Read this about a week ago but only now thought to comment: just from what I've seen so far there are very few other pieces of alternate history that have so successfully conveyed a sense of "verisimilitude" as this one, in the sense that if you put these quotes before me without context i would believe these to be the genuine article. There are scarce few of these projects where you truly feel like you're looking at another world that is just as real as ours, but you manage it with aplomb. Your portrayal of the horrors of the confederacy are itself tremendously well handled, exposed as the gruesome crimes they are without verging into the kind of "misery porn" that lesser writers often fall into. I am at the edge of my seat waiting for how this TL will continue.
Nothing For Which to Apologize: Ambition and Loathing in the New South
- Thread starter dcharles
- Start date
Excellent update, I enjoyed it thoroughly. It's interesting to see Beauregard's reputation so much higher in TTL than it ended up being in OTL, and a Creole Catholic as the second president is intriguing. Developments in both the USA and CSA seem to be headed in a decidedly dark direction but the way you write both sides makes it frighteningly plausible and engaging at the same time. And, as always, custom graphics are top notch.
dcharles
Banned
One of the things I noticed during the research process was how much more high profile an individual Beauregard was in his lifetime than he is now. During the war, he was regularly mentioned in the same breath as Lee and Jackson (not that he necessarily deserved to be), but after his relatively pro-civil rights stance, his long association with the Louisiana Lottery, and especially, his failure to respond adequately to Jefferson Davis's mad shit-talking, his historical reputation took a huge hit.
Here, obviously things work out a little different.
Would the South try to encourage settlement of Protestant whites or Skilled white immigrants from Western Europe? Similar to the way OTL Apartheid South Africa tried to appeal to Americans in the 80s?
I am sure they would, but they would have to compete to a USA market that offers more opportunities due to a) more factory jobs b) more land to transition to from said factory jobs c) a more racist USA having a bigger need for "right kind of workers" since both Free Blacks (500k people) and Asians are excluded from it.
This is why I think the south in the end will turn to catholic immigration, to gain what is lost due to WASP religious prejudice in the USA.
Agreed, especially given Beauregard's rise to the Presidency and the fact that encouraging white immigration seems like a natural policy for the New South to pursue.
dcharles
Banned
In those days, "encouraging immigration" often meant a private company providing some type of incentive to immigrate. Free tickets, free land, easy jobs...whatever it might be.
As there are more Southern companies with more Southern money to spread around, there is more European immigration to the South than OTL.
Really enjoy that this timeline has the entirety of the cultural South within the Confederacy's borders rather than just the eleven states, it makes for a more interesting story. I imagine the hard-hitting Orphan Brigade of Kentucky are men of absolute legend within the South, a romantic tale of the begotten and true hearted Southern American sons of the Bluegrass who expelled the Tories from the Pennyroyal hills of the tobacco-laden Dark and Bloody Ground in the warrior spirit of their Scots-Irish Border Reiver ancestors, rallying thousands more Kentuckians under the banner of reaction alongside the infamous and brooding Hangman, Stonewall Jackson himself.
The stars and bars raised over Louisville, "My orphans---my poor orphans; revenged at last!" Dark and tragic for the human suffering and extension of slavery their victory entails? To be sure. But romantic nonetheless. I imagine that there might have been quite a few more Kentucky Confederate regiment and even maybe an extra brigade or two in this timeline but those initial few in the Orphan Brigade would likely dominate Kentucky politics well into the future due to their fame. Kentucky Confederates had this song that captures the feeling very well, I imagine the updated 1865 lyrics would be very boastful.
The story will only grow more interesting when those East Kentucky hillbilly Tories and their western Virginian and eastern Tennessean kin, already probably resentful of the planter elite in Lexington, Nashville and Richmond, get put through the ringer with coal and lumber extraction giving them an even greater reason to hate the elites. The closest example we have to Kentucky-Tennessee-Virginia Appalachians reacting to something approximating "slave labor" being used in the mines is the 1891-92 Coal Creek War in which the coal companies tried using convict leasing in the mines, only for the miners to set the convicts free and wage war on the company, it ultimately ended in the end of convict leasing in that particular part of the nation. "Pierpont and the men at Wheeling are gone, but they were right about these lowlanders all along," many a miner's lip may say as socialist propaganda filters down through the mountains.
