Timeline of the United States: 1803 to 1922

1803: Informed by his advisors as to the desirability of maintaining at least a foothold near the promising independent United States, Napoléon chooses to sell only the part of the Louisiana Territory to the north of 31.5ºN to the United States. The French Empire keeps the territory to the south of said degree of longitude -- including the city of New Orleans -- for itself, although the United States is given full and unhindered access to the ports of Louisiana. President Thomas Jefferson is wary about this -- he fears that the United States might be dragged into an alliance with France against Britain. Still, the enthusiasm of the Democratic-Republic Party for the radical principles of the French Revolution and general Anglophobia leads to the acceptance of the French offer.

1804: British outrage at the seeming collaboration of the upstart United States with Napoleonic France leads to the adoption of policies by the British navy that entail the search and detention of almost every American merchant vessel, on the grounds that they might be carrying goods destined for France. This, and the impressment of American sailors into the British navy, outrages Americans and leads to calls for war.

1805: Jefferson reluctantly leads the United States into the Napoleonic Wars on the side of France, extending the Napoleonic world wars to the Western Hemisphere. For the next nine years, the United States will be in a state of war with Britain, alongside France.

In the American theatre of the Napoleonic Wars, fighting in the Western Hemisphere is mainly between the Franco-American alliance and the British. The early naval battles between the American and British navies force Britain to concentrate more of its forces in a blockade along the Atlantic coast of the United States, allowing the French to maintain intermittent contact with their overseas colonies (Mauritius, Ceylon, the Antilles, Louisiana). For the United States, though, the British blockade alone starves the young republic of the goods and technologies that it needs from Europe.

The incessant frontier warfare is the most difficult thing for Americans, though, bleeding the country white. Throughout the war, there is heavy fighting along the border between Canada and the United States. Early in the war, the disputed territories at the headwaters of the St. John River (New Brunswick/Maine border) are occupied by the British, and Lower Canada (Quebec) is safe from invasion. There are numerous battles in the region of Anglophone Upper Canada (Ontario), though, with many American-born settlers supporting the invaders. Almost sixty thousand settlers and their families who refuse to swear an oath of allegiance to the British Crown upon the end of the war are expelled, creating bitter anti-British sentiment in the Canadian exile communities in Ohio. New England's industrialists are hit hard by the effect of the war and the region almost secedes, but threats of federal intervention restrain them.

1813: In its last days, the Empire of France sells French Louisiana to the United States under the terms of the Treaty of Brest. Among the treaty's provisions is a requirement that the Francophone natives retain in perpetuity the right to use their language in official situations.

1814: The Congress of Vienna ends the Napoleonic Wars. Like France, which has been allowed to keep its pre-Revolutionary frontiers, the United States is forced only to cede most of northern Maine to the British colony of New Brunswick and to pay an indemnity of 20 million pounds to Britain. It is allowed to keep formerly French Louisiana though, and the terms of the Treaty of Brest are honoured. This suits the almost 20 thousand French liberals and their families who flee reactionary Restoration France for liberal Francophone Louisiana.

1815-1850: The Louisiana French community grows as more French liberals continue to immigrate to republican Francophone Louisiana. By 1850, there are almost one hundred thousand Louisiana French.  The intermarriage of the élite of the Louisiana French community with the prosperous upper-class Créoles of New Orleans and the Mississippi delta, and of the poor among the Louisiana French with the Cadiens of west Louisiana, creates a united Francophone enclave within the United States, amounting to more than 70% of the Louisiana population. This population is quite radical -- in 1853, Louisiana is the first state in the Union to abolish slavery, by enacting a graduated emancipation law. This anti-slavery radicalism sets Louisiana apart from the rest of the South: Although Francophone Louisiana sees itself as an integral part of the United States, neither it nor the South sees itself as Southern in the sense of being a conservative slaveowning society.

1816: Henry Clay and other nationalists succeed in convincing Congress to enact high tariffs against British imports, in what is known as the American System. Partly, the American system is inspired by the desire to deprive Britain of one of its largest export markets, though it is mostly influenced by the desire to protect American manufacturers and farmers against foreign competition. In the decades after the adoption of the American System, the United States enjoys breakneck industrialization.

1820-1848: As the United States' economy recovers from the Napoleonic Wars and population pressure builds, the United States embarks upon a period of western expansion and colonization. Under populist frontier President Andrew Jackson (1824-1836), the Native American populations living on the western frontier of the United States were harshly repressed and expelled to reservations west of the Mississippi, while the United States embarked on a policy of territorial expansion to the Pacific coast. In 1846, the United States annexes the portion of the Oregon Country south of 49ºN, while the Mexican-American War (1846-1848) leads to the annexation of Texas, New Mexico, California, Nevada, and California. Large numbers of American colonists follow the American flag.

1838: In this year, discontented colonies in the British colony of Upper Canada rebel against British authority. Although the rebellion is easily suppressed, Britain is outraged by the discovery that the Canadian exile community in Ohio had secretly funded the rebels. The United States and Britain come to the point of war, but ultimately Britain's distraction by French expansion in the South Pacific averts the threat of conflict. This "close-run thing," as Anglo-American historian Winston Churchill later described the crisis, serves to encourage American Anglophobia.

1840: Martin Van Buren is reelected president despite the economic depression in his first term and the attempts of the Whigs to criticize his economic policies.

1850: In Congressional elections, the American Party manages to win almost a quarter of the seats in the House of Representatives, and a third of the seats in the Senate. This explicitly xenophobic party has managed to gain substantial popular support through its populist calls for restriction of all foreign immigration, particularly of non-Anglophones, in the name of the American worker.

