XXVIII

In the years of Reconstruction, the fate of the Nickajack rested more than on just a rabble of freedman and poor white trash in Strangetown. Great forces were gathering to fill the commercial and political vacuum of a devastated South, specifically Republican forces. The Democrats were on the defensive. Thus as of yet they had no allies among the old War Democrats. But things were more complex in the Nickajack.

The Yankees occupied much of the old cotton growing region for most of the war. While the Democrats of South Alabama had been effectively disenfranchised by "Iron Clad" oaths, most Democrats of the Nickajack could still take this oath swearing they had not born arms against the Union, hiring substitutes not withstanding. Indeed, the planter-class of Democrats known as the "Greeks" survived the political revolution brought on by outright conquest. They avoided subjugation by having collaborated with the Yankee power. Even in the midst of a great conflict that emancipated millions from human bondage, they continued to sell slave-picked cotton North even after the Emancipation Proclamation... at least until Abraham Stone won Guster Ledbetter's case for freedom.

The other political class that survived the war were the old "Whig" Democrats. The Whig Party was a defunct national party that believed in a strong federal government emphasizing legislative power. The party platform was popular with burghers and yeoman yearning to bring their goods to a growing American market. They believed in internal improvements and high tariffs to support domestic industry. They had sent four Presidents to the White House before the slavery question destroyed the party. The Whigs had split, with the Northern Whigs finding embrace with the new Republican Party, and the Southern Whigs representing a class of 'moderates' in the Democratic Party. So strong were these old Whig sentiments among both parties that the 1860 Presidential election was split four ways, ushering the most unlikely political creature imaginable into the White House, Mr. Abraham Lincoln. Most Southern Whigs opposed secession, but enlisted in droves after Fort Sumter. When all those enthusiastic patriots had been killed, conscription started rounding up the rest.

However they may have survived, the class of Whig Democrats had been devastated by the war. Most of them could not afford substitutes, so they ended up fighting... and dying. Their properties were confiscated for taxes in arrears when they never came home. Their families were left destitute. What few slaves they may have had walked off to work on (marginally) better plantation contracts brokered by corrupt Union officers out to the Greeks. There was enormous resentment amongst the Whigs against the Greeks despite being of the same political party. So great was this scorn that many of these Southern Whigs had turned to the Republican Party after the war - "Scalawags."

Huntsville, Alabama was full of Republican Scalawags. They had even put one of their own into office, William Hugh "Skedaddle" Smith. Like most Huntsvillians these days, he wasn't even a native. He was a lawyer from Randolph County where he had studied law beneath a tree under the tutelage of Robert Stell Heflin. patriarch of a great Alabama political dynasty that has lasted more than 150 years. They remained close political allies, having stumped the South for Stephen Douglas for the 1860 election that swept Mr. Lincoln into office. They were passionate opponents of secession.

The Governor was scorned as "Skedaddle" by the Democrats. He had been one of their own. He may have been a Whig, but he was a slaveholder. That's what this war was all about, wasn't it? Though he voted against secession he ran anyway for the new Confederate Congress. Harangued out of the campaign by the fire-eating Montgomery press, he fled into Yankee lines. He skedaddled, and took roost in Huntsville, Ala., which was a hotbed of Union sentiment. There were Greeks in Huntsville too, like the Steeles and the Pope-Walkers, who had close kinship with the Limestone County Greeks.

Bill Smith cast his lot with the Yankees early as a very different collaborator from the Greeks. He spent the war raising up the pro-Union 1st Alabama Cavalry (US) in Madison County. The 1st Ala. (US) clashed with Frank Gurley and Bill Marmaduke in the mountains of Madison and Jackson Counties. So renowned had this unit become that General Sherman personally requested it to escort his horde of Yankees in its March to the Sea. Not willing to be left out of a good junket, he rode with Sherman's headquarters as it burned and looted its way from Atlanta to Savannah. It earned him the permanent enmity of the Greeks.

After the war and for his loyalty, he had found himself neatly tucked in at the Southern terminus of a Republican patronage system that radiated from the District of Columbia like a rotten fistula. The Greeks were aghast that Skedaddle Smith had eminently powerful political allies like "Pig Iron" Kelley and "Spoons" Butler. These were men roundly hated throughout the South as abolitionists. They were Radical Republicans who had nothing short of an agenda of radical social engineering of the defeated South, and they played Skeddadle Smith like a pawn in their plans. They were also all crooked as a barrell of fish hooks.

Skedaddle Smith was swept into power on passage of the Fifteenth Amendment. To ensure his election and inauguration, General Grant had sent the army in. When he settled into the Governor's mansion, he repaid his Radical Republican masters in kind by authorizing the sale of railroad bonds backed by the state coffers to rebuild the Memphis & Charleston Railroad. The bonds were solicited to investors by the Lehman Brothers of Montgomery for which Skedaddle Smith took a tidy cut. The proceeds of these bonds were used to pay overbid contracts on repairs to the Memphis & Charleston Railroad. The contractors, which included the Huntsville Railroad Corporation, were controlled by a Consortium of Radical Republican opportunists that included Pig Iron Kelley and Spoons Butler.

So spectacular did this scheme work that Skedaddle Smith thought to do it again! Without legislative authorization, he authorized the issuance of millions more in state-backed bonds to help build the railroad from Chattanooga to newly founded Birmingham. The railroad in question was the Alabama & Chattanooga, which was being laid down the Wills Valley between Sand and Lookout Mountains. Coincidentally, both the Governor and Pig Iron Kelley sat on the Board of Directors. Even Spoons Butler was a major stakeholder. And so the Alabama & Chattanooga Railroad reached Birmingham first, beating Jimmy "The Colonel" Sloss's railroad from Decatur.

The Republicans were raking in the cash. Special couriers - good Party men - shuttled between Montgomery and Washington with bags of specie in what Spoons Butler called his Underground Railroad. But once the railroad was constructed, problems grew quickly about how to actually run it. Gangs of Irish thugs called the Molly Maguires mysteriously began to attack the newly opened railroad up and down the Wills Valley. Profits faltered, then collapsed altogether. When the Alabama & Chattanooga Railroad defaulted on its interest payments, the states finances couldn't be more red. Now the Democrats had Governor Smith right where they wanted him... pinned as a Yankee collaborator and sheisty as politician could get.

But nothing was quite so shocking to the Consortium's commercial interests in Alabama as the story broken by the New York Sun on the Credit Mobilier scandal. Here was something that could destroy the Republican Party. It was corruption on a vast scale. It spanned the breadth of the continent... literally, for it involved overbid contracts and management abuse on the transcontinental railroad. Pig Iron Kelley was hauled before Congress. Here was a passionate abolitionist, a founder of the Republican Party, and now standing accused of unscrupulous corruption. As the investigation progressed, it was decided that some loose ends needed tying up.

The prototype for Credit Mobilier was the Huntsville Railroad Corporation and its obscenely expensive contract to rebuild the Tennessee River bridge from Limestone County to Decatur. It had been financed by the first round of state-backed railroad bonds authorized by Governor Smith. Somewhere in the records of this company, which had no office or employees, were names of the one-hundred shareholders of the Huntsville Railroad Corporation, now being solicited by the Lehman Brothers as an initial public offering with the ticker HRC.

And so it was passed down from the Consortium its desire to see this party shut down. It didn't care how. The Consortium was already at work cleaning up the loose ends on Credit Mobilier. They needed someone in the Nickajack to clean up the loose ends in Huntsville. So they called upon one of their own, William "Parson" Brownlow. Parson, who was by then Tennessee's Senator, had a man on the scene.

And so a telegraph went out down the wires from Nashville to the Western Union in Athens where this man sat stood waiting with a bowler in his hand. His query to Nashville was coded so as not to alarm the telegraph operator. How do you like your soup? With tongue or tail? The telegraph paused, as though in thought. Then the telegraph sounder began to tap and rattle. The telegrapher passed the message to the Melungeon. He took out his reading glasses and read what it said.

Tongue.
 

Scrapbook: Physiography and Soil Maps of Alabama

 

Scrapbook: The Muscle Shoals Canal

 

This image showing the course of the Muscle Shoals Canal is significant because it shows the significant barriers to navigation that the Muscle Shoals presented in the days before the TVA dams were built.  The Muscle Shoals is generally accepted as the western 'boundary' of the Nickajack. Over a distance of around 37 miles between Florence and Brown's Ferry in Limestone County, the river fell 137 feet, creating rapids, waterfalls, sandbars, whirlpools, sinks and sucks that were extremely hazardous to navigation.  The first Muscle Shoals Canal was completed in 1836 and was 14.5 miles long, 60 feet deep and 6 feet deep with a total of 17 locks with five foot lifts.  This first canal was abandoned in 1938 due to lack of funding.  An alternative was found - the Tuscumbia, Courtland and Decatur Railroad was chartered in 1832.  Steamboats would unload their cargo at Tuscumbia for the overland trip to Decatur where cargo was loaded again on steamboats to continue their journey through the Nickajack to the Upper Tennessee.  Surveying for a new canal system was begun in 1871 during Reconstruction, and construction began in 1875.  The Shoals were finally submerged and opened to navigation with the construction of the Wilson Dam in 1918.  

