Wrapped in Flames: The Great American War and Beyond
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I can promise at least one more chapter before the year ends that won't be quite so somber! 2024 will probably start with the 1865 Year in Review edition as my writing is going.
Though of course, this is the open ask for what people want to see from the "Year in Review" before I close out 1865!
Unfortunately they probably didn't know. The war was very removed for most of them, and though they picked up on the larger number of British troops, they also saw them leaving in 1864. That meant that this was the very last chance to maybe achieve something by force against the encroachment of the settler population. Unfortunately, without a wide coordination between the tribes there was little realistic chance it would succeed. Chief Nkawa (or as often called in English sources, Chief Nicolas) understood that warfare was likely to result in their destruction. He pointedly did his best to negotiate with the colonial authorities, and his clout was enough that by 1864 he did manage to have most of the tribes of BC peaceably working with the government. Unfortunately, the war delayed those efforts and he died in early 1865 as per OTL, leading to this unfortunate calamity.
I wonder if it’s a possibility that some of the Native Canadians might become a fifth column for the United States?
I wonder how a angry United States will react to the Métis, maybe they will see it as a way to knock Great Britain from their self righteous high horse and will recognize them as a independent country, even though the Métis will probably lose, it would allow the Americans to paint the British and Canadians as hypocrites. After all this wars aren’t just being waged with guns and cannons, it’s being waged with words, arguments, philosophy and Public Opinion……..
I wonder how a angry United States will react to the Métis, maybe they will see it as a way to knock Great Britain from their self righteous high horse and will recognize them as a independent country, even though the Métis will probably lose, it would allow the Americans to paint the British and Canadians as hypocrites. After all this wars aren’t just being waged with guns and cannons, it’s being waged with words, arguments, philosophy and Public Opinion……..
Likely they'd stay pretty quiet considering both their own past and what they plan to do with their own indigenous population.
When Louis Riel (not the guy from Chapter 65 but his son) was in exile after the Red River Resistance, he did at one point write to President Grant suggesting he could muster a sizable contingent of Metis and local sympathizers who would support a US invasion (he was wrong by the by) but there is no evidence of either Grant of anyone in the State Department ever reading it.
That being said, the Metis would not trust the US government. The way they're treated as half breeds is laid out in Chapter 65, and the US was under no obligation to respect their territorial claims or sovereignty or land claims either. The tribes north of the 49th parallels were well aware that the US was significantly more brutal than their nominal British overlords. The Dakota Sioux who fled north after the 1862 Dakota Uprising went to Canada specifically because the US was unlikely to violate that line (and in truth would have been hard pressed to summon the necessary forces to do so, as seen in WiF) but also because the British authorities tended to have a live and let live attitude. Even when settling across the Plains, the later Canadian authorities usually tried negotiation first, partly because the expense of an Indian War would be terrible, and partly because they believed it was more civilized to arrive at accommodation rather than genocide as they believed the Americans did. It was helped that the two greatest nations of the northern Plains (The Cree and the Blackfoot, and to a lesser extent the Sioux) were fighting one another for control of territory and buffalo hunting. By the 1860s the Blackfoot were getting the better of it and the Cree were on the backfoot. So in a pure hypothetically and unlikely scenario that the US was willing to arm the Cree, the Canadians would arm the Blackfoot in a proxy war that no one would want. However, neither colonizer would really benefit from arming the two groups.
More tragically, neither nation really wanted a viable Native group that could pose a speedbump to the settlement of the West.
Chapter 117: Forever Free
Chapter 117: Forever Free
“That on the twenty-second day of February, in the year of our Lord, one thousand eight hundred and sixty-three, all persons held as slaves within any State or designated part of a State, the people whereof shall then be in rebellion against the United States, shall be then, thenceforward, and forever free…” - Text of the October 22nd Emancipation Proclamation of 1862[1]
“...It is easy to imagine the scene. Along the Tennessee-Kentucky border, there stands two Confederate pickets in late September 1865. The war, so far as they are concerned, is over. They merely watch the languishing lines of their Yankee foes, mostly concerned when they will return home. The day is hot, everyone is complaining, but at least there is coffee and tobacco. Sometimes the Yankees cross the line to haggle for better food, and it seems as though movement in the lines beyond signals that.
