Malê Rising
- Thread starter Jonathan Edelstein
- Start date
After an hour of code-pushing, the Malê Rising records page is officially updated! If anyone wants to read any recent posts from this timeline (or any post if you want), you can now search for it there.
Thanks again for maintaining this!
As others have said, the best way to find out is to read through the timeline; I'm not saying this to be difficult (nor were they) but because the historical and cultural developments in this story are very interrelated. What happens in Afghanistan, for instance, depends a lot on what happens in India, Persia/Iran and Central Asia, so it isn't always easy to make sense of Afghanistan without knowing what has occurred in these other places. Also, this timeline is the story of ideas going back and forth across the world and the formation of cultural regions that aren't necessarily the same as OTL.
To get you started, though, here's a scene in Lisbon in 1943 and one in 1963; a guest post on Native Americans in Minnesota in the 1930s and a two-part series on Indigenous Canadians [1, 2]; and the most recent "academic" updates on Central America, South America, the Afro-Caribbean world, and Central Asia. Many of them will refer back to prior relevant events in those and other regions. (And while I don't think anime has come up for discussion and while I don't know enough about it to predict whether it would exist or what form it would take ITTL, I'm pretty sure there have been discussions of comics and graphic novels - a less censorious US during the mid-20th century would certainly affect the development of these.)
manga and anime was caused by the horror of war and the atomic bombing of japan, anime could exist in south east Asia if war had a horrific effect on the nation mind. maybe manga could appear in chin and not japan thanks to it being in a horrible war and not japan, analog japan can still make manga since they wear in the grate war themselves. also thanks for the links, that was very helpful of you.
I think I need to reread this as all I can remember is that we ended up discussing Treaty of Waitangi research reports and I really can't remember why Paulo ended up as a NZ historian working for the Office of Treaty Settlements
Burnt Offerings
Sampson County, North Carolina
October 1888
“It’s bad, Chief.”
George Henry White began to nod at the returning scout and then looked at him sharply. He’d known it wouldn’t be good, with smoke still rising from the village up ahead and the gutted church steeple visible even from here. But the look on the scout’s face spoke of something more.
“How bad, Tom?”
“You’ll see.”
A few minutes later, George did see. The village had no name on the maps – it was one of those places where freedmen had settled down after the war, with a name given by its citizens but none the county cared to notice. It would never have one now. Most of the houses were burned and there were bodies on the ground – at least twenty that George could see before he lost count. A few of them were night riders, but most were black men and women lying where they’d fought. And…
The girl lying where George got down from his horse had been eight or nine years old, and she wouldn’t get any older. She’d been killed a few hours ago like the others and her body had stopped leaking, but her clothes were horribly bloodstained and the bullet that killed her had blown half her head away. He had a daughter about that age.
He forced himself to look up. The rest of his volunteers had also dismounted and were looking around, and most of them – black and white – had the same look on their faces that the scout had. Mike Dowling, a white boy from Vanceboro who’d turned seventeen a month ago, was on his knees retching and crying at the same time. Of those nearby, only Jim Kabbah, who’d come up from the South Carolina low country, surveyed the scene evenly.
“Just like ’63,” he said. “No quarter in the Rising either.”
“But that was the war,” said Tom the scout. “This is an election.”
“Same thing,” Jim answered. “Who’s in charge.”
George remembered something he’d read once about war being politics by other means, and wondered if this might be where they met. The Bourbons were panting to take the state back from the Republicans and populists who’d won in ’84, and they thought white supremacy was their ticket. That was bad enough when it was just words, but it was worse when the night-riders started ambushing candidates and burning farms, and it got worse than that when Ben Tillman’s boys streamed across the Georgia border and other Redeemers came in from Virginia and Tennessee.
Up in the Second District where George lived, black folks were thick enough on the ground to fight back, and veterans from South Carolina had come to fill their ranks. Things were still pretty normal in the cities too, with the county seats full of state militia, and out west in the mountains, the brawls were no worse than usual. But here… the state militia couldn’t be everywhere, and there were too many black towns to patrol but not enough to be a majority. It was places just like this, where the coalition had won the last state house election by a few hundred votes and the same number of missing black smallholders could throw the next one to the Bourbons, where the night riders did their worst.
Someone had to get volunteers down here, so George Henry White, representative of Craven County in the North Carolina Senate, had raised a troop. And now, he realized, he had to lead it.
“Any survivors?” he asked.
The troopers who’d taken a look around the village were returning, and all of them shook their heads. “They’re all long gone,” one of them said – Robert Yancy, George remembered. “They took what they could and ran. Probably won’t stop till they get to Raleigh.”
George nodded; refugees on the road were what had brought them here in the first place, and the tent camps up in the Black Second and by Raleigh and Wilmington were filling up. “No one to tell us which way they went, then.”
“The folks on the road didn’t know either.”
“They weren’t here for the end. I was hoping someone would be.”
“I can track ‘em,” Mike said. He was looking better now, but his voice still burned with rage at the people who’d done this; like many of the white men in the troop, he'd joined because of exactly such atrocities. “Pop says I can follow good as a hound.”
“You can go ahead and try,” said George. “Not sure even a hound could find ‘em now, though – they’ve been gone for hours and they’ll be hard to follow once they get to the road. Son of a bitch.” He didn’t like to cuss, but he’d been hoping to get ahead of the bastards rather than guess where they’d hit next.
“I’ve got ways, Chief.” Mike swung back up on his horse, and George waved to the others to get mounted and follow. They rode out of the village through fields the night-riders had trampled, lost the trail at a small stream, picked it back up when Mike spotted tracks on the other side a quarter-mile up the bank.
“Looks like they headed toward the Black River road,” Tom said, looking ahead across stony ground. George looked the same way. The tracks would be easy enough to follow until the road, but after that, he wasn’t sure. Others would have traveled that road since, though maybe Mike had a way to pick out the ones they were looking for.
He started to ask, and then realized that Mike wasn’t crossing the stream at all but was on his knees looking at something else. Mike got up and walked about a hundred feet down the bank, and then he saw something and went to his knees again. “Something here,” he said, and an instant later, from inside a stand of brush, George heard the faint whimpering of a child.
The whimper turned to a cry of terror as more of the volunteers came up and whoever was in there realized she’d been found. “Best if you go in, Chief,” Mike said. “She sees my face first, she’ll probably lose her speech altogether.”
There were times Mike was a lot smarter than his years, and this was one of them; George nodded and crawled into the bushes. He heard another cry and a desperate scramble backward, but then he saw the child’s face, and at the same instant, she saw his. Her eyes registered a black face about her father’s age, and she suddenly was calm.
Her name was Mary, and they got the story out of her a few minutes later after Jim and a couple of the other South Carolina people had made her some tea and given her bread and dried beef. She’d been outside when the night-riders came, and she’d gone to hide in the same bushes where she hid from her brothers where they were playing games. She hadn’t known the riders would leave that way, and it had been pure terror when she heard their horses’ hooves splashing in the stream and their voices not ten feet away. But like George’s own girl, she’d had presence of mind, and after a little more calming, she remembered what they’d said.