The stars and bars raised over Louisville, "My orphans---my poor orphans; revenged at last!" Dark and tragic for the human suffering and extension of slavery their victory entails? To be sure. But romantic nonetheless. I imagine that there might have been quite a few more Kentucky Confederate regiment and even maybe an extra brigade or two in this timeline but those initial few in the Orphan Brigade would likely dominate Kentucky politics well into the future due to their fame. Kentucky Confederates had this song that captures the feeling very well, I imagine the updated 1865 lyrics would be very boastful.
The story will only grow more interesting when those East Kentucky hillbilly Tories and their western Virginian and eastern Tennessean kin, already probably resentful of the planter elite in Lexington, Nashville and Richmond, get put through the ringer with coal and lumber extraction giving them an even greater reason to hate the elites. The closest example we have to Kentucky-Tennessee-Virginia Appalachians reacting to something approximating "slave labor" being used in the mines is the 1891-92 Coal Creek War in which the coal companies tried using convict leasing in the mines, only for the miners to set the convicts free and wage war on the company, it ultimately ended in the end of convict leasing in that particular part of the nation. "Pierpont and the men at Wheeling are gone, but they were right about these lowlanders all along," many a miner's lip may say as socialist propaganda filters down through the mountains.
dcharles
Banned
Thought you all might be interested in this: https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2023/06/08/the-two-constitutions-abraham-lincoln-james-oakes/
It's a very penetrating review by David Blight, a scholar who shows up as an author within Nothing for Which to Apologize. No paywall, but you do have to register.
It's a very penetrating review by David Blight, a scholar who shows up as an author within Nothing for Which to Apologize. No paywall, but you do have to register.
Chang or Engs son served in the Confederate Army.which raises the question of what happens to the couple thousand Hispanic Asian and native Americans who fought for the south.
I'd hope they would be treated well and maybe be some sort of base from which non racism can grow but...
Okay, I did NOT know their story. Between the two of them, they have 1500 descendents living largely in NC to this day and many of them have gone on to be quite prominent. That's ... amazing. Wow.
There were also Filipinos who fought on both sides of the Civil War, IIRC. Like, between the Filipinos in Louisiana and Felix Balderry doing his thing in the Union army...
dcharles
Banned
I hadn't thought about Chang and Eng, but as you all can see, I'm pretty interested in the lives of all the minorities that are left out of the old American racial dichotomy. (trichotomy? Idk where indigenous Americans actually fit on the pseudoscience taxonomy.)
So I'll have to give them a wee check out as I'm finishing up this chapter. (it's coming!)
So I'll have to give them a wee check out as I'm finishing up this chapter. (it's coming!)
Chapter 5: The Advent of the Bayou Maharaja
dcharles
Banned
Chapter 5
TO: Julien Lacroix, f.m.c., New Orleans, LA.
FROM: Francois Lacroix, f.m.c*., St. Gabriel, LA.
April 9th, 1868
Dear Julien,
Say a prayer to St. Michael and light a candle for St. Brigid, for Victor is safe.
