Re: "Drakon" by S. M. Stirling

Lynn McGuire wrote:

On 6/17/2024 5:26 PM, William Hyde wrote:

Lynn McGuire wrote:

On 6/16/2024 11:48 AM, Robert Woodward wrote:

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The single trigger event is when George Washington exiled the 120,000 Loyalists to South Africa instead of Canada after the USA Revolutionary war.
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In our reality, the 120,000 Loyalists were exiled to Canada from the USA.

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I assume here that the attribution to Washington is in the book only, and that you know that in history he did nothing of the kind. Washington was far smarter and more just than that.
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Unfortunately, the citizenry at large and various state governments were not.
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But the vast majority of loyalists stayed behind, and played a role in the politics of the new nation.  The last laws against former loyalists were repealed a few years after the war, though local prejudice lasted much longer.
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And Canada certainly did not receive 100k of loyalist immigrants.
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 > I had no idea that this really happened in the late 1700s.
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Not mentioned in high school history?
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William Hyde

 https://www.britannica.com/topic/loyalist
 "Congress recommended repressive measures against the loyalists, and all states passed severe laws against them, usually forbidding them from holding office, disenfranchising them, and confiscating or heavily taxing their property. Beginning in March 1776, approximately 100,000 loyalists fled into exile. (This was between 3 and 4 percent of the total number of settlers in the colonies, which is estimated at 2,500,000–3,000,000 during the Revolutionary period.) The largest portion of those who fled ultimately went to Canada, where the British government provided them with asylum and offered some compensation for losses in property and income; those who met certain criteria (based, in part, on when they left America and their contribution to the British war effort) were known as United Empire Loyalists in Canada."

I assumed you meant Washington the person, not the Capital, as it didn't exist yet.
Yes, there was legislation, as I mentioned, and those laws were part of the reason that loyalists formed voting blocs in the last years of the century.
But we didn't get 100k.  After all, if you are a loyalist from Georgia, do you really want to grow turnips in Upper Canada, or sugar in Jamaica? And if you're a urban type from NY, do you chose Montreal or London?
When I was a kid there were still people who added "UE" to their names as descendants of the loyalists.  It's been a long while since I've seen that, though.
William Hyde