“They got a house on the South River somewhere near here,” she said. “I heard them talking about it. That’s where they hide out in the daytime.”
“Sounds like the Higgins place,” said a white man who’d joined the troop locally; George knew him as Emery, but unlike the men who’d been with him all the way from Craven County, he didn’t know his last name. “Only place by the river big enough to hide twenty or thirty of the bastards.”
Mary hadn’t heard of Higgins one way or the other. “Take me home now?” she asked.
It didn’t seem like the right time to tell her. “You come with us now,” George answered. “We’ll take care of that later. Did you hear them say anything about where they’re going tonight?”
“Somewhere by Garland. A village a mile or two from the town. They said something about meeting up with other people there.”
George drew in his breath; two groups of night-riders at once might be too much to handle. “Best if we take ‘em one at a time,” he murmured to himself, and then clapped Mike on the shoulder. “Still don’t know if you’re as good as a hound, but looks like you found them for us after all.”
When they got to the Higgins place two hours later, he was sure - if the horse tracks leading inside the house didn’t say so, the gunshots fired from the upper-story windows certainly did. He reined to a halt behind a stone wall two hundred yards from the manor house and took cover, and the others did the same. None of them had been hit, but they weren’t getting any closer without a fight.
“So what do we do now?” he said, again at a murmur but this time one that carried. George was in charge of his troop because he was on the state legislature and had bought their guns and kit, not because he was a soldier. He knew he didn’t want to assault a house with six hundred feet of open lawn to its front and sides and a river at its back, but maybe some of the veterans had ideas.
“If we can get to those sheds over there,” Jim said, “it’s a hundred feet to the house, but we’d be broadside to ‘em the whole way, and we’d have to get there across open ground. I wouldn’t recommend it.”
“Be nice if we had a couple of six-pounders,” said Tom.
“Be nice if we had a brace of Gatlings too,” Emery answered, “but unless there’s one in the shed, all we got is what we have.”
“We got ‘em treed, at least,” Mike said.
“Ties us up too, and in the meantime, their buddies’ll murder more people by Garland.”
“Wouldn’t take many of us to bottle ‘em up here, though.” Jim was looking thoughtful. “They’ve got the same problem breaking out that we’d have breaking in – ten of us along the wall could keep ‘em where they are, and the rest of us could go take care of their friends.”
George considered briefly. “I still don’t like it,” he said. “We don’t know how many men are in the other group, and we could get slaughtered if we split up. Tom!” he called. “Ride up to the courthouse and find the militia. Tell ‘em there’s a troop of the bastards holed up at the Higgins place and we need more men.”
Tom rode off, and for a couple of hours there was nothing to do but talk and play cards and try to keep Mary calm. A few of the volunteers stretched out behind the wall and caught some sleep. The house was quiet too, and George wondered if the men inside were doing the same things; even murderers had to eat and sleep when they weren’t committing murder.
It was getting toward one in the afternoon when Tom returned, and he had a militia lieutenant with him but no one else. “Can’t spare anyone right now, I’m afraid,” the officer said. “We’ve got trouble ourselves up north, and we have a tip that someone might try to bomb the courthouse. If you hold on here, we’ll try to get a troop to Garland by night…”
“You’ll try?” George repeated.
“That’s the best we can do, Mr. White. I’ll recommend it. But we’re stretched pretty damn thin.” A trace of a smile crossed his face. “We do have some mail for you, though.”
“Mail? What the hell good is that gonna do us?”
“Don’t know,” the lieutenant said, withdrawing a packet from his saddlebag. “But the post office heard your boys were down here.”
George took the packet by instinct and, in spite of himself, looked for his name. He was hoping for something from his wife, but he had to be satisfied with a two-day-old New Bern Journal. He scanned the front page briefly, and it seemed there was still an argument raging in Washington; with a Democrat in the White House, the federal government wasn’t about to send troops to help the state militia, but the Republicans in Congress weren’t going to let the army come in against them. Meantime, Governor Adams had extended the state of insurrection by another month and promised that everyone in the tent camps would get to vote, but sorting out which ballots went where and getting them past the bushwhackers wasn’t easy…
“Got my call-up notice,” Jim said, shaking George out of his concentration. “They called up the Circles in South Carolina. Just patrols and standby for now, but…”
George didn’t need Jim to finish that sentence. Most of the white folks in South Carolina had got used to the way things were – even happy about things like Robert Smalls’ farmers’ bank and crop insurance – but if there were ever a time for the others to make trouble, it was now, and the statehouse wanted to make sure they didn’t get ideas.
“Bet Miss Harriet’s happy,” Tom said. “She’s got a bigger army now than the president.”
“Could use some of them up here,” answered George, but he thought better of that even before he was done speaking. If organized militia crossed the border from South Carolina, that would give Georgia and Virginia the excuse they needed to send their militia in, and that was how the war started back in ’61, wasn’t it?
And that thought – how a skirmish or two could so easily become a war – brought George back to the here and now.
“Give me a handkerchief,” he said, and tied it to the bayonet of his rifle as he looked toward the house. He stood up slowly, wary of guns in the windows, and got up on the stone wall.
“Y’all in the house,” he called. “We got you trapped here and the state boys are on their way. If you come out now, we won’t string you up for what you did last night – my word of honor as a senator. You don’t come out, and we’ll take care of your buddies in Garland and then we’ll take care of you.”
There was silence for a few seconds; George saw shadowy movement inside the house and wondered if he was about to be shot at. But then a window opened and someone shouted out of it in a deep Georgia accent.
“Like hell you will. If the state boys were coming, they’d have already came. We’re staying right where we are, and y’all had best stop play-acting and be gone by the time we go out tonight.”
The window slammed and George climbed down. It had been worth a try. But now he was faced with the same problem that had confronted him when he got here – how to reduce a fortified defensive position over two hundred yards of open ground.
He sat, back against the wall, and tried to put himself in the place of a West Point cadet who’d been assigned a tactical problem. What would Louis Hairston have done with this in one of Bill Walker’s books? But if you were a dime-novel author, you could make things come out all right, while here it was up to God. A frontal assault or an attack from the sheds were out as Jim had said, and the only other way he could see…
“Could we come at ‘em by water?”
Jim raised himself on his elbows, risked another look at the house, and began to nod slowly. “Less than fifty feet on the water side, and the ground isn’t too steep. We did that a few times in the Rising.”
“We did that in Thomas Day’s army too,” said Reuben Ackie. He’d come all the way from Liberia, but he spoke with a North Carolina accent; he’d been born not far from where George was, but his father hadn’t been white enough to pass when the free blacks were expelled in ’47. He’d been with Day’s brigade in the Civil War and he’d fought in Liberia’s own civil war afterward, and now he was giving it a third try. “If we can find some boats, we might catch ‘em napping. Only thing is, if they see us in the boats before we land, we’ll be sitting ducks.”
“Some boats a couple miles up the river at the Taylor place,” Emery said, and everyone began chiming in at once.
“All right,” George said a few minutes later, raising a hand for silence. “I’ll take Emery and twenty men up to Taylor’s. Jim, you’re in charge of who’s staying. Wait about half an hour and start shooting up the house. Keep ‘em looking your way.”
