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Greetings all....trying to come up with a good workaround for a new motor mount for a 92 Trofeo. Apparently the motor mount configuration changed from all the previous years. The part cannot be purchased aftermarket anymore. I read an old post on the Olds forum about using a similar year model from a Cadillac and then modifying the frame to take the different bolt hole pattern.
Anyone else have any experience / ideas for dealing with this?
You may want to contact Lyn Steele /Steele Rubber. He will re-vulcanize new rubber on your old metal base.
We do offer certain revulcanizations for certain parts, but, unfortunately, we do not offer such service for the 1992 Oldsmobile. The process for this requires exact, negative molds for the item being revulcanized, and we do not have the molds we need to service these mounts.
Additionally, we do not do custom work, meaning, if we do not already have it, we do not make it on demand. We do take on project requests and, at this time, have a list spanning over the next 2-4 years.
The good news is I was able to retrofit a Cadillac mount tonight per instructions in this post below...from the Olds forum.
Wow. The Cadillac mounts are still available from parts stores? Did you take any pics of your job?
Yes to both! The mount I purchased at AdvanceAuto. But I'll have to post the photos of the job tomorrow. It looks a lot like the one in the forum I referenced...but mine was a bit less professional.
Cool. I've never owned a vehicle that new and probably never will but I like the technical aspects of jobs like this and how parts can be adapted to fit the need. | {
"redpajama_set_name": "RedPajamaC4"
} | 6,878 |
On 4 April, a ruling was passed in an Egyptian court that a Bahai couple could cite their religion as Baha'i on their official documentation. The government quickly issued an appeal against the decision as they do not recognise the Baha'i Faith as a religion.
There have been articles in Egypt focussing on the fact that the Baha'i World Centre is in Israel and suggesting that Baha'is are therefore a threat to their national security. There are a couple of blog entries on "Baha'i Blog" that look at the situation in some more detail.
Egyptian Baha'is are exemplary in their patience. They are only seeking the rights of citizen of any country: the right of belief and the right to have a required ID which is essential to functioning in Egyptian society. These rights are denied them for no reason other than their religious beliefs.
It is time they obtain the required documents as other Egyptian citizens. | {
"redpajama_set_name": "RedPajamaC4"
} | 2,128 |
\section{Introduction} \label{sec:intro}
The interaction between cosmic rays (CR) and clouds has been studied for many years because two main reasons: predicting the ionization rate induced by CRs and understanding the gamma ray emission due to hadronic collisions occurring between CRs and the material inside the cloud. Both problems require to understand how CRs enter the clouds and how they propagate inside them.
In this paper we focus on the penetration of CRs when they propagate from the hot phase of the interstellar medium (HISM), whose typical density and temperature are $n\sim 0.01-0.1$ cm$^{-3}$ and $T\sim 10^4-10^5$K, towards a diffuse cloud (with $n\sim 10-100$ cm$^{-3}$ and $T\sim 10^{3}$K). We concentrate only on diffuse clouds because denser molecular clouds are usually embedded into diffuse clouds.
The first systematic studies on how CRs interact with clouds have been done in \cite{Skill-Strong76, Ces-Voelk77}.
In passing from the HISM toward a cold cloud, the propagation properties of CRs are affected by the presence of neutral Hydrogen (both atomic and molecular) through two different effects: {\it i}) CRs lose energy through ionization and {\it ii}) the ion-neutral friction due to Hydrogen damps the magnetic turbulence which scatters CRs. As a consequence a non linear chain of processes takes place. The authors of \cite{Skill-Strong76} first realized that because of energy losses, the cloud acts as a sink of CRs and a net flux of CRs is established towards the cloud. The resulting density gradient of CRs can excite Alfv\'enic turbulence through streaming instability. On the other hand the excited magnetic turbulence is also damped by ion-neutral friction. This damping will eventually dominate inside the cloud, but in the transition layer between the HISM and the cloud, the dominant process between amplification and damping will depend on the CR spectrum as well as on the Hydrogen density profile. As a consequence of the whole process, \cite{Skill-Strong76} found that CRs with energy $E \buildrel < \over {_{\sim}} 300$ MeV do not penetrate into the cloud. Similar result has been obtained by \cite{Ces-Voelk77}, but with a lower energy threshold, namely $\buildrel < \over {_{\sim}} 50$ MeV. We note that both works approximate the cloud density as a step function, hence they provide no information on the spatial behavior and predict that the magnetic amplification occurs only on the outskirt of the cloud.
More recently \cite{EZ11} reanalyzed the same problem with a 1D hydrodynamic approach, where CRs are described as a fluid and the coupling between self-excited waves and CRs is treated self-consistently. In this work the authors conclude that the CR pressure in the cloud drops only by $\sim 8\%$ and ascribe such decrease to the fact that CRs decouple from the plasma because of the wave damping. Nevertheless the hydrodynamic approach can only handle with integrated quantities and do not allow one to have detailed information on the CR spectrum.
In order to overcome this drawback, here we examine the propagation problem using a kinematical description for both CRs and magnetic Alfv\'enic turbulence. The diffusive transport equation of cosmic rays is coupled to the magnetic turbulence which determines the diffusion properties of the particles and, in turn, the Alfv\'en waves are amplified in presence of CR density gradient. Our approach can be thought as an extension of all previous works. With respect to \cite{Skill-Strong76} and \cite{Ces-Voelk77} we can describe completely the space dependence of the CRs and turbulence, and with respect to \cite{EZ11} we also provide information on the energy spectra.
In \S~\ref{sec:model} we introduce the mathematical description of the model while in \S~\ref{sec:results} we discuss our results.
\section{The mathematical model}
\label{sec:model}
The propagation of CRs through the HISM is thought to be diffusive, a fact which is strongly supported by many observations. Particles are scattered by the magnetic turbulence present in the Galaxy, mainly Alfv\'en waves. In order to describe the process of CR propagation from the HISM towards a diffuse cloud we use the same diffusive approximation. The validity of such approximation inside the cloud is questionable, because the magnetic turbulence should be damped very efficiently by the ion-neutral friction. Nevertheless here we are mainly interested in the description of the propagation in the transition region between the hot interstellar medium and the cloud. In this region the density of neutral hydrogen is not highly enough to damp completely the Alfv\'enic turbulence and the diffusive approximation can still hold.
We will use a 1D model, which is justified by the fact that CRs diffuse mainly along the direction of the magnetic field, and the typical coherence length of the magnetic field in the Galaxy is 50--100 pc, while the typical dimension of a diffuse cloud is only $\sim 10$ pc. The geometry of the problem is sketched in Fig.~\ref{fig:sketch}. The strength of the large scale component of the magnetic field is assumed to be constant also inside the cloud, a fact which is supported by observations \cite{Crutcher10} showing that for low density ISM, the magnetic field strength is independent of the ISM density up to a density $n<300$ cm$^{-3}$.
In the following subsections we will illustrate how we describe each single piece of the problem: the transport of CRs, the transport of Alfv\'en turbulence, the ion-neutral damping and the resonant amplification due to CR streaming.
\begin{figure}
\begin{center}
{\includegraphics[width=0.4\textwidth]{sketch.eps}}
\end{center}
\caption{Schematic picture of CR diffusing through a diffuse clouds along the direction of the large-scale magnetic field $\bf B$. Deep inside the cloud, where the magnetic turbulence has been totally damped, we do expect a spiral motion along the field lines.}
\label{fig:sketch}
\end{figure}
\subsection{Transport equation for Cosmic Rays} \label{sec:CRs}
The one dimensional steady state equation for the transport of CRs in presence of diffusion, advection and energy losses, written in the rest frame of the plasma reads
\begin{equation}
\frac{\partial}{\partial x} \left[ D \frac{\partial f}{\partial x} \right] - v_A \frac{\partial f}{\partial x}
+ \frac{p}{3} \frac{\partial v_A}{\partial x} \frac{\partial f}{\partial p}
- \frac{1}{p^2} \frac{\partial}{\partial p} \left[ \dot p p^2 f \right] = 0 \,,
\label{eq:fCR}
\end{equation}
where $f(x,p)$ is the particle distribution function, $D(x,p)$ is the diffusion coefficient, $\dot p(x,p)$ is the momentum losses and $v_A(x)= B(x)^2/\sqrt{4\pi \rho_i}$ is the Alfv\'en speed in the regular magnetic field $B(x)$. Notice that in this expression we include only the ions mass density, $\rho_i$, because at the wavelengths relevant in this work, the wave frequency is smaller than the charge-exchange frequency between ions and neutrals, hence, while ions oscillate with waves, neutrals have no time to couple with them (see e.g.\cite{ZS82} for more details).
Concerning the diffusion process, we consider only the effect produced by Alfv\`enic turbulence which gives the following diffusion coefficient \cite{Bell78a}
\begin{equation}
D(x,p)= \frac{4}{3\pi} \frac{r_L(p)}{\mathcal{P}_w(x, \bar k(p))/P_B} \,,
\label{eq:D}
\end{equation}
where $r_L(p)$ is the Larmor radius of particles in the large-scale magnetic field $\mathbf B$ and $P_B= B^2/(8\pi)$ is the magnetic pressure of the regular field $\mathbf{B}$. $\mathcal{P}_w(x, k)$ is the magnetic pressure in turbulent mode with wavenumber $k$ and will be derived in the \S\ref{sec:waves}. Notice that Eq.(\ref{eq:D}) is strictly valid only in the linear regime, namely when $\mathcal{P}_w(x, k)/P_B \ll 1$. We checked {\it a posteriori} that this condition is always verified in our results.
In the region deep inside the cloud where the magnetic turbulence is totally damped, we set $D=L v(p)/3$ where $L$ is the cloud dimension and $v(p)$ the particle speed. Using this trick we can still use the diffusive approach which gives the correct travel time for the cloud crossing.
We limit our calculation to CRs with energies between 100 keV and 10 GeV. In this energy region the most important channels of energy losses are due to ionization of neutral hydrogen atoms and, for $E>1$ GeV, also to the pion production. We took the energy losses from \cite{Padovani09} (see their Fig.(7)) and we use an analytic expression which well fit the data in the energy range [100 keV, 10 GeV ]:
\begin{equation}
\dot{p} /(m_p c) = \left( n_H/{\rm cm^{-3}} \right) \left\{ k_1 \left( p/p_1 \right)^{\alpha_1}
\left[ 1 + \left( p/p_1 \right)^{\gamma(\alpha_1-\alpha_2)} \right]^{-1/\gamma}
+ k_2 \left( p/p_2 \right)^{\alpha_3} \right\} {\rm s^{-1}}\,.
\label{eq:losses}
\end{equation}
The fit procedure gives the following value for the parameters: $k_1=7.3\cdot 10^{-13}$, $k_2=9.5 \cdot 10^{-17}$, $p_1=0.011\, m_p c$, $p_2=0.503\, m_p c$, $\alpha_1=-1.58$, $\alpha_2=1.197$, $\alpha_3=1.1598$ and $\gamma= 1.2$.
Let us now discuss the boundary conditions. Outside the cloud we impose that the CR distribution reduces to the Galactic one, hence the boundary condition at $x=x_1$ is $f(x_1,p)=f_0(p)$. We also impose a second boundary condition in the centre of the cloud, where for symmetry we have $\partial_x f(x,p)|_{x=x_2} = 0$. This boundary condition is an important difference with respect to previous works, which impose the second boundary condition on the CR gradient far from the cloud. While \cite{Skill-Strong76} and \cite{Ces-Voelk77} set $\partial_x f(x,p)|_{x=x_2} = 0$, in \cite{EZ11} the authors set this same gradient equal to a fixed number. In our case, on the other hand, the value of $\partial_x f(p,x)|_{x=x_2}$ is an outcome of the calculation.
We stress that the symmetry condition is the most meaningful boundary condition and it is valid as long as the diffusion approximation holds. On the other hand, when the diffusion approximation loses validity, the distribution function is not in general isotropic but will depend on the pitch angle $\alpha$. In this case the symmetry condition becomes $f(x_2,p,\alpha) = f(x_2,p,\pi-\alpha)$.
Eq.~(\ref{eq:fCR}) cannot be solved in an explicit way because it is nonlinear, due to the dependence of the diffusion coefficient on the magnetic turbulence which is, in turn, determined by the gradient of the CR density. In order to get the solution we implement an iterative technique similar to those used to solve the nonlinear problem of shock acceleration (see e.g.\cite{AmatoBlasi05, Morlino13}).
The first step is to write an implicit solution for Eq.~(\ref{eq:fCR}). We define the function $g(x,p)= D \,{\partial_x f}$ and we note that the equation for $g(x,p)$ can be formally reduced to a first order differential equation, i.e.
\begin{equation} \label{eq:g}
\partial_x g - \left( v_A/D \right) \, g + Q = 0 \,,
\end{equation}
with the appropriate boundary condition $g(x_2,p)=0$. The nonlinearity of the problem has been hided in the function $Q(x,p)$ which plays the role of a source/sink term, and reads
\begin{equation} \label{eq:Q}
Q(x,p) = (p/3) \partial_x v_A \, \partial_p f - p^{-2} \partial_p \left[ \dot p p^2 f \right] \,.
\end{equation}
The implicit solution for $g$ is
\begin{equation}
g(x,p) = \int_{x}^{x_2} Q(x',p) \exp\left[-\int_{x}^{x'} \frac{v_A}{D(y,p)} dy \right] dx' \,.
\label{eq:g_sol}
\end{equation}
Eq.(\ref{eq:g_sol}) allows us to write down the solution for $f(x,p)$ in the following implicit form:
\begin{equation}
f(x,p) = f_0(p) + \int_{x_1}^{x} \frac{dx'}{D(x',p)} \int_{x'}^{x_2} Q(x'',p)
\exp\left[-\int_{x'}^{x''} \frac{v_A}{D(y,p)} dy \right] dx'' \,.
\label{eq:sol_fCR}
\end{equation}
This equation can be solved iteratively, once the functions $D$, $v_A$ and $\dot p$ are fixed. Nevertheless we note that a special care should be taken in choosing the solving algorithm, because the convergence of Eq.~(\ref{eq:sol_fCR}) is not guaranteed a priori.
\subsection{Transport equation for Alfv\`en waves} \label{sec:waves}
Whenever charged particles stream faster than the Alfv\'en speed, they generate Alf\'en waves with wavelengths close to their Larmor radius. In the steady state approximation and for one dimensional system, the equation for the transport of magnetic turbulence reads as (see e.g. \cite{McKenzieVoelk82})
\begin{equation}
\partial_x \mathcal{F}_w(x,k) = \sigma(x,k) - \Gamma(x,k) \, \mathcal{P}_w(x,k) \,,
\label{eq:Fw}
\end{equation}
where $\mathcal{F}_w(x,k)$ and $\mathcal{P}_w(x,k)$ are, respectively, the energy flux and pressure per unit logarithmic bandwidth of waves with wavenumber $k$. Notice that we are considering only waves moving towards the cloud, hence only with one polarity. $\sigma(x,k)$ is the growth rate of energy in magnetic turbulence and $\Gamma(x,k)$ is the rate at which the turbulence is damped. In principle, in Eq.~(\ref{eq:Fw}) we should include also the wave-wave coupling term, which produce a diffusion in the $k$-space, but here we neglect such a term because the damping rate due to neutral friction and the growth rate due to streaming instability are both faster than the wave-wave damping.
For Alfv\'en waves the following relations hold:
\begin{eqnarray}
\int dk \, k^{-1} \mathcal{P}_w(x,k) &=& (\delta B)^2/(8\pi) \equiv P_w \,, \nonumber \\
\int dk \, k^{-1} \mathcal{F}_w(x,k) &=& v_A (\delta B)^2/(4\pi) \equiv F_w \,.
\label{eq:PwFw}
\end{eqnarray}
such that the relation between energy flux and pressure is $\mathcal{F}_w= 2 v_A\, \mathcal{P}_w$ \cite{Caprioli08}. Using this relation Eq.(\ref{eq:Fw}) reduces to the following expression
\begin{equation} \label{eq:Pw}
\partial_x \mathcal{P}_w(x,k) = - \left[ \partial_x \ln(v_A) + \Gamma/(2 v_A) \right] \mathcal{P}_w + \sigma/(2 v_A)
\end{equation}
which can be easily solved once the boundary condition far from the cloud is specified. We set $\mathcal{P}_w(x_1,k) = \mathcal{P}_{w,0}(k)$, where the choice of $\mathcal{P}_{w,0}(k)$ presents some subtleties which will be discussed in \S~\ref{sec:boundary}. Using this boundary condition, the solution of Eq.(\ref{eq:Pw}) reads
\begin{equation}
\mathcal{P}_w(x,k) = \mathcal{P}_{w,0}(k) + \frac{1}{2 v_A} \int_{x_1}^x \left[ \sigma - \mathcal{P}_{w,0}(k)
\left( \Gamma + 2 \frac{\partial v_A}{\partial x'} \right) \right]
\exp \left\{ - \int_{x'}^x \frac{\Gamma}{2 v_A} dy \right\} dx'
\label{eq:Pw_sol}
\end{equation}
To understand the physical meaning of each term, it is useful to look at the solution (\ref{eq:Pw_sol}) in the case where $v_A$, $\Gamma$ and $\sigma$ are all constant in space. In this limit the solution becomes
\begin{equation}
\mathcal{P}_w(x,k) = \mathcal{P}_{w,0}(k) e^{-\frac{\Gamma}{2 v_A}(x-x_1)} + \sigma/\Gamma \,
\left( 1- e^{-\frac{\Gamma}{2 v_A}(x-x_1)}\right) \,,
\label{eq:Pw_const}
\end{equation}
where we recognize a local term, $\sigma/\Gamma$, plus a propagation term $\propto e^{-\Gamma x/v_A}$. In the further limit where the Alfv\`en speed is negligible with respect to the damping speed, $\Gamma x$, the propagation of waves drops to zero, and the power spectrum is determined only by the local ratio between the growth and the damping rates, i.e. $\mathcal{P}_w(x,k) = \sigma(x,k)/\Gamma(x,k)$.
We still need to explicit the amplification and the damping rates. The only source of magnetic amplification is the resonant scattering between the accelerated particles and the magnetic turbulence, which gives the following growth-rate \cite{Skilling75}
\begin{equation} \label{eq:sigma}
\sigma(x,k) = (4\pi/3) v_A(x) \left[ p^4 v(p) \partial_x f \right]_{p=\bar p(k)} \,,
\end{equation}
where the term in the square brackets is calculated for $\bar p(k)= eB/(k m_p c)$, which is the well know resonant condition between particles and Alfv\'en waves.
The main source of damping is, instead, the ion-neutral friction. In the present work we deal only with diffuse clouds, whose typical temperature and density are 10--100 K and 10--100 cm$^{-3}$, respectively, and are dominated by atomic hydrogen. Hence we only need to account for the elastic scattering between protons and atomic hydrogen. Moreover, for the particle energies we are interested in ($E< 10$ GeV), the ion-neutral damping does not depend on the wave number $k$, but it is only a function of the position. The resulting damping rate is \cite{Kuls-Cesa71,Drury96}:
\begin{equation} \label{eq:damping}
\Gamma = 4.2 \times 10^{-9} \left(T/10^4 \rm K \right)^{0.4} \left( n_H/{\rm cm^{-3}} \right) \, {\rm s^{-1}}\,,
\end{equation}
where $T$ is the temperature o the plasma and $n_H$ is the atomic Hydrogen density.
\subsection{Boundary conditions far from the cloud} \label{sec:boundary}
In order to solve simultaneously Eq.~(\ref{eq:sol_fCR}) and Eq.~(\ref{eq:Pw_sol}) one has to chose self consistently the boundary conditions $f_0(p)$ and $\mathcal{P}_{w,0}(k)$ far from the cloud, in such a way to match the conditions in the Galaxy. The Local Galactic CR spectrum is well know only for energies above few GeV, where $f(p)\propto p^{-4.7}$. For lower energies the spectrum is strongly affected by the solar modulation, which prevent us to know the actual Galactic spectrum. There are both theoretical and experimental reasons to believe that for energies below few hundreds MeV the slope of CR spectrum becomes harder. Without any loss of generality we chose here a simple broken power law:
\begin{equation} \label{eq:f0}
f_0(p) = K_f \left(p/p_0\right)^{-s_1} \left[ 1 + \left(p/p_0\right)^{s_1-s_2} \right]^{-1} \,,
\end{equation}
where $s_1= 4.7$ is the slope for $p>p_0\equiv 0.2$ GeV, while $s_2$ is the slope below $p_0$ and will be taken as a free parameter. $K_f$ is the normalization constant chosen in order to have a CR pressure equal to 1 eV cm$^{-3}$.
Here it is worth to underline a subtlety of the one dimensional model we are using. From a pure mathematical point of view, the value of $\mathcal{P}_{w,0}(k)$ should be strictly zero, because in the absence of any CR gradient, no turbulence is excited. On the other hand in the Galaxy this situation is never realized, because in the absence of diffusion the CR distribution would develop a strong anisotropy (due to a pure ballistic motion) which will turn on the self-generation of turbulence. Hence a physical justified boundary condition for $\mathcal{P}_{w,0}(k)$ is the actual Galactic turbulence, which determines the Galactic CR spectrum far from the cloud. The magnetic turbulence spectrum in the Galaxy is not well known, but in literature the most widely used one is the Kolmogorov power spectrum, which reads
\begin{equation} \label{eq:Pw0}
\mathcal{P}_{w,0}(k) = 2/3 \, \eta_w P_{B,0} \left( k L_{\rm tur} \right)^{-2/3} \,.
\end{equation}
The normalization factor $\eta_w$ gives the power in the magnetic turbulence with respect to the power in the regular field, and it is chosen in order to fix the diffusion coefficient at 1 GeV equal to $10^{28} \rm cm^2 s^{-1}$. This condition gives $\eta_w=0.6$. $L_{\rm tur}$ is the maximum scale at which the turbulence is injected into the Galaxy, which is typically assumed to be between 50 and 100 pc. In this work we use the value 50 pc. Using Eq.~(\ref{eq:D}) we see that the Kolmogorov turbulence implies a diffusion coefficient $D(p) \propto p^{1/3}$.
\subsection{Spatial profile of the cloud} \label{sec:cloud}
To study the penetration of CRs into a diffuse cloud we need to specify how the density profiles of both neutral hydrogen and ionized protons change in passing from the HISM to the cloud interior. We adopt a profile similar to what has been used in \cite{EZ11}. The total density profile of the plasma is described by a tanh profile:
\begin{equation}
\rho(x) = \rho_1 + \left(\rho_1-\rho_2 \right) \, \left( 1+ \tanh \left[ (x-x_c)/\Delta x_c \right] \right) /2 \,,
\label{eq:rho}
\end{equation}
where $x_c$ is the position of the edge of the cloud, and $\Delta x_c$ is the thickness of the transition. We chose $x_c=0.5$ pc and $\Delta x_c$ between 0.7 and 0.05 pc. $\rho_1 \equiv \rho(x_1)$ is the density far outside the cloud, while $\rho_2 \equiv \rho(x_2)$ is the density at the centre of the cloud. We adopt the typical values are $\rho_1= 0.01\, m_p$ cm$^{-3}$ and $\rho_2= 100\, m_p$ cm$^{-3}$.
Always following \cite{EZ11}, we describe the ionization fraction using a similar profile:
\begin{equation} \label{eq:f_ion}
\xi_{ion}(x) = \xi_1 + \left(\xi_1-\xi_2\right) \left( 1+ \tanh\left[ -(x-x_c)/\Delta x_c \right] \right) /2 \,.
\end{equation}
The ionization fraction is set to drop from a maximum ($\xi_2 = 1$) far outside the cloud, to a minimum ($\xi_1 = 10^{-3}$) inside the cloud. Such values are consistent with observations, but it is worth notice that, to treat the problem in a self consistent way, we should calculate the ionization produced by the CR spectrum predicted by Eq.(\ref{eq:sol_fCR}), rather than using an {\it a priori} profile like Eq.(\ref{eq:f_ion}). We will address this issue in a future work, but we stress that such a choice does not affect our main conclusions.
Finally we fix the temperature of the hot interstellar phase to be $T=3\cdot 10^6$ K, and we determine the corresponding temperature profile, $T(x)$ imposing everywhere the condition of pressure equilibrium.
\section{Results and discussion}
\label{sec:results}
In Fig.~\ref{fig:result1} we summarize the results of our calculations for a specific choice of the parameters' values, which are summarized in the first row of Table~\ref{tab:1}. The top left plot show the initial configuration of the plasma along the spatial coordinate $x$: different lines show the density profile of both neutral Hydrogen and ions, the plasma temperature, $T$, and the value of Alfv\'en speed $v_A$. Notice that the cloud size is assumed to be 10 pc.
The bottom left panel shows the results for the total CR pressure, $P_{c}(x)$, and the total energy density in magnetic waves, $P_w(x)$ (multiplied by 100). Notice that $P_w(x)$ is the integral of $\mathcal{P}_{w}(k)$ only between $k_{\min}$ and $k_{\max}$ which are the resonant wave-vectors corresponding to 10 GeV and 100 keV, respectively. We see that $P_w(x)$ start to increase far from the cloud, reaching its maximum at the location where the $n_H \approx 10^{-3}$ cm$^{-3}$ and has a value of $\sim 10^4 \times P_{w,0}$, confirming that the amplification of the turbulence can be very effective. In spite of this fact we stress that the amplification is still in the linear regime, meaning that $\delta B/B<1$. After the peak the density of magnetic turbulence drops rapidly because the ion-neutral friction and, simultaneously, the energy density of CRs decreases of $\sim 10\%$.
The right panels show the magnetic energy spectrum, $\mathcal{P}_{w}(k)$ (top panel) and the CR spectrum, $f(p)$ (bottom panel) at different location along $x$, according to the color code. The corresponding positions are marked with filled circles of the same color in the bottom left panel: hence the dark green lines correspond to spectra far away from the cloud, while the red lines represent the spectrum inside the cloud.
Notice that $\mathcal{P}_{w}(k)$ is plotted versus the resonant energy $E_r$, such that waves with wave-vector $k$ resonate with particles with energy $E_r$, i.e. $r_L(E_r)=1/k$. In this way we can easily compare the energy density of waves with wave-vector $k$ with the energy density of particles which resonate with the same $k$. From the top-right plot we see that not all waves are excited at the same rate: the largest amplification occurs for those waves resonating with particles which lose energy faster.
The bottom-right panel shows that the CR spectrum is depleted at low energies as we approach the cloud interior. Inside the cloud the spectrum has a peak at $E_{\rm peak}\approx 90$ MeV and remains unchanged for energies above $E_{\rm peak}$, while it is strongly damped below such value. $E_{\rm peak}$ is not a constant but depends mainly on two factors, namely the value of the density inside the cloud, $n_2$, and the thickness of the cloud edge, $\Delta x_c$. We also find a slight dependence on the CR spectral index at low energy, $s_2$. In Table~\ref{tab:1} we summarize the results for $E_{\rm peak}$ for few cases where we change the value of $s_2$, $\Delta x_c$ and $n_2$. In all cases we found $E_{\rm peak}$ between 10 and 100 MeV, confirming the "exclusion" effect first found in \cite{Skill-Strong76}, even if for the parameters used here the exclusion energy is slightly smaller.
\begin{figure}
\begin{center}
{\includegraphics[width=0.9\linewidth]{PLOT_s2_d05_n100.eps}}
\caption{{\it Top-left panel}: spatial profile of ions and Hydrogen number density, plasma temperature and Alfv\'en speed. {\it Bottom-left panel}: Total CR energy density and magnetic wave energy density ($\times 100$). The filled circles indicate the position where we take the energy spectrum of both waves and CRs which are shown in the top and bottom right panels, respectively (using the same color code). The parameters' values chosen for this case are written in the first row of Table~1.}
\label{fig:result1}
\end{center}
\end{figure}
\begin{table}
\caption{\label{tab:1} Value of the peak energy, $E_{\rm peak}$, in the CR spectrum inside the cloud for different values of parameters. The first row shows to values used to produce Fig.~1.}
\begin{center}
\begin{tabular}{ccccc | c}
\hline
$ s_1$ & $s_2$ & $\Delta x_c$/pc & $n_1$/cm$^{-3}$ & $n_2$/cm$^{-3}$ & $E_{\rm peak}$/MeV \\
\hline
4.7 & 2 & 0.5 & 0.01 & 100 & 90 \\
4.7 & 2 & 0.7 & 0.01 & 100 & 60 \\
4.7 & 2 & 0.1 & 0.01 & 100 & 110 \\
4.7 & 1 & 0.5 & 0.01 & 100 & 70 \\
4.7 & 3 & 0.5 & 0.01 & 100 & 90 \\
4.7 & 2 & 0.5 & 0.01 & 1 & 20 \\
\hline
\end{tabular}
\end{center}
\end{table}
| {
"redpajama_set_name": "RedPajamaArXiv"
} | 9,808 |
module Network
module Technologies
# A battery represents a technology which may take in excess energy from the
# network and release it again as needed.
#
# No custom behavior is needed over the base Storage class, but Battery exists
# to more easily differentiate batteries from other technologies which also
# inherit from the Storage class.
class Battery < Storage
def self.disabled?(options)
! options[:battery_storage]
end
def emit_retain?
true
end
end # Battery
end
end
| {
"redpajama_set_name": "RedPajamaGithub"
} | 2,484 |
**CONTENTS**
_TITLE PAGE_
_DEDICATION_
_MAPS_
_DRAMATIS PERSONAE_
_PROLOGUE_
PART 1
CHAPTER 1
CHAPTER 2
CHAPTER 3
CHAPTER 4
CHAPTER 5
CHAPTER 6
CHAPTER 7
CHAPTER 8
CHAPTER 9
CHAPTER 10
CHAPTER 11
PART II
CHAPTER 12
CHAPTER 13
CHAPTER 14
CHAPTER 15
CHAPTER 16
CHAPTER 17
CHAPTER 18
CHAPTER 19
CHAPTER 20
PART III
CHAPTER 21
CHAPTER 22
CHAPTER 23
CHAPTER 24
CHAPTER 25
CHAPTER 26
CHAPTER 27
CHAPTER 28
CHAPTER 29
PART IV
CHAPTER 30
CHAPTER 31
CHAPTER 32
CHAPTER 33
CHAPTER 34
CHAPTER 35
CHAPTER 36
CHAPTER 37
CHAPTER 38
CHAPTER 39
PART V
CHAPTER 40
CHAPTER 41
CHAPTER 42
CHAPTER 43
_ALTERNATE HISTORY TITLES BY ERIC FLINT_
_COPYRIGHT_
_To the memory of my father, Knute Waldemar Flint_
**DRAMATIS PERSONAE**
_American Characters_
JOHN QUINCY ADAMS: U.S. secretary of state; candidate for president in the 1824 election.
ADAM BEATTY: Adviser to Henry Clay.
JACOB BROWN: Major general, commander of the U.S. Army.
WILLIAM CULLEN BRYANT: American poet and newspaper reporter.
JOHN C. CALHOUN: U.S. senator from South Carolina; candidate for president in the 1824 election.
JULIA CHINN: Mulatto wife of Kentucky senator Richard M. Johnson; the marriage is invalid by Kentucky law.
HENRY CLAY: Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives; candidate for president in the 1824 election.
JOHN COFFEE: A close friend and associate of Andrew Jackson.
WILLIAM H. CRAWFORD: U.S. secretary of the treasury; candidate for president in the 1824 election.
ROBERT CRITTENDEN: Leader of the expedition to seize the Delta from Arkansas; scion of a prominent political family in Kentucky.
EDMUND GAINES: Brigadier general, U.S. Army; one of Jacob Brown's two top subordinate officers.
WILLIAM HENRY HARRISON: Retired U.S. Army officer.
ANDREW JACKSON HOUSTON: Son of Sam and Maria Hester Houston.
MARIA HESTER HOUSTON: Wife of Sam Houston; daughter of James Monroe.
SAM HOUSTON: Special commissioner for Indian Affairs in the Monroe administration; adopted son of Cherokee chief John Jolly; his Cherokee name is Colonneh, which means "The Raven."
ANDREW JACKSON: Senator from Tennessee; candidate for president in the 1824 election.
THOMAS JESUP: Brigadier general, U.S. Army; quartermaster general for U.S. Army.
ADALINE JOHNSON: Daughter of Richard Johnson and Julia Chinn; twin to Imogene.
IMOGENE JOHNSON: Daughter of Richard Johnson and Julia Chinn; twin to Adaline.
RICHARD M. JOHNSON: Senator from Kentucky; married to Julia Chinn, although the marriage is invalid by Kentucky law.
JOSIAH JOHNSTON: Adviser to Henry Clay.
JAMES MONROE: President of the United States, 1816–1825.
PETER PORTER: Adviser to Henry Clay.
SCOTT POWERS: Adventurer; partner of Ray Thompson.
WINFIELD SCOTT: Brigadier general, U.S. Army; Brown's other top subordinate officer.
ZACHARY TAYLOR: Lieutenant colonel, U.S. Army.
RAY THOMPSON: Adventurer; partner of Scott Powers.
MARTIN VAN BUREN: U.S. senator from New York; known as the Little Magician.
_Arkansas Characters_
CHARLES BALL: General, Arkansas Army.
JOHN BROWN: Abolitionist; a tanner from Ohio who moves to Arkansas.
SALMON BROWN: Abolitionist; brother of John Brown.
HENRY CROWELL: Banker and entrepreneur.
PATRICK DRISCOL: Principal chief, Arkansas Chiefdom. Also known as the Laird of Arkansas.
TIANA DRISCOL: Formerly Tiana Rogers; niece of Cherokee chief John Jolly; leader of the Arkansas Women's Council.
MARIE LAVEAU: Former New Orleans voudou queen; now married to Charles Ball.
ANTHONY MCPARLAND: Captain, Arkansas Army.
CALLENDER MCPARLAND: Soldier, Arkansas Army; cousin of Anthony McParland.
SHEFFIELD PARKER: Freedman from Baltimore; later soldier and then officer in the Arkansas Army.
HENRY SHREVE: Steamboat designer and entrepreneur; business partner with Patrick Driscol and Henry Crowell.
UNCLE JEM: Freedman from Baltimore; later soldier in the Arkansas Army; uncle of Sheffield Parker.
_Confederate Characters_
DUWALI: Cherokee chief; also known as Chief Bowles or The Bowl.
PUSHMATAHA: Principal chief of the Choctaws.
JOHN RIDGE: Co-owner, with Buck Watie, of a major newspaper in the Confederacy; later an officer in the Arkansas Army; son of Major Ridge.
MAJOR RIDGE: A major Cherokee chief; father of John Ridge; uncle of Buck Watie.
JOHN ROSS: A major Cherokee chief.
BUCK WATIE: Co-owner, with John Ridge, of a major newspaper in the Confederacy; later an officer in the Arkansas Army; nephew of Major Ridge.
_British Characters_
THOMAS CLARKSON: A leader of the British antislavery movement.
DAVID ROSS: Son of Robert Ross.
ELIZA ROSS: Wife of Robert Ross.
ROBERT ROSS: Former major general, British army; active in the antislavery movement.
WILLIAM WILBERFORCE: Member of Parliament; a leader of the British antislavery movement.
**PROLOGUE**
_The north bank of the Ohio River, near Cincinnati_
APRIL 22, 1824
By the time they had finished making camp for the night, Sheffield Parker was exhausted. They'd been pushing hard for over a week, ever since they'd reached the boat landing at Brownsville in Cabell County and started traveling across country instead of continuing down the Ohio River on a flatboat. A friendly white riverboat man had cautioned them about it. He said they'd been safe enough, passing down Virginia's western counties, since there were hardly any slaves in the area. But from there on downriver they'd have Kentucky on the south bank of the Ohio, and several slave catching parties were active on or near the river.
"We freedmen," Sheff's uncle Jem had protested.
The boatman glanced at their party, which consisted of Sheff and his mother, his sister Dinah and his uncle Jem, and twelve other people from three different families. Several of them were children of one age or another.
"Well, that's pretty obvious. You don't never see runaway slaves in parties this big. But look, folks, it just don't matter—and you got to know that much yourselves. Those slave-catchers are rounding up any black people they can lay their hands on, these days. It's been a field day for the bastards ever since the exclusion laws started getting enforced. They'll even roam into Ohio to do it. They'll grab you and haul you before a tame judge in Kentucky, and he'll bang his gavel and declare you obvious runaways, and you'll be up on the selling block before the day's over."
"We got papers—" Sheff 's mother started digging in the sack where she kept their few valuable belongings.
"Ma'am, it don't _matter._ " He flipped his hand, dismissing the idea. "Forget about anything you can call 'law,' down there. If you got papers, the slave-catchers will just burn them. Then it's your word against theirs—and any judge they'll be hauling you up before would rule against Jesus Christ in a heartbeat, if he was your color."
He shrugged. "It's a shame and a disgrace, but there it is. Was I you, I'd sell the flatboat and start moving overland. Stay away from the river, as much as you can. Course, that ain't so easy, lots of places. Just be careful, is all."
They'd taken his advice, eventually, after finding someone who was willing to pay them a reasonable price for the flatboat. But it had been hard going thereafter. The road along the north bank of the Ohio was a primitive thing compared with the National Road they'd been able to take as far as Wheeling after they'd fled Baltimore. Sheff had had to carry his little sister for the past two days, she'd been so worn out.
And then it all seemed to come to nothing. Less than an hour after they made camp, just at sundown, Sheff heard a noise in the woods that circled the clearing on every side except the river. A moment later, two white men emerged, with five more coming right after them. All of them had guns, to make it still worse. Two of them held muskets, and all the others had pistols. Nobody in Sheff 's party had any weapons at all, except the big knives that Jem and two of the other men carried.
"Well, lookee here, boys. Ain't this a haul?"
Sheff stared at them, petrified, from where he was squatting by the fire. He was sixteen years old. The first eleven years of his life had been the cramped years of a poor freedman's son in Baltimore, but not really so bad as all that. Then the white people started getting crazy after some sort of battle near New Orleans that Sheff didn't understand much about, except it seemed some black men had beaten the state militia over there and moved to the new Confederacy of the Arkansas. Which was way out west; Sheff wasn't really sure exactly where.
White people had gotten mean, thereafter, a lot meaner than usual. New laws had been passed in Maryland, ordering all freedmen to leave the state within a year. Like most freedmen, they'd just ignored the law, seeing as how they were poor and didn't know where to go anyway. Most states were passing the same laws. Freedman exclusion laws, they were called. Then the rioting had started, and they hadn't had any choice but to try to make it to the Confederacy.
And now, even that was going to be denied them.
One of the white men with a musket hefted it up a few inches. Not cocking it, just making the threat obvious. "Don't be giving us no trouble, now. I don't want to kill no nigger, on account of it's a waste of money. But I will. Don't think I won't."
One of the other men chuckled and started to say something. But he broke off after the first couple of words, startled by movement to his left.
Sheff was startled, too. He looked over to the far side of the clearing and saw that another white man had come out of the woods.
He hissed in a breath. That was the scariest-looking white man Sheffield Parker had ever seen. And, even at the age of sixteen, he'd seen a lot of scary white men. Especially over the past few months, since the killing had started.
"And who're you?" one of the white men demanded of the new arrival.
The man who'd come out of the woods ignored the question. His eyes simply moved slowly across the clearing, taking in everything. He was holding a musket in his right hand, almost casually.
The sun had set by now, and in the flickering light of the campfire, those eyes looked very dark. But Sheff was pretty sure they were actually light colored. That scary bluish gray color that he'd come to fear and hate more than any color in the world. The color of the eyes of most of the men who had beaten his father to death just a few weeks earlier. Sheff hadn't had any trouble, then, determining the color. The men had done the deed in broad daylight, on a street in Baltimore.
He'd thought they were going to kill him, too, but they'd satisfied themselves with just beating him and his mother. Following which, they'd given them two days to get out of Baltimore, or suffer his father's fate.
They'd left that very night, instead, along with a dozen other survivors from the race riot the white men had launched.
"Who're you?" the white man demanded again. He began to raise his musket.
"Bring that gun an inch higher and you're a dead man," the newcomer said. Turning his head, slightly: "See to it, Salmon. Levi, if any of the others makes a threatening move, kill him."
The seven original white men froze. Partly, Sheff thought, that was because of the sight of two musket barrels emerging from the woods, gleaming in the campfire light. But mostly it was just the way the man had said the words.
Scary, that had been, like everything about him. The words had issued from those gaunt jaws like decrees from a judge—or maybe one of those Old Testament prophets that Sheff 's uncle Jem was so partial to. For all the threat in the words, they'd been spoken neither casually nor in heat. Simply...
Stated. The way a man might state that the sky was blue, or that the moon rose. A certainty, a given, decreed and ordained by nature.
One of the other seven white men finally broke the paralysis. He hunched his shoulders and spit. "Well, tarnation, sir, who _are_ you?"
In a more aggrieved tone, one of the others added: "It ain't fair! We spotted and tracked 'em first. Rightfully, the reward should be ours."
The gaunt-jawed man brought his gaze to bear on that one. "What 'reward'?"
"Well..."The other seemed a bit abashed, for a moment. "The reward for capturing runaway slaves, of course."
That finally brought Sheff 's mother out of her own paralysis that she'd fallen into the moment the first seven white men had come into their camp. "Tha'ss not true! We freedmen! We was driven out of Baltimore, and we on our way to the Confederates in Arkansas."
One of the white men glared at her and started to snarl something, but the gaunt-jawed man cut him off.
"It matters not, anyway. This is Ohio. We do not tolerate the heathen institution of slavery here." He nodded toward the negroes squatting by the fire. "They are men, and thus they are by nature free. So God decrees. I care not in the least what some sinner claims in Virginia or the Carolinas. Soon enough, his flesh will roast in eternal hellfire."
He took a step forward, his musket held higher. "Begone, all of you."
The seven original white men just stared at him.
"Begone," he repeated.
One of them had had enough. He snatched his hat from his head and slammed it to the ground, then planted his hand on the pistol at his belt.
"The hell we will! I don't know what crazy notions you've got in your head, but we—"
The gaunt-jawed man took another step forward. He was now standing not fifteen feet away from the man with the pistol.
"I believe in the Golden Rule, sir, and the Declaration of Independence. I think that both mean the same thing. And, that being so, it is better that a whole generation should pass off the face of the earth—men, women, and children—by a violent death than that one jot of either should fail in this country. I mean exactly so, sir."
The man with the pistol hesitated. Then he sneered. "You won't shoot."
The musket came up like dawn rising. Not quickly, no. Sheff wasn't sure, but he didn't think the gaunt-jawed man was really what people meant by a "gun man." He wasn't handling the musket awkwardly, but he didn't seem especially favored with it, either.
It mattered not at all. The dawn rises. It just does, whether any man wills it or not.
At the end, the pistol-man seemed to realize it also. "Hey—! " he started to shout, before the bullet took him in the chest and hammered him to the ground.
"Hey!" two of the others echoed in protest.
The gaunt-jawed man ignored them as he began reloading his musket. "If any of them move, Salmon and Levi, slay them."
They didn't move. Even though they all had guns, too, and had the gaunt-jawed man and his fellows outnumbered.
Well...maybe. From the corner of his eye, Sheff could see his uncle Jem and two of the other men in their party reaching for their knives. His mother was doing the same.
Sheff wished he had a knife himself.
Halfway through reloading his musket, the gaunt-jawed man looked up. He was close enough now that Sheff could finally see the true color of his eyes.
Grayish blue, sure enough. That same frightening, cold color. But since it wasn't aimed at him for once, Sheff wasn't so scared.
"All of you," the man said quietly to the six white men still alive and facing him, "were condemned before you were born. God is Almighty and so He decreed, for purposes of His own. I will shoot each and every one of you—shoot you as dead as that one, sirs—and I will simply be the instrument of God's will. So do not think—ever—to say to me 'thou wilt not do it.' Oh, no, sirs. I assure you. I most certainly will."
They were strange words, in a way, coming from a man whom Sheff suddenly realized was quite young. Somewhere in his early twenties, at a guess, although the harsh features of his face made him seem older. Yet, he'd spoken the words like one of the ancient prophets, and Sheff knew that some of them had lived to be hundreds of years old.
"I most certainly will," the man repeated. He was close to being done, now, with the reloading. "Indeed, I shall, the moment this musket is ready to fire again."
He broke off the work for an instant to point with the ramrod at one of the six white men.
"I will kill you first. After that, the others. Those whom my brothers—black as well as white—have left alive. If there are any."
Sheff 's uncle rose to his feet. So did the other two black men. Their knives were all visible, out in the open and with campfire light on them.
"Won't be a one, sir," Uncle Jem predicted. "Not if your brothers shoot as straight as you do."
The eyes of the six original white men were very wide, by now.
"Hey!" one of them cried.
"Begone, I said." The gaunt-jawed man didn't look up from the reloading. "And do not—ever—come near me again."
Sheff almost laughed, watching how they ran away. His mother did, after one of them tripped over a root.
Before they slept for the night, the gaunt-jawed man insisted on leading them in prayer. Then he read from his Bible for a few minutes, until he passed it over to Jem.
Sheff didn't mind. His uncle Jem's heavy voice was a reassuring counter-tone to the white man's. And it wasn't as if they were quarreling over the biblical text, after all.
The next morning, when he awoke, Sheff saw that the white man and his two brothers were already awake. Awake, clothed—and armed.
For the first time in his sixteen years of life, the sight of an armed white man didn't scare Sheff. Even if the man in question was still the scariest-looking white man he'd ever seen.
Once the party were all awake and ready to resume their travel, the man spoke.
"My brothers and I will go with you as far as the Confederacy. To make sure nothing happens like last night."
"It's a far stretch, sir," pointed out Jem.
The man shrugged. "We've been thinking of settling in the Confederacy, anyway. I would much like to make the acquaintance of Patrick Driscol. In a world full of sinners, his like is not often encountered."
Uncle Jem nodded. "We'd much appreciate it, sir. Ever since Calhoun and his bunch got those freedmen exclusion laws passed, it's been nigh horrible for black folks."
"Yes, I know. Calhoun will burn. Not for us to know why God chose to inflict him upon us. No doubt He had His reasons."
By the time they reached the Mississippi, almost two weeks later, Sheff had worked up the courage to ask the man's name. He was the first one to do so.
It helped that a party of Cherokees was there, ready to escort them the rest of the way to the Arkansas Confederacy. Cherokees were frightening, to be sure, but they weren't as frightening as white men.
Not even all white men were frightening to Sheff any longer. Not even _him._ He was learning to make distinctions that hadn't seemed very clear, back in the freedmens' quarters of Baltimore.
"Please, sir," he said. "I'd really appreciate to know your name."
The man nodded gravely. Then he smiled. He had quite a nice smile, even if it wasn't often evident.
"I wondered when one of you might ask." He pointed to his two brothers. "That's Salmon. The other is my adopted brother, Levi Blakeslee. My name is Brown. John Brown."
>
**CHAPTER 1**
_Washington, D.C._
APRIL 25, 1824
"Houston must have known." The president turned his head away from the window, presenting his profile to the other two men. The expression on his face was not condemnatory so much as simply pensive. "Must have known for several years, in fact. Am I right, Winfield?"
The tall, handsome general in one of the chairs in Monroe's office shifted his position. Only slightly, of course. The very fancy uniform he favored didn't lend itself well to extravagant movement while he was seated.
"Oh, certainly," General Scott replied. "Driscol's been building another Line of Torres Vedras in those mountains. The original took Wellington over a year to build—and he had the population of Lisbon to draw on. Even with all the negroes who have migrated to Arkansas the past few years, Driscol doesn't begin to have that large a labor force. And the Cherokees and Creeks are useless for that sort of work, of course. For the most part, at least."
The secretary of state, the third man in the room, cleared his throat. "Perhaps..." John Quincy Adams pursed his lips. "The work stretched out over that long a period of time..."
President Monroe shook his head. "I thank you, John, but let's not be foolish. _Sam Houston?_ "
He chuckled. "I remind you that my son-in-law is the same man who, at the age of sixteen, crossed sixty miles of Tennessee wilderness after running away from home. Then he lived among the Cherokee for several years, even being adopted into one of their clans. He could find his way through any woods or mountains in Creation."
The president's tone of voice grew somber. "Even drunk, as he so often is these days."
Monroe finally turned away from the window. "No, let's not be foolish. He spends as much time in the Confederacy as he does here at home, since the treaty was signed. There is no chance that Sam Houston failed to see what his friend Patrick Driscol was doing. Nor, given his military experience, that he didn't understand what he was seeing."
As he resumed his seat at his desk, Monroe nodded toward Scott. "It didn't take Winfield here more than a few days to figure it out, when he visited the area. And—meaning no offense—Winfield's not half the woodsman Houston is."
The general's notorious vanity seemed to be on vacation that day. His own chuckle was a hearty thing. "Not a tenth, say better! I've traveled with Houston a time or two. But it didn't matter on this occasion. Patrick provided me with a Cherokee escort, who served as my guides. He made no attempt to keep me from seeing what he had wrought in those mountains. Quite the contrary, I assure you. He _wants_ us to know."
A bit warily, Scott studied the president. John Quincy Adams didn't wonder as to the reason. James Monroe was normally the most affable and courteous of men, but they were treading on very delicate ground here. That most treacherous and shifting ground of all, where political and personal affairs intersected.
Sam Houston's marriage to James Monroe's younger daughter Maria Hester in 1819, following one of the young nation's most famous whirlwind courtships, had added a great deal of flavor and spice to an administration that was otherwise principally noted for such unromantic traits as efficiency and political skill. The girl had only been seventeen at the time. The famous Hero of the Capitol—still young, too, being only twenty-six himself, and as handsome and well spoken as ever—receiving the hand in marriage of the very attractive daughter of the country's chief executive. What could better satisfy the smug assurance of a new republic that it basked in the favor of the Almighty?
It hadn't been all show, either. Very little of it, in fact. Allowing for his constant absences as the administration's special commissioner for Indian affairs, Houston had proved to be something of a model husband. He treated Maria Hester exceedingly well; she, in turn, doted on the man. And, thankfully, Houston's notorious womanizing had vanished entirely after his marriage. There'd been not a trace of scandal, thereafter.
His steadily worsening affection for whiskey, which had become a growing concern for the president, was something that Houston kept away from his wife. However much whiskey he guzzled in the nation's taverns—that, too, had become something of a legend—he did not do the same at home. He drank little, as a rule, in his wife's presence; was invariably a cheerful rather than a nasty drunk, on the few occasions when he did; and quit altogether after his son was born.
Even Houston's stubborn insistence on naming the child Andrew Jackson Houston hadn't caused much in the way of family tension. Monroe had made no formal objection of any kind, whatever he might have said in private. In any event, the president was far too shrewd a politician not to use the occasion to defuse the tensions with Jackson that had begun to build. As political tensions always did around Jackson, the man being what he was.
So, despite Houston's faults—and which man had no faults? Adams asked himself; certainly not he—the president liked his son-in-law. So did John Quincy Adams, for that matter, and he was not a man given to many personal likings.
Adams glanced at the general sitting in the chair next to him. So, for that matter, did Winfield Scott. At least, once he'd realized that Houston's resignation from the army and subsequent preoccupation with Indian affairs meant that he was no longer a rival in the military.
Yes, everybody liked Sam Houston. You could not have found a man in the United States who would tell you otherwise. Until they finally discovered that, beneath the good-looking and boyishly cheerful exterior, there lurked the brain and the heart of a Machiavellian monster.
A few months after his marriage, all of Houston's scheming and deal-making had come to fruition later that year with the Treaty of Oothcaloga.
The Confederacy of the Arkansas had been born that day. At first, the great migration of the Cherokees and the Creeks that followed had been hailed across the nation as a stroke of political genius on the part of the Monroe administration. By none more loudly than Andrew Jackson, of course, who had by then solidified his position as the champion of the western settlers. But even Calhoun had grudgingly indicated his approval.
For that one brief moment in time, the so-called Era of Good Feelings had seemed established for eternity. But, in hindsight, it had only been the crest of a wave. On January 13, 1820—almost five years to the day after he and his Iron Battalion had broken the British at the Battle of the Mississippi—Patrick Driscol and those same black artillerymen routed the Louisiana militia in what had since come to be called the Battle of Algiers. The four years that followed had been a steadily darkening political nightmare.
Houston was blamed for that, too, nowadays, by many people. His diplomacy had defused the crisis, long enough to allow Driscol and his followers to leave New Orleans and migrate to the new Confederacy. So, a full-scale war had been averted.
But John Calhoun had never forgiven the Monroe administration for the settlement Houston engineered, and Monroe's approval of it. Servile insurrections should be _crushed_ and their survivors mercilessly scourged, he argued, not allowed to flee unscathed—and never mind that the "servile insurrection" had actually been the work of freedmen defending their legal rights against local overlords.
To John Calhoun and his followers, a nigger was a nigger. Rightless by nature, legalistic twaddles be damned. The black race was fit only to hew wood and draw water for those who were their superiors.
A few months after the Algiers Incident, Calhoun resigned his post as secretary of war in order to run for senator from South Carolina. He won the election, very handily, and had been a thorn in the side of the administration since. It had been Calhoun who led the charge in Congress to pass the Freedmen Exclusion Act, which would have required all freedmen to leave the United States within a year of manumission. Monroe had vetoed the bill on the obvious ground that it was a gross violation of states' rights, whereupon Calhoun had given his open support to freedmen exclusion legislation passed by various states and municipalities, and his tacit blessing to more savage and informal methods of exclusion.
A duel had almost resulted, then, when Sam Houston publicly labeled him—Adams could not but smile, whenever he thought of the brash youngster's handy way with words—"a tsarist, a terror-monger, and a toad. Nay, say better—a toadstool. A toad can at least hop about. Calhoun is a fungus on the nation's flank."
"What are _you_ so cheerful about, John?" demanded Monroe.
Delicate ground, indeed. Adams stifled the smile.
"Ah, nothing, Mr. President. Just a stray thought that happened to cross my mind."
The look Monroe gave him was exceedingly skeptical. "Stray thought" and "John Quincy Adams" were not phrases that could often be found together. Anywhere within shouting distance, in fact. Disliked as he might be in many quarters, no one thought Adams's brain was given to loose functioning—and he was generally considered the best-read man in America.
But Monroe let it drop. Instead, he turned his gaze to Scott.
"What's your military assessment, General?"
Scott shrugged. "The fortifications that Driscol's built in the Ozarks and the Ouachitas pose no threat to the United States, Mr. President. They're purely defensive works, and too far—much too far—from the Mississippi to pose any threat to our commerce."
Monroe nodded. "Yes, I understand that." Perhaps a bit acerbically: "I have some military experience myself, you may recall. What I meant was—let's be frank, shall we?—what threat do they pose to our army in the event the United States goes to war with the Confederacy? Or, to put it more bluntly still, if _we_ invade Arkansas?"
Scott looked out the window for a moment. "Assuming Driscol's in command? Which, of course, he would be, if he's still alive when—if—that time comes." He paused for another moment. "Let me put it this way, Mr. President. Were you, or anyone, to ask me to command such an expedition, I would strongly—very strongly—urge that an alternative route of attack be chosen."
" _What_ alternative route, Winfield?" Adams demanded. It was not so much a question as a statement—and a caustically posed one, at that. If the president was known for his affable manners, the secretary of state was not.
Adams heaved himself out of his chair and went to another window than the one Monroe had been looking out earlier. The same window, in fact, that had been the focus of Scott's examination. That window allowed a view to the west.
Once there, Adams stabbed a finger at the land beyond. "Attacking the Confederacy from the south means marching through Texas. That means a war with Mexico, and probably Spain. An unprovoked war with Mexico—and no one except southern slave-owners would accept the premises for such a war as a provocation suitable for a casus belli—runs the risk of embroiling the European powers. The last thing we need. Not even Jackson would support that, as much as he hates the Dons."
He shifted his finger slightly to the north and jabbed it again. "The only other alternative is coming at the Confederacy from the north. That would be _diplomatically_ feasible, but as a military proposition..."
He shifted his gaze back into the room, to land on Scott. "You're the expert, Winfield. What's your opinion?"
The general grimaced. "The logistics would be a nightmare. You'd have to move the troops down the Ohio to the juncture with the Mississippi. Then—"
"Passing by free states as you went, each and every one of which will be opposed to the expedition," Monroe injected. "They have no quarrel with the Confederacy. Rather the opposite, since many of them are happy to be getting rid of their own freedmen—and without the Confederacy, they can't."
Scott's grimace had never quite left his face, and now it returned with a vengeance. "Yes, I understand that, Mr. President. You'd have to bivouac on the south bank of the Ohio and resupply in Kentucky ports."
The president wasn't about to let up. "I remind you that Richard Johnson keeps getting reelected by the citizens of Kentucky, General. What's he likely to say about that?"
"He'd pitch a fit," Adams agreed. "There's not only the matter of his personal attitudes to be considered, either. Senator from Kentucky or not, living openly with a black woman or not, don't forget he's also the darling of the northeast workingmen—and they're even happier with the freedmen exclusion laws than Calhoun is. Except, not being slave-owners, they don't care a fig about the problem of runaway slaves. Let the darkies escape to Arkansas, and good riddance—and for sure and certain, don't expect _them_ to support a war to get them back. Much less volunteer to fight in it."
"I wasn't _advocating_ such an expedition, Mr. President, Secretary of State. Personally, I think it'd be sheer folly. But you asked my military opinion, and I'm simply trying to give it to you."
"Of course, General." Monroe's courtesy was back in full force. "Neither I nor the secretary meant any of our—ah, perhaps impatient view of the matter—to be inflicted upon you."
"Yes," Adams grunted. "My apologies, Winfield. I didn't mean to suggest you were a party to Calhoun's madness. Please continue."
Scott nodded. "It would help a great deal, Mr. President, if I had a map to work from. Is there one at hand?"
"I can have one brought, certainly." The president began to rise, but Adams waved him down. "Please! The proprieties must be maintained. The best maps are in my office, anyway. I'll get one for us. Just the trans-Mississippi region, Winfield?"
"Yes, that should do."
Adams was at the door to the president's office. "This will take a moment. There's no point sending a servant. He'll just waste time not finding it and then waste still more time trying to think up an excuse."
It was said rather sarcastically. Adams said many things rather sarcastically. It was a habit his wife chided him about. As did a veritable legion of other people, including Adams himself. He tried to restrain the habit, but...
Alas. John Quincy Adams had many virtues. Even he would allow that to be true, as relentlessly self-critical as he was. But "suffering fools gladly" was not and never would be one of them.
Still, he thought God would forgive him that sin when the time came. As sins went, it was rather a small one, after all. Even Jesus, if you studied the New Testament from the proper angle, suffered from it to a degree.
By the time Adams returned to the president's office, Monroe had cleared his desk of all the materials on it. Adams, with Scott assisting, spread the large map across the surface.
"Good. This will make it all much clearer," Scott said. "Let's begin here, at the confluence of the Ohio and Mississippi."
A long, powerful-looking finger pinned the spot, then slid to the north. "Then, up the Mississippi to St. Louis. At St. Louis—upstream again, you'll notice—you move along the Missouri, skirting the Ozarks to the south. Then..."
He looked up, giving the other two men a sardonic glance. "Then... _what?_ "
"There's the Grand River," Adams suggested, but with no great force. "Eventually."
"Ah, yes, the Grand. Also called the Neosho, I believe. Hard to tell from this map, but it doesn't really _look_ all that grand, does it? And do please note that you have to traverse a considerable distance before you can reach any headwaters of the Arkansas. By now, you've gone hundreds of miles upstream, followed by a land march with no means of supplying your troops except with horses and wagons. That's difficult even without enemy resistance being encountered—and we're bound to encounter some. From the indigenes, first—those are the Osage, you know, a fierce tribe—even before we come into Cherokee territory."
He straightened. "I won't say it _can't_ be done. It could, certainly, with the expenditure of enough time, effort, and—most of all—money. There's simply no way around it, Mr. President, Mr. Secretary. West of the Mississippi, the main rivers all run west to east, or northwest to southeast. There is no real help there for an army large enough to do the job that tries to approach the Confederacy from the north."
Monroe pushed aside a portion of the map and sat down heavily in his chair. "I understand. The gist of it is that there is no practical alternative, unless one is prepared to wage a long and costly war, to launching a major expedition against the Indian Confederacy except up the Arkansas River valley."
"Yes, sir. The Red River can't serve, not with at least a hundred and fifty miles of it clogged up with fallen trees. The Great Raft, they call it."
"And Driscol, being a very experienced soldier, knows that perfectly well."
"Yes, sir."
"So he designed his fortifications and lines of defense—his version of Wellington's Lines of Torres Vedras in the Peninsular War—in such a way as to channel any attacker up the river."
"Yes, sir. His lines are brilliantly designed, too. Far better than I would have thought, to be honest. I think he must be getting advice from somewhere. Driscol was a sergeant in Napoleon's army, not an officer. And the only sight he would have ever gotten of Wellington's defenses would have been from a distance. Even with his huge army, Massena never made any serious attempt on Torres Vedras."
"How do you mean, 'brilliantly designed'?" asked Adams.
The general turned to face him. "Consider the problem he faces. Even with the recent flood of immigrants coming from the freedmen communities, added to the constant influx of runaway slaves and the settlers sponsored by the American Colonization Society, there still can't be more than some tens of thousands of negroes in that Arkansas Chiefdom, as the Confederates call their respective states. Certainly not more than eighty thousand, I shouldn't think. Add to that perhaps ten thousand whites by now, all told."
" _That_ many?" The president's eyebrows were lifted. "Whites, I mean. I wouldn't have thought..."
He glanced at Adams. "Again, a smile. Why?"
Adams had also resumed his seat. Now he leaned his short, heavy frame back into it. "I can't say I'm surprised, Mr. President. Not _every_ white man in America shares Calhoun's attitudes."
_Nor do most of them come from Virginia gentry, as you do._ But he left that unsaid, of course. "There are the missionaries, first of all. A very heavy presence of Quakers, naturally, and they tend to move in entire families. Then, a fair number—call it a heavy sprinkling—of young radicals. Abolitionists, they're starting to call themselves."
Monroe made a face. For all the president's humane nature, which Adams would be the first to allow, the man was still the product of his upbringing. Though a slave-owner himself, Monroe—like his close friends and predecessors Thomas Jefferson and James Madison—considered the institution of slavery problematic at best, and probably an outright evil. Still, any drastic and rapid abolition of slavery was considered impossible, and the attempt to do it, economically and socially disastrous.
Adams, a New Englander, thought it was probably impossible also, for political reasons. But he would have accepted the economic and social disasters abolition might bring, for the sake of the greater political disaster they would avert. More and more, he was becoming convinced that if slavery festered for too long, it would produce, in the end, one of the most horrible episodes of bloodshed any nation had ever endured. And would steadily undermine the foundations of the republic before it got there.
But there was no point reopening that debate here and now, so Adams continued to the next point.
"I imagine that most of the whites there, however, are simply settlers. No different, really, from any western settlers. Scots-Irish in the main, of course."
"I'd think they'd bridle at being ruled by blacks," Monroe said.
The president was a very perceptive man, so the moment those words were spoken, his gaze moved to Scott. "And now _you're_ smiling, General. Why?"
Scott coughed into his fist as a way of suppressing his amusement. "You have to be there to understand the thing, Mr. President. Yes, it's true that most of the chiefs—they've adopted Cherokee terminology—are negroes. Still, they're elected—and whites can vote also. They can run for office, as well, and a disproportionate number of them get elected. Even the negroes in Arkansas are more likely to vote for a white man, all other things being equal.
"What's most important, however, is that the _principal_ chief—that's their equivalent of what we'd call the governor of the state—is Patrick Driscol. You can't even say he gets elected in a landslide, since nobody ever runs against him."
He coughed again, into a large fist. "They don't call him that, though, except the Cherokees and Creeks who live in the province. Of whom, by the way, there are perhaps another five thousand. 'Principal chief,' I mean. I was quite entertained during the weeks I was there, I assure you, to discover that every white or black man I encountered refers to Patrick Driscol as the Laird of Arkansas."
The fist couldn't possibly suppress the grin that came then. "Not to his face, of course."
Adams smiled. Monroe, who knew Driscol personally, laughed aloud. "I can imagine not!"
After the moment's humor was gone, Scott said: "Perhaps you remember Driscol's young soldier, who accompanied him everywhere he went during the war. McParland? The young deserter whose faked execution I had Driscol stage, shortly before the Battle of the Chippewa?"
Monroe frowned slightly, dredging his memory. "Oh, yes. I remember him now. A country boy."
Scott nodded. "Yes. From a poor family in upstate New York. Except none of them live in New York, any longer. The entire family—uncles, aunts, cousins, and all—pulled up stakes and moved to Arkansas several years ago. And they're no longer poor, either. They're rather prosperous; in fact, since they own one of the furniture factories that Houston fostered in Fort of 98. Which, incidentally, has become surrounded by quite a large town. More in the way of a small city, by now. There are a number of advantages to moving to Arkansas, for a poor white settler, now that Driscol has established his rule there. For one thing, there's far less danger from Indian attacks, for obvious reasons."
At Monroe's gesture, the general resumed his own seat. "A large town—soon, if not already, a small city—protected by a powerful fortress, which holds the only gate to the rest of the Confederacy and the Cherokee and Creek lands beyond. Driscol has nothing like the population of Lisbon that Wellington had. But he's still got tens of thousands of men, and he designed those lines so troops could be moved rapidly from one point to another along the high ground. Any invading army will get battered back and forth as they march up the river valley, until they come to Fort of 98. He named it after the Irish rebellion, you understand? The one that brought death to his father and brother, and exile to him. I've seen it at close hand—spent two days studying it, rather, inside and out. Please trust me when I say it's as formidable a fortress as any in the continent."
Scott leaned over. His finger landed forcibly on the Arkansas. "That's the only really suitable invasion route. And Driscol knows it. And he spent some time as a young sergeant in the French colors, staring up at Wellington's Lines of Torres Vedras after having marched across all of Spain. And saw that his commander, Massena, never ordered a full assault. Massena had sixty-five thousand men in that army. How many soldiers will the United States send against the Confederacy of the Arkansas?"
Monroe's reply came instantly. "Not one, so long as I am president."
There was an awkward silence. Pleasantly, Monroe said to Scott: "Thank you for your advice, General. It was very helpful. And now would you give us a moment, please?"
Scott rose to his feet. "Certainly, Mr. President. I'll be in my offices at the War Department, should you need me again today." He turned and nodded to Adams. "A pleasure, as always, Mr. Secretary."
He probably even meant it, Adams thought. Winfield Scott and he got along quite well, as a rule. If for no other reason, because Scott was even less prone to suffering fools gladly.
After the general was gone, the silence returned for a time. Finally, sighing, Adams spoke up. "There is some talk, I believe, that people might want me to succeed you, Mr. President."
"Yes, so I've been led to believe."
Monroe maintained a studied blandness in his expression and tone of voice. It was the firm protocol of the young republic that no gentleman suited to be chief executive in the first place would ever directly express any ambition for the post, as absurd as that apparent indifference might be. Even Henry Clay maintained the posture, though every suckling babe in the nation knew that the Speaker of the House lusted for the presidency as other men lusted for food or whiskey or money or women.
Adams scratched under his chin. "Should that unlikely eventuality come to pass, my answer would be the same as yours. Not one dollar spent to send one soldier against the Confederacy."
Monroe nodded. "Jackson's answer might be different. He's as savage as anyone on the subject of the runaway slaves for whom Arkansas has become a magnet. But he's also far shrewder than most people realize. Even something of a genuine statesman, I think, in his own way. Finally, Jackson takes his honor seriously, and there is his vow to Houston. Which he might—or might not—feel has been satisfied by now."
_Houston._ Always Houston, it seemed. On Mondays, Adams thought the young man was the republic's greatest blessing. On Tuesdays, its greatest curse. On Wednesdays and Thursdays, he was indifferent to the question, for the secretary of state had many other things in midweek to occupy his mind. By Friday, he was back to blessing the youngster, and on Saturday to showering him with silent curses.
Sunday, of course, was the Sabbath. On Sundays, Adams studied the Bible and tried not to think about the subject of Houston at all. Sometimes he even succeeded.
"Yes, Andrew Jackson," he said. "Impossible to know how he'd react, and what he'd decide. With Henry Clay, of course..."
He left the rest unsaid. Monroe, however, did not.
"Clay will do whatever serves opportunity, as he sees it. And since he can't get the presidency without the support of Calhoun and at least the acquiescence of Crawford, that will determine his course."
"He'll call it a great compromise," Adams predicted.
The room burst into momentary laughter, again. The moment over, Adams began rolling up the map.
"Let's hope we never have to find out."
**CHAPTER 2**
_A tavern not far from Lexington, Kentucky_
MAY 10, 1824
The innkeeper eyed the big man in front of him uncertainly.
First, because he _was_ big. At least two inches over six feet and very broad-shouldered. The heavy Cherokee blanket he was wearing over his uniform made him seem as massive as a bear. He filled practically every square inch of the doorway to the room he'd rented for the night.
Second, because he'd obviously had some whiskey to drink, even though it was only two hours past dawn. The smell of it on his breath was not overwhelming but was still noticeable.
And finally, of course, simply because of who he was.
If there was one thing the whole country had come to know about Colonel Sam Houston, it was that...
You never knew. He might do anything.
The innkeeper decided to try reason. "Look, Colonel, you were planning to leave town this morning anyway."
"Not before breakfast," came the feared rejoinder. Stated every bit as reasonably.
"Well, sure," the innkeeper admitted. "But there's a good tavern just six miles down the road. And your boy's already getting your horses saddled."
The big young colonel smiled. "Chester's five years older than I am. Not as tall, I admit. Still, it seems a bit silly to be calling him a boy."
Who else would even think that way? A black man was always a "boy"—and the colonel's was a slave, to boot.
But the innkeeper wasn't about to argue the point. Not now, for a certainty, when he was trying to keep his tavern from being turned into a shambles.
Where reason hadn't worked, perhaps outright pleading would.
"Colonel...Jack Baxter's the meanest man in northern Kentucky. Just take my word for it. Been that way since he was a kid. He'll pick a fight over anything. And, uh..."
Houston's smile widened. "And, in my case, he's got real grievances."
"I guess. Depending on how you look at it."
"Well, then!" Cheerfully, Houston came into the hallway, moving the innkeeper aside the way the tide shifts seaweed. "As an of-fi-cial of the United States government, I figure it's my bounden duty to listen to the complaints of a taxpayer."
Over his shoulder, as he moved toward the stairs leading down to the tavern's main room: "He _does_ pay taxes, doesn't he?"
"As little as he can," the innkeeper muttered, hurrying after him. "Please, Colonel—"
"Oh, relax, will you?" Houston's soft Tennessee accent thickened noticeably. "I bean't a quarrelsome man. In fact, my mama told me she almost named me Tranquility instead of Sam."
He started down the stairs, not clumping as much as a man his size normally would. Partly because he was wearing Cherokee-style boots to match the blanket he still had over his shoulders, but mostly because he was very well coordinated. The innkeeper had been surprised by that the night before. There were usually impromptu dances in the tavern of a Friday evening. Half drunk—better than half—Houston had still been able to dance better than anyone else. Any man, at least.
"Almost," he added.
The innkeeper was following close behind. " 'Almost' is what I'm worried about, Colonel."
Houston chuckled. "I told you, Ned, relax. Just have Mrs. Akins fry me up a steak."
"No porridge?"
The chuckle came again. "Don't think porridge would do the trick. At all."
By the time Ned Akins scurried into the kitchen, gave his wife the order, and got back into the main room, the worst had happened. He was just in time to see Houston pull out a chair at the table in the corner where Jack Baxter was having his breakfast. A moment later, the young colonel was sitting right across from him.
Houston was smiling cheerfully. Baxter returned the smile with a glare.
It wasn't a very big table, either.
"And I just put in a new window," Akins muttered to himself. Fortunately, the window was a good ten feet from where Houston and Baxter were sitting. Maybe it wouldn't get smashed up along with everything else.
The room had fallen silent. Even packed as it was with men having their breakfast, you could have heard the proverbial pin drop. Most of the diners were travelers passing through on business, not locals. But it didn't matter. Every one of them had heard Baxter's loudly stated threats, should the nefarious nigger-loving traitor Sam Houston dare to show his face. And the fact that Jack Baxter was the meanest man in town could have been surmised by a half-wit, upon fifteen seconds' acquaintance.
Houston turned his head part way around, ignoring Baxter's glare. "Oh, Mr. Akins—I forgot. Be so kind as to tell your wife that I prefer my steak cooked rare. No blasted leather for me, thank you. When I stick my knife into meat, I want to see it _bleed._ "
He turned back to Baxter. "I've got quite the knife, too. Here, let me show you."
From somewhere under the blanket, Houston drew out a knife that looked more like a short sword than what any reasonable man—certainly any reasonable innkeeper—would have called a knife. It was all Akins could do not to hiss.
Two of the customers in the room _did_ hiss.
"Had it made for me in Arkansas," Houston continued, his tone as cheerful as ever. "At the knife shop James Black set up in Fort of 98. I think Rezin Bowie designed it, though. He or his brother Jim, anyway. Can't say either one is exactly a friend of mine, so I'm not sure."
All the while he'd been prattling gaily, Houston held up the knife and twisted it back and forth, letting Baxter—every man in the room, for that matter—get a good view of it. The thing looked as lethal as a rattlesnake.
"You know Jim Bowie?" Houston asked Baxter, not looking at him.
He didn't wait for an answer, which he wouldn't have gotten anyway because by now Baxter's glare was enough to melt brimstone.
"Hot-tempered man." Houston shook his head, still looking at the knife. " 'Course, I admit, sometimes a man's got to have a temper."
Finally, he lowered the knife and looked across the table at Baxter. Still, for all the world, seeming to be completely oblivious to Baxter's fury.
"I should've asked your pardon for just sitting here. But I'm afraid I've got no choice. Nowadays—sad to say, but there it is—I pretty much have to take a corner table anywhere I go. It seems I've got enemies. Got to watch my back."
In point of fact, it was Baxter's seat that gave a view of the entire room. Houston's back was turned to everybody except Baxter.
Houston shook his head again. "Hard to believe, isn't it? Why, there's people say _I_ caused the trouble with all the runaway slaves, even though—to any fair and judicious man—it's obvious as the nose in front of his face that the trouble was caused by that blasted Calhoun and his exclusion business."
He raised the knife a couple of inches above the table and brought the heavy pommel down. Hard.
"No, sir!" he bellowed. Baxter must have jumped the same two inches above his chair—and the glare suddenly vanished. Perhaps he'd finally remembered that that same voice had once bellowed orders across a battlefield, where British regulars had been beaten.
"No, sir," Houston repeated, forcibly if not as loudly. "Calhoun's to blame—him and every one of those Barbary killers of his. Going around the way they have, murdering black folk for no reason."
Houston looked very, very big now, hunched like a buffalo at the table. That huge knife was held in a hand of a size to match. His left hand was clenched into a fist that looked pretty much like a small ham.
Suddenly, the buffalo vanished, replaced by Houston's earlier cheerful smile.
"But, now—why am I carrying on like this? I'm sure a reasonable-looking man like yourself has no quarrel with me."
The steak had arrived. Akins's wife shoved the plate into Ned's hands. "Get it over there quick," she hissed. "Maybe we can still get out of this without the place being torn down."
The innkeeper hurried over to the table. By now, he wasn't actually worried about the tavern itself being wrecked. Meanest man in northern Kentucky or not, it was plain as day that Jack Baxter was thoroughly cowed. That still left the problem of cleaning the floor.
Akins was proud of that floor, tarnation. Real wood. And he didn't want to think about the howls his wife would put up, having to scour blood from it. Several quarts of blood, from the looks of that knife. Not to mention maybe eight feet of intestine.
He planted the plate in front of Houston. "I'll get you a fork."
"Don't bother," Houston growled. "Can't stand forks. Never use 'em except at my wife's table. Well, and my father-in-law's, of course."
There was that, too. The buffalo who'd broken British regulars in front of the Capitol, and then again at New Orleans, also happened to be married to the president's daughter.
Jack Baxter was just about as dumb as he was mean. But it seemed his intelligence was rising in proportion to the way he was slumping in his chair.
Houston seized the whole steak with his left hand, shoved it into his mouth, and began sawing off a chunk with the knife.
"Goo teak" he mumbled. After chewing more or less the way a lion chews—twice; swallow—he lowered the meat slightly and said: "My compliments to the good wife, Mr. Akins. Why, this steak is cooked proper, for a change!"
Akins looked at it. He'd wondered how Houston had managed to hold it bare-handed without burning himself. Now that the lion-bite had exposed the inside of the steak, the answer was obvious. His wife had been in such a hurry she'd barely cooked it at all. The meat was practically raw, once you got past the outside char.
Houston shoved it into his mouth, and sawed off another chunk. "Some whiskey, if you would," he said, after he swallowed. Again, after chewing it twice.
Akins didn't argue the matter. There was no way to stop Houston anyway—and, at least judging from his reputation and what the innkeeper had seen the night before, whiskey made him good-humored.
The innkeeper blessed good humor four times, on his way to the whiskey cabinet and back, tossing in a short prayer for good measure.
He didn't bother offering the use of a tumbler. As soon as the whiskey bottle was on the table—by then, half the steak had vanished, and what was left was back on the plate—Houston grabbed it by the neck and took a hefty slug.
He brought the bottle down with a thump. "Love whiskey with a rare steak. 'Course"—one more time, he bestowed that cheery grin on Baxter—"I dare not take more than the one good swallow, of a morning. Maybe two. As many enemies as I have."
Akins almost burst into laughter, then. He was standing by a table where a lion was beaming down on a rat. A cornered rat, at that, since there was no way for Baxter to get away from Houston, sitting where he was.
"No, _sir,_ " Houston stated, stabbing the steak again and bringing it back up. He reached halfway across the table and waved the piece of meat under Baxter's nose. "I got to be careful. Even though I can drink half a bottle and still shoot straight or cut slicker'n you'd believe a man could do plain sober."
The steak went back into his mouth, and the knife sawed off another chunk. By now, at least, Houston was chewing four or five times before he swallowed.
Akins heard a noise behind him. Turning, he saw that Houston's slave had come into the room. He was holding a satchel in his left hand.
"We're ready to go whenever you've a mind, Mr. Sam," he announced. "The horses are saddled, everything's packed, and—"
The same two men hissed as the slave brought a pistol out of the satchel.
"—I got your pistol here, if you've a mind for that, too."
Houston swallowed, turned his head, and frowned. "Now why in the world would I need a pistol, Chester?" He held up the steak—what little was left of it—skewered on the knife. "Cow's already dead."
The slave didn't seem in the least abashed by the apparent rebuke. Nor did anyone in the room miss the fact that he wasn't holding the pistol by the barrel, the way a man normally does when he's readying to pass it over to another. Instead, he had the handle cupped neatly in his palm. And if his forefinger wasn't precisely on the trigger, and his thumb wasn't precisely on the hammer, neither digit was more than half an inch away from turning the gun into a deadly thing.
He was holding the weapon as if he knew exactly how to use it, too. Most slaves didn't.
"You got enemies, Mr. Sam. Remember? Turrible enemies, people say."
Houston shook his head and waved the steak around the room. "Not here, surely! Chester, you ought to be ashamed of yourself. Even thinking such a thing!"
"Yes, sir, Mr. Sam. Sorry 'bout that." He didn't seem any more abashed by that rebuke than he'd been by the first one.
"As you should be! Why, I oughta have you apologize personally to every man in this room. Would, too, 'cept"—he paused for a moment while he sawed off another piece of steak and swallowed.
"Except that wouldn't be proper," he continued. "You being a black slave and them being free white men. Apology presumes equality, you know. All the philosophers say so."
He turned and scowled at his slave. "You got no excuse, neither, since you read the same philosophers. I know, 'cause I taught you how to read."
Teaching slaves to read wasn't illegal except in Virginia—yet, anyway. Calhoun and his followers were pressing for that, now, along with freedmen exclusion. Still, it certainly wasn't the custom in slave states like Kentucky.
But that, too, was part of Houston legend. He might as well have had _Custom Be Damned_ for a crest on a formal coat of arms.
"Yes, Mr. Sam. No, sir, I mean, it wouldn't be proper."
Houston chewed the last piece of steak more slowly than he had any of the others. With a thoughtful expression on his face, now.
When he was finished, he rose from the table. Then, suddenly and abruptly, shoved the table aside. Baxter, who'd been frozen in place for the past few minutes, started to jump from his chair, but Houston's big left hand jammed him back in his seat.
The young colonel held the knife in front of his face. Baxter's eyes were round, and his complexion was ashen.
"You'll have to excuse me, sir," Houston said politely. "I need to clean my knife, and there's nothing else handy. I daren't soil my blanket, of course. It's a personal gift from none other than Major Ridge himself. He'd be most offended if I showed up in the Confederacy with stains on it."
Quickly and efficiently, he wiped the blade clean on the shoulder of Baxter's coat. Then, moved the blanket aside and slid the knife into a scabbard.
"My thanks, sir." He bestowed the beaming smile on him. "And now, I must be off."
He turned and strode toward the door, where Chester was waiting. The slave raised the pistol as if to offer it to his master, but Houston shook his head.
"No, no, you keep it. I _do_ have enemies, it's true enough. Some of the rascals might be lurking outside. Since you shoot better than I do, best you keep the pistol."
"Yes, sir, Mr. Sam. If you say so."
Houston stopped abruptly. "Of course I do! Makes sense, doesn't it? The slave shoots them, and the master guts 'em."
He patted the knife under his blanket, turned around, and bestowed the grin on the whole room.
"You see, gentlemen? Easiest thing in the world to figure out, if you're not an imbecile like Calhoun. _I_ never have trouble with runaway slaves. You're not planning to flee from lawful bondage, are you, Chester?"
"No, sir. Don't need to. 'Bout another two months, and I'll have saved up enough to buy my way free."
Houston's eyes widened. "Why...so you will. And since you learned how to blacksmith along the way, you won't have any trouble setting yourself up."
Akins didn't know whether to laugh or cry. On the one hand, seeing Baxter get his comeuppance was worth its weight in gold. On the other...
Hiring out slaves as craftsmen was common, of course. Many of them were quite skilled, in fact. But Houston's practice of letting his slaves _keep_ their wages was just plain...
"Some people say I'm a lunatic, Chester," Houston boomed. "A veritable bedlamite!"
"Yes, Mr. Sam. But maybe we ought to be going, now. Before your enemies learn where you are."
"Probably a good idea. Mr. Akins, the bill, if you please."
Less than a minute later, Akins had the money—a tavern still intact, too—and Houston was on his way.
He watched him and the slave Chester for a while. The slave rode a horse just as well as the colonel did.
"That man is pure crazy," he muttered.
His wife had come out of the tavern and was standing next to him.
"I thought you said—bean't more than two months ago—that if Colonel Houston ever ran for senator from Kentucky, you'd vote for him."
"Well, yes. He got rid of the Indians for us, didn't he? And he backs Jackson against the stinking bank. The Senate's way out there on the coast, anyway. But I sure wouldn't vote for him as _governor._ "
"Nobody would," his wife agreed, "outside of a bedlam house."
**CHAPTER 3**
"Probably shouldn't have done that," Sam admitted, a couple of hours later. They'd stopped at a creek crossing to let their horses drink.
Chester studied the creek intently, as if the small stream were vastly more fascinating than any other body of moving waters on the face of the globe. " 'Probably' meaning how, Mr. Sam? 'Probably,' as in 'I probably shouldn't have baited that bear'? Or 'probably,' as in 'I probably shouldn't have stuck a pitchfork in Sam Hill'?"
Houston grinned. "Oh, surely the latter. But since I'm not a sinner—well, not much of one—what do I have to fear? Sam Hill won't have no hold on me, when the blessed day comes. Hand me the whiskey."
Chester rummaged in the saddle pack and came out with the bottle. He didn't say anything, but the expression on his face made clear his disapproval.
"And stop nattering at me," Sam said.
"Didn't say a word."
"Didn't need to." He opened the bottle, took a hefty but not heroic slug from the contents, stoppered it up, and handed it back to Chester. "See? Just needed something to take the taste out of my mouth. Blasted meat was practically raw."
As always, the warm glow in his belly steadied his nerves. Which needed it, in truth. There'd been a lot of encounters like that over the past two or three years. They'd been getting uglier, too.
The United States had been hit by a series of crises, coming in quick succession. Sam thought people would have handled the Panic of 1819 and the economic dislocation that followed. They'd also have handled—well enough, anyway—the Missouri Compromise that Henry Clay had engineered the following year, and the political tensions that came with it. Sam was no admirer of Clay, but he'd admit the man's vaunted political skills had been fully evident in that crisis.
But together, the Panic and the Compromise had brought the nation to a heated point just short of boiling—and then John Calhoun had seized upon the Treaty of Oothcaloga and the Algiers Incident to advance his proslavery political program. His speeches and actions had met a receptive audience in much of the South and the West. Almost overnight, it seemed, Sam Houston had gone from being a man generally admired both for his heroism in the war with Britain and for his settlement of the most acute Indian land questions, to the architect of a fiendish scheme to undermine the supremacy of the European race in America in favor of its lesser races.
"Still not sure how that happened," he muttered, looking down at the back of his hand. "My own skin's still as white as ever."
"What was that, Mr. Sam?"
Houston glanced at Chester. "Just talking to myself."
He decided to change the subject. "When _are_ you planning to buy your freedom, by the way? It'd be handy if you'd let me know a bit ahead of time, you rascal, so's I don't get caught in the lurch."
Chester went back to his creek-scrutiny. "Well. Wasn't actually planning on it, all that soon, Mr. Sam. Thought I'd keep saving up my money. Once we get to Arkansas, I can put it in Mr. Patrick's bank. It'll be safe there."
"Wonderful! Now you'll make me a liar, too."
Chester smiled apologetically but didn't look away from the water. "You didn't say anything about it in the tavern, Mr. Sam. I was the one said I could buy my way free in 'bout a couple of months. Wasn't lying, neither. I _could._ But 'could' and 'would' is two different things. I just don't see the point in being a freedman when I wouldn't have enough money left to do anything more than work for someone else. I'm gonna do that, might as well keep working for you. There's really not all that much difference for a poor man, when you get right down to it, between a master and a boss—and, either way, you're the best one I know."
Sam rolled his eyes. "In other words, you're agreeing with Calhoun. Slavery's just the thing to elevate the black man. While his poor downtrodden white master pays the bills."
Chester's smile widened and lost its apologetic flavor. "Begging your pardon, Mr. Sam, but I don't recall Mr. Calhoun ever saying anything about black men being free, at any time, for any amount of money."
Sam scratched his chin. "Well, no. Of course not. If Calhoun had his way, freedmen wouldn't exist at all. How'd he put it in his recent speech to the Senate?"
His accent took on a mimicry of a much thicker and more Southern one. " 'I hold that in the present state of civilization, where two races of different origin, and distinguished by color as well as intellectual differences, are brought together, the relation now existing in the slaveholding states between the two, is, instead of an evil, a good—a positive good.' "
Sam dropped the accent and shook his head. "Not much room there for freedmen. Now that they've gotten exclusion acts passed in most states, Calhoun and his people are pushing to make manumission illegal altogether. Not to mention getting laws passed that make teaching slaves how to read and write illegal."
Chester stopped smiling, then.
"He's a prize, Calhoun is." Sam leaned over and spit in the creek. Not so much as a gesture of disgust—although that was there, too—as to get rid of the taste of raw meat he still had in his mouth. The whiskey had helped some, but not enough.
For a moment, he contemplated taking another slug but decided against it. He'd already drunk almost a quarter of the bottle this morning. He wasn't worried about being able to ride a horse, of course. Sam could manage that with a full bottle under his belt. But he had an awkward interview coming up today, and he needed his wits about him.
"Come on," he said. "The horses have had enough, and I'd like to make it to the senator's house by midafternoon."
"Hi, Sam!"
"Hi, Sam!"
He grinned at the twin girls scampering around the front yard of Blue Spring Farm, as Richard M. Johnson's house and plantation were called. "Settle down, will you? You're making the horse nervous."
The admonishment had as much effect as such admonishments usually have on twelve-year-old girls. Fortunately, Sam's horse was a placid creature.
He decided to try the tactic of parental authority. "And you know your daddy doesn't like it when his girls don't act proper. Him being a United States senator and all."
That had no effect, either, not to Sam's surprise. Richard Johnson was a genial man toward just about everybody, especially his own daughters. Threatening them with his wrath was as useful as threatening them with a snowstorm in July.
In fact, they started laughing. And they were _still_ bouncing up and down.
Fortunately, the girls' mother emerged onto the front porch.
" _Settle down!_ Right this minute, Imogene, or I'll smack you proper! You too, Adaline!"
That did it. In an instant, the girls were the very model of propriety and demure behavior. Their father might be easygoing, but their mother was not. Julia Chinn was so well organized and disciplined that she almost managed to keep the senator from losing his money.
Almost, but not quite. But Sam didn't think anyone else could have kept him from going broke years earlier.
Sam got off his horse and handed the reins to Chester, who began leading the horses to the barn around the side. Sam stepped up onto the porch and took off his hat. He gave a polite nod to the two disabled veterans sitting on chairs further down the porch, and then turned to the lady of the house.
"Afternoon, Julia."
Her stern look vanished. "Hello, Sam. It's so nice to see you visit again. It's been...what? Over a year, now. You shouldn't stay away so long."
Before he could answer, she waved a hand. "Yes, yes, I know. You're a frightfully busy man."
Richard Johnson came out onto the porch just in time to hear the last words.
"Frightfully busy troublemaker, more like," he said gruffly. But he didn't even try to disguise the smile with which he said it.
As the two shook hands, Houston took a moment to size up the senator's appearance. It was...
Even more sloppy and eccentric than usual. The clothing itself simply consisted of the plain and unassuming garments that Johnson had always worn, which were part of his appeal to Kentucky's poor farmers and the workingmen of the nation's northeastern states. Nothing peculiar, in and of itself—except for the fact that the man who wore that humble apparel came from one of Kentucky's premier families and was himself one of the state's largest landowners. One of its largest slave-owners, too.
No, it was the rest of it. His hair was disheveled, his cravat was askew—only half tied, at that—and his boots had long since abandoned the status of "humble" and were pretty well past the stage of "worn down." Give them another few months, and they'd be able to proudly claim holes in the soles and heels that were nothing but memories.
The face, though, was the same. Johnson was a plain-looking man and always had been. Unassuming, in both his appearance and his manner. If you didn't know better, you'd find it hard to reconcile the man himself with his flamboyant reputation.
Flamboyant it was, too, even by the standards of the frontier. The Great Hero who'd personally shot Tecumseh at the Battle of the Thames after suffering terrible wounds himself in the battle—so the story went, anyway, and Johnson had never done anything to detract from it—was also the Great Almagamator. The disreputable fellow from Great Crossing—a United States senator, to boot!—who lived in an open state of quasi-marriage with a mulatto and who persisted in treating his quadroon daughters as if they belonged in proper society. Even took them in his own carriage to church on a Sunday!
Andrew Jackson had shown Sam some of the letters he'd gotten from outraged gentility in Kentucky and Tennessee, demanding that the general disavow his political ties to Johnson.
"They can take _that_ to Sam Hill," Jackson had growled, tossing the letters back into a drawer of his desk. He even lapsed into blasphemy for a moment. "I'll be damned if I will. Johnson's as stalwart as they make 'em, even if he is a blasted race-mixer."
Fortunately for Johnson, most of his own constituents felt much the same way about the matter. Whatever they felt personally about his notorious relationship with Julia Chinn, they overlooked it in favor of the rest.
Not the gentility, of course. During the six consecutive terms Johnson had served as one of Kentucky's members in the U.S. House of Representatives, most of the state's wealthy slave-owners had been indifferent to his personal habits. He didn't represent _them,_ after all, for the most part. The scandalmongering with regard to Julia and the girls hadn't really started until John J. Crittenden resigned from the Senate in 1819 and Johnson was appointed to fill out Crittenden's term of office. A congressman was one thing; a senator, another.
But most of Kentucky's citizens were neither wealthy nor slave-owners. So far as they were concerned, Johnson's family arrangements were his own business. What mattered was all the rest: the fact that he was a genuine war hero; the fact that he was politically allied with Andrew Jackson's wing of the Democratic-Republican Party; most of all, the fact that Johnson had led the fight to get debt imprisonment abolished in Kentucky and was striving to do the same thing on a national level.
And, besides, every _other_ personal habit of Johnson's led poor settlers on the frontier to favor him. Both as a Kentucky legislator and now as a national one, Johnson had made great efforts to gain compensation for the recent war's disabled veterans or their widows and orphans. If Blue Spring Farm was notorious as a place where a black woman presided over the dinner table and black children sat at it, it was also famous as a place of refuge for disabled veterans and their families. The two veterans on the porch—one missing an arm, the other a leg—would have half a dozen counterparts somewhere about the house or farm. Or their widows and orphans. No one in need was ever turned away from Richard M. Johnson's estate—never mind that the aid itself was often passed over by the dark-skinned hands of his common-law wife.
Kentucky's gentility had been disgusted to see Johnson appointed to serve out Crittenden's term in 1819. They'd been positively outraged to see him handily win the election for another term in the Senate in 1822.
Sam saw that Johnson was eyeing him a bit warily. "You seen the general lately?"
Sam shook his head. "Haven't seen him in nigh-on seven months, Dick." Since there was no point in letting Johnson fret on that score, when there were so many others he did need to fret about, Sam added hurriedly, "But I can assure you that the sentiments he expressed concerning you were just as warm as ever."
That was true, after all. Even if some of those "warm sentiments" had run along the lines of _I can't believe he'd treat a nigger like she was an actual wife!_
It wasn't that Andy Jackson didn't share each and every one of the common prejudices of his day. He most certainly did—and then some, often enough. It was just that in his own rough-hewn way, the general could often look past those things to see what really mattered to him.
Poor white men mattered to Andy Jackson. Not too many other people did, but _they_ did, for sure and certain. So, if one of their undoubted political champions chose to behave badly in some aspects of his personal life, Jackson would look the other way. And if the proper folk complained, they could take their complaints to Sam Hill and see what satisfaction they'd get in those very warm quarters.
"Just as warm as ever," Sam repeated forcibly. "My word on it."
Johnson's grunt combined relief with satisfaction. "Well, they ought to be," the senator stated, as if to reassure himself. "Henry Clay makes a fortune suing people on behalf of land speculators and the Second Bank of the United States, and I go broke from waiving the fees for defending them."
That was also true...as far as it went. Johnson was indeed famous as one of the few well-connected lawyers in Kentucky that a poor man or his widow could go to for legal assistance without being charged. Unfortunately, it was only part of the truth.
There were a lot of reasons Richard Mentor Johnson was always on the verge of being broke. His personal generosity ranked on that list, yes—and pretty high up on it. But not as high as his casual attitude toward bookkeeping, his inability to say "no" to just about every speculative scheme that came his way, and his predilection toward seeing only a blur instead of a line between his personal finances and those of the public. Not to mention his indulgence toward his brothers, who were separated by only a knife's edge from being outright thieves.
Sam liked Richard M. Johnson a very great deal. He'd never met a man who didn't, no matter what their attitudes on such subjects as race, whom he didn't think was a swine. But there was just no getting around the fact that, as often as not, both he and the general—not to mention the president of the United States—would like to take Johnson by the scruff of the neck and give him a real down-home shaking. Or thrash him outright, for that matter.
Some of his aggravation must have shown, for Julia hastily spoke up.
"Please come in, Sam. Something to drink? I've fresh-brewed some tea."
Sam was about to agree when Johnson broke in. "Tea for Sam Houston? Don't be silly, Julia. Sam'll have some whiskey. I'll join him myself."
The senator passed through the door into the house. Sam felt his resolve crumbling. A slug of whiskey _did_ sound good—and it would relax him for what was coming.
As Sam made to follow Johnson, Julia placed a hand on his arm.
"How much trouble is he in, Sam?" she asked quietly.
Houston shrugged uncomfortably. "Well...Nobody's talking about arresting him or anything like that, Julia. But..."
"But nobody's going to advance him any more money, neither."
"No. Not a chance." That wasn't quite true, but close enough for the moment.
She nodded and released his arm. "Thank you. I'll join you in a while."
The restraint their mother's admonition had placed on the girls finally broke.
"Can we come in, too?" Adaline demanded.
"We want to talk with Sam!" her twin added.
"Hush, girls! Sam and your father need some private time." Julia shooed them away. "You can talk to him all you want over dinner."
**CHAPTER 4**
It took three slugs before Sam was finally ready. Johnson seemed to sense it, because he didn't prod Sam at all until the third slug had settled in his belly. Then, sighing, he set his own half-full tumbler on the small table next to the divan and planted his hands on his knees.
"So tell me, Sam. It's bad news, I'm sure."
"The president refuses to authorize any more funds to cover the losses from the Yellowstone expedition, on the recommendation of the secretary of the treasury."
"William H. Crawford," Johnson stated, making the simple name sound like a curse.
"I don't like him, either," Sam said. "But it doesn't matter. Even if the secretary and the president proposed it, there'd be an uproar in Congress. Financially speaking, the Yellowstone expedition was a disaster." Sam raised his hand to forestall Johnson's protest. "Dick, I know most of your constituents still think the expedition was a good idea, to keep the peace on the frontier. But most of the country considers the whole thing a boondoggle."
_And probably a crooked one, to boot. Half-crooked, for sure._ But he left that unsaid.
Johnson didn't pursue the matter any further, not to Sam's surprise. The Yellowstone expedition and the debts it had saddled the senator with dated back several years now. Not quite ancient history, but ground that had now been trodden over several times. He hadn't really had any hopes of getting any relief there.
Instead, he moved to the subject that was much more pressing. "And the Choctaw Academy I want to set up?"
Julia Chinn came into the room at that moment, giving Sam a little breathing space. After she'd taken a seat on the divan next to the senator, Sam tried to present it as positively as possible. "Do you know Gerrit Smith?"
"That young New York fellow? Rich as Croesus, they say. Something of a philanthropist, I also heard."
"That's the one."
Johnson's eyes widened. "He's offered to back me?"
"Ah..."
There was no way around it. "Not exactly, Dick. He's willing to pay the debts you've accumulated for it and take the Academy off your hands."
"What?"
_May as well give it all to him, at one swallow._
"And he won't set it up here, and he won't call it the Choctaw Academy. He wants to establish it in New Antrim. And he wants to turn it into a school—maybe later a college, attached to it—that's open to children from all races. Whites, any tribe of Indians—and negroes. He thinks that's an experiment that'll work. If it's done in the Arkansas part of the Confederacy."
Johnson was just gaping at him. Sam took a deep breath and finished. "He's even got a schoolmaster lined up. Fellow name of Beriah Green. Also a New Yorker."
_Also an abolitionist,_ he could have added, but didn't. Whatever Johnson's relationship to Julia Chinn, the man was also a major slave-owner, with all the attitudes toward abolition that that entailed. If that seemed contradictory...
Well, it was. But it was a contradictory matter that Sam knew backwards and forwards. He'd owned slaves himself for years, despite having had reservations about slavery even as a teenager. By now, at the age of thirty, those misgivings had turned into a genuine detestation for the institution.
Sam had owned only a few slaves at any one time, true—sometimes not more than one. And he didn't depend on their labor for his sustenance the way Johnson did. Mostly, he maintained his status as a slave-owner simply out of ambition. Sam still had hopes for a political career after Monroe left office and Sam lost—as he almost certainly would—his position as special commissioner on Indian affairs. That career would have to be in the South somewhere, probably his native state of Tennessee. Sam was already notorious enough among many influential circles in that area. Owning slaves served to keep that notoriety within limits. A southern gentleman was expected to own slaves, and so he did.
Sam didn't have the same pecuniary attachment to slaveholding that a great landowner like the Kentucky senator did. Still and all, he understood the contradiction. Better than he wished he did, even leaving aside the caustic comments that his friend Patrick Driscol made whenever he visited the Confederacy.
Johnson finally found his voice. A blasphemous one, too. "I'll be damned if I will!"
"You'll be damned if you don't," Julia hissed. She leaned over and laced her fingers together. "Exactly how much of our debts will this New York fellow assume, Sam?" she asked.
Good news, finally. "Every penny, Julia. Dick, you hear that? _And_ he'll assume the financial burden of any further lawsuits arising from the—ah—"
_How to put it?_
Julia did it for him. "None-too-detailed nature of the books." She gave her more-or-less-husband a sharp glance. "Such as they are."
Johnson flushed. "Hey, look..."
"Dick, the school would have lost you money anyway," Sam said forcibly. " _Did_ lose you money, even before you had a chance to open the doors. So be done with it. At least this way, you walk out free and clear. You have enough other debts to worry about."
Johnson just stared at him. Julia took advantage of the silence to speak again.
"One condition, Sam. This New York rich man has to agree to it, or we won't."
"What's that?"
She looked through the open window. Outside, the sound of girls playing in the yard carried easily. "Imogene and Adaline get to attend the school. All expenses paid. If we decide to send them."
Sam couldn't help but laugh. "Well, _that_ won't be a problem. Mr. Smith asked me to pass on to you that he'd especially like your children to attend. And he offered to pay for it himself. That's because—ah—"
To Sam's relief, that stirred up Johnson's combative instincts. "Because they're famous," he growled. Again, he blasphemed. "God damn all rich men."
The senator's curse could have been leveled on himself and his New York benefactor, of course, as much as on the southern gentry who vilified him.
_We are sinners all,_ Sam thought to himself. It was a rueful thought, as it so often was for him these days.
The senator looked to Julia, now. "Are you sure about that, dearest? I don't like the idea of our kids being that far away."
Her face got tight. "You know any other school will take them, outside of New England—where they'd be just as far away? And even if there was one..."
She took a deep breath. When she spoke again, her voice started rising.
"What happens if you _die,_ Dick Johnson? It don't matter what you think. By law, those two daughters you spoil so badly are your slaves."
"I freed you!" he protested.
"Not till after the girls were born," came her immediate rejoinder. "Richard Mentor Johnson, how in the world can a lawyer like you be that deaf, dumb, and blind?"
It was a good question—and the wide-open mouth of the senator made it perfectly clear that he'd never even thought about it. By Kentucky law, as well as the law in any slave state, a child born to a slave inherited the legal status of the mother, not the father. That was in complete opposition to the standard way of figuring birth status as usually applied to white people. But the South's gentry had made sure and certain that their frequent dalliances with slave women wouldn't produce any legally and financially awkward children.
_As foul a breed of men as ever lived,_ was Patrick Driscol's assessment of southern slave-owners. Sam felt the categorization was far too harsh, as was so often true of Patrick's attitudes. But he didn't deny there was more than a grain of truth to it. Slavery corrupted the master as much as it degraded the slave. If there was any true and certain law of nature, there it was.
"Long as you're alive," Julia continued, "we don't got to worry none. But if you pass on, the girls are just part of your estate. And you got debts. Lots and lots of debts. You think your creditors will pass them over?"
"I'll free them, too, then. Tomorrow!"
She shrugged. "Good. But you trust judges way more than I do. With all those creditors circling like vultures, won't surprise me at all to find some judge will say the manumission was invalid."
The next words were spoken very coldly. "They'll be pretty, real pretty, give 'em another three or four years. But they inherited my color, too—enough of it, anyway—along with my looks. They'll fetch a nice price from some slave whorehouse somewhere. Your ghost can watch it happen."
"It's not unheard of, Dick," Sam said.
The senator was back to gaping. Again, obviously, never even having considered the matter. The man's blindness could be truly astonishing at times. The same blindness that led him into one financial disaster after another. Not so much because Richard Mentor Johnson was dishonest or rapacious as because it never seemed to occur to him that friends and relatives and acquaintances of his might be.
One of the house slave women came into the room. "Dinner's ready, Miz Julia."
One black woman addressing another as if she were a white mistress. The world had a lot more crazy angles in it than most people wanted to admit. Much less allow.
Imogene and Adaline were on their best behavior at dinner. That might have been because of Sam's presence, but he didn't think so. It was more likely because their mother had drummed it into them over the years. Dinner at a great house like Blue Spring Farm was rarely a small and private family affair. And so the girls of the family would act proper, they would, or they'd suffer the consequences.
The dinner table seemed as long as a small ship, with tall and stately candlesticks serving for masts and sails. Johnson at one end; Julia, presiding over the meal, facing him at the other. With, in two long rows down the side, well over a dozen other people in addition to Sam and the children. Disabled war veterans or their widows, for the most part. But there was also one of nearby Lexington's prominent lawyers, and one of the local plantation owners.
Sam wasn't surprised to see them there. Not all of the South's well-to-do disliked Johnson. Many admired him. That was true, starting with the president of the United States himself, James Monroe, who came from Virginia gentry. As always, in Sam's experience—contrary to Patrick Driscol's tendency to label people in sharp and definite categories—attitudes and habits blurred at the edges. Blurred so far, often enough, that no boundary was to be seen at all.
Fine for Patrick—the "Laird of Arkansas," in truth, even if no one used the term to his face—to sit up there in the mountains and divide the world and its morals into black and white. Sam lived down here in a world of grays and browns, just about everywhere he looked. And...being honest, he was more comfortable in that world. He had plenty of gray in his own soul, as young as he might be, and he'd always thought brown to be the warmest color of all.
"Clay's going to make a run for it," the plantation owner predicted. "In fact, he's already started."
The lawyer sitting across from him laughed sarcastically. "What else is new? Henry Clay was dreaming about the presidency while he was still in his mother's womb. More ambitious than Sam Hill, he is."
Johnson smiled into his whiskey tumbler. So did Sam. It was the same smile, half derisive and half philosophical. The difference was simply that the senator's tumbler was half full and Sam's was...
Empty, now that he looked into it. How had that happened?
"Don't make light of it, Jack," cautioned the lawyer. "I'm thinking he's got a very good chance at getting what he wants. With Monroe gone after next year, who else does it leave? Beyond Quincy Adams and the general, of course—and they've both got handicaps."
"Andy Jackson's the most popular man in America!" the senator stoutly proclaimed.
The lawyer, blessed with the name of Cicero Jones, gave him a look that might have graced the face of the ancient Roman statesman after whom he'd been named—just before he fell beneath the swords of the Second Triumvirate.
"Maybe so, Dick. But..."
For an instant, Jones's glance flicked toward Sam. Then he looked down at his plate. "But not as much as he used to be," he concluded glumly.
That was enough to tip Sam's decision over the immediate issue at hand. He held up his tumbler toward one of the slaves waiting on the table. "Some more whiskey, if you would."
As the slave made to comply, Sam gave Johnson a level gaze. "That's my doing. The settlement I made of the Algiers business hurt the general worse than the Treaty of Oothcaloga helped him. No doubt about it, I think."
Now that Sam had said it out loud, Cicero Jones was clearly relieved. "No doubt about it at all," the lawyer echoed.
Across from him, Jack Hartfield shrugged and spread his hands. As portly as the plantation owner was, the expansive gesture did unfortunate things to his tightly buttoned vest.
Adaline managed to keep quiet, but Imogene burst into a giggle. Sam almost did, too, for that matter. The way the button flew from Hartfield and bounced off one of the candlesticks was genuinely comical.
Hartfield himself grinned. But his good cheer didn't keep the girl from her chastisement.
_"Imogene!"_ exclaimed Julia. A hand the color of coffee-with-cream smacked her daughter, leaving a red mark on a cheek whose color wasn't much lighter. "Do that again and you'll finish dinner in your room!"
"Oh, go easy on her, Julia," chuckled the plantation owner. "It _was_ pretty funny. I probably would have laughed myself, 'cept I don't want to think what my wife'll have to say when I get home. I'm afraid I bust a lot of those."
"Don't matter," insisted Julia. She wagged a finger in Imogene's face. "You behave yourself, young lady. You know better than that."
Imogene assumed a properly chastened look. Although Sam didn't miss the angry glare she gave her sister across the table, once Julia looked away. Adaline's face had that insufferably smug look that a twin has whenever her sibling is rightfully punished—and she herself gets away with it.
Again, it was all Sam could do not to laugh. Fortunately, the tumbler arrived and he was able to disguise his amusement with a hefty slug of its contents. A heftier slug than he'd actually intended. It was hard to resist, though. The whiskey served at Blue Spring Farm was the best Sam had had in months. And that was a lot of whiskey back.
Once the humor of his mishap had settled, Hartfield went on with what he'd been about to say. "I don't think it's really fair to blame young Houston. If the general had just kept quiet about the matter, instead of..."
He shrugged. Even more expansively than he had before, now that further damage was impossible. The button that had popped off his vest had been the last survivor.
"That unfortunate speech."
That was something of a euphemism, in Sam's opinion. As much as he admired Andy Jackson, there was no denying the man had a savage streak in his nature that was sometimes as wide as the Mississippi River. If the clash at Algiers had been between any _other_ group of black men—free or slave, it mattered not—and a properly constituted white militia, Andy Jackson would have been among the first to demand loudly that the niggers be put in their place. For that matter, he'd probably have offered to lead the punitive expedition personally.
But those hadn't been just any black men. Those had been the men of the Iron Battalion, led by the same Patrick Driscol, who'd broken the British at the Battle of the Mississippi—the battle that had turned Jackson from a regional into a national figure. If Andy Jackson could be savage about race, he could be even more savage—a lot more savage—when it came to matters of honor, and courage, and cowardice.
Whatever the color of their skin—and their commander's skin was as white as Jackson's own—Old Hickory had a genuine admiration for the Iron Battalion. And, on the reverse side, despised no group of wealthy men in the United States so much as he despised the plantation owners in and around New Orleans who had, in the main, refused to participate in the fight against the invading redcoats. And had done so—to put the icing on the cake—because they feared their own slaves more than they did a foreign enemy.
Jackson had had choice words to say about that Louisiana gentry during the New Orleans campaign in the war against the British. His words spoken in public—and reprinted in most of the newspapers of the nation—the day after the Algiers Incident had been choicer still. _Poltroons_ and _criminals_ applied to rich white men, and the terms _stalwart fellows_ and _yeomen defending their rights_ applied to poor black ones, were all true, to be sure. But they'd caused the general's popularity in the South and the West—theretofore almost unanimous except for Henry Clay and his coterie—to plummet like a stone.
Only so far, of course. Soon enough, the plunging stone had reached the secure ledge of support from the poorer class of the Southwest's voters. For the most part, they'd been no happier with the result of the clash at Algiers than any other white men of the region. On the other hand, as the saying went, it was no skin off their nose. All the more so, since the battle had been precipitated by the lascivious conduct of some of the New Orleans Creoles, whose wealth and Frenchified habits the poor Scots-Irish settlers resented—and a good percentage considered not that much better than niggers anyway.
Still, when all the dust settled, Andy Jackson's popularity in the South and West was no longer as overwhelming as it had been. Clay, of course, had immediately seized the opportunity to continue the Jackson-bashing he'd begun two years earlier over the general's conduct of the Florida campaign. The Speaker of the House had had his own choice words to say on the floor of Congress. He'd even gone to the extreme of offering to lead a punitive expedition to Louisiana himself.
The offer had been as histrionic as it was ridiculous. First, because Henry Clay had no military experience whatsoever—indeed, he routinely dismissed Jackson as a "mere military chieftain," in no way suitable for higher positions in the Republic. Second, because he knew perfectly well that there was no chance at all that President Monroe would appoint him to the position, even in the unlikely event that he authorized such a mission in the first place. Always the Virginia gentleman, James Monroe kept his private feelings to himself. But Sam was his son-in-law, and he knew perfectly well that if Monroe's dislike and distrust of Henry Clay was less savage than Jackson's, it was not an inch shallower.
Ridiculous and histrionic as it might have been, however, Clay's stance had enhanced his own popularity in the region—and the congressman from Kentucky had already been the second most popular figure there, after Jackson. Considerably more popular among the region's gentry.
"Well, it's done now," said the lawyer. No slouch himself when it came to whiskey, Cicero Jones downed his tumbler. "But don't fool yourselves, gentlemen. Henry Clay is now at the front of the pack who'll be running for president, once Monroe's term is up. Quincy Adams is respected by just about everyone—gentlemen, at least—but he's not liked all that much, either. Too cold, too harsh, too caustic—too everything. And, like Calhoun, he's almost a purely regional figure. Adams will take New England just as certainly as Calhoun will take the hard-core South. But that's not enough votes to win, no matter how you slice it."
"There's Crawford," pointed out Senator Johnson. Only a slight twist to his lips indicated his dislike for the secretary of the treasury. The tone of his comment had been neutral and matter-of-fact.
Jones shrugged. "Yes, there's William Crawford. Popular in the South also, of course, being a Georgian. And the nation's well-to-do tend to be fond of him in all regions of the country."
"As they should!" barked Sam. Most of the disgruntlement in his tone, however, came from the state of his tumbler. Once again, not even noticing, he'd managed to drain it dry. And it would be ungracious to ask for another refill so soon. Always the generous host, Johnson still had a badly frayed pocketbook—and that whiskey was expensive.
"But he's seen by too many people as too slick," the lawyer continued. "I don't think the electorate trusts him all that much. Nor should they, for that matter."
"Hah!" exclaimed Hartfield. "Why should they look cross-eyed at Crawford? He's not half the cut-any-corner and make-any-deal bastard that Clay is."
The lawyer shook his head. "Yes, I know. But Clay makes pretty speeches and knows how to pose in public. Crawford's not got half his talent for that. Not a quarter." He took a long pull on his tumbler, leaving it as dry as Sam's. "No, you watch. It'll be Clay to beat. Calhoun will throw him his support as the election nears, in exchange for Clay's backing—half-backing, at least—on the issues Calhoun holds dear. And Crawford...well, I think he'll settle for secretary of state, if Clay will promise it to him. That'll position Crawford to replace Clay when the time comes. He's only fifty-one years old, after all."
Sam considered Jones's assessment as he considered the lawyer's empty tumbler. He thought the assessment was about right. More to the point, he could see where it led straight to a toast.
He cleared his throat. "What you're saying, Cicero, if I'm following you, is that if Andy Jackson is to be our next president, he'll have to reach an accommodation with John Quincy Adams. Right?"
"Dead right." Jones winced a little, then. "And that'll be some trick."
"The general thinks well of Adams," pointed out Johnson.
"Who doesn't?" said Jones. "A most admirable man, versed in the classics and everything. But does the general _like_ him? And, perhaps more to the point, what does Adams think of Andy Jackson?"
"He supported him during that ruckus over Florida," stated Johnson stubbornly.
The lawyer waved his hand. "Sure he did. John Quincy Adams is the best secretary of state the United States has ever had, if you ask me. Andy Jackson got us Florida, so Adams backed him. But that doesn't mean he much likes the general. Face it, gentlemen." Jones leaned forward in his seat and tapped the table with his forefinger. "First, they disagree over most issues that concern the internal affairs of the nation. Adams is still half a Federalist, when you come down to it. Half an abolitionist, too, if I'm not mistaken."
He tapped the table again, more forcibly. "Second, political affairs are determined more by matters of blood and attitude than they are by cold intellect. I don't think you could find two prominent men in the country more unlike than Andy Jackson and John Quincy Adams. They're as different as the Kentucky whiskey and French wine they each prefer to drink."
That was true enough, of course. Best of all, it was salient.
Sam rose to his feet. "A toast, then, gentlemen! To unlikely alliances!" The men at the table began to rise, all except the two veterans who were missing a leg. But their smiles were enough to indicate their full agreement with the toast.
Sam reached down for his tumbler. Then, his mouth widened as if he'd just noticed the glass was empty.
"Ah. How awkward."
"Grover!" Johnson barked at one of the slaves standing by the sideboard. "What are you daydreaming about? See to it that Sam's whiskey is refilled!"
**CHAPTER 5**
The next morning, at breakfast, Johnson waited until the girls were finished and had excused themselves from the table before returning to the subject of the new school.
More precisely, to where the new school might lead them.
"Tarnation, Sam—I'll make this as plain as I can—I want them to marry white men. Even if they have to move to Vermont or Massachusetts in order to do it. And how many white men are they going to run into, over there in Black Arkansas?"
"They're only twelve years old, Dick," Sam pointed out mildly. "Hardly something you've got to worry about right now."
The senator wasn't mollified. "They'll grow up fast enough. Faster than you expect. If there's any sure and certain law about kids, that's it. They _always_ grow up faster than you expect."
Sam glanced at Julia. Her expression was unreadable: just a blank face that might simply be contemplating clouds in the sky. He wondered how she felt about the matter.
But since there was no point in asking, he decided bluntness was the only tactic suitable.
"They'll marry whoever they marry, Dick. If you think you can stop them—here any more than in Arkansas—you're dreaming. You heard about the ruckus with Major Ridge's son? Over in Connecticut?"
Johnson chuckled. "Who didn't? I heard the girl even went on a hunger strike."
"Yep, she did. Stuck to it, too, until her parents got so worried they caved in and let her marry John Ridge after all. Cherokee or not. But here's really the point I was making. Did you hear what happened to her family afterward?"
The senator shook his head.
"Well, after the wedding they wound up moving to New Antrim also. I guess, after visiting the town to make sure their daughter wasn't winding up in some Indian lean-to—" He grinned widely. "Which Patrick Driscol's Wolfe Tone Hotel most certainly isn't, not with Tiana running the place. Anyway, it seems they found New Antrim most congenial. Especially since it was maybe the only town in the continent, outside of Fort of 98, where their daughter wouldn't be hounded every day. Neither would they, for that matter. It got pretty rough on them, too, you know. One newspaper article even called for drowning the girl's mother along with whipping the girl herself. John Ridge himself, of course, was for hanging."
"I heard." Johnson's lip curled. "So much for that snooty New England so-called upper crust. You can say what you like about the country folks hereabouts, but at least"—he nodded toward Julia—"she doesn't have to worry none, just going down to the store to buy provisions."
"Folks are right nice to me," she agreed.
"What's your point, Sam?" asked Johnson.
"I'd think it was obvious. The one thing you can at least be sure of, if one or both of your daughters winds up marrying somebody _you_ think is unsuitable, over there in Arkansas, is that nobody _else_ will."
He gave Johnson a cocked-head look. "Never been there, have you? You ought to go visit sometime. Soon."
"Yes," said Julia. "Soon. But..."
"It can be dangerous these days," said Johnson. His hand reached out and squeezed Julia's forearm. "Traveling, I mean, for anyone with her color. Even the color of Imogene and Adaline. Those so-called slave-catchers have been running pretty wild."
Sam grinned savagely. "Less wild than they used to be, I bet. When I passed through Cincinnati, I heard about the killing."
Johnson grimaced. "Don't make light of it, Sam. Most people down here were pretty upset about that."
"Sure. So what? 'Most people' aren't running around trying to catch so-called runaway slaves. Who, most times, are just freedmen trying to make it safely to Arkansas. Which they have to, thanks to that bastard Calhoun and his Cossacks stirring up lynch mobs all over the country. So what difference does it make if they're 'upset' because some unknown abolitionist fiend gunned down a slave-catcher across the river? What matters is that the slave-catchers are a lot more than just 'upset.' " His grin grew still more savage. "Why, I do believe they're downright nervous. Seeing as how they don't know who the fiend and his fifty brothers were. Or where they might pop up next."
Sam waved a hand. "But it doesn't matter, anyway. As long as you make the trip while Monroe's in office, I can provide you with a military escort as far as the Confederacy. A small one, but that'll be enough. After that, the Cherokees will escort you the rest of the way."
Julia pursed her lips. "That gives us almost a year. How soon will this Mr. Smith have the school up and running?"
Sam shrugged. "I don't know. Not that soon, I wouldn't think. But you can put the girls up at the Wolfe Tone in the meantime. Tiana will look after them."
Johnson looked a bit dubious. As well he might. The young Cherokee princess who'd married the notorious Patrick Driscol enjoyed her own reputation in the United States. Granted, a more favorable one than her husband's, since in her case most of it was in the form of overwrought and long-winded verses written by New England poets.
Ridiculous verses, too, for anyone who knew the realities of Indian and frontier life. Sam had shown one of the more famous poems to Tiana once—Edward Coote Pinkney's "The Cherokee Bride"—and her comment, after reading less than a third of it, had been a terse "Well, he's never gutted a deer."
But however uncertain the senator might be at the prospect, Julia was firm. "We'll do it, then. Look for us coming toward the end of the summer."
Sam nodded. "Good. I probably won't be there myself, then, but I'll let Patrick and Tiana know that you're coming."
When they found out at lunch, the girls were ecstatic.
"We get to play Indians!" squealed Imogene.
" _With_ Indians," her sister corrected her.
Imogene bestowed the inimitable sneer of a twelve-year-old upon a hopelessly ignorant sibling. "In Arkansas, silly, there's no difference. Everybody knows that!"
Johnson looked to be growing more dubious by the minute. But since Julia wasn't wavering, it didn't really matter.
Johnson left shortly thereafter to attend to some business around the plantation. After he was gone, Julia asked Sam quietly: "How much of that is really true? What Imogene said, I mean."
By then—noon being a thing of the past—Sam had a tumbler of whiskey in his hand and was leaning back comfortably in one of the porch chairs. "Not much, Julia. Not the way Imogene put it, anyway."
He took a sip from his whiskey, feeling the usual contentment the liquor gave him as it warmed its way down. "You're familiar enough with the Indians down here in the South. The way they figure descent and inheritance, through the mother rather than the father, makes a lot of difference when it comes to the way they figure which race starts here and which one ends there. It's not that they don't see the difference, mind you."
He chuckled harshly. "In a lot of ways, they're worse than white men. At least, our clan feuds don't tend to spring up that sudden and last forever. But that's because what really matters to them is not which race a person belongs to, but which clan. And clans intermarry. They always have. So..."
Another sip, longer this time, helped him focus his thoughts. "So the country they're putting together out there in Arkansas looks strange to us. A lot stranger than their tribes used to look, I think, because they're taking so much of it from us in the first place that most of it looks pretty familiar. In Arkansas, everything's a hybrid. Race counts, sure, but it doesn't trump everything the way it does here in the U.S."
He chuckled again, but the sound this time was much softer. Amusement rather than sarcasm. "They've even got newspapers. Five of 'em, at my last count. Four in English, and one that just started up that's trying out Sequoyah's new Cherokee script. The most popular is the one that's owned by Major Ridge's son and nephew. John Ridge and Buck Watie set it up in New Antrim, you know—or 'the Little Rock,' as the Cherokees call the town."
"Why there?" she asked. "I thought most of the Cherokees lived further west."
"They do. But newspapers need big towns to prosper, and the only big towns in the Confederacy are New Antrim and Fort of 98. Even the Cherokee capital at Tahlequah doesn't have more than two thousand people."
Sam considered tracing a map for her but gave up the idea almost immediately. With Julia's stern housekeeping regimen, there wasn't enough dust on the floor of the porch to do the trick—and he wasn't about to waste this good whiskey wetting his finger in it. So, he made do with words alone.
"Patrick's chiefdom ends at Fort of 98, where the Poteau River meets the Arkansas. Most of the Cherokees and Creeks live in the lands west of there. By now, they're spread out quite a ways, each clan staking out a big chunk. Mostly along the Arkansas, Canadian, and Cimarron rivers—but Chief Bowles and his people settled south of the Red River."
Julia frowned. "I thought they weren't supposed to do that."
"They're not. According to the Treaty of Oothcaloga—I ought to know, since I drafted it—the southern border of the Confederacy of the Arkansas is marked by the Red River. But Indians don't generally pay much attention to stuff like that. People like John Ross will, even Major Ridge these days, but not someone like The Bowl and the traditionalists who follow him."
He took another sip. "Right now, nobody's saying much. But once somebody figures out how to clear the Great Raft and make the Red navigable—which is bound to happen, sooner or later—there'll be Sam Hill looking to collect the bill."
She cocked her head, gazing at him. "I'd think you'd be more upset at the prospect."
He shrugged. "That won't happen any time soon, Julia. By then, it's not likely I'll still be in charge of Indian affairs for the government. I've spoken to Henry Shreve about it. He's the steamboat genius Patrick Driscol went into partnership with, if you didn't know."
"The one who got into that big legal fight over Fulton's monopoly?"
Sam nodded. "The very man. He won that fight in court, but the Fulton-Livingston steamboat company was still able to make things miserable for him in New Orleans. Legal monopoly or not, they've got the backing of the Louisiana authorities. When Patrick made him the offer to set up his own company on the Arkansas, he jumped at it. Anyway, the point is that Shreve told me it's _possible_ to clear the Great Raft out of the Red. In fact, in his spare time—which isn't much, as busy as the new companies in Arkansas are keeping him—he's starting to design a special steamboat to do the job. A 'snagboat,' he calls it. But even Henry Shreve doesn't think he could have it ready in less than five years—assuming he could find somebody to back him."
"And how likely is that?"
Sam shrugged again. "It'd almost have to be the government. A project like that would be too expensive for a private company, with no obvious quick profit to be made." After another sip of whiskey, he added: "The U.S. government, I mean. No way the Confederacy would do it. Even if they had the money, which they don't."
Seeing her head still cocked quizzically, he explained. "John Ross and Major Ridge think the Great Raft is just dandy, Julia. Patrick probably burns incense to keep it there. Well, he would if the scoundrel had a religious bone anywhere in his body."
Her head was still cocked. Sam shook his own. "You've never met Patrick Driscol."
He finished the whiskey and set the tumbler down on the floor of the porch. "He's probably my closest friend, Julia, but there are times I swear the man scares me. Scares Sam Hill, for that matter. I don't think there's a harder man alive, anywhere in the world. He's gotten stinking rich over the past few years, but not because he paid much attention to it. That came from luck—the proverbial right place at the right time—and having Tiana for a wife." A quick grin came and went. "Not to mention Tiana's rapscallion father, who seems to be able to squeeze money out of anything. But Patrick himself never thinks like a rich man. He thinks like a poor Scots-Irish rebel, still seeing redcoats everywhere he looks. Even if the coats look to be blue, these days."
"You want more whiskey?"
"I was hoping you'd ask," he replied, smiling cheerfully. "Yes, please. One more and I'll be steady enough for that blasted horse. I felt peckish, waking up this morning."
"Well, I don't wonder. As much as you drank last night."
She said nothing more. Just got up and went into the house. One of the many things Sam liked about Julia Chinn was that she wasn't given to nattering. Not even at the senator, really.
She was back a few seconds later with a half-full bottle and refilled his tumbler. And that was another thing Sam liked about the woman. No half-full tumblers when _she_ poured.
He took a hefty first sip and continued. "My point is that Patrick never stops thinking like a soldier. Doesn't matter how rich he gets. He's wound up making money hand over fist with each new company he sets up—not to mention his bank—but that's never why he does it. Each and every one of those companies, even the bank, has a military purpose."
Julia's eyes widened. "Whatever for? There's a treaty with our government, and the wild Indian tribes out there can't be that much of a threat."
"No, they're not. Dangerous, yes, but not what you'd call a real threat to the Confederacy. And, nowadays, even the Osages pretty much stay out of the Arkansas Chiefdom altogether. Patrick's soldiers are...rough, when they get riled. Not undisciplined, mind you." The chuckle, this time, was very harsh. "Not hardly, with Patrick's ways. But he's a firm believer that if someone picks a fight with him, he will surely give them what they asked for. And then some. Like I said, a scary man."
It was getting time to go, and Sam still had one last piece of business to take care of. So he left off the sipping and drained most of the tumbler in one slug.
"It's the U.S. he's thinking about, Julia. Not now, of course, with James Monroe in office. If John Quincy Adams succeeds him, that would be, if anything, even better. Adams is a diplomat by instinct and background. He'll always try to settle something by negotiation if he can. And I don't think Patrick even worries much, if the general gets elected instead. As ornery as they both are—and it's hard to choose between the man from County Antrim and Old Hickory—he and Andy Jackson could manage to get along. Well enough, anyway. No, it's Clay he's thinking about. You never know what Henry Clay will decide to do if he thinks it'll advance his prospects."
Julia made a face. Her common-law husband detested Henry Clay. Clearly enough, she didn't disagree with him on the subject.
Neither did Sam. He didn't share Andy Jackson's corrosive hatred for Clay, but that was simply because Sam didn't have it in him to hate anyone that much. If he did, though, Clay would be pretty much at the top of his list also. In the near vicinity, for sure. The man's personal morals stank, and his political morals were even worse.
"So, to get back to the point, there's no way Patrick would want the Red River cleared of the Great Raft. In fact, I think that's the main reason he went into business with Henry Shreve. Sure, and he's gotten rich from that partnership, too—everything Patrick touches seems to turn to gold, these days—but that's not why he did it. Now that Fulton's dead, Shreve's probably the only man in the United States today who'd have the wherewithal to figure out how to clear the Great Raft. So Patrick made sure to tie him down good and solid. As long as the Great Raft stays where it is, he doesn't have to worry about anybody using the Red River to attack him. His southern flank is pretty well protected."
Julia shook her head. "Man sounds a little crazy, to me."
Sam drained the last of the whiskey, grinning through the glass. "So people say. Lots of them."
He didn't bother to add _but not me._ The grin alone made it obvious enough.
He found Richard Johnson in one of the barns, attending to farm business of one kind or another. Something to do with a cow, apparently. Sam wasn't quite sure, because he'd decided at an early age that farming was even more boring than storekeeping. Tedium was bad enough on its own without piling study onto the affair.
He didn't need to, anyway, since as soon as the senator spotted him, Johnson broke off his discussion with the two slaves handling the barn animals and came over.
"You leaving now?"
" 'Fraid so, Dick. I want to make it to the Confederacy by the end of the month, and...ah..."
"You've got to pay a visit to the general first."
Sam half winced. "Yes, I do. Can't say I'm looking forward to it, this time."
Johnson studied him. "On account of how you figure you may have lost the general his chance to get elected president."
"You could have maybe sweetened that a little. But...yeah. On account of that."
Johnson looked away for a moment, then shrugged. "Well, maybe you did. Although I think Jack Hartfield's right. If Andy had just kept his mouth shut after Algiers, I don't think the affair would have hurt him much. He was not in any way directly involved, after all."
"I think Jack's probably right, too. But you know the general. Andy Jackson has a lot of virtues. Being fair-minded—especially when it involves something he did—just isn't one of them. Not usually, at least."
"True enough. Well, you have my sympathies. Give the general my best regards, will you?"
"Certainly."
Sam hesitated, then added: "But there's something else I wanted to raise with you, Dick. Tell me the truth. How bad are you hurting?"
Johnson looked away again. "In terms of money? Pretty bad, Sam." A half-whining note of resentment crept into his voice. "I was hoping the school..."
The one thing Sam didn't want to do was rehash that matter. "Forget the school," he said forcibly. "You would have lost money on it, anyway. _Did_ lose money, and plenty of it, before you even got it set up."
He summoned up the memory of his mad charge on the Creek barricade at the Horseshoe Bend. That seemed as good a model as any.
"Look, Dick, face it. You're a man I think well of personally, and a public figure I admire even more. But when it comes to business, you're a walking disaster. You've got no head for it, at all."
The senator scowled but didn't argue the point. Given his track record, that'd be pretty much impossible, even for a man as generally insouciant as he was.
So Sam kept the charge going. "I think there's a way out of the bind you're in, but you'd have to be willing to do two things. First, go into partnership with a man who _does_ know how to make businesses run profitably."
Johnson snorted. "And why would that be a problem for me? Except—good luck, finding a smart businessman who'd touch me with a ten-foot pole. Why should he? I've got nothing to bring to a partnership, Sam. No skill at it"—the scowl came back, for an instant—"as you've just been unkind enough to rub my nose in. And no capital to back someone who is. I'm broke, Sam. Worse than broke. I'm up to my waist in debts, and pretty soon the creditors are going to take me to court. The ones who haven't already, that is. Won't be surprised at all to see Henry Clay arguing the case for 'em. My biggest creditor is the Second Bank, after all, and he's one of their top lawyers whenever he takes the time away from his political chiseling."
Sam took a deep breath, remembering that final moment when he'd scaled the barricade. Right after Major Montgomery got his brains blown out by a Creek bullet.
"I've _got_ a partner for you, Dick. He'll put up the skill, and he'll put up all the money. In fact, he'll advance you enough to fend off your creditors. Far enough off to give you some breathing room, anyway, while he gets the business up and running and turning a profit."
Johnson's eyes widened, and then immediately narrowed. " _What_ business? And who is this paragon? Or bedlamite, I should say. Why in the world would a sane man do something like that?"
"The business is complicated. More complicated than I can follow, to be honest. Mostly it involves setting up a big foundry—biggest west of Cincinnati—but that also requires expanding the steamboat traffic. Expanding a foundry, I should say, since it's already in operation. But the expansion would be major. The man I'm talking about is one of the silent partners in the steamboat business Henry Shreve and Patrick Driscol set up."
Another deep breath. "His name is Henry Crowell, and the reason he's silent is because he's black. He's gotten rich enough over the past few years that he'd like to expand his business into the United States, but he can't do that without a white partner as his public face."
Sam was half expecting an outraged reaction. Despite his relationship to Julia, Richard Johnson's general attitudes on matters of race weren't really all that different from those of most people in the country. Like Andy Jackson, Johnson was always willing to make personal exceptions to generalities. But the generalities themselves, he didn't really question much.
To his surprise, though, Johnson's face simply seemed pensive. "Crowell? That name's familiar."
"Well, it ought to be!" Sam exclaimed. "He was the teamster who supplied us at the Capitol during the battle with the British. He fought well himself, later, as part of a gun crew at the battle of the Mississippi."
Best to leave it at that, he thought. The same Henry Crowell had also been the cause of the Algiers Incident—as the victim who triggered it, if not the instigator—but Sam saw no reason to bring that up.
"Yes, that's it. But I think there was something..."
"Look, Dick," Sam said, maintaining the stout tone to keep Johnson from dwelling on the name, "Henry's as good a businessman as you can find; I don't care what color. He parlayed the supply contract I got for him for the New Orleans campaign into a small fortune—okay, real small fortune, but big enough..."
His voice trailed off. He'd just stumbled into the pit he'd been trying to avoid.
Alas, that was sufficient to jog Johnson's memory. " _That_ Crowell? The one they castrated in New Orleans? Set off the whole blasted ruckus there?"
Sam gritted his teeth. Tarnation, he was tired of being diplomatic.
"Yes, that one," he growled. "The reason the Creoles had him castrated was because he'd gotten rich enough and prominent enough that he drew the attention of one of the girls they were grooming for one of their stinking Quadroon Balls. He almost died from the injury—castration's usually fatal, though most people don't realize it—and, yes, that's what set off the Battle of Algiers. Driscol called the Iron Battalion back into service. They marched into the French Quarter and blew the place half apart, and strung up every slave-catcher they got their hands on. Seeing as how they'd done the dirty work. Killed the Creole grandee who'd ordered it done, too. Patrick saw to that himself."
To his surprise, Johnson laughed. Quite a cheerful laugh. "And then pounded into splinters the Louisiana militia, when they got sent in to 'suppress a servile insurrection.' "
He laughed again, seeing the expression on Sam's face. "You know, Sam, you might be surprised at how a lot of people looked at that. Publicly, sure, it was a scandal and an outrage. But people have their own private thoughts—and don't ever underestimate the general. He would have done better to keep his mouth shut, but his own reaction was heartfelt. And the one thing about Andy is that he has a sure and certain knack for catching the sentiments of the common folk. That was a nasty filthy business, and there are still plenty of people in the United States for whom Patrick Driscol and the Iron Battalion are, were, and always will be the heroes who won the Battle of the Mississippi."
He gave Sam something of a sly look. "Meaning no disrespect to your own glorious part in the affair."
Sam just smiled. He'd gotten more public credit for winning that battle than Patrick had, but that was simply because he was a lot more acceptable figure than the grim and dour Irish rebel—and, most of all, because Sam's soldiers had been white. But Sam himself knew perfectly well that the valiant stand of the Iron Battalion had been the key to winning that battle. So did Andy Jackson, for that matter.
"Yes, that Crowell. After he recovered, well...He just got more determined than ever to be a successful man. Married the girl involved, in fact. And if he can't produce any children of his own, he makes up for it with an orphanage and the schools he set up." His tone hardened a bit. "And, yes, if you're wondering, he's Gerrit Smith's silent partner in that school of yours Smith is buying and moving to New Antrim."
Johnson shook his head. But it wasn't a gesture of refusal, more one of bewilderment.
"What in the name of Sam Hill is the world coming to?" he asked, wonderingly.
By now, Sam thought he'd come to know the answer to that question. And, for once, decided he'd say it out loud to another white man. "I'm Cherokee by adoption, Dick. What the world is coming to—if I've got anything to say about it—is that I'd like to see what happens if we use Cherokee methods for a change. At least in one part of the continent."
"Meaning?"
"Meaning I'm sick and tired of stumbling over race, everywhere I go. So I'd like to try clans, instead. I don't ask for a perfect world, just one where people deal with each other instead of categories. Imperfect as they may be."
Johnson went back to staring at the nearby wall of the barn. No reason to, really, since nothing hung on that wall but some half-rusted old tools that nobody had used in years.
"All right," he said finally. "I'm willing to give it a try. Not that I really have much choice anyway."
Sam nodded. "Good. I've already set it up at the other end. In fact, Henry told me he'd have the money ready, if you agreed. Soon as I get there, I'll have it sent. It'll be fifteen thousand dollars, to start."
That was enough to yank Johnson's eyes from the wall. " _Fifteen thousand?_ What kind of darkie has—"
"The richest darkie in the world," Sam replied coldly. "Anywhere in North America, anyway. Take it or leave it, Dick."
The senator seemed more bemused than ever. "Oh, I'll take it. I surely will. But still—"
He shook his head again. "Like I said, what's the world coming to?"
Sam had already given whatever good answer he had to that, so he just shrugged. "I'll be on my way, then."
"Sam Hill, if you will!" Johnson seized Sam by the arm and half dragged him out of the barn. "This calls for a drink of whiskey!"
Sam put up something of a protest.
As they rode away from Blue Spring Farm, in midafternoon, Chester asked him, "You going to make it through the rest of the day, Mr. Sam?"
"Don't be ridiculous."
"Just wondering. You might want to put your feet in the stirrups, then."
"Oh. Forgot."
**CHAPTER 6**
_New Antrim, Arkansas_
MAY 24, 1824
"This is the Little Rock," announced the middle-aged Cherokee who'd escorted Sheffield Parker and his folks up the Arkansas River. There was a hint of a sly smile on his face. "Be careful. It's full of Christians."
Sheff 's mother eyed the Indian skeptically but didn't say anything. His uncle just grinned, even though normally he'd have taken umbrage, as devout as he was. For whatever reason, Sheff 's uncle and the Cherokee had gotten along quite well on the trip upriver.
"I thought it was called New Antrim," Sheff 's sister said, half complainingly.
The Cherokee's smile widened, just a bit. "Depends who you ask. We Cherokee call it the Little Rock." He pointed to a rock formation not far from the pier the steamboat was approaching. "Got the name from that. Goes back quite a ways. When Patrick Driscol bought the area from a St. Louis speculator by the name of Russell, he named it New Antrim. Most of the white folks here use that name, too."
The smile widened still further. Sheff couldn't resist the tease. "So then, what do black folks call it?"
"Most all of them just call it Driscoltown. Though you'll also hear 'Driscolburg' and 'Driscolville.' Seeing as how you black folks make up almost three out of four people living here, but can't seem to agree on the details, I imagine it'll eventually just get known as Driscol."
By now, the smile was on the edge of being an outright grin. " 'Course, you'll have to wait until Driscol dies. He'll skin you alive, he hears you call it that."
Sheff studied the town the steamboat was approaching. He was impressed by the size of it, even though it didn't approach the standards of his native Baltimore. But it was far grander than anything he'd expected to see way out here on the frontier, beyond the limits of the United States. When they'd reached Cincinnati, Salmon Brown had told him it had fifteen thousand residents. From what he could see, Sheff was pretty sure New Antrim was even bigger.
Quite a bit bigger, in fact, at least in terms of the number of people. The houses here were a lot more crowded together than they'd been in Cincinnati. That town had been populated mainly by prosperous white mechanics and merchants. This one, even if it didn't seem to be as beat up as the freedmens' quarter in Baltimore, was obviously a lot poorer than Cincinnati. Although it was hard to tell, really. Most of the construction was new and raw, with nothing much in the way of frills. The people living inside those mostly log-and-wattle dwellings might be in better shape than the houses themselves.
The Cherokee confirmed his guess a moment later. "They took the first census just five months ago. The Little Rock's got just over twenty-eight thousand people in it. 'Bout twenty thousand of them are black, like you. Another five thousand or so are white people. The rest—"
No question about it. That _was_ a grin. "Are crazy Indians like me."
Sheff 's sister had the tactlessness of most eight-year-olds. "Why are you crazy? Don't really seem like it."
"Dinah!" exclaimed their mother. She smacked her daughter on the back of her head. "Mind your manners!"
The Cherokee's grin never faded, though. "Bean't no worse than what most Cherokees call me, Missus Parker. Considerable better, in fact." To Dinah, he said: " 'Course I'm crazy, girl. Why else would a Cherokee live in a place like this? When I could be doing exciting things like chasing deer in the rain?"
He looked away from her, bestowing the grin on the town. They were almost at the pier, by now.
"Don't bother me. There's enough other Cherokees feel the same way I do, that I never lack for company. Quite a few Creeks, too. And I do declare I think we're looking to outnumber the other Indians, you give it maybe ten or twenty years."
A deafening blast from the steamboat's whistle made Sheff jump a little.
"Well, here we are." The steamboat was being tied up to the wharf while a small crew of men moved a ramp toward the side of the boat. Two other men emerged from a door in the side of a large building next to the pier.
They were both black, as were all the men moving the ramp. But the two newcomers were wearing green uniforms.
Sheff had heard rumors about those uniforms. These were men in the Arkansas Army. It was real!
Some of his excitement must have shown. The old Indian chuckled softly. "Yep, that's them, all right. The Confederate Army. Arkansas Chiefdom, anyway."
"What are they doing here?" asked Sheff 's mother.
The Cherokee sucked his teeth for a moment. "I guess you could call it recruitment."
Sheff 's mother immediately frowned. "I don't want my boy signing up for no army!"
The Cherokee smiled again. But said nothing.
Less than an hour later, sitting behind his mother on a stool in a large office in New Antrim's largest bank, Sheff was mightily confused about most everything. But he understood why the old man had smiled.
"It's not fair!" his mother exclaimed. The words were half a protest, half a wail.
The man sitting on the opposite side of the biggest desk Sheff had ever seen just shrugged his shoulders. "No, I suppose not. But what's 'fair' got to do with anything, Mrs. Parker? You wanted your freedom, and you got it. But what 'freedom' means, right now, is the freedom to starve."
Sheff was too fascinated with the man himself to pay much attention to his words. His name was Henry Crowell, nothing spectacular. But to Sheffield Parker he was a living, breathing dragon, testifying in person that this new fantasy world was real.
First, because he was black.
Second, because he was the biggest man Sheff had ever seen.
Third, because he was wearing fancier-looking clothes than anything Sheff had ever seen anyone wear except a few of the richest white men in Baltimore.
Finally—most glorious of all—because he was the _president_ of the bank.
He _owned_ it!
Well, half of it, anyway. From what Sheff had been able to understand of the man's introductory remarks, the other half was apparently owned by the same Patrick Driscol who'd become a mysterious legend to Sheff.
"It's not fair!" Sheff 's mother repeated, trying, this time, for more in the way of sternness rather than simple misery.
Next to her, Sheff 's uncle shrugged. "I don't really mind, Lemon."
Mrs. Parker swiveled her head to glare at her brother. "So, fine. You're a full-growed man, Jem. What about my little boy?"
The man behind the desk chuckled, causing his immense chest to ripple the fancy cloth. "Don't look so 'little' to me, ma'am. He's not too tall, but he's powerful wide in the shoulders."
Now she glared at the banker. "It isn't fair!"
Crowell sighed and sat up straighter in his chair. Then, planting two huge hands on the desk, he leaned forward and spoke softly. Softly, but very firmly.
"Mrs. Parker, there is no magic here in Arkansas. 'Less you believe in the voudou business, but not even Marie Laveau claims she can conjure up food and shelter out of spiderwebs. You came here with nothing. No money, no tools beyond a few knives and such, no capital, no livestock, not much at all beyond the clothes on your backs—and those, meaning no offense, you couldn't sell even if you wanted to. They're not far removed from rags."
Sheff 's mother set her jaws. "We was poor to begin with. Then, what with havin' to leave Baltimore so sudden..."
"I am not _blaming_ you, Mrs. Parker. Just pointing out the facts of life. How do you propose to survive while you start making a living?"
She started to say something, but Crowell cut her off.
"Never mind that. 'Survive' isn't the word I meant. I don't doubt you could 'survive,' but you'd be so dirt poor you'd be nothing but an anchor dragging behind this community. We don't need that, Mrs. Parker. The last thing Arkansas needs is dead weight. Meaning no offense, but that's what dirt-poor people are. Dead weight."
He pushed himself back from the chair a little. "Patrick established that as the very first rule, here—and all of us in the Iron Battalion agreed with him. Black people are welcome in Arkansas, but they've got to pull their weight. That's the main reason we set up this bank in the first place, back then. We'll loan people money to get started, but they've got to put up collateral. And if they've got nothing but able-bodied men in the family, then those men have to agree to serve a term of enlistment in the army."
"What if we were just women?" his mother asked, her eyes narrowing. "Did you and this fancy 'Mr. Patrick' set up a whorehouse, too? Loan us money if we put up our cunts for collateral?"
Uncle Jem winced. "Lemon!"
But all Crowell did was chuckle again. "No, Mrs. Parker. Patrick and I are running no brothels in this town. There are a couple, I'm told, but they're strictly private enterprise. To answer your question, if the borrowers are females only, we'll accept a job in one of the local workshops as collateral. But the terms aren't as good."
"What _are_ the terms, Mr. Crowell?" Sheff 's uncle spoke a bit hastily, probably to keep his sister from another outburst.
The big banker looked at him. "Good as you could ask for. We'll loan any family three hundred dollars for every man who enlists, two hundred for every woman or boy or girl in a workshop. The interest is five percent, compounded annually. The loan has to be paid back monthly—but we'll waive the interest for the whole family as long as at least one man is serving in the colors. And for every man who completes a term of service satisfactorily, we'll knock a percentage point off the interest."
He glanced at Sheff 's mother and sister, and then at Sheff. "In your case, that means we'll loan you a thousand dollars even. No interest accumulates as long as either you or young Sheffield is still in the colors. Once both of you have finished your terms of duty—assuming you were discharged honorably—we'll start charging you three percent on whatever the balance is. The truth is, you can't find a better loan anywhere. Either here or in the United States."
Sheff had no idea if he was telling the truth or not, since what he knew about banking was that...well, it was a white man's business. He'd never known a black man who even went to a bank, much less owned one.
From the dubious expression on her face, it was obvious his mother was just as ignorant. But his uncle seemed satisfied. Not, probably, because he actually knew anything. But just because, as with Sheff himself, he was inclined to trust Mr. Crowell.
Crowell was famous, too, after all. And if most of that fame was due to his horrible mutilation, there wasn't actually any sign of it on the man himself. Not visibly, anyway, covered with that fancy clothing. Maybe he was a little fatter than he would have been otherwise. But it was hard to know. Men that big usually ran to fat, some, once they got a little older.
Sheff thought he was a nice man, though. Not that it really mattered. Even if Crowell had been poison mean, Sheff would have been inclined to take his word for something. The man was a _banker._ The only black banker Sheff had ever heard of.
"We'll do it," said Sheff 's uncle firmly. "Be quiet, Lemon. You've had your say, and you ain't my mother, even if you are older than me."
"I'm _Sheffield's_ mother."
His uncle smiled, and nodded toward Sheff. "And so what, girl? I mean, _look_ at him. You tried to stop your son, he'd just run away and enlist anyhow."
Sheff tried to look innocent when his mother gave him a sharp glance. It wasn't easy. He'd spent a good part of the past half hour trying to decide between two different ways he could run away and join the army. Daytime or nighttime.
There were advantages and disadvantages, either way. Daytime would be harder to make his getaway without his mother catching him, but he could probably enlist on the spot. Wherever the spot was. Nighttime, he'd have to wander around some in the dark.
"Would you do that, Sheff?" his mother demanded.
"No, ma'am. 'Course not."
She just rolled her eyes and threw her hands up in defeat.
By midafternoon, Sheff was in a state that bordered on sheer ecstasy. It was all he could do not to bounce up and down like a little boy.
He had a _uniform!_
True, it was too big, and his mother insisted the tailoring was poor, which it probably was. The cloth was pretty stiff and rough on his skin, too.
Sheff couldn't have cared less. It was a _uniform!_
His uncle Jem seemed almost as pleased as he did.
"Oh, stop nagging, Lemon," he said to Sheff 's mom. "They didn't cost us nothing. 'Sides, why don't you just do the fixing-up yourself when we get a chance? You're handy with a needle."
"Needle!" Lemon Parker gave the uniforms a look that was none too admiring. An outright glare, in fact. "Need a knife—no, a spear—to punch holes in that stuff."
Uncle Jem grinned. "Maybe they're bulletproof, then."
Before his sister could continue with her protests, Jem turned away from her and examined the room they'd gotten in the big boardinghouse. Now, his own expression took on a look of disapproval. Not deep disapproval—certainly nothing akin to the glares Sheff 's mother was still giving the uniforms—just the skeptical look that an experienced carpenter bestows on the work of lesser craftsmen.
"Pretty crude," he muttered.
Even Sheff could see that that was true. The boardinghouse, from the outside, had looked more like a huge log cabin than any boardinghouse or hotel Sheff had ever seen in Baltimore. On the inside, it looked about the same.
But, again, he couldn't have cared less. He had a _uniform!_ The garment was a magic shield, shedding all the minor cares of life as if they were so many raindrops.
"Never you mind, Jem!" Sheff 's mother shook her head. "Me and Dinah can patch up what needs it." Shrugging: "It's solid built, whatever else. A lot more solid built than you and my little boy are, when men start shooting at you."
"There ain't no war going on, Ma," Sheff protested. But, even in his high spirits, he didn't miss the fact that his uncle had grimaced slightly.
No, there wasn't a war going on. Leaving aside clashes with wild Indians, anyway. But even at sixteen, Sheff knew enough about the world to know that a war was most likely coming.
He couldn't have begun to explain the politics that would drive that war. He was only just beginning to even think in those terms.
It didn't matter. All he had to do was look down at that wonderful green uniform he was wearing. Would the sort of men who'd murdered his father just for being a black freedman allow the father's son to wear a uniform?
He didn't think so.
But he also didn't care. What mattered was that he _did_ wear the uniform of the army of Arkansas. And he made a solemn vow to himself, right then and there, that he'd learn everything a soldier needed to learn. So that when the men came to murder the mother and the daughter, the son would murder them instead.
"And why are you lookin' so fierce of a sudden, boy?" asked his uncle.
Best not to answer that directly, or his mother would start squawking again. "Ah...just thinking of the Bible, is all."
Uncle Jem smiled. "The Old Testament, I hope."
"Book of Judges. Book of Samuel, too."
**CHAPTER 7**
By evening, Sheff 's elation had become leavened by caution. According to the terms of their enlistment, Sheff and his uncle had been required to report for duty before nightfall. Which they'd done—and immediately found themselves assigned to a barracks on the outskirts of the city that made the construction of the boardinghouse look like the work of fine artisans.
Just a very long empty log cabin was all it was, with a single door at either end. The building had a row of bunks down each side, in three tiers, except for a fireplace on the north wall. The bunks were crammed so close together there was barely room to squeeze between them. They'd have covered up the windows completely, except there weren't any windows to begin with. And the space between the bunk tiers was so short that it looked to Sheff as if his nose would be pressed against the mattress of the man sleeping above him. Unless he got assigned to one of the top bunks, in which case his nose would be pressed against the logs of the roof.
The air would be horrible up there, too, with this many men crammed into so little space. To make things worse, there was still enough chill in the air at night that the fireplace in the middle of the barracks was kept burning. It had a chimney, of course, but Sheff had never seen a fireplace yet that vented all the smoke it produced.
There didn't seem to be enough spittoons, either, for that many men, half of whom Sheff could see were chewing tobacco. On the other hand, he couldn't see any sign that the men crammed into the barracks had been spitting on the floor, either, so maybe they emptied them regularly.
Chewing tobacco was a habit Sheff planned to avoid, himself. It just seemed on the filthy side, even leaving aside the fact that his pious mother and uncle disapproved on religious grounds. Sheff wasn't sure exactly why they did, since he'd never found anything prohibiting tobacco in the Bible, not even in Deuteronomy and Leviticus. He ascribed it to the fact that, in his experience so far in life, he'd found that people who were really devout tended to think a lot of things weren't proper, even if they couldn't exactly put their finger on any one place in the Bible where it said so.
About fifteen seconds after he and his uncle entered the barracks, standing there uncertainly after closing the door behind them, one of the men playing cards on an upended half barrel at the center of the room looked up.
"Just joined?" he asked.
Uncle Jem nodded. Sheff added, "Yes, sir."
The man exchanged thin smiles with his two fellows at the barrel. There was something vaguely derisive about the expressions.
"Sir, no less," one of them chuckled. "Lord God, another babe in the woods."
All three of the men at the barrel were black, but this one was so black his skin looked like coal. The eyes he now turned on Sheff were just as dark.
"We ain't 'sirs,' boy. We the sergeants of this outfit. 'Sirs' are officers. You salute them and act proper when they're around. Us, you don't salute. And while's you'll learn to act proper around us, too, it's a different set of rules."
Jem cleared his throat. "And those are...what?"
"You'll find out. Soon enough."
The third of the trio had never looked up from his cards. He now spoke, still without looking. "Only bunks open are two in the back," he said, giving his head a very slight backward tilt. "Both top bunks, but don't bother complaining."
He flipped a card onto the barrel. "I'm Sergeant Hancock. This here"—a flip of the thumb toward the sergeant who'd spoken first—"is Sergeant Harris. The one as black as the devil's sins is Sergeant Williams. He's the friendly one."
Williams grinned. "And he's the one who tells lies all the time." When he turned the grin onto Sheff and his uncle, it seemed full of good cheer. "I'm actually mean as Sam Hill, you cross me. But I'm sure and certain you boys wouldn't even think of that. Would you?"
That didn't really seem to be a question that required an answer, so Sheff kept his mouth shut. So did his uncle.
Williams grunted. "Didn't think so. Go ahead, now. Get yourselves settled in. So to speak. The captain'll be along shortly. Maybe—if you're real unlucky—the colonel, too."
Sheff and Jem did as they were told, edging themselves and their little sacks of belongings past the three sergeants at the barrel. None of them made the slightest effort to clear any space for them as they went by. From what Sheff could tell, they'd forgotten about the new arrivals altogether and were concentrating completely on their card game.
As Sheff and his uncle made their way to the back of the barracks, Sheff was surprised to spot three white men among the soldiers. He'd had the impression that the army of Arkansas was all black, except for some of the officers.
That officers would be white was a given. The only thing surprising there was that Sheff knew some of them were black, even including the colonel who commanded the regiment. But he hadn't expected to encounter white men in the enlisted ranks.
Two of them were no older than he was, either. Including, he discovered as he came up to the bunk he'd been assigned to, the soldier who'd be sleeping below him.
The situation was...strange. Confusing, too.
The white boy on the middle bunk looked away from the book he was reading and gave Sheff a smile. "Got stuck on the top, did you? Poor bastard. But at least you're in a corner bunk. There's enough cracks in the wattling that you'll be able to breathe. Some, anyway. 'Course, you'll hate it come winter. But who knows? By then you might be promoted, or dead. That's for sure and certain my plan."
Sheff wondered how he'd been able to read at all. The space in the middle bunk was so tight that the boy had had to keep the book pressed practically against his nose.
Now the boy lowered the book onto his chest—which didn't require shifting it more than two inches—and gave Sheff 's little sack a scrutiny. "Won't be no room for that, up there. But there's still some space under the bottom bunk."
Seeing Sheff 's hesitation, his smile got more cheerful still. "Relax. Bean't no thieves in this company."
The black man on the middle bunk across from him snorted sarcastically. "You livin' in a dream world, Cal. Plenty of these curries be thieves. It's just that they terrified thieves."
He rolled over to face Sheff, his shoulder barely clearing the bunk above him. There was no smile on his face, but he seemed friendly enough.
"He's right, though, boy. You don't got to worry about nobody stealing nothin' here. Not from another soldier, anyway."
This soldier was much older than Sheff or the white boy. At a guess, somewhere in his midthirties—about the same age as Sheff 's uncle. On his way down the line of bunks, Sheff had noticed that the age spread among the soldiers was considerable. None of them had seemed any younger than him, but he'd spotted one man who had to be at least fifty.
That seemed a little odd to him, also. But, then, he really knew very little about armies and soldiering.
Yet, anyway. He planned to learn, applying himself to the task.
"My, don't he look fierce of a sudden?" chuckled the white boy. "Must be thinking of the Bible. I just hope he don't talk in his sleep, like Garner does. Not sure how much Leviticus I can take, droning in my ear when I'm trying to sleep."
The older black soldier across from him echoed the chuckle. "Say that again."
That really did seem like a friendly smile on the boy's face. Sheff felt tension he hadn't even realized was there start to fade away.
He had other memories of white people beyond those of hateful and screaming faces beating his father to death, after all. One of his closest playmates, growing up, had been a white boy from a family living nearby. Until...
The world pulled them away from each other. Ed Rankin, his name had been. Sheff still found himself missing him from time to time.
So, finally, he smiled himself. "I do read the Bible," he allowed. "But I don't talk in my sleep—and I bean't too fond of Leviticus anyway."
By then, his uncle had muscled his way onto the top bunk above the older black soldier. "Lord in Heaven," he muttered, edging into blasphemy. "What kind of no-account carpenter built a bunk bed that don't give you no more than two foot of space from the ceiling?"
"His name's Jeremiah McParland," said the white boy immediately. "He's not a carpenter, though. He's the member of the family in charge of the bunk bed department, and he designed them. The space is twenty inches, by the way." The boy shook his head. "I had words with him about it. Pointless though it be. He always was the greediest member of the family."
Seeing the confused look on Sheff 's face, the boy's smile widened. "I'm Callender McParland. Family's rich now that we set up in Arkansas, since we own the biggest furniture company here. And the captain's a cousin of mine. Don't do _me_ no good, though. The colonel's that monster Jones. General Ball's still worse—and the Laird is worse yet. Even if cousin Anthony was inclined to play favorites—which he ain't, the bastard—he wouldn't dare nohow."
There was a commotion at the far end of the barracks. Peering around the corner of the bunk, Sheff saw that two men had come in through the same door he and Jem had used.
One was white; one was black. The white one was average size; the black one was very tall and long-legged. Both of them were officers, from the fancy look of the uniforms.
The three sergeants at the barrel had come to their feet. _"TEN-shut!"_ hollered Sergeant Harris.
Immediately, the white officer said loudly, "At ease, men."
From what little Sheff could tell at the distance, he seemed a friendly enough sort. Although it could just be that he'd been smart enough to realize that it would take nigh on forever for men crammed into three-tiered bunk beds to come to attention on the floor.
The black officer with him, though, didn't seem friendly at all.
The white officer came forward a few steps. "We've had five more recruits since my last inspection. My name's Anthony McParland, for those of you who don't know, and I'm the company captain." He nodded back toward the black officer. "And this here is Colonel Jones. He's in command of the regiment."
They were both young men, Sheff suddenly realized. The uniforms had confused him, at first, automatically imparting an aura of age along with authority. But now he could see that Captain McParland was somewhere in his midtwenties and Jones not more than a few years older.
"Our complement is now full," the captain continued. "That means we start real training tomorrow. _Early_ tomorrow."
Suddenly his face broke into a big smile, and Sheff could easily see the family resemblance to the young soldier in the bunk next to him. "We'll start teaching you how to kill white men. With some exceptions. Me, for starters. Anybody else in a green uniform. Civilians, of course."
The black colonel moved forward. Unlike the captain, his face was marked by a scowl.
"Don't get all eager, you dumb curries. You want to know how you kill white men? Lots of 'em, I mean, in great big heaps. Not just maybe one, here and there, while you're running like rats."
He waited, still scowling, while silence filled the barracks.
"Didn't think so," he grunted. "Well, boys, forget any fancy dreams you got about muskets and cannons and such. The way you kill lots of white men—any color of men—is by learning how to walk better than they do. Walk faster, walk farther, walk longer—and do it while carrying more than they can. Simple as that. By midmorning tomorrow—I guarantee it—you'll have learned that lesson. And you'll keep learning it, and keep learning it, and keep learning it, until even curries as ignorant as you understand it in the marrow of your bones."
He grunted again. "You'll find out." With no further ado, he turned and walked out of the barracks. The captain made to follow but paused in the open doorway and looked back. The smile seemed as wide and cheerful as ever.
"Don't eat much," he said. "I mean it. You really don't want to eat much. Neither tonight nor—specially—tomorrow morning. Of course, you probably won't have time anyway."
Then he was gone.
"I do believe I'm going to forgo the big repast I was planning," McParland said. "Of salt pork and potatoes, that being all we ever get, pretty much, so it ain't no big hardship."
Sheff decided he'd do the same. Despite the smile, he didn't think the captain had been really joking.
They were spilled out of the bunks by the sergeants somewhere around four o'clock of the morning. Felt like it, anyway. It was sure and certain still dark outside.
"This is 'morning'?" complained one of the soldiers. Softly, though, almost under his breath. The sergeants were definitely not in a joking mood.
Sheff shared the sentiment, but...
He reminded himself of the Book of Judges and—most of all—of a mob beating his father to death, and he kept his mouth shut.
By ten o'clock that morning, miles into the most godawful set of hills and hollows Sheff had ever seen, he was on his knees puking up what little food he'd had in his stomach. Cal McParland was kneeling right next to him, doing the same.
His feet ached, his legs felt as if they were burning from coals within, and the heavy pack on his back seemed like the Rock of Ages. They'd been marching since dawn, with the captain and the sergeants setting a murderous pace. At the start of the march, Sheff had been disgruntled that they hadn't been provided with muskets—or, indeed, any sort of weapon beyond the knives they all carried in scabbards at their belts, which were really more in the way of tools than fighting gear. Now he was deeply thankful for it.
"Funny thing is," McParland finally managed to half whisper, "I don't actually got nothing 'gainst white men. Being's I'm one myself."
Sheff had wondered about that. "Why'd you enlist, then?" he asked, in the same strained half whisper. "Your family bean't poor, like mine."
Somehow, McParland managed a shrug under that huge pack. "Something of a family tradition, now. And...well, we like Arkansas. Got nothing against the United States, really. But if they come here, not being polite about it, we decided we'll send them back."
There was something about that answer that seemed awfully fuzzy to Sheff. But...
There was also something about it that would probably look real good, clarified up some. He thought he was finally coming to understand—really understand—what Abraham's people felt when God led them into the Promised Land.
_"On your feet!"_ bellowed Sergeant Williams, trotting down the line of exhausted men. "Break's over!"
Williams didn't look any more tired than if he'd just come back from an evening stroll. Sheff envied him that ease, but mostly it just filled him with determination. If Williams could learn to do it, so could he.
He heaved himself to his feet, giving Callender McParland a helping hand as he did so. The white boy was a lot more slender than he was. That pack had to be just about killing him.
"Thanks," McParland murmured. He managed something of a chuckle, once he was erect. "And will you look at these uniforms? Good thing they made 'em out of whatever this awful cloth is. Dirty as they are, least they bean't torn."
Sheff looked down at his own uniform, which was just about as dirty and scuffed up as his companion's. There wasn't much left of the new look it had had when he got it the day before.
"I don't mind," he said softly. "It's still green, and it's still a uniform."
Williams came trotting back, whacking a few slow-movers with one of the fancy-looking sticks the officers and sergeants carried. A baton, Sheff had heard them called.
_"Move it, move it, move it!"_ he bellowed. "March is just starting, you lazy curries!"
He pointed with the stick to some mountains whose crest could just be seen from the hollow where the captain had ordered a brief rest for the company. "Before this march is done, you gotta be up there in the Bostons! And you will be, by God—or we'll leave you dead on the road!"
Sheff took a deep breath, staring up at those mountains. Next to him, McParland did the same.
Blasphemy in the army, Sheff had already discovered, was pretty contagious. "Sweet Jesus," McParland muttered.
"Just think of it as Mount Sinai," Sheff murmured back.
"You're crazy."
"Maybe. But what I am for sure and certain is a nigger. And that looks like Sinai to me."
The march lurched into motion again. For a few minutes, neither of them said anything.
Then McParland said: "People call me Cal. Can I call you Sheff?"
As exhausted as he was, Sheff thought that might be the most triumphant moment he'd ever had in his life so far. Not that he'd had many, of course, and this one wasn't really that big. But he could already see a road of triumphs shaping ahead of him. If he just kept marching forward, no matter how tired he was.
"Yes," he replied.
**CHAPTER 8**
_County Down, Ireland_
JUNE 3, 1824
"You owe these people nothing, Robert," said Eliza Ross. "That man, in particular."
She lifted her teacup from the side table next to her divan and used it to point to his shoulder. "Except for half crippling you."
The words weren't spoken angrily, or even in a condemnatory tone. They were stated matter-of-factly, as someone might present another piece of evidence to be weighed when a conclusion is being drawn.
Her husband was standing at the window of the Ross family seat in Rostrevor that gave him the best view of the Irish countryside. The hand he'd been using to hold back the curtains belonged to the same arm his wife had indicated with the cup. For a moment, half smiling, he studied that arm. Then, took away the hand, letting the curtains swing back into place.
"Hardly that," he murmured. "A quarter crippling, at worst. I can still use the arm, after all, and the hand's fine. I just can't lift much with it."
He didn't add, as he could have, that the arm ached frequently, especially in bad weather. His wife knew that already, and besides, that wasn't really what was at issue anyway. Eliza was no more given to nursing old enmities than he was.
Still at the window, he turned to face her squarely. And, from old habit, clasped his hands behind his back, ignoring the twinge of pain the gesture brought with it.
"What did you think of the letter itself?" he asked.
She finished draining the cup, set it on the side table, and looked down at the paper in her lap. Two sheets, it was, both covered with script written in some sort of particularly heavy ink.
"His handwriting's getting better," she said, a corner of her mouth quirking a little. "Mind you, that's not saying much."
Her husband's mouth matched the quirk with one of its own. "Amazing he does as well as he does, if you ask me. There's only four misspelled words in the whole letter—and three of them can be debated. I've seen worse dispatches from English noblemen, much less an Irish emigrant with no more than a village education. Even in English, much less French."
Eliza Ross picked up the sheets and held them closer to her eyes. She was a bit nearsighted. "And there's that, too, Robert. Why does he write in French instead of English?"
It was a rhetorical question, of course. So she moved right on to provide the answer herself. "Because Patrick Driscol, born in Ireland, learned most of his letters while serving in Napoleon's army. Because he's a man who has been England's enemy his entire adult life. For years, long before"—this time, she used the sheets to point to Robert Ross's left shoulder—"he ruined your arm."
Again, her tone was level, not accusatory. Just another fact, to be presented.
"True," he agreed. "All true."
She lowered the sheets back onto her lap. "Robert, I feel I must remind you that your standing within English society has become somewhat frayed, of late. If you accept this invitation..."
Firmly, her husband shook his head. "Don't mince words, love. 'Somewhat frayed' hardly captures the thing. 'Tattered as a beggar's coat' would do better."
Eliza took a slow deep breath and then let it out in a sigh. "Well, yes. Among Tory circles, at least."
She did not bother to add, as she could have, that for Anglo-Irish of their class, after the rebellion of 1798, "Tory circles" amounted to the only circles in existence. In Ireland, at least, if not always in England.
She didn't add it, partly because it was unnecessary. But mostly for the simple reason that she didn't care much. A bit, perhaps, where her husband no longer cared at all. But not much.
Abruptly, Robert Ross released the handclasp and strode—marched, almost—to the wall opposite the window. Hanging there, in a heavy and ornate frame next to the door, was an illustration.
A very odd one, to be so prominently displayed in such a house. The Ross family was an old and much-respected one among the Anglo-Irish gentry. Robert's father, Major David Ross, had served with distinction in the Seven Years' War. A still earlier ancestor, Colonel Charles Ross, had been killed at Fontenoy in 1745, during the War of the Austrian succession.
Their portraits, along with those of other distinguished ancestors, hung on many of the walls in the family seat. Along with, on another wall in the very room they occupied, all the distinctions accumulated by the current and most renowned member of the line.
Robert Ross himself, who had retired from the British army with the rank of major general. On that wall—Ross could have pointed to it with his left hand, were he willing to ignore the pain raising the arm would have caused him—were the sort of trophies that precious few officers had ever accumulated in the long history of British arms.
There was the gold medal he'd received after the Battle of Maida in 1805, the British victory in the Peninsular War that most reports ascribed to the decisive leadership of Colonel Ross, as he then was. Hanging next to it was the sword his fellow officers had presented him four years later, in 1809. Officially, it was another honor for Maida. But really, everyone knew, in appreciation for Ross's actions and leadership during the terrible retreat to Corunna. His 20th Foot had more often than not been the rear guard in that retreat, holding off Soult and the French pursuers long enough to enable Sir John Moore's army to reach the port and embarkation to England.
Next to it hung the gold medal he'd received for the Battle of Vittoria, and the Peninsular Gold Cross. And next to those, the Sword of Honor.
Other mementos were there, too, some of them personally meaningful if not as officially prestigious. Had he been so inclined, Ross could have covered the wall with his mentions in Wellington's dispatches from the war. Quite easily. From his return to Iberia in 1812 until Ross was placed in command of the British expedition to North America in 1814, he'd led troops in every major battle in the Peninsular War except Toulouse. From 1813 on, following his promotion to major general, as a brigade commander. He was largely credited with having saved the British army from disaster at Roncesvalles and with having played a key role in the British victory at Sorauren.
A brilliant career, until the expedition to America and the repulse of the British at the Capitol. But, even there, Ross's personal gallantry had excited British admiration. And since Pakenham had been in command, not Ross, when the British army was beaten again at the Battle of the Mississippi, no opprobrium attached to him for that defeat.
It might have, had he been forced to defend Pakenham from public censure upon his return to England, as he'd fully intended to do. But Pakenham's valiant death at Lille in the final campaign against Napoleon had put paid to that. Another defeat, true, but Pakenham's impetuous assault had delayed Napoleon long enough for Wellington and Blucher to trap the French army at Tournai and force the French emperor to surrender.
There were other honors on other walls, won by his predecessors, and portraits aplenty of the predecessors themselves. All of which made the illustration hanging by the door seem out of place.
Grossly so, in the opinion of many of the Anglo-Irish gentry who had, in the years since the wars, visited Ross at Rostrevor. Wellington himself had come once, some three years earlier. The moment he spotted the illustration he'd exclaimed, "Oh, dear God, Robert! Why do you have _that_ hanging on the wall?"
Wellington had recognized it immediately, of course. Detested though it might be by most of England's leading figures, the illustration was probably better known to the British populace by now than the portraits of any but kings and queens. First introduced to public attention in 1789 by Thomas Clarkson and Granville Sharp, the founders of the British antislavery movement, it was a diagram of the slave-trading ship _Brookes._
It was a horrid thing, really. Which was, of course, its whole purpose: neatly and meticulously displaying, in the form of a top-down diagram, exactly how slaves were carried across the Atlantic. Lying side by side, like so many spoons nestled in a silverware drawer—or so much meat in one of the new tin-lined cans.
Of all the methods used by the antislavery movement to advance its cause, this single diagram had always been the most effective. Against it, the claims of slave traders that their business was a reasonably humane one were simply froth against a cliff. Its copy, though not often so finely drawn, hung in taverns and workingmens' homes and lawyers' offices all over Britain. Not to mention, by now, perhaps a third of its churches. Well over half of them, if one counted only the Dissenting churches.
After staring at the diagram for perhaps a minute, Robert said softly: "I owe Patrick Driscol nothing, Eliza. True enough. But I shall never forget what I saw in America. One memory, in particular, haunts me to this day. A man—black as he might be—with a collar around his neck. Like a watchdog's collar, except the spikes faced inward, pricking the skin. The contraption is a common form of punishment for slaves, at least in Louisiana. The man cannot sleep without injuring himself—possibly even dying."
"Yes, I know, Robert. You've described it to me."
Ross smiled, a bit crookedly. "An obsession, perhaps. But I find as I age—I'm nearing sixty, you know, now much closer to my death than my birth—I find myself obsessing over the afterlife. And I wonder, almost every day now, what God will have to say about my life when my judgment comes."
He was back to that soldierly handclasping. His head swiveled, to bring the wall of honors and trophies under scrutiny. "Will he really be impressed by all that? You can find the same sort of wall, I can assure you, in the houses and mansions of many generals in many nations. For many centuries now. Each of us claiming, as we meet gallantly on the field, that the Lord favors our cause."
He looked away, back to the diagram. "Or will He present this to me? And ask me what I did in battle against _this_ monstrosity? How much will the defeat of Napoleon weigh, against this?"
He heard his wife's little laugh. "That damned Irishman! He's corrupted your thinking, Robert."
The retired general's smile grew more crooked still. "Perhaps. But what do you think, dearest?"
She said nothing for a time. Then, in the same level and matter-of-fact tone: "I think that I am your wife. The same wife who rode a mule across more of Spain than I wish to remember, after you were wounded at Orthes."
"Yes," he said softly. "I remember. The weather was frightful."
"Not as frightful as the sunny day you set sail for America. I was sure I'd never see you again, Robert. And I almost didn't."
He left off his examination of the diagram to look at Eliza. Her face was tight, perhaps, but quite composed.
"I am your wife, Robert. And you shall not leave me behind this time. If you are bound and determined to return to America, in response to"—she clutched the sheets in her right hand and held them up—"the damned Irishman's request, I shall not stand in your way. But you will not leave me behind. Not again."
"Surely you don't fear—"
For the first time, some anger came into her face. Not fury, simply exasperation. "Oh, stop it, Robert! You know perfectly well why Driscol is asking you to visit him. After—what has it been, now? Nine years? Nine years of the most peculiar correspondence in the world, but none of it was accompanied by any suggestion that you might actually come to America yourself instead of simply giving him some advice from a distance."
She brought her left hand to the sheets. Looking, for a moment, as if she might crumple them altogether. But, after a slight pause, she used the hand instead to flatten the sheets back out.
Then, smiling very crookedly herself: "And spare me the pious pose. I don't doubt you mean it well enough. But I know you better than anyone. You're like an old racehorse, looking at what might be your last starting gate."
"Don't be ridiculous!"
"Ridiculous? Patrick Driscol is expecting a _war,_ Robert. That's why he's asking you to come. No other reason. And...so are you."
He unclasped his hands and waved the left. "I say again, ridiculous. It's far too soon to predict any such thing, Eliza."
"Predict? Of course not. But generals are not in the business of predicting outcomes. You've said that to me a hundred times if you've said it once. Generals are in the business of _gauging_ outcomes. And you are gauging, Robert. Don't deny it. Not to me."
He didn't. For the simple reason that he couldn't. Major General Robert Ross was indeed gauging what might be the last war of his life. And the one that might—just might—be the one that saved his soul.
After so many decades, he was tired of duty to king and country. He'd paid that duty, paid it in full—and had the wounds as well as the honors to prove it. Wounds that ached everywhere he went, whereas the wall of honor was there only on the occasions he entered this room.
"Besides, there's Ireland," he murmured.
"What was that?"
"Ah...never mind."
Eliza was considerably more broad-minded than most people of her class, but she still retained most of its basic outlook. Whereas at the age of fifty-seven there was very little left at all, in Robert Ross, of the young man from Anglo-Irish gentry who'd enlisted in the 25th Foot right after graduating from Trinity College in Dublin. Except courage and determination, he liked to think. The years and the wars had burned most of it away, especially that horrible war in America. And what had remained had been slowly scoured off by his years working with Clarkson and Sharp. He was no Quaker, like so many of the supporters of the antislavery movement, and never would be. But their piety was contagious, in its own way.
The general who'd been active in the British army had never wondered much about such things. No need to, really, when it was obvious that God was an Englishman. But his years since Napoleon's defeat rubbing shoulders with the men in the antislavery movement had undermined that certainty.
What was left was Ireland itself. Bleeding, tortured Ireland. Ross had never seen anything he could do, in his life, that would have benefited Ireland. But perhaps he and another Irishman, on another continent, could prevent another such endlessly suppurating wound.
It seemed worth a try, at least. There was some evidence in the New Testament, if you looked at it properly, that Jesus would favor the Irish. Quite a bit, actually. Perhaps more to the point, Ross had read the Bible front to back three times over since his return from America. Noticing, each time, that nowhere was God's color recorded.
He might even be black. Worse yet, He might have no color at all. How, then, to explain one's inaction, knowing of the _Brookes?_ For Eliza, as for most Englishmen and Englishwomen—most members of the antislavery movement, for that matter—the blacks depicted as so many spoons in a drawer were miserable and suffering souls. Faceless, for all that.
But, at the age of fifty-seven, Robert Ross could now see his own wife and children on that ship. Something which, he could now understand, Patrick Driscol had been able to see since he was a boy.
"Dear God, I miss the man!" he said, as surprised as he'd ever been in his life.
Over dinner, when he told the children their plans, his oldest son raised an objection.
"I'd like to go, too."
Mrs. Ross shook her head. "David, your education—"
"Oh, Mother! I'm sick of boarding schools. Fine enough for the younger ones, but I need a change. Trinity can wait a year or two." Pouting, a bit: "Besides, it'd be good for me. Broadening of the horizons, all that. Boys my age do it all the time on the continent. The Germans even have a name for it."
_"Wanderjahr,"_ his father supplied. "Yes, I know."
He and Eliza looked at each other. After a moment, she shrugged. "As stubborn as he is, I suppose we may as well. He'd just waste a year at Trinity with sulking."
Robert nodded. "Very well, then."
Naturally, that immediately stirred up the other four children. But there, Robert held the line. Leaving aside the fact that they were too young to be interrupting their educations and forgoing the salutary discipline of boarding schools, there was the factor of disease to be considered. At nineteen, David was old enough that he'd be taking no more risk than an adult.
"No," he said. Then, swiveling his gaze as he'd once had cannons swiveled: "No. No. No."
Three days later, he set off for London. The ship he and Eliza and David would be taking to America wouldn't leave for weeks yet, and he had some final business to attend to.
Clarkson approved. No surprise there. Thomas Clarkson was the brawler of the movement. The man who, though no more a Quaker than Ross, had decided at the age of twenty-five, in June of 1785, that slavery was an abomination. And had devoted the rest of his life to ending it—throwing into that cause his fine education at Cambridge, his unflagging energy, and his extraordinary skills as a political organizer.
"When will you return, Robert?"
Ross shrugged. "Hard to say. Not for a year, certainly. Probably two. Possibly three."
Clarkson's gaze was direct, as always. Intense blue eyes looked out from under a veritable shock of hair, much of which was still the bright red of his youth.
Looked down, rather. They were standing together in Clarkson's cluttered office, and Clarkson was a very tall man.
"And maybe never," he stated.
"Oh, that's nonsense, Thomas. I can't deny I'm looking forward to seeing America again. But you may rest certain that I have no intention of _living_ there."
"That's not what I meant, and you know it. You may not live there, but you could easily die there."
Ross made a little grimace, indicating skepticism. "You can't ever rule that out, of course. But the risk of disease is not as bad as people think. Our army suffered terribly, true enough; those were the worst conditions imaginable."
"That's not what I meant, Robert," Clarkson repeated. "And you know it."
Ross said nothing, for there was nothing to say. After a moment, Clarkson slouched into his chair. "Well, so be it. We'll miss you greatly, Robert. Having a military figure of your prominence allied with us has been a tremendous boon to our cause these past years."
"You think I shouldn't go, then?"
Clarkson shrugged. "I didn't say that. Nor do I even think it." He was silent for a much longer moment, his elbow perched on the armrest and his chin propped on a fist. Now, however, he bestowed that startlingly direct gaze on a stack of shelves covered with books and papers.
Finally, very quietly, he said: "Whatever we do here in England—even in our Caribbean possessions—is really a sideshow. In the end, the issue will be decided in America. For the first time, over there in Arkansas, men are finally beginning to test all the premises upon which all sides in this dispute rest their case. If that test succeeds..."
He smiled then, for the first time since Robert had given him the news. "A soldier's business, that, in the end. Which I am certainly not. Whether you have God's blessing, I couldn't begin to fathom. But go with my own, Robert Ross. Go with my own."
Wilberforce disapproved. No surprise there, either. Leaving aside the issue of slavery, and despite his notoriety as the leader of the antislavery movement in Parliament, William Wilberforce was a profoundly conservative man. He was opposed to extending the suffrage to men who were not propertied, and he was opposed to tactics that relied upon mobilizing the masses instead of persuading the elite. He disapproved in particular of women who chafed against their proper place in society.
He disapproved strongly of the theater, too.
"Why, Robert? What can you possibly do in America—not even the United States, but that preposterous little nation called Arkansas—that you can't do here? Think, man! Please put our cause above your own whimsy. You are the only significant officer in the movement. I can't tell you how invaluable an asset that's been to us in Parliament."
So it went, for two hours.
Ross divided the rest of his time in London between lesser luminaries in the movement for which he had formed a personal attachment, and major luminaries in society as a whole for whom his attachments had grown very loose indeed.
Still. Protocol, as it were.
Wellington was gracious. No surprise there. He disapproved quite strongly of Robert's attachment to the antislavery movement. But, in the duke's case, that was simply due to his general conservatism. Wellington was no admirer of slavery.
Beyond that, the large and powerful Wellesley clan and its political allies had a debt to Robert Ross. The defeat of Wellington's brother-in-law Pakenham at the Mississippi might have produced a corrosive political issue in the years after the war, with Wellington's many enemies using the defeat as a stick against Wellington's own military accomplishments. True, Pakenham's valiant death in the final struggle against Napoleon had sapped most of that possibility. But the long and detailed analysis that Ross had published after the war concerning the campaign in the Gulf—which had been full of praise and admiration for Pakenham—had settled the question entirely.
Finally, there was politics, which was now Wellington's field of combat.
"I'm afraid many of my fellow Tories—Whigs, too, never mind what they claim—are too influenced by their immediate commercial ties to the slave trade and the Caribbean plantations. There is every reason in the world for England to welcome the creation of another nation in North America, south of Canada, regardless of the color or creed of its inhabitants. Especially located where the Confederacy is, in the heart of the continent. If it survives, it would serve as a useful check on American ambitions. A natural ally for England."
The duke gave Robert a skeptical glance. "Mind you, I question whether those niggers and wild Indians are up to the task."
Robert smiled thinly. "As to the first, we could visit Thornton's grave and ask his ghost. He's buried not far from here."
Wellington smiled back. Just as thinly, but it was a smile. Thornton had been one of England's best regimental commanders. He'd died on the Mississippi, and his regiment had been shattered by the black soldiers of the Iron Battalion.
"A point," the duke admitted. "Could the Americans field a force as good as Thornton's 85th? Not likely. Not even close. But numbers _do_ count, Robert; never forget that. There are now some ten million Americans, and how many people in the Confederacy? Two hundred thousand, all told? Such a disparity in numbers cannot be overcome simply by valor and skill at arms."
They were standing in Wellington's garden. Now that summer was here, and with Wellington's small army of gardeners, it was a glorious place. Robert took a few seconds to admire the scenery before answering.
"Very true. But _only_ true if those numbers can be mobilized. And as to that..."
He scrutinized a nearby hedge as if he were gauging the strength of an enemy line. "You might be surprised if you met some of the leaders of those 'wild Indians.' John Ross, in particular, is quite a diplomat. Was, even when I knew him as a very young man. And there are many Americans who would not support such a war, I think."
The duke was too familiar with foreign affairs to be put off so easily. "Not in New England, certainly. But what difference does that make? Andrew Jackson would, from everything I know of the man. And it was he and his forces—quite good ones, as you explained yourself at the time—who defeated us in the Gulf. If he went against Arkansas, could they withstand him?"
Robert didn't need to consider the question. He'd been considering it very carefully for some time now. "A full-fledged Andrew Jackson campaign, such as the one he mounted against us in the war? No, I don't think they could. They'd put up a ferocious battle, but they'd lose in the end. Jackson could organize and lead a very large army of his frontiersmen. Large, at least, by the standards of North America. And he's too capable, too determined—too relentless, most of all—for any nation with less than a quarter million inhabitants to withstand him. Not for more than a year or two, at any rate."
He looked away from the hedge to the duke. "But would he do so in the first place? He's not a savage, I assure you, despite some of the reports of him in the newspapers here. A very shrewd man, in fact, and with political ambitions of his own. So I think it would depend on how the war started, and over what issues, and based on whichever constellation of political alliances. Things which are far too complex to ascertain in advance, certainly from a distance."
"But you _are_ expecting a war?"
Robert shrugged. "Say rather that Patrick Driscol is expecting a war. For myself, I wouldn't venture an opinion yet. As I said, it's too soon and I'm too far away."
The duke sniffed. "He's a sergeant."
Robert made no reply. Anything he said would simply stir up Wellington's haughty nature, always close to the surface. In point of fact, Robert knew, Patrick's assessment was not even the crude strategic sense of a sergeant. It was something deeper and cruder still. The gut instinct of an Irish rebel that the Sassenach would someday be coming. Sassenach _always_ came, until and unless they were beaten bloody, simply because they were Sassenach.
And, as he'd once told Robert, the color of their coats didn't define "Sassenach" at all. That much of wisdom the refugee from the rebellion of 1798 had learned in the years that followed.
The rest of the afternoon went very pleasantly as they reminisced over old times. Two veteran soldiers, now grown rather distant, but once very close comrades-in-arms in the most desperate war in centuries.
The Duke of Clarence refused to see him at all. No surprise there, either, although it was quite rude. But the heir to the throne was one of slavery's most public advocates.
Truth be told, Robert had requested the audience only to satisfy a mild urge to poke a stick in the crown's underbelly. Mad King George III had been succeeded by a dissolute King George IV, who was now likely to be succeeded by a younger brother who was possibly more dissolute still.
Well, a day. He'd done his social duties. Now, there was a long voyage. And, at the end of it, a man waiting for him that Robert could not precisely call a friend, nor precisely call an enemy, nor precisely call much of anything.
Except, not dissolute. Never that.
**CHAPTER 9**
_New Antrim, Arkansas_
AUGUST 6, 1824
Sam loved coming to Arkansas. Whatever open hostility or veiled antagonism he ran into these days in the United States, he encountered none of it in New Antrim. His entrance into the town—city now, really—had turned into something of a triumphal procession, once news of his arrival started to spread.
Another window filled with women, waving at him. Just the latest of many in the second and third stories of the buildings that flanked New Antrim's main street.
He waved back, grinning. True, all of them were black, and only one of them was young and pretty. But those days were behind him, anyway, and the broad smiles were enough to cheer the gloomiest curmudgeon in the world.
Chester was riding next to him, leading their remounts. "This too shall pass," he murmured. "This too shall pass."
Sam never stopped grinning, though. "I deeply regret having urged you to read the Romans. Besides, you're supposed to be whispering it into my ear, riding behind me on a chariot."
"We don't got a chariot, Mr. Sam," Chester pointed out reasonably. "Got four horses. And one of them's a nag."
"The one riding the horse next to me is the nag. Mary's just a little worn out and tired, is all."
"Shoulda left her with that tanner, back on the river."
The last jest finally caused Sam's grin to fade a little.
_That tanner..._
"What in God's name is Patrick up to?" he muttered.
Loudly enough for Chester to hear, unfortunately. His response caused Sam's grin to fade a little more.
"Stirring up trouble, what else?"
Patrick was there, along with Tiana, to greet Sam when he arrived at the hotel. Standing right on the porch of the Wolfe Tone, just like a proper laird surveying his domain.
And why not? His hotel was not only the biggest building in the city but the only one with a wraparound front porch. Almost the only one with any sort of porch at all, in fact. Sam loved the energy and vitality of New Antrim, but there was no getting around the fact that its architecture fell woefully short of the standards in any city in the United States.
Any big collection of barbarians in ancient Gaul, for that matter. He'd allow that it was probably superior to Hun encampments.
"We expected you weeks ago," were the first words out of Patrick's mouth, as soon as Sam dismounted.
"How I've missed that rasp of yours." Sam handed the reins to Chester. "Tiana, it's good to see _you._ "
Tiana just smiled. It was a more serene smile, these days, than the hoyden one Sam remembered from the girl she'd been. It made her beauty more striking than ever. As he always did, encountering Tiana again after a prolonged absence, he felt a twinge somewhere in his heart.
But that was just an old reflex, grown almost comfortable with the passage of time. And not much of one, in any event. Sam's marriage to Maria Hester had eliminated most thoughts of other women.
Not all, of course. But most.
There came the rush of little feet from within the darkness of the hotel interior. A moment later, two boys emerged. One was six and a half years old; his brother, a year younger.
_"Sam's here! Sam's here!"_ they announced to the world in unison before leaping off the porch and into his arms.
Laughing, Sam held them up. "You're getting big. Both of you."
_"Sam's here! Sam's here!"_
"Hush," Tiana scolded. "You'll wake your sister."
To prove her point, an infant's wail emerged from one of the windows on the second floor.
"Oh, blast," said Tiana. She gathered her skirts and vanished back into the hotel.
Sam set the boys down. "Luckily for them—and the world—they look like Tiana, not you." He gave Patrick a sly smile. "Might make a suspicious man wonder..."
Patrick's returning smile was a thin sort of thing. But that was just the nature of the man. He was neither offended nor made anxious by the remark. Nor, from anything Sam knew, had he any reason to be.
"Stop playing the clown, would you?"
"Oh, fine. I can remember—I think—when you had a sense of humor, Patrick. The reason I'm weeks late is because there was another Chickasaw killing. I heard about it right after leaving the Hermitage. I needed to settle things down before it all spun out of control."
"Who killed who?"
"Who killed how many, is more the question. And in what order. It started as a clan killing. Then—I never did figure out the wheres and wherebys—somehow three settlers got involved. Two of them wound up dead, along with two Chickasaws. One from each clan, to make things perfect. There were only three survivors. One white man and one each from both of the contending clans."
Patrick's blocky head made a little quiver. From another man, that might have been called a headshake. "So you had three completely different stories. How did our young Solomon settle it? And would you like some whiskey?"
"Yes. The whiskey first. The settlement was far too complicated to explain sober. It displeased everybody, of course, but since I confused them even more, it all worked out well enough."
As they entered the hotel's big lobby, Sam asked, "Why is Tiana wearing a fancy dress?"
Patrick was heading toward the saloon doors in the far wall. Over his shoulder, he said: "What do you think happens when you're this late? John Ross and Major Ridge got tired of waiting for you in Fort of 98. So they came down to New Antrim. In fact, they're already here in the hotel."
Sam made a face. "Whiskey for sure, then. What is it this time?"
By now they were in the saloon. Patrick went behind the bar, hauled up a bottle, and started filling two small glasses. One, he filled to the top. The other, barely half. He handed the full one to Sam.
"The usual, most of it. Problems with the Osage. Problems with Cherokees who start quarrels with the Osage, as if there weren't quarrels enough. Problems with Comanches, too, now."
Sam scowled, as he picked up the glass. "Comanches? I'd hoped they'd avoid that. The Comanches are..." With his free hand, he gestured vaguely to the west.
"Not far enough west," Patrick stated. He took a small sip from his glass. "Not far enough, with Creek and Cherokee clans spreading up the rivers the way they've been. Not with Comanches, for sure."
He set the glass down with a little clink. "But the big problem is the runaway slave business."
Sam drained half the glass in one swallow. "Just what we needed. What happened this time? The usual?"
"No, worse. One of the chiefs decided I wasn't serious about the rules against unauthorized slave-catching. Not applied to Cherokees. So he sent three men here, looking for one of his runaway slaves."
Sam stared at him, the glass frozen on its way back to the bar top. "Patrick. You _didn't._ "
Driscol's square, harsh face looked like it was carved from stone. "Of course I did." He jerked his blocky jaw slightly, indicating a nearby window. "Hung two of them in the street, where I always hang the ones from the U.S. Hung all three, actually, but the third one was already dead. Stupid bastard tried to fight James, if you can believe a Cherokee being that dumb."
Tiana's half brother James was something of a legend among the Cherokee, true enough. But Sam's only wonder was that the other two _hadn't_ tried to fight him, rather than be captured. Driscol was a legend, too.
Now more than ever.
"Are you _trying_ to tear everything apart?"
"Be damned to that," Driscol rasped. "Nowhere in the Confederacy's constitution does it say that Arkansas has fewer rights than any other chiefdom. The laws regarding slavery are set in the chiefdoms, each to its own. Says so in Article VI, Clause Three. I'm the elected chief, and those are my rules. Everybody knows it. There's no slavery in Arkansas, and the only legal slave-catching is done by the legal authorities of the chiefdom."
He said the whole thing with a straight face, too.
"You're a troll," Sam muttered. He drained the rest of the glass. "And exactly how many escaped slaves have your 'legal authorities' returned to the Cherokees over the past two years?"
"One. Which, I will point out, is one more than I've ever turned over to slave-catchers from the United States."
Sam snorted. "Why that one? Was he too feebleminded to make his way into those 'secret' settlements you maintain in the Ouachitas? And don't bother claiming you don't, Patrick. I know it, you know it, and for sure and certain every Cherokee knows it. Every Creek, too. For that matter, every slave-owner in the States."
"The truth? He wanted to go back. Once he got here and discovered freedom meant harder work than what he had with the Cherokees. Either that or a stint in the army."
Sam stared at him. Trying, for a moment, to think of any argument he hadn't already used with Patrick.
He couldn't think of a single one. On this subject, Patrick Driscol was the personal embodiment of the term _intransigent._
So he fell back on the old staple. "This can't go on forever, Patrick."
"True enough. Either they break or I break. Guess which is more likely to happen."
Sam's temper was rising, now. "Patrick, without the Cherokees you don't have your legal fig leaf! If they declare you an outlaw chiefdom—"
"Don't be stupid. Without _me,_ they don't have anything. Not when the war comes."
That stopped Sam short. Like smashing into a wall a man didn't realize was there.
"Sweet Jesus," he whispered. " _That's_ why the tanner's there."
"What are you talking about?"
Sam shoved the glass in front of him. "Pour me another. And stop playing the innocent. That tanner—John Brown's his name, as if you didn't know—that you and Henry set up down on the river. I wondered why you'd financed him, that far down from New Antrim. You _want_ a war, blast your dark Irish soul—and he's your trigger. Your bait, too."
Driscol finished pouring the glass—just as full as the first—and then stoppered the bottle. "I will say all your drinking hasn't scrambled your brains yet. Yes, that's why we financed him to set up there. Mind you, it's good country for a tanner. A lot of livestock down there on the plain."
"He's the man who did the killing on the Ohio, Patrick. By now, enough people figured out who it was, and the word's spreading. You _do_ know how much ruckus there's been over that incident?"
He waved his hand. "Never mind. Stupid question. Of course you know. Although you might not be aware—yet—that the anti-Relief party introduced a resolution in the Kentucky legislature condemning the act and demanding that the culprit be brought to justice. Clay's behind that, of course."
Chester came into the saloon, then. Seeing that he was carrying a saddlebag, Sam waved him over. "Oh, and let me show you this, too."
He rummaged in the bag for a moment and brought forth a folded-up newspaper. Then, half slammed it on the bar top and spread it open. "Lookee here." His finger pointed to an article on the front page. "Why, I do declare. That looks like a speech by our favorite U.S. senator, the Honorable John C. Calhoun. Invoking the fugitive slave laws and demanding that the administration catch the culprit. And hang him."
"Fat chance of that."
"No chance at all, with Monroe in office. But Calhoun'll take it to the Supreme Court if he can, just to prove a point."
Sam refolded the newspaper and stuffed it back into the saddlebag. "You cold-blooded bastard. You deliberately set Brown up on the river—right smack in the territory that those adventurers down in Louisiana are hollering and whooping about 'reclaiming for the rightful owners'—just to make sure they'd attack you."
"Actually, I tried to get him to enlist in the army. He and his two brothers. Offered him a commission, even. But—"
The thin smile came and went, in a flicker. "Brown's a most pious man. He told me he'd made a solemn vow as a youngster that he'd never join any army, on account of soldiers being such a blasphemous bunch. I couldn't argue the point, of course. They are a blasphemous bunch. So I made him the second offer—but not without explaining to him the risk."
"And?"
"And John Brown's a man after my own heart. He has a right to practice his trade, doesn't he? Yes, he does. And he'd be practicing it in territory legally ceded to the Confederacy in the Treaty, wouldn't he? Yes, he would. So what does he care if some slavers damned in the eyes of the Lord claim that since it's good bottomland they ought by rights to have it, and try to take it from him? At that point, he recited some verses from the Old Testament. By heart, mind you, he didn't need to refer to the Book. Bloodcurdling stuff. Every other verb was 'smote.' "
He lifted the bottle. "Another?"
Sam realized his glass was empty. "Yes—well, no. John and Ridge ought to be here any moment. Thanks to you, I'll need a clear head. Which is the last thing I wanted, after this many days on the road."
Patrick shrugged and set the bottle back down. "A clear head's probably useless, Sam. Face it, lad. Not every dispute can be negotiated. Sometimes heads have to be broken. Yes, I set up John Brown on the Mississippi like so much bait, dangled in front of those brainless ruffians down there in Alexandria. They'll be coming sooner or later, anyway, and I'd prefer to make it sooner. For no other reason than just to remind—"
He broke off, his eyes moving to the door. "Those two, among others."
Sam swiveled his head. John Ross and Major Ridge had entered the saloon. To his considerable surprise, though, they had a third Cherokee with them. Chief Bowles, of all people.
Ross had entered in time to hear Patrick's last sentence. "Remind us of what?" he asked, mildly.
"That the only thing that stands between you and another settler land grab are those negroes you keep wanting me to hand back over to you."
"Not me," said The Bowl immediately. He was smiling quite pleasantly. "You're talking about these Cherokees in white men's clothes." He jerked his thumb at his two companions. "No runaway slaves from my clan. That's because we don't have any slaves in the first place. Well, not hardly."
His English was fluent. That was perhaps not surprising, given that The Bowl's physical appearance showed plenty of evidence of his Scot father even if his manner of dress was completely Indian. But Sam had grown up on the frontier and understood its complexities, and he'd known The Bowl for years. Bloodlines and attitudes were just as likely to veer apart as come together, among the Cherokees or any of the southern tribes. Where a mixed-blood like John Ross might incline strongly toward adopting American ways and customs, another one like Chief Bowles—or Duwali, to use his Cherokee name—was just as strongly inclined to maintain Indian traditions.
Then, to make things more complicated still, slavery got poured into the mix. Traditionalists like Chief Bowles's people would capture black slaves, in the course of fighting with white settlers, and put them to work in captivity. But thereafter the old customs would prevail, just as they had for generations with captives from other Indian tribes. Within a few years, as a rule, a black slave had gained his or her freedom. Almost certainly, their children would. Often enough, by being adopted into the clan or marrying a Cherokee, or both. Quite unlike the status that black slaves had on plantations run by mixed-bloods who considered themselves "civilized" and had adopted white customs wholesale—which could be almost as bad as their status on white-owned plantations in Georgia or Alabama.
Major Ridge was scowling. John Ross just gave The Bowl a glance that was half amused and half exasperated.
Then he turned to Sam. "Brace yourself. It's going to be a long afternoon."
Indeed, it was. Sam didn't dare take another drink, as much as he desperately wanted to.
That night, Tiana threw a ball. She'd started doing that eight months earlier, after one of the English ladies who'd emigrated to Arkansas for reasons that defied comprehension had offered to teach everyone the latest dances. The affairs had become very popular with New Antrim's black population—at least that part of it that might be considered "upper crust."
But Sam knew that wasn't the reason she'd done it on this occasion. Like her husband, if in a more subtle manner, Tiana was also making a point.
Looking out over the crowd packed into the hotel's huge dining room, which doubled as a dance hall, Sam also realized that the point was only somewhat more subtle.
First, there were only five white people in the crowd.
Second, all five of them were wearing the uniforms of the Arkansas Chiefdom's army. Two officers and three enlisted men.
That hardly made them stand out, however, because—third—at least half of the men in the crowd were wearing uniforms.
"Out of Ireland, by way of Sparta," Sam grumbled.
" 'Fraid I don't catch that, Mr. Sam," said Chester.
"Never mind. Get me a whiskey. No, two. Please."
After Chester left for the packed bar over to the side, Sam spotted John Ross and Chief Bowles and went over to them.
John Ross understood it just as well, of course. The man was as smart as any on the continent.
Fortunately, he was also even tempered. When Sam came up he just smiled. "Patrick does love to rub salt into wounds, doesn't he?"
"There's no give in the man, that's for sure. Where's the Ridge?"
Ross shrugged. "He knew what this was about, too. And he thinks dancing's silly. White men's dancing, anyway. So he's getting some sleep in his room."
"It _is_ silly," chimed in The Bowl.
The worst of it was that they were all friends. Close ones, by now. Patrick also.
Eventually, John said: "And what can I say or do? Major Ridge is quietly furious, but he knows it just as well as I do. Arkansas is our shield."
"That's why you agreed to set it up," Sam pointed out.
"Yes, I know. The most obvious 'secret plan' in the history of the world, probably. And like many such, it's backfiring on us."
The Bowl uttered a Cherokee curse word. Several, actually.
"It's your own fault. All you rich Cherokees, insisting on keeping your slaves. Set them free, why don't you? That'll solve the problem right then and there."
There was no answer to that, of course. Other than the most obvious one of all: _because they're what make us rich to begin with._ The same reason Thomas Jefferson had beaten his breast over slavery—and never freed his slaves.
"It'll wreck you," The Bowl predicted.
Finally, John Ross's mild temper frayed a little. " 'Us,' don't you mean?"
The Bowl shook his head. "No, John. I mean _you._ "
And so another little mystery was solved. Sam had wondered why The Bowl had come all the way to New Antrim.
Now he knew, and, knowing, he silently cursed Patrick Driscol again. The man's unyielding determination to fight it all out was driving everything forward. Sensible or not—but there was a terrible logic to it. He'd splinter his allies and his enemies both, the way a rock on a beach divides the waves. Forcing everyone to meet him on his own field because he would not move at all.
His eyes met The Bowl's. The Cherokee chief nodded. "Way it is, Sam. No offense, but I'm not relying on any more white men." He tipped his head toward the dancers. "If there's a war, I'm with them. So are a lot of the other traditionalist chiefs. John here and the Ridge and all those other fancy folk can do whatever they want."
Chester returned, carrying two glasses. Sam took one of them and drained it immediately.
"Who do you want me to give the other glass to, Mr. Sam?"
"Don't give me any sass. You're a slave, remember?"
Almost grinning, Chester handed over the second glass. "Best not to beat me, though, Massa. Here in Arkansas, I can always run away."
Out of the corner of his eye, as he started on the second glass of whiskey, Sam could see John Ross's jaws tighten a little. But, for the first time in hours, Sam found himself amused.
"You! Up there in the Ouachitas!"
"It ain't likely," Chester agreed. "I gotten soft, these years with you. Used to the finer things in life."
So, Sam was able to end the evening relaxed as well as amused. There was always that, after all. Everything weaving in and out and around, like a ball of string too tangled to unravel any longer. Black men—Indians, too—learning how to fight and maneuver skillfully against white men, sure enough. But they couldn't do it without coming to resemble their foes. Even The Bowl and his people knew it, attached as they were to the traditional ways of the Cherokee.
It was a cheery thought. Sam didn't have any use for simplicity. The most treacherous ground in Creation, that was. Simple meant smooth, and smooth meant slick, and slick meant many a fall.
He even danced himself, at the end.
Not well, no, even though he was a very good dancer. Not after that much whiskey. But he didn't fall down, either.
The next morning, over breakfast, Patrick finally asked Sam the question.
"So. How was the general?"
Carefully, Sam laid down his spoon. Not because the spoon was fragile, or even expensive, but simply because he was doing everything rather carefully this morning. His head hurt.
"Gracious. Very gracious."
"No rancor there?"
Sam managed a careful smile. "No, not any at all. That I could detect, anyway. There is that one advantage to Andy's...ah, what to call it? Vigorous way of looking at things, maybe."
"Meaning Andy Jackson is more self-righteous than an eagle," said Tiana. "If women didn't exist, you'd have to invent us. Just to keep you from needing to invent a new language every ten years, the way you maim and mutilate the ones you got."
"Well. Yeah. The point being that if he wanted to get really mad at me for messing up his presidential prospects, he'd have to admit that speech he gave after Algiers was a bad mistake. Which he's no more likely to admit—not to himself, not to anybody—than the sun is to start rising in the west."
"But?" asked Patrick. "There's a 'but' somewhere in there, Sam. I can smell it."
Sam nodded. Carefully. "But, the last day—friendly-like, but also stiff and proper—he said that he felt that vow he'd made to me after the Horseshoe had been kept. So that shield is gone, Patrick."
Tiana took a deep breath. Patrick just shrugged. "It lasted ten years. That was enough. And he's right, anyway. He did keep it, as long as you could ask any honorable man to keep so vague and open-ended a promise."
Sam studied him for a moment. Then, a bit exasperated: "Patrick, if _he_ ever comes at you, he'll crush you."
Andy Jackson might be more self-righteous than an eagle, but Patrick Driscol made any mule look wishy-washy. So Sam was expecting a stubborn denial. The answer he got surprised him.
"Oh, yes, I imagine so," Patrick said evenly. "But he won't."
The exasperation swelled. "Marie Laveau's been giving you lessons in fortune-telling, then? Patrick, you have no idea what Andy Jackson will do, if he takes a mind to it! He's just as riled over the runaway slave question as any slave-owner in the United States. And he's one of the biggest. Just had another one run away from the Hermitage a month before I arrived. Reported to have been heading here, naturally."
"No, I can't predict _what_ he will do. But I can predict _how_ he would do it."
Sam cocked his head, skeptically, then immediately regretted it. All the pain seemed to pour over to somewhere around his left ear, like water pouring off a ship's deck in a storm.
"And...that...means?" he said, through gritted teeth.
"It means he's very smart, Sam. He was a smart general, and he's a smart politician. I've done everything I could to make it plain as day to Andy Jackson that if he leads an army here, I'll bleed it and gut it. Half gut it, anyway. Yes, he'd probably win. But is it worth the cost? To his reputation, if nothing else?"
For the first time that morning, Patrick smiled. "He wants to be the next president of the United States, Sam. Failing that, the next. And he doesn't want the office simply out of ambition, the way Clay does, either. He wants it because there are things Andy Jackson believes in with a passion. You follow me so far?"
"An idiot can follow you so far." That came out more testily than it should have, being just the pain talking. Sam was actually getting intrigued. He'd half forgotten how shrewd a sergeant Driscol had been. Winfield Scott had once told him that Driscol was the best noncommissioned officer he'd ever met in his life—and when Sam passed the remark over to Robert Ross, the British major general had agreed.
They were much alike, in so many ways, Patrick Driscol and Andy Jackson. Scots-Irish to the core. Both crude and rough on the outside, and neither with much in the way of a formal education. And both with such sharp and pronounced personal characteristics that an unobservant man could easily miss the keen brains that lay beneath those thick skulls.
"Keep going," he said.
"Think it through, Sam. Yes, I know the general's furious about the runaway slaves. But was it runaway slaves who stripped thousands of poor white men of their belongings, after the Panic? Or was it the Bank of the United States, and their favored lawyer at the time, Henry Clay? Is it runaway slaves, on their way to Arkansas, who demand the retention of debt imprisonment? Or is it the men who are backing Clay and Crawford? Did any runaway slave ever accuse the general and Mrs. Jackson of being adulterers and bigamists? Or was that Henry Clay's creatures?"
Sam grimaced. Even Jackson's friends would admit—if not to his face—that there was indeed some murkiness surrounding his marriage. But who could possibly care? Rachel Jackson's first husband, Lewis Robards, had been a notorious brute and a man who copulated openly with his slave women. No one, not even Jackson's enemies, blamed Rachel for abandoning him. She and Jackson hadn't married until they'd received word from Virginia that Robards had divorced her. The fact that the divorce hadn't been finalized didn't reach them until later. For any honest man with no ax to grind, the whole issue was a legal technicality, and terms like "adultery" and "bigamy" were preposterous.
No one had ever been able to prove that Clay was behind those never-ending accusations and insinuations that kept surfacing in the press. But no one much doubted it, either—and Jackson didn't doubt it at all. It was that, more than anything, that gave Jackson's hatred of Clay such a sharp and unyielding edge.
And it was so typical of Clay. The Speaker of the House was almost the polar opposite of men like Jackson and Driscol. On the surface, as slick and smooth—and smart, no doubt about it—as any man in America. But underneath, a man whose brains were constantly corroded by naked ambition. Naked, because unlike Jackson's ambitions—which were every bit as great—there were few principles to serve ambition as a guide. So, the man couldn't distinguish clearly between small victories and big ones—and would, quite often, lose the latter because he could not resist the former.
Which, now that Sam thought about it, was also the opposite of Jackson. Even as pugnacious as he was, Andy would—Sam had seen him do it, time after time—forgo the pleasure of winning a small fight in order to win a bigger one.
"Ah," he said, finally understanding. "But...that's a Sam Hill gamble, Patrick."
Driscol had finished his own porridge and pushed it aside. Then, splayed out his square hand on the table. The movements weren't awkward at all, but they were just that little bit complicated. For the first time since he'd arrived in New Antrim, Sam was reminded that Patrick had lost his left arm at the Chippewa. One tended to forget, around such a man.
"Possibly. But I don't think Sam Hill would take it. Because he'd figure I'd likely win. The thing is, Sam, I'm betting that Andy Jackson is smart enough to know that when the time comes, he can negotiate a settlement with me. Not one he'd be very happy with, no, but one he could live with."
"Could he?"
Patrick shrugged. "Oh, yes. I'm not stupid. Sheltering runaways and maroons isn't any more critical to me than catching them is to Jackson. It's a dispute, that's all. A sharp one, granted. But we could work out a settlement." He smiled, the way a troll might. "Not that either one of us would call it a 'great compromise.' "
Sam chuckled. "But what if Clay wins the election? I have to tell you that he's most likely going to, Patrick. Even Andy will admit that nowadays, at least in private to his friends."
"All the better, so far as I'm concerned. Jackson would then be able to let someone else play the general, and fumble it—and then he can ride in and save the day. Four years later. What's four years, Sam? In the great scheme of things."
The boys came charging into the dining room. They got right to the verbs, as six-year-olds will. The nouns being self-evident to the world, since they were self-evident to them.
"You promised, Pa! You promised!"
Driscol pushed away from the table and rose. "So I did."
"Promised what?" Sam asked.
"That he'd take them up to the new fort today," Tiana answered. "They love forts. Do you know any little boys who don't?"
Sam was tempted to answer: _Don't know too many full-grown men who don't love 'em either. Especially if they're Scots-Irish._
But he didn't, because as soon as the quip came to his mind he realized that Andy Jackson was one of them. The general built forts the way boys built tree houses—and, now that Sam thought about it, he realized that Andy always did prefer to fight on the defensive whenever he could.
"I'll be damned," he said.
He normally avoided blasphemy, just for the sake of appearances if nothing else. But Patrick was a freethinker, and the Lord Himself only knew what Tiana thought about such matters.
So he did it again. "I will be damned."
Patrick's rejoinder was inevitable, of course. "Most likely." But Sam paid that little attention. His headache was coming back with a vengeance.
"I need a drink," he announced.
Tiana didn't argue the point, since she never did. She just rose and went over to the cabinet.
"Hair of the dog, is it?" Patrick said. "Someday that dog'll swallow you whole, Sam."
But that was an old refrain, too, so Sam ignored it. The whiskey bottle was coming to the table, and he needed to think. Whiskey helped him think when he had a headache as bad as this one.
There might be an angle here...As reluctant as he was to use it, Sam's father-in-law had his own connections to the press. Very good ones, as you'd expect. Perhaps more importantly, so did John Quincy Adams. Who also hated Clay, because Clay's creatures had slandered him over the Treaty of Ghent. And though the issue was not as personal as the issue over which Clay and his people hounded Jackson, Adams took his reputation as a diplomat seriously.
For reasons he could never quite fathom, Sam was quite fond of Adams, and the two of them got along well. He hadn't seen him now in...two years? Time for a visit, perhaps.
The first slug of whiskey cleared his brain marvelously. And the sight of Patrick and Tiana embracing before he departed with his children reminded Sam that he hadn't seen Maria Hester and his son in months, either.
"I'll be going soon," he announced as Patrick headed for the door.
"Figured you would. Don't forget to toss a few bones to John Ross and Ridge before you leave."
The second slug was on its way down, now. Half of it, at least. Sam felt splendid. "You didn't leave any," he grumbled.
"Sure I did. They're just hidden. Don't ask me where, because I have no idea. But you'll find them."
And he did, before he left three days later. Little bones, and not many of them. But enough to mollify the Indian leaders for the time being, especially when they had their own problems.
Chief Bowles wasn't there for any of the discussions. He was spending all his time with Patrick and General Charles Ball and the colonels of the three regiments—and the boys, of course—inspecting the lines and discussing how The Bowl's Cherokee irregulars could best be used in the coming war.
None of them seemed to have any doubt at all that there _would_ be a war. Especially The Bowl, who shared Patrick's opinion on the subject of Sassenach and the inevitability of their coming.
**CHAPTER 10**
_Lexington, Kentucky_
AUGUST 24, 1824
"I think you've got the finest racehorses in the state, Henry," said Peter Porter. "And probably the best racetrack." Leaning on the rail fence, the former New York congressman took a few moments longer to admire the sight. It was a sunny afternoon. A bit too hot for comfort, but not intolerably so.
Henry Clay laughed. "It may not be the best, but I can assure you it's the most profitable. For me, at any rate." A bit smugly: "Indeed, my horses are superior. They earn me quite the tidy sum in prize money. But come: Crittenden's people should be arriving shortly. In fact, they may already be here by now."
Porter was hard-of-hearing, so Clay spoke more loudly than he normally would. That was one of the many gracious courtesies the Speaker of the House practiced routinely with his friends and associates, and one that was much appreciated.
The two men turned back toward the main house at Ashland. Clay had named his estate just south of Lexington for the ash trees that were native to the region. That seemed a bit odd to Porter, given that Clay was actually partial to spruces. He'd been replacing the ash trees with spruces since the day he bought the estate seventeen years earlier. Just one of the man's many personal quirks. Clay spilled over with them, but since he usually turned them to advantage or amusement, none of his friends minded.
The walk back was leisurely, taken in a companionable silence, as they followed the winding carriageway that led to the house through a grove of cypress, locust, and cedar trees. The distance to be traveled was over two hundred yards, so it took a bit of time.
There was a short interruption once they reached the path that led to a cluster of buildings not far from the house itself. That consisted of a smokehouse, a dairy, a carriage house, and the slave quarters.
"A moment, please," Clay said. "Something I must attend to." He strode down the path toward the smokehouse, leaving Porter behind.
Porter used the quarter-of-an-hour wait to admire Clay's country home, which he could see quite well from where he stood. Brick, very well built—and very large. Two and a half stories in the center, with one-story wings to either side. Clay had told him the overall dimensions were one hundred and twenty six feet by fifty-seven. One of the grandest homes in the area, it was.
When Clay returned, Porter cocked an inquiring eyebrow. A polite gesture, nothing intrusive.
"A minor matter," Clay explained, taking his friend by the elbow and leading him toward the house. "Lucretia told me that she had suspicions concerning one of the overseers, from something she overheard one of the house girls saying to another. So I just had words with the man. If I discover he's taking advantage of the slaves, I shall discharge him immediately, and I told him so."
Porter pursed his lips but said nothing. As a New Yorker born and raised in New England, the institution of slavery seemed peculiar to him. Exotic, really, more like something you'd expect to find in Araby than America. With the same aura of sexual excess, to boot. That slave-owners and their overseers had what amounted to their own harems, if they chose to exercise their power, was something understood by practically everyone, North as well as South. Though few people beyond irresponsible abolitionists chose to speak of it publicly.
Even this little incident reeked, if you insisted on sniffing at it for too long. "Discharge" a man—as a penalty for an act which, if carried out against a white woman, would result in a prison sentence. Possibly even a hanging, depending on the circumstances.
Still, it was none of Porter's business, so he said nothing. Whenever the Speaker of the House was in Washington, since his wife rarely accompanied him to the capital, Clay was an insatiable womanizer. The same, when he went on one of his many political tours. That was always a potential political liability, of course, and one that Clay's friends and associates had tried to caution him about—to little avail, unfortunately. But at least it seemed he kept his sexual exploits under control on his own estate.
The one thing they did _not_ need would be for rumors of black bastards to join the other innuendos concerning Clay's personal character. Jackson might or might not get involved in that—always hard to know, with that man—but Crawford certainly would. Henry Clay had been using bare-knuckle tactics in his campaign for the presidency, just as he had in all his previous campaigns, and at least some of his opponents would gladly respond in kind.
Well, not "bare-knuckle." Never that. Clay's fists were always gloved, and in very fine gloves at that. But he never hesitated to use them, either.
As for the larger issue, slavery was simply a given. Half the nation depended on the institution economically. So there was no possibility of uprooting it now, whether or not it should ever have been created in the first place. Both Clay and Thomas Jefferson would state, quite bluntly, that if they could roll back time, they'd prefer it if slavery had never come into existence. But since they weren't the Almighty, they couldn't—and their own livelihoods depended on the institution.
There it sat, thus, and would continue to sit. For a practical politician and businessman like Porter, simply another factor to be considered in the ongoing political struggles in the Republic. An immovable one, however, like the seasons. Why waste time over it when nothing could be done anyway—and there were so many other more pressing issues that could be settled? One might as well demand legislation abolishing winter.
"Any further news on the killing?" he asked.
Clay smiled. "Indeed there is. The culprit has been identified, almost for sure. A certain tanner named John Brown, it seems, and several of his brothers."
"An Ohioan?"
"Yes. Was, rather. Apparently he belongs to an extensive family of radical malcontents. A veritable tribe of abolitionists, descended from New England Puritan stock."
Porter made a face. "Yes, I know the type. Better than I wished I did, since we have our share in New York. But, you say, he 'was' from Ohio?"
"A town called Hudson. His father's still there, according to the reports I've received. But John Brown himself, along with his wife and children and brothers, have recently moved to..."
The smile expanded, and became a grin. Since Henry Clay had a very wide mouth to begin with, the expression looked quite shark-like. "To Arkansas, we've learned. He's setting up a new tannery right along on the Mississippi, just north of the confluence with the Arkansas. A stretch of land, you may recall—good bottomland, quite well suited for cotton—that I argued at the time should not be included in the land ceded to the Cherokees in the Treaty of Oothcaloga."
"Yes, I remember. But Houston carried that, as well."
They were almost to the house. Porter stopped and placed a restraining hand on Clay's elbow.
"Henry, please be careful here. Don't forget that I was at the Chippewa, in command of the Third Brigade. Driscol was a sergeant then, in the Twenty-Second Regiment. One of the units that Scott sent directly up against the redcoats."
"Yes, yes," Clay said impatiently. "I recall the accounts of his exploits, after the Capitol affair. 'Lost an arm' for the nation, yack yack, 'immediately raced to the capital upon hearing news of the invasion, despite his grave injury,' yack yack; the newspapers were full of it."
"I saw it unfold, Henry. With my own eyes. They never so much as flinched. Not even in the face of volleys from British regulars, on an open battlefield. Whereas..." Honesty was needed here. "I couldn't keep my own men from panicking, even with woods for a cover."
"Those were white soldiers."
"They weren't white at the Mississippi," Porter replied forcibly. "Black as night, all of them—except Driscol himself. And they did the same again. Henry, you _must_ take this man seriously." He waved a hand at the house. "No pack of border adventurers is going to succeed, where professional soldiers like Riall and Pakenham failed."
Clay had been frowning, as he usually did when someone raised objections to his plans. But when he heard the last, the frown vanished. In fact, he laughed aloud.
"Oh, for the love of—"
He shook his head. "This is a misunderstanding between us. Did you think I believe Crittenden's expedition would _succeed?_ "
Clay glanced at the house. Gauging the distance, Porter thought, to make sure that he wouldn't be heard by anyone there. "Speaking of whom, they may have arrived already. Let me do all the talking. But, quickly: I have no intention—never did—of being attached to this except from a distance. Nor do I expect—never did—that Crittenden would win his prize. If he does, splendid. As one of the quiet backers, I shall get credit for it soon enough. Once a feat like that is accomplished, as you well know, all secrets get tossed to the wind."
Porter stared at him. "And if he fails? Which he almost certainly will."
Clay shrugged, in that incredibly graceful way he did all gestures. "Even better. Don't you see? It'll be a _cause,_ Peter. 'Vengeance for...whatever the name of whatever wretched little town or bayou Crittenden gets hammered at.' A drumbeat in the newspapers, which will provide a rhythm for my march into the president's house."
Porter took a long, slow, deep breath. "You're gambling again, Henry. Can't you _ever_ just take straight odds?"
It was the wrong thing to say, and Porter knew it immediately. Clay prided himself on his skill at cards. As well he might, true enough—but he kept thinking politics was a card game. And he could be more reckless in politics than he was at cards, because the odds were harder to gauge.
Clay grew a little stiff. "I'll want you to continue your efforts in New York, be assured. If you can make an arrangement with Van Buren, that would be splendid. I'll need either New York or Pennsylvania, and preferably both. But please do not presume to instruct me on how to win over the West. I know these people, Peter. I've lived here all my life. They're besotted with martial heroics. How else to explain Jackson's popularity when the man has no conceivable qualifications for high office beyond those of a military chieftain?"
The door opened, and Lucretia Clay emerged. "Your visitors are here, Henry. Been waiting for most of an hour."
"Yes, darling. We'll be right there." Clay took Porter by the arm this time. "Come, Peter. Just let me handle it."
SEPTEMBER 3, 1824
"It failed only this," John Quincy Adams said softly, staring out the window of his office in the State Department. He was talking to himself, since his aide had left the room as soon as he delivered the latest report from England.
Too quickly, as it turned out, although the man was simply being courteous. Adams turned from the window and went to the door. Opening it and leaning out, he called for the same aide.
"Yes, Mr. Secretary?"
"I need to see the president. See to making an appointment, if you would."
The man was back within ten minutes. "He says he can see you now, sir. Since it's that pressing."
Adams started to snap a response to the effect that he'd never said anything to the aide about the matter being "pressing." In fact, it wasn't, precisely.
But he held the reproof in check. Simply the fact that he'd felt something was important enough to ask for a special meeting with the chief executive, he realized, was enough for Monroe to label it as urgent. There was something of a compliment there, actually.
James Monroe was an imperturbable man, as a rule, so there was no expression on his face when he finished reading the relevant portion of the ambassador's report. That didn't take long, since Ambassador Rush's prose tended to run to the terse side.
The president laid the report on his desk. "I think we should ask Winfield to join us, if you don't mind."
"Of course, Mr. President." Adams rose from his chair. "I'll summon a messenger."
Since the War Department was no farther away than the State Department, General Scott arrived within ten minutes. It took him considerably less time than that to read the report.
Having done so, he sighed. "Ross, no less. And if Rush's report is accurate, he's said to have packed his uniform in the trunk." He glanced back down at the report. "His ship should be arriving in New Orleans within a fortnight. Not time enough for us to get anyone down there with a warning."
"A warning of _what,_ Winfield?" demanded Adams. "That a private citizen of Great Britain—a nation with whom we are no longer at war, I remind you; indeed, are enjoying relatively good terms with these days—has decided to pay a personal visit to our shores. Even if we could get a warning down there in time, what good would it do? We could hardly have the man arrested, after all."
The general's lips quirked as he glanced around the president's office. "We _are_ talking about the same 'private citizen' whose troops once burned this very residence, as I recall."
Monroe's smile was broader but just as crooked. "Indeed. But that was then—ancient history, almost—and this is now. The real question is..."
Scott nodded. "Yes, Mr. President, I understand. The real question is whether Robert Ross is in fact simply a private citizen, or whether he's acting on behalf of the British government. Informally, if not formally."
"We _have_ been expecting such a move on their part," Monroe pointed out. "Actually, I'm surprised they haven't done it sooner. It's perfectly logical for Britain to consider an alliance with the Confederacy."
"They probably would have," Adams said, "except Canning is waiting to see what our response will be to his proposal to form a common bloc against the continental powers over the issues in South America. Keeping France from getting a toehold in the New World again is far more important to Britain than whatever gains they could make against us by forming an alliance with the Arkansas Confederacy. Besides..."
He pondered for a moment while the president and the general waited patiently. Like most educated men in America, they considered John Quincy Adams the nation's foremost analyst of international affairs.
"Here's what I think, Mr. President," he said at length. "Nothing I haven't told you before, of course. I believe the long era of sharp antagonism between the United States and Great Britain has come to an end. Henceforth—oh, yes, there'll be squabbles here and there—I don't foresee any major tensions. In fact, I expect we'll see the emergence of what amounts to a tacit alliance _with_ Britain."
Monroe glanced at Scott. Technically, the general had no business sitting in on a discussion of the nation's foreign affairs. But, under the circumstances, Monroe apparently felt the same as Adams. Why not? Scott was astute himself, and he could be trusted to keep his mouth shut.
"Continue, John. Though I can't resist the temptation here to point out that your analysis seems a bit odd, given that you've been the member of the Cabinet who's argued most vehemently against accepting Britain's latest proposal."
"That's matching teapots against camels, Mr. President. My objection isn't to the _substance_ of Canning's proposal; it's simply to its form. The foreign secretary wants Britain and the United States to issue a joint statement, and I don't. I'd far rather—as you know—see us take an independent stance against continental ambitions in Latin America than come in as—"
" 'A cockboat in the wake of the British man-of-war,' " the president concluded for him. "Yes, I know, John. And I'll agree it's a very nice turn of phrase. But, as I said, please continue."
Adams shrugged. "If I'm right—and I am—then I think the conclusion follows directly, with regard to the matter at hand. Whatever purpose Robert Ross has in coming to America, he is not acting—not in any way—on behalf of the British government."
Monroe gazed at him levelly. "Would you be willing to state as much in a private letter to Senator Jackson? I'd just as soon avoid an explosion there. Given his attitudes toward Britain—added to the tensions that already exist with Arkansas—any hint that a British officer is meddling in American affairs will be like waving a red flag in front of a bull. But he's likely to listen to you, John."
Adams caught the grimace that came briefly to Scott's face. The general, quite obviously, felt that catering to Jackson was questionable, given that the man had no real business being involved in the first place. He was a senator, now, no longer active in the military and not a part of the administration.
But however good a general he might be, Scott's grasp of politics left much to be desired. As witness the very public brawl he'd gotten into with Jackson himself, a few years back, that could have easily been avoided just by the use of some reasonable amount of tact. So Adams ignored the expression.
"Yes, certainly." He smiled crookedly himself. "Mind, it'll be a bit difficult to phrase it properly. A good part of the reason I'm certain Ross isn't acting for Canning is because he's been so closely tied to the British antislavery movement these past years. Hardly the man a Tory government would choose as a go-between—and hardly something I want to dwell on in a letter to one of Tennessee's major slave-owners."
Monroe actually laughed. "Yes, I'd say! One of Britain's most notorious abolitionists come to pay a visit to the man who is quite possibly the most notorious abolitionist in the whole world. Certainly in North America. There's as much in that to infuriate Old Hickory as in the thought of an actual British agent."
To Adams's surprise, Scott shook his head. "I wouldn't be so sure, Mr. President. They're all soldiers, don't forget, and soldiers tend to treasure two things above all: gallantry, and their own reputations."
Monroe cocked an eyebrow at him. "The gallantry I understand. I was once a soldier myself. But I'm not following you on the rest. The part about reputations, I mean."
"Have you—either one of you—read Ross's account of the Gulf campaign?"
Monroe and Adams looked at each other. Then, simultaneously, shook their heads.
"Well, I have—and you can be sure and certain that Andrew Jackson has read it also. It was published quite extensively. Very popular in Britain at the time—and any number of copies were purchased here in America."
Adams frowned. "I'm still not following you, Winfield. I've never read the thing, but I understood it was a defense of Pakenham's conduct in the—ah. I see. Yes, of course."
Monroe was frowning now, looking back and forth between the other two men in his office. "Will _someone_ please explain...Ah. Yes, of course. No way to defend Pakenham, is there, except to speak well of Jackson?"
"Exceedingly well, Mr. President," Scott said. "I wouldn't go so far as to state that Ross used a ladle to pour praise over Jackson. But he certainly used a very large spoon. That's something Jackson will appreciate, just as he appreciates the martial accomplishments of Patrick Driscol. Meaning that you might have three men coming to a clash of arms, but all of them respect—even admire—each other. That makes quite a difference, for men who think like soldiers. Which they all do."
Monroe sat up a little straighter in his chair. "Well, that's something of a relief. The last thing we need is another eruption from Andy Jackson. So let's get down to it then. Why _is_ Robert Ross coming to America?" He glanced down at the ambassador's report. "Quite clearly, in response to an invitation from Driscol."
By now, Adams thought he saw it clear. "The simplest of all reasons. Driscol expects a war—half expects it, at least—and he wants expert military counsel. More counsel, I should say. I'm remembering now that Winfield suggested in this very room, just months ago, that the fortifications in Arkansas were too sophisticated for Driscol to have developed all on his own."
Monroe looked at Scott. The general nodded. "I'd have to agree, Mr. President."
The president was now completely erect in his chair, his fingers laced together in front of him on the desk. "Very well, then. What does either of you suggest we might do?"
"Nothing, Mr. President," came Adams's immediate response. "Other than the letter I'll write Jackson, I propose we do nothing at all, since I can't see anything we could do that wouldn't make everything worse. We've already—several years ago—put a stop to any government funding for those adventurers in Louisiana. So we have no financial leverage to bring to bear. What's left is direct military action. But against who? We have no legitimate quarrel with the Confederacy. Not one, at any rate, that would be accepted by any other nation as a casus belli. That means all we could do would be to use troops or the threat of troops in Louisiana, to prevent a freebooting expedition by the likes of Crittenden. Which would stir up a hornet's nest. Besides, you can't stop such expeditions, anyway, if they have any serious local backing. We've never been able to in the past; why should we succeed now?"
Scott hesitated for a few seconds. "I'd have to agree, Mr. President, although I feel the need to point out that if an attempt is made against Arkansas by private adventurers, it's likely to result in a catastrophe for them."
"They wouldn't be entering the fortified mountainous areas," the president pointed out. "What they'd want is simply the river plain and its broad bottomlands."
The general spread his hands. "Yes, sir, I know. But if they think Driscol won't come down to get them, they'd be badly mistaken. He will—and he'll smash them."
"You're sure of that?"
"Oh, yes. Both of the first, and of the last. And Driscol won't do it piecemeal, the way Perez drove Long's expedition out of Texas. He'll maneuver them into a battle and hammer them flat."
Monroe nodded and looked at the window. "Which political elements here would use for a rallying cry."
"Clay, to give them a name," stated Adams.
"Yes, most likely." After a moment, Monroe said: "General, if you'd be so—"
"Of course, sir," said Scott, rising from his chair and heading for the door. "If you need me any further, I'll be in the War Department."
After he was gone, Monroe's eyes came away from the window and looked at Adams. "I'll leave the decision to you, John. I've not more than a few months left in office. Whatever does or doesn't happen in Arkansas between now and then won't be something whose consequences I'll have to deal with. You, on the other hand, might. Are you so sure of this?"
"Yes, Mr. President, I'm quite sure." It was Adams's turn to hesitate. "Should it come to pass that the Republic calls on my services—I've had to consider that possibility, of late—then it's necessary for me to think in the long run. The situation with Arkansas will continue to fester, no matter what. Sooner or later, that boil will have to be lanced—but it's a mistake to lance a boil too soon, or it simply returns."
"Clay won't 'lance' it if he's elected president," Monroe said bluntly. "He'll scrape it."
"Well. He'll try. But I am not Henry Clay." Stiffly: "I refuse to adopt another man's methods—methods I consider base, sir, to speak bluntly—simply in order to put myself in his place. Where's any purpose in that?"
Monroe unlaced his hands and leaned back in the chair. "I understand. Nothing it is, then. We'll just let it keep unfolding."
**CHAPTER 11**
_Alexandria, Louisiana_
SEPTEMBER 13, 1824
_"Robbed, I say again!"_ Robert Crittenden's voice filled the tavern, even managing to ride over the hubbub of far too many men packed into far too small a space—and with far too much whiskey packed inside them, to boot.
_"Robbed, I say again!"_
Raymond Thompson looked at his companion across the small table in a corner of the tavern and rolled his eyes. "How many times do you think he'll say it again?"
Scott Powers swirled the whiskey in his glass. "Ten, at least." Then, shrugging: "Better him than you or me, Ray. Somebody's got to keep the boys stirred up."
_"Cheated of our rightful new state by the scoundrel Adams—that bastard Monroe, too!—and their tools in Congress! Has ever mankind seen a more infamous act of treachery than the selling of Texas and Arkansas—and for the sake of nothing more sublime than appeasing the corrupt Dons and their—"_
Powers chuckled. "Sore, isn't he? Mostly he's just riled because he was sure he'd be appointed the governor of Arkansas. If the state had ever come into existence."
Thompson didn't reply. The statement was true enough, of course, but he didn't share Powers's cynical equanimity on the subject. For Powers, any expedition to seize Arkansas was just a stepping-stone to Texas. But Thompson had been counting on getting some of that fine bottomland in the Arkansas portion of the Delta. He could have sold it to speculators within a year and turned a profit on the deal. Instead, he was holed up in Alexandria, trying to evade his creditors.
_"—Cherokee savages and the Quapaws, more savage still—"_
But there was no point in dwelling on past misfortunes. If all went well, before long he'd be rich enough to thumb his nose at any creditors. "Any word from the Lallemand brothers?" he asked.
"Not lately. Far as I know, they should still be arriving any day."
Thompson frowned into his whiskey glass. "I still don't like the idea. You know as well as I do that they're just looking for an angle to set up French rule in Texas."
"So what?" Powers drained his own glass. "Let 'em dream. Napoleon died two years ago. Without him as the anchor—even assuming they could have freed him from St. Helena—they don't stand a chance. And in the meantime, they're willing to put two hundred and fifty trained soldiers in the field—and Charles Lallemand is a genuine general. Fought at Waterloo, even."
_"—niggers for the taking, too! Like catching fish in a pond! What say you, boys?"_
Thompson and Powers both winced. An instant later, the roar of the crowd hammered their ears.
When the noise ebbed enough to allow conversation again, Thompson returned stubbornly to the subject. "French soldiers, Scott. Who's to say—"
"Not more than a third, any longer, after that comedy of errors they called Champ d'Asile. Not even Long's people scrambled out of Texas faster." Powers looked away for a moment, a considering expression on his face. "Most of the men around the Lallemands, since they settled in Alabama, are local boys. They'll listen to Charles on the field, but that's it."
He stood up, holding his empty glass. "Another?"
Thompson shook his head. "No, I've got to be able to see straight tomorrow morning. At least—"
_"—problem will be catching those niggers, the way they'll run after a stout volley and the sight of level bayonets! I'm telling you, boys—"_
"God, I'm sick of that man's voice," Thompson grumbled. "But, as I was saying, at least he came up with the muskets he said he would. Two thousand stand."
Powers's eyes widened. "Where did—"
"Don't ask, Scott. But you can probably figure it out."
After a moment, Powers smiled. "Benefactors in high places, indeed. But I shall be the very model of discretion."
After he left, Thompson drained his own glass.
_"—envy of every Georgian and Virginian! And then! On to Texas!"_
Another roar from the crowd caused Thompson to hunch his shoulders. "Enough, already," he muttered to himself.
He eyed the far-distant door, gloomily certain it would take him five minutes to work his way through the mob. More like ten, if he wanted to avoid a duel. Half the men in the tavern would fight over any offense, and they could find an offense most anywhere.
_Blue Spring Farm, Kentucky_
SEPTEMBER 15, 1824
"I'd really feel a lot better about this if I were going along, Julia," said Richard Johnson. The Kentucky senator's face looked more homely than ever. Downright woebegone, in fact.
"Oh, stop frettin', dear. You can't possibly leave now, with the political situation the way it is." Julia Chinn nodded toward the small cavalry escort waiting patiently near the wagon. "They'll handle any little problem that might come up."
Johnson looked at the cavalrymen, trying to find some comfort in the sight.
Trying...and even succeeding to a considerable degree. Not so much from the sight of a dozen cavalrymen as from their commanding officer. Houston had promised a real military escort if Julia decided to take the girls to Arkansas for their schooling, and he hadn't failed on that promise.
Recognizing inevitability—Julia had remained adamant on the subject for months, never budging at all—Johnson stepped over to the side of the officer's horse and looked up at it.
"Got to say I'm downright astonished to see you here, Zack. Don't usually see a lieutenant colonel in charge of something like this."
Zachary Taylor looked down at him, smiling. A bit to Johnson's relief, the lieutenant colonel's heavy, rough-featured face seemed quite good humored.
"Hell, Dick, why not? Sam asked me to find somebody reliable when I ran into him in Wheeling. I was on my way back to my post in Baton Rouge, in any event. I figured I was more reliable than anybody I could find on short notice, and it really isn't that far out of my way. Besides, I owe you a favor."
In point of fact, coming through western Virginia and northern Kentucky to provide an escort for Julia and the children, instead of just taking a barge down the Ohio, had been considerably out of Taylor's way. But the man was an experienced Indian fighter, so terrain was no great challenge for him.
True, he did owe Johnson a favor, but it hadn't been much, really. Just the sort of minor intervention that a senator often made on behalf of a well-respected and capable military officer. And...
They liked each other. Taylor and Johnson had never been what you could call good friends, but that was probably just because they'd never been able to spend much time together. On those occasions when they had, they'd gotten along quite well.
They had a lot in common. Both were veterans, even though Johnson's soldiering days were over, and both came from wealthy Kentucky families—of Virginian origin, in Taylor's case, now with large plantations over near Louisville. What was more important was that while they didn't see eye to eye on some political issues, Taylor seemed to share Johnson's attitudes on slavery. An economic necessity for the nation, to be sure, but nothing to brag about and much to cause uneasiness. Certainly nothing to proclaim, as Calhoun would, as a "positive good."
Taylor was one of the few members of the slave-owning gentry in Kentucky who'd never seemed to care about Johnson's relationship to Julia. At least, the one time he'd visited Blue Spring Farm, he hadn't blinked an eye at the sight of a black woman presiding over the dinner table. Indeed, he'd been quite gracious to her and the children throughout the visit.
"Take good care of them, Zack," Johnson said quietly, in a half-pleading tone.
"Now, don't you worry yourself none, Dick. I'll see them all the way to the Confederacy myself." To Johnson's relief, Taylor voiced aloud the senator's underlying concern. "If you're worrying some slave-catchers might try to claim they was runaways, I'll set 'em straight right quick."
For a moment, Taylor's thick hand shifted to the sword at his belt. "Right quick," he repeated, almost growling the words. "And God damn John Calhoun, anyway."
There was that, too. Richard Johnson was also famous as the senator who'd fight—at the drop of a hat—any attempt to foist anything that even vaguely resembled an established church on the great American republic. In his pantheon of political virtues, separation of church and state ranked right alongside states' rights and putting an end to debt imprisonment.
Public opinion and custom be damned. Richard Mentor Johnson trusted blasphemers a lot more than he did those pious folk who could always find an excuse in the Bible to do whatever they pleased.
"That's fine, then," he said.
Julia's voice rose up from behind him. "You settle down, Imogene! You too, Adaline! Or I'll smack you both! See if I don't!"
Taylor grinned. "Besides, I won't have to worry none about keeping wayward girls in line. Way more fearsome foes than some sorry slave-catchers."
_New Orleans, Louisiana_
SEPTEMBER 22, 1824
"That's where the final battle was fought," Robert Ross told his wife and son, pointing off to the steamboat's left. "You can still see the remnants of the Iron Battalion's fortifications. About all that's left, any longer, of what they called the Morgan Line at the time."
David Ross gave his father an uncertain glance and said, "It doesn't really look like much."
"Some of that's the climate, son. Between the heat and the rains—the river floods, too, quite often—no construction mostly made of dirt and logs is going to wear well. Even after less than a decade's passage, much of it will be gone. And the city's poorer residents would have scavenged the iron used by the battalion to bolster the works, here and there."
The retired British general studied the distant mound for a few seconds. "But that's just part of it. Held by determined and valiant men—which they most certainly were—even a modest line of defenses can be incredibly difficult to surmount. The casualties were fearful on both sides."
"Is this where Thornton was killed?"
"No." Ross pointed further upriver, in the direction of New Orleans. "Rennie died here. Thornton fell some hundreds of yards to the west, in the first clash with Houston's forces. Right on that road you can see pieces of, here and there."
There was silence for a time as the steamboat continued its steady progress up the immense river. David, who had been intrigued by the craft itself for most of the voyage upriver from Fort St. Philip, was now giving it no attention at all. His eyes were fixed on the terrain where, almost ten years earlier, a great contest of arms had been waged. As with most young men of his class—certainly one with his family history—martial affairs were of engrossing interest.
He already knew the terrain well, too, at least in the abstract. He'd read his father's account of the campaign as well as several other memoirs that had since been published in Britain.
"We should be approaching Chalmette field," he announced.
"Yes," Ross said, nodding. "We'll have to cross to the other side of the boat in order to see it."
Shortly afterward, the boat was passing by the location where Pakenham and Jackson's armies had faced each other—but never come to an actual battle.
"Field!" David exclaimed, half disappointed and half amused.
Ross shrugged. "It's plantation area, David. You can hardly expect people to leave such a potentially profitable area unexploited, simply for the benefit of an occasional tourist. At the time, I can assure you, that expanse of lush crops was nothing but stubble. Jackson saw to that, to give his men a clear line of fire."
David had no personal experience with battles, but as the son of a major general he had a good sense of some basic principles. He might have found it difficult to gauge the fortifications back on the Morgan Line. But, his eyes ranging back and forth across Chalmette field, he had no difficulty here.
"What a slaughter that would have been. Five hundred yards to cross."
His father nodded. "Five hundred yards—in the face of the world's best artillery. Along with thousands of riflemen and musketeers protected by an excellent rampart. And with the attacking force having no cover and no possibility of threatening the enemy's flanks. Jackson chose his position exceedingly well: his right wing anchored on the Mississippi, his left on the cypress swamps."
Ross lifted his arm and pointed into the distance. "You can see the start of the swamps quite easily. They continue on for miles. The Cherokees and Choctaws savaged our forces whenever we ventured into them."
David shook his head. There was a subtle but great satisfaction in the gesture. His father's analysis of the Gulf campaign might have been accepted by the British establishment, including its military, but there had been plenty of boys his own age who'd shared the brash certainties of youth. _One stout charge would have taken the day, I tell you!_ He'd now be able to return and sneer at them with the authority of someone who'd seen the lay of the land himself.
Ross was amused. He could remember those wonderful certainties himself from forty years ago.
Eliza laid a hand on his arm where it rested on the boat's railing. "We'd best see to the packing. We'll be arriving in the city soon."
A small delegation at the foot of the ramp was waiting for them. Ross had thought Driscol would have made some arrangements, but he was surprised at the form it took.
He hadn't expected Patrick himself to be there, of course, nor Tiana. But whatever he'd expected, it certainly hadn't been four scruffy-looking men in civilian attire. Two young white men—one of whom was younger than David—and two black men. One of whom was also younger than David, and the other of whom...
"I didn't expect the army of Arkansas to follow _precisely_ the methods used by us British," he said to that black man, after debarking onto the pier. "But I still think it's absurd for the only general in your army to be serving as the leader of a small detachment of escorts."
Charles Ball grinned at him. "Leader? Nonsense, General Ross!" He jerked his thumb at the older of the two white men standing next to him. "Here be the esteemed leader of this expedition. Captain Anthony McParland. You might be able to remember him still, just a bit. He was Patrick's lad in the war. Just a new sergeant, then, though."
Ross studied McParland. Now that he looked at him more closely, he could recognize him. But...
He was impressed, actually. The young man standing before him, now in his midtwenties, seemed vastly more self-assured than the very young and uncertain sergeant he could remember from nine and a half years earlier. That spoke well of the Arkansas Army, if such a quick study could be trusted. Of all the military skills praised in the literature, the one Robert had always found to be the least mentioned and most underrated was the ability of a given army to instill self-confidence in its men, especially its junior officers.
Ball's grin grew wider still. "I be the young massa's slave. So's Corporal Parker here. Sheffield Parker, that is. And he's"—the thumb now indicated the younger of the two white men—"Corporal McParland. Callender, to distinguish him from his cousin, our august commander."
Ross examined the two younger men. Boys, almost, since neither of them could be more than seventeen or eighteen years old. Callender McParland bore a definite resemblance to the captain. Average height, a bit on the slender side if quite wiry-looking, a blue-eyed open face under a thatch of sandy hair. The sort of lad one would barely notice in a crowd and never think twice about.
The black corporal, Sheffield Parker, was about the same, allowing for the racial differences. Dark-skinned, even for a negro, with very dark eyes and rather broad features. He'd never be noticed at all, except possibly for an unusual breadth of shoulders in a man who was a bit on the short side.
They both looked very fit—almost absurdly so, given their clothing. Which couldn't be depicted as "rags," certainly, but could most charitably be called nondescript. Parker was even barefoot.
Done with his quick examination, Ross cocked an eyebrow at Ball. "I assume there's an explanation for this, other than—I hope—the fact that Patrick has adopted _sans-culottes_ principles for a military table of organization."
"Don' know what 'sangullot' means, General," Ball replied cheerfully. "But, yes, there's a reason for it. I'm afraid a bit of trouble has developed lately. There's a small army of frontier adventurers been gathering themselves at Alexandria these past months. Mostly the usual Texas freebooters, but they gotten sidetracked with taking back eastern Arkansas, on account of a fellow named Robert Crittenden. He was likely to have been appointed the governor of the new state of Arkansas, except—"
That really was a murderous grin. Even this many years later, Robert could remember his impressions of Ball during the Gulf campaign. As a veteran U.S. Navy master gunner, he'd been Driscol's second in command of the Iron Battalion at New Orleans—just as he'd been in command of Houston and Driscol's artillery battery at the Capitol. The same artillery that had battered Robert's own forces when they tried to storm the seat of the U.S. government.
Color be damned. Men like Ball had been the core of every great army in history, going back at least as far as the Romans.
"—there ain't no such thing as 'Arkansas,' 'cept as the chiefdom of the Confederacy. Crittenden be righteous mad about it—and he's got plenty of backing from disgruntled local planters and land speculators who'd figured on making a killing."
"Disgruntled," no less. Ball's education seemed to have expanded a great deal. His vocabulary, at least.
"We didn't expect any real trouble from them this soon," Ball continued, "because—this be normally the case with freebooting schemes—they didn't have much in the way of arms. But just recent and sudden-like they turned up with plenty of muskets. Even got four three-pounders and a six-pounder."
Still grinning, Ball nodded toward the nearby square. Jackson Square, as it was now apparently called, not the _Place d'Armes_ that Ross remembered. "The three-pounders lookin' amazingly like the ones that used to be sittin' right there, till most recently. Don't know where they got the six-pounder. New shiny-lookin' gun, by all accounts."
Ross wasn't surprised. Even in Britain and the continent, the confusing and turbulent southwestern frontier of the United States was notorious. Between the collapse of the Spanish Empire, the shaky state of the new nation of Mexico, and what seemed like a never-ending cornucopia of Napoleonic adventurers—most of all, the territorial ambitions of Americans, official and civilian alike—every other month seemed to have a new expedition setting off to seize Texas. Sometimes for the United States, although that was usually disguised as a "revolution" to set up a new republic. Sometimes for one or another faction in Mexican politics. Sometimes as a result of Spain's continuing involvement in the region. Sometimes, even—although this had thankfully started to fade since Napoleon's death on St. Helena a couple of years earlier—as a place to magically restore a Napoleonic empire.
Often enough, any combination thereof.
Most of the adventurers— _flibustiers,_ the French called them, after the old Dutch term _vrijbuiter_ that had become the English "freebooter"—were poorly funded, not to mention of questionable competence. Some of them, of questionable sanity.
But, now and then, a group formed with real leadership and serious financial backing. The last such had been Dr. James Long's ill-fated Texas expedition in the summer of 1819, which might well have succeeded in carving out a big chunk of Mexican territory for an independent American-based republic. But the U.S. government, which had often tacitly supported earlier such attempts, refused to support this one. The U.S. secretary of state had finally gotten all of Florida from Spain in the Adams-Onis Treaty signed in February of that year, and he was in no mood to have the settlement upended by yet another adventure in Texas. Monroe had agreed with him, and Long's little republic had collapsed within months. Long himself had been taken prisoner by the Mexicans and then "accidentally" shot by a Mexican soldier while a captive in Mexico City.
The large and brawling community of southwestern adventurers and their backers had never forgiven Adams, of course. And now, it seemed, had found another source of support. Probably political as well as financial.
Eliza had been getting steadily more concerned. "Does this mean we'll have to suspend our journey to Arkansas? It sounds quite dangerous."
"Oh, it's not really dangerous, Mrs. Ross," Ball said. "Not for us. We should manage to pass through quite easily. But that's the reason for this odd getup we decided on."
A little wave of his hand indicated his companions. "We're just another party of Southerners, passing through the area. Nothing unusual. Got to be Southerners, seein' as how we got slaves, just like proper Southern gentlemen do."
The grin had vanished momentarily while the Arkansas general gave Ross's wife that assurance. Now it came back in full force. "Anthony been studyin' his letters right vigorously, these past years. Can't hardly believe it myself, the way he can talk now, when he's of a mind. 'Course, his accent's still Northern, but that won't stand out. Plenty of young Northerners come down here to make their fortune."
Having a much better sense of the social realities of the American South than his wife, Ross could immediately understand the logic of the scheme. Except...
"How about _our_ accent?" he asked. "It should be a bit difficult for us to remain silent, throughout the journey."
"No problem there, either. There be plenty of Englishmen—not to mention Irishmen—comin' here to set up a plantation. In fact, Crittenden's got a whole company of Irishmen in that little army he's put together. Most of 'em just the usual adventurers left over from the wars, of course. But some of them got real money to invest."
And that, too, wasn't surprising. The wars triggered by the French Revolution and the Napoleonic era had lasted for almost a quarter of a century and had involved enormous numbers of men. Every such war epoch in history had produced, in its aftermath, a plethora of veterans who turned their military skills to this or that adventure. Some of them criminal; still more, skirting the very edges of legality.
"I see." Ross couldn't help but smile. "So my wife and I—with our son along, presumably to stay behind and manage the business—are scouting the Delta to see a likely place for a plantation. Perhaps even in newly seized—or perhaps I should say, rightfully restored—Arkansas. With our local guides and partners—that'll be you, I imagine, Captain McParland, along with your cousin Callender here—and the slaves to provide their _bona fides._ "
"Yup."
Ross scrutinized Ball's face for a moment. "Which still doesn't explain the mystery of _you_ being included among the 'slaves,' Charles. Surely Arkansas didn't have to use its one and only general for the purpose."
For the first time, Ball's good cheer seemed to slip a bit. "Well...First off, I'm _not_ the only general. The Laird—ah, that's Chief Patrick, I mean—has the same rank, too, even though he ain't normally active. But he's perfectly capable of leading the army in the field, as you well know, should Crittenden and his pack take off before I get there. Don't need me for that. And the thing is..."
Finally, it all came into focus. "Yes, I see," said Ross. "You wanted the chance to study the terrain carefully yourself. Even be able to observe firsthand a large military force moving through it. Not because you care much about this one, but another that might follow."
"Yup." Now, Ball seemed to be scowling slightly. "Tarnation, General, you just cost me two dollars."
"How's that?"
"We had a bet. I didn't think you'd figure it out until we got halfway to Alexandria. Patrick said you'd do it before we even left the docks."
And how odd it was to see that a father's reputation with his oldest son should be cemented for all time by such a trivial thing. But, looking at David's face, Ross didn't doubt it. Books, essays, mementos, medals, swords of honor, dispatches—all abstractions, in the end. Whereas there was nothing at all abstract about seeing the conclusion of a wager between two men, one of whom stood right before the boy and looked like some sort of Moor legend, and the other of whom was an Irish troll who had almost killed his father once.
"Oh, what a splendid adventure!" David exclaimed.
_Washington, D.C._
SEPTEMBER 30, 1824
Maria Hester opened the door herself. She must have seen him coming.
"I've missed you so," she said, before he swept her into his arms. Then, laughing: "Sam! Stop it! Right in public!"
He growled something incoherent, lifted her into the house, and closed the door with his boot heel, never relinquishing the embrace or leaving off with the kisses. "Missed you, too."
"Father wants to see you," she mumbled. "As soon as you arrived, he told me."
"Can wait till tomorrow."
"Daddy! Daddy! Daddy!"
Sighing, Sam set his wife down. Maria Hester was grinning up at him. "The president of the nation might have to wait a day, but your son won't."
Lurking just beneath the surface of her bright eyes was the same anticipation that was practically flooding him. The boy was only four years old, after all. Four-year-olds need a lot of naps.
A moment later, Sam had little Andrew Jackson Houston hoisted up. His son was beaming at him, too.
"Would you care for some whiskey, sir?" asked a servant, coming into the foyer.
"Of course not. It's only afternoon."
>
**CHAPTER 12**
_The Mississippi River, near_ _Natchez, Mississippi_
SEPTEMBER 30, 1824
Robert Ross and his son watched the Kentucky flatboat men carrying wood from the stacks on shore into the steamboat. They seemed to be carrying out the labor even more energetically than usual.
"Amazing, really," David commented. "The rest of the time they barely move from their accommodations on deck. And that, only to flip another card or unstopper a jug of whiskey."
Anthony McParland was standing next to them. "It's part of their contract," he explained, smiling slightly. "They bring their goods downriver on rafts, just using the current. In New Orleans, the rafts are broken up, and the wood is sold along with whatever they were carrying on them. They get this free passage back upriver—but they have to do the labor of hauling the wood into the boiler room."
"And who cuts and stacks the wood in the first place?" Robert asked, eyeing the rapidly diminishing pile of logs at the other end of the little pier reaching out into the Mississippi.
"Here? Choctaws, mostly. Elsewhere, it'd be poor white woodcutting families."
David frowned. "I thought the Choctaws had moved to the Confederacy also."
"Only maybe a third of the tribe. The rest are being stubborn, claiming—which is true enough—that they never signed the Treaty of Oothcaloga."
David was still frowning. "Is there going to be trouble over that?"
McParland's smile lost some of its amusement. "Be better to say there _is_ trouble over it. Has been for years, now. And it's been getting worse. More settlers keep moving into Mississippi, and with Crittenden and his mob stirring up everybody...
"Chief Pushmataha is a damn fool, if you ask me," Anthony continued. "Well, not that, I guess. He's canny, by all accounts, but he's getting old. He and his Choctaws have even less chance of holding back the tide than the Cherokees and Creeks did in Georgia, Alabama, and Tennessee. And there's a big chunk of land still set aside for them in the Confederacy, between the Canadian and the Red rivers. That's where those of 'em who've moved already have settled. But if the rest of the Choctaws don't get there pretty soon, they'll start seeing the land gobbled up."
"I thought white people weren't—"
McParland shook his head. "Not by white people. Other Indians. Caddos and Quapaws, mostly. They're already moving into the area, since they're being pushed out of Louisiana."
David's frown now seemed permanently fixed in place. Like most nineteen-year-olds, he preferred the world to be a neatly organized and categorized place. "Caddos and Quapaws aren't signatories to the treaty, either," he pointed out.
The young Confederate captain shrugged. "No, they're not. Ask them if they care. Louisiana's making it more difficult for them to stay every year—and there's all that open territory over there on the other side of the Red River. Most Indian tribes are organized along clan lines. If their clan didn't make an agreement, they figure they're not bound by it—much less to anybody who is."
"There will be trouble there as well, then," David predicted sagely.
McParland chuckled. "No, there _is_ trouble there, already. Just had another clash between some Choctaws and Caddos two months ago, I heard. Not to mention that neither the Osage nor the Comanches figure _any_ of these tribes from across the Mississippi got any business at all in the area. Those fights are pretty much constant, now."
Robert had been listening to the exchange with only half his mind. He'd been paying more attention to the actions of the flatboat men.
"Something's amiss, I believe," he said suddenly. He pointed to the men coming back—even more hurriedly than usual, it seemed—across the pier onto the boat.
McParland studied their movements for a moment before pushing himself away from the rail. "Do believe you're right. I'll find out."
He was back less than five minutes later, with no trace of amusement left on his face.
"They found four bodies in one of the woodpiles. Choctaws. Been scalped and skinned. Two men, a child, and a woman. The woman had also—" He glanced at David. "Well, never mind."
_"Skinned?"_ David's eyes were wide.
"Yeah, skinned. Might have been done by settlers, but..." McParland's expression was grim. "Whoever did it took their time about it. That's not likely to have been settlers. Clashes between them and Indians don't generally last too long, since as a rule both sides never have all that many men, and they don't want to risk a counterattack. A quick scalping, and they leave. Besides, there were a lot of prints in the area." He pointed to the lush growth of palmettos and pawpaws that shielded the woods beyond from easy view. "That pile was back there a ways, which is why we didn't see it. Some of the flatboat men are pretty fair trackers. They think a lot of men were involved."
All three of them stared into the woods.
"I think it's Crittenden's men," McParland stated. "They must have left Alexandria sooner than we thought they would. I guess getting those guns and some cannons made them bold-like."
The steamboat was pulling away from the pier. David's eyes followed its course to the north. "But Arkansas is..."
"Still a long ways away," Anthony concluded for him. "Yeah, I know. But it'd be just like that crowd to figure on hounding the Choctaws along the way. They want land in northern Mississippi just as much as in Arkansas. Anywhere in the Delta, where cotton plantations can be set up. There's a lot of money in cotton, now, since Whitney made that machine of his."
Robert nodded. "It's an old pattern. The Crusaders savaged a lot of Jewish communities on their way to the Holy Land. Did more killing in the ghettos, some of them, than they did in the Levant. If they ever got there at all, which some of them didn't. The whole Fourth Crusade stopped at Constantinople after sacking it."
His own expression was grim. "War's never easy on neutrals, as a rule."
"It's an outrage," David proclaimed.
Robert's jaws were set. "Yes, it is. What concerns me more, however, is what the impact of it'll be. Up there." He used his chin to point to the north.
His son looked at him. "What do you mean, Father?"
"You've never met Patrick Driscol, David. He's a harsh man at any time. If this is indeed Crittenden's men, they'll be conducting outrages all the way upriver. Hand something like that to Patrick Driscol—the man who, as a boy, hid from the massacres in Ireland in '98—and he'll not react well. Not well at all."
"I see. You're afraid he'll be hotheaded."
Robert took a deep breath. "No, not that. Patrick is a man given to rage, but it's a very cold sort of thing. He'll not lose control, whatever else."
A subtle shift in McParland's expression made it clear that the young captain understood him. "Ah," he said. Then, a moment later: "Well, yes. Not that he'll have to stir anybody up to do it. Pretty much nobody in Arkansas is going to feel the least bit kindly to Louisiana freebooters. Even if they was behaving well, which they aren't."
"It would be a bad error," Ross stated.
McParland shrugged. "Maybe. Then again, maybe not. Sometimes the best way to set a pack of curs running is to show 'em the wolf 's teeth."
"The political ramifications—"
Abruptly, Robert broke off. There was something a bit absurd, after all, about lecturing Americans on the dynamics of American politics. Even if he was almost sure he was right.
Eliza came up onto the deck. "There's been trouble, it seems. Do we continue, or go back to New Orleans?"
She wasn't pushing for a particular answer, just inquiring.
Robert glanced at McParland. "I don't believe we have much choice, dearest. Unless we want to return on a raft. This steamboat, I'm quite sure, will be continuing north."
McParland's shoulders had become a bit stiff. "Well. Yes, I'm afraid so. The _Comet_ is owned by the Arkansas Riverboat Company, of which the Laird—ah, Mr. Driscol—and Mr. Crowell own half the stock. Mr. Shreve won't like it much, but that was part of the arrangement."
Eliza and David frowned at him, clearly puzzled.
"What he means, dearest, is that in the event of hostilities, the boat will be pressed into Confederate service. And, it seems, hostilities have begun."
They looked at McParland.
The young captain cleared his throat. "Well. Be better to say 'Arkansas service.' Not sure John Ross or the Ridge know anything about it."
That wasn't surprising. It had already been clear to Ross, just from his long correspondence with Patrick, that the chiefdom of Arkansas wore its theoretical subordination to the Confederacy rather lightly.
As was inevitable. Of all political quandaries faced by the human race over the millennia, this was perhaps the most intractable. The Romans had an expression for it: _Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?_
Without realizing it, he murmured the phrase aloud.
" 'Who will guard the guardians?' " his son translated. "That's about the Praetorian Guard, isn't it?"
His mother smiled. "Actually, no. I believe it was a remark made by the satirist Juvenal, concerning the wisdom of having eunuchs guarding women."
Ross couldn't remember, but he suspected Eliza was correct. She was very fond of the classics.
"What do eunuchs—?"
To Robert's surprise, McParland understood the point immediately. He realized again that there was really not much left of the shy, ill-educated, and uncertain teenaged soldier he remembered from years earlier.
"Pretty good assessment, sir. Yeah, the Cherokees and Creeks—the Choctaws soon, too, if I don't miss my guess—need Arkansas to buffer them against the United States. But you pays a price for that, always do. Just the way it is."
He seemed quite unconcerned about the matter. It was also now clear to Robert that McParland's allegiance had shifted completely to Arkansas. There seemed to be no animosity in the young officer toward his native United States, but also no doubt where he stood in the event of a conflict. And if that was true for a white citizen of Arkansas, how much more true would it be for its black ones?
So. A war was starting, and it would unfold as wars did. Very messily.
_Memphis, Tennessee_
OCTOBER 1, 1824
"Perhaps you should remain here, Julia," Colonel Taylor suggested. He looked around the inn. "It seems comfortable enough, and the senator left you with plenty of money."
Julia Chinn was having none of it, as Taylor had feared. "Colonel, meaning no offense, but that's crazy. You going to leave a black woman and two black children alone—with money, which just makes it worse—in _this_ town? Leavin' aside that Memphis got a reputation that's of practically biblical proportions, I remind you that Tennessee's a slave state. Give it two days, and we'd be vanished somewhere."
"I could..." But the sentence trailed off.
"Don't be silly. You got only twelve men to begin with. If you insist on going south into what looks like a war starting, you'll need all of them."
He couldn't argue the point. "Well. I'm sure the boat captain would agree—"
"He's going back up to St. Louis," Julia interrupted. "St. Louis is a frontier town, which means the only reason it ain't looking at Bible rank is just 'cause it ain't well enough knowed yet. And Missouri's another slave state."
"Surely there's _some_ boat that'll be heading for Ohio."
She shrugged. "Prob'bly. And the captain might even be a Northerner. But most of the crew will be Southern. And as excited as they all are, since the news came..."
She shrugged again. The fact that the shoulders which made the gesture were still those of a fairly young and very attractive woman simply drove home her point. Being a mulatto, Julia was light-skinned compared with the average negro, but there was no chance at all she could pass for a white woman. Not even Imogene and Adaline could, for that matter. In truth, the girls' skin color wasn't really any darker than that of many white people. Italians or Spaniards or Louisiana Creoles, at any rate. But their features had a distinctly African cast.
A subtle one, perhaps—but Zachary Taylor was a Southerner himself. He knew full well that any Southerner could distinguish racial origins at a glance unless they'd been almost completely submerged. Why else the fine and precise distinctions between such terms as "mulatto," "quadroon," "octoroon"?
Silently, he leveled a curse on his native land. He understood his fellow Southerners and even liked them most of the time. But there was something ultimately savage and obsessive about his folk when it came to race.
Not all Southerners shared that obsession, of course. He didn't. Senator Johnson didn't. Sam Houston didn't. Even Andrew Jackson didn't, really, once you cut beneath the surface. At least, Old Hickory would make some personal distinctions, even if he agreed with the general attitude.
For a moment, the colonel found himself wishing desperately that Jackson were on the scene. Of course, that would mean a relentless, all-out sort of war, if it came to that. But Jackson would also keep his men in line. Whereas Crittenden's army, from all accounts they'd been getting, had been moving north like so many Huns.
True, the atrocities had been practiced on Choctaws, which meant that from the standpoint of most white Southerners in the area it was all to the good. Leaving aside their own land hunger, there had been plenty of instances in the past of Choctaw outrages against white settlers.
And vice versa, of course. It was a land that sometimes seemed to Taylor to be drenched in blood. He was an experienced and capable Indian fighter himself. But he'd never really shared the common attitude toward the natives. He'd encountered many he'd respected, even admired; and, if nothing else, he liked to think he was too fair-minded. It _was_ their land, after all. And if his loyalties were to the American republic, and he didn't have any qualms about driving Indians off the land to allow that republic to swell in greatness, he wasn't going to besmirch himself by adding hypocrisy to the mix either.
"Damnation," he muttered.
"You shouldn't blaspheme, Colonel, you know that." But Julia was almost grinning as she said it. Over the weeks of their journey, she and Taylor had gotten along quite well.
He sighed and leaned back in his chair at the table in the tavern's dining room. Remembering, as he did so, how he'd had to browbeat the innkeeper's wife into serving Julia and the girls at all.
_Damnation._
A bit desperately: "Julia, I have _got_ to keep going. Leaving aside the fact that I'm supposed to be reporting back for duty at my post in Baton Rouge, the War Department will want a full report on what's happening in Arkansas."
She shrugged. "So, fine. I can ride, and so can the girls. Just take us with you."
"We're going into a _war._ "
The gaze she gave him was level, and rather cold. "Colonel Taylor, I been in a war zone my whole life. So's every colored person in this country. We goin' with you, and that's that."
"All right," he said, giving in to the inevitable. He could hardly refuse, after all, unless he intended to avoid Senator Johnson the rest of his life. He consoled himself with the thought that Dick Johnson served the best and most expensive whiskey in Kentucky at Blue Spring Farm—and made a silent vow, right then and there, to drink the amalgamating bastard dry the next time he visited.
"Just give me the time to write some dispatches," he added, wincing a little. Of all the duties of an officer, writing dispatches was the one he detested the most. He wasn't really that well educated.
Julia smiled. "Tell you what, Zack. I do all the paperwork at home. You tell me what you want, and I'll write 'em for you. My written English is a lot more proper than the way I talk, too."
The temptation was well-nigh irresistible. "It'll look peculiar," he half argued. "You not having what anyone would likely call a masculine hand."
"Tell 'em you sprained your wrist."
Resistance was futile. "Deal."
_Natchez, Mississippi_
OCTOBER 1, 1824
"Another five dollars," the man offered. He even had the cash on hand. A half-eagle, at that, which was literally as good as gold. Even better than the usual Spanish _reales._
The young man's New England accent irritated the steamboat captain, who had been born and raised in Georgia and now made his home in New Orleans. But the extra money offered was too much to pass up.
"All right, then. We'll find you a berth somewhere's aboard. Though I'm blasted if I understand why a poet wants to go upriver in these times. I've half a mind not to myself. Wouldn't, if I didn't have a contract I got to meet."
The New Englander shrugged. "I thought I'd try my hand at some frontier extravaganzas and the like. Perhaps an epic, if I can find a suitable topic. New York publishers love the stuff, and a poet needs an epic to cement his reputation. I might even be able to sell it in Europe, too."
He didn't seem inclined to explain further. He was practically talking ancient Greek anyway, as far as the captain was concerned. Poetry. New York publishers. Europe. Epics, no less!
"Come aboard, then."
The poet found a convenient chair toward the rear of the deck and set himself up. There was an overhang to shelter him in case of rain, which would likely be handy. He'd have to sleep in that chair also, the craft being such a small one. But the blanket in his trunk should suffice to keep him warm, this far south and still being in early fall.
Since it would be a day, at least, before the steamboat neared the scene of the activities he was interested in, he decided he might as well work on "Thanatopsis" further. It had been his most famous and popular poem since he'd first gotten it published in 1817 in the _North American Review._ But he'd actually written it in 1811, still one month short of his seventeenth birthday, and he'd never been satisfied with the end result.
Sadly, he'd soon be forced to put aside poetry, for the most part. There was just no money in it, and now that he was almost thirty years old he needed to find an occupation that would support a family. He had one daughter already and would no doubt soon have other children to care for.
Find another occupation, rather. He'd done well enough as a lawyer but had discovered that he detested the work. Lawyers spent most of their time dealing with people they rarely liked and often loathed. Even the few whose company they might otherwise have enjoyed, they encountered under bad circumstances. So, with the support of his wife, Fanny, he'd decided on journalism, being interested in public affairs. And, now, found himself blessing the impulse that had taken him to the west to write some essays on the new Confederacy. There was quite a bit of fascination with the subject in New England, New York, and Pennsylvania.
Talk about perfect coincidence!
That evening, the captain came by for a brief visit.
"What'd you say your name was?"
"Bryant, Captain. William Cullen Bryant."
At four o'clock the next afternoon, the first corpse drifted past the steamboat. By noon, two more had done the same.
