March (polity)

A March is a constituent polity of the United Kingdom of America made by Act of Parliament for a frontier, under a head appointed by the Crown with emergency powers, and containing land of the treaty nations that is governed by compact rather than by the March’s own law. There have been two. The Northern March, made in 1861 for the northern plains, was converted into the State of the Dakotas on its admission in 1889. The March of Arizona, made in 1884, is the only March today, and in ordinary speech “the March” means Arizona.

The designation has no single founding text. The Charter of Union of 1783 provides in Article VIII.5 that “Parliament may by law recognise such further local forms and settlements as the growth of the Union may require”, and every later form, the Commonwealths, Grand Duchies, Kingdoms, Republics, Territories and Marches, stands on that clause. What a March is was therefore settled by the two Acts that made one and by the practice that followed, and the two Marches differ in almost everything except the three marks that make them Marches.

The word is old. Parliament took it in 1861 from the frontiers of the English Crown, the Welsh Marches and the Scottish Marches, where land on a disputed border was held for the Crown by lords with powers no ordinary county had. The Northern March took the Scottish title for its head, Lord Warden. The March of Arizona, made fresh in 1884, took the Welsh one, Lord Marcher.

Name

In England a march was a border country, from an old word for a boundary. The Marcher lords of the Welsh borderland held their lordships from the Norman conquest until the Laws in Wales Acts of the 1530s, with their own courts and their own law, because the King could not govern the border from London and needed men who could. On the Scottish border the English and Scottish Crowns each appointed Lords Warden of the Marches, who kept the peace of the frontier, held its courts and commanded its musters, until the union of the two Crowns in 1603 made the border an internal one.

Both offices were long gone when Parliament at New Westminster revived the word. It did so because the Realm’s other designations did not fit what it wanted to make. A Territory was governed by federal appointees and could expect to become a polity. A Province, a Commonwealth or a State governed itself under an elected head. What Parliament wanted in 1861 was a polity that governed itself in its ordinary business and was held for the Crown in its frontier business, and the English word for that was march.

The word has never been much used in ordinary speech outside the polity that bears it. Arizonans say “the March” as Texans say “the Republic”. Nobody calls themselves a Marcher, which is the head of state’s title. The people of the March are Arizonans, or in the Eastern March Nuevomexicanos, and the lower-case word means nothing in particular to most Americans.

What makes a March

Three things make a polity a March, and both Marches have had all three.

It is made by Act of Parliament, not admitted on petition. The other polities west of the original thirteen were organised as Territories, governed under federal law, and admitted when their people petitioned and Parliament agreed. A March is constituted directly, by a statute that creates it as a polity from the start, without a territorial apprenticeship and without waiting for its people to ask.

Its head is appointed by the Crown and holds frontier emergency powers. The head of a Province, Commonwealth or State is elected, and the head of a Kingdom or Grand Duchy inherits. The head of a March is commissioned by the Crown for a term, and holds powers over the frontier that no other polity’s head has: the Northern March’s Lord Warden commanded its militia and its border posts, and Arizona’s Lord Marcher certifies emergencies of water, border and defence and, since the twentieth century, of heat.

The treaty nations’ land lies inside it and is governed by compact. Every polity in the West contains or adjoins treaty nations. A March is the one form whose founding instrument makes the nations’ land part of its constitution and puts it beyond the March’s own law: the March’s head deals with the nations under compact, as the Crown does, and not as a polity government deals with its own counties.

A March is not a Territory, which has no polity government of its own and is administered by the federation, as the Territory of Loreto is today. It is not a Kingdom or Grand Duchy, whose heads inherit and are not commissioned. It is not an ordinary polity with a frontier, of which the Realm has several, from Michigan on the Great Lakes to Texas on the Rio Grande: a frontier does not make a March, and the designation has never been proposed for any polity but the two that had it.

The Northern March, 1861 to 1889

Creation

Parliament made the Northern March in 1861 out of the northern plains between Minnesota and the mountains, along the border with New Albion. It was the first March. The country was held by the Lakota, Dakota and Nakota nations and their neighbours under treaty, it was crossed by a border that was not yet surveyed, and the war that began in 1861 had drawn the regular army east. Parliament wanted a government on the plains that could hold the frontier without the army, and a Territory under federal appointees could not.

The March at first ran from Minnesota to the Rocky Mountains. In 1863 its western country, the land that is now Montana, was taken into the new Idaho Territory, and in 1864 Montana was organised as a Territory of its own. From 1863 the Northern March was the land of the present State.

The Lord Warden and the Council

The Northern March’s head was the Lord Warden, commissioned by the Crown, and every holder of the office was an army officer. The Lord Warden commanded the March’s militia and the border posts, could rule by emergency proclamation in war on the frontier, and conducted the March’s dealings with the Lakota and Dakota nations under compact. It was a harsher office than any the Realm has made since, and it was meant to be.

