So you took that job with the technomagic do-gooders from thesethreads, whom I am going to call the Knights-Errant because I don’t feel like typing techomagic do-gooders any more. In your most recent mission, you saved the Earth from destruction via sun-killer bomb, but in the process you and your space-time buggy were sent hurtling through hypertime. By the time you got the buggy under control, you had (a) emerged in Earth’s past, around the year 1890, near Boston; and (b) the buggy’s hypertime drive was irreperably goobered, as was your hypertime communicator and personal backup. You can neither get home on your own or call for help.
An hour later, you know that you’re in REALLY deep shit. If your brother Knights were going to rescue you, they’d have done so immediately (from your point of view; it might take much longer from theirs). If the Knights were able to track your passage through hypertime at all, it would necessarily have been to the date and place wehre you emerged into the normal space-time continuum; you’ve led such rescue missions yourself. The fact that your buddies weren’t waiting for you when you arrived means that they have no idea where or when in the multiverse you are. Athena herself couldn’t find you under such conditions.
Being a stubborn bastich, you decide to go for a longshot: a delay-mail setup, like Doc Brown used in BACK TO THE FUTURE. That costs you your last bit of hope. Heading to Boston, you discover that you’re not in the 1890s of your own past; you’re on an alternate Earth in which the South (with help from various European allies) won the Civil War. The victorious Confederacy expanded both far to the north and all the way to the Pacific; slavery is both legal and flourishing throughout, with the African slave trade re-established. All that’s left of the United States is New England and the Mid-Atlantic States. Checking your buggy’s computer records, you see that this Earth is one of the trillions that the Knights-Errant have never catalogued, which means the delay mail setup won’t work.
The Knights-Errant have a simple policy for this scenario. Use your own judgmentl. You don’t know what’s “supposed” to happen and have no way to find out, so you’re released from all obligations and shouldn’t worry about contaminating the time stream. And that gets you to thinking. The only parts of the continua buggy that are damaged are the hypertime drive and communications system. Those two are by far the most power-intensive parts of the system; without them to worry about, you could simultaneously use every other system at full output for 20 years before you ran out of juice. That means you’ve got hypersonic flight, a cloaking device, turbolasers, a transporter, even a replicator at your disposal for essentially the rest of your life. You could easily overthrow the CSA and free the slaves all by your lonesome–or, if you wanted to be more subtle, you could create an essentially unlimited amount of gold and use it to fund a social movement to free the slaves that way. Or of course you could do something else.
Free the slaves, no question about it. Start with non-violent methods, like purchasing and then freeing slaves. Someone will catch on at some point, so force will probably be required eventually. Recruit the slaves I free to help free the rest of the slaves, so it doesn’t seem so much like I’m a god or something. Further, conduct a full Reconstruction of former slave-owning territory, along with mandatory re-education (like post-war Germany) to show everyone how brutal and inhuman slavery was, and how nearly every white citizen played a part, even those who didn’t own slaves.
Conduct post-conflict Nuremberg-like trials. Every slave owner, overseer, slave merchant, etc., will answer for their Crimes Against Humanity (including rape, kidnapping, murder, brutality, cruelty, etc.). Some will probably be executed. Many more will be imprisoned.
Once America is a truly free place, then I’ll move on to the rest of the world. To prevent the Holocaust, I’ll establish secretive outposts in various parts of Europe to look for signs of anti-Semitic pogroms, and step in with force if they get started. Other genocides, like in Turkey/Armenia, will also require some attention to prevent. I’ll also have to keep a very close eye on nuclear weapons research.
Undoubtedly there would be plenty of problems that I couldn’t foresee, and many (probably) that pop up that wouldn’t otherwise come about. But I think it’s unlikely that they’ll be worse than the actual historical genocides, brutalities, etc.
Now, doing it by fiat may not be the best solution: my understanding is that many times when a third party tries to impose some level of morality on someone that someone rebels against the idea when the third party is not around any more (Correct me if I’m wrong, but I believe this was the situation with homosexuals in the soviet union, who were persecuted once the USSR collapsed).
However, being a knight-errant, plus with a computer to check my assumptions and a wide variety of powers, I foresee that the abolitionists of the time will be getting very lucky while the primary slaveholders and politicians helping them will run into a long streak of bad luck.
Hmm. I’m skeptical about my ability to impose a solution on the CSA single-handedly. I’d rather use the buggy’s technology to help the rump-USA advance its own tech base, turn into something of an economic powerhouse, with military technology significantly beyond that of the CSA. Letting the USA serve as a proof right next door that the CSA system is just not competitive might be the best way to encourage dissent within that system.
Um, homosexuality was technically illegal in the Soviet Union right up until it collapsed. (To be precise it was legalized in 1917 and then banned again in 1933). It was legalized in 1993.
Of course I’m freeing the slaves. Though I’m finding aspects of your hypothetical pretty improbable: what the South would have won would have been the right to be left alone within their 11-state region.
