveled very quickly right across Russia towards the pacific. I can't help but think about the days when Russia its self was charging across Siberia towards the sea and beyond. Russian expansion is some of the most remarkable in western history. And the inevitable clash that expansion caused is likewise remarkable. It resulted in one of the most interesting battles of east meet west I know of.






About a hundred and ten years before today the Russian empire was enormous. It spanned most of northern Eurasia and included much more of Europe than does present day Russia. And it was still expansionist. In the south it had, with the help of a few well chosen allies, essentially forced the concession of Port Arthur from China. And Russia had also started making inroads into Manchuria and northern Korea. The other empire that was much closer to and that was expanding into this territory was Japan.

The Russian Empire in green, Port Arthur in red, disputed Manchuria and northern Korea in pink.
(base image from Wiki)

The thirty seven year old Japanese Empire didn't think it would be able to take on Russia and any of her European allies in a war. So at first Japan offered the expansionist Russians a partition of the disputed territory, giving Russia Manchuria and giving Japan northern Korea. This wouldn't have been too bad a deal for Russia.


The Russians and Japanese negotiated on this basis, but the Russians were unwilling to consent, believing themselves to have the stronger military position. But then the Japanese secured an alliance with the British that ensured the Brits would fight off any Russian allies who joined a potential Russo-Japanese War. With this alliance the Japanese saw their position grow much stronger. So when Russia once again rejected their offer to split the disputed territory, Japan was willing to fight it out.


At this point the Japanese thought they could probably win an at least short-term victory and could  use that victory to extract concessions from Russia. The Russians felt certain they would win too, and Tsar Nicholas is rumored to have wanted war because he thought it could ignite Russian patriotic fervor.


On February 8, 1904 the Japanese declared war, and launched an attack on the Russian fleet at Port Arthur that very night. Because of how bad communication was, that was actually before the declaration of war had even reached Moscow and the Tsar. That meant that news of the Japanese attack came before the news of the war declaration. The Japanese hit the two biggest Russian battleships hard in the first attack and they injured the rest of the fleet too. Still, none of the big ships were sunk, so there was still very much a question of who would win. The Russians weren't beat by a long shot, and they dug in at their port. The Japanese used this chance to blockade the besieged Russians and to seize Korea. They landed at Inchon and quickly overran the rest of the country.


After taking Korea, the Japanese pressed on towards Port Arthur. The Japanese did their best to effect a lightning fast war that could be won before Russian reinforcements arrived in great numbers. The Russians, by contrast, tried only to slow the Japanese down as much as possible and to exact as high a casualty toll on the Japanese as possible. They succeeded at their second goal. The Japanese had completely surrounded and besieged port Arthur before too long, but they had suffered stunningly high losses. And Russia still had many more soldiers coming.

The battles were incredibly hard-fought. Some sources portray these battles as a precursor
 to the immensely  deadly  trench warfare battles of WWI. It's not a bad comparison.
(pic from Wiki)

The Japanese besieging Port Arthur sunk almost the whole Russian Pacific fleet in fairly short order by using offensive mine-laying tactics. The Russians soon hit the Japanese back with offensive mining tactics but the Japanese fleet was much closer at hand, and could more easily replenish their losses. Even so, the Russians sank a third of the Japanese battleships. The Russian position at Port Arthur was hit hard, but the battle for it was hurting the Japanese much worse than it hurt the Russians. The Japanese were not in a great position. The Tsar, perhaps not happy, was at least content.


And then the Russian commander surprised everyone on both sides of the war by surrendering. He had decided that since the fleet had been destroyed, the purpose for defending Port Arthur had been lost. So even though the Russian Empire was doing very well off of the defense of Port Arthur, he surrendered. The Japanese were ecstatic. The Russians were furious.


The Japanese fleet now tried to attack and destroy the bedraggled remnants of the Russian fleet, to knock the Russian military out of the east all together. But when a quick victory wasn't forthcoming and the word of approaching Russian reserves arrived, the Japanese commander Togo left the Russians to limp back to a friendly port, and returned to Port Arthur. No, not THAT Togo.


The  reinforcements were the ships of the Russian Baltic fleet, which was sent from the Russian home waters all the way around Europe, Africa, and Asia to reinforce the Russians. They left Russia for the far east, and they made the long journey while the land armies of the Russians and Japanese in Manchuria hunkered down for the winter.


The winter came and went, and when it went the Japanese moved their land forces to attack the town of Mukden, which was at the door of the rest of Manchuria. Both sides dug in, the Japanese attacked, and many soldiers were killed. Eventually the Russians saw that their position was about to be encircled, and retreated. They suffered 90,000 casualties. The Japanese suffered too, but they at least held Mukden for it.

The Japanese Army after Mukden.
(Pic from Wiki)

Now everything was up to the arrival of the Baltic fleet.


The Baltic fleet had a few options. They had to get to the only remaining Russian port: Vladivostok. But there were a few diffenerent ways they could go. One would be to steam around the outside around the Japanese archipelago. That was safer, but it would also give the Japanese more time to consolidate their positions. Another way would be to steam straight through the narrow straits between Japan and Korea. This was the sort of risky but daring move that had the potential to give the Russians enough speed to knock the Japanese off balance and to win the war.


