THE LIGHTS ROSE, the crowd dispersed. Usually the young men who came to watch the fight left afterward with adrenaline coursing through their veins, and were apt at the slightest provocation to start brawling with one another in the back alleys south of the boardwalk. But on this night the crowd was muted, and diffused quietly to the Imperial and the other Reynolds Street bars.
Adam Bragg Jr., fully drunk now, invited the sisters back to the Woodrow, where he and his entourage had booked every room for the weekend. But it was clear his interest lay in only one of the twins, and both declined.
Sarat and Dana stood awhile on the boardwalk, watching the docks. In the wake of the big winter storms, the wash often broke over the seawall. Tonight the water moved like black molasses. Even the massive freight ships, the first of which should have started to arrive at port by now, were nowhere to be seen.
“A guy at the fight said one of the gift ships ran aground all the way out at the Mouth,” said Dana.
“They’re here every month,” Sarat replied. “How do they still manage to screw it up?”
“The land shifts under the water. Places that were deep one season turn shallow the next, and unless you’re out there every day you can’t know it.”
Sarat watched the men down in the reef pilots’ house. The lights were on. They were drinking and playing cards and passing time, hoping for the call to head out to the Mouth, the gaping waterway where the ocean met the river near the drowned remains of old Savannah. Others had already joined the tugboats dispatched to rescue the freighter, because it was a day’s work and, even though the reef pilots earned a better living than almost any legal job in Augusta offered, they could still use the money.
“You going to meet that pretty boy of yours tonight?” asked Sarat.
“You know I am,” said Dana. “Don’t go making it a big deal when it ain’t. We’re just seeing each other is all. It’s just fun. I’ll be there when you get up in the morning.”
“He’s not even a real pilot.”
“He’s in training. Everybody’s gotta learn to do a thing before they do it. Gotta get taught.”
“He’s not good enough for you.”
Dana laughed. “You tell me one man you think is.” She took her sister’s hand and kissed it. “I’ll see you soon, beautiful girl.”
Sarat knew where her sister would be spending the night: the Fargo shipping building on 7th Street. It was a block-wide, bureaucratic-looking thing, and amassed within it were the reef pilot trainee dorms, the shipping authority and customs offices, the foreign crews’ hostel, and the north Georgia branch of the Free Southern State.
Sarat despised the place. It spoke to her of all the unnecessary adornments with which her country’s institutions justified their own existence. In truth, the customs officers were crooked, the hostel a thinly disguised brothel, and the temporary storage units in the basement used almost exclusively by smugglers.
It was, all of it, a lie—and the worst kind of lie: a charade of normality at a time of war. The thought of her sister inside that building—lying on one of those soiled bunks with one of those vacant, libidinous boys—made her sick.
Alone, she went to the Belle Rebelle to drink and then to sleep. It was a small bar, built inside one of the old row houses between 10th and 11th Streets. Upstairs, the owner, Layla Denomme, kept three rooms. Some nights she rented them out, but most of the time she let old friends and regulars stay there for free.
Layla’s sixteen-year-old daughter, Layla Jr., had been pouring drinks there for the last two years, standing atop a Yuxi crate to see over the bar top. She knew the regulars by name and Sarat by more.
Of the Belle Rebelle’s die-hard regulars, there were predominantly two groups—the first were stump-limbed war pensioners. They sat at the back tables, growing rust and getting eyes-shut drunk on Atlanta’s dime. The others were river rats: reef pilots, tugboat and towboat captains, and the men who ran skiffs laden with contraband in the dead of night. These patrons sat at a corner of the bar, congregated near a large screen mounted on the back wall.
The screen showed the position and status of the freighters as they approached and navigated the river. Whenever one of the charity ships needed a reef pilot or a batch of dockhands to help with unloading, a notice popped up on the screen.
The simple screen was, for the bar owner, a coup—the result of a years-long relationship with the proprietor of one of the very few working commercial satellites that still covered this slice of the world.