Horrid-looking things. But not as horrid—not nearly—as the corpse they passed on the riverbank. The man—apparently an Indian, although it was difficult to tell—had been spread-eagled on the wheel of an old wagon, flayed, and disemboweled. His intestines—what was left of them, after the birds and animals—trailed on the ground.
Bryant didn't vomit over the side, however, until they passed the corpses of the woman and child who'd been impaled. Both bodies were naked. The woman's breasts had been cut off and...something had been done to her groin. Thankfully, the details were impossible to discern in the twilight. From the blood caked in the area, the boy had had his genitals severed. He was perhaps eight years old, as near as Bryant could tell from the distance.
"Boys are bein' right rambunctious," the captain said, shaking his head. "Don't really hold with it myself, though I understand how they feel."
Tight-lipped, trying to control his stomach, Bryant said nothing.
"Thanatopsis." A teenage boy's poem on death. It all seemed very distant, now.
Journalism, however, did not. That night, on a steamboat deck by lamplight, he began writing in earnest the first article of _An Account of the Current Situation in Arkansas._
**CHAPTER 13**
_The Mississippi River, south of Hopefield, Arkansas_
OCTOBER 3, 1824
Taylor never saw any bodies in the river, coming down from Memphis, since the current would have taken them away. But he didn't much doubt there had been some. The news of Crittenden's expedition had spread throughout the area. While the main body of freebooters might be coming into Arkansas from the south, there were plenty of adventurers—border ruffians, to call them by their right name—from Missouri and Tennessee and Kentucky who were eager to throw themselves into the fray. Give it a week, and they'd be coming from Mississippi; two weeks, Alabama; a month, if it kept up, from Georgia and the Carolinas; two months, from all over the country, especially the South.
From what he could see from the deck of the steamboat he'd hired—well, commandeered in all but name—some hundreds of freebooters had already passed through the area. And they were being just as rough on anybody they ran into as you'd expect from such men.
When Taylor's steamboat reached Hopefield just after dawn, he discovered the settlement had been deserted, with most of its cabins burnt. And Hopefield had been a white settlement. Taylor had seen two burned-out woodcutters' cabins in the miles they had gone since, and their owners would have also been white people. Some of them, at any rate. They might have been mixed families, whites and Indians, which was a lot more common on the frontier than many people liked to admit.
It didn't matter. By now, over four years after the treaty, it was the firm opinion of white Southerners of the type who'd be attracted to this adventure that any white man who voluntarily settled in Arkansas—anywhere in the Confederacy—was a damned nigger-lover. No better than an abolitionist or one of those detestable New England missionaries who were always prattling nonsense about the "rights of Indians."
And there was some truth to the charge, at least if you removed the loaded terms. White opinion on the subject of race, especially when it came to Indians, had never been uniform. In some ways, because contact was so much closer, even less so in the South than the North. True, there were very few white Southerners who'd admit to having any African ancestry, and none of them willingly, since the legal repercussions were so harsh. However absurd it might be, they'd try their best to use a subterfuge term like "Portuguese." But there were plenty who'd admit to having some Cherokees or Creeks or Choctaws perched in the family tree. Brag about it, in fact—even though everybody in the South knew perfectly well that the southern tribes didn't maintain the same sharp and everlasting barriers to the absorption of negroes that whites officially did. A "full-blood Cherokee" might very well be someone whom Southerners would have labeled a "quadroon" or "mulatto" if he'd been white instead of Indian.
Such white folks would be willing to move to Arkansas readily enough. There were advantages, after all. Just for starters, the treaty had among other things finally removed the legal headaches left over from settling disputed Spanish land grants and insurance claims from the great earthquakes of 1811 and 1812. The Confederacy—or the chiefdom of Arkansas—could issue legal land titles, now. For another thing, within a short time the danger of Indian attacks had receded sharply. The Cherokees were pretty well disciplined, Driscol's people even more so—and they proved soon enough that they could handle any Osage raiding parties.
The land in the Arkansas Delta was rich, once you got past the swamps along the rivers. Good land for livestock and good land for cotton. Slavery was a handy way to organize cotton agriculture, but it was by no means essential. And if Driscol's regime forbade slavery, the Bank of Arkansas was a lot easier to deal with than the Second Bank of the United States, at least if you were a poor white man. Especially since everybody knew that in a pinch, a man could always satisfy a bank debt by serving a term in the Arkansas Army—something that positively infuriated the likes of Crittenden.
Julia came out on deck, interrupting Taylor's musings. Her two daughters were following right behind her.
"How does it look, Zack?"
The question—even more so, the sight of Imogene and Adaline—made up the colonel's mind. The twins were twelve years old, nearing thirteen. Still girls, yes, but already very pretty and entering womanhood. They'd be particularly attractive to slave hunters.
"It's too chancy," he announced. "By now, from all reports I've gotten, the freebooters will have dozens of craft moving up into the Arkansas. Steamboats, keelboats, rowboats, sailboats, canoes, even flatboats—hell, you name it." He gave their own steamboat a quick survey. "No way to fend them off from this thing, not if we get trapped in the river. Not with as few men as I've got. We'll need to disembark at the nearest suitable spot and ride cross-country to Arkansas Post. That should still be safe enough."
"Whatever you say."
_The confluence of the Mississippi and Arkansas rivers_
OCTOBER 3, 1824
"Oh, dear," said Eliza Ross. Her husband thought the comment was outstandingly low-keyed under the circumstances. Very much "stiff upper lip," to use the expression that had started coming into vogue during the Napoleonic Wars.
He would have been amused, except there was nothing amusing about the sight of the two riverboats heading for their steamer. Longboats, the British navy would have called them, although Robert had no idea what the correct term was for them here.
True, the boats were oar driven, but with multiple oars and the advantage of the current, they would arrive long before the steamboat could turn itself around and head back to the south. They'd emerged suddenly from the mouth of the Arkansas, just as the steamboat came up. Much as if they'd been lying in ambush.
Which was probably true. Not because the freebooters were targeting their steamboat in particular, but simply because they'd been left behind to seize any steamboat that came along. The freebooters' supply train—if such a term could be used at all—was not likely to have been well planned and organized. By now, especially as scattered as his forces must have gotten from their frenzy of plundering and mayhem as they went upriver, Crittenden must be getting worried about his logistics. Having an extra steamboat would be invaluable, especially one as big as the _Comet._
"Oh, dear," his wife repeated, as she watched the approaching craft. "What shall we—"
Her question was interrupted as well as answered by Charles Ball's emergence onto the deck.
_General_ Ball, now. The slave disguise was gone, with a vengeance. Ball was wearing his full uniform. The hussar-style uniform had the green pants of an officer, unlike the white ones of enlisted men, with a much fancier green coatee trimmed with black, and the distinctive fur cap. It was something of an odd-looking uniform to Ross, accustomed as he was to the continental styles. But he knew Driscol had had it patterned after the uniforms worn by Canadian _voltigeurs,_ and it was probably more practical in this terrain.
Anthony McParland had emerged alongside him, wearing a uniform that was very similar except for the officer's insignia. Right after them came the two corporals, both in enlisted men's uniforms and both carrying muskets. Young as they might be, Callender and Sheffield seemed to be very familiar with the firearms. Knowing Driscol, Ross was quite sure they'd been thoroughly drilled by now.
Still, while the four of them made a resplendent showing on the upper deck of the _Comet,_ there were only four of them—and there were at least a dozen men in each of the approaching boats.
David came out on deck, holding a weapon in each hand. "I've brought our pistols, Father."
Six men, then—but two of them armed merely with pistols.
But Robert discovered that he'd underestimated Ball. Most of the Kentucky flatboat men had left the _Comet_ the day before, not wishing any further involvement. The men who had remained behind had been the eight black ones and the three poorest-looking of the whites. The most indigent of the lot, Robert had assumed, unable to forgo the free passage no matter what the risk.
"All right, boys!" Ball shouted. "Time to show the bastards what's what, don't you think?"
The eleven "flatboat men" on the lower forward deck grinned up at him. In an instant, any trace of lackadaisical, undisciplined civilians vanished. Before Robert quite understood what they were doing, six of the men were hauling two guns from somewhere below. Four-pounders, in naval carriages.
Rummaging in his memory, Robert recalled seeing a pair of large hatches down there on one of his tours of the boat. Storage, he'd assumed.
Indeed, "storage" it had been. The other five men were bringing forth powder and balls.
Starting to, rather. Seeing what they were carrying, Ball hollered at them.
"Canister, damn you! Think we're fighting a siege? Canister—and be damn quick about it!"
Hastily, the two guilty parties scurried back out of sight. They emerged just a few seconds later carrying a tin of canister each.
"Good, boys! Good!" Ball's tone had gone from fury to praise in a heartbeat. "I want to see the bastards bleed!"
By the time the ammunition carriers got the canister tins to the front, the rest of the men already had the guns laid and were training them on the approaching boats. They'd also done something to the steamboat front rail—the guard, as it was called—that had lowered a section of it on hinges. That allowed a clear line of fire while leaving the thick stanchions necessary to attach the recoil slings. And there were eyebolts already in place for that purpose. Robert had noticed them earlier but had not thought much about their function. Tying up the boat, he'd assumed, even though that was not normally done at the bow.
Robert understood at once that the _Comet_ had been prepared for such a battle—and that Ball must have brought with him the cream of the Iron Battalion's gun crews.
He didn't know whether he should be gratified or furious. It was clear enough, now, that Ball had been expecting such an encounter even before they left New Orleans. Half expecting it, at the very least.
Patrick, too, for that matter.
After a moment's hesitation, he decided on gratification. Why not? It wasn't as if, deep down, he hadn't always known his wife was right.
"See?" she demanded, as if to prove the point. But there didn't seem to be any condemnation in her tone, either. Eliza had been a soldier's wife for decades, a fair bit of which time she'd spent with her husband in the field in Iberia. She was probably remembering Spanish and Portuguese officers she'd cursed in the past. For not being able to do a tenth as much in ten hours as Ball and his men had just shown themselves capable of doing in a few minutes.
And while she didn't have Robert's experience with battles—never having actually been _at_ any of them, thankfully, if not so many miles distant—the sight of those two cannons would have cheered even the most naïve of civilians.
Robert himself was cheered immensely. True, they were both four-pounders. It would have been foolish to bring any larger ordnance. As big as it was, by steamboat standards, the _Comet_ lacked the sheer bulk and bracing that warships had to have to withstand the recoil of heavier guns.
But, in the here and now, four-pounders should do very nicely, he thought. Those two approaching longboats were even further removed from ships of the line. Cockleshells, practically, and jammed full of men.
Worried men, now. The freebooters were close enough to have spotted the cannons—which they quite obviously hadn't been expecting.
"Hey!" one of them shouted, half rising to his feet in the lead boat. "You there in the—"
_"Fire!"_ Ball bellowed.
Belatedly remembering some of the realities of cannon fire—the wind was blowing the wrong way, too—Robert hissed: "Eliza! David! Close your eyes!"
He did the same himself. The sharp double clap of the four-pounders was followed, very quickly, by the familiar feel of unburned powder and smoke on his face. Along with, of course, that very familiar smell.
As it always did, the odor roused something deep and primitive in Robert Ross. As soon as he felt the gust passing, he opened his eyes. Only with great effort was he able to restrain himself from shouting the sort of praise and encouragement he would have shouted, in years past, to his own soldiers.
The man who'd been half standing in the bow of the lead ship was nowhere to be seen. Not surprising, that. The bow itself had been badly splintered by canister balls. Not shattered, since Ball's guns hadn't been using round shot, or even the heavy shot that naval men called grapeshot. But it hardly mattered. Canister rounds weighed three ounces each: twice the weight of a musket ball. At that range, a three-ounce ball wouldn't destroy a wooden boat, but it would do a very nice job of shredding it some. And even a four-pounder fired a lot of them at once. Like a huge shotgun, for all intents and purposes.
The men in the bow of that lead boat had all been killed or mutilated. Or both, mostly. The ones toward the rear who'd survived had done so simply because their comrades had absorbed most of the fire—and not all of them had come off it uninjured.
Three of them were just sitting in the boat, screaming, covered with blood. How much of it was theirs was impossible to determine. The rest were already throwing themselves overboard and starting to swim toward the west bank of the river, over a hundred yards distant.
The second boat was desperately trying to turn around. Clearly enough, that crew had no intention of risking all in a fierce boarding attempt.
Wisely, Robert thought. Even if they could have reached the steamboat before another volley was fired from the cannons, they no longer outnumbered Ball's men by any significant margin. And he didn't doubt for a moment that every one of those so obviously experienced gunners was just about as skilled with pistols and hand weapons.
"I want that boat down!" Ball hollered. "Don't you give me one and not the other, you blasted curries!"
One of the white gunners flashed a grin. However much he might have taken offense as being labeled a curry under other circumstances, under this one he apparently simply found it amusing.
Ball didn't see the grin. He was already turning his glare onto Callender McParland and young Parker.
"All right, boys. Jones been braggin' you the best shots in his regiment. That's why you here, wet behind the ears and all." He pointed at the boat some forty yards away, which was now halfway through its turn. A man was crouched in the stern, yelling orders.
"Take him down," Ball hissed. "I want that bastard _down._ "
Both young corporals already had their muskets leveled. Rifled muskets, Robert now understood, from the way they were actually aiming the weapons, not simply pointing them in the general direction of the enemy.
For a brief moment, they seemed to hesitate. Robert recognized the moment. Just so had he seen other young soldiers, in times past, hesitate before firing their first shot intended for real murder. Just so could he remember himself hesitating, that first time so long ago.
Ball knew the moment also. " _Down,_ I said." But he growled the words; he didn't shout them. This was not the time for shouting.
Sheffield Parker fired first, just a split second before Callender. Robert saw his shot take the steersman in the shoulder, lifting and turning him just in time to take Callender's shot in the chest. A second later, his corpse—for corpse it surely was—splashed into the river.
"Good," Ball said. "Reload."
He paid no more attention to the teenage corporals, leaning instead over the guard of the upper deck and going back to hollering at his gun crews.
Hollering, now. No need for tenderness—of sorts—dealing with such veterans.
"Kill 'em, God damn you! Kill 'em all!"
Two seconds later, both cannons fired almost simultaneously. And—
Robert looked up at the target.
And it was done. For the most part, at least. There were survivors, of course. There almost always were, even with a murderous volley at such close range. Time after time, Robert had been astonished at the way the whimsy of battle would rip one man to pieces and completely spare the man next to him. That same whimsy had saved his life more than once.
Still, over half were dead or wounded. Only four of them went over the side into the river, to start swimming after their companions toward the shore.
Robert wondered if Ball would show any mercy. He didn't expect he would.
No, no chance of it.
"Reload, blast you! That boat's bloody but it's still not down! I want it _down!_ "
The gun crews went through their practiced cycle. Ball turned back to the youngsters. "Don't waste shots on them while they're still in the water. But the minute they start climbing up on shore, I want to see at least two of them dead before the rest get away. You hear me? Two, at a rock-hard damn bottom!"
Callender was a bit pale-faced, perhaps. Impossible to tell about Sheffield, as dark-skinned as he was. But from the tightness of the young negro's very full lips, he seemed determined to keep whatever emotions he was feeling under control.
Splendid young soldiers. Whoever this "Jones" was, Robert had no difficulty understanding why he'd recommended them to Ball. Their marksmanship had only been part of it, as always—and not the most important part. This was probably their first real clash at arms, and they were conducting themselves with as much composure as most veterans.
The cannons went off again. That volley slew whoever might still have been alive on the second boat, and punched enough holes in the hull that it began to settle. Robert swiveled his head and saw that the first boat was still afloat. But it was drifting with the current, obviously out of control, leaking streams of blood into the water. The three men slumped in the boat might still be alive—some of them might even survive the whole experience—but they were no longer a threat to anyone.
By now, even with the difficulty of reloading rifled muskets, Callender and Sheffield had them ready. Not quite to shoulder, but close. Waiting for their targets to come out of the water. To his surprise, Robert saw that the shore was now much closer. Apparently—he'd never noticed—the steamboat pilot had been driving the craft after the men swimming toward safety.
That seemed rather dangerous, Robert thought. He was no expert on the subject, but he could remember people talking about the perils of navigating the Mississippi, much of which was still uncharted. The river was so muddy that it was impossible to see more than an inch or two beneath the surface. If they grounded on a hidden sandbar or hit a submerged snag...
The first of the freebooters reached the riverbank and started to clamber ashore, with two of his companions right behind. From the corner of his eye, Robert could see the two corporals aiming.
But they never fired. Instead, a volley was fired from somewhere in the thick growth next to the river. All three of the freebooters were blown right back into the river. The two remaining, who'd been with that first five, were paralyzed by the shock, crouched half in and half out of the water.
A man stalked out of the foliage, a pistol in his hand. From a distance of five feet, he leveled the pistol and shot one freebooter in the head. Then, he leaped on the other and began clubbing him senseless with the pistol butt. His opponent tried to resist, but to no avail. His attacker seemed on the slender side, but there was something utterly relentless about the way he kept slamming down the pistol butt. As if, half immersed in water like his companion, he was engaging in some sort of horrible, upside-down baptism.
Within half a minute, the freebooter slipped into the water. His body, rather. That skull had been shattered into a pulp.
The four remaining freebooters were now treading water in the middle of the river, trapped between the oncoming steamboat and whoever had fired the volley from the riverbank. Their faces looked pale. One of them was gaping like a fish.
"Did I say anything about quarter?" Robert heard Ball snarl at the two corporals.
"No, sir," replied Sheffield. "But you did say—"
"Don't sass me, boy! I said don't waste shots while they were in the water. At this range—now—that don't count. Or if it does, you not the men Jones said you were."
Parker's jaws tightened, just for an instant. Then:
"Yes, _sir._ " He stepped up to the rail, aimed, fired. Quick as that. The freebooter with the gaping mouth went under, leaving a little patch of blood and brains on the surface.
Callender was a bit slower. Not much. Another shot, and another freebooter went down. Rolled, rather, the way a slain fish might, before slowly starting to sink.
The two survivors—the second boat's sole survivors, now—began frantically swimming downstream.
"Follow 'em!" Ball yelled to someone Robert couldn't see. The pilot, he assumed.
A voice came back. "Be damned if I will! Be damned, I say! This ain't your boat, Ball—and I ain't in the fucking army!"
A sudden moment of mercy, Robert might have assumed, except for the next exercise in profanity and blasphemy.
"God damn you, Ball, this boat is _valuable!_ Henry Shreve'll have my fucking hide, I run it aground and we gotta scuttle it! Which we will, God damn your black soul, 'cause there ain't no way were gonna—"
"Oh, never mind. And shut up!" Ball hollered back. "It's all gonna be over soon, anyway, so take your blasted boat wherever you want to—as long as it's upstream and into the Arkansas!"
Soon, indeed. Robert could now see over a dozen men emerging from the foliage by the river. All of them were armed with muskets, and all of them were half running down the riverbank, keeping even with the swimmers. Like a pack of wolves trailing wounded prey.
It was over quickly. The two surviving freebooters were exhausted by now, as much from sheer fright as from physical exertion. The moment one of them slowed, a dozen muskets went off. At least one of the rounds hit. Another patch of red stain was all that was left on the surface of the river.
It took almost a minute for the repetition. Mainly because the men, whoever they were, were clearly not experienced infantrymen. They took much too long to reload. Still, another volley went off soon enough, and the last head faded from sight.
By now, a different river might have been streaked with blood. The carnage had been as horrendous as any Robert had ever seen in a small unit action. But the muddy Mississippi swept it all away within seconds.
Half an hour later, the pilot finally agreed he had a safe place to bring the steamboat alongshore. There was a pier there. Not much of one, since it had clearly been designed for a much smaller boat than the _Comet._ Still, it was enough to tie up to.
Seventeen men came out of the woods, five of them boys. Along with them came six girls and four young women, two of whom were carrying infants. All were white except for two of the adult males, one of the boys, and one of the infant-toting women. They were black.
The man who led the way across into the steamboat was the same one who'd clubbed the man in the river. Robert hadn't been able to discern his features, at the distance, but there was something distinct about his way of moving.
He was quite a young man, Robert realized, once he came aboard. He hadn't seemed so, at first, from the severity of his features.
"Name's Brown," he said to Ball. "John Brown." He turned and helped one of the young women with an infant into the boat. "My wife, Dianthe. My whole family—those as are living in Arkansas—and the people working for me."
The pistol was stuck back in his belt. Shifting his musket to his left hand, he stuck out his right to Ball. "Pleased to meet you."
"Charles Ball. General in the Arkansas Army. You the one got that new tannery set up near the river?"
" _Had_ a new tannery," Brown corrected. Tight-jawed but not seeming especially angry. More like a man depicting an unfortunate turn in the weather—but such is God's will.
"They burned me out," he explained. "Not without a fight, mind you. But there was too many to make a stand, so we ran off after shooting a few."
Ball nodded. "We're heading up the Arkansas, if you want to join us. To be honest, I could use your help. Don't know what's waiting for me up there. But...it's likely to be another fight, and you got children and womenfolk."
"Would they be any safer anywhere else?" Brown asked, mildly. "With the land overrun by heathens? I think not. Yes, we'll join you. We'll fight, too. But—!"
He held up a stiff, admonishing finger. "I want it clearly understood that I am not enlisting in any army! I'll fight, but I won't be a soldier. Meaning no personal offense, General Ball, but you're a blaspheming lot."
**CHAPTER 14**
_The Arkansas River, south of Arkansas Fort_
OCTOBER 4, 1824
"I'm starting to get a little worried, Scott," Ray Thompson confided to his friend. The two of them were resting in a field, leaning against a tree stump, watching what remained of a small farm cabin burn to the ground. By now, it was mostly embers.
"You're just _starting_ to get worried?" Powers jibed. "Gol dern, I wonder why. Could it be that it just dawned on you that Crittenden set off without having any resupply figured out? Oh, but I forget. We were gonna 'live off the richness of the land,' weren't we?"
He half leveled his musket at the smoldering cabin. "Insofar as a nigger's ain't-got-a-pot-to-piss-in shack qualifies as 'the richness of the land.' Insofar as it would have, I mean, if these crackers and yahoos weren't burning everything down the moment they come to it."
Thompson couldn't help but smile a little. He wasn't any fonder of most of their "compatriots" than Powers was. Both of them—quietly and privately, of course—had shared a laugh after four of Crittenden's men had been blown to shreds at Brown's tannery and another half dozen had been injured. It turned out that the damned abolitionist had left kegs of gunpowder behind, strategically situated. When the mob started burning down the tannery without investigating the premises first, the charges had exploded.
But the smile faded very quickly, and Thompson returned stubbornly to the subject. "Quit making jokes, Scott. Or have you got some magic sack full of food I don't know about?"
Powers sucked his teeth, idly watching a group of men raping one of the two black women they'd found in the shack. That was the young one. The older of the two—presumably her mother—was huddled over the corpse of a middle-aged black man lying in the dust some ten yards away. She was weeping softly, seemingly oblivious to everything else around her.
"No, I don't," he admitted. "But we'll find what we need at Arkansas Post." He nodded toward the corpse. "I figure he wasn't lying none. Not after his ears were cut off."
Gloomily, Thompson studied the body. Other than the skin color, it was impossible any longer to tell much about the man. His nose had been cut off also, along with his genitals and both of his hands. After the group that had been torturing him at Crittenden's command to get information were done, there hadn't been any point in keeping him alive. You'd have had to offer money to get anyone in the slave market at New Orleans to take him. So, the crackers had amused themselves for a time before he finally bled to death.
Crittenden might have told them to stop wasting time, but he'd left right after the negro had told them of the storehouses in Arkansas Post. Of course, whether they'd have listened to him or not was another question. Except for the men under the command of the Lallemand brothers, Crittenden's army was to discipline what a tornado was to decorum.
Well...it wasn't quite that bad. Most of the men belonged to groups of one sort or another. Even if the lines of authority were loose and informal, they existed at least on that level.
As was demonstrated, in fact, just that moment. Another man came up, wearing an outfit that bore a passing resemblance to a uniform if you squinted and were willing to make some allowances. He had a real sword, too, not one of the big knives that usually did for one on the frontier.
"Cut it out!" he shouted, grabbing the current rapist by the scruff of his neck and hauling him off the woman. There was something downright comical about the look on the rapist's face: a combination of outrage, frustration, and surprise.
"Just relax, boys. We'll be fuckin' her all the way down the Mississippi," the "officer" said, in a friendlier tone, lifting the man to his feet. "You betchum. We want that nigger pregnant by the time we put her up on the block. But we got to get going, before somebody else grabs the boat I got us."
That was standard procedure for slavers. Thompson had served for two years on the crew of a slave ship. That's where he'd first met Scott Powers, who'd been an officer of the ship. Even though the international slave trade had been illegal in the United States since 1808, it still went on despite the risk. Mostly, of course, for the profits involved; but there were also the perquisites and the side benefits. Young black women would be segregated from the rest of the cargo and raped all the way across the Atlantic. Entertainment for the crew during the voyage—and a pregnant female was worth more on the slave block when they arrived. "Two-for-one" for the buyer—and, more important, proof that the female was good breeding stock.
Grudgingly, the little crowd around the young black woman obeyed their commander. Two of them hauled her to her feet, one of them taking the time to yank her torn and dirty dress back down to her knees. The woman's eyes seemed vacant until, wandering, they fell on the corpse lying in the dirt. Then she let out a wail before one of the men holding her slapped her face.
"What do we do with this one?" another man asked, pointing with his pistol at the older woman still clutching the corpse.
The commander studied her for a moment, then shrugged. "May as well leave her. She's too old to bring much, and we ain't got enough food to begin with."
The man who'd asked the question looked back down at the woman. Then, cocked his pistol and shot her in the back of the head.
The younger woman wailed again, and got another slapping.
"Runnin' low on powder, too," the commander said sourly. But he didn't carry the chastisement any further.
Thompson didn't blame him. Killing the woman had been pointless, but control over a crew like this was always a chancy thing. As excited and fired up as they were, Crittenden's army had been killing, burning, raping, and torturing anyone they ran across almost since they left Alexandria. Crittenden had barely been able to keep them in check until they passed beyond the borders of Louisiana—and then, only when they came across white people.
Some of those activities had had a conscious purpose—especially the ones aimed at the Choctaw—but most of them had been as mindless as a shark's feeding frenzy. Just the way it was, with expeditions like this, as a rule. The Lallemands' men were under better discipline, but Crittenden wasn't so much leading this army as he was trying to half steer a raft through turbulent rapids.
Thompson and Powers watched the group as they dragged the woman into a keelboat and shoved her onto a bench alongside two other negroes they'd caught. Both young boys, in this case. Then, at a command from their leader, they pushed off from the bank and starting rowing down the Arkansas toward its junction with the Mississippi.
"Damn fools," Powers said. "For the price of three slaves! You won't catch me heading off without enough men around to handle Choctaws. I don't care if I find me a pot of gold. They'll be riled right good, by now."
Thompson grunted his agreement. What concerned him, however, was that he was pretty sure a lot of the men in Crittenden's force weren't going to have the same horse sense. This was likely to be just the first of many small groups peeling away from the expedition once they'd gotten their hands on a few slaves. Not all of the men who'd come with Crittenden were looking to set up plantations in the northern part of the Delta. That took some money, no matter what else—access to loans, at any rate—and plenty of these boys didn't have any more of a pot to piss in than a negro did. A fair number of them were, quite literally, former pirates.
But there was nothing they could do about it, so he levered himself onto his feet, using the musket as a brace. "Come on, we may as well catch up with Crittenden."
"Our own veritable Napoleon," Powers sneered. But he was getting to his feet also. There wasn't really any alternative, no matter what qualms and reservations they were both starting to have. Even leaving aside the risk of encountering Choctaws, the land behind them had been so thoroughly ravaged that they wouldn't find enough food to get them back to Louisiana.
_The confluence of the Arkansas and the Mississippi_
OCTOBER 4, 1824
By midafternoon, Ball had made his decision.
"All right, General Ross. Much as it rubs me the wrong way, I admit you're probably right. We oughta keep this boat here, not be running up the Arkansas with it."
Since it had taken Robert most of a day to persuade the black general of something so obvious, he was careful to do nothing more than nod agreeably. Ball was far from stupid, and a very experienced combat veteran to boot. But the problem was that, as was uniformly true of the officer corps of the army of Arkansas from Patrick Driscol on down, his experience was deep but narrow. It was an army led by sergeants, essentially. Granted, some of the finest noncommissioned officers Robert Ross had ever encountered, but without enough experience at higher command levels to really grasp that war was much broader than battles.
The idea of taking such a critical piece of military equipment as a large steamboat armed with cannons—which could completely cut off any chance of Crittenden being resupplied—in order to use it for what amounted to nothing more than a big water-going cavalry horse...
From Robert's viewpoint, the idea had been sheer insanity. But it had taken a whole night and most of a day to finally convince Ball on the matter. Again, not because the man was stupid, but simply because he wasn't accustomed to thinking in strategic terms.
Worse than that, really. Ball had been trained _not_ to think in such terms. In the modern era of line warfare, massed muskets, and cannons against equal masses—and naval warfare was no different at all—the last thing an officer wanted was sergeants who tried to think for themselves. There was no room in such utterly brutal and up-close combat for independent initiative. What was wanted, from the men and the noncommissioned officers who led them, was simply obedience, discipline, and courage. Don't _think._ Just face the enemy, fire, accept the casualties, reload, step forward, fire again. And do it and do it and do it—the very same thing, invariant and inflexible—until the enemy broke.
Patrick Driscol might be an exception, to a degree. To begin with, he'd had the experience of serving as what amounted to Winfield Scott's sergeant major in the Niagara campaign. And with his years of service in the French army during the Napoleonic Wars, he had a much wider range of experience than someone like Charles Ball. Still, even Patrick was likely to be rigid and angular in his thinking. He'd be oriented toward war as a series of battles, rather than seeing war as a complete campaign.
So be it. Robert was not frustrated, really, even if there'd been moments over the past twenty-four hours when he'd felt like hitting Ball on the head with a pistol butt. The truth was, he was in his element.
It had been a long time. But he was finding that, near the age of sixty, his body might be creaking a bit—leaving aside the lingering effects of his wounds in the American war—but there was nothing wrong with his brain. He'd been, all false modesty aside, one of the half dozen best generals in the British army—and that, during a time when the quality of generalship had reached a peak because of the demands of the great war.
His wife had commented on it, the night before. In a manner of speaking, the memory of which left Robert feeling half embarrassed and half smug.
"And what brought _that_ on?" she'd asked, smiling from under a sweat-soaked brow. Her hair, splayed across the little pillow in their cabin, had been almost as wet. It was a hot and humid climate, and neither of them were what you'd call spry any longer. He'd been covered with just as much sweat.
How to explain?
"Never mind," she said, adding a little laugh. "Thank God I'm too old to get pregnant, or I'd be bearing quintuplets in nine months."
She reached over and stroked his cheek. "Robert," she said softly, "I know you're feeling...useful again. But please be careful. This is not actually our war, and you are not actually a general in it."
"Yes, dearest," he'd agreed. Knowing, finally, that he was lying. Or would be, at any rate, before much longer. He would _make_ it his war. Share in it, for a certainty.
All through the next day, as he argued with Ball, one part of Robert's mind had been attentive to his son. David, he understood, was making the same decision himself—and doing it with the verve and recklessness of a nineteen-year-old. By midmorning, his mother's protestations notwithstanding, he'd had a spare uniform refitted by the captain's wife and was training with one of the gun crews.
He looked to be quite good at it, too.
It couldn't be said that Ball actually sulked after agreeing to Robert's proposal. But he was noticeably gruff toward his men for a time thereafter. If Ball had been harsh and even caustic during the moments of combat the previous day, Robert had found him to be very good humored any other time.
Fortunately, the time was brief. Before the sun had reached the western horizon, Robert was vindicated.
Twice, in fact—even if, ironically, neither of the instances had anything to do with cutting lines of supply. But Ball was beginning to learn what any capable general knew in his bones: that a good strategic move always brought serendipitous results in its wake.
"Hey, we're noncombatants!" the captain of the captured steamboat protested.
"Not any more," Ball countered cheerfully.
The captain stared at the Arkansas soldiers who were hacking away the front guard of his steamboat with axes. Then, stared at the soldiers manhandling a cannon from one steamboat to the other. It was a tricky operation, even with the two boats tied together in the middle of the river.
"This is piracy!" he squawked.
Robert cleared his throat, drawing the man's eyes. "Actually, it's not, by the laws of war. The Confederacy of the Arkansas has been invaded by an army coming out of the territory of the United States. Until and unless the United States makes clear through diplomatic channels that there was no official involvement—and takes rigorous and public measures to put a stop to such offenses—General Ball has no choice but to conclude that a state of war exists. That being the case, he has every right—indeed, the obligation as an officer—to seize enemy property that might be turned to military advantage."
He added a smile for good measure. "Provided, of course, he follows proper military procedure and sees to it that his men remain disciplined and no outrages are committed against the persons owning the property. Which, I dare say, he has done meticulously in this case."
He turned the smile onto the American who'd been scribbling furiously in his notebook since the moment the steamboat had come into sight and been captured. "Wouldn't you agree, Mr. Bryant?"
"Oh, yes," the scribbler replied, not even looking up from his scribbling. "Been right the proper gentleman."
"Damn New Englander!"
Bryant finally looked up from his notebook. "New Englander or not, Captain, I remain a citizen of the United States. Registered to vote, I assure you. And I'm just as curious to know as General Ball is, how it came to pass that an army large enough to commit savageries that would have shamed the Huns managed to assemble, train, and launch an attack on a neighboring country from the state of Louisiana—without, so far as I can determine at the moment, any official of that state issuing so much as a peep of protest. Perhaps I shall ask you for an interview. Being as you are, I understand, a citizen of Louisiana."
The captain's jaws tightened. Bryant went on, relentlessly: "I'm curious to discover if the state of Louisiana entertains a different translation of the Constitution than my native state of Massachusetts—or any other state of the Union, so far as I'm aware. I refer you to Article I, Section 8. The right to select officers for the militia is reserved to the states, true enough, but only Congress can declare war."
"That ain't no Gol-derned militia! That's just Crittenden and his boys!"
"Ah. Pirates, in other words. Or bandits, if you prefer. May I quote you to that effect?"
"You sure as Sam Hill can _not._ Those boys find out I said any such thing, my life ain't worth a plucked chicken."
"Oh, splendid. That'll do even better." Bryant began scribbling in his notebook. "A knowledgeable local source who insisted on remaining anonymous for his own safety depicted Crittenden and his men as criminal extortionists, who would cold-bloodedly murder any man who exposed their nefarious activities to the light of day."
"I said no such thing!"
"Actually, you did," said Robert mildly. "If not in so many words."
Ball was less diplomatic. "Sure did. And fuck you. This boat now belongs to the Arkansas Army. And if you don't pilot it for me, you best stop worrying about what Crittenden's men'll do to you."
His black face could have served as the model for a bust entitled _Menace._
"You wouldn't!" the captain protested.
Ball sneered. "No, _I_ wouldn't. Don't need to. You don't do what I tell you, you be useless. Ain't no room for useless men on this boat, so I'll have to set you ashore. A ways down, though. In Choctaw territory."
The captain's face paled. Ball swiveled his head to the south. "I do believe the Choctaws be pissed, right around now. Pissed like you wouldn't believe. 'Course, they might listen to you, when you explain you just an innocent bystander. But if I was you, I surely wouldn't want to bet on it."
"All right, then," the captain muttered.
Less than half an hour later, the newly expanded flotilla made its next capture: a keelboat, filled with white men and three negroes. One young black woman and two black boys.
They didn't put up a fight. Not with two steamboats alongside and cannons trained on them. And close to thirty well-armed men with muskets leveled.
Bryant interviewed the blacks, who turned out to be captives. The boys, at least. The young woman—not much more than a girl, really—was too distraught to be coherent. Clearly enough, she'd been badly abused.
Ball's interview of the white men was extremely brief. There wasn't any mystery about their identity, after all, even without the testimony of the two boys.
"Hang 'em," he ordered, "I want to save our powder."
"You can't do that!" shrieked the man who seemed to be the leader of the group.
Ball's expression had long since gone beyond menace.
"Watch me, you pile of shit," he said. "You'll have the best view around."
After it was done, and the corpses had been pitched into the river, Ball took a few minutes to settle his anger. That was the mark of a good officer, too. Robert's hopes for the man kept rising.
Still higher, when Ball turned to him for advice.
"What do you recommend now, General? I'd dearly love to have some knowledge of what's happening upriver." He nodded to the west. "The Arkansas, I mean."
The two steamboats were now positioned right at the confluence. Controlling both rivers completely, at least until such time as an opposing force of warships could arrive. Which wasn't likely to happen any time soon, in Robert's estimation. Unless he was badly mistaken, both the state of Louisiana and the American federal authorities had been caught by surprise by Crittenden's expedition. Not the fact of it, so much as the timing. From what they'd been able to glean, Crittenden had come into a sudden and unexpected windfall in terms of arms. The expectation had been that he couldn't launch any serious attack on Arkansas until the following year, if ever.
By now, after two decades of constant freebooting activity into Mexico and—in times past—Florida and Amelia Island, the mere fact that a band of adventurers had gathered somewhere in the Gulf and was making noise didn't really mean that much. Even as large a group as Crittenden had assembled needed more in the way of arms and ammunition than personal weaponry. Following the Adams-Onis Treaty, the United States had clamped down on the former custom of providing unofficial assistance through government channels.
As he pondered the answer to Ball's question, Robert's eyes fell on Bryant. The young New England poet and journalist had left off his interview of the rescued negroes and was back to scribbling. He had the look of an energetic and curious man, as well as an intelligent and well-educated one. It would be interesting to see what his investigations turned up, once he returned to the United States. Somebody had provided those arms to Crittenden—or the money for them, at any rate. And as quickly as it had happened, it had to have been one man or a small handful. No collection taken up from a large group contributing small amounts could possibly have done it so quickly and so secretively.
A cabal, in short. The American public doted on tales of cabals and conspiracies in high places. Robert had hopes for the poet, too.
But it was time to give Ball an answer, and the answer was obvious—even if Robert didn't much like it. Still...
Parker and the two McParlands weren't the first young men he'd sent into harm's way in his life. Not by several decades' worth. He doubted they would be the last.
"A reconnaissance is in order, I think. Now that"—he nodded toward the captured keelboat—"you've acquired the means for it, without jeopardizing your main force. I'd recommend Captain McParland for the commanding officer. Beyond that—"
But Ball was already turning away, and Robert closed his mouth. There was really no need to give Ball advice on the rest.
"Anthony!" Ball hollered. "You and Corporals McParland and Parker. Take enough men to man the oars on the keelboat and head upriver." He pointed to the west, his finger indicating the Arkansas. "I want information, mind. Don't be gettin' in no pointless scrapes."
Robert hesitated. But before it was necessary to intervene, Ball corrected his own error.
"Ah, never mind that. I don't need the information so much as Patrick does. You do whatever you gotta to do to find him. Let him know where things stand down here."
Captain McParland nodded and began giving orders. Robert relaxed and went back to watching Bryant at his work.
It was quite a bright day, he realized. Even now, so close to sundown.
Just after sunset, many miles downriver, another keelboat finally drifted ashore. The sole survivor of the three men in the boat clambered painfully onto the east bank of the Mississippi.
As exhausted as he was—the wound in his leg had kept him from sleeping—he was still shaking from the whole experience. Seeing most of his friends ripped to shreds by that incredible steamboat— _since when did steamboats have cannons?_ he was still wondering—and then watching two of them slowly bleed to death, was never anything he'd expected when he joined up with Crittenden. He was only twenty-two years old.
He'd barely gotten ashore when he half sensed a threat. Turning his head, he got a glimpse of a war club coming at him before he lost consciousness altogether.
When he woke up, his head ached and there was dried blood caked on the side of his face. He tried to wipe it off but discovered his hands were tied.
What—?
Everything was flickering. It took him a while to realize that night had fallen and that he was seeing everything by the light of a fire in a small clearing. A while longer, to realize that he'd been tied spread-eagled between two trees in the clearing. And a bit longer still, to discover that he was naked.
Not long at all, then, to realize the rest. The dozen or so men also in the clearing were all Choctaws, from their outfits. He was pretty sure they were, anyway. Indians all looked alike to him, but since he'd moved to Mississippi from South Carolina he'd gotten to know a little of the differences in the way the various southern tribes dressed.
Knives, however—Indian, white, or Creole, it really didn't matter—all looked very much the same. And he was looking at an awful lot of them.
"Oh, shit," was all he could think to say.
**CHAPTER 15**
_Arkansas Post_
OCTOBER 5, 1824
It took a day longer to reach Arkansas Post than Zachary Taylor had expected. He'd assumed that, this being the autumn, the White River would be fairly low, and fording it would be easy enough.
And so, in fact, it had proved—once they _got_ to the river. What he hadn't realized was how difficult the terrain between the Mississippi and the White rivers would be in the first place. No settlers had moved into this part of the Delta yet, and the natural landscape was essentially unmodified. Swamps, bayous, oxbow lakes, a profusion of creeks—everything that cavalrymen detested.
Crossing the White itself hadn't been a big problem, although they'd had to travel upriver a ways to find a ford. But, finally, a day late, they'd arrived at Arkansas Post.
More precisely, _would_ have arrived—except by now, the fort was under siege.
"A day late and a dollar short," Taylor muttered to himself. "For want of a nail. Hell and damnation."
He didn't even have the advantage of high terrain, from which he might have been able to spot the gaps in the siege lines. There wasn't any high terrain worth talking about, in the area. The only reason he was able to observe the Post at all, from a reasonably close range, was simply because most of the area north of the river hadn't been cleared yet, and the terrain was still heavily wooded.
That there _were_ gaps in the siege lines was certain, for the good and simple reason that the terms "siege" and "lines," applied to Crittenden's army, were laughable to begin with. That wasn't really an army out there; it was just a very big lynch mob. Or bandit raid—take your pick. Given the nature of Crittenden's forces, the distinction was pretty much meaningless.
Unfortunately for Crittenden—this much was also obvious, even from Taylor's limited vantage point—the lynchees who were the target of the mob's attention were hardly the sort they'd have found in a local county jail. First, because they were armed. Second, because the authorities in Arkansas had apparently taken the time since the founding of the Confederacy four years earlier to turn a ramshackle French trading post into a fort.
A frontier fort, granted, with wooden palisades instead of stone walls. But Taylor could see that they'd even dug a moat around the fortified town, on all three sides that weren't already sheltered by the Arkansas, and kept it filled with water diverted from the river. No dinky little ditch, either. This was full-scale military construction, with a twenty-foot moat, glacis, scarp, counterscarp, the whole works. There were even berms protecting the four-pounders positioned just outside the walls of the fort—with gates right behind them through which the guns could be hauled if it appeared an enemy was making a successful assault on the outer fortifications.
Not that there was much chance of that, with an enemy like Crittenden's mob. The Arkansans had kept the glacis meticulously clear of any growth and had cleared the area well beyond it. Any assaulting force would have to cross at least five hundred yards in the open, the last thirty yards while climbing up a glacis; then, have to cross the moat, whose waters were undoubtedly at least eight feet deep; and then have to clamber up a scarp before they could finally reach the fort's guns. Which, by then, would have been withdrawn into the palisade anyway. All the while, being swept by canister fired from four-pounders manned—Taylor was sure of this, too—by some of the same veterans of the Iron Battalion who had broken British elite regiments at the Mississippi in 1815 and routed the Louisiana militia at Algiers five years later.
Even the U.S. Army would suffer major casualties in any such assault against defenders like these. Taylor himself wouldn't be willing to try it without a minimum of three regiments in the attacking force—and only if those were regular units, not state militias. In his estimate, the likelihood that Crittenden's yahoos would be able to storm the fort was about that of the proverbial snowball's chance in Hell.
Not far away, looking at Arkansas Post from the opposite side of the river, two other men reached the same conclusion.
"Well, shit," said Ray Thompson.
"We are well and truly fucked," agreed Scott Powers. Sighing, he squatted on the ground, propping himself with his musket. "God damn Robert Crittenden. God damn all Crittendens. God damn every Kentuckian who ever lived. Louisianans, too."
Thompson squatted next to him. "So what do we do now?"
Powers gave him a sideways glance. "Meaning no offense, Ray, but what's 'we' got to do with it? You got hard-nosed creditors. I don't." He inclined the musket forward, pointing toward Arkansas Post. "You want to get your head blown off trying to take that place, you go right ahead. Me, this was just supposed to be a stepping-stone to Texas. I'll take Mexican regulars over these crazy Arkansas niggers any day of the week, and twice on Sunday."
Thompson scowled but didn't make any response. He and Scott were pretty good friends, all things considered. But "friendship" in their circles had some clear and definite limits. That Powers would abandon him in an instant if he thought it necessary was a given.
The opposite was also true, of course. And now, somewhere in the back of his mind, Thompson was starting to gauge that possibility.
_"Non,"_ Charles Lallemand said forcefully to Robert Crittenden. _"Absolument pas!"_ He pointed stiffly at the fort across the river and shifted to heavily accented English. "We have no more chance of storming it than we do of swimming back to Alexandria."
"Less," his brother Henri-Dominique added with a sneer. His eyes ranged over the mass of men clustered on the south bank of the Arkansas. Most of them were shouting curses and jeers at their opponents across the river, brandishing their muskets in what they apparently thought were warlike gestures. A fair number of them were even firing at Arkansas Post. At a range of perhaps four hundred yards, and getting low on powder.
It might be possible to plumb the depths of American stupidity, but Henri-Dominique suspected the line necessary would be so long that only a team of oxen could hold it up. Why had he and his brother ever agreed to this madness in the first place?
The answer, alas, was obvious. Money. Their enterprises in Alabama had turned out poorly, and they'd not been able to resist Crittenden's blandishments concerning the wealth of new plantations in the Delta. So perhaps their own stupidity was not much shallower.
Glumly, while his brother Charles and Robert Crittenden continued their argument, Henri-Dominique studied the Arkansas fortifications across the river. About the only consolation he could find was that at least they'd been designed by a man who'd also once served in the emperor's colors.
Poor consolation, though. The empire was gone, vanished, and there was today to be dealt with. Henri-Dominique and his brother had both known, of course, that Driscol was a veteran of the French army. But they'd never expected anything like _this._ And, unfortunately—he took a moment to curse himself and Charles along with Crittenden and his men—they hadn't taken seriously the few reports they'd gotten about the nature of the fortifications at Arkansas Post. In their experience, an American "moat" was a poor excuse for a ditch, a "walled fort" was a glorified log cabin, and such terms as "glacis" and "counterscarp" were quite literally foreign.
He was still surprised, though, at the quality of the design. He wouldn't have thought a sergeant, on his own, would have been able to come up with it. Especially a sergeant whose service, by all accounts, had been entirely in units of the line.
_"Absolument pas!"_ his brother repeated.
_"Merde, alors,"_ Henri-Dominique added for good measure.
A few hundred yards to the west, and on the Post side of the river, Captain Anthony McParland had come to the same conclusions arrived at by Taylor and Lallemand.
"No chance they're going to take the Post," he told the two corporals. "Not without a siege, anyway—and the Laird'll be here long before that."
His grin was on the wicked side. "I'll add that the stupid bastards got themselves penned up, on top of everything else." He pointed backward toward the river, which was now hidden by the woods. "The Arkansas makes a loop, right there, just opposite the Post. General Ball told me that's why the Laird shifted the fort from the original French location. Any enemy who camps opposite the Post can be trapped against the river real easy, since they're in a sort of little peninsula. And I'll bet you a month's pay—mine against yours—that's exactly what the Laird's planning to do."
"What's a peninsula?" his cousin asked.
The captain glared at him. "You're supposed to know that already!"
Sheffield Parker gave his fellow corporal a quick glance. "Cal was sick that day when they covered it in the sergeants' school." To Cal, he explained: "It's what they call a piece of land stickin' out into the middle of the water. Like Florida. The whole state's basically a big peninsula."
"Oh. Yeah. I was sick that day."
"You was malingering that day, you mean," his older cousin growled. But there wasn't much heat in it. In truth, he was more surprised that Parker remembered than that Callender didn't know. The "sergeants' school" that the Laird had instituted in the army of Arkansas was a compressed sort of affair. Worse, even, than the officers' training Anthony himself had gone through—and he well remembered how many once-mentioned items he'd forgotten. Mostly thanks to being promptly dressed down by his superiors soon afterward.
"What do you want to do, sir?" Parker asked.
The young black corporal was meticulous about military protocol in the field, unlike most of the white noncoms. So were most of the other black ones, now that Anthony thought about it. On some level, very deep, quiet, and still, he'd come to realize that the black soldiers in the army—the noncoms and officers, even more so—took the whole business more seriously than white ones usually did. All the white people of Arkansas, leaving aside the foreign missionaries, were still Americans in every sense of the term except formal citizenship. So they shared the generally casual attitude toward military matters that characterized most Americans.
The blacks didn't. For them, the army was all that stood between freedom and a return to slavery. A line so sharp, so clear, and so dark that they cleaved to military values the way a devout Christian cleaved to the cross. It was sometimes a little frightening. Anthony's education had expanded a lot over the years since the British war. He'd even studied the classics, now—some of them at least. There were ways in which the new little nation taking shape between the Ozarks and the Ouachitas reminded him of ancient accounts of Sparta, more than of anything he remembered growing up in New York. Or the Swiss of a few centuries ago, that the Laird had told him about, whose pikemen were feared by every power in Europe.
Sheff 's own mother had absorbed it in the few months since the family had arrived in Arkansas. As much as she'd opposed her son joining the army in the first place, he also knew from his cousin that her last words to Sheff when he left for New Orleans were "There be a war, boy, I want you back alive. But I rather see you dead than come back and cain't tell me we won. You hear me?"
Before Anthony could make a decision, one of the soldiers from the squad he'd sent out to make a reconnaissance of the area returned.
"Sir, there's some people not far away. U.S. Army soldiers. Maybe a dozen of them. And they got three black women with them. Well, a woman and two girls." The soldier turned and pointed to the northwest. "About four hundred yards that way."
Anthony looked in the direction the man was pointing. But, of course, couldn't see more than maybe fifty yards, and that only in spots. Still mostly uncleared, the area around Arkansas Post was heavily wooded. Mostly gum and oak trees, with some cypress here and there. For all practical purposes, most of the region was still a forest.
The only cleared land, except for a few farms scattered about, was the area south of the river and right around the Post. And that had been cleared for purely military purposes. Anthony was pretty sure Crittenden's army was so mindless that they still hadn't figured out that the only reason they could all assemble easily in the peninsula opposite the Post was that it had been cleared for precisely that reason. It was a prepared killing ground—and they were the prey who'd stumbled into it.
"Are the women captives?"
"Don't think so, sir," the soldier replied, shaking his head. "The older woman's riding a horse, and the girls are sharing one. They real light-skinned, too. The girls, I mean. The woman—might be their mother—she's high yeller."
Anthony's lips quirked slightly. The soldier was black, and like most black people the captain knew, he'd parse skin shades and tones even more meticulously than a white man. It was amusing, in a way—although it could be rough at times on someone like Corporal Parker, who was very dark-skinned and had no white features at all in his face.
On the other hand, the same was true of General Charles Ball, and nobody in their right mind in Arkansas—white, black, or red—treated him lightly. Not more than once, for sure.
"All right. There's no way we can get into the Post, anyhow, except after nightfall. We may as well go see what they're up to. What's the officer's rank?"
"Don't know, sir. We didn't get close enough to be able to see the insignia. But...he don't look to be nothing like a lieutenant, I can tell you that. Nor even a captain, we don't think."
_A small unit of U.S. cavalrymen, led by a field-grade officer. What would they be doing here?_
Now, he was genuinely curious, not simply professionally interested.
"Let's go find out."
One of Taylor's men spotted the Arkansas unit, but not until they were forty yards away. Stiffly, the colonel realized that if this had been an ambush, they'd be in sore straits.
"Friend or foe?" he called out.
"Thought we might ask you the same thing!" came the response. "Seeing as how you're trespassing."
The tone didn't seem belligerent so much as amused, though. And Taylor couldn't detect any trace of real hostility on the face of the Arkansas officer who emerged from the woods. He wasn't carrying a weapon, either, although he had a pistol at his belt.
"Captain McParland, of the army of Arkansas. And you are, sir?"
"Zachary Taylor, lieutenant colonel in the United States Army." Since the next question was a foregone conclusion, he pointed a thumb at Julia Chinn, whose horse was standing next to his. "We're an escort for Miz Julia Chinn here, and her two children. She's—ah..."
Not even Taylor was prepared to publicly refer to Julia as Senator Johnson's wife. For a white man to marry a black woman was illegal in the state of Kentucky. Illegal in any state of the Union, so far as he knew, outside of some of the New England states. The colonel wasn't sure if that legal proscription extended so far as to banning any third-party reference to such a marriage that implied it was legitimate, but...
Like any career professional officer, Taylor was chary of crossing such lines. Fortunately, an alternative explanation was at hand. That a man was a husband was something a legislature could decree. That he was a father was decreed by Nature and the God who had created it—and, in this case, the father acknowledged the fact publicly and openly, and always had.
"The girls are Senator Johnson's daughters," he said. "Senator Johnson of Kentucky, that is."
Then, pointing to them: "Adaline's the one sitting in front. Imogene's behind her. The senator and Miz Julia wanted them to attend the school in New Antrim. The one that's being set up, I mean."
He could sense the relaxation in the Arkansas officer. More to the point, he could see several of the muskets in the woods that hadn't _quite_ been pointing at him, lifting away entirely.
Still, there was never any harm in slathering the cake with some icing. "Sam Houston asked me to provide them with an escort."
Houston's name might be cursed as often as praised in the United States, but it was a magic talisman in Arkansas. Now, the captain was smiling cheerfully and waving his men forward.
"Come on out, boys. Everybody's friendly."
While Captain McParland and the U.S. colonel conferred, Sheff Parker found himself having to fight off the urge to ogle the three women.
Especially the girls. Lord, they were pretty. Even if they were still too young to be entertaining any such thoughts.
"Stop staring," Cal murmured. "You bein' rude."
Corporal McParland himself, Sheff noticed, wasn't looking any other place either.
"You the one to talk."
"Prettiest girls I seen in an age. Too bad they're so young still."
"Girls grow up."
But the moment Sheff said it, he realized how absurd he was being. First, because Senator Johnson's family situation was famous all over the South. Notorious, maybe, for white people. But black folks didn't feel the same way about it. Freedmen weren't allowed to vote in Kentucky, no more than they were in any state of the United States that Sheff knew of, except maybe some of the New England states. But if they had been, every black man's vote would have gone to Richard M. Johnson, any election he ever stood for. That would have been true even if he wasn't also the man demanding the abolition of debt imprisonment.
These were _rich_ girls. Important girls. Beyond that, they were so light-skinned that even "high yeller" didn't apply. Sheff might as well be entertaining fantasies about jumping over the moon.
So, he looked away. And, an instant later, saw Cal do the same. He realized then, not really ever having thought about it before, that there could even be things that a white boy couldn't entertain fantasies about, either.
That thought went through his mind like a crystal, bringing many things into clear and certain place that hadn't been so before. There was no barrier to his friendship with Cal, he suddenly realized, except things that were not decreed in any page of the Bible he knew. And he knew them all.
McParland was ordering a camp made.
"It's your turn to cook," Sheff said. "Don't argue about it. I been keepin' track and you ain't."
Life in the army did, indeed, lead to blasphemy. Even Sheff was sometimes guilty of it. "Hell of a state of affairs," Cal complained, "when a curree adds and subtracts better than a white man."
"Not my fault you miss so many days in school. And don't you be pissin' me off, or you won't have nobody to help you catch up."
"Well. That's true. I cook better'n you do anyway—even if that's upside down, too."
**CHAPTER 16**
_Arkansas Post_
OCTOBER 5, 1824
That night, Taylor and his party, along with the unit from the Arkansas Army, snuck into the fort.
"Snuck," insofar as a relaxed and almost open promenade—the U.S. party on horseback, even—could be given the term. The young black corporal with Captain McParland had led the way, advancing alone to within sight of Arkansas Post and calling out to the sentries.
Taylor had been rather impressed by his courage. Granted, there was no danger from any of Crittenden's outfit. Taylor's cavalrymen had scouted the area to make sure there were none such present. But the real risk in such a situation would come from the sentries themselves. As keyed up and tense as they were certain to be, they'd be quite likely to fire as soon as they spotted anyone moving in the area beyond the walls.
The corporal's black face had helped, of course. There'd be no one in Crittenden's army with skin anywhere near as dark. But the night was dark, too, with only a quarter moon in the sky, so sentries couldn't be certain of anyone's race at a distance. And while the green uniform of an Arkansas soldier was easily discernible in daylight, at night it simply looked like any dark garment.
Fortunately, the youngster was shrewd. As soon as he emerged from the woods he began singing "Blue Tail Fly," with its well-known refrain:
_Jimmy crack corn, and I don't care_
_Jimmy crack corn, and I don't care_
_Jimmy crack corn, and I don't care_
_My master's gone away_
Taylor found himself chuckling as he watched. Nobody in Crittenden's army was likely to be singing a song about a slave's glee at his master's death from an accident!
The boy had a very nice tenor voice, too.
"Oh, he sure sings pretty," he heard Imogene say.
He discovered that Arkansas Post was under the command of a Major Joseph Totten. A bit to his surprise, a white officer. Taylor had known, of course—Captain McParland being living proof he'd already encountered—that a number of the officers and even enlisted men in the Arkansas forces were white. But it was still a bit startling. Not so much the skin color itself as the apparent lack of concern that anyone seemed to have about it, one way or the other. Totten's second-in-command was a Captain Davies, whose dark face seemed to have a subtly Indian cast to it. Quite possibly, the son or grandson of one of the early slaves taken by the Cherokees or Creeks in the past century. Manumission was far more common in the Indian tribes than it was among white Americans, and it often took the form of a former slave or at least their children marrying into one of the clans.
That, too, was a break with American custom. Andrew Jackson had created something of a scandal by giving Driscol's sergeant Charles Ball a field promotion to lieutenant during the New Orleans campaign. That had been in clear violation of U.S. Army regulations, which did not permit black freedmen to rise to any commissioned rank.
Jackson being Jackson—with the great victory at the Mississippi to add luster to his reputation for fury—no one had dared to object officially at the time. But after Ball had resigned from the army, the authorities had quietly seen to it that there would be no repetition of the problem and that the promotion would not establish any sort of precedent.
Arkansas, clearly, had different rules. Taylor wasn't sure if he approved. On the other hand, he was no more sure that he didn't. He did not consider himself an intellectual officer, in the way that Winfield Scott was, but he thought a man had to be a plain damn fool not to understand that there was ultimately something dark and dangerous about having slavery at the foundation of a republic. Even though his own family's considerable wealth—even his own position, to a degree—rested on that same institution.
That said, he had no more use for abolitionists than he did for men like John Calhoun. Fine and dandy to denounce slavery in the abstract—but how was one to get rid of it? Two great obstacles stood in the way, the second more immovable than the first.
The first, of course, was simple economics. Slavery was profitable, and the solid basis for most of the wealth of Southern gentlemen. Easy enough for a New England merchant—whose own family's wealth might very well have derived a century earlier from the slave trade—to demand that a Virginia farmer bankrupt himself by freeing his slaves. Not so easy for the farmer.
But, even if that were done, what would happen next? How was a society to absorb two million freed negroes? That was the second rock below the surface, and the one that all schemes for abolition foundered upon.
Until now, perhaps. If the United States could not do it, what if its new neighbor _could?_
Zachary Taylor didn't know the answer to that question. What he did decide, that night, studying Major Totten and his staff of officers, was that he was glad the question was finally being asked by somebody, and in dead earnest.
Many miles away, on a steamboat at the confluence of the Mississippi and Arkansas rivers, an English lady was pondering the same issue. In her case, a rumination brought on by the experience of the past two evenings, watching John Brown leading his large family through a reading of the Bible.
A large family which had just gotten larger, and darker, since Brown had calmly assumed that the three rescued negroes—having no other family any longer—would find a home with his.
"He simply doesn't _care,_ does he?" she murmured to her husband.
Sitting next to her in the sheltered rear of the _Comet_ 's main deck, Robert watched Brown and his people for a moment before answering.
"No. He doesn't."
"I find him a somewhat frightening man."
Her husband smiled wryly. "I find him considerably more than 'somewhat' frightening, my dear. Still..."
He trailed off. Eliza suspected he had no more of a ready answer than she did.
_Still..._
The day before, in conversation with the two young corporals before they'd left with Captain McParland, the black one had told her what Brown had said the first time he met him. To a band of slave-catchers.
_I believe in the Golden Rule, sir, and the Declaration of Independence. I think that both mean the same thing. And, that being so, it is better that a whole generation should pass off the face of the earth—men, women, and children—by a violent death than that one jot of either should fail in this country. I mean exactly so, sir._
Said it calmly and matter-of-factly, just as he'd calmly and matter-off-actly slain the one slave-catcher who'd doubted him.
A frightening man, yes. A fanatic, some would say.
But Eliza had also heard the tale of the young black woman—bits of it, rather, since the poor girl was still half out of her wits. Faced with such incredible barbarity, the term "fanatic" seemed almost meaningless. She understood now, really for the first time, why her husband had found himself drawn into Clarkson's movement. Understood, finally, why he insisted on keeping that horrid illustration of the _Brookes_ on the wall of their home in Ireland.
Quietly, she rose from the bench and went over to stand by the guardrail. The quarter moon glinted off the waters of the Mississippi, a shining crescent half obscured by mud and slime.
If one allowed oneself—even for a moment—to consider that those spoons shaped like people nestled in a drawer were _actually_ people...
She could hear Brown's voice murmuring in the background. The words were indistinguishable, but she knew he was reading from Judges. A Calvinist through and through, Brown was partial to the Old Testament. His God was a wrathful deity.
Eliza being an Anglican, her God was a considerably gentler Creator. But she could no longer avoid the simple and obvious truth that if those spoons were _actually_ people...each and every one of them a real human being...full and complete in every particular....
Not even the sweetest cherub in Heaven would show any mercy at all. Less—much less—than any man who ever lived, be he never so fanatic.
A shudder ran through her whole body. At that moment, the Mississippi seemed like a dark torrent rushing toward a pit of eternal damnation, carrying her with it. Scream as loudly as she might, no angel would hear. Nor care, if they did.
Robert was at her side an instant later, running his hand up her arm.
"Are you ill, dearest?" His voice was full of concern. "These waters are not healthy."
A half laugh, half sob burst from her lips. "Not healthy!"
But, blessedly, the horrible vision was gone. She took a deep breath and sighed it out.
"No, I'm quite well, Robert. Just...a bad moment."
She leaned her head into his shoulder. "You intend to see this through to the end, don't you?"
She didn't wait for an answer. "And our blessed rambunctious son, too!"
She laughed again, very softly, but there was no half sob to go with it. "Very well, husband. I'll help. As best I can."
Near midnight, Captain McParland and the two corporals left the fort again. On horseback, having been assured by Major Totten that the few enemy units who had crossed to the north bank during the day had retreated to their own camp before nightfall. They'd have no difficulty moving upriver to find Driscol and his army—who were surely coming, the major had no doubt at all—beyond the obstacles posed by the terrain itself.
The rest of McParland's soldiers remained behind to strengthen the garrison at Arkansas Post.
After carefully asking permission, Taylor took the opportunity to inspect the fort. He was a bit surprised that Totten gave that permission. It was quite possible that a time would come, and not so far in the future, when Taylor might be investing Arkansas Post. If not he himself, some other officer in the army of the United States.
But there might lie the answer, as well. A potential foe, forewarned, might never become a foe at all. These things were always difficult to predict. For a professional soldier even more than most people, life was seen in the words of the apostle: _through a glass, darkly._
The fort itself was quite impressive: well designed and sturdily constructed, especially by the standards of the frontier. Taylor didn't envy Crittenden at all, trying to take it.
In fact, he very much doubted that he could. Even though, by now, Crittenden's army must have swelled to something like fifteen hundred men. He'd lost some through the inevitable desertion that always plagued such jury-rigged military forces as little bands of men peeled away after finding some loot. But he'd gained more than he'd lost, since his initial force of roughly a thousand men coming up from Alexandria had been augmented by adventurers coming down the Mississippi from Missouri and the other border states.
True enough, Crittenden's army greatly outnumbered the garrison at Arkansas Post, which didn't have more than a hundred and fifty men. All other things being equal, a ten-to-one numerical superiority would normally be quite sufficient to overrun even a well-designed fort.
But all other things were very far from equal. Crittenden's force was more in the way of a mob or a gang of outright criminals than what any sane man—certainly a professional officer—would call an army. And while Taylor was sure that most of the fort's garrison were green troops, a sufficient number of them were veterans of the Iron Battalion to serve as a spine and a stiffener.
Not that much stiffening would be needed, anyway. All but perhaps a dozen of the soldiers in Arkansas Post were black. Surrender, for them, meant a life of slavery. And, if anything, the fate of the white soldiers would most likely be worse. Under these circumstances, the term "nigger-lover," for such men as filled the inchoate ranks of Crittenden's army, amounted to a death sentence. Especially after the blood they'd spill, getting into the fort.
They had women to defend, too, at least fifty of them. And children. The women would suffer worse than their menfolk if Crittenden's men made it over the wall. The youngest of the children, also, since Crittenden's men wouldn't want the burden of carrying toddlers all the way back to New Orleans. Just bash in their little skulls with a musket butt while waiting a turn to rape their mothers and sisters.
But he didn't think it would come to that. In fact, the more he wandered through the Post and studied the soldiers in their green uniforms, the more certain he became that it wouldn't. Those might be green troops, mostly, but they'd clearly had considerable training. They were tense, yes, but it was more the tension of a racehorse before the gun went off than the tension of men expecting calamity.
In fact, he was pretty sure that most of them were downright eager to see the sun come up.
He laughed, then, standing in the middle of an alien army.
So was he, when you got right down to it. Lieutenant Colonel Zachary Taylor wasn't certain of many things in life. But he surely and purely loathed the sort of men who were gathered across the river. Come morning, let the bastards bleed. And bleed and bleed and bleed, until the river ran red and the dirt was crimson mud and the stink of their emptied bowels drew every crow and beetle in Creation.
_The Arkansas River, five miles west of Arkansas Post_
OCTOBER 6, 1824
Captain McParland and the two corporals found the Laird's army at half past two o'clock in the morning.
It wasn't hard. The whole river seemed covered with boats. From what Anthony could tell, by the light of the quarter moon, Driscol had commandeered every single rivercraft in or around New Antrim, from the steamboat _Hercules_ —the newest of Shreve's boats, and the pride of his company's fleet—all the way down to rowboats and fishing skiffs.
By the time they arrived, it looked as if a good half of the Arkansas Army had already debarked onto the southern shore of the river. Which was, unfortunately, the opposite bank from the one they were on.
That proved to be a minor problem, however. Driscol had sent several keelboats to patrol the north bank of the Arkansas, and McParland had Corporal Parker go down to summon them.
The device having worked once, Sheff saw no reason not to do it again. He had just finished the fourth verse—
_Well the pony jumped, he start, he pitch_
_He threw my master in the ditch_
_He died and the jury wondered why_
_The verdict was the blue-tail fly_
—when the picket in the nearest boat called out: "Who's there? Name yourself!"
Parker stepped out into plain view from behind a gum tree at the edge of the river. "It's Corporal Parker. With the Third Regiment."
"That you, Sheff? You just in time!"
Easy as that.
After Captain McParland finished his report, standing on the main deck of the _Hercules,_ Patrick Driscol spent perhaps half a minute examining the steamboat. Then, cocked his head at the two men standing nearby in civilian clothing.
One was white, one was black—but their garments were both expensive, and equally so.
"It's mostly your money, gentlemen," Driscol said. "So I suppose I should ask permission. Mind you, I make no guarantees I'll accept the answer."
The white man started to glare at him but wound up just rolling his eyes. "The day I agreed to be your partner..." Henry Shreve sighed. "Fine, Patrick, fine. Let's go ahead and wreck _another_ of my boats. Why not?"
The black man with him, who looked to be about twice his size, shrugged massive shoulders. "The captain didn't say they was wrecked, Henry. Just maybe banged up a little bit."
"Crittenden's got guns," Shreve pointed out sourly. "The three-pounders, I'm not much worried about. But a six-pounder's a different story altogether." His eyes gave the boat the same inspection Driscol's had done, except in far less time. "This boat was never designed to handle any such thing. A six-pounder'll hammer it into splinters."
"That's assumin' they fire it in time, and fire it straight," said Crowell. Again, he shrugged those shoulders. The gesture bore a fair resemblance to a small landslide encased in fine linen. "From what the captain's told us, I doubt me either one of those is gonna be true."
His white partner gave him a none-too-friendly look. "And you're willing to bet money on it. Just as much of it's yours as mine, Henry."
Crowell smiled. "I'll do more than bet money. I'll bet my life." He pointed toward the bow. "We got four cannons of our own, and I still remember how to serve on a gun crew. I did it before, on the Mississippi. I plan on doin' it again."
He turned the smile onto Driscol. "Assuming, of course, our fine general will allow me to resume the colors." He stuck out a huge finger and wagged it under Driscol's nose. "Just for a day, y'understand? We ain't got no conscription in Arkansas, Patrick, even though I know your black Napoleonic soul's lusting for it, so don't be gettin' any crazy ideas!"
Driscol gave him a thin smile in return. "Leave it to a banker—black one worse than a white one—to parse the difference between conscripting a man with an honest press gang and doing it by squeezing his empty wallet. But I'll not argue the point again, tonight. Sure, Henry. Consider yourself reenlisted—very temporarily—in the Iron Battalion."
Shreve threw up his hands. "Oh, fine, then! I'll pilot the blasted thing. What I get for going into business with a curree and an Irishman. Especially the crazy Irishman."
When he brought his hands down, though, Anthony thought he might be detecting a little gleam in the shipbuilder's eyes. There had to be something of a professional interest there, he figured. Shreve really prided himself on his boats. If one of them could...
"But we're not doing it in daylight!" Shreve continued. "No blasted way!" He emulated his black partner's finger-wagging in the face of the general. "We do this, we're going past Crittenden before dawn—or we don't do it at all."
"Weren't you the one pissing and moaning all the way down here about the frightful risks of navigating an uncharted river by the light of a pitiful quarter moon?" Driscol asked mildly. "Let's compromise, Henry. I want the gun crews to be able to see what they're doing, even if the pilot's working by guess and memory. We'll steam past Crittenden just at sunup."
Shreve rolled his eyes again. "Don't remind me. I like to have lost five years of my life this night. I say we're still lucky the whole blasted flotilla didn't wind up stranded and snagged, instead of just two of the boats."
"Which we got off the sandbars right easily," Crowell pointed out, his tone as mild as Driscol's. "In less than five minutes each. Come on, Henry. By now you know this river about as well as you do the back of your hand."
Since that also struck to Shreve's pride, he didn't say anything. From what Anthony could tell, in the poor lighting provided by the lamps on deck, the disgruntled expression still on his face was more a matter of stubbornness than anything really heartfelt.
"And what's this 'we' business?" Shreve asked sourly. "If you're planning to come along, Patrick, I'm backing out right now. No way I'm letting a mad Irishman—"
"Oh, leave off. Of course I'm not coming. I've got an army to command." He turned toward Anthony. "Captain McParland here will lead the expedition. He knows exactly where Ball can be found."
To Anthony, directly: "Tell Charles I want him to stay there. And be ready for Crittenden's men—a lot of them—to be coming down that river sometime around late afternoon. Rowing like their lives depended on it, which they will be."
"Yes, sir. And what—"
"Don't ask silly questions. Charles knows what to do. You already saw him do it. Crittenden and his men are nothing but pirates and brigands. The penalty for piracy is death by hanging. I'm not fussy, though, so if it works better to just shoot them down like mad dogs, have at it. I don't care. So long as not one man from that crowd ever makes it back alive to Alexandria."
He gave his shoulders a little shake, like a dog shedding water. "Well...all right. I'll be reasonable. Some of them are bound to escape. Might even be to the best, letting them spread terror through their circles. But if I find out it's more than a handful, I shall not be a happy man."
He smiled then, more thinly than ever. "Not that you need to give Charles any such explanation. I'd not insult him."
"Yes, sir."
"Be at it, then. Get the guns ready to rake Crittenden as you steam past. Don't linger, though—and don't aim for his army. Wreck as many of his boats as you can. Remember that, Anthony. Shoot up the _boats._ You can leave the killing to me. Just make sure they've got as little to make an escape with as possible."
"Yes, sir. Do you want me to take the corporals with me?"
Driscol frowned for a moment. "No, I don't think so. You've no real need for them, not with gun crews from the battalion on the _Hercules._ They're not really trained artillerymen anyway, being in Colonel Jones's regiment. From your report, they've done very well for themselves. But with a battle coming on the morrow, it'd be best for them to be back in their ranks. I've got hopes for both of those youngsters, but they need real blooding on a battlefield. There's never a substitute for that, in war."
"Yes, sir."
When he told the two corporals, they both seemed more relieved than anything else.
As Anthony watched them march off the gangplank to join their 3rd Regiment, now mustering somewhere in the darkness, he found himself envying the boys. Not for the moment, but for the past memory. On the eve of Anthony's first battle, he'd been frightened out of his wits. Of course, it hadn't helped any that he'd been executed by Driscol not so many days earlier.
He grinned, then. It was an odd world. Now that he was looking toward his fourth decade of life, in just a few years, he found that he had a more insouciant view of the world than he'd had as a teenager. Death had been a mysterious terror, then. Today it was just a familiar enemy—and he _still_ had the world's meanest troll on his side.
**CHAPTER 17**
_Arkansas Post_
OCTOBER 6, 1824
_"Imogene! Adaline! You come down from there right this minute! You hear me?"_
The twins standing on the gun platform above her tried for a moment to pretend they hadn't heard their mother.
_"This second! I ain't foolin'!"_
Imogene stamped her foot. Watching, it was all Zack Taylor could do not to laugh.
"Mama! It's _exciting._ "
"Won't be excitin' you get a bullet in your head! Or be too excitin' altogether. _Get down here._ I ain't sayin' it one more time."
Reluctantly, the two girls obeyed Julia, clambering down the ladder that led up to the platform with the peculiar combination of grace and awkwardness that seemed to be the uniform property of twelve-year-old girls. Most of all, that blithe indifference to propriety. Taylor's oldest daughters Ann and Sarah were about the same age as Julia's twins. Imogene and Adaline were just at the point in their lives when they were starting the transition from girlhood to womanhood. It simply hadn't registered on them yet that proper young ladies didn't give the world such an exposure of leg and ankle as they came down a ladder wearing dresses.
Anywhere—much like a fort full of soldiers. Especially girls as pretty as these two seemed likely to be.
Julia knew it, of course. As soon as the girls arrived on solid ground, she was looming over them, shaking a finger in their faces.
"You bein' a disgrace! If your father had seen this!"
As stern a disciplinarian as their mother was, the girls—especially Imogene, whom Taylor had already recognized as the more rambunctious of the two—weren't ready to give in yet.
"It's gonna be a _battle,_ Mama!" Imogene protested. "We oughta be able to watch it!"
The shaking finger now concentrated on her alone. "And watch your language, young lady! Your daddy ain't sending you to no expensive school so's you can talk about 'gonnas' and 'oughtas'!"
Blithely indifferent, of course, to the fact that Julia's own lingo was every bit as colloquial as that of most frontier women. But the thought was simply one of amusement, not condemnation. Being the father of four girls himself, Taylor had more than once fallen back upon that most ancient and reliable staple of parenting: _Do as I say, blast it, not as I do._
Imogene was nothing if not stubborn. " 'Sides, I'm worried about that young corporal. The one who sings so pretty."
Adaline even pitched in, though she was normally the more obedient of the two. "And I'm worried about th'other one." She and her twin exchanged glances. "Me and Imogene already decided."
"Decided _what?_ " Julia's expression could by now only be described as a glower. The finger shaking increased its tempo. "Don't you two be thinkin' about no boys! You too young for that! Way too young! Only thing you best be thinkin' about—I'll smack you, so help me I will!—is your lessons in school."
"School ain't started yet," Imogene said sulkily.
_Smack._ "Don't you sass me, girl! And don't you be usin' no 'ain'ts,' neither!"
Chuckling, Taylor turned away from the scene. The sun hadn't even come up yet, but daylight was starting to fill the sky. He foresaw a frenzied day for Julia, trying to keep her spirited daughters from finding ways to watch the battle that was about to unfold.
Zack Taylor, on the other hand, was long past the age where he had a mother to answer to. Which was fortunate, because he had every intention of watching the battle himself. Not from simple curiosity, in his case, but from professional necessity. It wouldn't surprise him at all if he found himself someday having to face the army of Arkansas. He wanted to get as good an estimate as he could of its capabilities.
Since there was no point in skulking about, however, he'd simply join Major Totten in the blockhouse, which had the best view of the cleared ground on the riverbank opposite the fort. It was possible that Totten would order him to leave, but Taylor didn't think so. As polyglot as it might be, he'd already gotten enough sense of the spirit that infused the Confederate army—its Arkansas portion, anyway—to think that Totten and his officers would consider it ungallant to refuse a fellow officer such a straightforward courtesy. Enemies they might be on the morrow, but today was today, and protocol was important for its own sake.
He hoped he was right. The battle that was about to unfold was going to be fought by such rules as any Hun or Mongol would accept. But it was Taylor's growing belief—certainly his personal desire—that if a war did erupt between the United States and the Confederacy, such savagery could be avoided in the future. And, if so, his own behavior and conduct today might make a difference.
No skulking, then, and no spying. Just a straightforward request by an officer of one army to observe a battle being conducted by another. Who was to say, after all? The time might also come when the United States and the Confederacy were allies.
When Taylor arrived in the blockhouse, Major Totten looked away from the firing slit he was peering through and gave him a courteous nod. "You're just in time, Colonel. It appears that the Laird—ah, General Driscol—plans to start the battle by ravaging the enemy's fleet."
He turned to one of his aides. "Lieutenant Morton, be so good as to lend Colonel Taylor your eyeglass. And please make room for him while you're at it, so he can get a good view."
So.
"Slow down, Henry!" shouted Captain McParland.
He was wasting his breath, of course. He'd yelled out of simple frustration. Even if Shreve could have heard him over the sound of the engines, in the pilothouse, Anthony knew perfectly well he wouldn't obey. Shreve wasn't under military discipline, and he was a lot more concerned about keeping his beloved _Hercules_ intact than he was over such petty minutiae as making sure they inflicted as much damage as possible on the enemy flotilla.
"Don't worry, Anthony," said Crowell, leaning on his sponge staff. "We'll manage, well enough—and there ain't no way Henry'll pay attention nohow. He do surely love this boat."
The steamboat was almost in range. If nothing else, the speed Shreve was making had the advantage of increasing the element of surprise. And Anthony would allow that the steamboat designer was at least not trying to keep to the very middle of the river. In fact, he was skirting the southern shoreline more closely than Anthony would have himself. Of course, he was a lot more familiar with the river.
"And will you look at 'em!" came a gleeful shout from another member of the gun crew. "Scurryin' like chickens!"
It was true enough. Any commander with any brains—or one who wasn't being constantly distracted by the sort of squabbles that were bound to plague a force like Crittenden's—would have seen to it that the river was patrolled by picket boats for hundreds of yards upstream and downstream. And would have had sentries along the shore extended just as far.
But they'd seen none of that. No picket boats at all, and the one and only sentry they'd spotted had been fast asleep. Now that the _Hercules_ was almost on the enemy flotilla tied up to the shore, of course, the sound of its engines was waking everybody up. But the men sleeping on those boats quite clearly had no thought at all except to either run or gape.
McParland's eyes swept the riverbank ahead, looking for the battery. It _had_ to be there, somewhere. Not even an amateur like Crittenden would have been dumb enough not to move his few cannons into position during the night.
Anthony spotted it, then, and had to suppress a gleeful shout of his own. A genuine battery, sure enough. Sheltered behind an earthen berm, just like it should be. A great big one, too—bigger than Anthony would have thought Crittenden's mob could have erected in the dark.
Unfortunately, whether from inexperience or simple enthusiasm, they'd made it _too_ big. Crittenden's guns could fire on Arkansas Post across the river, but they couldn't lower the elevation enough to hit anything on the river itself.
"You know what to do," Anthony said to the gun crew as he headed toward the pilothouse. "I'm going to go try and talk some sense into Henry."
He'd just reached the pilothouse when the four-pounder toward the starboard bow cut loose. He didn't turn to see what effect the shot had, though. The whooping and hollering coming from the gun crew made that plain enough.
He opened the door and stuck his head in. "Tarnation, Henry, their battery's too high to shoot at us, anyway. _Slow down._ "
Shreve was squinting through the eyeslit, peering ahead toward Crittenden's battery. Normally, of course, there'd have been a full window there. But he'd had most of the pilothouse fortified by timbers in the course of the voyage down from New Antrim. The planks wouldn't stop a cannon shot, but they'd handle musket fire pretty well.
"Sam Hill, if you aren't right." A sudden and very wicked grin came to the steamboat designer's face. "Tell you what, Anthony. I'll go you one better. Get on back there, now! You're going to be a busy man for a bit."
As he turned back toward the gun crews, Anthony heard a sudden change in the noise coming from the engine. An instant later, he felt the _Hercules_ starting to shudder a bit. Shreve, he realized, was reversing the thrust on the stern paddlewheel. He was going to bring the boat to a complete _stop_ —right smack in front of the whole flotilla.
"Hot damn!" shouted the gunner on the rear four-pounder. That crew had just fired its own first shot. "Boys, I want to see this gun firing till it melts! Move it!"
The bow gun fired again, jerking back against the recoil lines. The round struck the stern of one of Crittenden's keelboats and caved it in. It also slaughtered, in the process, the one man who'd been either too slow or too dumb to get off the boat in time. A big splinter flew into his back as he was trying to clamber ashore and ripped open most of his rib cage. Blood and bone bits went flying everywhere. The corpse hit the muddy bank like a sack of meal.
Crowell was at that lead gun and already had it swabbed out by the time Anthony looked back. The crew hauled the gun back into position, took cursory aim, and fired again.
The aim hadn't been as cursory as it looked, though. Or maybe they'd just been lucky. That shot hit one of Crittenden's few steamboats. A little too high, unfortunately, so it simply smashed in part of the main deck instead of holing the hull. But it was enough to send the men gawking there racing to get off the boat, even if none of them looked to have been injured any.
Good enough. There was no chance, other than by a fluke, that four-pounders would be able to destroy any of the steamboats in Crittenden's flotilla. Not badly enough to prevent them from being repaired, at least. But repairs would take time, and time was one thing Crittenden's army now had in short supply.
Very short supply. In the lulls between cannon fire, Anthony could hear the faint sounds of the Laird's regiments coming. The tone of voices raised in command, if not the words themselves; most of all, that unmistakable jingle-jangle of their gear that masses of soldiers made, approaching at a fast march.
The four-pounder in the rear went off again, followed closely by Crowell's gun. The same steamboat took another hit, this one in the hull. A keelboat rocked wildly, breaking loose its tether and starting to drift with the current. With that hole torn in its side, though, it likely wouldn't drift more than a few miles.
Didn't matter. A few miles would be enough, even if the boat didn't sink at all. The sounds of the Laird coming were starting to fill the dawn. There was no time at all, now, for Crittenden and his men. No time at all.
"All right, Henry!" Anthony shouted. "You can get us under way again!"
In the blockhouse, Zachary Taylor had come to the same conclusion. And he made it a point to jot down in his unwritten mental notebook that the two oncoming regiments of the army of Arkansas were able to march faster and for longer than any regiment of the U.S. Army he'd ever known. It remained to be seen how well they'd been trained in battlefield tactics. But one thing was now sure and certain. Driscol must have had them practicing marches—relentlessly—for months.
Taylor was not guessing. He was one of the few field-grade officers in the U.S. Army who was adamant himself about keeping troops well trained and in good condition. Part of the reason his whole career had been spent on the frontier, with none of the usual assignments to Washington that might have advanced him more rapidly, was that he had a reputation for being a commander who could be sent to a poorly trained and dispirited garrison stuck in a fort out in the middle of nowhere and rapidly bring order and discipline to what had been not much more than a half-trained and three-quarters-drunk mob of gamblers, whoremongers, and idlers.
From what Taylor could determine thus far, on the other hand, Driscol's tactics didn't seem particularly sophisticated. Not that Taylor was fond himself of fancy tactics on a battlefield. But still, this was about as crude and blunt as it got.
Driscol had shifted his regiments from column march into lines, not more than three hundred yards from the outlying units in Crittenden's army. Risky, that. Taylor himself wouldn't have chanced getting that close to an enemy while still in column formation. Not regular troops, at any rate. It took even a well-trained army two minutes or more to shift from column to line formation, during which time it was vulnerable to a vigorous counterattack.
Against a force like Crittenden's, admittedly, there wasn't much risk. They were just as sluggish as they were brutal and undisciplined. But trained soldiers under good officers would have been able to take advantage of that recklessness on Driscol's part.
And now that he had his two regiments formed up, Driscol was just advancing them forward, side by side. No cavalry screen on the flanks—in fact, he didn't seem to have any cavalry at all—and not even any use of light infantry as a substitute. He did have a small battery of four-pounders, but those were still a considerable distance to the rear. The artillerymen were trying to bring them up on the flank, but the horses were having a rough time of it. The terrain was awfully soggy this close to the river.
Clearly enough, though, Driscol had no intention of waiting until he could bring his artillery to bear. He'd go at Crittenden with his infantry alone, relying on discipline and impact to keep his enemy off balance and prevent them from using their own artillery to good effect.
It was going to be a pure and simple slugging match. A sergeant's sort of fight. About twelve hundred men under Driscol's command, against a slightly larger force of Crittenden's.
Under the circumstances, Taylor was pretty sure this was going to be as one-sided a slugging match as he'd ever seen. Whether between armies, pugilists, or rams in a field, for that matter. Unsophisticated Driscol's tactics might be, but those two regiments were advancing in perfect order and in perfect cadence. Trained and trained and trained. Not blooded yet, most of them, but even green recruits, with good enough training and enough of it, could acquit themselves very well on a battlefield.
He shifted the glass to observe Crittenden's forces.
_Forces._ Could ever a term be so misused?
One large group of men, near the center of Crittenden's army, looked to be in something you could call a formation. Taylor had been told by Major Totten that the Lallemand brothers had joined Crittenden's expedition, along with what was left of their French troops and some Alabamans they'd recruited. That was probably them. But fewer than three hundred men were in those ranks taking shape. What was worse was that none of the other loosely knit groups of men in Crittenden's army were following their example. Not even the groups clustered around his handful of field guns. In fact, they looked more disorganized than anybody.
One man in a fancy-looking uniform, some fifty yards from the Lallemand unit, was racing back and forth and waving a sword. Taylor couldn't make out his features at the distance, but he seemed like a young man, which Crittenden was.
Probably Robert Crittenden himself, then. Taylor had met him once on one of the several visits he'd paid to John J. Crittenden when he'd still been a U.S. senator from Kentucky. Taylor liked John quite a bit but hadn't been much impressed with the younger brother. By all accounts, Robert Crittenden was something in the way of the black sheep of that very prominent family.
For all the good Crittenden was doing, he might as well have been ordering the tide to recede. Even from the distance, it was as clear as the day itself—now that the sun was well over the horizon—that none of Crittenden's men were paying him any attention at all.
That was hardly surprising. From his years serving on the frontier, Taylor was quite familiar with the sort of men who filled the ranks of Crittenden's army. Basically, they were gangs. Sometimes outright loners, with maybe a partner or two. But usually they were part of a group of perhaps half a dozen to several dozen men, loosely organized and led by one or a few dominant characters. Many of them were outright criminals, and a goodly percentage of those who weren't simply hadn't been convicted yet.
Their motives were about as rudimentary as their organization. Adventure, of course. Loot, whether in the form of money or—mostly, in this situation—slaves; evading debts; evading the authorities of one state or another. Often enough, evading other men like themselves. If the officer corps of the U.S. Army stationed in frontier garrisons was notorious for its dueling habits, men like these made them seem veritable pacifists—except that their "duels" were rarely formal affairs.
There was another sort of a man in that army, to be sure. A different layer, it might be better to say. There'd also be men like Crittenden himself, with money to invest. Looking for the cheapest land there was, at least in financial terms. Conquered land, paid for only in blood.
Someone else's blood, they'd thought. They were about to learn otherwise.
Julia finally gave up trying to keep the girls from watching at all. At least the slit they were now peering through was just a half-inch gap between two logs on the lower level of the fort. Only the most extreme bad luck would bring a musket ball to either one of them.
If any got fired at the fort at all. Julia was now peering through the same slit, and from what she could tell that was getting less likely by the minute. She couldn't see much, since almost none of Crittenden's army was visible from this angle through such a narrow aperture. But she had a decent enough view of the army of Arkansas as it marched up to the riverbank. They were spread out wide now, in clearly delineated ranks, and were starting to bring their muskets level.
Julia had no military experience of any kind. But a person facing such a completely menacing sight would have to be a lunatic to waste any shots at a fort all the way on the other side of a river. She figured the girls were safe enough.
From musket balls, anyway. Of course, there were other perils in life.
"I'm so scared," Imogene whispered.
"Me too," her sister chimed in.
Julia made the mistake of being the reassuring mother. "We're safe enough here, girls. I don't think those men are even going to be attacking us at all."
Her daughters gave her a dismissive sideways glance.
"Not worried about _us,_ Mama," Adaline said.
"Our beaus might get hurt," Imogene explained. "Might even get killed."
"You don't even know those boys! And you too young to be thinking such thoughts, nohow!"
Her daughters ignored her and went back to their intent peering. Softly—though not softly enough—Julia banged her head against one of the logs. Once, twice, thrice.
"Imogene, your father finds out you eyeing that one boy! That currie be black as coal!"
"He sings pretty."
Adaline, as usual, couldn't resist the sibling rivalry. " _My_ beau's white."
"So what?" came Imogene's cool response. "Bet he can't sing at all. And even if he can, who'd want to listen? That funny accent he got."
"He's from New York originally." Adaline's tone was defensive. "I axed him. Not his fault he don't talk right yet."
"' _Doesn't_ talk right,' " her mother hissed. "And it's 'asked,' not 'axed.' I swear, if you two—"
The rest was buried under an explosion of gunfire coming from across the river.
"Oh!" Imogene shrieked. "They're being hurt!"
**CHAPTER 18**
_Arkansas Post_
OCTOBER 6, 1824
Sheff dealt with the first fusillade fired by Crittenden's men by just gritting his teeth and marching forward. He'd been trained; and, now, clutched to that training the way he'd clutched at the Bible in other frightening moments of his life.
They'd been told—told and told and told—to expect this. It was a lesson the Laird himself insisted on imparting to the units in their training.
_Let the bastards shoot first. Some of you will die. Some of you will be crippled and maimed. We all die soon enough anyway, and old age will cripple you and maim you as sure as any musket ball. Just take it. Take it and keep coming. You do that, boys—don't fire till you get the word—you'll hammer 'em. And then you'll hammer 'em again, and again, and again, and again. Until there's nothing left but victory. Those of you who survive standing tall, and the bastards lying bloody in front of you, wailing like whipped curs._
_You don't matter. The regiment matters. Victory matters. That's all that matters._
"Level arms!" Colonel Jones had a good battlefield voice. Real high-pitched. Much more so than when he talked normal-like.
Sheff had to fight off an instant's urge to aim, reminding himself that he was holding a regular musket now, not a rifle. There was no point in aiming, in line formation on a battlefield. Just level the weapon at the mass of the enemy.
_"Fire!"_
He even remembered to yank the trigger instead of squeezing it. So he didn't embarrass himself by having his shot go off after all the others.
For a moment, the world seemed to dissolve in a thunderclap. Everything he could see was white. Well, some gray. Gunsmoke always had impurities.
There wasn't much wind, so the clouds lingered. All he could see ahead of him was maybe twenty feet—and that, only here and there. But he was too busy reloading to be looking around much anyway, especially since he had to be sure to be the first one in his squad ready.
"Ten paces forward!"
That was Sheff 's cue, since he was the corporal. A half step ahead of the others, he led them through the paces.
"Level arms!"
The next man over to his left stumbled back, falling on his rear end and dropping his musket. He'd been shot in the head by one of the many shots being fired by Crittenden's men, but Sheff paid him no more mind. He didn't matter. Only the regiment mattered. Only victory mattered. At the moment, Sheff couldn't even remember the dead man's name.
"Fire!"
Another thunderclap, another dissolution of the world.
Victory mattered. And Sheff could start to feel it coming. The first angel he'd ever seen approaching in his life.
Taylor was genuinely shocked by that first volley fired by the Arkansans. He'd never in his life seen such a clear, crisp, perfect volley—from even a company, much less two regiments working together.
True, his whole experience had been on the frontier, almost entirely fighting Indians. Traditional battlefield tactics weren't very applicable under such conditions. Still, he'd trained his men no differently than Driscol had. But he'd never gotten results like this. Not really even close, being honest.
Winfield Scott had, probably. Jacob Brown, too. But they'd served in the Canadian theater in the war, fighting British regulars.
It took a few seconds for the huge cloud of gunsmoke produced by that first volley to roll sluggishly over Crittenden's men. So Taylor was able to see, very clearly, what effect it had.
The first thing it did was eliminate Crittenden himself. Still racing back and forth when his men began firing singly and indiscriminately, he was picked up by the volley and hurled a good five to ten yards. The sword went flying, along with the hand holding it. When his body hit the ground, his right leg came loose at the knee, held to the rest only by the cloth of his trousers and maybe some ligaments. It flopped over onto his hip like the limb of a broken rag doll.
Which was a pretty good depiction of him, Taylor knew. Those two wounds alone would probably have killed Crittenden, just from blood loss. But he had to be dead already. At least two or three other rounds must have struck him to have thrown him that far.
Except for the Lallemands' unit, Crittenden's whole army reeled back. Gunfighters and roughnecks they might be, most of them, but this was something completely outside their experience. Driscol's tactics might leave a lot to be desired, but not even Napoleon's Old Guard or one of Wellington's elite regiments could have fired a better volley.
Truth be told, it was outside of Zachary Taylor's experience also. But at least he understood the matter intellectually. He might not be the same sort of voracious reader of military manuals and accounts that Winfield Scott was, but he had studied his profession. And he'd talked to plenty of officers and men who'd fought against British regulars in the war.
On the battlefield, outside of artillery, the volley reigned supreme. That went far beyond any crude and simple arithmetic. By now, Crittenden's men might quite possibly have fired just as many shots as had come to them in that opening Arkansas volley. But first, a much higher percentage would have gone wild. And second—more important still—shots fired singly hit an enemy like a hail of rocks. A volley hit like a landslide, or an earthquake. There was simply no comparison in terms of the key factor of shock.
Taylor had always known that, abstractly. Now he could see the truth of it with his own eyes. Crittenden's men weren't simply torn and bleeding in the body; their minds were stunned.
They weren't going to get any respite, either. The Lallemands' unit managed to get off a ragged volley. Some other individual shots were fired.
Then— _again._ The second volley shattered the Lallemands' unit, and they stumbled back in the general inchoate retreat to the river.
Taylor cursed himself and started counting. He needed to get a sense of the timing.
Driscol's regiments were still advancing. That same, steady, disciplined cadence. Again, the guns came level. Again, a volley.
He stopped the count and hissed in a breath. He knew for a fact that not more than one or two regiments in the U.S. Army could fire two disciplined volleys in that short a time—and the Arkansans were going to do it yet again.
Half dazed, Charles Lallemand stared down at the corpse of his brother.
"Henri-Dominique..."
There was no time for that. He turned to steady his men and bring them ready.
But there was no time for that, either. All of them were running away. To a river that was nothing but a trap.
He leveled a silent curse on Robert Crittenden and his own folly. Then he turned back, thrust his sword into its scabbard, squared his shoulders, and faced the enemy.
He had no illusions. But he was still a general in Napoleon's army, even if the emperor himself was gone. A condemned officer would die by firing squad. Not a hangman's noose.
The fourth volley came and granted him his last wish.
There was nothing left of Crittenden's army but a shrieking mob, fighting with itself for space in one of the surviving boats along the riverbank. You could hardly call this a battle any longer. That first volley had broken the freebooters like a rotten stick. Now it was going to be nothing but a massacre.
For the first time, Taylor was able to get a good look at the banners being carried by the Arkansas color-bearers. That wasn't the regular Confederate flag, with its simple salmon field and a blue triangle with the six stars of the chiefdoms. The triangle was still there, with the white stars, but the field was now five stripes. The outer two, salmon; the next in, white—and the fifth and center stripe, pure black.
That'd probably cause a political ruckus amongst the Confederacy's politicians. But Taylor was pretty sure Driscol was making a point to them, here, just as much if not as brutally as he was to the men who'd invaded Arkansas.
That black stripe was only one of five, true enough. But even from this distance, Taylor could sense the spirit of those oncoming Arkansas regiments and the man who commanded them. They might as well have been flying the solid black flag of no quarter.
"There ain't no more room!" Thompson shouted. But the man trying to clamber into the already overloaded flatboat wasn't paying him any attention at all.
Cursing, Scott Powers managed to pry his musket loose from the mass of men pressed against him in the boat. No way to aim, so he just jammed the butt against the ribs of the man next to him, half leveled the musket—good enough, at this range—and pulled the trigger.
The man trying to clamber into the flatboat went into the river, with the top of his skull missing. The man next to Powers, against whom he'd jammed the musket butt, screamed and grabbed his ribs. A couple of them were probably broken.
There were _still_ too many men on the boat. Even as frontier flatboats went, this one was on the small side.
The man whose ribs he'd broken was at the flatboat's port rail. Powers brought the butt up against his jaw—then again, and again—and shoved him over the side. He'd probably drown, now stunned as well as having some broken ribs. But Powers didn't care in the least. He didn't care about anything except getting out of this nightmare.
No one had really noticed what he'd done anyway. Well, except Thompson—but the smile on Ray's face made it clear he approved heartily.
Things got better a moment later. Another one of those hideous Arkansas volleys went off. The flatboat was still close enough to the bank that some of the stray shots hit two of the men in the bow. One went over the side on his own; the other was helped on his way by the man next to him. Clearly a fellow thinker.
"Let's get out of here!" Ray shouted.
The one drawback to being on the side now meant that Powers had to man one of the poles. He didn't mind the work itself. He'd have willingly labored like Hercules to get them out of there. But there was no way to pole a flatboat except by standing up and making a better target.
"Damn," he hissed. Still, it was better than staying there. Anything was better than staying there. Powers was pretty damn sure—would have bet every penny he'd made during his years in the slave trade—that the Arkansans weren't going to be taking any prisoners.
So, he heaved himself up and began poling. Ray, the bastard, had managed to squirm still lower into the boat.
"There they come," Totten said. " 'Bout time."
Looking up, Taylor followed the direction of the major's gaze. Then, brought up the eyeglass.
So Driscol did have cavalry, after all. Cherokee irregulars. Maybe Creeks. They'd not have been of much use in the battle. Not in tight ground like this.
But they'd be of use, now. No use Taylor would have put them to, though.
Well...he liked to think so, anyway. But he was fair-minded enough to realize that his way of looking at the world probably wasn't much the same as the way a freedman did. Especially one who'd been driven out of his home by exclusion mobs and maybe seen some of his family die. If not at the hands of the mob, from the rigors of the forced journey overland to Arkansas.
He brought the glass back to his eye and swept the terrain. Sure enough. Around three hundred Cherokees or Creeks. Maybe four hundred. It was hard to be certain, between the distance and the fact they were scattering out.
Inevitably, some of Crittenden's men were escaping the ever-closing trap on the little peninsula on the south bank of the Arkansas. Some, leaving by boat; others, by swimming downstream; still others, simply by scrambling and running. Driscol was still keeping the regiments in formation and probably would until almost the very end. So, like a piston driving into a very loose and sloppy cylinder, a lot of steam was escaping from the sides.
Most of them wouldn't get far. Not across that terrain, with hundreds of Indian light cavalry hunting them down.
_Another_ volley came. By now, that was like hammering porridge. But if nothing else was clear to Zachary Taylor about the man they called the Laird of Arkansas, one thing was. All of war, for that man, would be a hammer or an anvil. Beat or be beaten against, he'd not yield at all. Taylor had always wondered a bit how such a peculiar unit as the Iron Battalion had managed to break British regiments on the Mississippi. He didn't wonder any longer.
He brought the glass down to examine the situation at the river. What was left of Crittenden's army—still a good half of it, in sheer numbers—was now crammed along the bank, many of the men spilling into the water. The Arkansas regiments were still coming, ten paces at a time.
The volleys were finally ending, though. Now, lifting the glass again, Taylor could see that Driscol had given the order "Charge bayonets." The two regiments had their muskets in the proper position, the right hand holding the stock at hip level, the left keeping the barrel and the bayonet about chest high. The bayonet assault would begin momentarily.
The charge itself was well executed, overall. A bit ragged, finally, but bayonet charges usually were. The emotion involved was intense, and much more difficult to control than ranked volley fire.
The resistance put up by Crittenden's men with whatever musket butts, pistols, knives, and sabers they had—and could bring to bear, so tightly were they crowded against the river—killed or injured some of the Arkansans.
Not many, though, and almost none at all once the butchery began.
Taylor stepped away from the firing slit and handed the eyeglass back to the aide.
"Thank you, Lieutenant Morton."
"You're done with it?" Totten asked. "You're welcome to keep it through to the end."
"No need, thank you." He could have added _and certainly no desire,_ but didn't. The officers and men in the blockhouse might have taken that as a veiled insult, which it actually wasn't. Taylor had no difficulty at all understanding why those men, most of whom were black, were watching the scene across the river with an intensity that bordered on fervor. Had they lost this battle, they would have been butchered or enslaved, their babes murdered, their womenfolk ravaged.
No, he didn't blame them. But he wanted no part of watching it, either.
He decided to go below and find Julia Chinn and her daughters. The sight of those two fresh-faced girls would be good for him. He liked daughters, fortunately, since he had several of his own.
Sheff would never be able to explain to anyone, afterward, the sensation that swept over him when he plunged his bayonet into the chest of his first victim. As strong as he was, despite his relatively short stature, the narrow triangular blade slid all the way through with no difficulty at all. Prying it out had actually been much harder.
He'd had the time, doing so, to watch his opponent die. The face, its mouth contorted, eyes wide, had resembled nothing so much as the faces he remembered beating his father to death. Except the froth coming out of this white's man mouth was bright red, and the eyes were filled with terror instead of glee.
_Welcome to your afterlife, white boy. The direction you're headed is down._
The sheer savage exultation of that moment was like nothing he'd ever experienced in his life. So grand, so glorious...
And he never wanted to again. Some saner part of him recognized the abyss and dragged him away from it lest he follow his enemy.
He slew two more, and probably a third with a strike of the musket butt to the skull. But that was done much as he'd fired the volleys. Effectively and well, according to his training. But what mattered was no longer him, simply the regiment and the victory.
At the very end, he found himself using the bayonet—the threat of it, at least—to drive off some of the men in his squad. The killing was done, but they kept on.
"Stop it, boys!" He shifted the musket to his left hand and dragged off one of his privates. "He's dead, Adams. You just mutilatin' yourself now. Obey me, damn you!"
Fortunately, the Laird arrived then, and the pointless business ended immediately.
Sheff took a few deep breaths and looked around. Now that it was over, he was feeling exhausted. Only the superb conditioning of the Arkansas Army's training regimen was keeping him on his feet.
Some killing was still going on, but that was being done by squads under the direction of officers or sergeants. No bayonet work—there was nobody left alive on the bank—simply shooting at enemies in the water trying to swim downriver.
There was no room on the bank for Sheff 's squad, anyway. He was more relieved than anything else.
To his surprise, he saw the Laird was watching. Then, summoned him over with a wave of the hand.
"Yes, sir?"
"You're Parker, aren't you?"
"Yes, sir. Sheffield Parker."
"One of Crowell's so-called volunteers?"
There seemed to be a twist in that craggy mouth, which might be humor. Hard to tell, though, as it always was with the Laird. He really was something of a troll.
"Yes, sir."
The Laird nodded. "If you're willing to go career, I'll give you a field commission. Right now."
Sheff 's eyes widened. "Sergeant, sir?"
The Laird chuckled. "I said _commission,_ lad. Second lieutenant."
Sheff couldn't think of anything to say. Except...
"I'm just turned seventeen, sir."
"I figured. That's why I'm making the offer. Any lad your age who can...Never mind. Let's just say I couldn't have done it at the age of seventeen. Find it hard enough at the age of forty-two. Which is why I'll always be a sergeant and you've got the makings of an officer. So what do you say, Corporal Parker?"
Now Sheff couldn't think of anything to say at all. His mind seemed to be a complete blank.
The Laird waved his hand. "All right, think it over. The offer will stand for a week."
He left then. Attending to whatever business a general attended to after a victorious battle.
Once Sheff was sure his squad was settled down, he decided he had a bit of time for personal matters. He went looking for Callender.
But Callender was gone. Struck down almost at the very beginning. Still alive, apparently, when two of his squadmates carried him off to be loaded into a boat and taken across to the Post. But nobody knew what had become of him since.
"Oh, blast it," Sheff muttered. He stared at the carnage all around him. The cleared south bank of the Arkansas River, across from Arkansas Post, was a slaughterhouse. Corpses or pieces of them everywhere he looked, mashed in with enough blood to make them seem like bits of meat in a stew cooked by the Devil.
There were a few black corpses, here and there, that hadn't been carried away yet. One white one, also in a green uniform. But nine out of ten—more like nineteen out of twenty—were white men. The same sort of white men who had terrified Sheff all his life until a short time ago.
They'd never terrify him again, he knew. And realized also, with genuine surprise, that the main reason wasn't really that he'd been able to kill them. It was because, now that he'd proved he could, he found himself a lot more concerned over the fate of a white boy who might be dead than he was over all the ones who most certainly were.
His uncle Jem was still alive. Alive and uninjured, except for a small powder burn.
Sheff found him on his knees, praying.
Probably for deliverance, although he couldn't make out the murmured words. And probably words from one of the Gospels, this time. The day had started as an Old Testament day, sure enough, but Uncle Jem was plenty smart enough to know that it was much wiser for a man to end it in the New. Probably for a black man, even more than for a white one.
And, thankfully, Cal had survived, too, although Sheff didn't find out until late in the afternoon, when his squad was rotated for a rest period in the Post.
He found Callender in the mess hall, which had been transformed into an infirmary. He was lying on a blanket on the floor, there being no more cots available and—thankfully again—him not being one of the really bad cases.
He'd suffered a flesh wound, which had torn through the muscles of his right arm but hadn't broken the bone. That was something of a minor miracle right there. Sheff knew full well from the accounts of veterans that the .69- and.75-caliber bullets used by most of the muskets on either side of the battle usually pulverized the bone so badly that the only treatment was immediate amputation. Cal wouldn't even lose the use of the arm, he'd been told by the surgeon who'd given him a quick examination.
On the other hand, he'd need to spend weeks in recuperation—and the Laird had a rigid policy that soldiers recovering from wounds would be billeted in private residences. He had some sort of peculiar detestation of army hospitals. Called them guaranteed death houses, from what the veterans had told Sheff.
That posed a bit of a problem, though, since the whole McParland clan lived way up in Fort of 98. Too far for Cal to travel, for at least a week or two.
The problem was solved almost immediately, once the surgeon came back through and pronounced Callender fit to be removed to a billet. For, as it happened, Senator Johnson's folks had been gathered around him when Sheff arrived.
He didn't understand why. Couldn't even really think about it, since he was too nervous about the one girl—that was Imogene, he thought—who kept her eyes on him the whole time. Real pretty eyes, hazel colored.
When the surgeon left, the other twin immediately piped up. A peculiar sort of imperious wail.
_"Mama!"_
Julia Chinn took a deep breath through tight jaws. Then, glared at Callender for no reason Sheff could figure out. Then, glared at _him._
"Oh, Hell and damnation!" she muttered. "Fine. It ain't worth listening to it for the next God knows how long." She looked back at Callender and gave him what someone as dumb as a carrot might call a smile. It was really just a baring of naked teeth.
"Mr. McParland. I believe the lodgings Senator Johnson has reserved for us at the Wolfe Tone Hotel are reasonably spacious." She was talking a lot more formal-like than she had been earlier, too. That was even scarier than the "smile."
"I therefore extend the offer to provide you with billeting in our rooms." The smile vanished like dew under Sam Hill's breath. So did the formal speech. "Only till you be strong enough to go to y'own folks, y'hear? Mind me, now!"
She was even shaking her finger under Cal's nose as if he'd done something wrong. Sheff was starting to wonder if the woman wasn't a little off in her head, or something.
"Sheff can come sing for him, too!" Imogene said brightly. "Pick up his spirits. That's important, Mama, for someone's been hurt so bad."
Julia glared at her. Then, swiveled her head and glared at Sheff again. That was about the most unfriendly look Sheff had ever gotten from anyone, except a white man in a killing mood. And he hadn't done nothing!
"Is there anything you can do besides sing, boy?" she demanded.
Sheff thought about it. Well, tried to. Those hazel eyes made it hard to think. Blast it, the girl was only twelve!
But it made a decision easy. Real easy.
"Pretty soon I will, ma'am. I've been offered a commission in the army. So I'll be an officer come next week."
For some reason—the woman really had to be a little crazy—that just made her glare even more.
Imogene, on the other hand, was smiling so wide it looked like her face might split in two. Sheff had to remind himself—again—that she was way too young for him to be having any such thoughts like the ones his brain was skittering around like spit on a hot griddle.
"Well, it's all settled then," Adaline pronounced. She was giving Cal a smile just about as wide. And, weak though he might be from blood loss, Sheff could tell that his friend's brain was skittering around on the same griddle.
"Oh, Hell and damnation," Julia repeated.
**CHAPTER 19**
_The confluence of the Arkansas and the Mississippi_
OCTOBER 6, 1824
By the time their flatboat reached the confluence with the Mississippi, Scott Powers and Ray Thompson knew they were facing the most desperate situation either of them had ever encountered, in lives that had both been full of perils aplenty.
To make things worse, the flatboat was under the control of a gang of seven men under the leadership of a fellow named Robert Lowrey. His lieutenant—using the term loosely—went by the charming monicker of Alfred "Two Bear" Decker. The nickname came from Decker's immense size, but it could just as easily have been a reference to his intelligence.
Or his disposition, which rivaled that of a grizzly with a sore paw. Before they'd gotten more than three miles downriver from Arkansas Post, Decker had killed one man in the boat by clubbing him to death. Why? Who knew? Apparently the man had made an offensive remark of some sort. Offensive, at least, once filtered through Decker's mudflat of a brain.
The second man he killed—a stabbing, this time—was at the command of Lowrey.
Why? Who knew? Apparently the man had made an offensive remark of some sort. Offensive, at least, to Lowrey—who, if he was smarter than his sidekick, also seemed to have an even more tenuous grasp of reality.
As he proved again, the moment the flatboat came into sight of the flotilla of Arkansas steamboats that commanded the confluence.
They'd known of the flotilla already. Half an hour earlier, a small steamboat had come chugging back upriver, calling out a warning to the stream of crafts that were trying to make their escape into the Mississippi.
"You cain't get past 'em, boys!" shouted one of the men on the steamboat. "They got's cannons and everything! Fuckin' niggers are killing anybody they get their hands on!"
Lowrey had ignored the warning and kept going. Being honest, neither Powers nor Thompson had blamed him at the time. What was the point of going back upriver? They were butchering everybody up there also. Besides, the Mississippi was a big damn river. Surely—at least with some luck—they'd be able to get past a couple of steamboats being run by illiterate negroes who thought a wrench was a funny-looking hoe.
But now that they could actually see the Arkansans' flotilla, Thompson and Powers immediately recognized the mistake.
Just for starters, there were _five_ steamboats, not the two or three they'd expected. The Arkansans must have captured prizes and turned them into jury-rigged warships. Five steamboats were more than enough to cover a river even the breadth of the Mississippi. For a second thing, sure enough, they had cannons.
Quite a few of them, too. Peering past the monstrous figure of Two Bear in the prow, Thompson and Powers watched as two of the enemy vessels converged on a keelboat and pounded it into a wreck in less than two minutes.
And, sure enough, men at the guardrails of the steamboats were shooting anybody who went into the water. A goodly number of the men doing the shooting were white themselves. Where in Creation had they come from?
Finally, if those boats—not to mention the cannons—were being crewed by illiterates who had no idea what they were doing, there sure wasn't any sign of it.
"We're fucked," hissed Powers, slumping back into the bench they'd taken at the very stern of the boat, to get as far away from Lowrey and Decker as possible.
"What do you want to do?" asked Ray. He kept his voice as low as Scott's, not wanting the maniacs running the boat to get it into their heads they had mutineers to deal with.
Thompson's eyes scanned the riverbank. At least Lowrey had had enough sense to stay closer to the northern than the southern shore. By now, the south shore of the Arkansas was practically crawling with Cherokees and Creeks, coming down from the massacre at the Post and looking to add to it as best they could.
"We could slip over the side and make it to shore," he whispered. "Can't be more than fifty yards."
"And then what?" Scott demanded. "What's the point of being stuck in Arkansas, with no food and no horses, the clothes on our backs, and—" He checked his pouch. "Hardly any shot or powder left. Unless you got some I don't know about."
In point of fact, Thompson's pistol—he'd dropped his musket in the panicky flight to the boats—had the one shot loaded, and that was it. He was out of ball and powder altogether.
"And _then_ what?" Scott repeated.
Ray had no answer. True, the Arkansans might not extend the pursuit to the north bank of the river. Given the maniacal way they'd conducted themselves thus far, though, he rated the chances of that somewhere a long ways south of winning a horse race with a cow. But even if they didn't, that still left the prospect of trying to get through rough country to St. Louis, or at least the nearest settlements in Missouri. With no food, no mounts, and hardly any ammunition.
The smartest thing left to do, of course, would be to wait until nightfall to try to run past the blockade at the confluence. But sundown was still a good two hours off, and Thompson was glumly certain that a man like Lowrey didn't have the patience.
Sure enough. "Let's go, boys! Throw it into those poles! Them niggers cain't shoot straight nohow!"
Thompson wondered, given the day just past—not to mention the sight of another keelboat being ripped to pieces by the cannons up ahead—if he'd ever heard a more idiotic statement in his entire life.
They were dead meat. Especially once they got into the Mississippi where the steamboats were cruising. Poling down the Arkansas was possible, most places. Poling down the Mississippi was chancy. They'd have to unship the oars.
All one of them. Two Bear had shattered the second one during the first killing. Nobody knew what had happened to the other four that should have been on board.
Dead fucking meat.
"Pole, boys, pole!"
Any second, Lowrey was going to look around and see that neither Thompson nor Powers had joined in the poling.
There was only one chance, slim as it was. Thompson had half considered it earlier, on the assumption it was each man for himself, and too bad for Scott. But now, seeing the relentless way the Arkansans were continuing the slaughter, he realized the only chance at all would depend on including Powers.
"You lie pretty damn good, Scott," he whispered. "And you met Henry Clay once, didn't you?"
"Yeah—and so what? Met him in his office in Washington that time—"
"Never mind the details. Ever been to his place in Kentucky?"
"No."
_Damnation._ Thompson would just have to hope the description of the Clay estate he'd gotten from Crittenden would do the trick.
"Okay. You just stick to the personal details about Clay. I'll do the rest of the talking."
"What are you—I—"
_"Shut up."_ He jabbed a finger toward the bow. "Shoot Two Bear. Now. I don't dare try it with this pistol, not as big and crazy as he is. I'll handle Lowrey."
"What in the—"
One of the steamboats was coming. Coming fast. It looked as big as a mountain.
"Just shut up and do it!" he half shrieked.
Lowrey heard, and started to turn around. Two Bear was still leaning into his pole, as were some of the other men on the boat.
"Well, shit," Powers muttered. He rose to a crouch, leveled the musket, and shot Two Bear in the back.
Nice clean shot. Even a man as big as Two Bear Decker couldn't survive a.69-caliber round fired at close range that cut his spine and probably jellied half his guts in the process. He threw his hands wide, the pole went sailing, and over he went with a big splash.
"You fucking—!" Lowrey was drawing his pistol, but Ray already had his leveled. He damn near missed altogether, with the unsteady footing, but he managed to hit Lowrey in the arm. Not much of a wound, but enough to make his own shot go wild.
Scott was frantically reloading. Not seeing anything else to do, Ray drew back the pistol and prepared to throw it at Lowrey.
And then a hail of canister from the steamboat's forward gun made it all a moot point. Lowrey took maybe half the rounds himself. By the time he hit the river he was in pieces.
The same blast killed three other men toward the bow and wounded a couple more. The steamboat started to swerve, bringing the rear gun in line.
Ray stood up as straight as he could, balancing precariously on the bench, threw his pistol in the river, and spread his hands wide.
"We give up! We give up! I know something you want to know! I _know something!_ "
Scott was no dummy. He'd already pitched his musket in the river and was emulating Thompson's stance.
"Yeah! Yeah! We know everything! You don't want to kill us! You'll never find out how it happened!"
The surviving men in the middle of the flatboat were gaping at them. The steamboat's rear gun went off and took care of that.
The steamboat was almost alongside, now. Five men—two of them white—were leaning over the guardrail with their muskets leveled.
"We know something!" Thompson shrieked. Desperate, now. Those men didn't look the least bit interested in expanding their education.
"It was Henry Clay!" Scott screeched. "Henry Clay hisself! I talked to him! Right there as near as you and me!"
There seemed to be a slight hesitation in the way the guns were coming to bear. Well, not that. They were _already_ to bear. Still—
Belatedly, Thompson remembered. It was risky, but...
He lowered his hand—left hand—and pointed to his haversack under the bench. "It's all in there! All of it! I got the records! I was Crittenden's moneyman!"
No use. Ray could tell, just from the way the guns weren't wavering.
But then—
"Hold up!" A young man in a fancy Eastern-style frock coat came to the rail. "Hold up!"
He leaned over the rail. "Did you say 'Henry Clay'?"
"Yes!"
"Yeah! Henry Clay hisself!"
The meanest-looking negro Thompson had ever seen was at the guardrail. Wearing a fancy uniform that Ray would have laughed at seeing on any black man anywhere else, even a doorman in Philadelphia or New York. But there wasn't anything funny about this one.
"You lyin' through your teeth," he proclaimed.
Scott started to protest their innocence, but Ray could tell that was no use at all with this black bastard.
"Try us, then!" he shouted. "What you got to lose?"
The negro hesitated, then glanced at the Easterner. The young man in the frock coat came to his side and whispered something.
The uniformed negro looked back down at them.
"Fine. Swim on over. You tellin' the truth, I'll let you live." A grin colder than Canadian winter came to his face. "Best dive in quick, though. You 'bout to have no boat under you."
Thompson and Powers just barely made it off the side when another cannon blast shredded the flatboat's stern.
So, the worst day in Ray's Thompson's checkered life ended in a miracle.
Two, actually. They didn't even get beaten after they were hauled aboard the steamboat.
Well. Nothing unreasonable, anyway.
**CHAPTER 20**
_Arkansas Post_
OCTOBER 7, 1824
The closer the _Comet_ got to Arkansas Post, the worse it got. Even Robert Ross, with his years of experience in the bloody and often savage Peninsular War, had never seen anything quite like it. The pursuit Driscol had launched after the battle had been utterly pitiless. Of course, a few of the boats fleeing from the disaster had managed to get through Ball's blockade at the confluence. Days from now—assuming they weren't ambushed by the Choctaws they'd ravaged on the way upriver—a relative handful of the freebooters would make their escape to Alexandria or New Orleans.
But not many. Not many at all. Perhaps one or two hundred, all told, of the roughly fifteen hundred men Robert Crittenden had led to disaster in front of Arkansas Post.
Bodies were scattered all along the banks of the Arkansas, most of them on the south bank, for miles downstream. A few were perched on snags in the river itself. There would have been still more the day before, Robert knew. Some of the predators in the river were large enough to pull entire corpses into the water, and almost all predators would scavenge if given the chance.
Alligators he'd expected to see, but he'd also seen at least two types of fish large enough to do the work. One of them resembled the catfish he'd seen in New Orleans, except grown to enormous dimensions; the other had been similar in appearance—from a distance, anyway—to a sturgeon of some sort.
"Yup, giant catfish," one of the gunners confirmed. "They'll eat anything if it ain't movin'. T'other fish was what they call an alligator gar in these parts, General. Big damn things. Can get to ten foot, maybe even more. They not too dangerous, though, long's a man's still kicking. It's the gators you gotta watch out for."
Naturally, birds were everywhere. By now, a day after the slaughter, they'd already stripped much of the flesh from the corpses. What was left would be finished by small scavengers, insects. Worms, eventually. By next year, there'd be nothing but skeletons left, and most of those bones would be scattered.
From the middle of the Arkansas where the _Comet_ was steaming upriver, it was usually impossible to determine the cause of death. Those might have been simply victims of some sort of fast-spreading plague rather than violence. But two corpses had quite obviously been slain by human hands. One of them had been hung upside down from the fork in a dead tree leaning over the river. His facial features had been removed, along with his scalp, and his arms severed at the elbows. He might have blessed that last indignity, under the circumstances, since at least he'd have bled to death quickly.
The other such corpse...Eliza had retreated from the open deck then, back into the blessed gloom of the boat's interior. She'd been quite pale. Robert's son had given the men on his gun crew a look that was half reproach and half sheer horror.
"Hey, look, David, wasn't us," the black soldier said, uncomfortably. "That was Cherokee work, or maybe Creek. They be settlin' a lot of old grudges. Cain't say I blame 'em much."
"I was told the Cherokee were _civilized,_ " David hissed.
Charles Ball happened to be standing nearby, close enough to hear the remark. He chuckled, very harshly. " _Which_ Cherokees, boy? You talkin' about John Ross, his sort? Oh, he be very civilized. I visited him at his house in Tahlequah. Twice, now. Could almost call it a mansion. Books everywhere, and nice linen on the table."
The black general's smile had little humor in it, and his black dialect seemed to deepen with every sentence. "Oh, very civilized. That's 'cause he got upwards of fifteen slaves to keep him in proper comfort, so's he can study them books. But them out there—"
Ball jerked his head toward the bank. "Those be what they call the traditionalists out there, doin' the killing. Cherokees who stick to chiefs like Duwali—The Bowl, he's also called—and Tahchee. They be right savage, sometimes."
His smile thinned and lost any humor whatsoever. " 'Course, on t'other hand, they don't got no slaves. Hardly none, anyways. And they right friendly to us niggers, 'cause they ain't tryin' to bleed us dry and they smart 'nough to know we their best chance at keepin' their old ways." He jerked his head again, this time upward, indicating the banner flying from a mast above. "They got no problem with that red-white-and-black-striped flag of Arkansas. It be the civilized Cherokees who gonna squawk and scream about it, and make threats. Not that we goin' pay no attention to them. Sure as Creation not after yesterday."
"Be quiet, David," his father said softly. "I can assure you that was not the first man I've ever seen impaled. It was a common enough sight in Spain. White men everywhere you looked—perpetrators and victims both—and the only sign of civilization was that they'd generally use a prepared stake of some sort rather than the sharpened end of a severed sapling."
His son fell silent then, a bit abashed. Only a bit, of course, which was fine with Robert.
"No, I don't approve," he continued, more softly still. "But if you plan to be a soldier, be prepared to see such sights. The rules and laws of war are just a veneer that we insist on so strongly because the veneer can crack so very, very easily. Never think otherwise."
Arkansas Post was worse. Much worse.
Only a day after the battle, the corpses of the men who'd been trapped and butchered on the peninsula were piled up in heaps. Fairly tidy heaps, now, since they'd been moved there to clear ground for the shallow mass graves that were starting to be dug by Arkansas soldiers. But the tidiness simply served to underscore the sheer scale of the slaughter. Hundreds of corpses scattered on a level are bad enough; the same hundreds stacked like so much firewood are considerably worse.
But the worst of all was the fort itself.
Seeing the decorations hanging from the walls, like so many ornaments, Robert sighed.
"As I feared. Oh, Patrick, will you _never_ put that damned road to rest?"
At least sixty corpses were hanging from the walls. The only reason there weren't more was simply that there was no more room. Another three dozen or so were hanging from three long A-frame gallows that had been erected on the flat ground by the river.
No sign of torture, thankfully, though Robert wasn't surprised at that. Torture wasn't Driscol's way.
It hardly mattered. Close to a hundred men, hands tied behind their backs and hung from the neck, was plenty bad enough. Even the absence of torture was a relative thing. The men pitched off the walls might have had their necks mercifully broken—most of them, at least—but all the men hanging from those low A-frames had simply strangled to death. Garroted, for all intents and purposes.
It remained to be seen, but Robert was now fairly certain that the only prisoners the army of Arkansas had taken after the battle were the two men who'd been seized by the _Comet._ And he wouldn't be at all surprised to see them hung on the morrow, once they were turned over to the man called the Laird of Arkansas.
Not a bad cognomen, actually. For all of Patrick's devotion to the most radical modern political philosophies, there had always been that streak in him that was purely medieval. Savage Scot clan medieval, at that. No Camelot, here.
Patrick was waiting for him at the pier.
Alone. No aides or soldiers anywhere within thirty yards.
Robert understood. "Please wait here, Eliza. David. General Ball, I'd appreciate a private moment with General Driscol."
Ball inclined his head. Two soldiers extended a gangplank, and Robert marched onto the shore.
"I'll have no part of this, Patrick," were his first words. "Either you agree—I'll want your word on this—that we abide by the rules of war, henceforth, or I shall simply return to Ireland immediately."
In a gesture familiar from so many years ago, Driscol lowered his head slightly. Like a bull, preparing a charge.
But instead of the harsh proclamations Robert expected, concerning the hypocrisies and perfidies of gentlemen, Patrick simply smiled.
It was not much of a smile, granted. But Robert remembered that also. A face so square and craggy that it led many to compare the man to a troll did not, after all, lend itself well to cheery and insouciant expressions.
"Oh, leave off, Robert." Patrick twitched his arm slightly, as if he had started to point back at the fort with its grisly decorations. "You think I'm still exorcising the ghosts of '98?"
Before Robert could answer—and the answer would have been yes—Patrick shook his head.
"Leave off, I say." This time he twitched the other arm, the left arm that ended above the elbow. "I buried that bloody road in County Antrim at the Chippewa, along with my arm."
Patrick took a slow breath. "Well, most of it, anyway. But what was left..." He shrugged. "I figure that went with your own arm, that I ruined at the Capitol."
"Then why—"
The familiar glower was back. " _Gentlemen._ Robert, I have no doubt at all you have much to teach me concerning the science of war. But what you know about the training of soldiers—the _real_ training I'm talking about, not that petty business with drill and the manual of arms—is what any gentleman knows. Which is absolutely nothing, because you do not know the men."
This time, when he moved his remaining arm, the gesture was as full and complete as the arm itself. A stiff finger pointed to the corpses hanging from the walls and moved slowly across.
"I didn't do this—or that killing across the river—for my own sake. Robert, did you ever—once—ask yourself how you teach a man to be a soldier who has no memory of any victories at all? Not in his life, not in his father's, not in his grandfather's—not in any generation so far back as he can trace them. Which, in the case of my soldiers, is usually not more than two, and those on the distaff side."
Ross straightened. "Well. Ah..."
He cleared his throat. "Well. No, actually. I haven't."
The glower faded, replaced by that crack of a smile. "Didn't think so. You take it for granted, no reason not to, that even the lowliest recruit to British colors—be he never so drunken, never so indigent, never so stupid, and never so shiftless—has endless memories to hold him up. He goes into his first battle knowing that his forefathers, perhaps as lowly as he, still managed to triumph. Over and over again. If he didn't know the names before he enlisted, he learns them soon enough. Start with Crecy, almost five hundred years ago, and now you can end with Waterloo. In between, there are how many dozens?"
Robert thought about it. "I'd have to sit down and write them up, actually. Couldn't really do it proper justice, off the top of my head."
"Yes, you would. So would a French general. So would a German. And their soldiers."
Driscol paused for a moment. "Yesterday—he accepted this morning—I issued my first field commission. To a black boy named Sheffield Parker. Splendid lad, I'm thinking. I have considerable hopes for him. How many victories does he have, d'ye think? A lad who watched a mob of white men beat his father to death—with impunity—on a street in Baltimore, in broad daylight. I happen to know in his case, because I investigated his history. Such as it is. I couldn't do the same for most of the black men in my army—and they constitute over nine out of ten—but you'd find the story was much the same. Add into the bargain as many generations as they can remember, which are precious few, of men who had to watch their women debauched—again, with complete impunity—by slave-masters."
Ross was silent.
_"How many victories, Robert?"_
"One. Yesterday's. Fine—but there was still no reason—"
"Yes, there was. I can't train men to control their violence until they learn—learn down to their toenails and fingernails—that they can unleash it as furiously as any men alive. Never letting them run wild, mind you. This was no barbarian frenzy. But they know— _now_ —that they can do it. And if they can do it once, they can do it again. As many times as it takes."
He took a deep slow breath and let it out just as slowly. "That said, once is enough. I'm glad you're here, Robert. So very glad, to be honest. And I accept your condition. Was planning on it, anyway."
Whatever else, Patrick Driscol had never been a liar. And if he was far more likely to sneer at the phrase "word of honor" than use it, Robert Ross had met precious few men in his life who took the heart of the thing more seriously and earnestly.
"Well. Fine."
And then it was time for the smiles and the handshake—even the embrace.
"Eliza! David! Come down! I'd like to introduce an old and very dear friend!"
_Arkansas Post_
OCTOBER 9, 1824
"I'll thank you again, General Driscol, for the use of the _Comet._ "
The Arkansas commander nodded. "My pleasure, Colonel Taylor. I'd not wish it on any man, unless he were my bitterest enemy, to make that journey downriver overland. At any time, much less now, with the Choctaws on the warpath. That country's malarial, as often as not."
Taylor hesitated. That raised a perhaps delicate issue, and not one that was really under Taylor's authority. Not at all, in fact. At least, at the moment.
Understanding, Driscol continued. "As soon as the _Comet_ leaves you off at Baton Rouge, she's got orders to return and help with ferrying the Choctaws across the Mississippi. Chickasaws, too, if they make the request."
"Ah. Have you by chance—"
Driscol shook his head. "I haven't been able to establish contact with Chief Pushmataha yet, no. But I got a letter from John Ross yesterday. He and Major Ridge should arrive on the morrow, and the _Hercules_ will be taking them down to parlay with the Choctaws. I don't imagine Pushmataha will continue being stubborn. His people will have wreaked whatever vengeance they could, by now, and they're simply in no shape to deal with the state militias that are surely being mustered. Neither are the Chickasaws, certainly, as few in number as they are. You know how it works as well as I do. It doesn't matter who started the killing; it'll be the Indians who get blamed for it."
He stiffened a body that was already a bit stiff. "Everywhere except in the Confederacy, that is. And no militia—perhaps no army—can get to the Confederacy without coming through Arkansas. Which is not so easily done as all that."
He didn't bother to point out the window of the blockhouse. There was no need. The prisoners he'd hung had been taken down after a day, their bodies lowered into the same shallow graves that had been the burial site for Crittenden and the rest of his men.
Very shallow graves, which meant that Taylor could see the mounds easily, even from across the river.
Had he bothered to look, which he didn't. He had the memories of the actual battle, which did better for the purpose.
As Driscol well knew, of course.
That left the final matter. Again, though, Taylor hesitated. This, too, was really beyond his authority.
Fortunately, however brutal-looking the man's face was, Driscol had quite the shrewd brain beneath that blocky skull. "Please be assured, Colonel Taylor, that in the unfortunate event a state of war should exist between the United States and the Confederacy—Arkansas, at any rate—I shall conduct my own operations giving respect to the established rules and customs of war. Provided, that is"—there was just the slightest emphasis on _provided_ —"my opponent does the same."
Taylor nodded. "For my part, I can assure you that in that same unfortunate event, should it come to pass, I will see to it that my own officers and men conduct themselves accordingly." Honesty required him to add, "That's assuming I'm in a position of command, of course, which will not be my decision."
"Yes, I understand." There came a smile, then. Not much of one, perhaps, but a smile nonetheless. "At the same time, the army of the United States is not so large as all that. So I imagine you'll have various conversations with your fellow officers. Here and there."
Taylor couldn't help but laugh. "Oh, yes—you can be sure of that! Bunch of old women gossiping, I sometimes think."
There was nothing more to say, really. And he'd already made his farewells to Julia and the girls, since they'd left for New Antrim the day before.
"I'll be going, then. Again, my thanks for your courtesies."
There was a last courtesy still to come. Driscol even had an honor guard waiting by the steamboat to see Colonel Taylor and his men off.
For his part, Taylor mustered his small unit on the deck to exchange the honors as the _Comet_ pulled away from the pier.
Very punctilious, it was. That seemed wise to Taylor.
Apparently it seemed wise to his men, too. Toward sundown, as they neared the confluence with the Mississippi, Taylor happened to pass by two of his cavalrymen on the deck. They were leaning on the guardrail, looking at the riverbank with its grim mementos.
"Hope we don't find ourselves comin' back up this river, any time soon," one of them commented.
"Not wearin' a uniform, for sure," his mate agreed.
After Colonel Taylor and his cavalrymen left, Driscol went to the blockhouse in the fort that had been turned into an impromptu jail.
"Well?"
Smiling a little ruefully and scratching his head, William Cullen Bryant looked down at his notepad. "Can't say for sure, Patrick. I'm almost certain that at least some of what they've told me is a lie. But..."
"A lie, how?"
"Well, that's the thing. Mostly, I think they're just exaggerating how much they were personally involved. A good part of this"—he tapped the notepad—"could well be hearsay. On the other hand, Thompson certainly has the financial figures. He's got the records to verify it, too, unless we want to suppose that he somehow managed to fake such a thing on the off chance he might get captured and be able to use it to parlay leniency for himself."
Patrick shook his head. "No, that's preposterous."
"Exactly. And the financial figures _are_ the heart of it. What's left is simply proving that Clay was personally involved, to the extent they claim he was. Which would amount, in effect, to the Speaker of the House having been the linchpin in a conspiracy to divert funds from the Second Bank—some of its directors and officers, at any rate—into Crittenden's coffers. Which is all that allowed him to provide his army with that sudden influx of weapons and ammunition they needed."
"Where's the weakness in their testimony, then?"
Bryant shrugged. "Basically, it'll be their word against Clay's. Powers's depiction of Clay's estate in Kentucky, I couldn't vouch for one way or the other. I've never been there myself—although you can be sure I'll make it a point to visit on my way back to New York. But I can tell you that his description of Henry Clay himself is dead on the money, all the way down to that peculiar habit he has of using a snuffbox to emphasize points while he's speaking. I've observed the Speaker giving speeches."
Driscol scratched his jaw. "In short, they claim to have met with Clay in private at his estate, but they can't prove that part of it. I don't care about that. This is not something that will ever be put to a test in a court of law, anyway. It's the public's opinion that'll matter."
"Ah, Patrick...." Bryant seemed uncomfortable. "You do understand..."
"I'm not a babe, William. I know perfectly well that such a report would—for a time—boost Clay's popularity in a lot of the states. Send it soaring in the South, and elevate it in the border states and probably some of the middle Atlantic states."
Bryant nodded. "New England will be outraged, in the main. New York also, leaving aside the wealthiest circles. No way to know, yet, how Van Buren and his crowd will swing. Pennsylvania, probably; Philadelphia, certainly—again, leaving aside the bank circles. But I'm glad to see you're not fooling yourself."
He hefted the notebook. "If I publish this—well, _when_ I publish it—the impact will be mostly to Clay's advantage, not disadvantage."
"In the short run. Yes. But what about the long run, William?"
The poet-turned-reporter mused on that for a bit, then shrugged again. "There's no way to know, Patrick. There simply isn't. Yes, it will also establish that he's an unscrupulous and unprincipled maneuverer. Even a Machiavellian one. But at least half the country knows that already. That's why so many people think John Randolph was referring to Clay, when he described a man—"
Patrick chuckled. "Yes, I read it. I will say Randolph has a fine way with words, insane as he might often seem. 'He shines and stinks like a rotten mackerel in moonlight,' wasn't it?"
Bryant nodded. "Yes. He was actually talking about Livingston, but if you recite that phrase to most Americans and ask them to guess, two out of three are likely to name Clay."
He lifted the notebook a few more inches. "But so what, Patrick? History is littered with cases of successful schemers and demagogues. It may well be the case that Henry Clay is America's Alcibiades—but I remind you that Alcibiades had a long and successful career."
Driscol stared at him. After a moment, Bryant smiled ruefully. "Well, yes, also a career that ended quite badly."
Patrick grinned. " 'Quite badly.' A bit of a euphemism, wouldn't you say? A career that ended with him just as dead as Randolph's mackerel. And why, William?" He moved right on to the answer. "Because it's one thing to maneuver a country into a war for the sake of personal aggrandizement. Another thing entirely to maneuver that same country through the bloodshed—when the heady first moments pass, and the butcher's bill comes due, and the same men who hailed you once are now wondering what it was really all for and about in the first place."
He looked toward the east. "I think I'll bet on the American republic. Publish it with my blessing, William. Publish all of it. If Jackson came against us, I doubt we could stand. Not for more than three years, at least. But I don't think Jackson will come. I think it'll be Clay. Whatever else, Jackson has principles. Clay has none at all. That fish is foul. No more capable of forcing through a great victory than any rotted meat. He'll come to pieces if he tries. Watch and see."
Bryant left the next morning on a keelboat. Arrangements had been made for him to wait at Brown's camp, where the tanner was rebuilding his works, until either the _Comet_ or the _Hercules_ came by to take him to Memphis.
To his surprise, Thompson and Powers were frog-marched on board to join him.
"Do as you will with them," Driscol told him.
"I imagine I'll just set them free, once we reach Memphis." Bryant spread his hands. "I'm hardly equipped to be a jail-keeper."
"Fine with me. They'll have no choice but to flee the country altogether—or keep telling whatever lies might be in that report of yours."
He swiveled his head to bring the two prisoners under his cold gaze. They were obviously trying their best not to look like the most relieved men in North America, but not succeeding too well.
"Excellent liars, I'm thinking," Driscol mused. "We'll know soon enough, of course. Before they get to Memphis, they'll have to survive a few days in John Brown's company."
The looks of relief on the faces of the two adventurers vanished instantly. Driscol and Bryant shared a laugh.
"I recommend an immediate immersion in Judges," the poet advised them. The reporter added a caveat: "But don't try to claim any particular expertise. Arguing biblical text with John Brown—the mood he's in, and given your history—would be about as insane as any act I can imagine. Short of invading Arkansas again."
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**CHAPTER 21**
_Washington, D.C._
NOVEMBER 3, 1824
When Peter Porter entered the dining room of the lodging house on Ninth Street near Pennsylvania Avenue where Henry Clay was residing in the capital, he found that the Speaker of the House and his close political associates had taken it over, for all intents and purposes, and turned the chamber into what amounted to a staff headquarters. Fortunately, the landlady was an amenable woman. Easily intimidated, at least.
"Peter!" called out Josiah Johnston, cheerfully. He waved a hand at an empty chair at the large table in the center of the room. "Take a look at the latest reports. The situation gets brighter day by day."
Porter came up to the table and gave the newspapers spread across it no more than a glance. He'd already seen them, and they were much of a piece. The headline on one newspaper that had been vigorously backing the Crawford campaign was typical:
HORRID DETAILS CONCERNING THE MASSACRE IN ARKANSAS
_A river awash in blood_
_The banks covered with corpses_
_Driscol the Robespierre of the West_
He pulled out the newspapers he had tucked under his arm and handed one of them to Henry Clay, who was sitting at the head of the table. The other three he tossed onto the table.
"You'd better look at this before you start celebrating. It's the latest issue of the _National Intelligencer._ I commend to you in particular the article by William Cullen Bryant. You can't miss it. The _Intelligencer_ gave it half the front page."
He pulled out a chair and sat in it heavily.
Clay had already put on his eyeglasses and was scanning rapidly through the article. After a minute he exclaimed: "This is a tissue of lies! I've never met these two men in my life. Never even heard of one of them. This Powers fellow, whoever he is."
Johnston, who'd been scowling as he read the same article, looked up. "It's simple, then. You issue a straightforward denial and point out that the _Intelligencer,_ being well known for its Federalist sympathies, has a long history—"
"Won't work, Josiah," Porter said bluntly. He gave Clay a look that was not entirely friendly. As much as Porter generally admired the Speaker and thought he would make by far the best new president of the United States, the man was not without his faults. "I'm afraid that Henry was using hyperbole when he referred to a 'tissue' of lies. That there are some lies in the story, scattered here and there, I don't doubt. In fact, I know one of them to be a lie, because Thompson and Powers were most certainly not at the meeting reported in this article."
He gave Clay another look. The Speaker avoided his eyes, choosing to look out the window.
"Yes. I know that for a fact, because I _was_ at the meeting—and so was Henry. And while Thompson was not at the meeting, it is indeed true that he was the man we were instructed to have the money sent to. That's why, you might notice, Henry can say he never heard of _Powers._ "
The landlady was entering with another pot of tea and an extra cup. Porter shoved the pile of newspapers aside to make room for the service, gave her a polite nod, and waited until she'd left the room.
"I never heard of Powers, either," he continued. "But I don't doubt that most of this report is accurate enough."
Across from him, the Kentucky legislator Adam Beatty had been reading the same article. Now he laid down the newspaper and shrugged his shoulders.
"What difference does it make? This report is coming in too late to have any effect on the election. But even if it had come in sooner, I doubt it would have made a difference." He chuckled. "I can assure you all, gentlemen, that my constituents are outraged by the events in Arkansas and demanding action. So are people all over the South. In fact, I was told just yesterday by one of Crawford's people that new recruits are flocking to the Georgia militia, lest their wives and children—"
"—be subjected to depravities at the hands of rampaging African savages," Porter concluded for him. "Leave off, Adam. You're not giving a campaign speech here. And you know just as well as I do that there is no chance whatsoever that the virtuous damsels of Georgia—or Tennessee, or Mississippi, or Missouri, or Louisiana, for that matter, which are considerably closer to Arkansas—are at any risk at all. From Arkansas negroes, at any rate. Choctaws might be a different matter. But all reports—including Bryant's—are agreed that the Choctaws are migrating to the Confederacy in the aftermath of the Crittenden incident. So are the Chickasaws."
He peered down at the offending article. "If this is accurate—and I'm quite sure it is, in these particulars—the total forces that met in front of Arkansas Post amounted to no more than two or three regiments on each side. Hardly enough, even without subtracting the half, to launch an invasion of the United States."
Beatty was quite unabashed. "Sure," he said, grinning. "So what? There wasn't any real chance the Creeks could overrun Kentucky, Tennessee, and Georgia, either. That didn't stop the massacre at Fort Mims from being a rallying cry eleven years ago—and I will point out to you that the slaughter at Arkansas Post was far worse."
Porter restrained his temper. Truth be told, he didn't much care for the Westerners and Southerners who had come to represent an ever-growing percentage of Henry Clay's coterie. They had a blithe disregard for simple logic that offended his New England upbringing, and an instant readiness to resort to naked emotionalism in the conduct of public affairs. Almost as bad as Jackson and his people, in that regard.
Almost...but not quite. Firmly, Porter reminded himself that his support of Clay derived from far more cogent and profound sources. Without Clay's American System, the manufacture and commerce of the nation would be stunted. The United States would remain a bucolic, agrarian backwater in the world, always at the financial mercy of England and other European powers.
"I say again, leave off," he growled. "The comparison is absurd. At Fort Mims, white people were massacred by Indians breaking _into_ a fort. At Arkansas Post, they were massacred by negroes trying to keep them out."
Beatty shrugged again. "All true—and again, so what? If you think the average Westerner or Southerner is going to care—especially Southerners—I can assure you that you are quite mistaken. All that matters here is that white men—lots of them—were butchered by niggers. A wave of patriotism is sweeping the country in response." He pointed a finger at Henry Clay. "And it will sweep our man into the president's house."
Patriotism, no less. Porter found Beatty to be perhaps the most offensive of the lot.
"All very well and good," he replied, forcing himself to keep his tone civil. " _If_ Henry wins a straightforward majority in the electoral college. But none of us have ever thought he could. Our campaign strategy was always to get him enough electoral votes to force the election into the House of Representatives. Where..."
He left off the rest. Henry Clay's control of the House of Representatives was doubted by no one in the United States, least of all his closest advisers. The Constitution provided that, in the event there was no clear winner of a presidential election in the electoral college, the House would choose between the three candidates who won the most votes. For the past year, therefore, their strategy had been predicated on that simple arithmetic.
There had been five major candidates for president at the start of the election campaign: Clay, Jackson, Adams, Crawford, and Calhoun.
At one point, fearing that his popularity in the Deep South was being too badly eroded by Jackson, Calhoun had almost retired from the race to run for vice president instead. But he'd eventually concluded that the continuing repercussions from the Algiers Incident and Jackson's response to it had steadied his own supporters.
In truth, Calhoun had no chance of winning the presidency nor even of being one of the three top contenders in the event no one won a majority. His support was completely regional, restricted entirely to the Deep South. Essentially, he was running now as a power broker. If someone won an outright majority of the electoral college, of course, that would be that. But in the far more likely event that the decision was thrown into the House, Calhoun would have considerable political leverage in the negotiations that followed.
Still, since at least the beginning of the summer, it had been clear that the election was narrowing down to the other four candidates. Three out of four, now, who'd wind up in the House in the event no one won a majority in the electoral college. All they had to do was just make sure that Henry Clay ended up among the top three. The rest, the Speaker would take care of himself.
"What's your point, Peter?" asked Josiah Johnston. He, too, had been reading the _Intelligencer._ Now he lifted it up. "And although you're right with regard to the past, I'm not at all sure this latest development _won't_ give him a clear majority."
Clay finally stopped looking out the window. "Not much chance of that, Josiah, I'm afraid." He gave all the men at the table his winning smile. "I wish it were true—mind, it _should_ be true—but we need to keep our feet on solid ground."
He squared his chair around, propped his elbows on the table, and began counting off on long, slender fingers.
The forefinger went up. "First, New England won't budge from Adams's camp, no matter what."
Then, the middle finger. "Neither, I'm afraid—not even after Arkansas Post—will Tennessee desert Jackson."
The ring finger came to join them. "I had hopes for Pennsylvania, as you know, but those seem to have been dashed. Pennsylvania—for reasons that still defy comprehension, given that it's the foremost manufacturing state in the nation—is going for Jackson. Don't ask me why."
Porter knew the answer and was a bit amazed that Clay didn't. For all his many marvelous qualities, not least of which was sheer intelligence, the Speaker could sometimes blind himself to unpleasant realities.
It was hardly complicated. Pennsylvania had the most populistic constitution of any of the states, where South Carolina had perhaps the least. As far back as 1776, at the outset of the revolution, Pennsylvania had granted suffrage to all adult white males, with no property qualification whatsoever.
Yes, Pennsylvania was now the largest manufacturing state in the nation, and thus—by right and reason—should incline toward Clay's American System. And indeed it did. Pennsylvania's delegation in Congress had led the fight for the tariff that had finally been enacted this year over strong Southern objections—the first truly protectionist tariff in American history.
But there were a lot more men working in those factories and workshops in Pennsylvania than men who owned them, and everything else about Jackson appealed to them. Nor, despite being a Southerner, was the Tennessee senator seen by America's northeastern and mid-Atlantic workingmen as being alien or hostile. Jackson had spoken in favor of the tariff and voted for it himself. In something like thirty separate votes in the Senate, he'd sided every time with Pennsylvania. In fact, Jackson was so favorable toward tariffs that John Calhoun routinely accused him of being a traitor to Southern interests.
Which was true, leaving aside Calhoun's histrionic way of putting it. Whatever else Andrew Jackson was—this was the man's one quality that Porter respected—he was a nationalist. Jackson had made clear many times, both as a general and as a senator, that he'd always place the interests of the United States above the narrow interests of any of its geographical sections. In that respect, you couldn't honestly say that Clay was any better.
The real problem, of course, came thereafter. Jackson's policies, should he become president, would favor the nation as a whole, true enough. But the nation he would favor was not the nation Porter wanted favored. Although he did not share the extreme views of the old Federalists, and never had, Porter didn't doubt for a moment that a republic needed to be led and dominated by its propertied classes. To do otherwise would surely begin the descent into chaos and civil strife that had brought down the ancient Roman and Greek republics.
Clay had been droning on about the details—complex to the point of madness—of the negotiations with Adams's and Van Buren's people in New York. Now that he was coming to the point, Porter concentrated on his words.
"—that seems to be the best we can do, after this latest arrangement. We'll get no more than seven electoral votes from New York."
Beatty had been jotting down figures. "So. We can still count on Kentucky, Indiana, Ohio, Illinois, Missouri, and Louisiana, as we have from the beginning." He jabbed his pen toward the newspapers piled on the table. "There's certainly nothing in there that'll change that equation. The reports are that militia recruitment is up in all the northwestern states, too."
It would be better to call those rumors than reports, Porter thought, although he tended to believe them accurate himself. Still, it didn't necessarily mean much. The militias were a political powerhouse in most of the states, especially the western ones. They usually had a surge in recruitment during election campaigns.
"—figure we can win in New Jersey also," Beatty continued, "although we can't be sure of it. Jackson's got quite a following in the mob of that state, almost as much as Pennsylvania. And we've got a good chance in Delaware and Maryland. Still, even if none of the three come over to us, we've got enough to push Crawford aside for one of the three slots in the electoral college. All the more so since the knowledge of the stroke he suffered last year is now widespread, despite all the efforts of his advisers to conceal his medical condition."
He laid down the pen carefully. "New England, of course, won't desert Adams. What that leaves, therefore, is the South. If we can reach a suitable accommodation with Crawford's people and Calhoun, we might even be able to win a straight majority. Although I agree with Henry that that's most unlikely. Still, we can certainly get enough votes to be included in the House's selection. In fact..."
His bright eyes swept the men gathered at the table. "I think we've got a very good chance of coming in with a plurality. Which we'd never thought we had before."
"That'd be a blessing," Johnston grunted. He had his chair tipped back, with his hands folded across his stomach. "Without a plurality, Henry can win the presidency if the election gets tossed into the House. But he'll never hear the end of it for the next four years. There'll be endless accusations about 'rotten deals' and 'corrupt bargains.' Watch and see."
"The next _eight_ years," Clay said stiffly. "I have every intention of serving two terms in office. That said, I agree with Josiah. Let's remember, gentlemen, that the whole purpose of this exercise is not to assuage my own ambition but to advance the interests of the nation. To do that, I need eight years in the president's house—"
He rose and pointed dramatically out the window. " _And_ the support of Congress. Enough of it, at least, to get my American System so firmly rooted in the country that no one can tear it back out."
The window he was pointing to faced west, as it happened, which was the opposite direction from the Capitol. But Henry Clay was never given to fussing over minutiae, Porter thought wryly.
He also had some wry thoughts about the Speaker's insistence that his own aggrandizement was not involved. Many of the insinuations against Henry Clay were false, in Porter's opinion. His reputation for sexual debauchery, for instance, was grossly exaggerated. But the accusation that he was as ambitious as Lucifer was...
Close to the mark, at least.
Still, Porter knew that Clay meant what he said. It wasn't mere flippery for the sake of cloaking personal goals. The frequent charge that the Speaker had no political principles at all was just wrong. He was quite committed to his project of strengthening the United States through his American System. If for no other reason, out of pride in having forged it in the first place. And that, in the end, was what mattered to Porter and men like him.
Clay sat down. "So, yes, let's hope for a plurality. It won't matter either way in terms of the election. But it will matter for the next eight years."
"The election's in three days, Henry," Josiah pointed out. "It takes weeks for news to spread across a country as big as ours. How—"
Impatiently, Clay waved his hand. "That's news to the mob. Fortunately, in their wisdom, the founders of this nation saw fit to create a true republic. That means that what matters in the long run is not the opinion of the populace as such—which is often uninformed and always prone to emotionalism—but the opinion of its elected political leaders. They—not the mob—will be the ones who make the decisions. And while senators and congressmen are naturally influenced by popular opinion in their states, they are not bound by it. Not legally, not morally—certainly not politically."
His famous broad smile appeared. "And many of the congressmen have now arrived in the city. _They'll_ get the news, in plenty of time."
" _What_ 'news'?" Porter asked, half dreading the answer.
Dramatically, as he did most things, Clay held up the _Intelligencer._
"This!" he replied, shaking the offending newspapers. "Not only shall I not attempt to deny any of these charges—so-called charges—I shall take them for my own. Brandish them like a spear before battle, if you will."
Porter had to fight not to roll his eyes. "Henry, you're gambling again. I strongly urge you to say nothing at all. Simply ignore the reports. It's only one newspaper, as influential as it might be in some circles."
Clay's sneer was every bit as broad as his smile—and just as famous. "Play it safe, you mean? I think not!"
He rose again and pointed out the window. "No, gentlemen! To lead this great nation, boldness is always required!"
At least he was pointing in the right direction, this time. The president's house was that way, indeed.
_Washington, D.C._
NOVEMBER 6, 1824
" '—has it come to this? Are we so humbled, so low, so despicable, that we dare not express our sympathy for suffering Louisiana, lest, peradventure, we might offend some one or more of their imperial and royal majesties?' "
Standing at the window to his office listening to the attorney general quoting from Clay's speech of the day before, James Monroe barked a laugh. "Isn't that the same language he used a few months ago to excoriate us for refusing to intervene in the Greek rebellion?"
"It's almost identical," said John Quincy Adams, sitting in a chair nearby. "Oh, but it gets better. Please continue, Bill."
William Wirt scanned farther down the newspaper in his lap. "I'll skip a bit, Mr. President. There's some pure verbiage here, mixed in with the merely histrionic."
The attorney general cleared his throat and continued quoting from the speech. "Here's where he gets—finally—to the point. 'I would rather adjure the nation to remember that it contains a million freemen capable of bearing arms, and ready to exhaust their last drop of blood and their last cent, in defending their country, its institutions, and its liberty.' "
Wirt fell silent and lowered the newspaper.
President Monroe continued to look out the window, gazing at the country's capital city. After a few seconds, he said softly: "This is the same Henry Clay who praised us for our stance of forbidding any further European intervention in the New World. Albeit, to be sure, criticizing us for taking so long to do so. Am I not correct?"
Adams laughed sarcastically. "And adding into the bargain that he was prepared to wage a war against the whole world for it, even England. Somehow, a man of his undoubted intelligence failed to grasp what was clear to anyone with an ounce of sense with regard to foreign affairs: that our policy had the full if tacit support of that very same England he proposed to war against. Bah! He knew perfectly well, then, that his bombast with regard to England was as safe as a man threatening to wage war against the tide—when it is receding."
Adams pointed to the newspaper on Wirt's lap. "Just as he knows perfectly well, now, that threatening to wage war against the European powers should they dare to interfere in the Arkansas situation is every bit as safe. If an attack on the Confederacy is launched by the United States, it will be condemned the world over. But no one will send any ships or troops to support Arkansas. How could they get there, anyway?"
Monroe still hadn't turned around. "You have to admit it's a fascinating chain of logic," he mused, "even for Henry Clay. I'm still not quite sure how he managed to segue from the need to defend the bleeding Greek heroes against the Turk oppressor who rules Greece, to the need to defend the states of our nation from which a band of criminals sallied forth to conquer a neighboring country of ours, which hasn't threatened them at all. If you didn't know better, you'd think Louisiana and Mississippi were groaning under Arkansas occupation."
Finally the president turned around. "Has Jackson said anything?"
Wirt shook his head. "Not a word, sir. Not in public, anyway, and even his private thoughts seem a mystery to everyone. Possibly even his closest confidants."
"Any guesses?"
"With Jackson, Mr. President, it's always hard to know. Most people are assuming he'll side with Clay, if for no other reason than to keep Clay from undercutting his support in the West and the South. But..."
Monroe cocked an eyebrow. "But you're not so sure."
"No, sir, I'm not."
Adams had been listening intently. "Why, Bill? It's the obvious move to make, for a presidential candidate in his position."
Wirt shifted uncomfortably in his chair. "Yes, it would be. But I'll remind you that it would have been politically shrewd for Jackson to have opposed the tariff bill, too. But he didn't. In fact, he was one of the administration's strongest supporters in the Senate. That cost him in the Southern states, probably as much as he gained in the manufacturing ones."
Monroe shook his head. "Not the same thing. No one's ever doubted—not anyone who's politically educated, anyway—that Jackson is a firm supporter of the principle that the United States is a _nation,_ not simply an aggregate of states. In that respect, he's quite unlike John Randolph or Crawford's Radicals. It still doesn't follow that in this instance he wouldn't take the same stance as Clay."
"You could even say that the very same nationalist principles called for it," Adams added. "If I might play devil's advocate for a moment, one could argue that the massacre at Arkansas Post was a humiliation of the United States that needed to be set right. As a matter of national pride, if nothing else."
Wirt gave him a level stare. Adams looked aside. "Well, you _could._ "
"Finish the sentence, John," the attorney general said. It sounded a bit like a command, oddly enough.
Adams smiled crookedly. "If you weren't me. Or Andrew Jackson."
Wirt nodded. "Yes." He turned to Monroe. "And that's really my only point, Mr. President. There's simply no way to know what Jackson will do. His origins, his history, his background—certainly his temperament, which can be quite savage—will all be pulling him in one direction. But he's also the same man who outraged Louisiana's plantation owners by arming black freedmen in the war against Britain, don't forget."
Monroe's smile was almost as crooked as the one that had been on Quincy Adams's face a moment before. "Not to mention outraging the War Department when he gave that black gunner a field commission. Yes. I remember."
The president now looked at the secretary of state. John Quincy Adams had risen and was standing at the same window the president had been gazing through earlier.
"There's always that about Jackson," Monroe said softly. "One never quite knows, until the moment, exactly where his principles might fall. But he is a man of principle."
Adams made no response. He seemed completely preoccupied by the sight of the city beyond. Which was actually not that prepossessing, outside of the Capitol in the distance.
**CHAPTER 22**
_Washington, D.C._
NOVEMBER 7, 1824
"We can take a carriage, if you prefer," Houston said. "It's chilly out."
Maria Hester shook her head. "Oh, stop being so pestiferously male, Sam. I swear! I'm not even sure I'm pregnant in the first place. If I am, it's not more than a few weeks."
She looked up, giving him a sly smile. Then, leaned into him a bit, squeezing his arm more tightly. "I will say you didn't waste any time, once you got back."
Sam didn't know whether to look smug or embarrassed. He tried for dignity instead.
And failed completely, judging from his wife's giggle.
"Come on," she said. "If you want to talk to Andy before he says anything public, you'd best do it now. It's already noon." She nodded toward the distant Capitol. "Besides, we only have to walk a mile. This time of year, Pennsylvania Avenue won't even be that muddy."
After a hundred feet, she qualified the statement. "Well. Compared to summer, anyway."
"I've seen pigsties that were cleaner than this city," Sam muttered.
"Stop it!" Maria Hester scolded. "You promised. No politics until we get to the senator's chambers."
When John Coffee entered Andrew Jackson's office, the senator was looking out of a window. In his case, positioned as it was on the second floor of the Capitol, one that gave him a very nice view of the president's house he hoped to occupy soon. The White House, some people were starting to call it, now that the house had been repaired and repainted after the British vandalism of the past war.
All of the key men in Jackson's entourage were already present in the chamber, seated here and there about the room. Judge John Overton; Tennessee state senator Hugh Lawson White; John Henry Eaton, Tennessee's other U.S. senator; and Eaton's brother-in-law, William H. Lewis.
Lewis seemed gloomy, but Coffee discounted that. The man's heavy face always gave him a solemn demeanor except when he was talking. But both Overton and Eaton seemed out of sorts as well.
Jackson, on the other hand, seemed in something of an impish mood. Hearing Coffee enter, he gave him a peculiar smile and waved him toward one of the empty chairs. "Have a seat, John."
"Yes, do," said Overton. "Maybe you can talk some sense into him."
Sitting down, Coffee cocked his head. "Sense about what?"
"This," said Eaton. He picked up some sheets of paper and handed them over.
Coffee immediately recognized Jackson's handwriting, which was quite unmistakable. Even if it hadn't been, the senator's sometimes eccentric spelling and syntax would have identified the author.
It was a speech, evidently the one Jackson proposed to give to the Senate later that afternoon. Coffee took the time to read it slowly and carefully. Being one of Andy's closest friends, he wasn't surprised at all by the quality of the speech. Its intellectual content, at least, if not the specific thrust. Even after all these years, many people still kept thinking of Jackson as if he were some sort of semiliterate frontier roughneck. In point of fact, although the senator's rudimentary formal education still left traces in his prose, Jackson was as astute and well-read a politician as most any in the United States. John Quincy Adams excepted, of course.
When he was finished, Coffee laid the speech down on the low table in front of him.
"If you just keep your mouth shut, Andy, I'm pretty sure this will all blow over."
"That's just what I told him," Eaton complained. "The votes were in all over the country before the news from Arkansas had time to spread. Much, anyway. And those people out West and in the South—most of the Southern states wouldn't have gotten the news at all, before the election—who did hear about it would just assume..."
"That Andy Jackson was another God-damned Henry Clay," the senator interrupted. But the words weren't snarled. Actually, they'd been said quite good-humoredly.
Eaton flushed. "Andy, that's not the point and you know it."
"Actually, it is the point," Overton said mildly. "And you know it as well as anyone here does."
The judge raised his hand, forestalling Eaton's further protest. "Not the part about another Henry Clay—and, Andy, don't let Rachel hear you blaspheming like that. Nobody thinks Andy and Henry Clay are any more alike than bulls and roosters. What they _do_ think is that the general who won the Horseshoe Bend and the Mississippi ain't likely to stand by twiddling his thumbs while a bunch of niggers butcher white folks."
"He's right, Andy," said Coffee. "Just keep your mouth shut, and everybody will assume that Old Hickory will be Old Hickory. Plenty of time after you settle in the White House to set them straight."
Jackson had been pulling out the chair to his desk, preparatory to sitting down. But now he stopped and stood up straight. "Steal the election, you mean."
Ramrod-straight. Coffee heaved a sigh. "You and your damn pride—and don't give _me_ lectures on blaspheming, Judge Overton. You, of all people."
"I'll be blasted if I will," said Jackson. "All that happened here is that Henry Clay—as foul a man as ever besmirched the halls of Congress; I hate that bastard with a passion, and you all know it—financed a pack of bandits, using his connections with the stinking Bank to raise the money, in order to weasel his way into the presidency. Give me one good reason I should support that."
The earlier good humor was gone, now. He gave his advisers the same blue-eyed glare that was famous across much of the country. "No, sirs, I shall not."
But none of those men had remained Andy Jackson's friends and advisers by being easily intimidated. "That ain't the point, Andy," said Overton. "It all comes down to the race issue. You know it just as well as we do. Yes, sure, Crittenden's men were bandits. But they were _white_ bandits—and the men who massacred them were all niggers."
"The commander who gave the order wasn't," Jackson fired back. "There's no dispute over that, not in any of the reports. His name is Patrick Driscol. As Scots-Irish as I am, and with a skin paler than mine. Formerly of the United States Army. A major, when he resigned. I know. He served under me in New Orleans and was one of the best officers I've ever had."
Silence filled the room for a time. Jackson shoved the chair back under the table and went to stand at the window again.
By the time they were halfway down Pennsylvania Avenue, Sam wished he'd been firm about calling for a carriage. Maria Hester might have a fortitude to shame most frontier women, but—dammit—his boots were filthy. His favorite boots, too.
Of course, his wife's shoes were a hopeless wreck. But those were the old ones she didn't care about anyway, that she only kept for just such promenades. Like any experienced lady of Washington, she had a nice set in her purse, ready to change into when they reached their destination.
"Are you sure—"
"Sam Houston, Injun fighter and war hero," his wife jibed. "Defeated by a little mud. Just soldier on, soldier."
"I retired from the army, remember?"
"Then why does everyone keep calling you Colonel?"
Jackson let out a sigh, his stiff shoulders easing a little. "There's something wrong with John Calhoun," he said, so softly the men in the room had to strain to hear him. "Him, and all the men like him."
Overton frowned. "We were talking about Henry Clay."
Jackson turned around. "No, we weren't. Clay doesn't give a damn about Crittenden's men, even less than I do. This isn't about Henry Clay. Not really. This is about John Calhoun. Might be better to say, the South that Calhoun is doing his level best to bring into existence. Like some sort of Araby heathen, trying to summon a demon out of a sealed lamp."
Jackson now had his hands clasped behind his back. His jaws seemed more gaunt than ever. "I got no use for Sam Houston's fancies about black folk. Indians, maybe a little, but not niggers. Never did, never will. It's just a fact that the black race is inferior to the white race. Taken as a whole, at any rate. I'll allow for the exceptional individual, here and there."
He paused, scanning the room. "Anybody here disagree with me?"
After a moment, they all shook their heads.
"Didn't think so. That's why slavery doesn't bother me any. Never did. If that fraud Thomas Jefferson wants to beat his breast over it—though I notice he has yet to free a single one of his slaves—let him do it. I won't." His jaws grew tighter still. "But that doesn't mean I agree with Calhoun, either. That man..."
He took a deep breath. "That man is just plain mean. He's like all that type of slave-owner. The same ones who played the traitor at New Orleans. The fact that I don't think black men are the equal of white men doesn't mean I think they aren't still men. They're not dumb animals, tarnation, with no rights at all. And that's exactly what John Calhoun thinks—and that's exactly where he wants to lead the nation. With Henry Clay playing his tune, because he's the fanciest piper in town."
He went over to his desk and picked up one of the newspapers lying there. "Never thought I'd see the day when I thought the _Intelligencer_ was the best paper around," he said wryly. "But today, at least, on this issue, the fact is they are."
He held up the paper. "Got another article in here by that Bryant fellow. Gives you all the details you want to know—or don't want to know—about how Crittenden's men conducted themselves. You've read it, I assume?"
Again, they all nodded.
"So, fine," Jackson continued. "Let me ask you this, then. Suppose a gang of white criminals broke into a black freedman's house right here in Washington—and don't bother yapping to me about the exclusion laws, because you know as well as I do they aren't enforced half the time. There's too many black servants their masters want to keep around, free or not, including me. Why? Because some of them are good servants, that's why. Not to mention they don't want to listen to the kids hollering when their nanny gets sent away. Or the cook who gives them treats when their parents aren't looking."
Still holding the paper in his left hand, he ran the fingers of the other through his stiff gray hair. "Truth is, I'm sorry now I ever voted for those blasted laws. They're just a violation of human nature, is all. Inferior or not, black people are still people, and most people—any color, leaving aside the Calhouns of the world—form attachments to each other. Free or slave, it don't matter. It just don't."
He stopped the hair-ruffling and slapped the paper back on the desk. "So let me ask you. A gang of white criminals breaks into a black man's home, starts stealing everything he owns—which ain't much—and sets to raping his womenfolk in the bargain. So he shoots them dead, like any man would do who was worth his salt. Am I supposed to demand that _he_ gets arrested and punished? Just because he's black?"
He was back to glaring. "Well? Answer me. Am I?"
After a moment, everyone looked away.
"What I figured. Be damned if I will. They want Old Hickory, I aim to give 'em Old Hickory. Right between the eyes."
Thankfully, the Capitol was only a hundred yards away. For all her determination and teasing, Sam could tell that his wife was tiring. Plowing through mud was hard enough for a big man like Sam. He could just imagine how a mile of it would exhaust a small woman like Maria Hester.
Coffee had been watching Jackson closely through his little peroration. When it was done, he chuckled.
"What's so funny?" the senator demanded.
"You are, if you want to know the truth. Sam Houston's still sticking in your throat, isn't he?"
Jackson glared at him. "I kept that promise, and it's done. Told him so myself."
"Yes, I know. So what?" Coffee didn't flinch at all from that blue-eyed fury. Worst thing you could do around Andy Jackson.
After a few seconds, the glare started to fade. After a few more, Jackson even started chuckling himself.
"Blast that youngster," he muttered. "Still worse, once he named his firstborn after me. Now that the kid's old enough to talk, he calls me Grandpa. Damn little conniving clever politician like his daddy."
He yanked out the chair and folded himself into his seat. "Yes, fine. I suppose so." He stuck out his bony finger, like a gun. "Not that I didn't mean it when I said I had no use for Houston's fancies. Still."
Coffee understood. "You said he'd turn down the rose of fortune when you offered it to him. And you were right. He did. Proud as a peacock you were, afterward."
"I sure was. Proud of both of us. Him for turning it down, and me for knowing he would and knowing why."
He swiveled his gaze toward the other men in the room. "Do you understand, now? We've talked it over, like we always do. But the decision's mine, and I've made it."
He'd never lowered the finger. Now, the bony weapon pointed to the newspaper. "There's my rose of fortune, gentlemen, that you're waving under my nose. The answer's no. We'll go into the president's house through the front door, or we won't go in at all. Let Henry Clay sneak himself in through the servant's entrance if he wants it that bad."
The steps of the Capitol were a blessed relief from the mud. As soon as they reached the top of the steps, Maria Hester crouched and began opening her bag.
"No way I'm going in there in these filthy things."
Sam smiled.
"Colonel Houston!"
He turned, still smiling, but the smile faded almost immediately. The man coming up the steps toward him had no friendly look on his face. As much of it as Sam could see, at any rate. The fellow had a broad-brimmed hat to go with a long cloak. He looked positively conspiratorial, like something out of a cheap stage performance.
"May I help you, sir?"
"You were born in Virginia, am I not correct?"
Coffee nodded. Whether because he agreed with Jackson or not, he didn't even know himself. But that wasn't the point, in the end. You could always trust Andy Jackson. Not to be right, necessarily, but to be Andy Jackson. For Coffee, that was good enough.
Judging from the nods that went around the room, the other men had come to the same conclusion.
"All right, then," said Eaton. "We'll almost surely lose this election. But there's 1828 to look to."
"Clay's sure to go for two terms," cautioned White.
Overton started to say something, but Jackson cut him off. "He'll _try._ Whether he can do it or not—"
A loud clap coming from outside interrupted him. Jackson's head twisted around to the window. "That was a gunshot."
Sam never went armed in the streets of Washington. Now he was half regretting it. He was fully regretting not having accepted Chester's offer to come along. This man—
"I asked you a question, sir!"
"And did so most uncivilly," Sam snapped back. "But the answer is no secret. Yes, I was—"
"You are a traitor, then!"
"Sam!" Maria Hester shrieked.
A pistol was coming out from under the cloak. Sam started to lunge for him.
Maria Hester came up from her crouch, wildly swinging her bag. The fancy shoes she'd gotten half out went flying, one of them into the man's face.
He flinched. The pistol went off but missed. Sam smashed his face with a fist. It was a big fist, and Sam was in a fury. His assailant's lips were shredded against his teeth, and some teeth went skittering down the steps. So did the man himself, his hat coming loose and his cloak swirling like a blanket.
Sam started to follow. He was going to beat this bastard into—
_"Sam..."_
Overton was the first one at the window. "Oh, dear God," he said.
By the time Coffee and Jackson and the others came out of the Capitol onto the steps, Maria Hester had bled to death. The shot that Sam thought to have missed had struck her instead, severing the big artery under her arm. Coffee couldn't remember the name of it. But he'd seen men die on a battlefield from just such a wound.
Of the assailant there was no trace, beyond spots of blood and broken teeth. Houston had, understandably, paid the man no further attention once he realized his wife had been shot.
"Put a five-thousand-dollar reward out, in my name," Jackson ordered. His face was pale as a sheet, and he was trembling with rage. "Dead or alive."
Coffee nodded. Medical orderlies had arrived by now and were tending to Maria Hester. To her corpse, rather. Or trying to. Houston was still holding her body, his face blank. His own clothes were soaked with her blood, but he didn't seem to notice.
"Anything else, immediately?"
"Yes." Jackson swallowed. Just a reflex, to control his fury. This was no feigned Andy Jackson tantrum, either. Coffee knew the signs. This was the real thing, the rage of a man famous all over the frontier for his capacity for violence.
"Yes," he repeated. "Just remember that I'd already made my decision."
Coffee hissed. "Andy, you _can't_ give that speech this afternoon. In your state—"
"Watch me."
The speech was as bad as Coffee feared. Not the words themselves, so much. It was the tone and, worst of all, the coda that Jackson added that had never been part of his written text.
"...the basest, meanest scoundrel, that ever disgraced the image of his God—nothing too mean or low for Henry Clay to condescend to, secretly to carry his cowardly and base purpose...
"...he is personally void of good morals, and politically a reckless demagogue, ambitious and regardless of truth when it comes in the way of his ambition..."
That the words he spoke were all true, in Coffee's opinion, made no difference. All the assiduous work that Andy had done in Washington since he'd been elected senator two years earlier—and done exceedingly well—were washed away. The suave and sophisticated political leader that the capital's elite had come to know and even admire was gone; the frontier half savage that they feared, risen to the surface.
It didn't help that he'd ended his speech by referring the Speaker of the House to "all the laws which govern and regulate the conduct of men of honor." Which amounted, under the circumstances, to a challenge to a duel, should Clay choose to take exception to his remarks.
To be sure, Clay himself had been known to make similar noises in the course of public controversies. But "noises" were all they were: just typical Clay theatrics that nobody took in earnest.
Coming from Jackson, the words were taken dead seriously. The senator from Tennessee was one of the most notorious duelists in America.
Clay made no public response, of course. Since he hadn't been present in the Senate when Jackson gave the speech, he could ignore it. To do otherwise would be politically foolish, and personally...
Quite possibly fatal.
Besides, he was too relieved by the latest news to give much thought to Jackson.
**CHAPTER 23**
_Washington, D.C._
NOVEMBER 8, 1824
"Well, breathe easy, gentlemen," said Adam Beatty, as soon as he entered the dining room of the boardinghouse. "They found him."
Henry Clay, who had been slumped in a chair gazing out the window, came erect immediately. "They caught the bastard?"
Beatty shook his head. "Well, no, they didn't _catch_ him. It looks like he made his escape from the city. But they know for sure who did it. No question, apparently."
He smiled so widely it was almost a grin. "What's important is...He wasn't one of ours. A Radical, it seems. One of Crawford's people. Well, not directly. From what I was told, there's no evidence he was active in Crawford's campaign. But those were definitely his sympathies."
Most of the other men in the room were starting to smile, too. Porter wasn't, though—and he was glad to see that Clay wasn't, either. In fact, Clay's expression was darkening fast.
"No, Mr. Beatty!" the Speaker snapped. "What's important here is that an innocent young woman was foully murdered on the very steps of our nation's Capitol. What in Sam Hill is wrong with you?"
That wiped the smiles off. Clay glared around the table. "For the sake of all that's holy, gentlemen. Yes, I want to be in the White House, and you want me there. But if I ever see you gloating again because a young woman's murder can't hurt us politically, I shall ask you to leave my company at once. And don't return. Is that understood?"
The nods came as fast as the smiles had vanished. Clay could be as gracious and charming as anyone in the world when he wanted to be—which he usually did. But there was a very sharp edge to him, also, as any number of rambunctious young congressmen had learned when they thought heedlessly to cross lances with the Speaker of the House. Clay had not dominated that very unsubmissive chamber of legislators for years by being unable or unwilling to crack the whip, when need be.
Beatty had taken a seat, now, doing everything in his power to look as inconspicuous as possible.
There was perhaps half a minute of strained silence. Then, sighing, Clay slumped back in his chair again.
"Henry, I'm sorry—" Beatty began.
Clay waved off the apology. "Never mind, Adam. Didn't mean to bite your head off. It's just...Dear God, what a horrible thing to have happen. I think Maria Hester was the president's favorite child, too, even if he'd never admit it. I don't want to think what he's going through, right now."
Josiah Johnston made a face. "She was certainly my favorite of his daughters. The other, Eliza..."
He left off the rest. Eliza Hay, Monroe's oldest daughter, was rather notorious in Washington. A very attractive and intelligent woman, to be sure. Also very vain, and given to being haughty and sarcastic. Maria Hester had been much the more charming of the two.
Silence, again, for a minute or so. Then Clay sat up straighter in his chair.
"Very well. The needs of the nation continue, after all. So what's the news, Adam?"
This time, very wisely, Beatty gave his report with neither smiles nor commentary. "It's been clearly established that the culprit was a certain Andrew Clark. From a family—rather prominent, it seems—in Savannah, Georgia. His father owns a large plantation in the area."
"Clearly established—how?" Porter asked.
Beatty shook his head. "I don't know the details, Peter. I got the news from a reliable source in the War Department. But there are definitely eyewitnesses to the man's making threats about Houston. Had been since he arrived in the city a fortnight ago, it seems. Nobody took much notice of it, because..."
He shrugged. There were plenty of taverns in some quarters of the capital, patronized by Southern gentlemen, where damning the traitor Sam Houston and wishing all manner of ill upon him went with practically every round of whiskey. Nobody took much notice of it, not even the ones doing the damning and cursing. That type of Southern gentleman issued bloodcurdling threats routinely on every controversial subject imaginable, as casually as other men commented on the weather.
"The description fits, too," Beatty continued, "all the way down to that bizarre hat and cloak. And when the hat was shown to the man's landlady, she identified it as being his."
"What's the connection to Crawford?" asked Johnston.
"Nothing direct, as I said. He doesn't seem to have been active in the campaign. It's more a matter of being an extreme Radical."
Porter grunted. "Why call him a Crawford man, then? More likely to be an admirer of John Randolph."
Obviously still smarting from Clay's rebuke, Beatty opened his mouth and closed it. His expression was a bit like that of a stubborn child, wisely silent after a parent's chastisement but not having changed his mind any.
Clay's broad mouth quirked into something that bordered on a smile. "Oh, fine, Adam. Say it."
Beatty's words came out in something of a rush. "Look, Henry, I apologize if my earlier remark was unseemly. But, blast it, it's _true._ It would have been a disaster if this bastard had been associated with us. As it is..."
Johnston picked up the cue. "Just being a known extreme Radical is enough. Who cares what he thought of Crawford himself, Peter? Much less Randolph. Randolph's not the Radical candidate for president. Crawford is. That's what counts. Everybody's furious about this, regardless of what they thought about Sam Houston. But it won't come down on our heads."
"In fact," Beatty added, "it makes Jackson's grotesque performance yesterday look worse than ever."
Clay gave him a sharp look. Not a hostile one, though, more in the way of cold calculation. "You think so?"
Beatty's detestable hearty bluffness was returning, alas. "For sure and certain, Henry! Why, the man practically threatened to kill you, and you had nothing to do with it at all. So why'd he attack you instead of Crawford?"
Porter tightened his jaws. That had to be one of the stupidest comments he'd ever heard. The reason Jackson had gone after Clay instead of Crawford—could even a dimwit not grasp this?—was that Clay had helped fund the Crittenden expedition, and Crawford had had nothing to do with it. That had been the subject of Jackson's speech. He'd said nothing about Mrs. Houston's murder.
On the other hand...
Grudgingly, Porter allowed that Beatty might be right, if not for the reasons he advanced. Whatever else, the murder had horrified everyone in Washington. The reasons behind it meant less than the sheer brutality of the deed itself. Which meant that the emotional reaction was likely to spill against...
Ironically enough, Andrew Jackson, the man the dead woman and her husband had named their firstborn son after. Not because anyone thought Jackson had any connection to the murderer but simply because he, more than any other candidate, exemplified that capacity for violence in the first place. Did a nation that had just witnessed the daughter of its president shot down on the steps of the Capitol want that president's successor to be a man who'd killed another in a duel? A man who'd once held a gunfight in a hotel with the Benton brothers?
"It's over," Beatty predicted. "It's all over but the shouting."
Clay's expression was darkening again. Hastily, Johnston interjected: "Well, no, Adam. There's a funeral first, remember? Tomorrow."
"Oh. Yes, of course."
Later that afternoon, Clay spoke in private to Porter.
"Jackson put up five thousand dollars for that reward; am I right?"
Porter nodded.
"Fine. Then I'll put up ten."
Porter started to shake his head, but Henry had already seen the problem.
"No, no, that won't do. It would make it seem as if I were engaged in a petty contest with Jackson. But I can put up an equal amount, I think. See to it, would you, Peter?"
John Quincy Adams worked later than usual that day, well into the evening. Not because there was anything particularly pressing to be done, but simply because he couldn't think of anything better to do.
By eight o'clock, he decided it was time to go home. On his way out, however, a sudden impulse led him to the president's office. Monroe was not in, having spent the entire day in the private quarters of the house with his wife and surviving daughter and his grandchildren. And Houston.
The same impulse—half sensed, not understood—led Adams into the office itself, and to the window behind the president's desk that Monroe liked to look through.
Perhaps a minute later, Adams discovered himself sitting in the president's chair. He'd been so lost in his thoughts that he hadn't even realized he'd done so.
He began to rise immediately, but froze halfway through. That half-felt, not-understood impulse had come into sudden focus. So, sighing softly, he sat back down again.
There was still a duty to be performed this day. Not one that John Quincy Adams wanted to perform, nor one that suited him well at all. But, whatever else, he was not a man who had ever shirked duty.
He spent perhaps an hour lost in his thoughts again. Only a small sound at the doorway brought him out of them.
Turning his head, he saw that James Monroe was standing there. Instantly flushing, Adams rose from the chair.
"Mr. President. Ah...my apologies. I don't know what I was thinking. Please excuse my impertinence—"
"It's fine, John," Monroe said softly. He came into the room, waving his hand a bit. "Sit back down again. Why not? You may very well be sitting in that chair for four years, come March. Possibly eight. No reason not to see if it suits you."
Monroe's face seemed more drawn than usual, but it was hard to tell. The president was a man with such self-control that he would have been the envy of any Roman stoic.
Adams didn't know quite what to say. He'd already visited the family earlier that day to extend his condolences. Repeating them again would seem...
Not like John Quincy Adams. For the same reason, the impulse to ask Monroe how he was managing died stillborn. For all the mutual respect between them, there had never been much in the way of personal intimacy between Adams and the president. Monroe was rarely given to such; and Adams, still less.
Monroe was at the window now, looking out over the darkened city. Not that he could actually see it. With the lamp in the corner shining against the windowpane, he could see only his own reflection.
Fortunately, it was always possible to ask about women. "How is Mrs. Monroe doing, sir?"
"Not well, as you might imagine," the president replied softly. "Her health has not been good for some time, as you know. This..."
He drew in a long deep breath. "This was as bad as anything that could have happened. Fortunately, Eliza is with her, and bearing up well."
Adams nodded. As was true of most people, he didn't much care for the president's oldest daughter—only daughter, now—but she was certainly a woman of strong character.
"And Mr. Houston?"
Monroe took another long deep breath. "I'm more concerned about Sam, immediately."
"Is he..."
Monroe shook his head. "No, John. He isn't drunk. I don't believe he's done so much as glance at a bottle of whiskey. He's spent most of the past day with his son, trying to explain to a four-year-old that he'll never see his mother again."
There might have been a slight catch to Monroe's voice, right there at the end. A very subtle thing, though, if it had been there at all.
Adams frowned. "Then...What's the nature of your concern, if I might ask?"
Monroe's head turned, half facing Adams. "Never forget that Sam Houston is Scots-Irish, John. Perhaps the most warmhearted and good-natured Scots-Irishman who ever lived, true. But he's still of that stock. Which is one that is given to rage, and dark furies, and forgives very little—and that slowly if at all."
"Ah. You think he'll take out after the murderer?" A worse possibility occurred to Adams. Andrew Jackson wouldn't be the only man who'd think to lash out at a political opponent as detested as Henry Clay.
Monroe might have smiled slightly, then. If so, the smile came and went almost instantly.
"No, John. Don't underestimate my son-in-law. I've come to know him quite well, these past years. He's a man who thinks...very large thoughts. No, he'll not seek his revenge on the man who murdered his wife. Should he happen to encounter him, of course, he'd certainly kill him. But he'll let the law handle it, otherwise."
He was silent for a moment: "But I'm much afraid, in the mood he's in, he will seek revenge on the _nation_ he holds responsible for Maria Hester's death in the first place."
Adams's eyes widened. "But how...Ah."
That, too, suddenly brought many things into focus. "He's right, actually, Mr. President. In a way, at least."
Monroe took yet another one of those long slow breaths. "Yes, I know he is." For the first time, a genuine sadness entered his voice. "He most certainly is. Only a nation—a republic, to make it worse—that was mad enough to place slavery at its foundation could produce such a monster as Andrew Clark. And the madness is growing, John, year by year. Fueled by greed: the greed glowing hotter as more and more cant and hypocrisy is piled upon it, the flames then fanned by men like John Calhoun. With, now, even men like Henry Clay aiding and abetting the madness, for no purpose more sublime than personal ambition."
Another long slow breath. Then, quietly, sadly: "I have often wondered if my mentor and friend Thomas Jefferson was right when he foresaw a terrible vengeance by a just God. Now I know he was. I saw the proof of it yesterday, in my daughter's bloody corpse."
There might have been a slight tremor in the last few words. Perhaps not. Monroe's stoicism was truly exceptional.
"And yet..." The president shrugged. "And yet it continues, since very few men—and I am not included among them—have the courage to stand squarely against it. And, again, for no better reason than greed." His lips twisted a bit. "Well, perhaps that's too harsh. Economic and financial strain, more often—but is that really any better than naked greed?"
He'd had his hands clasped behind his back. Now he brought them to the fore and looked down upon them. "I can see my daughter's blood on my own hands if I look closely enough. I am in debt, as I'm sure you know. Most Southern gentlemen are, especially if they've spent as many years in public service as I have."
Adams had known that of Monroe's personal situation, although he didn't know any of the details. Public office was not very remunerative in the American republic, even in high posts, and many of the expenses had to be borne by the officeholder out of his own purse. Unless a man was an outright thief—which Monroe himself was certainly not, though some of the men who'd risen to prominence with him might be so accused—he'd soon enough find his personal finances badly strained.
Adams himself suffered from the problem, despite the frugality of his Puritan New England upbringing. Almost no Southern slave-owning gentleman ever managed to get out from under a small mountain of debt, even if he devoted himself entirely to his plantation. The manner of the Southerners' lives, their habits, their customs—not to mention the vagaries of any agriculture, and their dependence on English financiers and brokers—made it effectively impossible.
A few managed. George Washington had gotten completely out of debt and had turned away from plantation agriculture as the source of his sustenance, to make sure that he'd remain debtless. So, he was one of the very few slave-owners who'd freed all his slaves in his will. A few others had done so, here and there. At least one of them had freed all his slaves and then moved to Ohio so he could get away from slavery altogether.
But such were a rarity. Most Southern gentlemen were in debt from the time they reached their maturity to the day they were lowered into their graves—and the debts were then inherited by their offspring. Which meant that the same profligate, wasteful, slave-based plantation economy that had placed them in lifelong debt to begin with would continue, generation after generation. So long as a man retained his plantation and his slaves, he could, at the very least, find a creditor willing to lend him more money.
"So," Monroe continued, "I shall no more be able to free my own slaves upon retiring from this office than Thomas was before me. Once you set Mammon upon your shoulders, ridding yourself of the demon becomes impossible. Unless you're prepared to become a pauper, at least, which few men are. Certainly I am not one of them."
There was more of fatalism in Monroe's tone than Adams had ever detected before. Not surprisingly, perhaps, given that the man was coming to the end of many decades of a life given over to the service of the republic. In four months, James Monroe would become a private citizen and, now at the age of sixty-five, would almost certainly remain one for the rest of his life. Whatever he could do, he had done. Whatever he had failed to do, he could not do now. Whatever he had harmed, he could no longer repair.
None of which was true of John Quincy Adams himself.
And so, now, it was time. As difficult as the task might be for a man like Adams. But he would not shirk his duty.
"Do you think I would make a good president?" he asked abruptly. Then, raising his hand sharply: "Please, James. I know it's an uncivil question. But I really need your opinion. I can't think of any man who'd know better. Certainly not one who no longer has any personal stake in the issue."
Monroe turned from the window to face Adams squarely. His hands, as if by automatic reflex, clasped behind his back again.
"Yes, I understand." He thought for a moment. Not, obviously, to ponder the question, but simply pondering the right words for an answer.
"You'd not be a bad one, John. In some respects—foreign affairs, for a certainty—an excellent one. But, overall...Let me put it this way. I do not think you'd make the president that the republic needs in this time, this place in our history. You're too much the intellectual, too much the executive, too much the manager."
Adams grimaced ruefully. "I'm certainly not much of a politician."
"No, you're not. Although—" Monroe smiled for the first time since entering the room. "I do recommend you spare yourself your usual Puritanical self-condemnation, John. Consider, rather, that your many other fine qualities—superb ones, to speak frankly—have allowed you to reach a position of influence in our nation that precious few politicians have ever achieved, regardless of their skill. That is hardly something to sneer at."
Adams issued a soft grunt. As it happened, he'd been thinking much the same thoughts this past hour. The sole consolation for what was coming.
"But that's not even the point," Monroe continued. "What the republic needs now is not another politician, either. Henry Clay is the most accomplished and talented politician in the nation. But—being as frank and open as I can—I'd far rather see you sitting in that chair for the next four or eight years than see Clay sitting there."
Monroe looked aside for a moment, now studying the whale-oil lamp sitting on a small table in the corner of the office. There was nothing remarkable about the lamp itself except for being finer than most, with a decorative glass base and an attractive pear-shaped font. It seemed more as if he were simply trying to extract the light from it.
"You would make a fine president, John, if we lived in a time when the nation simply needed to be steered a course through the inevitable fog of public affairs. So would Henry Clay, being fair to the man. He's not a brute, after all. A very fine man, in a number of ways, and many of his views are ones I share myself. The problem is simply that he can't—never could—control his naked ambition. But if we lived in different times, his talents would probably make up for it, once that ambition was satisfied. But we don't live in such a time. I had hopes—delusions, perhaps—that we did, when I came into this office. But I know now, eight years later, that we are entering turbulent waters, not simply foggy ones. And the turbulence will get worse before it is all over. Much worse, I fear."
Adams nodded. Being a rather accomplished poet, he'd have used less pedestrian metaphors himself. But perhaps that lay at the heart of the matter. Monroe was an excellent politician, and Adams was not. If the president's imagery was mundane, so was the nature of politics, in the end. Prosaic as it might be, the language was apt.
"Jackson, then," he stated.
Monroe turned back to look at him. "You've read Jackson's speech of yesterday by now, I'm sure."
It was not a question. The chance that John Quincy Adams wouldn't have, within a day, read—no, studied—a major speech by a major political figure was so small as to be laughable.
In fact, Adams did laugh. Once, softly. "Oh, yes. Of course."
"And your opinion?" The president jerked his head. "Leaving aside that perhaps grotesque coda."
Adams scowled. "Grotesque, indeed."
But he forced himself away from that comfort. It was time for the heart of the truth, and that alone.
"It was a magnificent speech, Mr. President. In the main. But what else really matters now?"
"Nothing," Monroe stated flatly.
"Yes. Truly magnificent. In fact..." It was Adams's turn to take a slow, deep breath. "I shall not be surprised—not that I'll live long enough to know—if posterity records it as the most important speech given in the United States in this entire decade."
Monroe looked away again, pursing his lips. "I hadn't thought of it, in those terms. But you could well be right."
He turned his head back, his expression suddenly very stern. "Enough, John. It's time for you to give me your opinion. Simply to say it out loud, if nothing else."
Adams nodded and levered himself out of the chair. There was no reason to stay in it any longer.
"What I believe, Mr. President, is that we are entering Jackson's time. For good or ill—or both, most likely. Truth be told, I've had that sense for some years now. Resenting it deeply, to be honest, but still sensing that it was probably true. Now I see it cannot be avoided at all. The difference the speech makes is very simple. On the eve of that time, the man who is best suited to lead the nation through has revealed himself to be, in every important particular, a man of deep and abiding principle. Even when those principles bring him to a distasteful conclusion, and one that requires him to stand against many—perhaps most—of his own followers."
He took one of those slow deep breaths that seemed, that night, to be a requirement for occupying the office. "That being the case, for me to continue to oppose his entry into this very chamber, would be—in the end, when all is said and done—no more sublime a deed than whatever Henry Clay is plotting tonight." Harshly: "Ambition, nothing more."
Monroe cocked his head a little. "That's very well said, John. And let me take this moment to tell you that you are a man I much respect and admire."
Adams jerked a little nod of the head. "Thank you, sir."
"Will you allow me to put it in my own terms?" Monroe issued his second smile of the evening. Like the first, it was a thin and fleeting thing, with more than a trace of sadness in it.
"Yes, of course."
"I've had years—decades—to ponder the matter. The last eight of them, as the nation's chief executive. In the end, just as our Roman forebears knew, republics stand or fall on virtue. Simply that, nothing else. Policies might be wrong, but policies can be corrected. Let virtue fail, the republic fails. Yes, it's Jackson time, for good or ill—so let Jackson take his rightful place. Help him or oppose him on any particular issue or question, as you will. But I can foresee no worse disaster than if, by clashing, the two principal men of virtue in today's American republic allow another man to slide by them and take this office. I disagree with many of Jackson's opinions and views, as you know. But I can live with Jackson. The republic can live with Jackson. Right, wrong, indifferent, or just plain mad, Jackson always has virtue. Henry Clay has none at all."
Adams jerked another little nod. Then, smiled. "You understand, Mr. President, that after Senator Jackson's speech yesterday, it is very likely that Henry Clay will slide by us anyway."
Monroe shook his head firmly. "No, John. He won't _slide_ by you. He'll win enough votes, and thus, by the rules established by our Constitution, come to occupy this office. But the Constitution does not embody the nation's virtue, simply its political principles. So long as you and Jackson stand against him—clearly, sharply—then the nation will not be confused, except momentarily."
The president shrugged. "It's impossible, for any republic that lasts for more than a few decades, to avoid the occasional Alcibiades winning the favor of the populace for a time. That matters little, so long as the republic does not come to see Alcibiades as a man of principle."
He waved his hand at the window, through which nothing could be seen except the reflection of the chamber's own light. "Let Clay enjoy—if that's the term—his four years of triumph. I think he'll find it turns sour on him, soon enough. Even faster—if men of principle stand their ground—will he find the nation's favor turning sour also. It's one thing to gain office by pandering to prejudice, unreason, and blind fury. Quite another, to guide a nation based on them. The first can be done, yes. The second, not at all."
**CHAPTER 24**
_Washington, D.C._
NOVEMBER 8, 1824
Fortunately, Jackson was still awake. Adams had hesitated disturbing the senator so late at night. But he'd feared the consequences of waiting till the morrow. Far too easy, even for a Puritan, to find that morning's glow sapped resolve. Some things were best done in the middle of the night, not for the sake of its secrecy but simply because darkness had no false auras. Mornings were always treacherous times, with their ever-returning promise.
"My apologies for the hour, Senator," he began, as soon as a black servant ushered him into the salon where Jackson was waiting for him. "It's just—"
"Not at all, Mr. Secretary." Jackson was standing in the middle of the room, his posture that familiar ramrod one. But it was simply erect, not stiff at all. He was smiling broadly and seemed inclined to be as gracious as he could often manage, sometimes to everyone's surprise.
"Some cordials, perhaps?"
"No, thank you, I..." Adams peered at the row of bottled spirits on a cabinet against the wall. He waged a regular battle with himself to maintain temperate habits, and when he did drink he preferred wine, not whiskey.
Then again, new times.
"Well, perhaps a small whiskey."
"Of course." The servant headed for the cabinet, but Jackson waved him off. "I'll manage it, Pompey, thank you. You may retire for the evening."
After the servant was gone and the whiskey poured, Jackson waved Adams to the divan. "Please, have a seat." As Adams did so, Jackson perched himself on a nearby chair.
There was no point delaying it. If a man was to fall on his sword, it was best to do it quickly and firmly.
"Senator Jackson, I have come to inform you that I shall be urging those who are supporting me for the presidency to vote for you instead."
There. It was done. No way to retract anything now. Not even the meanest scoundrel in America could do that. And Adams had always allowed, whatever else, that he was very far from that. A sinner, yes; a scoundrel, no. Certainly not a mean one.
Jackson's eyes widened. Slowly, he set his untouched whiskey down on a low table next to the chair.
"Well. I will be dam—ah. Well. Tarnation, sir!"
At least he hadn't completed the blasphemy. Adams's gloom lightened a bit.
"Tarnation," Jackson repeated. "That comes as quite a surprise. I wouldn't have thought..."
He paused, his bright blue eyes peering at Adams intently. "It was the speech, wasn't it?"
"To a degree, yes. The murder that came before it, perhaps as much."
The famous blue glare entered Jackson's eyes. "Yes, that too. I'll see that man hanged if I do nothing else in my life. Be sure of it, sir. If the laws allowed, I'd have him drawn and quartered first."
Adams wouldn't flinch from that, either. "I must, however, tell you that while I admired the speech itself—greatly, in fact—I took considerable exception to the ending. I felt that was most unfortunate. Uncalled for."
For an instant, the fury fell on Adams. But only for an instant. The blue eyes simply became blue, a color like any other. Jackson even smiled a bit. Even ruefully.
"Well. I'm not sure I'd agree that it was uncalled for. But, ah, perhaps unfortunate."
The smile returned, now with more humor in it. "For sure and certain, all my friends have been berating me for it since, I can tell you that! Still..."
He shrugged and took a first sip of the whiskey. "What's done is done, and I'm not a man given to fretting over the past."
No, that he wasn't, for good or ill. And Adams would also allow that, in these times, that was probably to the good. For the most part, at least.
Suddenly Jackson chuckled. "You do understand, I trust, that you just made a promise you might not be able to keep."
Adams frowned. "Excuse me, sir." Stiffly: "I can assure you—"
"It doesn't matter what _you_ assure me, Mr. Secretary. The people of the republic decide who'll be the president, not you or me. What if you win an outright majority in the electoral college? How could you possibly, then, hand the office to me as if it belonged to you? When, in fact, it belongs to no man in the country, not even the one who currently occupies the office. It is the sole and exclusive property of the nation itself. Its electorate, at any rate."
Adams stared at him. He'd...
Simply not considered the possibility.
"That's quite unlikely," he protested, knowing full well that wasn't Jackson's point.
Jackson just stared at him. Adams cleared his throat.
"Well. I suppose I couldn't. Given that eventuality."
"No, of course you couldn't. Nor could I accept."
Now, Jackson was smiling very broadly. "I'm not needling you, Mr. Secretary. And I agree it's unlikely that any of us will win an outright majority, given the political divisions in the party. I simply wanted to make sure that we understood each other."
Adams finally took a sip of his own drink. It was very good whiskey. The liquor was not to Adams's particular liking, true. But...
Very good whiskey, indeed.
"Agreed," he said abruptly. "But I will do so if the election is thrown into the House. That I _can_ assure you, Senator Jackson."
"Call me Andy, if you would. All my friends do."
Trying not to be stiff—well, stiffer than necessary—Adams shook his head. "We're not actually friends, Senator Jackson. And being honest, I rather doubt we ever will be."
Jackson's cordial smile didn't fade in the least. "Probably not, though much stranger things have happened. But I'd still prefer it if you'd call me Andy. Consider it a matter of personal preference, if it pleases you."
Adams thought about it. Reciprocation would be necessary, of course.
It really was very good whiskey. He took another sip.
"Very well. Andy. And please call me John."
"Right!" Jackson set his whiskey glass down. Then, actually slapped his hands together. "Oh, Lor—ah, whatever. Am I going to enjoy gutting that bastard Clay!"
"I have to tell you, Sen—ah, Andy—that I actually doubt we can now stop the Speaker from being elected to the presidency."
Now Jackson was _rubbing_ his hands together.
"Oh, sure. My estimate is we've got almost no chance if it gets thrown into the House. Not after that speech I gave yesterday. Coffee and Eaton tell me I'll do well if I can hang on to the Tennessee delegation. Pennsylvania, they think remains certain. I probably had a chance to win over some of Crawford's and Calhoun's support, but not now. On the other hand—here's an interesting thing—I might still be able to take Kentucky from the bastard."
That _was_ interesting. Assuming the assessment of Jackson's advisers was accurate. But Adams knew they were a very shrewd lot, Westerners or not.
"Yeah, it seems Kentucky's not all that pleased with Henry Clay, be it his home state or not. Kentucky's a border state, still more Western than Southern. Like Tennessee, really. Nobody's at all happy at the idea of black men killing a lot of white men, sure, no matter who the white men were or what they were up to. But they haven't forgotten that it was Henry Clay—not Patrick Driscol, not Sam Houston, and sure as Sam Hill not some negro in Arkansas—who spent his two-year retirement from the House getting rich by serving as the Bank's main lawyer, suing people going bankrupt, and stripping every last thing from them."
Jackson picked up his glass and took a big swallow from it. "No, that was done by good old 'man-of-the-people' Henry Clay. Who now proposes to start a war using poor white men to kill poor black men so he can spend four years swindling the nation on behalf of the rich and mighty."
Adams couldn't help but wince. That was exactly the sort of plebeianistic, class-against-class rhetoric that made Jackson and his followers so disliked in his own New England.
Well. Not disliked by New England _laborers,_ to be sure. Actually, Jackson was quite popular among such folk.
Seeing the wince, Jackson grinned. "Relax, John. I promise you I won't be calling for storming the Bastille. Which we don't have in America, anyway, being a republic." He pointed a stiff finger at him. "But I'm not whitewashing anything, either. That's exactly what the bastard is planning on."
Adams cocked his head a little, considering the matter. "Yes...and no. I agree that his rhetoric all implies that Clay, if elected president, will launch a war against Arkansas. But the truth is, Andy, I don't think he will. Don't forget that the core of his support—certainly his financial support—comes at least as much from Northern...ah..."
He couldn't help but laugh, softly. "What I believe you would call the moneyed interests."
Jackson laughed with him. "Oh, tarnation, no. That's _way_ too namby-pamby. Bloodsucking leeches comes closer. But to keep peace in the room, I'll settle for 'Northern upper crust.' How's that?"
Adams nodded. "That's why he's got a fair amount of backing even in New England. None of those people—certainly not the ones close to the Bank—are going to be interested in a war with Arkansas. If anything, they'll be inclined to oppose it."
Jackson finished the rest of his whiskey in a quick gulp. After setting down the glass, he shook his head. "You're right, John, as far it goes. But that doesn't go far enough. This is _still_ a republic, despite all the efforts of Nicholas Biddle and the rest of that pack of Bank scoundrels to undermine it. Money counts, sure, but it's not the trump card. Not yet, anyway—and not ever, if I get into the White House."
Adams tightened his lips. He himself wasn't fond of Nicholas Biddle, the head of the Second Bank, but he agreed with President Madison—and Henry Clay—that a national bank of some sort was important for the nation's economic well-being. However, that was a battle with Jackson that could be postponed for the moment. The Bank's charter ran until 1836, after all. Even if Jackson got elected to the presidency, he couldn't do much about it.
"The point being," Jackson continued, "that if Clay's to win the presidency now, he doesn't have any choice but to throw in his lot with Crawford and Calhoun. Not with you throwing your support to me, in the House."
That...was true. Adams realized that he'd been so preoccupied with the personal aspect of his decision to withdraw from the race that he hadn't considered what tactical results would follow in the political arena. If the election was thrown into the House, with his supporters giving their votes to Jackson...
He drew in a breath so sharply it was almost a hiss. "Oh, good heavens."
Jackson nodded. " 'Good heavens,' is right, John—except I wouldn't put the word 'heaven' in there at all. There's only one way Clay could win. He'd have to get Calhoun's full support and almost all of Crawford's."
"I don't think he can get all," Adams mused. "Van Buren and his people are supporting Crawford because of his extreme states' rights views. They're New Yorkers, not Southerners. They'll have no liking for a war with Arkansas."
"No, they won't. But the problem is that Van Buren—they don't call him the Little Magician for nothing—is sometimes too smart for his own good. Might be better to say, he's so good at political tactics that he tends to lose sight of their purpose. He's likely to figure that Clay's war talk is just hot air. Campaign blather, that'll vanish like the dew after the inaugural address."
The senator rose, went over to the cabinet, and unstoppered the whiskey bottle. "Would you care for another?" he asked as he began refilling his own glass.
Adams looked down at his whiskey. There wasn't much left.
It really was very good whiskey. On the other hand, he reminded himself, he was prone to intemperance if he didn't maintain good self-control.
What decided him was an oddity. He was starting to _enjoy_ this conversation.
"Yes, please."
The glasses refilled and Jackson back in his chair, the senator resumed. "What it all comes down to is that Clay is going to have to throw his lot in with Calhoun and Crawford. Lock, stock, and barrel. And you can be damn sure that Calhoun is going to insist on a war. In fact—watch and see if I'm not right—he'll insist on the post of secretary of war for himself, so he can make sure it gets done."
Adams sipped his whiskey thoughtfully. "Yes, I can see that. Clay will offer the position of secretary of state to Crawford, of course. That would position Crawford to succeed him in the White House, four or eight years from now."
"In Crawford's medical condition," Jackson said mildly, "he couldn't handle the work. No one knows that better than you."
Adams sniffed. "No, he couldn't. Frankly, I don't think he could even on his best days. But it doesn't matter, Andy. All the better from Clay's point of view, since the Speaker—"
_Oh, blast it._ He'd thrown in his lot with frontier roughnecks, after all, so why not at least enjoy the benefits?
"Since the rotten bastard fancies himself a great diplomat, he'll just figure on managing the State Department personally."
Jackson grinned. "Still sore over the Russell letter, huh?"
Adams couldn't resist returning the grin. It was quite infectious, really.
"Certainly. The man committed a forgery to try to smear my reputation during the negotiations with Britain—and I know perfectly well Clay was the one put him up to it. If only I could prove it."
He took another drink. No sip, this time. "I genuinely detest Henry Clay."
"Well, so do I, partner. So, like I said, let's gut the bastard. Forget this election. We'll have four years to do it—and we'll know exactly where to find him." He waved the glass in the direction of the White House. "Just down the street a ways."
Monroe came upon Houston just as his son-in-law was gently closing the door to his grandson's room.
"Is he asleep, finally?" he asked.
Houston glanced over his shoulder. "Yes. He'll have nightmares again, though. So, with your permission—"
"Of course. I've already told the servant to vacate the room next door so you can occupy it for the night."
Houston looked genuinely haggard. He'd gotten no sleep himself since the murder. "Thank you. I wouldn't want to sleep in our—that—bedroom anyway. I don't think I could bear it."
"Yes, I understand. If you'd like, I can manage other arrangements. More permanent ones, I mean."
Houston shook his head. "No, thank you, sir. Any arrangements you made would be invalid come March, anyway. But, as it happens, I've already decided to seek residence elsewhere."
"You're going to Arkansas." It was a statement, not a question.
"Yes, sir, I am. As soon as I think the boy is up to the trip."
"Sam..."
"No, sir." The dark fury Monroe had sensed was rising to the surface now, filling Houston's face. "No, sir. You forget—most people forget—that I belong to two nations, not one. My name is also Colonneh. 'The Raven,' in English."
"Sam—"
"No, sir. I didn't get much of a look at the man who murdered my wife. But I saw enough to know one thing, for sure. That man was not a Cherokee. That man was one of those stinking, filthy Georgians who drove the Cherokee off their land. To call 'relocation'—yes, I know I engineered the treaty, and I used it, too—by its right name."
A little shudder passed through his big body. Then, softly: "So I'm going home, and taking my boy with me. Meaning no offense to you, sir, but I want him to meet his Cherokee grandfather. While John Jolly's still alive."
Monroe sighed. "Please don't forget that you shared five years of Maria Hester's life, Sam. And I shared all of them."
Houston's eyes teared. "I know that, James," he said softly. "I don't mean to belittle your grief, or her mother's, or her sister's. But you do what you feel necessary, and I will do the same. I'm not bringing up my boy in a country that murdered his mother, because it was a country full of spite and meanness. No way in Hell. We're for Arkansas."
Monroe recognized the impossibility of altering his son-in-law's course. Still...
Forty years of political life produced unshakable habits. "Don't burn any bridges you don't need to, Sam. Lafayette's visiting the country, as you know."
Sam frowned, thrown off by the remark. "Well, sure. His tour's taking the whole country by storm. In fact, I met him—well, shook his hand and exchanged pleasantries—at a festival in his honor just two weeks ago. But what's that got to do..."
His voice trailed off, and the color of his eyes seemed to lighten a bit. "Oh."
Monroe was careful not to show any visible relief. If Sam Houston didn't have much of the Scots-Irish capacity for rage, except in his worst moments, he had all of that breed's aptitude for political maneuver. Considerably more than his rightful share, in fact.
"Oh," he repeated. Then, shook his head slightly. "I doubt he'd receive me, James. He's deluged with well-wishers, and he doesn't know me at all."
"Don't be foolish. He knows who you are. Just because the Marquis is now sixty-six years old, don't think for a moment he's become less acute when it comes to political affairs. The hero of the Capitol, and then New Orleans?"
Monroe cleared his throat. "Not that it matters. He certainly knows who I am, since I'm not only the president of the nation but the one who extended the invitation for him to visit. He'll see _me,_ Sam. In fact..."
Monroe had to swallow for a moment. "He's coming here tomorrow, as it happens. He asked if he could accompany us in person to the funeral."
Sam nodded. "In that case, I'll be able to see him. At least briefly."
"Briefly, yes. Tomorrow. But..."
Monroe paused, for a moment, thinking. "Can you postpone your departure for a week or two?"
"Well...Yes, I suppose. Andy won't be up for traveling immediately, anyway."
"Good. In that case, I think I can manage something quite a bit better than 'briefly.' "
Houston was looking at him very intently now, his fury almost completely gone. "What are you thinking, James?"
"What I am thinking, my dear son-in-law—which you are and will remain, whatever else—is that the last sight of you I want the United States to have, before you depart for Arkansas, is receiving the blessing of the Marquis de Lafayette. Who fought with George Washington and shed his blood on American soil at Brandywine, that republicanism might triumph in the world."
_Washington, D.C._
NOVEMBER 19, 1824
Eleven days later, at the state dinner hosted by President Monroe at Williamson's Hotel and attended by practically every member of Congress, the Marquis sat beside Sam Houston.
That caused pained looks among some of the congressmen present, but not many. Word was already spreading that John Quincy Adams would throw his support to Jackson in the event the election was thrown into the House. Which, with the first election results beginning to come in, now seemed certain to happen. State dinners of this sort were such enormous affairs that there was plenty of time and space for quiet dickering. Most of the congressmen were too busy with their whispered consultations to pay much attention to the formalities of the affair.
Peter Porter was one of the exceptions. He'd gotten an invitation through the offices of the Speaker, so he was there also. But since he was not a congressman, he paid little attention to the small maneuvers taking place at the multitudes of tables in the huge dining room. Instead, he spent the time carefully studying the men at the central table.
James Monroe. Sam Houston. The Marquis de Lafayette.
Porter had had enough military experience to understand—he was pretty sure, anyway—what he was seeing. Strategists at work, not tacticians. He tried, at one point in the evening, to get Clay's attention. But the Speaker was preoccupied with his negotiations with several of the congressmen from North Carolina.
"Tomorrow, Peter. I couldn't possibly find the time to speak to you tonight."
Toward the end of the evening, the Marquis rose and offered three toasts.
The first, in solemn remembrance of the president's daughter.
The second, in honor of his heroic son-in-law, who had so valiantly defended the Capitol of the United States from enemy attack—and then repeated the deed, a few months later, at New Orleans.
The third—
Smiling broadly, the Marquis prefaced his toast by announcing that Sam Houston was moving to Arkansas and taking his young son with him. They would depart two days hence.
So, another toast: "To the New World, so clearly blessed by the Almighty! To the New World! Which has produced yet another great republic on its soil!"
Andrew Jackson was the first to rise to the toast. Had he not been a bit too portly, John Quincy Adams might have beaten him to it.
Outside the hotel, later, Clay brushed Porter off again. "Not now, Peter, sorry. Yes, I know it's a bit awkward. A minor setback. But I think we're on the verge of taking all of North Carolina from Jackson. South Carolina, Calhoun can promise us for sure."
Off he went. Porter was left alone in the night, watching the crowd spilling out of Williamson's Hotel.
_Setback._
"Jesus Christ," Porter muttered to no one at all. "Who cares about that? This thing is careening out of control."
**CHAPTER 25**
_Natchez, Mississippi_
DECEMBER 15, 1824
The bullet missed, but it did manage to shatter a bottle of whiskey sitting on the bar top that was close enough to shower Ray Thompson with its contents. Crouching behind the bar next to Powers, he cursed bitterly. It was rotgut, naturally. He'd be stinking for hours. Assuming he survived the next few minutes.
"Can't you _ever_ just keep your mouth shut?" he hissed.
Powers finished reloading his pistol. "Damnation, this tavern was my old watering hole." He peered up at the bar top above them. "How many were there?"
"Four, till you shot one and I shot another."
"The tavern keeper?"
"He ran off. I don't think he was one of them. But they'll have friends coming, you watch. And meantime they've got us pinned here, and"—Ray rapped a knuckle against one of the planks that formed the base of the bar—"sooner or later it's going to occur to those stupid yahoos to try to shoot through these planks to see how thick they are. I'm not looking forward to the results."
Powers winced. "Neither am I." He gave Thompson a calculating look. "We got no choice, I'm thinking. Right at 'em is the only way."
Ray shook his head. "Yeah, we got no choice. But I'm only joining you if you _swear_ you'll stop using your own name."
"Yeah. Fine. I swear. Mother's grave, whatever you want."
Thompson didn't bother to answer. He was too busy gauging the distance to the only unshattered bottle still on the bar top.
"I'll go first, right over the top. You come around the side."
Powers nodded. Since there was no point in dallying, Ray rose up enough to tap the bottle over with the barrel of the pistol.
Almost instantly, a shot was fired, smashing into the wood behind the bar.
"Thank God for yahoos." But he was erect before he finished the statement, where he could see the room, his pistol tracking the man who'd fired.
_Dumber'n sheep._ The idiot was standing up, reloading. Ray shot him in the chest. Then, lunged to his left, just in time to evade the shot fired by the man's partner. He kept lunging leftward, half running and half scrambling, but never dropping out of sight. That would keep the man's eyes on him while Scott—
Powers's shot came from the other side of the bar. Ray stopped and looked over. Good enough. He didn't think Scott had killed him outright, but it was good enough.
"Fucking yahoos," Powers snarled on their way out of the tavern. "Why the hell do _they_ care if we hurt Clay's chances? The bastards never bother to vote, anyway. Too stupid to read the ballot."
Ten minutes later they were ready to head for the Natchez Trace.
"Now we're horse thieves, too," Ray complained as he led his mount out of the barn they'd broken into.
Powers was in a cheerier mood. "Lookit this. Found it tacked on the wall in there."
He handed over a printed notice.
Thompson didn't look at it, though, until they were out of the town's limits. Killing three or four men might be forgiven in Natchez, depending on who their friends and relatives were, but stealing a horse was a hanging offense.
When he did look at it, reading slowly because of the horse's gait, he whistled.
"Ten thousand dollars. _Whoo-eee._ "
Then he shrugged and handed it back to Powers. "Lot of good it does us."
But Powers was still smiling. "O ye of little faith. I _know_ him, Ray. Andrew Clark's the first cousin of an old friend of mine."
Thompson looked over at him skeptically. "And what of it? He did the killing in Washington, Scott. If your geography's gotten hazy since our seafaring days, that's about a thousand miles from here as the crow flies—and we ain't crows. By now he could be anywhere."
" 'Could be,' sure. But he won't be. Where's he going to go? That's a snooty family he comes from, real Georgia gentlemen. If he'd killed _Houston,_ he'd have been all right. They'd hide him as long as it took. But killing Houston's wife, won't nobody in those circles touch him. In fact, they'd turn him in faster'n anybody. Even the yahoos in Louisiana would. Well, half of 'em, anyway."
Ray thought about it. That was true enough, actually. Killing a woman, unless she was a whore or a cheating wife, was one of the few ways a man could cross the line with Southern and Western roughnecks. Almost as bad as horse stealing.
The last thought reminded him of their own predicament. "What're we going to do with these horses, Scott?"
"Let 'em go; what else? As soon as we reach Port Gibson. That's stretching it a little, but I figure we can probably get away with it. Being as there was four of them, and us not knowing how many friends they might have."
Again, Ray thought about it. That was...
Also true enough. There was a certain protocol involved. Actually _stealing_ a man's horse was a hanging offense, sure enough. But if a man let the horse go while it was still close enough to find its way home—or be returned by someone else who knew the brand—most people were inclined to let it go as more-or-less borrowing the horse just to get out of a bad spot. Which theirs had certainly been. Often enough, it became a laughing matter.
It wasn't surefire, of course. But at least it gave you an arguing point if you got caught.
"Okay, then what?"
"Port Gibson's where we want, anyway." Powers flashed Thompson a grin. "Being as how you and me is for a Mississippi steamboat and St. Louis. I figure we can get hired on, easy enough. This soon after the massacre, a lot of the regular men'll still be nervous about steaming past the Arkansas."
Thompson grimaced. "Scott, _I'm_ nervous about steaming past it. Unless they're even dumber than yahoos, they'll still have that flotilla there. One or two boats anyway—and they're likely to be none too fussy about diplomatic protocol. What if they stop our boat and search it? They find us, we're for the rope."
"Yeah, sure. But it's been two and a half months since Arkansas Post. I figure by now the U.S. State Department has made plenty of protests to the Confederacy on the subject of interfering with American commerce on the Mississippi. Say whatever else you will about the bastard, Quincy Adams ain't no slouch. As long as we stay out of sight when our boat gets to the Arkansas, we should be safe enough." His cheery expression was disfigured for a moment by a scowl. "Which won't be hard, since we'll probably be working in the boiler room."
Ray matched the grimace. Boiler room work was just as hard as it was dangerous.
Not, however, as dangerous as staying in yahoo country, with their names black as mud because of that damned Bryant. And even if they always used aliases, there were just too many men in the area who knew them personally.
Nor could they return to more civilized parts of the United States. Leaving aside what difficulties they might encounter because of Bryant's articles—which could be serious, given that Clay might well be the next president—they had several other awkward issues to deal with. Scott had arrest warrants out for him, and Ray had creditors. Not the sort of creditors who demanded imprisonment for debt, either, as a last resort. The sort who started with broken knees.
"All right, then."
"Oh, stop being gloomy," Scott said. "We need to get to St. Louis anyway, on account of this." He patted the pocket into which he'd stuffed the reward notice.
"Why?"
"Don't you pay any attention? I _told_ you. Well, maybe not all of it. Andrew Clark's cousin is the black sheep of the family. He's the one person Clark could find shelter with, and he's in Missouri."
"In St. Louis?"
"Well. No." Powers seemed to be avoiding his gaze. "Further west. Missouri Territory."
Ray rolled his eyes. "Wonderful. He's a bandit, isn't he?"
"Some might call him that, I suppose."
" 'Some,' " Ray mimicked sarcastically. "Let me guess. Ninety-nine out of a hundred citizens of Missouri."
Scott grinned. "Nah, not that many. Maybe ninety-five out of a hundred."
He gave Ray a sideways look. "What? You worried about our good names?"
Thompson said nothing. What was there to say?
"What I thought. Face it, Ray. We ain't exactly upstanding citizens, our own selves. Not even around bandits. Southern ones, for sure."
_New Antrim, Arkansas_
DECEMBER 16, 1824
"I don't care if we go bankrupt, Henry." Patrick Driscol's rasp seemed more pronounced than ever. "What difference does it make if Arkansas goes under? I'll be dead on a battlefield, you'll be a slave picking cotton in the Delta, and even the engineer fellow here"—a thumb indicated Henry Shreve, who was scowling at him from the doorway—"is likely to be standing trial for treason. Never gave up his U.S. citizenship, you know."
"That's not funny, Patrick!" Shreve's scowl grew darker still.
"No, I suppose not. It's still true." Driscol smiled thinly. "Of course, you could always have a sudden conversion on the road to Damascus. 'Reconversion,' I guess I should say. Hurry on down to Memphis, confess the error of your wicked ways, and offer your services to the Fulton-Livingston Company. Word has it they've already got the contract for supplying the U.S. Army, in the event war comes. I'm sure they'd hire you on."
Now Shreve's scowl could have terrified an ogre. "Stop playing the fool! 'Hurry on down to Memphis.' In _what?_ A rowboat?—seeing as how you've already seized everything I own, you damn tyrant. Worse than any Federalist who ever lived, you are."
Henry Crowell's grunt combined amusement and exasperation. "Don't forget the years he spent with Napoleon, Henry. Conscription—seizure of personal property—all out for the war effort. Nothing's too low for the Laird. By next Tuesday, I figure he'll start debasing the currency."
"Don't call me that, damnation. I hate that term."
"Why? It's true, Patrick. And before you start prattling about your republican principles—about which Henry's right; you've shredded every one these past two months—you might keep in mind that the term is prob'bly worth another regiment, as far as the army's morale goes."
Shreve's scowl lightened a bit. "He's right about that. Black heathen savages. Bad as Frenchmen. _Vive l'empereur! Allons enfants de la patrie!_ "
His French accent was quite good. Better than Driscol's, in fact, although Driscol was more fluent in the language. So Crowell had been told, anyway. His own knowledge of French was limited to the Creole he'd picked up in New Orleans.
"They're hardly heathens," grumbled Patrick. "Most of 'em are downright Calvinists, by now, since Brown started his preaching."
Shreve gave him a skeptical look. Driscol shrugged. "Well, fine. Some of Marie Laveau's voudou in there, too, I suppose."
"John Brown doesn't actually preach," Crowell said mildly. "It's more just that black folks admire the man so much. And why shouldn't they? The Catholics are doing pretty well, too, actually. Especially since all that money started coming in from Pierre Toussaint to fund them."
Shreve rolled his eyes. "You had to bring that up, didn't you?" Sourly, he crossed his arms and slouched in the doorway. "I can remember a time—O blessed days of innocent youth—when my world was a lot simpler. Sure as hell didn't include rich black bankers in Arkansas and still richer darkies in New York. And a crazy Scots-Irishman to fan the flames of their insane ambitions."
Crowell's grunt this time was simply amused. For all of Shreve's more-or-less constant carping and complaining, the fact was that the Pennsylvania steamboat wizard had thrown in his lot with Arkansas as unreservedly as the poorest freedman. Henry wasn't sure why, exactly, since it certainly wasn't due to any commitment on Shreve's part to abolition or even any deep faith in human equality. Shreve didn't really care that much about such things, one way or the other. He had the mind and soul of an engineer, first, last, and always.
In the end, Henry thought, that was the key. As much and as often as Shreve protested Driscol's ways—which did, indeed, sometimes border on Napoleonic high-handedness if not outright tyranny—the fact remained that the Laird of Arkansas had supported and funded Shreve's plans and schemes far more extensively than any person or institution in the United States had ever done. Or ever would, so long as the Fulton-Livingston Company could throw its money and influence around.
But it was time to settle the current dispute. "Fine, Patrick. Seeing as how you're being stubborn—"
"When is he _not?_ " demanded Shreve.
"—we'll sink every dime we can into buying iron plate from the foundries in Cincinnati and Pittsburgh. The ones who'll still do business with us, anyway."
Seeing Driscol's sarcastic expression, he chucked. "Which, I admit, is all of them. Amazing, in a way, since Ohio's supposed to be solid for Henry Clay."
Shreve snorted. " 'Solid' refers to politics. Money has no country."
He glared at Driscol. "Besides which, the United States is a republic. A nation of free men, where the idea that the government could tell a man what he could and couldn't do with his own property is anathema."
"Especially when the property talks and has a black skin," Driscol fired back. "So don't preach to me about 'freedom,' Mister Shreve. I find myself quite willing to abrogate the lesser freedoms to maintain the great ones. We're _still_ going to buy all the iron plate we can, since we can't make it in our own little foundries, so that when the bastards come up the river it'll be our boats—yours, when I give them back after the war—who steam out of the encounter. And theirs which go under. Or would you rather we did it the other way around?"
Put that way...
Shreve threw up his hands. "Fine! I'm going back to work. Otherwise your lunatic scheme will sink the boats right there at the piers, all the iron you'll try to bolt onto them."
"I wouldna dream of telling an engineer his business," said Driscol, his Belfast accent thicker than usual. "Mind, I'd appreciate the occasional reciprocation."
But Shreve had already left.
_Washington, D.C._
DECEMBER 18, 1824
"Well, that's it," said Adam Beatty. "We'll have a merry Christmas, gentlemen. With Louisiana's vote having come in, everything's been reported."
At the head of the table in the boardinghouse, Henry Clay rubbed his face wearily. "Summarize it, please."
"Nationwide, Jackson has the plurality of votes, though not by as large a margin as it appeared he would in midsummer. That's the 'Arkansas effect,' most likely, coming in at the last minute. Still, he's got eighty-five electoral votes, just a little under one-third of the total. Adams comes a pretty close second, with seventy-six."
"In short," Peter Porter said bluntly, "our two principal enemies—who've now formed an alliance, with Adams willing to throw his support to Jackson—have a total of one hundred and sixty-one votes. Which is a clear majority in the electoral college. And the same percentage, roughly speaking, in the popular vote."
"A little over sixty percent," Beatty agreed. "But it really doesn't matter, because the electoral college is not where the issue gets settled, according to the Constitution. Since no _single_ candidate won a majority, the three top candidates are the ones chosen from by the House. And there—"
He smiled widely. "Henry's the third man. Clear-cut, no question about it. He got forty-two votes to Crawford's thirty-four and Calhoun's twenty-five. All we've got to do, gentlemen, is turn that forty percent in the electoral college into fifty-one percent in the House."
Put that way, Porter mused, it didn't sound so bad. But the sense he'd had of a situation steadily unraveling was getting stronger all the while. Because the _other_ way to look at it was that the man who could only muster...
Porter was good at arithmetic. Silently, in his head, he did the calculations.
And was appalled. Henry Clay had gotten barely _sixteen percent_ of the popular and electoral votes. Which Beatty was cheerily projecting he could triple—more than triple—in order to get elected, purely and solely based on political maneuvering in the House of Representatives.
That it _could_ be done, Porter didn't much doubt. Clay's ability to manipulate the House was practically legendary by now. But could a president elected in such a manner actually carry out the tasks and duties of the nation's chief executive in the years to follow? That was another matter entirely.
His musings were interrupted by Clay's voice. "Peter, are the rumors we've been hearing about Van Buren true, in your estimate?"
A bit startled, Porter looked up. "Well...It's hard to know. Van Buren plays the game very close to the chest. But I think it's likely, yes. Jackson, unlike Adams, has always had a clear stance on states' rights, which is what matters to the New York Radicals. They simply don't have the same concerns regarding Arkansas and the issues surrounding it that Calhoun's people do, and some of Crawford's." He cleared his throat. "Some _others_ of Crawford's, I should say, since they were in that camp themselves."
Clay nodded, his expression weary but still alert. "In other words, Crawford's camp is breaking up."
"Pretty much, yes. His Northern supporters shifting toward Jackson, his Southern ones in our direction. More toward Calhoun than us, though, and keeping in mind that it's certainly not a split down the middle. Most of his support was in the South, to begin with. New York was really his only major Northern stronghold."
"The key's the South, then," stated Josiah Johnston. "It's that simple. We haven't got enough, even getting all of Calhoun's and Crawford's votes. And we can't possibly hope to crack anything away in New England, that matters. Or Pennsylvania and New Jersey. Or Tennessee."
He stopped there, a bit awkwardly. Porter didn't blame him. He could have added _or Kentucky, probably._ The two most populous border states had gone for Jackson, even Clay's home state.
Clay sat up straight. "All right. I agree with Josiah. It's simple enough. We've got to keep Calhoun solid—that, whatever else—and win over Crawford's Southern supporters. Then—"
He took a deep breath. "Ignore New England altogether. Ignore Pennsylvania and New Jersey. Go straight at the Southern congressional delegations, and a few of the softer Western ones, like Indiana and Illinois. We can assume that Ohio and Missouri will remain solid for us. Persuade them that the allegiance many of their states showed for Jackson was an error, produced by the fact that news of Arkansas—and Jackson's disturbing reaction to it—hadn't had time to reach the populace before they voted. Surely they would have voted otherwise, had they known."
"Remember Arkansas Post!" Beatty exclaimed. "That's the drum we beat."
Clay looked around the room. Everyone nodded. Even Porter, in the end. What else was there to do?
**CHAPTER 26**
_Washington, D.C._
DECEMBER 19, 1824
"Please, Colonel Taylor, have a seat." General Brown half rose from the seat behind his desk when Zachary entered his office, motioning toward a chair next to the one occupied by General Winfield Scott. A bit to the side sat Thomas Jesup, the army's quartermaster general.
Taylor would have felt awkward under any circumstances in such august company. Since the reorganization and drastic reduction in the size of the army ordered by Congress in 1821, Jacob Brown was the only remaining major general, and thus the commanding general of the entire U.S. Army. Winfield Scott was one of its two remaining brigadier generals of the line and commanded the eastern department of the military. For the moment, at least. Rumors were that he and Brigadier General Edmund Gaines, who commanded the western department, would soon be exchanging posts.
In short, he was sitting in an office with three of the army's four generals. Nor were they "political generals," although Brown had begun his career as a political appointee. All three of them were considered by the entire U.S. military—except for a few rivals in the officer corps like Gaines—to be the army's best fighting generals. Brown had been in overall command of the Army of the Niagara, which had won the first major American land victory in the war with Britain; Scott, the general in command of the forces that triumphed at the Chippewa; Jesup, then a colonel, had commanded the 25th Infantry regiment that Scott had used in the battle to drive back the British right flank.
The presence of Jesup was a bit reassuring, since Jesup had been Taylor's principal supporter in the army's high command since the days they'd worked together in the northwest frontier. Still, the situation was nerve-wracking. Zachary had been half expecting to receive a summons for a court-martial since he arrived in the capital.
He decided to deal with that immediately. "General, I'm quite aware that I had no specific orders to report to Washington. Still, as soon as I was assured that my post in Baton Rouge was in good order, I felt it incumbent—"
Jesup chuckled. Brown waved his hand. "Oh, relax, Zack. You're not in any trouble."
"Not from us, anyway," Scott murmured.
Taylor glanced at him. Then, looked back at Brown.
"The reason I asked you here," the major general said, "is because of these." He leaned over and picked some papers from his desk. The movement was stiff and ungainly, as his earlier rise from the chair had been. Brown had suffered a bad stroke three years earlier and was still recovering from the effects.
Even from the distance, Taylor recognized the handwriting on the sheets. Which was hardly surprising, since it was his. Well...
Brown's stiff face broke into a smile. "First, by the way, let me congratulate you on the sudden and marked improvement in your penmanship."
Taylor felt himself flushing a bit. "Not mine, actually. I'd suffered, ah, something of a sprain in my wrist. Miss Julia Chinn wrote the dispatches for me, at my dictation."
Jesup frowned slightly. "Chinn. Isn't she Senator Johnson's woman?"
"Wife, I believe, in reality if not in law," corrected Scott. He gave both Jesup and Brown a quick, hard glance. "Shall we get to the point, gentlemen? We wouldn't have invited Colonel Taylor here if we didn't think he was trustworthy."
_Trustworthy of what?_ Zack wondered. But from the look Scott was now giving him, he realized he was about to find out.
"Here's how it is, Colonel," Scott continued. "I'm from Virginia, as you are. So's Thomas Jesup. Our august commander"—a thumb indicated Brown—"on the other hand, is a Pennsylvania Quaker."
"More of a New Yorker, really," Brown said mildly, "although I was born in Pennsylvania. And I abandoned pacifism quite some time ago."
Scott ignored him, his eyes still intent on Taylor. "Not a single New England abolitionist in the lot, you'll notice. That said, all three of us think John Quincy Adams would make the best next president of the United States. Failing him, Andrew Jackson—yes, even me, despite my well-known feud with the man. But what's most important is that all three of us think the election of Henry Clay, which now seems almost certain, is going to be a disaster. Not simply for the nation, but for the army in particular."
Brown winced. Jesup was scowling openly.
For his part, Taylor was simply trying to keep from gaping openmouthed. Even by the standards of the U.S. Army, whose top officers politicked aggressively, this sort of blunt and open statement concerning current politics was almost unheard of. From any officer, at least, who didn't expect to be relieved from duty.
Which—
Scott smiled crookedly. "Oh, I shan't give the bastard the satisfaction of discharging me. The day it's officially announced that Henry Clay will be the sixth president of the United States, I shall tender my resignation from the army."
"So will I," said Brown. "My health is poor, as it happens, so that gives me a graceful way to do it." He gave Scott something of a sly glance. "Unlike what I suspect will be Winfield's more flamboyant language."
"The tactics Henry Clay is using to win the presidency are a stench in the nation's nostrils," stated Scott, "and I will not hesitate to say so publicly when the time comes. Leaving aside everything else, he's recklessly using the army as if we were simply a card in his game. He knows perfectly well that the army is far too grossly understrength to be talking as if a victory over Arkansas is simply a matter of will and purpose."
Jesup cleared his throat. "I'll stay. They'd find me hard to replace, and they won't care that much anyway."
That was probably true, Taylor thought. Jesup had brought professional order and system into what had in earlier times been a disgracefully slapdash manner of keeping the military supplied. And since the quartermaster corps was outside the normal chain of command for line units, an ambitious officer like Gaines wouldn't consider him a rival.
Not knowing what to say, Taylor kept his mouth shut. He looked back at Brown.
"You'll be staying in service, yes?" asked the major general.
Zack nodded. "Yes, sir."
"Good," said Brown. He lifted the sheets. "These reports were excellent. What's your assessment of our chances in a war with the Confederacy?"
"It depends, sir. If it were done right, there's no question we would win. Despite the Confederacy's considerable geographic advantage in a defensive war—which is what they'd be fighting, of course—the overall disparity in numbers is simply overwhelming. The United States has a population of about ten million people; the Confederacy, less than two hundred thousand. But it won't be easy, it won't be quick, and..."
He relaxed a bit. The rest of what he had to say would certainly bring no censure from the men in _this_ room. "And, finally, it's just absurd to think it can be done with an army the size ours has been since the demobilization after the war with England. We've got—what? Not much more than six thousand regular soldiers in the whole country?"
"About that," agreed Brown. "Officially—the real numbers vary a bit—the bill passed by Congress in 1821 allows us five hundred and forty commissioned officers and slightly over five thousand, five hundred enlisted men. Divided into seven infantry and four artillery regiments."
"Clay will call for an immediate expansion of the armed forces," Jesup predicted.
Scott's answering grimace was just short of a sneer. "Oh, splendid. Even in the war with Britain, it took a year and a half to build up to fifteen thousand men. By the end of the war, we had not more than thirty-five thousand regulars. Half of whom, throughout, did purely garrison duty. And that war was generally popular outside New England. This new war, if it begins, will be anathema in New England and popular nowhere except in some—not all—of the Southern states."
Now the expression on his face was an outright sneer. "The same states of the Deep South, I remind you, whose contributions to the war against England were pitiful."
Jesup grunted. "They didn't even do much against the Creeks except plunder helpless villages. The real fighting, outside of regulars, was done by border state militias."
It was a harsh indictment, but Taylor couldn't find any real fault with it. Throughout the recent war, Jackson's Tennessee militia had borne the brunt of the fighting in the southern theater; first against the Creeks and later the British. The Kentuckians had contributed a large number of soldiers also, although they'd generally produced mediocre officers. The rest of the South, outside of the many officers produced by Virginia, hadn't done much. The Georgia militia, in particular, had been as notorious for its incapacity in the field against a real enemy as for its penchant for committing atrocities against noncombatants. Jackson had despised them and made no bones about it.
"And Clay won't have the Tennessee militia as a southern anchor, this time around," Jesup continued. "Not a chance. Not with the stance Jackson's taken. He's already starting to call it Henry Clay's War. Usually with a string of adjectives attached, the mildest of which is 'benighted.' "
Winfield Scott raised an eyebrow. "William Carroll's the governor of Tennessee, though, Tom. Not Andrew Jackson—and they're political enemies."
Jesup waggled his hand. "Yes and no. There's no personal animosity between them, and not really all that much in the way of real political issues in dispute. Their 'enmity' is mostly just a matter of old factional quarrels in Tennessee politics. Go back a few years, and they were close friends and allies. Who's to say they can't be again?"
"Yes, I agree," said Brown. "Despite his reputation, Jackson's perfectly capable of ending a feud if there's no personal injury involved."
"Even then!" snorted Scott. "He's burying the hatchet with Thomas Hart Benton right now."
Moving stiffly, Brown sat up straight in his chair and placed his left hand on the desk. His other hand remained in his lap, since he'd lost most of the use of his right arm after his stroke.
"There's no chance at all that Governor Carroll will agree to let the Tennessee militia be used in any war against the Confederacy," he said firmly. "Not this war, at any rate. And there's no better chance, in my judgment, that the Kentucky militia will be available to Clay, either. The current governor, John Adair, served under Jackson at New Orleans. And both he and his successor, Joseph Desha, are members of the Relief Party. They're Clay's political enemies, not his friends."
Taylor didn't have the familiarity of the three generals in the room with the politics of the nation as a whole, but he did know Kentucky politics. So, finally, he ventured an opinion.
"I agree. And for sure and certain, Senator Johnson's going to be against any such war. Leaving aside his political allegiance to Jackson, his two daughters are going to school in Arkansas, and his—ah—Julia Chinn is still residing there also. At least for the moment."
Brown cocked his head. "She didn't return to Kentucky?"
"No. That was her original plan, but...well...The girls are only twelve."
He had to fight a little to keep a straight face. It'd have been more accurate to add _going on thirteen, with their eyes already on two boys not all that much older._
"So, there it is," stated Jesup. "A war fought with a regular army stripped to the bone, and without the Tennessee and Kentucky militias to provide the additional men we relied on in the southern theater against the Creeks and the British."
Brown picked it up immediately. "Yes, there it is. So what's your assessment, Colonel Taylor? And please add, if you would, your own recommendations."
"Assume for the moment that you were in overall command," chimed in Scott.
Taylor didn't hesitate. He'd now spent months considering the problem. "Whatever else, avoid the obvious route. The Arkansas River valley is a trap that could easily turn into a death trap."
He saw Scott and Brown exchange glances. Triumphant, in the case of Scott's; acknowledging, in the case of Brown's. Apparently he wasn't the only one who'd been pondering the matter.
"Well fortified?" That came from Jesup.
"Arkansas Post is as well built a fort as any in North America, outside the coastal regions," Taylor stated. "I wasn't able to personally inspect the fortifications farther up the river, but from what I was able to determine, they're possibly even more formidable."
"I _did_ inspect them, not long ago," said Scott. "Your assessment is quite accurate, Colonel."
Taylor nodded. "I'd simply establish a stronghold at the confluence to block the Confederacy's access to the Mississippi. Then, launch a diversionary attack up the Red River—"
"How would you deal with the Great Raft?" Brown interrupted.
Taylor smiled. "With great difficulty, sir."
A little laugh filled the room. "Still, with some patience and good logistics," Taylor continued, "it's not impossible. But I stress that this would be merely a diversion. Its main purpose would be to force the Confederates to maintain a considerable military force on their southern border. The Confederacy's great advantage is geography; its great disadvantage, a small population from which to draw soldiers. We'd need to use the former, as best we could—however hard it might be—to place as great a strain as possible on the latter."
The three generals looked at one another. "Makes sense to me," said Jesup. Scott nodded.
Brown looked back at Taylor. "Please continue."
"But the main attack would come from the north. A big army—very big, with lots of cavalry and a well-organized supply train—marching up the Missouri from St. Louis and then down onto the Indian lands of the Confederacy, following the Arkansas. The emphasis would be on using our potentially much superior cavalry in relatively open terrain, and placing pressure on the Cherokees and Creeks to sever their relations with the blacks in Arkansas. If we can succeed in doing so, we'll then have Arkansas in a vise. Over time, by methods of siege and economic strangulation if nothing else, they'd have to surrender."
"You'd not go directly against Driscol's chiefdom?"
Taylor shook his head. "No, sir. The Indian nations in the trans-Arkansas region of the Confederacy are still not that well organized, not even the Cherokee, and there are already strains among them over the issue of slavery. Moreover, while they're certainly brave enough, none of them can field a disciplined and well-trained professional army that could face U.S. regulars in the field. I cannot stress enough the need to stay away from major direct clashes with the Arkansans on their own terrain. That'll be a bloodbath, sir. Even if we win—and I am not frankly sure we could at all, on their terrain, without a minimum of fifteen thousand men in the field—the casualties would produce an uproar in the country."
"Explain," Brown commanded.
Taylor shifted uncomfortably in his seat. "Sir, if you'll allow me to say so, the great danger is that the army will underestimate the Arkansas forces because of their color."
"Jackson wouldn't," Scott said immediately. "The core of that army is the Iron Battalion. If he's ever had anything to say about them other than praise, I've never heard it."
"No, he probably wouldn't," Taylor agreed. He smiled then, for the first time since he'd entered the office. "But I think if there is one single thing we can be sure and certain of, it's that Old Hickory is the very last man Henry Clay would ask to command an expedition against the Confederacy."
Another laugh filled the room. Not a little one, this time.
Brown nodded. "Harrison's likely to be put in command. By all accounts I've heard, he's champing at the bit."
Taylor thought about it for a moment. William Henry Harrison had resigned from the army in a huff in 1814, after a dispute with Secretary of War Armstrong, and had since then been engaged in a middling-successful career as a politician. He'd lost as many elections as he'd won, but he had just managed to get elected as one of the U.S. senators from Ohio. He was known to be a Clay supporter. What was more important was that, second only to Andrew Jackson, he was widely considered the nation's greatest "Injun fighter" because of his victories over Tecumseh's alliance at Tippecanoe and the Thames. If Clay offered to return him to the army as a major general and placed him in command of a war against the Confederacy, Harrison would most likely accept. He was an ambitious man, and he must by now have realized that his principal strength as a politician was his military reputation. Resigning from a Senate seat he'd not even warmed yet in order to answer a patriotic call to duty in a war against the Confederacy would position him nicely to succeed Clay in the White House.
Assuming he won the war, of course.
"What about General Gaines?" he asked. Zack raised the question diffidently, since he'd been very careful to keep a distance from the feud between Winfield Scott and Edmund Gaines that had, for years now, divided a good portion of the officer corps into two hostile camps. Still, it needed to be asked.
Brown shrugged. "With me and Winfield both resigning, Edmund will automatically become the next commander in chief. Unless Clay decides to supersede seniority altogether, which I think unlikely."
"Not a chance," stated Scott confidently. "Harrison wants the glory of a successful campaign, so he'll not be interested. And with you and me both resigning—and I'll make my reasons blunt and explicit, Jacob, even if you won't—Clay will have enough problems with the remaining officers. If he alienates Gaines, he'll have nothing."
Again, Scott sneered. "Of course, Clay can rely on Gaines to wag his tail obligingly, no matter what nonsensical military results he demands."
There was always that to be said for Winfield Scott. As vain and arrogant as the man could be, there was a genuine streak of integrity in him. More than a streak, actually. Jacob Brown had come into the army as a politician, and although he'd gained the respect of the military for his demonstrated courage and prowess as a soldier, he remained a politician. Scott wasn't, and never had been. He was quite capable of resigning from the army on grounds of political principle, and stating them publicly.
Gaines, on the other hand...
Mentally, Zachary shook his head. He'd never taken sides in the long-running Scott–Gaines feud, since there'd been no practical reason to do so personally, and the causes of the feud were petty in any event. But if he had to choose between the two men, either as generals or simply as men—especially the latter—he had no doubt which way he'd go.
Yes, Gaines would wag his tail and do what his master bade him if the food bowl was filled.
"So let's sum it, Colonel Taylor," Scott said. "We're looking at a war with John Calhoun as the secretary of war, Edmund Gaines sitting where I am now, Winfield out of the army entirely, and William Henry Harrison placed in command of the campaign against the Confederacy. Into this, you propose to recommend a campaign that ignores seizing Arkansas and humbling the negroes—which is the main purpose of the war from Calhoun's viewpoint—in order to fight a long and protracted campaign against Indian tribes with which, were it not for their ties to Arkansas, the United States no longer has any real quarrel."
Taylor took a deep breath. "Yes, sir. That's what I recommend."
The three generals in the room grinned.
Jesup spoke first. "Jacob, I told you so. By all means, promote this splendid officer."
Brown chuckled. "Indeed I will. Zack, it's within my power to promote you to full colonel. Beyond that, of course, I can't go without authorization from Congress. If I could make you a brigadier, I would. What I can do also, however—which is more important than anything, if you'll accept—is place you in command of all U.S. Army forces in Missouri. That'll require you and your family to relocate to St. Louis, of course."
While his mind worked on the matter as a whole, Taylor dealt with the latter issue. "That's not a problem, sir. To be honest, I'd prefer moving the girls out of Louisiana. That's not been good for their health. For the rest..."
He hesitated. Normally, of course, any officer would be delighted by such a promotion. But, although he was no expert on the workings of political infighting in Washington, Zachary Taylor was not stupid. For all intents and purposes—even if nothing was said directly—by accepting the promotion and the assignment he would be joining what amounted to a conspiracy against the man now almost certain to become the next president of the United States.
A most far-ranging and vast conspiracy, at that. One which, soon if not already, would have Andrew Jackson and John Quincy Adams involved in the cabal.
He looked at Scott. "If you'll permit me the liberty, General, what do you plan to do upon your retirement?"
Scott smiled. "First, of course, I shall pay a visit to Senator Jackson. It's time, I think, for he and I to end that old feud between us stemming from the Florida campaign. Second, I shall pay a visit upon John Quincy Adams to tender my respects. He's a man I both like and admire. Thereafter..."
The smiled widened considerably. "I believe I shall try my hand at journalism. That William Cullen Bryant fellow has expressed an interest in continuing his reportage on the situation in the Confederacy. But he told me—I happened to run into him just the other day—that he could benefit from the advice of a military expert. And apparently several editors at several of the nation's major journals have indicated a willingness to pay for it. Quite well, in fact."
Taylor looked at Brown. The army's commanding general shrugged. Most of the motion was in the left shoulder. The right barely moved at all. "My health really is very poor, Colonel. My doctors have been urging me for some time to relinquish the strains of military command. So I'll simply return to private life in Brownville and resume my business affairs. Which I need to do, in any event, since I have some major debts I need to retire."
He cleared his throat. "Of course, I retain certain connections in New York politics."
Now Taylor looked at Jesup.
"I shall give you whatever support I can, Zack," the quartermaster general stated firmly. "Rest assured of it."
Much as it went against his cautious temperament, Zachary felt he had to say the heart of the thing out loud. "If I understand you correctly, General Brown, you fear that the coming war is likely to damage the U.S. Army."
"Half wreck it, say better," hissed Winfield Scott. "God damn Henry Clay."
"And you want me to do what I can to salvage something from the disaster."
"It really is too bad you can't promote him to brigadier, Jacob," mused Jesup.
"In essence, yes," said Brown. "I realize it won't be easy, Zachary. But if you can give us a good campaign in the north, I think"—he glanced around the room—"and we all think, that the damage can be repaired when the time comes."
"Ah, General...Generals." Zack shook his head. "There is no way—not if I were Napoleon or Alexander the Great—that I could defeat the Confederacy with a northern campaign unless it were properly mounted, equipped, and supplied, with enough men. None of which is going to be true." He gave Jesup a quick apologetic glance. "Well, perhaps the supplies and equipment will be adequate."
"They won't even be that," Jesup growled. "But I'll give you whatever I can."
Brown started to say something, but Scott waved him down. "It's time for you to keep quiet, Jacob. Private citizen and behind-the-scenes politician, remember? Let me state what needs to be stated openly."
Brown nodded and slumped back in his seat, rubbing his right arm. The general seemed very fatigued now.
"Here's the truth, Colonel Zachary Taylor," said Winfield Scott, looking at him directly. "Who cares if you beat the Confederacy? We have no legitimate quarrel with them in the first place. Jackson's right. This war, if it comes—which now seems well-nigh certain—will be nothing but 'Henry Clay's War.' A war launched by an unprincipled schemer and demagogue to satisfy his own personal ambitions; a war which, in terms of its goal and purpose, is nothing more sublime than John Calhoun's rabid determination to prove to the country that a nigger is a nigger and fit only to be a slave."
For a moment he looked as if he might spit on the floor. "Just fight us a good, clean, hard, and honest fight, Zack. That's all. Best you can. So at least the real army will have something else to point to when Clay's expedition comes to its catastrophe at Syracuse."
Taylor frowned. There was no "Syracuse" in Arkansas.
Brown snorted. "Winfield, _will_ you please stop showing off your classical education?" To Taylor, he said, "It's a reference to the disaster the Athenians suffered in the Peloponnesian War when they followed the advice of Alcibiades and invaded Sicily."
"Oh."
Later that day, after he returned from the War Department, a message was delivered to Zack at his lodgings. From Thomas Hart Benton, inviting him to dinner at the Washington home of the senator from Missouri.
Taylor had never had more than the most casual encounters with Benton, but the senator greeted him as if they were old friends. Which was perhaps not that surprising, since, just before dinner began...
Andrew Jackson arrived. Ushered in through the rear entrance—to avoid being spotted, Zack assumed—but otherwise treated by Benton as if he were a long-lost brother.
The only term Zack could think of was "bizarre." To the best of his knowledge, the last time Andrew Jackson and Thomas Hart Benton had met in person was on the front porch—later spilling into the lobby—of the City Hotel in Nashville. Being as it was one of the more legendary affrays of the frontier, Zack even knew the details. That encounter had begun with Jackson threatening Benton with a pistol, then being shot in the shoulder by Benton's brother Jesse, then exchanging shots—all of which missed—with Benton himself, who, for his part, was then assailed by Jackson's friend John Coffee, whose first shot missed and whose subsequent attempt at pistol whipping Benton was thwarted by the now-senator's fall down a flight of stairs in the hotel.
Meanwhile, Jackson's nephew Stockley Hays had wrestled Jesse Benton to the floor of the hotel, stabbing him repeatedly in the arm with a knife. Fortunately for Hays, when Jesse shot him at point-blank range with his second pistol, the gun misfired.
Half raw violence, half comic opera. And here they were, twelve years later, the two principals in the brawl—acting as if nothing untoward had ever happened between them!
Zack would have ascribed the weird situation to the old saw about politics making strange bedfellows, but...
Politically speaking, they weren't strange bedfellows at all. The feud between Andrew Jackson and Thomas Hart Benton had always been purely personal, stemming from Benton's anger at Jackson's behavior when the general—as he then was—had served as William Carroll's second in Carroll's previous duel with Jesse Benton. There had never actually been any serious political quarrels among any of the men involved. Twelve years later, Jackson was a Tennessee senator, Carroll was the governor of the state, Benton was a Missouri senator—and all three of them detested Henry Clay.
So, Zack wasn't surprised when, after dinner, the whiskey bottle was opened and talk immediately turned to his forthcoming assignment.
Which Jackson and Benton both knew about—in considerable detail—not more than eight hours after Taylor himself had first been informed.
Wide-ranging conspiracy, indeed. He almost felt sorry for Henry Clay.
"I'll see to it you get the Missouri militia put under your command, Zack," said Benton.
Taylor tried to stifle a wince but, obviously, was not entirely successful.
Jackson laughed. "The colonel's got no use for any blasted volunteers, Tom! Can't say I blame him much. Until they'd been tested and horsewhipped, no militia I ever seen—not even Tennessee's—was worth the contents of a spittoon."
"I've not had any great success with militia units in the field," Taylor admitted cautiously.
But Benton just grinned. "Who does? Yeah, sure, it's proper Republican doctrine, and we all swear by it." He waved his half-empty whiskey glass at Jackson. "Him, too, you betchum. But nobody with any sense wants to fight a real war with anything except regulars. Still and all—"
He slurped some more whiskey. "The main thing is that I figure if you're in charge of the militia, you can at least keep them out of mischief. Use 'em to garrison your supply depots, whatever. Otherwise—sure as sunrise if Harrison's in charge—they'll be sent down to Arkansas."
When he set down the whiskey glass, his good cheer seemed to have vanished. "Here's the thing, Zack," the Missouri senator said quietly. "When all the dust settles, I figure Missouri will still have Arkansas to deal with on our southern border. And I'd just as soon the war didn't leave the kind of memories behind that winds up with ten or twenty years of border raids, ambushes, and massacres of isolated settlements afterward. You understand what I mean?"
Taylor eyed him a bit warily. "Missouri's a slave state, Senator."
"I told you. Call me Tom."
"Tom. No matter what I do, there'll still be the problem of runaway slaves."
Benton sneered. Jackson was more pungent.
"Fuck that," he said forcibly. "That's just a problem—and it ain't that big a problem anyway. Problems can be negotiated. Put me and Patrick Driscol across from each other at a table, and within a day we'll have a solution for it that won't please anybody much but everybody can live with."
Zack shifted his skeptical gaze to Jackson. "I feel obliged to remind you, Sena—ah, Andy—that John Calhoun wouldn't agree with you. Neither would most big plantation owners in the South."
"That's because John Calhoun is a stinking liar and a man with a cesspool for a soul, and most slave-owners have the brains of rabbits." The Tennessee senator half slammed his glass back onto the table next to him. Fortunately, it was empty by now.
"I'm one of the biggest slave-owners in Tennessee, Zack. So is Dick Johnson. You want to know why neither one of us is hollering and yelling about it? Because the plain and simple truth—any slave-owner knows this, if he's willing to be honest about it—is that the only slaves that run away from a master who treats his slaves properly are the ones who are troublemakers anyway. Good riddance, frankly. If I catch one of my slaves running away—sure, it happens, from time to time—the first thing I do is have him whipped. On general principles. But the second thing I do—always—is sell him, because I don't want him around. And if he makes his escape to Arkansas, I just shrug it off. Let Driscol deal with the shiftless bastard if he can."
Taylor's family were major slave-owners in Kentucky. And...
Well, Jackson was right. If a plantation was managed properly, with the slaves decently housed and fed and the overseers kept on a short leash, most slaves didn't run away. And the ones who did, sure enough, were usually a problem in any case.
Still...
"Calhoun's not likely to agree with that, Andy, no matter what the evidence."
Jackson's glare was a genuine marvel to behold. Given that it wasn't aimed at Zack, at least. He'd hate to be on the receiving end of the thing.
"I told you," Jackson snarled. "Calhoun's a heathen; I don't care how many times he goes to church and invokes the name of the Almighty. Calhoun doesn't care about runaway slaves any more than I do. What he _does_ care about is his pagan notion that slavery is a positive good. Which it ain't, as any man with any sense can plainly see. It's an economic necessity for the republic, that's all it is. So we keep it."
He held out his glass to Benton for a refill. "Who knows?" Jackson continued, after taking a sip. "Maybe Sam Houston's right, and maybe someday we'll give it up finally. But in the meantime we've got it—and Calhoun is bound and determined to lock slavery in forever. And _that's_ why he's demanding a war. If a bunch of niggers out there in Arkansas can build a country of their own—whipping white men in the bargain, in a fair fight—then what happens to his heathen idolatry?"
Taylor hesitated. Jackson was being very friendly, but...
Mentally, he shrugged. This was another thing that just had to be said out loud. "I feel a need to point out to you, Andy, that if negroes can build a reasonable country of their own—and defend it—then...."
But Jackson simply grinned. "Yeah, sure. Then what happens to _my_ point of view?" He waved the glass about. "Or Tom's. Or yours, for that matter."
Cheerful as could be, the Tennessee senator took another sip from his whiskey. "I'm not worried about it, though, because I think you got a better chance—lot better chance—of filling an inside straight than seeing negroes build a country that's worth anything. Doesn't mean they can't defend it, mind you. Give 'em good leadership, and they make plenty good soldiers. They proved that in New Orleans, and they're proving it again now. But all the rest? A stable republic, prosperity, learning, and education? No, I don't think so."
He gave Zack a disconcertingly direct stare. "From the way you're fidgeting a little, I take it you don't agree?"
Zachary had been nursing his own whiskey, too nervous in such company to be relaxed enough to match Jackson's and Benton's pace. Now he shrugged, and downed his glass in one gulp.
"To be honest, Andy, I don't know. A few months ago, I'd have agreed with you without even thinking about it. But I've been to Arkansas myself recently. And...I just don't know any more. Some of those black people are right impressive. And that's just the way it is."
Jackson didn't argue the matter. Instead, he maintained that calm, level, blue-eyed stare while he finished his whiskey. Not by downing it, just with a steady even sip.
When he was done, he set down the glass and grinned again.
"Well, maybe that's true. If it is, though, we're in trouble. First, because we'll have to listen to Sam Houston crowing 'I told you so' till we're ready to strangle him. What's worse is that all three of us—me for sure—are likely to have some fast talking to do in the afterlife."
So, what had been perhaps the most peculiar day in Zachary Taylor's life ended with a laugh. And he was able to tell himself, as he half staggered his way back to his lodgings, that at least he'd joined a cabal that drank whiskey instead of wine. Even John Quincy Adams, apparently, these days. And wasn't that another marvel?
**CHAPTER 27**
_Uniontown, Pennsylvania_
DECEMBER 22, 1824
It took Sam and his little party a month to reach Pennsylvania. That was at least a week later than he'd planned on when they'd left the nation's capital. The delay had been partly due to a stretch of rough weather in early December that caused him to stay over in Hagerstown for a few days. Little Andy had been handling the rigors of the journey quite well, but they were now into winter, and Sam didn't want to expose him to severe conditions.
Much of the delay, however, had been due to something quite unexpected.
Crowds. Small ones, true, in the smaller towns, and smaller still in the hamlets. But in every city or town or hamlet that Sam and his party passed through, crowds came out to greet them.
Crowds, not mobs. There might have been someone in those masses of people who disliked Sam Houston, but if so they were quite wisely keeping their mouths shut. The mood and temper of the crowds was adulatory toward Houston—and Andrew Jackson—and just about as hostile toward Henry Clay as people could get short of loading firearms.
Sam had begun his journey by taking the National Road, which started in Baltimore and had now been completed through most of Ohio. So, he'd traveled through most of Maryland on his way. At the last moment, Lafayette had decided to accompany him for the Maryland stretch. The presence of the Marquis meant that the crowds were especially large, and it had been difficult to gauge their sentiment. Obviously, Lafayette himself was the focus of much of the interest, more than Houston, although the two were now so closely tied in the popular mind that it was hard to separate one from the other.
Very closely tied, indeed. Henry Clay's political camp had a lot of influence and connections with moneyed interests, but it was weak when it came to controlling or influencing the newspapers. Most of the nation's press had been either pro-Jackson or pro-Adams. Now that the two men had made a political alliance, a veritable torrent of anti-Clay material was pouring out of the printing presses everywhere in the country except the Deep South. And most of them had made sure to quote Lafayette's toast to Sam and the New World.
But if the presence of the Marquis accounted for most of the crowds in Maryland, once Sam entered Pennsylvania at Uniontown, that factor vanished. Everything now became very clear.
The former governor of Pennsylvania, Joseph Hiester, was there to greet him, as was his successor, John Shulze, who'd just been elected. They were quite a pair. Both of them spoke English with a heavy German accent, being members of the state's large German community—which was often called Pennsylvania Dutch but mostly consisted of immigrants from the Palatinate in southwest Germany.
The former governor, Hiester, was a generation older than his successor and had retired after one term of office. Like Andy Jackson and Lafayette, he'd fought in the Revolution. The new governor, Shulze, was part of the extended Muhlenberg clan that was a long-standing powerhouse in Pennsylvania politics, partly because of their close ties to the Hiester family. Governor Shulze's grandfather, the Reverend Muhlenberg, had been the founder of the Lutheran Church in America.
In short, official Pennsylvania—and, in particular, the central political figures of the state's large German immigrant population—had turned out to greet Sam Houston. Who was himself emigrating to Arkansas on the eve of a likely war with the United States.
Pennsylvania was now solid Jackson country, and the state's heretofore muted hostility to slavery had risen to the surface. In one of those ironies of history that Sam had become acutely aware of in his years as the country's Indian commissioner, Henry Clay's cynical and opportunist pandering to John Calhoun's political attitudes had given the South Carolina senator's extremist slavery program far more weight in the nation's political life than it would have had otherwise. It had also, willy-nilly, transformed Andrew Jackson—a man who was himself a major slave-owner—into the nation's principal spokesman against any deepening extension of the institution.
Less than a year ago, only a small number of hard-core New England abolitionists had referred to the "slave power" as a menace to American freedom and liberty. Today, the phrase spilled trippingly off the tongues of Pennsylvania's current and former governors—and if the phrase was spoken with an accent, so what? German immigrants were rarely slave-owners, and they had their own long and bitter memories of the oppressions of the high and mighty. There was nothing these two governors were saying, in their fulsome speeches to the crowd at Uniontown, that Pennsylvanians weren't saying in the privacy of their own homes.
The massacre at Arkansas Post wasn't the issue any longer. Not to anybody, really, not even in the Deep South. In the way these things can happen in a nation's political life, Arkansas Post had become the catalyst for crystallizing antagonisms within the United States that had been lying under the surface for a long time. Dormant, for the most part—until Henry Clay forced the issue. Ironically, the man who liked to be thought of as a great compromiser.
Which, indeed, he was. The problem was that this time, Clay was greatly compromising the nation's political stability in order to further his own personal ambition. He made Sam think of a captain at sea who, not knowing how to navigate, simply ran before the wind. Hoping, presumably, that the sheer swell of the waves would carry him over any unseen reefs ahead.
The icing on the cake came the following morning as Sam was leaving Uniontown. A small group of young men came up to him and very solemnly presented him with a handmade banner.
"A pledge," said the youngster who seemed to be the leader of the group. He had not a trace of a German accent, which wasn't surprising. The German immigrant communities were concentrated in the eastern and central parts of Pennsylvania. This far west, the population was more likely to be of Anglo-Saxon or Scots-Irish stock.
Sam spread out the banner as best he could while sitting on a horse. It was the familiar Pennsylvania state flag, more square than rectangular, with the state coat of arms flanked by two rearing horses on a blue field. But the usual slogan under the coat of arms— _Virtue, Liberty, and Independence_ —had been removed. In its place, someone had laboriously stitched a writhing serpent beneath the horses' hooves, which bore the label "the slave power."
At least, Sam was pretty sure the effect being aimed for was "writhing." An uncharitable soul might have used other terms, such as "lumpy" or "misshapen" or even "looks more like a worm than any snake I ever seen."
"Splendid," he pronounced. He started to hand it back, but the youngster shook his head.
"No, sir. That one's for you. We're having more made up, in case."
Sam hesitated. He wasn't entirely sure he wanted to know...
"In case of what?" he asked.
The youngster—he couldn't have been more than eighteen, like all of them in the group—gave Sam a puzzled expression. "Well, in case the traitor Henry Clay gets to start his war. What else?"
Eagerly, he pointed to the space just below the serpent. "There's still room there, we made sure. So we can add 'Pennsylvania Lafayette Battalion.' "
" 'Battalion Number One,' " another of the little group proclaimed. "No way we're gonna let those upstarts in Harrisburg claim it. They can be Number Two."
Sam had a weird sense of dizziness for a moment. Not a physical one, simply...
More like a man might feel who contemplates what a barrel might feel if the men handling it lost their grip and it began to careen out of control.
Which was altogether a crazy notion, in the first place.
"Ah, fellows...The only way Henry Clay can start a war is if he's president of the United States. In which case—"
He cleared his throat. "You might want to reconsider taking up arms against it."
Now all of them were giving him that puzzled expression.
"That's what you're doing, isn't it?" asked the same youngster who'd laid such proud claim to the number one.
"Well...yeah. But."
_But what?_ he had to ask himself. He realized now, for the first time, that the rage and grief he'd been consumed with for the past nine weeks had half blinded him. His own motivations—conscious ones, anyway—had been so emotionally rooted that he simply hadn't considered how other people might react to the same events.
_The traitor Henry Clay._
This wasn't the first time he'd heard people use that expression. Often mixed in with "the slave power"—and almost always with "woman killers."
Nobody, including Sam himself, thought that Clay had any direct connection to Maria Hester's death. For that matter, nobody thought she'd even been the assassin's intended victim in the first place. He'd murdered her quite by accident while trying to kill her husband.
But that simply didn't make any difference to a lot of people. Henry Clay had stirred up the lurking reptile, hadn't he? The fact that the murdered woman had been the daughter of the nation's president was, in many ways, more important than the fact that she'd also been Sam's wife. These were people—traitors—who would stop at nothing, who would commit any crime to force their slavery onto the nation.
None of this might have been entirely rational. But there was an inexorable logic to it once you went deeper into the nation's soul. There were, and always had been, two different conceptions of the "United States" abroad in the land. Often enough, residing within the same person—Andrew Jackson himself being a case in point, as was James Monroe. As had been, before them, George Washington and Thomas Jefferson.
Now, perhaps long before it might have been otherwise, Henry Clay was driving that underlying contradiction right to the surface. Arkansas Post had been the catalyst. Not because it had to have been, but because Clay and Calhoun had made it so.
The facts themselves were obvious to everyone, and not in dispute. Arkansas had been attacked and had defended itself. Perhaps with much greater harshness than was warranted—although not many people in the North and the border states would even agree with that any longer, since William Cullen Bryant's gruesome depictions of the atrocities committed by Crittenden's army had become widely spread.
Still, there was no real dispute over the legalities involved. All the more, since Arkansas was an independent sovereign nation to begin with, established by treaty with the United States.
So, what was the problem? The only answer Clay could give—pandering to Calhoun to get the votes he needed in the House of Representatives—was that the law be damned. The real issue was slavery itself. More precisely, Calhoun's dissatisfaction with the institution's current state of semi-disrepute and his determination to foist his extremist version of it upon the whole United States. From John Calhoun's point of view, and that of the people who followed him, what was really at stake was the intolerable notion that black people could have _any_ rights at all, even if they were not slaves.
Most of the nation was simply choking on that. Black people might be inferior to white people—most definitely were, in the opinion of all but a handful—but that didn't make them animals. Women were inferior to men, also, when you got right down to it. Certainly children were. Like freedmen, they weren't allowed to vote. Like freedmen, their ability to exercise control over their finances was tightly circumscribed, as was their control over property in general. Like freedmen, their status in life was and would always remain—in the case of women, at least, if not male children—lesser than that of men.
Did that mean they had no rights _at all?_ Could a man choose to murder his wife with impunity? If he couldn't—which he certainly couldn't, not even in South Carolina or Georgia—then why could the same be done to black people?
The nation's single most popular political figure, Andrew Jackson, had done more than choke on the notion. He'd spat it right out and ground it under his heel, calling it a vile abomination to the principles of the republic. Whereupon the political figure who was the nation's most respected—if not much liked outside of New England—had done the same.
Andrew Jackson owned more slaves than all but a tiny number of Southerners, and John Quincy Adams had probably read more books than anyone in the whole country. Could _both_ of them be wrong on the subject?
Outside of the seven slave states of the Deep South, and with Virginia and the border states teetering back and forth, a national consensus was beginning to emerge.
_No._
And if Henry Clay thought he could shove it down the nation's throat simply by maneuvering in the House of Representatives to get himself made president...
_Made,_ not elected. By now the results of the national election were known to everyone in the country. Clay hadn't gotten but one vote in six.
Then to Sam Hill with Henry Clay. Was a whole nation—the majority of its population and its constituent states—to be labeled traitor by an American Alcibiades? Or was the term properly laid at his own feet?
That's what Sam thought, anyway, sitting on a horse in Uniontown at the onset of winter and looking down at a blue banner. And it occurred to him that this was the first thing he could probably call thought at all since he'd seen the life fading out of his wife's eyes.
"Sam," she'd kept whispering until the end, looking up at him more in confusion than in pain. What made the agony complete—still did—was the trust that had also never left her eyes. Maria Hester had been just as certain that her husband would make it right as he'd been certain, from several battlefields, that there was no way in God's earth he could possibly keep her from bleeding to death from that wound.
There'd been nothing in him but guilt, rage, and grief since that moment. Until now.
"I'll keep it then," he said abruptly, folding up the banner. Rolling it, more like. Folding, properly speaking, was an awkward business while one was sitting in a saddle.
But soon enough it was done, and the banner stuffed into his saddlebag. He leaned over, extended his hand, and shook those of all eight of the youngsters.
"I'll look for you in the summer," he said firmly. "If the traitor starts his war."
"We won't fail you, sir!" exclaimed one of them.
Sam shook his head. "Got nothing to do with me. Just make sure you don't fail your state and your country."
He rode out of Uniontown to the same chant he'd ridden out of every town before it since Baltimore. _To the New World!_
_Louisville, Kentucky_
JANUARY 14, 1825
He'd spent the time he could, after Uniontown, chewing on his thoughts. He couldn't do more than that, between the rigors of the winter journey and the need to care for his young son. Chester was a help, of course; even more, Andy's nursemaid Dinah and her teenaged daughter Sukey. But there was still plenty to keep Sam occupied.
In Louisville, though, they'd have at least a week's layover. It would be best to forgo overland travel and take a steamboat the rest of the way to Arkansas, since it would be much safer for Andy. The Ohio and the Mississippi were navigable in winter by a captain who knew his business, but the same captain would wait for the best possible weather, also.
