This one is longer than I intended, but still shorter than the first two chapters in the
last interlude. Let me know if I missed anything.
The Dead Skunk
December 23, 1839
Twenty-five years ago today, Major General John Keane saw something in the Louisiana woods that caused him to make a different decision than he otherwise would have.
Let’s take a look at the general state of the world.
Russian America and the Canadas
Russian America is still along way from Russia proper… or anywhere else. Sometime next year they’ll get the word that the market for furs is back. This will be good news for the dissidents living out in the Seraya Gavan’[1] area, once they’ve learned to trap.
In the meantime, the Pushkins are still living in Novoarkhangelsk[2]. Recently a Dutch vessel pulled in with nine-month-old newspapers from Europe. Reading their takes on the repression in Poland sent Pushkin into a rage.
That may seem weird, but Pushkin is a patriot. The only thing he hates more than the tyranny of Tsar Alexander is hearing that same tyranny maligned by French people who still worship the Corsican Bandit’s embalmed corpse and Germans who would probably all be speaking French by now if not for the force of Russian arms. And besides, there’s a weird kind of pride that comes from knowing there’s no limit to the stupid bullshit you are capable of enduring at the hands of your Tsar. This explains a lot of Russian history.
Elsewhere in the Pacific Northwest, after over a year at the far end of nowhere, the “Surprisers” finally got their orders to leave. Austin and his fellow Astorians, both in Astoria City and at what they’re now calling Symmesburg, are very relieved to see them go. They may not be so relieved to learn where this regiment is headed—the new city of Charlottehaven[3] which Russell is having built on Vancouver Island.
Also relieved to see the backs of soldiers are the settlers at Port Harmony. They were not really in a position to resist the small companies of Dodge’s militia that occupied them last year, except by hiding their supplies in the woods so they couldn’t be requisitioned. The militia who went out into the woods looking for those supplies got ambushed by Ojibwe. And now, Dodge has gone back to Wisconsing, and the only American soldiers are the surveyors working alongside their British counterparts to catalogue those islands whose status was left unclear by the Treaty of Windsor. For the first time, Port Harmony feels like a community rather than an experiment. It’s a good feeling.
The rest of Her Majesty’s North American possessions are feeling less at ease with one another. Which seems surprising—you’d think they’d be more united than ever before. These people are now defined twice over by loyalty to the Crown. French, British, and natives fought alongside each other against the Americans. At Moncton, the descendants of black and white Loyalists fought as part of the same unit and saved Nova Scotia from invasion. The rebellion in Upper Canada was (as they never tire of repeating) against Lord Auckland and the Clique, not against the empire itself. And with Lord Durham holding court in Halifax, listening to representatives of the various communities, it seems that rebellion has been vindicated. The people of the Maritime Provinces and Upper and Lower Canada have a chance at getting a real say in their destiny—perhaps more so than the Niagarans, whose rebellion has gained them a position as one barely medium-sized state among twenty-six with more to come.
Yet the remnants of the old Compact and Clique still exist, and even those who fought alongside French-speaking Roman Catholics don’t necessarily want to share power with them. Their leader in this is the Anglican bishop John Strachan, who has now moved his diocese to Peterborough.
Strachan wrote a long letter on the subject. He couldn’t just say
Hey, don’t we get extra points for being Protestant and having ancestors who came from the British Isles? Do you people really not care about anything other than who fights for you? Instead, he phrased his objections to Durham’s work as concerns about the future of Anglicanism in the Canadas. Then he got Col. Talbot, Sir Adam Thom, John Beverly Robinson, and a bunch of others to sign it, and sent it straight to the Archbishop of Canterbury. After all, the Queen has to listen to the Archbishop, right? Didn’t she swear an oath to defend the faith? They didn’t even run it past Auckland, who could have warned them that the Queen hates Archbishop Howley so much she regularly checks the papers for anything she can use as an excuse to get him sacked.
This month, they received her response:
We are at all times mindful of our duty to defend our Most Holy Church of England from all perils, and require no reminders of this duty from our subjects.[4] We of course shall never allow either this Church or our co-religionists to be subject to tyranny or persecution within our dominions; neither shall we allow them to become the instrument or perpetrators of tyranny. It is this latter peril which concerns us most, for it is both more immediate and more dangerous; whereas to be the subject of tyranny is perilous to mortal flesh, to be the perpetrator thereof is perilous to the immortal soul[5]…
So… that would be a no, then. For better or worse, they owe allegiance to Her Majesty, have put that allegiance on proud display for the whole world to see, and are therefore subject to all of Her Majesty’s efforts to do good.
