#and so begins his terrible journey in the confederacy

[grievuos]

         𝐓𝐇𝐄   𝐑𝐄𝐁𝐈𝐑𝐓𝐇     .               grievous   drabble   one     .

The   Elder’s   finger   drew   slowly   down   the   warrior’s   mask.      The   Wise   One’s   pointed   finger   bore   two,    blood - red   streaks     —     made   of   residue   from   a   pestle,    and   a   mortar   filled   with   crushed   herbs   and   minerals     —     down   the   warrior’s   face,    bisecting   each   of   his   wetted,    yellow   eyes.     The   streaks   passed   over   the   bandage - like   wrappings   wound   about   his   head,    then   down   upon   the   plate     —     carved   of   mumuu   bone     —     protecting   his   face.      ‘  Our   appeals   have   been   ignored,  ’     the   Wise   One   crooned.     ‘  The   Republic   and   their   monks   favour   our   enemy.  ’     He   rose   from   the   bowed   warrior,    and   closed   up   his   scaled   hand   around   his   carved   staff.     ‘  Our   last   hopes   rest   heavily   upon   your   shoulders,    Khagan.      ‘  May   the   spirits   of   our   ancestors   watch   over   you,    and   your   Izvoshra.  ’      Qymaen,    knelt   atop   the   summit   of   Shrupak,    placed   his   hand   upon   the   mossy   stone   ground,    as   if   to   draw   the   last   of   the   Temple’s   spirit   into   himself;     to   set   a   great   zeal   coursing   though   his   hot,    swelling   veins.      ‘  By   your   grace,    Holy   One,  ’     he   spoke,    his   coarse   voice   muffled   by   the   carved   tusks   upon   his   mask.      The   Khagan   rose,    taking   his   rifle   by   its   grip,    and   moved   with   the   elite   Izvoshra   in   tow.      He   ascended   into   their   vessel     —     a   clunky,    labouring   thing     —     and   once   the   Eight   joined   him,    sealed   them   on   their   course   for   Oben.      The   vessel’s   engines   spat   and   crackled   with   disuse,   coughing   hot   air   over   the   sacred   grounds.      The   ship   ascended,    whirring   off   into   the   bloody   Kalee   horizon,    over   the   Ausez   Steppes,    and   across   the   expanding   sea.

They   had   travelled   a   great   distance,    passing   beyond   the   threshold   of   monitored   Kalee   airspace.      It   was   then   that   the   vessel   began   to   heave,    staggering   with   a   sourceless   current.      The   monitor   grew   blurred,    fizzed   in   and   out   of   definition,    before   a   great   surge   of   crackling   electricity   enveloped   the   vessel,    sapping   its   life.      Qymaen   became   frantic     —     prying   aggressively   at   anything,    and   everything   that   he   could   use   to   save   the   ship   from   its   ruin.      Sheelal,    in   what   he   believed   to   be   his   final   moments,    closed   his   eyes,    and   dreamed   of   the   abstract   past:     of   his   Izvoshra,    and   their   unerring   fidelity.     Of   the   mumuu   hunt,    and   of   Ronderu,    that   had   completed   his   soul.     He   longed   to   return   there,    if   only   for   a   moment,    and   would   covet   such   a   wish   as   he   passed   into   the   beyond.      The   vessel   began   to   burn.      Its   smouldering   components   snapped   from   its   hull,    and   it   descended   indefinitely   towards   the   water.      His   eyes   fell   into   slits,    and   he   breathed   a   final   breath.      And   then,    abruptly,    the   fires     —     that   had   already   taken   to   the   blistering   of   his   body     —     dissipated,    and   a   great   wind   passed   over   him.      He   had   thought   it   to   be   the   heralding   of   his   Pilgrimage,    but   when   his   scolded   eyes   opened,    he   felt   it   to   be   the   wind   of   the   sea,    as   he   fell,    plummeting   from   the   sky.

