Is This the First US Science Fiction Novel? The Partisan Leader

      . . . .  Science Fiction, published very early in the United States of America, is a confederate novel by a Virginian, who was a passionate advocate for slavery.  

The Partisan Leader (1836) by Nathaniel Beverly Tucker (male; 'Beverly' is a common male surname and first name in earlier decades among the Aristo class in VA, SC, etc., particularly those descended from pre-Independence VA ), under the pseudonym of Edward William Sidney.  After losing election campaigns in two states, Missouri and Virginia, Tucker's well-connected friends and family got him appointed as professor of Constitutional Law at William and Mary -- his father held the position before him. As we see, this gave Tucker copious free time to write novels (while waited on hand-and-foot by enslaved labor): his first novel, George Balcombe was also published in 1836. *. 

He employed his additional leisure time to write political pro-southern slave state secession, economy and power tracts. Thus, as one likely would expect, this, if not the first, one of the first sf novels -- the novel is set 13 years in the future from the year in which it was published -- would be a romance centered on Virginia, about slavery,  a successful Southern secession from, and confederation against, the dastardly North, which Happy Ending turns the entire Western hemisphere into a vast slave state.

Tucker lived in those halcyon decades in which the Southern Plantation class ruled the Federal government from the White House all the way down, planning to expand slavery as the economic system throughout the Western Hemisphere, while defending it from the heinous designs of Britain, "the Great Apostle of Emancipation”. This 'design' was to destroy the Southern cotton economy in favor of their own in India (which Britain did not have and wasn't trying to have then), while invading the United States with an army of Africans and those freed from bondage out of Cuba, Haiti, Brasil, etc..

 

One of Tucker's  best friends was Virginian, Abel P. Upshur, who was contributing his bit to expansion and defense by building a navy that could successfully take on Britain's.  The photo above is the USS Abel P. Upshur (DD-193), a Clemson-class destroyer in the service of the United States Navy and United States Coast Guard until -- IRONY!  IRONY! IRONY! --  transferred to the United Kingdom in 1940. During World War II, she served in the Royal Navy as HMS Clare.

The Partisan Leader can be read on the Documenting the South website here. 

* Incidentally, as a point of interest in the history of American Literature, it was reviewed by this southerner, Edgar Allan Poe.

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     . . . . This Vast Southern Empire: Slaveholders at the Helm of American Foreign Policy (2016) by Matthew Karp "illuminates this era of American history with an intelligent survey of those Southern politicians and their ambitions, both at the regional level and the federal level. “By the middle of the [19th] century,” he writes, “southern masters ruled over the wealthiest and most dynamic slave society the world had ever known.”

Their leaders were nationalists, not separatists. Their “vast southern empire” was not an independent South but the entire United States, and only the election of Abraham Lincoln broke their grip on national power. Fortified by years at the helm of U.S. foreign affairs, slaveholding elites formed their own Confederacy—not only as a desperate effort to preserve their property but as a confident bid to shape the future of the Atlantic world.

 Calhoun's policy was to insure the power of the agrarian South by limiting the power of the federal government. "That section distinct from the rest of the nation, however, eventually aimed to create its own Confederate States of America and then export that confederacy. The result would be a Southern Empire."

The consequence? The failure or success would depend upon southern statesmen advancing that world through United States foreign policy. “Few mid-nineteenth-century Americans,” he writes, “were more deeply engaged with international politics than southern slaveholders.” Those in positions of power, southern elites, also kept the international politics of slavery under constant surveillance, “tracking threats to slave property . . . monitoring oscillations in global attitudes toward emancipation.”

"Given that global perspective, there was little in the southern “institution” that was “peculiar.” During those antebellum decades, the blunt facts illustrate a vise-like grip on the presidency, the cabinet, and the lower levels of federal administration. Professor Karp quotes Iowa Congressman Josiah Grinnell, who observed that during those antebellum years southern slaveholders held the Secretary of State office for two-thirds of the time."

In their minds, Great Britain’s 1833 Slavery Abolition Act was part of the nefarious design to destroy them.  This accounts for the region's adamant anti-British policy in all things up until the War of the Rebellion.

I do believe though, the author is mistaken when he describes these Southerners as "cosmopolitan, highly educated and sophisticated -- because their fundamental tenets were made of contradiction. They were firmly convinced Britain schemed to destroy them economically for it's own economic benefit.  Yet, these leaders also assumed, presumed and expected Britain to support and assist and finance their Great War of the Rebellion. It could have no choice, they were certain, because Britain's industry depended on King Cotton.

Goes to show, again, that the current crops of racist conspiracists, delusionists, climate and election deniers, disseminators of lies and fakery and outright insanity come from a vast pedigree in our national history of determined violence to rid themselves of government and have their own preferred systems of cruel, selfish greed.

As He Said: "The Past Isn't Even Past"

     . . . . Most of our current crises are connected to this nation's founding history in genocide and African slavery -- economically, politically and socially, even down to emergency natural disaster crews. 

