raharris1973
Well-known member
1) What if Gaspard De Coligny's French colonial efforts of the 1560s and 1570s had a more northern focus?
In OTL the French Huguenot Admiral Gaspard de Coligny supported colonization attempts in Charlesfort in modern South Carolina around 1762, which failed, then Fort Caroline, near Jacksonville Florida, and then another brief failed attempt at Fort Caroline. There Spanish raids and counter-raids. The Spanish burned and exterminated Fort Caroline outright, while the Spaniards burnt the remains and hunted down the survivors of the failed Charlesfort colonies and set up their own short lived forts in that region before abandoning them. The furthest north the Spanish north the Spanish were ever recorded having a fort or mission for any period of time was Ajacan at the mouth of the Chesapeake. The extermination of For Caroline may have happened shortly after a French attempt to do the same to Spanish St. Augustine failed.
So it seems the Spanish stomped hard, and effectively, on French competition in the greater Florida area in the 1500s. They had a first mover advantage and much firmer position in the Caribbean.
What if the French tried their luck further north? Would the result have been, A: to simply draw Spanish pursuers and destroyers further north?, or B: to place the French settlements just far enough enough from easy Spanish reach to give them a decent chance to survive and endure, leading to decades of continues French colonial settlement, based on the North American east coast in the 1500s, instead of Nova Scotia and the St. Lawrence Valley in the 1600s, like OTL.
How might these locations work out in terms of survival versus Spaniards, natives, the elements, and year-to-year sustainability for the French Huguenots?
a) Roanoke/Outer Banks - North Carolina
b) James River/Delmarva - Virginia
c) Delaware Valley - Delaware/S. Jersey/Philly side
d) Jersey shore
e) Manhattan-Hudson Valley
f) Connecticut River
g) Narraganset Bay, RI
h) Cape Cod
2) What if Louis XIV's focus is shifted a bit more in the naval/colonial direction and less in the continental expansion direction?
He skips a war or two, saves some money on army forces and palaces, builds up the navy a little more, which wasn't all that behind this century anyway. Also, butterflies remove English campaign of conquest of New Netherlands circa 1665 that immediately preceded the outbreak of the 2nd Anglo-Dutch War, so New Netherlands, then stretching from north of Albany to Delaware (the former New Sweden) remains Dutch through the end of the 1660s and into the 1770s.
The French still get into the Franco-Dutch war in the 1670s, seeking Spanish Netherlands and this time also colonial gains. Like OTL, they also buy English support and at least benevolent neutrality with subsidies to the restored Charles II.
The French may or may not have any greater success than OTL on the mainland Spanish Netherlands front against the Dutch, in terms of being able to hold desired territorial gains, recognized by all in treaty, but with their larger navy and colonial/expeditionary ambitions, the French mount a successful invasion of New Netherlands during the war.
The French manage to keep at least the mainland New Netherlands colonies, recognized by the peace treaty of 1678. An option for the French is to restore New Sweden to their Swedish allies, if those allies are interested and offer sufficient reciprocal diplomatic and economic concessions or commitments to France. Restoring New Sweden would create a buffer between the extended New France and English Maryland to the south consisting of Delaware, southwest Jersey, and far southeast Pennsylvania (these last three names not yet used by England).
French control of Manhattan, Albany, the Hudson Valley, and northern and central Jersey from the 1670s provides an alternate riverine route and set of trails to reach Montreal and the St. Lawrence colonies, and helps keep New England and the English southern colonies of Maryland-Virginia-Carolina physically separate. It also puts a more ethnically and religiously diverse population, including many Protestants, including French-speaking ones, under the French Crown.
This also has vital effects on the Amerindian trades. The French now control the major trade routes to the south of the Mohawk and Iroquois nations as well as to the north. Could this force the Iroquois into an accommodation with France if they lack an independent source of trade goods arms/ammunition, or, result in an early weakening of the Iroquois in the face of French-Algonquin-Huron alliances?
Another prospect is Iroquois turning to west Connecticut and west Massachusetts New England tradesmen for arms and ammunition and trade goods.
Of course the New Englanders may want to be careful about arming Amerindian rivals of the French at this moment for fear of reciprocal retaliation, because the French could do the same thing in support of the New England Wampanoag's in King Philipp's War.
