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The Eastern Front(39)

By:Eric Flint


But most of the Crown Loyalists, pigheaded as usual, would not accept that compromise. They wanted an established church to be mandatory for every province, whether that province wanted one or not. In effect, they insisted on picking a fight with the Committees of Correspondence in their own strongholds, which the ruling couple of Hesse-Kassel thought was about as smart as picking a fight with a bear in its own den.

Still, despite the heat that had been generated over the question of an established church during the campaign, almost nobody thought it was really a critical matter. The reason was simple. With the exception of a very small number of reactionary diehards, who were considered blockheads even by most Crown Loyalists, every prominent figure in the political life of the USE agreed that religious persecution was dead and buried. No one would be required to join the established church, nor would any member of any other denomination be penalized for not belonging—except, of course, that some of the taxes they paid would be used to support a church they didn't belong to.

In private discussions, Mike Stearns had told Amalie Elizabeth and her husband that he would be willing to accept an established church as a compromise solution, if need be. He'd even accept a nation-wide established Lutheran church, provided it was set up the way established churches had been set up in some of the nations from the universe he'd come from, like England and Denmark.

The real heat—the real fury, calling things by their right name—was centered on the other major issue before the nation.

Who was to be considered a citizen of the USE in the first place?

Again, there were basically four positions:

The citizenship program of Mike Stearns and his Fourth of July Party was simple. They lifted it word-for-word, in fact, from the constitution of the United States in the universe they'd left behind, as modified by what the up-timers called the Fourteenth Amendment:

All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside. No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.

Substitute "Province" for "State" and there you had, in two sentences, the position of the Fourth of July Party. Which, needless to say, was vociferously and belligerently supported by the Committees of Correspondence.

The opposing positions fell into three camps.

The far opposite position, as with the matter of an established church, was subscribed to by few people—in this case, intellectuals rather than reactionaries. These were people so addicted to regularity and precision that they insisted that whatever criteria for citizenship were decided upon needed to be applied to all provinces uniformly.

Most members of the Crown Loyalist Party considered that completely impractical. The variations in local and regional custom when it came to citizenship were simply too great. Trying to come up with any standard criteria applied across the board nationally would tie up the parliament for years.

Instead, as with the established church, most Crown Loyalists felt that each province needed to establish its own criteria for citizenship. Some of them even pointed out that that had been the stance originally taken by the United States the up-timers came from.

(To which Mike Stearns responded bluntly and crudely: "Yup, we sure did, which goes to prove Americans can fuck up like the best of 'em. As a result of which, we saddled ourselves with slavery, property qualifications to vote—you name the stupid limitation on citizenship, we did it—and it took Andy Jackson and a civil war to get rid of all that crap.")

Within that broad camp, a division existed. The moderate wing of the Crown Loyalists, with Hesse-Kassel again in the lead, advocated that citizenship criteria should be established by the provincial governments.

That was simple enough, they argued. In private, Stearns had told them that if his back was to the wall, he'd accept that compromise also.

But most of the Crown Loyalists thought that policy would be disastrous, and for two reasons.

First, they pointed out—correctly enough—that Hesse-Kassel's position amounted to locking the barn after the horse got out. There being as yet no established constitution for the USE, the recent election that had produced the existing provincial governments had willy-nilly been held under the terms dictated by the prime minister in power, Mike Stearns. He had simply decreed that all adult permanent residents were citizens and thus could vote.

To be sure, in many of the provinces still dominated by traditional elites there had been plenty of voter intimidation and vote fraud. Still, from the viewpoint of most Crown Loyalists, the result was hopelessly tainted. Allowing the provincial governments elected under Stearns' dictatorial fiat to turn around and decide citizenship was preposterous. As one prominent Crown Loyalist put it, "You might as well allow a band of robbers to vote on whether their loot is legal."