As we all know, the vast majority of our vast incarcerated populations are of color -- and poor. Now many local California politicos and pundits -- and the state fire fighting agency --  are bitterly criticizing the state for giving prisoners early release due to the hotspotting prisons are for outbreaks of covid-19.  Guess what?  The state's fire fighting agency, underfunded by the taxpayers and the politicians, depend instead on what is essentially slave labor -- which for the moment at least it does not have so our homes burn.  How much you want to bet California doesn't make this mistake again?

We all benefited, we benefit even now, from this nation's history of  slavery and perennial racial injustice to African Americans and Native Americans, even if we are more recent immigrants, whether we are white or not. 

We are seeing it so clearly with our dependence upon the poor and of color as the real line of disaster fighting -- and just to get groceries, to get medical care.* Because, you know, we believe don't need to pay them even a living wage.

Really, who believes in their heart that $1 - $2 a day for fighting these wildfires is pay?  particularly for those whose lives and health are at such a high level of risk? Plus, we all know too, these firefighting prisoners are legally prohibited from getting jobs as professional fire fighters because that means paying salaries and benefits. It's so much more practical and tax saving to just refresh the prison population constantly.  Keeping people who have served their sentence from getting real jobs is an effective method of ensuring that constant refreshment.

We all benefit, then and now, who aren't African American, who aren't Native American.

The brilliant light of 19th Century literature in this country couldn't have happened without the resources of slavery.  Longfellow's wife, recall, was vastly wealthy, like all those Boston cultural luminaries were -- allowing them to dedicate their lives to art and culture. There were so many who had that wealth resource that within 3 centuries of first colonization the US there were enough heirs of such wealth to support a leisure class that supports the arts and literature.

Where did much of that wealth of New England and the North, like NY, come from?

As with Longfellow's wife, her father owned the vast wealth creating textile factory complexes such as his Lowell, MA.  Those textiles were produced from the slave-grown cotton.  Much shipping and insurance and banking in so many ways out of slavery -- even after the African slave trade to the the US was abolished, even after slavery itself supposedly was abolished.  

Immediately after the war those wealthy northern and New England movers and shakers headed south** and allied with the great pioneers of neo-slavery, sharecropping, such as the Percys of Greenville, Mississippi (Walker Percy's family -- which was why he could live and write without a job.)

It is nearly impossible to look at even the brilliant light elements of our past and not see it rooted in and shadowed by slavery and genocide -- including the massive removal out of "Dixie" to make that vast territory safe for slavery. 

This morning there's a Marine Dem retweeted on Bill Gibson's Twitter feed, who warns us from where he lives within a huge maga country enclave, that 'they' hate 'us' with almighty passion, they are voting.... it's all about white vs everyone else -- and women. If you can only get it by giving over all power to the insane, and destroying what's left, and dying too, so be it. Long rage the covid-19 hoax! as proclaimed by a relative undergoing chemo for cancer in a rally in a waiting room of fellow unmasked cancer victims.

It merges well with Jon Meacham on the history of the revisionist Glorious Lost Cause history of the War of the Rebellion -- which began immediately.*** 

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/23/books/review/lost-cause-meacham.html?

[....]Here, then, was the ur-text of the Lost Cause, of the mythology of a South that believed its pro-slavery war aims were just, its fate tragic and its white-supremacist worldview worth defending. In our own time, the debates over Confederate memorials and the resistance in many quarters of white America, especially in the South, to address slavery, segregation and systemic racism can in part be understood by encounters with the literature of the Lost Cause and the history of the way many white Americans have chosen to see the Civil War and its aftermath.

To Pollard, the Southern side had fought nobly for noble ends. “The war has left the South its own memories, its own heroes, its own tears, its own dead,” he wrote. “Under these traditions, sons will grow to manhood, and lessons sink deep that are learned from the lips of widowed mothers.” Pollard declared that a “‘war of ideas,’” a new war that “the South wants and insists upon perpetrating,” was now unfolding.

And in many ways it unfolds still. The defiance of federal will from Reconstruction to our own day, the insistence on states’ rights in the face of the quest for racial justice and the revanchist reverence for Confederate emblems and figures are illuminated by engaging with the ethos of which Pollard so effectively wrote. He enlarged on his thesis in “The Lost Cause Regained,” published in 1868. Pollard wrote that he was “profoundly convinced that the true cause fought for in the late war has not been ‘lost’ immeasurably or irrevocably, but is yet in a condition to be ‘regained’ by the South on ultimate issues of the political contest.” The issue was no longer slavery, but white supremacy, which Pollard described as the “true cause of the war” and the “true hope of the South.”

The Civil War, then, was to be fought perennially....

We're already fighting our second civil war -- but while they are using their guns and everything else already, we insist on pretending it hasn't happened yet and it won't happen because we are going to win (one) election.  Which latter is in NO WAY assured of happening either. They certainly are doing everything, including shooting, to make sure it doesn't happen.

