God Bless Aaron Burr - Preface

Foreword:

The idea for this timeline came to me in two separate parts. Firstly, I wondered what America would be like if Hamilton had survived his duel with Aaron Burr. Its my belief that under the right circumstances American industrialism would have been given an early boost and because of this sectionalism would also have arrived much sooner.

Secondly, I wished to create an America that was both more violent and yet more progressive. I am a Northerner. The Civil War was fought over slavery (the state's rights issue was the right to retain slavery and nearly all economic differences between the two regions came about because of this "peculiar institution.") and as such a Southern victory, especially an earlier one, would see the institution of slavery retained for as long as possible. This being said? the South had to go to get the effect I wanted. The Southern sates, even after the Civil War, have been the bastion of American conservatism. This is not to say that all Southerners are prejudice or that the North does not have its fare share of racists. But revolutionary change very rarely arose in the South. So I had the South depart a bit early.

To enhance revolutionary fervor in the North I had them lose a couple wars, suffer economic hardship, and languish under incompetent presidents. But I found that once I had the nation to the point of revolution there were several factors that made it very different from the French or Russian revolutions.

First? the ideology was one of liberty and equality (similar to the French Revolution but different from the Russian Revolution), but unlike in the French Revolution the people of America wanted reform from newly arisen injustices not the complete overthrow of an inherently undemocratic system.

Second? the leadership, which arose to take command of the American Civil War, was to a large extent rather enlightened for their time. Men like Thaddeus Stevens and Abraham Lincoln joined forces with recent immigrants from the failed revolutions in Europe to guide the American effort. There would be no blood baths or dictatorships to arise from this revolution.

Third?there were already established frameworks that the revolutionaries could fall back upon. The Second Constitution was very similar to the original, but with some key changes. The democratic process established in the late 1700s remained very much intact even after the revolution. And for most the revolution was not about massive change but was more an effort to tidy up those areas where the Founding Fathers had been a little too hesitant to rock the boat.

Overall I wound up with a vastly more progressive North and a South that has remained very similar to our pre-Civil War South. The rest of the world is more conservative. While an early demise to the "American Experiment" would have disheartened revolutionaries worldwide a renewed post-Revolution Union would quickly become the beacon for a new wave of republicanism.

As a side note: I enjoy alternate history as a form of entertainment and as a form of teaching. To me the best alternate history makes full use of historical characters? even if the chance of the sperm that created them in OTL has a billion-to-one chance of being the one that gets there in the ATL. For me seeing historical figures live different lives allows me to better understand how they really lived. Would a Lincoln who stayed in the Army after the Black Hawk War been a similar man to what he was for real? Who can say, but exploring the possibilities is what makes AH so darn much fun.