The next North American flashpoint as we move from the 1670s to the 1680s will be the area of Pennsylvania, where we have still powerful Susquehannock and Lenape Native American tribes, no European settlements on the ground, but natural claims to expansion by English Maryland and Virginia trying to fulfill northerly interpretations of charters, and French acquired New Netherlands, and New Sweden interesting in expanding into the area because of proximity and to buffer either their Great Lakes or Delaware Valley trades.
3) What if Cherokee help the Creek and Yamassee destroy Charleston in 1716?
Yamasee War - Wikipedia
The war had had already driven most whites from frontier settlements and many of the whites in Charleston to ships. What if instead of turning on the visiting Creek and Yamasee at the Tugaloo massacre, the Cherokee decided to join them in burning out Charleston and the remaining English South Carolina settlements?
Charleston is destroyed and burned down, Roanoke style. Some shiploads of survivors escape the harbor. Whites and blacks are generally killed throughout the settlements but some are taken captive and adopted, especially black slaves who are disproportionately among the abandoned people in the retreat and escape.
The Spanish in St. Augustine applaud and smile at the Englishmen, who so recently ravaged northern Florida and massacring missionized Apalachee Indians, getting massacred and expelled in turn. The Spanish assert the boundary is at least up to the Savannah River, but don't have the resources or people to make adequate settlement and governance efforts that far. Native tribal groupings dominate for the short term.
With the South Carolina colony and its plantations destroyed, the English go back to a single colony of Carolina administration for the whole colony, based out of the north, in Albemarle county.
By the 1720s, a punitive expedition of Carolina (really North Carolina), Virginia, Maryland, and Middle Colonies militia rampages through coastal South Carolina to ravage Amerindian villages loosely associated (or just assumed to be) with the Yamassee, Creek, and Cherokee destroyers of South Carolina, and maroon villages, as an act of revenge. There's no immediate resettlement however, but colonial English black market trade with Amerindians and maroons (mixed Amerindian, escaped/freed African slave communities) restarts.
In 1732 the British government moves to establish a new colony in the far south to guard the frontier against natives and the Spanish (and hypothetically, the French) - The British government teams up with General James Oglethorpe and the Trustees, and is granted the former site of South Carolina for establishment of the "Province of Georgia" as a garrison colony.
Following the design of Oglethorpe and the Trustees, it is intended to be a place for yeoman proprietors, liable for military service, drawn from the "worthy poor" fallen into debt, with slavery, alcohol, and gambling banned. Slavery is banned first as a security risk but also because of a feeling it competes with and degrades hardy labor.
The new city of Georgetown is built essentially on the old site of Charleston. Oglethorpe conducts successful diplomacy with the local Amerindians. He has the concept that raising Mediterranean style fruit crops, silk and vines will be the agricultural future of the region in addition to tobacco and a revival of rice. Germans and Scots and Scots-Irish migrate into "Georgia" in addition to Englishmen, and small groups of Protestant Waldensian Italians, free Africans from the rice coast, and Bengalis from near the EIC's properties to help reestablish rice cultivation.
The Georgia colony grows and develops over the next thirty years. In OTL, Georgia, established south of the Savannah, was slave-free from 1732-1749, but witnessed a booming prosperity in next-door South Carolina based on ever-intensifying slave-based agriculture, which led colonists to emigrate, local planters to lobby to emulate, and royal merchants to also lobby to open up Georgia to slavery. In this TL, since "Georgia" with no slavery sits on old, destroyed South Carolina, there's is no "South Carolina economic miracle" next door. North Carolina is next door, reasonably, prosperous, and has slavery, mainly on tobacco plantations, but not so lavishly prosperous as to exert an irresistible attractive force.
The lack of the South Carolina example reduces pressure for overturning the slavery ban, although over time, the most restrictive laws on property accumulation and alcohol are relaxed. The persistence of the slavery ban encourages the continued migration of religious dissident German types with religious objections to slavery introduction as well as a lack of economic interest in it.
This keeps Georgia from legalizing slavery, by the skin of its teeth until the 1760s when intermittent continental embargoes begin that occasionally interrupt slave imports, and then the ideological environment of the 1770s and American revolution and revolt of the "disloyal dozen" colonies, is not conducive to simultaneous legalization of African slavery.
Overall, "Georgia" in South Carolina is one of the lower populated colonies, with alot of its land still open range for cattle ranching and fur-hunting in addition to agriculture, and the land west and south of the Savannah is generally still frontier disputed between Spain and Britain at late as the 1750s, and administered as part of the Floridas after the British victory in the 7 Years War.
