the Confederacy

[Slimcreeper]

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 ...

[etherial]

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.

Slaves represented the single largest block of Capital in the Nineteenth Century. The UK decided to pay reparations to slave owners during their Abolition and it took them over 100 years to pay off the debt.

[Andrew1879]

This isn't in the published books - we were saving it for the Confederacy sourcebook. The Confederacy used a particularly nasty trick for this. They assessed the newly freed slaves their own market value, and turned them into indentured servants. This allows us to make the Union complicit in the continuing harsh treatment of blacks in the South. For the record, we are hiring a black writer from the American South to write the Confederacy sourcebook, had declared that some time ago, and will be including some of the political institutions and ethnic peoples you have mentioned. You will be seeing some of the migration you mentioned also - for example, the Buffalo Soldiers will be a much larger contingent, as newly freed blacks move West and enlist in order to have a means of support. Field hands were not needed in the South in pre-War numbers due in part to the automation developed that helped the South survive the War, and due in part to the destruction of the plantation system that allowed Stephens to sell the idea of ending slavery.

Part of what we intend for this game line is to confront some of the darker aspects of history head on. We're already tackling colonialism and empire, with the Zulus being co-opted and the Saurids standing in for the Native Americans during the British colonization of North America. We've set up situations to deal with indigenous peoples in Canada, the Union, and Mexihco. We're hiring a writer from India to handle the Raj sourcebook from the Indian perspective. Dealing with the Confederacy, and racial issues in the Americas, is something we intend to be very careful with, and make sure that we are giving the mic to the right voices.

[Slimcreeper]

Something like this is what I hoped and rather expected to hear. You guys generally do a good job with this sort of thing. I hadn't heard about the authorship for the Confederacy; that's perfect.

What about the rise of magic on the religious traditions in the New World? Do we see a power dynamic shift with Native American's mystical technologies gaining new power?

[etherial]

It's also like to see why the Russians failed to carry out their threat to make the Civil War a World War, although perhaps their internal problems were exaggerated enough by the rise of magic to answer it for me.

[Andrew1879]

The power shift with the rise of magic will be there, but not as pronounced (or as clunky) as Shadowrun. Again, we're engaging the appropriate writers, and going to Native authors for the American magic story. Yes, there will be a power shift. The Dine' will rise a lot sooner as an economic power than they did in our world. Not going to give away more than that.

etherial - the Russians didn't get involved because of the Ottoman Empire, which is not the Sick Man of Europe in our gameworld. Again, don't want to spoil the surprise.

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