The Japanese had nearly taken the entire pacific theater. So the Russian admiral decided that the necessity was worth the risk and chanced the more dangerous, shorter route. Under the cover of night he doused his fleet's lights and prepared to sneak through. Had he been fully refueled he might have forgone the maneuver and attacked the Japanese fleet outright. After all he but outnumbered and outgunned them. But he needed to fuel up, so one night he started to run the narrows.


All was going well for the Russians, except one little issue. Their safe passage required the cover of darkness. The hospital ships trailing them, in compliance with the rules of war, had to leave their lights on. Japanese fishermen spotted the hospital ships, estimated the rest of the fleet's position, and went to tell admiral Togo. Togo moved swiftly and audaciously into position to cut off and completely obliterate the Russians.


They attacked, and their attack was perfect. All the Russian battleships were sunk in that one battle, as was most of the rest of the convoy. Only three smaller Russian ships escaped to Vladivostok.

There's some pretty cool battle art too.
(Pic from Wiki)

The Japanese had won a crushing victory. The Russians ultimately could have fought on, mustered more forces and ultimately probably won. But the Russian political mood would not accept that. In 1905, the same year the Baltic fleet was destroyed, the forces of Russian society forced the Tsar to cede absolute power and create a proto-parliament. This was partly a result of the humiliating defeat to the Japanese. Maybe Russia had the capacity to continue and to win the war, but the Russian people were unwilling to do so.


And so Russian expansion in the east was halted. For a while, anyway.

OMG Gage

What Up, Nerds?

So on Friday my family found out that my mother had brain cancer. It was in her frontal lobe. Yesterday she had successful surgery to remove it. Though she'll be in for chemo and radiation for a while yet. Relief.

When the doctors asked her what year it was before the surgery, she said 2013. She had other difficulties keeping time straight. Apparently that's one thing your front brain keeps track of. But they opened up her brain, removed the tumor, and she's fine with time now.

This is the famous story of Phineas Gage, who was one of the first recorded cases of having his brain opened. He was in fact worse with time afterwards.

It was 1848. Vermont. Phineas was the foreman of a crew that was preparing railroad grade. They filled boreholes with gunpowder and blew them up to explode the railroad bed into the right shape.

This was before they invented work-place safety. One day while Gage was compaction it down, the gunpowder exploded. The blast shot the the yard long and inch and a half wide steel tamping spike right through Gage's head. Through his frontal lobe. Bam. Gage collapsed immediately.

Ka Chunk.
(Pic from Wiki)

The spike landed eighty feet away, brains and blood all over it.

A few minutes later Gage just got up, probably swore a lot, walked over to a nearby cart, and rode on it back into town.

There wasn't even a doctor in town when he got there. So they sent for one, and in the meantime Gage sat himself down and started telling anybody who would listen about how he had just shot a big metal spike through his brain. He got a pretty big crowd to listen.

No really, right through the top.
(Pic from Wiki)

When the doctor came he saw Gage had some sort of injury, but he was sure the man was lying out his ass about what it was and how he had gotten it. After a minute of Gage and the doctor arguing, Gage started to throw up and half a cup of his brains fell out. Suddenly the doctor believed Gage.

An hour later a better doctor showed up. Gage told him "I hope this injury isn't too bad."  The doctor couldn't believe Gage was alive.

Gage declined quickly after that. He spent the next few weeks in near coma, with a coffin just outside of his house for when he died. Because he was clearly going to die. Because he still had a hole clean through his head. But then after a few weeks he got up and started walking around. He got out and walked to see his friends and family every day that he could escape from his doctor's care. And a month after that he was healed enough to live life normally. His main challenge after this point was escaping the care of his doctor.

He looked a little funny now, he had a scar and a depression in his head, couldn't use his left eye, and had a paralyzed left side of the face. But apart from that he was physically fine.

Walk it off.
(Pic from Wiki)

Gage lived a fairly normal life after that, until he died "of convulsions" a few years later. After the doctors heard he was dead, they got permission, dug him up, and took his head off to study.

But what about Gage's mental health? Well, that's where the problems were. After his accident, Gage became kind of a dick. Just a douchebag in general. Not a pleasant person. Besides that he lost many of his adult reasoning abilities. And what else? He couldn't keep an appointment or keep time straight. That's about it.

And then after a few years he got better, less of a dick. Parts of his brain took up the slack, and he returned to normal, more or less.

And that is how we know why my mother thought it was 2013. Or maybe she just wasn't paying attention when they asked her. Either way.

Due to family emergency, no new posts until Monday.

OMG the Storm (N.C.4)

What Up, Nerds?

1768. Eight years before the penning of the Declaration of Independence. Seven years before the beginning of the American Revolutionary War at Lexington and Concord.


Last time we left North Carolina on the brink of a major upheaval. The whole north part of the state was chafing under the British government's partition of it into the separate Granville District. The whole western part of the state was likewise groaning under the weight of corrupt government officials, courts, and lawyers from Britain and from the east. And in the east Governor William Tryon was building himself an ostentatious opulent mansion. Carolina had suffered like this for years.

