1776 - 1804:
Following American Independence the British Empire is forced to raise taxes in Canada and for the Hudson Company to compensate for the loss. Instead of inciting a revolution in Canada, the US government raises taxes in most eastern states and enforces a federal income tax to the entire territory. The Ohio valley is settled and less fiscally restricted states are formed upon it and around the Great Lakes. The western migration intensifies more than in real life (IRL). Louisiana is purchased. Mexico struggles for independence while more Anglo settlers move to the (legally Spanish) Rockies and northwestern free territories escaping taxes and the law. Spanish presence in Cuba, Florida and particularly the Central American increases tensions between Washington and Madrid.
South America Turmoil in Europe isolates Britain. In 1806, while the Napoleonic Europe falls in turmoil Britain captures the Dutch and Spanish colonies of The Cape and Rio de la Plata. With Europe crumbling, Britain destroys and Balkanizes the Spanish Empire in the Americas just as IRL except for a growing Anglo colony in Patagonia, the Chilean valley and the Pampas. Venezuela, Peru, Paraguay and Tucuman (the landlocked territories of northwestern IRL Argentina) gain independence. After the fall of Lisbon, Brazil becomes the new home of the Portuguese Crown, remaining until present day as the only Monarchy in the Americas.
1805-1833
North America is fully settled west to the eastern shore of the Mississippi. A growing bureaucracy in Washington demands a higher rate for income taxes, taxation of religious congregations and slave-ownership. The Democrat party loses the elections to the National Autonomist Party which raises taxes even more and hires a huge ¨National Urban Guard¨ of Riot crushers which in return demands more taxes. Immigration from Europe continues even at a higher rate than IRL as the Napoleonic wars continue bleeding Europe (the UK drawn of resources to cost its new South American, Australian and African colonies while only taking just enough from its Asian colonies, is forced to sign peace treaties with France, only defeating it in 1833). The disenchanted immigrants in the Northern states move westward to the Free Territories (untaxed British Oregon, and Spanish Rockies) while the disenchanted plantation owners in the south take the State Capitals and declare a Confederated United States of America.
1834-1856
Anglo pioneers in the Spanish Rockies, Texas and British Oregon, declare independent nations: Manitoba 1834, Texas 1835, California 1837, Westria 1840. The Mexican independence war breaks out. The new American nations of Texas and California take control of all the Spanish-Mexican lands down to Durango. The USA declares war to the Confederation and is forced to recognize the independence of new four western Republics. Britain tries to crush the Manitoban and Westrian nations but the Hudson Bay company, filled up with Britain's taxation, as well as the remoteness of the new countries, leads to a pacific independence. Canada is tempted to gain independence. A, weak, Continental Parliament still alleged to the British Crown, is founded in Montreal. The American First American Civil War lasts from 1834 until the Summer of 1842, paralyzing the east (North and West). During the war draft spares only the highest crème of Washington-connected society, as a result immigration to the Western States intensifies. It concludes with a ceasefire and the South losing half its territory. Soon would be bankrupted plantation owners organize themselves in land acquisition cooperatives and invade Florida. Entrepreneurs copy the idea and set out to colonize Central America forming weak states that are at war with Spain and Britain. The enslavement of the local population in tropical plantations compensates the war costs.
Texans build an almost libertarian ethnocentric society. While whites must only abide the law, they enjoy no income-tax and no draft and slavery is abolished, non-whites have no legal representation at all. A true, spontaneous, ethnic cleansing displaces by force almost all Native Americans, Mexicans and blacks to a much more populated and smaller Mexico.
The second American Civil Wars breaks out when the new Republican party beats the Autonomist Party, and declares war to the Confederation. Lasting from 1840 to 1856 the second Civil War is much more industrialized and the whole American Confederation is slowly destroyed. Rich Southerners and their slaves migrate to Central America, strengthen the existing Anglo countries and form an internationally recognized Central American Confederations. As machinery partially replaces tropical agriculture some slaves are used to dig a canal connecting the Pacific Ocean with Lake Nicaragua, and both oceans.
Approaching the end of the war, riots in Washington demand the end of draft and church taxes. The First American Republic falls to the Anarchists. After the war is over, the military calls for elections. The New Republican Party grants religious fiscal freedom and individual freedom from draft. By the time, however, thousands had formed independent gulches in the West as well as a highly organized theocracy in the Great Basin: The Nation of Deseret.
British Patagonia demands a continental parliament as well as Australia. Those are not granted. Tax-collectors murders are widespread in Montevideo, Buenos Aires, Trelew, Rawson, Sandy Point and other Patagonian cities. Rioting begins in the Australian prisons and in the streets of Patagonia. The settlers demand independence. War breaks out in 1854 and expands to South Africa and Canada. 1856-1906 Manifest Destiny
The reunited east adopts western government values. Manitoba, Westria, Deseret, California and Texas form a Continental Congress to deal united with foreign affairs and land administration. For that purpose the United States are invited to the Congress of Columbia (held in Fort Worth). In 1858 the Land Unification Act is signed, uniting all states in a single American Union. A new Capital, Columbia, is built in the eastern shores of the San Francisco bay upon the little town of Oakland.
Canada, Australia and New Zealand obtain independence. The new countries are invited to the second Congress of Columbia in 1860. The Western Union is signed uniting North and South American, New Zealand and Australian states in a single federal government. War with Britain and France as the WU claims all Pacific Ocean territories. War continues in Southern Africa, but the Western Union stays away and signs a permanent peace agreement with Britain after invading all known Pacific Islands, Guyana and the Kingdom of Hawaii. Newfoundland remains the only British territory in the Americas outside the Caribbean.
1890: The legal territorial rights of a now English-speaking Alaska are purchased from the Tzar. Alaskan and Australian gold rushes fuel the settlement of the most remote areas of the Union.
1906: The Nicaraguan Canal fails to allow bigger cargo steamers. Rich Central Americans sets to build a more successful canal in Panama this time with more machines and less slaves (which continue producing export quality bananas in the DDT soaked lower eastern shores of the Isthmus). A sparsely populated Western Union loses its frontier when the first Anglo settlers build the first ports in northern Alaska and first mines in western Australia. A tricontinental country leads global industrialization and occupies all fertile template lands out of Eurasia.
Only the Kingdom of Brazil; the Spanish speaking countries of Paraguay, Peru, Venezuela and Mexico; the Central American Confederation and the newly created, American controlled, State of Amazonia & Guyana remain American countries out of the Western Union.
1906 - 2006:
Its huge resources, sparse population and violent history makes the Western Union adopt a liberal isolationist policy. Turmoil in Europe and East Asia is tolerated to the point in which trade relations are respected.
To be continued.
? The Western Union will need Europe and Asia to accept Free Trade Agreements. How will they enforce that? Should some kind of anti-capitalist regime force the WU to invade the continent as it happened IRL?
? Brazil's, Amazonia & Guyana's, and the Central American Confederation's economies are still moved by slavery while the Spanish-speaking republics are doomed to corruption. For how long will both systems will be tolerated by the Industrial-Capitalist biological imperative? Perhaps until today, since IRL de facto slaves pick up coffee and cocoa in Guinea...
(I realize this last part should be in discussion) (This political Western Union has nothing to do with money transfer and was created decades before the real one. It's just that it's such a great name!)