VI. Fell on Black Days
From Zuckerkorn, B. Foreigners in Their Homeland: Being Black in North America in the Twentieth Century. Philadelphia: Bluth and Co., 2004.
The Negro Regiments
Lyman Coates has said (2001) that if one wishes to get a measure of the popular academic image of Gabriel Semmes as “the pragmatist par excellence” it is best to look at the story of how he spent his Inauguration Day. According to the myth…his third action upon sitting behind Lee’s Desk on that February morning [1] was to swallow his own pride and issue an executive order expediting the establishment of training camps in Alabama and Georgia for the training of black troops. Five days later, most of the incoming contingent of Radical Liberals (who had gained twenty seats despite the electoral flop of Doroteo Arango [2]) and about half of the Whigs in the House united to pass the Negro Defensive Recruitment and Training Act, also referred to as the Cohen Act for John S. Cohen, the Georgia soldier-politician who raised the profile of the Act through his friends in Congress. Despite protest from the Governors of Florida and Mississippi, those of Alabama and Georgia were eager to remove some of the increasingly troublesome blacks who have begun raising the spectre of revolution across the Deep South.
Curiously, many blacks proved quite keen to enlist: the promise of full citizenship, and thus the ability to vote and own their own homes, offered a degree of humanisation hitherto unknown to most African-Confederates. The policy also engendered a strange degree of patriotism, reflecting the extent to which nationalism coloured the Great War: for better or worse, the CSA was the only country Confederate blacks had ever had. Even if it had treated them poorly (at best), the common impression (false as it was) that the US was just as bad, if not worse to those trying to cross the border, imbued some – not quite a majority, but a sizable minority – with patriotic sentiment.
The first of the Negro Regiments, the 129th Infantry, colloquially known as the ‘Fighting Bucks’, was assembled after a six-week training course and sent to the Kentucky Front, it being held that only white troops would be courageous enough to keep taking the fight to the Yankee on his home ground while Negroes were supposedly only competent enough to fend off their clumsy advances. Sure enough, they were given a baptism of fire at the opening stages of the Battle of Prestonsburg (April 4-9), where they were sent over the top to try and retake the strategic road and junction. As green troops, they (and their white officers) suffered appalling losses but, by all accounts, fought with as much determination and valour as their white counterparts. The eventual success of the 129th in helping retake Prestonsburg on the morning of the 22nd led to the increased deployment of Negro Regiments along second-priority areas of the front, with the side-effect of allowing white veteran units to be redeployed to the increasingly grim frontlines south of Bowling Green and on the Potomac.
It is impossible to quantify the impact of the Regiments in all, considering the relatively short amount of time they spent at the front – five months at the absolute maximum – but the presence of almost 200,000 extra men at or behind the lines provided vital relief as Confederate manpower was stretched beyond its breaking point by the second Remembrance Day Offensive, with the presence of the 414th at Blacksburg buying vital time…
…breakthroughs in the Summer Offensive were almost inevitable; although Semmes had plastered over the cracks in the Confederacy’s manpower woes, he could not make up for the disparities in production of the resources which fuelled a total war effort. Exhaustion, hunger, and disease were rife amongst the defenders north of Nashville, Memphis, and along the rivers and hills which made up the bullet-strewn border between North and South.
Emotion has a way of triumphing over logic, however, in the harsh light of defeat, and we should not be surprised even in hindsight that the blacks ended up receiving a massively disproportionate share of the blame for the manner in which the Confederate States had to throw up their hands in defeat and surrender to the ignominies of the Armistice…
From Driver, M. “Two Decades of Despair: Afro-Confederates During the Bloody Twenty” in Chains of Iron, Chains of Law: Being Black in the Confederate States, 1865-2015. Philadelphia: Liberty Bell Press, 2016.
The Red Rebellion
…Afro-Confederate population of the CSA had been surprisingly quiet during the war (the term ‘docile’, as suggested by contemporaries, is too condescendingly paternalistic to be used in any serious modern work), but there remained issues. While many of the more than nine million black Confederates had been satisfied with the opportunity to work in war industries as more whites were called away to the front, even for considerably lower standards of pay and conditions (which were nonetheless the best-paid work most had ever seen), the predominantly rural sector was heavily influenced by Marxist thought, a trend predicted by Abraham Lincoln but largely ignored…
…almost unimaginable economic disparities between blacks and whites aside, the social marginalisation of Negroes in the CSA was the driving factor behind their radicalisation. Their second-class status as ‘residents, not citizens’ meant that every Negro resident of the CSA had since the 1882 Manumission been legally obligated to carry an internal passport (known as a “passbook”, in which their name and address was contained), which served to add an extra dimension to the means of control over blacks through systemic regulation and regimentation. The decision to allow blacks to take surnames in 1885, for instance, was largely taken in order to facilitate efforts to track fugitives; it was for this reason that South Carolina, Georgia, Mississippi, Alabama, Florida, and Arkansas only permitted blacks to select from a list of approved surnames, usually derived from counties, plantations, and former owners.