Wetted,    burned   flesh   marred   the   air   with   its   scent.      It   was   dark,    and   the   Moon   cast   its   reflection   in   the   billowing   sea.      He   was   hoisted   from   the   water,    blinded   by   spotlights,    and   laid   limply   upon   a   durasteel   platform.      He   tried   to   move     —     his   arms,    his   legs     —     but   the   effort   wrought   nothing.     His   eyes   twitched,    spasming   in   effort,    but   the   images   were   watercolours,    and   few   and   far   between.      breathing,    but   unconscious     —      The   words   were   but   a   messy,    bloated,    electronic   sound.      A   silhouette   split   the   Moon   above   him     —     hooded   and   unkind     —     a   visage   of   Death.      Death   held   out   its   hand,    and   a   great   bolt   of   spitting,    red   electricity   struck   him.      Sheelal   laid   in   rigor   mortis,    as   Death   reached   down   to   strip   him   of   his   face.     He   could   feel   the   cold     —     his   mask   unbearably   absent,    though   he   could   do   naught   of   it.      He   was   taken   by   what   remained   of   his   upper   arms,    held   by   cold,    and   metal   things     —     things   that   glared   a   terrible   red.      His   organs   convulsed   and   sputtered,    and   with   the   last   of   his   consciousness,    he   looked   on   as   he   ascended   a   metal   ramp,    into   the   blinding   and   frightening   unknown.

[thephilosopheroftheboudoir]

Grim History

The Dred Scott Case and the Supreme Court’s Lowest Moment Eve

     The United States of America has never been without divisive and contentious political issues that that threatened to tear the nation apart. By 1857, the abolition vs. slavery debate was exactly that. Northern Abolitionists were ramping up their attacks on slave-holders and the southerners were pressuring the government to permanently make slavery a legal institution. As America expanded into the territories further west, the debate became more heated since both northerners and southerners wanted to claim them as their own. The Missouri Compromise allowed that states below the 40th parallel were allowed to be slave states and those above that line were not, with the exception of Missouri where slavery was legal but some African-Americans were also allowed to be free. Missouri is where the Dred Scott vs. Sandford case started and escalated all the way up to the Supreme Court. To this day, the judgment in that case is considered to be one of the biggest legal disasters in the history of the USA.

    The man named Dred Scott was born a slave in 1795 in Virginia. His owner, plantation manager Peter Blow, moved to Alabama and brought Scott with him. Later he moved to St. Louis and decided to give up farming so he sold his slaves and the ownership of Dred Scott was transferred to a doctor named John Emerson. Dred Scott’s legal status as a slave became complicated when Emerson moved to Illinois while retaining ownership of him. Slavery was illegal in Illinois. They later went on to Wisconsin, then part of Minnesota, yet another state where slavery was illegal. While there, Dred Scott married a woman named Harriet Robinson, complicating his legal status ever further since slave marriages were not recognized by law in slave states. The married couple went on to have a daughter. Emerson, being an army doctor, was ordered back to St. Louis so he brought Dred Scott and Harriet Robinson with him. During the journey by steamboat down the Mississippi River, Ms. Robinson gave birth to their daughter, Eliza; she was born while they were still traveling in the northern territories so technically she was a free citizen.  Emerson was then reassigned to a post in Louisiana so the Scott family again were taken along. Under Louisiana law, Harriet Robinson and Eliza were slaves simply because they were African-American and were thereby considered Emerson’s property. Dred Scott’s marriage was considered null and void since slave marriages were not recognized in southern courts.

    Dr. Emerson was further transferred to another state, this time to Florida to serve in the Seminole War. He gave Dred Scott and his family over to his wife Irene in St. Louis where she hired them out for her own financial gain. Emerson died and Irene inherited the estate which included the Dred Scott family as part of the possessions. She continued to rent them out but Dred Scott was tired of slavery; after having tasted freedom in Illinois and Wisconsin, he decided he wanted to be free. He offered to buy his way out of ownership but Irene Emerson thought renting the family out for hire was too lucrative and she refused. Since slavery was only partially legal in Missouri, Dred Scott took the matter to court.

