Nat Turner's Revolt

The state of TIAH

August 21st, 2006

in [time unknown], the officers of the Pokor and the Eagle intercept the Starwalkers carrying the golden jump device off of the human's spaceship. They are able to physically overpower them; the Quarai use a martial art that is very effective in nature, but “causes no damage,” Captain Mawrao said. They then struggled the device back on board the Eagle and roused their crew. The Pokor took off quickly, and was almost instantly pursued by Starwalker ships. Commander Patterson ordered Najib Kasem to activate the jump - “We need to get the hell out of here, Najib!” Kasem, calling on the changes in his mind that close contact with the device had made, quickly inputs coordinates into the device and asks Captain Mawrao, “It's ready to go – are we?” The Quarai captain told the crew to brace themselves, and said to Kasem, “Do it.” While still in the atmosphere of the Starwalker world, Kasem turned on the jump device, and the familiar white light enveloped them.

in 1831, the slave minister Nat Turner freed the slaves on the plantation of his owner Joseph Turner, killing the Turner family in the process. He revealed his plan to them – they would work their way slowly to Jerusalem, Virginia, gathering other slaves on the way, take the armory in Jerusalem, and thus armed, move to the west and establish themselves as a free nation. His plan worked brilliantly, and with hundreds of slaves at his back, Jerusalem was his. However, this success drew the attention of the Virginian government, which felt that they couldn't let this challenge to their authority go unanswered. The state militia was called out, but too late – they reached Turner and his army after they had the weapons from Jerusalem's armory, and in the bloody battle for the town, Turner emerged victorious. Slaves across the south rallied to his side, and, although many were lynched or killed by their former owners in the process, many more swelled Turner's numbers until he had an invincible force in western Virginia. The state asked for federal assistance in November, and this led to the great debate between the free states and the slave states in the US House of Representatives. The Representatives from the free states were often quite hostile to the notion of sending out American troops to quell what they considered a battle for liberty, and the slave state Representatives were horrified that their colleagues were willing to allow this “alien army,” in the words of Virginia's Representative Joseph Augustine, to rampage across the south. The debate became so vicious that the southern Representatives left the House en masse, and talk began circulating among southerners that they would secede from the Union if it refused to protect them. President Andrew Jackson ordered some troops to Virginia, and this proved too great an offense against Congress' powers to make war – they impeached him and removed him from office. The southern states then made good on their threat to secede, and the south was quickly embroiled in war against its huge population of African slaves. President Martin van Buren of the Union held the northern states together as well as he could, but the chaos in the south spilled over into the rest of the US by the turning of the year, and by the time hostilities finally ceased in 1842, the former United States was now three countries – several states of New England had merged with Canada, the surviving mid-Atlantic states still called themselves the US, and a large chunk of the south and central US was held by Turner's New Israel.

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