Passbooks had to be presented upon request by any state or federal law enforcement official – including soldiers and militia – for inspection, and issued with a travel visa for inter-state travel; the penalty for ignoring any and all of these provisions was lengthy jail time, usually in one of the penal labour gangs present at the time. These laws were, naturally, exploited with flippancy; in Mississippi and South Carolina, where blacks comprised over half of the population, the number of Afro-Confederates press-ganged into prison labour rose from 2,000 in 1910 to 73,000 by the summer of 1916…
…little under half of Confederate blacks were functionally literate, not unimpressive given that schooling had only been legal since 1882, and many lawmakers had feared the spread of revolutionary sentiment if Negroes were taught how to read. They were correct, though only somewhat; while the half who could read often did read and disseminate Marxian readings, the fact that the overwhelming majority of literate blacks (81% of the total, according to the 1910 Census) lived in cities meant that most revolutionary ideology was spread by word of mouth in gatherings in the countryside dwellings of sharecroppers. The resulting ideology was eclectic, with particular interpretations of Marxism varying from state to state and even county to county – some, particularly in South Carolina and Mississippi, were extremist Marxist movements of the type promoted by Ulyanov in contemporary Russia, while others in Florida and North Carolina were closer to what later became known as Christian Socialism…
…steadily mounting defeats of the CS Army in Kentucky and southernmost Pennsylvania – and soon Tennessee and Maryland – encouraged many would-be revolutionaries, with very localised uprisings in Alabama and Georgia occurring as early as the winter of 1915, but the major uprisings would not occur until news of the imminent Union assault on Nashville brought the fact home to cell leaders that their time to strike – while Confederate power was at its nadir, but before the war had ended and the full force of the military could be utilised against them – was quickly passing. The first major disturbances erupted in Mississippi and South Carolina almost simultaneously in mid-July of 1916, with the Congaree Socialist Republic and People’s Confederation of the Delta springing up and rapidly taking root amongst the Afro-Confederate populations of the Congaree and Mississippi Delta areas, respectively. Scores of these ‘Red Republics’ would be declared across the Deep South, from the Republic of Outer Banks in North Carolina to the People’s Democratic Republic of the Everglades in Florida to the Texark Proletarian Dictatorship which, at its peak, spanned four states…
…[T]hese republics were generally ramshackle affairs which struggled to govern themselves effectively, and the fragility of their institutions – which operated on local interpretations of Marxist ideologies and were, thanks to the charismatic rather than democratic foundations of their legitimacy, susceptible to Terrors of the sort France was notorious for in both the First and Second Revolutions – combined with the racist perceptions endemic to the Caucasian populace at the time to lead Richmond to consider it sufficient to organise those too young, old, or crippled to fight in the regular Army in the hastily-organised Local Defense Volunteers as a means of suppressing the Rebellion. Initially it appeared that this might be the case, but after the cataclysmic failure to defend Albany, Georgia from the Black Belt Socialist Republic and the havoc wrought upon the Confederate logistical chain by several hundred thousand farm labourers abandoning or even torching their fields on the eve of the harvest, the War Office was convinced to dispatch several brigades of new troops intended to fight up north to instead do what was referred to as “punching smoke;” fighting revolutionaries in the swamps and forests.
At its peak in November 1916, the Rebellion encompassed all of the Confederate states besides Sonora and Chihuahua, where the Afro-Confederate population was too small to be able to organise and rebel in any meaningful fashion, even though labourers in the Army of Texas were known to engage in sabotage and…
…two states in particular – the Black Belt Socialist Republic in southern Alabama and Georgia, and the Congaree Socialist Republic of South Carolina – were sufficiently threatening to warrant at least a brigade-equivalent of troops and militia each to go into the swamps after them, beginning around the end of August 1916. Following the Armistice, these troops were bolstered by returning veterans, with the efforts of local planter aristocrats – under whom many enlisted men had served in the Great War – vital in securing the support of poor whites who, but for the colour of their skin, might otherwise have been at risk of joining the Revolution…
…took months to root out the Red forces, with several Afro-Confederates proving themselves brilliant tacticians. Of particular note was Cassius Marsh, formerly of the Marshlands plantation outside St Matthews, South Carolina, who evaded capture for a full nine months before the Congaree Socialist Republic was completely expunged and he himself was summarily executed in early spring, 1917. The quashing of the C.S.R. was also notable as the ‘last gasp’ of the local plantocracy, with the Colletons, Lynches, Heywards, and the indomitable Tillmans all throwing their weight behind the militia campaign...