The March governed its ordinary business through an elected Council, sitting from 1861, whose measures the Lord Warden could veto. The Lord Warden sat at a fort on the Missouri from the first year, and the town that grew up at the crossing beside it took the name Bismarck in the 1870s; the seat never moved, and Bismarck is the capital of the Dakotas still.

The wars

The March’s first years were the years of the plains wars. The Dakota conflict that began in Minnesota in 1862 sent fighting and flight across the eastern March, and the Lord Warden’s militia took part in the punitive campaigns that followed. Through the 1860s and 1870s the Lord Wardens fought and negotiated with the Lakota by turns, and the Sioux wars on the March’s side of the border were fought under their proclamations.

The defining act of the Northern March was the seizure of Pahá Sápa, the Black Hills, in the 1870s. Gold was found there, miners went in against the treaty, and the land was taken without valid consent by an office that existed to keep the compacts. The March did not cause the seizure, which was driven by gold and settled in New Westminster, but it was the instrument of it, and the Lord Warden’s proclamations did the work.

Conversion

The Northern March was converted because it filled. The railways brought settlers in tens of thousands through the 1870s and 1880s, and the elected Council, speaking for a population that by the late 1880s numbered in the hundreds of thousands, petitioned for an elected head and the ordinary standing of a State. Parliament agreed. On 2 November 1889 the Northern March was admitted as the State of the Dakotas, a single State and not two, and the Lord Wardenship was abolished. The Dakotas’ Governor is a new office of 1889, and nothing of the March survives in the State’s constitution except its capital.

The March of Arizona, since 1884

Made fresh

Parliament made the March of Arizona in 1884 out of the Arizona and New Mexico territories, for reasons the March’s own history gives: an international border of more than a thousand kilometres, water already in dispute, and treaty nations whose land and jurisdiction no ordinary polity government could deal with. Its drafters did not look to Dakota. They wrote their own instrument, the March Charter, sealed as a covenant between three parties with the nations of the March among them, and the two Marches share a word, a Crown-appointed head and the three marks and very little else.

The Lord Marcher

The March’s head is the Lord Marcher, commissioned by the Crown for eight years, from 1 July to 30 June. The office was vacant from 1884 to 1911, when the Territorial Governor exercised it under the Charter’s transitional chapter, and there have been fifteen Lord Marchers since, from George W. P. Hunt in 1911 to Gabrielle Giffords, who has held the office since 2027. The Lord Marcher carries the ordinary functions of a Crown representative, assent, commissioning and the opening and dissolution of the March Diet, and two that no other polity’s head has.

The first is the emergency authority. As sealed in 1884 it covered the failure of water and danger on the border and in defence; heat was added in the twentieth century, when cooling made heat a subject of government, and fire and flood with it. A Lord Marcher certifies the emergency, without which certain executive powers cannot be used, and the authority has never been used for civil order, a convention fixed when Hunt declined to proclaim during the deportation of the strikers in 1917. The second is the Council of Nations and Compacts, through which compact disputes with the treaty nations go to a head of state rather than a department.

The High Steward and the Diet

The March governs itself through a High Steward, its head of government, commissioned as the member able to command the March Diet. The Charter’s most important business, the allocation of water between basins, its own amendment and anything touching treaty land, treaty water or a nation’s jurisdiction, needs the concurrent assent of a majority of the members from at least four of the March’s six regions.

Permanence

Arizona has never been converted and can be converted only by amending the March Charter under that concurrent-majority rule, which nobody can assemble for the purpose. Its settlement has never filled the March as Dakota’s filled the plains, and the pressure that converted the Northern March has never arisen. Nobody in the March argues about the designation: the argument in Arizona is about what the Lord Marcher may do, not about whether there should be one.

The two Marches compared

The Northern March was a frontier held against enemies. Its head was a soldier who commanded troops, its emergency power was a war power, and its compacts were with nations it was at war with for much of its life. It lasted twenty-eight years and ended when the frontier it was made to hold had ceased to be one.

The March of Arizona is a frontier held against scarcity. Its head is a civilian who commands nothing, its emergency powers concern water and heat as much as the border, and its compacts are a constitutional limit on its own government rather than an instrument of it. It has lasted a hundred and forty-four years and shows no sign of ending.

What the two have in common is the idea behind the form: that a part of the Realm can be governed by its own people in its ordinary business while the Crown keeps a hand on it in its frontier business, and that a head the Crown appoints can hold that hand more safely than one the frontier elects. The Northern March tested that idea against war and failed it in the Black Hills. Arizona has tested it against water and heat for a century and a half, and the Realm has judged it to work there.

Failings

The Northern March was the instrument of the Black Hills. Pahá Sápa was seized without valid consent in the 1870s under a Lord Warden whose office existed to keep the compacts, and the proclamations that cleared the land were the March’s. A form designed to hold treaty land under compact was used to take it, and the strongest case against government of the frontier by special powers is the record of the March that had the most of them.

The Lord Warden’s powers were a war power with no term. Emergency proclamations in the Northern March ran for years at a time and bound settlers and nations alike, and Parliament, which had made the March so that it would not have to govern the plains itself, did not look at them.

