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I’ve had this little scenario bouncing around in my head for a few years now. It isn’t a detailed timeline or a sweeping epic – rather it’s a vision of a single moment in history that may or may not have been particularly crucial, and how I wish things had gone differently just for the sake of that one moment.



The POD is the existence of a man who never lived in OTL, who for purposes of poetic license and convenience of imagination we can think of as a grown up, real-life version of Huckleberry Finn.

“Huck” is born very poor in Missouri in 1828, and spends his childhood and early teen years in and around Hannibal, Missouri; he does a surprising amount of traveling at a young age, and becomes peripherally involved with the Underground Railroad – unusually for his society, he decides for himself quite early on, based on his experiences in interacting with both whites and negroes, and his own personal moral code, that slavery is “just plumb wrong.” In his mid-teens he comes into a small amount of money, and with the assistance of some of his childhood friends and their families, he gets a semblance of an education (very much against his will) – he even studies law in St. Louis in the late 1840s; in 1850 he heads out to California during the Gold Rush, and by 1853 he has made himself a small fortune after a variety of rough-and-tumble adventures.

A bit of a late bloomer, Huck grows up to be more than six feet tall, broad and muscular, a man of extraordinary physical power, durability and stamina, capable of astonishing violence when the situation calls for it.

An impressive and commanding figure, with a warm, honest, and open personality, a reputation as an absolutely fearless genuine frontier bad-ass, lots of friends, a certain rough charisma, and a way with words – not great oratorical skill by the standards of the day, but witty, insightful, and humorous – Huck somehow finds himself elected to the US House of Representatives from California in 1854.

Huck discovers he doesn’t much care for Washington (and he loathes politics), and he decides not to run for re-election in 1856, determined to “light out for the territories again” once his term is up, but he is still in town in May of 1856, and when Preston Brooks attacks Charles Sumner in the Senate chamber, Huck happens to be passing by just outside, and he hears the start of a ruckus…



Huck rushes into the chamber and moves forward with several others to help Sumner as Brooks begins beating him.

Laurence Keitt, standing nearby, jumps into the aisle and threatens the approaching Congressmen with a pistol, shouting:


“Let them be!”


The others withdraw, but Huck’s blood is up. He stands his ground and scoffs at Keitt, bellowing:


“A gun, is it? Then I reckon you’re yellow! Shoot me, if you dare!”


He steps toward Sumner and Brooks.

Surprised by this, without thinking, Keitt shoots him in the chest, driving him back a step with a pained grunt.

The onlookers (and Keitt) gasp in shock, and Brooks pauses in beating Sumner and turns around, surprised by the shot.

By a great stroke of luck, the bullet deflects off of two of his ribs (breaking them), narrowly missing his heart and lungs, and exits out his back, splattering the floor behind him with blood and a tiny chunk of flesh; though the pain is tremendous, he is an incredibly tough and vigorous man, with an unusually high pain threshold – years before, in California, he survived a mauling by a grizzly bear (during which, despite being horribly clawed and bitten and suffering several broken bones, he managed to bite off one of the bear’s toes, and survived by throwing himself off a cliff into a river), and this isn’t as bad as that was.

Huck looks down at his chest, oozing blood, considers it for several seconds, looks up at Keitt’s horrified face, gives an evil grin, spits, and says:


“Huh. Not enough gun.”


He once more steps forward, this time raising his hands as though to grab Keitt.

At this point, several other congressmen, government officials, and passers-by have entered the Senate chamber, drawn by the sound of the first gunshot, just in time to see Keitt shoot Huck a second time.

Keitt, in a confused panic, takes a step back, and, giving a strangled curse, shoots him again at point blank range; though this time the bullet merely grazes the side of his neck, the angle of the shot causes a dramatic spray of blood.

Pausing for only a split second, Huck closes the distance with Keitt, and snatches the gun out of his hand, saying:


“I’ll have that!”


He points it into Keitt’s face; Keitt goes cross-eyed, staring down the barrel of his own pistol inches from his nose.

All the onlookers, including Preston Brooks, are motionless, silent, staring at the unbelievable tableau of what is unfolding (though the bleeding and concussed Sumner is struggling up to his knees while Brooks is distracted).

After a moment’s consideration, Huck tosses the gun off to one side – it slides loudly across the Senate floor and thumps to a stop on the far side of the room.

Keitt starts to back away from him, but Huck grabs him by the lapels, lifting him up onto his toes, gives him a violent shake, and growls, teeth clenched in pain:


“That’s two for you. And now, one for me.”


Huck cocks his arm back, holding Keitt by one lapel, and slams his fist into Keitt’s face with all his strength, snapping his head back, shattering his nose, fracturing his cheek, and knocking out three of his teeth; Keitt is dazed and concussed.

He drops Keitt, who slumps to his knees with a quiet moan as teeth and blood pour out of his mouth, and steps around him, up to Preston Brooks.

Brooks, shocked and amazed by this turn of events, raises his cane in front of him, in a vague, half-hearted defensive move, and sputters:


“No – what – Now, look here – you – I – AH!”


Huck once again snatches the weapon out his opponent’s hand, and takes a step back.

Holding it out horizontally, showing it to Brooks, Huck slowly, deliberately, takes a grip on either end of the thick gutta-percha cane, strains, and snaps it in two with a shattering crack (an incredible feat without a point of leverage, especially considering his injured state, but made possible by the hysterical rage-and-adrenaline-fueled magnification of his naturally extraordinary strength – the strain actually causes several tiny stress-fractures in the bones of his hands that he won’t feel until much later).

Breathing heavily, his eyes blazing with rage, adrenaline coursing through his veins, his clothing soaked and his face splattered with his own blood – blood still pulsing from his chest and neck – he drops the two broken halves of the cane at Preston Brooks’ feet, and looming over him, he hisses:


“Take your pick. If’n it’s a fight you want, I’ll oblige you - fair and square. At your pleasure, sir… No? NO?!Then I reckon you’re a MISERABLE! GUTLESS! BACK-SHOOTIN’! YELLOW-BELLIED! NO-ACCOUNT CUR! Now you get out of my sight or I’ll whip you too!


Stunned by this red-faced stentorian bellowing (less than a foot away from Brooks’ face at the end of his tirade) and the mythic spectacle of what he has just seen, Brooks hesitates, half-turns, starts to speak, stops, and starts again, but when Huck glares at him and raises his bloody fist, Brooks cringes away and stumbles out of the Senate chamber.

Keitt, sitting in a half-conscious daze on the floor, tips over onto his side with a dull thud.



That’s all I’ve got. I don’t really have any clear idea of what might happen next, how this might affect the course of history, or the details of what would happen to the participants, aside from:

- Charles Sumner would not have been beaten as badly as OTL.
- Huck would survive the wounds he received, making a nearly full recovery over the course of the next few months; he would not seek re-election, or indeed ever seek elected office of any sort ever again, having acquired a deep distaste for politics.
- If Keitt or Brooks or anyone else challenged Huck to a duel over the affair, Huck would eagerly accept, and specify Bowie knives as the weapon of choice – and Huck would most likely win such a fight. On the other hand, I could imagine any number of angry Southerners blowing his head off without bothering to challenge or face him...
- There would be more than a dozen eye witnesses to the events that transpired in the Senate chamber that day, most of them US Senators and Congressmen.


Thoughts, comments? I’d be grateful for any attempt to seriously flesh out and/or develop an ATL based on this event.




“Happy the man, and happy he alone,
He who can call today his own,
He who secure within can say:
Tomorrow, do thy worst,
For I have lived today.”
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