The Dead Skunk
- Thread starter Lycaon pictus
- Start date
Ideas on polandball/Hetalia/SATW portrayals :
France : Storngest country in Europe, can only be beaten by all of Europe acting together, also a manipulative bastard
Spain : Inbred retard Catholic fundamentalist who lost a war to Haiti.
Italy : Mad scientist
Austria-Hungary : Inbred retard who does horrible stuff to countries to try to get them to give up
France : Storngest country in Europe, can only be beaten by all of Europe acting together, also a manipulative bastard
Spain : Inbred retard Catholic fundamentalist who lost a war to Haiti.
Italy : Mad scientist
Austria-Hungary : Inbred retard who does horrible stuff to countries to try to get them to give up
Another excellent update! Part of what I like most about this project - beyond the quality and depth of it, and the premise itself - is how well the writing styles and topics at hand lend themselves to the excerpt-based format of the timeline. These feel like things you'd read in an old historical book in a library somewhere, and that atmosphere feels very good to see replicated here.
Retard?
Unless you are talking about the impact of a drogue parachute I would strongly advise you to remove that term from your lexicon, at least on the Board.
Winter of Discontent (3)
Lycaon pictus
Donor
Thanks. Yeah, slave power is definitely getting weaker—and they've noticed. (Content note: more n-bombs.)
Virginia Governor John Floyd had long favored an eventual end (with emphasis on the eventual) to slavery in the commonwealth. His response to the Savannah Fire was to propose a mix of immediate repression—forbidding slaves from leaving their masters’ estates—with gradual emancipation. Floyd also sought “the immediate expulsion” of free blacks from the state. This last was impossible—the Army and Navy had already barred all slaves from shipyards and coastal fortifications[1], but these same shipyards and forts still had a need for certain forms of manual labor which (in slave states) were often scorned by whites as “nigger work” and would go undone if there were not low-paid freedmen available to do them. Floyd, however, entertained hope that the newly emancipated could be deported either to Haiti or to Pays-Crou “if our French allies are willing.” These opinions were echoed by State Senator Thomas Jefferson Randolph, grandson to the late President Jefferson. (Like many Americans, they held a false conception of Pays-Crou as entirely subordinate to Paris.)
Opposition to these measures came mainly from the eastern half of the state, particulary from Delegate John Thompson Brown of Petersburg and State Senator William O. Goode. The loudest in opposition was not a legislator, but a professor of history and metaphysics at William and Mary College, Thomas Roderick Dew. He pointed out in various pamphlets that, if history were viewed as a totality, slaveholding society could not be viewed as an aberration—rather, it was the abolition of slavery that was an experiment, and one which could not yet be called a success. “Let us admit that slavery is an evil, and what then? Why, it has been entailed upon us by no fault of ours, and must we shrink from the charge which devolves upon us?”[2] (Many historians believe that Dew’s writings—too prolix for the average reader even in the nineteenth century—were as much an influence on George Fitzhugh as those of his fellow “Wise Man” Thomas Carlyle[3].)
It seemed in early 1834 that the majority of the state’s opinion makers were behind Dew, Goode and Brown. During the month of January, the Richmond Times had presented the fire as a tragedy for which it would be in poor taste to lay blame. However, the editorial of the February 16 edition suggested that SINC’s policies of manumission were at least partly responsible: “It is not slavery itself that agitates the simple mind of the Negro, but the promise of freedom that cannot be kept—something that Virginians would do well to bear in mind.” The Richmond Compiler had already denounced the “malaria of agitation wafting north from the swamps of Florida.” The recently re-founded Virginia Gazette blamed the Bank, which “has neither the firmness nor the gentleness of a true master, considering its charges with no more true feeling than a Yankee stockbroker views his shares,” but added that “we cannot ignore the risk posed to our citizens by troublemakers either from the north or the south.”
What all of these editorialists—and many politicians—had in common was that they emphasized the danger that servile insurrection might pose in Virginia, and even in the District of Columbia where slavery was likewise legal, in the hope of persuading the general public that abolitionists needed to be pressured into silence for the good of the commonwealth. “Nothing can be done about Yankee agitators from Boston and Philadelphia,” said Brown, “but let the fanatics among us remember at least that they walk the same streets, live in the same towns and are threatened by the same catastrophes as their neighbors.”
This was about to come back to bite them. Charles J. Faulkner had recently been elected to the Virginia State Senate. His district included the counties of Berkeley and Jefferson, and his signature issue was placing a greater share of the tax burden on major slaveholders. He believed that the small, free-labor farms he represented were paying more than their share. And now, after Savannah, it was increasingly difficult for even free-labor farms and businesses in slave states to obtain fire insurance at a reasonable rate.