Still, the divisions in Canada are nothing compared to the divisions in…
The United States
You’d think that in the aftermath of a short, technically successful war (yes, the U.S. had to go into debt to pay for Niagara, but one day that debt will be repaid and Niagara will still be there) the United States would be more united behind the leader in that war. Instead, the opposite has happened—the U.S. has never been more divided.
Case in point: Chief Justice Sam Smith’s body had barely gotten cold when Berrien appointed his most loyal ally in Congress, the 49-year-old Rep. James Moore Wayne of Georgia, to replace him. But the Democratic-Republican Party now has a one-seat majority in the Senate, and they have made it clear that no further judicial appointments of Berrien will be considered—especially not to the Supreme Court. “A man in disgrace with the law must not be permitted to appoint the interpreters of that law,” said Henry Clay. Although Clay didn’t mention Wayne’s name once, Wayne took that as a slur upon his own honor—and in any case, he had no intention of refusing a lifetime appointment from Georgia’s favorite son when
Rankin v. Missouri just showed the importance of the Supreme Court. To make a long story short, on New Year’s Day the two men will be fighting a duel.
Even inside President Berrien’s own party and cabinet, there is discord and mistrust. Some in the Tertium Quid party believe that for the good of the party, Berrien should step down in favor of another—Tyler, Poinsett, or possibly Calhoun. Poinsett has already taken his name out of the running. He’s announced he’ll be stepping down in ’41 so he can work to promote the growth of science and the useful arts in the U.S. The Smithson bequest, a rare example of British goodwill long held up by the war, has at last been freed up, and it’s time to make use of it[6]. The result is that Berrien is eyeing both his own Secretary of State and the man who should be his greatest ally in Congress with equal suspicion.
What political unity exists in Washington and the nation is unity against John Macpherson Berrien. At the moment, that unity is centered around Daniel Webster, who with a 117-member DRP delegation in the House has almost gotten his majority back. The Quids are down to 56 seats in the House—slightly more than they had before the ’34 midterms—and only Rep. Cass remains of their northern wing.[7] They also lost two seats in the Senate, and Sen. Crockett has stepped down as their leader. He’s let it be known that when he runs for re-election in 1840, it wil be on the Reform ticket.
The third parties only cooperate with the Dead Roses because it’s easier than trying to cooperate with each other—the Populists want slavery ended with all deliberate speed, the Liberationists think “deliberate speed” is for weak-ass white moderates, and the Reformists want to bring down the planter oligarchy while saving the small mom-and-pop mom-or-pop-owner. It’s no wonder that Webster, Southard, Clay, and the other DRP leaders prefer to focus their attention on the misdeeds of the man in the White House, and the great moral failure of the Quids in preventing his removal from office.
And so the protests in D.C. against Berrien and the Quids have continued. Now they’ve gotten musical, with protestors singing a song from
The Boston Tea Party, the new show by J.F.F. Green (lyrics by O.W. Holmes) that’s taken New York City by storm this fall.
How this opera—and it is a genuine opera, with every minute of its nearly two and a half hours[8] of running time accompanied by music and not a word uttered onstage that is not sung—came into being is a saga in itself. Since coming home in the summer of ’35, Jeff Green has been wowing audiences in New York and Philadelphia with the things he wrote in Italy and his newer compositions, especially his
Symphony No. 2 (“Homecoming”), completed aroud the end of ’36. And this is gratifying to him, even more so than the king of Italy’s approval. King Achille loved the
Southern Summer Sonata for the same reason the teachers in Milan hated it—it was different. Americans just like it because it’s beautiful.
So Green was earning a passable living already, but raising the money and finding the singers to do this work justice was the hardest thing he’d ever done in his life. First he had to find a lyricist. He wrote to his old friend Francis Boott. Boott was busy with his own work (and privately thought Jeff had bitten off more than even he could chew) but pointed him at another Bostonian writer, Oliver Wendell Holmes. Holmes, a man who’s always ready to try something new, met with Green and the two quickly became friends. Together they came up with the story of the adventurous young Hubert Rocester, captain of the East India merchantman
Eleanor, who meets and falls in love with Miss Elizabeth Phipps, daughter of a local merchant and patriot,[9] even as the Bostonian gentry are growing increasingly tired of British rule. Over the course of the opera, she persuades him to abandon the sea and join in the adventure of a new nation.