Then a fusillade of gunfire breaks the silence. Men fall, and suddenly a fight not seen since nearly a year before breaks out in the Confederate line. Rows of black soldiers are storming the position. Their objective? A plantation just beyond the lines.
Contrary to many expectations, the United States Colored Volunteers did not take the news of the Louisville Conference passively. Many who had previously been enslaved slipped away, unsure of their fate. Others did leave, often with their guns and ammunition as well, sometimes alone, and sometimes in large groups. They had one intention, striking back against their former masters, or simply freeing as many as they could. Often both.
The emergence of ‘mutinous’ Colored units in late 1865 was purely a reaction to the news of peace. To many former slave soldiers that could only mean they would be put back in shackles, but for others it meant that the time was now to try and reach family members, friends or loved ones who had not had the courage to flee. Groups left to liberate their families, and groups were especially involved in Tennessee and Arkansas, trying to reach plantations deeper in the Confederacy and get home before the Union dissolved…
How badly some units came apart depended in part on the control of officers and any esprit de corps which had been formed during the war. Naturally, the freshest units came apart quickly, while men who had fought since 1863 stood in the ranks and were disciplined enough to not take unnecessary risks. In some cases, officers used harsh methods to keep units in line, up to and including executions. But in many others, men disappeared with weapons and ammunition which would mysteriously vanish from the quartermasters inventory.
Just how complicit many officers were in this activity is a matter of debate. With the rapid demobilization of the army, including many units of the United States Colored Volunteers that the Democratic White House was eager to be rid of, veritable mountains of equipment and material went missing. Some of it into the hands of Fenians, bandits, and the eventual militia units which would emerge on the new frontier of the United States. It was not necessary for men to be entirely complicit to get caught up in the ‘hollowing out’ of the army as one general would say…
The early skirmishes in 1865 would lead to a full blown crisis in 1866 as news of the Treaty of Havana was promulgated. Many slaves and former slaves now realized that it was now or never to be free or to bring freedom to their fellows. It was the beginning of the Great Disturbance and the first real diplomatic incident between the new Confederacy and the United States…” - The Great Disturbance of 1866, Daniel Oldman, University of Lexington, 2006
“The events of 1866 were one of the first mass stirrings of a generation. Simple memories of men like Charles Deslondes, Denmark Vesey, and Nat Turner now inflamed men’s hearts as they had the weapons and organization to enforce a change in their circumstances. Putting a rifle in the hands of freedmen and former slaves revolutionized the way these men, formerly looked upon barely as beasts of burden, thought of one another, and of what they could achieve!
More than the First Liberation itself, this burning fire of resistance would mount in the hearts of the slaves of the South. They would realize that through their own coordinated action, they could achieve things that would make the Confederacy, and the world, tremble…
Raids on plantations and deep encroachments into Confederate territory would mark the winter of 1865-66. Those brave men who often carried off whole families, and in some cases, entire plantations, turned the Upper South into a hotbed of revolutionary violence. While a sad number of men were too beaten down or too scared to run away, even when the soldiers, overseers and dogs were killed or driven off, thousands more took their chance at freedom. A blow was delivered to the slavers that was not soon forgotten!” - Road to Liberty, Cheatham Academy, 1946
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1] Yes this is the alt-text of the Emancipation Proclamation issued in Wrapped in Flames. I would make an important note that virtually no Confederate territory (save for some counties in Northern Virginia) was exempt from this proclamation in WiF. Everything was fair game south of Kentucky.
May the Confederacy forever ache and burn from the rebellion of the enslaved, that their greed of wanting to keep men in chains results in a internal war they can never win and will steadily erode them from within.