On this night the screen showed that the freighters, which should by now have been working their way upriver to Augusta, were instead log-jammed behind the ship that had run aground. The workers nursed watered-down Joyful and cursed their lousy luck.
“If he’s got any sense, he’ll stay on that goddamned boat and hope they take his ass all the way back to China,” said one of the reef pilots. “He comes back here, they’ll string him up on the boardwalk.”
Sarat sat at the other end of the bar, where Layla the elder leaned on the bar top, eating frickles.
“Baby girl!” she said, hugging Sarat. “Gaines said you’d be coming around soon. It’s so good to see you.”
“How you been, Mama Layla?” said Sarat.
The bar owner shrugged. “The same. Bad night tonight. There’s talk it might be another couple days before they get that ship moving. People are starting to worry about credit, about paying last month’s bills.”
“Is there a storm out there or something?”
“Nah. They had one called Walter, was a Cat Six coming in off the Gulf four days ago, but died real quick over the Florida Sea. Just some rain and wind now, gave the gift ship captains a little trouble out past the borderline, but nothing too bad.”
“Then what’s keeping them?” asked Sarat. “It can’t just be that one stuck ship. Are the Blues tightening up inspections again?”
Layla shook her head. “Just the one stuck ship, can you believe it? They sent this new pilot out, kid named Brunswick—hasn’t been certified no more than a week, and they send him out to guide the first gift ship in. Well don’t you know, he’s running off last season’s map, and he guides them too far south. First damn ship of the month, and he runs them aground into Hutchinson Reef.”
“So they’re just sitting there?”
“Been there since dusk. FSS shipping authority folks being real hardasses about letting other ones go round it. I think they finally saw a chance to flex their muscles. So now everybody’s just waiting on them to pull her out and tow her in.”
“Christ,” said Sarat. “Can’t run a ship up a river. How we supposed to win a war?”
She picked at the bowl of frickles. Layla, who swore up and down that nobody could tell the difference, made them with cricket flour. But Sarat swore she could. There was a stale aftertaste to it, a dishwater echo on the tongue.
Layla called on her daughter to bring over a carafe of Joyful. The girl poured Sarat a cup.
“How are those boys doing?” asked the mother, pointing to the reef rats at the corner of the bar.
“They’re asking if they can start a tab on next month’s ships, if these ones end up turning around.”
“What did you tell them?”
“You know what I told them.”
“Good girl.”
Layla Jr. walked back to the other end of the bar. Sarat watched her. She had her hair in a thick, braided ponytail. Behind it, on the back of her neck, lay a small tattoo of the state of Georgia that her mother had yet to discover.
“How’s your family?” asked Layla Sr.
“They’re all right,” said Sarat. “Gaines’s friend Dr. Heller came by again last month, talking about how they’re working on a program with the Red Crescent where they send injured Southerners up to the good hospitals in Pittsburgh. I told him I’d rather Simon die.”
“What’s the harm in it? It’s not like you’re turning on your people. What if they got something up there in those hospitals can fix him?”
“Unless they got a time machine in those hospitals, they ain’t fixing him.”
Layla sighed. She poured herself a glass of Joyful. “How about the letters? Gaines said you’ve been sending them back.”
“We don’t need donations,” said Sarat. “Every week they come in from all over the Red. People I’ve never met before—some of them I know don’t even have a pot to piss in, and they still send us envelopes stuffed with cash, like we’re a church or something. Well we ain’t a church—we don’t need their charity.”
Layla laughed. “Oh honey I know that. Knew it the minute Gaines first introduced us. But what you need to know is, it isn’t about you. It’s about them. You really think those folks are too dumb to know they’re poor? Of course they know. And they send you that money anyway, because it means that much to them to be connected to you.”
“What do they know about us?” Sarat replied. “What they read in the papers? What those FSS politicians said in those rallies? For all they know, they’re mailing their cash to a hole in the ground.”
“The only thing they need to know is you’re clean,” said Layla. “You and your sister and your brother. Especially your brother. You’re clean because of what was done to you at Patience. All the politicians and the rebels and even the preachers, they might say the right things, but they haven’t been made clean like you. That’s why they send you money, that’s why they write you those letters saying you’re in their prayers. Because you’re clean.”
