The Symbiotic Travelers

The symbiotic Travelers

The American

Civil War

BADSAM

It is Wednesday afternoon May 4, 1859. When the sun broke the horizon to a cloudless sky earlier that morning, it found the two syngeneic beings happily packing their few belongings away, including SAM, the Simplified Automatic Mainframe computer that they keep locked in a chest.

Just yesterday James signed the papers to sell the general store he and Julia have managed since 1836. Included in the sale is a small cottage behind the store, consisting of a kitchen with a cast iron stove, a combination living area and dining area with a fireplace and a large bedroom. As part of the sale, they are also selling all the furniture in the adobe house. They figure that with the money they have saved and what they got from the sale, that will give them enough cash to buy any new furniture they will need in their next living quarters.

It is easier to travel if they don't have to lug around a lot of stuff, especially bulky furniture. They have learned to keep their possessions to a minimum. Whatever they can fit into their two trunks, one for SAM and some blankets and clothes and another for the rest of their clothes and some pots, pans and other cooking and eating utensils along with their personal devices and shaving and grooming items.

Zlatex still keeps his face clean shaven; Yaphet likes to shave her legs regularly. But she does not shave the fiery red curls of her vagina. Mainly because her symbiotic lover believes that her pubic mound looks sexier if she isn't shaved; her hair is thin enough that he can perceive her lips. Also, her love locks capture the aroma secreted by her womanhood and turns him on sexually, especially when he performs cunnilingus on her. Another reason she doesn't shave her love nest is because both she and her consort think that a woman's shaved labia resemble a young female child's vagina. While acknowledging that some women must trim their hair for reasons of health, both she and Zlatex believe that to have sex with a woman who completely shaves her knoll would be tantamount indulging into pedophilia.

The two aliens sold the establishment to a retired army colonel who had been stationed in Fort Worth. Zlatex and Yaphet figured it was time to move on. Both of them still looked like a young married couple in their early twenties, not anyone who had been managing a general store for over twenty years and therefore ought to look like a middle aged couple.

Using their solar powered personal mobile communicators, they recorded details of the sale into SAM; how much money they got, the date, who they sold it to, who witnessed the sale, along with his fees and what they did with their money. Although it's been almost a hundred years since the two extraterrestrials came to Earth in 1766, they still keep a chronicle of everything they encounter, everything they learn. Whenever they verbally record anything, they make sure no one can hear or interfere in any way with what they are doing. When they are home, they just lock the door to wherever they are staying, but when they are traveling, they put blankets up around their cart and silently text the info into SAM.

They have maintained their anonymity that they are from the distant planet Herth. They do this because they are still wary of what Earthlings would do to them should they discover that they are aliens. Most of them believe that all the stars are just that, stars without planets or life. Of the rare few that believe that there may be other planets with life on them, none of them believe that these beings have ever been here. None of them believe that space flight or even flying is possible. Yaphet and Zlatex know that someday someone will learn how to fly and then Earthlings will probably travel in space, maybe land on the moon. Some of them might even change their attitude toward alien life. But until they can be assured that no one will attack or harm them in any way because they are aliens, they are both adamant in keeping inconspicuous.

They used some of the money to purchase a horse and a new four wheeled farmer's wagon; their mule died several years ago, and they sold their original cart soon after taking over control of the trading post. The rest of their money they deposited in a bank. Then after loading all their possessions onto their small wooden cart, they set out for southern California, their original destination before the siege of the Alamo and then getting sidetracked into staying in Fort Worth. Using a map that she obtained from the U.S. Army, Yaphet has already charted the route they hope to take. They plan to stop and pick up supplies in Fort Stockton, Texas and then Tucson and Fort Yuma, Arizona.

The presidio San Augustin del Tucson was founded in 1775 by the Spaniards as a military garrison to help protect settlers and travelers from Apache attacks. The Spanish stayed in the area, fighting off numerous assaults on the fort by the Native American Indian warriors. In 1821, Tucson became part of the new government of Sonora in Mexico, that had recently won independence from Spain.

In 1854, the United States secured much of the region of southwestern New Mexico and southern Arizona from Mexican government in the Gadsden Purchase; it was then made part of the expansive New Mexico Territory. The Gadsen Purchase was between the United States and Mexico in the Treaty of Mesilla on June 8, 1854, the date the treaty took effect. The Arizona cities of Yuma, Tucson, Tombstone and a few other small towns and villages were acquired by the United States in the acquisition.

Yuma was looked upon as the gateway to the state of California, because it was one of the few natural spots where settlers could cross the expansive Colorado River. It was established in 1848 and served as a stagecoach stopover from 1858 until 1861 on the Butterfield Overland Mail route. Then in 1857, Tucson was established as a stage station of the San Antonio and San Diego Mail Line.

Two years after setting up the San Antonio, San Diego Mail Line, the U.S. Army built Fort Stockton in 1859, as a semiweekly stagecoach rest stop on the Comanche Trail to the San Antonio & El Paso Road and the Butterfield Overland Mail route.