In the future,
The Boston Tea Party will be considered… well, a good opera—possibly even a great one, especially when you remember it’s Green’s first try—and it will get the occasional performance. It will suffer somewhat from comparison to Green’s later works, but it will also get the benefit of being the first opera by an American and written in American English.[10] Right now, however, it’s taken New York by storm. Not only that, next year they’ve gotten invitations to perform at venues in Boston and Philadelphia.
Green is hardly apolitical. He loves this land that gave his family a home, hates slavery with all his heart, and though he rejoiced when Niagara joined the nation, he regards the president on whose watch it happened as the worst excuse for an American since Benedict Arnold. Part of the reason he and Holmes wrote this was to remind everybody of what was supposed to be so special about America in the first place. But if you’d asked him which part of the opera people would go home singing, he would’ve said it was either the final love duet between Captain Rocester and Miss Elizabeth, performed as the rioters fling handfuls of “tea leaves” (mostly crushed oak leaves) into the audience, or one of the rollicking songs the sailors sing that Green based on sea shanties he heard while crossing the ocean—or possibly “Eleanor,” Rocester’s sad solo about the long-dead lost love he took to the sea to forget, yet named his ship after, which seems kinda counterproductive.
To his surprise, the part that has really taken off is the song wherein the Bostonians (in response to Captain Rocester trying to explain to that they’re not actually getting a bad deal on their tea) object that neither the East India Company nor the king himself should have this kind of power over them to begin with. Mostly they sing about how free they are, and how awesome it is to be free:
We stand as men endowed with our rights
By Nature’s God who loves us
No tyrant e’er by force or by lies
Shall raise his rod above us
Okay, so it’s a little phallic. The point is that “Ode to Freedom” has become a protest song. In the context of
The Boston Tea Party, it’s a protest against George III and his attempts to tyrannize over the American colonies. (Anyone watching the opera would conclude that Parliament was just sitting around doing nothing this whole time.) But the people singing this song in New York, and Boston, and at this point Philadelphia, Baltimore, and Washington itself… they have a different tyrant in mind. To them, trying to steal command of the war-making power from Congress is one step on the road to a completely unaccountable executive—a king in all but name—and that is one step too many. When they sing this song, they’re saying
not on my watch, Johnny. Even they would not believe that this song will one day be of such unreserved popularity that Congress will unanimously vote to declare it the U.S. national anthem.
Certainly it isn’t that universally beloved yet. There are Southern states where the legislatures are working on bills to ban “Ode to Freedom”—possibly because of the implied criticism of Berrien, possibly because black people can sing too.
Less controversially, the Army and Navy have been considering the lessons of the war. The first lesson is that they’ve been on the right track for the last twenty-plus years, which is certainly good news. The U.S. Navy had a rough time of it, but they fought the British at sea and still exist as an institution. The army that triumphed at Mount Hope in ‘37 could not have been more different from the armed mob that fled Bladensburg in ’14.
This applies not only to the army, but to the nation. American science created the demologos, the Colt, the Henry-Hunt, and (with a little help from the French) the dreaded #23. American industry built the weapons and supplies, American soldiers wielded them, American railroads and supply wagons brought men and materiel where they were needed, and American finance paid for it all. Going forward, what America will need is… more of everything. The nation needs to get back to peacetime expansion.
The second lesson is that Louisianans and those who are still Canadians
do not want the Stars and Stripes flying over their territory. However servile their governing arrangements may look to an American, they will fight and die to keep them. This was proven on many battlefields, but especially Málaga, Lake Saint-Louis and Quai-Trudeau.
The third lesson—which was also learned in the last war but was forgotten later—is that yes, black people can be soldiers. Berrien and his supporters are trying to shove this one back down the memory hole, but the experiences are still too fresh for that. In some places, they’re not waiting for permission from the Army. In Hopewell, Governor Green has organized the Kyantine Rangers, the cavalry arm of the territorial militia. John March and his fellow recruits are inexperienced, but learning fast.
Out west, what is now Symmesburg is very relieved to have been, well, relieved by the Bonneville expedition. But because Koale’xoa wasn’t too brutal, people here will remember her as an honorable and somewhat romantic defeated foe. “Princess Raven” will become something of a local symbol of the city. All the depictions of her will make her look younger and sexier than she actually was, and none of them will get the shape of her head right.