And now was the time to do something about it.



They met in the seat of the corrupt North Carolina colonial court system. This was the town of Hillsborough which lay in both the west of the state and in the Granville district, so it was especially badly hit by corruption.


 Sometimes what follows is portrayed as a dry-run for the American Revolution. But it wasn't really. The angry Carolinians who met weren't riled up for the principles of self-government. They weren't interested in the constitutional theories behind the link from taxation to representation. They were just angry about the men who had installed themselves as masters of backwater North Carolina. These men were corrupt and greedy and terrible administrators. Many of the Regulators wouldn't have gave a rat's ass about whether the administrators, were British, American, elected, or appointed. Just as long as they did their jobs correctly.


The anti corruption movement did not precede the revolution in creating an executive council, structured army, and high minded declaration of grievances. If they had written a declaration like that, it would have been pretty short. It would be something like "Fire officials who are corrupt, and don't tax us for the mansion Governor Tryon is building himself." They liked to say they just wanted some modest regulations put on the corrupt government. So they got themselves called the Regulators.


Instead of a Continental Congress the Regulators decided that they'd rather just meet as a colonial mob. No formal structure, no formal leaders. Just a community mob that would meet to f*ck sh*t up. Perhaps the best comparison you could make would be the mobs of the wild west in the 1800's who would meet and dish out cowboy vigilante justice.


So they met in Hillsborough, stormed the court, and carried off the corrupt officials. Next they tried to force the Judge to try and condemn these officials, but he managed to delay for a day and then slip away in the night. They captured the chief corrupt lawyer who was named Edmund Fanning and beat him nearly to death before burning down his house. Next they vandalized the courtroom, pooped in the judge's seat, and sat up the decomposing corpse of an enslaved man at the lawyer's bar. 


For several years the regulators held this kind of sway in the west. There was periodic violence. Petitions were circulated. But the question never really moved towards a solution. In 1770 much of the Granville district also rose up for similar purposes, but Governor Tryon obliterated that uprising with the eastern Militia.


The important thing to understand right now is the Regulator's image problem. In the west of North Carolina it was largely understood that these were just good, reasonable, simple backwoods poor folk who had been exploited by corrupt officials and lawyers. That much was actually pretty true. But in the east the officials weren't corrupt, and they didn't imagine the west was either. The Regulators just looked like wild self-entitled cowboy vigilantes. They were a literal mob of roughnecks who wouldn't accept their government, burned down the house of a "leading" citizen, and pooped in the Judge's seat.






In 1771 Governor Tryon decided enough was enough. He called together a thousand eastern militiamen and organized them into fighting order. And then he set out with his own private army to destroy the Regulators.


The Regulators decided that this would be their chance to teach those easterners that they couldn't just mess with the west. About two thousand of them gathered with guns to whoop Tryon's ass. When the sides met the Regulators showed up in an enormous armed mob of vigilantes with groups of soldiers milling around loosely appointed captains. Tryon's men were arranged in lines of battle, with cannons for support.


Both sides sent demands and conditions for peace. But the Regulators sent over petitions and emissaries without organization or collaboration. Tryon sent over demands, but these were unmet, soon the two armies faced each other over a very short distance.


It was then that the de facto leader of the Regulators left the battlefield. Why? He was a Quaker, a sect of Christianity that involves a strict pacifism. So staring battle in the face the Regulators not had no leadership.


Two Regulators had crossed the lines to try to negotiate peace, but were unsuccessful. Sensing danger, these two had tried to flee. One of them had escaped the easterners' line. The other had been captured by Tryon. And then in a fit of rage at the Regulators Tryon pulled his pistol and executed the captured peacemaker. When Tryon cooled down enough to recognize the implications of what he had done he tried to send over an emissary to cool things down. Enraged about the summary execution of their peace emissary, the Regulators opened fire when they saw one of Tryon's men approaching.


The Battle of Alamance erupted.


At first the Regulators did well. A man named Montgomery had risen up as a temporary battle leader since the Quaker leader had left. And the rebels were able to hide behind trees in the woods and fire at the easterners from there. They even managed to capture one of the governor's three cannon, though they had no ammunition. 


Governor Tryon began to see which way the battle was going and sent another emissary to offer a ceasefire. The Regulators, unfortunately, shot him. At the same time the temporary Regulator battle-leader Montgomery was shot dead. Tryon was enraged by the shooting of his peace emissary and reordered his troops to attack again.


The Regulators were trying to hold out for two hundred more reinforcements that were on on their way. But as Tryon attacked again they began to run out of ammunition. Most of them fled when they ran out of bullets, but a few stayed to fight on. Tryon had the woods they were fighting from lit on fire, and the last of the Regulators fled before their reinforcements could arrive.


