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.