In his March 10 speech to the Virginia State Senate, Faulkner put forward his argument thus: slavery was inherently dangerous, more so than any other form of labor. “A steam engine is dangerous,” he said. “The mighty locomotives that now thunder their way from Boston to Philadelphia can crush the life from a man without slowing their pace. Even on our own Virginia farms, we have bulls, boars, restive horses and savage dogs, and all these creatures may kill. But the slave is the chattel that thinks, and pits his wit against that of his master, ceaselessly plotting to escape his bondage at whatever the cost.” Moreover, he argued, the danger posed by slaves extended to the entire community: “How many of the homes that burned in Savannah were homes where none had ever labored in bondage? How many of the innocents who perished there had never in their lives owned a slave?” Faulkner, a slaveholder himself, was not proposing an end to slavery. Rather, he held that if slavery was indeed worth the risk to the commonwealth as its proponents claimed, then it would only be just for those who most benefited from it to shoulder the cost of dealing with the risk. Slaveholders had long enjoyed lower taxes on their human property. Now, Faulkner argued, it was time for them to pay higher taxes.
This was an argument that held a good deal of force—not only with the farmers of western and northwestern Virginia, but with some of Virginia’s most powerful citizens, especially Thomas Snowden Stabler. His dyeworks and medicine factories in Alexandria, Leesburg and Frederick depended on skilled and knowledgeable labor; slaves were of no use beyond janitorial duties. The new factory in Charlottesville for the processing of opium poppies made no use of slaves at all—like the Norfolk shipyards and coastal forts, freedmen were hired to do any work that white Virginians saw as beneath them. The reason for this was simple. The drugs made in Charlottesville were extremely valuable and easy to conceal and smuggle in one’s clothing, and as one foreman bluntly put it: “A slave knows if he steals anything worth less’n his own hide, they won’t whup him so hard he can’t go back to work. But a free nigger dasn’t[4] ever steal—he knows what the law’ll do to him.” And of course Martinsburg, which Faulkner represented, was the site of the facility where Thomas Stabler conducted his most dangerous research, and the place where civil unrest of any sort could least be tolerated.
Faulkner’s district also represented the northern tip of the wine belt—the “long hills that catch the light of dawn/To grow the blessed vine”[5] where slavery was of little use. This business was dominated by Italian immigrants or those taught by them, especially in the Shenandoah Valley where the Frescobaldis held sway. Like the Antinoris[6] in the Yadkin Valley of North Carolina, this family had a few domestic slaves, but they regarded the work of grape-growing and wine-making as a joy and a privilege not to be shared with slaves, and their attitude had spread throughout the industry. And, of course, all of these people felt overtaxed in comparison to the tobacco plantations of eastern Virginia.
Faulkner’s proposal had the effect of turning the whole debate upside down. The same politicians and editorialists who had been speaking and writing of the dangers of a slave revolt now began downplaying that same threat. “The more we learn about what happened at Savannah,” said the Richmond Compiler, “the less it appears to be the result of malice, and the more it appears to be the result of accident.” “The only lesson Virginians should learn from Savannah is to be more careful with our lamps and candles,” wrote the Gazette.
Then Floyd stepped in, pointing out that this might be a necessary measure to prevent “this honorable commonwealth” from having to default on its bonds as so many states had done. He proposed a compromise—there would be an additional tax on slaves of $15 a head per annum, but there would also be a voluntary program of gradual emancipation, in which children of slaves born after 1836 could be declared free. Any slaveholder who took part in this would have the taxes on his or her slaves cut to zero. In effect, slaves that were no longer true property would no longer be taxed as such. Floyd also proposed that freed children of slaves who had reached their majority be put into work gangs to pay for their eventual passage to Haiti.
With some modification (the tax was reduced to $10 a head, and the work-gang proposal was shelved until there was some notion of how many freed children there would be) this passed on June 4. Under other circumstances, it might have had little impact, but in the hiemal year of 1834 it was a great relief to many small farmers in dire financial straits who happened to own a slave or two. (Indeed, as abolitionists noted with chagrin, under this law a farmer with one elderly slave could pledge this slave’s nonexistent future children to freedom and get a tax break for nothing.) Maryland, which had already defaulted on its bonds and desperately needed more money, passed a similar tax hike without the emancipation program. Delaware went further, narrowly passing a gradual emancipation plan that would first take effect at the beginning of 1836.