In the end the battle had a surprisingly low toll. Out of a thousand easterners and two-thousand regulators, only between twenty four and thirty six people were killed. Nine of the dead were Regulators and between fifteen and twenty seven were easterners. Because he had taken the field Tryon was able to capture thirteen Regulator prisoners and he executed seven of them. Despite a good early performance, the Regulators had left the field and the spoils to Tryon. That was a significant defeat for them and Regulator military power was broken up.


Tryon roved around the captured Regulator territory with his army, burning down regulator homes and exacting even more and higher taxes to pay for his army's supplies from the battle. In the east and in the other colonies people called Governor Tryon a hero, and saw him as the fearless crusher of a bunch of lawless amoral greedy vigilantes. Social order is indeed a very difficult thing to maintain. It is perhaps one of the great underappreciated challenges in social history. And Tryon did enforce order on a fairly unordered place. But whether he was in the right to do is still a question with an ambiguous answer at best.


Many of the defeated Regulators fled further west, into the mountains in present day northeast Tennessee. There they governed themselves and in 1772 created the Republic of Watauga, which operated separately from any British or Colonial government. This republic eventually served as the nucleus for the Free Republic of Franklin after the American Revolution. Franklin applied to join the United States under the Articles of Confederation in 1785 as the first new state to be added, but lost the confirmation vote by two votes in the Continental Congress.


Eventually, Franklin became the nucleus for the State of Tenessee. But it's lost some of it's Regulator ethos since then.

OMG the East is Corrupt (N.C.3)

What Up, Nerds?


So. In 1729 the British Empire partitioned North and South Carolina into separate crown colonies. From that point on North Carolina really began to take off. There was only one little and pretty strange issue.


Back in 1729 when the eight original owners were asked to sell their shares of the Carolina Colony back to the king, one of the eight refused. Owning seven eighths of Carolina was good enough for the king though, so the government went ahead and divided North and South Carolina and started to rule them as royal colonies.


But that eighth owner who didn't sell the land back still wanted his share. For quite a while this man, the Earl of Granville couldn't do anything about the issue. He was too tied up in England where Granville's chief rival had become Prime  Minister and was busily attacking him. Until in 1742 he finally freed himself up to claim his share. The British government agreed to let him take his share out of northern North Carolina. North Carolina was a sizable and populous place, but it lacked the ports and infrastructure to substantively and directly trade with anybody but nearby colonies. Because its trade with England wasn't as important as Virginia's or South Carolina's, the Brits figured they wouldn't miss it too much. Two years later Granville had surveyed his land.


And he took the whole northern part of North Carolina.

This goddamn much.

That was a damn big chunk of the colony to just up and take. But that didn't exactly bother Granville. The government of the rest of the colony was unhappy about Granville's aquisition. The setup of Granville's grant was such that the Earl got all the revenue from taxes and tariffs from the District. But the government of the rest of the state still had to pay for the upkeep and the security of the district, because it was the government. The southern half of the colony was being forced to pay for the business of the whole thing. This made people pretty upset.


Things weren't much better in the north. As time went on the officials the British sent to the District became corrupt and ineffective. Sometimes they'd collect a tax twice and pocket the proceeds, sometime's they wouldn't collect any tax at all from their friends.


When Granville died in 1763 things only got worse. The people were ready to do something about this corrupt government of overseas Englishmen. The storm that had been brewing for the last twenty years was about to break.






But trouble in the District was only half of the foul political weather that was converging over North Carolina.


Since the early 1700's a lot of people had started immigrating to North Carolina. In the beginning they all settled along the coast. Most of these immigrants were English and Scots-Irish. Lots of them were religiously Quaker. Most of them were small farmers. But the richest of them set up plantations. The demands of both groups meant that a significant number of enslaved people got brought in to work on both the small farms and plantations. Slave labor based farming would expand so much that around mid century about a quarter of the population was enslaved black people.


This early American slavery was not as you might imagine it. The image of a large plantation with dozens of enslaved people living in shanties who are forced to labor in the fields all day is, in fact, mostly wrong. There were a few large plantations. But for quite a while during the youth of the colonies the more common experience for slaves and for slavers was the small farm with perhaps one slave on it.


In both North and South Carolina slaves were bought by masters with small holdings. They'd live lives on the rough and tumble frontier. The enslaved man and the master would cohabit. They would be each other's primary companion. They'd cooperate to get the food they needed to survive. And they had to  cooperate on any number of physical tasks, too.


For instance a frontier sawhorse only works with the skilled cooperation of both men on either end. The necessary cooperation and proximity improved the lives of many enslaved people in the period. This "sawhorse equality" did not amount to equality over the law. But it did transform the master and slave into two men alone together in the woods and struggling to survive.

See if YOU can do it on your own.

But over time the number of plantations grew. And with that growth, so too grew chattel slavery. Conditions worsened.


By mid-century and later the eastern part of North Carolina acquired a slave holding elite population. Perhaps because of the relative importance of those elites, the east maintained a fairly efficient and prosperous government.

The settlers in the east weren't all British though. The very important city at New Bern was founded and settled by Germans and Swiss-Germans. Soon this little frontier German burg gre to be North Carolina's biggest and most important town.