“That’s not true,” said Sarat.
“Oh it’s true. It might not be reasonable, it might not be fair. But it’s true.”
“If they want to be clean so bad, why are they sitting in their homes writing letters? Why aren’t they out fighting, or even saying they’re proud of the South, proud of their own side? Every time I read the J-Con or any other one of those Southern newspapers, they’ve got some article about a new poll showing more and more people in favor of those cowards at the FSS and their phony peace plan—a plan that don’t ask for nothing but free movement over our own land. If they’re so worried about being clean, whatever that means, they’d hang those cowards in Atlanta with their pocket linings stuffed in their mouths.”
A cheer erupted from the other corner of the bar. At first Sarat thought the river workers had been listening to what she said, but it was the movement of the ships they were cheering. The red dot that had been stalled atop Hutchinson Reef finally turned green, and to the east the waiting freighters began to move upriver. The month’s parade of gift ships was under way.
“Won’t be needing that credit after all, sweetheart,” said one of the dockhands as he raced from the bar.
“Wasn’t gonna be getting it anyway,” said Layla Jr.
The dockhand blew her a kiss as he left, and she returned it with a finger.
Soon the bar was quiet save for the murmuring of the war pensioners. The men—a half-dozen on this night—were between ten and twenty years older than Sarat, but looked older. She knew them only vaguely: the one missing his legs was Nathan Something. The one next to him was named Jeb, and was paralyzed on his left side. Others who drank in the Belle Rebelle’s dark corners on this and other nights were broken in other ways, some cracks visible, some not.
Layla Sr. pointed to the men. “You want people who’ll never stop supporting the war? Talk to them over there. The war will never be over for them. The people who’re sending you those letters, I bet you most of them aren’t yet damaged that way. Maybe they’ve been touched by it, lost a friend or heard about some massacre, but it’s not the same. The truth is, they’re on the other side of the river from where you are, they haven’t been through what you’ve been through. And they don’t want to. They’re not young like you; most of them are old enough to remember when it wasn’t like this, when there was peace. And if you’d known that, you’d want it back too.”
“It ain’t coming back,” said Sarat. “If they wanna dream, that’s their choice.”
Layla cupped her hands on Sarat’s. There was a warmth to her palms that seemed to emanate from her eyes. “Maybe,” she said. “Maybe. But let me ask you this, and be honest: if they did have a time machine up in that Northern hospital, and you had a chance to go back—back to a time when none of what happened to you happened, a different world altogether where there had never been any war—wouldn’t you take it?”
“Doesn’t matter,” said Sarat. “They can’t ever make that happen.”
“But if they could…”
“They can’t.”
The bar owner smiled. It was a sad smile, and behind it Sarat suspected something akin to pity. “It’s getting late,” she said. “They’re gonna be out on the docks unloading all night, and then tomorrow the shirt factory dealers are gonna join them, and it’ll be a carnival for three days straight.”
She passed a set of room keys to Sarat. “Get some sleep while you can,” she said. “Room’s all set up how you like it.”
Sarat thanked her. They hugged and Layla retired to her own home, which stood about ten blocks south of the boardwalk, insulated from the riverside cacophony.
Layla Jr. rang the bell: Last call. Sarat finished off the Joyful in her cup and she stumbled off her chair. She climbed the stairs near where the pensioners were getting ready to leave for the dime-bag motels and the VFWs, repurposed now as VDWs. As she climbed the stairs, she leered at Layla Jr., who caught her eyes but said nothing.
The bedroom upstairs was small. The bed was made of a steel bunk salvaged from a ruined Southern destroyer. The bunk bed’s frames had been severed from each other and reset side by side to make a crude double bed. A lamp lit the room, its light sinking into the brown-painted walls. A ceiling fan spun, its bamboo arms warped and wobbling. A small window overlooked the boardwalk and the docks and the river.