Back east, Edgar Allen Poe is back in Baltimore. He enjoyed being a war correspondent even less than being an Army clerk, but the pay was decent and he got a chance to write some excellent poems about war and Canadian winters. Tragically, his brother Henry relapsed this January, made off with a big chunk of the money, overdosed on morphia and died of hypothermia after falling asleep in a Baltimore alleyway. But his wife and daughters are still in good health, and he has a lot of recognition as a writer.
In Virginia, George Fitzhugh finally got to meet his idol Thomas Roderick Dew at William and Mary College. They got to talking politics over wine and pizza, which Dew’s slaves have just learned how to make.
They say you should never meet your heroes, but in some cases it’s your heroes who shouldn’t meet you. Even by Dew’s standards, Fitzhugh is a man much too in love with the theoretical at the expense of the practical. They agreed on the erosion of slavery in Virginia and how terrible it was, but when Fitzhugh started saying that maybe some white people (not either of them, of course) might do better if they were slaves to other white people of sufficient wisdom and virtue, Dew was just about ready to tear his hair out. He tried to be polite, but he really wanted to scream
No, no, no, you fool! We get to GIVE orders! They get to TAKE orders! Stop overthinking everything! Because at the end of the day, Dew is just a conservative. All his intellect—and he is a man of ideas and learning—is bent towards the task of justifying either the way things are now or the way were maybe ten or twenty years ago. Fitzhugh is… something else.
Also in Virginia, Adolf Rasmussen just turned 23 and is working for Christian Sharpes in Harpersburgh, one of the few towns to be struggling in the improving economy—or rather, not to be doing as well as it was during the war. But the market for guns never goes entirely away. Harpersburgh will survive.
Still in Virginia, Richard Quincy Stabler, youngest of the Stabler brothers, is recovering in the family mansion at Shuter’s Hill House. He got hit in the butt with shrapnel from a passing Woolwich rocket at Quai-Trudeau. It wasn’t a severe injury—he was in more danger from his own horse, which was hurt worse and started to panic—but when you’re in the cavalry and spend most of your day on the back of a horse, wounds to that part of the body lose their humor very quickly. By the time he made it home, he’d developed a morphia problem from trying to deal with the constant pain. Since then he’s gotten better, but this made the family more inclined to listen when a senior manager, John L. Leadbeater[11], suggested that it was high time[12] they broadened their range of painkillers to include milder, less addictive drugs for managing less severe pain. Which is why Leadbeater and Robinson Stabler were in Louisville this fall talking business with Joshua Fry Speed, a free-labor farmer and landowner who happens to be the biggest single hemp-grower in the state of Kentucky. There are many cultivars of
Cannabis sativa, after all, and some of them are good for much more than rope and canvas.
Kentucky, by the way, is flourishing, and at this point it’s fairly obvious that they’ll win the railroad race to the Mississippi. Tennessee finally has a route purchased and is making good progress, but the eastern part of the Raleigh & Mississippi has already reached Bowling Green and the western part extends from Wickliffe to the banks of the Tennessee River.[13] Sometime next year, the two will meet around Hopkinsville. Henry Clay is privately hoping that one day Hopkinsville, Bowling Green and Cumbercross[14] will grow to surpass Nashville and Knoxville. Whether that ambition will ever be fulfilled is a different question. After all, just because Tennessee is losing the race doesn’t mean they’re going to give up on building the railroad at all.
And of course the real end goal of the Raleigh & Mississippi is Cairo and Elephantine, both of which are determined to one day become the greatest American city west of the Appalachians. Neither of them is paying much attention to Wickliffe yet. They have city plans, after all—city plans and
Egyptian names. What does Wickliffe have? (Other than the only good high ground in the area and a USNU branch, of course—plus an Army base where Mike Todd and Bill Shannon continue to exasperate everyone with their friendly rivalry.)
In North Carolina, Hooper Bragg is working on the Wilmington to Raleigh line. He never wanted to be anything but a soldier, but the army is downsizing and ex-POWs are the first to go. That’s the least of his problems. The knife he stole off that boy Anil was taken when he was caught, but of course he still has the scar that boy left on his chest with that knife. But men who work and fight will get scars here and there on their bodies. Bragg picked up much deeper scars from what
wasn’t done to him. Another sort of man might have taken mercy as his due and learned nothing from it, but Bragg—bitter, resentful asshole that he is—has never expected anything but the worst from other people, and certainly not from people who aren’t white.