“Who knows – maybe we’ll hit something.”
“Couldn’t hurt.” George got up on the wall again, handkerchief flying. “Last chance, gents,” he called. “I’m riding out now with the state lieutenant, and we’re coming back with a whole company. If you’re still in there when we get back, you’ll get no mercy.”
There was no reply from the house, and George murmured again that it had been worth a try. He saddled up, waited for the others to join him, and waved to the lieutenant, and they rode off together.
They found three boats in the Taylor boathouse; two of them floated, and the third was close enough to patch up with some tar. They took the tar too, and George set some of the men to coating the ends of sticks with it. Old man Taylor watched it all from his window and George could see in his eyes that he wanted to shoot, but he didn’t dare. “Hope you drown,” he shouted; George gave him no mind.
They pushed downriver with muffled oars, sticking as close to the swampy shore as they could. They heard the Higgins place before they saw it; the sound of gunfire told that Jim was indeed keeping the night-riders busy. George paddled a little faster and the house appeared around a bend in the river. He could see the river side of the estate from where he was; the ground was rough and broken by swampy pools, but there was a retaining wall for cover and the distance to the house wasn’t far. A couple of minutes and they’d be there…
A shot rang out and George heard it whistle past him, and a moment later, there was another. Evidently not everyone was on the other side of the house; the night-riders had kept men on watch, and they’d seen the boats.
“Pull hard!” George shouted, all thought of surprise gone. He wrenched on the oars, but the boat handled like a damn tub, and it seemed to take forever to pull into shore. The gunfire was slow at first but became thicker as more men rushed to the water side, and now they were getting the range. Tom cried out and pitched over the side, his oar-stroke unfinished; Reuben shouted and there was blood on his arm, but he kept pulling.
A couple of the troopers fired back from the boats, aiming at the upper-story windows where the gunfire was coming from. Emery wrapped his rifle in oilskin and dove into the river, his outline barely visible under the water as he swam for shore. George couldn’t swim; he crouched as low as he could and prayed.
The boat scraped bottom. They were still a few feet from shore, but that would have to do. George jumped out and ran, hoping that the gunfire from Emery and the couple of others who’d made shore would be enough to protect him. The ground was soft beneath his boots and the mud sucked at him as the bullets crackled. The noises around him seemed to merge and he saw things in flashes: a night-rider’s body hanging halfway out a second-story window, Mike grunting with pain as a bullet hit him and dragging himself forward, the muzzle flash from Reuben’s rifle.
There it was at last: George felt the retaining wall’s presence more than he saw it, but he threw himself down and savored the moist ground and cool stones. He took stock and saw that everyone but Tom had also made the wall; all of them were somehow still alive, though some were wounded. The gunfire from the house was murder, though, and they wouldn’t be so lucky if they tried to charge the rest of the way.
He gauged the distance to the nearest window: about twenty-five feet. It would have to do. He lit one of the tarred sticks with a match, raised himself up and threw it like a spear, falling back behind the wall even as he let go. He heard, rather than saw, breaking glass and the crackle of flames. The other troopers followed; he saw Mike throw a flaming stick and reach for another, and saw Emery draw back his arm but fall backward, the throw unfinished, as a bullet caught him in the chest.
But now cries of fear were added to the noise within the house, and so was the neighing of terrified horses. Dear God the horses – George had forgotten up to now that the night-riders had brought their horses right into the house rather than risking them being cut off in a stable. He heard one kicking at a door, followed by an inhuman scream – whether from horse or human, he didn’t know – as the flames rose higher.
There was gunfire from the other side of the house again, and George realized that Jim and his people must be making the frontal assault that would have been suicide a few minutes before. He wished he could see how it was going, but the night-riders’ fire was becoming spotty and panicked, and if the same thing was happening on the other side, the charge would go home. Jim was a veteran; George would have to trust that he knew what he was doing.
The next thing he heard was more shouting and broken glass in the front; evidently Jim’s troopers had got there. The flames grew higher and suddenly joined together, and the whole house was burning.
An offering, George thought. A burnt offering for a burned village. It was barbaric and brutal and it felt like the Lord’s vengeance.
Someone flung himself out a second-story window and landed heavily on the ground. Mike shot the night-rider where he lay. He remembered what had happened last night. In the front of the house, someone shouted “I surrender!” and was answered with a single shot.
For a moment, George nodded. He remembered what Jim had said about the Rising back in ’63 – no quarter asked and none given. But then anger replaced agreement. This wasn’t the Civil War. They were fighting for the law here, and what would they be if they broke it? Was that what they wanted Mary to see – two massacres in one day?
He stood up, ignoring the gunfire that was still coming from a couple of the windows. “Take prisoners!” he shouted, making his voice carry across the grounds. “Take prisoners, God damn it! We’ll take ‘em to the jail in Clinton and they can have a trial before the sheriff hangs ‘em!”
He wasn’t sure the troopers would obey - he’d raised the troop, but he hadn’t been tested as the leader until today, and some of them were veterans where he wasn’t. Their blood was up, and he was risking it all trying to restrain them. But then another night-rider ran out, and the troopers shouted at him to get on the ground instead of shooting. A fourth one followed, and the others who were still alive came out a few seconds later, and the flames rose to heaven as the troopers found rope to tie them.
They found a cart in one of the sheds and put the prisoners in it, and George detailed Mike and a couple of the walking wounded to take them into town. Mary, uncomprehending but willing to trust, went with them. Maybe the county would be able to find her a new home when all this was over. If not, maybe George would head back north with another child.
There wasn’t time to think about that now. It was getting late in the afternoon, there was another bunch of night-riders heading for Garland, and George would have to get there first if he planned to surprise them. He watched the cart go, made sure his troopers were ready, and signaled them to ride.
They were a different group of people from what they’d been that morning: filthy with soot and mud, clothing torn and bloody, and ready for another fight. And, George realized, so was he. He’d become a soldier at thirty-five, and his troopers with him.
Well, if he was a soldier, they said soldiers were only as good as their last battle, and there was another one waiting a few miles away. The road to Garland stretched in front of them, and the election seemed as far as the next lifetime.
October 1888
“It’s bad, Chief.”
George Henry White began to nod at the returning scout and then looked at him sharply. He’d known it wouldn’t be good, with smoke still rising from the village up ahead and the gutted church steeple visible even from here. But the look on the scout’s face spoke of something more.
“How bad, Tom?”
“You’ll see.”
A few minutes later, George did see. The village had no name on the maps – it was one of those places where freedmen had settled down after the war, with a name given by its citizens but none the county cared to notice. It would never have one now. Most of the houses were burned and there were bodies on the ground – at least twenty that George could see before he lost count. A few of them were night riders, but most were black men and women lying where they’d fought. And…
The girl lying where George got down from his horse had been eight or nine years old, and she wouldn’t get any older. She’d been killed a few hours ago like the others and her body had stopped leaking, but her clothes were horribly bloodstained and the bullet that killed her had blown half her head away. He had a daughter about that age.