Sarat smelled the sheets. They’d been recently washed and they smelled of jasmine. It was the first thing she did whenever she stayed at the Belle Rebelle; the scent of other people on the sheets disgusted her. If she ever detected it—even the slightest remains of another body’s signature—she stripped the sheets from the bed and slept on the naked mattress, or on the floor, where the dust tempered all other scents.
On the nightstand there was an old music-player, the kind that carried songs in its own memory instead of fetching them from the clouds. It had once belonged to Layla’s mother, and had reached that useless middle age between novelty and antique—it was simply old.
Sarat searched it for a song she’d heard before, a slow number she liked. The player had a little display on its face but that had long ago stopped working. Instead she listened, and skipped past song after song until she found the one she wanted. From the speakers came the sound of bourbon-clouded piano keys. A shredded nightgown of a song. You moved like honey, in my dream last night.
Sarat undressed. She set her shirt over the lamp shade, and the soft light turned from amber to blood. The shirt depicted the flag of South Carolina, drawn against a red background instead of blue.
Sarat listened. Layla Jr.’s footsteps were light against the stairs outside. She opened the door. With her apron off she appeared even smaller, a milk-skinned apparition under Sarat’s looming shadow. She closed the door behind her.
“Come here,” said Sarat.
“Say it nicer,” Layla replied.
“No.”
Sarat smiled. She wanted Layla to stand her ground, and Layla knew Sarat wanted it. Because it made what came next sweeter, made the roughness sweeter. And it was the roughness Sarat craved. She wanted not love itself but the taking and giving of it; the parched hardness of her tongue scraping along Layla’s skin, a harvest of goose bumps in its wake. She wanted her to feel love the way a bone feels a break, to make her scream in a language she never even knew she knew, a language deposited from her lips like secrets into the vault of a muffling pillow. She wanted it to hurt, and for Layla to want it to hurt.
The sound of them seeped through the brittle bedroom window and was drowned by the bustle of the docks. Outside, the river rats worked the cranes and the trucks, readying to relieve the gift ships of their contents. Soon the freight ships would arrive and their cargo of rations and tent materials and charity blankets would be moved throughout the Red. Then in the days that followed the ships would be loaded with their reward in the great barter: crate upon crate of clothing from the Southern shirt factories; cheap electronics from the sweatshops along the Alabama coast; fruits and vegetables from Atlanta’s vertical farms. Then the ships would depart, and Augusta would grow quiet once more, the giving and taking complete.
Layla’s heartbeat echoed in the springs. Sarat rolled away. The fan turned slow, easy circles overhead.
She felt Layla’s finger on her back, tracing a wound. The cut was thin and long, running from the top of her left shoulder to the middle of her back.
“How did you get this?” asked Layla.
“Don’t know,” said Sarat.
“Yeah you do. You just don’t want to tell me.”
“That’s right.”
Layla sat up in bed. She leaned over and picked her shirt off the floor and put it on. It was stretched out a little around the collar from when Sarat had pulled it off her. Outside on the boardwalk, there shone a great blinking lantern. A sliver of its light came in through the bedroom window. It cast Layla momentarily in a wash of white, and in this moment the places where her skin was red and flush were made porcelain and clean, the newness of her restored.
“This is my last year in this place,” she said. “Come January, I’m gone.”
“And where exactly you gonna go to?” asked Sarat, her back still turned.
“South to Valdosta, where my mother grew up. All her people are still there.”
Sarat chuckled. “Everybody trying to get the hell out the south coast, and you’re going back?”
“Better there than here,” said the girl. “I’m not gonna wait on drunk river rats and clean up puke for the rest of my life. Wake up one day find out now I’m the Old Layla. At least down there I don’t have to worry every day about whether this’ll be the night the Blues finally come down from Tennessee, burn the whole place to the ground.”
“Only reason Blues won’t come all the way down to Valdosta is because there’s nothing down there worth burning,” said Sarat. “What are you gonna do, work in one of the farm slums? The shirt mills?”
“Maybe I will.”