The Route of Hernando de Soto through Alabama

There are two proposed locations in which Hernando de Soto entered into Alabama. One is through the Nickajack via the Tennessee River Gorge ("western route"), departing from the Tennessee River in today's Marshall County (Guntersville), and then probably down Browns Valley into the Coosa River basin.  The relative impassability of this terrain seems to make it less likely than an "eastern" entry point at the head of the Coosa River in NW Georgia.  

Topographic of the Great Tennessee River Gorge

 

A topographic map of the Nickajack where the Tennessee River winds itself through a gorge cut through Walden's Ridge, a spur of the great Cumberland Plateau, and Racoon Mountain.  The Sequatchie Valley, though not really part of the Nickajack, is part of the same long rift valley which the Tennessee flows through before cutting west and away from Brown's Valley near Guntersville. Browns Valley is the name of this same valley as it stretches southwest from Guntersville, dividing Sand Mountain from Brindlee Mountain.  

Blemmye, A Humanoid Medieval Cryptid

 

The Franciscan Friar Sebastian de Sabastades encountered the deserter Jimenez Maldonado near the springs of the Escambia River (also called the Conecuh River) in Central Alabama. So disfigured with syphilis was the old Conquistador that the friar thought at first he had encountered a Blemmye. These were medieval cryptid humanoids believed to live in Nubia near the kingdom of the legendary Prester John. Through Maldonado's incredible testimony, Sabastades learned of the kingdom of the Koasati, an ancient pre-Columbian people of the Nickajack, and the paradise of the New World that by then had already been extirpated by the Great Columbian Exchange.     

The Great Tennessee River Gorge, Gateway to the Nickajack

The Great Tennessee River Gorge, which lies below Chattanooga, and is the ancient gateway to the Nickajack. It is the course through which Maldonado and de la Cabra (1540's), William Penn Redus (1800's) and the ancestors of the "Rats" (1830's) had arrived in today's Limestone and Madison Counties. It is bound by the Cumberland Plateau and Racoon Mountain between which the Tennessee River twists and curves.

It is best viewed in winter along Highway US 41, which can take the Nickajack traveler directly into Chattanooga. Several elevated viewing options are available, some requiring a brisk hike. Next time you travel to Chattanooga, choose to take US 41 rather than Interstate 24 and see the Gateway to the Nickajack yourself.

Hobbs Island, Madison County, Ala. Site of "Chickasaw Old Fields"

Hobbs Island, Madison County. Site of Chickasaw Old Fields and where the Spanish deserters Maldonado and de la Cabra built their would-be chiefdom deep in the virgin heart of the Nickajack. This was before the land became ravaged by the pigs and plague, which had cast the New World itself forever out of Paradise.

Burial mound of the Koasati located on Hobbs Island.  The Koasati stock and culture was subsumed into the Chicaza (Chickasaw) following the great social and ecological upheaval of the Columbian Exchange.  

XXVII

Locked behind a glass cabinet in the Archivo y Biblioteca Historicos of Vera Cruz, Mexico was a most curious manuscript relating the details of an interview between a Franciscan friar named Sebastian de Sabastades and a Spanish deserter named Jimenez Maldonado. It is dated in the Year of Our Lord 1570 when the recollections of this interview were finally recorded from memory to parchment in Latin and by way of an amanuensis, for the friar was on his death bed.

 
It was in 1559 that the fort of Santa Maria de Ochuse was first settled within Pensacola Bay by the Conquistador Tristan de Luna y Arellano and 1,500 Spanish settlers and soldiers. This colony met almost immediate misfortune when it was struck by a hurricane and its galleons were wrecked before they could be unloaded. So to spread their hungry mouths, the settlers split into groups led by captains and cast about deep up the wild pine country to hunt game. One such group included Fr. Sabastades, who tended the religious needs of his party. They trekked up the Escambia River into central Alabama and encountered few of the Pensacola Indians, who were mound builders. What they did encounter, however, had astonished them all, for a most haggard and grotesque man wandered into their camp. He was most delirious and was so terribly disfigured that Sabastades thought they might have stumbled upon a tribe of Blemmyes, which are mythical, headless humanoids from Nubia. Alas though, he spoke Castellan Spanish!

They settled the man down onto a straw mattress and gasped when they saw the gummata on his chest. The friar prayed for a healing hand from Our Lord Jesus Christ and proffered the man water, learning his name was Jimenez Maldonado. It seemed from his dire and evil affliction that he might expire soon. Realizing this, the friar sought to elicit the man's undoubtedly remarkable account.

 
Jimenez Maldonado was born in Segovia in the slums in the shadow of that great Roman aqueduct. He joined the army fighting the Italian Wars with pike and shot before enlisting with a company of adventurers going to the New World - Conquistadors. He enrolled in the expedition of Hernando de Soto and they marched deep into the interior of this mysterious continent searching for gold and to bring the Word of Jesus Christ to the heathens. They did this with cruel alacrity, burning and looting any village which defied the summons and demands of the Captain de Soto. They marched across a great barrier of mountains they called the Appalachians until they emerged into a wide valley stretching towards the southwest along the river called Kasquinampo. At night the men would gather around their campfires and tossed together the shell necklaces and polished stone beads they had purloined from the Indian villages along the way. They were deeply disappointed in what they had collected. There was scarcely any gold in all this junk.  

 
Gold is known to afflict the mind of men, causing them to carry out extraordinary deeds to gain it. And so the rumors of an entire city of gold, that legendary Cibola, afflicted the Conquistadors in different and passionate ways. Everyone was hoping to strike it rich with another Tenochtitlan or Cajamarca lurking in the depths of the New World. And so did it strike the imaginations of both Jimenez Maldonado and his friend Alonso de la Cabra, both being great adventurers from impoverish origins. They had sworn themselves to blood secrecy upon the revelation of a mighty chiefdom called the Koasati located on an island of the Kasquinampo. This they learned from an expiring Indian of that place, whose testimony had been translated by Alonso, who was a Taino mestizo experienced in the heathen tongues. And as Captain de Soto's expedition turned east and away from the great river chasing the legend of Cibola into the chiefdom of the Coosa, Jimenez and Alonso stole away into the night laden with supplies they had stolen from the company's larders.

They sailed down the Kasquinampo through a mighty, twisting gorge and into the land the Koasati, and were guided by them to the island they sought. It was a great disappointment to the two Conquistadors, who found not pyramids but mounds, and not gold but worthless shells and beads. Being intrepid adventurers as they were, they impressed the Koasati, who placed themselves under their protection, believing Alonso to be something of a god. And with this influence they became the masters of the Koasati, dispatching their new subjects into the interior to trade for gems and precious metals what Alonso and Jimenez crafted cleverly by hand. And when there were hostilities with the Koasati's neighbors, Alonso and Jimenez would lead them into battle brandishing sword and crossbow and the Armor of God. Alonso was made a cacique and crowned with feathers and worshipped as a deity by an amused Jimenez.

It could not be said with enough fullness how beautiful this country was when Jimenez and Alonso first arrived - sights that would never to be seen again even a decade hence. It was less than virgin, for it was still teeming with Indians then. They clustered around long houses and planted their fields with stalks of maize entwined by beans. They made extensive use of burning. Across the horizon could be seen the smoke of fires that the Indians tended to, clearing the underbrush among that great teeming, primeval forest. It improved their ability to kill game like elk, deer and bear. Trails were as wide as a wagon and crisscrossed these vast lands between salt licks and river fords and villages. All of this the natives of the New World had lived for thousands of years. And then it all began to unravel until the New World itself had been cast forever out of Paradise.

 
It started with the pigs. They were driven as meat-on-the-hoof by the Captain de Soto when many had gone feral and bred in the wild. Within a few years they were everywhere destroying crops. The Indians adapted to eating this strange creature. They had never seen anything with hooves before. Then came the plague. A devastating pestilence swept across the land within just a few years. Entire villages were wasted with the sick, whose skin turned black or burst with pustules. The Indians were dying so quickly that the dead could not be buried. Three out of four Indians perished in a plague that exceeded the most injurious acts of God recounted in the Holy Bible. The social and ecological upheaval this global calamity unleashed had opened a new epoch in natural and human history. The Lost World that Jimenez and Alonso had the fortune and good luck to bear witness to was dashed within the space of a decade. The vast network of trails wilted and grew overgrown. The forests grew thick with underbrush. Survivors in a post-apocalyptic landscape forged new tribal kinships with other survivors.

