Chapter 3: The Romantic 19th Century
TL: Hanguk
Gaining knowledge of the past through James's memories was a good thing, but it still came with a few limitations.
For instance, the common sense rattling around in my head still ran on twenty-first-century settings, so whenever I bumped up against the averages of this era, it never failed to catch me off guard.
The America I pictured was a country blanketed coast to coast with a dense web of railroads, but the reality was that no direct rail line from Natchez, Mississippi, to Bloomington existed at all.
Which meant we first had to take a steamboat to St. Louis, about four days of travel, then transfer to a train for another eight hours or so.
Doesn't even this little snippet give you the general idea?
The nineteenth-century South didn't just trail the North in industry; its transportation network wasn't even in the same conversation.
All anyone here cared about was cramming in more cotton fields, squeezing the enslaved harder to boost output, and selling the stuff off to the whole world.
And the breathtaking humanitarianism of nineteenth-century America didn't stop there.
"Mr. James Sergent, Ms. Kate Miner. Your first-class accommodations are confirmed. We hope you have a pleasant journey, and you may set the slaves down beside the cargo hold."
"Oh."
Not load them, not seat them. Set them down.
Really going all out to treat them as objects rather than human beings, huh.
The personal attendants Kate and I had brought along were three in total: Leo, who served me; Ann, Kate's maid; and Sam, who would manage our luggage.
The three of them, used to this as an everyday occurrence, calmly picked up the bags and headed down below deck.
Watching it didn't exactly put me in a good mood.
It's not like I'm doing this because I've got some lofty sense of human rights.
But isn't it ridiculous, the way they strain to hypnotize themselves into believing that a being who can plainly hear and see and speak is just an object?
Of course, I wasn't fool enough to let it show and draw frowns from the people around me, so for the moment I gave the manager a polite word of instruction.
"Our itinerary is a hard push, from St. Louis to Bloomington and then all the way up to New York. If the slaves happen to fall ill, it's us who'll be inconvenienced, so please make sure they at least have space to rest comfortably."
And to back up the words, I slipped him a single silver dollar.
In this era, a dollar was about a day's wages for an ordinary laborer.
At the generous tip, the sailor's mouth spread into a wide grin, and he bowed politely.
"Not to worry, sir. I'll personally see to it that the slaves have space to stretch their legs and rest, so your journey stays comfortable."
"Thank you. Thanks to a kind sailor, my trip is off to a fine start."
This is the survival savvy of a poor kid who climbed the ranks fast in a major corporation's HR department.
In practice, if the slaves serving you personally end up in poor condition, it's the master who pays for it, so my behavior wasn't logically wrong.
After telling Kate to rest well, we each retired to our own rooms.
Even though it was the nineteenth century, first class in this era came equipped with a bed, glass windows, a washbasin, and even basic heating.
I lay down on the bed and went over the road ahead once more.
No matter how I worked the angles, the collapse of this barbarous neighborhood was simply a historical inevitability.
So how should someone like me, at the very least a sort of tribal chief in this neighborhood of barbarians, conduct himself to come through the rest of his life in one piece?
How do I talk smoothly enough to make the South reconcile with the North?
'Eeeveryone! Slavery is a barbaric institution, and of all the great white nations, only our America still maintains it! We must put an end to slavery!'
'Ohh, to think we'd been committing such wicked deeds. Let us all repent! From this day forth, the blacks are free!'
As if anything like that would ever happen.
If it were that easy, surely one of America's politicians would've cleaned up the mess by now.
In the first place, slavery persisted in the South not simply because Southerners were rotten to the core.
Slavery was an essential condition for the survival of a Southern society engaged in large-scale plantation agriculture, cotton above all.
And I'm not just talking about the economy.
Let's be blunt, how many people in the South actually owned slaves?
Judging by the knowledge stored in James's memory, the whites who owned slaves in the South came to roughly twenty to twenty-five percent.