He forced himself to look up. The rest of his volunteers had also dismounted and were looking around, and most of them – black and white – had the same look on their faces that the scout had. Mike Dowling, a white boy from Vanceboro who’d turned seventeen a month ago, was on his knees retching and crying at the same time. Of those nearby, only Jim Kabbah, who’d come up from the South Carolina low country, surveyed the scene evenly.
“Just like ’63,” he said. “No quarter in the Rising either.”
“But that was the war,” said Tom the scout. “This is an election.”
“Same thing,” Jim answered. “Who’s in charge.”
George remembered something he’d read once about war being politics by other means, and wondered if this might be where they met. The Bourbons were panting to take the state back from the Republicans and populists who’d won in ’84, and they thought white supremacy was their ticket. That was bad enough when it was just words, but it was worse when the night-riders started ambushing candidates and burning farms, and it got worse than that when Ben Tillman’s boys streamed across the Georgia border and other Redeemers came in from Virginia and Tennessee.
Up in the Second District where George lived, black folks were thick enough on the ground to fight back, and veterans from South Carolina had come to fill their ranks. Things were still pretty normal in the cities too, with the county seats full of state militia, and out west in the mountains, the brawls were no worse than usual. But here… the state militia couldn’t be everywhere, and there were too many black towns to patrol but not enough to be a majority. It was places just like this, where the coalition had won the last state house election by a few hundred votes and the same number of missing black smallholders could throw the next one to the Bourbons, where the night riders did their worst.
Someone had to get volunteers down here, so George Henry White, representative of Craven County in the North Carolina Senate, had raised a troop. And now, he realized, he had to lead it.
“Any survivors?” he asked.
The troopers who’d taken a look around the village were returning, and all of them shook their heads. “They’re all long gone,” one of them said – Robert Yancy, George remembered. “They took what they could and ran. Probably won’t stop till they get to Raleigh.”
George nodded; refugees on the road were what had brought them here in the first place, and the tent camps up in the Black Second and by Raleigh and Wilmington were filling up. “No one to tell us which way they went, then.”
“The folks on the road didn’t know either.”
“They weren’t here for the end. I was hoping someone would be.”
“I can track ‘em,” Mike said. He was looking better now, but his voice still burned with rage at the people who’d done this; like many of the white men in the troop, he'd joined because of exactly such atrocities. “Pop says I can follow good as a hound.”
“You can go ahead and try,” said George. “Not sure even a hound could find ‘em now, though – they’ve been gone for hours and they’ll be hard to follow once they get to the road. Son of a bitch.” He didn’t like to cuss, but he’d been hoping to get ahead of the bastards rather than guess where they’d hit next.
“I’ve got ways, Chief.” Mike swung back up on his horse, and George waved to the others to get mounted and follow. They rode out of the village through fields the night-riders had trampled, lost the trail at a small stream, picked it back up when Mike spotted tracks on the other side a quarter-mile up the bank.
“Looks like they headed toward the Black River road,” Tom said, looking ahead across stony ground. George looked the same way. The tracks would be easy enough to follow until the road, but after that, he wasn’t sure. Others would have traveled that road since, though maybe Mike had a way to pick out the ones they were looking for.
He started to ask, and then realized that Mike wasn’t crossing the stream at all but was on his knees looking at something else. Mike got up and walked about a hundred feet down the bank, and then he saw something and went to his knees again. “Something here,” he said, and an instant later, from inside a stand of brush, George heard the faint whimpering of a child.
The whimper turned to a cry of terror as more of the volunteers came up and whoever was in there realized she’d been found. “Best if you go in, Chief,” Mike said. “She sees my face first, she’ll probably lose her speech altogether.”
There were times Mike was a lot smarter than his years, and this was one of them; George nodded and crawled into the bushes. He heard another cry and a desperate scramble backward, but then he saw the child’s face, and at the same instant, she saw his. Her eyes registered a black face about her father’s age, and she suddenly was calm.
Her name was Mary, and they got the story out of her a few minutes later after Jim and a couple of the other South Carolina people had made her some tea and given her bread and dried beef. She’d been outside when the night-riders came, and she’d gone to hide in the same bushes where she hid from her brothers where they were playing games. She hadn’t known the riders would leave that way, and it had been pure terror when she heard their horses’ hooves splashing in the stream and their voices not ten feet away. But like George’s own girl, she’d had presence of mind, and after a little more calming, she remembered what they’d said.
“They got a house on the South River somewhere near here,” she said. “I heard them talking about it. That’s where they hide out in the daytime.”
“Sounds like the Higgins place,” said a white man who’d joined the troop locally; George knew him as Emery, but unlike the men who’d been with him all the way from Craven County, he didn’t know his last name. “Only place by the river big enough to hide twenty or thirty of the bastards.”
Mary hadn’t heard of Higgins one way or the other. “Take me home now?” she asked.
It didn’t seem like the right time to tell her. “You come with us now,” George answered. “We’ll take care of that later. Did you hear them say anything about where they’re going tonight?”
“Somewhere by Garland. A village a mile or two from the town. They said something about meeting up with other people there.”
George drew in his breath; two groups of night-riders at once might be too much to handle. “Best if we take ‘em one at a time,” he murmured to himself, and then clapped Mike on the shoulder. “Still don’t know if you’re as good as a hound, but looks like you found them for us after all.”
#
When they got to the Higgins place two hours later, he was sure - if the horse tracks leading inside the house didn’t say so, the gunshots fired from the upper-story windows certainly did. He reined to a halt behind a stone wall two hundred yards from the manor house and took cover, and the others did the same. None of them had been hit, but they weren’t getting any closer without a fight.
“So what do we do now?” he said, again at a murmur but this time one that carried. George was in charge of his troop because he was on the state legislature and had bought their guns and kit, not because he was a soldier. He knew he didn’t want to assault a house with six hundred feet of open lawn to its front and sides and a river at its back, but maybe some of the veterans had ideas.
“If we can get to those sheds over there,” Jim said, “it’s a hundred feet to the house, but we’d be broadside to ‘em the whole way, and we’d have to get there across open ground. I wouldn’t recommend it.”
“Be nice if we had a couple of six-pounders,” said Tom.
“Be nice if we had a brace of Gatlings too,” Emery answered, “but unless there’s one in the shed, all we got is what we have.”
“We got ‘em treed, at least,” Mike said.
“Ties us up too, and in the meantime, their buddies’ll murder more people by Garland.”
“Wouldn’t take many of us to bottle ‘em up here, though.” Jim was looking thoughtful. “They’ve got the same problem breaking out that we’d have breaking in – ten of us along the wall could keep ‘em where they are, and the rest of us could go take care of their friends.”
George considered briefly. “I still don’t like it,” he said. “We don’t know how many men are in the other group, and we could get slaughtered if we split up. Tom!” he called. “Ride up to the courthouse and find the militia. Tell ‘em there’s a troop of the bastards holed up at the Higgins place and we need more men.”
Tom rode off, and for a couple of hours there was nothing to do but talk and play cards and try to keep Mary calm. A few of the volunteers stretched out behind the wall and caught some sleep. The house was quiet too, and George wondered if the men inside were doing the same things; even murderers had to eat and sleep when they weren’t committing murder.