 
And so it was that one of these new tribal kinships came to call themselves the Chicaza, or "Chickasaw." They attacked the Koasati on their island where Jimenez and Alonso still maintained their hegemony, albeit their chiefdom had suffered terribly under the plague. Jimenez himself had become afflicted with a disease which had ulcerated his body and was driving him into delusions. It had even begun to disfigure his face with gummata. He was unable to restrain his dear friend Alonso who rushed into the Chickasaw braves brandishing his sword of Damascus steel and crying "Santiago!" The Koasati were greatly disheartened by the loss of their cacique and surrendered themselves into bondage. The Chickasaw took over the island, which they renamed after their new tribe and settled upon it since.

 
Jimenez Maldonado was unharmed, but banished as an untouchable by the Chickasaw across the Kasquinampo where the rotting man made his way south towards Ochuse, which had been known since the Narvaez expedition of 1529. That is where after an incredible journey of survival on foraging Jimenez Maldonado had learned of the encampment of Fr. Sabastades and the others. The Lord had spared him just a few hours to recount this fantastic tale, which was so unbelievable to Fr. Sabastades that he thought not to record it. For he recognized the disease which had so disfigured Jimenez Maldonado as syphilis, a cruel wasting disease not known before to Europeans but was reported on by the Narvaez expedition. It was known to drive men mad with delusions and fantasy. The manuscript concluded with the death of Jimenez Maldonado and, incidentally, with the death of Friar Sabastades. He and the rest of the settlers of Santa Maria de Ochuse had abandoned their colony and returned to Vera Cruz, where the friar's account was recorded by the amanuensis just before his death.

 
And so it remained locked in a curio until it had been discovered by that autodidact of history and amateur antiquarian, Burnside Lee. He had taken leave from his duties with the company stockpiling supplies. They had been stacking crates and barrels in the plaza of Vera Cruz for General Scott's anabasis towards Mexico City, that original Cibola, when Burnside recognized a good library when he saw one. And with his rusty Latin, he examined this most amazing chronicle which the librarian, who appreciated classical learning, obliged him to. In doing so he had come to the stunning realization that Kasquinampo was the Tennessee River itself. And the island he was certain he recognized - Chickasaw Old Fields, otherwise known as Hobbs Island. And more shocking than all this was the final testimony of Jimenez Maldonado that he and Alonso de la Cabra had deposited the horde of their amazing little chiefdom into the grounds of that island.

 
Burnside Lee looked up. He looked from side to side from the table at which he had sat. And when he had seen that the librarian had gone to the lavatory, he looked askance at his own mores, but saw only a luster of gold. Then he rolled up the manuscript, tucked it into the tunic of his blue uniform, and bolted out the door back to his company.

William Hugh "Skedaddle" Smith, 21st Governor of Alabama (1868 - 1870)

 

Literary Note: Alabama's Republican Governors of Reconstruction

A literary note should be made that there were two Republican governors during Reconstruction. Both William “Skedaddle” Smith (1868-1870) and Daniel “Beechnut” Lewis (1872-1874) had been Huntsville residents with significant connections to Nickajack Unionism during the War. They were Scalawags both with Whig backgrounds. The post-war Republican control of Alabama had only a brief Democratic interregnum under Democratic “Whig” Robert Lindsay (1870-1872) until the election of George “Bourbon” Houston of Athens (1874-1878), which brought the conservative Democrats permanently back in power and ended Alabama Reconstruction. These “Greeks,” termed Bourbons, remained generally in power until Wilsonian-style populism (and populist racism) gained in the next century. A Republican would not be elected governor again for more than 110 years until the landslide victory of Guy Hunt in 1986.

 
For literary purposes I may be folding both the Lewis and Smith administrations into a single Republican gubernatorial politician, preferably under “Skedaddle” Smith, who seemed somewhat petty and therefore far more interesting. Furthermore I would forgo mentioning Lindsay’s Democratic interregnum at all, which would otherwise be interesting for the flare up in Klan activity before his election. This will prevent confusion and ease the flow of this non-sequential, anthological and quasi-historical narrative. Thank you all for enjoying this series. Your kind and encouraging comments have brought good tidings to me, and I am grateful you all enjoy this series as much as I enjoy weaving it

XXVI

Much has been said of the first white settlers of the Nickajack such as John Hunt and John Ditto and the Criners of Hurricane Valley, who arrived in present day Madison County in the dawning years of the 19th century. They were squatters all on Cherokee lands that they anticipated would be opened up to settlement. And so they were by the Treaties of Tellico, except those Cherokee lands which overlapped Chickasaw claims along the Elk River in Limestone County. That is where, in the years before John Hunt settled on the Big Spring, that a desperate band of derelicts hove their makeshift flatboats alongside Buck Island, at the great bend of the Elk in northwest Limestone County .

 
They were eight families led by William Penn Redus, who was a lapsed Quaker, and whose relations survive widely in Limestone County still today, both black and white. Among them also was Abner Stockwell Shoney and a woman whose name is lost to history but apparently he hadn't married anyway. They formed a cult-like compact and fashioned flatboats to carry them down the Tennessee River from Knoxville past Ross's Landing and through the Tennessee Gorge. They drifted down into the Cherokee lands known as the Nickajack and, finding the mouth of a rich tributary, steered themselves up that course into the uplands of the Highland Rim.

 
They arrived at an island and tied their flatboats into a floating village. In those days great elk still roamed the Nickajack, and Abner Shoney had slain one with his long rifle as it forded the river across the island, which was thereafter named Buck Island on the river thereafter named the Elk. They made contact with their Chickasaw neighbors, who were irate that an elk had been taken on the island, which was sacred burial ground. They cursed Abner Shoney and all his progeny and would thereafter raid the squatter settlement at Buck Island during the night, rustling livestock and leaving bad omens such as skinned rabbits. The squatters survived mainly by fishing and growing crops in the Indian fashion with stalks of corn intertwined with beans and crowded with peas and squash.

 
Bitter complaints by the Chickasaw to their agent about these squatters brought federal intervention in the form of a company of soldiers from the 7th Infantry Regiment, who marched overland from the Hiwasee to construct Fort Hampton on the Elk River. They commenced to remove the Buck Island squatters from their settlement further east into undisputed Madison County in a relocation settlement called Barkville for the bark which were clasped to its shanty structures. And so they were uprooted, and they did not return until the Chickasaw did relinquish their lands sometime thereafter. Abner Shoney, however, refused to give up his claim crying that "there is just one redskin for every 10,000 acres." To avoid removal, he went native into the wilds of the upcountry, which was not even part of the United States at the time. His lady companion unsurprisingly falls off the record. He survived by shooting for birds and pelts and elk. He kept the great rack of the elk he first brought down on Buck Island and mounted it over the mantle of the dogtrot house he built near today's Leggtown.

 
As the Natchez Trace was surveyed up the northwest corner of Alabama, the Chickasaw finally decided to sell their land before it was taken from them. Limestone County was now opened up along all points west and south of the Tennessee River. When William Penn Redus and the other squatters returned to Buck Island, they found Abner Shoney had taken a Chickasaw squaw as his next companion and had survived on pemican and dried fish and bird flesh during two hard winters.

 
Abner Shoney used his old Chickasaw relations to open a trade in liquor and dry goods from a post on Buck Island, for the Chickasaw did not vacate the lands they relinquished, but had only settled on farms like white settlers had. The Chickasaw, however, did not give up their temperamental ways. When the unscrupulous Abner Shoney was caught cutting his liquor and overcharging his customers, a pair of Chickasaw braves accosted him at his post. A scuffle erupted, and Abner was pinned to the ground and scalped by the braves, who then robbed him and stole his rifle. Abner survived the scalping and carried the disfigurement the rest of the days. And so Abner Shoney eventually built up his farm starting with 20 acres at Leggtown and purchased his first slave from Nashville. There he gave birth to a one Cawthorp Shoney, a man of considerably less intrepidity as his forebear, and whose mother remained unknown or unknowable.

XXV

The Melungeon and Crab Orchard Boys were playing a screwy game in Limestone County where they settled into business. Something about Strangetown had frightened the Melungeon and his efforts to cut in on its juice had came to nothing. So he settled in on hunting down bounties for Klan fugitives from Pulaski, Tennessee, where the Klan had been founded. Parson Brownlow, Tennessee's tetchy Republican governor, wanted them chased into Alabama where they had taken refuge with the Limestone County Chapter of the Exalted Knights of the Ku Klux Klan. The highest bounty went to a one Luther Lang for $120, dead or alive.