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*  For a breathtaking account of earlier dependence on coerced African American labor  even when slavery supposedly was over, see John M. Barry's Rising Tide (1997) for how the Walkers did it in their Yazoo Delta Kingdom in the Great Mississippi Flood of 1927.

** One of the most well recognized among those even now, is J.P. Morgan.  Not to mention all the racial injustice placating D.C. and presidents such as Theodore Roosevelt did for them, helping make labor laws and court cases go away, as he did for the Walkers with whom he happily went hunting.

***  In truth, though Meacham doesn't mention it, the revisionism began at least as soon as Vicksburg fell, with Davis and others suddenly dropping 'slavery' from their cause for fighting -- though it was top and center in their constitution as a 'nation' and the secessionist state constitutions, and in their many other printed works before and after secession.

Pat Conroy Dies

In some ways his books were my introduction to South Carolina, starting when he began publishing them.  As with so many readers certainly, that

Prince of Tides (1986) contained the ambient charm of South Carolina -- for WHITE readers -- his work provided me with regional and thus exotic description of place and time, particularly that of coastal SC.

I read intently his book describing his experiences teaching on an isolated Sea Island school of all black kids. {c&p from Wiki}:

The Water Is Wide is a 1972 memoir [1] by Pat Conroy and is based on his work as a teacher on Daufuskie Island, South Carolina, which is called Yamacraw Island in the book. The book is sometimes identified as nonfiction[2] and other times identified as a novel.[3]

As this region of the U.S. is the cradle of secession and slavery is God's will by GAWD, it was particularly interesting he was very young then, and it was the Civil Rights and Vietnam era.  I didn't read The Water is Wide though, until I had all that history about SC and the slavery of the coast and the Sea Islands rice plantations. Anyone who possesses this historical information sees  Beaufort (site of what is known as "Secession House" the mansion built by Barnwell Rhett and his fire eating secessionist brothers; there's even an inscription they put on the basement walls that boasts, "in this house the first meeting of Secession was held")  and the Sea Islands with very different eyes than do snow birding tourists,

I'm looking forward to being down there again at the end of May.

From the Richmond Enquirer, July, 1858

Virginia knew exactly what the stakes were for her personally, pro and con for secession.

I have long been wondering what the horse trading was that got Virginia to finally secede – it was a rush all through the south to push through secession -- like the way the dubdarth coalition shoved through war in Iraq, war on 'terrorism', the Patriot Acts, etc. in the immediate aftermath of 9/11.  Virginia dragged her feet on secession (and one entire part refused all together and seceded then, from Virginia, to become West Virginia). Without Virginia at the helm even South Carolina and Texas knew they stood not a chance of winning The Wah. One of the persuaders was that Richmond would be the capital of the CSA -- and very likely, after winning the Waw, of the new United States of Slavery.  It still rankled among the old Virginia aristocracy and their nouveau peers (like Woodrow Wilson's father and then Woodrow Wilson himself) that King James had taken away Virginia's Dominion.  Yet there must have been more, as we can infer from reading this opinion piece from 1858:

If a dissolution of the Union is to be followed by the revival of the slave trade, Virginia had better consider whether the South of the Northern Confederacy would not be far more preferable for her than the North of a Southern Confederacy. In the Northern Confederacy Virginia would derive a large amount from the sale of her slaves to the South, and gain the increased value of her lands from Northern emigration – while in the Southern Confederacy, with the African slave trade revived, she would lose two-thirds of the value of her slave property, and derive no additional increase to the value of her lands.  

We do certainly know that one of the horse trades was written into the CSA constitution: South Carolina would not re-open the African Atlantic slave trade.

One of the reasons the British army didn't do better in the South during the War of Independence is the South received so many supplies through the Spanish port of New Orleans -- in spite of as many of her slaves running to help the Brits as possible -- and the terrible atrocities the Brits committed, to which we can trace back Andrew Jackson's undying hatred of the Brits.  The Spanish could get supplies up to SC and VA via Georgia from the  Floridas by way of Cuba much faster than the Brits could get theirs.  Only the coastal parts were settled at the time, and -- that's very difficult country to traverse and out of which to supply an army.  Once you've raided out the plantations (Virginia didn't have cities, and Richmond was built on the Falls, past which the James is no longer navigable by ship, and South Carolina had Charleston -- the only Atlantic port for her -- which is a long way from the fabulously wealthy Sea Island rice plantations) -- you're kind of stuck in a real wilderness of forests, swamps, creeks etc.  Your only dependable route of transport is the huge Chesapeake.

But the people who lived there -- they knew the navigation and how to do it.

Thus the Brits held the colonial cities like Philadelphia -- but that did them no good.  They didn't own the country or the immense wildernesses.

And further west, it all belonged to Spain -- or France and Indians still, as with the Mississippi Valley (though at that period New Orleans was Spanish).