To slaveholders in the Deep South, the laws passed in Tennessee, Virginia, Maryland and Delaware were as much a wake-up call as the Savannah Fire itself, or Queen Charlotte’s emancipation. They were surrounded. And later that year, Congress began debating the admission of Michigan to the Union, which would neutralize the benefits to them of adding Arkansaw. They would need to expand or die, and time was running out…
Charles Cerniglia, The Road to the Troubles: The American South, 1800-1840
[1] A side effect of emancipation in the British Empire and British Florida becoming a hub of abolitionism is that even outside Georgia, slaves are seen as a potential fifth column for the British.
[2] An OTL quote.
[3] In the future of TTL, aristists will refer to Thomas Carlyle, George Fitzhugh and Johann Feuerbach as the “Three Wise Men.”
[4] Note that dasn’t isn’t a regional variation of doesn’t, but a contraction of dares not.
[5] The author is quoting the Green & Poe opera Susan Grace, first performed in 1847.
[6] The Frescobaldis and Antinoris are old and proud Tuscan families known for wine-making. ITTL, branches of them settled in the U.S. during the Other Peninsular War. They haven’t anglicized their names, and won’t.
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I love the update! Hopefuly with a earler emancipation, there'll be earler succesfull civil rights movement!
I have a few questions. 1. What's going to happen with Napoleon's illegitimate children, Charles Léon and Alexandre Colonna-Walewski?
2. Is Napoleon II going to have other children who have a impact on history?
3. How different will science and technolgy be in this ATL?
4. Will there be a scramble for Africa?
5. If flight happens earler will space-flight happen earler too?
Thank you for writting this timeline! I have enjoyed it immensely!
Good luck and God-speed!
Sincerly
A Fan of your works!
I have a few questions. 1. What's going to happen with Napoleon's illegitimate children, Charles Léon and Alexandre Colonna-Walewski?
2. Is Napoleon II going to have other children who have a impact on history?
3. How different will science and technolgy be in this ATL?
4. Will there be a scramble for Africa?
5. If flight happens earler will space-flight happen earler too?
Thank you for writting this timeline! I have enjoyed it immensely!
Good luck and God-speed!
Sincerly
A Fan of your works!
hmm i dot think the UK would allow too much US expansion without acting.
I noticed some hickups in the text:
Some text missing here?
The words "the slave" don't maje sense here.
Some text missing here?
The words "the slave" don't maje sense here.
Lycaon pictus
Donor
Thanks for the tips! Fixed.
1. Charles Léon was a major in the French Army during the rebellion. He was wounded fighting in the Vendée and promoted to colonel. He is currently serving in Algeria.
Alexandre Colonna-Walewski grew up in Poland, raised by Count Walewski, and is currently Russia’s ambassador to Paris.
2. At some point Napoleon II will marry again and produce an extra heir. At the moment, he’s still mourning his departed bride. Women in Paris are lining up to try and heal his wounded heart.
3. As of 1834, science and technology are about where they were IOTL. However, in time (lots of time) literacy and education will spread further and faster through the world, which will mean more engineers and scientists, which will mean faster progress in most areas. In the meantime, Babbage is having more success—the collapse of the canal bubble has convinced the Royal Bank that a machine which can monitor changes in things like price-to-earnings ratios is a worthy investment.
4. For the most part, the scramble for Africa will be different—fewer instances of outright conquest and more cases of client states being cultivated. This has already begun with places like Pays-Crou and Asanteman. This won’t necessarily be any less bloody.
5. I haven’t quite gotten as far as planning flight/space flight yet.
Winter of Discontent (4)
Lycaon pictus
Donor
Happy Easter, everybody!
June 22, 1834
Becksville[1], Kyantine Territory
The rye harvest had ended last week, and the ache was just starting to go out of Denmark Vesey’s shoulders. Being 67 years old (give or take a few month) and the mayor of the largest town in the Kiamichi meant that people nodded respectfully at you while you swung a scythe like everybody else.
The church stood on a hill northeast of the center of town. The traveling preacher was standing on the front steps. People had been hearing about him, and had come from as far away as Cavanal[2] and the farms down along the Red River to hear him speak. There were nearly two thousand people here—much too many for the church.