…by April the worst of the rebellion was over and the social order of the Confederacy had been preserved, at the cost of over a hundred and fifty thousand lives – of whom perhaps five thousand were whites.
A complex wrinkle of the Rebellion was the manner in which both during and after the Armistice black units were kept at the front – they could ill afford to be removed – and continued to give a good account of themselves, with many working hard to prove their loyalty to the only country they’d ever known. But the Backstab Myth – the idea that the rebellion had prevented Confederate victory in the Great War, despite all evidence to the contrary – would persist in nationalist circles once peace broke out. Conversely, the Hand-Behind-Back theory held that the blacks, having proved excellent at holding off the Yankees and Confederates alike, would have been better used from the beginning at the front, and advocated for greater use of Negro troops in any future war. This conflict would set the scene for the ideological conflict of the 1920s within the debate…
Congaree Socialist Republic (declared)
Orangeburg County, South Carolina [4]
March 3, 1917
Scipio was surrounded by maniacs. That was the conclusion he’d drawn late last summer when one war erupted as another ended, and Cassius and the rest of the labourers had torched the Colleton mansion where he had hitherto been gainfully employed.
It wasn’t as if, with thousands upon thousands of demoralised yet vengeful and angry young men returning from Tennessee, the buckra would hesitate to stamp out the efflorescent Marxist revolt flaring into life across the state. Nor was it, he had thought, sufficient to claim that the poorly-armed scratch battalions of Negroes would magically overpower their erstwhile overseers; not when they had the entire machinery of the state at their disposal. Furthermore, he had claimed and been quickly ignored in claiming, necessity rather demanded that the abolition of “the capitalist blood money of the bourgeoisie” be put aside so that the revolutionaries might be able to offer the unwilling blacks something rather more tangible than rhetoric in their pockets to lend them a little sympathy for The Cause.
To say those objections – or at least, those he’d felt comfortable advancing in the face of fanatics – had fallen on deaf ears was an understatement. And why wouldn’t they? To the revolutionaries, the fall had been surprisingly productive. The harvest had been brought in more-or-less on time; Cassius had, no matter what else might be said for him, been intelligent enough to realise that a revolution lived or died on its stomach.
The grey cotton shirt and torn dungarees he wore were loose-fitting, uncomfortable rags compared to what he had worn in his domestic servitude. Still, they were all equal now, all free and equal to be shot at and shot down like dogs by the soldiers who were now returning in droves from the front. Cassius spat defiance at them from the Congaree swamps and, at the moment, from the bully pulpit.
“Looks like the cap’talist oh-pressors [he always said it like that, “oh-pressors”] gwine try make another go at crushing the Proletarian Revolution. How we feel ‘bout that, folks?”
The labourers-cum-revolutionaries who comprised the CSR in word and thought and deed jeered and hissed and shook their fists from their place in the dimming light of the evening. Scipio joined in from his position amongst the dozen-man knot of the People’s Revolutionary Congress at the head of the gathering.
“If this be liberty and independence,” he thought mutely, “or whatever else it may be called, God grant me enjoyment of the opposite.”
“That bitch Colleton” he began, pausing for the inevitable chorus of hatred the name of the capitalist oh-pressor par excellence always brought “reckon she gwine come on in here with her sojer boys ‘n coonhounds and bag her a pretty kill.” He smiled, something which as usual contorted his face into a sweaty, leathery mask of predatory hate. “Whadda us coons think ‘bout that?”
Scipio made sure to shout even louder on that one, feeling eyes boring into him. Cherry had regularly accused him of “wantin to go back be the bitch’s porch nigger”, often enough that even though she was now safely dead (maybe as the result of something Scipio had sent to Colleton via post, maybe not), he had to make the effort to be seen as the most enthusiastic of Cassius’ supporters. That one may smile, and smile, and be a villain. Yes, best to keep smiling, as Cassius’ speech reached its crescendo.
“So now we’s the last left o’ the Sou’ Carolina Revolution. Whitey reckon he gwine come in here, teach the niggers a lesson ‘bout getting’ back into they plantations. How we plannin’ to welcome them when they comes?”
Rumours had trickled through, now and then, of goings-on in other counties, other states, other countries. From the shouts and waved weapons, improvised and otherwise, that Cassius got in response, the welcome was going to be as warm as the cockles of Lucifer’s heart.
The next morning came with warmth and humidity, as it would in the swamps along the Congaree from now until November. It also came with the buzz of an aeroplane motor.
“They got fuckin’ flyin’ machines,” one of the revolutionaries noted flatly, every eye raised to the sky. Cassius nodded by way of response.
