The Clash of Titans: The Anglo-American War and Beyond

By Raymond Smith, published in Timstown, Jefferson

".... By the time the Wellington Ministry decided to order a general withdrawal of British regulars in North America, General Bonapart was on the move in Florida. After shattering the French Empire and Spain outside of Northdale on June 22nd, the major general regrouped with General Oliver and marched westward to bring an end to the Alliance presence in Georgia and Florida. Gathering his forces and supplies in a small village called Waukeenah (which was just thirty-two kilometers east of Tallahassee), the Corsican-American general planned for a lightning assault to take the occupied city. Since western Florida was more settled compared to central Florida, there were wider roads, better infrastructure, and more settlements. Thus, General Bonaparte was able to muster two divisions to execute his plan to rapidly advance against his disorganized opponents (due to Spain's hasty withdrawal from the North American theater after the defeat at Northdale and the invasion of the French Republic). However, his hopes of marching into Tallahassee within a week were quickly dashed when the true horrors of the Alliance occupation revealed themselves to the American soldiers...

The existence of concentration camps was not a secret to the American public or soldiers. Indeed, a number of recruits joined the United States Military after seeing the photographs of the camps with their own eyes (after the pictures of the concentration camps were revealed to the public, the American military saw a huge surge in recruits, fulfilling its necessary quota and beyond). Unfortunately, nothing prepared the advancing American soldiers to the consequences of the months-long Alliance occupation. As forty thousand American soldiers moved westward, they were greeted with the sight of starving civilians and dead bodies. As Private First Class Luke Bonapart of the 41st Regiment, 5th Division wrote in a letter to his family, "It is horrible. I walked past thousands of graves and they were not for fallen soldiers; they were for ordinary citizens that were starved and abused by the invaders. We entered a small settlement that was once a prosperous farming town. Before the war, it boasted a population of five thousand people. When we entered, there were three thousand souls that were still alive, and all of them were ghastly thin."

Famine and disease were the main causes of death, as Alliance soldiers stripped the occupied territories clean of any resources and food. This meant that hundreds of thousands were starved and left vulnerable to diseases. Most of the occupied population were forced into a state of slavery, toiling away on the fields to feed the massive Alliance armies and serve as laborers for their overlords. To make matters worse, the invaders hardly sold any provisions to the people and seized any and all valuables. As one survivor stated, "They did not come to conquer us. They came to loot, burn, and destroy us." There were numerous incidents of cannibalism and a countless number of refugees that fled to nearby states during the war (often at the risk of their own lives). A few years after the war, the estimated number of Floridian civilians dead came up to 60,000, with the pre-war population of Florida standing at 500,000. Directly after the war, 330,000 people remained within Florida's borders. Florida was not the worst state in terms of population loss. Indeed, nearly a third of Louisiana's population laid dead by the end of the war (from a pre-war population of 200,000), and only 90,000 people lived in the state by the war's end. Similarly, 40% of Jefferson's population perished during the war (from a pre-war population of 160,000, and also the state with the highest black population percentage-wise), and only 50,000 inhabitants remained when the peace treaty between the League of American Nations and the Alliance was signed...

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American soldiers were mobbed by starving and diseased civilians and Bonapart's Army expectedly slowed to treat the survivors as best as they could. Unfortunately, this also led to a number of disease outbreaks and a rapid shortage of supplies as General Bonapart attempted to uplift the civilians. Even worse, there were a number of civilians that were hostile to the advancing American Army. While most partisan groups in the South organized behind the assistance of the Special Forces, a minority of them remained hostile to both the invaders and the American federal government. These partisan groups, often called "Whigs" (due to their opposition to the British, that were led by Tories, and opposition to the federal government, much like how the American Whigs were opposed to a powerful federal government), believed that the American government failed to protect the livelihood of the people and blamed the mass destruction of the South on both the invaders and the federal government. While they held off on attacking American soldiers throughout the beginning of the invasion, as the United States regained the upper hand in the region, the Whigs struck without mercy. It took two weeks for General Bonapart to root out all the Whigs in Florida, and nearly a hundred American soldiers were killed by their own countrymen. About one hundred Whigs were captured and executed without trial by the American commander, and this has often been overlooked by contemporary historians due to the chaotic and controversial nature of the European Invasion of America...

Finally, after nearly a month-long delay, the Army of Florida advanced into Tallahassee on August 1st and clashed with the French defenders within the town (by this time, most of the Spanish regulars were in Cuba and in transit to Spain, which saved the Spanish Army from being annihilated). Only ten thousand French defenders greeted the thirty-five thousand American soldiers. With the combination of the Gatling guns (the first time they were used to attack an enemy position), Springfield guns (General Bonapart's weapon of choice, with each gun firing a dozen explosive shells upon the enemy within a minute), military balloons (for communications purposes), and a well-disciplined and well-trained army, General Bonapart took the town within three hours. The battle was a complete route and the general broke the last remaining bastion of enemy resistance in Florida, inflicting six thousand casualties for only a thousand of his own. The remaining defenders surrendered and Tallahassee was back in American hands. However, due to General Bonapart's delay, the majority of French forces managed to flee to the west (to the British and Portuguese) and dug in on the border of Alabama and Jefferson. British Field Marshal Gough was forced to divert thousands of British regulars to protect his flank and retreated towards the Gulf of Mexico for a better defensible position. Thankfully for him, General Bonapart was in no position to advance as he was tasked with providing aid to the ailing civilians in western Florida, dismantling the Tallahassee Concentration Camp (the camp that killed nearly 10,000 Americans), and reorganizing his forces as he grouped with Major General Duncan Lamont Clinch (the commander of the Army of Georgia)...

However, two shocking events would rock the United States and aid it in its war effort. The first was the arrival of the first ironclads (the USS Monitor, the USS Virginia, and the USS Quebec) on August 3rd of 1834, spelling the end of the Alliance invasion of the United States. The second was the unexpected death of one of the most prominent leaders in American history, due to a stroke of misfortune involving a sniper in the city of Salem in Jefferson..."