 
The Klan at that time was associated with a derelict cotton warehouse in the place known as Dogwood Flats near Piney Creek. Inside they ran gambling tables and wagered on the cocks. It was popular among bereft and disillusioned veterans who had bought into what Barry Hogan called The Big Lie, which was that they while they had lost the war and everything they knew had been cast adrift, at least they were still white. They wouldn't be caught dead in the unnatural pleasures of Strangetown where there was miscegenation of the races.

 
As it were, three of the fugitives from the Tennessee had hunkered down at Dogwood Flats after seeing their bills posted at the Athens Depot. Luther Lang could be among them. So the Melungeon and the Crab Orchard Boys took up positions in the burnt corn around the warehouse and fired a parleying shot. When the Klan refused to give them up, a firefight erupted. A-head and Ling Ling moved in under the cover of the smoke which hung in the hot, stagnant air. When they had reached the door, A-head kicked it in and shot down two Klansman, blowing them into the bails. A third was dispatched by a tomahawk thrown by Ling Ling, which had wedged itself into the man's skull. Picking up his tomahawk and the fallen man's Remington, he put two slugs into the chest of a fourth.

 
Dogwood Flats emptied out. Klansmen scattered in all directions into the brush. The Melungeon walked into Dogwood Flats and looked decidedly pleased. There were four dead Klansmen, two of whom were posted bounties. But if $80's worth of bounty money was all they'd get paid, they had won much more than that. Dogwood Flats now belonged to the Crab Orchard Boys.

George "Bourbon" Smith Houston, 24th Governor of Alabama (1874 - 1878)

 

XXIV

"Pig Iron" Kelley by any other measure would have had no business to do with actually going to Alabama. A Pennsylvania abolitionist and Radical Republican congressman, he detested the Democratic Party and was an impassioned advocate of the freedman. Ostensibly that's why came to Limestone County by the cars from Philadelphia - to observe the negro's condition. He would do so in an extravagant junket trailed by a bootlicking political entourage that lazily made its way south like a caravan of Mughals. As it were, he met with The Major, Bonwit Vrooman, at the Nickajack Hotel to discuss the future of the Freedman's Bureau. Pig Iron wore a tweed frock coat of pedestrian make that contrasted with The Major's fine Italian linen suit and Chinese silk cravat. So it was that the congressman was such a zealous protectionist that he only bought American-made. The niceties were rushed. The congressman was a busy man.

I don't need to tell you that your little cabal here is f****d, Bonwit. The Major was taken aback. Kelley lit a monstrous cigar and exhaled a nimbus of smoke. You know what's going in Washington? Congress is about the defund the Freedman's Bureau. Nobody wants coloreds on the government teat anymore. You've done great work here, Bonwit. But I'm afraid the curtain is closing on your little show. I get the long face. You've got a lot invested here. Well that's why I've come. We're here to lift up the negro. Luckily that can still be a profitable enterprise for the both of us.
The Major was listening. Kelley continued.

 
He explained how millions in railroad bonds were being issued to rebuild the Memphis & Charleston Railroad, which was still damaged from the war. Specifically, only a train ferry then existed linking the M&C between Decatur and Limestone County across the Tennessee River. The original stone pier railroad bridge had been burned down by the Yankees in '62. Construction of the bridge was going to take three years. The bonds themselves were backed by the Alabama state coffers, which cut the Republican governor into the deal, William Hugh Smith. They were solicited out to Northern investors by the Lehman Brothers, Henry and Emanuel, who were Jewish cotton brokers in Montgomery with shady Wall Street connections. The public offering was a stunning success for Radical Republicans who promised vast employment for the tens of thousands of freedman looking for better wages and freedom of movement that railroad work entailed.

 
Governor William "Skedaddle" Smith grew rich off the bond deal. He was Alabama's first of only two Republican governors before Guy Hunt was elected in a landslide over 110 years later. Both of these governors, the other being David "Beechnut" Lewis, had deep connections to the Nickajack Unionism movement during the war. Smith was sneered at as Skedaddle because he fled to Union lines when we couldn't get elected the Confederate Congress. He spent the rest of the war in Huntsville, Ala. recruiting Unionists across the Nickajack into the 1st Alabama Cavalry (US) without doing any actual fighting himself.

 
"Pig Iron" Kelley explained he represented a Consortium of investors - good Party men like yourself, he added. This Consortium owned the management company Huntsville Railroad Corporation, each investor holding a 1% stake in the entity. These investors included bankers, politicians, generals, and industrialists affiliated with the Republican establishment - all good Party men like yourself, he said again. We hold the contract for the new railroad bridge over the Tennessee River at Decatur. We need your labor. And now that the Freedman's Bureau is about to get defunded, you could use the money to keep up the good work you're doing down here. The HRC can give you 20% margin on your labor, but mind you this will be paid all up front.

 
What Pig Iron did not explain was the the HRC was just a post office box at the Huntsville Depot. A check for $4,000,000 (less "loan costs") payable to the Memphis & Charleston was written out by Lehman Brothers which had underwritten the bond sale. The check arrived at the Eastern Division headquarters of the Memphis & Charleston Railroad, which had only one employee at Huntsville Depot and whose only purpose was to deposit the check and subsequently draw a cashier's check for $4,000,000 on the bridge contract, payable to the HRC.

An accountant from Huntsville named Asher Applebaum arrived later to collect the check, who was the bookkeeper for HRC, which had no employees at all. He deposited the check at the National Bank of Huntsville, which was a great temple of money overlooking the Big Spring. Then at the desk of the bank president spent all $4,000,000 within the space of half an hour. Cashier checks were drafted for stockholder dividends and overbid subcontracts controlled by Consortium interests. When this was done, he closed the bank account and prepared financial statements showing a 15% profit margin for the investors, who had already cashed their dividend checks. Then the Consortium took the company public and dumped the stock on the back of a bogus prospectus. The deal was so clean that everyone from the governor on down thought to try it again to build the railroad from Chattanooga to Birmingham. And so later they did, nearly bankrupting the state.

 
The Major always thought himself a good Party man. What if they cut him in on the Huntsville Railroad Corporation someday? So he took the deal and four months later the Democrats indeed shut down the spigots from Washington. But since the Freedman's Bureau still technically existed, it had only one office left open in the waning years of existence, which was on Pryor Street in Athens. Asher Applebaum was hired to manage its manage its finances, for it held several subcontracts for which The Major held interests. And the labor was paid fairly, as implored by Pig Iron Kelley, who indeed cared for the freedman's condition, as did The Major. Strangetown continued to boom even as the Freedman's Bureau withered on the vine of history.

William "Pig Iron" Kelley, US Congressman from Pennsylvania and Railroad Investor

 

XXIII

A delegation of Greeks waited patiently at the Athens Depot as the two o' clock train from Corinth arrived twenty minutes late. They included Dr. Licinius Prentiss, Luke Pryor and Branse Havelock. A telegraph from that penultimate Greek, George Smith Houston, had summoned them. He was by then arriving via a long circuitous route. It took him from Montgomery, then west into and then north through Mississippi, and finally east from Corinth. It was an excruciating voyage in the heat of August, but it was the only way. As of yet, there was no railroad linking the Nickajack to the rest of the state. But all that was about to change. The train hove into the station chuffing steam from its brakes. A rather hefty man stepped off wearing a pair of polished balmorals and an ashen broadcloth suit. Most of the hair he had was hanging bosky from his chin. For the figure he cut, he was surprisingly deft on his feet.

 
George "Bourbon Smith" Houston was a tower of Alabama politics even before the war. He had been a professional Democrat politician since the 30's. He had voted for both the Mexican War and for secession, then sat out both wars at home.. He purchased a substitute to avoid conscription, and then brokered the sale of cotton to the Union Army when the Yankees occupied Limestone County. He and the Greeks grew fat off this illicit trade deep in heart of the Confederacy, which increasingly demanded corn just to feed its citizens. Just then he had been milling about the halls of power in Montgomery. He had been working over his well-aged system of patronage, which he cynically called "The Swamp." Principally, he had been whipping up furor against the Governor of Alabama, David P. Lewis, who was a Republican from Huntsville and nicknamed "Beechnut."

 
He looked for supplicants and found them grouped together near the platform, Dr. Prentiss foremost. The party chairman for the County stepped forward very formally to greet his master. George Houston brushed by him as though heading to the horizon, and spoke without greeting or shaking hands. The other Greeks fell in behind.

What the hell is going on here, Licinius, George blurted? I leave for a year in Montgomery trying to drum up support for my gubernatorial campaign, and then I find out we elect a black sheriff in my own backyard!?