    Missouri, in precedent cases, had a history of freeing slaves who had been transported into free states or territories. Therefore, when Dred Scott went to trial he was optimistic of an easy victory. Unfortunately, he lost the case due to an absurd minor technicality; the prosecuting attorneys had failed to establish that Irene Emerson had enslaved Dred Scott. The judge did, however, grant Dred Scott the right to a retrial.

    It took three years for the next trial to begin due to a cholera outbreak, a fire in the courthouse, and delays on the part of the legal teams. During that time, Dred Scott and his family were temporarily  transferred to ownership under the sheriff who continued to rent them out for work, thereby holding the wages he earned in escrow to be delivered to the winner of the case at the end of the trial. This time the jury ruled in favor of Dred Scott but Irene Emerson did not accept defeat. She complained that losing three slaves and the escrow attached to them was too much of a financial loss so she took the case to the Supreme Court of Missouri. Before the case went to trial, Irene Emerson transferred ownership of Dred Scott’s family to her brother, John Sandford since she had moved to Massachusetts, ironically, to marry an abolitionist senator. The Supreme Court of Missouri overturned the previous verdict on the grounds that, times having changed, setting slaves free would cause a major disruption and upheaval in society; in order to keep the state in a condition of peace, there were to be no more emancipations of slaves from then on.

    Dred Scott was again granted a retrial. By this point he was without any financial backers so an abolitionist lawyer agreed to represent him in exchange for janitorial work in his office building. The jury ruled in favor of Sandford because the Supreme Court of Missouri ruled that Scott was to remain a slave and slaves had no legal right to sue their owners.

    After the fourth trial, John Sandford moved to New York and continued to rent out Dred Scott and his family as an absentee owner. During this time, Scott continued to plead for a retrial but since Sandford was living out of state, the case had to be taken to the Supreme Court of the United States. In March of 1857, the Supreme Court ruled 7 – 2 in favor of John Sandford. In a 200 page explanation of the ruling, Supreme Court justice Roger Taney explained that the writers of the Constitution had never intended for African-American people to be considered citizens of the United States; they were brought to America to act as laborers with the same legal rights as domesticated farm animals and other forms of property for white people. He reasoned that since it was impossible for African-Americans to be citizens, it was impossible for them to take a case to court. Therefore, John Sandford was found innocent. The two dissenting Supreme Court justices countered this by saying that if Dred Scottt, as an African-American, could not legally take a slave owner to court, then there was no logical ground for accepting the verdict of the case anyhow. But the emotions of the other Supreme Court judges overruled their ability to think sensibly. Dred Scott had lost again but his life was not over.

    In addition to the absurd verdict, the justices of the Supreme Court had made another terrible miscalculation. Since slavery was such a divisive issue, they mistakenly thought that their judgment in the Dred Scott case would put the controversy behind so the nation could move on to other matters. But the Abolitionists reacted to their verdict with rage. In response to their fury, the southern secessionist movement began to grow and plans to initiate the Confederacy began. Instead of uniting the nation, the Supreme Court divided the nation further. Hostility between the two sides exploded and soon the Civil War would begin. Meanwhile, the status of the Supreme Court sank so low that they were unable to regain respectability until much later in American history.

    John Sandford soon died and ownership of Dred Scott, Harriet Robinson, and their daughter Eliza was transferred to Taylor Blow, the son of Scott’s first owner. Feeling sympathetic to Dred Scott’s plight, Blow filed manumission papers with the state court in Missouri and Dred Scott, along with his family, were emancipated in 1857. The Abolitionists were ecstatic and Dred Scott became a celebrity. He went to work as a porter in a St. Louis hotel. Sadly his freedom was short-lived and he died of tuberculosis less than two years after being set free and living the greatest eighteen months of his life.

Reference

Kelly, Alfred H. and Harbison, Winfred A. The American Constitution: Its Origins and Development. W.W. Norton and Company, 1946.

 https://grimhistory.blogspot.com/