Fallout - Chapter 135: Interlude (Patreon)

The Commonwealth, Minutemen Base.

The library at the Minutemen Base wasn't very large.

Strictly speaking, it couldn't really be called a library at all. It was just an empty room tucked into a corner of the second floor of the base's main building, which Givens had personally converted into a reading room.

Several rows of roughly made wooden bookshelves had been nailed to the walls, packed with physical books brought back from the Boston Public Library. Most of the pages had long since yellowed and curled with age, yet Givens had arranged everything neatly according to a classification system that only he understood.

An old table stood in the center of the room, covered with a piece of green velvet that no one knew where he'd found. The edges were badly worn, but the cloth itself had been washed spotless.

A desk lamp sat on the table, assembled by Givens from salvaged parts. Its heavy copper shade cast a soft, warm yellow glow.

The air carried the distinctive smell of old books. The faint sweetness of oxidized paper, the dry scent of leather bindings, and a trace of mustiness blended together into the quiet, comforting smell unique to a room filled with books.

Nate sat at the table with a book in his hands.

Ever since learning that the U.S. government had betrayed him, one question had remained lodged in his mind.

When he had enlisted, full of conviction, had the America he believed in ever truly existed?

He had asked Jace that question.

Jace had thought about it for a moment before giving him a simple answer.

"Givens wrote a history of the United States. It's pretty good. Finish it, and you'll find your answer."

That was why Nate had come to this reading room.

The book was wrapped in a dark brown leather cover, with a title stamped across the front:

A History of the United States of America, compiled by Givens.

The historical work Givens had personally researched and compiled was far more extensive than Nate had expected.

Many of the events recorded in it were things he had never heard about while growing up. The section on the Civil War in particular completely overturned what he thought he knew.

Givens stated the fundamental causes of the Civil War bluntly.

Southern slaveholders needed low tariffs so they could export cotton and import cheap manufactured goods from Europe.

Northern factory owners couldn't compete with European industrial products, so they wanted uniformly high tariffs across the country to protect domestic manufacturing.

During the Civil War, Northern armies and tax collectors rampaged across Southern territory, burning, killing, and looting with little restraint.

The Union Army broadly adopted scorched-earth tactics, directing its attacks at the civilian and economic foundations that sustained the enemy's war effort.

One of the Union commanders at the time, Sherman, left behind a famous saying:

"War is hell."

Grant believed that only by thoroughly destroying the South's ability to fight, its economic system, and the population's will to resist could the war be brought to an end as quickly as possible.

Once the scorched-earth strategy was put into practice, Union forces abandoned traditional supply lines and sustained themselves by taking supplies locally, while systematically destroying anything useful along their path.

Destroying infrastructure. Troops methodically tore up railroads. Soldiers heated rails until they glowed red, twisted them, and wrapped them around tree trunks, creating the famous "Sherman's neckties." Cotton mills, warehouses, and military installations were burned as well.

Seizing supplies. The army organized detachments specifically to raid the countryside, confiscating food from farms and taking livestock to support military operations.

Pressuring civilians. Although Sherman ordered his soldiers not to enter private homes without cause, if Union officers determined that Southern civilians had aided Confederate forces in harassing Union troops, those officers were authorized to retaliate directly and destroy private property.

Under those rules, a third of Atlanta was reduced to ruins.

Then there were the tax collectors.

To raise money for the war, the Lincoln administration gave tax officials enormous authority.

"Forced tax collection." As long as the money came in, almost any method could be overlooked.

"A cut of the taxes." Pay what was owed to the federal government, leave enough for the state, and keep whatever remained.

In the North, they could seize the homes and businesses of people who refused to pay taxes. They could use coercive measures against anyone who tried to obstruct or delay collection. They could even assess the value of a person's property on their own authority.

In the South, they were effectively allowed to kill legally.

Tax officials formed their own armed collection teams. Officially, they existed to collect special wartime taxes. In practice, they functioned more like legalized gangs, provided they returned north afterward to dispose of what they had taken.

They entered Southern farms and homes, opened fire at the slightest resistance, stripped the property of anything valuable, then moved on to the next target.

These armed tax squads, led by well-dressed officials in proper uniforms, could be even faster and more brutal than Sherman's army.

Yet this strategy of crushing the South completely failed to break its resistance.

Instead, it intensified the conflict.

Large numbers of poor Southern white farmers who couldn't afford slaves and had originally had little interest in risking their lives for wealthy plantation owners were driven to desperation.

Even without military pay, they willingly took up arms and fought the Union Army to the death.

Their homes had been destroyed. Their families had been killed. Their food had been taken.

Even if they stayed out of the war, they wouldn't survive the winter.

So they might as well fight the Northerners and take a couple of them down along the way.

Nate sighed and turned the page.

The entire next chapter was devoted to the commander of the Confederate Army, Robert Edward Lee.

General Lee was a native Virginian and a graduate of West Point. Before the Civil War broke out, he had served as a colonel in the U.S. Army, and Lincoln had personally invited him to command the Union forces.

He refused.

Although Lee personally opposed slavery, according to the book, his decision to join the Confederacy had not been made to preserve the institution itself.

Virginia had voted to secede.

His homeland, his family, and everything he owned were in the South.

He couldn't bring himself to take up arms against the people of his own home.

So he resigned his commission, returned to Virginia, and joined the Confederate Army.

Over the following years, his exceptional tactical ability allowed him to lead Southern forces that were inferior to the Union in manpower, industrial capacity, and logistics, yet still hold the front for years.

Givens described several famous battles in detail, including Chancellorsville, Fredericksburg, and the Second Battle of Manassas.