1853: The Immigration Act of 1853 passes both houses of Congress, and avoids a threatened veto. This act prohibits all further immigration from southern and eastern Europe and the Austrian Empire. In coming decades, the scope of the act is widened to exclude or otherwise restrict immigration from France and Belgium (1865), Canada (1886), the Scandinavian states (1889), the German Empire and the Netherlands (1904) and even the British Isles (1907). Industrialists in the east lament the shortfall of labour in its growing industrial centres, but native-born white Americans profit from a tight labour market.

1861: The US Civil War begins as the slaveholding southern states secede to form the Confederate States of America. Louisiana, though, with a large population firmly opposed to slavery, refuses to join the Confederates and opts for the Union. Louisiana falls under heavy attack; by the end of the year, it looks like it will fall to the Confederates.

1862-3: The French Empire intervenes in the Civil War on the side of the Union, in the hope of gaining political capital for the creation of a satellite Mexican empire. Even as the French Navy blockades the Atlantic and Gulf ports of the Confederacy and the French Army crushes the Confederates, French units land and occupy Yucatán and invade the Chiapas district of Mexico. French intervention crushes the Confederacy, which falls to the Union armies north of Richmond on the 4th of September, 1862.

Contrary to French expectations, though, the Union refuses to countenance a French empire in Mexico and Central America. After a tense stand-off, the French withdraw from the occupied districts of the southern states in April of 1863, and sign the New Orleans Accord, which allows France to maintain protectorates over a Yucatecan protectorate, but keeps it out of juarista Mexico.

Franco-American relations gradually recover, but the bitterness produced by the French attempt to take advantage of the Union's preoccupation in the Civil War to create a Mesoamerican empire will sour the Union on  foreign affairs. Aside from an occasional entente with the liberal Mexican republic, and the occupation of various central American republics, the Union will maintain a dignified isolation from the affairs of the wider world.

1863: The First Civil War ends with a Union victory over the Confederacy, and in the passage of the 12th Amendment freeing all slaves in the Union without compensation to their owners. For generations after the conquest of the Confederacy, the Southern economy will lag behind the industrialized North and the colonized West.

1865-1910: Following the elimination of slavery throughout the United States by the 12th Amendment, Southern whites emigrate en masse from the impoverished Southern states (Louisiana aside) to the burgeoning industrial centres of the north. This white emigration is particularly noticeable in the Deep South, where the white middle classes are unable to continue to enjoy the same pre-slavery standards of living that they enjoyed before the First Civil War. By 1910, much of the white population of the South has settled permanently in the North. African-Americans, due to discriminatory land policies and their extreme poverty, are unable to migrate North in anything like the same numbers as whites. As a result, the South -- the Deep South in particular -- gains an overwhelming Black majority of population.

1867: The Union purchases the territory of Alaska from the Russian Empire. By the end of the century, the Territory of Alaska has been garrisoned, but scarcely settled or developed.

1870: The Franco-Prussian War occurs in Europe. After the Battle of Nancy, which crushes the French army and forces the cession of France's territories between the rivers Saar and Rhine, along with Bas-Rhin and the city of Strasbourg, to the newly-formed German Empire in November of 1870, President U.S. Grant sends an official congratulation to the German Emperor. This poisons Franco-American relations, and contributes greatly to both French and American isolationism.

1881: In face of British competition in the Pacific, the United States manages to establish an exclusive protectorate over the Kingdom of Hawai'i. The US sponsors immigration from Japan to the Hawai'ian islands outside of the main island of Oahu, making Hawai'i a major sugar producer for the US domestic market.

1886: This year's immigration act sharply limits immigration from the Dominion of Canada, creating a Canadian immigration quota limited to an annual total of forty thousand people. The fluency tests in the English language ordered by the Union immigration service sharply limits French Canadian immigration into the United States. The resulting disproportionate drain of English Canadians further increases the relative and absolute growth of French Canadians inside the Dominion.

1900: The amazingly rapid industrialization of the Union throughout the 19th century has created, at the beginning of the 20th century, the single largest industrial economy in the world. Home to some 85 million people, the Union is more populous than any industrial state save Russia, while standards of living for the working classes of the Union are as high as any in Argentina, Chile, or Australia. Despite this prosperity, the Union is isolationist, with a marginal overseas presence (in Hawai'i and in various central American puppet states) and little foreign trade.

1904: The United States Congress votes in favour of annexing Hawai'i. The Japanese government protests this annexation -- almost half of the Hawai'ian population is made up of Japanese immigrants -- but otherwise does nothing.

1906: After nine years, the Nicaraguan Canal is completed. Using Central American, Cuban, and Jamaican labourers, and Union money and technology, the first canal to cross the Central American isthmus has been built. Almost overnight, the distance by sea between New York City and San Francisco has been halved. The Republic of Nicaragua, and its northern neighbours, have become client states of the Union. The contemporary American construction of a naval base at the leased Haitian harbour of Mole St. Nicholas symbolizes the emergence of the United States as the dominant power in the Caribbean basin.

1914-1917: The First World War is fought in Europe between the Triple Entente (the British, French, and Russians) and the Central Powers (Germany, Austria-Hungary). The United States, like South America and Japan, prospers off of sales of matériel and food to the Franco-British alliance. Unlike South America and Japan, though, the United States remains neutral throughout the entire war: Even after the 1917 offensives that destroyed the Central Powers, the United States Congress opts not to issue even a perfunctory declaration of war.

1919: The United States is invited by the victorious Western and South American allies to join the League of Nations. The continuing isolationism of the American people leads to the cordial rejection of that invitation, although the United States will maintain a presence in many of the League of Nations' agencies.

1922: The United States purchases the Caribbean island of Cuba from its Spanish owners. The new Territory of Cuba becomes the latest frontier of American capitalism.