And then in the west settlement was a different story too. There were indeed many English settlers of the region. But these were tempered with the addition of Scots-Irish and many more German immigrants who came from Europe via Pennsylvania. They settled mostly small farms. And though slavery sometimes happened there was no real plantation economy. These immigrants soon started to fill the west of the state. By 1752, the population of North Carolina reached 100,000. By 1765 the population was 200,000.


Remember the east of the state, by virtue of its elite position, had secured for themselves a government relatively free of corruption. But the royal and British officials sent into the west had no such elite population to deal with. They abused their powers and made themselves the new elites.


They started to exploit their power in the west in much the same way that the Granville District officials abused their power. They'd extract taxes multiple times. They'd refuse to barter goods as taxes when the west suffered from an acute cash shortage. And then they'd import lawyers to sue and confiscate the farms of those who couldn't pull together the hard cash. The most prominent of them was a man named Edmund Fanning who was caught embezzling but was part of the courts system and so was only fined one penny per guilty charge.

You have to follow laws? How quaint!
(Pic from Wiki)

The westerners couldn't change the tax laws because the eastern elites denied them equal representation in the assembly. When extended droughts hit, the situation worsened and more people still began to lose their farms.


And then the Governor built himself a new mansion at the Capital at New Bern this looked like just one more sign of eastern decadence and exploitation of the west. So many of the westerners refused to pay the tax that would pay for the building. They were itching for a fight, and another political storm started to brew in the west of the state.


In 1768 the poor westerners who opposed the corrupt officials and wanted to lower taxes met in Hillsborough, NC.


And so the storm broke.

OMG the Empire of China

What Up, Nerds?


A lot of people actually know a good deal about the Chinese Revolution.


You may not be surprised to hear that the last dynasty of the Chinese empire, the Qing, fell as recently as 1911. You may know how the Chinese Nationalist Party's Republic of China ruled China for many years afterwards by using a loose confederation of self-interested warlords. You may know that this coalition fought against the weak and small Chinese Communist Party and tried to wipe it out. And it almost succeeded.


But then everything changed when the Japanese Nation attacked. They conquered the east and committed war crimes that are well remembered to this day. Eventually the Chinese helped the Americans crush the Japanese Empire.


Almost immediately the Chinese Communists and the Nationalists went to war with each other. And in a very short period the tiny Communist sphere defeated the Nationalists' incompetent and corrupt Republic of China. They replaced it with the Peoples' Republic of China, and the R.O.C. retreated to Taiwan.


There is infinity history in the story of the Chinese Revolution. Successfully telling that story would take months.


But what I want to do is look at just one crazy and awesome guy from the early days of the Republic of China. He isn't incredibly well known, but he should be.








The Qing Empire was crumbling under the weight of its incompetent administration. The Emperor and the Empress Dowager fought, died, and were replaced. Political machinations bubbled. In all of this there was a man who rose to become very prominent in the empire's waning days. He was a general by the name of Yuan Shikai. He was good at imperial politics, and he used the rough times to build himself an army that was loyal to himself alone.

Also, he looked like a total badass.
(Pic from Wiki)

This army soon became the most dominant military force in the nation. In 1911 the anti-imperial revolution started in south China. The imperial government in the north didn't really have its own army so Yuan's was the only one that might be able to put down the rebels. Similarly the republican Chinese rebels had a very weak military, and begged Yuan to join them. The team that Yuan picked was the one that would win.


Yuan played it cool while both sides worked themselves into a fit trying to get him to join them. After he'd waited long enough he finally seemed to take a side. He showed up in the Imperial court and offered to accept the position of Prime Minister. He also offered to act as regent for the boy-emperor and gave the old regent the boot. This let him install his own men in all the top positions of imperial government.


The revolutionaries were totally freaking out that they were going to be crushed by Yuan's huge army. Sun Yatsen—the first elected president of the Chinese republic—sent messages begging Yuan to join the revolution.


Yuan laughed at the revolution's pleas. And then immediately he offered to force the boy-Emperor resign as long as the revolutionaries made him their president. The republicans were torn, but given that the alternative was death they eventually accepted. Yuan made the young Emperor resign.


And Yuan got himself elected as the second president of the Republic of China.

"At last I can fulfill my dream of becoming president. Which I've had since
I decided against declaring myself the Emperor twenty minutes ago."
(Pic from Wiki)

Yuan was supposed to set up the national capital at Nanjing, but said "screw that," faked a coup, and used national security as an excuse to stay at the old imperial capital of Beijing.


The very next year the Chinese Nationalist Party won the parliamentary elections in a landslide. Their candidate for prime minister was a dynamic politician who planned to jealously guard the Parliament's power. He looked specifically to western nations like the United States with the tradition of divided powers. Yuan was less interested in this concept and decided he'd like to have all the power as president. So he had the prime minister elect killed. When the nationalist parliament tried to take power from him, he attacked their party structure, threw them into disarray, and suppressed them. At this point weren't nobody going to try to call out Yuan because he still had the army and had shown he didn't mind assassinating inconvenient people.