It was getting toward one in the afternoon when Tom returned, and he had a militia lieutenant with him but no one else. “Can’t spare anyone right now, I’m afraid,” the officer said. “We’ve got trouble ourselves up north, and we have a tip that someone might try to bomb the courthouse. If you hold on here, we’ll try to get a troop to Garland by night…”
“You’ll try?” George repeated.
“That’s the best we can do, Mr. White. I’ll recommend it. But we’re stretched pretty damn thin.” A trace of a smile crossed his face. “We do have some mail for you, though.”
“Mail? What the hell good is that gonna do us?”
“Don’t know,” the lieutenant said, withdrawing a packet from his saddlebag. “But the post office heard your boys were down here.”
George took the packet by instinct and, in spite of himself, looked for his name. He was hoping for something from his wife, but he had to be satisfied with a two-day-old New Bern Journal. He scanned the front page briefly, and it seemed there was still an argument raging in Washington; with a Democrat in the White House, the federal government wasn’t about to send troops to help the state militia, but the Republicans in Congress weren’t going to let the army come in against them. Meantime, Governor Adams had extended the state of insurrection by another month and promised that everyone in the tent camps would get to vote, but sorting out which ballots went where and getting them past the bushwhackers wasn’t easy…
“Got my call-up notice,” Jim said, shaking George out of his concentration. “They called up the Circles in South Carolina. Just patrols and standby for now, but…”
George didn’t need Jim to finish that sentence. Most of the white folks in South Carolina had got used to the way things were – even happy about things like Robert Smalls’ farmers’ bank and crop insurance – but if there were ever a time for the others to make trouble, it was now, and the statehouse wanted to make sure they didn’t get ideas.
“Bet Miss Harriet’s happy,” Tom said. “She’s got a bigger army now than the president.”
“Could use some of them up here,” answered George, but he thought better of that even before he was done speaking. If organized militia crossed the border from South Carolina, that would give Georgia and Virginia the excuse they needed to send their militia in, and that was how the war started back in ’61, wasn’t it?
And that thought – how a skirmish or two could so easily become a war – brought George back to the here and now.
“Give me a handkerchief,” he said, and tied it to the bayonet of his rifle as he looked toward the house. He stood up slowly, wary of guns in the windows, and got up on the stone wall.
“Y’all in the house,” he called. “We got you trapped here and the state boys are on their way. If you come out now, we won’t string you up for what you did last night – my word of honor as a senator. You don’t come out, and we’ll take care of your buddies in Garland and then we’ll take care of you.”
There was silence for a few seconds; George saw shadowy movement inside the house and wondered if he was about to be shot at. But then a window opened and someone shouted out of it in a deep Georgia accent.
“Like hell you will. If the state boys were coming, they’d have already came. We’re staying right where we are, and y’all had best stop play-acting and be gone by the time we go out tonight.”
The window slammed and George climbed down. It had been worth a try. But now he was faced with the same problem that had confronted him when he got here – how to reduce a fortified defensive position over two hundred yards of open ground.
He sat, back against the wall, and tried to put himself in the place of a West Point cadet who’d been assigned a tactical problem. What would Louis Hairston have done with this in one of Bill Walker’s books? But if you were a dime-novel author, you could make things come out all right, while here it was up to God. A frontal assault or an attack from the sheds were out as Jim had said, and the only other way he could see…
“Could we come at ‘em by water?”
Jim raised himself on his elbows, risked another look at the house, and began to nod slowly. “Less than fifty feet on the water side, and the ground isn’t too steep. We did that a few times in the Rising.”
“We did that in Thomas Day’s army too,” said Reuben Ackie. He’d come all the way from Liberia, but he spoke with a North Carolina accent; he’d been born not far from where George was, but his father hadn’t been white enough to pass when the free blacks were expelled in ’47. He’d been with Day’s brigade in the Civil War and he’d fought in Liberia’s own civil war afterward, and now he was giving it a third try. “If we can find some boats, we might catch ‘em napping. Only thing is, if they see us in the boats before we land, we’ll be sitting ducks.”
“Some boats a couple miles up the river at the Taylor place,” Emery said, and everyone began chiming in at once.
“All right,” George said a few minutes later, raising a hand for silence. “I’ll take Emery and twenty men up to Taylor’s. Jim, you’re in charge of who’s staying. Wait about half an hour and start shooting up the house. Keep ‘em looking your way.”
“Who knows – maybe we’ll hit something.”
“Couldn’t hurt.” George got up on the wall again, handkerchief flying. “Last chance, gents,” he called. “I’m riding out now with the state lieutenant, and we’re coming back with a whole company. If you’re still in there when we get back, you’ll get no mercy.”
There was no reply from the house, and George murmured again that it had been worth a try. He saddled up, waited for the others to join him, and waved to the lieutenant, and they rode off together.
#
They found three boats in the Taylor boathouse; two of them floated, and the third was close enough to patch up with some tar. They took the tar too, and George set some of the men to coating the ends of sticks with it. Old man Taylor watched it all from his window and George could see in his eyes that he wanted to shoot, but he didn’t dare. “Hope you drown,” he shouted; George gave him no mind.
They pushed downriver with muffled oars, sticking as close to the swampy shore as they could. They heard the Higgins place before they saw it; the sound of gunfire told that Jim was indeed keeping the night-riders busy. George paddled a little faster and the house appeared around a bend in the river. He could see the river side of the estate from where he was; the ground was rough and broken by swampy pools, but there was a retaining wall for cover and the distance to the house wasn’t far. A couple of minutes and they’d be there…
A shot rang out and George heard it whistle past him, and a moment later, there was another. Evidently not everyone was on the other side of the house; the night-riders had kept men on watch, and they’d seen the boats.
“Pull hard!” George shouted, all thought of surprise gone. He wrenched on the oars, but the boat handled like a damn tub, and it seemed to take forever to pull into shore. The gunfire was slow at first but became thicker as more men rushed to the water side, and now they were getting the range. Tom cried out and pitched over the side, his oar-stroke unfinished; Reuben shouted and there was blood on his arm, but he kept pulling.
A couple of the troopers fired back from the boats, aiming at the upper-story windows where the gunfire was coming from. Emery wrapped his rifle in oilskin and dove into the river, his outline barely visible under the water as he swam for shore. George couldn’t swim; he crouched as low as he could and prayed.
The boat scraped bottom. They were still a few feet from shore, but that would have to do. George jumped out and ran, hoping that the gunfire from Emery and the couple of others who’d made shore would be enough to protect him. The ground was soft beneath his boots and the mud sucked at him as the bullets crackled. The noises around him seemed to merge and he saw things in flashes: a night-rider’s body hanging halfway out a second-story window, Mike grunting with pain as a bullet hit him and dragging himself forward, the muzzle flash from Reuben’s rifle.
There it was at last: George felt the retaining wall’s presence more than he saw it, but he threw himself down and savored the moist ground and cool stones. He took stock and saw that everyone but Tom had also made the wall; all of them were somehow still alive, though some were wounded. The gunfire from the house was murder, though, and they wouldn’t be so lucky if they tried to charge the rest of the way.
