AHC: "Boxed-in" United States of America?

[Neoteros]

By "boxed-in" I mean this: imagine if the USA's western border coincided, more or less, with the eastern and St. Lawrence continental divides, upon independence; everything beyond that divide would be in the hands of another power. The remaining northern and southern borders of this alternate USA would coincide with those it had in OTL post-independence.

How would such a scenario be able to come to pass? Maybe a bloodier war against the United Kingdom, resulting in a mutilated peace? And, with the United Kingdom surrounding the newly independent country on all sides, with the exception of Spanish Florida, how would this rump USA develop, economically and socially? Would Manifest Destiny be strangled in the cradle, or would it be even more of a national, revanchist obsession?

 

[Mildtryth]

By "boxed-in" I mean this: imagine if the USA's western border coincided, more or less, with the eastern and St. Lawrence continental divides, upon independence; everything beyond that divide would be in the hands of another power. The remaining northern and southern borders of this alternate USA would coincide with those it had in OTL post-independence.

View attachment 873319

How would such a scenario be able to come to pass? Maybe a bloodier war against the United Kingdom, resulting in a mutilated peace? And, with the United Kingdom surrounding the newly independent country on all sides, with the exception of Spanish Florida, how would this rump USA develop, economically and socially? Would Manifest Destiny be strangled in the cradle, or would it be even more of a national, revanchist obsession?

Have France not losing any of its American colonies in the Seven Years' War, maybe?

 

[Neoteros]

Have France not losing any of its American colonies in the Seven Years' War, maybe?

This way, if the revolution still happens, and France still ends up aiding the rebels, the US government wouldn't even be able to try and conquer its way westwards, since the French government would be a close ally - nice. At most, the US could try to grab Florida, that might end up being partitioned along the continental divide above, between the US itself and New France.

If the French revolution still happens, having the US border, albeit indirectly, revolutionary France, would be interesting, given that even IRL there was plenty of cross-pollination between the countries' revolutionary movements, down to some of the same people taking part in both uprisings. Maybe the French government models itself more closely on the American one, with the old provinces becoming federal states of a new French republic?

 

[raharris1973]

Hard -

Maybe something earlier than the ARW - Somehow a miraculous Jacobite win occurs in the rising/invasion of the '19 (the 1719) or the '45 (the 1745) that causes a Spanish (in the first case) or French-backed Stuart restoration in Britain, that wins the struggle there with foreign support, but the American colonies just are not accepting the result, and by this point in the 1700s, especially 1745, are too demographically strong to bring to heel simply because Britain is under a Stuart pro-Catholic occupation regime? However, because the Colonies do not have reliable Royal Navy support, flows of Redcoats, guaranteed commercial ties, they are not in any great shape, despite demographic-numerical strength to go pushing beyond the mountain barriers to New France or Spanish Florida, or even to hold Nova Scotia/Acadia from a combination of Acadian revolt, external French reinforcement, pro-Stuart forces.