Theft, Rhetoric, and Fixed Bayonets: The Lone StAAR Empire

Argh.

My website is down badly, and I can't post new images or link to some old ones -- so this AAR may be on hold for a while.

Since I was planning something like this anyway after Part 5, and now we have a bit of time between updates, question time: ask anything and, as long as it won't spoil the rest of the story, I'll try and answer.

Nope! I actually did absurdly well for Texas.

Of course, I'm only to about 1872 in game, so there's still time to lose a few wars...

Part 5: Castles in the Sky

President Lamar would come to view the Texans' attempts to conduct diplomacy with faint contempt. He would wrestle for a week with himself, trying to figure out the best way to achieve Texan goals without being smashed by Mexico, or becoming dependent upon the US: two fates anathema to Texan sentiment.

Finally, he came up with a plan.

Three days before Christmas, he made a speech before the Texan congress in which he espoused the 'manifest destiny' of the Lone Star Republic: to become a free and independent state stretching from Corpus Christi to Oregon, the titan of the American west: heroes of the frontier, and a man standing tall in the family of nations.
Texas would also bolster its power through land, law, and military reforms, all of which stretched the power of the President to absurd lengths.
The Lamar Doctrine would have been killed in Congress if it hadn't been for the anti-Mexican rhetoric: Lamar argued fiercely against reconciliation with Mexico, and said that the only way to achieve Texan goals would be another war with their southern neighbors. He called another victorious conflict an 'abject inevitability'.

Some Texans questioned whether they occupied the same reality as Mr. Lamar. A great nation? Texas struggled to remain solvent, and the US and Mexico both eyed her hungrily. But many more became invigorated with a new purpose: Manifest Destiny! The Texan people would spread uncontainably and dominate the American west! On Christmas Eve, Santa Fe seemed impossibly distant.

And on New Year's Eve, San Francisco hardly seemed a stone's throw away.


Texas at the birth of 'Manifest Destiny'

The Mexicans had grown truly worried: the Texans honestly believed that they could sweep the Mexicans out of Alta California and even parts of their own country. Mexico seemed to have reached a nadir; rebels in the North could, if supported even slightly by Lamar's government, defect to the Texans.

Another war would be a disaster for both parties. So Lamar sent a man in secret to propose peace: $5 million in exchange for the most liberal interpretation of what constituted Texas.

The Mexicans, to everyone's surprise, grudgingly accepted.


Texas in 1839: greatly expanded. Not pictured: clamancy on Colorado territories also gained as a result of the peace treaty

Texans greatly supported this move, even though it plunged the Lone Star Republic into debt which would take some time to repay. Lamar's reforms thus received enough support to go forward: his legal reforms passed almost unanimously, codifying Texas law and giving more power to the President; his border reforms, after being slimmed down in Congress, were passed; his land reforms, under which reserves of coal, iron, and sulfur in east Texas would be given to exclusive government use. His military reforms also passed, albeit with less enthusiasm. By the time he proposed expansion of the navy, the Lamar fever that had gripped Texas seemed to subside, and Congress, even backed by Lamar's supporters, called it absurd and wasteful and refused to allow funds for it.

Texan industry began to improve, creating fine furniture for modest profits. Except for countless shifts in Indian relations -- as would be the norm for Texas until the 1890s -- very little happened until 1841, when the Texans approached the United States to conduct the first diplomatic affair managed by Texas without the direct aid of loaded rifles.

President Lamar, who faced the last year of his term, approached President Van Buren, who had recently thrashed his Whig opponent to be re-elected President. Van Buren was a staunch Jackson man, and a very honest person; he had conducted very friendly diplomacy towards Texas, while recognizing it as a necessarily independent country. He wanted to discuss the exact terms of Texan independence and relation to the US.


Martin Van Buren

At the conference, Lamar and Van Buren spoke as if old friends -- even though one was a Southerner and another a Northerner, one a slaveowner and another soon to become one of the Republicans' staunchest allies, and even though one's country seemed to continuously foil the imperialist ambitions of another.

