Sure, but then what happens? If the entire society collapses, that’s not going to make life better for the slaves, who will still be slaves, but slaves of a nonfunctioning society on the verge of total meltdown, as opposed to slaves of a stable society with functioning infrastructure.
There’s a difference between assassinating the CSA leaders during the civil war, which presumably leads to the North winning the war much faster, and doing so during hypothetical alternate-history peacetime.
They can always totally surrender. Those would basically be the two choices I’d offer them. If you haven’t guessed, I regard the Confederacy as right down there with child molesters and people who talk in the theater. I would do everything in my power to erase them as completely from history as the Etruscans. (Sorry, Skald.) Let no two stones stand together.
Right… but… surrender to who? You? Are you going to publicly reveal your existence and powers? Surrender to the USA, a much smaller country that is not (in this hypothetical) currently at war with them, might not WANT to be at war with them, and hasn’t the faintest clue to do with a million odd square miles of new territory and several million newly freed individuals?
I don’t think anyone is disagreeing with your rage or your judgment of the CSA. But seriously, you go in, you reduce every governmental building, slave market and slave ship in the CSA to rubble. Then for extra fun, you orbital-laser-assassinate every overseer and every master and vanish-ize every shackle and chain and whip and locked door.
So… what happens the next day? The next week? The next month?
First off, I’ve known some racist good old Southern boys and I’m pretty sure they’d conclude that if they were going down, the blacks were going first.
But more seriously, what does a freed slave know how to do? You can’t just throw a million people who can’t read or write, who don’t even have experience running their own households, out in a job market that is totally unprepared for them. I’m not going to be the kind of liberator who says “Congratulations! You’re now free… to starve.”
And how does this affect everyone else? Imagine all million of these slaves running for Canada, Mexico and the USA all at once. Now we’ve reduced an entire continent to complete and utter chaos, and most of the people who suffer are entirely innocent of the crimes I want to stop.
(It’s a little like: which is better, the Marshall Plan or the Treaty of Versailles? In one case, restoration of our enemies leads to a stronger economy that benefits the entire world. In the other case, punishment of our enemies just set the stage for 20 years of worldwide stagnation and a bigger war.)
My mistake - I must’ve heard what Lenin did and missed what Stalin did. Thanks for fighting my ignorance.
Is this a Next Generation-style transporter, or an Original-style one? I just need to know if I need to stand in the transporter room with a weapon, or can do point-to-point, as I beam all the slaveholders, and their enforcers, in batches of 6 or so (families grouped together, and with basic supplies, I’m not a monster), to other parts of the globe. Mostly the European countries that backed the CSA, because fuck those guys, but also any empty places I can find.
For every plantation or other location thus freed,a large black stone monolith will pop up at the entrance saying “Slavery Is An Evil In My Sight! Thus Sayeth MrDibble! P.S. I Am Not A God. Gods Don’t Exist! Read Darwin!!!”
I will also approach a banker in the Free States with lots of gold, to open accounts in the names of the slaves on each of those plantations, and some extra to fund teachers to travel to those plantations and start reconstruction.
By the time the first slaveholders start trickling back to the US, I expect my changes would be established somewhat. But I don’t mind repeatedly transporting people away until they learn their lesson.
P.S. I am not approaching this hypothetical in full seriousness. I’m thinking how can I free the slaves in a way that’s maximally fun to me. Freeing them is a no-brainer. Not just the ones in the South, either - Africa, Asia, S. America and Australia is going to be a colonist-free zone by the time I’m through…I hope the European countries like their mass of new immigrants. Serves them right for backing the CSA.
And the idea that Blacks are incapable of looking after themselves? Who ran the plantations in the South? Who farmed its fields, cooked its food, washed its clothes, carried its burdens? Yes, most slaves couldn’t read - neither could most poor White farmers to a great degree, I shouldn’t wonder.
Of course not.
That’s thinking too small.
The Confederacy, and her European allies, have obviously grown far too powerful to merely “topple.” Their diseased economic, social, and political structures must be systematically eroded, crushed, humiliated, and replaced.
To that end, I intend to take the ship to another rising, energetic nation, with ambitions towards expanding it’s influence. Meiji Japan.
I shall offer my “assistance” to them, in their efforts at modernization. “Advising” them of the terrible fate that history has in store for them should they turn me down—probably not that far from the truth, from certain points of view, plus a bit of embellishment.
After that, I may try to bring in other powers who may be sympathetic to the common cause—or at least, resentful of the power block of the CSA and her allies, and frightened (or frightenable) for their own places in history.
If all goes well, this “coalition” will burst upon the world a new order, strange even to the men who build it, to shake men out of cities, and businesses, and economic relations; a new pivot around which the world would revolve. A new…axis.
Today, it may be China. Or the Raj. Tomorrow, the liberation of the CongoFree State. After that…
In the end, the traitorous devils who destroyed great nations will watch their beloved “planter aristocracy” fall under the boot of a Caesar, and the swords of a Mikado. They will be stripped of their power, their livelihood, their way of life, and finally their culture, their language, and their history.