Again and again, smaller and weaker forces defeated larger and stronger ones.

Through tactical ability alone, Lee repeatedly compensated for the South's overwhelming strategic disadvantages.

Nate had never attended a formal military academy, but he still knew enough about warfare to understand what he was reading.

As he went through those passages, he could almost see the poorly equipped Confederate soldiers before him. Undernourished, badly supplied, and vastly outnumbered, yet standing like a flag battered by a storm, swaying again and again without finally falling as they held back repeated Union attacks.

He couldn't help thinking that General Lee's military ability was far beyond that of his own direct superior during the Battle of Anchorage, General Constantine Chase.

Nate could still remember the final battle on the Anchorage front, the Liberation of Anchorage.

The war had nearly been won by then, and Nate himself was approaching retirement.

But Chase had refused to let him take it easy.

He seemed determined to squeeze every last bit of usefulness out of Nate before he left the service.

One near-suicidal mission after another came pouring down on him.

Destroy enemy artillery positions.

Blow up tank supply depots.

Clear out surveillance posts.

Push deep into enemy command centers.

That bastard Chase clearly intended to use Nate until there was nothing left of him, all before he'd even had the chance to take off his uniform.

Fortunately, Nate had been both skilled enough and stubborn enough to survive.

Pushing those turbulent years back into the depths of his memory, Nate turned the page.

But even the strongest banner eventually falls.

By 1865, the South had exhausted both its ammunition and its food.

The Union naval blockade had completely wrecked the Southern economy.

Railroads across the region had stopped functioning. Factories had shut down. Soldiers were starving to the point that they could barely fight. Weapons and ammunition were running out, and there were no longer enough men or supplies in the rear to replace what had been lost.

Eventually, General Lee surrendered to General Grant at Appomattox Court House.

At the time of his surrender, his only request was that the Union Army treat captured Southern soldiers humanely, allow the men to take their own farm animals home so they could work their land, and minimize the suffering of Southern civilians after the war.

Grant agreed.

Nate stopped turning the pages.

He remembered how his history textbooks in Boston had described the war.

The North had fought to preserve the Union and free the slaves, so the North had been just.

The South had fought to preserve slavery and insisted on secession, so the South had been responsible for starting the war.

Homes destroyed?

That was a necessary price.

Simple.

Clear.

Black and white.

But in Givens' book, it wasn't that simple.

According to the book, the war fought under the banner of ending slavery had never truly intended to eliminate it completely.

Once the fighting ended, the Southern elite bowed their heads and accepted defeat.

They agreed to let Northern capitalists acquire the South's cotton industry at low prices.

In return, even though the Thirteenth Amendment was adopted in 1865, formally abolishing the institution that treated human beings as private property, one exception remained:

"Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction..."

But lawmakers had left an opening.

"...except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted."

The key point was that it applied to violations of any law, including state law.

Southern states quickly seized on that loophole.

Various Black Codes followed.

Vagrancy.

Unemployment.

Curfew violations.

Minor offenses were turned into crimes.

Black people were arrested in large numbers, sent to prison, then leased out like cargo to plantations, mines, and railroad companies.

This became known as the "convict leasing system."

Slavery had merely been given a different name.

The institution itself was still alive.

And in some ways, the new version was even more brutal.

A slave owner in the past still had an incentive to keep an enslaved person alive. That person was property. If they became sick, the owner had to spend money treating them.

Now, Black prisoners were simply expendable labor.

If one died, another could be arrested.

Laws could always be changed.

There would never be a shortage of replacements.

At the end of the chapter, someone had left a handwritten note in fine, narrow script.

The writing was small, yet impossible to overlook.

"History is never written by the victors, because they don't need history. They only need a story that sounds good."

Nate finished reading and closed the book.

He said nothing.

He simply sat there, staring at the desk lamp.

The dim yellow glow fell across the copper shade, spreading into a small, blurred halo.

"What was any of it for?"

He spoke so quietly that it was almost a sigh.

"All that... just for cotton?"

Then he thought about himself.

Nate.

Born and raised in Boston, Massachusetts.

A true New England Northerner.

Before the Great War erupted in 2077, he had been a retired U.S. Army veteran.

He still remembered why he had enlisted.

Freedom.

Democracy.

Those two words had been everywhere, repeated like scripture in recruitment advertisements, news broadcasts, and school presentations.

Day after day, they were proclaimed so loudly and so often that eventually no one stopped to ask what they really meant.

They simply became truths that weren't supposed to be questioned.

Nate remembered swearing allegiance to the Stars and Stripes.

He remembered spending the best ten years of his life on frozen battlefields.

He remembered watching his comrades die in wars supposedly fought for "freedom."

And he remembered his own belief in justice being worn away little by little.

Those wars had been fought in the name of freedom and democracy.

Underneath it all, they had been fought for oil.

For the black crude buried beneath the ice.

To keep the factories running.

To keep the weapons supplied.

Nate and countless other young men like him had been sent to the other side of the world and ordered to pull the trigger on people who had never had anything to do with them.

Two hundred and ten years had passed.

Now he sat inside this small reading room with the old book in his hands.

The yellowed pages looked almost gentle beneath the lamplight.

But the words written across them, about war, freedom, and justice, were completely different from what he had been taught in school two centuries earlier.

The nature of war, it seemed, had never really changed.

Nate suddenly felt as though something had finally clicked into place.

"War."

The word came from deep in his throat, so softly it was almost inaudible.

"War never changes."

The reading room fell completely silent.

Only the faint electrical hum of the desk lamp remained, mingling with the occasional footsteps and distant murmurs drifting through the base.