During the war itself, their armies could only stay in Maryland and Pennsylvania for brief periods of time, because they weren’t welcome there. Some in the South had this notion that if they could send an army up through Kentucky into Indiana, thousands of sympathetic Midwesterners would join their cause, but that was an illusion. Hell, once you get very far into 1862, even Kentucky, a slave state, wasn’t susceptible to this approach.
And given that the CSA Constitution basically gutted any centralized government, the notion that they would have conquered any nearby territory once the war was over was a remote prospect at best.
See: Childhood’s End, both in the passage where the overlords force South Africa to restore full rights to the minority population (who PUNCHLINE! turn out to be the whites), and where they discuss “the appropriate use of power.” Future-magic weapons need not be destructive on small or mass scales; terror and focus work fine.
South Africa:
The overlords blank out the sun for a 200-mile radius around Johannesburg for a few hours.
Correct application of power:
“How far do you think Hitler would have gotten if he’d had a voice talking and singing in his ear 24 hours a day?”
I’m Union-blue down to the bone, and think a Confederate victory in the Civil War would’ve been a disaster on any number of levels. So yes, I’d definitely do all I can to free the slaves and tear down the CSA. As earlier noted, try the subtle approach whenever and wherever it would work. It would be cool to use the buggy’s cloaking device and communications system for instance, to be the unseen Voice of God and encourage/demand the speedy dismantling of slavery and the reunion of the country.
1890, eh? Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain would still be alive (probably, in this timeline, just as in ours). I always thought he would’ve made a better POTUS than most of those who served 1865-1900. Now I can make it happen!: Joshua Chamberlain - Wikipedia
I’d be too chicken to try to overthrow the Confederacy directly. Not that it couldn’t be done with the buggy’s tech, but it couldn’t be controlled by one man, and I ain’t letting nobody else into the buggy. Just not happening. I’m never even showing it to anybody. It stays either well-hidden on Earth or in orbit, and the first thing I’ll do is rig up an automatic relay and deadman switch so that I can teleport myself home with a word, and be automatically teleported back if I’m ever rendered unconscious or even knocked down. Likewise, anyone other than me who tries to use any control gets unceremoniously teleported into the most convenient stream.
Anyway – after I’ve set up my worst-case-scenario countermeasures, I begin by putting an end to the slave trade, quickly and violently. It may take a while to identify ships involved in it (there’s no EM communications network to monitor), but it’s hardly impossible. Once I know which ships are heading from the US to Africa to buy slaves, I’ll scuttle 'em one at a time, soon after they leave port (going east, I mean) and leaving the survivors just barely enough resources to get back home and tell the tale. (The captains will NOT be among the survivors. They’re fucking slavemongers, and if they survive the initial bolt from the blue will be killed on general principles.) A couple of months of that will result in nobody being willing to carry slaves, though I might have to give some thought to finding a way to do it that doesn’t result in a complete disruption of transoceanic shipping.
Next I turn my attention to the stateside trade. Here I’ll have to act more surgically, as I want to free the slaves without killing them, but I prefer to act from the safety of my buggy. But slave factors and overseers get blasted from above once the slaves are removed to safety. (You don’t even need to use the cloak for that; nobody in 1890 has any anti-aircraft weapons.)
Between scaring the shit out of slave mongers, factors, and buyers–I’m fine with them believing that God Himself is putting His foot down–I use my replicator to make gold and banknotes, and use those to either assist any existing abolitionist movement or start one if none exists already. I don’t try to control them; I just look for the ones I just least likely to start a race war (Quakers, say) and slip them whatever material help I can. I leave it to them to help escaped slaves (though if I happen to encounter any Confederate official in the process of reclaiming an escapee, that official gets his head teleported off.)
You don’t need the cloaking device. Just hover half a mile up, or do fly-byes.
I don’t think you can count on Chamberlain or anybody else you know from your history books being alive, or to have the life experience this entirely different USA would need in a president… For the South to have won and expanded as it seems to, the point of divergence was probably before 1860. You’ll have to do some old-school research–libraries and newspaper morgues and such–to figure out who to assist politically.
That’s OK. I love research, and old libraries are cool. With my vast, period-authentic replicated wealth, I can also hire a regiment of researchers, spies, business agents and go-betweens.
Turbolasers and a cloaking device? Let’s see how the Confederacy handles having a total naval blockade in effect. Any major military target gets it as well. Use the replicator to arm the shit out of whatever pissed-off Native American tribes there are left. Every single slave ship gets sunk before it can get to Africa. Every slave auction space gets lasered out of existence. I will fucking erase the whole Confederacy from existence.
With the technology described in the OP, you could probably set yourself up as some sort of god or divine prophet, and gather a large number of followers willing to wage holy war with you. Will you fight for John-with-the-firey-chariot or will you risk his wrath and being smitten by his thunderbolts of death?