The South will Fall. Again, and forever.
So, can my replicator make replicators? Because that’s what I would do. Flood the world with the things and see what happens. 
No, don’t free the slaves. Give them frilly maid costumes and stockingd to wear “on the job” and hire tall, striking-looking women to wear leather corsets and whip them. Explain to them that they are enjoying a specialized sexual perversion that persons in other parts of the world have to pay big money to enjoy. Threaten to free them if they get out of line. Explain that in the future people will be writing fantasies based on THEIR experiences.
Yes, that makes about as much sense as the CSA winning the Civil War.
Why would I bother freeing the slaves? I would plan to enslave the entire human race anyway.
Grow food, for one thing. You kill the plantation owners, use the replicator to give the now ex-slaves plenty of guns so they can defend themselves against the white folk, and let them grow food to feed themselves and their livestock with instead of cotton and tobacco. Then let them figure things out from there themselves. Once they can feed and defend themselves, they have agency, and can stand or fall on their own.
The Confederacy could certainly have won the war, in the sense of winning its independence, not conquering and occupying the North. It always lagged behind the U.S. in military and industrial potential, but won most of the early battles and might have forced the U.S. to sue for peace had events unfolded slightly differently. If Great Britain had intervened as a result of the Trent incident; if Lee had won at either Antietam or Gettysburg and then threatened the capital; if Lincoln had lost reelection in November 1864 (as he considered very likely the previous summer), etc.
Particularly Antietam, as up to that point the British government was toying with intervention. The South had a better ratio of strength vs the North than either the 13 Colonies vs King George or North Vietnam vs The USA, and in both those efforts the underdog prevailed with outside support.
I would of course overturn slavery and the CSA (a Lincoln man through and through!), but I think to make it stick, I would have to include other political forces, such as the rump-state USA and surviving loyalists in the CSA. It will work better if it’s the idea and belief of many people, not just the guy with the flaming chariot.
Also, habits given up too quickly tend to revert. A long an bitter struggle will drive the point home (not to mention the diehards dying hard.)
Anyone else thinking of hooking up with a couple of the Plains tribes and just generally killing whitey? It would accomplish freeing the slaves and more that could have interesting results. Especially if you went planet-wide and at least blasted them back to the BC/AD line/era.
(Imagine “second contact” if Europeans ever did make it back to the New World)
First, I free the slaves.
Then, I make everyone MY slaves!
I live out the rest of my days as the tyrannical Emperor of the World and God on Earth. Someday I will be remembered as History’s Greatest Monster.
During the Civil War the Union had two weapons it was barely aware of. If these had been used extensively and intelligently the Civil war could have ended much earlier. Union casualties would have been much less. The Confederate Army would have been nearly annihilated.
These weapons were the Henry Rifle,
and the Gatling Gun.
The Henry Rifle was available at the beginning of the Civil War. It was an forerunner of the Winchester repeating rifle. During the time it took to load one bullet into a rifled musket one could load sixteen bullets into a Henry Rifle. The Henry Rifle did not have an attachment for a bayonet, but that could have been added. If the Union forces had been armed with Henry Rifles at the First Battle of Bull Run in July 1861 the Civil War could have ended then.
The Gatling Gun was a predecessor of the machine gun. It was not available until 1862. Several Gatling Guns at the Battle of Gettysburg in 1863 could have annihilated the Confederate forces.
If you can make *lots *of banknotes… well, if they thought they had inflation problems during the war, just wait. A few Santa Moneybags runs across a few population centers sounds like just the thing to really mess up a society where entrenched wealth is a linchpin of the social order (which is most of them, admittedly, but especially so of anything resembling the old slavocracy).
I’m not so sure the slaves did know how to grow food. Cotton, tobacco and sugar cane were some of the crops that relied extensively on slave labor, so large amounts of their time were not spent on food crops.
It’s also one thing to be told when to go out into the field to plant and another altogether to know when to do the telling. It’s like saying that the guys on an assembly line could keep an auto company running if you killed off the executives and the engineers. There’s a lot of work that goes into making sure that the guys on the assembly line have something to do, and they don’t necessarily have those skills.
I expect it’s more like a NextGen shuttle transporter. The term “continua buggy” implies that it’s meant for very few passengers; probably there’s just one pad. (The turbolasers and other such weaponry were clearly aftermarket add-ons specifically installed for the save-the-earth mission.)
[OP rather than poster]
The NextGen replicators all had chambers in which the replicated items appeared, and as noted upthread the buggy obviously isn’t that big (it’s not a TARDIS, either) so the replicator itself must be pretty small. So I’m going to rule that a replicator can only make items smaller than itself; thus you’ll have to make the parts and assemble them. (Not sure what you’ll do about the housing.) I also doubt it can replicate its own fuel (or, rather, that replicating, say, 10 grams of antimatter uses up 20 grams, so doing so is stupid), any more than it can make space-time-twister.
That said, I’m surprised you’re the first to suggest this. I’d think that the first thing anybody would do is replicate all the crucial parts of the system.