As of last month, he remains at liberty. How long this condition will persist is anyone’s guess. After all you did to smuggle him and the girl out of New Orleans and get them to Paris; after all the favors I called in to get him the position in Veracruz, he has fought two duels in the eleven months he has been in Mexico thus far. It is only by the grace of God and the intercession of the saints that he hasn’t been killed or arrested. Your nephew pursues his vendettas with the same ardor as he pursues his love affairs. The boy may be dispositionally incapable of maintaining a low profile, and were he not my own son, I would have grown exasperated long ago. Edgar has always been the steady one; Victor careens from quarrel to quarrel like an engine out of speed. The first opponent, a Tte. Guzmán de Vizcaya, conceded the issue to Victor after the latter took off two fingers with a LeMat at twenty paces. In the second duel, which was fought with swords, Victor was thrashed by his opponent, a French officer by the name of Joubert, and he was blooded quite badly. Apparently Victor and le Capitaine have resolved their disputes, because Victor has engaged the man for lessons since the start of the new year…
…Mouton must win. Be under no illusions though, Mouton is not an ally; he is merely less of an enemy. He understands the Creole way of things. After Allen and Pearce, the thought of another Anglo in the Governor’s Mansion nauseates me, and my own preference aside, the days of men like Conrad have passed. But Mouton will not waltz away with the votes of Louisiana like Beauregard did. That they are co-partisans, and that Mouton served under him will only go so far. We must show to Mouton that we are as indispensable as we know ourselves to be. Conrad will win in the north, and there is little we can do to help it. But there are more Negroes and colored, slave and free, in the city than there have been in years. The Grand-blancs, even the Petit-blancs, they need us as much as we need them. We must be his margin of victory, whatever it comes to. We will deliver the city to Mouton this November, just as much as we did to Beauregard during the war. We can count on the Third District police for good returns downtown, but that won’t be enough. We’ll need to capture as many ballot boxes as we can. (If you’ll match my bounty, we can offer twenty silver dollars per box. If not, I’ll go no higher than twelve, what say you?) There will be no repeat of ‘58. We’ll have the Yellow Boys** and the Live Oaks. Can we trust the Spiders with something like this? I’ll defer to your judgment, but we’ll have to make up the difference, come what may. I’ll talk to Mazureau directly, but criminal sheriffs don’t come cheaply. The Liberals will be able to fall back on the First District police, and even the Claffleys, but what else do they have? A fire brigade or two, at most. If we can get the Second District and about two-dozen gut-cutters from Gallatin Street to go along with what we already have, we will rout them. Speak to the boys down at the Amsterdam. The Second District won’t want trouble with that lot, and they might just go along to avoid it…
*Free man of color. This section is about some doings of the Lacroixs, a wealthy free family of color from New Orleans. TTL, free people of color in New Orleans will be very influential within the world of organized crime, and the Lacroixs will be one of the bigger New Orleans crime families. This is an introduction.
** All names of real gangs in New Orleans around the time of the Civil War or the late nineteenth century. History is hilarious.
“There is a kind of look, a poisonous glare seen from the brows of many white men and not a few women as well. The Negroes all know it; they recognize it as ‘the hate stare.’ The red Indians in this section call it the ‘power eye’ and the brown Indians in San Francisco and in London call it the ‘buri nazar.’ I myself did not recognize it, though it was surely all around me, until Lucia and I stepped off the ferry and onto the soil of Illinois. By then, most of Missouri’s Negroes had either been sold to the Confederacy or had the good sense to emancipate themselves and flee the state. Those that fled west could lose themselves in the vast expanses of the plains, where they might farm a plot or work a claim in the mountains and live unmolested. Those who had the ill-fortune or the ill-judgment to find themselves in Illinois were objects of almost constant scorn and harassment….
…the innkeeper loured at us from behind his counter. As we approached, he barked out: ‘No dogs, no drunks, no whores, and no black n— wenches!’ Before we knew it, we were being hustled out of the inn by the bellman, an enormous towheaded German who I would soon come to know by the name of Andreas Francois. The man was a veteran, and rather than cursing me as a damned Reb and a n— lover, as I expected him to do, he looked upon Lucia and I with a certain pity, and advised us that we might find some accommodation in the house of one Colonel Joseph Weydemeyer, also a German, and notably, a red who had been run out of St. Louis after the Cherokee Street Massacre. Colonel Weydemeyer was as hospitable as Andreas had promised. He was also the first red that Lucia or I had ever met, and the seven days we spent at his home were a kind of political awakening for both Lucia and myself. As for Weydemeyer, I can only say that when I told him of my time with Forrest & Son, when Lucia told him of our wanderings, and even of our meeting, and her manumission, he was shocked and moved in turn. Weydemeyer himself, newly perceiving the Yankee’s fickleness, had soured on St. Louis altogether, and was in those days openly musing about a return to New York or even Europe…
Hoping to spare us the embarrassment we had encountered in East St. Louis. Weydemeyer posted letters of introduction to Mr. Stephen Andrews in Philadelphia and Mr. James Blood and Mrs. Victoria Woodhull, at that time married in New York, before we left. Blood and Woodhull especially would become our lifelong friends, but most significantly of all, the Colonel planted the seed within us that defeating the tyranny of the capitalists and the slave masters would necessitate a fight on their own ground. It could not be done in the communes of Oneida or New Harmony, or the tony drawing rooms of Manhattan, and it could certainly not be done in the congresses of corruptibles in Washington or Richmond. The oppression and the brutalities inflicted upon the Negroes in Texas and Mississippi fed the brutalities inflicted upon the workers of Lancashire, Lowell, Louisville, and Lyons. Though Lucia and I were still at that time resolved to settle in Boston or perhaps even in Montreal, it was on the train ride out of East St. Louis that we began to discuss what a life back in the Confederacy might be like for us…”
—Albert Parsons, A Rebel From Way Back: the Collected Memoirs and Prison Letters of Albert Parsons ed. Lucia Carter and Myra Page (Norfolk: Fortune, 1919) 40-42.