Actually, he's white. But yes, he's a Republican. Its Bill Marmaduke.

Bourbon Smith sighed a breathe of relief. Thanks god he's white. But Bill Marmaduke? Goddam, he's popular. A real war hero. He could be a worse threat than Beechnut Lewis. You know what this means? I'm in danger of losing this County at the polls.

 
Indeed we are, said Dr. Prentiss. Strangetown is filling with negroes and white trash, and the Republicans are registering them like a machine. We successfully collapsed the voting precincts to a single registration point here in Athens, but they are just bussing them in from the rural precincts.

 
It was true. A black freeman and carpetbagger named Bartholomew "Barry" Hogan had assumed chairmanship of the Limestone County Republican Party. His credentials were shady, having arrived from Illinois. He was part of the powerful Republican establishment of that state, He was notable for being an influential colored delegate to the 1860 Republican Convention in Chicago that nominated Mr. Lincoln. He arrived in Strangetown and established a headquarters in a front on Strange Street. He got to work by festooning wagons with patriotic bunting. Then he would range them across the county, promising sweets and liquor to bring the formerly disenfranchised into Athens for registration. As if to reinforce the public trust, he passed out slips of paper inscribed with the Fifteenth Amendment that most of the freedman and poor whites couldn't even read.

 
Dr. Prentiss recited figures. Republicans turned out in record numbers. The Democrats got clobbered at the polls. When he had finished, he looked pale. Bourbon Smith had ceased walking and was glaring into Dr. Prentiss's face.

 
You’re the Chairman of the Democratic Party of Limestone County. I don't think you appreciate, Licinius, how critical the Nickajack has become to the future of Alabama. It has come down to me and a Huntsville scalawag - a Whig. The political compass of this state has swung North, and we are caught in this critical moment, Licinius. Do we hold onto what we have left of our way of life, or do we fold to a rabble of n*****s and illiterate crackers? Get your ship in order. Figure something out. Put your brains together, Licinius. I left you in charge for a reason!

 
The Klan sir?

 
Out of the question, barked Bourbon Smith. Jimmy Sloss is already on my ass about keeping them off the railroad he's building across the mountains from Decatur. He needs the colored labor. This is bigger than you think, Licinius. He's one of my largest donors, and he's in competition to get to Birmingham first with his railroad before the Yankees do.

 
That was also true. A Republican congressman from Pennsylvania named William "Pig Iron" Kelley was part of a cabal of Radical Republican investors who were racing Jimmy Sloss's railroad to Birmingham. Their railroad was being built from Chattanooga down the Wills Valley, which was flanked by Sand and Lookout Mountains. The A&C Railroad was backed by millions in government-backed bonds approved by the last Republican governor of Alabama, William Hugh Smith, which were corruptly solicited in excess of legal limits.

 
Sir, interjected Branse, who stepped in beside Dr. Prentiss, who was sweating visibly now. I think I may have an idea.

 
Smith warmed. Branse, I knew your father. He was a good friend of mine. He was definitely committed to the Cause. Some say more, he added cryptically. Branse nodded.

 
Mr. Houston, I don't think we need to sidestep the Klan just offhandedly. They may serve one more purpose for us yet.

 
The last thing we need is for President Grant to send in the army again to quell violence at the polls. The Radical Republicans are already lashing out at us for suppressing the vote with these registration ordinances. It's not ideal, but it is all we have. I know you'll work something out, Licinius, he said turning to the doctor again.

 
Sir, if I may, pressed Branse. You may leave it to me to handle the Klan when the time is right. We'll clean up your backyard before election.

Literary Note: James Sloss Reimagined

There is a significant character change to The Darlings of Strangetown as this series evolves. James "The Colonel" Sloss is being completely re-visioned more towards his actual historical trajectory, and will become an ally of the Democrat Greeks rather than a separate capitalist "Whig" faction. His former role is being subsumed by a new character exclusively of the Republican fold. Chapter XIX introducing Jimmy Sloss will be rewritten with this new character.

William "Parson" Brownlow, Radical Republican Governor of Tennessee

 

XXIII

The Melungeon walked into Madame de Smets trailed by a Chinese boy and another boy whose head was shaped like an "A." The former had been a coolie goon on the transcontinental, but he was cast bereft along the fringes of the railroad frontier after the Panic of '73. His name was Ling Ling, or anyway they called him that. The other boy was called A-head on account of his single bar of eyebrow and even mop of greasy hair. He cast slow, stony glances around the room. They both brandished knives, but A-head kept an Ithaca riding shotgun under his oilcloth duster, and Ling Ling slung a tomahawk visibly from under his shoulder. The Melungeon didn't need anything more to get his point across.

Madame Julia de Smet closed in to greet the newcomers. They were welcomed by a room of sofas and a lecherous exchange of sexual economy. The smell of opium was thick and a pipa twanged languidly from an unseen room.

Well, don't y'all look like a dishy bunch!

The Melungeon smiled half-heartedly, but not enough to hide his his rotten teeth. Madame de Smet smiled without mirth and curtsied. I'm looking for Maw Possum, he said, removing his bowler hat and casting his eyes sideways this way and that to size up the room.

I'm afraid you've come to the wrong place, you thorny brown stud. Her accent hung thick like the humid air. She studied down his body and looked over to her girls to find the right match, and then returned her smile to The Melungeon. It invited him to unspoken pleasures. But that's not what interested him. He wanted to speak with Maw Possum. I heard she could be seen here, he said.

Madame de Smet shrugged. She can't be seen, she said. No one sees her. The Melungeon was confused. But you can see her mwenzi, Mr. Lincoln, she said.

What the f**k is that, The Melungeon thought? What the hell is she talking about?

A negro who had been sitting in an arm chair reading the Limestone Democrat suddenly put down his paper and stood up. He continued to rise until he stood near seven feet tall. He wore red paisley pants and bleached white cotton shirt. He was clean shaven and bald as kettle. Papa Laduc, he introduced himself. What bidness you got with Maw, he asked?

The Melungeon was impressed. Even the A-head had to turn his head up. Ling Ling itched his fingers on the tomahawk under his left shoulder.

Your the muscle I see. I've come to see who everyone calls the Queen of Strangetown, he announced to the milling forms on the sofas. He was ignored, which irritated him.

You're the Melungeon, said Papa Laduc. Maw Possum says no good will come of you being here in Strangetown. Bad omens come with you.

What the s**t is this, The Melungeon thought as he turned his head to Ling Ling, who pulled his axe and swung at Papa Laduc. The whole room had seized. Papa Laduc threw out his long arm and snagged Ling Ling's arm before he could even swing the tomahawk, then threw the Chinaman into table, which shattered under him.

As A-head drew his coach gun, The Melungeon threw out his arm to restrain him.

Get the f**k up, he barked at Ling Ling, who fumed and steamed with embarrassment. Papa Laduc sneered down at The Melungeon, who seems none among the intimidated.

So what's this mwenzi, he asked?

I'm Maw Possum's agent you might say.

Then we've much to discuss my tall friend, as the Melungeon accepted a seat offered by Madame de Smet. Forgive my Chinaman, he said. He comes from a rough stock.

XXII

The man they called The Melungeon was a short, wiry ruffian. His skin was a leathery brown, and his long walrus mustache curled around his sunken dimples. He was one of William G. Brownlow's men, the Radical Republican governor of Tennessee. They nicknamed the governor "The Parson." Born Simon Mise, he fought as a staunch Unionist in the guerilla war that swept East Tennessee during the rebellion. He and his band ranged up and down the Cumberland Plateau from the Nickajack to the Cumberland Gap burning bridges and ambushing Confederate patrols. Towards the end of the war Bill Brownlow, probably the most hated man in the Confederacy besides Mr. Lincoln, was swept into the governorship of Tennessee. Ex-Confederates were barred from voting, so only Tennessee Unionists were polled. He replaced his political rival, the military governor and Unionist Democrat Andrew Johnson, who in three months would became President upon Mr. Lincoln's assassination.

When The Parson moved into the governor's mansion in Nashville, disenfranchised whites who fought for the Confederacy were appalled. They were unable to vote without taking the "Ironclad Oat,h" avowing they had never voluntarily aided the rebellion. They were horror stricken when The Parson began to agitate for the black suffrage, saying a "loyal negro was more deserving that a disloyal white man." That's when the Ku Klux Klan was born and exploded across war-torn Tennessee with the celebrity of that devil Nathan Bedford Forrest in its ranks. Bill Brownlow had another insurgency on his hands, albeit one against his own power. For this irascible Radical Republican governor, vengeance against disloyal didn't end at Appomattox. He welcomed the insurgency to destroy his political foes in the Democratic party, whether they had been Unionist or not.