Most of the men, and maybe a quarter of the women, were black. Earning your freedom working for SINC was a path open to far more men than women. There was a reason the people here had balked at letting him name it “New Charleston,” after the town he’d spent most of his life, but had agreed to the name “Becksville.” More than half the men here had had to leave a Beck[3] behind somewhere in the quicksand of the slave states. But there were about as many women around as men—remnants of Caddo, Sauk and Fox chiefdoms whose men had mostly fallen in battle with the Army.
And there were a few white men—very poor, with a permanent air of embarrassment that life had dropped them here. They were useful people to have around when you needed someone to talk to the garrison that the garrison might actually listen to, but everyone kept a discreet eye on them for the first year or so to make sure they weren’t working for slave catchers or looking for particular fugitives.
There were even a couple of soldiers from the garrison. Whether they were religious, curious or keeping an eye on people here Vesey couldn’t say. He did know that if it weren’t for the food grown in this part of Kyantine, the Army would never be able to keep so much as a company stationed here, let alone a regiment. And so it would remain for the next ten years, or however long it took Shreve to finish clearing the Raft.
For all his fame, the preacher had arrived in time for the rye harvest to begin, and had worked as hard as anybody. When he raised his hand, the crowd went quiet.
“Welcome, my brothers and sisters,” he said. “Today I take my text from the Letter to the Ephesians…” There was a murmur of shock through the audience. There were perhaps half a dozen Bible verses that masters wanted their slaves to know, and one of them was in Ephesians.
“Chapter 6, verse 12: ‘For we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places.’” So not as bad as “servants obey your masters,” but it still seemed like an odd message for a community that mostly wrestled against rocky soil, bad weather and Indian raids. Denmark was starting to wonder where this Nat Turner person was going with this.
Turner went on to talk about Paul writing from prison, about the repressiveness and injustice of the Roman Empire, in ways that made it all sound very familiar—familiar even to Vesey, who knew himself to be much, much luckier than most men born slaves. The darkness of this world. Spiritual wickedness in high places. There were very few here who needed to be told what these things meant. Perhaps even the white men understood. Every one of them who’d come to Kyantine and wasn’t in the garrison had claimed to have lost everything, and to be on the run from creditors. And it could be that they were all telling the truth. (Or some of them might have been on the run from the law, for other reasons. Another reason they needed a little watching.)
“These principalities and powers,” Turner continued, “have been around for a very long time—before the time of the Romans, even. The Book of Job speaks of Behemoth and Leviathan, beasts that cannot be killed by mortal hands. I ask you now, my brothers and sisters, where in the land or in the sea is there a beast of flesh and blood that men cannot kill? But the Lord knew what Job did not—there are far worse monsters roaming this earth than any of flesh and blood. And the worst of these, my brothers and sisters, is the Serpent.
“You may never have seen the Serpent, but you know its touch. It is everywhere. Its body runs all through this land, holding white men in its coils and Negroes in its belly. Its bones are law. Its flesh is custom. Its blood is money. Its scales gleam with false religion. We were all of us born into the war against it, and we will die with that war unfinished…”
[2] OTL Poteau, Oklahoma
[3] Vesey’s wife, now deceased, whom he was unable to buy out of slavery.
[4] OTL Oklahoma City
June 22, 1834
Becksville[1], Kyantine Territory
The rye harvest had ended last week, and the ache was just starting to go out of Denmark Vesey’s shoulders. Being 67 years old (give or take a few month) and the mayor of the largest town in the Kiamichi meant that people nodded respectfully at you while you swung a scythe like everybody else.
The church stood on a hill northeast of the center of town. The traveling preacher was standing on the front steps. People had been hearing about him, and had come from as far away as Cavanal[2] and the farms down along the Red River to hear him speak. There were nearly two thousand people here—much too many for the church.
Most of the men, and maybe a quarter of the women, were black. Earning your freedom working for SINC was a path open to far more men than women. There was a reason the people here had balked at letting him name it “New Charleston,” after the town he’d spent most of his life, but had agreed to the name “Becksville.” More than half the men here had had to leave a Beck[3] behind somewhere in the quicksand of the slave states. But there were about as many women around as men—remnants of Caddo, Sauk and Fox chiefdoms whose men had mostly fallen in battle with the Army.
And there were a few white men—very poor, with a permanent air of embarrassment that life had dropped them here. They were useful people to have around when you needed someone to talk to the garrison that the garrison might actually listen to, but everyone kept a discreet eye on them for the first year or so to make sure they weren’t working for slave catchers or looking for particular fugitives.