“...grown tired of the dismal sights of New Hampshire and the shrewery of domestic life, I resolved to vacate the area, and made my way first to New York, then to Philadelphia. Upon my arrival, I made it my business to gain admission to one of the medical colleges in that city or in Baltimore…
…The college in Baltimore replied with great alacrity, and so I repaired to the Monumental City…
…I was well into my term as an internist, and fatigued from my day's labors, I made my way to an old saloon in Fell’s Point. There, not yet in my cups, I made the acquaintance of a gentleman both mature and prosperous, who, in the course of conversation told me of the boom-times of Baltimore in the sixties, when all of Maryland’s Negroes, it seemed, were being clapped in irons and sold South. Any sporting man, the old gentleman assured me, was apt to lay his hands upon the first blackamoor he spied and take him to a broker, whereupon he might realize a profit of five hundred dollars or more. I took it to be a great injustice that I should have ‘missed the gravy train,’ and let the old man know that I thought so.
‘O, but a fellow such as yourself might yet find profitable employment in Richmond,’ said he.
‘There they are always in want of doctors to make assurances as to the health of n— going to Anderson, or being sold south, or what-have-you.’ This was a prospect I had never considered, and I asked the fellow to whom might these assurances be made. ‘Why, to those that give sureties,’ he said.
It had never occurred to me that a guarantor of life insurance might guarantee a policy on a slave, but I immediately set to thinking about how a man of enterprise might profit from such an arrangement.…”
— HH Holmes, Holmes’ Own Story (Norfolk: Fortune, 1904) 5-22.
“..disdained the private car during his presidency, Lincoln was glad to have the use of one for his journey back to Illinois. As he explained to his young protege Robert LaFollette in 1880, ‘I polled better than thirteen hundred thousand votes in eighteen and sixty-four. By March of sixty-five, you couldn’t find three people brave enough to admit it in public, and I had a grown son by then. After all that strife, sorrow, and death, to walk away with a handful of nothing...I don’t reckon I ever felt so low-down and despised.’ Though Lincoln’s public esteem was at its nadir in 1865, with his lifelong knack for making useful connections, he was far from universally reviled. It was through one such connection, James Hutchinson Woodworth– former Congressman, former Mayor of Chicago, and current Trustee of the University of Chicago–that Lincoln landed the job that he was to occupy for the rest of his life, that of the Presidency of the University of Chicago…
…often acted ahead of the trustees, and sometimes even against their wishes. In 1868, Lincoln secured a large endowment from Cornelius Vanderbilt, who was neither a Baptist nor particularly religious. Using Vanderbilt’s purported ecumenicalism as cover, Lincoln began admitting Catholics and Jews the same year. Under Lincoln’s tenure, the University was to matriculate its first black graduate, first female graduate, and the first Chippewa Indian. Lincoln, who never ceased to be tickled by the irony that the land upon which the University sat was donated by his old rival Stephen Douglas, liked to joke that they owed it all to the Little Giant, a devoted and lifelong white supremacist...