“Reckon they do,” he said. “Reckon we best show the flyboy that these is the lands o’ the proletariat,” he added, hefting his Lee-Enfield to his shoulder and squeezing off a round at the distant speck. A few other fighters joined in, banging idly away at the contraption like it was a massive game bird of string and wood and fabric rather than a war machine. It made for sport, and allowed people to prove their revolutionary zeal: a rare opportunity for no risk.
Then Scipio heard the whistle in the distance, and overheard tales of the Kentucky front given in exacting detail by the late unlamented Marse Jacob came to mind. He had just enough presence of mind to begin to shout when the first shell thudded in the distance, screams rising alongside a cloud of dirt and broken branches.
“Do Jesus!” he roared. “They gots artillery!”
The last word rang strangely cultured amongst the dialect of the Congaree. It got the message across, though, and other blacks began scattering as other shots – ranging shots, thought Scipio, they’ll be trying to pin our location so they can hit us with everything – began creeping closer to the encampment.
The barrage was comical compared to the Biblical thunder of the war recently ended, but it was worse than any of the amateur soldiers in the swamp had faced. The small mercy was that they didn’t get gassed; whether that was because the militia couldn’t get their hands on any or because they didn’t want to kill all of the rebels before they could get their hands on them to make some examples of them…Scipio shivered as he remembered the image of Anne Colleton in rifle and plus-fours, death in her eyes and hell in her heart.
The aeroplane, the revolutionaries had realised, must have a wireless telegraph in it reporting their position to the artillerymen. The firing grew more intense as they tried to hit it, and remained as ineffective. Wouldn’t it be something, Scipio thought, if the bullets weren’t just landing on our own further afield?
As soon as the thought came, he tried to banish it. The whites had been steadily forcing them back through the swamps for a fortnight now, and it looked as if the kid gloves had come off.
Which didn’t mean the Negroes didn’t try to do their best to match the buckra’s professionalism; as shells whistled around, Cassius and all the rest of them kept firing defiance at the whites, exhorting their comrades to carry on the fight. It might be expedient to begin the search for alternative paths to freedom, Scipio’s mind told him as he made a show of finding a rifle, considering how the violent path to change has worked for you thus far.
As it so often was, Scipio’s mind was right, and not before time. Cassius gave the order to scatter into the forest, an order which the revolutionaries followed so efficiently it was almost as if they had begun fleeing before he spoke. He certainly hadn’t caught Scipio napping, anyway; branches whipped at his face in the dawn’s early light as Cassius’ voice echoed after him, distorted and pale in the silent hollows left between the bursts of shellfire.
As Scipio’s self-preservation instinct finally overruled his fear of Cassius and his comrades, he decided this was as good a time as any to make a bid for freedom. He gambled upon his chances of heading west, where the woods would grow thinner sooner but he’d end up further from Red-held territory, or Marshlands for that matter. As if to confirm the wisdom of his choice, Scipio heard rifle shots ring out – not close enough for him to need to take cover, but closer than he would have preferred – Tennessee, now, that would have been distant enough, but anything this nearby…
It was night by the time he made it to an overgrown, weed-infested cotton field. Shaking as the adrenaline left his system and fatigue finally overcame him, he heard once more the boom of artillery as lightning flashed to the east and rain began to pour. Dropping to his knees, Scipio laughed up at the sky as the cool water washed the mud off him. He could get struck by lightning now and it wouldn’t make a damn bit of difference. Neither Colleton nor Cassius nor anyone else owned him now.
If Scipio was to die from here on out, either on his knees in the mud or on his feet like the Congaree Socialist Republic had, he would do so – he would do anything, for the first time in his life – a free man.
[1]Confederate Inauguration Day is February 22, the day the Constitution took force – another petty way to distance themselves from the North. Lee’s Desk is TTL’s Resolute Desk, Queen Victoria having little incentive to give the Union any gift that wasn’t posted via a Lee-Enfield.
[2] Even in-universe this is pretty unfair to Arango – he was up against a Whig during a war, and was only ever intended as a controversy candidate to draw out Hispanic voters. It worked; Sonora and Chihuahua went solidly Rad Lib, eroding the power of the landholding patrones who had traditionally ensured their peons voted Whig [3] decisively and cementing the image of the Party as one of upwards mobility for most (with one glaring exception) of the Confederacy’s social groups.
[3] Landowners voting Rad Lib? Fat chance; they’re more Whiggish than your most mint-julep-y South Carolinian. Pay attention – this will be important later.
[4] While in OTL Calhoun County, the OTL partition of Lexington and Orangeburg Counties never came to pass ITTL. Minor state adminstrative butterflies, yay!