The two symbiotic equivalents arrived in Fort Stockton late in the afternoon on June 7, 1859. They had originally intended to just purchase some supplies and then continue on to Tucson the next morning. But upon receiving a warning from the soldiers stationed there that hostile Native American Indians were in the area, Julia and James decided to wait until they could go with a company of troopers, who were scheduled to leave the following Monday June 13, 1859, for Fort Davis, Texas.

They ended up staying in Fort Davis for nine years. They traveled there with an assemblage of families in fourteen prairie schooner wagons and a company of 200 Union Calvery soldiers to protect them; James and Julia had the only farmer's wagon. The army had two Conestoga wagons that held some food and supplies for everyone. The expedition took them three days to make the trip, arriving on a cloudy afternoon June 16th. They made the trip without any Native American Indian warriors attacking them. The biggest scare came when one of the soldiers shot a rattlesnake.

While they were encamped on the evening of the 14th, James learned from the captain of the company that there was talk of war between the Northern states and the Southern states. James wanted to know if they went to war, would Texas be drawn into the conflict.

James told the officer that he had no desire to get involved in the hostilities. But the captain informed him that he needn't worry. He did not expect any battles to take place in Texas. He believed that if there was a war, the fighting would mostly be among the Atlantic coastal states and the Mississippi River states, including New Orleans, a strategic port. If there were any skirmishes in Texas, he thought they would be along the port cities on the Gulf Coast.

While they lived at Fort Davis, James got a job working in the fort's livery stable; their own horse needed a new shoe. While watching the owner reshoe his horse - it didn't look too complicated - James asked the man if he needed any help; he had several Calvary horses in the stable that needed shoeing. He showed James how to do it, and after watching him shoe a horse, he hired him.

Julia stayed home in a house they rented. She tended a garden of potatoes, carrots, green beans, tomatoes and corn. She also helped the only schoolteacher teach the children who were living in and around the fort; she found this to be easier and more enjoyable than weaving baskets. There were twenty-eight students. Julia took the younger nineteen of them and taught them their basic arithmetic, English spelling and reading. The other teacher taught the older children higher mathematics, history, geography and science.

Both syngeneic equivalents avidly read the newspaper in order to keep abreast of how the war between the states got started and was progressing. They also recorded any information they thought important into SAM. They decided not to input figures about advertisements that were offering the sale of women's dresses, shoes, farm equipment and other household items. They reasoned that this type of data would not be able to help them get established or teach them about the Earth. They did, however, record news about Presidential elections, who was campaigning for the office, who won and by how many votes, and any new laws the U.S. government passed and any event that they thought was relevant.

They read an article about Eli Whitney who invented the cotton gin in 1793. It was one of the key inventions of the Industrial Revolution that shaped the economy of the Antebellum South.

Whitney is most famous for two innovations which came to have significant impacts on the United States in the mid nineteenth century: his invention of the cotton gin and his advocacy for interchangeable parts in the manufacturing of guns. In the South, the cotton gin revolutionized the way cotton was made into a product suitable for use, and it bolstered slavery. In the North the adoption of interchangeable parts revolutionized the manufacturing industry, which in turn contributed significantly to the U.S. victory in the American Civil War.

By 1861, when the American Civil War began, the Northern states had developed a more diversified, industrialized economy, which relied more on manufacturing, commerce and the wage labor of indentured servants and less on agriculture slave labor. However, slavery did exist in the Northern states during the colonial period and for several years after the American Revolution. Many important statesmen and Presidents, such as George Washington and Thomas Jefferson, owned slaves. Benjamin Franklin also owned slaves before coming to the realization that slavery was immoral.

Slaves continued to perform labor in some Northern industries, such as shipbuilding, skilled activities and domestic service. But the North gradually shifted towards a wage labor system that afforded industrialists and factory owners the ability to hire workers when they were needed or dismiss them whenever they were no longer of any use, leaving them without any source of income.

Even when slavery was abolished, with the passage of the 13th Amendment in 1865, racism and discriminatory actions persisted in many areas of the North and in the South after the American Civil War. The South maintained de jure segregation, i.e., discrimination by law, while de facto segregation, discrimination by actual practice, was in the South and in some places in the North. Former slaves often faced significant barriers to employment, were frequently relegated to low paying labor intensive jobs, were denied access to many activities, educational opportunities and even medical care and voting rights.

The cotton gin, short for cotton engine, is a mechanical device that removes the seeds from cotton balls, a process that had previously been done by hand. It quickly and efficiently separates cotton fibers from their seeds; labor that was done by slaves at the rate of about a half a kilogram of cotton a day. But a single cotton gin could generate up to 25 kilograms of cleaned cotton in one day. After ginning, a compressed bale of cotton weighs about 225 kilograms, a considerable weight that would take two slaves to lift.

This substantively contributed to the economic development of the South, a prime cotton growing area. Many historians believe that the cotton gin allowed for the system of slavery to become more sustainable. It transformed southern agriculture as well as the national economy. Further, southern cotton growers found markets in Europe more profitable than selling cotton to northern states.