Louisville was hospitable, fortunately. Sam hadn't been entirely sure it would be. Kentucky was a border state—and the same state that had produced Richard Mentor Johnson as a senator and Henry Clay as the Speaker of the House.
But, in the end, the state seemed to be swinging the same way as its newly elected governor, Joseph Desha, and the Relief Party for which he was a champion. Whatever private thoughts they might have about the issue of slavery, or the ins and outs of Arkansas Post, their overriding concern was the still deep distress of the state's poorer citizens since the Panic of 1819. Much of the nation might be coming to the conclusion that Henry Clay was a minion of Sam Hill, but Kentucky's Relief Party had come to the conclusion several years earlier that the principal lawyer for the Second Bank of the United States was no "minion" at all. At the very least, he was one of Sam Hill's chief demons. If not the creature himself, which some of the Relief Party's more vocal partisans thought quite likely.
Desha hadn't been sworn into office yet. But it hardly mattered, since the man he was replacing in the governor's office, John Adair, was also a leader of the Relief Party. Like Pennsylvania's former governor Hiester, he'd fought in the Revolution and, years later, had been in command of the Kentuckian forces under Andy Jackson in the New Orleans campaign.
The state capital of Frankfort being nearby, both men came up to visit Sam after learning of his arrival. Theirs was more in the way of a private visit to pay their respects than the sort of public spectacle staged by Hiester and Shulze in Uniontown. Kentucky was a slave state, after all. But they made no attempt to disguise their arrival, either, and the visit itself was most cordial.
Sam remembered Adair, of course, since both of them had fought the British at New Orleans.
Well, Sam had fought them, at any rate. Adair had never had to, beyond the clashes of the first days. The reason he'd never had to was that Sam—along with Patrick Driscol's Iron Battalion, made up almost entirely of black freedmen—had met the British regiments who launched the opening assault on the west bank of the Mississippi. Opening and only assault, because their defeat had been so crushing and complete that General Pakenham had wisely chosen to withdraw from the field at Chalmette rather than launch the assault Adair and his men had been braced for.
So, there was that, too. Now that his brain was starting to work naturally again, Sam was gauging the fact—quite significant, he thought—that most of the men in the United States with real command experience in combat did not share the blithe assumption of Clay and Calhoun that any war with Arkansas would be a trifle. The only outstanding exception that Sam knew about, in fact, was William Henry Harrison—and for that, there was the usual culprit to blame.
Ambition. It didn't matter what Harrison really thought. Like Clay himself, that would be subordinated to his personal goals. Which might make sense, looked at from a narrow and immediate perspective, but which, in the longer run, struck Sam as nothing less than a form of insanity.
"Nice to see you again, General," he said, exchanging a handshake with Adair. "Some whiskey?"
"And you as well, Colonel. Yes, please."
Chester had the drinks poured within seconds. Once the glasses were in everyone's hands, the serious dickering began. That was mostly with Desha, naturally. Adair was essentially there as a wise old man giving advice to his successor.
"—not like to see Kentuckians on the wrong side of the Iron Battalion's bayonets, Joseph; even more, their six-pounders—"
Being the gist of it. Wise old man, indeed.
By the time they left, Sam had the private agreement he wanted. There'd be no Kentucky militia forces sent against Arkansas in the event _that man_ —they might as well have said "traitor" and be done with it—chose to start a war.
He was pleased. Granted, the Kentucky militia wasn't as good as Tennessee's. But it was probably the second best state militia in the country.
"You want the rest of your drink, Mr. Sam?" Chester asked after the two governors had gone. He held up the glass, which was still mostly full.
"No. Just pour it out. No, that'd be a silly waste. Finish it yourself, Chester."
"I don't drink, Mr. Sam. You know that."
A bit surprised—he'd been half lost in thought—Sam stared at him for a moment.
"Oh, that's right. Sorry, I forgot. Give it to Dinah, then."
"She don't—"
Sam threw up his hands. "I'm surrounded by temperance fanatics! Fine. Give it to the dog. Any dog you can find. Tarnation, it's good whiskey."
Chester looked dubious. Sam snorted.
"They're _Kentucky_ dogs hereabouts, Chester. Of course they'll drink whiskey."
"Well. That's true."
After he was gone, Sam checked the time. It'd still be hours before Dinah and Sukey would want his help with little Andy.
Time enough to start. He went over to the writing desk in the hotel room—he'd made sure it had one, when he arrived—and took a seat. Then, settling down with paper and pen, he began working on his first letters to Andrew Jackson and John Quincy Adams.
He'd get his revenge for Maria Hester, sure enough. But it had also finally dawned on him that his father-in-law's advice, unheeded at the time, was undoubtedly correct. It was just as much a form of insanity for a man like himself to seek a different man's form of vengeance as it was for Henry Clay to think he could lead a nation into a war by posturing like Achilles.
Sam knew how to use a gun—cannons, too, and quite well—and would again if he needed to. But there were other weapons he'd learned how to use in the years since New Orleans. If the pen was not mightier than the sword on a battlefield, it was much the mightier weapon on other fronts.
A different man might be satisfied by inflicting as much harm as he possibly could on the likes of Henry Clay and John Calhoun. For which purpose, guns would do nicely.
What a trifling ambition.
Sam scrawled the date at the top of the sheet: January 14, 1825.
Ten years, almost to the day, since he and Patrick Driscol had won the Battle of the Mississippi. He'd been twenty-one years old, then. Now he was thirty-one, and already a widower.
Still, he was a young man. With most of a lifetime left to devote to the conscious and deadly purpose of utterly destroying Henry Clay, John C. Calhoun, all other men like them, and everything they stood for.
He wasn't at all sure that he could, of course. But he was positive and certain he could give it a mighty run. Mighty enough that when the time came, in the afterlife, that he saw two trusting eyes again, he wouldn't have to look away with a husband's shame.
**CHAPTER 28**
_Washington, D.C._
FEBRUARY 7, 1825
Henry Clay was elected president of the United States on the first ballot in the House of Representatives. By the rules established in the Constitution, each state got one vote, determined by the majority of its delegation. Thirteen votes were thus needed for Clay to be elected president, since the nation had twenty-four states.
That's exactly what he got. Thirteen votes.
The solid core came from the seven states of the Deep South, delivered by Calhoun's people and those of Crawford's who were not breaking away with Van Buren and the New Yorkers:
_Alabama_
_Florida_
_Georgia_
_Louisiana_
_Mississippi_
_North Carolina_
_South Carolina_
He also picked up Virginia, although it was a much closer call than he and his associates had expected.
On the one hand, the state was politically dominated by the same class of slave-owners who ruled the roost in the Deep South. In fact, Virginia had historically led the South in the direction of ever harsher laws regarding slavery as an institution and black people as a race. In 1785, it had been the first state to officially declare any person with "black blood" to be a mulatto and to legally define mulattos as negroes. In 1799, it had banished white mothers of mulattos with their children. In 1806, it had required slaves to leave the state within a year of manumission. And, finally, in 1819, Virginia had been the first—and was still the only—state in the union that outlawed blacks and mulattos, whether free or slave, from meeting for the purposes of education. It also forbade anyone, including whites, from teaching black people to read and write.
On the other hand...
The Old Dominion's elite took great pride in its political history and saw Virginia as the nation's preeminent state. And why should they not? Four of five presidents of the United States had been Virginians—and all of them had served two terms, unlike the one-term tenure of the sole outsider, John Adams. The Old Dominion had produced a similarly disproportionate number of the country's political leaders in Congress and the judicial branch.
So, even with their class interests inclining them toward following Clay, their well-honed political instincts were shrieking alarm bells. The manner in which Clay was taking the office—and no other term than "taking" could really be used—was far outside the parameters of what many of Virginia's congressmen could easily swallow.
But eventually, enough of them did. The quirky and unpredictable John Randolph perhaps swung the matter when he abruptly decided—following a train of logic that was semi-incomprehensible but, as usual, brilliantly expounded on the floor of Congress—that electing Henry Clay was essential to the preservation of slavery, an institution that he personally viewed with dubiety but whose stalwart defense was necessary to prevent the ever-growing encroachment of federal dictatorship upon the liberties of the states.
"In a phrase," John Quincy Adams caustically remarked afterward, "John Randolph felt it necessary to install a tyrant in order to forestall tyranny."
What made Randolph's actions particularly bizarre was that he detested Clay personally. When they met in a corridor of the Capitol shortly after the vote, Randolph stood his ground and hissed at the newly elected president, "I never sidestep skunks."
Clay smiled. "I always do," he replied, and deftly skirted him.
The border states split. Tennessee and Kentucky voted for Jackson; Missouri and Maryland, for Clay. No surprise there.
Granted, a different sort of politician might have been embarrassed by the fact that his own home state had voted for another candidate. But Clay was above such picayune concerns. As well he might be, having managed the notable feat of getting elected as the nation's chief executive with five out of six voters opposed to him.
He did lose New York, which caused a momentary panic among his advisers. At the last minute, Martin Van Buren broke publicly with Crawford and Clay and threw his support to Jackson. Van Buren himself was a senator, not a congressman, so his own vote was irrelevant. But they didn't call him the Little Magician for nothing. Van Buren had created the nation's first really well-oiled political machine in New York, and the machine delivered.
The decision came from the West. Ohio, Illinois, and Indiana all voted for Clay.
Ohio's vote was expected by everyone and really had little to do with the ruckus over Arkansas Post. Ohio had long been "Clay country" because it was the state that felt it had the most to gain from the newly elected president's American System.
So, in the end, Illinois and Indiana were the key—and their votes were purely the product of panic over Arkansas Post. Both states were new—Indiana had been admitted to the union in 1816; Illinois in 1818—and both bordered on "wild Injun country."
Most of all, both were sparsely settled, which made them feel vulnerable to the nebulous danger of being suddenly overrun by hordes of murdering negroes surging out of Arkansas. The fact that Arkansas was hundreds of miles away and no sane man could think of any conceivable way the Confederacy would or could attack Illinois or Indiana without stumbling over Tennessee and Kentucky—with their large populations and the nation's two most powerful and best-organized militias—was neither here nor there. By that point, Clay's partisans had pulled out all the stops and were fanning every spark of fear they could find into a blaze of terror.
So, there it was. In the nation as a whole, in the presidential election of 1824, about 360,000 popular votes were cast. Of that total, the decision was made by the delegations representing 16,000 voters in Indiana and fewer than 5,000 in Illinois—and, in both states, by narrow margins.
"In the history of the world," Andrew Jackson would thunder the next day, "was ever a greater mockery made of the phrase 'decision of the people'?"
Needless to say, the question was not rhetorical. Old Hickory proceeded to answer it at length many times thereafter. To the end of their days, the mildest term anyone could remember him using to refer to Clay and his minions was "the rascals."
John Quincy Adams was more restrained. But the capital's political observers noted that he immediately announced his intention to run for Congress from Massachusetts.
The House, not the Senate, interestingly enough. Given that a Senate seat would also be available in 1826, and that the Senate was generally considered a more prestigious body, Adams's choice seemed odd.
But perhaps not so odd, in the opinion of the more astute of those observers. True enough, a "senator" was a more august personage than a mere "congressman." But those terms were abstractions. The concrete reality remained that no senator—indeed, no person in the country save the president himself—potentially wielded more power and influence than the Speaker of the House of Representatives.
True, the thought of John Quincy Adams serving in the same post that Henry Clay had transformed into such a political powerhouse was extraordinarily peculiar. Clay was the nation's most adroit and adept politician, as everyone including his bitterest enemies would agree; Adams, its most awkward and inept.
But perhaps that was what Adams was basing his calculations upon. After two years of Henry Clay in the White House, perhaps by 1826 the nation would welcome a Speaker—freshman though he might be—who was everything Henry Clay was not. Stubborn on matters of principle where Clay was lizard-quick, thoughtful and deeply read where Clay was clever and facile, and if not as gracious in his manners, more than his equal in intelligence.
A week after the election, the announcement was made that William Crawford would be Clay's nominee for the nation's next secretary of state; John Calhoun, for its next secretary of war.
That drew another round of thunder from Jackson. "So you see, the Judas of the South has closed the contract and will receive the thirty pieces of silver. His end will be the same. Was there ever witnessed such a bare-faced corruption in any country before?"
To no one's surprise, Crawford said nothing. The Georgia politician's physical ailment was now so widely known that everyone understood the appointment was a mere fig leaf. Crawford's partisans would be allowed to use the State Department to pass around perks, privileges, posts, and the like, but Clay himself would direct the nation's foreign affairs.
Calhoun, still only forty-two years old, was in his prime. But he also made no public response to Jackson's denunciations. Instead, he limited his riposte to an indirect one.
He immediately announced that he would be urging Congress to approve a rapid and major expansion of the nation's armed forces "to deal with the barbaric threat arisen on our western border." Then, with an implied sneer, wondered how such an expansion could possibly be opposed by prominent figures—he did not mention Jackson by name—who had long advocated the same measure.
That was a pointless tactic, given Old Hickory. Jackson's response came the next day:
"In times past, I advocated strengthening the nation's armed forces to fend off foreign murderers, arsonists, and robbers. Calhoun calls for its expansion for the sole purpose of murdering, burning, and robbing neighbors who have never attacked us at all. Judas, did I name him? If so, I insulted Judas."
The most astute of the capital's observers, however, ignored this predictable byplay. They were quite fascinated by something else.
John Quincy Adams was starting to profess—in public—a liking for whiskey. So long as it was the corn-based whiskey distilled out West, not the Eastern rye-based stuff. What some people were starting to call "bourbon."
_Arkansas Post_
FEBRUARY 9, 1825
Patrick Driscol and Robert Ross were at Arkansas Post when Sam's steamboat arrived. Not because they'd been awaiting him there, but because they'd been engaged in negotiations with Pushmataha and other major chiefs of the Choctaws.
The Choctaws, Sam discovered, had almost all crossed the Mississippi by now and had taken up residence in the Confederacy. They'd not had much choice in the matter. Whether they were signatories to the Treaty of Oothcaloga or not, in the aftermath of Arkansas Post—not to mention the retaliations the Choctaws had taken on local settlers for Crittenden's outrages—the states of Louisiana and Mississippi had mobilized their militias to drive them out. Alabama had eagerly sent its own militia in support. Not so much because they cared about the Choctaws but because it gave them an excuse to drive the last remaining Chickasaws out of northwestern Alabama.
The Chickasaws, in the end, had crossed the Mississippi also. Whether or not they were the most warlike tribe in the Southeast, as both they and several other tribes contended, they were simply too small to stand against that sort of concerted attack. There weren't more than five thousand Chickasaws in the whole world.
So, by the time Sam arrived, Arkansas Post appeared to be under siege again—only, this time, not by fifteen hundred freebooters but by more than ten times that number of Indians. Fortunately, it was a relatively peaceful sort of siege, being waged by wheedles, threats, demands, proposals, and offers of compromise rather than by guns and bayonets.
"Glad you're here," Patrick gruffed to him as he escorted Sam and his party off the boat. "Maybe you can talk sense into them."
"What's the problem? There should still be plenty of land left for them in the trans-Poteau area. Blast it, that's awkward. Have they settled on a name for it yet?"
Driscol grinned humorlessly. "Indians, remember? Contentious bastards are worse than the Irish when it comes to finding a point of dispute over any subject under the sun. The Cherokees—the ones following Ross and Ridge, anyway—had pretty well settled on 'New Kituhwa' and seemed to have bullied and sweet-talked most of the Creeks into it. But no sooner did Pushmataha and most of the Choctaws arrive than they denounced the name as an instrument of Cherokee oppression. They're arguing for 'Oklahoma,' on the grounds that since it means 'red people' it's fair to all the tribes, which 'Kituhwa' isn't. Ross seems inclined to concede the point to them, but Ridge is holding stubborn. His argument is that it may mean 'red people' in Choctaw, but it means no such thing in Cherokee."
His grin widened and even gained a bit of real humor. "The most delicious part of it—well, to a Scots-Irishman, anyway—is that I think they're all going to finally agree to adopt English as the official language of the whole Confederacy. Seeing as how there's no way any one of them will accept the language of any other instead. Ha! Damned Sassenach. Same dirty rotten trick they pulled on us."
A bit apprehensively, Sam looked up at the fort they were nearing. "They're _all_ in there?"
"Every last chief of any note at all, from all four of the tribes. There's even somebody claiming to speak for the Seminoles, although nobody's paying much attention to him. Seeing as how most of the Seminoles—talk about stubborn—are still holed out somewhere in the Florida Everglades."
He gave Sam a sly glance. "Now that you're here, though, I figure you can exercise that famous silver tongue of yours and persuade all of them to move the whole ruckus upriver to New Antrim. At least we'd be able to reside in the Wolfe Tone Hotel instead of this place, which"—his blocky, ugly face got blockier and uglier than ever—"is _supposed_ to be a fort, damnation."
Sam shook his head. "Patrick, big as it is, the Wolfe Tone's smaller than Arkansas Post."
An odd expression came to Driscol's face. Half embarrassment; half...
Pride?
"Not any longer. Been a lot of new construction since you were here. Tiana persuaded me to add another extension. A wing I'd call it, except, well, it's actually bigger than the rest of the hotel. We had to tear down two whole city blocks to make room for it."
Hurriedly: "The people living there got compensated, of course. Including the right to rooms in the new wing of the hotel, which—comes down to it—is in a lot better shape than the log cabins they'd been living in."
Sam peered down at him. "Laird of Arkansas, indeed. What's next, mighty one? Do you figure on claiming all land in the Delta as your personal domain? Yes, I know, you'll graciously allow the serfs to run their sheep on the land. The one or two you'll leave them with."
"That's not—!"
"Oh, I think it's quite funny. No sense of humor, Patrick; that's always been your problem. But that aside, why _did_ you expand the hotel? I'll admit you're not actually greedy."
Driscol grunted. "Didn't have much choice. The new wing isn't really what you'd properly call a hotel. It's more like a giant dormitory." Defensively: "And I'm not charging anybody more than maintenance costs to stay there. Tiana agreed to that. Even browbeat her father when the plundering algerine tried to talk us into raising the rates."
Sam listed an eyebrow. "Something I don't know?"
"Guess so. Though you must have been blind as a bat not to have noticed, coming as you did all the way from Washington. Started in the summer, once everybody figured Clay would most likely win the election. The biggest wave of freedman migrations since the very first days of Arkansas. I think we've gotten another fifteen thousand of them in the last three months. Another five thousand or so in the way of runaway slaves and maroons."
Now that he thought about it, Sam _had_ noticed an unusual number of black people working their way down the Ohio and the Mississippi on flatboats. But he'd been so engrossed in his own ruminations—grief, too, still—that he hadn't paid it much attention.
Which he should have, he chided himself. Black people tended to shy away from traveling on flatboats down the rivers. Yes, it was an easier form of travel, but a much harder one from the standpoint of evading slave-catchers. There was also the danger of lynch mobs, passing by some towns.
Something must have showed on his face. Driscol's grin returned—but this was the troll's grin. The savage, pitiless one that fit Patrick's face to perfection when the mood took him. Sam's best friend or not, he really was a frightening sort of man.
"Oh, there's been no trouble. John Brown's doing, that is. Odd fellow, the tanner, no doubt about it. A man after my own heart, though. As a matter of religious principle, he refuses to join any army. But it seems his reading of the Bible allows him to raise what amounts to his _own_ army. So, he did."
Sam's eyes widened.
"Oh, aye, lad! And not such a small one, neither. By now I figure he's got something like four hundred men—at least half of them white, mind you—serving under his...well, can't call them colors, really, since they don't have a banner. But they're his army, never doubt it. He doesn't call them anything but stalwart lads, but they've taken to calling themselves Brown's Raiders. For the past three months, they've been patrolling the rivers—in U.S. territory also. Everybody knows they're there—especially would-be slave-catchers—but since they don't wear uniforms..."
"Who in the name of—" Sam shook his head. "Who _are_ they? I mean, I know the Brown clan breeds like rabbits, but there aren't _that_ many of them."
"His own family's the core of it, still. But most of them are just boys from Ohio and, mostly, Pennsylvania. Some other Northern states. Abolitionists, I'd call them, except this new breed has little of the Quaker in them. Nothing at all, actually. Bloody-minded fellows."
"I didn't think there were that many abolitionists—outright ones, anyway—in the whole United States."
Driscol snorted. "Probably weren't, a year ago. But—"
He stopped abruptly. They were now not more than twenty feet from the bridge leading across the moat that surrounded the Post.
"It started changing rapidly after the battle here, Sam. Which has been my whole life's experience—and the reason I was utterly merciless in this place, be damned to what you or any other politician tells me. The old-style abolitionists were a handful, feeling sorry for the miserable negroes. Middle-aged, most of them, fat and prosperous. There are a lot more of the new-style ones—young men, overwhelmingly, and most of them from modest circumstances like John Brown himself—and they don't feel sorry for negroes at all. Why should they? The negroes showed—in battle, where it counts—that they could take care of themselves, thank you. So now it's just a matter of principle. People will petition to redress an injustice, Sam, but they'll _fight_ for a principle. That's because injustice is a property of the weak and powerless, but principles belong to the strong."
Sam stared at him. He had a tendency to forget—and chided himself for it, once again—that beneath Driscol's craggy forehead lay a brain that, whatever it lacked in the way of formal education and wide reading, was as acute as any Sam had ever known.
Granted, it was a sergeant's brain, with a sergeant's harshly practical and ruthless way of gauging the world. But was that really such a handicap under these circumstances?
Driscol cleared his throat. "And then...Ah, lad, I am sorry for it. I truly am, and so's Tiana. But for whatever it might be worth, your wife's death may have saved a nation's life. We'll never know, but that's what I'm thinking."
He looked away, down the Arkansas. Not avoiding Sam's gaze so much as simply giving him some personal space. "It all changed again," he said quietly, "after Maria Hester's killing. There'll be no going back now, Sam. Not for the boys John Brown is gathering around him. No going back, no give, no surrender—and damn little in the way of mercy, unless Brown himself calls for it. I swear to you, I think they'd even frighten the old Hebrews. They can't possibly be any more Old Testament." He grinned again, very crookedly. "Even the Tennessee and Kentucky state militiamen are giving them a wide berth on the rivers, as long as they leave the settlements alone and only go after slave-catchers."
Sam didn't know what to say. As always—it hadn't lessened a bit, not even after almost three months—the thought of his wife dying just took his breath away. A man with a silver tongue, struck speechless.
When he was able to talk, he grasped at it. "You think so? About Maria Hester, I mean."
"Oh, aye." Driscol seemed to swallow. Hard to tell, of course, with a neck like his. "I—ah—should perhaps give fair warning. You know—ah—that rich black fellow in New York? The one from Haiti who's been sending so much money here."
"Pierre Toussaint."
"Yes, him. He's a devout Catholic, so most of the money he sends goes to support the Church here." For just a moment, the Scots-Irish Presbyterian surfaced. Patrick had been raised in that creed, even if he himself had long since become a freethinking deist. "Heathen lot, even if—well, I'll grant they do a lot of good work. Charitable stuff. But the point is, they're given to saints and icons and graven images and such."
Sam coughed. "Oh, come on, Patrick! Not even the Catholics—"
"Not on their own, probably. But Marie Laveau decided she was a Catholic two years ago, and she's been busy ever since importing as much of her voudou as she can into the Church." Again, the Presbyterian surfaced: "Which isn't hard, of course, being as the papists half-think like voudou anyway."
Sam couldn't help but chuckle. Which, thankfully, leached away some of the grief-surge.
Driscol chuckled with him. "Marie's got quite the following, too. Except for Tiana, she's probably the most influential woman in Arkansas. So...Well, look, here's the point. Don't get all worked up if you come to find out Maria Hester's...well, actually, they've already declared her a martyr of the Church."
"She wasn't Catholic!"
"Don't argue with _me_ about it. Marie Laveau can explain it to you, if you can manage to follow the logic. Which I couldn't, after she got to the part about consulting—ah, never mind. The point is, they'll probably be making her a saint by next spring. They already have an image of her—a veritable icon—up on the wall of the big church in New Antrim. The priest squawked, but they made it stick."
"I thought only the pope—"
"Marie Laveau can explain that to you, also. It seems—this is _her_ version, mind you, I doubt me the pope in Rome would agree with her—that since it's obvious the Virgin Mary is equal to the Christ, it follows as night from day that saints can also be declared by the Women's Council."
" _What_ 'Women's Council'?"
Patrick cleared his throat again. "Well, the one that she and Tiana set up. Tiana being a Cherokee, of course, the notion came naturally to her. Especially since Nancy Ward urged it on her, just before the ancient _ghighua_ finally died last year. Marie Laveau thought it made perfect sense, too. Which isn't really that surprising, when you think about it. Slavery being what it is, black people mostly have a matrilineal society, too, in practice if not in theory."
That was true enough. But—
"The chiefdom of Arkansas now has a _Women's Council?_ Run by Tiana and Marie Laveau? Good God in Heaven!"
"Yes, that's exactly what Major General Robert Ross said. When his wife Eliza got invited to join. Then he repeated the exclamation—twice; I heard him; I was there—when she accepted."
"Good God in Heaven!"
Driscol shrugged. "It's the nature of the soil in Arkansas. Very contagious terrain."
**CHAPTER 29**
_Arkansas Post_
FEBRUARY 9, 1825
"Thank God you're here!" John Ross said when he spotted Sam entering the fort's big mess hall, which had been set aside as an impromptu conference room.
The Cherokee leader pointed an accusing finger at Pushmataha. The principal chief of the Choctaws was ensconced on a chair in a corner, for all the world as if he were seated on a throne. "Explain to this madman that if he doesn't get his people moved across the Poteau into New Kitu—ah, blast it, Oklahoma—that they'll starve. As it is, it's going to be touch and go."
Sam studied Pushmataha. The old chief was famous all over the frontier for his canny ways, but all it took was one glance to know that he wasn't going to budge.
"They murdered and raped and robbed—Crittenden and his devils—all up and down the great river," the chief growled. His English was fluent, if heavily accented. "Then their militias did it again when they came at us afterward. We will not move from this place until we have our revenge. We will certainly not go to hide across the Poteau, leaving—"
Pushmataha choked off a term that was the Choctaw equivalent of "nigger." He took a slow, shaky, old man's breath. "Leaving the blacks to do all the fighting."
Sam decided to shift the matter into Choctaw—in which he was by now just as fluent, and had considerably less of an accent. "Well, of course not. But your women and children can't fight, Pushmataha. Not many of the old men, either. So it only makes sense..."
By evening, he'd managed to work out a compromise. Most of the Choctaws would winter over in New Antrim. That would require hastily erecting enough shelter for an additional fifteen thousand people, in a city that was already bursting with more than thirty thousand. But Driscol announced he'd exercise his full powers as principal chief of Arkansas and institute the measure he'd been considering for some time now.
_Conscription._ Pure and simple—no blasted inefficient, haphazard Sassenach press gangs, either. Arkansas would do it the proper way. The Napoleonic way.
However, exemptions would be given to able-bodied men engaged in necessary labor.
Building housing on short notice for the newly arrived Choctaws was decreed necessary labor.
The principal chief of Arkansas foresaw no great problem.
"Can Patrick actually manage it?" Sam whispered to John Ridge, with whom he'd been quietly consulting on the side while Driscol and John Ross and Major Ridge and Pushmataha continued their wrangling over the details. "Conscription, I mean."
Major Ridge's son was extremely astute, had been residing in New Antrim for some time now, and, along with his cousin, Buck Watie, who was standing alongside him, owned New Antrim's biggest and most influential newspaper. Sam figured his assessment would be as good as any. And whatever he missed, Buck wouldn't.
"There'll be a ruckus, of course. But...yes, he can."
"Of course he can," Buck chimed in, speaking as softly as his cousin even if the words came out like a snort. "Don't let all the similarities fool you, Sam. There are some ways—and not just obvious ones involving race—that Arkansas is about as different from the United States as both of them are from, I don't know, someplace in Mongolia. One of them is the attitude people have toward the army here. Even a lot of the whites and Indians. The truth is, the way things are now, if Chief Driscol called for a massive number of volunteers, he'd get them. There'll be a ruckus over conscription, like John says, but it'll be mostly for show."
Sam looked back and forth from one to the other. Neither of the young Cherokees looked at all happy.
"And the problem is?"
John, as usual, took some time to think about his answer. Buck, as usual, gave it right away.
"Isn't it obvious, Sam? What happens if we _win_ the war? And come out of it at the end—"
John finished the thought: "—with what amounts to an all-black army, in a confederacy that's supposed to be mostly for Indians? That's a recipe for another war. A civil war, this time. In fact, we're already getting closer to it than I like. If you go out and talk to some of the Cherokees in New Kit—ah, Oklahoma—you'll hear some nasty predictions and even calls for action. Especially from some of the richer mixed-bloods who own a lot of slaves. Some Creeks are talking the same way, too."
Sam studied the leaders in the corner of the mess hall. In deference to Pushmataha's age and infirmities, all of them had gathered around the Choctaw chief 's chair.
All the races of the continent were represented there. Mostly Indians, with two white men in the form of Patrick Driscol and Robert Ross. Only one black man. That was Charles Ball, the general in the chiefdom of Arkansas' little army.
But it didn't matter. All Sam had to do was step outside and walk about the fort for a few minutes. Everywhere he went—manning the twelve-pounders, not just holding muskets—he'd see almost nothing but black men. With a sprinkling of whites, constituting less than ten percent of the whole. One or two Indians, at most—if there were any at all.
"The solution's obvious," he said harshly, not caring now if his voice carried. "Pick up the load yourselves, damnation."
Both young Cherokees flushed. "We'll fight, Sam, and you know—"
"That's not what I meant, and _you_ know it. Sure, you'll fight. Nobody ever accused Cherokees—or Creeks, or Choctaws, and sure as Sam Hill not Chickasaws and Seminoles—of being cowards. And so fucking _what?_ "
He jerked his head in the direction of Major Ridge. "You'll fight the way your father—and your uncle, Buck—fights. A great warrior; nobody denies it. Not me, that's for sure, having fought next to him at the Horseshoe Bend and the Mississippi. And it doesn't matter, because the only role he and his men could play at the Horseshoe and the Mississippi was that of auxiliary troops. There's no way—not on their own—they can stand against what's coming."
Now he jerked his head in the direction of Driscol and Ball. "They _can,_ on the other hand. Because whether you like it or not—whether it rubs your Cherokee customs and traditions the wrong way or not—they'll fight the white man's sort of war. And that's what kind of war this is going to be. And you know it. So cut out the tomfoolery. I ask you again. You know the solution. Are you willing to accept it?"
John and Buck looked at each other. "Yeah, all right," said Buck almost immediately.
"My wife can handle the newspaper," John chimed in. "Truth is, she manages it pretty much already, on the business end."
"Well, good."
The Chickasaws wouldn't budge at all. So, finally, Patrick cut the Gordian knot.
"Fine, then. I'll be pulling out of Arkansas Post come spring. Because there's no way to hold it, against the size army the United States will send. So you can winter over in this area, and you can have the Post thereafter, if you think you can hold it. I give it to you. You'd still be smarter to send your women and children—them, at least—over into Oklahoma."
Sam translated. The Chickasaw chiefs swelled.
"We'll hold it! Watch and see if Chickasaws can't!"
Ten minutes later, most of the mess hall was cleared of people. The only ones who remained behind were Driscol, Robert Ross, Sam himself, and the four Cherokee leaders: John Ross and Major Ridge, and Ridge's son and nephew.
"Idiots," Robert Ross stated. "The American army will overrun the Post, and they'll all die. Most of them, anyway. A few might escape at the end."
Driscol shrugged. Every ounce of him the ice-blooded troll, now. "So let 'em die. They're Chickasaws; they won't die easily. They'll bleed the bastards, be sure of that. And once it's over"—the troll's grin, as pure as you could ask for—"it'll be us instead of Henry Clay hollering 'vengeance for Arkansas Post!' "
Driscol turned to Sam, glowering at him. "I've half a mind to forbid you from enlisting in the army altogether. I've got the legal authority to do it, too, at least here in Arkansas."
"Damn you, Patrick, I didn't come all the way—"
"Damn _you,_ Sam Houston! Look, sooner or later wars have to be _ended,_ too. And..." For a moment, the troll almost looked embarrassed. Impossible, of course. "Well, the truth is, I'm a poor one to try to make a settlement. You, on the other hand, are a natural diplomat and could probably manage the trick— _provided_ you weren't actually involved in the fighting and killing."
Before Sam could continue the argument, Robert Ross intervened.
"Patrick, you're being foolish. First, you have to win the war in the first place. Which, as it stands now, you mostly likely won't."
Driscol glared at him. The British major general didn't seem to care in the least.
"Be as stubborn as you want. Here's the truth, Patrick. You've got probably the best army anywhere in the world that could have been created by sergeants. The world's best sergeants, I'll add that into the bargain. But sergeants can't win wars. They can rarely even win battles. What you need is what you don't have. A real officer corps. You don't have real cavalry, either, but you can probably survive that lack. You won't survive without officers. Real ones, and enough of them."
Ross nodded toward Ball. "There are some exceptions, I grant you. Charles here is one of them. I'm not really sure yet about Jones. A very fine soldier, and I'd trust him on any battlefield. But..." He shrugged. "He's still more of a sergeant wearing a colonel's uniform, really, than an actual colonel."
"We've got some youngsters coming up," Driscol grumbled.
"Yes, you do. Some very fine ones, I'm thinking. Young Parker is especially promising. So is McParland—the younger cousin, I mean, not Anthony, who already thinks like an officer. But his injury may keep him out of line command."
He shook his head. "It's not enough, Patrick. Not with only a few months to prepare."
Ross jabbed a finger at Sam. "So, now, here arrives—at your service—one of the most capable and experienced commanding officers on the North American continent, and you propose to refuse him the colors. Are you mad?"
Patrick sighed and looked away. "It's not really that, Robert. Sam is also my best friend."
"Death's always a risk in war," Sam stated. "It doesn't bother me."
He hesitated then. But the rest was a given—he'd known it since the moment he decided to come to Arkansas—so it might as well be said aloud. "My son wouldn't even be an orphan. Not with you and Tiana for his parents. Or even just Tiana, should you fall also in the war."
Patrick shook his head. "That's not what I'm talking about, Sam. What happens when the war is over—and you _survive?_ "
Sam stared at him, groping at the question.
"Sam, face it. You're an American at heart. I'm not, since I was an immigrant here to begin with. But you'll never really be comfortable as an Arkansan. Even as a Confederate. If your wife hadn't been murdered, you'd never once have considered changing your citizenship. You'd have stayed in the United States and done what the man you named your son after will be doing. Opposing the war, surely—but never once crossing the line marked 'allegiance.' "
Sam continued to stare at him. Groping at the answer.
"Tell me I'm wrong."
Sam...couldn't.
"What I thought. That's why, at bottom, I'd much prefer to keep you out of uniform. Whatever else, when the war's over, no one will be able to claim there is any American blood on your own hands. You were just a diplomat."
Robert Ross sighed, now. "Patrick, you _can't._ Neither can Sam, being honest, unless he simply wants to return. The army of Arkansas desperately needs experienced officers. And Houston—my opinion, at least—is possibly the best field-grade officer in North America."
That was enough to break Sam's paralysis. "Be damned to the future, Patrick. Yes, I suppose in a perfect world, someday I'd return to the United States." Harshly: "But in a perfect world my wife wouldn't have been murdered. And I made a vow and I intend to keep it. And that's all there is to the matter."
Driscol said nothing. But Sam could tell from his stance alone that he was conceding the argument.
Time for diplomacy, therefore, and a silver tongue.
"As for the rest," Sam said cheerily, "I am pleased to announce that both John Ridge and Buck Watie are volunteering for the colors. The _Arkansas_ colors, mind you."
The two young Cherokees stepped forward. Without hesitation, either—although both of them avoided the gaze of the two Cherokee chiefs.
Especially that of Major Ridge, who was now glaring at his son and nephew.
"Of course, you'll offer them commissions," Sam continued smoothly. "I've no doubt of it at all."
"Of course he will!" exclaimed Major General Robert Ross. "Splendid young men! From a fine family, and well educated. Perfect officer material."
"Well, sure," said Patrick.
The glare faded from Major Ridge's eyes. Five minutes later, he was even embracing his young kin.
_New Antrim, Arkansas_
FEBRUARY 14, 1825
The thing was there, all right. Just as grotesque as Sam feared it would be.
Shivering a bit—even with his Cherokee blanket, the great stone church was bitterly cold, in mid-February—he stared up at the icon. The newly proclaimed _martyr of the Church._
"She didn't look in the least bit like that—that—"
"Don't be rude, Sam," said Tiana. She gave Marie Laveau a look that Sam couldn't really interpret. Something so profoundly female that it was just beyond his comprehension.
"So we make up another one," Marie said, shrugging. The tall, gorgeous quadroon gave the icon a dismissive glance and an equally dismissive wave of the hand. "It's just some painted wood, you know. Has no holy power in itself. Might have, if they'd let me sprinkle—well, never mind. Father James is a good priest, even if he is just as superstitious as men always are."
She half turned and imperiously summoned forward a short, very dark-skinned black woman who'd been hanging back in the shadows of the cavernous church. "Antoinette here is a magnificent carver. Almost as good with the paints, too. With your guidance"—she waved again at the icon perched on the wall—"she can soon have that replaced with an image that captures the martyred wife to perfection."
Sam opened his mouth, about to proclaim that under no circumstances would he be a party to any such half-papist, half-voudou heathenist nonsense. He was something of a freethinker himself, to be sure, not a dyed-in-the-wool Protestant. Still and all!
But the words never came. They were choked off by the worst of the grief. That he had lost his beloved wife, Sam could eventually accept. What he couldn't accept was the knowledge that his son—only four years old when Maria Hester died—would never really remember his mother.
It was worse than that. Sam knew—had known from the day he made the decision—that he was looking at another of the world's terrible ironies. No matter what happened, little Andy _would_ have a mother, here in Arkansas. It would be Tiana Rogers—Tiana Driscol, now—the woman whom Sam had once thought, from time to time, might be the mother of his own children. And so, in a way, she would be. But only at the price of obliterating any real memory of his son's natural mother, Maria Hester, née Monroe and died Houston.
Now...
If the boy could come, any day, any time, to a revered place, and look up and see...
"All right," he said.
"Good!" proclaimed Marie. "And once Antoinette has made the proper icon, and you pronounce yourself satisfied, I will do the rest. Properly, this time. _Pfah!_ "—that was a very rude gesture—"to what the priest says."
"Just stay out of it, Sam," Tiana quietly counseled.
He decided the counsel was good.
>
**CHAPTER 30**
_New Antrim, Arkansas_
JULY 18, 1825
The first thing Winfield Scott said to Patrick and Sam, after they'd taken seats in a quiet corner of the Wolfe Tone Hotel's huge foyer, was this:
"You understand, gentlemen, I cannot pass on to you any information that might be detrimental to the United States or its armed forces. At the same time, you have my pledge that I will not pass on to General Harrison—or any of his subordinates—any information that is not contained already in the reports Mr. Bryant and I will be sending to the newspapers back home."
It was said a bit stiffly, but pleasantly enough. Understanding and accepting the protocol, Patrick and Sam simply nodded. Then both of them turned their eyes to William Cullen Bryant.
The poet-turned-reporter looked a bit uncomfortable. "Ah...I must insist upon the same conditions. My personal sympathies—well, never mind that. If nothing else, the reports General Scott and I will be filing must be viewed by everyone as uncompromised."
Sam kept a placid expression. Patrick's face twisted into something close to a sneer. Winfield Scott sneered outright.
"Oh, that's ridiculous, Cullen!" he exclaimed. "No matter what we do, Clay and his supporters will accuse us of spouting a pack of lies. So will every newspaper in the administration's camp. They're _already_ saying so, before we've even filed a single report. What's involved here isn't practical; it's simply a matter of our personal honor."
Bryant looked stubborn. "Yes, I know they'll accuse us of lying. But it doesn't matter, Winfield, nor do I agree with you that it's simply a matter of honor. At least half—more like two-thirds, I suspect—of the population of the United States is reserving their judgment. What we report _will_ have an influence—provided it's not tainted with charges of bias, that aren't coming from people who have an obvious bias of their own."
"Gentlemen, please," Sam said smoothly. "It's really not a problem. We have full confidence in your integrity, and you can rest assured we will respect it, on our part."
Winfield Scott's eyes ranged up and down Sam's figure. The gaze was curious and perhaps a bit cold.
"It's an attractive uniform," he said abruptly. "Though I think that fur hat will get very uncomfortable now that we're in midsummer."
Patrick smiled. "Oh, we've got summer headgear, General Scott. But we'll wear the fur hats except when it's unbearable. It's a small thing, but it helps remind the troops that we're expecting a winter campaign."
Scott turned the same curious perhaps-a-bit-cold gaze onto Driscol.
"You don't think it'll all be over within a few months, then."
"Not hardly," Sam stated. "By the first snowfall it'll just be starting."
Scott looked back at him. "Are you... _uncomfortable_ in that uniform, Colonel?" He glanced at the insignia. "Excuse me. Brigadier, I should say."
Sam didn't hesitate. He'd now had almost half a year to think about it, since he'd taken Arkansas citizenship as soon as he'd arrived back in February.
"No, not in the least. That's because I don't really think of it as a change in uniform to begin with. As far as I'm concerned, the uniform I used to wear has been stolen by a swindler and his accomplices. The political principles for which I'm fighting today are no different than they were on the day I stood"—he gestured at Patrick—"when then-Lieutenant Driscol and I stood side by side facing the redcoats in front of the Capitol."
"May I quote you to that effect, General Houston?" Bryant asked. His pad and pen were already in hand.
"Oh, yes," Sam said brightly. "Please do."
An hour later, Patrick offered to give Scott and Bryant a tour of New Antrim's military installations. They accepted, of course, leaving Sam alone in the foyer's corner.
Not more than fifteen seconds after Driscol and the two reporters left the hotel, Salmon Brown took the seat formerly occupied by Winfield Scott.
He began without preliminaries. "We figure they've landed close to six thousand troops at the confluence, almost half of them regulars. The only artillery they've got—so far, anyway—is the First Regiment. Colonel Abram Eustis is in command. They were stationed—"
"In Charleston, South Carolina. Yes, I know." Sam scratched his chin. "Interesting. It would have been a lot easier to bring in the Fourth Artillery under Armistead. What's the infantry?"
"They've got four infantry regiments. The First, the Fifth—which used to be the Fourth, it seems—"
"That's Harrison's old unit," Sam interrupted, "from the Thames campaign. They renamed it after the war, when they consolidated the regiments during the reduction. The Fourth did pretty well in the war with Britain, except for when Hull surrendered his whole army at Detroit. But nobody's ever blamed the regiment for that. Harrison'll be leaning on them heavily, I'm pretty sure. If it was me, I'd be more inclined to rely on the First Regiment. The Battle of the Thames was a long time ago, and who knows what shape the Fourth's in today? The First, on the other hand, has been in Baton Rouge under Colonel Taylor, who's an excellent troop trainer."
Salmon Brown shook his head. "Taylor's no longer in command of the First. Colonel John McNeil is."
Sam's eyebrows rose. "Then where's Taylor?"
"Don't know for sure, Sam." Like John Brown himself, his brother was not given to military formalities. "Word is, though, that he was sent up north. To St. Louis."
Sam's eyes moved to the northern wall of the foyer as if he were trying to look through it. " _St. Louis?_ What...Ah, never mind. Let's deal with what's at hand, for the moment. Which are the other two infantry regiments Harrison's got down there on the confluence? The Seventh is probably one of them. They were stationed not far away."
"That's right. Colonel Matthew Arbuckle's in command. The other one is the Third, with Lieutenant Colonel Enos Cutler in command."
Sam chewed on it for a moment. "So. One regular regiment of artillery; four of infantry. The United States sent four out of their seven regular infantry regiments and a fourth of their artillery. Against which, we've got at the moment—all told—three infantry regiments and an artillery regiment."
He laughed, once, very sarcastically. "They're overconfident. They should have sent six infantry and two artillery regiments. Six infantry, anyway. It's always hard to pry artillery units out of their garrisons, because the local politicians put up such a fuss. Need 'em there to defend the town against—whoever. Barbary pirates, maybe, come all the way across the Atlantic."
"John and me figure they got you outnumbered three to two," Salmon pointed out dispassionately. "That's just in regular troops. Unless you decide to use the three new regiments."
"No, that'd be a mistake. Those recruits aren't ready for a pitched battle on the open field in the Delta, yet. Send them into one, they'd just shatter—and it would take a year to rebuild their self-confidence." He went back to scratching his chin. "And your arithmetic's just about right, although it wouldn't be if we could send all of our regiments down there. But we can't. We need to keep the First in reserve as well as using it to train the new regiments. And we can't risk the whole artillery regiment on the open Delta. We'll need it intact when the war moves up the river valley, which it will. We always knew we couldn't stop the United States from taking the Delta."
Sam shrugged. "On the other hand, our regiments will be stronger than theirs. We can muster at least six hundred men to a regiment, maybe seven. They'll be lucky if they're even half strength. I'm willing to bet not one of those infantry regiments down there has more than five hundred men actually present. At least one of them won't have more than maybe four hundred. Desertion and absence without leave is rampant in the U.S. Army; always has been. Not much of a problem for us. Give it a few months, down there in the Delta—disease will make it worse."
He took a moment, doing the math. "Figure...they'll have two thousand infantry, actually on the field, when we meet. We'll have about one thousand, three hundred. They'll have an advantage in artillery, but that terrain isn't very good even for field artillery. Not anywhere near the river, anyway. If we maneuver properly, they won't be able to move their ordnance up quickly enough. And the one thing I'm sure and certain about is that Arkansas infantry can out-march any infantry the U.S. Army's got. Like I said, they're overconfident."
"They got lots of militia troops, Sam. At least three thousand. About half of them are the Georgia militia. The rest are mostly Louisianans. A few units from Alabama. Nothing yet but a handful from Mississippi."
Sam's sneer was magnificent. At least, he hoped so.
"The Georgia militia." He uttered the phrase the same way he might refer to offal or animal refuse. "Ah, yes. The same heroes who retreated precipitously from the Red Sticks during the Horseshoe campaign—I can remember Old Hickory's choice words at the time—and then ravaged defenseless towns of friendly Creeks and our Cherokee allies. Jackson had choice words about that, too."
The situation seemed worth the effort of a gesture. So, although he didn't chew tobacco, Sam rose, stalked over to a nearby spittoon, and used the device loudly. He didn't miss, either.
After returning to his seat, he pulled the cap off his head and plopped it into his lap. Winfield Scott was right. The blasted thing might look splendid, but it was going to be a pure nuisance in the months ahead.
"One thing we'll do," he continued, "—I've already discussed it with Patrick and Charles, and General Ross agrees—is break those Georgia bastards. If we get any kind of a chance, anyway. Have they started their usual atrocities?"
Salmon Brown disapproved of tobacco entirely. But for a moment he looked as if he wanted to use the spittoon himself. "They fell upon two families of Indians who'd somehow remained near the river. Quapaws, probably, or Caddos, not paying attention to anything except their immediate business. They wouldn't have been Choctaws or Chickasaws."
He didn't volunteer any details, nor was Sam about to ask. Georgia militiamen were notorious for their brutality and had been for decades. Disemboweling pregnant Indian women, after they'd been gang-raped, was pretty typical behavior. Sometimes the fetus would be mutilated also.
They could do so with impunity, because the state of Georgia adamantly refused to discipline them. During the war with Britain, Andrew Jackson had become so furious with the depredations of the Georgia militia that he'd had an entire unit placed under arrest by regular troops. Unfortunately, he'd had no legal choice but to turn them over to the Georgia authorities—whereupon a Georgia jury had promptly declared them innocent of all charges.
"Break them," he muttered. Then, shaking off the moment's anger: "Harrison'll try to use the militia's numbers, but they won't be much use to him. Not against our regulars, at least. Against the Cherokees, Creeks, and Choctaws...It's always hard to tell. Militias are prone to panic. Leadership's always the key. With strong enough leaders, they can usually beat an equal number of Indians. Although..."
Again he shrugged. "We'll just have to see. Part of the reason they can is simply because the Indians don't ever have much in the way of guns—and especially ammunition."
Salmon smiled. In that moment, he looked very much like John Brown's brother. "That won't be no problem here."
Sam smiled back. In addition to terrorizing slave-catchers and serving as a genuinely excellent spy network, over the past months Brown's Raiders had also proved to be superb gunrunners.
It had taken Henry Clay weeks after his inauguration to cajole and bully Congress into declaring war on the Confederacy of the Arkansas. But the very day after his inauguration, he'd made several sweeping decrees prohibiting the sale of weapons or other warmaking goods to the Confederacy.
And what a laugh that had been! All the Northern and border states had immediately raised an outcry over federal tyranny, the trampling of states' rights—Jackson leading the charge in the Senate—and even some of the Southern states had choked on the measures. Virginia's John Randolph, contrarian as always, had immediately turned from being Clay's loudest supporter in the House to his loudest critic.
The only immediate effect had been to double the transfer of arms that Brown's Raiders carried down the rivers. It wasn't until the federal government was finally able to get enough armed steamboats patrolling the Ohio and the Mississippi that the flood was stymied at all. Even then, it was never stopped altogether.
By which time, the proverbial barn door had been locked after the horse escaped. Arkansas was still a bit short of heavy iron plate for armoring the steamboats. But it already had enough cannons and muskets and powder and shot to fight for years.
It hadn't even had to pay for most of it. Clay's campaign and election had stirred the sparks of Northern abolitionism into glowing coals, and Clay's War was fanning them now into roaring flames. A political sentiment that might have taken decades to develop was now growing explosively. There were still not more than a few hundred abolitionists in the United States willing to take up arms themselves, on behalf of "bleeding Arkansas," either as part of Brown's Raiders or the small Lafayette Battalions that were springing up here and there. But thousands of people were willing to donate arms of some sort—and tens of thousands willing to donate money, most of them asking no questions about what the money was spent on.
Salmon was long gone by the time Scott and Bryant returned with Patrick, late in the afternoon. Sam made sure of it. Brown's Raiders were a double-edged sword, and they had to be handled carefully. Mostly unseen, a mysterious presence lurking in the heavily forested rivers and the mountains and the woods, they were something of a terror to the enemy's soldiers. But if Arkansas let them get too visible, the political repercussions were likely to outweigh the military gains. As it was, Clay's partisans—not to mention the entire press of the Deep South—were doing their level best to portray the Mississippi valley as being overrun by murderous fanatic abolitionists.
"Overrun" was absurd, of course. "Fanatics" could be argued. But "murderous" was the plain and simple truth. Patrick had put it quite well. Brown and his men were reminiscent—perhaps frighteningly so—of the Hebrews of the Old Testament. Doing God's will to defend the Promised Land, and not at all concerned as to how many Philistines got chopped to pieces in the process. Those of them who weren't John Brown's brand of Calvinist when they joined the Raiders soon became so.
It was a peculiar variety of that harsh strain of Protestantism, admittedly. John Brown was actually quite tolerant of religious differences and didn't care about theology at all. He'd even accept Catholics in the Raiders, if they were black, and make no attempt to persuade them to abandon popery. But they'd still join every night in the Bible readings. And if Brown's interpretation of the Old Testament was perhaps a little eccentric, it had the great advantage for irregular soldiers of being very clear and straightforward. As Patrick Driscol liked to put it, every other verb was "smite."
Winfield Scott was—had been—undoubtedly the best trainer of troops in the United States Army. He'd proved that during the war with Britain, and after it he'd been placed in charge of developing the army's new manual of drill and field regulations.
So it wasn't surprising that the first thing he said after resuming his seat in the hotel's foyer was "I commend your decision not to send those three new regiments into combat quickly. But..."
He glanced at Patrick and then shook his head. "Dear God, are you really _that_ confident? Patrick—Sam—you _have_ to meet Harrison in the Delta. At least once, even if it's a draw. Even if it's a _defeat,_ when it comes down to it, as long as your forces can be extracted afterward and you bloody him badly. Whereas if you allow him unchallenged possession—"
Abruptly, he closed his mouth. Then swallowed.
"Excuse me, gentlemen. It occurs to me that if I insist you respect my personal integrity, I must place the same condition upon myself. Not my business, after all, to be counseling officers of what is, in fact and leaving sentiment aside, a nation that is at war with my own."
Patrick nodded solemnly. Every bit as solemnly, Sam said, "Yes, of course."
But he was finding it hard not to laugh, and he was quite sure Patrick was waging the same struggle. They'd come to the same conclusion themselves, four months ago. Robert Ross had been particularly adamant about it. Sam remembered the conversation as if it'd happened yesterday.
"We've _got_ to fight them as soon as they cross the river. Not a month later, not a week later—well, perhaps a week, but no longer than it takes to march our forces down there. Speaking of which—"
"Relax, Robert," grunted Driscol. "We've been using a good half of the forced labor—sorry, the shiftless bastards who're shirking the colors—to finish the road to Arkansas Post."
"It'll be ready by the end of May," Charles Ball added, "and there's no way they're coming any sooner than that."
"No chance at all," agreed Houston. Of the four generals and four colonels sitting around the table in the Arkansas Army headquarters, Sam had by far the best sense of American politics. Ross was British, Driscol was a Scots-Irish immigrant, and the other six officers were all black men whose color had made it effectively impossible for them to engage in politics until they settled in Arkansas. "It's now mid-March, so Clay will have just gotten inaugurated. Figure it'll take him till the end of April before he can get Congress to declare war."
"Can he do it in the first place, Sam?" Ross asked. The British general seemed simultaneously curious and bewildered. "I confess I find the inner workings of your American political system well-nigh unfathomable, at times. You've just explained—it was only yesterday—that Clay's election does not reflect any real sentiment for war on the part of most of the United States. So why would Clay be able to get Congress to agree to a declaration of war?"
"Because Congress— _that_ Congress—doesn't have any choice. Most of them are going to be in hot water when the session's over and they return to their home districts, Robert, and they know it. The truth is, if Clay didn't have to get the Senate to go along also, he could probably get a declaration of war in a week. Every one of those congressmen who voted him into the president's house has to stand for reelection in two years. Less than two years, now. What they'll all be hoping is that a short, glorious, and victorious war will wash away the memory of their sins."
"Ah." Robert leaned back in his chair. Then, as his gaze moved across the officers at the table, a smile came to his face. "Well, then. As your more-or-less official military adviser—and one who has often been critical these past months—let me be the first to state that the prospects that the United States will enjoy a short and glorious war in Arkansas are slim to none. They might still achieve victory, of course. But they won't win quickly, and they certainly won't win easily."
Most of the officers returned the cool smile. Charles Ball's was openly sarcastic. "Glorious, is it? They'll find out all 'bout glory, come winter in the Ozarks and Ouachitas."
"But I interrupted you, Sam," said Ross. "Continue, please."
"Figure he'll get his declaration of war by the end of April. Then, it'll take him—the army, I should say—another six weeks to get their units ready to be moved to the confluence."
"Clay could order the preparations to be made prior to a declaration of war, couldn't he?"
Sam waggled his hand back and forth. "Yes...but it won't be as easy as all that. Especially if he leaves Jesup as the quartermaster general. Which he almost has to do, now that Brown and Scott have resigned from the army. He's too short of experienced officers to let Jesup go also."
"You told us—again, just yesterday—that Jesup was a superb quartermaster."
It was Sam's turn to smile coolly. "Indeed he is. But I'll remind you that great skill at doing a job efficiently can just as easily be turned to doing it incredibly _in_ -efficiently—but in such a way that Jesup's bosses can't figure out what he's doing. Somehow, in all the smoke and dust and confusion, everything just seems to take forever."
"Why would—"
Ross broke off and leaned back. "Ah. I see. The war is no more popular in the army than it is in the country at large."
"Well...it's not that simple. Harrison—you can bet on it—will practically jump for joy when he receives Clay's summons to return to the army as a major general. So will Gaines, when he finally realizes his ambition to replace Brown as the head of the army and gets rid of his arch-enemy Winfield Scott. There'll be some other officers, too, especially the ones around Gaines, who'll see the war as a route for quick promotion. But most of the officers...Well, a lot of them are Southern, true enough, but those are mostly from Virginia and the border states. They'll certainly do their duty, but they won't be making any great exertions until Congress declares war and it's a settled issue."
Sam half rose, reached into the middle of the table, and placed his finger on a spot in the big map that covered much of it. Then, shifted it to two others. "I figure they'll muster at Louisville, St. Louis, and Baton Rouge. There's another few weeks. It'll take time to assemble enough riverboats, if nothing else. There's no way Harrison's going to try to move that many troops without using the rivers and water transport. Then Harrison will want to move all his units at once—as best as he can coordinate it—so he doesn't get caught on the Arkansas side of the river with only part of his forces available. That can be done, but it'll also take time."
He leaned back from the table into his chair. "Mid-June, at the very earliest. Personally, I think it'll take him a month longer than that."
Ross nodded. "So. Mid-July. Enough time for one big battle in the Delta—perhaps two, if the engagement is close—before both armies will have to take time to regroup and recuperate. And by the time that's done, we're well into fall. Mostly likely, Harrison will wait until next spring to start his march on New Antrim."
He started to say something but broke off. Sam wasn't sure, but he suspected Ross wanted to reopen the issue of how—or whether—to defend New Antrim. But since that was a contentious issue, and one that didn't need to be settled immediately, the British general returned to the Delta.
"Where in the Delta? I remind you, gentlemen, that I don't much care for the terrain around Arkansas Post. It's not terrible, but the terrain farther upriver would be more in our favor. Their artillery is considerably superior—in weight, at least. The soggier the terrain, the better for us."
"We don't have any choice, Robert," Driscol said. "Yes, we all agree, the Chickasaw chiefs are bedlamites to think they can hold Arkansas Post. But—they're Chickasaws. Just as fierce—and just as dumb—as any Scot highlanders. They'll insist on standing their ground, and..."
He shrugged. "As much as it might please my more cold-blooded instincts, we can't very well just stand by while they get massacred."
Patrick started to say something further, but Sam cut him off. In the few weeks since he'd arrived in Arkansas, he'd inevitably become the principal liaison between the Arkansas Army and the Indian chiefdoms in Oklahoma. And the Choctaws in New Antrim, for that matter.
"It's more complicated than that. The mixed-bloods politically dominate the Chickasaws nowadays, just like they do the Cherokees and the Creeks. With the Chickasaws, that's centered on the Colbert clan. But it's a touchy business, and they can't afford to aggravate the full-bloods too much. Those are still, by a large margin, the majority of the tribe, and their blood is up. If it was just up to the Colberts, I'm sure they'd already be halfway to Oklahoma."
"With their slaves," Patrick growled. "Of which they have a good thousand, for four thousand Chickasaws. A higher percentage than your average white Southern state has, South Carolina aside."
He leaned forward in his own chair and pointed a finger at Sam. "So don't you even think of arguing the matter when the time comes. If we have to save those Chickasaw bastards from their own pigheadedness, they'll pay the price, Sam. Pay it in full. We will strip them of every single one of their slaves. Every—single—one."
A grunt of agreement went up from the six black officers at the table. Well, five of them. Charles Ball just grinned.
But Sam wasn't fooled by the grin. The top-ranked black officer of the army of Arkansas wasn't much given to denouncing the injustices of the world. Or even worrying about them in private, for that matter. But he was, if anything, the most ruthless of the lot.
Sam hesitated for a moment. He didn't care at all about the Chickasaws losing their slaves. The smallest of the Southern tribes, they'd been the one that had adopted slavery more extensively than any of the others. Between that and their own current stupidity, he figured they had it coming. The problem was that any such peremptory action would certainly stir up a lot of antagonism with the other tribes, especially the Cherokees. And relations between Arkansas and the Oklahoma chiefdoms were already tense.
But—
The ancient Romans knew it, and so did Sam. _Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?_ If the Indian tribes in the Oklahoma portion of the Confederacy depended on the black soldiers of Arkansas to protect them from the United States...
They might as well just sign slavery's death warrant and be done with it. Sooner or later, it was bound to happen, and Sam found himself not caring much any longer how it came to pass. He hoped it could be done peacefully. But if it couldn't, he was no more forgiving of slavery in his new country than he'd become of it in his old one. The day he'd crossed the Mississippi and set foot on Arkansas soil was the day he'd left slavery behind forever.
The first thing he'd done had been to free Chester, Dinah, and Sukey. When Chester had then offered to pay back the cost of his purchase—Dinah's and Sukey's, too—Sam had refused the money.
"It's blood money," he said curtly. "My wife's blood. You keep it, Chester, and make a life for yourself."
Dinah and Sukey had started wailing immediately—and it hadn't taken little Andy more than ten seconds to start wailing also, when the boy figured out he might be losing his nursemaids.
"Tarnation, I didn't say you had to leave!" Sam exclaimed, throwing up his hands with exasperation. "I'll hire you. But—I'm warning you!—I haven't got much money left. So the pay's as bad as you could ask for."
"Better'n it was, which was nothing, Mr. Sam," Chester pointed out placidly. "In that case, I believe I'll hire on, too. May as well keep saving up my money."
**CHAPTER 31**
_New Antrim, Arkansas_
JULY 18, 1825
That night, the Women's Council threw a ball for the soldiers of Arkansas. It was specifically intended for the 2nd and 3rd Infantry Regiments and the 3rd Artillery Battalion, who would be marching out of New Antrim on the morrow to meet the invading U.S. Army coming up the Arkansas. But the women weren't being particularly finicky about the matter. As long as a man was wearing a uniform of the Arkansas Army—or that of one of the other chiefdoms, of which there were a handful present—he'd be allowed into the festivities.
Winfield Scott and William Cullen Bryant were granted an exception, being distinguished visitors vouched for by the Laird himself. But the three old black women guarding the entrance to the Wolfe Tone Hotel gave them no friendly looks as they were passed through. Nothing personal, just a matter of principle.
Once they got past the fearsome trio, Scott chuckled. "Amazing to see such devotion to the classics, wouldn't you say, William? Given that—I'd wager a year's income—not one of them can read."
Bryant gave him a quizzical look.
Scott waved his hand expansively. They were now halfway into the great foyer, heading for the still larger central dining area that doubled as the ballroom. The foyer was packed with people, and from the sounds coming through the double doors, the ballroom was more crowded still.
"The three-headed Cerberus at the door—and _Lysistrata_ here, right before your eyes. Upsidedown, of course, the way most things are in Arkansas. I predict a wave of births nine months from now."
Bryant examined a group nearby. Five young soldiers—four of them black, one white—were exchanging repartee with six young black women. The uniforms of the young men were matched by what came very close to uniforms on the part of the girls. "Ballroom gowns," technically, but in addition to being very simply and plainly made, they were all the same color. White, with a bit of blue trim here and there. Bryant was pretty sure they'd been mass-produced for the occasion by one of the same clothing companies that made the uniforms.
Those were private enterprises, technically. But Bryant had already come to realize that for Arkansans—especially black Arkansans—the distinction between private enterprise and government was much fuzzier than it was in the United States. Chief Driscol and his political subordinates did not meddle with the ownership of enterprises, to be sure. But they did expect the businesses to be cooperative with the chiefdom's policies—and they had the Bank of Arkansas to enforce their desires, if nothing else.
True, Driscol and Crowell's bank was also supposed to be private. But in practice it served Arkansas in the capacity of a state bank—even more so, really, than the Second Bank of the United States.
There was a certain irony there. Patrick Driscol, in terms of his political ideology, was as ferocious a democrat as any in the Republican Party in the United States. But the American Party was and had been from its inception heavily influenced by the aristocratic attitudes of men like its founder, Thomas Jefferson—not to mention its current most extreme partisan, John Randolph. For such men, government was always the great threat to their personal liberties, so they emphasized its iniquities. For a man like Driscol, and for those who followed him, the government—so long as it was their own—served as both a shield and a support.
The merits of either view could be argued in the abstract. But in the end, Bryant had concluded it was simply the different perspectives of wealthy slave-owners versus poor freedmen. The methods used by Driscol and his people worked in Arkansas—worked quite well, in fact—because the mostly black businessmen of the chiefdom saw nothing peculiar or unreasonable about them.
Nor, for that matter, did the Cherokees or Creeks. Nor would the newly arrived Choctaws. The southern Indian nations had their own customs and traditions, which harmonized far more closely with Arkansan practice than they ever had with that of Americans. The whole of the Confederacy, as it had emerged since its foundation in 1819, was a hybrid society—and nowhere more so than in Arkansas.
While ruminating, Bryant had continued to observe the group of young people standing by the entrance to the ballroom, waiting for enough space to be cleared to allow them to enter.
Two of the girls were obviously mulattos, or perhaps a quadroon in the case of one. The lighter-skinned of the two was very pretty, as was one of the negresses. All six of the girls, however, shared the general attractiveness of lively young women, regardless of appearance. And all of them had very bright eyes.
So did the young men. Boys, almost. Not one of them—or one of the girls—looked to be older than twenty.
Bryant found it all somewhat unsettling. His upbringing led him to disapprove of Arkansan customs when it came to sex. He wouldn't go so far as to use the term "licentious," himself, but he wouldn't strenuously object to it, either, if used by someone else. When it came to relations between the sexes, Arkansan youth behaved in a manner that was quite scandalous by American standards, especially those of New England. Still worse were the lax and tolerant attitudes of their elders.
But...
Another hybrid, he supposed. The black people who had poured into Arkansas over the past few years had come from shattered communities that had never, even in the best of times, enjoyed much in the way of social cohesion. So, already predisposed toward it anyway, they'd come to adopt and modify many of the cultural traditions of their Cherokee neighbors, if not some of the extreme customs of the Creeks. Just the year before, for instance, the chiefdom had passed a law allowing for matrilineal descent if a family chose to exercise that alternative. Whether they did or not, women were under no restrictions concerning property, and in the event of divorce they were entitled to keep whatever they'd brought into the marriage as well as half of whatever had been acquired since.
Bryant did not really approve, especially since he knew of several New England women who were already expressing an unhealthy interest in Arkansan custom. Giving such unnatural latitude to women, he thought, led to a casual attitude toward fornication. Bastardy, which was a major scandal and disgrace in the United States, was treated in Arkansas as a purely civil matter. The man involved—or boy, often enough—was expected to recognize his paternity and, if nothing else, provide support for the child. If he didn't, in fact, the penalties visited upon him by the woman's male relatives could be extremely harsh.
But that was as far as it went. He could marry her or not as he chose. For the girl, the matter was purely one of personal preference. She had no worries of being cast out by her family or of being unable to care for the child. As with the Cherokees, the bastard would simply be brought up by the clan—extended and interconnected families, in the case of the negroes—which were developing some of the features of outright clans, as if it were perfectly legitimate.
"And will you look at that white fellow!" Scott chuckled softly. "Every bit as lustful as any plantation owner's scion, except he won't bother hiding the matter."
It was true enough. The young white soldier's eyes were just as bright as those of any of his comrades in uniform, and he was paying very close attention to the prettiest of the negresses. She, for her part, seemed to reciprocate his interest. The New England poet and reporter wouldn't be at all surprised to discover that, some nine months hence, the world's population had been increased by another mulatto.
Again, Bryant's lips tightened disapprovingly. But Scott's quip also brought out that other side of his upbringing. The white Arkansas soldier's lust might be as reprehensible as that of any young plantation owner's son in Virginia or South Carolina, but there remained one critical difference.
"I'm afraid I can't see the analogy, General. Where I come from, rape is not considered to be a form of seduction."
Scott's back stiffened. Bryant realized he'd offended him. His general disapproval of the situation had made his comment emerge more harshly than he'd intended. Winfield Scott was a Virginian himself, after all.
Fortunately, after a moment, Scott seemed to relax. Indeed, he smiled sardonically.
"True enough, William. True enough." Scott gave the young white soldier another glance, then shrugged slightly. "And I'm also a soldier," he murmured, "and a few days from now that boy might very well be torn in half by a cannonball. So I can't say I'll fret over the possibility he might leave something of himself behind."
He took Bryant by the elbow. The crush at the door was easing. The group they'd been observing was already passing through the double doors. "Finally. Our chance! Come on, William. I confess to being rather fascinated by the chance to see how Arkansans will manage a formal ball. Mind you, I expect the worst."
So it proved. By the end of the evening, Bryant felt like a lemon on two legs, so sour had he become.
In truth, it was worse than he'd expected. He'd thought to see a primitive, awkward version of what he might have observed in New York, Boston, or Philadelphia. He'd completely forgotten—or hadn't taken into account—that a high percentage of the population of Arkansas had come here from New Orleans.
That sinful city, with its Creole ways—all the worse, for its black Creoles. _La Place des Nègres,_ the semirecognized open market for negroes in northern New Orleans, was notorious for its nightly revels. Its wild dancing to the sound of _bamboulas_ and _banzas_ was now being replicated in New Antrim.
Finally the band started playing more familiar music, and the young revelers assumed the more dignified stances that Bryant associated with American-style dancing. He heaved a small sigh of relief.
Alas.
Not five minutes into the new music, Bryant realized his error. For all the heedless abandon of the previous dances, they'd actually had not much in the way of unsuitable intimate contact. They'd been group dances, basically: congeries and lines of people weaving in and out. Now, however, the theoretically more sedate music allowed young couples to interact quite personally. Which, indeed, they were doing—to a degree that would never have been tolerated in good society in the United States. Not even in Philadelphia or New York, much less Boston.
It was all rather confusing. Part of him was certain he was observing a modern equivalent of Sodom and Gomorrah. In the making, at least, if not quite yet to the biblical standard. Another part, however, was just as certain that the anger of a wrathful deity was centered on other men—the ones even now advancing upon the sinful city from the southeast.
They'd know soon enough, he supposed.
"No."
_"Mama!"_ The wails were simultaneous. Imogene's might have lasted a split second longer.
"No way I letting you two out there. No. Not a chance. End of discussion. And Adaline, too much of your shoulder is showing."
_"It's not fair!"_
**CHAPTER 32**
Callender was inclined to give up. "There's no chance she's going to let them out on the floor, Sheff. May as well look for some other partners."
Sheff was made of sterner stuff. Or maybe it was simply that his interest wasn't exactly the same. For Cal McParland, the twin sisters were very attractive even if much too young. He'd enjoy spending an hour or two with Adaline, sure enough. He didn't even have to guess at that. The weeks he'd spent in the care of Senator Johnson's women before he finally recuperated from his wound had been quite pleasant, in that regard.
But he'd enjoy the company of other girls at the ball, also—with the added incentive that, just possibly, an older girl might have a more concentrated purpose in coming here this evening. They'd be in a battle very soon. Callender was feeling all of his mortality and the ancient urges that went with it.
Yes, Adaline was a very pretty girl, and quite vivacious. She was also only thirteen. Even leaving aside that dragon mother, Cal's interest in her could only go so far. Three or four years from now...
Was three or four years from now. Cal might very well be dead in three or four days.
Sheff understood all that. He felt some of it, himself. But, for him, Imogene Johnson also represented something else.
He didn't care about her age. Well, not much. A pity she wasn't older, of course, but time would pass. That assumed he survived the war, but Sheff didn't see any point in brooding on that. He would or he wouldn't. If he didn't, it was all a moot point.
But what if he _did?_
In the months since he'd accepted the Laird's offer of a commission, Lieutenant Sheffield Parker had come to be consumed by an emotion so exotic that it had taken him some time even to recognize it for what it was.
Ambition.
Not the cramped, stunted, freedman's version of it, either. This was the great, vaulting, white man's variety. The one that saw no limits between a man and what he might achieve, except the capabilities and determination of the man himself.
Sheff had spent weeks thinking about it, in the methodical way he did such things. He was not impulsive, the way his friend Callender often was. Perhaps that was the result of their different upbringing, perhaps simply a difference in personality, most likely both.
So far, he'd come to three conclusions. Two of them firm, the third...firming up quickly.
First, and most obviously, he needed to get an education. A real one, not the haphazard affair that a freedman's son got in an American city like Baltimore.
Fortunately, the means for that were at hand. There were, by now, half a dozen missionary schools in New Antrim and at least three in Fort of 98. Sheff had already begun investigating them when—to his relief—the Laird made the choice unnecessary. Arkansas' chief decreed that the army needed a school of its own, and he set it up within a week.
The teachers were all Christian missionaries, of course. But since the school was secular, most of the education concentrated on the practical business of reading, writing, arithmetic, and the like. That suited Sheffield just fine. He didn't need Bible instruction. That was the one book in the world he already knew. Pretty much by heart, thanks to his uncle.
The school was military as well as secular, because the Laird also decreed that officers who attended it needed to undergo additional instruction as well. He called it an officers college and asked Major General Ross to oversee it.
Ross did more than that, actually. He was the college's principal instructor himself.
Sheff liked Robert Ross, once he got the measure of the man. And Sheff had an admiration for the Laird that came very close to outright hero worship, and one for Charles Ball that wasn't much the slighter.
So, inexorably, he'd come to the second of his conclusions. Ambition needed education as a means, but it also needed a channel to focus itself upon. In Sheff 's case, that would be the army. The only other alternatives were politics and business, and Sheff didn't think he had any particular aptitude for either. Or any real interest, for that matter.
But he thought he had the makings of a good soldier. And, for what it was worth—which was quite a bit—he had the encouragement of both Driscol and Ross to spur him on. General Ball had had complimentary things to say, also, which was something of a minor miracle.
So. Education, and a career. That left...
Sheff had no firm opinion of the customs that he saw emerging around him in Arkansas. He didn't share his uncle Jem's stern disapproval or his mother's ambivalence. That was mostly because he saw the issue as being personally irrelevant.
Others could do what they chose. Sheffield Parker wanted to rise as far as he possibly could in this life. And, looking around him at the men he took for his role models, he saw one characteristic in common.
They were all married. Even Charles Ball, although his uncle would insist that the ceremony that had united him and the notorious Laveau woman was more heathen than Christian.
Patrick Driscol was married. Robert Ross was married. Sam Houston was a widower, now, but he'd been married. Nor was it a race matter. The two outstanding leaders of the Cherokees, John Ross and Major Ridge, were both married. So was Ridge's son John—in his case, to a white girl he'd met while he'd been in the United States pursuing his education.
That was the way ambitious men conducted themselves in the United States also, he knew. Sheff couldn't think of a single man of any prominence in America who wasn't married, unless his wife had died.
So, he'd started turning his mind to that problem. No sooner had he done so than the figure of Imogene Johnson had come into very clear and sharp focus. Almost instantly, she'd gone from being a very attractive but too young girl to being something completely different.
The girl was _important._ A girl to _aim_ for. Her father was a United States senator. She'd been raised in wealth and privilege, even if the privileges had been somewhat constrained by her skin color.
But the latter, from Sheff 's viewpoint, was what made the whole thing thinkable at all. John Ridge had married a white girl, and from what Sheff could determine the marriage seemed to be working out quite well. But Sheff couldn't even contemplate the idea, leaving aside whatever social barriers he might encounter. The idea of a white wife just made him nervous.
Imogene, on the other hand...
"Come on, Sheff." Cal jogged his elbow. "Let's mingle a bit."
Sheff made his decision. You couldn't be an officer unless you were bold, after all.
"No," he said, shaking his head. "But you go ahead if you want to."
With no further ado, he headed for Julia Chinn and her daughters, seated against one of the walls of the great hall. Behind him, he heard Cal mutter something. He wasn't sure, but he thought it had been "Damn hero! You'll get us both killed in action."
Sheff had to consciously restrain himself from adopting a quick march pace. It wasn't easy. By now, that had become his ingrained habit whenever there was something urgent and pressing to be done. He knew that Robert Ross was still critical of many features of the Arkansas Army, especially its small officer corps, but the one thing he would allow was that it was probably the best disciplined and best trained army in existence, when it came to a sergeant's basics. Certainly on this side of the Atlantic.
Imogene spotted him almost immediately. With a new feeling—plain warmth, instead of nervous excitement—Sheff realized that was because she'd been keeping an eye on him since the ball started. He didn't begin to understand why the girl was interested in him. But that she was, he was now quite certain.
In the uncanny way the two had, her twin's sudden interest registered on Adaline within a couple of seconds. Now she, too, was watching him come closer. Or, more likely—he thought he could hear Cal's footsteps behind him—his fellow officer.
After a moment, Adaline's gaze began sliding off and then back again, in the awkward way a thirteen-year-old girl tries to act demure in public.
Imogene didn't bother. Her eyes remained fixed on Sheff the whole time. So did the big smile on her face.
By the time Sheff was within twenty feet, their mother had spotted him also. The expression on her face made it clear that he was about as welcome as a tornado.
Fortitude, fortitude. He kept advancing fearlessly.
"The girls will not be dancing, Lieutenant Parker," Julia Chinn announced as soon as he came up. She stated the sentence with the same firmness a granite boulder might announce it was a real, no-fooling rock.
"Oh, certainly, Miz Julia. They're still a bit young for such carryings-on." He was quite proud of the smooth way he said that. Not a single stammer or waver anywhere in it, even with his hands properly clasped behind his back. "But it occurred to me you might need some refreshments by now, and—"
He nodded toward their chairs. "If you relinquish these seats, you'll never get them back, with this mob."
He said and did all that smoothly, too. With just the right smile: slight, sophisticated, relaxed, at ease. Fortunately, he'd had a better role model for such business over the past few months than he'd ever had in his life. Major General Robert Ross did _everything_ with style, and he made it a point to correct his students' manners if they lapsed—which they often did—into the sergeants' ways of the older officers of the army.
He'd heard the Laird grumble once that Ross seemed determined to produce a pack of young officers who acted for all the world as if they were English gentry. Which he thought absurd, given that all but seven of them were black. But on this subject at least, Sheff was firmly in the British general's camp.
Julia Chinn was staring at him. The hostility was still there in full force—it didn't even lessen when Cal showed up alongside Sheff—but she now seemed a bit startled, also.
"I _am_ thirsty, Mama," Imogene said.
"So am I. And you were just complaining about it yourself," her twin added.
Chinn glanced at the girls. Then, at the long table at the far end of the ballroom where the drinks were being served.
"Well..."
She rallied for an instant. "I'm not having these girls touching any liquor! Certainly not the blackstrap and applejack they're serving over there. No wine, neither."
"Of course not, ma'am." Cal unclasped his hands and motioned toward the table with his right. "But I believe there's some apple cider available, as well as tea. And I can probably rummage up some tea cakes, as well."
"I _am_ a little hungry, Mama," Imogene immediately piped up.
The refrain from Adaline followed as smoothly as if they'd rehearsed it: "So am I. And you were just commenting yourself—"
"Enough!" Chinn nodded abruptly. "Very well, then. Some tea and cakes would be nice. And, ah, thank you, Lieutenant Parker. You as well, Lieutenant McParland."
Once the refreshments were brought to Julia Chinn and her daughters, Sheff didn't try to dawdle in their company for more than a reasonably gracious minute or two. Just an officer and a gentleman, doing his duty. If he'd learned nothing else from Robert Ross over the past few months, he'd learned the difference between a battle and a campaign, and a campaign and a war.
This was a campaign at the very least. He hoped he could avoid an outright war.
"You're still plotting, aren't you?" Cal grumbled after they left.
"Yes."
Sheff kept an eye on them throughout the next hour, maintaining proper position. Once he saw that Julia was finally taking the girls out of the ballroom, he moved to intercept them just outside the hotel. By now, Callender was no longer with him. He'd gotten distracted by the dancing, followed by a friendly argument with another artillery officer. The sort of argument that two young men get into, neither of them knowing much concerning the subject they were debating and both of them absolutely certain they were correct. A complete waste of time, so far as Sheff was concerned.
He emerged out of the shadows just as the Johnson women came off the veranda onto the street.
"Miz Julia. What a surprise. I was just leaving for the barracks myself. I need to be up early tomorrow to see to the arrangements for the march." He gave the twins a courteous nod. "Imogene. Adaline."
Chinn was looking at him suspiciously. So it seemed, at any rate. The light shed by the two lamps on the veranda was poor, and the streets beyond were completely dark except for an occasional lamp in front of a tavern.
Sheff had come prepared for that, of course. He didn't think he was the smartest young fellow around, not by a long shot. But he was possibly the most methodical and systematic.
He held up the oil lamp in his hand, which he hadn't lit yet. "I've a lamp handy. If you'll give me a moment to strike a light, perhaps I could escort you home."
Julia had given up her rooms at the hotel six weeks earlier, foreseeing the prospect of an immense influx of Choctaw refugees. She'd rented rooms in one of New Antrim's few good boardinghouses, just four blocks up the street. The lodgings weren't as spacious as they'd enjoyed at the Wolfe Tone, but the boardinghouse was considerably quieter than the hotel, and the food was better. The black family who owned and operated the boardinghouse and its adjacent tavern were freedmen from New York, who had experience in the trade.
She hesitated for a moment. Quite obviously, torn between the impulse to refuse and the practical reality that walking in the dark down New Antrim's streets—the main street perhaps worst of all—was a chancy business without a lamp. Even in boots, much less good shoes.
"Well...I was thinking of hiring a carriage."
Sheff waited patiently, the very soul of politeness, while Julia worked out the arithmetic herself. True, New Antrim _did_ have public carriages. Quite a few of them, in fact, since that was a trade that was open to black people in the United States. Mostly simple buckboards in the summer and booby huts in the winter—the ungainly sleighs that were sometimes called Boston boobies. An occasional shay or even a Dearborn here and there.
The problem was that the city also had, by now, a population as large as that of any in the United States outside of New York, Philadelphia, Boston, and Baltimore. And if the population was proportionately much poorer, that was mostly due to the absence of much in the way of a wealthy upper crust. The average resident of New Antrim wasn't probably any worse off than the average resident of New York or Philadelphia, certainly not the average immigrant. Most of them could afford a carriage, now and then, for special occasions.
Which tonight most definitely was. In a few days, Arkansas would be fighting for its very existence. The whole city was turning out to cheer on its army, whether they could get into the Wolfe Tone or not.
"Well..."
"Oh, _Mama._ " That was Adaline, not Imogene, expressing simple impatience. Imogene was—probably wisely—keeping her mouth shut.
A strange little smile came to Julia Chinn's face. It seemed so, at least, to Sheff. More sad than anything else. He wasn't sure, though. The lighting on the veranda really wasn't very good.
"Very well, Lieutenant. And thank you for the offer."
On the way to the boardinghouse, Julia began questioning Sheff. Pointed questions concerning his own prospects, to his surprise, rather than the general inquiries he'd expected regarding the upcoming campaign.
"But why the _infantry,_ Lieutenant Parker? It's...Well, I can only go by what my—the senator says—but Dick tells me the infantry is the lowest-regarded of the service branches. At least in the United States Army."
"That's true, ma'am. Engineers are held in the highest esteem in the American army, followed by artillerymen, cavalrymen—and, sure 'nough, infantrymen at the very bottom."
He gave her a smile that he hoped looked confident. Assuming she could see it at all, in the light thrown off by a single lamp. "But the thing is, Miz Julia, the U.S. Army is mostly designed for peacetime. The main thing they do is build dams and the like. And since that sort of civil engineering requires advanced mathematics—the artillery also, to some extent—it draws the best educated men."
He shrugged. "Which I'm not. But the Laird doesn't look at it the same way, in any event. Neither does General Ball. Arkansas is mountain country, from a military point of view."
"Most of the people don't live up there," Adaline objected.
"Yes, I know, Miss Johnson. Most people in Arkansas live in New Antrim, the Fort of 98, or somewhere in the river valley. But that's not where any big war will be decided. Our enemies can probably take the Delta and the lower river valley, if they try hard enough. Maybe even New Antrim. They can't take the Ozarks and the Ouachitas. That's where Arkansas lives and dies—and that's infantry country."
They'd reached the boardinghouse. "Arkansas has the best infantry in the world. That's our opinion, anyway—and we aim to prove it, sometime in the next week or so."
Sheff held the lamp a little higher to allow the women a good view of the short staircase. "It's been a pleasure, ladies."
"Be careful, Sheff!" Imogene blurted out. "Please be careful!"
In the dim lighting, right then, she looked much older than she was. A young woman instead of a girl. Sheff thought his heart might have skipped a beat or two.
Or three. Lord, she was pretty.
"Please be careful," she repeated.
"Imogene, stop carrying on," her mother scolded her. But there wasn't much heat in it.
"Thank you for the courtesy, Lieutenant. We'll be going in now. Please take our best wishes with you. And...Well. Be careful."
A moment later, she was shooing the girls into the boardinghouse. Sheff waited until the door closed, and then went on his way.
As soon as they got into the house, Imogene raced over to the small window that gave a view of the street outside. Within a second she had her nose pressed to the pane.
"Imogene, stop carrying on!"
"He's gonna get hurt, Mama," the girl whispered. "I just know he is. Maybe even kilt."
"It's 'going' to get hurt, not 'gonna.' And if I hear you say 'kilt' again, you'll be the one kilt. And take your face out of the window!"
Imogene's nose didn't budge.
"Oh, Mama, please. I really _like_ Sheff."
Julia sighed. She wasn't really up for this battle. The problem was...
She liked Sheffield Parker herself. Quite a bit, in fact. He seemed like a very levelheaded and reliable young man. Quite well suited to Imogene, actually, who was a bit too high-strung.
But it just wouldn't do. Richard would have conniptions at the idea. And while Julia didn't have the same emotional reaction, she didn't really disagree with him. A person had to be cold-blooded about these things. The best chance Imogene and Adaline would have in this world, with everything else they had against them, would be to marry white men. Not a negro boy whose skin was almost literally as black as coal. It didn't matter what else might be true about him. Not until the afterlife, at any rate.
"He's going to get hurt," Imogene said. "Oh, Mama, I just _know_ it!"
Under the circumstances, Julia decided to settle for the grammatical victory.
**CHAPTER 33**
_The Arkansas River
Three miles downstream from Arkansas Post_
JULY 22, 1825
Gloomily, Major General William Henry Harrison watched men from one of the batteries of the 1st Artillery struggling with a six-pounder whose carriage had gotten stuck in the mud by the riverbank. They were having to manhandle the thing up onto dry land—drier land, rather—because the footing was so bad that trying to use horses for the purpose would have been more trouble than it was worth.
"Wish we had some oxen." That came from Stephen Fleming, one of the young lieutenants who served as an aide to the general.
"And what good would that do?" Harrison almost snarled the words. He pointed a finger at the battery, whose three other guns and two howitzers had finally been dragged clear of the muck on the riverbank. "That's supposed to be _field_ artillery, you—"
He bit off the rest. Then, after a moment to steady his temper, continued in a more even tone. "The whole point of light artillery, Lieutenant Fleming, is to be able to maneuver with it on a battlefield. Maneuver—with oxen! Do you know how fast a team of oxen can pull a cannon? Any cannon, whether it's a four-pounder or a siege gun?"
Abashed, the young lieutenant avoided his commanding general's gaze. "Uh. No, sir. I don't."
"One. Mile. An. Hour." Harrison shifted his glare from the hapless officer to the battery crew still struggling with the six-pounder. "Which is just about what we're managing as it is."
He looked up at the sun to gauge the time, rather than taking the trouble to pull out his watch. It was already at least an hour past noon. No way to begin the assault on Arkansas Post until the morrow, at the earliest. They'd lost _another_ day.
The whole campaign, thus far, seemed to be nothing more than one lost day after another. Silently, Harrison spent the next few seconds cursing Thomas Jesup and the Arkansas Delta in about equal proportions.
That done, he spent considerably more time cursing militiamen in general and the Georgia militia in particular. Their slack habits, near-constant drunkenness, and indiscipline had cost him at least as much in the way of lost days as fouled-up logistics and soggy terrain.
He'd been warned about them by Andrew Jackson himself, when he'd paid the Tennessee senator a visit at the Hermitage in mid-April. Harrison had decided he could afford to take the time to do so, since his supplies were so badly snarled it would be at least two weeks before anything got moving again.
Jackson had been cordial, and the visit had gone smoothly. There was no love lost between the two men, to be sure—never had been—but Jackson was being careful. The running stream of caustic and excoriating comments he was having published in the nation's newspapers concerning "Clay's War" were always aimed entirely at Henry Clay and John Calhoun and the politicians around them. Toward the U.S. Army itself, Jackson's stance was friendly and supportive. In public, at least—and in private as well, if the tenor of Harrison's visit with him was any gauge.
"No militia's worth much, of course, unless you've got time to train them thoroughly—which you usually don't, because their terms of enlistment are so short. But the Georgians are the worst of all."
They'd been standing in the front yard of the Hermitage when Jackson made the comment. He pointed to an aged hound lying in the shade by the wall of the house. "Old Hussar, over there, is no lazier. The difference is, he don't drink, he don't gamble, he don't steal—well, not much; nothing compared to what a Georgian will—he don't rape all the womenfolk he can get his paws on, he don't sass you, he don't argue every blasted thing under the sun"—Jackson took time for a breath—"and he don't run off in a panic if a rooster crows or a cat hisses at him."
"That bad?"
Jackson nodded. "That bad. The worst of it is they're also the biggest braggarts in the country. If you didn't know better, just listening to 'em, you'd swear that their forefathers whupped Alexander the Great and Julius Caesar, and their own martial accomplishments put those to shame."
Jackson barked a sarcastic laugh. "Southron valor, they call it. Bah. I wouldn't trade a whole company of Georgia militia for one Tennessean or two Kentuckians. Well. Three Kentuckians. You always got to subtract one Kentuckian on account of the whiskey consumption."
At the time, Harrison had thought Jackson was exaggerating. The man was notorious for his vindictive temper and his unrelenting feuds, after all. The stories of his clashes with Georgia militiamen during the war with the Creeks were well known.
Now, three months later, Harrison was more inclined to think Jackson had been light-handed in his condemnation. Evenhanded, for sure. The bastards _were_ that bad.
He'd had the unit that committed the outrages on the Quapaws put under arrest as soon as he heard about the incident. But he was sure there'd still be Sam Hill to pay when the newspapers got hold of the story. Which they surely would, as many pestiferous reporters as the army had hanging around it, like flies on a horse.
Harrison took a few more seconds to silently curse newspapers and newspapermen. And the abolitionist maniacs and bedlamites who were egging them on. What had the world come to, when a military campaign against Indians and rebellious negroes had to worry about maintaining a so-called good press?
To be sure, any competent commander would punish soldiers who committed flagrant atrocities, even against savages. But that was simply for the purpose of maintaining discipline. Nobody actually cared that much about the incidents themselves. It wasn't as if any treatment was being visited on the savages that they didn't commit themselves, after all.
But...Harrison did have to concern himself over the business. He'd been given explicit instructions by the president. By the secretary of war, also, but for Calhoun that was obviously just a formality. Henry Clay, on the other hand, had been quite serious about it—and, for once, Harrison didn't think that had been purely a matter of maintaining his political reputation. The newly elected chief executive had seemed genuinely concerned that the conflict with Arkansas be waged according to civilized rules of war.
The idiot. Only a man who'd never gotten any closer to a battlefield than—
Harrison broke off his sour train of thought. The battery had finally gotten the last of the six-pounders clear of the mud. Thank the heavens. Now, maybe they could—
A different young officer was at his elbow, looking fidgety. John Riehl, his name was, if Harrison remembered correctly.
"What is it, Lieutenant?"
"Ah, sir, the commander of the Louisiana militia is complaining that his men aren't being fed properly. Well. The food's all right, I guess, but he's real peeved that the regulars and the Georgia—"
"Tell that fucking—! No. Never mind. I'll tell him myself. Where is he?"
Riehl looked more fidgety than ever. "Ah. Well, that's the other thing. He and the rest of the Louisiana officers went off afterward—after he chewed on me, I mean—to have lunch on the _Chesapeake_ to get some relief from the heat, and...well."
"Don't tell me," Harrison said through gritted teeth.
"Yes, sir. She ran aground on a sandbar."
Lieutenant Riehl cleared his throat. "Again."
_The Arkansas River
Missouri Territory_
JULY 22, 1825
Some four hundred miles to the northwest, Colonel Zachary Taylor wasn't in any better mood. In his case, though, the source of dissatisfaction was far more concentrated. The Missouri militiamen he'd been saddled with weren't really that much of a problem, and he had no complaints at all concerning the terrain. The plains in that part of Missouri Territory that some people were starting to call Kansas were perfectly dry this time of year, even next to the river.
It helped, naturally, that the Arkansas River this far upstream from the Confederacy didn't bear much resemblance to the big river that passed through Fort of 98, New Antrim, and Arkansas Post before it emptied into the Mississippi. The Arkansas was the fourth longest river in North America, with its headwaters in the Rocky Mountains far to the west. But for most of its length—especially in midsummer, after the end of the snowmelt—it was a modest affair.
No, Taylor's foul mood was solely and entirely due to one single man.
Robert Mitchell. Plucked from obscurity as a junior state representative from South Carolina by the secretary of war personally, and foisted on Colonel Taylor's "Army of the Missouri" as a special commissioner to handle relations with the Indian tribes of the Great Plains.
It sometimes seemed to Taylor that John C. Calhoun's madness had no limits. Had the former senator from South Carolina suffered from simple dementia, the dementia itself would have conscribed his sphere of action. But Calhoun's disease was a mania, more than maniacalism as such.
So—Heaven grant mercy—it possessed theories. Notions. Schemes. Delusions of certainty, and convictions that were unshakable in direct proportion to their lack of bearing on reality.
All of which traits were concentrated in the person of Robert Mitchell to a degree that was genuinely breathtaking. As if the man were the distilled essence of lunacy, given two legs to walk about—and, alas, armed with the powers given him by the secretary of war and the president of the United States.
The division of authority was clear and simple. Colonel Zachary Taylor was in command of all U.S. military forces assembled under the somewhat preposterous name of the Army of the Missouri. To put the matter in less grandiose perspective, he commanded the 2nd and 6th Infantry Regiments and two full batteries from the 3rd Artillery—about fourteen hundred men, all told.
Special commissioner Mitchell, however, had been given full authority to treat with any and all Indian tribes west of the Mississippi, saving only those who were part of the Confederacy. He had the power to make whatever treaties and arrangements with said tribes he felt would be to the advantage of the mission of the Army of the Missouri, with no regard whatsoever for what the actual commander of that army might think.
It was sheer madness. The only thing Taylor could figure out was that Calhoun, having—very disapprovingly—seen the way in which, in years past, Sam Houston had transformed a similar special commission into something that bore a definite resemblance to a magic wand, had decided that the magic resided in the title, not the man.
Sam Houston had been adopted by the Cherokees as a teenager, was intimately familiar with their ways and customs, and was fluent in most of the languages of the southern tribes: Cherokee, Choctaw, and the major dialects of the Creeks. He also had a passing knowledge of some of the Plains Indians' tongues.
So, naturally, Calhoun had appointed a man to the post who spoke no Indian languages at all, had never in his life had any real contact with Indians, and was still confused by the fact that the chiefs of the southern tribes wore turbans instead of feather headdresses.
Sam Houston had also had a detailed and in-depth knowledge of the political factions and political issues in dispute among the Indian tribes he dealt with. Whereas it had never occurred to Robert Mitchell—still didn't, so far as Taylor could tell—that Indians had any "politics" to begin with. He seemed to think they behaved according to some mystical inner tribal essence, or something.
But that wasn't surprising, really. Mitchell was one of Calhoun's most fervent—say better, fevered—partisans. So far as he was concerned, the only people in the world who really deserved the term "people" at all were white men. All the other breeds weren't simply lesser ones. They were, in some fundamental sense, not really human to begin with. Semi-intelligent two-legged animals, basically, who managed with great effort and usually ridiculous results to mimic some of the simpler aspects of human society.
To make things worse, the only trait Mitchell shared as special commissioner with his predecessor Sam Houston was that he was scrupulously honest. So there wasn't even the hope—usually a near certainty, with Indian agents—that he'd soon be distracted from his Great Mission by the usual vices of peculation and swindling.
Not that his personal honesty did any good for Indians. Since Mitchell couldn't speak any of the indigenous tongues, he was forced to rely on the existing network of Indian agents to translate for him and to carry out the ensuing decisions and agreements. Which, of course, they did in their usual corrupt manner.
Houston had had to deal with them also, of course. The difference had been that Houston spoke the languages as well as they did, was approximately five times smarter, and had a network of his own in most of the major tribes that was better than that of his subordinates. He'd overseen them the way a great gray wolf oversees foxes. The foxes had been on their very, very best behavior.
But worst of all—worse than anything—was the man's temperament. Mitchell was so infuriatingly _chipper._
"Splendid news, Colonel! The Kiowas have agreed to join our cause!"
With an air of great self-satisfaction, Mitchell plopped himself down onto one of the stools in Taylor's command tent. Taylor was still using the tent for his headquarters until the fort's construction was finished, even though he'd started sleeping in the commander's quarters of it. This was a big fort being erected on the Arkansas, since it would have to serve as the base of operations for the whole campaign. The noise from the construction work during the day was too much to allow for the conduct of business.
Mitchell bestowed a beaming smile on the colonel and his two medical officers, who'd been in the tent discussing the health issues facing the army. They were Surgeon John H. Bendel and Assistant Surgeon Charles Stewart.
Taylor had insisted on having a full medical unit attached to the expedition, all the way down to two ambulances staffed by each of the artillery batteries. He'd known Bendel for years and had specifically requested him. Stewart was a Rhode Islander, new to the service. But in the short time since he'd been with the expedition, Zack had been pleased with his performance.
As he was again, that moment. He'd come to realize that Stewart had a very sly, very dry sense of humor. Quite different from Zack's own, but still one he could appreciate.
The assistant surgeon's eyes widened. "The Kiowas have expressed a deep concern over the prospect that an independent Arkansas might stir unrest among black slaves in the Carolinas? Who would have imagined?"
Taylor managed—barely—to choke down a laugh. Bendel didn't do quite as well.
Mitchell gave Bendel a quick glare, followed by a longer one aimed at his assistant.
"I fail to see the humor, Mr. Stewart. Of course the savages don't care about the maintenance of proper racial order in the United States. What difference does that make? The Kiowas have agreed to join our campaign against the Confederacy, which is all that matters."
There were so many errors in that last sentence that Taylor didn't know where to begin.
So he simply started with the subject. " _Which_ Kiowas, Robert?"
"Ah. Well, two of their chiefs." Mitchell pronounced two names, neither of which meant anything to Zack. That was assuming that the special commissioner was pronouncing them correctly in the first place, which was about as likely as snow in July.
"I'm not actually sure which clans they represent," he admitted.
"Well, that part's easy enough," said Taylor. "They didn't represent any. The Kiowas aren't divided into clans."
"But...they have to be."
Clearly, Zack had contradicted one of Mitchell's certain pieces of Indian lore. He might as well have said the sun rose in the west. There were two things the special commissioner Knew To Be True. Indian chiefs all wore feather headdresses, and Indians all belonged to clans.
"Why?" grunted the surgeon. "We're not divided into clans."
"Leaving aside Scotsmen, Baltimore plug-uglies, and opera enthusiasts," his assistant quipped. The Rhode Islander's derision for Mitchell, however, was momentarily overridden by simple interest.
"Is that indeed the case, Colonel?" he asked. "I confess I labored under the same misapprehension as the special commissioner."
Bendel answered before Taylor could. Like Zachary, he'd spent years serving on the frontier. "They're all called Indians. But the truth is, Charles, that's just a white man's notion. There's as much difference between the southern tribes like the Cherokees and the nomads on the plains as there is between a Frenchman and a Mongol. Their languages aren't remotely similar, their customs are different, their religion is different—native religion, I mean, insofar as the Cherokees still retain it—and the whole way they look at the world is different. There's no love lost between them, either, believe you me."
Taylor chimed in. "The Kiowas don't reckon descent through the mother, the way the southern tribes do. And, no, they don't have clans of any kind. They've got loosely defined ranks, instead. It's a nobility of sorts, except a man can move up or down depending on his accomplishments and behavior. The most important divisions, for men at least, are the six military societies. The Dog Soldiers, they're called."
Unable to resist the temptation, he turned back to Mitchell. "So, special commissioner. Which Dog Soldiers may we rely upon to augment our forces? And were these two 'chiefs' ranked Onde or Odegupa? It'll make a difference."
Mitchell just stared at him.
After a few seconds, Taylor gave up the momentary pleasure. "Never mind."
The special commissioner rose and headed for the entrance to the tent. Once he had the flap pulled aside, he gave Taylor a cheery look over his shoulder. "I don't see what difference it could make, Colonel. Once they receive the guns I promised them, they'll surely rally to our side."
Then he was gone.
"Marvelous," Bendel muttered. "Just what the world needs. Well-armed Kiowas. Do you know, Zack—just yesterday—the lunatic told me he was planning to pass out arms to the Comanches also. In the event they 'rallied to our cause,' of course."
"Oh, God help us."
"Yup. Comanches. Between whom and the Huns the only difference I can see is that the Huns were less barbaric. _Everybody_ hates Comanches. Even more than they do Kiowas."
The assistant surgeon had been looking back and forth between them. "This is a problem, I take it? Forgive my ignorance. I'm from Rhode Island, as you know."
Bendel grunted. "Yeah, Charles, you could call it that. 'A problem.' Our blessed special commissioner has been making promises to provide guns and ammunition for every tribe of nomads anywhere in the area. The worst of it is, he'll likely manage to do it, too, with the backing he's got from Calhoun."
"For which," Taylor growled, "we'll get practically no help in our campaign against the Confederacy. No direct military help, for sure. The Osage and the Kiowas—certainly the Comanches—will raid outlying Cherokee and Creek settlements. Commit their usual depredations and outrages. That will have the effect of infuriating the southern Indians and making them cleave more tightly to the Arkansans—which is exactly the opposite of what we _should_ be doing."
He ran angry fingers through hair caked with dust and sweat. "Best of all, when the war's over—which it will be, sooner or later—the idiot will have scattered guns all over the southern plains, putting them in the hands of the worst tribes I can think of. God damn the fucking bastard. The army'll be putting the pieces back together for years."
"Years and years," the surgeon agreed. "Trust us on this, Charles. A war between the United States and the Confederacy—Cherokees or Arkansas negroes, it really doesn't matter—will be a pretty civilized business." He nodded toward the tent entrance. "Which the wars we'll have with those nomad savages out there for twenty or thirty years afterward will be anything but."
Taylor was tempted to add a verbal damnation onto the heads of Henry Clay and John Calhoun, too. But he was a career officer, so he stifled the impulse. That would, after all, technically be insubordination. Even if the chances that either of the medical officers in the tent would report him were about as likely as snow in August.
_Some miles east of the Arkansas River
Missouri Territory_
JULY 22, 1825
"It's him, all right." Scott Powers lowered his eyeglass. "Now all we gotta do is figure out how to pry him out of there."
Lying next to him in the tall grass, Ray Thompson squinted at the distant bandit camp. "Why can't we just ride in there? You said his cousin was a friend of yours."
"Well...he is, in a manner of speaking. But by now he'll have heard about the reward offer. And, ah..."
"Right. He might suspect your motives."
Powers grinned mirthlessly. "About as likely as a rooster guarding hens, who spots a coyote coming. 'Well, hello there, my old friend the rooster. I just dropped by to pay a social call.' "
Ray went back to studying the bandit camp some hundred yards away. "Why hasn't _he_ turned him in for the reward, do you think?"
Scott shrugged, insofar as a man could manage that gesture while lying prone. "Who knows? Eddie's another Georgian. You know the type. Walk around calling themselves Southrons and challenging their images in a mirror to a duel because of some slight nobody else noticed. Crazy bastards can find a point of honor in anything. There's no way he's going to let us have Andrew Clark without a fight."
Ray sucked his teeth. "You know, Scott, you _could_ have maybe mentioned this little problem a few weeks back. Before we added horse stealing and card cheating to our track record."
"We let the horses go, and we didn't get _caught_ cheating," Powers pointed out, reasonably enough. "And we would have needed the money no matter what. Besides, I got a plan."
"A plan. That'll somehow make it possible for two men—yeah, sure, we're the most dangerous desperadoes on the frontier—to win a gunfight with eleven bandits. _And_ an assassin, even if we know he can't shoot straight. You got a plan."
The same grin came back to Powers's face. "Well, of course _that's_ not the plan. Do I look like an idiot? But why bother? When—"
He rolled a little sideways to clear his left arm and pointed to the southwest. "When just over yonder we got two regiments of the U.S. Army to do the work for us. Even got artillery."
Ray's eyes widened. "You think—"
"Hey, look. Zack Taylor's in command. He'll remember us from when he commanded Cantonment Robertson at Baton Rouge."
"Sure he will," Ray said sourly. "He'll remember we tried to swindle his commissary."
" 'Swindling's' an awful harsh way to put what I prefer to think of as frugal business practices. It's hard to keep meat from getting wormy in the Delta. Even if you try."
"It's the way _he'll_ put it. Taylor's always been unreasonable."
Scott shook his head. "Fine. But it's beside the point. All we have to do is convince him we know where Mrs. Houston's killer is. For that, our perhaps unsavory reputation will work in our favor. 'Thieves falling out,' as they say."
Thompson thought about it for a moment. "You think?"
Scott did that awkward prone shrug again. "Worth a try, the way I see it. It sure beats eleven-to-two odds in a gunfight. Even ten-to-three, figuring that any dang fool who can't hit a man as big as Houston at point-blank range is likely to shoot one of his own."
"Well, that's true."
**CHAPTER 34**
_Arkansas Post_
JULY 23, 1825
By the time Sheff 's 3rd Infantry got close enough to get a good view of Arkansas Post, the fort was already under siege by the United States Army. Had been, in fact, for at least two hours. They'd been able to hear the cannons from miles away.
Now that Sheff could actually see the Post, he realized that the U.S. forces had begun a mass assault. He'd been puzzled by the fact that the Laird had been moving them so slowly this morning until the quick march of the last two miles. The regiments had needed less than four days to complete the march from New Antrim to their camp upriver the night before. They'd been up and ready by five o'clock this morning and could certainly have reached the Post before the siege had barely gotten under way. Instead, the Laird had taken four hours to cover less than ten miles. For Arkansas regiments, except for the last stretch, that amounted to a leisurely promenade.
Now, fitting the sight with what he already knew of their battle plan, he understood. Sheff wondered if he'd ever learn to be that cold-blooded and calculating.
He wasn't sure. But he'd work on it.
It all made sense, of course. Half of the U.S. forces would be tangled up in the assault on the Chickasaws forted up in the Post when the Arkansas regiments got within fighting distance. Harrison would have to match an equal number of regiments against his Confederate opponents until he could call off the assault—which was a lot easier said than done. By delaying the march, Driscol had partially nullified the Americans' numerical advantage.
It was tough on the Chickasaws, of course. But Sheff didn't see where the army of Arkansas was under any obligation whatsoever to sustain worse casualties in order to rescue them from their own pigheadedness. And he suspected the Laird's cold-bloodedness ran still deeper than that. The Chickasaws were notorious all over the frontier for their pugnacity and independence. Sheff was pretty sure the Laird had no problem at all with the idea of bleeding them half dry before letting them into the Confederacy.
Neither did Sheff, come down to it. The Chickasaws were also notorious—among black people, anyway—for being the one southern Indian tribe that had taken to slavery wholeheartedly. More precisely, they'd traditionally used lots of slaves. The only change in the past few decades was that most of their slaves were now black people purchased on the market instead of other Indians captured in battle.
With their ingrained warrior culture, much more akin to that of Plains Indians than tribes like the Cherokees or the Choctaws, Chickasaw men didn't do much work. Except for fighting and hunting, they thought the proper role for a man was to loll about while the women did all the real labor. So it was hardly surprising that Chickasaw women wanted as many slaves as they could get their hands on.
In short, as far as Sheff was concerned, the Chickasaws were the southern Indian equivalent of South Carolina gentry. Sheff was just about as likely to shed tears over their plight as he was to shed them over the difficulties of men like John Calhoun.
Let 'em bleed. Better them than the regiments. The Arkansan soldiers would bleed plenty enough before this day was over.
"Oh, God damn it," muttered General Harrison. "I didn't think they'd get here this soon."
From his vantage point on one of the artillery berms east of Arkansas Post, he'd just gotten a glimpse of the oncoming Arkansas forces. They were using the well-built military road that followed the north bank of the Arkansas, which placed them on the same side of the river as most of his own army.
He indulged himself in one of those moments of silent cursing that seemed thus far inseparable from the Arkansas campaign. Curses aimed, this time, at the American legislatures of times past.
Congress, in its infinite wisdom, had drastically reduced the size of the U.S. Army in 1815 and again in 1820. The reductions had cut infantry and artillery to the bone and had eliminated the cavalry altogether as an independent branch of service. Not even dragoon units had been kept.
The measure had seemed sensible at the time. Cavalry was expensive to maintain, and neither the War of Independence nor the War of 1812 had seen much in the way of cavalry action. The American military tradition was an infantry and artillery tradition, with cavalry as an afterthought.
That might be fine and dandy, fighting in the relatively cramped terrain of the eastern seaboard amidst a largely friendly populace. Here, fighting in the Delta across the Mississippi, in a countryside whose population was implacably hostile, Harrison was feeling a desperate need for strong cavalry forces.
He was _blind,_ damnation! He had no way to determine what might be happening in the surrounding terrain, much farther than his own or his officers' eyes could see with an eyeglass. He'd learned quickly that sending out the small dragoon units he had in his command was pointless. They'd either get killed within five miles or be sent in hasty retreat.
The Delta here in Arkansas was still mostly natural wilderness. The thick woods and underbrush seemed to be crawling with Choctaws. They were quite at home in the terrain and were burning for revenge on the Americans who had just driven them out of Mississippi.
Brown's Raiders were out there, too, somewhere. Harrison's soldiers, especially the militiamen who were usually their target, had developed a real dread of the fanatical abolitionist irregulars.
"Should we call off the assault, sir?" asked Lieutenant Fleming.
Harrison's eyes went back to the fort. He'd spent the first two hours after daybreak bombarding the east wall of Arkansas Post with most of his artillery. Field guns, unfortunately, not one of them bigger than twelve-pounders, and only three of those. Still, they'd done an adequate job of clearing a way in for the infantry, once they got past the outer fortifications. The walls were wooden logs, after all, not stonework. Harrison had been able to move his guns up to what amounted to point-blank range for artillery, since there was no counterbattery fire coming from the Post. Either the Chickasaws didn't know how to use cannons, or—more likely—the Arkansans had taken them out when they'd abandoned the fort. No point leaving the valuable guns in the hands of savages who'd ignore them anyway.
The infantry assault was now in full steam, with both the 3rd and the 5th Infantries engaged. They'd suffered some casualties, but they'd gotten the fascines in place and were on the verge of storming into the fort through the breaches made by the artillery bombardment.
That would be bloody fighting, in there, against Chickasaws. But Harrison was quite confident the two regiments could manage the task. He'd had all of his howitzers raining shells into the Post during the artillery bombardment. Between that and the inevitable tendency of Indian forces to disintegrate into small units under pressure, the Chickasaws would not be able to put up a well-organized and centrally directed defense.
As individual warriors they'd be ferocious enough, as Indians normally were. But it didn't matter. It never had and it never would. Harrison couldn't think of a single battle between coherent and well-led white military forces and Indians in two hundred years that hadn't ended with a victory for the whites and enormous casualties for the Indians. Leaving aside cases of ambush or surprise, or poor leadership, or completely disproportionate numbers—none of which applied here.
"No, Lieutenant. We'll have Arkansas Post within two or three hours. I want that fort. We need a solid base from which to continue the campaign upriver, and it's far better to seize one of the enemy's—especially something this well built—than have to construct one of our own."
He turned to summon the commanders of the 1st and 7th but saw that Colonels McNeil and Arbuckle were already trotting up.
"You've seen them, I assume?" McNeil and Arbuckle had enjoyed a perch on the next berm over.
McNeil simply nodded. Arbuckle, as usual, was verbose.
"Two regiments, I figure, General. They'll be up to strength better than ours, they being so close to home and us so far away. Call it twelve hundred men to our thousand. But John and I can stand them off, long enough"—here came a sneer and a backward wave of the hand—"for that horde of militiamen to finally work up the nerve to join the fight. After that—"
Harrison disliked talkative officers in general, and Arbuckle in particular. "Spare me the obvious, please," he said impatiently. "The militias won't be much good, but there _are_ three thousand of them. If you and Colonel McNeil can fix the enemy in place, Colonel Arbuckle, I can get the militias up soon enough to simply overwhelm the foe. I'll give you artillery support, also, once the 3rd and the 5th are into the fort. As much as I can, at any rate, keeping in mind that I need to hold most of the guns by the river in case the Arkansans bring down their steamboats."
Arbuckle opened his mouth, but Harrison cut him off. "Be about it, gentlemen. Now."
Sheff Parker was attached as a second lieutenant to the leading company of the 3rd Infantry, commanded by Captain Charles Dupont. And the 3rd was leading the march down the road to Arkansas Post, with the 2nd following behind. So he had as good a view as anyone of the evolutions of the American forces as they drew near Arkansas Post. He also had a better angle from which to examine the enemy now, since the military road curved to the north, here, just half a mile from the Post. Most of the American units were no longer out of sight behind the bulk of the fort.
They were...
Reacting pretty much the way the Laird had predicted. Driscol, either because of his own temperament or because of Robert Ross's coaching—both, most likely—was not in the habit of keeping his officers in the dark regarding his plans. He'd thought that Harrison would take the risk of dividing his forces rather than ignoring the Chickasaws altogether and concentrating everything against the Arkansans.
That was foolish. Concepts that had seemed abstract and half unreal in Ross's seminars now took on real life and concrete weight. It wasn't just simply that "division of forces" lowered the numerical strength of a military force. Now that Sheff could see an enemy actually doing it, on a real battlefield, he could fully understand something else Ross had told them.
Battlefields were incipient chaos, just waiting to happen. The noise alone—they were still hundreds of yards from the fighting—was numbing to the mind as well as deafening to the ears. Add to that the clouds of gunsmoke that would soon be obscuring everything, the shrieks and screams of injured and frightened men, the confused and half-heard orders of officers trying to maintain control in a tornado—
"Dividing your forces" meant doubling the demands on your brain and nerves at the same time as you lessened your ability to act. It wasn't _impossible,_ as a tactic. In fact, the Laird was planning to do it himself if the opportunity arose. But it did require, as a supposition, that your army was not only well trained but also had an officer corps that was accustomed to working together and operating independently when needed.
The first might be true of the American regulars, here. They'd find out soon enough. But the second wouldn't be.
Couldn't be. Until a few months ago, these American regiments had been scattered in posts all over the country, and it was a country that filled a good part of a continent. Many of those officers had never worked together, and even the ones who had, hadn't done so since the end of the war with Britain ten years ago.
"Never forget something, gentlemen," Robert Ross had told them in one of the seminars. "When you read accounts of a battle written afterward, it all seems very primitive. The actions of men with, it would seem, not much more in the way of sagacity than a six-year-old child."
He stood, then, and began gesturing. His right hand straight out, forefinger pointing down. "You, remain here."
His left hand, forefinger pointing out. "You, move around to the left—that way—and go over there."
He brought both fingers together. "Then, attack the enemy together."
He dropped his hands and gave them a smile. "Doesn't seem like much, does it? Walk a straight line while rubbing your stomach. Any child can do as much."
There'd been a little titter of a laugh. Ross had shared in the humor for a moment. But the smile faded soon enough.
"Yes, very simple indeed. But you'll be trying to do it under the worst imaginable conditions. Conditions that are literally impossible to describe adequately in mere words. Conditions that will hammer your senses, hammer your body, and certainly destroy bodies around you, if not your own; conditions that will leave your mind grasping for sanity. And all the while, as officers, you'll be expected and required to think and act coherently. Not only for yourself, but as leaders of men. Imagine, if you will, trying to walk a straight line while rubbing your stomach, in the middle of a house on fire and collapsing around you—and making sure all the men following you are doing the same."
The British general resumed his seat at the table. "And now—O ye military geniuses—you propose to divide your forces as well. So you have _twice_ as much to keep track of, and worry about, in the middle of all that."
The laugh that time had been more than a titter.
Ross shrugged. "It can be done, mind you. Even done brilliantly. But it's the sort of thing that requires a good, experienced army and very good officers—and all of them with the mutual confidence that comes from joint experience. To put it another way, it's no trick for amateurs, or even professionals who are no longer or never were in peak condition."
They were five hundred yards off, now. Sheff could see the lead companies of the nearest American regiment trying to form a line across the road, barring the Arkansans from coming to the fort's relief.
They weren't going to manage it in time, he didn't think. Colonel Jones would follow standard Arkansas practice of coming to within three hundred yards of the foe before ordering the regiment into line formation. That was something General Ross had his doubts about, Sheff knew. But it was a tactical issue that the British general wasn't going to argue with a soldier of Driscol's experience if the Laird thought his army could move quickly enough to manage the risky maneuver. The Americans didn't have that much more in the way of cavalry than the Arkansans, after all.
The terrain wasn't bad, once you got off the road. Not soggy at all, this far into summer. There weren't any trees, either, and not much in the way of brush, since the garrison of the Post had kept the terrain clear within half a mile of the fort's walls. But it was still rough enough that not even the American infantry would be in good position when the clash came, much less their artillery.
Sheff could see American artillerymen in the distance, struggling to move some of the cannons from the berms where Harrison had positioned them to bombard the Post. The enemy commander must have separated his artillery units from the infantry regiments they'd normally be attached to, in order to mass all of his guns for the assault on the fort. It had probably seemed like a good idea at the time. But he'd pay the price for it now.
"Quick march!" came Colonel Jones's piercing voice from behind. "Artillery, _up!_ "
Sheff doubled the pace while he and Captain Dupont led the men off the road itself—Dupont to the left, away from the river, Sheff to the right—so the field artillery could pass through the ranks and take up position at the front. Even with their rougher footing, the 3rd was still advancing very rapidly. The Laird always thought like a sergeant. Whatever else his army could or couldn't do, the one thing it could do superbly was _move._
Harrison was dismayed to see how quickly the two Arkansas regiments were coming into position. He'd been warned about that by Colonel Zachary Taylor—both in person, shortly before the colonel had left for Missouri, and in his written reports of the clash with Crittenden.
Harrison had discounted most of it. Taylor had a reputation among some circles in the U.S. officer corps—the ones who were concentrated in Harrison's own army, as it happened—for becoming obsessed with minutiae at the expense of the bigger sweep of things. That made him a superb trainer of garrison troops, granted, as even his longtime antagonists Colonels McNeil and Arbuckle would admit. But they'd also pointed out to Harrison, when he'd discussed Taylor's reports with them, that Zachary Taylor had not much of a reputation as a _fighting_ commander. Certainly nothing compared with Harrison's own demonstrated skills.
Most of that latter, Harrison had also discounted as the inevitable flattery of subordinate officers to their commander. Still, it was all true enough. Taylor's combat record in the war with Britain had been respectable but hardly distinguished. Whereas Harrison had been the victor in two of the major battles of the war, Tippecanoe and the Thames.
Today, watching the celerity and precision with which the Arkansans were maneuvering their infantry and their artillery, Harrison was developing an uneasy feeling. He'd thought of this war as being, in its essence, not much different from the campaigns he'd fought against the British and their Indian allies in the northwestern theater during the War of 1812. A mass of Indians—fundamentally undisciplined and disorganized, even if fired with zeal by Tecumseh—with a small core of British regulars who'd been as much exasperated as helped by the actions of their allies.
But he hadn't yet seen a single Indian since he'd arrived in Arkansas, except for the Chickasaws who'd so foolishly gotten themselves trapped in Arkansas Post. That was, of course, another predictable trait of the savages. No matter how many times the United States proved to them otherwise—you'd think Jackson at the Horseshoe Bend would have settled the matter for all time—Indians still had a near-mystical faith in the value of fortifications.
Which, admittedly, did well enough against militias—just as the forts of settlers were usually good enough to withstand Indian raids. But against trained and disciplined regulars, supported by artillery, not even something as well built as Arkansas Post could be held against a superior force.
That there _were_ Indian warriors out there in the Arkansas countryside around him, Harrison didn't doubt in the least. If nothing else, he had the ambushes encountered by his small mounted reconnaissance parties to prove it to him. But that was how they were fighting—as irregulars, not as an integral part of the Arkansas Army. If the Americans broke and ran, their Choctaw and Cherokee allies would savage the fleeing troops. But so long as Harrison's men stood their ground, it would be a straight-up fight between regular armies.
Very much, in short, the sort of war that Jacob Brown and Winfield Scott had fought farther east on the Niagara front. And Harrison was now pretty sure, watching the oncoming enemy, that beneath Brown's claim of illness when he retired, and Scott's histrionic claims of political principle when he did the same, something much more darkly practical had been lurking.
_They_ didn't think the Arkansas War was going to be anything but a bloodbath. The sort of bloodbath they'd faced willingly at the Chippewa and Lundy's Lane when they'd seen the survival of the nation at stake. But not something they felt the need or desire to go through again, for purposes that were considerably less sublime. As even Harrison—even President Clay, for that matter—would readily admit. Only John C. Calhoun, on the American side, thought this war was being fought over fundamental principles.
"Move it!" Harrison bellowed at the two artillery batteries he'd ordered out of the berms in support of McNeil's and Arbuckle's regiments. "God damn you, move it!"
**CHAPTER 35**
Being one of the few men in the Arkansas forces who was riding a horse, Sam had a fairly good view of what was developing, even though he was positioned behind the 3rd Infantry. So did Winfield Scott and William Cullen Bryant, who were riding next to him.
The reporters occupied a somewhat peculiar position. As noncombatants—and technically enemy civilians—they wouldn't be privy to any of the Arkansas Army's battle plans, of course. On the other hand, given the importance to Arkansas of getting American newspaper coverage that was as favorable as possible, Driscol was bending over backward to accommodate them.
Naturally, he'd handed Houston the job of keeping the two reporters happy but ignorant.
Sam couldn't honestly complain, though. He wouldn't have much to do in this battle until and unless what they'd taken to calling the Georgia Run became possible. Colonel H. Spencer Street, the commander of the 2nd Arkansas Infantry, didn't need Sam to tell him how to handle the regiment in a battle.
If the Georgia Run took shape, things would be different. Meaning no disrespect to Colonel Street, but Driscol wanted a more experienced commander in charge in the event that a complex maneuver became possible. At that point, of course, keeping Winfield Scott and Cullen Bryant happy but ignorant would be a moot point. What was about to transpire would be blindingly obvious to anyone.
Street had been perfectly happy with the arrangement. Spence, as everyone called him except in the field, was an unassuming officer. One of Charles Ball's naval gunners from the Capitol, later the Iron Battalion at New Orleans, he'd steadily worked his way up the ranks in the Arkansas Army because he was immensely reliable and cool under fire. But he wasn't the man to pull off something that required flair and initiative, and he knew it himself.
The formalities were being respected, anyway. Street would remain in command of the 2nd. Houston would officially assume overall command of a maneuver that involved one of the batteries from the 3rd Battalion as well as Spencer's regiment. An impromptu miniature brigade, as it were.
He glanced over to make sure the battery was maintaining position. When he did so, his eyes met those of John Ridge. The newly commissioned Cherokee lieutenant had been assigned to the artillery, as had his cousin. Major Ridge had insisted on that. The way the Cherokee chief looked at it, if his oldest son and his nephew were bound and determined to put on the green uniform of Arkansas, then they'd damn well learn to use the big guns while they were at it.
Sam didn't blame him. Who could know what the future might hold? One of the biggest military weaknesses of any Indian tribe was that they had no artillery at all and wouldn't really know how to use it if they did. Soon enough, whatever else, that would no longer be true of the Cherokees.
John Ridge gave Houston a nod. Then he went back to paying attention to what Callender McParland was explaining to him. For this battle, as new as he was, John's rank was a formality. In practice, he'd be watching McParland to see how it was done. His cousin Buck Watie had an identical position with Lieutenant Thomas Talley, who commanded the other battery that had come with the expedition.
John would be the one who got all the excitement if the Georgia Run happened. His cousin Buck would be stuck with the unglamorous—and deadly brutal—business of slugging it out alongside the 3rd Arkansas against the American regulars.
Sam didn't envy them. That was likely to get purely murderous before it was over.
Movement in the distance caught his eye. Looking up, he saw what appeared to be three people scuttling through one of the little groves that dotted the plain. He thought they were black but couldn't really be certain. Perhaps sixty or seventy yards behind them, he could see two more people. Definitely Chickasaws, from the costumes. One of them appeared to be a woman; the other, an old man brandishing some sort of weapon. Sam couldn't tell what it was, exactly, this far away. Perhaps a spear, perhaps an antique long-barreled musket.
"What's that all about?" asked Winfield Scott. The former American general was squinting at the same distant little drama.
"At a guess, some of the Chickasaw slaves just ran off, figuring they could make it to New Antrim before the Chickasaw warriors in the Post could get on their trail." Sam nodded toward the woods. "Most of the Chickasaws are out there in hiding. The noncombatants, that is. They've got, at most, seven hundred warriors. That's enough in itself to pack the Post fuller of men than it should be. No room for women and children, so the Chickasaws sent them off into the woods. That means women and old men, watching over maybe a thousand slaves."
Sam gave his head a slight backward jerk. "With freedom and sanctuary not much more than a hundred miles upstream. You can figure out what the odds are that they'll be able to keep things under control."
"Ah." The general gave Houston a quizzical look. "You don't seem much disturbed by the prospect that your Chickasaw allies will soon be very disgruntled allies."
"Frankly, who cares?" Sam's face felt tight. "Everybody in Arkansas, including me, is sick and tired of Chickasaws. For over a hundred years, the bastards have picked fights with everybody and made slaves out of anybody they could. So fuck 'em if they're finally between the hammer and the anvil."
"Yes, I understand. But I'd think it would cause you a great deal of trouble. With the rest of the Confederacy, I mean."
Sam shrugged. "Yes and no. The Cherokees and Creeks are none too fond of Chickasaws, either. The Choctaws purely hate them, even if they do speak the same language. Besides, the Choctaws have never engaged much in slavery, not even their mixed-bloods. The Cherokees and Creeks have, but most of the ones who own slaves"—again, that little backward jerk of his head—"are way back there in Oklahoma. The Cherokees and Creeks who live in Arkansas—we figure there's now about six thousand and two thousand, respectively—don't own slaves to begin with. Besides, by now I think it's an open question which way they'd swing in the event of a real clash."
He looked over at Scott and Bryant. "Finally, there are all the pure-blood traditionalists. They don't own hardly any slaves, not even the Chickasaw ones. So what do they care if some rich mixed-bloods have to start working for a living?"
He started to add a comment about people like The Bowl and Chief Aktoka but broke off when he heard Colonel Jones's shout from ahead.
_"Quick march! Artillery UP!"_
"And here we go," he said.
Fifty yards behind Houston and the other battery, Lieutenant Buck Watie was feeling nervous. More nervous than he'd ever felt in his life.
He wasn't scared, exactly. But that was simply because fear seemed completely inadequate to the situation. Buck knew the battle plan—he'd been one of the officers at the back of the mess hall when Driscol and Ball explained it—and he knew what the role of his battery would be.
It wasn't complicated, to put it mildly. They'd stand with the 3rd Infantry and go toe-to-toe with the American regulars, while Houston and the 2nd Infantry—and his cousin's battery, talk about having all the luck!—kept an eye out for the Georgia Run.
A man got scared when he contemplated taking a risk. This wasn't a risk. This was that crazy white man's way of fighting a battle. Plant yourself—standing straight up, right out in the open!—in plain sight of your enemy, and then swap gunfire until one or the other of you quit. And the reason you quit was because you'd been bled dry.
Madness was what it was. There was no skill involved, no way a man could use his reflexes and cunning. The "risk" was no risk at all, but a certainty. Such-and-such percentage would die; such-and-such percentage would be mortally wounded; such-and-such percentage would survive but would be permanently maimed or disfigured; such-and-such percentage would suffer temporary wounds; and such-and-such percentage would somehow, miraculously, emerge entirely unscathed.
The only question was which one of those percentages you wound up falling into. Which was determined by nothing but pure, blind, stupid luck.
"You white people are insane," he muttered to his fellow lieutenant and instructor, Thomas Talley.
Belatedly, he remembered. Talley's answering grin was all the brighter because the white teeth stood out so sharply against skin the color of old coffee.
"You right," Talley said. "We is definitely crazy. On the other hand, we ain't color-blind."
Harrison was up on his horse by now. Everyone—except the Arkansans—was moving too slowly.
Much too slowly. He had the sick sensation a man gets while watching a carriage sliding off a bridge. Every moment of the disaster as clear as crystal, and seeming to take forever. But with no way to move fast enough to stop it from happening.
"God _damn_ it! Get that artillery over there!"
The familiar clap of six-pounders jerked his eyes to the front. He saw two companies of the 1st Infantry staggering back from the enemy. McNeil _still_ hadn't gotten them into a proper line, and already the Arkansan artillery had hammered his lead companies with a volley. Canister, from the looks of it.
Thankfully, Arbuckle's regiment was almost in position. Within a few minutes, that leading Arkansas regiment would be matched up against two American ones, and good ones at that. Coming around the fort the way they were, the Arkansans were hemmed in, too. Even with understrength regiments, McNeil and Arbuckle would have that leading enemy regiment outnumbered, without enough room for the Arkansans to bring their other regiment into play very quickly or easily.
It'd be brutal, though, if the Arkansans stood their ground. Brutal as all hell.
"Fire!" Sheff yelled, echoing Captain Dupont's command. He did his best to emulate that high-pitched, piercing tone that both Driscol and Ball had mastered on battlefields. With his natural tenor voice, he thought he did pretty well, too.
Not that anyone—including him—could possibly tell. The whole regiment fired the volley on cue, as if six hundred and fifty men had one single brain and one single trigger finger. Anyone's voice, in that incredible white-clouded thunderclap, vanished without a trace.
His ears were ringing, worse than he remembered them doing at the earlier battle at Arkansas Post with Crittenden's army. That was probably because he, now an officer, was standing slightly in front of the line of muskets instead of being part of them. A bit off to the side, of course, but that didn't compensate.
His brain felt muzzy, too. He shook his head to clear it, squinting at the gunsmoke that obscured everything. They should be—
The answering clap came. Not as loud, perhaps oddly.
Sheff sensed a bullet whizzing by his head. Felt something—another bullet, maybe—that seemed to tug briefly at the uniform which was slightly bunched at his waist.
Other than that, he was quite uninjured. Glancing behind, he could see that at least three of his men had been hit. But looking farther down the line, he was relieved to still see his uncle Jem, now a sergeant in the company, urging the men forward as if he were Samuel himself.
These were no border adventurers they were fighting today. These were U.S. regulars. Wretched men, as a rule, taken one at a time. Recent immigrants, at least half of them, mostly from Ireland or Germany. Drunkards, gamblers, blasphemers; life's failures; flotsam and jetsam.
It didn't matter. They were professional soldiers, trained to do a job and able and willing to do it. Crittenden's men had crumpled under a single mighty blow. These wouldn't. The regulars would stand and fight.
The regiment had reloaded.
"Ten paces forward!" Sheff led them into the gunsmoke.
Houston was standing in the stirrups, straining to get as good a view as possible.
No use. The damn fort was in the way! Somehow, in all the planning, nobody had thought of that. He could see the two regiments of U.S. regulars that Harrison had brought out to meet the 3rd Arkansas on the road. And it was obvious just from the gunfire and the shouting and shrieking that the other two enemy regiments had broken into the Post and were fighting its Chickasaw defenders.
But he had no idea at all where the Georgia and Louisiana militias might be found. They were hidden from his view, somewhere behind that hulking fort.
Driscol and Ball trotted up.
Patrick had a wry smile on his face. "Never fails, does it, lad? Scheme all you want; the god of battles will roll his dice."
Ball was scowling. "Very funny. Patrick, we _can't_ risk it without knowing. If they're too close to the regulars, we'll get torn to pieces. Especially after Harrison pulls the rest of the regulars out of the Post. Which"—Ball pointed at the fighting on the road ahead—"he will. He'll have to."
Sam was already studying that fight and had come to the same conclusion. The U.S. regulars were accounting adequately for themselves, true. No signs of panic, at least not yet. But they'd been caught off guard by the speed of the Arkansas attack, and they still hadn't recovered. Even as Sam watched, another perfectly timed Arkansas musket volley went off, followed by an almost equally perfect volley of canister from the six-pounders McParland had positioned slightly to the north.
Whichever that American regiment was, up in the front, it was being hammered very badly indeed. Its companion regiment had been partly shielded from the Arkansas muskets, but McParland was concentrating his guns on them.
The solution was obvious. It wasn't as if Sam really had any other duties, anyway, unless the Georgia Run was on.
"I'll reconnoiter," he said. He spurred his horse into a trot, not bothering to wait for permission from the two generals. He and Patrick and Charles went a long way back together, now. Ten years and counting. After a point, formalities were just silly.
Harrison's horse was shot out from under him by a volley from the six-pounders. Caught by surprise—he'd been looking at the Post, trying to gauge from the outside how well that fight was going—he couldn't free one of his feet from the stirrups in time.
Fortunately—great good fortune—the horse's knee crumpled under the carcass. Just enough to leave him room to kick his boot free.
He'd lost his sword. Where—
Lieutenant Fleming came up with it. "Here, sir." The youngster even had the presence of mind to proffer it hilt first. "Are you all right?"
He was helping Harrison to his feet as he asked the question.
"Never mind that!" Harrison pointed at the Post. "Get in there and find out— _God damn you, sir!_ "
Fleming was staring at him empty-eyed. Empty-headed, too. A heavy three-ounce canister ball had caught him right in the forehead. Most of his brains were lying on the ground behind him.
Slowly, he toppled over onto his back. Falling as stiffly as a pine tree.
"Oh, _damn_ you, sir," Harrison repeated. He looked for another aide.
He found Lieutenant Riehl a minute or so later. But John Riehl was equally useless. Another one of those deadly Arkansas canister balls had taken his left hand off at the wrist. Riehl was holding it in his right hand, just staring down at it. Completely oblivious, it seemed, to the blood pouring out of his left stump.
"Bind yourself up, you idiot," Harrison snarled. "Or you'll bleed to death."
Riehl turned puzzled blue eyes up to him. "My hand seems to be no longer attached, sir. What should I do?"
"Bind yourself—Ah! Here!"
Quickly—he was the commanding general, he had no business being distracted like this!—Harrison tore a strip of cloth from Riehl's uniform. That was easy because the uniform was torn. There was another wound somewhere on the lieutenant's ribs. Probably nothing serious, though, judging from the small flow of blood.
He tied the tourniquet roughly, crudely, and most of all quickly.
"Report to the rear, Lieutenant."
"Sir, my hand seems to be no longer attached. What should—"
"Shut up!" Harrison looked for another aide. He'd started the battle with three of them.
Sheff was a little amazed that he still hadn't been hurt at all. Not _very_ amazed, but that was because only a tiny part of his brain was paying attention to the problem.
Which was just as well, since that part of his brain was gibbering like a monkey.
But he simply ignored it. Victory was all that mattered. The regiment was all that mattered.
He looked over and saw that Captain Dupont was lying on the ground. He was groaning and moving a little, so he was still alive. But from the looks of the wound—what Sheff could see of it, which was a coatee blood-soaked above the waist—he might very well not be in a few days. He'd probably been gut-shot.
That put Sheff in command of the company. He raised his sword and went at the enemy.
"Ten paces forward!"
By the time Harrison found a soldier who could substitute for the missing aide and sent him into the Post and got back to the front lines, he knew that the situation was rapidly becoming critical. Outnumbered or not—their other regiment still unused or not—that initial hammering blow from the leading Arkansas regiment had caught his own men off guard and off balance.
They'd been kept off balance ever since. The Arkansans were relentless, despite the heavy casualties they were suffering themselves. They kept coming forward, steadily—ten paces, fire; ten paces, fire—no matter how hard the 1st and 7th fought. By now, the battle was centered just north of the Post, with the Arkansas right and the American left anchored on the fort's wall.
McNeil was dead. He'd been killed just before Harrison returned, a musket ball right in the heart. Arbuckle was still in the fray. He'd even finally managed—God damn him, as well—to get his regiment into line.
McNeil had been succeeded in command of the 3rd by Captain Jeremy Baisden. The major who should have succeeded him had been killed in the same volley that slew the regiment's commander.
Just as well. Harrison had thought the major was an incompetent. Baisden seemed to know what he was about.
"You'll have to hold them, Captain!" Harrison shouted. "Until I can get the 3rd and the 4th out of the Post!"
Baisden waved his hand. Then, calmly, went back to his business.
Good man. Best of all, he didn't talk much. If Harrison had to lose one of his experienced regimental commanders, it was really a pity the Arkansans hadn't killed Arbuckle instead of McNeil.
He needed another horse. Unfortunately, he seemed to have lost all of his young aides. One dead, one maimed—and God only knew where that useless Lieutenant Whatever-His-Name-Was had gotten off to.
The terrain in the Delta was generally flat, but there were small rises here and there. Sam found one of them within a couple of hundred yards that—finally—gave him a decent view of the entire battlefield.
He spotted the militia units right away. They were hugging the river, at least a third of a mile from the regulars, who were now completely tangled up with the 1st Arkansas or the Chickasaws in the Post itself.
"Oh, what a beautiful sight."
There was no need to stand on ceremony. Rising again in the stirrups, he could easily see Patrick and Charles. That meant they could see him also, if they were watching.
He laughed. As if they wouldn't be!
He swept off his hat—a proper one, not that blasted fur cap—and waved it around.
"Come and get it, boys! Dinner's on the table!"
**CHAPTER 36**
The first companies of the 3rd and 4th Regiments had just come out of Arkansas Post and were moving into position in support of the 1st and 7th when Harrison spotted the second Arkansas regiment coming forward.
He'd been expecting that, of course, and already had a battery of six-pounders in position to guard his right flank. He'd take casualties from the coming assault, but for once the Arkansans had been sluggish.
"Get up there!" he shouted at the two captains leading the companies emerging from the Post. He stood up in the stirrups and pointed to the battery. "Take position! They'll be coming at our flank!"
It didn't occur to him until after they passed by that he hadn't inquired as to conditions within the Post itself.
Stupid. He might have a sally from the Chickasaws to deal with soon.
But, thankfully, it seemed there wasn't much chance of that. The battle was finally turning his way.
"No, sir." Captain James Franks took off his hat and wiped his brow with a uniform sleeve. That only replaced the sweat there with a smear of blood, because that whole side of his uniform seemed blood-soaked.
None of it his, apparently, judging from his demeanor.
"No, sir," he repeated. "There isn't much left, except a lot of bodies. I will say there wasn't no quit in them. There's probably two or three hundred live Chickasaws hiding out somewhere in there—the place is a maze—but they won't be doing no sorties."
There was a grim satisfaction in the words. The regulars had known of the Chickasaw reputation, and nothing that had happened in the two hours since the beginning of the assault on Arkansas Post had done anything to modify it. "No, sir. There won't be no Chickasaws coming out of there until we let them out."
Captain Franks was probably right. But Harrison had had to leave much of the artillery behind at the river, anyway, to guard against the steamboats that had finally appeared upstream. The same batteries could have two or three guns moved around to bear on the main entrance to the Post, as well as the breaches. If the Chickasaws did come out, they'd be met with a storm of canister.
Yes, indeed. The battle was finally—
"General Harrison!" He looked up, squinting to see who had called him. One of Arbuckle's officers. Captain...Whatever.
"General Harrison!" The captain was pointing to the north.
Harrison looked.
"What in the name of..."
The Arkansas maneuver made no sense at all. That second regiment was staying much too far to the north, as if it were simply evading Harrison's army. What was the point of that?
And they weren't even developing into a line. Instead, they were—
What _were_ they doing?
"Oh, how splendid!" Winfield Scott exclaimed. He was standing up in his stirrups. As tall as he was, that gave him quite a good view of whatever the 2nd Arkansas was up to.
Bryant was considerably shorter, to begin with. Perhaps more to the point, the incredible din of the nearby battlefield had left his mind feeling numb.
"What are you talking about, Winfield?"
Scott pointed. He was genuinely excited, Cullen could tell. Not even making the slightest attempt to hide it under a patina of calm professionalism.
"I've never seen one! Read about them, of course."
The infernal cacophony had also left Cullen more than a bit irritable.
"What _are_ you talking about?"
"It's a French column, Cullen! Right out of the Revolution and the early days of Napoleon. Don't think one's been used in a battle in years."
He might as well have been gibbering in Greek.
Well, no. Turkish. William Cullen Bryant's grasp of the Greek language was actually rather good.
He'd never heard it spoken. But he could read it, of course.
"Oh, dear God," Harrison whispered.
The bizarre formation finally made sense. That second Arkansas regiment was ignoring the American regulars altogether. They were sweeping around Harrison's regiments, keeping just out of musket range, and going for the militiamen.
Who were—
"God damn those bastards!"
Who were almost half a mile downriver. Figuring they'd be completely useless in a close assault, Harrison had left them to their own devices while he handled the attack on Arkansas Post. Then, in the press of affairs and the chaos after the Arkansans launched their attack, he'd simply forgotten about them altogether, even though he'd originally intended to use them to reinforce the 1st and 7th. He'd simply been overwhelmed by too much happening, too soon.
Naturally, the wretches hadn't come to his aid on their own. If he knew militia officers, they'd have been dancing back and forth trying to decide what to do and spending most of their time quarreling with each other.
Well, they weren't going to have to decide anything, any longer. The Arkansans were going to make the decision for them.
For one tiny moment, before he suppressed it, Harrison found himself hoping the Arkansas maneuver would succeed.
At least it meant he could concentrate on fighting that one Arkansas regiment that had been gutting his army from the first moment of the battle. If nothing else, _they_ would go under.
Sheff was still unhurt, but by now he was in command of the regiment's entire right wing. Anchored against the side of the Post the way they were, those companies had been unable to maneuver at all. Nor did they have any artillery support, as the left wing did. It had just been simple, straightforward, volley against volley. Moving closer and closer, until the distance separating them from the nearest American regiment was less than thirty yards.
_"Reload!"_
He wasn't ordering any further advance. Not unless the left wing came forward and Colonel Jones ordered a bayonet charge. Which Sheff didn't think was likely at all. The Arkansan and American lines had met at an angle. By the Post, not more than thirty yards separated them, but the distance between the Arkansan left and the American right was still almost a hundred yards. That enabled the Arkansan artillery battery positioned on the far left to bring what almost amounted to enfilade fire on their opponents.
Sheff didn't know whether it had happened by pure accident or by conscious design on the colonel's part. Either way, in effect, he'd used the companies on his right—Sheff 's among them—to pin the Americans while the companies of his left and the artillery pounded them into pieces. Much the way a barroom brawler might use one hand to hold his opponent while he flailed away with the other fist.
It wouldn't have worked if the Americans had had guns of their own to bring counterbattery fire. But they didn't. Sheff was guessing, but he was pretty sure the American guns were still stuck in front of the Post or by the river, guarding against a sally by the riverboats upstream.
As battle tactics went, this one was dandy. But it was rough on Sheff 's people.
_"Fire!"_
The musket volleys were starting to get a bit ragged, as many casualties as they'd suffered. But not as ragged as the ones coming in return. Sheff was impressed that the one American regiment was still fighting at all. Tough bastards, for sure.
Sam joined up with Colonel Street after the 2nd Regiment had bypassed the U.S. forces tangled up at the Post and were heading straight for the militias. He'd bided his time, since he wanted to gauge how well the militia commanders would handle the sudden crisis they'd found themselves in.
Just about as he'd expected. Officers running back and forth, shouting orders most of which countermanded one another. The men, for their part, doing whatever struck their fancy.
Some of them had formed a line. Not much of a line, but a line. They'd even gotten two of their four-pounders into something that approximated a decent position.
Approximated, no better. The guns weren't far enough forward. That was typical of militia artillery. It took experience and confidence for artillery crews to be willing to position themselves far enough in advance of their infantry to do much good. Militias could almost never manage the thing properly.
Sam couldn't really blame them. Not only did the gun crews need to be confident that they had the skill to pull their guns back into the shelter of the infantry in time; also they needed to be confident that the infantry would be there to shelter them in the first place. More often than not, militia infantry would break, leaving the artillerymen they were supposed to protect high and dry. Ten years earlier, some of the men who were now serving in the Arkansas artillery had been cursing militiamen who'd left them exposed to the mercy of British regulars at the Battle of Bladenburg.
Another chunk of militiamen—several chunks, rather, and big ones—were obviously making preparations for a hasty retreat. "Rout," to call things by their right name.
Those were the complete idiots. They _had_ to be idiots. There were two thousand Choctaw warriors out there, and at least two hundred men from Brown's Raiders. They'd been lying low, as instructed. But if the militiamen broke and ran, they'd be like rabbits at the mercy of predators.
Most of the militiamen, about half, were doing neither. They were just milling around in confusion, not sure what to do.
"It ain't complicated, boys," Sam murmured, kicking his horse into motion to rejoin the 2nd. "You can stand and die, or you can run and die. But either way, lots of you are gonna die today."
Sheff finally received his first wound. A small one, just a bullet that grazed his ribs. Barely even a flesh wound, and he was too busy anyway to take the time to bind it up. The uniform would be a ruin by the end of the day, but he didn't care anymore. He could barely remember the thrill of that first day he'd put it on.
Truth be told, he was a little relieved. His luck had been too good. Maybe this would even things out a bit.
Then, not fifteen seconds later, he saw a musket ball catch his uncle Jem in the throat and rip his neck open. Jem had been standing just in front of the line and slightly off to the side. He collapsed to the ground like a pile of rags, dropping his musket.
Sheff stared at him blankly for a moment. But there was nothing he could do.
Nothing at all. With that wound, his uncle would bleed out long before any aid could get to him—and no possible medical treatment could prevent his death, anyway.
Ruthlessly, Sheff stifled the spike of anguish that started to come. Only victory mattered. Only the regiment mattered.
"Reload!" he shouted, channeling the grief into his voice, bringing it to just the right high pitch for a battlefield. More like a shriek than a shout. It was the first time he'd ever really done it right—and he knew he'd never forget how to do it again, no matter how many battles he fought.
Harrison was just plain astonished. That first Arkansas regiment was _still_ fighting. Staggering some, to be sure, especially the companies on their right. The volleys no longer came with their earlier crispness. But they were still recognizable volleys—and at the range the fight was now taking place by the wall of the Post, aiming was completely meaningless. That was sheer murder.
He'd never seen anything like it. The closest comparison had been that last charge on Tecumseh at the Thames. But that had been quick, however desperately fought. This was like fighting some sort of mindless machine. Black ants, wearing uniforms and armed with muskets.
"God damn you!" he shrieked at the Arkansans.
There came no response except another volley.
Sam found the final moments of the 2nd Arkansas' charge on the militias rather fascinating. The regiments had been trained in the tactic, and Driscol had predicted its success—so had Robert Ross—but Sam had wondered.
The term "column" was a misnomer, he now realized, applied to the fighting formation of the French armies of the Revolution. This bore no resemblance at all to a long, slender line of men marching down a road.
It was more like a sledgehammer. Or perhaps a very blunt spear. Fifty men across, at the front, firing as they came, with the rest of the regiment in close support. The formation relied on speed and impact, more like a cavalry charge than anything else Sam could think of.
Watching it in action, he could now understand why the formation had eventually been abandoned. Very well trained and disciplined professional armies, formed into lines, could bring too much fire to bear on the front of the column. Hundreds of men against fifty.
But that presupposed the sort of professional armies trained and led by generals like the Duke of Wellington, or Napoleon and his marshals. Against levies raised by French noblemen—or Georgia and Louisiana gentry—the French column did very splendidly indeed.
It struck the Georgians like a hammer. An axe, rather, since the bayonets came down at the final moment.
The Georgians, not the Louisianans. The militia units had very distinctive and different colors, naturally, and the Arkansans knew what to look for. Any Louisianan or Alabaman who got in their way would get dealt with, to be sure. But on this day, July the 23rd of the Year of Our Lord 1825, Sam Houston and the 2nd Arkansas were looking to kill Georgians.
Another hybrid. Black people didn't actually have any reason to detest Georgians more than any other Southern militia. But the Cherokees and Creeks hated them with a passion. And, whatever strains might exist in the Confederacy between its different races and peoples, there was also much that united them. Some of those black men in uniform now had Cherokee or Creek wives or paramours—either way, usually with children in the bargain—and all of them had Cherokee and Creek neighbors.
The Georgians had made the mistake of coming to Arkansas to commit their depredations. The nearest friendly jury was four hundred miles away as the crow flies—and not one of them had a pair of wings.
The Louisianans peeled away before the blow came and were already racing in a panic downriver. The Alabamans put up a bit of a fight before—very wisely—sidling out of the way and scrambling upriver for the shelter of the regulars.
The 2nd Arkansas let the Louisianans go. The Choctaws and Brown's men would deal with them. They wanted the Georgians.
David Ross was half fascinated and half appalled. Officially attached as an observer to the battery that was part of Houston's column, he had an excellent view of the fighting that erupted on the north bank of the Arkansas when the 2nd Regiment struck the Georgians. He didn't even have any specific duties to keep his attention elsewhere. His status in the Arkansas Army was still unsettled, since no one was ready to accept him as a straightforward soldier except David himself. His father and the Laird—and Sam Houston, apparently—all felt the possible diplomatic complications were still too uncertain, should word get out that the son of a British major general was actively serving against the United States.
In practice, everyone understood that being an "observer" also meant that he would be getting informal training as an artillery officer. But since no one really wanted him getting underfoot in the furious fire that the battery was leveling on the Georgians, he spent most of his time just watching.
That was another massacre taking place down there on the riverbank. But the most fascinating—and appalling—thing about it was the lack of any apparent murderous frenzy. David thought he finally understood, deep in his bones, why the Laird had ordered that massacre of Crittenden's army the previous year. Many of the soldiers in the 2nd were veterans of that affair, and they'd imparted the lessons and the attitudes to the newer recruits. What resulted was an implacable determination to kill as many men as the regiment possibly could, today, coupled with the confidence that they _could._
So, it was like watching craftsmen at their trade, even if the trade itself was murder. Almost all the fury and frenzy was being displayed by the Georgians. Many of them had fled, or were trying to, but many of them were fighting back. But it did them precious little good. They fought as individuals, for the most part, and poorly trained ones at that. Whereas the Arkansans they faced were maintaining order and discipline even now that the bayonets had been brought into play.
So was the artillery. The captain in command had positioned them on the left flank of the 2nd Regiment. To the fore, when the engagement began; now, perhaps two hundred yards to the rear. But they were firing balls, not canister, and two hundred yards for that shot amounted to point-blank range. The artillerymen were being careful to keep their fire well away from the regiment, but with the huge numbers of Georgians—some Louisianans, too—who were spilling down the Arkansas, that left them with plenty of targets.
The ground was even dry enough, this far into summer, to allow for the grazing shots that good artillery always tried for when facing infantry. The guns were trained low, so that the balls would strike the ground some yards before the enemy and then carom into their ranks somewhere around waist-high. A six-pound ball fired in such a manner could easily kill or maim half a dozen men or more if it caught them in a clump.
There were a lot of clumps down there: first of men, then of offal.
After a while, David looked away. For the first time in his now twenty years of life, he wondered if he really wanted to become a soldier.
He thought so, still. But he understood, better, something about his father that had never been very clear to him before. Robert Ross had always seemed strangely reticent about his exploits, given that there were enough of them to cover an entire wall at their home back in Rostrevor with the mementos.
David thought he understood now. The reticence was because many of those memories were not ones his father wished to dwell upon. The mementos were there to remind him—perhaps reassure him—that there had been a reason for them in the first place. A full-grown and very mature man's way of doing something that little boys often did. Make sure there was a light of some sort shining into a room at night, so that when a sudden nightmare-inspired waking came, the monsters in the room could be seen for what they were.
Sam didn't participate in the slaughter. Not directly, at least. But that was only because he felt duty bound to make sure the situation as a whole didn't get out of control. There was always the possibility that Harrison might send some of the regulars down to the aid of the Georgian militia.
Not much of a possibility, granted. Sam couldn't see enough of the fighting that was still raging around Arkansas Post to get a clear sense of the battle's progress. But for his purposes, all that mattered was the sound of it. There was no way, in the face of such ferocious and continuing gunfire, that Harrison was going to make the mistake of dividing his forces again.
Too bad for the Georgians. They were on their own. Sam had never met William Henry Harrison, but if the professional soldier from Ohio had a different attitude toward militias than almost any other professional officer Sam had ever met, he was certainly hiding it well that day.
So, Sam Houston didn't kill a single Georgian himself. But he watched with pitiless eyes. So far as he was concerned, each and every one of those men shot or bayoneted or clubbed to death on the banks of the Arkansas River was no different from the Georgian who'd murdered his wife. The whole state could burn in hell for all he cared.
And hundreds of them were killed before it was all over. The slaughter at the river wasn't as bad as the slaughter of Crittenden's army the year before, but that was only because the Georgians weren't trapped in a peninsula. A much higher percentage of them managed to make their escape into the countryside.
Where two thousand Choctaw warriors waited, with a very recent and burning grudge to settle. And if the Choctaw grudge was more with Mississippians or Louisianans, they'd settle for Georgians.
Brown's men were out there, too, and they didn't care at all about the fine distinctions between states. John Brown had agreed to abide by Chief Driscol's rules when it came to fighting U.S. regulars. But the militias weren't included in those prohibitions. So far as Brown and his people were concerned, those militiamen—be they from Georgia or Louisiana or Mississippi or Alabama, it made no difference—had come to Arkansas for the express purpose of reenslaving its citizens.
That made them damned in the eyes of the Lord, pure and simple, and as plain to see as the nose in front of your face. It was right there in the Bible. There was no good reason not to assist the Lord in his righteous work of sending them on their way to eternal hellfire. Indeed, it was a duty, and Brown was not the man to shirk his duty.
"All right, Charles, pull them out," Patrick Driscol commanded.
General Ball nodded and sent the order. He'd been waiting for the order for some time. Only a man as troll-blooded as the Laird could have held off that long. By now, the 3rd Arkansas was a bleeding ruin.
But not broken. Not even close. They'd gone head-to-head for as long as it took against two—and then units from three, and then four—regiments of U.S. regulars. Moving forward or standing their ground, never retreating an inch.
For years, the Iron Battalion had served the black people of Arkansas as a magic talisman. There hadn't actually been much reality to it for some time, since the Iron Battalion as such no longer existed. They'd had to break it up in order to use its men as the core around which to build other and larger units.
After today, it wouldn't matter at all. After today, Arkansas had the 3rd Infantry, which stood its ground, and the 2nd, which broke the state of Georgia.
And hadn't used the 1st Infantry at all—which might actually be the best.
This war might go on for years. Probably would, in fact. But it was already won where it mattered. Arkansans would have the stomach to fight forever, after Second Arkansas Post. The Americans had been dragged into this war by politicians and had no stomach for it at all outside of some of the Southern states.
From here on, it was just a matter of how long it would take the enemy to figure it out.
For all Sheff knew, he was now the commanding officer of the regiment. The companies on its right wing, for sure. Colonel Jones was gone. Wounded, not dead, although it might have been a mortal wound. He'd looked awful bad. Sheff didn't know what had happened to the major or any of the captains of the left wing. The captains of the three companies by the Post had all been killed or wounded by now. The gunsmoke was so thick you couldn't see much in any direction, except once in a while when a gust of wind cleared the air for a bit.
Sheff hadn't spent any time wondering about the colonel's fate. He'd stopped wondering about anyone's fate, including his own. He'd reached some sort of pure state of mind, he decided. Slogans that he'd once recited to himself as if they were prayers had become simple realities.
Only victory mattered. Only the regiment mattered. They'd fight until the last man shot the last bullet, and then they'd lower the bayonets.
"Pull out! Pull out!"
Sheff recognized General Ball's voice, but the words didn't quite register. He ordered another volley. Couldn't hardly call it a volley any longer—but the same could be said for what was coming the other way.
"Listen to me, Lieutenant Parker! Pull the men _out!_ Move!"
That registered. Groggily—his brain really wasn't working too well anymore—Sheff tried to remember the orders for calling a retreat.
No. Fighting withdrawal. Big difference.
He got the first two orders out. Properly, he was pretty sure. But while he was still groping for the next evolution, a musket ball took him square in the shoulder and spun him around. Around, and down, taking all consciousness with it.
The last thing he remembered was a great sense of relief. He'd done his duty and could finally rest.
**CHAPTER 37**
For a moment, Harrison was tempted to order a pursuit. The Arkansas regiment his men had been fighting while the other one went after the militias was pulling back now. It was a fighting withdrawal, not a retreat—certainly not a rout. But that evolution was extremely difficult to manage properly, especially by a regiment that had lost so many of its officers. If he brought enough pressure to bear, they might finally crack.
Easier said than done, though, in the real world where battles are actually fought.
His own 1st and 7th Regiments—the 1st, especially, which had taken the brunt of the fighting right by the Post—were too badly battered for the purpose. They'd stood their ground like good regulars, but they were in no shape to launch a pursuit. He'd have to use the 3rd and 5th.
Mostly the 3rd. Lieutenant Colonel Cutler had come out of the Post and, by now, had his regiment pretty well organized. But Harrison still hadn't seen the commanding officer of the 5th. He might be dead; he might be injured; he might just be too confused to understand what he was supposed to do. Whatever the reason, the 5th as such was still incoherent. What Harrison had available, right now, were maybe half of its companies for a pursuit. By the time the others finished their withdrawal from the Post and got into position, it would be too late.
Much too late. The gunsmoke had finally cleared away, most of it, and Harrison could see that the top commanders of the Arkansans had taken direct charge of the withdrawal, substituting themselves for the regiment's fallen officers. That regiment was pulling back in good order, even managing to take most of their wounded with them.
The moment passed. There was no chance, he realized. Especially since—
Belatedly, he remembered. Hurriedly, he trotted his horse to the rear, to one of the artillery berms where he could get a better view of what was happening downriver. What was that _other_ Arkansas regiment up to? For all he knew, he might soon be fending them off.
On the way, he took the time to level silent curses on himself. He'd lost control of this battle from the very beginning, and he knew it. His plans had been too complex. He'd taken the risk of dividing his forces without enough of a staff and regimental officers who'd worked together and shaken themselves down. He hadn't even been able to remember the names of some of his aides, for the love of God.
So, now, here he was—forced to serve as his own scout because his staff had disintegrated around him and his regimental commanders were completely preoccupied with their own affairs.
He also cursed Henry Clay and John Calhoun. They'd lied to him, damn them. Reassured him that he'd simply be facing savages—better still, negroes who didn't even have the martial customs of the savages. And William Henry Harrison—he went back to cursing himself—had been too ambitious, too eager, to question their assurances.
He reached the berm. To his immense relief, he saw that the second Arkansas regiment had broken off their own pursuit of the militias and were returning. But they were back in that peculiar thick column formation and were angling away from the battlefield. Clearly enough, they'd be coming back the same way they went, avoiding his own forces until they could reunite with their fellow regiment.
In short, the battle was over—unless Harrison insisted on trying to continue it. Which he was no more inclined to do than he was to order a charge on the moon. He slumped in the saddle. He was exhausted. Mentally, even more than physically.
He'd suffered a wound somewhere along the way, too, he suddenly realized. The whole left side of his torso ached. Looking, he couldn't see any blood. But when he pulled up his tunic, he saw a huge bruise beginning to form over his rib cage. The ribs themselves weren't broken, obviously. With a rib flail, he'd have been completely incapacitated. But some of them might well be cracked. He'd find out by the morrow.
God only knew what had happened. He had no memory at all of having any injury inflicted on him. But it could easily happen in such a ferociously fought and confused battle—confusing for him, at any rate. The most likely cause was a glancing blow from a cannonball, although to the best of Harrison's recollection the enemy had used canister throughout the engagement.
His mind in something of a daze, he watched the second Arkansas regiment moving across the Delta to the northwest. That part of his brain that was still working professionally—which was no small part, given his experience—recognized that Taylor's report had been quite accurate in this respect also. The Arkansans could march like nobody's business. He'd remember that in the future.
Somebody was talking to him. Looking down, he saw that the commander of the 5th Regiment was there, standing atop the berm and looking up at him. Harrison groped for the man's name and couldn't find it.
"—do about the Chickasaws, General?"
Harrison had to grope for the meaning of the question, too. Fortunately, the colonel's pointing finger gave him the clue. Aided, a moment later, by the sound of six-pounders going off.
Looking in the direction the 5th's commander was pointing, Harrison could see dozens of Chickasaw warriors—hundreds, within a minute—pouring out of the Post. Some through the main entrance, some through the two breaches in the east wall, some by simply taking the risk of climbing over the walls and jumping.
The batteries by the river were firing on them, as Harrison had instructed them to do. Quite a few of the fleeing Chickasaws were being killed before they could get out of range. They were racing upriver as fast as they could run.
No danger there, in short—which, at the moment, was all Harrison cared about.
"Just let them go, Colonel."
_Peters._ That was his name. Lieutenant Colonel Curtis Peters.
"Just let them go, Colonel Peters," he repeated. He forced up the energy for a compliment. "You battered them badly, I take it. Very well done."
Peters nodded. "I estimate we killed four hundred hostiles in there, General. Well. Three hundred, for sure. At no great cost to ourselves. We were able to trap most of them in the mess hall and had four guns to bring to bear. By the time we sent in the infantry, they were too rattled to put up much of a resistance. But we couldn't catch all of them, of course."
Even as he spoke, Harrison could see soldiers from the 1st Artillery hauling a six-pounder out of the Post. No easy task, that, without horses. But they couldn't possibly have used horses to bring guns into a fort under assault. No matter how well trained, the beasts would panic.
"Just let the Chickasaws go," he said again. "For the moment, we need to concentrate on preparing a defense against the possibility of counterattack by the Arkansans. We've taken Arkansas Post"—he said that with more energy, it being the sole consolation of the day—"so let's make sure we keep it."
He pointed up the river. "I'd appreciate it if you'd bring your regiment into position just west of the fort, Colonel Peters. And tell Colonel Eustis to move his batteries up with you. Those Arkansas steamboats are still up there, and it'll be days—weeks, possibly—before we can finally get armored steamboats of our own."
The Arkansans hadn't ever used their steamboats. Harrison was pretty sure they'd never intended to. Simply having them there had immobilized a good portion of his artillery, the arm in which he had the clearest advantage over his enemy.
Grudgingly—he was not a man for which doing so came easily—Harrison admitted that his opponent had fought a considerably smarter battle than he had.
He didn't say it out loud, of course. "Be about it, please, Colonel."
Peters left. Harrison took a few more seconds to rally his spirits and energy.
He'd need them. The battle was over, but there was still the butcher's bill to be examined. There were dead and wounded all over the area. Small piles of them near the Post—and from what he could tell at the distance, considerably bigger piles of militiamen by the riverbank downstream.
Leaving aside the Chickasaws in the Post—that'd be a charnel house in there; his mind shied away from it for the time being—most of the dead and wounded outside the fort were Americans. But there were a fair number of Arkansans, too. The enemy had done their best to carry off their wounded, but there was only so much that could ever be done in that respect on a still-contested field of battle.
He'd better see to that immediately, he realized. The regulars would be furious at the casualties they'd suffered. Furious enough that they might not only ignore their training but ignore practical reality as well.
Of all the things Clay and Calhoun had lied to him about, the biggest lie had been the first.
A _short_ war. Blithering nonsense. The fact that both the president and the secretary of war had probably believed it themselves didn't make it any less of a lie. It just made them stupid liars.
Short wars can wash themselves away, along with their sins. Long wars require rules. Best to establish them immediately.
Fortunately, if nothing else, the regulars had been too exhausted to do anything but rest. Whatever other energy they'd had available had been devoted entirely to assisting their own injured. Their officers hadn't even started picking through the enemy soldiers lying about, separating the wounded from the dead.
So, Harrison found himself one of the first three American officers to start moving through the enemy bodies. He was accompanied by a captain and a lieutenant from the heavily battered 1st. The captain's name he remembered, thankfully. Trevin Matlock. The lieutenant's was unknown to him.
The Arkansans were lying in piles, too, especially near the Post. The first body Harrison came across was that of a young officer, lying slightly before his men. A second lieutenant. Arkansans used the same insignia as the American army, even if the uniforms were green instead of blue.
A very young lieutenant, he could now see, once he looked more closely. As always—being from Ohio, he was not very familiar with negroes—the racial differences had momentarily obscured lesser matters like age. Not even twenty, he thought. It was hard for him to be certain, however, since the lieutenant's skin was very dark and his features completely African. Very young, though, he was sure of that.
The Arkansas officer wasn't moving, but his chest was rising and falling. A very bad injury to the shoulder, that was. The sort of bone-shattering wound that usually rendered a man unconscious, even if it wasn't directly fatal. Especially if he was already exhausted, which Harrison had no doubt he had been. The battle had been ferocious as a whole, but nowhere more so than here right by the walls of the Post, where the two armies had met at point-blank range.
"Him," the lieutenant from the 1st Regiment said tonelessly. "Hadn't been for him, I think we could have beaten them here, at the end. I can't believe he's still alive, the bastard. I've half a mind—"
"Shut up," Captain Matlock said, just as tonelessly. "He did his job and did it well. And there's an end to it."
"Indeed," Harrison said firmly. "A most gallant foe."
He gave the lieutenant—very young himself—a look that was more harsh than he felt but as harsh as it needed to be.
"We shall be following the rules of war here, Lieutenant. I trust that's understood? And if I discover there have been any violations, I shall have the man—or officer—immediately court-martialed. Do I make myself clear?"
The lieutenant seemed suitably abashed. "Yes, sir. Ah. Sorry."
"I understand, Lieutenant," Harrison said in a milder tone. "Emotions always run high after a battle. But indulging yourself in them is a bad mistake, leaving aside any moral concerns. Do keep in mind that the day might come when you—or me, or Captain Matlock—might find ourselves in the very same position. You'll be thankful then that you weren't an idiot now."
That assumed, of course, that the enemy followed the rules of war also. Harrison was by no means sure of that, yet. Who knew what negroes would do? They'd been pure savages, by all accounts, in the small uprisings in North America and the huge one in Hispaniola.
But rebellions and uprisings were almost invariably savage, no matter the color of the men involved. The negroes he was fighting here were part of a regular army, established by a government that the United States had diplomatically recognized. Still did, for that matter, even if war had been declared. Harrison could only hope that they'd conduct themselves like white men.
Whether they did or not, however, he would. Civilized behavior and custom was determined by its own imperatives, not petty bargaining with breeds outside the law.
"See to it, Captain Matlock, if you would. I want any wounded Arkansans gathered where they can be given medical attention, whenever our surgeons can be freed from tending our own. There's probably a suitable area somewhere in the Post."
He started to move off but paused. "And place a guard over them, Captain. Reliable men, with a steady sergeant in command."
"Yes, sir."
An hour later, after he was sure the regular units were steady and Harrison was satisfied that they could repel any Arkansas counterattack, he went downriver to see how the militias were doing. He took Captain Matlock with him, since he no longer had any of the three lieutenants he'd had for aides at the beginning of the battle. Fleming was dead; Riehl would be retired from the service with that wound, assuming he survived; and he'd finally found the missing third lieutenant.
The lieutenant had been brought before him, rather. The youngster's wits were quite gone. He'd been found by soldiers from the 7th huddled in a ball some fifty yards from the lines, weeping uncontrollably. Harrison had a vague recollection of sending the boy with orders to Colonel Arbuckle. He'd never gotten there, apparently, his nerve having completely broken along the way.
Harrison still couldn't remember his name, and the young lieutenant had been too incoherent to provide it himself. No matter. He'd learn it when the time came to put together a court-martial. Which there had to be, given the circumstances.
Harrison would be demanding the death penalty, which was called for in cases of pusillanimity in the face of the enemy. He didn't care for the idea, but he simply had no choice. The nameless lieutenant who'd die in a few weeks at the end of a rope would be just one more casualty that could be properly laid at the feet of Clay and Calhoun, from Harrison's viewpoint. In a short war, sins could be forgiven as well as washed away. In a long war, they couldn't. Simple as that.
The commanders of the militias—those few of them Harrison could find, most having run away with their men—were livid.
But Harrison's energy was coming back, and he was no mild-mannered man himself.
_"Shut. Up."_ He glared at the loudest of the Georgian officers. Insofar as the term "officer" wasn't a bad joke to begin with. The man was actually a Georgia state representative whose military experience was entirely limited, so far as Harrison knew, to having gotten himself appointed a "colonel" in the expedition for the sake of garnering some more votes. Georgians seemed to grow militia colonels with the same profligacy that they grew cotton. And they were just about as fluffy.
"You had three thousand men," he rasped, "to face not more than seven hundred. And you tell me the fault was _mine?_ You ran like rabbits from a force a quarter the size of your own because _I_ didn't give you proper support? Be damned to you, sir!"
Angrily, he pointed back at the Post. "My _regulars_ defeated the forces we faced while taking the fort as well as preventing the enemy steamboats from coming into play."
That was taking some liberties, perhaps, but it was technically correct. By ancient custom, the army that held the field at the end of a battle was considered the victor, even if the term was more a formality than anything else. The fact that the Arkansans hadn't been "defeated," so much as simply choosing to withdraw from the field, could be ignored.
The American forces at Lundy's Lane had done the same, after all, whereupon the British had claimed to be the winners of the battle. In the world where professional soldiers dealt with each other, it simply didn't matter. Protocol would be respected, even if both sides knew perfectly well that, in all important respects, the battle had been something quite different.
The Georgian and his three fellows were glaring back. So were the two Louisiana officers present. One of them was also a state representative—also with the rank of "colonel." It seemed to be an iron law with militias that they had as many colonels as they did privates, with precious few majors or captains—and not a single paltry lieutenant—anywhere to be found.
They could glare all they wanted. What could they _say?_ Even politicians playing at being soldiers had enough sense to realize that their forces had suffered a complete humiliation today.
Not that it would make a difference in the long run, Harrison was gloomily certain. They'd shut up today, sure enough. But in the months to come—half of them would be finding excuses to leave the campaign as soon as possible—they'd be back in their state legislatures and doing their level best to ruin Harrison's reputation. So would their fellows in the Congress of the United States. Unfortunately, while militias were rarely worth much on a battlefield, they were quite potent in the American political arena.
"So just shut up," he repeated. "And I'd recommend you get busy rounding up your men."
He waved a hand at the surrounding countryside. "Leave them out there for very long, and they'll be coming back in pieces."
The glares started to fade then, replaced by worry.
"I'll provide units from the Fifth and Third to help you," Harrison said, in a milder tone. "With some artillery."
That eased the worry from their faces some, but not much. These so-called officers weren't really concerned about the military aspects of the situation so much as the political ones. _They_ would have to answer to their constituents directly, where Harrison would at least have the shield of the professional army. And all they had to do was look around to see that a lot of their constituents were now dead, an equal if not greater number were badly injured, and all the survivors would be blaming them for the disaster, no matter how much of it they tried to shift onto Harrison's shoulders.
So would their relatives back home. Especially those whose husbands and sons weren't coming back.
"And you'd better detail some burial parties right away," Harrison added. "Big ones. This is the Delta in July. That many corpses will stink like you wouldn't believe, give them any time aboveground."
The sergeant in charge of the guard over the wounded prisoners being held in a room of the Post was simply amused.
"Do ye now?" he asked, in a pronounced Irish accent. He glanced at his four men. "D'ye hear that, lads? These gentlemen from Alabama wish to wreak havoc upon yon niggers. Having failed the task miserably, mind, when the niggers were on their feet and had guns in their hands."
"It ain't funny, you fucking Irish—"
_Click._
The Alabaman who was more or less the leader of the little group froze. The musket barrel held by one of the sergeant's men was now pushing under his chin. It was cocked, too.
"Hey, fella..."
"Oh, there's no point pleading with Private Aupperle," the sergeant said, still grinning. "Dieter doesn't speak but three words of English. The first two are 'fuck you.' The third is 'asshole.' He got off the boat not six months ago and joined the army straight off, that being the only trade he knows. How's your German?"
The six Alabamans stared at him.
"My German's quite good. Even if the dumb Krauts complain about the accent."
"Can barely understand him," the corporal growled. His accent was German, whereas the sergeant's was Irish, and even thicker.
His expression was a lot thicker than the sergeant's, too. "Fucking militia _scheisskopf._ You go home, two months. Maybe three. Half of you already running there now. We will be here long time. Get out."
He brought up his own musket and cocked it. "Get out _now._ "
"Best do as he says, lads," said the sergeant, as cheerily as ever. "Dieter's even-tempered, being from the Palatinate. Corporal Affenzeller, it grieves me to relate, is not. Juergen's a Swabian, alas. A surly breed; they're known for it."
After they were gone, a few seconds later, the sergeant chuckled. "Even in Alabama, now."
Private Dieter Aupperle uncocked his musket. He uttered several phrases in German that were most uncomplimentary on the subject of militias in general. So did Corporal Affenzeller, after he uncocked his own weapon. But, having considerably more knowledge of their adopted country as well as its language, he added details and specifics.
"—fuck pigs, being Creoles, no better than filthy Frenchmen. But at least the French have a few brains. Georgians can't figure out which end of a pig to fuck in the first place. Alabamans—"
Late in the afternoon, a delegation from the Arkansas Army showed up under a flag of truce. Harrison ordered them escorted into the Post.
Sam Houston, in the flesh. Harrison had never met him, but the man was one of those few in the world whose reputation genuinely preceded him. In the United States, at any rate.
To Harrison's much greater surprise—he'd known Houston was serving in the enemy colors—Winfield Scott came with him. Along with a poet whose name Harrison couldn't remember, even though he could remember reading two of his poems. One had been a gloomy thing, full of histrionics on death. Overwrought, the way poets will be about the subject and professional soldiers won't. But the other had been a poem about a man's thoughts watching a waterfowl flying in the distance. Harrison had been quite taken by it.
While he listened to Houston, Harrison's mind was at least half on Scott and the poet. They represented a real danger to him, which Houston didn't at the moment. He knew why they were there, of course.
"—the eighteen prisoners who are uninjured or walking wounded, we propose to exchange immediately against a similar number of our own. It's your choice, but we recommend that you permit us to continue providing medical attention to the other thirteen prisoners."
Houston glanced around the room in the Post that Harrison had chosen for his headquarters. He'd chosen it for the purpose partly for its size, but mostly because it had little in the way of the carnage that was being cleaned up elsewhere. Still, there were several pockmarks in the wall from bullets, and one bloodstain that hadn't quite been removed.
"I think we can do better for them at the moment than you could do here, General," he concluded.
Harrison didn't doubt it. His medical staff was exhausted already.
"All regulars?"
"Yes, sir. We have no militia prisoners."
Houston didn't bother adding: _We didn't take any._ The complete lack of expression on his face would have made that obvious, even if it hadn't been already. Just as it made clear there would be no apologies forthcoming for the fact, either.
Harrison had no intention of asking for them, anyway. His concerns for the moment, outside of his own professional prospects, were entirely for his regulars.
The terms of exchange seemed fair enough. But—
"Let's make it an equal exchange—within the usual parameters—but I'd prefer not to distinguish between walking and immobile wounded." He gave Houston a nod that was respectful, perhaps a bit on the embarrassed side. "We—ah—don't have but three walking wounded of your own. You didn't leave more than that."
"Fine. Select fifteen of our men that you think could manage the transfer without further injury, and we'll begin with that. We can do the rest later, as they heal."
"Terms of parole?"
"We propose an agreement not to fight on the same front—for a year, let's say?—but no overall prohibition against bearing arms in the current conflict."
Harrison thought about it. A complete prohibition—especially with no time limit—would better serve the interests of the United States Army. With their much smaller pool of manpower to draw from, the Arkansans could ill afford to have capable soldiers removed from service altogether.
But he was sure the Arkansans would never agree to that, for the same reason, so there was no point raising it. He could live with their proposal, and it was similar enough to various prisoner exchanges that had taken place in the war with Britain that no politician could yap about it.
Not that some of them wouldn't try, of course.
"Done." He extended his hand. "Please convey to your officers and men my salutations. You fought a most gallant battle."
Houston returned the handshake, an expression coming back into his face. Quite a friendly one, even an animated one. "And please accept our own compliments. Generals Driscol and Ball asked me to forward their admiration to your First Regiment and its commander, in particular. That was a bloody business by the wall."
Harrison nodded. "I'll certainly pass that on to the regiment. The commanding officer—that was Colonel John McNeil—fell in the battle, I'm afraid."
And then it was a round of handshakes between all the officers present. The fact that two of the three Arkansans were black caused not even a moment's hesitation, so far as Harrison could detect.
Not even on his part. He tried to remember if he'd ever shaken a negro's hand. He couldn't recall doing so, unless one were to count pressing a coin into a doorman's hand at a fancy hotel in Philadelphia and Washington.
Which would be an absurd comparison.
Scott and Bryant stayed behind, after Houston and the other Arkansan officers left to begin the prisoner exchange.
The first words out of Winfield Scott's mouth were the critical ones.
"The victory was yours, General Harrison, and Cullen and I shall so report it in our account."
Harrison nodded, stiffly, trying to let no sign of his relief show.
For a moment, he and Winfield stared at each other. They were not friends and never had been. Harrison resented the man, actually. Despite his victories at Tippecanoe and the Thames, Harrison's resignation from the army in 1814 as a result of his clash with Secretary of War Armstrong had inevitably removed some of the luster from his reputation. Scott, on the other hand, had suffered a dramatic wound at Lundy's Lane that had enabled him—in effect if not in name—to withdraw from the rest of the war with his great victory at the Chippewa untarnished.
Still, there were rules. And since Scott had made clear he would follow them, Harrison had no legitimate grounds for complaint.
He knew full well, of course, what sort of account Scott would be filing with the newspapers. Any discerning reader with any military experience who got past the headline— _U.S. VICTORIOUS AT SECOND ARKANSAS POST—_ would understand that beneath the formality lay something completely different. An Arkansas Army less than half the size of its American opponent had completely outmaneuvered the U.S. commander; allowed a good portion of its Chickasaw allies to escape a trap; fought a superior force of U.S. regulars to a standstill in a battle whose butcher's bill, proportionate to the size of the forces involved, was worse than Lundy's Lane; and practically destroyed the Georgia militia to boot.
A complete disaster, beneath the headline. A tactical "defeat" that was actually a strategic victory. A battle—never mind the formalities—that guaranteed that Henry Clay's short war was going to be a long and protracted one. With God-only-knew-what consequences would come out of it, at the end.
Still, Harrison had the headline. He clutched it for all it was worth.
Quite a bit, actually. Luckily for him—on this occasion—almost all the politicians in America with real military experience were on the other side anyway. Clay and Calhoun would clutch that headline even more tightly than he would. They'd have no choice.
"Please be seated, gentlemen." He indicated some nearby chairs. "This will be a long interview, I imagine. Some refreshments, perhaps? I believe—"
He cocked an eye at Captain Matlock, who gave him a quick little nod in return.
"We have some whiskey."
He'd start with Matlock to assemble a new staff. His regimental commander would protest, of course, but too bad for him. For the war that was coming, Harrison needed a staff. A real one, this time.
**CHAPTER 38**
_New Antrim, Arkansas_
JULY 26, 1825
Sheff would retain flashes of memory of what happened to him after he'd received his wound. But flashes were all they were. The last one, thankfully, was a hazy recollection of himself screaming while two men held him down and a surgeon dug a bullet out of his shoulder.
The one thing from that episode he did remember clearly was the surgeon grunting, "Well, he's a lucky one."
If he'd had any strength at all, he'd have hit him. As it was, he lapsed into unconsciousness again.
So, when his eyes opened and he saw the hand, he spent some time just looking at it, getting reacquainted with having a clear head. It was a delicious sensation, as enjoyable as one of the glasses of iced milk his mother made on occasion when she could afford ice.
Sheff had never drunk much whiskey, anyway. But he made a promise to himself then and there that he'd avoid liquor altogether henceforth, except when doing so would be socially ungraceful. He'd never appreciated before what a blessing it was to have an unfettered consciousness. Why would any sane man go out of his way to imitate an experience that a battle wound provided?
It was a small hand, quite nicely shaped. Female, clearly. The hand wasn't moving, just lying loosely on an open book. He couldn't see the thumb, just the fingers. They were spread out on the pages, curled up a bit. The book was the Bible, he realized after a while. From what he could tell, open to some passage midway through the Old Testament.
Eventually, it occurred to him that the hand belonged to an arm, and the arm belonged to a person. So his eyes began moving up along the forearm, then past the elbow. He couldn't see the arm itself, though, above the wrist. It was covered in the sleeve of a calico blouse, which seemed better made than usual. That didn't necessarily mean it was store bought, since there were women who could cut and sew that well. Sheff 's mother was one of them. But he had the sense that this blouse was tailor made. The common everyday calico seemed more finely dyed than usual.
His eyes got as far as the shoulder, which was puffed out in one of the new-style gigot sleeves. What his mother called leg-of-mutton sleeves. Then, his eyes couldn't roll any further in their sockets. He had to decide whether he had the strength and interest to shift his position.
He was in a bed, he suddenly realized, covered by a thin blanket. He wondered how that had happened. There were no beds in the tents of army surgeons. You were lucky if you got a cot.
It dawned on him that he wasn't in a tent to begin with. This was a room. In a house of some kind.
For that matter—
His eyes rolled back, coming to bear again on the hand.
Yes, that was a woman's hand, sure enough. No chance of error. A young woman's, too, he was certain. But there wouldn't be any women in an army medical tent, either, certainly not young ones. Nursing wounded soldiers was a filthy business.
He was interested enough, and he thought he had the strength and energy. So, painfully—champing down a shout when he placed weight on the left shoulder and felt a spike of agony—he managed to shift position enough to be able to look up at the woman's head.
Which turned out to be pointless. The woman was asleep, her head slumped forward with her chin resting on her chest.
At least, Sheff assumed the chin was on the chest. He couldn't actually see any part of the woman's face. Her head was covered by a large bonnet with a flaring brim. Sheff thought the technical term for it was "cabriolet," but his mother just called them coal-scuttle bonnets. She had one herself, since they were handy out in the sunshine.
A thought finally occurred to him, then, and he experienced what might just possibly have been the single most frustrating moment in his life. Was this...
Tarnation, he couldn't _move._ No more than he had, anyway, and he'd almost fainted doing that much. And what good would it do, anyway? He couldn't very well shake the woman awake, even if he could have reached her.
Fortunately, his quandary was resolved.
"Stop fidgeting, young man! You'll reopen the wound, and I'll have to get the surgeon around again."
Well, he knew that voice. _Courage,_ he told himself. He'd faced U.S. regulars, hadn't he? Hadn't even flinched, so far as he could remember.
Turning his head a little, he saw the dragon in the doorway. She was glaring at him as usual.
Well...not quite. The look on her face seemed more one of exasperation than outright hostility. So did the look she bestowed upon the mysterious woman sitting by his bed.
"The two of you!" he heard her mutter. The dragon came into the room and laid a hand on the leg-of-mutton shoulder. Then, gave it a little shake.
"Wake up, Imogene. Your precious captain's come around."
The head popped up. Yes, that _was_ Imogene under the brim.
"Oh," she said.
Julia Chinn was now looking at the open Bible on Imogene's lap.
"I told you!" Firmly, she moved Imogene's hand aside and, more firmly still, closed the Bible. "You too young to be reading that."
Puzzled, Sheff tried to remember what part of the Old Testament—
_Oh._
Fortunately, he didn't say it out loud. He even managed not to smile. He could remember the time his own mother had caught him engrossed in the Song of Solomon the way no proper thirteen-year-old boy ought to be.
To cover the moment's awkwardness, he cleared his throat. "I'm not a captain, Miz Julia. Just a second lieutenant."
Julia gave him that same exasperated look. "I wish! Boy, I will say you are prob'bly the most tenacious critter I ever met."
But the tone in her voice didn't seem as chilly by the time she got to the end of the sentence as it had when she started it. She reached down and tugged his blanket back into position and said quietly to Imogene: "Five minutes, girl. Then I want you out of here."
After she'd left the room, Imogene burst into a smile so wide it looked to split her face in half. That expression, with her full lips, brought out the African part of her ancestry, which was normally overshadowed by her light skin and hazel eyes. More green than hazel, really.
For the first time, Sheff felt a surge of passion. No poetic abstraction, neither.
Fortunately, he was still too weak to embarrass himself. The hand that would have impulsively reached for her lay limp on the blanket. So did...well. Everything else.
"They promoted you, Sheff! All the way to captain."
"That's..." He tried to decide how he felt. Pleased, of course. But—
"I'm not even eighteen years old. Won't be, till next month."
The smile wasn't fading at all. "Don't matter! The whole town's talking about it. Oh, Sheff, I'm so proud of you!"
" 'Doesn't' matter," he corrected.
"You and Mama!" She waved a dismissive hand. Which, on the way back, somehow found its way into Sheff 's. "Both nagging me."
He had enough strength to squeeze the hand. "You listen to your mama. Listen to me, too. She wants you talking proper. Properly. I'm trying myself."
The smile was replaced by a serious look. "Do—does it really matter, Sheff?"
"Yes, Imogene. It does."
In the corridor of the boardinghouse just outside the open door, where she'd been eavesdropping, Julia Chinn pressed the back of her head against the wall. It was either that or bang it against the wall.
The next three minutes weren't any better. She could have handled a rascal, easy as pie. This one...
"Imogene, that's been five minutes, for sure!" she shouted.
"Mama!"
"You listen to me, young lady!"
Sheff 's firm voice could be heard clearly, even through the wall. "Best do as your mama says, Imogene."
Julia had heard the talk herself. It couldn't be avoided, anywhere you went in New Antrim. Parker by the wall. For just that moment, she had a deep sympathy for the U.S. regulars who'd faced him. If only they'd...
But that thought led to a place Julia Chinn never wanted to go. There were limits. Whatever else, there _had_ to be limits, or there was no point to any of it. She might as well sell Imogene to a slave brothel right now. Or herself, for that matter.
Sheff 's mother arrived shortly thereafter. She was all solicitous concern, fussing over him, but Sheff thought that was mostly her way of handling the grief caused by her brother's death. Sheff was still trying to come to grips with it himself.
It was hard. He still had that iron shell around him. The battle shield, he'd come to think of it. As useful as it was—indispensable, perhaps—it was now getting in the way of normal emotions. He was pretty sure he'd have to be careful about that. Taken too far, or too long, it could rub a man's soul so hard it became just a callus.
But he wasn't ready to deal with it yet. So, the two hours his mother spent in the room before she had to go home were mostly taken up with practical concerns.
There, fortunately—in a horrible sort of way—his uncle's death had eased the strain.
"The bank says it's canceling the loan outright," his mother said quietly. "On account of Jem. Well, your uncle's part, anyway. We still got to pay yours off. But Mr. Crowell told me they'd take your service as being complete. So there won't never be no interest."
Sheff knew the bank had adopted a policy of canceling any loans secured by a soldier's pay in the event the soldier died in the line of duty. The chiefdom's legislature was also talking about providing some subsidies for widows and orphans, but Sheff didn't think anything would come of it. Arkansas was actually thriving, economically, on account of all the new construction and manufacture. The war hadn't even put a dent in it—probably stimulated it, in fact. But wages were very low, with the constant influx of freedmen, and there just wasn't that much money to throw around.
Still, between the increased pay that would come with his promotion to captain and the work his mother got as a tailor, they should manage. She was paid a real tailor's wage, too, not the much lower rate most girls got in the garment manufactories. He was pretty sure they'd even be able to let Dinah keep going to school instead of her having to go to work in the shops.
His mother was holding up pretty well, too. She had her own version of a battle shield.
"The truth is, Sheff, we're doing better than we were back in Baltimore, with your father and uncle bringing in whatever they could. Which weren't never much. So you just make sure when you can get about again, that you keep fighting for Arkansas. You hear?"
Cal McParland came to visit him later that day. He brought John Ridge and Buck Watie with him.
"Congratulations," Ridge said immediately after walking into the room. "You heard about your promotion, I take it?"
"You'll give him a swelled head," Cal chided. But he was smiling as he said it. "Jumped him a rank, even."
Buck Watie slid into a chair. "Gave you the Legion of Honor, too. Only one who got it except Captain Dupont."
Cal laughed. "My cousin says the Laird got the idea from Napoleon, but he's obviously going to be a lot stingier than the emperor ever was."
Sheff had been wondering what a Legion of Honor was. For the most part, the Arkansas Army was patterned after the American, since that was the experience of most of its veterans. The American army didn't have the custom of awarding decorations for valor or merit, as did most of the European armies.
But that thought was swept away for the moment. "How's the captain doing?"
The good cheer left the room. Buck Watie shook his head. "Captain Dupont didn't make it, Sheff. The Americans returned his body the day after the battle."
"At least he didn't die slowly from being gut-shot," Cal added. "The Americans think he must have bled to death before the fighting was even over. From what I heard, our surgeon who looked at his body agreed with them."
Well, that was something. Sheff had liked Charles Dupont, even if he'd found his heavy accent hard to understand sometimes. He'd been a lot less prone to judging people simply by skin color than most of the Creole freedmen from New Orleans were.
As a group, Sheff didn't care for them much. Some of them had even been slave-owners themselves, and they still retained a lot of the attitudes. If they hadn't been forced out of the city after the Algiers Incident, most of them would still be in New Orleans. As it was, they tended to cluster together in one part of New Antrim that people were starting to call the Creole Quarter.
But Sheff hadn't really been close to Dupont, so there wasn't any personal grief involved. Besides, he _was_ still short of eighteen, and...
He tried to figure out how to ask without seeming full of himself.
Fortunately, Cal saved him the effort. "Yup. The Legion of Honor. The Laird established it right after the battle. Announced he would, before the day was over, even."
"Established" was a word that seemed a little absurd if they only gave out two of them. But that mystery got cleared up by Buck.
"He also established what he's calling the Arkansas Post Medal, and they're handing those out like candy. Everybody who was there gets one, except the steamboat crews, and they're complaining like nobody's business."
"Them!" Cal snorted. "They didn't get within half a mile—not even that—of a shot being fired."
He gave Sheff a big grin. "Don't get your hopes up too soon, though. What I heard, it'll be weeks before they can get around to actually making the things. There's a big squabble over who gets the contract."
That brought a little laugh to the room. The Arkansas House of Representatives was even more notorious than its American counterpart for the fervent dedication of its members to advancing the interests of their constituents. If anything, the House of Chiefs was worse.
The next half hour was spent bringing Sheff up to date on what had happened in the battle after he'd been taken out of combat. It was a cheerful discussion until Sheff asked about the Chickasaws.
His three fellow officers exchanged glances, their smiles either fading or seeming frozen in place.
"Well," said Cal.
"That got a little sticky," John Ridge added.
His cousin Buck gave him a glance that was at least half angry. The rest of it seemed derisive.
"You talk! We were the ones had to do the dirty work."
John made a face. So did Cal.
"Give," said Sheff. "What happened?"
Cal provided the answer. The first part, anyway. "They got really hammered in there, Sheff. Near as we can tell, half the warriors in the tribe died in the Post—they never had but a little over six hundred, to begin with—and a fair number got killed or badly wounded during the escape. So...well, by the time they could pull themselves together, the Laird already had their slaves in custody. By then, Houston was back with the Second Infantry. And—ah—he'd already moved over my battery and the others from the Third."
"The women and old men raised Sam Hill, of course, but..." John Ridge shrugged. "Wasn't really much they could do to stop him. Houston was in no friendlier mood than the Laird. Neither was General Ball, of course."
They fell silent again. "So?" Sheff demanded.
Buck provided the rest. "So, the Chickasaw warriors finally got there and starting hollering and making threats. Real nasty threats, not just name-calling. And—" He took a deep breath. "We followed orders. Cut loose with both batteries. Canister—and we were targeting the Colbert clan."
"The Laird told us to spare as many full-bloods as we could," Cal added. "And we did. But they were pretty well mixed together, and canister's what it is. There ain't much left of the Colberts, I can tell you that."
"Oh...Jesu—Sam Hill," Sheff murmured, barely avoiding the blasphemy.
John Ridge's face was stiff. "Sam Hill is right. My father's furious. So's Chief Ross, although he's hiding it better. Even the Choctaw chiefs are hollering about it. The Creeks will be, too, soon as they hear."
"Sure, and nobody likes Chickasaws," Buck chimed in, "but..." He shook his head. "I did what I was told—well, watched, anyway—but I can't help think the Laird'll come to regret it. This could even start a civil war."
Callender McParland started to say something but broke off before he got a word out. From the quick look he gave his two Cherokee companions, Sheff had no trouble figuring out what he'd been about to say.
So he went ahead and said it for him. He was too weak to summon up the energy to be diplomatic.
"Fuck the Chickasaws. And fuck the Choctaws and the Creeks. And—sorry, fellows—but if push comes to shove, fuck you Cherokees, too. You got Sam Hill's nerve, as far as I'm concerned, expecting us niggers"—he rolled his eyes at Cal—"and some white boys to do your fighting for you while thinking you'll keep us in slavery."
Anger that had been quietly festering for a long time finally came to the surface. "Fuck you," he stated flatly. "Learn to work. I've been working since I was ten years old."
"Me too," said Cal. "My family's poor Scots-Irish—well, not poor any longer—from New York. We never owned any slaves. And sure as hell aren't gonna start now."
He gave Buck a look that had none of its earlier friendliness. "And I'd be real careful, was I you, Lieutenant Watie, making too many noises about 'civil wars.' You think we can't do the same thing at Tahlequah we just done at Arkansas Post, best you think twice."
So there it was: the threat naked and right out in the open. Strangely, perhaps, that was enough to start draining away Sheff 's anger.
"Come on, now, Cal—there was no call for that. Buck was just expressing a concern. He wasn't making no threats."
Hastily, he corrected himself. "Any threats."
Their voices had gotten raised a bit. You never knew. Imogene might be somewhere close enough to overhear. Worse, so might her mother.
Cal took a long deep breath. Simultaneously—it almost made Sheff laugh, watching it—the two Cherokees did the same.
They let it out at the same time, too. Then Cal said: "Sorry. Didn't really mean it that way."
John chuckled. "Sam Hill, you didn't! Still..."
He sighed, and wiped a hand over his face. "The truth is, Buck and I don't really disagree with you. And I already told my father so. Our newspaper will have some criticisms of the way the Laird handled it, I imagine, but we're not going to make any bones about the rest of it. There's no slavery in Arkansas—that's established, right there in the Constitution—and since the Chickasaws sought refuge in Arkansas, they had to abide by Arkansas law. And the threats they were making went way beyond anything you could rightly call a petition in redress of grievances."
Sheff 's anger was almost gone, now. Enough, even, for him to play devil's advocate. "Members of other Confederate chiefdoms _do_ have the right to travel in Arkansas, with their slaves, without having them seized."
"For no more than two weeks, without a permit," Cal countered. "No way were all the Chickasaws—almost any of them, the shape they were in—gonna make it to Oklahoma in two weeks. And the chance that the Arkansas Chiefdom would have issued permits for a thousand slaves is exactly nothing."
John shook his head. "It doesn't matter, anyway. Nobody"—he managed a real smile, here—"not even us disputatious natural-lawyer Cherokees, thinks this is something you can settle in a courtroom. The Laird's been pushing for this ever since he brought out that separate Arkansas flag. Pushing it harder than ever, after Houston arrived and made clear he'd back him. Sooner or later, something like this was going to happen, anyway. May as well be now—when everybody knows there's another U.S. army sitting there on our northern border, and the second battle of Arkansas Post is fresh in everybody's mind."
He caught the look on Sheff 's face.
"Oh," Ridge said. "Guess you didn't know about that, either, did you? The word just got to New Antrim yesterday."
"There's at least two regiments of U.S. regulars sitting on the Arkansas just north of the border," Buck added. "They're building a great big fort. Colonel Zachary Taylor's in command."
"They got us surrounded, in other words," Cal said. "The stupid bastards."
**CHAPTER 39**
_Missouri Territory_
JULY 29, 1825
Skeptically, Zack Taylor eyed the two men standing in front of him. "Explain to me why I should care in the least whether this Clark fellow stays alive or not."
He waved a hand at the rise in the prairie, beyond which lay the bandit camp. "I've got three companies here. I'll call for them to surrender, but..."
His shoulders shifted, too slightly to be called a real shrug. The movement was an accurate reflection of his attitude, which was that bandits were unlikely to just lay down their arms—and he was indifferent to the matter. With three companies of dragoons, he could afford to be.
"What do _you_ care, for that matter? The reward—both of them—specify 'dead or alive.' I'd think 'dead' would make things easier for you."
The man on his left—that was Ray Thompson—shook his head.
"It doesn't work like that, Colonel. Sure, and the reward poster _says_ 'dead or alive.' You believe that, you believe in paradise on earth. What'll really happen—"
His partner chimed in. "You bring in a dead body, the man offering the reward will look at it, shake his head, and tell you it's the wrong man. Dancing with joy the whole time. And how are you going to prove otherwise? Seeing as how your principal witness to the contrary is dead, on account of you killed him."
Scott Powers, that was. Taylor remembered them both quite well. The two scoundrels had had the effrontery to claim that the meat they'd try to fob off onto Cantonment Robertson's commissary hadn't really been wormy. Just "prespiced," in the Louisiana custom. To this day, Zack didn't think he'd ever encountered more bold-faced liars in his life.
He hadn't run into them since, but he'd almost had the two arrested, just on general principles, when they arrived in his camp a few days ago. But eventually he'd agreed to come look for himself. There was no good reason not to, after all. It was less than a three days' ride, even for a sizeable force of dragoons, and until he heard what had happened to General Harrison's first thrust up the Arkansas River Valley he'd had to bide his time in Missouri Territory anyway. If Mrs. Houston's murderer was within his grasp, he had the duty to seize him. Besides, he just couldn't figure out any way—any reason, rather—Thompson and Powers would be lying about this matter.
Taylor still didn't know if Mrs. Houston's killer was in that camp. But that it was a bandit camp, he didn't doubt at all. There was no reason in the world for white men who weren't bandits to be camped out here like this. Not to mention still be sleeping this late in the morning if they were doing honest work. The sun had come up over an hour earlier.
"The two of you are experienced bounty hunters, I take it?"
Thompson looked more shifty-eyed than ever. Powers just grinned. "Not exactly, Colonel. Be more accurate to say 'experienced bounty.' But we know what we're talking about."
He pointed a thumb toward the hidden camp. "Anyway, that's why we need Clark alive."
Taylor's patience had run out. "Fine. But you'll have to figure out how to do it, because I'm not about to risk any of my men for the purpose. I'll give you ten minutes to get into whatever position you think might do the trick for you. After that, I'm calling on them to surrender—and if any of them so much as wave too hard, I'll have 'em all shot down."
"Ain't this a mess?" Ray grumbled, nine minutes and maybe fifty seconds later. They'd found a place to wait in ambush in some switchgrass on the opposite side of the bandit camp. It was a good hiding place, sure, but switchgrass was no fun at all. It was almost like hiding in a thicket of razor blades.
"Shut up," Scott hissed. "It's worth ten thousand dollars."
"I think there's a _snake_ somewhere in here."
"So bite him if he gives you any trouble."
"I hate snakes, you know that. What if—"
He was interrupted by the sound of distant shouting. He and Scott were too far away to make out the exact words.
It didn't matter, though. He'd heard words spoken in that official tone of voice often enough to know the gist of it. _We're the law and you ain't, so give up or we'll shoot you dead and not even have to skip lunch on account of it._
Not five seconds later, the camp burst into activity, men spilling out of their bedrolls and running every which-a-way. Most of them were pulling out guns, and two or three of them were shooting at nothing.
The idiots. Ray and Scott could only hope that their quarry was at least a little smarter.
The company Taylor had had hidden behind that rise came over it, just as crisp as you could ask for. Up came the muskets, and a volley went off. That took down at least three bandits. The rest started veering north, but another company was in front of them, and another volley went off.
This was about as uneven a contest as you could ask for. If their quarry was in that pack of dumb yahoos, he was a dead man, and they'd just have to hope Andrew Jackson and Henry Clay were more honest than most reward-posters. Given that one of them was a U.S. senator and the other was president of the whole country, Ray thought that was about as likely as getting a royal flush in an honest game of poker.
"Somebody's coming," Powers murmured. "Over there."
Ray followed the direction of Scott's little nod. Sure enough. Somebody was moving through the bluestem grass that covered most of the area. The stuff was tall enough for a crawling man to stay out of direct sight, but not so tall that his progress couldn't be followed by watching the grass move, if you were looking for it.
"Two of 'em, I think," Powers added.
Ray thought he was right. He gauged the course of whoever it was crawling through the grass, maybe forty yards off, and the pace they were making. Another volley went off while he did so. He could hear men shouting and screaming in the distance, but he ignored all that. The bandits who'd been caught in the camp were as good as dead. Taylor wouldn't be taking any prisoners, given that they'd put up a resistance. Such as it was.
So he and Scott might as well assume that Andrew Clark was one of the two men making their escape. There was no point in doing anything else.
"Fancy or not?" Scott asked.
Damnation, there _was_ a snake in here. Ray could hear it slither.
"Fuck 'fancy.' I can run if you can't."
He was out of the switchgrass and running toward the quarry not two seconds later. It didn't occur to him until then that maybe the soldiers off in the distance would take _him_ for a bandit.
But he ignored the risk. The range was long for muskets, and he really hated snakes.
He could hear Scott pounding behind him. As ambushes went, this one was about as crude as you could ask for.
The men in the grass heard them once they were halfway there. They rose up, each holding a pistol.
Sure enough, one of them was Clark. The other was Scott's erstwhile friend.
"Erstwhile" being the operative term, Ray stopped and shot him when he was ten yards off. The man returned fire—tried to—but his gun didn't go off.
Ray's shot hit him somewhere in the ribs, turning him. Scott's following shot hit him in the upper arm, knocking him down.
They each had two pistols, the second of which they brought to bear on Clark.
"You're under arrest!" That came from Ray's partner.
Clark fired his pistol. Scott yelped, clutching the top of his shoulder. Too angry to think straight, he fired back. His returning shot must have come within a hair of Clark's head, judging from the way the assassin flinched.
"We need him alive!" Ray shouted.
"The bastard hit me! He couldn't hit Houston right in front of him—but he hit _me._ "
"So what?" Ray might have had some sympathy, except it was obvious Clark's bullet hadn't done more than graze Scott's shoulder.
The assassin was now trying to reload, not paying any attention to Ray at all.
Ray shook his head. "Andrew Clark, you are one dang fool." He stepped forward a few quick paces, leaned over far enough to move the grass aside, aimed, and fired.
The shot was perfect, right through the top of Clark's Blucher half-boots. Probably blew off a couple of toes. He wouldn't be making any escape, for sure—and he wouldn't bleed to death, either.
Clark screeched and threw up his hands. The pistol he'd been reloading sailed off somewhere. He stumbled backward and fell on his butt.
Up close, with Clark howling the way he was, Ray could see the scar where Houston had split his lip pretty badly. At least three teeth were missing, too.
No reason not to subtract a few more. Ray kicked him in the face, twice, and then clubbed him with the pistol butt. That ought to do it.
"You stinking bastard!"
Looking over, he saw that Clark's companion was still alive. In fact, he'd levered himself up on the elbow of his uninjured arm.
Which was his left arm—and he was left-handed. In that position, he couldn't fight a kitten. The world was full of dang fools.
By then, Scott had retrieved the man's pistol and was working at it. "Sorry 'bout that, Eddie," he said, "but ten thousand dollars is ten thousand dollars."
"You stinking bastard!"
Scott flipped up the frizzen and shook his head. "You got some dew in the primer. You should've watched for that, this early in the morning, crawling through grass like you were doing." He scraped out the powder and reprimed the pistol.
"I'll kill you, you stinking bastard!"
"Oh, Eddie, that ain't likely at all." Scott cocked the pistol and shot the man in the head. At that range he could hardly miss, and he didn't.
He looked up at Ray and shrugged. "Sorta hated to do that, him being a friend of mine and all. But Eddie always was the unforgiving sort. I don't feel like having to look over my shoulder all the time, the next twenty or thirty years."
That was the main reason Ray and Scott had been partners for so long. They were both reasonable men, neither one of them given to silly fancies that might strain the relationship.
By the time they got back to the fort, three days later, word had arrived about Arkansas Post. The news was on the scanty side but enough for Taylor to know that he wouldn't be marching into the Confederacy any time soon. Victory or not—and Zack was sure that was a formality, in this instance—any army that had been battered that badly would need months to recuperate. Harrison wouldn't be moving out of the Post until winter came, and then he might very well decide to wait for spring. He'd need reinforcements—lots of them—before he could even think of marching upriver on New Antrim.
That meant Zack was effectively stymied also. The Confederates had the advantage of interior lines. If he and Harrison didn't move together, the enemy could simply switch forces back and forth between their southeastern and northwestern fronts.
He took it philosophically enough. Zack had never thought this war would be over quickly, to begin with, and he'd had years of experience on the frontier. Just another six to twelve months ahead, building another fort and keeping his men in fighting condition. Nothing he hadn't done many times before.
Besides, there was at least one small benefit. He'd be able to make sure those two rascals were telling the truth.
"Send a squad down to Arkansas," he told his aide. Then, thinking about it, amended the order. "No, better make it a whole company. The way that luna—the special commissioner—has been throwing arms around to Indians in the area, a squad might get ambushed. Under a flag of truce, of course."
"Yes, sir. And they're..."
"What do you think? Sam Houston was really the only eyewitness. See if he's willing to come here and verify that we've got the right man."
AUGUST 22, 1825
"Yes, that's him. I'm quite sure of it, Colonel Taylor."
Sam had wondered how he'd react if indeed it proved to be the man who'd killed Maria Hester. Six months earlier, he'd probably have had to be physically restrained from attacking him.
Now...
The man glaring at him from a much-battered face just reminded him of a filthy rat. Not even a cornered one, but one caught in a trap, and knowing it.
He turned away, not ever wanting to see the man again in his life. Taylor's rough, honest features were a relief.
"And thank you, Colonel."
"My pleasure." Taylor looked to the guards holding Clark. "Get him out of here, and back into chains."
When he looked back at Sam, his face was a bit stiff. "Ah..."
Sam waved his hand. "Yes, I understand, Colonel. The crime was committed against an American citizen, on American soil. The prisoner will have to be returned there for trial."
Taylor nodded. "Personally, I'd be quite happy to hand him over to you. Or Arkansas, for that matter. But—"
He rubbed his heavy jaw for a moment. "I think it'd be best, all around, if we did everything by the book."
There was a slight stress on _everything._
"Yes, I agree. Everything by the book."
Later that day, Sam met privately with the two men Colonel Taylor credited with the capture.
"I can guarantee you that Andy Jackson will pay his half of the reward, once he gets my letter. Clay's half..."
He shrugged. "Who knows? And even if Clay is good for it, I'm not sure where you'd need to go to collect. You can wait for Andy's money in New Antrim."
The two men looked particularly shifty-eyed in response to that.
"Well. Ah." That came from the one called Ray Thompson. It might even be his real name.
His partner, Scott Powers, echoed him. "Well. Ah."
Sam grinned. "Don't tell me you boys are in bad odor in the chiefdom of Arkansas?"
"Well. Ah."
"Well. Ah."
That was worth a chuckle. "What was it? Slave trading? Or were you part of Crittenden's crowd?"
That was worth an outright laugh. "Both, huh? Anybody ever suggest to you that you're not walking in the ways of the Lord?"
"Well. Ah." That was Thompson. Powers managed to return the grin. "Yeah. Started with my mother. I was maybe five."
A thought came to Sam. It was...intriguing, anyway.
"Tell you what," he said. "You come back to New Antrim with me. I'll guarantee your safety."
Those _had_ to be the two most skeptical looks he'd ever gotten in his life.
"Safety out, too?" asked Thompson.
"Oh, relax, will you? Nobody'll lay a hand on you, all the way in and out of Arkansas. Fact is, I think the Laird's more likely to be amused than anything else. Charles Ball, for sure."
At the mention of Charles Ball, Sam thought they almost jumped.
"We'll probably have to keep you out of John Brown's sight, however."
At that, they did jump. Not more than half an inch, though. Tough fellows, obviously. Rogues, rascals, and renegades, too, just as obviously. But Sam was pretty sure he could find a good use for such. Several good uses, in fact.
It took two weeks longer than anyone expected to get Andrew Clark back to Washington, D.C. Not because of his bad foot, which none of his captors cared about in the least. But simply because the army soon realized it had to detail sizeable units to escort the prisoner every step of the way.
As it was, they almost lost him at Uniontown. The crowd that surrounded the company was more in the way of a small army than the lynch mobs they'd encountered in St. Louis and the Ohio river towns.
Fortunately, the governor of the state was there also, and Shulze finally managed to talk the crowd out of the hanging they'd been looking forward to.
He'd been there by pure coincidence, as it happened. News of Clark's capture and return for trial had spread all over the country by then, but Shulze hadn't paid much attention to the details. He'd had no idea the prisoner was coming through Uniontown when he planned to be passing through.
Word had spread all over the country about the Second Battle of Arkansas Post, too. "Word," in the form of extensive and detailed reports printed in every newspaper in the nation.
Not always the same reports in all the newspapers, of course. Most newspapers gave pride of place to the reports filed by Bryant and Scott, those being authoritative in terms of their authors as well as being the only really eyewitness accounts from all sides of the fray. But not all did. A considerable number of papers, especially in the Deep South, refused to run the Bryant-Scott accounts at all. Several of them went so far as to point to those reports as prime examples of the sort of pernicious abolitionist propaganda that the Georgian delegation to Congress had already announced it was going to demand be banned from being carried by the U.S. Postal Service.
Some newspapers emphasized one thing; others something else. _U.S. DEFEATS ARKANSAS_ in one paper might be _MONSTER CASUALTIES IN ARKANSAS_ in another. But there was enough commonality for one thing to be clear to everyone.
The Arkansas War was just starting, and it wouldn't be over any time soon.
In Washington, D.C., the president and the war secretary announced that they'd be presenting to the next Congress, convening over the winter, a plan for the drastic expansion of the American military in response to the threat posed by the Confederacy. Or Black Arkansas, as Calhoun referred to it, not being a man given to euphemisms.
In response, Senator Andrew Jackson called for the formation of a new political party, since there was clearly no longer room in the existing Republican Party for both him and—"the rascals" was the mildest term he used—Clay and Calhoun. And he invited several key political figures in the nation to meet with him in advance of the convening of Congress, so that a common platform for the new party could be forged.
And that's where Governor Shulze of Pennsylvania had been headed when he passed through Uniontown and, by pure accident, happened to be there at the right time to save Andrew Clark from a lynching.
At the Hermitage, in Nashville, another declaration of war was being prepared. A war, in this case, that nobody in the United States with any political sense at all thought would be over any sooner than the other one—and a goodly number thought would continue long after peace came to Arkansas.
Clark did eventually make it to Washington. The trial that followed was brief, as was the sentencing. Several congressmen from Georgia, at the last minute, made a somewhat bizarre attempt to persuade the president to commute Clark's sentence to life imprisonment. Bizarre, at least, in its contorted logic.
But other than a few Georgians, only John Randolph rose in the House to defend the proposal, and his logic couldn't be followed by anyone.
President Henry Clay turned them down flatly, even—very unusual for him—in a curt and almost uncivil manner. First, he said, because he had no proper jurisdiction over the matter. Granted that the District of Columbia was under federal authority, not being part of any state, murder was a local crime. So why didn't Congress act directly instead of trying to shuffle the matter off on the president? And what exactly had happened to John Randolph's principles concerning states' rights and the ever-present danger of an overweening executive branch, by the way?
That last, with a sneer, which Clay did very well also.
Beyond that, he told them, even if the courts ruled that he could intervene, he would under no circumstances do so anyway.
"The bastard murdered an innocent young woman! Who might very well have been pregnant with child. Right there—not a mile away—on the steps of the Capitol! What in the name of God is wrong with—"
He broke off abruptly and resumed the seat behind his desk. "No, gentlemen," he said. "The answer is no. Let the murderer hang by the neck until dead, and good riddance. And now, I'm sure you have other business to attend to. If not, I do."
The murderer did hang, on January 23, 1826. But by the time the noose finally took his life, Congress had convened, and no one was paying much attention any longer.
No politician, at any rate. One observer at the hanging was a visiting plantation owner from South Carolina. When it was all over, he was heard by some of the guards to curse Andrew Clark with vehement bitterness, ending with "You dang fool! Why did you have to _miss?_ "
>
**CHAPTER 40**
_The Hermitage Nashville, Tennessee_
OCTOBER 12, 1825
"—not budging an inch on the subject of the Bank! No, sir, Mr. John Quincy Adams. Not—one—inch." Andrew Jackson broke off his angry stalking back and forth in the living room of the Hermitage. Planting his bony hands on his hips, he leaned over and, from a distance of not more than two feet, bestowed his patented Andy Jackson glare on the short, chunky man sitting in the chair in front of him.
Who, for his part, was glaring right back. Watching the two of them from the far side of the room, Jackson's old friend and confidant John Coffee didn't even try to hide his grin.
You had to tip your hat to Quincy Adams. The whole Jackson style just plain aggravated him, but he'd soon learned how to deal with it. The man might have the mind of a scholar, but he could be just as pugnacious as anyone in Jackson's camp, including Andy himself.
"—don't care about all that fancy economics prattle," Jackson was continuing. "The issue's not finances in the first place. It's politics! A national bank with the authority of the federal government behind it is a mortal threat to the republic. You might as well put a viper in a baby's crib."
Standing by a window not far away, Thomas Hart Benton cleared his throat noisily. Noisily enough, in fact, to break off Andy in mid-tirade and intercept the harsh riposte that Quincy Adams was obviously about to launch.
"Got to say I agree with Andy here, John," the senator from Missouri said, in a mild tone of voice. He then gave the Tennessee senator a look of deep reproach. "Though I can't see where there's any call for him to get so rambunctious about it."
Thomas Hart Benton! Complaining that someone _else_ was being "too rambunctious." Coffee still had vivid memories of the gunfight in the City Hotel, not more than a few miles away though a considerable number of years back in time. It'd been a fistfight and knife fight, too, no holds or weapons barred.
"But he does cut to the heart of it, I think." Benton took a few steps forward, placing himself in front of most of the men gathered in the room. The senator was a natural orator of the rip-roaring school, and he began lapsing into the sort of speech he might give on the Senate floor.
"I plain can't see why, in a confederacy of such vast extent, so many independent states, so many rival commercial cities, there should be but one moneyed tribunal, before which all the rival and contending elements must appear."
Sure enough, his left hand was slipping into his waist, and the right was beginning to wave about. "What a condition for a confederacy of states! But one single dispenser of money, to which every citizen, every trader, every merchant, every manufacturer, every planter, every corporation, every city, every state, and the federal government itself must apply, in every emergency, for the most indispensable loan!"
He was in full roar, now, the right hand no longer waving about but pointing—no, thrusting—the forefinger of denunciation from a mighty thick fist of righteousness. Fortunately, at a blank spot on a wall, beyond which lay defenseless farmland, rather than at John Quincy Adams.
Though, to be sure, Adams was not far from the line of fire. Benton had only to lower the hand perhaps a foot and shift it three inches to the left to bring the man from Massachusetts directly into the accusatory finger's aim.
"And this!—in the face of the fact that in every contest for human rights, the great moneyed institutions of the world have uniformly been found on the side of kings and nobles, against the lives and liberties of the people!"
Adams clapped his hands together. Once, twice, thrice.
"Splendidly said, Thomas! And I can assure you that should I ever choose to forgo the barren soil of New England for the fertile vistas of Missouri, I shall certainly cast my vote for you upon every possible occasion."
That brought a laugh to the room. A booming one from Benton.
Coffee laughed, too, but his laugh faded quickly. Choked off at the source, so to speak. Adams had turned his head slightly, and Coffee finally spotted the little gleam somewhere in there.
_Uh-oh._ Belatedly, he remembered. Adams had so few of the overt political skills of most of the men in that room that it was easy to start underestimating the rest of the man. Even Andy Jackson, by now, would allow—not often, and then only grudgingly, true, but he'd still admit it—that John Quincy Adams had probably the finest political brain in the nation.
That didn't mean he was necessarily right on any given issue or dispute. He had his own biases, his own sectional and class views and interests, as much as any man. Not to mention that stiff Puritan way of looking at the world, so different from that of the Jackson camp, all of whom were certainly Christians but few of whom belonged to any church or regularly attended services.
But you underestimated that rapier intelligence at your peril.
"Fine, gentlemen," he said firmly. "We've argued this matter long enough. Clearly, I'm in a small minority on this issue, in present company. A minority of one, to be precise."
Sitting on a divan nearby, Governor Shulze waggled his hand. "Say one and a half, John." With his German accent, it came out more like "vun-unda-haff."
Shulze gave the room at large a mildly apologetic glance. "I understand—even agree, for the most part—with the points made by the senators from Tennessee and Missouri. Still, mine is a state with much industry and manufacture. I should not care to return to the financial chaos of previous times when it comes to the nation's banking system. I have also seen poor men—even thrifty German ones—stripped of all they own because a wildcat bank collapsed, and through no fault of their own. That is a form of tyranny, also."
Adams gave him a nod. On the opposite side of the room, so did Jackson. Shulze was raising the practical and financial side of the problem, which not even Andy would deny existed so long as the basic principle was retained.
But John Coffee barely noticed all that. His attention was riveted on Adams. There was a great big giant trapdoor opening here somewhere. He was sure of it.
Adams cleared his throat, almost as noisily as Benton had done a few moments ago.
"So I shall concede the point, while not restricting myself from saying what I believe on the issue as a representative from my state. In the event I should be elected, of course."
Normally, that would have brought a laugh, too. That Adams would be sitting in the House—in less than two months, not even having to wait for 1826—was now a foregone conclusion. As soon as John Quincy had announced his intentions, the sitting congressman from the Massachusetts 11th District had offered to resign his seat—on the condition that the governor of the state would appoint Quincy Adams to serve out his term.
The governor was no great friend and admirer of Adams, but no one expected him to do otherwise—for the simple reason that, whatever his personal inclinations, refusing to appoint Adams would pretty well guarantee his own removal from office at the next gubernatorial election. The Arkansas War had all of New England hopping mad, no state more so than Massachusetts. In the fray that was coming, the Bay State wanted its best lance in the tournament.
Coffee saw that Jackson wasn't smiling any longer, either. Andy had spotted the same gleam.
"But having done so, I must advance a demand of my own. It strikes me as grotesque for the senator from Missouri—as well as the senators here from Kentucky and Tennessee—to be making orations on the subject of the dire threat posed by a national bank to the foundations of our democracy."
Adams cocked an eye at Jackson. "A 'viper' in the crib of the republic, as I recall you putting it. A very nice turn of phrase. But having conceded the viper, I must now insist that my colleagues here explain to me how they can tolerate—decade after decade—the presence of a dragon in that very same crib. That great ancient reptile that is called slavery."
Coffee blew out his cheeks. So. There it was.
The elephant in the middle of the room, that they had all been doing their level best to pretend wasn't there.
Jackson sighed and looked away, staring out of one of the windows. Through whose panes he could easily see some of his own slaves—his many slaves—working in the fields beyond.
His lips quirked slightly. "Tarnation, John Quincy, the Republican Party managed to get all this way without ever much talking about that."
"Yes. I know we did. Quite successfully. But that was because the dragon was asleep."
For the first time since that day's session began, Adams rose from his chair. Unlike most of the politicians there, he was not given to perorations. But, clearly enough, his time had come. John Coffee didn't doubt for a moment that Adams had planned it this way from the opening of the informal session.
Not today's session, either. From the beginning. From the day he arrived at the Hermitage—or, more likely, weeks earlier when he'd accepted Jackson's invitation.
"It is time to face reality, gentlemen. We did not ask for the Arkansas War. Indeed, we opposed it. But the war is here, and none of us expects it to be over any time soon. Not before 1826, at the very earliest, and most likely not until 1828."
He pointed a finger of his own toward the west. Not a finger of accusation, simply that of a scholar, in college, instructing students.
"The Arkansas War changes everything, gentlemen. Whether you like it or I like it. Whether you ever intended to deal with the matter, or I did."
Adams paused long enough to finish composing his stance and expression. That Puritan rectitude business, whose self-critical honesty was perhaps even more annoying than the critical nattering at others. "And I will state here, for the record, that I never had any intention of doing so, either. Like you, I decided long ago to let the dragon sleep. As did George Washington, our first president. As did my father, who succeeded him. As did his successor, Thomas Jefferson—for all his public histrionics on the subject."
The last was said with a sneer. The whole Adams family, even those like John Quincy who had abandoned Federalism, had a corrosive detestation of Jefferson stemming from the campaign of 1800.
But his sneer was no greater than Jackson's. For all that the Republican Party—movement, say better—was sometimes called Jeffersonian, Andy Jackson despised Thomas Jefferson. So did the majority of the men in that room.
"As did James Madison and James Monroe, who succeeded them," Adams went on. "And you can be quite certain that our sixth president, the estimable Henry Clay, will be moving heaven and earth to do the same. Not that Calhoun will allow him the luxury."
He paused again, to sweep the room with a hard gaze. "Oh, no. In John C. Calhoun, you can _see_ the dragon, gentlemen. Erect and breathing fire. Henry Clay will sacrifice the virgin to the beast, or the beast will devour him whole. It has come wide awake. A dragon that might well have continued sleeping for decades, had things been otherwise. Slept long enough, indeed, for all of us here to pass on to the afterlife, never having dealt with the monster. Although I suspect our descendants would not have thanked us for it, two or three generations hence. And I have come to do much more than suspect that the God we will all someday answer to will most certainly not thank us at all. In that, if nothing else, I think the scoundrel Jefferson was stating the simple truth."
He sat down abruptly. "So. There it is. I have some proposals of my own. I am most willing to listen to proposals from anyone else. But this much I will not budge on. I will give you the bank, Senator Jackson. We have already compromised on the tariff and internal improvements, in which I conceded more than I gained. I will probably concede much else. But I _will not_ —ever again—participate in a political party that does not at the very least have the simple honesty—the simple virtue, if you will—to be able to call a reptile a reptile. If it can't even manage that much, it can't manage anything worthwhile."
Silence followed. Coffee looked around the room.
Andy was still staring out the window. Benton was giving Adams a look that was half a glare. Only half, though. Shulze was obviously trying not to look smug. Martin Van Buren, over in the corner, had an unreadable expression. But that was a given with the senator from New York. If there was any politician in the country slicker and smoother than Henry Clay, it was the Little Magician. The former Radical Republican's first and immediate reaction to anything was to start calculating the votes, once he was assured that states' rights would be respected. And no one thought Adams was challenging that principle.
Coffee then looked at Richard Johnson. The senator from Kentucky was giving Adams a look that Coffee couldn't interpret at all. Well...
He could, actually, he thought. If you remembered that Johnson was a man as well as a politician.
Finally, he looked at the two men who, in the end, were perhaps the most important ones of all. They were sitting side by side in a divan angled to the one holding Shulze.
William Carroll, governor of Tennessee. Joseph Desha, governor of Kentucky. There was no one here representing the state government of Missouri, because the elected governor had just died a couple of months earlier and his successor wasn't known yet.
Both men looked more like rabbits paralyzed by the sight of a viper—or a dragon—than anything else he could think of. Coffee couldn't really blame them. In the United States of America, in the year 1825, the states were more often than not the battlefields upon which the political wars were fought. A proposal—not even that yet, just a question—that frightened presidents and senators and congressmen could be downright petrifying for a governor.
Jackson spoke first, still looking out the window. His tone was quite mild. "Let's start with this, John. Under no conditions will I support outright abolition. Not even on a state level, much less a national one. First, because I detest abolitionists. Second, because I don't think it would work anyway. Third, because"—he had a crooked smile, now—"fine, I'll be honest. I can't afford it myself."
"Agreed," said Adams immediately. "To make something clear, Senator Jackson—or anyone here—I have no fondness for abolitionism myself. Never have had, despite what some people insinuate." He shrugged heavily. "The truth is, being blunt, I don't care much what happens to negroes. They are not my race of men, and I've never seen much evidence that leads me to question the general assessment of their capabilities. But that's not the point. The problem with slavery, so far as I am concerned, is not its effect upon negroes. The problem is its effect upon _us._ It is corroding the republic, gentlemen. Like venom from a viper. Sooner or later, it will sweep the republic under, in all but name, or it will tear it apart."
Carroll started to protest. "I think that's more than a bit—"
"No, he's right," said Jackson quietly. He still hadn't taken his gaze from the countryside beyond. "I didn't use to think so, either, Bill. But John's right. Arkansas changed everything. Or maybe it's better to say that Arkansas stripped away the blinders. Where do you want to start? States' rights? Calhoun and his people are already demanding that the federal post has to be closed to abolitionist literature."
"But you said—wasn't but—"
Jackson waved his hand impatiently. "I know what I said. Didn't seem like such a bad idea to me, once. Stinking abolitionists. But haven't you been paying attention? Now they're claiming that even the reports being filed by Cullen Bryant—even Scott!—are 'abolitionist.' "
Finally, he turned away from the window. Some fury was coming into his eyes. "And don't that cap the climax? Winfield Scott, who whipped the British at the Chippewa and almost lost his life at Lundy's Lane, has to shut his mouth and not tell the country the truth about its military affairs—so that John Calhoun, who never once in his life put himself in harm's way for the sake of the republic, isn't discomfited on his plantation. No different, I tell you—no different at all!—from those damn traitors in New Orleans!"
He gave the room a sweeping gaze much like the one Adams had just given it. Allowing for a fifty-degree increase in temperature. "No, sir! Be damned if I'll support that!"
His eyes met those of John Quincy Adams, then, and the two men exchanged a quick, hard nod.
So, it was all over but the shouting.
Well, all over but the dickering. There'd be days of that, still.
John Coffee thought about his own reaction and was a bit surprised at what he found.
Simply relief. A man could live with a reptile, even place his own well-being in the creature's care. That wasn't easy, but it could be done. What was truly hard—exhausting, after a while—was the need to keep insisting the scaly damn thing was warm and furry. As if it were a pet instead of a vicious wild beast that could turn on you at any moment.
By midafternoon, two days later, they finally agreed on a modification of New York's method of gradual emancipation. Quincy Adams dragged the negotiations out for at least half a day, all but calling them a pack of cowards. New York had taken longer to free its slaves than any of the Northern states except New Jersey. In fact, they still weren't all free. There were hardly any negroes remaining who were affected by those particular curlicues in a set of laws that was riddled with curlicues, true enough. But, technically, the last slave in New York wouldn't be free until 1827.
But Coffee knew—everybody knew—that was just Quincy Adams's way of applying the goad. Fine for him to advocate the Vermont or Massachusetts approach, when slaves had never featured significantly in those colonies and states to begin with. The legislative program they were trying to develop had the border states as their principal target, and slavery was prominent in those states.
So, they felt the New York model would be more palatable, given that New York had had a large number of slaves through most of its history. In fact, until very recently, there had been more slaves in New York City than in any city in the nation, including Charleston, South Carolina. Nor was that simply a reflection of the fact that New York was by far the largest city. It was estimated that, as late as the end of the century, one out of four households in the city had owned slaves.
There was the further advantage, using the New York model, of having Martin Van Buren's expertise—no small thing, when it came to what would surely be bitter infighting in Congress.
Not that the issue would really be decided in Congress. Jackson, a firm advocate of states' rights, was adamant that no emancipation program of any kind could be applied to the nation as a whole. The new party could legitimately use Congress only as a podium from which to expound its views. The battles themselves would have to be won in the separate states, one at a time.
In practice, that meant Tennessee and Kentucky within a year or two, with Missouri to come later. The issue of slavery was still a sore point in Missouri because of the Missouri Compromise. Benton warned them that it would take, in his estimate, at least four years before any Missouri legislature would be willing to seriously contemplate the notion.
You never knew, though, he added. More and more German immigrants were coming into the state, and wherever Germans went, support for slavery was sure to drop. Drastically, at times. What was perhaps more important, however, was the uncertain variable of the Arkansas War.
Arkansas had forced the issue—and Arkansas might very well continue to set the pace and determine the parameters. If for no other reason than the simplest and crudest. The longer and more successfully a mostly black nation could defend its independence, the more difficult it became for any white man in America—even John Calhoun—to persist in the claim that black people were incapable of managing their own affairs.
That was the ancient formula, even older than the dangers of a Praetorian Guard. A nation might produce no poets, no philosophers, no inventors, no scientists, no statesmen, no theologians, no sculptors—no barbers and butchers and bakers, for that matter. But if it could beat down anyone who tried to conquer it, no one could claim that it didn't produce men.
Poets and philosophers might weep over that crude arithmetic. But Andrew Jackson was neither, whatever John Quincy Adams's pretensions might be. He had no trouble with it at all. He had subscribed to the formula in full since the age of thirteen, when he told a British officer who commanded him to shine his boots that he'd not do it. He still had the scar on his forehead from the officer's ensuing saber cut—but he'd never shined the boots.
**CHAPTER 41**
On the following day, having settled the core question, the founders of the new National Democratic-Republican Party—such was the title they decided upon—were seized by a bolder spirit. Or perhaps it was simply that they could calculate a different arithmetic. That was certainly true of Van Buren.
With the political authority gathered at that founding convention of the new party, its leaders were quite confident that they could win in Tennessee, Kentucky, and Missouri. Not easily, no, but win they would. And they'd win Delaware, too, perhaps even sooner than Missouri. The Quakers and Methodists were influential in that state. The Quakers had long been antislavery, and the Methodists had been moving steadily in that direction. Arkansas Post—the whole Arkansas situation—was turning the Methodist drift into a powerful current.
That aside, the new party's program of gradual emancipation was sure to lose them all of the South itself, with the possible exception—over time, not quickly—of Maryland and the Old Dominion. That was sure to be true, even though the rest of their program would generally appeal to the poorer classes of white Southerners.
That meant, whatever else, that they needed to seize and keep the allegiance of New England—and New England would chafe at too many compromises. Outright abolitionism was growing by leaps and bounds in the region after Second Arkansas Post. A current in Delaware, it was a tide in New England.
The same was true in Pennsylvania, perhaps even more so. If Pennsylvanians were not given to Puritan posturing, they were considerably more iron-headed than New Englanders. Abolitionists might pour into meetings at Faneuil Hall in their thousands. Pennsylvania had already sent a Lafayette Battalion to Arkansas. A small one, granted, according to the news reports. More in the way of a company than anything a military man would call a battalion. But there would be more coming, if the same accounts were accurate.
Needless to say, countermoves were being planned, beginning in South Carolina and Georgia. Calls had already been issued for the formation of Cavalier Brigades to show Brown's Raiders and the so-called Lafayette Battalions what was what on the field of valor. Even allowing for the usual Southron bombast, no one had much doubt that private military forces from Southern states would be entering the fray by next year. "Bleeding Arkansas" would soon be more than an abolitionist's histrionic slogan.
So, for the rest—with the obvious exception—they swung over to the Vermont road. The "high road," as Quincy Adams persisted in calling it, much to the irritation of his colleagues.
_No disenfranchisement due to race or color._
_No restrictions of property due to race or color._
_No restrictions of movement or residence due to race or color._
In short, in one fell swoop—with the obvious exception—they proposed to eliminate the middle ground between slavery and freedom. Strike down any and all forms of exclusion laws. A black man might be a slave, or he might be free. But if he was free, he would have—legally, at least—the rights of any white citizen.
The work done, they basked in self-esteem.
For perhaps three minutes, until Richard Mentor Johnson finally spoke after days of almost unbroken silence.
John Coffee had been afraid he would.
"Gentlemen, I can't go along with this any longer." The Kentucky senator's face seemed more homely than ever. But it was also set as stubbornly as any mule's. "Not without the rest. It just sticks in my craw."
Jackson was back at the window. The others were in their usual seats.
No one said anything. Their faces were stiff, wooden. With the exception of the two border states' governors, anyway. Their expressions were back to that rabbit-staring-at-a-viper look.
"To Sam Hill with all of you," Johnson said tonelessly. "I don't care what you think. I've been in love with my wife since I was eighteen years old. She's the mother of my two children. And I find, when all is said and done, that I just don't see where all the rest means a good God-damned thing if a man can't marry his own wife and claim his children for his own. Which I would surely like to do some time before I die. Let that hypocrite Tom Jefferson explain Sally Hemings and his bastards to the Lord when his time comes. I don't want to have to do the same."
"Well said," stated Quincy Adams. "My salutations, sir."
Coffee looked to the window. After a moment, Jackson turned around. "Yes. I agree. Add it to the list."
Carroll threw up his hands. "Andy, for the sake of—tarnation! We throw in amalgamation, we may as well just fold up our tents right now."
"Oh, bullshit." Jackson nodded at Johnson. "He's been married in all but name to a nig—negress—for a quarter of a century. And if there's anybody—any voter—in the state of Kentucky who don't know it, I'd like you to show me where they're hiding. And how many times has he gotten elected, Bill? And reelected?"
The governor of Tennessee tightened his jaws. But they weren't any tighter than those of the state's senator. The next words from Jackson almost came through gritted teeth.
"Besides, it doesn't matter. The thing that separates our party from—whatever you want to call that pack of scoundrels who don't agree on much of anything except they want power—is this, before it's anything else. You figure out what you think the republic needs. First. Then you figure out how to get enough people to vote for you. What you don't do—ever—is go at it the other way around. Leave that to the Henry Clays of the world."
"Well said, also," stated Quincy Adams. "In fact, I'd like to propose a drink to that statement. Manifesto, I should rather call it."
He bestowed the first real smile on his colleagues he'd given them since he'd arrived at the Hermitage. "Whiskey, of course."
Even Carroll chuckled at that. But he made one last stab at it.
"How about—"
" _Add it,_ tarnation," Jackson growled. " 'No restrictions on marriage due to race or color.' To Sam Hill with the whole business! I've just gotten sick of it. And the longer we argue about it, the sicker I get. In the end, you've got to ask yourself a simple question. What kind of democracy have you got when a man can't make such a basic decision on his own as to which woman he marries? And if the decision he makes is one that you or me think only a lunatic would make, so be it. Every man in this room"—he gave Adams a semiskeptical glance—"except maybe the blasted Puritan over there, believes staunchly in the separation of church and state. And marriage is a matter between a man and a woman and their God. So what business has the state got sticking its nose into it?"
He waved his hand, more or less in the direction of the nation's capital. "You know and I know what the real issue is here. It's the same issue that's underneath every single blasted one of these points. It's not about marriage, just like"—here he gave Adams a frosty eagle's look—"the Bank quarrel's not about banking. It's about _power._ You give black people that last opening—give it three generations, who's to say what's black in the first place?—and you throw overboard John Calhoun's precious so-called 'positive good.' Slavery's just a thing, then. A machine to make money. Nothing more, nothing less. And no machine lasts forever. Never has, never will."
Carroll took a very deep breath, and let it out slowly. "Well...all right. We'll take a beating, though, Andy. Don't think we won't."
"Yes, I know," Jackson replied. "I've taken beatings before."
He grinned then. "But the worst one I ever took in my life came at the hands of that bear-sized bastard Benton sitting right over there. So why am I supposed to worry about what a skinny pipsqueak like Henry Clay might do?"
That brought uproarious laughter, and the whiskey came out. And stayed out, for the rest of the day and well into the night. The work was done. No one could say it wasn't, any longer.
Toward evening, Governor Carroll approached Senator Johnson, who had joined Jackson and Coffee at the window.
"Look, Dick, I don't want you to think there was anything personal about that. It's just—"
Johnson smiled and shook his head. "Oh, I know that, Bill. I couldn't hardly get too self-righteous about it anyway. Seeing as how I didn't make up my mind until yesterday. And the truth is, it didn't so much involve Julia in the first place. Not really."
He seemed to be a bit embarrassed then. "What I mean is, she and I have managed well enough for a long time now. We could have gone on the same way. But the thing is..."
His voice trailed off, and his eyes went back to the window. Beyond, there really wasn't much to be seen except sunset over the Tennessee countryside. And black people walking slowly back to the slave quarters. Their day's work was done, too.
"I got another letter from Julia two days ago," he said. "Longer one than usual."
"How's she holding up?" asked Coffee.
"Pretty well, actually." He chuckled, very softly. " 'Course, she spent the first page of the letter goin' on and on about how much she misses me. Which I don't doubt. But it's pretty obvious New Antrim agrees with her quite well."
He paused, watching the slaves. Their pace was picking up as they neared the quarters. Faster, the closer they got. That was because the word was spreading, not because they were all that eager to return. Their quarters were decent enough, as slave quarters went. Andy wasn't the sort of plantation owner to force his slaves to live in shacks. But they were still considerably more modest—certainly more cramped—than even a frontier family's log cabin.
"How much whiskey are you passing out?" he asked.
"As much as they want," Jackson replied, "so long as they don't get rowdy. Not the good stuff, of course. And I told the overseers to give them the day off tomorrow."
A thin sort of grin came to his face. "And I'm prepared to be charitable about how I define 'rowdy.' So don't be expecting too much in the way of quiet rest tonight, gentlemen. But to go back to the subject, I can't say I'm surprised that she finds New Antrim agreeing with her. She _is_ a black woman, Dick, even if she's got twice as many white ancestors as black ones and her skin's no darker than most Indians. And New Antrim is a black city. Bigger than any in the United States, now, according to the newspaper accounts, except a handful."
He shook his head slightly. "I got to admit, I'm surprised. I wouldn't have thought you could pack that many black folks in one place without them burning it down. Just by accident."
"It's pretty orderly, actually, what Julia says. But the main thing about the letter was that she turned to Imogene. It seems my daughter has formed a certain attachment to a young fellow there. Pretty serious, Julia says, even if Imogene's still too young for any such thing."
Jackson frowned. "Your twins are...what, Dick? Not more than fourteen, if I remember right."
"Not even that. Thirteen. And the boy involved just turned eighteen. Julia don't approve, of course. But..."
Johnson sighed. "Imogene's always been the more rambunctious of the two, and she's stubborn like you wouldn't believe. The main thing, Julia tells me, is that he's a nice boy. Quite a decent sort, and not one to take advantage of a girl so young. In fact, it seems he's leaning on her to pay more attention to her studies, and she's even obeying him. And ain't that a laugh? I couldn't ever do it with a stick!"
"So..."
"What's the problem? The problem is that Julia went on for another two pages about what a splendid young fellow this here boy was. Courteous, levelheaded, responsible. He's even an officer already, in their army. Just got promoted to captain, in fact."
"At _eighteen?_ " Jackson's brow was close to thunderous. "What kind of army promotes an eighteen-year-old—? Oh."
Johnson squinted at him. "Oh what, Andy?"
Jackson's frown was fading quickly. "Didn't you read Scott's account of the battle?"
"Well, sure, but—"
"Dig it up and read it again. You'll find your Imogene's swain. I can even tell you his last name, though I don't remember the first. Parker."
He shook his head. It was one of those odd sorts of head-shakes, though. Admiring more than disapproving, mixed with something of just plain wonder. "That's quite some boy, I can tell you that. But I see your problem."
Carroll and Coffee were both lost, now. They'd also read the accounts of the battle, of course. But they hadn't subjected them to the sort of fine-tooth-comb scrutiny that Andy had. Not that Jackson actually expected he'd ever be leading an army against Arkansas. But...you never knew, and an old general's habits die hard.
Seeing their looks of confusion, Johnson got to the point. "Oh, come on, fellows. You both know Julia, as many times as you've visited Blue Spring Farm. When was the last time—or the first time—you ever heard her showering praise on _anybody?_ Much less two pages worth in a letter?"
Coffee smiled. "She's astringent that way, no doubt about it."
Johnson was staring out the window again, his expression gloomy. "There's only one possible explanation. This Parker boy might be a veritable paladin. But I can tell you for sure what else is true about him, that Julia just somehow never got around to mentioning in her letter. He's black as the ace of spades, too. Only reason she'd be carrying on like that."
"Oh." That came from Carroll.
"Yeah. Oh."
"Yes, Scott mentions that in his account," Jackson added. "As negro as they come."
He twisted his head to bring his eyes to bear on Johnson. That same frosty eagle's look he'd bestowed on Adams earlier. "Also as valiant as they come, in whatever color. Read Scott's report. So what do you propose to do about it, Dick?"
Johnson chuckled humorlessly. "Well, first I'll try to talk the girl out of the foolishness. Whenever I can manage to see her next, which is Sam Hill knows when. Knowing Imogene, though..."
The sun had almost set by now. "But that's actually why I got stubborn in the end. To go back to where we started. What it all comes down to is that I just can't really see where anybody except the Creator who made us all has the right to pass the sins of the fathers onto their children. I hope Imogene gets more sensible about it all when she gets older. But whatever she does, I don't ever want her having to live the lie I did. Not ever again. I wouldn't wish that on anybody."
There was silence for a bit, until the sun finished setting. Then Jackson called for another round of drinks.
Later that evening, when Coffee had a moment alone with Jackson, he leaned over and said quietly: "I'm not all that surprised, now that I've had time to think about it, that you swung over to John Quincy on the matter. But I'm still surprised you did it so fast and easy."
Jackson's responding smile was a bit rueful. Coffee might have even called it a bit of a guilty smile. Except that "guilt" fit Andy Jackson about as well as feathers fit a bull. Whatever else Old Hickory might be, he was surely the most self-righteous man in America.
"Well...That was Houston's doing. I've gotten letters from him about every week for months now." He nodded toward Adams. "So's John Quincy, he tells me. When Sam puts his mind to something, that blasted youngster can be awful persuasive."
Coffee thought about it. That was true, up to a point. Sam Houston's silver tongue was famous all over the country, and although Coffee had never read any of his correspondence, he didn't doubt that the man's pen was just as silvery. Still...
"Andy, you could teach stubbornness to a mule. Nobody who ever lived can be _that_ persuasive."
Jackson's smile broadened and lost any trace of ruefulness. "Sure he can. When he's got Arkansas Post on his side—and he's writing letters to a general. Think about it, John. The question Sam kept posing was as simple as it gets. As long as Arkansas stands, the issue of slavery just can't be ignored any longer. And did I think—really think—that Arkansas could be driven under? And if so, how? Blast that conniving youngster!"
Coffee wasn't quite following him. "And your answer was...?"
"Of course I could whip Arkansas! The first time he asked, I sent back a short summary of how I'd do it. Pretty much the same plan Zack Taylor tried to talk those idiots in Washington around. It ain't complicated. Stay out of that death trap in the river valley after seizing as much of the Delta as we can. Threaten them on the south, doing whatever it takes to secure a route up the Red. Then make the big thrust from the north, down the Arkansas, splitting off the Indians from the negroes. It'd all end with a siege of Fort of 98. Bloody damn business, for sure, but I'd win."
He took a self-satisfied sip from his whiskey. "It'd work, sure as the sunrise. There just aren't enough negroes and Indians in Arkansas—I don't care how tough they are—to stand off eight million white Americans."
He fell silent. Coffee frowned. "And...?"
"And what do you _think?_ Sam right off sent back a letter congratulating me on my perspicacity and posed a few more questions. And did the same in all the letters that followed, until I gave up."
Now, Coffee was completely lost. " _You_ gave up? Why?"
"Figure it out, John. You've fought wars, too, right alongside me. Sit down when you get home, and start writing down everything you'd have to do to make that plan work. Figure the size army you'd need. Figure the logistics you'd need. That part's not too hard. Then—Sam never let me off the hook, not once—start figuring out all the _political_ changes you'd need to back all that up. By the fifth letter, I'd had martial law declared all across New England and Pennsylvania. And how do you finance the business? Nothing in the world's as expensive as a war, especially a big one that goes on for years. By the time I got to the seventh letter—maybe the eighth—I was starting to contemplate the virtues of a national bank. So help me God, I was."
Jackson drained the rest of his whiskey. "And there's your answer, which Sam Houston wouldn't let me slide away from. Yeah, sure, I _could_ conquer Arkansas. But was I willing to pay the price? And for what?"
He waved the empty glass at the window, beyond which the slaves could be heard at their festivities. "So I could keep my slaves? Tarnation, I came into the world without a slave to my name, and the day I'll destroy my republic in order to keep them is the day my name stops being Andrew Jackson. I can figure out ways to emancipate slaves without going broke in the process. Not easily, but I can. What I can't do is figure out how to keep them—not for all that long—in a world that has Arkansas in it. Without gutting and skinning the republic. It just ain't worth it, John. Simple as that."
Now he waved the empty glass at Adams, who was in a corner talking with Van Buren. "I imagine Sam did exactly the same to that poor bastard. Except—being a pigheaded Massachusetts scholar—it probably took John Quincy twice as long to admit he was cornered as it took me. How about another drink?"
The slaves did push the limits of "rowdy," although nothing important actually got broken. But on both occasions when the overseers came to Jackson for instructions, he sent them away.
The masters were pretty rowdy themselves by then. His pious wife Rachel, much disapproving, went early to bed. They were even beginning to blaspheme quite openly, laughing all the while.
Especially after John Quincy Adams, no longer even remotely sober, proposed an alternative title for their new party: the National Illegitimate Party. With its clear and simple fighting slogan: _Better a Plain Black Bastard in Office than a Fancy White-Striped Skunk._
**CHAPTER 42**
_Washington, D.C._
NOVEMBER 1, 1825
"It's definite," said Adam Beatty. He laid a copy of the _National Intelligencer_ onto the president's desk. "Today's edition. It has the full text of the program of the new party. The 'Declaration of Principles,' the silly bastards are calling it."
At Clay's courteous nod, Beatty took a seat in one of the chairs surrounding the desk where Clay's other political advisers were already seated. Fortunately, not adjoining Porter's. By now, Peter's dislike for the Kentucky legislator had grown into pure loathing.
"Everything's there, Henry," Beatty continued, grinning. "And—believe me—it's every bit as insane as any of the rumors. Ha! The bedlamites might as well have cut their own throats and been done with it!"
Clay already had the newspaper spread in front of him and was starting to read the first-page headline story. Most of the advisers—all of them, actually, except Porter himself—were craning their necks. Josiah Johnston, sitting the closest, had half risen out of his chair.
Beatty rummaged in his satchel. "No need to strain yourselves, gentlemen. I obtained plenty of copies. Enough for everyone."
A moment later, Porter had a copy of the _Intelligencer_ on his own lap. He didn't give it more than a cursory glance, though, for the same reason he hadn't craned his neck with the others. He'd already read it before coming to the meeting this morning.
Twice. All the way through and back again.
"They're madmen, I tell you!" exclaimed Beatty, still with that grin. "They're even advocating amalgamation!"
Porter cleared his throat. There were limits, and he had finally reached all of them.
"No, actually—and I'd advise you to be careful how you phrase that. They are not _advocating_ amalgamation. They're simply calling for the removal of all laws that regulate marriage by criteria of color."
Beatty was giving him that look that Porter had come to detest. Half frowning, because he was stupid. Half jeering, because his stupidity had no bottom.
"If you can't understand the difference, Representative Beatty, it's the difference between advocating divorce and allowing for it in the law. I do not advocate that you divorce your wife."
_Not that the poor woman probably wouldn't thank me._
"I do, however, propose to make it legally possible for you to do so, should that be your choice."
He didn't bother disguising the underlying sneer.
Clay spoke a bit hastily to keep the matter from escalating. "Yes, yes, Peter, of course you're right." He gave Beatty a veiled look from under lowered brows. "Do be careful about that, Adam. We don't want to be accused of outright fabrication."
Porter had become all too familiar with that veiled expression, also. More and more, Clay was separating his lines of action and using different advisers for different purposes. He might just as well have said: _By all means throw the charge around, Adam—with wild abandon—just make sure it can't be traced back to me._
Granted, Clay had always been a rough political fighter, even if he wore gloves. Porter had admired the trait in times past, and he wouldn't have objected if the gloves came off. The problem was that Henry was doing the opposite as time went on. He was adding more gloves at the same time his blows were getting lower.
It was becoming...filthy. There was no other word for it.
Johnston spoke next. "We shouldn't have any trouble, now, getting Congress to pass the military appropriations bill. None at all, I'd think."
Porter levered himself upright. That issue was his principal concern. "Henry, I want to advise you again that I think it would be a mistake to present that bill to Congress."
The other advisers were looking either pained, in the case of Johnston, or derisive, in the case of Beatty, or something in between. Clay's face had no expression at all.
Porter knew this was his last chance, so he decided to use whatever leverage he had. What little leverage he had any longer.
He pointed to the _Intelligencer._ "Let the ramifications of that settle in for a bit. In a month or two, I think you'd be able to get the appropriations bill passed that we _need._ "
"Oh, for the love of—" Beatty broke off the incipient blasphemy. Clay didn't approve of such, and at least part of his disapproval was actually genuine.
Beatty slid forward, perched on the edge of his chair. "We've been over this more often than I want to remember. Mr. Porter, no one except you thinks it will take an army the size of the Russian tsars to squelch a pack of rioting negroes. A simple doubling of the regiments—"
Weeks—months—of simmering doubts and frustration boiled to the surface. Without realizing he'd done so, Porter was on his feet.
"Mr. Beatty, have you ever gotten any closer to a battlefield than you have to the moon? Because I _have._ " He pointed a slightly shaking finger at the newspaper. "Did you read the account of the battle, every detail of which was published in that same newspaper? And many others. They were _outnumbered,_ and they still held off half the existing U.S. Army while inflicting worse casualties than almost any battle in the war with Britain and routing several thousand militiamen. And you—you—you—propose to call them rioting negroes, as if we faced nothing more than a minor civil disturbance?"
Clay was saying something, but Porter was simply too angry to pay attention. "Blast you! Gentlemen, we are dealing with a _war,_ here. A very real, no-joking, _war._ That means we have got to mobilize the same way—"
_"Peter!"_
Porter broke off at that half shout. He saw that Clay was on his feet. The president's expression was just short of a glare.
"Peter," he said sternly, "I'm afraid I shall have to ask you to leave. And please do not return until and unless you have regained your composure."
Porter stared at him.
"Now, please."
There was—
Nothing to say, that he could think of. Any longer. Explosively, he let out a breath that he hadn't even realized he was holding in.
"Yes, of course, Mr. President. My apologies." He gathered up his own satchel and made for the door.
On the way out, he heard Clay saying: "For that matter, gentlemen, I think we should leave this whole issue out of our discussion altogether. It is now properly a matter for the Cabinet."
_The Cabinet._ That meant John Calhoun, first and foremost. Who had also never in his life come closer to a battlefield than he had to the moon. And who, while he favored as big an expansion of the army as possible, had a contempt for black people so deep that it blinded him.
But as he passed through the door, Peter realized it was no longer any of his concern. There were limits. There _had_ to be limits, and he was now past them.
Outside, on Pennsylvania Avenue, he looked down at the Capitol. Trying, for a moment, to remember how many years he had spent in the republic's service, doing his best to help guide it.
Enough. He had his own affairs to tend to, which he had long neglected. What would happen would happen, unfolding according to its own grim logic. A war begun by happenstance—some scheming, too, to be honest—would now be fought by men who thought they could do everything by half measures, supplanting the other half with schemes. The half measures would fail, succeeded by fuller ones—but those, too, would be stunted by that same cleverness, which was too clever by half. Until, in the end, they found themselves in a roaring rapids, in a rudderless raft they'd thought to be a steamboat, with the falls ahead.
Be damned to them all. Peter Porter owned no slaves and never had.
He was finally able to laugh, a bit. And never would own any, of course. Not now.
_New Antrim_
NOVEMBER 7, 1825
Sheff Parker was surprised when Julia Chinn ushered Winfield Scott into his room. He knew who the man was, of course, and had even seen him a time or two on the streets before his injury. But they'd never exchanged so much as a single word.
He lowered the newspaper he'd been working his way through, with some relief. He'd have preferred reading an account of the new National Democratic-Republican Party's program in an article written by Cullen Bryant and Scott. But Bryant had left a few weeks ago. He'd decided to remain in Arkansas for the duration of the war. But, that being the case, he had no desire to remain separated from his wife and daughter, so he'd gone to get them and bring them back with him.
From what Sheff had been told by Julia, Scott had considered the same course of action. But either because his family was larger—five children in all—or because his wife came from Virginian upper crust, or because he was apparently planning to cover the war from both sides of the line, he'd decided otherwise.
Unfortunately, from Sheff 's point of view, that meant the analysis of the new party's program was being written by John Ridge and Buck Watie. And they tended toward a far more flowery style of prose. Sheff 's ability to read was improving rather quickly, now that he had so much time on his hands. But this was a strain.
Scott came to the bed and leaned over to see what Sheff was reading.
"Oh, dear Lord. I don't envy you that. I leave aside the fact that their assessment misses the mark wildly, and on at least three counts."
"Why do—ah, please have a seat, General."
"Thank you. Why do I think that?" The tall former officer drew up a chair. "Let's start with the most basic. If you took that seriously, you'd think the entire program of the new party—well, let's say nine points out of ten—was essentially a fraud. Then let's consider the fact that the estimable Ridge and Watie can't decide whether that's good or bad. Which is understandable enough, given their predicament. The Ridge family estates in Oklahoma have more slaves working them than all but the wealthiest plantations in the South. After that, we can move on—"
"Is it true that most of the slaves will never see freedom?"
"Oh, yes, Captain Parker, that's quite true. The same thing will happen in Tennessee and Kentucky—and Missouri, though perhaps not Delaware—that happened in New York and most of the Northern states that adopted gradual emancipation. Before the time limit expires, most slave-owners will have sold their slaves to masters somewhere in the South. I'd be surprised if more than one out of five people who were scheduled for manumission ever receive it. The black populations of most of those states dropped precipitously in the years prior to emancipation—and I can assure you they didn't move to Canada, the most of them."
He nodded toward the southeast. "They—or their children—are laboring on a plantation somewhere in the Carolinas or Georgia, or perhaps working as stevedores on the docks of Savannah or Charleston. As I say, Delaware may be an exception. The Quakers and Methodists will be vigilant, and they may be able to keep that to a minimum. In any event, Delaware already has the largest freedmen population of any state in the nation, at least in percentage terms. The people of the state are fairly accustomed to it by now."
Sheff studied the man's face. For all the cynicism that rested on the surface of Scott's expression, something else lay underneath.
"Please explain," Sheff said. He lifted the paper a bit. "Why that goes against what they're saying."
"Because they're like men on a battlefield who see only the casualties and don't consider the fight. In the long run, Captain Parker—yes, I know this will sound very callous to you—it doesn't matter what happens to those people. Give it two generations, three at the outside, and slavery is dead. Jackson knows that, Adams knows that, and you can be quite sure that John Calhoun knows it, too."
Scott waved a dismissive hand at the newspaper. "Those lads—they're very young, so I'll grant them the excuse—are approaching this as if it were simply a moral issue. Which it is, of course. But battles are not won with moral splendor. They're won by the brute force of the clash of arms."
Sheff just waited, patiently. Sooner or later, he figured the man would get around to it.
After a moment, Scott smiled at him. "You _are_ smart. Patrick told me you were."
He lifted one long leg and crossed it over the other. Then, folded his hands in his lap.
"Here's how it is, Captain Parker. Slavery expands, or it dies. For two reasons. First, because the agriculture involved is frightfully wasteful of the soil. Within a much shorter time than you might think, so-called King Cotton will look like a bedraggled down-at-the-heels little robber baron. As it already does in the northern tier of slave states. The truth is—my father-in-law dislikes to admit it, as do most of my native state's gentry—Virginia's main crop nowadays is slaves themselves. Whom they breed like so much livestock in order to sell to cotton growers in the Deep South."
A sneer came to his face. "Remember that, the next time you read one of John Randolph's perorations on liberty. But you can see where I'm going. How are slave-owners in Georgia and Alabama to make the same transition—from King Cotton to King Negro—when there are no new slave territories into which cotton production is expanding?"
Sheff thought about it. "Well, there's Texas."
Scott chuckled. "Yes, indeed. And—remember I told you this—I expect within ten years we'll be seeing a war down there, too. But Texas alone, even if the South can seize it, won't be enough. Once Kentucky and Tennessee and Missouri are closed to slavery, it begins to die in its own waste. But it won't come to that, anyway. Because the _other_ reason slavery needs to expand is political. The population of the North and the West in the United States grows much faster than that of the South. Because of immigration, if for no other reason. No immigrants except wealthy ones—and they're but a handful—want to live in a slave state. Slavery depresses wages, and it stifles opportunity for small enterprise. So they move to the North and West. And now—"
He pointed to the newspaper. "— _this_ is the essence of that program, which the estimable Ridge and Watie managed to miss completely. The border states have finally decided they are part of the West, not the South."
"They haven't actually decided yet," Sheff said mildly. He wasn't trying to be disputatious, though. He was just deeply interested in the former general's assessment and wanted to draw it out as far as he could.
Winfield Scott really did have quite a magnificent sneer. Sheff was impressed.
"Ha! With _that_ band of brigands leading the charge? My dear captain! Should the legislature of Tennessee be so bold as to defy Andrew Jackson, he's quite capable of ordering the militia to train their guns on the state capitol. I believe he still holds the rank of major general in the militia, which remains fiercely attached to the man. By 'guns,' I include twelve-pounders. There are precious few slave-owners in the Tennessee militia, and those not major ones. One or two slaves, more like family servants than the chattel labor on big plantations. Hired hands, once they're freed, which is an easy enough transition for all parties involved."
Once again, he waved his hand dismissively. "No, no. With Jackson and Benton and Johnson and Carroll and Desha calling for it, the border states are lost to slavery. Not immediately, but they're lost. And once they're gone, the South will slide further and further into political impotence. The slave states have already lost the House, and the imbalance will grow deeper every year. Now, soon enough, they'll have lost the Senate. And I doubt if you'll see more than—at most—one Southerner ever sitting in the president's house again, so long as slavery lasts, where the first four of five came from the region. Five out of six, if we count Clay. Which I suppose we must, given that he's thrown himself into Calhoun's clutches. The blithering idiot."
Sheff studied him for a moment. "And that doesn't concern you?"
"Oh, of course it does. But it concerns me as a soldier of the United States, not as a Virginian. My loyalty is to the nation, Captain Parker. It always has been. I have no use for men with divided loyalties. On that if nothing else, I've always agreed with Andrew Jackson. So...I imagine I'll be returning to the colors one of these fine days."
The handsome patrician head looked very much like one of the Roman busts Sheff had seen in the Wolfe Tone Hotel. He'd wondered, a bit, why the Laird had gone to the trouble and expense of having them shipped there all the way from Philadelphia. He was normally quite frugal.
He figured he finally knew, now.
"You think there might be a war over it."
"That's...putting it too strongly," Scott mused. "But it's a possibility, yes. Although I think it's more likely to take the form of a series of armed clashes than what you could properly call a war. Either way, I expect I'll have work to do. My real line of work, so to speak."
He said that last with a smile. "Which, actually, brings me to the purpose of my visit. Patrick insisted I come. I didn't dare refuse him, of course. Him being my old master sergeant and a troll of most frightening proportions."
They shared a laugh at that. Sheff decided he liked Winfield Scott. Not that he could imagine ever being what you could call a real friend of the man, given the chasm of their origins. Although...who could say what the future might bring? As each year—each month—passed, Sheff was finding the future less and less predictable.
It was an enjoyable sensation, even a thrilling one, for an eighteen-year-old who could well remember how the future had looked not more than two years earlier. Extremely predictable, indeed. A life—probably a short one—filled with hard labor and poverty, ending in a grave. A pauper's grave at that.
There was a little commotion at the door. "Ah, that'll be the workmen," said Scott. He gave the small bedroom a quick inspection. "We'll have to move that dresser to another room. I'll let Julia figure that out."
He rose and went to the door, leaving Sheff to frown at the dresser.
_Why would they need to move—_
The answer came within five seconds. Two men entered, carrying between them a very large oak bookcase. It was bigger than any bookcase Sheff had ever seen, except the one in the parlor of the Wolfe Tone. Behind them came two more men, each bearing boxes. From the strain in their shoulders, heavy ones.
The next few minutes were simply confusing. Scott didn't seem to feel that explanations were needed. But when it was all done, the dresser in the corner was gone, and the bookcase was in its place. Filled with books, now.
Sheff could hear Julia talking with the workmen in the corridor beyond. Trying to decide where to put the dresser, he imagined, but he didn't spend any time worrying about that. None of his own clothes had been in it. All of his clothes, even the two uniforms, fit into the locker that was shoved under his bed.
"There you are, Captain," Scott said, presenting the bookcase with an outstretched hand. "Mind you, it's only on loan, and I'll want it back when my peregrinations are finished. Since my partner chose to leave for a few months to fetch his family, I'll let him handle the American side of the reporting. I'm off—tomorrow, in fact—for the first of several tours of the Oklahoma front. Colonel Taylor has agreed to give me an interview. I expect I'll be visiting the Red River region as well. But by the time that's all done, you should be fit for active duty again."
He wagged a finger at Sheff. "Mind you, I'll expect them all to be in the same good condition. Some of these books took me years to track down."
Sheff 's expression must have finally registered on Scott.
"What?" he exclaimed. "Patrick didn't _tell_ you? What a troll!"
But he was smiling, quite widely. "It's my famous military library, Captain Sheff. Patrick felt that it was time you applied yourself to your work seriously instead of lolling about in comfort and ease. General Ross agrees, with the caveat that he expects to be able to borrow from them himself. And now, I must be off. Good day."
He paused briefly at the door and looked back. "I spoke with the surgeon, by the way. Your wound seems to be quite similar to my own. The one I acquired at Lundy's Lane. If so, Captain, expect it to hurt off and on for the rest of your life. But there shouldn't be any other problem of any consequence. And if pain is a major concern to you, then you'd best start looking for a different line of work."
He was gone.
Ten seconds later, his head reappeared in the door. "One last thing. If you're still struggling with your reading, I'd recommend you start with the biographies. The technical manuals can be quite dismal."
Gone again. Sheff stared at the bookcase.
After a while, defying the surgeon's orders, Sheff levered himself out of bed and began to examine the titles.
Eventually, he decided on Julius Caesar's _The Gallic War._ He had no idea who the Gallics had been, but at least he'd heard of Caesar. Now that he thought about it, in fact, that might be one of the busts in the hotel.
But maybe not. It was always hard to know with the Laird. Being as he was a man who hated tyranny, but never seemed to have any trouble being a tyrant himself when he thought he needed to be.
Not that Sheff cared. Like almost everyone in New Antrim, he'd seen tyranny at its most naked. No nebulous abstraction that someone like John Randolph might declaim against, but the real faces that had murdered his father.
So if it took a tyrant to deal with that tyranny, he'd surely be the tyrant's legionnaire. Not hesitate for an instant, not though he waded through an ocean of blood.
He'd only gotten through the first few pages, though, when there was another commotion at the door. Julia Chinn came in with a white man Sheff had never seen before.
"Will this do?" she asked.
The man shook his head vigorously. "Impossible, Mrs. Johnson. Not for what you want. We really need a much larger room, where we can place at least three chairs."
Julia nodded and gave Sheff a quick inspection. "Can you sit upright, Captain? For—" She cocked an inquiring head at the stranger.
"Two hours at a stretch, Mrs. Johnson. Though I'd prefer three."
Julia turned back to Sheff. "Can you manage that?"
"Oh, sure, Miz Julia. Truth is, I'd find it a relief. I get real tired of lying in bed, no matter what the surgeon says."
"Splendid. Let's begin at once then, since Mr. Wiedeman has the day free, and that's hardly ever true."
Wiedeman gave Sheff a curt nod and left. Julia moved over to help Sheff out of the bed. "That's Lyle Wiedeman, Captain Parker. He just arrived in town less than two weeks ago. Everyone's thrilled, of course. First real artist we've ever had in New Antrim. Well, painter, at least. But for this purpose, a wood-carver like Antoinette simply wouldn't do at all."
It was odd hearing Miz Julia talking so properly. Not that she couldn't when she wanted to. She always did, in fact, on the frequent occasions when General Ross's wife, Eliza, came to visit. But Sheff wasn't accustomed to hearing her talk like that when just he and the girls were around.
After she helped him to his feet, she shook her head, smiling widely, and indicated his bedclothes with a finger. "And that won't do at all, either. Can you manage to put on your uniform, Captain? The dress uniform, I mean."
"I might need some help with the coatee, Miz Julia, but I can do the rest. If you give me just a few minutes."
"Certainly. But there's one other thing, Captain, I'd much appreciate."
"Yes, Miz Julia?"
" _That._ It won't do all, either. Not any longer. So I must insist."
The words were said sternly—whatever they meant—but she was smiling more widely than ever.
"I don't understand, Miz Julia."
"Mrs. Johnson, Captain. That's my name. Please use it, henceforth."
**CHAPTER 43**
By the time Sheff got into his uniform, Mrs. Johnson helping him with the coatee, and made it out into the boardinghouse's salon, he discovered that the whole room had been rearranged. Lyle Wiedeman had an easel set up to one side, with a large blank canvas, and paints of various kind on a small table next to it. The divan that normally occupied pride of place in the room had been moved against one of the walls. The boardinghouse's owner, Susan Wilson, was perched on its edge watching the activities, with her grandchildren—all six of them—filling the rest of the divan.
Fortunately, it was one of the crudely made but sturdy pieces of furniture produced by the McParland Furniture Company in Fort of 98. The young children were rambunctious, climbing all over the thing, and Mrs. Wilson was not being her usual stern taskmistress self. The widow's dark eyes were bright with interest at the unusual goings-on in the rest of the room. Clearly enough, she was giving only a small part of her mind to the matter of the youngsters.
Sheff thought that might get sticky before too long. Literally sticky, what with all the paint bottles on Wiedeman's little table—which was not sturdily built at all. He hoped that nothing disastrous would happen before the children's two mothers and their uncle got back from work.
That would be a while yet, though. Susan Wilson's daughters worked for one of the larger of New Antrim's garment manufacturers, which, like all such, had long hours. The uncle, a partly disabled veteran since Second Arkansas Post, enjoyed one of the secured jobs set aside for such by the army's commissariat. His hours of work were not particularly long, but he was sure to dawdle after work in one of the military saloons before finally wending his way home.
The husband of the younger of the Wilson daughters wouldn't be returning for two weeks at the earliest, since his unit was on patrol somewhere in the Ouachitas. The husband of the older daughter would never be returning at all. He'd died at Second Arkansas in the fighting at the wall, not more than fifty feet from the spot where Sheff had been struck down.
But Sheff didn't give the matter of the children much of his mind, either. First, because he was too fascinated and puzzled by everything else. And second, because Imogene was in the room and wearing a fancy dress he'd never seen on her before. It looked brand-new and store-bought.
She was grinning at him and seemed to be on the verge of jumping up and down with excitement like a girl half her age. Sheff wouldn't have thought much of it a year ago, when he'd first met her. She'd seemed so young, then, that the difference between a twelve-year-old and a six-year-old would have been minor.
But he couldn't help notice it today. It was odd, really, the way the girl seemed to age, since he'd been moved into the room upstairs and got to see her all the time. As if she were a month older for every day that passed. Sheff would swear that was true, except he was pretty sure it was just his mind playing tricks on him.
He'd asked Cal about it, just the week before.
"You wish!" had been the unkind response.
Mrs. Johnson clapped her hands. "All right, everyone take their positions! Mr. Wiedeman's time is valuable, and we can't waste any of it."
She pointed imperiously to one of the three chairs lined up in a row. "Captain Parker, you take the seat on the left."
No sooner had he done so than Mrs. Johnson took the seat next to him, in the middle. The other seemed destined to remain vacant.
"Mama!" Adaline exclaimed. "Cal's not here yet!"
For the first time, Sheff noticed the twin. It might be better to say that her presence registered on him. He realized now that she'd been in the room all along, wearing a dress very similar to her sister's except in small details of color and trim. But, as often happened when Imogene was there also, he simply hadn't paid any attention to her.
And there was another oddity. Sheff kept hearing people comment on the identical appearance of the two girls, leaving aside whatever clothing they might have on. Sheff would have thought they were insane, except he had a vague recollection of having once thought the same thing himself.
That was hard to imagine now. He could tell them apart instantly at any distance, rain or shine. He'd never had to test the matter, but he was just as sure he could tell them apart in pitch darkness, just from the sound of their voices. For that matter, just from listening to them breathe.
But he forced that last thought aside. Best not to dwell on the thought of listening to Imogene breathe, in the here and now. He had time to do that—and did, and would—every night that passed. In a bed covered by a blanket, where he didn't have to worry about the possible indelicacy posed by the tight-fitting trousers of his dress uniform.
"Hush, Adaline!" her mother scolded. "Lieutenant McParland will be along soon enough. Something must have detained him. In the meantime, we can get started. Mr. Wiedeman tells me he'll be concentrating on one part of the portrait at a time. So he can start with Sheff and Imogene. Be still, I say!"
Imogene came to stand behind him, and just to one side. A moment later, he felt her hand coming to rest on his shoulder.
He stiffened slightly, casting a nervous glance at Mrs. Johnson. He'd been careful—very, very careful—not to engage in any sort of physical contact with Imogene. That would get him pitched out of the house in an instant, he was quite sure. And as much as he sometimes found the temptation difficult to resist, he managed. Whatever else he was, Sheffield Parker was patient and methodical. If it took him longer to get somewhere than it might take someone else, he'd get there all the more surely.
But, to his relief—and surprise—he saw that Mrs. Johnson was simply giving the hand on his shoulder a calm assessment.
"Not so close to the neck, Imogene. And keep your fingers still."
That was it. Sheff had to tighten his jaw to keep it from dropping altogether.