In OTL the French Huguenot Admiral Gaspard de Coligny supported colonization attempts in Charlesfort in modern South Carolina around 1762, which failed, then Fort Caroline, near Jacksonville Florida, and then another brief failed attempt at Fort Caroline. There Spanish raids and counter-raids. The Spanish burned and exterminated Fort Caroline outright, while the Spaniards burnt the remains and hunted down the survivors of the failed Charlesfort colonies and set up their own short lived forts in that region before abandoning them. The furthest north the Spanish north the Spanish were ever recorded having a fort or mission for any period of time was Ajacan at the mouth of the Chesapeake. The extermination of For Caroline may have happened shortly after a French attempt to do the same to Spanish St. Augustine failed.
So it seems the Spanish stomped hard, and effectively, on French competition in the greater Florida area in the 1500s. They had a first mover advantage and much firmer position in the Caribbean.
What if the French tried their luck further north? Would the result have been, A: to simply draw Spanish pursuers and destroyers further north?, or B: to place the French settlements just far enough enough from easy Spanish reach to give them a decent chance to survive and endure, leading to decades of continues French colonial settlement, based on the North American east coast in the 1500s, instead of Nova Scotia and the St. Lawrence Valley in the 1600s, like OTL.
How might these locations work out in terms of survival versus Spaniards, natives, the elements, and year-to-year sustainability for the French Huguenots?
a) Roanoke/Outer Banks - North Carolina
b) James River/Delmarva - Virginia
c) Delaware Valley - Delaware/S. Jersey/Philly side
d) Jersey shore
e) Manhattan-Hudson Valley
f) Connecticut River
g) Narraganset Bay, RI
h) Cape Cod
2) What if Louis XIV's focus is shifted a bit more in the naval/colonial direction and less in the continental expansion direction?
He skips a war or two, saves some money on army forces and palaces, builds up the navy a little more, which wasn't all that behind this century anyway. Also, butterflies remove English campaign of conquest of New Netherlands circa 1665 that immediately preceded the outbreak of the 2nd Anglo-Dutch War, so New Netherlands, then stretching from north of Albany to Delaware (the former New Sweden) remains Dutch through the end of the 1660s and into the 1770s.
The French still get into the Franco-Dutch war in the 1670s, seeking Spanish Netherlands and this time also colonial gains. Like OTL, they also buy English support and at least benevolent neutrality with subsidies to the restored Charles II.
The French may or may not have any greater success than OTL on the mainland Spanish Netherlands front against the Dutch, in terms of being able to hold desired territorial gains, recognized by all in treaty, but with their larger navy and colonial/expeditionary ambitions, the French mount a successful invasion of New Netherlands during the war.
The French manage to keep at least the mainland New Netherlands colonies, recognized by the peace treaty of 1678. An option for the French is to restore New Sweden to their Swedish allies, if those allies are interested and offer sufficient reciprocal diplomatic and economic concessions or commitments to France. Restoring New Sweden would create a buffer between the extended New France and English Maryland to the south consisting of Delaware, southwest Jersey, and far southeast Pennsylvania (these last three names not yet used by England).
French control of Manhattan, Albany, the Hudson Valley, and northern and central Jersey from the 1670s provides an alternate riverine route and set of trails to reach Montreal and the St. Lawrence colonies, and helps keep New England and the English southern colonies of Maryland-Virginia-Carolina physically separate. It also puts a more ethnically and religiously diverse population, including many Protestants, including French-speaking ones, under the French Crown.
This also has vital effects on the Amerindian trades. The French now control the major trade routes to the south of the Mohawk and Iroquois nations as well as to the north. Could this force the Iroquois into an accommodation with France if they lack an independent source of trade goods arms/ammunition, or, result in an early weakening of the Iroquois in the face of French-Algonquin-Huron alliances?
Another prospect is Iroquois turning to west Connecticut and west Massachusetts New England tradesmen for arms and ammunition and trade goods.
Of course the New Englanders may want to be careful about arming Amerindian rivals of the French at this moment for fear of reciprocal retaliation, because the French could do the same thing in support of the New England Wampanoag's in King Philipp's War.