He gauged the distance to the nearest window: about twenty-five feet. It would have to do. He lit one of the tarred sticks with a match, raised himself up and threw it like a spear, falling back behind the wall even as he let go. He heard, rather than saw, breaking glass and the crackle of flames. The other troopers followed; he saw Mike throw a flaming stick and reach for another, and saw Emery draw back his arm but fall backward, the throw unfinished, as a bullet caught him in the chest.
But now cries of fear were added to the noise within the house, and so was the neighing of terrified horses. Dear God the horses – George had forgotten up to now that the night-riders had brought their horses right into the house rather than risking them being cut off in a stable. He heard one kicking at a door, followed by an inhuman scream – whether from horse or human, he didn’t know – as the flames rose higher.
There was gunfire from the other side of the house again, and George realized that Jim and his people must be making the frontal assault that would have been suicide a few minutes before. He wished he could see how it was going, but the night-riders’ fire was becoming spotty and panicked, and if the same thing was happening on the other side, the charge would go home. Jim was a veteran; George would have to trust that he knew what he was doing.
The next thing he heard was more shouting and broken glass in the front; evidently Jim’s troopers had got there. The flames grew higher and suddenly joined together, and the whole house was burning.
An offering, George thought. A burnt offering for a burned village. It was barbaric and brutal and it felt like the Lord’s vengeance.
Someone flung himself out a second-story window and landed heavily on the ground. Mike shot the night-rider where he lay. He remembered what had happened last night. In the front of the house, someone shouted “I surrender!” and was answered with a single shot.
For a moment, George nodded. He remembered what Jim had said about the Rising back in ’63 – no quarter asked and none given. But then anger replaced agreement. This wasn’t the Civil War. They were fighting for the law here, and what would they be if they broke it? Was that what they wanted Mary to see – two massacres in one day?
He stood up, ignoring the gunfire that was still coming from a couple of the windows. “Take prisoners!” he shouted, making his voice carry across the grounds. “Take prisoners, God damn it! We’ll take ‘em to the jail in Clinton and they can have a trial before the sheriff hangs ‘em!”
He wasn’t sure the troopers would obey - he’d raised the troop, but he hadn’t been tested as the leader until today, and some of them were veterans where he wasn’t. Their blood was up, and he was risking it all trying to restrain them. But then another night-rider ran out, and the troopers shouted at him to get on the ground instead of shooting. A fourth one followed, and the others who were still alive came out a few seconds later, and the flames rose to heaven as the troopers found rope to tie them.
#
They found a cart in one of the sheds and put the prisoners in it, and George detailed Mike and a couple of the walking wounded to take them into town. Mary, uncomprehending but willing to trust, went with them. Maybe the county would be able to find her a new home when all this was over. If not, maybe George would head back north with another child.
There wasn’t time to think about that now. It was getting late in the afternoon, there was another bunch of night-riders heading for Garland, and George would have to get there first if he planned to surprise them. He watched the cart go, made sure his troopers were ready, and signaled them to ride.
They were a different group of people from what they’d been that morning: filthy with soot and mud, clothing torn and bloody, and ready for another fight. And, George realized, so was he. He’d become a soldier at thirty-five, and his troopers with him.
Well, if he was a soldier, they said soldiers were only as good as their last battle, and there was another one waiting a few miles away. The road to Garland stretched in front of them, and the election seemed as far as the next lifetime.
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Wow! It's one of the best ever, I'm envious you get to read it all for the first time. Enjoy!
Jonathan, very beautiful story. Wonderful writing as always.
Cheers,
Ganesha
If there's one thing I want to ask the night riders, it's: is it worth it?
And as before, amazing writing, Jonathan.
And as before, amazing writing, Jonathan.
Another great post. I like how this TL keeps delivering even after it's long since "finished".
That has nothing to do with why anime and manga got created, although the proliferation of American comics and cartoons during the occupation of Japan does have something to do with it. There was what you could call "anime" or "manga" during and before WWII.
Would it look the same? I doubt it, but it would evolve on a different path than American comics and animation so would have a distinct style.
Local elections are serious business, especially when they involve the threat of non-whites gaining power.
That has nothing to do with why anime and manga got created, although the proliferation of American comics and cartoons during the occupation of Japan does have something to do with it. There was what you could call "anime" or "manga" during and before WWII.
Would it look the same? I doubt it, but it would evolve on a different path than American comics and animation so would have a distinct style.
Local elections are serious business, especially when they involve the threat of non-whites gaining power.
"Damn! I can't see fuckin' shit out of this thing!" really is the perfect verdict on the Klan hood and the racist echo chamber generally.
yboxman
Banned
Will he? It's still trial by jury, after all, and Sampson County today is 56.7% white, 27% Black, and 16.5% Latino. Back then, I guess that means White jurors will likely outnumber blacks at least 2.5:1. How many southern whites, even in the maleverse, will vote to hang whites for murdering blacks in the 1880s?
They would have considered it so if they had won. This kind of terrorism happened throughout the Redeemer and Jim Crow eras IOTL and also happened ITTL wherever white supremacists thought they could get away with it. The existence of non-Jim Crow states, especially but not only South Carolina, made the fear and resulting reaction even more intense.
Of course, given that the night-riders lost the battle and that their side will lose the election, they might have a different view of the matter.
Or keeping it. Post 1273 gives some context about TTL's North Carolina election of 1888, in which the Redeemers are trying to overthrow a biracial Republican-populist coalition that took power in 1884. The model is the OTL North Carolina election of 1898, which also featured a violent white supremacist campaign and ended with an armed coup against the city government of Wilmington. The difference ITTL, aside from the ten-year advance, is that the good guys are in a better position to win.
The demographics of North Carolina today are the result of the Great Migration and the recent movement of northern whites to the Sunbelt. In the 1880s, Sampson County would have been blacker, probably in the low 40s. Of course, the Latino population would be very small at that time, so the percentage of whites would be roughly the same.
You're correct that this will be a problem. It only takes one person to hang a jury, and though the prosecutor will strike any juror with known Redeemer sympathies, that leaves the possibility that some jurors will have unknown sympathies. Sometimes the prosecutor will get a jury willing to convict white terrorists for murdering black victims, and sometimes he won't.
What might help will be that the night-riders killed white people too. Most of their violence was directed at the black community, but as IOTL, they also targeted white Republicans, especially those who were active or politically prominent. Southern juries even IOTL were willing to hang Klansmen who killed white victims, and in the atmosphere of general disgust that will follow this election, they'd certainly be willing to do so ITTL.
Of course there could be other problems as well - not enough evidence or witnesses, etc. Some - not all or even most, but some - of the night-riders probably will walk, and maybe it would have been more expedient to kill them out of hand. But at the end of the day, George Henry White is a lawyer and a senator who believes in government and the rule of law. He realizes that he has to control his men if he expects them to be more than a mob, and he's afraid of his own feelings only a few moments before when the burning house seemed like God's vengeance. He would prefer imperfect justice in the courts to participating in mob justice - which isn't to say, of course, that he won't come to the hangings of the riders who do get convicted.
Man, I hope Sea Lion Press picks this up when it eventually finishes.