Now Sun Yatsen, the first republican president, fled to Japan. He called for another revolution, this time against Yuan. Yuan used the army to destroy this second revolution, dissolved almost all the institutions of the new republic, replaced them with his own "council of state" and seized control of the bureaucracy.


Yuan officially repressed the Nationalist Party. He had himself elected president again, to a longer term. He placed military governors in control of all the provinces since the military was his base of power. Then he rewrote the constitution to his liking. But as he assumed more power his popularity started to decline, especially since he was conciliatory to the unpopular and aggressive Japanese Empire.


In 1915 Yuan took it to the next level. He convened a handpicked Assembly which voted to make him emperor. He pretended to decline at first, and then accepted the position when the assembly "insisted." He declared the new Empire of China, declared him self to be the "Great Emperor of China," declared the "Era of Constitutional Abundance," and changed the flag to something really stupid looking.

Really stupid looking.
(Pic from Wiki)

Well Yuan had just f*cked up big time. You see the people had actually wanted a republic, which is why they had fought for it. So they denounced him. The international community didn't have any respect for the long-wimpy institution of the Chinese Empire. So they ignored him. And Yuan's army, which he had always relied on, thought he was trying to abandon them. So they abandoned him.


The provinces all started to declare themselves independent. They raised an army with the stated goal of restoring the republic. But since Yuan had placed military governors in control they really just seized local power and started to act like warlords. Yuan's army didn't care enough for him to actually fight the rebels. After eighty three days on the throne Yuan officially abandoned the Imperium. The great Empire of China had lasted for less than a quarter year.

Goddamn Yuan, you done messed up.
(Pic from Wiki)

This was not enough for Yuan's growing number of enemies though. The Republic of China was now officially restored but Yuan was still president. The revolutionaries demanded he should resign the presidency too. He refused to quit and the war closed in on him for two and a half more months until he died of Kidney failure. The broke out the next day. Yuan was buried ceremoniously in a lavish tomb, but it was raided and stripped by the Nationalists a few years later.


And that is how one man gave the revolution success, got himself run over by it, and left the country as a patchwork of feuding warlords who would plague it until the final victory of the Communists.

OMG Carolina Colony Part 2

What Up, Nerds?




Last thing we saw, the Carolina Colony was still trying to get off the ground.


In the center of the eastern Carolina coastline was Charleston. The English saw Charleston as the most important part of the colony. The city had a good port. It was prosperous. It did a lucrative trade with the natives. And it had good connections to England. So the eight men who owned the colony made it their colonial capital and base of operations.


The only other settlement in the colony lay on the coast of modern-day North Carolina. Two major communities had been founded in the north. One was close to Virginia and connected by both roads and sea. This was was Rogues' Harbor. A group made mostly of Virginians had settled in a settlement there that actually pre-dated the foundation of the Carolina Colony by ten tears. Between Charleston and Rogues' harbor was the town of Clarendon. Clarendon didn't have the same kind of good trade position or terrain as Charleston, and it stayed a backwater.


Indeed the whole northern part of Carolina was a bit of a backwater. To the north the great colony at Virginia had close connections with the English Empire, and to the south Charleston did too. But north Carolina was not internationally important and it only really interacted with the important colonies that flanked her on either side.

The Carolina coastline and surroundings at about 1700.
Starting on the left. The yellow dot is the Spanish settlement at  St Augustine. The red dot is Charleston, in the Carolina Colony. The blue dot is Clarendon, in the northern Carolina Colony. The Blue shaded area is Rogues' Harbor, also in northern Carolina. The red shaded area is the Virginia Colony.

Because north Carolina was such a backwater the eight English owners of the colony didn't pay it much attention. There were only about five thousand Englishmen in the north anyway. The real business was in Charleston. After a while the  decided to send an official Colonial Governor to Charleston. They sent along a "deputy" Governor to govern northern Carolina as an afterthought.


The north was not very interested in being sent a governor. They had got along just fine without one, and had even arranged their own representative assembly and council. They had even gave themselves the sort of freedoms they wanted. That included religious freedom, a rather nice thing to have. 


Freedom of religion was a rare thing in those days. So it attracted a lot of religious dissenters. Most of those dissenters were a radically pacifist and non-hierarchical sect called Quakers, who immigrated to north Carolina in such great numbers that they soon took over the politics of Rogue's Harbor.


But in 1699 the English decided that enough Quakerism was enough. They sent an Anglican Governor and an Anglican Deputy Governor and these men required that anybody who was a member of the government had to swear an oath to that government. Quaker religious practice forbade them from swearing oaths. So all the Quakers were kicked out of government.


The Quakers in the north were unhappy with this situation. They complained and complained, and gathered enough Anglican allies so that the eight owners of Carolina fired the Deputy Governor who carried out the anti-Quaker policies, a man named Tom Cary.


But the man they sent to replace Cary pressed on with the anti-Quaker policy. Now that Cary was put of office he had a change of heart. This time he allied himself with the Quakers. Cary ran in an election in the now-growing colony, declared himself against the persecution of Quakers, and won handily. Cary's replacement as Deputy Governor had held office by virtue of appointment and not by election. But Cary's election victory still meant that north Carolina now refused to treat the replacement as Deputy Governor any more. So he ran away to Virginia where he started spreading stories of how Cary had threatened to kill him. Cary assumed the Governor's office and stopped the anti-Quaker policies.