And planters who held twenty or more slaves were a mere one to two percent, while the great-plantation masters with a hundred or more came to barely about a tenth of a percent.
In other words, the overwhelming majority of whites living in America owned no slaves at all, and yet there they were, crying, "Can't live without slavery," "Defend slavery to the last."
The biggest cause of this was the deliberate stoking of a mood meant to preserve the South's social order.
The South's ruling class relentlessly drummed into ordinary white laborers and farmers the pride of: even if you're poor, aren't you a far superior white man compared to those inferior slaves?
And because they were white, they could dream of the hope that someday, poor as they were now, they too might live a wealthy life with slaves of their own.
But what if slavery were abolished here and those blacks became free men, equal to themselves?
For men who had nothing to fall back on but their status as whites, it was only natural to tremble in terror that they too might become inferior beings like the blacks.
It was something they could not, and must not, accept.
So if I stepped out carelessly, I'd be branded a traitor on the spot and might get mobbed and lynched by my enraged Southern brethren.
Five years left until the Civil War broke out.
In those five years I had to grow my capital as much as possible and pour the bulk of it into financial assets or buying up factories in the North.
The point being, I must never reduce the number of plantations or slaves I held in the South.
The moment I showed signs of winding down a plantation, I'd obviously draw the suspicion: "You bastard! Trying to betray us and run off to the North, are you?"
I'd also have to maintain proper connections with politicians on both sides, so as not to get on the wrong side of either North or South.
And once the war broke out, I'd need to secure the means to guarantee my own safety and my family's.
To do that, what I had to do was–
"James, they're saying it's time to eat, so come out and have some food."
"Sure. I'll be right out."
Fill the stomach first, then think.
For someone like me who'd spent his days in a hospital unable to so much as eat, surviving on IV drips, a proper meal was a blessing and a thing to be grateful for, so I ought to attend to it reverently.
And besides, an empty stomach means the brain won't work either.
*
"Ohhh! The eldest son of the Sergent family, grown up so splendidly!"
"We've wanted so badly to meet you, and at last we can be together. A pleasure to make your acquaintance!"
"A pleasure, James Sergent!"
About four days from Mississippi to St. Louis.
And about eight hours by rail from St. Louis to Bloomington.
Having come through a journey that was long or short depending on how you looked at it, the moment we arrived in Bloomington we were met with our companions' fervent welcome.
Naturally, the members of this gathering were the most rabid defenders of slavery, assembled in backlash against the founding of the Republican Party.
Which was why men like me, masters of great plantations with hundreds of slaves, were quite naturally pushed forward as central figures of the group.
"Mr. Sergent, did you see on your way in? Apparently this goddamn excuse for a state makes you pay a fifty-dollar fine if you stay more than ten days with black slaves in tow."
"Ah, so it does. That's why I went ahead and signed an affidavit saying we'd only stay two days before leaving."
"Tsk, you see? Look at this. This is the vicious, atrocious true intent of those Northern dogs. They mean to turn this entire country into a world without slaves."
I wanted to ask what exactly was so vicious and atrocious about that goal, but I held my tongue.
Right now I had to keep wearing the mask of James Sergent, the slave king of Mississippi.
To think that my past life, walking the path of crushing every private feeling and focusing thoroughly on nothing but work, would come in this handy.
Wearing a sneer, I gave appropriate nods to the Dixies yapping away noisily.
Oh, and for the record, in this period the title "Dixie" was one that had only just begun spreading bit by bit through the South, not a slur but the very identity of the South, proud and brimming with affection.
So let them call themselves that all they like. Though naturally I had no intention of calling them anything of the sort.
In any case, having arrived at Pike House along with these noisy people, I called for the manager to check in.
The manager, holding a thick guest register, bowed politely and leafed through it for my name and Kate's.
"Mr. James Sergent and Ms. Kate Miner, yes. Confirmed. By Bloomington's commercial ordinance, blacks may not lodge in this hotel. So I'll show them to the storeroom in the basement."