Europe, especially Great Britain, had a massive textile industry that was highly dependent on cotton for production. The industrial revolution in Europe, particularly in England, led to a huge demand for cotton. The American South, due to its climate and the conditions of its soil made it profitable for growing tobacco, rice, indigo, sugar cane and cotton farming. Plantation owners were able to meet this demand at a low cost.

European manufacturers were willing to pay higher prices for southern cotton than northern industrialists. Hence, selling cotton to Great Britain and Europe was generally more profitable for the South than selling it to the North. Also, there were fewer logistical and market barriers when selling it across the ocean. The European market provided a critical economic outlet for southern cotton, and its profitability played a central role in the South's economy and the further entrenchment of slavery.

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From the newspaper articles they have read, Zlatex and Yaphet discovered, that Industrial Revolution began in England, around 1760, but the United States quickly picked it up and ran with it.

Beginning in Great Britain, the Industrial Revolution spread to continental Europe and then the United States. This transition included going from hand production methods to machine production systems; the increased use of waterpower and steam power; the development of machine tools; and the rise of a mechanical factory system.

The textile industry was the first to use modern production methods. Textiles soon became the dominant industry in terms of employment, value of output, and the capital invested in production. Together, it all greatly increased output of goods and the result was an unprecedented rise in population as well as the rate of population growth.

In the United States it also augmented the differences between the northern states and the southern states.

This contributed to a society in the North whereby individuals of different cultures, races and classes worked side by side and frequently lived in the same areas. While the South remained mostly agricultural and held onto a social hierarchy of upper, middle and lower classes who did not intermingle with each other. The North had indentured servants who worked in the factories, and the South had slaves who worked on the plantations.

By the 1850s, these differences in the North and the South resulted in two views by many individuals on the powers of the federal government to control the economies and the cultures of the states. Some people wanted to grant more power to the states. They wanted autonomy from the federal government in order to make all their own laws, including laws governing taxes as well as laws governing the buying and selling of slaves. While others believed that the federal government ought to retain more power.

This was the same argument that the Founding Fathers faced. Many of the early Americans believed that the new government ought to retain power. They wanted a strong central government. But some others wanted the states to have more control. They wanted a weaker central government.

In the 1850s, these differences also led to the ideal of nullification - the belief that the states could rule that federal acts and laws that they did not like or believe in were unconstitutional. When nullification did not work, this led to thoughts of secession from the Union.

In order to preserve a peaceful coexistence between the North and the South, as the United States expanded west, the federal government tried to ensure that equal numbers of free states (states without slavery) and slave states (states that allowed slavery) would be admitted into the Union. The Missouri Compromise of 1820 prohibited slavery in the North. It balanced the wishes of northern states to prevent the expansion of slavery with the desires of southern states to expand it. It admitted Maine into the Union as a free state and Missouri as a slave state. It also prohibited slavery in the remaining territories of the Louisiana Purchase north of the 36.30 parallel.

The problem seemed to be solved, and everyone appeared to be satisfied. Those who disagreed with slavery believed the institution would eventually die, while those who owned slaves thought that they were safe from further opposition.

But the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854 essentially repealed the Missouri Compromise. It created the territories of Kansas and Nebraska which allowed the settlers to decide on the legality of slavery through popular sovereignty. The act effectively invalidated the Missouri Compromise of 1820, which had prohibited slavery in those two territories.

By creating Kansas and Nebraska as two new territories it allowed the states to use the consent of the people to decide whether or not they would be free states - whereby a person had to pay their servants a wage - or they would be slave states - whereby a person did not have to pay their slaves for their labor.

The bill was introduced by Democratic Senator Stephen A. Douglas in 1854. He had hoped to use it as a starting point in his attempt to be elected to the presidency in 1860. He campaigned against the Republican candidate Abraham Lincoln who opposed the expansion of slavery into the new territories. The presidential election was decisive in the history of America, mainly because many southerners had a misunderstanding of Lincoln's views on slavery.

Lincoln believed slavery was morally wrong; his goal was to contain and limit slavery. He wanted to prevent the spread of slavery into new territories and states, rather than immediately abolishing it. He believed that it was possible to have a United States free of slavery. He hoped that by restricting its expansion, this would put slavery on the road to gradual extinction.

Many in the South believed he was going to use his presidency to abolish slavery throughout the United States. However, Lincoln did not advocate for the immediate abolition of slavery. His method of addressing the question of slavery was pragmatic, influenced by his desire to preserve the Union and the political realities of the differences between the North and the South, particularly in their views on slavery.

It is the evening of November 5, 1860; Zlatex has just come home from work where he is a typesetter in the local Fort Davis newspaper. He has been working there for six years. He has a copy of the edition that will be distributed tomorrow morning. He and his alien consort then read an article about the upcoming Presidential election. There are two major candidates, Lincoln and Douglas, and two minor candidates, John C. Breckinridge and John Bell. The author of the column says that it is going to be a close race; he believes Lincoln will win. The two extraterrestrial beings hope he is right; both of them believe slavery is wrong.