So The Melungeon earned his reputation of busting heads at the Tennessee ballot boxes for the Republican Party, and crashing Klan rallies with a pistol whip and shillelagh. He was part of the Brownlow patronage system that dominated post-war Tennessee. But a love of Union didn't prevent this Republican from lining his own pockets in the pursuit of vendetta. The L&N Railroad, while under Yankee occupation for much of the war, was under the influence of a cabal of old Whigs investors. They all had pre-war connections between both North and South dating back to the Fillmore administration, James Withers Sloss being notable among them.

The Parson's rub was that the thousands of negroes he held in thrall with the voting franchise could not find enough opportunity in war-ravaged Tennessee. They crowded into freedman camps where they worked pitiable wages on annual plantation contracts negotiated by corrupt Republican authorities. But down south in Limestone County they'd heard up the grapevine that a place called Strangetown was bursting at the seams with work and opportunity. So they started packing up and train hopping their way south towards the Nickajack where they found work on Jimmy Sloss's railroad to Birmingham. Bill Brownlow was bleeding the black vote his party's power depended on as it migrated South to help close the last frontier of Alabama. And the Melungeon followed in their wake, chasing freedman who fled their plantation contracts in Tennessee. It landed he and his gang, the Crab Orchard Boys, in Limestone County where one of America's forgotten post-war frontiers was throbbing with opportunity, and riches. It was an irresistible temptation to the Melungeon.

Mary Fletcher Wells, founder of the Trinity School for Freedman

 

XXI

Guster Ledbetter trusted only two white people in his life, and one of them was dead. The rest of them he could take or leave. He thought about this as he thumbed through his copy of the Holy Bible and found the verse in 1 Corinthians.

For by one Spirit are we all baptized into one body, whether we be Jews or Gentiles, whether we be bond or free; and have been all made to drink into one Spirit.

He had a lot of trouble with that one.

Early in the war his slave quarters had been aswirl with rumors that the Yankees had just marched into Limestone County and occupied Athens. Does that mean we're free? Apparently not since the Yankees didn't seem eager to free anybody. They ended up pillaging the town instead. The rumor now was that they were raping slaves. What kind of liberator was this? Then the Emancipation Proclamation came and went and still there wasn't any freedom. Can we leave now? Is someone supposed to come and get us? Tired of waiting, he fled Cowford Plantation with the aide of Maw Possum. Her underground railroad ran up the creeks and bottomlands into Limestone County's interior towards freedom - Strangetown contraband camp.

Strangetown was then a filthy bottomland crowded with tents. Brothers and sisters were sleeping out in the open. Everyone was sick and coughing and wearing masks fashioned from kerchiefs. Typhoid and dysentery were rife. It was nothing short of an open air refugee camp. The Yankees were completely apathetic. Worse yet, they kept everyone under guard in Strangetown so as not to antagonize the very white people on the Hill who kept them as slaves. What the hell? Guster's mistrust of white people deepened.

They weren't completely helpless. There were teachers and missionaries. They seemed sincere, especially Mary Fletcher Wells, who was white and taught him to read and found him 'oh! so bright!' There was also Brother Jessup Floyd, a black preacher from Boston who preached to the freedman in the Sea Islands. He warmed to Brother Floyd and his Christian ministry, but he kept back a devilish secret. With Mrs. Wells, however, he was hesitant. The only white woman he interacted with was Mrs. Zeigler, who was a complete b***h to her slaves. But Mrs. Wells was persistent, and she loved everything she could do for him, and he sensed it.
Things took a bad turn when he was approached by his old master, Mr. Zeigler , who held a rag dramatically to his face as he walked Strangetown contraband camp looking for his fugitive slaves. He had the Yankees apprehend Guster. His arrest was greatly protested by Mrs. Wells, who sought the assistance of other sympathetic whites around her. Only one white man stepped forward in his defense. His name was Abraham Stone.

The rub was that the Emancipation Proclamation only freed slaves in regions in the South in open rebellion against the Union. Since Limestone County was occupied by the Union and rather pacified after a good pillaging, Guster's master argued his property was not beholden to Mr. Lincoln's proclamation. Rather than being consigned to his master, Guster was jailed instead until the case could be decided. He was extraordinarily bitter about this.

Abraham Stone had come to Limestone County from Maryland as a carpetbagger and established a practice on Market Street where he turned a tidy profit from representing drunk Yankee soldiers in civil court. He used to pass the slave markets of the Baltimore every day on the way to his clerkship. They disgusted him. So he gave pro bono legal work to the freedman. When Guster was apprehended and threatened to be dragged back into human bondage, Abraham acted on his moral instincts. He immediately walked to Limestone County courthouse and obtained a stay. The judge agreed.

Abraham Stone felt he had met God's calling in securing the freedom of this one man, Guster Ledbetter. In a sensational case followed by the Yankee press, Mr. Stone was jostled between the civil and military courts until he made the long trek to Washington D.C. by the cars. He waited in a long line of petitioners for six hours at the White House before he was ushered into the presence of Mr. Lincoln. After stating Guster Ledbetter's case, Mr. Lincoln related the parable of the Frog Who Wished for a King and drafted an order declaring the Limestone County subject to the Emancipation Proclamation. When Abraham Stone returned to Limestone County, he was met with cheers in Strangetown. The Darlings of Strangetown were now free!

Guster Ledbetter was released into freedom and he returned to Strangetown to resume his studies with Mrs. Wells. He had placed his trust in Abraham Stone, and in doing so had helped secure the permanent freedom of all the contraband slaves collected around Town Creek. And now that they were free, they had to find out how to move on with life in this world without chains. That was a long road ahead, and one that would last for a hundred years.

Abraham Stone did not live long after. He was shot dead in his home in front of his wife on East Street by a single man in a scarlet robe and hood, who was Adelphon Kuklos. Guster Ledbetter wept at his funeral, like he had wept for his brothers and sisters who had died in the fields. And he recalled the passage from 1 Corinthians, and may have glimpsed some of that One Spirit. And then it would pass, and he would remember that name - Adelphon Kuklos. And then he never wept again.

There was only one white person he had left to trust, and Mary Wells Parker went on to found the Trinity School for freedman with funds she had procured from The Major. She collected her 'oh, so bright!' students from among the freed negroes of Strangetown and taught them to read and to write and to stand proud on their accomplishments. And though Guster Ledbetter had joined the army and had come back and gone out into the County from the racist tumult of Reconstruction Athens, he found it just as bad out there. The Klan was beginning to surge, guided by the invisible hand of Adelphon Kuklos. So he took up his musket that the Yankees let him keep, and practiced with his Colt Walker until he was ready to face them all.

Historical Seal of Adelphon Kuklos

 

XX

When he arrived in Mexico, Burnside Lee had never in his life imagined such a place. Before he ended up in the Land of Moctezuma, he had never been further away from his home in Limestone County than Nashville, Tennessee. That's where he swore his oath and he was given a rifle and told he was going to Mexico to fight Mexicans. He could not have been more eager. This was exactly what he needed - adventure to mollify a long bout of melancholia.

War with Mexico had been roundly supported by slaveholding Democrats, who wished to expand their extraordinary voting privileges into new lands where they could import slavery. George Smith Houston, that penultimate Greek of Limestone County, was then representing the Nickajack in Congress. He voted for the war after a pantomime speech, and then sat the rest of it out at home.

 
Burnside had long been a widower, having lost his first wife and child in childbirth years before. He kept his mind active by abjuring from alcohol and studying history. Longing for adventure to assuage his perpetual grief, he placed his hardware store on Jefferson Street in stewardship when war was declared against Mexico. Then he made the trip to Nashville to enlist in the army. There he was enrolled in the 1st Tennessee Regiment, which drew a wild swashbuckling type from here on to all over. Most of the soldiers thought this was the big ticket. Mexico! As far as Southerners were concerned, that place was next on Manifest Destiny's hitlist. Many of them thought they would get land in Mexico out of the deal, and recruiters weren't eager to dissuade them with the truth of it. There were so many volunteers that they couldn't take them all.

 
The army hit the beaches at Vera Cruz, Mexico and laid siege to its ancient walls of coral. They were cheerfully led by that old War of 1812 hero, General Winfield Scott, who was nicknamed "Old Fuss and Feathers." After capturing the ancient city, they marched inland into the jungle towards the distant mountains. They followed the old invasion route of the Conquistador Hernando Cortez. Burnside was amazed to observe jaguars and ocelots prancing among the babbling trees. There were birds that burst in carnivals of color, and there were tarantulas that grew as large as his fist. Spider monkeys would climb down and rob him at night of the fruit he foraged from the jungle. It was quite a remarkable encounter with the alien and exotic for just a boy from Limestone County!