Lincoln’s commitment to radical egalitarianism became far more pronounced in his post-presidency than during his career as an electoral politician. In 1871, he argued before the Illinois Supreme Court on behalf of two black law school graduates, Richard Dawson and Lloyd Garrison Wheeler, to be admitted to the Illinois bar. In 1872, he publicly split with the Republican Party. Instead of endorsing the presidential run of his former Secretary of War, Simon Cameron, or his fellow Illinoisan (and Democrat), Vice President Jack Logan, Lincoln went with Senator Ignatius Donnelly, a Radical. Lincoln claimed that Logan and Cameron were ‘both crookeder than a snaggletoothed dog’s hind leg,’ and even if the eccentric Donnelly (often ridiculed as Senator Don Quixote) ‘might dent a few windmills, he might slay a giant while he’s at it.’ Donnelly denounced the Negro Expulsion Act, vowed not to enforce the 15th Amendment, and loudly demanded the immediate emancipation of any remaining slaves. He supported the Franciscans, keeping the greenbacks in circulation, an eight hour day, and the right of unions to organize and strike.[1] Though Lincoln’s move surprised many, according to his former secretary and lifelong friend John Hay, he’d privately been voting for the Radicals ever since Frederick Douglass’ emigration, ‘which had shamed [Lincoln] greatly.’ To the historian’s everlasting lament, Hay never explained why the emigration of Douglass in particular shamed Lincoln in particular, and we can only offer informed conjecture…”
— George S. McGovern, Lincoln Goes West (New York: Scribner, 1977) 25-47.
[1]--And a great many other things. He was not called “The Man of a Thousand Causes” for nothing.
TO: Dir. Jacob Thompson, DSS
FROM: Col. JS Mosby, Chief Inspector, DSS 1st Dist.
PROTECTED AND CLASSIFIED
January 12, 1873
Director Thompson,
During our meeting in December, you made several remarks regarding the problem of literacy amongst the bondsmen, and how our efforts to monitor that situation are hindered by our lack of understanding as to its scope. I have therefore taken the liberty to begin an informal and preliminary investigation into the prevalence of literacy among the Negroes of the First District. Because of the hurried nature of this inquiry, I do not warrant the results with absolute specificity, and until more thorough study has been completed, I would be reluctant to assume that the several Districts are situated in a like manner to the First. Nonetheless, I believe even the tentative findings expressed herein to be instructive…
As seems to be the case with all matters of import, the present state of affairs has changed markedly from the prewar situation. In 1860, we estimate that between one in twenty and one in twenty five bondsmen were literate. Our preliminary findings suggest that today, between one in five and one in three bondsmen in the First District have some degree of literacy–a remarkable increase in little more than a decade. The reasons for this are several. One factor is peculiar to the First District, that being the large influx of Maryland Negroes–roughly fifty thousand–which only ended in 1871, when the Border Trade was abolished. The rates of literacy among Maryland Negroes, both slave and free, were–and are–higher than those in much of the rest of the South. It is known that many of those who were traded into Virginia protested at the time that they were in fact, free Negroes who had been press-ganged into servitude by unscrupulous traders. If that were true in more cases than have thus been proven, it would go some way to explaining a portion of the increase.
Another factor to consider, though one rather harder to quantify, are the efforts by Northern fanatics to educate the Negroes. During the war this took the guise of “philanthropy,” when thousands of fugitives were given the rudiments of education in areas occupied by the Union. Since the end of the war, these efforts have continued in secret. Though individual misfits have engaged in this kind of agitation for some time, the first arrest of a person affiliated with a clandestine organization in this district was in 1869, when a Lynchburg schoolteacher, Edward Delashmutt, was discovered to be a Franciscan. Though he first claimed to be of Winchester, and went by the alias of Dellahunt, under strenuous questioning it was revealed that he was actually of Frederick, Maryland, where his family had been longtime conductors on the Underground Railroad. Dellashmutt had been about in Virginia for a year, busy at his mischief in Charlottesville before he aroused suspicion there and came to Lynchburg. Through the interrogations of Delashmutt and several others in the following years, we know that the Franciscan operatives are dispatched from within the United States, aided domestically, and generally know little of operations beyond their own ken. I would here reiterate my earlier recommendation, that we should redouble our efforts to turn, infiltrate, or eliminate the Franciscan leadership within the United States. A purely defensive posture fails to capitalize upon the advantages we possess in funding, training, materiel, and coordination over secret fraternities such as the Brothers of Francis….
