TIME-ZONE! Civil War Kronicles, Part 9

It was another few hours before Grant even began to move. He took the paper the messener had left from the table and tried to force his eyes along the page. It was a letter.


Grant my dearest and oldest friend,
As you should very well know by now upon receiving this letter, the capitol has fallen to the south, and Mr. Lincoln has been killed, thereby making me president of whatever we have left of a Union. It seems that the Confederate army has shown that their ability in battle, and by extension their way of life, is far superior to that of the North. Therefore I propose that we surrender to Jefferson Davis before there is more violence and bloodshed directed against our white brethren. Davis has offered to make me vice president of the new America if I join him, and he will reward you handsomely if you do the same. Mind you, there shall be a few mock trials and executions against lesser union commanders, but you will be fine as long as you lay down your arms and join the South. Again I implore you to do the polite thing and cease in any attempts of insurrection against the true government of this nation.

Your dearest and oldest friend,
Andrew Johnson


The sheer hypocrisy, not to mention the genuine idiocy, of Johnson’s letter almost made Grant laugh. This was the Johnson who had betrayed his president, his country, and an entire race of people. This was the man who had given his notorious “Hey sorry guys, what Sherman meant by ‘40 acres and a mule’ was really ‘no acres and years of crippling poverty, racism, discrimination, and segregation.’ so yeah. I guess I’ll be taking your land now” speech. But that had been in another time and place, not this realm so strange and yet disturbingly familiar. How could everything have gone so wrong? It wasn’t that he had failed to break the cycle of timezones, after all. The cycle had been broken, but in a way that he could not imagine. Something devastating had happened. But Grant couldn’t sit on his ass, waiting for the fates to come to him. And as he forced himself out of his awful reverie, a worm of an idea was already burrowing it way towards the front of his thoughts, vying for a position among that swirling, muddled throng of ideas and indecisions. Grant stepped out of the tent and into a dream.

It wasn’t that he was in some fantasy world, with fantastic creatures and imagings zooming around in a menagerie of strange colors and sounds. This was perfectly real, but Grant had an acute sense of his place, his position within the expanses and confines of time and space. He was able to look at himself from outside the world he inhabited, and this world went by in a blur as Grant watched himself. He was giving a sombre speech of some sort to his men. He could not make out or understand the words themselves, but rather innately knew the speech’s content. He was going to fight on, to defeat the South and Johnson and slavery, no matter what the cost. And there he was, meeting the confederate armies in magnificent and awful confrontations, every battle taunting Grant with the risk of losing everything. And somehow he was winning. Here he saw a union government-in-exile created, appointing him their ‘dictator’ as in Roman times.There he was giving Lincoln’s emancipation proclamation. Here, stopping Sherman from his total war and the complete devastation ofthe south. There, he was already planning the legislation for reconstruction and civil rights. Somehow, he had seen this, experienced this, lived this before, even though he knew he had not.

And then there was the victory, the celebration, the prompt and unfortunate executions of Davis and Johnson. Time began to fly by even faster, while becoming all the more clear to Grant. He was abolishing slavery, strictly enforcing reconstruction, ending segregation, reorganizing the social structure of the south, creating universal suffrage, obliterating the KKK the moment it sprang up, even bringing prosperity to the south through industrialization, 10 years gone by in the flash of a second. And then it grinded to a halt. He was sitting in his office, dying, with his last moments finishing the legislation that would bring America back to democracy. His dictatorship had presided over a successful reconstruction, a healing of the diseases that had so ravaged America, the scars of the country slowly fading away. He signed his name and closed his eyes. And he was borne out onto the streets of Washington as the nation mourned his passing.

(OP: Nate, April 5 2008)