"Begin when you're ready, Mr. Wiedeman. Susan, I would recommend that you not allow that rascal to stand on the arm of the divan."
"Oh!" Mrs. Wilson tore her eyes away from the tableau in the center of the room. "Andrew, you sit down! Right now, or I'll smack you!"
"Everybody please be still," Wiedeman commanded.
"Where's Cal?" Adaline wailed.
Some part of Callender McParland felt like wailing, himself. The mission that the Laird had recruited him for as he'd been on his way to the boardinghouse—"recruited" as in "press-gang"—was now successfully completed.
They'd found Sam Houston, missing since the night before. He was sprawled on a pew in the city's big Catholic church, just underneath the wall where the new painted carving of his wife was suspended.
Drunk as a skunk, as the saying went—except no skunk who ever lived would get this drunk. He was almost comatose.
The Laird took a deep breath. "What I figured," Cal heard him mutter.
Standing next to Driscol, Charles Ball shook his head. "Like old times, isn't it? Tarnation, he hasn't had hardly a drop of whiskey in...how many months has it been, Patrick?"
"Twelve," he replied stonily. "Exactly. God damn me for a fool, I plain forgot. His wife was murdered a year ago yesterday."
On the Laird's other side, Charles Crowell sighed. "Oh, Lord. I forgot, too."
He heaved his massive shoulders and moved toward Houston. "Old times, Charles, as you say. I carried him before; I'll do it again."
"Wait," said Driscol, putting a hand on the huge banker's arm. His eyes were on the carving.
"For what?" asked Ball.
The Laird didn't answer for a moment. Then he shook his head.
"No. The boy will have to deal with this soon enough. Not often, I'm hoping. Sam made it through a widowing, and moving his son to a new home, and fought and won a battle. But it'll happen again. You know it and I know it. So go to the Wolfe Tone and bring little Andy here. It's the best place to begin."
Ball nodded. Crowell hesitated. "Are you sure—"
"No, he's right," said Ball. "You stay here with Patrick and watch over him. I'll get the boy."
"Tiana'll have your hide, Patrick, when she finds out," said Crowell.
"No, she won't. She'll not say a word. Times like this, she's pure Cherokee."
Driscol turned to Callender. "Thank you for your assistance, Lieutenant McParland, but it won't be needed any longer. My apologies for detaining you."
Cal left with Ball. At a dignified enough pace, until they got out of the church and went their separate ways. Then he starting walking as fast as he could.
Adaline would have _his_ hide, for sure. And the worst of it was, he still couldn't figure out exactly how he'd found himself in this fix. As close friends as they'd become, he understood what drove Sheff to his fixation on Imogene. But what was _his_ excuse?
The girl was only thirteen! Cal wasn't any sort of Puritan, sure, but some things a man just didn't contemplate. And he wasn't looking for a wife of any age. Not yet, anyway. Most men didn't get married until they were ten years older than he was. He'd figured to do the same.
He still hadn't come to any conclusions by the time he reached the boardinghouse. Except the dim, growing, horrible sense that things just happened because they did. Whether a man planned them or not, or wanted them or not, they just went right ahead and happened all on their own.
Then he was ushered into the salon by Mrs. Wilson, and Adaline squealed the moment he came in, and the next thing he knew she'd raced over and was hugging him and—sure enough—her mother was fit to be tied.
" _Adaline!_ You come back here right this instant! And stop behaving disgracefully!"
After about three seconds, Adaline obeyed. Cal was pretty sure that had been the most thrilling three seconds of his life.
The dragon's glare now got leveled on him. Tarnation, he hadn't done anything!
"Lieutenant McParland."
But he'd look on the bright side. Might as well, since it was obvious the world would toss him however it would.
"How nice of you to come."
An ice cream parlor had finally opened for business in New Antrim. Wildly popular, of course, with Cal as much as anyone. Whenever it was open, the line went around the block. But it wasn't open very often, because ice was so hard to come by.
"Sit. Here. Please."
Not any longer. Just bottle that voice.
When Adaline put her hand on his shoulder, he liked to fly out of the chair. But, to his astonishment, the dragon didn't say a word.
Of course, if you could bottle the look in its eyes, you could probably freeze the whole chiefdom of Arkansas. And whenever Adaline so much as twitched a finger, the monster's hiss was enough to freeze your blood.
Still. It was an awfully thrilling two hours, with that hand there the whole time. By the end of it, Cal was halfway reconciled to the inescapable chaos of existence.
"Mrs. Johnson," said Sheff, sounding a bit timid.
"Yes, Captain Parker?"
"Ah...If I might ask, what's the—I mean. What are we doing here?"
She bestowed on him a look that was a _lot_ warmer than anything she'd given Cal in at least two months. Just another example of life's essential unfairness.
"Oh, that's simple. I told my husband I'd have a portrait of us made up. Since it may be quite a while before we see him again. Mr. Wiedeman assures me he can have it shipped safely to Kentucky."
"Oh, certainly," said the artist. "Might be a problem a few months from now, of course."
Cal almost choked. He leaned over a bit to get a good look at Sheff.
Sure enough. Amazing that a face that black could manage to look that purple at the same time.
"Ah...am _I_ going to be in the portrait?"
"What a ridiculous question. Of course you are, Captain Parker. Why else would you be sitting here?"
"But...ah..."
" _Imogene!_ I told you! Not so close to the neck! For that matter, the session is over. Remove the hand, please. At once."
All the ice cream you'd need for everyone in New Antrim, dawn to dusk.
"Is Daddy all right? He looks real sick."
Driscol shifted the boy a bit farther into his lap. "He's fine, Andy. A little sick, yes. But he'll be fine by tomorrow. It might happen again, mind. You needn't worry about it though, lad, because we'll take care of it. Your father has many friends."
The boy looked up at him uncertainly. Then, just as uncertainly, swiveled his head to look up at the carving.
"That's Mommy, isn't it?"
"Yes, it is."
There was silence for a time as the boy settled his head on Driscol's shoulder and stared up at the carving. Houston's gentle snores were the only sound in the church.
Antoinette really had done a splendid job. It was Maria Hester, almost to the flesh.
"Will she go away again?"
"No, lad. She will not." All the weight of the Ozarks and the Ouachitas was in that voice. Ireland, too, and the mountains of Spain.
"Not today. Not tomorrow. Not ever."
ALTERNATE HISTORY TITLES BY ERIC FLINT
_1632_
_1633_ (with David Webber)
_Ring of Fire_
_1634: The Galileo Affair_ (with Andrew Dennis)
_Grantville Gazette_
_1812: The Rivers of War_
_1824: The Arkansas War_
The Belisarius Series (with David Drake)
_An Oblique Approach_
_In the Heart of Darkness_
_Destiny's Shield_
_Fortune's Stroke_
_The Tide of Victory_
_The Dance of Time_
_1824: The Arkansas War_ is a work of fiction. Though some characters, incidents, and dialogues are based on the historical record, the work as a whole is a product of the author's imagination.
Copyright © 2006 by Eric Flint
All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Del Rey Books, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.
DEL REY is a registered trademark, and the Del Rey colophon is a trademark of Random House, Inc.
www.delreybooks.com
Map illustrations by Jeffrey L. Ward
eISBN: 978-0-345-49547-1
v3.0
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Sergio Omar Almirón (ur. 18 sierpnia 1958 w Rosario, Santa Fe) – argentyński piłkarz, który występował na pozycji napastnika.
Kariera klubowa
W swojej karierze grał w takich klubach jak: Newell's Old Boys, Tours FC (Francja), Tigres UANL (Meksyk), Estudiantes La Plata, Central Córdoba Rosario i Talleres Córdoba.
Kariera reprezentacyjna
Almirón był w kadrze Argentyny, gdy ta wygrała mistrzostwo świata w 1986 roku. Podczas samego turnieju nie wszedł jednak na boisko. Pomimo bycia napastnikiem otrzymał on koszulkę z numerem 1, co tradycyjnie zarezerwowane jest dla bramkarzy. Argentyna jednak przydzielała numery na trykotach zgodnie z alfabetem.
Sukcesy
Klubowe
Newell's Old Boys
Primera División: 1987–88
Reprezentacyjne
Argentyna
Złoty medal Mistrzostw Świata: 1986
Linki zewnętrzne
Profil na footballdatabase.eu
Reprezentanci Argentyny w piłce nożnej
Piłkarze CA Newell's Old Boys
Piłkarze Tours FC
Piłkarze Estudiantes La Plata
Piłkarze Tigres UANL
Piłkarze CA Talleres (Córdoba)
Uczestnicy Mistrzostw Świata w Piłce Nożnej 1986
Urodzeni w 1958
Mistrzowie Świata w Piłce Nożnej
Ludzie urodzeni w Rosario | {
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} | 590 |
Anxious about a business' COVID-19 safety standards? This website gives you the rundown
By Miranda Anthistle Global News
Posted May 28, 2020 4:07 pm
Updated June 16, 2020 3:42 pm
2:08 Anxious about COVID-19 safety standards at businesses? This website might be able to help
WATCH ABOVE: Toronto-based company OneLocal has launched a free online tool allowing consumers to see a checklist of what a business is doing to comply with COVID-19 public health measures. The goal is to build trust and ease consumers' fears and anxiety about going back into businesses again. Miranda Anthistle reports – May 28, 2020
Wearing masks and gloves has become the new norm and according to one survey, consumers want to see that a business is following COVID-19 safety standards.
The digital marketing company OneLocal surveyed over one thousand people and found four out of five respondents wouldn't enter a small business unless it complied with safety regulations. It also found 89 per cent want those regulations publicly posted.
READ MORE: Too fast, too soon? How we'll know whether Ontario reopened at the right time
"People are looking for reassurance. A lot of the education has fallen to small businesses for them to tell consumers what they should be looking out for," said OneLocal's Director of Operations, Maggie McIntyre.
"Consumers like being able to see very easily on a website what the business is doing before they even approach the business."
Hoping to help ease consumers' fears as they get back to interacting with others in-person, OneLocal has launched the free online tool COVIDSAFE.SERVICES which allows consumers to see a checklist of what a business is doing to comply with COVID-19 public health measures.
There are photos on the website, and if consumers have concerns or complaints, the tool keeps the businesses accountable.
"The goal is to build trust between both parties. We take issues seriously… A member of our team can investigate either working with the business to solve the problem, or flagging or removing a profile if necessary," said McIntyre.
READ MORE: Coronavirus: What you can and cannot do in Ontario amid Stage 1 of reopening
For CSN 427 Auto Collision in Etobicoke, Ont., signing up to COVIDSAFE.SERVICES was an easy decision. The business has been around for nearly half a century. But due to the pandemic, its operations have decreased by 75 per cent and it's lost almost 50 per cent of its workforce.
"We want to reassure everyone that it is safe for them to come in. We're doing everything we possibly can … We have sanitized your vehicle, anything you touch in the office is sanitized. The staff all wear PPE, we have hand sanitizing stations and if you want to stay in your vehicle, staff will go outside to do a curbside estimate," explained manager Violetta Kaczor.
This list of measures can be found on the website which also works with medical professionals who help make the guidelines easier to follow for both businesses and consumers.
2:19 Coronavirus: Curbside pickup option doesn't change much for business owners
Coronavirus: Curbside pickup option doesn't change much for business owners – May 11, 2020
"The medical professionals distill information from governments, trade associations, and public health organizations .… They zero in on the guidelines that are most important to not only keep consumers and employees safe, but also set their minds at ease," said McIntyre.
COVIDSAFE.SERVICES is working with hundreds of businesses in industries that are starting to reopen. It has also started reaching out to trade associations and governments getting their feedback on what they would like to see and helping them understand which of their members are following the guidelines.
The website currently lists businesses in North America and Australia.
CoronavirusCOVID-19coronavirus newscoronavirus updatecovid-19 newscovid-19 canadaCanada CoronavirusCoronavirus CasesCoronavirus In CanadaOneLocalCOVIDSAFE.SERVICESSafe Business Practices
Coronavirus: Hamilton reports 103 new COVID-19 cases, 4 deaths tied to outbreaks
Alberta health minister to provide update on COVID-19 vaccine Friday afternoon
Coronavirus: List of Saskatchewan school exposures and outbreaks
Community powering through as outage continues in parts of Beechy, Sask., surrounding area | {
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Goeldia nigra is een spinnensoort in de taxonomische indeling van de rotskaardespinnen (Titanoecidae).
Het dier behoort tot het geslacht Goeldia. De wetenschappelijke naam van de soort werd voor het eerst geldig gepubliceerd in 1917 door Cândido Firmino de Mello-Leitão.
Rotskaardespinnen | {
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NiceEwok MurielStar jasmin. loveForever21. KarinaNDMira. JuicyHoles4U.
sexyandhornyboySacajaweyBIGdickBALLXxAlison .MaturePervCplSexyArinaXbatman1793Seniorinnaa .SacajaweysweeteyespearlLadyAverySacajawey .SeniorinnaaJusttheQueenStunningJennyLadyAvery .QueenTopkarinaMatthewAndLauriePrettyGirl200BayleeTales .sexyandhornyboyFirekatherinaSexyTomBigCockInfamousAngel .TheSexyLexaBayleeTalesLegendaryQUEENCuteMiley4U .ChelseaFosterRenataSmithXSacajaweyAischaa .badrsexycatHornyVikTheSexyLexaJanethPassion .SacajaweyMrLeonardsantismitbadrsexycat .antuanhotflirtDarkMisstressTopTeens19PrettyGirl200 .
SubboyMaturePervCplGraceShawBlackXDiamondx .TwinkTaylorsweeteyespearlKleolevaRogerboston12 .11INCHBLACKChelseaFosterMaturePervCplHornyVik .ArasiKimLovelyBoobz4USabrinaLittleLadyAvery .CallCenterBoy21BeautifulBIGgirkinkyhotpreggloveForever21 .antuanhotflirtMatthewAndLauriepinayHOTTIEDOLLsweeteyespearl .MrLeonardAlanaKlausGeishadepravataLovelyBoobz4U .KRISTHIAN1antuanhotflirtmyProfessorAmandaClain .ChelseaFosterBlackXDiamondxBlackXDiamondxGregTeen .OneElegantGirlMantyLoveFrankyBeerBIGdickBALL .11INCHBLACKQUEENSQUIRTXLUNARCITOSCUTE1EbonyLNDBarbie . | {
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Friedrich Nobbe (* 20. Juni 1830 in Bremen; † 15. September 1922 in Tharandt bei Dresden) war ein deutscher Agrikulturchemiker, Botaniker und Saatgutforscher. Als Professor für biologische Naturwissenschaften wirkte er seit 1868 an der Akademie für Forst- und Landwirte in Tharandt. 1869 errichtete er hier die erste Saatgut-Kontrollstation der Welt und begründete damit die Saatgutprüfung.
Lebensweg
Friedrich Nobbe, Sohn eines Schulvorstehers, war bereits 1846, im Alter von 16 Jahren, als Lehrer tätig. Durch Selbststudium erweiterte er sein Wissen und übernahm 1852 die Leitung einer Schule in Berge bei Osnabrück. Seit 1854 studierte er Naturwissenschaften, insbesondere Pflanzenphysiologie, an der Universität Jena. 1856 siedelte er nach Berlin über und legte 1857 am Cölnischen Gymnasium die Reifeprüfung ab. 1858 promovierte er an der Universität Jena mit der Dissertation Disquisition gewisser physikalischer Eigenschaften der Erdkrume. Es folgte eine zweijährige Lehrtätigkeit an der Realschule in Chemnitz.
1861 wurde Nobbe als Lehrer für Pflanzen- und Tierphysiologie an die staatliche höhere Gewerbeschule nach Chemnitz berufen. Zugleich erhielt er eine Anstellung an der landwirtschaftlichen Versuchsstation in Chemnitz, wo er zahlreiche physiologische Untersuchungen über die Bedeutung einzelner Mineralstoffe für das Pflanzenwachstum durchführte.
Auf Vorschlag des Agrikulturchemikers Julius Adolph Stöckhardt folgte Nobbe 1868 einem Ruf als Professor für biologische Naturwissenschaften an die Akademie für Forst- und Landwirte nach Tharandt. Bereits im folgenden Jahr gründete er an der Akademie eine pflanzenphysiologische Versuchsstation. Als erfolgreicher Lehrer und Forscher wirkte Nobbe dreieinhalb Jahrzehnte in Tharandt. Erst 1904, im Alter von 74 Jahren, trat er in den Ruhestand. Die letzten Jahre seines Lebens verlebte er mit seiner Frau in seiner Tharandter Wohnung.
Die ehemalige Milkau-Villa, zeitweise in Trägerschaft der TU Dresden, Fachrichtung Forstwissenschaften, und heute Interims-Sitz der Akademie der Sächsischen Landesstiftung Natur und Umwelt in Tharandt ist als Nobbe-Bau nach ihm benannt.
Forschungsleistungen
Mit finanzieller Unterstützung des Landwirtschaftlichen Kreisvereins Dresden gründete Nobbe 1869 in Tharandt eine der Akademie für Forst- und Landwirte angegliederte, jedoch selbstständige pflanzenphysiologische Versuchsstation, die gleichzeitig eine Kontrollstation für landwirtschaftliches, forstliches und gärtnerisches Saatgut sein sollte. Unter der Bezeichnung "Physiologische Versuchs- und Samenkontroll-Station zu Tharandt" war sie weltweit die erste Institution für Saatgutprüfungen.
Nobbe ging es vor allem darum, die Saatgutqualität, für die es damals keine verbindlichen Normen gab, durch eine systematische Kontrolltätigkeit nachhaltig zu verbessern. Diesem Ziel diente auch sein 1876 erschienenes "Handbuch der Samenkunde". Es gehört zu den bedeutendsten Werken der wissenschaftlichen Landbauliteratur. Nobbe beschreibt hier beispielhaft die Morphologie und Anatomie der Samen, den Keimprozeß und seine physikalischen Bedingungen und die Methoden zur Wertbestimmung des Saatgutes. Eindringlich forderte er, einheitliche Untersuchungsmethoden einzuführen. Nobbe gab mit diesem Buch der Saatgutforschung wegweisende Impulse. Seine Tharandter Versuchs- und Kontrollstation wurde Vorbild für die Einrichtung ähnlicher Samenprüfungsstationen im In- und Ausland.
Ein weiterer Forschungsschwerpunkt Nobbes waren Untersuchungen über die Knöllchenbakterien der Leguminosen. Seit 1888 prüfte er gemeinsam mit seinem langjährigen Assistenten Lorenz Hiltner die Möglichkeit, den Ackerboden bzw. das Saatgut mit Knöllchenbakterien zu "impfen". Obgleich ihr 1896 patentierter Impfstoff "Nitragin" in der landwirtschaftlichen Praxis keine befriedigenden Ergebnisse erbrachte, konnte Hiltner später in München diese "Impftechnik" bis zur Praxisreife weiterentwickeln.
An der Tharandter Akademie, an der nach 1870 nur noch Forststudenten ausgebildet wurden, hatte Nobbe das Fach Botanik und in den ersten Jahren auch Zoologie zu vertreten. Seit 1877 war er auch Leiter des forstbotanischen Gartens. 1882 gab er nach gründlicher Überarbeitung die vierte Auflage des umfangreichen Lehrbuches "Döbner's Botanik für Forstmänner" heraus.
Eng verbunden war Nobbes Name mit dem 1858 gegründeten Journal Die landwirthschaftlichen Versuchs-Stationen. 1861 hatte Nobbe die redaktionelle Leitung dieser Fachzeitschrift übernommen, von 1863 bis 1905 war er alleiniger Herausgeber. 1888 wurde er zum Vorsitzenden des neugegründeten "Verbandes landwirthschaftlicher Versuchsstationen im Deutschen Reiche" gewählt. Dieses Amt übte er bis 1904 aus.
Ehrungen und Auszeichnungen (Auswahl)
1880: Ritterkreuz des Schwedischen Nordstern-Ordens
1882: Ritterkreuz I. Klasse des Sächsischen Albrechts-Ordens
1888: Auswärtiges Mitglied der Königlichen Schwedischen Landwirtschaftsgesellschaft
1889: Königlicher Titel Geheimer Hofrat
1893: Ehrenmitglied des Kaiserlichen Russischen Forstinstituts zu St. Petersburg
1894: Ehrenmitglied des Landwirtschaftlichen Kreisvereins Dresden mit Verleihung der silbernen Denkmünze
1896: Ehrenmitglied der Royal Agricultural Society of England
1903: Ehrenmitglied des Verbandes der landwirtschaftlichen Versuchs-Stationen im Deutschen Reich
1910 zum 80. Geburtstag: Zueignung einer Tanne im Forstbotanischen Garten Tharandt.
seit 1959: Friedrich-Nobbe-Preis, gestiftet vom Verband Deutscher Landwirtschaftlicher Untersuchungs- und Forschungsanstalten (VDLUFA) zur Förderung junger Wissenschaftler, die auf dem Gebiet der Angewandten Botanik besondere Leistungen erbracht haben. Der Preis (dotierter Geldbetrag und Urkunde) wird nur in mehrjährigen Abständen vergeben.
Werke
Ueber die organische Leistung des Kalium in der Pflanze (gemeinsam mit J. Schroeder und R. Erdmann). Verlag Focke Chemnitz 1871 = Mittheilungen aus der physiologischen Versuchs-Station Tharandt.
Handbuch der Samenkunde. Physiologisch-statistische Untersuchungen über den wirthschaftlichen Gebrauchswerth der land- und forstwirthschaftlichen, sowie gärtnerischen Saatwaaren. Verlag von Wiegandt, Hempel & Parey Berlin 1876.
E. Ph. Döbner: Botanik für Forstmänner. Nebst einem Anhang: Tabellen zur Bestimmung der Holzgewächse während der Blüthe und im winterlichen Zustande. Mit 430 in den Text gedruckten Holzschnitten. Vierte Aufl., vollst. neu bearbeitet von Friedrich Nobbe. Verlag Paul Parey Berlin 1882.
Führer durch den akademischen Forstgarten zu Tharandt. Herausgegeben von F. Nobbe und G. Büttner. Verlag Paul Parey Berlin 1905.
Literatur
Heinrich Vater: Friedrich Nobbe und die pflanzenphysiologische Versuchs- und Samenkontroll-Station zu Tharandt. In: Tharandter Forstliches Jahrbuch Bd. 75, 1924, S. 141–188 (mit Bild und Schriftenverzeichnis). – Zugl. als Separatdruck bei: Verlagsbuchhandlung Paul Parey Berlin 1924.
H. Jahnel und H. Ludwig: Friedrich Nobbe, der Begründer der Samenkontrolle. In: Proceedings of the International Seed Testing Association Bd. 26, 1961, S. 127–139 (mit Bild u. Schriftenverzeichnis).
Johannes Schubert und Werner Zentsch: Gründung der ersten Samenkontrollstation – Eine Pioniertat Friedrich Nobbes. In: Archiv für Forstwesen Bd. 18, 1969, S. 1245–1255 (mit Bild).
A. Finck: Friedrich Nobbe (1830–1922). In: VDLUFA-Schriftenreihe Bd. 28/I, Kongressband 1988 Bonn. Darmstadt 1989, S. 161–163.
A. M. Steiner: 100 Jahre Technische Vorschriften des Verbandes Landwirtschaftlicher Versuchs-Stationen im Deutschen Reiche für die Samenprüfungen. In: VDLUFA-Schriftenreihe Bd. 55, 2000, S. 100–105.
Weblinks
Stadtwiki Dresden
Agrarwissenschaftler (19. Jahrhundert)
Botaniker (19. Jahrhundert)
Agrikulturchemiker
Hochschullehrer (Forstliche Hochschule Tharandt)
Herausgeber
Geheimrat
Träger des Nordstern-Ordens (Ritter)
Träger des Albrechts-Ordens (Ritter 1. Klasse)
Person (Bremen)
Deutscher
Geboren 1830
Gestorben 1922
Mann | {
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{"url":"https:\/\/mathematica.stackexchange.com\/questions\/169487\/package-documentation-separately-from-code","text":"# Package documentation separately from code\n\nMathematica documentation is heavy duty stuff. Of the 7.75GB my Mac says Mathematica 11.3 takes up, 5.46 of that is documentation.\n\nSo when I write my own packages I don't want to do what WRI did and bloat my system with docs that will most likely never be opened.\n\nHow can I distribute my documentation separately from my program? Can I distribute it in such a way that I can easily push updates?\n\n\u2022 Does such a package exist whose documentation is so huge that you wouldn't want to install it? \u2013\u00a0QuantumDot Mar 22 '18 at 0:19\n\u2022 @QuantumDot documentation can easily balloon in size as packages bloat and the number of symbols increases. I figure it's only kind to any people who choose to use my packages to keep them free of bloat that could be served separately on demand. In a non-object-oriented language if you document each function and each documentation page is at minimum 50 kb it only takes 150 symbols to reach ~10MB of docs. And reaching 150 symbols is easy unless you're careful about your design. \u2013\u00a0b3m2a1 Mar 22 '18 at 0:25\n\u2022 Oh ok. Usually, the problem I have with other people's packages is quite the opposite -- definitely not enough documentation. \u2013\u00a0QuantumDot Mar 22 '18 at 0:28\n\u2022 @QuantumDot that's why I've been working on a system to autogenerate docs :) And that makes documentation bloat even easier... \u2013\u00a0b3m2a1 Mar 22 '18 at 0:29\n\nThe trick here is to make a paclet for just your documentation that won't ever interfere with your main package.\n\nTo do we'll assume we have a main paclet named \"MyPaclet\". Then we'll generate its documentation and put it into a new paclet called \"Documentation_MyPaclet\". This name is chosen to imitate the way the ServiceConnect framework names its paclets (as well as many other internal frameworks).\n\nThen to make sure that it loads when we ask for \"MyPaclet\" we'll reassign the \"LinkBase\" argument in the \"Documentation\" extension to be \"MyPaclet\", as this is how the DocumentationResolveLink performs its lookups.\n\nSo overall our \"PacletInfo.m\" will look like:\n\nPaclet[\nName -> \"Documentation_MyPaclet\",\nVersion -> \"1.0.0\",\nExtensions ->\n{\n{\n\"Documentation\",\n\"Language\" -> \"English\",\n\"MainPage\" -> \"Guides\/MyPaclet\"\n}\n}\n]\n\n\nNow when we search for the paclet it will show up, but it won't interfere with PacletFind and it won't interfere with loading the paclet. For instance, using some documentation I auto-built:\n\nPacletFind[\"Documentation_BTools*\"]\n\n\nPacletFind[\"BTools\"]\n\n\nWhat makes this particularly nice, though, is that I can put these paclets on a paclet server and then people can download just what they want for documentation--and if I update the documentation it's easy for these updates to mirror.\n\nFor instance, if you wanted to install some of my documentation, you could run:\n\nPacletInstall[\"Documentation_BToolsWeb\",\n\"Site\"->\"http:\/\/www.wolframcloud.com\/objects\/b3m2a1.docs\/DocumentationServer\"\n]\n\n\nAnd then you can search for BToolsWeb and look at just the part of my documentation that handles web functions in my main package.\n\nIf you wanted to update it, you could run:\n\nPacletUpdate[\"Documentation_BToolsWeb\",\n\"Site\"->\"http:\/\/www.wolframcloud.com\/objects\/b3m2a1.docs\/DocumentationServer\"\n]\n\n\nAnd if you wanted to uninstall it so it doesn't bloat your system you can run:\n\nPacletUninstall[\"Documentation_BToolsWeb\"]\n\n\u2022 We do this also, for example with FEMDocumentation. It is still shipped with Mathematica, but it is structured as a Documentation-only paclet. So it could in principle be shipped separately, or updated separately, etc... \u2013\u00a0Itai Seggev Mar 22 '18 at 0:17\n\u2022 @ItaiSeggev I'd really love if more documentation were loaded in an on-demand fashion. Particularly for stuff like the \"Units\"` package where the package is already deprecated (of course the heavy hitter is the system-level docs anyway) \u2013\u00a0b3m2a1 Mar 22 '18 at 0:19\n\u2022 @ItaiSeggev Is it technically feasible to make the FE be able to read gzipped notebooks? If would result in a very significant saving on the documentation size. \u2013\u00a0Szabolcs Jul 9 '18 at 20:12\n\u2022 @Szabolcs that\u2019d be great. Python does something like that for compressing modules. \u2013\u00a0b3m2a1 Jul 9 '18 at 21:05\n\u2022 @Szabolcs It would have certain costs. A notebook has structure that allows the FE the only loaded the rough outline, and load other parts on demand as you scroll\/open sections. Gzip would essentially destroy that strucutre, so the FE would need need to either unzip the whole notebook and look at the copy, or read in the whole notebook at opening time. Either would lead to a significant delay in opening notebooks. \u2013\u00a0Itai Seggev Jul 11 '18 at 6:15","date":"2019-11-21 10:29:29","metadata":"{\"extraction_info\": {\"found_math\": true, \"script_math_tex\": 0, \"script_math_asciimath\": 0, \"math_annotations\": 0, \"math_alttext\": 0, \"mathml\": 0, \"mathjax_tag\": 0, \"mathjax_inline_tex\": 0, \"mathjax_display_tex\": 0, \"mathjax_asciimath\": 1, \"img_math\": 0, \"codecogs_latex\": 0, \"wp_latex\": 0, \"mimetex.cgi\": 0, \"\/images\/math\/codecogs\": 0, \"mathtex.cgi\": 0, \"katex\": 0, \"math-container\": 0, \"wp-katex-eq\": 0, \"align\": 0, \"equation\": 0, \"x-ck12\": 0, \"texerror\": 0, \"math_score\": 0.24088068306446075, \"perplexity\": 2476.4631333142906}, \"config\": {\"markdown_headings\": true, \"markdown_code\": true, \"boilerplate_config\": {\"ratio_threshold\": 0.18, \"absolute_threshold\": 10, \"end_threshold\": 15, \"enable\": true}, \"remove_buttons\": true, \"remove_image_figures\": true, \"remove_link_clusters\": true, \"table_config\": {\"min_rows\": 2, \"min_cols\": 3, \"format\": \"plain\"}, \"remove_chinese\": true, \"remove_edit_buttons\": true, \"extract_latex\": true}, \"warc_path\": \"s3:\/\/commoncrawl\/crawl-data\/CC-MAIN-2019-47\/segments\/1573496670770.21\/warc\/CC-MAIN-20191121101711-20191121125711-00224.warc.gz\"}"} | null | null |
Steffan Wyn "Steff" Evans, né le à Llanelli, est un joueur gallois de rugby à XV. Il joue au poste d'ailier ou d'arrière. Il évolue avec les Llanelli Scarlets en Pro14 depuis 2014. Il mesure pour .
Carrière
Il commence sa carrière professionnelle lors d'un match de Pro14 en face à la franchise italienne des Zebre. Il devient titulaire au fil de la saison malgré la concurrence de Liam Williams et de DTH Van der Merwe à son poste.
En 2017, il devient le meilleur marqueur de son championnat en inscrivant 13 essais, son club remporte par la suite, le championnat cette saison.
Il profite de l'absence de nombreux cadres à cause de la Tournée de l'équipe des Lions britanniques et irlandais de rugby à XV en 2017 pour être appelé par Warren Gatland lors de la tournée d'été face aux Tonga et aux Samoa. Il est titulaire lors de ses deux matchs en inscrivant deux essais. Il est rappelé en pour disputer la tournée d'automne. Il joue trois matchs en étant toujours titulaire en inscrivant 1 essai Il est une nouvelle fois rappelé quelques mois plus tard pour disputer le Tournoi des Six Nations 2018. Il dispute quatre matchs toujours titulaire en inscrivant encore deux essais.
Malheureusement, une blessure au genou début juin va le priver de tournée d'été en Argentine, et Evans voit son ancien camarade de classe Josh Adams prendre sa place sur l'aile gauche de l'équipe nationale, ce dernier réalisant des prestations remarquées en juin puis en novembre. Une mésentente avec son club des Scarlets le cantonne au banc, et, bien qu'appellé par Warren Gatland dans le groupe gallois, Steff Evans ne participe à aucun des matchs du Tournoi 2019, barré par la concurrence de North et Adams, mais aussi handicapé par son faible temps de jeu en club lors de cette saison.
Appelé dans le groupe gallois pour préparer la Coupe du Monde 2019, il n'est finalement pas retenu parmi les 31 joueurs que Warren Gatland décide d'emmener au Japon. Owen Lane lui est d'ailleurs préféré lorsque Gatland doit appeler un ailier en renfort au milieu de la compétition.
L'arrivée de Wayne Pivac à la tête du XV du Poireau ne lui est guère favorable : malgré de belles prestations avec les Scarlets, Evans n'est pas rappelé en équipe nationale par son ancien entraîneur en club, avec lequel ses relations se sont rafraichies lors de la dernière saison de Pivac à Llanelli. Les bons matchs d'Adams et l'émergence à l'aile du jeune phénomène Louis Rees-Zammit ferment un peu plus la porte à un retour en sélection.
Palmarès
Vainqueur du Pro12 en 2017
Notes et références
Liens externes
Joueur international gallois de rugby à XV
Joueur des Scarlets
Ailier (rugby à XV)
Arrière (rugby à XV)
Naissance en septembre 1994
Naissance à Llanelli | {
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package com.baidubce.services.bec.model.blb;
import com.baidubce.services.bec.model.vm.LogicPageResultResponse;
import com.baidubce.services.bec.model.vo.BlbBackendPodBriefVo;
/**
* The response for getting the bind BEC blb backend Pod/Vm list.
*/
public class GetBecBlbBackendPodListResponse extends LogicPageResultResponse<BlbBackendPodBriefVo> {
}
| {
"redpajama_set_name": "RedPajamaGithub"
} | 333 |
Стивен Майкл Уэдгвуд Бенн, 3-й виконт Стэнсгейт (; родился 21 августа 1951 года) — британский наследственный пэр и член Палаты лордов от лейбористов.
Ранняя жизнь
Родился 21 августа 1951 года. Старший сын Тони Бенна, 2-го виконта Стэнсгейта (1925—2014), и Кэролайн Миддлтон Бенн (урождённая Де Камп) (1926—2000). Его отец, Тони Бенн, и его младший брат, Хиллари Бенн, оба были высокопоставленными лейбористскими политиками. Его матерью была Кэролайн Бенн, педагог и писатель, а сестрой — Мелисса Бенн, писательница-феминистка.
Образование
Окончил Кильский университет. Он был избранным членом Лондонского управления образования с 1986 по 1990 год.
Карьера
В 2011 году Стивен Бенн был назначен директором по парламентским делам Общества биологии после того, как провел два десятилетия в аналогичной роли в Королевском химическом обществе. Он также является вице-президентом парламентского и научного комитета.
Стивен Бенн унаследовал титул виконта Стэнсгейта после смерти своего отца в марте 2014 года. Его активное принятие титула было зафиксировано 10 ноября 2014 года примечанием в протоколе заседания Палаты лордов, в котором говорилось:
«Лорд-канцлер сообщил, что Стивен Майкл Веджвуд Бенн установил свои претензии на виконта Стэнсгейта в пэрстве Соединенного Королевства. Соответственно, клерку парламентов было поручено внести виконта Стэнсгейта в реестр наследственных пэров, который велся в соответствии с регламентом 10(5)».
Он баллотировался на выборах в качестве наследственного пэра от лейбористов в Палату лордов и был избран без сопротивления 10 июля 2021 года, заменив лорда Ри, который умер в 2020 году. Он принял присягу 6 сентября того же года. Свою первую речь он произнес в четверг, 14 октября 2021 года, на дебатах региональных государственных дебатов, за которыми наблюдал его брат Хилари Бенн.
Личная жизнь
В 1988 году Стивен Бенн женился на Ашике Ните Боуз, дочери Стюарта Эшли Боуза, от брака с которой у него были дочь и сын:
Достопочтенная Эмили София Уэдгвуд Бенн (род. 4 октября 1989)
Достопочтенный Дэниел Джон Уэдгвуд Бенн (род. 10 декабря 1991).
Эмили, инвестиционный банкир по профессии, занималась политической карьерой и заседала в Лондонском городском совете Кройдона в качестве члена лейбористской партии, пока не ушла в отставку в 2016 году после переезда в Нью-Йорк.
Примечания
Ссылки
Stephen Michael Wedgwood Benn, 3rd Viscount Stansgate
Father's obituary
Виконты Стэнсгейт
Члены палаты лордов Великобритании
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7 Bits Are Not Enough for 2-Digit Accuracy
By Rick Regan April 1st, 2015
In the 1960s, I. Bennett Goldberg and David W. Matula published papers relating floating-point number systems of different bases, showing the conditions under which conversions between them round-trip; that is, when conversion to another base and back returns the original number. Independently, both authors derived the formula that specifies the number of significant digits required for round-trip conversions.
In his paper "27 Bits Are Not Enough for 8-Digit Accuracy", Goldberg shows the formula in the context of decimal to binary floating-point conversions. He starts with a simple example — a 7-bit binary floating-point system — and shows that it does not have enough precision to round-trip all 2-digit decimal floating-point numbers. I took his example and put it into diagrams, giving you a high level view of what governs round-trip conversions. I also extended his example to show that the same concept applies to binary to decimal floating-point round-trips.
Relative Spacing Governs Round-Trips
The well-known digit counts for round-trip conversions to and from IEEE 754 floating-point are dictated by these same principles.
Seven Bits Looks Like Enough But It Isn't
With 7 bits, you can represent 27 = 128 binary integers. With two digits, you can represent 102 = 100 decimal integers. Clearly, seven bits is enough to represent two-digit integers. But floating-point numbers need to be analyzed differently; the spacing of decimal and binary floating-point numbers comes into play.
Overlapping Gaps
To understand why two digits can't round-trip through seven bits, you have to look at how the decimal and binary spacings interact. Decimal spacing increases between increasing powers of ten, and binary spacing increases between increasing powers of two. Since powers of ten and powers of two are interleaved, the relative spacing of decimal and binary floating-point numbers is going to change at power of ten and power of two boundaries.
In the example system, there are 90 decimal numbers (and 90 gaps) between powers of ten, and 64 binary numbers (and 64 gaps) between powers of two. Because of the interleaving of powers, these will divided into regions at power of ten and power of two boundaries. This table shows how this plays out for the range [1,10000):
Interleaving of Decimal and Binary Gaps In a 2-Digit/7-bit Floating-Point System In The Range [1,10000)
[1,2) 0.1 0.015625 10 64
[2,4) 0.1 0.03125 20 64
[4,8) 0.1 0.0625 40 64
[8,10) 0.1 0.125 20 16
[10,16) 1 0.125 6 48
[16,32) 1 0.25 16 64
[32,64) 1 0.5 32 64
[64,100) 1 1 36 36
[100,128) 10 1 3 28
[128,256) 10 2 13 64
[512,1000) 10 8 48 61
[1000,1024) 100 8 1 3
[1024,2048) 100 16 10 64
[8192,10000) 100 128 18 15
The numbers highlighted in red show where the problems occur; in these regions, binary numbers are spaced further apart than decimal numbers, and so there are fewer of them.
20 Decimal Numbers Map 16 Binary Numbers
In the region [8,10) there are 20 decimal numbers, spaced 0.1 apart: 8.0, 8.1, 8.2, … , 9.8, 9.9. Also in this region are 16 binary numbers, spaced 0.125 apart: 1000, 1000.001, 1000.01, … , 1001.11, 1001.111. (It's easier to compare decimal and binary numbers when binary numbers are written in decimal; conveniently, all binary numbers have exact decimal representations, so let's write these as 8.0, 8.125, 8.25, … , 9.75, 9.875.) Since we have more decimal numbers than binary numbers, some decimal numbers will convert (i.e., round) to the same binary number. When such a binary number is converted back to decimal, only one of the multiple decimal numbers can be chosen — the one closest to it. The ones not chosen are not recoverable.
Let's see what this looks like:
Mapping 2-Digits to 7 Bits Over [8,10)
In this example, there are four pairs of duplicates, and in each case each pair is equally close to the binary number it maps to. (It's just a coincidence in this example that all the duplicates map to a halfway point in this region; for instance, this isn't the case for the duplicates in [8192,10000), which I have not shown.) Regardless of how halfway cases are rounded back to decimal, only four of the eight numbers will be recoverable, so only 16 of the 20 decimal numbers will round-trip.
So How Many Bits Do You Need?
Informally, "you need one more bit than you think you need" to round-trip numbers. In this case, that's 8 bits. (I will not state or derive the formula in this article.) Here's how the two-digit numbers map to 8 bits:
Every decimal number in this region converts to a unique binary number, which means they all will round-trip. And it turns out 8 bits covers all two-digit numbers, with any exponent.
Review: Gap Size Is Key
The relative gap size between decimal and binary floating-point numbers determines whether decimal numbers will round-trip through binary floating-point. For a region containing only integers, the gap size for both sets of numbers is 1, and the gaps will line up (integers convert exactly). In all other regions, the gaps will be different. Occasionally, endpoints of gaps will line up — for numbers like 8.5 with exact binary representations. All other numbers will not line up and hence need to be rounded to the closest binary number.
To round-trip these numbers, the gaps between decimal numbers must be greater than the gaps between binary numbers. Since gap size changes at power of ten and power of two boundaries, the relative spacing between the two sets of numbers is constantly changing. There must be enough binary precision to ensure that the binary gaps are smaller over the entire range of exponents.
3 Digits Are Not Enough For 7-Bit Accuracy
This analysis works equally well for round-trip conversions originating from the binary side.
To round-trip 7-bit numbers, we know right away that two digits is not enough: 27 = 128 > 102 = 100. You may think three digits is enough since 128 < 103 = 1000, but it isn't.
In the region [0.1,0.125), decimal numbers are spaced 0.001 apart, and binary numbers are spaced 0.0009765625 apart. These gaps are very close, but the decimal numbers are spaced further apart. This sets the stage for duplicate mappings. I examined the values in that region and found one pair of binary numbers that convert to the same decimal number: 0.000110101 (0.103515625) and 0.0001101011 (0.1044921875) both convert to 0.104. 0.103515625 is closer, so 0.1044921875 is not recoverable.
It turns out that four digits is enough. In the example, 0.103515625 would round to 0.1035, and 0.1044921875 would round to 0.1045.
Round-Trips To and From IEEE 754 Floating-Point
The concepts behind this example explain the well-known digit counts for round-trip conversions to and from IEEE 754 floating-point:
Decimal floating-point numbers of 15 significant digits or less will round-trip through double-precision binary floating-point.
Decimal floating-point numbers of 6 significant digits or less will round-trip through single-precision binary floating-point.
Double-precision numbers converted to decimal floating-point numbers of 17 significant digits or more will round-trip.
Single-precision numbers converted to decimal floating-point numbers of 9 significant digits or more will round-trip.
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Categories Numbers in computersTags Convert to binary, Convert to decimal, Floating-point
njuffa says:
I wonder what the round-trip digit counts are for half precision, i.e. IEEE-754 binary16. I don't recall seeing that information published anywhere. The reason I am asking is because recently half precision has been mentioned frequently in connection with deep learning applications.
It looks like the round-trip digit counts for IEEE-754 binary16 may be {3, 5}, but a rigorous proof of that would be welcome. As for IEEE-754 binary128, a.k.a. quadruple precision, sources seem to disagree. A write-up by W. Kahan suggests the round-trip digit counts are {33, 36} [http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~wkahan/ieee754status/IEEE754.PDF], while this standard proposal suggests the numbers are {34, 36} [http://www2.open-std.org/JTC1/SC22/WG21/docs/papers/2005/n1822.pdf].
Rick Regan says:
@njuffa,
The formula, which I have not discussed, derives from this inequality, as stated in I. Goldberg's paper: for decimal->floating-point->decimal round-trips, if 10p < 2q-1, then q bits are enough for p-digit accuracy.
So if binary16 is 11 bits, the longest decimal you can round-trip is 3 digits (just play around with the numbers; you can solve the inequality using logarithms though). If binary128 is 113 bits, then 33 digits is the max.
For floating-point->decimal->floating-point, you can just switch the bases around (not stated in I. Goldberg's paper): 2r < 10s-1. So for binary 16, you need at least 5 digits; for binary128, you need at least 36 digits.
So I agree with {3, 5} and {33, 36}, respectively.
I contacted the author of http://www2.open-std.org/JTC1/SC22/WG21/docs/papers/2005/n1822.pdf and he in fact confirmed that 34 is an error (should be 33).
A very clear explanation of floating-point characteristics. Thank you for an excellent collection of articles.
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{"url":"https:\/\/tex.stackexchange.com\/questions\/484677\/biber-error-message-at-file-pm-line-151","text":"# Biber, error message at File.pm line 151\n\nI have a php script test.php which invokes latex+biber:\n\n\/usr\/local\/texlive\/2016\/bin\/x86_64-linux\/latex --interaction batchmode test.tex ;\n\/usr\/local\/texlive\/2016\/bin\/x86_64-linux\/biber test;\n\n\nThe script works fine if I run it from terminal php test.php (as root); it does not work when it is called from a browser http:\/\/localhost\/test.php. In the latter case, I understand it is called from user apache. (I am testing on a Linux Fedora 29 machine).\n\nThe issue turns out to be related with biber':\n\n[root@fedora-pc]# su -s \/bin\/bash apache\nbash-4.4$\/usr\/local\/texlive\/2016\/bin\/x86_64-linux\/biber test Can't open test.blg (Permission denied) at \/tmp\/par-617061636865\/cache-975de9a2a2c44ccaa5329d9695a54026ffc29f68\/inc\/lib\/Log\/Log4perl\/Appender\/File.pm line 151. Also, I just discovered that [root@fedora-pc 2019]# \/usr\/local\/texlive\/2016\/bin\/x86_64-linux\/tlmgr update --list \/usr\/local\/texlive\/2016\/tlpkg\/installer\/xz\/xzdec.x86_64-linux: (stdin): Unexpected end of input [root@fedora-pc 2019]# tlmgr update --self \/usr\/local\/texlive\/2016\/tlpkg\/installer\/xz\/xzdec.x86_64-linux: (stdin): Unexpected end of input \/usr\/local\/texlive\/2016\/bin\/x86_64-linux\/tlmgr: checksum error when downloading \/tmp\/WQEchRh21D\/TzyO2wJ8pA from http:\/\/ftp.rrze.uni-erlangen.de\/ctan\/systems\/texlive\/tlnet\/tlpkg\/texlive.tlpdb: digest disagree I am not so knowledgeable about LaTex to know what is going on and how to fix it. (biber is version 2.9) \u2022 It looks as though Biber is not allowed to write its log file (the .blg). If I'm not mistaken, Biber will try to write the .blg in the current working directory. Not sure what that would be in your case, but it might be in a place where you have no write permissions. The other errors have nothing to do with Biber and are TeX live infrastructure-related. TeX live 2016 is frozen and doesn't get any updates any more (just about current is TeX live 2018, TeX live 2019 should be released around May). \u2013 moewe Apr 13 '19 at 18:13 \u2022 It would be interesting to know if the LaTeX run works properly, I would have expected it to face similar permission issues with the .log file and all the auxiliary files. It should be noted, though, that Biber unpacks its executable into a temporary directory (in your case \/tmp\/par-617061636865\/cache-975de9a2a2c44ccaa5329d9695a54026ffc29f68\/) and runs from there. If programs in that path are restricted compared to programs in \/usr\/local\/texlive\/2016\/bin\/x86_64-linux\/ and elsewhere (and it might not be unreasonable to apply such restrictions), that could explain things. \u2013 moewe Apr 13 '19 at 18:22 \u2022 Related question on Windows: tex.stackexchange.com\/q\/406960\/35864. There it turned out that Bitdefender was blocking Biber (maybe even due to a heuristic that took issue with executables coming from a temporary folder). \u2013 moewe Apr 13 '19 at 18:27 \u2022 @moewe LaTeX run works properly. How do I check whether 'programs in that [tmp] path are restricted'? \u2013 mario Apr 13 '19 at 20:12 \u2022 Sorry, no idea, that would be more of a Linux question than a LaTeX question, I guess. \u2013 moewe Apr 14 '19 at 4:04 ## 1 Answer Linux Fedora 29, 4.19.12-301.fc29.x86_64; pdfTeX, Version 3.14159265-2.6-1.40.19 (TeX Live 2018) (I updated) I fixed my issue when I added the following line to the sudoers file: apache ALL=(ALL:ALL) NOPASSWD:\/usr\/local\/texlive\/2018\/bin\/x86_64-linux\/biber My script test.php is: <?php$NomeFile = 'test';\n$bibFile =$NomeFile;\n$texFile =$NomeFile.\".tex\";\n$pdfFile =$NomeFile.\".pdf\";\n$f=fopen($texFile,'w');\n\n$header =\"\\\\documentclass{article} \\n \";$header.=\"\\\\usepackage[latin1]{inputenc} \\n \";\n$header.=\"\\\\usepackage[T1]{fontenc} \\n \";$header.=\"\\\\usepackage[american,italian]{babel} \\n \";\n$header.=\"\\\\usepackage[babel,italian=guillemets]{csquotes} \\n \";$header.=\"\\\\usepackage[backend=biber,sorting=ynt]{biblatex}\\n\";\n$header.=\"\\\\usepackage[pdftex]{hyperref} \\n \";$header.= \"\\\\bibliography{\".$bibFile.\"}\";$header.=\"\\\\begin{document} \\n \";\n\n$f=fopen($NomeFile.'.tex','w');\nfputs($f,$header);\n\nfputs($f,\"\\\\cite{Mario}\");$printbib = '\\\\printbibliography';\nfputs($f,$printbib);\nfputs($f,\"\\\\end{document}\"); fclose($f);\n\n$filenameTeX =$NomeFile.'.tex';\n$test_2 = \/usr\/local\/texlive\/2018\/bin\/x86_64-linux\/pdflatex --interaction batchmode$texFile ;\n$test_3 = sudo -u root \/usr\/local\/texlive\/2018\/bin\/x86_64-linux\/biber$bibFile ;\n$test_4 = \/usr\/local\/texlive\/2018\/bin\/x86_64-linux\/pdflatex --interaction batchmode$texFile ;\n\n$filenamePdf =$NomeFile.'.pdf';\necho \"2 <pre>$test_2<\/pre>\"; echo \"3 <pre>$test_3<\/pre>\";\necho \"4 <pre>$test_4<\/pre>\"; echo \"<br><a href=\\\"$filenamePdf\\\">$filenamePdf<\/a>\"; echo \"<br><a href=\\\"$filenameTeX\\\">$filenameTeX<\/a>\"; ?> my .bib file @BOOK{Mario, author = {Mario Doe}, title = {TITLE}, publisher = {My Pubblisher}, location = {World}, year = {2025} } I have set PAR_GLOBAL_TEMP=\\var\\www\\tmp too, tmp owned by user apache, but it did not help. A call from my browser http:\/\/localhost\/test.php produces the wished test.tex and test.pdf files, bibliography included. \/var\/www\/tmp\/ remains empty. The same if I try by either [root@....]# php test.php or [root@...]# su -s \/bin\/bash apache bash-4.4$ php test.php\n\n\nNote, if later I compile the .tex file, then \/var\/www\/tmp\/ gets polluted by a number of files, mainly within a inc` sub-directory.\n\nI am not sure this is the best solution, still it works for me, on a local settings.","date":"2021-06-13 20:03:18","metadata":"{\"extraction_info\": {\"found_math\": true, \"script_math_tex\": 0, \"script_math_asciimath\": 0, \"math_annotations\": 0, \"math_alttext\": 0, \"mathml\": 0, \"mathjax_tag\": 0, \"mathjax_inline_tex\": 1, \"mathjax_display_tex\": 0, \"mathjax_asciimath\": 1, \"img_math\": 0, \"codecogs_latex\": 0, \"wp_latex\": 0, \"mimetex.cgi\": 0, \"\/images\/math\/codecogs\": 0, \"mathtex.cgi\": 0, \"katex\": 0, \"math-container\": 0, \"wp-katex-eq\": 0, \"align\": 0, \"equation\": 0, \"x-ck12\": 0, \"texerror\": 0, \"math_score\": 0.5868094563484192, \"perplexity\": 10485.94576658168}, \"config\": {\"markdown_headings\": true, \"markdown_code\": true, \"boilerplate_config\": {\"ratio_threshold\": 0.18, \"absolute_threshold\": 10, \"end_threshold\": 15, \"enable\": true}, \"remove_buttons\": true, \"remove_image_figures\": true, \"remove_link_clusters\": true, \"table_config\": {\"min_rows\": 2, \"min_cols\": 3, \"format\": \"plain\"}, \"remove_chinese\": true, \"remove_edit_buttons\": true, \"extract_latex\": true}, \"warc_path\": \"s3:\/\/commoncrawl\/crawl-data\/CC-MAIN-2021-25\/segments\/1623487610841.7\/warc\/CC-MAIN-20210613192529-20210613222529-00478.warc.gz\"}"} | null | null |
\chapter{Preface}\label{chap:intro}
\addcontentsline{toc}{chapter}{Preface}
\lettrine[lines=2, lhang=0.33, loversize=0.1]{T}his thesis is designed to serve a dual purpose. First, it is a stand-alone treatment of contemporary decoherence theory, accomplishing this mostly within a rigorous framework more detailed than is used in typical undergraduate quantum mechanics courses. It assumes no prior knowledge of quantum mechanics, although a basic understanding obtained through a standard introductory quantum mechanics or modern physics course would be helpful for depth of meaning. Although the mathematics used is introduced thoroughly in chapter \ref{chap:math_background}, the linear algebra can get quite complicated. Readers who have not had a formal course in linear algebra would benefit from having ref. \cite{poole} on-hand during some components, especially chapters \ref{chap:quantum_formal} and \ref{chap:dynamics}. The bulk of the work specifically related to decoherence is found in the last three chapters, and readers familiar with quantum mechanics desiring a better grasp of decoherence theory should proceed to the discussion of quantum mechanics in phase-space, found in chapter \ref{chap:wigner}.
Second, this thesis is an introduction to the rigorous study of the foundations of quantum mechanics, and is again stand-alone in this respect. It develops the bulk of quantum mechanics from several standard postulates and the invariance of physics under the Galilei group\index{Group!Galilei} of transformations, outlined in sections \ref{sec:posts} and \ref{sec:galgroup}, respectively. Readers interested in this part of the thesis should study the first three chapters, where many fundamental results of quantum mechanics are developed. We now begin with a motivating discussion of quantum decoherence.
One of the fundamental issues in physics today is the emergence of the familiar macroscopic physics that governs everyday objects from the strange, underlying microscopic laws for the motion of atoms and molecules. This collection of laws governing small bodies is called quantum mechanics, and operates entirely differently than classical Newtonian physics. However, since all macroscopic objects are made from microscopic particles, which obey quantum mechanics, there should be some way to link the two worlds: the macro and the micro. The conventional interpretation of quantum mechanics answers questions about the transition from classical to quantum mechanics, known as quantum emergence\index{Quantum Emergence}, through a special \textit{measurement}\index{Measurement} process, which is distinct from the other rules of quantum mechanics \cite{griffiths}.\footnote{In fact, the motion of a system not being measured is considered \textit{unitary}, and hence reversible, while the measurement process is conventionally considered discontinuous, and hence irreversible. So, not only are they treated separately, but they are considered fundamentally different processes!}
However, when this measurement concept is used, problems arise. The most famous of these problems is known as Schr\"odinger's cat\index{Schr\"odinger's cat}, which asks about the nature of measurement through a paradox \cite{omnes}. The problem creates ambiguity about \begin{enumerate} \item when a measurement occurs, and \item who (or what) performs it.\end{enumerate} When all is said and done, the conventional interpretation leaves a bitter taste in the mouths of many physicists; what they want is a theory of quantum measurement that does not function due to subjectively defined observation. If no external observers are permitted, how can classical mechanics ever emerge from quantum mechanics? The answer is that complex systems, in essence, measure themselves, which leads us to decoherence.
\section{Decoherence and the Measurement Problem}
\begin{figure}[bt]
\begin{center}
\includegraphics[width=0.9 \linewidth]{figures/informationexchange}
\end{center}
\caption[Graphical representation of decoherence]{A graphical representation of decoherence. Here, the environment, which is treated statistically, can be thought of as an information reservoir. It serves to absorb the quantum interference properties of the system, making the system appear as a classical, statistically prepared state.}\label{fig:informationexchange}
\end{figure}
Quantum decoherence theory is a quantitative model of how this transition from quantum to classical mechanics occurs, which involves systems performing local measurements on themselves. More precisely, we divide our universe into two pieces: a simple system component, which is treated quantum mechanically, and a complex environmental component, which is treated statistically.\footnote{The words statistical and classical are being tossed around here a bit. What we mean is statistical in the thermodynamic sense, for example probability distributions prepared by random coin-tosses. These random, statistical distributions are contrasted against quantum states, which may \textit{appear} to be random when observed, but actually carry quantum interference information.} Since the environment is treated statistically, it obeys the rules of classical (statistical) mechanics, and we call it a \textbf{mixture}\index{Impure State} \cite{ballentine}. When the environment is coupled to the system, any quantum mechanical information that the system transfers to the environment is effectively lost, hence the system becomes a mixture over time, as indicated in figure \ref{fig:informationexchange}.
In the macroscopic world, ordinary forces are huge compared to the subtle effects of quantum mechanics, and thus large systems are very difficult to isolate from their environments. Hence, the time it takes large objects to turn to mixtures, called the \textbf{decoherence time}\index{Decoherence Time}, is very short. It is important to keep in mind that decoherence is inherently local. That is, if we consider our entire universe, the system plus the environment, quantum mechanically, classical effects do not emerge. Rather, we need to ``focus'' on a particular component, and throw away the quantum mechanical information having to do with the environment \cite{omnes}.
In order to clarify this notion of decoherence, we examine the following unpublished example originally devised by Herbert J. Bernstein\index{Bernstein, H. J.} \cite{greenstein}. To start, consider an electron gun, as shown in figure \ref{bernsteindevice}. Electrons are an example of a two-state system, and as such they possess a quantum-mechanical property called spin \cite{nielsenchuang}. As we develop in detail later in section \ref{sec:quantumsup}, the spin of a two-state system\index{Two-State System} can be represented as a vector pointing on the unit two-sphere. Further, any possible spin can be formed as a linear combination of a spin pointing up in the $\hat z$ direction, and a spin pointing down in the $-\hat z$ direction.\footnote{In linear algebra terminology, we call the spin vectors pointing in $+ \hat z$ and $- \hat z$ a \textbf{basis} for the linear vector space of all possible states. We deal with bases precisely in section \ref{sec:linearvecspace}.}
We suppose that our electron gun fires electrons of random spin, and then we use some angular control device to fix the electron's spin to some angle (that we set) in the $xy$-plane. Then, we use a Stern-Gerlach\index{Stern-Gerlach Analyzer} analyzer adjusted to some angle to measure the resulting electron. The Stern-Gerlach analyzer measures how close its control angle is to the spins of the electrons in the beam passing through it \cite{greenstein}. It reads out a number on a digital display, with $1$ corresponding to perfect alignment and $0$ corresponding to anti-alignment.
\begin{figure}[t]
\begin{center}
\includegraphics[width=0.9 \linewidth]{figures/bernsteindevice}
\end{center}
\caption[H. J. Bernstein's simple model of decoherence]{A sketch of Bernstein's thought experiment. The electrons with initial random spin are set to a certain angle in the $xy$-plane at the first angular control. A switch determines whether or not an additional phase factor is added using a roulette wheel. Then, a Stern-Gerlach analyzer is used to measure the angle of electron spin.} \label{bernsteindevice}
\end{figure}
So far, we can always use the analyzer to measure the quantum-mechanical spin of each electron in our beam. We simply turn the analyzer's angular control until its digital display reads one, and then read the value of the angular control. Similarly, if we were to turn the analyzer's control to the angle opposite from the beam's angle, the display would read zero. The fact that these two special angles always exist is fundamental to quantum mechanics, resulting from a purely non-classical phenomenon called \textbf{superposition}.\index{Superposition}\footnote{The precise nature of quantum superposition is rather subtle, and we discuss it at length in section \ref{sec:quantumsup}.} We next insert another component into the path of the electron beam. By turning on a switch, we activate a second device that adjusts the angle of our beam in the $xy$-plane by adding $\theta$. The trick is that this device is actually attached to a modified roulette wheel, which we spin every time an electron passes. The roulette wheel is labeled in radians, and determines the value of $\theta$ \cite{greenstein}.
We now frantically spin the angular control attached to our analyzer, attempting to find the initial angle of our electron beam. However, much to our surprise, the display appears to be stuck on $0.5$ \cite{greenstein}. This reading turns out to be no mistake, since the angles of the electrons that the analyzer is measuring are now randomly distributed (thanks to the randomness of the roulette wheel) throughout the $xy$-plane. No matter how steadfastly we attempt to measure the spin of the electrons in our beam, we cannot while the roulette wheel is active. Essentially, the roulette wheel is absorbing the spin information of the electrons, as we apparently no longer have access to it.
This absorption of quantum information is the exact process that the environment performs in quantum decoherence theory. In both cases, the information is lost due to statistical randomness, and forces a quantum system to be classically random as well. The roulette wheel in this simplified example, just like the environment in reality, is blocking our access to quantum properties of a system. In chapter \ref{chap:applications}, we return to a more physical example of decoherence using the quantitative tools we develop in this thesis. First, we need to discuss the mathematical underpinnings of quantum mechanics.
\section{Notational Conventions}
Throughout this thesis, we adopt a variety of notational conventions, some more common than others. Here, we list them for clarity.
\begin{itemize}
\item The symbol $(\equiv)$ will always be used in the case of a definition. It indicates that the equality does not follow from previous work. The $(=)$ sign indicates equality that logically follows from previous work.
\item An integral symbol without bounds, \[\left( \int \right), \] is a definite integral from $- \infty$ to $+ \infty$, rather than the antiderivative, unless otherwise noted.
\item Usually, the differential term in an integrand will be grouped with the integral symbol and separated by $(\cdot)$. This is standard multiplication, and is only included for notational clarity.
\item Vectors are always given in Dirac kets, $\left( \, \left| \cdot \right> \, \right)$, operators on abstract vector or Hilbert spaces are always given with hats, $\left( \, \hat{\cdot}\, \right)$, linear functionals over vector spaces are given in Dirac bras, $\left( \, \left< \cdot \right| \, \right) $, and operators on function spaces are given with checks, $\left( \, \check{\cdot} \, \right)$.
\item Both partial and total derivatives are given using either standard Leibniz or in a contracted form $d_x$, where \[ d_x \equiv \frac{d}{dx}. \]
\item The symbol $(\leftrightarrow )$ is used to denote a special representation of a particular structure. Its precise definition is made clear by context.
\item The symbol $(*)$ is used to denote the complex conjugate of a complex number.
\end{itemize}
\chapter{Mathematical background}\label{chap:math_background}
\lettrine[lines=2, lhang=0.33, loversize=0.1]{B}efore we begin our discussion of quantum mechanics, we take this chapter to review the mathematical concepts that might be unfamiliar to the average undergraduate physics major wishing a more detailed understanding quantum mechanics. We begin with a discussion of linear vector spaces and linear operators. We next generalize these basic concepts to product spaces, and finally consider spaces of infinite dimension. Quantum mechanics is much more abstract than other areas of physics, such as classical mechanics, and so the immediate utility of the techniques introduced here is not evident. However, for the treatment in this thesis to be mostly self-contained, we proceed slowly and carefully.
\section{Linear Vector Spaces}\label{sec:linearvecspace}
In this section, we introduce linear vector spaces, which will be the stages for all of our subsequent work.\footnote{Well, actually we will work in a triplet of abstract spaces called a \textbf{rigged Hilbert space}, which is a special type of linear vector space. However, most textbooks on quantum mechanics, and even most physicists, do not bother much with the distinction. We will look at this issue in more detail in section \ref{sec:infdim}.} We begin with the elementary topic of vector spaces \cite{poole}.
\begin{boxeddefn}{Vector space\index{Linear!Vector Space}}{defn:vecspace}
Let $F$ be a field with addition $(+)$ and multiplication $(\cdot)$. A set $V$ is a \textbf{vector space} under the operation $(\oplus)$ over $F$ if for all $\left| u \right> , \left| v \right>, \left| w \right> \in V$ and $a,b \in F$:
\begin{enumerate}
\item $\left| u \right> \oplus \left| v \right> = \left| v \right> \oplus \left| u \right> $.
\item $(\left| u \right> \oplus \left| v \right> ) \oplus \left| w \right> = \left| u \right> \oplus (\left| v \right> \oplus \left| w \right> )$.
\item There exists $\left| 0 \right> \in V$ such that $\left| 0 \right> \oplus \left| u \right> = \left| u \right>$.
\item There exists $- \left| u \right> \in V$ such that $ - \left| u \right> \oplus \left| u \right> = \left| 0\right> $.
\item $a \cdot ( b \left| u \right> ) = (a \cdot b ) \left| u\right> $.
\item $(a + b) \left| u \right> = a \left| u \right> + b \left| u\right> $.
\item $a ( \left| u \right> + \left| v \right> ) = a \left| u \right> + a \left| v\right> $.
\item For the unity of $F$, $1$, $1 \left| u \right> = \left| u \right>$.
\end{enumerate}
\end{boxeddefn}
If $V$ satisfies the criteria for a vector space, the members $\left| u \right> \in V$ are called \textbf{vectors}\index{Vector}, and the members $a \in F$ are called \textbf{scalars}\index{Scalar}. For the purposes of quantum mechanics, the field $F$ we are concerned with is almost always $\mathbb C$, the field of complex numbers, and $V$ has the usual (Euclidean) topology.\footnote{The fields\index{Field (algebraic)} we refer to here are those from abstract algebra, and should not be confused with force fields (such as the electric and magnetic fields) used in physics. Loosely speaking, most of the sets of numbers we deal with in physics are algebraic fields, such as the real and complex numbers. For more details, see ref \cite{anderson}.} Since the operation $(\oplus)$ is by definition interchangeable with the field operation $(+)$, it is conventional to use the symbol $(+)$ for both, and we do so henceforth \cite{anderson}.\footnote{In definition \ref{defn:lindep}, we use the notion $\alpha \in \Lambda$, which might be foreign to some readers. $\Lambda$ is considered an index set, or a set of all possible allowed values for $\alpha$. Then, by $\alpha \in \Lambda$, we are letting $\alpha$ run over the entire index set. Using this powerful notation, we can treat almost any type of general sum or integral. For more information, see ref. \cite{gamelin}}
\begin{boxeddefn}{Linear dependence\index{Linear!Dependence}}{defn:lindep}
A collection of vectors $\{ \left| v _{\alpha} \right> \}_{\alpha \in \Lambda}$, where $\Lambda$ is some index set, belonging a vector space $V$ over $F$ is \textbf{linearly dependent} if there exists a set $\{a_{\alpha}\}_{\alpha \in \Lambda}$ such that
\begin{equation}
\sum_{\alpha \in \Lambda} a_{\alpha} \left| v_{\alpha}\right> = \left| 0\right>
\end{equation}
given that at least one $a_{i} \in \{ a_{\alpha} \} \neq 0$.
\end{boxeddefn}
This means that, if a set of vectors is linearly dependent, we can express one of the member vectors in terms of the others. If a set of vectors is not linearly dependent, we call it \textbf{linearly independent}\index{Linear!Independence}, in which case we would not be able to express one of the member vectors in terms of the others \cite{poole}.
\begin{boxeddefn}{Dimension\index{Dimension}}{defndimension}
Consider the vector space $V$ and let $\{ \left| v\right>_{\alpha} \}_{\alpha \in \Lambda} \subseteq V$ be an arbitrary set of linearly independent vectors. Then, if $\Lambda$ is alway finite, the \textbf{dimension} of $V$ is the maximum number of elements in $\Lambda$. If $\Lambda$ is not always finite, then $V$ is said to have \textbf{infinite dimension}.
\end{boxeddefn}
\begin{boxeddefn}{Basis\index{Basis}}{def:basis}
Let $B=\{\left| v_{\alpha}\right> \}_{\alpha \in \Lambda} \subseteq V$, where $V$ is a vector space over the field $F$. If $\left| v_{\alpha} \right>$ and $\left| v_{\beta} \right>$ when $\alpha \neq \beta$ are linearly independent and an arbitrary vector $\left| u \right> \in V$ can be written as a linear combination of $\left| v _{\alpha}\right>$`s, i.e.
\begin{equation}
\left| u \right> = \sum_{\alpha \in \Lambda} c_{\alpha} \left| v _{\alpha}\right>,
\end{equation}
with $c_{\alpha} \in F$, we say $\{\left| v_{\alpha}\right> \}_{\alpha \in \Lambda}$ is a \textbf{basis set} or \textbf{basis} for $V$.
\end{boxeddefn}
It follows directly from this definition that, in any vector space with finite dimension $D$, any basis set will have precisely $D$ members. Because quantum mechanics deals with a Euclidean vector space over the complex numbers, it is advantageous to precisely define the inner product of two vectors within that special case \cite{ballentine}.
\begin{boxeddefn}{Inner product}{defn:innderproduct}
Let $V$ be a vector space over the field of complex numbers $\mathbb C$. Then, $g:V \times V \rightarrow \mathbb C$ is an \textbf{inner product} if, for all $\left| u \right>, \left| v \right>, \left| w \right> \in V$ and $\alpha, \beta \in \mathbb C$,
\begin{enumerate}
\item $g \left( \left| u \right> , \left| v \right> \right) = g \left( \left| v \right> , \left| u \right> \right)^ *$,
\item $ g \left( \left| u \right> , a \left| v \right> + b \left| w \right> \right) = a \cdot g \left( \left| u \right> , \left| v \right> \right)+ b \cdot g \left( \left| u \right> , \left| w \right> \right) $,
\item $ g \left( \left| u \right> , \left| u \right> \right) \geq 0$ with $ g \left( \left| u \right> , \left| u \right> \right) = 0 \Leftrightarrow \left| u \right> = \left| 0 \right>$.
\end{enumerate}
\end{boxeddefn}
Although it is not immediately clear, the inner product is closely related to the space of linear functionals on $V$, called the dual space of $V$ and denoted $V^*$. Below, we define these concepts precisely and then show their connection through the Riesz representation theorem \cite{ballentine}.
\begin{boxeddefn}{Linear functional\index{Linear!Functional}}{}
A \textbf{linear functional} on a vector space $V$ over $\mathbb C$ is any function $F: V \rightarrow \mathbb C$ such that for all $\alpha, \beta \in \mathbb C$ and for all $\left| u \right>, \left| v \right> \in V$,
\begin{equation}
F \left( a \left| u \right>+ b \left| v \right> \right) = a \cdot F \left( \left| u \right> \right) + b \cdot F \left( \left| v \right> \right).
\end{equation}
We say that the space occupied by the linear functionals on $V$ is the \textbf{dual space}\index{Dual Space} of $V$, and we denote it by $V^*$.
\end{boxeddefn}
We connect the inner product with the dual space $V^*$ using the Riesz representation theorem \cite{ballentine}.
\begin{boxedthm}{Riesz representation\index{Riesz Representation Theorem}}{thm:rieszthm}
Let $V$ be a finite-dimensional vector space and $V^*$ be its dual space. Then, there exists a bijection $h: V^* \rightarrow V$ defined by $h(F) = \left| f \right> $ for $F \in V^*$ and $\left| f \right> \in V$ such that $F \left( \left| u \right> \right) = g \left( \left| f \right>, \left| u \right> \right)\, \forall \left| u \right> \in V$, where $g$ is an inner product of $V$ \cite{ballentine}.
\end{boxedthm}
The proof of this theorem is straightforward, but too lengthy for our present discussion, so we will reference a simple proof for the interested reader \cite{ballentine}. The consequences of this theorem are quite drastic. It is obviously true that the inner product of two vectors, which maps them to a scalar, is a linear functional. However, the Riesz theorem asserts that any linear functional can be represented as an inner product. This means that every linear functional has precisely one object in the dual space, corresponding to a vector in the vector space. For this reason, we call the linear functional associated with with $\left| u \right>$ a dual vector and write it as
\begin{equation}
\left< u \right| \in V^*,
\end{equation}
and we contract our notation for the inner product of two vectors $\left| u \right>$ and $\left| v \right>$ to
\begin{equation}
g\left( \left| u \right>, \left| v \right> \right) \equiv \left< u \big| v \right>,
\end{equation}
a notational convention first established by P. A. M. Dirac.\index{Dirac, P. A. M.} The vectors in $V$ are called \textbf{kets}\index{Ket} and the dual vectors, or linear functionals associated with vectors in $V^*$, are called \textbf{bras}\index{Bra}. Hence, when we adjoin a bra and a ket, we get a bra-ket or bracket, which is an inner product. Note that by the definition of the inner product, we have
\begin{equation}\label{eqn:diracinner}
\left< u \big | v \right> = \left< v \big | u \right>^*,
\end{equation}
so if we multiply some vector $\left| v \right>$ by a (complex) scalar $\alpha$, the corresponding dual vector is $\alpha^* \left< v \right|$. When we form dual vectors from vectors, we must always remember to conjugate such scalars. As another note, when choosing a basis, we frequently pick it as \textbf{orthonormal}, which we define below \cite{poole}.
\begin{boxeddefn}{Orthonormality of a Basis\index{Basis!Orthonormality of}}{defn:orthobasis}
A basis $B$ for some vector space $V$ is \textbf{orthonormal} if any two vectors $\left| \phi_i \right>$ and $\left| \phi_j \right>$ in $B$ satisfy
\begin{equation}
\left< \phi_i \big | \phi_j \right> = \begin{cases} 1 & \text{if $i=j$} \\ 0& \text{if $i \neq j$} \end{cases}.
\end{equation}
\end{boxeddefn}
For any vector space, we can always find such a basis, so we do not lose any generality by always choosing to use one.\footnote{The process for finding an orthonormal basis is called the Graham-Schmidt algorithm\index{Graham-Schmidt Algorithm}, and allows us to construct an orthonormal basis from any basis. For details, see ref. \cite{poole}.}
A useful example that illustrates the use of vectors and dual vectors can be found by constraining our vector space to a finite number of dimensions.\index{Matrix Representation!of Vectors}\index{Matrix Representation!of Linear Functionals} Working in such a space, we represent vectors as column matrices and dual vectors as row matrices \cite{nielsenchuang}. For example, in three dimensions we might have
\begin{equation}
\left| e_1 \right> \leftrightarrow \left( \begin{array}{c} 1 \\ 0 \\ 0 \end{array} \right)
\end{equation}
and
\begin{equation}
i \left| e_2 \right> \leftrightarrow \left( \begin{array}{c} 0 \\ i \\0 \end{array} \right),
\end{equation}
where $\left| e_1 \right>$ and $\left| e_2 \right>$ are the unit vectors from basic physics \cite{hrw}. Then, the linear functional corresponding to $\left| e_2 \right>$ is\footnote{Here, notice that to generate the representation for $\left< e_2 \right|$ from $\left| e_2 \right>$, we must take the complex conjugate. This is necessary due to the complex symmetry of the inner product established in eqn. \ref{eqn:diracinner}.}
\begin{equation}
\left< e_2 \right| \leftrightarrow i^* \left( \begin{array}{ccc} 0 & 1 & 0 \end{array} \right) = \left( \begin{array}{ccc} 0 & -i & 0 \end{array} \right) .
\end{equation}
We represent the inner product as matrix multiplication, so we write
\begin{equation}
- i \left< e_2 \big |e_1 \right> \leftrightarrow \left( \begin{array}{ccc} 0 & -i & 0 \end{array} \right) \left( \begin{array}{c} 1 \\ 0 \\ 0 \end{array} \right) = 0,
\end{equation}
which indicates that $\left| e_1 \right> $ and $\left| e_2\right>$ are orthogonal, as we expect.
\section{Linear Operators}
So far, we have looked at two main types of objects in a vector space: vectors and linear functionals. In this section, we focus on a third: the linear operator. Recall that linear functionals take vectors to numbers. Similarly, linear operators are objects that take vectors to other vectors. Formally, this is the following definition \cite{riley}.
\begin{boxeddefn}{Linear Operator\index{Linear!Operator!Abstract}}{}
Let $\left| u \right>, \left| v \right> \in V$ be vectors and $\alpha, \beta$ be scalars in the field associated with $V$. Then, we say $\hat A$ is a \textbf{linear operator} on $V$ if
\begin{equation}
\hat A \left| v \right> \in V
\end{equation}
and
\begin{equation}
\hat A \left( \alpha \left| u \right> + \beta \left| v \right> \right) = \alpha \hat A \left| u \right> + \beta \hat A \left| v \right>.
\end{equation}
\end{boxeddefn}
Throughout the rest of this thesis, whenever we discuss an operator on a vector space, we will always use a hat to avoid confusion with a scalar. In a finite dimensional vector space, as indicated previously, we often represent vectors by column matrices and dual vectors by row matrices. Similarly, we represent operators by square matrices \cite{nielsenchuang}.\index{Matrix Representation!of Linear Operators} For example, if
\begin{equation}
\hat{A} \leftrightarrow \left( \begin{array}{ccc} 0 & 0 & 0\\ 1 & 0 & 0\\0 & 0 & 0 \end{array} \right),
\end{equation}
then
\begin{equation}
\hat{A} \left| e_1 \right> \leftrightarrow \left( \begin{array}{ccc} 0 & 0 & 0\\ 1 & 0 & 0\\0 & 0 & 0 \end{array} \right) \left( \begin{array}{c} 1 \\ 0 \\ 0 \end{array} \right) = \left( \begin{array}{c} 0 \\ 1 \\0 \end{array} \right) \leftrightarrow \left| e_2 \right>.
\end{equation}
We can also use our formalism to access individual elements of an operator in its matrix representation. Working in the three-dimensional standard, orthonormal basis from the example above, we specify $\hat B$ as
\begin{equation}
\hat{B} \left| u \right> = \left| v \right>,
\end{equation}
where
\begin{equation}
\left| u \right> = u_1 \left| e_1 \right> + u_2 \left| e_2 \right> + u_3 \left| e_3 \right>
\end{equation}
and
\begin{equation}
\left| v \right> = v_1 \left| e_1 \right> + v_2 \left| e_2 \right> + v_3 \left| e_3 \right>.
\end{equation}
Then,
\begin{eqnarray}
\left<e_i \right| \hat B\left| u \right>&=&\left< e_i \right| \hat B \left( u_1\left| e_1 \right> +u_2\left| e_2 \right> + u_3\left| e_3 \right> \right) \nonumber \\
&=& \left<e_i \right| \hat B \sum_{j=1}^3 u_j \left| e_j \right> \nonumber \\
&=& \left<e_i \big | v \right> \nonumber \\
&=&\sum_{j=1}^3 v_j \left<e_i \big | e_j \right> \nonumber \\
&=& v_i,
\end{eqnarray}
which is just the matrix equation \cite{ballentine}
\begin{equation}
\sum_{j=1}^3 B(i,j)u_j=v_j,
\end{equation}
where we made the definition
\begin{equation}\label{eqn:matrixelem}
B_{ij}=B(i,j)\equiv \big < e_i \big | \hat B \left| e_j \right>.
\end{equation}
We call $B(i,j)$ the \textbf{matrix element}\index{Matrix Element} corresponding to the the operator $\hat B$. Note that the matrix elements of an operator depend on our choice of basis set. Using this expression for a matrix element, we define the trace of an operator. This definition is very similar to the elementary notion of the trace of a matrix as the sum of the elements in the main diagonal.\footnote{Since the individual matrix elements of an operator depend on the basis chosen, it might seem as if the trace would vary with basis, as well. However, the trace turns out to be independent of basis choice \cite{ballentine}.}
\begin{boxeddefn}{Trace}{defn:trace}
Let $\hat A$ be an operator on the vector space $V$ and let $B=\{\left| v_{\alpha}\right> \}_{\alpha \in \Lambda} \subseteq V$ be an orthonormal basis for $V$. Then, the \textbf{trace} of $\hat{A}$ is
\begin{equation}
\mathrm{Tr} \left( \hat A \right) \equiv \sum_{\alpha \in \Lambda} \left< v _{\alpha }\right| \hat A \left| v_{\alpha} \right>.
\end{equation}
\end{boxeddefn}
So far, we have defined operators as acting to the right on vectors. However, since the Riesz theorem guarantees a bijection between vectors and dual vectors (linear functionals in the dual space), we expect operators to also act to the left on dual vectors. To make this concept precise, we write a definition.
\begin{boxeddefn}{Adjoint\index{Adjoint}}{def:adjoint}
Suppose $\left| u \right>, \left| v \right> \in V$ such that an operator on $V$, $\hat A$, follows
\begin{equation}
\hat A \left| u \right> = \left| v \right>.
\end{equation}
Then, we define the \textbf{adjoint} of $\hat A$, $\hat A ^{\dagger}$, as
\begin{equation}
\left< u \right| \hat A^{\dagger} \equiv \left< v \right|.
\end{equation}
\end{boxeddefn}
From this definition, it follows that
\begin{eqnarray} \label{eqn:adjointapp}
\left( \left< u \right| \hat A^{\dagger} \left| w \right> \right)^* &=& \left<v \big | w \right>^* \nonumber \\
&=& \left< w \big| v \right> \nonumber \\
&=& \left< w \right| \hat A \left| u \right>,
\end{eqnarray}
which is an important result involving the adjoint, and is sometimes even used as its definition. This correctly suggests that the adjoint for operators is very similar to the conjugate transpose for square matrices, with the two operations equivalent for the matrix representations of finite vector spaces.\footnote{Many physicists, seeing that linear functionals are represented as row matrices and vectors are represented as column matrices, will write $\left| v \right> = \left< v \right| ^{\dagger}$. This is not \textit{technically} correct, as the formal definition \ref{def:adjoint} only defined the adjoint operation for an operator, not a functional. However, though it is an abuse of notation, it turns out that nothing breaks as a result \cite{ballentine}. For clarity, we will be careful not to use the adjoint in this way.}
Although the matrix representation of an operator is useful, we need to express operators using Dirac's bra-ket notation. To do this, we define the outer product \cite{nielsenchuang}.
\begin{boxeddefn}{Outer Product\index{Outer Product}}{}
Let $ \left| u \right>, \left| v \right> \in V$ be vectors. We define the \textbf{outer product} of $\left| u \right>$ and $\left| v \right>$ as the operator $\hat A$ such that
\begin{equation}
\hat A \equiv \left| u \right> \left< v \right|.
\end{equation}
\end{boxeddefn}
Note that this is clearly linear, and is an operator, as
\begin{equation}
\big( \left| u \right> \left< v \right| \big) \left| w \right> = \left| u \right> \left< v \big | w \right> = \left< v \big | w \right> \left| u \right> \in V
\end{equation}
for $\left| u \right>, \left| v \right>, \left| w \right> \in V$, a vector space. Further, if an operator is constructed in such a way, eqn. \ref{eqn:adjointapp} tells us that its adjoint is
\begin{equation}
\left( \left| u \right> \left< v \right| \right)^{\dagger} = \left| v \right> \left< u \right|.
\end{equation}
Self-adjoint opeartors\index{Linear!Operator!Self-Adjoint}, i.e. operators such that
\begin{equation}
\hat A^{\dagger} = \hat A,
\end{equation}
are especially important in quantum mechanics. The main properties that make self-adjoint operators useful concern their eigenvectors and eigenvalues.\footnote{We assume that the reader has seen eigenvalues and eigenvectors. However, if not, see ref. \cite{poole} or any other linear algebra text for a thorough introduction.} We summarize them formally in the following theorem \cite{ballentine}.
\begin{boxedthm}{Eigenvectors and Eigenvalues of Self-adjoint Operators}{}
Let $\hat A$ be a self-adjoint operator. Then, all its eigenvalues are real and any two eigenvectors corresponding to two distinct eigenvalues are orthogonal.
\end{boxedthm}
\begin{proof}
Let $ \hat A \left| u \right> = u \left| u \right>$ and $\hat A \left| v \right> = v \left| v \right>$ so that $\left| u \right>$ and $\left| v \right>$ are arbitrary (nonzero) eigenvectors of $\hat A$ corresponding to the eigenvalues $u$ and $v$.
Then, using eqn. \ref{eqn:adjointapp}, we deduce \cite{ballentine}
\begin{eqnarray}
u \left< u \big | u \right> &=& \left< u \right| u \left| u \right> \nonumber \\
&=& \left< u \right| \hat A^{\dagger} \left| u \right>^* \nonumber \\
&=& \left< u \right| \hat A \left| u \right>^* \nonumber \\
&=& \left< u \right| u \left| u \right>^* \nonumber \\
&=& u^* \left< u \big| u \right>^* \nonumber \\
&=& u^* \left< u \big| u \right>.
\end{eqnarray}
Since $\left| u \right> \neq 0$, we get $u=u^*$, so $u$ is real. Hence, any arbitrary eigenvalue of a self-adjoint operator is real. Next, we consider combinations of two eigenvectors. That is,
\begin{eqnarray}
0 &=& \left< u \right| \hat A \left| v \right> - \left< u \right| \hat A \left| v \right> \nonumber \\
&=& \left< u \right| \hat A \left| v \right> - \left< v \right| \hat A^{\dagger} \left| u \right>^* \nonumber \\
&=& \left< u \right| \hat A \left| v \right> - \left< v \right| \hat A \left| u \right>^* \nonumber \\
&=& \left< u \right| v \left| v \right> - \left< v \right| u \left| u \right>^* \nonumber \\
&=& \left( v - u \right) \left< u \big | v \right>.
\end{eqnarray}
Thus, if $v \neq u$, $\left< u \big | v \right> = 0$, so $\left| u \right>$ and $\left| v \right>$ are orthogonal as claimed.
\end{proof}
Now that we have shown this orthogonality of distinct eigenvectors or an operator, we would like to claim that these eigenvectors form a basis for the vector space in which the operator works. For finite dimensional spaces, this turns out to be the case, although the proof quite technical, so we omit it with reference \cite{ballentine}. However, infinite dimensional cases produce problems mathematically, hence the eigenvectors of an operator in such a space need not form a basis for that space \cite{ballentine}. For the moment, we will proceed anyway, returning to this issue in section \ref{sec:infdim}.
Suppose that $\{\left| v_{\alpha}\right> \}_{\alpha \in \Lambda}$ is the set of all eigenvectors of the self-adjoint operator $\hat A$. Since eigenvectors are only determinable up to a scaling factor, as long as our vectors are of finite magnitude, we may rescale all of these vectors to be an orthonormal set of basis vectors \cite{poole}. By our assumption, this set forms a basis for our vector space, $V$. Thus, for any $\left| u \right> \in V$, we can write
\begin{equation}
\left| u \right> = \sum_{\alpha \in \Lambda} u_{\alpha} \left| v_{\alpha} \right> = \sum_{\alpha \in \Lambda} \left| v_{\alpha} \right>u_{\alpha} .
\end{equation}
Noting that, since the basis vectors are orthonormal,
\begin{equation}
\left<v_i \big | u \right> = \sum_{\alpha \in \Lambda} u_{\alpha} \left< v_i \big| v_\alpha \right> = u_i,
\end{equation}
we get
\begin{equation}
\left| u \right> = \sum_{\alpha \in \Lambda} \left| v_{\alpha} \right> \left< v_{\alpha} \big | u \right> = \left(\sum_{\alpha \in \Lambda} \left| v_{\alpha} \right> \left< v_{\alpha}\right| \right) \left| u \right> .
\end{equation}
It follows immediately that
\begin{boxedeqn}{eqn:projector}
\sum_{\alpha \in \Lambda} \left| v_{\alpha} \right> \left< v_{\alpha}\right| = \hat 1,
\end{boxedeqn}
which is called the \textbf{resolution of the identity}\index{Resolution of the Identity}. This leads us to a result that allows us to represent self-adjoint operators in terms of their eigenvector bases, the spectral theorem \cite{ballentine}.
\begin{boxedthm}{Spectral Theorem\index{Spectral Theorem}}{thm:spectral}
Let $\hat A$ be an operator on the vector space $V$. Assuming that the spectrum of eigenvectors of $\hat A$, $\{\left| v_{\alpha}\right> \}_{\alpha \in \Lambda}$, forms a basis for $V$, $\hat A$ can be expressed as
\begin{equation}
\hat A = \sum_{\alpha \in \Lambda} a_{\alpha} \left| v_{\alpha} \right> \left< v_{\alpha} \right|,
\end{equation}
where $\{ a_{\alpha} \}_{\alpha \in \Lambda}$ are the eigenvalues of $\hat A$.
\end{boxedthm}
\begin{proof}
Let $\left| u \right> \in V$ be an arbitrary vector. Then, since $\{\left| v_{\alpha}\right> \}_{\alpha \in \Lambda}$ is a basis for $V$, we can write
\begin{equation}
\left| u \right> = \sum_{\alpha \in \Lambda} u_{\alpha} \left| v_{\alpha} \right>.
\end{equation}
Hence,
\begin{equation}
\hat A \left| u \right> = \sum_{\alpha \in \Lambda} u_{\alpha} \hat A \left| v_{\alpha} \right> = \sum_{\alpha \in \Lambda} u_{\alpha} a_{\alpha} \left| v_{\alpha} \right>.
\end{equation}
Now, we consider the other side of the equation. We get \cite{ballentine}
\begin{eqnarray}
\left( \sum_{\alpha \in \Lambda} a_{\alpha} \left| v_{\alpha} \right> \left< v_{\alpha} \right| \right) \left| u \right>
&=& \left( \sum_{\alpha \in \Lambda} a_{\alpha} \left| v_{\alpha} \right> \left< v_{\alpha} \right| \right) \sum_{\beta \in \Lambda} u_{\beta} \left| v_{\beta} \right> \nonumber \\
&=& \sum_{\alpha \in \Lambda} \sum_{\beta \in \Lambda} a_{\alpha}u_{\beta} \left| v_{\alpha} \right> \left< v_{\alpha} \big| v_{\beta} \right> \nonumber \\
&=& \sum_{\alpha \in \Lambda} a_{\alpha}u_{\alpha} \left| v_{\alpha} \right> \nonumber \\
&=& \hat A \left| u \right>,
\end{eqnarray}
where we used the orthonormality of our basis vectors. This holds for arbitrary $\left| u \right> \in V$, so \cite{ballentine}
\begin{equation}
\hat A = \sum_{\alpha \in \Lambda} a_{\alpha} \left| v_{\alpha} \right> \left< v_{\alpha} \right| ,
\end{equation}
as desired.
\end{proof}
Since we assumed that the eigenvectors for any self-adjoint operator formed a basis for the operator's space, we may use the spectral theorem to decompose self-adjoint operators into basis elements, which we make use of later.
\section{The Tensor Product}
So far, we have discussed two types of products in vector spaces: inner and outer. The tensor product falls into the same category as the outer product in that it involves arraying all possible combinations of two sets, and is sometimes referred to as the cartesian or direct product \cite{anderson}. We formally define the tensor product operation $( \otimes )$ below \cite{nielsenchuang}.
\begin{boxeddefn}{Tensor Product\index{Tensor Product}}{defn:tensor}
Suppose $V$ and $W$ are two vector spaces spanned by the orthonormal bases $\{\left| v_{\alpha}\right> \}_{\alpha \in \Lambda}$ and $\big\{\left| w_{\beta}\right> \big \}_{\beta \in \Gamma}$, respectively. Then, we define the \textbf{tensor product space}, or product space, as the space spanned by the basis set
\begin{equation}
\big \{ \left( \left| x \right>, \left| y \right> \right) \, : \, \left| x \right> \in \{\left| v_{\alpha}\right> \}_{\alpha \in \Lambda}, \left| y \right> \in \big\{\left| w_{\beta}\right> \big \}_{\beta \in \Gamma} \big \}
\end{equation}
and denote the space as $V \otimes W$. We call each ordered pair of vectors a \textbf{tensor product} of the two vectors and denote it as $\left| x \right> \otimes \left| y \right>$. We require
\begin{equation}
\left< \left( \left| x_1 \right> \otimes \left| y_1 \right> \right) \big| \left( \left| x_2 \right> \otimes \left| y_2 \right> \right) \right> \equiv \left< x_1 \big | x_2 \right> \otimes \left< y_1 \big | y_2 \right>.
\end{equation}
\end{boxeddefn}
The tensor product is linear in the normal sense, in that it is distributive and can absorb scalar constants \cite{nielsenchuang}. Further, we define linear operators on a product space by
\begin{equation} \label{eqn:tensorop}
\left( \hat A \otimes \hat B \right) \left| v \right> \otimes \left| w \right> \equiv \hat A \left| v \right> \otimes \hat B \left| w \right>.
\end{equation}
The definition for the tensor product is quite abstract, so we now consider a special case in a matrix representation for clarity. Consider a a two-dimensional vector space, $V$, and a three-dimensional vector space $W$. We let the operator
\begin{equation}
\hat A \leftrightarrow \left( \begin{array}{cc} 1 & -i \\ 0 & 2 \end{array} \right)
\end{equation}
act over $V$, and the operator
\begin{equation}
\hat B \leftrightarrow \left( \begin{array}{ccc} i & 2 & -1 \\ 0 & 1 & -2 \\ 2i & -1 & 0 \end{array} \right)
\end{equation}
act over $W$. Then, operating on arbitrary vectors, we find
\begin{equation}
\hat A \left| v \right> \leftrightarrow \left( \begin{array}{cc} 1 & -i \\ 0 & 2 \end{array} \right) \left( \begin{array}{c} v_1 \\ v_2 \end{array} \right) = \left( \begin{array}{c} v_1-i v_2 \\ 2 v_2 \end{array} \right)
\end{equation}
and
\begin{equation}
\hat B \left| w \right> \leftrightarrow \left( \begin{array}{ccc} i & 2 & -1 \\ 0 & 1 & -2 \\ 2i & -1 & 0 \end{array} \right) \left( \begin{array}{c} w_1 \\ w_2 \\ w_3 \end{array} \right) = \left( \begin{array}{c} iw_1+2w_2-w_3 \\ w_2 -2 w_3\\ 2iw_1 - w_2 \end{array} \right).
\end{equation}
The representation of the tensor product as a matrix operation is called the \textbf{Kronecker product}, and is formed by nesting matrices from right to left and distributing via standard multiplication \cite{nielsenchuang}. We now illustrate it by working our example.
\begin{eqnarray}
\hat A \left| v \right> \otimes \hat B \left| w \right>
&\leftrightarrow& \left( \begin{array}{c} v_1-i v_2 \\ 2 v_2 \end{array} \right) \otimes \left( \begin{array}{c} iw_1+2w_2-w_3 \\ w_2 -2 w_3\\ 2iw_1 - w_2 \end{array} \right) \nonumber \\
&=& \left( \begin{array}{c} \left( v_1-i v_2 \right)\left( \begin{array}{c} iw_1+2w_2-w_3 \\ w_2 -2 w_3\\ 2iw_1 - w_2 \end{array} \right) \\ 2 v_2 \left( \begin{array}{c} iw_1+2w_2-w_3 \\ w_2 -2 w_3\\ 2iw_1 - w_2 \end{array} \right)\end{array} \right) \nonumber \\
&=& \left( \begin{array}{c} \left( v_1-i v_2 \right) \left(iw_1+2w_2-w_3 \right) \\ \left( v_1-i v_2 \right)\left(w_2 -2 w_3 \right) \\ \left( v_1-i v_2 \right) \left( 2iw_1 - w_2 \right) \\ 2 v_2 \left( iw_1+2w_2-w_3 \right) \\ 2 v_2 \left( w_2 -2 w_3 \right) \\ 2 v_2 \left( 2iw_1 - w_2 \right) \end{array} \right) .
\end{eqnarray}
But by eqn. \ref{eqn:tensorop}, we should be able to first construct the tensor product of the of the operators $\hat A$ and $\hat B$ and apply the resulting operator to the tensor product of $\left| v \right>$ and $\left| w \right>$. Working this out using the Kronecker product\index{Kronecker Product}, we have
\begin{eqnarray}
\hat A \otimes \hat B
&\leftrightarrow&\left( \begin{array}{cc} 1 & -i \\ 0 & 2 \end{array} \right) \otimes \left( \begin{array}{ccc} i & 2 & -1 \\ 0 & 1 & -2 \\ 2i & -1 & 0 \end{array} \right) \nonumber \\
&=& \left( \begin{array}{cc} 1 \left( \begin{array}{ccc} i & 2 & -1 \\ 0 & 1 & -2 \\ 2i & -1 & 0 \end{array} \right) & -i \left( \begin{array}{ccc} i & 2 & -1 \\ 0 & 1 & -2 \\ 2i & -1 & 0 \end{array} \right) \\ 0 \left( \begin{array}{ccc} i & 2 & -1 \\ 0 & 1 & -2 \\ 2i & -1 & 0 \end{array} \right) & 2 \left( \begin{array}{ccc} i & 2 & -1 \\ 0 & 1 & -2 \\ 2i & -1 & 0 \end{array} \right)\end{array} \right) \nonumber \\
&=& \left( \begin{array}{cccccc} i & 2 & -1 & 1 & -2i & i \\ 0 & 1 & -2 & 0 & -i & 2i\\ 2i & -1 & 0 & 2 & i & 0 \\ 0 & 0 & 0 & 2i & 4 & -2 \\ 0 & 0 & 0 & 0 & 2 & -4 \\ 0 & 0 & 0 & 4i & -2 & 0 \end{array} \right) \nonumber \\
\end{eqnarray}
and
\begin{equation}
\left| v \right> \otimes \left| w \right> \leftrightarrow \left( \begin{array}{c} v_1 \\ v_2 \end{array} \right) \otimes \left( \begin{array}{c} w_1 \\ w_2 \\ w_3 \end{array} \right) = \left( \begin{array}{c} v_1 w_1 \\ v_2 w_1 \\ v_1 w_2 \\v_2 w_2\\ v_1w_3 \\v_2 w_3 \end{array} \right),
\end{equation}
so
\begin{eqnarray}
\hat A \otimes \hat B\left( \left| v \right> \otimes \left| w \right> \right)
&\leftrightarrow & \left( \begin{array}{cccccc} i & 2 & -1 & 1 & -2i & i \\ 0 & 1 & -2 & 0 & -i & 2i\\ 2i & -1 & 0 & 2 & i & 0 \\ 0 & 0 & 0 & 2i & 4 & -2 \\ 0 & 0 & 0 & 0 & 2 & -4 \\ 0 & 0 & 0 & 4i & -2 & 0 \end{array} \right) \left( \begin{array}{c} v_1 w_1 \\ v_2 w_1 \\ v_1 w_2 \\v_2 w_2\\ v_1w_3 \\v_2 w_3 \end{array} \right) \nonumber \\
&=& \left( \begin{array}{c} i v_1 w_1+ 2 v_2 w_1 -v_1w_2+v_2w_2-2iv_1w_3+iv_2w_3 \\ v_1w_2-iv_2w_2-2v_1w_3+2iv_2w_3 \\ 2iv_1w_1+2v_2w_1-v_1w_2+iv_2w_2 \\ 2iv_2w_1+4v_2w_2-2v_2w_3\\ 2v_2w_2-4v_2w_3\\4iv_2w_1-2v_2w_2 \end{array} \right) \nonumber \\
&=& \left( \begin{array}{c} \left( v_1-i v_2 \right) \left(iw_1+2w_2-w_3 \right) \\ \left( v_1-i v_2 \right)\left(w_2 -2 w_3 \right) \\ \left( v_1-i v_2 \right) \left( 2iw_1 - w_2 \right) \\ 2 v_2 \left( iw_1+2w_2-w_3 \right) \\ 2 v_2 \left( w_2 -2 w_3 \right) \\ 2 v_2 \left( 2iw_1 - w_2 \right) \end{array} \right) \nonumber \\
&\leftrightarrow& \hat A \left| v \right> \otimes \hat B \left| w \right>,
\end{eqnarray}
and we confirm that this example follows
\begin{equation}
\left( \hat A \otimes \hat B\right) \left| v \right> \otimes \left| w \right> = \hat A \left| v \right> \otimes \hat B \left| w \right>
\end{equation}
when we use the Kronecker product representation for the tensor product. Since the matrix representation is very convenient for finite dimensional vector spaces, we frequently use the Kronecker product to calculate the tensor product and then shift back to the abstract Dirac notation.
\section{Infinite Dimensional Spaces}\label{sec:infdim}
So far, we have largely ignored the main complication that arises when we move from a finite dimensional space to an infinite one: the spectrum of eigenvectors for a self-adjoint operator is no longer guaranteed to form a basis for the space. To deal with this problem, we will have to work in a slightly more specific kind of vector space, called a Hilbert space, denoted $\mathcal H$. A Hilbert space is defined below \cite{ballentine}.
\begin{boxeddefn}{Hilbert Space\index{Hilbert Space}}{}
Let $W$ be a general linear vector space and suppose that $V\subseteq W$ is a vector space formed by any finite linear combinations of the basis set $\{\left| v_{\alpha}\right> \}_{\alpha \in \Lambda}$. That is, if
\begin{equation}
\left| u \right> = \sum_{i=1}^n u_{\alpha_i} \left| v \right>_{\alpha_i},
\end{equation}
for some finite $n$, then $\left| u \right> \in V$. We say the \textbf{Hilbert space} $\mathcal H$ formed by completing $V$ contains any vector that can be written as
\begin{equation}
\left| u \right> = \lim_{n \rightarrow \infty} \sum_{i=1}^n u_{\alpha_i} \left| v \right>_{\alpha_i},
\end{equation}
provided
\begin{equation}
\sum_{i=1}^{\infty} \left | u_{\alpha_i} \right|^2
\end{equation}
exists and is finite.
\end{boxeddefn}
Note that for the vector spaces described in the above definition, the Hilbert space associated with them always follows $ V \subseteq \mathcal H \subseteq W$, and that $W=\mathcal H = V$ holds if (but \textit{not} only if) $W$ has finite dimension. Without spending too much time on the technicalities, there is a generalized spectral theorem that applies to spaces very closely related to, but larger than, Hilbert spaces \cite{ballentine}. To determine precisely what this space should be, we must first develop a certain subspace of a Hilbert space, which we define by including all vectors $\left| u \right>$ subject to
\begin{equation}
\left< u \big | u\right> = \sum_{n=1}^{\infty} \left| u_{\alpha_n} \right|^2 n^{m}
\end{equation}
converging for all $m \in \mathbb N$. For a Hilbert space, we require a much weaker condition, as we do not have the rapidly increasing $n^{m}$ in each term of the summand. We define this space as $\Omega$, and note that always $\Omega \subseteq \mathcal H$ \cite{ballentine}. The ramifications of the extra normalization requirement for a vector to be in $\Omega$ can be thought of as a requirement for an extremely fast decay as $n \rightarrow \infty$. We now define the space of interest, called the conjugate space\index{Conjugate Space} of $\Omega$, and written as $\Omega^{\times}$ in terms of its member vectors \cite{gamelin}. Any vector $\left| w \right>$ belongs to $\Omega^{\times}$ if
\begin{figure}[tb]
\begin{center}
\includegraphics[width=0.9 \linewidth]{figures/riggedhilbertspace}
\end{center}
\caption[Venn diagram of a rigged Hilbert space triplet]{The spaces $V \subseteq \Omega \subseteq \mathcal H \subseteq \Omega^{\times} \subseteq W$. The area shaded blue is the rigged Hilbert space triplet.}\label{fig:riggedhilbertspace}
\end{figure}
\begin{equation}
\left< w \big | u \right>= \sum_{n=1}^{\infty} w_n^* u_n
\end{equation}
converges for all $\left| u \right> \in \Omega$ and $\left< w \right|$ is continuous on $\Omega$. Since we noted that for a vector $\left| u \right>$ to be in $\Omega$, it must vanish very quickly at infinity, $\left| w \right>$ is not nearly as restricted as a vector in $\mathcal H$. Thus, we have the triplet
\begin{equation}
\Omega \subseteq \mathcal H \subseteq \Omega^{\times},
\end{equation}
which is called a \textbf{rigged Hilbert Space triplet}\index{Rigged Hilbert Space Triplet}, and is shown in figure \ref{fig:riggedhilbertspace} \cite{ballentine}.\footnote{The argument used here is rather subtle. If the reader is not clear on the details, it will not impair the comprehension of later sections. To thoroughly understand this material, we recommend first reading the treatment of normed linear spaces in ref. \cite{gamelin}, and then the discussion of rigged Hilbert spaces in refs. \cite{ballentine} and \cite{sudbery}.} We noted earlier that the set of eigenvectors of a self-adjoint operator need not form a basis for that operator's space if the space has infinite dimension. This means that the spectral theorem would break down, which is what we wish to avoid. Fortunately, a generalized spectral theorem\index{Spectral Theorem!Generalized} has been proven for rigged Hilbert space triplets, which states that any self adjoint operator in $\mathcal H$ has eigenvectors in $\Omega^{\times}$ that form a basis for $\mathcal H$ \cite{ballentine}. Due to this, we will work in a rigged Hilbert space triplet, which we will normally denote by the corresponding Hilbert space, $\mathcal H$. We do this with the understanding that to be completely rigorous, it might be necessary to switch between the component sets of the triplet on a case-by-case basis.
Now that we have outlined the space in which we will be working, there is an important special case of an infinite dimensional basis that we need to examine. If our basis is \textbf{continuous}\index{Basis!Continuous}, then we can convert all of our abstract summation formulas into integral forms, which are used very frequently in quantum mechanics, since the two most popular bases (position and momentum) are usually continuous.\footnote{A common form of confusion when first studying quantum mechanics is the abstract notion of vectors. In classical mechanics, a vector might point to a particular spot in a physical space. However, in quantum mechanics, a vector can have infinite dimensionality, and so can effectively point to every point in a configuration space simultaneously, with varying magnitude. For this reason, a very clear distinction must be drawn between the vectors used in the formalism of quantum mechanics and the everyday vectors used in classical mechanics. } Specifically, suppose we have a continuous, orthonormal basis for a rigged Hilbert space $\mathcal H$ given by $\big\{ \left| \phi \right> \big \}_{\phi \in \Phi}$, where $\Phi$ is a real interval. Then, if we have \cite{ballentine}
\begin{equation}
\left| u \right> = \sum_{\phi \in \Phi} u_{\phi} \left| \phi \right>, \,\, \left| v \right> = \sum_{\phi \in \Phi} v_{\phi} \left| \phi \right>,
\end{equation}
we find a special case of eqn. \ref{eqn:diracinner}. This is\index{Integral Form!Inner Product}\index{Integral Form!Trace}\index{Integral Form!Spectral Theorem}
\begin{equation}
\left< u \big| v \right> = \int_{\Phi}d \phi \cdot u^*_{\phi} v_{\phi},
\end{equation}
where the integral is taken over the real interval $\Phi$. Similarly, for an operator $\hat A$, definition \ref{defn:trace} becomes \cite{ballentine}
\begin{equation}
\mathrm{Tr} \left( \hat A \right) = \int_{\Phi} d \phi \cdot \left< \phi \right| \hat A \left| \phi \right>,
\end{equation}
and for self-adjoint $\hat A$, theorem \ref{thm:spectral} is
\begin{equation}
\hat A = \int_{\Phi}d \phi \cdot a_{\phi} \left| \phi \right> \left< \phi \right|.
\end{equation}
When working in a continuous basis, these integral forms of the inner product, trace, and spectral theorem will often be more useful in calculations than their abstract sum counterparts, and we make extensive use of them in chapter
\ref{chap:dynamics}.
\chapter{Formal Structure of Quantum Mechanics}\label{chap:quantum_formal}
\lettrine[lines=2, lhang=0.33, loversize=0.1]{W}e now use the mathematical tools developed last chapter to set the stage for quantum mechanics. We begin by listing the correspondence rules that tell us how to represent physical objects mathematically. Then, we develop the fundamental quantum mechanical concept of the state and its associated operator. Next, we investigate the treatment of composite quantum mechanical systems. Throughout this chapter, we work in discrete bases to simplify our calculations and improve clarity. However, following the rigged Hibert space formalism developed in section \ref{sec:infdim}, translating the definitions in this section to an infinite-dimensional space is straightforward both mathematically and physically.
\section{Fundamental Correspondence Rules of Quantum Mechanics} \label{sec:posts}
At the core of the foundation of quantum mechanics are three rules. The first two tell us how to represent a physical object and describe its physical properties mathematically, and the third tells us how the the object and properties are connected. These three rules permit us to state a physical problem mathematically, work the problem mathematically, and then interpret the mathematical result physically \cite{ballentine}.
The first physical object of concern is the \textbf{state}, which completely describes the physical aspects of some system \cite{ballentine}. For instance, we might speak of the state of a hydrogen atom, the state of a photon, or a state of thermal equilibrium between two thermal baths.
\begin{boxedaxm}{State Operator\index{State Operator}}{axm:state}
We represent each physical state as a unique linear operator that is self-adjoint, nonnegative, and of unit trace, which acts on a Rigged Hilbert Space $\mathcal H$. We write this operator $\hat{\rho}$ and call it the \textbf{state operator}.
\end{boxedaxm}
Now that we have introduced the state, we can discuss the physical concepts used to describe states. These concepts include momentum, energy, and position, and are collectively known as dynamical variables \cite{ballentine}.
\begin{boxedaxm}{Observable\index{Observable}}{}
We represent each dynamical variable as a Hermitian linear operator acting on a rigged Hilbert space $\mathcal H$ whose eigenvalues represent all possible values of the dynamical variable. We write this operator using our hat $\left(\, \hat{ }\, \right)$ notation, and call it an \textbf{observable}.
\end{boxedaxm}
We now link the first two axioms with the third \cite{ballentine}.
\begin{boxedaxm}{Expectation Value\index{Expectation Value}}{axm:expectation}
The \textbf{expectation value}, or average measurement\index{Measurement} of the value of an observable $\hat{\mathcal O}$ over infinitely many identically prepared states (called a virtual ensemble of states) is written as $\left< \hat{\mathcal O} \right>$ and given by
\begin{equation}
\left< \hat{\mathcal O} \right> \equiv \mathrm{Tr} \left( \hat{\rho} \hat{\mathcal O } \right).
\end{equation}
\end{boxedaxm}
Though we claimed that these three axioms form the fundamental framework of modern quantum mechanics, they most likely seem foreign to the reader who has seen undergraduate material. In the next section, we work with the state operator and show that, in a special case, the formalism following from the correspondence rules outlined above is identical to that used in introductory quantum mechanics courses.
\section{The State Operator}
In axiom \ref{axm:state}, we defined $\hat{\rho}$, the state operator. However, the formal definition is very abstract, so in this section we investigate some of the properties of the state operator in an attempt to solidify its meaning. Physicists divide quantum mechanical states, and thus state operators, into two broad categories. Any given state is either called \textbf{pure} or \textbf{impure}. Sometimes, impure states are also referred to as mixtures or mixed states. We now precisely define a pure state \cite{ballentine}.
\begin{boxeddefn}{Pure State\index{State!Pure}\index{State!Impure}\index{State!Vector}}{defn:pure}
A given state is called \textbf{pure} if its corresponding unique state operator, $\hat{\rho}$, can be written as
\begin{equation}
\hat{\rho} \equiv \left| \psi \right> \left< \psi \right|,
\end{equation}
where $\left| \psi \right> \in \mathcal H$ is called the state vector in a rigged Hilbert space $\mathcal H$, $\left< \psi \right| \in \mathcal H^*$ is the linear functional corresponding to $\left| \psi \right>$, and $\left< \psi \big| \psi \right>=1$. If a state cannot be so represented, it is called \textbf{impure}.
\end{boxeddefn}
Although the importance of pure and impure states is not yet evident, we will eventually need an efficient method of distinguishing between them. The definition, which is phrased as an existence argument, is not well-suited to this purpose. To generate a more useful relationship, consider a pure state. We have
\begin{equation}
\hat{\rho}^2=\hat{\rho} \hat{\rho} = \left( \left| \psi \right> \left< \psi \right| \right) \left( \left| \psi \right> \left< \psi \right| \right) = \left| \psi \right> \left( \left< \psi \big| \psi \right> \right) \left< \psi \right| = \left| \psi \right>( 1 )\left< \psi \right| = \left| \psi \right> \left< \psi \right| = \hat{ \rho}.
\end{equation}
Thus, if a state is pure, it necessarily follows \cite{ballentine}
\begin{equation}
\hat{\rho}^2 = \hat{\rho}.
\end{equation}
Although seemingly a weaker condition, this result turns out to also be sufficient to describe a pure state. To show this, we suppose that our state space is discrete and has dimension $D$.\footnote{This is mainly for our convenience. The argument for an infinite-dimensional space is similar, but involves the generalized spectral theorem on our rigged Hilbert space.} Invoking the spectral theorem, theorem \ref{thm:spectral}, we write
\begin{equation}
\hat{ \rho} = \sum_{n=1}^{D} \rho_n \left| \phi_n \right> \left< \phi_n \right|, \label{eqn:specrho1}
\end{equation}
where $\{\rho_n\}_{n=1}^D$ is the spectrum of eigenvalues for $\hat{\rho}$, corresponding to the unit-normed eigenvectors of $\hat{\rho}$, $\big\{\left| \phi_n \right> \big \}_{n=1}^D$. If we consider some $1 \leq j \leq D$ with $ j,D\in \mathbb Z$ and let $\hat{\rho} = \hat{\rho}^2$, we have
\begin{equation}
\hat{\rho} \left| \phi_{j} \right> = \hat{\rho}^2 \left| \phi_{j} \right>,
\end{equation}
which is
\begin{equation}
\rho_{j} \left| \phi_{j} \right> = \rho_{j}^2 \left| \phi_{j} \right>,
\end{equation}
so
\begin{equation}
\rho_{j}=\rho_{j}^2
\end{equation}
or
\begin{equation}
\rho_j \left(1- \rho_j \right) = 0.
\end{equation}
Since all of the eigenvalues of $\hat{\rho}$ must also follow this relationship, they must all either be one or zero. But by axiom \ref{axm:state}, $\mathrm{Tr}\left( \hat{\rho} \right) = 1$, so exactly one of the eigenvalues must be one, while all the others are zero. Thus, eqn. \ref{eqn:specrho1} becomes
\begin{equation}
\hat{ \rho} = \left| \phi_{q_1} \right> \left< \phi_{q_1} \right|,
\end{equation}
where we have taken $q_1=1$. Evidently, $\hat{ \rho}$ is a pure state, and we have shown sufficiency \cite{ballentine}.
At this point, it is logical to inquire about the necessity of the state operator, as opposed to a state vector alone. After all, most states treated in introductory quantum mechanics are readily represented as state vectors. However, there are many states that are prepared statistically, and so cannot be represented as a state vector. An example of one of these cases is found in section \ref{sec:bellstate}. These impure states or mixtures\index{State!Impure} turn out to be of the utmost importance when we begin to discuss quantum decoherence, the main focus of this thesis \cite{zurek}.
We now turn our attention to the properties of pure states, and illustrate that the state vectors defining pure state operators behave as expected under our correspondence rules. By axiom \ref{axm:expectation}, we know that the expectation value of the dynamical variable (observable) $\hat{A}$ of a state $\hat{\rho}$ is
\begin{equation}
\left< \hat A \right> = \mathrm{Tr}\left( \hat{\rho} \hat{A} \right).
\end{equation}
If $\hat{\rho}$ is a pure state, then we can write
\begin{equation}
\hat{\rho} = \left| \psi \right> \left< \psi \right|.
\end{equation}
Hence, $\left<\hat A \right>$ becomes
\begin{equation}
\left< \hat A \right> = \mathrm{Tr}\left( \left| \psi \right> \left< \psi \right| \hat{A} \right),
\end{equation}
which, by definition \ref{defn:trace}, is \cite{ballentine}
\begin{eqnarray} \label{eqn:recoverexp}
\left< \hat A \right> &=& \sum_{n=1}^{D} \left< \phi_n \right| \left( \left| \psi \right> \left< \psi \right| \hat{A} \right) \left| \phi_n \right> \nonumber\\
&=& \sum_{n=1}^{D}\left( \left< \phi_n \big | \psi \right>\right) \left( \left< \psi \right| \hat{A} \left| \phi_n \right> \right) \nonumber\\
&=& \left< \psi \right| \hat{A} \left| \psi \right>,
\end{eqnarray}
where we have used definition \ref{defn:orthobasis} to pick the basis $\big \{ \left| \phi_{\alpha}\right> \big \}_{\alpha \in \mathbb R}$ to be orthonormal and contain the vector $\left| \psi \right>$.\footnote{This works since $\left| \psi \right>$ is guaranteed to have unit magnitude by definition \ref{defn:pure}.} This is the standard definition for an expectation value in introductory quantum mechanics, which we recover by letting $\hat{\rho}$ be pure \cite{griffiths, cohtan}.
\section{Composite Systems}\label{sec:composite}
In order to model complex physical situations, we will often have to consider multiple, non-isolated states. To facilitate this, we need to develop a method for calculating the state operator of a composite, or combined, quantum system \cite{ballentine}.
\begin{boxedaxm}{Composite State\index{Composite!State Operator}}{}
Suppose we had a pure composite system composed of $n$ substates, $\big \{ \hat{\rho}_i \big\}_{i=1}^n$. Then, the \textbf{composite state operator} $\hat{\rho}$ of this combined system is given by\index{Composite!State Vector}
\begin{equation}
\hat{\rho} \equiv \hat{\rho}_1 \otimes \hat{\rho}_2 \otimes \cdot \cdot \cdot \otimes \hat{\rho}_n,
\end{equation}
where $(\otimes)$ is the tensor product, given in definition \ref{defn:tensor}.
\end{boxedaxm}
Note that if $\hat{\rho}$ is pure, there exists some characteristic state vector $\left| \psi \right>$ of $\hat{ \rho}$ where
\begin{equation}
\left| \psi \right> = \left| \psi_1 \right> \otimes \left| \psi_2 \right> \otimes \cdot \cdot \cdot \otimes \left| \psi_n \right> \label{eqn:stateveccomp}
\end{equation}
and each $\left| \psi_i \right>$ corresponds to $\hat{ \rho}_i$. As an important notational aside, eqn \ref{eqn:stateveccomp} is frequently shortened to \cite{nielsenchuang}
\begin{equation}
\left| \psi \right> = \left| \psi_1\psi_2 ... \psi_n \right> ,
\end{equation}
where the tensor products are taken as implicit in the notation. Just as we discussed dynamical variables associated with certain states, so can we associate dynamical variables with composite systems. In general, an observable of a composite system with $n$ substates is formed by \cite{nielsenchuang}\index{Composite!Observable}
\begin{equation}
\hat{\mathcal O} \equiv \hat{\mathcal O}_1 \otimes \hat{\mathcal O}_2 \otimes \cdot \cdot \cdot \otimes \hat{\mathcal O}_n,
\end{equation}
where each $\hat{\mathcal O}_i$ is an observable of the $i$th substate. We have now extended the concepts of state and dynamical variable to composite systems, so it is logical to treat an expectation value of a composite system. Of course, since a composite system is a state, axiom \ref{axm:expectation} applies, so we have
\begin{equation}
\left< \hat{ \mathcal O } \right> = \mathrm{Tr} \left(\hat{\rho} \hat{ \mathcal O } \right).
\end{equation}
However, composite systems afford us opportunities that single systems do not. Namely, just as we trace over the degrees of freedom of a system to calculate expectation values on that system, we can trace over some of the degrees of freedom of a composite state to focus on a specific subsystem.\footnote{Here, a degree of freedom of a state can be thought of as its dimensionality. It is used analogously with the notion in a general system in classical mechanics, where the dimensionality of a system's configuration space corresponds to the number of degrees of freedom it possesses. For more on this, see ref. \cite{thornton}.} We call this operation the partial trace over a composite system, and we define it precisely below \cite{nielsenchuang}.
\begin{boxeddefn}{Partial Trace\index{Partial Trace}}{def:partialtrace}
Suppose we have an operator
\begin{equation}
\hat{ \mathcal Q} = \hat{\mathcal Q}_1 \otimes \hat{\mathcal Q}_2 \otimes \cdot \cdot \cdot \otimes \hat{\mathcal Q}_n.
\end{equation}
The \textbf{partial trace} of $\hat{\mathcal Q}$ over $\hat{\mathcal Q}_i$ is defined by
\begin{equation}
\mathrm{Tr}_i \left( \hat{ \mathcal Q} \right) \equiv \hat{\mathcal Q}_1 \otimes \hat{\mathcal Q}_2 \otimes \cdot \cdot \cdot \otimes \hat{\mathcal Q}_{i-1} \cdot \mathrm{Tr} \left( \hat{\mathcal Q}_i \right) \cdot \hat{\mathcal Q}_{i+1} \otimes \cdot \cdot \cdot \otimes \hat{\mathcal Q}_n.
\end{equation}
\end{boxeddefn}
If the partial trace is applied to a composite system repeatedly such that all but one of the subsystem state operators are traced out, the remaining operator is called a reduced state operator \cite{nielsenchuang}.
\begin{boxeddefn}{Reduced State Operator\index{Reduced State Operator}}{def:redstate}
Suppose we have a composite system $\hat{\rho}$ with $n$ subsystems. The \textbf{reduced state operator for subsystem i} is defined by
\begin{equation}
\hat{\rho}^{(i)} = \mathrm{Tr}_1 \circ \mathrm{Tr}_2 \circ \cdot \cdot \cdot \circ \mathrm{Tr}_{i-1} \circ \mathrm{Tr}_{i+1} \circ \cdot \cdot \cdot \circ \mathrm{Tr}_n \left( \hat{\rho} \right).
\end{equation}
\end{boxeddefn}
The partial trace and reduced state operator turn out to be essential in the analysis of composite systems, although that fact is not immediately obvious. To illustrate this, we consider some observable $\hat{\mathcal O}_m$ that acts only on the $k_m$th subsystem of a composite system. We choose a basis $\big\{\left| \Phi_k \right> \big \}_{k=1}^n$, where each element is formed by the Kronecker product of the basis elements of the corresponding subsystems. That is, each basis vector has the form $\left| \Phi_k \right> = \left| \phi_1 \phi_2 ... \phi_n \right>$, where each $\phi_l$ is one of the orthonormal basis vectors of the $l$th substate space. Then, from axiom \ref{axm:expectation}, we have
\begin{eqnarray}
\left< \hat{\mathcal O}_m \right> &=& \mathrm{Tr} \left( \hat{ \rho} \hat{ \mathcal O}_m \right) \nonumber \\
&=& \sum_{k=1}^n \left< \Phi_k \right|\hat{ \rho} \hat{ \mathcal O}_m \left| \Phi_k \right> \nonumber \\
&=& \sum_{k_1,k_2,...,k_n} \left< \phi_{k_1} \phi_{k_2} ... \phi_{k_n} \right| \hat{ \rho}\hat{ \mathcal O}_m \left| \phi_{k_1} \phi_{k_2} ... \phi_{k_n}\right>.
\end{eqnarray}
We use the resolution of the identity, eqn. \ref{eqn:projector}, to write our expectation value as
\begin{equation}
\sum_{k_1,k_2,...,k_n} \left< \phi_{k_1} \phi_{k_2} ... \phi_{k_n} \right| \hat{ \rho} \left( \sum_{j_1,j_2,...,j_n} \left| \phi_{j_1} \phi_{j_2} ... \phi_{j_n} \right> \left< \phi_{j_1} \phi_{j_2} ... \phi_{j_n}\right| \right)\hat{ \mathcal O}_m \left| \phi_{k_1} \phi_{k_2} ... \phi_{k_n}\right>,
\end{equation}
where $\left| \phi_{j_1} \phi_{j_2} ... \phi_{j_n} \right>$ corresponds to a basis vector. This becomes
\begin{equation}
\sum_{k,j} \left< \phi_{k_1} \phi_{k_2} ... \phi_{k_n} \right| \hat{ \rho} \left| \phi_{j_1} \phi_{j_2} ... \phi_{j_n} \right> \left< \phi_{j_1} \phi_{j_2} ... \phi_{j_n}\right| \hat{ \mathcal O}_m \left| \phi_{k_1} \phi_{k_2} ... \phi_{k_n}\right>.
\end{equation}
If the observable $\hat{\mathcal O}$ acts as identity on all but the $m$th subsystem, by eqn. \ref{eqn:tensorop}, we have
\begin{equation}
\sum_{k,j} \left< \phi_{k_1} \phi_{k_2} ... \phi_{k_n} \right| \hat{ \rho} \left| \phi_{j_1} \phi_{j_2} ... \phi_{j_n} \right> \left< \phi_{j_m} \right| \hat{ \mathcal O}_m \left| \phi_{k_m} \right>\left< \phi_{j_1} ... \phi_{j_{m-1}} \phi_{j_{m+1}}...\phi_{j_n} \big | \phi_{k_1} ... \phi_{k_{m-1}} \phi_{k_{m+1}}...\phi_{k_n} \right>.
\end{equation}
Since our chosen basis is orthonormal, for any non-zero term in the sum, we must have $j=k$ (except for $j_m$ and $k_m$), in which case the final inner produce is unity. Hence, we get
\begin{equation}
\sum_{k_1,k_2,...,k_n,j_m} \left< \phi_{k_1} \phi_{k_2} ... \phi_{k_n} \right| \hat{ \rho} \left| \phi_{k_1} ...\phi_{k_m-1} \phi_{j_m} \phi_{k_m+1}... \phi_{k_n} \right> \left< \phi_{j_m} \right| \hat{ \mathcal O}_m \left| \phi_{k_m} \right>.
\end{equation}
If we apply eqn. \ref{eqn:tensorop}, letting $\hat{\rho}=\hat{\rho}_1 \otimes \hat{\rho}_2 \otimes \cdot \cdot \cdot \otimes \hat{\rho}_n$, we have
\begin{equation}
\sum_{k_1,k_2,...,k_n,j_m} \left< \phi_{k_1} \right| \hat{\rho}_1 \left| \phi_{k_1} \right> \left< \phi_{k_2} \right| \hat{\rho}_2 \left| \phi_{k_2}\right> \cdot \cdot \cdot \left< \phi_{k_m} \right| \hat{\rho}_m \left| \phi_{j_m} \right> \cdot \cdot \cdot \left< \phi_{k_n} \right| \hat{\rho}_n \left| \phi_{k_n} \right>\left< \phi_{j_m} \right| \hat{ \mathcal O}_m \left| \phi_{k_m} \right>,
\end{equation}
or
\begin{equation}
\sum_{k_m,j_m} \mathrm{Tr}\left( \hat{\rho}_1 \right) \mathrm{Tr}\left( \hat{\rho}_2 \right) \cdot \cdot \cdot \left< \phi_{k_m} \right| \hat{\rho}_m \left| \phi_{j_m} \right> \cdot \cdot \cdot \mathrm{Tr}\left( \hat{\rho}_n \right) \left< \phi_{j_m} \right| \hat{ \mathcal O}_m \left| \phi_{k_m} \right>.
\end{equation}
Since each trace is just a scalar, we can write
\begin{equation}
\sum_{k_m}\left< \phi_{k_m}\right| \mathrm{Tr}\left( \hat{\rho}_1 \right) \mathrm{Tr}\left( \hat{\rho}_2 \right) \cdot \cdot \cdot \hat{\rho}_m \cdot \cdot \cdot \mathrm{Tr}\left( \hat{\rho}_n \right) \left( \sum_{j_m} \left| \phi_{j_m} \right> \left< \phi_{j_m} \right| \right) \hat{ \mathcal O}_m \left| \phi_{k_m} \right>.
\end{equation}
Recognizing the definition \ref{def:redstate} for the reduced state operator and the resolution of the identity from eqn. \ref{eqn:projector}, we find \cite{ballentine}
\begin{boxedeqn}{}
\left< \hat{\mathcal O}_m \right> = \sum_{k_m} \left< \phi_{k_m}\right| \hat{\rho}^{(m)} \left( \, \hat 1 \, \right) \hat{\mathcal O}_m \left| \phi_{k_m} \right> = \mathrm{Tr} \left( \hat{\rho}^{(m)} \hat{\mathcal O}_m \right).
\end{boxedeqn}
Due to this remarkable result, we know that the reduced state operator for a particular subsystem is enough to tell us about any observable that only depends on the subsystem. Further, we end up with a formula for the expectation value of a component observable very similar to axiom \ref{axm:expectation} for observables of the full system.
\section{Quantum Superposition}\label{sec:quantumsup}
Though we have introduced some of the basic formalism of the state, we are still missing one of the key facets of quantum mechanics. This piece is the superposition principle, which, at the time of this writing, is one of the core aspects of quantum mechanics that no one fully understands. However, due to repeated experimental evidence, we take it as an axiom.
\begin{boxedaxm}{Superposition Principle\index{Superposition Principle}}{axm:sup}
Suppose that a system can be in two possible states, represented by the state vectors $\left| 0 \right>$ and $\left| 1 \right>$. Then,
\begin{equation}
\left| \psi \right> = \alpha \left| 0 \right> + \beta \left| 1 \right>,
\end{equation}
where $\alpha, \beta \in \mathbb C$, is also a valid state of the system, provided that $\left| \alpha \right|^2 + \left| \beta \right|^2 = 1$.
\end{boxedaxm}
The superposition principle allows us to create new and intriguing states that we would not have access to otherwise. In fact, if we have $n$ linearly independent states of a system, any point on the unit n-sphere corresponds to a valid state of the system.\footnote{The reader might wonder why the superposition principle is necessary, after all, we know that state vectors exist in a Hilbert space, and Hilbert spaces act linearly. However, we were not guaranteed until now that any vector of unit norm in Hilbert space represents a valid physical situation. The superposition principle gives us this, which allows us great freedom in constructing states.} If we consider a two-state system with an orthonormal basis $\big \{ \left| 0 \right> , \left| 1 \right> \big \}$, the 2-sphere of possible states guaranteed by the superposition principle is conveniently visualized imbedded in 3-space. This visualization of a two-state system\index{Two-State System} is called the \textbf{Bloch sphere representation}\index{Bloch!Sphere}, and is pictured in figure \ref{fig:bloch_sphere} \cite{nielsenchuang}. To calculate the position of a system in Bloch space, we use the formula
\begin{figure}[t]
\begin{center}
\includegraphics[width=0.7 \linewidth]{figures/blochsphere}
\end{center}
\caption[The Bloch sphere representation]{Two-state systems can be visualized as being vectors on a two-sphere, known in quantum physics as the Bloch sphere. The angles $\phi$ and $\theta$ are defined in eqn. \ref{eqn:bloch_def} for pure states, and the axes x, y, and z are defined in eqn. \ref{eqn:paulivec} for all states. \label{fig:bloch_sphere}}
\end{figure}
\begin{equation} \label{eqn:blochvec}
\hat{\rho} \leftrightarrow r_0 1 + \left< r \big| \sigma \right>,
\end{equation}
where $\left| r \right>$ is the 3-vector,
\begin{equation}
\left| r \right> \equiv r_1 \left| e_1 \right> + r_2 \left| e_2 \right> + r_3 \left| e_3 \right>,
\end{equation}
and $\vec{\sigma}$ is the vector of Pauli spin matrices,
\begin{equation}
\left| \sigma \right> \equiv \sigma_x \left| e_1 \right> + \sigma_y \left| e_2 \right> + \sigma_z \left| e_3 \right>. \label{eqn:paulivec}
\end{equation}
The Pauli matrices are
\begin{equation}
\hat{\sigma}_x \leftrightarrow \left(\begin{array}{cc}0 & 1 \\1 & 0\end{array}\right),
\end{equation}
\begin{equation}
\hat{\sigma}_y \leftrightarrow \left(\begin{array}{cc}0 & -i \\i & 0\end{array}\right),
\end{equation}
and
\begin{equation}
\hat{\sigma}_z \leftrightarrow \left(\begin{array}{cc}1 & 0 \\0 & -1\end{array}\right).
\end{equation}
Writing eqn. \ref{eqn:blochvec} explicitly, we find
\begin{equation}
\hat \rho \leftrightarrow \left( \begin{array}{cc} r_0 + r_3 & r_1 -i r_2 \\ r_1+i r_2 & r_0 - r_3 \end{array} \right).
\end{equation}
This is trivially a basis for all two by two matrices, so we can indeed represent any $\hat \rho$ by eqn. \ref{eqn:blochvec}. Further, if we use the fact that $\mathrm{Tr}\left(\hat \rho \right) = 1$, we know
\begin{equation}
\mathrm{Tr}\left(\hat \rho \right) \leftrightarrow ( r_0 + r_3) + (r_0 - r_3) = 2r_0 = 1,
\end{equation}
so $r_0=1/2$. With this constraint in mind, it is conventional to write eqn. \ref{eqn:blochvec} as \cite{nielsenchuang}
\begin{boxedeqn}{eqn:bloch2}
\hat{\rho} \leftrightarrow \frac{1 + \left< r \big| \sigma \right>}{2}.
\end{boxedeqn}
Also, since $\hat \rho$ is self-adjoint, the diagonal entries must all be real, so $r_3 \in \mathbb R$. By the same reasoning,
\begin{equation}
r_1+ir_2 = (r_1 - ir_2)^*.
\end{equation}
Since $r_1$ and $r_2$ are arbitrary, we can choose either of them to be zero, and the resulting equation must hold for all values of the other. Hence, $r_1 = r_1^*$ and $r_2 = r_2^*$, so both $r_1$ and $r_2$ are real, and $\left| r \right>$ is a real-valued vector. Since $\left| r \right>$ is real, we use it as a position vector that tells us the location of the system in Bloch space and call it the Bloch vector.\index{Bloch!Vector} If we have a pure state
\begin{equation}
\left| \psi \right> = \alpha \left| 0 \right> + \beta \left| 1 \right>,
\end{equation}
we can express the location of the state in terms of the familiar polar and azimuthal angles of polar-spherical coordinates. Taking into account our redefined, conventional $\left| r \right>$, eqn. \ref{eqn:bloch2} is
\begin{equation}
\frac{1 + \left< r \big| \sigma \right>}{2} \leftrightarrow
\frac{1}{2} \left(\begin{array}{cc}1+r_z & r_x-i r_y \\r_x+ir_y & 1-r_z\end{array}\right).
\end{equation}
We use the polar-spherical coordinate identities for unit vectors
\begin{eqnarray}
r_x &=& \sin \theta \cos \phi, \nonumber \\
r_y &=& \sin \theta \sin \phi, \nonumber \\
r_z &=& \cos \theta,
\end{eqnarray}
to determine
\begin{eqnarray}
\frac{1}{2} \left(\begin{array}{cc}1+r_z & r_x-i r_y \\r_x+ir_y & 1-r_z\end{array}\right) &=& \frac{1}{2} \left(\begin{array}{cc}1+\cos \theta & \sin \theta \cos \phi-i \sin \theta \sin \phi \\ \sin \theta \cos \phi+i \sin \theta \sin \phi & 1- \cos \theta \end{array}\right) \nonumber \\
&=& \frac{1}{2} \left(\begin{array}{cc}1+\cos \theta & \sin \theta e^{-i\phi} \\ \sin \theta e^{i \phi} & 1- \cos \theta \end{array}\right) \nonumber \\
&=& \frac{1}{2} \left(\begin{array}{cc} 2 \cos^2 \left( \frac{\theta}{2} \right) & 2 \sin\left( \frac{\theta}{2} \right) \cos \left( \frac{\theta}{2} \right) e^{-i\phi} \\ 2 \sin\left( \frac{\theta}{2} \right) \cos \left( \frac{\theta}{2} \right) e^{i \phi} & 2 \sin^2 \left( \frac{\theta}{2} \right) \end{array}\right) \nonumber \\
&=& \left(\begin{array}{cc} \cos^2 \left( \frac{\theta}{2} \right) & \sin\left( \frac{\theta}{2} \right) \cos \left( \frac{\theta}{2} \right) e^{-i\phi} \\ \sin\left( \frac{\theta}{2} \right) \cos \left( \frac{\theta}{2} \right) e^{i \phi} & \sin^2 \left( \frac{\theta}{2} \right) \end{array}\right).
\end{eqnarray}
If we let $\alpha \equiv \cos \left( \theta / 2 \right)$ and $\beta \equiv e^{i \phi} \sin \left( \theta / 2 \right)$, the right side of eqn. \ref{eqn:blochvec} becomes
\begin{equation}
\left(\begin{array}{cc} \left| \alpha \right| ^2 & \alpha \beta^* \\ \beta \alpha^* & \left| \beta \right|^2 \end{array}\right) \leftrightarrow \left| \psi \right> \left< \psi \right| = \hat{\rho}.
\end{equation}
Hence, the state vector of the pure state is \cite{nielsenchuang}
\begin{boxedeqn}{}
\left| \psi \right> =\cos \left( \frac{\theta}{2} \right) \left| 0 \right> + e^{i \phi} \sin \left( \frac{\theta}{2} \right) \left| 1 \right>. \label{eqn:bloch_def}
\end{boxedeqn}
We note that the coefficient on $\left| 0 \right>$ is apparently restricted to be real. However, unlike state operators, state vectors are not unique; physically identical state vectors may differ by a phase factor $e^{i \gamma}$ \cite{ballentine}.
The notion of superposition\index{Superposition} also enables us to refine our classification of composite systems. Besides distinguishing between pure and impure states, physicists subdivide composite pure states into two categories: entangled states and product states.
\begin{boxeddefn}{Product State\index{Product State}\index{Entangled State}}{}
Suppose $\hat{\rho}$ is a pure composite quantum system with associated state vector $\left| \psi \right>$. If there exist state vectors $\left| \phi_1 \right>$ and $\left| \phi_2 \right> $ such that
\begin{equation}
\left| \psi \right> = \left| \phi_1 \right> \otimes \left| \phi_2 \right>,
\end{equation}
then we call $\left| \psi \right>$ a \textbf{product state}. If no such vectors exist, then we say $\left| \psi \right>$ is \textbf{entangled}.
\end{boxeddefn}
To construct entangled states, we take product states and put them into superposition. In illustration of this concept, we consider the following example.
\section{Example: The Bell State}\label{sec:bellstate}
An important example of an entangled state of two two-state systems is called the \textbf{Bell State}\index{Bell State}. Before we define this system, we need to develop some machinery to work with two-state\index{Two-State System} systems. We use the orthonormal basis set introduced previously for a single, pure, two-state system, $\big \{ \left| 0 \right> , \left| 1 \right> \big \}$, which we represent as column matrices by
\begin{eqnarray}
\left| 0 \right>&\leftrightarrow& \left( \begin{array}{c} 1 \\ 0 \end{array} \right), \nonumber \\
\left| 1 \right> &\leftrightarrow& \left( \begin{array}{c} 0 \\ 1 \end{array} \right).
\end{eqnarray}
In this representation, we define an orthonormal basis for two of these two-state systems as \cite{nielsenchuang}
\begin{equation}
\big \{ \left| 0 \right>\otimes\left| 0 \right> , \left| 0 \right>\otimes \left| 1 \right>,\left| 1 \right> \otimes \left| 0 \right> ,\left| 1 \right>\otimes\left| 1 \right>\big \} = \big \{ \left| 00 \right>,\left| 01 \right>,\left| 10 \right>,\left| 11 \right> \big \},
\end{equation}
which have matrix representations
\begin{eqnarray}
&\left| 00 \right>& \leftrightarrow \left( \begin{array}{c} 1 \\ 0 \\0 \\0 \end{array} \right), \, \, \,
\left| 01 \right> \leftrightarrow \left( \begin{array}{c} 0 \\ 1\\0\\0 \end{array} \right), \nonumber \\
&\left| 10 \right>& \leftrightarrow \left( \begin{array}{c} 0 \\ 0 \\1\\0 \end{array} \right), \, \, \,
\left| 11 \right> \leftrightarrow \left( \begin{array}{c} 0 \\ 0\\0\\1 \end{array} \right).
\end{eqnarray}
By the superposition principle, we define the state
\begin{equation}
\left| \psi_B \right> \equiv \frac{\left| 00 \right> + \left| 11 \right> }{\sqrt{2}} \leftrightarrow \left(\begin{array}{c} \frac{1}{\sqrt 2} \\ 0 \\ 0\\ \frac{1}{\sqrt 2} \end{array}\right),
\end{equation}
which is the Bell state. To check if this state is entangled, we see if we can write $\left| \psi_B \right> = \left| \phi_A \right> \otimes \left| \phi_B \right>$ for some vectors $\left| \phi_A \right>$ and $\left| \phi_B \right>$. As matrices, this equation is
\begin{equation}
\left(\begin{array}{c} \frac{1}{\sqrt 2} \\ 0 \\ 0\\ \frac{1}{\sqrt 2} \end{array}\right) = \left(\begin{array}{c} a_1\\ a_2 \end{array}\right) \otimes \left(\begin{array}{c} b_1 \\ b_2 \end{array}\right) = \left(\begin{array}{c}a_1 b_1 \\ a_1 b_2 \\ a_2 b_1\\ a_2 b_2 \end{array}\right).
\end{equation}
This is a system of four simultaneous equations, $\frac{1}{ \sqrt 2} = a_1 b_1$, $0 = a_1 b_2$, $0 = a_2 b_1$, and $\frac{1}{ \sqrt 2} = a_2 b_2$. Since $\frac{1}{ \sqrt 2} = a_1 b_1$, $a_1\neq 0$ and $b_1 \neq 0$. Then, since $a_1 b_2 = 0$, $b_2=0$. But $\frac{1}{ \sqrt 2} = a_2 b_2$, so $b_2 \neq 0 $, which is a contradiction. Hence, $\left| \phi_A \right> $ and $\left| \phi_B \right>$ do not exist, so $\left| \psi_B \right>$ is entangled. \cite{nielsenchuang}
Next, we compute the state operator corresponding to $\left| \psi_B \right>$. By definition \ref{defn:pure}, since the Bell state is pure by construction, its state operator is
\begin{eqnarray}
\hat{ \rho} &=& \left| \psi_B \right> \left< \psi_B \right| \nonumber \\
&=& \left( \frac{\left| 00 \right> + \left| 11 \right> }{\sqrt{2}} \right) \left( \frac{\left< 00 \right| + \left< 11 \right| }{\sqrt{2}} \right) \nonumber \\
&=& \frac{\left| 00 \right> \left< 00 \right| +\left| 00 \right> \left< 11\right| +\left| 11 \right> \left< 00 \right| +\left| 11 \right> \left< 11 \right|}{2} \nonumber \\
&\leftrightarrow& \left(
\begin{array}{cccc}
\frac{1}{2} & 0 & 0 & \frac{1}{2} \\
0 & 0 & 0 & 0 \\
0 & 0 & 0 & 0 \\
\frac{1}{2} & 0 & 0 & \frac{1}{2} \\
\end{array}
\right).
\end{eqnarray}
Even though we constructed the Bell state from a state vector, we will explicitly verify its purity as an example. We find
\begin{eqnarray}
\left( \hat{ \rho} \right)^2 &=& \left(\frac{\left| 00 \right> \left< 00 \right| +\left| 00 \right> \left< 11\right| +\left| 11 \right> \left< 00 \right| +\left| 11 \right> \left< 11 \right|}{2} \right) \left(\frac{\left| 00 \right> \left< 00 \right| +\left| 00 \right> \left< 11\right| +\left| 11 \right> \left< 00 \right| +\left| 11 \right> \left< 11 \right|}{2} \right) \nonumber \\
&=& \frac{2 \left(\left| 00 \right> \left< 00 \right| +\left| 00 \right> \left< 11\right| +\left| 11 \right> \left< 00 \right| +\left| 11 \right> \left< 11 \right| \right)}{4} \nonumber \\
&=& \frac{ \left(\left| 00 \right> \left< 00 \right| +\left| 00 \right> \left< 11\right| +\left| 11 \right> \left< 00 \right| +\left| 11 \right> \left< 11 \right| \right)}{2} \nonumber \\
&=& \rho,
\end{eqnarray}
which confirms that the Bell state is pure.
Next, suppose we want to measure some particular facet of the first subsystem. Since the Bell state is entangled, we cannot ``eyeball" the result, but rather we need to use the reduced state machinery we developed in definition \ref{def:redstate}. The reduced state operator for the first subsystem is
\begin{eqnarray}\label{eqn:thisisamixture}
\hat{\rho}^{(1)} &=& \mathrm{Tr}_2 \left( \hat{\rho} \right) \nonumber \\
&=& \mathrm{Tr}_2 \left( \frac{\left| 00 \right> \left< 00 \right| +\left| 00 \right> \left< 11\right| +\left| 11 \right> \left< 00 \right| +\left| 11 \right> \left< 11 \right|}{2} \right) \nonumber \\
&=& \frac{1}{2} \mathrm{Tr}_2 \left( \left| 0 \right> \left< 0 \right| \otimes \left| 0 \right> \left< 0 \right| + \left| 1 \right> \left< 0 \right| \otimes \left| 1 \right> \left< 0 \right| + \left| 0 \right> \left< 1 \right| \otimes \left| 0 \right> \left< 1 \right| + \left| 1 \right> \left< 1 \right| \otimes \left| 1 \right> \left< 1 \right| \right) \nonumber \\
&=& \frac{1}{2} \big ( \left| 0 \right> \left< 0 \right| \cdot \mathrm{Tr}\left( \left| 0 \right> \left< 0 \right| \right) + \left| 1 \right> \left< 0 \right| \cdot \mathrm{Tr}\left( \left| 1 \right> \left< 0 \right|\right) + \left| 0 \right> \left< 1 \right| \cdot \mathrm{Tr}\left( \left| 0 \right> \left< 1 \right| \right)+ \left| 1 \right> \left< 1 \right| \cdot \mathrm{Tr}\left( \left| 1 \right> \left< 1 \right| \right) \big ) \nonumber \\
&=& \frac{1}{2} \big ( \left| 0 \right> \left< 0 \right| \cdot 1 + \left| 1 \right> \left< 0 \right| \cdot 0+ \left| 0 \right> \left< 1 \right| \cdot 0+ \left| 1 \right> \left< 1 \right| \cdot 1 \big ) \nonumber \\ &=& \frac{ \left| 0 \right> \left< 0 \right| + \left| 1 \right> \left< 1 \right| }{2} \nonumber \\
&\leftrightarrow& \left(\begin{array}{cc}\frac{1}{2} & 0 \\0 & \frac{1}{2}\end{array}\right).
\end{eqnarray}
Oddly enough,
\begin{equation}
\left( \hat{\rho}^{(1)} \right) ^2 = \frac{ \left| 0 \right> \left< 0 \right| + \left| 1 \right> \left< 1 \right| }{4} \neq \hat{\rho}^{(1)}, \nonumber \\
\end{equation}
so $\hat{\rho}^{(1)}$ is impure \cite{nielsenchuang}. Surprisingly, a pure composite system does not necessarily contain pure subsystems. If we express $\hat{\rho}^{(1)}$ in terms of the Pauli matrices and the identity as in eqn. \ref{eqn:blochvec}, we find that the Bloch vector corresponding to $\hat{\rho}^{(1)}$ is $\left| r\right> = 0$. We already noted that in Bloch space, the unit two-sphere represents all the possible pure state configurations for a two-state system. However, the unit ball represents all state configurations; the impure states have $\left< r \big| r \right> < 1$ \cite{nielsenchuang}. The Bell state, with $\left< r\big| r \right>=0$, is a special case of a totally mixed or impure state, meaning that the subsystem is entirely statistical (classical). By symmetry, if we had traced out the first subsystem rather than the second, we find $\hat{\rho}^{(1)}=\hat{\rho}^{(2)}$, so we actually have an entangled state composed of totally classical subsystems.
\section{Projection Onto a Basis}\label{sec:projonbasis}
So far, we have worked mostly in an abstract Hilbert space, although we have taken brief forays into matrix representations of states and observables. In this section, we formalize the notion of a representation of an operator in a basis. We are mainly interested in infinite and continuous bases\index{Basis!Continuous}, which we use to define a very useful structure \cite{cohtan}.
\begin{boxeddefn}{Wavefuntion\index{Wavefunction}}{defn:wavefunction}
Suppose that we have an infinite and continuous basis for $\mathcal H$, $\{ x \}_{x \in \mathbb R}$. Then, for some pure state vector $\left| \psi \right> \in \mathcal H$, we form the \textbf{wavefunction}
\begin{equation}
\psi : \mathbb R \rightarrow \mathbb C
\end{equation}
defined by
\begin{equation}
\psi(x) \equiv \left< x \big | \psi \right>.
\end{equation}
\end{boxeddefn}
We note that if
\begin{equation}
\left| \psi \right> = \sum_{x \in \mathbb R} a_x \left| x \right>,
\end{equation}
\begin{equation}
\left< \psi \right| = \sum_{x \in \mathbb R} a_x^* \left< x \right|,
\end{equation}
so
\begin{equation}
\mathrm{Tr}\left( \hat{\rho} \right) = \sum_{x \in \mathbb R} \left< x \big | \psi \right> \left< \psi \big| x \right> = \sum_{x \in \mathbb R } \psi^*(x) \psi(x),
\end{equation}
where we have used the complex symmetry of the inner product given by eqn. \ref{eqn:diracinner}. But since this is a sum over a continuous interval, it can be written as an integral. We obtain
\begin{equation}
\mathrm{Tr}\left( \hat{\rho} \right) = \int dx \cdot \psi^*(x) \psi(x) = \int dx \cdot \left| \psi(x)\right|^2 = 1,
\end{equation}
as the state operator has unit trace. Since our sum is infinite, it must be that $\psi(x)$ decays at infinity sufficiently fast such that the integral converges. This special class of functions is known as the set of square-normalizable functions, and is often denoted as $L^2$. Physically, this means that the wavefunction must be \textit{localized} in some sense, so that at extreme distances it is effectively zero.
Just as we projected a vector into a basis and obtained a function, we can project a linear operator acting in Hilbert space onto a basis to obtain a linear operator in function space. We denote such operator with a check $\left( \, \check{ } \, \right)$, and define it by \cite{cohtan}\index{Linear!Operator!on a Function Space}
\begin{equation}\label{eqn:checkop}
\check{\mathcal O} \psi(x) \equiv \left< x \right| \hat{\mathcal O} \left| \psi \right>,
\end{equation}
where $\hat{\mathcal O}$ is an operator on a Hilbert space. An interesting application of this considers the matrix elements, given by eqn. \ref{eqn:matrixelem}, of a state operator $\hat{\rho}$ in the position basis. If $\hat \rho$ is pure, then
\begin{boxedeqn}{}
\rho(x,y) = \left< x \right| \hat \rho \left| y \right> = \left< x \big| \psi \right> \left< \psi \big| y \right> = \psi(x) \psi^*(y).
\end{boxedeqn}
Since we previously established that every valid wavefunction must vanish quickly at infinity, it follows that sufficiently off-diagonal elements of the state operator must vanish quickly, as well as distant points along the diagonal.
\chapter{Dynamics}\label{chap:dynamics}
\lettrine[lines=2, lhang=0.33, loversize=0.1]{Q}uantum dynamics is the framework that evolves a quantum state forward in time. We begin by considering the Galilei group\index{Group!Galilei} of transformations, under which all non-relativistic physics is believed to be invariant. We show that this group leads to the fundamental commutator relations that govern quantum dynamics, and then use them do derive the famous Schr\"odinger equation. Finally, we consider the free particle in the position basis.
\section{The Galilei Group}\label{sec:galgroup}
Fundamental to the notion of dynamics is the physical assumption that certain transformations will not change the physics of a situation \cite{ballentine}. All known experimental evidence supports this assumption, and it seems reasonable mathematically. This set of transformations forms a \textit{group}, called the Poincar\'e group\index{Group!Poincar\'e} of space translations, time translations, and Lorentz transformations.\footnote{The term group\index{Group} here is used in the formal, mathematical sense. We will not dwell on many of the subtleties that arise due to this here, and the interested reader is directed to ref. \cite{jones}.} However, for our purposes we take $v \ll c$, so the Poincar\'e group becomes the classical Galilei group, which we take as an axiom. For clarity, we assume a pure state in one temporal and one spacial dimension, but this treatment can be readily extended to impure states in three-dimensional space \cite{lindner}.
\begin{boxedaxm}{Invariance Under the Galilei Group\index{Group!Galilei}}{}
Let $G$ be the Galilei group, which contains elements generated by the composition of the operators
\begin{eqnarray}
\check S_{\epsilon} \psi(x,t) &=& \psi(x +\epsilon,t) \nonumber \\
\check{T}_{\epsilon} \psi(x,t) &=& \psi(x,t+\epsilon) \nonumber \\
\check{L}_{\epsilon} \psi(x,t) &=& \psi(x+\epsilon t, t) ,
\end{eqnarray}
where $\psi (x,t)$, given by definition \ref{defn:wavefunction}, is a function of position and time, and $(\check{\,})$ represents an operator on the space of such functions, as defined in eqn. \ref{eqn:checkop}. Let $\check g \in G$ and let $\hat A$ be an observable of the state $\left| \psi \right>$ with eigenvectors $\big\{ \left| \phi_n \right> \big\}_{n \in \mathbb R}$ and eigenvalues $\{ a_n \}_{n \in \mathbb R}$. Then, if $\hat A \left| \phi_n \right> = a_n \left| \phi_n \right>$ and for all wavefunctions $v(x,t)$,
$\check g v = v'$, we assert
\begin{equation}\label{eqn:galobservables}
\hat A ' \left| \phi_n' \right> \equiv a_n \left| \phi_n' \right>
\end{equation}
and
\begin{equation}\label{eqn:galstates}
\left| \left< \phi_n \big | \psi \right> \right|^2 \equiv \left| \left< \phi_n' \big| \psi' \right> \right|^2.
\end{equation}
\end{boxedaxm}
In essence, eqns. \ref{eqn:galobservables} and \ref{eqn:galstates} refer to the invariance of possible measurement\index{Measurement} and invariance of probable outcome, and thus the invariance of all physics, under the Galilei group. We now write a motivating identity using the Galilei group. Considering the state wavefunction $\psi(x,t)$, we find \cite{lindner}
\begin{eqnarray} \label{eqn:comm1}
\check L_{\epsilon}^{-1} \check T_{\epsilon}^{-1} \check L_{\epsilon} \check T_{\epsilon} \psi(x,t) &=& \check L_{-\epsilon} \check T_{-\epsilon} \check L_{\epsilon} \check T_{\epsilon} \psi(x,t) \nonumber \\
&=& \check L_{-\epsilon} \check T_{-\epsilon} \check L_{\epsilon} \psi(x,t+\epsilon) \nonumber \\
&=& \check L_{-\epsilon} \check T_{-\epsilon} \psi(x+\epsilon(t+\epsilon),t+\epsilon) \nonumber \\
&=& \check L_{-\epsilon} \psi(x+\epsilon(t+\epsilon),t) \nonumber \\
&=& \psi(x+\epsilon(t+\epsilon)-\epsilon t,t) \nonumber \\
&=& \psi(x+ \epsilon^2,t) \nonumber \\
&=& \check S_{\epsilon^2} \psi (x,t) .
\end{eqnarray}
We conclude that these transformations do not commute, which will play a major role in the dynamics of quantum mechanics. Before we move to a Hilbert space, we need to convert our Galilei group into a more useful form. Due to eqn. \ref{eqn:galstates}, we can make use of Wigner's theorem, which guarantees that any Galilei transformation corresponds to a \textbf{unitary} operator $\hat U$ on a Hilbert space that obeys\footnote{Wigner's theorem is complicated to prove. See ref. \cite{bargmann} for a thorough treatment.}
\begin{equation}
\hat U \hat U^{\dagger} = \hat U^{\dagger} \hat U= \hat 1.
\end{equation}
Thus, if $\hat U$ is a unitary representative of a Galilei group member and $\hat A$ is an observable. If we take that
\begin{equation}
\left| u' \right> \equiv \hat U \left| u \right>
\end{equation}
for all $\left| u \right> \in \mathcal H$, we have
\begin{equation}
\hat A ' \left| \phi_n '\right> = a_n \left| \phi_n ' \right> \Rightarrow \hat A ' \hat U \left| \phi_n \right> = a_n \hat U \left| \phi_n \right>,
\end{equation}
so
\begin{equation}
\hat U^{\dagger} \hat A' \hat U \left| \phi_n \right> = \left( \hat U^{\dagger} \hat U \right) a_n \left| \phi_n \right> = a_n \left| \phi_n \right>.
\end{equation}
Hence, we get
\begin{equation}
\hat A \left| \phi_n \right> - \hat U^{\dagger} \hat A' \hat U \left| \phi_n \right> = a_n \left| \phi_n \right> - a_n \left| \phi_n \right> = \hat 0.
\end{equation}
Since this equation holds for all eigenvectors of $\hat A$, we have \cite{ballentine}
\begin{equation} \label{eqn:operatortrans}
\hat A - \hat U^{\dagger} \hat A' \hat U = 0 \Rightarrow \hat A = \hat U^{\dagger} \hat A' \hat U \Rightarrow \hat A' = \hat U \hat A \hat U^{\dagger}.
\end{equation}
We now take our unitary transformation to be a function of a single parameter, $t$, subject to $\hat U(t_1+t_2) = \hat U(t_1) \hat U(t_2)$ and $\hat U(0)=\hat 1$. Then, for small $t$, we take the Taylor expansion of $\hat U$ about $t=0$ to get\footnote{We will be making frequent use of the Taylor expansion. Readers unfamiliar with it are advised to see ref. \cite{riley}.}
\begin{equation}
\hat U(t) = \hat 1 + t \frac{d \hat U}{dt}\Big | _{t=0}+... \, .
\end{equation}
Similarly, we know that \cite{lindner}
\begin{eqnarray}
\hat 1 &=&\hat U \hat U^{\dagger} \nonumber \\
&=& \hat 1 + t \frac{d\hat U \hat U^{\dagger}}{dt}\Big|_{t=0} + ... \nonumber \\
&=& \hat 1 + t \left( \frac{d\hat U }{dt}\hat U^{\dagger} +\hat U\frac{d\hat U^{\dagger} }{dt} \right) _{t=0}+ ... \nonumber \\
&\sim& \hat 1 + t \left( \frac{d\hat U }{dt} +\frac{d\hat U^{\dagger} }{dt} \right) _{t=0}+ ... \, , \nonumber \\
\end{eqnarray}
as $t \sim 0$ and $\hat U(0)=\hat U^{\dagger}(0)=\hat 1$. Since $\hat 1 = \hat U \hat U^{\dagger}$ for all $t$, it must be that
\begin{equation}
\left( \frac{d\hat U }{dt}+\frac{d\hat U^{\dagger} }{dt} \right) _{t=0} = \hat 0.
\end{equation}
We now let
\begin{equation}
\frac{d\hat U }{dt}\Big |_{t=0} \equiv i \hat K,
\end{equation}
which is well-defined so long as $\hat K$ is self-adjoint. We impose the boundary condition $\hat U (0) = \hat 1$ to find the solution to this first order differential equation,
\begin{equation}
\hat U(s) = e^{i \hat K t}.
\end{equation}
Since any unitary operator can be represented in this form, we now define the three generating operators of the Galilei group\index{Group!Galilei!Unitary Representatives}. They are \cite{lindner}
\begin{eqnarray}\label{eqn:galdefexp}
\check S_{x} \psi(x) &=& \left< x \right| \hat S_x \left| \psi \right> \equiv \left< x \right| e^{-i x \hat p} \left| \psi \right> \nonumber \\
\check T_t \psi(x)&=& \left< x \right| \hat T_t \left| \psi \right>\equiv \left< x \right| e^{-i t \hat h} \left| \psi \right>\nonumber \\
\check L_v \psi (x)& = & \left< x \right| \hat L_v \left| \psi \right>\equiv \left< x \right| e^{i v \hat f }\left| \psi \right>,
\end{eqnarray}
where $\hat f$, $\hat h$, and $\hat p$ are self-adjoint, and the particular signs and parameters associated with the transformations are matters of convention. \section{Commutator Relationships}
We next introduce three particular observables. First, the position operator, $\hat Q$\index{Position Operator}, obeys the eigenvalue equation
\begin{equation}
\hat Q \left| x \right> = x \left| x \right>,
\end{equation}
where $\left| x \right>$ is an eigenvector of the position, i.e. a state of definite position. Second, the momentum operator, $\hat P$\index{Momentum Operator}, follows
\begin{equation}
\hat P \left| p \right> = p \left| p \right>.
\end{equation}
We require that the expectation values of these operators follow the classical relationship \cite{griffiths}
\begin{equation}\label{eqn:classcorsp}
\left< \hat P \right> \equiv \frac{d \left<\hat Q\right> }{dt}.
\end{equation}
Further, we define the energy operator $\hat H$, also known as the \textbf{Hamiltonian}\index{Hamiltonian}, in analogy to the classical total energy of a system, which is the kinetic energy $P^2/(2m)$ plus some potential energy $V$. It is
\begin{equation}\label{eqn:eop}
\hat H \equiv \frac{1}{2m} \hat P^2 + V.
\end{equation}
First, note that
\begin{equation}
\hat H \hat P = \left( \frac{1}{2m} \hat P ^2 + V\right) \hat P = \hat P \left(\frac{1}{2m} \hat P ^2 + V \right) = \hat P \hat H,
\end{equation}
so $\left[ \hat H , \hat P \right] = 0$. Next, recall that
\begin{equation}\label{eqn:schropic}
\left| \psi(t + \epsilon) \right> = \hat T_{\epsilon} \left| \psi(t) \right>.
\end{equation}
By the definition of the derivative, we have \cite{lindner}
\begin{eqnarray}
\frac{d}{dt} \left| \psi(t) \right>
&=& \lim_{\epsilon \rightarrow 0} \frac{\left| \psi(t+\epsilon) \right> - \left| \psi(t) \right>}{\epsilon} \nonumber \\
&=& \lim_{\epsilon \rightarrow 0} \frac{e^{-i \epsilon \hat h} \left| \psi(t) \right> - \left| \psi(t) \right>}{\epsilon} \nonumber \\
&=& \lim_{\epsilon \rightarrow 0} \frac{\left(1-i \epsilon \hat h+\left(-i\epsilon \hat h \right)^2/2 +... \right) \left| \psi(t) \right> - \left| \psi(t) \right>}{\epsilon} \nonumber \\
&=& \lim_{\epsilon \rightarrow 0} \left( -i \hat h \left| \psi(t)\right> - \epsilon \hat h^2 \left| \psi(t) \right> + ... \right) \nonumber \\
&=& -i \hat h \left| \psi(t)\right> .
\end{eqnarray}
Following identical logic, we find \cite{lindner}
\begin{equation}
\frac{d}{dt} \left< \psi(t) \right| = +i \left< \psi(t)\right| \hat h.
\end{equation}
Since $\left| \psi(t) \right>$ is pure, we use eqn. \ref{eqn:recoverexp} to write
\begin{eqnarray}
\frac{d}{dt} \left< \hat Q \right>(t)
&=& \frac{d}{dt} \left< \psi(t) \right| \hat Q \left| \psi(t) \right> \nonumber \\
&=& \left( \frac{d}{dt} \left< \psi(t) \right|\right) \hat Q \left| \psi(t) \right> +\left< \psi(t) \right| \hat Q \left( \frac{d}{dt} \left| \psi(t) \right> \right) \nonumber \\
&=& i \left< \psi(t)\right| \hat h \hat Q \left| \psi(t) \right> -\left< \psi(t) \right| \hat Q i \hat h \left| \psi(t)\right> \nonumber \\
&=& \left< \psi(t)\right| i \left( \hat h \hat Q - \hat Q \hat h \right) \left| \psi(t) \right> \nonumber \\
&=& \left< \psi(t)\right| i \left[ \hat h, \hat Q \right] \left| \psi(t) \right>,
\end{eqnarray}
so
\begin{equation}
\frac{d}{dt} \left< \hat Q \right>(t) = \left< i \left[ \hat h, \hat Q \right] \right>.
\end{equation}
Then, by eqn. \ref{eqn:classcorsp}, we have
\begin{equation}
\frac{1}{m} \left< \hat P \right> = \left< i \left[ \hat h, \hat Q \right] \right> \Leftrightarrow \left< \psi(t) \right| \frac{1}{m} \hat P \left| \psi(t) \right> = \left< \psi(t) \right| i \left[ \hat h, \hat Q \right] \left| \psi(t) \right>.
\end{equation}
Since this result holds for arbitrary $\left| \psi(t) \right>$, we get \begin{equation}
\frac{1}{m}\hat P = i \left[ \hat h, \hat Q \right] ,
\end{equation}
or \cite{lindner}
\begin{equation}
\left[ \hat Q, \hat h \right] = i \frac{1}{m} \hat P.
\end{equation}
We next continue working with the position operator to derive a second relation. Recall that from eqn. \ref{eqn:operatortrans}, a unitary transformation defined by
\begin{equation}
\left| \psi ' \right> = \hat U \left| \psi \right>
\end{equation}
transforms an operator as
\begin{equation}
\hat A ' = \hat U \hat A \hat U^{\dagger}.
\end{equation}
So, if our unitary operator is $\hat S_{x_0} = e^{-i x_0 \hat p}$, we can transform the position operator $\hat Q$ to $\hat Q '$ according to
\begin{equation}\label{eqn:posexps}
\hat Q ' = \hat S_{x_0} \hat Q \hat S_{x_0}^{\dagger} =e^{-i x_0 \hat p} \hat Q e^{+i x_0 \hat p}.
\end{equation}
By our definition of $\hat Q$, we know\footnote{This is because $\left| x \right>$ and $\left| x' \right>$ are valid eigenvectors of $\hat Q$, as the spectrum of allowed positions (the eigenvalues for $\hat Q$) is the entire real line.}
\begin{equation}
\hat Q \left| x \right> = x \left| x \right> \Rightarrow \hat Q \left| x' \right> = x' \left| x' \right>.
\end{equation}
Further, eqn. \ref{eqn:galobservables} tells us
\begin{equation}
\hat Q ' \left| x ' \right> = x \left| x ' \right>.
\end{equation}
Thus,
\begin{equation}
\left( \hat Q ' - \hat Q \right) \left| x' \right> = (x-x') \left| x' \right> = \left( x - (x+x_0) \right) \left| x ' \right> = - x_0 \left| x' \right>.\footnote{Note that $x'=x+x_0$, since $\check S_{x_0} \psi(x) = \psi(x_0+x) = \psi(x')$.}
\end{equation}
Note that this relationship holds for arbitrary $x_0$, and hence for all $\left| x' \right>$. This implies \cite{lindner}
\begin{equation}
\hat Q ' = \hat Q - x_0 .
\end{equation}
Recalling our definition for $\hat Q '$, we have
\begin{equation} \label{eqn:qpcomm3}
e^{-i x_0 \hat p} \hat Q e^{+i x_0 \hat p} = \hat Q - x_0 .
\end{equation}
As before, we expand the exponential terms in a Taylor series to obtain
\begin{eqnarray}
\left( \sum_{n=1}^{\infty}\frac{ \left( -i x_0 \hat p \right)^n}{n!} \right) \hat Q \left( \sum_{n=1}^{\infty}\frac{ \left( i x_0 \hat p \right)^n}{n!} \right)
&=& \left( 1 - i x_0 \hat p + ... \right) \hat Q \left( 1 + i x_0 \hat p + ... \right) \nonumber \\
&=& \hat Q - i x_0 \hat p \hat Q + i x_0 \hat Q \hat p +... \nonumber \\
&=& \hat Q + i x_0 \left( \hat Q \hat p - \hat p \hat Q \right) + ... \nonumber \\
&=& \hat Q + i x_0 \left[ \hat Q , \hat p \right] +... \nonumber \\
&=& \hat Q - x_0 .
\end{eqnarray}
Hence, in the limit as $x_0 \rightarrow 0$, eqn. \ref{eqn:qpcomm3} is \cite{lindner}
\begin{equation}
i \left[ \hat Q, \hat p \right] = -1 \Rightarrow \left[ \hat Q, \hat p \right] = i
\end{equation}
Next, we examine the momentum operator. Taking our unitary operator to be $\hat L_{v_0}=e^{+i v \hat f}$, we get
\begin{equation}
\hat P ' = e^{+i v_0 \hat f} \hat P e^{-iv_0 \hat f}.
\end{equation}
If we operate on states of definite momentum, we know
\begin{equation}
\hat P \left| p \right> = p \left| p \right> = m v \left| p \right>.
\end{equation}
By direct analogy with the states of definite position above, we find \cite{lindner}
\begin{equation}
\hat P ' = e^{+i v_0 \hat f} \hat P e^{-iv_0 \hat f} = \hat P - m v_0 .
\end{equation}
As above, we find the Taylor expansion of the exponentials to obtain
\begin{eqnarray}
\left( \sum_{n=1}^{\infty}\frac{ \left( +i v_0 \hat f \right)^n}{n!} \right) \hat P \left( \sum_{n=1}^{\infty}\frac{ \left( i v_0 \hat f \right)^n}{n!} \right)
&=& \left( 1 + i v_0 \hat f + ... \right) \hat P \left( 1 - i v_0 \hat f + ... \right) \nonumber \\
&=& \hat P + i v_0 \hat f \hat P - i v_0 \hat P \hat f +... \nonumber \\
&=& \hat P + i v_0 \left( \hat f \hat P - \hat P \hat f \right) + ... \nonumber \\
&=& \hat P + i v_0 \left[ \hat f , \hat P \right] +... \nonumber \\
&=& \hat P - mv_0 .
\end{eqnarray}
In the limit as $v_0 \rightarrow 0$, we have
\begin{equation}
i \left[ \hat f , \hat P \right] = - m \Rightarrow \left[ \hat f , \hat P \right] = i m .
\end{equation}
It is a convention to define $\hat f \equiv m \hat q$, in which case we have \cite{lindner}
\begin{equation}
\left[ \hat q , \hat P \right] = i .
\end{equation}
We now have
\begin{eqnarray} \label{eqn:commsecondset}
\left[ \hat H, \hat P \right] &=& 0, \nonumber \\
\left[ \hat Q, \hat h \right] &=& i \frac{1}{m} \hat P, \nonumber \\
\left[ \hat Q, \hat p \right] &=& i, \nonumber \\
\left[ \hat q , \hat P \right] &=& i.
\end{eqnarray}
We make the standard definition for the position, momentum, and energy operators in terms of the Galilei\index{Group!Galilei!Generators} group generators. It is \cite{lindner}
\begin{equation}
\hat Q \equiv \hbar \hat q, \, \,\, \hat P \equiv \hbar \hat p , \, \, \, \hat H \equiv \hbar \hat h,
\end{equation}
where $\hbar$ is a proportionality constant known as Planck's reduced constant, and is experimentally determined to be
\begin{equation}
\hbar \approx 10^{-34} \, \mathrm{joule-seconds}
\end{equation}
in SI units. Then, eqn. \ref{eqn:commsecondset} reads \cite{lindner}
\begin{eqnarray}\label{eqn:goodcomm}
\left[ \hat P , \hat H \right] &=& 0, \nonumber \\
\left[ \hat Q, \hat H \right] &=& i \hbar \frac{1}{m} \hat P, \nonumber \\
\left[ \hat Q, \hat P \right] &=& i \hbar,
\end{eqnarray}
where
\begin{boxedeqn}{}
\left[ \hat Q, \hat P \right] = i \hbar
\end{boxedeqn}is especially important, and is called the \textbf{canonical commutator}\index{Canonical Commutator}.
As a consequence of our work so far this chapter, we now are in the position to evolve a state operator $\hat \rho$ in time. From eqn. \ref{eqn:operatortrans}, we have
\begin{equation}
\hat A' = \hat U \hat A \hat U^{\dagger}
\end{equation}
for an arbitrary observable $\hat A$. Letting $\hat A = \hat{\rho}$ , the state operator, and $\hat U = \hat T_t= e^{-i t \hat H/\hbar}$, we have
\begin{equation}\label{eqn:freestateop}
\hat{\rho}' = e^{-i t \hat H/\hbar} \hat{\rho} e^{+i t \hat H/\hbar}.
\end{equation}
Thus, by the definition of the derivative,
\begin{equation}
\hat{\partial}_t \hat{\rho} = \lim_{t \rightarrow 0} \frac{\hat{\rho}' - \hat{\rho}}{t} = \lim_{t \rightarrow 0} \frac{e^{-i t \hat H/\hbar} \hat{\rho} e^{i t \hat H/\hbar}- \hat{\rho}}{t}.
\end{equation}
Expanding the exponential terms in a Taylor series, we get\index{Equation of Motion!of the State Operator}
\begin{eqnarray}
\hat{\partial}_t \hat{\rho} &=& \lim_{t \rightarrow 0} \frac{\left(1 - \frac{it \hat H}{\hbar}+... \right) \hat{\rho} \left(1 + \frac{it \hat H}{\hbar}+... \right) - \hat{\rho}}{t} \nonumber \\
&=& \lim_{t \rightarrow 0}\left( -\frac{i \hat H}{\hbar} \hat {\rho} + \hat{\rho} \frac{i \hat H}{\hbar} + ... \right) \nonumber \\
&=&- \frac{i \hat H}{\hbar} \hat {\rho} + \hat{\rho} \frac{i \hat H}{\hbar} \nonumber \\
&=& \frac{i}{\hbar} \left[ \hat{\rho} , \hat H \right] ,
\end{eqnarray}
so the equation of motion for the state operator is
\begin{boxedeqn}{eqn:heispic}
\hat{\partial}_t \hat{\rho}= \frac{i}{\hbar} \left[ \hat{\rho} , \hat H \right] .
\end{boxedeqn}
\section{The Schr\" odinger wave equation}
Now that we have the commutator relations in eqn. \ref{eqn:goodcomm}, we can touch base with elementary quantum mechanics by deriving the Schr\"odinger wave equation. We work in the position basis, where our basis vectors follow
\begin{equation}
\hat Q \left| x \right> = x \left| x \right>.
\end{equation}
Considering some state vector
\begin{equation}
\left| \psi \right> = \sum_{x \in \mathbb R} a_x \left| x \right>,
\end{equation}
its wavefunction, given by definition \ref{defn:wavefunction}, is
\begin{equation}\label{eqn:wavefunction}
\psi (x) = \left< x \big | \psi \right> = \left< x \right| \left( \sum_{x \in \mathbb R} a_x \left| x \right> \right)= a_x.
\end{equation}
Considering $\hat Q$, we find by eqn. \ref{eqn:checkop} that
\begin{equation}
\check Q \psi (x) = \left< x \right| \hat Q \left| \psi \right>= \left< x \right| x \left| \psi \right> = x \left< x \big| \psi \right> = x \psi(x).
\end{equation}
So, in the position basis, $\check Q$ turns out to be multiplication by $x$. Using this result with eqn. \ref{eqn:recoverexp}, we find \cite{griffiths}
\begin{eqnarray}
\left< \hat Q \right> &=& \left< \psi \right| \hat Q \left| \psi \right> \nonumber \\
&=& \left( \sum_{x \in \mathbb R} a_x^* \left< x \right| \right)\hat Q \left( \sum_{y \in \mathbb R} a_y \left| y \right> \right) \nonumber \\
&=& \left( \sum_{x \in \mathbb R} a_x^* \left< x \right| \right) \left( \sum_{y \in \mathbb R} a_y \hat Q \left| y \right> \right) \nonumber \\
&=& \left( \sum_{x \in \mathbb R} a_x^* \left< x \right| \right) \left( \sum_{y \in \mathbb R} a_y y \left| y \right> \right) \nonumber \\
&=& \sum_{x \in \mathbb R} a_x^* x a_x \nonumber \\
&=& \int dx \cdot \psi(x)^* x \psi(x) \nonumber \\
&=& \int dx \cdot \psi(x)^* \check Q \psi(x).
\end{eqnarray}
We would like to find a similar expression for momentum within the position basis. To do this, we consider the canonical commutator from eqn. \ref{eqn:commsecondset}, $\left[ \hat Q, \hat P \right] = i \hbar$, which corresponds to
\begin{equation}
\left< x \right| \left( \left[ \hat Q, \hat P \right] = i \hbar \right) \Rightarrow \left[ \check Q, \check P \right] \psi(x) = i \hbar \psi(x)
\end{equation}
Considering some dummy function $f(x)$, we have \cite{griffiths}
\begin{eqnarray}
i \hbar f(x) &=& x \frac{\hbar}{i} \frac{d f}{dx} - x \frac{\hbar}{i} \frac{df}{dx} + i \hbar f \nonumber \\
&=& x \frac{\hbar}{i} \frac{d f}{dx} - x \frac{\hbar}{i} \frac{df}{dx} - \frac{ \hbar}{i} f \nonumber \\
&=& x \frac{\hbar}{i} \frac{d f}{dx} - \frac{\hbar}{i} \frac{d }{dx}\left( x \cdot f \right) \nonumber \\
&=& \left( x \frac{\hbar}{i} \frac{d}{dx} - \frac{\hbar}{i} \frac{d }{dx} x \right)f \nonumber \\
&=& \left( \check Q \check P - \check P \check Q \right) f.
\end{eqnarray}
Since we know $\check Qf =xf$ in the position basis,
\begin{equation} \label{eqn:mominpos}
\check P f= \frac{\hbar}{i} \frac{d}{dx}f.
\end{equation}
We now drop our test function to obtain the famous operator relationship\index{Momentum Operator!in Position Basis}
\begin{boxedeqn}{}
\check P =\frac{\hbar}{i} \frac{d}{dx}.
\end{boxedeqn}
Now, recall from eqn. \ref{eqn:schropic},
\begin{equation}
\left| \psi_{t=\epsilon} \right> = \hat T_{\epsilon} \left| \psi_{t=0} \right> = e^{-i \epsilon \hat H/{\hbar}} \left| \psi_0 \right>.
\end{equation}
It follows that
\begin{equation}
\hat{ \partial_t} \left| \psi_t \right> = \hat{\partial_t} \left( e^{-i \epsilon \hat H/{\hbar}} \left| \psi_0 \right> \right) = -\frac{i \hat H}{\hbar} e^{-i \epsilon \hat H/{\hbar}} \left| \psi_0 \right> = -\frac{i \hat H}{\hbar}\left| \psi_{t} \right>,
\end{equation}
so
\begin{equation}
\check{\partial_t} \psi_t(x) = \left< x \right| \hat{\partial_t} \left| \psi_t \right> = \left< x \right| -\frac{i \hat H}{\hbar} \left| \psi_t \right> = -\frac{i}{\hbar} \left< x \right| \hat H \left| \psi_t \right> = -\frac{i}{\hbar} \check H \psi_t(x).
\end{equation}
But by eqn. \ref{eqn:eop},
\begin{equation} \label{eqn:hcheck}
\check H \psi_t(x) = \left< x \right| \hat H \left| \psi_t \right> =\left< x \right| \left( \frac{1}{2m} \hat P^2 + V \right) \left| \psi_t \right> = \frac{1}{2m} \check p ^2 \psi_t(x) + V \psi_t(x).
\end{equation}
Hence, we have
\begin{equation}
\check{\partial}_t \psi_t(x) = -\frac{i}{\hbar} \frac{1}{2m} \check P ^2 \psi_t(x) - V\psi_t(x) = -\frac{i}{\hbar} \frac{1}{2m} \left( \frac{\hbar}{i} \check{\partial}_x \right)^2 \psi_t(x)- V\psi_t(x).
\end{equation}
This is rewritten as
\begin{boxedeqn}{}
i \hbar \frac{\partial \psi(x,t)}{\partial t} = - \frac{\hbar^2}{2m} \frac{\partial^2 \psi(x,t)}{\partial x ^2} + V \psi (x,t),
\end{boxedeqn}
and is the \textbf{time-dependent Schr\"odinger equation}\index{Schr\"odinger Equation!Time Dependent} \cite{griffiths}.
Remarkably, so long as $V$ is time-independent, this equation turns out to be separable, so we can effectively pull off the time-dependence. To do this, we suppose \cite{griffiths}
\begin{equation}
\psi(x,t) \equiv \psi(x) \varphi(t),
\end{equation}
and substitute into the Schr\"odinger equation. We have
\begin{equation}
i \hbar \frac{\partial \psi(x) \varphi(t)}{\partial t} = - \frac{\hbar^2}{2m} \frac{\partial^2 \psi(x) \varphi(t)}{\partial x ^2} + V \psi(x) \varphi(t),
\end{equation}
which is
\begin{equation}
i \hbar \psi(x) \frac{\partial \varphi(t)}{\partial t} + \frac{\hbar^2}{2m}\varphi(t) \frac{\partial^2 \psi(x)}{\partial x ^2} = V \psi(x) \varphi(t),
\end{equation}
or
\begin{equation}
i \hbar \frac{1}{\varphi(t)} \frac{\partial \varphi(t)}{\partial t} = - \frac{\hbar^2}{2m}\frac{1}{\psi(x)} \frac{\partial^2 \psi(x)}{\partial x ^2} + V,
\end{equation}
provided $\varphi(t), \psi(x) \neq 0$. We now have two independent, single-variable functions set equal , so we know each of the functions must be equal to some constant, which we name $E$. That is, we have \cite{griffiths}
\begin{eqnarray}
E &=& i \hbar \frac{1}{\varphi(t)} \check d_t \varphi(t), \nonumber \\
E &=& - \frac{\hbar^2}{2m}\frac{1}{\psi(x)} \check {d}_x^2 \psi(x)+ V ,
\end{eqnarray}
where we have let the partial derivatives go to normal derivatives, since we now have single-variable functions. The time-dependent piece has the solution
\begin{equation}
\varphi(t) = e^{-i E t / \hbar},
\end{equation}
and the time-independent piece is usually written as \cite{griffiths}
\begin{boxedeqn}{eqn:schrotimeind}
- \frac{\hbar^2}{2m} \check d _x^2 \psi (x) + V \psi(x) = E \psi (x),
\end{boxedeqn}
which is the\textbf{ time-independent Schr\"odinger equation}\index{Schr\"odinger Equation!Time Independent}. Although this result cannot be reduced further without specifying $V$, we can use eqn. \ref{eqn:hcheck} to find
\begin{equation}
\check H \psi(x) = E \psi(x).
\end{equation}
This means that the values for the separation constant $E$ are actually the possible eigenvalues for $\check H$, the position representation of the Hamiltonian (energy operator). Further, if we find $\psi(x)$, we can construct $\psi(x,t)$ by
\begin{equation}
\psi(x,t) = \varphi(t) \psi(x) = e^{-i E t / \hbar}\psi(x) .
\end{equation}
If we compare this to eqn. \ref{eqn:schropic},
\begin{equation}
\left| \psi_t \right>=\hat T_{t} \left| \psi_{t=0} \right> = e^{-i t \hat H/{\hbar}} \left| \psi_0 \right>,
\end{equation}
we find a distinct similarity between the form of time evolution in Hilbert space using the unitary $\hat T_t$ operator and time evolution in position space using the complex exponential of the eigenvalues of the associated $\check H$ operator on function space.
\section{The Free Particle}\label{sec:freeparticle}\index{Free Particle!in Position Basis}
Now that we have derived the Schr\"odinger equation, we will put it to use by treating the case of a free particle, when the potential $V=0$. In this case, the time-independent Schr\"odinger equation (eqn. \ref{eqn:schrotimeind}) reads
\begin{equation}
- \frac{\hbar^2}{2m} \check d _x^2 \psi (x) = E \psi (x),
\end{equation}
which we write as
\begin{equation}
\check d _x^2 \psi (x) = -k^2 \psi (x),
\end{equation}
where
\begin{equation}
k \equiv \frac{\sqrt{2E}}{\hbar}.
\end{equation}
This equation has a solution \cite{cohtan}
\begin{equation}\label{eqn:planewave1}
\psi(x) = Ae^{ ik x},
\end{equation}
which is sinusoidal with amplitude $A$. Note that we identified the constants in our equation as $k$ with some foresight, as it turns out to be the wave number, $k=2\pi/\lambda$, of the solution. However, this solution does not decay at infinity, so the condition imposed by definition \ref{defn:pure} is violated. That is \cite{griffiths},
\begin{eqnarray}
\left< \psi \big| \psi \right>
&=& \left( \sum_{x \in \mathbb R }a^*_x \left<x \right| \right) \left( \sum_{y \in \mathbb R} a_y \left| y \right> \right) \nonumber \\
&=& \sum_{x \in \mathbb R } \sum_{y \in \mathbb R} a^*_x a_y\left<x \big| y \right> \nonumber \\
&=& \sum_{x \in \mathbb R } a^*_x a_x \nonumber \\
&=& \int dx \cdot \psi^*(x) \psi(x) \nonumber \\
&=& \int dx \cdot A^* e^{-ikx} A e^{ikx} \nonumber \\
&=& \left| A \right| ^2 \int dx \nonumber \\
&=& \infty,
\end{eqnarray}
so we cannot pick appropriate $A$ such that $\left< \psi \big| \psi \right> =1$. Hence, $\left| \psi \right> $ must not be a physically realizable state. The resolution to this problem is to use a linear combination of states with different values for $A$. The general formula for this linear combination is \cite{griffiths}
\begin{boxedeqn}{}
\psi(x) = \int dk \cdot \phi(k) e^{ikx},
\end{boxedeqn}
where $\phi(k)$ is the coefficient that replaces $A$ in our linear combination. Each of the component states of this integral are called \textbf{plane waves}\index{Plane Wave}, while the linear combination is called a \textbf{wave packet}\index{Wave Packet}. We will make use of the plane wave components for free particles later, so we need to investigate their form further. Consider the eigenvalue problem
\begin{equation}
\check P f_p(x) = p f_p(x),
\end{equation}
where $f_p$ is an eigenfunction and $p$ is an eigenvalue of the momentum operator in the position basis. Using eqn. \ref{eqn:mominpos}, we write
\begin{equation}
\frac{\hbar}{i} \check d_x f_p(x) = p f_p(x).
\end{equation}
This has a solution \cite{griffiths}
\begin{equation}\label{eqn:planewave}
f_p(x) = Ae^{ipx/\hbar},
\end{equation}
which is of identical form to eqn. \ref{eqn:planewave1}. If we identify the eigenfunctions of the position operator with the plane wave states, we get the famous de Broglie relation\index{De Broglie Relation} \cite{griffiths, ballentine, sudbery, cohtan},
\begin{equation}
p = \hbar k.
\end{equation}
Recall that plane wave states are not normalizable, and thus cannot be physically realizable states. This means that in the position basis, states of definite momentum are not permissible, which is a famous consequence of the Heisenberg uncertainty principle.\footnote{The uncertainty principle reads $\Delta x \Delta p \geq \hbar /2$ \cite{griffiths}. If we have a state of definite position, $\Delta p = 0$, so, roughly, $\Delta x = \infty$. This is the result that we have already seen; states of definite momentum are not square-normalizable in the position basis.} The wave packet, then, can be thought of as a superposition\index{Superposition} of states of definite momentum, giving rise to a state of definite position. That is \cite{griffiths},
\begin{equation}
\psi(x) = \int dp \cdot \phi(p) e^{ipx},
\end{equation}
where we have switched to units in which $\hbar \equiv 1$, as we will do for the remainder of this thesis.
\chapter{The Wigner Distribution}\label{chap:wigner}
\lettrine[lines=2, lhang=0.33, loversize=0.1]{T}he Wigner distribution was the first quasi-probability distribution used in physics. Invented in 1932 by E.P. Wigner\index{Wigner, E.P.}, it remains in wide use today in many areas, especially quantum mechanics and signal analysis \cite{wigner}. The Wigner distribution has been used to develop an entirely new formalism of quantum mechanics in phase-space, a space of position vs. momentum, which we touch on briefly in section \ref{sec:wig_harmonic} \cite{zachos2}.
In the following chapter, we first define the Wigner distribution and derive some of its fundamental properties. Next, we discuss the Wigner distribution of a combined system and treat a free particle. Following that, we extend the distribution to its associated transform. We then create a table of useful inverse relationships between the state operator and Wigner distribution required in subsequent sections. Finally, we construct the Wigner distribution for a simple harmonic oscillator as an example and observe its correspondence to a classical phase-space probability distribution.
\section{Definition and Fundamental Properitees}
In this section, we explore the basic properties of the Wigner distribution, starting with its definition, which is stated below \cite{zachos}
\begin{boxeddefn}{The Wigner distribution\index{Wigner Distribution!Defintion}}{def:WignerDist}
Consider the matrix elements of some state operator, given by $\rho(x,y)=\left< x \right| \hat \rho \left| y \right>$. Then, the Wigner distribution $W$ associated with $\rho$ is given by
\begin{equation}\label{eqn:wigdef1}
W(\bar x,p,t ) \equiv \frac{1}{2 \pi} \int d \delta \cdot e^{-i p \delta } \rho(x,y,t),
\end{equation}
where $\bar x = (x+y)/2$ and $\delta = x-y$. This is also usefully written
\begin{equation}\label{eqn:wigalt}
W(\bar x,p) = \frac{1}{2 \pi} \int d \delta \cdot e^{-ip \delta}\rho \left( \bar x +\frac{1}{2} \delta, \bar x - \frac{1}{2} \delta \right),
\end{equation}
where time dependence is understood and not written explicitly.
\end{boxeddefn}
Note that the Wigner distribution is given by a special case of the \textbf{Fourier transform} of the state operator with respect to the mean ($\bar x$) and difference ($\delta$) coordinates.\footnote{We assume some basic familiarity with the Fourier transform. If this topic is unfamiliar, the reader is advised to see ref. \cite{riley}.} Using this definition, we now list and verify some of the well known properties of the Wigner distribution.
\subsection{Inverse Distribution}
As one might guess, just as the Wigner distribution is defined in terms of the state operator, it is possible to define the state operator in terms of the Wigner distribution. This distinction is arbitrary: valid formulations of quantum mechanics have been made with the Wigner distribution as the primary object, while the state operator takes a secondary seat. However, historically the state operator and its associated vector have been the objects of primary importance in the development of quantum mechanics \cite{styer}. If we wish to express a state operator in terms of an associated Wigner distribution, we can make use of the relation \cite{halliwell}\index{Wigner Distribution!Inverse}
\begin{equation}
\rho(x,y) = \int d p \cdot e^{i p \delta} W \left( p, \bar x \right).
\end{equation}
In order to show that this is well-defined, we note that the Plancherel theorem states \cite{griffiths}
\begin{equation}
f( p ) = \frac{1}{2 \pi} \int d \delta \cdot e^{- i p \delta} \mathcal{F}\left( f(\delta) \right) \Leftrightarrow \mathcal{F}\left( f(\delta) \right) = \int d p \cdot e^{i p \delta} f( p),
\end{equation}
for some function $f$ and its Fourier transform, $\mathcal F (f) $, so long as the functions decay sufficiently fast at infinity. From this, is evident that the state operator is a kind of Fourier transform of the Wigner distribution, as we claimed in the previous section, so our inverse relationship is indeed appropriate.
\subsection{Reality of the Wigner Distribution}\index{Wigner Distribution!Reality}
One of the most important of the basic properties we will cover is that the Wigner distribution is always real-valued.\footnote{Although it is real-valued, the Wigner distribution is \textit{not} always positive. It is called a quasi-probability distribution since it is analogous to a true probability distribution, but has negative regions. We will deal these apparent negative probabilities more in section \ref{sec:wig_harmonic}.} That is,
\begin{boxedeqn}{}
W(\bar x, p, t) \in \mathbb R. \label{eqn:reality}
\end{boxedeqn}
In order to show this, we will take the complex conjugate of $W(\bar x, p)$. This gives us \cite{cohen}
\begin{eqnarray}
W^*(\bar x, p) &=& \frac{1}{2 \pi} \int_{\delta=- \infty}^{\infty} d \delta \cdot e^{ip \delta}\rho^* \left( \bar x +\frac{1}{2} \delta, \bar x - \frac{1}{2} \delta \right) \nonumber \\
&=& \frac{1}{2 \pi} \int_{\delta= \infty}^{-\infty} \left( - d \delta \right) \cdot e^{-ip \delta}\rho^* \left( \bar x -\frac{1}{2} \delta, \bar x + \frac{1}{2} \delta \right) \nonumber \\
&=& \frac{1}{2 \pi} \int_{\delta= -\infty}^{\infty} d \delta \cdot e^{-ip \delta}\rho^{\dagger} \left( \bar x +\frac{1}{2} \delta, \bar x - \frac{1}{2} \delta \right) \nonumber \\
&=& \frac{1}{2 \pi} \int_{\delta= -\infty}^{\infty} d \delta \cdot e^{-ip \delta}\rho \left( \bar x +\frac{1}{2} \delta, \bar x - \frac{1}{2} \delta \right) \nonumber \\
&=& W(\bar x, p),
\end{eqnarray}
where we used eqn. \ref{eqn:adjointapp} for the self-adjoint operator $\hat{\rho}$. Since we found $W^*(\bar x, p) = W(\bar x, p)$, we have $W(\bar x, p) \in \mathbb R$, as we claimed in eqn. \ref{eqn:reality}.
\subsection{Marginal Distributions}\label{sec:marginals}\index{Wigner Distribution!Marginal Distributions}
Based on our definition of the Wigner distribution, we note two important marginal distributions. They are \cite{hillery}
\begin{boxedeqn}{}
\int dp \cdot W(\bar x,p) = \left< \bar x \right| \hat \rho \left| \bar x \right> \label{eqn:marginal1}
\end{boxedeqn}
and
\begin{boxedeqn}{}
\int d\bar x \cdot W(\bar x,p) = \left< p \right| \hat{\rho} \left| p \right>.
\end{boxedeqn}
To show these results, we recall the definition of the Wigner distribution. We have
\begin{eqnarray}
\int dp \cdot W(\bar x,p) &=& \int dp \cdot \frac{1}{2 \pi} \int d \delta \cdot e^{-ip \delta}\rho \left( \bar x +\frac{1}{2} \delta, \bar x - \frac{1}{2} \delta \right) \nonumber \\
&=& \frac{1}{2 \pi} \int d \delta \cdot \rho \left( \bar x +\frac{1}{2} \delta, \bar x - \frac{1}{2} \delta \right) \int dp \cdot e^{-ip \delta}\nonumber \\
&=& \frac{1}{2 \pi} \int d \delta \cdot \rho \left( \bar x +\frac{1}{2} \delta, \bar x - \frac{1}{2} \delta \right) 2 \pi \delta_D(\delta) \nonumber \\
&=& \int d \delta \cdot \delta_D(\delta) \rho \left( \bar x +\frac{1}{2} \delta, \bar x - \frac{1}{2} \delta \right) \nonumber \\
&=& \rho \left( \bar x , \bar x \right) \nonumber \\
&=& \left< \bar x \right| \hat{\rho} \left| \bar x \right>,
\end{eqnarray}
where $\delta_D$ is called the $\textbf{Dirac delta}$\index{Dirac Delta},\footnote{The Dirac delta is roughly a sharp spike at a point, and zero elsewhere. Technically, it is not quite a function, but it is a very useful construct in theoretical physics. For more information, see ref. \cite{riley}.} and has the important properties \cite{riley}
\begin{equation}
\int dx \cdot \delta_D(y) f(x+y) \equiv f(x)
\end{equation}
and
\begin{equation}
\int dx \cdot e^{-i x y} \equiv 2 \pi \delta_D(y).
\end{equation}
In preparation for calculating the postion marginal distribution, it is useful to discuss the momentum representation of the state operator\index{State Operator!in Momentum Basis}. Analogous to the position representation, we define
\begin{boxedeqn}{}
\tilde{\rho}(p,p') \equiv \left< p \right| \hat p \left| p \right>,
\end{boxedeqn}
where the $(\, \tilde{} \, )$ is used to distinguish position matrix elements from momentum matrix elements. In terms of the momentum representation, the Wigner distribution is\index{Wigner Distribution!in Momentum Basis}
\begin{boxedeqn}{eqn:wigmomrep}
W( \bar x, p ) \leftrightarrow W_P( x, \bar p ) \equiv \frac{1}{2 \pi} \int d \lambda \cdot e^{-i x \lambda}\tilde{\rho} \left( \bar p +\frac{1}{2} \lambda, \bar p - \frac{1}{2} \lambda \right),
\end{boxedeqn}
where $\bar p = \frac{p + p'}{2}$ and $\lambda = p - p'$ are the average and difference momentum coordinates, in direct analogy to $\bar x$ and $\delta$. We are now ready to calculate the position marginal distribution. We have
\begin{eqnarray}
\int d\bar{x} W(\bar x, p) &\leftrightarrow&\int d\bar{x} W_P( x, \bar p) \nonumber \\
&=& \int dx \frac{1}{2 \pi} \int d \lambda \cdot e^{-i x \lambda}\tilde{\rho} \left( \bar p +\frac{1}{2} \lambda, \bar p - \frac{1}{2} \lambda \right)\nonumber \\
&=& \frac{1}{2 \pi} \int d \lambda \cdot \tilde{\rho} \left( \bar p +\frac{1}{2} \lambda, \bar p - \frac{1}{2} \lambda \right) \int dx e^{-i x \lambda}\nonumber \\
&=& \frac{1}{2 \pi} \int d \lambda \cdot \tilde{\rho} \left( \bar p +\frac{1}{2} \lambda, \bar p - \frac{1}{2} \lambda \right) 2 \pi \delta_D(\delta) \nonumber \\
&=& \int d \lambda \cdot \delta_D(\delta) \tilde{\rho} \left( \bar p +\frac{1}{2} \lambda, \bar p - \frac{1}{2} \lambda \right) \nonumber \\
&=& \tilde \rho (\bar p , \bar p) \nonumber \\
&\leftrightarrow& \tilde \rho (p , p) \nonumber \\
&=& \left< p \right| \hat \rho \left| p \right>,
\end{eqnarray}
which is what we claimed.
\section{Wigner distributions of combined systems} \label{sec:combinedwig}
Recall that in section \ref{sec:composite}, we defined the state operator of a composite system as
\begin{equation}
\hat{\rho}_{1+2} = \hat{\rho}_1 \otimes \hat{\rho}_2,
\end{equation}
where $( \otimes )$ is the tensor product. In analogy to this, we define the Wigner distribution of a composite system to be \cite{halliwell}
\begin{equation}\label{eqn:combinedwig}
W_{1+2}(x_1,x_2,p_1,p_2) \equiv W_1(x_1,p_1)W_2(x_2,p_2). \index{Wigner Distribution!Composite systems}
\end{equation}
In section \ref{sec:composite}, we also developed the partial trace, which was a method for extracting information about a single sub-state operator in a composite state operator. Not surprisingly, we define an analogous operation, which effectively annihilates one of the sub-Wigner distributions in a composite distribution by integrating out the degrees of freedom of the sub-distribution. Formally, we call this the projection function $\mathcal A:W_{1+2}\rightarrow W_1$ and define it as
\begin{equation}
\mathcal A \left( W_{1+2} \right) \equiv \int dx_2 dp_2 W_{1+2}. \label{eqn:annihilator}\index{Wigner Distribution!Projection Function}
\end{equation}
To understand how it works, we evaluate it on the initial total Wigner distribution. This is
\begin{eqnarray}
\mathcal A \left(W_{1+2} \right)
&=& \mathcal A \left(W_1(x_1,p_1 ) W_2 (x_2,p_2 )\right) \nonumber \\
&=& \int dx_2 dp_2 W_1(x_1,p_1 ) W_2 (x_2,p_2 ) \nonumber \\
&=& W_1(x_1,p_1 ) \int dx_2 dp_2 W_2 (x_2,p_2 ) \nonumber \\
&=& W_1(x_1,p_1 ) \int dx_2 \rho_2(x_2,x_2) \nonumber \\
&=& W_1(x_1,p_1 ) \mathrm{Tr}\left( \rho_2 \right) \nonumber \\
&=& W_1(x_1,p_1 ),
\end{eqnarray}
where we have used eqns. \ref{eqn:marginal1} and definition \ref{defn:trace} to integrate $W_2$ and perform the full trace of $\rho_2$. Thus, $\mathcal A$ behaves as desired, in direct analogy to the partial trace on composite state operators.
\section{Equation of Motion for a Free Particle} \label{sec:freesys}
Now that we have laid out the basic properties of the Wigner distribution, we need to understand how to use it to describe a physical system. In this section, we investigate how a Wigner distribution evolves in time in the absence of a potential. Recall that in section \ref{sec:freeparticle}, we established the Hamiltonian of a free system as
\begin{equation}
\hat H=\frac{\hat P^2}{2m}.
\end{equation}
Given the Hamiltonian, we can calculate the time evolution of the state operator of the system via the commutator relation
\begin{equation}
\partial_t \hat{\rho} = - i \left[ \hat H, \hat{\rho} \right],
\end{equation}
developed in eqn. \ref{eqn:heispic}, to obtain
\begin{equation}
\partial_t \hat{\rho} = i\left(\hat{\rho} \hat H - \hat H \hat{\rho} \right)= \frac{i}{2m} \left( \hat{\rho} \hat P^2 - \hat P^2 \hat{\rho} \right),
\end{equation}
noting that $m$ is a scalar. So far, we have a general operator equation for the evolution of the system. If we want to know more specific information about its motion, we need to choose a basis onto which we may project our equation. Choosing momentum, we multiply both sides of the equation by $\left< p \right|$ from the left and $\left| p' \right>$ from the right, where $p$ and $p'$ are two arbitrary momentum states of our system. This gives us
\begin{equation}
\left< p \right| \partial_t \hat {\rho} \left| p' \right>= \left< p\right| \frac{i}{2m} \left( \hat{\rho} \hat P^2 - \hat P^2 \hat{\rho} \right) \left| p' \right>.
\end{equation}
Since $p$ and $p'$ are states of definite momentum, they are eigenvalues of $\hat P$. Hence, $\hat{P} \left| p \right>= p\left| p \right>$, $\left<p \right| \hat P = \left<p \right| p$, and likewise for $p'$. So, our equation of motion becomes
\begin{eqnarray}
\left< p \right| \partial_t \hat{\rho} \left| p ' \right> &=&
\left< p \right| \frac{i}{2m} \left( \hat{\rho} \hat p^2 - \hat p^2 \hat{\rho} \right) \left| p' \right> \nonumber \\
&=& \frac{i}{2m} \left< p \right| \hat{\rho} \hat p^2 \left| p' \right> - \frac{i}{2m} \left< p \right| \hat p^2 \hat{\rho} \left| p' \right> \nonumber \\
&=& \frac{i}{2m} \left< p \right| \hat{\rho} \hat p p' \left| p' \right> - \frac{i}{2m} \left< p \right| p \hat p \hat{\rho} \left| p' \right> \nonumber \\
&=& \frac{i}{2m} \left< p \right| \hat{\rho} p' \left| p' \right> p' - \frac{i}{2m} \left< p \right| p \hat{\rho} \left| p' \right> p\nonumber \\
&=& \frac{i}{2m} \left< p \right| \hat{\rho} \left| p' \right> \left( {p'}^2-p^2 \right) \nonumber \\
&=& \frac{i}{2m} \left< p\right| \hat{\rho} \left| p' \right> \left( p'-p \right) \left( p' +p \right) .
\end{eqnarray}
Next, we substitute difference and mean variables, $\lambda$ and $\bar{p}$, for $p$ and $p'$ by defining $\lambda\equiv p-p' $ and $2 \bar{p} \equiv p+p'$. This substitution is algebraically equivalent to $p=\bar{p}+\lambda/2$ and $p'=\bar{p}-\lambda/2$, so
\begin{equation}
\left< \bar{p}+\lambda/2 \right| \partial_t \hat {\rho} \left| \bar{p}-\lambda/2 \right> = \frac{i}{2m} \left< \bar{p}+\lambda/2\right| \hat{\rho} \left| \bar{p}-\lambda/2 \right> 2\bar{p}\lambda.
\end{equation}
We multiply both sides of the equation by $d\lambda\cdot e^{-i\lambda x}/(2 \pi)$ (the kernel of the Fourier transform) and integrate from $\lambda=- \infty$ to $\lambda= +\infty$. The left hand side is
\begin{eqnarray}
LHS
&=&\int d\lambda \cdot \frac{1}{2 \pi} e^{-i\lambda x}\left< \bar{p}+\lambda/2 \right| \partial_t \hat {\rho} \left| \bar{p}-\lambda/2 \right> \nonumber \\
&=& \int d\lambda \cdot \partial_t \frac{1}{2 \pi} e^{-i\lambda x}\left< \bar{p}+\lambda/2 \right| \hat {\rho} \left| \bar{p}-\lambda/2 \right> \nonumber \\
&=& \partial_t \frac{1}{2 \pi}\int d\lambda \cdot e^{-i\lambda x}\left< \bar{p}+\lambda/2 \right| \hat {\rho} \left| \bar{p}-\lambda/2 \right> \nonumber \\
&=& \partial_t W_P(x,\bar p,t) \nonumber \\
&\leftrightarrow& \partial_t W(\bar x, p,t),
\end{eqnarray}
where we use the fact that the only explicitly time dependent piece of the integrand is $\hat{\rho}$. We also assume that the integral converges and, in the last step, we use eqn. \ref{eqn:wigmomrep} for the Wigner distribution in the momentum basis. Proceeding in a similar fashion on the right hand side, we get
\begin{eqnarray}
RHS
&=& \int d\lambda\cdot \frac{1}{2 \pi} e^{-i\lambda x} \frac{i}{2m} \left< \bar{p}+\lambda/2\right| \hat{\rho} \left| \bar{p}-\lambda/2 \right> 2\bar{p}\lambda \nonumber \\
&=& \frac{i \cdot i\bar{p}}{m 2 \pi} \int d\lambda\cdot \left( \frac{\lambda}{i}e^{-i\lambda x} \right) \left< \bar{p}+\lambda /2\right| \hat{\rho} \left| \bar{p}-\lambda /2 \right> \nonumber \\
&=& - \frac{\bar{p}}{m} \frac{1}{2 \pi} \int d\lambda \cdot \left( -ie^{-i\lambda x} \right) \left< \bar{p}+\lambda /2\right| \hat{\rho} \left| \bar{p}-\lambda /2 \right> \nonumber \\
&=& - \frac{\bar{p}}{m} \frac{1}{2 \pi} \int d\lambda \cdot \partial_{x} \left(e^{-i\lambda x} \right) \left< \bar{p}+\lambda /2\right| \hat{\rho} \left| \bar{p}-\lambda /2 \right> \nonumber \\
&=& - \frac{\bar{p}}{m} \partial_{x} \frac{1}{2 \pi} \int d\lambda \cdot e^{-i\lambda x} \left< \bar{p}+\lambda /2\right| \hat{\rho} \left| \bar{p}-\lambda /2 \right> \nonumber \\
&=& - \frac{\bar{p}}{m} \partial_{x} W_P(x,\bar{p},t) \nonumber \\
&\leftrightarrow& - \frac{\bar{p}}{m} \partial_{\bar x} W(\bar x,p,t),
\end{eqnarray}
where we use the fact that $e^{-i\lambda x}$ was the only factor in the integrand that explicitly depended on $x$. We again assume that the integral converges and use eqn. \ref{eqn:wigmomrep} for the Wigner distribution in the momentum basis. Thus, equating the right hand and left hand sides in the position representation leaves \cite{hillery}
\begin{boxedeqn}{eqn:wigfree}
\partial_t W(\bar x,p,t) = - \frac{p}{m} \partial_{\bar x} W(\bar x,p,t),\index{Wigner Distribution!Free Evolution}
\end{boxedeqn}
which is the equation of motion for a free system in terms of its Wigner distribution.
Although it might seem convoluted to introduce the Wigner form of this equation rather than using the evolution of a free particle in terms of its state operator, the power of the Wigner distribution is that it allows us to treat position and momentum simultaneously.
\section{Associated Transform and Inversion Properties}
Now that we have determined some of the properties of the Wigner distribution, it is useful to define the Wigner transform of an arbitrary distribution of two variables.
\begin{boxeddefn}{The Wigner transform\index{Wigner Transform!Defintion}}{def:WignerTrans}
Let $D(x,y)$ be an arbitrary distribution of two variables, $x$ and $y$, and possibly have an implicit temporal dependence. Then, the \textbf{Wigner transform} $\mathcal W$ of $D$, a special case of the Fourier transform, is defined as
\begin{equation}
\mathcal W \left( D (x,y ) \right) \equiv \frac{1}{2 \pi} \int d \delta \cdot \cdot e^{-ip \delta } D(x,y),
\end{equation}
where $\delta=x-y$, as identified in definition \ref{def:WignerDist}.
\end{boxeddefn}
By definition, we know the Wigner transform of $\rho(x,y)$ immediately. It is
\begin{equation}
\mathcal W \left( \rho (x,y) \right) = \frac{1}{2 \pi} \int d \delta \cdot e^{-ip \delta} \rho(x,y) = W(\bar x, p).
\end{equation}
We arrive at a more interesting result by considering
\begin{equation}
\mathcal W \left( \partial_t \rho(x,y) \right)=\int d \delta \cdot e^{-ip \delta } \partial_t \rho(x,y).
\end{equation}
Clearly, neither $\delta$ nor $e^{-ip \delta }$ depend explicitly on time. Assuming that the integral converges, we have
\begin{equation}
\int d \delta \cdot e^{-ip \delta } \partial_t \rho(x,y) = \partial_t \int d \delta \cdot e^{-ip \delta } \rho(x,y) = \partial_t W(\bar x,p),
\end{equation}
where we have applied definition \ref{def:WignerTrans}. So,
\begin{equation}
\mathcal W \left( \partial_t \rho(x,y) \right) = \partial_t W(\bar x,p),
\end{equation}
as desired.
In the following sections, we work out some of the Wigner transforms of functions that we will need later. The results of these derivations are summarized in table \ref{tab:inversions} below.
\begin{table}[h] \caption{Wigner transforms of important quantities, where $\bar x = \frac{x+y}{2}$ and $\delta = x - y$. \index{Wigner Transform!of Important Quantities}} \label{tab:inversions}\centering
\begin{tabular}{|cc|}
\hline Expression & Transform \\
\hline
$ \rho (x,y)$ & $W(\bar x, p)$ \\
$\partial_t \rho(x,y)$ & $\partial_t W(\bar x,p)$ \\
$ \frac{i}{2} \left( \partial_x^2 - \partial_y^2 \right) \rho(x,y)$ & $-p \partial_{\bar x} W \left( \bar x , p\right)$\\
$(x-y) \left( \partial_x - \partial_y \right) \rho (x,y)$ & $- 2 \partial_p \left( p \cdot W( \bar x, p) \right)$ \\
$ \left(x - y \right)^2 \rho( x, y)$ & $- \partial_p^2W( \bar x, p)$ \\
\hline
\end{tabular}
\end{table}
\subsection{The Wigner transform of $\left(i/2 \right)\left( \partial_x^2 - \partial_y^2 \right) \rho(x,y)$}
By definition \ref{def:WignerTrans},
\begin{equation}
V \equiv \mathcal W \left( \frac{i}{2} \left( \partial_x^2 - \partial_y^2 \right) \rho(x,y)\right)=\int d \delta \cdot e^{-ip \delta } \frac{i}{2} \left( \partial_x^2 - \partial_y^2 \right) \rho(x,y),
\end{equation}
where we have defined $V$ for our convenience. Then, we know from Clairaut's theorem that since all partial derivatives of the state operator are continuous, $\left[ \partial _x \rho (x,y) , \partial_y \rho (x,y) \right]=0$ \cite{stewart}. $V$ then expands to
\begin{equation}
V = \frac{i}{2} \int d \delta \cdot e^{-ip \delta } \left( \partial_x^2 - \partial_y^2 + \partial_x \partial_y - \partial_y\partial_x \right) \rho(x,y).
\end{equation}
We next note that by definition \ref{def:WignerDist}, $x=\bar x + 1/2 \cdot \delta$ and $y = \bar x - 1/2 \cdot \delta$, which implies $\partial_{\delta}x = 1/2$ and $\partial_{\delta} y = -1/2$. Hence, $2 \partial_{\delta} x = 1$ and $2 \partial_{\delta} y = -1$. We rework $V$ to be
\begin{eqnarray}
V
&=& \frac{i}{2}\cdot 2 \int d \delta \cdot e^{-ip \delta } \left( \left( \partial_{\delta}x\right)\partial_x^2 + \left( \partial_{\delta}y\right)\partial_y^2 + \left( \partial_{\delta}x\right)\partial_x \partial_y + \left( \partial_{\delta}y\right) \partial_y\partial_x \right) \rho(x,y) \nonumber \\
&=& i \int d \delta \cdot e^{-ip \delta }\left( \left( \frac{ \partial \rho(x,y) / \partial x}{\partial x} \right) \frac{\partial x}{\partial \delta} + \left( \frac{ \partial \rho(x,y) / \partial y}{\partial y} \right) \frac{\partial y}{\partial \delta} + \left( \frac{ \partial \rho(x,y) / \partial y}{\partial x} \right) \frac{\partial x}{\partial \delta} +\left( \frac{ \partial \rho(x,y) / \partial x}{\partial y} \right) \frac{\partial y}{\partial \delta} \right)\nonumber \\
&=& i \int d \delta \cdot e^{-ip \delta } \partial _{\delta} \left( \partial_x \rho(x,y) + \partial_y \rho (x,y) \right).
\end{eqnarray}
Now, by definition \ref{def:WignerDist}, $\partial_{\bar x } x = \partial_{\bar x } y=1$, so
\begin{equation}
\frac{\partial \rho(x,y)}{\partial \bar x } = \frac{ \partial \rho (x,y) }{\partial x} \frac{\partial x}{\partial \bar x} + \frac{ \partial \rho (x,y) }{\partial y} \frac{\partial y}{\partial \bar x} = \frac{ \partial \rho (x,y) }{\partial x}+ \frac{ \partial \rho (x,y) }{\partial y} = \partial_x \rho(x,y) + \partial_y \rho (x,y).
\end{equation}
Thus, we have
\begin{equation}
V = i \int d \delta \cdot e^{-ip \delta } \partial _{\delta} \partial_{\bar x} \rho(x,y).
\end{equation}
Next, we integrate by parts to get
\begin{equation}
V = \left( e^{-ip \delta } \partial_{\bar x} \rho(x,y) \right)\Big |_{\delta = - \infty}^{\infty} - i \int d \delta \cdot \left( \partial _{\delta} e^{-ip \delta } \right) \partial_{\bar x} \rho(x,y).
\end{equation}
Noting that the state operator is continuous in the position basis, we find
\begin{eqnarray}
\lim_{\delta \rightarrow \pm \infty} \partial_{\bar x} \rho(x,y)
&=& \lim_{\delta \rightarrow \pm \infty} \partial_{\bar x} \rho \left( \bar x + \frac{1}{2} \delta, \bar x - \frac{1}{2} \delta \right) \nonumber \\
&=& \partial_{\bar x}\lim_{\delta \rightarrow \pm \infty} \rho \left( \bar x + \frac{1}{2} \delta, \bar x - \frac{1}{2} \delta \right) \nonumber \\
&=& \partial_{\bar x}\lim_{\delta \rightarrow \pm \infty} \rho \left( \frac{1}{2} \delta, - \frac{1}{2} \delta \right) \nonumber \\
&=& 0.
\end{eqnarray}
Further,
\begin{equation}
0 \leq \left| e^{-ip \delta} \right| \leq 1 \, \forall \delta,
\end{equation}
so
\begin{equation}
\left( e^{-ip \delta } \partial_{\bar x} \rho(x,y) \right)\Big |_{\delta = - \infty}^{\infty} = 0.
\end{equation}
Hence,
\begin{equation}
V = - i \int d \delta \cdot \left( \partial _{\delta} e^{-ip \delta } \right) \partial_{\bar x} \rho(x,y)= - i \int d \delta \cdot \left(-ip e^{-ip \delta } \right) \partial_{\bar x} \rho(x,y)= -p \partial_{\bar x} \int d \delta \cdot e^{-ip \delta } \rho(x,y).
\end{equation}
That is, by definition \ref{def:WignerDist},
\begin{boxedeqn}{}
\mathcal W \left( \frac{i}{2} \left( \partial_x^2 - \partial_y^2 \right) \rho(x,y)\right) = -p \partial_{\bar x} \int d \delta \cdot e^{-ip \delta } \rho(x,y) = -p \partial_{\bar x} W \left( \bar x , p\right),
\end{boxedeqn}
which is what we wanted to show.
\subsection{The Wigner transform of $ (x-y) \left( \partial_x - \partial_y \right) \rho (x,y) $}
By definition \ref{def:WignerTrans},
\begin{equation}
V \equiv \mathcal W \left( (x-y) \left( \partial_x - \partial_y \right) \rho (x,y) \right)=\int d \delta \cdot e^{-ip \delta } (x-y) \left( \partial_x - \partial_y \right) \rho (x,y) ,
\end{equation}
where we have again defined $V$ for our convenience. Since $\delta = x - y $, we have
\begin{equation}
V = \int d \delta \cdot \delta e^{-ip \delta } \left( \partial_x - \partial_y \right) \rho (x,y).
\end{equation}
As we did in the previous section, we note that $\partial_{\delta} x = 1/2$ and $\partial_{\delta} y = - 1/2$, so $2 \partial_{\delta} x = 1$ and $2 \partial_{\delta} y = - 1$. Thus,
\begin{equation}
V = 2 \int d \delta \cdot \delta e^{-ip \delta } \left( \frac{\partial \rho(x,y)}{\partial x} \frac{\partial x}{\partial \delta}+ \frac{\partial \rho(x,y)}{\partial y} \frac{\partial y}{\partial \delta} \right).
\end{equation}
Next, we use the chain rule to find
\begin{equation}
V = 2 \int d \delta \cdot \delta e^{-ip \delta } \partial_{\delta} \rho(x,y).
\end{equation}
After that, we use integration by parts to get
\begin{equation}
V = 2 \left( \delta e^{-ip \delta } \rho(x,y) \right)\Big |_{\delta = - \infty}^{\infty} - 2 \int d \delta \cdot \rho(x,y) \partial_{\delta} \left( \delta e^{-ip \delta } \right) .
\end{equation}
As before, we investigate the boundary term. The non-oscillatory component follows
\begin{equation}
\lim_{\delta \rightarrow \pm \infty} \delta \rho(x,y) = 0,
\end{equation}
since $\rho(x,y)$ goes to zero rapidly off the diagonal, as we noted in section \ref{sec:projonbasis}. Since
\begin{equation}
0 \leq \left| e^{-ip \delta} \right| \leq 1 \, \, \forall \delta,
\end{equation}
we have
\begin{equation}
\lim_{ \delta \rightarrow \pm \infty} e^{-ip \delta} \delta \rho(x,y) = 0,
\end{equation}
so
\begin{equation}
V = - 2 \int d \delta \cdot \rho(x,y) \partial_{\delta} \left( \delta e^{-ip \delta } \right).
\end{equation}
Finally, note that
\begin{equation}
\partial_{\delta} \left( \delta e^{-ip \delta } \right) = \partial_{p} \left( p e^{-ip \delta } \right),
\end{equation}
hence
\begin{equation}
V = - 2 \int d \delta \cdot \rho(x,y) \partial_{p} \left( p e^{-ip \delta } \right) = - 2 \partial_{p} \left( p \int d \delta \cdot e^{-ip \delta } \rho(x,y) \right) = - 2 \partial_p \left( p \cdot W( \bar x, p) \right).
\end{equation}
That is,
\begin{boxedeqn}{}
\mathcal W \left( (x-y) \left( \partial_x - \partial_y \right) \rho (x,y) \right) = - 2 \partial_p \left( p \cdot W( \bar x, p) \right),
\end{boxedeqn}
as desired.
\subsection{The Wigner transform of $\left(x - y \right)^2 \rho( x, y) $}
By definition \ref{def:WignerTrans},
\begin{equation}
V \equiv \mathcal W \left( \left(x - y \right)^2 \rho( x, y) \right) =\int d \delta \cdot e^{-ip \delta } \left(x - y \right)^2 \rho( x, y) ,
\end{equation}
where, as in the past two sections, we have defined $V$ for our convenience. By definition \ref{def:WignerDist}, $\delta = x-y$, so
\begin{equation}
V = \int d \delta \cdot e^{-ip \delta } \delta^2 \rho( x, y)=\int d \delta \cdot \delta^2 e^{-ip \delta } \rho( x, y).
\end{equation}
Now, since
\begin{equation}
\delta^2 e^{-ip \delta }= -\left(i^2 \delta^2 \right) e^{-ip \delta } =- \partial_p^2 e^{-ip \delta } ,
\end{equation}
we have
\begin{equation}
V= \int d \delta \cdot \left( - \partial_p^2 e^{-ip \delta } \right) \rho( x, y) = - \partial_p^2 \int d \delta \cdot e^{-ip \delta } \rho( x, y) = - \partial_p^2W( \bar x, p),
\end{equation}
or
\begin{boxedeqn}{}
\mathcal W \left( \left(x - y \right)^2 \rho( x, y) \right) = - \partial_p^2W( \bar x, p),
\end{boxedeqn}
which is what we wanted to show.
\section{Example: The Wigner Distribution of a Harmonic Oscillator}\label{sec:wig_harmonic}
We will next develop the Wigner distribution for the quantum harmonic oscillator. The Hamiltonian is \cite{griffiths}
\begin{equation}
\hat H = \frac{\hat P^2}{2m} + \frac{1}{2} k x^2,
\end{equation}
where $k$ is the spring constant, and the angular frequency is
\begin{equation}
\omega = \sqrt{\frac{k}{m}}.
\end{equation}
From the time-independent Schr\"odinger equation, eqn. \ref{eqn:schrotimeind}, we have
\begin{equation}
- \frac{\hbar^2}{2M} \check d _x^2 \psi (x) + \frac{1}{2} k x^2 \psi(x) = E \psi (x).
\end{equation}
This equation is readily solved using power series, and has the well-known family of solutions \cite{ballentine,griffiths,cohtan}
\begin{equation}
\psi_n(x) = \frac{1}{\sqrt{n!}}\left( \frac{1}{\sqrt{2 m \omega}}\left( m \omega x - \partial_x \right) \right)^n \left( \frac{m \omega}{\pi} \right)^{1/4}e^{-\frac{m \omega}{2}x^2},
\end{equation}
\begin{figure}[tb]
\begin{center}
\includegraphics[width=0.9 \linewidth]{figures/harmonic_wavefunctions}
\end{center}
\caption[Wavefunctions of the quantum harmonic oscillator]{The first four energy states, $\psi_n(x)$, of the harmonic oscillator.}\label{fig:harmonic_wavefunctions}
\end{figure}
which correspond to states of constant energy \cite{griffiths}
\begin{equation}
E_n=\left( n + \frac{1}{2} \right) \omega.
\end{equation}
For the purposes of this example, we will concentrate on the ground state ($n=0$) and the first three excited states, shown in figure \ref{fig:harmonic_wavefunctions}. In order to calculate the Wigner distribution of these states, we must use eqn. $\ref{eqn:wigalt}$, so we need explicit forms for the matrix elements of the state operators in the position basis. Fortunately, since the harmonic oscillator is pure, we easily obtain these by
\begin{equation}
\rho_n (x,y) = \left< x \right| \hat{\rho}_n \left| y \right> = \left< x \big| \psi_n \right> \left< \psi_n \big| y \right> = \psi_n^*(x) \psi_n(y),
\end{equation}
where we used eqn. \ref{eqn:wavefunction} to identify the wavefunction $\psi_n(y)$ and its complex conjugate $\psi_n^*(x)$. Since $\psi(x)$ is real we have,
\begin{boxedeqn}{eqn:stateopharmonic}
\rho_n(x,y) = \frac{1}{n!} \left( \frac{m \omega}{\pi} \right)^{1/2} \left( \frac{1}{2 m \omega}\right)^n\left( m \omega x - \partial_x \right)^n \left( m \omega y - \partial_y \right)^n e^{-\frac{m \omega}{2}x^2} e^{-\frac{m \omega}{2}y^2}.
\end{boxedeqn}
\begin{figure}[tb]
\begin{center}
\includegraphics[width=0.9 \linewidth]{figures/harmonic_stateops}
\end{center}
\caption[State operators of the quantum harmonic oscillator]{The position representation of the state operator, $\rho_n(x,y)$, for the first four energy states of the harmonic oscillator. In the density plots, yellow indicates maximum values, while blue indicates minimum.}\label{fig:harmonic_stateops}
\end{figure}
Particularly, for $n=0$ through $n=3$, in units where $m=\omega = \hbar = 1$, we have
\begin{eqnarray}
\rho_0(x,y)&=& \frac{1}{\sqrt{ \pi}}e^{ - \frac{ x^2+y^2}{2}} \nonumber, \\
\rho_1(x,y)&=& 2 x y \frac{1}{\sqrt{ \pi}}e^{ - \frac{ x^2+y^2}{2}} \nonumber, \\
\rho_2(x,y)&=& \frac{1}{8}\left( -2 e^{-x^2}+4e^{-x^2}x^2\right) \left( -2 e^{-y^2}+4e^{-y^2}y^2\right) \frac{1}{\sqrt{ \pi}}e^{ \frac{ x^2+y^2}{2}} \nonumber, \\
\rho_3(x,y)&=& \frac{1}{48} \left( 12 e^{-x^2} x - 8e^{-x^2}x^3\right) \left( 12 e^{-y^2} y - 8e^{-y^2}y^3 \right) \frac{1}{\sqrt{ \pi}}e^{ + \frac{ x^2+y^2}{2}} \nonumber, \\
\end{eqnarray}
which we plot in figure \ref{fig:harmonic_stateops}. Now that we have the general form of the state operator matrix elements, it is just a matter of evaluating eqn. \ref{eqn:wigalt} to get the corresponding Wigner distributions. Starting with $n=0$, we have
\begin{eqnarray}
W_0(\bar x,p)
&=& \frac{1}{2 \pi} \int d \delta \cdot e^{-ip \delta} \psi_0 \left( \bar x +\frac{1}{2} \delta \right) \psi_0 \left( \bar x - \frac{1}{2} \delta \right) \nonumber \\
&=& \frac{1}{2 \pi} \int d \delta \cdot e^{-ip \delta} \left( \left( \frac{\omega m }{\pi}\right) ^{1/4} e^{-\frac{1}{2} \omega m \left( \bar x +\frac{1}{2} \delta \right)^2 }\right) \left( \left( \frac{\omega m }{\pi}^{1/4}\right) e^{-\frac{1}{2} \omega m \left( \bar x -\frac{1}{2} \delta \right)^2 }\right) \nonumber \\
&=& \frac{1}{2 \pi} \left( \frac{\omega m }{\pi}\right) ^{1/2} \int d \delta \cdot e^{-ip \delta} e^{-\frac{1}{4} \omega m\left( \bar x - \frac{1}{2} \delta \right)^2 } \nonumber \\
&=& \frac{1}{\pi} e^{- p^2 - \bar x^2},
\end{eqnarray}
\begin{figure}[tb]
\begin{center}
\includegraphics[width=0.9 \linewidth]{figures/harmonic_wigs}
\end{center}
\caption[Wigner distributions of the quantum harmonic oscillator]{The Wigner distribution, $W_n(\bar x, p )$, of the first four energy states of the harmonic oscillator with their well-known shape \cite{zachos2}. In the density plots, yellow indicates maximum values, while blue indicates minimum.}\label{fig:harmonic_wigs}
\end{figure}
which is just a three-dimensional Gaussian distribution. The calculations involved for the excited states are similar, but the algebra is significantly less trivial. They are easily performed using a computer algebra system, so we state the result. The Wigner distributions are\index{Harmonic Oscillator!Wigner Distribution Solutions}
\begin{eqnarray}
W_0(\bar x,p) &=& \frac{1}{\pi} e^{- p^2 - \bar x^2} \nonumber \\
W_1(\bar x,p) &=& \frac{2p^2+2\bar x^2 - 1}{ \pi} e^{- p^2 - \bar x^2} \nonumber \\
W_2(\bar x,p) &=& \frac{2 p^4 + 2 \bar x^4 +4 p^2 \bar x^2 -4 p^2 -4 \bar x^2+1}{ \pi} e^{- p^2 - \bar x^2} \\
W_3(\bar x,p) &=& \frac{4 \bar x^6 + 12 p^2 \bar x^ 4 - 18 \bar x^4 +12 p^4 \bar x^2 - 36 p^2 \bar x^2 +18 \bar x^2 + 4 p^6 - 18 p^4 + 18 p^2 - 3}{3 \pi} e^{- p^2 - \bar x^2}, \nonumber
\end{eqnarray}
\begin{figure}[tb]
\begin{center}
\includegraphics[width=0.9 \linewidth]{figures/convolution}
\end{center}
\caption[Classical correspondence of the quantum harmonic oscillator]{The position representation of the state operator, $\rho_10(x,y)$, at $n=10$, its associated Wigner distribution, $W_{10}(\bar x, p)$, and the smoothed Wigner distribution generated by convolution with a Gaussian, $W_{10}^c(X,P)$.}\label{fig:convolution}
\end{figure}
which are plotted in figure \ref{fig:harmonic_wigs}. Note how $W_0 > 0$ for all values of $x$ and $p$, but the higher energy states are sometimes negative. As we mentioned briefly before, the Wigner distribution is motivated by classical phase-space probability distributions, but is permitted to have negative values. These ``negative probabilities'' are a weird signature of a quantum mechanical system. To make this analogy more concrete, we consider $W_{10}(\bar x, p)$, shown in figure \ref{fig:convolution}. At the high energy of $n=10$, the oscillations inside the Wigner distribution become increasingly rapid. In the classical limit, as $n \rightarrow \infty$, we expect the negative portions to overlap and cancel with the positive components, giving us a positive-definite, classical probability distribution. In order to force this for $n=10$, we perform a careful function smoothing, known as a convolution\index{Convolution}, of $W_{10}$ with a simple Gaussian. Mathematically, this is \cite{hecht}
\begin{equation}
W^c_{10}(X,P) \equiv \int d \bar x d p \cdot W_{10}(\bar x, p) e^{-(X - \bar x)^2 -(P - p)^2}.
\end{equation}
As shown in figure \ref{fig:convolution}, this averages the inner oscillations to zero, but retains a large, outer, positive ring. This is what we expect, since a classical simple harmonic oscillator has eliptical orbits in phase-space.
\chapter{The Master Equation for Quantum Brownian Motion}\label{text}
\lettrine[lines=2, lhang=0.33, loversize=0.1]{I}n this chapter, we develop the fundamental equation of quantum decoherence, the master equation for quantum brownian motion. The master equation dictates the time-evolution of a \textbf{system} and an \textbf{environment} with which the system interacts (these terms will be precisely defined later). To facilitate this, we use the formalism of the Wigner distribution developed in chapter \ref{chap:wigner}, since it incorporates both position and momentum simultaneously, and consider how the system's Wigner distribution changes with time. Then, we invert the Wigner transformation to get the master equation, written in terms of the the system's state operator. After the equation is developed in this chapter, we examine its physical meaning and work through an example in chapter \ref{chap:applications}.
\section{The System and Environment}
The idea of collisions between a system and environment can be represented intuitively in a physical picture, as shown in figure \ref{fig:collision}. However, before we begin, we need to define precisely the notion of \textbf{system} and \textbf{environment}. Further, we need to specify what we mean by an interaction or \textbf{collision} between the system and environment.
\begin{boxeddefn}{System\index{System}}{def:system}
A \textbf{system}, or system particle, denoted as $\mathcal S$, is a single, one-dimensional point particle. It has momentum $p_S$, mass $m_S$, and position $x_S$.
\end{boxeddefn}
\begin{boxeddefn}{Environment\index{Environment}}{def:environment}
An \textbf{environment} of a system $\mathcal S$ is denoted $\mathcal E_S$, and consists of an ideal one-dimensional gas of light particles. Each of these particles has momentum $p_E$, mass $m_E$, and position $x_E$. We will often abbreviate $\mathcal E_S$ to $\mathcal E$ if it is clear to what system $\mathcal S$ the environment belongs.
\end{boxeddefn}
\begin{boxeddefn}{Collision\index{Collision}}{def:collision}
A \textbf{collision} between a particle of an environment $\mathcal E$ and a system $\mathcal S$ is defined as an instantaneous transfer of momentum that conserves both kinetic energy and momentum.
\end{boxeddefn}
It is important to note that the system we are considering is very large (massive) when compared to the individual environmental particles. Precisely, we take \cite{halliwell}
\begin{equation}\label{eqn:massapprox}
\frac{m_E}{m_S} \ll 1,
\end{equation}
and we will typically neglect terms of second or higher order in this factor.
\begin{figure}[t]
\begin{center}
\includegraphics[width=0.9 \linewidth]{figures/collision}
\end{center}
\caption[System particle interacting with environment particles]{A graphic representation of the system and environment. Note that one of the environment particles is undergoing a collision with the system. For simplicity we consider the corresponding one-dimensional problem.}\label{fig:collision}
\end{figure}
Now that we have defined the key objects treated by the master equation, we begin to investigate its structure. As stated above, we first want to consider how the Wigner Distribution of the system, $W_S$, changes with time. Quantum mechanically, we separate this change into two pieces. First, $W_S$ undergoes standard unitary time evolution, with the system treated as a free particle. Second, $\mathcal S$ collides with environment particles, and the collisions alter the system's energy and momentum. In section \ref{sec:freesys}, we considered the change in the Wigner distribution of a particle due to its free evolution, which we will make use of later. Now, we begin to consider the influence of an environment on a system.
\section{Collisions Between Systems and Environment Particles}
Before we begin to examine how a system behaves in the presence of an environment, we first consider the collision between a system particle and one particle from an environment. For each collision, we derive equations for momentum and position change. First, we address momentum change.
Let $p_S$ and $p_E$ denote the initial momenta of a system and an environment particle. By definition \ref{def:collision}, the interaction between the two particles is totally elastic. That is, both kinetic energy and momentum are conserved. We write kinetic energy conservation as \cite{hrw}
\begin{equation}
\frac{p_S^2}{2m_S}+\frac{p_E^2}{2m_E}=\frac{\bar p_S^2}{2m_S}+\frac{\bar p_E^2}{2m_E},
\end{equation}
which is equivalent to
\begin{equation}\label{eqn:kecons}
m_S\left( p_E- \bar p_E \right) \left( p_E + \bar p_E \right)=-m_E\left( p_S- \bar p_S \right) \left( p_S + \bar p_S \right),
\end{equation}
and momentum conservation as \cite{hrw}
\begin{equation}
p_s+p_E=\bar p_S + \bar p_E,
\end{equation}
which is also written as
\begin{equation}\label{eqn:momcons}
\left( p_E- \bar p_E \right) =-\left(p_S - \bar p_S \right).
\end{equation}
We then assume that, since a collision occurred, the momenta of both the system and environment particle have changed, i.e. $ p_E- \bar p_E \neq 0$ and $p_S - \bar p_S \neq 0$. So, we divide eqn. \ref{eqn:kecons} by eqn. \ref{eqn:momcons} to get
\begin{equation}
\frac{m_S\left( p_E- \bar p_E \right) \left( p_E + \bar p_E \right)}{ \left( p_E- \bar p_E \right)}=\frac{-m_E\left( p_S- \bar p_S \right) \left( p_S + \bar p_S \right)}{-\left(p_S - \bar p_S \right)},
\end{equation}
which implies
\begin{equation}\label{eqn:redkecons}
m_S\left( p_E + \bar p_E \right)=m_E \left( p_S + \bar p_S \right).
\end{equation}
Then, we solve eqns. \ref{eqn:momcons} and \ref{eqn:redkecons} simultaneously for both $\bar p_S$ and $\bar p_E$. We have \cite{hrw}
\begin{eqnarray}\label{eqn:pebar}
m_S\left( p_E + \bar p_E \right)=m_E \left( p_S + p_S+p_E-\bar p_E \right)
&\Rightarrow& -(m_S-m_E)p_E+2m_Ep_S=(m_E+m_S)\bar p_E \nonumber \\
&\Rightarrow& \bar p_E = -\frac{m_S-m_E}{m_S+m_E}p_E+\frac{2m_E}{m_S+m_E}p_S
\end{eqnarray}
and
\begin{eqnarray}\label{eqn:psbar}
m_S\left( p_E + p_E+p_S -\bar p_S \right)=m_E \left( p_S + \bar p_S\right)
&\Rightarrow& (m_S-m_E)p_S+2m_Sp_E=(m_S+m_E)\bar p_S\nonumber \\
&\Rightarrow& \bar p_S=\frac{m_S-m_E}{m_S+m_E}p_S+\frac{2m_S}{m_S+m_E}p_E ,
\end{eqnarray}
which are the changes in the momenta of the environment particle and the system.
Now that we have investigated the momentum change that results from a collision, we will develop the corresponding position change. To do this, we use the plane wave treatment for the total system we developed in section \ref{sec:freeparticle} and note how changes in momentum imply changes in position.
The wavefunction of the composite system containing both the system and environment particle, a product state, is given by\footnote{Since the product state vector is $\left| \phi \right> = \left| \phi_S \right> \otimes \left| \phi_E \right>$, the wavefunction form of the composite state takes ordinary multiplication.}
\begin{equation}
\phi = \phi_S \phi_E.
\end{equation}
Using equation \ref{eqn:planewave}, we can form the composite plane wave, $\phi_i$, from the individual incident plane wave of each particle.\footnote{Remember that plane waves are states of definite momentum. We are using them in this case because we are conserving the momentum in the collision.} This is\begin{equation}
\phi_i=e^ {ip_Sx_S} e^ {ip_Ex_E}.
\end{equation}
After collision, using the momentum representation, the plane wave, $\phi_f$, becomes
\begin{equation}
\phi_f=e^ {i \bar p_S x_S}e^{i \bar p_E x_E}.
\end{equation}
By eqns. \ref{eqn:pebar} and \ref{eqn:psbar}, this can be written as
\begin{eqnarray}
\left( \text{Exponent of $\phi_f$} \right)
&=& \left(i \left( \frac{m_S-m_E}{m_S+m_E}p_S+\frac{2m_S}{m_S+m_E}p_E\right) x_S \right) + \left( i\left(-\frac{m_S-m_E}{m_S+m_E}p_E+\frac{2m_E}{m_S+m_E}p_S\right) x_E \right)\nonumber \\
&=& i \left( \frac{m_S-m_E}{m_S+m_E}p_S x_S+\frac{2m_S}{m_S+m_E}p_E x_S-\frac{m_S-m_E}{m_S+m_E}p_E x_E +\frac{2m_E}{m_S+m_E}p_S x_E \right) \nonumber \\
&=& \left( ip_S\left(\frac{m_S-m_E}{m_S+m_E}x_S+\frac{2m_E}{m_S+m_E}x_E\right)\right) + \left( ip_E\left( \frac{2m_S}{m_S+m_E}x_S-\frac{m_S-m_E}{m_S+m_E}x_E \right) \right). \nonumber
\end{eqnarray}
We define
\begin{equation}
\phi_f=e^ {i \bar p_S x_S} e^{i \bar p_E x_E} \equiv e^{ip_S\bar x_S }e^{ip_E\bar x_E},
\end{equation}
where \cite{halliwell}
\begin{equation}
\bar x_S = \frac{m_S-m_E}{m_S+m_E}x_S+\frac{2m_E}{m_S+m_E}x_E
\end{equation}
and
\begin{equation}
\bar x_E = \frac{2m_S}{m_S+m_E}x_S-\frac{m_S-m_E}{m_S+m_E}x_E.
\end{equation}
This way, we now have position and momentum representations of the collision. As is common in physics, we need to require that these collision interactions are local\index{Collision!Locality}.\footnote{It is important to emphasize that locality is \textit{not} an approximation, but is necessary to include in our treatment. Ideally, we would work this into our equations formally. However, for simplicity, we can achieve local interactions by requiring this condition.} Thus, throughout the collision, we take
\begin{equation} \label{eqn:locality1}
\left| x_S-x_E \right| \ll \left| x_S \right|
\end{equation}
and
\begin{equation}
\left| x_S-x_E \right| \ll \left| x_E \right|,
\end{equation}
since the potential energy, $V \left(x_S-x_E \right) \rightarrow 0$ as $\left| x_S-x_E \right| \rightarrow \infty$. Recalling that from eqn. \ref{eqn:massapprox}
\begin{equation}
\frac{m_E}{m_S} \ll 1,
\end{equation}
it is reasonable to ignore contributions to distances of order
\begin{equation}
\frac{m_E}{m_S} (x_S-x_E) \ll x_S,x_E.
\end{equation}
Enforcing the locality of collision, we find
\begin{eqnarray}
\bar x_S
&=& \frac{m_S-m_E}{m_S+m_E}x_S+\frac{2m_E}{m_S+m_E}x_E \nonumber \\
&=& \left( \frac{m_S+m_E}{m_S+m_E}-\frac{2m_E}{m_S+m_E} \right)x_S+\frac{2m_E}{m_S+m_E}x_E \nonumber \\
&=& \left( 1-\frac{2m_E}{m_S+m_E} \right)x_S+\frac{2m_E}{m_S+m_E}x_E \nonumber \\
&=& x_S-\frac{2m_E}{m_S+m_E} x_S+\frac{2m_E}{m_S+m_E}x_E \nonumber \\
&=& x_S+ \frac{2m_E}{m_S+m_E}\left( x_E- x_S \right) \nonumber \\
&=& x_S +2 \frac{m_E}{m_S}\left( x_E- x_S \right) - 2 \left( \frac{m_E}{m_S} \right)^2\left( x_E- x_S \right) + ... \nonumber \\
&\sim& x_S
\end{eqnarray}
and
\begin{eqnarray}
\bar x_E
&=&\frac{2m_S}{m_S+m_E}x_S-\frac{m_S-m_E}{m_S+m_E}x_E\nonumber \\
&=&\left( \frac{2m_S+2m_E}{m_S+m_E}-\frac{2m_E}{m_S+m_E} \right)x_S+\left( \frac{2m_E}{m_S+m_E}-\frac{m_S+m_E}{m_S+m_E} \right)
x_E\nonumber \\
&=&\left( 2-\frac{2m_E}{m_S+m_E}\right)x_S+\left(\frac{2m_E}{m_S+m_E}-1 \right) x_E\nonumber \\
&=&2x_S-x_E+\frac{2m_E}{m_S+m_E}\left(x_E-x_S\right) \nonumber \\
&=& 2x_S-x_E+2 \frac{m_E}{m_S}\left( x_E- x_S \right) - 2 \left( \frac{m_E}{m_S} \right)^2\left( x_E- x_S \right) + ... \nonumber \\
&\sim&2x_S-x_E,
\end{eqnarray}
which amounts to a phase shift in our plane wave state. We have now worked out all the position and momentum components we will need to treat the full case of a system coupled to an environment. In summary, we have\index{Two-body Collisions}
\begin{eqnarray} \label{eqn:summary}
\bar p_S &=& \frac{m_S-m_E}{m_S+m_E}p_S+\frac{2m_S}{m_S+m_E}p_E, \nonumber \\
\bar p_E &=& -\frac{m_S-m_E}{m_S+m_E}p_E+\frac{2m_E}{m_S+m_E}p_S, \nonumber \\
\bar x_S &\sim& x_S, \nonumber \\
\bar x_E &\sim& 2x_S-x_E.
\end{eqnarray}
\section{Effect of Collision on a Wigner Distribution}
In this section, we consider the change in the Wigner distribution of the system, $W_S$, from one collision with an environment particle. Since we have a composite state of environment and system particle, we use equation \ref{eqn:combinedwig} to write the Wigner distribution for the system and environment as
\begin{equation}
W_{S+E}=W_SW_E.
\end{equation}
It follows that the change in the total Wigner distribution for the system and environment, $\Delta W_{S+E}$, due to one collision is \cite{halliwell}
\begin{eqnarray}
\Delta W _{S+E}
&=& \overline{W}_{S+E}-W_{S+E} \nonumber \\
&=&\overline{W}_{S}\overline{W}_{E}-W_{S}W_{E} \nonumber \\
&=& W_S\left(\bar x_S,\bar p_S \right) W_E \left(\bar x_E, \bar p_E \right) - W_S(x_S,p_S ) W_E (x_E,p_E ).
\end{eqnarray}
Now that we have the change in the total (system and environment) Wigner distribution, we use eqn. \ref{eqn:annihilator} developed in section \ref{sec:combinedwig} to deduce $\Delta W$, the change in the system's Wigner distribution, by summing (integrating) over all environmental configurations. We have \cite{ballentine}
\begin{eqnarray}\label{eqn:deltawintegrals}
\Delta W &=& \mathcal A \left(\Delta W _{S+E} \right) \nonumber \\
&=& \int dp_E dx_E \cdot\left( W_S\left(\bar x_S,\bar p_S \right) W_E \left(\bar x_E, \bar p_E \right) - W_S(x_S,p_S ) W_E (x_E,p_E ) \right) \nonumber \\
&=& \int dp_E dx_E \cdot W_S\left(\bar x_S,\bar p_S \right) W_E \left(\bar x_E, \bar p_E \right) - \int dp_E dx_E \cdot W_S(x_S,p_S ) W_E (x_E,p_E ).
\end{eqnarray}
To evaluate these integrals, we need to perform some algebraic manipulations on the first term in eqn. \ref{eqn:deltawintegrals}. From the eqn. \ref{eqn:summary}, we know that the first term of eqn. \ref{eqn:deltawintegrals} is (approximately) given by
\begin{equation}\label{eqn:deltawfirstterm}
\int dp_E dx_E \cdot W_S\left(x_S,\frac{m_S-m_E}{m_S+m_E}p_S+\frac{2m_S}{m_S+m_E}p_E \right) W_E \left(2x_S-x_E,-\frac{m_S-m_E}{m_S+m_E}p_E+\frac{2m_E}{m_S+m_E}p_S \right).
\end{equation}
We make the substitution
\begin{eqnarray}\label{eqn:subs}
u & \equiv& 2x_S-x_E \nonumber \\
v & \equiv & -\frac{m_S-m_E}{m_S+m_E}p_E+\frac{2m_E}{m_S+m_E}p_S ,
\end{eqnarray}
from which it follows that
\begin{eqnarray}\label{eqn:subsdiff}
dx_E \cdot&=&-du \nonumber \\
dp_E&=&-\frac{m_S+m_E}{m_S-m_E} dv.
\end{eqnarray}
Further, since
\begin{equation}
p_E=\left( \frac{m_S+m_E}{m_S-m_E} \right) \left( \frac{2m_E}{m_S+m_E}p_S - v \right),
\end{equation}
we have
\begin{eqnarray} \label{eqn:substaylor}
\frac{m_S-m_E}{m_S+m_E}p_S+\frac{2m_S}{m_S+m_E}p_E
&=& \frac{m_S-m_E}{m_S+m_E}p_S+\frac{2m_S}{m_S+m_E}\left( \frac{m_S+m_E}{m_S-m_E} \right) \left( \frac{2m_E}{m_S+m_E}p_S - v \right) \nonumber \\
&=& \frac{m_S-m_E}{m_S+m_E}p_S+ \frac{4 m_E m_S}{\left(m_S - m_E\right) \left( m_E +m_S \right)} p_S - \frac{2 m_S}{m_S - m_E} v \nonumber \\
&=& \frac{m_E+m_S}{m_S-m_E} p_S - \frac{2 m_S}{m_S - m_E} v \nonumber \\
&=& p_S + \frac{2 \left( m_E p_S - m_S u \right)}{m_S-m_E}.
\end{eqnarray}
Thus, substituting eqns. \ref{eqn:subs}, \ref{eqn:subsdiff}, and \ref{eqn:substaylor} into eqn. \ref{eqn:deltawfirstterm} gives
\begin{equation}
\frac{m_S+m_E}{m_S-m_E} \int dv du W_S\left(x_S, p_S + \frac{2 \left( m_E p_S - m_S u \right)}{m_S-m_E} \right) W_E \left(u,v \right).
\end{equation}
Next, we make the substitution $u \equiv x_E$ and $v \equiv p_E$, so eqn. \ref{eqn:deltawfirstterm} becomes
\begin{equation}
\frac{m_S+m_E}{m_S-m_E} \int dp_E dx_E \cdot W_S\left(x_S, p_S + \frac{2 \left( m_E p_S - m_S p_E \right)}{m_S-m_E} \right) W_E \left(x_E,p_E \right).
\end{equation}
Now, eqn. \ref{eqn:deltawintegrals} is
\begin{eqnarray}\label{eqn:deltawintegrals2}
\Delta W &=& \frac{m_S+m_E}{m_S-m_E} \int dp_E dx_E \cdot W_S\left(x_S, p_S + \frac{2 \left( m_E p_S - m_S p_E \right)}{m_S-m_E} \right) W_E \left(x_E,p_E \right) \\
&-& \int dp_E dx_E \cdot W_S(x_S,p_S ) W_E (x_E,p_E ) \nonumber \\
&=& \int dp_E dx_E \cdot \left( \frac{m_S+m_E}{m_S-m_E} W_S\left(x_S, p_S + \frac{2 \left( m_E p_S - m_S p_E \right)}{m_S-m_E} \right) -W_S(x_S,p_S ) \right)W_E \left(x_E,p_E \right). \nonumber
\end{eqnarray}
Next, we expand
\begin{equation}
W_S\left(x_S, p_S + \frac{2 \left( m_E p_S - m_S p_E \right)}{m_S-m_E} \right)
\end{equation}
using a Taylor series expansion in momentum about $p=p_S$. This is
\begin{eqnarray}\label{eqn:taylor1}
W_S\left(x_S, p_S + \frac{2 \left( m_E p_S - m_S p_E \right)}{m_S-m_E} \right) &=& W_S(x_S,p_S) + \frac{2 \left( m_E p_S - m_S p_E \right)}{m_S-m_E} \frac{\partial W_S}{ \partial p_S}(x_S,p_S) \nonumber \\
&+& \frac{1}{2} \left( \frac{2 \left( m_E p_S - m_S p_E \right)}{m_S-m_E} \right)^2 \frac{\partial ^2 W_S}{ \partial p_S^2}(x_S,p_S)+...
\end{eqnarray}
In order to justify dropping the high-order terms of the expansion, we need to show that
\begin{equation}
\frac{2 \left( m_E p_S - m_S p_E \right)}{m_S-m_E} \ll \left| p_S \right| ,
\end{equation}
which is not readily apparent. If we expand the term in $m_E/m_S$, we have
\begin{equation}
\frac{2 \left( m_E p_S - m_S p_E \right)}{m_S-m_E} = -2 p_E + 2 \left( p_S - p_E \right) \frac{m_E}{m_S} + 2 \left( p_S - p_E \right) \left( \frac{m_E}{m_S} \right)^2 + ...
\end{equation}
Recalling eqn. \ref{eqn:massapprox}, it is obvious that while the terms of first order and higher in $m_E/m_S$ are small compared to $p_S$, the first term, $-2 p_E$, is not necessarily small with respect $p_S$. Fortunately, since we are expanding in an integrand and the average value of $p_E$ is zero, we can neglect this term and so we are justified in dropping high order terms in our Taylor expansion.\footnote{The fact that the average value of $p_E$ is zero is dealt with explicitly in eqn. \ref{eqn:peavgiszero}.}
Simplifying coefficients and dropping terms of third order or higher, eqn. \ref{eqn:taylor1} is approximately
\begin{equation}
W_S(x_S,p_S) + \frac{2 \left( m_E p_S - m_S p_E \right)}{m_S-m_E} \frac{\partial W_S}{\partial p_S}(x_S,p_S) +\left( \frac{2m_S^2 p_E^2-4m_Em_Sp_Ep_S+2m_E^2p_S^2}{\left( m_E - m_S \right)^2} \right) \frac{\partial ^2 W_S}{\partial p_S^2}(x_S,p_S).
\end{equation}
Hence, we write $\Delta W$ as \cite{halliwell}
\begin{equation} \label{eqn:deltawap1}
\Delta W \sim \int dp_E dx_E \cdot\left( A W_S(x_S,p_S) W_E \left(x_E,p_E \right) + B \partial_{p_S}W_S(x_S,p_S) W_E \left(x_E,p_E \right)+ C\partial_{p_S}^2 W_S(x_S,p_S) W_E \left(x_E,p_E \right)\right),
\end{equation}
for some $A$, $B$, and $C$. We now work out the values of these coefficients, starting with $A$, which is
\begin{eqnarray}
A &=& \frac{m_S+m_E}{m_S-m_E} - 1 \nonumber \\
&=& \frac{2 m_E}{m_S-m_E} \nonumber \\
&=& \frac{2 m_E}{m_S-m_E} \cdot \frac{1/m_S}{1/m_S} \nonumber \\
&=& \frac{2m_E}{m_S} \cdot \frac{1}{1-m_E/m_S} \nonumber \\
&=& \frac{2m_E}{m_S} \left( 1 + \frac{m_E}{m_S} + \left( \frac{m_E}{m_S} \right)^2+... \right) \nonumber \\
&=& 2 \frac{m_E}{m_S} + 2 \left( \frac{m_E}{m_S} \right)^2 + ... \nonumber \\
&\sim& 2 \frac{m_E}{m_S},
\end{eqnarray}
where we used the approximation in eqn. \ref{eqn:massapprox} to neglect the terms of order two or higher in $m_E/m_S$. We now turn to $B$, given by
\begin{equation}
B = \left( \frac{m_S+m_E}{m_S-m_E} \right) \frac{2 \left( m_E p_S - m_S p_E \right)}{m_S-m_E}.
\end{equation}
Anticipating a series expansion, we change variables to $r = m_E/m_S$ so that $m_E=r m_S$. $B$ is then
\begin{equation}
B =\left( \frac{m_S+r m_S}{m_S-r m_S} \right) \frac{2 \left( r m_S p_S - m_S p_E \right)}{m_S-r m_S} = \left( \frac{1+r}{1-r} \right) \frac{2 \left( r p_S - p_E \right)}{1-r} .
\end{equation}
We also calculate the first and second derivatives of $B$ with respect to $r$. They are
\begin{equation}
\frac{d B}{dr} = \frac{2 p_E (3 - r) - 2 (p_S +3 p_S r)}{(r-1)^3}
\end{equation}
and
\begin{equation}
\frac{d^2 B}{dr^2}= \frac{4 p_E (5+r) - 12 p_S (1+r)}{(r-1)^4}.
\end{equation}
Taking the Taylor series expansion of $B$ in $r$ about $r=0$, we find
\begin{eqnarray}
B &=& B\big|_{r=0}+ \frac{d B}{dr}\Big|_{r=0} \cdot r + \frac{d^2 B}{dr^2}\Big|_{r=0} \cdot \frac{r^2}{2}+... \nonumber \\
&=& -2p_E +\left(2p_S-6p_E \right) \cdot r + \left( 12p_S - 20 p_E \right) \cdot \frac{r^2}{2} + ... \nonumber \\
&=& -2p_E +\left(2p_S-6p_E \right) \cdot \frac{m_E}{m_S} + \left( 6p_S - 10 p_E \right) \cdot \left( \frac{m_E}{m_S}\right)^2+ ... \nonumber \\
&\sim& -2p_E +\left(2p_S-6p_E \right) \cdot \frac{m_E}{m_S} \nonumber \\
&=& 2 p_S \frac{m_E}{m_S} - \left( 2 + 6 \frac{m_E}{m_S} \right) p_E,
\end{eqnarray}
where we used eqn. \ref{eqn:massapprox} to neglect the terms of order two or higher in $m_E/m_S$. Finally, we consider the coefficient $C$, given by
\begin{equation}
C = \left( \frac{m_S+m_E}{m_S-m_E} \right) \frac{2m_S^2 p_E^2-4m_Em_Sp_Ep_S+2m_E^2p_S^2}{\left( m_E - m_S \right)^2}.
\end{equation}
In the same way we worked out coefficient $B$, we make the substitution $m_E = rm_S$, which gives us
\begin{equation}
C= \left( \frac{1+r}{1-r} \right) \frac{2 p_E^2-4rp_Ep_S+2r^2p_S^2}{\left( r - 1 \right)^2},
\end{equation}
\begin{equation}
\frac{d C}{dr} = \frac{4 \left( p_E^2 (2+r) + p_S^2 r (1+2 r) - p_E p_S \left(1+4r +r^2\right) \right)}{(r-1)^4},
\end{equation}
and
\begin{equation}
\frac{d^2 C}{dr^2} = \frac{4 \left( 2 p_E p_S \left( 4 + 7r +r^2 \right) - 3 p_E^2 (3+r ) - p_S^2 \left( 1 + 7r +4r^2 \right) \right)}{(r-1)^5}.
\end{equation}
When we take the Taylor series expansion of $C$ in $r$ about $r=0$, we have
\begin{eqnarray}
C &=& C\big|_{r=0}+ \frac{d C}{dr}\Big|_{r=0} \cdot r + \frac{d^2 C}{dr^2}\Big|_{r=0} \cdot \frac{r^2}{2}+... \nonumber \\
&=& 2p_E^2 +\left(8 p_E^2- 4 p_E p_S \right) \cdot r + \left( 36 p_E^2 - 32 p_E p_S + 4 p_S^2 \right) \cdot \frac{r^2}{2} + ... \nonumber \\
&=& 2p_E^2 +\left(8 p_E^2- 4 p_E p_S \right) \cdot \frac{m_E}{m_S} +\left( 18 p_E^2 - 16 p_E p_S + 2 p_S^2 \right) \cdot \left( \frac{m_E}{m_S}\right)^2+ ... \nonumber \\
&\sim& 2p_E^2 +\left(8 p_E^2- 4 p_E p_S \right)\cdot \frac{m_E}{m_S} \nonumber \\
& = & \left( 2 + 8 \frac{m_E}{m_S} \right) p_E^2 - 4 p_E p_S \frac{m_E}{m_S}.
\end{eqnarray}
Thus, using eqn. \ref{eqn:deltawap1}, we can write $\Delta W$ as
\begin{equation} \label{eqn:wignersimple}
\Delta W \sim X + Y+ Z,
\end{equation}
where
\begin{equation}
X =\left(2 \frac{m_E}{m_S} \right) \int dp_E dx_E \cdot W_E(x_E,p_E) W_S(x_S,p_S),
\end{equation}
\begin{equation}
Y = \left(2 p_S \frac{m_E}{m_S} \right) \int dp_E dx_E \cdot W_E(x_E,p_E) \partial_{p_S}W_S(x_S,p_S) - \left(2+6 \frac{m_E}{m_S} \right) \int dp_E dx_E \cdot p_E W_E(x_E,p_E) \partial_{p_S}W_S(x_S,p_S),
\end{equation}
and
\begin{equation}
Z =\left( 2 + 8 \frac{m_E}{m_S} \right) \int dp_E dx_E \cdot p_E^2 W_E(x_E,p_E) \partial_{p_S}^2W_S(x_S,p_S) - 4 p_S \frac{m_E}{m_S} \int dp_E dx_E \cdot p_E W_E(x_E,p_E) \partial_{p_S}^2W_S(x_S,p_S).
\end{equation}
Now, we recall from our preliminary discussion on the marginal distributions of the Wigner distribution in section \ref{sec:marginals} that
\begin{eqnarray}
\int dp_E dx_E \cdot O(p_E) W_E(x_E,p_E) W_S(x_S,p_S)
&=& W_S(x_S,p_S) \int dp_E \cdot O(p_E) \int dx_E \cdot W_E(x_E,p_E) \nonumber \\
&=& W_S(x_S,p_S) \int dp_E \cdot O(p_E) \tilde \rho\left( p_E, p_E \right) \nonumber \\
&=& W_S(x_S,p_S) \mathrm{Tr} \left(\hat O \hat{\rho} \right) \nonumber \\
&=& W_S(x_S,p_S) \left< \hat O \right>,
\end{eqnarray}
where $O$ is an observable. Hence, our previous calculations yield
\begin{equation}
X = \left(2 \frac{m_E}{m_S} \right) \left< 1 \right> W_S(x_S,p_S)= 2 \frac{m_E}{m_S}W_S(x_S,p_S),
\end{equation}
\begin{equation}
Y = \left(2 p_S \frac{m_E}{m_S} \right) \partial_{p_S} W_S(x_S,p_S) - \left(2+6 \frac{m_E}{m_S} \right) \left< p_E \right> \partial_{p_S} W_S(x_S,p_S),
\end{equation}
and
\begin{equation}
Z = \left( 2 + 8 \frac{m_E}{m_S} \right) \left< p_E^2 \right> \partial_{p_S}^2 W_S(x_S,p_S)- 4 p_S \frac{m_E}{m_S}\left< p_E\right> \partial_{p_S}^2 W_S(x_S,p_S).
\end{equation}
However, originally we considered the environment as an ideal (one-dimensional) gas of environment particles, so it is reasonable to assume that any measurement\index{Measurement} of an environment particle momentum is equally likely to be in the opposite direction, i.e. $\left< p_E \right> = 0$. Eqn. \ref{eqn:wignersimple} then becomes
\begin{equation}\label{eqn:peavgiszero}
\Delta W \sim 2 \frac{m_E}{m_S} W_S(x_S,p_S) + \left(2 p_S \frac{m_E}{m_S} \right) \partial_{p_S} W_S(x_S,p_S)+\left( 2 + 8 \frac{m_E}{m_S} \right) \left< p_E^2 \right> \partial_{p_S}^2 W_S(x_S,p_S).
\end{equation}
We notice that
\begin{eqnarray}
2 \frac{m_E}{m_S} W_S(x_S,p_S) + \left(2 p_S \frac{m_E}{m_S} \right) \partial_{p_S} W_S(x_S,p_S) &=& 2 \frac{m_E}{m_S} \left( W_S(x_S,p_S) + p_S \partial_{p_S} W_S(x_S,p_S) \right) \nonumber \\
&=& 2 \frac{m_E}{m_S} \partial_{p_S} \left( p_S W_S(x_S,p_S) \right),
\end{eqnarray}
so we write the change in the Wigner distribution of the system due to one environmental collision as
\begin{boxedeqn}{eqn:environcol}
\Delta W \sim 2 \frac{m_E}{m_S} \partial_{p_S} \left( p_S W_S(x_S,p_S) \right)+\left( 2 + 8 \frac{m_E}{m_S} \right) \left< p_E^2 \right> \partial_{p_S}^2 W_S(x_S,p_S).
\end{boxedeqn}
\section{The Master Equation for Quantum Brownian Motion}
In our simple model, the system is only under the influence of environmental particles, and is free otherwise. Thus, the total change in the system's Wigner distribution with time is given by its free particle term added to some contribution due to the environment. Since the environment acts on the system through collisions, if we define $\Gamma$ to be the statistical number of collisions per unit time between the system and environmental particles, we combine eqns. \ref{eqn:wigfree} and \ref{eqn:environcol} to get \cite{halliwell}\index{Master Equation!Wigner Form}
\begin{equation}
\frac{\partial W_S}{\partial t} = - \frac{p_s}{m_S} \partial_{x_S} W(x_S,p_S,t) + \Gamma \left( 2 \frac{m_E}{m_S} \partial_{p_S} \left( p_S W_S(x_S,p_S) \right)+\left( 2 + 8 \frac{m_E}{m_S} \right) \left< p_E^2 \right> \partial_{p_S}^2. W_S(x_S,p_S) \right),
\end{equation}
an expression for the total change in the system's Wigner distribution with time. We use table \ref{tab:inversions} to convert our equation for the Wigner distribution to an equation for the state operator of the system. This is
\begin{eqnarray}
\mathcal W \left( \partial_t \rho_S(x,y) \right) &=& \frac{1}{m_S} \mathcal W \left( \frac{i}{2} \left( \partial_x^2 - \partial_y^2 \right) \rho_S(x,y) \right) - \Gamma \frac{m_E}{m_S} \mathcal W \left( (x-y) \left( \partial_x - \partial_y \right) \rho_S (x,y) \right) \nonumber \\ &-& \Gamma \left( 2 + 8 \frac{m_E}{m_S} \right)\left< p_E^2 \right> \mathcal W \left( \left(x - y \right)^2 \rho_S( x, y) \right).
\end{eqnarray}
Noting that this is true for all $\rho_S (x,y)$, we have
\begin{equation}
\partial_t \rho_S(x,y) = \frac{i}{2m_S} \left( \partial_x^2 - \partial_y^2 \right) \rho_S(x,y) - \Gamma \frac{m_E}{m_S} (x-y) \left( \partial_x - \partial_y \right) \rho_S (x,y) - \Gamma \left( 2 + 8 \frac{m_E}{m_S} \right) \left< p_E^2 \right> \left(x - y \right)^2 \rho_S( x, y).
\end{equation}
We take the standard definition for the dissipation\index{Dissipation} rate $\gamma$ to be \cite{halliwell}
\begin{equation} \label{eqn:dissipation}
\gamma \equiv \frac{m_E}{m_S} \Gamma,
\end{equation}
so
\begin{equation}
\partial_t \rho_S(x,y) = \frac{i}{2m_S} \left( \partial_x^2 - \partial_y^2 \right) \rho_S(x,y) - \gamma (x-y) \left( \partial_x - \partial_y \right) \rho_S (x,y) -\gamma \frac{m_S}{m_E} \left( 2 + 8 \frac{m_E}{m_S} \right) \left< p_E^2 \right> \left(x - y \right)^2\rho_S( x, y).
\end{equation}
To express this result in standard form, we use the definition for temperature in one dimension from statistical mechanics, which is \cite{kittelkroemer}\index{Temperature}
\begin{equation} \label{eqn:temp}
\frac{1}{2} k T\equiv \frac{\left< p_E^2 \right> }{2 m_E},
\end{equation}
where $T$ is temperature and $k$ is the Boltzmann constant. Using this definition, we examine the last term more closely and find
\begin{eqnarray}
\gamma \frac{m_S}{m_E} \left( 2 + 8 \frac{m_E}{m_S} \right) \left< p_E^2 \right> \left(x - y \right)^2\rho_S( x, y)
&=& \gamma \frac{m_S}{m_E} \left( 2 + 8 \frac{m_E}{m_S} \right) m_E k T \left(x - y \right)^2\rho_S( x, y) \nonumber \\
&=& \gamma \left( 2m_S + 8 m_E \right) k T \left(x - y \right)^2\rho_S( x, y) \nonumber \\
&\sim& \gamma 2m_S k T \left(x - y \right)^2\rho_S( x, y),
\end{eqnarray}
where we have used the fact that $m_E \ll m_S$. Thus, our final result is \cite{halliwell}\index{Master Equation!State Operator Form}
\begin{boxedeqn}{eqn:masterequation}
\partial_t \rho_S(x,y) = \frac{i}{2m_S} \left( \partial_x^2 - \partial_y^2 \right) \rho_S(x,y) - \gamma (x-y) \left( \partial_x - \partial_y \right) \rho_S (x,y) - 2m_S \gamma k T \left(x - y \right)^2\rho_S( x, y),
\end{boxedeqn}
which is the accepted master equation for quantum Brownian motion \cite{omnes, zurek, halliwell}. Using dimensional analysis, we can reinsert $\hbar$ to bring the master equation into SI units. This is
\begin{boxedeqn}{eqn:masterequationSI}
\partial_t \rho_S(x,y) = \frac{i}{2m_S \hbar } \left( \partial_x^2 - \partial_y^2 \right) \rho_S(x,y) - \gamma (x-y) \left( \partial_x - \partial_y \right) \rho_S (x,y) - \frac{2m_S}{\hbar^2} \gamma k T \left(x - y \right)^2\rho_S( x, y).
\end{boxedeqn}
The assumptions used to derive this equation are listed in table \ref{tab:asum}.
\begin{table}[h] \caption{Assumptions used for the derivation of eqn. \ref{eqn:masterequation} \label{tab:asum}}\centering
\begin{tabular}{|ccc|}
\hline Assumption & Equation & Label \\
\hline Small mass ratio & $m_E/m_S \ll 1$ & \ref{eqn:massapprox} \\
Locality & $\left| x_S-x_E \right| \ll \left| x_S \right| $ & \ref{eqn:locality1} \\
Statistical environment & $\left<p_E\right> = 0$ & \ref{eqn:peavgiszero} \\
Dissipation & $ \gamma = m_E/m_S \cdot \Gamma$ & \ref{eqn:dissipation}\\
Temperature & $1/2 \cdot k T = \left< p_E^2 \right>/(2m_E)$ & \ref{eqn:temp} \\
\hline
\end{tabular}
\end{table}
\chapter{Consequences of the Master Equation}\label{chap:applications}
\lettrine[lines=2, lhang=0.33, loversize=0.1]{W}e now explore the physical ramifications of the master equation for quantum Brownian motion, developed in the previous chapter. First, we investigate its physical meaning term by term. Next, we consider the simple example of a quantum harmonic oscillator undergoing decoherence. Finally, we offer some closing remarks on decoherence theory in general and suggestions for further reading.
\section{Physical Significance of the first two terms}
In the realm of master equations, eqn. \ref{eqn:masterequation} for quantum Brownian motion actually is \textit{simple} \cite{zurek}. Even so, the purpose of each term is not immediately obvious. In this section, we examine the physical meaning of the first and second terms. The first term is the free system evolution, as it is the transform of eqn. \ref{eqn:wigfree}. It does not hurt to verify this explicitly, without employing the Wigner distribution. If we switch to SI units via eqn. \ref{eqn:masterequationSI}, the first term is
\begin{eqnarray}
\frac{i\hbar}{2m_S} \left( \partial_x^2 - \partial_y^2 \right) \rho_S(x,y).