…The education of bondservants by masters who, inflamed by their own cupidity, choose to flout the law is a factor as important as all the others put together. Certain jurisdictions in the Second District, namely the state of Kentucky, persist in their laxity regarding the education of bondsmen. Indeed, the brokers of Lexington, who boast of their stock being able to read plans and act as foremen over their fellow hands, have made something of a cottage industry of selling skilled Negro mechanics to Anderson Iron & Tool. Here in the First District, certain masters of the Old Dominion (envious at seeing so many Richmond dollars going to Bluegrass squires) made adjustments to remain competitive within the market, irrespective of proper regulation…
…the Maryland Negroes are hard to weed out, as most of the Maryland trade took place before the Negro Surname bill took effect. There is no national law barring slave education, and even if there were, local magistrates are backward to act against wealthy masters who flout the law. Therefore, our domestic operations should focus on surveillance of suspicious whites, especially–but not only–those from the United States and British Canada, along with infiltration of the Negro population.
On the latter initiative, General Hill’s recent articles on the late anti-guerilla operations in South Carolina were instructive…
“Neither Wheeler nor Villere were under any illusions as to the magnitude of Beauregard’s ambition, and they understood that his acceptance was likely little more than a formality. Although Beauregard never acknowledged it, in a missive to William Mahone in December of 1866, Wheeler bragged that ‘the Great Creole is with us and has been almost from the get-go. His sole anxieties are in relation to the controversies he anticipates will be incited by his religion, and thus he is insistent on two points. First, that we must find the proper running mate, and second, that he should have our solemn assurance that the New South men will defend to the utmost any attacks on his patriotism.’ If the second condition could be taken as a given, the first was far more challenging to satisfy. True to his word, Beauregard didn’t publicly state his intention to run or comment on his willingness to be nominated throughout the winter and early spring of 1867, consciously cultivating a Washingtonian air of being above the fray. In those days, it was considered unseemly for a Presidential candidate to personally campaign for votes. Nonetheless, went the reasoning, only a candidate could campaign. Beauregard, by not openly declaring himself a candidate, was merely a retired general, a private citizen. And as a private citizen, he embarked on a tour of all twelve of the Confederate States at the beginning of the year, commiserating with his many friends in high places and addressing local chapters of the United Confederate Veterans and the New South along the way.
Once he finished ringing in the New Year at his home in New Orleans, Beauregard made his way north along the River Road, marshaling the sugar lords of Acadiana for their support in the hypothetical campaign. After a February fete in Baton Rouge, Beauregard proceeded by ship to Galveston and then to Mobile, where he spent the Mardi Gras in grand style. Making a brief visit to Pensacola the following Thursday, he was back in New Orleans in time to take the first Sunday mass of Lent at St. Louis Cathedral. After a week’s rest, Beauregard, accompanied by Wheeler and Duncan Kenner, boarded the steamboat Robert E. Lee on the 18th of March, beginning the long journey upriver, the first leg of the pseudo-campaign. Their itinerary took them upriver as far as Cairo, whereupon they headed up the Ohio as far as Point Pleasant, Virginia, with stops along the way in Vicksburg, Helena, Memphis, Paducah and Louisville. Wheeler himself was to depart in Memphis, where he would make his way by rail to North Carolina in order to close the deal with Zebulon Vance. It was understood that the good opinion of Nathan Bedford Forrest, Memphis’ most prominent citizen and the Confederacy’s original robber baron, would be a powerful asset going forward, and if they could not secure his endorsement or his money, they could at least avoid alienating him. As Wheeler and Forrest detested one another, all parties agreed that a departure was in the campaign’s best interests.
Forrest, who had just completed a year that saw him become the South’s largest slave owner, received Beauregard like an emperor in a private dining room of the Gayoso Hotel on the evening of the 23rd. Boasting gaslights throughout its hundreds of rooms, central heating, running water, and their own private sewer system, the Gayoso’s state of the art amenities were the equal of any facility in North America. By turns rivals and allies (but never friends), Beauregard and Forrest stand out as two of the most influential Confederates of the post-revolutionary period, and their dinner of the 23rd has been a source of rich dramatic speculation, most famously in Tennessee Williams' A Table in the Sun. Beauregard never provided a direct account of the evening, and in writing came closest when he told his friend William Porcher Miles that ‘I feel as if I understand Forrest…He is well mannered, but coarse in outlook. Alas, a shrewd man, and together we studied how the South might find her place in the sun…and what we shall make of this great nation.’