Sarat shook her head. “Christ,” she said. “You still so young.”
“Like you ain’t?”
Sarat faced her. “Turn around,” she said.
Layla complied. Sarat brushed aside her ponytail and kissed the place where Georgia’s outline lay inked upon her neck. “Run off wherever you like,” she said. “You mine tonight, though.”
“I ain’t nobody’s,” Layla replied. But she lay a while longer under the slow-turning fan.
Then she was gone, and Sarat slept. She dreamed of Patience, and of the knife coming loose from her hand too soon. In the dream the Blues bound her and took her north, to a place in the forest. They dug for her a prison well deep into the ground, a dark earthen hollow from which she could not climb. It was always the same. Every night she closed her eyes and was confined to the empty well, powerless and blind and alone.
She woke with the residue of the nightmare in her pores. For a moment she scratched at the mattress, but a warm hand patted her head, and a voice said: It’s all right, beautiful girl, it’s all right.
She let her sister’s breathing calm her, and smelled the skin of her thigh. She let the lullaby wash over her—it’s all right, beautiful girl, it’s all right, beautiful girl. But she held her own eyes closed because she knew that the voice and smell and touch of her sister were not real. They were only imagined things, concocted by her mind to cleanse the aftertaste of the nightmare. When she finally opened her eyes, her sister would not be there.
OUTSIDE, the docks rattled with the movement of commerce. All morning, the crews unloaded the boxes. By noon, when Sarat could no longer keep her eyes closed, the opposite process was under way.
Sarat walked to the window. The room was dank, despite the fan’s slow circling. Still naked, she lifted the window open and leaned out to catch a little of the Savannah breeze. The boardwalk looked old and weathered in the clear light of day. A couple of drunks lay asleep in their vomit. A freight ship blocked the view of the river but Sarat could still see, on the other bank, the great martyrs’ mural.
It was painted onto a stretch of the Carolina quarantine wall, about ten blocks long. Here the wall was covered with a collage of the South’s unjustly killed. Not an inch of concrete was visible behind a mass of drawings and photographs. Almost daily, the survivors of Northern assaults were ferried on skiffs across the river and given a chance to paste or draw their loved ones’ images on the wall.
Only the dead were allowed to grace the wall. In time, the ritual became so popular that the kids who ran the skiffs started mounting ladders to their boats to reach the topmost edges. The Red soldiers looked on from their guard towers, and no matter how close the mourners came to falling over into the Slow country of South Carolina, they did not intervene. Eventually, the center of the quarantine wall in Augusta was saturated entirely, and the mural began to spread up and downriver.
Only very special circumstances, such as the massacre at Camp Patience, allowed for the pasting of new martyrs on the old part of the mural in Augusta. But the very center of the mural, it was understood by all, was never to be touched. In that sacred place was painted a large portrait of Julia Templestowe.
A tipsy, whistling dockhand stumbled down the boardwalk, shirtless. He was a rookie, fresh off celebrating his first shift on the docks. He wore a child’s toy Viking’s hat, its plastic horns bright green. As he passed the Belle Rebelle he looked up and saw Sarat standing naked at the window. He stopped and stared, uncertain. Finally Sarat snapped forward as though to lunge at him. He flinched and fell back, nearly tumbling off the boardwalk and onto the wharf below. Sarat winked at the jolted dockhand. She closed the window.
She dressed and went downstairs. The bar was empty. She fixed herself a drink and ate the stale leftover frickles, and then she left.
The waterfront was as busy now as it was the night before, but it was a different kind of traffic. This was the busyness of work. By nightfall, when the month’s business was done and the gift ships were moving back to the Atlantic, Augusta would once again be consumed in revelry, the temporarily flush dockworkers burning through their cash. Then it would grow quieter and quieter, until by the third week of the month half the bars wouldn’t bother opening their doors at all.
She hitched a ride east to the coast on one of the trucks that ran back and forth along the Savannah highway, shuttling dockhands, foreign crew members, and packages to and from Augusta.
