In 1946, on this day Winston S. Churchill (pictured) is sworn in as first Prime Minister of the United Dominions of America. He will preside over a domain extending from the Arctic Circle to the Rio Grande and including Cuba.

Fruition of a Dream by Eric LippsThe UDA's nominal subordination to London will in practice amount to little more than continuing to accept the British pound as legal tender alongside the United Dominions' own. Theoretically, the UDA is to answer to the King and Parliament; in reality, it is strong enough, both economically and militarily, to say no to London and make it stick.

This reality is not lost on London, which dreads the prospect of having to enforce its will militarily. Incoming British prime minister Clement Attlee privately advises King Edward VIII that it will probably be necessary to treat the UDA as, de facto if not quite de jure, a sovereign nation. The King reluctantly concurs, but mourns being the monarch to in effect lose so large a portion of the British Empire. Attlee responds that he should console himself that the process has been underway for many years, and is not the fault of any failing on his part.

American nationalists celebrate throughout the UDA at the coming to fruition of a dream they have nurtured since the uprising of the 1770s. That attempt at secession from the British Empire had fallen apart when rebel leader Thomas Jefferson refused to excise a passage condemning the African slave trade from his proposed declaration of independence and the insurgents' "Continental Congress" broke apart over the issue. A second rebellion, launched by slaveholding Southerners after Britain outlawed slavery throughout the Empire in 1838, had likewise failed. But the power of the nominally subject North American colonies had grown steadily, and the terrible generation of the 1914-1942 World War, when Britain, Spain and Japan had battled for their lives against Imperial Germany, Austria-Hungary, and the totalitarian republics of France and Russia had only strengthened North America while badly weakening the Home Islands. At the same time, North American awareness of the colonies' strength had combined with a growing resentment of being ruled, however loosely, by a distant monarch to revive the movement for independence. At the close of the war, Americans had been in a position to press London for sovereignty, and Churchill, whose mother had been American and who had left England in 1913 following a bitter dispute with his father Lord Randolph Churchill, had been among the most eloquent and forceful advocates for the cause.