Forrest was more concrete. ‘Railroads, railroads, telegraphs, and more railroads,’ he declared to a young Henry Grady in 1873, ‘It was time to bind this country up. Now I reckon he had lots of big plans [1], and he wasn’t shy about letting a fellow know about them, but I looked him in the eye and told him that if he wanted my support, he was going to have to succeed where old Jeff Davis couldn’t. Pass that Kenner bill, the railroad bill. All the silver in Arizona ain’t worth a flip if you can’t get it out of the desert. I already had the hands and we was getting more every day…All we needed was the will to make it happen…’
…a neutral Forrest was better than a hostile Forrest, but Beauregard was nonetheless dejected with the outcome. The next major stop was in Louisville, the Confederacy’s second largest city, where an appointment with John C. Breckinridge awaited. The purpose of this meeting was entirely different than the one with Forrest. Rather than lobbying Breckinridge for his support, Beauregard was attempting to gauge Breckinridge’s own election year intentions…
Beauregard was shocked by what he found in Louisville. Confiding again to Miles, he said that ‘there are as many Tory flags in this city as there are patriotic flags, and gangs of Tory rowdies– called bluecaps hereabouts–glower from the street corners, intimidating the patriots when they can.’ It had not been that way in Paducah. Beauregard realized that if the situation in Louisville was indicative of Kentucky politics, it was not only unlikely that Breckinridge would be the nominee on the New South ticket, but it was unlikely that the New South would have much hope of winning the state at all. The platitude that the Revolution set brother against brother was nowhere more true than in Kentucky, which alone among the Confederate States had sent as many soldiers to the Union side as they had to the Confederate. While most Kentuckians of the day, witnessing the firestorm set off in Missouri by the Free Birth Amendment, did not regret throwing in their lot with the Confederacy, they gravely resented being forced to make the choice at all. The vast majority of the 60,000 Kentuckians who fought for the old Union had no intention of relocating to the United States when the war ended. They were far too numerous to persecute, as Pat Cleburne was gleefully doing in Arkansas, and far too obstreperous for a common shunning, as John Calvin Brown was doing in Tennessee. As it was nowhere else in the Confederacy, Toryism in Kentucky was a political force that had to be confronted on its own terms.
For his own part, Breckinridge was as noncommittal as his home state. He would not consent to be considered as a running mate, and he would not commit to sitting out the race. He did not believe in the repeal of the export tax, nor was he prepared to repudiate the proposed acquisition of Baja California, which would be two of the central planks in the Liberal platform. Yet he was quite content, unlike the New South, to swap land for back payments to the railroad companies, owed from years of wartime deferments. His diffidence aside, the hotheaded Robert Breckinridge Jr (with the New South since Spotswood), had for several months been urging his elder cousin to run for the nomination, and was attempting to push the whole Breckinridge faction into the New South. Alas, the hemp country Hamlet was fundamentally troubled by the stridency of the Young Bulls, who were still the heart of the New South movement in 1867. Though he agreed that many of their grievances were legitimate, he had just witnessed the bloody consequences of strident rhetoric and did not care to repeat the experience. In any event, it seemed to Breckinridge that he might have more to fear from the Young Bulls and their imitators than he did from anyone else. After all, they had already dethroned two antebellum political institutions, Joe Brown in Georgia and The Family in Arkansas. Was the Breckinridge clan going to be next? In Breckinridge’s mind, it seemed alarmingly possible. His extended family had already split over the war. Divided as they were, their influence in the state was at a low ebb, even if they were still preeminent. As the clan’s patriarch, Breckinridge knew that he could not heal the rift in his family–much less the rift between Patriots and Tories in all of Kentucky–while aligning himself with the most extreme faction in the fight…
Breckinridge did offer Beauregard at least one concession: that he would not attack Beauregard on the basis of his religion, and that if and when such attacks came from other quarters, he promised to condemn them…
