In March, 2032, the Confederate Congress finally ordered the army to take over Florida and restore order. Had the CSA been allowed to do what was necessary, the Confederacy’s disintegration might have been checked at that point.
The Confederate Congress, being New South, had no stomach for anything of the sort. Instead, it laid a set of rules of engagement on the forces it sent to Florida that made them first impotent, then laughingstocks, and finally targets. All crew-served weapons were forbidden, and individual weapons could be used only to return fire, not initiate it. Fleeing felons could not be shot. “De facto local authorities” were to be respected and negotiated with, not rounded up and hanged–and the Army had to negotiate in Spanish if the locals demanded it. Habeas corpus remained in force. Black and Hispanic ombudsmen were to accompany the troops to investigate any charges of racism or insensitivity, with Confederate soldiers subject to courts-martial on either charge.
It was the same old cultural Marxist crap as used to flow out of Washington, for the simple reason that the same people were sitting in Richmond who had sat in Washington. Just as when the Soviet Union fell apart in the 1990s, the nomenklatura simply transferred its allegiance to the new system, kept the same jobs and got richer.
By the Fall of 2032, the Confederate forces sent into south Florida had been pushed into enclaves by the effects of their own rules of engagement. As in intervention missions by the old U.S. Army, force protection had become the top-priority mission. A military that is most concerned with protecting itself can’t do anything else, so the local tribes and gangs became bolder than ever .
Ominously, blacks and Hispanics began concluding local nonaggression pacts so they could cooperate in raiding into white areas up north. On October 2, a column of over three hundred vehicles and almost 5000 gang-bangers hit Tallahassee, sacked the city for three days and made it back to Dade with a train of loot that stretched for seven miles along the highway. The Confederate Army threw up a roadblock, but the raiders, wise to their enemy’s weaknesses, literally pushed their way through it without firing a shot. Not having been fired upon, the Southern soldiers couldn’t use their weapons.
This pathetic display of impotence on the part of an army with a noble fighting heritage enraged the Old South. Rallies, marches, and torchlight parades were held in protest in all the Southern states, with hundreds of thousands of people turning out. When one came right down Monument Avenue in Richmond, old President Yancey joined it himself, telling the crowd he was “disheartened and dismayed by the disgrace to our ancestors and our flag.” In response, the Confederate Congress removed itself to Atlanta, where it passed a joint resolution “reaffirming the South’s commitment to a diverse, tolerant, and multi-cultural future.”
New Orleans had long been a strange Southern amalgam. Physically, it was one of the finest cities of the Old South, not just in its unique French Quarter, but also in the old Anglo section along St. Charles Avenue, the site of America's most beautiful homes and quaintest streetcar line.
Its population was another matter. Run since the 1970s by the usual corrupt and inept black city government, the city had long been a hell-hole of violent crime and sexual perversion. The scenes in the French Quarter on a Friday or Saturday night would have given pause to a citizen of Sodom. A walking tour of the Garden District was dangerous even in daylight.
The city depended on tourism, but the breakup of the union put an end to most of that. Under the Confederacy, there were some half-hearted efforts to sweep the French Quarter's dirt under the rug, but the lowest class grew steadily more worthless and more violent. From events in Florida, it drew the lesson that it could get away with anything. On the prematurely stifling evening of May 17, 2033, it erupted.
At first, there was some organization, as much as gangs could manage. Columns headed out into the suburbs and surrounding countryside to loot and kidnap. But Louisiana wasn’t Florida, and the local refinery workers, shrimpers and good old boys had long ago put together the Coon-ass Militia, as they called it. The black raiding columns were met not with roadblocks but ambushes. The Coon-asses knew how to hunt, and the raiders who left New Orleans did not return.
The state government in Baton Rouge was corrupt but white, and it swiftly mobilized the official State Militia and marched on New Orleans. Mississippi sent reinforcements, and from Richmond President Yancey ordered CSA units to assist–this time with heavy weapons. Within ten days, New Orleans was sealed and under siege.