The timeline is finished - I just have more stories to tell in this universe every so often. And, as I've mentioned before, anyone else with stories to tell in this world is welcome to do so - just run any ideas by me first.
Thanks! I'm really enjoying your Palmera timeline and would be interested to hear your thoughts on the development of the Caribbean ITTL.
Jonathan, was this latest entry in any way inspired by the announcement of the Amazon project for a story about an ATL African-American separatist nation?
I've had it suck up some of my time. I think that your situation of at least one African-majority run state and the situation you have going here in NC is superior in the long run, for African-Americans are intertwined with the USA as a whole and properly belong in it, but of course this is at costs to them you know all about. Some people involved in the Amazon channel show mentioned that the separation of the African-American nation (Called "New Colonia" for reasons the author, Macgruder of Boondocks fame, would have to explain though I made a stab at reasoning it out myself) is at least in part a matter of "reparations." Well, I did some math; if the ATL nation gets Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama in full, the resulting nation would be around 150,000 square miles--bigger than modern Germany though perhaps smaller than the pre-1918 German Empire; considerably bigger than the modern UK, smaller than France. But the African-American population as a whole of US OTL in the 1860s would be 1/7 the total, and those three states are a lot smaller than 1/7 the area at the time, basically the modern lower 48 states, by a factor of 3. So if New Colonia is "reparations" it is cheap at the price!
Naturally a number of people attack the idea of carving a black homeland out of the already owned US territory of 1865, and argue that it is first of all impossible and secondly a very bad move for the Africans--I have been provoked into proposing scenarios in which it could happen, and work out OK for the AA--but I will freely grant that a good outcome is pretty unlikely. The author apparently also has the USA doing badly; not clear if he means worse than OTL, or just that it suffers as we do OTL while New Colonia does not.
So naturally that argument has led me back to thinking about the mechanisms whereby a people who actually comprised demographic majorities in some states in the late 19th century could still be blocked from political power at least in those states OTL. South Carolina, not part of New Colonia in the miniseries apparently, had solid black majorities for a hundred years, from 1820 to 1920; few other states ever did but Louisiana had more though in declining percentages from the early decades of the century, while Mississippi fell just short in 1860 but had surged ahead in the next two or three decades. After 1900 black proportions started to fall across the nation, so that African Americans are minorities everywhere but DC today.
But as your post shows, holding a majority is not strictly necessary; being a large minority but in alliance with even a minority of white people is enough for a ruling coalition. Though I note that the "2nd district" area White comes from is apparently a local black majority bastion within NC.
How exactly did the majority get toppled from power in South Carolina, Mississippi and Louisiana OTL then? Was it a simple matter of large numbers of adult male African Americans never being allowed to register and vote, due no doubt to claims they were illiterate and otherwise lacking in civil skills (or simply failing property tests)? Surely there was outrageous violence involved as well?
Naturally to try to lay out a plausible path to an independent New Colonia myself, I borrowed from your pages the idea of an organized network of slave uprisings forming a partisan militia securing the several states eventually deeded over to New Colonia on behalf of the Union, while actual regular Union forces were not present in adequate numbers to do the job themselves, and that these militias form the political skeleton on which assertion of universal manhood suffrage becomes the muscle and skin.
I put a twist on it, since some of the argument was implicitly at least about the morality of a black separatism movement--I figured the black-majority state leadership were in favor of staying in the Union, and exercising majority elected rights in Congress and Senate and in influencing Presidential elections, but that a post-war reaction deprives the Radical Republicans of leadership though does not totally eliminate them, and the white consensus, north and south, is that black-run states are intolerable, but they cannot simply come in and repress them by force because there are enough Radical Republicans to turn that into a second, and much less regional, civil war, while of course the black states will fight for their rights too. Therefore instead of the black leaders scheming to secede on their own, as most assume, I have the white government in Washington coming to a compromise solution of expelling the three states from the Union unilaterally, much as Boris Yeltsin's faction of Russians cast the Central Asian former Soviet Republics loose from Russia.
To get to this sorry state, I imagined Lincoln dies early in his first term, Hannibal Hamlin runs the war with more impetuous radicalism (including of course the strategy of fomenting and organizing slave risings in coordination with Union army advances) earlier and more sweepingly than Lincoln did, which causes the more conservative reaction after an earlier victory.
I don't think this is very plausible at all, but I do think it is not an inconceivable sequence and does address many of the most withering "gotcha!" denials of those who simply won't countenance an African-American separatist state carved out of former US soil as anything but ASB. That the people interviewed about the OTL miniseries project speak of the existence of New Colonia as "reparations" is very troubling, since as I say they are very cheap reparations; a fairer donation that is contiguous would probably throw in twice as many states if not more--
Georgia, Florida and South Carolina would make the deal sweeter and thus all the more crippling for the USA. But of course if the real basis of independence was an attempt to contain the contagion of black self-assertion, and perhaps expel African Americans from regions where they were not close to majorities, politicians might indeed seek to put a fair face on it by claiming it was reparations for slavery as well.
I don't think Macgruder is going to do anything like this, and wonder what line he'll take instead, but I did not appreciate people angrily denouncing the whole idea as ASB. I have mixed feelings about whether separatism might or might not have worked out better for African Americans than OTL, but none that it would be bad for the rest of the USA. It's not what I like to see--what I like to see is more like your TL.
But it is in the air lately and I wondered if that is what triggered another view of the post-bellum US south just now.
I've had it suck up some of my time. I think that your situation of at least one African-majority run state and the situation you have going here in NC is superior in the long run, for African-Americans are intertwined with the USA as a whole and properly belong in it, but of course this is at costs to them you know all about. Some people involved in the Amazon channel show mentioned that the separation of the African-American nation (Called "New Colonia" for reasons the author, Macgruder of Boondocks fame, would have to explain though I made a stab at reasoning it out myself) is at least in part a matter of "reparations." Well, I did some math; if the ATL nation gets Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama in full, the resulting nation would be around 150,000 square miles--bigger than modern Germany though perhaps smaller than the pre-1918 German Empire; considerably bigger than the modern UK, smaller than France. But the African-American population as a whole of US OTL in the 1860s would be 1/7 the total, and those three states are a lot smaller than 1/7 the area at the time, basically the modern lower 48 states, by a factor of 3. So if New Colonia is "reparations" it is cheap at the price!
Naturally a number of people attack the idea of carving a black homeland out of the already owned US territory of 1865, and argue that it is first of all impossible and secondly a very bad move for the Africans--I have been provoked into proposing scenarios in which it could happen, and work out OK for the AA--but I will freely grant that a good outcome is pretty unlikely. The author apparently also has the USA doing badly; not clear if he means worse than OTL, or just that it suffers as we do OTL while New Colonia does not.
So naturally that argument has led me back to thinking about the mechanisms whereby a people who actually comprised demographic majorities in some states in the late 19th century could still be blocked from political power at least in those states OTL. South Carolina, not part of New Colonia in the miniseries apparently, had solid black majorities for a hundred years, from 1820 to 1920; few other states ever did but Louisiana had more though in declining percentages from the early decades of the century, while Mississippi fell just short in 1860 but had surged ahead in the next two or three decades. After 1900 black proportions started to fall across the nation, so that African Americans are minorities everywhere but DC today.