While I can't guarantee an immediate bleeding ulcer (there huge swathes of slaves in the Deep South and other places who barely know much has changed, while few outside Tennessee, Mississippi, Virginia, South Carolina and Arkansas know about the Emancipation Proclamation) the events of 1866 will, as I think I've hinted, leave a lasting impact.
The Confederacy will find its own bleeding ulcer on the issue in the future. Don't you worry...
It'd only be fitting if a Bleeding Hearts' Party forms around the disgruntled planters who lose slaves to the lure of Northern freedom.
extremely common USCT W
I also love that you bring this up
lots of timeliness ignore the armed and well trained people with an existing under the ground network who had every reason to keep the war going even on there own
I did feel that tens of thousands of former slaves who, seeing there suddenly an incoming hard line on the potential freedom of their loved ones, wouldn't just sit back and wait for it to happen. Nor would some officers, bitter about the peace, be bothered to stop them. Very much against government policy, but it definitely feels good.
It would be rather amusing. The Fire Eaters are definitely going to have something to say about the matter in the near future!
Unfortunately for the USCT boys, these actions are only going to reinforce and harden the opinions of McClellan and the other Democrats. I definitely see McClellan using these mutinies as an "I-Told-You-So" moment, I expect this will be one step forward, two steps backwards for the foreseeable future (with the exception of Abolitionist strongholds like New England)
Oh the Democrats are going to jump on that, and be very much "I told you so" and portray them as villains. To many though, they will be heroes.
This, especially those in the New England area and Freedman communities in the North who now will not only be smuggling people out of the south but also guns and such into the hands of guerrillas/
The Deep South must be happy indeed at how things ultimately turned-out, aside from coastal raiding in South Carolina and Grant's turning-movement against Corinth, both of which must have produced vast "refugeeing" among blacks and Yankee speculation. Methinks businessmen at Virginia and Nashville will be quite discontent in the future regarding "lost opportunities" and what-have-you.
Unless the democrats respond to this by totally dissolving all units of 'colored' troops and actively helping the confederacy in stopping these raids, which in and of itself can cause a much larger mutiny among those soldiers who see it as the government stabbing the army in the back, this raiding will continue for decades to come. It might well create the flashpoint of the next US-confederate war.
Some members of the Secret Six are alive and well, and have even less scruples about arming "radical abolitionists" in 1866 than they did in 1859.
I'm just not sure how many white men might have the same incentive to "go south" and offer their expertise to help the guerilla bands.
For places like Louisiana, Georgia, Alabama, and especially Florida, its like the war never happened save for all the men who didn't return home. To them the war was as far away as it was for someone in, say, Wisconsin or Illinois, places that never once saw enemy troops or ships. To them the economy kept on chugging, and they were the least happy about the draft laws passed in 1863 and 1864. However, Joseph E. Brown of Georgia's future "it wasn't so bad, what are you complaining about" attitude regarding the war will make him enemies in places like Tennessee and Arkansas.
That said, South Carolina is coming out of the war believing they were absolutely right to secede and the Fire Eaters are correct about everything. With armed black men running around in the back country and memories of the United States putting armed men ashore, they will be the most vocal about never trusting the US and enforcing white supremacy on the Confederacy. Consider them the "problem child" of an independent CSA.
There's a rogues gallery I have lined up for future political tussles.
Economically, there's lots of men of means who are basically rich now, with lots of land that is going for fire sale prices. There's some missed opportunities, but lots of opportunity in creating a new economy in the South post-war. I mean to explore some of that!
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Even the Democrats are not quite so stupid as to actively help the South in this matter. They will crack down on border disturbances because that's just basic security, but they aren't about to do anything more than they absolutely have to in order to stop it. The border is just too long, the army still ending up too small, and the ill will just enough that it will be seen as a "serves you right" lesson to the secesh.
McClellan will move all black units far away from the border, but he can't very well station a soldier for every kilometer (or miles to the unenlightened
) of border. He has other worries and complaints from Richmond will fall on deaf ears for the most part in his administration. He's also going to have other border headaches too.Needless to say, despite the peace, the border will not be free of bloodshed.
1866 is still going to be a bloody year.