There were even a couple of soldiers from the garrison. Whether they were religious, curious or keeping an eye on people here Vesey couldn’t say. He did know that if it weren’t for the food grown in this part of Kyantine, the Army would never be able to keep so much as a company stationed here, let alone a regiment. And so it would remain for the next ten years, or however long it took Shreve to finish clearing the Raft.
For all his fame, the preacher had arrived in time for the rye harvest to begin, and had worked as hard as anybody. When he raised his hand, the crowd went quiet.
“Welcome, my brothers and sisters,” he said. “Today I take my text from the Letter to the Ephesians…” There was a murmur of shock through the audience. There were perhaps half a dozen Bible verses that masters wanted their slaves to know, and one of them was in Ephesians.
“Chapter 6, verse 12: ‘For we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places.’” So not as bad as “servants obey your masters,” but it still seemed like an odd message for a community that mostly wrestled against rocky soil, bad weather and Indian raids. Denmark was starting to wonder where this Nat Turner person was going with this.
Turner went on to talk about Paul writing from prison, about the repressiveness and injustice of the Roman Empire, in ways that made it all sound very familiar—familiar even to Vesey, who knew himself to be much, much luckier than most men born slaves. The darkness of this world. Spiritual wickedness in high places. There were very few here who needed to be told what these things meant. Perhaps even the white men understood. Every one of them who’d come to Kyantine and wasn’t in the garrison had claimed to have lost everything, and to be on the run from creditors. And it could be that they were all telling the truth. (Or some of them might have been on the run from the law, for other reasons. Another reason they needed a little watching.)
“These principalities and powers,” Turner continued, “have been around for a very long time—before the time of the Romans, even. The Book of Job speaks of Behemoth and Leviathan, beasts that cannot be killed by mortal hands. I ask you now, my brothers and sisters, where in the land or in the sea is there a beast of flesh and blood that men cannot kill? But the Lord knew what Job did not—there are far worse monsters roaming this earth than any of flesh and blood. And the worst of these, my brothers and sisters, is the Serpent.
“You may never have seen the Serpent, but you know its touch. It is everywhere. Its body runs all through this land, holding white men in its coils and Negroes in its belly. Its bones are law. Its flesh is custom. Its blood is money. Its scales gleam with false religion. We were all of us born into the war against it, and we will die with that war unfinished…”
* * *
NO ONE CAN BE TOLD
WHAT THE SERPENT IS
YOU HAVE TO SEE IT
FOR YOURSELF
NO ONE CAN BE TOLD
WHAT THE SERPENT IS
YOU HAVE TO SEE IT
FOR YOURSELF
-on the gateposts at the main entrance to Turnerite Methodist University, Spartacus[4], Kyantine.
[1] OTL Talihina, Oklahoma
[2] OTL Poteau, Oklahoma
[3] Vesey’s wife, now deceased, whom he was unable to buy out of slavery.
[4] OTL Oklahoma City
SuperZtar64
Banned
> mfw the capital of Kyantine is named after a guy who led a slave revolt
Things are gonna happen boys and girls
Things are gonna happen boys and girls
Great TL
I got a question, why didn't George IV remarried and try to have an son after his wife died?
I got a question, why didn't George IV remarried and try to have an son after his wife died?
Lycaon pictus
Donor
I'm afraid the answer is not very satisfying from a narrative perspective.
He couldn't be bothered.
What George IV really wanted, deep down, was freedom. Which might seem like a weird thing to say about a king who was also one of the great party animals of history, but he had suffered a major loss of freedom in his life. The one time he actually married for love, the marriage was legally void. Then, when he was deeply in debt, his father made it a condition of paying his debts that he marry a woman whose body and personality he found repulsive. His father, and pretty much everyone else, also expected him to sire a child on her. So he did.
This is the sort of arrangement fanfic writers call "dubcon." It would have been a terrible thing to happen to anyone, and precisely because "Prinny" had been given so much leeway in every other aspect of his life, he was uniquely ill-equipped to endure it. And because he was basically weak and cowardly, IOTL and ITTL he directed all his wrath and bitterness, not at his father, Parliament or the laws, but at the innocent woman that others had foisted onto him.
As humiliating as it was ITTL to be politically defeated by Charlotte, it left him free to do what he enjoyed most—wear fine clothes, eat rich food, drink fine wine, have his various houses remodeled, hang out with cronies who helped him feel better about himself, and have sex with mistresses for as long as his health allowed. Marrying a "suitable" woman for reasons of state whether or not he loved her, and then having a baby with her, would have been too much of an interruption of his life to put up with on behalf of the Tories who'd failed him… not to mention too much like what he'd gone through with Caroline.