&=& \frac{i\hbar}{2m_S} \left( \partial_x^2 - \partial_y^2 \right) \left< x \right| \hat{\rho_S} \left| y \right> \nonumber \\
&=& \frac{i\hbar}{2m_S} \partial_x^2 \left< x \right| \hat{\rho_S} \left| y \right> - \frac{i\hbar}{2m_S} \partial_y^2 \left< x \right| \hat{\rho_S} \left| y \right> \nonumber \\
&=& \frac{i\hbar}{2m_S}\frac{-1}{\hbar^2} \left( \frac{\hbar}{i} \partial_x \right) ^2 \left< x \right| \hat{\rho_S} \left| y \right> - \frac{i\hbar}{2m_S} \frac{-1}{\hbar^2} \left( \frac{\hbar}{i} \partial_y \right) ^2 \left< x \right| \hat{\rho_S} \left| y \right> \nonumber \\
&=& \frac{i\hbar}{2m_S}\frac{-1}{\hbar^2} \check P_x^2 \left< x \right| \hat{\rho_S} \left| y \right> - \frac{i\hbar}{2m_S} \frac{-1}{\hbar^2} \check P_y ^2 \left< x \right| \hat{\rho_S} \left| y \right> \nonumber \\
&=&- \frac{i}{2m_S\hbar}\left(\check P_x^2 \left< x \right|\right) \left( \hat{\rho_S} \left| y \right>\right) +\frac{i}{2m_S\hbar} \left( \left< x \right| \hat{\rho_S} \right) \left(\check P_y ^2 \left| y \right> \right) \nonumber \\
&=&- \frac{i}{2m_S\hbar}\left( \left< x \right| \hat P^2 \right) \left( \hat{\rho_S} \left| y \right>\right) +\frac{i}{2m_S\hbar} \left( \left< x \right| \hat{\rho_S} \right) \left(\hat P ^2 \left| y \right> \right) \nonumber \\
&=&- \frac{i}{\hbar}\left( \left< x \right| \frac{\hat P^2}{2m_S} \hat{\rho_S} \left| y \right> - \left< x \right| \hat{\rho_S} \frac{\hat P ^2}{2m_S} \left| y \right> \right)\nonumber \\
&=& -\frac{i}{ \hbar }\left< x \right| \left( \frac{\hat P^2}{2m_S} \hat{\rho_S} - \hat{\rho}_S \frac{\hat P ^2}{2m_S} \right) \left| y \right>.
\end{eqnarray}
By eqn. \ref{eqn:eop}, the free system (for which $V=0$) has a Hamiltonian of
\begin{equation}
\hat H_f = \frac{\hat P^2}{2m_s},
\end{equation}
so our equation becomes
\begin{equation}
-\frac{i}{ \hbar }\left< x \right| \left( \hat H_f \hat{\rho_S} - \hat{\rho_S} \hat H_f \right) \left| y \right> = \left< x \right| \frac{i}{ \hbar} \left[ \hat{\rho}_S ,\hat H_f \right] \left| y \right>,
\end{equation}
which is
\begin{equation}
\left< x \right| \hat{\partial}_t \hat{\rho}_S \left| y \right> = \check{\partial}_t \rho_S(x,y)
\end{equation}
by eqn. \ref{eqn:heispic}. Thus, we confirm that the first term in the master equation is the free evolution of the state operator.
The second term is not so obvious, and turns out to be responsible for damping our system's motion. To explain this, we use the master equation to calculate the rate of change of the expectation value of momentum due to the second term. In the position basis, the second term reduces to \cite{omnes}
\begin{eqnarray}
\partial_t \left< \hat P \right>_2
&=& \partial_t \mathrm{Tr}\left(\hat P \hat \rho \right)_2 \nonumber \\
&=& \mathrm{Tr}\left(\hat P \partial_t \hat \rho \right)_2 \nonumber \\
&=& - \gamma \mathrm{Tr} \left( \check P _x \gamma (x-y) \left( \partial_x - \partial_y \right) \rho(x,y) \right) \nonumber \\
&=& - \gamma \mathrm{Tr} \left( \frac{1}{i} \partial_x\left[ \gamma(x-y) \left( \partial_x - \partial_y \right) \rho(x,y)\right] \right) \nonumber \\
&=& - \gamma \mathrm{Tr} \left( \frac{1}{i} \left( \partial_x - \partial_y \right) \rho(x,y) \right)- \gamma \mathrm{Tr} \left( \frac{1}{i} (x-y) \left( \partial_x^2 - \partial_x \partial_y \right) \rho(x,y) \right) \nonumber \\
&=&- \gamma \int dx \cdot \frac{1}{i} \left( \partial_x - \partial_y \right) \rho(x,x) + \gamma \int dx \cdot \frac{1}{i} (x-x) \left( \partial_x^2 - \partial_x \partial_y \right) \rho(x,x) \nonumber \\
&=&- \gamma \int dx \cdot \frac{1}{i} \left( \partial_x - 0 \right) \rho(x,x) + 0 \nonumber \\
&=& - \gamma \mathrm{Tr} \left( \frac{1}{i} \partial_x \rho(x,y) \right) \nonumber \\
&=& - \gamma \mathrm{Tr} \left(\hat P \hat \rho \right) \nonumber \\
&=& - \gamma \left< \hat P \right> ,
\end{eqnarray}
which is
\begin{boxedeqn}{}
\partial_t \left< \hat P \right>_2 = - \gamma \left< \hat P \right>.
\end{boxedeqn}
Hence, the contribution to the rate of change of momentum of the second term is the dissipation\index{Dissipation} (a scalar) times the momentum, pointed in the opposite direction as the momentum. This is precisely a damping effect, which is what we wanted to show \cite{thornton}.
\section{The Decoherence Term}
\begin{figure}[p]
\begin{center}
\includegraphics[width=0.9 \linewidth]{figures/harmonic1_statedecoherence}
\end{center}
\caption[Decoherence in the ground state of the quantum harmonic oscillator]{The decoherence of the ground state of the quantum harmonic oscillator under the simplified master equation \ref{eqn:shodecoh}. In the density plots, yellow indicates maximum values, while blue indicates minimum.}\label{fig:decoherence0}
\end{figure}
The last term of the master equation turns out to cause decoherence of the system, so it is central to our discussion. To interpret it, we will make some reasonable approximations. To get a better idea of the relative size of the terms, we use the SI version of the master equation, eqn. \ref{eqn:masterequationSI}. Notice that the last term contains a numerical factor of $1/\hbar^2 \approx 10^{68}$, while the other terms are either first or zeroth order in $1/\hbar$. Thus, we surmise that for sufficiently large $\left| x - y \right|$, the last term will dominate equation.\footnote{In the matrix representation of a state operator, this corresponds to the \textit{off-diagonal} elements. Recall that the totally mixed state in eqn. \ref{eqn:thisisamixture} had a diagonal state operator. This confirms that decoherence works on the off-diagonal elements of the state operator.} Hence, our drastically simplified master equation is \cite{omnes}
\begin{boxedeqn}{eqn:simplifiedmaster}
\partial_t \rho_S(x,y) \sim - \frac{2m_S \gamma k T}{\hbar^2} \left(x - y \right)^2\rho_S( x, y),
\end{boxedeqn}
which has the standard solution
\begin{equation} \label{eqn:approxdecoherence}
\rho_S(x,y,t) = \rho_S(x,y,0) e^{ -\frac{2m_S \gamma k T}{\hbar^2}\left(x - y \right)^2t}.
\end{equation}
Since the argument of the exponential must be dimensionless, $\frac{\hbar^2}{2m_S \gamma k T\left(x - y \right)^2}$ has units of time. Customarily, we identify \cite{omnes}\index{Decoherence Time}
\begin{boxedeqn}{}
t_d \equiv \frac{\hbar^2}{2m_S \gamma k T\left(x - y \right)^2}
\end{boxedeqn}
as the (characteristic) decoherence time of the system, which is its $e$-folding time.\footnote{When $t=t_d$, $\rho(x,y,t_d) = \frac{1}{e} \rho(x,y,t)$.} Notice also that the decoherence time varies with location in state-space, as it depends on both $x$ and $y$. Thus, we are not surprised to find that some regions decay faster than others. Further, since $\hbar^2 \approx 10^{-68}$ in SI units, the decoherence time for any reasonably large system is incredibly small.\footnote{For example, if we suppose our environment is an ideal, one dimensional gas at room temperature with a mass of $10^{-26}$ kg per particle and a collision rate with the system of $\Gamma \approx 10^{10}$ collisions per second (atmospheric conditions), we find the decoherence time of the system for length scales of nanometers to be of order $t_d =\frac{\hbar^2}{2 m_E \Gamma k T (x-y)^2} \approx \frac{10^{-68}}{2 \cdot 10^{-26} \cdot 10^{10} \cdot 10^{-23} \cdot 300 \cdot 10^{-9}} \approx 10^{-19 }$ s.} Next, we consider an example to show how decoherence operates on a simple situation.
\section{Example: The Harmonic Oscillator in a Thermal Bath}
\begin{figure}[p]
\begin{center}
\includegraphics[width=0.9 \linewidth]{figures/harmonic3_statedecoherence}
\end{center}
\caption[Decoherence in the third excited state of the quantum harmonic oscillator]{The decoherence of the third excited state of the simple harmonic oscillator under the simplified master equation \ref{eqn:shodecoh}. In the density plots, yellow indicates maximum values, while blue indicates minimum.}\label{fig:decoherence3}
\end{figure}
So far, we have supposed that $\rho_S$ is a free particle. However, note that our simplified master equation, eqn. \ref{eqn:simplifiedmaster}, does not explicitly depend on the system's Hamiltonian (this was contained in the first term), so we are free to replace our initial state operator with some other state operator of a different system. We choose, due to its utility and familiarity, the harmonic oscillator. From our work in section \ref{sec:wig_harmonic}, we know that state operator for the harmonic oscillator, eqn. \ref{eqn:stateopharmonic}, is
\begin{equation}
\rho_n(x,y,t=0) = \frac{1}{n!} \left( \frac{m \omega}{\pi} \right)^{1/2} \left( \frac{1}{2 m \omega}\right)^n\left( m \omega x - \partial_x \right)^n \left( m \omega y - \partial_y \right)^n e^{-\frac{m \omega}{2}x^2} e^{-\frac{m \omega}{2}y^2}.
\end{equation}
If we place this state operator in a thermal bath, we expect the system to evolve approximately according to eqn. \ref{eqn:approxdecoherence}, so the time dependent state operator of the harmonic oscillator is\index{Harmonic Oscillator!Decoherence of}
\begin{boxedeqn}{eqn:shodecoh}
\rho_n(x,y,t) = \frac{1}{n!} \left( \frac{m \omega}{\pi} \right)^{1/2} \left( \frac{1}{2 m \omega}\right)^n\left( m \omega x - \partial_x \right)^n \left( m \omega y - \partial_y \right)^n e^{-\frac{m \omega}{2}x^2} e^{-\frac{m \omega}{2}y^2}e^{ -2m_S \gamma k T\left(x - y \right)^2t}.
\end{boxedeqn}
In figures \ref{fig:decoherence0} and \ref{fig:decoherence3}, we plot the state operators for $n=0$ and $n=3$. As is evident from the form of eqn. \ref{eqn:shodecoh}, the off-diagonal matrix elements (when $x \neq y$) quickly vanish with time. Physically, the off-diagonal elements of the state operator represent the quantum interference terms, terms that can interact only with other quantum systems. These interference terms are what give the entangled states we explored in sections \ref{sec:quantumsup} and \ref{sec:bellstate} their interesting qualities. By zeroing the off-diagonal elements, we take a quantum mechanical system and force it into a classical distribution.
As it turns out, this interpretation becomes obvious as $t \rightarrow \infty$. By eqn. \ref{eqn:shodecoh}, this is
\begin{figure}[b]
\begin{center}
\includegraphics[width=0.9 \linewidth]{figures/harmonic_wavefunctions_final}
\end{center}
\caption[Decoherence of the quantum harmonic oscillator as $t \rightarrow \infty$]{The final state reached by the first four energy states of the simple harmonic oscillator under the simplified master equation \ref{eqn:shodecoh}. The two-dimensional plots coincide with the diagonal of the density plots.}\label{fig:decoherenceall}
\end{figure}
\begin{equation}
\lim_{t \rightarrow \infty} \rho(x,y,t) =
\begin{cases}
0 & \text{if $x\neq y$}, \\
\psi^*(x)\psi(x) = \left| \psi(x) \right|^2 & \text{if $x =y$},
\end{cases}
\end{equation}
as shown in figure \ref{fig:decoherenceall}. This quantity is a statistical probability distribution, and as we saw with the roulette wheel at the beginning of this thesis, decoherence has effectively blocked us from accessing any of the quantum mechanical information present in our initial system.
\section{Concluding Remarks}
We have now developed and applied the master equation for quantum Brownian motion, and used it to clarify how a macroscopic, classical object might emerge from quantum mechanics. We started by setting the stage with the mathematics and formalism we would need to develop quantum mechanics. Then, we used the tools we made to derive the Schr\"odinger equation and the equation of motion for the state operator.
We then shifted and considered quantum mechanics in phase-space, where the central object is the Wigner distribution. Next, we explored some of its key properties and described and example of its application using the harmonic oscillator. After that, we used it to derive the simple master equation for one-dimensional quantum Brownian motion. We explained each of the terms physically, and finally considered an example of decoherence, where the master equation transformed a quantum harmonic oscillator into a classical probability distribution.
The debate still rages in the physics community; does decoherence theory \textit{solve} the philosophical problems brought about by paradoxes like Schr\"odinger's cat\index{Schr\"odinger's cat}, or does it merely postpone the problem, pushing the fundamental issue into an environmental black box \cite{meuffels,hobson,schlosshauer}? Regardless, it provides a practical framework for performing objective measurements\index{Measurement} without an observer, which is of key importance to the emerging fields of quantum computation and quantum information. Current efforts are underway to probe decoherence directly, both experimentally and theoretically. Through the use of mesoscopic systems, scientists have been able to manufacture tiny oscillators that are getting very close to the quantum regime \cite{lahaye, blencowe}. Theoretical predictions of what should be observed at the quantum-classical barrier have also been made, with the promise of experimental feasibility within a few years \cite{katz}.
Just last year, scientists performed experiments involving ultra-cold chlorophyll, confirming that even photosynthesis is a quantum-emergence phenomenon, and thus governed by decoherence theory \cite{engel}. The group went so far as to suggest that chloroplasts were actually performing quantum computation algorithms on themselves to speed-up reaction times. This idea of selective self-measurement is intriguing, but largely undeveloped theoretically. It, along with the many other application areas of quantum decoherence theory, are sure to occupy physicists for years to come.
| {
"redpajama_set_name": "RedPajamaArXiv"
} | 7,450 |
package jp.wasabeef.glide.transformations.gpu;
import com.bumptech.glide.load.Transformation;
import com.bumptech.glide.load.engine.Resource;
import com.bumptech.glide.load.engine.bitmap_recycle.BitmapPool;
import com.bumptech.glide.load.resource.bitmap.BitmapResource;
import android.content.Context;
import android.graphics.Bitmap;
import jp.co.cyberagent.android.gpuimage.GPUImage;
import jp.co.cyberagent.android.gpuimage.GPUImageSketchFilter;
public class SketchFilterTransformation implements Transformation<Bitmap> {
private Context mContext;
private BitmapPool mBitmapPool;
public SketchFilterTransformation(Context context, BitmapPool pool) {
mContext = context;
mBitmapPool = pool;
}
@Override
public Resource<Bitmap> transform(Resource<Bitmap> resource, int outWidth, int outHeight) {
Bitmap source = resource.get();
GPUImage gpuImage = new GPUImage(mContext);
gpuImage.setImage(source);
gpuImage.setFilter(new GPUImageSketchFilter());
Bitmap bitmap = gpuImage.getBitmapWithFilterApplied();
source.recycle();
return BitmapResource.obtain(bitmap, mBitmapPool);
}
@Override
public String getId() {
return "SketchFilterTransformation()";
}
}
| {
"redpajama_set_name": "RedPajamaGithub"
} | 8,137 |
Masters Colleges and Universities
6,901 Applicants
Mercy College is a higher education institution located in Westchester County, NY. In 2016, the most popular Bachelor's Degree concentrations at Mercy College were General Social Sciences (378 degrees awarded), General Health Services (220 degrees), and General Business Administration & Management (171 degrees).
In 2017, 2,651 degrees were awarded across all undergraduate and graduate programs at Mercy College. 75.1% of these degrees were awarded to women, and 24.9% awarded men. The majority of degree recipients were white (1,121 degrees), 1.56 times more than then the next closest race/ethnicity group, hispanic or latino (719 degrees).
The median undergraduate tuition at Mercy College is $18,084, which is $-2,649 less than the national average for Masters Colleges and Universities ($20,733).
Masters Colleges & Universities: Larger ProgramsMasters Colleges and Universities
In 2017, the cost of tuition at Mercy College was $18,084. The cost of tuition at Mercy College is $-2,649 less than than the overall (public and private) national average for Masters Colleges and Universities ($20,733).
This chart compares the tuition costs of Mercy College (in red) with those of other similar universities.
In 2017 Mercy College had an average net price — the price paid after factoring in grants and loans — of $16,246. Between 2016 and 2017, the average net price of Mercy College grew by 1.16%.
This chart compares the average net price of Mercy College (in red) with that of other similar universities.
The average yearly cost of room and board at Mercy College was of $10,798 in 2017. During the same period, the average yearly cost of books and supplies was $1,524. The cost of room and board decreased by 0.157% between 2016 and 2017. The cost of books and supplies increased by 2.14% during the same period.
This chart compares the average student costs at Mercy College (in red) with that of similar universities.
63% of undergraduate students at Mercy College received grants or loans in 2017. This represents a growth of 6.78% with respect to 2016, when 59% of undergraduate students received financial aid.
This chart compares the average award discount at Mercy College (in red) with that of other similar universities.
In 2016 the default rate for borrower's at Mercy College was 8.26%, which represents 260 out of the 3146 total borrowers.
Mercy College received 6,901 undergraduate applications in 2017, which represents a 4.29% annual growth. Out of those 6,901 applicants, 5,433 students were accepted for enrollment, representing a 78.7% acceptance rate.
There were 9,506 students enrolled at Mercy College in 2017, and N/A% of first-time enrollees submitted SAT scores with their applications.
Mercy College has an overall enrollment yield of 16.7%, which represents the number of admitted students who ended up enrolling.
Accepted Out of 6,901
In 2017, the undergraduate acceptance rate of Mercy College was 78.7% (5,433 admissions from 6,901 applications). This is higher than the acceptance rate of 2016, which was 77.7%. Between 2016 and 2017, the number of applicants grew by 4.29%, while admissions grew by 5.7%.
This chart compares the acceptance rate of Mercy College (in red) with that of other similar universities.
N/A% of enrolled first-time students at Mercy College in 2017 submitted SAT scores with their applications.
Mercy College has a total enrollment of 9,506 students. The full-time enrollment at Mercy College is 6,313 students and the part-time enrollment is 3,193. This means that 66.4% of students enrolled at Mercy College are enrolled full-time.
The enrolled student population at Mercy College, both undergraduate and graduate, is 35.1% Hispanic or Latino, 29.7% White, 21.4% Black or African American, 4.67% Asian, 1.45% Two or More Races, 0.295% American Indian or Alaska Native, and 0.263% Native Hawaiian or Other Pacific Islanders.
Students enrolled at Mercy College in full-time Undergraduate programs are majority Hispanic or Latino Female (28.3%), followed by Black or African American Female (15.2%) and White Female (13.5%). Students enrolled in full-time Graduate programs are majority White Female (26.2%), followed by Hispanic or Latino Female (22.3%) and Black or African American Female (14.9%).
The total enrollment at Mercy College, both undergraduate and graduate, is 9,506 students. The full-time enrollment at Mercy College is 6,313 and the part-time enrollment is 3,193. This means that 66.4% of students enrolled at Mercy College are enrolled full-time compared with 68.6% at similar Masters Colleges and Universities.
This chart shows the full-time vs part-time enrollment status at Mercy College (in red) compares to similar universities.
Retention rate measures the number of first-time students who began their studies the previous fall and returned to school the following fall. The retention rate for full-time undergraduates at Mercy College was 73%. Compared with the full-time retention rate at similar Masters Colleges and Universities (75%), Mercy College had a retention rate lower than its peers.
This chart shows the retention rate over time at Mercy College (highlighted in red) compares to similar universities.
The enrolled student population at Mercy College is 35.1% Hispanic or Latino, 29.7% White, 21.4% Black or African American, 4.67% Asian, 1.45% Two or More Races, 0.295% American Indian or Alaska Native, and 0.263% Native Hawaiian or Other Pacific Islanders. This includes both full-time and part-time students as well as graduate and undergraduates. By comparison, enrollment for all Masters Colleges and Universities is 54.4% White, 15% Hispanic or Latino, and 13.2% Black or African American.
Any student who is studying in the United States on a temporary basis is categorized as a "Non-Resident Alien", and the share of those students are shown in the chart below. Additionally, 525 students (5.52%) did not report their race.
In 2017, 1333 more women than men received degrees from Mercy College. The majority of degree recipients at Mercy College are white (1,121 degrees awarded). There were 1.56 times more white graduates than the next closest race/ethnicity group, hispanic or latino (719 degrees).
The most common Bachelor's Degree concentration at Mercy College is General Social Sciences (378 degrees awarded), followed by General Health Services (220 degrees) and General Business Administration & Management (171 degrees).
The most specialized majors across all degree types at Mercy College, meaning they have significantly more degrees awarded in that concentration than the national average across all institutions, are Social Sciences (398 degrees awarded), Education (514 degrees), and Psychology (180 degrees).
Elementary & middle school teachers
The most common jobs for people who hold a degree in one of the 5 most specialized majors at Mercy College are Elementary & middle school teachers (2,207,287 people), Registered nurses (1,422,114 people), Lawyers, & judges, magistrates, & other judicial workers (426,662 people), Other managers (420,911 people), and Education administrators (387,023 people).
The most specialized majors at Mercy College are Social Sciences (398 degrees awarded), Education (514 degrees), Psychology (180 degrees), English (46 degrees), and Health (639 degrees).
The highest paying jobs for people who hold a degree in one of the 5 most specialized majors at Mercy College are Surgeons, Electrical & electronics engineers, Nuclear medicine technologists and medical dosimetrists, Public relations specialists, and Cardiovascular technologists and technicians
The most common industries for people who hold a degree in one of the 5 most specialized majors at Mercy College are Elementary & secondary schools (3,525,280 people), General medical and surgical hospitals, and specialty (except psychiatric and substance abuse) hospitals (1,783,697 people), Colleges, universities & professional schools, including junior colleges (746,926 people), Outpatient care centers (394,649 people), and Legal services (373,964 people).
IPEDS uses the Classification of Instructional Programs (CIP) standard, so the categories may not match the exact concentrations offered by Mercy College.
General Social Sciences
General Business Administration & Management
In 2017, the most common bachelors degree concentration at Mercy College was General Social Sciences with 378 degrees awarded.
This visualization illustrates the percentage of degree recipients from bachelors degree programs at Mercy College according to their major.
In 2017, 659 degrees were awarded to men at Mercy College, which is 0.331 times less than the number of degrees awarded to females (1,992).
This chart displays the gender disparity between the top 5 majors at Mercy College by degrees awarded.
In 2017, 137 degrees were awarded to men at Mercy College in General Business Administration & Management, which is 0.703 times less than the 195 female recipients with that same degree.
In 2017, 329 degrees were awarded to women at Mercy College in General Social Sciences, which is 6.71 times more than the 49 male recipients with that same degree.
In 2017, 19% of students graduating from Mercy College completed their program within 100% "normal time" (i.e. 4 years for a 4-year degree). Comparatively, 38% completed their degrees within 150% of the normal time, and 40% within 200%.
The following chart shows these completion rates over time compared to the average for the Masters Colleges and Universities Carnegie Classification group.
American Indian or Alaska Native Female
The student demographic with the highest graduation rate at Mercy College is Female and American Indian or Alaska Native (71.4% graduation rate). Across all Masters Colleges and Universities, Asian Female students have the highest graduation rate (67.2%).
The National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) categorizes any student who is studying in the United States on a temporary basis as a "Non-Resident Alien", and the graduation rate of those students is shown in the chart below. Additionally, 3.86% of graduates (16 students) did not report their race.
The most common race/ethnicity at Mercy College is white (1,121 degrees awarded). There were 1.56 times more white recipients than the next closest race/ethnicity group, hispanic or latino (719 degrees).
2.15% of degree recipients (57 students) did not report their race.
Black or African American Female
The most common race/ethnicity and gender grouping at Mercy College is white female (884 degrees awarded). There were 1.62 times more white female recipients than the next closest race/ethnicity group, hispanic or latino female (547 degrees).
Mercy College has an endowment valued at nearly $224M, as of the end of the 2017 fiscal year. The return on its endowment was of $27.1M (12.1%), compared to the 6.94% average return ($2.3M on $33.1M) across all Masters Colleges and Universities.
In 2017, Mercy College had a total expenditure of $135M. Of that $135M, they spent $57.6M on salaries and $135M on benefits.
Mercy College employs 97 Assistant professors, 72 Associate professors, and 22 Professors. Most academics at Mercy College are Female Assistant professors (62), Female Associate professors(44), and Male Assistant professors (35).
The most common positions for non-instructional staff at Mercy College are: Librarians, Curators, Archivists, and Academic Affairs and Other Education Services, with 227 employees, Management, with 46 employees, and Business and Financial Operations with 40 employees.
Mercy College has an endowment valued at about $224M, as of the end of the 2017 fiscal year. The endowment of Mercy College grew 16.6% from the previous year. The value of their endowment was $191M higher than than the median endowment of Masters Colleges and Universities according to the Carnegie Classification grouping.
This line chart shows how the endowment at Mercy College (in red) compares to that of some similar universities.
The small bar chart below shows the endowment quintiles for all universities in the Masters Colleges & Universities: Larger Programs Carnegie Classification grouping.
$175k - Local
As of 2017, Mercy College received $3.96M in grants and contracts from the federal government, $1.73M from state grants and contracts, and $175k from local grants and contracts.
The bar chart shows the share of the primary expenses at Mercy College over time, and the line chart shows the expenditure for solely salaries and benefits over time compared to the median for the Masters Colleges and Universities Carnegie Classification grouping.
This tree map shows all of the primary expenses of Research at Mercy College as a share of total expenditure.
In 2017, Mercy College paid a median of $57.6M in salaries, which represents 42.6% of their overall expenditure ($135M) and a 6.26% growth from the previous year. This is compared to a 7.75% growth from 2015 and a 1.95% growth from 2014.
The median for similar Masters Colleges and Universities is 31.4M (40.5% of overall expenditures).
In 2017, Mercy College paid a total of $17.5M to 203 employees working as instructors, which represents 30.4% of all salaries paid.
This is compared to a median of $16.8M (34%) for similar Masters Colleges & Universities: Larger Programs.
In 2017, the most common positions for instructional staff at Mercy College were Assistant professor with 97 employees; Associate professor with 72 employees; and Associate professor with 22 employees.
In 2017, the most common positions for non-instructional staff at Mercy College were Librarians, Curators, Archivists, and Academic Affairs and Other Education Services with 227 employees; Management with 46 employees; and Business and Financial Operations with 40 employees.
Female Assistant professor
Female Associate professor
In 2017, the most common demographic for instructional staff at Mercy College was Female Assistant professor with 62 employees, Female Associate professor with 44 employees, and Male Assistant professor with 35 employees.
This chart shows the gender split between each academic rank present at Mercy College.
Central Methodist University-College of Graduate and Extended Studies
Southern Wesleyan University
Alverno College | {
"redpajama_set_name": "RedPajamaCommonCrawl"
} | 683 |
package com.ibatis.sqlmap.engine.config;
import com.ibatis.sqlmap.client.extensions.*;
import com.ibatis.sqlmap.engine.impl.*;
import com.ibatis.sqlmap.engine.mapping.result.*;
import com.ibatis.sqlmap.engine.scope.*;
import com.ibatis.sqlmap.engine.type.*;
import java.util.*;
public class ResultMapConfig {
private SqlMapConfiguration config;
private ErrorContext errorContext;
private SqlMapClientImpl client;
private SqlMapExecutorDelegate delegate;
private TypeHandlerFactory typeHandlerFactory;
private ResultMap resultMap;
private List resultMappingList;
private int resultMappingIndex;
private Discriminator discriminator;
ResultMapConfig(SqlMapConfiguration config, String id, Class resultClass, String groupBy, String extendsResultMap, String xmlName) {
this.config = config;
this.errorContext = config.getErrorContext();
this.client = config.getClient();
this.delegate = config.getDelegate();
this.typeHandlerFactory = config.getTypeHandlerFactory();
this.resultMap = new ResultMap(client.getDelegate());
this.resultMappingList = new ArrayList();
errorContext.setActivity("building a result map");
errorContext.setObjectId(id + " result map");
resultMap.setId(id);
resultMap.setXmlName(xmlName);
resultMap.setResource(errorContext.getResource());
if (groupBy != null && groupBy.length() > 0) {
StringTokenizer parser = new StringTokenizer(groupBy, ", ", false);
while (parser.hasMoreTokens()) {
resultMap.addGroupByProperty(parser.nextToken());
}
}
resultMap.setResultClass(resultClass);
errorContext.setMoreInfo("Check the extended result map.");
if (extendsResultMap != null) {
ResultMap extendedResultMap = (ResultMap) client.getDelegate().getResultMap(extendsResultMap);
ResultMapping[] resultMappings = extendedResultMap.getResultMappings();
for (int i = 0; i < resultMappings.length; i++) {
resultMappingList.add(resultMappings[i]);
}
List nestedResultMappings = extendedResultMap.getNestedResultMappings();
if (nestedResultMappings != null) {
Iterator iter = nestedResultMappings.iterator();
while (iter.hasNext()) {
resultMap.addNestedResultMappings((ResultMapping) iter.next());
}
}
if (groupBy == null || groupBy.length() == 0) {
if (extendedResultMap.hasGroupBy()) {
Iterator i = extendedResultMap.groupByProps();
while (i.hasNext()) {
resultMap.addGroupByProperty((String) i.next());
}
}
}
}
errorContext.setMoreInfo("Check the result mappings.");
resultMappingIndex = resultMappingList.size();
resultMap.setResultMappingList(resultMappingList);
client.getDelegate().addResultMap(resultMap);
}
public void setDiscriminator(String columnName, Integer columnIndex, Class javaClass, String jdbcType, String nullValue, Object typeHandlerImpl) {
TypeHandler handler;
if (typeHandlerImpl != null) {
if (typeHandlerImpl instanceof TypeHandlerCallback) {
handler = new CustomTypeHandler((TypeHandlerCallback) typeHandlerImpl);
} else if (typeHandlerImpl instanceof TypeHandler) {
handler = (TypeHandler) typeHandlerImpl;
} else {
throw new RuntimeException("The class '' is not a valid implementation of TypeHandler or TypeHandlerCallback");
}
} else {
handler = config.resolveTypeHandler(client.getDelegate().getTypeHandlerFactory(), resultMap.getResultClass(), "", javaClass, jdbcType, true);
}
ResultMapping mapping = new ResultMapping();
mapping.setColumnName(columnName);
mapping.setJdbcTypeName(jdbcType);
mapping.setTypeHandler(handler);
mapping.setNullValue(nullValue);
mapping.setJavaType(javaClass);
if (columnIndex != null) {
mapping.setColumnIndex(columnIndex.intValue());
}
discriminator = new Discriminator(delegate, mapping);
resultMap.setDiscriminator(discriminator);
}
public void addDiscriminatorSubMap(Object value, String resultMap) {
if (discriminator == null) {
throw new RuntimeException("The discriminator is null, but somehow a subMap was reached. This is a bug.");
}
discriminator.addSubMap(value.toString(), resultMap);
}
public void addResultMapping(String propertyName, String columnName, Integer columnIndex, Class javaClass, String jdbcType, String nullValue, String notNullColumn, String statementName, String resultMapName, Object impl) {
errorContext.setObjectId(propertyName + " mapping of the " + resultMap.getId() + " result map");
TypeHandler handler;
if (impl != null) {
if (impl instanceof TypeHandlerCallback) {
handler = new CustomTypeHandler((TypeHandlerCallback) impl);
} else if (impl instanceof TypeHandler) {
handler = (TypeHandler) impl;
} else {
throw new RuntimeException("The class '" + impl + "' is not a valid implementation of TypeHandler or TypeHandlerCallback");
}
} else {
handler = config.resolveTypeHandler(client.getDelegate().getTypeHandlerFactory(), resultMap.getResultClass(), propertyName, javaClass, jdbcType, true);
}
ResultMapping mapping = new ResultMapping();
mapping.setPropertyName(propertyName);
mapping.setColumnName(columnName);
mapping.setJdbcTypeName(jdbcType);
mapping.setTypeHandler(handler);
mapping.setNullValue(nullValue);
mapping.setNotNullColumn(notNullColumn);
mapping.setStatementName(statementName);
mapping.setNestedResultMapName(resultMapName);
if (resultMapName != null && resultMapName.length() > 0) {
resultMap.addNestedResultMappings(mapping);
}
mapping.setJavaType(javaClass);
if (columnIndex != null) {
mapping.setColumnIndex(columnIndex.intValue());
} else {
resultMappingIndex++;
mapping.setColumnIndex(resultMappingIndex);
}
resultMappingList.add(mapping);
resultMap.setResultMappingList(resultMappingList);
}
}
| {
"redpajama_set_name": "RedPajamaGithub"
} | 3,520 |
{"url":"https:\/\/pressbooks.online.ucf.edu\/osuniversityphysics\/chapter\/5-1-forces\/","text":"5 Newton\u2019s Laws of Motion\n\n5.1 Forces\n\nLearning Objectives\n\nBy the end of the section, you will be able to:\n\n\u2022 Distinguish between kinematics and dynamics\n\u2022 Understand the definition of force\n\u2022 Identify simple free-body diagrams\n\u2022 Define the SI unit of force, the newton\n\u2022 Describe force as a vector\n\nThe study of motion is called kinematics, but kinematics only describes the way objects move\u2014their velocity and their acceleration. Dynamics is the study of how forces affect the motion of objects and systems. It considers the causes of motion of objects and systems of interest, where a system is anything being analyzed. The foundation of dynamics are the laws of motion stated by Isaac Newton (1642\u20131727). These laws provide an example of the breadth and simplicity of principles under which nature functions. They are also universal laws in that they apply to situations on Earth and in space.\n\nNewton\u2019s laws of motion were just one part of the monumental work that has made him legendary (Figure). The development of Newton\u2019s laws marks the transition from the Renaissance to the modern era. Not until the advent of modern physics was it discovered that Newton\u2019s laws produce a good description of motion only when the objects are moving at speeds much less than the speed of light and when those objects are larger than the size of most molecules (about ${10}^{-9}$ m in diameter). These constraints define the realm of Newtonian mechanics. At the beginning of the twentieth century, Albert Einstein (1879\u20131955) developed the theory of relativity and, along with many other scientists, quantum mechanics. Quantum mechanics does not have the constraints present in Newtonian physics. All of the situations we consider in this chapter, and all those preceding the introduction of relativity in Volume 3,\u00a0Relativity, are in the realm of Newtonian physics.\n\nWorking Definition of Force\n\nDynamics is the study of the forces that cause objects and systems to move. To understand this, we need a working definition of force. An intuitive definition of force\u2014that is, a push or a pull\u2014is a good place to start. We know that a push or a pull has both magnitude and direction (therefore, it is a vector quantity), so we can define force as the push or pull on an object with a specific magnitude and direction. Force can be represented by vectors or expressed as a multiple of a standard force.\n\nThe push or pull on an object can vary considerably in either magnitude or direction. For example, a cannon exerts a strong force on a cannonball that is launched into the air. In contrast, Earth exerts only a tiny downward pull on a flea. Our everyday experiences also give us a good idea of how multiple forces add. If two people push in different directions on a third person, as illustrated in Figure, we might expect the total force to be in the direction shown. Since force is a vector, it adds just like other vectors. Forces, like other vectors, are represented by arrows and can be added using the familiar head-to-tail method or trigonometric methods. These ideas were developed in Vectors.\n\nFigure(b) is our first example of a free-body diagram, which is a sketch showing all external forces acting on an object or system. The object or system is represented by a single isolated point (or free body), and only those forces acting on it that originate outside of the object or system\u2014that is, external forces\u2014are shown. (These forces are the only ones shown because only external forces acting on the free body affect its motion. We can ignore any internal forces within the body.) The forces are represented by vectors extending outward from the free body.\n\nFree-body diagrams are useful in analyzing forces acting on an object or system, and are employed extensively in the study and application of Newton\u2019s laws of motion. You will see them throughout this text and in all your studies of physics. The following steps briefly explain how a free-body diagram is created; we examine this strategy in more detail in Drawing Free-Body Diagrams.\n\nProblem-Solving Strategy: Drawing Free-Body Diagrams\n\n1. Draw the object under consideration. If you are treating the object as a particle, represent the object as a point. Place this point at the origin of an xy-coordinate system.\n2. Include all forces that act on the object, representing these forces as vectors. However, do not include the net force on the object or the forces that the object exerts on its environment.\n3. Resolve all force vectors into x\u2013 and y-components.\n4. Draw a separate free-body diagram for each object in the problem.\n\nWe illustrate this strategy with two examples of free-body diagrams (Figure). The terms used in this figure are explained in more detail later in the chapter.\n\nThe steps given here are sufficient to guide you in this important problem-solving strategy. The final section of this chapter explains in more detail how to draw free-body diagrams when working with the ideas presented in this chapter.\n\nDevelopment of the Force Concept\n\nA quantitative definition of force can be based on some standard force, just as distance is measured in units relative to a standard length. One possibility is to stretch a spring a certain fixed distance (Figure) and use the force it exerts to pull itself back to its relaxed shape\u2014called a restoring force\u2014as a standard. The magnitude of all other forces can be considered as multiples of this standard unit of force. Many other possibilities exist for standard forces. Some alternative definitions of force will be given later in this chapter.\n\nLet\u2019s analyze force more deeply. Suppose a physics student sits at a table, working diligently on his homework (Figure). What external forces act on him? Can we determine the origin of these forces?\n\nIn most situations, forces are grouped into two categories: contact forces and field forces. As you might guess, contact forces are due to direct physical contact between objects. For example, the student in Figure experiences the contact forces $\\mathbf{\\overset{\\to }{C}}$, $\\mathbf{\\overset{\\to }{F}}$, and $\\mathbf{\\overset{\\to }{T}}$, which are exerted by the chair on his posterior, the floor on his feet, and the table on his forearms, respectively. Field forces, however, act without the necessity of physical contact between objects. They depend on the presence of a \u201cfield\u201d in the region of space surrounding the body under consideration. Since the student is in Earth\u2019s gravitational field, he feels a gravitational force $\\mathbf{\\overset{\\to }{w}}$; in other words, he has weight.\n\nYou can think of a field as a property of space that is detectable by the forces it exerts. Scientists think there are only four fundamental force fields in nature. These are the gravitational, electromagnetic, strong nuclear, and weak fields (we consider these four forces in nature later in this text). As noted for $\\mathbf{\\overset{\\to }{w}}$ in Figure, the gravitational field is responsible for the weight of a body. The forces of the electromagnetic field include those of static electricity and magnetism; they are also responsible for the attraction among atoms in bulk matter. Both the strong nuclear and the weak force fields are effective only over distances roughly equal to a length of scale no larger than an atomic nucleus (${10}^{-15}\\,\\text{m}$). Their range is so small that neither field has influence in the macroscopic world of Newtonian mechanics.\n\nContact forces are fundamentally electromagnetic. While the elbow of the student in Figure is in contact with the tabletop, the atomic charges in his skin interact electromagnetically with the charges in the surface of the table. The net (total) result is the force $\\mathbf{\\overset{\\to }{T}}$. Similarly, when adhesive tape sticks to a piece of paper, the atoms of the tape are intermingled with those of the paper to cause a net electromagnetic force between the two objects. However, in the context of Newtonian mechanics, the electromagnetic origin of contact forces is not an important concern.\n\nVector Notation for Force\n\nAs previously discussed, force is a vector; it has both magnitude and direction. The SI unit of force is called the newton (abbreviated N), and 1 N is the force needed to accelerate an object with a mass of 1 kg at a rate of $1\\,{\\text{m\/s}}^{2}$: $1\\,\\text{N}=1\\,\\text{kg}\\cdot {\\text{m\/s}}^{2}.$ An easy way to remember the size of a newton is to imagine holding a small apple; it has a weight of about 1 N.\n\nWe can thus describe a two-dimensional force in the form $\\mathbf{\\overset{\\to }{F}}=a\\mathbf{\\hat{i}}+b\\mathbf{\\hat{j}}$ (the unit vectors $\\mathbf{\\hat{i}}\\,\\text{and}\\,\\mathbf{\\hat{j}}$ indicate the direction of these forces along the x-axis and the y-axis, respectively) and a three-dimensional force in the form $\\mathbf{\\overset{\\to }{F}}=a\\mathbf{\\hat{i}}+b\\mathbf{\\hat{j}}+c\\mathbf{\\hat{k}}.$ In Figure, let\u2019s suppose that ice skater 1, on the left side of the figure, pushes horizontally with a force of 30.0 N to the right; we represent this as ${\\mathbf{\\overset{\\to }{F}}}_{1}=30.0\\mathbf{\\hat{i}}\\,\\text{N}.$ Similarly, if ice skater 2 pushes with a force of 40.0 N in the positive vertical direction shown, we would write ${\\mathbf{\\overset{\\to }{F}}}_{2}=40.0\\mathbf{\\hat{j}}\\,\\text{N}.$ The resultant of the two forces causes a mass to accelerate\u2014in this case, the third ice skater. This resultant is called the net external force ${\\mathbf{\\overset{\\to }{F}}}_{\\text{net}}$ and is found by taking the vector sum of all external forces acting on an object or system (thus, we can also represent net external force as $\\sum \\mathbf{\\overset{\\to }{F}}$):\n\n${\\mathbf{\\overset{\\to }{F}}}_{\\text{net}}=\\sum \\mathbf{\\overset{\\to }{F}}={\\mathbf{\\overset{\\to }{F}}}_{1}+{\\mathbf{\\overset{\\to }{F}}}_{2}+\\cdots$\n\nThis equation can be extended to any number of forces.\n\nIn this example, we have ${\\mathbf{\\overset{\\to }{F}}}_{\\text{net}}=\\sum \\mathbf{\\overset{\\to }{F}}={\\mathbf{\\overset{\\to }{F}}}_{1}+{\\mathbf{\\overset{\\to }{F}}}_{2}=30.0\\mathbf{\\hat{i}}+40.0\\mathbf{\\hat{j}}\\,\\text{N}$. The hypotenuse of the triangle shown in Figure is the resultant force, or net force. It is a vector. To find its magnitude (the size of the vector, without regard to direction), we use the rule given in Vectors, taking the square root of the sum of the squares of the components:\n\n${F}_{\\text{net}}=\\sqrt{{(30.0\\,\\text{N})}^{2}+{(40.0\\,\\text{N})}^{2}}=50.0\\,\\text{N}.$\n\nThe direction is given by\n\n$\\theta ={\\text{tan}}^{-1}(\\frac{{F}_{2}}{{F}_{1}})={\\text{tan}}^{-1}(\\frac{40.0}{30.0})=53.1^\\circ,$\n\nmeasured from the positive x-axis, as shown in the free-body diagram in Figure(b).\n\nLet\u2019s suppose the ice skaters now push the third ice skater with ${\\mathbf{\\overset{\\to }{F}}}_{1}=3.0\\mathbf{\\hat{i}}+8.0\\mathbf{\\hat{j}}\\,\\text{N}$ and ${\\mathbf{\\overset{\\to }{F}}}_{2}=5.0\\mathbf{\\hat{i}}+4.0\\mathbf{\\hat{j}}\\,\\text{N}$. What is the resultant of these two forces? We must recognize that force is a vector; therefore, we must add using the rules for vector addition:\n\n${\\mathbf{\\overset{\\to }{F}}}_{\\text{net}}={\\mathbf{\\overset{\\to }{F}}}_{1}+{\\mathbf{\\overset{\\to }{F}}}_{2}=(3.0\\mathbf{\\hat{i}}+8.0\\mathbf{\\hat{j}})+(5.0\\mathbf{\\hat{i}}+4.0\\mathbf{\\hat{j}})=8.0\\mathbf{\\hat{i}}+12\\mathbf{\\hat{j}}\\,\\text{N}$\n\nFind the magnitude and direction of the net force in the ice skater example just given.\n\nShow Solution\n\n14 N, $56^\\circ$ measured from the positive x-axis\n\nView this interactive simulation to learn how to add vectors. Drag vectors onto a graph, change their length and angle, and sum them together. The magnitude, angle, and components of each vector can be displayed in several formats.\n\nSummary\n\n\u2022 Dynamics is the study of how forces affect the motion of objects, whereas kinematics simply describes the way objects move.\n\u2022 Force is a push or pull that can be defined in terms of various standards, and it is a vector that has both magnitude and direction.\n\u2022 External forces are any outside forces that act on a body. A free-body diagram is a drawing of all external forces acting on a body.\n\u2022 The SI unit of force is the newton (N).\n\nConceptual Questions\n\nWhat properties do forces have that allow us to classify them as vectors?\n\nShow Solution\n\nForces are directional and have magnitude.\n\nProblems\n\nTwo ropes are attached to a tree, and forces of ${\\mathbf{\\overset{\\to }{F}}}_{1}=2.0\\mathbf{\\hat{i}}+4.0\\mathbf{\\hat{j}}\\,\\text{N}$ and ${\\mathbf{\\overset{\\to }{F}}}_{2}=3.0\\mathbf{\\hat{i}}+6.0\\mathbf{\\hat{j}}\\,\\text{N}$ are applied. The forces are coplanar (in the same plane). (a) What is the resultant (net force) of these two force vectors? (b) Find the magnitude and direction of this net force.\n\nShow Solution\n\na. ${\\mathbf{\\overset{\\to }{F}}}_{\\text{net}}=5.0\\mathbf{\\hat{i}}+10.0\\mathbf{\\hat{j}}\\,\\text{N}$; b. the magnitude is ${F}_{\\text{net}}=11\\,\\text{N}$, and the direction is $\\theta =63^\\circ$\n\nA telephone pole has three cables pulling as shown from above, with ${\\mathbf{\\overset{\\to }{F}}}_{1}=(300.0\\mathbf{\\hat{i}}+500.0\\mathbf{\\hat{j}})$, ${\\mathbf{\\overset{\\to }{F}}}_{2}=-200.0\\mathbf{\\hat{i}}$, and ${\\mathbf{\\overset{\\to }{F}}}_{3}=-800.0\\mathbf{\\hat{j}}$. (a) Find the net force on the telephone pole in component form. (b) Find the magnitude and direction of this net force.\n\nTwo teenagers are pulling on ropes attached to a tree. The angle between the ropes is $30.0^\\circ$. David pulls with a force of 400.0 N and Stephanie pulls with a force of 300.0 N. (a) Find the component form of the net force. (b) Find the magnitude of the resultant (net) force on the tree and the angle it makes with David\u2019s rope.\n\nShow Solution\n\na. ${\\mathbf{\\overset{\\to }{F}}}_{\\text{net}}=660.0\\mathbf{\\hat{i}}+150.0\\mathbf{\\hat{j}}\\,\\text{N}$; b. ${F}_{\\text{net}}=676.6\\,\\text{N}$ at $\\theta =12.8^\\circ$ from David\u2019s rope\n\nGlossary\n\ndynamics\nstudy of how forces affect the motion of objects and systems\nexternal force\nforce acting on an object or system that originates outside of the object or system\nforce\npush or pull on an object with a specific magnitude and direction; can be represented by vectors or expressed as a multiple of a standard force\nfree-body diagram\nsketch showing all external forces acting on an object or system; the system is represented by a single isolated point, and the forces are represented by vectors extending outward from that point\nnet external force\nvector sum of all external forces acting on an object or system; causes a mass to accelerate\nnewton\nSI unit of force; 1 N is the force needed to accelerate an object with a mass of 1 kg at a rate of $1\\,{\\text{m\/s}}^{2}$","date":"2021-09-18 07:58:12","metadata":"{\"extraction_info\": {\"found_math\": true, \"script_math_tex\": 0, \"script_math_asciimath\": 0, \"math_annotations\": 0, \"math_alttext\": 0, \"mathml\": 0, \"mathjax_tag\": 0, \"mathjax_inline_tex\": 1, \"mathjax_display_tex\": 0, \"mathjax_asciimath\": 0, \"img_math\": 0, \"codecogs_latex\": 0, \"wp_latex\": 0, \"mimetex.cgi\": 0, \"\/images\/math\/codecogs\": 0, \"mathtex.cgi\": 0, \"katex\": 0, \"math-container\": 0, \"wp-katex-eq\": 0, \"align\": 0, \"equation\": 0, \"x-ck12\": 0, \"texerror\": 0, \"math_score\": 0.6812158226966858, \"perplexity\": 322.1812190431943}, \"config\": {\"markdown_headings\": false, \"markdown_code\": true, \"boilerplate_config\": {\"ratio_threshold\": 0.18, \"absolute_threshold\": 10, \"end_threshold\": 15, \"enable\": true}, \"remove_buttons\": true, \"remove_image_figures\": true, \"remove_link_clusters\": true, \"table_config\": {\"min_rows\": 2, \"min_cols\": 3, \"format\": \"plain\"}, \"remove_chinese\": true, \"remove_edit_buttons\": true, \"extract_latex\": true}, \"warc_path\": \"s3:\/\/commoncrawl\/crawl-data\/CC-MAIN-2021-39\/segments\/1631780056348.59\/warc\/CC-MAIN-20210918062845-20210918092845-00116.warc.gz\"}"} | null | null |
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He holds the Cambridge DELTA and also a postgraduate degree in English Language Teaching and Applied Linguistics from Kings College London.
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Q: Optimise processing of for loop? I have this basic dataframe:
dur type src dst
0 0 new 543 1
1 0 new 21 1
2 1 old 4828 2
3 0 new 321 1
...
(total 450000 rows)
My aim is to replace the values in src with either 0, 1 or 2 depending on the values. I created a for loop/if else below:
for i in df['src']:
if i <= 1000:
df['src'].replace(to_replace = [i], value = [1], inplace = True)
elif i <= 2500:
df['src'].replace(to_replace = [i], value = [2], inplace = True)
elif i <= 5000:
df['src'].replace(to_replace = [i], value = [3], inplace = True)
else:
print('End!')
The above works as intended, but it is awfully slow trying to replace the entire dataframe with 450000 rows (it is taking more than 30 minutes to do this!).
Is there a more Pythonic way to speed up this algorithm?
A: Try numpy.select, for multiple conditions:
cond1 = df.src.le(1000)
cond2 = df.src.le(2500)
cond3 = df.src.le(5000)
condlist = [cond1, cond2, cond3]
choicelist = [1, 2, 3]
df.assign(src=np.select(condlist, choicelist))
dur type src dst
0 0 new 1 1
1 0 new 1 1
2 1 old 3 2
3 0 new 1 1
A: I have not tested this, but I think this should work
pd.cut(df.src, [0, 1000, 2500, 5000], labels=[1,2,3] )
| {
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A few days ago one of Hebron's least best friends, MK Yossi Beilin, introduced a bill into the Knesset calling for the expulsion of all Jews from Hebron. One of Hebron's best friends, MK Aryeh Eldad, pulled a fast one, introducing the identical bill, except that he exchanged the words, "Jewish Community of Hebron," with the words "Hebron Palestinians."
A great gimmick, which makes a point. Of course the left starting yelling and screaming about racism, to which he replied, 'what about you?" The bill, on its first reading, was defeated 47 to 11.
What bothers me is not Beilin or his friends. They are predictable. I can't say they are totally harmless, but their bark is certainly worse than their bite. What does bother me is the reaction of the present ruling Olmert clan. How did they react? Ministress Ruhama Avraham, answering in the name of the government said that 'this is a diplomatic issue which must be decided by the government, not by the opposition.'
Hearing that response, little red lights start flashing on and off in front of my eyes. My good friends at Arutz 7-Israel National News called me for a response, and this is what I told them:It is ironic that during the very weeks we are reading about Abraham, Hebron, and purchase of Ma'arat HaMachpela, the Knesset should be dealing with a bill promoting expulsion of Jews from Hebron, following in the footsteps of Nazi Mufti Haj Amin el-Hussainei and the British in 1929.
The government response also leaves much to be desired. The response should have been: Hebron, the first Jewish city in the land of Israel, home of our Patriarchs and Matriarchs, site of the 2nd holiest place to Jews in the world, is part of the eternal essence of the Jewish people, the Jewish state and Jewish heritage. It does not stand to reason that such a subject should even be broached. Hebron will remain an integral part of the State of Israel forever." So should have been the response. The fact that it was not so only strengthens the fact that this government must be toppled as soon as possible and a new government, recognizing Hebron's significance, should take power.
Over 70,000 people visited Hebron from R"H Elul thru the end of Succot and tens of thousands are expected next Shabbat, when we read about the purchase of Ma'arat HaMachpela. This is our strength, this is our support and this is our future! [http://www.israelnationalnews.com/News/News.aspx/ 124023]
So, the question to be addressed is: why? Why didn't Ministress Avraham (name ring a bell?) say that Hebron will remain Jewish forever?
In the past, PM Olmert, talking about Ma'arat HaMachpela, exclaimed that Israel would never relinquish that holy site. However, he neglected to speak about the Jewish COMMUNITY of Hebron.
Over a half a year ago the Hebron Jewish Community completed purchase of a new, huge structure between Hebron and Kiryat Arba, called it Beit HaShalom, the Peace House, and moved in. Inevitably, due to pressure from the left, and an Arab yelling 'wolf wolf' ('forgery forgery' – which probably saved his life – otherwise he would have been tortured and killed), the case has been in court, and a final decision has yet to be made.
When we bought the building and moved in, the structure was nothing more than a shell. The community installed plasterboard walls, dividing the empty halls into rooms, allowing families to move in. However, there weren't any windows installed, nor were their electric lines hooked up to the building.
Due to leftwing demands and pressures, any construction in the building must be okayed by the Israeli "Civil Administration" or the Defense ministry. A couple of months ago, in preparation for winter, the community requested permission to: install windows, tar the roof to prevent leakage, and install electric lines to allow necessary heating in the building. These requests were based solely on humanitarian needs. The answer we received, straight from the desk of Defense Minister Ehud Barak was "NO!" No electricity, no windows and yes to a leaky roof.
Why did Barak so respond? Seemingly, he wishes to apply pressure on Yesha leaders to agree to remove so-called illegal 'hill-top settlements' (ma'ahzim) without a fight. A total building freeze in Judea and Samaria, including such sanctions in Hebron is, as far as he's concerned, a step in the right (left) direction.
Yet, I'm not so sure. The government and its long, extended arms, have been giving Hebron much grief. Barak refused to reconsider the expulsion and destruction of the homes in the Shalhevet neighborhood this past summer, despite the advice of some of his closest advisors. The 'Civil Administration' has plans to destroy another apartment and a room added onto another home as soon as they get a green light from the Supreme Court. The prosecutor's office is backing the planned destruction. Other pro-Arab, dangerous to Jews measures are also planned for the near future. Where is this all leading to? What is the 'between the lines' translation of Ministress Ruhama Avraham's response concerning Hebron?
I supposed you've already guessed. The answer starts with an "A." No, it's not the regime's report card. But it very well could be Annapolis.
Olmert won't be able to make any deals with Abu-Babbu about Jerusalem; that's still too sticky an issue. He will be able to come out with a declaration about a Palestinian state – 'everyone' agrees with that. But he needs something else, an issue with meat on the bones, to prove one hundred percent that he's serious, that he means business. He needs an issue that 'all' agree is a big bone stuck in the throat of the piece process. The big bone, is, of course, the 'settlements.' Which 'settlement' is the biggest and baddest of them all? Hebron. So what could be better than an announcement in Washington, about the impending removal of those 'problematic' Jews from Hebron?!
I wish it was a far-fetched idea. Unfortunately, I'm not sure it is. I don't know, of course, but wouldn't be surprised.
Who is standing behind the pressure on Israel to make such far reaching concessions? Undoubtedly, the White House. But WHO in the White House? George W. may give his blessings, but the woman running the show, (no, not Hillary yet), is Ms. Rice. Condi, looking for a place in history, realizes that it's now or never. And the American Secretary of State has a lot of punch behind her words. And she's punching, real hard. And George W is saying a lot of Amens.
What have Ms Rice and Mr Bush forgotten? Following the expulsion from Gush Katif the Americans suffered a tremendous catastrophe in New Orleans. Tens of thousands of people were forced from their homes due to the storms and flooding waters of Katrina. That was AFTER some 10,000 people were expelled from Gush Katif and the northern Shomron.
This time lightening struck BEFORE; Just saying the words Jerusalem, Judea, Samaria (and about 80,000 people) – and some 500,000 people had to be evacuated from their houses, with over 1,500 homes destroyed.
Everyone knows that George W. is a 'born-again. And it's said that Condi is real religious herself. But it seems they've forgotten that the G-d of Israel watches over his people, and thoughts and pressures concerning Jerusalem, Hebron, and Eretz Yisrael can have serious repercussions.
According to media reports, authorities in California are looking for arsonists who intentionally set the hellish blaze. Those really responsible are planning the next cataclysm out of the White House: George W and Condi. I call them 'the burning bush' and 'fried rice.'
It should be worthwhile to keep in mind that this may have been the heavenly response to verbal expression of the expulsion from Judea, Samaria and Jerusalem. G-d forbid, what might occur should it actually happen? First, the middle of the country, and now, the west coast. Where's next? Hope we never have to find out. It's preferable not to test the Almighty.
With blessings from Hebron. | {
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# Barefoot Running
* * *
## The Top Three Takeaways
By Charlie Reid
**The closer you are to nature — to what is absolutely natural (not man-made "nature") — the healthier you'll be.** The Centenarian Culture, who lived in a natural setting, exhibited low stress, local-natural diet, high levels of activity throughout the lifespan, most goods produced locally. Discover your movement potential by rooting yourself into the ground with your own feet without the use of shoes and orthotics.
We believe the highest mark of a human being is that person's ability to create or accomplish something out of nothing. Movement, either barefoot or in minimalist footwear, is an expression of this paradigm and is central to our personal choice to explore our own bodies and the possibilities they hold. We already know what orthotics and expensive footwear can do, but what can you do when you take them off? **You are enough without shoes, and we hope this is just one step in your journey to a healthier, happier self.**
**Some Potential Reasons To Go Barefoot:**
* Increased balance.
* Better body awareness through a more reactive foot/ankle.
* Better posture (elevated heels and shoes distort the body's posture)
* Potential decrease in plantar fasciitis and foot-related pain.
**Barefoot is the number one way to enter into the sphere of health!** It's very positive. People get into pain cycles because they're disconnected from their bodies. Be aware of how you sit every day. Be aware of your movement habits (or lack of movement). After several of our clients injected barefoot movement into their day it began to open up other things in their life like eating better and sleeping more. The fantastic thing about any health practice is that once you start to improve one area of your life, things begin to improve in other areas of it.
**Have fun, don't be overly exuberant, work within yourself, and use the tools in this book to help guide your barefoot/minimalist footwear journey.**
## The Evolution Of Walking Humans
By Josh Leeger
Way back in our history, something shifted to give our distant ancestors a greater advantage. **We started to walk on 2 legs exclusively, gaining the ability to use our hands separately from our feet.**
What caused the shift? We can't say, but we look at chimpanzees and other close relatives to observe their bipedal activity.
Chimps and other hominids typically don't walk on two legs for long periods of time. However, they will use a two-legged stance to reach for food. As species adapt to swinging between branches, **the body changes and adapts to demands placed on it by a new posture** (Sylvester, 2006).
Similarly, for us, morphological changes over time (use-patterns, biomechanical efficiency, mutation or other factors) were almost certainly part of our adaption process. All told, this wasn't a short series of simple "steps" to bipedalism. It was a long stumbling road with fits and starts that led to the first bipedal ape, or humans. (Preuschoft, 2004).
### The History Of The Shoe
Humans are known for their creativity and ingenuity. If we imagine early humans, we think of animals that constantly recognized potential in their environment. They developed new tools, tried new things, figured things out.
Once we began walking upright, all of our load was focused onto 2 points – our feet. Not only that, but we began to cover all types of terrain. It probably wasn't long before we figured out that we could reduce injuries from sharp sticks, rocks or other natural features by covering our feet.
Evidence shows that the use of footwear goes as far back as 24,000 years. One researcher provides a very good, if highly technical, overview of the effects of footwear on the foot – primarily on the increase of the arch and the decrease in the robustness of the big toe, especially of the lateral foot. **The evolution of the modern foot is related to the use of footwear.** This process continues to a very large extent with the advent of the modern "running shoe" with its over-sized wedge heel (Trinkaus, E., 2005).
## Why Barefoot?
By Josh Leeger
"Barefooting" is a full-body way to enter into the sphere of health and has positive impacts on total wellness. The "sphere of health" is the many ways toward improvement of physical, emotional, spiritual and communal health.
When you address one part of this sphere, your consciousness wakes up and you begin to pay attention to other components of the sphere. When you take your shoes off you get better sensory feedback from your environment and can start to regain function lost from years of wearing shoes. This affects your physical health in a positive way. Barefooting is a way to enter the sphere of health then branch out and make positive changes in other areas of your life.
**It is our belief that the body is the most beautiful piece of machinery ever created, and the foot is surely one of the human body's greatest features.** We cannot make arguments saying that taking off one's shoes will lead to decreases in foot pain, better balance, more efficient running, etc, although we've seen plenty of anecdotal cases of this from our clients, friends, and colleagues. There is something very liberating about taking off your shoes. Remember the joy you felt as a child when you ran down the beach towards the water, or played in the front yard in the sprinklers?
For us, barefooting was a personal choice. As health and fitness coaches, we always look at current research, new training methods, techniques and equipment. However, over the years, we've noticed that the simplest solution is usually the best. We've heard time and time again about the benefits of choosing the right footwear and the right orthotics, but the foot is an adaptable structure like the rest of the body. **What if a barefoot movement practice, over time, strengthened the foot, thus influencing the rest of the body's function?**
So, we started taking our shoes off, working out, walking, running and hiking – all barefoot. This seemed to lead to better balance and coordination, as well as pointed out flaws in technique during different exercises (this isn't something we can prove in a lab — if you want the data, it just isn't there yet). The next step was our clients. We had our clients take their shoes off, and what we noticed was nothing short of awesome: **b** **alance, strength and coordination all improved!**
This makes sense, especially considering how thick and unstable some shoes are. They distort the body's ability to send feedback from the ground up. Taking our shoes off and proposing our clients do the same was an exciting expedition, exploring the possibilities of a life lived without overly-supportive footwear.
However, we discovered that it wasn't exactly that simple. Indigenous cultures used to travel barefoot their whole lives. They began as barefoot infants and continued to remain so throughout their adult lives. Most of the rest of us have grown up with shoes. That isn't necessarily a bad thing, but it is something that needs to be balanced. **The reality is that barefooting should be a mix of both.**
Everybody's journey is going to be different; everybody's going to start at a different pace. Check with a physician first. If you have severe foot issues or dysfunctional feet, then start at a slower pace. If you have loss of sensation, nerve damage, or diabetes, going completely barefoot may not be a good option for you. Some people have more functional feet. Perhaps they've played soccer since they were 6. They're going to have good foot function. But you have to earn that functionality before you push the envelope.
That being said, we've had several clients with running backgrounds explore barefooting. They might only barefoot one day a week for 30 minutes! But even if it is only once a week you will benefit from taking your shoes off.
You will enjoy the positive effects of your balance and your newfound ability to sense your own weight. You will learn how to efficiently absorb forces which are largely responsible for poor movement function, poor balance, poor movement quality, and possible over-use injuries.
Why will you learn how to absorb force better as your foot contacts the ground? Because **shoes blunt the response and cause forces to localize around just 1 or 2 joints (usually the foot/ankle complex and the knee), instead of learning how to absorb force with ALL of the body's load joints.**
So, is the guy with the shoe going to be able to run faster than the guy who's barefoot? Yeah, probably. Will it be better for his body? Questionable! Elite athletics aren't necessarily about health. Elite athletics are about pushing the envelope of performance. There's a point where fitness and health intersect and there's a point where they go in divergent directions.
We would make the argument that elite athletics are actually very unhealthy for the body because of the volume of work load. Elite athletes, depending on the sport, age out or retire when they're 30 with nagging aches and pains all the way up to joint replacements.
Does barefoot running make you faster? **It can by way of improving your mechanics and teaching full body integration.** But if your goal is to be an elite level 100 meter sprinter in the Olympics, is barefooting on the Olympic track going to win? No.
Many heated arguments arise when the barefoot/minimalist footwear guys get into verbal fisticuffs with guys that opt for shoes and orthotics. This is an argument that will only lead to exhaustion over time, as the debate seems to always come down to evidence for one versus the other. **We encourage people to find their own reasons for why they choose to take off their shoes.**
## Structure Of The Foot – Nature's Beautiful Design
By Charlie Reid
The human foot combines mechanical complexity and structural strength. The ankle serves as foundation, shock absorber, and propulsion engine. The foot can sustain enormous pressure (several tons over the course of a one-mile run) and provides flexibility and resiliency.
The foot and ankle contain:
* 25% of body's bones.
* 26 bones (One-quarter of the bones in the human body are in the feet).
* 33 joints.
* More than 100 muscles, tendons (fibrous tissues that connect muscles to bones), and ligaments (fibrous tissues that connect bones to other bones).
* A network of blood vessels, nerves, skin, and soft tissue.
These components work together to provide the body with support, balance, and mobility. A structural flaw or malfunction in any one part can result in the development of problems elsewhere in the body. Abnormalities in other parts of the body can lead to problems in the feet, and vice versa.
### Your Foot is a Shock Absorber
The joints of your legs are designed to absorb the impact forces you experience when living your life. **Contrary to popular opinion, these joints should last the entirety of your life, even with very heavy use.** Misuse and abuse are typically the culprits in things like osteoarthritis and other issues with the joints of the body – not "wear and tear."
If you look at the anatomy of the foot there are an incredible amount of nerve endings that originate in the foot and go up to the spinal cord and give us a position sense: that's how we right ourselves and balance. As bipedal animals we partly depend on our feet for posture and balance. **When you put your foot in a shoe you're sending blunted or diminished signals up to the rest of your body.** That is body awareness – how is your body loading?
We have a couple exercises in here that teach you how to load through the foot with your shoes off versus with them on. The book Muscles & Meridians talks about how lumbar spine control is directly correlated with the nerve endings in your feet. **Your feet are the first line of defense.** (Beach, P. 2010)
If your feet are not as active as they should be it will affect all the building blocks above. **Plantar fasciitis happens when there are soft tissue movement restrictions in the foot itself because it's been bound up in a shoe – things are really, really tight and inflamed.** Many people suffer from plantar fascia pain. Barefooting allows the foot to move and spread outwards. When the foot is allowed to spread out it can actually be a nice foot massage.
A great physiotherapist from Australia, Joanne Elphinston, talks about "the listening foot". **Your feet are your prime sensory organs that inform and awaken the body to get everything to work in harmony.** If you don't have good awareness or control of your feet then the rest of the joints above don't stand a chance. Stability, Sport and Performance Movement
That being said, it's time to talk about the way you walk.
## How Shoes Affect Your Feet: Pros And Cons
By Josh Leeger
We mention this here because there are many "barefoot-only" folks out there. We have nothing against them or their mission, **but it's dangerous (both from a mental and physical perspective) to assert that we should only ever be barefoot.** The use of shoes is an important protective measure in many places. Shoes can save us a lot of pain, especially in big cities, where large populations lead to broken glass and other hazards in the streets. **The trick is to wear the best shoes for your feet.**
While shoe-wearing doesn't change the musculature of the fore-foot, it does change the pliability of the fore-foot, resulting in lower pliability for people who wear shoes. Modern shoes have a narrow toe box and medial arch supports, leading to decreased natural function of the foot. **Your toes cannot spread as they do when barefoot, so the muscles of your feet don't get the relaxation they need on a regular basis.**
This also affects the absorptive properties of your foot, which are jammed into a smaller surface area and directed through narrowed (though thicker) channels of tissue. This combination of lack of movement and focused force results in strain on the structures of the foot and leads to symptoms like plantar fasciitis (Kadambande, et al., 2007).
**Most running shoes create very real sensory deprivation.** Aboriginal barefooters pick up specific information about their environment from their feet. Your skin absorbs all kinds of elements from the environment around it. Contact with the earth provides not only information about temperature and texture but also information about soil health, which is directly related to your own health.
A different paper's bottom line says that the use of footwear seems to lead to an **increase in the appearance of what is called "hallux valgus."** That means that the tip of the big toe points away from the midline of the body, toward the outside of the foot – especially when the footwear in question is ill-fitting (too small, too tight, inflexible, etc.).
Over time, this situation leads to the formation of bunions (which is when the bone around the toe reforms to match the new angle of strain). The paper finds that, **"a hallux that already exhibits valgus deviation often tends to straighten when footwear allows spreading of the toes"** (Barnett, C.H., "The normal orientation of the human hallux and the effect of footwear", pg. 493, 1962)."
### Hallux Valgus
So, **if your shoes are the cause of hallux valgus (and they may not be, there may be other bio-mechanical issues your body is dealing with), switching to a shoe that allows your toes to spread will help reverse the process.** Barnett's findings above have been supported over the years, notably and recently, by Zipfel and Berger (2007).
Not only is the information above not new it shouldn't be surprising! Part of the reason for hallux valgus, as pointed out by Barnett, is the weakening of the muscle that controls the movement of the big toe away from the other toes – the abductor hallucis. This leads to a discussion about why some people who don't wear restrictive footwear exhibit hallux valgus and foot deformations. These are the "biomechanical issues" mentioned in the parentheses above.
**The body is a long "kinetic chain," where the forces from any part of the body extend to every other part in some way shape or form.** There is no part of your body (or brain) that is not connected directly to every other part. The distinctions we make between body parts are useful in learning anatomy and physiology, and in focusing on particular areas, but they are also misleading if we forget to reconnect the parts with the whole.
If you have a postural deviation (such as rounded shoulders and a forward head position, also known as "upper crossed syndrome") that deviation extends down the entire body to the feet. **Your entire body will attempt to compensate to keep you upright,** and to keep your head on top of your body, with your eyes pointing straight ahead, so that you're able to see your environment.
**Those deviations at the top will cause you to put more pressure on the inside of your foot than across the entire surface.** That pressure will lead to a turning out of the entire foot (valgus, again), as well as a turning-out of the big toe. Voila! Hallux Valgus!
## Modern Gait
By Josh Leeger
Let's look at modern gait research. Modern gait research studies the human foot in a shoe. However, **"The human foot was anatomically modern, and therefore fully functional for bipedal walking and endurance running, more than 100,000 years ago"** (D'Aout, et al., 2009, pg. 103).
Habitual use of the type of rigid footwear in vogue in our current culture extends back to the 17th century – and at that time was seen mostly in wealthy, or aristocratic populations. Widespread use of rigid footwear by a majority of Western Europeans probably only began around the time of industrialization – about 150 years ago.
**Can we safely say that after 100 years of research we have a truly good understanding of normal human gait (as in "physiologically normal" – considering that the human species has existed without footwear for roughly 100,000 years)?**
In addition to the changes that shoe wear has brought we are also not as active as we once were. 2 researchers found that the "removal of 8500 steps (dropping from ~10,000 to ~1500) in the absence of a structured exercise program for two weeks results in abnormal physiological changes in healthy young men". **It is difficult to guarantee accurate gait studies research when our daily activity levels have dropped so much.** Can we claim to have studied "physiologically normal" human gait at all, with or without shoes (Booth and Laye, 2009, pg. 2)?
All this means that we are studying an abnormal population in terms of morphology and kinematics, due to the use of footwear (and the accompanying loss of tissue tone and function accompanying that loss of normal movement). In addition we are studying a potentially (in terms of gross physiology) abnormal population (in terms of our evolutionary history). One that suffers from a lack of sufficient movement in general, and the accompanying loss of proprioception and tissue strength and tone.
The point is that if we use our bodies in ways closer to how it evolved we will have healthier, more active lifestyles with fewer problems and less pain.
# Why Barefoot?
_"Barefooting is a full body way to enter into the sphere of health and has positive impacts on total wellness."_
* * *
## Is Barefooting Bad For You?
By Charlie Reid
There's really no comprehensive resource out there that shows how to progress in barefooting. **We did it wrong and that's the reason we wrote this book!**
Ever since the release of McDougall's "Born to Run" there's been an influx of people taking their shoes off. However, we see two things. First, poor mechanics, and second, runners with the bad habit of ONLY running (not doing soft tissue work, movement preparation, strength or conditioning).
Josh and I are by no means elite endurance athletes or long distance runners. However, because of our backgrounds as personal trainers and movement geeks, barefoot has always made sense to us. We've always incorporated it into our training. A couple years ago, we decided to do some long distance barefoot running. We accrued mileage upwards of 15 miles per run at one point.
**We took it over the top.** The first run was 3 miles; it was easy and it felt good. We scaled it up so rapidly that barely 4 weeks after our first run we attempted a 15 mile run from San Francisco to Tiburon. Bad! It was way too far, much too soon.
With shoes, we could have done it. If we had brought regular running shoes and changed into them at some point it would have been a different story but we didn't. We did it wrong and picked up some foot injuries and knee pain. We are personal trainers — you'd think we'd be smarter — but we made mistakes just like anybody else.
That particular run exemplifies the fact that over-training or chronic overuse syndromes develop from not progressing in a logical manner. **You may not get injured immediately but if you try to do incredible leaps in your barefoot mileage you'll pay in escalating foot, ankle, back and knee pain.**
**The biggest concern for barefooters are soft tissue issues.** Even though your cardiovascular system and conditioning may be in good shape, your tendon, ligaments, and fascial structures need time to catch up and adapt after wearing shoes your whole life.
We are going to match your goals and expectations in a logical intuitive way. Manage your expectations. Don't get ahead of yourself. It's easy to be super excited and then go run without shoes. It's also easy to burn out or get injured. We want you to have a logical progression! You're doing something your body isn't 100 percent adapted to, so go slow.
We don't recommend running completely barefoot in most cities! This is where minimalist footwear comes in handy. **Don't start barefoot running on super hard surfaces or near broken glass and hazardous materials.** Use common sense. Go to a beach or grassy park that you know is free from hazards. Start training there: the pretty natural places to be barefoot! **Remember, your instinct is your best guide!**
We're probably reaching the peak of barefoot running now. But it's only going to get better. However, in the next 1-5 years we're going to see more injuries. There's going to be an escalating number of people with injuries who don't know why they're hurt. It's because they didn't develop a logical plan, they likely have poor running mechanics, they probably aren't doing soft tissue/recovery work and/or they don't have the requisite strength and stability to run correctly.
Before taking off your shoes, let's start with an appreciation of the foot through a brief anatomy lesson.
## Heel Strikes and Barefoot Running
By Josh Leeger
**We tend to think the right way to walk is to land on our heel, roll across the middle of our foot, and then off of our toes at the front.** While this is one way of walking, it's probably only healthy to walk this way in very limited settings, where the ground is soft, and activity is occurring at a nice slow pace. However, most of us walk this way all the time. Why is that?
A big part of the reason is the shoes we wear. **Observe children who do not wear shoes often. They walk with a mid-foot strike.** You'll also notice that children around the ages of 3-5 will frequently walk up on their toes.
In fact, we've seen blog entries and ask-it websites where concerned mothers ask if it's healthy that their children are spending so much time on their toes. Try it for yourself, and see what happens. **Stand up, take your shoes off, and then rise up as far as you can onto the balls of your feet.** The stance provides a lot of body information about balance and how to get better body balance; it also results in your toes spreading out more and taking a firmer grip on the ground.
Most modern shoes are made with a large heel. The shoe then slopes down to a thinner front-sole. This type of shoe, with a high heel, and thin sole, became popular in the Victorian era, primarily for two reasons. 1st, it made men taller, and 2nd, it kept your feet out of the filth on the streets. The ramifications of wearing a shoe like that, though, are huge.
J.R. Napier (1957) divides the foot into two sections. The outer half of your foot (the last two toes and their supporting musculature) is for support, while the inner portion is devoted to locomotion. **The foot is a lever, and the fulcrum is the talus.** The plantar aponeurosis (or, "plantar fascia" – a sheath of connective tissue that runs along the bottom of your foot) is what is responsible for the arch in your foot. It runs from your heel bone (calcaneus) to the tops of your metatarsals (the long bones in your feet, just before the toe-bones, or "phalanges").
In children the plantar fascia is connected directly to the achilles tendon. Our animal ancestors have a single tendon running the length down the backs of their legs to the bases of their toes. **Children are born without arches, mostly because of the continuity of the plantar fascia with the achilles tendon.**
As the achilles and plantar fascia begin to differentiate, the child is also building strength in the muscles of the feet. In particular, they are flexing their toes, which is increasing the size and strength of the toe flexors that lie directly under the plantar fascia, and they are dorsiflexing (or, extending) their toes (as they do when they stand on the balls of their feet for extended periods), which pulls the plantar fascia taught, increasing the arch in the foot. This piece of connective tissue is critical to normal walking. It is highly elastic, and provides a great deal of elastic energy to normal walking.
The foot is built to take the impact of stepping on the outside part of the middle-portion of the foot first. The outside two toes and their supporting bones and muscles are "shock absorbers" for the rest of the foot. They spread a great deal during barefoot running. Don't believe me? **Go run in some wet sand, and then compare the width of your running-footprint with the width of your foot.**
A shoe with a very large heel will force you up onto your toes all the time. Your heel cannot come down, or provide the fulcrum for forward-movement. A shoe with a slightly lower heel means that you'll tend to strike the heel first, or at least at the same time as the forefoot. Again, you lose the downward/backward pressure of the heel, pulling you forward.
For a great overview of how the running shoe industry became what it is, check out Christopher McDougall's article, The painful truth about trainers: Are running shoes a waste of money?
# How To Start Barefoot Running
_"Conditioning of the foot happens best by being barefoot more often. Any other method creates reliance on the tool itself."_
* * *
## Starting Barefoot Running
By Charlie Reid
First let's establish some guidelines:
**Know Where You Are Now**
First, you need to assess where you're starting from. Any person of any age group can present a different path. If you have had no experience with barefoot movement (from growing up in the age of the Marshmallow Shoe), you will be ill-prepared to get into barefooting. A 50-something who grew up in the 50's and 60's will most likely have been barefoot quite often as a child and actually have a better neuro-muscular memory than someone with no barefoot experience.
**Know Where You're Going**
Understand the way your feet function and the reasons for different footwear at different times. Also, different people have different goals, and will require different types of footwear to meet those goals. What is your desired end-point?
The 1st step is to learn to listen within and know where you are. From here, we have drafted a program for conditioning the body for barefoot running that will help avoid any overuse injuries or chronic pain.
**Be barefoot more often.** A lot of people come home from work and keep their shoes on. When you get home take your shoes and socks off! Think about the amount of time spent training barefoot running. It might be an hour a day for a really excited person. But think about how much time you spend at home walking over the course of the day or weekend – it's 10 fold! That is the corollary to learning how to do it well, start doing it more often. Period.
### The Short Foot
One way to begin to condition your feet when you begin is to practice a technique called "The Short Foot."
Begin by standing barefoot on a flat floor. Now "shorten" your foot from heel to toe, focusing on shortening the middle-portion of your foot, between the pad above the ball of your foot and your heel. When done correctly, your arch and the middle portion of your foot will naturally "rise."
You want to do this movement without flexing or pressing with your toes. Focus on the muscles in the middle of the sole of your foot shortening to create your "short foot."
Practice this technique whenever and wherever you can. It's going to be especially helpful, of course, right before you go barefoot running!
While this set of instructions provides a relatively straightforward technique for creating a "short foot," the instructions are really just a set of tools to help you to mimic a way of interacting with the ground.
So, once you've practiced the technique above a few times, and you feel like you've achieved a good "short foot," practice the following.
First, think about how you shake hands with another person. There are all sorts of handshakes you could potentially use, so let's take the example of shaking hands with someone you really like a lot and who you're really excited to see (maybe you haven't seen them for a long time). It's the kind of handshake you might give right before giving someone a hug!
Stand barefoot again on a flat floor. This time, imagine the ground is your friend's hand, and with each step, you're shaking your friend's (the ground's) "hand" with your bare foot. Use the "short foot" technique to express your pleasure at seeing your "friend" again!
As you get into barefoot running, this simple concept will help you to keep your "short foot," and to engage a loving exuberance for the ground you're running with!
**KEY POINT:** Make sure to master the short foot drill before moving on to other portions of movement training like balance games, strength training and running barefoot. The short foot posture should be maintained during all of these drills without compensations like toe-gripping or collapsing of the arches.
## Barefoot Training Assessments
By Charlie Reid
### Single Leg Squat Assessment
This next drill looks at the stability and strength of the body while standing on one leg. This is important because if one does not have good control of the down leg when running, it can lead to pain down the road. The first pre-requisite is to make sure you can stand on one-leg, maintaining the short foot posture for 30 seconds. Once that is established, you'll want to go down into a single leg squat by flexing the hips and bending the knees at the same time. Then, straighten up and come up onto the toes. Do this for 10 repetitions on each side. You have passed this test if you can do the following:
* Maintain short foot posture throughout (no collapsing of the arch or gripping of the toes)
* No touchdown of opposite foot during the attempt
* No diving in of the knee
* No excess wobbling (should be smooth and controlled)
* Ability to keep all joints stacked in a straight line on the same side (shoulder, hip, knee and ankle)
If you are able to complete 10 repetitions on both sides cleanly, then you have given yourself a good insurance policy that your body can handle impact safely while running. If you did not pass, then you should focus more on strengthening work and balancing activities that are listed in the cross-training sections of this book. Re-test the single leg squat periodically to see if your stability and strength have improved. Once you have cleared the test, you are fit to start your running practice.
### Balance Games
* Balance Game With Shoes On – Then Off
* One Leg Against A Partner
* Ball Tossing
* Closing Eyes
* Hacky Sack
**Try to stand on one leg. Do that for longer than 10 or 30 seconds.** It's a great indicator of your body's ability to balance and stabilize.
The key to progressing back to a barefoot state is being barefoot. Our feet, ankles, and knees are used to being shod. Try it first with shoes on. It will condition your knees, hips, and sense of balance. Then do it barefoot and you'll can see the difference when the foot is involved. . **Try standing on one leg, facing a partner.** Touch fingers. Start close together, finger to finger, then begin to spread out. Reach across bodies so you increase the distance from your base of support. That teaches the body how to right itself properly. The further out your hand gets from your body the more of a challenge it is to balance.
Try tossing a ball back and forth with a partner.
Another experiment is to close your eyes. **We depend a lot on our visual system for balance and often we don't develop our auditory or inner ear vestibular system and our proprioception in our body (the nerve endings in our body).** When you close your eyes it can severely limit your balance capabilities.
Hacky sack is a fun way to inject balance training. We try to inject fun into balance exercises because sometimes just standing on one leg is BORING! Inject a ball or something. It makes things more fun and engaging and creates an interactive and dynamic process (as opposed to "touch this target, now touch this target").
Ramp up the games. **Challenge your static balance.** Static and dynamic balance are different so the way your body organizes itself moving is different from the way it organizes itself standing. Another idea is to use a partner to stabilize you as you move around on one leg. It's almost like wrestling. Try to unbalance the other a little, but at the same time support each other. That way you're getting dynamic balance as well as static.
**Balance should be something that is very open chain.** Your body should learn how to react quickly while trail running. Things change as you run through your environment. Your body needs to learn to react quickly to whatever stimulus it receives at a moment's notice. Balance should be variable like that and games are a great way to ramp up.
Experiment and make up your own games. By judging a ball trajectory or working with a partner doing various exercises you learn how to properly balance barefoot.
Practice the exercises. That is the corollary to learning how to do it well, start doing it more often. Period.
The human body is really smart, it adapts to whatever stimulus you give it. Your body will develop balance for the shoe when you have a shoe on. Put on something with a really thick EBA sole, stand on it, balance, and move your leg around, the opposite leg. You can see the instability of the foot as the body tries to right itself on the squishy surface. You'll see improvements in balance when you take the shoe off. **When your foot is on solid ground it's not getting mixed signals.** It's able to grip the ground. It's solid.
Squishy or thick shoes don't send the best signal back up to your body. That can lead to rolled ankles, poor foot loading or arch collapse. Take your shoes off and you instantly get better feedback from the ground up.
## Barefoot Running Obstacles
By Josh Leeger
Give yourself realistic expectations about how your body should be progressing. Look within yourself, trust your instincts. The 1st step is to understand where you are at, honor that, and then work from that sphere out as your function improves.
Running in an urban environment as opposed to living in the countryside is potentially injurious. Be aware of your environment.
Life can be unpredictable sometimes. Lifestyle factors matter. If you're on your feet a lot that could pose a problem.
### Get Connected
It's good to go with people who are doing what you're doing, maybe experiencing it for the first time. Why feel like a social outcast? Find a group or running buddy. There are many resources for that. Try meetup.com, Facebook Groups or Google Groups.
For further research please look into the Exuberant Animal training group. There are some great resources on Barefoot Ted McDonald's blog . Chris McDougall, the author of "Born to Run" has regular blog here . Paleo groups like <http://paleohacks.com> are gaining ground.
Barefoot running is becoming increasingly popular so nowadays most cities have some sort of group. Its great to be around people who are into what you are getting into.
# Choosing Your Minimalist Shoe
_"We've been through this personally..."_
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## Barefoot Running Shoe Reviews and Recommendations
By Charlie Reid
The minimalist shoe is for when you can't be completely barefoot. **There is no substitute for actual barefoot training!** However, there are shoes that are smart for urban environments or areas that may be hazardous. Also, there are certain shoe models that are good for the transition from a more cushioned shoe to a less cushioned shoe. We've been through this personally so these are real recommendations!
Step 1 – Look for shoes with a low-and-flat profile, the more neutral heel the better. (Adidas, Puma, etc.)
Step 2 – Find a shoe with a thin and highly flexible sole (Vivo, etc.)
### **4 Popular Minimal Shoes**
Vibram 5 Fingers Luna Sandal Saucony Hattori Merrill Trail Glove & Pace Glove
**TheVibram 5 Fingersare absolutely the hottest barefoot shoe out there.** The pros of the Vibram shoe is that it separates the toes so it helps the foot regain strength (in terms of intrinsic foot muscles) and gives some flex (so you're strengthening lengthwise). The cons are actually also that it separates the toes. When you run on really hard surfaces it can separate the toes. Mine inflamed the nerve that goes between the toes.
Vibrams are pretty close to running barefoot. If you're using 5 Fingers it should be on soft surfaces. To give fair warning – they stink after a while. You won't get the smell out, that's just how it goes.
Incidentally, The 5 Fingers started as a boating/yachting shoe. Barefoot Ted and others began running in them and they started selling more and more. We think they're pretty awesome! **Summary – they're great for walking, hiking, and running on soft surfaces.**
**The 2nd one is theLuna Sandal, made by Barefoot Ted.** His sandals are pricey, one of the cons. Also, since they're sandals they aren't great at making fast turns. Your foot will shift on the platform. Get used to it or at least be aware!
The pros for the Luna are that the feet are completely open to the air and the foot bed is super flexible; your foot really gets to contract and feel the ground beneath. Another plus is that the whole foot is exposed to air and sunlight so they're not going to smell like the 5 Fingers.
There're now other brands online that make this type for less. They'll be the same but without the name. Another minus is that you can't wear them in most gyms because they are an open-toe shoe. If you're going to work out you're going to have to have another pair of shoes with you. The straps break now and then, so may have to repair them. Since they're an open shoe, if you're in a wet or really cold climate it's not much fun. **However, this is my absolute favorite shoe for hot, dry days.**
**The Saucony Hattori is a recent minimalist shoe.** It's a more traditional shoe shape, with a little bit thicker sole, so it's a real transitional shoe. And it's rather inexpensive, which is another pro. Because it's a normal shoe it'll transition from the trail to a indoor gym environment. **We think it is a fantastic transitional shoe and the price is really good.**
**Terra Plana EVOs are very minimalist; the sole is very thin.** It's kind of like a normal shoe shape with the Vibram 5 Finger super thin sole. It's a fantastic shoe – I have nothing bad to say about. They aren't super-expensive.
**The Merrill Trail& Pace Gloves.** The men's are the Trail Glove. They're like the New Balance Minimus, a similar type of shoe. It's a great transitional shoe, more for a cross country trail run. It has a decently thin sole without being so thin that it'll hurt if you step on a pointy rock.The price is good. We especially like this shoe for trail running.
# Barefoot Walking & Running Techniques
_"It's efficient and safely reduces impact on the body."_
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## Barefoot Walking and Running Techniques
By Charlie Reid
**The first step is good mechanics.** Exercises are key but your mechanics have to be solid. Barefoot running is different than running with shoes. You're not going to be hitting your heel strike hard. You're going to be sitting more mid-foot.
The key is to understand how to load your body and how to stack your joints properly during the run. When your joints are stacked properly on top of one another, it reduces the wear-and-tear on your body caused by poor alignment. **Good stacking also makes the body more efficient, so you become a better runner who has fewer injuries.**
The foot is actually designed as a shock absorber so when the middle of the foot hits the arch spreads out and the heel comes down with the calf muscle acting as a shock absorber. When you land on your heel the heel can't do anything. The calf muscle and your foot flatten and the muscle on the front of your shin has to work to slow your foot down. That's how people get shin splints!
The **Fingers in Ears Exercise** is to help you get an idea of the amount of impact that you put on your body when you walk in the heel to toe pattern – when you run it's even more!
The exercise is both about getting a sense of the impact on your foot and getting a sense of the fact that how you strike the ground matters, or how you land matters.
First walk like you do normally, hit your heel and roll across your foot onto the front of your foot. When you stick your fingers in your ears you can hear the impact on your body. Do you hear the thud, thud, thud? When you transition to the mid foot strike that disappears, **so it gives you a sense of how the way you hit the ground makes a huge difference in the impact on your body.**
**Foot strike is velocity dependent.** Velocity dependence on gait cycle simply means that the faster you run the more you will come up onto the balls of the feet. There isn't a specific formula or percentage of how much heel or ball there is here, but it serves to be mentioned.
**Walking is done on the front part of the heel.** At slow speeds, it's natural for a person to walk in the "normal" heel-to-toe type of pattern we're familiar with (unless they're stalking an animal, then they do the "Fox Walk"). A heel-toe walking gait is normal on surfaces that are soft enough for the foot. This style of gait actually unlocks the ankle joint, which is a good thing for good foot/ankle function, however, this foot pattern is not as ideal for running.
As you begin to jog, you naturally begin to land closer to the mid-foot. When you watch a world-class sprinter run as fast as they can, they're completely on the ball of their foot the entire time. So foot-strike is velocity (or speed) dependent. The faster you run, or the more like a sprinter you run, the more you are up on your fore-foot.
**A slower distance run is definitely mid-foot.** If you're running slow but landing on your fore-foot you're putting a lot of strain on the bones down at the front of the fore-foot. That can lead to things like neuromas and excess stress as opposed to distributing the force evenly throughout the foot, from the mid-foot forward. When you're learning you're going to go slow anyway, so a mid-foot strike is the most efficient and healthiest way to go.
**Barefoot running requires a foot turnover of 180 bpm.** 180 beats per minute is actually a pretty quick turnover of the feet. A lot of people, and this is running with shoes or not, are over-striders. They stride far out and hit hard on the heel because the leg is fully extended. That puts a braking force on the body instead of allowing the feet to continuously turn over.
The feet should land right underneath the body in line with the hips and shoulders, right in an angle position!
**Turn your feet over quickly so that they aren't on the ground for long.** That puts less stress on the body and is more efficient (once you get the technique down). It feels foreign at first because your feet are moving really fast. But the brilliant thing about this running style, from an efficiency standpoint, is that in order to increase speed all you have to do is lean your shoulders forward and your legs will keep turning over without you having to force with muscles.
To put it another way, your foot absorbs shock and rebounds as you go forward, it hits mid-foot, you get a little bit of a spring, and the hamstring which helps pull the leg back up helps pull it and then reaches back over for the next stride.
You get a lot of motion for free! You're rebounding off your muscles and using stored elastic energy in the soft tissues to turn your body over. It's efficient and safely reduces impact on the body.
The **Kick The Butt Technique** is to pull your heels up toward the glutes. That engages the hamstrings to help turn the body over quicker.
Then there's the triathlete's shuffle. Have you seen runners who hunch their shoulders up, all they way to their ears, and kick their elbows out to the side? When the elbows are kicking out to the side, energy is wasted going side to side, instead of forward. Not only that, but the abdominal muscles are really tight when you crunch into that awkward posture. The slumped posture causes undue fatigue and muscle tightness in the upper back and shoulders. Maintain a nice tall spine at all times when running!
**Diaphragmatic breathing** is essential for oxygenating your tissues and that helps with your running efficiency. Relax the torso and stay tall and lifted. Your posture helps keep the body's breathing cycles better. An upright posture will also help keep your body relaxed. When your body is too tense while running, it wastes a lot of energy and causes your stride to be inefficient. Relaxing the torso helps your breathing and relaxes the nervous system.
This should eventually be an effortless thing after enough practice. When you watch a marathon, the first runners to cross the finish line are almost quiet as they breathe. The more novice runners begin to cross toward the end of the race. Notice the flailing limbs? **That's a running deficiency!** They haven't learned to keep everything in close, relax, and just turn the feet over.
## Barefoot Running on Varied Surfaces
By Josh Leeger
The barefoot running technique **doesn't really change how the foot loads on different surfaces.** As stated above, foot loading is velocity dependent. When you run faster you put a lot more impact on the fore-foot. Period. A beach run will be more demanding in soft sand instead of the hard pack nearer the water. It's going to tax the lower leg musculature and you'll be a lot sorer a lot quicker!
**You may have to cut down your normal pace, distance and time by 25% or more!** Sand shifts and it's going to require more musculature work to rebound to the next step. Firmer surfaces let your body more easily store elastic energy and propel you to next step. Sand absorbs your stride and you have to use muscular work to get your foot out as opposed to using tendons and ligaments to spring it out.
**Use softer natural surfaces in the beginning like grass, or sand.** The more packed the surface is the harder the impact will be on your tissues. There is some debate about this. Some people say if it's a harder surface than a runner will step lighter.
Actually, runners used to running shoes hit the ground hard because they don't have a good sense of how hard they're hitting it. When you go barefoot your body will still be used to running that way and you're going to hit the ground pretty hard. **Soft natural surfaces are definitely the best way to start!**
# Barefoot Cross-Training
_"Add a strength training routine and it will help to bullet proof the body from injury by improving movement quality."_
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## Barefoot Cross-Training
By Charlie Reid
### Movement Preparation and Warm-Up
**When engaging in strength and conditioning training, it is essential to map out a scheduled and incremental plan.** The movement preparation section helps get the body's joints opened and functional. It includes moves that mimic the postures you're going to assume in a run. For example, a half kneeling or split stance helps strengthen the body in that particular range of motion.
These are basic movements that a human body should be doing regardless of whether you run: **squatting, lunging, pushing, pulling and basic core stabilization exercises.** A lot of runners only like to run, but their bodies typically aren't functional enough to maintain a certain level of training. Add a strength training routine and it will help to bullet proof the body from injury by improving movement quality. These exercises should ideally be done 1-2 days a week on days that you are not running.
We'll conclude with YouTube links on how to perform these properly: **Movement Preparation Video**
These movement preparation and strength conditioning exercises are based on our experience of seeing which areas are tightest or most dysfunctional. **This series of movements hits about 80-90% of those areas.**
Later, we'll go over a range of motion assessment, as well as personal self-assessments, to see where your body will specifically need additional stretching for better joint range of motion. Movement prep exercises are designed to wake up sleepy muscles and tight tissues to allow for the body to move most efficiently. **They primarily activate the muscles around the core, hips, and the lower leg so that all of those muscles are firing properly.**
This also wakes the nervous system and brings your attention to areas that may be weak, especially when you compare one side to another. The **warm-up** a step beyond that. But now we've got things turned on in the central nervous system so the brain is really connected. Things are firing properly.
Then we're going to get more vigorous with movement and get the tissues warmed up. **Think of these exercises as a re-alignment and a tune up for the body as well as an insurance policy that will prevent any overuse injuries down the line.**
This sequence should be done prior to a run to mobilize any tight muscles and wake up any sleepy muscles that can inhibit good running mechanics.
* 3D Quad/Hip Flexor Stretch 1 x 5-10 Repetitions Each Position.
* Standing Ankle Mobilization Drill 1 x 10 Repetitions Each Side.
* Cook Hip Lift 1 x 10 Repetitions Each Side.
* Side Lying Clam 1-3 x 10-15 Repetitions Each Side.
* Side Lying Leg Raises 1-3 x 10-15 Repetitions Each Side.
* Bird Dogs 1-3 x 5 Repetitions Each Side (Hold For 2 Breaths At End Range).
* Front Plank 30-60 Seconds.
* Side Plank 30-60 Seconds Each Side.
* Jog 5 Minutes Barefoot Emphasizing Proper Mechanics.
**The** **3D Hip Flexor Stretch:** Many people are very tight in their hip flexors because they sit a lot. That makes the hip flexors really short and impeded. The 3D Hip Stretch incorporates a bar or arms over the head with some spinal movement to open up the shoulders and spine which tend to get really tight from sitting and lack of activity. This stretch opens the hips, shoulders and thoracic spine.
**The** **Standing Ankle Mobilization Drill** is designed to open up the foot and ankle because people are typically limited in the calves. Range of motion limitations in the foot and ankle could lead to a higher risk for ankle sprains as well as problems up the chain, including knee pain and potentially back pain.
**The** **Cook Hip Lift** is a glute activation exercise. The gluteus maximus is what distinguishes us as bipedal animals. Since we're upright the glute stabilizes the legs and hips in a single limb stance. When your foot touches down your glute needs to kick in to stabilize your body. A lot of people, especially in today's society, don't have strong glutes likely because of poor movement habits and hours of sitting in chairs. The Cook Hip Lift is a way to wake up the glutes and help you to be more stable and functional when you go for a run.
**The** **Side Lying Clam Exercise** is designed to strengthen the lateral rotators of the hip which help prevent the knee from diving inward towards the mid-line of the body and potentially collapsing the arch of the foot. The lateral hip muscles and glutes are the cavalry to the infantry of the foot. This means that when the hip and core muscles aren't stabilizing and firing properly the foot has to work extra hard to maintain stability.
**The** **Side Lying Leg Raise** targets the gluteus medius muscle which also helps stabilize the leg during running. Poor gluteus medius function is often associated with lateral knee pain and IT Band friction syndromes.
**The** **Bird Dog Exercise** is a foundational core exercise that helps to stabilize the spine in a cross-pattern motion. Cross-patterning is what we do when we run by swinging one leg forward and the opposite arm forward. The Bird Dog teaches and strengthens this cross-patterning motion by coordinating one leg and opposite arm to be stable while their opposites are in motion. This exercise is also great for preventing low back pain in runners by training stability and strength in the deep spinal stabilizers.
**The** **Front and Side Plank Exercises** are fundamental core exercises that teach neutral spinal alignment, which should always be maintained during running and other loaded movements like push-ups and squats. Planks also strengthen the abdominal muscles that protect the spine.
## Barefoot Running Warm Ups
By Josh Leeger
### Warm Up
Jog 5 minutes using the techniques outlined in the Running Technique section. This will reinforce good movement mechanics at a low intensity while also warming up the core temperature of the body for the run ahead. Treat this section as practice, as well as a chance to get the body primed when you ramp up the intensity. Practice the 180 bpm, kick the heel to the butt, keep the torso relaxed, and go through all the keys mentioned earlier. Strength Training 1-2 Times A Week
These are Full Body exercises based on fundamental movement patterns that will strengthen the hips, legs, core, and upper body. This will keep the body strong and healthy for running. A good strength training program is often neglected by runners but it should be a part of any running-specific workout routine.
Perform 2-3 Rounds Of The Following Exercises:
* Inchworms x 5-10 Repetitions
* Forward Lunge x 10-15 Repetitions Each Leg
* Incline Pushups w/Rotation x 10-20 Repetitions
* Prisoner Squat x 10-20 Repetitions
* 1-leg toe touches x 20 Alternating
* 2-Leg or 1-leg Calf-Raises x 20 Repetitions
Note: You can add repetitions or added resistance via dumbbells, medballs, kettlebells, or weighted vests to make the exercises more difficult. Do NOT use weights for the inchworm exercise. Make sure to emphasize quality first and progress by no more than 10% each week in either repetitions or added resistance.
**Inchworms** are a fantastic core exercise as well as a great dynamic stretch of the calves and hamstrings, which tend to get tight in runners. Lunges mimic running patterns and ultimately stabilize the hips and legs.
**The Prisoner Squat** is a foundational exercise that everyone, but particularly runners, should do. It opens up the thoracic spine, offers extension, and is a great stretch for the calf complex, soleus, and gastrocnemius.
**Strength training exercises are done 1-2 days a week; they put you in postures that strengthen the Running Gait Cycle.** Take, for example, the lunge. You have one foot forward and one foot back. It's just like a running except you're going through an increased range of motion, strengthening the quads, glutes, and hamstrings, all while stretching the opposite hip.
## Static Stretching and Diaphragmatic Breathing
By Charlie Reid
### The 6 Best Stretches
* Kneeling Shoulder Opener
* Kneeling Hip Flexor Stretch With 1 Arm Reach
* Wall Quad Stretch
* 3-Position Hamstring Stretch
* Spinal Floor Twist
* Downward Dog
Flexibility is important because without this mobility in the joints, our body may compensate by overusing another part of the body. This could lead to joint degeneration and chronic pain overtime. By engendering awareness of range of motion limitations, we can start to train and improve these deficits over time.
**Your movement preparation drills, dynamic warm-up, and strength training practice should help clear up any of these range of motion deficits. However, if you are grossly deficient in any of the above assessments, then you may want to add some accessory static stretching drills in the evenings before bed** or after your workouts to help grease the wheels and improve your range of motion. It is best to do these static stretches at least 3-5 days a week if you wish to improve range of motion over time. It's better to stretch a little bit everyday than for a long time 1 or 2 days a week. Focus most on the stretches that you need the most work on. This routine should take no longer than 10-15 minutes to do.
**Hold the following stretches for 30-90 seconds each side at an intensity of 6 out of a perceived exertion scale of 1-10.** Again, this should be done ideally in the evenings before bed or after your workouts. If you are severely deficient in range of motion, then doing the stretches that you need the most before your workouts may also be a good idea if your joint restrictions don't allow you to perform the movements of the workout properly. Use your best judgment.
In an ideal world you'd move through a full range of daily motion: climbing trees, running, jumping, etc.; no one would have to stretch. Static stretching is meant for our society, where we have soft tissue limitations. Beginners especially are going to have some joint limitations. Static stretching is a way to touch base with areas that are limited and affect performance.
You can do these 6 foundational stretches to see where your range of motion is at. Most people have 2 or 3 that they're going to have to spend the most amount of time on. Again, static stretching can be done after your run or at night. I do mine before bed because it relaxes the nervous system and gets the tissues to open.
**If you feel comfortable with your range of motion with these stretches, eventually you won't need them.** Strength training takes you through full ranges of motion (i.e. deep squatting, lunging, etc.). Static stretching is great as extra credit to improve range of motion, help speed recovery, and to relax the body after a hard day. Make sure to relax into the stretches and breathe diaphragmatically throughout (See section below on how to perform proper diaphragmatic breathing). If your body is too tense and you are not breathing through the stretches, your body will not want to open up and release those tight muscles.
**The Kneeling Shoulder Opener** (http://bit.ly/n8Zflz) is designed to improve extension in the upper back, as well as open up the shoulders. This will aid in better arm swing and a more upright posture while running. When you raise your arms straight overhead, if you aren't able to keep the hands in line with the shoulders, or you hyper-extend your lower back in order to get the hands overhead, then this stretch is for you. Rounded upper backs are a common culprit that could lead to back pain, shoulder pain, and inefficient arm swing while running. This is also a fantastic stretch for helping to relieve upper back tightness and tension headaches.
**The Kneeling Hip Flexor Stretch With 1-Arm Reach** (http://bit.ly/plXNoK) is designed to lengthen the muscles of the front of the hip. If your hip flexor is tight you're not going to be able to have an efficient stride. This is more applicable to sprinters with a wider stride who are picking up the pace. Tight hip flexors are also correlated with overarching in the lumar spine, which could cause lower back pain.
**The Wall Quadriceps Stretch** (http://bit.ly/p9ecEJ) is great for lengthening the muscles that extend, or straighten, the legs. When the quads get too tight, they can pull down on the pelvis, leading to a poorly positioned pelvis. This bailed forward position of the hips can lead to back pain and limited power in the running stride. Tight quads can also prevent proper tracking of the cap. This could cause excess friction and soreness/pain at the front of the knee.
**The 3-Position Hamstring Stretch** (http://bit.ly/oLZtKZ) lengthens the tissues in the hamstrings, calves, IT Bands, and Adductor muscles. If your leg doesn't have 90 degrees of flexion, then not only will your stride mechanics be less efficient, but it will also predispose your lumbar spine to potential injuries and can actually affect your ability to maintain an upright posture while you're running. This stretch is also great for increasing range of motion in the foot/ankle complex. If you don't have good foot and ankle mobility, particularly in dorsiflexion where you pull the toes back, or in eversion where you're pulling from the outside of the foot, that can cause ankle impingement, shin splints or plantar fasciitis. A good rule of thumb is to have at least 10-20 degrees of dorsiflexion in the foot/ankle. When starting off with barefoot or minimalist styles of running, the lower leg will start to get tight, therefore, it needs to be addressed in a consistent manner with healthy doses of soft tissue work and stretching.
**The Spinal Floor Twist** (http://bit.ly/qUzYNU) is designed to get some rotation in the spine. This is important to have good rotation throughout the entire spine for proper arm swing as well as to properly counter-balance the opposite rotation that takes place in the hips and legs. If the spine is stiff in one segment, it could cause over-rotation in the segments above or below. This means that discs tend to wear out a lot quicker and your legs have to work harder because your upper body isn't counter-rotating in harmony with the lower body. Your body should have the ability to rotate and your arms should be able to move freely in the socket.
**The Downward Dog stretch** (http://bit.ly/nx3CbH) is the ultimate test of the flexibility on the entire backside of the body from head to tail. From shoulders, upper back, hamstrings, and calves, the downward dog stretch measures flexibility from hands all the way to the feet. This is a great stretch to end the sequence, as well as be used as a diagnostic to see which area of the body is most restricted. For example, if your heels come off the ground, then you may need to focus more on calf flexibility. If you can't get your spine straight, then you may need to engage your hip flexors more to put an arch in your lower back. Spend more time on the 3 Position Hamstring Stretch, or stretch the upper back and shoulders more to get the spine to straighten out. You can also book end this stretch at the beginning and end of this stretching sequence to see if your range of motion has improved. If you only had time for one stretch in this entire sequence, this would be the one.
**These 6 stretches break down, joint by joint, the most important range of motions that runners should address.** They're quick and simple for most people to get a self-diagnostic on each area of the body front to back, right to left. This will keep the joints and muscles in their optimal range of motion while also helping to aid in recovery of the tissues.
### Diaphragmatic Breathing
**Breathing is the cornerstone of life.** If you're not using the correct breathing techniques, then chances are you are short changing your performance and overall health. Diaphragmatic breathing means your diaphragm, a dome shaped muscle under the ribcage, pushes downward. Most people, because of stress and anxiety (or pulling their stomach in), develop poor breathing habits.
Paradoxical breathing is breathing upward as opposed to a healthier pattern of breathing downward and outward as the ribs expand during inhalation. M **any people, should they take a 30% larger than normal breath, will breathe up into their chest instead of pushing the diaphragm down into the pelvis.**
Diaphragmatic breathing has many benefits and yoga instructors are willing to talk candidly about them. They include better digestion, better circulation, and increased mental clarity. If you breathe an average of 22,000 times a day INTO your chest you'll get tight shoulders. It's very common!
Diaphragmatic breathing for runners means that the torso stays relaxed. **If you're breathing in the upper 1/3 of your torso, you have the whole 2/3 below that pushes down and expands. This will relax the spine, keep your focus, and increase your running economy or running efficiency.** The diaphragm oxygenates tissues better.
For more on diaphragmatic breathing, check out this exercise video: http://bit.ly/pUjkcO
The diaphragm is the key. The diaphragm is innervated by the same nerve as the hip flexors and is also directly intertwined with the muscles of the core. If you don't have good diaphragm function you sacrifice core stability and function, both of which translate into good running efficiency.
# Soft-Tissue Work
_"Everybody—regardless of if they're running—should be doing soft tissue work."_
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## Soft-Tissue Work and Recovery Modalities
By Charlie Reid
If you aren't accustomed to being barefoot, your feet and calves will naturally be sore and stiff following barefoot training. It takes time to adapt! But there are some things you can do to help yourself to progress more quickly, and recover faster.
Probably the "weakest" muscles in your feet will be the intrinsic muscles on the bottom of your foot. These muscles hardly have to work at all in stiff, heavily-padded shoes. So let's go from the ground up!
**Every day, find some time to stand up and roll the bottom of your foot on a tennis ball.** Start with very light pressure, and move the entire length of your foot with the ball. After a couple of swipes, try increasing the pressure a little bit. Once you've gotten the bottom of your foot nice and warmed up, and hopefully a little looser, do some focus work with the ball.
Place the tennis ball under your heel, and apply a significant amount of pressure for a couple of seconds. Let off, and repeat a few times. Repeat this heavy-pressure/light-pressure focus work on the instep or middle of your foot, and on the ball of the foot. After that, get the ball up under your toes and grasp it with your toes. Let the toes relax and roll the sole of the foot toward the floor, stretching the toes out across the ball. Repeat as many times as you'd like!
**Self-myofascial release (SMR), also known as "foam rolling" is also really helpful for any athlete, and especially for the barefoot newbie!** If you've never done it before, start with one of the white rolls. They're much softer than the black foam rolls. The best way to use a foam roll is to roll the entire length of the muscle, from one tendon to the next, but not onto the joint itself. Starting at the calf, roll back and forth from ankle to knee.
When you hit a spot that's especially tender, it's probably a "knot" (unless it's a bruise, in which case, don't roll over that!). Sit on the knot for up to thirty seconds, and breathe into it. Focus on allowing the muscle to release. Roll across the muscle some more and see how it feels. Continue for as long as you like.
When you get up to the hips, you can do some great foam roll and tennis ball work to release the muscles of the hip – especially the glutes and external rotators. **Sit on the foam roll with your feet on the ground and knees bent. Cross one ankle over the opposite leg (like you're sitting in a chair with your leg crossed), and lean over onto the glute (your butt muscle) on the side of the crossed leg (not the one with the foot still flat on the ground).** Roll back and forth across the length of the glute, and lean over more or less to get different aspects of the muscle. After you've done that on both sides and feel pretty loose, try it with a tennis ball!
**Everybody—regardless of if they're running—should be doing soft tissue work. The foam roll and tennis ball compress the tissues, thereby allowing fresh blood to be drawn in.**
When you consistently fire your muscles, the muscle fibers slide. When you get a micro trauma, a small tear, one of the fibers can stick, it can't slide anymore. The foam roll across that tissue breaks that up and lets the tissues slide again. **A knot is a denser bit of interwoven material. When there is an entry into the muscle fibers, the metabolic products of your blood and tissue begin to build there. When that happens the tissue can't function and becomes a place of stagnation.** You'll feel them when you use a roll under or on the side of your legs and you hit the tender spots. It sometimes takes 1 or 2 weeks before the adhesion breaks up.
Tennis balls are a bit denser and more focused; they're great for the bottom of the foot. Surprisingly, the bottoms of barefoot runners' feet can actually be suppler and softer than the bottoms of those who wear shoes because shoes fix your feet into one position. Since the foot can't fully flex or open its toes it becomes more rigid.
**If you've previously done muscular work** , you may have existing micro trauma in some areas. Jamming on those tissues with the foam roll or tennis ball may end up making you feel slightly sorer than before. For this reason, it's good to do soft tissue work before a run in the beginning. Think of it as the opposite of stretching (except for alignment and dynamic stretches done beforehand). The foam roll will be better immediately before or between 6-8 hours after the run once the body has had a chance to recuperate. This should help alleviate some of the pain a foam roll or tennis ball may add if you've had previous muscle trauma.
# Barefoot Training Schedule
_"Progression never goes in a direct linear fashion; it has to climb on a stair step graph line."_
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## A Barefoot Runner's 8-Step Progression
By Charlie Reid
**With any workout routine you need to have a logical systematic progression.** Running as far as you can every day is a recipe for shin splits and plantar fasciitis. Especially if you've been running in shoes or, worse yet, haven't been running at all! Before you start barefoot running practice make sure that you mastered the short-foot drill and clear the single leg squat assessment listed earlier in the book.
**After establishing proper running mechanics, the next step is to add some functional movement training to your weekly workout routine.** Good movement quality and functional leg and core strength is essential for healthy running while barefoot.
The premise of this 8-Step Progression is to build up progressively. Between the 4th and 6th week of any program you need a "Deload" week. Err on the side of caution. Elite athletes can go for a longer stretch, up to 6 weeks, increasing their mileage and intensity before a Deload. We've found that the average gym goer and recreational athlete peaks at about 3 weeks. That's why we provide the Deload at week 4. You then build back up into week 8 and then week 8 is the next Deload week.
The general rule of thumb for any running or strength conditioning plan is adding approximately 5-10% a week of intensity or volume so the body has a chance to adapt. Then take a Deload week to catch up with the cumulative fatigue of the previous 3 weeks. When we went on our ill-advised initial runs, phantom pains started showing up after 2-3 weeks...that's typical.
**A good baseline for most people is walking 20-30 minutes, slowly ramping up intensity, and then on a Deload week only going 1 day instead of 2-3.** That gives your body a chance to catch up with the cumulative fatigue of 3 weeks, then you start to build again. Progression never goes in a direct linear fashion; it has to climb on a stair step graph line.
For the purposes of this program, time is of more concern than mileage. The mistake of aiming at a mileage marker is that you can start to over stride to get the mileage. Total time on your feet is far more important than mileage. That's why we chose the time marker. It doesn't matter how far you go at first!
Spend this 8 weeks getting the technique solid. **It doesn't matter if you go at a snail's pace, as long as you turn those feet over, learn to load properly, and run for time (30-60 minutes or whatever you decide on).** After this base program you can start to think about tempo runs and increasing intensity.
The time factor is most appropriate because it'll build strength and resilience in the tissues, bones, muscles, and ligaments. Once you've built these up, you'll be able to take longer and longer runs.
For now concentrate on the checklist and your form. Focus on both of those and you'll soon look at your watch and realize you're done. Learn the technique. We've seen beginners, uncoordinated in technique, sweating at a 15 minute mile pace. **Learning means accumulated time learning a skill, not whether or not you're running a minute mile!**
**A marathon requires a different set of goals than either a triathlon or a 10k.** Once you start getting the technique and are looking for further progression join something like Tempo Running. A 10k is going to be a faster pace so you'll want to do some tempo or speed work. If you're starting out on your 1st, 2nd, or even third marathon, there are different training goals. The marathon is a 26.2 mile race. World-class runners finish marathons in just over two hours—that's two hours of constant running.
**A training program that prepares the body for that type of effort is going to be much different from one that prepares the body to go as fast as possible over 6.2 miles—the distance of a standard 10k or Olympic triathlon.** There are plenty of great running coaches out there that have templates for different races. This is a general template to get your body used to the barefoot running technique and to allow your body's tissues to adapt.
A quick addendum: if you do begin a marathon training program, cut the mileages in half. You'll be safe with that type of loading. **The important thing is to pay attention to how your body feels and adapts to the load.** If you're finishing a run completely seized up and walking like Frankenstein, you pushed it a little too far. Back off a bit.
There's a difference between soreness and being frozen. If your joints are frozen up the next day, that's not good. A little bit of muscle soreness is a completely normal part of training, and nothing that a little stretching and soft tissue work won't take care of.
**MOVEMENT PREPARATION & DYNAMIC WARM-UP:** 10min.
**Week 1:** 2 Days of 20min. Walk/Jog **Week 2:** 2 Days of 30min. Walk/Jog **Week 3:** 2 Days of 40min. Walk/Jog **Week 4:** (Deload) 1 Day of 40min. **Week 5:** 1 x 30min. Walk/Jog, 1 x 40min. Walk/Jog **Week 6:** 1 x 30min. Walk/Jog, 1 x 50min. Walk/Jog **Week 7:** 1 x 30min. Walk/Jog, 1 x 60min. Walk/Jog **Week 8:** (Deload) 1 x 60min. Walk/Jog
# Nutrition
* * *
## A Barefoot Runner's Guide To Nutrition
By Josh Leeger
**We aren't nutritionists, so we can't prescribe dietary information. However, we can tell you our general opinion on diet.**
* Eat locally grown foods in season that have been processed as little as possible (both in their growing and in their preparation).
* Eat plenty of organic, free range, lean proteins.
* Nuts and seeds of all sorts are the best!
* Try the local farmer's market (if there's one in your area)!
* Minimize your alcoholic beverage intake.
* Focus on the quality of your food 1st, not the quantity. It's more important to engender the habit of good quality food 1st and then listen to your body and figure it out from there.
If you can master a structured and healthy workout regimen and balance this with a nutritious diet for your own body, everything else will fall into place!
# Appendix: References and Supportive Technology
* * *
## References And RunningTechnology
By Charlie Reid
### Smart Phone Apps
**Metronome** (http://bit.ly/q1yq9J )
Metronome (iPhone & Android) is a free app that lets you set a metronome at 180 beats per minute for practicing the technique.
**Camera**
Have a buddy film you run to see if you're slouching and to check the uprightness of your torso.
**Nike GPS** (http://bit.ly/nAKzTg)
Nike GPS (for iPhone) actually tracks your runs; it tracks your runs over time and shows approximate minute per mile pace. You can map your runs, track your progress and "get the motivation you need to go even further. Hear mid-run cheers every time your friends like or comment on your run status, or outrun them in a game of Nike+ Tag." $1.99
**Endomondo (**http://bit.ly/rgW93g)
Endomondo Sports Tracker (for iPhone & Android) is similar to Nike GPS. Track your run in real time and challenge your friends' runs using GPS. It has real time GPS tracking of time, distance, speed, & calories burned. If you want you can get real time pep talks from friends following you live. Or you could go run with people. You can compete with friends on route times.
### Heart Monitors
**Polar** (http://bit.ly/pVsfOV)
Polar makes a whole line of heart monitors that include lap timers and distance trackers. Their products cover the spectrum from basic models to complete professional athlete training systems. A basic model will tell you if you are improving your fitness or burning fat. The more advanced models will help you avoid over or under-training by aiding you to exercise at the right intensity. You can use one to measure your aerobic fitness at rest and track your progress.
### Websites
<http://borntorun.org>
This is a great 1st stop to make if you're just getting into the barefoot world. You can subscribe or just peruse Born to Run's site. Hear about upcoming events and check out the minimalist shoes! Don't leave the site until you've looked at the link page. There are several blog links to barefooters, ultra-marathoners, training program ideas, and a Google Group.
<http://www.mapmyrun.com/>
You can browse routes, find your friends, join a group, and log workouts. You can also create running maps of your favorite runs. The site links to various social media sites so that you can show your routes and progress.
<http://barefootted.com>
Barefoot Ted's official site has a forum on barefoot running, coaching packages (based out of Seattle but there is a telephone coaching option) and links to Luna Sandal's site.
<http://paleohacks.com>
Paleohacks promotes itself as "a place to get answers about all aspects of Paleo diet, exercise and lifestyle." It's a discussion forum that seems to mostly lean toward dietary concerns. This is the place to read up and decide what you think about fish oil supplements, caffeine, intermittent fasting, or nutritional lifestyle choices in general.
Exuberant Animal
The site has some interesting blogs on holistic well being, play and interpersonal skills. "Exuberant Animal is an innovative health leadership organization that promotes performance, health, team cohesion and physical happiness. We offer a transformational, multi-disciplinary approach that's invigorating, liberating and life-changing. Exuberant Animal training is exciting, inspirational and intensely meaningful."
Exuberant Animal: The Power of Health, Play and Joyful Movement book "explores the totality of human health and promotes a truly integrated approach that spans culture, biology, psychology and animal behavior. You'll discover powerful new ideas for movement and living that will stimulate your vitality, creativity and enthusiasm."
## About the Authors
**Charlie Reid**
Charlie Reid B.S., CSCS, CPT, is a personal fitness coach, fitness writer, and business consultant based out of San Francisco, CA. His passion lies in helping others realize their physical potential through training smarter and learning to move their bodies in the most efficient way possible. He believes that physical health and well-being can be distilled from learning to master one's own body through guided discovery and consistent practice. Besides running and training barefoot, Charlie also shares a strong passion for music, and is a session bassist for local artists and touring bands.
**Josh Leeger**
Josh Leeger M.S., NASM-CPT, has a Master's degree in Kinesiology (human movement science) from San Francisco State University. He has been a certified personal trainer since 2001, and has coached and trained men and women from every age group and activity level, from couch potatoes to competitive athletes. His interests are in human evolutionary behavior and physical activity. Find him at www.leegertrained.com.
## About the Publisher
**Hyperink is the easiest way for anyone to publish a beautiful, high-quality book.**
We work closely with subject matter experts to create each book. We cover topics ranging from higher education to job recruiting, from Android apps marketing to barefoot running.
Hyperink is based in SF and actively hiring people who want to shape publishing's future. Email us if you'd like to meet our team!
**Note:** If you're reading this book in print or on a device that's not web-enabled, **please email** books@hyperinkpress.com with the title of this book in the subject line. We'll send you a PDF copy, so you can access all of the great content we've included as clickable links.
Copyright © 2012-Present. Hyperink Inc.
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All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from Hyperink Inc., except for brief excerpts in reviews or analysis.
**Our note:**
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Thanks!
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**Disclaimer**
This ebook provides information that you read and use at your own risk.
We do not take responsibility for any misfortune that may happen, either directly or indirectly, from reading and applying the information contained and/or referenced in this ebook.
This Quicklet, Best Book, and Hyperink are not affiliated with or sponsored by the original work or its author or publisher(s). This Quicklet and Best Book are intended to provide educational commentary and analysis about the original work, but this Quicklet and Best Book are not endorsed by the author or publisher(s) of the original work.
Thanks for understanding. Good luck!
| {
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} | 9,476 |
Is American Horror Story: Apocalypse Inspired By a Classic Short Story?
Kim Kardashian Says Sister Kourtney Is "The New Rob"
This Summer's Biggest Fashion Trend Is: Extreme Sports?
Ireland Baldwin Speaks Out About Past "Eating Disorders and Body Issues"
Did Taylor Swift and Karlie Kloss Just Reunite at Her Nashville Concert?
Serena Williams Showed Up to the US Open in a Black Tutu By Virgil Abloh and Sneakers That Said "Queen"
What Is "Bad Times at the El Royale" Even About? | {
"redpajama_set_name": "RedPajamaC4"
} | 6,435 |
Jaitley's condition critical, several ministers visit AIIMS
Edited By Odishatv Bureau Published By IANS On Aug 18, 2019 - 11:04 PM
New Delhi: Several Union Ministers including Rajnath Singh, Smriti Irani and Jitendra Singh, RSS chief Mohan Bhagwat as well as Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal visited AIIMS on Sunday to enquire about the health of former Finance Minister Arun Jaitley who is in a critical condition on life support systems.
Jaitley, 66, has been put on extra-corporeal membrane oxygenation (ECMO), which is used for patients whose lungs and heart are incapable of operating on their own.
He was admitted to the All India Institute of Medical Sciences on August 9 after he complained of breathlessness and restlessness.
Others who visited the hospital on Sunday included Union Minister Ram Vilas Paswan, Himachal Pradesh Governor Kalraj Mishra, RSS Joint General Secretary Krishna Gopal and former Samajwadi Party leader Amar Singh.
President Ram Nath Kovind, Union Home Minister Amit Shah and Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath had visited AIIMS on Friday and Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) President Mayawati on Saturday.
Bihar Chief Minister Nitish Kumar flew to Delhi on Saturday and directly went to the hospital from the airport.
Among other leaders, Union Minister Piyush Goyal, Jammu and Kashmir Governor Satya Pal Malik, and Congress leaders Abhishek Singhvi and Jyotiraditya Scindia also visited the hospital.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi, Lok Sabha Speaker Om Birla and top BJP leaders have also visited the hospital. | {
"redpajama_set_name": "RedPajamaCommonCrawl"
} | 1,501 |
{"url":"http:\/\/physics.stackexchange.com\/tags\/bose-einstein-condensate\/hot?filter=month","text":"# Tag Info\n\n3\n\nThere are different ways to define this phase. In mean-field (low temperature, weak interaction regime), the many-body wave function $\\psi(x_1, x_2,...)=\\prod_i \\Phi(x_i)$ where $\\Phi(x)$ is sometimes called the macroscopic wavefunction (because all the bosons are in the same state described by $\\Phi$). In the simplest case (homogeneous system), one can ...\n\n2\n\nI recently updated the wikipedia article on statistical ensembles which might be relevant. Basically, in classical physics the probability distribution for the state of a system is written as an integral over position and momentum as in your equation. It turns out to be necessary to choose an arbitrary unit of action (energy times time) in order to define ...\n\n1\n\nIn the specific case of slowing light with a Bose-Einstein condensate there will be a limit because the slowing of the light is due to an interaction of the light with the BEC to form a polariton. If you put too much energy in you'll destroy the BEC and it will stop slowing the light. Offhand I don't know what the limit is, but it will be a very small amount ...\n\nOnly top voted, non community-wiki answers of a minimum length are eligible","date":"2013-12-12 05:47:51","metadata":"{\"extraction_info\": {\"found_math\": true, \"script_math_tex\": 0, \"script_math_asciimath\": 0, \"math_annotations\": 0, \"math_alttext\": 0, \"mathml\": 0, \"mathjax_tag\": 0, \"mathjax_inline_tex\": 1, \"mathjax_display_tex\": 0, \"mathjax_asciimath\": 0, \"img_math\": 0, \"codecogs_latex\": 0, \"wp_latex\": 0, \"mimetex.cgi\": 0, \"\/images\/math\/codecogs\": 0, \"mathtex.cgi\": 0, \"katex\": 0, \"math-container\": 0, \"wp-katex-eq\": 0, \"align\": 0, \"equation\": 0, \"x-ck12\": 0, \"texerror\": 0, \"math_score\": 0.931789755821228, \"perplexity\": 290.6579753962563}, \"config\": {\"markdown_headings\": true, \"markdown_code\": true, \"boilerplate_config\": {\"ratio_threshold\": 0.18, \"absolute_threshold\": 20, \"end_threshold\": 15, \"enable\": true}, \"remove_buttons\": true, \"remove_image_figures\": true, \"remove_link_clusters\": true, \"table_config\": {\"min_rows\": 2, \"min_cols\": 3, \"format\": \"plain\"}, \"remove_chinese\": true, \"remove_edit_buttons\": true, \"extract_latex\": true}, \"warc_path\": \"s3:\/\/commoncrawl\/crawl-data\/CC-MAIN-2013-48\/segments\/1386164554256\/warc\/CC-MAIN-20131204134234-00057-ip-10-33-133-15.ec2.internal.warc.gz\"}"} | null | null |
Q: id=setInterval() is first undefined than 3 (Uses Jquery) I would like to have a counter, that counts backwards, and is stopped if the user filled the input-field.
Unfortunately the counter does not stop - I tried to read the counter ID on many places
of the code and can't see the logic where it changes the value (Probably I have a wrong idea
how SetInterval() and clearInterval() works ...
The relevant part of the code:
$(document).ready(function() {
var counter=0;
function hole_erste_Frage(aktuelle_div, nr){
$.ajax({
url: 'gnkid.php',
data: 'sectionid='+sectionid+'&nr='+nr,
success: function(data)
{
if ($('.dbantwort').eq(aktuelle_div).val().length>0) {
console.log(counter); // "0"
counter = start_counter($('.dbantwort').eq(aktuelle_div).val().length*2+5);
console.log(counter); // "undefined" - WHY????
}
}
});
}
hole_erste_Frage(aktuelle_div,aktuelle_div);
function start_counter(count) {
console.log(counter); // 1. call: "undefined" - 2. call: "3" !!! - Why 3??
if (count<3) {count=3};
var cnt=count*10;
counter = setInterval(function() {
console.log(counter); // still "undefined" than "3"
if (cnt >= 0) {
var sek=Math.floor(cnt/10);
var zsek=cnt/10;
if (sek<5){
$('#displayCounter').html(zsek);
} else {
$('#displayCounter').html(sek);
}
cnt--;
return_prevent--;
question_time=question_time+100;
}
else {
console.log(counter); // "undefined" - "3"
stop_counter(counter,'Timeout!!');
}
}, 100);
console.log(counter); // and still "undefined" - I don't understand!
}
function stop_counter(cter,bool){
clearInterval(counter); // I think here is the problem, because when it is called the first time the variable "counter" seems to be "undefined"
if (bool!='') {$('#displayCounter').html(bool);}
}
function press_send(){ // This one is called after the user pressed "return"
stop_counter(counter); // Here is the problem - it does not stop "undefined" - and "3"
if (check_answer()) {
$('.Abfrage-Box').eq(aktuelle_div).toggle();
check_answer_sql($('.antwort').eq(aktuelle_div).val(),$('.kid').eq(aktuelle_div).val(),aktuelle_div, question_time, true);
aktuelle_div = (aktuelle_div>=anzahl_abfrageboxen-1) ? 0 : aktuelle_div+1;
$('.Abfrage-Box').eq(aktuelle_div).toggle();
$('.antwort').eq(aktuelle_div).focus();
if ($('.dbantwort').eq(aktuelle_div).val().length>0) {
console.log(counter);
start_counter($('.dbantwort').eq(aktuelle_div).val().length*2+5);
console.log(counter);
}
} else {
check_answer_sql($('.antwort').eq(aktuelle_div).val(),$('.kid').eq(aktuelle_div).val(),aktuelle_div, question_time, false);
$('.antwort').eq(aktuelle_div).css('backgroundColor','red');
$('.richtige_antwort').eq(aktuelle_div).toggle();
}
}
A: Looks like you're assigning different values to counter...
I'd suggest adding a new variable outside of the functions, say gCounterTimer. Whenever you call setInterval(...) assign it to this new variable, i.e.:
gCounterInterval = setInterval(...)
And then when you need to clear it use:
clearInterval(gCounterInterval)
So your code would look like this:
var gCounterInterval;
$(document).ready(function() {
var counter=0;
function hole_erste_Frage(aktuelle_div, nr){
$.ajax({
url: 'gnkid.php',
data: 'sectionid='+sectionid+'&nr='+nr,
success: function(data)
{
if ($('.dbantwort').eq(aktuelle_div).val().length>0) {
console.log(counter); // "0"
counter = start_counter($('.dbantwort').eq(aktuelle_div).val().length*2+5);
console.log(counter); // "undefined" - WHY????
}
}
});
}
hole_erste_Frage(aktuelle_div,aktuelle_div);
function start_counter(count) {
console.log(counter); // 1. call: "undefined" - 2. call: "3" !!! - Why 3??
if (count<3) {count=3};
var cnt=count*10;
gCounterInterval = setInterval(function() {
console.log(counter); // still "undefined" than "3"
if (cnt >= 0) {
var sek=Math.floor(cnt/10);
var zsek=cnt/10;
if (sek<5){
$('#displayCounter').html(zsek);
} else {
$('#displayCounter').html(sek);
}
cnt--;
return_prevent--;
question_time=question_time+100;
}
else {
console.log(counter); // "undefined" - "3"
stop_counter(counter,'Timeout!!');
}
}, 100);
console.log(counter); // and still "undefined" - I don't understand!
}
function stop_counter(cter,bool){
clearInterval(gCounterInterval); // I think here is the problem, because when it is called the first time the variable "counter" seems to be "undefined"
if (bool!='') {$('#displayCounter').html(bool);}
}
function press_send(){ // This one is called after the user pressed "return"
stop_counter(counter); // Here is the problem - it does not stop "undefined" - and "3"
if (check_answer()) {
$('.Abfrage-Box').eq(aktuelle_div).toggle();
check_answer_sql($('.antwort').eq(aktuelle_div).val(),$('.kid').eq(aktuelle_div).val(),aktuelle_div, question_time, true);
aktuelle_div = (aktuelle_div>=anzahl_abfrageboxen-1) ? 0 : aktuelle_div+1;
$('.Abfrage-Box').eq(aktuelle_div).toggle();
$('.antwort').eq(aktuelle_div).focus();
if ($('.dbantwort').eq(aktuelle_div).val().length>0) {
console.log(counter);
start_counter($('.dbantwort').eq(aktuelle_div).val().length*2+5);
console.log(counter);
}
} else {
check_answer_sql($('.antwort').eq(aktuelle_div).val(),$('.kid').eq(aktuelle_div).val(),aktuelle_div, question_time, false);
$('.antwort').eq(aktuelle_div).css('backgroundColor','red');
$('.richtige_antwort').eq(aktuelle_div).toggle();
}
}
| {
"redpajama_set_name": "RedPajamaStackExchange"
} | 3,011 |
Irvine teen Olivia Severson on the job in Huntington Beach.
Share via Email: Dream job: Irvine teen is HB lifeguard Share via Twitter: Dream job: Irvine teen is HB lifeguard Share via LinkedIn: Dream job: Irvine teen is HB lifeguard Share via Facebook: Dream job: Irvine teen is HB lifeguard
Dream job: Irvine teen is HB lifeguard
by TOMOYA SHIMURA
It's hard to beat the view from Olivia Severson's "office."
Five days a week, the University High School senior climbs a lifeguard tower in Surf City, USA, and gazes over the ocean.
It's a dream job, says the 17-year-old, now in her second year as a lifeguard.
She points to the 1,850-foot-long Huntington Beach Pier and recalls her lifeguard tryouts in 2018.
The water was 57 degrees, and the air temperature wasn't much warmer. But neither the cold nor the waves could deter her. She swam the length of the pier and back in the required time, competing against applicants nearly all older than her.
Soon after, Severson became one of the youngest lifeguards for the city of Huntington Beach.
"I love it," Severson says. "You are working at the beach every day and spending quality time with fellow lifeguards."
Not yet 18, she already knows more about saving lives and keeping others safe than most adults.
It isn't easy. Many people, even adults, don't realize when they're in danger, like swimming near a rip current.
She keeps a watchful eye on the crowds, attending to those in need.
"I'm proud of myself for doing my best and helping people," she says.
Living In Irvine
Irvine has allowed Severson to pursue her lifeguarding passion.
"Living in Irvine, which is so close to the beach, ocean safety is such an integral part of life for residents here," she says. "I'm grateful that I can live in a place where the weather is nice, the views are great and the ocean is nearby."
She's always loved swimming – she plays goalie for University High's water polo team – and visiting the beach with her family.
She joined the junior lifeguard program at age 10, eventually becoming a captain. That allowed her to try out as a lifeguard at age 16, one year before most teens can apply.
Even then, she made the cut among 50 applicants trying out.
"This job has given me confidence and continues to grow my confidence," she says. "I want to be a lifeguard as long as I possibly can – maybe even after college." | {
"redpajama_set_name": "RedPajamaCommonCrawl"
} | 7,341 |
`fmi4cpp` is available through the conan remote ais:
`conan remote add ais https://ais.jfrog.io/artifactory/api/conan/ais-conan-local`
Then add a dependency to: </br>
`fmi4cpp/<version>@ais/stable` (stable channel -> releases) </br>
`fmi4cpp/<version>@ais/testing` (development builds -> master) </br>
`fmi4cpp/<version>@ais/testing-<branch>` (development builds -> branches)
Additionally, you can of course build, include and link to it as any other
CMake project or include it as a subproject in your own CMake project.
| {
"redpajama_set_name": "RedPajamaGithub"
} | 5,716 |
Q: Understanding css background shorthand properties The shorthand definition of the css background property is as follows:
background: color position/size repeat origin clip attachment image|initial|inherit;
But then i find following examples:
body {
background: #00ff00 url('smiley.gif') no-repeat fixed center;
}
So here the order is: color-image-repeat-attachment-position
Is there any reason why this order can change?
A: Shorthand properties try not to force a specific order for the values of properties, this however works well when those properties have values of different types but not when those properties could have identical values.
Background shorthand property has values of different types so the order of values shouldn't cause errors, however you should stick to the standard order to maintain good readability.
Here's a manual from mozilla's dev center about shorthand properties, the statement that I quoted about the order can be seen under 'Tricky Edge Cases' at point #3.
https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/Shorthand_properties
| {
"redpajama_set_name": "RedPajamaStackExchange"
} | 8,092 |
Q: Sidebar menu and main content on modern mobile browsers I'm trying to avoid scrolling on the main content in mobile browsers when a sidebar menu is opened ° by adding a class to the main content with a 100% height, a hidden overflow and an absolute position, but the problem is if I scroll down and then open the menu I get automatically moved to the top of the page and don't stay on the position where I was before opening the sidebar. I can't figure out what's going wrong.
I tried some solutions like saving the position and then forcing the window to stay always at that place until the sidebar is closed, but I'm pretty sure there's a cleaner way to do it.
Anyone has a better idea?
Thank you very much.
° (I think the technique is known as "off canvas")
A: You must have put the sidebar at the top of your page, thats why it scrolls to top. To solve this, just use position:absolute;
| {
"redpajama_set_name": "RedPajamaStackExchange"
} | 2,510 |
__KEIN_INHALTSVERZEICHNIS__
Die Alte Synagoge in Hagen, einer kreisfreien Großstadt im südöstlichen Teil des Ruhrgebiets, wurde 1858/59 errichtet und im Jahr 1895 umgebaut. Die Synagoge stand in der Potthofstraße.
Beim Novemberpogrom 1938 wurde die Synagoge zerstört. Im Jahr 1946 konstituierte sich die jüdische Kultusgemeinde neu, 1960 wurde eine neue Synagoge am alten Standort in der Potthofstraße 16 errichtet.
Am 16. September 2021 ist zum Jom Kippur ein Sprengstoffanschlag auf die Synagoge vereitelt worden, indem auf konkrete Hinweise von einem ausländischen Nachrichtendienst vor einem 16-jährigen Syrer gewarnt wurde, der dann festgenommen worden ist. Laut Herbert Reul war der Anschlag islamisch motiviert.
Siehe auch
Liste der im Deutschen Reich von 1933 bis 1945 zerstörten Synagogen
Jüdische Gemeinde Hagen
Literatur
Klaus-Dieter Alicke: Lexikon der jüdischen Gemeinden im deutschen Sprachraum. Band 2: Großbock – Ochtendung. Gütersloher Verlagshaus, Gütersloh 2008, ISBN 978-3-579-08078-9 (Online-Ausgabe).
Ralf Blank und Stephanie Marra: Ortsartikel Hagen, in: Historisches Handbuch der jüdischen Gemeinschaften in Westfalen und Lippe. Die Ortschaften und Territorien im heutigen Regierungsbezirk Arnsberg. Herausgegeben von Frank Göttmann, Münster 2016, S. 355–372 Online-Fassung der Historischen Kommission für Westfalen.
Weblinks
Aus der Geschichte der jüdischen Gemeinden im deutschen Sprachraum - Hagen (NRW)
Einzelnachweise
Hagen
Hagen
Hagen
Hagen Synagoge
Abgegangenes Bauwerk in Hagen
Hagen Synagoge
Hagen
Judentum in Hagen
Sakralbau in Hagen | {
"redpajama_set_name": "RedPajamaWikipedia"
} | 80 |
module Puppet::Parser::Functions
newfunction(:num2bool, :type => :rvalue, :doc => <<-EOS
This function converts a number into a true boolean. Zero becomes false. Numbers
higher then 0 become true.
EOS
) do |arguments|
raise(Puppet::ParseError, "num2bool(): Wrong number of arguments " +
"given (#{arguments.size} for 1)") if arguments.size < 1
number = arguments[0]
# Only numbers allowed ...
unless number.match(/^\-?\d+$/)
raise(Puppet::ParseError, 'num2bool(): Requires integer to work with')
end
result = case number
when /^0$/
false
when /^\-?\d+$/
# Numbers in Puppet are often string-encoded which is troublesome ...
number = number.to_i
# We yield true for any positive number and false otherwise ...
number > 0 ? true : false
else
raise(Puppet::ParseError, 'num2bool(): Unknown numeric format given')
end
return result
end
end
# vim: set ts=2 sw=2 et :
| {
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IT'S BEEN A long road to Brexit – one made even more trying by the inaccurate statements made by British politicians about Ireland, politics, and the border with Northern Ireland.
There's a lot of things in the Brexit process that are up for debate: whether the backstop is needed and what exactly it entails, being just one. But some things we're quite sure of – like that Leo Varadkar and the Sinn Féin party are most definitely not in cahoots.
And let's be clear: we're not expecting British politicians to know every aspect of Ireland's history – or any other country's history.
But if you're going to try to offer a solution to the Irish border issue or comment on Irish politics with an ounce of authority, you should be informed on the issues.
Here are some of the gems we've had since the process began.
While still in the role as British Foreign Secretary, Boris Johnson was recorded talking about Brexit and foreign affairs at a private gathering. The audio was obtained by Buzzfeed News, who then published it in an article on 8 June, detailing all the questionable things he'd said about a whole spectrum of nations.
[Northern Ireland] is so small and there are so few firms that actually use that border regularly, it's just beyond belief that we're allowing the tail to wag the dog in this way. We're allowing the whole of our agenda to be dictated by this folly.
"So few" is obviously a subjective term, so we'll give you the figures here and let you decide on whether they're worthy of the UK government's attention.
There are around 208 road border crossings between the Republic and Northern Ireland: at least 30,000 people cross the border everyday. Trucks in the drinks industry alone make 23,000 border crossings a year.
The farming community has been repeatedly described as an "all-island" economy, meaning firms have assets both north and south of the border, and would be wiped out, in the event of a no-deal Brexit.
Added to that are fears that young people in Donegal will have their options for accessing third level education limited if a hard border was put up, as many students live at home and commute to Derry to study at the University of Ulster.
Usually when the phrase "just like the Troubles" is used, it's in the sense that we shouldn't go back to that era.
It would be possible to continue with historic arrangements to ensure there wasn't a great loophole in the way people could get into the UK to leave us in just as bad a position as we are in.
There would be our ability, as we had during the Troubles, to have people inspected. It's not a border that everyone has to go through every day. But of course for security reasons during the Troubles we kept a very close eye on the border to try stop gun running and things like that.
It's not inconsistent to have a border that people pass through that you're keeping an eye on.
Speaking of loopholes, here's a few in that suggestion. Not everyone would be checked, says Rees Mogg, so how would you decide who to check? By how they're dressed, or the colour of their skin?
Boris Johnson suggested in the audio mentioned above that there would be a system like an Oyster card or a Leap card, where you tagged in and out to get across the border. But there are at least two big problems with that: that isn't a frictionless border, it's just friction-lite, and the second being one or Leap card can be used by anyone freely, as there's no name or photo ID on them.
When a border first went up in Ireland in 1924, it only had customs checks. But extremists saw it as a symbol of UK occupation in Ireland, a symbol of division, and began targeting custom posts. This led to police protection, and armed guards at the border.
In November 2017, a few days before the backstop was first mentioned, Conservative MP Iain Duncan Smith appeared on Channel 4 News and said that Ireland was being tough in Brexit negotiations because of the presidential election.
It was then pointed out that an election was now off the table due to political developments (Frances Fitzgerald had just resigned as Justice Minister of the scandal unearthed bty garda whistleblower Maurice McCabe).
Now it's suddenly become an issue because the Irish, for political reasons internally, presidential elections, disputes between the two elements of the same party, they suddenly laid this on.
This one is a little different in that it's an admission of ignorance, rather than an assertion that is later proved to be incorrect.
In an interview with The House, Karen Bradley said that she hadn't realised how elections were fought in Northern Ireland prior to her appointment, and that her understanding of the region was from 1990s.
I had no idea how wonderful Northern Ireland was. I was slightly scared of Northern Ireland because of my impression and images from 20 years ago. That is not the place that it is today.
She also said that she didn't fully understand the political climate in the North. At the time of her appointment, the Stormont Assembly had been absent for over a year.
So, the parties fight for the election within their own community. Actually, the unionist parties fight the elections against each other in unionist communities and nationalists in nationalist communities. That's a very different world from the world I came from.
Speaking to Stephen Nolan's show in October this year, Andrew Bridgen showed that he didn't understand the difference between the Common Travel Area and citizenship.
The Conservative MP (there's a pattern here) got confused when trying to explain how they would ensure that Northern Ireland wouldn't be treated differently to the rest of the UK, but also allow them to apply for Irish citizenship, which would be EU citizenship.
"That's the Common Travel Area," Bridgen said.
We do have the right to go to Ireland, don't we? As an English person I've the right to go to Ireland and ask for a passport, can't I?
There's a reciprocal agreement where I can go to Ireland and ask for an Irish passport, and someone from Ireland can come to the UK and ask for a British passport. We have that system, that's the system we have, isn't it?
When asked if he thought he was entitled to an Irish passport because he is English, he said yes, and when asked where that right comes from, he answered the Common Travel Area.
Speaking at a Hibernian Law Journal lecture about the legal implications of Brexit, Professor of Human Rights Law in London School of Economics Conor Gearty said that there was a "tremendous civic duty" on the Irish living in the UK to "educate the English".
Email "The ridiculous things UK politicians have said about Ireland and Brexit".
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\section{Introduction}
\input{parts/01-introduction}
\section{Related works}
\label{related_work}
\input{parts/02-related_works}
\section{Model}
\label{model}
\input{parts/03-model}
\section{Data}
\label{data}
\input{parts/04-data}
\section{Comparison to state-of-the-art}
\label{comparison_SOTA}
\input{parts/05-comparison_sota}
\section{Ablation study}
\label{ablation_study}
\input{parts/06-ablation_study}
\section{Conclusion}
\input{parts/07-conclusion}
\section*{Acknowledgments}
This work benefited from the support of the French National Research Agency (ANR) through the project HORAE ANR-17-CE38-0008. It is also part of the \textit{HOME History of Medieval Europe} research project supported by the European JPI Cultural Heritage and Global Change (Grant agreements No. ANR-17-JPCH-0006 for France, MSMT-2647\\/2018-2/2, id. 8F18002 for Czech Republic and PEICTI Ref. PCI2018-093122 for Spain). Mélodie Boillet is partly funded by the CIFRE ANRT grant No. 2020/0390.
\bibliographystyle{IEEEtran}
\subsection{Training}
Our model is implemented in PyTorch. We trained it with an initial learning rate of \textit{5e-3}, Adam optimizer and the cross entropy loss. The weights are initialized using Glorot initialization. In addition, we used mini-batches of size 4 to reduce the training time. We tested different dropout probabilities and decided to keep the model with \textit{p\_dilated = p\_conv = 0.4} since it yielded higher performances on average on the validation set. The model is trained over a maximum of 200 epochs and early stopping is used to stop training when the model converges. In the end, we keep the model with the lowest validation loss.
We also trained dhSegment on our data with the same splits for a maximum of 60 epochs since the model is pre-trained and converges faster than our. We used mini-batches of size 4 and trained on patches of shape \textit{400$\times$400 px}. The initial learning rate is \textit{5e-5} and we chose to use a ResNet50 \cite{resnet} as pre-trained encoder. Early stopping is also used and the best model obtained during training is selected.
Both models have the same post-processing step with the same hyper-parameters. After testing thresholds within a range from \textit{0.5} to \textit{0.9}, we kept \textit{t = 0.7} since it shows the best results on the validation set, allowing the expected pixels to be predicted as text lines and rejecting those belonging to the background. Lastly, the small connected components with less than \textit{min\_cc = 50} pixels are discarded. Several values have also been tested for this parameter, however, it didn't really impact the results obtained.
\subsection{Results}
\label{results}
We trained the two networks on the four datasets and now we report the scores obtained for both of them. Most of the existing methods are evaluated using the Intersection-over-Union (IoU) metric. The IoU measures the average similarity between the predicted and the ground truth pixels. Alberti et al. \cite{albertiDIVA} designed a tool to evaluate the performance of a model by calculating the IoU, precision, recall and F-measure. It allows to have more information concerning the model's performances at pixel level than just the IoU.
Therefore, to evaluate the models, we computed various pixel level metrics. We first report the Intersection-over-Union (IoU) as well as the Precision (P), Recall (R) and F1-score (F) in Table \ref{tab:results}. To be comparable, the images predicted by dhSegment are resized to \textit{384$\times$384 px} before computing the metrics. In addition, the values are only presented for the text line class (the background is not considered here).
The results obtained by our method are often better than those obtained by dhSegment. On the Balsac dataset, our model outperforms dhSegment by up to 6 percentage points for the F1-score metric. This is due to a better separation of close text lines that are often predicted as one single line by dhSegment. Our model helps separating these lines where dhSegment fails. It also helps to have smoother and more accurate contours.
So far, our model has shown better performances than dhSegment while having no pre-trained encoder. Another interesting point is that our model is way lighter than dhSegment. It has only 4.1M parameters to be learned whereas dhSegment has 32.8M parameters including 9.36M that have to be fully-trained. This leads to a reduced prediction time. Indeed, our model is up to 16 times faster than dhSegment model as shown on Table \ref{tab:prediction_time}. \\
\begin{table}[htbp!]
\begin{center}
\begin{tabular}{c|cc|c}
\hline
\multirow{2}{*}{\textsc{Dataset}}&\multicolumn{2}{c|}{\textsc{Mean prediction time$^1$}}&\multirow{2}{*}{\textsc{Ratio}} \\
& dhSegment & Our & \\
\hline
Balsac & 2.95 & 0.41 & 7.20 \\
Horae & 7.87 & 0.97 & 8.11 \\
READ-Simple & 3.73 & 0.45 & 8.29 \\
READ-Complex & 4.70 & 0.59 & 7.97 \\
DIVA-HisDB & 12.90 & 0.80 & 16.13 \\
\hline
\multicolumn{4}{l}{\footnotesize{$^1$ Predictions made on a GPU GeForce RTX 2070 8G.}} \\[-0.1ex]
\end{tabular}
\end{center}
\caption{Prediction times (s / image) reported for the two networks for the experiments presented in Section \ref{results}. The ratio column contains the improvement ratios (dhSegment / our times).}
\label{tab:prediction_time}
\end{table}
\begin{table*}[htbp]
\begin{center}
\begin{tabular}{c|cc|cc|cc|cc}
\hline
\multirow{2}{*}{\textsc{Dataset}}&\multicolumn{2}{c}{\textsc{Mean IoU (\%)}}&\multicolumn{2}{|c}{\textsc{Precision (\%)}}&\multicolumn{2}{|c}{\textsc{Recall (\%)}}&\multicolumn{2}{|c}{\textsc{F1-score (\%)}} \\
& dhSegment & Our & dhSegment & Our & dhSegment & Our & dhSegment & Our \\
\hline
Balsac & 74.02 & \textbf{84.87} & 91.89 & \textbf{94.25} & 79.09 & \textbf{89.49} & 84.95 & \textbf{91.75} \\
Horae & 60.69 & \textbf{68.81} & \textbf{80.94} & 80.31 & 73.65 & \textbf{84.80} & 81.99 & \textbf{88.62} \\
READ-Simple & 65.07 & \textbf{68.14} & \textbf{88.34} & 83.19 & 71.56 & \textbf{78.05} & \textbf{80.72} & 79.45 \\
READ-Complex & 53.34 & \textbf{60.28} & \textbf{85.51} & 81.03 & 57.80 & \textbf{68.17} & 68.47 & \textbf{78.30} \\
DIVA-HisDB & 73.00 & \textbf{74.72} & \textbf{91.56} & 89.43 & 78.28 & \textbf{82.20} & 84.32 & \textbf{85.44} \\
\hline
Balsac Fine-tuning & 74.52 & \textbf{85.73} & 91.48 & \textbf{92.90} & 80.03 & \textbf{91.70} & 85.29 & \textbf{92.24} \\
Horae Fine-tuning & 62.79 & \textbf{68.00} & \textbf{86.91} & 79.51 & 71.12 & \textbf{84.51} & 79.91 & \textbf{87.97} \\
READ-Simple Fine-tuning & 64.39 & \textbf{68.14} & \textbf{86.22} & 83.19 & 71.29 & \textbf{78.05} & 77.39 & \textbf{79.45} \\
READ-Complex Fine-tuning & 52.96 & \textbf{60.28} & \textbf{85.63} & 81.03 & 57.43 & \textbf{68.17} & 68.95 & \textbf{78.30} \\
DIVA-HisDB Fine-tuning & 74.24 & \textbf{74.72} & \textbf{92.83} & 89.43 & 78.79 & \textbf{82.20} & 85.18 & \textbf{85.44} \\
\hline
\end{tabular}
\end{center}
\caption{Comparison of the results obtained by the two networks at pixel level. The two models have been trained on the \textit{Multiple document dataset}. In the second part of the table, the models have been fine-tuned on the corresponding dataset.}
\label{tab:results_pre-training}
\end{table*}
\subsection{Pre-training}
We have shown that pre-training on natural scene images is not required to have good results on document images. It is sometimes even worse than having a different model without any pre-trained part. We now want to see if pre-training on document images instead of natural scene images can have a positive impact on the performances. Therefore, in addition to the previous experiments, we trained dhSegment and our model on a mixture of all the datasets presented before. This dataset is denoted in the following as the \textit{Multiple document dataset}. The splitting obtained by mixing these images is shown in Table \ref{tab:split}.
\begin{table}[htbp]
\begin{center}
\begin{tabular}{lcc}
\hline
& \sc{Pages} & \sc{Text lines} \\ \hline
\sc{Train} & \textbf{1688} & \textbf{77454} \\
\hspace{0.4cm} Balsac & \hspace{0.4cm} 730 & \hspace{0.4cm} 37191 \\
\hspace{0.4cm} Horae & \hspace{0.4cm} 510 & \hspace{0.4cm} 11341 \\
\hspace{0.4cm} READ-Simple & \hspace{0.4cm} 172 & \hspace{0.4cm} 5117 \\
\hspace{0.4cm} READ-Complex & \hspace{0.4cm} 216 & \hspace{0.4cm} 17768 \\
\hspace{0.4cm} DIVA-HisDB & \hspace{0.4cm} 60 & \hspace{0.4cm} 6037 \\
\sc{Validation} & \textbf{188} & \textbf{10562} \\
\hspace{0.4cm} Balsac & \hspace{0.4cm} 92 & \hspace{0.4cm} 4612 \\
\hspace{0.4cm} Horae & \hspace{0.4cm} 17 & \hspace{0.4cm} 251 \\
\hspace{0.4cm} READ-Simple & \hspace{0.4cm} 22 & \hspace{0.4cm} 540 \\
\hspace{0.4cm} READ-Complex & \hspace{0.4cm} 27 & \hspace{0.4cm} 2160 \\
\hspace{0.4cm} DIVA-HisDB & \hspace{0.4cm} 30 & \hspace{0.4cm} 2999 \\
\sc{Test} & \textbf{200} & \textbf{10573} \\
\hspace{0.4cm} Balsac & \hspace{0.4cm} 91 & \hspace{0.4cm} 4356 \\
\hspace{0.4cm} Horae & \hspace{0.4cm} 30 & \hspace{0.4cm} 839 \\
\hspace{0.4cm} READ-Simple & \hspace{0.4cm} 22 & \hspace{0.4cm} 723 \\
\hspace{0.4cm} READ-Complex & \hspace{0.4cm} 27 & \hspace{0.4cm} 1758 \\
\hspace{0.4cm} DIVA-HisDB & \hspace{0.4cm} 30 & \hspace{0.4cm} 2897 \\ \hline
\sc{Total} & \textbf{2076} & \textbf{98589} \\ \hline
\end{tabular}
\end{center}
\caption{Splitting of the \textit{Multiple document dataset}.}
\label{tab:split}
\end{table}
\begin{figure}[htbp]
\centerline{
\includegraphics[width=0.16\textwidth]{resources/Allemagne_Munchen_BayerischeStaatsbibliothek_4Inc.c.a.756g-0018.png}
\includegraphics[width=0.16\textwidth]{resources/dhsegment.png}
\includegraphics[width=0.16\textwidth]{resources/U-FCN.png}
}
\caption{Page from Horae dataset with the results of a line segmentation made by dhSegment (middle) and our model (right). dhSegment merges some lines and fails in detecting vertical text lines where our model correctly detect them.}
\label{fig:visual_results}
\end{figure}
These generic models have then been tested on each dataset. The results are reported in Table \ref{tab:results_pre-training}. We also fine-tuned the models on each single dataset. To do so, we continued the training of our model for 80 epochs and dhSegment for 40 epochs.
Without any fine-tuning, our architecture is almost always better than dhSegment's. One can see that our architecture lacks in precision indicating that our model sometimes predicts text line pixels that belong to the background. However, recall is higher than dhSegment's which indicates that more of the expected text line pixels are found. This is more interesting for us since it means that we don't miss any characters. Figure \ref{fig:visual_results} shows the results of the two models for an image from Horae dataset.
Fine-tuning on each single dataset is not required to get good results with any of the models. With our architecture, only the model trained on Balsac took advantage of this fine-tuning. For the three other datasets, fine-tuning didn't improve the results since the best model obtained remains the one before re-training.
These results show that our model is better than dhSegment whatever the dataset, with and without fine-tuning. Adding this pre-training step to our model has improved the results, mostly on the READ datasets. This impact is less important on Balsac, mainly because this dataset represents 43 \% of the \textit{Multiple document dataset}. DIVA-HisDB is also less impacted by the pre-training. This is due to the small quantity of training data it has and the high complexity of the pages.
\subsection{Comparison of architectures}
In this section, we detail the two architectures, dhSegment and Yang's one, and explain the choices we made to design our own model.
\subsubsection{dhSegment}
dhSegment is the state-of-the-art method for multiple layout analysis tasks on historical documents. It has shown various advantages like working with few training data and a reduced training time. In addition, the code to train and test the model is open-source\footnote{https://github.com/dhlab-epfl/dhSegment} and can be easily trained in the same conditions as our model to have a fair comparison.
\begin{figure*}
\centering
\begin{subfigure}[hbtp]{0.75\textwidth}
\centerline{\includegraphics[width=1\textwidth]{resources/dhSegment-min.pdf}}
\caption{Architecture of dhSegment. The encoding path corresponds to a modified version of the ResNet-50\cite{resnet} architecture.}
\label{fig:dhsegment_archi}
\end{subfigure}
\begin{subfigure}[hbtp]{0.50\textwidth}
\centerline{\includegraphics[width=1\textwidth]{resources/Yang-min.pdf}}
\caption{Architecture of Yang's model.}
\label{fig:yang_archi}
\end{subfigure}
\hspace{2cm}
\begin{subfigure}[hbtp]{0.2\textwidth}
\centerline{\includegraphics[width=1\textwidth]{resources/legend.pdf}}
\end{subfigure}
\begin{subfigure}[hbtp]{0.65\textwidth}
\centerline{\includegraphics[width=1\textwidth]{resources/UFCN-min.pdf}}
\caption{Architecture of our model Doc-UFCN. The encoding path is represented in red and the decoding path in blue.}
\label{fig:ufcn_archi}
\end{subfigure}
\caption{Architectures of the different models.}
\end{figure*}
dhSegment's architecture is presented Figure \ref{fig:dhsegment_archi}. This model is deeper than Yang's and can have up to \textit{2048} feature maps. The encoder is composed of convolution (light blue and orange on the Figure 2a) and pooling layers. This encoder is first pre-trained on natural scene images \cite{ImageNet} and both the encoder and decoder are then trained on document images. The decoder is quite similar to the one used by Yang and consists in successive blocks composed of one standard convolution and one upscaling layer.
\subsubsection{Yang et al.}
Yang's model is a multimodal fully convolutional network. It takes into account the visual and textual contents for the segmentation task. It has shown good performances on synthetic and real datasets of modern document images. The code to train the model is also open-source\footnote{http://personal.psu.edu/xuy111/projects/cvpr2017\_doc.html}.
Yang's model is presented on Figure \ref{fig:yang_archi}. It is made of 4 parts: an encoder (red blocks on the Figure \ref{fig:yang_archi}), a first decoder outputing a segmentation mask, a second decoder for the reconstruction task and a bridge (red arrows) used for the textual content. The Text Embedding Map and the bridge are used to encode the textual content of the images and then to add the text information to the visual one before the last convolution. To have a fair comparison with dhSegment, only the visual content is used. Therefore, the Text Embedding Map, the bridge and the second decoder for the reconstruction task are removed.
\subsection{Description of Doc-UFCN}
Recent systems can show long inference times which can have great financial and ecological impacts. Indeed, dhSegment takes up to 66 days to detect the lines of the whole Balsac corpus (almost 2 million pages) on a GeForce RTX 2070. To this aim, we want to show the impact of the pre-trained parts on the segmentation results while having a small network and a reduced prediction time. To design our model, we chose to use the core of Yang's network since it has a reduced number of parameters and contains no pre-trained parts. Therefore, our architecture is a Fully Convolutional Network (FCN) composed of an encoder (red blocks on the Figure \ref{fig:ufcn_archi}) followed by a decoder (blue blocks) and a final convolution layer. Dealing with a FCN without any dense layer has many advantages. First, it highly reduces the number of parameters since there is no dense connection. In addition, it allows the network to deal with variable input image size and to keep the spatial information as is.
To keep a light model, the second decoder used by Yang is not used in our architecture.
\subsubsection{Contracting path}
The contracting path (encoder) consists in 4 dilated blocks. The dilated blocks are slightly different from those presented by Yang et al. since they consist in 5 consecutive dilated convolutions. Using dilated convolutions instead of standard convolutions allows the receptive field to be larger and the network to have more context information. Each block is followed by a max-pooling layer except for the last one.
\subsubsection{Expanding path}
The goal of the expanding path (decoder) is to reconstruct the input image with a pixel-wise labeling at the original input image resolution. This deconvolution is usually done using transposed convolutions or upscaling. As suggested by Mechi et al. \cite{mechi2019}, we decided to replace the unpooling layers of Yang's model by transposed convolutions in order to keep the same resolution on both the input and output. Therefore, the decoding path is composed of 3 convolutional blocks, each consisting of a standard convolution followed by a transposed convolution. In addition, the features computed during the encoding step are concatenated with those of the decoding stage (purple arrows on the Figure \ref{fig:ufcn_archi}).
\subsubsection{Last convolution}
The last convolutional layer outputs full resolution feature maps. It returns \textit{c} feature maps with the same size as the input image, \textit{c} being the number of classes involved in the experiment. A softmax layer is then applied to transform these feature maps into probability maps.
\subsection{Implementation details}
We now present the implementation details of our model.
\subsubsection{Input image size}
Since our model is inspired by Yang et al. \cite{yang2018}, we decided to use the same input image size. We thus resized the input images and their corresponding label maps into smaller images of size \textit{384$\times$384 px}, adding padding to keep the original image ratio. This allows to reduce the training time without losing too much information. We also tested another input size to see the impact of this choice (see Section \ref{input_size}).
\subsubsection{Dilated block}
As stated before, all the dilated blocks are composed of 5 consecutive dilated convolutions with dilation rates \textit{d = 1, 2, 4, 8} and \textit{16}. The blocks respectively have \textit{32, 64, 128} and \textit{256} filters. Each convolution has a \textit{3$\times$3} kernel, a stride of \textit{1} and an adapted padding to keep the same tensor shape throughout the block. All the convolutions of the blocks are followed by a Batch Normalization layer, a ReLU activation and a Dropout layer with a probability \textit{p\_dilated}.
\subsubsection{Convolutional block}
The convolutional blocks are used during the decoding step. The expanding path is composed of 3 convolutional blocks and each block is composed of a standard convolution followed by a transposed convolution. The blocks respectively have \textit{128, 64} and \textit{32} filters. Each standard convolution has a \textit{3$\times$3} kernel, a stride and a padding of \textit{1}. Each transposed convolution has a \textit{2$\times$2} kernel and a stride of \textit{2}. As for the dilated blocks, all the standard and transposed convolutions are followed by a Batch Normalization layer, a ReLU activation and a Dropout layer with a probability \textit{p\_conv}.
\subsubsection{Last convolution}
The last convolution layer is parametrized as follows: \textit{c} (number of classes) filters, \textit{3$\times$3} kernel, stride and padding of \textit{1}. It is followed by a softmax layer that computes the pixel's class conditional probabilities.
\subsubsection{Post-processing}
As a post-processing step, we apply the same operations as the one applied by dhSegment: pixels with a confidence score higher than a threshold \textit{t} are kept and connected components with less than \textit{min\_cc} pixels are removed.
\subsubsection{Balsac}
The Balsac dataset consists in 913 images extracted from 74 registers selected among 44742 registers in total. The images represent pages of acts written in french and are annotated at line level. Two examples images are shown on Figure \ref{fig:balsac}.
\begin{figure}[htbp]
\centerline{
\includegraphics[width=0.185\textwidth]{resources/CE501S02_1906_2_line.png}
\hspace{0.1cm}
\includegraphics[width=0.25\textwidth]{resources/CE502S61_1878_3_line.png}
}
\caption{Two pages from the Balsac dataset with annotated text lines. 3 full acts on the left and one full act on the right document image.}
\label{fig:balsac}
\end{figure}
\subsubsection{Horae}
This dataset consists in 557 annotated pages of books of hours. These pages have been selected among 500 manuscripts as they represent the variety of layouts and contents \cite{horae2019}. The pages have been annotated at different levels and with various classes such as simple initials, decorated initials or ornamentations. Figure \ref{fig:horae} shows two annotated pages for text line segmentation selected from two different manuscripts.
\subsubsection{READ-BAD}
This dataset \cite{gruning_cbad} is composed of 2036 annotated archival images of documents and has been used during the cBAD: ICDAR2017 \cite{cBAD2017} competition. The images have been extracted from 9 archives and the dataset is split into Simple and Complex subsets. Each image has its corresponding ground truth in PAGE xml format. For the line segmentation task, we used the bounding boxes of the \textit{TextLine} objects as labels.
\subsubsection{DIVA-HisDB}
This last dataset \cite{diva} contains 120 annotated pages extracted from 3 different manuscripts. Each manuscript has 30 training, 10 validation and 10 testing images.
\subsection{Batch Normalization}
As stated in \cite{batchnorm}, Batch Normalization has a great impact on the convergence speed during training but can also impact the results. Indeed, our model converged more than twice faster with Batch Normalization. In addition, as shown in Table \ref{tab:ablation}, Batch Normalization has a real impact on the F1-score in particular for Horae, READ-Complex and DIVA-HisDB. In addition to the quantitative results, we remarked that the visual results with Batch Normalization are also improved. It helps separating close regions but also helps joining regions that would be separated otherwise. In addition, the contours of the predicted regions are often more accurate and smoother.
\subsection{Dropout}
We tested two configurations with dropout layers. The first one (\textit{Drop1}) consists in applying a dropout with \textit{p\_dilated = p\_conv = 0.4} only after the dilated blocks. The second one (\textit{Drop2}) consists in applying the same dropout after every convolution of the model and not only after the last one of the dilated blocks. The application of dropout layers has most of the time a good impact on the performances. Even if the first configuration gives better results on the Horae and READ-Simple datasets, the impact is greater when implemented using the second configuration.
\subsection{Dilation}
For implementing the model, we chose to use a modified version of the dilated block proposed by Yang et al. \cite{yang2018} to have more context information to predict the text lines. To justify our choice of dilation rates, we tested 4 different configurations on the Balsac dataset. We tested blocks with only one convolution and a dilation rate of 1 ($[$\textit{1}$]$) and blocks with a dilation rate of 16 ($[$\textit{16}$]$). We also tested blocks with 5 convolutions with different rates ($[$\textit{1, 1, 1, 1, 1}$]$ and $[$\textit{1, 2, 4, 8, 16}$]$). The results obtained are presented in Table \ref{tab:dilation}.
\begin{table}[htbp!]
\begin{center}
\begin{tabular}{c|c|c|c|c}
\hline
\sc{Dilation}&\textsc{IoU (\%)}&\textsc{P (\%)}&\textsc{R (\%)}&\textsc{F (\%)} \\
\hline
$[$\textit{1}$]$ & 75.94 & \textbf{95.02} & 79.07 & 86.20 \\
$[$\textit{1, 1, 1, 1, 1}$]$ & 79.93 & 92.02 & 85.77 & 88.57 \\
$[$\textit{16}$]$ & 77.45 & 91.68 & 83.22 & 87.13 \\
$[$\textit{1, 2, 4, 8, 16}$]$ & \textbf{83.79} & 94.80 & \textbf{87.86} & \textbf{91.11} \\
\hline
\end{tabular}
\end{center}
\caption{Impact of the dilation rates.}
\label{tab:dilation}
\end{table}
The results with the last configuration are better than any of the others since the receptive field is way larger and the model has more context to predict the text lines. Figure \ref{fig:receptive_field} shows the receptive field growth through the network. The receptive field with the dilation rate ($[$\textit{16}$]$) corresponds to the one of Yang's model since the dilated convolutions are not successive. Having dilated convolutions instead of standard ones really impacts the receptive field size (1000 pixels instead of 200) which results in using more context to predict the text lines and provides higher performances.
\begin{figure}[htbp]
\centerline{
\includegraphics[width=0.50\textwidth]{resources/Receptive_field.png}
}
\caption{Receptive field growth through the network.}
\label{fig:receptive_field}
\end{figure}
\subsection{Training set size}
In addition to the ablation study, we tried to analyze the impact of the training set size on the performances. Therefore, we trained our model on 4 subsets of Balsac training set and report the results on Table \ref{tab:training_size}.
\begin{table}[htbp!]
\begin{center}
\begin{tabular}{c|c|c|c|c}
\hline
\sc{Number of images}&\textsc{IoU (\%)}&\textsc{P (\%)}&\textsc{R (\%)}&\textsc{F (\%)} \\
\hline
90 (12\%) & 77.42 & 92.40 & 82.52 & 87.00 \\
182 (25\%) & 78.64 & 95.17 & 81.85 & 87.91 \\
365 (50\%) & 80.58 & \textbf{95.69} & 83.58 & 89.16 \\
731 (100\%) & \textbf{81.95} & 94.53 & \textbf{85.92} & \textbf{89.89} \\
\hline
\end{tabular}
\end{center}
\caption{Impact of the training set size.}
\label{tab:training_size}
\end{table}
The more the training data, the higher the IoU. However, this progression doesn't have the same effect on the precision metric. The model trained with 365 images has even a higher precision value than the one trained with 731 images. Moreover, we see that training over only 90 images (12 \% of the training set) gives quite good results which are even better than those obtained by dhSegment when trained on the whole dataset.
\subsection{Input image size}
\label{input_size}
As we wanted to follow the model proposed in \cite{yang2018}, we decided to train our models on images resized to \textit{384$\times$384 px}. However we want to see the impact of this choice on our results. Therefore, we trained a model on Balsac and one on DIVA-HisDB on images resized to \textit{768$\times$768 px}. Table \ref{tab:image_size} shows that training on larger images improves a bit the results. However this impact is bigger when the training set contains a lot of images. Balsac dataset contains 731 training images and is more impacted than the DIVA-HisDB dataset that contains only 60 training images.
\begin{table}[htbp!]
\begin{center}
\begin{tabular}{c|c|c|c|c|c}
\hline
\sc{Dataset}&\sc{Size}&\textsc{IoU (\%)}&\textsc{P (\%)}&\textsc{R (\%)}&\textsc{F (\%)} \\
\hline
\multirow{2}{*}{Balsac} & 384 & 83.79 & \textbf{94.80} & 87.86 & 91.11 \\
& 768 & \textbf{86.50} & 94.57 & \textbf{91.06} & \textbf{92.69} \\
\hline
\multirow{2}{*}{DIVA-HisDB} & 384 & 75.71 & 92.14 & 80.88 & 86.09 \\
& 768 & \textbf{76.55} & \textbf{93.33} & \textbf{80.98} & \textbf{86.67} \\
\hline
\end{tabular}
\end{center}
\caption{Impact of the input image size.}
\label{tab:image_size}
\end{table}
| {
"redpajama_set_name": "RedPajamaArXiv"
} | 2,291 |
Another drawing, check it out.
This is a discussion on Another drawing, check it out. within the Amsoil forums, part of the Preferred Vendors category!
It has been a while since the last drawing so I figured it was time for another one. The rules are the same, to enter all you need to do is just post in this thread. Only one post, more than one will disqualify you. Up for the prize is a bottle of AMSOIL's P.i.
The drawing will be on September the 2nd 2013. So get your post in for a chance to win a bottle of P.i. Once the winner is picked I will send a PM to let the individual know they won and to get all the info needed to send the P.i. to them.
OK, the time has come and I would have hoped more would have chimed in but they didn't, the lucky winner is The DarkKnightKnox. Congrats. PM me with your name, and delivery address and I will get this right out. An e-mail address would be helpful in case of delivery problems as well as phone number. Thanks.
Did the winner claim their prize?
free, fuel treatment, gas, p.i. | {
"redpajama_set_name": "RedPajamaC4"
} | 2,522 |
The following is a list of state highways in the U.S. state of Louisiana designated in prior to the 1955 Louisiana Highway renumbering. All were part of the original 98 state highways authorized by the state legislature in 1921.
List
See also
References
Louisiana Highways @ AARoads (includes a route log)
Louisiana Department of Transportation and Development, State, District, and Parish maps
Louisiana Department of Transportation and Development, Functional Classification Maps
External links
Road Signs of Louisiana
State highways | {
"redpajama_set_name": "RedPajamaWikipedia"
} | 7,642 |
Caphys eustelechalis is een vlinder uit de familie van de snuitmotten (Pyralidae). De wetenschappelijke naam van de soort is voor het eerst geldig gepubliceerd in 1914 door Dyar.
Snuitmotten | {
"redpajama_set_name": "RedPajamaWikipedia"
} | 8,101 |
The 2008 FIFA Beach Soccer World Cup qualifiers for (UEFA) was the first FIFA Beach Soccer World Cup qualification championship for Europe, held in Benidorm, Spain. Held in May 2008, hosts Spain won the championship, with Portugal finishing second and Russia winning the third place play off to finish third, beating Italy who finished fourth. The four nations moved on to play in the 2008 FIFA Beach Soccer World Cup in Marseille, France, from July 17 to 27. France qualified as the fifth European nation, being the hosts of the world cup.
Participating teams
24 teams confirmed their participation in the competition.
Group stage
The 24 teams were drawn into 6 groups of 4 teams.
Group A
Group B
Group C
Group D
Group E
Group F
Knockout stage
Round of 16
Quarter finals
Semi finals
Third place play off
Final
Winners
References
Results, at the Roonba
Beach Soccer Worldwide reports: Day 1, Day 2, Day 3, Day 4, Day 5, Day 6, Day 7.
Beach Soccer World Cup Qualification (Uefa) 2008
Qualification (Uefa)
2008
FIFA Beach Soccer World Cup qualification (UEFA)
2008 in beach soccer | {
"redpajama_set_name": "RedPajamaWikipedia"
} | 799 |
Álbum MTV: Cássia Eller é o terceiro DVD da cantora brasileira Cássia Eller, lançado em 2003. O DVD traz a performance da cantora no programa Luau MTV, da MTV Brasil, gravada no dia 19 de dezembro de 2001 (exatamente 10 dias antes de seu falecimento) na Costa do Sauipe, na Bahia, além de oito videoclipes.
Faixas
Luau MTV
Vá Morar Com o Diabo
Luz dos Olhos
Gatas Extraordinárias
Nós
Relicário
O Segundo Sol
Malandragem
Quando a Maré Encher
Videoclipes
Teu Bem
Hear My Train a Coming (Get My Heart Back Together Again)
Que o Deus Venha
Malandragem
O Segundo Sol
Nós
No Recreio
Vá Morar Com o Diabo
Álbuns de Cássia Eller
Álbuns de vídeo de 2003
Álbuns de rock do Brasil
Álbuns em língua portuguesa
Álbuns lançados pela Universal Music Brasil | {
"redpajama_set_name": "RedPajamaWikipedia"
} | 2,882 |
The Bionic arm, making bowls easy with left and right hand and 3 different sizes. Being spring loaded you don't need to hold the bowl in place and for delivery.. Extremely lightweight at only 620 grams!
Australian Made and fully approved by Bowls Australia. | {
"redpajama_set_name": "RedPajamaC4"
} | 8,619 |
Back in March, I mentioned Nic Schell, an electro-mechanically inclined fellow who is touring North America and fixing pinball machines. At that point Nic was just beginning his tour.
These shirts will be printed on nice, soft, 100% ring-spun cotton T's. Shirt color is a cool blue and the 4-color screen-printed image is located on the front chest. Shirts will be $20 plus necessary shipping (based on your location, please see drop-down menu below). Sizes 2X and 3X will cost an additional $5. Sizes offered will be unisex XS-3XL and female fitted shirts in sizes XS-2XL. We do not plan to print extras, so this pre-order period will likely be your last chance to get one. Pre-order lasts for about two weeks and closes at the end of the day on Thursday, June 29th, 2017 at midnight EST. We'll also need 10 pre-orders to make this happen. If we do not reach our minimum, pre-order money will be fully refunded.
Best of luck wrapping your ambitious tour, Nic! | {
"redpajama_set_name": "RedPajamaC4"
} | 7,601 |
{"url":"http:\/\/openstudy.com\/updates\/55f1d89ce4b0227b594fa3d4","text":"## Empty one year ago Evaluate the derivative:\n\n1. Empty\n\n$\\frac{d}{dn} \\left( \\sum_{k=0}^n x^k \\right)$\n\n2. anonymous\n\nnow the thing is should i consider x as constant or variable of n ?\n\n3. anonymous\n\nnot used to x with n xD\n\n4. anonymous\n\n$$\\Large \\frac{d}{dn} \\left( \\sum_{k=0}^n x^k \\right) \\\\ \\Large \\sum_{k=0}^n x^k =\\dfrac{1+x^n}{1-x}\\\\ \\Large \\dfrac{d}{dn} \\left( \\dfrac{1+x^n}{1-x} \\right)$$\n\n5. anonymous\n\nxD\n\n6. Empty\n\nWe could do something like this: $\\frac{S(n+1)-S(n)}{(n+1)-n} = \\frac{\\sum_{k=0}^{n+1} x^k - \\sum_{k=0}^n x^k}{1} = x^{n+1}$\n\n7. anonymous\n\noh this makes more sense\n\n8. IrishBoy123\n\n.","date":"2016-10-26 19:58:56","metadata":"{\"extraction_info\": {\"found_math\": true, \"script_math_tex\": 0, \"script_math_asciimath\": 0, \"math_annotations\": 0, \"math_alttext\": 0, \"mathml\": 0, \"mathjax_tag\": 0, \"mathjax_inline_tex\": 1, \"mathjax_display_tex\": 1, \"mathjax_asciimath\": 0, \"img_math\": 0, \"codecogs_latex\": 0, \"wp_latex\": 0, \"mimetex.cgi\": 0, \"\/images\/math\/codecogs\": 0, \"mathtex.cgi\": 0, \"katex\": 0, \"math-container\": 0, \"wp-katex-eq\": 0, \"align\": 0, \"equation\": 0, \"x-ck12\": 0, \"texerror\": 0, \"math_score\": 0.7807846665382385, \"perplexity\": 11714.307760054633}, \"config\": {\"markdown_headings\": true, \"markdown_code\": true, \"boilerplate_config\": {\"ratio_threshold\": 0.18, \"absolute_threshold\": 10, \"end_threshold\": 15, \"enable\": true}, \"remove_buttons\": true, \"remove_image_figures\": true, \"remove_link_clusters\": true, \"table_config\": {\"min_rows\": 2, \"min_cols\": 3, \"format\": \"plain\"}, \"remove_chinese\": true, \"remove_edit_buttons\": true, \"extract_latex\": true}, \"warc_path\": \"s3:\/\/commoncrawl\/crawl-data\/CC-MAIN-2016-44\/segments\/1476988720972.46\/warc\/CC-MAIN-20161020183840-00471-ip-10-171-6-4.ec2.internal.warc.gz\"}"} | null | null |
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fried rice? It's ready in 10 minutes! Yes, please!
I LOVE this recipe for fried rice! And making it in the pressure cooker makes it even easier.
for a few months now but I am totally spoiled with it. More than I like to admit, I tend to get side tracked and when dinner time rolls around, getting it together becomes a fuss. Since I've had this little miracle appliance, it's made my life a lot less hectic.
and your favorite frozen veggies. (do not add the veggies until after your rice is cooked) The amounts are given in the recipe print out below.
Btw, I'm using the Power Pressure Cooker XL but this recipe works with any electric pressure cooker.
To get started, you'll need to heat the unit up. Just press one of the options. Place your butter, onion and garlic in the pot and saute for about a minute.
Add the egg and cook another minute. Be sure to stir it around because it will stick to the bottom of the pot a bit. Stir in the rest of the ingredients once the egg is mostly cooked.
Place the lid on the unit and set the steam release valve to closed. Select the setting for rice/risotto and adjust the timer to cook for 10 minutes. After the timer has counted down to zero and the rice is done, carefully turn the steam valve to release.
Once the steam is finished releasing, remove the lid and stir in your frozen veggies. I like peas in my fried rice. The residual heat from the rice is just enough to warm the veggies through.
That's all there is to it friends. Easy, right? I should warn you though, this stuff is addicting. Really.
I do hope you'll give this one a try next time you're looking for something fun and yummy to make with your pressure cooker. It's definitely a keeper!
teriyaki chicken fried rice recipe and we've made a video just for you fine foodie folks out there. Check it out..
For detailed ingredients and instructions, you can click here —> Teriyaki Chicken Fried Rice.
Thank you so much for stopping by. If you'd like to subscribe to our Youtube channel, here's a handy dandy link for ya —> HappyBellyFoodie Youtube Channel. It'd tickle me pink if you'd join us there, too!
Have a fabulous week and as always, keep it delicious!
Heat the pressure cooker on the meat setting.
Place the oil in the pot. Add the onion and garlic. Saute 1 minute.
Add the egg and scramble it with the rest of the ingredients for 1-2 minutes.
, soy sauce and chicken stock and stir well.
Place the lid on the unit and set the steam valve to closed.
Press the rice option and adjust the timer for 10 minutes.
When the unit is done cooking, carefully release the steam valve.
Remove the lid and stir in frozen peas or veggies.
Why do you call this fried rice? It is not fried at all.
Ive been searching for a go to recipe for fried rice and made a few but they all seem to make something that should be simple WAY too complicated with WAY too complicated ingredients. This recipe is awesome! Quick and simple and tastes great…I had some leftover brisket and tossed that in as well! The only thing I will do differently next time is half the recipe if its just for me as it made a big serving.
Just bought a pressure cooker and am looking forward to trying this recipe! Have you made this with chicken? I am wondering if the chicken needs to be browned/partially cooked first.
Can you use long grain rice?
I just made this recipe and followed the instructions and I opened it up after 10 minutes in the press use cooker and it's full of water. I used brown basmati rice.
Brown rice requires more time. And perhaps allow a natural release.
I feel really stupid for asking this, but do I need to have prepared steamed rice for this recipe before I make it or does it somehow cook with the chicken stock instead of water…? I'm new to pressure cookers.
The pressure cooker will cook the rice.
I make this ALL THE TIME, we all love it. Any recommendations when you double it with the cook time?
I would add 2 minutes.
I love this recipe, and it works every time even when I *improvise *, haha! Thanks for a fantastic recipe!! | {
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\section{introduction}
\label{introduction}
Ultracold neutral atoms provides a fertile playground for engineering artificial gauge fields~\cite{Goldman,Galitski,Zhai2015,Zhang2016}.
Synthetic spin-orbit coupling, utilizing atomic hyperfine levels as pseudo-spins, can be realized by coupling these states via Raman lasers~\cite{Lin,WangP,Cheuk}.
Spin-orbit-coupled Bose-Einstein condensates (BECs) open a new route in exploring exotic superfluid states and simulating topological matters~\cite{JiS,WuZ,HuangL,Mossman,Valdes,Frolian}. One of interesting features is that the spin-orbit coupling modifies dispersion relation of a BEC. The spin-orbit-coupled dispersion may have multiple energy minima. Condensations into these energy minima present exotic quantum phases, such as plane-wave (PW) phase and stripe phase
~\cite{Wang2010,Wucong2011,Hotian2011,Hu2012,Yongping2012,LiY2012}.
The PW phase occupies one of the minima and possesses a nonzero quasimomentum, which breaks the time-reversal symmetry~\cite{Wucong2011}. The phase transition and excitations of PW states have been experimentally observed~\cite{JiS,Khamehchi}. The stripe phase, condensing at least two minima, represents a combination of spatial density modulation and superfluidity and is identified to have supersolid properties~\cite{LiY2013}.
Realization of the stripe phase requires miscibility of the two spin components and a low Rabi frequency of the Raman lasers~\cite{LiY2012, Zheng2013}.
This is quite a challenge in $^{87}$Rb atoms experiments, since atomic interactions are insensitive to the hyperfine states~\cite{Martone2014, Luo2019,Peter2019}.
Recently, the spin-orbit-coupling-induced stripe phase has been observed in atoms loaded into superlattices~\cite{LiJR}, in which the sub-lattice sites are treated as pseudo-spins.
A spinor BEC has more degrees of freedom and intriguing interactions which lead to a rich ground-state phase diagram~\cite{Stamper-Kurn}. A spin-orbit-coupled spin-1 BEC has been experimentally realized~\cite{Campbell}. Quantum phases in spin-orbit-coupled spin-1 BECs depend on antiferromagnetic and ferromagnetic spin-spin interactions and show salient features~\cite{Lan,Sun, Yu,Martone2016,ChenY}. Three different kinds of stripe phases are revealed to exist and phase transitions between different phases are so abundant that tricritical points emerge~\cite{Yu,Martone2016}. One of outstanding features is that the quadratic Zeeman field plays an important role in the existence of stripe phases. Especially, in a ferromagnetic spinor BEC, stripes appear in the limited regime of low Rabi frequency and quadratic Zeeman field~\cite{Campbell}.
On the other hand, Floquet engineering is a powerful tool in quantum physics for controlling system parameters and manipulating quantum states~\cite{Bukov,Eckardt,Oka}.
In a periodically driven system, an effective static Hamiltonian can be tailored which depends on the driving parameters.
The driving could lead to dramatic changes of the system properties.
Ultracold atoms provide an ideal platform for Floquet engineering due to the tunability and purity of the system,
which has been used to explore artificial gauge fields, topological insulators, and soliton dynamics~\cite{Jotzu,Struck,GoldmanPRX,Flaschner,Ha,Schweizer,Wintersperger,Mitchell,LuM}. In spin-orbit-coupled ultracold atoms, a coherently periodic modulation of Raman laser intensities can produce a tunable spin-orbit coupling strength~\cite{Zhang2013,Jimenez-Garcia,Llorente},
which provides a practical way for dynamical control. A periodic modulation of Raman laser frequencies is employed to manipulate the emergence of the Dirac point in Floquet bands, thus to change band topology~\cite{Huang2018}. A shaking Raman lattice that generates high dimensional spin-orbit coupling is implemented to tune Floquet topological bands~\cite{ZhangJY}.
Recently, a Floquet spinor BEC has been proposed by a periodically driven quadratic Zeeman field~\cite{Kazuya}. Compared with a usual spinor BEC, the Floquet spinor BEC has an additional spin-exchange interaction which is induced by the high-frequency driving. Such an induced spin-exchange interaction can have a profound effect in ferromagnetic condensates and generate unconventional quantum phases~\cite{Kazuya}.
In this paper, we study a Floquet spin-1 BEC with spin-orbit coupling. In spin-1 spin-orbit coupling experiments, three external Raman lasers are used to couple three hyperfine states and the quadratic Zeeman effect is proportional to the two-photon detunings between Raman lasers and hyperfine states~\cite{Campbell}. We propose to drive the quadratic Zeeman effect periodically around a constant value via a periodic modulation of Raman laser frequencies. Under high-frequency driving, the spin-orbit-coupled spinor BEC is effectively described by a static Floquet spinor BEC, in which the Rabi coupling is modulated by a Bessel function and a unique spin-exchange interaction emerges. Quantum ground phases are investigated in such a spin-orbit-coupled Floquet spinor BEC with antiferromagnetic or ferromagnetic spin-spin interactions. Our main results are the following.
(i) Due to the Bessel-function-modulated Rabi frequency, each quantum phase can exist in a broad region of the Rabi frequency. The previous studies show that the stripe phases in antiferromagnetic and ferromagnetic spinor BECs exist in a small regime of the Rabi frequency, saying $\Omega_{c1} <\Omega <\Omega_{c2} $, where $\Omega$ is the Rabi frequency and $\Omega_{c1,c2}$ are two critical values with $\Omega_{c2}-\Omega_{c1}$ being a small quantity~\cite{Campbell,Yu,Martone2016}. In the Floquet spinor BEC, the Rabi frequency is modulated as $\Omega J_0$ with $J_0$ the zero-order Bessel function of the first kind. We find that the corresponding phases appear in $\Omega_{c1}/J_0 <\Omega <\Omega_{c2}/J_0 $. Since $J_0$ is tunable and less than 1, the $\Omega$ region for the existence of the stripe phase is enlarged significantly. Such extension of the Rabi frequency for the stripe phases is beneficial for their experimental observations.
(ii) For antiferromagnetic interactions, the appearance of the Floquet-induced spin-exchange interaction extends the second stripe phase to broaden quadratic Zeeman field domain, which exists in an extremely narrow region of the quadratic Zeeman field in a usual spin-orbit-coupled spinor BEC.
(iii) For ferromagnetic interactions, a new stripe phase is induced by the combined effects of the Floquet-induced spin-exchange interaction and the Rabi coupling. These stripes have a very high density contrast. Their Bogoliubov excitations are identified to have two gapless Nambu-Goldstone modes.
This paper is organized as follows.
In Sec.~\ref{model}, we present the theoretical model for a spin-orbit-coupled Floquet spinor BEC. It features the Floquet-induced spin-exchange interaction and the Bessel-function-modulated Rabi frequency. In Sec.~\ref{noninteracting}, phase diagram of a noninteracting spin-orbit-coupled Floquet spinor BEC is analyzed. In Sec.~\ref{interacting}, phase diagrams in antiferromagnetic and ferromagnetic spin-spin interactions are studied separately.
Finally, the conclusion follows in Sec.~\ref{conclusion}.
\section{MODEL}
\label{model}
We consider an experimentally realizable spin-orbit-coupled spin-1 BEC. The spin-orbit coupling is implemented by coupling three hyperfine states with total angular momentum $F=1$ ($m_F=0,\pm1$)
via three Raman laser propagating along the $x$-axis~\cite{Campbell}. Adjusting two-photon detunings between Raman lasers and hyperfine states to be equal can mimic an effective quadratic Zeeman field. We propose to periodically drive it by a periodic oscillation of the Raman laser frequencies. The mean-field energy functional of the oscillating system is
\begin{align}
E[\Phi]&=\int d\bm{r} \Phi^\dagger \left[ H_{\text{SOC}}+ \xi(t) F_z^2 \right] \Phi \notag\\
&\phantom{={}}+\int d\bm{r} \Phi^\dagger\left[\frac{c_0}{2} \Phi^\dagger \Phi+\frac{c_2}{2}
\Phi^\dagger \bm{F} \Phi\cdot \bm{F} \right] \Phi,
\label{EnergyS}
\end{align}
with $\Phi=(\Phi_1,\Phi_2,\Phi_3)$ being the spin-1 spinor to describe three-component wave functions.
$\bm{F}=(F_x,F_y,F_z)$ are the spin-1 Pauli matrices. $H_{\text{SOC}}$ is the single-particle spin-orbit-coupled Hamiltonian,
\begin{align}
H_{\text{SOC}}=\left(-i\frac{\partial}{\partial x} +2F_z\right)^2 + \varepsilon F^2_{z} +\frac{\Omega}{\sqrt{2}} F_{x},
\label{SocH}
\end{align}
where $\Omega$ is the Rabi frequency depending on the laser intensities, and $\varepsilon$ is a constant quadratic Zeeman shift which is induced
by the detunings of the Raman lasers~\cite{Campbell}. The spin-1 spin-orbit coupling is represented by the second term in Eq.~(\ref{SocH}) with a fixed coupling strength due to the experimentally chosen gauge.
In our dimensionless equations, the units of momentum, length, and energy are $\hbar k_{\text{Ram}}$, $1/k_{\text{Ram}}$,
and $\hbar^2k^2_{\text{Ram}}/2m$, respectively.
Here, $m$ is the atom mass, and $k_{\text{Ram}} = 2\pi/\lambda_{\text{Ram}}$ is the wave number of the Raman lasers with $\lambda_{\text{Ram}}$ being the wavelength.
The quadratic Zeeman field is periodically driven,
\begin{equation}
\xi(t)=\alpha \cos(\omega t),
\end{equation}
with $\omega$ and $\alpha$ being
the frequency and amplitude of the driving, respectively.
$c_{0}$ and $c_{2}$ in Eq.~(\ref{EnergyS}) denote density-density and spin-spin interactions, respectively,
which depend on the $s$-wave scattering lengths in the total spin channels.
In this work, we assume a repulsive density-density interaction ($c_0>0$), while the
spin-spin interaction $c_2$ can be either positive (antiferromagnetic) or negative (ferromagnetic).
For a high-frequency driving, we can derive an effective static Hamiltonian by averaging the time-dependent Hamiltonian over one modulation period~\cite{Eckardt}.
We transform the system into an oscillating frame by using the transformation,
\begin{align}
U(t)=\exp\left(-i\frac{\alpha}{\omega}\sin(\omega t)F_z^2\right).
\end{align}
After applying the transformation $\Phi=U(t)\Psi$, resultant time oscillating terms are dropped due to the average in a period. At last, we end up with a time-independent energy functional as,
\begin{align}
E[\Psi]&=\int d\bm{r} \Psi^\dagger\left[ H^{\prime}_{\text{SOC}}
+\frac{c_0}{2} \Psi^\dagger \Psi+\frac{c_2}{2}
\Psi^\dagger \bm{F} \Psi\cdot \bm{F} \right] \Psi \notag\\
&\phantom{={}} +c_{f}\int d\bm{r} \left( \Psi_{1}^{\dagger}\Psi_{3}^{\dagger}\Psi^{2}_{2}+ \Psi_{1}\Psi_{3}\Psi_{2}^{\dagger2}\right).
\label{eq:energy}
\end{align}
The energy functional describes a spin-orbit-coupled Floquet spinor BEC with the spinor $\Psi=(\Psi_1,\Psi_2,\Psi_3)$ . The modulated single-particle Hamiltonian is
\begin{align}
H^{\prime}_{\text{SOC}}&=\left(-i\frac{\partial}{\partial x} +2F_z\right)^2 + \varepsilon F^2_{z}
+\frac{\Omega}{\sqrt{2}}J_0\left(\frac{\alpha}{\omega}\right) F_{x}.
\label{eq:SOC}
\end{align}
Note that the only difference between the Floquet spin-orbit coupled Hamiltonian $H^{\prime}_{\text{SOC}}$ and the original one $H_{\text{SOC}}$ is that the Rabi frequency is modulated by the zero-order Bessel function of the first kind $J_0(\alpha/\omega)$.
The density-density and spin-spin interactions in Eq.~(\ref{eq:SOC}) are the same as a usual spinor BEC. Nevertheless, there is a new spin-exchange interaction with the coefficient $c_f$ which is a pure effect of Floquet modulation~\cite{Kazuya},
\begin{equation}
c_{f}=c_{2}\left[1- J_{0}\left(2 \alpha /\omega \right)\right].
\end{equation}
The spin-orbit-coupled Floquet spinor BEC is reduced back to a usual spin-orbit-coupled spinor BEC if the driving disappears, i.e., $\alpha/\omega=0$.
\begin{figure}[t]
\includegraphics[width=3.2in]{Fig1.pdf}
\caption{Quantum ground-state phase diagram of a noninteracting spin-orbit-coupled Floquet spinor BEC in the space of the Rabi frequency $\Omega$ and the quadratic Zeeman field $\varepsilon$. The driving is $\alpha/\omega=2$ ($J_0(\alpha/\omega)=0.224$). The background corresponds to values of the tensor magnetization $\langle {F}^2_z \rangle$.
The black and white dotted lines represent first-order and second-order phase transitions, respectively. Below the dotted lines is the plane-wave phase, and beyond is the zero momentum phase.
The red star denotes a tricritical point. Insets show the lowest bands of the single-particle dispersion.
The black dashed lines separate different regions where the lowest band of the dispersion has three, two or one local energy minima.
}
\label{Fig1}
\end{figure}
\section{Phase diagram of the noninteracting spin-orbit-coupled Floquet spinor BEC}
\label{noninteracting}
We study quantum phases in a spin-orbit-coupled Floquet spinor BEC. First, we analyze the single-particle phase diagram which has been addressed in Refs.~\cite{Lan,Sun, Yu}. The analysis of the single-particle phase diagram can provide an insight to ground states in the interacting system. The dispersion of $H^{\prime}_{\text{SOC}}$ can be calculated by a direct diagonalization. Depending on spin-orbit-coupling parameters, the lowest band in the dispersion may have three, two or one local minima. Ground states choose one of minima to occupy. Therefore, a general ground-state wave function should be
\begin{align}
\Psi=\sqrt{\bar{n}}e^{ikx}\left(\begin{array}{c}
\cos\theta\cos\varphi \\ -\sin\theta \\ \cos\theta\sin\varphi
\end{array}\right),
\label{eq:pw}
\end{align}
where $\bar{n}=N/V$, with $N$ being the total atom number and $V$ the volume of the system,
$k$ is the quasimomentum, and $\theta$ and $\varphi$ are two parameters. By substituting Eq.~(\ref{eq:pw}) into Eq.~(\ref{eq:energy}) (with $c_0=c_2=0$), we obtain the energy per particle,
\begin{align}
E_{k}=k^{2}- \left( \frac{A_{k}^{\prime}}{54}\right)^{\frac{3}{2}}-A_{k} \left(\frac{2} {27 A_{k}^{\prime}}\right)^{\frac{3}{2}} +\frac{2}{3} A_{0},
\end{align}
with
\begin{align}
A_{k}&=48 k^{2}+(\varepsilon+4)^2+\frac{3}{2}J^2_{0}\left(\frac{\alpha}{\omega}\right) \Omega^{2},\notag\\
A^{\prime}_{k}&=(\varepsilon+4)A_{k}^{\prime \prime}+\sqrt{(\varepsilon+4)^{2} A_{k}^{\prime \prime 2}-4 A_{k}^{3}} , \notag\\
A_{k}^{\prime \prime}&=-288 k^{2}+2(\varepsilon+4)^{2}+\frac{9}{2}J^2_{0}\left(\frac{\alpha}{\omega}\right) \Omega^{2}. \notag
\end{align}
Then the quasimomentum can be determined by solving $\partial E_k/\partial k=0$. The occupation of $k=0$ is the zero momentum (ZM) state, and the occupation of a nonzero quasimomentum is the plane-wave (PW) state.
Fig.~\ref{Fig1} shows ground-state phase diagram in the $(\Omega, \varepsilon)$ plane,
in which the tensor magnetization $\langle {F}^2_z \rangle=\cos^2\theta$ is chosen as the order parameter. The dotted lines are the transition line between PW and ZM phases, above which is the ZM phase and below is the PW phase. We also show the lowest band of $H^{\prime}_{\text{SOC}}$ in Fig.~\ref{Fig1}. The dashed line in the ZM regime is a separation, above which the lowest band has only one minimum at $k=0$ and below which it has three local minima but the lowest one at $k=0$. In the PW regime, the lowest band may have three local minima or two. The separation between these two cases is demonstrated by the blakc dashed lines. Two dashed lines merge together with the phase transition line at the so-called tricritical point, which is labeled by the red star in Fig.~\ref{Fig1}. The location of the tricritical point can be analytically calculated from $\partial^2 E_k/\partial k^2=0$ and the equal energy between the PW and ZM states~\cite{Sun,Yu}. The calculated value for the tricritical point is $(\Omega^{\ast},\varepsilon^{\ast})=(30.14,-1.66)$. When $\Omega<\Omega^{\ast}$ the PW-ZM transition is first-order and when $\Omega>\Omega^{\ast}$ the phase transition is second-order.
\section{Phase diagram of the interacting spin-orbit-coupled Floquet spinor BEC}
\label{interacting}
For a spin-orbit-coupled spin-1 BEC, the previous works revealed ground states including PW, ZM and stripe phases and rich phase transitions between them~\cite{Campbell, Sun,Yu,Martone2016}. The single-particle spin-orbit-coupled dispersion provides diverse arrangements of energy-minima, and interactions determine the way to condense into these minima. Since the dispersion of $H^{\prime}_{\text{SOC}}$ have three energy-minima at most, we construct ground-state wave functions as a superposition of the spinors at these minima, which can be assumed as
\begin{align}
\Psi&=\sqrt{\bar{n}} C_{+}e^{ikx}\left(\begin{array}{c}
\cos\theta_1\cos\varphi \\ -\sin\theta_1 \\ \cos\theta_1\sin\varphi
\end{array}\right)+\sqrt{\bar{n}} C_{0}\left(\begin{array}{l}
\sin\theta_2/\sqrt{2} \\ -\cos\theta_2 \\ \sin\theta_2/\sqrt{2}
\end{array}\right) \notag\\
&\phantom{={}}+\sqrt{\bar{n}}C_{-}e^{-ikx} \left(\begin{array}{c}
\cos\theta_1\sin\varphi \\ -\sin\theta_1 \\ \cos\theta_1\cos\varphi
\end{array}\right).
\label{eq:variation}
\end{align}
The superposition coefficients satisfy normalization condition, $|C_{+}|^2+|C_0|^2+|C_{-}|^2=1$. The spinors are the eigenstates of $H^{\prime}_{\text{SOC}}$ with the concrete parameters $\theta_{1,2}$ and $\varphi$ to be specified. The second state in Eq.~(\ref{eq:variation}) is the spinor at $k=0$, and the first and third ones are spinors modulated by the plane waves at $\pm k$. The symmetry of $H^{\prime}_{\text{SOC}}$ requires that the first and third states have the same $\theta_1$ and $\varphi$. We substitute the above variational wave functions Eq.~(\ref{eq:variation}) into the energy functional in Eq.~(\ref{eq:energy}). The minimization of the resultant energy functional gives the values of parameters $k$, $C_{0,\pm}$, $\theta_{1,2}$ and $\varphi$. From these parameters, we can classify ground states:
the ZM phase has $C_\pm=0$; the PW phase has a nonzero $k$ and $C_0=0$ with one of $C_\pm$ being nonzero; the stripe phase requires $k\ne 0$ and at least two of $C_{\pm,0}$ are nonzero. The stripe phases can be further classified according to relative values of $C_{\pm,0}$~\cite{Yu,Martone2016}.
Considering that the classification of ground states depends strongly on $C_{\pm,0}$, we use the tensor magnetization $\left\langle F^2_z\right\rangle$ as the order parameter to identify different phases,
\begin{equation}
\left\langle F^2_z\right\rangle=\left(\left|C_{+}\right|^2+\left|C_{-}\right|^2\right) \cos ^2 \theta_1+\left|C_0\right|^2 \sin ^2 \theta_2.
\label{order}
\end{equation}
We find that antiferromagnetic and ferromagnetic spin-spin interactions have very different ground-state phase diagrams,
which are studied separately.
\subsection{Antiferromagnetic interactions}
\begin{figure}[t]
\includegraphics[ width=3.2in]{Fig2.pdf}
\caption{Quantum ground-state phase diagram of a spin-orbit coupled Floquet spinor BEC with an antiferromagnetic spin-spin interaction ($\bar{n}c_0=1$ and $\bar{n}c_2=0.1$). The background corresponds to values of the tensor magnetization $\langle {F}^2_z \rangle$ defined in Eq.~(\ref{order}). The black and white dotted lines represent the first-order and second-order phase transitions.
The different tricritical points are denoted by the red and purple stars.
The driving is $\alpha/\omega=2$ ($J_0(\alpha/\omega)=0.224$ and $J_0(2\alpha/\omega)=-0.397$).
}
\label{Fig2}
\end{figure}
The antiferromagnetic interaction is $c_2>0$, which is typical for the $^{23}$Na BEC. Fig.~\ref{Fig2} demonstrates the phase diagram for antiferromagnetic interactions with a driving $\alpha/\omega=2$ in the space of the quadratic Zeeman field $\varepsilon$ and the Rabi frequency $\Omega$. When $\varepsilon$ is negative, the single-particle dispersion has two lowest minima locating at $\pm k_m$ [see the inset in Fig.~\ref{Fig1}], the antiferromagnetic interaction allows atoms to simultaneously occupy these two minima to form a stripe for a low $\Omega$. This stripe phase labeled as S1 in Fig.~\ref{Fig2} has $|C_{+}|=|C_{-}|=1/\sqrt{2}$ and $C_0=0$.
Using the wave functions in Eq.~(\ref{eq:variation}) with $C_0=0$ and considering the single-particle spinors at $\pm k_m$ having $\varphi= \pi/2$, we get the energy of antiferromagnetic interaction $\langle E \rangle_{c_2}$ and Floquet-induced spin-exchange interaction $\langle E \rangle_{c_f}$,
\begin{align}
\langle E \rangle_{c_2} +\langle E \rangle_{c_f} &=\frac{c_2\bar{n}^2 }{2}\cos^4\theta_1 + c_2\bar{n}^2|C_{-}|^2|C_{+}|^2
\notag \\
&\phantom{={}}\cdot\left[(1+\frac{c_f}{c_2}) \sin^2(2\theta_1)-2\cos^4\theta_1\right].
\label{Twoenergy}
\end{align}
For a low $\Omega$, we have $\theta_1\approx 0$ and the minimization of $\langle E \rangle_{c_2} +\langle E \rangle_{c_f}$ leads to $|C_{+}|=|C_{-}|=1/\sqrt{2}$,
corresponding to the S1 phase, the tensor magnetization of which is $\left\langle F^2_z\right\rangle \approx 1$, as shown in Fig.~\ref{Fig2}.
$\theta_1$ prefers to be nonzero for a large $\Omega$.
Meanwhile, the first term
$c_2\bar{n}^2/2\cos^4\theta_1$ in $\langle E \rangle_{c_2} +\langle E \rangle_{c_f}$ allows $\theta_1$ approaching to $\pi/2$ at which it is minimized,
so that $\theta_1$ can grows from zero to $\pi/2$ as $\Omega$ increases. Consequently, for a high $\Omega$, we may have $(1+c_f/c_2) \sin^2(2\theta_1)-2\cos^4\theta_1>0$. Then the minimization of $\langle E \rangle_{c_2} +\langle E \rangle_{c_f}$ requires one of $C_{\pm}$ to be zero. Even though the single-particle dispersion has two minima, the antiferromagnetic interaction chooses one of them to occupy, generating the PW phase shown in Fig.~\ref{Fig2}. The phase transition between the S1 and PW phases is first order. Physically, $\langle E \rangle_{c_2} +\langle E \rangle_{c_f}$ is proportional to $c_2\bar{n}^2 |C_{+}|^2|C_{-}|^2 [(1+c_f/c_2)\langle F_x \rangle_+ \langle F_x \rangle_- + \langle F_z \rangle_+ \langle F_z \rangle_-]$, where $\langle F_x \rangle_\pm $ and $\langle F_z \rangle_\pm $ are the $x$ and $z$ polarization of the spinors at $\pm k_m$. The antiferromagnetic interaction generates $ \langle F_z \rangle_+ \langle F_z \rangle_- <0$ and the Rabi coupling is in favor of $\langle F_x \rangle_+ \langle F_x \rangle_->0$. The competition between these two effects gives rise to the S1-PW transition and we have $\left\langle F^2_z\right\rangle < 1$ in the PW phase [see Fig.~\ref{Fig2}].
The emergence of the ZM phase in Fig.~\ref{Fig2} is due to the fact that the lowest minimum of the single-particle dispersion lays at $k=0$. There is a second stripe phase labeled as S2 which is unique only for antiferromagnetic interactions. The S2 phase is featured with $|C_-|=|C_+|\ne 0, |C_0| \ne 0$ and $\Theta\equiv \arg(C_-)+ \arg(C_+)-2\arg(C_0)=\pi$.
At first glance, the phase diagram shown in Fig.~\ref{Fig2} is similar to that of a usual spin-orbit-coupled BEC demonstrated in Refs.~\cite{Yu,Martone2016} (i.e., Fig.~1(a) in~\cite{Yu} and Fig.~1 in~\cite{Martone2016}). There are two tricritical points represented by stars in Fig.~\ref{Fig2}. The first (second) order phase transitions between different phases are shown by black-dotted (white-dotted) lines.
However, there are two new features in our system. (i) All phases exist in a broadened region of the Rabi frequency. This is a straightforward consequence of the Bessel-function modulation $\Omega J_0$. (ii) The existence of the S2 phase is also extended in the $\varepsilon$ domain. In the usual spin-orbit-coupled antiferromagnetic BEC the S2 phase exists in an extremely narrow region of $\varepsilon$ (see Fig.~1(a) in~\cite{Yu} and Fig.~1 in~\cite{Martone2016}). Our Floquet system has a large extension, which benefits from the Floquet-induced interaction.
\begin{figure}[t]
\includegraphics[ width=3.2in]{Fig3.pdf}
\caption{Phase diagram for an antiferromagnetic interaction ($\bar{n}c_0=1$ and $\bar{n}c_2=0.1$) as a function of the driving $\alpha/\omega$. The Rabi frequency is $\Omega=2$. The background corresponds to values of the tensor magnetization $\langle {F}^2_z \rangle$.
The black and white dotted lines represent the first-order and second-order phase transitions.}
\label{Fig3}
\end{figure}
To reveal the extension of the stripe regions more clearly, we study the phase diagram as a function of the driving $\alpha/\omega$. The results are shown in Fig.~\ref{Fig3}
for $\Omega=2$.
It is clear from the figure that without the driving ($\alpha/\omega =0$) the S2 phase exists in a extremely narrow region of $\varepsilon$. This gives rise to a challenge for its experimental implementations. The upper boundary of the S2 phase corresponds to the degeneracy of three minima of the single-particle dispersion, i.e., $E_{-k_{m}}= E_{k=0}=E_{k_{m}}$, and beyond the boundary $E_{k=0}$ becomes the lowest one such that ground state is the ZM phase. Below the boundary, we have $E_{-k_{m}}=E_{k_{m}}< E_{k=0}$.
For a low $\Omega$, the spinors at $\pm k_{m}$ have $\theta_1=0$, $\varphi=\pi/2$ and the spinor at $k=0$ has $\theta_2=0$. The general wave function becomes
\begin{equation}
\Psi=\sqrt{\bar{n}} \begin{pmatrix}
C_-e^{-ikx} \\ -C_0 \\ C_+e^{ikx}
\end{pmatrix},
\label{Approx}
\end{equation}
which is a good approximation for a low $\Omega$. By using Eq.~(\ref{Approx}), we find that
the antiferromagnetic energy can be minimized as $\langle E \rangle_{c_2}=0$ in both the S1 phase ($|C_{\pm}|=1/\sqrt{2}, C_0=0$) and the S2 phase
($|C_-|=|C_+|<1/\sqrt{2}$, $C_0\neq 0$, $\Theta=\pi$) .
However, the S2 phase is not a minimization of the quadratic Zeeman energy $\langle E \rangle_{\varepsilon}=\varepsilon\bar{n} ( |C_-|^2+|C_+|^2 )$ for
$\varepsilon<0$, so that the ground state is the S1 phase. A dominant Rabi frequency $\Omega$ causes a small deviation $\theta_1$ from 0, i.e., $\theta_1=\delta\theta$, where $\delta\theta>0$ is a very small quantity. This term leads to $\langle E \rangle_{c_2}=8c_2\bar{n}^2|C_+|^4(\delta \theta)^2$ for both the S1 and S2 phases. Considering the S1 phase with $|C_+|^2=1/2$ and the S2 phase with $|C_+|^2<1/2$, this extra antiferromagnetic energy prefers the S2 phase as the ground state if the quadratic Zeeman energy is weak. If the quadratic Zeeman energy exceeds this extra energy, the S1 phase is back as the ground state. Since the extra energy is a small quantity of second order, the S2 ground state exists in a very small $\varepsilon$ domain.
In the presence of the driving, the region of the S2 phase is dramatically extended around $\varepsilon=0$ [see Fig.~\ref{Fig3}]. The upward shift of the region is due to the Bessel-function-modulated Rabi frequency. As the driving $\alpha/\omega$ increasing from 0, $\Omega J_0(\alpha/\omega)$ decreases towards zero. As shown in Fig.~\ref{Fig2}, for a small $\Omega$, the S2 phase locates around $\varepsilon=0$. The dramatic expansion of the existence area is the consequence of the Floquet-induced spin-exchange interaction. The S2 phase can greatly minimize the spin-exchange-interaction energy, which can be easily seen from the approximate wave function for a low $\Omega$ in Eq.~(\ref{Approx}). With the wave function, the spin-exchange-interaction energy
becomes $\langle E \rangle_{c_f}=2c_f\bar{n}^2 |C_-||C_+||C_0|^2\cos(\Theta)$. The S2 phase, having $0<|C_-|=|C_+|<1/\sqrt{2}$ and $\Theta=\pi$, makes the spin-exchange energy minimized. Other phases, such as the ZM phase ($C_0=1$), the PW phase ($C_0=0$, $|C_+|+|C_-|=1$), and the S1 phase ($C_0=0, |C_{\pm}|=1/\sqrt{2}$), lead to $\langle E \rangle_{c_f}=0$,
so that the Floquet-induced spin-exchange energy cannot be minimized. Meanwhile, the S2 phase also minimizes the antiferromagnetic interaction energy, $\langle E \rangle_{c_2}=c_2\bar{n}^2/2 (|C_-|^2-|C_+|^2)^2 +c_2\bar{n}^2[|C_-|^2|C_0|^2+|C_+|^2|C_0|^2+2|C_-||C_+||C_0|^2\cos(\Theta)]=0$. The only obstacle for the existence of the S2 phase is the quadratic Zeeman energy $\langle E \rangle_{\varepsilon}=\varepsilon \bar{n}( |C_-|^2+|C_+|^2 )$. If $\varepsilon>0$, the quadratic Zeeman energy prefers the ZM phase and when $\varepsilon<0$ it prefers the S1 phase. Therefore, the competition between the Floquet-induced spin-exchange interaction and the quadratic Zeeman field leads to the existence region for the S2 phase which is dramatically extended in comparison with the usual case with $\alpha/\omega=0$. The S2-ZM (white-dotted) and S2-S1 (black-dotted) transition lines oscillate as a function of $\alpha/\omega$. It is noted that the maxima of the transition lines correspond to the zeros of $J_0( \alpha/\omega)$, therefore the oscillations come from $\Omega J_0(\alpha/\omega)$. It is also interesting that without the driving the S2 phase always exists in the negative $\varepsilon$ area, but with the driving it can exist even in positive $\varepsilon$ areas.
\subsection{Ferromagnetic interactions}
The ferromagnetic interaction is $c_2<0$. We consider $c_2/c_0=-0.5$, which is typical of $^7$Li atoms~\cite{Martone2016}. Fig.~\ref{Fig4} demonstrates the phase diagram for ferromagnetic interactions with a driving $\alpha/\omega=1.6$. In the low $\Omega$ region, there is a third stripe phase, which is labeled as S3 in Fig.~\ref{Fig4}. It has $|C_-|=|C_+|\ne 0, |C_0| \ne 0$, and $\Theta=0$. Using the approximate wave function in Eq.~(\ref{Approx}), we know that the S3 phase only minimizes the second term in the ferromagnetic interaction energy $\langle E \rangle_{c_2}=c_2\bar{n}^2/2 (|C_-|^2-|C_+|^2)^2 +c_2\bar{n}^2[|C_-|^2|C_0|^2+|C_+|^2|C_0|^2+2|C_-||C_+||C_0|^2\cos(\Theta)]$ ($c_2<0$) and it cannot minimize the first term $c_2\bar{n}^2/2 (|C_-|^2-|C_+|^2)^2$ which is minimized by the PW phase. With the effect of the quadratic Zeeman field, the S3, PW and ZM phases are distributed in the way shown in Fig.~\ref{Fig4}. These three phases are similar to the previous studies~\cite{Yu,Martone2016} (i.e., Fig.~1(b) in~\cite{Yu} and Fig.~2 in~\cite{Martone2016}), but with an outstanding feature that every phase exists in a broaden region of $\Omega$ due to the Bessel-function modulation.
\begin{figure}[t]
\includegraphics[width=3.2in]{Fig4.pdf}
\caption{Quantum ground-state phase diagram of a spin-orbit coupled Floquet spinor BEC with a ferromagnetic spin-spin interaction $\bar{n}c_0=1$ and $\bar{n}c_2=-0.5$. The background corresponds to values of the tensor magnetization $\langle {F}^2_z \rangle$. The black and white dotted lines represent the first-order and second-order phase transitions. The different tricritical points are denoted by red and yellow stars. The driving is $\alpha/\omega=1.6$ ($J_0(\alpha/\omega)=0.455$ and $J_0(2\alpha/\omega)=-0.320$). }
\label{Fig4}
\end{figure}
Different from the case of $\alpha/\omega=0$ in Refs.~\cite{Yu,Martone2016, Campbell}, we find in the Floquet spinor BEC that there exists a new stripe phase, which is labeled as S4. The S4 phase locates inside the region where the single-particle dispersion has two energy minima at $\pm k_m$,
and they are equally occupied by the S4 phase with $|C_{\pm}|=1/\sqrt{2}$ and $C_0=0$. This condition is exactly same to the S1 phase with antiferromagnetic interactions. Nevertheless, the S1 phase exists in the low $\Omega $ region [see Fig.~\ref{Fig2}] while the S4 phase is in the high $\Omega$ region [see Fig.~\ref{Fig4}]. Such a difference of existence region related to $\Omega$ brings new features to the S4 phase. With $C_0=0$, the minimization of the ferromagnetic energy and the Floquet-induced energy demonstrated in Eq.~(\ref{Twoenergy}) leads to $|C_-|=0$ or $|C_+|=0$ for low $\Omega$ ($\theta_1\approx 0$). In this case, the ground state is the PW phase with $\left\langle F^2_z\right\rangle\approx 1$, as shown in Fig.~\ref{Fig4}.
For a high $\Omega$, one may have $\theta_1\ne 0$ and $(1+c_f/c_2) \sin^2(2\theta_1)-2\cos^4\theta_1>0$.
The minimization of
$\langle E \rangle_{c_2} +\langle E \rangle_{c_f}$ requires $|C_{\pm}|=1/\sqrt{2}$, so that the ground state is the S4 phase. Due to the existence of the S4 phase, there are two tricritical points labeled by stars in Fig.~\ref{Fig4}.
\begin{figure}[b]
\includegraphics[ width=3.2in]{Fig5.pdf}
\caption{Phase diagram in a ferromagnetic interaction ($\bar{n}c_0=1$ and $\bar{n}c_2=-0.5$) as a function of the driving $\alpha/\omega$. The Rabi frequency is $\Omega=8$. The background corresponds to values of the tensor magnetization $\langle {F}^2_z \rangle$. The black and white dotted lines represent the first-order and second-order phase transitions. The different tricritical points are denoted by red and yellow stars.}
\label{Fig5}
\end{figure}
We want to emphasize that without the driving ($c_f=0$) the S4 phase cannot exist~\cite{Yu,Martone2016, Campbell}.
In absence of the driving, Eq.~(\ref{Twoenergy}) becomes $\langle E \rangle_{c_2} =c_2\bar{n}^2 /2\cos^4\theta_1+
c_2\bar{n}^2|C_{-}|^2|C_{+}|^2\left[ \sin^2(2\theta_1)-2\cos^4\theta_1\right]$. For $c_2<0$,
the first term $c_2\bar{n}^2 /2\cos^4\theta_1$ prefers $\theta_1=0$. According to the second term, the realization of the S4 phase needs a nonzero $\theta_1$ satisfying $\sin^2(2\theta_1)-2\cos^4\theta_1>0$, which can be achieved by increasing the Rabi frequency.
Besides, the negative Rabi coupling energy is also beneficial for lowing the total energy.
However, the single-particle dispersion with a large $\Omega$ will have the energy minimum at $k=0$
lower than the energy minima at $k=\pm k_{m}$ and the ground state prefers the ZM phase. Thus, there is no way for the S4 phase to exist. The Floquet-induced interaction has the nature of spin-exchange. It has two effects: the spin-exchange interaction causes a direct competition with the first term since it prefers $\theta_1=\pi/4$ so that three components having equal populations in each spinor; according to Eq.~(\ref{Twoenergy}), the S4 phase requires $ (1+c_f/c_2) \sin^2(2\theta_1)-2\cos^4\theta_1>0$,
and the positive $c_f/c_2$ as a prefactor also increases the possibility for $\theta_1$ satisfying the requirement. Therefore, combined effects of the Rabi coupling and the Floquet-induced interaction makes the possible existence of the S4 phase.
\begin{figure}[t]
\includegraphics[ width=3.2in]{Fig6.pdf}
\caption{Profiles of the S4 phase in a ferromagnetic interaction ($\bar{n}c_0=1$ and $\bar{n}c_2=-0.5$). The driving is $\alpha/\omega=1.6$ ($J_0(\alpha/\omega)=0.455$ and $J_0(2\alpha/\omega)=-0.320$). The quadratic Zeeman field is $\varepsilon=-2$. (a) Spatial density distributions, $n_i=|\Psi_i|^2$, and $n$ the total density $n=n_1+n_2+n_3$. The Rabi frequency is $\Omega=8$. (b) The contrast $(n_{\mathrm{max}}-n_{\mathrm{min}})/(n_{\mathrm{max}}+n_{\mathrm{min}})$ as a function of $\Omega$.}
\label{Fig6}
\end{figure}
In order to know how the S4 phase emerges in the presence of the driving, we analyze the phase diagram as a function of the driving $\alpha/\omega$, which is demonstrated in Fig.~\ref{Fig5}. The Rabi frequency is fixed as $\Omega=8$.
For $\alpha/\omega=0$, the ground state is the ZM phase, as shown by the focused area of $\varepsilon$ in Fig.~\ref{Fig5}, which is consistent with the results in Refs.~\cite{Yu,Martone2016, Campbell}. As $\alpha/\omega$ increasing, the S3, S4 and PW phases appear and have an interesting distribution shown in Fig.~\ref{Fig5}.
Transition (white-dotted and back-dotted) lines have an oscillating behavior with the maxima matching with the zeros of $J_0(\alpha/\omega)$. The S3 and S4 phases locate between two transition lines. Furthermore, the S4 phase exists in limited regions. The changing of $\alpha/\omega$ is equivalent to scan $\Omega$. A high $\alpha/\omega$ leads to $\Omega J_0(\alpha/\omega)$ confining around $0$. According to Fig.~\ref{Fig4}, the ground state around $\Omega=0$ is the S3 phase.
Therefore, for a high $\alpha/\omega$ there is no S4 phase anymore [see Fig.~\ref{Fig5}].
In Fig.~\ref{Fig6}(a), we show density distributions $n_i=|\Psi_i|^2$ of a typical S4 state. The outstanding feature is that the second component $n_2$ is comparable with other components $n_1=n_3$. This is completely different from the S1 phase with antiferromagnetic interactions, where $n_2 \ll n_1=n_3$.
This is due to the low $\Omega$ region for the S1 phase. For a low $\Omega$, the spinors at $\pm k_{m}$ can be physically approximated as $e^{ik_mx}(\delta^2, \delta, 1)^T$ and $e^{-ik_mx}(1, \delta, \delta^2)^T$ respectively, where $\delta$ is a small quantity. The S1 phase is an equal superposition of the two spinors and we have $n_1=n_3=1+2\delta^2\cos(2k_{m}x)$ and $n_2=4\delta^2\cos^2(k_{m}x)$. Therefore, the S1 phase has $n_2 \ll n_1=n_3$ and a very low contrast for $n_1$ and $n_2$ which is proportional to a small quantity of second order. The contrast is defined as $(n_{\mathrm{max}}-n_{\mathrm{min}})/(n_{\mathrm{max}}+n_{\mathrm{min}})$ with $n_{\mathrm{max}}$ ($n_{\mathrm{min}}$) the density maximum (minimum). The low contrast of the S1 phase is unfavorable for experimental observations. However, the S4 phase with ferromagnetic interactions exists in the high $\Omega$ region, and with the further help from the Floquet-induced spin-exchange, $\delta$ is not a small quantity anymore. Therefore, the contrast of $n_1$ and $n_3$ is obviously high for the S4 phase. The excellence of the second component is that its contrast is always maximized (which is equal to one). The dominated occupation in the second component makes it perfect for directly experimental observations. In Fig.~\ref{Fig6}(b), we show the contrast in the full $\Omega$ region. The contrast of $n_1$ and $n_3$ increases with the increase of $\Omega$, and it is always one as expected for the second component $n_2$.
\begin{figure}[t]
\includegraphics[ width=3in]{Fig7.pdf}
\caption{Bogoliubov excitation spectrum $\zeta(q_x)$ of a typical S4 state. The parameters are $\bar{n}c_0=1$, $\bar{n}c_2=-0.5$, $\Omega=7$ and $\varepsilon=-1.1$. The lowest two bands are gapless corresponding to two Nambu-Goldstone modes.
}
\label{Fig7}
\end{figure}
A closely related study of ground states is their elementary excitations. Excitation spectrum of each phase in usual spin-orbit-coupled spin-1 BECs has been investigated~\cite{Sun,Yu, ChenY}. The new S4 phase only exists in Floquet spinor BECs and we study its Bogoliubov excitation. The stripe wave function ansatz in Eq.~(\ref{eq:variation}) only includes low-order plane waves. It has been known that such ansatz cannot precisely capture Bogoliubov excitation and high-order planes waves should be involved~
\cite{Martone2014,LiY2013,Xiaolong,Lyu,Guanqiangli2021}. Therefore, we use the ansatz with high-order modes~\cite{ChenY},
\begin{equation}
\Psi= \sqrt{\bar{n}} \sum_{j=-L}^L e^{ijKx}\begin{pmatrix}
\varphi_1^{(j)} \\ \varphi_2^{(j)} \\ \varphi_3^{(j)}
\end{pmatrix},
\label{stripeexcitation}
\end{equation}
with the normalization condition $\sum_{\sigma,j}|\varphi_\sigma^{(j)}|^2=1$. Here, $L$ is the cutoff of plane waves, and $K$ relates to the period of the stripes. Spinors $ (\varphi_1^{(j)}, \varphi_2^{(j)}, \varphi_3^{(j)})^T$ and $K$ are determined by minimizing the energy function in Eq.~(\ref{eq:energy}) using Eq.~(\ref{stripeexcitation}). In the S4 phase parameter region, we first get the stripe wave function by the minimization procedures, and then we use the ground state to solve Bogoliubov-de Gennes equation to get the elementary excitation energy $\zeta$~\cite{ChenY} . A typical excitation spectrum $\zeta(q_x)$, i.e., the relation between excitation energy $\zeta$ and excitation quasimomentum $q_x$, is demonstrated in Fig.~\ref{Fig7}, in which only three lowest bands are shown. The size of Brillouin zone is $2K$ which means that the period of stripes is $\pi/K$. The lowest two bands are gapless, corresponding to two Nambu-Goldstone modes. The physical origin of these two gapless modes is that stripes spontaneously break the continuously translational symmetry and gauge symmetry~\cite{LiY2013}.
\section{Conclusion}
\label{conclusion}
Spin-orbit-coupled spin-1 BECs have been realized in experiments. Based on the experimental platform, we propose a spin-orbit-coupled Floquet spinor BEC by periodically driving the quadratic Zeeman field with a high-frequency. In the Floquet spinor BEC, the Rabi frequency is modulated by a Bessel function and a Floquet-induced spin-exchange interaction emerges. We study quantum ground-state phase diagram of a spin-orbit-coupled Floquet spinor BEC considering antiferromagnetic and ferromagnetic spin-spin interactions separately. A general result is that due to the Bessel-function modulation, every phase in diagram can exist in a broadened Rabi frequency region. For antiferromagnetic interactions, we find that the existence of a stripe phase can be dramatically extended in the $\varepsilon$ domain due to the Floquet-induced spin-exchange interaction. For ferromagnetic interactions, a new stripe phase is revealed, and its features, including high contrast and Bogoliubov excitations, are identified. In all previous studies of spin-$1/2$ and spin-1 spin-orbit-coupled BECs, stripes have a very low contrast, since they exist in low $\Omega$ regime and the contrast is proportional to the Rabi frequency $\Omega$~\cite{Martone2014}. The new stripe phase in the Floquet spinor BEC exists in high $\Omega$ region and its high contrast is in favor of experimental observations.
\section*{Acknowledgments}
We appreciate Prof. Peter Engels for stimulating discussions. This work is supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China with Grants No. 11974235 and No. 11774219.
H.L acknowledges supports from Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology Graduate University.
| {
"redpajama_set_name": "RedPajamaArXiv"
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What do they expect. Mostly every teenager is anti social I am always watching a series or a movie am I doing something wrong?
yes i think i am a bad son.
You aren't a bad person. Most teenagers that are like this tend to be shut or closed off from the human world. It can because of on going things that happen inside of the home. Since you haven't specified what it is. Then we can figure maybe something is happening between the parents and you or you are withholding from telling them something in fear of being punished. Most teens become sucked into the online world and it's hard to be human and step away from it and talk to others like the golden days. Technology has its perks yes but like someone else said "technology can not replace the human connection skills." So come out once in a while or sit and cant with some friends about what is going in life. Have a real face to face connection this world is very full of tech that is consuming absolutely everyone. be apart of the change an difference. Make human interactions and connections. Otherwise everything will become like sleek and robotic like.
Not at all! Most people love the social life while some love being alone. Half of my family are social animals while the other half which is my dads side love their alone time. My dads side are the super smart nerds with masters degrees in engineering who grew up not getting out much and look at them today. My moms side of the family is mostly the druggie, alcoholics, social animal, go out and party type of people who are lazy bums mostly. Social people lie a lot more too. Because I hate liars. I myself grew up loving my alone time since I was the smartest kid in school for 4 years straight. I used my time to study hard and loved reading, learning new things etc. My mom cared more about money though than me up until I was 24. She cheated on my dad when I was 5, left my dad when I was 6 and they divorced when I was 8. She took me away from my dad to marry the guy she cheated on my dad with which put me into depression. Then the night I met my step dad, he started physically abusing me for several years. He would abuse me for being the smartest kid in school and sometime for no reason. My mom caught him cheating on her 5 years later and divorced him to marry a guy no different than him. My second step dad verbally and emotionally abused me for having seizures. I started having Epilepsy at the age of 10 but we don't know why. But my thought is because of my first step dad forcing me to play baseball and football for 5 years as a kid instead of learn. I never have learned 1 thing from my mom or step dads so I had to learn everything myself since I only got to see my dad for 2 days several times a year. To my step dads it was all about what they wanted me to be instead of what I wanted to be. It's my life not theirs but I couldn't stop it no matter how hard I tried and my mom didn't care. Just be yourself. Follow your heart! Go talk to your parents about it. You may get nervous to talk to them but face the fear if you have it. Chances are they will forget about it anyway within a day or 2.
As a teenager, you want to enjoy your personal space and you do not feel the need to talk to them. However, this is making your parents get the impression that there is a certain distance between you. In other words, you are not close to them. This shows that they care about you. Try to spend a few minutes having a conversation with them every day. They will really appreciate it.
The first step toward solution is to recognize the problem. You are not a bad son if you want to improve your relationship with your parents. But, if you do nothing, you will feel a lot of guilt.
Spend some time with them every day (10-15 minutes max) and whole family will be happier.
It sounds to me like a form of depression or fear. Are you afraid how they will react if they know the real you, if you let who you really are show? What will happen if they get to know you?I just like to be left alone sometimes,The big worry is that constant isolation can have a bad impact on any mental health issues you may have, so make sure you get out and have some social time where you're actually in the presence of people.Humans are a social animal and we need to be able to see each other and share a face to face laugh over coffee or soda. Even if it's just an hour a day, sharing physical presence does wonders. Internet and phone conversations are great, but they can't replace one of our basic human needs. | {
"redpajama_set_name": "RedPajamaC4"
} | 7,752 |
Q: Is this parametrized semidefinite program convex? I am considering an optimization problem of the form:
\begin{equation}
\begin{split}
f(s) &= \min_{X} \mathrm{tr}(C(s)X) \\
&\;\;\;\;\;\;\;\;\;\;\; X \ge 0, \\
&\;\;\;\;\;\;\;\;\;\;\; \mathrm{tr}(A_iX) = a_i, \;\; 1 \le i \le M,
\end{split}
\end{equation}
where the minimization is over $n\times n$ Hermitian matrices $X$. Further, $A_i$ for $1 \le i \le M$ denote some $n\times n$ Hermitian matrices which together with $a_i \in \mathbb{R}$ determine linear constraints on $X$. Finally, the matrix-valued function $C(s)$ is of the block form:
\begin{equation}
C(s) = \left( \begin{array}{cc} C_{1}(s) & 0 \\ 0 & 0\end{array} \right),
\end{equation}
where the upper left block $C_1(s)$ is of size $(n_1 + 1) \times (n_1 + 1)$ for some $n_1 < n$, and is given by:
\begin{equation}
C_1(s) = \left( \begin{array}{ccccc} I_{n_1\times n_1} & -ic \mathbb{I}_{n_1\times n_1} & \cdot & \cdot \\ i c \mathbb{I}_{n_1\times n_1} & \cdot & -i \frac{s}{2} \mathbb{I}_{n_1\times n_1} & \cdot \\ \cdot & i \frac{s}{2} \mathbb{I}_{n_1\times n_1} & \cdot & \cdot \\ \cdot & \cdot & \cdot & s^2\end{array} \right).
\end{equation}
Here, $c \in \mathbb{R}$, $I_{n_1\times n_1}$ is the $n_1 \times n_1$ matrix of ones and $\mathbb{I}_{n_1\times n_1}$ denotes the $n_1 \times n_1$ identity matrix (whereas all entries indicated by $\cdot$ vanish).
Can it be shown that $f(s)$ is convex?
If not, which further requirements has the optimization to fulfill in order to guarantee convexity of $f(s)$?
A: Yes, this is convex because the objective function and all constraints are convex.
The objective function is affine (linear), which is convex. The semidefinjite constraint on X is convex. The trace equality constraint on X is affine (linear), and therefore is convex.
A: Consider the following argument for a slightly changed problem (with $s^2$ in $C(s)$ replaced by $-s^2$) . Not sure if this would be of any help, but writing it anyway. Note that due to concavity of $-s^2$ in C(s) and the rest of the terms being either constant or linear in $s$ (in $C(s)$), we have:
$$
C(\lambda s_1 + (1-\lambda)s_2) \succeq \lambda C(s_1) + (1-\lambda)C(s_2).
$$
Therefore,
$$
f(\lambda s_1 + (1-\lambda)s_2) \geq \min_{X\in \Gamma} \left\{ \lambda \mbox{Tr}(C(s_1)X) + (1-\lambda)\mbox{Tr}(C(s_2)X) \right\} \geq \lambda \min_{Y\in \Gamma} \left\{ \mbox{Tr}(C(s_1)Y)\right\} + (1-\lambda) \min_{Z\in \Gamma} \left\{ \mbox{Tr}(C(s_2)Z)\right\} = \lambda f(s_1) + (1-\lambda)f(s_2).
$$
And hence $f(.)$ is concave in $s$.
| {
"redpajama_set_name": "RedPajamaStackExchange"
} | 2,348 |
Existem muitas opções hoje, listei alguns que vocês podem gostar. Espero que algum dessa lista possa te ajudar.
FluentU takes real-world videos like music videos, commercials, news, and inspiring talks and turns them into English learning experiences. Unlike traditional apps, FluentU uses a natural approach that helps you ease into the English language and culture over time. You'll learn English as it's spoken in real life.
If you've searched online for English resources before, you might have already heard of Rosetta Stone.
Rosetta Stone is probably the most famous method for learning languages.
It's also very a unique method compared to many others.
Usually, an English app teaches you English with explanations in your native language. For example, if you're French, you'll see French explanations of English grammar, or French translations of English words.
But Rosetta Stone doesn't do that—it teaches you English with English.
MindSnacks is known for its fun and simple to use interface.
For the English language, you can now expand your vocabulary with the SAT Vocabulary apps.
Traditionally, if you were trying to get a high SAT score, it's important to look at the SAT vocabulary list. But it can be boring at times because it's like studying an English dictionary.
MindSnacks helps make this process fun.
Instead of studying endless word lists, you now have fun games to learn new English words with. Learning new vocabulary is easier when you're motivated—and MindSnacks helps make it fun.
There are nine mini-games inside of the MindSnacks app. Each game is designed to help you master English words a certain way.
Memrise is a bit similar to MindSnacks—the focus of this app for learning English is English words.
But, unlike MindSnacks, Memrise doesn't help you learn through games.
Instead, it uses some creative, funny ways to help you remember what words mean.
And if something's funny, you can probably remember it better.
Open Language has a lot of different sections to learning English. If you've learnt another language before, you might know the CEFR—it stands for the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages, which is a way to measure how good you are in a language. It goes from A1 (Beginner) to C2 (Native).
On every level, you'll find different courses for different uses. For example, there's Business English, English used in giving presentations, English in daily life and Interview Skills in English. As you can see, Open Language is really well organised.
Mosalingua is yet another app for learning English using some effective learning methods.
For example, one common problem many English learners face is forgetting a word after a some time.
While this is normal for anyone learning a new language, it can also be really frustrating.
Busuu is a little bit different than many of the apps we've mentioned here. Many apps for learning English we talked about so far are for personal use. For most of the lessons, you go through them yourself. With Busuu, however, you can talk with native English speakers to practice your English speaking—it's a great way to practice your speaking.
With Duolingo, it teaches you English from many languages – French, Portuguese, Russian, Italian, Dutch, Spanish, and many more languages in the future.
Duolingo is designed to help you learn English quickly. That means if you've never learnt English before, by using Duolingo about twenty minutes a day, you can probably start to talk in simple English, read a lot of English articles, and listen to some basic English phrases in very little time. It's really effective. | {
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} | 1,402 |
{"url":"https:\/\/www.sarthaks.com\/204110\/find-the-unit-vector-perpendicular-to-the-plane-abc-where-the-position-vectors-and-are-and","text":"# Find the unit vector perpendicular to the plane ABC where the position vectors A, B and C are 2 i - j + k, i + j + 2 k and 2 i + 3 k.\n\n52.4k views\n\nFind the unit vector perpendicular to the plane ABC where the position vectors A, B and C are 2 i - j + k, i + j + 2 k and 2 i + 3 k.\n\nby (34.7k points)\nselected\n\nRequired vector","date":"2022-09-28 05:36:20","metadata":"{\"extraction_info\": {\"found_math\": false, \"script_math_tex\": 0, \"script_math_asciimath\": 0, \"math_annotations\": 0, \"math_alttext\": 0, \"mathml\": 0, \"mathjax_tag\": 0, \"mathjax_inline_tex\": 0, \"mathjax_display_tex\": 0, \"mathjax_asciimath\": 0, \"img_math\": 0, \"codecogs_latex\": 0, \"wp_latex\": 0, \"mimetex.cgi\": 0, \"\/images\/math\/codecogs\": 0, \"mathtex.cgi\": 0, \"katex\": 0, \"math-container\": 0, \"wp-katex-eq\": 0, \"align\": 0, \"equation\": 0, \"x-ck12\": 0, \"texerror\": 0, \"math_score\": 0.8462457656860352, \"perplexity\": 196.48133863518757}, \"config\": {\"markdown_headings\": true, \"markdown_code\": true, \"boilerplate_config\": {\"ratio_threshold\": 0.18, \"absolute_threshold\": 10, \"end_threshold\": 15, \"enable\": true}, \"remove_buttons\": true, \"remove_image_figures\": true, \"remove_link_clusters\": true, \"table_config\": {\"min_rows\": 2, \"min_cols\": 3, \"format\": \"plain\"}, \"remove_chinese\": true, \"remove_edit_buttons\": true, \"extract_latex\": true}, \"warc_path\": \"s3:\/\/commoncrawl\/crawl-data\/CC-MAIN-2022-40\/segments\/1664030335124.77\/warc\/CC-MAIN-20220928051515-20220928081515-00752.warc.gz\"}"} | null | null |
Q: What does "most" mean in "why do you most want to work here"? Filling an interview form, I read the question
Why do you most want to work here?
What exactly does "most" mean?
I read Where should "most" be in this sentence?
and it seems to suggest the sentence would be equivalent to
Why do you want to work here most?
But I'm still at a loss interpreting it. Should I give my most compelling reason for wanting to work there or should I try to explain why, from all companies, that company is the one I most want to work in?
A: To rephrase more thoroughly it means :
Which of your reasons for wanting to work here is most important to you?
It is a very standard question on job interviews, and something of a trap as one who is too exuberant about what a valuable employee s/he would be, may be rejected as insincere, and one who explains that the job has the best paycheck available may be deemed not motivated enough.
A: It is relative to you. In the terms of *your life.
"Why do you *most want to work here?"
*your is synonymous to *most.
Why do [you most] want to work here?
| {
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\section{Introduction}
The fields of game theory and secure computation are both primarily concerned with the interactions of mutually untrusting parties.
Game theory studies the behavior of \emph{rational} players that seek to maximize
their personal payoffs as derived from the outcome of their interaction~\cite{osborne94book}.
Equilibria are an important concept in understanding how rational players may attain and enforce desirable payoffs.
Secure computation concerns the design of interactive protocols that allow the parties to perform computations while retaining privacy of their inputs~\cite{yao82focs,micali92crypto}.
These parties may be \emph{semi-honest}, i.e., they follow the protocol but may attempt to infer information about other parties, or they may be \emph{malicious}, i.e., they may
arbitrarily deviate from the protocol in an attempt to subvert its privacy and/or correctness.
Loosely speaking, both equilibria and secure protocols are means to ensure resilience against, respectively, selfish rationality and arbitrary maliciousness.
Thus, there are interesting philosophical and theoretical connections that have motivated cross-pollination of ideas across these disciplines~\cite{dodis07bookchapter,katz08toc}.
This work explores the application of secure computation in attaining equilibria with rational players.
Informally, consider players that observe some randomness (e.g., a coin flip) that assigns correlated actions to each player.
Such a strategy is a correlated equilibrium if no player has an incentive to unilaterally deviate from its assigned action~\cite{osborne94book}.
The expected payoffs of this correlated equilibrium may be better than those obtained by any Nash equilibrium.
One method for realizing a correlated equilibrium is to use a trusted mediator who generates the correlated actions for the players.
However, we are concerned with situations in which a trusted mediator is not available.
In this case, secure computation suggests a solution: The players can run a secure protocol that simulates the mediator while guaranteeing the correctness of correlated action distribution, and the privacy of the actions assigned to each player.
This specific secure computation problem of securely generating samples from a joint distribution is known as secure sampling.
While much of the existing work has considered settings with computationally bounded players, we study the feasibility of simulating the mediator with unconditional (information-theoretic) security guarantees.
The remainder of this paper is organized as follows: In Sec.~\ref{sec:prelims}, we briefly review background material on correlated equilibria and secure sampling with semi-honest parties.
Sec.~\ref{sec:mainresults} contains our main result, which characterizes the class of joint distributions that can be securely sampled by malicious players, and discusses the payoffs attainable via the secure sampling of correlated equilibria.
\section{Preliminaries}
\label{sec:prelims}
\subsection{Games and Equilibria}
\label{sec:gametheory}
For simplicity of exposition, our development will focus on two-player strategic games with complete information and finite action sets\footnote{Strictly speaking, our analysis inherently must consider extended games with infinite action sets in order to analyze mixed strategies, however, the core game motivating the development is assumed to have finite action sets.}.
Such games are given by a pair of finite action sets $\mathcal{X}, \mathcal{Y}$, and utility functions $u_1, u_2: \mathcal{X} \times \mathcal{Y} \rightarrow \mathbb{R}$.
In an execution of the game, the first player (who we will call Alice) plays an action $X \in \mathcal{X}$, and the second player (who we will call Bob) plays an action $Y \in \mathcal{Y}$.
The actions $(X,Y)$, together called an {\em action profile}, may be randomly chosen, but are revealed simultaneously.
Each realization $(x,y) \in \mathcal{X} \times \mathcal{Y}$ constitutes an outcome in the game, with the utility functions $u_1(x,y)$ and $u_2(x,y)$ quantifying the respective payoffs for Alice and Bob under that outcome.
The objective of a {\em rational} player is to play in a manner that maximizes his or her personal utility.
The concept of equilibria is important toward understanding how rational players may behave in playing such games~\cite{osborne94book}.
We will use the definition of {\em mixed-strategy} Nash equilibrium and subsequently refer to them as Nash equilibria\footnote{The {\em pure-strategy} Nash equilibria are the subset of mixed-strategy Nash equilibria where the action profiles are deterministic.}.
\begin{defn} \label{def:nasheq}
A pair of distributions $(P_X, P_Y)$ on $\mathcal{X}$ and $\mathcal{Y}$, respectively, is a {\em mixed-strategy Nash equilibrium} of game $(\mathcal{X}, \mathcal{Y}, u_1, u_2)$ if, and only if, for all distributions $P_{X'}$ on $\mathcal{X}$ and $P_{Y'}$ on $\mathcal{Y}$, we have that $E[u_1(X,Y)] \geq E[u_1(X',Y)]$ and $E[u_2(X,Y)] \geq E[u_2(X,Y')]$,
where the random variables $(X,X',Y,Y') \sim P_X P_{X'} P_Y P_{Y'}$.
\end{defn}
An interpretation of Nash equilibria is that they are strategy profiles to which, if the players have committed, there is no incentive for either player to unilaterally deviate in their action.
For the finite action set games that we consider, the set of mixed-strategy Nash equilibria is non-empty~\cite{osborne94book}.
\begin{defn} \label{def:correq}
A joint distribution $P_{X,Y}$ on $\mathcal{X} \times \mathcal{Y}$ is a {\em correlated equilibrium} of game $(\mathcal{X}, \mathcal{Y}, u_1, u_2)$ if, and only if, for all random variables $X'$ and $Y'$ such that $X' - X - Y$ and $Y' - Y - X$ form Markov chains with $(X,Y) \sim P_{X,Y}$, we have that $E[u_1(X,Y)] \geq E[u_1(X',Y)]$ and $E[u_2(X,Y)] \geq E[u_2(X,Y')]$.
\end{defn}
The Nash equilibria are also correlated equilibria (with $P_{X,Y} = P_X P_Y$), and hence the set of correlated equilibria is also non-empty.
An interpretation for correlated equilibria is that if a trusted mediator chose actions $(X,Y) \sim P_{X,Y}$ and revealed each action only to its respective player to play, then there would be no incentive for either player to unilaterally deviate from their given action\footnote{Formally speaking, a Nash equilibrium of the extended game, where nature (acting as the mediator) first chooses and distributes actions to the players before they play, would be both players following their given action.}.
For the correlated equilibria that are also Nash equilibria, the mediator is not necessary, since players could choose their actions independently.
Thus, of particular interest are the correlated equilibria that are not also Nash equilibria, hence seeming to require a mediator to be realized.
For a given game, we say that a pair $(p_1,p_2) \in \mathbb{R}^2$ is a {\em Nash payoff} (or {\em correlated payoff}) if, and only if, the game has a Nash (respectively, correlated) equilibrium with expected payoffs $(p_1,p_2)$.
The sets of Nash and correlated equilibria correspond to sets of Nash and correlated payoffs.
Some examples of well-known games are given in Fig.~\ref{fig:games}.
The ``Battle-of-the-Sexes'' game, given in Fig.~\ref{fig:bos}, has three Nash equilibria ($P_X(M)=P_Y(M)=1$, $P_X(O)=P_Y(O)=1$, and $P_X(M)=P_Y(O)=2/3$) and a correlated equilibrium for every $\lambda \in [0,1]$ ($P_{X,Y}(x,y) = \lambda \mathbf{1}(x=y=M) + (1 - \lambda) \mathbf{1}(x=y=O)$).
The ``Chicken-or-Dare'' game, given in Fig.~\ref{fig:cod}, has three Nash equilibria ($P_X(C)=P_Y(D)=1$, $P_X(D)=P_Y(C)=1$, and $P_X(D)=P_Y(D)=1/2$) and a correlated equilibrium ($P_{X,Y}(x,y) = 1/3$ for $(x,y) \in \{(C,C), (C,D), (D,C)\}$).
\begin{figure}
\centering
\subfigure[``Battle-of-the-Sexes'']{
\includegraphics[width=1.1in]{figures/bos}
\label{fig:bos}}
\quad \quad
\subfigure[``Chicken-or-Dare'']{
\includegraphics[width=1.1in]{figures/cod}
\label{fig:cod}}
\caption{Common examples of two-player games}
\label{fig:games}
\end{figure}
\subsection{Secure Sampling Protocols}
\label{sec:securesampling}
In the problem of secure two-party sampling, the objective is to design a {\em secure} interactive protocol that allows the two parties to generate correlated randomness according to a given joint distribution, where security means that {\em correctness} (in terms of the randomness actually matching the desired distribution) and {\em privacy} (in terms of revealing nothing about either output except what is inherent due to correlation) of the outputs are assured.
A two-party {\em interactive protocol} is a pair of algorithms designed to interact over several rounds via communication channels.
In this work, we will restrict our scope to protocols using only error-free channels.
We will further consider two specific cases of error-free communication. Using the game-theoretic terminology, they are {\em cheap talk}, where parties may exchange messages simultaneously, and {\em polite talk}, where parties must take turns in exchanging messages\footnote{In each round of cheap talk, neither party is able to see the other's message before sending their own. In either scenario, we assume some weak synchronization (i.e., a ``timeout'' mechanism) preventing a missing message from holding up the protocol.}.
In between the rounds of interaction, the algorithms may generate independent randomness, perform local computations, and compute the next message to be sent from everything observed in previous rounds.
After the interaction has terminated, each party produces an output that may be computed from everything that they have observed during the protocol.
Unlike previous work (see~\cite{WangIshwarISIT11}), we will not place a finite bound on the rounds of interaction and instead allow protocols that potentially last a random, unbounded number of rounds, provided that they terminate almost surely when at least one of the parties is honest.
Motivated by the application to rational players, we are primarily interested in the security of protocols against malicious parties that may arbitrarily deviate from the protocol in an attempt to undermine correctness and privacy.
The following definition for secure sampling stipulates that the correctness and privacy of the honest parties be maintained if there is at least one honest party.
This definition is an adaptation of a definition for secure {\em computation} in~\cite{CrepeauSSW-Eurocrypt06-ITSecCond2PSFE}, where it is shown to be equivalent to simulating a trusted mediator.
\begin{defn} \label{def:secactive} (see~\cite{CrepeauSSW-Eurocrypt06-ITSecCond2PSFE})
A two-party protocol for sampling $P_{X,Y}$ is secure against malicious parties if, and only if, for any execution generating outputs $(U,V)$, we have that:
\begin{enumerate}
\item When both parties are honest, $(U,V) \sim P_{X,Y}$.
\item \label{itm:AliceBad} When Bob is honest, there exists random variable $\overline{X}$ such that
$(\overline{X}, V) \sim P_{X,Y}$, and
$U - \overline{X} - V$ forms a Markov chain.
\item \label{itm:BobBad} When Alice is honest, there exists random variable $\overline{Y}$ such that
$(U ,\overline{Y}) \sim P_{X,Y}$, and
$V - \overline{Y} - U$ forms a Markov chain.
\end{enumerate}
\end{defn}
Note that in conditions~\ref{itm:AliceBad} and~\ref{itm:BobBad} of Defn.~\ref{def:secactive}, one player is fixed to be honest while the other can arbitrarily deviate from the protocol. This may include the deviating party changing their output to be any information gathered about the other party's output, and hence the Markov chain requirements capture privacy in the sense that a deviating party can only extract information that would have been inherent to a hypothetical output (i.e., $\overline{X}$ or $\overline{Y}$).
The next definition provides the conditions for security against {\em semi-honest parties} where the parties execute the protocol honestly but may attempt to infer additional information from what they observe.
This is a weaker security condition implied by that for malicious parties (see Lem.~\ref{lem:ActiveSecStronger}) and will be useful for proving impossibility results for the malicious party case.
The conditions require that, for an honest execution of the protocol, the outputs are correctly generated and that the {\em view} of each player (consisting of all intermediate computations, local randomness, and messages exchanged) does not reveal any information not already derivable from each player's own output.
\begin{defn} \label{def:secpassive} (see~\cite{WangIshwarISIT11})
A two-party protocol for sampling $P_{X,Y}$ is secure against semi-honest parties if, and only if, for any honest execution generating outputs $(U,V)$, we have that:
\begin{enumerate}
\item $(U,V) \sim P_{X,Y}$.
\item $\mathrm{View}_A - U - V$ forms a Markov chain, where $\mathrm{View}_A$ denotes the view of Alice.
\item $\mathrm{View}_B - V - U$ forms a Markov chain, where $\mathrm{View}_B$ denotes the view of Bob.
\end{enumerate}
\end{defn}
\subsection{Background Results}
The feasibility of secure two-party sampling with semi-honest parties has been previously characterized in~\cite{WangIshwarISIT11}.
\begin{thm} \label{thm:PassiveFeasibility} (see~\cite[Cor.~1]{WangIshwarISIT11})
Given polite and/or cheap talk channels, there exist two-party protocols\footnote{This result assumed bounded rounds of communication, however the converse can be extended to unbounded communication. The corresponding achievability result trivially extends to the unbounded case.} for securely sampling $P_{X,Y}$ against semi-honest parties if, and only if,
\begin{equation} \label{eqn:CommInfo}
I(X;Y) = C(X;Y) := \min_{W: I(X;Y|W) = 0} I(X,Y ; W),
\end{equation}
where $C(X;Y)$ is called the Wyner common information~\cite{Wyner-75-CommonInfo}.
\end{thm}
In general, $I(X;Y) \leq C(X;Y)$, with equality holding only for the special class of random variables $(X,Y)$ where a minimizing $W$ in~(\ref{eqn:CommInfo}) is the {\em ergodic decomposition} of $(X,Y)$~\cite{GacsKorn-73-CommonInfo, AhlsKorn-74-CommonInfo}.
The ergodic decomposition is given by first uniquely labeling the connected components in the graphical representation\footnote{The graphical representation of $P_{X,Y}$ is the bipartite graph with an edge between $(x,y) \in \mathcal{X} \times \mathcal{Y}$ iff $P_{X,Y}(x,y) > 0$.} of $P_{X,Y}$, and then assigning $W$ to the label of the connected component in which $(X,Y)$ falls.
Clearly, the ergodic decomposition is also a deterministic function of either $X$ or $Y$ alone.
As a consequence of the above, the following lemma provides a condition equivalent to $I(X;Y) = C(X;Y)$, in terms of a simple property of the ergodic decomposition of $(X,Y)$.
\begin{lem}
Given $P_{X,Y}$, $I(X;Y) = C(X;Y)$ if, and only if, for $W$, the ergodic decomposition of $(X,Y)$, the Markov chain $X - W - Y$ holds.
\end{lem}
A widely studied special case of the secure sampling with malicious parties is that of generating an unbiased coin-flip, that is, $P_{X,Y}(x,y) = 0.5 \cdot \mathbf{1}(x=y)$ with $\mathcal{X} = \mathcal{Y} = \{0,1\}$.
It is well known that it is impossible to perform a secure coin flip given only {\em bounded} polite talk~\cite{Cleve-STOC86-CoinFlips, HanggiW-TCC11-CoinTossBounds}.
A tight characterization of the tradeoff between protocol reliability (in an honest execution) and the potential bias that can be introduced by a cheating party is given in~\cite{HanggiW-TCC11-CoinTossBounds}, which shows that at least one party must always be able to significantly bias the coin flip.
On the other hand, given cheap talk, performing a secure coin flip is trivial; each player chooses a uniform bit independently, the players simultaneously exchange bits via cheap talk, and assign the coin flip as the binary XOR of the bits\footnote{If one party chooses not to send a valid bit, the other will simply set the coin flip to their own bit.}.
Also, given cheap talk, this procedure can be extended to securely sample a series of independent coin flips or any general discrete random variable.
\section{Main Results}
\label{sec:mainresults}
Our main result is the characterization of the set of distributions that can be securely sampled by malicious parties via protocols using either cheap talk or only polite talk.
The feasibility region boils down to ``separable'' distributions (where $I(X;Y) = C(X;Y)$) for the cheap talk case, and ``trivial'' distributions (where $X$ and $Y$ are independent) for the polite talk case.
For a given game, the correlated equilibria (and their corresponding payoffs) that are in this feasible set can be realized via a secure protocol replacing a trusted mediator.
However, we ask whether security against malicious parties is too strong a requirement, and discuss the correlated equilibria and payoffs attainable by rational players.
\subsection{Secure Protocols for Sampling}
\begin{lem} \label{lem:ActiveSecStronger}
If a two-party protocol for sampling $P_{X,Y}$ is secure against malicious parties (see Defn.~\ref{def:secactive}), then it is also secure against semi-honest parties (see Defn.~\ref{def:secpassive}).
\end{lem}
\IEEEproof
Consider an ``almost honest'' execution of the protocol, where the parties follow the protocol honestly, except that they append their full views to their honest outputs.
Let these outputs be denoted by $U' := (\mathrm{View}_A, U)$ and $V' := (\mathrm{View}_B, V)$ respectively, where $(U, V)$ are the outputs and $(\mathrm{View}_A, \mathrm{View}_B)$ are the views produced by an honest execution.
The security of the protocol against malicious parties implies that $(U,V) \sim P_{X,Y}$, and that there exist $\overline{X}$ and $\overline{Y}$ such that $(\overline{X}, V) \sim P_{X,Y}$, $(U, \overline{Y}) \sim P_{X,Y}$, and the Markov chains $(\mathrm{View}_A, U) - \overline{X} - V$ and $(\mathrm{View}_B, V) - \overline{Y} - U$ hold.
The Markov chain $(\mathrm{View}_A, U) - \overline{X} - V$ implies that
\begin{align*}
0 &= I(\mathrm{View}_A, U; V | \overline{X}) \\
&= H(V | \overline{X}) - H(V | \overline{X}, \mathrm{View}_A, U) \\
&\geq H(V | U) - H(V | \mathrm{View}_A, U) = I(\mathrm{View}_A; V | U),
\end{align*}
and hence the Markov chain $\mathrm{View}_A - U - V$ holds. Similarly, it can be shown that the Markov chain $\mathrm{View}_B - V - U$ holds. Therefore, the protocol is secure against semi-honest parties.
\endproof
\begin{thm} \label{thm:ActiveFeasibility}
Given cheap talk channels, there exist two-party protocols for securely sampling $P_{X,Y}$ against malicious players if, and only if, $I(X;Y) = C(X;Y)$.
Secondly, given only polite talk channels, there exist two-party protocols for securely sampling $P_{X,Y}$ against malicious players if, and only if, $P_{XY} = P_X P_Y$, that is, the random variables are independent.
\end{thm}
\IEEEproof {\em (sketch)}
First, we consider the situation with cheap talk.
The converse (``only if'') direction is due to the impossibility of securely sampling $P_{X,Y}$ if $I(X;Y) \neq C(X;Y)$ even against semi-honest parties (see Thm.~\ref{thm:PassiveFeasibility}) which also applies to the malicious case by Lem.~\ref{lem:ActiveSecStronger}.
To show the achievability (``if'') direction, we argue that given $I(X;Y) = C(X;Y)$, a secure protocol can be constructed that first securely generates the ergodic decomposition $W$ of $(X,Y)$ using cheap talk, followed by each party independently generating $X$ and $Y$, respectively, from $W$.
Since $W$ is a function of either $X$ or $Y$ alone, it does not reveal to each party any additional information about the other party's output than their own output.
Next, we consider the situation with only polite talk.
In the converse (``only if'') direction, the semi-honest converse requiring $I(X;Y) = C(X;Y)$ similarly applies as above. Thus, given a protocol securely sampling $P_{X,Y}$, we must have that the ergodic decomposition $W$ of $(X,Y)$ satisfies the Markov chain $X - W - Y$. We argue by contradiction that $W$ must be deterministic, and hence that $P_{X,Y} = P_X P_Y$ following from the Markov chain.
If $W$ is not deterministic, then there exists a partitioning of its alphabet $\mathcal{W}$ into $\mathcal{W}_0$ and $\mathcal{W}_1$ such that $\Pr(W \in \mathcal{W}_0), \Pr(W \in \mathcal{W}_1) \in (0,1)$.
Thus, since $W$ is a function of either $X$ or $Y$, one can convert the secure protocol for $P_{X,Y}$ into a protocol for a secure biased coin flip\footnote{This coin flip would be inherently biased, but secure in the sense that no player can alter that bias.} by mapping $X$ (or $Y$) to the $Z \in \{0,1\}$ where $W \in \mathcal{W}_Z$.
It follows from~\cite{HanggiW-TCC11-CoinTossBounds} that generating such a secure coin flip from polite talk is impossible\footnote{The proof of~\cite{HanggiW-TCC11-CoinTossBounds} assumes protocols with finitely bounded interaction, however, this result can be extended, albeit with a non-trivial argument that we must omit due to space, to protocols with unbounded interaction but almost sure termination given at least one honest party.}, and hence $W$ must be deterministic.
The achievability (``if'') direction is immediate for $P_{X,Y} = P_X P_Y$ via the trivial protocol with no interaction and the parties independently generating $X$ and $Y$.
\endproof
The secure sampling feasibility results of Thm.~\ref{thm:PassiveFeasibility} and Thm.~\ref{thm:ActiveFeasibility} are summarized in Table~\ref{tab:secsampresults}.
\begin{table}
\center
\renewcommand{\arraystretch}{1.5}
\begin{tabular} {| r || c | c |}
\hline
& {\bf Semi-honest Parties} & {\bf Malicious Parties} \\
\hline \hline
{\bf Polite Talk} & \multirow{2}{*}{$I(X;Y) = C(X;Y)$} & $P_{X,Y} = P_X P_Y$ \\
\cline{1-1}\cline{3-3}
{\bf Cheap Talk} & & $I(X;Y) = C(X;Y)$ \\
\hline
\end{tabular}
\caption{Feasibility Conditions for Secure Two-Party Sampling}
\label{tab:secsampresults}
\end{table}
\subsection{Rational Protocols for Games}
Secure sampling protocols can be applied toward realizing correlated equilibria when players lack a trusted mediator but are able to first communicate via cheap talk or polite talk.
The following definition provides sufficient conditions for a protocol that would allow \emph{rational} players to realize a given correlated equilibrium in lieu of a mediator\footnote{Formally speaking, for any correlated equilibrium for which a rationally secure protocol exists, a Nash equilibrium of the extended game, where parties may first interact via cheap or polite talk and then play moves, would be both players honestly executing that protocol and playing the outputs generated.}.
\begin{defn} \label{def:secrational}
Let $u_1, u_2: \mathcal{X} \times \mathcal{Y} \rightarrow \mathbb{R}$ be the payoffs in a two-player game with a correlated equilibrium $P_{X,Y}$.
A two-party protocol for sampling $P_{X,Y}$ is secure against rational players if, and only if, for any execution generating outputs $(U,V)$ with support in $\mathcal{X} \times \mathcal{Y}$\footnote{Without loss of generality, we need only consider deviations that still generate outputs in the appropriate alphabets, since the ultimate choice of action can be subsumed into the deviation from the protocol.}, we have that:
\begin{enumerate}
\item When both parties are honest, $(U,V) \sim P_{X,Y}$.
\item When Bob is honest, $E[u_1(U,V)] \leq E[u_1(X,Y)]$, where $(X,Y) \sim P_{X,Y}$.
\item When Alice is honest, $E[u_2(U,V)] \leq E[u_2(X,Y)]$, where $(X,Y) \sim P_{X,Y}$.
\end{enumerate}
\end{defn}
Protocols that are secure against malicious parties ensure that any deviation cannot subvert the correctness or privacy of the sampling.
Hence, such protocols would be sufficient for realizing correlated equilibria for rational players (see Lem.~\ref{lem:MalSecImplRatSec} below).
\begin{lem} \label{lem:MalSecImplRatSec}
Given a two-player game with a correlated equilibrium, $P_{X,Y}$, if a two-party protocol for sampling $P_{X,Y}$ is secure against malicious parties (see Defn.~\ref{def:secactive}), then it is also secure against rational players (see Defn.~\ref{def:secrational}).
\end{lem}
\IEEEproof
The first condition of Defn.~\ref{def:secrational} is immediate from Defn.~\ref{def:secactive}.
For the second condition of Defn.~\ref{def:secrational}, Defn.~\ref{def:secactive} requires that for any Alice (including those that only output $U \in \mathcal{X}$), there exists $\overline{X}$ such that $U-\overline{X}-V$ and $(\overline{X},V) \sim P_{X,Y}$.
Since, $P_{X,Y}$ is a correlated equilibrium, we have that $E[u_1(U,V)] \leq E[u_1(\overline{X},V)] = E[u_1(X,Y)]$.
The third condition of Defn.~\ref{def:secrational} follows similarly.
\endproof
However, protocols that are secure for malicious parties may be unnecessarily strong for rational players that will only deviate if it serves their best interests.
Further, as follows from Thm.~\ref{thm:ActiveFeasibility}, only a limited correlated equilibria can be securely sampled by malicious parties.
In particular, given only polite talk, this is limited to only the trivial Nash equilibria.
Hence, a valid question is whether requiring security against only rational players would allow for a larger set of attainable correlated equilibria or corresponding payoffs.
Consider the (somewhat pathological\footnote{Following similar principles, one can also construct less pathological examples exhibiting this significant gap.}) scenario where the payoff functions are constant, and hence all joint distributions over the action profiles are correlated equilibria.
All distributions can be securely sampled against rational players given constant payoffs, using the simple protocol where the first party generates both $(X,Y) \sim P_{X,Y}$, gives $Y$ to the second party, and then each party outputs its respective variable.
However, notice that, for this example, all of the correlated and Nash payoffs are the same, thus the expanded range of equilibria that can be sampled with rational parties does not correspond to an expansion of the attainable correlated payoffs.
Thus, the pertinent comparison appears to be the payoffs attainable by rational players versus those attainable via secure sampling by malicious parties.
The sets of correlated payoffs achievable by rational players using cheap or polite talk have been characterized in~\cite{AumannHart-03-LongCheapTalk}.
Their results, specialized to our scenario, give that the set of the achievable payoffs for rational players with cheap talk is the convex hull of the Nash payoffs, while the set of achievable payoffs with polite talk is the biconvex-span of the Nash payoffs\footnote{The biconvex-span is a subset of the convex hull and consists of the expectations of possible bounded bimartingales that converge almost surely to a Nash payoff (see~\cite{AumannHart-03-LongCheapTalk} for more details).}.
Any payoff in the convex hull of Nash payoffs corresponds to a correlated equilibrium that is a convex combination of the Nash equilibria, i.e., there exist $Z$ such that $P_{X,Y} = \sum_{z \in \mathcal{Z}} P_Z(z) P_{X,Y|Z=z}$, where $P_{X,Y|Z=z} = P_{X|Z=z}P_{Y|Z=z}$ are the Nash equilibria.
The distribution $P_{A,B}$, given by $A := (X,Z)$ and $B := (Y,Z)$, is a correlated equilibrium\footnote{This is actually a generalization of Defn.~\ref{def:correq} introducing a random variable $Z$ and changing the Markov chains to $X' - (X,Z) - Y$ and $Y' - (Y,Z) - X$.} that can be securely sampled by malicious parties (i.e., $I(X,Z; Y,Z) = C(X,Z; Y,Z)$).
Hence, the payoffs attainable by rational players with cheap talk are the same as those realizable via secure sampling by malicious parties.
On the other hand, the payoffs in the biconvex-span of the Nash payoffs (attainable by rational players with polite talk) do not necessarily correspond to any Nash equilibria, and hence may not be realizable via secure sampling by malicious parties with polite talk.
However, all payoffs in the biconvex span of Nash payoffs are dominated by the Nash payoffs themselves, which are immediately attainable via a Nash equilibrium that can be securely sampled by malicious parties with polite talk.
| {
"redpajama_set_name": "RedPajamaArXiv"
} | 447 |
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← Like Queen, but with more soul
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From Milwaukee with love
The days of digging through dollar records and coming away with a stack of 20 LPs for $20 seem to have passed. The last few record digs haven't yielded much.
Saturday was no exception. There were two record sales within a half-hour's drive. There were thousands of records, too many of them country and easy listening. In the days when records dominated the scene, this was a somewhat less sophisticated corner of Wisconsin.
However, all that digging yielded two gems. This is one.
You may know the Esquires for "Get On Up," their 1967 hit. There was a time when I knew of the song but not the group, which came out of Milwaukee.
But not now. "Get On Up And Get Away," the Esquires' 1967 LP, was of the records I came across Saturday, and one I never expected to come across. Its jacket needs some TLC, but the grooves inside are just fine.