She arrived at Garden Sound in the late afternoon. The mouth of the river where it met the ocean was a desolate place, but beautiful in its own way. Great looming wharfs lined the edge of the land. It was here where many of the freight companies kept offices, and where the last remaining salvage divers set sail to search for bounty in the undersea heart of sunken Savannah.
In the distance, six miles outland, a line of glowing buoys marked the boundary beyond which the Blues controlled the water. Their coastal vessels circled, and whenever a gift ship arrived, they escorted it to a large floating customs platform, where the soldiers searched it.
At the very edge of the Red, near the light ships that provided guidance to the mouth of the river, another, smaller platform stood. A tiny building of welded shipping containers sat atop the platform.
It was a coffee shop, run by a man named Prince Wendell who was nearing his hundredth birthday and had lived on the Georgia coast his entire life. He was known as the very last holdout of the great Inland Exodus, the one man left who remained on his land even when it ceased being land.
For the better part of eighty years he had run this business. Mostly blind now but unwilling to retire to the dry world, he opened the coffee shop for business only on the first three days of every month. During those days, his customers were reef pilots, foreign crews, and Northern soldiers with the circling customs fleet.
Any other Southerner would have been strung up for serving Blues, but Prince Wendell was old and stubborn enough to be grandfathered into the peace of his youth, and the tiny confines of his floating coffee shop stood as the only place in the wartime country where the North and South maintained an unspoken truce.
In one of the warehouses near the shore, Albert Gaines kept a Sea-Tok docked in Wharf Twenty-one. Sarat took the tiny vessel out into the ocean.
It was a slow trip to Prince Wendell’s coffee shop. She had chosen this place and this time to meet her informant because it coincided with a lull in the traffic at the mouth of the river. By nightfall the first of the gift ships would begin the crossing back to the other side of the world, and the coastline would once again become congested as the Blues searched the freighters for stowaways. But in these few hours the sea was clear.
Sarat docked at the foot of the platform and climbed the ladder to the deck. A neon “Open” sign buzzed on the door. Inside, the coffee shop was decorated with pictures of the old city of Savannah and of Prince Wendell’s childhood home.
Sarat had seen many walls decorated with pictures like these—pictures treated by their bearers with ritualistic reverence, as though the memory of a thing, showered with enough devotion, could resurrect the thing itself.
Prince Wendell sat at the counter. For a while he stared at the door, trying to make out his customer. When Sarat was close enough for him to see, he smiled.
“Julia!” he said. “Good to see you again!”
Sarat hugged the old man, one of many acquaintances in and around Augusta to whom she had given a fake name. “How you feeling, boss?”
“Can’t complain,” said Prince Wendell. “Good month, this one. Storm just missed us. Last month though, Christ, that was a bad one.”
He continued describing the previous month’s storm as he walked to the kitchen to fetch his customer a cup of coffee. Sarat sat at the table nearest the counter and waited. Soon she heard another skiff docking at the base of the platform. A Blue soldier climbed the ladder.
No matter how many times they met, the sight of her informant’s uniform up close slipped a primal switch deep within Sarat’s gut.
The soldier walked inside. He greeted Prince Wendell and soon the old man was back in the kitchen, preparing the soldier’s usual order.
The soldier sat at Sarat’s table. Every month, they met this way, briefly, no more than a couple of minutes. And every month she marveled at the sight of him—the way he had grown into a man seemingly overnight, even as his frame remained stunted. He had survived, he had lived; it was the only thing that mattered.
“You got him,” said Marcus Exum. “Every damn one of them is talking about it. Highest-ranking Blue casualty since they killed the president in Jackson.”
“Couldn’t have done it without you,” said Sarat.
Marcus looked over Sarat’s shoulder at the door.
“You got someone joining you on this coffee run?” asked Sarat.
“No. But you never know who else might come by.”
Marcus slid a cigarette across the table. “Only intel I could get this month. It’s a convoy, four LAVs. They’ll be passing near the Tennessee line at Russell Cave. Supposed to have some deputy secretary from the War Office onboard, getting a tour of the front.”