The next North American flashpoint as we move from the 1670s to the 1680s will be the area of Pennsylvania, where we have still powerful Susquehannock and Lenape Native American tribes, no European settlements on the ground, but natural claims to expansion by English Maryland and Virginia trying to fulfill northerly interpretations of charters, and French acquired New Netherlands, and New Sweden interesting in expanding into the area because of proximity and to buffer either their Great Lakes or Delaware Valley trades.
3) What if Cherokee help the Creek and Yamassee destroy Charleston in 1716?
Yamasee War - Wikipedia
The war had had already driven most whites from frontier settlements and many of the whites in Charleston to ships. What if instead of turning on the visiting Creek and Yamasee at the Tugaloo massacre, the Cherokee decided to join them in burning out Charleston and the remaining English South Carolina settlements?
Charleston is destroyed and burned down, Roanoke style. Some shiploads of survivors escape the harbor. Whites and blacks are generally killed throughout the settlements but some are taken captive and adopted, especially black slaves who are disproportionately among the abandoned people in the retreat and escape.
The Spanish in St. Augustine applaud and smile at the Englishmen, who so recently ravaged northern Florida and massacring missionized Apalachee Indians, getting massacred and expelled in turn. The Spanish assert the boundary is at least up to the Savannah River, but don't have the resources or people to make adequate settlement and governance efforts that far. Native tribal groupings dominate for the short term.
With the South Carolina colony and its plantations destroyed, the English go back to a single colony of Carolina administration for the whole colony, based out of the north, in Albemarle county.
By the 1720s, a punitive expedition of Carolina (really North Carolina), Virginia, Maryland, and Middle Colonies militia rampages through coastal South Carolina to ravage Amerindian villages loosely associated (or just assumed to be) with the Yamassee, Creek, and Cherokee destroyers of South Carolina, and maroon villages, as an act of revenge. There's no immediate resettlement however, but colonial English black market trade with Amerindians and maroons (mixed Amerindian, escaped/freed African slave communities) restarts.
In 1732 the British government moves to establish a new colony in the far south to guard the frontier against natives and the Spanish (and hypothetically, the French) - The British government teams up with General James Oglethorpe and the Trustees, and is granted the former site of South Carolina for establishment of the "Province of Georgia" as a garrison colony.
Following the design of Oglethorpe and the Trustees, it is intended to be a place for yeoman proprietors, liable for military service, drawn from the "worthy poor" fallen into debt, with slavery, alcohol, and gambling banned. Slavery is banned first as a security risk but also because of a feeling it competes with and degrades hardy labor.
The new city of Georgetown is built essentially on the old site of Charleston. Oglethorpe conducts successful diplomacy with the local Amerindians. He has the concept that raising Mediterranean style fruit crops, silk and vines will be the agricultural future of the region in addition to tobacco and a revival of rice. Germans and Scots and Scots-Irish migrate into "Georgia" in addition to Englishmen, and small groups of Protestant Waldensian Italians, free Africans from the rice coast, and Bengalis from near the EIC's properties to help reestablish rice cultivation.
The Georgia colony grows and develops over the next thirty years. In OTL, Georgia, established south of the Savannah, was slave-free from 1732-1749, but witnessed a booming prosperity in next-door South Carolina based on ever-intensifying slave-based agriculture, which led colonists to emigrate, local planters to lobby to emulate, and royal merchants to also lobby to open up Georgia to slavery. In this TL, since "Georgia" with no slavery sits on old, destroyed South Carolina, there's is no "South Carolina economic miracle" next door. North Carolina is next door, reasonably, prosperous, and has slavery, mainly on tobacco plantations, but not so lavishly prosperous as to exert an irresistible attractive force.
The lack of the South Carolina example reduces pressure for overturning the slavery ban, although over time, the most restrictive laws on property accumulation and alcohol are relaxed. The persistence of the slavery ban encourages the continued migration of religious dissident German types with religious objections to slavery introduction as well as a lack of economic interest in it.
This keeps Georgia from legalizing slavery, by the skin of its teeth until the 1760s when intermittent continental embargoes begin that occasionally interrupt slave imports, and then the ideological environment of the 1770s and American revolution and revolt of the "disloyal dozen" colonies, is not conducive to simultaneous legalization of African slavery.
Overall, "Georgia" in South Carolina is one of the lower populated colonies, with alot of its land still open range for cattle ranching and fur-hunting in addition to agriculture, and the land west and south of the Savannah is generally still frontier disputed between Spain and Britain at late as the 1750s, and administered as part of the Floridas after the British victory in the 7 Years War.