A March’s compacts are only as good as its head. Arizona’s Charter makes the nations a party and its compacts a limit, and for decades no Lord Marcher used the Council of Nations and Compacts, whose yearly sessions went on as formalities until 2027. The protections the form gives the nations have depended on the person holding it.

Assessment

A March is the Realm’s answer to a frontier it cannot govern from New Westminster and will not leave to itself. It gives the frontier self-government in ordinary business, keeps the Crown’s hand on the frontier business, and writes the treaty nations into the polity’s constitution rather than leaving them to its statutes.

The form has been tried twice and has given two answers. In the Northern March it was a military government with an elected council, used in the 1870s to take the land it existed to protect, and converted as soon as there were enough settlers to ask. In Arizona it is a civilian constitutional office whose emergency powers have never been used against the March’s own people and whose compacts bind the March’s own government.

What decides which kind of March a frontier gets is what the frontier is. A frontier against enemies produced a Lord Warden and ended in a conversion. A frontier against scarcity produced a Lord Marcher and has no end in view.

✎ Editor's Note · Why the Register has Marches

The March is the Register’s frontier form, built from the English vocabulary of the Welsh and Scottish borders because a Realm under the British Crown would reach for that vocabulary when its own ran out. Arizona came first in the writing, and this page gives it a predecessor: the Northern March, the plains frontier of the 1860s and 1870s, which the real Dakota Territory’s history fills with the same wars and the same seizure of the Black Hills.

The two Marches are deliberately unlike. A frontier form that worked everywhere would be flattery, so the first March fails at the thing the form exists for and is converted when its settlers outnumber its purpose, and the second works because its frontier is water and heat rather than an enemy. The page does not settle whether the form is good. It records that it has been tried twice and has given two answers.

Chronology

Date	Event
1783	The Charter of Union, Article VIII.5, allows Parliament to constitute polities in new forms
1861	Parliament makes the Northern March out of the northern plains to the Rocky Mountains; the Lord Warden at a fort on the Missouri; an elected Council
1862	The Dakota conflict spreads from Minnesota into the eastern March
1863	The March’s western country passes to Idaho Territory
1864	Montana is organised as a Territory
1870s	Pahá Sápa, the Black Hills, is seized without valid consent under the Lord Warden’s proclamations; the town at the Missouri crossing takes the name Bismarck
1884	Parliament makes the March of Arizona; the March Charter sealed with the nations as a party; the Lord Marchership vacant, exercised by the Territorial Governor
2 November 1889	The Northern March is admitted as the State of the Dakotas; the Lord Wardenship abolished
1911	George W. P. Hunt, the first Lord Marcher
1917	Hunt declines to proclaim during the deportation of the strikers; the authority is never used for civil order
Twentieth century	Heat added to the emergency authority
2027	Gabrielle Giffords Lord Marcher; she convenes the Council of Nations and Compacts, the first time in decades

Trivia

In-Universe There have been two Marches. The Northern March of 1861 to 1889 became the State of the Dakotas, and the March of Arizona, made in 1884, is the only one left.
In-Universe For five years, from 1884 to 1889, the Realm had two Marches at once.
In-Universe The Northern March's head was a Lord Warden, after the wardens of the Scottish border. Arizona's is a Lord Marcher, after the lords of the Welsh border.
In-Universe Every Lord Warden of the Northern March was an army officer. No Lord Marcher of Arizona has commanded troops.
In-Universe The Lord Warden sat at a fort on the Missouri from 1861, and the town that grew up at the crossing beside it became Bismarck. The capital never moved.
In-Universe The Northern March was converted because it filled: its settlers wanted an elected head. Arizona has never filled enough for anyone to press.
In-Universe The Governor of the Dakotas is a new office of 1889. Nothing of the Lord Wardenship survives in the State's constitution.
In-Universe Arizona can stop being a March only by amending its Charter, which needs a majority of the members from four of its six regions, and nobody has tried.
In-Universe Nobody from Arizona calls themselves a Marcher. That is the head of state's title.
In-Universe The March Charter of 1884 gave the Lord Marcher emergency powers over water, the border and defence. Heat came later, when cooling made it a subject of government.
In-Universe Arizona's emergency authority has never been used for civil order, a convention fixed when the first Lord Marcher declined to proclaim during the deportation of the strikers in 1917.
In-Universe The designation has never been proposed for any polity except the two that had it.
Real-World In reality the northern plains were the Dakota Territory from 1861 and were admitted as two states, North Dakota and South Dakota, on 2 November 1889. The Register's Northern March is that territory under a Crown head.
Real-World The Marcher lordships of Wales were abolished by the Laws in Wales Acts of 1535 and 1542, and the English and Scottish Wardens of the Marches lapsed after the union of the Crowns in 1603.
Real-World Arizona and New Mexico were real United States territories, admitted as two states in 1912. The March of Arizona joins them in 1884 under one instrument.