The blacks responded by letting loose the red cock. It wasn’t merely random mob action, which usually concentrates on liquor stores and leaves civic monuments alone. It was systematic self-destruction. The mayor of New Orleans, Mr. Tsombe “Big Daddy” Toussaint L'Overture Othello Jones, climbed up on a Mardi Gras float, a vast statue of Aunt Jemima pouring syrup into a pool where high yellow beauties wrestled with “White Planters” and harangued the crowd in Jackson Square. “The white folk like things pretty. The white folk love this beautiful city. Well, I’m here to tell tha white folk that this here city ain’t gonna be beautiful no more. Blow it up! Tear it down! Burn it to the ground! That’s the word we have for tha white folk of Dixie–burn, baby, burn!”
This, their final promise to their glorious city, the blacks accomplished. The cathedral on Jackson square was blown up by the New Orleans’s police SWAT team. The little cafe across from it by the river, famous for its beignets and cafe au lait, was bulldozed with city equipment, as were the gardens of the square itself. Bourbon Street was burned, along with Tulane University. Audubon Place, which the 20th century writer George Will said contained “America’s noblest collection of stately homes,” was first burned by the city fire department, then razed. The stately, ancient Perley Thomas streetcars of the St. Charles Avenue line were stacked in a pile, doused with gasoline and set on fire. A mob then ripped up the tracks, heated the rails over bonfires and twisted them around trees, just as Sherman had done to southern railroads during the first Civil War. By the tenth of June, everything that had made New Orleans what it was lay in smoking ruins. Like Dresden in 1945, the city was no more than a bend in the river, covered in ash.
The Confederate Army, state, and militia forces around the city were strong enough to have intervened, but they did nothing. The orders to move in never came. No one believed the blacks would really destroy one of the South’s most historic places until they did it. And when they did, the authorities in Baton Rouge and in Richmond were too stunned to react.
In Atlanta, the New South Congress did react. Blaming the death of New Orleans on “racism and intolerance that tried the patience of loyal African Americans beyond endurance,” they called for a series of “reforms to eliminate the symbols and substance of the South's racist heritage.” The first reform was to abolish both the Confederate national flag and the battle flag as the nation’s emblems. In their place, they raised over the Congress’s temporary quarters, the Atlanta Convention Center, a new flag that showed a rainbow on a U.N.-blue background. Beneath the rainbow was a black-and-white dove, behind and beneath which floated a sprinkling of silver stars, one for each Confederate state. The banner was immediately nicknamed “the Pooping Pigeon.”
Charlotte, Raleigh-Durham, Alexandria, Baltimore, Birmingham, Little Rock, and other New South cities promptly raised the new flag. The Old South stuck with the old flag. Pointedly, the St. Andrew's Cross still flew over the Confederate White House in Richmond.
Often, a people will put up with unimaginable abuses on matters of real importance, but rebel when their sacred symbols are defiled. So it proved in the new Confederacy. The official replacement of the old Confederate flag with the Pooping Pigeon recalled the people of the Old South to their founding tradition: rebellion. On June 23, Coffee County, Alabama, announced its secession from the Confederacy, “in order to uphold and preserve the traditions of our Southern people and culture.” Ironically, Coffee County was peopled almost wholly by blacks.
As the news of Coffee County’s act
ion spread, it set off a chain reaction. All over the South, towns and counties, cities and some whole states—Mississippi was the first—seceded from the Confederacy. They still recognized Mr. Yancey as President, and called themselves True Confederates, but they would have no more of Atlanta, the Confederate Congress, and the New South.
The New South responded in mirror-image fashion. New South cities withdrew their recognition from the executive branch in Richmond and from most of the state governments as well, pledging their loyalty to the Congress in Atlanta. That Congress elected a new President, a Dr. Louis Greenberg, formerly head of Duke University. True Confederates replied by electing a new Congress, which once again met in Richmond. This time, there were no holdovers from Washington.