The Esquires started out in 1957 in Milwaukee as a family group. By the time this came out a decade later, they'd moved to Chicago in search of a higher profile. At the time they made this record, the group consisted of brothers Gilbert and Alvis Moorer, and Shawn Taylor, all of Milwaukee, and Millard Edwards of Chicago, none of them older than 25.
The Esquires wrote most of their own material, along with producer Bill "Bunky" Sheppard, who ran the Bunky label and had managed or produced several similar groups. The arrangements are by "Tom Tom" Henderson, who later arranged a couple of Chicago soul classics: Tyrone Davis' "Turn Back The Hands of Time" and the Chi-Lites' "(For God's Sake) Give More Power To The People."
With Valentine's Day at hand, how about some sweet soul from those gents, some love songs from a more innocent time, all laid down at Universal Recording Studios in downtown Chicago.
"Listen To Me," written by Gilbert Moorer and Bill Sheppard. A real fine stew, with call-and-response vocals, some cooking percussion and some hot horns.
https://amthenfm.files.wordpress.com/2011/02/esquires-listen-to-me.mp3
"My Sweet Baby," written by Gilbert Moorer, whose falsetto soars above the smooth harmonies and more big horns.
https://amthenfm.files.wordpress.com/2011/02/esquires-my-sweet-baby.mp3
"When I'm Ready," written by Millard Edwards and Sheppard. This seems inspired by Barbara Mason's "Yes, I'm Ready," but its driving Chicago groove is way more upbeat, its vibe far more streetwise.
https://amthenfm.files.wordpress.com/2011/02/esquires-when-im-ready.mp3
All by the Esquires, from "Get On Up and Get Away," 1967. (The buy link is to a 1995 CD reissue.)
Filed under February 2011
Tagged as 1967, Esquires
2 responses to "From Milwaukee with love"
Larry Grogan
This was among the many fine albums sacrificed in the vinyl to cd purge in the 80s (alongside my original copy of the Larry Williams and Johnny Watson). Still have the hit single though. A classic.
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\section{Introduction}
cIn 1974, S.-S. Chern and J. Simons introduced a collection of secondary characteristic classes on a Riemannian manifold, $M$, which reflect some of the geometric structure of the manifold in addition to its topological structure. In particular, if $M$ is a compact 3-manifold, the secondary characteristic class $\left\{\widetilde{TP_1\left(\Omega\right)}\right\}\in H^3\left( M,\ensuremath{ {\mathbb R} }/\ensuremath{ {\mathbb Z} } \right)$ is invariant under a conformal change in the metric. So metrics with different Chern-Simons classes will have different conformal structures. However, it is still unclear in general which geometric properties of a Riemannian manifold are reflected in these classes.
The present work is a step in seeing what sort of geometric information can be determined by these classes. For a 3-manifold, the Ricci curvature flow deforms the metric of the manifold towards the standard geometries of Thurston's geometrization program. If it were true that the Chern-Simons class of 3-manifolds (specifically corresponding to the first Pontryagin form) were invariant under the Ricci flow, then perhaps these classes would reflect something of this geometric structure. See \cite{Scott1983} for a detailed treatment on the different geometries.
However, it will be shown that this is not so in general. For a warped product of the form $S^2 \times_f S^1$, the Chern-Simons class is invariant as this flows under the Ricci flow towards the geometry of the product $S^2 \times S^1$. However, for a generalized Berger sphere, which for generic choices would flow towards a spherical geometry, the Chern-Simons class is not invariant.
Let $G$ be a Lie group with Lie algebra $\mathfrak g$. Let $M^n$ be a smooth $n$-dimensional manifold with $E\to M$ a principal $G$-bundle. Denote its connection and curvature forms by $\omega$ and $\Omega$, respectively. Additionally, let $\left<\theta^1,\theta^2,\dots,\theta^n\right>$ be an orthonormal coframe.
Then
\begin{align}
R_{ijk\ell} =& g_{\ell m}{R_{ijk}}^m\\
\omega_i^j =& \Gamma_{ik}^j \theta^k\\
\Omega_i^j =& \frac{1}{2} {R_{k\ell i}}^j \theta^i \wedge \theta^j
\end{align}
\begin{defn}
\label{dfn:cspoly}
A \emph{polynomial of degree $\ell$}, $P$, is a symmetric and multilinear map $P: {\mathfrak g}^\ell \to \ensuremath{ {\mathbb R} }$. The Lie group $G$ acts on $\mathfrak g$ by inner automorphism. If the polynomial is invariant under this action, then it is said to be an \emph{invariant polynomial}. The set of invariant polynomials of degree $\ell$ is denoted $I^\ell(G)$.
\end{defn}
For $G = Gl_n(\ensuremath{ {\mathbb R} })$, the first Pontryagin polynomial is denoted $P_1 \in I^2(G)$ and is defined by
\begin{equation}
\label{eqn:p1}
P_1(A\otimes B) = \frac{1}{2\pi^2}\left( \tr A \tr B - \tr \left( AB \right) \right)
\end{equation}
\begin{defn}
\label{dfn:csform}
For $P\in I^\ell(G)$, define the 2-form $\varphi_t = t\Omega + \frac{1}{2}\left( t^2-t \right)\left[ \omega,\omega \right]$. The \emph{Chern-Simons form of P} is defined to be
\begin{equation}
\label{eqn:TP}
TP\left( \omega \right) = \ell\int_0^1 P\left( \omega\wedge\varphi_t^{\ell-1} \right)dt.
\end{equation}
Since $\varphi_t$ is a 2-form, order is irrelevant. The form $TP\left( \omega \right)$ is a $\left(2\ell-1\right)$-form on $E$ and Chern and Simons showed in \cite[Prop. 3.2]{Chern1974} that $dTP\left(\omega\right)=P\left(\Omega\right)$.
\end{defn}
Because of this, if $P\left(\Omega\right) = 0$, then the form is closed and so defines a cohomology class in $H^{2\ell-1}\left(E,\ensuremath{ {\mathbb R} }\right)$. Denote this class $\left\{TP\left(\omega\right)\right\}$. Theorem 3.9 of \cite{Chern1974} shows that if $\dim M = n$ and $2\ell-1 = n$, then $TP\left(\omega\right)$ is closed and $\left\{TP\left(\omega\right)\right\}\in H^n\left(E,\ensuremath{ {\mathbb R} }\right)$ depends on $\omega$. In this paper, it will usually be the case that $\ell = 2$ and so $2\ell-1=3=\dim M$. Let $\sim$ represent the reduction of a cohomology class mod $\ensuremath{ {\mathbb Z} }$. Theorem 3.16 of \cite{Chern1974} shows that there is a well-defined cohomology class $\left\{\widetilde{TP\left(\omega\right)}\right\}\in H^{2\ell-1} \left(M, \ensuremath{ {\mathbb R} }/\ensuremath{ {\mathbb Z} }\right)$ whose lift is $\left\{\widetilde{TP(\left(\omega\right)}\right\}\in H^{2\ell-1} \left(E(M),\ensuremath{ {\mathbb R} }/\ensuremath{ {\mathbb Z} }\right)$.
The following result is proved in \cite[Prop 3.8]{Chern1974}.
\begin{prop}
\label{prop:tpd}
Let $\omega(s)$ be a smooth 1-parameter family of connections on $E\to M$ with $s\in \left[ 0,1 \right]$. Set $\omega = \omega(0)$ and $\dot{\omega} = \dfrac{d}{ds} \omega(s) \mid_{s=0}$. For $P\in I^\ell(G)$,
\begin{equation}
\label{eqn:tpd}
\dfrac{d}{ds}TP\left( \omega(s) \right)\mid_{s=0} = \ell P\left( \dot{\omega} \wedge \Omega^{\ell-1} \right) + exact.
\end{equation}
\end{prop}
Given a 1-parameter family of metrics, $g(t)$, on a Riemannian $M^n$, defined on some interval $I\subset \ensuremath{ {\mathbb R} }$, Richard Hamilton , in \cite[p. 259]{Hamilton1982}, defined the Ricci flow equation as
\begin{equation}
\left\{\begin{array}{rl}
\frac{\partial}{\partial t} g_{ij}(t) &= -2R_{ij}(t) \\
g(0) &= g_0.
\end{array}\right.
\end{equation}
Hamilton proved the following important theorem in corollaries 17.10 and 17.11 of \cite{Hamilton1982}.
\begin{thm}[Hamilton, 1982]
Let $\left(M^3,g_0\right)$ be a closed Riemannian 3-manifold with positive Ricci curvature. Then there exists a unique solution, $g(t)$, of the normalized Ricci flow with $g(0)=g_0$ for all $t\geq 0$. Furthermore, as $t\to\infty$, the metrics $g(t)$ converge exponentially fast in every $C^m$-norm to a $C^\infty$ metric $g_\infty$ with constant positive sectional curvature.
\end{thm}
An excellent, in-depth treatment of the Ricci flow is \cite{Chow2006}.
\section{Warped Products of Spheres}
The simplest example of how the Chern-Simons classes are related to the Ricci flow is given by the round $n$-sphere.
\begin{prop}
Let $M=S^{2\ell-1}$ with the standard metric and $P\in I^{2\ell-1}\left( Gl_n\left( \ensuremath{ {\mathbb R} } \right) \right)$ be any invariant polynomial. Then the Chern-Simons class,
\begin{equation*}
\left\{ \widetilde{TP\left( \omega \right)} \right\}\in H^{2\ell-1} \left( M,\ensuremath{ {\mathbb R} }/\ensuremath{ {\mathbb Z} } \right),
\end{equation*}is invariant under the Ricci flow.
\end{prop}
\begin{proof}
The Ricci flow causes the sphere to shrink to a point in finite time. At every time, however, it is still a round sphere and so the Ricci flow is a conformal change in metric. Since the Chern-Simons classes are conformal invariants, they are therefore invariant under the Ricci flow.
\end{proof}
\begin{defn}
Given manifolds $\left( M^m,g_M \right)$ and $\left( N^n,g_N \right)$ along with a smooth function $f: M \to \ensuremath{ {\mathbb R} }^+$, the \emph{warped product} of $M$ with $N$, denoted $M \times_f N$ is defined by $\left( M\times N, g_M \oplus f g_N \right)$. The function $f$ will be referred to as the \emph{warping function}.
\end{defn}
Let $\left( M,g \right)$ be the warped product of $S^n$ with $S^m$ with $m+n=3$ and using the standard round metrics. Let $f:S^n\to \ensuremath{ {\mathbb R} }^+$ be the warping function. Let $\left\{ \theta_i \right\}_{i=1}^n$ be the coordinates for $S^n$ and $\left\{ \theta_i \right\}_{i=n+1}^{m}$ be the coordinates for $S^m$. These are the standard spherical coordinates. For $S^1$,
\begin{equation*}
x_1 = \cos\theta^1, x_2 = \sin\theta^1.
\end{equation*} For $S^2$,
\begin{equation*}
x_1 = \cos\theta^1, x_2 = \sin\theta^1\cos\theta^2, x_3 = \sin\theta^1 \sin\theta^2.
\end{equation*}
Thus $g$ is diagonal and
\begin{equation}
g_{ii} = \left\{ \begin{array}{rl}
\prod_{j=1}^{i-1}\sin^2\theta^j& 1 \leq i \leq n\\
f\prod_{j=n+1}^{i-1}\sin^2\theta^j & n+1 \leq i \leq n+m
\end{array}\right.
\end{equation}
Formulas for the Christoffel symbols and curvature of the warped products can be found in \cite[pp. 209-211]{Oneill1983}.
\begin{lem}
\label{lem:0deriv}
Given $n+m=3$ and $f:S^n \to \ensuremath{ {\mathbb R} }^+$, let $M = S^n\times_f S^m$. For the first Pontryagin polynomial $P_1\in I^2\left( Gl_n\left( \ensuremath{ {\mathbb R} } \right) \right)$, the derivative of $TP_1\left( \omega \right)$ is exact at time 0.
\end{lem}
\begin{proof}
For $n=1$, the Christoffel symbols are computed using the standard formula $\Gamma_{ij}^k = \frac12 g^{k\ell}\left(\partial_i g_{j\ell} + \partial_j g_{i\ell} - \partial_\ell g_{ij}\right)$. From there, the connection 1-forms are computed using the formula $\omega_i^j = \Gamma_{ki}^jd\theta^k$. Finally, the curvature 2-forms are computed according to $\Omega_i^j = d\omega_i^j - \omega_i^p\wedge\omega_p^j$.
Based off of these computations along with the fact that $\Omega_i^j = {R_{pqi}}^j \theta^p \wedge \theta^q$,
\begin{equation*}
\Omega = \left(\begin{array}{ccc}
0 & {R_{121}}^2 d\theta^1 \wedge d\theta^2 & {R_{131}}^3 d\theta^1 \wedge d\theta^3 \\
{R_{122}}^1 d\theta^1 \wedge d\theta^2 & 0 & {R_{232}}^3 d\theta^2 \wedge d\theta^3\\
{R_{133}}^1 d\theta^1 \wedge d\theta^3 & {R_{233}}^2 d\theta^2 \wedge d\theta^3 & 0
\end{array}\right).
\end{equation*}
The variational formulas for the Christoffel symbols under the Ricci flow are
\begin{equation}
\label{eq:chrd}
\partial_t \Gamma_{ij}^k = \frac{R_{i\ell}}{g_{ii}g_{\ell\ell}}\left(\partial_i g_{j\ell} + \partial_j g_{i\ell} - \partial_\ell g_{ij}\right) - g^{k\ell} \left(\partial_i R_{j\ell} + \partial_j R_{i\ell} - \partial_\ell R_{ii}\right)
\end{equation}
Using \eqref{eq:chrd} combined with the formula for $\Omega$, the derivative of $\omega$ is of the form
\begin{equation*}
\dot\omega = \left(\begin{array}{ccc}
a_1^1 d\theta^1 & a_1^2 d\theta^2 & a_1^3 d\theta^3\\
a_2^1 d\theta^2 & a_2^2 d\theta^1 & 0\\
a_3^1 d\theta^1 & 0 & a_3^3 d\theta^3
\end{array}\right).
\end{equation*} Since the curvature form $\Omega$ has zeroes along the diagonal, $\tr\Omega=0$ and thus $\tr \dot{\omega} \tr\Omega =0$. The product $\dot{\omega}\wedge \Omega$ has the following diagonal
\begin{align*}
\left(\dot\omega \wedge \Omega\right)_1^1 =& \left(a_1^2 d\theta^2 \right) \wedge \left({R_{122}}^2 d\theta^1 \wedge d\theta^2\right) + \left( a_1^3 d\theta^3 \right) \wedge \left({R_{133}}^3 d\theta^1 d\theta^3 \right)\\
=& 0\\
\left(\dot\omega \wedge \Omega\right)_2^2 =& \left(a_2^1 d\theta^2\right) \wedge \left({R_{121}}^2 d\theta^1 \wedge d\theta^2\right)\\
=& 0\\
\left(\dot\omega \wedge \Omega\right)_3^3 =& \left(a_3^1 d\theta^1\right) \wedge \left({R_{131}}^3 d\theta^1 \wedge d\theta^3\right)\\
=&0
\end{align*} and so $\tr\left(\dot\omega \wedge \Omega\right) = 0$.
For $n=2$, the same computations as above show that $\Omega$ is of the form
\begin{equation*}
\left( \begin{array}{ccc}
0 & - d\theta^1 \wedge d\theta^2 & \scriptstyle{ {R_{131}}^3 d\theta^1 \wedge d\theta^3 + {R_{231}}^3 d\theta^2 \wedge d\theta^3}\\
\sin^2\theta^1 d\theta^1 \wedge d\theta^2 & 0 & \scriptstyle{ {R_{132}}^3 d\theta^1 \wedge d\theta^3 + {R_{232}}^3 d\theta^2 \wedge d\theta^3}\\
\scriptstyle{ {R_{133}}^1 d\theta^1 \wedge d\theta^3 + {R_{233}}^1 d\theta^2 \wedge d\theta^3} & \scriptstyle{ {R_{133}}^2 d\theta^1 \wedge d\theta^3 + {R_{233}}^2 d\theta^2 \wedge d\theta^3 }& 0
\end{array}\right).
\end{equation*}
The derivative of the connection form is
\begin{equation*}
\dot\omega = \left(\begin{array}{ccc}
a_1^1 d\theta^1 + b_1^1 d\theta^2 & a_1^2 d\theta^1 + b_1^2 d\theta^2 & c_1^3 d\theta^3\\
a_2^1 d\theta^1 + b_2^1 d\theta^2 & a_2^2 d\theta^1 + b_2^2 d\theta^2 & c_2^3 d\theta^3\\
c_3^1 d\theta^3 & c_3^2 d\theta^3 & a_3^3 d\theta^1 + b_3^3 d\theta^2
\end{array}\right).
\end{equation*}
As in the case $n=1$, computation shows that both $\tr \dot{\omega} \tr \Omega=0$ and $\tr \left( \dot{\omega}\wedge \Omega \right)=0$. Therefore $P_1\left( \dot{\omega}\wedge\Omega \right)=0$ and $\dfrac{d}{ds}TP\left( \omega\left( s \right) \right)\mid_{s=0} = exact$.
\end{proof}
This lemma combined with the fact that the Ricci flow preserves isometries yields the following theorem.
\begin{thm}
If $m+n=3$ and $f:S^n\to \ensuremath{ {\mathbb R} }^+$, then for the manifold $M = S^n \times_f S^m$ and the first Pontryagin polynomial $P_1 \in I^2\left( Gl_{3}\left( \ensuremath{ {\mathbb R} } \right) \right)$ the cohomology class $\left\{ \widetilde{TP\left( \omega \right)} \right\}\in H^3 \left( M,\ensuremath{ {\mathbb R} }/\ensuremath{ {\mathbb Z} } \right)$ is invariant under the Ricci flow.
\end{thm}
\begin{proof}
Consider the projection $\pi : S^n \times_f S^m \to S^n$. For each $x\in S^n$, the fiber $\pi^{-1}(x)$ is going to be an $m$-sphere with radius determined by $f(x)$. Thus the fibers will be isometric to each other up to a factor determined by $f$. At any time $t$ the, the fiber above a point $x$ is going to have isometry group $SO\left( m \right)$ with isotropy subgroup $SO\left( m-1 \right)$. Thus the fiber will be isometric to a sphere of some radius determined by $t$ and $x\in S^n$.
If $n=1$, any metric on $S^1$ is clearly conformally equivalent to the round metric. For $n=2$, the uniformization theorem says that any metric on $S^2$ is conformally equivalent to the round metric. Multiplying the metric by the conformal factor will yield a metric that is a warped product of $S^n$ with $S^{m}$.
By lemma \ref{lem:0deriv} it follows that the derivative of the form $TP_1\left( \omega(t) \right)$ at any time is exact. Thus the class $\left\{ \widetilde{TP_1\left( \omega \right)} \right\} \in H^{2l-1}\left( E(M), \ensuremath{ {\mathbb R} }/\ensuremath{ {\mathbb Z} } \right)$ is invariant. Therefore the class $\left\{ \widetilde{TP_1\left( \omega \right)} \right\}\in H^3\left( M,\ensuremath{ {\mathbb R} }/\ensuremath{ {\mathbb Z} } \right)$ must also be invariant.
\end{proof}
\section{Generalized Berger Spheres}
Consider the manifold $S^3$ identified with the Lie group $SU(2)$. The identification is from the map that sends $(x,y) \in S^3\subset C^2$ to $\left(\begin{array}{cc} y & x\\ -\bar x & \bar y\end{array}\right)\in SU(2)$. The following is the basis for the Lie algebra $\mathfrak{su}(2)$ of $SU(2)$.
\begin{equation}
X_1 = \left(\begin{array}{cc} i & 0 \\ 0 & -i\end{array}\right), X_2=\left(\begin{array}{cc} 0 & 1 \\ -1 & 0\end{array}\right), X_3 = \left(\begin{array}{cc} 0 & i \\ i & 0\end{array}\right).
\end{equation}
The basis $\left< X_1,X_2,X_3\right>$ forms an orthonormal basis on $S^3$ under the standard metric. The Lie bracket of these vector fields is $\left[X_i, X_{i+1}\right] = 2X_{i+2}$ where the indices are taken mod 3.
\begin{defn}
\label{dfn:genberger}
Define a new metric on $S^{3}$, $\bar{g}$, such that $\left\langle \lambda_1^{-1}X_{1},\lambda_2^{-1}X_{2},\lambda_3^{-1}X_{3}\right\rangle $ is an orthonormal basis where $\lambda_{i}$ are constants. For notation, let $\ensuremath{ \bar{X}} _{i}=\lambda_i^{-1}X_{i}$. Additionally, let $\left< \ensuremath{ \bar{\theta}} ^1,\ensuremath{ \bar{\theta}} ^2,\ensuremath{ \bar{\theta}} ^3 \right>$ be the orthonormal coframe. The manifold $S^3$ equipped with this metric is called the \emph{generalized Berger sphere}. If $ \lambda_2 = \lambda_3 = 1$ then this is the standard \emph{Berger collapsed sphere} or \emph{Berger sphere}.
\end{defn}
In this section $i,j,k$ are fixed and distinct from one another, so the Einstein summation convention does \emph{not} apply to these indices. Sums will use the letters $p$ and $q$, which do follow the Einstein summation convention. The terms $\omega_i^j(t)$, $\Omega_i^j(t)$, $R_{ij}(t)$, and $\dot{\omega}_i^j(t)$ will represent the connection 1-forms, curvature 2-forms, Ricci curvature, and the derivative of connection 1-forms, respectively, at time $t$. Finally, $\epsilon_{ijk}$ represents the sign of the permutation $(i j k)$.
Consider the manifold $M$ which is a generalized Berger sphere with basis and coframe as defined in definition~\ref{dfn:genberger} . Under the Ricci flow, $g_t$ will represent the metric at time $t$ with $g_0 = \overline{g}$. The frame, $\left<\ensuremath{ \bar{X}} _1,\ensuremath{ \bar{X}} _2,\ensuremath{ \bar{X}} _3\right>$, and coframe, $\left<\ensuremath{ \bar{\theta}} ^1,\ensuremath{ \bar{\theta}} ^2,\ensuremath{ \bar{\theta}} ^3\right>$, are not being evolved with time and depend only on the initial parameters, $\lambda_i$.
Using the Koszul formula, the connection can be computed to be $\nabla_{\ensuremath{ \bar{X}} _i}\ensuremath{ \bar{X}} _j = \varepsilon_{ijk}\frac{-\lambda_i^2 + \lambda_j^2 + \lambda_k^2}{\lambda_i\lambda_j\lambda_k} \ensuremath{ \bar{X}} _k$ and $\nabla_{\ensuremath{ \bar{X}} _i}\ensuremath{ \bar{X}} _i = 0$.
The connection and curvature forms at time 0 are
\begin{align*}
\omega_i^j(0) =& \varepsilon_{kij}\frac{-\lambda_k^2 + \lambda_i^2 + \lambda_j^2}{\lambda_k\lambda_i\lambda_j}\ensuremath{ \bar{\theta}} ^k\\
\Omega_i^j(0) =& \frac{3\lambda_k^4 - \lambda_i^4-\lambda_j^4 + 2\lambda_i^2\lambda_j^2 - 2\lambda_i^2 \lambda_k^2 - 2\lambda_j^2 \lambda_k^2}{\lambda_i^2\lambda_j^2\lambda_k^2}\ensuremath{ \bar{\theta}} ^i \wedge \ensuremath{ \bar{\theta}} ^j.
\end{align*} (For details on these and the following computations, see Appendix \ref{app:computations}).
The Ricci curvature terms at time 0 are
\begin{equation*}
R_{ii}(0) = \frac{2\lambda_i^4 - 2\lambda_k^4 -2\lambda_j^4 + 4\lambda_j^2 \lambda_k^2}{\lambda_i^2 \lambda_j^2 \lambda_k^2}.
\end{equation*}
The derivative of the connection forms can be computed directly.
\begin{align*}
\partial_{t}\left\langle \nabla_{\ensuremath{ \bar{X}} _{k}}\ensuremath{ \bar{X}} _{i},\ensuremath{ \bar{X}} _{j}\right\rangle = & \partial_{t}\left\langle \omega_{i}^{p}\left(\ensuremath{ \bar{X}} _{k}\right)\ensuremath{ \bar{X}} _{p},\ensuremath{ \bar{X}} _{j}\right\rangle \\
= & \dot{\omega}_{i}^{p}\left(\ensuremath{ \bar{X}} _{k}\right)\left\langle \ensuremath{ \bar{X}} _{p},\ensuremath{ \bar{X}} _{j}\right\rangle +\omega_{i}^{p}\left(\ensuremath{ \bar{X}} _{k}\right)\partial_{t}\left\langle \ensuremath{ \bar{X}} _{p},\ensuremath{ \bar{X}} _{j}\right\rangle \\
= & \dot{\omega}_{i}^{j}\left(\ensuremath{ \bar{X}} _{k}\right)\left\langle \ensuremath{ \bar{X}} _{j},\bar{X_{j}}\right\rangle +\omega_{i}^{p}\left(\ensuremath{ \bar{X}} _{k}\right)\partial_{t}\left\langle \ensuremath{ \bar{X}} _{p},\ensuremath{ \bar{X}} _{j}\right\rangle \\
= & \dot{\omega}_{i}^{j}\left(\ensuremath{ \bar{X}} _{k}\right)-2\omega_{i}^{p}\left(\ensuremath{ \bar{X}} _{k}\right)R_{pj}\\
= & \dot{\omega}_{i}^{j}\left(\ensuremath{ \bar{X}} _{k}\right)-2\omega_{i}^{j}\left(\ensuremath{ \bar{X}} _{k}\right)R_{jj},
\end{align*}
so that
\begin{equation*}
\dot{\omega}_{i}^{j}(0)\left(\ensuremath{ \bar{X}} _{k}\right)=\partial_{t}\left\langle \nabla_{\ensuremath{ \bar{X}} _{k}}\ensuremath{ \bar{X}} _{i},\ensuremath{ \bar{X}} _{j}\right\rangle +2\omega_{i}^{j}\left(\ensuremath{ \bar{X}} _{k}\right)R_{jj}.
\end{equation*}
At time 0, computation yields
\begin{equation}
\label{eqn:omdij}
\dot{\omega}_{i}^{j}(0) = -2 \varepsilon_{kij}\frac{-\lambda_k^2 + \lambda_i^2 + \lambda_j^2}{\lambda_k\lambda_i\lambda_j} \left( R_{11}+R_{22}+R_{33} \right)\ensuremath{ \bar{\theta}} ^k
\end{equation}
Since $\Omega$ is skew-symmetric, the first Pontryagin polynomial reduces to
\begin{equation*}
P_1\left( A\otimes B\right) = -\frac{1}{2\pi^2}\tr\left( AB \right).
\end{equation*}Thus the derivative at time 0 of $TP_1\left( \omega \right)$ is $-\frac{1}{2\pi^2}\tr\left( \dot{\omega}\wedge\Omega \right) + exact$.
\begin{lem}
\label{lem:berger}
For a Berger sphere, the Chern-Simons class, $\left\{ \widetilde{TP_1\left( \omega \right)} \right\}$, is invariant if and only if $\lambda=1$.
\end{lem}
\begin{proof}
The derivative of $TP_1\left( \omega \right)$ at time 0 is
\begin{equation}
\label{berger}
\dfrac{d}{dt} TP\left( \omega(t) \right) \mid_{t=0} = -\frac{2}{\pi^2}\lambda\left( \lambda^2-1 \right)^2 \theta^1 \wedge \theta^2 \wedge \theta^3 + exact.
\end{equation}
If $\lambda=1$, the Berger sphere is just a 3-sphere. It is already known that the Ricci flow conformally shrinks a 3-sphere to a point \cite[Chapter 1.6]{Chow2004} For any other value of $\lambda$, however, the Chern-Simons form changes by something that is not exact and therefore the Chern-Simons class $\left\{ TP_1\left( \omega \right) \right\}\in H^3\left( E(M),\ensuremath{ {\mathbb R} } \right)$ varies. Since the class varies continuously, its reduction mod $\ensuremath{ {\mathbb Z} }$ must also vary and therefore $\left\{ \widetilde{TP\left( \omega \right)} \right\}\in H^{3}\left( M,\ensuremath{ {\mathbb R} }/\ensuremath{ {\mathbb Z} } \right)$ must vary.
\end{proof}
The derivative of the Chern-Simons form simplifies to
\begin{equation}
\label{3consts}
\textstyle{\partial_{t}TP_{1}\left(\omega\right)\mid_{t=0} =\frac{16}{\pi^2\lambda_{1}^{5}\lambda_{2}^{5}\lambda_{3}^{5}}\left(\sum\limits_p\lambda_{p}^{10}-\sum\limits_{p\neq q}\lambda_{p}^{8}\lambda_{q}^{2}+\sum\limits_{p}\lambda_{p}^{6}\lambda_{p+1}^{2}\lambda_{p+2}^{2}\right)\ensuremath{ \bar{\theta}} ^{1}\wedge\ensuremath{ \bar{\theta}} ^{2}\wedge\ensuremath{ \bar{\theta}} ^{3}}.
\end{equation}
\begin{thm}
\label{thm:3const}
For the Berger sphere generalized by three constants, the Chern-Simons class $\left\{ \widetilde{TP_1\left( \omega \right)} \right\}\in H^3\left( M,\ensuremath{ {\mathbb R} }/\ensuremath{ {\mathbb Z} } \right)$ defined by the first Pontryagin polynomial form is invariant only if $\lambda_1=\lambda_2=\lambda_3$.
\end{thm}
\begin{proof}
If $\lambda_1=\lambda_2=\lambda_3$, the generalized Berger sphere is just a 3-sphere of a different radius. This changes conformally and the Chern-Simons forms are conformal invariants. If exactly two of the constants are the same, then this the manifold is conformally equivalent to a Berger sphere, which was dealt with in corollary \ref{lem:berger}.
Let $g$ be the metric such that $\left< \lambda_1^{-1} X_1, \lambda_2^{-1}X_2,\lambda_3^{-1}X_3 \right>$ is an orthonormal basis of vector fields. Without loss of generality, assume that $\lambda_1^{-1} < \lambda_2^{-1} < \lambda_3^{-1}$. This metric is conformally related to the metric, $\hat{g}$, such that $\left< \lambda_3\lambda_1^{-1}X_1, \lambda_3\lambda_2^{-1}X_2,X_3 \right>$ is an orthonormal basis.
Let $\alpha=\lambda_3^{-1}\lambda_1$ and $\beta = \lambda_3^{-1}\lambda_2$. It is clear that $\alpha >1$ and $\beta >1$. And so the numerator of the coefficient of \ref{3consts} reduces to
\begin{equation}
F\left(\alpha,\beta\right) = \alpha^{10} + \beta^{10} - \alpha^8 \beta^2 - \beta^8\alpha^2 - \alpha^8 - \beta^8 + \alpha^6 \beta^2 + \beta^6 \alpha^2 + \alpha^2 \beta^2 - \alpha^2 - \beta^2 +1.
\end{equation}
This can be factored into either of the following.
\begin{align}
& \left( \alpha^2-\beta^2 \right)^2\left( \left( \alpha^2-1 \right)\left( \alpha^4 + \alpha^2\beta^2 + \beta^4 \right) + \beta^6 \right) + \left( \alpha^2-1 \right)\left( \beta^2-1 \right)\\
& \left( \alpha^2-\beta^2 \right)^2\left( \left( \beta^2-1 \right)\left( \beta^4 + \beta^2\alpha^2 + \alpha^4 \right) + \alpha^6 \right) + \left( \alpha^2-1 \right)\left( \beta^2-1 \right).
\end{align}
Since $\alpha > 1$ and $\beta > 1$, this coefficient is clearly positive.
Thus, $F\left( \alpha,\beta \right) = 0 $ if and only if $\alpha = \beta = 1$. Otherwise the class $\left\{ TP_1\left( \omega \right) \right\}\in H^3\left( E(M),\ensuremath{ {\mathbb R} } \right)$ varies continuously and so does its reduction mod $\ensuremath{ {\mathbb Z} }$. Therefore $\left\{ \widetilde{TP_1\left( \omega \right)} \right\}\in H^3\left( M, \ensuremath{ {\mathbb R} }/\ensuremath{ {\mathbb Z} } \right)$ varies.
\end{proof}
| {
"redpajama_set_name": "RedPajamaArXiv"
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Q: convert int to char * in C++ I want to convert an int to char *
char str[10]=;
int i=567;
str=itoa(i, str, 10)
This gives an error on str the third line
str must have a modifiable lvalue
A: char str[10];
int i=567;
itoa(i, str, 10);
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Melaloncha zikani är en tvåvingeart som beskrevs av Borgmeier 1934. Melaloncha zikani ingår i släktet Melaloncha och familjen puckelflugor. Inga underarter finns listade i Catalogue of Life.
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Puckelflugor
zikani | {
"redpajama_set_name": "RedPajamaWikipedia"
} | 4,872 |
Paphiopedilum stonei is a species of orchid, endemic to Borneo (Sarawak).
stonei | {
"redpajama_set_name": "RedPajamaWikipedia"
} | 9,591 |
{"url":"https:\/\/www.groundai.com\/project\/exotic-quantum-spin-models-in-spin-orbit-coupled-mott-insulators\/","text":"Exotic quantum spin models in spin-orbit-coupled Mott insulators\n\n# Exotic quantum spin models in spin-orbit-coupled Mott insulators\n\n## Abstract\n\nWe study cold atoms in an optical lattice with synthetic spin-orbit coupling in the Mott-insulator regime. We calculate the parameters of the corresponding tight-binding model using Peierls substitution and \u201clocalized Wannier states method\u201d and derive the low-energy spin Hamiltonian for fermions and bosons. The spin Hamiltonian is a combination of Heisenberg model, quantum compass model and Dzyaloshinskii-Moriya interactions and it has a rich classical phase diagram with collinear, spiral and vortex phases.\n\nSince the first experimental realization of Bose-Einstein condensate (BEC), cold atoms have proven to be an excellent playground for studying many-body physics\u00a0Lewenstein et\u00a0al. (); Bloch et\u00a0al. () and many interesting phenomena take place for strongly interacting atoms in an optical lattice. These studies started with an experimental observation of superfluid to Mott-insulator phase transition\u00a0Greiner et\u00a0al. () which was followed by experimental and theoretical work on both Bose and Fermi gases in lattices of different dimensionality and in various parameter regimes\u00a0Lewenstein et\u00a0al. (); Bloch et\u00a0al. (). The key features of cold atoms in optical lattices are the excellent tunability of parameters and the fact that the sample is almost perfectly described by the Hubbard model in the deep lattice regime\u00a0Bloch et\u00a0al. (). Since it is well known that the Hubbard model is mapped to an effective spin Hamiltonian for Mott-insulator phases with integer filling\u00a0MacDonald et\u00a0al. (), it is clear that cold atoms can be used to \u201cengineer\u201d various quantum spin systems\u00a0Kuklov and Svistunov (); Duan et\u00a0al. () from those described by the Heisenberg model to more exotic ones, like the Kitaev model\u00a0Kitaev (). In designing effective spin systems different tools like polar molecules\u00a0Micheli et\u00a0al. () and tilted optical lattices\u00a0Simon et\u00a0al. () can also be used. In recent years there has been a lot of interest in creating artificial Abelian and non-Abelian gauge fields in cold-atom systems\u00a0Dalibard et\u00a0al. () and successful experimental realizations of synthetic magnetic\u00a0Lin et\u00a0al. (a); Aidelsburger et\u00a0al. () and electric field\u00a0Lin et\u00a0al. (b) and spin-orbit coupling (SOC)\u00a0Lin et\u00a0al. (c) have been reported. The role of SOC in cold atoms has been extensively studied following the theoretical proposal for the creation of artificial SOC\u00a0Stanescu et\u00a0al. (a); Ruseckas et\u00a0al. () and rich phase diagrams have been found in BECs\u00a0Stanescu et\u00a0al. (b); Wang et\u00a0al. (); Sinha et\u00a0al. () and fermionic systems\u00a0Sato et\u00a0al. (); Iskin and Subasi (); Takei et\u00a0al. ().\n\nIn this letter we combine optical lattice and SOC which, in the deep lattice regime, leads to tight-binding description with non-zero \u201cspin-flip\u201d hopping between neighboring sites\u00a0Goldman et\u00a0al. (a). We show that in the Mott-insulator phase with integer filling the system is described by an interesting effective spin Hamiltonian which is a combination of Heisenberg model, quantum compass model and Dzyaloshinskii-Moriya terms. We note that combination of an optical lattice and SOC has already been considered with a purpose of studying superfluid-insulator transition\u00a0Gra\u00df et\u00a0al. (), topological phase transitions\u00a0Goldman et\u00a0al. (b) and BEC dynamics\u00a0Larson et\u00a0al. (). In the context of solid-state physics spin models resulting from Mott-insulators with strong SOC were studied in Ref.\u00a0Stekhtman et\u00a0al. (a, b); Zheludev et\u00a0al. (); Jackeli and Khaliullin ().\n\nWe study a two-dimensional system of pseudospin- atoms on a square optical lattice with synthetic SOC. The single-particle physics is described by the Hamiltonian:\n\n H0=[p22m+Vxsin2(Kx)+Vysin2(Ky)]\u02c71+\u03b1\u02c7\u03c3xpx+\u03b2\u02c7\u03c3ypy, (1)\n\nwith and being the atomic momentum and mass; , the lattice depth in and direction, ( is the lattice spacing), the unit matrix, Pauli matrices; and characterize the SOC. Since (1) is invariant under lattice translations, its eigenstates have Bloch-wave form: and , being a lattice vector. We are interested in the deep lattice regime in which pairs of energy bands are well separated and the low-energy physics is captured by the lowest pair of bands which touch at , , and in the energy spectrum. In this regime the system is well described by the tight-binding approximation in which the Hilbert space is spanned by states localized on individual lattice sites and the tunneling exists only between nearest-neighbor sites. There are two localized states per site (, ), hence we have two effective particle species. This is the most general tight-binding description of (1):\n\n HT=\u2212\u2211rij\u2211\u03b3=x,y[a\u2020r,iT(i,j)\u03b3ar+\u03b7\u03b3,j+H.c.], (2)\n\nwhere () creates (annihilates) a particle in the state , are the tunneling matrices and . In finding the elements of corresponding to , we use Peierls substitution and \u201clocalized Wannier states (LWS) method\u201d. We write SOC in a gauge-field form: with and may use Peierls substitution to find tunneling matrices\n\n T\u03b3=t\u03b3e\u2212iaA\u03b3=t\u03b3ei\u03b8\u03b3\u02c7\u03c3\u03b3,\u03b3=x,y (3)\n\nwhere are tunneling coefficients in the -direction in the absence of SOC, , ; and are dimensionless SOC strengths: , . However, Peierls substitution is only an approximation, valid for SOC weak with respect to the kinetic plus lattice part of . This is the case when , , where is the lattice recoil energy. While the SOC is quite weak in solid-state systems, in cold-atom systems it is typically very strong and in that case Peierls substitution is not completely valid. For example, if we combine optical lattice with spacing and Rashba SOC generated by a scheme described in Ref.\u00a0Campbell et\u00a0al. (), we obtain , while the usual experimental values of lattice depth are (for smaller values of the tight-binding approximation is not valid). For the SOC scheme experimentally realized\u00a0Lin et\u00a0al. (c) . Since the validity condition for Peierls substitution is not completely satisfied, we calculate tunneling matrices using LWS method which is more involved and requires numerical approach but it does not contain any approximation. In a system with sites and periodic boundary conditions, Wannier states for a single band are defined as\u00a0Wannier (); Kohn (): , where are Bloch states and is an arbitrary phase. In the absence of SOC it is possible to obtain maximally LWS by varying the phase of each Bloch state Kohn () and in the deep lattice regime these maximally LWS are well localized on individual sites. In the presence of SOC it is generally not possible to have Wannier states localized on individual sites if these are constructed from Bloch states of a single band. Therefore we consider generalized Wannier states introduced in Ref.\u00a0Marzari and Vanderbilt (): , where are unitary matrices which mix Bloch states of the two bands. We find maximally LWS by minimizing the functional with respect to matrix elements of ( is an expectation value associated to ). The minimization is done numerically and example of an algorithm is given in Ref.\u00a0Marzari and Vanderbilt (). Numerical results show that the tunneling matrices still have the form given in (3) but now the parameters , , and are some more general functions of , , , , and . It can be shown that the structure of tunneling matrices (3) follows from the symmetries of .\n\nPeierls substitution has the advantage to give an analytical form for tunneling matrices, however it does not give any information about the Wannier states, whereas the LWS method explicitly gives states , which is important in interpreting the experimental data.\n\nIn Fig.\u00a01 we compare tunneling amplitudes in the Rashba-coupling case obtained by Peierls substitution and LWS method for . They show excellent accord for small and sizable differences for larger ones.\n\nCold atoms in optical lattices are described by the tunneling Hamiltonian (2) plus interactions\u00a0Bloch et\u00a0al. ():\n\n V=12\u2211rijUij:nr,inr,j:, (4)\n\nwhere is a number of particles in state , are interaction coefficients and :(\u2026): denotes normal ordering of creation and annihilation operators.\n\nWe are interested in the Mott-insulator regime with , and integer number of atoms per site ( for fermions and any integer for bosons). In this case interactions (4) are the dominant part in the full Hamiltonian and we may treat the problem perturbatively by taking as starting Hamiltonian and as perturbation. The ground state of is a state with uniform distribution of atoms and the ground state degeneracy is very large since there are two states per site that atoms can occupy. The perturbation couples the ground-state manifold and excited states of and the resulting low-energy effective Hamiltonian can be calculated in the second order of perturbation theory\u00a0Kuklov and Svistunov (); Duan et\u00a0al. ():\n\n (Heff)\u03b1\u03b2=\u2212\u2211\u03b3(HT)\u03b1\u03b3(HT)\u03b3\u03b2E\u03b3\u2212(E\u03b1+E\u03b2)\/2, (5)\n\nwhere and label states in the ground-state manifold, while labels the excited states of .\n\nWe first calculate the effective low-energy Hamiltonian for fermions. Since two fermions cannot occupy the same quantum state the only interesting regime is when . The only relevant interaction coefficient is and the excited states of are those with two fermions of different species at the same site. Now it is convenient to introduce isospin operators: , and . Using (5) we obtain\n\n Missing or unrecognized delimiter for \\bigg (6)\n\nwhere , , , , and are introduced in (3). The Hamiltonian is a combination of Heisenberg model, compass model and Dzyaloshinskii-Moriya-type terms; for (no SOC) and we recover the Heisenberg model\u00a0MacDonald et\u00a0al. (); Kuklov and Svistunov (); Duan et\u00a0al. ().\n\nNext we find the effective low-energy Hamiltonian for bosons, and now the number of atoms per site can be greater than one. The calculation for any and general interaction coefficients is very cumbersome, however it simplifies for , where or when Kuklov and Svistunov (). We express the Hamiltonian in terms of spin- operators defined in the same way as in the previous case. For , the Hamiltonian in the first order of is where and .\n\nFor and general we obtain\n\n Missing \\left or extra \\right (7)\n\nwhere , , , , , and , are given in (6) with replaced by . Since the atoms usually used in experiments have almost spin-independent interactions we assume (): this simplifies the Hamiltonian and yields .\n\nWe intend to find the classical zero-temperature phase diagram of (7) with . Some previous papers presented models combining Heisenberg, Dzyaloshinskii-Moriya and compass-model interactions\u00a0Stekhtman et\u00a0al. (a, b); Zheludev et\u00a0al. () but they did not provide a complete phase diagram, neither at a classical level, usually considering only small SOC. In our approach we treat the spins as classical vectors and we aim to find the configurations which minimize the energy, with constant . We did our computations usually on -site lattices and finite-size effects are negligible. In Fig.\u00a02 we show the phases and in Fig.\u00a03 the corresponding phase diagram. We obtain two Ising-type phases [ferromagnet (Fig.\u00a02a) and stripes (Fig.\u00a02e)], coplanar spirals (Fig.\u00a02b) and three-dimensional ordered phases with vortices (Fig.\u00a02c) or antivortices (Fig.\u00a02d). In describing our results, it is helpful to focus on a so called \u201cbasic region\u201d given by the triangle : the solutions for other parameters can be obtained by simple mappings, e.g. ground-state configurations in region are obtained by simultaneous -rotation of spins and sites of ground states in the \u201cbasic region\u201d. Upon activating SOC, the ferromagnet is immediately replaced by spiral waves, whose spatial periodicity reduces from several to three sites upon increasing and ; we found both commensurate and incommensurate waves. When the compass-model term becomes dominant over the Dzyaloshinskii-Moriya one, another coplanar phase appears, the ferromagnetic stripe order, either directly or via the three-dimensional ordered phases. We always find non degenerate classical ground states, except along the dashed lines (Fig.\u00a03) which indicate points in the parameter space with a continuous degeneracy of classical ground states. However, we expect this degeneracy to be removed by slight deviations of the realistic engineered SOC with respect to the Rashba-Dresselhaus form of the coupling\u00a0Campbell et\u00a0al. (). The dashed lines also represent the boundaries between phases with stripes of different orientation, i.e. between the phase shown in Fig.\u00a02e and the one obtained by rotating the sites and spins of the latter by around the -axis. The vortex phase (Fig.\u00a02c) takes place along the diagonal : vortices are left-handed in the region with smaller SOC and right-handed in the one with larger SOC. The antivortex phase (Fig.\u00a02d) is found along the diagonal and the configuration (d) is obtained from the phase (c) by a transformation which reflects sites (but not spins) with respect to the -axis. For a better identification of the phase properties, we consider their behavior with respect to the breaking of the translational symmetry of (7). While all the phases (except the ferromagnet) break this symmetry, they do it in a different way, i.e. the stripe phase in Fig.2e is not invariant under one-lattice-site translation along -direction, but it is invariant under two-lattice-sites translations in -direction and under one-lattice-site translation in -direction; the phases with vortices or antivortices are not invariant under one- and two-lattice-sites translations in and -direction, but they are invariant under three-lattice-sites translations. Then we can understand the evolution from stripe to vortex phase as a transition in which two-lattice-sites translational symmetry becomes broken. The same reasoning applies for the rest of the phase diagram.\n\nIt is important to emphasize that the classical analysis yields no gapless modes in the whole parameter region except for the diagonal lines (, ) in the stripe region. The absence of these gapless modes provides stronger guidelines for further analysis in a semiclassical or quantum approach.\n\nIn summary, we studied the effects of spin-orbit coupling in cold atoms in an optical lattice in the Mott-insulating regime. We derived the tight-binding model using Peierls substitution and Localized Wannier State method and obtained the effective low-energy Hamiltonian for fermions and bosons: this takes the form of an exotic spin model with Heisenberg, compass-model and Dzyaloshinskii-Moriya interactions. We determined the classical phase diagram for this model and showed that the interplay between the different interactions is responsible for a large variety of phases: ferromagnet, spirals, stripes, three-dimensional vortex and antivortex phases. We expect that our classification of ground states could generally survive in a quantum approach; in fact, except for some particular cases we mentioned in the discussion, on the classical level there are no degeneracies which would be lifted by quantum fluctuations.\n\nWe thank W.S. Cole, S. Zhang, A. Paramekanti and N. Trivedi for discussions. J.R. thanks Stephen Powell and Qinqin Lu for discussions. This research was supported by US-ARO, JQI (A.D.C. and V.G.), ARO-MURI (J.R.) and JQI-NSF-PFC (K.S.).\n\n### References\n\n1. M.\u00a0Lewenstein, A.\u00a0Sanpera, V.\u00a0Ahufinger, B.\u00a0Damski, A.\u00a0S. De, and U.\u00a0Sen, Adv. Phys. 56, 243 (2007).\n2. I.\u00a0Bloch, J.\u00a0Dalibard, and W.\u00a0Zwerger, Rev. Mod. Phys. 80, 885 (2008).\n3. M.\u00a0Greiner, M.\u00a0O. Mandel, T.\u00a0Esslinger, T.\u00a0H\u00e4nsch, and I.\u00a0Bloch, Nature 415, 39 (2002).\n4. A.\u00a0H. MacDonald, S.\u00a0M. Girvin, and D.\u00a0Yoshioka, Phys. Rev. B 37, 9753 (1988).\n5. A.\u00a0B. 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Lin, K.\u00a0Jimenez-Garcia, and I.\u00a0B. Spielman, Nature 471, 83-86 (2011).\n15. T.\u00a0D. Stanescu, C.\u00a0Zhang, and V.\u00a0M. Galitski, Phys. Rev. Lett. 99, 110403 (2007).\n16. J.\u00a0Ruseckas, G.\u00a0Juzelinas, P.\u00a0\u00d6hberg, and M.\u00a0Fleischhauer, Phys. Rev. Lett. 95, 010404 (2005).\n17. T.\u00a0D. Stanescu, B.\u00a0Anderson, and V.\u00a0Galitski, Phys. Rev. A 78, 023616 (2008).\n18. C.\u00a0Wang, C.\u00a0Gao, C.-M. Jian, and H.\u00a0Zhai, Phys. Rev. Lett. 105, 160403 (2010).\n19. S.\u00a0Sinha, R.\u00a0Nath, and L.\u00a0Santos, Phys. Rev. Lett. 107, 270401 (2011).\n20. M.\u00a0Sato, Y.\u00a0Takahashi, and S.\u00a0Fujimoto, Phys. Rev. Lett. 103, 020401 (2009).\n21. M.\u00a0Iskin and A.\u00a0L. Subasi, Phys. Rev. A 84, 043621 (2011).\n22. S.\u00a0Takei, C.-H. Lin, B.\u00a0M. Anderson, and V.\u00a0Galitski, Phys. Rev. A 85, 023626 (2012).\n23. N.\u00a0Goldman, A.\u00a0Kubasiak, A.\u00a0Bermudez, P.\u00a0Gaspard, M.\u00a0Lewenstein, and M.\u00a0A. 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B 56, 12847 (1997).\nComments 0\nYou are adding the first comment!\nHow to quickly get a good reply:\n\u2022 Give credit where it\u2019s due by listing out the positive aspects of a paper before getting into which changes should be made.\n\u2022 Be specific in your critique, and provide supporting evidence with appropriate references to substantiate general statements.\n\u2022 Your comment should inspire ideas to flow and help the author improves the paper.\n\nThe better we are at sharing our knowledge with each other, the faster we move forward.\nThe feedback must be of minumum 40 characters\nLoading ...\n100496\n\nYou are asking your first question!\nHow to quickly get a good answer:\n\u2022 Keep your question short and to the point\n\u2022 Check for grammar or spelling errors.\n\u2022 Phrase it like a question\nTest\nTest description","date":"2019-01-21 18:45:01","metadata":"{\"extraction_info\": {\"found_math\": false, \"script_math_tex\": 0, \"script_math_asciimath\": 0, \"math_annotations\": 0, \"math_alttext\": 0, \"mathml\": 0, \"mathjax_tag\": 0, \"mathjax_inline_tex\": 0, \"mathjax_display_tex\": 0, \"mathjax_asciimath\": 0, \"img_math\": 0, \"codecogs_latex\": 0, \"wp_latex\": 0, \"mimetex.cgi\": 0, \"\/images\/math\/codecogs\": 0, \"mathtex.cgi\": 0, \"katex\": 0, \"math-container\": 0, \"wp-katex-eq\": 0, \"align\": 0, \"equation\": 0, \"x-ck12\": 0, \"texerror\": 0, \"math_score\": 0.8356603980064392, \"perplexity\": 1456.9357522850614}, \"config\": {\"markdown_headings\": true, \"markdown_code\": true, \"boilerplate_config\": {\"ratio_threshold\": 0.3, \"absolute_threshold\": 10, \"end_threshold\": 15, \"enable\": false}, \"remove_buttons\": true, \"remove_image_figures\": true, \"remove_link_clusters\": true, \"table_config\": {\"min_rows\": 2, \"min_cols\": 3, \"format\": \"plain\"}, \"remove_chinese\": true, \"remove_edit_buttons\": true, \"extract_latex\": true}, \"warc_path\": \"s3:\/\/commoncrawl\/crawl-data\/CC-MAIN-2019-04\/segments\/1547583804001.73\/warc\/CC-MAIN-20190121172846-20190121194846-00100.warc.gz\"}"} | null | null |
{"url":"https:\/\/eduzip.com\/ask\/question\/displaystyle-91circ-is-an-example-ofnbsp-520512","text":"Mathematics\n\n# $\\displaystyle 91^{\\circ}$ is an example of\n\nobtuse\n\n##### SOLUTION\nAn obtuse angle is one which is more than $90^0$ but less than $180^0$.\nand hence\n$\\displaystyle 91^{\\circ}$ is an example of obtuse.\n\nYou're just one step away\n\nSingle Correct Medium Published on 09th 09, 2020\nQuestions 120418\nSubjects 10\nChapters 88\nEnrolled Students 86\n\n#### Realted Questions\n\nQ1 Single Correct Medium\nCube has 6 flat faces and _________ straight edges.\n\u2022 A. $6$\n\u2022 B. $8$\n\u2022 C. $10$\n\u2022 D. $12$\n\nAsked in: Mathematics - Understanding Elementary Shapes\n\n1 Verified Answer | Published on 24th 09, 2020\n\nQ2 Single Correct Medium\nMark the correct alternative of the following.\nTwo complementary angles are in the ratio $2:3$. The measure of the larger angle is?\n\u2022 A. $60^o$\n\u2022 B. $66^o$\n\u2022 C. $48^o$\n\u2022 D. $54^o$\n\nAsked in: Mathematics - Lines and Angles\n\n1 Verified Answer | Published on 09th 09, 2020\n\nQ3 Single Correct Medium\nIf $E$ is a point on the side $CA$ of an equilateral triangle $ABC,$ such that $BE\\perp CA,$ then $AB^{2}+BC^{2}+CA^{2}=$\n\u2022 A. $2BE^{2}$\n\u2022 B. $3BE^{2}$\n\u2022 C. $6BE^{2}$\n\u2022 D. $4BE^{2}$\n\nAsked in: Mathematics - The Triangle and Its Properties\n\n1 Verified Answer | Published on 23rd 09, 2020\n\nQ4 Subjective Medium\nIn the given fig. $AB||CD,\\angle BDC=40^{o}$, and $\\angle BAD=75^{o}$. Find $x,y,z$.","date":"2022-01-21 09:10:50","metadata":"{\"extraction_info\": {\"found_math\": true, \"script_math_tex\": 0, \"script_math_asciimath\": 0, \"math_annotations\": 0, \"math_alttext\": 0, \"mathml\": 0, \"mathjax_tag\": 0, \"mathjax_inline_tex\": 1, \"mathjax_display_tex\": 0, \"mathjax_asciimath\": 0, \"img_math\": 0, \"codecogs_latex\": 0, \"wp_latex\": 0, \"mimetex.cgi\": 0, \"\/images\/math\/codecogs\": 0, \"mathtex.cgi\": 0, \"katex\": 0, \"math-container\": 0, \"wp-katex-eq\": 0, \"align\": 0, \"equation\": 0, \"x-ck12\": 0, \"texerror\": 0, \"math_score\": 0.5367369055747986, \"perplexity\": 7463.924177180838}, \"config\": {\"markdown_headings\": true, \"markdown_code\": true, \"boilerplate_config\": {\"ratio_threshold\": 0.18, \"absolute_threshold\": 10, \"end_threshold\": 15, \"enable\": true}, \"remove_buttons\": true, \"remove_image_figures\": true, \"remove_link_clusters\": true, \"table_config\": {\"min_rows\": 2, \"min_cols\": 3, \"format\": \"plain\"}, \"remove_chinese\": true, \"remove_edit_buttons\": true, \"extract_latex\": true}, \"warc_path\": \"s3:\/\/commoncrawl\/crawl-data\/CC-MAIN-2022-05\/segments\/1642320302740.94\/warc\/CC-MAIN-20220121071203-20220121101203-00486.warc.gz\"}"} | null | null |
{"url":"http:\/\/math.stackexchange.com\/questions\/433310\/proof-by-contradiction-to-show-that-if-x2-2x-3-0-then-x-neq-2\/433314","text":"Proof by contradiction to show that if $x^2 +2x-3=0$ then $x\\neq 2$\n\nI need to write a proof by contradiction to show that if $x^2 +2x-3=0$ then $x\\neq 2$\n\nTo do a proof by contradiction, you assume the opposite. So I would assume that if $x^2+2x-2$ is not equal to $0$, then $x=2$.\n\nTo prove: Assume $x^2+2x-2$ is not equal to $0$ for $x$ in $E$....\n\n-\nWhat you say is not a proof by contradiction but a logical mistake: you want to prove $\\,A\\implies B\\,$ by means of $\\,\\neg A\\implies \\neg B\\;$ , which is wrong. What you can do is the counterpositive $\\,\\neg B\\implies \\neg A\\;$ ... \u2013\u00a0 DonAntonio Jul 1 '13 at 0:34\n\nFirst: To prove $\\;p\\implies q$ using a proof by contradiction, it is not a good idea to think of it as \"assuming the opposite.\" Assuming the opposite of what? In logic as in math, it's good to think of \"opposite\" of an assertion as its negation. And importantly, you need to remember here exactly which part of the overall assertion gets \"negated\" in our assumption:\n\nWe have an overall assertion which we call an implication, which has the form $\\;p \\implies q$: $\\;p$ happens to also be an assertion (serving as a premise, or antecedent, of the implication) which is said to imply another assertion, $q$ (which we call the conclusion, or consequent, of the implication.)\n\nNow: To prove $p \\implies q$ using a proof by contradiction, you assume the premise $p$, and you also assume the negation of $q$, that is, you assume the negation of the conclusion.\n\nIn this case, you start by assuming that the premise $x^2 + 2x - 3 = 0$ is true, and by assuming that it is not the case that the conclusion \"$x \\neq 2$\" holds(i.e., you assume it is false that $x \\neq 2)$. In other words, here, we assume $x^2 + 2x - 3 = 0\\;$ and suppose $\\bf x = 2$. Now the aim is to arrive at a contradiction.\n\nThen, having found a contradiction, you can conclude that the assumption $(x = 2)$ is false, and therefore, it follows that if the premise $x^2 + 2x - 3$ is true, then the conclusion $\\lnot (x = 2) \\iff \\;x \\neq 2$ must also be true.\n\n-\nso to find the contradiction, I would do (x^2) +2x -2=0 for x+2. Then (2^2) + 2(2)-2=0 which is not true. Is this correct? \u2013\u00a0 sophie Jun 30 '13 at 23:48\noops, I think you mean $-3$ in the equation. But yes, Exactly! substitute, as you did, evaluate, and Then you can reject the \"supposition that $x = 2$\" and claim that if $x^2 + 2x - 3 = 0$, then $x\\neq 2$. \u2013\u00a0 amWhy Jun 30 '13 at 23:49\nIn either case, if we have $x^2 + 2x - 3 = 0$ or $x^2 + 2x - 2 =0$, you can see that we get a contradiction if we suppose $x = 2.$ In either case, by arriving at a contradiction, you can conclude that $x\\neq 2$ \u2013\u00a0 amWhy Jun 30 '13 at 23:57\nThis helps so much!!! Thank you!!! \u2013\u00a0 sophie Jul 1 '13 at 2:36\nYou're welcome, sophie! \u2013\u00a0 amWhy Jul 1 '13 at 2:37\n\nYou took the revese meaning of contradiction.\n\nIf you have to prove anything by contradiction it means that the answer which you have to prove is false(x is not equal to 2) and not the statement which you will use to prove the same ($x^2+2x-3=0$).\n\nThe basic idea behind contradiction is that you assume that the thing you need to prove is not correct and you $contradict$ yourself by proving that you are wrong, that everything you've assumed is wrong and since you just assume the opposite, the opposite of the opposite i.e. the thing you assumed wrong is correct.\n\nThis is an analytical approach to try your questions. If there is a general statement $\\mathbb x$ and from it you have to prove statement $\\mathbb a$ then you take the converse of it {$\\mathbb b$} to do the job. You put your assumption back to $\\mathbb x$ and if it follows then your answer is $\\mathbb b$ else it is $\\mathbb a$.\n\nSo here, $$x^2+2x-3=0$$ We assume$x=2$. So we get $5=0$. So our assumption is wrong.\n\n-\n\nWhen you try to prove a logical proposition by contradiction, you have to assume the opposite. In your case $p\\Longrightarrow q$ is false only when $p$ is true and $q$ is false, translating this to your problem:\n\nIf $x^2+2x-3=0$, then $x\\neq 2$.\n\nWe assume $p$ is true: $x^2+2x-3=0$.\n\nAnd $q$ is false: $x=2$.\n\nAre those two things compatible, can you see the contradiction here?\n\n-\n\nYou were probably thrown by the ridiculously easy nature of the answer, which is this:\n\nIf $x$ were equal to $2$, then $x^2+2x-3$ would equal $5$, not $0$.\n\nHence (duh!) $x$ is not equal to $2$.\n\n-","date":"2014-11-29 07:43:30","metadata":"{\"extraction_info\": {\"found_math\": true, \"script_math_tex\": 0, \"script_math_asciimath\": 0, \"math_annotations\": 0, \"math_alttext\": 0, \"mathml\": 0, \"mathjax_tag\": 0, \"mathjax_inline_tex\": 1, \"mathjax_display_tex\": 1, \"mathjax_asciimath\": 0, \"img_math\": 0, \"codecogs_latex\": 0, \"wp_latex\": 0, \"mimetex.cgi\": 0, \"\/images\/math\/codecogs\": 0, \"mathtex.cgi\": 0, \"katex\": 0, \"math-container\": 0, \"wp-katex-eq\": 0, \"align\": 0, \"equation\": 0, \"x-ck12\": 0, \"texerror\": 0, \"math_score\": 0.9497333765029907, \"perplexity\": 233.61879648569774}, \"config\": {\"markdown_headings\": false, \"markdown_code\": true, \"boilerplate_config\": {\"ratio_threshold\": 0.18, \"absolute_threshold\": 10, \"end_threshold\": 15, \"enable\": true}, \"remove_buttons\": true, \"remove_image_figures\": true, \"remove_link_clusters\": true, \"table_config\": {\"min_rows\": 2, \"min_cols\": 3, \"format\": \"plain\"}, \"remove_chinese\": true, \"remove_edit_buttons\": true, \"extract_latex\": true}, \"warc_path\": \"s3:\/\/commoncrawl\/crawl-data\/CC-MAIN-2014-49\/segments\/1416931014049.81\/warc\/CC-MAIN-20141125155654-00072-ip-10-235-23-156.ec2.internal.warc.gz\"}"} | null | null |
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\section{Appendix Overview}
First, we present the details of the various proofs of Section~\ref{sec:main_propositions_for_grassmann_flow} in Appendix~\ref{sec:proofs}.
Next, in Appendix~\ref{sec:experimental_details_for_learning}, we describe the network layers for the building GrCNF, and the detailed model architectures, hyperparameters, and implementation on the experiments.
Finally, in Appendix~\ref{sec:fundamental_of_grassmann_manifold}, we provide a summary of the fundamentals of a Grassmann manifold, which is the core concept of this study.
\section{Proofs}
\label{sec:proofs}
\subsection{Proposition \ref{proposition:gr_flow}}
\label{proof:gr_flow}
First, we invoked the following two corollaries.
\begin{corollary}[Diffeomorphism Invariance of Flows]
\label{ref:pushforward_flow}
Let $F : \C{M} \rightarrow \C{N}$ be a diffeomorphism.
If $X$ is a smooth vector field over $\C{M}$ and $\theta$ is the flow of $X$, then the flow of $F_{*}X$\footnote{$F_*$ denotes the pushforward, that is, another notation for the differential of $F$.} is $\eta_t = F \circ \theta_t \circ F^{-1}$, with domain $N_t = F(M_t)$ for each $t \in \mathbb{R}$.
\end{corollary}
\begin{proof}
See \citet[Corollary 9.14]{lee2003introduction}.
\end{proof}
\begin{corollary}[Homogeneity Property]
\label{corollary:homogeneity_property}
The horizontal lift $\Bxih{\B{Y}}$ at representative $\B{Y}\in\operatorname{St}\!\left(k,D\right)$ relative to $\BS{\xi}_{\GY}\inT_{\GY}\Gr$ satisfies the following homogeneity (equivariance) property with regard to $^{\forall}\B{Q}\in\C{O}\!\LS{k}$.
\begin{equation}
\label{eq:homogeneity_property}
\overline{\BS{\xi}}^{\mathrm{h}}_{\B{Y}\B{Q}} = \Bxih{\B{Y}}\B{Q}.
\end{equation}
\end{corollary}
\begin{proof}
$\pi\LS{\B{Y}} = \pi\LS{\B{Y}\B{Q}}$ is true for $^\forall\B{Y}\in\operatorname{St}\!\left(k,D\right), \B{Q}\in\C{O}\!\LS{k}$. Therefore, $\pi\LS{\B{Y}} = \LS{\pi\circ q}\LS{\B{Y}}$ is true when defined as $q\LS{\B{Y}} = \B{Y}\B{Q}$.
When the derivative $d \pi\LS{\cdot}\LL{\cdot}$ of both sides is applied to the horizontal lift $\Bxih{\B{Y}}$ of $\BS{\xi}_{\GY}$, the following is obtained:
\begin{equation}
d \pi\LS{\B{Y}}\LL{\Bxih{\B{Y}}} = d \LS{\pi\circ q}\LS{\B{Y}}\LL{\Bxih{\B{Y}}} = d \pi\LS{q\LS{\B{Y}}}\LL{d q\LS{\B{Y}}\LL{\Bxih{\B{Y}}}} = d \pi\LS{\B{Y}\B{Q}}\LL{\Bxih{\B{Y}}\B{Q}}.
\end{equation}
Moreover, from (\ref{eq:horizontal_lift}) which is definition of horizontal lift, the following equation is true.
\begin{equation}
\BS{\xi}_{\GY} = d \pi\LS{\B{Y}}\LL{\Bxih{\B{Y}}} = d \pi\LS{\B{Y}\B{Q}}\LL{\overline{\BS{\xi}}^{\mathrm{h}}_{\B{Y}\B{Q}}}.
\end{equation}
Subsequently, we obtain the following equation.
\begin{equation}
\BS{\xi}_{\GY} = d \pi\LS{\B{Y}\B{Q}}\LL{\overline{\BS{\xi}}^{\mathrm{h}}_{\B{Y}\B{Q}}} = d \pi\LS{\B{Y}\B{Q}}\LL{\Bxih{\B{Y}}\B{Q}}.
\end{equation}
Finally, the uniqueness of the horizontal lift yields $\overline{\BS{\xi}}^{\mathrm{h}}_{\B{Y}\B{Q}} = \Bxih{\B{Y}}\B{Q}$.
\end{proof}
\begin{propos}[\ref{proposition:gr_flow}]
Let $\operatorname{Gr}\!\left(k,D\right)$ be a Grassmann manifold, $\SU{X}$ be any time-dependent vector field on $\operatorname{Gr}\!\left(k,D\right)$, and $F_{\SU{X},T}$ be a flow on a $\SU{X}$.
Let $\overline{\SU{X}}$ be any time-dependent horizontal lift and $\overline{F}_{\overline{\SU{X}},T}$ be a flow of $\overline{\SU{X}}$.
$\overline{\SU{X}}$ is a vector field on $\operatorname{St}\!\left(k,D\right)$ if and only if $\overline{F}_{\overline{\SU{X}},T}$ is a flow on $\operatorname{St}\!\left(k,D\right)$ and satisfies invariance condition $\overline{\SU{X}}\sim \overline{\SU{X}}^{\prime}$ for all $\overline{F}_{\overline{\SU{X}},T}\sim \overline{F}_{\overline{\SU{X}}^{\prime},T}$.
Therefore, $\SU{X}$ is a vector field on $\operatorname{Gr}\!\left(k,D\right)$ if and only if $F_{\SU{X},T} := \LL{\overline{F}_{\overline{\SU{X}},T}}$ is a flow on $\operatorname{Gr}\!\left(k,D\right)$, and vice versa.
\end{propos}
\begin{proof}
\textbf{Flow} $\boldsymbol{F_{\SU{X},T}}$ \textbf{on} $\boldsymbol{\textbf{Gr}\!\LS{k,D}\Rightarrow}$ \textbf{Vector Field} $\SU{X}$ \textbf{on} $\boldsymbol{\textbf{Gr}\!\LS{k,D}}$.
Let $\theta: \operatorname{St}\!\left(k,D\right)\times \C{O}\!\LS{k}\to\operatorname{St}\!\left(k,D\right), \LS{\B{Y}, \B{Q}} \mapsto \B{Y}\B{Q}$ be a map representing the right action of the orthogonal group.
In addition, let $F_{\SU{X},T}$ be a flow on $\operatorname{Gr}\!\left(k,D\right)$ and $\overline{F}_{\overline{\SU{X}},T}$ be a flow on $\operatorname{St}\!\left(k,D\right)$.
These satisfy $\overline{F}_{\overline{\SU{X}}\B{Q},T}\sim \overline{F}_{\overline{\SU{X}},T}, \overline{F}_{\overline{\SU{X}}\B{Q},T}\in F_{\SU{X},T}, \overline{F}_{\overline{\SU{X}},T}\in F_{\SU{X},T}$.
\begin{align}
\overline{\SU{X}}\LS{t, \overline{F}_{\overline{\SU{X}}\B{Q}, t}\LS{\B{Y}\B{Q}}} &= \overline{\SU{X}}\LS{t, \overline{F}_{\overline{\SU{X}},t}\LS{\B{Y}}\B{Q}}\\
&= \frac{d{}}{d{t}}\LM{\overline{F}_{\overline{\SU{X}},t}\LS{\B{Y}}\B{Q}}\\
&= \frac{d{}}{d{t}}\LS{\theta\circ \overline{F}_{\overline{\SU{X}},t}}\LS{\B{Y}}\\
&= {d{\LS{\theta}}_{\B{Y}}}\LM{\frac{d{}}{d{t}}\overline{F}_{\overline{\SU{X}}, t}\LS{\B{Y}}}\\
&= {d{\LS{\theta}}_{\B{Y}}}\LM{\overline{\SU{X}}\LS{t, \overline{F}_{\overline{\SU{X}}, t}\LS{\B{Y}}}}\\
&= \overline{\SU{X}}\LS{t, \overline{F}_{\overline{\SU{X}}, t}\LS{\B{Y}}}\B{Q}.
\end{align}
Thus, $\overline{\SU{X}}\sim\overline{\SU{X}}\B{Q}$ is true.
Therefore, $\overline{\SU{X}}$ is the horizontal lift of the vector field $\SU{X}$ on $\operatorname{Gr}\!\left(k,D\right)$ and is unique for $\SU{X}$.
\textbf{Flow} $\boldsymbol{F_{\SU{X},T}}$ \textbf{on} $\boldsymbol{\textbf{Gr}\!\LS{k,D}\Leftarrow}$ \textbf{Vector Field} $\SU{X}$ \textbf{on} $\boldsymbol{\textbf{Gr}\!\LS{k,D}}$.
Let $\theta: \operatorname{St}\!\left(k,D\right)\times \C{O}\!\LS{k}\to\operatorname{St}\!\left(k,D\right), \LS{\B{Y}, \B{Q}} \mapsto \B{Y}\B{Q}$ be a map representing the right action of the orthogonal group.
In addition, let $\overline{\SU{X}}$ be a vector field over a horizontal bundle $\Hor{}$ on $\operatorname{St}\!\left(k,D\right)$ and $\overline{F}_{\overline{\SU{X}},T}$ be its flow.
From the Corollary \ref{ref:pushforward_flow},
\begin{align}
\overline{F}_{\theta_{*}\circ\overline{\SU{X}},T} &= \theta\circ \overline{F}_{\overline{\SU{X}},T}\circ \theta^{-1}\\
\overline{F}_{\theta_{*}\circ\overline{\SU{X}},T} \circ \theta &= \theta\circ \overline{F}_{\overline{\SU{X}},T}\\
\overline{F}_{{d{\LS{\theta}}_{\B{Y}}}\overline{\SU{X}},T} \circ \theta &= \theta\circ \overline{F}_{\overline{\SU{X}},T}\\
\overline{F}_{\overline{\SU{X}}\B{Q},T}\LS{\B{Y}\B{Q}} &= \overline{F}_{\overline{\SU{X}},T}\LS{\B{Y}}\B{Q}.
\end{align}
Note that $d{\LS{\theta}}_{\B{Y}}\overline{\SU{X}} = \overline{\SU{X}}\B{Q}$ is derived from the Corollary \ref{corollary:homogeneity_property} and (4) in \cite{cayley_transform_based_ratraction_on_Grassmann_Manifolds}.
This indicates that $\overline{F}_{\overline{\SU{X}},T}\sim \overline{F}_{\overline{\SU{X}}^{\prime},T}$ is true for any $\overline{\SU{X}}, \overline{\SU{X}}^{\prime}\in\Hor{}$ that satisfies $\overline{\SU{X}}\sim \overline{\SU{X}}^{\prime}$.
Thus, a new flow can be defined as $F_{\SU{X},T}:=\G{\overline{F}_{\overline{\SU{X}},T}}$. This is a flow on a $\operatorname{Gr}\!\left(k,D\right)$.
Because $\overline{\SU{X}}$ is a vector field in a horizontal bundle $\Hor{}$ on $\operatorname{St}\!\left(k,D\right)$, it is a horizontal lift of the vector field $\SU{X}$ on $\operatorname{Gr}\!\left(k,D\right)$ and is therefore unique for $\SU{X}$.
Based on this, it can be concluded that the subject is satisfied.
\end{proof}
\subsection{Proposition \ref{proposition:probability_distribution_on_grassmann_manifold}}\label{proof:probability_distribution_on_grassmann_manifold}
\begin{propos}[\ref{proposition:probability_distribution_on_grassmann_manifold}]
Let $\operatorname{Gr}\!\left(k,D\right)$ be a Grassmann manifold.
Let $p$ be the probability density on $\operatorname{Gr}\!\left(k,D\right)$ and $F$ be the flow on $\operatorname{Gr}\!\left(k,D\right)$.
Suppose $\overline{p}$ is a density on $\operatorname{St}\!\left(k,D\right)$ and $\overline{F}$ is a flow on $\operatorname{St}\!\left(k,D\right)$. Then, the distribution $\overline{p}_{\overline{F}}$ after transformations by $\overline{F}$ is also a density on $\operatorname{St}\!\left(k,D\right)$.
Further, the invariance condition $\overline{p}_{\overline{F}}\sim\overline{p}_{\overline{F}^{\prime}}$ is satisfied for all $\overline{F}\sim\overline{F}^{\prime}$.
Therefore, $p_F := \G{\overline{p}_{\overline{F}}}$ is a distribution on $\operatorname{Gr}\!\left(k,D\right)$.
\end{propos}
\begin{proof}
Let $\theta: \operatorname{St}\!\left(k,D\right)\times \C{O}\!\LS{k}\to\operatorname{St}\!\left(k,D\right) : \LS{\B{Y}, \B{Q}} \mapsto \B{Y}\B{Q}$ be a map representing the right action of the orthogonal group.
\begin{align}
\overline{p}_F\LS{\theta\circ\B{Y}} &= \overline{p}_F\LS{\theta\circ\B{Y}}\frac{\LA{\det\LM{J_{\theta}\LS{\B{Y}}}}}{\LA{\det\LM{J_{\theta}\LS{\B{Y}}}}}
= \frac{\overline{p}_{\theta^{-1}\circ F}\LS{\B{Y}}}{\LA{\det\LM{J_{\theta}\LS{\B{Y}}}}}\\
&= \overline{p}\LS{\LS{F^{-1}\circ\theta}\LS{\B{Y}}}\frac{{\LA{\det\LM{J_{F^{-1}\circ\theta}\LS{\B{Y}}}}}}{\LA{\det\LM{J_{\theta}\LS{\B{Y}}}}}\\
&= \LS{\overline{p}\circ F^{-1}}\circ\theta\LS{\B{Y}}\frac{{\LA{\det\LM{J_{\theta\circ F^{-1}}\LS{\B{Y}}}}}}{\LA{\det\LM{J_{\theta}\LS{\B{Y}}}}}\\
&= \theta\circ\LS{\overline{p}\circ F^{-1}}\LS{\B{Y}}\frac{{\LA{\det\LM{J_{\theta} \LS{F^{-1}\LS{\B{Y}}}J_{F^{-1}}\LS{\B{Y}}}}}}{\LA{\det\LM{J_{\theta}\LS{\B{Y}}}}}\\
&= \theta\circ\LS{\overline{p}\circ F^{-1}}\LS{\B{Y}}\frac{{\LA{\det\LM{J_{\theta} \LS{F^{-1}\LS{\B{Y}}}}}\LA{\det\LM{J_{F^{-1}}\LS{\B{Y}}}}}}{\LA{\det\LM{J_{\theta}\LS{\B{Y}}}}}\\
&= \theta\circ \overline{p}\LS{F^{-1}}\LS{\B{Y}}\LA{\det\LM{J_{F^{-1}}\LS{\B{Y}}}}\frac{\LA{\det\LM{J_{\theta} \LS{F^{-1}\LS{\B{Y}}}}}}{\LA{\det\LM{J_{\theta}\LS{\B{Y}}}}}\\
&= \theta\circ \overline{p}_F\LS{\B{Y}}\frac{\LA{\det\LM{J_{\theta} \LS{F^{-1}\LS{\B{Y}}}}}}{\LA{\det\LM{J_{\theta}\LS{\B{Y}}}}}\\
&= \theta\circ \overline{p}_F\LS{\B{Y}},
\end{align}
where $\LA{\det\LM{J_{\theta}\LS{\B{X}}}} = 1$ is true because $\theta$ is the action of the orthogonal group.
Therefore, as $\overline{p}_F\LS{\theta\circ\B{Y}} = \theta\circ \overline{p}_F\LS{\B{Y}}$ is true, $\overline{p}_F \sim \overline{p}_F\B{Q} \in p_F$ is true.
Based on this, it can be concluded that the subject is satisfied.
\end{proof}
\subsection{Proposition \ref{proposition:prior_distribution_on_grassmannian}}
\label{proof:matrix_variate_gaussian_distribution_on_grassmannian}
\begin{propos}[\ref{proposition:prior_distribution_on_grassmannian}]
The distribution $p_{\operatorname{Gr}\left(k,D\right)}$ on a Grassmann manifold $\operatorname{Gr}\!\left(k,D\right)$ based on the matrix-variate Gaussian distribution $\C{MN}$ can be expressed as follows.
\begin{equation}
p_{\operatorname{Gr}\left(k,D\right)}\LS{\GX; \G{\B{M}},\B{U},\B{V}} = V_{\operatorname{Gr}\left(k,D\right)} \C{MN}\LS{\Bxih{\B{M}}; \B{0},\B{U},\B{V}} \LA{\det\LS{\frac{d\overline{R}_{\B{M}}}{d\Bxih{\B{M}}}}},
\end{equation}
where $\B{M}$ is an orthonormal basis matrix denoting the mean of the distribution, $\B{U}$ is a positive definite matrix denoting the row directional variance, $\B{V}$ is a positive definite matrix denoting the column directional variance, and $\Bxih{\B{M}}$ is a random sample from $\C{MN}$ in an $k\LS{D-k}$-dimensional horizontal space $\Hor{\B{M}}$.
$V_{\operatorname{Gr}\left(k,D\right)}$ denotes the total volume of $\operatorname{Gr}\!\left(k,D\right)$ defined by (\ref{eq:integral_of_invariant_measur_on_grassmann_manifold}),
$\overline{R}_{\B{M}}$ denotes the horizontal retraction at $\B{M}$, and $\LA{\det\LS{\nicefrac{d\overline{R}_{\B{M}}}{d\Bxih{\B{M}}}}}$ denotes the Jacobian.
\end{propos}
\begin{proof}
Let $p_{\operatorname{Gr}}\LS{\GX}$ be a probability density function on a $\operatorname{Gr}\!\left(k,D\right)$.
From (\ref{eq:haar_measure_on_grassmann_manifold}), let $\LS{d\B{X}}$ be the invariant measure on $\operatorname{Gr}\!\left(k,D\right)$ and $d\Bxih{\B{M}}$ be the Lebesgue measure on $\Hor{\B{M}}$. Subsequently, a change of variables was performed according to the following:
\begin{align}
p_{\operatorname{Gr}\left(k,D\right)}\LS{\GX}\LS{d\B{X}} &= p_{\operatorname{Gr}\left(k,D\right)}\LS{\G{\overline{R}_{\B{M}}\LS{\Bxih{\B{M}}}}}d\Bxih{\B{M}},\\
p_{\operatorname{Gr}\left(k,D\right)}\LS{\GX} &= p_{\operatorname{Gr}\left(k,D\right)}\LS{\G{\overline{R}_{\B{M}}\LS{\Bxih{\B{M}}}}} \LA{\det\LS{\frac{d\Bxih{\B{M}}}{d\overline{R}_{\B{M}}}}},\\
p_{\operatorname{Gr}\left(k,D\right)}\LS{\GX} &= p_{\operatorname{Gr}\left(k,D\right)}\LS{\G{\overline{R}_{\B{M}}\LS{\Bxih{\B{M}}}}} \LA{\det\LS{\frac{d\overline{R}_{\B{M}}}{d\Bxih{\B{M}}}}}^{-1}.
\end{align}
Suppose $p_{\operatorname{Gr}}\LS{\GX}$ is integrable with the probability measure $\dH{d\B{X}}$ on $\operatorname{Gr}\!\left(k,D\right)$ defined by (\ref{eq:uniform_distribution_on_grassmann_manifold}).
Then, we obtain the following relation.
\begin{align}
\int_{\operatorname{Gr}\left(k,D\right)}&{p_{\operatorname{Gr}\left(k,D\right)}\LS{\GX}\dH{d\B{X}}}\\
&= \frac{1}{V_{\operatorname{Gr}\left(k,D\right)}}\int_{\operatorname{Gr}\left(k,D\right)}{p_{\operatorname{Gr}\left(k,D\right)}\LS{\GX}\LS{d\B{X}}}\\
&= \frac{1}{V_{\operatorname{Gr}\left(k,D\right)}}\int_{\Hor{\B{M}}}{p_{\operatorname{Gr}\left(k,D\right)}\LS{\G{\overline{R}_{\B{M}}\LS{\Bxih{\B{M}}}}}\LA{\det\LS{\frac{d\overline{R}_{\B{M}}}{d\Bxih{\B{M}}}}}^{-1}d\Bxih{\B{M}}}.
\end{align}
In addition, we obtain the following equation based on $\dH{d\B{X}}$.
\begin{equation}
\int_{\operatorname{Gr}\left(k,D\right)}{p_{\operatorname{Gr}\left(k,D\right)}\LS{\GX}\dH{d\B{X}}} = \int_{\Hor{\B{M}}}{\C{MN}\LS{\Bxih{\B{M}}}d\Bxih{\B{M}}} = 1,
\end{equation}
where $\C{MN}\LS{\Bxih{\B{M}}}$ denotes the matrix-variate Gaussian distribution (\cite{Mathai2022MatrixVariateGauss}).
Thus, the probability density function on $\operatorname{Gr}\!\left(k,D\right)$ can be expressed as follows:
\begin{equation}
p_{\operatorname{Gr}\left(k,D\right)}\LS{\G{\overline{R}_{\B{M}}\LS{\Bxih{\B{M}}}}} = V_{\operatorname{Gr}\left(k,D\right)} \C{MN}\LS{\Bxih{\B{M}}} \LA{\det\LS{\frac{d\overline{R}_{\B{M}}}{d\Bxih{\B{M}}}}}.
\end{equation}
The Jacobian can be represented as $\LA{\det\LS{\frac{d\overline{R}_{\B{M}}}{d\Bxih{\B{M}}}}} = \LA{\det \LM{\LS{\nabla\overline{R}_{\B{M}}}^{\top}\LS{\nabla\overline{R}_{\B{M}}}}}^{\frac{1}{2}}$ from \cite{Measure_Theory}.
Further, $\nabla\overline{R}_{\B{M}}$ can be computed as follows.
First, we define the horizontal retraction $\overline{R}_{\B{Y}}: T^{\mathrm{h}}_{\Y}\St\to\operatorname{St}\!\left(k,D\right)$ based on the Cayley transform from \cite{cayley_transform_based_ratraction_on_Grassmann_Manifolds}.
\begin{equation}
\label{eq:retraction_on_grassmann_manifold_with_horizontal_ratraction_economy1_fixed_time}
\B{X} = \overline{R}_{\B{M}}\LS{\Bxih{\B{M}}} = \B{M} + \Bxih{\B{M}} - \LS{\frac{1}{2}\B{M} + \frac{1}{4}\Bxih{\B{M}}}\LS{\Ik{k} + \frac{1}{4}{\Bxih{\B{M}}}^{\top}\Bxih{\B{M}}}^{-1}{\Bxih{\B{M}}}^{\top}\Bxih{\B{M}}.
\end{equation}
This is a fixed time ($t=1$) version of (\ref{eq:retraction_on_grassmann_manifold_with_horizontal_ratraction_economy1}).
Next, for improved visibility in subsequent calculations, let $\B{E} = \Bxih{\B{M}},\; \B{F} = \frac{1}{2}\B{M} + \frac{1}{4}\B{E},\; \B{G} = \LS{\Ik{k} + \frac{1}{4}\B{H}}^{-1},\;\B{H} = {\B{E}}^{\top}{\B{E}}$.
In addition, let $\SU{D}$ be defined as the operator for the derivative of a matrix by a matrix. Then, the derivative $\nabla\overline{R}_{\B{M}} = \SU{D}\B{X}$ by $\B{E}$ is as follows:
\begin{align}
\label{eq:derivative_retraction}
\SU{D}\B{X}
= \SU{D}\B{M} + \SU{D}\B{E} - \SU{D}\LS{\B{F}\B{G}\B{H}}.
\end{align}
Finally, each derivative can be calculated as follows:
\begin{align}
\SU{D}\B{M} =& \B{0},\\
\SU{D}\B{E} =& \Ik{Dk},\\
\SU{D}\LS{\B{F}\B{G}\B{H}} =& \SU{D}\LS{\B{F}\LS{\B{G}\B{H}}}\\
=& \LM{\LS{\B{G}\B{H}}^{\top}\otimes\Ik{D}}\SU{D}\B{F} + \LS{\Ik{k}\otimes\B{F}}\SU{D}\LS{\B{G}\B{H}}\\
=& \LM{\LS{\B{G}\B{H}}^{\top}\otimes\Ik{D}}\SU{D}\B{F} + \LS{\Ik{k}\otimes\B{F}}\LM{\LS{\B{H}^{\top}\otimes\Ik{k}}\SU{D}\B{G} + \LS{\Ik{k}\otimes\B{G}}\SU{D}\B{H}}\\
=& \LM{\LS{\B{G}\B{H}}^{\top}\otimes\Ik{D}}\SU{D}\B{F} \nonumber\\
&+ \LS{\Ik{k}\otimes\B{F}}\LS{\B{H}^{\top}\otimes\Ik{k}}\SU{D}\B{G} + \LS{\Ik{k}\otimes\B{F}}\LS{\Ik{k}\otimes\B{G}}\SU{D}\B{H}\\
=& \LS{\B{G}^{\top}\B{H}^{\top}\otimes\Ik{D}}\SU{D}\B{F} + \LS{\B{H}^{\top}\otimes\B{F}}\SU{D}\B{G} + \LS{\Ik{k}\otimes\B{F}\B{G}}\SU{D}\B{H},\\
\SU{D}\B{F} =& \SU{D}\LS{\frac{1}{2}\B{M}} + \SU{D}\LS{\frac{1}{4}\B{E}} = \frac{1}{4}\SU{D}\B{E},\\
\SU{D}\B{G} =& -\LS{\B{G}^{\top}\otimes\B{G}}\SU{D}\B{H},\\
\SU{D}\B{H} =& \LS{\Ik{k^2} + \B{K}_{k,k}}\LS{\Ik{k}\otimes {\B{E}}^{\top}}\SU{D}\B{E},
\end{align}
where $\otimes$ denotes the Kronecker product.
$\B{K}_{D, k}$ is a $Dk\times Dk$ matrix $\B{K}_{D, k} = \sum_{i=1}^{m} \sum_{j=1}^{n}\LS{\B{L}_{i, j} \otimes \B{L}_{i, j}^{\top}}$ referred to as the commutation matrix, which denotes the transposition operation of $D\times k$.
Further, $\B{L}_{i, j}$ is a $D\times k$ matrix whose $\LS{i,j}$ component is 1 whereas all other components are 0.
\end{proof}
For details on the formulae for matrix derivatives used in this proof, please refer to \cite{magnus2019matrixDifferencial}.
$p_{\operatorname{Gr}\left(k,D\right)}\LS{\GX} = p_{\operatorname{Gr}\left(k,D\right)}\LS{\GX; \G{\B{M}}, \B{U}, \B{V}}$ is a probability distribution following mean $\G{\B{M}}$ and matrix variance $\B{U}, \B{V}$.
Using $\Gra{1}{3}$ as an example, we qualitatively confirmed through visualization that $p_{\Grasmall{1}{3}}\LS{\GX}$ is density on $\Gra{1}{3}$.
$\Gra{1}{3}$ is a 1-dimensional subspace on a 3-dimensional space; that is, a space whose elements are lines passing through the origin in 3-dimensional space.
For the visualization, we expressed $\Gra{1}{3}$ by mapping a 1-dimensional subspace to two points on the sphere (one point on the sphere and its antipodal point), using a sphere of radius 1 centered at the origin.
Figure~\ref{fig:gr_gauss_distribution} shows the density of $p_{\Grasmall{1}{3}}\LS{\GX}$ with $\B{M} = \LS{1.0, 0.0, 0.0}^{\top}, \B{U} = \sigma^2\Ik{3}, \B{V} = \Ik{1}, \sigma = 0.5$.
Each sphere in the figure indicates $\Gra{1}{3}$, with brighter spheres representing higher densities and conversely, darker spheres representing lower densities.
The leftmost figure shows $\B{M}$ as viewed from the front diagonally above, and the other figures present the views when the viewpoint is rotated clockwise around the $z$-axis by $30^\circ$ to $150^\circ$ with movement to the right.
The leftmost figure shows that the density is highly spread around $\B{M}$.
Further, the other figures (particularly the rightmost one) show that the antipodal point ($-\B{M} = \LS{-1.0, 0.0, 0.0}^{\top}$) is also densely spread out.
This implies that by specifying only one $\B{M}$ as the representative of the equivalence class $\G{\B{M}}$, the density around the other elements in the equivalence class $\G{\B{M}}$ is as high as that around the representative.
Thus, based on the above, we can confirm that $p_{\operatorname{Gr}\left(k,D\right)}\LS{\GX}$ has a density of $\Gra{1}{3}$.
\begin{figure}[t]
\centering
\includegraphics[width=1\textwidth]{figures/exp/gr_gauss_distribution.png}
\caption{$p_{\Grasmall{1}{3}}\LS{\GX}$ with $\B{M} = \LS{1.0, 0.0, 0.0}^{\top}, \B{U} = \sigma^2\Ik{3}, \B{V} = \Ik{1}, \sigma = 0.5$.
Each sphere in the figure indicates $\Gra{1}{3}$, with brighter spheres representing higher densities and conversely, darker spheres representing lower densities.}
\label{fig:gr_gauss_distribution}
\end{figure}
\clearpage
\section{Experimental Details for Learning GrCNF}
\label{sec:experimental_details_for_learning}
\subsection{ODE Solver with Orthogonal Integration}
\label{subsec:ode_solver_orthogonal_integration}
We provide an ordinary differential equation (ODE) solver on $\operatorname{Gr}\!\left(k,D\right)$.
There are many studies of ODE solvers that work on a manifold $\C{M}$ (\cite{MuntheKaas1999RungeKuttaManifold,iserles2000LieGroupMethods,hairer2006Geometric}).
\cite{hairer2006Geometric} proposed the simple projection method that projects onto the manifold at each step and the symmetric projection method suitable for long-time integration.
However, these require that $\C{M}$ is a submanifold in Euclidean space, it cannot be applied on $\operatorname{Gr}\!\left(k,D\right)$.
On the other hand, \cite{Celledoni2002StODE} introduce an intrinsic ODE solver that works on a Stiefel manifold and does not assume an outer Euclidean space.
The solver in \cite{Celledoni2002StODE} works on a Stiefel manifold, thus we need to reformulate it into a solver that works on $\operatorname{Gr}\!\left(k,D\right)$, which is our problem setting.
We introduce below a solver on $\operatorname{Gr}\!\left(k,D\right)$ via ODE operating on the horizontal space $T^{\mathrm{h}}_{\Y}\St$, based on results from \cite{Celledoni2002StODE} and Section~\ref{sec:main_propositions_for_grassmann_flow}.
This approach is intrinsic in the sense that it does not depend on whether M has been embedded in a bigger space with a corresponding extension of the vector field F.
To begin with, let us consider an ODE given by means of a vector field $\SU{X}_{\theta}$ on a curve $\gamma\LS{t} : [0, \infty) \rightarrow \operatorname{St}\!\left(k,D\right)$ such that for each time $t$.
\begin{equation}
\label{eq:ode_on_gr}
\frac{d \gamma\LS{t}}{d t} = \SU{X}_{\theta}\LS{t, \gamma\LS{t}}, \quad \gamma\LS{0}=\B{Y},
\end{equation}
where $\SU{X}_{\theta}$ is constructed by a neural network with parameter $\theta$, as described in Section~\ref{subsec:details_of_vector_field}.
Horizontal retraction $\overline{R}_{\B{Y}}$ which is defined as (\ref{eq:retraction_on_grassmann_manifold_with_horizontal_ratraction_economy1_fixed_time}) and is described in Appendix~\ref{sec:retraction}, serves to define local coordinates of $\operatorname{Gr}\!\left(k,D\right)$ in a neighborhood of the point $\GY$.
We can thus represent the solution of ODE in the form:
\begin{equation}
\label{eq:solution_ODE}
\gamma\LS{t} = \overline{R}_{\B{Y}}\LS{\epsilon\LS{t}},
\end{equation}
where $\epsilon : [0, \infty) \rightarrow T^{\mathrm{h}}_{\Y}\St$ is the curve on $T^{\mathrm{h}}_{\Y}\St$.
By differentiating (\ref{eq:solution_ODE}) with $t$, we obtain the following equation:
\begin{align}
\frac{d \gamma\LS{t}}{d t} = \frac{d}{d t}{\overline{R}_{\B{Y}}\LS{\epsilon\LS{t}}} = \SU{X}_{\theta}\LS{t, \gamma\LS{t}}.
\end{align}
Therefore, the ODE defined on $T^{\mathrm{h}}_{\Y}\St$ is obtained:
\begin{align}
\label{eq:ode_on_hor}
\frac{d \U{Vec}\LS{\epsilon\LS{t}}}{d t} = \LS{\frac{d \overline{R}_{\B{Y}}}{d \epsilon}}^{-1}\U{Vec}\LS{\SU{X}_{\theta}\LS{t, \overline{R}_{\B{Y}}\LS{\epsilon\LS{t}}}},
\end{align}
where $\nicefrac{d \overline{R}_{\B{Y}}}{d \epsilon}$ can be calculated using (\ref{eq:derivative_retraction}) and $\U{Vec}$ denotes the map of vertically concatenating matrices and converting them into a single vector.
Because (\ref{eq:ode_on_hor}) is an ODE on $T^{\mathrm{h}}_{\Y}\St\cong\mathbb{R}^{\LS{D-k}\times k}$ from (\cite{AbsMahSep2008}), it can be solved using an ODE solver such as Runge-Kutta that operates on Euclidean space.
In this paper, we use the Algorithm~5.1 in \cite{Celledoni2002StODE}, and in each step, we first solve (\ref{eq:ode_on_hor}) using the Runge-Kutta of order 5 of Dormand-Prince-Shampine (\cite{dormand1980_RungeKutta_family}), and then we obtain the solution of ODE (\ref{eq:ode_on_gr}) by applying the solution $\epsilon$ to (\ref{eq:solution_ODE}).
\subsection{Loss Functions}
\subsubsection{Loss Function for GrCNF}
\label{subsec:loss_function_for_grflow}
The total change in log-likelihood using GrCNF can be calculated using the following equation.
\begin{equation}
\label{eq:grassmann_target_density_with_prior_integration}
\log p_{\theta}\LS{\B{Y}\LS{t_1}} = \log p_{\operatorname{Gr}\left(k,D\right)}\LS{{F^{-1}_{\SU{X},t_1}}_{\theta}\LS{\B{Y}\LS{t_1}}} - \int_{t_0}^{t_1}{\nabla\cdot \SU{X}_{\theta}\LS{t, \B{Y}\LS{t}}}d{t}.
\end{equation}
In this study, we defined the loss function $\operatorname{Loss}$ for maximizing the log-likelihood as follows:
\begin{equation}
\label{eq:gr_loss}
\operatorname{Loss} = \operatorname{NLL} = -\log p_{\theta}\LS{\B{Y}\LS{t_1}},
\end{equation}
where $\operatorname{NLL}$ denotes negative log-likelihood.
\subsubsection{Loss Function based on Variational Inference}
\label{subsec:loss_function_for_grflow_vi}
In the setting in Section~\ref{subsec:ex_qm9}, we used orthonormalized data $\B{Y}$ as in $\B{P}\B{P}^\top\simeq\B{Y}\BS{\Lambda}\B{Y}^{\top}, \;\text{s.t.}\; \BS{\Lambda}$ is diagonal (\cite{Huang15PML}), such that the $k$-dimensional point cloud data $\B{P}$ of $N$ points $N\times k$ matrix is a matrix with $k$ orthonormal basis vectors.
Thus, generating a complete point cloud requires the estimation of the scale parameters $\sqrt{\BS{\Lambda}}$ to be $\B{P} = \B{Y}\sqrt{\BS{\Lambda}}$ and a loss function that incorporates this.
In this study, we approximated by maximizing the evidence lower bound (ELBO), which is the lower bound of the overall log-likelihood $\log{p_{\psi}\!\LS{\B{P}}}$ of $p_{\psi}\!\LS{\B{P}}$, using a variational inference framework.
The loss function is the variational energy $-\operatorname{ELBO}\LS{\B{P}}$ with negative ELBO.
\begin{equation}
\label{eq:gr_vi_loss}
\operatorname{NLL} = -\log{p_{\psi}\!\LS{\B{P}}} \leq -\operatorname{ELBO}\LS{\B{P}} = \operatorname{Loss}.
\end{equation}
$\operatorname{ELBO}\LS{\B{P}}$ can be decomposed as follows.
\begin{align}
\operatorname{ELBO}\LS{\B{P}}
&= \log{p_{\psi}\!\LS{\B{P}}} - D_{KL}\left(q_{\phi}\!\left(\B{Y} \!\;\middle|\;\!\B{P}\right) \middle|\middle| p_{\psi}\!\left(\B{Y}\!\;\middle|\;\!\B{P}\right)\right)\\
&= \BB{E}_{q_{\phi}\!\left(\B{Y} \!\;\middle|\;\!\B{P}\right)}\LL{\log{p_{\psi}\!\left(\B{P}\!\;\middle|\;\!\B{Y}\right)}} - D_{KL}\left(q_{\phi}\!\left(\B{Y} \!\;\middle|\;\!\B{P}\right) \middle|\middle| p_{\theta}\!\left(\B{Y}\right)\right),
\end{align}
where $q_{\phi}\!\left(\B{Y} \!\;\middle|\;\!\B{P}\right)$ is the inference model with parameter $\phi$, $p_{\psi}\!\left(\B{P}\!\;\middle|\;\!\B{Y}\right)$ is the decoder model with parameter $\psi$, $p_{\psi}\!\left(\B{Y}\!\;\middle|\;\!\B{P}\right)$ is the posterior distribution with parameter $\psi$, and $p_{\theta}\!\left(\B{Y}\right)$ is the prior distribution with parameter $\theta$.
Further, $D_{KL}\left(q_{\phi}\!\left(\B{Y} \!\;\middle|\;\!\B{P}\right) \middle|\middle| p_{\theta}\!\left(\B{Y}\right)\right)$ can be formulated using differential entropy as follows.
\begin{align}
D_{KL}\left(q_{\phi}\!\left(\B{Y} \!\;\middle|\;\!\B{P}\right) \middle|\middle| p_{\theta}\!\left(\B{Y}\right)\right) = -\BB{E}_{q_{\phi}\!\left(\B{Y} \!\;\middle|\;\!\B{P}\right)}\LL{p_{\theta}\!\left(\B{Y}\right)} - H\LL{q_{\phi}\!\left(\B{Y} \!\;\middle|\;\!\B{P}\right)}.
\end{align}
Thus, the final loss function is as follows.
\begin{align}
\operatorname{Loss} &= -\operatorname{ELBO}\LS{\B{P}} \\
&= -\BB{E}_{q_{\phi}\!\left(\B{Y} \!\;\middle|\;\!\B{P}\right)}\LL{\log{p_{\psi}\!\left(\B{P}\!\;\middle|\;\!\B{Y}\right)}} -\BB{E}_{q_{\phi}\!\left(\B{Y} \!\;\middle|\;\!\B{P}\right)}\LL{p_{\theta}\!\left(\B{Y}\right)} - H\LL{q_{\phi}\!\left(\B{Y} \!\;\middle|\;\!\B{P}\right)}.
\end{align}
Each term of the loss function can be calculated as follows.
\paragraph{Expectation of log-likelihood}
$\BB{E}_{q_{\phi}\!\left(\B{Y} \!\;\middle|\;\!\B{P}\right)}\LL{\log{p_{\psi}\!\left(\B{P}\!\;\middle|\;\!\B{Y}\right)}}$ is the reconstruction log-likelihood of $\B{P}$.
The expectation is estimated by Monte Carlo sampling.
\paragraph{Differential entropy}
In the decomposition of a point cloud $\B{P}$, there exists arbitrariness in the choice of $\B{Y}$ and $\BS{\Lambda}$, as in $\B{P}\B{P}^\top \simeq \B{Y}\BS{\Lambda}\B{Y}^{\top}$.
In this study, we assumed that the diagonal components of $\BS{\Lambda}$ are in descending order, and we restricted the decomposition arbitrariness to be an action $\B{Q}\in\C{O}\!\LS{k}$.
If we suppose that the action $\B{Q}$ follows a uniform distribution when $\B{Y}=\B{X}\B{Q}$ holds, then $\B{Y}$ also follows a uniform distribution in the $k$-dimensional subspace $\Span{\B{Y}}$.
Although this is a uniform distribution on $\Sti{k}{k}$, we can consider a uniform distribution on $\C{O}\!\LS{k}$ because $\Sti{k}{k}=\C{O}\!\LS{k}$.
The probability density function of $\B{Q}$ is represented by $U_{\C{O}\LS{k}}\LS{\B{Q}}$ in (\ref{eq:uniform_pdf_of_orthogonal_group}).
Therefore, the differential entropy of the decoder model can be calculated as follows.
\begin{align}
H\LL{q_{\phi}\!\left(\B{Y} \!\;\middle|\;\!\B{P}\right)} &= \BB{E}\LL{-\log{q_{\phi}\!\left(\B{Y} \!\;\middle|\;\!\B{P}\right)}}\\
&= -\int_{\C{O}\LS{k}}{U_{\C{O}\LS{k}}\LS{\B{Q}}\log{U_{\C{O}\LS{k}}\LS{\B{Q}}}{\dH{d \B{Q}}}}\\
&= -\int_{\C{O}\LS{k}}{\frac{1}{V_{\C{O}\LS{k}}}\log{\frac{1}{V_{\C{O}\LS{k}}}}{\dH{d \B{Q}}}}\\
&= \frac{\log{V_{\C{O}\LS{k}}}}{V_{\C{O}\LS{k}}}\int_{\C{O}\LS{k}}{\dH{d \B{Q}}}\\
&= \frac{\log{V_{\C{O}\LS{k}}}}{V_{\C{O}\LS{k}}}.
\end{align}
\paragraph{Expectation of prior distribution}
We used (\ref{eq:grassmann_target_density_with_prior_integration}) for the prior distribution $p_{\theta}\!\left(\B{Y}\right)$.
Further, re-parameterization was used to enable differentiable Monte Carlo estimation of expectations.
\begin{equation}
\BB{E}_{q_{\phi}\!\left(\B{Y} \!\;\middle|\;\!\B{P}\right)}\LL{p_{\theta}\!\left(\B{Y}\right)} = \frac{1}{L}\sum_{l=1}^{L}{p_{\theta}\!\left(\B{X}\B{Q}_l\right)} \;\text{s.t.}\; \B{X}\sim\B{Y}, \;\B{Q}_l\in\C{O}\!\LS{k},
\end{equation}
where it was assumed that $\B{Q}$ is sampled from a uniform distribution, which follows Haar measure on $\C{O}\!\LS{k}$.
$L$ is set $L=1$.
\subsection{Implementation Details and Experimental setting}
\label{subsec:implementation_details}
The following sections present more details about the network architectures, training hyperparameters, and experimental conditions for each of the experiments in Section~\ref{sec:experiments}.
\subsubsection{Artificial Textures}
\label{subsec:Details_of_Imp_2DToy}
\paragraph{Network Architecture}
The vector field was constructed with the specific input, intermediate, and output layers described in Section~\ref{subsec:details_of_vector_field}.
The GrCNF architecture is shown on top in Table~\ref{tab:ex_arch_Toy_2D_Data}.
Layers are denoted as Layer in the table, and were processed from top to bottom.
Norm. and Act. denote the normalization and activation functions to be applied immediately after the Layer, and the Norm. and Act. were applied in that order.
Further, Out Size denotes the output size after Act.
$\U{Vec}$ denotes the map of vertically concatenating matrices and converting them into a single vector.
Moreover, only row $\U{Input}$ denotes the size of the input data, not the input layer ($\U{HorP}$).
(\ref{eq:gr_loss}) was used for the loss function.
\paragraph{Hyper-parameters}
The mean $\B{M}$ and covariances $\B{U}$ and $\B{V}$ in the prior distribution on the Grassmann manifold were set to $\B{M} = \LS{1.0, 0.0, 0.0}^{\top}$, $\B{U} = \sigma^2\Ik{3}$, and $\B{V} = \Ik{1}$, $\sigma = 0.3$, respectively.
Other hyperparameters used during the training of GrCNF are shown in Table~\ref{table:hyperparams}.
\input{figures/exp/toy_experiment_arch}
\input{figures/exp/experiment_hyperparams}
\paragraph{Implementation}
\label{subsec:implementation_toy_2d_data}
We used PyTorch (\cite{Paszke2019_pytorch}) to implement the model and run the experiments.
The CNF is based on the implementation\footnote{We used the authors' implementation: \url{https://github.com/rtqichen/torchdiffeq.git}.} in \cite{chen2018_ODE} and the framework of the RCNF \cite{Emile2020_Riemannian_continuous_normalizing_flows}.
Thus, the ODE was solved using the explicit and adaptive Runge--Kutta method (\cite{dormand1980_RungeKutta_family}) of order 5, and worked by projecting each step onto a manifold (\cite{hairer2006Geometric}).
The $\U{autograd}$ in (\ref{eq:HorL_layer}) was calculated with $\U{torch.autograd.grad}$ (\cite{Paszke2019_autodiff_pytorch}) in PyTorch.
The experimental hardware was built with an Intel Core i7-9700 CPU and a single NVIDIA GTX 1060 GPU with 6 GB of RAM.
The code used in the experiment to generate the data distributions on $\Gra{1}{3}$ is shown in Listing~\ref{program1}.
This implementation of the data distributions is based on the codes in \cite{kim2020_softflow} and \cite{grathwohl2018_FFJORD}\footnote{We used the authors' implementations: \url{https://github.com/ANLGBOY/SoftFlow.git} and \url{https://github.com/rtqichen/ffjord.git}.}.
\input{figures/exp/syn/code_data_distributions}
\subsubsection{DW4 and LJ13}
\label{subsec:Details_of_Imp_DW4_LJ13}
\paragraph{Network Architecture}
As in Appendix~\ref{subsec:Details_of_Imp_2DToy}, the vector field was constructed with the specific input, intermediate, and output layers described in Section~\ref{subsec:details_of_vector_field}.
The GrCNF architecture is shown on the bottom left and right in Table~\ref{tab:ex_arch_Toy_2D_Data}.
The bottom left and right were used for experiments on the DW4 and LJ13 datasets, respectively.
The views presented in the table is the same as in Appendix~\ref{subsec:Details_of_Imp_2DToy}.
(\ref{eq:gr_loss}) was used for the loss function.
In addition, for architectures in methods other than GrCNF, please refer to \cite{Garcia21EnNF}.
\paragraph{Hyperparameters}
The mean $\B{M}$ and covariances $\B{U}$ and $\B{V}$ in the prior distribution on the Grassmann manifold were set to $\B{M} = \IDxk{4}{2}$, $\B{U} = \sigma^2\Ik{4}$, and $\B{V} = \sigma^2\Ik{2}$, $\sigma = 0.3$ for DW4 and $\B{M} = \IDxk{13}{3}$, $\B{U} = \sigma^2\Ik{13}$, and $\B{V} = \sigma^2\Ik{3}$, $\sigma = 0.3$ for LJ13, respectively.
Other hyperparameters used during the training of GrCNF are shown in Table~\ref{table:hyperparams}.
In addition, for the hyperparameters in methods other than GrCNF, please refer to \cite{Garcia21EnNF}.
\paragraph{Implementation}
\label{subsec:implementation_DW4_LJ13}
The experimental hardware was built using a single NVIDIA Quadro RTX 8000 GPU with 48 GB of GDDR6 RAM.
The other environments were the same as in Appendix~\ref{subsec:Details_of_Imp_2DToy}.
\paragraph{Full results}
In Tables~\ref{table:dw4_results_with_std} and \ref{table:lj13_results_with_std}, the same DW4 and LJ13 averaged results from Section~\ref{subsec:ex_dw4_lj13} were reported; however, they included
the standard deviations over the three runs.
\subsubsection{QM9 Positional}
\label{subsec:Details_of_Imp_QM9_Positional}
\paragraph{Network Architecture}
On the QM9 Positional, we addressed the task of generating the molecular $\B{P}$ by estimating the scale parameter $\sqrt{\boldsymbol{\Lambda}} = \operatorname{diag}\LS{\LM{\sqrt{\lambda_i}}_{i=1}^{3}}$, in addition to the generation of the orthonormal basis matrix $\B{Y}$ with GrCNF.
Because the molecular generation task requires a specialized loss function based on variational inference, we used (\ref{eq:gr_vi_loss}), as explained in Appendix~\ref{subsec:loss_function_for_grflow_vi}.
We designed two networks to achieve this.
The first is the same GrCNF architecture as in previous experiments, and the second is a scale estimator.
Table~\ref{tab:ex_arch_qm9_Data} shows the architectures.
The left side of the table shows the GrCNF architecture and the right side shows the scale estimator.
The scale estimator estimated one scale parameter from each of the three orthonormal basis vectors $\B{Y}=\LM{\B{y}_i\in\mathbb{R}^{19}}_{i=1}^3$, for a total of three parameters $\LM{\sqrt{\lambda_i}\in\mathbb{R}}_{i=1}^{3}$.
With the orthonormal orthogonal basis matrix $\B{Y}$ and the estimated scale parameter $\sqrt{\boldsymbol{\Lambda}}$, we generated a point cloud $\B{P} = \B{Y}\sqrt{\boldsymbol{\Lambda}}$.
In this study, the overall architecture that generates $\B{P}$ is also named GrCNF.
\paragraph{Hyperparameters}
The mean $\B{M}$ and covariances $\B{U}$ and $\B{V}$ in the prior distribution on the Grassmann manifold were set to $\B{M} = \IDxk{19}{3}$, $\B{U} = \sigma^2\Ik{19}$, and $\B{V} = \sigma^2\Ik{3}$, $\sigma = 0.3$, respectively.
In addition, for the hyperparameters in methods other than GrCNF, please refer to \cite{Garcia21EnNF}.
\paragraph{Implementation}
\label{subsec:implementation_QM9_Positional}
The experimental hardware was built using a single NVIDIA A100 GPU with 80GB PCIe of GDDR6 RAM.
\input{figures/exp/dw4_lj13/dw_lj_supp}
\input{figures/exp/qm9/qm9_arch}
\clearpage
\section{Fundamentals of Concepts Associated with Grassmann Manifold}
\label{sec:fundamental_of_grassmann_manifold}
\subsection{Definition of Stiefel Manifold}
\begin{definition}
An (orthogonal or compact)
Stiefel manifold $\operatorname{St}\!\left(k,D\right)$ is defined as the set of orthonormal bases of $k$-dimensional subspaces in the Euclidean space $\mathbb{R}^{D}$ as in (\ref{eq:stiefel_manifold}).
\begin{equation}
\label{eq:stiefel_manifold}
\operatorname{St}\!\left(k,D\right):=\left\{\B{Y} \in \mathbb{R}^{D \times k} \;\middle|\; \B{Y}^{\top} \B{Y}=\B{I}_{k}\right\}.
\end{equation}
\end{definition}
For $\B{Y}\in\operatorname{St}\!\left(k,D\right)$, the space $\Span{\B{Y}}$ spanned by its column vectors is the element of $\operatorname{Gr}\!\left(k,D\right)$.
\begin{equation}
f: \operatorname{St}\!\left(k,D\right) \rightarrow \operatorname{Gr}\!\left(k,D\right) : \B{Y} \mapsto \Span{\B{Y}}.
\end{equation}
$\operatorname{St}\!\left(k,D\right)$ is a $Dk-\frac{k\LS{k+1}}{2}$-dimensional compact manifold (\cite{AbsMahSep2008}).
\subsection{Equivalence Relation}
\label{subsec:equivalence_relation}
To define the equivalence relation $\sim$
\footnote{
Reflexive, symmetric and transitive binary relations.
As a consequence of these properties, in a given set, one equivalence relation divides (classifies) the set into equivalence classes.
Note that $R$ is a binary relation in the set $X$ if for any $x, y \in X $, only either $x$ is related to $y$ by the relation $R$, or $x$ is not related to $y$ based on the relation that $R$ occurs.
We write $x$ is related to $y$ by relation $R$" as $xRy$.
}
on a Stiefel manifold $\operatorname{St}\!\left(k,D\right)$, we introduce the following two lemmas.
\begin{lemma}\label{lemma:douchi}
The necessary and sufficient conditions for $\Span{\B{Y}_{1}}=\Span{\B{Y}_{2}}$ to hold for $\B{Y}_{1}, \B{Y}_{2} \in \operatorname{St}\!\left(k,D\right)$ are as follows.
\begin{equation}
\label{eq:douchi}
^{\exists}\B{Q} \in \C{O}\!\LS{k} \;\text{s.t.}\; \B{Y}_2=\B{Y}_1 \B{Q}.
\end{equation}
\end{lemma}
\begin{proof}
$\Span{\B{Y}_{1}}=\Span{\B{Y}_{2}} \Leftarrow \B{Y}_2=\B{Y}_1 \B{Q}$.
From the definition, $\B{Y}_{1}^{\top} \B{Y}_{1}=\B{Y}_{2}^{\top} \B{Y}_{2}=\B{I}_{k}$, the following is obtained:
\begin{equation}
\B{I}_{k}=\B{Y}_{1}^{\top} \B{Y}_{1}=\B{Q}^{\top} \B{Y}_{2}^{\top} \B{Y}_{2} \B{Q}=\B{Q}^{\top} \B{Q}.
\end{equation}
Thus, there exists a $k$-dimensional orthogonal matrix $\B{Q} \in \C{O}\!\LS{k}$.
As the subspace $\Span{\B{Y}}$ is invariant to coordinate transformations by orthogonal matrices, $\Span{\B{Y}_{1}}=\Span{\B{Y}_{2}}$ is true.
$\Span{\B{Y}_{1}}=\Span{\B{Y}_{2}} \Rightarrow \B{Y}_2=\B{Y}_1 \B{Q}$.
From the assumption, we immediately concluded that $\B{Y}_{2}=\B{Y}_{1} \B{Q}$ for $\B{Q} \in \C{O}\!\LS{k}$.
\end{proof}
\begin{lemma}
We define the equivalence relation $\sim$ on $\operatorname{St}\!\left(k,D\right)$ to be $\B{Y}_{1} \sim \B{Y}_{2}$ whenever (\ref{eq:douchi}) is satisfied with respect to $\B{Y}_{1}, \B{Y}_{2} \in \operatorname{St}\!\left(k,D\right)$.
The fact that a binary relation is an equivalence relation $\sim$ implies that the following three statements hold for $^\forall \B{Y}_{1}, \B{Y}_{2}, \B{Y}_{3} \in \operatorname{St}\!\left(k,D\right)$.
\begin{description}
\item[Reflexivity] $\B{Y}_{1} \sim \B{Y}_{1}$.
\item[Symmetry] $\B{Y}_{1} \sim \B{Y}_{2}\Rightarrow\B{Y}_{2} \sim \B{Y}_{1}$.
\item[Transitivity] $\B{Y}_{1} \sim \B{Y}_{2} \land \B{Y}_{2} \sim \B{Y}_{3} \Rightarrow \B{Y}_{1} \sim \B{Y}_{3}$.
\end{description}
\end{lemma}
\begin{proof}
With Lemma \ref{lemma:douchi}, we can confirm that it is valid as follows:
\textbf{Reflexivity}
From $\B{Y}_1=\B{Y}_1 \B{I}, \;\B{I}\in \C{O}$, we obtain $\B{Y}_1 \sim \B{Y}_1$.
\textbf{Symmetry}
As $\B{Y}_{2}=\B{Y}_{1} \B{Q}$ is obtained from $\B{Y}_{1} \sim \B{Y}_{2}$, and $\B{Y}_{2}\B{Q}^{\top}=\B{Y}_{1}, \;\B{Q}^{\top}\in\C{O}$ is true, then $\B{Y}_{2} \sim \B{Y}_{1}$ is obtained.
\textbf{Transitivity}
$\B{Y}_{3}=\B{Y}_{1}\B{Q}_1\B{Q}_2$ with $\B{Y}_{2}=\B{Y}_{1}\B{Q}_1$ and $\B{Y}_{3}=\B{Y}_{2}\B{Q}_2$.
$\B{Q}_1\B{Q}_2$ is $\LS{\B{Q}_1\B{Q}_2}^{\top}\LS{\B{Q}_1\B{Q}_2} = \B{Q}_2^{\top}\B{Q}_1^{\top}\B{Q}_1\B{Q}_2 = \B{Q}_2^{\top}\B{Q}_2 = \B{I}$.
Moreover, as $\LS{\B{Q}_1\B{Q}_2}\LS{\B{Q}_1\B{Q}_2}^{\top} = \B{Q}_1\B{Q}_2\B{Q}_2^{\top}\B{Q}_1^{\top} = \B{I}$ holds, $\B{Q}_1\B{Q}_2 \in \C{O}$ is true.
Therefore, we concluded $\B{Y}_{1} \sim \B{Y}_{3}$.
\end{proof}
The equivalence class of $\B{Y}\in\operatorname{St}\!\left(k,D\right)$ is denoted by $\GY$.
In other words, $\GY$ is the set of all elements of $\operatorname{St}\!\left(k,D\right)$ that are equivalent to $\B{Y}$, and the equivalence relation on $\operatorname{St}\!\left(k,D\right)$ divides $\operatorname{St}\!\left(k,D\right)$ into equivalence classes with no intersection.
Thus, $\B{Y}$ is then referred to as the representative of the equivalence class $\GY$.
The set of equivalence classes is denoted $\St\!/\!\!\sim$ and is referred to as the quotient of $\operatorname{St}\!\left(k,D\right)$ by the equivalence relation $\sim$.
In addition, $\pi:\to\operatorname{St}\!\left(k,D\right)\to\St\!/\!\!\sim$ is the natural projection that maps $\B{Y}\in\operatorname{St}\!\left(k,D\right)$ onto its equivalence class $\GY$.
This projection $\pi$ is surjection.
\subsection{Quotient Manifold}
\label{subsec:quotient_manifol}
\begin{definition}
Let $\overline{\C{M}}$ be a manifold with equivalence relation $\sim$.
The quotient space $\quo{\overline{\C{M}}}$ with $\sim$ of $\overline{\C{M}}$ is the set of all equivalence classes.
Thus, $\quo{\overline{\C{M}}} := \{\pi\LS{\overline{\B{x}}} \mid \overline{\B{x}} \in \overline{\C{M}}\}$, where $\pi: \overline{\C{M}} \rightarrow \quo{\overline{\C{M}}}$ is the natural projection and $\pi\LS{\overline{\B{x}}}:=\LM{\overline{\B{y}} \in \overline{\C{M}} \mid \overline{\B{y}} \sim \overline{\B{x}}}$.
Then, $\overline{\C{M}}$ is referred to as the total space or the total manifold.
Moreover, $\quo{\overline{\C{M}}}$ is referred to as a quotient manifold of $\overline{\C{M}}$ if $\quo{\overline{\C{M}}}$ admits a differentiable structure.
\end{definition}
Let $\C{M} = \quo{\overline{\C{M}}}$ be a quotient manifold.
Further, suppose that $\overline{\C{M}}$ is endowed with a Riemann metric $\overline{g}$, and let $\B{x}=\pi\LS{\B{x}}$.
The horizontal space $\HOR{\overline{\B{x}}}{\overline{\C{M}}}$ is the orthogonal complement of the vertical space $\VER{\overline{\B{x}}}{\overline{\C{M}}} := \T{\overline{\B{x}}}{\pi^{-1}\LS{\B{x}}}$ in the tangent space $\T{\overline{\B{x}}}{\overline{\C{M}}}$ and is defined as the follows:
\begin{equation}
\HOR{\overline{\B{x}}}{\overline{\C{M}}} := \LS{\VER{\overline{\B{x}}}{\overline{\C{M}}}}^{\perp} = \left\{\overline{\BS{\eta}}_{\overline{\B{x}}}\in \T{\overline{\B{x}}}{\overline{\C{M}}} \;\middle|\; \overline{g}_{\overline{\B{x}}}\LS{\overline{\BS{\xi}}_{\overline{\B{x}}},\overline{\BS{\eta}}_{\overline{\B{x}}}}=0, ^{\forall}\overline{\BS{\xi}}_{\overline{\B{x}}}\in \VER{\overline{\B{x}}}{\overline{\C{M}}}\right\}.
\end{equation}
The horizontal lift $\overline{\BS{\xi}}^{\mathrm{h}}_{\overline{\B{x}}}\in\HOR{\overline{\B{x}}}{\overline{\C{M}}}$ of the tangent vector $\BS{\xi}_{\B{x}}\in\T{\B{x}}{\C{M}}$ at point $\overline{\B{x}}\in\pi^{-1}\LS{\B{x}}$ is a tangent vector that is uniquely determined as $d\pi_{\overline{\B{x}}}\LS{\overline{\BS{\xi}}^{\mathrm{h}}_{\overline{\B{x}}}} = \BS{\xi}_{\B{x}}$ (\cite{AbsMahSep2008}).
\subsection{Grassmann Manifold Exploiting the Quotient Structure}
\label{subsec:tangent_space_on_grassmann_manifold}
\subsubsection{Tangent Space on $\operatorname{St}\!\left(k,D\right)$}
We describe the relationship between tangent space $\T{\GY}{\operatorname{Gr}\!\left(k,D\right)}$ on $\operatorname{Gr}\!\left(k,D\right)$ and tangent space $\T{\B{Y}}{\operatorname{St}\!\left(k,D\right)}$ on $\operatorname{St}\!\left(k,D\right)$ to relate the tangent vectors of a Grassmann manifold $\operatorname{Gr}\!\left(k,D\right)$ to the tangent vectors of a Stiefel manifold $\operatorname{St}\!\left(k,D\right)$ in a matrix representation.
We take the derivative on both sides of $\B{Y}\LS{t}^{\top}\B{Y}\LS{t}=\B{I}_p$ in (\ref{eq:stiefel_manifold}) by $t$ and solve for $t=0$.
\begin{align}
\frac{d}{d t}\LM{\B{Y}\LS{t}^{\top}\B{Y}\LS{t}}&=\frac{d}{d t}\B{I}_p\\
\frac{d}{d t}\B{Y}\LS{t}^{\top}\B{Y}\LS{t} + \B{Y}\LS{t}^{\top}\frac{d}{d t}\B{Y}\LS{t} &= 0\\
\frac{d}{d t}\B{Y}\LS{0}^{\top}\B{Y}\LS{0} + \B{Y}\LS{0}^{\top}\frac{d}{d t}\B{Y}\LS{0} &= 0\\
\overline{\BS{\xi}}_{\B{Y}}^{\top}\B{Y} + \B{Y}^{\top}\overline{\BS{\xi}}_{\B{Y}} &= 0.
\end{align}
where $\overline{\BS{\xi}}_{\B{Y}}=\frac{d}{d t}\B{Y}\LS{0}$ is the tangent vector at $\B{Y}$
\footnote{
The tangent space is defined independently for each point of the manifold; hence, the subscript $\B{Y}$, as in $\overline{\BS{\xi}}_{\B{Y}}$, is clearly stated to emphasize that it is a tangent vector at $\B{Y}$.
}.
\begin{definition}
Define the tangent space $\T{\B{Y}}{\operatorname{St}\!\left(k,D\right)}$ at $\B{Y}$ on the Stiefel manifold as follows:
\begin{equation}
\T{\B{Y}}{\operatorname{St}\!\left(k,D\right)} = \left\{\overline{\BS{\xi}}_{\B{Y}}\in\mathbb{R}^{D\times k} \;\middle|\; \overline{\BS{\xi}}_{\B{Y}}^{\top}\B{Y}+\B{Y}^{\top}\overline{\BS{\xi}}_{\B{Y}}=\B{0}_{k}\right\}.
\end{equation}
\end{definition}
Let matrix $\B{Y}_{\perp}\in\mathbb{R}^{D\times\LS{D-k}}$ be a matrix satisfying the following:
\begin{equation}
\label{eq:complementary_matrix}
\B{Y}_{\perp}^{\top} \B{Y}_{\perp}=\Ik{D-k}, \quad \B{Y}^{\top} \B{Y}_{\perp}=0, \quad \B{Y}\Y^{\top}+\B{Y}_{\perp}\B{Y}_{\perp}^{\top}=\Ik{D}.
\end{equation}
As $\LL{\begin{array}{cc}\B{Y} & \B{Y}_{\perp}\end{array}}$ is an orthogonal matrix
\footnote{
$\LL{\begin{array}{cc}\B{Y} & \B{Y}_{\perp}\end{array}}^{-1}\LL{\begin{array}{cc}\B{Y} & \B{Y}_{\perp}\end{array}}=\LL{\begin{array}{cc}\B{Y} & \B{Y}_{\perp}\end{array}}^{\top}\LL{\begin{array}{cc}\B{Y} & \B{Y}_{\perp}\end{array}}=\LL{\begin{array}{cc}\B{Y} & \B{Y}_{\perp}\end{array}}\LL{\begin{array}{cc}\B{Y} & \B{Y}_{\perp}\end{array}}^{\top}=\B{I}_D$.
}
, the column vectors of $\B{Y}$ and $\B{Y}_{\perp}$ form an orthonormal basis in $\mathbb{R}^{D}$.
Thus, any $D\times k$ matrix can be written in terms of the $\B{C}\in\mathbb{R}^{k\times k}$ and $\B{B}\in\mathbb{R}^{\LS{D-k}\times k}$ coefficient matrices as follows:
\begin{equation}
\label{eq:Dxk_matrix_representation}
\B{Y}\B{C} + \B{Y}_{\perp}\B{B},
\end{equation}
where $\overline{\BS{\xi}}_{\B{Y}} = \B{Y}\B{C} + \B{Y}_{\perp}\B{B}$ is inserted. The following equation is obtained.
\begin{align}
\overline{\BS{\xi}}_{\B{Y}}^{\top}\B{Y}+\B{Y}^{\top}\overline{\BS{\xi}}_{\B{Y}} &= \LS{\B{Y}\B{C} + \B{Y}_{\perp}\B{B}}^{\top}\B{Y}+\B{Y}^{\top}\LS{\B{Y}\B{C} + \B{Y}_{\perp}\B{B}}\\
&=\B{B}^{\top}\B{Y}_{\perp}^{\top}\B{Y} + \B{C}^{\top}\B{Y}^{\top}\B{Y} + \B{Y}^{\top}\B{Y}\B{C} + \B{Y}^{\top}\B{Y}_{\perp}\B{B}\\
&= \B{B}^{\top}\B{Y}^{\top}\B{Y}_{\perp} + \B{C}^{\top} + \B{C}\\
&= \B{C}^{\top} + \B{C}\\
&=\B{0}_{k}.
\end{align}
Thus, the following equation is derived.
\begin{equation}
\B{C}^{\top} + \B{C} =\B{0}_{k}.
\end{equation}
Thus, $\B{C}$ is a $k\times k$ skew-symmetric matrix $\operatorname{Skew}\LS{k}$.
Therefore, we obtain the following as another representation of the tangent space on $\operatorname{St}\!\left(k,D\right)$.
\begin{equation}
\label{eq:tangent_space_on_stiefel_manifold}
\T{\B{Y}}{\operatorname{St}\!\left(k,D\right)} = \left\{\B{Y}\B{C} + \B{Y}_{\perp}\B{B} \;\middle|\; \B{C}\in\operatorname{Skew}\LS{k}, \B{B}\in\mathbb{R}^{\LS{D-k}\times k}\right\}.
\end{equation}
\subsubsection{Riemannian Metric on $\operatorname{St}\!\left(k,D\right)$}
In the tangent space $\T{\B{x}}{\C{M}}$ defined at each point $\B{x}\in\C{M}$ on the manifold $\C{M}$, the inner product $h$ is endowed as a bilinear map.
This $h$ is referred to as a Riemannian metric on a manifold, and the manifold $\C{M}$ on which the Riemannian metric $h$ is endowed is referred to as a Riemannian manifold $\LS{\C{M}, h}$.
We define the Riemannian metric $\overline{g}$ on $\operatorname{St}\!\left(k,D\right)$ as follows.
\begin{equation}
\label{eq:riemann_metric_on_stiefel_manifold}
\overline{g}_{\B{Y}}\LS{\overline{\BS{\xi}}_{\B{Y}}, \overline{\BS{\eta}}_{\B{Y}}}:=\operatorname{tr}\LS{\overline{\BS{\xi}}_{\B{Y}}^{\top} \overline{\BS{\eta}}_{\B{Y}}} \;\text{s.t.}\; \overline{\BS{\xi}}_{\B{Y}}, \overline{\BS{\eta}}_{\B{Y}} \in \T{\B{Y}}{\operatorname{St}\!\left(k,D\right)}, \; \B{Y} \in \operatorname{St}\!\left(k,D\right).
\end{equation}
This is the standard inner product of $\mathbb{R}^{D \times k}$ induced by $\T{\B{Y}}{\operatorname{St}\!\left(k,D\right)}$, with $\T{\B{Y}}{\operatorname{St}\!\left(k,D\right)} \subset \mathbb{R}^{D \times k}$
\footnote{
The inner product $\B{A} \cdot \B{C}=\B{A}^{\top} \B{C}$ of a vector is typically referred to as the standard inner product.
Further, matrices are similarly defined with a standard inner product, defined as $\B{A} \cdot \B{C}=\operatorname{tr}\LS{\B{A}^{\top} \B{C}}$.
A space $\mathbb{R}^{D\times k}$ such that the $D\times k$ matrix $\B{A}$ is an element is referred to as a matrix space.
The standard basis of the matrix space can be constructed by a matrix wherein only one element in the matrix is 1 and the remaining are 0.
The matrix space is a linear space because it satisfies the linearity that is similar to that in case of a linear vector space.
}\footnote{
When $\C{N}$ is a submanifold of a Riemannian manifold $\LS{\C{M},g}$, we define the Riemannian metric $\overline{g}$ of $\C{N}$ to be: $$
\overline{g}_{\B{x}}\LS{\BS{\xi}, \BS{\eta}}:=g_{\B{x}}\LS{\BS{\xi}, \BS{\eta}}, \quad \B{x} \in \C{N} \subset \C{M}, \BS{\xi}, \BS{\eta} \in T_{\B{x}} \C{N} \subset T_{\B{x}} \C{M}.$$
$\overline{g}$ is an induced metric and $\LS{\C{N},\overline{g}}$ is a Riemannian submanifold of $\LS{\C{M},g}$.
As $\operatorname{St}\!\left(k,D\right)$ is a submanifold of $\mathbb{R}^{D \times k}$, we can define the standard inner product $\B{A} \cdot \B{C}=\operatorname{tr}\LS{\B{A}^{\top} \B{C}}$of $\mathbb{R}^{D \times k}$ as the induced metric $\overline{g}$.
Thus, $\operatorname{St}\!\left(k,D\right)$ is a Riemannian submanifold of $\mathbb{R}^{D \times k}$.
}.
\subsubsection{Tangent Space on $\operatorname{Gr}\!\left(k,D\right)$}
We describe the relation between tangent spaces $\T{\GY}{\operatorname{Gr}\!\left(k,D\right)}$ and $\T{\B{Y}}{\operatorname{St}\!\left(k,D\right)}$ to relate tangent vectors in tangent spaces $\T{\GY}{\operatorname{Gr}\!\left(k,D\right)}$ on $\operatorname{Gr}\!\left(k,D\right)$ to tangent vectors $\overline{\BS{\xi}}_{\B{Y}}\in\TSt{\B{Y}}$.
First, we define the vertical space $T^{\mathrm{v}}_{\Y}\St$ as a subspace of $\T{\B{Y}}{\operatorname{St}\!\left(k,D\right)}$ as follows.
\begin{equation}
\label{eq:vertical_space0}
T^{\mathrm{v}}_{\Y}\St := \T{\B{Y}}{\pi^{-1}\LS{\GY}},
\end{equation}
where $\pi:\operatorname{St}\!\left(k,D\right)\to\operatorname{Gr}\!\left(k,D\right)$ is the natural projection defined by $\pi\LS{\B{Y}}=\GY$
\footnote{Suppose a set is given a suitable equivalence relation.
A natural projection is a map that sends each element of a set to the equivalence class to which it belongs.}.
Thus, $\pi$ converges all $\B{Y}^{\prime}\in\operatorname{St}\!\left(k,D\right)$ such that $\B{Y} \sim \B{Y}^{\prime}$ to a point $\GY$ on $\operatorname{Gr}\!\left(k,D\right)$.
Therefore, using (\ref{eq:equivalence_class_and_subspace}), (\ref{eq:vertical_space0}) can be transformed as follows.
\begin{equation}
\label{eq:vertical_space1}
T^{\mathrm{v}}_{\Y}\St=T_{\B{Y}}\left\{\B{Y} \B{Q} \;\middle|\; \B{Q} \in \C{O}\!\LS{k}\right\}.
\end{equation}
However, $\overline{\BS{\xi}}^{\mathrm{v}}_{\B{Y}}\in T^{\mathrm{v}}_{\Y}\St$ can be written as $\overline{\BS{\xi}}^{\mathrm{v}}_{\B{Y}}=\B{Y}\B{S}$ with $\B{S}\in \T{\Ik{k}}{\C{O}\!\LS{k}}$.
\begin{align}
\T{\Ik{k}}{\C{O}\!\LS{k}} &= \T{\Ik{k}}{\Sti{k}{k}}\\
&= \left\{\B{I}_{k}\B{C} + \LS{\B{I}_{k\perp}\B{B}=\B{0}_{k}} \;\middle|\; \B{C}\in\operatorname{Skew}\LS{k}, \B{B}\in\mathbb{R}^{\LS{k-k=0}\times k}\right\}\\
&= \operatorname{Skew}\LS{k}.
\end{align}
Thus, we obtain the following formula.
\begin{equation}
\label{eq:vertical_space2}
T^{\mathrm{v}}_{\Y}\St = \left\{\B{Y} \B{C} \;\middle|\; \B{C} \in \operatorname{Skew}\LS{k}\right\}.
\end{equation}
Next, we define the horizontal space $T^{\mathrm{h}}_{\Y}\St$ as the orthogonal complement of $T^{\mathrm{v}}_{\Y}\St$ in $\T{\B{Y}}{\operatorname{St}\!\left(k,D\right)}$ endowed with the inner product (\ref{eq:riemann_metric_on_stiefel_manifold}).
\begin{align}
\label{eq:horizontal_space1}
T^{\mathrm{h}}_{\Y}\St :&= \LS{T^{\mathrm{v}}_{\Y}\St}^{\perp}\\
&=\left\{\Bxih{\B{Y}} \in \T{\B{Y}}{\operatorname{St}\!\left(k,D\right)} \;\middle|\; \operatorname{tr}\LS{ \overline{\BS{\xi}}_{\B{Y}}^{\mathrm{h}\top} \overline{\BS{\eta}}^{\mathrm{v}}_{\B{Y}} }=0, \overline{\BS{\eta}}^{\mathrm{v}}_{\B{Y}} \in T^{\mathrm{v}}_{\Y}\St \right\}.
\end{align}
Based on the fact that $T^{\mathrm{v}}_{\Y}\St$ is a subspace of $\T{\B{Y}}{\operatorname{St}\!\left(k,D\right)}$ and $T^{\mathrm{h}}_{\Y}\St$ is defined as its orthogonal complement, the direct sum decomposition is as follows.
\begin{equation}
\label{eq:tangent_space_St_sum_decomposition}
\T{\B{Y}}{\operatorname{St}\!\left(k,D\right)}=T^{\mathrm{v}}_{\Y}\St \oplus T^{\mathrm{h}}_{\Y}\St,
\end{equation}
where $\oplus$ denotes direct sum.
Moreover, the tangent space is a linear space (\cite{AbsMahSep2008}).
From (\ref{eq:tangent_space_on_stiefel_manifold}), element $\B{Y} \B{C}$ of $T^{\mathrm{v}}_{\Y}\St$ corresponds to the first term of (\ref{eq:vertical_space2}); thus, (\ref{eq:tangent_space_St_sum_decomposition}) is formulated as follows:
\begin{equation}
T^{\mathrm{h}}_{\Y}\St=\left\{\Bxih{\B{Y}}=\B{Y}_{\perp} \B{B} \;\middle|\; \B{B} \in \mathbb{R}^{\LS{D-k} \times k}\right\}.
\end{equation}
Note that the horizontal vector $\Bxih{\B{Y}}$ is not necessarily an orthogonal matrix.
Finally, define the element $\Bxih{\B{Y}}\in T^{\mathrm{h}}_{\Y}\St$ of the horizontal space at $\B{Y}\in \operatorname{St}\!\left(k,D\right)$ for the tangent vector $\BS{\xi}_{\GY}\in T_{\GY}\Gr$ at $\GY\in\operatorname{Gr}\!\left(k,D\right)$ as satisfying the following formula.
\begin{equation}
\label{eq:horizontal_lift}
d \pi\LS{\B{Y}}\LL{\Bxih{\B{Y}}}=\BS{\xi}_{\GY},
\end{equation}
where $d\pi\LS{\B{Y}}: \T{\B{Y}}{\operatorname{St}\!\left(k,D\right)} \rightarrow T_{\GY}\Gr$ is the derivative $\frac{d\pi\LS{\B{Y}}}{d\B{Y}}$ of $\pi: \operatorname{St}\!\left(k,D\right)\rightarrow \operatorname{Gr}\!\left(k,D\right)$ at $\B{Y}\in\operatorname{St}\!\left(k,D\right)$.
The $\Bxih{\B{Y}}\in T^{\mathrm{h}}_{\Y}\St$ is referred to as the horizontal lift at $\B{Y}\in\operatorname{St}\!\left(k,D\right)$ of $\GY\in\operatorname{Gr}\!\left(k,D\right)$.
We describe the tangent space of $\operatorname{Gr}\!\left(k,D\right)$ with the concept of horizontal lift.
\begin{definition}
Let $T^{\mathrm{h}}_{\Y}\St$ be a horizontal space on $\operatorname{St}\!\left(k,D\right)$.
Then, we define the tangent space $T_{\GY}\Gr$ of the $\operatorname{Gr}\!\left(k,D\right)$ as follows.
\begin{equation}
T_{\GY}\Gr =
\left\{\BS{\xi}_{\GY} \;\middle|\; d \pi\LS{\B{Y}}\LL{\Bxih{\B{Y}}}=\BS{\xi}_{\GY},\, \Bxih{\B{Y}}\in T^{\mathrm{h}}_{\Y}\St\right\}.
\end{equation}
\end{definition}
From the above, $\BS{\xi}_{\GY}\inT_{\GY}\Gr$ is obtained from the map $d \pi\LS{\B{Y}}\LL{\Bxih{\B{Y}}}$ when $\Bxih{\B{Y}}$ is obtained.
The $\BS{\xi}_{\GY}$ is defined by an equivalence class and cannot be treated numerically in matrix form; however, it is sufficient to obtain the $\Bxih{\B{Y}}$ for actual numerical calculations.
For $\BS{\xi}_{\GY}\in T_{\GY}\Gr$, there exists a $\Bxih{\B{Y}}\in T^{\mathrm{h}}_{\Y}\St$ that uniquely satisfies (\ref{eq:horizontal_lift}).
In other words, we can handle it in matrix form by using elements of the horizontal space of Stiefel manifolds through the concept of horizontal lifting.
Figure~\ref{fig:horizontal_lift_in} is a conceptual diagram of the tangent space representation of a Grassmann manifold by horizontal lift.
\subsubsection{Riemannian Metric on $\operatorname{Gr}\!\left(k,D\right)$}
\label{subsec:riemann_metric}
We define the Riemannian metric $g$ of $\operatorname{Gr}\!\left(k,D\right)$ through the concept of horizontal lift.
\begin{definition}
Let $\Bxih{\B{Y}}$ and $\overline{\BS{\eta}}^{\mathrm{h}}_{\B{Y}}$ be the horizontal lifts that become $d \pi\LS{\B{Y}}\LL{\Bxih{\B{Y}}}=\BS{\xi}_{\GY}$ and $d \pi\LS{\B{Y}}\LL{\overline{\BS{\eta}}^{\mathrm{h}}_{\B{Y}}}=\BS{\eta}_{\GY}$, respectively. Then, we define the Riemannian metric on $\operatorname{Gr}\!\left(k,D\right)$ as follows:
\begin{align}
\label{eq:riemann_metrix_on_grassmann_manifold}
g_{\GY}\LS{\BS{\xi}_{\GY}, \BS{\eta}_{\GY}}:=\overline{g}_{\B{Y}}\LS{\Bxih{\B{Y}}, \overline{\BS{\eta}}^{\mathrm{h}}_{\B{Y}}} = \operatorname{tr}\LS{\B{B}^{\top}\B{D}},
\end{align}
where $\B{B}$ and $\B{D}$ are matrices that are $\Bxih{\B{Y}} = \B{Y}_{\perp} \B{B}$ and $\overline{\BS{\eta}}^{\mathrm{h}}_{\B{Y}} = \B{Y}_{\perp} \B{D}$, respectively.
\end{definition}
\subsection{Invariant Measures}
\label{subsec:haar_measure_on_grassmannian}
Let the column vectors of matrix $\B{Y}=\left\{\B{y}_1,\cdots,\B{y}_k\right\}\in\mathbb{R}^{D\times k}$ be the orthonormal basis that span the subspace $\Span{\B{Y}}\in\operatorname{Gr}\!\left(k,D\right)$ in $\mathbb{R}^D$, and the column vectors of $\B{Y}_{\perp}=\left\{\B{y}_{k+1},\cdots,\B{y}_{D}\right\}\in\mathbb{R}^{D\times {D-k}}$ be the orthogonal complementary space $\Span{\B{Y}_{\perp}}$ of $\Span{\B{Y}}$, respectively.
Then, the following differential form can be defined.
\begin{align}
\label{eq:haar_measure_on_grassmann_manifold}
\LS{d\B{Y}}&=\bigwedge_{j=1}^{D-k} \bigwedge_{i=1}^{k} \B{y}_{k+j}^{\top} d\B{y}_{i}\\
&=\LS{\B{y}_{k+1}^{\top} d\B{y}_{1}\wedge\cdots\wedge\B{y}_{k+1}^{\top} d\B{y}_{k}}\wedge\cdots\wedge\LS{\B{y}_{D}^{\top} d\B{y}_{1}\wedge\cdots\wedge\B{y}_{D}^{\top} d\B{y}_{k}}.
\end{align}
where $\wedge$ is the wedge product and the relation satisfies $\omega_i\wedge\omega_i=\omega_j\wedge\omega_j=0$ and $\omega_i\wedge\omega_j=-\omega_j\wedge\omega_i$.
The above equation is in $k\LS{D-k}$-order differential form, which is an invariant measure on $\operatorname{Gr}\!\left(k,D\right)$ (\cite{special_manifold_statistics}).
If we define the matrix $\B{X}_{\perp}$ to be $\LL{\begin{array}{cc}\B{X} & \B{X}_{\perp}\end{array}}$ for any point $\B{X}=\left\{\B{x}_1,\cdots,\B{x}_k\right\}\in\operatorname{St}\!\left(k,D\right)$, the differential form for an invariant measure on $\operatorname{St}\!\left(k,D\right)$ is defined as follows.
\begin{equation}
\label{eq:measure_on_stiefel_manifold}
\dF{\B{X}}=\bigwedge_{j=1}^{D-k} \bigwedge_{i=1}^{k} \B{x}_{k+j}^{\top} d\B{x}_{i} \bigwedge_{i<j} {}_1^k \B{x}_{j}^{\top} d\B{x}_{i} = \LS{d\B{Y}}\LS{d\B{Q}},
\end{equation}
where $\LS{d\B{Q}}$ is the invariant measure of $\C{O}\!\LS{k}$.
The integral of (\ref{eq:measure_on_stiefel_manifold}), that is, the volume of $\operatorname{St}\!\left(k,D\right)$, can be evaluated as follows:
\begin{equation}
\label{eq:integral_of_invariant_measur_on_stiefel_manifold1}
V_{\operatorname{St}\left(k,D\right)} = \int_{\operatorname{St}\left(k,D\right)}{\dF{\B{X}}}.
\end{equation}
(\ref{eq:integral_of_invariant_measur_on_stiefel_manifold1}) can be computed as follows.
First, the surface $S_{D}$ of the $D$-dimensional unit sphere can be defined as follows:
\begin{equation}
S_{D} = \left.\frac{d}{d r}\right|_{r=1}V_{D} = DV_{D} = \frac{D \pi^{\frac{D}{2}}}{\Gamma\LS{\frac{D}{2}+1}}=\frac{2 \pi^{\frac{D}{2}}}{\Gamma\LS{\frac{D}{2}}},
\end{equation}
where $V_D$ is the volume of a $D$-dimensional sphere $\frac{\pi^{\frac{D}{2}}}{\Gamma\LS{\frac{D}{2}+1}}r^{D}$ and $\Gamma\LS{\frac{D}{2}}$ is the gamma function.
Then, the following equation is obtained.
\begin{equation}
\label{eq:integral_of_invariant_measur_on_stiefel_manifold2}
\int_{\operatorname{St}\left(k,D\right)}{\dF{\B{X}}} = S_D\int_{\operatorname{St}\LS{k-1,D-1}}{\dF{\B{X}_1}},
\end{equation}
where ${\dF{\B{X}_1}}$ is the differential form of $\Sti{k-1}{D-1}$.
Thus, (\ref{eq:integral_of_invariant_measur_on_stiefel_manifold1}) can be transformed as follows.
\begin{equation}
\label{eq:integral_of_invariant_measur_on_stiefel_manifol3}
V_{\operatorname{St}\left(k,D\right)} = \int_{\operatorname{St}\left(k,D\right)}{\dF{\B{X}}} = \prod_{i=1}^{k}{S_D} = \frac{2^k \pi^{\frac{Dk}{2}}}{\Gamma_k\LS{\frac{D}{2}}},
\end{equation}
where $\Gamma_k\LS{\frac{D}{2}}$ is the multidimensional gamma function.
The invariant measure ${\dF{\B{X}}}$ is an unnormalized measure.
A measure normalized to be a probability measure can be formulated as follows:
\begin{equation}
\label{eq:uniform_distribution_on_stiefel_manifold}
\dH{d\B{X}} = \frac{1}{V_{\operatorname{St}\left(k,D\right)}}\LS{d\B{X}}.
\end{equation}
This is a uniform distribution on $\operatorname{St}\!\left(k,D\right)$.
As $\Sti{k}{k} = \C{O}\!\LS{k}$, the volume $V_{\C{O}\LS{k}}$ of $\C{O}\!\LS{k}$ can be represented using $\LS{d\B{Q}}$ as follows.
\begin{equation}
V_{\C{O}\LS{k}} = V_{\operatorname{St}\LS{k,k}} = \frac{2^k \pi^{\frac{k^2}{2}}}{\Gamma_k\LS{\frac{k}{2}}}.
\end{equation}
Furthermore, a measure normalized to be a probability measure can be represented by the following:
\begin{equation}
\label{eq:uniform_distribution_on_Ok_groups}
\dH{d\B{Q}} = \frac{1}{V_{\C{O}\LS{k}}}\LS{d\B{Q}}.
\end{equation}
From the above, the probability density function $U_{\C{O}\LS{k}}\LS{\B{Q}}$ of the uniform distribution on $\C{O}\!\LS{k}$ is as follows:
\begin{equation}
\label{eq:uniform_pdf_of_orthogonal_group}
U_{\C{O}\LS{k}}\LS{\B{Q}} = \frac{1}{V_{\C{O}\LS{k}}} \;\text{s.t.}\; \B{Q}\in\C{O}\!\LS{k},
\end{equation}
\begin{equation}
\int_{\C{O}\LS{k}}{U_{\C{O}\LS{k}}\LS{\B{Q}}\LS{d\B{Q}}} = \int_{\C{O}\LS{k}}{\frac{1}{V_{\C{O}\LS{k}}}\LS{d\B{Q}}} = \int_{\C{O}\LS{k}}{\dH{d \B{Q}}} = 1.
\end{equation}
As $\operatorname{Gr}\!\left(k,D\right)$ is defined as a quotient manifold $\operatorname{St}\!\left(k,D\right) / \C{O}\!\LS{k}$ as in (\ref{eq:grassmann1}), the volume $V_{\operatorname{Gr}\left(k,D\right)}$ of $\operatorname{Gr}\!\left(k,D\right)$ can be defined as follows.
\begin{equation}
\label{eq:integral_of_invariant_measur_on_grassmann_manifold}
V_{\operatorname{Gr}\left(k,D\right)} = \int_{\operatorname{Gr}\left(k,D\right)}{\dF{\B{Y}}} = \frac{V_{\operatorname{St}\left(k,D\right)}}{V_{\C{O}\LS{k}}} = \frac{V_{\operatorname{St}\left(k,D\right)}}{V_{\operatorname{St}\LS{k,k}}} = \frac{\pi^{\frac{k\LS{D-k}}{2}}\Gamma_k\LS{\frac{k}{2}}}{\Gamma_k\LS{\frac{D}{2}}}.
\end{equation}
The measure normalized to be a probability measure is expressed as:
\begin{equation}
\label{eq:uniform_distribution_on_grassmann_manifold}
\dH{d\B{Y}} = \frac{1}{V_{\operatorname{Gr}\left(k,D\right)}}\LS{d\B{Y}}.
\end{equation}
\subsection{Retraction}
\label{sec:retraction}
In general, the points except the origin ($\B{p}\LS{0}=\B{x}$) of the tangent space $\T{\B{x}}{\C{M}}$ at $\B{x}$ on the manifold $\C{M}$ are not elements on $\C{M}$ ($\B{p}\LS{t}\in \T{\B{x}}{\C{M}}, t\neq 0$).
Therefore, if the result of the operation on the tangent space is to be used at another point on the manifold $\C{M}$, it is necessary to map $\B{p}\LS{t}$ to the manifold $\C{M}$.
The map from a tangent space to a manifold is referred to as an exponential map.
However, because the exponential map is computationally expensive, retraction based on numerical linear algebra is often used as an alternative (\cite{cayley_transform_based_ratraction_on_Grassmann_Manifolds}).
Retraction is a method for approximating an exponential map to first order while maintaining global convergence in optimization algorithms on Riemannian manifolds.
The most commonly used retractions on $\operatorname{Gr}\!\left(k,D\right)$ are methods based on QR decomposition or singular-value decomposition (SVD) (\cite{AbsMahSep2008,cayley_transform_based_ratraction_on_Grassmann_Manifolds}).
In addition, a retraction based on the Cayley transform is introduced in \cite{cayley_transform_based_ratraction_on_Grassmann_Manifolds}.
This retraction is closely related to the Cayley transform on $\operatorname{St}\!\left(k,D\right)$ (\cite{cayley_transform_based_ratraction_on_Stiefel_Manifolds1, cayley_transform_based_ratraction_on_Stiefel_Manifolds2, cayley_transform_based_ratraction_on_Stiefel_Manifolds3}) and the Projected polynomial retraction (\cite{High_Order_based_ratraction_on_stiefel_Manifolds}).
\subsubsection{Exponential Map and Retraction}
Geodesics on $\operatorname{Gr}\!\left(k,D\right)$ can be expressed as the equivalence class $\LL{\exp_{\B{Y}}^{\mathrm{Gr}}\LS{t \overline{\BS{\xi}}_{\B{Y}}}}$, where
\begin{equation}
\label{eq:exact_exp_map}
\exp_{\B{Y}}^{\mathrm{Gr}}\LS{t \overline{\BS{\xi}}_{\B{Y}}} = \LL{\begin{array}{cc}\B{Y} & \B{Y}_{\perp}\end{array}} \exp \LS{t \mathfrak{B}} \IDxk{D}{k}.
\end{equation}
Here, exp on the right-hand side is the matrix exponential, and $
\F{B}=\LL{\begin{array}{cc}
\B{0}_{k} & -\B{B}^{\top} \\
\B{B} & \B{0}_{D-k}
\end{array}}\in \operatorname{skew}\LS{D}
$, where $\B{B}$ satisfies $\overline{\BS{\xi}}_{\B{Y}}=\B{Y}_{\perp} \B{B}$.
We can use a following exponential map that is mathematically equivalent to (\ref{eq:exact_exp_map}) (\cite{edelman1998}):
\begin{equation}
\exp_{\B{Y}}^{\mathrm{Gr}}\LS{t \overline{\BS{\xi}}_{\B{Y}}} := \LM{\B{Y} \B{V} \cos \LS{\boldsymbol{\Sigma} t} + \B{U} \sin \LS{\boldsymbol{\Sigma} t}} \B{V}^{\top},
\end{equation}
where $\B{U}, \boldsymbol{\Sigma}, \B{V}^\top = \operatorname{SVD}\LS{\overline{\BS{\xi}}_{\B{Y}}}$.
Further, we can use the Pad\'{e} approximation to approximate geodesics on Grassmann manifolds as follows:
\begin{equation}
\B{Y}(t)=\LL{\begin{array}{cc}\B{Y} & \B{Y}_{\perp}\end{array}} r_m(t \mathfrak{B}) \IDxk{D}{k} \approx \exp_{\B{Y}}^{\mathrm{Gr}}\LS{t \overline{\BS{\xi}}_{\B{Y}}},
\end{equation}
where $r_m\LS{\B{X}}$ is the $m$th-order diagonal Pad\'{e} approximation to the matrix exponential $\exp\LS{\B{X}}$.
See the expression of $r_m\LS{\B{X}}$ in \cite{moler2003matrix_exponential}.
The simplest member of this class is surely the first-order Pad\'{e} approximation
\begin{align}
\overline{R}_{\B{Y}}\LS{t \overline{\BS{\xi}}_{\B{Y}}} :=& \LL{\begin{array}{cc}\B{Y} & \B{Y}_{\perp}\end{array}} r_1\LS{t \mathfrak{B}} \IDxk{D}{k}\\
\label{eq:horizontal_retraction}
=& \LL{\begin{array}{cc}\B{Y} & \B{Y}_{\perp}\end{array}}\LS{I_n-\frac{t}{2} \mathfrak{B}}^{-1}\LS{\Ik{D}+\frac{t}{2} \mathfrak{B}} \IDxk{D}{k},
\end{align}
which is also known as the Cayley transform.
From the error expression $\exp\LS{\B{Y}}=r_m\LS{\B{Y}} + O\left(\|\B{Y}\|^{2 m+1}\right)$ of the Pad\'{e}
approximation, we have
\begin{equation}
\overline{R}_{\B{Y}}\LS{t \overline{\BS{\xi}}_{\B{Y}}}=\exp_{\B{Y}}^{\mathrm{Gr}}\LS{t \overline{\BS{\xi}}_{\B{Y}}} + O\LS{t^{2 m+1}\left\|\overline{\BS{\xi}}_{\B{Y}}\right\|^{2 m+1}}
\end{equation}
which is also given by Theorem 3 in \cite{Gawlik18high_order_retraction}.
\subsubsection{Horizontal Retraction}
\label{subsec:horizontal_retraction}
From Definition 3 in \cite{cayley_transform_based_ratraction_on_Grassmann_Manifolds}, (\ref{eq:horizontal_retraction}) is a horizontal retraction, and
\begin{equation}
R_{\GY}\LS{t \BS{\xi}_{\GY}}:=\LL{\overline{R}_{\B{Y}}\LS{t \overline{\BS{\xi}}_{\B{Y}}^{\mathrm{h}}}}
\end{equation}
is a retraction on $\operatorname{Gr}\!\left(k,D\right)$ as a quotient manifold defined by (\ref{eq:grassmann1}).
This is because $\overline{R}$ satisfies the invariance condition that $\overline{R}_{\B{Y}}\LS{t \overline{\BS{\xi}}_{\B{Y}}^{\mathrm{h}}} \sim \overline{R}_{\B{Y}^{\prime}}\LS{t \overline{\BS{\xi}}_{\B{Y}^{\prime}}^{\mathrm{h}}}$ for all $\B{Y}\in\operatorname{St}\!\left(k,D\right), \B{Y}^{\prime}\in\operatorname{St}\!\left(k,D\right), \overline{\BS{\xi}}_{\B{Y}}\inT^{\mathrm{h}}_{\Y}\St$ and $\overline{\BS{\xi}}_{\B{Y}^{\prime}}\in\Hor{\B{Y}^{\prime}}$ such that $\B{Y}\sim\B{Y}^{\prime}$ and $\overline{\BS{\xi}}_{\B{Y}}$ and $\overline{\BS{\xi}}_{\B{Y}^{\prime}}$ are horizontal lifts of $\BS{\xi}_{\GY}\inT_{\GY}\Gr$ at $\B{Y}$ and $\B{Y}^{\prime}$, respectively.
In low-rank cases, we can obtain an economical version of (\ref{eq:horizontal_retraction}) as follows (\cite{cayley_transform_based_ratraction_on_Grassmann_Manifolds}).
\begin{equation}
\label{eq:retraction_on_grassmann_manifold_with_horizontal_ratraction_economy1}
\overline{R}_{\B{Y}}\LS{t\overline{\BS{\xi}}_{\B{Y}}^{\mathrm{h}}}=\B{Y} + t\overline{\BS{\xi}}_{\B{Y}}^{\mathrm{h}}-\LS{\frac{t^2}{2} \B{Y}+\frac{t^3}{4} \overline{\BS{\xi}}_{\B{Y}}^{\mathrm{h}}}\LS{\Ik{k} + \frac{t^2}{4} \overline{\BS{\xi}}_{\B{Y}}^{\mathrm{h}\top} \overline{\BS{\xi}}_{\B{Y}}^{\mathrm{h}}}^{-1} \overline{\BS{\xi}}_{\B{Y}}^{\mathrm{h}\top} \overline{\BS{\xi}}_{\B{Y}}^{\mathrm{h}}.
\end{equation}
The inverse retraction $\LS{\overline{R_{\GY}^{-1}}}_{\B{Y}}^{\mathrm{h}}:\operatorname{St}\!\left(k,D\right)\toT^{\mathrm{h}}_{\Y}\St$ of $\overline{R}_{\B{Y}}\LS{\overline{\BS{\xi}}_{\B{Y}}^{\mathrm{h}}}$ is the following:
\begin{align}
\label{inverse_retraction_on_grassmann_manifold}
\LS{\overline{R_{\GY}^{-1}\LS{\GX}}}_{\B{Y}}^{\mathrm{h}}
&= \overline{R}_{\B{Y}}^{-1}\LS{\B{X}}\\
&= 2 \B{Y}_{\perp} \B{Y}_{\perp}^{\top} \B{X}\LS{\Ik{k} + \B{Y}^{\top} \B{X}}^{-1}
= 2 \LS{\B{X}-\B{Y} \B{Y}^{\top} \B{X}}\LS{\Ik{k} + \B{Y}^{\top} \B{X}}^{-1}.
\end{align}
\section{Introduction}
\label{sec:introduction}
Many machine learning algorithms aim to automatically learn and extract latent factors that explain a specific dataset.
Symmetry is known to be an inductive bias (i.e., prior knowledge other than the training data that can contribute significantly to the learning results) for learning latent factors (\cite{cohenc16GroupEquivariant,cohen2017steerable,Weiler19GeneralE2Equivariant,satorras21EnEquivariant,puny2022frame}).
Symmetries exist in many phenomena in the natural sciences.
If a target $M$ is invariant\footnote{Invariance implies the transformation $\pi$ satisfies $\pi\LS{x}=\pi\LS{x^{\prime}} = \pi\LS{g(x)}$ for $x^{\prime}=g\LS{x}$ obtained by applying the operation $g$ to the input $x$.
The transformation $\pi$ is considered invariant with respect to the operation $g$.
A transformation $\pi$ is considered equivariant with respect to an operation $p$ if $\pi$ satisfies $g\LS{\pi\LS{x}} = \pi\LS{g(x)}$.
Invariance is a special case of equivariance wherein $\pi\LS{g}$ is an identity transformation.}
when the operation $g\in S$ designated by $S$ applied to $M$, $M$ has symmetry $S$.
For example, a sphere remains a sphere even if a rotation $R$ is applied; a symmetrical shape remains symmetrical even if a left--right reversal is applied.
Recently, studies have focused on methods to incorporate symmetry into models through equivariance and invariance when the data space forms a non-Euclidean space (a sphere $S^n$ or a special unitary group $SU\!\LS{n}$) (\cite{Taco2018spherical,Taco19EquivariantCNNs,haan2021gauge,Simon20DenseSteerable,Boyda20EqMF}).
Among them, discriminative and generative models for subspace data (e.g., shape matrices of point cloud data such as three-dimensional molecules and general object shapes, and image sets) have been proposed as viable approaches using Grassmann manifolds, which are invariant to orthogonal transformations.
Numerous studies have reported their effectiveness (\cite{Ham2008GDA,Harandi11GGDA,Huang15PML,HuangWG18DeepGrassmann,SOUZA2020EGDA,Applications_on_Grassmann_manifold,Turaga08StatisticalGrassmannShapeAnalysis,GrAPP_MRI,GrAPP_SHAPE_SPACE,GrAPP_AeroSHAPE,SOUZA2022GrLearning}).
In particular, through the application of generative models on Grassmann manifolds to inverse molecular design for shape regression and shape generation to discover new molecular structures, they can contribute to the development of drug discovery, computational anatomy, and materials science (\cite{Benjamin18MolecularDesign,Bilodeau22MolecularDesign}).
In addition, they can contribute to the development of computer vision technologies such as video surveillance and interpolation of moving images through their application to the generation of a basis, which is a potential representation of video images (\cite{Garcia21EnNF,hong17GrassmannRegression}).
Among the various generative models, the continuous normalizing flow (CNF) (\cite{chen2018_ODE,grathwohl2018_FFJORD,lou2020_manifold_ODE,kim2020_softflow,Emile2020_Riemannian_continuous_normalizing_flows}) is a method that has attracted attention in recent years along with the variational auto-encoder (VAE) (\cite{VAE_kingma2014autoencoding}), auto-regressive model (\cite{Germain2015_Autoregressive_model,oord2016_Autoregressive_model}), and the diffusion model (\cite{dickstein2015_diffusion_model}). CNF is a method possessing theoretically superior properties that enable rigorous inference and evaluation of log-likelihood.
The CNF renders the learning of extremely complex data distributions; however, no CNF has been constructed on Grassmann manifolds.
Therefore, we propose a CNF on a Grassmann manifold.
To construct this, we focused on the quotient structure of a Grassmann manifold and translated the problem of flow learning on a Grassmann manifold into that of preserving equivariance for orthogonal groups on a Stiefel manifold, which is its total space.
The contributions of this study are as follows.
\begin{itemize}
\item A theory and general framework for learning flows on a Grassmann manifold was proposed.
In our setting, we can train flows on a Grassmann manifold of arbitrary dimension.
To the best of our knowledge, this is the first study to construct continuous normalizing flow on a Grassmann manifold in a unified approach, focusing on the quotient structure.
\item The validity of the proposed approach was demonstrated by learning densities on a Grassmann manifold using multiple artificial datasets with complex data distributions.
In particular, the orthogonally transformed data were proven to be correctly learned without any data augmentations by showing that un-trained transformed (i.e., rotated or mirrored) data can be generated from the trained model.
Further, the model was evaluated on multiple patterns of training data and confirmed to perform well with particularly small amount of training data.
\item The validity of our approach was demonstrated by its state-of-the-art performance in a molecular positional generation task.
\end{itemize}
\section{Related Works}
\paragraph{Symmetry-based Learning}
The concept of equivariance has been studied in recent years to leverage the symmetries inherent in the data (\cite{cohen2017steerable,Taco19EquivariantCNNs,cohen19GaugeEquivariant,haan2021gauge,Finzi20LieGroup,Kondor18CompactGroups,Taco2018spherical}).
In particular, early work by \cite{cohen2017steerable} showed that when the data are equivariant, they can be processed with less computational cost and with lesser number of parameters.
In the context of CNF (\cite{rezende15NormalizingFlow,chen2018_ODE,grathwohl2018_FFJORD}), which are generative models, \cite{Kohler20EquivariantFlows}, \cite{rezende19hamiltonian} and \cite{Garcia21EnNF} proposed equivariant normalizing flows to learn symmetric densities on Euclidean spaces.
Further, the symmetries appearing in learning densities on a manifold were also introduced by \cite{Boyda21SUnEquivariantFlow} and \cite{Katsman_EquivariantManifoldFlow} as a conjugate equivariant flow on $SU(n)$, which is a quotient manifold, for use in lattice gauge theory.
However, a normalizing flow on a Grassmann manifold capable of handling subspace data is yet to be established.
\paragraph{Subspace Data on the Grassmann Manifold}
Subspace data can be obtained on many types of data and can provide advantages such as practicability and noise robustness.
For example, multi-view image set or video data (\cite{Applications_on_Grassmann_manifold,GrAPP_MRI,Statistical_Computations_on_Grassmann_and_Stiefel_Manifolds_for_Image_and_Video_Based_Recognition,Alashkar2016Gr4DShapeAnalysis}), signal data (\cite{srivastava_klassen_2004,Bernardo17bioacousticsCls,lincon19bioacousticSignalAnalysis,yataka2019signal_subspace}), and text data (\cite{Erica21TextClassification}) are often provided in the form of a set of feature vectors.
Such raw data in matrix form is not very useful owing to its considerable size and noise.
The analysis of its eigenspace, or column subspace, is important because alternatively, the raw data matrix can be well approximated by a low-dimensional subspace with basis vectors corresponding to the maximum eigenvalues of the matrix.
Furthermore, three-dimensional shape data (\cite{GrAPP_AeroSHAPE,GrAPP_SHAPE_SPACE,Begelfor2006_AFFINE_INVARIANCE,Yoshinuma16PersonalAuthentication}) such as point clouds are essentially represented as a subspace (shape space (\cite{Begelfor2006_AFFINE_INVARIANCE,Statistical_shape_analysis_clustering_learning_and_testing,yataka2017shape_subspace})) data on a Grassmann manifold if the scale is removed. Therefore, they inevitably give rise to the necessity of analyzing them on a Grassmann manifold.
\section{Mathematical preliminaries}
In this section, the basic mathematical concepts covered in this paper are described.
Further details regarding the fundamentals of a Grassmann manifold are summarized in Appendix~\ref{sec:fundamental_of_grassmann_manifold}.
\subsection{Grassmann Manifold Defined as Quotient Manifold}
\paragraph{Definition of a Grassmann Manifold}
A Grassmann manifold $\operatorname{Gr}\!\left(k,D\right)$ is a set of $k$-dimensional subspaces $\Span{\B{Y}}$ ($\B{Y}$ is a matrix of $k$ basis vectors) in the $D$-dimensional Euclidean space $\mathbb{R}^D$, and is defined as $\operatorname{Gr}\!\left(k,D\right)=\left\{\Span{\B{Y}} \subset \mathbb{R}^{D} \;\middle|\; \DIM{\Span{\B{Y}}} = k \right\}$ (\cite{AbsMahSep2008}).
The $\Span{\B{Y}}$ is the same subspace regardless of a $k$-dimensional rotation or $k$-dimensional reflection applied to $\B{Y}$ on which it is spanned.
In other words, $\operatorname{Gr}\!\left(k,D\right)$ is a space invariant to transformations by the $k$-dimensional orthogonal group $\C{O}\!\LS{k}$.
With respect to the compact Stiefel manifold $\operatorname{St}\!\left(k,D\right):=\left\{\B{Y} \in \mathbb{R}^{D \times k} \;\middle|\; \B{Y}^{\top} \B{Y}=\B{I}_{k}\right\}$ defined as the set of $D\times k$-orthonormal basis matrices $\B{Y}$, the equivalence class of $\B{Y}\in\operatorname{St}\!\left(k,D\right)$ determined from the equivalence relation $\sim$
\footnote{
When there exists some $\B{Q} \in \C{O}\!\LS{k}$ such that $\B{X}=\B{Y} \B{Q}$, then $\B{X}$ and $\B{Y}$ are defined to be equivalences $\B{X}\sim\B{Y}$. Appendix~\ref{subsec:equivalence_relation} provides further details.
}
is defined by $\GY:=\pi\LS{\B{Y}} = \left\{\B{Y}\B{Q} \in \operatorname{St}\!\left(k,D\right) \;\middle|\; \B{Q}\in\C{O}\!\LS{k}\right\}$, where $\pi\LS{\B{Y}}$ is a continuous surjection referred to as a quotient map.
The equivalence class corresponds one-to-one with the $k$-dimensional subspace
\begin{equation}
\label{eq:equivalence_class_and_subspace}
\GY=\GX \Longleftrightarrow \Span{\B{Y}}=\Span{\B{X}},
\end{equation}
where $\B{Y} \in \operatorname{St}\!\left(k,D\right)$ is the representative of $\GY$.
The quotient set composed of such $[\B{Y}]$ as a whole can introduce the structure of a manifold (\cite{sato2014_optimize_algo_on_grassmannian}).
\begin{definition}
A Grassmann manifold as a quotient manifold is defined as follows:
\begin{equation}
\label{eq:grassmann1}
\operatorname{Gr}\!\left(k,D\right) := \operatorname{St}\!\left(k,D\right) / \C{O}\!\LS{k} = \left\{\GY \;\middle|\; \B{Y} \in \operatorname{St}\!\left(k,D\right) \right\},
\end{equation}
where $\operatorname{St}\!\left(k,D\right) / \C{O}\!\LS{k}$ is the quotient manifold by the $k$-dimensional orthogonal group $\C{O}\!\LS{k}$ with the total space $\operatorname{St}\!\left(k,D\right)$, and $\pi\!\LS{\B{Y}}$ is the quotient map $\pi:\operatorname{St}\!\left(k,D\right)\to\operatorname{Gr}\!\left(k,D\right)$.
\end{definition}
\paragraph{Tangent Space and Vector Field on the Grassmann Manifold}
Let $T_{\GY}\operatorname{Gr}\!\left(k,D\right)$ be the tangent space of $\GY\in\operatorname{Gr}\!\left(k,D\right)$.
As the point $\GY\in\operatorname{Gr}\!\left(k,D\right)$ is not a matrix, $T_{\GY}\operatorname{Gr}\!\left(k,D\right)$ cannot be represented by a matrix.
Therefore, treating these directly in numerical calculations is challenging.
\begin{wrapfigure}[14]{r}[0mm]{70mm}
\vspace{-10pt}
\centering
\includegraphics[width=70mm]{figures/concepts/horizontal_lift_IN.pdf}
\vspace{-15pt}
\caption{Conceptual diagram of spaces with horizontal lift.}
\label{fig:horizontal_lift_in}
\end{wrapfigure}
To solve this problem, we can use the representative $\B{Y}\in\operatorname{St}\!\left(k,D\right)$ for $\GY\in\operatorname{Gr}\!\left(k,D\right)$ and the tangent vector $\Bxih{\B{Y}}\in T^{\mathrm{h}}_{\Y}\St$, which is referred to as the horizontal lift of $\BS{\xi}_{\GY}\in T_{\GY}\operatorname{Gr}\!\left(k,D\right)$, for $\BS{\xi}_{\GY}$.
These facilitate computation with matrices (\cite{AbsMahSep2008}).
$T^{\mathrm{h}}_{\Y}\St$ is a subspace of the tangent space $\TSt{\B{Y}}$ at $\B{Y}$, referred to as horizontal space (i.e., the orthogonal complement of the vertical space $T^{\mathrm{v}}_{\Y}\St$ along the geodesic composed of $\B{Y}\B{Q}$), and $\Bxih{\B{Y}}$ is referred to as a horizontal vector.
The tangent bundle $\T{}{\,\operatorname{Gr}\!\left(k,D\right)}=\bigcup_{\GY\in\operatorname{Gr}\left(k,D\right)}{\T{\GY}{\operatorname{Gr}\!\left(k,D\right)}}$ that sums up the tangent spaces $T_{\GY}\Gr$ form vector fields $\SU{X}: \operatorname{Gr}\!\left(k,D\right)\to\T{}{\,\operatorname{Gr}\!\left(k,D\right)}$.
The conceptual diagram of the various spaces is shown in Figure~\ref{fig:horizontal_lift_in}.
Further details on these concepts can be found in Appendix~\ref{subsec:tangent_space_on_grassmann_manifold}.
\subsection{Manifold Normalizing Flow}
Let $(\C{M}, h)$ be a Riemannian manifold.
We consider the time evolution of a base point $\B{x} = \gamma\LS{0},\; \gamma:[0, \infty) \rightarrow \C{M}$ on $\C{M}$, whose velocity is expressed by a vector field $\U{X}\LS{t, \gamma\LS{t}}$.
Intuitively, $\U{X}\LS{t, \gamma\LS{t}}$ represents the direction and speed at which $\B{x}$ moves on the curve $\gamma\LS{t}$.
Let $\T{\B{x}}{\C{M}}$ be the tangent space at $\B{x}$ and $\T{}{\C{M}}=\bigcup_{\B{x}\in\C{M}} \T{\B{x}}{\C{M}}$ be the tangent bundle.
The time evolution of a point according to a vector field $\U{X}: \C{M} \times \mathbb{R} \to \T{}{\C{M}}$ is expressed as the following differential equation.
\begin{equation}
\frac{d \gamma\LS{t}}{d t}=\U{X}\LS{t, \gamma\LS{t}}, \quad \gamma\LS{0}=\B{x}.
\end{equation}
Let $F_{\U{X}, T}: \C{M} \rightarrow \C{M}: \B{x} \mapsto F_{\U{X}, T}(\B{x})$ be defined as the map from $^{\forall}\B{x} \in \C{M}$ to the evaluated value at time $T$ on the curve $\gamma\LS{t}$ starting at $\B{x}$.
This map $F_{\U{X}, T}$ is known as the flow of $\U{X}$ (\cite{lee2003introduction}).
Recently, \cite{Emile2020_Riemannian_continuous_normalizing_flows} introduced the Riemann CNF (RCNF), wherein the random variable $\B{z}\LS{t}\in\C{M}$ is assumed to be time-dependent and the change in its log-likelihood follows the instantaneous change formula for the variable.
This is an extension to the CNF (\cite{chen2018_ODE,grathwohl2018_FFJORD}) to a Riemannian manifold.
Specifically, when $p_{\theta}$ is the density parameterized by $\theta$, the derivative of the log-likelihood is expressed as $\nicefrac{d{\log{p_{\theta}\LS{\B{z}\LS{t}}}}}{d{t}} = -\nabla\cdot \U{X}_{\theta}\LS{t, \B{z}\LS{t}}$,
where $\U{X}_{\theta}$ is the vector field parameterized by $\theta$ and $\nabla\cdot \U{X}_{\theta}$ is the divergence of $\U{X}_{\theta}$.
By integrating this over time, the sum of the changes in log-likelihood with flow ${F_{\U{X},t_1}}_{\theta}$ can be computed.
\begin{equation}
\label{eq:target_density_with_prior_integration}
\log p_{\theta}\LS{\B{z}\LS{t_1}} = \log p\LS{{F^{-1}_{\U{X},t_1}}_{\theta}\LS{\B{z}\LS{t_1}}} - \int_{t_0}^{t_1}{\nabla\cdot \U{X}_{\theta}\LS{t, \B{z}\LS{t}}}d{t}.
\end{equation}
\section{Invariant Densities from Grassmann Manifold Flow}
\label{sec:main_propositions_for_grassmann_flow}
This section~ provides a tractable and efficient method for learning densities on a Grassmann Manifold $\operatorname{Gr}\!\left(k,D\right)$.
However, the method for preserving the flow on $\operatorname{Gr}\!\left(k,D\right)$ is non-trivial.
Therefore, we derive the following implications.
\begin{enumerate}
\item \textbf{Vector field on $\operatorname{Gr}\!\left(k,D\right) \Leftrightarrow$ Flow on $\operatorname{Gr}\!\left(k,D\right)$} (\textbf{Proposition \ref{proposition:gr_flow}}).
\item \textbf{Flow on $\operatorname{Gr}\!\left(k,D\right) \Leftrightarrow$ Probability density on $\operatorname{Gr}\!\left(k,D\right)$} (\textbf{Proposition \ref{proposition:probability_distribution_on_grassmann_manifold}}).
\item \textbf{Construction of a prior probability density function for an efficient sampling on $\operatorname{Gr}\!\left(k,D\right)$} (\textbf{Proposition \ref{proposition:prior_distribution_on_grassmannian}}).
\end{enumerate}
These series of propositions show that by using a prior distribution on $\operatorname{Gr}\!\left(k,D\right)$ that can be easily sampled, a flow that generates a complex probability density distribution on $\operatorname{Gr}\!\left(k,D\right)$ can be obtained.
We defer the proofs of all propositions to Appendix~\ref{sec:proofs}.
\subsection{Construction of Flow from Vector Field on $\operatorname{Gr}\!\left(k,D\right)$}
\label{subsec:flow_on_grassmann_manifold}
To construct flows on $\operatorname{Gr}\!\left(k,D\right)$, we use tools in the theory of manifold differential equations.
In particular, there is a natural correspondence between the vector fields on $\operatorname{Gr}\!\left(k,D\right)$ and the flows on $\operatorname{Gr}\!\left(k,D\right)$.
This is formalized in the following proposition.
\begin{proposition}\label{proposition:gr_flow}
Let $\operatorname{Gr}\!\left(k,D\right)$ be a Grassmann manifold, $\SU{X}$ be any time-dependent vector field on $\operatorname{Gr}\!\left(k,D\right)$, and $F_{\SU{X},T}$ be a flow on a $\SU{X}$.
Let $\overline{\SU{X}}$ be any time-dependent horizontal lift and $\overline{F}_{\overline{\SU{X}},T}$ be a flow of $\overline{\SU{X}}$.
$\overline{\SU{X}}$ is a vector field on $\operatorname{St}\!\left(k,D\right)$ if and only if $\overline{F}_{\overline{\SU{X}},T}$ is a flow on $\operatorname{St}\!\left(k,D\right)$ and satisfies invariance condition $\overline{\SU{X}}\sim \overline{\SU{X}}^{\prime}$ for all $\overline{F}_{\overline{\SU{X}},T}\sim \overline{F}_{\overline{\SU{X}}^{\prime},T}$.
Therefore, $\SU{X}$ is a vector field on $\operatorname{Gr}\!\left(k,D\right)$ if and only if $F_{\SU{X},T} := \LL{\overline{F}_{\overline{\SU{X}},T}}$ is a flow on $\operatorname{Gr}\!\left(k,D\right)$, and vice versa.
\end{proposition}
\subsection{Construction of Probability Densities with Flow on $\operatorname{Gr}\!\left(k,D\right)$}
\label{subsec:probability_distribution_on_grassmann_manifold}
We show that the flow on $\operatorname{Gr}\!\left(k,D\right)$ induces density on $\operatorname{Gr}\!\left(k,D\right)$.
\begin{proposition}\label{proposition:probability_distribution_on_grassmann_manifold}
Let $\operatorname{Gr}\!\left(k,D\right)$ be a Grassmann manifold.
Let $p$ be the probability density on $\operatorname{Gr}\!\left(k,D\right)$ and $F$ be the flow on $\operatorname{Gr}\!\left(k,D\right)$.
Suppose $\overline{p}$ is a density on $\operatorname{St}\!\left(k,D\right)$ and $\overline{F}$ is a flow on $\operatorname{St}\!\left(k,D\right)$. Then, the distribution $\overline{p}_{\overline{F}}$ after transformations by $\overline{F}$ is also a density on $\operatorname{St}\!\left(k,D\right)$.
Further, the invariance condition $\overline{p}_{\overline{F}}\sim\overline{p}_{\overline{F}^{\prime}}$ is satisfied for all $\overline{F}\sim\overline{F}^{\prime}$.
Therefore, $p_F := \G{\overline{p}_{\overline{F}}}$ is a distribution on $\operatorname{Gr}\!\left(k,D\right)$.
\end{proposition}
In the context of RCNF, Proposition \ref{proposition:probability_distribution_on_grassmann_manifold} implies that the application of a flow on $\operatorname{Gr}\!\left(k,D\right)$ to a prior distribution on $\operatorname{Gr}\!\left(k,D\right)$ results in a probability density on $\operatorname{Gr}\!\left(k,D\right)$.
Thus, the problem of constructing a probability density on $\operatorname{Gr}\!\left(k,D\right)$ is reduced to that of constructing a vector field on $\operatorname{Gr}\!\left(k,D\right)$.
\subsection{Prior Probability Density Function on $\operatorname{Gr}\!\left(k,D\right)$}
\label{subsec:prior_distribution_on_grassmann_manifold}
To construct a flow on $\operatorname{Gr}\!\left(k,D\right)$, a prior distribution that is easy to sample as a basis for the transformation is required, although the method for constructing such a distribution is non-trivial.
This study introduced a distribution based on the matrix-variate Gaussian distribution as a prior on $\operatorname{Gr}\!\left(k,D\right)$ that is easy to sample and construct a flow on $\operatorname{Gr}\!\left(k,D\right)$.
\begin{proposition}\label{proposition:prior_distribution_on_grassmannian}
The distribution $p_{\operatorname{Gr}\left(k,D\right)}$ on a Grassmann manifold $\operatorname{Gr}\!\left(k,D\right)$ based on the matrix-variate Gaussian distribution $\C{MN}$ can be expressed as follows.
\begin{equation}
p_{\operatorname{Gr}\left(k,D\right)}\LS{\GX; \G{\B{M}},\B{U},\B{V}} = V_{\operatorname{Gr}\left(k,D\right)} \C{MN}\LS{\Bxih{\B{M}}; \B{0},\B{U},\B{V}} \LA{\det\LS{\frac{d\overline{R}_{\B{M}}}{d\Bxih{\B{M}}}}},
\end{equation}
where $\B{M}$ is an orthonormal basis matrix denoting the mean of the distribution, $\B{U}$ is a positive definite matrix denoting the row directional variance, $\B{V}$ is a positive definite matrix denoting the column directional variance, and $\Bxih{\B{M}}$ is a random sample from $\C{MN}$ in an $k\LS{D-k}$-dimensional horizontal space $\Hor{\B{M}}$.
$V_{\operatorname{Gr}\left(k,D\right)}$ denotes the total volume of $\operatorname{Gr}\!\left(k,D\right)$ defined by (\ref{eq:integral_of_invariant_measur_on_grassmann_manifold}),
$\overline{R}_{\B{M}}$ denotes the horizontal retraction at $\B{M}$, and $\LA{\det\LS{\nicefrac{d\overline{R}_{\B{M}}}{d\Bxih{\B{M}}}}}$ denotes the Jacobian.
\end{proposition}
A retraction is a map for communicating data between a manifold and its tangent bundles, and is a first-order approximation of an exponential map (\cite{cayley_transform_based_ratraction_on_Grassmann_Manifolds}).
Various methods of retraction have been proposed (\cite{AbsMahSep2008,Tangent_Bundle_on_Grassmann_Manifolds,cayley_transform_based_ratraction_on_Grassmann_Manifolds}); particularly, the one based on the Cayley transform, which is differentiable and does not require matrix decomposition.
We use (\ref{eq:retraction_on_grassmann_manifold_with_horizontal_ratraction_economy1_fixed_time}) as a Cayley transform based horizontal retraction.
Further details are provided in Appendix~\ref{sec:retraction}.
\section{Learning Probability Densities with Flow}
\begin{figure}[t]
\begin{algorithm}[H]
\footnotesize
\caption{Random Sampling from $p_{\operatorname{Gr}\left(k,D\right)}\LS{\GX; \G{\B{M}},\B{U},\B{V}}$}
\label{alg:1}
\begin{algorithmic}[1]
\Require A mean matrix $\B{M}\in\operatorname{St}\!\left(k,D\right)$, a rows covariance matrix $\B{U}\in\mathbb{R}^{D\times D}$ and a columns covariance matrix $\B{V}\in\mathbb{R}^{k\times k}$.
\State Sample a $\U{Vec}\LS{\B{Z}}\in\mathbb{R}^{Dk}$ from Gaussian Distribution $\C{N}_{Dk}\LS{\B{0}, \B{V} \otimes \B{U}}$ and reshape to $\B{Z}\in\mathbb{R}^{D\times k}$.
\State Compute a projected horizontal vector $\overline{\BS{\xi}}^{\mathrm{h}}_{\B{M}} = \LS{\Ik{D} - \B{M}\B{M}^{\top}}\B{Z}$.
\State Compute a representative $\B{Y} = \overline{R}_{\B{M}}\LS{\overline{\BS{\xi}}^{\mathrm{h}}_{\B{M}}} = \B{M}+\overline{\BS{\xi}}^{\mathrm{h}}_{\B{M}}-\LS{\frac{1}{2} \B{M} + \frac{1}{4} \overline{\BS{\xi}}^{\mathrm{h}}_{\B{M}}}\LS{\Ik{k} + \frac{1}{4} \overline{\BS{\xi}}_{\B{M}}^{\mathrm{h}\top} \overline{\BS{\xi}}^{\mathrm{h}}_{\B{M}}}^{-1} \overline{\BS{\xi}}_{\B{M}}^{\mathrm{h}\top} \overline{\BS{\xi}}^{\mathrm{h}}_{\B{M}}$ of the equivalence class $\G{\B{Y}} \in \operatorname{Gr}\!\left(k,D\right)$.
\end{algorithmic}
\end{algorithm}
\vspace{-20pt}
\end{figure}
\subsection{Training Paradigms}
\label{subsec:training_paradigm}
Using the results of Section~\ref{sec:main_propositions_for_grassmann_flow}, a flow model on a Grassmann manifold $\operatorname{Gr}\!\left(k,D\right)$ is constructed.
This study describes the flow model on $\operatorname{Gr}\!\left(k,D\right)$ as \textbf{GrCNF}.
In the proposed GrCNF, the probability density function in Section~\ref{subsec:prior_distribution_on_grassmann_manifold} is first constructed as a prior distribution.
Subsequently, the vector field $\SU{X}_{\theta}: \operatorname{Gr}\!\left(k,D\right)\times\mathbb{R}\to \T{}{\,\operatorname{Gr}\!\left(k,D\right)}$ that generates the flow model $F_{\SU{X}_{\theta},T}$ is constructed using a neural network, wherein stepwise integration on the manifold occurs based on (\ref{eq:target_density_with_prior_integration}).
The RCNF (\cite{Emile2020_Riemannian_continuous_normalizing_flows}) framework is used for integration and divergence calculations.
In the integration steps, the ordinary differential equation (ODE) is solved using the ODE solver with orthogonal integration.
The learnable parameters are updated using backpropagation to maximize the sum of the computed log-likelihood.
Further details on our ODE solver and exact loss function can be found in Appendix~\ref{subsec:ode_solver_orthogonal_integration} and \ref{subsec:loss_function_for_grflow}.
\subsection{Sampling Algorithm from Prior}
\label{subsec:sampling_algorithm_on_grassmann_manifold}
We propose a sampling algorithm on $\operatorname{Gr}\!\left(k,D\right)$ derived from the Cayley transform, based on the results of Section~\ref{subsec:prior_distribution_on_grassmann_manifold}.
The algorithm of sampling from a distribution on $p_{\operatorname{Gr}\left(k,D\right)}$ is shown in Algorithm~\ref{alg:1}.
The $\U{Vec}$ denotes the map of vertically concatenating matrices and converting them into a vector.
\subsection{Construction of Vector Field}
\label{subsec:details_of_vector_field}
We describe the method to construct the vector field $\SU{X}_{\theta}: \operatorname{Gr}\!\left(k,D\right)\times\mathbb{R}\to \T{}{\,\operatorname{Gr}\!\left(k,D\right)}$ that generates the flow $F_{\SU{X}_{\theta},T}$.
The learnable parameters $\theta$ of $\SU{X}_{\theta}$ are feed forward neural networks, which accept the representative $\B{Y}\in\operatorname{St}\!\left(k,D\right)$ of $\GY$ on $\operatorname{Gr}\!\left(k,D\right)$ inputs and output a horizontal lift ${\Bxih{\B{Y}}}\inT^{\mathrm{h}}_{\Y}\St$ of $\BS{\xi}_{\GY}\inT_{\GY}\Gr$ that satisfies (\ref{eq:homogeneity_property}).
The structure of the $\SU{X}_{\theta}$ is extremely important because it directly determines the ability of the distribution to be represented.
To address these geometric properties, the following specific input and intermediate layers are used to obtain a $\C{O}\!\LS{k}$-invariant function value $v_{\operatorname{out}}$ for the output layer.
Subsequently, $\SU{X}_{\theta}$ is obtained by applying automatic differentiation (\cite{Paszke2019_autodiff_pytorch}) to $v_{\operatorname{out}}$ at the output layer.
Figure~\ref{fig:vector_field} shows a conceptual diagram of procedures for vector field calculation.
\input{figures/concepts/vector_field}
\paragraph{Input Layer}
The input layer maps the input representative $\B{Y}$ to a point $\overline{\BS{\zeta}}^{\mathrm{h}}_{\B{Y}}$ in the horizontal space $T^{\mathrm{h}}_{\Y}\St$.
The tangent space is $T^{\mathrm{h}}_{\Y}\St\cong\mathbb{R}^{\LS{D-k}\times k}$ because it is a linear space (\cite{AbsMahSep2008}).
A horizontal projection $\U{HorP}: \operatorname{St}\!\left(k,D\right)\to\mathbb{R}^{\LS{D-k}\times k}$ is constructed as an input layer.
\begin{equation}
\U{HorP}\LS{\B{Y}} = \LS{\Ik{D} - \B{Y}\Y^{\top}}\B{W},
\end{equation}
where $\B{W}$ is the weight.
$\U{HorP}$ is an orthogonal projection to a horizontal space $T^{\mathrm{h}}_{\Y}\St$ on $\operatorname{St}\!\left(k,D\right)$ at $\B{Y}$, with the ability to project $\B{W}$ onto horizontal space, that is, to obtain a representation of $\B{Y}$ on horizontal space.
\paragraph{Intermediate Layer}
To model the dynamics over horizontal space, intermediate layers based on neural networks are constructed.
The intermediate layers are particularly important for the power to represent the distribution, and although various configurations are possible, we specifically employ a time weighted $\U{TW}$ layer, a function that weights with time evolution.
\begin{equation}
\U{TW}\LS{\B{x},t} = \LS{\B{W}\B{x} + \B{b}} \sigma \LS{t},
\end{equation}
where $\B{W}$ and $\B{b}$ are the weight and the bias, $\sigma\LS{\cdot}$ denotes the sigmoid function.
The $\U{TL}$ layer can be stacked multiply, and the overall power of expression increases with increase in the number of layers.
The input $\B{x}$ of first intermediate layer is $\B{x} = \U{Vec}\circ\U{HorP}$.
The last intermediate layer (one layer before the output layer) must be constructed such that it exhibits a scalar function value (i.e., output size is 1).
This is to obtain the directional derivative for the output of the intermediate layer in the output layer.
\paragraph{Output Layer}
We construct a horizontal lift $\U{HorL}: \LS{\mathbb{R}, \operatorname{St}\!\left(k,D\right)}\toT^{\mathrm{h}}_{\Y}\St$ as an output layer.
In the horizontal lift layer $\U{HorL}$, a horizontal vector on the horizontal space $T^{\mathrm{h}}_{\Y}\St$ with the origin $\B{Y}$ is obtained by directional derivative of the intermediate layer $v_{\operatorname{out}}$ with $\B{Y}$.
\begin{equation}
\label{eq:HorL_layer}
\U{HorL}\LS{v_{\operatorname{out}}, \B{Y}} = P^{\operatorname{h}}_{\B{Y}}\LS{\U{autograd}\LS{v_{\operatorname{out}}, \B{Y}}} \;\text{s.t.}\; P^{\operatorname{h}}_{\B{Y}}\LS{\B{Z}} = \LS{\Ik{D} - \B{Y}\Y^{\top}}\B{Z},
\end{equation}
where $\U{autograd}\LS{v_{\operatorname{out}}, \B{Y}}$ is automatic differentiation (\cite{Paszke2019_autodiff_pytorch}) of $\B{Y}$ with respect to $v_{\operatorname{out}}$, and $P^{\operatorname{h}}_{\B{Y}}\LS{\B{Z}}$ is the projection of $\B{Z}$ onto the horizontal space $T^{\mathrm{h}}_{\Y}\St$ at $\B{Y}$.
\section{Experimental Results}
\label{sec:experiments}
In this section, we discuss the results of several experiments to evaluate the validity of GrCNF.
Further details regarding each experimental condition, such as the architectures and hyperparameters used in training, can be found in Appendix~\ref{subsec:implementation_details}.
\input{figures/exp/toy_experiment_result}
\subsection{Generation and Density Estimation on Artificial Textures}
We first train on five different $\Gra{1}{3}$ (1-dimensional subspace in $\mathbb{R}^3$, that is, a line through the origin) data to visualize the model and the trained dynamics.
The five datasets\footnote{We provide the code for the data distributions in Appendix~\ref{subsec:implementation_toy_2d_data}} were 2 spirals, Swissroll, 2 circles, 2 sines, and Target.
We represented $\Gra{1}{3}$ with a sphere of radius 1 centered at the origin by mapping a 1-dimensional subspace to two points on the sphere (a point on the sphere and its antipodal point) for visualization purposes.
\paragraph{Result}
The five types of probability densities transformed by GrCNF and the results of data generation are shown in Figure~\ref{fig:toy_experiment1}.
The top, middle and the bottom rows in the figure shows the correct data, the generated data with GrCNF when the left-most column is the prior distribution, and the probability density on a $\Gra{1}{3}$ obtained by training when the left-most column is the prior distribution, respectively.
The probability density indicates that brighter the region, higher is the probability.
The figure shows that GrCNF can generate high quality samples that are sufficiently accurate to the distribution of the correct data.
To investigate whether the GrCNF learns the distribution on $\Gra{1}{3}$, we generated antipodal points in Figure~\ref{fig:toy_experiment1} with trained GrCNF used in Figure~\ref{fig:toy_experiment1}.
As shown in Figure~\ref{fig:toy_experiment2}, GrCNF generated exactly the same high quality samples as the original for the untrained antipodal points.
This experimental result implies that the proposed flow accurately learns the distribution on a $\operatorname{Gr}\!\left(k,D\right)$ and that all the orthogonal transformed samples can be obtained with equal quality by only training with arbitrary representatives.
\subsection{Comparison with Conventional Methods on DW4 and LJ13}
\label{subsec:ex_dw4_lj13}
This study performed comparative experiments using DW4 and LJ13, the two systems presented by \cite{Kohler20EquivariantFlows}.
These data sets were generated synthetically by sampling from their respective energy functions using Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) methods.
Both energy functions (DW4 and LJ13) are ideal for analyzing the advantages of various methods when they exist on data that are equivariant for rotation and reflection, respectively.
We used the datasets generated by MCMC that have been used in \cite{Kohler20EquivariantFlows}.
The orthonormalized data $\B{Y}$ was used for this study by applying Gram-Schmidt's orthogonalization to each column of $\B{P}$ such that the $D$-dimensional data was a matrix with $k$ orthonormal basis vectors (DW4: $D=4,k=2$, LJ13: $D=13,k=3$).
To match the experiment conducted in \cite{Garcia21EnNF}, $1,000$ validation and testing samples each were used for both datasets.
For DW4 and LJ13, different numbers of training samples, $\LM{10^2, 10^3, 10^4, 10^5}$ and $\LM{10, 10^2, 10^3, 10^4}$, respectively, were selected and their performances for each amount of data were examined.
The proposed approach was compared to the state-of-the-art E($n$) equivariant flow (E-NF) presented by \cite{Garcia21EnNF} and Simple dynamics by \cite{Kohler20EquivariantFlows}.
In addition, comparisons with graph normalizing flow (GNF), GNF with attention (GNF-att), and GNF with attention and data augmentation (GNF-att-aug) (data augmentation by rotation), which are non-equivariant
variants of E-NF, were performed.
All reported values were averages of cross-validations (three runs).
Otherwise, the network structures of all these conventional methods were the same as in \cite{Garcia21EnNF}.
\paragraph{Result}
Table~\ref{table:dw4_lj_results} shows the results of the cross-validated experiments (Negative log-likelihood; NLL) for the test samples.
The proposed GrCNF outperformed both the conventional non-equivariant models (GNF, GNF-att and GNF-att-aug) and conventional equivariant models (Simple dynamics, E-NF) in all data domains.
\input{figures/exp/dw4_lj13/dw_lj_main}
\subsection{Comparison with Conventional Methods on QM9 Positional}
\label{subsec:ex_qm9}
A comparative experiment was performed using QM9 Positional, a subset of the QM9 molecular dataset that considers only positional information.
The purpose of this experiment was to evaluate the feasibility of generating a practical point cloud.
The QM9 Positional comprises only molecules with 19 atoms/nodes, and each node has a 3-dimensional position vector associated with it.
However, the likelihood of the molecules must be invariant to translation and rotation in 3-dimensional space; thus, the proposed model is suitable for this type of data.
The dataset consists of 13,831, 2501, and 1813 training, validation, and testing samples each.
In this experiment, we used evaluation metrics based on the NLL and Jensen-Shannon divergence (JSD) (\cite{Lin91JSD}), based on the experiments conducted in \cite{Garcia21EnNF}.
The JSD calculates the distance between the normalized histograms that are generated from the model and obtained from the training set, by creating a histogram of the relative distances between all the node pairs in each molecule.
GrCNF handles subspace data.
Therefore, orthonormalized data $\B{Y}$ was used only in the proposed GrCNF, as in $\B{P}\B{P}^\top\simeq\B{Y}\BS{\Lambda}\B{Y}^{\top} \;\text{s.t.}\; \BS{\Lambda}$ is diagonal (\cite{Huang15PML}), such that the $k$-dimensional point cloud data $\B{P}$ of $N$ points $N\times k$ matrix is a matrix with $k$ orthonormal basis vectors.
However, a complete point cloud generating task, such as QM9 Positional, must also store a scale parameter $\sqrt{\BS{\Lambda}}$ such that $\B{P} = \B{Y}\sqrt{\BS{\Lambda}}$.
Therefore, GrCNF incorporates an additional architecture to estimate $\sqrt{\BS{\Lambda}}$.
In addition, the proposed GrCNF encounters difficulties in computing the NLL in distribution $p_{\psi}\!\LS{\B{P}}$ of $\B{P}$; thus, a new loss function is required to address this.
This study maximized the evidence lower bound (ELBO), the lower bound of the log-likelihood $\log{p_{\psi}\!\LS{\B{P}}}$, using a variational inference framework.
This is equal to the minimization of $-\operatorname{ELBO}\LS{\B{P}}$.
Further details regarding ELBO can be found in Appendix~\ref{subsec:loss_function_for_grflow_vi}.
We compared our GrCNF with the GNF, GNF-att, GNF-att-aug, Simple dynamics, Kernel dynamics, and E-NF methods.
The network structure and experimental conditions for all of these conventional methods were the same as in \cite{Garcia21EnNF}.
Further, in all experiments, the training was done for 160 epochs.
The JSD values were the average of the last 10 epochs for all models.
\paragraph{Result}
Table~\ref{table:qm9_pos_results} (Left) shows the NLL, and JSD cross-validated against the test data.
Although the proposed GrCNF cannot directly compute the NLL in this problem setting, it can still be concluded that GrCNF outperformed all other algorithms because the relation $\text{NLL}\leq-\text{ELBO}$ is true in general.
With respect to JSD, GrCNF achieved the best performance.
Table~\ref{fig:qm9_pos_hist_results} (Right) shows the normalized histograms of the QM9 Positional molecular data and the generated data by GrCNF, in relation to the JSD of GrCNF, respectively.
This shows that the histograms of the molecules generated by GrCNF are close to the histograms of the data set; that is, GrCNF can generate realistic molecules.
\input{figures/exp/qm9/results}
\section{Conclusion}
This study proposed the concept of CNF on a Grassmann manifold (GrCNF).
This is a generative model that handles subspace data; that is, it is a continuous-time normalizing flow that considers the equivariance on the Stiefel manifold.
Through suitable experiments, the ability of the proposed GrNCF to generate qualitatively in 1-dimensional subspace datasets in $\mathbb{R}^3$ was confirmed. Further, it was demonstrated that GrCNF significantly outperformed existing normalizing flows methods in terms of log-likelihood or ELBO in DW4, LJ13, and QM9 Positional.
\label{sec:conclusion}
\paragraph{Further considerations}
Our work is concerned with accurately modelling data topology, so we do not expect there to be any negative consequence in our application field.
The proposed theory and implementation are valid in a remarkably general setting, although there are still certain limitations that can be addressed in future works:
\textbf{1.} The CNF introduces the adjoint method to reduce memory utilization; however, it was not used in this study because it must be executed on $\operatorname{Gr}\!\left(k,D\right)$.
\cite{lou2020_manifold_ODE} proposed a CNF on a manifold, and such a method must be introduced to GrCNF to handle larger and higher dimensional data sets in the future.
\textbf{2.} The proposed method requires a calculation of inverse matrix and projection operation onto the manifold at each ODE step (Appendix~\ref{subsec:ode_solver_orthogonal_integration}), which is computationally expensive.
\clearpage
\section*{Checklist}
The checklist follows the references. Please
read the checklist guidelines carefully for information on how to answer these
questions. For each question, change the default \answerTODO{} to \answerYes{},
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justification to your answer}, either by referencing the appropriate section of
your paper or providing a brief inline description. For example:
\begin{itemize}
\item Did you include the license to the code and datasets? \answerYes{See Section~.}
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Checklist section heading above along with the questions/answers below.
\begin{enumerate}
\item For all authors...
\begin{enumerate}
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| {
"redpajama_set_name": "RedPajamaArXiv"
} | 2,487 |
RSpec.describe Tagging::TaggingUpdatePublisher do
describe "#save_to_publishing_api" do
before do
stub_request(:patch, %r{https://publishing-api.test.gov.uk/v2/links/*}).to_return(status: 200)
end
let(:content_id) { "2797b5f2-7154-411e-9282-7756b78b22d6" }
let(:stubbed_content_item) do
instance_double(
ContentItem,
content_id:,
allowed_tag_types: %i[ordered_related_items ordered_related_items_overrides suggested_ordered_related_items],
)
end
it "converts base paths of related items into content IDs" do
stub_content_id_lookup("/my-page" => content_id)
update_taggings_with_params(ordered_related_items: ["/my-page"], ordered_related_items_overrides: ["/my-page"], suggested_ordered_related_items: ["/my-page"])
expect_links_to_have_been_published(ordered_related_items: [content_id], ordered_related_items_overrides: [content_id], suggested_ordered_related_items: [content_id])
end
it "generates a valid links payload using ordered_related_items and overrides" do
stub_content_id_lookup("/my-page" => content_id)
publisher = described_class.new(
stubbed_content_item,
taxons: %w[0ffd5e18-af20-4413-a215-8511cf7628b5],
ordered_related_items: ["/my-page"],
ordered_related_items_overrides: ["/my-page"],
suggested_ordered_related_items: ["/my-page"],
)
expect(links: publisher.generate_links_payload).to be_valid_against_links_schema("publication")
end
it "converts absolute paths of related items into content IDs" do
stub_content_id_lookup("/my-page" => content_id)
update_taggings_with_params(ordered_related_items: ["https://www.gov.uk/my-page"])
expect_links_to_have_been_published(ordered_related_items: [content_id], ordered_related_items_overrides: [], suggested_ordered_related_items: [])
end
it "is not valid if the provided base path does not exist" do
stub_content_id_lookup("/my-page" => nil)
response = described_class.new(
stubbed_content_item,
ordered_related_items: ["/my-page"],
)
expect(response.save_to_publishing_api).to be(false)
expect(response.related_item_errors).to eql("/my-page" => "Not a known URL on GOV.UK")
end
def expect_links_to_have_been_published(links)
expect(stub_request(:patch, %r{https://publishing-api.test.gov.uk/v2/links/*}).with(body: { links:, previous_version: 0 }.to_json)).to have_been_made
end
def update_taggings_with_params(controller_params)
Tagging::TaggingUpdatePublisher.new(stubbed_content_item, controller_params).save_to_publishing_api
end
def stub_content_id_lookup(response = {})
stub_request(:post, "https://publishing-api.test.gov.uk/lookup-by-base-path")
.with(body: { "base_paths" => response.keys })
.to_return(body: response.to_json)
end
end
end
| {
"redpajama_set_name": "RedPajamaGithub"
} | 3,921 |
Q: How to type following expression in Mathematica I want to eneter following expression in mathematica
$$\prod_a^3 \prod_{b\neq a}^3 \frac{x(a)}{b-a}$$
How is this extra condition in product entered in Mathematica?
Without the restriction, I would just use
Product[x[a]/(b - a), {a, 1, 3}, {b, 1, 3}]
Now with this restriction, I wrote something like
If[b != a, Product[x[a]/(b - a), {a, 1, 3}, {b, 1, 3}]]
But this does not seem to evaluate anything.
How do I put the condition $a\neq b$ in the product?
A: Product[x[a]/(b - a), {a, Range[3]}, {b, Complement[Range[3], {a}]}]
-(1/4) x[1]^2 x[2]^2 x[3]^2
A: Equivalent way, without excluding pairs in the iterator:
Product[Which[a != b, x[a]/(b - a), a == b, 1], {a, 3}, {b, 3}]
| {
"redpajama_set_name": "RedPajamaStackExchange"
} | 2,997 |
import itertools
import os
import re
import operator
from decimal import Decimal as D, ROUND_DOWN, ROUND_UP
from django.core import exceptions
from django.template.defaultfilters import date as date_filter
from django.db import models
from django.utils.encoding import python_2_unicode_compatible
from django.utils.timezone import now, get_current_timezone
from django.utils.translation import ungettext, ugettext_lazy as _
from django.utils.importlib import import_module
from django.utils import six
from django.core.exceptions import ValidationError
from django.core.urlresolvers import reverse
from django.conf import settings
from oscar.core.compat import AUTH_USER_MODEL
from oscar.core.loading import get_class, get_model
from oscar.apps.offer.managers import ActiveOfferManager
from oscar.templatetags.currency_filters import currency
from oscar.models import fields
BrowsableRangeManager = get_class('offer.managers', 'BrowsableRangeManager')
def load_proxy(proxy_class):
module, classname = proxy_class.rsplit('.', 1)
try:
mod = import_module(module)
except ImportError as e:
raise exceptions.ImproperlyConfigured(
"Error importing module %s: %s" % (module, e))
try:
return getattr(mod, classname)
except AttributeError:
raise exceptions.ImproperlyConfigured(
"Module %s does not define a %s" % (module, classname))
def range_anchor(range):
return u'<a href="%s">%s</a>' % (
reverse('dashboard:range-update', kwargs={'pk': range.pk}),
range.name)
def unit_price(offer, line):
"""
Return the relevant price for a given basket line.
This is required so offers can apply in circumstances where tax isn't known
"""
return line.unit_effective_price
def apply_discount(line, discount, quantity):
"""
Apply a given discount to the passed basket
"""
line.discount(discount, quantity, incl_tax=False)
@python_2_unicode_compatible
class ConditionalOffer(models.Model):
"""
A conditional offer (eg buy 1, get 10% off)
"""
name = models.CharField(
_("Name"), max_length=128, unique=True,
help_text=_("This is displayed within the customer's basket"))
slug = fields.AutoSlugField(
_("Slug"), max_length=128, unique=True, populate_from='name')
description = models.TextField(_("Description"), blank=True,
help_text=_("This is displayed on the offer"
" browsing page"))
# Offers come in a few different types:
# (a) Offers that are available to all customers on the site. Eg a
# 3-for-2 offer.
# (b) Offers that are linked to a voucher, and only become available once
# that voucher has been applied to the basket
# (c) Offers that are linked to a user. Eg, all students get 10% off. The
# code to apply this offer needs to be coded
# (d) Session offers - these are temporarily available to a user after some
# trigger event. Eg, users coming from some affiliate site get 10%
# off.
SITE, VOUCHER, USER, SESSION = ("Site", "Voucher", "User", "Session")
TYPE_CHOICES = (
(SITE, _("Site offer - available to all users")),
(VOUCHER, _("Voucher offer - only available after entering "
"the appropriate voucher code")),
(USER, _("User offer - available to certain types of user")),
(SESSION, _("Session offer - temporary offer, available for "
"a user for the duration of their session")),
)
offer_type = models.CharField(
_("Type"), choices=TYPE_CHOICES, default=SITE, max_length=128)
# We track a status variable so it's easier to load offers that are
# 'available' in some sense.
OPEN, SUSPENDED, CONSUMED = "Open", "Suspended", "Consumed"
status = models.CharField(_("Status"), max_length=64, default=OPEN)
condition = models.ForeignKey(
'offer.Condition', verbose_name=_("Condition"))
benefit = models.ForeignKey('offer.Benefit', verbose_name=_("Benefit"))
# Some complicated situations require offers to be applied in a set order.
priority = models.IntegerField(
_("Priority"), default=0,
help_text=_("The highest priority offers are applied first"))
# AVAILABILITY
# Range of availability. Note that if this is a voucher offer, then these
# dates are ignored and only the dates from the voucher are used to
# determine availability.
start_datetime = models.DateTimeField(
_("Start date"), blank=True, null=True)
end_datetime = models.DateTimeField(
_("End date"), blank=True, null=True,
help_text=_("Offers are active until the end of the 'end date'"))
# Use this field to limit the number of times this offer can be applied in
# total. Note that a single order can apply an offer multiple times so
# this is not the same as the number of orders that can use it.
max_global_applications = models.PositiveIntegerField(
_("Max global applications"),
help_text=_("The number of times this offer can be used before it "
"is unavailable"), blank=True, null=True)
# Use this field to limit the number of times this offer can be used by a
# single user. This only works for signed-in users - it doesn't really
# make sense for sites that allow anonymous checkout.
max_user_applications = models.PositiveIntegerField(
_("Max user applications"),
help_text=_("The number of times a single user can use this offer"),
blank=True, null=True)
# Use this field to limit the number of times this offer can be applied to
# a basket (and hence a single order).
max_basket_applications = models.PositiveIntegerField(
_("Max basket applications"),
blank=True, null=True,
help_text=_("The number of times this offer can be applied to a "
"basket (and order)"))
# Use this field to limit the amount of discount an offer can lead to.
# This can be helpful with budgeting.
max_discount = models.DecimalField(
_("Max discount"), decimal_places=2, max_digits=12, null=True,
blank=True,
help_text=_("When an offer has given more discount to orders "
"than this threshold, then the offer becomes "
"unavailable"))
# TRACKING
total_discount = models.DecimalField(
_("Total Discount"), decimal_places=2, max_digits=12,
default=D('0.00'))
num_applications = models.PositiveIntegerField(
_("Number of applications"), default=0)
num_orders = models.PositiveIntegerField(
_("Number of Orders"), default=0)
redirect_url = fields.ExtendedURLField(
_("URL redirect (optional)"), blank=True)
date_created = models.DateTimeField(_("Date Created"), auto_now_add=True)
objects = models.Manager()
active = ActiveOfferManager()
# We need to track the voucher that this offer came from (if it is a
# voucher offer)
_voucher = None
class Meta:
app_label = 'offer'
ordering = ['-priority']
verbose_name = _("Conditional offer")
verbose_name_plural = _("Conditional offers")
def save(self, *args, **kwargs):
# Check to see if consumption thresholds have been broken
if not self.is_suspended:
if self.get_max_applications() == 0:
self.status = self.CONSUMED
else:
self.status = self.OPEN
return super(ConditionalOffer, self).save(*args, **kwargs)
def get_absolute_url(self):
return reverse('offer:detail', kwargs={'slug': self.slug})
def __str__(self):
return self.name
def clean(self):
if (self.start_datetime and self.end_datetime and
self.start_datetime > self.end_datetime):
raise exceptions.ValidationError(
_('End date should be later than start date'))
@property
def is_open(self):
return self.status == self.OPEN
@property
def is_suspended(self):
return self.status == self.SUSPENDED
def suspend(self):
self.status = self.SUSPENDED
self.save()
suspend.alters_data = True
def unsuspend(self):
self.status = self.OPEN
self.save()
suspend.alters_data = True
def is_available(self, user=None, test_date=None):
"""
Test whether this offer is available to be used
"""
if self.is_suspended:
return False
if test_date is None:
test_date = now()
predicates = []
if self.start_datetime:
predicates.append(self.start_datetime > test_date)
if self.end_datetime:
predicates.append(test_date > self.end_datetime)
if any(predicates):
return False
return self.get_max_applications(user) > 0
def is_condition_satisfied(self, basket):
return self.condition.proxy().is_satisfied(self, basket)
def is_condition_partially_satisfied(self, basket):
return self.condition.proxy().is_partially_satisfied(self, basket)
def get_upsell_message(self, basket):
return self.condition.proxy().get_upsell_message(self, basket)
def apply_benefit(self, basket):
"""
Applies the benefit to the given basket and returns the discount.
"""
if not self.is_condition_satisfied(basket):
return ZERO_DISCOUNT
return self.benefit.proxy().apply(
basket, self.condition.proxy(), self)
def apply_deferred_benefit(self, basket, order, application):
"""
Applies any deferred benefits. These are things like adding loyalty
points to somone's account.
"""
return self.benefit.proxy().apply_deferred(basket, order, application)
def set_voucher(self, voucher):
self._voucher = voucher
def get_voucher(self):
return self._voucher
def get_max_applications(self, user=None):
"""
Return the number of times this offer can be applied to a basket for a
given user.
"""
if self.max_discount and self.total_discount >= self.max_discount:
return 0
# Hard-code a maximum value as we need some sensible upper limit for
# when there are not other caps.
limits = [10000]
if self.max_user_applications and user:
limits.append(max(0, self.max_user_applications -
self.get_num_user_applications(user)))
if self.max_basket_applications:
limits.append(self.max_basket_applications)
if self.max_global_applications:
limits.append(
max(0, self.max_global_applications - self.num_applications))
return min(limits)
def get_num_user_applications(self, user):
OrderDiscount = get_model('order', 'OrderDiscount')
aggregates = OrderDiscount.objects.filter(offer_id=self.id,
order__user=user)\
.aggregate(total=models.Sum('frequency'))
return aggregates['total'] if aggregates['total'] is not None else 0
def shipping_discount(self, charge):
return self.benefit.proxy().shipping_discount(charge)
def record_usage(self, discount):
self.num_applications += discount['freq']
self.total_discount += discount['discount']
self.num_orders += 1
self.save()
record_usage.alters_data = True
def availability_description(self):
"""
Return a description of when this offer is available
"""
restrictions = self.availability_restrictions()
descriptions = [r['description'] for r in restrictions]
return "<br/>".join(descriptions)
def availability_restrictions(self): # noqa (too complex (15))
restrictions = []
if self.is_suspended:
restrictions.append({
'description': _("Offer is suspended"),
'is_satisfied': False})
if self.max_global_applications:
remaining = self.max_global_applications - self.num_applications
desc = _("Limited to %(total)d uses (%(remainder)d remaining)") \
% {'total': self.max_global_applications,
'remainder': remaining}
restrictions.append({'description': desc,
'is_satisfied': remaining > 0})
if self.max_user_applications:
if self.max_user_applications == 1:
desc = _("Limited to 1 use per user")
else:
desc = _("Limited to %(total)d uses per user") \
% {'total': self.max_user_applications}
restrictions.append({'description': desc,
'is_satisfied': True})
if self.max_basket_applications:
if self.max_user_applications == 1:
desc = _("Limited to 1 use per basket")
else:
desc = _("Limited to %(total)d uses per basket") \
% {'total': self.max_basket_applications}
restrictions.append({
'description': desc,
'is_satisfied': True})
def hide_time_if_zero(dt):
# Only show hours/minutes if they have been specified
if dt.tzinfo:
localtime = dt.astimezone(get_current_timezone())
else:
localtime = dt
if localtime.hour == 0 and localtime.minute == 0:
return date_filter(localtime, settings.DATE_FORMAT)
return date_filter(localtime, settings.DATETIME_FORMAT)
if self.start_datetime or self.end_datetime:
today = now()
if self.start_datetime and self.end_datetime:
desc = _("Available between %(start)s and %(end)s") \
% {'start': hide_time_if_zero(self.start_datetime),
'end': hide_time_if_zero(self.end_datetime)}
is_satisfied \
= self.start_datetime <= today <= self.end_datetime
elif self.start_datetime:
desc = _("Available from %(start)s") % {
'start': hide_time_if_zero(self.start_datetime)}
is_satisfied = today >= self.start_datetime
elif self.end_datetime:
desc = _("Available until %(end)s") % {
'end': hide_time_if_zero(self.end_datetime)}
is_satisfied = today <= self.end_datetime
restrictions.append({
'description': desc,
'is_satisfied': is_satisfied})
if self.max_discount:
desc = _("Limited to a cost of %(max)s") % {
'max': currency(self.max_discount)}
restrictions.append({
'description': desc,
'is_satisfied': self.total_discount < self.max_discount})
return restrictions
@property
def has_products(self):
return self.condition.range is not None
def products(self):
"""
Return a queryset of products in this offer
"""
Product = get_model('catalogue', 'Product')
if not self.has_products:
return Product.objects.none()
cond_range = self.condition.range
if cond_range.includes_all_products:
# Return ALL the products
queryset = Product.browsable
else:
queryset = cond_range.included_products
return queryset.filter(is_discountable=True).exclude(
structure=Product.CHILD)
@python_2_unicode_compatible
class Condition(models.Model):
"""
A condition for an offer to be applied. You can either specify a custom
proxy class, or need to specify a type, range and value.
"""
COUNT, VALUE, COVERAGE = ("Count", "Value", "Coverage")
TYPE_CHOICES = (
(COUNT, _("Depends on number of items in basket that are in "
"condition range")),
(VALUE, _("Depends on value of items in basket that are in "
"condition range")),
(COVERAGE, _("Needs to contain a set number of DISTINCT items "
"from the condition range")))
range = models.ForeignKey(
'offer.Range', verbose_name=_("Range"), null=True, blank=True)
type = models.CharField(_('Type'), max_length=128, choices=TYPE_CHOICES,
blank=True)
value = fields.PositiveDecimalField(
_('Value'), decimal_places=2, max_digits=12, null=True, blank=True)
proxy_class = fields.NullCharField(
_("Custom class"), max_length=255, unique=True, default=None)
class Meta:
app_label = 'offer'
verbose_name = _("Condition")
verbose_name_plural = _("Conditions")
def proxy(self):
"""
Return the proxy model
"""
klassmap = {
self.COUNT: CountCondition,
self.VALUE: ValueCondition,
self.COVERAGE: CoverageCondition}
# Short-circuit logic if current class is already a proxy class.
if self.__class__ in klassmap.values():
return self
field_dict = dict(self.__dict__)
for field in list(field_dict.keys()):
if field.startswith('_'):
del field_dict[field]
if self.proxy_class:
klass = load_proxy(self.proxy_class)
# Short-circuit again.
if self.__class__ == klass:
return self
return klass(**field_dict)
if self.type in klassmap:
return klassmap[self.type](**field_dict)
raise RuntimeError("Unrecognised condition type (%s)" % self.type)
def __str__(self):
return self.name
@property
def name(self):
"""
A plaintext description of the condition. Every proxy class has to
implement it.
This is used in the dropdowns within the offer dashboard.
"""
return self.proxy().name
@property
def description(self):
"""
A description of the condition.
Defaults to the name. May contain HTML.
"""
return self.name
def consume_items(self, offer, basket, affected_lines):
pass
def is_satisfied(self, offer, basket):
"""
Determines whether a given basket meets this condition. This is
stubbed in this top-class object. The subclassing proxies are
responsible for implementing it correctly.
"""
return False
def is_partially_satisfied(self, offer, basket):
"""
Determine if the basket partially meets the condition. This is useful
for up-selling messages to entice customers to buy something more in
order to qualify for an offer.
"""
return False
def get_upsell_message(self, offer, basket):
return None
def can_apply_condition(self, line):
"""
Determines whether the condition can be applied to a given basket line
"""
if not line.stockrecord_id:
return False
product = line.product
return (self.range.contains_product(product)
and product.get_is_discountable())
def get_applicable_lines(self, offer, basket, most_expensive_first=True):
"""
Return line data for the lines that can be consumed by this condition
"""
line_tuples = []
for line in basket.all_lines():
if not self.can_apply_condition(line):
continue
price = unit_price(offer, line)
if not price:
continue
line_tuples.append((price, line))
key = operator.itemgetter(0)
if most_expensive_first:
return sorted(line_tuples, reverse=True, key=key)
return sorted(line_tuples, key=key)
@python_2_unicode_compatible
class Benefit(models.Model):
range = models.ForeignKey(
'offer.Range', null=True, blank=True, verbose_name=_("Range"))
# Benefit types
PERCENTAGE, FIXED, MULTIBUY, FIXED_PRICE = (
"Percentage", "Absolute", "Multibuy", "Fixed price")
SHIPPING_PERCENTAGE, SHIPPING_ABSOLUTE, SHIPPING_FIXED_PRICE = (
'Shipping percentage', 'Shipping absolute', 'Shipping fixed price')
TYPE_CHOICES = (
(PERCENTAGE, _("Discount is a percentage off of the product's value")),
(FIXED, _("Discount is a fixed amount off of the product's value")),
(MULTIBUY, _("Discount is to give the cheapest product for free")),
(FIXED_PRICE,
_("Get the products that meet the condition for a fixed price")),
(SHIPPING_ABSOLUTE,
_("Discount is a fixed amount of the shipping cost")),
(SHIPPING_FIXED_PRICE, _("Get shipping for a fixed price")),
(SHIPPING_PERCENTAGE, _("Discount is a percentage off of the shipping"
" cost")),
)
type = models.CharField(
_("Type"), max_length=128, choices=TYPE_CHOICES, blank=True)
# The value to use with the designated type. This can be either an integer
# (eg for multibuy) or a decimal (eg an amount) which is slightly
# confusing.
value = fields.PositiveDecimalField(
_("Value"), decimal_places=2, max_digits=12, null=True, blank=True)
# If this is not set, then there is no upper limit on how many products
# can be discounted by this benefit.
max_affected_items = models.PositiveIntegerField(
_("Max Affected Items"), blank=True, null=True,
help_text=_("Set this to prevent the discount consuming all items "
"within the range that are in the basket."))
# A custom benefit class can be used instead. This means the
# type/value/max_affected_items fields should all be None.
proxy_class = fields.NullCharField(
_("Custom class"), max_length=255, unique=True, default=None)
class Meta:
app_label = 'offer'
verbose_name = _("Benefit")
verbose_name_plural = _("Benefits")
def proxy(self):
klassmap = {
self.PERCENTAGE: PercentageDiscountBenefit,
self.FIXED: AbsoluteDiscountBenefit,
self.MULTIBUY: MultibuyDiscountBenefit,
self.FIXED_PRICE: FixedPriceBenefit,
self.SHIPPING_ABSOLUTE: ShippingAbsoluteDiscountBenefit,
self.SHIPPING_FIXED_PRICE: ShippingFixedPriceBenefit,
self.SHIPPING_PERCENTAGE: ShippingPercentageDiscountBenefit}
# Short-circuit logic if current class is already a proxy class.
if self.__class__ in klassmap.values():
return self
field_dict = dict(self.__dict__)
for field in list(field_dict.keys()):
if field.startswith('_'):
del field_dict[field]
if self.proxy_class:
klass = load_proxy(self.proxy_class)
# Short-circuit again.
if self.__class__ == klass:
return self
return klass(**field_dict)
if self.type in klassmap:
return klassmap[self.type](**field_dict)
raise RuntimeError("Unrecognised benefit type (%s)" % self.type)
def __str__(self):
return self.name
@property
def name(self):
"""
A plaintext description of the benefit. Every proxy class has to
implement it.
This is used in the dropdowns within the offer dashboard.
"""
return self.proxy().name
@property
def description(self):
"""
A description of the benefit.
Defaults to the name. May contain HTML.
"""
return self.name
def apply(self, basket, condition, offer):
return ZERO_DISCOUNT
def apply_deferred(self, basket, order, application):
return None
def clean(self):
if not self.type:
return
method_name = 'clean_%s' % self.type.lower().replace(' ', '_')
if hasattr(self, method_name):
getattr(self, method_name)()
def clean_multibuy(self):
if not self.range:
raise ValidationError(
_("Multibuy benefits require a product range"))
if self.value:
raise ValidationError(
_("Multibuy benefits don't require a value"))
if self.max_affected_items:
raise ValidationError(
_("Multibuy benefits don't require a 'max affected items' "
"attribute"))
def clean_percentage(self):
if not self.range:
raise ValidationError(
_("Percentage benefits require a product range"))
if self.value > 100:
raise ValidationError(
_("Percentage discount cannot be greater than 100"))
def clean_shipping_absolute(self):
if not self.value:
raise ValidationError(
_("A discount value is required"))
if self.range:
raise ValidationError(
_("No range should be selected as this benefit does not "
"apply to products"))
if self.max_affected_items:
raise ValidationError(
_("Shipping discounts don't require a 'max affected items' "
"attribute"))
def clean_shipping_percentage(self):
if self.value > 100:
raise ValidationError(
_("Percentage discount cannot be greater than 100"))
if self.range:
raise ValidationError(
_("No range should be selected as this benefit does not "
"apply to products"))
if self.max_affected_items:
raise ValidationError(
_("Shipping discounts don't require a 'max affected items' "
"attribute"))
def clean_shipping_fixed_price(self):
if self.range:
raise ValidationError(
_("No range should be selected as this benefit does not "
"apply to products"))
if self.max_affected_items:
raise ValidationError(
_("Shipping discounts don't require a 'max affected items' "
"attribute"))
def clean_fixed_price(self):
if self.range:
raise ValidationError(
_("No range should be selected as the condition range will "
"be used instead."))
def clean_absolute(self):
if not self.range:
raise ValidationError(
_("Fixed discount benefits require a product range"))
if not self.value:
raise ValidationError(
_("Fixed discount benefits require a value"))
def round(self, amount):
"""
Apply rounding to discount amount
"""
if hasattr(settings, 'OSCAR_OFFER_ROUNDING_FUNCTION'):
return settings.OSCAR_OFFER_ROUNDING_FUNCTION(amount)
return amount.quantize(D('.01'), ROUND_DOWN)
def _effective_max_affected_items(self):
"""
Return the maximum number of items that can have a discount applied
during the application of this benefit
"""
return self.max_affected_items if self.max_affected_items else 10000
def can_apply_benefit(self, line):
"""
Determines whether the benefit can be applied to a given basket line
"""
return line.stockrecord and line.product.is_discountable
def get_applicable_lines(self, offer, basket, range=None):
"""
Return the basket lines that are available to be discounted
:basket: The basket
:range: The range of products to use for filtering. The fixed-price
benefit ignores its range and uses the condition range
"""
if range is None:
range = self.range
line_tuples = []
for line in basket.all_lines():
product = line.product
if (not range.contains(product) or
not self.can_apply_benefit(line)):
continue
price = unit_price(offer, line)
if not price:
# Avoid zero price products
continue
if line.quantity_without_discount == 0:
continue
line_tuples.append((price, line))
# We sort lines to be cheapest first to ensure consistent applications
return sorted(line_tuples, key=operator.itemgetter(0))
def shipping_discount(self, charge):
return D('0.00')
@python_2_unicode_compatible
class Range(models.Model):
"""
Represents a range of products that can be used within an offer.
Ranges only support adding parent or stand-alone products. Offers will
consider child products automatically.
"""
name = models.CharField(_("Name"), max_length=128, unique=True)
slug = fields.AutoSlugField(
_("Slug"), max_length=128, unique=True, populate_from="name")
description = models.TextField(blank=True)
# Whether this range is public
is_public = models.BooleanField(
_('Is public?'), default=False,
help_text=_("Public ranges have a customer-facing page"))
includes_all_products = models.BooleanField(
_('Includes all products?'), default=False)
included_products = models.ManyToManyField(
'catalogue.Product', related_name='includes', blank=True,
verbose_name=_("Included Products"), through='offer.RangeProduct')
excluded_products = models.ManyToManyField(
'catalogue.Product', related_name='excludes', blank=True,
verbose_name=_("Excluded Products"))
classes = models.ManyToManyField(
'catalogue.ProductClass', related_name='classes', blank=True,
verbose_name=_("Product Types"))
included_categories = models.ManyToManyField(
'catalogue.Category', related_name='includes', blank=True,
verbose_name=_("Included Categories"))
# Allow a custom range instance to be specified
proxy_class = fields.NullCharField(
_("Custom class"), max_length=255, default=None, unique=True)
date_created = models.DateTimeField(_("Date Created"), auto_now_add=True)
__included_product_ids = None
__excluded_product_ids = None
__class_ids = None
objects = models.Manager()
browsable = BrowsableRangeManager()
class Meta:
app_label = 'offer'
verbose_name = _("Range")
verbose_name_plural = _("Ranges")
def __str__(self):
return self.name
def get_absolute_url(self):
return reverse(
'catalogue:range', kwargs={'slug': self.slug})
def add_product(self, product, display_order=None):
""" Add product to the range
When adding product that is already in the range, prevent re-adding it.
If display_order is specified, update it.
Default display_order for a new product in the range is 0; this puts
the product at the top of the list.
"""
if product.is_child:
raise ValueError(
"Ranges can only contain parent and stand-alone products.")
initial_order = display_order or 0
relation, __ = RangeProduct.objects.get_or_create(
range=self, product=product,
defaults={'display_order': initial_order})
if (display_order is not None and
relation.display_order != display_order):
relation.display_order = display_order
relation.save()
def remove_product(self, product):
"""
Remove product from range. To save on queries, this function does not
check if the product is in fact in the range.
"""
RangeProduct.objects.filter(range=self, product=product).delete()
def contains_product(self, product): # noqa (too complex (12))
"""
Check whether the passed product is part of this range.
"""
# Child products are never part of the range, but the parent may be.
if product.is_child:
product = product.parent
# Delegate to a proxy class if one is provided
if self.proxy_class:
return load_proxy(self.proxy_class)().contains_product(product)
excluded_product_ids = self._excluded_product_ids()
if product.id in excluded_product_ids:
return False
if self.includes_all_products:
return True
if product.product_class_id in self._class_ids():
return True
included_product_ids = self._included_product_ids()
if product.id in included_product_ids:
return True
test_categories = self.included_categories.all()
if test_categories:
for category in product.get_categories().all():
for test_category in test_categories:
if category == test_category \
or category.is_descendant_of(test_category):
return True
return False
# Shorter alias
contains = contains_product
def __get_pks_and_child_pks(self, queryset):
"""
Expects a product queryset; gets the primary keys of the passed
products and their children.
Verbose, but database and memory friendly.
"""
# One query to get parent and children; [(4, None), (5, 10), (5, 11)]
pk_tuples_iterable = queryset.values_list('pk', 'children__pk')
# Flatten list without unpacking; [4, None, 5, 10, 5, 11]
flat_iterable = itertools.chain.from_iterable(pk_tuples_iterable)
# Ensure uniqueness and remove None; {4, 5, 10, 11}
return set(flat_iterable) - {None}
def _included_product_ids(self):
if not self.id:
return []
if self.__included_product_ids is None:
self.__included_product_ids = self.__get_pks_and_child_pks(
self.included_products)
return self.__included_product_ids
def _excluded_product_ids(self):
if not self.id:
return []
if self.__excluded_product_ids is None:
self.__excluded_product_ids = self.__get_pks_and_child_pks(
self.excluded_products)
return self.__excluded_product_ids
def _class_ids(self):
if None == self.__class_ids:
self.__class_ids = self.classes.values_list('pk', flat=True)
return self.__class_ids
def num_products(self):
# Delegate to a proxy class if one is provided
if self.proxy_class:
return load_proxy(self.proxy_class)().num_products()
if self.includes_all_products:
return None
return self.included_products.all().count()
@property
def is_editable(self):
"""
Test whether this product can be edited in the dashboard
"""
return not self.proxy_class
class RangeProduct(models.Model):
""" Allow ordering products inside ranges """
range = models.ForeignKey('offer.Range')
product = models.ForeignKey('catalogue.Product')
display_order = models.IntegerField(default=0)
class Meta:
app_label = 'offer'
unique_together = ('range', 'product')
# ==========
# Conditions
# ==========
class CountCondition(Condition):
"""
An offer condition dependent on the NUMBER of matching items from the
basket.
"""
_description = _("Basket includes %(count)d item(s) from %(range)s")
@property
def name(self):
return self._description % {
'count': self.value,
'range': six.text_type(self.range).lower()}
@property
def description(self):
return self._description % {
'count': self.value,
'range': range_anchor(self.range)}
class Meta:
app_label = 'offer'
proxy = True
verbose_name = _("Count condition")
verbose_name_plural = _("Count conditions")
def is_satisfied(self, offer, basket):
"""
Determines whether a given basket meets this condition
"""
num_matches = 0
for line in basket.all_lines():
if (self.can_apply_condition(line)
and line.quantity_without_discount > 0):
num_matches += line.quantity_without_discount
if num_matches >= self.value:
return True
return False
def _get_num_matches(self, basket):
if hasattr(self, '_num_matches'):
return getattr(self, '_num_matches')
num_matches = 0
for line in basket.all_lines():
if (self.can_apply_condition(line)
and line.quantity_without_discount > 0):
num_matches += line.quantity_without_discount
self._num_matches = num_matches
return num_matches
def is_partially_satisfied(self, offer, basket):
num_matches = self._get_num_matches(basket)
return 0 < num_matches < self.value
def get_upsell_message(self, offer, basket):
num_matches = self._get_num_matches(basket)
delta = self.value - num_matches
return ungettext('Buy %(delta)d more product from %(range)s',
'Buy %(delta)d more products from %(range)s', delta) \
% {'delta': delta, 'range': self.range}
def consume_items(self, offer, basket, affected_lines):
"""
Marks items within the basket lines as consumed so they
can't be reused in other offers.
:basket: The basket
:affected_lines: The lines that have been affected by the discount.
This should be list of tuples (line, discount, qty)
"""
# We need to count how many items have already been consumed as part of
# applying the benefit, so we don't consume too many items.
num_consumed = 0
for line, __, quantity in affected_lines:
num_consumed += quantity
to_consume = max(0, self.value - num_consumed)
if to_consume == 0:
return
for __, line in self.get_applicable_lines(offer, basket,
most_expensive_first=True):
quantity_to_consume = min(line.quantity_without_discount,
to_consume)
line.consume(quantity_to_consume)
to_consume -= quantity_to_consume
if to_consume == 0:
break
class CoverageCondition(Condition):
"""
An offer condition dependent on the number of DISTINCT matching items from
the basket.
"""
_description = _("Basket includes %(count)d distinct item(s) from"
" %(range)s")
@property
def name(self):
return self._description % {
'count': self.value,
'range': six.text_type(self.range).lower()}
@property
def description(self):
return self._description % {
'count': self.value,
'range': range_anchor(self.range)}
class Meta:
app_label = 'offer'
proxy = True
verbose_name = _("Coverage Condition")
verbose_name_plural = _("Coverage Conditions")
def is_satisfied(self, offer, basket):
"""
Determines whether a given basket meets this condition
"""
covered_ids = []
for line in basket.all_lines():
if not line.is_available_for_discount:
continue
product = line.product
if (self.can_apply_condition(line) and product.id not in
covered_ids):
covered_ids.append(product.id)
if len(covered_ids) >= self.value:
return True
return False
def _get_num_covered_products(self, basket):
covered_ids = []
for line in basket.all_lines():
if not line.is_available_for_discount:
continue
product = line.product
if (self.can_apply_condition(line) and product.id not in
covered_ids):
covered_ids.append(product.id)
return len(covered_ids)
def get_upsell_message(self, offer, basket):
delta = self.value - self._get_num_covered_products(basket)
return ungettext('Buy %(delta)d more product from %(range)s',
'Buy %(delta)d more products from %(range)s', delta) \
% {'delta': delta, 'range': self.range}
def is_partially_satisfied(self, offer, basket):
return 0 < self._get_num_covered_products(basket) < self.value
def consume_items(self, offer, basket, affected_lines):
"""
Marks items within the basket lines as consumed so they
can't be reused in other offers.
"""
# Determine products that have already been consumed by applying the
# benefit
consumed_products = []
for line, __, quantity in affected_lines:
consumed_products.append(line.product)
to_consume = max(0, self.value - len(consumed_products))
if to_consume == 0:
return
for line in basket.all_lines():
product = line.product
if not self.can_apply_condition(line):
continue
if product in consumed_products:
continue
if not line.is_available_for_discount:
continue
# Only consume a quantity of 1 from each line
line.consume(1)
consumed_products.append(product)
to_consume -= 1
if to_consume == 0:
break
def get_value_of_satisfying_items(self, offer, basket):
covered_ids = []
value = D('0.00')
for line in basket.all_lines():
if (self.can_apply_condition(line) and line.product.id not in
covered_ids):
covered_ids.append(line.product.id)
value += unit_price(offer, line)
if len(covered_ids) >= self.value:
return value
return value
class ValueCondition(Condition):
"""
An offer condition dependent on the VALUE of matching items from the
basket.
"""
_description = _("Basket includes %(amount)s from %(range)s")
@property
def name(self):
return self._description % {
'amount': currency(self.value),
'range': six.text_type(self.range).lower()}
@property
def description(self):
return self._description % {
'amount': currency(self.value),
'range': range_anchor(self.range)}
class Meta:
app_label = 'offer'
proxy = True
verbose_name = _("Value condition")
verbose_name_plural = _("Value conditions")
def is_satisfied(self, offer, basket):
"""
Determine whether a given basket meets this condition
"""
value_of_matches = D('0.00')
for line in basket.all_lines():
if (self.can_apply_condition(line) and
line.quantity_without_discount > 0):
price = unit_price(offer, line)
value_of_matches += price * int(line.quantity_without_discount)
if value_of_matches >= self.value:
return True
return False
def _get_value_of_matches(self, offer, basket):
if hasattr(self, '_value_of_matches'):
return getattr(self, '_value_of_matches')
value_of_matches = D('0.00')
for line in basket.all_lines():
if (self.can_apply_condition(line) and
line.quantity_without_discount > 0):
price = unit_price(offer, line)
value_of_matches += price * int(line.quantity_without_discount)
self._value_of_matches = value_of_matches
return value_of_matches
def is_partially_satisfied(self, offer, basket):
value_of_matches = self._get_value_of_matches(offer, basket)
return D('0.00') < value_of_matches < self.value
def get_upsell_message(self, offer, basket):
value_of_matches = self._get_value_of_matches(offer, basket)
return _('Spend %(value)s more from %(range)s') % {
'value': currency(self.value - value_of_matches),
'range': self.range}
def consume_items(self, offer, basket, affected_lines):
"""
Marks items within the basket lines as consumed so they
can't be reused in other offers.
We allow lines to be passed in as sometimes we want them sorted
in a specific order.
"""
# Determine value of items already consumed as part of discount
value_consumed = D('0.00')
for line, __, qty in affected_lines:
price = unit_price(offer, line)
value_consumed += price * qty
to_consume = max(0, self.value - value_consumed)
if to_consume == 0:
return
for price, line in self.get_applicable_lines(
offer, basket, most_expensive_first=True):
quantity_to_consume = min(
line.quantity_without_discount,
(to_consume / price).quantize(D(1), ROUND_UP))
line.consume(quantity_to_consume)
to_consume -= price * quantity_to_consume
if to_consume <= 0:
break
# ============
# Result types
# ============
class ApplicationResult(object):
is_final = is_successful = False
# Basket discount
discount = D('0.00')
description = None
# Offer applications can affect 3 distinct things
# (a) Give a discount off the BASKET total
# (b) Give a discount off the SHIPPING total
# (a) Trigger a post-order action
BASKET, SHIPPING, POST_ORDER = 0, 1, 2
affects = None
@property
def affects_basket(self):
return self.affects == self.BASKET
@property
def affects_shipping(self):
return self.affects == self.SHIPPING
@property
def affects_post_order(self):
return self.affects == self.POST_ORDER
class BasketDiscount(ApplicationResult):
"""
For when an offer application leads to a simple discount off the basket's
total
"""
affects = ApplicationResult.BASKET
def __init__(self, amount):
self.discount = amount
@property
def is_successful(self):
return self.discount > 0
def __str__(self):
return '<Basket discount of %s>' % self.discount
def __repr__(self):
return '%s(%r)' % (self.__class__.__name__, self.discount)
# Helper global as returning zero discount is quite common
ZERO_DISCOUNT = BasketDiscount(D('0.00'))
class ShippingDiscount(ApplicationResult):
"""
For when an offer application leads to a discount from the shipping cost
"""
is_successful = is_final = True
affects = ApplicationResult.SHIPPING
SHIPPING_DISCOUNT = ShippingDiscount()
class PostOrderAction(ApplicationResult):
"""
For when an offer condition is met but the benefit is deferred until after
the order has been placed. Eg buy 2 books and get 100 loyalty points.
"""
is_final = is_successful = True
affects = ApplicationResult.POST_ORDER
def __init__(self, description):
self.description = description
# ========
# Benefits
# ========
class PercentageDiscountBenefit(Benefit):
"""
An offer benefit that gives a percentage discount
"""
_description = _("%(value)s%% discount on %(range)s")
@property
def name(self):
return self._description % {
'value': self.value,
'range': self.range.name}
@property
def description(self):
return self._description % {
'value': self.value,
'range': range_anchor(self.range)}
class Meta:
app_label = 'offer'
proxy = True
verbose_name = _("Percentage discount benefit")
verbose_name_plural = _("Percentage discount benefits")
def apply(self, basket, condition, offer, discount_percent=None,
max_total_discount=None):
if discount_percent is None:
discount_percent = self.value
discount_amount_available = max_total_discount
line_tuples = self.get_applicable_lines(offer, basket)
discount = D('0.00')
affected_items = 0
max_affected_items = self._effective_max_affected_items()
affected_lines = []
for price, line in line_tuples:
if affected_items >= max_affected_items:
break
if discount_amount_available == 0:
break
quantity_affected = min(line.quantity_without_discount,
max_affected_items - affected_items)
line_discount = self.round(discount_percent / D('100.0') * price
* int(quantity_affected))
if discount_amount_available is not None:
line_discount = min(line_discount, discount_amount_available)
discount_amount_available -= line_discount
apply_discount(line, line_discount, quantity_affected)
affected_lines.append((line, line_discount, quantity_affected))
affected_items += quantity_affected
discount += line_discount
if discount > 0:
condition.consume_items(offer, basket, affected_lines)
return BasketDiscount(discount)
class AbsoluteDiscountBenefit(Benefit):
"""
An offer benefit that gives an absolute discount
"""
_description = _("%(value)s discount on %(range)s")
@property
def name(self):
return self._description % {
'value': currency(self.value),
'range': self.range.name.lower()}
@property
def description(self):
return self._description % {
'value': currency(self.value),
'range': range_anchor(self.range)}
class Meta:
app_label = 'offer'
proxy = True
verbose_name = _("Absolute discount benefit")
verbose_name_plural = _("Absolute discount benefits")
def apply(self, basket, condition, offer, discount_amount=None,
max_total_discount=None):
if discount_amount is None:
discount_amount = self.value
# Fetch basket lines that are in the range and available to be used in
# an offer.
line_tuples = self.get_applicable_lines(offer, basket)
# Determine which lines can have the discount applied to them
max_affected_items = self._effective_max_affected_items()
num_affected_items = 0
affected_items_total = D('0.00')
lines_to_discount = []
for price, line in line_tuples:
if num_affected_items >= max_affected_items:
break
qty = min(line.quantity_without_discount,
max_affected_items - num_affected_items)
lines_to_discount.append((line, price, qty))
num_affected_items += qty
affected_items_total += qty * price
# Ensure we don't try to apply a discount larger than the total of the
# matching items.
discount = min(discount_amount, affected_items_total)
if max_total_discount is not None:
discount = min(discount, max_total_discount)
if discount == 0:
return ZERO_DISCOUNT
# Apply discount equally amongst them
affected_lines = []
applied_discount = D('0.00')
for i, (line, price, qty) in enumerate(lines_to_discount):
if i == len(lines_to_discount) - 1:
# If last line, then take the delta as the discount to ensure
# the total discount is correct and doesn't mismatch due to
# rounding.
line_discount = discount - applied_discount
else:
# Calculate a weighted discount for the line
line_discount = self.round(
((price * qty) / affected_items_total) * discount)
apply_discount(line, line_discount, qty)
affected_lines.append((line, line_discount, qty))
applied_discount += line_discount
condition.consume_items(offer, basket, affected_lines)
return BasketDiscount(discount)
class FixedPriceBenefit(Benefit):
"""
An offer benefit that gives the items in the condition for a
fixed price. This is useful for "bundle" offers.
Note that we ignore the benefit range here and only give a fixed price
for the products in the condition range. The condition cannot be a value
condition.
We also ignore the max_affected_items setting.
"""
_description = _("The products that meet the condition are sold "
"for %(amount)s")
@property
def name(self):
return self._description % {
'amount': currency(self.value)}
class Meta:
app_label = 'offer'
proxy = True
verbose_name = _("Fixed price benefit")
verbose_name_plural = _("Fixed price benefits")
def apply(self, basket, condition, offer): # noqa (too complex (10))
if isinstance(condition, ValueCondition):
return ZERO_DISCOUNT
# Fetch basket lines that are in the range and available to be used in
# an offer.
line_tuples = self.get_applicable_lines(offer, basket,
range=condition.range)
if not line_tuples:
return ZERO_DISCOUNT
# Determine the lines to consume
num_permitted = int(condition.value)
num_affected = 0
value_affected = D('0.00')
covered_lines = []
for price, line in line_tuples:
if isinstance(condition, CoverageCondition):
quantity_affected = 1
else:
quantity_affected = min(
line.quantity_without_discount,
num_permitted - num_affected)
num_affected += quantity_affected
value_affected += quantity_affected * price
covered_lines.append((price, line, quantity_affected))
if num_affected >= num_permitted:
break
discount = max(value_affected - self.value, D('0.00'))
if not discount:
return ZERO_DISCOUNT
# Apply discount to the affected lines
discount_applied = D('0.00')
last_line = covered_lines[-1][1]
for price, line, quantity in covered_lines:
if line == last_line:
# If last line, we just take the difference to ensure that
# rounding doesn't lead to an off-by-one error
line_discount = discount - discount_applied
else:
line_discount = self.round(
discount * (price * quantity) / value_affected)
apply_discount(line, line_discount, quantity)
discount_applied += line_discount
return BasketDiscount(discount)
class MultibuyDiscountBenefit(Benefit):
_description = _("Cheapest product from %(range)s is free")
@property
def name(self):
return self._description % {
'range': self.range.name.lower()}
@property
def description(self):
return self._description % {
'range': range_anchor(self.range)}
class Meta:
app_label = 'offer'
proxy = True
verbose_name = _("Multibuy discount benefit")
verbose_name_plural = _("Multibuy discount benefits")
def apply(self, basket, condition, offer):
line_tuples = self.get_applicable_lines(offer, basket)
if not line_tuples:
return ZERO_DISCOUNT
# Cheapest line gives free product
discount, line = line_tuples[0]
apply_discount(line, discount, 1)
affected_lines = [(line, discount, 1)]
condition.consume_items(offer, basket, affected_lines)
return BasketDiscount(discount)
# =================
# Shipping benefits
# =================
class ShippingBenefit(Benefit):
def apply(self, basket, condition, offer):
condition.consume_items(offer, basket, affected_lines=())
return SHIPPING_DISCOUNT
class Meta:
app_label = 'offer'
proxy = True
class ShippingAbsoluteDiscountBenefit(ShippingBenefit):
_description = _("%(amount)s off shipping cost")
@property
def name(self):
return self._description % {
'amount': currency(self.value)}
class Meta:
app_label = 'offer'
proxy = True
verbose_name = _("Shipping absolute discount benefit")
verbose_name_plural = _("Shipping absolute discount benefits")
def shipping_discount(self, charge):
return min(charge, self.value)
class ShippingFixedPriceBenefit(ShippingBenefit):
_description = _("Get shipping for %(amount)s")
@property
def name(self):
return self._description % {
'amount': currency(self.value)}
class Meta:
app_label = 'offer'
proxy = True
verbose_name = _("Fixed price shipping benefit")
verbose_name_plural = _("Fixed price shipping benefits")
def shipping_discount(self, charge):
if charge < self.value:
return D('0.00')
return charge - self.value
class ShippingPercentageDiscountBenefit(ShippingBenefit):
_description = _("%(value)s%% off of shipping cost")
@property
def name(self):
return self._description % {
'value': self.value}
class Meta:
app_label = 'offer'
proxy = True
verbose_name = _("Shipping percentage discount benefit")
verbose_name_plural = _("Shipping percentage discount benefits")
def shipping_discount(self, charge):
discount = charge * self.value / D('100.0')
return discount.quantize(D('0.01'))
class RangeProductFileUpload(models.Model):
range = models.ForeignKey('offer.Range', related_name='file_uploads',
verbose_name=_("Range"))
filepath = models.CharField(_("File Path"), max_length=255)
size = models.PositiveIntegerField(_("Size"))
uploaded_by = models.ForeignKey(AUTH_USER_MODEL,
verbose_name=_("Uploaded By"))
date_uploaded = models.DateTimeField(_("Date Uploaded"), auto_now_add=True)
PENDING, FAILED, PROCESSED = 'Pending', 'Failed', 'Processed'
choices = (
(PENDING, PENDING),
(FAILED, FAILED),
(PROCESSED, PROCESSED),
)
status = models.CharField(_("Status"), max_length=32, choices=choices,
default=PENDING)
error_message = models.CharField(_("Error Message"), max_length=255,
blank=True)
# Post-processing audit fields
date_processed = models.DateTimeField(_("Date Processed"), null=True)
num_new_skus = models.PositiveIntegerField(_("Number of New SKUs"),
null=True)
num_unknown_skus = models.PositiveIntegerField(_("Number of Unknown SKUs"),
null=True)
num_duplicate_skus = models.PositiveIntegerField(
_("Number of Duplicate SKUs"), null=True)
class Meta:
app_label = 'offer'
ordering = ('-date_uploaded',)
verbose_name = _("Range Product Uploaded File")
verbose_name_plural = _("Range Product Uploaded Files")
@property
def filename(self):
return os.path.basename(self.filepath)
def mark_as_failed(self, message=None):
self.date_processed = now()
self.error_message = message
self.status = self.FAILED
self.save()
def mark_as_processed(self, num_new, num_unknown, num_duplicate):
self.status = self.PROCESSED
self.date_processed = now()
self.num_new_skus = num_new
self.num_unknown_skus = num_unknown
self.num_duplicate_skus = num_duplicate
self.save()
def was_processing_successful(self):
return self.status == self.PROCESSED
def process(self):
"""
Process the file upload and add products to the range
"""
all_ids = set(self.extract_ids())
products = self.range.included_products.all()
existing_skus = products.values_list(
'stockrecords__partner_sku', flat=True)
existing_skus = set(filter(bool, existing_skus))
existing_upcs = products.values_list('upc', flat=True)
existing_upcs = set(filter(bool, existing_upcs))
existing_ids = existing_skus.union(existing_upcs)
new_ids = all_ids - existing_ids
Product = models.get_model('catalogue', 'Product')
products = Product._default_manager.filter(
models.Q(stockrecords__partner_sku__in=new_ids) |
models.Q(upc__in=new_ids))
for product in products:
self.range.add_product(product)
# Processing stats
found_skus = products.values_list(
'stockrecords__partner_sku', flat=True)
found_skus = set(filter(bool, found_skus))
found_upcs = set(filter(bool, products.values_list('upc', flat=True)))
found_ids = found_skus.union(found_upcs)
missing_ids = new_ids - found_ids
dupes = set(all_ids).intersection(existing_ids)
self.mark_as_processed(products.count(), len(missing_ids), len(dupes))
def extract_ids(self):
"""
Extract all SKU- or UPC-like strings from the file
"""
for line in open(self.filepath, 'r'):
for id in re.split('[^\w:\.-]', line):
if id:
yield id
def delete_file(self):
os.unlink(self.filepath)
| {
"redpajama_set_name": "RedPajamaGithub"
} | 9,334 |
DOLE reviews 'Work-from-Home' bill
Marje Pelayo • July 2, 2018 • 4596
QUEZON CITY, Philippines – The Department of Labor and Employment (DOLE) cannot decide on whether or not it would favor the proposed work-from-home bill for employees.
Labor Secretary Silvestre Bello III said several groups of employers have expressed concern on the matter especially on the quality of performance of employees once they are allowed to work at the convenience of their homes.
On the other hand, DOLE said the employers also contemplate on the bill's benefits as they would also save overtime and night differential pays.
Bello said the proposal definitely needs more scrutiny and analysis by Congress before it is enacted into law. – Grace Casin / Marje Pelayo
TAGS Department of Labor and Employment (DOLE), Labor Secretary Silvestre Bello III, work-from-home bill
DOLE suspends deployment of domestic workers to Saudi Arabia
Maris Federez • November 29, 2021
MANILA, Philippines — The Department of Labor and Employment (DOLE) has suspended the deployment of newly hired household service workers (HSW) to the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia following reports of domestic workers being abused by their employers in the said country.
Based on an urgent memorandum by Labor Secretary Silvestre Bello III, the suspension will not be lifted until guidelines on the recruitment of domestic workers are finalized.
Bello directed the Philippine Overseas Labor Officer (POLO) in KSA to stop the verification of documents of newly hired HSWs to be deployed in the said country.
Bello cited a report regarding a certain retired general in Saudi Arabia named Ayed Thawah Al Jealid who still continues to recruit Filipinos to work in the said country despite complaints of abuse lodged against him.
The DOLE chief said Al Jealid always seemed to get through the verification of employment contract processes of POLO and the Philippine Overseas Employment Administration (POEA) by using other individuals to pose as employers.
"POEA and POLO need to come out with a new set of verification guidelines to prevent the abuse committed by Gen. Ayed (Thawah Al Jealid) in KSA," Bello said.
"Gen. Ayed was able to circumvent POLO and POEA rules on verification by placing in the employment contract a pseudo-KSA employer when in fact he was the real employer," he added.
Bello recommended to the POEA and POLO to indicate the addresses of the blacklisted employers alongside their names.
"Under the new verification guidelines, it's not only the employer who is blacklisted but also the address of the employer," Bello said.
Meanwhile, POLO-KSA clarified that only newly hired household service workers are included in the said suspended deployment.
It added that the deployment of domestic workers with renewed contracts and skilled workers is still in effect.
"The suspension does not include verification of renewed contracts of HSWs. Except for Mega and Construction companies, the suspension does not also affect the processing and verification of employment documents relating to the hiring of skilled workers," it said. —/mbmf (from the report of UNTV Correspondent Aileen Cerrudo)
TAGS Department of Labor and Employment (DOLE), household service workers
Bello vows justice for OFW raped in Saudi Arabia
Marje Pelayo • July 6, 2021
MANILA, Philippines – Labor Secretary Silvestre Bello III on Monday (July 5) directed Philippine representatives in Saudi Arabia to take immediate action on the case of a Filipina overseas worker who was raped by her foreign recruiter and abused by her employer there.
Specifically, Bello ordered the Philippine Overseas Employment Administration (POEA) and the Philippine Overseas Labor Office (POLO) in Riyadh to initiate appropriate legal steps against the suspects, and impose administrative penalties on the local recruitment agency which deployed the victim.
The OFW identified by the name Michelle was allegedly raped by the owner of the foreign recruitment agency (FDA) and molested by one of her employers before she was repatriated recently.
The Labor Chief directed POLO to take legal action and go after Meshail Mabrook Al Bassani Al Qahtani and employer Abdulaziz Ahlas, owners of Home Comfort Recruitment Office/Home Comfort Manpower Services, for the rape and abuse of the Filipina.
Bello also directed the POEA to penalize the local company SAMA International Recruitment Agency which reportedly ignored Michelle's complaints and her ordeal in Saudi Arabia.
In his urgent memorandum to Labor Attache Fidel Macauyag, Bello instructed the POLO in Riyadh to work with authorities there for immediate legal action there as the case is cannot be processed in the Philippines "due to lack of jurisdiction."
"The crime happened outside of the Philippines and the principle of extraterritoriality can't be applied to the case," he explained.
Nevertheless, Bello vowed justice to the aggrieved OFW.
"I will do everything possible to help our OFW fight back against her tormentors," Bello said.
He noted that he already ordered the suspension of the FDA's accreditation with the POLO.
He also directed Macauyag to coordinate closely with Arab authorities for the filing of criminal cases and prosecution of Al Qahtani and Ahlas.
On the other hand, Bello tasked POEA Administrator Bernard Olalia to probe Ahlas over violations of POEA rules and impose penalties for the sexual abuse committed against the OFW.
The Labor chief also told Olalia to sanction the FDA and Qahtani.
Likewise, he ordered POEA to build up an administrative case against SAMA and suspend the agency to prevent further violation and exploitation of Filipino migrant workers.
Upon her arrival in the country, Michelle went to the Public Attorney's Office (PAO) where she was given legal assistance in the preparation for her sworn statement.
PAO also conducted forensic tests on the OFW which yielded results indicating sexual abuse and injuries.
TAGS Labor Secretary Silvestre Bello III, overseas Filipino worker, Saudi Arabia
Government, business groups to create 1M job opportunities for Filipinos — DOLE
Marje Pelayo • June 29, 2021
MANILA, Philippines – The Department of Labor and Employment (DOLE) leads key government agencies in a collaboration with major business groups to create one million jobs this year.
The project is in line with President Rodrigo Duterte's approval and signing of an executive order adopting the National Employment Recovery Strategy (NERS).
NERS is an employment recovery plan from 2021 to 2022 which aims "to create a policy environment that encourages the generation and improved access to employment, livelihood, and training opportunities; improve employability, wellness, and productivity of workers; and provide support to existing and emerging businesses to preserve and create employment."
Coincidingly, the EO prompts the formation of a task force to oversee the project's implementation.
"This project synchronizes with safe and gradual reopening of the economy and addresses the impact of the prolonged community quarantine to thousands of smaller enterprises and millions of Filipinos workers," noted Labor Secretary Silvestre Bello III.
The project known as Reform, Rebound, Recover: One Million Jobs for 2021 prompts the business and employers sector to primarily identify job vacancies from its member companies and find jobs for the qualified but unemployed jobseekers.
Through the NERS Task Force, the government sector will secure vaccination for workers who qualify for the partnership project.
Also, it will organize job caravans; provide a profile of workers who can be referred to existing job vacancies; and offer transportation services to workers who will get their vaccination jabs.
TAGS Department of Labor and Employment (DOLE), National Employment Recovery Strategy (NERS) | {
"redpajama_set_name": "RedPajamaCommonCrawl"
} | 274 |
### Skykeep
By Joseph R. Lallo
Copyright © 2015 Joseph R. Lallo
Cover By Nick Deligaris
www.deligaris.com
Smashwords Edition, License Notes
This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each person you share it with. If you're reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then you should return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.
# Table of Contents
Prologue
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Epilogue
From The Author
Connect with Joseph R. Lallo
# Prologue
Amanita Graus stirred slightly in her hammock, swaddled in plush blankets and rocking gently with the motion of her surroundings. One wouldn't think the drafty loading bay of an airship called the _Wind Breaker_ would make for a comfortable bedroom. Nita certainly didn't think so, at least when she'd first become a part of the crew. It was small, its walls unpainted wood festooned with various brass pipes and fittings that ran throughout the ship. In the center of the floor was a large hole through which a small boat was held in place with chains leading down from a pulley in the ceiling. What light there was came from the scattering of portholes on the port and starboard walls, and most spare stretches of floor were piled with boxes and crates stuffed with all sorts of goods.
In the four months since her first journey, though, the creaking of the wooden walls and the distant hiss and hum of the steam engine had become a lullaby. The cold took longer to adjust to, but a down quilt from her bed at home took care of that. Its astoundingly intricate pattern made the quilt less a blanket and more a work of art, practically a tapestry fit for the walls of a museum. Not for a Calderan, though. Nita's people felt that beauty and elegance should be found in everything, be it a sculpture in the garden of a palace or a comforter in a forgotten closet. And an elaborate design of rich reds and golden yellows didn't hurt its ability to keep her as warm as toast and sleeping like a baby.
The first hint of the rising sun cast its rays through the port side portholes of her makeshift bedroom. Though the light was dim, it was enough to wake her. Somehow Nita had trained herself to awaken at the crack of dawn. It was one of the few times the ship was relatively quiet and free of activity, which meant it was a fine time to see to some personal tasks.
Nita yawned and reluctantly threw her blanket aside, revealing a somewhat droopy pair of fleece pajamas that had been purchased as a welcome gift for her from the crew after her first official trip among them. It was clear from its poor fit and lackluster styling that it was a product of Rim, the continent that was home to the more industrial portion of society. Like all such products, it served its purpose well enough, even if it lacked the artistry of a Calderan piece. She tugged at one of the sleeves and made a mental note to pick up a needle and some embroidery thread during her next trip home to give it a personal touch.
She rubbed some sleep from her eyes and reached blindly for the hook beside her bed, finding her slippers there and pulling them on to perform the complex dance of her morning routine. First was the tricky dismount from the hammock, something that had taken more than two weeks to master. Next was the choreographed sequence of steps, leans, and shuffles it took to navigate around the brass workings of the winch mechanism, the piles of crates, and the copious strapping used to secure it all. Finally she found her way to a hinged wooden shelf folded against the port side wall in one corner of the bay. Beside it was a kettle, a teacup, a small bag, and a cask of water all hanging from their own hooks. Above it was a stout brass steam pipe with some simple metal clamps and platforms affixed to it.
Nita shifted a crate in front of her cozy little corner, took a seat, and unfastened the leather strap to lower her shelf. It was a desk of sorts. Thinner straps held down assorted stationary, most notably two small leather-bound books with silk ribbons marking their pages. On the wall previously hidden behind the shelf were pinned three magnificent watercolor paintings. The first proudly displayed her mother and father, the second her gorgeous twin sister, Analita, and the third her handsome younger brother, Joshua.
After filling the kettle with water and clamping it in place atop the steam pipe, she turned a valve on a transparent tube on the forward wall just above her, conjuring the distinctive green light of what the members of the crew called a "phlo-light." She slid a fountain pen from its leather sleeve in the wall and loaded it with ink. By the time she'd loaded it properly and found a blank page, the kettle was bubbling merrily for a badly needed cup of tea. She found a pouch of her favorite blend, clamped a pinch of it into a wire cage, and prepared a nice cup. The soothing warmth and heavenly aroma finally perked up her brain sufficiently to get to the matter at hand.
Dear Mother, she scrawled in precise and curving letters. It has been three weeks since my last visit. Captain Mack has been attempting to teach me to "smell the wind" as we travel, which is what he claims allows him to navigate so well. I honestly don't know how he smells anything over those sickly sweet cigars he smokes, but the whole of the crew seems always to know just how far we've traveled without so much as a glance out the window, so there must be some knack to navigation. I'm doing my best to work it out.
A louder and longer than normal creak prompted Nita to snatch up her teacup, hold her pen in her teeth, and hold down her book. The ship tipped and swung, causing some of the smaller crates to shuffle across the floor and spilling some water from her kettle to hiss against the pipe. A moment or two later, the swing reversed itself, and after another minor one things settled.
For instance, we've just made a hard turn to starboard. I believe that means we are nearing the trading post. We should be there in about five hours or so. I'm looking forward to it. Lil says the people along the southern border of Rim make music boxes, just like father used to. This post is very near to the southern edge of Rim, so I'm willing to bet they'll have some. I'm curious to see how they compare. I'll be sure to bring you one.
I've just finished reading your second to last letter. Please give Joshua my congratulations on having his sculpture displayed in the mayor's office. I can just imagine how proud he is. And if things work out properly, I hope to be home long enough to see Lita's performance in the ballet. It is so wonderful that the opening night falls during one of my visits! You wouldn't have anything to do with that, would you?
As you know, I've been doing my best to teach the crew how to care for their own ship. After spending their lives afraid to so much as tighten a bolt for fear of angering the fug folk and being banned from further repair, it is difficult to convince them to try their own maintenance. Coop has no interest at all in it, but he follows directions fairly well and is a decent assistant. Lil, bless her, tries her best, but she's a bit hopeless. She doesn't quite understand how important it is to do things in the right order. Yesterday she tried taking a pipe cap off without shutting off pressure and bleeding the system. You should have seen how far that cap flew! Gunner, on the other hand, is a natural. It stands to reason since, as he's so eager to point out, he is the only one with a college education. The problem is, his education is in destroying things. That's not the sort of person I'm comfortable having maintain a boiler.
Nita stopped writing and tilted her head, a sound just barely at the edge of her hearing catching her attention. It didn't take long to identify it, and she was already hastily stowing her things when a gruff voice echoed out of a tube on the wall.
"Wailers! All hands on deck!" the captain ordered.
Without warning, the ship started to pitch violently to one side, sending crates sliding free of their restraints and across the floor. Nita scrambled to her feet and bolted for the door. She braced herself against the wall and navigated the narrow hallway to the ladder to the next deck, meeting Lil at the top. The petite little firebrand was already dressed, or more likely _still_ dressed, as she tended to sleep in her work clothes. Times like this made it clear why she did so.
"They better not make a habit of attacking before breakfast," Lil said, wide awake but with the disheveled hair of someone who had been in bed moments earlier. "I can be right ornery when I haven't had a good plate of hash yet." A snore behind her prompted her to duck back into her tiny room and deliver a motivating kick to her older brother, who was still nestled in his hammock. "Dang it, Coop, you're not sleeping through another attack!"
Nita sprinted through another few decks until she finally scrambled onto the main deck. The ship was moving at quite a clip, the chilly wind billowing Nita's pajamas and sending a brisk breeze through some very unwelcome areas. There wasn't much to see, as the ship was just emerging from a cloud bank and most of the view of the sea far below was blotted out in a field of cottony white plumes. Gunner, who had been on night watch, was already manning the spike gun mounted to the port railing. With a stuttering bark, it sent a string of finger-sized nails—called "fléchettes"—whistling through the air at a distant two-man airship screaming toward them out of the clouds.
"Gunner, I swear, you keep wasting ammunition on them things when they're so far off and it'll be Lil on mounted guns instead of you," growled the captain as he spun the wheel hard to put the attacker in better position for return fire.
"I'm ready for it, Cap'n," Lil said, popping out onto the deck with a rifle in hand.
Coop clumsily crawled up after her. "How many we lookin' at, Cap'n?"
"I've got one on port," Gunner said, firing another string of nails with a grin. "But not for much longer."
"Sounds like one more," Nita called. "I can't tell if it is above us or below us."
There was the distinctive thump of darts biting into the thick fabric of the envelope, then a metallic screech and a hard jolt as the ship twisted under an unbalanced engine load.
"That'll be above us then," the captain said. "Nita!"
"I'm on it!" Nita said.
"I'll go with her. If that's where the wailer is, she'll need cover," Lil said.
Nita pulled open a large wooden case tucked beneath the railing of the deck and snagged a pack that was within. In one smooth motion she swung it across her back and grasped the nearest rigging, hauling herself quickly up. Lil slung her rifle behind her and darted up another section of rigging. As much practice as she'd had in the last few months climbing up and down the ropes that held and stabilized the massive gas envelope that kept the ship aloft, Nita could never seem to match the nimbleness of the sprightly young deckhand. The girl must have been part squirrel and part lunatic.
"Hold tight, hard turn to port!" bellowed the captain.