Sarat looked at the cigarette—she could see the outline of words and a simple map drawn on the inside of the wrapping paper. “Thank you,” she said.
“Can I ask you a favor?” said Marcus.
“Sure.”
“Lay low a while. There’s talk they’re going to retaliate for what happened at Halfway. They’re going to put the old man’s son in charge of the War Office, everyone’s sure of it. And he’s going to tear the whole front apart. I don’t know how or when, but I promise you he will.”
Sarat touched her friend’s shoulder. She felt the bars on his uniform, markers of his place in the hierarchy of what was once the most powerful force in the world, the military of her enemy.
“You’re a good friend,” she said. Once more he glanced at the door.
They heard Prince Wendell coming back from the kitchen. Marcus paid him and walked out without saying another word. Sarat waited a half-hour after he left, nursing her coffee and listening to Prince Wendell reminisce about the time George came through in ’57 and took the entire eastern edge of the city with it.
Then she left for the docks. To the east she saw the Blue customs ships waiting, and she knew her friend would be there for another two days before returning to the base at Halfway Branch. She thought about that last time she saw him at Patience, about watching him walk that thin concrete tightrope to the alien country. And she begrudged him not a single one of the choices he’d made since.
Excerpted from: ARCHIVES OF THE SPECIAL SENATE COMMITTEE ON INSURRECTIONIST AND SECESSIONIST ACTIVITY—TESTIMONY OF WAR OFFICE DIRECTOR JOSEPH WEILAND JR.
Perhaps the best way to explain it, Madam Chairwoman, is with a simple analogy.
In this country, we have elections. Our elections have strict rules, of which I’m sure every member of this committee is familiar. But, under special circumstances, we also have special elections. When President Daniel Ki was murdered, for example, we had a special election that was in fact not an election at all. It was an emergency measure taken in response to extreme and unique events. In other words, we set aside the normal guidelines because the circumstances themselves were far from normal.
And I think it’s fair to say, Madam Chairwoman, that no reasonable person genuinely believed that by temporarily setting aside normal protocol and installing a President until the following election, we had somehow forever dismantled the foundations of American democracy.
Now, to return to your question. You asked about the methods we use to extract information from insurrectionist detainees, and I am happy to answer.
Since I assumed directorship of the War Office, insurrectionist terror attacks across the so-called Tennessee line—attacks similar to the one that cost my father his life—have plummeted. Certainly the primary credit for this goes to the brave men and women of our Armed Forces. But I believe that the dramatic reduction of secessionist violence is also a direct result of our strategic initiative to capture and interrogate known and suspected insurrectionist leaders in those regions where attacks have been most rampant.
Let’s be clear, Madam Chairwoman: the people we target are no angels. We have focused our efforts intently on rebel recruiters—the cowardly men and women who have for years brainwashed young Southerners into violent, suicidal acts to further the cause of treason.
Now these recruiters, in most cases, never had the courage to take up arms themselves. So we were faced with a choice, Madam Chairwoman: either spend years trying to prosecute them for crimes that, while very much real, are nonetheless extremely difficult to prove—especially to the standards of a peacetime court in a wartime setting—or extract from them as much information as we could. I speak of information, Madam Chairwoman, that has subsequently saved American lives.
We do not act as monsters, Madam Chairwoman, even though we are often pitted against them. As is the case in any war, we use the tools available to us under the constraints of time and urgency to which we are subject. And in cases where information from insurrectionist recruiters has subsequently proven false or unreliable, we have responded accordingly. The mission of the War Office, above all else, is to protect our nation.
And I believe we have done so, Madam Chairwoman. I believe in the coming months the insurrectionist terrorists will abandon their doomed efforts at disunion, and this war will come to an end. And I certainly believe that, just as we have returned to the normal rules of Presidential elections, we will also return to the normalcy of peacetime. I’m sure all the members of this committee echo my desire that we reach that normalcy as quickly as possible.
I believe we are closer now to peace, Madam Chairwoman, than ever before.