Further south, Charleston is rebuilding its defenses from the attack last summer. They’re proud of the way they handled it, and you’d think they’d be less afraid with the war over. But the state still has more black people than white people, and a lot of those black people are slaves working near the coast, where they spend much of the year unsupervised by white people or anybody else who has a choice. White South Carolinians still feel painfully exposed and vulnerable. They’re sure if a slave revolt started, President Berrien and S.C.’s own Poinsett would crush it. They’re not so sure they’d stay alive long enough to see it happen, and nothing works them into a state of hysteria faster than thinking about what could happen to their women and girls in that scenario.
One of those girls, Elizabeth Miller, turnd 15 this year and feels much older. Every few weeks, just when things were calming down, another rumor would start or another unfamiliar boat would be spotted off the coast. She’s no economist, but even she can see that dragging every able-bodied white man out of work for days at a time so they can watch slaves at work, paying them for their time in state bonds, and making all the white women stay inside and lock their doors at the same time, is costing S.C. dear. But it’s been a full month since she last had a machete-themed nightmare. That’s a good sign.
There are other ways in which she’s growing up too fast. As Mrs. Poe could tell you, 15 is not too young to be thinking about a husband in this society, especially when your family is in reduced circumstances and a fair number of former eligible bachelors have already been claimed by bullets or malaria. And it’s not like they’re going to hitch her up with somebody old enough to be her father (which also happens quite often)—the two beaus who most often come calling are William Brewster and Henry Pinckney Jr., both too young to have taken part in the war.[15]
And although she has her brother Stephen back, she isn’t seeing much of him. He’s gotten a job with Aiken’s railroad company, supervising the crew building the line from Columbia to Augusta. It’s a supervisory position, not because he has any idea how to supervise but because of a general feeling that someone of his social standing should be in charge. Alas, he keeps getting pulled off the job to participate in militia patrols, for which he’s getting paid in state IOUs. South Carolina, with all its cotton wealth, is getting even deeper into debt than it was during the worst of the Hiemal Period.
Georgia has the same problems, but more of them, in spite of the gold in what was Cherokee country but by now mostly isn’t. They have the ocean and the Florida border to worry about. Berrien has been reduced to exercising his power over the Army in petty ways, and one of them is putting General Twiggs in charge of that border. An awful lot of Georgians remember being led to disaster under him, so this builds no one’s confidence—especially with a big chunk of their state militia up in DC serving as the personal bodyguard of the president and his huge family[16], which is a big favor even for the state’s favorite son.
Alabama and Mississippi aren’t quite so badly off, but the Cherokees are still a force in Alabama politics. Their tribe still owns more usable land than they can farm. The usual approach would be to lease the land to tenant farmers, as the tribes in Florida do. The problem is that if a white guy doesn’t want to pay a Cherokee, the courts in Alabama are none too reliable. So their tenants tend to be free blacks—usually sharecroppers. And because the DRP is moribund this far south and the TQs don’t want them, young Cherokee leaders like Joshua Ross and allies like Sam Houston are joining the Reform Party. The result of all this is that a lot of white people are thinking of the slaveholding, black-people-exploiting Cherokees as dangerous allies of abolition. (Not that they need much excuse to turn against natives of any sort.) Meanwhile, there’s an actual abolitionist running around—James G. Birney, preaching against slavery with all the ferocious urgency of a man who took over twenty years to put his money where his mouth is and free the last of his own slaves: “If then slavery be characterized by violence, oppression, injustice—by tendencies to the ruin of the souls of both master and slave—why should you hesitate to say it ought to cease
at once?”[17] In Mississippi, Joe Davis has emerged as an outspoken advocate of his own brand of reform, which basically amounts to letting black people form self-sufficient communities while charging them rent on themselves. And in Tennessee and the border states—Missouri, Kentucky, Maryland, Delaware—the economic advantages of joining the free states are becoming more and more obvious, and the advocates of slavery are feeling themselves at more and more of a disadvantage. After all, the basic question of
Rankin v. Missouri is whether white people who want to undermine white supremacy are free to do so… and they are.
In the north, Berrien’s behavior and the Senate TQs’ support of him has turned people against slavery who never cared before. State Rep. Abraham Lincoln’s colleague and frenemy Stephen Douglas quit the Quids in protest when he got word of the Senate vote. Lt. Quincy Grissom, shivering in the new fort on Manitoulin Island commanded by Gen. Kearny (Berrien gave Kearny this assignment as punishment for losing to a mixed-race unit at Moncton) has started reading such abolitionist literature as the mail can deliver to this outpost. And in Boston, astronomy student E.R. Beecher (caretaker of her family’s most treasured possession, a copy of Audubon’s illustrated masterwork) is thinking of writing a book or two about… well, about lots of things, but slavery, tyranny, and war are definitely three of them.