The lines in Nita's hands groaned under the stress of the sudden turn, and the deck dangling below suddenly swung out from beneath her. She held tight and tried not to look at the waves a few hundred yards below her, which of course had chosen that moment to peek at her through the thinning clouds. Nita wasn't precisely afraid of heights anymore. That much had been trained out of her fairly quickly as a result of spending so much time among the clouds. She did sometimes suffer from an acute _awareness_ of heights, however. Fortunately when there was a job to be done, it typically managed to be the first thing on her mind. That was because being the engineer on an airship meant a job that needed to be done would usually send them plummeting into the sea if she didn't get to it quickly. When the ship swung back and stabilized in its new course, Nita continued up. The stretch of rigging they'd selected brought her to the envelope about midway between the turbines and the envelope's rear fins, which made for a very windy climb whenever she was directly behind one of the turbines. Nevertheless, she preferred it to being in front of them, since the thought of getting blown away from the spinning blades was marginally more pleasant than the thought of being pulled toward them.
"Better not be taking your time on this one, Nita. We're losing the green stuff pretty good," Lil called down.
Nita looked up to see the deckhand standing a short distance farther up the envelope. Her legs were in a wide, solid stance, and each foot was hooked under a piece of rigging. This kept her hands free to take aim at a wailer ship, which was much closer than the one Gunner was targeting. The vehicle—little more than a cigar-shaped steam turbine slung under a long, thin balloon—carried two men. Both the ship and the men were referred to as wailers, named for the high-pitched scream of the engine that forced them through the air. Wailers were raiders who wanted to clear out the crew of a ship so that the cargo and supplies would be theirs for the taking, and lately they had been taking an extreme interest in the _Wind Breaker_.
The wailer in the rear seat of the ship was lining it up for an attack run. The one in front was manning a gun that was a match for the one Gunner operated below—a precise match, since the _Wind Breaker_ crew had salvaged theirs from a wailer ship that had attacked previously. Judging from the angle of the ship, the wailers were planning to run a string of shots directly toward Lil, but the deckhand seemed unconcerned that she was about to be perforated. She simply leveled her weapon and readied her shot.
By the time Nita was far enough around the curve of the envelope to set her feet on the surface, the wailers were near enough for her to see their crazed eyes behind their smoked-glass goggles. At the same moment, Lil and the wailer gunner pulled the trigger. A row of hollow tubes traced a line along the _Wind Breaker_ 's envelope, biting deep and sending up streamers of thin green vapor. Lil's shot punched a neat hole in one side of the enemy ship's envelope and out the other. It was a good shot, one that would eventually send the vehicle fleeing back to the mother ship that launched it, but at the rate they were filling the _Wind Breaker_ with holes, _eventually_ wouldn't be soon enough. The shot also startled the pilot enough to send him veering to the left, curving the line of darts away from Lil. One of them punched into the envelope just to the left of her foot, snagging the rigging that secured her. Lil's left foot slipped free; she lost her balance and began to slide along the envelope. A quick hook of her right foot got it twisted in the supports along the side of the envelope, and she came to a sudden stop dangling upside down by one foot.
"Lil, are you okay?" Nita said, crouching down to call to her friend.
"I'm fine, Nita. See to the leaks and don't bug me while I'm aiming," Lil said, seeming almost to be unaware of the precariousness of her predicament.
She clicked the lever of the rifle, ejecting the spent casing and chambering another round while Nita shifted her attention to the nearest of the tubes. The forceful stream of green was escaping phlogiston, the only substance that could keep a ship like this aloft without needing an envelope the size of a small city. The circumstances of the last few months had made it pretty precious stuff, so she knew she had to work fast to cut the losses down. With one hand tightly gripping the rigging, Nita slipped her pack around in front of her and pulled it open. The bag held a variety of swatches of the same cloth that made up the envelope, and a tight-topped tin of black tar. She pinned the jar under one arm and pulled free the lid, which had a built-in brush already loaded with the gooey contents.
The following task would have been a lot easier if she had three hands, not to mention if she were on solid ground and not being shot at by lunatics. She threaded her legs through the rigging to free her hands as Lil had, then held the brush in one and grasped the first of the tubes in the other. With a well-practiced sequence of motions, she pulled the tube and discarded it, swiped a thick glob of tar onto the hole as it vented green gas, then clamped the brush in her teeth and fished out a patch to slap over the hole. She repeated the process for each tube she could reach, then repositioned and started over. Above her head, the sound of the wailing engine of their attacker started to draw closer.
"Lil," Nita called out warily, keeping her eyes on her work. "Is the wailer on its way back?"
Lil fired another shot, the thundering crack splitting the air. A moment later the stuttering grind of a stricken steam turbine heralded the accuracy of the attack.
"Not no more it ain't," she called back. The attacker's malfunctioning ship turned to retreat. "Let's see Gunner take out a wailer while he's upside down!"
The engines subtly changed their hum and Nita instinctively stopped her work to hold a bit tighter. She'd been working on these engines long enough to get a feel for their rhythm, and she knew a sharp turn coming when she heard it. The ship turned and tilted, rolling enough to put Lil almost directly beneath Nita. The deckhand was dangling away from the envelope with one hand clutching the rifle and the other outstretched to catch a piece of rigging. While Nita watched, Lil wrapped her free arm around an upright, hooked her free foot over the same rigging that entangled her other one, and rolled the trapped ankle to free it. Thus released she tumbled forward, her feet flipping down in front of her. The one-armed grip on the rigging held long enough for her scrambling feet to hook back into the rigging below them, and just like that, Lil was righted and facing the ship. The sight was enough to briefly make Nita forget the puzzle of how to reach and patch the remaining leaks and instead work at the riddle of where Lil had learned to do such things.
When Nita set the thought aside again and looked up, she started making a mental tally of the remaining leaks. As far as she could see, everything that was left was on the portion of the envelope ahead of the turbines. She edged her way to a space between two of the motors and began to work her way forward. To her right she noticed the remaining wailer whisking out from under the _Wind Breaker_ and attempting to circle back to continue the work of its departed partner. A peppering of shots from Gunner's fléchette gun met their mark, and suddenly retreat seemed to be a far preferable idea for this wailer as well. Both damaged ships—one of which seemed to have a damaged pilot also—were heading in the same direction. A fortuitous breath of wind scattered the clouds ahead of them, and the shifting mist revealed the silhouette of a ship a bit larger than the _Wind Breaker_ , lurking not far away.
"He's going to fire the cannons with us up here, isn't he?" Nita muttered to herself.
"Brace for cannons!" Lil called out, the deckhand's voice barely audible over the rattle of the turbines on either side of Nita.
She slapped the lid to the jar back in place, stuffed it in the pack, and held tight to the metal bands to which the turbines were mounted. A half second later a deafening thump pitched the ship forward so savagely it felt as though they had collided with something. Gray smoke and a cloud of what the captain called "grapeshot" belched forth from the ship's port-side forward cannon. The silhouette in the clouds shuddered, then began to pivot and descend, either unwilling or unable to return fire. With its retreat, and the desperate attempts of its crew, who deployed an attack craft to catch up, the morning battle had been brought to an end. Nita breathed a sigh of relief, then worked her way slowly out from between the turbines and toward the edge of the envelope.
"Lil!" she called, spying her crewmate just as she was making ready to swing herself back onto the deck.
"Yeah?"
"Would you please ask the captain to shut down the engines so that I can finish patching?"
"Sure thing. I'm heading down for some hash. You want Butch to fix you a plate?"
Nita looked to the dozen or so remaining jets of green gas, as well as one rather significant tear. She sighed. "No, I'll get my own... I think I'm going to be here awhile."
#
Three hours later, Nita trudged into the loading bay-slash-bedroom. All things considered, the encounter had gone rather well. Almost thirty punctures from the attack, but she'd gotten temporary patches on them within a few minutes, and enough stitches to make the patches permanent before any of them let loose. The first time she'd had to do a patch job like this, it had taken her the better part of a day, and they'd lost enough phlogiston to require a stop at a port in order to refill. Today they were able to top off from their stores. One of the spikes had lodged itself in the turbine as well, but removing it seemed to reveal little more than some very minor warping, which could be fixed another time. Considering she was smeared with tar, chilled to the bone, and still dressed in her pajamas, a bit of procrastination on that matter could be excused. She plopped down onto the crate and pulled down her desk again, doing her best to wipe away the tar from her hands before delicately picking up the pen. She knew she couldn't finish the letter, since writing more would inevitably smudge the page with tar. That was all it would take to make her mother worry about any number of things that might have put it there. Instead, she would add one last thought for the moment before stowing her pen and cleaning up.
I know I should be working a bit harder to get these folks ready to take care of themselves, but sometimes it feels like a shame to know I'll be leaving them once I do. After all, I think I've finally gotten used to the routine.
#
Around noon, after the patching of the envelope had been finished, Nita took a moment to scrub herself clean of the layer of tar and the stink of phlogiston. Life had become much more tolerable for her once she'd worked out a method to rid her skin and clothes of the sticky black gunk she so often worked with. Her sister of all people had been the one to work out the solution, which was to mix a bit of the crew's soap with some crushed-up Calderan lava rock and a healthy dose of orange rinds. The mix took some experimentation to get right, but now tar was much less of an inconvenience, and the stuff smelled so nice Lil had taken to using it as well, even when tar wasn't an issue.
Once clean, Nita's first order of business was to change into her work clothes. The outfit was a practical leather-and-canvas ensemble, though, as the work of a Calderan, it was tailored to fit her properly and accented with gleaming brass-and-copper hardware. She wore a corset for back support rather than fashion and topped the outfit with a double sash of wrenches and other tools, and had adorned her goggles with a small butterfly made from brass gears by her brother.
Not until she considered herself presentable did Nita finally make her way into the galley for her first proper meal of the day. It wasn't rare that her many duties aboard the _Wind Breaker_ kept her from eating when she would have liked to, but it was never any fun. One of the few things that had come as a pleasant surprise regarding life on the airship was the quality of the food, and it was a shame to miss it when it was fresh off the stove. Glinda West, or Butch, as she was unfortunately nicknamed, was the cook and medic of the ship. She was nothing short of a miracle worker with a saucepan. Day in and day out she would take the same unappetizing provisions and turn them into the hearty delicious meals that fueled the crew. Her dishes never would have made it back on Caldera, as visually they fell into the brackets of either "green-brown mound of lumpy mush" or "crusty, fried hunk of something unidentifiable," but Nita had long ago learned that the dinner table was a place where color and composition weren't always necessary to create a masterpiece.
Though at the moment Butch was the only other person in the galley and she could have sat anywhere, Nita took her usual seat at the first table to the left of the entrance and pushed up her goggles.
"Good afternoon, Butch," she said, running her hands across her braided brown hair and yawning. "I don't know if I'm late for breakfast or early for lunch, but if you've got anything that's hot, I would love a plate of it."
Butch muttered something surly from her station behind the counters and among the stoves of the galley. She was a sixty-year-old bulldog of a woman who always sounded angry and spoke a language Nita hadn't quite been able to learn or even identify, but the rest of the crew assured Nita that the cook liked her. Butch pulled a clean tin bowl from the shelf and ladled a thick soup into it, handing it over with a spoon and two dense biscuits. Nita stood and took the meal, breathing in the meaty aroma.
"Slop-in-the-pot today? Always one of my favorites," Nita said sincerely.
Butch nodded and put out a mug of tea. While the rest of the crew seemed to drink either ale, rum, or coffee exclusively, Butch and Nita shared an appreciation for a good cup of tea. She took the warm beverage and returned to her seat to dig in to her meal.
She'd barely started when the sound of wind echoed out of the flared tube just beside the door.
"Get yourselves to the galley," barked the voice of the captain. "The weather's being obliging, so I think the ship can mind herself for a bit. I'll put Wink on watch. Don't dillydally. I don't want to be away from the wheel long."
Again Butch muttered something, this time a good deal more vigorously and colorfully, and began to line up bowls along the front of the counter. She slotted them into grooves that would keep them from sliding with the motion of the ship and stirred up the pot in preparation for portioning. The crew began to file in one at a time, each wearing his or her own variation of the unofficial uniform of the ship: black canvas trousers, a tan button-down shirt, and a brown coat. First was Ichabod Cooper, the rail-thin and sandy-haired young deckhand known by the whole crew—including his own sister—as Coop. Through some miracle of grooming that Nita had not seen fit to investigate, he seemed to have perfected the technique of having permanent stubble. She'd never seen him clean shaved or with a beard. He also tended to keep his sleeves rolled up, though from the number of scars on his forearms it seemed he'd be better served with them down.
"Oh, Gunner. I'd be obliged if you'd take a look at the sights on my rifle. Can't seem to hit the broad side of a barn with it these days," he said over his shoulder to the man behind him. "Morning, ma'am. You're getting pretty quick up the rigging."
"Thank you, Coop. You know, we've been working together for months. I don't believe it is entirely necessary to call me 'ma'am.'"
"Aw, you're a Calderan. If I'm not gonna call a fancy sort like you 'ma'am' now and again, I may as well not use the word at all."
"Good morning, Nita," said Gunner, their shorter, mildly less lean armory officer. Despite some missing fingers and the fresh singes on his face and sleeves, the man was actually quite capable. He was just a little too enthusiastic at times. "And Coop, I very much doubt the sights of your rifle have miraculously misaligned themselves overnight."
"Well, then why do you reckon I didn't pick off them two pilots like I did a week back?"
"Because you stumbled out onto the deck half-asleep and started shooting. I'm lucky you didn't hit _me_ while you were up there."
"Lucky for you boys _somebody_ on this ship knows how to work a rifle proper," Lil said, more formally Chastity "Lil Coop" Cooper, as she pranced into the galley. She was the younger sister of Coop and a regular chip off the old block.
"How long you reckon it'll be before you let us forget about that lucky shot of yours?" Coop asked.
"What, the one where I was dangling off the side of the ol' gasbag by one foot and still made the two of you look like _you_ were the ones that didn't know which way was up? I reckon it'll be quite a bit."
"I'll tell you what. When we get back to the island, we'll hang me up by my foot and see what I can do."
"And just what island are you talking about, Coop?" Lil asked.
"That one south of Caldera. The one where we hid most of our haul from the heist a way's back."
"The one that's underwater most of the time and ain't got so much as a tree on it? The one that we only use because of the cave under it that you can't get to most days?"
"Yeah."
"Whereabouts you reckon we're going to hang you on that island? The trees that ain't there?"
"We'll hang me off the ship," Coop said. "Just so long as Gunner fixes the sights on my rifle first."
"It is a poor artist who blames his brush," Gunner countered.
"What's painting got to do with you not knowing how to true up an iron sight?"
"Enough, all of you," commanded the sandpaper-rough voice of the captain, a man the Coopers called Cap'n Mack.
He was moving with purpose, though Nita was not certain she'd ever seen him move otherwise. Some people were a captain in name only, a leader simply because the position had been vacant and no one else had the years or training to fill it. Captain McCulloch West was a captain to the bone. His crew didn't follow orders due to anything as flimsy as a chain of command. They followed orders because _he_ was giving them. He puffed on a cigar that smelled like burning cherries and pulled off a pair of dark lenses that had left his eyes the only portion of his face not roasted golden brown by the sun. There was a weariness to him that had become progressively more noticeable in the preceding weeks. His red-rimmed eyelids likely hadn't shut for more than an hour at a time in days. He rubbed them irritably and cleared his throat.
"Everybody grab a plate and a seat. I don't like giving the inspector the bridge for more than a minute or two. That goes double considering the number of wailers who've been catching our scent of late. We're going to make this quick. Once our engineer here patched up the nicks we picked up in this latest brush and we topped off what we lost, that put us down to our last canister of phlogiston."
"No, already? Seems like it wasn't two weeks ago we bought five canisters from them smelly folks from over where Gunner comes from," Coop said.
"We did. But since then we've been slashed up and poked full o' holes near a dozen times. How are we set for ammunition?"
"We're down to about half our usual stock for small arms, and _very_ low on fléchettes. The cannons are pretty well stocked," Gunner said.
"And fuel?"
"We could use some. Between coal and burn-slow we've got enough for maybe three more round trips to Caldera," Lil said.
"How are the nuts and bolts, Nita?" the captain asked.
"The boiler is running fine. One of the turbines took some hits. I'd like to rebalance it. At this point the main envelope is more patches than anything else. Another few weeks like these and we'll be needing a new one. Other than that, we're doing well enough."
"Good. Then just so long as we don't lose any more phlogiston, we're not in trouble. But since we've been doing a right sorry job of defending this bucket lately, there are going to be some changes. I want two lookouts on deck at all times. That includes when we are at port. If Gunner hadn't been in his quarters tinkering with that new gadget of his last time we tried to spend the night in Keystone, we'd've been cleaned out. And if you're on lookout detail, I want you armed. Nita, that means you're going to need to brush up on your shooting."
"I'm not entirely comfortable with the idea of handling a rifle, Captain. Perhaps—"
"I'm not entirely comfortable riding my ship to the seafloor, or getting picked clean by the sort of folks who lurk around the sort of piers that'll let us moor these days, so it don't make much difference to me what makes _you_ comfortable," he barked. "Talk to Gunner, pick a weapon, and start practicing. Next time those wailers come buzzing around, I want them full of holes before they even notice they've found us." He stomped up to the counter and snatched up a bowl, stuffing the biscuit into the pocket of his coat and taking the bowl but not the spoon.
"We are too damn close to seeing our way through to the other end of this, people. We've got enough fugger goods stowed away in Cache Island to keep us fat and happy for the rest of our days. We just need to stay alive long enough to figure out how we're going to sell them, and where we're going to stay once we do. Now, as you were. Finish your meals, then draw straws on who's manning the deck. You've got five minutes."
He turned and paced back out the door, taking a swig out of the bowl as he went. Once his footsteps had disappeared back up to the main deck, Coop spoke up.
"You know something? I don't know what's sending him to his grave quicker, drinking or not drinking," he said.
"Times like these I do miss the rosy-cheeked, boozy lout who hired us," Lil said. She mashed her biscuits into her bowl and scooped some of the resulting mush into her mouth. "And does anyone remember when he last hit his hammock?"
"I'm not certain I even recall the last time he sat down," Gunner said.
"So what _is_ the plan going forward?" Nita asked. "It's been four months since we raided that Fugtown warehouse, and so far all we've done is stash the stuff and lend me out to fix some ships whenever we visit Lock."
"The captain plays things like this close to his chest," Lil said. "When he's ready to tell us, he'll tell us."
"'Til then, we just go along," Coop said. He'd emptied his bowl and stood to return it to Butch, snagging another biscuit when he did. "Who's on lookout right now? And you reckon the captain counts himself as one of the lookouts?"
"Well now, that wouldn't make no sense, would it? If that was the case, we've been doing two lookouts all along. And you can't rightly navigate the ship with a rifle in your hands," Lil said.
"I'm on lookout right now," Gunner said.
"I reckon I'll join you then. It'll give you a chance to get my sights straightened out," Coop said.
Rather than dignifying the statement with a response, Gunner merely muttered something vaguely threatening and followed the deckhand out. That left only Lil and Nita in the galley.
"So, Nita, what're you fixing to do until it's your turn up on deck?"
"It won't be long until we reach Lock, and I'm sure the captain will have a line of people hoping I can help get their boilers boiling or their turbines turning again. Between that, my maintenance work, and now these watch shifts, I'd better take this time to finish up my letter home, or else it won't get written at all."
"You know," Lil said, washing down another mouthful of her meal with a swallow of coffee, "I still don't quite get why you write them letters. The only folks who could even deliver 'em is us."
"I know, but sometimes our visits are so short. Before I joined the crew, the longest I'd ever stayed away from home was a few days. Mother and I just aren't used to spending so much time apart. Writing these letters and reading them one at a time sort of makes it feel like we aren't so far apart. I hand Mother my book, she hands me hers, and we read and answer one a week."
"You ever write about me in them letters?" Lil asked.
"Of course! Mother said she's been working extra hard to get the _Wind Breaker_ permission to make port so that she and the family can meet you. My brother, Joshua, in particular is interested in you."
Lil grinned. "Is he now?"
"He's a composer and he's always looking for dancers. He says with the way you're so fearless climbing all around the ship, he'd love to see what you could do on stage."
Lil twisted her head. "Now what kind of stage are we talking about here? Because the only dancers I ever seen are them girls in Keystone who do them high kicks and ain't barely wearing no clothes. The sort Coop always spends all his money gawking at."
"No, no. Ballet, interpretive dance. Things to do more than simply titillate."
"See, Coop says doing any more than titillating costs more'n he's willing to spend." She finished her plate of food and her coffee. "Say hi to your mama for me. Once we get to Lock, if the captain asks you to take a look at somebody's ship, give me a holler. I reckon if I'm going to be practicing, may as well be on a ship that ain't ours."
"Certainly," Nita said.
Lil stood and handed her plate to Butch. "A fine meal as always, Butch. I always say I don't worry about dying, because every one of your meals is fit to be my last."
"What are you off to do now?" Nita asked.
"If we're going to be spending a mite more time on deck, I reckon I'll top off the firebox, then head down for a nap until we hit port. You might want to do the same, since if Coop and Gunner are up there now, you know you and me are going to be stuck on the night shift."
"Not a bad idea," Nita said.
Lil trotted away, and Nita, as seemed to happen rather frequently, found herself the first one to begin eating and the last to finish. She'd picked up a great deal of very necessary habits from the crew, but the two she'd never seemed to get the knack for were choking down her meals and drinking the syrup-thick sludge they called "coffee." It was a wonder that Butch, who could make month-old smoked fish into something that would make you ask for seconds, couldn't seem to make a proper cup of coffee. Nita was thankful for water, which due to the boiler was never in short supply, and tea. The only alternatives were alcoholic... though she was somewhat ashamed to say she was beginning to develop a taste for Westrim ale.
She finished her meal, taking every moment of the five minutes allotted to her by the captain, then thanked Butch for the fine cooking and made her way back to her room. As she pushed open the door—thanks to its draftiness, her room was one of the few that actually _had_ a door rather than a curtain—and stepped inside, she heard a peculiar scratching noise. It was followed by a crunch. Nita frowned and clapped her hands.
"Wink! Wink you get out of there right now!" she scolded.
The crunching suddenly stopped and there was silence.
"You don't think I know where you are?"
She lightly stepped through the maze of crates and boxes to one at the opposite side of the loading bay. It was tucked under one of the two gig winches, and the lid was askew. She moved the lid aside and saw a single eye gleaming out from the darkness inside. Nita reached up and twisted on the nearest phlo-light, revealing a cat-sized creature that was simultaneously the ugliest and cutest thing Nita had ever seen. It was ghost gray and had formerly worn a bandage until Nita had fashioned an eye patch for it. The creature was technically known as an aye-aye, though, due to the effects of the fug, it had a few unnatural characteristics, including a batlike nose and its peculiar coloring. They called the beast Wink, and it was intended to be the ship's inspector, but lately it seemed to have taken on the unofficial role of designated pain in Nita's backside.
It looked up at her innocently, completely ignoring the large, half-eaten macaroon it clutched in its creepy little hands. The half-open and half-empty tin at its feet in the crate suggested this was not the first time it had committed this particular crime.
"Come out of there," Nita said, lightly nudging the box.
Wink darted out and spiraled around Nita's body to just under her arm, keeping the cookie in one spider-fingered hand as it did. She leaned down to shut the tin, then secured the crate and heaved a heavier one on top of it before returning to her desk. Wink crawled to her back, peering over her shoulder and munching away on his ill-gotten gains as she read through her letter. Once the words were fresh in her mind, she picked up where she'd left off.
I've just had to step away from this letter for a bit. There was some ship business I had to attend to. Nothing unusual, but the sort of thing that can't wait until I'm done writing.
In the past I've mentioned that I'd like for you to meet some of the crew. I know that father is doing his best to get them a special exception to the rules about outsiders docking at Tellahn, but perhaps you can convince Drew to take you down to Moor Spires next month so that you can say hello. Hopefully by then Captain Mack won't be quite so out of sorts. As you'll no doubt remember we...
Nita paused for a moment, considering the correct word.
... acquired some goods from the people in the fug, and the captain seems certain he can trade them for a high enough price to finally secure a comfortable future for himself and his crew. The problem is everyone knows we have them, and some fellow airmen are making it difficult to lay the groundwork for the captain's plans. He hasn't shared what those plans are yet, but the crew certainly trusts him, and I've learned to do the same.
Some crumbs fell on the page as Wink finished his stolen macaroon. He'd crept up to her shoulder, too nosy to settle for anything but an unobstructed view of what she was doing. The creature then reached down and tapped its long, thin middle finger on one of the wrenches in Nita's tool sash. The result was a quick, clear, and complex pattern of taps. To anyone who had never heard it before, and most people who had, it would have seemed like the random, nervous tapping of a timid creature. Through a bit of sleuthing and a lot of careful listening, Nita and the rest of the _Wind Breaker_ crew had worked out that it was actually a method of communication not unlike the one she'd used to tap out messages through the pipes of her previous career in the steamworks. Wink and the other ship inspectors were a good deal more intelligent than anyone had realized, and their mandatory inclusion on the fug folk–made ships was not a safety decision, it was an act of espionage. Fortunately, they had convinced Wink to stop sending reports on them, making the _Wind Breaker_ possibly the only ship in the sky that had the benefit of privacy and surprise when dealing with the fuggers.
Nita wrote a letter to her mother, Wink tapped.
He had a peculiar way of phrasing things, as the tap code was only ever meant to provide reports of the activities on a ship, so he "spoke" in past tense, and even questions were phrased as statements.
"Yes, Wink, I'm writing home, like I always do at the beginning of the week."
Nita told her mother to send more good foods.
"Now why should I tell her that?" Nita asked. "I never gave you permission to eat my macaroons, you know. I think I liked you better when you spent your time staring at me like I was a criminal."
Nita told her mother to send more good foods, Wink repeated.
Nita sighed and resumed writing.
The ship's inspector would like me to inform you that Marissa's coconut macaroons are very tasty, and he would appreciate if you send some just for him. Though to be honest, if I don't hurry up and eat some, this batch will end up being just for him anyway.
In a few hours we'll be tying the ship up at a place called Lock. I don't know if you remember me mentioning it in the past, but Lock is the only major city that will let us openly make port these days. The fug folk aren't pleased with us right now, because of the aforementioned acquisition of some of their goods. Unfortunately, since they keep most of the rest of Rim on a fairly short leash, that means that most other people aren't willing to deal with us for fear of making the fug folk angry. Officially, no one in Rim actually knows how to maintain their own airships or technology, since if the fug folk find out a crew has been tinkering with their machines, they'll ban the entire ship from further trade and maintenance. The presence of the inspectors, who report all relevant activities on the ships, means the fug folk will always find out. So much of modern life in Rim revolves around fug technology that losing it would be ruinous. That's not a problem in Lock, though. Lock is where most people who have already been banned end up. Almost every airship in the sky absolutely refuses to do business with the residents of Lock for fear of earning the same fate. It is as though the whole city has the plague. These people have nothing to lose, so they are more than willing to have us visit.
It has been a while since we had any shore leave, and while the captain has made some changes to our responsibilities for the time being, I'm hoping I can get a few hours on shore to see about those music boxes.
I think I've rambled long enough. There's plenty to do, and if I don't stop myself, I'll spend the whole day scribbling away. I shall write to you again next week, and I look forward to reading your letter.
Love always,
Nita
She stowed the pen in its sleeve and made ready to close the book when she spied a corner peeking out from between the last page and the back cover.
"Oh! I nearly forgot!" she said.
Quickly she pulled the book open again.
P.S. Honestly, if it wasn't attached, I'd forget my own head. I've spoken in the past about Drew purchasing one of those cameras, the ones that produce images of whatever you choose. Well, it turns out there was a broken one in the corner of one of the Wind Breaker's storerooms, and I was able to repair it.
She tugged the stowed picture free and laid it on the opposite page.
Enclosed is a photograph of the crew. It takes a minute or so for the image to form, so I was able to set up the camera and get in front of it without too much blurring. Let's see if you can work out which member of the crew is which based on what I've told you!
Again she closed the book and carefully stowed it before making her way to the hammock.
The crew had many quirks and skills that had fascinated Nita upon her arrival. They had a casual distrust and an unapologetically pragmatic view of just about anyone who didn't belong to the crew, for instance. It had been made clear to her when she'd maneuvered her way onto the ship that if she ever became a liability, she would be removed from it, whether or not it was at port. That, at least, was behind her, but one of the quirks that had initially seemed astounding was the crew's universal ability to drop off to sleep at a moment's notice. Sleep was the grout that filled the gaps of their day, squeezing into any place that could hold it. After three weeks on the ship, Nita had discovered this wasn't a learned skill, it was a consequence of doing physically demanding tasks around the clock for days at a time. For the last two months or so she'd found she was just as capable of stealing a few minutes of sleep whenever the opportunity arose as they were, and life had become a good deal more pleasant as a result.
She hung up her tool sash and stowed any bits that might fall out of her pockets as she slept, then kicked her feet up into the loop that held one end of her hammock. The very moment she reclined, she began the speedy slide toward slumber. Her lips curled into a grin just before she drifted off as she heard Wink pushing and shoving at the box keeping him from his treats.
# Chapter 1
On the deck of the ship, Gunner and Coop were standing at the port and starboard sides respectively. Gunner had reluctantly agreed to exchange weapons so that he could take a look at the sights on Coop's rifle. That left the lanky deckhand handling a weapon that looked like it had eaten two or three lesser weapons. It had likely started life as a shotgun, with a stout, imposing barrel to show for it. Since it was first built, however, Gunner had "improved" it. He'd added not one but two additional barrels, both nearly twice the size of the original one. It now had four triggers as well, and an arrangement of lenses that looked more like something a jeweler would use to study gems than a marksman would use to take aim. In all likelihood the lenses were indeed jeweler's tools. It wouldn't have been the first time Gunner had found a way to make something lethal out of something innocuous.
"How come you got four triggers on this gadget but only three places to put shells?" Coop called to him.
"All you need to know is that you should never pull the fourth one first," Gunner replied.
"Which one's the fourth one? Is that the one in front or the one in back?"
"The one in back. And please don't fire anything unless you actually see a raider or pirate. I hand pack those shells, and I'd rather not waste one."
"You hand pack these shells?" Coop said.
"Yes."
The deckhand slowly moved his fingers a bit farther away from the triggers. "Judging by your hands, I'd rather trade back before I do any shooting."
"The shells _and_ the gun are perfectly sound," Gunner said.
"So you say, but I'm a trifle slow to trust a claim like that from a man who needs to take off a shoe to count to ten."
"I may only have seven and a half fingers left, Coop, but unlike you I don't need them to do my counting," Gunner grumbled.
He let Coop's smaller, less elaborate rifle hang by its strap and reached down into a crate at his feet. Inside were a flexible hook and a pile of clay pigeons. He loaded a pigeon and let it fly with a practiced flick of his arm. As it sailed up and then began to plummet, he stowed the thrower and took aim. A pull of the trigger released a crisp clap of gunfire and shattered the pigeon.
"Your sights are fine, Coop. Just as I said they were," Gunner said. "Now get over here and give me back my gun."
The deckhand walked over and presented the contraption to its inventor, gratefully taking back his own weapon.
"So what've you been up to these days, Gunner?" Coop asked, reaching into the crate to load a pigeon of his own to test Gunner's claim.
"I've been doing what any reasonably intelligent person would be doing in the face of an influx of fugger goods. I'm learning how their things work. I think I've got that rocket-propelled grenade worked out," he said.
"You been monkeying with that thing?" Coop said. "Cap'n! How's about you letting me move my quarters a bit farther away from Gunner's?"
"No one is moving their quarters," the captain rumbled.
"What do you mean you've almost got it worked out, anyway? I thought we made sure we got them instructions that was in the box with it."
"Any fool could determine how to _operate_ a weapon. I want to know how it functions. I can't very well improve upon it if I don't know how it functions. That device is fairly simple, though. There's one gadget we turned up that I'm still having trouble puzzling out. At first I thought it was some sort of lantern, a portable phlo-light. It definitely takes canisters of phlogiston in lieu of ammunition, and there's another compartment that stinks like fug. But in our haste to pack the thing and escape, we seem to have lost a few pieces, as well as the manual. Nita says she thinks the pieces were just valves, and the fuggers design their components in a fairly standardized way, so it's taken some testing to find the right ones. It still doesn't do much, though. More trial and error is called for."
"That just may be, but I don't want to be around when one of those errors makes it so you need to take off _both_ shoes to count to ten. Give it to me straight, now. When's the last time you had two whole eyebrows?"
"Nothing ventured, nothing gained," Gunner said.
"Nothing ventured, nothing blown off, neither."
Coop launched the pigeon and fired, easily picking it off. "Guess you were right." He dug into the pocket of his coat and began to reload the weapon. "So, if I can get off the ship at all once we're down at Lock, I figure I might spend some money. This is the first time in too long I've had two coins to rub together and then some, and it figures I ain't had no chance to spend it."
"The fact you haven't been able to spend it is precisely why you still have some."
Coop ignored the observation. "If I was to look for something nice for Nita, what do you reckon she'd like?"
Gunner looked warily to Coop. "Don't tell me you've got designs on the Calderan."
"Why not? She's pretty, and she's been as good as any of us on the ship. I reckon she's here to stay."
"Do you honestly think she would be interested in _you_? Calderans are refined."
"I'm as refined as the next fella."
"Need I remind you I'm the only one on the ship with a formal education?"
"Nope, you don't need to remind me of that, because you say it just about every chance you get. Why? _You_ got designs on Nita?"
"If anyone on this ship has a chance with her, it is me," Gunner said.
"But have you got _designs_ on her?"
"There is something special in that one, no doubt. Perhaps someday. I certainly wouldn't shun any advances on her part."
"See, that ain't right. Nita's the only woman of courting age on the ship that ain't my sister. Seems to me the gentlemanly thing to do would be to wait until she turns me down before you start making plans."
"I'm not making any definite plans. And as I recall, you informed me that if I ever so much as looked at your sister the wrong way, you'd break my nose."
"And I meant it, too."
"Then she isn't exactly an option for me, is she? And I don't think there are any established rules regarding courtship on—"
"You boys wouldn't be standing both on the same side of the ship jawing about women when you should be keeping watch, would you?" called out the captain from his place at the wheel.
"No, Cap'n," Coop said, shouldering the rifle and returning to his position.
Gunner shook his head and polished one of the lenses on his weapon. "I'm sure this is going to be a match made in heaven," he muttered.
#
About an hour behind schedule, Captain Mack brought the _Wind Breaker_ into the port of Lock. Like any reasonably sized city on the mainland, Lock was a precarious assemblage of walkways and platforms clinging to the mountaintops. It was anything but a pleasant or simple way to live, but it was a necessity due to the ever-present fug that lapped at the lower slopes of the mountains. The fug was a reeking, toxic purple vapor that hung like a permanent blanket of fog over the bulk of the mainland. It had decimated the continent decades ago, and no one seemed certain where it came from or what it was, but its arrival had claimed the lives of most of the surface dwellers. Nearly all of those who didn't flee to the skies, mountaintops, and plateaus were suffocated or poisoned by the horrid stuff. The fraction who survived and thrived within the fug had become what polite people called the "fug folk" and most others called "fuggers." They were emaciated, ghost-white parodies of humanity who held the continent in their iron grasp by being the only providers of a number of inventions and products that had become indispensable in the fug-stricken world. These included the boilers and turbines that ran the ships, the inspectors that checked them for flaws, the maintenance that corrected these flaws, the burn-slow that fueled them for long voyages, and the phlogiston that kept them airborne. In short, they held all the cards.
As home to those unfortunates who had fallen out of favor with the fug folk, Lock had a few features that other mountain cities lacked. The first was its windmills. Whereas the rest of the _world_ seemed to run on steam, Lock had no such luxury. Instead, they relied upon the near-constant wind to keep their power demands satisfied. As a result, Lock was instantly recognizable from afar, with each major and minor peak in the area hosting a large, slowly rotating windmill, tiny shafts linking them and delivering power to the town.
Lock also had one of the deepest and most productive coal mines in all of Rim, which was almost a slap in the face. It would have made for ample fuel for fug-made boilers if they were able to use them. Instead the coal was mostly burned to heat the homes and cook the meals of the residents, as well as traded to those few airmen and seamen with the nerve to do business with the forsaken town.
While the almost unbroken ring of mountains that gave Rim its name served as something of a bowl to hold the fug in the inland areas, there was always a thin layer of the stuff leaking out between the mountains or flowing over the low points in the mountain chain. This made seagoing ship's docks unpleasant places at best and lethal at worst, since the layer of fug could easily poison any sailors who drew near to the shore. Lock was lucky enough to be situated a few hundred feet above a relatively sheltered cove on the seaward side of the mountains. A quirk of wind and geography managed to keep this harbor free enough of fug to accept sea traffic, so Lock kept itself fed with ample fishing. The fishermen and their day's catch were hauled to the city via wind-powered elevators, and barges carried coal to more popular trading posts to trade for essential supplies. All in all, the place was a testament to the ability of a society to find a way to persist in spite of the odds mounded against them.
When they were near enough to one of the three mooring points the city maintained for those few airships daring or desperate enough to visit, Lil turned to Wink. The inspector was clinging to the main support pole for the envelope.
"Okay, critter, make yourself scarce," she said.
Wink darted down the pole and into the bowels of the ship.
"Good thing you remembered. I keep forgetting to get rid of the little bugger," Coop said. "Why we doing that again, Cap'n?"
"Because fuggers have eyes in every port, even Lock."
"And what's that mean to us? Wink don't rat us out no more."
"That ain't general knowledge, Coop. And I want to keep it that way."
"Oh. Why?"
"Because if the fuggers knew that _we_ knew the inspectors were the reason they knew what we were all doing, they'd probably kill them all off and find a new way to do it."
"What's that matter to us?"
The captain grumbled impatiently. "I'm not too fond of the thought of being the reason the inspectors all get killed, and besides, having everyone _but_ us using the inspectors means we can listen in on what they're up to."
"I follow, Cap'n... but why's that mean Wink can't be out and about?"
"Honest, Coop. You better have Glinda check and see if that head of yours has any extra holes, because it seems you've got a leak. I must have told you a dozen times."
"Well, make it a baker's dozen and maybe it'll stick."
The captain gritted his teeth. "If we don't want them to know we're wise to the inspectors, then the only way we'll end up without one ratting us out is if we don't _have_ one."
"Oh... I got it now, Cap'n."
"Yeah, until tomorrow," Lil muttered.
Lil and Coop threw out lines to a port crew quite happy to see them. As the _Wind Breaker_ was secured, the captain turned to address his crew, which had assembled on deck without being summoned.
"All right, you lot can draw straws to pick the lookouts if you want to swap. Like I said, I want at least two. I've got matters to attend to in town, but when I'm through I'll relieve one of you. We'll be in port for two days. Glinda will see to placing the orders for the fuel, phlogiston, and other such. The lookouts will also be loading them up. Nita, you're off the hook for this one, if you're willing to put them wrenches to work for a few of the locals."
"Always glad to lend a hand," Nita said.
"You boys are already on watch. You figure you can stay on for a bit? Nita said she'd show me a thing or two about fixing them boilers and such," Lil asked.
"May as well," Gunner grumbled. "Sticking near the ship should give me the chance to get back to work on that gun I'm tinkering with. Besides, once you've spent a few hours in Lock, you've done everything there is to do."
Coop nodded. "I'll agree with you there. Ain't much I miss about the old days, but a rowdy night in Keystone is one of them." He turned to Nita. "You ever seen something so silly as all that with the windmills, ma'am?"
"I don't know. I think it's rather lovely. The way the blades are all turning at the same speed, it is like they are choreographed, dancing. And there's so much less smoke to blacken the air. The whole cityscape is picturesque, like the townsfolk made ornaments to decorate the mountains."
Coop scratched his head. "Well, when you put it like that I reckon it _is_... uh... pretty."
Captain Mack headed toward the hatch below decks.
"Nita, Lil, come with me," the captain said. "You boys keep an eye on the ship." He lowered his voice. "And keep an eye on Wink while you're at it. He's been going below decks to pick at Nita's sweets. Bad enough he should be nabbing from the crew, but all that sugar makes him a right awful terror come sundown. I don't want to come back to my inspector bouncing off the walls."
Wink looked to the captain reproachfully from his perch within the hatch leading to the lower decks and tapped his middle finger at the ground.
"Now hold on now... that was something about... the crew and... dang it, that little thing taps too fast," Coop said.
"Oh Coop, he said 'The crew ate good food, then the inspector ate good food. This was fair.' You could hear it plain as day," Lil said impatiently. "What's the matter, you forget how to learn or something?"
"I spent years learning to tune out that stuff. Takes a bit of time to learn to pay attention is all," Coop said.
"Coop, you stay on deck. Gunner, since you're staying on lookout, man the gig and handle any trade the good folks of Lock might be after."
"Aye, Captain," Gunner said.
The crew filed one by one down the hatch, leaving Coop on deck and Wink just below the open hatch. The creature looked up to the deckhand with its one eye and began to slyly slink into the darkness.
"Cap'n said I should keep an eye on you. That means you stay where I can see you, you little critter," Coop said.
Wink scowled at him and tapped a finger.
"I think I caught a jab about me being big and dumb in there. You'd best be remembering the big part, because you keep slinging comments like that and we're going to see just how far this boot of mine will send you," Coop said.
Wink rattled off a message that Coop was reasonably sure had to do with the fact that, since Coop had to stay on deck, there was nothing he could do to stop the inspector from having free rein down below. He then darted off into the bowels of the ship.
"I miss back when I was smarter than that critter. Or at least when I thought I was," he muttered to himself.
#
"You know something," Lil said, pacing along beside the captain and Nita as they made their way off the swaying catwalk of the pier and deeper into the moderately more secure platforms of the town. "The hustle and the bustle of Keystone is nice and all. They got pretty near anything a gal might want all in one place, but I think I like Lock better. Folks here are so much happier to see you. And the air smells a good bit fresher. Ain't nothing like a breath of fresh air."
"I imagine when so few people use the port, the locals would be happy to see any new face," Nita said. "I'm just happy that people seem to have finally gotten used to seeing a Calderan complexion."
"How come?" Lil said.
"You didn't notice how people would stare whenever I showed up the first few times?"
"Come to think of it, you did get a few funny looks. I always figured it was your outfit. Even in your work clothes you dress fancier than folks around here are used to. Well heck, you do _everything_ fancy. Just look what you done to the ol' _Wind Breaker_."
Lil turned Nita to view the crew's ship at the end of the pier. At this distance the whole ship was visible, from the sideways teardrop of the envelope to the gleaming brass turbines and the gondola that would have looked just as appropriate on a seagoing frigate as an aircraft. The captain's gig, the dinghy that was held to the belly of the ship while in flight, had been loaded with goods and lowered to the pier, with a line of people eagerly chatting up Gunner as he described their wares.
When Nita had first joined the crew, the ship had looked positively decrepit. There had been splintered and poorly replaced planks all over the hull. Bolts were half-inserted, badly tarnished, and sometimes flat-out missing. It was airworthy, but just barely, and not a moment of thought had been put into how it _looked_. To a Calderan, trained from birth to see the potential for beauty and artistry in all things, it was something she couldn't bear to witness. To the crew, her most important role in the ship was the work she'd done on its mechanisms. Under her ministrations, the boiler and turbines had been simplified and carefully tuned. They were now much easier to fix, and they ran as smoothly and efficiently as the day they were made. That made for a ship that moved faster from port to port and hadn't had more than a few hours of downtime in months. But as far as she was concerned, her greatest achievement had been turning the ship into the work of art it deserved to be.
Every spare moment had been spent polishing this or painting that. She'd brought gold paint from her home in Dell Harbor and added sweeping highlights and designs to the hull, decorating the trim and railings. With acid and a steady hand she'd etched similar detailing into the cowling of the turbines themselves, and she'd worked hard to acquire lumber of the same grain and figuring to patch any hull damage, such that the ship looked almost brand new. She'd even contributed more than a bit of her own money to purchase replacement envelope cloth that matched as closely as possible not the _original_ color of their envelope, but the one it had faded to over the years, such that from this distance the patches were barely noticeable.
"Thanks to you we got the prettiest ship in the sky," Lil said.
The captain, a momentary break forming in his month's-old shell of surliness, turned to the ship and nodded. "Always been proud of the ol' girl. Now she looks as good to the rest of you as she always did to me."
"I'm pleased you like it, but that's just what comes natural to a Calderan. We're all artists at heart, and they say every Calderan is obligated to produce at least one masterpiece before we meet our maker. The _Wind Breaker_ was a fine canvas for it."
"So you ask me, that's why folks were looking at you. It ain't like you're the first person any of them seen that's been dark skinned. Anyone who works in the sun gets pretty much brown before long, and here in Lock half of the workers finish their day in the mine even darker than you, what with all the dust and such."
"Maybe you're right," Nita said. "I suppose I've never been comfortable being singled out. Lucky I didn't become a dancer like my sister. I'd have never survived the stage."
"See, me? I've got the opposite problem. I got just about the most plain face you could ever hope to see, not a pretty one like yours. And I ain't got curves like you, either. Coop and me may as well be twins, 'cept he's taller and don't wear a bow," she said, adjusting the red ribbon that held her short hair out of her face.
"Oh, don't say that. You're very pretty," Nita said, placing a hand on Lil's shoulder.
"Nice of you to say it, but I got a mirror. Don't bother me much, though. Most days it's easier if folks don't pay you no mind, 'specially in the rougher towns. But I'll tell you what. Once we're done fiddling with whatever it is we've got to fiddle with, I'm heading back to the ship and putting on one of them fancy Calderan dresses you gave me and we can hit the town proper."
Nita smiled. "It might be nice. Seems like I only get to wear a dress when I visit home."
"Heck, Nita, if it's just gonna be nice, there ain't no reason to do it. It'll be better than nice, it'll be _fun_. Just the girls for once. 'Cept... there's a few shops and such we won't be visiting."
"Why?"
"Aw, early on when I was first on the crew, we were hard up for money for provisions and such. Cap'n Mack didn't _exactly_ tell us we had to pinch stuff to get the supplies we needed, but he made it darn sure that we didn't have coins to get it all the proper way."
"So you... creatively acquired some items."
"Heck no, I stole 'em. Got pretty good at it, too. Eventually I got caught enough that I had to stop. So I started picking pockets for a while. That's how I got so good with my hands. Like so." Lil dug into her pocket. "You got a victor?"
"I think so," Nita said. She rummaged in her pocket until she revealed a large silver coin.
"Flip it in the air and catch it."
Nita obliged, sending the coin ringing through the air. Lil darted her empty hand in and snatched it, then tipped the hand over and dropped it into Nita's hand.
"That wasn't so... wait..." Nita stared at her hand. The coin Lil had dropped wasn't a large silver coin, it was a small copper one. "How did you do that?"
"Lot's of practice doing things I ought not be doing," Lil said, clipping the silver coin out from between two fingers and swapping it for the copper again. "But we don't do that anymore. Much."
They made their way to the door of a tall, sturdy building near the rear of the town. It was something of an unspoken rule in the larger cities of Rim that if only one building could be built on solid ground, it would be the hospital, and this was no exception. One of the handy parts of it being a mining town was the fact they had all of the equipment and expertise to carve out a nice, wide notch in the mountain to build something that the town couldn't afford to have slip down the slope and into the ocean on a blustery day. The hospital was three stories tall and took as much of a footprint as the mountain was willing to offer, such that the left side and the entire rear wall were physically touching the stone. Its design was a good deal more stable than most of the other buildings in town. Even those who made their homes in the houses sitting on wooden platforms would agree that they were little more than temporary, and thus little was done to them that didn't have clear utility. The hospital actually had things like decorative shutters, painted doors, and outdoor lanterns.
The overall quality and impressiveness of the building was also why any of the town officials who needed to meet with outsiders tended to use the hospital and its offices to conduct business. It is hard to convince someone to invest in your town when the conference room sways with the breeze. At the door waited a portly man with a wide smile on his face. He was well dressed, with a matching jacket, slacks, and vest, along with a heavy overcoat and a pocket watch. He'd made the unfortunate facial-hair choice of connecting his mustache to his sideburns, which became more unfortunate once his slide into middle age had cost him the hair on the top of his head. If nothing else, it made him distinctive. One glance was all it took to confirm that he was the mayor, a man named Lester Wilshire. Nearly every visit to Lock began with a visit to him.
"Captain West, it is glorious to see you again. I tell you, sir, it is brave air-goers like yourselves who have kept our fair town alive. We were withering away before your trade revitalized us, but leave it to the crew that downed the dreadnought to turn a blind eye to the potential wrath of the fug folk rather than ignore those in need."
The crew members let their minds wander as the mayor lavished praise upon them, making at least three more references to the dreadnought and its demise. Though they'd fought against the dreadnought primarily because it was trying to destroy the _Wind Breaker_ after they had robbed a warehouse, the fortunate side effect was an instantaneous reputation across the continent as doers of the impossible and champions of the little guy.
The captain shrugged off the unwanted praise. "Yes, that's fine. We have matters to discuss. And Nita here, I'm sure, is eager to see to what you've got so she can have a bit of shore leave."
"Of course, of course. Amanita the intrepid engineer. My assistant, Matthews, will take you to the, er, the item in question," said the mayor.
The degree to which the people of Rim feared defying the fug folk was truly astounding at times. The mayor or those like him would talk all day about how horrible the fug folk were, and laud those who would defy them, but when there came a chance for their own act of defiance, they would trip over themselves to make it clear that _they_ had no intention of breaking any of the long-standing policies. That this disposition could persist even in Lock, where almost every citizen was already suffering the greatest punishment the fug folk could levy upon someone, spoke volumes of their mythic status in the minds of the people.
Matthews stepped out from within the hospital. It was clear in moments that he was a miner. Certain characteristics of the profession were unmistakable, and Matthews had them all. Despite obvious attempts to correct the issue, his fingernails weren't quite free of grime. He had a subtle stoop to his walk, as though the fact that there was a rough stone ceiling an inch from his head was, at best, a rare departure from the norm. His skin had an almost ghostly pallor, and most sentences ended with a stifled cough. That said, he was dressed nearly as nice as the mayor and had a closely cropped beard and head of hair that suggested he took his appearance seriously.
"This way please," he said, not waiting for introductions.
Matthews paced along the front of the hospital and onto a narrow but well-maintained ledge of stone. The platforms that held the rest of the town extended outward from this ledge. The captain stepped inside the hospital with the mayor, leaving Lil and Nita to follow Matthews to their task.
"See what I mean about no one paying me no mind?" Lil said. "The captain gets this whole 'you're so great' speech. You're 'the intrepid engineer.' The best I get is a nod."
"I'm sure if the captain hadn't cut him off, the mayor would have had something to say about you," Nita said.
"You're sure of that, are you?" Lil said doubtfully. "Hey, Matthews. You have any idea who I am?"
"You're part of the _Wind Breaker_ crew, I assume."
"He assumes. See that?" Lil said, more pleased to have proved her suspicions than displeased at not being known. "I'll bet you know Nita though, right?"
"I should hope so. I'm supposed to get her to fix the pump for shaft seven," Matthews said.
Lil gave Nita a wide "I told you so" grin.
"I'm glad you're taking this in stride. I wouldn't have imagined this would be a smiling occasion," Nita said.
"Just because that's the way it is now don't mean it won't change. I got a lot of living to do. Plenty of time to notch up my belt with things worth doing. Until then I'll spend my time getting ready."
The trio circled around the mountain until they came to an impressively large, perfectly flat stretch of stone. It seemed absurd that such a prime piece of real estate would be completely vacant until one noticed all of the tracks and tool marks on the ground. This was clearly a staging area for the mines, and sure enough, not far from where the courtyard began was the first of a series of precisely cut passageways into the stone, some with cart tracks, others without. Matthews led them to the third of the openings, by far the widest, and stopped just inside, where the sun dropped away to blackness. There he grabbed three helmets from hooks on the walls and carefully screwed fist-sized canisters into receptacles in the back. He then grabbed three tags from within a cabinet and pocketed one, handing one each to the others.
"What's this?" Lil asked.
"Everyone who goes in takes a tag. Everyone who comes out puts it back. The number of empty hooks is the number of folks still inside," Matthews explained. With a twist of a valve and the roll of a knurled knob, a bright blue flame sparked to life behind a glass lens on the front of the helmet, casting light into the darkness. "Watch your heads and watch your step. This shaft has been out of use for some time. There may have been some minor collapses."
"I'll keep my eyes open," Nita said, donning the mining cap and looking over the walls.
This was the first time she'd been in a mine, but as the steamworks where she'd learned her trade had been bored out of the side of a volcano, she felt strangely at ease surrounded by tool-scarred stone walls. Lil was not quite so comfortable, looking with concern at the retreating point of sunlight behind them as they moved deeper inside.
"Something wrong, Lil?" Nita asked.
"I don't like the idea of being anyplace where there's only one way out and it ain't anywhere nearby. I 'specially don't like it when that place has had 'minor collapses' and such, because I don't much trust ol' Matthews and me to have the same idea of what counts as minor."
"If it sets your mind at ease at all, there are plenty of ways in and out of this shaft. It links to six other shafts, each with their own entrance," said Matthews.
"Still don't do me any good with a mountain sitting on my chest," Lil said.
They progressed a bit farther, and the tunnel opened out to reveal an excavated alcove that branched off into a series of other tunnels. This section of the mine seemed quite well made. There were even wooden doors separating carved-out rooms to one side. Matthews stopped in front of one such door and pulled a ring of keys from his pocket, searching for the proper one.
"What exactly are we meant to repair?" Nita asked.
"We get most of our fresh water from springs that run throughout this mountain. Unfortunately, sometimes those springs pour right into a shaft. We keep the active shafts drained by using pumps powered by the windmills, but there's only so much power to go around. This is easily our most productive shaft, but it's so deep we can't spare the power to drain it. If we could get one of the old steam-powered pumps going, we could probably double our production."
"And you folks can't fix it yourself?" Lil said. "Seems to me, what with you not having anything else to lose, you'd start trying to figure out how the things work and just get them running on your own."
"It's been tried," Matthews said.
"What happened?" Nita asked.
He shifted his head toward the far wall of the alcove and pointed a finger. They each turned. The combined light of the three helmets revealed a room quite similar to the one they were trying to access, though the word "room" couldn't really be applied anymore. It looked like a bomb had gone off, rubble from the ceiling piled into the center of the room and the thick front walls were blasted away.
"Same thing happens just about anytime someone has a mind to work on something the fuggers built. Sometimes they get it running, but never for very long. Once you lose a few friends to faulty workmanship, you stop trying that sort of thing. And in a mine, you can't afford to have things exploding or you might lose a whole shaft. We are hoping someone with a firm expertize in boiler repair might be able to rebuild the pump without risking another explosion," Matthews said. He turned back to the door and finally found the key. "There are also those in town who hold out hope that if they walk the line and obey the rules, they can get back in the good graces of the fuggers."
"Good luck with that. We've had a lot of dealing with the fuggers, and they aren't the forgiving types. You gotta do them a favor before they'll so much as look at you," Lil said.
Matthews opened the door to reveal a carved-out chamber large enough to fit half of the _Wind Breaker_ inside. About a third of the room was mounded with equipment. Some of it was old and tarnished, some brand new. Mostly it was a jumble of brass piping, with a few massive vats and canisters standing tall in the center. The moment the door had opened, a blast of wind had hit them, rushing out of a darkened tunnel that branched off the main room. As they stepped inside, Lil started sniffing the air.
"You smell that? I swear I'm getting a whiff of fug in this place," Lil said.
Nita sniffed. "Yes... I do get a hint of it myself."
"This shaft was dug down deep enough that we punched through to a cave system. It must have an opening in the fug, because the whole system is flooded with the stuff. Shutting the door helps because it cuts down the cross breeze," he explained, closing the door. Sure enough, the wind settled and the scent of the fug became much more tolerable. "We'll have to get some men down there to block it up and then try to clear the stuff out, but there's no sense going through the trouble if you can't get this gadget working again to keep the work area dry. Can you do it?"
Nita looked over the mound, taking a mental inventory.
"You may have all of the parts, but this isn't really repairing an old pump, this is assembling a new pump," Nita said.
Their host removed his helmet and flipped open the lens, then turned a valve on a pipe running along the wall and lit a gas lantern with it.
"Are you able to do so? The mayor has authorized us to pay you whatever you feel is a fair price."
Nita eyed up the equipment. "I suppose with Lil's help we _may_ be able to get it done in a day. But for a boiler and pump this size, it really isn't a two-person job. We'll need some people in here to move some of the larger stuff in place."
"It would be a tremendous help to the town," Matthews said. "If you can get started on the finer tasks, once the current shift in the mines is complete we'll get a crew in here to help with the heavy lifting."
"I say we give it a try, Nita," Lil said. "Worst we can do is leave them with half a pump or whatever instead of no pump."
"There's no question we'll try, but we're only in port for a short time, so if we're not through by then, it will have to wait for the next time."
"Anything you do will be enormously appreciated," Matthews said. "I'll leave you to your work. I or one of my associates will be at the entrance of the mine. If you need anything at all, just shout." He took a step toward the door, then stopped. "Oh, I'm sorry. I was supposed to ask you if there was anything you'd like to eat."
"We actually ate not long ago, so—" Nita began.
"So it can wait a bit, but give us a couple of them big, thick sammiches you make here. With the roasted meat. Fresh stuff, not corned or like that. And put some cheese on there, too. Thick, crusty bread, toasted. And a big glass of milk for each of us," Lil proclaimed. She turned to Nita. "Always get yourself a glass of milk when you're on shore leave, because you won't be getting it on the ship, that's for sure."
"Do they even have cows here?" Nita asked.
"Nope, but they got goats. Goats do good in the mountains. I grew up on goat's milk. Good stuff."
"Anything else?" Matthews asked.
"If there's anything you think goes good with that, pile that on there, too. Thanks a bunch, Matthews!" Lil said.
Their host nodded and took his leave, shutting the door behind him and retreating with an echo of footsteps. Nita removed her helmet and shut off the flame, Lil following suit. She clipped it to one of the many hooks and clasps on her belt.
"You should know better than to turn down a free meal on the mainland, Nita," Lil said. "Good as Butch is, it never hurts to get some fresh stuff in you when you have the chance." She rubbed her hands together. "Now let's get started. How do we do this again?"
"Just break the big job into smaller jobs. In this case, the first job would be identifying all of the pieces to see if we have enough to do the repair."
"Right, right. Lemme see if I remember this stuff from last time. This here's the firebox, right? And that's the kettle bit. I don't think I ever seen this flappy part before."
Lil held up what looked like the wheel of a miniature paddleboat.
"You wouldn't have seen one of those before. That's an impeller. That's for the pump, not the boiler. Let's get this all sorted out to make sure we have what we need..."
The two women got to work, moving things into piles, chatting happily between pauses to identify and organize.
#
Captain West followed Mayor Wilshire up a flight of stairs toward the administrative wing of the hospital, where the mayor kept an office for meetings such as this. The captain found himself pausing every few steps to catch his footing, not because the ground was moving but because it wasn't. At this point in his life, he had spent more time off the ground than on it, and walking across a floor that didn't lurch along with its own rhythm always took a few minutes to become accustomed to.
They reached the appropriate door and pushed it open to find a small but neatly kept office. There was a desk with two chairs and an oil lamp. Most of the walls were hidden behind bookshelves that were used as much for knickknacks as books, but in the bare wall between them a few official documents were on display. The mayor took off his coat and hung it on a varnished wooden rack, offering to take the captain's as well. Mack waved him off. Both men took a seat in cushioned leather chairs.
"It is always an honor to host you and your crew in our fair town, Captain. I—"
"Mayor, I appreciate the song and dance, but I ain't really one for wasting too many words on patting each other on the back, so if it's all the same to you, I'd just as soon get the brass tacks hammered out and be on my way," Captain Mack said.
"Of course. A born businessman. Time is money after all," the mayor said. He cleared his throat. "Now I must say, I was surprised when you approached me a few months ago. It isn't every day that someone expresses interest in buying an _island_."
"No, I don't reckon it is."
"You'll understand if I had my doubts regarding your wherewithal to do so. But... well, if what you've shown me is representative of the goods you've got to offer. Medicines, weapons... so many things the fug folk have never even _entertained_ making available to us... I think it is a foregone conclusion that you'll have what you need to make the purchase in no time."
"You say that, but I haven't heard a price yet, Mayor."
"Captain, there is the matter of the island itself." The mayor stood and opened a cabinet to find a bundle of long, rolled-up pieces of parchment. "I had to dig into the archives to find the relevant documentation. Ever since we had to shift from airships to traditional ones, we've begun to... _deemphasize_ our more distant holdings. Particularly those of the size you've indicated."
Lock had become the catchall for those cast-off from airship-centric society largely because of its active harbor. Even before the steady flow of former airmen seeking to make a living on the sea, it had kept a small but well-maintained fleet of warships and merchant vessels. As effective as an airship might be, with the exception of the now defunct dreadnought nothing in the sky could ever hope to rival the power and size of a fully equipped battleship. Thus Lock had managed to stake a claim to and defend a scattering of islands stretching out into the sea. Initially those holdings were a part of Westrim, Lock's home nation, but as more and more of the people who had angered the fug folk accumulated there, Westrim distanced itself more and more from Lock. These days it functioned effectively as a city-state.
"Any of the islands large enough to support a worthwhile agricultural concern are doing so. The others simply can't produce enough of any product valuable enough to warrant the time and resources of sending a ship out to them. I wasn't entirely certain the island you'd indicated was even under our flag any longer."
"I can assure you, it's still under your flag, since I brought the _Wind Breaker_ down there for a spell and your flag was just about the only thing on it."
The mayor cleared some room on the center of his desk and unfurled a nautical map. "Forgive me, I've never been one for maps. Could you indicate the island to which you are referring?"
Mack leaned forward and tapped his finger on a spot of black ink that was small and haphazard enough to be mistaken for a stray speck of fly dirt if not for the small, carefully lettered label identifying it.
"Laylow Island," the mayor read. He walked to one of the bookcases and selected a thick volume. "Let me see... moderate crop potential. Good elevation. Natural harbor sufficient for two or three large boats or half a dozen small ones. No natural resources to speak of beyond a few fruit trees. Well. It is easy to see why we haven't been keeping an eye on the place. It is too far from the mainland to be of any use to any trade routes here on Rim. It is too far off course to be of any use to any potential trade with Caldera, even _if_ they decided to open their borders again. It couldn't support more than ten people by itself. That wouldn't even feed the crew of the boat it would take to reach it."
"That's why I reckon it might be in my price range," the captain said.
"We can certainly discuss it, but before we do, I've got to ask... not that I'm not grateful, but if you are so interested in it, why didn't you just claim it and squat there? The chances were good it would have been years before we even found out."
"Because I'm an honest man, Mayor. And because it would be a mite troublesome if ten years from now you folks get it in your heads that you'd like a military base there, or this or that, and you come to the place with troops and cannons. Better for all of us if I just see if I can't do things proper."
"What do you see in the place?"
"I see a place to set down where I ain't in nobody's way. A little spot in a corner where me and my crew will be left alone to watch the world go by. The life I been leading is the life of a young man. Most folks don't do what I do and live as long as I have, and I'm pretty near finished pressing my luck. Getting where I am, doing what I done, I made more than my share of enemies, so living someplace like Lock or Keystone where I'm shoulder to shoulder with folks who might think I done them dirty in the past and who've been waiting for a chance to return the favor isn't likely to be a long-term arrangement. What I'm looking for is a place to hang my hat, warm my bones, and forget my troubles. I'm looking to retire. And my crew has done right by me, so I mean to find a place where they can do the same, if they've got a mind to. Laylow fits the bill."
"So long as you're aware of what you're getting into. Now, based on the relative value to Lock, the acreage of the island, and a few more factors, I believe I can let you have the island for..." He scribbled some figures onto a scrap of paper. "Seven million victors."
The captain's face remained impassive, but he leaned back a bit in his chair.
"I been working through barter for a bit, Mayor. Forgive me if I don't remember quite how much, say, a bag of Calderan Sea salt stacks up to a coin with the face of an old man who lost his kingdom to the fug a lifetime ago."
"Oh, let us see now..." the mayor said, scratching out some more figures. "The last I saw, a full five-pound bag of Calderan salt was good for two hundred victors. That's... the equivalent of thirty-five thousand bags of salt, or about... eighty-eight tons of the stuff."
Mack nodded. "Would you be needing it all up front?"
"Oh, heavens no. Even someone with your skill and resources wouldn't be expected to provide us with the full payment immediately. I'm not entirely certain there are that many victors in circulation. I took the liberty of having a word with the president of the bank. Normally... well, you're what we would call a high-risk investment. But since if you were for any reason unable to pay the full price, we could simply reclaim the island, he is comfortable with allowing you to acquire it with a twenty percent down payment. That would be in victors or in equivalent merchandise. Then there would be the matter of interest, which would be roughly..."
The captain leaned back a bit farther, eyes drifting to the ceiling as the mayor ran through the numbers. If they played their cards right, haggled properly, and sold every last scrap of stolen goods, the crew combined would just about have enough to buy the island. There would be another year or so of work while he squirreled away the money to live on, but with Nita doing their repairs and the flow of Calderan goods she provided, it wouldn't be difficult. He just had to survive that long. He reached into his pocket and pulled out a twisted, narrow cigar, clamped it into his yellowed teeth, and lit it.
"You give me a few hours, and I do believe we'll be shaking hands on this, Mayor," Mack said with a grin.
#
On the _Wind Breaker_ , things were going about as well as they could be. Gunner was, by a wide margin, their best huckster, able to dazzle the locals with his words and sometimes fetch as much as twice the price that the other crewmen might earn. The captain's requirement that an additional lookout be stationed turned out to be a prudent one, as three potential customers, upon hearing the price for the products they had their eyes on, decided it would be much more economical to simply sneak aboard. Since that required shimmying up the mooring lines, it wasn't precisely a subtle affair, and typically Coop only had to take aim and clear his throat to convince them of the error in their ways. The third opportunist was now in the process of climbing toward the ship, and after three progressively louder throat clearings from Coop, it was obvious he was unwilling or unable to acknowledge him. Further motivation would be necessary.
"You know I can see you down there, right?" Coop said, calling down to the teenage boy who was hanging below the mooring rope, inching his way up while trying to keep his hat from blowing off with one hand.
The boy ignored him.
"What'd'you reckon is going to happen once you get up here?" he asked, aiming a bit more intently.
Still the boy continued.
"You know the law says I can pull the trigger and it won't mean nothing but some paperwork, right?" Coop said.
Again there was no response. The boy had nearly reached the deck.
"I gotta imagine you're deef then. I'm gonna have to do this so's you can feel it." He leaned forward. "Which might be a mite messy if I don't do it right, so if you _can_ hear me, you might want to slide back down now."
In response, the boy reached the deck and hauled his way up. As soon as his head popped up above the railing, he felt the barrel of Coop's rifle press against his forehead. Now suddenly _very_ aware of the man he'd been ignoring thus far, the boy froze.
"This here is a fugger rifle. I don't know if you ever seen what one of these can do to a turbine, but that ain't nothing compared to what it'll do to a head," Coop said.
"You wouldn't shoot me, I'm just a kid," he said.
"If you was just a kid, o' course I wouldn't shoot. But you ain't just a kid. You're also a thief, and shooting thieves is more or less what I'm getting paid to do right now."
"I don't believe you'd pull the—"
A deafening blast rang out, and the boy's hat fluttered down to the pier with a brand new hole in it. Now hatless and missing a few inches across the middle of the wild tuft of hair the hat had concealed, the boy was suddenly quite eager to leave the _Wind Breaker_.
Coop watched as the boy slid down the line and rushed in a panic through the crowd. Below him, he could hear Gunner putting the demonstration to good use.
"What you just saw and heard was an example of the peerless workmanship that goes into each and every firearm assembled in the fug. Most days the only chance you'd get to see one of these fine weapons up close would be if you had the fortitude to storm a fugger facility, and even then you'd likely only see them pointed in your direction. But not today, folks. Today you can see them _in person_ because my colleagues and I did the storming _for_ you. And for the right price, you can _own_ one of these fine weapons. Purchase one today and I'll even throw in the instructions you'll need in order to fabricate your own ammunition. This procedure was developed and tested by me, a formally trained student of Circa Naval Academy and a crucial member of the very crew that bested the dreaded dreadnought..."
He continued his pitch, and not long after sold three of the rifles and a fair amount of ammunition for each. A few minutes later the crowd had dwindled, and Gunner decided to reel in the gig and join Coop on the deck. He brought with him the mysterious weapon he'd been tinkering with off and on since the heist.
"I tell you, Gunner. It's like you're a different fella down there when you're doing the sales routine," Coop said.
"It makes me feel filthy. There are such better usages of my time. But it is a necessary evil."
Coop looked to Gunner. "Just so we're clear, that's a gun you're fiddling with, right?"
"I certainly hope so."
"For killing folks?"
"Ideally."
"And _selling things_ to folks is the necessary evil?"
"Indeed."
"That's a special sort of thinking right there."
"No offense, Coop, but I'm not interested in a philosophical debate, and you'd be ill equipped to handle one in any case."
"I ain't much for debate anyways," Coop said, working industriously to dislodge a piece of his lunch from his teeth. "Hey, listen. I was thinking maybe a poem."
Gunner stopped tinkering and looked up. "What in the world are you talking about?"
"For Nita. She likes art and all that. I'm going to buy her something nice, but I know it'll mean more if I make her something. I can't paint worth a lick, or draw. I could play the spoons, or maybe dig out my harmonica, but that doesn't seem like it'd impress her much. But poems aren't so bad. I could write a poem. Do you think she'd like that?"
"I need to be certain I understand this correctly. You are going to attempt to win Nita's heart with a poem."
"Not win her heart. Just sort of let her know I might be after it. But why not a poem? Don't Calderans like poems?"
Gunner sighed. "This may come as a surprise to you, but a single set of likes, dislikes, and behaviors cannot be applied universally to an entire society. Nita, you'll notice, is quite different from the typical Calderan as we've come to know them. But since I'm not certain there is room in your head to accept people as individuals, let us assume that your premise here applies. Yes. Calderans like poems. They like them _so_ much that some Calderans devote their lives to poetry. They spend hours a day ruminating on the very nature of language. Months are spent attempting to craft the perfect verse and experimenting with different meters."
"So you're saying she'll like it," Coop said.
Gunner sighed more heavily. "Yes, Coop. If you are able to write a beautiful poem, I am sure she will like it."
"That shouldn't be too hard. It just has to rhyme, right?"
"Poetry need not necessarily rhyme, no."
"... Well, then how do you know it's even poetry?"
"If you can't tell if something is a poem, then it isn't a poem. And may I ask how you intend to write a poem when you can barely write your own name?"
"I don't figure I'll have to write my name in a poem, Gunner. Oh, 'cept at the end, so's people can tell who wrote it."
Gunner shook his head and turned back to his work. "Coop, something tells me regardless of what you come up with, people are going to be able to tell who wrote it."
#
Nita and Lil had been making good progress. Despite taking time to make sure Lil understood each step, most of the smaller assemblies were already together after just a few hours. They were just preparing to tackle the safety mechanisms when their food arrived, along with a basin of water and some clean towels to wash up.
"I'll tell you what," Lil mumbled, her mouth filled to bursting with the fourth big bite of sandwich. "These Lock folk sure know how to pack a meal." She washed the mouthful down with a sip of milk. "Ah... you can just _feel_ it doing you good."
Nita took a sip. From her expression, she was less convinced. "It's definitely... different."
"Oh, you just gotta get used to it. This stuff puts meat on you." She crunched into the sandwich. "I tell you. If Butch could get her hands on a proper kitchen and some good fresh stuff like this, she'd have a restaurant with a line out the door."
"It's true." She took another small sip and gathered her thoughts. "I've got to say, and forgive me if it sounds rude, but I didn't think very highly of the crew when I first met you all."
Lil shrugged. "There ain't too many high thoughts to be had about us."
"But you've all struck me with your skills and your work ethic. I wish I could see what any one of you could accomplish if you didn't have to spend so much time shuttling from place to place and just trying to stay alive."
"All of us? I mean, Gunner's educated and all that. And the cap'n a _cap'n._ Butch's good with food and stitching folks up. But what about me and Coop?" Lil asked. "We don't do nothing but what we're told. What could _we_ do?"
"Lil, please. Give yourselves the credit you deserve. The two of you are easily the most capable and dedicated people I've ever worked with," Nita said. "You're deckhands. Like you told me, you do _everything_ on the ship. I learned so much more from the two of you than I did from the others, and far more than you're ever likely to learn from me. The question isn't 'What _could_ you do?' The question is 'What _couldn't_ you do?'"
"Well Nita... I'm fit to blush right now," Lil said.
"I'm just telling you what you should already know." Nita took a bite of her sandwich and glanced over the remaining parts. "If we keep going with this pump, we might just get it done today. Would you like to keep at it?"
"Let's get to it!" Lil said. She stuffed the remainder of her sandwich into her mouth and sprayed some crumbs as she continued speaking. "You just sit and finish eating and tell me what needs doing."
She wiped her hands on her pants and knelt on the floor, picking up the next parts in the pile. Her nose wrinkled. "Got a fresh whiff of the fug just then. They better plug that hole right quick or it ain't gonna be much fun to work here. But what do we got next? This here's just a pipe. Threaded on either end. Nothing special about that. This is one of them input valves. We already got some of them, so I guess this one is extra." She picked up a component that was a veritable contraption, pipes leading in and out and a tall metallic cap sticking up from the middle with a screw protruding from the end of it. "This is... what is this?"
"Think about it for a second," Nita said.
Lil turned it over and twisted it about. "Well... oh... oh wait, this is one of them... it's a valve, but a special one. The... dang it, what is it... the relief valve!"
"That's right. And what's it for?"
"For letting steam out when there's no place else for steam to come out."
"And why is that important?"
"Because steam's got to go somewhere, and if it can't go somewhere, it's gonna go _everywhere_. That's when the thing blows."
"That's exactly right."
"So then that goes right here," Lil said, springing to her feet and grabbing a wrench.
"Wait!" Nita said. "What are you forgetting?"
"... What?"
"You need to inspect it."
"Oh, well I already did that. Look at this thing. Good and shiny."
"I don't care what it looks like on the outside. The workings are what matters. I'll put the ugliest piece of mangled metal in that pile onto a boiler if the inside is sound, but if one piece is out of place in a relief valve, the whole boiler is a risk."
"So I gotta unscrew this top part then?"
"Yes indeed," Nita said, handing Lil a screwdriver from her sash.
The eager student carefully twisted free two of the screws. As she started on the third, Nita issued a warning.
"Now you'll want to put some pressure on the top of that while you unscrew the other two screws. There's a spring inside there, and it is under compression. You don't want the top to pop off and send those screws flying. I found that out the hard way."
"Hey, I was wondering," Lil said, putting the gadget down and pressing on the top with one hand while she worked at the remaining screws. "Let's say your papa does his thing, and it turns out we're allowed to go with you on shore in Caldera. What do folks do there? What would you want to show us?"
"Oh, it is a wonderful place, Lil. I'd _have_ to take you to the Dell Harbor gallery. Our family has a whole _wing_ devoted to us. I never made anything worth displaying there, but my brother has a sculpture, and a portrait of my sister is hanging there as well. And my mother's sculptures... I tell you, she could have filled the wing all by herself. And did I tell you? She's back to sculpting!"
Lil nodded and smiled. "Only about a dozen times. Them fuggers make good medicine. That all you folks do, though? Make your own art and look at other folks's art?"
"Oh no. We do... well, we do everything you people do out here. It just tends to be a bit more elaborate. More deliberate."
Lil removed the final screw and slowly released the pressure on the top. "I thought you said there was a spring squeezed in here."
"There should be. For regulating pressure."
"It didn't pop or nothing." She pulled the top off. Inside was a set of rods holding a cover on an opening in the main pipe.
"Let me see that," Nita said.
Lil handed it over. "Is it broke or something?"
"It isn't broken. This never would have worked. The way these pieces are... this was designed to fail."
"That's no good. Where'd'ya reckon they got this, then?"
"We're certainly going to find out," Nita said. She set the remainder of her sandwich down on the tray and paced to the door, opening it. "Matthews! Would you come here please?"
Lil coughed. "Gosh dang it that fug smell is strong with that door open," she said, waving the stench away.
In moments the sound of footsteps echoed toward them, accompanied by the light of a mining helmet. Matthews, in his bizarre mixture of business attire accessorized with mining equipment, appeared at the door.
"Good evening. I trust the food was to your liking?" he said, stepping inside and shutting the door behind him.
"That it was, darlin'. My compliments to the cook," Lil said.
"May I ask where you got these parts?" Nita asked.
"Most of them were salvaged from the broken airships of whatever unfortunate soul was most recently banned by the fug folk."
"This one is _very_ fresh. It doesn't look like it was ever used."
"It probably never was. Most of the people banned by the fug folk have their ships returned to them prior to repair work being done. That means a lot of replacement parts are left on board from the prerepair inspection."
"Well, this part is very dangerous, and deliberately so. There should be a spring in here, and it was replaced with a solid rod. This isn't broken. I don't think there's any other word for it but sabotage."
"Really..." he said, taking the part to look it over. "You're sure?"
"This isn't the sort of thing that could be done by mistake."
He looked over the part for a few more seconds, then handed it back. "Here. Take it. I'll summon the mayor. He'll want to hear about this personally. Is there any work you can continue to do while I fetch him?"
"There's plenty left to be done. As long as none of the other parts are dangerous, we can leave the relief valve for last."
"If you would do so, it would be much appreciated," he said. "I'll get the mayor right away."
He opened the door and quickly shut it behind him. Lil and Nita went back to work, both of them crouching over the remaining parts to look over them with a bit more care in light of this discovery. After a few moments, Lil paused and put her hand to Nita's shoulder, stopping her as well.
"What is it?" Nita asked.
Lil made a shushing motion with her finger and leaned close, whispering in Nita's ear. "He said he was going to go see the mayor right quick, didn't he?"
"Yes," Nita replied quietly.
"Then how come I didn't hear no footsteps?" Lil asked. She brushed her hand against the hem of her coat, lifting it to reveal a pistol on her belt. She raised her voice. "Matthews, you still hanging about?"
There was no answer. She put her hand to the grip and stood, creeping toward the door. Nita slipped the largest of the wrenches in her sash free and hefted it. Lil reached the door and tried the handle. She turned to Nita and mouthed the word, _Locked._
"Matthews? Would you please come here a moment? I've got something else you need to see," Nita called out.
Still there was no sound of footsteps.
"I don't like this one bit. We're getting out of here, darlin'," Lil said, pulling back the hammer of the pistol. "Plug your ears. This makes a heck of a noise in a place like this."
Nita did so, Lil doing her best to do the same while still aiming. She pulled the trigger, and a thunderous boom echoed off the walls, her bullet lodging in the delicate locking mechanism. Lil took one hand from the gun and tried the knob. It turned, but only slightly. Nita quickly put her wrench to work on the knob, clamping it down and turning. The added leverage was just about enough to get it to turn, and the two of them yanked the door open. Wind rushed from behind them, and it dragged with it not just the gagging scent of fug, but a few curls of the toxic vapor. Suddenly the gas pipes on the walls rang and shuddered. The flames lighting the room died away.
Without delay, Nita grasped the helmet on her belt and sparked a flame to light, holding it with her nonwrench hand to light the room.
"Lil!"
Lil whipped around, pistol at the ready, and at the first glimpse of what was approaching, fired. Three men dressed in thick layers of strange, leathery black material were stalking out of the darkness. Their faces were partially obscured by masks, but there was no mistaking what little flesh remained exposed. The men were stark white, like bleached bone. Their eyes were a reddish brown, and they walked with an odd, twisted posture. Fug folk. Lil's shot had knocked the one in front to the ground. The others scattered and charged. Lil fired twice more, but the fuggers were faster than she'd expected and neither shot met its mark. One of them grappled with her, and the other attempted to do the same with Nita, only to take three punishing blows from her wrench, sending him to the ground. She then tackled the fugger attempting to disarm Lil, sending the scrawny but surprisingly strong assailant sprawling.
The light dangling from Nita's belt swung about chaotically, casting illumination all around, however briefly. Acting quickly, Lil fired two quick rounds into the chest of the fugger Nita had knocked down, then put a boot to the head of the one who had tangled with Nita to keep him down.
"You wanna end up like your friends there, or you wanna act like a gentleman and tell us what you were trying to do?" Lil asked, putting her pistol to his forehead.
Before anyone could speak, or even react, Nita and Lil each felt something close around their ankles. A firm yank pulled them from their feet, sending them spilling forward. Lil fell on top of her would-be informant, pulling the trigger as she went but only managing to graze his temple. A hand held tight to Nita's braid and pulled her head back, another one grasping Lil's ponytail to do the same. The first man Lil had shot was on his feet again, the light of the helmet revealing the bullet divot in his chest only as deep as the first layer of uniform and not leaking any blood. He was dousing a rag with a strong-smelling chemical, while what was presumably the second fugger Lil had shot pressed his knees into the smalls of the girls' backs. They each struggled, Lil peppering their assailants with hair-curling profanities, but all it did was earn the deckhand the first dose of the rag. She struggled more violently for a moment, then fell still. Nita fought harder, but to no avail. The rag was pressed to her mouth, and the world went dark.
# Chapter 2
"So this here is the prettiest one you got?" Coop said, turning a music box over in his hands.
He stood in a curio shop in the market district of Lock, which was the name they gave the section of catwalk that had all seven of the storefronts the town had to offer. Around him were shelves carefully arranged with contraptions, figurines, and ceramics. The music box in question was made from stained mahogany. When he clicked it open, it tinkled a gay little tune he didn't recognize, all while a tiny tin ballerina pirouetted gracefully.
"Well, beauty is a matter of taste, sir. I could show you any of the others if you'd like," said the shopkeeper. She was an older woman, dressed in a gown that seemed simultaneously too formal and too complex to be appropriate for a storekeeper. It was a full gown, complete with bustle, and her hair was put up in a beehive that was tall enough to be bordering on architectural.
"But are they more pretty or less pretty? I only want to see them if they're more pretty," Coop said. "The lady this is for has got a real good eye for this sort of thing, and I don't want her to look at what I bring her and say 'Why didn't you get the pretty one?' You get my meaning?"
"I'm sure your lady friend will be quite satisfied."
"Okay. You're a lady, so I reckon you'd know what a lady would like. They all look the same to me," he said. "Now how about the insides? They pretty?"
"You're looking at them right now, sir," the shopkeeper said with a raised eyebrow.
"Not this inside. The inside of the inside. Where the fiddly bits are. Are there lots of fiddly bits? This lady, she likes the fiddly bits. Fiddlier the better."
"I assure you that the workings are of the highest quality, and stunningly intricate. Quite... fiddly, sir."
"This'll be the one then. You said this'd be fifty, right?"
"Seventy-five, sir."
"That's a mite steep."
"You pay for beauty, sir."
"Well sure, but you said beauty's a matter of taste. This here tastes more like fifty."
"I'd be willing to give it to you for seventy."
"I'd be willing to let you keep it for seventy. Might take it with me for sixty."
The proprietor sighed. "Sixty-five _might_ be acceptable."
"That'll be fine," Coop said, clicking the lid shut and setting it down so that he could count out the payment in fives. It was a task that pushed him to the very limits of his mathematical knowledge. Once he'd worked out the right amount, and the shopkeeper was counting to keep him honest, he dug around in his pocket.
"Since you're a lady, maybe you could tell me. I got started on this poem here. You reckon a lady would like it?" He unfurled the page and cleared his throat.
There was a terrifying crackle, then a deep, rumbling roar that rattled the contents of the shelves.
"What the hell is that?" Coop said.
"I don't know. It sounds like it came from the mines," said the shopkeeper.
"The mines? But Lil's at the mines! And Nita too!"
He snatched his purchase and sprinted onto the wooden slats of what passed for streets in Lock. There he quickly found that the whole of the town had chosen to do the same. He shouldered, elbowed, and when necessary punched his way through the crowd, rushing for the courtyard at the mouth of the mines. The courtyard was flooding with people, both from townsfolk rushing to see what had happened and miners rushing out for fear of what would happen next. Dusty air was pouring out of one of the entrances. Someone in a very official-looking uniform shouted something as Coop sprinted past, and someone else stopped him with a hand to his chest.
"You can't go any farther, sir. It's too dangerous," the man said.
"My sister's in there!" he cried, shoving the man aside.
The man grabbed him from behind and held him back. "Sir! I'm the safety officer of the mine. You can't go inside. It is _too dangerous!_ "
Without looking, Coop reached back and grabbed the man's belt, then, with a swift hook of his heel, kicked one of his legs out from under him. As the man stumbled to get his balance, Coop pulled at his belt and overbalanced him, pivoting him as he fell so that he landed square on his back. Before the safety officer could reclaim the wind that had been knocked from him, Coop cocked his pistol. He leaned low and pushed it beneath the man's chin. The deckhand had a terrifying, manic look in his eyes.
"My sister is in there. And if you mean to keep me from her, then it's about to get _real_ dangerous for you out here, too."
"Weapon away, Coop," bellowed Captain Mack as he thumped up to the scene, huffing and puffing.
A few steps behind him was Gunner, and a few steps farther was Butch.
Reluctantly, Coop holstered the weapon and pulled the safety officer to his feet.
"Someone better start talking about what happened here. I've got two members of my crew in that mine," the captain said.
The safety officer tried to catch his breath. "Sir, we are evacuating the mine now. If they are inside, they will be coming out, but you have to let us do our job."
"Right then. Make room, Coop. Glinda, see to anyone who needs help. Everyone keep your eyes peeled for Lil and Nita."
A few minutes passed, Coop barely able to restrain himself as the carefully practiced procedures played out in front of them. One by one, each miner turned his or her tag over to the safety officer, who replaced it in the cabinet. With remarkable efficiency, not five minutes later the last of the tags were being hung up. There were three hooks vacant. Then Matthews stumbled out of the mine, caked with dust and clearly disoriented. The officer approached him, claiming his tag and hanging it up.
"Matthews," Captain Mack said, stomping up to the final person to vacate the mine. "You were with the girls. Tell me what happened."
"Please, sir, he may require medical attention," the safety officer said, reaching out to hold the captain back. Before he could touch the man, a familiar cocking sound drew his attention to Coop, pistol once again in hand.
"Glinda, is this man fit to answer a few questions?" Mack called out.
His ex-wife and current medic paced over and looked Matthews up and down once. She muttered something and made a dismissive gesture.
"Tell me what happened," Mack said.
"I... I don't know. There was an explosion," Matthews said.
"Where are the girls?" Mack asked.
"They were in the chamber with the pump. It was nearly finished. They might even have been testing it."
"I was terrified this might happen, Captain," said the harried mayor as he made his way to the scene with labored breath. "Those devices are so difficult to maintain. It must have burst! Safety Officer, what is the situation?"
"The explosion was in a disused shaft. No miners were inside. There was only Matthews and the two visitors."
"We've got to assume it was the pump that blew," Matthews said. "And if they were inside its chamber, we've got to assume—"
There was a second cock of a weapon, this time the captain's pistol.
"Until I see what happened with my own eyes, no one is assuming anything. We clear on that?"
Matthews nodded.
"Now we're going in to see to our crew," the captain said. "Coop, bring Matthews along."
The deckhand grabbed a handful of the man's vest.
"You can't just go inside. There has been an explosion. There is tremendous potential for collapse!" the safety officer explained desperately.
The captain shifted his pistol to the officer. "Well, then you can come along, make sure we're good and safe."
Without waiting for his response, Captain Mack, Butch, Coop, and Gunner marched into the mine, grabbing helmets and fumbling them to flame on the way. The officer followed on their heels, fetching the proper number of tags and catching up. As the group moved deeper into the darkness, the dust in the air became choking, but they simply retrieved kerchiefs and tied them around their mouths, the safety officer deploying a more purpose-built dust mask.
"You need to keep your eyes and ears open. Any sound of crackling or clattering could be the roof giving way. Look for cracks in the walls and ceiling, splintered beams. And for heaven's sake put those guns away. If the shaft is compromised, even a loud report could be the last straw and cause a cave-in."
"Tell me what happened," Mack said once more to Matthews.
"I told you!" the man said, pulling himself free of Coop's grip and putting a handkerchief to his mouth. "They were with the pump. They may have been testing it. There was an explosion."
The group made their way quickly to the site of the explosion. The alcove was largely intact, but the walls of the chamber that the girls had been working in were little more than rubble, and a large section of the ceiling had collapsed, burying the room under at least fifteen feet of jagged stone.
Coop pointed his gun at Matthews. "Is that where they were?"
"Yes... I'm sorry, yes..." Matthews replied.
Coop holstered his weapon and ran to the rubble, heaving and tugging at the first boulder he could reach. It didn't budge. The safety officer cast the light of his helmet at the ceiling above them.
"This is bad. A partial cave-in already. We've got to get a support crew in here to shore this roof up. And a rescue crew to clear the rubble." He turned and called to the entrance at a carefully moderated level, to avoid further risk of collapse, "Rescue and recovery. Now."
"Coop, leave it," Mack said.
"But Lil!" he cried, tears in his eyes. "And Nita!"
"Nothing you can do cutting your hands up on a stone you can't move," the captain said.
Gunner searched the walls and ground, stopping when he came to the remnants of the door, some distance away. Mack sniffed the air. Gunner did the same. They cast a meaningful look at each other. Gunner then looked to the remains of the door again, leaning low to scrutinize it.
"Matthews, what'd you hear again?"
"An explosion."
"That's all you heard. Just an explosion?"
"That's all."
Gunner nodded and turned back to the door. He planted a foot on it and levered a piece of it free, slipping it into an inner pocket of his jacket.
"Anyone want to tell me why I'm getting a whiff of fug?" Mack said.
"It's shaft seven," the safety officer said. "There's a leak near the low point. We decommissioned the shaft before we could deal with it."
Mack paced over to the wall and looked over the crumbled edge and the ruptured pipe there. A crew began to file into the alcove with picks, timbers, ladders, and lights.
"Captain, I must firmly request that you and your crew leave us to our work. When we find your crew, alive or dead, you will be alerted."
"You're going to look into this. What caused it and such," Mack said. It wasn't a request; it was an order.
"All mine incidents are investigated, Captain."
"Then I think we've got all we're going to get. Everyone, we're going back to the _Wind Breaker_."
"Captain, I ain't going nowhere until they find Lil," Coop said.
"Coop, look around you. I'm here, you're here. Gunner and Glinda are here. There's no one watching the _Wind Breaker_. Your first duty is to that ship. Now you will follow orders, understood?"
Coop and Mack stared each other down for a tense few seconds. "Aye, Cap'n."
The crew formed up and filed out, throwing down the tags as they exited. The mayor walked quickly along beside them.
"Of course you have my deepest sympathies."
"Keep 'em," the captain rumbled.
"If there is anything the people of Lock can do—"
"You can find out exactly what happened, and you can find my crew," he said.
"Yes, of course. Of course!" the mayor said, falling behind and finally stopping to issue orders to his underlings.
Most of the town was still clustered around the mine courtyard, parting only to allow the crew through. What few stragglers there were seemed to scatter and disappear into the crowd at the approach of the crew. Before long they were the only ones on the catwalks, moving quickly to their ship. The ladder was still down, an uncharacteristic oversight on the part of Gunner and Butch, the two crewmen who had been aboard at the time of the explosion.
"Report, now!" Mack bellowed into the ship, his order intended for Wink. "Coop, inside. Full ship check. You find anything alive, you make sure it doesn't stay that way."
The inspector appeared at the top of the ladder instantly, looking down to the pier while Coop worked his way up. Wink reached down and started drumming at the top rung of the ladder.
There were men. They had knives. They cut the mooring ropes. They did not finish. The crew came and the men jumped off the pier, Wink tapped.
Gunner ran to the edge and peered over. He dropped to the planks of the pier and reached underneath, snagging a loose rope and pulling it up.
"There is a rope tied to the supports under the pier. And someone was definitely working at cutting the mooring ropes," Gunner said. "If they got under the pier and into the supports for the town, they could be anywhere by now."
"All aboard," the captain said. "This whole situation is wrong. Every last part of it."
#
The crew had gathered in the galley. Mack was standing, leaning heavily on a table with his eyes cast down. The others were also on their feet, looking to him expectantly.
"I want everyone to listen to what I have to say. Until that rescue crew shows us two bodies, this is still a crew of seven. No one is mourning, no one is seeking revenge. That understood?" he said.
"Aye, Captain," was the universal reply, Coop notably more reluctant than the rest.
"Good. Any of us in our right mind just now probably noticed that nothing about this adds up. I may as well start. Them pipes there on the wall? They were gas lights. Anybody smell any gas?"
"No, Captain."
"No. That place should have been blazing or stinking of gas, and it was neither. Someone could have shut it off after the blast, but we still would have smelled it. So either they had them girls working in the dark, or by the light of them helmets, or someone shut off the gas at the source before the place blew. And that don't sound like an accident."
"That's not the half of it, Captain," Gunner said. He pulled the shard of door from his jacket and dropped it on the table. It was the portion of the door containing the lock. "Take a whiff. Does anyone else get a hint of something sharp. Something with a touch of char, and the stink of lamp oil?"
"There's a bit of it, yes," Mack said.
"That's explosive. Or what's left of it when it goes off."
"You're sure?" Coop said.
"Half of my wardrobe smells like that. Trust me. I'm familiar with the aftermath of a good explosion."
"But we already knew the thing exploded," Coop said.
"They'd have us believe the _boiler_ exploded. A steam explosion is nothing but water and debris. There wouldn't be any of this stink. At least, not if the boiler blew on its own."
"And this isn't the sort of thing they might put in the firebox," Mack said.
"Not unless they wanted it to detonate," Gunner assured him. "And I'll tell you this. Matthews is either deaf or a liar." He pointed the lock. "That's a bullet hole. If we dig around in there, I bet we'll find a bullet. Unless miners routinely unload revolvers into locks, I'd say Lil fired a shot."
"And Matthews said all he heard was an explosion. No gunshot," Mack said.
"So that suit-wearing snake had something to do with this!" Coop fumed. "I'll kill him!"
"No, Coop. You'll stay here and keep guard of the ship."
"But—"
"You questioning my orders, crewman?" Mack asked, his voice steady, but with an edge of reprimand.
Coop was practically shaking. "No, Cap'n."
"Then you will guard the ship with Glinda and Wink. Gunner, you find Matthews and keep an eye on him. Get ready to ask some questions and motivate him to answer good and proper. I'll have a word with the mayor. Find out what we can about him. And I want all of you to keep your eyes open. This ain't over by a long shot."
All filed toward the door to fulfill their orders. Coop stopped Captain Mack with a hand to the shoulder.
"Cap'n," he said.
"Yes?"
"I know we're a crew of seven... even if I'm still not sure Wink oughta count as one, but... you reckon we're going to be saying any prayers at breakfast?" he asked, his voice shaking with a potent mix of emotions.
"Times like this, Coop, the question you should be asking is how many other folks are going to be saying prayers tomorrow. Because however this turns out, somebody's wearing black come sunup."
# Chapter 3
A well-dressed but rather shaken gentleman sat at the bar of a small pub near the edge of Lock. One could easily dismiss his rattled appearance from his proximity to the explosion in the mine a few hours earlier, but based on his frequent anxious glances over his shoulder, he was either concerned about a second explosion sneaking up on him, or he had other things on his mind.
"Henry, are you sure there isn't another ferry? Something sooner?" Matthews asked, thumping down his shot glass for a third refill.
"You asked six times, James," said the bartender, reaching for a bottle. "You know the six o'clock to Clemens Isle is just about the only passenger boat leaving today. What's got you so jumpy?"
"I just... I just want to get away for a bit. The mountain almost came down on my head today."
The pub was rather empty. It was the second of two such establishments in a town not quite large enough to support such an arrangement, but there was inevitably someone who had been thrown out of the first pub before he or she had reached the desired level of inebriation. These scraps were Henry the bartender's bread and butter, and right now in addition to Matthews there were two more patrons at the bar and one at a table.
The door opened, and both Henry and Matthews looked up.
"Ah, splendid. Just the man I was hoping to see," said Gunner from the doorway. His voice was oozing with false politeness.
Matthews turned back to his drink and gulped it down, thumping the glass on the bar again. Gunner sauntered over and sat beside Matthews. His long coat was open, revealing three progressively more threatening weapons strapped to his chest, belt, and thigh.
"You're... you're one of the _Wind Breaker_ crew!" Henry said, a wide smile coming to his face. "You knocked out the dreadnought! By gum, we've got a certified celebrity in our midst!"
There was a halfhearted murmur of appreciation from the rest of the clientele, its lack of enthusiasm having more to do with the veil of alcohol than anything else.
"Which one are you again?" Henry said.
"Guy von Cleef. You'd likely know me as Gunner."
"Right, right. Gunner. Listen, I heard what happened in the mine. It's a damn shame what happened to your crewmates, but I want you to know that we all appreciate that they were trying to help us out when it happened." He set out a glass and filled it with a hearty ale. "Here you go. On the house."
"Many thanks, good barkeep," Gunner said. He took a sip, then turned to Matthews. "What about you, Matthews? Have _you_ got any sympathy for me today."
"Yes, yes as I said before, we are all sorry for your loss."
"Well, it isn't a loss _yet._ Not for certain," Gunner said. "The rescue crew is hard at work, but that's a lot of rubble to sort through. Funny thing, Matthews. They've got the rescue dogs in the mine, sniffing away, trying to find where the crew should dig. Doesn't seem like they can catch a whiff of anything."
"The dogs aren't always able to catch a scent. Airflow in a mine is tricky. Especially after an explosion."
"No doubt, no doubt," Gunner said with a nod, taking another sip. "Do you remember the explosion, Matthews?"
"How can I forget?"
"Yes, certainly. A thing like that burns itself into one's mind. I've had more than a few similar scares, I'm sure you're aware. Tell me, what did it sound like, what did it look like?"
"I've said. There was a thunderous sound, and a rush of dust and steam."
"Mmm. Yes. That _is_ what you said. A thunderous sound. Just one? Not perhaps a smaller sound first?"
"Just one burst."
"And no flash of light to go with the explosion?"
"Just dust and debris. And steam."
Gunner nodded again and sipped some more. "People are looking for you, you know. The doctors wanted to know if you were all right."
"I'm fine. Nothing to worry about. They should focus on finding your crewmates."
"Are you certain you're well enough? It would be a real tragedy if you had an injury you didn't notice. Your hearing, for instance. An explosion in a mine can be quite detrimental to one's ears."
"I've got a bit of a ringing, but I can hear well enough."
"Never can be too careful about that," Gunner finished his ale. "I'll tell you what. Join me outside for a moment. Let's have a quick hearing test."
"That really isn't..."
Gunner pulled back his coat a bit more to reach into his pocket, revealing two more holsters with similarly threatening contents. He fished out a few coins and threw them on the bar. "For my friend's latest drink."
"Really, sir," Matthews said. "That isn't necessary. And I don't need a hearing test."
"Nonsense. I insist," Gunner said, adding in a more ominous tone, "On both counts."
Matthews looked to Gunner, an unreadable expression on the latter man's face.
"I really would rather not step away at the moment," Matthews said.
"Very well, we can do it in here," Gunner said.
In a smooth, practiced motion he drew a pistol from one of his many holsters, cocked it, and fired it into the floorboards. The sound was painfully loud, startling all of the patrons and prompting a few passersby to look curiously inside.
"Did everyone hear that?" Gunner asked innocently.
"Of course we all heard that. You nearly deafened us!" Henry growled. "Just what are you trying to do, firing that thing in my pub?"
"And you, Matthews?" Gunner asked calmly, placing the revolver on the bar, its barrel pointed at the man's chest. "Did you hear that?"
"Yes. Of course," Matthews said.
"Rather loud indoors, isn't it?" Gunner remarked.
"Very."
Gunner picked the revolver back up and spun the chamber, popping it open and fishing a fresh bullet from his pocket to reload. As he did, he chatted idly. "This is my favorite medium-caliber weapon, Matthews. Small enough to conceal, powerful enough to be devastating to a person, and even a bit of a threat to machinery. I've made sure every member of the crew has one. Everyone except Nita. She never did embrace the firearm as readily as she might have." He snapped the weapon shut. "Are you _certain_ you didn't hear anything before or after the explosion?"
"Th-there was nothing to hear."
Gunner nodded. "Captain's been talking to the mayor. I understand you've been a real help to him. A liaison between him and the other miners."
"I do what I can," he said.
"And what did you do _before_?"
"What does that have to do with—"
"The mayor says you were in charge of a pilot crew at a little repair pier about seventy miles south of Keystone. You'd bring damaged ships down into the fug for the fuggers to repair. Obviously, since you're here, you lost your right to do such things... for some reason or another. But you had _plenty_ of contact with the fuggers before that happened. Plenty of contact, and plenty of contacts."
"That was a long time ago," he said.
"So very long ago.... Let me ask you this, Matthews. If I were to walk you to your home right now, would I find your bags packed?"
"I'm not comfortable—"
"Any reason you bought a ticket on a ferry out to Clemens Isle, but no return ticket?"
"How do you know—"
"The mayor has been very helpful. He and the captain are rather friendly. Clemens Isle is the closest airport that passenger dirigibles are willing to make stops at, I recall."
"I'm visiting family in Keystone."
"I'm sure."
"Listen, if you are going to accuse me of something, just come right out and say it."
"I think you're working with the fuggers. I think you either conspired with them to kill my friends or conspired with them to cover it up. But there is _no_ reason for you to want those women dead and there is _every_ reason for the fuggers to want them dead, and as a man who moved from a cushy career to a back-breaking one on their whims, I've got to imagine you'd do just about anything to get back in their good graces. I don't know what the truth is, but I know for certain that it isn't what's come out of your mouth thus far."
Matthews was silent, sweat trickling down his brow.
Gunner continued. "I'm going to explain something to you right now, Matthews. You know the two women you escorted into that mine and did _not_ escort back out? The little one was a woman named Chastity Cooper. Her older brother is on our ship right now. I'm going to ask you some questions, and I want honest answers. If I get them, you can go on your way and do whatever you choose. Might I recommend you choose to hide from us, because even though we've got bigger fish to fry at the moment, it doesn't mean you're safe from the skillet. If I don't get honest answers, you'll be meeting the man who blames you for burying his sister. As frightening as you might find these guns, Coop will be using his bare hands, and between the two of us, I think your better chance is with me."
Matthews looked around. There was nothing quite like a gunshot to bring a handful of drunks back to their wits. Almost every resident of Lock had a bone to pick with the fug folk, and if Gunner's accusations were true, they now had a bone to pick with Matthews. Half of them would hate him because a bone deep, bitter hatred of the fug folk had been brewing for years and anyone who worked with them was an excellent target for that hostility. The other half would hate him out of envy of the fact he had managed to find a way back to the life from which they had been forced.
"May I do this outside?" he said quietly.
"If you think it will help," Gunner said, letting Matthews lead the way.
# Chapter 4
As though they had arranged it, the captain and Gunner arrived at the _Wind Breaker_ at the same time. Eight hours had passed since the explosion.
"What've we got?" both men asked the other.
"You first," ordered the captain.
"Sure enough, Matthews was in on it, and the fug folk are behind it. He was kept in the dark about the details, but he was told that there would be an explosion once Nita was nearly through with the repair, and that he was to keep her inside the chamber until it happened. He got paid piles of money and has had his repair privileges reinstated in exchange for what he did. He may not have killed Nita and Lil with his own hands, but he was handsomely rewarded for making sure it happened," Gunner explained quickly.
"So where you got him tied up?" called a voice from above as the gig began to lower.
Standing in the lowering gig like an avenging angel descending from heaven was Coop. He wore no coat and had a pair of rifles strapped to his back, a pair of pistols on his hips, and a cruel pair of brass knuckles on each hand.
"I let him go. It was the only way to get the full story," Gunner said, looking up to Coop.
The deckhand didn't wait for the gig to touch down. He leaped from the boat and came down hard on Gunner, knocking him to the ground. Coop stood over the downed armory officer and grabbed a handful of his shirt, stooping down and hauling him face to face.
"You telling me that pile of filth killed my sister and our engineer and you let him go?" He pulled a pistol with his free hand and put it to Gunner's cheek. "I always knew you didn't respect me and Lil, but I figured even _you_ would know better'n to get between a man and the man who killed his kin..."
Gunner drew one of his pistols and pushed it into Coop's ribs. "Coop, you put that gun away or Butch is going to have a hell of a time finding enough pieces of you to stitch together into something fit for a coffin."
"That's enough, boys," the captain said, as though they were nothing more than two disobedient children who wouldn't put away their toys before dinner. "No one's killing anybody for anything right now, because Lil and Nita ain't dead. At least, not from the explosion."
"How do you know that?" Coop said, dropping Gunner with a thump.
The drop caused Gunner to whack his head on the ground. It also caused him to fire the gun, fortunately after it was pointed harmlessly over the city rather than at Coop's chest. The sudden sound startled Coop, who in turn fired his own gun, in his case into the pier beside Gunner's head.
"You boys want to put your guns away before we do the fuggers' job for them?" Captain Mack said wearily.
"Sorry, Cap'n," Coop said, holstering his weapon and helping Gunner to his feet. "You sure the girls are alive?"
"No. But I'm sure the boiler, or whatever else blew that mine to hell, didn't do them in. The rescue crews have got the place cleared out pretty good. Didn't find a drop of blood or a shred of clothing. But they did find plenty of rope and climbing equipment."
"... You reckon the girls went climbing?" Coop said, anger replaced by confusion.
"No, Coop, I reckon someone climbed up and got them," the captain said.
"And if Matthews was getting paid off by the fuggers, no doubt they're the ones who got them," Gunner said.
"That seems about right," the captain said. "Anyone come sniffing around the pier while we were gone?"
"Nope, but I fired some shots all the same. Wanted folks to know I was serious."
"If you were firing shots at nothing, I'd be more inclined to assume you are insane," Gunner said.
"Either way, it'll make folks think twice about getting too close," Coop countered.
"Fair enough."
They all stepped into the gig while Coop scrambled up the chain and activated the winch to haul them up into the ship.
"So what do we do now?" Gunner asked.
"I'm still chewing that one over, but I know for sure we're not doing it here. This whole town's got the stink of fug on it now. The mayor seems straight and narrow enough, but he's got the wool over his eyes when it comes to who in his staff is trying to romance the fuggers into giving them back the right to pay an arm and a leg to get their ship fixed up. We're good and stocked when it comes to food, fuel, and phlogiston, so I say we get moving. Sitting in port is making my skin crawl."
"Why do I have the feeling that as soon as we get away from the city some ship or another is going to open fire on us?" Gunner said.
"Because you been at this long enough to know what to expect, that's why. But roundabout now I could use a little ship-to-ship shooting. Feel like I got my hands tied not knowing where them girls are at."
"We can't afford to take any serious damage without Nita on the crew," Gunner said. "And there wasn't much ammo to be had in town, so we're still low on fléchettes."
"Well then, that means three things, doesn't it?" the captain said. "You better make sure we take out any attackers before they do any damage, we better make every shot count, and you better start explaining why after four months neither of you know how to fix us up. I know for a fact Nita's been putting you through the paces."
"I tried, Cap'n," Coop said. "That stuff just don't fit in my head too easy. Takes a lot of tosses before it sticks good and tight. I could slap a patch on the envelope if needs be, and I'm pretty fair at fiddling with the pipes, but once we get into valves and such I'm... well, I'm a bit slow is all."
"That much we know about you, Coop," Gunner said.
"And what's your excuse, Gunner?"
"I've been a bit distracted with the gear we liberated from the warehouse. And that's paid off in the form of better cannons, better deck guns, and better firearms, mind you."
"And a fat lot of good any of that will do us if we rupture the boiler and need to rebuild half the system," the captain said.
"I can give it a try, but as Nita's pointed out more than once, I'm more adept at blowing things apart than putting them together. Plus..."
"Plus what? You got more excuses?"
"I don't think I'm the only one who's been seeing that look in Nita's eye since the beginning. We all knew ever since that first wailer skirmish she wasn't going to be a short-timer on this crew. She had the skill to make herself useful _and_ to keep herself alive. I think we can all agree she fit into this crew like she was the missing piece we didn't realize we were missing."
"It's true. Nita has the sky in her blood now. She's here to stay," Coop said.
The captain nodded. "Well, now it's up to us to keep ourselves alive and to get our missing pieces back. From this moment, we're assuming they're alive and working just as hard to get back to us as we are to get them back."
"How are we going to get them back if we don't even know where they went?" Gunner asked.
Suddenly Coop became very still. "We do know where they went."
"What are you talking about?" Gunner said.
"They went down that shaft. You said there was climbing gear. The fuggers took them down that shaft."
"Well obviously, but I don't think they're still down there, Coop. The fuggers probably loaded them up onto a ship and brought them heaven knows where."
"But they brought them _from_ there. If we're going to find somebody, where else we gonna start but from where we _know_ they must have been?"
"Are you suggesting we should climb down that shaft until we strike fug, then find our way out the way the fuggers came in?"
"I'm not suggesting you do it. I'm telling you I'm fixing to do it."
"That's going to be a hell of a climb, Coop," the captain said.
"Before you snagged us for your crew, Lil and me was tending a herd on the plateaus, remember? We had to climb half a mountain just to get home for supper."
"Climbing a mountain and climbing a mine are two different things, Coop. You'll be climbing in cramped space, and in the dark."
"I don't know what kind of shepherds you talked to, but round my parts we didn't climb our way back home until after sundown. And if things is cramped, that just means there'll be plenty to grab hold of if I slip," Coop said.
Captain Mack and Gunner looked at one another.
"What'll we do when he gets down there?" Gunner said.
"Fix him up with some of them phlo-flares you rigged up. When he sets off down the hole, we'll take the _Wind Breaker_ down into the fug. When he gets out, he'll set off a flare, and we'll fetch him up."
"I'm not sure either of you are thinking this through..."
"Do you want to get them girls back or not?" Coop growled.
"I _absolutely_ want to get those girls back, but I feel obligated to be the level head in this scenario. What exactly is the outcome we are looking for? Either we'll get down there and the trail will be cold, or we'll get down there and we'll find fuggers waiting for us."
"If we find a cold trail that just means we spent that time doing nothing, which is what we're already doing, and if we find us some fuggers, then either we'll ask real nice what they done with the girls or else we'll kill them, which would make for a real nice start to this rescue mission, regardless," the captain said.
Gunner considered the words. "Fair enough."
"Coop, you suit up with everything you need to get down that shaft, plus everything you need to persuade a few fuggers to be polite and obliging if needs be. Gunner, give him some flares. Once you're on your way, I'll get the mayor to give his best guess on where that shaft punched through to the fug, and we'll be as near to it as the wind will allow. But make sure you get us unmoored first. With them girls gone and you in the hole, we're going to be running mighty light on crew."
#
Coop held firm to a line and rappelled into the inky blackness below. Some might have marveled at the speed with which some skills come rushing back after years of neglect. It had been years since he'd done any rock climbing, after all, and he was climbing like a pro again after just a few minutes. Coop wasn't the sort to introspect and reflect on such things, though. He wasn't really the sort who would reflect on anything. As far as he was concerned, skills like these came back quickly because if they didn't, he would die, and he was far too busy to die today.
Though his mind was mostly occupied with the complicated task of descending into the bowels of the mountain, one or two thoughts wormed their way into whatever nooks and crannies of his mind were free to grapple with them. The first was the grudging acceptance of the fact that climbing in a mine was indeed _much_ different than climbing a mountain, even at night. As dark as a moonless night might be, it had _nothing_ on a mine. The darkness was as thick as porridge, and the weak blue flame of the mining helmet he'd borrowed barely seemed to slice so much as a wedge into it. Early on in the climb that didn't matter. The shaft was almost perfectly vertical, and the fuggers had left all of their climbing anchors and ropes in place. Leave it to those arrogant swine to assume no one would even attempt to follow them. Once he reached the point where the shaft was increasingly mingled with natural caves and tunnels in the mountain, the lengths of rope and strings of anchors began to thin out and he was left looking for handholds and footholds by the light of the aforementioned weak helmet flame. They were not the climbing conditions he would have chosen, but all it took was one little flicker of an image in his mind, the thought that something might be happening to his sister at that moment, and he was practically flinging himself into the blackness.
Another thought that had disturbed him from time to time was the matter of finding his way through the mine. Again, once the initial shaft ran its course there were no shortage of branching paths, and he assumed only one of them was the right one to take. Sometimes it was easy enough, because there was an anchor driven into the rock here or a rope hanging from an outcrop there. Other times there were long stretches of relatively level ground with branching paths in all directions. The way forward at those times had been determined by whichever path had the strongest chemical sting against his skin and the foulest scent in the air. When he'd progressed far enough that he needed his mask to breathe, he knew he had to be close. Of course, he also had even _less_ visibility and had to cope with getting enough air through a mask that made it difficult to breathe even _without_ exerting himself, but one of the benefits of spending half his time among the clouds was learning how to get by without much "air" to his air.
The ground snuck up on him for the third time since he'd been climbing. That tended to happen while rappelling in the darkness. The seat of his pants hit the jagged rocks hard enough to ensure that he would be walking funny for the next few hours, and he wisely took a few moments to recover. When he felt confident he could stand without falling over, he leaned aside to place his hand on the ground to hoist himself up, but it brushed against something that was certainly not stone.
"What in the world?" he muttered, gingerly touching it again.
It felt like a length of string. He turned to it, casting the light of the mining helmet to reveal a thread stretched between metal struts driven into the stone. One strut also had a small bundle of something that looked and smelled a bit like burn-slow mounted to it.
"I don't know what this thing is," he muttered to himself, "but I know the fuggers must have put it here, and that means it probably means to do me harm. Best to leave it be."
He stepped over the wire with exaggerated care... and planted his foot squarely on a second wire.
The wire popped free, and he instinctively broke into a full sprint. In less dire circumstances, sprinting along the ground at the base of the latest of several multihundred foot drops would not have been very keen survival instinct, but in light of the unknown mechanism that he had just triggered, he decided it was the least suicidal of the options available. He got a total of ten steps away before his sprint turned into an out-of-control tumble down a loose gravel slope. About halfway through his tumble, a deafening blast roared through the cave as the trap he'd set off detonated.
A flash of light and a wave of debris filled the air, and the rattle and clatter of his rapid descent was replaced by the sudden silence that came from the ears getting more than they could handle. Now in utter darkness and in the best case _temporarily_ deafened, Cooper was left with nothing but touch to navigate by. In this case, navigation was limited to getting a rough idea of the size and shape of the gravel he was tumbling along as he fell.
After what felt like several hours of rolling, he slid to a stop. The fall had not treated him kindly. His body felt like one enormous bruise, and it was a miracle both that he'd not broken any bones and that his mask hadn't become dislodged. One of his rifles had broken free of its strap, though, and both of his pistols were somewhere along the slope. But a quick inventory taken while attempting to catch his breath indicated that, aside from a broken lamp on his helmet, he was otherwise still fully equipped.
Another miracle came in the form of an almost imperceptibly dim glow coming from his left. With a bit of squinting, he was just able to make out the jagged natural cave mouth that must have led out into the fug. He stumbled to his feet and walked unsteadily toward the dull purple light.
What greeted him on the outside was a rather steep slope that was host to a deserted shantytown of sorts. Three tents each barely clung to the slope. A few half-empty crates of provisions and assorted other things were scattered among them, but his half-blurred and barely adequate vision couldn't quite make them out. A little bit of digging in one of the supply crates revealed a handheld phlo-light. He turned the valve and summoned a strong green glow to light his surroundings.
Now with a clearer view, he could see that people had been living here for some time. There was an outhouse dug not far away, and man-sized mooring poles had been driven into the slope. It was also apparent that the departure had been a hasty one, as one of the mooring poles had been hauled halfway out of the ground, which tended to occur when the engines of an airship were already spinning up to speed before it was completely unmoored. Here and there he also found recent char and scattered piles of ashes. They'd set fire to something before they left. Coop had no doubt in his mind that it was travel orders or some other bit of evidence that would have given him an idea of where they'd gotten off to. He sifted through the cinders, but they had been thorough. There wasn't a single intact page.
He started to rummage through the supplies to see if there was anything of value. He found a pistol much like the ones he'd lost—not surprising since the ones he'd been armed with were fug-made. There was also a staggering amount of ammunition, indicating perhaps they had been prepared for a fight. Pity they hadn't still been present or he would have given them one. Under a third box of bullets, he found a well-hidden folio, which he tore open hoping to find some useful information. Instead he found images of rather scantily clad, ghost-white women, scrawny women.
"Huh, the fuggers have ladies after all. And they ain't got no meat on them, either," Coop observed, flipping through the pages.
His hearing was returning, or at least silence had been replaced with a loud hiss, when he finally decided that there simply wasn't anything worth finding in the camp. He dug through his pack and found a phlo-flare. The name was a bit much, considering it was just a small canister of phlogiston with a valve locked closed by a pin. On the surface, phlogiston was a simple green vapor, but when released into the fug it had a brilliant green glow. This was what made phlo-lights work, but it had other uses, too. Airships in the fug could easily spot a slow leak because it would glow as bright as day. And of course, if you wanted to catch someone's attention, all you had to do was release a stream of the stuff and it would rush skyward, tracing a bright green line to where you were waiting.
He pulled the pin and heaved the canister, a lance of blinding green light curling into the purple-black abyss the fuggers called a sky. Now there was nothing to do but wait. And ready his rifle, of course, because there was no guarantee it would be the _Wind Breaker_ that found him first.
Slowly the hiss in his ears began to subside, and he heard something else. It was a quiet ticking noise. He looked cautiously to the source of the sound, which was well outside the circle of light cast by the pho-light.
"I swear, if these fuggers left another bomb," he growled, as though he could intimidate the hypothetical explosive into defusing itself.
He picked up the phlo-light and paced toward the sound, swapping the rifle for the pistol. As he paced closer to the source of the ticking, he noticed it seemed a bit too irregular to be a clock—or something which would be _activated_ by a clock. About thirty paces from the campsite, he found a long wooden pole. The bottom of it had a point that was darkened with soil, indicating it too had been driven into the slope previously. It was easily twenty feet long, and at the end was a broken reed basket. The ticking was coming from within the basket.
Erring on the side of caution, he traced a wide circle around the basket and bent low to peer inside. Huddled within, tapping weakly, was a badly injured aye-aye. From the looks of it the former occupants of the camp had done their best to eliminate the creature in the same way that they had the paperwork. Three large sections of its fur were charred black, though in no case did it appear to have reached the flesh. What _had_ reached the flesh was a large and ugly gunshot wound. It was probably a grazing blow, but it had nearly clipped the poor thing's tail in half.
"Ugh, they did a number on you, little guy," he said. "What was this, your perch?"
At the sound of his voice the creature huddled a little deeper into the broken basket. Coop looked at the ground and noticed an irregular pattern of blood drops leading back toward the camp.
"Did you drag this whole thing from way over there?" he said. "Tough little rat, aren't you?"
He leaned down, holstering his weapon so that he could reach into the basket. The creature tried to cram itself even further inside, but it plainly didn't have much strength left. Coop managed to unhook the leash that tethered the creature to the perch and scooped it up. The thing resisted with what little force it could.
"Relax, you little bugger. The cap'n's got a soft spot for you things. He'd have a fit if he found out I let one of you die. Besides, if the fuggers wanted you dead, I sure as sugar want you alive."
A low hum began to approach, and Coop recognized it immediately as the five-engined thrum of the _Wind Breaker_.
"That's them now," he said, aye-aye held to his chest. "Let's get you fixed up and see what you've got to say."
#
Coop worked quickly once the _Wind Breaker_ arrived, loading up virtually all of the remaining goods from the camp and handing off the rescued aye-aye to Gunner. Once they were on their way, surfacing and finding a hidden nook among the mountain peaks to tie up the ship, the crew rushed to the galley, which in times such as this doubled as the infirmary. Butch made a rare appearance out from behind the counter in order to tend to those who needed medical attention. First and foremost was the rescued inspector, which was still dazed when Coop entered to see what progress had been made. Butch had a needle and thread, stitching up the part of the beast's tail that could be salvaged as the creature rested comfortably on a towel. Both swaths of blackened hair had been shaved away and some manner of ointment had been swabbed on the skin beneath.
"What'd you give that thing? It looks like it's actually enjoying the surgery," Coop said.
"Two shots of my rotgut," Mack said. "That's just about how much it takes to knock Wink for a loop, so it stands to reason it'd be the same for this one."
"Captain, is there a reason you know the precise dosage of rye necessary to anesthetize an inspector?"
"That's a fine anecdote, but one for another time, Gunner," he said.
"Is the little critter going to make it?" Coop asked.
Butch muttered something under her breath.
"Well, I'll let you treat my bumps and bruises once you got Nick all patched up."
"Nick?" Gunner said.
"Yeah. Because of that little Nick on his tail. Nick."
"Coop, that's a female."
"... How do you know?"
Gunner looked at him. "Do you really need me to explain that?"
"Oh... Well, Nikita then," he said.
"Nikita? I wouldn't have expected you to _know_ a name as exotic as that," Gunner said.
"Remember last time we spent a night at Keystone, that waitress who wouldn't even tell you her name?" Coop said.
"Yes."
"Her name was Nikita. And she snored like a banshee."
"I would ask how you could have possibly wooed her, but one can only imagine it was your gift for metaphor. Should I point out that Nikita is usually a male name?"
"That waitress wasn't no male, and I'm not coming up with another name."
Butch finished her work and gently moved the aye-aye to an empty table. She made a rather pointed demand for Coop to take its place on the operating table. He reluctantly complied, initiating a rather uncomfortable and awkward checkup. There was something rather embarrassing about being given a thorough examination by the ex-wife of your current boss while he watched, but fortunately the reduced size of the crew and the increased threat of attack required that both Gunner and Captain Mack join Wink on deck for lookout duty. That meant that by the truly embarrassing portion of the procedure, he was left with only the inherent awkwardness of being ordered to undress by an older woman.
She took nearly an hour to tend to every scrape, bump, and bruise, but in the end everything was either cleaned up, stitched up, or bandaged. By the time she was through, Nikita was coming around. The aye-aye climbed woozily from the table to the floor, then up to Cooper's table as he was getting dressed and tried to crawl into his shirt before he buttoned it.
"Get out of there," he grumbled, reaching in to scoop it out.
Butch slapped him on the head and reprimanded him.
"Well, I know she's recovering, but she shouldn't be in my shirt. Just because I pulled her out of the basket doesn't make me her mama," he said. He got another button fastened before the creature crawled in again. When he reached to pull her out, Butch clocked him again. "You know _I'm_ recovering too, Butch. Would you at least hold her until I get dressed proper?"
This was acceptable to Butch, but Nikita clearly had a lower opinion of it, because the instant she was no longer in physical contact with Coop, she struggled and fought to get back to him. He buttoned up his torn and stained shirt just in time for her to pull free from Butch and leap to him.
He heaved a heavy sigh. "You're going to make things difficult, aren't you, Nikita?"
Coop cradled the injured creature in one arm as Butch held up his coat for him. Putting it on was a bit of a circus act, requiring him to shift Nikita to the other arm multiple times, but finally he was fully suited up with an aye-aye nestled snug beneath his overcoat. From the feel of its fluttering heart, the thing was finally beginning to calm down.
"Long as I don't upset her, you reckon we can see what this little thing knows about what went on down there?" Coop asked.
Butch indicated the affirmative, and Coop made his way up to the main deck. The sun was already setting, giving the sky a beautiful orange hue and casting long shadows from the scraggly trees to which the ship was moored. When Gunner saw the heartwarming sight of the recovering aye-aye poking its head out of Coop's coat, his face lit up with fiendish glee and he opened his mouth to speak.
"You better watch what comes out of your mouth next, or you're liable to have a fat lip," Coop growled.
"Is that thing ready to talk?" the captain asked.
"You tell me. I could never get the hang of all of that tapping. Just a bunch of noise half the time," Coop said, pacing over to the railing on the port side, which was the only part of the ship facing open sky.
Wink, who had been up in the rigging keeping an eye on the surroundings and performing his original function as inspector, finally decided that the presence of what was essentially a business associate couldn't be ignored any longer. He climbed down, hopped up on the railing, and came practically nose to nose with Nikita. She peered out and sniffed him a bit, then pulled back inside.
She tapped out a message against one of the buttons of Coop's coat.
This inspector wanted to know if that inspector was the inspector for this ship, she tapped.
This inspector was the inspector for this ship. This inspector was named Wink. That inspector repeated its name, Wink tapped.
This inspector was named inspector 55655, she replied.
"That bit was about names, wasn't it?" Coop said. "What was that about?"
"She says her name is 55655," the captain said.
"No, Nikita. Your name's Nikita now," Coop said.
The aye-aye looked up to him.
This crew understood what these inspectors said, Nikita said. This inspector reported this to the fug folk.
No, 55655 did not report this to the fug folk. This crew learned. It was a secret to the trainers and the fug folk. 55655 didn't tell anyone. 55655 stayed out of sight. Wink did these things. Wink was rewarded with good food and good treatment. 55655 might have been rewarded, too, Wink said. 55655 understood. 55655 agreed.
The newcomer looked uncertainly at Coop and the rest of the crew.
No, she tapped. 55655 did not agree. This inspector was named Nikita. Nikita agreed.
"That's what I like to hear," Captain Mack said. He fished into his pocket and fetched a waxed paper pouch filled with slices of overripe breadfruit. He gave one to Wink and held one out to Nikita. She reluctantly took it and nibbled at it. "Real team players, these inspectors. I wouldn't mind if I had a whole crew of them."
"Now _that's_ an image," Gunner said.
"Nikita, did you see two surface folk down there in the fug recently?"
There was a surface woman. She had black skin and leather clothes. There was a second surface woman. She was dressed like this crew. They were loaded onto a cutter ship. The cutter went to the Phylactery, Nikita said.
"I heard a mishmash of letters at the end there," Coop said.
"She said she saw them and they went to the Phylactery," Gunner said.
"I ain't never heard of that."
"I don't think any of us have. What's the Phylactery?" Mack said.
Nikita didn't know, she said.
"Where is the Phylactery?" Gunner asked.
Nikita didn't know.
"Well, then what good does that do us?" Gunner asked.
"It does us plenty of good. It lets us know the girls were alive, and it tells us the name of the place they got sent," Mack said.
"But she said they were loaded into a cutter. You know how fast those things are. By this time tomorrow they could be anywhere in the fug," Gunner said.
"But they're alive. That's enough to know we don't give up searching." The captain turned to Nikita. "Why did they have you down there?"
The fug folk were on the ground for a long time. One of the fug folk was a trainer. The fug folk had to wait. The cutter couldn't stay. Nikita listened for a message. The message came, the cutter came. The fug folk climbed in the mountain. The fug folk came back with the surface folk. The fug folk broke things in the camp. The fug folk burned things in the camp. The fug folk burned Nikita. The fug folk shot at Nikita. Nikita ran. This surface person found Nikita. This surface person was good. Nikita stayed with this surface person.
"Yeah, well, you're in luck, because once the captain gets his hands on an injured inspector, they stick around," Gunner said. "Sounds like you've got a partner, Coop."
Nikita stayed with Coop.
"Why did they try to burn you?" Coop asked.
The fug folk said there was no ship. The fug folk said an inspector with no ship was suspicious. The fug folk didn't want that.
"Where did you come from, Nikita?" Mack asked.
Nikita was in training. Nikita was put on a cutter. Cutter already had an inspector. Nikita was brought to Pendercrook. Nikita was put on a new cutter...
"Pendercrook. What's that?" Gunner said.
Nikita didn't know.
"Well, what did it look like?"
There were many ships. There were no places where fug folk lived. There were many places where ships moored. There was much equipment and food and water.
"Sounds like a supply point," Mack said. "Do you know where Pendercrook is?"
Nikita heard the navigator when the cutter left Pendercrook, seventy-five miles west-northwest.
Mack turned and headed for the wheel, dictating orders. "Then we're heading seventy-five miles east-southeast. Get us unmoored, and then masks on. We're doing this under the fug. Once we're on the way, I want fore and aft cannons loaded with grapeshot, and then I want everyone on deck and heavily armed. Nikita, remember that from now on you deliver no reports. Wink, you keep her honest. Pendercrook is our only clue right now. When we get there I want eyes open, ears open, everything. We are going to use that place to find Nita and Lil. Maybe it means spotting a cutter and trailing it. Maybe it means breaking in and finding some travel orders. Maybe it means kidnapping the man in charge and pulling the information out of him with pliers." The crew had already snapped to action, but before he put his hands to the controls, he paused and turned to them. "I'm about to take an undermanned ship that can't be repaired into enemy territory. There's more ways this can go wrong than ways it can go right. If anyone wants out—"
"Just get moving, Captain," Gunner said irritably. "We all know if anyone drops out now, the ship won't have crew enough to do what it needs to, and none of us are going to leave Nita or Lil in the hands of the fuggers."
"That's the right answer," Captain Mack said, turning back to the wheel. "Pull them ropes up and let's get our crew."
# Chapter 5
Nita's eyes fluttered open. Her head ached terribly, like she had the most wretched hangover of her life. Wherever she was, it was at least a small mercy that the light was dim, because she didn't think she could handle sunlight at the moment. As her vision slowly cleared, she started to make out details of her surroundings. The light was yellow-green. A phlo-light. She was cold, too. Not the icy cold of a winter night, but the skin-deep chill of medicine swabbed onto a scrape. She stiffened. She knew that sensation. It was the fug. She was in the fug.
She fought to focus her eyes, and to work out what had happened. A mask was cinched painfully tight around her mouth, one of the filter contraptions that surface folk had to wear when journeying down into the wretched fumes that blanketed most of Rim. It made breathing difficult, but not nearly as difficult as it would have been without the mask. Her hands were bound behind her back, from the feel of it by stout metal shackles. Her ankles had similar restraints as well. They seemed to be in a large wood-paneled room with a heavy door. From the subtle motion she felt, she was in some sort of vehicle, almost certainly an airship. There were no windows, save a barred slit at eye level on the door, and the only furniture to speak of was a pair of wooden planks affixed to the opposite walls. Nita was laying on one of them, and across from her, Lil was still unconscious on the other.
"Lil," Nita croaked.
It was clear that these masks weren't designed with the same usage in mind as the ones the _Wind Breaker_ crew usually deployed. The _Wind Breaker_ masks were rather ingeniously designed, allowing voices to be surprisingly understandable. This mask muffled her voice almost to the point of incomprehension.
"Lil!" she called again, more loudly, and was quickly punished by a throb to her head from the exertion.
Nonetheless, the cry did the job, and she could just barely make out Lil's eyes opening. It said something about the deckhand's personality that her first action upon discovering her situation was to mutter some muffled expletives and struggle at her chains rather than attempt to puzzle out where she was.
"Damn fugger scum," Lil mumbled.
"Lil, are you all right?" Nita asked, struggling to sit up and swing her restrained feet to the ground.
"I feel like I put away a gallon of the cap'n's rotgut. But yeah. I'm breathing," she said, shaking her head. "Why're we in the fug? Why ain't we dead?"
"I'm sure it wasn't charity or good will," Nita said.
Lil shook her head, then uttered a moan of regret for doing so. "You seen any of the rest of the crew?"
"I just woke up. You know as much as I do."
"They took my gun," Lil said.
"No surprise there. My tools are gone as well."
Lil swung her feet out and sat up, tipping her head from side to side with a crackle. "Got a crick in my neck something awful." She pressed the back of her head against the wall, set her feet against the floor, and arched her back to lift her bottom off the seat. A few awkward twists and turns got the chain of her manacles down to the back of her mid thigh. She then sat and pivoted, flipping her legs up and sliding the chain along them. The manacles got caught briefly on her leg irons, but she managed to shake them loose and pull them the last few inches up over the edge of her heels, leaving her with hands restrained in front rather than behind.
"You would _certainly_ make a fine dancer," Nita observed.
"If being a dancer means not waking up in a situation like this, then I might be willing to give it a try," Lil said. "You know anything about picking locks?"
"I'm afraid not."
"Coop's always been the one with the knack for that. I never could get around a fugger lock. Not that we have the tools for it, regardless. Guess I'll just try and bust them."
Lil began smashing the manacles against one of the metal supports for the plank. Now that her mind had recovered enough, Nita began to feel the flutter of fear. In the heat of battle, or at least when there was something to be done, she seldom felt even a flash of anxiety. What concern she felt always fell a distant second to the job at hand. The feeling of helplessness, though, was something else entirely. She needed to do something, to make _some_ progress toward escape, or she knew panic wouldn't be far behind. There didn't seem to be anything else to do but attempt to imitate Lil's feat of flexibility. She got the chain as far as her ankles when it became clear that she wasn't _quite_ as lithe as her cellmate. Lil glanced over at her while Nita was trying to decide if she should continue forward or abandon the effort.
"Having fun over there?" Lil asked with a snort.
"I may have overestimated my suppleness," Nita said.
"Hang on. I'll bet you're plenty supple. You just need a little help is all," Lil said.
Lil stood and shuffled over to Nita and turned aside, propping her hip against the back of Nita's thigh. "You let me know if I need to let up, all right?"
Nita nodded and Lil shoved a bit, helping to fold Nita just a bit further in half. It wasn't comfortable, but it was enough for her to get the chain up over her leg irons and, with some difficulty, past her own heels. The ship chose that moment to lurch aside with a sharp turn, and with both of the girls in a somewhat precarious position, they lost their balance and tumbled to the ground in a tangle. They were just untangling when the ship shifted again, this time with a steady and constant tilt in one direction.
"Feels like they're bringing this thing to a stop," Lil said, struggling to her feet and helping Nita to do the same.
"What do you think they mean to do with us?" Nita said. "They must not want us dead, or they wouldn't have put these masks on us."
"That just means they don't want us to die from the fug. I reckon they have something more elaborate in mind for us. The fuggers are always real fond of making examples of folks, and we'd be a couple of good ones."
She shuffled to the door and stood on tiptoe to look out through the slot.
"There's... two, three... five guards along the hall there. I don't think I've ever seen so many in one place before. Kind of makes you feel good, knowing how many they think it'd take to keep us in line," Lil said. "Hey! You twisted, stinking purple-breathers! You know who you got in here, right? We're the crew that knocked that dreadnought of yours out of the sky! And we weren't even _trying_! What do you reckon we're going to do to you? What do you reckon the cap'n's gonna do when he finds out you took two of his finest? I'd sleep with one eye open, boys, because the _Wind Breaker_ 's coming for you. Mark my words!" She turned to Nita. "Never hurts to let them know who they're dealing with."
The tilt of the ship finally seemed to even out, and there came the subtle rocks and jerks of a ship being moored. Nita joined Lil at the door to look upon their guards. Each of them shared the almost interchangeable features of their race. They were all terribly thin, their skin tight, drawn, and papery. Long, skeletal fingers and tall, hunched postures made them seem frail, but anyone who had come to blows with one knew that they were no weaker than their surface-dwelling counterparts. The guards were layered with dark blue uniforms that were generously padded to protect against the sort of things that Lil no doubt had in mind. They also wore helmets and dark goggles. While the bulk of the uniforms made them appear almost imposing, it also underscored the apparent frailness of their hands and faces. Each was armed with a stout wooden baton.
"Heh. All they got is sticks," Lil said. "We can take them, easy."
Nita couldn't tell of Lil was joking, which she supposed was likely for the benefit of the guards. There was something surreal about a short, scrawny young woman trying to intimidate a cluster of tall, scrawny men. The strangeness was interrupted not long after when a door at the far end of the hall opened. The person who entered was clearly the commander of the group. He stood a bit taller than the rest, dressed in an outfit that seemed to have been devised as an attempt to combine the attire of a businessman and a general. The suit was impeccably tailored to the fug person's serpentine physique. It was gray, with matching vest and bow tie, but black braiding had been added to the shoulders, and an assortment of awards and commendations had been pinned to the left side of the narrow chest. The whole of the ensemble was topped by a sharp-brimmed hat with a flat, backward-sloping top and an insignia depicting a winged cage on the front. He was notably the only one in the hall to be armed with a firearm, a small but ornate pistol that peeked out from the bottom of his jacket.
As tended to be the case on airships, the hall was only truly wide enough for at best two people to walk side by side, and that was being generous. With guards on either side, the maneuvers necessary for the newcomer to approach would have been comical if they hadn't been so expertly choreographed. As he approached each pair of guards, they would turn and step back, standing at attention and pressing against the wall at the same time, thus creating enough of an opening for him to step through.
The newcomer came closer, allowing them to notice a few additional details. He wore a mustache, a thin strip of white hair almost invisible against his equally white skin. An etched nameplate labeled him "Asst. Warden Blanc."
"So, the prisoners are awake," said Blanc in a clipped, impatient tone. "I was beginning to think we would have to tote their worthless carcasses along with us."
Lil turned to Nita and whispered, barely able to be heard through her mask, "Make sure you get to the gun first."
Nita didn't have a chance to request clarification before the guard nearest to the door began to work at the lock with his key.
"Back away from the door," Blanc ordered.
"Or what?" Lil said. "That tag says you're a warden, right? That means we're already headed to prison. If we're already locked up, what more can you do?"
"If you do not behave yourselves, my men will beat you both to within an inch of your lives. The three of us are going to be spending a great deal of time together. It would behoove you to do your best to get on my good side."
"In my experience, wardens more or less get paid to not have a good side, but I guess I'll try anything once," Lil said, shuffling aside.
"A wise decision. And you?" asked Blanc, addressing Nita.
"Something tells me if you know anything about us, there isn't much chance that we'll be seeing your good side anytime soon," Nita said, backing away. "Though it may be worth pointing out that I am a citizen of Caldera, and thus my incarceration without a trial could be considered an act of war."
"No, Miss Amanita Graus, there is no 'could' about it. This is inarguably an act of war, and you are in no uncertain terms a prisoner of war."
Nita's eyes widened. "You are declaring war on Caldera?"
"Heavens no. Caldera declared war upon us. How else are we to interpret your attack on a warehouse within our borders and your destruction of one of our most valuable dreadnought-class airships."
Now it was Lil's turn to widen her eyes. "One of... wait, dreadnought _class_? You mean you had more than one?"
"Oh, Miss Chastity Cooper, there will be _plenty_ of time for you to realize the depths of your underestimations. A few steps farther back, please. Ivors, open the door."
The key turned and the guard, presumably Ivors, pulled the door open. Two others carefully maneuvered inside and stepped behind the girls.
"Why, may I ask, have these women not been restrained with their arms behind their backs?" Blanc said angrily. "We have procedure for a reason."
"I guess your procedure didn't account for having to transfer such supple prisoners," Lil said, nudging Nita in the side with her elbow.
"Warden Blanc, if perhaps I could speak to a representative of your government, I would like to offer my most profound apologies and entreat you not to consider my actions representative of Caldera as a whole," Nita said, shuffling unsteadily out behind Lil with a guard behind her. "I do not wish to be responsible for starting a war."
"It is a bit late, Miss Graus," Blanc said, turning to pace down the hall.
"And don't apologize to him, Nita," Lil said as she was led out behind Blanc.
"On the contrary. Her apology is at least a step toward the proper behavior," Blanc said.
"Yeah, but it's going to sound real empty after what happens next," Lil said.
"And what might that—"
Lil, anticipating his request for clarification, chose to illustrate. She leaped and brought both heels down onto the feet of the guard leading her. He growled in anger and pitched forward. With perfect timing, Lil recovered from her leap with a second one, driving the top of her head into the chin of the guard. The cramped hallway exploded with motion, five guards and their superior all shouting orders at one another. The only one who knew what she was doing was Lil. She darted around behind Blanc, who had turned to face her, and sprang once again into the air, swinging the chain of her shackles over his head. Drawing it tight across his neck, she used the leverage to kick her feet up on one side of him, knocking his pistol free. As it twirled through the air, she swung backward and forward again to drive both feet into the back of his knees. The warden crumbled to the ground on top of Lil, struggling for breath.
From the instant Lil moved, Nita had known that at some point the gun would be coming free, as she was the only one marginally prepared for what was happening. The guard restraining her was well trained enough to keep his grip on her rather than release her in order to join the fray in front of him, but in such close quarters and such madness it didn't take much for Nita to wrench herself free. The gun clattered to the floor, and before any of the guards could so much as kick it away, she was on it. Gun in hand she sprang backward, plowing through the confused guards until she was in the doorway of her former cell with no guards behind her. There she braced a shoulder against the doorway and used it to slide upright. The guards advanced on her, but she clicked back the hammer of the pistol and pointed it threateningly.
"All of you, against the wall now!" she barked.
Either the intensity of the situation had made her voice particularly intimidating or the weapon was a very impressive one, because the fug folk quickly obeyed, backing against the walls to reveal Lil and her hostage still grappling on the floor. Asst. Warden Blanc had both of his hands wrapped around the chain of her manacles, trying to pull her free, but Lil was as tenacious as a terrier when she needed to be. Her teeth were gritted tight and her eyes were wild as she kept the chain tight enough to make breathing difficult but not impossible.
"I want you all to drop your weapons," Nita said. "All of them, on the ground, now!"
The batons clattered to the ground, as well as a pair of knives that one guard had evidently been hiding.
Nita continued. "No one needs to get hurt. All I want is for us to be taken to the surface and let free. Our crew doesn't want anything to do with your people. We've had our dealings, and we've done what we had to. The time has come for you to live your lives and us to live ours. Let us go and this is the last you'll ever see of the _Wind Breaker_ crew."
" _Don't_ let us go and the _Wind Breaker_ crew is the last thing you'll ever see," Lil added with a grunt.
More guards appeared at the doorway, but a sharp point of Nita's gun and a repeat of her order convinced them to drop their weapons as well. For several seconds, no one seemed willing to act, and the only sound was Blanc trying and failing to loosen the chain from around his throat. Then the slow, deliberate click of footsteps approached from down the hall.
"That better be someone who can give us what we want, because I'm getting pretty near fed up with this pasty-white scarecrow lying on top of me," Lil growled, giving the chain a quick yank to make it clear any air Blanc was getting was her decision, not his.
The footsteps drew closer, and a new figure appeared in the door. Everyone else in the hallway was stretched thin and on edge, but the man who stood framed in the doorway was as calm as a still lake. Unlike his rather more elaborately dressed associate, he was really quite plain in his wardrobe; a black suit, a black tie, a black vest, and a white shirt. He looked more like a rather well-to-do undertaker than anything else. What set him apart was his poise. He took in the hostage situation around him and slowly crossed his arms, no flicker of emotion on a face that was thin even for a fug person. His face and head were clean shaved, and despite the chemical chill to the air, there was the slight twinkle of perspiration on his brow. There was no question, even in the absence of pomp and regalia, that this man was the one above all others in the command chain. He was the one in charge.
"Sir," Nita said, her weapon held low but ready. "Please. All I ask is that you and your men let us go. No one needs to get hurt."
"Except this guy. He got on my nerves," Lil said.
The man in the doorway calmly looked down to the stricken assistant warden.
In a voice like distilled reason, he spoke a single word. "Mask."
For a fraction of a second, no one seemed to understand. Then, at the same time, Lil and Blanc did. She tried to pull her head back and away, but the long, lanky arms of her hostage had reach to spare. He hooked a hand behind her head, pulled at a latch, and yanked her mask free. Lil grabbed a final deep breath of filtered air before it was stripped away, and pulled with all of her might on the chain, digging it into Blanc's throat as he threw the mask out of her reach.
"Put it back on her! _Put it back on her!_ " Nita demanded, her hands shaking as she took aim directly at the man in the doorway.
He didn't show an ounce of fear or anger and simply spoke in calm, soothing tones. "Miss Graus, your concern for your friend is admirable, but you'll find it rather more difficult to compel someone into action at the point of a gun than it is to compel them into inaction. And your friend has been exerting herself quite vigorously. We need only delay a short while for her to run short of breath, and a short while longer for her to cease to breathe entirely."
Lil shuddered and convulsed, her face beet red, and finally exhaled. She drew in a breath of the horrid fumes around them and instantly began to cough and gasp in agony.
"I understand breathing the fug is really quite painful to those from the surface, Miss Graus," the man said, raising his voice over the agonized wheezing at his feet. "Drop your weapon and I assure you we will restore her mask immediately. I extend to you the same gracious offer you made to us. No one needs to get hurt."
Tears were running down the side of Lil's head as she attempted to shape her coughs into words, but the violent, painful sounds were incomprehensible. The pressure on the chain was weakening now.
"She doesn't have much time left, Miss Graus."
Nita gritted her teeth and eased the hammer of the gun back into place, lowering the weapon entirely. The moment it was no longer in position to threaten them, the two guards nearest to her closed in, taking the gun and roughly immobilizing her. Two more guards removed Lil from the assistant warden and helped him to his feet.
"Replace the mask," the man in the doorway ordered.
Though he did not seem pleased to be doing so, the nearest guard grabbed the fallen mask and strapped it back onto Lil's face. After a few more ragged, wheezing coughs, her breathing became easier.
"Thank you, Miss Graus. It is pleasing to know that one of you is reasonable. That will make your time here far more tolerable for us all," he said. "I am Warden Linn. Welcome to Skykeep."
#
The warden led the way through the cramped hall of the ship. It was a small but heavily locked-down vessel. Fifteen cells similar to the one that had held them took up most of the space. Like most fug vessels, it was lightly crewed, quite likely the five guards and the assistant warden were joined by no more than two additional crewmen. The nearly successful escape attempt had convinced those on board to assign two guards to each of the women, meaning that there was virtually no room to maneuver. The inconvenience, all seemed to agree, was a necessary evil if it meant keeping the prisoners in check. Eventually they made it to the gangplank and out onto the pier. The disorienting black void of the near-light-less fug was all around them. Above them was the thick purple fog that resulted when the fug met fresh air, a midday glow just barely breaking through it. That meant they were near the surface, and the pier ahead of them led upward.
"I didn't know there were any cities in the fug that were anywhere near the surface," Nita said.
"Quiet!" barked Ivors, one of the guards assigned to the Calderan.
"Please, Ivors. The observation was not out of line. I have no quarrel with intelligent discourse. Miss Graus, your statement is quite understandable. There are, in fact, quite a few fug settlements in the central expanse of Rim that are quite near the surface, not because they are elevated, but because the layer of fug there is so thin. This, however, is not one of them."
"You should have shot him," Lil wheezed, her voice finally returning.
"Quiet!" growled one of her guards, wrenching her arm. This time there was no counter-order from Linn.
"You would have died," Nita said. The grip around her arm tightened.
"So'd've he," she coughed. "Fair trade, if you ask me."
"Really, Miss Cooper. You aren't improving matters for yourself," Linn said.
The ramp reached a long, narrow platform that stretched out to either side, hugging a wooden wall with a staircase at its center. Navigating the stairs was a challenge when in leg irons, but they managed. They crossed through the thick layer of fug, spiraling up flight after flight of stairs, until they finally broke through to the surface. Neither Nita nor Lil was prepared for what they saw next.
It was a fortress, or it may as well have been. There were towers of wooden scaffold at each corner of a plank courtyard with nearly as much square footage as half the town of Lock. A simple railing ringed the outside edge, and a larger central tower sat at the center, this one with a few large shacks and cabins at its base and a massive, stout pole at its peak. Along each edge, anchored to massive metal rings, were three spherical airship envelopes nearly as large as those that had been used to keep the dreadnought aloft. They cast enormous shadows across the courtyard. All around them, as far as the eye could see, was the roiling, wind-whipped purple surface of the fug, lapping at the edge of the wooden platform like an angry sea in slow motion.
"What... _is_ this?" Lil asked, awe in her voice.
"Skykeep is a prison, Miss Cooper. Most of my fellow fug folk call it the Phylactery, for poetic reasons. You'll note we have no walls. We do not require them. The whole of this facility is elevated nine hundred feet above the surface. The masks that have been removed from you are going to be returned to the cutter that delivered you. There are _no_ permanent filter masks here. You will each be given mouthpieces, which can offer you no more than one continuous hour of breathing before they must be changed, and only when we deem such things necessary. The altitude of this facility is adjusted hourly to keep the top three floors above the fug, and the bottom three floors below it. The central three floors are all somewhere in between. Beneath the fug are anti-aircraft guns, each heavily fortified and directed by spotters here on the surface. At the top of each of these five towers is a sharpshooter." He turned to Ivors. "Fetch Anthus, would you?"
The guard paced toward the center of the platform and opened a door at the base of the tower.
Linn continued. "Many have attempted to escape. The most popular method has been to reach one of the four anchor chains that hold us in place and attempt to climb to the surface. No one has survived such an attempt, and because our purpose is to imprison and not to execute, I would like to demonstrate for you why this is so."
Ivors returned, and with him he brought a creature. It was man-sized, stalking on all fours and snarling to reveal vicious teeth. The beast was large enough to have been a small bear, but it was as lanky and skeletal in build as the fug folk. Also it had the long, pointed muzzle and sharply pointed ears of a jackal, and the same sweeping tail. Short, dense fur made up its pelt, gray and dappled with black spots. It growled with a ghastly wind-through-the-gallows wheeze, and it darted its gaze back and forth with wild red eyes.
"As air-goers you are familiar with the inspectors. They are what happens when an aye-aye is exposed to the fug and survives. And of course you are familiar with us. We are what happens when a human is exposed to the fug and survives. This is a fug hound. This is what happens when a dog is exposed to the fug and survives. Like all I've mentioned thus far, they are at least marginally more intelligent than their mundane brethren. They are utterly bloodthirsty and can outrun a horse and eat their weight in meat once a week, and there are a dozen of them loose on the surface where the chains are anchored. Unlike Anthus here, they are not well trained, and they are not well fed. We found training tended to take the edge from the killer instinct that serves them so well as guard dogs. Thus they are, quite simply, wild hunters. If they don't hunt, they don't eat, and they _love_ to eat. Placing yourself anywhere within a mile of these creatures is... inadvisable."
Nita shook her head. "If... if the fug has blanketed most of the continent... is the entire surface flooded with those things? And others like them?"
"I admire your curiosity, Miss Graus, and I'm sure that in time we will be able to discuss the details of my homeland, but for the moment we are not here to educate you. Now, Miss Cooper, your behavior has regrettably earned you a day in isolation. You will be taken there now. Miss Graus, you brandished a weapon and threatened the lives of fug folk. This is an unacceptable offense as well, but in light of your willingness to forgo any actual violence, you will in this one case be granted leniency. And this leniency is contingent upon joining me for a short discussion."
"He means an interrogation," Lil rumbled.
"It will become an interrogation only if your behavior renders it necessary. The very nature of this place provides more than enough discomfort to make it a suitable punishment, in time, for any crime. I seldom see the need to enhance the punishment." He glanced to Lil. "With some obvious exceptions. When your friend has been secured, my men will remove your restraints, and you are free to move about the courtyard so long as you do not attempt to approach or communicate with those in isolation. If for any reason you feel the need to misbehave, I encourage you to look to the towers, and to Anthus here. At all times you are in the sights of several rifles, and potentially on the menu of a hound. Is that understood?"
Nita nodded once.
"Splendid," Linn said. "Ivors, bring Anthus to the lower level for feeding, and place Miss Cooper in one of the isolation cells."
"You don't tell them _nothing_ , Nita! You don't tell them _nothing_! They have no idea what sort of devilry they signed up for when they took us..."
"It's going to be okay, Lil," Nita called out. "Everything is going to be okay."
"Yeah, _for us_ maybe," Lil called back. "But these fuggers' days are numbered!"
"Undo Miss Graus's restraints," Linn ordered.
One of the guards began to sift through a set of keys while Nita watched nervously as her friend was literally dragged kicking and screaming toward the central tower.
"You aren't going to... hurt her, are you?" Nita asked.
"It would be entirely within our rights to do so. She assaulted my assistant warden. But no. I deplore physical violence. Isolation is a different sort of punishment. Like more conventional forms of discipline, it can, if overused, leave scars. But at least these scars aren't the sort that show."
The guard finished undoing Nita's manacles and leg irons. She rubbed her wrists and watched as Lil was thrown inside her "cell." "Crate" would have been more appropriate. It was a heavily built cube of wood and steel, tiny holes drilled liberally through the wooden slats that made up its sides, top, and bottom. Beneath the slats seemed to be a few layers of heavy mesh, which blocked the view of the inside entirely and likely shrouded the interior in complete darkness. The front hinged open to allow Lil to be tossed inside, restraints still on her wrists and ankles. She was cursing a blue streak and banging at the walls as a hook was lowered from a boom mounted about two-thirds of the way up the central tower's pole. The guards affixed the hook to the top of the crate and roughly hoisted it dozens of feet into the air, straight past the roof of the tower and almost to the boom itself. Once they were through hauling it up, Nita watched as it jerked and swung with Lil's angry struggles.
"This way, Miss Graus. We will have our chat," the warden said.
#
Nita walked uncertainly after Warden Linn. She was flanked by guards and gagging on the omnipresent stench of the fug. She'd had the misfortune of nearly losing her life to the stuff during the now legendary clash with the fug folk aboard the dreadnought, but not since then had the smell been so strong and strangling. It was as though every plank of wood had been soaked in the wretched stuff, marinated over the years.
"Do you require any medical attention?" the warden asked.
"No."
"Are you hungry, Miss Graus?" He led the group down into a recessed staircase and moved into the lower levels.
They were clearly traveling through a network of corridors intended for staff rather than inmates. As with any airship, which, despite the difference in scale, was the nearest point of comparison to this floating prison, space was at a premium. They were forced to walk single file, one guard in front of Nita and one behind, while Linn led from the front of the line, raising his voice just slightly.
"You've arrived just after our midday meal. There won't be any more food until this evening," he said.
"I don't have much of an appetite at the moment," Nita said. "The smell is stomach-turning."
"In time I'm told the scent becomes tolerable. You'll forgive me, but you and Miss Cooper are among only a handful of surface dwellers with whom I've had direct dealings. If I'm not attentive to any of your needs, please inform me, as I'll have no way of knowing otherwise. Your time here is not intended to be pleasant, you realize, but I take the health and well-being of my inmates very seriously unless circumstances require me to take punitive measures. It is entirely possible there have been oversights with regard to necessities not shared between our people. While Skykeep was designed to accommodate you, it was not designed with you in mind."
"It wasn't? You mean you lock up your own people here?"
"Of course. Who do you keep in _your_ prisons? Did you believe that we were a society entirely devoid of criminals, Miss Graus?"
"Not to offend you, sir, but many of the people I've come to call friends would claim that you are a society of nothing _but_ criminals. The way you've held the people of Rim by the throat for all of these years..."
He raised his hand gently to interject. "The politics and the economic balance between our communities is a fascinating and nuanced subject, Miss Graus, and much can be said of it. But that will not be the focus of today's discussion, so if you'll forgive me, I'd like to avoid treading too deeply into the matter at this time."
At no point in their dealings had his tone of civility and gentility even wavered. In spite of herself, Nita couldn't help but admire the poise and professionalism with which he conducted himself. She'd envisioned the man in charge of such a prison to be the sadistic sort, someone who took joy in the power. Asst. Warden Blanc fit the image. Linn was different. In a way, it made Nita _more_ uneasy. An adversary would at least have given her something to steel herself against. It would have been a target for the resolve that had carried her through so many other trying circumstances. Having to butt heads with a calm, deliberate, reasonable opponent felt... wrong.
"What _will_ we be discussing?" Nita asked.
"Your crew, their activities, and certain details regarding Caldera."
"Don't expect me to be very talkative on those matters," Nita said.
"Naturally not. I'm a patient man, Miss Graus. This will not be the last of our chats. Just a bit farther. The room in which we shall be having these discussions is not my office. As my office is in the immersed section of the facility, and as I've said, we do not have the means to keep you there for any reasonable amount of time, and conversation would be impossible, regardless. So I've had to clear out a small storeroom for this purpose."
"If this prison was meant to house other fug folk, why is it even at the surface?" Nita asked.
"Because while it may not be lethal to us as the reverse is for you, removing a fug person from the fug is a profoundly unpleasant experience. The air here is... lacking. It is terribly uncomfortable for us, the light stings our eyes and roasts our skin. And the inmates housed in the surface sections are those deemed by the authorities to be responsible for acts which threaten the very stability of our society. The discomfort is part of the sentence."
"What about you and the rest of the staff?"
"We stay in the immersed sections when possible and endure the surface when necessary. Such is the nature of our duty in this Phylactery of ours."
"Phylactery... that's... something to do with alchemy, isn't it? Or dark magic?"
"A bit of each. It is the legendary term for the vessel in which a lich stores his soul to attain immortality."
"Which would make the inmates the soul and your society a demon," Nita said.
"I'm aware the imagery does not paint us in a sympathetic light, and it is why I prefer the official name of Skykeep. But the name was not selected to evoke sympathy. It was intended to invoke the invincibility of our society, and as such has come to be interchangeable with the official name. Here we are," he said, opening a door to reveal a small room. It had only enough space for a table with a chair on either side of it. Not even the guards would have a place in the cramped, phlo-light-lit room. He sidled into the room to the far chair and motioned to the remaining one. "Please, sit."
She did so, looking uncertainly to the guards as they shut the door, leaving her alone with the warden. He picked up a small packet of pages that had been set on the table and began to leaf through them.
"I won't be restrained?" Nita asked.
"Unlike your crewmate, I do not believe you are inclined toward pointless violence. Nothing you can do to me in this room will earn you your freedom, and thus you will not do anything to me," he said. "Now, I'll begin by giving you the opportunity to provide information of your own volition. Any cooperation you show will go a long way to encouraging us to provide you with better treatment, more privileges, and—if circumstances permit—a reduced sentence. Tell me about the _Wind Breaker_ and her crew."
Nita took a breath, trying to avoid coughing. "Warden Linn, I have spent four months with the _Wind Breaker_ crew. But I scarcely needed four _days_ to know that you could never hope to find a more dedicated, more capable, and more motivated crew. What Lil said is correct. They will find this place, they will come for us, and they will free us, or they will die trying. And I will not utter a syllable to you that I believe will help you strike them down."
"Powerful words. But are you certain? They do not know where this place is, nor do you. I very much doubt they are even aware it exists, as your crewmate didn't seem aware of it. Steps were taken to delay their search until the path was thoroughly cold. They may even have been convinced that both you and Miss Cooper were killed. But if what you say is true, if they do somehow locate you and come to your rescue, then your friends will indeed die in the attempt. You are their engineer, Miss Graus. And they are without you. Any damage will go unrepaired. And there will be damage. Because this is my prison. It is my duty to keep these prisoners safely inside, and I will do everything in my considerable power to see to it that inside they shall remain.
"I do not feel any rancor toward you. I believe you are a reasonable person. My superiors informed me of your motivation for the heist. You were hoping to treat your mother, to save the life of a family member, and they denied you out of simple greed and the desire to control. I cannot in all honesty say that I wouldn't have done the same if faced with the same situation. And when confronted with opposition, you did what was necessary to save your life and succeed in your goal. Again, this is only natural. You did what you believed you had to do, and I now must do the same. Because your goals and mine are mutually exclusive, we are enemies. In another world, we might easily have been friends.
"You say you will not endanger your friends with your words. I would not expect you to. But please be aware that I do not need to break you to break your crew. Simply by keeping you here, my superiors have succeeded. So your resistance, while admirable, in the end would achieve nothing." He calmly set down one page and began the next. "Now, tell me about Caldera..."
#
Nita sat quietly on the lower of two bunks in the cell that was her new home. The cell was small enough that if she stretched, she could reach the left and right walls at the same time. The ceiling was normal height, or perhaps a bit higher, but that stood to reason if the cell had been designed with the tall, thin fug folk in mind. Likewise the cell was only as deep as the length of the bunk, but that was still about half again as long as she would have expected to find in a traditional prison. Each had a stiff pillow, a stiffer mattress, and a rather rough wool blanket. The only other things present in the cell were a small wash basin—water would need to be requested each day—and a small fixture for answering the call of nature, which Nita had to admit was rather more hygienic than the plank of wood with a hole leading to open air that served the same purpose on the _Wind Breaker_. The cell was one of a half dozen identical cells in the current hall, three on each side, and the only one currently occupied.
Following her chat with the warden—which she'd been informed would be a daily occurrence from this point forward—they had required that she change out of her work clothes and into prison attire. This consisted of a short-sleeve shirt and a pair of loose trousers, each with a white-and-blue checkered pattern.
It had been a long day and a longer night since her arrival. Two meals had been served—a supper composed of coarse bread and thin soup, and a breakfast composed of a rather unpleasant egg concoction and more of the same bread. Each time the only beverage was some tepid water, which managed to taste as awful as the fug smelled. She choked down what she could and set the rest aside, partially because the thought of finishing it didn't appeal to her in the slightest but mostly because Lil had yet to return from isolation, and Nita wasn't certain if she had been fed. The fate of her crewmate weighed heavily on Nita's mind when she finally heard the unmistakable sound of the little firebrand's voice echoing down the hall.
"You better take good care of them britches. Those are my best britches!" she called out, her voice hoarse but fierce. "And don't you think you're keeping that ribbon!"
Nita stood. "Lil! Are you okay?"
"Nita, that you? Where are you?" she called back excitedly.
Two sets of footsteps, accompanied by the scrabbling and squeaking of a third set of less willing steps, approached and finally Lil stood in front of the barred door of their cell. At some point her restraints had been removed, but the guards held her in a grip tight and vicious enough to ensure she couldn't pull away. She looked worn, fatigued, and frazzled, but her eyes had the same fire they'd had when she was taken away. At the sight of Nita, those eyes flashed with a look of profound relief.
"Oh, you got Nita in the same ridiculous getup? Don't you know she's from Caldera? They like to dress up pretty and such. It must be killing her to wear them clothes," Lil jabbed.
A third guard, the one stationed just out of sight at the end of the hall and assigned to this block of cells, stepped up to unlock the door.
"Back away, Graus," he ordered.
She did so. The guard unlocked the door and shoved Lil roughly through, where she collided with Nita and caught herself on the bed. Before they could recover, the guards slammed the door shut and locked it. The two guards who had escorted Lil set off from whence they came, and the third returned to his station at the end of the corridor.
"Yeah, that's right!" Lil said. "Walk away!"
The very moment the footsteps stopped and Lil no longer had anyone to stand in defiance of, she suddenly seemed to lose the strength to stand at all. She slumped, her knees giving out, and would have hit the floor had Nita not been there to catch her.
"Lil, are you okay?" Nita asked again, helping her crewmate to the cot beside her. She took Lil's hand. It was shaking within her grasp. "Lil! You're chilled to the bone!"
Nita stood and tore the blanket from the top bunk, throwing it around Lil. She wrapped her arms around her shivering friend from behind to help steady and warm her.
"What did they do to you?" Nita asked.
"It wasn't so bad," she said, smiling weakly. "Just... cold... and dark. Did they feed you?"
"Yes."
"Not me... Every now and then they'd drop the crate down and throw a tarp over it, then heave a bucket of water in there with me and take out the old one."
"Here. I've got some breakfast left," Nita said, making ready to fetch the tray.
"Not just yet. Let me quit shaking first," Lil said, pulling her blanket tighter and putting some more of her weight on Nita. "How long was I in there?"
"About a day."
"No... You sure it wasn't a week? Those walls are some kind of screen. A bunch of layers. Couldn't see any light at all, but the wind sure cut through... Didn't know if it was day or night. And... there was this... clicking noise. Sometimes I heard stuff scrabbling around... Might have just been in my head... Any sign of the cap'n yet?"
"Not yet."
"He better hurry up," she muttered, her shivers slowly subsiding. When she was finally steady, she took another breath. "Let's see what passes for food in this place."
Nita fetched the dish and spoon, handing them to Lil. Her crewmate completely skipped the utensil, grabbing the eggs with her bare hands and shoveling them into her mouth, then grabbing the remaining bread and dropping the empty metal dish to the ground.
"Since when," she mumbled, her mouth stuffed full, "do they feed prisoners in their cells? Shouldn't we be in some big prisoner's mess with the rest of them?"
"I think it has something to do with the fact we can't be down in the fug. Fug folk don't like to leave it, and most of the prisoners here are fug folk. So I'd imagine the cafeteria is down there. Either that or they are afraid to mix us with the general population."
"They better be," Lil said, swallowing enough of the food to be more understandable. "If the folks they let roam around free are any indication, I don't think we're going to get along very well with the ones they lock up." She swallowed hard. "Well, that was really awful... Is there any more?"
"I'm afraid not. And perhaps it's just as well. If breathing the fug is lethal, I can't imagine eating food prepared down there is doing us any good."
"Nah, fug food won't do you no harm. At least, not any more than regular food will. We used to sell these fancy candies they make down there. And booze. Their booze kicks like a mule. I could do with a belt of it right now. Them eggs left a taste that's going to linger."
"I'll get you some water, but I should warn you, it won't help much," Nita said. "Jailer! May we have some water please?"
The guard thumped over the bars to take the cups Nita passed through them. Lil gave the man a dirty look before he left. The water must have been just at the end of the hall, because they could distantly hear the mugs being filled.
"What're you saying 'please' for? You don't have to be nice to these folks. They're keeping us prisoner."
"It won't do us much good to be rude. The guards have the ability to make our time here much better or much worse. I'd like to encourage them to do the former."
"Yeah, well if the rest of the crew was here, I know what _I'd_ encourage these fuggers to do..."
The guard returned a moment later, half-filled mugs in hand. Nita accepted them graciously and handed one to Lil.
"Well... it don't look like he spit in it," she said, eyeing up the water as the guard returned to his post.
She took a sip and made a sour face, then resumed looking into the cup. Try as she might, she couldn't hold it steady, the lingering shivers from her long night of hanging like bait from a hook causing the water to ripple. Finally she clutched the mug with both hands to stop the shaking.
"Nita... what're we gonna do?" she said, her voice as steady as she could make it, which at this moment wasn't very steady at all.
"We'll think of something," Nita said.
"No... I'm no good for that. You gotta tell me what to do."
Nita tried to smile. "Hey. You've got seniority on the crew. Shouldn't _you_ be giving the orders?"
"We ain't on duty right now, Nita. We're in a prison, so seniority don't enter into it. And even if it did, I'm a deckhand and you're the engineer. If you give me orders, I still gotta follow. So make with the orders."
"This isn't exactly the sort of problem an engineer is intended to solve."
"Well it sure as hell ain't the sort of problem a deckhand is supposed to solve." Lil twisted to look Nita in the eye. "Nita, you _gotta_ tell me what to do."
There was genuine fear in Lil's eyes. It was unsettling to see such a thing. This woman had thrown herself from the ship to slide along mooring ropes to untie them. She'd gleefully taken aim at better-armed ships and stared down people twice her size. Not only had Nita never seen Lil afraid, she'd begun to think it wasn't possible. But now there was no question. In this moment, Lil was a frightened young woman, up to her neck in a situation she didn't know how to handle.
"Lil..." Nita said, again quietly enough for the guard not to hear. "This is a problem. You solve it the same way you solve any other problem. Break it into smaller pieces until the pieces are small enough to handle. We know that the crew will come for us if they can find us. So all we need to do is find out where we are and then find a way to tell them. So right now the problem isn't escaping. It's simply determining where the prison is located."
"Find out where we are..." Lil said. Slowly the fear began to drop away from her face as her mind instead grappled with the problem. "Well... that's just navigation. They never did give me much of a turn at the ship's wheel, but anyone who's spent much time on an airship knows how to navigate. They had me do that plenty, because it's easiest when you can see the whole sky, and that means scrambling up on the top of the envelope. Pretty much just me and Coop were willing to do that." She smiled. "We just gotta get a good hard look at the night sky. Someplace where we can see the horizon, too. And we need to know the time. The more accurate the better."
"Okay then. Those are the smaller pieces. Get to the courtyard at night, and find a timepiece."
"But what do we do once we know? How do we get it to them?"
"Hey, hey," Nita said, placing a hand on Lil's shoulder. "First thing's first. Our plate is full. We can cross that bridge when we come to it."
Nita paused to consider her tendency to rely upon idioms to calm Lil down when their personal guard approached, prompting both of them to hush up and turn to the bars.
"It's yard time. Get ready to meet the rest of your fellow prisoners," the guard said.
#
Neither Lil nor Nita had known precisely what to expect when they were led under heavy guard through a few halls and finally up toward the top deck of the facility. The _best_ of the fug folk seemed rather despicable and cold. What would their prisoners be like?
The upper surface of the prison served the purpose of its exercise yard, and while during transit they were locked up, once they were on deck the guards removed the restraints. It was just before midday, and though the sun was high in the sky, the atmosphere was thin and blustery. Nothing Lil and Nita weren't used to from their time on the _Wind Breaker_ , but not the sort of weather a normal person would seek out. Given the choice between it and the interior of a cell—or in Lil's case, the interior of a dangling crate—it was a refreshing change of pace.
By coincidence or by design, Nita and Lil were the first to reach the surface and were thus treated to the procession of other inmates, one by one. It was clear by the time the third of them had been released from his manacles that yard time was not a reward, at least not for the fug folk. Each of them squinted at the sun and shuffled into the shade of one of the envelopes as soon as they were free. Most gave a wary glance at the _Wind Breaker_ crew and gave them plenty of space. Nita had been expecting anger, hatred, or at least distrust to be the most prevalent reaction, but instead there seemed to be equal parts fear and awe in their expressions.
Most of the prisoners were virtually indistinguishable from the guards, save the presence of the same checkered prison garb. It took a practiced eye to tell fug folk apart, mostly because the withered and drawn features left little room for variation. Then, mixed among what turned out to be about sixty inmates, a few specific prisoners began to stand out. There were a half dozen of them who had _very_ little in common with the others. They were all nearly a foot taller than the rest of the population, with a build that would have placed them on the lean side of average if they had been humans. For a fug person they looked positively muscle-bound. Then came the last prisoner to be released. This one was different, but it was difficult to put their fingers on why.
"Is that... is that a _woman_?" Lil said, staring at the last prisoner.
Indeed it appeared to be. She was a touch shorter than most of the other prisoners. Though she was far too lean to have any appreciable curves, there was something about the purse of her thin lips, the angle of her hips, her posture. It was subtly but undeniably feminine. And then, of course, there was her voice, which they were treated to when she noticed they were staring.
"What the _hell_ are _you_ looking at?" she hollered from across the wooden courtyard in a voice a register higher in pitch than the others.
"I'm sorry, I didn't mean to—" Nita began to reply.
"We're not sure! Are you a woman?" Lil cried with her usual tact.
The fug woman strode angrily toward them.
"Of _course_ I'm a bloody woman," she growled when she was near enough to not have to yell to be heard. "And what's more, I'm a _lady_. Which, with manners like that, you certainly are _not_."
"I apologize for my friend," Nita said, mortified on behalf of the group. "My name is—"
"I know who you are. We all know who you are. You're Nita Graus. This one here is Cooper or something similar. You are on the crew that destroyed the dreadnought." She had a voice that lent itself very well to being aghast. It was powerful yet fragile, cracking and fluttering with her words.
"That's right. Don't you forget it. I'm Lil to her," Lil said, hitching a thumb in Nita's direction. "But to you and all these fuggers I'm Chastity Cooper until I say otherwise."
"What's your name," Nita said, trying her best to offer a friendly face.
"I can't imagine it would be of any interest to you, but my name is Blanche."
"Since when do fuggers have women, Blanche?" Lil said, ignoring the attempted pleasantries and delivering the question as though she wasn't so much curious as angry that she didn't already know.
"Need I explain biology to your little friend here?"
"No, you don't need to explain biology. I know about the birds and the bees, but we've had a _lot_ of dealings with you folks and never have we seen a lady."
"Lil... maybe we can afford to be a little more polite. It wouldn't hurt to have some friends here."
"That isn't likely to happen among the _civilized_ prisoners," Blanche said. "I'm frankly surprised you're still alive."
"You threatening me, Blanche?" Lil said, cracking her knuckles.
"Heavens no," Blanche said, taking a wary step back. "Not by _our_ hands. Look at those people. Half of them are afraid you are homicidal monsters and the other is on the verge of declaring you knights in shining armor. The _guards_ are the ones who will eventually kill you!"
"The guards want us dead?" Lil said.
"I've been in this facility for seven years. Do you think I would even know who you people are if the guards didn't curse your names nightly? _Everyone_ in a formal role within the establishment hates you. You took away their _teeth_ when you destroyed the dreadnought. Or at least knocked one out in full view of the rest of the world. Thanks to you, people no longer believe they are invincible."
"Them having guns, you'd think if the guards wanted us dead, we'd be dead," Lil said, casting a quick glance to the nearest guard tower. Its sharpshooter was taking aim at the women.
"I imagine they'll wait until they've gotten information out of you. Those vile cretins who make the decisions always want information."
"It sounds to me you're not fond of the 'establishment,' either," Nita said.
Blanche gave Nita a condescending look. "I've been locked away for _seven years_. Do you think that would be the case if the ruling class and I had any love for one another?"
"What'd you do?" Lil asked.
"My personal life is none of your concern," Blanche said.
"What're you, too stuck up to—" Lil muttered, balling up her fists.
"That's entirely fair," Nita said. "Would you mind answering some questions about how things work in this place?"
"I'm not your mentor," she said. "And if it isn't clear, I'm one of the ones who thinks you two are monsters, so I'm not obliged to help you."
"Well, if you're not going to help us..." Lil said, stepping forward and prompting another skittish retreat. Nita wrangled her back again.
It was becoming increasingly clear that Blanche was not nearly as confident and defiant as she would have the crewmates believe. Nita didn't need to be told why she was behaving as she was. It was for the same reason that Lil seemed to be spoiling for a fight. In the nightly chitchat that would occur whenever at least three members of the crew had wound up eating supper at the same time, the subject of how to handle oneself in prison had been a fairly common topic. Coop and Gunner had each spent brief stints in small prisons, and the captain had been somewhat evasive about the details but had certainly spent time behind bars as well. They insisted that the proper way to survive and thrive within such an environment was quite similar to how one established oneself in a rough crew of airmen. Illustrate yourself as a force to be reckoned with at the first opportunity. Start the first fight and win it. Though all three of the men swore by the tactic, Nita was not so sure. If things became rough, she wouldn't hesitate to defend herself, but it seemed that things were difficult enough for everyone in this place that making matters worse as an icebreaker was not advisable. Besides, it was obvious they'd earned their reputations _long_ before being locked up. Now might be a time to show a willingness to be reasonable.
"Again, I understand. Thank you for having the courage to speak to us," Nita said.
Blanche eyed Nita uncertainly. "What did you want to know?"
"Are _all_ of those folks either scared of us or... the other one?" Lil asked.
"Most certainly," Blanche said with a sneer.
"I'm going to go find out who's on which list," Lil said, stalking off toward one of the larger groups.
Blanche lingered near Nita as they both watched Lil thunder toward them. When she got within a few dozen steps, she made a sudden dash toward one of the clusters, then stopped short and doubled over laughing when half of them scattered as though a bull were charging.
"Your associate is demented."
"It takes a special kind of person to survive what she's been through," Nita said.
"What did _you_ want to ask? You at least wear a _mask_ of civility."
"Do we have yard time at the same time every day?"
"Yes," she said flatly, clearly not pleased by the fact. "It is mandatory. Midday yard time, even in poor weather. One of the things they do so they can search our rooms and make sure for at least an hour a day we are miserable."
"Does anyone get to spend any time outside for any other reasons?"
"Good behavior might get you the odd midnight yard time. At least then the sun doesn't sting so much," Blanche said.
"What if—"
"You're plotting an escape," Blanche said.
Nita kept her expression neutral. "Pardon?"
"I know the look. I don't know precisely what you're up to, but I know the sound of someone feeling around the walls of their cage, looking for loose bars. We've all done it. We've all thought we had the way out, found the weak link. There isn't one. Your choice is die in here or die on the way out. Don't waste your time. And if you do, don't come anywhere near me when you make your grab for freedom. Sometimes those sharpshooters miss, and I'd hate to catch a bullet meant for you."
With that, Blanche turned and walked back toward the cluster of gathered fug folk beneath one of the gas bladders, notably choosing the one farthest from Lil. Meanwhile, Lil seemed to be exchanging words with the group she'd chosen to harass, and though voices were raised, it didn't seem to be the beginning of an altercation. As would naturally have been the case, Lil had selected the group with all of the strangely large fug folk, and two of them in particular seemed to have smiles on their faces as they listened to her speak. Nita had a feeling it wasn't wise to leave Lil to her own devices for too long, but before she joined her, she decided a quick survey of the yard was in order.
There was little to be learned about the towers at each corner, save that they were only accessible with ladders, as downward-pointing spikes had been installed on the uprights to prevent prisoners from scaling them. As an added precaution, the ladders were in sections, and the lowest one had been hauled up from the ground. The central tower was more interesting, as it was triple the size of the other towers. Nita felt certain at least one of the scattering of shacks and rooms at the base was a supply locker. Getting into that would provide her with all sorts of potential assets to an escape attempt, but aside from the fact at least two sharpshooters could see her from whichever way she might approach, there was a chain-link fence around the base separating it from the rest of the yard. There was also that _monster_ of a hound to contend with.
She turned her eyes upward, following the central tower. Oddly, the anticlimbing spikes were missing from this one. No doubt they felt the fence and hound provided adequate protection. She continued sweeping her gaze upward to its pointed roof and onward to the shaft that projected from it. Along the shaft ran a thick copper cable that didn't seem to serve any obvious purpose. The cable ran all the way to the decking and across it to the edge. The "isolation" boom had been raised now that it was not in use. She squinted a bit as she craned her neck to try to make out the very top of the shaft. It stretched beyond even the tops of the envelopes and was difficult to see with the midday sun almost perfectly behind it, but there was _something_ at the tip. It wasn't just a point, though there _was_ some sort of gleaming metal rod above all else. In addition to the rod was a boxy shape, one that let the light through. It almost looked like the crow's nest of the old sailing ships, but unless her sense of scale was off, it was far too small for a person.
"Nita! Come here!" Lil called.
To Nita's relief, and mild surprise, it was a call of excitement rather than a call for help. She looked to her friend and was greeted by a wide smile and wave of her hand. Lil was now alone with the two previously smiling large fug people. Nita made her way quickly over.
"What is it?" she asked.
"This is Donald and this is Kent," Lil said, pointing to each of the men in turn.
She had to point upward, because the two men were approaching seven feet tall. Their lanky limbs had visible muscle. Each man offered a callused hand that had obviously seen a bit of hard work, and Nita gave each a firm shake.
"Guess what these guys used to do," Lil said.
"What?"
"We done work at the shipyards," said Kent, his words slow and accented with an odd, loose diction. "We were the ones what built half of what them fancy folk ride around in."
"I knew they made all of the boilers and stuff down in the fug, and I could never picture any of those twisty, pasty white skeletons in fancy suits doing a lick of real work," Lil said. "It turns out there are blue-collar fuggers."
Nita flinched.
"Huh-huh," chuckled Donald. He spoke in a voice so deep it was almost difficult to understand. "She finks we fink that's not a nice name."
"No one cares what you call us. _We_ don't because one word's as good as another. And the bosses don't care because they don't care about _anything_ anyone says but them," Kent explained.
"And tell her why you got locked up," Lil said.
"I tried to sneak repair parts to one of them cities up north. Them valves the bosses let you folks swap in and out," Kent said.
"I tried to cave in the head of my boss when he tried to lock up Kent here," Donald said.
"In other words, these two tried to help people like _us_ , and that's why they got locked up! _That's_ the sort of people fuggers lock up. People who almost caused them to lose grip of the world even a little bit," Lil said.
"That's right. There's... how many of us, Kent?" Donald said.
"Fifty-eight. An even sixty with these two," Kent said.
"Fifty-eight people in this place. And fifty-six of us'd sooner see the bosses choke on their own ties than do what they say anymore. Just about everybody on our side of the bars is glad you done what you done."
"Who are the two holdouts?"
"The Ebonwhite brothers. Real snakes among snakes, them two," Donald said.
"Ebonwhite... isn't that—"
"The mayor of Fugtown. Them's his nephews. He caught them embee... embuh... He caught them nicking coin from the city coffers and all that. Had them sent here. They'd do just about anything to be back in good with their dear old uncle again. The rest of us would like to do to him what you done to that dreadnought."
"I was on the crew what assembled that ship. Took us _years_. I never thought the old girl would go down. How did you do it?" Kent asked.
"The bigger the boiler, the bigger the boom," Nita said. "I have my ways."
"I told you the boiler's what done it," Donald said.
"But the boiler was tucked away in the heart of the thing. How'd you even hit it?" Kent said.
"It's a long story. I suppose we'll have time for that later," Nita said.
"Hey, you two. I've been meaning to ask you. How come you're so much meatier than the other fuggers?"
"We were near the center of Rim, where the fug gets thin. Didn't get the same dose other folks got. There's... how many, you figure? Maybe two thousand fug folk when it's all said and done? Could be more. Anyway, maybe two hundred are like us. They have us doing most of the grunt work. Matter of fact, they usually call us 'grunts.'"
"But we've clashed with fug soldiers plenty of times, and they're always the scrawny sort," Lil said.
"They would rather keep us grunts in the factories, making money for them. Plus, they say we're apt to disobey orders. They don't really feel that we're enough like them to be trusted."
"Do they do the same with the women? Keep them hidden away working?" Nita asked.
"The ladies are hid away, all right. But not for working. There just ain't many of 'em. Maybe as many as there are grunts. Maybe less. When there's so few, you make sure you keep 'em safe. And there's nothing as dangerous as dealing with the surface folk, far as the bosses are concerned."
"Fascinating," Nita said. "How long have you been here?"
"Three years, the bofe of us," Donald said.
"Have you ever seen anyone escape?"
"We never even seen someone let out. They don't let people leave the Ph'lact'ry. You get sent here to die, slow."
"Beats dying fast," Lil said with a shrug.
"No, Lil. It really doesn't," Kent said. "About twice a year, someone goes over the side rather than spend another day here. A minute of free fall is still a minute free."
"It doesn't really seem that bad," Nita said.
"Except that dangling box they put me in," Lil said.
"At least you're a little shrimpy fing. You probably fit just fine. Last time Kent got put in there, he couldn't straighten his neck out for a week," Donald said.
"Hey! Watch who you're calling shrimpy, beanpole. You're _this_ close to being the first couple of fuggers I ever actually _liked_ ," Lil said.
"Oi," Donald said, elbowing Kent in the ribs. "Ask what you were wondering about the other day."
"Oh, right! Is it true that captain of yours took down a scout ship by dropping a _boat_ on it?"
"Ha! Not only is it true, but _I'm_ the one who dropped the boat!" Lil said proudly.
Lil and the two grunts continued to chat and share stories for the better part of forty minutes. It wasn't precisely what one would call friendship. The grunts were, if anything, starstruck at meeting one of the only humans they considered famous. Nita chimed in now and again, but mostly she devoted her time to observing as much as she could about the courtyard. She ran a few dozen scenarios through her head of how they might get away, but none of them were promising. They couldn't risk doing anything to threaten the facility's airworthiness because it would only have to drop a few dozen feet for it to be deep enough in the fug for them to suffocate. That meant no firing on the envelopes, no attempting or even threatening to unfasten them. And at the same time they couldn't even try to physically leave the facility. All ships docked below the fug, so they would need filter masks just to board them. Finally she abandoned the thoughts. It was as she'd said to Lil. They had their small tasks. Better to stick to solving those than attempt to tackle something as insurmountable as a full escape. And so she walked about the courtyard looking for weaknesses. Looking for possibilities. Slowly, some new ideas began to form.
Nita paced over to Lil and the grunts as Lil was reaching the conclusion of one of her raunchier jokes.
"... and the farmer said 'If he's that far in, I think he's a goner!'" Lil said.
Kent burst out laughing. Donald scratched his head. "But what's that got to do with a shoe?"
"Sorry to interrupt, but how long did you say we would stay out here in the yard?" Nita asked.
"An hour," Kent said, wiping a tear away. "Not a minute less."
"How much longer do you suppose we've got?"
"I don't know. Oi! Warden Blanc! How much longer?" he called out to a guard standing near one of the staircases.
His cry was addressed to the very man whom Lil had tried to choke during their arrival. The assistant warden reached into an inside pocket of his elaborate uniform and tugged free a pocket watch. "Two more minutes," he replied. "Start lining up for your restraints."
The appearance of a pocket watch was not lost on Lil. She gave Nita a meaningful glance, then turned to the grunts as the group began to line up near the stairs for their chains to be applied. "So Blanche over there tells me we can get out here for a midnight yard time if we're good."
"Heh. _Sometimes_. If they're in the mood. And you ask nice," Kent said. "I manage that a few times a year. Cleaning and the like, usually."
"Most times the guards won't do anyfing for you. They'd rather do fings _to_ you," Donald added.
Nita nodded. "So I'd imagined." The sparks of inspiration fluttered in her mind as she shuffled forward, awaiting lockup.
One by one manacles were attached and the group were moved off toward their cells. It took a rather long time to move everyone down because the staff of the place was very small, and even with restraints in place, the guards didn't move any group that was larger than two inmates to every one guard. It took ten trips before Nita and Lil were ready to be taken to their cell, but rather than taking them together, Lil was taken first.
"The warden wants to speak with you," said the guard.
"Does he now? Oh, this ought to be good," Lil said with a smile, stumbling down the stairs with the guards.
#
The guards thrust Lil down into her chair, hands still shackled, with Warden Linn sitting opposite. Unlike when Nita had been interviewed, this time the door stayed open, an armed guard watching dutifully over the volatile crewmate.
"So, Miss Cooper. I'm terribly sorry for your regrettable stay in isolation."
"Feh. It was a walk in the park. I loved it. Reminded me of home. I had a real little bedroom as a kid," Lil said.
"Putting a defiant face on it. I hadn't expected anything less. But I watched as they removed you from isolation. I know the effect it had on you. I take no joy in inflicting so savage a punishment, but you must be taught the consequences of violence against our people."
"Yeah, yeah. Spare the switch, spoil the child. You're all heart, teaching us dumb ol' surface folk proper manners and such."
"This will be much easier for you if you simply learn to follow the rules."
"This is a prison, Linn. I know about prisons. They aren't about things being easy. Am I here for any real reason, or are you just lookin' to lie to my face for an hour?"
The warden didn't show any sign of annoyance at Lil's attitude, which was more than could be said for the guard, who became visibly more furious with each word Lil said. Instead, Linn simply opened a packet of pages, just like the one he'd held during Nita's interview, and looked over the first one.
"Tell me. How has Miss Graus been performing in her duties as your ship's engineer?"
"Better than you fuggers ever did. The _Wind Breaker_ is purring like a kitten. We go farther on a load of coal, we go faster than we ever have, and she even got rid of most of the rattles and squeaks."
"It is a significant task. Particularly for one unskilled in our equipment. Has there been any exterior decay? Wood rot?"
Lil grinned. "You should see the old girl. Pretty as a painting. Nita spent a couple of weeks of her own time painting up all these gold lines on it. You ain't _seen_ a ship so pretty. Not a speck of rot to be seen."
"And how does she manage to be certain that it remains in such a fine state of repair?"
"If one of them little rats you have knocking on all of the boards and such can do it, then you better bet Nita can do it."
"If you had an inspector, you wouldn't _need_ her to do so. The inspectors are for your safety."
"Like I said, you guys are all heart. You care so much about us. Let me ask you this. If you actually wanted us to be safe, why wouldn't you let us fix our own ships?"
"That's not the issue at hand."
"No. I reckon not. Look, once we had Nita and we knew she could take care of the ship good and proper, we pitched that rat of yours overboard. I don't know if you ever had to deal with one of them things, but they aren't the nicest little buggers to be around. Better off without 'em, that's what I say."
The warden scratched down some notes, and Lil allowed herself a brief grin. In the days after their heist of the warehouse and the subsequent battle with the dreadnought, Captain Mack had spent a fair amount of time drumming into their heads "the story." Together, the crew had concocted a careful retelling of the facts, and central to that was the issue of Wink. The story had it that once Nita was added to the crew, they disposed of their now unnecessary inspector. This would explain the lack of reports to the fug folk without revealing that they knew how the reports were being sent.
Linn moved to another page.
"You've been operating quite effectively without direct contact to our facilities. It begs the question of how exactly you can stay aloft without some of our more unique resources."
"You might be the only folks who _make_ phlogiston, but you ain't the only ones who _have_ it. Everybody and their mother needs the stuff, so there's plenty of it around. Same goes for burn-slow."
"It is forbidden to sell those resources to anyone banned from maintenance."
"Yeah. It's forbidden to rob fugger warehouses and such, too. And we did that just fine. We're good at the forbidden stuff. That's how our bread is buttered. Speaking of that, you folks ain't got no _clue_ how to make a proper breakfast. You're good at tinkering, but I ain't never _had_ a worse plate of eggs."
The warden shuffled through his pages some more. "Yes, I understand you've got quite a cook on board. And she's a surgeon as well?"
"Butch. Finest doctor I ever met."
"Where did she receive her training?"
"I don't know. You'd have to ask the cap'n. Maybe he'll have a chat with you before he blows this mess out of the sky."
"You seem quite confident in the capabilities of your former crew."
"They're still my crew, Linn."
"The _Wind Breaker_ is a zephyr, correct? Made for a crew of sixteen?"
"Yep."
"And yet you had only a crew of five, before the addition of Miss Graus."
"Six... remember, that was before we tossed the inspector."
He scratched down a note. "And now that crew is down to four. The _Wind Breaker_ has achieved some truly mythic things in the past, but do you really believe they can perform another miracle without you and Miss Graus on the crew?"
"You ain't listening, Linn. _We're still on the crew_. Just because I'm not eating Butch's cooking or holding one of Gunner's guns doesn't mean I'm not toting my share of the load. You can't win this one, because we got folks on both sides of the walls. All you did by locking us up here was let us know you got plenty of people down in the fug who ain't too happy with how things are being run. And you call the stuff we done a miracle. It ain't. It's just what we do. And we're going to keep doing it. You can throw your best ships at us, we'll knock them out of the sky. You can throw your best men at us, we'll fill them full of lead. You can hire every last bandit, marauder, raider, pirate, and whatever else you can find to hunt us down. We'll take care of them, too. See, this is what you folks don't get. I been down in the fug a few times. You got these nice cobblestone streets, right? And you ain't got a lick of sun down there. And you know what I see coming up out from between those cobbles? Weeds. That's us. Try and take away everything we need and we'll still find a way to squeeze through the cracks. You folks can push hard as you want. All you're doing is teaching us folks to push back harder. And we're good learners, the _Wind Breaker_ crew. We learned our lessons. 'Bout time you folks learned yours."
Linn looked her evenly in the eye, and Lil looked right back, a defiant smile on her face.
"I think that will be all for today, Miss Cooper. Thank you for your cooperation," he said.
The guard stepped in and roughly hoisted Lil from the chair.
"Have your fun while you can, screw. The clock's ticking on this place," she said. "And I'm going to remember the ones who was and who wasn't nice."
# Chapter 6
They rest of the day had been rather uneventful, though it confirmed a few things they'd suspected. For one, it became clear that the pair of them would never see the cafeteria. Lunch was served in their cell, as was dinner. This suited them just fine. It gave them time alone to discuss their ideas, reassure one another that the crew would find them as soon as it could, and generally keep their spirits up. Supper was some sort of horribly overcooked cutlet and a mound of what was probably cabbage. Despite its unsuitability for the meal in question, they were still only given a spoon to eat with, so a fair amount of eating with their hands was necessary.
When night came, both Lil and Nita slept like the dead. The following morning brought more horrific eggs and Nita's second "chat" with the warden, this time focusing largely on surveillance. The warden was careful with his wording, but it was clear before long that he was trying to determine how exactly the _Wind Breaker_ was able to avoid being detected. Nita stuck to the story, and eventually she was returned to her cell.
"How did it go?" Lil asked, tossing something up in the air and catching it periodically as she backed against the far wall to allow Nita to be released from her bonds and ushered inside.
"It went well enough. He's not as subtle as he thinks he is, though I think he's reading questions written by someone without his tact. What are you tossing?"
The cell door slammed, and the door was locked.
"A hunk of bread from breakfast," Lil said.
"Isn't it stale?"
"It was stale at breakfast. Now it's a rock." She knocked it on the wall.
"Then why do you still have it?"
"Thinking I might clock one of the guards with it."
"Do you think it'll do any good?"
"It'll make me feel better."
"It'll also get you put in isolation."
Lil tipped her head back and forth, then tucked the chunk of bread into the waist of her pants. "We'll play it by ear then. Might still be worth it."
A thump and knock came from the far end of the hall.
"Yard time," called a guard from behind the door.
"Blast it! I just locked the door," the guard growled.
"Maybe they should give you all watches, so you'd know when it's time for this sort of thing," Nita said.
" _That_ would be _intelligent_. Management doesn't make _intelligent_ decisions," the guard muttered. "They make _budgetary_ decisions. So only shift leaders and the wardens get watches. So until I get the second stripe on my sleeve, I've got to waste my time with this idiocy."
"That's a real shame," said Lil.
The guard ignored her.
"Maybe you should buy your own watch," she said.
Again he had no reaction.
"Oh, I see. You'll get all friendly and chatty with Nita but not with me."
"Yes, because the Calderan has manners, and you are an uncouth, boorish street urchin."
"Oh, well la-de-dah. I didn't know I was supposed to put my pinkie up when folks slap manacles on my wrists."
The guard finished securing them and brought them to the surface. Shortly afterward, the fug folk prisoners from the lower levels started to arrive, and when Kent and Donald reached the surface, they quickly sought out the two crewmates.
"Huh, you owe me your muffin," Donald said, punching Kent in the arm.
"I know, I know, you win it, fair and square."
"What were you two gambling about?" Nita asked.
"And where are you getting these muffins?" added Lil.
"They don't give you muffins wiff breakfast?" asked Donald.
"All we get is bread that's liable to crack a tooth."
"The guard's been eating your muffins then."
"Does their treachery know no bounds?" Nita said jokingly. "But again, what was the bet about?"
"Oh, Kent here thought one of you would have kicked it by now."
"It's only our second day!" Lil said.
"I said you'd make it to the end of the week."
"What happens if we live beyond that?" Nita asked.
"I don't fink that's very likely," Donald said.
"Well, then I contend you each owe us a few muffins if we manage," Nita said.
"What do we get if you lose?" Donald said.
"If they lose, they'll be dead," Kent said.
"Oh, right... I suppose that's a proper penalty. It's a bet," he said, shaking hands on it.
The four prisoners chatted for a bit, the subject quickly turning to the reason that each inmate was locked up. Crime after crime turned out to be either leniency or outright defiance of some of the more vicious and draconian rules that the fug folk had put in place. Acts that would have been considered charitable in any other culture were punished more viciously than murder. Evidently the ruling class was afraid that such charity and minor rebellion could turn into a plague of decency that would topple their stranglehold if left unchecked.
"... Over there's Eggy. He wasn't enforcing an embargo on that other town up north. And that's Snow. He used to do repairs off the books. And that's about it," Kent said.
"What about Blanche?" Nita asked.
"Oh, right. Blanche. She's... what did she do again, Donald?"
"She did... it had to do with writing fings down."
"Oh, right, right. She was a trainer for them inspectors, and she wrote something down she wasn't supposed to. That's all I really know... I guess if we knew what it was she wrote down, we'd have been locked up for _that_ instead of what we already did."
More thoughts began to spark in Nita's mind.
"Can either of you tell me what inspectors do on ships?" she said.
"They... inspect," Donald said.
"Check for rot, wood worms. See if there's any loose pipes and steam and that. Then they kick a big fuss if they find anything. Jumping about and all that," Kent said.
"Anything else?"
"They also eat. And you shouldn't look up at one with your mouth open because—" Donald began.
"I don't think the ladies need to be told that bit," Kent said.
"Well, what else would they do?" Donald said.
"Nothing I suppose," Nita said. "It just seems odd that they should be trained to do a job that a person could easily do."
"Huh. You teach a person how to find what's broke, next thing they'll figure out how to fix it, and we can't have that, can we?" Donald said.
Nita nodded, then turned. "Lil, can you come with me for a moment?"
"Sure," she said.
The pair paced off. Nita gestured up at the clouds and swept her hands as though she was in a vigorous discussion about some far-off destination. Her words in no way matched the motions.
"They don't know about the inspectors being used as spies," Nita said.
Lil, a bit more theatrically, began to play as though she was engaged in the same conversation. "No offense to them, but it seems like there's a lot those two don't know."
"Granted, they aren't the mastermind types that we've dealt with before, but they're citizens, and they don't know. That means at the very least that not everyone knows. And from what we've seen, its fair to say there is an awful lot of compartmentalization of information with the fug folk. Let's imagine that only a handful of people know. If Blanche got locked up for 'writing something down' about the inspectors, then I've got to believe she's one of the people who knows, and they didn't want her writing any of it down, because they didn't want anyone else to know."
"So? We already know it."
"We know _that_ they are spies, and we know the language they use, but that's only half of it... Think of it this way. When I had to work out how to fix and rebuild the boiler of the _Wind Breaker_ , I knew what the mechanism did. It boiled water to spin the turbines. But it took me a while to figure out how to maintain it because between boiling water and spinning turbines it pushed the steam through any number of valves and splits, and if I pulled the wrong handle at the wrong time, the steam wouldn't go the way it needed to. There's got to be more to it than just tapping out a code on the main support of the envelope."
"And you think Blanche might know that stuff?"
"I do."
"And we want to know that why? Just for reference?"
Nita turned and continued her skyward gestures, this time with relevance to the conversation. There was a cloud in front of the sun, making the view of the pole above the tower much less painful.
"You see the top of the tower there?"
"Yeah."
"Look closely."
Lil squinted. "Is that... wait... there's an aye-aye up there. _That's_ what I heard scampering and tapping and such. Thank the Lord! I thought my mind was going!"
"You don't think there would be just _one_ inspector, and way up there, if it was actually for inspecting the place. And I doubt they are spying on themselves."
"So it's for... what?"
"I'm hoping Blanche would know."
"Well, good luck getting it out of her. She's a little more fuggy than the two grunts over there. And... hang on... you got a problem, you two?"
Nita turned to find that two of the other inmates had been sidling closer, and Lil had finally decided they were getting too close for comfort in light of the current conversation. They were dressed in the same outfit as the rest of the prisoners, but pinned to the front of each of their shirts was a black rose. Something about the pair made Nita's skin crawl, and she quickly realized what it was. They were the Ebonwhite brothers, and they were the spitting image of their uncle, the man whose refusal to help treat Nita's mother had resulted in her place among the crew.
"What were you discussing?" asked the first of the brothers. He was a hair taller than the other, and the grunts had identified him as Lars. "Because you seemed to be speaking _awfully_ quietly for a simple conversation."
"We were discussing how those clouds look a lot like your faces," Lil said.
"Those clouds don't look anything like our faces," said the second brother, Nils.
"They will after I'm done pounding you for not minding your own business," Lil growled.
Lars glanced aside briefly, then took a step forward, an infuriating smirk of superiority on his face. "I don't believe you have the intestinal fortitude to act upon such a threat. You are a weak, posturing little imbecile."
"Oh, you wanna bet? You lousy purple-breathing—" Lil snapped, stalking forward with fire in her eyes.
"Lil, no," Nita said, hauling her back.
"You heard what he said!" Lil growled.
"Lil, there's a guard right there, and three snipers have got you in their sights. Ebonwhite is trying to coax you into another trip to isolation at best, if not getting you gunned down."
Her angry crewmate glanced aside to find one of the guards approaching.
" _Oooh_ ," Lil said. "So you're _that_ scared of me, you want the guard to do your dirty work. I knew I was intimidating. I didn't know I was _that_ intimidating." She flashed a cocky smile. "Good to know."
"Is there a problem here?" barked the guard as he reached them.
"I am _quite_ certain these two surface dwellers were attempting to plot something," Lars said. "I suggest you keep them under tighter surveillance."
"Yes." Nils nodded. "They were talking about having a gun hidden in their quarters. You should search it!"
"Oh, so you're a couple of _snitches_ , too? And not even good ones. That isn't _close_ to what we were talking about," Lil said. She turned to the guard. "Search away. And when you're done not finding anything, remember who it was who told you to waste your time."
"If the four of you are going to be trouble together, separate now or we'll have to separate you ourselves."
"Gladly," remarked Lars. "I would not dream of consorting with such a boorish ruffian for any longer than I deemed necessary to aid you fine jailers in administering proper justice."
"A brownnose shows up _extra_ good on a pale face like that," Lil jabbed.
"Just disperse or I'll inform Assistant Warden Blanc that you've all been making trouble," the guard threatened, pointing at the man in question.
The appearance of the assistant warden was enough to convince the Ebonwhites to withdraw. After lingering long enough to be sure they had moved to a reasonable distance, the guard gave Nita and Lil a firm look and returned to the shelter of the shade.
Lil eyed Asst. Warden Blanc, the wheels in her head visibly turning.
"I've got an idea. Stick close but not too close, be ready to catch something, and I might not be home for dinner tonight."
"What are you, wait!" Nita said, but it was clear Lil had ceased taking input on the issue.
Lil marched toward Blanc. "Hey! Can I talk to you for a second?"
"Back off," he growled.
"I just have a question," Lil said. She subtly waved her hand behind her, gesturing Nita into position.
"I don't care what you have! Back away," he repeated, threat in his voice.
Nita glanced to the towers. Every sharpshooter in position was taking aim, and two guards were approaching her. Lil either didn't know or didn't care. When she was near enough to touch him, he drew and raised his baton, placing the other hand on the grip of his pistol. She took the opportunity to reach forward and hook a small brass chain dangling from Blanc's pocket. With a quick jerk of the chain, she caused his watch to flip out into the air. As it was twirling above her, she pivoted on one foot, twisting out of the way of his swinging baton and facing Nita. In a masterpiece of sleight of hand, she retrieved the stale bread from her waistband, caught the watch, and dropped the bread in its place. She flipped the watch in Nita's direction at the same time that she reared back and kicked the bread. From just about any angle but Nita's, it would have taken a sharp eye to realize that it wasn't the watch that had been sent hurtling off the edge of the courtyard and into the fug below. And it was unlikely anyone had spared a glance to notice the switch, or to see Nita catch and hide the pocket watch, because they were too distracted by what was about to occur.
Blanc swung the baton a second time, and this time it connected. Though the blow undeniably had some force behind it, Lil clearly put a bit more into her performance than the attack deserved, practically leaping to the side and throwing herself to the ground. The two guards converged on her and yanked her from the ground, forcing her arms behind her back.
"That's it! Isolation! Take her away!" Blanc ordered.
Lil put up a cursory struggle but couldn't quite keep the smile from her face as she was dragged backward through the parting crowd.
"That woman is insane. I've said it a dozen times," muttered Blanc. "What possible reason could she have for destroying a perfectly good watch?"
Donald and Kent paced over, watching as Lil was brought through the gates to the isolation cell and loaded inside.
"What was that for? What did you talk about that made her do that?" Kent asked.
"Honestly," Nita said, her heart still drumming in her chest from how quickly that had happened. "I... just don't know what gets into her sometimes. She's fearless, which isn't always a good thing." She carefully tightened the cord supporting her trousers to ensure the watch in her waistband didn't slip. "Though it has paid off in the past."
"Listen!" called out Blanc. "Because Inmate Cooper chose to destroy the watch that I use to keep track of your mandatory yard time, I suppose you'll just have to stay out here until a new shift supervisor takes my place. And that won't be for another three hours. You have Cooper to thank."
There was a murmur of anger at the further consequences of the stunt, but Donald and Kent seemed to remain in high spirits.
"You aren't angry about that?" Nita said.
"If we have to stay up here that long, it means so do the guards. If they're miserable, I'm happy," Kent said.
"Likewise," Donald agreed.
The three of them chatted for a while longer, but in time Donald's mind wandered and he paced over to talk to some of the other inmates. Kent followed, leaving Nita alone once again. Part of her wanted to keep a low profile in order to make certain, or at least do her best to make certain, that she didn't attract any attention and thus the watch was not discovered. But after seeing what Lil was willing to do in order to get them one step closer to escape, she felt she would be remiss if she didn't put forth a similar effort.
She scanned the courtyard and swiftly spotted Blanche. As one of the only females, Nita had expected her to be perpetually surrounded by suitors, and in a prison that wasn't a pleasant thought. Instead, she was almost always alone, or at best on the outskirts of one of the other groups. Perhaps her surly attitude wasn't reserved for surface dwellers like Nita... Then again, Nita and Lil had been left alone thus far as well. It was only the second day, and their imposing reputations could have had quite a bit to do with that, but it was still curious. Perhaps fug folks tended not to have tastes outside their own kind. Or perhaps they simply didn't place as high a focus on romance and its less genteel counterparts. It would certainly explain why, if the grunts' estimate was correct, there were fewer fug folk overall than there were people in Keystone alone.
Nita set the puzzle aside and returned to the task at hand. She needed to know if Blanche knew about the aye-ayes, and if the rest of the staff and prison population _didn't._ There was a fairly direct way to go about it, but it was a tremendous gamble. The fact that the fug folk still clearly assumed no one on the surface knew about the true role of the inspectors was key to not only the _Wind Breaker_ 's continued success, but its continued survival. If she showed those cards now, the consequences would be dire... but if she didn't get out of here soon, the next even minor clash the _Wind Breaker_ had could damage her beyond functionality, and the crew's journey would end, probably messily. She had to take the chance.
She paced over to the base of one of the towers, the one nearest to Blanche, and pulled the tap code to mind.
The fug folk thought we didn't know about this. The fug folk were fools to think that, she tapped on the support.
Blanche's head snapped in Nita's direction and their eyes met. She had a look of barely contained shock and confusion on her face. No one else in the cluster of people near her turned, and a quick glance around revealed that not a single other member of the staff, and none of the prisoners, seemed to assign any sort of meaning to the rattles and taps. Nita stepped toward her.
"I think you and I have something to discuss," Nita said, her voice low enough to not be heard by any of the others.
Blanche nodded and paced after Nita as they moved to an unoccupied bit of shade a short distance away. Nita intended to start the conversation, but the first question was Blanche's.
"How long have you known?" she asked.
"I worked it out shortly after I joined the crew. It took a few months to figure out the tap code well enough to communicate."
"It was bound to happen eventually. Even with all the secrecy. It's... we've always done all we could to encourage the simple assumption that the aye-ayes aren't any more intelligent than any other trained animal, and they were such a constant on airships people seldom had any cause to even notice their presence. They were tools, furniture..."
"I can't help but notice you're the only one who turned your head," Nita said.
"Do you think it would have remained a secret for long if it was general knowledge? Most of our people are as ignorant of the deeper value of the aye-ayes as your people. I'm sure there are theories and suspicions among the others, but only communications supervisors, trainers, and regional overseers know the whole truth. Less than three people in every city, generally. Maybe two dozen people overall. I'd wager the only other person in the Phylactery who knows is one of the messengers up in the central tower. Though I assume that's changing by the day, now that you've figured it out."
"No. We're keeping the secret."
"... Why? Without the inspectors—"
"I know, but the captain has his reasons, and I'm not sure I entirely disagree with them."
"Then why reveal it to me?"
"Because it never hurts to know a little more about something."
Blanche gave Nita a measuring gaze. "I didn't think the surface dwellers were terribly interested in education."
"And I didn't think that there were any fug folk with empathy and respect for anyone but themselves, so it seems we're both learning things today."
"What makes you think I would willingly help you? I have no interest in helping you destroy my people."
"As you began to point out, if we wanted to destroy your people, we already know everything we need to do it. Right now all I want to do is get out of here."
"And you think a few details about aye-ayes will do the job?"
"I don't know, but I know it will do me more good than _not_ knowing. Tell me again how many years have you been locked up?"
"Seven."
"Do you imagine they'll ever let you out?"
"I don't imagine they'll ever let anyone out."
"Then what have you got to gain by keeping their secrets? And what have you got to lose by sharing them?"
"... If I tell you what you need to know, even if it doesn't make one _ounce_ of difference in your escape plans, I want you to take me with you."
"I don't know that I'll be able to convince the captain."
"Then I don't know that I'll be able to tell you anything."
Nita eyed her would-be informant, who looked back with defiance and the gleam in her eye that betrayed a fondness for being in a position of power over someone else. It seemed she wasn't _entirely_ devoid of the negative qualities so often associated with the fug folk.
"Fine. But that means no limits. It is in your best interest to offer any help you can, or else _none_ of us are getting out."
"Agreed. So, where would you have me begin?"
"Let us begin with what exactly your involvement is with the inspectors, and why you got locked up."
"I am a trainer... _was_ a trainer. I was responsible for selecting the most intelligent of the infant aye-ayes and teaching them the language and the communication protocols. I was locked up because they were introducing a new shorthand to help speed up and condense communication, and I just couldn't remember it. I wrote down a few of the key phrases to help me memorize them, but the standing order was that we were under no circumstances permitted to record them in any way. I'd... not been overly cooperative with some of my supervisor's policies in the past, so he parlayed my minor offense into some absurd plot about me creating a _handbook_ of terms that I was intending to sell to the highest bidder." She shook her head and muttered something not quite audible that sounded rather rude, then curled her lips into a wry smile. "The worst slap to the face was that they didn't even end up _using_ the shorthand. The inspectors just didn't take to it."
"Why not?"
"They are smarter than most realize but they aren't at my level, or even _yours,_ by any stretch of the imagination. They can form sentences, they can have a truly remarkable memory at times, and they can mechanically follow orders, but only the very brightest can think abstractly. They don't have imaginations. They don't lie because they can't conceive of something other than the truth. The shorthand required them to group their reports by topic, and all but a handful of my best specimens couldn't do more than regurgitate their total report in the order that it was observed."
Nita nodded, ignoring the casual jab at her intelligence. "And the communication people just listen to the taps echoing from each ship as they come in?"
"Heavens no. We couldn't hope to hear all we need to. The receiving inspector listens to the taps and repeats the relevant ones to the operator. It takes an aye-aye's ears to differentiate all of the dozens of different messages that might be coming in at a busy port."
"So the messenger only listens to what the aye-aye says."
"Most times the messenger can only _hear_ what the aye-aye 'says.' I spent some time as one. You quickly learn to tune out anything but what the aye-aye taps."
"How does the aye-aye know what the operator needs to know?"
"Keywords. The code for a broken rule, for example. Also, a message can be addressed to a specific aye-aye. That only happens when it is a forwarded report."
"What's that?"
"If something truly dangerous to fug society occurs, the message needs to get to someone who can do something about it. So a message is sent out with a specific aye-aye's designation on it. Every aye-aye who hears it will add it to their own report, along with the name, and tap it out at the next port. It continues until the target aye-aye replies that it has received it, then that message ripples through to silence the rest."
"You've been using our airships to deliver your messages without us knowing?"
"Ours airships as well. All airships are potentially delivering a message about another one's behavior halfway across the world. I wouldn't be surprised if a few of the inmates were riding on the same ship as the inspector carrying the message ordering their arrest."
"That's fiendishly brilliant."
"Undeniably brilliant. Fiendish is a matter of opinion."
Nita turned this information over in her mind. "So I have to assume the sole purpose of Skykeep's aye-aye is to deliver and receive reports."
"Naturally."
"And if I were to ask you, could you teach me how to compose one of these forwarded reports?"
"I suppose... You'd need to know both the name of Skykeep's aye-aye and the one you intend to deliver a message to."
"How would I learn the name of this prison's aye-aye?"
"Ask it. The code is a simple one." She lightly clapped out the phrase _That inspector repeated its name._ "The next code the aye-aye taps will be..." Again she clapped. _This inspector was named inspector 1234._ "But it won't do you any good. Because if you've only just learned that code phrase, then you don't know the names of any other aye-ayes. It isn't something you choose. It is something _I_ choose when I train them, or whoever has replaced me. Probably that buffoon from Nesterlane..."
"I'll worry about that. Just teach me the proper methods. Is there a way to get an inspector to reply only to a specific trainer or messenger?"
"You can give the instruction. Not every inspector is savvy enough to do it."
"I want to learn it all. Every little bit helps..."
# Chapter 7
Nita had made the most of the extended yard time, doing the best she could to feel out which members of the prison population might be of aid to any potential escape effort without outright voicing an intention to escape. All through what turned out to be nearly five hours on the surface deck, Nita had been concerned about what she would do if she was searched before returning to her cell, but it turned out to be a nonissue, as they didn't give her so much as a second look before slapping the manacles on and leading her below deck. Perhaps it was the arrogance of a staff who believed their prison was impossible to break out of, but security seemed alarmingly lax at times. Granted, there was no clear indication of how anyone might smuggle items into or out of the facility. In light of the nature of the prison's safeguards, perhaps it was only natural that they would become complacent.
Once she was alone in her cell, she carefully loosened a seam on the mattress of her bed and hollowed out a section just large enough to hide the watch. The "stuffing" was so uncomfortably firm that it was actually difficult to feel where the watch was kept, though a careful observer would be able to spot the untidy seam. Once the watch was hidden, there was little to do but hide the displaced stuffing and prepare for Lil's arrival. At dinner Nita squirreled away any part of her meal that she felt might keep well enough to be edible the next day. She pulled the blanket from Lil's bed and folded it under herself, sleeping atop it and sitting on it to make sure it was as warm as she could make it. Of course, there was little sleeping done.
As day drifted into night, Nita noticed the wind outside beginning to howl. It was a distant sound that barely reached her cell, but there was little doubt the weather was getting choppy. If she strained, she could _just_ hear the hiss of rain pattering against Skykeep, and now and then she felt the subtle increase in rocking and rolling that came with each gust of wind. Lil was out there, _up_ there, in a downpour...
After Nita spent a sleepless night of worry, breakfast was served. She saved almost the entire meal, and likewise for lunch. The pillowcase under her bed that served as the stash of extra food was beginning to get a bit crowded when the door to the cell block finally opened a few minutes before yard time.
There was no squeak of struggling feet this time. No angry growl at the guards or stream of profanity. Lil merely shuffled along with the guards, allowing herself to be thrown into the cell without so much as a comment. One look at her face made it clear why. She was exhausted. The long, wet night had left her shivering and weak. Her eyes had dark bags under them, her lips were tinged with blue, and worst of all, she was soaking wet. During her last isolation, she'd been splashed a bit with water from the hasty way in which the bare minimum for survival was given to her, but this time she was absolutely drenched.
"I cannot _believe_ you left her in that crate through a storm!" Nita barked, fury in her eyes.
"Isolation is a _punishment_ ," said the guard. "We don't cut it short simply because it isn't a pleasant day."
"It wasn't nothing I couldn't take," Lil said with a flicker of a grin as Nita sat her carefully on the bed and wrapped both blankets around her. "Just a little wind and rain." Her voice was rough, and she concluded her statement with a ragged cough.
"Would you at least get her a dry set of clothes?" Nita said.
The guard grunted something and paced off to an unseen cabinet to rummage around inside.
As before, Nita sat beside her and held her close. It was the only option available to her to help her friend warm up.
"I... I think I might wait awhile before I do that sort of thing again," Lil said quietly.
"You should have told me what you were up to," Nita said.
"You'd have told me not to do it," Lil said.
"That's absolutely right, I would have."
"Do you still have it? Did it work?"
"Yes."
"Worth it then."
"How's your arm?"
"Where the guard hit me? Not as bad as my throat... and my head. The wind rattled that crate around something awful. I thought I was fixing to come loose. And the fug gets stirred up pretty bad in wind like that. I was coughing and gagging on the stuff all night. I wasn't sure I'd make it..." A tear ran down her cheek. "I'm so damn glad to see you again."
"Do you think you can eat?"
"Can I eat? You get your fingers too close to my mouth, I'm liable to eat your arm."
The guard reappeared at the bars. "Here. But you've got to get changed and hand over the wet stuff. The warden doesn't want any prisoner having an extra set of clothes."
Nita took the clothes, then helped Lil to her feet and held up one of the blankets to give her some privacy. She finished getting changed, and Nita handed over the wet clothes, returning to her place on the bed and wrapping back up in the driest of the two blankets. When the guard was back at his post, Nita fetched the stowed food and Lil began to eat gratefully. Lil hadn't stopped shaking, so Nita put an arm across her shoulders again to try to hold her steady enough to feed herself.
"You know something," Lil said, a bit of life and mischief in her expression again as she forced down a day-old meal. "This keeps happening, people are liable to start talking."
"What are you talking about?"
"This is twice you and me ended up in bed together with your arms around me. And just now I was nekkid not an arm's length away from you. People are liable to think we're sweet on each other." She chewed slowly and stared at the far wall. "You think... you think maybe they already do?"
"I think you should focus on warming up and getting fed, Lil."
She took another bite, continuing on the same train of thought. "Ain't neither of us had any suitors since you joined the crew. Me trying to learn how to fix this and that and you trying to teach me, we been spending more time together than apart. You reckon... you reckon maybe folks are already talking?"
"Lil, eat. It's almost yard time."
"I'm serious, though. What do you reckon people are saying?"
"It doesn't matter what people are saying about us, Lil," Nita said. She was speaking calmly. "It doesn't matter how things look between the two of us. How you feel about me and how I feel about you should only matter to you and me. It is absurd to think you'd trouble yourself with thoughts like that at a time like this. It is absurd that you'd ever _need_ to trouble yourself with things like that."
"So if someone asked what was going on between us..."
"I would politely tell them that I can't talk right now because my friend Lil is too busy fretting about silly matters to eat a proper meal, and she needs my help." She took the freshest of the pieces of bread remaining and stuck it in Lil's mouth, then brushed her damp hair from her eyes. "Now are you about ready to talk about something we actually need to be concerned about?"
Lil chewed down her current bite. "Fine, what've you got for me?"
"We've got the time, and I had a word with Blanche. I learned a bit more about how the inspectors are used. I think we might be able to use them to get a message out."
"Well, there's some good news," Lil said, gulping down a few more mouthfuls of food more hungrily as the tremors began to ease away.
"Those two grunts who chatted you up seem like we can trust them, and I've done the best I can to feel out the rest. A few might help us if we asked, most would look the other way. But those Ebonwhite brothers... we'll have to be even more careful around them than the guards. Any scrap of information they get will go straight to the warden."
"Any idea how we can get me outside at night?" Lil said.
"Nothing yet."
"That's the last part then, right?" she said, washing down the remainder of her food with a cup of wretched water.
"Besides waiting and hoping," Nita said.
"Good... because you ain't been up there yet, but they brought me across the deck to take me down here. The wind did a number on the deck. If they work this place like they do the other prisons I've heard about, _someone's_ going to be up on deck for an extra long time..."
#
Lil had barely choked down the last of her meal when the guards came to shackle the pair for transport to the yard. The instant they stepped out on deck, it was clear what Lil had meant about someone spending extra time on deck. The high winds and pounding rain had torn up a whole section of decking. About a dozen planks were splintered or missing along one corner, and one of the sniper towers was badly damaged, so much so that the sharpshooter wasn't present.
"As you have no doubt noticed," announced Asst. Warden Blanc, a shiny new watch in his hand as the last of the inmates took the yard. "There has been a bit of damage to your beloved home. This means there's work to be done. Much as I would _love_ to put you to labor in the burning sun, I need this place repaired properly, and that means I can't afford to have any of you squinting in the light and falling off the edge before the work is done."
There was a murmur of irritation across the inmates at the mocking level of false concern in the voice and words of Blanc. He continued to rattle off things like the specific damage that was done and the individual jobs that would need to be done to repair it, but none of the prisoners seemed to need to know any of it. At this point it was clear that the assistant warden simply loved his own voice.
"Who wants in?" Kent said quietly out the side of his mouth.
"You know I do," Donald said.
"What's this about?" Nita asked.
"He's going to pick seven of us to do the work. I'm always the first one he picks, and he lets me suggest my own team. Probably because I haven't made a stink around here much lately, and I helped build a couple parts of this place."
"You helped build this place?!" Nita hissed. "How did that not come up in conversation?"
He shrugged. "Not too proud of it."
"You've got to get me on the team, Kent," Lil said.
"... You sure? You don't look too steady."
"I _need_ this. If you're afraid I can't help, then get Nita on there, too. She's an engineer, remember?"
He looked between them uncertainly. "You think he'll go for it?"
"We'll get him to go for it. Just suggest us. Don't worry about what we say after that. All we need is for you to try," Nita said. "We'll owe you."
"Damn right you will."
"... And so I think it is wise to once again appoint Kent as temporary foreman of this repair. Kent, any thoughts on your crew?" the assistant warden said, as expected.
Kent looked to the girls. "Well... I'm going to need Donald. Eggy would be a good one. The two new girls look like they could put a good night's work in... maybe Blanche'd be a good one. And Snow."
"You sure about the surface folk?" said Blanc uncertainly. "We've been having trouble with the little one, as you know."
"Please pick someone else," Lil said, playing up the very real roughness and unsteadiness of her voice for all it was worth. "I spent the whole night in the box getting tossed around by the storm. I just got out an hour ago. I need a night of sleep, or I don't know how I'll make it another day."
"I don't even want to think about what it will be like up here in the cold of night. Two nights up here has nearly killed Lil," Nita agreed.
"Oh, well I'm so very sorry you aren't enjoying your stay with us," the assistant warden said. "But at Skykeep we do what we're told. Work gets done overnight, and you're on the crew. If you don't like that, it'll be isolation instead. How's that?"
Nita and Lil each just barely fought off a grin of satisfaction. It was astounding how simple it was to manipulate the truly cruel.
"Er... a word with you, Supervisor?" said a voice that was several degrees too intellectual for the setting. Forward from the back of the general population came the Ebonwhite brothers. They began to chat quietly with the supervisor.
"Of course the Ebonwhite boys are going to buy their way on the job," Kent muttered. "Whenever the boys want a chance to get out of their cells and enjoy a night they just grease the palm of the supervisor and then..."
"Eggy and Blanche, I feel, aren't a good fit for this crew," the assistant warden said. "I believe the Ebonwhites would be a better choice."
"You'd know best, Supervisor," Kent said wearily.
"Yes, I _would_ know best. And there you have it. Two hours after sundown we'll get your people together and start the work by moon and phlo-light."
There was a general murmur of disappointment from those not selected, and the crowd paced off into their usual cliques. Nita and Lil approached Kent and Donald.
"I really can't thank you enough," Nita said.
"Uh-huh. You want to know how to make it up to me?" Kent said.
"If it is within my power, and within reason, then I'll do it."
"I want out."
"What?" Lil said.
"Don't pretend like you don't know what I'm talking about. You two have had so much up your sleeves since you showed up I'm surprised there's room enough for your arms. This is about a prison break, and if what you're doing works, I want out. Donald, too."
"I can't promise we'll be able to..."
"Oh, I know you can't promise anything because I don't think what you're working on is going to do much more than get the two of you put in the box one after the other for the rest of your lives. But if it works, I want out."
"We'll do what we can. If it works, you'll certainly deserve it," Nita said with a nod. "But if you really helped build this place, and you've been here long enough to see most of it, then we'll need you to tell us all you can about it."
"Plenty of time to chitchat once the sun goes down. Best part is, me talking about what went into building this place won't turn any heads while we're trying to repair it. You just better carry your weight, because nice as the night shift is, we still need to get the job done, and those Ebonwhites aren't going to lift a finger."
"No worries. It'll be nice to ply my trade again."
"Yeah," Lil said, glancing up at the sky. "Likewise..."
#
Lil was swinging in her hammock, Wink curled up on her lap, a plate of biscuits by her side, and a tall lemonade in her hand. Before her was the glorious sunset, and in her ears was the long, low howl of a warm summer wind. It was glorious. It was perfect. And then suddenly it was gone, replaced with a dank cell, a dim view of the bars ahead of her, and a bellowing voice.
"Prisoners Graus and Cooper, awake and on your feet for repair duty!" cried their night guard, a somewhat taller and less friendly version of his daytime counterpart.
Lil shook away the sleep as Nita dropped down from the top bunk.
"Well... that was a good three hours I guess. Better'n some nights on the _Wind Breaker_ ," Lil said with a yawn. "Come to think of it, the room's bigger, too. And we got our own lavat'ry."
"Yes, I'm starting to feel pampered," Nita said, sticking her hands between two bars to be locked up.
Lil's eyes opened wide as she noticed about an inch of brass chain dangling down beneath Nita's shirt.
"Hold on there, darlin'. You need to fix your shirt some," Lil said, tucking the chain into Nita's waistband.
When the evidence was hidden, she let Nita step back and had her own hands secured. They were led to the upper deck. It looked quite different lit by the moon and a few phlo-floods. The darkened surface of the deck seemed to fade out into the almost black surface of the fug. Patches of clouds speckled an otherwise spectacular starry sky. Some long pieces of lumber, presumably delivered at some point between yard time and sundown, were lined up on the deck. The wood was waiting to be cut, drilled, installed, and sealed. Even with seven people on the work crew, it was likely to take more than a single night. The guards handed out tools and work commenced. It became obvious that there weren't really seven people on the crew, there were five. As expected, the Ebonwhites didn't even pretend to lend a hand.
Nita was on one side of a team saw, with Donald working the other. He turned out to be a monster of a worker, but Nita was no slouch. The two made an excellent pair, trimming wood to length quickly and efficiently. Lil, based upon her past behavior, wasn't trusted with anything more dangerous than a piece of chalk and a measuring line. Nita grinned at that. If they knew half of what Lil was capable of, they wouldn't have let her have the measuring line, either. Kent was doing a great deal of the hammering and positioning, so he was frequently at Nita's side, requesting boards of certain lengths. He also used these moments to deliver brief descriptions of what he knew of the design of the prison. The aircraft guns were at the base of the anchors. There were at least four. They were targeted via long speaking tubes similar to what the captain used in the _Wind Breaker_. So on and so forth.
At the beginning and end of each cut, Lil had to measure for the next piece. It was during those brief breaks in activity that she and Lil collaborated.
"This chalk is gumming up my fingers something awful," Lil announced. "Mind if I wipe my hands on your shirt, Nita?"
"Fine," Nita said breathlessly.
Lil stepped up behind Nita and carefully revealed the watch, clicking it open. "Eleven twenty-five. I've got a good view of the south from the edge of the worksite. I'm going to get an angle."
"Okay," Nita said. "I'll try to buy you time." She turned to Donald and spoke up. "Donald. Maybe we can slow down a bit on this one? I'm getting a little winded."
"We've been making good time. We can probably ease up a bit," he said with a nod.
Their rhythm slowed, and Nita watched out of the corner of her eye as Lil paced over to the edge of the deck. Since the planking had been damaged, there was no railing anymore, and Lil was mere inches from the edge. She stretched a bit, then slowly extended her arms in front of her. To an untrained eye, it looked like just another stretch. A quick and dirty navigator would recognize her lining her pinkies up with the horizon, then quickly walking them upward, one on top of the other, until she reached the point of a certain star. She then stooped and scrawled a few marks on the plank at her feet and did a few side bends before seeking out the moon to count off some more pinkie-widths.
"So... is it true? Are you _really_ members of the _Wind Breaker_ crew?" came a slimy voice beside Nita.
She turned. Beside her was the younger of the two Ebonwhite brothers, Lars.
"That's right, we are. If you don't mind, I'm trying to work," Nita said.
"You don't look like you're trying very hard," he said.
Nita lined up three or four poisonous barbs about how little work he and his brother had been doing, but she let them slide.
"You know, it was really quite a black eye to the Ebonwhite family when you robbed that warehouse," Lars said. "Uncle might never live it down."
"Knowing what I know about the Ebonwhite family, I'm sure I'm not the only one who wishes it was more than a black eye."
"It is true. The _small minded_ such as yourself no doubt believe him a villain. Those who would foment chaos always see the voice of order as a hindrance rather than an asset. You cannot begin to respect my uncle on the same levels that my brother, Nils, and I do."
"Yes, I understand you respected him so much you were embezzling from him."
" _I contend that our alleged embezzling was never adequately proved,_ " he snapped. "However, this does not alter the fact that we have been placed here, and that we shall not be released until someone in a position of influence, like our uncle, decides to speak on our behalf. Regardless of any supposed limits on our sentences, to my knowledge no one has ever left this place alive without a good word from the outside... And Nils and I know precisely how best to prove our allegiance once again."
At the edge of hearing, Nita detected the ring of a blade. Her body took control of the situation, releasing the saw and leaping aside just in time to turn an angry lunge at her back into a grazing slash at her side. Lars clearly hadn't expected to need a second attack and wasn't prepared to deliver it. Nita swept a kick at his hand, sending the knife flying into the poorly lit center of the courtyard. She then grabbed a handful of his shirt and yanked his head down to crack it on the stout handle of the team saw. Ebonwhite crumpled to the ground, a welt quickly forming on his forehead.
It all happened quickly enough that most of the rest of the work crew didn't notice until Lars started muttering slurred threats and trying to get to his feet, but Nita didn't linger long enough to hear them.
"Are you all right, Nita? He looks like he got you," said Donald, the one fellow inmate who had observed the whole exchange from the other side of his saw.
"Where's the other one?" Nita said insistently. "Where's his brother?"
"I don't know."
Nita walked as quickly as she dared toward Lil. If she broke into a sprint, especially as the commotion surrounding her groggy assailant began to spread, there was little doubt the ever-present snipers might take it as reason enough to take her down.
"Lil! Watch yourself!" Nita said.
"Just a few more seconds, Nita," Lil said, her voice hushed as she worked her fingers upward.
From the darkness near the base of the damaged tower, the shorter of the Ebonwhite brothers was approaching. The moonlight glinted off a blade in his hand.
"Drop the knife!" Nita called out.
All heads turned to Nils. Like his brother, he was unaccustomed to dirty work such as this and briefly froze as he realized he'd been discovered. When he spotted Nita heading his way and saw that Lil was still angling her hands at the sky, he decided to take his chance, running for Lil. Nita broke into a run as well. She and Nils met just barely three steps away from Lil. The wiry fug person, despite the longer running start, couldn't muster much momentum and was forced back to the very edge of the broken decking before he got his footing enough to bring the pair to a stop.
"I'll kill the both of you," Nils growled, knife firmly in hand as Nita wrestled with him. "Uncle will _have_ to let me out then."
She struggled against him as guards began to rush forward. There were only three guards on duty, not counting the sharpshooters, and seven prisoners. Since most of the prisoners were currently working with tools that could quickly render them a threat if this was part of a coordinated act of violence, they began securing every prisoner, starting with those they deemed the greatest threat. This meant the very instant she was through with her observations, Lil's hands were behind her back and shackled. Donald and Kent were secured as well. All the while Nita continued to fight with her assailant.
Desperation, fury, and a deceiving amount of strength made Nils a match for Nita. It was all she could do to keep his weapon away from her. At the edge of her mind, she heard calls erupting from the prisoners and the guards. Some calling for her blood. Some calling for Nils's blood. The guards were calling for the warden. Then, after an eternity of trying to wrench the knife away from him, Nita finally got a firm grip around his throat with one hand and his wrist with the other. It was then that a single, commanding voice rang out above the rest.
"Drop him," Warden Linn ordered.
"If I drop him, he'll kill—" Nita began to object, but with a distant clap of gunfire and a sudden limpness from her attacker, it became clear that the order was not meant for her.
She released her grip, and both knife and wielder fell to the ground, the latter featuring a large and gruesome reminder of the power and skill of the sharpshooters. Nita placed her hands behind her back without being asked and was quickly secured.
"What's this?" muttered the guard.
Nita heard a heart-stopping jingle of delicate chain. The scuffle with Nils had once again dislodged the watch chain, and the guard seized it and pulled the watch free. He held it up to the warden.
While the rest of the workers were secured, and Lil surreptitiously scuffed out the marks she'd created, the warden approached and took the watch. He held it in his hand and looked first to Lil, then to Nita.
"Take them to the infirmary on level five. Return the prisoners to their cells. Work will resume tomorrow night, and I will personally select the crew," the warden instructed. "I have a number of questions, and before the sun rises I mean to have the answers."
#
Nita bit her lip and winced in pain as one of the guards sewed up the gash Lars had opened on her side. Now that the intensity of the moment was past, it was clear just how deep it really was. The guard, who evidently was also the medic for the facility, had applied some sort of numbing agent to the wound before stitching, but perhaps by design it had not been nearly a sufficient dosage.
They were on level five now, which was in the center of the facility and thus half-immersed in the fug. It gave the air a choking, barely breathable quality, something that was doubly trying for Nita as she tried to hold still for treatment.
"At least give her one of those breathing things until you're done," Lil said.
"Breathers are given only with the warden's permission or in life or death situations," the guard said coldly.
"And additionally," came the warden's voice from the doorway, "the breathers in this facility will not permit you to speak, and you both have a great deal to answer for." He addressed the guard. "When you are through, bandage the inmate and stand guard at the door."
"Yes, Warden."
It took two more pulls of the needle to finish closing the wound. Then came a swab of ointment and a bandage wrapped around her midriff. When the guard was through and in place by the door, the warden revealed the watch.
"This, I presume, is the 'destroyed' watch for which Assistant Warden Blanc requisitioned a replacement."
"It is," Nita said, stifling a cough that sent a bolt of pain through her side.
"Why did he believe it was destroyed?" the warden asked.
"Because your supervisor is a fool. But I'll wager you already knew that," Lil said.
The warden looked to her impassively, then back to Nita.
"We stole it and threw something over the side to make him think the watch was gone," Nita said.
"Why did you steal the watch?"
"It's a nice watch. I never had a watch before," Lil said.
"If you won't speak to me honestly, I see very little reason to allow you to speak at all. Guard, take Miss Cooper down to level six. It is deeper in the fug, but she should be able to survive there until Miss Graus has answered my questions, provided she answers quickly."
"Don't tell him nothing, Nita," Lil growled as the guard took her by the arms and guided her out the door.
Nita watched uncertainly as the guard dragged her friend away, then turned back to the warden. It was truly unnerving how completely calm his expression was. There seemed to be no malice behind this action, despite the suffering it was calculated to cause. It was all simply part of a procedure to him, a way to get what was required to do his job properly.
"Speak," he said.
"When you put Lil in isolation, the light is blocked for a reason, isn't it? If the isolation was meant to punish fug folk like you, then it would let the light through to torture you during the day, but you block the light... It's because without light there's no telling how long one has been inside, isn't it? A day is as good as a week, because it feels that way." She gave a hollow, painful cough.
"The purpose of this discussion is for you to answer my questions. Not the other way around."
"We stole the watch because we both knew that Lil would be locked up again, and if she had some way to tell the time, she would handle the isolation better."
The warden measured her with his eyes. "And if I ask your friend, she will say the same?"
"Of course not," Nita said. "She'd rather both of us die than give you people a straight answer. She's lost a lot more to the fug and its people than I have."
The warden took a breath. "I have attempted to show you and your crewmate consideration. I knew that survival for you would be difficult, and to perform my task of extracting information from you, it was in my best interest that we maintain a relationship of respect. Until this moment, I've felt that decision was a sound one. You were not entirely forthcoming, and I suspect you were not entirely honest, but unlike your friend, you at least didn't show contempt for my intelligence. I no longer feel this is the case. The watch went missing immediately prior to Miss Cooper's most recent stay in isolation. She was searched before being placed inside. She did not have the watch. Your explanation does not hold to scrutiny. Listen closely, Miss Graus."
He stopped speaking, but a moment later Nita knew what she was to be listening for. Distantly she could hear the agonized coughing of her crewmate. It was a long, painful, ragged sound. There was little sign that she was able to get a single breath of air without releasing it again in a fit of hacking.
"It is possible I overestimated the quality of the air on level six."
Nita tried to remain strong, but each burst of the horrid noise cut into her.
"I was forced to order the death of one of my inmates today. I do not regret it. He had a knife and he was threatening the life of another inmate. The question of how he and his brother secured the knife is one that shall be investigated tirelessly. Nils will be put in the ground, and Lars will for many weeks wish that he had been. His punishment begins in just a few hours with the first of several dozen day-long stays in isolation. It is my duty to keep you all alive and as healthy as I can so that your incarceration will be a long one. But I can and will end a life if it serves this purpose. If you want Lil to survive the night, speak. And if it is a lie, make it an excellent one, because if I don't believe you, Lil will stay on level six until morning."
He gazed into her eyes. At the sound of Lil's distant coughing, Nita shut them and shook.
"We were trying to find out where we are," she said in defeat. "A watch, the night sky, and a sailor is all it takes to find out that sort of thing. So we stole the watch and manipulated the supervisor into putting us on the repair detail."
"And did you succeed?" the warden asked. "Do you know where we are?"
"No. The Ebonwhites attacked before Lil could say anything about it."
"And you wanted to know where you are so that you could escape?"
"Yes."
"How did you plan to escape?"
"We didn't know yet, but we knew this was the first piece."
Linn considered her words. The air shook with Lil's coughing.
"You will be separated. Each of you will be kept in separate cells on level four. You will remain separate until further notice, and you will be permitted yard time on alternating days. I do not take this breach lightly. The isolation cell is going to be getting a great deal of use in the days ahead. You, Miss Cooper, and the surviving Ebonwhite will be taking turns in it until I decide that you've been made to properly regret your actions. Guards! Take Miss Graus to the northeast cell block on level four. Cell one with the window. When she is secured, take Miss Cooper to cell three of the same block."
A guard entered, and Nita was manhandled out into the hallway. The rough treatment made her side ache terribly, but right now nothing mattered to her but the terrible sound of Lil's suffering. She could still hear it even as she was brought up the stairs to the next level, where the air was marginally more tolerable but a haze of purple still hung in the stinking atmosphere. Her cell was identical to the one she'd shared with Lil with the exception of the presence of a window, and it was clear that it was not there for her benefit or comfort. The glass was stained with the purple film that seemed to accumulate on every surface that spent any time in the fug, and the same discoloration marred the wood and bars around the edge. The window leaked terribly, which meant that each breath of wind gave her a fresh dose of fug.
The terrible sound of Lil's coughing lingered for a few minutes, then slowly began to draw nearer. When the guards brought her to the floor, they didn't even do them the kindness of walking Lil past Nita's cell, instead bringing her via a different stairwell and locking her away with a cell between them.
It was nearly five minutes before Lil seemed able to breathe again without pain.
"Lil! Are you okay?" Nita called out.
"Quiet!" ordered a guard stationed between the two cells.
"What did you tell these monsters?" Lil wheezed.
"I told them everything," Nita said.
" _Why?!_ " Lil cried.
"You will shut your mouths, or one of you is going back to level six," the guard threatened.
Both women quickly dropped to silence. Nita climbed onto the top bunk, where the air was marginally clearer, and began to tap on the wall, forming a slow, deliberate message in inspector code.
I told them. It saved you, she tapped.
There was a long moment as each prisoner waited to see if there was any reaction from the guard, but there was none.
It was a bad idea. Dead was a better trade, Lil tapped back.
_You knew where we were,_ Nita tapped out, a bit limited by the past tense nature of the code.
I didn't. Needed more time. Needed charts. I got close. Knew almost. Not exact.
Nita thought for a moment. You told me what you knew. You and I worked it out.
For nearly three hours the two exchanged slow, stilted messages, stopping only briefly whenever the guards took notice. A list of things they knew and things they didn't were traced out. They couldn't have been unconscious for much more than a half a day at best while being brought to Skykeep, but that didn't narrow things down much considering how fast the fugger vessels could be. They knew they hadn't seen any airships at all during yard time. That meant that they were off any standard trade routes, which stood to reason since if they were near a trade route, then the prison would have been spotted. They knew they weren't near the center of the continent since the fug was too thick here to be that far inland. Every scrap of information was considered, from the lack of mountain peaks to the type of food they were served.
Piece by piece they collected the clues and—coupled with what little precision they could wring out of Lil's calculations—they reasoned out a set of coordinates that was probably within about a hundred miles of being accurate. That, at least, should hopefully be enough to get a rescue party within visual range. Now all that was left was finding a way to tell the crew. And if what the warden said was true, that much would take care of itself.
#
Sure enough, the warden was as good as his word. A day and a half after their midnight meeting, Nita was brought into the comparatively fresh air of the surface.
"Did your friend give you the rundown?" asked the guard.
"She wasn't terribly talkative after her times in the box," Nita said as she stepped up to the crate.
They opened the front, releasing a scent that was best left undescribed.
"You're here until tomorrow. You get no food. There's an empty bucket in there now. I think you know what it's for. Every now and then we'll lower you down and swap the bucket for one full of water. Do with it what you will. Now get in," the guard said.
He forced her head down, shoved her inside the box, and slammed it shut. Once the crate was sealed, it was utterly black inside. There wasn't nearly enough room to stand. In fact, even sitting left her head almost touching the roof. Realizing it was designed as a punishment for the tall, thin fug folk made her wonder just how uncomfortable it must have been for them. They'd practically have to curl up.
They hoisted it in the air, and she very quickly learned just how much worse things could get for her. Nita's first few hours on the _Wind Breaker_ weren't her proudest moments. The motion of an airship took some getting used to, and until she did there was the matter of keeping the contents of her stomach where they belonged, which wasn't always a winning battle. She'd since become quite accustomed to it, but the instant the crate left the deck she knew she was in for a tough time. Every little motion of the fairly steady floating prison was amplified into a ponderous swing, and somehow having no view of the outside made it worse. For now the lack of meals would be a blessing because even the thought of food was more than she could handle.
Nita tried to keep herself calm, and her stomach settled with very slow, deliberate breathing, counting to five as she breathed in and counting to ten as she breathed out. Her sister, who had grappled with stage fright early in her performance career, swore by it as a method to focus the mind and steady the heart.
"Five... six... seven... eight," she breathed, clutching her arms a bit more tightly about herself as another gust of wind passed effortlessly through the mesh and chilled her. "Lita... I think your method may have met its match..."
She steadied herself for another inhale when she heard the sound she'd been waiting for. It was the scratch of claws and the scamper of feet along the support pole outside the crate. She began to hammer on the crate, knocking out a code.
That inspector repeated its name, she tapped.
The scampering stopped. She repeated the message, this time louder and more urgently. There was a moment of scratching and tapping, then suddenly something thumped against the side of the crate and climbed to the top. Finally the quicker, more delicate taps of an aye-aye rattled against the roof of her hanging prison.
This inspector was named 34097, it tapped. That inspector repeated its name.
This inspector was named Nita, she replied. Nita took another breath, then began her message. Report forwarded to inspector Wink.
She knew that Wink wasn't the _real_ name of the _Wind Breaker_ 's inspector, at least for the purposes of this message, but it was the only one she knew. It would have to do.
Reply intended only for Nita, she continued. Both crew were in Phylactery. Skykeep. Airborne prison. Coordinates followed message. Anti-aircraft cannons on surface. Sharpshooters in four corner towers. One more in central tower. Anchored by chains to surface. Large hounds guarded chains...
For the better part of five minutes she listed off everything she could think of that might be of some aid to the crew. When she was through, there was a silence that likely only lasted a few seconds but felt like hours. Then came a few simple taps.
_Report received,_ the inspector tapped.
Its acknowledgment delivered, the creature scurried up the rope, along the boom, and to the top of the pole. Time passed with agonizing uncertainty, nothing but the wail of wind and the sickening motion of the crate to occupy Nita's mind. Then she heard the low, slicing whir of airship blades. Shortly afterward she began to hear the rattling tap of messages being drummed out by the inspector. The sound was distant and indistinct, but if she strained her ears Nita could just barely make out snippets of the messages. _... seven crates of flour......killed in the act of attacking......requesting further instruction......intended for Nita. Both crew were in Phylactery..._
Nita practically deflated, releasing a breath she'd not intentionally held. The plan had run its course. It might not have been the best one. After all, the captain only rarely used Wink to spy on other messages, and he had no way of knowing that Nita might be sending one, but it was the best chance she had. And now she had done it. It was a blessing in that it gave her the sliver of hope that rescue might be on the way, but it was a curse in that the monomaniacal focus that had driven her for the last few days was gone. Now she'd have to find something else to fixate on, lest she go mad. Fortunately, at the moment she had the very effective distraction of trying to keep her lunch where it belonged because she wouldn't be getting another one anytime soon.
# Chapter 8
Regardless of how one might have felt about the fug folk and their behavior, captains and navigators always had a grudging respect for their fug counterparts. Above the fug the ground, the sky, and their landmarks were almost always present. Every ship had a dozen instruments dedicated to keeping one abreast of things that were plainly visible on all but the darkest and cloudiest nights. Beneath the fug, there was no sky, and there was no horizon. On the brightest, most beautiful day above the surface, the fug folk were at best treated to a dim purple glow. At night, there was nothingness. The sky, the ground, and all around were black. Ships could have and often did run aground thinking they had hundreds of feet to spare. Traveling long distances with anything approaching precision required an intimate understanding of one's own ship and the intricacies of the wind. Distance was judged by setting a steady speed and counting out the minutes. Adjustments were made by working out how much drift the wind had caused and correcting for it. It was not correct to say that it was as much an art as a science, because there was virtually no science to it at all. One took one's best guess, hoping to come at least close enough to the proper course that the lighthouse or beacon of the intended destination came into view. Only the bravest or foolhardiest of surface ships spent any time in the fug, and those who did always did so because they were up to some sort of no good and couldn't afford to be caught. It was thus of little surprise that the _Wind Breaker_ and her crew had spent a fair amount of time doing just that. No one could navigate in the fug like a fug pilot, but if there was one person who was close, it was Captain Mack.
Despite this, fate had not been with them in their journey. A heading and a distance were all well and good, but they were not the most precise way to find a destination in the best of circumstances. Even if they'd had the sky to guide them, the simple quirk of one compass compared to another might put one _well_ off the mark. A strong headwind had made navigation difficult and burned through a fair amount of fuel and water during the beginning of their journey. To keep their boilers full, the _Wind Breaker_ had been forced to seek out a river, which took them off course and required considerable backtracking to find their way back to the original path. By their figuring they had come within five miles of Pendercrook when the same storm that had stirred up Lil's second stint in the isolation crate threw them off course again, requiring another session of backtracking, and two more water stops. By the time they were finally drawing near to what they believed was their destination, days had passed in a trip that should have taken hours.
"I reckon we're just about fit to bump into the place now," the captain said, his eye on the fragile collection of brass plates and glass tubing that formed his altimeter. He then referred to his carefully calibrated airspeed indicator, otherwise known as a spit-moistened finger. "Everybody keep your eyes peeled for the beacon. Should be off to the port side. Holler as _soon_ as you see it because if we get too close, this whole operation is over before it starts; and if we're too far, we might barely see it. I'll be damned if we waste another day because of the odd breeze and a poor lookout."
"Hold on, Cap'n... I think I hear another set of engines," Coop warned. He looked down to the fuzzy little head sticking out of his jacket, where Nikita had been carefully tucked away since her treatment. "You hear that, little critter?"
Nikita tapped an affirmative on one of Coop's buttons. The one blessing of their lengthy misadventure was that both Nikita and Coop had been granted the time to at least mostly recover from their respective injuries.
Mack eased off the steam to the rotors. His ship had five small engines rather than the more typical twin engine configuration. This meant that all things being equal, the _Wind Breaker_ was quieter than most other ships. Nita's faithful and proactive tuning and repairs meant that it tended to hum rather than rattle, thus keeping the noise down even further. If they had heard another ship, the odds were good that the other ship had _not_ heard _them._ When the _Wind Breaker_ fans were nearly silent, the crew listened. Sure enough, somewhere off the starboard side, a ship lurked with a low rumble.
"Too low-pitched to be a cutter. Sounds like one of them scouts... short-rangers, like the ones guarding the warehouse. If it's a scout, we're close, but it's also probably got its lights on, so we'd best be sure it doesn't get too close to _us_. Somebody spot that thing right quick."
"It's nowhere around us," Gunner said. "It must be above or below."
"It ain't below us, because were pretty near scraping our belly. Someone get up there and spot it."
"Up there... you mean on top?" Gunner said.
"If Lil can do it, then so can you," the captain said.
"I believe this is the precise reason that the concept of seniority was created. Coop, do the honors."
"Yeah, yeah, I'm going," Coop said, slinging his rifle on his back and hauling himself into the rigging.
While Nita's efforts to beautify the _Wind Breaker_ had done a great deal of good for them when they were above the fug in terms of building a reputation and adding to the mystique that was beginning to surround them, it had the unfortunate side effect of making them the most recognizable ship in the sky. This meant that so much as a glimpse in their direction from one of the fug ships was more than they could afford. To avoid being seen, Mack was flying entirely dark, and Coop knew better than to ask permission to use a handheld light of any kind, so climbing the rigging and working his way up onto the envelope had to be done by touch. Luck was with him, though. He'd no sooner reached the side of the envelope than the phlo-lights of the scout ship became visible.
"I got her, Cap'n. About sixty yards. Pitched down. Probably coming in from a surface sweep."
"Then she's inbound. She'll lead us the rest of the way," the captain said. "We can't be more than five minutes out. Now's the time to get our ducks all lined up. Cannons loaded?"
"Fore and aft, grapeshot, as ordered," Gunner said.
"All small arms on hand and loaded?"
"I lost a couple of my favorites back in the mine, but what I got is ready to fire," Coop said, dropping back down to the deck.
"Deck guns loaded?"
"Our last full magazine of fléchettes ready to unload, Captain."
"Repeat back your orders," Mack said.
"Me and Gunner hit the ground as soon as we see the beacon. We get inside on foot and look for the station master or whoever else might be in charge," Coop said.
"Once we find him, we try to get into his office and find his paperwork and look for something about the Phylactery," Gunner said.
"Even if it's just a map. If we can't find nothin', we grab the master himself and bring him back."
"If we can't find the station master, we grab _anybody_ and bring him back."
"And we shouldn't even pull a trigger unless we're ready to kill every last one of them. Which should be easy, because I been ready to kill every last one of these fuggers since I heard the explosion."
"We're not in a strong position for a firefight, gents. Gunner, use your best judgment. Coop, use Gunner's best judgment."
"Aye," the men said.
The captain brought the ship lower and decreased speed until the scout ship was easily visible overhead. He kept dropping until the scratch of scraggly, gnarled tree branches against the belly and gig told them any further loss of altitude would be ill-advised. Less than two minutes later, Gunner's sharp eyes spotted the steady green glow of the phlo-beacon atop what could only be Pendercrook. From there they dropped a ladder and lowered the gig in lieu of an anchor. Gunner was the first to hit the ground, followed by Coop.
"Do you need me to run through the proper tactics?" Gunner asked, checking each of his five guns in sequence to ensure they were mechanically sound, then pulling down a pair of goggles with an array of flipped-up lenses.
"I broke into plenty of places plenty of times, Gunner. I know the drill."
"Yes, you broke into places, but this is reconnaissance."
"Reconi... rec... what you said is just fancy talk for sticking our noses where they don't belong and not getting caught. I did that plenty, too. You don't need to lead me around."
Gunner looked to him. "Oh, don't I? Then why do you have an inspector in your coat? Are you really thinking of bringing her along?"
"Look, if you can figure a way of getting her out without her clawing a hole through you or me, then have at it. Otherwise, she's coming along."
"But you... fine. But we're splitting up as soon as we reach the station. If that thing is going to make a racket, the least I can do is use you as a diversion."
"She ain't gonna do nothing. You didn't even know she was there," Coop said.
The two began to move along at a carefully moderated pace, as fast as they dared to go to avoid making too much noise or exhausting themselves on the way. The distance at which the _Wind Breaker_ had set down left them with a lot of ground to cover. By the time they were near enough for the lights of the buildings to become visible, the scout ship had reached port and a second ship had come in for supplies.
"You see what I see, Gunner?" Coop said quietly.
"Yes, Coop. I have eyes."
The new ship was a cutter.
"You reckon that came in from that Ph'lac'try place?"
"That's what we're here to find out," Gunner said, quickening his pace.
As they drew nearer, it was clear that this was like any typical fug facility. That is to say, it was pristine, well maintained, and practically deserted. There were two landing pads, each currently occupied. At a surface station that would mean there should be a swarm of ground crews scurrying about to reload each ship with coal, burn-slow, and water. Here there was only a pair of workers, each operating a steam-powered cart. A third fug person, probably the only other person in the station, seemed to be giving orders. All told there were a dozen buildings that made up the station. The central office was to one side. It was a tall tower with the beacon mounted atop it. The rest were either warehouses filled with consumables and other airship-related items, or else they were water towers. Here in the fug one couldn't rely upon the ocean to supply ample water for the boilers. As a result many stations such as this had been erected by the fug folk to resupply when natural bodies of water weren't nearby.
Neither of the crewmates needed to confer on what was to come next. If there was any information to be had, it would be in the tower. The building wasn't exactly a fortress. They were deep enough into the fug and far enough from trade routes that the fug folk probably didn't expect any surface people to ever _see_ the place, let alone try to infiltrate it, so there were no fences or other such security measures. The only problem presented to them was the fact that the useful part of the station office was at the top of the tower, which was only accessible via a well-lit, exposed staircase that they couldn't hope to climb without being seen. Gunner motioned for Coop to stop.
"Clearly we'll need to coordinate a diversion to keep eyes off the stairs until one of us can... damn it, Coop," Gunner whispered, first assuming Coop had actually heeded the motion to stop and then realizing that he hadn't.
The nimble deckhand swiftly and silently wove his way to the base of one of the supports for the tower and scrambled from strut to strut, climbing the structure like an oversized ladder.
"I suppose I'll just keep watch then," Gunner growled to himself, flattening himself to the ground and keeping an eye on the camp through the scope of his rifle.
#
Coop reached the upper catwalk with little difficulty. He'd probably catch an earful from Gunner once he got back, but that was anything but new. Coop had always felt that it was better to get an earful and get the job done than follow the rules and come up empty. He peeked up into one of the windows of the station and found it filmed over with the purple fug residue. He wiped at it with his sleeve and peered through. Sure enough, with the supervisor on the ground overseeing the resupply of the ships, the office was empty. The telltale clack and tap of claws on the beacon pole overhead revealed that the station had a resident inspector, but as long as it stayed on its pole, it wasn't a problem. Coop crept up to a door and eased it open, slipping inside. It was a sparse office. A few phlo-lights provided ample—and at the moment, unwanted—light. One wall was covered with scattered charts and maps, file cabinets aligned neatly below them. A desk was pushed against the opposite wall, which had its share of charts and mounted folder hangers as well. The two remaining walls were floor-to-ceiling windows, meaning that any sneaking he did was largely pointless, since he was practically on display for the people below.
He kept low and eyed up the maps and charts. Something seemed off about them. Though he knew there couldn't be more than a dozen large fug folk settlements and maybe another dozen stations like this one dotting the land between them, the maps before him had hundreds of places labeled, and those in the positions he knew to be fug settlements didn't have the proper names. He wondered at first if they might have been some kind of code, but then it dawned on him. The problem was that the maps were incredibly _old_. He should have assumed as much from the purple tint to the paper. These maps were from before the calamity, or at least were copies of those from before. The places listed were the towns and cities that had been wiped out a hundred or so years earlier when the toxic stuff rolled over the continent and killed, chased away, or changed the residents. No doubt the fug folk all knew the names of the old cities that coincided to the new ones, and thus hadn't felt the need to replace the maps.
"This ain't going to do us no good at all, Nikita," he muttered. With a resigned sigh, he crept over to the first of the file cabinets and pulled it open. "Dang it, if I knew there'd be all this reading, I would've waited for Gunner to get up here."
#
Gunner was breathing slowly, sweeping his scope back and forth between the base of the tower and its windows. Judging from the fact five minutes had passed and Coop was still in the tower, the information they were after wasn't forthcoming. At the moment, that didn't matter, as both crews and the ground staff had taken the arrival of the cutter as an excuse to gather at the base of the tower to chatter, spread gossip, and generally socialize. The supervisor had produced a bottle, and it was being passed around. Hopefully this was a sign that neither crew had any intention of leaving anytime soon, but hoping was a terrible battle plan, so Gunner put his mind to work on a better one.
He already knew that the scout craft was crewed by two men, and both of them were on the ground. That meant it was largely resupplied but completely unmanned. He didn't know how many men usually ran a cutter, but he knew enough about fugger uniforms to know that the pilot was part of the little get-together as well. Both ships were thus grounded as long as the gathering persisted. In theory this meant that as long as Coop could find the appropriate information and get back to the _Wind Breaker_ without being seen, they might actually achieve their goals according to plan. Gunner, however, had known Coop far too long to put his trust in that sequence of events. Particularly when a better alternative could be devised.
The armory officer made his way toward the scout ship. The crew on the ground meant the ladder was down, so it was a simple matter to slip inside while the fug folk appeared to be enthralled by whatever the cutter pilot had to say. The inside of the ship was as stripped down as it could possibly be, and almost entirely occupied by fuel, water, and ammunition. The deck had the controls, a grappling hook, and a fléchette gun. He crouched behind the control wheel, kept a close eye on the gathering below, and waited for the inevitable chaos.
#
"Well, this here's mostly numbers, so that ain't gonna be it," Coop muttered, tossing a sheaf of pages aside. "That's a list of parts, don't care about that."
He'd long ago given up on the concept of slipping in and out without anyone knowing he'd been there, opting instead for the much faster method of making a massive mess and getting away before they found it. The first three filing cabinets had their contents strewn across the entire interior of the office, and the fourth was well on its way. As he opened the latest drawer, Nikita suddenly shifted an ear toward the ceiling. After a few seconds more, she crawled out of his jacket and climbed on top of the filing cabinet.
"Don't go wandering off now," he whispered. "We're going to be heading out in a great rush once I find what I'm after. Ph'lac'try... Ph'lac'try. Dang it... you know what? You think maybe that starts with a _P_ instead of an _F_? I better not have to start over."
Nikita looked straight up at the roof, where the endless tapping continued to rattle out. When it came to an end, Nikita hopped to the ground and crawled back into his jacket, reaching out to tap something on one of his buttons.
Report forwarded to inspector Wink, she tapped out insistently.
"Hey, hey now. What'd we say about you sending any reports?" he hissed, wrapping his hand around the button to silence the message.
Nikita chittered and switched to a different button. _Reply intended for Nita._
"You're liable to be thrown off this crew if you don't... wait now. What was that last bit?"
Reply intended for Nita.
"Okay... let's hear what you've got to say. And go slow now. I ain't the best at this tapping stuff..."
#
From Gunner's perch on the deck of the ship, he had an excellent vantage to see both the gathering below and Coop inside the tower. What he was seeing at the moment was Coop crouched beside a filing cabinet doing absolutely nothing. That was something the deckhand could _not_ afford to be doing, because the bottle that had served as the focus for the gathering of fuggers below had just run dry, and with it their interest in continuing their chat. The cutter pilot was already heading back to his ship, and the supervisor had turned to the stairs, delayed only by a short exchange with his underlings. In a moment Gunner was going to have to either abandon ship and hope that Coop could work things out for himself or put his contingency plan into motion.
"Damn it, Coop, get moving!" Gunner growled as he watched the scout crew turn to pace toward their ship.
Motion on the deck of the cutter caught his eye, and he looked up just in time to see a crewman, in similarly excellent vantage to see the interior of the tower, step up onto the deck to light up a quick cigarette. It took all of six seconds for him to glance at the tower, widen his eyes in shock, and call down to the others.
"Took longer than I'd expected," Gunner proclaimed, springing up from behind the controls.
First he swapped his rifle for his monstrous shotgun and took aim at the nearest mooring rope. A single thunderous blast both sparked mass confusion on the ground and cleanly severed the rope. The whole ship pitched to the other side until he turned and blasted the deck side of the remaining rope, cutting the ship entirely free. It began to drift slowly but steadily upward, making him a moving target as the crew on the ground opened fire. Fug folk weapons were top notch, but a crewman's sidearm wasn't quite up to the task of taking on a whole scout ship. Particularly not once Gunner took control of the fléchette gun and gave the ground a quick spray to send them running for cover.
Much as he would have liked to cut down the entire crew on the ground, he knew that if Cooper had failed, the best chance they would have to get the information they needed would be to question the survivors. That lamentably meant there had to _be_ survivors. Instead he took aim at the envelope of the cutter ship, since the crewman on deck had already reached a gun and was attempting to do the same to him. Before he pulled the trigger, he flipped down a pair of dark lenses on his goggles. Properly protected, he released three seconds of concentrated fire, which perforated the cutter's bladder enough to fill the air with the brilliant green glow of escaping phlogiston. It was a glow as bright as day, blinding the darkness-adapted vision of all on the ground. He continued firing until he saw the mooring lines slacken, a sure sign that the whole ship would crash down before much longer.
He looked about on the deck and eventually spotted the megaphone that had so often been used to issue orders and threats to the _Wind Breaker_ over the years. He picked it up and turned to the tower.
"Coop, tell me you got what you were after," he said. He was now roughly eye level with the top of the tower, and still slowly rising.
Coop stumbled out onto the catwalk, shielding his eyes from the light that was only now starting to dim as the phlogiston started to run low. "You dang fool, what'd you do that for?" he called out.
"Do you have the information?" Gunner growled.
"Well, I got something," he called back, stumbling aside as the station inspector dove in frantic terror from the roof to the walkway and scampered down to the ground.
"Then standby to board."
Gunner dropped the megaphone and angled the grappling hook at the catwalk. It launched like a javelin, digging into the wooden slats, and before the line had even gone taut, Coop was climbing up almost as quickly as the escaping aye-aye had climbed down.
"Take the wheel, and where's the information?" Gunner said, running back to the fléchette gun.
"Nikita's got it. I think she overheard something or some such. Seems like it's from Nita. Or for Nita. She'll have to tell you in a bit."
He steered the ship hard to port, using the power of the ship's engines to pull the grappling hook free along with about half of the tower's catwalk. This was much to the chagrin of the unarmed members of the ground crew, which had taken shelter beneath the tower and now had to run to avoid the falling debris. He then turned up the power on the engines and directed the ship toward the cutter for a strafing run.
"You mean to tell me the _inspector_ is the one who found it?"
"I guess. I don't know. Can we wait 'til the shooting's done before we jaw about it?"
The sound of splintering wood drew their attention downward, then the hiss and flare of green light drew it upward. It would appear the remarkably dedicated crew of the cutter had kept its guns manned even as it slowly sank to the ground. In their blind firing they had managed find the scout ship. Lines of fléchettes swept back and forth across the deck, narrowly missing both Gunner and Coop but doing quite a bit of damage to the control wheel's linkages.
"I think we should probably ditch this thing," Coop said.
With his usual decisiveness, he illustrated the wisdom of his suggestion by immediately taking his own advice. He ran to the grappler and hopped over the side, sliding down its line and hitting the ground running. Gunner followed suit, though his dismount of the line was more of a tumble than a run. Coop helped him up, and the two began to sprint.
"I'm a bit turned around," Coop yelled. "Which way is the _Wind Breaker_ again?"
"It's back that way, we're in the middle of the station," Gunner said.
A crunching grind filled the air as the pilotless scout ship rammed its gondola into the mostly deflated envelope of the cutter and began to drag it away from the station.
"You sure? Because I think I remember the water towers being on that side when we got here," Coop said, as though the ship-to-ship collision wasn't any of his concern.
"Yes, Coop, I'm sure!" Gunner said.
"Both of you put your hands up!"
Coop drew his pistol and turned, Gunner doing the same with both of his. The two members of the scout ship crew had their pistols leveled at the _Wind Breaker_ crewmen, as did the supervisor and the pilot of the cutter, who, for better or worse, hadn't made it back to the cutter before the mayhem started.
"I'd rather if you folks put _your_ hands up," Coop said.
"You are outnumbered," the pilot said.
"Perhaps, but not to toot my own horn too much, I'd say _you_ are outgunned," Gunner said, clicking back the hammer on each of his monstrous pistols.
"Plus, we were outnumbered when we blew up both your ships, too. So just think of what we'll do to you," Coop said, using his free hand to brush some splinters that had dug their way into his cheek when the scout ship was under fire.
"Be reasonable. You've destroyed both ships that could have carried you out of here. The next ship to come in is going to be loaded with fug folk. Even if you can hold us at bay until then, once they arrive you are finished."
Coop looked to Gunner. "I thought these guys were supposed to be smart."
"I suppose no trait is perfectly universal."
"... What are you talking about?" the pilot asked.
"What do you think? That we _walked_ here?" Coop said.
On cue, the distinctive five-engine rumble of the _Wind Breaker_ rang out around them, and it emerged from the darkness, lit by the dying glow of the deflating airships. The captain appeared, peering over the prow at the half-demolished remains of what ten minutes earlier had been a tidy little supply station and two fully operational ships. At the sight of the ship, both ground crew and their supervisor dropped down, throwing aside their weapons and putting their hands behind their heads. The pilot remained on his feet, weapon in hand.
"You boys don't quite get the ins and outs of stealth, do you?" Mack called out. "You get what we're after?"
"I think so, Cap'n, but we might want to have a word with these three to make sure," Coop said.
"There's four of us!" the pilot said.
Coop pointed his pistol at the man's face. "Not if you don't drop that gun, there isn't."
In the face of this very important piece of mathematics, the pilot wisely disarmed.
"Anybody left in them ships over there?" Captain Mack called out.
"There's a four-man crew still on my ship. Or what's left of my ship. If they survived," the pilot said.
"Whichever two of you folks is the lowest ranked, head over to the wreckage and pull out any survivors. You didn't kill any of my crew. I don't feel obliged to take any of yours. And boys, while we're here we may as well top off our supplies. I don't reckon these boys would want to see us stranded in their backyard. You boys all right?"
"A few bruises, and I believe I turned my ankle abandoning ship, but otherwise unharmed, Captain," Gunner said.
"Got a few slivers in my face, and it feels like something's sticking into me pretty fierce under my jacket here..." He opened his jacket to reveal Nikita—eyes shut tight and ears flat against her head—clutching as tightly as she could. "Oh, never mind that last bit. That's just Nikita. I don't think she's got a taste for field missions."
#
Once the remaining crew in the cutter had been retrieved, remarkably intact thanks to the slow speed at which their ship touched down, Captain Mack had them restrained and left Gunner on guard. Coop and Nikita boarded the _Wind Breaker_ , and Wink joined the trio in the captain's quarters. On other ships there might have been a captain's suite. On the _Wind Breaker_ it was more akin to the captain's closet. This was likely the first time four members of the crew had been able to fit, and that was only because two of them were aye-ayes.
"All right, Coop. Let's have it," Captain Mack said.
"Nikita overheard a report, I guess coming in from that cutter we took down. Or maybe going out to it, I don't know. It was addressed to Wink. Says it was from Nita," Coop said.
The captain's face didn't betray any emotion. He simply accepted the words and quietly considered them. Wink, on the other hand, perked up immediately. He hopped down to the desk between the captain and Coop and crept up to Nikita.
Nikita repeated the forwarded report, he drummed on the desk.
Nikita looked uncertainly upward.
"Well go ahead, little critter," Coop said.
Coop said no more reports, she tapped.
"You can report to the rest of the crew. Just no one else."
Nikita repeated the forwarded report, Wink tapped.
And so she repeated the message once again, verbatim. For some reason, hearing the message seemed to make Wink progressively more proud. By the time the last piece of information was repeated, his little chest was sticking out and his head was held high.
... All other prisoners but one were enemies of the fug folk. We needed them all freed.
After a short string of numbers and letters, the approximate coordinates of Skykeep, the message was complete.
The captain wanted the report meant for Wink, he tapped out.
"Yes, Wink. That's what we were after," the captain said.
The captain was welcome, Wink replied. He turned to Nikita. Wink thanked Nikita for the report.
"I do believe this is the least surly I've ever seen the one-eyed bugger. What's got into you, Wink?" Coop asked.
Forwarded reports were very important. Important inspectors got forwarded reports. Wink received a forwarded report. Wink was important.
"We'll discuss this whole forwarded message matter in a bit. But let's see if I got the gist. Nita and Lil are locked up in a floating fortress I never heard of. Those coordinates sound an awful lot like one of Lil's sloppy guesses. If I was a fugger trying to throw me off the scent, I sure as hell would have come up with something that was a little less fanciful than all that. So I reckon it's the truth. You see any maps while you were in that office?"
"Just the old ones they had before the fug showed up."
"Any new places marked on them?"
"None I could spot, but once I figured out I wouldn't find the Ph'lac'try on the map I stopped looking."
The captain nodded and pulled open a drawer beside him. Inside was a bundle of rolled up maps. He picked one and unfurled it to the extent that the captain's tiny excuse for a desk would allow. Then came a compass of the circle-drawing variety, the stub of a pencil secured in its end.
"We're here, right around where Crophaven was. If they built this in what used to be a town, and Fugtown used to be one too, then let's assume the fug folk do all of their building in the carcass of something that was already there. So the Phylactery is going to be on this map, it just won't be called that." He placed the pivot on Crophaven and began to widen the points. "About here is as far as a cutter can go on a full stock of fuel and water." He drew an arc, then moved the pivot. "This here is where Lil's guess puts the place. Which is smack in the middle of a mountain, so we know she wasn't spot on."
"Which means it was definitely her that came up with these numbers," Coop said, the weight of anxiety lifting from him as he spoke. This was the first evidence he had that Lil was still alive, and to look at him, you'd think he'd received a handwritten message telling him she was alive and well. "Ever since she dropped that navigation gadget over the side and you told her, she couldn't use it if she was going to be climbing, she never did get us closer than fifty miles."
Mack drew a circle around the mountain.
"And she was never much more than a hundred miles off," he added, widening the compass for another circle. "Best guess, then, is that the girls are somewhere in this bit here."
The section of the map that fell between the second two lines and behind the first contained three cities.