By the winter of 2033, two states existed on one territory. There was no geographic separation, beyond urban and rural. One city owed allegiance to one government, one to another. So far, there was no shooting, but it was obvious the situation was too unstable to endure. In the New South cities, militias were being organized by combining black gangs and weapons were smuggled in. In Richmond, President Yancey was desperate for peace, but the Confederate Army was thinking about the war it knew was coming.
On March 4, 2034, Bill Kraft asked me to stop by his office.
“John, I received a letter this morning via our embassy in Richmond from the Commanding General of the Confederate States Army. He is of course aware of the vote up here to provide military advice to people elsewhere in the former United States who share our beliefs. The True Confederates meet that standard, without a doubt. Are you ready to do some traveling?”
“Have they formally asked for our assistance?” I asked.
“They have,” Bill replied.
“Well, it should be an interesting war,” I said. “When do you want me to leave?”
“Tomorrow.”
Chapter Thirty-Four
As ordered, on March 5, 2034, I left for Richmond. I thought about who to take with me, and decided in the end I didn’t want anyone but our Spec Ops chief, Sergeant Danielov. A sergeant would help get me out of trouble, other officers might get me into it. Besides, if I screwed up, Ron wouldn’t tell anyone.
I could have asked the Confederates to send a plane for me—due to the fuel shortage, we didn’t fly ours unless we had to—but I didn’t want to come hat in hand. So I decided to travel like everyone else did.
From Augusta, I took the steam train to Portland. I had to admit I enjoyed bucketing along through the Maine countryside at a stirring 40 miles per hour, the smells of summer mingling with the wood smoke from the engine, the rail joints and the locomotive exhaust playing their leisurely, syncopated song. Old pleasures rediscovered are better than new, because you can muse on your grandparents and great-grandparents enjoying the same things.
At Portland, we booked passage on a freighter sailing for Norfolk, Virginia. There weren’t enough people traveling to support passenger liners, but most freighters had space for half-a-dozen folks. Ours was a Maine vessel, sail with auxiliary diesel, the Silas Lapham out of Castine with a cargo of used cars, newsprint, and live lobsters. I noticed .50 cals mounted on either side of the quarterdeck. Pirates were operating out of Philadelphia.
We left Portland harbor on the evening tide, picking up a strong breeze off the port quarter aft, the remains of a Nor'easter, as we headed south. Dano turned green and spent the night communing with the leeward rail. I enjoyed the sharp sea air and a cigar, then turned in. We’d be in Norfolk on the 29th.
Like so many activities from the past, traveling by ship gave me time to think. The question I needed to think about was, what was I going to do? Our objective was to help the True Confederates. In our Germanic way of war, help didn’t mean fiddle and diddle at the margins. Help meant win, win decisively, completely, finally, in such a way that the victory could never be reversed. Icy cold and lightning fast, as somebody used to say.
Did that mean keeping the peace or tilting the balance toward war? And what kind of war could our True Confederate allies wage? I'd known a few Marine generals from the old Southern aristocracy. They were fine, upright, honorable men, solid as old Stonewall himself on matters of morals and character. But they seemed to have the notion that it wasn’t quite gentlemanly to make a decision. And the people they chose for their staffs… John Randolph of Roanoke’s simile came to mind: like a rotten mackerel in the moonlight, they shined and they stank.
War, as von Moltke said, is a matter of expedients. You need to know what result you want. That was clear enough in this case. But as to how I’d get there, that would have to depend on what I found, and who. In war, the power of personality is immense. You get a Napoleon, you conquer Europe. You get a Napoleon III, you end up in a chamber pot at Sedan. Sam Yancey even in his younger days had been a cautious, lawyer-like fellow, and few men get bold as they get old. But it isn’t only the people at the top who count. Sometimes it’s a guy at the bottom who takes the action that gains the decision.
Such soliloquies, along with the volume of Horatio Hornblower I always took with me when I went to sea, made the few days pass agreeably. The Silas Lapham carried enough canvas that we bowled along at eight knots or better.