They began to ascend the snow-capped peaks of the Sierra Madre Orientale, where the wind blew like furies and the mornings were blanketed with frost. Somewhere up there in the mountains was the Mexican Napoleon, General Antonio Lopez de Santa Anna, who was the butcher of the Alamo. He held a strong position with ten-thousand Mexican soldiers guarding the jagged defile of Cerro Gordo. In his first action, Burnside Lee's regiment was sent against the enemy's center. They blundered into a crossfire among the slopes of chapparal overlooking the gorge and tumbled back behind whatever defilade they could find.

 
This was a terrifying experience for Burnside Lee. This was not what he expected. Enemy musket fire barked through the scrubs with every volley. Fuego! Artillery smashed into the rocks sending shards everywhere. Curling with abject terror and having urinated himself, it took quite an effort for Burnside to pull himself back together again. It helped when an Irish sergeant kicked him in the ass screaming foreign obscenities and pulled him to his feet. Somehow he mustered the mental enterprise to fold himself back into the ranks and return fire. It was not until a bright young captain named Robert E. Lee had personally reconnoitered General de Santa Anna's left flank that the whole position could be turned. And when it had, the Mexicans suddenly broke. So calamitous was the retreat that the Mexican Napoleon left behind his wooden leg and wine chest. Both brought great glee and cheers to the American ranks.

 
Burnside Lee swore he would never go into combat sober again. The experience was entirely too suffuse with terrors surreal, too phantasmic. It wasn't worth the glory if he had to endure it. So he broke his embargo on spirits and around a campfire asked for a swill from another soldier named Luther Lang. He passed along a flask filled with hot bourbon that went down hard. Then they got to talking about where they'd come from.

Limestone County, Luther asked? Why I'm from Giles County, Tennessee. I reckon we're neighbors.
Luther eyed him queerly when Burnside said he was a Whig, as though he were untrustworthy. He asked him if he had slaves, which was a rude question. Two.

 
I've got eight, Luther said. He gazed quietly. I got my eyes set on becoming a grandee here. These people can work. They built pyramids! Unlike our n*****s, they understand a hierarchy. They understand class and racial distinction. Did you know they grade their mestizos based on how white or Indian they are? As far as I'm concerned, your either white, a redskin or a n****r. What a strange country this is. It will take some getting used to.

Burnside didn't know what to think of all that. It really took him aback.

 
I got me near 80 acres near Prospect, Tennessee. Say when this is over, we'll need to visit one another. Burnside thought not.

 
He noticed Luther thumbing his ring, and he thought to ask. Did he go to college?

 
No sir. That's the ring of Adelphon Kuklos. He took it off and tossed it to Burnside, who looked it over. A red jasper was inscribed with white gold letters - AK. Is this some fraternity, Burnside asked?
Yes sir, but not of the college type. We're a band of brothers... white brothers. Our aim is to spread white culture across the Western Hemisphere, to build an empire where white Americans of the South can prosper without the interference of those devilish Yankees. And that starts right here in Mexico. These people are a wasted and degenerate race, ripe for the picking.

 
Burnside was disturbed, but he let the man talk. And so he did into the evening about how Adelphon Kuklos was funding filibuster expeditions to undermine Hispanic governments around the Gulf and Caribbean. By installing white dictators, they could apply for statehood or otherwise thrive with the support of Southern slaveowning investors. It was a vast conspiracy, though none too secret. A lot of poor whites and yeomen were buying into it. A lot of them were there in Mexico. But Adelphon Kuklos seemed especially sinister in its organization.

 
Burnside was absorbed, and took his mental notes long into the night.

James "The Colonel" Sloss, one of the founders of Birmingham

 

XIX

James Withers Sloss of Birmingham fame was known as the "The Colonel" on account of his service with the Confederate Corps of Engineers during the war. This complicated social occasions that involved The Major, so he called him Bonwit. James Sloss was a native of Limestone County who had proven to possess all the industry of his class. Having started his bookkeeping business in Mooresville, he expanded into planting on several non-contiguous plots he steadily acquired throughout Limestone County. To farm these scattered fields, he employed various bogtrotters and other poor whites to till and harvest, though he continued to employ household slaves at his home. He was a burgher and yeoman, a Whig to the bone who had voted against secession. He was also of a class more rarified and aristocratic than even the wealthiest Greeks. He was the new breed of a bright and promising age of gilded capital.

 
Following the war The Colonel became president of the Decatur & Nashville Railroad and negotiated its merger with the larger Louisville & Nashville. This created a transportation monopoly spanning from the Ohio River to the Nickajack. It terminated near the Tennessee River in Limestone County where it junctioned with the east-west Memphis & Charleston. The L&N grew into a vital conduit of capital and goods flowing both ways to rebuild a war-torn Dixie. It thrived under long periods of Yankee occupation during the war, and grew further still under the The Colonel's vision which unfolded with the settlement of Birmingham.

 
The ridge and valley system of today's Birmingham was nearly inaccessible from the Nickajack and was sparsely settled before the war. When surveyors found deposits of iron, coal and limestone in close proximity in Jones Valley, the settlement of Birmingham was founded by investors including The Colonel. They intended to exploit these resources to build blast furnaces and coal mines under the aegis of rising post-war tariffs. Tariffs were vilified by the Greeks who believed they reduced cotton exports by strengthening the dollar. This was of no concern to James Withers Sloss, who was never a Greek and who no longer even lived in Limestone County. He had liquidated his local holdings to invest wholly in the Birmingham deal, bedding with Northern industrial and banking partners. He had gone 'national.' Limestone County's politics were mainly a provincial concern to him now.

 
But he could not wholly disregard the political ferment of his home county. The L&N Railroad was now laying tracks across the Warrior Mountains towards Birmingham, requiring enormous amounts of material and labor, much of which needed staging in Limestone County. Theft and graft was rampant along the L&N corridor. So The Colonel returned to the county of his birth to meet with The Major, Bonwit Vrooman. They met in the conference room of Sloss's agent in Athens, an obdurate and carpetbagging attorney named Rufus Lipman who never ceased glaring at The Major. The niceties were rushed. Sloss was a busy man. They had known each other through business circles.

I don't need to tell you that your little cabal here is f****d, Bonwit. The Major was taken aback. The Colonel spoke in a bizarrely neutral accent for his origins. It was the accent of money. The Colonel continued. You know what's going on in Washington? Congress is going to defund the Freedman's Bureau. The Democrats and moderate Republicans don't want negroes on the government teat, so they are shutting down your party. What will you do then? Look, I know you've got a lot invested here. I've come to offer you a deal. I need labor for the railroad. That's easy. You find me labor and I'll lease them. We are subsidized cost plus, so I can give you 20% margin. That's a generous offer. But it needs to come with extras.

Bonwit shifted uncomfortably. His hands were sweating underneath the table. Extras?

 
Look, The Colonel explained. I need protection for my investments all up and down these tracks. You know people here. I'm an outsider here now. I never had anything in common with these people, referring to the Greeks. I'm hiring colored labor from you. I need them protected. The political situation here is dicey, Bonwit. You're eaten up with the Klan, and they are growing more violent as we approach the mid-term elections. I can't be seen as getting my hands dirty here, but you? You are one dirty bastard, Bonwit. I know you can find the people to put a lid on the Klan.

 
Bonwit was stunned. He had never thought of himself as a "dirty bastard." The Colonel was assuming Bonwit had dealt in violence. How else could he have prospered in this tumultuous political environment of Reconstruction Alabama? But it was all just good old government fraud. Before he could raise a finger in objection, The Colonel continued.

You don't have to pay them. Just invoice them directly to me. Call them railway detectives. I dont give a damn. All you need to do is keep the Klan off my work crews and protect our capital here. We've got a lot invested in this railroad. I don't need a bunch of white cracker peckerwoods gumming up the works just because they won't work for less than a negro.

 
And with that said, Bonwit's mind raced. This was indeed getting his hands dirty, but he was sharing the risk with one of the most renowned industrialists of the New South. And furthermore, The Colonel was right. The Freedman's Bureau was on the chopping block in Washington. Nevermind the social progress made in Strangetown, he was facing destitution. Bonwit blurted out - 30%.

The Colonel thought a minute and then nodded. 30%. This is important to me, and your reputation for the work you've done here serves to your credit. The Colonel turned and presented his hand towards his attorney.

This is my attorney Rufus Lipman. He's Jewish. Lipman nodded. He'll be my agent here in Limestone County. He's just here to watch over my interests. He'll draft the first contracts, but this is where we shake hands.

 
And so they did, but James Withers Sloss held his grip. Leaning forward he spoke very seriously.