The conference finalized Texan borders, giving a formal promise that the US would never invade Texas and Texas would never invade the US. The conference also exchanged Texan claims throughout Sequoyah for the remaining US claims on Colorado.

Van Buren came under fire for his action. 'Mr. President, the Treaty of New Orleans seems to tell the world that the US has given up on annexation of Texas. How can we allow this?'
To which he could only respond, 'Sir, so far as I am concerned, the US has given up on such an annexation -- and so has Texas.'

In the wake of the Treaty of New Orleans, Lamar had gone from liked to loved again -- and it would be in the months following that he pushed through two laws to have much influence on Texan political futures.

First, one defining the exact relationship of Texas with outer territories: citizens of territories cannot vote, but are entitled to all other priveleges of Texan citizenship, including the right to form a local assembly. All states will be given a separate governor, who shall be appointed by the President in order to represent the political interests of that state.
(In fact, an interpretation of this law would, decades later, lead to democratization of gubernatorial elections -- but now we're getting ahead of ourselves.)
Territories, on the other hand, would be governed by the direct consent of their owners. In essence, this turned Texan territories into corporate possessions with only loose allegiance to the Lone Star Republic.

As the final details of the Texas Africa Company's official charter were hammered out, Lamar slipped another crucial bit of legislation in through Congress: the final codification of election law, which had been bogged down for years due to its lack of the crucial and traditional clause stating 'the President shall not be reeligible'.

The passing of the electoral clause nonplused some Texans, excited others, and infuriated still others. Sam Houston declared he was not yet ready to come out of retirement, in spite of suddenly being able to run against Lamar.

So Texas approached an election year with the laws and legality of their nation completely changed. The 1840s would see Texas go from an irritable, backwater corner of Mexico to a nation in their own right.


Texas in 1841, after the finalization of the borders and the chartering of the Djibouti colony

This is where I had planned the Q&A thing, to give time to catch up with the game a little with the AAR and screenshots. I'll try and update again within the next few days. In the meanwhile, you got any questions and I'll be glad to answer them

EDIT: damnedable tags

Machiavellian: Nope. In a country like Texas, where you have a relatively small number of pops with low-to-medium consciousness and a decent number of needs satisfied, the conservatives tend to form dynasties. And the Liberty Party is a third party anyway.

If you look closely, though, the Manifest Destiny event activates and sets as ruling the Destiny Party, which is like the Whig party only not protectionist.

I think the next time liberals will rule Texas will be the 1870s, although the fact that the Texas Party tends to thrash the Destiny Party after it is born and it is protectionist makes my life much easier.

Nicomacheus: Thanks! Not bothered by it at all, BTW :rofl:

Why Sequoyah? Simple -- the resources are better up there in Colorado, and it was motivated by some small degree by the ability to take properties that Adams-Onis didn't give to Mexico.

Hawkeye: Depends on which version you're using. Although the VIP adds the nasty option on Mexico's behalf of annexing Texas in one war by occupying the home provinces, the first Texican war is a gantlet: if you can survive it for a year, you're free to spend the next decade or so playing around in the big Lone Star sandbox with little plastic cowboys and indians
I have no idea what sort of mess you have to face if you don't take one of the isolationist routes -- Manifest Destiny, the rise of the Ranger Party (which leads to Manifest Destiny), killing Santa Anna, and so on -- because I've never done it in VIP.

Texas in the VIP (I think VIP-1.02, but I could be wrong) just feels like sticking a pre-VIP country into the VIP: it has all sorts of absurd little advantages seemingly given to it for the fact that no one who isn't missing a few marbles plays Texas and expects to do well.
I'm curious as to what devious tricks are at work on the AI for Britain for the Crimean and Opium wars -- how they always invade through certain routes with overwhelming force.
To make Texas challenging like it was before, you'd have to give something like that to Mexico -- give the AI player the 'foreknowledge' that a player would have, that occupying certain provinces immediately ends the war in Mexican victory.
But hey, I'm not complaining -- I don't think I could have done any of this pre-VIP, after all!

Nerfix: Sure. Do you?

More updates when AAR catches up to game, I promise.