Once Ron got his sea legs, we liberated some lobsters from the tank in the hold and dined in style each night on the quarterdeck. Good sergeant that he was, Dano had a couple bottles of Piesporter Spatlese, the companion God intended for lobster. As we drained the last on the evening of the 12th, I remembered the old Marine rule: don’t whistle while packing for deployment. Detached duty had long been good to captains.
We awoke on the 13th to find ourselves back in the 21st century; a pilot boat was leading us through the minefields into Norfolk. The Confederate ambassador in Augusta had cabled our arrival, and a young CSA officer was on the dock to meet us and whisk us around customs and immigration. He introduced himself as Captain Charles Augustus Ravenal of the Palmetto Horse Guards.
Captain Ravenal was splendid in his high-collared gray uniform and mirror-shined cavalry boots with silver spurs. In the simple, forest green hunting jacket that was the uniform of the Northern Confederation, I looked like Grant opposite Lee. Captain Ravenal’s darkey driver bowed us into a Mercedes limo with the CSA crest on the doors and Confederate battle flags on the front fenders, and we were soon speeding up the Interstate toward Richmond. Dixie was indeed rich.
Southerners are good at small talk. Mainiacs aren’t, but we listen carefully. As the captain went on, I got the sense he was uncomfortable about something. So in Maine fashion, I went right at him. “Something’s bothering you, Captain. If it’s that we smell like lobsters, well, most folks up north smell like fish, ‘cause it’s all we've got to eat. If it’s something else, why don't you tell us about it?”
“I am truly sorry, sir, if I have in any way offended,” Captain Ravenal replied. “We are all deeply grateful for your time and trouble in coming here. But to be entirely honest, sir, there is a small matter that gives us some difficulty in our protocol.”
Welcome to the South, I thought. Up our way, protocol meant seeing that the other guy was warm and had something to eat. “I am certain we can resolve the matter easily, Captain, if you’ll tell us what it is,” I replied.
“Sir, we are all aware that you are Chief of the General Staff of the Northern Confederation,” Captain Ravenal answered. “You will be accorded every honor due to your position. Our difficulty, sir, is that formally your rank is that of captain. That required that you be met by someone of similar rank, which is why I am your escort. Again, I assure you no offense was intended.”
“None taken, Captain,” I replied. “I rather like the rank.”
“Thank you, sir. But you will be meeting with our generals and our President, Mr. Yancey. Normally, a captain would not be included in such circles, and there is some concern about seating arrangements, precedence, and the like. We do not wish to offend, as I have said.”
“No problem, Captain. Sergea
nt Danielov and I are happy to stand in the back.”
“Er, sergeant, sir? Would you expect the sergeant to accompany you, sir? I assumed he was your servant.”
“Sergeant Danielov is head of Special Operations for the Northern Confederation. In effect, he’s a Commander-in-Chief. Besides, he might have something useful to say.”
“Yes, sir. I’m afraid we have made arrangements for the sergeant to stay in our NCO quarters.”
“Is the NCO mess good?” Dano asked.
“The specialty is Tennessee barbecue,” Ravenal answered.
“Then I'm not moving. Captain Rumford can go to the meetings. I'll just potter around on my own.”
“I’m certain that will be agreeable with us,” Ravenal said, making a mistake of serious proportions.
“Captain Rumford,” Ravenal continued, “if I may put forward an entirely unofficial proposal, for which I take full responsibility, would you possibly be willing to take on a higher rank while you are our guest here in the Confederacy? It would make our situation a great deal easier, in term of providing the hospitality which is our duty as officers and gentlemen. Please understand that I intend no disrespect to the rank you hold up North. It’s just that, well, things are different down here.”
I remembered how my Senate staff friend back in Washington in the old days had always been given three-star rank when he spent time with the American military. He found it funny as hell, but without that, they didn’t know how to deal with him.
“If that would make your situation easier, Captain Ravenal, I have no objection,” I said. “After all, we are allies, and I hope we will be friends. Anything I can do to assist, I am ready to do. What rank did you have in mind?”
Victoria: A Novel of 4th Generation War Page 27
