the Confederacy
Posted: Sun Apr 22, 2018 3:17 pm
Hey, there is one thing about the setting that has always bothered me, and that is the handling of slavery and the Confederacy. Alexander Stephens convinces everyone to drop slavery in a pretty casual way. It ... seems too easy. Plantation owners had a lot of capital wrapped up in slaves; when they were freed those owners lost a lot of wealth. In our timeline, banning slavery led to sharecropping, slavery in all but name. I'm assuming that there was some sort of mechanization in the fields that dramatically reduced the manpower required in the fields, but that would have broad implications for agricultural labor across the globe.
I say this as a guy from Georgia - we have all the best food and most of the best music, but it is a good thing we lost the Civil War. We were the bad guys; the Therans only with cotton instead of stone airships. The South was fighting to maintain race-based slavery. I'm okay with an alternate history where there is an inconclusive end to the Civil War, which effectively means the South wins, but it is a mistake to whitewash the Confederacy. Northerners were certainly cool with casual institutional racism, and largely didn't believe in equality by any means. In the South, however, whites were faced with the power dynamics of a large population of black people that they had kept as slaves, and which they explicitly debated and were afraid of how it might play out.
It would also be great to explore what southern blacks did on their own behalf. The GMG says they were "thrown out on their own with no means of support." I'm assuming they wouldn't get the vote and any political power - there would be no Reconstruction. Would they leave in mass to go north or to Texas or Mexico? Where are the economic pressures taking them? I can only assume they were not needed to work in the fields in the same numbers, which would create a lot of conflict with poor whites. What is old Fredrick Douglass doing? What about this whole list of people: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_A ... litionists, most of whom went North prior to the war. What about the Seminoles (and Black Seminoles, which I'm learning about in the course of writing this?) Plus there is the role of religion - the AME vs the Southern Baptists. It might be cool to have the AME really take a leadership role. In Europe, it is really only somewhat alternative history, but in the Americas 1879 is _very_ alternative.
One of the things I like about the game is that it legitimately has good intentions regarding diversity. This is the only part that sends up warning flags. You know I love the game and the setting; this is really just about opening up a conversation. I'm not proscribing any solutions, except that this might be a good area to bring in a black writer to get another perspective.
As an aside, what happened to the Free State of Jones? The Gullah Geechee? New Orleans? Sorry, each of those should be its own thread. Maybe I'll do that ...
I say this as a guy from Georgia - we have all the best food and most of the best music, but it is a good thing we lost the Civil War. We were the bad guys; the Therans only with cotton instead of stone airships. The South was fighting to maintain race-based slavery. I'm okay with an alternate history where there is an inconclusive end to the Civil War, which effectively means the South wins, but it is a mistake to whitewash the Confederacy. Northerners were certainly cool with casual institutional racism, and largely didn't believe in equality by any means. In the South, however, whites were faced with the power dynamics of a large population of black people that they had kept as slaves, and which they explicitly debated and were afraid of how it might play out.
It would also be great to explore what southern blacks did on their own behalf. The GMG says they were "thrown out on their own with no means of support." I'm assuming they wouldn't get the vote and any political power - there would be no Reconstruction. Would they leave in mass to go north or to Texas or Mexico? Where are the economic pressures taking them? I can only assume they were not needed to work in the fields in the same numbers, which would create a lot of conflict with poor whites. What is old Fredrick Douglass doing? What about this whole list of people: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_A ... litionists, most of whom went North prior to the war. What about the Seminoles (and Black Seminoles, which I'm learning about in the course of writing this?) Plus there is the role of religion - the AME vs the Southern Baptists. It might be cool to have the AME really take a leadership role. In Europe, it is really only somewhat alternative history, but in the Americas 1879 is _very_ alternative.
One of the things I like about the game is that it legitimately has good intentions regarding diversity. This is the only part that sends up warning flags. You know I love the game and the setting; this is really just about opening up a conversation. I'm not proscribing any solutions, except that this might be a good area to bring in a black writer to get another perspective.
As an aside, what happened to the Free State of Jones? The Gullah Geechee? New Orleans? Sorry, each of those should be its own thread. Maybe I'll do that ...