I agree. Large economic institutions have a lot of built-in inertia, and one man, no matter how well equipped, just isn’t going to make a great deal of difference. But if you leverage the technology into advancing the overall tech level of the free states, even further emphasizing their advantages (already overwhelming!) over the slave states, you’re then using the vast power of economic systems to make the changes you want.
In very coarse terms, it was the steam engine that freed the slaves. So, if you jump ahead to early cybernetics tech, you amplify the power of the steam engine a hundred fold. You not only free the slaves, but start the creation of a wealthy middle class!
If you go about freeing slaves, you also have to establish a massive education project to teach them to live independent lives.
One lesson I learned in U. S. History class was that this didn’t just happen spontaneously. Slaves in the ante-bellum American South commonly didn’t get a very good education, if any; and had a lot of their needs taken care of for them. When they were freed, many of them thought it meant they didn’t have to work any more – after all, the only free-person role models many of them had seen were their white masters, who didn’t have to work (because they had those slaves).
Many freed slaves ended up working for their former masters after all, only now they were employees. But their working conditions were just as bad as ever, and their pay was just bare subsistence pay. And, though they were free to go work for someone else now, they didn’t really have any bargaining power, nor business savvy about it.
So a lot of slaves ended up only “nominally” better off than before, even if they were legally free persons now.
The idea of convincing everyone that God hates Slavery is tempting… although I think you have to factor into that what happens when there’s massively-witnessed-and-documented evidence that God exists and is taking an active role in the world’s affairs… at least for a few years, about one particular issue. I mean, you could just go nuts inventing an entire religion, tell people what you really think is morally right, and then say “and in 10 years, I will be leaving you forever” or something so they don’t wonder. But that would be, quite literally, playing god.
So I think it’s tough. Taking direct action has the potential to free slaves NOW, but (a) has worrying moral and theological implications, and (b) doesn’t actually help freed slaves if they end up starving to death in the absolute collapse of society. Spreading money and information to abolitionists is probably better in the long run but does nothing to alleviate immediate and present suffering.
I wonder how many “accidental” fires at harbors and shipyards that would be blamed on non-supernatural arson it would take to bring either side of the Atlantic slave trade to a halt? (Although, again, it doesn’t help any one person if, instead of being chained in the hold of a ship for the middle crossing, he’s left to slowly starve to death in a holding pen in Africa because his captors don’t have anything useful to do with him.)
So I think I’d have to take a middle road. Do everything I can to encourage anti-slavery movements. At the same time wander around committing whatever acts of minor or major sabotage I can that will still be blamed on bad luck or human intervention. Although there’s no point in doing that willy-nilly, however satisfying it might be. Suppose I focus on one plantation, and teleport all the shackles off in the middle of the night, and also long-distance-melt the firing mechanism on all the overseer’s guns. So, there’s an uprising and an orgy of mostly-deserving-slaveowners-getting-their-just-desserts. But a month later how many of those freed slaves will actually be living better lives? And how many relatively innocents (children in particularly) will be (understandably) slaughtered during the carnage?
So I guess one step would be to establish an underground railroad of sorts, assuming that there’s somewhere for the underground railroad to end up. Maybe somewhere in Canada, if I spread some money around. Once it exists, then small and large slave escapes are a lot more actually meaningful rather than just satisfying-of-bloodlust.
I can also do a bunch of random things to weaken the overall power and influence of the CSA. Oops, their federal reserve bank suffered a break-in and all of their gold was mysteriously stolen. Well, that sucks, but no reason to blame it on God!
My understanding of history is that slavery was already on the way out. As the industrial revolution progressed in both manufacturing and agricultural, you needed fewer laborers and more educated workers. The 100 years following the Civil War showed that you could get cheap labor in a number of ways that was actually cheaper than slavery.
Given this assumption, it doesn’t seem to me like opposing the CSA would be a very big change in the timeline.
I would have a three-pronged attack:
use my gold synthesizer to fund groups opposed to the CSA and/or slavery. This might be political campaigns… perhaps we could convince Europe to embargo the CSA, or even to use their warships to interrupt the Africa trade.
use may vast libraries of information to help introduce a few key technologies that would help make slaves less valuable. For example, I might be able to speed up internal combustion engines to make more modern combines for harvesting crops. If they don’t already have a cotton gin, I’ll make sure someone gets the idea, and there’s another strike against slavery.
I just might use my weapons and such to make sure that slave-traders sailing from Africa disappear at an alarming rate. I can rescue the slaves and make sure that they wind up back home. However, this is the only element of violence that would make sense to me. A one-man army (even with technomagic) is not going to overthrow slavery or the CSA in a way that actually helps the slaves.
Assassination. Take out every leader the CSA has, and any they try to install. Cloaking device and lasers, remember? Make the entire CSA learn what Jules meant by Ezekiel 25:17.