…gathered everywhere he went, like schools of minnows crowding about. But for all the cheers of the crowds, the big fish had all eluded him. Forrest would only offer a skeptical neutrality, and Breckinridge, far from being in Beauregard’s corner, seemed to be preparing to move against him. Duncan Kenner, who was probably the most politically astute of Beauregard’s close allies, interpreted the situation with alarm. ‘How can we, with credibility, affect to be for the nation and the soldier if the beloved commanders are all arrayed against us?’ he wrote to Mahone after their failure in Louisville. Coming to the end of their sojourn on the Ohio, Beauregard was in a bad humor, and all agreed on the need for rest and fresh tactics. Disembarking at Point Pleasant, Virginia, the pseudo-campaign traveled first by rail and then by carriage to Hot Springs, where, meeting up with Mahone at the Homestead Resort, Beauregard and his retinue resolved to take the waters and strategize for the next fortnight…
…the next major stop being Richmond. Mahone had arranged a meeting with General Lee, who had retired to the city after the burning of Arlington House in the waning days of the war. Although all parties involved maintained that the call made on the evening of Holy Saturday was purely social, the events of Easter Sunday, when Beauregard attended church services with Lee at St. Paul’s Episcopal, had major political implications. Writing at the time to his son René, Beauregard paraphrased Good King Henry when he said that ‘Richmond, my son, is worth forgoing a mass…’”
[1]-Although it is unclear what the ‘big plans’ to which Forrest alluded were, numerous sources confirm that Beauregard–who was an engineer by training and inclination–was fascinated by the Eads Bridge project, which had begun construction in St. Louis that very year. Considering Forrest’s extensive (and scandalous) involvement in the Memphis Bridge Corporation, and Beauregard’s 1868 directive to the Corps of Engineers to investigate favorable sites for a railroad crossing of the Lower Mississippi, it is reasonable to infer that they spoke of it then, but ultimately unprovable.
—Vann Woodward, War Child: Joe Wheeler, John Gordon, and the Origins of the New South Party. (New Orleans: Free University Press, 1969) 33-41.
“In Brazil and Spanish Cuba, in Carolina and Missouri, in Mississippi and in Maryland, millions of Negroes toil daily from dawn till dusk. Now, you of the Workingmen’s Congress claim to be for the worker. You decry his compensation, you decry his treatment, you abhor the conditions of his drudgery. And it is a fine thing you do, and I join you in your cries. But you must not forget, in all your indignation, to spare a cry for the slave as well. For who works harder than the slave? What meaner compensation is there than the bite of a whip? What ruder accommodation is there than a Virginia mining camp or a Richmond shanty? What condition is more odious than that of the violence, the rapine, and the tyranny that the slave lives every day?
You must ask yourselves: how far will you advance in your efforts to raise up the free working man when you ignore the working men who are treated as livestock? Where is the bargaining power of the free man when his brothers can be sold as one would sell a string of oxen?
As I speak to you all in London this noonday, the dawn is breaking over the Virginia hills. There in Virginia, hundreds of Negroes, dog tired and sore from the day before, are trudging up the mountainside, their feet slipping in the slick red clay, marching off to mine the coal that will power locomotives and factories all over the continent. The moon will be high over the Thames before the Negroes slaving in the coal mines of the Blue Ridge will put aside their picks and shovels for the night. It is dark when they report, dark where they work, and dark when they leave for the day. These are men who will live and die, benighted.
Now I ask you, men of the International: what wages shall you demand for the coal miners of Swansea when the factors of Lynchburg pay their miners none at all? Does not coal mined by slave labor burn just as hot as coal mined by free labor? What accommodations might we seek for the men laying track through the passes of the Pyrenees when there is a coolie in India or Negro in Texas who is not accommodated in the least?”
—Frederick Douglass, London, 1870; in address to the International Workingmen’s Congress.
"As a matter of fact, Miss Bisland, the meeting in Port-au-Prince was the second time I met Frederick Douglass. The first was in Washington City, when I was just a pup, few months after I stole the Planter."
--Robert Smalls, quoted in Elizabeth Bisland, The Mexican Dispatches; or, Conversations With the Devil of Beaufort County (New Orleans: Dixie Free Press, 1894), 41.
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Why am I not surprised that someone who IOTL was a serial killer ends up a slave trader ITTL?