Carolina had grown a lot indeed. From the left: Spain's zone at St. Augustine (yellow),
Charleston in southern Carolina (red), the backwater settlements in northern Carolina (blue),
the enormous and populous settlement in Virginia and Maryland (red).

This map is not historically precise. It is my casual approximation of European settlement in
the 1710's. It is based on other maps from slightly earlier and later in the period.

British law said Cary wasn't actually the governor because he hadn't been appointed by the eight owners of Carolina. But in practice he governed the northern part of Carolina for several years. And then in 1711 the eight sent over a new Governor to replace him. This new replacement was a man named Hyde


At first Cary and the north Carolinians just up and let Hyde be governor. But before long the new guy started to side with the Anglicans against the Quakers. He put the anti-Quaker reforms back in place.


And at that both Cary and north Carolina were like "aw HELL no!"


First the anti-Hydeyans just found a loophole in the law that technically made the Hyde governorship illegal. With their position legally secure they just ignored Hyde's position as governor. But Hyde still had the backing of England. He declared this to be rebellion, and put together a hundred and fifty militiamen to go physically attack Cary.


Cary was a little bit screwed now. He suddenly found himself in an actual battle fighting for the Quakers. And Quakers are pacifists. Damn.


So Cary ran away about as fast as he could. He quickly holed up on a friend's plantation. While he was there his friends gathered together as many local anti-Hyde non-pacifists as they could. Cary got a few dozen men and those men brought guns and even some goddamn cannons to the fight. They fortified the plantation for battle. When Hyde got there he took one look at Cary's fortified plantation, turned around, and high-tailed it back home. Then Cary decided to go on the attack.


Cary pulled together men from all across central north Carolina so that he could make an attack on Hyde's own plantation. Despite the fact that his support mostly came from Quakers, Cary got together his own little army and even a medium sized coastal ship to and attacked Hyde's plantation. They went north to make the attack. But the battle went badly and Cary retreated again.


At this point those big Virginians even further north decided enough was enough and that these Quakers really needed to be taught a lesson about royal power. The Governor of Virginia called up a militia army and a contingent of royal marines to squash Cary. He marched south.


Cary knew he was really screwed now. He did the only thing he thought he could do and disbanded his army. The Virginians arrested him and sent him back to England to stand trial. He was sentenced to a year and a half, after which he returned to north Carolina and lived out the rest of his life.

Hyde was kind of a prick.
(Pic from Wiki)

When Hyde replaced Cary as Governor of the north he was supposed to try to further unite the northern and southern parts of Carolina Colony. But that wasn't to be. In the very same year as Cary's rebellion one half of the Tuscarora Indian people rose up and attacked the colonials in a war that spread across the entire north Carolina coast. The settlers had spread far out, and their over-friendly interactions with the other half of the Tuscarora had sparked the war. Under the onslaught Governor Hyde called out the militias and fought back. It took until 1715, but the Carolinians eventually won. The anti-British half of the Tuscarora fled north to New York and the half that had sided with Carolina took part of their territory.


And then without even a break, the natives around Charleston rode up and attacked the Carolinians in the south. They killed hundreds of people and all the British settlers fled into Charleston. The city couldn't grow food on its own though, and so it began to starve. In 1715 there was a very real threat that Charleston would be wiped off the map.

I think this map really captures the abject horror and the bloodshed.
(Pic from Wiki)

But early in the next year the Cherokee nation allied with the Brits against their other Indian foes. Once the Cherokee joined the war favored the settlers. And slowly Carolina started to get the upper hand. They pushed back their enemies until they had whooped the last one in 1717.


But over the course of all this Indian war the northern and southern halves of the Carolina government couldn't really keep in very good touch. The British efforts to unite Charleston and the north failed, and the governments fortified themselves in their notions of separation and independence. In the year 1729 the seven of the eight men who owned Carolina sold their shares of it to the king. When this happened the Brits officially reorganized Carolina into two separate colonies and so the de-facto separation of North Carolina and South Carolina became law. It wasn't until 1771 that they could actually agree about where the border was, but that was only a minor point.


The separation was probably for the best Charleston. Apart from the war Charleston had spent the period happily chugging along and growing as a trade depot. It traded with the Indians and the whole British Empire, a real intercontinental port city. Slaving plantations sprouted up around it to produce raw goods for trade.


The north also continued to expand. It welcomed more and more immigrants such as the Swiss and Germans who settled the town at New Bern. But they went to farm, not to trade and grow rich like Charlestonians did. They were mostly smaller farmers, although some slaveholders with plantations did settle all across the Carolina coast. North Carolina continued to flourish as a sort of backwater in between the two great British Imperial Colonies to her north and south. 


Three years after the partition of North and South Carolina, the new king carved off the southern section of South Carolina and made another new colony out of it. He named that Georgia, after his daddy. And so the former Carolina Colony adopted the borders we're more familiar with today.