"Now, you can't even take a separate room and have them stay there?"
"No, sir. As I said, by ordinance, colored people may not lodge in this hotel."
What the hell? They go on about how slavery's evil and Southern barbarians this and that, and these bastards are no different.
"I have an important deal to make in New York in a few days. If my servants stay somewhere filthy and pass an illness on to me, will the hotel take responsibility?"
"Mmm... I'll have the basement cleaned up as neatly as possible. Please understand it at that."
When it's an actual ordinance written into law and not just hotel policy, what more could I say?
We settled on the arrangement that I'd go down myself later to inspect how clean the basement was before sending the attendants down.
Up to this point, it was at least bearable.
My discontent, the petty irritations that kept piling up little by little, finally exploded right in front of the fine restaurant where we'd planned to dine.
"My apologies, sir. Colored people cannot enter our establishment."
"Why not?"
"Because I'm not particularly fond of niggers. And our regulars don't care for it when there are colored people about. The restaurants around here will all be much the same anyway."
"Hold on, so what you're saying is that around here a man can't even bring his attendants into a restaurant?"
"Mm, I suppose that's right? After all, this area is mainly frequented by white gentlemen of means. Blacks, well..."
The restaurant owner glanced at the line of black attendants strung out behind me and the Dixies, and faintly furrowed his brow.
"Shouldn't you be looking for somewhere else, where there aren't any customers likely to complain?"
Southerners, I'm sorry for cursing you out as if it were all on you.
Then again, no matter how they split apart and fought, they were all Americans in the end, so how different could they really be?
I knew, as a matter of knowledge, that the North hardly treated blacks well just because it had abolished slavery.
But experiencing it firsthand like this really drove home just how deep the humanitarianism of our nineteenth-century American brethren ran, didn't it?
Of course, I, James Sergent, pride of the South and frontrunner of black oppression, was supposed to let this slide as if it were nothing... no, wait.
It came to me.
A clever trick that could relieve this simmering irritation and earn the praise of the Southern Dixies all in one go.
"Owner, how much does this restaurant usually take in a day?"
"Sir? Well, selling food and liquor all day long... in pure revenue I suppose it'd come to around sixty dollars."
The words were barely out of his mouth before I pulled a hundred and fifty dollars from my coat and held it out in front of the owner.
"I'll rent the place out until you close for the day. Any objections?"
The owner looked back and forth between us and the money in my hand, cleared his throat, and snatched the cash up in a flash.
"Ahem, then I'll just have to put a notice outside saying something's come up today and we can't take other customers. Heh heh heh."
The owner, who only moments ago had been glaring with a look that said how dare a black set foot in my restaurant, walked back inside humming a tune.
I turned to look back at Kate, who was watching all this with a puzzled expression, and at the Dixies, unable to hide their bewilderment.
"Did you see that? The convictions of Northerners amount to no more than this: press a few dollars into their hands and they bend like reeds."
"Ahh~! So that's what it was. They mocked us as barbarians for keeping slavery, while they themselves can't stand to mingle with blacks. You skewered their hypocrisy perfectly."
"Indeed, indeed. Compared to men who won't even share a meal with them in a restaurant, aren't we far nobler people, seeing as we at least make a place for them? Hahaha!"
Yeah, no. Humor them for a moment and they're thrilled.
But even so, compared to you lot, those guys are a hair's breadth better.
It's just that my life is the stuff of legend, forced to sit here weighing which is preferable, shit or diarrhea.
If only I'd been in the position of someone with a mere ten or twenty slaves, I could've quietly switched over to the North and been done with it, but in any society it's only the ones who have to stand as a symbol, like me, who suffer.
But for some reason, what was this?
With the situation this shitty, I felt an inexplicable streak of stubborn defiance rising in me.
Right. Five years until the war breaks out.
So why not just spend that time changing the very environment around me, the whole thing? By whatever means it takes.
*****
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