Back in New York, Joseph Fortune Francis Green and Oliver Wendell Holmes are of course very pleased about the success of
The Boston Tea Party. Holmes has an idea for another opera—this one based on the writings of Washington Irving, especially
The Legend of Sleepy Hollow. Fair Katrina (the title character) is in love with the handsome young farmer Brom, but her parents have promised her to the old schoolmaster Ichabod Crane, so she and Brom conspire to scare Crane out of Sleepy Hollow using a local ghost legend[18]. It’s a fluffy little story of the sort that in Europe they’d call Neo-Pastoral. Nothing very bad happens to anyone—even creepy old Crane ends up married to a rich widow. Holmes has shared this with Green, who likes the idea and has already started to write the music. Next year old W. Irving himself, still very much alive, will give the project his blessing and let them know he’s looking forward to seeing it on stage.
But in the long term, Holmes isn’t so sure this partnership is going to last. He’s a jack-of-all-trades, and songwriting isn’t even the biggest one. Essays, law, medicine—you name it, he’s at least dabbled in it, and there’s many more things he wants to turn his brilliant mind to. His biggest interest is medicine—he’s one of those who are becoming outspoken about the dangers of morphia. A composer of Green’s caliber wants (and, Holmes is happy to admit, deserves) a lyricist who can devote his full attention to his work.
And Green wants to write more than just light opera. He wants to write grand operas, tragedies, moving stories of valor and sacrifice, darker tales of grief and revenge and madness. That’s a problem. Holmes doesn’t really do darkness—the best he can manage is a kind of deep gray melancholy, such as the song “Eleanor,” or “The Last Leaf”[19] that he just finished writing for the character of Rip Van Winkle in
Katrina.
Also, Green wants to do at least one major work set in the South where he grew up. Holmes, learned though he is, is kind of provincial. He’s a Bostonian through and through. Even New York City feels like a sort of exile to him. He’d sooner write an opera about Japan than the South—at least then, it’s unlikely there would be any Japanese in the audience who could tell him what he got wrong.
Where is Green going to find a writer who can help him tell the stories he wants?
[1] Gray Harbor. What the colonists have started calling the north end of Cook Inlet.
[2] Sitka
[3] OTL Victoria, British Columbia. Easier to supply by sea because you don’t have to navigate past the Columbia Bar.
[4] I should mention that when Queen Charlotte breaks out the Royal We, it usually means she’s filled with more rage than one person should be able to contain.
[5] Most people suspect Henry Brougham helped her write this missive, or possibly even wrote it himself, which shows how widespread sexism is—it was actually his daughter Elphinstone who suggested this line of argument.
[6] As IOTL, where Poinsett was a co-founder of the National Institute for the Promotion of Science and the Useful Arts.
[7] The rest of the House—Populists 40, Reform 27, Liberation still stuck at 2. Yes, that means the Populists and Reformists together now outnumber the Quids.
[8] Roughly the length of
Oberto, Verdi’s first opera IOTL.
[9] If you’re wondering about the accuracy of these historical references, I can assure you that they are sourced entirely from Green’s and Holmes’ asses.
[10] IOTL the first such opera was
Leonora, by William Henry Fry, in 1845. See, this isn’t all as crazy as it sounds.
[11] He and the Stabler family dealt in medicinal cannabis in the 1850s IOTL.
[12] Pun shamelessly intended
[13] If you’re following on a map, the dam that created Kentucky Lake IOTL hasn’t been built yet.
[14] IOTL Burkesville
[15] I wish I could build up some dramatic tension around this love triangle, but there’s no way Lizzie is ever going to choose Martha Pinckney’s brother over Maggie and Jessie’s brother.
[16] One thing about Berrien I didn’t have time to discuss is his fifteen children. Some of them are grown up and moved away, but that still left a lot in the White House with him.
[17] An OTL quote, italics and all.
[18] I personally love Tim Burton’s
Sleepy Hollow, but I’ve read the original and seen its illustrations, and it’s pretty obvious that this is the subtext.
[19] Something like OTL’s
The Last Leaf, but from the older character’s POV.