I have one problem now that does not involve the Klan that I'd also like for you to take care of. He and his gang have been filching my depots all up and down this railway, and my people tell me he is moving his operation to Athens. His name is The Melungeon.

XVIII

For someone who had been such a vocal proponent of secession, Drake Shoney went to extraordinary lengths to avoid actually fighting for it. When the first conscription act was passed, he placed an entreaty in the paper to hire a substitute. He could scarcely afford one. Thankfully, Linus Poteat was broke after the debacle of the Gar and Drake hired him at a discount in forbearance of his gambling debts. Later, when the hiring of substitutes was abolished, the Confederate government left an exemption from conscription for any white male who owned twenty or more slaves. So Drake went even further into debt and purchased two slaves bringing his total to twenty.

Esmerelda had her hands full as the overseer of Gloaming Birch. Drake seemed to have very little interest in the running of his plantation. He left almost all day-to-day management to her. She did well enough. She learned her trade at Davis Bend under the legendary Ben Montgomery, the slave who managed the Hurricane plantation and its five-thousand acres. Each year she sold the cotton harvest, she brought in tidy profits for her master. So she was frustrated that Gloaming Birch still did not prosper, but it was only a point of personal pride. Drake was actually a generous if flippant master. He was munificent everywhere with his finances. Whatever she needed to improve the living conditions of the estate's slaves, he showed a dismissive largesse. It was not out of benignity, for Esmerelda had long come to the realization that Drake Shoney was just an a**hole.

Fine! Fine! Elzey. You're just about getting on my goddam nerves now. Go and get you and your darky friends instruments then. I don't give a damn. Besides, I'm tired of hearing y'all beating those gourds and s**t in my backyard. You sound like a bunch of mooks out there. And when you get back from town bring me some tobacco. Oh, and if they got some orange juice I need some for my cocktails. And you can use the change to buy you and your darky pals some gum. Just get yer s**t done before you go. Now go on. Get out of here. And don't let me forget to sign your negro papers before you go! 

So she bought instruments and the slaves of Gloaming Birch learned to pick tunes and sing ditties and put their slave spirituals on the strings. With so many slaves working so few acres they had plenty of time on their hands. On cool autumn evenings, they'd play music around the fire like Jimmy Get Your Hoe Cake Done and Rose of Alabama.  Drake was often surrounded by a milieu of bogtrotters, mudsills and low downers he held in his social thrall. They'd sit on Drake's porch and listen to the music and get roaring drunk into the night playing cards and talking about hunting.

Meanwhile Gloaming Birch was in dire financial straits. Drake searched the papers for a Southern victory that would remove the yolk of his Northern creditors. When the Yankees occupied Athens in the Spring of '62, he never went into town.  He grew reclusive and spent more time hunting and fishing and neglecting the estate.  When the Greeks started selling cotton up North during the occupation, he told Esmerelda to change the crop over to corn. He understood he could make more in Confederate dollars selling corn, but did not understand that inflation rendered higher revenues in that currency meaningless.  

None of this concerned Esmerelda. With the war she knew slavery was on its way out.  She could have fled Drake long ago, but she stayed with him.  Besides, the corn he now grew made it even easier to smuggle fugitive slaves through his fields.  She had been running them under Drake's nose for years.  

A New Cover

Many thanks to Elaine Coley of Tiny Tags (tinytagco.com) for a fantastic new graphic!  These will go with my Facebook posts of each new installment.

XVII

For his courageous actions as a messenger at the Battle of Shiloh, Branse Havelock was recommended by Fighting Joe Wheeler to the signals staff of General P.G.T. Beauregard, whom they called Little Napoleon. Pierre Gustave Toutont-Beauregard was a Louisiana Creole with grandiose tactical visions - a breathtaking prima donna. From this vantage Branse gained marvelous insight into the gods and generals that moved the destinies of nations. After General Beauregard withdrew the Confederate Army from Shiloh the Yankees had amassed a mighty host of over 120,000 men and followed him to lay siege to Corinth. Facing such a grandiose army, General Beauregard ordered an evacuation. He placed Branse in charge of a fantastic ruse to mask the withdrawal lest they invite an attack at a critical moment.

As the trains arrived to evacuate the countless wounded from the Battle of Shiloh, Branse had the 19th Alabama cheer around the railroad station to make it sound like they were welcoming reinforcements. Beyond the earthworks it gave the Yankees pause, who were now under the studious command of Henry Halleck, and who was nicknamed "Old Brains." Branse had so-called "Quaker Guns" made of logs installed around the perimeter to replace the real guns they evacuated by rail. Every night Branse had more campfires built to create the appearance of swelling numbers. Old Brains scratched his elbows and continued to hesitate, perhaps even expecting to be attacked by overwhelming numbers of rebels. Then one night they were all gone.

The Yankees mounted the earthworks kicking over Quaker guns and rummaging through empty tins looking for food. They had been bamboozled! The rebels slipped away! Indeed they had towards Tupelo, and for much of the summer of '62 the two great armies stood facing each other across the Mississippi hill country. At length, P.G.T. Beauregard was relieved after a scuffle with Mr. Davis in the press and was replaced by the General Braxton Bragg, who looked like a terrier. Branse was retained on Bragg's staff, but he found the general aloof and pugnacious. Still, the general planned a bold invasion of Kentucky for the autumn that raised the army's spirits after an inactive summer. The army was now called the Army of Tennessee and would remain so-named throughout the rest of the war. 

Branse helped organize the railway schedule to entrain 50,000 rebel soldiers from Tupelo to Mobile to Columbus to Chattanooga in a tortuous journey for the soldiers. The Army of Tennessee took this enormous geographical detour on account of the Memphis & Charleston Railroad being occupied by federals from Memphis to Huntsville, Ala. When they stepped off north into Kentucky they had high hopes of being welcomed as liberators, swelling their ranks with volunteers. Instead they were met with indifference, even derision.  They tarried for awhile until the grains were harvested and clashed in a sharp fight called the Battle of Perryville, in which the 19th Alabama didn't even participate. It was about that time that Branse Havelock received a letter from Virginia.  

It was marked with a return address to Richmond, but had no name for the sender. At his camp table in his field tent, he sliced open the envelope beneath the glow of a paraffin lantern. A ring had fallen out. He read the letter that was enclosed.

Dear Branse,

It is with great heartfelt condolence that I must convey to you the news that your father was killed in action at Sharpsburg on September 17th. He bravely withstood several Yankee charges made across the Antietam Creek bridge. His body was recovered and with General Lee's intervention was forwarded through to our lines. He is being advanced to Athens for burial.  Your father and I shared deep bonds of affection and politics. I have never had the pleasure of meeting my dear friend's son, but we must soon. Perhaps duty soon will bring us within reach, for I have much to tell you of your father's remarkable legacy. 

I Am Your Most Obedient Servant, Henry Lewis Benning, Brig. Gen., C.S.A.

His father was dead. They were at odds when they parted. Branse had voted against secession, one of the few Greeks to have done so.  His father, however, was a vehement secessionist - a real Fire Eater.  He had never been warm.  Indeed, he was harsh and domineering. He was too absorbed in the management of his plantation, Barbados, where he farmed a thousand acres with over a hundred slaves. He was gone often on business. As the country slid towards the secession crisis, he cursed the Yankee race and told Branse this war was for the salvation of the white race.  It will be like Haiti, where the n*****s killed ten thousand whites... women, children. They dashed babies against rocks and crucified white women after raping them. 

Whatever the truth may or may not be, these rants offended Branse's political sensibilities.  He believed slavery would eventually be extinguished of its own accord, but it must be within the Union and involve compensation to the owners for their pains.  Branse's father was appalled by his son's Whig-ish sentiments.  He called his own son a n****r lover, which wholly offended Branse. When they last saw one another, it was on the platform of the Huntsville Depot. They did not embrace. His father simply looked at him and said to 'look to your kind,' whatever that meant. Then he was off to Virginia to fight.

In spite of all this, Branse began to weep. His father was a very renowned and respectable aristocrat among the Greeks. They were all embarrassed when the elder Havelock enrolled to fight, though they fully expected it from the fanatical Fire Eater. They commented that they would remain behind to aide the war effort with their tills, never mind the slaves that actually worked them.  Cotton was still going to pay the bills for the war.  Now Branse inherited a towering legacy, for Barbados was an expansive estate, and there was the mansion on the Hill. Dr. Prentiss and the Greeks would be looking to him to fill in his father's shoes when it came to the elaborate system of patronage that kept the Democrats in power.  

As he dabbed his tears with his hankerchief he noticed the ring again.  It looked like a class ring, perhaps from the University of Georgia where his father had attended. He picked it up and rolled it with his thumb.  Inlaid into the bezel was a red jasper stone inscribed with white gold initials. They read - AK.