#79: Reconstruction
In North America, Britain had its work cut out. The rebellious shires, along with the Native Protectorates were all returned to colonial status, governed from London, with appointed governors to rule over them. The main difference between the current situation and other colonies was that this was regarded as first of all a temporary situation, and second of all a military operation. The new governors were generals, the law imposed was martial, and a radical agenda of changing the old slave-owning counties into functional parts of the Kingdom was enacted. There was a somewhat similar thing going on in Great Britain proper, where the more rebellious cities of the Great Crises remained under martial law, governed and regulated by the Myrmidon Corps. But there was no precedent of doing in Insular Britain what was about to occur in Continental Britain.
The first act was to alter the boundaries of the rebellious counties into larger military districts reducing the number from nearly twenty to six. All of the Caribbean shires were turned into one district, including British Honduras and the Miskito Coast. The Carolinas and Georgia became one district. The Floridas became another. The former Native Protectorates were merged into district. The counties beyond the Appalachian Mountains became one district, and the counties of Virginia and Maryland became one. Each district was to be governed by an officer not below the rank of lieutenant colonel. The duties of these governors were to protect all persons in their rights of person and property, to suppress insurrection, disorder, and violence, and to punish, or cause to be punished, all disturbers of the public peace and criminals. They also supervised elections and appointment of officials, the registration of voters, and the sheriffs and other officers of the law and state were placed under the command of these governors. The governor had the power to remove persons from civil office in their district and it was their responsibility to oversee and enforce oaths of allegiance to King and Country.
The black population was immediately emancipated and enfranchised, while those who had served the rebellious state in a civilian capacity or as an officer were disenfranchised until they proved their loyalty. While compensation was granted to slaveowners, many large plantation owners became desitute overnight from the costs of paying a large staff, as well as losing many as they moved away to make their own lives. These bankrupt plantations were bought up by the state and sold off in parcels to the former slaves as tenant farmers. Many freedmen were offered a deal to settle in the west (avoiding the areas agreed for the Lakota in the treaties which ensured their participation in the wars with the rebels and the New Spanish), receiving licences to claim a fixed area of land. Laws which discriminated on the basis of race were banned and punished severely. Those which tried to fix the system were quickly cut off.
Schools were built across the South, often by charities based in the North or Great Britain proper. Infrastructure investment came, and factories were built, railway lain. An alliance was swiftly forged of the military governors, newly enfranchised blacks, the white poor who had benefited little from slavery, and newcomers from outside the South. In the former Native Protectorates, a similar alliance was forged, with the chiefs responsible for rebellion kicked out and parliamentary structures of governance imposed.
Violence was frequent and brutal. Natives and whites alike balked at the enfranchisement and participation of blacks. The Red Banners, a group of radical white supremacists emerged and were brutally suppressed by the military government. Such groups became increasingly isolated as the years went on, and poor whites participated in the new structures, former rebels made oaths of allegiance to return to even the lowest of offices. Before long, the Red Banners was an organisation of common bandits and extreme reactionary former plantation owners.
The institutions of public education and the participation of an increasingly literate black population in politics saw the idea of state education become increasingly popular and mainstream. Reforms to tax policy in the South, long institutionally corrupt, saw revenues dramatically increase, particularly with the industrialisation of the region.
Some of the smaller plantation owners, who had been able to survive the emancipation of their smaller numbers of slaves, were able to build a system known as sharecropping which perpetuated systems of partially unfree labour. These were most common in the areas where slavery had been relatively newer, the Carolinas and Floridas. Elsewhere, the plantation owners had been larger and more institutionalised and so had suffered more from fines and emancipation, resulting in the collapse of their livelihoods. These counties would become the strongholds of Reaction when restored to the Kingdom proper.