OMG Carolina Colony Part 1

What Up, Nerds?




Between 1658 and 1660 eight men risked their lives working in a movement that was trying to replace the heir of an ambiguously benevolent dictator with the heir of their old de-throned king. They succeeded when they put the new king, Charlie Two, on the throne of England. Once king Charlie was secure in his place these eight men expected him to reward them for their part in helping to give him England.


They got their reward. It was a pretty expansive one, too. Three years after his coronation the king gave these three men a present. What was that gift?

It was all the land in blue.
I wouldn't mind finding THAT under a Christmas tree.

The king wanted to use the gift to honor his dethroned and decapitated daddy, king Charlie One. So he called it the Carolina Colony--so called because Carolus is how you say Charles in Latin, and because "Charlolina" sounds stupid. One of those eight men who were given the colony was named Lord Shaftesbury. He had his favorite secretary draw up a constitution for the Colony. And that secretary? He was none other than John Goddamn Locke, the political-philosopher and father of liberal democracy. Locke, Shaftesbury, and a friend drew the document up, and this wonderful new transcontinental colony was bequeathed a constitution.


And so the Carolina Colony got off to a great start.


There was only one problem. There were not a lot of people who thought king Charlie had owned the land in the first place. Charlie had basically only called "dibs" on the area. And that weak claim was even weaker because the Spanish had already claimed it a hundred and seventy years earlier. Never mind the local American Indians who had also already dibs-ed it long before that.


The question is that of who supported Carolina's claim to the land?


Did the inhabitants of Carolina think that the English owned the land? Nope. There were enormous numbers of people who lived in the lands that Carolina Colony occupied. But they were the American Indians who'd been hanging out on the continent for a few tens of thousands of years already. They had very little reason the care what some guy named Charlie across an ocean declared about their land.


Did any other European countries think Charlie Two owned the land? No. People either recognized the Spanish right to that land or claimed it themselves. And there were actually Spaniards living in the territory to enforce Spanish rule.


But at least the English agreed that the territory belonged to England, belonged to the king, and belonged to those eight men. Those Englishmen were willing to fight to support their King's claim. And those who lived in Carolina could fight to enforce English administration. Surely there must have been at least a few Englishmen somewhere in this huge swath of land. Right?




Well. Let's look at the land's history.


Way back in the day the English had built Lost Colony at Roanoke within the bounds of Carolina Colony. That had disappeared mysteriously, but in the far northeast corner of the territory  a small community of Englishmen had recently appeared. Ten years before Carolina Colony was chartered, there had been a few rapscallions in Virginia and other British colonies who had decided that the ungoverned Virginia frontier just had too much Johnny Law for them. So they picked up, left, and settled themselves on the inland shore of the Albermarle sound. This settlement is located in the northeast of modern North Carolina. Because of these settlers' dispositions, the Virginians called their settlement "Rogues' Harbor." That small Virginian frontier community constituted all of the Englishmen in Carolina.


So what the eight men had been given was actually lordship over these few citizens in Rogues' Harbor, and the right to fight off the Spanish and the local Indians before trying to colonize the rest.

You know what? Could I actually have a different reward?
Please? Any different reward?

Except it was an even worse deal than that. Because the king had messed up and drawn the border so that Rogues' harbor was actually just outside of the Carolina border to the northeast.


That meant that the number of Englishmen who actually lived in Carolina Colony was officially zero. The eight men had been given no citizens to live in their vast tract of territory.


So the king decided to be a little more generous, and in 1665 he added a little more land to Carolina. He added everything in the light blue below. This larger grant included the Spanish City of St. Augustine, in Florida. Needless to say, the Spaniards living there did not feel very Carolinian. Indeed, they still insisted the King of Spain's dibs from a hundred and seventy years earlier meant the whole continent belonged to them. And they were well enough armed to fight over the point. Undoubtedly the eight recipients of Carolina were somewhat less than overjoyed at this.

Oh yay, more of a reward I really don't want.

It is hard to imagine that the colony was the world's most attractive gift. But when your king gives you something you don't tell him "no." So the eight men accepted this vast swath of earth that several other people already owned. And they started planning how to make something out of it.


They decided that the first necessary step in improving Carolina was to try and get a few more Englishmen living in it. At least then they'd have somebody to rule. One man established the town of Clarendon near modern Wilmington, NC. But that town town didn't really take off though. It suffered from the northern Carolina problem of bad ports. And for the next five years Clarendon just puttered along and communed with Rogues' Harbor.


In 1670 the eight men decided to try to settle the colony again. They sailed a boat to the geographical center of the colony's east coast where they discovered a good harbor at the mouth of two rivers. They set up a new town on the edge of the wilderness there, and it flourished. They named the two rivers after one of the eight: Lord Shaftesbury. Shaftesbury's real name was Anthony Ashley Cooper. So one river was named the Ashley and the other was named the Cooper. They named the town after the king, and called it Charleston.


Charleston was a good place for a port and the city grew and flourished. Before long it was the biggest city in all of Carolina. But the success of this big old town was going to lead to some problems between the north and the south.