But as your post shows, holding a majority is not strictly necessary; being a large minority but in alliance with even a minority of white people is enough for a ruling coalition. Though I note that the "2nd district" area White comes from is apparently a local black majority bastion within NC.
How exactly did the majority get toppled from power in South Carolina, Mississippi and Louisiana OTL then? Was it a simple matter of large numbers of adult male African Americans never being allowed to register and vote, due no doubt to claims they were illiterate and otherwise lacking in civil skills (or simply failing property tests)? Surely there was outrageous violence involved as well?
Naturally to try to lay out a plausible path to an independent New Colonia myself, I borrowed from your pages the idea of an organized network of slave uprisings forming a partisan militia securing the several states eventually deeded over to New Colonia on behalf of the Union, while actual regular Union forces were not present in adequate numbers to do the job themselves, and that these militias form the political skeleton on which assertion of universal manhood suffrage becomes the muscle and skin.
I put a twist on it, since some of the argument was implicitly at least about the morality of a black separatism movement--I figured the black-majority state leadership were in favor of staying in the Union, and exercising majority elected rights in Congress and Senate and in influencing Presidential elections, but that a post-war reaction deprives the Radical Republicans of leadership though does not totally eliminate them, and the white consensus, north and south, is that black-run states are intolerable, but they cannot simply come in and repress them by force because there are enough Radical Republicans to turn that into a second, and much less regional, civil war, while of course the black states will fight for their rights too. Therefore instead of the black leaders scheming to secede on their own, as most assume, I have the white government in Washington coming to a compromise solution of expelling the three states from the Union unilaterally, much as Boris Yeltsin's faction of Russians cast the Central Asian former Soviet Republics loose from Russia.
To get to this sorry state, I imagined Lincoln dies early in his first term, Hannibal Hamlin runs the war with more impetuous radicalism (including of course the strategy of fomenting and organizing slave risings in coordination with Union army advances) earlier and more sweepingly than Lincoln did, which causes the more conservative reaction after an earlier victory.
I don't think this is very plausible at all, but I do think it is not an inconceivable sequence and does address many of the most withering "gotcha!" denials of those who simply won't countenance an African-American separatist state carved out of former US soil as anything but ASB. That the people interviewed about the OTL miniseries project speak of the existence of New Colonia as "reparations" is very troubling, since as I say they are very cheap reparations; a fairer donation that is contiguous would probably throw in twice as many states if not more--
Georgia, Florida and South Carolina would make the deal sweeter and thus all the more crippling for the USA. But of course if the real basis of independence was an attempt to contain the contagion of black self-assertion, and perhaps expel African Americans from regions where they were not close to majorities, politicians might indeed seek to put a fair face on it by claiming it was reparations for slavery as well.
I don't think Macgruder is going to do anything like this, and wonder what line he'll take instead, but I did not appreciate people angrily denouncing the whole idea as ASB. I have mixed feelings about whether separatism might or might not have worked out better for African Americans than OTL, but none that it would be bad for the rest of the USA. It's not what I like to see--what I like to see is more like your TL.
But it is in the air lately and I wondered if that is what triggered another view of the post-bellum US south just now.
It's always good to read something new, even though the TL proper was completed. Keep it up, JE!
Not consciously, although I've been following both the "Black America" release and the "Confederate" controversy. My conscious inspiration was my recent reading about the 1898 North Carolina election and the armed coup against the Wilmington city government that capped it off, which reminded me of the analogous 1888 election ITTL. Also, George Henry White is a fascinating character, and I wanted to include him (or more accurately his ATL-brother) in the Malêverse.
Since he won't be reappearing, BTW, his subsequent career is as follows: He obviously can't campaign for re-election to the state senate in 1888 (another black Republican will be elected as placeholder), but he will reclaim his seat in 1890 and hold it for two terms. From 1894 to 1902, he'll represent the "Black Second" in Congress and from 1902 to 1914, he will be Attorney General of North Carolina. At his death at 68 in 1921, he'll be survived by his wife and four of his five children, one of them adopted.
Armed force, whether taking the form of terrorism (the South Carolina election of 1876), pitched battle (New Orleans in 1874; Barbour County, Alabama in 1874), or a combination of both (the "Mississippi Plan" in 1874-75). There were a lot of Confederate veterans among the Redeemers who were armed, trained, and willing to shoot; in contrast, only a minority of African-Americans in the South were veterans and they weren't militarily organized.
A lot of what made the difference ITTL is that the African-Americans in South Carolina were militarily organized - more than half of them were under military discipline during the Rising of 1863-64 and the battalions from the Rising became the Freedmen's Circles afterward. Between the 1860s and the 1920s, nearly every black South Carolinian participated in regular military training, and the collectively owned plantations doubled as strongpoints and armories. As I've said before, South Carolina during the Circle period ITTL was in many ways a Soviet garrison state, but it was more than strong enough to hold.
The other states that bucked the Jim Crow trend ITTL - Mississippi, North Carolina and Texas - had a large black yeoman class and alliances between black Republicans and white populists (such as existed in North Carolina IOTL until violently overthrown). The Reconstruction government was more durable in Mississippi because there were many more black landowners and thus more of a base for military organization, and the Republican-populist alliance was able to hold in NC both because of the "Black Second" strongpoint and because the good guys had a long friendly border with South Carolina rather than being surrounded on all sides. Texas was due less to military considerations and more to Norris Wright Cuney being able to maintain his political coalition - the "lily-white movement" among TTL's Texas Republicans wasn't anywhere near as strong as OTL.
The Southern states where most of the black population were sharecroppers rather than landowners went Jim Crow ITTL as IOTL, and by the same methods.
I'm not entirely sure that such a compromise would be entertained so soon after the Civil War - "more than 300,000 Union soldiers had given their lives to preserve the country, and now we're just going to give some of it away?" The Soviet Union had a very different constitutional structure - among other things, the union republics had an explicit legal right to secede, although that right had little practical meaning prior to the late 1980s - and hadn't recently fought a civil war to preserve its integrity. My guess is that if matters came to this point and if the federal government wasn't willing to bite the bullet and force the issue (a Democratic government would, but a moderate Republican one might not), any compromise might involve the three states being conceded to black self-rule but not being formally readmitted into the Union, becoming effectively territories with internal self-government but not Congressional representation. No doubt these states would cooperate with each other and assert as much de facto independence as possible - making under-the-table diplomatic deals, for instance - and become an independent homeland in fact but not in name. De jure independence might follow a generation or two later when the bloody shirt isn't as emotional an issue, possibly as a quid pro quo for help in a *World War.
I also suspect that there would be some pretty nasty population exchanges between the three homeland states and the rest of the South, and that the Redeemer takeover of South Carolina would be vicious. All this would leave a lot of bad blood that could be exploited by separatists later, possibly resulting in the initial Unionist government of New Colonia being replaced by a pro-independence one.
I'd agree that a black homeland is pretty improbable, but I'd also agree that it isn't ASB. Necessity is a harsh mistress.
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