"Coyneville..." Mack said. "Looks like the ground there is all marsh. Not the sort of place you'd want to drive anchors for them chains she described. Then there's old Caer Kaetri... She said there were hounds or some such. Wild hunting-type hounds. Caer Kaetri is dead center of a plain. I don't know what sort of animals are left down here, but if them hounds are hunting, I have to figure they'll be doing it in a forest. And Shuttermill has one. From the name, they probably had a sawmill, too. And if I remember correctly, that's where that big foundry used to be. Pretty much everything you'd need to build floating prison."
"So that's where the girls are?"
"Best I can figure. And so long as we fill up on burn-slow and find at least one more place to soak up some water along the way, we can just about make it there in two days' traveling, mostly by fug. Did you say anything to those boys down there about what you were looking for?"
"We didn't get a chance to get too friendly with them."
"Good. The _Wind Breaker_ 's fast, but the fugger cutters are faster. If they know we're heading to that prison, at best they'll be able to get a message through to get them ready for us, and at worst we'll run into a fleet between there and here. Better they don't know."
"But, Cap'n, they know they got Lil and Nita, and they know we're down here. Don't you think they're going to guess where we're headed?"
"I'll give you three reasons why I think they won't. First, there ain't nothing a fugger loves more than keeping secrets. They keep secrets from us, they keep secrets from each other. Maybe it comes from spending all this time down here in the dark, but they like keeping _other_ folks in the dark, too. So I don't think they sent out a bulletin to tell every last fugger who they got and where.
"Second, fuggers think we're idiots. Every last one of _them_ thinks every last one of _us_ is as sharp as a bag of wet leather. A fugger would rather tear off his left arm than give us the benefit of the doubt when it comes to figuring out where they're keeping the girls.
"Third, and most important, if they guess we're heading to rescue the girls, we're dead and buried already. And if that's the case, may as well go on through, regardless. I'd hate to disappoint the Reaper," he said. "Get down there and help Gunner tuck those fuggers away where they won't give us any trouble. If he told them what we were looking for, kill them. If he didn't, let them live. We've a task ahead of us that'll need more than a bit of help from the folks upstairs if we're going to pull it off. I don't want to be wiping blood off my hands while I'm asking for favors unless I have to."
#
Coop and Gunner tied the captured fug folk into the most uncomfortable and embarrassing positions they could dream up, then stuffed the _Wind Breaker_ to capacity with coal, burn-slow, water, and every spare canister of phlogiston they could get their hands on. While they stocked the ship, the captain plotted a course. He would work his way to the surface and to a trade route to the north, following it as far as he could before ducking back below the fug to approach the prison. The longer they could go without appearing to be heading toward the prison, the better, and at the moment, precise navigation was more important than stealth.
Once the course was set, he bellowed into the speaking tube. "All hands on deck. We've got a riddle, and the more minds we can throw at it the better."
He and the crew assembled on the deck a minute later, including Butch, Wink, and Nikita. Coop had been once again patched up, leaving very little of his exposed flesh free of either a bandage or some manner of medical concoction. Gunner had his ankle bandaged.
"Coop get everybody caught up?" the captain asked.
"Are we operating on the theory that our two missing crewmates are being held in a sky prison over the remains of Shuttermill?" replied Gunner.
"Yes," said the captain.
"And this theory was devised based in part on the exceptionally unexceptional navigation skills of Lil Cooper, given to us secondhand through the minds of a string of lesser primates?"
"Yes."
"Then I'm all caught up. I just wish I wasn't."
"If anyone's got any ideas about how to get done what's got to get done, then shout them out. We'll be there in maybe two days. Whatever we come up with between then and now is what we're doing, because I don't want to leave them girls in that place any longer than we already have."
"Well, if I heard correctly, Nita included in her message the suggestion that _all_ of the prisoners should be freed," Gunner said.
"That was my understanding."
"I suggest we start by abandoning that idea and simply focusing on Nita and Lil."
"I suggest we don't," the captain said. "They put Nita and Lil in that place because they considered our crew to be as bad as the rest of the prisoners. If the fuggers want them folks locked up, I want them free."
"Tremendous... Very well then. No sense making it too easy on ourselves." Gunner sighed.
Two hours rolled by with all members of the crew pitching ideas. It didn't take long before they all realized that the task ahead was an insane one, and they therefore weren't likely to find their way to a solution by making sane suggestions. Outside-the-box thinking was utterly necessary, and ideally the box should be completely destroyed in the process. If time wasn't a factor, the task might have been enormously eased by heading to their secret stash of stolen fug tech near Caldera and arming themselves properly. That would take more than a week round trip, though, and at the rate they'd been encountering raiders, they couldn't guarantee they'd make it back in one piece.
Gradually the plans expanded to include anything that they might be able to steal from the station below them, and the solution began to form.
Mack crossed his arms. "I think that's about as close as we're going to get. Everyone know their prep?"
"I've got to convert some burn-slow into burn-fast," Gunner said.
"I've got to ditch the gig and hoist up its replacement," Coop said.
Butch muttered something irritably.
"If I wasn't going to be busy at the wheel, I'd do it myself, but I've never been good with a needle and thread," Mack said.
Wink found Nita and Lil, tapped Wink.
Nikita followed Wink, Nikita added.
All eyes turned expectantly to Gunner.
"... Why are you looking at me?"
"This is right about where you do your naysaying," the captain said.
"Is it going to do any good?"
"No, but best to get it out of the way," Coop said.
"Fine. I would be remiss if I didn't point out that this fever dream of a plan began as a jailbreak and has become the most absurd heist ever conceived. I will be frankly astounded if anyone survives. And that includes the inmates. I _am_ understanding it correctly, right? We _are_ planning to _steal_ the prison."
"Nah. Just borrow it," Coop said.
"Ah. Well, then I retract my objection."
"Noted. Now get to work," said Mack.
He nodded, and the crew scattered dutifully to their tasks.
# Chapter 9
I thought of this question. The Wind Breaker name sounded like something to you when you heard it first. You told me what it was, Lil tapped.
Once their message had been sent to the _Wind Breaker_ , at first Nita and Lil had tapped out messages to one another sparingly. After they'd heard the guards joking about all of the "nervous jitters" coming from the cells, though, they realized it wouldn't matter how much they tapped; the guards would never assume it was anything more than evidence of weakness. If there was one thing the fug folk could be counted on to do, it was assume the worst of the surface folk. From that moment they tapped away to one another, sometimes to share information, sometimes to plot and plan, but mostly just to preserve their sanity. The only time both of them were in their cells were moments like this, when the remaining Ebonwhite was taking his turn in isolation.
The name was poetic. Words that said it was fast, Nita answered. That was what I thought of.
_Not me,_ tapped Lil.
You told me what you thought it was.
Farts.
Nita couldn't help but giggle at the unexpected reply. The sound of laughter drew the guard's attention.
"Quiet down in there," the guard grunted.
The laughter descended into a genuine cough. Depending on the day and the whims of the breeze, the air was almost too dense with fug to breathe at times. The guard had two sets of temporary breathers, but he'd only once felt the need to deploy them. Nita had learned to breathe shallow until the air seemed clear, and in a way almost looked forward to her time in isolation. At least up there she could breathe deep, and she got a glimpse of unfiltered sunshine on the way in and out. Of course, isolation also meant that she was only getting regular meals two days out of every three. Today, though, neither the box nor the cell would be particularly tolerable. The wind outside her window was wailing, fat raindrops pattering against the windowpane. Another storm. The wind forced cold air and fug through the poorly sealed window and would make the isolation box a freezing and even more stomach-turning experience than usual. She didn't even want to think about what yard time would be like in wind like this.
_You didn't mean that,_ Nita tapped, pulling her mind back to the conversation.
Yes I did. Wind Breaker. Broke Wind. I thought our ship's name sounded like someone with bad gas. Made sense. Had a big bag full of gas.
Neither of them "spoke" for a moment, and Nita turned to the window. Telling time through a residue-encrusted window half-immersed in the fug was a bit of an art, and doing it during a storm was even more difficult, but it was amazing how quickly one's sense of time adapted to one's conditions.
Nearly lunchtime, Nita tapped.
Nearly my turn in the box, Lil replied. You knew what today was. One week. The grunts owed us muffins. You made sure you collected.
Noted.
The same horrid food was served to them a few minutes later, and a few minutes after that the surface guard came for Lil to tuck her away in the box for a day. The deckhand couldn't even muster the energy to object or resist. She simply forced down the last of her meal, tapped out _Talk to you in two days_ , and presented her hands for restraint. The guard, dressed in a drenched poncho and appearing even more irritable than usual, wrestled with his keys.
"Seems like I'm always the one who gets put out there during a storm. Guess I'm just lucky like that," Lil said.
"Oh," remarked the surface guard as he clicked the manacles in place. "The warden has canceled yard time for the day. He says the surface is too dangerous."
"But not the box?" Lil asked.
"The isolation cell is tethered. You won't be in any danger of being blown free."
Lil sighed. "Figures."
The whole exchange went through without anger or rebellion. It was no doubt precisely how the warden had intended it to happen. In just a few days, the routine had taken the fight from them. In a few days more, he might decide they had learned their lesson and would behave themselves for good. And he might have been right.
#
In the pouring rain and buffeting wind, Coop, Gunner, Wink, and Nikita sat atop the platform of a device they'd first been exposed to during their warehouse heist four months before. It was a cart with a steam engine attached and quite possibly the most convoluted control system ever devised. Everything from steering to acceleration was controlled by an array of unlabeled levers and valves. Nita had done a fair amount of fiddling and trial on the steam cart they'd stolen during their brief visits to Cache Island, and like all other areas of her expertise, she did her best to teach the others, but it wasn't until this precise moment that the value of those lessons became clear. It didn't help that the one they'd stolen from the warehouse didn't _quite_ match the one they'd stolen from Pendercrook.
"Are you sure we're okay keeping them bombs this close to the boiler?" Coop said uncertainly. He pulled his rain gear a bit closer. It was a heavy leather coat, and snuggled beneath it was not just Nikita but Wink as well.
"They are quite inert until I insert my detonators, Coop," Gunner said.
"And what about after you put the detonators in?"
"Then we have a precisely calibrated time before they detonate."
"And you're _sure_ you're sure?"
"I am certain."
"As certain as the first time you blew a finger off, or as certain as the second time you blew a finger off?"
"More certain than both of those times because I learn from my mistakes. And now is not the time to have your doubts about my pyrotechnic capabilities."
"I ain't worried about all that. I'm just worried you ain't as good with bombs as you think."
"Well don't be. We're getting close."
Gunner adjusted some valves to bring down the speed of the steam cart a bit as the rain hissed against the boiler beside him. They had been moving along the remains of what had been the main road leading to Shuttermill for several minutes. Now they could see the looming remains of the buildings come into the dimmer than normal light of a stormy noon beneath the fug. Bad weather had a whole new meaning beneath the surface. Falling rain mixed with the toxic atmosphere and struck the skin with an even more potent chill, like pure alcohol. And then there was the lightning. It was like something out of a nightmare. Something about the fug seemed to attract the stuff. Wind whipped the surface of the fug into twisting spires, then lightning would strike them, sending a jagged lance of bright violet light that lingered in the air for tens of seconds after the thunder had died away. It was like the lightning left a ghost behind, a branching replica of the bolt, which was quickly pulled apart into a fading blur by the wind.
Visibility was practically zero, but even so there was no doubt they'd come to the right place. While they hadn't yet reached their base, the four chains that secured the prison were visible rising up to the very surface of the fug, silhouetted whenever lightning struck. They pressed on, moving farther into the city, and watched as the dismantled frameworks of a few dozen homes and businesses whisked by them. Ahead, they could see what the fug folk had made of the city.
"Those are big guns," remarked Coop with his usual penetrating insight.
Anchors for each of the chains were visible now. They were house-sized blocks of cement. A dozen or so yards away from each one of them was a defense cannon. As the crew was well aware, the islands of Caldera were defended by massive guns, and in their monthly decisions to risk those cannons, the crew had gotten an excellent look at them. Though updated frequently and well maintained, the cannons were first built long ago and showed their age in their massive size and crude design—magnificent artistic embellishments not withstanding. These defense cannons were lean, efficient, and undoubtedly a match for the deadliness of their Calderan counterparts. Their barrels were as long as the _Wind Breaker_ and actuated by precision-ground gears that were almost half that size. Near the base of each was a complex arrangement of struts, chains, and linkages, which could only have been used for reloading the weapon, thus allowing it to be entirely manned by a single operator. Around each gun and its stockpile of ammunition was a fifteen-foot fence.
"One shot from any one of those would punch a hole through three _Wind Breakers_ ," Gunner said in awe.
"Makes you wonder why they don't have them defending every town they got," Coop said.
"One would imagine cost is a factor. Let's just be thankful for it."
The anchors, and thus the guns, were set several hundred yards apart. This gave the prison a very wide and stable foundation. Even the gale-force wind barely caused the floating fortress to rock. It also meant that the guns were far enough apart that if they piloted the steam cart through the center, they would probably not be seen through the downpour. They would still have to approach each of the anchors, though. That would put them within a few dozen yards of each gun, but that portion of the mission could be done on foot. They worked their way through the streets of the deserted city until they found one that led directly between two of the anchors and trundled onward.
Closer to the anchors, the remains of the houses were more and more picked clean, in some cases offering little more than foundations to show where once there'd been a cottage or inn. The section of the city directly below the prison was wiped completely clean, even the foundations filled in to form a single sprawling courtyard. Once they had maneuvered the cart into the center of the courtyard, they breathed a brief sigh of relief through their masks. The guns were pointed away from the courtyard, so unless the operators decided to turn and look, Coop and Gunner probably wouldn't be seen despite the lack of cover.
Coop peered up at a structure that, if not for the storm and the fug, would have blotted out the glow of the noon sun like some sort of man-made eclipse. "Every day I get just a bit more worried about the sort of shenanigans these folks could get up to if they had the notion to..."
"Well then, let's not waste any time showing them what sort of shenanigans _we_ can get up to now that _we've_ got the notion to," Gunner said.
"Wait... what do you suppose happens when that thing gets struck by lightning?" Coop asked.
"I imagine they've worked that out, or else it wouldn't have lasted past the first storm." He peered around them. "That eastern pylon looks badly charred. I suppose the lightning gets wicked over to that one somehow."
"So what would happen if we put a bomb on that one and it got struck by lightning?" Coop asked.
"... I suggest we do that one last," Gunner said. "Now let's get moving."
Coop grabbed a small bundle from the cart, and they set off toward the first of the anchors. They moved low to the ground while Coop tried to ready the inspectors for their part of the plan.
"You first, Nikita. I know you like chumming around with me, but if you're going to be a member of this crew, you have to earn it, and Nita and Lil would do the same for you."
"Would you keep it down?" Gunner hissed.
In a bit of a test of coordination, Coop managed to slip the harness onto Nikita. It was strapped with a fug mask, a small knife, and what the captain liked to call a "boot gun," which was a palm-sized firearm good for two shots. Once the harness was held to Nikita's back like a little pack, Wink got the same treatment. By the time they were both suited up, the group had reached the anchor. A thick tube spiraled up along the chain, the speaking tube that would feed the gunner the coordinates of his intended target. Presumably it would also feed the prison warnings of attack, so before anything else, they carefully and quietly attached a clamp to the tube, crushing it shut to mute any communication.
"Up you two go," Coop whispered, giving them each a boost. "Make sure to tell the girls what's coming. Lil's the one that looks like me only smaller, and Nita's the one with the dark skin."
"And be quick about it," Gunner added. He checked his watch. "This bomb is going to go off in twenty-two minutes."
Nikita and Wink scurried up the anchor, onto the chain, and onward toward the prison. Despite the jerking of the chain, the intensity of the wind, and the hammering of the rain, they moved surely and steadily. Conditions like these were what they were bred for. Gunner slapped a lump of putty onto the wall. It was the size of his own head and had a grainy scattering of black mixed in with an otherwise uniform gray color. Once it was in place, he pulled out a clockwork contraption with enough exposed gears and incorrectly sized fasteners to have the appearance of a clock that someone had attempted to repair while blindfolded.
"You sure that's going to be enough?" Coop asked.
"It is in point of fact _far_ too much, but this is not a situation in which frugality is advisable. Now please be quiet. I need to concentrate on the timing mechanism, or we'll learn just how excessive the payload really is. Keep an eye on the gun operator."
Gunner twisted and clicked his cobbled-together mechanism while Coop watched, but no matter how much of a threat the gun operator might have posed, Coop couldn't help but feel that Gunner's workmanship was the greater threat. He was grateful when Gunner clicked a final switch and signaled for them to return to the cart to grab the next charge.
#
Nita lay in bed. These were the worst times, when Lil was in the box and she was in the cell. She had no one to talk to and nothing to occupy her mind but concern for how her friend was handling matters. Today was worse, due to the storm that Lil would have to endure. Nita had taken to staring out her fug-choked window, squinting at the stormy sky in the distance and trying her best to remain strong in the face of a creeping hopelessness that gripped her more with each hour.
She was therefore in an excellent position to notice when a soaking wet form skittered past her window, then skittered back and peered inside with a single eye. Nita tried to keep the surprise and joy from her face. Without Lil to split his attention, their designated guard tended to linger directly in front of her cell, and the less he noticed, the better.
_Nita,_ Wink tapped out on the window, producing a sharp and highly noticeable sound that Nita frantically motioned for him to cease.
"What are _you_ so jumpy about?" the guard said. He glanced at the window, then back to Nita. "It's just the inspector. About time the damn thing got down off that pole and started actually _inspecting._ "
Nita stood, eager to take advantage of his dismissal of Wink for as long as it would last. "I know... I know but it was startling... It's been so long since I've seen one."
She stood and stepped up to the window, coughing lightly, and tapped on the wall in reply.
The crew came, Nita tapped.
Wink had a mask for Nita. Knife and gun for Nita. Nikita had same for Lil. Soon Gunner cut chain. After, all... Wink began to rattle off.
Wait. Wink helped Nita. Wink came inside, was not seen, tapped when close, waited for guard to leave. Wink understood.
"What are you doing with that thing? Stop distracting it. Do you want the wall to rot out because you wouldn't let it do its inspection?"
Understood. Nita told Wink where Lil was, Wink tapped.
In the box, hung from the pole, on top of the prison, Nita tapped.
"What did I just say? Back away from the wall," the guard growled.
"I'm sorry," Nita coughed again. She moved back to the bed and shut her eyes, plotting out what she needed to do and how it would be done.
#
Wink scrambled sideways along the wind-scoured exterior wall of the prison, quite literally as though he was born to do it, and found his way to where Nikita was searching as he had been.
Nikita found Lil in box hanging from pole on top, he instructed.
Nikita darted up the wall toward the surface while Wink climbed downward. He'd been searching from bottom to top and had passed some open and unbarred windows along the way. When he reached the nearest one, he slipped inside. It led to a currently vacant guard quarters.
He shook away the rain drenching his fur and moved quickly and surely along the ground, not giving a thought to stealth. He didn't have to. Anyone who had spent any time on an airship or in the fug was perfectly accustomed to seeing an inspector scurrying along the ground or up a wall in any part of the ship at any hour. They had free rein in any vehicle and seldom warranted a second thought. As a species they had effectively become invisible. The only thing that earned him so much as a second glance from the inmates and staff was the bundle of gadgetry on his back, but Wink moved quickly enough to give them no time for a second thought.
He skittered up the stairs and found his way to Nita's cell, stopping just before the final turn that would take him face to face with her.
_Here now,_ he tapped.
"What was that?" muttered the unseen guard.
"I think it was just the inspector again," Nita replied.
The guard grunted. "I'm getting damn sick of tapping. Between you girls drumming your fingers and the inspector, I'm going to be hearing tapping in my _sleep_ ," he complained.
Nita began to speak, but it quickly degenerated into a bout of coughing that was a bit more dramatic than those the guard had been accustomed to hearing.
When she was through, with a rough voice, Nita spoke. "May I please have a glass of water? This air... it's so thick with the fug today."
The guard grunted again and stepped past Wink to a pitcher of water in the corner beside his seat.
_Here. Quickly. Now,_ Nita tapped urgently.
Wink darted to her and squeezed through the bars. Nita picked him up, found the knife among his things, and set him on the top bunk.
"Stay hidden," she whispered, stepping up to the bars again, and holding the knife behind her back.
The guard stepped up to her, mug of water in hand. "This is the last time I bring you any extra water. Drink what you need at meal times," he instructed, handing the mug through the bars.
"Thank you, I assure you, this is the last time I'll ask. And I apologize. About that, and about this."
She grabbed the water and threw it in his face, then reached through the bars and grabbed his shirt, pulling him toward her. In a lightning-fast move, she flicked the knife out and pressed it to his neck.
"Don't scream or I'll cut your throat. Don't struggle or I'll cut your throat. Just drop the keys and kick them through the bars," she demanded.
He reluctantly complied.
"I really am very sorry. Under different circumstances you would have found me a much more pleasant person," Nita said. "But too many people are counting on me. I can't sit idle in this cell and hope that it all works out. As it is, my back's in a corner. I hope you understand."
"I'll see you hang for—"
Before he could finish his threat, Nita withdrew the knife, shifted her grip to the back of his head, and gave it a good firm smash against the bars. He looked at her, dazed, so she gave him another smash, which was enough to send him to the ground.
"Wink, if there's anything else you need me to know, tell me, because in a moment we're both going to be very busy," Nita said. She pulled the mask from his back and strapped it on, allowing herself three deep, clean, and long inhales followed by painful coughs before stowing the weapons and snatching up the keys.
Nita and Lil needed to find a way. Took care of the guards and snipers.
"Nice to know they've got such a high opinion of our abilities. Two knives and two guns against an entire prison staff. If I'm going to do that, I need help. Did you say something about Gunner cutting the chain before?"
Yes.
"Would that be _all_ of the chains?"
Didn't know.
"... This is going to be exciting. How soon?"
Soon.
"Well, then let's get moving," Nita said, finding the proper key and unlocking the door. Wink climbed onto her back as she brandished the keys in one hand and the gun in the other. "I'd like to have Lil free and the guards outnumbered before things get _too_ out of control."
#
Lil braced her legs against one wall of the isolation box and her back against the other, doing her best to avoid being thrown around its interior as it swung and spun in the breeze. Years on the _Wind Breaker_ had immunized her to the motion sickness that plagued Nita, but that didn't make the experience any more pleasant for her. The rain was pouring through the upper mesh, and wind spritzed it through the sides.
"This is another bad one," she said to herself. She had to yell just to hear her own voice over the wailing wind. "I sure hope them fuggers are good with knots, because I'd hate for this thing to come loose."
Something thumped down onto the top of the box.
"What now? Hail? That's just about the only thing left that can make this worse," Nita bellowed.
If the rain and wind hadn't been so deafening, she might have heard a rattling sound on the top of the box, but as it was she didn't know that she had a visitor until a set of chisel-like teeth began to gnaw a hole through the box's roof.
"What the...?" Lil remarked.
The dim light of the storm filtered through the new hole along with copious amounts of rain. It only took a moment for Lil to realize an inspector was paying her a visit, and it barely took a minute for the powerful teeth and jaws of her would-be rescuer to widen the hole enough to squeeze through. A wet and frazzled Nikita then tried to dive into the relative shelter of the box and immediately got her harness snagged, leading to full-scale panic as the creature realized she was stuck.
"Calm down, let's get you in here," Lil said.
Another person might have been startled by the sudden appearance of a soaking wet, not terribly friendly creature like an aye-aye. After even a short time in isolation under these conditions, though, Lil was happy for the prospect of having someone to share her plight. A few good tugs at the front of the harness got it free, allowing the drenched creature to slip inside and instantly crawl up under her shirt.
She yelped. "Getting awful friendly in a hurry there," Lil squealed at the sudden cold of a creature shivering against her bare skin. With another mighty pull, she got the rest of the harness inside and peered at it in the weak light. "But you brought gifts." She pulled out the knife, then the gun. "I can tell you and me are going to be _real_ good friends."
Lil strapped on the mask, secured the gun in her waistband, and began widening the hole with the knife. It didn't take long to hack away enough material to almost make an escape hole, but doing so weakened the anchor point of the support rope. When a powerful gale caused it to splinter and crackle, she clamped the knife in her teeth and reached through the hole to grasp the rope itself tightly.
"Hold on tight, whoever you are. This isn't going to be easy," Lil said.
Nikita held tight, which wasn't the most comfortable thing for Lil, and the deckhand began kicking and shoving at the floor of the cell. Another gust and a few more kicks caused most of the box to tear free and crash to the ground, leaving Lil and her temporary partner hanging from the rope and dangling in the breeze. A large chunk of the box's roof was still attached to the rope, making it a bit challenging to haul herself up the first few feet, but once she was past it, she scrambled up to the boom as quickly and easily as Nikita would have. She made a slight miscalculation once she reached the top because, without the box as a counterbalance, as soon as she grabbed the rope on the opposite side of the pulley, it reeled in the slack and sent her swinging toward the pole. Ever the quick thinker, she used it to her advantage, swinging her feet out to meet the pole and then wrapping her legs around it to steady herself. Using a combination of her legs and the rope, she slid quickly down the pole and came down hard upon the roof of the sniper's nest at its base.
Now on reasonably steady footing, she hooked an arm around the pole and looked to each of the four towers around the upper deck. The horrid weather had chased the primary snipers down from their relatively precarious perches. That meant if there were any gunmen left, they were directly beneath her in the most stable of the towers. She crept to the edge and looked down to find that two sharpshooters were against the railing, peering down at the wreckage of the box. She couldn't quite make out their words, but Lil assumed they were arguing about who should go down to see if she'd survived the fall. It seemed cruel to keep them waiting.
She jumped down from the roof onto the catwalk surrounding the sniper's nest and crouched down between the gunners. Before they could make sense of what was happening, she'd hooked an arm around one leg each and stood up, throwing them off balance and sending them tumbling over the railing to smash through the roof of a shack at the base of the tower. Now standing, Lil looked into the sniper's nest and discovered, to her dismay, that all three of the remaining snipers on duty were armed and ready. There were now three high-powered rifles either pointing at her or shifting toward her. She ducked down and darted below the low wall of the sniper's nest as two shots punched fist-sized holes through the catwalk where she'd been standing.
A rifle is not a favored close range weapon for any number of reasons, and it was rare that one would assign more than one sniper per nest for many of the same reasons. In their attempts to pivot toward and target Lil's most likely position, the gunmen spent more time clashing rifles and thumping each other than actually aiming. By the time she appeared at the door opposite where she'd dropped down, the nest was a hopeless tangle of three lanky gunmen. She drove a boot into the side of the nearest knee, grabbed the rifle that tumbled to the ground as a result, and put it to work as a club with far more success than she would have as a gun. In a tornado of confusion and chaos, Lil managed to disable and disarm a second gunman. The third and final chose to strategically retreat, dropping down through a hatch in the center of the floor and pulling it shut behind him. She gave a quick tug, found it tightly secured, and surveyed her handiwork. The two gunmen still in the room were in no position to mount an offense. Now was as good a time as any to take a moment to plan the next move.
"You okay in there?" Lil said, peeking down through the neck of her shirt.
Nikita stared back up at her, eyes crazed with fear, but otherwise unharmed.
"Well, maybe ease up on the grip just a bit. You're fixing to draw blood," she said. She slipped her head through the strap of the sniper rifle and slung it around her back, taking care not to interfere with the grip of her passenger, and pointed her boot gun at the downed riflemen. "You boys really should stay down. I'm having an awful bad day because of you and pulling a trigger is starting to seem like it'd do me a world of good. Best not to tempt me." One man complied. The other attempted to grab for a weapon and got a bullet in his thigh for his trouble. "Told you not to test me. Now if either of you folks has a ring of keys, that'd be handy. Otherwise I'll just take all the bullets you got. Then you may as well give me your firing pins and hidden guns and such. Wouldn't want you taking pot shots at me once I hop over the side..."
#
The first three charges had been set on the anchors of the prison, and thus far nothing had exploded. As far as Coop was concerned, this was over and above expectations. Now they were on the trickiest of the anchors, the one that seemed to be the designated lightning-magnet of the group. While Gunner suggested a bolt of lightning "might not set off the bomb," that didn't stop him from being particularly diligent when it came to getting this charge set.
"What's the time?" Gunner asked.
Coop pulled out his watch and squinted at it. "About seventeen minutes since you set up the first one."
"I'm going to require something more precise than 'about.' We are synchronizing these, remember?" Gunner said.
"Well, I busted the second hand on my watch a while back, so 'about' is all you're gonna get," Coop said.
Gunner grumbled something under his breath and continued clicking and cranking the timing mechanism. Coop scanned their surroundings, mindful of being discovered, and stopped when he saw something illuminated by the fading glow of a distant bolt of lightning.
"They told us to watch out for hounds, right?" Coop said.
"Yes. Have you spotted any?"
"I don't know what it is I spotted, but if it spotted us, I'm in favor of running."
Gunner clicked a final switch and looked up. Just barely visible in the dim light and pounding rain was one of the massive fug hounds, standing stone still, eyes on the crewmen.
"Maybe they're blind. The fug does strange things to—" Gunner began. He was interrupted when the creature threw its head back and released something that sounded like four howls combined into one horrific, ghostly sound.
The baying of the hound caused three more to emerge from the ruins of the city, each stalking up to the first. Coop and Gunner raised their pistols and began to back slowly toward the cart.
"I'm not too keen on shooting dogs, Gunner," Coop said.
"I'm not either, but I'm not sure the term really applies anymore. They look more like carnivorous horses."
"I'd still rather not shoot 'em."
"Well, I've grown attached to my throat, so if they start running, I'm going to start shooting."
The pair moved cautiously backward, and the hounds began to stalk toward them. They weren't running, but they didn't really need to. Their long, thin legs covered ground quickly. Both Coop and Gunner knew dogs well enough to know the moment either one of them ran, the dogs would run as well. Eventually, with a few strides left before they would reach the cart, the hounds became impatient and broke into a sprint. Rather than attempt to take all four of them down, both Coop and Gunner chose instead to mount the vehicle and hope that the cart was faster than the hounds. Gunner vaulted into the seat and cranked open every valve. The wheels spun wildly and threw up globs of mud and chunks of chewed-up cobblestone before the front end finally lurched into the air. Driving on the two rear wheels, it roared off down the road, not slamming back down until fifty yards later.
"How does our speed compare to theirs?" Gunner asked, fighting to keep them on the road.
"This as fast as we can go?" Coop asked.
"As far as I can tell," Gunner said.
"Then it don't compare too well," Coop said. "They're gaining."
The monstrous hounds charged after their prospective meal as it veered off toward the main road that would take them back to the distant and hidden _Wind Breaker_.
"Well then _kill them_!" Gunner said.
"Unless you can make this ride smoother, I ain't hitting nothing that's not a much bigger target," Coop said. "I got a better idea. Keep heading toward that closest gun operator."
Gunner veered aside, the first pylon whipping past them as the hounds galloped ever closer. The howling of the hounds had been enough to alert the gunners, and the nearest had dismounted the gun seat and was standing at the fence of his enclosure, pistol in hand. Coop grabbed Gunner's monstrous shotgun and targeted the fence. The operator dove for cover just before Coop fired, pulling the fourth trigger. Rather than one of the barrels firing, _all_ of them fired. This produced enough recoil to nearly launch Coop off the cart. A monumental cloud of shot struck the hinge of the fence's door, causing the door to crumble to the ground. Suddenly all four hounds realized a far easier meal was now available. They skidded to a stop and turned to the undefended gun operator.
"Warms my heart to see two wrongs make a right like that, Gunner," Coop said.
"And it makes my skin crawl that a pack of monsters attacking one of their masters warms your heart," Gunner replied.
"Then we're just different is all," Coop said. "About how long you figure before we can get back to—"
A deafening roar split the air, and the area around them filled with a blinding violet glow. Lightning had struck the prison, and thus the careful timing of their final bomb was rendered moot as it detonated in a secondary flash and boom. The force was enough to turn the anchor and a ten-foot section of courtyard into pulverized rubble. The slacked chain immediately lurched upward, and high above them the prison subtly began to tilt while bits of stone and chain rained down around the crewmen.
"Dang, Gunner. You know your bombs..."
#
A moment ago Lil was sprinting across the upper deck of the prison, heading for the nearest staircase toward the inside of the facility and hoping anyone who still had a gun wasn't any better at seeing through the rain than she was. Now she was on her hands and knees, trying to use her scrambled mind to work out how and why the whole world seemed to have been made of light, heat, and noise. She turned her shaken head toward the tower and saw a thick metal cable running down the pole, down the tower, and out of sight along the courtyard. She'd never noticed it before, but now it was hard to miss, because it was glowing brilliant red and sizzling. She shook her head and crawled along the slick planks of the deck toward the stairs.
Nikita was still under her shirt but now clung to her back. The little creature had reflexes that bordered on precognition, it seemed, managing to scurry aside in time to avoid being crushed between Lil and whatever she was colliding with next.
"Well, little thing... that was about as close to lightning as I ever care to get again," she called out to the creature clinging to her. She was only barely able to hear her own voice. "Guess you can count your lucky stars I didn't go sprawling, or you'd've been in a bad way."
She made it to the stairs and hauled herself to her feet with the banister in time for her hearing to finally clear enough to make out a general groan from the prison's framework.
"Feels like this whole place is tipping. This is gonna be _real_ fun..."
#
Nita had reached the belly of the prison and was lurking in the hallway trying to work out how she would distract the guards, when a call came out through the ship to report to the yard due to an escaped inmate. It could only have been Lil. The call had sent nearly all of the prison guards sprinting for the stairs. She'd narrowly managed to slip into a supply room to avoid being seen. Then came a blast that could have been nature and could have been Gunner. She didn't care, because it was enough to chase the rest of the guards from the level. Now she could move freely through the most densely populated floor in the prison. She paced out into the aisle and fitted a key into the first cell, which happened to belong to Donald and Kent.
"Nita... no... are _you_ doing all this?" said Kent.
"Not me, but people working on my behalf," Nita said, pulling open the cell door.
"Did you... make it rain, too? Can you people do that?" Donald asked, his tone suggesting that even _he_ thought it might be a stupid question.
"No, Donald. That was just luck," she said. "Or maybe timing."
"Well, what's the plan? How are we getting down from here?"
"First thing's first. We're getting everyone out of their cells. If we're going to do this, we're going to need to take the guards out of the equation. Right now the best I can come up with is overwhelming them with numbers. Then we'll see about getting us off the prison."
"But what about the cannons?"
"One problem at a time," she said.
Each row of cells had its own key, so Nita pulled the chain apart and handed off keys to the others to speed up the process. In the back of her mind, she couldn't help but notice the facility seemed to be shifting a great deal more than it ever had before, but as she'd said to the others, one problem at a time.
"Where's Lil?" Kent asked as the twelfth cell was opened, finishing the floor and unleashing nearly half of the population.
"She was in the box. But now I guarantee she's in the middle of the largest concentration of guards she can find, giving them all the reason they'll ever need to kill her. You and Donald think you can help me find her?"
"We're your men," Kent said.
As the freed prisoners flooded the other floors, unlocking every occupied cell and overwhelming what few guards they encountered to earn weapons and more keys, Nita and the grunts ran upstairs, listening with blast-weakened hearing for anything that might be Lil. When they reached level two, they found what they were after. Six guards had formed a human wall, crowding the hallway full, and in the corner with her back to the wall was Lil, rifle leveled.
"I know you fuggers are thinking I can only kill one of you with this thing before you can get to me," she growled. "But with you bunched up like that, I'm betting I can get two of you, easy. That means if you take another step, that's a one in three chance it's the last decision you ever make. You like them odds? Because I like 'em plenty."
The guards were still weighing their options and waiting for one of their cohorts to be the first to act when she noticed Kent and Donald approaching from behind them.
"Oh well, boys. Guess you waited too long," Lil said. "Looks like the cavalry's arrived."
Now faced with the possibility that she was bluffing or that there was indeed a second threat behind them, the assemblage of guards seemed further lost for what to do next, which was just as well, because it didn't really matter. Donald and Kent bowled into the group, knocking them to the ground and putting their fists and feet to work until it was clear they'd be staying there. Nita stepped over the tangle of fug folk and ran up to Lil.
"Are you all right?" she asked.
"All right? Come here, you!" she said, sliding the rifle around behind her and throwing her arms around Nita. "I'd hug you tighter, but it'd mean crushing my little friend here." She patted the lump under her shirt. "It's being a little shy. I don't think it's used to our kind of excitement."
"How are things looking up there?" Nita asked as Donald and Kent began harvesting keys from the groaning and dazed guards.
"Weather's got everybody holed up in the central tower. Unless those boys are real good at looking for firing pins in the rain or got a couple spares around, I've got all but maybe two of the snipers disarmed. The others locked themselves out of their perch, but I reckon by now they figured out I ain't up there no more and let themselves back up."
The pounding rain and howling wind were a steady noise to those inside the prison, punctuated occasionally by a peal of thunder. Three sharp pops, like cannons firing, broke through the din and heralded a rough tilt that threw Nita, Lil, and the others off balance.
"What the hell is going on?" Kent bellowed, slamming the door shut on the cell into which he'd crammed all six guards.
"I believe our crew has just finished cutting the strings on this balloon," Nita said.
"You mean we're flying loose in the wind?" Donald said. "Why would anyone do that?"
"Guess Cap'n decided if he couldn't crack the prison, he'd set it free," Lil said with a shrug, bracing herself against a wall. "Feels good to be moving with the breeze again. This place didn't tip and swing _near_ as much as a proper airship."
Kent looked to Nita. "Your friend behaves as though all of this is _normal_."
"For us, it is," Nita said.
"Oh, hey! It's a week and we're not dead. You boys owe us muffins!" Lil said.
"If you and your crew can get his thing down safe, we'll owe you a lot more than that," Kent said.
"We'll get it down all right, but safe means different things to different folks," Lil said. She turned to Nita. "What do you reckon we do next?"
"I think we've got to take the rest of the sharpshooters out of the equation. And I'd be a lot happier if I knew where the warden and his assistant were. Not to mention Ebonwhite."
"No telling where the warden would be," Kent said. "Linn doesn't keep to a schedule, and with the guard passages that run through this place, he could have got anywhere before we finished clearing it out. The assistant warden would have been in the central tower. They moved Ebonwhite to level one. He's still there, unless someone let him out. And to be honest, I don't think any of us like him any more than you do."
"All right. I suppose you and the others should do what you can to lock up any guards you run into. No one go to the surface until we work out how we're going to handle the rest of the snipers."
"I don't think anyone's going to the surface at all," Kent said, grabbing on to a bar from a cell door as the prison began to roll in the opposite direction. "Unless they want to go off the edge."
"Why do you have an inspector hanging on to you?" Donald asked, clearly having just realized it.
"Long story," Nita said. "Lil, you and I are going to level one to check on Ebonwhite. Donald and Kent, I think you should gather the rest of the inmates onto the middle three floors. Move all of the guards there too, and stay away from the outer walls. I don't want anyone to get hurt, and chances are good there will be some cannons fired before this is over. We'll come down and get you when the time comes to make a move."
"Sounds like a plan," Kent said.
Nita and Lil made their way up the shifting stairwell to an entirely vacant level one.
"Looks like at least _one_ person had a soft spot for Ebonwhite after all," Lil said.
"Wink, tell me this. Did the captain have a plan beyond this point?" Nita asked.
Wink tapped his answer on the side of her mask. The prison was cut free. Captain waited until the guns couldn't reach. Captain came and dropped Gunner and Coop on prison. Prison rifles gone by then. Crew found controls to bring prison down. Prisoners ran free.
"Controls to bring it down... Well, I suppose this thing _must_ have phlogiston pumps to adjust the altitude. Unless they were using winches to do it via the chains... and if that's the case, there's no bringing this place down _softly._ Let's operate on the assumption there _are_ pumps. Where would the controls be?... Probably the base of the central tower... along with all of the remaining armed guards and likely the assistant warden," Nita said.
"Well, at least everything we're after is in one place. That'll save us a lot of running around," Lil said. The prison shuddered and rocked. "Just as well, too. I don't know how much longer this place is liable to stay airborne."
Nikita was not hurt, Wink tapped.
"Who's Nikita?" Lil asked.
Wink pointed to the shivering form tucked under her wet shirt. "Oh, this new inspector's named Nikita? Let me guess, Coop named her. That was the name of one of his girls back in Keystone. Come out from there. Let's get a look at you," Lil said.
Nikita reluctantly allowed herself to be pulled from her hiding place. Aside from looking almost critically frazzled, she didn't seem to be any worse for wear.
"She's only got half a tail. Is that new or old? No, wait, I see stitches. Old then. Same goes for the bald patches. She looks fine to me," Lil said.
"I think maybe we should let these two stay behind. It's going to be messy up there," Nita said.
Wink reached up and tapped at her mask. _Wink stayed with crew._
Nikita shakily pulled herself up and tapped at Lil's mask. _Nikita stayed with crew._
"Well, that's that then. The crew stays together," Lil said. "Now let's get up there and clear the way for the rest of it."
#
Gunner flipped open the bypass valve on the steam cart as they approached the temporary mooring of the _Wind Breaker_. They had only just finished hooking it up to the gig winch when the voice of the captain came bellowing down over the roar of the storm.
"You boys, on deck, now!" he cried. "We need to get unmoored and in the air!"
Coop scrambled up the chain and activated the winch, then ran to the speaking tube.
"Hauling Gunner and the cart up now, Cap'n," Coop said. "What's the hurry?"
"Looks like Lil and Nita didn't share all of the defenses. Last bolt of lightning showed a ship deep in the city, spinning up its blades."
"Guess them gun operators had to get here somehow," Gunner said.
"It's a heavy scout. It could be trouble. I want to be moving five minutes ago."
"Aye, Cap'n," Coop said. He ran to the opening. "I'm going to get the lines undone. Cap'n says there's a scout about to hit the air. You oughta get on guns once you're up here."
Coop sprinted to the upper deck and yanked at the release ropes, pulling them free from the exposed beams that he'd secured the ship to upon their arrival. The wind made it hard to get the slack out. By the time he'd gotten the first rope free, Gunner was on the deck and lent a hand freeing the second rope.
"Gunner, get on that deck gun. The scout is on the move. It hasn't spotted us yet, but it won't be friendly if it does," said the captain.
"Then we'd best hope he holds still. In this weather, the effective range of this gun is going to be pitiful, and we're _going_ to run out of ammo if there's a firefight."
"Well, that's mighty unfortunate, Gunner," the captain said, pushing the turbines to full. A distant clap heralded the enemy cannon firing, and the ruins of a church just off the ship's starboard bow burst into a cloud of splinters. "Because there's already a firefight."
The _Wind Breaker_ maneuvered low to the ground, its gondola barely above the roofs of the ghost town.
"If you don't get up above them, our envelope is fodder for their deck guns, Captain," Gunner said.
"Did you kill all four cannon operators?" the captain asked.
"No, Captain, just one."
"Then even if both crewmen working the scout are former cannon operators, we've still got one cannon to worry about. I've got to stay low until I know they can't target us, or the scout's the least of our problems. And this low, I can't put the cannons to work on that thing."
A second distant clap peppered the area with lesser impacts, two of which splintered but didn't penetrate the hull.
"They switched to grapeshot. That won't make this any easier," Mack said. "Get to firing!"
"At this range all we'd be doing is wasting ammo, Captain!"
"Then waste it! If it's an outside chance at a lucky shot or no shot at all, I'll roll the dice."
Gunner growled and muscled the deck gun into position. When he had it pointed as precisely as possible as the distant form of the approaching scout, he began firing. Even in broad daylight and a dead calm it would have been difficult tracking his shots until they hit the distant ship, but in these conditions he based his aim entirely on intuition.
Captain Mack pulled a sharp turn, swinging the ship aside and dipping the gondola even lower, such that Gunner's shots were barely missing the peaks of the roofs around them. Another shot fell just to their aft, demolishing half a block of buildings.
Finally, a dozen shots before running dry of ammunition, one of Gunner's darts finally found the envelope of the enemy ship. It wasn't nearly enough to take it out of the air, but the escaping phlogiston lit them up as bright as day.
"Coop! Leave your rifle, then run down to my quarters and bring up _anything_ with a long barrel. Rifles preferred, but at this point we can't be choosy."
The scout ship turned, attempting to put the highly visible leak on its far side, which also meant it couldn't use its cannons, but it had drawn near enough that it could put its own deck guns to use. Scattered shots of the imprecise weapon began to bite into the hull and thunk into the envelope. Most were glancing shots, but two met their mark.
In another ship the successful hits would have meant a slow death without repair, but the _Wind Breaker_ had been so frequently repaired, and hardened against attack so frequently, that most sections of the envelope had a thick layer of tar beneath the surface. It cost them some maneuverability, but it also made the skin at least moderately self-sealing. A dribble of phlogiston painted them as a target just as visible as their foe, but they weren't in any danger of dropping out of the sky anytime soon.
"They'll be able to target us from a hell of a lot farther now," the captain said.
"They won't have to if we take too many more hits," Gunner said, shouldering a rifle and pumping a few rounds at the enemy ship.
"The prison is dead ahead now. I'll take us below it and bring us up on the other side, evasive maneuvers all the way. Keep us alive until then."
"Aye, Captain," Gunner said, dropping an emptied rifle and reaching for the next weapon.
The captain flipped a few levers and twisted a few valves to haul the _Wind Breaker_ up into the air. Just when the whole of the ship was free of the sheltering roofs of the deserted town, a sound stopped the collective hearts of the crew. It wasn't something as simple as a roll of thunder or a blast of cannon fire, though both of those were in no short supply. This sound was altogether terrifying. It was a grinding, sputtering whine, the sound of blades dropping down from their full speed.
"Damn it! We've lost three turbines," Mack bellowed.
"I don't see any hits on the equipment," Gunner said.
"Then I guess the old girl misses her engineer," Mack growled. He fought with the wheel to keep the ship on track, but they were losing speed by the second. "I'm down to the left and center turbine. Just keeping her on course is going to be rough. Someone get down below decks and get this fixed."
Coop popped up from below decks with an armload of weapons. "There's an awful lot of steam rushing about where it ought not be down there, Cap'n!"
"So I noticed, Coop. Get down there and fix it!"
He dumped the weapons beside Gunner. "That's Nita's thing, Cap'n. I don't know half of what I'd need to—"
"You are a deckhand, Coop. When the right crewman for the job isn't available, that means _you_ get it done. Now get it done!"
"Aye, Cap'n!" Coop said, sucking an edgy breath through his teeth before hopping back down through the hatch.
"And when you're done, haul up some more guns!" Gunner called after him. He then turned his head. "Captain? What do you suppose the odds are that Coop is about to blow us all to scalding hot fragments?"
"About even money that the scout ship'll do it, I'd reckon. So keep firing!"
#
Coop rushed below decks. The halls were quickly filling with steam, which had the mixed blessing of making it very easy to narrow down where the problem was but very difficult to actually navigate. Fortunately Coop had stumbled through the ship in a bleary haze of half-sleep or drunkenness enough times that he was an old hand at finding his way through blind groping. Before long the thickening cloud of sweltering steam was joined by a worrying hiss, and then angry shouts.
"That you, Butch?!" Coop called, stumbling aside as a successful attack splashed against the _Wind Breaker_ 's outer hull _._
Their cook and medic shouted something agitated and incomprehensible. Her form was vaguely visible through the haze, and she was gesturing vigorously at a jet of steam whistling out from the elbow joint at one end of a pipe.
"Yeah, Butch, I see it. You reckon it's a clog?" Coop said, scratching his head and whipping the torrent of sweat from his eyes.
Butch responded in the affirmative. She'd fetched one of Nita's many scattered tool kits and shook it urgently at Coop.
"How d'you reckon I should get it unstuck?"
If Butch knew the answer, she certainly didn't share it. Coop scratched his head again and fell back against the wall as a crackling slap signaled yet another solid blow. With little in the way of intuition and virtually nothing in the way of understanding, Coop tackled the problem with his usual tact: brute force and persistence. He took the heaviest wrench from the tool kit and began to hammer violently at the offending pipe. In his experience, extreme violence was usually enough to coax things into submission, animate or otherwise.
A dozen good hard whacks and as many dents in the pipe later, something solid rattled along the inside. The escaping steam reduced to a trickle, and the ship tipped under the force of suddenly revitalized turbines.
"There... This engineering stuff isn't so—"
His ill-informed observation was cut short by a metallic crunch and a deafening whistle that sent both Butch and Coop diving to the ground.
"Damn it, Coop. Now all five turbines are down!" bellowed Mack over a speaking tube. "We're adrift!"
Coop squinted through the once again thickening steam to find that the far end of the pipe he'd been "adjusting" had completely ruptured. Any steam that would have been making it to the turbines was instead venting down the hallway with terrifying intensity. Worse, the whistle of pressure was rising swiftly, and while Coop didn't know the first thing about steam systems, he _did_ know the _last_ thing about them, which was that if the pressure got too high, it stopped being a system and started being a hole in the ship.
He didn't panic because in Coop's head there usually wasn't much room to spare for things like panic. Instead he crawled forward to where the wrench had landed and plotted out the next part of the system he intended to beat on until it started behaving. Butch, still on the floor, had found a shiny piece of hand-etched brass attached to the wall beside a valve near the point where the offending pipe and its parallel twin separated.
"What you got there?" Coop asked, crawling up to the floor-level valve. He squinted through the steam at the careful, precise letters that could only be Nita's handiwork. "By... bypass valve to... to reroute..."
The pitch of the whistling steam rose sharply, and Butch started screaming something with enough urgency and concern that even Coop couldn't understand.
"Aw heck, it can't make it worse, right?"
He grasped the valve and muscled it open. From the first fraction of a turn, it was clear it was having an effect. The second pipe began to rattle with increasing flow, and the wail of escaping steam began to drop off. Better yet, the hum of turbines started to pick up, and with them the speed of the ship. He twisted with all of his might and got the valve almost entirely closed before a grind and creak suggested some combination of overpressure and Coop's attempted maintenance had damaged it enough to prevent complete closure.
Coop climbed to his feet and hauled Butch up, then ran to the nearest speaking tube. "Where we at, Cap'n?"
"Four of five turbines, but they're not where they ought to be. Something still ain't right!" he answered.
Coop looked to Butch. "So things got better when steam stopped coming out from over there. Probably things'll be right again when there's no steam at all coming out from over there. But the valve's busted..." He looked at the wrench, then the dented pipe. Finally he turned to the tube. "Okay, Cap'n. I'll have this fixed up right quick. Don't mind the clanging."
He reared back and began hammering the pipe flat, each blow cutting the flow off just a bit more, and restoring a fraction more power to the turbines.
"I hope Nita won't be too sore about me busting up her pretty little pipes..."
#
Assistant Warden Blanc loaded his pistol. Minutes earlier Warden Linn had reached the central tower, managing to escape the riot below through careful use of the staff passages. The wardens were joined by two guards and two of the snipers. They were the last remaining staff that was healthy and armed.
"All right, men. We all know that it is only a matter of time before the inmates advance on the offices. We drop as many of them as we can. Protect the warden at all costs," Blanc ordered.
"No..." Warden Linn said slowly.
Unlike his men, who were fighting off various states of panic and showing it, Linn seemed entirely composed. If not for the rain that had drenched him in his sprint for the tower, one would think this was an everyday situation he was quite equipped to deal with.
"Warden, this is a full scale riot. We must meet force with force!" Blanc urged.
"We are _jailors,_ not _executioners_!" Warden Linn stated. It was the first time any in the room had heard him raise his voice. When he continued, he was once again composed. "Few of our inmates are here for violent crimes, Blanc. They aren't after our blood. They are after freedom. And despite their appearance, those surface women aren't after blood, either. Whitman took a bullet to the thigh, the only serious injury. It could easily have been to the heart if they had been after blood. This, all of this, is in pursuit of freedom... And freedom is what we are charged with denying them. Sharpshooters, you are with me. Weapons steady, and fingers off the trigger. No one fires without my order."
"Warden, the chains have been severed. The prison is no more."
"We control what we can and cope with what we cannot, Blanc. I intend to see to it that the inmates remain within the prison regardless of its state. Secure the door behind me. And prepare the countermeasures."
He opened the door, wind blasting through and drenching him without prompting even a flinch. He simply strode out onto the reeling courtyard and turned aside to stalk toward one of the remaining shelters at the foot of the tower. There was one final point of preparation before he faced the inmates...
#
Nita and Lil stalked slowly up the stairs into the pounding rain. They took a wide stance, putting their air legs to the test. Both of them held their pistols at the ready.
"It's a heck of a storm to be flying a prison in," Lil called out. "At least those boys won't be able to draw a bead on us unless they're..."
Through the wind and rain, she saw them. Warden Linn, both snipers, and Anthus. The hound was standing with his head down and his hackles up. He bared his teeth and released a growl that could be heard even through the downpour. Though his gunmen and even Anthus wavered as the prison pitched and rolled, Linn was as steady as the girls, legs wide and planted, face stern and impassive.
"Miss Graus, Miss Cooper," he said, his voice even.
"Warden," Nita said.
"I must say, I underestimated you. But I don't think anyone could have foreseen so suicidal an action."
"Well, you'll know better next time. The _Wind Breaker_ crew stops at _nothing,_ " Lil said.
"In your zeal for freedom, you have likely sentenced yourselves and each one of your fellow inmates to death. A far heavier sentence than even their peers and your enemies saw necessary. But the nature of the sentence is not my concern. My role is to be sure that it is carried out."
"All we have to do is bring the facility down slowly. There are controls for that in the tower, aren't there?" Nita began.
"There are," he said.
"Then if you'll just let us bring this down, once—"
"No, Miss Graus. You've crossed a great many lines since you arrived. This last line, you shall not cross. Gentleman, take aim. If they come a step closer to the office... dissuade them."
"Well hell, there's more than one way to let the gas out of these things," Lil said. "We can just blow a few holes in them, or let some of them go. Won't be a smooth landing, but I walked away from plenty of hard landings before."
"And what then?"
"Then the _Wind Breaker_ arrives," Nita said.
"If your crew attacks, then they will die, because I _will_ defend this prison."
"With what? We're probably miles away from your precious cannons, and they wouldn't be able to aim without the prison to spot for them anyway," Lil said.
"That isn't your concern. All you need to know is that there is no way that this will turn out in your favor."
"Warden Linn, with all due respect, I think the same can be said for you."
"Perhaps, but we shall all do our jobs until the very moment we are unable," Linn said. "I will give you and your fellow inmates one final chance to end this. Return to your cells."
Nita stood in awe of the warden. She didn't know if she admired or pitied the man's iron resolve to do his job even in the face of incomprehensible disaster. He was like a statue, rain pouring down on a suit that, for the first time, was less than tidy. He almost seemed to feel that through raw will he could return the prison to its foundation.
A distant bolt of lightning filled the sky and drew Nita's eyes to the central tower above. Two guards were there, and each of them held a curious contraption.
"Lil... in the tower." Nita kept her voice low so that over the wind and rain only Lil could hear the words.
"I see them... What're those things they got?"
"I think I've seen Gunner tinkering with things like that from the warehouse heist. He said it was called a rocket-propelled... something."
"Aw heck. If Gunner was messing with it, it must be pretty dang dangerous."
"If there's even a chance that it might be a danger to the _Wind Breaker_ , I don't think we can risk leaving it."
"I am growing impatient, ladies. I suggest you head down and speak to the others. Quickly," Linn warned.
"Your gosh dang prison's blowing in the wind, Warden! There's dedicated and there's just plain stubborn."
Another flash of lightning illuminated the sky. One of the guards called out.
"Incoming ship! Zephyr class! Heavily damaged! With a heavy scout on its tail!"
"Okay, no more waiting," Lil whispered. "I say we scatter. Save our shots for the guys in the tower."
"Agreed... _Go!_ "
Lil went left, Nita right, each sprinting across the slick planks of the courtyard. Both rifleman fired, narrowly missing their targets as the prison shuddered in a gale.
"So be it," the warden declared.
He released Anthus, and the beast charged, choosing Nita as his prey. In three strides the creature closed the gap between them, but Nita dove to the side. For all of its speed, the hound couldn't change direction very quickly, and its feet slid out from under it.
Lil had gone straight for the supports of the tower, aiming to reach the catwalk the same way she left it. The gunmen focused their attention on her, but the rain and wind made it impossible to aim properly.
Anthus was back on his feet and up to speed as Nita ran for the firmly secured door. She holstered her weapon and leaped for a strut that supported the lower of two catwalks above the door. With inches to spare, she pulled herself above it while the mass and momentum of the hound carried him through it. She knew better than to follow him inside, but neither could she stay put, lest the gunmen turn to her. She dropped down and dashed around to the opposite side of the tower.
#
"All this climbing and I might as well be an inspector, huh, Nikita?" Lil said breathlessly as she swung hand over hand along the bottom of the upper catwalk, working her way around the tower. The aye-aye crawled under her shirt again in response.
Once she was safe from the guns for at least a moment or two, she turned to the _Wind Breaker_. It was getting closer, and from the looks of the lingering glow around its leaks, it hadn't been having a terribly pleasant ride. It unloaded its rear cannon, but the violent wind was clearly making navigation, and thus the aiming of the cannons, an issue.
"There! Fire on my word!"
Lil opened her eyes wide and swung out to the edge of the catwalk, pulling her head up to peek over it. The feet of a guard were right before her eyes, and on his shoulder was a rather unimpressive tube with a trigger and sight.
"Steady... _Fire!_ " ordered the spotter.
With no time left, Lil acted out of reflex. She reached out and grabbed the gunman's ankle. Immediately her other hand slipped and she was supporting her full weight from the man's leg. The gunner was yanked from his feet, firing as he fell. A projectile hissed from the tube. It burned like a flare and moved almost faster than the eye could follow.
The fouled attack streaked by the _Wind Breaker_ , narrowly missing, and continued into the fug. Not long after, there was a fiery blast from below.
"Someone's got me!" cried the former gunman and current piece of climbing apparatus.
Lil's weight dragged him between the slats of the catwalk railing, and he released the weapon to grab hold. When he finally got a firm grip, he was dangling entirely off the edge, with Lil hanging from one of his legs. He tried to shake her free, but Lil climbed him effortlessly, slipping through the railing and giving his fingers a good hard kick for good measure, sending the man crashing down to the deck below. Before anyone could stop her, she snatched up the tube and pointed the business end at the spotter.
"Hold it right here. No one's shooting at that ship!" she said, finger on the trigger.
The remaining guard froze, glancing first to her, then to the crate at her feet, then back to her. Lil looked briefly at the crate. Inside was a pile of small cylindrical objects with a bulge on one side and fins on the other. She looked to the guard.
"This thing isn't loaded anymore, is it?" she muttered.
He dove for her, and she dove for the crate, snatching at its contents. The guard struck her on the side and sent her rolling to her back, very nearly crushing Nikita in the process, but not before Lil got a handful of something from the crate. Her hand came up without a round. Instead she found wire tangled around her fingers, and a worrying hiss coming from the crate.
The sound was enough to convince the guard to dive through the central hatch and shut it behind him. Lil scrambled to her feet and saw one of the rockets attempting to fizzle to life. She snatched it up, but it finally ignited in her fingers, flashing off into the sky and startling her off her feet. The blast of the rocket set the wood of the ammo crate on fire, and Lil didn't need Gunner's knowledge of explosives to know what would follow. Rather than attempt to extinguish the flame, she scrambled to her feet and hopped the railing.
#
"Cap'n, did you see that?" Coop cried, dropping the latest armload of weapons from Gunner's personal collection. With his "repairs" complete, he now resumed arming Gunner with whatever he could find.
"I got my eyes open, Coop. I don't know what it was they just shot at us, but I don't want to take a chance of being hit by one. I'm taking her back down below the surface."
"Damn it, Captain! I can't get a clear shot if you keep taking us down into that soup!" Gunner said. "And I'm scraping the bottom of the barrel when it comes to small arms ammunition!"
Heedless of the complaints, Mack angled the ship downward. The wind-whipped shroud of purple fumes washed over the ship, renewing the bright glow of the scattered leaks in its envelope. Behind them the trailing scout ship plunged down after them. It had it's own smattering of leaks, but neither ship had taken damage enough to force it from the sky.
Gunner fired a handful of shots from an elaborate rifle of his own design, punching three more holes in the enemy envelope. He threw the weapon down for Coop to collect and reload while he pulled up the next weapon.
"Coop! Tell me this isn't the last long-barrel you found."
"That's it, Gunner. You packed away a mess of your stuff in the stash to make room for that fugger stuff you like tinkering with."
Gunner looked down at the last weapon. It was one he'd been working on intermittently for weeks. It had the overall look of a rifle, but based on the fittings, it seemed more like part of the steam system of the ship, and even on the surface the thing had the lingering smell of fug and phlogiston. He'd never been able to get it to do much more than spray phlogiston from a small canister, which didn't seem like a terribly useful function for a weapon. He was about to toss it aside and wait for his rifle to be reloaded when he noticed a glow coming from within a compartment at the base of the barrel. He pulled it open, revealing a brilliant, painfully bright light.
"Of course... it was designed in the fug. It must only work in the fug!" Gunner said.
"I don't know what you're on about, but if you don't start harrying that scout, we're going to have more holes than Nita will be able to patch!" Captain Mack said.
Gunner began to attach the fittings of the canister and dashed for the back of the ship.
"Coop, you might want to give me some room. I'm not entirely sure what is going to happen."
"Way ahead of you!" Coop called from a hatch leading to the lower decks.
When everything seemed to be properly affixed, Coop raised the weapon and pulled the trigger. At first nothing happened beyond the hissing release of gas and a strange whining sound. Then, gradually, a dim shaft of light began to shine forth from the barrel. It was perfectly straight and barely diminished at all as it sliced into the mist around them.
"What the hell is it?" Coop called out.
"I don't know... It doesn't have any recoil at all. Doesn't seem to be doing much good, either!"
He kept it trained on the envelope of the trailing ship, and the brightness of the beam grew steadily more intense. A forward cannon on the scout fired. It missed the _Wind Breaker_ , but the attack was close enough to its target that the whole crew could hear it whistle by.
"Quit toying with that thing and get the scout off our tail!"
Coop took a hand off the weapon and grasped one of the valves, spinning it open. The shaft of light flashed brighter than lightning, and the barrel began to quickly sizzle in the rain. The enemy envelope peeled open where the beam struck it, releasing a wave of escaping phlogiston. As the weapon's canister emptied, the beam sputtered and died away, but not before the damaged ship quickly descended out of sight.
"Any idea what you just took that ship down with?" Mack asked.
"No, but if the fuggers have many more of these, those cannons down there are going to be the least of our concern."
"I'm taking us back up. You boys get ready to drop down on the deck of that drifting prison. I'm all for setting the rest of those prisoners loose, but I'm getting our girls off there first!"
He spun the wheel and pushed the _Wind Breaker_ to full speed. Ahead of them, deep thumps, spiraling trails of light, and bright flashes were erupting from the deck of the prison just above the surface of the fug.
"And we'd best hurry before they destroy the place."
#
Nita curled up against the base of one of the central tower's support pillars as unguided ordnance poured out of the upper platform. Most of the rockets sprayed out into the darkness and detonated above. The remainder either exploded immediately—reducing the platform to burning splinters—or rained back down on the deck. When the explosions died away, there was a pair of smoking holes blasted into the planks. The largest of the holes represented the smoldering remains of one of the corner towers. The anchor point of the nearest support balloon had been badly damaged in the bombardment as well.
Somewhere below the ringing in her ears and the pounding of the rain, Nita was able to distinguish some crackling above her. She looked up to find Lil dangling from the former railing of the tower's lower catwalk. It had pivoted out, and she was a few feet above the deck. From the look on her face, the pyrotechnics had left her a bit disoriented. She reluctantly opened an eye, saw how near the ground was, and dropped shakily to the deck where she quickly stumbled and fell.
"Lil, are you all right?" Nita asked, rushing out to help her to her feet.
"I'm okay... I... kind of overdid it up there, I think," Lil said. "Where's the _Wind Breaker_?"
"I don't know. I think I saw a flash of phlogiston a moment ago. An envelope must have let go under the fug."
"Well it couldn't have been—"
Whatever Lil had been preparing to say suddenly became a distant afterthought as a long, rumbling creak of breaking wood signaled the release of the damaged balloon anchor. With the loss of the balloon, the corner of the prison began to tip. Wind caught the deck and forced it down, causing the whole of the facility to tilt dangerously.
Lil and Nita ran back to the tower. Nita held tight to the support and offered her hand to Lil, who grasped it gratefully. The two remaining gunmen were not so lucky, just a few steps too far away from the tower to reach it before the angle of the deck and the slickness of the planking began to force them toward the lagging edge. One of them managed to grab the railing around the stairs leading inside. The other slid out and just barely grabbed the railing on the edge of the platform.
The tilting of the platform seemed to reach its maximum and the prison was losing altitude, dropping down below the surface of the fug. The first of the gunmen reached out to his partner. Then a new figure emerged from the stairway. Before the gunman could react, the newcomer tore away his rifle and bashed him with it, then shoved him free of the stairwell to slide off the edge. He then fired the rifle at the man dangling off the edge and turned toward the center of the platform. It was Ebonwhite.
From the sound of the cries coming from within what was left of the central tower, Nita and Lil were not the only ones to notice the new threat. Shots began to ring out from within the tower, likely the assistant warden putting his pistol to work, but all it managed to do was convince Ebonwhite to fire back. It was doubtful the inmate had ever fired a weapon in his life. He managed three shots before he was struck in the arm and took cover, but the final shot intended for the shooter in the tower instead grazed Nita's arm. She cried out and lost her grip. Lil, Nita, Wink, and Nikita slid helplessly along the soaking wet deck.
Lil struck the post of the railing, her flailing arms just barely finding their way to Nita's ankle as she slid by. It took every ounce of strength she had, but she managed to keep Nita from flying off the edge. She began to slide forward, but a wild kick of her leg hooked the railing itself. Now folded over the post with her leg wrapped around the railing, she held tight and fought to regain her breath.
"You okay, Nita?! Where'd you get hit?" Lil called down.
"I'm okay. I'm okay. It was just my shoulder. I... I lost the gun. I'm not sure if I'm going to be able to pull myself up," she called back, sputtering as she hung upside down in the rain, water seeping through the vents of her mask.
"Don't worry. I got you. I won't let you go," Lil said.
Nita looked up, trying to steel herself for an attempt to grab Lil's wrists with her hands, then froze.
"Lil!" she cried out.
Lil looked up to find Ebonwhite standing over them, madness in his eyes. He had one foot on the post of the railing and the other on the deck. The rifle was in his hands, its barrel practically pressed to Lil's back.
"When my uncle finds out you killed my brother, and that I killed you, I'll have my—"
In an act that illustrated both their loyalty to their crew and their lack of respect for dramatic speeches, Nikita and Wink scurried up along Lil and Nita to attack Ebonwhite before his crazed proclamation was through. A pair of aye-ayes can't do a lot of damage, but they can certainly make their presence known. As they put their teeth to work, he dropped the rifle and tried desperately to pull them free. He got his hand around Nikita's neck, but Wink crawled up and sank his teeth into Ebonwhite's wrist. He howled in pain and released her, then tore Wink free.
Wrapping both hands around Wink's neck, he tried to strangle the beast, but a hand reached out from behind him and grasped him by the front of his shirt. His assailant spun him around.
"Warden Linn!" Ebonwhite yelped.
The warden grasped both of Ebonwhite's shoulders and pulled him forward into a devastating head-butt that forced the inmate into unconsciousness. He muscled the now motionless man back to the stairs and heaved him inside while the inspectors scattered to what they perceived to be a safe distance, watching him warily.
"Ms. Cooper? Have you got a firm grip on Ms. Graus?"
"I got her... but... I don't know how much longer," Lil said.
Linn turned and released a piercing whistle. Anthus padded up to him, a pronounced limp indicating the collision with the door and the resulting partial collapse had not been without consequence. Linn pulled the leash around and lowered it down. Nita grasped it, and Linn and Anthus pulled her up. Linn clicked a manacle onto her wrist, the other on his own, then pulled Lil to the safety of the stairwell.
The pitch of the prison was such that the stairs were nearly level. The inmates, the hound, and the warden moved far enough along the steps to be out of the rain. Wink and Nikita crawled in shortly after.
"Why'd you help us, Warden?" Lil asked, once she'd recovered enough to do so. "And I never would have figured you to be a head-butt man."
"I've said many times, I am not an executioner. You've done an adequate job of that yourself."
"We're not sunk yet, Warden. We don't want to kill no one that didn't try to kill us," Lil said.
"Nor do I. Which is why I suggest you do not attempt to escape. Ms. Graus is manacled to me. If any of you attempt to do anything foolish, I will be forced to take regrettable action."
Lil ignored the threat and turned to Nita. "That arm of yours all right? You need to rest it?"
"It will be sore tomorrow, but I'm well enough," Nita said.
"You figure you and me can get this thing sorted so it don't tear itself up before it touches down?"
"I've never landed a prison before, but in theory we could release the balloon on the opposite side. We'll descend a bit faster, but we'll level out, which should take some of the stress off."
"A theory that will not be tested, as I'm afraid you girls won't be going anywhere. You've both lost your weapons, and you are my prisoners. As far as I'm concerned, you've made your bed, and it is my job to see to it you sleep in it."
"That don't make much sense, Warden. You make your bed after you sleep in it, not before."
Outside the stairwell, the drum of rain on the planks was joined by the hum of engines.
Lil smiled. "And that sound means it isn't bedtime, regardless."
She paced forward and stuck her head out in time to see the _Wind Breaker_ drift over the pitched deck of the prison, nestling itself down between the envelopes. A rope ladder hit the deck, and not two seconds later Coop touched down. A rope was fastened around his waist, the slack held in one hand.
"Coop!" she cried. "Over here!"
"Lil!" he called back.
Like a mountaineer, he fed out the slack and worked his way down the sloped deck, stepping toward the stairwell.
"Lil, where's Nita! I don't know how long the cap'n can keep the ship close enough to this floating death trap."
"She's right here, brother!" she proclaimed, tackling him with a hug when he was finally near enough.
"Dang it, you two! You know how worried you had us?" he said, throwing an arm around her and squeezing her tight. At the sound of his voice, Nikita climbed his leg and snuggled between him and Lil, taking her rightful place in his jacket. "Did they hurt you girls?"
He turned, for the first time noticing both Linn and Anthus, as well as the manacle tying Nita to the former. This was particularly impressive considering the massive hound had been growling viciously since his arrival and would have attacked if not for the cautioning hand of Linn.
"You want I should shoot this fugger?" he growled.
"Nah, Coop. He's all right. Figures we'd find the only decent fug folk in the prison. Come on. We've got to get Nita loose from him and up to the _Wind Breaker_. Then we've got to set this thing down."
"He gonna try to stop us? Because I ain't got no problem shooting a fugger, but the dog don't know no better."
Nita drummed out a message against the waterlogged wood with her free hand. Wink skittered across the walls of the stairwell.
"It is my purpose to keep order. I will not see you killed, but all the same I will not see you freed," Warden Linn said.
There was the quiet jingle of chain.
"So that mean you're going to stop us, because I like I said, I haven't got much time to waste here," Coop said.
"The women are my prisoners, and they shall remain. But you, sir, are trespassing. I offer you one opportunity to leave this place."
"Not without the girls," Coop said.
"I respect that. But it leaves me with no recourse. Anthus," Linn said calmly. "Attack."
The hound lunged, and Coop raised his rifle, but the monster stopped short as its chain went taut. Linn turned down the stairwell to see that somehow the loop of his leash had been thrown over the end of the handrail. Without a running start, the hound could not muster the strength to tear the wood free, and it was far too intent on attempting to tear Coop's throat out to allow Linn to free it. Wink dashed back to the others, a look of proud achievement on his face.
"You reckon you can pick this manacle, Coop?" Lil asked.
"I reckon I got just the tool for it."
He reached forward and grasped Nita's wrist, then yanked it aside, pulling Linn off balance. With the chain taut, he put the muzzle of the rifle to the portion nearest to Linn's wrist and pulled the trigger.
His rifle's report was deafening, but it did its work, albeit messily. When the smoke was swept away by the whipping wind, the chain had been shattered and a large chunk of the nearest stair had been gouged away. The fragments of wood and chain took their toll on all in attendance, speckling and scraping the _Wind Breaker_ crew and the hound, but taking their biggest toll on the warden. His arm and hand were bloodied horribly.
"So long, Warden," Lil said, her voice raised over both the wind and the ringing in her own ears. "You trying to sic your dog on my brother makes me not feel so bad about all this."
The _Wind Breaker_ crew made their way to the rope ladder when it was once again brought into range. With a roar of engines, the captain lifted them up and away, finally reunited with their ship and crew.
# Epilogue
Landing a prison turned out to be a rather challenging proposition. Balancing the support balloons by freeing the opposite one was indeed enough to bring the facility back to roughly level, but that was only the start. The crew dropped mooring ropes down and secured them to the deck, using the _Wind Breaker_ as a woefully underpowered tug to keep the facility at least moderately stable while a few carefully placed rifle shots produced enough leaks in the remaining balloons to bring the place down completely.
Touching down was less than graceful. The prison skidded for half a mile and left most of its bottom two levels scattered across that distance, proving that keeping everyone away from the lower floors had been a wise decision. When it finally settled, the _Wind Breaker_ crew cut the rest of the balloons free and made their way down into the facility to see about the inmates and guards.
Between the uprising and the landing, blood had been shed. Most of the inmates were shaken up by the landing, with every last one of them sporting bumps and bruises, and in the most severe cases a few broken bones. The only lives lost were those lost during the battle for the surface. Gunner, Coop, and Lil secured the facility while Butch saw to Nita's arm and the more problematic of the fragment wounds. Then Butch entered the teetering prison to treat the injuries.
"Here we are! Knew they'd still have our stuff," Lil said after kicking open one of the supply room doors on the second level. "They got your outfit and mine. A good thing, too. These are my best work britches."
Nita knelt and picked up her goggles, slipping them onto her head. "I wouldn't want to have to explain to my brother how I lost the goggles he accessorized for me."
"They sure did hide these good. Glad we had to pick this place clean to fix up the _Wind Breaker_ or we might never have found them," Lil said.
"Lil? Nita? You in here?" called Kent from down the hall.
"Yep, we're in here. Just getting our things," Lil said.
"Your captain wants you outside. We're done moving everyone to the surface."
"Sure thing. We'll be down shortly," Nita said.
They finished reclaiming their personal effects, and at Lil's prodding found a dark corner to get changed into their proper clothes, then navigated the wrecked interior to the makeshift gangplank they'd rigged to the third floor.
The prison had set down in a marshy field not far from the remnants of what had been a town prior to the arrival of the fug. This one hadn't been repurposed by the fug folk and thus was almost perfectly intact, save for the wear and tear of the elements without residents to perform upkeep.
While the injuries were being treated, the storm had died down to a light drizzle, and now there was only the scattered patter of rain. The inmates were gathered around the captain, Blanche, and the grunts. The latter three had become something of the unofficial spokespeople for the group. To the side were the remaining guards, each outfitted with a set of shackles—after first being searched for spare keys. Both Linn and Blanc were among them. Linn's hand had been heavily bandaged, but Butch seemed to have treated it well enough for recovery to be genuinely possible. Anthus was by their side, outfitted with a makeshift muzzle.
"Nita here got a message out to us saying you folks were different from what we've come to expect from your kind. Suppose I shouldn't be surprised to find she was right. Does my heart good to know there's a few of you down here that feel just about the same as we do about how things are being run," Captain Mack said. "There ain't room on the _Wind Breaker_ for the lot of you to hitch a ride, and I don't think we could afford to stay down here that long besides, so I reckon your first order of business with all this fresh new freedom you got is to figure out where you're going to go and how."
"I know where we are, roughly. About... a hundred miles up that way there's a mine. Bunch of grunts like us'll be working there. I guarantee I'll know a few of those guys, one way or another. There's always a few people in a mine like that who'll be looking for a way to get even with the folks in charge. Shouldn't be hard to get an ore barge down here in a day or two to pick up the inmates."
"You reckon you can get to the mine on the steam cart?"
"My first job was operating one of those," Donald said, nodding.
"I suppose the rest of us can spend a night or two in this ghost town until then," Blanche said.
"And what'll you do with the guards?"
"Just leave 'em here. We're not so far from the old site of the prison that a search party won't find them eventually. Maybe if they're nice, we'll even set up a flare or something for after we're gone," Kent said.
"That suit the rest of you?" the captain said.
There was an unenthusiastic but affirmative murmur from the rest of the inmates.
"And, Captain West, none of us are going to forget what you did here. One of these days, you'll hear from one of us, I promise. You've got friends in the fug now," Kent said.
"Lord knows we could use them," the captain said.
Donald, Kent, Blanche, and the captain exchanged hearty handshakes.
"So long, grunts," Lil said, giving the two of them each a hug and a slap on the back. "Meeting you two was the best part of being locked up." She looked to Blanche. "You, I could take or leave."
"The feeling is mutual," she replied.
Lil twisted her head and stepped to the side to find a small, furry form clinging to Blanche's side.
"What've you got there?" Lil asked.
"This is inspector 34097. Skykeep's inspector," Blanche said.
"These little critters sure do know how to survive the worst, don't they?" Lil said. "You better take good care of her."
"Him, actually."
"All the same, take good care. I'm really getting a soft spot for those rascals."
A few more good-byes were exchanged before the captain finally signaled for Lil and Nita to board the _Wind Breaker_.
"Get on in, ladies. Once the cart's unhitched, we'll be on our way," the captain said.
Nita looked to Warden Linn. He seemed smaller somehow, with his hat missing and his suit torn. Nonetheless, he stood poised and with dignity.
"Just one last thing, Captain," Nita said.
She touched Lil on the shoulder and coaxed her toward the warden.
"Warden, I want to say that I am genuinely, deeply sorry that it turned out this way. You are an honorable man, and—"
"Ms. Graus, do not apologize to me. We had opposing goals. I was to keep you caged, you were to rejoin your people. You, Ms. Cooper, and your crew bested me and my men. It is the way of things. If we cross paths again, I will be better prepared, and perhaps things will end differently."
"Don't bet on it," Lil said. "Oh, and Blanc?"
She gave the assistant warden a vicious punch to the arm.
"That was for hitting me with your stick."
Their affairs now in order, the ladies returned to the ship.
In deference to the ordeal the girls had been through, Gunner and Coop had done the requisite patching of the envelope. Lil and Nita were thus free to go directly to the galley after a short stop in the gig bay to fetch Nita's book of letters and a box from her things. While they wouldn't be able to remove their masks and eat until they were out of the fug, they wanted to be ready to eat their first proper meal in more than a week the very instant the fug drained away. At the moment, Butch was fetching some supplies in the storeroom, leaving Lil and Nita alone. They sat at one of the tables, dreaming of the meal to come.
"I can't _wait_ to get my hands on a big plate of Butch's biscuits and gravy. Dreaming of them things was just about the only thing that got me through my time in the box sometimes," Lil said.
"I don't care what we get, as long as it is warm and fresh," Nita said.
"You said it," Lil said. She looked to Nita. "You know something, Nita... I... I don't know if I would've made it through this if it was anyone else in there with me."
"You would have found your way out. Or we would have found you."
"No, that's not what I mean. You... look, we're all a crew. All us are like family. 'Cept Coop. He really _is_ family. But you... aw, I ain't good with words. I just feel like you and me... we're good together, you know. I'd've fallen to pieces if you weren't there. I feel like... you're... you and me... aw, am I making _any_ sense at all?"
"Perfect sense, Lil. I couldn't have said it better myself," Nita said, putting an arm over her shoulder.
"Shame we never got a chance to do that night on the town like I was planning."
"There's plenty of time for that. Maybe we'll even be able to do it in Caldera. Father has been working hard to earn you all safe harbor there." She took her hand from Lil's shoulder and flipped the book open. "I didn't get a chance to read her final letter. Perhaps it already happened."
As she was scanning the page, Coop walked in.
"Here you two are. Figured you'd be looking for something to eat," Coop said.
He sat beside Lil and pulled her close. "It's going to be a long while before I feel like I can let you out of my sight again, Chastity."
"Aw, you knew I'd be fine. And I knew you'd come get me," Lil said. "What's that you got squirming in your coat there?"
"Oh. That's Nikita. She ain't been out from under there. Little critter's my buddy I guess."
"And here I remember you being neck and neck with Gunner when it came to who hated Wink more. Now you got an inspector all your own. Don't that beat all."
"At least she's a good one."
"If that's Nikita," Nita said, pulling open the box she'd brought, "then this is for her."
She held out a macaroon, reaching across Lil. Coop leaned back and tugged his jacket open. Nikita pulled slightly away, then sniffed at the treat. Finally she snatched it, rattling a quick thank-you on the table before tugging the jacket shut again to munch at it.
"Oh, speaking of gifts, Nita, might not be the time for it, but right before what happened happened, I picked something up for you," he said, reaching into his pocket.
He pulled out the music box he'd purchased and set it down beside her book. It was a bit dented, but otherwise intact.
"You got this for me?" Nita said. She opened the cover, and an intricate ballerina did a graceful turn to a simple little tune. "I was thinking of buying one of these! How did you know?"
"Oh, I just figured it was pretty and such. And you're pretty and such. It was pretty near the only thing you might like that we got."
"That's very thoughtful, Coop. Thank you."
"I was gonna write you a poem too, but then what happened happened and it got so I was too busy thinking about what I'd do to whoever did whatever got done to you."
"I'm sure it would've been a real nice poem, Coop," Lil snorted.
"A poem?" Nita said. "You're a poet?"
"Well, no, but I reckon it can't be that hard. If I still get one writ, you reckon you'd like it?"
"I'm sure I'll love it."
"Well, maybe I'll go do some thinking on it right now," Coop said.
He stood, tousled Lil's hair, and marched for the door.
"Oh, Coop?" Nita called.
He turned.
"Was it you who flattened a six foot length of pipe in the hall out there?"
"Yep!" he said, pride in his expression. "Fixed it all by myself."
"We'll have to have a word about the proper use of bypass and cutoff valves."
"Sure thing, Nita. And I'll have that poem for you soon as I finish it." He stepped quickly into the hall.
"Don't mind him none," Lil said. "He's not any better with his words than I am. Figures he'd be sweet on you by now."
A familiar patter of little feet drew their eyes to the door. Wink scurried in and climbed up on the table.
"There's our little hero. What's the matter, did you see Nikita eating a macaroon and get jealous?"
Nikita got good food, Wink tapped.
Nita took the lid from the box and pushed it forward.
"And so will you. All yours. And I'll make sure to get a box for you and Nikita each when we get back to Caldera."
Wink didn't need to be told twice. He scrambled into the box and grabbed a macaroon in each cunning little hand, then crawled down between the girls to crunch away eagerly.
"Won't be long, either. Cap'n said we're headed right to Caldera once we shove off," Lil said. "Otherwise we might miss the low tide."
"In that case, I should start writing my letter. Maybe you can help me. It's going to be a long one," Nita said. She picked up a pen.
Dear Mother, she began. Things have been exciting since I last wrote. I know that you worry about me and the trouble I'll get into out here, and what you'll read below will no doubt confirm some of your fears. But as you learn about what happened, please keep this in mind. I am safe. I made it through with the help of my crew, and with the help of a very good friend...
# From The Author
Thank you for reading the second book in my _Free-Wrench_ series. I hope you enjoyed the story! Steampunk has been a great deal of fun for me to write, and _Free-Wrench_ has the distinction of being a series written entirely as NaNoWriMo novels! If you enjoy my writing, please consider taking the time to sign up for my newsletter. It is the best way to be certain you'll find out about new books and projects from me as soon as they become available. Thanks for reading!
Discover other titles by Joseph R. Lallo:
The Book of Deacon Trilogy:
Book 1: _The Book of Deacon_
Book 2: _The Great Convergence_
Book 3: _The Battle of Verril_
Other stories in the same setting:
Jade
The Rise of the Red Shadow
Science Fiction Titles:
Bypass Gemini
Unstable Prototypes
Artificial Evolution
NaNoWriMo Projects:
The Other Eight
Free-Wrench
Skykeep
# Connect with Joseph R. Lallo
Website: http://www.bookofdeacon.com
Twitter: @jrlallo
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/pages/The-Book-of-Deacon/239647549418500
Tumblr: http://jrlallo.tumblr.com/
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# From Fascism to Populism in History
# From Fascism to Populism in History
Federico Finchelstein
UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS
University of California Press, one of the most distinguished university presses in the United States, enriches lives around the world by advancing scholarship in the humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences. Its activities are supported by the UC Press Foundation and by philanthropic contributions from individuals and institutions. For more information, visit www.ucpress.edu.
University of California Press
Oakland, California
© 2017 by Federico Finchelstein
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Finchelstein, Federico, 1975– author.
Title: From fascism to populism in history / Federico Finchelstein.
Description: Oakland, California : University of California Press, [2017] | Includes bibliographical references and index. |
Identifiers: LCCN 2017006846 (print) | LCCN 2017014268 (ebook) | ISBN 9780520968042 (Epub) | ISBN 9780520295193 (cloth : alk. paper)
Subjects: LCSH: Fascism. | Populism.
Classification: LCC JC481 (ebook) | LCC JC481 .f518 2017 (print) | DDC 320.53/3—dc23
LC record available at <https://lccn.loc.gov/2017006846>
Manufactured in the United States of America
25 24 23 22 21 20 19 18 17
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
A Gabi, Luli, y Laura
# CONTENTS
Prologue
Introduction: Thinking Fascism and Populism in Terms of the Past
1. What Is Fascism in History?
2. What Is Populism in History?
3. Populism between Democracy and Dictatorship
Epilogue: Populism Recharged
Acknowledgments
Notes
Index
# PROLOGUE
It is known that personal identity resides in memory, and the annulment of that faculty is known to result in idiocy.
Jorge Luis Borges, History of Eternity (1936)
Some months before Donald Trump became the president of the United States, I found myself in Dresden surrounded by a mix of German neo-Nazi and xenophobic populist demonstrators. I had come to the city with my family to lead a seminar on fascism and populism at the city's university. As fate would have it, we arrived on Monday, the day that the Patriotic Europeans against the Islamization of the West (Pegida) held its weekly demonstration. Racist flags and angry faces encircled us. Literally, one of the most extreme examples of current populism was now standing between the hotel and us. At this point, my eldest daughter, who was eight years old at the time, asked "Are these the Nazis that killed Anne Frank?" We had visited the Anne Frank Museum in Amsterdam the previous year, and she had been quite affected by her story. No, I answered, they are not her killers, but these neo-Nazis are happy she was killed. The identification of extreme right neo-fascists and populists with past movements has reformulated the dictatorial legacy of fascism for different democratic times and is central to understanding the connections between the past and the present. With soothing words, and in Spanish, I assured my daughters, Gabriela and Lucia, that nothing was going to happen to us because in a democracy there are limits to what violent partisans can do. I trusted that these xenophobes would not dare to move openly from their populist rhetorical demonization to fascist physical aggression. But as the history of populism shows, they would nonetheless undermine tolerance and eventually democracy. My daughters were born in New York, and the conditions would be ok there too. Was I right? Having lived under a military dictatorship in Argentina when I was their age, I remember that it would have been too dangerous to pose similar questions to my parents in public. And certainly my family and I would not have been able to walk and talk freely in the midst of military profascist demonstrations. As a young boy, I had been interested in the history of the Holocaust and in Hitler's persecution of the Jews, but the connection between those in power and fascism was not a topic that a child from a middle-class Jewish family openly talked about in Argentina. Too many people had been "disappeared." But like many other citizens, I am asking them now, when populists occupy the global stage.
The first modern populist regime was born in Argentina, not the United States, but lately the world's greatest power is the one brandishing its populist might to the rest of the globe. This is something many Americans, including most social scientists, had previously deemed impossible. Having lived in the United States since 2001, I have often been told that neither populism nor fascism could ever set foot north of the Rio Grande. But especially now that populism has taken hold in the United States, the global histories of fascism and populism offer key lessons that we should bear in mind as we enter a new era of populism in America and beyond.
If we return populism to its global history, the apparently unexpected can be better understood. This book examines the historical connections between fascism and those in power in the context of populist democracies.
Like other historians who have dedicated their academic lives to the study of fascism and populism, I have always thought studying the past could illuminate the present, and for the last two decades, my work has looked backward to understand the problematic relationships among fascism, populism, violence, and politics. Now the question of fascism and power clearly belongs to the present.
Crisis, xenophobia, and populism characterize our new century. But these traits are not new nor were they simply reborn in our present. To understand the apparent rebirth of populism is, in fact, to comprehend the history of its adoption and reformulation over time. This history starts with fascism and continues with populism in power. If this century has not left behind the history of violence, fascism, and genocide that was so central to the twentieth century, dictatorship, and especially fascistic dictatorships, has nonetheless increasingly lost legitimacy as a form of government. Inflated metaphors of Munich and Weimar aside, we are not witnessing the return of fascism as it existed before. The past is never the present. Yet the current expressions of neofascism and populism have important histories behind them, and the passage from fascism to populism over time has shaped our present. This book argues not only that contextual public and political uses of fascism and populism are key to understanding them but also that studying how these histories have been conceived and interpreted will refresh our awareness and increase our understanding of the current political threats to democracy and equality. Contexts and concepts are key.
This book counters the idea that past and present-day experiences of fascism and populism can be reduced to particular national or regional conditions. It argues against dominant American and Eurocentric views. Especially in light of the historical turning point of Trump's populist victory, tales of American democratic exceptionalism have finally been put to rest. This new age of American populism shows clearly that the United States is like the rest of the world. Similar arguments can be made for French or German democratic culture. We now have no excuse to allow geopolitical narcissism to stand against historical interpretation, especially when analyzing ideologies that cross borders and oceans and even influence each other.
I present a historical take on populism and fascism but also offer a view from the south. In other words, I ask what happens to the center when we think about it from the margins. Neither populism nor fascism is exclusively European, American, or Latin American. Populism is as American as it is Argentine. By the same token, fascism also took hold in Germany and in India. In the United States and in Europe, too many scholars explain the past and present of fascism and populism by narrowly emphasizing the American or European dimensions of what is in fact a global and transnational phenomenon. Decentering the history of fascism and populism does not mean adopting a single alternative explanation for their origins. All histories are important.
What is fascism and what is populism? These questions were first asked by some fascists, antifascists, populists, and antipopulists to validate, criticize, or distance themselves from the perceived common features associated with the terms. Their supporters, and some of their staunchest critics, have repeated them ever since. Then and now, actors and interpreters alike have agreed that both terms have been counterposed against liberalism; that both involve a moral condemnation of the liberal democratic order of things; and that both represent a mass response advanced by strong leaders in the name of the people, and against elites and politics as usual. But beyond these affinities, and moving past ideal types and the limits of generic interpretations, how have fascism and populism been connected historically and theoretically, and how should we address their significant differences? This book provides historical answers to these questions. While fascism and populism are at the center of political discussions, and are often conflated, they actually represent alternative political and historical trajectories. At the same time, fascism and populism are genealogically connected. They belong to the same history.
Modern populism was born out of fascism. In the same way that fascist mass politics moved popular engagements beyond democratic premodern agrarian forms of populism such as the Russian Narodniki or the American People's Party, and was also radically different from protopopulist formations such as Yrigoyenismo in Argentina or Battlismo in Uruguay, the first modern populist regimes in postwar Latin America moved away from fascism while keeping key antidemocratic features that were not as predominant in prepopulist and protopopulist movements before World War II.
A new populist modernity was born with the defeat of fascism. After the war, populism reformulated the legacies of the "anti-Enlightenment" for the Cold War era and for the first time in history became complete, that is, it achieved power. By 1945, populism had come to represent a continuation of fascism but also a renunciation of some of its defining dictatorial dimensions. Fascism put forward a violent totalitarian order that led to radical forms of political violence and genocide. In contrast, and as a result of the defeat of fascism, populism attempted to reform and retune the fascist legacy to a democratic key. After the war, populism was an outcome of the civilizational effect of fascism. The rise and fall of fascisms affected not only those like General Juan Perón in Argentina that have been close to the fascists but also many authoritarian fellow travelers such as Getulio Vargas in Brazil, or many members of the American populist right that had not experienced or agreed full heartedly with fascism in the first place. In order to reach power, postwar populism renounced its interwar, pro-dictatorial foundations but did not leave fascism entirely behind. It occupied the place of fascism as it became a new "third way" between liberalism and communism. However, unlike fascism's supporters, its proponents wanted populism to be a democratic choice. This populist intention to create a new political tradition that could rule the nation but was different from fascism, and its eventual success in doing so, explains the complex historical nature of postwar populism as a varied set of authoritarian experiments in democracy. To be sure, modern populism incorporated elements from other traditions, but the fascist origins and effects of populism after the defeat of Hitler and Mussolini shaped its postfascist constitutive tension between democracy and dictatorship.
In history, populism can be a reactionary force leading society into a more authoritarian mode, but in its progressive variants, it can also start, or advance, democratization in a situation of inequality while also undermining the rights or legitimacy of political minorities to its right and to its left. Especially in terms of the left, and particularly in the context of left populist's claims to represent the left as a whole, one should not meld together mass citizen participation and popular egalitarian social and political demands with a populist situation. Pundits often ahistorically confuse social democracy, progressive politics, and populism. One of the objectives of the book is to be clear in situating populism historically, and to be equally focused on the ethico-political need to make a distinction between populism and other democratic and emancipatory forms that are too often dismissed as populist. If populism uses xenophobia to turn society backward, as it often does in its right-wing versions, in its leftist formations populism turns society's attention to unequal social and economic conditions. More recently this has meant questioning even the dogmas of neoliberal austerity measures and the supposed neutrality of technocratic business-oriented solutions.
In all cases, populism speaks in the name of a single people, and it does so in the name of democracy. But democracy is defined in narrow terms as the expression of the desires of the populist leaders. Populism cannot be simplistically defined by its claim to exclusively represent the entire people against the elites. It is not only that populists want to act in the name of all the people, they also believe that their leader is the people and should be a surrogate for the citizens in making all decisions. The global histories of populism show that it has generally had a constitutive beginning when the leader becomes the people. But though the leader in theory personifies the people, in practice he or she represents only his or her followers (and voters), which populists conceive as the expression of an entire people. The leader replaces the people, becoming their voice. In other words, the voice of the people can only be expressed through the mouth of the leader. It is in the persona of the leader that the nation and the people can finally recognize themselves and participate in politics. In fact, without a conception of the charismatic and messianic leader, populism is an incomplete historical form. Understanding populism without its authoritarian notion of leadership and its aim of reaching power through electoral means, therefore, is difficult. These absolute claims on people and leadership encapsulate not only the populist understanding of how populists in the opposition and campaign modes should severely question the state of a democracy but also how that democracy should be ruled when populists reach power. Ultimately, and in practice, populism replaces representation with the transfer of authority to the leader. From left to right, this constitutes the ideology of populism, which is the need for a more authoritarian form of democracy. In other words, when a populist wins the will of the circumstantial electoral majority, its will is conflated with the desires of the leader, who acts in the name of the "real" people.
As Andrew Arato, a leading scholar of political and social theory, explains, in populism, the part becomes the whole. That is, a fictional united people is invented to be led and incarnated by authoritarian leaders. "The people," in fact, is a concept that accounts for many diverse peoples living in a nation. Its translation into a single united people embodied in a leader is a key historical recurrence in populism. This historical process, by which the people created from a section of the citizens first become One, then are appropriated by a movement, and finally are incarnated in the authoritarian leadership of a constructed subject (the united and undifferentiated people) that does not actually exist, has clear undemocratic effects. But for the populists, it is the enemy that is against democracy, not them. From the Argentine populist left to the populists on the French and German extreme right, populists have argued that they are defending the people from tyranny and dictatorship. For populists, dictatorship is viewed not so much as a past form of government but as a metaphor for the enemy in the present. This allows them to equate democracy with populism while neatly associating its opposite (tyranny or dictatorship) with the political foe, be it anti-Peronism in Argentina, imperialism in Venezuela, or the European Union in France and Germany. To be sure, all of these actors have, or have had, authoritarian dimensions, but they are not part of the populist caricaturization of the political enemy. Populists are not greatly concerned with the subtleties of empirical observation but instead direct their attention toward reworking, even reinventing, reality in accordance with their varied ideological imperatives. Living inside the populist bubble allows leaders, regimes, and followers to present everything they dislike as lies of the media and as internal and external conspiracies against the people, the leader, and the nation. Here populism relates directly to fascism's classic refusal to determine the truth empirically.
A distinction between populism and liberalism, as well as between populism and socialism, is that liberalism and socialism must empirically confront their failures, which they typically, though not always, do. Populists think differently. Everyone opposing them is turned into a tyrannical entity. In this context, democracy and dictatorship are just designations for the self and the other. They become images of the populist vision and are no longer categories of political analysis. This transformation of concepts into images is a key dimension of populism's take on a similar fascist trait, long ago noted by Walter Benjamin—namely, the aestheticization of politics. This emphasis on politics as spectacle accompanies populism whenever it shifts from an opposition movement to a regime.
If important, even essential, differences exist between the manifold populisms of the left and the right, populism generally presents a stark contrast when it moves from the opposition to take on the quite different role of the regime. In opposition, populism appears as a protest movement and makes clear the limits that governing elites have in representing important segments of society, but it also claims that it represents society as a whole. As a regime, populism sees no limits on its claims to popular sovereignty, identifying the votes of electoral majorities who support the regime with the structural, transcendental desires of the people and the nation. As the opposition, populism often contributes to an understanding of the frustrations but also to the outing of the long-held prejudices of large elements of the population. As a regime, populism claims the full representation of an entire people and often translates this into the idea of full delegation of power to the leader. In this context, the leader claims to know what the people truly want better than they do.
Unlike fascists, populists most often play the democratic game and will eventually cede power after losing an election. That's because populism, though similar to fascism in conflating itself with the nation and the people, links these totalizing claims of popular national representation to electoral decisions. In other words, populism projects a plebiscitary understanding of politics and rejects the fascist form of dictatorship.
Populism is an authoritarian form of democracy. Defined historically, it thrives in contexts of real or imagined political crises, wherein populism offers itself as antipolitics. It claims to do the work of politics while keeping itself free from the political process. Democracy in this sense simultaneously increases the political participation of real or imagined majorities while it excludes, and limits the rights of, political, sexual, ethnic, and religious minorities. As noted above, populism conceives the people as One—namely, as a single entity consisting of leader, followers, and nation. This trinity of popular sovereignty is rooted in fascism but is confirmed by votes. Populism stands against liberalism, but for electoral politics. Therefore, we can better understand populism if we think of it as an original historical reformulation of fascism that first came to power after 1945. Populism's homogenizing view of the people conceives of political opponents as the antipeople. Opponents become enemies: nemeses who, consciously or unconsciously, stand for the oligarchical elites and for a variety of illegitimate outsiders. Populism defends an illuminated nationalist leader who speaks and decides for the people. It downplays the separation of powers, the independence and legitimacy of a free press, and the rule of law. In populism, democracy is challenged but not destroyed.
As I finish this book, a new populism has taken the world's reins. Once again, the electoral success of a narcissistic leader has come with offending, and downplaying the value of, others. Intolerance and discrimination have opened the way for a definition of the people that relies simultaneously on inclusion and exclusion. As in the past, this new, recharged populism challenges democracy from within, but history teaches us that democratic institutions and a strong civil society can forcefully challenge populists in power. In short, we can learn from historical instances of resistance.
When modern populism emerged, the Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges stated that, having been thrown out of Berlin, fascism had migrated to Buenos Aires. The regimes of Germany and Argentina advanced oppression, servitude, and cruelty, but it was even "more abominable that they promote[d] idiocy." Even if he problematically conflated fascism (a dictatorship) and populism (an authoritarian electoral form of democracy), Borges acutely revealed why and how they both endorsed stupidity and the absence of historical thinking. They ignored lived experiences and affirmed crass mythologies. If in his elitism he was not able to recognize why the new populism was an inclusive choice for people who felt unrepresented, Borges still clearly noted its defining "sad" monotony. Diversity was replaced with imperatives and symbols. In this early analysis of populists in history, Borges stressed how their leaders turned politics into lies. Reality became melodrama. They twisted everything into fictions "which can't be believed and were believed." Like Borges, we need to remember that fascism and populism must be faced with empirical truths, or, as he put it, we need to distinguish between "legend and reality." In times like this, the past reminds us that fascism and populism are themselves subject to the forces of history.
New York, May 2, 2017
# Introduction
## Thinking Fascism and Populism in Terms of the Past
Representing a historian's inquiry into how and why fascism morphed into populism in history, this book describes the dictatorial genealogies of modern populism. It also stresses the significant differences between populism as a form of democracy and fascism as a form of dictatorship. It rethinks the conceptual and historical experiences of fascism and populism by assessing their elective ideological affinities and substantial political differences in history and theory. A historical approach means not subordinating lived experiences to models or ideal types but rather stressing how the actors saw themselves in contexts that were both national and transnational. It means stressing varied contingencies and manifold sources. History combines evidence with interpretation. Ideal types ignore chronology and the centrality of historical processes. Historical knowledge requires accounting for how the past is experienced and explained through narratives of continuities and change over time.
Against an idea of populism as an exclusively European or American phenomenon, I propose a global reading of its historical itineraries. Disputing generic theoretical definitions that reduce populism to a single sentence, I stress the need to return populism to history. Distinctive, and even opposed, forms of left- and right-wing populism crisscross the world, and I agree with historians like Eric Hobsbawm that left and right forms of populism cannot be conflated simply because they are often antithetical. While populists on the left present those who are opposed to their political views as enemies of the people, populists on the right connect this populist intolerance of alternative political views with a conception of the people formed on the basis of ethnicity and country of origin. In short, right-wing populists are xenophobic.
Emphasizing the populist style rather than its contents, most historians have rejected the most generic, transhistorical dimensions of the many theories of populism that minimize historical and ideological differences. By questioning definitions of populism as either exclusively left or right, I stress how populism has historically presented a range of possibilities, from Hugo Chávez to Donald Trump, maintaining essential social and political distinctions between left and right but without losing its key illiberal attributes in its varied historical manifestations. And against the commonplace idea of populism as a new political experience without a deep history—namely, a new formation that was born out of the turn-of-the-century fall of Communism—put forward a historical analysis of populism as equally rooted in the three other global moments of the past century: the two world wars and the Cold War.
From the European right to the United States, populism, xenophobia, racism, narcissistic leaders, nationalism, and antipolitics occupy the center of politics. Should we brace ourselves for an ideological storm similar to the one fascism precipitated when it first appeared a little less than one hundred years ago? Some actors and analysts of world politics believe so, and the recent surge of racist populist politics in the United States, Austria, France, Germany, and many other places around the globe seems to confirm it. But few agree on what fascism and populism actually are, and scholars of fascism and populism have often been reticent about entering the public discussion about the uses of the terms. By absenting themselves from public debates, they have left the uses of fascism and populism basically devoid of historical interpretation. Whereas fascism and populism seem to be all over the place, many current actors and interpreters are not aware of their actual histories.
## THE USES OF FASCISM AND POPULISM
Fascism, like populism, is often used to denote absolute evil, bad government, authoritarian leadership, and racism. These uses of the terms take away their historical meanings. The problematic belief that history merely repeats itself has traveled the Global North and the Global South, from Moscow to Washington, and from Ankara to Caracas. After the Russian annexation of Crimea in 2014, and the connected Ukrainian crisis, Russian officials referred to the government in Ukraine as the outcome of a fascist coup. Hillary Clinton, secretary of state at the time, described Russian president Vladimir Putin's actions with respect to Ukraine as something like "what Hitler did back in the '30s." Far from the Black Sea, the Venezuelan president, Nicolás Maduro, that same year used the threat of fascism to justify his imprisonment of an opposition leader. The same problematic claims were, and are, made by those opposed to Latin American experiments with populism. Similar epithets are commonly used for the Middle East and Africa. In 2017, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan described Europe as "fascist and cruel." Almost identical characterizations of both government and opposition as fascist crisscross the Global South and North from Argentina to the United States, where Donald Trump faced this very serious accusation during his successful 2015–16 presidential campaign and where he himself as President-elect accused intelligence agencies of having engaged in Nazi practices against him. Trump symptomatically asked, "Are we living in Nazi Germany?"
Like the term fascism, the term populism has been abused equally as a condensation of extremes from right to left. It has been inflated or conflated with anything that stands against liberal democracy. For example, politicians like Mexican president Enrique Peña Nieto or the former British prime minister Tony Blair (notably, after the British "Brexit" of 2016) charged that populism was standing against the neoliberal status quo that they so passionately represented. In fact, this tendency to paint populism as an unproblematized negative take on democracy reveals a simplistic, and often self-serving, identification of democracy with neoliberalism. These positions replicate the us versus them totalizing views of populism. Moreover, these views void democracy of any emancipatory potential. In this context, when confronted with its neoliberal enemies, sectors of society (from right to left) that feel they have been left aside by technocratic elites find populism even more appealing. Populism and neoliberalism can be seen as equally undermining democratic diversity and equality, but neither is a form of fascism.
Populism and neoliberalism do not enable meaningful political decision making by citizens. Nonetheless, they are part of the democratic spectrum, and especially after 1989 they have been causally connected and have often succeeded each another. On a global scale, populism is not a pathology of democracy but a political form that thrives in democracies that are particularly unequal, that is, in places where the income gap has increased and the legitimacy of democratic representation has decreased. As a response, populism is capable of undermining democracy even more without breaking it, and if and when it does extinguish democracy, it ceases to be populism and becomes something else: dictatorship.
Historically, the populist responses to these contexts (right or left) are distinctive and have been framed within varying national situations and political cultures, but they generally go in the direction of authoritarianism. This is mainly because populism, like fascism before it, understands its own position as the only and true form of political legitimacy. The single truth of populism is that the leader and the nation make up a whole. For populism, the singular will of the majority cannot accept other points of view. In this regard, populism is like fascism in being a response to liberal and socialist explanations of the political. And also like fascism, populism does not recognize a legitimate political place for an opposition that it regards as acting against the desires of the people and that it also accuses of being tyrannical, conspiratorial, and antidemocratic. But this refusal to recognize the opposition's legitimacy does not generally go beyond the logic of discursive demonization. The opponents are turned into public enemies but only rhetorically. If populism moves from this rhetorical enmity to practices of enemy identification and persecution, we could be talking about its transformation into fascism or another form of dictatorial repression. This has happened in the past, for example, in the case of the Peronist Triple A during the beginning of Argentina's Dirty War in the 1970s, and without question it could happen in the future. This morphing of populism back into fascism is always a possibility, but it is very uncommon, and when it does happen, and populism becomes fully antidemocratic, it is no longer populism. While fascism celebrates dictatorship, populism never does so. Fascism idealizes and practices raw forms of political violence that populism rejects in theory and, most often, in practice. Talking about populism and fascism as though they are the same is thus problematic, as the two are significantly different. Populism is a form of authoritarian democracy, while fascism is an ultraviolent dictatorship. The terms are genealogically but usually not conceptually or contextually connected. Properly historicized, populism is not fascism.
Why then are populism and fascism used without reference to their histories? Are we really witnessing the return of fascism, the ism that marked the first half of the twentieth century with steel and blood? Generally, fascism is not approached as a specific historical experience that had very traumatic outcomes but is, rather, considered an insult. Thus, populist parties and leaders that generally represent authoritarian understandings of democracy, but ultimately are not against it, are wrongly equated with fascist dictatorial formations. After 1945, for the first time in its history, populism finally morphed from an ideology and a style of protest movements to a power regime. This was a turning point in its conceptual and practical itineraries, and the historical relevance of this turning point cannot be stressed enough. Likewise, fascism became truly influential only when it transitioned from ideology and movement to regime. In this sense, as the first populist leader in power, Perón played a role similar to the one enacted by the fascist leaders Mussolini and Hitler. When populism became a regime, it finally crystalized as a new and effective political form for ruling the nation. In doing so, populism reformulated fascism, and to that extent, as in the famous case of Argentine Peronism, it became a fully differentiated ism: one that was, and is, rooted in electoral democracy at the same time that it displays a tendency to reject democratic diversity.
## FASCISM RETURNS
Fascism as a term has the uncanny ability to absorb any new event in a way that obscures its meaning and history. We are not far from the time when US president George W. Bush presented Al-Qaeda as an Islamo-fascist entity. Fascism is part of our political vocabulary, but has it really returned from its 1945 grave? Has it returned as populism? Significant differences exist between fascism as discursively invoked and its more bifurcated continuities in the present. As a regime, fascism never returned after the end of World War II, and in fact the absence of fascist regimes defined the second half of the last century. Liberalism and communism united to defeat the other ism of modern politics. Once they defeated fascism, they often fought and competed against each other, creating the Cold War. Modern populism as we know it today emerged in this new context. Many historians agree that the Cold War was in fact very hot in the Global South (from Vietnam and Indonesia to the Guatemalan genocide and the Argentine Dirty War), but it never reached the record global "hotness" levels of the fascist violence that led to the Holocaust and World War II. In any case, after 1945, most actors believed that fascism had been defeated for good. From then on, few antidemocratic politicians, from Juan Perón to Marine Le Pen and Donald Trump, associated themselves with terms such as fascism, but this does not mean they were fully disassociated from fascism in theory and practice. Populism is the key term for understanding the fascist soundings of events and political strategies that reformulated the legacies of fascism for new democratic times.
In the guise of postfascist forms of antiliberal democracy, fascism continued its legacy through various combinations of populism and neofascism. The truth is that, despite the predominance of populism, many neofascist groups remained and continue to exist. Actual neofascist movements that, unlike the populist ones, want to flatly invoke and replicate the fascist legacy are on the rise in Europe. Countries like Greece, with its extreme right-wing movement Golden Dawn, or Norway, where a solo, fascist mass killer, fed by transnational neofascist readings, slaughtered seventy-seven people in 2011, have provided these societies with measured doses of fascist political violence and death that exemplify what neofascism stands for. Sometimes neofascists are fellow travelers of populism. Populists differ from neofascists in their desire to reshape democracy in authoritarian fashion without fully destroying it, but like the neofascists, right-wing Euro-populists identify "the people" with an ethnically conceived national community. In Germany, the Alternative for Germany (AFD), and especially the Patriotic Europeans against the Islamization of the West (Pegida) Movement straddle right-wing populist authoritarianism and the neo-Nazi legacies of German fascism. These populists reduce democracy to the predominance of a majoritarian ethnic group and claim that this type of democracy is being attacked by outsiders. Similarly, populist movements in France and the Netherlands are partly rooted in a xenophobic reclamation of the fascist past, at the same time that they reject it. In Ukraine, the street protests of 2014 were crowded with Ukrainian radical rightists, but this does not mean that fascism is ruling Ukraine or that France or Germany are at risk of witnessing a fascist resurgence. The same pattern goes for the European populism of the right and extreme right as a whole, as well as for North American populism.
## TRUMPISM IN HISTORY
During the 2015–16 US presidential campaign, Donald Trump, and significant sectors of the American right, featured populist forms of racism, especially against Mexican immigrants, and discrimination against religious minorities as key parts of their programs. These forms of populism were also supported by neofascist groups like the Ku Klux Klan and others, but this does not mean that Trumpism was a form of fascism. As in Europe, neofascist fellow travelers supported what in fact was a constellation of right-wing populisms that defined the Trumpist campaign. As a result of the predominance of xenophobic moments in the campaign, including some cases of violence against critics and protesters, a new legitimacy for these views emerged. The extreme right-wing side of Trumpism at the white supremacist "alt-right" website, Breitbart, argued in its famous "A Manifesto for the 60 Percent: The Center-Right Populist-Nationalist Coalition" that the politics of populism stood between national salvation and a new civil war. Only a "strong and far-seeing leadership" could save America from a war from within. Electoral decisions were part of this populist formula, but they were linked to the idea of Trump as representing what the people wanted even before they voted. As the American populists argued, "That's populism in a nutshell, taking the people's side against the power elites who clearly do not have our best interests at heart." They claimed "populism" made "a resurgence in America and indeed in increasingly significant pockets across Europe because it puts our people first, FIRST. That is why it is winning. That is why the elites hate it so much, and it's ultimately the root of why they hate Donald Trump." The former CEO of Breitbart Steve Bannon, who was also one of Trump's closest advisors and the CEO of his campaign, especially stressed the populist nature of the rise of Trump in American history. His alt-right, white supremacist supporters stated that Trump belonged to the tradition of American populism, which they differentiated from fascism.
From a historical perspective, Trump clearly sounded like a fascist, and he bridged the gap between what he represented—namely, a radical extremist populist candidacy—and what fascism has stood for. But he was still inscribed in the postwar authoritarian ways of populism rather than in "classical" fascist politics. Like many other populist leaders, from Juan Perón in Argentina to Silvio Berlusconi in Italy, Trump repeatedly stated that he acted in the name of the people, while he also pushed the limits of democracy. Even though he introduced himself as the "law and order" candidate, he questioned respect for the rule of law and the separation of powers. Trump was especially antidemocratic in his attempts to downplay the autonomy of the justice system. He used race as a political tool to attack the judiciary when he accused an American judge of acting against him because of that judge's Mexican heritage. In the campaign, Paul Ryan, the Republican speaker of the house and the second most powerful Republican politician at the time, characterized Trump's comments about the judge as "the textbook definition" of racism. In turn, Trump resorted to the populist playbook, declaring his candidacy was the unspoken expression of what "the people" wanted: "The people are tired of this political correctness when things are said that are totally fine." Trump saw himself as the unrepressed voice of the people's desires. In turn, he saw his opponent, Hillary Clinton, "as running against all of the American people and all of the American voters." Trump believed he represented the people of the entire country, and Clinton was antithetical to the American people and the nation. Fascist-sounding conspiratorial views abounded in Trump's authoritarian message. He said that Clinton had met "in secret with international banks to plot the destruction of US sovereignty." Having won his own party's primaries, Trump understood that he had received a "mandate from the people," which justified his antagonistic populist style, but he remained far from fascism's dictatorial ways.
The ideas presented in the Trump campaign had clear fascist and racist undertones. As noted historian of fascism Robert Paxton argued, while there are significant differences between the interwar context that gave rise to fascism and the present day, "echoes of fascism" could be heard in Trump's themes in 2015 and 2016, especially in the candidate's concern for national regeneration and fear about decline, as well as in his "style and technique." However, he concluded that Trump was not a fascist. Paxton referenced Trump's xenophobic proposals, which clearly linked the candidate with Hitler and Mussolini, and identified Trump as a protofascist in the making. He represented "a sort of populist quasifascism" that had not yet developed into fascism. If Paxton as a historian used populism as a prefascist stage to historically analyze the fascist soundings of Trumpism, other interpreters of fascism and populism refused to view Trump through the lens of fascism. Stanley Payne, a famous conservative historian of fascism, stressed that Trump was not a fascist but a reactionary. Violence and nationalist revolutionary trends were absent in Trump, who was part of a "right-wing populist movement." Similarly, for Roger Griffin, a renowned historian of fascist studies, "You can be a total xenophobic racist male chauvinist bastard and still not be a fascist." Griffin did not see in Trump the fascism that he identifies with his own theory of fascism: "There has to be a longing for a new order, a new nation, not just a reformed old nation." For Griffin, Trump was not yet fascist: "As long as Trump does not advocate the abolition of America's democratic institutions, and their replacement by some sort of post-liberal new order, he's not technically a fascist."
These scholars did not stress the historical links between fascism and populism. Mostly absorbed with the West, neither significantly considered the transnational dimensions of these phenomena. In other words, their Euro–North American approach to fascism and populism did not meaningfully place Trump in a global context beyond the United States and Europe. At best, global examples acted as mere additions to what was and is for them basically a North Atlantic story. What sounded like echoes of the past were part of the historical explanation of the present. In contrast with these arguments, I would argue that fascism and populism, while linked in history, belong to different contexts and became very different historical global experiences. Fascism and populism are different chapters in the same transnational history of illiberal resistance to modern constitutional democracy. Trumpism is part of that history. From fascism to populism, many things changed in the world, including the fact that fascist regimes were left behind in the dividing waters represented by the allied victories in 1945 and the subsequent Cold War between them. Fascist regimes were part of the past, but populist regimes thrived after the defeat of fascism. While there are important links between fascism and populism, one historical experience cannot be subsumed under the other. Hitler and Mussolini were indeed different from Perón and Trump, but historically meaningful connections exist between Peronism, or American populism, and fascism.
All in all, most of these populist movements and persons distanced themselves from classical fascism, but they nonetheless were often labeled as such. Most historians, myself included, are allergic to these generalizations. These public uses of fascism and populism need to be confronted, not simply denied or ridiculed. Presently, pundits and politicians use fascism to loosely describe not only populism but also authoritarian regimes, international terrorism, or repressive stances by the state, or even street protests by the opposition. This laxity is historically problematic, as such careless uses of fascism demonize populism but don't account for its historical causes. The conflation of fascism and populism often leads to proffering the status quo as the only alternative to populist choices.
In Latin America, for example, these ahistorical uses of populism and fascism often conflate populist leaders (either in the government or the opposition) who aggressively used mass politics with the dictatorial leaders who used criminal means to suppress them. They collapse essential distinctions between the populism of the left and the right, when in fact populism can be distinctively leftist or rightist or an amalgamation of both. They also conflate democratically elected regimes or democratically engaged citizens with military dictatorships that destroy democracy. In conceptual terms, the use of the adjectives fascist and populist is a serious problem. In light of the way the terms fascism and populism have been used and abused, the time has come to place both in their historical contexts. Only then can we assess the movements and situations presently taking place in Latin America, Europe, Africa, the United States, and elsewhere. The present cannot be understood in isolation from its many genealogies, and fascism and racism are clearly among them. Fascism is not only a blurry ghost from the past but also a once-defeated historical ideology that has clear populist and neofascist repercussions today.
Overall, this book provides a contextual reading of primary sources, historiography, and political theory that is highly attentive to how and why fascism often turned into populism. It offers a historical critique of the pathways from fascist to populist ideologies, movements, and regimes. Moving away from the public uses of the terms, this book studies how and why fascism and populism emerged in history.
## FASCISM AND POPULISM IN HISTORY
After Mussolini and the Italian fascists adopted fascism as the name for their antidemocratic revolution, and especially when fascism became a power regime in 1922, the word fascism became a global marker of a renewed anti-Enlightenment, antidemocratic tradition. Going beyond national contexts and restricted Eurocentric theories, I put forward a historical understanding of fascism as a traveling political universe, a radical nationalism affected and, to some extent, constituted by transnational patterns.
In history, fascism was a political ideology that encompassed totalitarianism, state terrorism, imperialism, racism, and, in Germany's case, the most radical genocide of the last century: the Holocaust. Fascism in its many forms did not hesitate to kill its own citizens, as well as its colonial subjects, in its search for ideological and political domination. Millions of civilians perished across the world during the apogee of fascist ideologies in Europe and beyond.
In historical terms, fascism can be defined as a global ideology with national movements and regimes. Fascism was a transnational phenomenon both inside and outside Europe. A modern counter-revolutionary formation, it was ultranationalist, antiliberal, and anti-Marxist. Fascism, in short, was not a mere reactionary position. Its primary aim was to destroy democracy from within in order to create a modern dictatorship from above. It was the product of an economic crisis of capitalism and a concurrent crisis of democratic representation. Transnational fascists proposed a totalitarian state in which plurality and civil society would be silenced, and there would increasingly be no distinctions between the public and the private, and between the state and its citizens. In fascist regimes, the independent press was shut down and the rule of law was entirely destroyed. Fascism defended a divine, messianic, and charismatic form of leadership that conceived of the leader as organically linked to the people and the nation. It considered popular sovereignty to be fully delegated to the dictator, who acted in the name of the community of the people and knew better than they what they truly wanted. Fascists replaced history and empirically based notions of truth with political myth. They had an extreme conception of the enemy, regarding it as an existential threat to the nation and to its people that had to be first persecuted and then deported or eliminated. It aimed to create a new and epochal world order through an incremental continuum of extreme political violence and war.
In my own work, I propose analyzing fascism as a transnational ideology with important national variations. A global ideology, fascism constantly reformulated itself in different national contexts and underwent constant national permutations.
Fascism was founded in Italy in 1919, but the politics it represented appeared simultaneously across the world. From Japan to Brazil and Germany, and from Argentina to India and France, the antidemocratic, violent, and racist revolution of the right that fascism presented was adopted in other countries under different names: Nazism in Germany, nacionalismo in Argentina, integralismo in Brazil, and so on. Fascism was transnational even before Mussolini used the word fascismo, but when fascism became a regime in Italy in 1922, the term received worldwide attention and acquired different meanings in local contexts. This is not to say that the Italian (or the French or later the German) influences were not important for transnational fascists. But there were few imitators. Transnational fascists tailored fascist ideology to fit their distinct national and political traditions. As the Brazilian fascist Miguel Reale argued, "fascism is the universal doctrine of the century," and as such it transcended Mussolini's Italian version insofar as from the beginning "The creature was bigger than its creator." Reale concluded that fascism in Brazil was superior to that in Europe. Similarly, Argentine fascists claimed that theirs was better precisely because it was not restricted by European problems.
Across the globe, fascists conceived of political violence as the source of political power. Against a shared liberal and communist idea of power as being the result of the state's monopoly on violence, fascists equated power with the exercise of political violence, not its suppression. Fascists believed that unleashing violence created and increased their power. They envisioned violence as the source of a new authoritarian society in which nationalism, racism, and (centrally planned) capitalism could be integrated. Fascists saw the state's restrictions on violence as being opposed to political power. They also believed that a free press and an open public sphere acted against their interests. In fascist regimes, civil society had no place. Dissent was not permitted. Fascism identified the pacification of national and international spaces with political weakness. At the same time, fascists conceived of their own violence as "sacred." Nationalist myths inspired and legitimized violence as a key dimension of the fascist political religion. According to fascist ideology, these myths preceded and transcended historical time. Central to this conception was the messianic leader as a warrior who would lead the people into holy contests against internal and external enemies. Brute force was deemed fundamental to opposing those who were perceived to be against the fascist trinity of people, nation, and leader. On a global scale, this fascist brutalization of politics created and legitimized the conditions for extreme forms of political repression, war, and genocide. Fascism theorized an existential enemy that it would subsequently identify and repress. To recapitulate, fascism proposed dictatorship, a mythical idea of the leader, a social-nationalist take on capitalism, and a radical idea of the enemy as the foundation of modern politics.
These historical features of fascism, especially the stress on the mythical leader of the people and his authoritarian rule, the third way between liberalism and socialism, and the idea of an enemy that must be responded to with total war have clear continuities with the right-wing forms of prepopulism that preceded fascism. Like previous forms of racism, xenophobia, and imperialism, this prepopulist side of fascism cannot be ignored. In turn, fascist ideas of the community of the people, the leader, and the nation have been foundational elements of modern populism since World War II, but populism often reformulated or even at times rejected these features, especially those related to fascism's extreme political violence and its totalitarian overthrow of democracy.
Fascism came in different colors that carried different meanings. As the historian of Japanese fascism Reto Hoffman observes, fascism was "donning a rainbow of shirts"—steel gray in Syria, green in Egypt, blue in China, orange in South Africa, gold in Mexico—and these variations spoke volumes about the distinctive national adaptations of what clearly was a global ideology. To this connection between ideology and fashion, one could add the now classic brown in Germany and, of course, black in Italy, blue in Portugal and Ireland, and green in Brazil. As a global rejection of universal democratic values, fascism displayed an ideological palette clearly located on the extreme right of the political spectrum. In contrast, populism was shirtless. As epitomized in Argentine Peronism, the first populist regime in history and thus one of the more significant cases of modern postwar populism, the lack of shirts of the followers (the descamisados) explicitly rejected fascism and established populism as postfascism. The historical example of the lack of coloration in populism also works as a metaphor for the ideological crossings of populism and explains why populism, unlike fascism, was not a united front against liberalism. Linking, once again, extreme nationalism with social concerns and an intolerance of the people, modern populism did not restrict itself to the political right. This expanded populism's reach but voided a transnational, ideological consensus on its anti-Enlightenment meanings, as had also been the case for global fascism. In different historical postwar experiences, in which even the rejection of liberal forms of democracy took a democratic form, populism contested both liberalism and fascism. The existence of a previous fascist regime was not a necessary precondition for the rise of postwar populism. Populist movements and regimes emerged without national fascist interludes in countries like Brazil, the United States, Peru, or Venezuela, but a central tenet of these new populisms was that fascism was no longer an option for global authoritarians. Along these lines, in the United States, Senator Joseph McCarthy's post-1945 populism was very different from the interwar fascism espoused by a fellow traveler like Father Charles Coughlin. And the authoritarianism of Getulio Vargas in Brazil changed when his dictatorship ended in 1945. It had undergone a populist transformation by the time Vargas was elected president in 1951. More important than the global impact of Peronism after 1945, or Varguism later on, was the way each exemplified how democracy and authoritarianism could coexist. To these and other global authoritarians, populism provided a successful example of a new electoral road to power. After fascism and its constellations of fascist-like coups, anticommunist dictatorships were no longer viable political options in most of the world. In this new context, and especially in Latin America, populists engaged with the world of constitutional democracy, polluting its foundations but not causing them to crumble. As populism struggled with the fascist and liberal pasts, it adopted elements of both and mixed them with other popular traditions from the left and the right.
This new modern populism's ascent to power after World War II was the unintended result of fascism. In a new age of liberalism, it replaced fascism as the most significant challenge to liberal democracy. Like fascism, populism was and is hard to pin down. Even more than fascism, postwar populism created coalitions that crisscrossed the traditional boundaries of the political spectrum, incorporating sectors that had hitherto been opposed to each other. This history explains why conventional categories and schemes do not explain its different looks. Is it right? Is it left?
Echoing the title of historian Zeev Sternhell's major book on fascism, Neither Right nor Left, I find that populism is conceptually neither. But I would say that historically, as an intolerant understanding of a democracy in which dissent is allowed but is portrayed as lacking any legitimacy, it has been both. More often than not, the differences among populisms have been immense in the ways they push and combine forms of participation and exclusion. In fact, a defining characteristic of modern populism is the fluidity of its transitions from right to left and vice versa.
Populism is an ideological pendulum, but some central features nonetheless remain constant: an extreme sacralizing understanding of politics; a political theology that considers only those who follow an illuminated leadership to be the true members of the people; an understanding of the leader as being essentially opposed to ruling elites; an idea of political antagonists as enemies of the people, who are potentially (or already) traitors to the nation but yet are not violently repressed; a charismatic understanding of the leader as an embodiment of the voice and desires of the people and the nation as a whole; a strong executive branch combined with the discursive, and often practical, dismissal of the legislative and judicial branches of government; continuous efforts to intimidate independent journalism; a radical nationalism and an emphasis on popular or even celebrity culture, as opposed to other forms of expression that do not represent "national thought"; and finally an attachment to an authoritarian form of antiliberal electoral democracy that nonetheless rejects, at least in practice, dictatorial forms of government.
Despite the recurrence of academic references to the volatility of populism as a concept and experience, populism is no mystery to historians reading the sources. In fact, I would argue that it is not that we lack clarity in defining the term, but rather that our theories of populism lack history. Needless to say, the reverse is also true. Historians often neglect the contributions of theoretical approaches to populism. The result is a lack of understanding between history and theory.
A new understanding of populism needs to address the postwar democratic context for the emergence of the first modern populist regimes in history—namely, that populism was originally reconstituted in 1945 as a postfascist response to the left. However, it was not a radical break with the past, and populism was not engendered outside a historical continuum. From the end of the nineteenth century to the interwar years, pre- and protoforms of populism emerged in places as far apart as the United States, Russia, Mexico, Argentina, Brazil, and France. These movements and leaders spoke in the name of the people as one single entity. From the left and the right, they opposed oligarchies and elites, but they did not generally contest liberal democracy tout court.
The contestation of democracy came after World War I, when fascism fused prepopulist tendencies of left and right with a radical antiliberal and anticommunist ideology that led even some noted historians to talk about fascist-populist dictatorships. After 1945, in a radically changed context, modern populism returned to its prefascist roots, but without forgetting the lessons it had learned from fascism. For historians this historicity is clear, but outside the field, populism is often regarded as a transhistorical phenomenon. In other words, it is viewed as happening without a historical context. As postfascism, populism emerged as a form of authoritarian democracy for the Cold War world: one that could adapt the totalitarian version of politics to the postwar hegemony of democratic representation. This transformation was first predominant in Latin America, after the global fall of fascism, and much later became widespread in Europe after the fall of real socialism.
Populism started with the recognition that fascism was now part of the past rather than the present. For General Perón, the leader of the first modern populist regime in history, fascism was "an unrepeatable phenomenon, a classic style to define a precise and determined epoch." As much as Perón mourned the loss of "poor Mussolini" and his fascism, he did not want to imitate the defeated past. He wanted to free Peronism from the charge of fascism, and the result was a postfascist, authoritarian, and antiliberal version of democracy. Many years later, Italian neofascists arrived at a similar conclusion. Thus, Gianfranco Fini, the Italian leader of the neofascist Movimento Sociale Italiano, in attempting to morph it into a populist formation, argued in 1993 that fascism was irreversibly consigned to the past: "Like all Italians we are not neo-fascists, but post-fascists."
Similar moments of recognition first occurred in Latin America in the 1940s and 1950s and much later in other European contexts, where, for example, Lepenism started its ambivalent transition from neofascism to populism in the 1980s. While Bolivian and Ecuadorian populists renounced their links with fascism during the early part of the Cold War, Austrian neofascists practically did so when they became part of a government coalition in 2000. This situation generated outrage and repudiations in Europe, but Italian postfascists had preceded the Austrians when they formed their first power coalition with Silvio Berlusconi in 1994. In the Berlusconi coalitions that followed, their postfascist leader Fini subsequently became deputy prime minister, foreign minister and later president of the Italian chambers of deputies. In a spectacular U-turn, Fini even said in 2003 that Mussolini's participation in the Holocaust meant that "fascism was part of absolute evil."
Though populism often curtailed political rights, it at times expanded social rights while limiting the more radical emancipatory combinations of both. This specific postfascist historical dimension of populism is often lost in the various theoretical reconfigurations, including those approaches that favor or oppose the populist phenomenon.
As a contemporary concept and case, populism has a specific modern history. In other words, it is not a concept outside history. The nonhistorical view of populism reduces it to a transhistorical metaphor for something else, whether it be the constitutive problems of representative democracy, the empty or filled spaces of the political, technocracy, or politics as such. In sharp contrast with those views, I propose viewing populism as the outcome of a modern historical process, in other words, as part of an ongoing history in which the limitations and intrinsic problems of formal democracy meet the interwar and postwar history of democracy being contested from within and without. This book stresses the place of fascism and its legacy in the foundation of modern populism.
By exploring the intimate historical and theoretical links between the fascist and populist experiences, this work analyzes the centrality of global practices, styles, and concepts, and of the postwar memories of political violence for thinking through these connections. Fascism and populism are forms of nationalism, but they also present supranational links and commonalities.
Part of a new transnational trend in the study of fascism and populism, this book expands the understanding of both by way of their transatlantic, and global, repercussions in the postwar period, especially the populist rejection of fascist violence. Violence, its conception and more importantly its practices, divides the waters between fascism and populism. Violence, and its legacy of repression and extermination, defines the contrasting global experiences of fascism and populism as ideologies, movements, and regimes. as well as their subsequent reformulations in our new century.
Focusing on the legacies of fascist violence allows us to better grasp fascism's historical global implications after 1945. I want to overcome the opposition between antitheoretical approaches to fascism and populism and those focused solely on the theoretical dimensions of fascist and populist phenomena. The emphasis on fascist violence on a comparative and cross-national scale overcomes the dichotomy between history and theory. My main point is that fascism's emphasis on political violence, repression, and genocide has remained a significant dimension of its place in the memories of fascists and antifascists, and of populists and antipopulists, after 1945. This traumatic memory of violence has also engendered both neofascist movements and postfascist forms of populism. Thus, this book's perspective integrates the fields of conceptual history and political theory, especially with respect to European and Latin American history but also to instances of fascism and populism in Africa, Asia, and beyond. The interconnected histories of global fascism, populism, and political violence offer particularly meaningful cases for the analysis of the interactions among ideology, antidemocracy, and politics
## MAPPING FASCISM AND POPULISM
Overall, the emphasis here is on the transnational and national dimensions of historical experience at the center and at the periphery, but thinking comparatively about the ideology and politics of modern antidemocratic practices across contexts and beyond historical and theoretical commonplaces is also important. Fascism and populism are two historical formations that are contextually connected, and the fact they are not generally analyzed together by historians and theorists is puzzling. This introduction, like the book as a whole, reconnects and analyzes histories and theories of fascism and populism. Chapter 1 provides a conceptual and historical working explanation of fascism and stresses the central role violence and genocide play in fascist ideology and practice, especially in its global dimensions. It establishes a dialogue between different historical interpretations that often avoid talking to each other. In this context, I insist on the need to analyze the history of fascism as a form of political violence that contrasts sharply with populism, in order to contextualize the key distinctions between the two. The chapter also addresses how historians have interpreted fascism, from an early focus on its national variants to one emphasizing generic theories of fascism that downplay national distinctions. I critically engage with these historiographies, especially with their refusals to study fascism outside Europe. Against a Eurocentric view of fascism, I stress the contributions of the new transnational turn in its history. Overall, the chapter forwards a reading of fascism as a critical subject of global history (from Europe to Latin America to Asia and beyond), at the same time that it deals with fascism's ultimate and most extreme realization, the Holocaust.
Most historians of the Holocaust have rejected the notion of fascism as a causal explanation for its origins. At the same time, many historians of fascism present the Holocaust as a particular event that is not central to fascist historiography. Chapter 1 underlines how the Shoah, when viewed in a global rather than national context, poses significant challenges to the transnational history of ideology and politics. Finally, this chapter addresses the "populist" dimensions of fascism in history and theory. The chapters that follow analyze how these dimensions affected the novel postwar experience of populism in power, precisely because it marked an ambivalently democratic rejection of the legacies of fascism, genocide, and dictatorship.
Chapter 2 deals with the emergence and development of modern populism. Eurocentric and US-centered versions of the populist phenomenon prevail in the analysis. Against these ethnocentric tendencies in history and theory, and the challenge they pose to theories of populism as a sort of pure form of democracy, I put forward a more global and critical reading of populism, taking a critical stance toward contemporary interpretations that use history merely to illustrate theory. I provide a working definition of populism in history, and show what historians and theorists can gain by considering populism in regard to fascism. In short, the chapter presents a historical explanation of what populism is, from the early populisms of Russia and the United States to the protopopulisms of Mexico, Argentina, and Brazil. While the former were incomplete populisms, in the sense that they were only opposition movements and not regimes, the latter were in power but were not fully engaged with the populist fusion of antiliberalism and electoral democracy. The chapter also explores the adventures of populism from the "classical" postwar populists in power to neofascist, neoliberal, and left-wing, popular-nationalist forms of populism, especially in Latin America and Europe but also in the United States, Africa, and Asia.
Populism stands in clear opposition to the fascist version of dictatorial rule that preceded the Cold War, decolonization, and different transitions to democracy on a global scale. In other words, populism has been a form of antiliberal democracy that reproduced, but also often reformulated and at times even rejected, the political antinomies of fascism. Populism was and is defined by its contextual postwar rejection of fascist dictatorship and extreme violence, while it continues to reflect some of fascism's ideological premises.
Dictatorship is one of the historical foundations of modern populism. Yet populism is not dictatorship. In fact, in the context of the early Cold War period, modern populism represented a democratic renunciation of dictatorship. In this context, chapter 3 argues that "mass dictatorship" is central to the genealogy of populism. More specifically, the fascist dictatorial experience was one of the reasons behind the emergence of the first populist movements and regimes, but it also helped define them in opposition to their dictatorial origins. Later on and in other contexts, especially in its Southern European, African, and Latin American left-wing variants, populism took on forms of nationalism that explicitly rejected fascism, imperialism, colonialism, racism, and dictatorial rule. This rejection has historically been more ambiguous in right-wing and extreme right-wing cases of populism, which sometimes adopted neoliberal forms.
In dialogue with, but also in contrast to, a literature that makes a binary distinction between fascism and populism, I stress the need to understand the ambivalent, democratic nature of the authoritarian populist experience, including the more recent issues of the new media landscape, "macho-populism," and "Islamic populism."
Born out of the dictatorial defeat of fascism, postwar populism historically became an authoritarian form of democracy. Yet nothing prevents its future relapse into its past fascist foundations. Few but significant historical examples of the relapse of populism into fascist violence range from neofascist Peronism in the 1970s to the Golden Dawn in Greece and to other European movements of the extreme right. Even if it does not renounce electoral democratic procedures, populism as a movement becomes neofascism when it transitions from a homogenizing conception of the people to one that posits its ethnic identification with the national community, while simultaneously switching from a more or less generic rhetoric of an unidentified enemy (the elites, traitors, outsiders, etc.) to the articulation of an identifiable racial or religious foe who is met with political violence. Similarly, as a regime populism becomes dictatorship (fascist, neofascist, or nonfascist) when it voids its association with its defining democratic features. To put it differently, when elections are finally banned or are no longer free, when the intimidation of the independent press leads to its suppression, when dissent is not only deemed illegitimate by those in power but is also prohibited and punished, when undermining the separation of powers morphs into unifying them under the leader, and last but not least when the populist logic of polarization is translated into actual political persecution, populism loses its historical elements and, in many ways, ceases to be populist. In these cases, the populist tendency to corrupt constitutional democracy leads to its elimination. If populism reverts fully to its classical, dictatorial, and antirational roots, it is no longer populism—a resolution of the populist ambivalence between dictatorship and democracy that is always possible, but historically has not been the most common one. More generally, populism as an antiliberal democratic response to modern politics straddles these two opposing poles. This foundational historical tension in populism emerged in the early Cold War and was reinforced after the fall of the Iron Curtain and the rise of new twenty-first-century nationalisms. In 1919, in 1945, and in the early years of our new century, the contexts were very different. While fascism was born in 1919 out of the interwar crisis of liberalism, and was then reinforced by the deep economic crisis of the 1930s, modern populism emerged in 1945 out of the crisis and defeat of fascism. It did so in the context of the world powers' economic recovery. The new surge of contemporary xenophobic populism is happening in a context that is more similar to the 1920s and 1930s, the period that witnessed the rise of fascism. In this new century, in the context of the Great Recession, democracy is confronting challenges that are similar to those it encountered during the Great Depression. We are witnessing a new global slump and a new crisis of representation in which democracy is once again being tested by populist forces.
History does not repeat itself, but genealogies are important for understanding the present. The new populism of the right is very different from that which accepted the torch from the fascists after World War II. In fact, it is directly related to the affirmation of neoliberalism in Europe and in the rest of the world after 1989. As neoliberalism solidified after 1989, Europe, West and East, saw the rise of invigorated nationalisms, which often looked to the interwar authoritarian past as a precedent for the liberal triumph over communism. Nationalism worked in tandem with neoliberalism. As opposed to claims that the new populisms of the right and the extreme right are unidimensional products of 1989, and thereby have no significant links with the past, connecting these populisms to their authoritarian genealogies both inside and outside Europe is important. Populism and neoliberalism are parts of the same process that the leading political theorist of populism Nadia Urbinati suggests is a disfigurement of democracy. This new American and European populism in many ways is less defensive about its nationalism and racism. It remains close to the interwar past, offering old, undemocratic solutions to new problems.
Globally, populism is particularly attractive for sectors that have perceived of themselves as excluded from the political system, and as unrepresented by existing democratic institutions. Populist leaders equate their desires with the needs of the people and the whole nation. They stand for a homogeneous society that never existed. Populists push nationalist proposals intended to exclude the other and to integrate followers, while remaining deeply suspicious of difference.
As in the past, contemporary populism offers authoritarian answers to the crisis of democratic representation. Populism constantly changes, but the fundamentals remain. Since its postwar ascent to power, populism has asserted a democratic third way between liberalism and socialism. In that context, fascism became populism in history.
## ONE
# What Is Fascism in History?
The word fascism derives from the Italian word fascio and refers to a political group (such as the political group led by Giuseppe Garibaldi during the times of Italian unification). Fascism also refers visually and historically to a Roman imperial symbol of authority. Its birthplace as a modern political movement was northern Italy, the year of its birth was 1919, and its founder was Benito Mussolini. Thus, fascism as a term as well as a political movement originated in the Italian peninsula. Its ideological origins, however, predated its name. Because its antidemocratic realities were global and existed under different national names, its effects were both national and transnational. Knowing that fascism was born as a global ideological contestation of the pre–World War I liberal order before its explicit emergence as a movement is central to any understanding of fascism. The ideology of radical nationalism that made it possible was part of a larger intellectual reaction to the Enlightenment, a tradition that was both European and "non-European." Ideologically, fascism was conceived as a reaction to the progressive revolutions of the long nineteenth century (from the French revolution of 1789 to the American and Latin American revolutions of 1776 and the 1810s, respectively, to the Paris commune of 1871 and the Cuban War of independence that started in 1895). Fascism represented a counter-revolutionary attack against political and economic equality, tolerance, and freedom.
Rooted in the ideology of the anti-Enlightenment, fascism was not only a reaction against liberal politics and a rejection of democracy. Fascism did not oppose the market economy, for example, and often put forward a corporatist organization intended to promote the accumulation of capital. Equally important, fascism was a philosophy of political action that ascribed absolute value to violence in the political realm. This ascription was boosted by one radical outcome of the Enlightenment: Soviet communism. The rise of Bolshevism in 1917 was both opposed and emulated on a global scale. By presenting themselves as the opposite of communists, fascists took advantage of this widespread rejection and fear of social revolution while also incorporating some of its dimensions.
A new age of total war, rather than the Soviet experiment, is what ultimately provided the context of fascism. In fact, fascist ideology first emerged in the trenches of World War I. As the Italian historian Angelo Ventrone argues, the war provided a "reservoir" for fascist ideology. This war ideal, and its related notion of the militarization of politics, transcended European borders and circulated in places such as India, Iraq, and Peru. Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini openly stated that war constituted their most meaningful personal experiences, and after World War I, these two former soldiers found violence and warfare to be political elements of the first order. When this ideology of violence fused with extreme right-wing nationalism, imperialism, and non-Marxist antiparliamentarian leftist tendencies of revolutionary syndicalism, fascism as we know it today crystallized.
The moment of fascist crystallization was not exclusively Italian or European. In Argentina, former socialist intellectuals like the poet Leopoldo Lugones soon understood the political implications of this fusion. Fascism permutated in different national contexts. As General Eoin O'Duffy, the leader of the Irish Blueshirts argued, the recent history of Italian fascism had a "striking similarity" to the Irish situation but "This is not to say that Ireland can be rescued only by Fascism, but we would be fools were we to shut our eyes to the fact that behind fascism in Italy, and responsible for its phenomenal success, is the same spirit which is now making the Blueshirt movement the biggest political movement that Ireland has ever known." The Argentine fascists admired the Irish Blueshirts, but they saw them as part of their kin, not as models to copy. Sharing the same spirit did not mean imitation; as the Portuguese fascist João Ameal maintained, Italian fascism as it existed in Italy could not be reproduced outside the country. Portuguese fascism could not be a "sterile copy." Fascism was rooted in each nation but was related in transnational revolutionary ways: "It is not the case that it is a reproduction. It is about equivalence. The Italians did their revolution of order. We are starting ours."
Like Lugones and Ameal, the Brazilian fascist Miguel Reale saw fascism as the expression of a universal transnational ideology of the extreme right: "After the Great War, in Brazil as in China, in India as in France, there is no place for a nationalism without socialism. In other words, there is no place for nationalism lacking the elements of profound social revolution." Like their transnational partners, Brazilian fascists believed they represented "a powerful renewal" of the practices of "individual and collective life." Reale claimed that "the revolution" was no longer done in the name of a class: "The revolution is the sacred right of the nation, of the totality of its productive forces." Similarly, Spanish fascists assumed fascist movements existed in countries as far from each other as China, Chile, Japan, Argentina, or Germany because fascism was an agglomeration of right-wing "nationalist" movements. This cluster of fascism was going to "save" each country by constituting "a true new international of civilization against barbarism." Fascism represented a new foundation for the world, "a civilization of unity, universality and authority."
At the end of the war, young Adolf Hitler, a disenfranchised war hero, began to give political expression to his basic violent tendencies. And he did it in the new trenches of modern mass politics. Hitler first adopted, and then shaped, the ideology of a small German party of the extreme right, soon to be called National Socialism. Hitler early on recognized his debt to the thought and practice of Mussolini, but both leaders shared a more extended belief that the world as they knew it was in crisis. Above all Hitler felt illuminated by Mussolini's road to power. The epochal dimension of the fact that fascism had become a regime cannot be more stressed. As the prominent historian of Nazism Richard Evans argues, "Hitler looked admiringly to Mussolini as an example to follow." Hitler and Mussolini, shared fierce anticommunist and antiliberal stances that were widely disseminated among global counter-revolutionaries at the time. This antidemocratic modernism combined modern politics with technological innovation, aesthetic ideas, and a discourse of war.
The modernity of fascism has preoccupied major thinkers over the course of the last century. Whereas Sigmund Freud saw fascism as the return of the repressed—namely, the mythical reformulation of death and violence as a source of political power—Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer in their Dialectic of the Enlightenment presented fascism as modernity's worst outcome. Although I agree overall with their arguments, they are nonetheless limited to European developments. Grasping the global and transnational dimensions of fascism requires an understanding of its history, first as it is formulated on the national level, and second, as that manifestation of fascism relates to intellectual exchanges across the Atlantic Ocean and beyond.
Like Marxism and liberalism, fascism was a global phenomenon that assumed many national variations and political interpretations. Also like them, fascism never had a closed ideological apparatus. Its ideas changed over time and only now, with the benefit of hindsight, is it possible to conceive of its major ideological patterns. Most fascists perceived fascism as a new political ideology in the making. It was radically opposed to traditional democratic politics, what they disdained as western "electoralism." Its creator, Benito Mussolini, argued that only decadent and old-fashioned ideologies had a closed body of knowledge. For Mussolini, ideas were useful when they had a practical value, that is, when they confirmed his own confused intuitions about social regeneration and the rebirth of nations, the leading role of men like himself in guiding the people, politics as an art, and more generally his noted antihumanitarianism. In short, for the creator of fascism, ideas were useful when they legitimized short-term political goals.
Mussolini was a strategist who believed political needs should determine theoretical formations. Many historians have concluded that this belief made Mussolini a kind of antitheorist and that fascist theory was not important to the movement. For these historians, fascist theory is simply not significant. To be sure, Mussolini at some moments of his career had antitheoretical biases, but all the political needs that shaped Mussolini's strategic view of fascism were informed by a set of unarticulated thoughts and aims. His ideas about power, violence, the internal enemy, and empire, and his own expectation of being the virile, messianic leader of his people, drove Mussolini's political practice over the years. These ideas were abstract enough to inform his political priorities, and practical enough to be considered by transnational fascist politicians, who often wanted to avoid conceptual complications. Antonio Gramsci, an astute antifascist Italian observer and theorist, preferred to stress the "concretism" of Mussolini as a defining characteristic of the fascist leader and, perhaps, of fascist ideology at large. Mussolini's concretism was related to the idea of the primacy of politics over "rigid dogmatic formulas." With some wishful thinking, Mussolini himself argued that "theological" or "metaphysical" discussions were foreign to his movement. Fascism was not dogma but a "special mentality." In typical anti-intellectual terms, Mussolini usually merged his concretism—namely the fascist preference for violent "immediate action"—with a simplistic understanding of reality. Early on, Mussolini posed his "heretic" realism against the "prophecies" of liberalism, socialism, and communism. In other words, Mussolini defended the "reactionary," "aristocratic," and yet "antitraditional" character of fascism by juxtaposing it with the "orgy of the revolution of words."
Fascism was essentially modern. Nevertheless, it was a "reactionary" form of modernism. Acting against emancipation in order to create a new totalitarian modernity, fascism saw itself as a child of the present and even as a "primitive" dimension of the future. Past causes, past theoretical formations, and even past experiences were not as important to Mussolini as present political "action." However, present strategies could for him only be manifest acts of a significant whole, a set of meaningful formations that constituted the basis from which political strategies could emerge.
The search for a symbiosis between this common ground from which fascist practices emanated, and various theoretical justifications for these strategies, constituted the most dynamic element of fascist ideology, and also revealed its most obvious limits to full canonization. At the end of the day, the creation of a fascist canonical corpus was an endless task for fascists. They tried to combine various short-term strategies with a long-standing basic preconception of the world. The fascist synthesis was based on this impossible transition from the politics of daily life to dogma. Fascist interpreters across the world had to articulate the often-tense relationship between fascist practice (strategy) and ideal (theory). These ideas about the divine, race, the people, empire, and a mythical past were constantly adapted to the particularities of the very different realities of East and Southeast Asia, Europe, the Middle East, and Latin America. In India and the Middle East, fascist ideas served the purpose of rethinking an authoritarian variant of postcolonialism, whereas in Japan they were used to rethink the modernity of the empire. In Republican, postcolonial Latin America, fascism often presented itself as having continuities with the prerepublican Spanish empire, but also as the primary way of putting forward an authoritarian form of anti-imperialism. In all these places, as elsewhere with fascism, aesthetics were a key dimension of its politics.
Yet fascist theory was not only about aesthetics. In this regard, although it is important to pay attention to antifascist conceptions of fascism, my emphasis does not rely much on Walter Benjamin's aesthetic notion of fascism. For Benjamin, "The logical result of Fascism is the introduction of aesthetics into political life." As historian Robert Paxton argues, Benjamin clearly saw that war was the most extreme aesthetic experience of fascism. The fascist leader wanted to elevate the people into "a higher realm of politics that they would experience sensually." This substitution of "reasoned debate" with the intimacy of shared sensorial experiences substantially altered contemporary politics.To be sure, fascist aesthetics played a central role in how fascism showed itself to the world, but fascism as a political ideology could not be exclusively encompassed by aesthetics. Fascism needed to balance its static ideal of the perfect world with a deeper articulation of its political ideas that could account for and justify a constantly changing strategy. Ultimately, fascist practice was not related to mundane day-to-day politics, or to aesthetics, but rather was focused on a set of political rituals and spectacles aimed at objectifying fascist theory and grounding it in lived experiences. These practices presented fascism as something that could be seen and involved active participation and contact with others, turning ideas into reality.
Fascist theory never became an articulated system of belief. It was always a changing set of tropes and ideas. In this sense, Mussolini considered fascism to be unique "within the forest of 'isms.'" He personally disliked systems of belief because he considered them to be by definition dysfunctional. If economics or art were elements that the Duce deemed irrelevant to a person of his stature, he considered fascist ideology or fascist theory to be subordinated to practice and thereby capable of worldly adaptation. But behind or above adaptation there was something more grandiose: the definition of fascism as an epochal turning point, a mythical and sacred revolution of the nation, the leader, and the people. Indeed, despite his contempt for theory, Mussolini believed in the existence of "high theory"—the master narrative that represented immediate intuitions about the world—namely, a belief in the primacy of fascist basic meaning over the external word. Intentional, self-affirmative violent meaning was thereby the hardcore attribute of fascist ideology.
Above all fascism put forward a radical form of political subjectivity. Fascism's inner meaning represented the fascist matrix, its sacred founding dimension. This conception of an unconscious, prerational intuition expressed the supposed purity of the fascist ideal, the "fascist feeling" that kept the fascist universes of people and specific ideas tied together. Tellingly, even as early as 1919, Mussolini had represented the different groups that formed fascism as sharing the same "unique soul." Fascism, he claimed, may have been "distinctive in form but it is fused and confused in substance." To borrow a Saussurean metaphor, fascism was to be understood as a specific code, a language of political interpretation and action that had a changing set of signifiers attached to a less malleable signified. Mussolini called this more rigid aspect of fascism the "fondo commune," or the "common denominator." It was the meaningful nucleus, the core contained within the less coherent changing dicta or set of fascist signifiers. The common denominator was a master cursor, a point of orientation. It was, in short, the fascist core that contained the most basic premises of fascism, what was relatively constant in fascist ideology as opposed to variable forms of fascist expression. The "fondo commune," the fascist primal notion of the world, was more important than its contextual practices or strategic presentations. The latter were the externalized manifestations of fascism in particular contexts, the strategic instantiations of a more stable "substance of fascism." As Mussolini put it in an uncanny moment of full disclosure, "Each of us has his own temperament, each has his own susceptibility, each has his own individual psychology, but there is a common denominator through which the whole is equalized."
For the Duce, this equalized whole, the fascist matrix, was the most basic level, or core, of fascist notions about politics and the world. It was a set of master tropes, distorted values, and feelings about violence; war; the trinity of leader, people, and nation; myth; the sacred; and the abject. For some present-day interpreters, it may be difficult to make sense of the sheer charge of irrationality and instinctual force that fascism embodied, what Antonio Gramsci had earlier presented as a fascist embrace of the "mysterious" coupled with a "psychology of war." Although fascists in the past often understood this psychology in mystical or even esoteric terms as being imbued with unsignifiable, or unrepresentable, hidden meaning, its main components can perhaps be defined by historians in the present.
The fascist matrix was constituted by traditional binaries such as "us versus them" or "civilization versus barbarism," and the people versus its enemies, among others. But the fascist importation of this notion of the other as a total, existential, enemy provided a central dimension to its ideology. Thus, fascism also had central victimizing dimensions, that is, negative drives that represented what it stood against as opposed to what it stood for. My historical working definition of fascism as a global mythical ideology with distinctive national movements stresses the connections between these binaries and fascism's modern, counter-revolutionary, ultranationalist, antiliberal, and antisocialist features, which took shape in the perfect storm of the interwar years: the dual crises of capitalism and liberalism. In this scenario, the primary aim of fascism was to destroy democracy from within and create a totalitarian dictatorship. Destroying democracy would in turn destroy civil society, political tolerance, and pluralism. The new legitimacy of the fascist order was rooted in the power of the leader, the people, and the nation. Fascism was formulated on the basis of a modern idea of popular sovereignty, but one in which political representation was eliminated and power was fully delegated to the dictator, who acted in the name of the people.
This dictatorship of the people, with its will to create a new man and a new world order, relied on its dialectical other, the existential enemies, the antipeople. These links among the enemy, the dictatorship, and the people were central to fascists around the globe. Fascism's methods against the enemy were persecution and elimination. As the Argentine fascists put it, "The day of final reckoning is close in the future, we will make disappear all the unworthy for the sake of the Patria." In his famous "prophecy" speech of January 1939, Hitler had, just a few months before he himself started World War II, similarly, and equally explicitly, addressed the world as follows:
In the course of my life I have very often been a prophet, and have usually been ridiculed for it. During the time of my struggle for power it was in the first instance the Jewish race which only received my prophecies with laughter when I said that I would one day take over the leadership of the State, and with it that of the whole nation, and that I would then among many other things settle the Jewish problem. Their laughter was uproarious, but I think that for some time now they have been laughing on the other side of their face. Today I will once more be a prophet: If the international Jewish financiers in and outside Europe should succeed in plunging the nations once more into a world war, then the result will not be the Bolshevization of the earth, and thus the victory of Jewry, but the annihilation of the Jewish race in Europe
For Hitler, sacrifice and violence worked in tandem with believed lies and the imagined actions of the enemy of the people. The notion of sacrificial violence in the name of the prophetic leader and the people concerned not only the enemy but also the fascist self, as Mussolini often repeated and Hitler personally embodied with his suicide in 1945. Fascist racism and anti-Semitism were the consequences of the continuous search for the ideal public enemy, who was becoming increasingly dehumanized from 1919 onward. However, fascism was not made up only of "anti," or negative, dimensions. The more "positive" elements of a definition of fascism included a messianic "religious conception, which stressed the centrality of a dictatorship embodied in the persona of Mussolini, for whom violence, war, and the accumulation of power were the categorical premises for a desired turning point in national and world history: the fascist empire. In fascist ideology, violence and aggression were considered the best expressions of power, as embodied in the people's "race" and "normal" masculinity. The clear outcome of this extremely masculinist and antifeminist dimension of fascism, was, as historian Richard Evans suggests, "a state in which men would rule and women would be reduced mainly to the functions of childbearing and childerearing."
Fascism represented a particular understanding of the state and its monopoly on violence—namely, totalitarianism. Whereas the Italian antifascists who coined the term totalitarianism in the 1920s meant it to denote a modern form of tyranny, with fascism as a contemporary version of absolutism, Mussolini had a different take on totalitarianism. He appropriated the term, changing it from a negative political adjective to a self-assertive concept, and reformulated it to encompass all of fascist ideological imperatives (violence, war, imperialism, and a particular notion of the abject) with respect to the state, the nation, and the people:
The Fascist State is not a night-watchman, solicitous only of the personal safety of the citizens; nor is it organized exclusively for the purpose of guarantying a certain degree of material prosperity and relatively peaceful conditions of life, a board of directors would do as much . . . The State, as conceived and realised by Fascism, is a spiritual and ethical entity for securing the political, juridical, and economic organization of the nation, an organization which in its origin and growth is a manifestation of the spirit. The State guarantees the internal and external safety of the country, but it also safeguards and transmits the spirit of the people, elaborated down the ages in its language, its customs, its faith. The State is not only the present; it is also the past and above all the future. Transcending the individual's brief spell of life, the State stands for the immanent conscience of the nation. The forms in which it finds expression change, but the need for it remains.
The state that fascism posited as being above and beyond anything else was not every state but a fascist state personified in the leader of the national people and his ideological imperatives. It was the state that fascism had previously conquered and dominated. This state eliminated the distinction between the public and the private. Moreover, the fascist state swallowed civil society and eventually destroyed it. As many antifascists noted at the time, fascism used democracy, and even democratic alliances, in order to destroy democracy.
The fascist revolution that the state impersonated was supposed to exterminate the bourgeois order once and for all. Fascism advertised itself as the antithesis of gradualism, the "antiparty," the "anti-Europe," that would move Europe and the world to the future.
Fascism was essentially revolutionary in that it created a new political order, but it was less revolutionary in its relationship to capitalism. In fact, it never threatened it. Fascists wanted to reform capitalism in nationalist terms that took social reform away from the left. They put forward a way of ruling society with massive popular support but without seriously questioning "conservative social and economic privileges and political dominance."
Yet while capitalism remained intact, the way most fascists approached capitalism should not be conflated with liberal or neoliberal methods. In the interwar years, transnational fascism put forward corporatism as an economic and social solution, and in this economic sense, it was not that far from other experiments in capitalistic reform like the New Deal in the United States. On the contrary, fascism essentially differed from liberalism politically. In the political sense, fascism was clearly totalitarian.
Like Soviet Russia, fascism eliminated political discussion, tolerance, and plurality. Like "real socialism" it obscured the distinction between the state's legitimate use of power and the use of unlawful violence. In short, in totalitarianism, the state became a criminal that abhorred enlightened normativity. However, if Stalin was totalitarian in practice, he never rejected the legacy of the Enlightenment from a theoretical point of view. This was, of course, the ethical failure of communist ideology. That Nazis could enjoy listening to Beethoven in the midst of Auschwitz stands in contrast to Lenin's incapacity to listen to the German composer in the midst of communist terror. Lenin believed that listening to Beethoven would make him softer while he was engaged in the gruesome repression of political opponents. As we are told in the German movie The Lives of Others (2006), for Lenin, Beethoven's music represented reason—namely, the legacy of the Enlightenment. This was a symptom of Lenin's recognition that one could not listen to reason while acting against it.
In contrast, for the Nazis, the German composer represented bare beauty and violence. One may recall in this regard, film director Stanley Kubrick's re-creation of postfascist urban squads leader Alex DeLarge in A Clockwork Orange (1971). De Large shared his musical taste with Nazis such as Hitler, Goebbels, and Mengele. Fascist totalitarianism, unlike Soviet Russia, does not spread fear, violence, and death with the sole objective of silencing real and imagined dissent. In fascism, violence ceases to be exclusively a means to achieve political goals and becomes a political end in itself. It is precisely the primacy of violence in fascism and its absence in populism that, as we will see, presents the starkest contrast between fascists and populists. But first we will examine how historians have interpreted fascism, followed by an analysis of the Holocaust and, more generally, the primacy of violence in the name of the people as key examples of the logic that shaped fascism in history.
## FASCISM AND HISTORIANS
As a globalized form of political ideology, like Marxism and liberalism, that found followers throughout the world, fascism has always been an object of global study. But more recently, the resurgence of a binary that traditionally put history in opposition to theory as a field of study appears to be working in tandem with a classic division of labor among historians. According to this situation, many "working" historians test the hypotheses developed by groups of historical theorists, the "generic" interpreters of fascism. As a result, highly theoretical notions arrived at aprioristically now shape national considerations of fascism in history. At the same time, a transnational phenomenon like historical fascism has been displaced, obscured, or simply ignored. What occupies its place is a generic definition that homogenizes what fascism is and does not consider important national distinctions. Such an understanding of fascism as a generic phenomenon is not new. Since its inception, "Nazi-fascism" was theorized in political and global ways that were easy to understand and useful to combat it. This simplicity helped in its defeat but had the unintended result of obscuring its complex historical nature. These first readings, which were antiliberal, anticommunist, or both, stressed fascism's surrogate role as a global puppet of capitalism or, alternatively, as a borderless replica of communism. However, in the 1960s and 1970s, new comparative historical studies acknowledged that different fascisms shared common structural features even as they also stressed the particularities of a given national incarnation. With these new trends, the centrality of contexts and processes was affirmed, but their transnational effects were lost. Until the 1990s, this was the prevailing tendency among historians, who were mainly working on national cases. Fascism was part of different national histories. Italian historian Renzo De Felice is the most representative example of this approach.
De Felice was a founding historian of fascism studies in Italy. He outlined the idea that fascism was a unitary phenomenon resulting from a dialectical movement among many forces from right and left. A main component of this complex interaction, Mussolini at many times conditioned these forces but at many others he was conditioned by them. Already in 1965, in the introduction to the first volume of his extensive biography of Mussolini, De Felice identified himself with the famous phrase by Angelo Tasca, "per noi definire il fascismo è anzitutto scriverne la storia [for us to define fascism is above all to write its history]." De Felice interpreted it in terms of the need for a new historicization of fascism. He advanced a new historiographical line, in clear opposition to Benedetto Croce and predominant Italian historiography, that claimed fascists were a parenthesis, a historical aberration, and were not a truly causal outcome of Italian history.
Telling the history of fascism involved recognizing the difficulties presented by characterizing (or defining) it from theoretical typologies, since, for De Felice, fascism was not a phenomenon made up of immutable, well-defined characteristics but a reality that was in constant transformation. To be sure, De Felice never suggested that the task of generic characterization was impossible. In fact at the same time that he downplayed the need for a cross-national understanding of fascism, he embraced the comparative concept of totalitarianism. In this context, De Felice's narrative adopted a fierce anticommunist stance, which was reinforced by the early Cold War approach to totalitarianism that equated fascism with communism. This approach converged with that of such historians as Ernst Nolte, François Furet, Stéphane Courtois, and, more recently, Timothy Snyder in propagating a new historical paradigm that tends to conflate fascist and communist forms of violence and repression. Doing so involves reformulating the theory of totalitarianism in terms that remain close to the slogans of the early Cold War. As the Israeli historian Zeev Sternhell argues, "The theory that fascism and communism are twins, accomplices and enemies at the same time, and that Nazism was an imitation of Stalinism, an understandable and even natural response to the Bolshevik danger and a simple product of the First World War, is not only a banalization of fascism and Nazism but above all a distortion of the true nature of the European disaster of our century."
Expanding on the works of George Mosse, Stanley Payne, and the German historian Ernst Nolte in the 1970s and 1980s, a new generic trend emerged in the 1990s and early 2000s. Since then, the historical study of fascism has consolidated into a distinctly global field of knowledge, one that must be founded by consensus. And yet the consensus approach was not totally accepted by all researchers. According to Payne, criticism of the consensus usually took a nominalist perspective. The historian Gilbert Allardyce stood as the emblematic advocate of this position. Allardyce saw no use in the term fascism and proposed discarding it as a category of historical analysis. In contrast, most historians promote the need to understand fascism beyond national borders.
Among the most cogent definitions of fascism is Emilio Gentile's. He argues that fascism was typically organized as a militaristic party that held to a totalitarian conception of state politics, an activist and antitheoretical ideology, and a focus on virility and antihedonistic mythical foundations. A defining feature of fascism was its character as a secular religion, which affirms the primacy of the nation understood as an organic and ethnically homogeneous community. Moreover, this nation was to be hierarchically organized into a corporativist state with a vocation for potency, warmongering, and national expansion.
Similarly, Paxton expanded our knowledge of fascism by providing a theory of its developmental stages, from the creation of fascist movements and their presence in political systems to the fascist seizure and exercise of power. The last stage is the moment when fascism is in power and either goes in the direction of self-destruction through war and radicalization or follows the path of entropy and de-fascistization. Paxton made clear that "Most fascisms stopped short, some slipped back, and sometimes features of several stages remained operative at once. Whereas most modern societies spawned fascist movements in the twentieth century, only a few had fascist regimes. Only in Nazi Germany did a fascist regime approach the outer horizons of radicalization." Paxton de-emphasized the centrality of fascist ideology and focused on its practice. Consequently he stressed behavior and function over fascist ideas and rationales. Paxton defined fascism "as a form of political behavior marked by obsessive preoccupation with community decline, humiliation, or victimhood and by compensatory cults of unity, energy, and purity, in which a mass-based party of committed nationalist militants, working in uneasy but effective collaboration with traditional elites, abandons democratic liberties and pursues with redemptive violence and without ethical or legal restraints goals of internal cleansing and external expansion."
Another influential author of current theories of fascism is the German historian Ernst Nolte, who is also famous, or rather infamous, among historians for having generated the Historiskerstreit, that is, the debate among West German historians and critical theorists regarding the German character of the Holocaust. Nolte stressed the common genetic nature of fascism and Marxism. This is a position that led him first to minimize fascism as an event that was born not out of right-wing traditions but from Marxism, and second to minimize Nazi extermination policies against the European Jewish population.
Nolte started his treatment of fascism with a definition that became highly influential for later generic historians. Fascism was primarily a dialectical reaction to liberalism, and, more importantly, to Marxism. The latter is for Nolte the consequential culmination of the former. If fascism as anti-Marxism aims to "exterminate its opponent, it cannot be satisfied with the mere political defeat of a recognizable party: it must expose the 'spiritual roots' and include them in its condemnation." In Nolte's view, the Nazis, even in their exterminatory drive, took after the Soviets. Stalin thus inspired Hitler. In short, fascism was a revolutionary reaction against Marxism that aimed to change the world that surrounds it. Nazism was the synthetic form of fascism, something close to its ultimate realization. Nolte defined Nazism as, "the death throes of the sovereign, martial, inwardly antagonistic group; it was the practical and violent resistance to transcendence." Transcendence is a term that for Nolte relates to the historical, the transhistorical, and even the metaphysical in probing the "hidden structures of fascism."
Whereas for Nolte, fascism was basically anti-Marxism (in his view a combination of Marx and Nietzsche), Sternhell, an intellectual historian who rejects most generic definitions, is far more suggestive in his approach to fascism. He stresses the antiliberal nature of fascism, with its proposal for the future, and argues fascism cannot be defined only by what it stood against: liberalism, Marxism, and democracy. Also, he points out, Marxism and liberalism began by challenging the existing ideas and political forces: "Before offering its own vision of the world, Marxism began by opposing liberalism, which a century earlier had risen up against absolutism. The same was true of fascism, which conflicted with liberalism and Marxism and then was able to provide all the elements of an alternative political, moral, and intellectual system."
In contrast to Nolte and other scholars who take a generic approach, Sternhell studies a cultural and ideological phenomenon, the revolt against the Enlightenment that was synchronically developed with it, and was later reinforced in the aftermath of the French Revolution. Thus, for him, the prehistory of fascism is to be found in the anti-Enlightenment. However, Sternhell suggests that it was much later, at the end of the nineteenth century, that this revolt radicalized itself into a massive political phenomenon, as it was during the Dreyfus affair. But Sternhell sees these two events as catalysts and not prime movers. Sternhell argues that an aristocratic rejection of the Enlightenment was translated into truly popular, revolutionary terms by thinkers like Maurice Barrès and other members of the generation of 1890. Barrès and company radicalized the legacies of thinkers like Edmund Burke, J.G. Herder, Friedrich Nietzsche, Ernest Renan, and Hippolyte Taine, launching a revolt against "ideological modernity, against the 'materialism' of liberalism and Marxism. Thus fascism was a third revolutionary option between liberalism and Marxism that could offer its own vision of the world and create a new political culture."
Sternhell sees the latter part of the nineteenth century, and the period before the First World War, as a laboratory of fascist thought. During this period, the crisis of liberal democracy was a symptom of a broader intellectual crisis critically centered on democratic values. Fascism has two essential components: 1) a brand of antiliberal and antibourgeois tribal nationalism based on social Darwinism and, often, biological determinism; and 2) a radical leftist, antimaterialist revision of Marxism. Sternhell's work addresses the origins of fascism in the pre–World War I context. The Great War was important insofar as it created favorable conditions for fascism to become a political movement with a broad mass of constituencies. But Sternhell provocatively proposes that the war was not that important in the genealogy of fascism. For Sternhell, "Anyone who regards fascism as no more than a byproduct of the Great War, a mere bourgeois defensive reaction to the postwar crisis, is unable to understand this major phenomenon of the past century. As such fascism represents a rejection of the political culture prevailing at the beginning of the century. It is difficult to find in the fascism of the interwar period, in Mussolini's regime as in all the other European movements, an important idea that had not gradually come to fruition in the quarter century preceding August 1914."
Likewise, Mosse, and later Gentile, has stressed fascism's prewar origins in radical nationalist ideas of the nation, its history, and the people, as well as in political cultures, rituals, and modern aesthetics. According to Mosse, a political and cultural phenomenon such as fascism cannot easily be categorized within the traditional canons of political theory. For Mosse, this type of phenomena was not constructed as a coherent system that can be understood by means of a rational analysis of philosophical writers. Fascism is for him a preeminent object of cultural history. Mosse thinks of fascism as a complex phenomenon that in its different national variants introduced itself as a spiritual revolution made up of hierarchical mass movements. In this way, it could appeal to the past for ways of relating it to a national mystic. Linked to Romaness in Italy and to "race" in Germany, and lacking a concrete political or economic program, a specific fascist aesthetics constituted the essence of fascism, which was objectified through its particular mythologies, rites, and symbols and which expressed the general willingness of the movement and the nation.
For Mosse, fascism needed to be analyzed through its own self-understanding. Social and economic factors were important, but they were not as important as its cultural dimensions. Fascism was a civic religion and belief system. It combined extreme nationalism, ideas of regeneration and sacrifice, a mythical mindset, a supreme leader, an expansionist drive, racism and extreme violence, aesthetic ideals of war and masculinity, and revolutionary rites and symbols.
As historian Enzo Traverso argues, "In spite of their differences, Mosse, Sternhell and Gentile converge in their underestimation of a major mark of fascism: anti-communism." Traverso is right in emphasizing the anticommunist dimensions of fascism. But why have so many historians occluded this dimension? An important aspect of this oversight is the extent to which this idea has been exaggerated by conservative historians like Ernst Nolte, the most famous champion of the idea of fascism as anticommunism. But if the Sternhell or the Mosse-Gentile approaches have been truly influential for transnational historians of fascism, Nolte's methodology has been the most important for generic historians, who have thus far dominated recent discussions of what fascism is in history. For them, fascism works as an illustration of the theory that it has previously explained. Thus, in most generic approaches, taxonomic explanations tend to replace more empirically based historical inquiries.
## FROM THE "GENERIC CONSENSUS" TO THE TRANSNATIONAL TURN
Generic historians present a European explanation of fascism. When confronted with the non-European fascism of modernizing reactionary traditions, they often resort to tautology. Fascists outside Europe cannot be true fascists because they are not European. This European objection is not apparent in fascist sources, and like other simplistic definitions does not preclude fascism's becoming a diverse reality on European and non-European soils.
For these historians, fascism as a generic object of study becomes a subject only when it is "ideal typed." Examples of this swift and paradigmatic displacement of agency (from how fascist theorists saw themselves to how historical theorists generically defined them) are to be sure quite diverse, and sometimes are even opposed. For Payne, fascism is a radically antagonistic form of revolutionary ultranationalism having a vitalist philosophy and authoritarian conceptions of leadership, war, violence, and mass mobilization. In contrast, Roger Griffin sees generic fascism as essentially focused on national rebirth, what he suggestively calls the palingenetic myth, as a form of historical, modernist resistance to liberalism.
Generally, generic historians tend to displace the peculiar intertwining of fascist theory and practice onto the past. Yet this radical connection between action and theory shaped how fascists themselves conceived of the experience of political violence as ideology. Although this connection was not specific to fascism, it was with fascism that it became radicalized in an extremely novel political formation, according to which the primacy of violence was globally explained and practiced through the prism of political myth. I consider this mythical experiential ideology to be one of the most significant aspects of transnational fascism, as it accounts for how and why fascists acted out ideological constructs through extreme forms of violence. Violence became the ultimate form of theory, and the centrality of violence is precisely what these historians tend to situate outside of national and transnational contexts.
Most generic historians of fascism consider their task to be finding the "fascist minimum," a sort of Holy Grail of fascist historiography. Ironically, this view coincides with Mussolini's belief in an essential kernel of fascism that transcends its more national and political connotations. However, generic scholars are not very interested in fascist self-understanding that posits a transnational enemy of the people in politics. They tend to reify important aspects of fascism, such as notions of national rebirth, modernism, and biopolitics, while also omitting the analysis of fascist processes of global circulation, adaptation, and reformulation.
In his important critique of generic historiography, Benjamin Zachariah juxtaposes the "fascist minimum" of generic historians to his proposal for a "fascist repertoire," which he draws from his own research on Indian fascism: "Perhaps it is easier to acknowledge this important presence if fascism is not seen as a specific European import that comes readymade and relatively clearly formed." For Zachariah, "The repertoire tends to include an organic and primordial nationalism involving a controlling statism that disciplines the members of the organic nation to act as, for, and in the organic (or völkisch) nation that must be purified and preserved. It is in the service of preserving this organic nation that a paramilitarist tendency towards national discipline is invoked. The coherence of the repertoire is maintained by inciting a sense of continuous crisis and alarm about the potential decay of the organic nation if discipline and purity is not preserved." Zachariah cogently argues for the need to rethink fascist transnational connections as processes of convergent evolution and mutual recognition, rather than as top-down "diffusionist" Eurocentric frameworks. This argument represents a new trend in transnational studies that rethinks fascism as a diverse group of national formations with a distinctive and yet converging set of political ideas and practices.
All in all, major generic historians of fascism like Paxton, Griffin, Mosse, and Payne propose a Eurocentric model of fascism that emphasizes the mimicry and the lack of agency of non-European actors. The same can be said for the few who take the nominalist position that dominated earlier discussions in the field. Going back to De Felice's emphasis on national singularity, Nolte's historicism about an epoch of fascism that had no clear links with its past and its future, and Allardyce's antitheoretical nominalism, these neo-positivist historians deny the possibility of fascism outside of Europe and project great hostility, even irritation, toward both the relationship between history and theory and the idea that analyzing fascism globally is opposed to, that is, not the same as, merely telling its history. These historians dispute that Argentine, Japanese, or Indian fascists were fascists because they stress epochal, national, and specialized disciplinary paths. In this profoundly conservative and anti-intellectual view, fascism deserves no analysis, and its ephemeral nature does not warrant any substantive interpretation. The history of fascism problematically becomes a form of antiquarianism.
Unlike neopositivists, most generic historians turn fascism into a theory that is at the ready when it is needed to catalog fascism according to its different national expressions. To be sure, generic theorists deal with fascism as a universal entity and expect all national historiographies to follow their models. However, most historians of, for example, Italian fascism in Italy, or Latin American, Japanese, or German fascisms have not joined the generic consensus, or they even ignore its success among English readers interested in fascism.
Many studies of fascism go only so far in addressing the interwoven dimensions of fascism on a global scale. As Constantin Iordachi remarks, too often historians of fascism "fell into the trap of reifying geographical labels into historical types." And as Zachariah observes, "Much of the (still meagre) material on 'global' fascism 'outside Europe' still sees Europe as the natural homeland of fascism; it is not clear why this is the case." An outcome of employing this European-centered lens is that fascism outside Europe is regarded as a subject without agency or as having been replaced with stereotypes, such as "Islamo-fascism" in the Arab world or the "caudillo" rule in Latin America. It is rather curious that scholars of European history are open to studying the global circulation of liberalism and Marxism, but when they are confronted with the European participation in fascist global exchanges, they prefer to stress a more Eurocentric view. As bluntly put by Zachariah, "Scholarship on fascism tends to ignore the extra-European writing for reasons of embarrassment, disciplinary specialisation or (in)competence or because it is seen as a secondary part of the history of fascist ideas." When confronted with these positions on fascism, many historians of India, Japan, Syria, Brazil, and other places simply accept them and then treat fascism as a category that is essentially external to their national histories. In some cases, there is even an undercurrent of nationalism in these historical positions. This often unacknowledged nationalist approach stresses the singularity of national history and denies that, for example a country like Argentina could have been polluted by such a problematic "European" ideology. The result of this approach is an essentialist idea of two nations, one being authentically national and the other being a European ideology that was first exported and then adopted by nationals with false consciousness or worse. These readings of fascism that converge in denying it any sort of national dimension are devoid of contextual implications, but paradoxically they first appeared in many contemporary antifascist sources that confronted fascism from the position of a progressive nationalism. For them, fascism simply had no relation to more inclusive national traditions. These antifascist critics offered up an idealized idea of the nation that had no place for fascism. Yet historical explanations still need to address why fascism belonged to the experience of extreme right actors within so many of these national traditions, at the same time that it circulated and was constantly reformulated around the globe.
## TRANSNATIONAL FASCISM
When considered globally, in terms of its national specificities but also in terms of ideological transfers and social, cultural, and economic exchanges, fascism becomes less European centered. In contrast with what the leading historian of global history Sebastian Conrad aptly criticizes as a "national container" mentality and a "methodological nationalism," global mobilities, circulation, and transfers are in fact key elements of national history. As a historical approach that focuses on external links that also shaped nations, the transnational perspective leads to better a understanding of the national and supranational workings of geopolitical spaces.
The history of the transnational is not only about transfers but also about those things that were never transferred, or could not be successfully exported because of specific national histories. As Rebekka Habermas suggests, transfer and nontransfer "are two sides of the same coin and therefore must always be viewed together." She argues it is important to look not only on "what was transferred or not transferred but also at the often unintended effects the transfer interaction produced." Processes of transfer are "always accompanied by the shadow of a non-transfer, whether owing to actual ignorance or a conscious decision not to address an issue." In analyzing the clear and shadowy aspects of fascist exchanges, transfers, and nontransfers, the transnational approach to fascism moves it far away from ideal forms and "minimal" definitions. Fascism was a lived experience and, like liberalism and Marxism, it eventually became a global political ideology with significant differences from one national context to another.
Fascism crossed the Atlantic and adopted extreme clerico-fascist dimensions that were not as prevalent in Europe. If this were the case in countries like Argentina, Japanese fascism put forward a distinctive imperial notion of "restoration" of the past. But as in Argentina and elsewhere, Japanese fascism was concerned with modernizing previous forms of national sovereignty. The historian of Japanese fascism Reto Hofmann observes, "The ambiguities of Japan's fascism are a characteristic of fascism itself, reflecting its role as a mediator between revolution and restoration as well as its hybrid nature as a product of global and national history." As a global contestation of liberal democracy and socialism, fascism affirmed nationalism while posing a seemingly paradoxical global challenge to liberal and socialist forms of universalism.
The relationship between fascism and the nation was always ambivalent, since fascism was both a global ideology and an extreme form of nationalism. Most fascists defended a fascist form of internationalism. For the Colombian fascists, the Leopards, there were no "enemies to the right," which for them meant that both nationally and internationally, fascism represented a dictatorial solution to national states of emergency. The fascists of Colombia argued that they "represented a coherent, organized and logical doctrine that has a solution of its own to all the problems in the universe." The Leopards especially stressed how Latin American forms of the extreme right had to be dually rooted in anti-imperialism and Bolivarian ideals. Latin Americans had to be united in order to defend themselves from the "ambitions" of the Anglo-Saxon races that were taking away from their national sovereignty. But if racism were a legitimate solution for a cosmopolitan place like Argentina, the Leopards wanted to defend the internal homogeneity of Colombia as it had grown from the "simple mestizaje of the Spaniard and the Indian." Similarly, José Vasconcelos, a major Mexican intellectual who embraced fascism, presented his country, and Latin America as a whole, as living in colonial conditions. For him, Mexico needed to defend its mestizaje and its imperial Hispanic legacies against the northern powers and the "world program" of the "Jews."
While in Brazil some fascists proposed an idea of a multiracial and multireligious totalitarian society, in Mexico fascists often associated fascism with an idealization of both Catholicism and Mexico's Indian past. If in Germany fascists were obsessed with Judaism as the primary enemy of the community of the people, in the Andes, the Peruvian Blackshirts aimed their totalitarian animosity toward Asians, and especially Japanese, immigrants. In what eventually would become India and Pakistan, fascism adopted Hindu or Muslim undertones, while in Argentina, fascists put forward "Christian fascism." Considered from a transnational perspective, fascist entanglements defy standard national histories. Even in Europe, fascism did not always come to power out of an internal crisis such as in the "classical" cases of Germany or Italy. It is true that Mussolini and Hitler were "elected" to power, but it is also true that they reached power as members of party coalitions that they eventually came to dominate and later obliterate. If in Germany and Italy fascism destroyed democracy from within and they became dictatorships, in countries like Spain, fascism came to power with a coup d'état. Desires for civil war in the name of the people's national community predominated on both sides of the Atlantic. Peruvian fascists, for example, called themselves the "children of the people," but in a more adult manner they also stated that they were waging a "holy crusade" as "guerrillas" of fascism. These claims notwithstanding, an actual civil war took place in a few historical cases, notably Spain in 1936–39 and in Italy in 1943–45. Across the world, fascism thrived not only when conservative and authoritarian powers were in decay (Italy, Germany, Spain, and Argentina) but also when other fascist powers helped them. The reasons for fascism were both internal and external. In countries like Romania, Norway, France, and Hungary fascism was "successful" after the German fascist war of occupation. Power and transnational politics were equally important during the Spanish Civil War, which the Spanish fascists won owing to substantial Nazi and Italian fascist support. The same can be said about the Ustasha Movement in Croatia. When this was not the case, the fascists were contested or diminished by authoritarian governments or imperial powers: in Hungary before the Nazi occupation; in Brazil, Colombia, Portugal, Uruguay, and Mexico during the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s; in British India and British South Africa; and in imperial Japan.
Across the world, fascism contested liberalism and socialism, but it also confronted more moderate forms of the conservative right on a global scale. Most fascists supported forms of corporativism, but they differed in terms of their ultimate and practical applications. Fascism brutalized politics and militarized society. It magnified the political use of violence. The two world wars affected all territories of the world, but in very different ways and with very different outcomes. Countries like Argentina, Mexico, Portugal, and Spain never faced external war during this period, but their politics, fascism included, were substantially affected by international conflicts. England and the United States, on the other hand, experienced the war as combatants but did not face important internal fascist threats. The opposite happened in what is now Ukraine and the Baltic countries, the Middle East, China, Japan, and India, where fascism found an important place in the sun. Later on, the emergence of populism in the Global South was also related, and it became a response to the military events and the genocidal violence that had first originated with fascism in the north.
Political violence through internal and external repression and war remained at the center of transnational fascism. Fascism was a political model that first took power in Italy, but then acquired regional and cross-regional connotations. There were important Mediterranean points of convergence among southern fascisms, and the same can be said about transatlantic fascism, Central European fascisms, and fascism's Asian or Middle Eastern variants.
In contexts of political deterioration, and during periods of economic regression or imperial occupation, fascism proposed an alternative to the perceived crisis of liberal democracy in the interwar and war years. It put forward political violence, racism, and dictatorship as transcendental solutions to epochal problems. Fascism wanted to redefine the relationship between society and the state, but its efforts to do so resulted in very different national permutations. At times, different fascisms (especially but not only Nazism and Italian fascism) competed against each other, and conflict was often at the center of fascist transnational exchanges. Even the study of Nazi Germany is in need of more transnational approaches.
All in all, it would be misleading for historians to study specific cases of fascism without considering others. As Zachariah argues, fascism was
a family of ideas, with common—though often disavowed—roots, intellectual underpinnings, styles and organisations of movements, and sometimes even a strong overlap of personnel. The phenomenon of fascism in India has not been adequately explored, in part because of a prejudice that fascisms in general are strictly European phenomena and that non-Europeans only produced inadequately understood imitations. When and if it is addressed at all, fascism in India is usually attributed (correctly) to the Hindu right, collectively known as the Sangh Parivar, but often (incorrectly) only to the Hindu right; however, its history in India is a much longer and broader one.
As in most places, many Hindus in India recognized fascism as both a global and local phenomenon, while Muslims like the fascist intellectual Inayatullah Khan al-Mashriqi not only claimed to have inspired Hitler's own program but also considered his own "Muslim fascism" to be the best version of fascism. If al-Mashriqi claimed that fascism should follow "the shining guidance of the Holy Qur'an," Argentine fascists claimed that their clerico-fascist version was superior to the more secular European versions. In Argentina it was "a Christianized fascism." These views of Latin American fascism were also influential in Europe. A prominent Spanish fascist even stated that European fascists should learn from the Latin Americans:
It is the case that the Latin American processes of reaction followed an inverse path to that of Europeans. Here [in Europe] it is the nationalist and imperialistic consciousness that initiates the processes, and [European fascists] look for a way to accommodate Catholic principles and the Church. There [in Latin America] the Catholic groups initiate the process and they start looking for collaboration with fascist instruments and styles. Here it is force and violence that, with a decorative intention, later call upon Catholic principles. There, these Catholic principles call upon force in order to defend themselves.
In contrast with this Latin American, and at times European and Southeast Asian, view of the sacred in fascism, Japanese fascists admired fascism's down-to-earthness rather than its godlike features.
Fascism was different and even incompatible in different places. Its causes and effects changed with respect to broader national histories, as well as to changing international contexts, from the Great War to the Cold War and beyond. In my own work, I have studied how in Argentina the clerico-fascism of the 1930s and 1940s was central in the postwar period through Peronism, its populist reformulation, and later in the ideological origins of the Dirty War in the 1970s.
These aftereffects of fascism are often missing from the Eurocentric literature, which downplays fascism's transnational and later its transcontextual connections. For example, in Japan, as in Argentina and in the Arab World, the complex relation between European powers and fascism was a key element in the local attempts to leave fascism behind after 1945. In Argentina and Japan, past fascist connections became inconvenient truths in the new Cold War against communism. After 1945, fascism encountered a certain denationalization of its ideology with the increasing development of pan-European forms in Europe and, often, anti-European forms in Latin America or Asia. As Andrea Mammone, a foremost historian of transnational neofascism argues, "Even what is generally perceived as a narrow nationalism can take a non-national dimension and redeploys at a supranational or international level (even if the main feeling of black shirted comradeship was almost always with their right-wing fellows and with their political and ideological projects)." Neofascists in France and Italy influenced each other and even read their own national contexts in terms of the other. Transatlantic neofascist engagements were continued and often reformulated among Chile, Argentina, and Spain and between Brazil and Portugal. As the Mexican historian of Latin American neofascism Luis Herrán Ávila shows, transnational fascist ideas crisscrossed the Americas from Mexico City and Miami to Buenos Aires and Taipei. Many of these neofascists, earlier in Latin America and the Middle East and later in Europe, would turn to populism as the way to reach a wider antiliberal consensus.
Immediately after World War II, the memories of fascist violence, especially those of the Holocaust, motivated the populist rejection of the past. New forms of postfascist populism created an authoritarian version of democracy, influenced but also firmly rooted in the explicit rejection of genocidal fascist violence.
Modern populism also enforced a notion of popular sovereignty, but this was, and is supposed to be, anchored in an antiliberal electoral democracy and not in the fascist form of dictatorship. Fascism and populism presented clear distinctions in their uses and conceptions of political violence. If fascism understood power as firmly rooted in violence, populism later shared with liberalism a more Weberian, and restricted, notion of violence. In fact, when actual dictatorship in countries like Argentina in the 1970s replaced populist forms of democracy, fascist forms of violence returned. In this case, fascism came back from the past in the form of often-silenced, but at times quite active, memories of and by perpetrators. This was a process in which fascist notions of violent subjectivity returned after they had been repressed. This new take on the perpetrators' memories of violence renewed fascist ideology, in the postfascist and neofascist contexts of the Latin American Dirty Wars but also in other "hot" war contexts of the global Cold War, from the Middle East to Africa and Southeast Asia. Many of these radical dictatorships represented a form of antipopulist ideology, in which violence reigned supreme. In contrast, populism put forward an authoritarian version of democracy that straddled democracy and dictatorship. Turning the page on the Holocaust and other memories of fascist violence, populists tried to close the book of liberal recipes for the nation. Populist postfascism denied the centrality of extreme violence for the authoritarian democracies it constructed in the early postwar period. If many populist regimes were initially founded in order to detach from the fascist past, populists implicitly ignored how much their politics were an effect of this past's radical violence, which the German case epitomized. Because it is at the center of the populist reformulation of fascism, the Holocaust remains a challenge to historians of fascism and populism.
## FASCISM AND THE HOLOCAUST
The Holocaust is a paradigmatic fascist transnational experience of genocide, and for this reason still poses, and is symptomatic of, the problems and perspectives opened by a critical global history of fascism. By the end of the Holocaust, Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges thought of Nazi ideology as a theory of violence. And in 1945, Borges considered violence literally to be fascist ideology. Borges also realized that the victims of this radical form of political violence—the Jewish other in the Holocaust case—were turned into sacrificial objects. For the Borgean Nazi character of the story "Deutsches Requiem," camp commander zur Linde, for example, the fascist body and the national organism are sacrificial objects as well. Moreover, for zur Linde the sacrifice of the fascist self is, in a sense, an even more significant source of ideological self-determination through violence. Moments before his imminent execution by the Allies, zur Linde argues that the memories of fascist violence will remain after the defeat of fascism: "An inexorable epoch is spreading over the world. We forged it, we who are already its victim. What matters if England is the hammer and we the anvil, so long as violence reigns and not servile Christian timidity? If victory and injustice and happiness are not for Germany, let them be for other nations. Let heaven exist, even though our dwelling place is Hell. I look at myself in the mirror to discover who I am, to discern how I will act in a few hours, when I am face to face with death. My flesh may be afraid; I am not."
In Borges's view, the Nazi idea of the sacrifice of the Jews implied for Hitler's followers an end in itself—namely, bare physical violence. For a fascism that transcended national borders and cultures, the Jew represented absolute darkness. This violence is presented as a naked innate form of authenticity, but according to Borges's interpretation it leads to an ideological maelstrom of destruction and self-destruction beyond fascist regimes.
Fascism ends when it achieves its ideologically sacred imperative of violence. It ends with the sacrifice, the destruction of the fascist self. This was clearly exemplified in Hitler's decisions as his armies began to undergo defeat at the eastern front. He sacrificed his troops regardless of military logic. Fascism is fully entropic. More so than any other ideology, fascism is bound to inevitable decline and harm its own political viability. Entropy leads to the destruction of reason as epitomized in the split between the flesh and the ego in the body and memory of Zur Linde. The killing of the ego is the result of the overdetermination of the forces of desire in politics, the equation of authenticity with victimization, sacrifice, and violence. For Borges, the fascist internationalism that aims to establish violence through victimization as the only politics is a wrong kind of universalism.
Some years before, Sigmund Freud considered Nazi victimization as a central element of global fascist ideology, especially in terms of its stress on myth and the unconscious and of its rejection of reason. Both the Argentine Borges and the Austrian Freud considered the Nazi victimization of Jews an essential element of fascist ideology. To be sure, their view was more sophisticated than the simplistic view shared by the majority of their fellow antifascists. For the latter, fascism was simply an evil, a brute yet silly aberration from normative politics. Fascism had no ideology and was even a surrogate for other ideologies and economic forces. Borges and Freud postulated the opposite view. Fascism was above all a radical ideological event that threatened enlightened civilization. The reasons for this distinctive perspective in the context of antifascism was especially related to the Borgean and Freudian emphasis on anti-Semitism as a central source of ideological fulfillment in Nazi ideology, as well as their inclusion of the latter within a broader fascist mythical notion of the primordial role the unconscious played in politics. The most violent dimensions of this mythical worldview would later be repressed with the defeat of fascism but as Borges indicated, its most damming legacies would remain for future perpetrators as a memory of the overpowering violence of fascist victimization.
It was in the camps that this most violent mythical implication of fascist ideology was first experienced and later interpreted. Jean Améry, an antifascist and a member of the resistance against Nazism, would talk of "real fascism and singular Nazism."
Many other victims felt the same. The tendency to identify fascism with Nazism was widespread during the time of the Holocaust, especially among the victims. In the Warsaw Ghetto, for example, Chaim Kaplan used it to aptly explain the Nazi fascist attempt to create a new world order. For Kaplan, this world order clearly proposed victimization as an ideology of conquest and persecution. In contrast, for historians of the Holocaust, the limits of historiographical notions of fascism and Nazism explained the need to exclude fascism altogether as an analytical tool for understanding the Holocaust. As a result, many historians often overlooked the actual ideological connections between the transnational history of fascism and the historical conditions for the Holocaust.
Primo Levi, who became a member of a fascist youth group in 1924, when he was only five, came to realize the victimizing implications of the Italian variant of fascism. He saw and experienced the grip of fascism from the perspectives of substantially different "gray-zoned" subject positions—namely, semimandatory fascist youth, onlooker, antifascist, and Jewish victim. For Levi, the "exaltation of violence" opened the way to the fascist ideological attack against reason. Levi who conceived Nazism as the "German version of fascism," saw the former as a radical version of fascist ideology. The camps were the model for the fascist "New Order."
Levi reflected on the sacrificial aspects of fascist violence. Fascist violence had the ultimate aim of destroying the humanity of the self. Levi traced the continuum of fascist violence from the Italian fascist squads of 1922 to the world of Auschwitz: "The Blackshirts had not just killed Turin's trade unionists, Communists and Socialists. First they made them drink half a kilo of castor oil. In this way a man is reduced to tatters, is no longer human . . . There's a direct connection between the Turin massacres [of 1922] and the entry ceremony in the Nazi camps, where they stripped, destroyed your personal photographs, shaved your head, tattooed you on the arm." He concluded, "This was the demolition of man; this is Fascism."
Fascists around the globe shared this view of their actions as a total attack against their enemies, albeit not its critical ethico-political implications. For the fascists the victimization of the enemy was another example of the centrality and desirability of violence in fascist ideology. Mussolini and the Argentine, Japanese, Brazilian, Colombian, Peruvian, and Romanian fascists considered the enemy to be a defining character of their own notion of the self. In short, Jews and other enemies defined what the fascists were not and, by opposition, what they actually were.
Not all fascist ideologies were as radical as Nazism in terms of their victimization of the invented enemy of the people. Similarly, other forms of fascism were not as extreme in terms of their desire, their "will," to put their fantasies about violence and demonization in practice. For most "sources" living during the time of fascism (1919–45), Nazism was a peculiarly radical version of it. In other words, Nazism was German fascism. This appreciation was shared by most fascists and antifascists. After the war and the Holocaust, this experiential conceptualization of fascist ideology was displaced by newer forms of historical meaning-making and selective postwar memory processes. Whereas before 1945, global fascism served the purpose of illuminating the global ideological implications of Nazi processes of victimization, after 1945, fascism as an explanatory device often obscured central dimensions of the Shoah experience, especially the experiences of its Jewish victims. In this context, the different experiences of all victims of the Nazis were homogenized, obscuring the ideological hierarchies and victimizing imperatives present in German fascist ideology.
After the war, and until recently, fascism and Nazism were generally conflated in public memories. This conflation buttressed a form of collective silence about the identities of the victims of the Holocaust, and hence the ideological peculiarities of Nazi persecution. This was the case when these notions of fascism were embraced either in Western or in Eastern Europe. In the East and the West, the inclusion of Nazism within global fascism, or global totalitarianism, served the purpose of downplaying the main features of Nazi victimization.
This situation obliterated the history and memory of victims. It also downplayed the particularities of transnational fascism, as it was understood at the time of the Shoah. In turn, many historians of fascism and the Holocaust presented an uncritical take on this transnational peculiarity of fascism. In fact, they often ended up mutually excluding their respective fields of knowledge. Especially generic historians of fascism replaced a mutually inclusive living field of ideological experiences and genocidal practices in the past with definitions, glossaries, and "high theory" from the present.
Concurrently with this exclusion, historians of the Holocaust have concluded that fascism has no connection whatsoever with Nazism. For example, Saul Friedländer, a major historian of the Holocaust, stresses the singularity of what he aptly calls Nazi redemptive anti-Semitism. Friedländer emphasizes the pseudoreligious dimension of the Holocaust, that is, the extermination was a "sacred end and not a means to other ends." He concludes that no similar trait can be found in other countries. In Friedlander's master works Nazi Germany and the Jews and The Years of Extermination, the global history of Nazi endeavors is explained through the enactment and reception of Nazi policies, both nationally and internationally. To be sure, Friedländer states that the Holocaust "is an integral part of 'the age of ideology,'" but he also clearly differentiates between global fascism "in Italy and elsewhere" and Nazism in Germany. In other words, for him fascism can be a transnational ideology but not in Germany. Friedländer's work is especially innovative in its emphasis on the experience of the victims. In this regard, the lack of references to fascism as experienced and interpreted by the victims is surprising. The transnational history of global interpretations of fascism could provide another angle for thinking about the Nazi transnational project of conquest and destruction, especially in terms of how it was interpreted by its victims.
Developing transnational and comparative approaches outside the framework of the Nazi empire is often anathema in Holocaust historiography. However, the adoption of a global historical approach to Nazism may not necessarily mean a general downplaying of the Holocaust as an extreme event within an extreme history. Eurocentrism, which is also a trademark of many studies of fascism, plays an important role in current pleas for uniqueness in Holocaust historiography. Whereas Africans, and also Arabs, experienced an equally unique brand of Italian racism in the forms of mustard gases and other chemical weapons, summary executions, and killings of civilians, the Nazis effected one of the most severe events in history. In short, it was a radical departure, a turning point in history. But empire, fascism, and racism link the Holocaust with the world outside Europe. More recently many historians of Nazism have focused on German and European imperialisms as central precursors of the Nazi genocide in the East. All in all, as Hannah Arendt suggested many years ago in her Origins of Totalitarianism, global ideologies and imperialism were central elements of the history and prehistory of fascism and the Holocaust. They also continued to play a role in its aftermath.
In their radical display of raw, unmediated physical violence, Nazis pushed the fascist experience to the extreme. In a sense, Nazism became fully different from other forms of fascism. However, fascism exercised its genocidal potential by engaging in genocidal practices in Italian fascist Africa and Civil War Spain. Transnational fascists (from France to the Ukraine) also collaborated in the Nazi Final Solution by providing logistical and ideological support and, last but not least, killers. However, Nazism presents a radical departure from other fascist formations. Nazism is not a generic "ideal type" of fascism but the culmination of its most radical possibility.
Fascism as a movement and as a regime rose and fell promoting civil war. This was at last the Italian legacy of Mussolini's fascism: a country divided and a near apocalyptic fight that required radically violent means, including fascist collaboration, in sending Italian Jews to Auschwitz. But perhaps more importantly, the legacy of fascism goes beyond Italy and Mussolini. Not only did Italian fascism send Jews to Auschwitz after 1943 but links existed from the far-distant Argentine fascists, who justified the extermination of the Jews; to the French and Dutch collaborators who corralled them; and to the Baltic and Ukrainian fascists who killed them. Transnational fascism was the global ideology that made that crime possible.
Nazism in its radical spiral of integral "sacred" terror against the Jews left the fascist pack behind. It was in the Nazi empire in the East that the Nazis decided to literalize in the concentration camps the most circular notion of Nazi fascism, the notion of the abject. In Auschwitz, a closed and controlled laboratory of fascism, the Nazi idea of the abject as the existential enemy of the people, the most detached and psychotic aspect of Hitler's ideology, became a reality.
## THE FASCIST HISTORY OF VIOLENCE
Fascism was an ideology of violence. It took violence so seriously that it not only devoted thousands of pages of books and speeches to it but also made violence a political imperative. Violence defined fascist practice. In other words, there is no fascism without political violence. There is no real fascism without a total, existential enemy of the people and its consequent political persecution.
The logic of violence in fascism is central for thinking through its ideological and aesthetic dimensions. Violence defined fascism's conceptual representations, especially with respect to fascist genocidal notions of the abject and sacrifice. Violence constituted fascism and the fascists. Violence was ascribed a sacred status and made fascism an extreme political theology. It was a primary idea of the world as rooted and ruled by violence in apocalyptic times of emergency. As the Chinese Blueshirts stated, this was why fascism "is the only tool of self-salvation of nations on the brink of destruction. It saved Italy and Germany. . . . Therefore, there is no other road than imitating the fascist spirit of violent struggle as in Italy and Germany." Like the Blueshirts in China, the Portuguese Blueshirts also identified the apology for violence with international fascism. Violence was the aim of fascism but also the starting point of politics: "Violence is the essential and intelligent start of all good politics because without violence and in adversity, conquest is impossible."
There was no place for other ideas, insofar as in fascist minds alternative politics represented a rejection of the idea of fascism as the only possibility for politics. Those with other ideas were necessarily positioned against the national community of leader and people. They had no legitimate place in fascist politics or society. For fascists, it was theoretically logical that the enemy fully deserved to be met with violence. The logic of violence was equated with power. To put it simply, the logic of violence constituted a core element of fascist ideology. A practical outcome of this ideology was the victimization of those deemed to be different. This form of political victimization was entirely modern in the fascist sense precisely because, although it claimed to be rooted in old myths from the past, it was actually a violence legitimized by and through a modern political myth of the leader, the nation, and the people.
In fascism, belief was connected to an act of faith in the conductor. Fascism presented its leaders as living myths. While in Germany the Führerprinzip presented Hitler as the ultimate sacred source of truth and authority, in Brazil, Argentina, Spain, and beyond, fascists identified the politics of the leaders with a transcendental mythical truth. In Argentina, Leopoldo Lugones, the country's most famous fascist, related truth to power and the divine. For fascists truth was a matter of almost divine intuition and detached from practical corroboration. Like Lugones, Spanish fascist writer Ramiro de Maeztu posited the existence of an "eternal truth." It was in the search for right and truth "as transcendental essences" that reality emerged. Similarly, Gustavo Barroso argued that Brazilian fascism was the best political formation on earth because it represented "eternal truths." These truths of Brazilian fascism promised an extraordinary change, the "new times," when the "unity" of the spirit, the cross, and the nation would rule. Like Lugones and de Maeztu, Barroso identified the rise of a new era with the aesthetic and political primacy of an absolute truth.
Fascism connected the reality of the movement and its leaders with a mythical past of heroism, violence, and subordination. In fascist ideology, the leaders personified an epochal continuum establishing a direct link, a unitary front with the people and the nation. In turn, the leader was the ultimate source of popular sovereignty, responsible only to himself. Fascists were obsessed with the infallibility of their leaders because, for them, their assumed lack of error reflected the core divine truths of the ideology. Unlike liberalism or socialism, which they believed had nontranscendental roots, fascists longed for a return of the mythical warring heroes, and that is what they expected from their leaders. Fascism was a political religion. Its modernity especially lay in the fact that it repositioned the place of the sacred in politics.
It is important to stress the particular modernity of fascism with respect to the sacred and the unconscious. As historian Angelo Ventrone argues, the fascist critique of modernity was apocalyptic, but it also proposed an alternative modernity at the service of conquest and domination. Fascists wanted to replace what they saw as mechanistic, repetitive, and involuntary modernity with a "qualified" modernity in which the fascist could tame matter and the economy. Fascists saw their modernity as the "domination of the spirit and the political." They placed an "ethics of war" and a violent sense of masculinity and community at the center of these concerns. For this reason, for fascists violence was the ultimate form of politicization.
Violence, and the lawless use of violence, is a defining aspect of both fascist practice and fascist theory. Violence, as Primo Levi cogently put it, became an end in itself. Fascism brandished power and violence as ideological aims rather than means. In fascist ideology, violence is not only instrumental, it is mainly a form of intuition, of creation. It is not only a mobilizing myth but also a dark negative sublime. Namely, violence is elevated to the greatest form of politics. For Mussolini, violence was power without restraints. It was a nonrational state that provided the nation and the individual with the security of being protected from the menacing outer world. For thinkers like Max Weber and Karl Marx, or even in part for Georges Sorel (who nonetheless exalted violence in regenerative and redemptive terms), violence has a primary role in politics but needs to be restrained one it has achieved a useful end. These authors clearly differ from the fascist theorists of violence.
In the fascist ideal, violence loses its instrumentality and becomes a direct source of knowledge. Violence defines fascist identity. It is a key dimension of the inner self. Violence becomes a transcendent experience that renders politics an almost sacred field of action. In Mussolini's case, violence was an ethical force that helped fascism achieve a radical break from ordinary concerns. Here the notion of sacrifice is once again central. Over time, Mussolini best expressed this idea in the famous fascist catchphrase, "I don't care" (or I don't give a damn), which was inscribed in the showrooms of the permanent fascist revolution in 1942. For Mussolini this action of not caring was related to the acceptance of death and "purifying blood" as redemptive forces. Even as late as 1942, when considering the future of the Italian nation, he could not (or did not want to) conceal the fascist embrace of violence that the Nazi war of destruction promised him. As was the case for Hitler, or for the Argentine fascist nacionalistas, violence and war were for Mussolini sources of political orientation and personal and collective redemption. Spanish fascists talked of the "sacred violence of action," which for them was equally rooted in justice and right. Similarly fusing politics and holy violence, Eugenia Silveyra de Oyuela, one of the most extreme Argentine fascist intellectuals, asserted that violence was legitimate as a result of God's war against the internal enemies. For her, this was the situation in Argentina: where "red hordes" had invaded the country, "we have the invaders in our midst, and we are, in fact, in a state of defensive war. This is a licit war for the Argentine who needs 'to defend the rights of the threatened homeland.'" The motto of the Egyptian Blueshirts was "Obedience and Struggle" (al-tcah wa al-jihad), and this idea of struggle was also reflected in their oath, "I swear by almighty God, by my honour and by the fatherland that I will be a faithful and obedient soldier, fighting for the sake of Egypt, and that I will abstain from whatever would pervert my principles or be harmful to my organization." A world away from the Middle East, the Chinese Blueshirts asserted that violence had to be directed toward all political rivals: "There must be a determination to shed blood—that is, there must be a kind of unprecedented violence to eliminate all enemies of the people." If Chinese fascists considered violence the way to achieve the true politics of the people, the Colombian fascists, the Leopards, asserted, "Violence, as illuminated by the myth of a beautiful and heroic fatherland, is the only thing that can create for us a favorably alternative in the great fights of the future." The myth of fascism as rooted in the notion that the inner self and collective unconscious forces could lead only to violence and death was the preeminent form of conceiving politics as essentially divine.
Fascists connected violence and death, in and though politics, to a radical renewal of the self. For example, the Romanian fascists linked the sacred nature of violence to the idea of regeneration and salvation of their warriors through death as sacrifice. For them, as "God wanted" it, "the germ of a renewal can grow only out of death, of suffering." Romanian fascists did "love death." Death was for them, "our dearest wedding among weddings." A feeling of imminent danger embedded in violence was part of the fascist way of life, and death was an outcome of the fascist response to the political enemy, and eventually the self. As Mussolini declared, "Living dangerously, should mean always being ready for everything—whatever the sacrifice, whatever the danger, whatever the action, when the defense of the fatherland and fascism are concerned."
Violence was, for fascism, essentially expressed in the totalitarian fascist state and its "spiritual" and "ethical" imperialism. As Mussolini stated,
The Fascist State expresses the will to exercise power and to command. Here the Roman tradition is embodied in a conception of strength. Imperial power, as understood by the Fascist doctrine, is not only territorial, or military, or commercial; it is also spiritual and ethical. An imperial nation, that is to say a nation which directly or indirectly is a leader of others, can exist without the need to conquer a single square mile of territory.
Imperialism is for fascism a state of becoming rather than a state of being. To be sure, fascism does not differ in this sense from other imperialist formations. However, it diverges in that it is presumably a "proletarian imperialism" when it is viewed as the ultimate expression of Mussolini's nationalist displacement of class struggles onto national struggle. Paradoxically, for Mussolini, fascist imperialism was the ultimate form of anticolonialism. Imperialism was the political antithesis of decadence. In other words, an active, new fascist form of imperialism eliminated the possibility of "becoming a colony." Fascist imperialism proffered itself as heir to Roman imperial traditions. But the importance of Romaness notwithstanding, Italian fascism, in contrast to the ancient Romans, promoted the idea of a war without end. In other words, Mussolini conceived of war as preemptive action to strengthen Italian leadership in the Latin world—indeed, as an imperialist move against "plutocratic empires—"a war of civilization and liberation. It is the war of the people. The Italian people feel it is its own war. It is the war of the poor, the disinherited, and the war of the proletarians." When projected onto a global stage, fascist imperialism was the ultimate form of people's violence and power: "Fascism sees in the imperialistic spirit—i.e. in the tendency of nations to expand—a manifestation of their vitality. In the opposite tendency, which would limit their interests to the home country, it sees a symptom of decadence. Peoples who rise or rise again are imperialistic; renunciation is characteristic of dying peoples." For fascists, imperialism was at the center of the fascist matrix. It provided them with a sense of moving from theory to practice, through war and violence, in the name of the people. In short, it represented a tangible expression of fascist action situated beyond ritual and theory. The different failed attempts to create a formal fascist international have to be understood within the larger framework of fascist spiritual imperialism.
Spiritual imperialism also included the conception of the Nazi genocidal empire. Whereas the Nazi radical version of fascism stressed the perceived enemy as the defining aspect of its ideology, most fascisms ascribed to it a less fixed placed in fascist ideology. These key differences notwithstanding, fascism was a global phenomenon that included Nazism. There is no such thing as a fascist platonic type. Italian fascism was the first fascist movement in Europe, and it was the original point of reference for other fascist movements. It was not, however, a form of fascism from which all other fascisms were derived. Understanding the Italian case is central to the global understanding of fascism, but fascism as a term and a reality refers to a transnational network of shared opinions and feelings. Fascists in Europe and across the world were identified with the "idea." Above all, fascism was, and is, an idea about the world, the people's national community, and the leader that occluded other readings of reality. Fascism confuses reality with truth. Hannah Arendt defines ideology as providing a circular vision of the world that occludes perception and empirical experience. Fascism represented the ultimate ideological gaze in this Arendtian sense. Among political ideologies, fascism represented an ideological lens through which to see and read the world. But it was more than that. It paradoxically implied a denial of reality, an ideological detachment from it that changed it, and even created a new reality and a new definition of the possible in ideological politics. Yet this fascist contribution to the dark side of modernity was not only a singular and tragic historical experience but also part of the broader history of challenges to democracy. In fact, this history includes fascism's most distinctive descendant, modern populism.
## FASCIST POPULISM?
Fascism is not populism, but it is clear to historians that both share important affinities regarding the people, the nation, the leaders, and their enemies. They are different chapters of the same history. The longue durée intellectual trajectory of fascism and populism is essentially global. It has a long history as part of the itinerary of ideas of democracy (and dictatorship) across the globe and a shorter one as part of the transcontextual history that turned fascism to populist postfascism in power after the end of World War II.
To put it playfully, if democracy starts in Athens, modern democratic populism begins in Buenos Aires. The other stops in this long, schematic genealogy of ideas and regimes of power are manifold, but we could tentatively mention the following: 1) preimperial Rome and its grappling with the concept of the people, as well as the role of tribunes and plebeians in this earlier political context; 2) the Paris of the French Revolution and its creation of a modern notion of popular sovereignty; and 3) Rome again, along with many places like Berlin, Lima, Aleppo, or Tokyo, with their respective fascist counter-revolutions against the democratic legacies of the enlightened revolutions.
While classical Athenian democracy emerged from the collapse of tyrants and monarchs, and modern democracy emerged in the French Revolution as the product of a rejection of absolute monarchy, fascism came out of democracy. It was an unexpected, negatively dialectical offspring of popular sovereignty. As a movement, fascism was at times involved in political persecution, street fighting, and the assassination of the preconceived enemy, and it combined this extreme violence with a militarization of politics and the adoption of varied electoral strategies. Fascists often participated in the democratic game, but they were not democratic in any way. In fact they explicitly wanted to destroy democracy. As a regime, fascism became at all times a dictatorial formation, emerging from the democratic crisis of representation that came out of the ruins of World War I. However, it was also rooted in the modern principles of the people and the idea that the leader represents and conveys the desires of the national popular community.
Similarly rooted in this triad of people, leader, and nation, the modern populism that emerged as a regime after 1945 was not a static or an obvious outcome of fascism. Populism was not fascism. Populism had existed in incomplete forms as a set of ideas and movements before the rise of fascism. In turn fascism incorporated some elements of early forms of populism and at times converged with it. At the time of fascism, and in countries as different as Austria, the United States, France, Argentina, or Mexico, many early populists (whom in this book, in part to differentiate between substantially different contexts, I call either prepopulists or protopopulists) became fascists or fellow travelers of fascism, while others clearly rejected fascism. But after the demise of fascism, all populists clearly rejected the violence that had defined fascism as an ideology and a practice of power. Fascism, to be sure, featured traits that we might call populist, but fascism should not be conflated with the postfascist, modern populism that emerged out of its defeat.
From the perspective of the theory of populism, one might argue that fascism was an incomplete populism, a populism without democracy. But historically, fascism was substantially new and thereby different from early populism, as well as from the postwar modern populist regimes, in that fascism fully rejected democracy. Fascists were also keen to present a multiclass authoritarian front that would later be typical of populist regimes, but they did so by establishing a single-party dictatorship with no legal role for the political opposition. Nonetheless fascists and populists both translated this idea of the unrepresented whole into a homogenizing idea of the nation as the social community of the people. As Peter Fritzsche explains, in the case of Germany, "The aim of Nazism was the realization of a racially purified 'people's community' or 'Volksgemeinschaft,' which relied on violence and exclusion even as it promised to overcome the deep divisions among Germans. The idea of the 'people' was both the rhetorical ground on which the National Socialists operated and the horizon for which they reached." Geoff Eley also argues that "Combining together widely disparate and heterogeneous interests and demands, the ideal of the Volksgemeinschaft promised to make a damaged and corrupted Germany once again whole." For other European cases such as Spain or Italy historians have similarly presented fascism as being endowed with an extreme form of antidemocratic populism. As António Costa Pinto argues, fascism stood against reactionary principles precisely because it had the aim of destroying liberalism without restoring the old order. They wanted to create a new man and a new civilization. This was the context of fascist mass plebiscitarian politics and its calls for social reform. For the Portuguese Blueshirts, as was the case for many other fascist movements, corporatism first appeared as a combination of these concerns about the masses and a nondemocratic way that established a new form of populist consensus.
This antiliberal and anticommunist version of corporatism was a key element of the global circulation of fascism and its politics of the people. Stressing this contextual situation provides a more complex view of the social nationalism of global fascism and its close interactions with other interwar dictatorships similarly opposed to "demoliberalism." As Costa Pinto observes, "Powerful processes of institutional transfers were a hallmark of interwar dictatorships . . . corporatism was at the forefront of this process, both as a new form of organised interest representation and as an authoritarian alternative to parliamentary democracy. The diffusion of political and social corporatism, which with the single-party is a hallmark of the institutional transfers among European dictatorships, challenges some rigid dichotomous interpretations of interwar fascism."
All in all, fascism emerged as a reaction against the legacy of the Enlightenment. It rejected liberal democracy and replaced it with dictatorship. This replacement was theoretical as well as practical. While historians have important doubts regarding the real application of corporative practices, few disagree with respect to the centrality of corporative ideas within fascist ideological circles and fascist regimes.
Starting in the 1920s, corporatism increasingly became a synonym for antiliberal and anticommunist dictatorial forms of government. During this period, Mussolini included corporatism as a central element of fascism. It was part of a "new synthesis" that "overcomes socialism and liberalism." Mussolini was not alone. His corporatist "third way" between liberalism and socialism became a global vehicle for the diffusion and reformulation of fascist ideas. Corporatism became one of the arguments put forward by transatlantic fascists as well by the representatives of the "hybrid dictatorships," the authoritarian fellow travelers of the fascists, who thrived during this period. For these regimes, corporatism represented a form of sovereign legitimacy that established a system of representation without downplaying in any significant way the authority of the dictator. If more generally, dictatorship was rooted in a trinitarian notion of popular sovereignty, according to which the leader personally embodied the nation and the people—or as the fascists put it, one man, one people, one nation—corporatism provided a theory for regulating conflict in capitalism and under the supreme arbitration of the leader.
While in nondictatorial forms of representation, corporatism presented the state as the arbiter of interest groups (as would be the case later on for early postwar populist regimes in Latin America), under totalitarian corporatism, there was in general no difference between leader and state with regard to corporatist organization. In theory, corporatism worked as an ideological means for the legitimation of the dictator. Nevertheless, was corporatism only a theoretical bluff or had the fascists meant what they said? To paraphrase the Italian historian Matteo Passetti, it was neither a bluff nor a true revolutionary change in the fascist organization of the state. Similarly, Alessio Gagliardi, called our attention to the need to understand this failed project as a successful form of popular legitimation. This legitimating power of the corporatist dictatorship was created to last. In fact, as Costa Pinto cogently argues, it was a deep-seated element of the dictatorial European response to liberalism: "Corporatism put an indelible mark on the first decades of the 20th century, both as a set of institutions created by the forced integration of organized interests (mainly independent unions) in the state, and as an organic-statist alternative to liberal democracy."
In this context, the fascist critique of capitalism was not against capitalism per se, but rather against forms of capitalism that according to fascists had ignored the needs of the people. For example, the program of the Spanish fascist Falange stated that they repudiated the capitalist system that disengaged itself from popular needs and dehumanized private property. For them, fascism was on the side of the working people. As José Antonio Primo de Rivera expressed it, "We have in common with socialism the aim of advancing the fate of the proletariat." But as Italian fascists also argued, fascism was opposed to socialism—they wanted all of the people to be united with the fatherland. Fascists worldwide wanted "social justice" for the people and the nation. Mixing nation and people, fascism was thus conceived of as "authentically popular" because, as Italian fascist Carlo Costamagna argued, under fascism the people ceased to be an "amorphous mass." Fascism differed from liberalism in maintaining a nationalist notion of the people as needing to be led by the leader and the state. Fascism took from liberalism the concept of the general will of the people, but as Costamagna maintained, "For fascism the general will it is not a will expressed by each citizen." A common understanding among fascists was that only the leader of the state incarnated this tradition and made decisions in its name. The fascist notion of the people collapsed the distinction between the past and the present and created a fascist myth of the people: "For fascism, the people is the infinite number of generations that follow each other as the flow of a river and for this reason these past generations are revived in the most remote of descendants." This idea of the people made fascism stand against liberalism and socialism: "Fascism is as anti-liberal as it is anti-socialist, and in this place between liberalism and socialism fascism finds its originality. In this way it shows its revolutionary character."
The fascist politics of the people were supposed to create a harmonic relationship among capital, people, and nation. As the Argentine fascists affirmed in murals displayed in the streets of Buenos Aires, fascism was going to defend the "superior interest of production." "The time has come to harmonize capital and labor in order to save the nation from the voracity of professional politicians. You are with us or against us." As would later be the case for populism, for fascism, corporatist solutions could only be headed up by the leader, who in turn would be advised by technocrats and experts rather than professional politicians. Fascism was not opposed to technocracy, but technocracy had a secondary role with respect to the leaders of the people. In this regard, it was no different from populism.
Across the globe, fascists opposed the dictatorship of the proletariat with their own idea of a people's fully organized national community. They defended the people and the nation against international forms of capitalism. As the Brazilian fascist Gustavo Barroso explained, fascism, which combined the defense of God, family, and property with social justice, was against international capitalism and communism. If for the Brazilian Green Shirts, capitalism was not a pejorative term in itself, but became a problem only when it was not national and social, for the Argentine fascists it was clear that incorporating the people, and especially the working classes, into mass politics was a key dimension for the success of their movement.
For the Argentine fascist Leopoldo Lugones this relationship between the nation and the people was the starting point of any modern theory of the state. For him, corporatism belonged almost exclusively to the politics of global fascism, but he also proposed an Argentine national version of it. Lugones saw the fascist politics of the people as being essentially antipolitical. He argued that, as a needed historical process of political reform, modern dictatorship was not the expression of conservatism, or more generally a return to the past, but a "revolutionary" attempt to radically modify the organization of the state in "authoritarian reactionary" and prepopulist fashion. By reactionary authoritarianism, Lugones meant the national and popular reaction against the "universal crisis of liberalism."
The national and social reorganization of the administration that Lugones advocated included the reestablishment of domestic loans; the extirpation of "foreign agitators"; the imposition of national defense in economic and military terms; and, more important, the reform of the electoral system in terms of corporative structures of government, or what Lugones, with self-proclaimed "impersonal objectivity," called "functional representation." Lugones argued that functional representation, with a universal but qualified vote and organized in corporations and vocational groups, was the form of nationalism that was more adapted to the needs of Argentina. The Argentine people, and not the "amorphous masses," would be the electors of this political system. Lugones identified ordinary politics with liberal democracy. In contrast, he saw the corporatist system as part of the global fascist reaction against electoral representation, but he also diverged from Italian fascism in the sense that he wanted one corporation (the military), even beyond the dictator, to reign supreme. Lugones advocated for the "imposition of the military technique at the governmental plane." He insisted on the need for an "Authoritarian reorganization" (reorganización autoritaria) of the state that would be solidly rooted in a new popular form of legitimacy.
From Sweden to Egypt, and from Portugal to Syria, fascists believed in the socially popular nature of their politics. All fascists wanted to represent the working people, whose authentic national habitus they opposed to the antinational laziness of the elites. Fascist ideologues claimed to adopt an alternative position that genuinely transformed traditional politics into people's politics. As Mussolini saw it, from the start fascism wanted to bring politics back to the people. He had "faith" in the "inalterable" fascists program of "going to the people." But this search for the people was far away from notions of democratic electoral representation or what he dismissed as "electorialism." As the Colombian fascist Silvio Villegas reminded his followers, the people's role was to obey the Duce. Hitler had said that he "never felt as the dictator of my people but rather as its conductor." The German dictator claimed to be "indissolubly united with my people as a man and as a conductor." Mussolini in turn, affirmed that the people "delegated" its sovereignty and power in the persona of the leader. Villegas concluded that "Hitler and Mussolini rule with the people and for the people." The Egyptian Green Shirt Ahmad Husayn put forward a strikingly similar interpretation of the fascists politics of the people: "By working night and day for the interest of the people as a whole," Mussolini and Hitler had overcome social divisions. They exemplified, "the genuine rule of the people for the sake of the people." Similar José Vasconcelos, the most famous Mexican fascist, talked about "the liberating totalitarianisms of Hitler and Mussolini." These leaders fought for the people and against the "international banking democracy." Vasconcelos presented Hitler as the incarnation of the idea of his nation. For him, Hitler and Mussolini were giving a "productive lesson to all the Hispanic peoples of America." If they learned this lesson, Latin Americans could "incarnate the collective will and convert it to a creative element and suddenly decide to change the paths of history."
For fascist followers around the world, there was no fascism without the people. Mussolini had named his newspaper The People of Italy, and distinguished between the "true people" and those who did not belong in that group. As Matteo Pasetti observes, this theory of the people and the antipeople first legitimized political violence and then acted against parliamentary democracy. With the affirmation of the fascist dictatorship, and the defeat of its internal enemies, the homogenization of the people was combined with racism, imperialism, and the creation of new external enemies. In global terms, these fascist notions of the people were not conceived as democratic concepts, but their existence established significant continuities between fascism and populism in history. As Roger Griffin also argues in his famous generic definition of fascism as a palingenetic form of populist ultranationalism, fascism was a "peculiarly undemocratic mode of populism." Thus Griffin stresses, perhaps more than other scholars, that fascism was a fascist populism.
Calling fascism a fascist populism often leads to the confusion of ideas and contexts. Fascism was not merely a subset of populism. If these ideas of fascism as populism help us to identify important links between fascism and populist strategies and conceptions, their historical distinctions are also important. This is especially clear once we leave behind Eurocentric views, and the focus shifts to a more global perspective. For example, most historians of Latin American fascisms stress the distinctions between fascism and populism. In countries like Chile, Colombia, Peru, Bolivia, Argentina, and Brazil, fascist groups presented totalitarian ideas of the people that proved influential in the subsequent history of modern populism but this does not mean fascists and populists were the same. This was especially the case after the fall of fascists regimes, once postwar Latin American populist regimes inaugurated a new modern form of populism as the preeminent authoritarian road to power. Similarly, in India, ideas of the people's community held important continuities with the later developments of Indian nationalism in a very different postwar, democratic context. In the Middle East, a right-wing political radicalism that often resembled, but was also significantly different from, European fascisms "prepared the ground for long-term authoritarian trends in the post-war Arab states." In Japan, fascism offered a combination of populist-sounding themes and appeal, mixed with the idea of kokutai (national polity), thus establishing continuities with the politics of the past and the present.
Across the globe, fascist ideas of the nation, the mythical leader, and the people unleashed mutually connected processes of consensus building and dictatorial repression, inclusion, and exclusion. As Michael Wildt explains, in Nazism, the idea of the community of the people meant some people were included and many others were excluded. Similarly, Dan Stone argues that the Nazi people's community implied "an endless process of 'becoming the Volk.' The more the process was realized, the more alternative conceptions of ways of living became marginalized." This processes was a key element of the ideology of fascism, as Aristotle Kallis cogently put it, and "fascist ideologies offered the opportunity to enact a future without 'others', dominated by the regenerated and cleansed national community in a powerful, complete and homogenous state." Yet for tactical and ideological reasons, fascism needed a constant supply of enemies. In Nazism, this led to a dynamics of radicalization that increasingly moved from the invention of the enemy as antipeople to its persecution and extermination. In other forms of fascism, this move from the rhetorical enemy of the people to its actual personification in the bodies of its victims was never as radical, but it was nonetheless central.
Modern populism also embraces this intolerant creation of the people as dependent on the exclusion of others. In fascism and populism, the presence of the people-antipeople binary defines political relations, and historically both political ideologies have held to a homogenizing idea of the people. This process led to increasing political marginalization of dissenters while it also generated, for some periods, wide consensus and participation. As Dylan Riley argues, fascism pooled together claims of democratic legitimacy with authoritarian means: "Fascists combined the claim to represent the people with a rejection of politics as the institutionalized struggle of groups over control of the state. Fascists held that elections, parliaments, and discussion about public affairs—in short, the stuff of politics—were incapable of constituting and representing a 'general will.'" The fascists wanted to replace institutional representation and political struggles with "a form of nonpolitical interest representation." In fascism, the total homogenization of the people happens only once electoral democracy is destroyed along with the imagined enemies of the people.
Like fascists, modern postwar populists like Juan Domingo Perón wanted to take away political representation from professional politicians. As we will see in the next chapters, populist leaders claimed that only they could speak for the people and protect them against their enemies—namely, the antipeople. However, Perón did not want to replace electoral representation altogether, nor did he want to eliminate the multiparty system. In contrast with fascism's, the populist processes of homogenizing the people are generally restricted to the rhetorical creation of its people, and they refrain from the extreme practices of violence that define the progression of fascism from the theory of the people and its enemies to the persecution and even elimination of the latter. In other words, unlike fascism, populism does not fully marginalize the "enemies of the people" from the political process. Rather, its leaders and followers want to defeat their candidates with formal democratic procedures. Elections and not elimination are key sources of legitimacy in populism. Even if one were to argue fascism has populist tendencies, and even though it defines itself politically against the enemy of the people, it does not require its victims to play an active role in politics after the destruction of democracy has been accomplished.
The fascist notion of the people produces consensus through political violence. It turns enemies of the people into enemies of the state. In doing so, it consolidates totalitarian dictatorships. The populist homogenizing idea of the people promotes intolerance within democracy. It embattles democracy without destroying it. Populism creates, and depends on, minorities to vote and lose in open elections. These minorities are not eliminated or even substantially persecuted. Their role is to vote for those who have been designated the antipeople. Only after winning democratic elections can populist leaders claim their legitimacy as the only true expression of the true community of the people.
Fascism was against electoral representation, while populism channeled elections in authoritarian terms. The historical continuities and distinctions between fascism and populism—namely, how forms of the inclusion and participation of the many in fascism and populism were coupled with marginalization and exclusion—are generally lost in theory. While, some theorists reduce fascism to being just another type of populism, others simply ignore their historical connections. The most productive example of the failure to acknowledge the historical context is the key work of the preeminent Argentine theorist of populism Ernesto Laclau.
Laclau is the author of arguably the most significant current theory of populism. He is also attentive to the global dimensions of populism, and this attention is generally lost on his many antipopulist critics. If fascism is generally absent in his famous work Populist Reason, it is overwhelmingly present in his earlier work from the 1970s. He argued then that, rather than being reactionary, fascism became one of the "possible ways of articulating the popular democratic interpellations into political discourse." Fascism used mass politics and the idea of a unified people to guarantee that socialism would not be a popular alternative. "Fascism has been the extreme form in which popular interpellations, in their most radicalized form—jacobinism—could be transformed into the political discourse of the dominant fraction of the bourgeoisie." Debating those who attempted to ground populism in a specific period and context, Laclau argued that populism appeared at different times and places. In this context, he suggested that fascism was just one populist experience among many others. In short, for Laclau, Fascism is populism.
In his treatment of fascism and populism as forms of democratic interpellation, Laclau collapses important boundaries between the two. While fascism did first appear within a democratic context, it also used democratic interpellations to destroy democracy. In this sense, fascism presented populist forms when it was part of the opposition but not when it was the regime. This important dimension in the work of Laclau was relegated to insignificance in his most recent and influential work on populism. Without sufficiently noting this change, Slavoj Žižek, another prominent theorist of fascism and populism whose work lacks historical perspective, blamed Laclau for ignoring the perils behind the link between fascism and populism. Populism, even when it was on the left, preserved the capitalist edifice, leaving it untouched, and could not be emancipatory insofar as it presented a notion of the enemy that was deeply rooted in protofascist tendencies. Radical popular politics were replaced with the desire to destroy the enemies of the unified people. He stated, "fascism definitely is a kind of populism." In making fascism a subspecies of populism, Žižek showed how fascism had populist undercurrents and why populism displayed fascist tendencies. However, important historical distinctions between fascist and populist enemy-making theories and practices were lost in his analysis.
Fascists and populists shared a notion of the people as threatened by the ultimate enemies, which led to alarmist ideas of the onset of apocalyptical times and crisis that only their leaders could resolve. In fascism, this notion of the people was radically exclusionary, and eventually racist, in most if not all cases, while most populist notions of the people, even when they were xenophobic and racist, tended to be more indeterminate and rhetorical. The fascist notion of the people moved theory toward practice in radically violent ways that were absent from modern postfascist populism. Dictatorship was the form of governance under which this radical violence took place. Populism, on the other hand, represented an unstable mix where electoral democracy could be squared in practice with authoritarianism.
Fascism often used democratic means to eliminate democracy while constantly and paradoxically claiming that its dictatorial totalitarianism was the best means of popular democratic representation. Leaders like Mussolini in Italy or Uriburu in Argentina claimed that fascism and dictatorship represented higher stages of democracy. As is well known, these fascist understandings of democracy led to the destruction of democratic forms of representation and the rule of law. Extreme fascist violence led to war, genocidal imperialism, and the Holocaust. After 1945, the result of this extreme interpretation of the supposed desires of the "majority" led to a sort of crisis of fascist thinking on representation that paralleled its lack of power and legitimacy in the emergent Cold War era. This was the context in which the Peronist third way emerged as a reformulated fascism, one more rooted in democratic forms of representation. Other Latin American populist regimes soon followed in countries like Brazil, Bolivia and Venezuela. These classical populist regimes were not imitations of Peronism but rather converging symptoms of a new political epoch in which populism would take center stage and achieve and keep power. This is what I call a new complete form of populism that differed from fascism. Emerging from the ruins of fascism, this new modern populism was very different from its ancestors. After fascism, it implied a transnational rethinking of the need to leave totalitarian dictatorship and extreme violence behind while keeping authoritarianism. The result was a political ideology radically different from the original. This new modern postwar populism in power was a new genus not a political subspecies. As had happened before with fascism, only after the epochal turning point of ideas and movements had reached power for the first time did populism become more complete as a formidable challenger of liberalism and socialism.
Modern populism arose from the defeat of fascism as a novel postfascist attempt to return the fascist experience to the democratic path, thus creating an authoritarian regime form of democracy that would stress social participation combined with intolerance and rejection of plurality. In populism, political rights were highly strained but never eradicated, as they had been under fascism. Modern populism pushed democracy to its limits but generally did not break it. Early Cold War Latin America was the first context in which such a postfascist attempt to redefine democratic theory and practice took place. It was there and then that modern populism first emerged as a regime. Thus, after 1945 fascism became populism, which is the subject of the next chapter.
## TWO
# What Is Populism in History?
Populism is an authoritarian form of democracy that emerged originally as a postwar reformulation of fascism. Before the demise of fascism, some early ideologies and prepopulist movements had existed in countries as different as France, Russia, and the United States but in an entirely different context. It was after fascism left the world stage that populism became for the first time a regime. This was a turning point in history like the rise of Mussolini's and Hitler's regimes. Before its first regime forms, fascism was also a mere protest movement rather than a successful road to power. Once it first reached power in Italy, fascism became a truly global political paradigm. Then transnational fascists substantially changed their perspective. It was now a successful path to power and no longer a political style for opposition to liberalism and socialism. In this sense, Mussolini's revolution had groundbreaking and global effects similar to those of the Russian and French revolutions. If these revolutions and the fascist regimes first consolidated in Europe, populist regimes first emerged in Latin America after 1945. The populist regimes, such as those of Juan Perón in Argentina and Getulio Vargas in Brazil, were not true revolutions but rather revolutionary symptoms of the creation of a new political, early Cold War paradigm for ruling the nation.
Before fascism, populism had also been an authoritarian political style for opposition movements. After fascism, the political field was clear and populism become complete. It became a fully fledged authoritarian political paradigm—namely, an influential way of dominating the state in the absence of fascist powers. Like fascism, populism was not a surrogate for other politics. Populists were not simple messengers of the people but actors in their own right. As the fascist ones had done before them, populist regimes acted and decided in the name of the people, but now through democratic means. In other words, populism was not a mere parenthesis in history. More than a mere democratic form of fascism, populism was a new political phenomenon for a new era in history. Modern populism was anchored in the Cold War and was originally a response to the crisis of political representation that had first created fascism and then contributed to its demise. For this reason, explanations of populism and its politics need to be situated in populism's historical contexts.
While fascism's aim is dictatorship, and it seeks to abolish the separation of powers and the rule of law, populism has, at least in modern history, never destroyed democracy. Nonetheless, populists serially undermined the rule of law and the separation of powers without fully abolishing them. For fascists, elections had no significance, but populists considered them meaningful. To be sure, populist democracy was nationalistic and was less cosmopolitan and emancipatory than other democratic forms. At the same time, because populists increased electoral participation, populism could be seen as an enhancement of democracy. The historical complexity of populism, therefore, has stymied recent attempts to provide simplistic definitions by either inflating or reducing the term to a static formula. Indeed, the more simplistic the definition, the more detached we are from what populism distinctively represents in the history of politics.
Understandably, historians have reacted against reducing history to a curio cabinet of artifacts for theorists to select as needed. Such a reductive approach represents a radical form of contextualization that is more antiquarian than historiographical. While antiquarians are collectors of relicts from the past, professional historians analyze and interpret past contexts with respect to their variations and continuities in the present. If some theorists display this antique, and antiquarian, view of history, others stress the long history of the term populism without sufficiently addressing the different contexts of its political history and theory. As Pierre Rosanvallon cogently points out, populism has a long history that includes actors as varied as the sycophants of ancient Greece, the radical journalist of the French Revolution Jean-Paul Marat, and the Russian and American "populists" of the nineteenth century. But Rosanvallon, like many other theorists, does not sufficiently engage with the modern authoritarian, postwar history of populism, a symptom of a general tendency in the political theory of populism to exclude fascism from the picture.
And yet fascism and totalitarianism are key parts of populism's long history, and the ways in which populism has been and continues to be used are not limited to its origins. Nonetheless, it is important to acknowledge these first populist moments and then assess its subsequent bifurcations and repercussions with respect to their various historical phases: the early populist trends in nineteenth-century Russian and American politics, the prepopulist formations on the right (e.g., Boulangism in France, Lueger's movement in Vienna, and the South American patriotic leagues), and the interwar protopopulist precedents in Latin America (e.g., Cardenism in Mexico, Yrigoyenismo in Argentina, and the first Varguism in Brazil). The post-1945 phases of what can be considered modern populism, which emerged after early populism and the prepopulisms of the right that preceded the Great War, include the following:
1) Classical populism. Argentine Peronism was at the forefront, but this term also encompasses the second stage of Varguismo in Brazil (1951–54), Gaitanismo in Colombia (late 1940s), and the José María Velasco Ibarra era in Ecuador (1930s to the 1970s), as well as postwar populist experiences in countries like Venezuela, Peru, and Bolivia.
2) Neoliberal populism. Carlos Menem in Argentina (1989–99), Fernando Collor de Melo in Brazil (1990–92), Abdalá Bucaram in Ecuador (1996–97), Alberto Fujimori in Peru (1990–2000), and Silvio Berlusconi in Italy (1994–95, 2001–6, 2008–11).
3) Neoclassical populism of the left. The Kirchner administrations in Argentina (2003–15), Hugo Chávez (1999–2013) and Nicolás Maduro (2013–) in Venezuela, Rafael Correa in Ecuador (2007–17), and Evo Morales in Bolivia (2006–), as well as the leftist neoclassical populist parties in Europe, such as Podemos in Spain and Syriza in Greece.
4) Neoclassical populism of the right and extreme right. From the Peronist neofascism of the 1970s, to the predominance of current right-wing movements and leaders that are generally in the European opposition but can also be in power in countries like the United States, the Philippines, and Guatemala, as well as in power coalitions like those in Austria, Italy, and Finland. These forms of neoclassical populism also include the regimes of Recep Tayyip Erdogan in Turkey and Viktor Orbán in Hungary. Opposition forms of neoclassical populisms of the right and extreme right include UKIP in England, the National Front in France, Golden Dawn in Greece, and the movements led by the xenophobe Pauline Hanson in Australia and Avigdor Lieberman in Israel, among many others.
Modern populism begins with the early Cold War, postfascist contestation of democracy in Latin America, which points to the centrality of Peronism to any study of the history of populism. What's striking about the case of Argentina is not only that it became the first populist regime in history after Perón was elected to power in 1946 but that its form of populism has morphed into all of its possible varieties. In other words, Peronism, created in opposition to the American-led, postwar liberal-democratic consensus, both represents the first modern power form of populism and exemplifies all of the different phases of populism—from the authoritarian populism of the first governments of Perón (1946–55), to the leftist Montoneros guerrilla and the neofascist right wing Triple A in the 1960s and 1970s, to the neoliberalism of Carlos Menem of the 1990s and the neoclassical populism of the Kirchner administrations in the new century.
The need to put populism in its modern context is even more pressing in light of the current inflation of analyses of populist politics as a political malaise that has no specific point of origin. Returning the populist phenomenon to its global histories forces us to rethink negative stereotypes about populism as a concept and to reconnect it to the contexts of its emergence. What I want to insist on here is the need to bring history, and historiography, back to the theoretical debates about populism.
Populism presented a variety of historical possibilities that included extremely different experiences swinging from the left to the right extremes of the political spectrum. Nonetheless, and to recapitulate, this ideological pendulum always combined several common features:
1) An attachment to an authoritarian, electoral, antiliberal democracy that practically rejects dictatorship
2) An extreme form of political religion
3) An apocalyptic vision of politics that presents electoral successes, and the transformations those transitory electoral victories enable, as revolutionary moments in the foundation or refoundation of society
4) A political theology founded by a messianic and charismatic leader of the people
5) A consideration of political antagonists as the antipeople—namely, as enemies of the people and traitors to the nation
6) A weak understanding of the rule of law and the separation of powers
7) A radical nationalism
8) A notion of the leader as the personification of the people
9) An identification of movement and leaders with the people as a whole
10) The claim of antipolitics, which in practice means transcending politics as usual
11) The act of speaking in the name of the people and against the ruling elites
12) A self-presentation of its standing for true democracy and against imagined or real forms of dictatorship and tyranny (the European Union, the parallel or deep state, empire, cosmopolitanism, globalization, military coups, etc.)
13) The homogenizing idea of the people as a single entity that, when populism becomes a regime, is then equated with its electoral majorities
14) A deep antagonism, and even aversion, to independent journalism
15) A dislike for pluralism and political tolerance
16) A stress on popular culture and even, in many cases, on the world of entertainment as embodiments of national traditions.
## GLOBAL POPULISM IN THE PRESENT: EUROPE, LATIN AMERICA, AND BEYOND
Populism has returned to Europe and the United States with a vengeance. However, rather than being a new creation, populism has reappeared as a dynamic reformulation of previous populist cases both outside and inside Europe and the United States. Most critics agree that Euro-populists are united in their desire to undo the European Union's transnational premises. In Europe, this new populism represents a return to the nation, a vertical idea of democracy, and the outing of long-standing, and supposedly past, xenophobic continental traditions. In fact, they were not gone but had only been ignored and repressed in the memories of a continent that, after 1945, was refounded on the antifascist rejection of those ideas. Converging developments in the United States are apparent in the Tea Party's attack on institutions (notably, the 2013 government shutdown) and in other recent populist attacks on more dialogical traditions, as well as in the resurgence of a nativist, and sometimes racist, stance toward Hispanics, Muslims, and other minorities, especially as exemplified in the success of Donald Trump, the Republican candidate for president in 2015–16.
For many Latin American observers, the return of populism to the center signals the global dimensions of a political experience long associated with Latin American history. Latin America's embodiment of the populist tradition in politics is not simply a stereotype. From General Juan Domingo Perón to the late comandante Hugo Chávez, populism has often defined the politics of the region. But the strength of European and American engagements with populist politics (in England, France, the Netherlands, Germany, Austria, Italy, Hungary, Greece, Trump's America, and elsewhere) has forced Latin Americans to also rethink the apparent historical peculiarities of their histories in a broader global sense.
Is Latin American populism a template for Europe and the United States? Does its history reflect the pathos of the tumultuous European and American present? In Europe and Latin America, but also in Asia, Australia, and Africa, populism is witnessing a global rise. Populists worldwide invoke the name of the people to stress a form of highly hierarchical leadership, to downplay political dialogue, and to solve a perceived crisis of representation, increasingly by attacking institutional checks and balances. They do so to assert a direct link between the people and the leader, relying on a form of leadership that might best be described as religious (in the sense of its strong tendency to deify its causes and leaders). Finally, populists conflate temporal electoral majorities with the people of the nation as a whole. Populism buttresses social and political polarization. Fewer spaces are left for the expression of political minorities. Their political rights are not eliminated, but their democratic legitimacy is undermined. Populism, in short, is an authoritarian form of democracy.
If current Latin American experiences with populism veer toward a tense combination of a limited expansion of social and political rights with authoritarian trends, Europe and the United States are witnessing the overpowering presence of a populist right that engages in the latter while neglecting the former. In this sense, Europe and the United States resemble the Latin American past more than its present. It would be difficult to understand current populism separately from its past formulations, and this history is a transnational one. Modern populism has a lot to do with the Global South, especially Latin America, specifically with the way populism was originally engendered in that part of the world as an electoral regime form of postfascism.
I propose a preliminary historical framework for understanding populism's bewildering shift back and forth between left and right movements and regimes and across the oceans. After situating my approach to populism historically as a reformulation of fascism, I briefly critique the functionalist, regionalizing, and transcendental theories of populism. I also provide a transatlantic genealogy of its contextual reformulations, from postfascism to neoliberalism, and from neoclassical Latin American leftist forms to the nationalistic rightist ones so prevalent in Europe and the United States. In short, I am taking part in a larger interdisciplinary dialogue. This very ambitious task cannot, of course, be fulfilled in a single book. Nonetheless, I believe that my approach can help bridge some significant gaps between history and theory that have been occasioned by the absence of many historians from these theoretical discussions, as well as by theorists' similar lack of engagement with historiography.
## ORIGINS OF MODERN POPULISM AS POSTFASCISM
Because modern populism is a reformulation of fascism in the context of postwar democracies, I distinguish between it and early populisms, in which democracy was severely limited. For example, in the first half of the nineteenth century, populist forms sometimes coexisted with slavery and later with the racist suppression of voting rights and other forms of exploitation that, especially after 1945, were increasingly becoming antithetical to modern conceptions of democracy. Thus, as a nineteenth-century European and American phenomenon, especially in autocratic regimes such as tsarist Russia's, and in the context of the elitist politics of representation in the United States, populism was a term for a popular and at the same time national means to fight the state that envisioned a nationalist and more participatory role for the masses. In these contexts, democracy was extremely curtailed in the modern sense of extended universal political and social rights, or did not exist at all. The Russian Narodniki or the American People's Party both stressed the need for social and political equality at the same time that they tended to present a unitary and mythical idea of the people as essentially right and virtuous. Hypothetically, one could argue that once democracy had been more or less established the term populism no longer applied in the same way that it had before. Authors like Isaiah Berlin in Europe and Gino Germani and Torcuato Di Tella in Latin America maintained that populism could exist in societies "standing at the edge of modernization." This so-called modernization thesis is historically problematic precisely because populism never ceased to exist after these processes of democratic consolidation. It constantly reappeared well beyond the standard points of modernization across the Atlantic and beyond.
Isaiah Berlin stressed that populism lacked a clear program, but it was intimately linked to a totalizing view of society. It fused nationalism with the regenerative notion of the unified people posed against the minority-controlled state. It particularly emphasized the existence of enemies who threatened the life of the "spontaneous integral group and the sense of brotherhood which unites them." It was potentially or practically against minorities and institutions, but it also stressed equality for the national group. Was this early populism, then, an inner contestation of democratic representation at the time of oligarchic liberal regimes? What was its connection to newer authoritarian trends? Berlin notes that populism is incompatible with fascism and other forms of totalitarianism, the latter of which he calls "pseudo-populisms." Rather than being merely opposites, populism and fascism belong to a converging political and intellectual history. Even considering that the core of populism is democratic but not liberal, the history of fascism is meaningfully related to the history of populism. In fact, democracy was born with its dialectical other, the contemporary and reactionary counter-Enlightenment that at different times contested it from within or without.
Especially before World War I, and in contrast to early American and Russian populist movements, various prepopulist authoritarian movements of the right (in Austria under Karl Lueger; in France under General Georges Boulanger; in Argentina, Brazil, and Chile with nationalist patriotic leagues, among others) were vehicles for incorporating the masses. At the same time that they played the democratic game, they also attempted to limit democracy from within. In the name of the people, prepopulists were xenophobic and racist and practiced extreme forms of nationalism. While not all forms of right-wing prepopulism turned into fascism, all fascisms had prepopulist roots. Thus, in transatlantic contexts like Germany and Italy, or Chile, Argentina, and Brazil, prepopulism was radically reformulated as transnational fascism, especially after the practical and symbolic devastations of World War I.
The interwar crisis of representation led to totalitarianism in many European countries. In short, it led to the elimination of democracy and its replacement with fascist totalitarian forms of dictatorship. If these forms of prepopulism often ended with the destruction of limited forms of democracy, it was only after the fall of fascism that populism re-emerged as a vertical, and often intolerant, form of democracy. Such experiments in political ideology radically changed populism, which originated as a regime outside Europe. In fact, historical analysis shows that these modern Latin American populist experiences complicate the notion that populism was a simple pathology of democracy. From Peronism to the Bolivian, Brazilian, and Venezuelan cases, Latin American populisms pose significant challenges to the most negative dimensions of the definition of populism as anti-Enlightenment. Their expansion of social rights can also be seen as lasting enhancements of democracy.
## THE EMERGENCE OF MODERN POPULISM IN LATIN AMERICA
After the fall of European fascisms in 1945, a modern populist regime first emerged in Latin America. Peronism was not only the first modern populist regime in history, but it is one that has also had spectacular bifurcations throughout its history. These forking paths started with its stunning emergence as a Cold War reformulation of fascism—that is, a revolutionary rejection of fascist violence that emerged out of a military dictatorship, led by Juan Perón, but created in 1946 the first postwar case of populist democracy. Peronism continued with the left-wing Peronist guerrillas and the right-wing Peronists of the 1960s and 1970s; with the neoliberal stage of the Peronism of Carlos Menem, when Peronists joined the so-called Washington consensus in the 1990s; and finally with the left populism of the Kirchners (2003–15). Throughout its long history, a central facet of Peronism's populist ideology has been its refusal to produce a clear programmatic position. Peronism (as a movement, as a regime, and even more so as an ideological way of doing and understanding politics) has the flexibility to be in a state of constant reformulation. Even when some politicians leave the political game, Peronism, with its continuous refurbishing of the electoral machinery, perks, and clientelistic relations with the electorate, remains. This Peronist metamorphosis represents the fluctuating nature of populism as it constantly searches for absolute majorities, demands total allegiance to authoritarian forms of leaderships, and last but not least challenges not only liberalism but also popular forms of radical democracy.
Peronism is not fascism, but fascism represents a key dimension of its origins. Fascist leaders wanted a dictatorship whose leader would deny the legitimacy of electoral means to power. Such was the case of Mussolini in Italy; Hitler in Germany; and the fascist leaders in Argentina, China, and many other places. All of them participated in the experience of transnational fascism. But after 1945, the Argentine military officer Juan Perón, in a contextual search for legitimacy, inverted the terms of the issue and, in fact, created the first form of modern populism. Unlike fascism, Peronism embraced electoral democracy. As a practical leader of a dictatorship that starting in 1943 had ruled the country, Perón won the presidential elections to become a bona fide democratic leader. Peronism destroyed (or even caused the self-destruction of) the military dictatorship, which had Perón as its de facto leader, and built a new, postwar way of understanding democracy.
Peronism emerged in the context of the decline of liberal and secular Argentine traditions in the interwar years. After the conservative restoration started in the 1930s, the military steered Argentina closer to other authoritarian fascist dictatorships of the period, such as those in Portugal and Spain. However, unlike in those countries, in Argentina, the military junta eventually embraced democratic electoral procedures and ceased to be a dictatorship. The dictatorship of 1943 constituted a full frontal attack on Argentine secularism. The coup of 1943 "nationalized" Catholic education (making it mandatory in public schools), erased the autonomy of national universities, and legally banned political parties. As signaled by the anti-Semitic writer, and the dictatorship's minister of education, Gustavo Martínez Zuviría (Hugo Wast), the agenda was intended to "Christianize the country," decrease immigration, increase the national birth rate, and eradicate secular doctrines. More importantly from the Peronist point of view, after 1945, the democratically elected president Perón maintained, and sometimes deepened, the social reforms (e.g., improving working conditions, enforcing labor laws, giving more rights to farm and urban workers, fully funding state retirement, significantly expanding the power of unions, restricting the conditions under which workers could be fired, enacting paid holidays and vacations) applied during his term as the secretary of labor of the military dictatorship. Perón also maintained an active racist immigration policy that discriminated against Jewish immigrants and encouraged white, Catholic immigration from Italy and Spain. In political and ideological terms, the coup of 1943 announced the power of the military, which was inspired by an ideology that was nationalist, neutral (that is, pro-Nazi and pro-German in an anti-Nazi hemispheric context), authoritarian, anti-imperialist, and clerico-fascist. The history of the military dictatorship is, in large part, the odyssey of Perón to appropriate their commands and reshape it as an elected democratic government. These changes were realized in the context of what scholars call a "revolution within a revolution," in which young officers led by Perón used the coup to reframe the institutional bases of the country in populist terms. During the period from 1943 to 1955, ideology was constantly reformulated to adapt to the multivaried demands of different social and political "Peronist" actors, from the fascists within and outside of the military to the left-leaning unions and the working class at large. Polarization was a foundational element of the new Peronist order. As the prominent historian Raanan Rein observes, Peronism divided Argentine society into two absolutely opposing factions: "To members of the working class, Peronism represented a real improvement in their living conditions." Peronism also gave them a sense of participation and pride. In contrast, for most members of the middle and upper classes, and for most Argentine intellectuals, "The Peronist decade was a traumatic experience." Now displaced from the official world of politics, "They were shocked to realize that they had lost not only control of the political and social processes in the country, but also their understanding of those processes."
Argentine Peronism was the first attempt to "democratize" the antiliberal legacies of fascism for the Cold War context. Peronism ruled in a context of basically no unemployment and represented a substantial increase in state support for public health care and education. In the same context of economic expansion and new legitimacy for the expansive role of the state after 1945, other movements, including the second phase of Varguism in Brazil, the Bolivian revolution, Gaitanismo in Colombia, and the postwar presidencies of José María Velasco Ibarra in Ecuador, soon followed it. After 1945, protopopulist movements like Aprismo in Peru and Betancourism in Venezuela became modern populist formations of the Cold War that increasingly combined anticommunist stances, extreme polarization, and negative views of opponents as enemies with a critique of liberalism and strong doses of egalitarianism. Overall, these new democratic populist regimes and movements challenged the liberal understandings of democracy.
These were not the first such attempts in Latin American history. To be sure, there were important interwar precedents such as Cardenism in Mexico (1934–40), Yrigoyenismo in Argentina (1916–22 and 1928–30), and the first era of Varguism in Brazil (1930–45). Another important precedent was the Peruvian APRA party led by Víctor Raúl Haya de la Torre from the 1920s onward. But all these experiments were greatly shaped by the different national, regional, and global contexts before and during World War II. These protopopulist regimes and movements were very different from the prepopulist, right-wing movements that had been more typical of the European, American, and Latin American cases before the Great War. If early and prepopulist movements were incomplete forms of populism with no regime form in their sight, protopopulist ones were regimes without enough populism. Protopopulisms were first marked by the realities of revolution and counter-revolution, including the Mexican and Soviet revolutions, which were central; by the then recent legacies of oligarchic republics; and, subsequently, by anticolonialist struggles and the global war between fascism and antifascism.
These forms of protopopulism were all quite different, but none of them considered that liberalism was their main enemy as would later be the case with modern populism. They focused instead on transcending the untouched legacies of the oligarchic states that had preceded them. These protopopulist regimes presented themselves as nationally inspired "correctives" to the old forms of Latin American liberal democracy, but while they wanted to correct the liberal past, they never fully broke with it. Rather, they were keen to stress the limits of those democratic models for young nations in search of autonomy.
Argentina's protopopulist Yrigoyenismo was linked more to the conservative past than to its Mexican and Brazilian protopopulist counterparts. In Argentina, radical protopopulism led to the expansion of political rights but only for men and only in the context of a system that combined charismatic leadership, a strong executive, and the expansion of the army's role in handling social unrest with sporadic, but significantly high levels of, antileftist repression in Patagonia, Buenos Aires, and other places. In Mexico, protopopulism presented an authoritarian system, in which elections did play a role in particular local contexts, especially in terms of intraparty competition. At the same time, Mexican protopopulism incorporated significant parts of the population (urban sectors, peasants, and the working class), especially through the party and the corporate structure of the state. There were similar developments in Brazil under Vargas, but Vargas situated himself clearly to the right of the political spectrum, creating a corporatist dictatorship from 1937 to 1945. Cardenism and Varguism saw themselves as revolutionary actors from above. They were born in power. Unlike modern democratic populism (from Peronism to Trumpism and Lepenism), these protopopulisms witnessed, and at times produced, high levels of political violence. Both Cardenism and the first Varguism eventually opposed global fascism and locally repressed the fascists and the extreme right. In Brazil, the first Varguist phase was for the most part a dictatorship that actually destroyed the elitist formal democracy that had preceded it. In Mexico, the Cardenista period led to the institutionalization of one-party rule, a strong but temporally limited executive, and the practical minimization of electoral democracy. The Mexican and Brazilian protopopulist regimes cannot be considered to be as fully democratic as modern democratic populism would be after 1945. And yet, much more so than Argentina's Yrigoyenismo, movements in Mexico and Brazil established important antecedents for the populist future, including new forms of economic nationalism and the consequent incorporation of the urban working classes into the authoritarian pact. The protopopulism that was even closer to what modern populism would be after the war was Aprismo in Peru.
The APRA (American Popular Revolutionary Alliance) movement was very active, not only in Peru but also, to a minor extent, in other parts of Latin America, as an urban party and an alliance of workers, students, and middle-class intellectuals—a coalition that the leader called "the union of the arm and the brains." The nexus between them was increasingly the mythical leadership of Haya de la Torre. During these years, Haya de la Torre put forward a Latin American, anticommunist, and antifascist front for "national defense" and the "affirmation of sovereignty" against "omnipotent enemies." Central to this model was, as Haya stated, that "There is no such thing as good or bad peoples or masses, there are good and bad leaders." The Peruvian leader presented APRA, and his own leadership, as the means to defeat the enemies from within and from without. APRA became an actual party in the early 1930s, and it often switched from democratic procedures, in democratic times, to armed insurrection in dictatorial ones. In these early years, as Carlos de la Torre explains, it is possible to note a "moralism, religiosity, and intransigence that characterize populist discourses." Aprismo also featured the "my-way-or-the highway" logic of populist contestation that even included racist criticism of its opponents (as would later be the case with Gaitanismo in Colombia). Starting in 1931, and most definitely after 1945 with the emergence of the Cold War, it was singularly clear that Aprismo was a Peruvian nationalist protopopulist organization despite its Latin Americanist rhetoric. It put forward a postwar anti-imperialist front against both communism and liberalism under the vertical leadership of Haya, who was officially defined as the "Jefe Máximo," the chief interpreter of the "vague and imprecise desires of the multitude." Even though some historians have dubbed it the first Latin American populism, before the postwar era, Aprismo was attached to a more traditional model of multiclass paternalism and had a more diffuse idea of populist popular sovereignty, a more traditional link between the leader and the people, and a much less nationalist perspective. All in all, these protopopulisms (Cardenism, the first Varguism, Yrigoyenism, and early Aprismo) constituted significant and clear precedents for the modern populisms, especially Peronism, that emerged after 1945.
The histories of protopopulisms in Mexico, Argentina, Peru, and Brazil show they were deeply influential, and after 1945, in countries like Argentina, they were combined with more proper prepopulist and fascist legacies. This does not mean that fascism was as pervasive in the rest of Latin America as it had been in Argentina. In most of Latin America the long-term history of liberalism in power, which was more protracted than in other places where fascism emerged as a regime (e.g., Germany, Italy, and Spain), shows it was peculiar to most Latin American cases of populism: even in places like Colombia that had the most violent outcomes, the liberal rules of the political game were too entrenched to be completely eliminated. Argentina was a different matter. The country witnessed an attack against the liberal tradition that was unequaled in other Latin American countries.
In the new context in which liberal democracy had reemerged as the most legitimate form of government in the West, fascists worldwide, first and especially in Argentina, went back to fascism's right-wing, prepopulist roots, organically reframing them for the postwar context. As a dictatorial outcome of modern democracy, fascism was rooted in the previous experiences of authoritarian prepopulist reactions to democracy, from nineteenth-century Bonapartism and Boulangism in France, to the social, Christian anti-Semitism of Karl Lueger in fin-de-siècle Vienna. But once it came into power, in Italy in 1922 and in 1933 in Germany, fascism destroyed democracy from within. Fascists worldwide put forward similar proposals. After their global defeat in 1945, many fascists, and global right anticommunists, realized that to gain legitimacy fascism could no longer be rooted in dictatorship. This signaled the emergence of modern populism as we know it today. The genealogy of modern populism is rooted in this radical attempt to reinscribe the fascist tradition, and, more generally, to move away from extremist dictatorial nationalism.
For the fascists who had survived the demise of the fascist regimes, the Cold War presented a new dichotomy between the liberal-democratic forms of capitalism and Soviet-style communism. They wanted to escape the newly established bipolar world. Modern populism was first proposed as a third position aimed at overcoming the Cold War dilemma of choosing between communism and liberalism. In its first historical instantiation (that is, in the first historical experience in which this "democratic" rethinking of fascism became a power regime), populism was called Peronism. Rather than adopting a preformatted version of Cold War neofascism, Peronism in Argentina was the first movement that attempted to adapt the legacy of fascism to a novel democratic framework. It was also the first example of a modern populist regime.
For many of its adversaries, Peronism was a new fascism adapted to democratic times. This was also the case for other examples of 1940s populism in Latin America. Latin American countries experienced deep changes after World War II. The Brazilian Getúlio Vargas, Ecuadorian José María Velasco Ibarra, and Colombian leader Jorge Eliécer Gaitán were all accused of being fascist and Peronists. But, in fact, they constituted a national populist response to the limitations of democracy in their countries. This involved denunciations of existing limits to social rights and an authoritarian way of identifying the people and the nation with their own personas and agendas.
Like Perón, Vargas had ruled an anticommunist dictatorial regime (in his case the Estado Novo, 1937–45), but he later reconverted to democratic procedures and won the presidential elections in 1951. This "new Vargas era" was essentially populist. Vargas had defined his previous dictatorial approach as the single alternative to the interwar threat of civil war. But the times were changing. Now Vargas was a democratic politician. He reformulated the terms of his dictatorial Estado Novo for a new democratic context. Like Perón, Vargas rejected political and economic liberalism. Also like Perón, he was an anticommunist. His policies reflected equally a manipulation of the working classes and a perceptive reading and means of expressing and acting on their concerns. In other words, Varguismo combined authoritarianism with social democratization. As were many of his Latin American peers, Vargas was accused of being the "Brazilian Perón," but he stressed a Brazilian response to that country's crisis of hegemony that, as expected, was related more to Brazilian developments than to Argentine ones. Peronist Argentina was not the platonic form of modern populism. It was rather the first populist regime among the many to emerge in postwar Latin America.
Thus, similar developments happened in Colombia, where the surge of populism was the unexpected consequence of a widely extended Latin American tradition of excluding popular sectors from political decision making. As in other parts of the region, postwar populism in Colombia was a result of a lack of popular political representation, the existence of a big divide between the elites and most citizens, and social inequality. Jorge Eliecer Gaitán, like Perón, was influenced by fascism when he visited fascist Italy. Gaitán read his graduate thesis in front of Mussolini's entire cabinet, but, like Perón, he moved to the left, combining a fascist style with unitary ideas of the people and a push for social rights to address a majority of citizens who were disenfranchised. Gaitán felt an affinity with the Peronist third position between capitalism and communism. He also stressed the need for a "defensive nationalism" against imperialism. This populist reformulation was misunderstood, by conservatives as a "fascism of the left" and by liberals and the left as the fascism of Hitler and Mussolini. Thus, like Perón, Gaitán was often accused of being a fascist and was also charged with being a Peronist. But as in the case of the Argentine leader, Gaitán was not a fascist but was actually one of the key politicians, who especially after 1945 adapted older ideas for the new democratic realities. As Enrique Peruzzotti argues, populists saw in electoral procedures one of the constitutive elements of their political legitimacy. In this, they sharply differed from the fascists, who did not ascribe any true legitimacy to elections and who stressed the absolute need for dictatorship. Gaitán does not fit this latter fascist pattern. His assassination in 1948 halted a formidable political career and, more importantly for the immediate future, populism in Colombia, resulting in a gruesome civil war and, eventually, the country's only and brief modern military dictatorship.
In Ecuador, a fascist party that was influenced by the Falange supported Velasco Ibarra in his third presidency (1952–56). Similar parties had supported Perón's rise to power. Initially, workers and Catholic sectors that were fiercely anticommunist supported Velasco. But as with Peronism, Ecuadorian populism mixed left- and right-wing ideas and followers. Velasco's return to power in 1944 was eventually backed by leftists and rightists, who claimed to be supporters of the Allies in the Second World War. As the leading scholar of populism Carlos De la Torre notes, Velasco Ibarra's political thinking, which was influenced by Simón Bolívar's pessimism about democracy, idealized strong executives and even temporary dictatorship. These views were also reinforced by his longstanding but not mimetic admiration for Peronism. Velasco Ibarra was exiled in Buenos Aires during some of the years of classical Peronism (1943–55).
Leaders like Perón, Gaitán, and Velasco Ibarra transformed political arguments into all or nothing fights for a new moral order. This is what De la Torre, calls the "transmutation of politics into ethics or even into eschatological redemption." Acting and speaking in the name of the people, classical populisms emerged at a time when democratic procedures were weak. They provided a voice to those who felt unrepresented, but did so at the expense of the legitimate right to dissent and by morphing the voice of the leader into the "source of all virtue." Similar developments happened in Peru, Bolivia, and Venezuela. In fact, if leaders like Víctor Raúl Haya de la Torre in Peru and Rómulo Betancourt in Venezuela had been initially close to communism, they had clearly switched to the populist mix of vertical antiliberal leadership and political demands for social change, especially after 1945. Like Gaitán, Haya never reached power, but unlike the Colombian leader, who was assassinated in 1948, Haya went into exile and remained a key actor in Peruvian politics. Banned in Peru, he demanded the return of electoral participation for himself and his followers. His postwar populism was characterized by decreasing calls for social reform, an ever-increasing commitment to the myth of the charismatic leader, sincere unconditional support for the United States in its Cold War against communism, and an alliance with Peru's previous oligarchic enemies.
Populism in Bolivia, as was already the case in Argentina, and would be the case in Venezuela, first reached power by participating in a military dictatorship. Major Gualberto Villarroel, the dictator and leader of the junta, and Víctor Paz Estenssoro, the leader of the Revolutionary Nationalist Movement (MNR) had close links with the Argentine military junta of the GOU (Grupo de Oficiales Unidos) led by Colonel Juan Perón in Buenos Aires. As it had done with Perón, the United States equated the Bolivian junta with the coming of fascism to Latin America. To be sure, Argentines probably had some role in the Bolivian coup. But the most important features of the Bolivian coup were not fascist but protopopulist. Transnational connections were indeed important, but the Bolivian events had specific national roots that pointed in the direction of a national version of Bolivian populism. As it had with Peronism, Bolivian populism's support for dictatorship would later morph into authoritarian electoral democracy. Historian of Bolivia Laura Gotkowitz explains that the MNR first supported dictatorship but also put forward a socially inclusive vision of a "mestizo nation." This was a nationalist, and at times xenophobic, model for social inclusion that at the same time stressed national unity and ascribed legitimacy to the country's majority of Indians and mestizos. It also sought to control this majority "that . . . was pressing its demands on the state." The Villarroel-MNR dictatorship severely limited political rights, and even expanded some national fascist tendencies, resorting to political assassinations and imprisoning members of the left-wing opposition. But also at this time MNR leader Victor Paz Estenssoro explained they wanted to turn the "government of Villaroel as the point of departure for the creation of a new legality, a revolutionary legality at the service of the people." The MNR aimed at a new regime form—in fact, it sought a legitimacy rooted in the people. Eventually the dictator was killed by a mob, and the MNR leadership was exiled after 1946. Just some five years later, the MNR had renounced its fascism, and adopted a third-way position that moved it clearly to the left of the Bolivian political landscape. Paz Estenssoro was now the leader of a worker-supported nationalist revolutionary party. Against it were the military and the Bolivian right under the banner of the Bolivian Falange. It was in this early postwar moment (1952) that the MNR came to power on its own, but once again not through open electoral procedures. In fact, the MNR won elections in 1951 through a limited-democracy process that restricted the votes to only a minority of alphabetized individuals. In any case, a dictatorial junta blocked its access to power. In 1952, the MNR led a revolution in the name of the people and their votes. By that time, it had left behind its previous fascist influences and incorporated a new working-class base with Marxist and Trotskyist roots. The MNR revolution had extensive urban and rural roots, and it led to a radical increase in the Bolivians' opportunities to participate in the politics of their country, including universal suffrage, nationalization of the tin mines, and agrarian reform. Although it presented its actions as a "blow" to the oligarchy, for Gotkowitz the MNR did not link citizens' rights with "broader ideas of liberty and equality, nor did it link them with the history of participatory struggles to free the nation from colonial bonds." The agrarian reform itself was "reformist" in nature, giving preference to private rather than communal possession of the land (before the reform, 6 percent of landowners possessed 92 percent of developed lands). Still, it significantly changed land distribution (after the reform, 20 percent of the lands were redistributed) in one of Latin America's most unequal countries. After the revolution, the MNR rooted its legitimacy in expanded electoral procedures, unitary nationalism, and a homogenizing notion of popular sovereignty. As Gotkowitz argues, the defining feature of its revolution was its democratizing impact, an expansion of democracy that was marked by the "tension between support and restraint of indigenous political participation." Bolivian classical populism increased polarization and downplayed political, social, and ethnic plurality while significantly expanding democratic representation. The MNR combined a unitary notion of the people versus the oligarchy with relatively low levels of personalism. In this moderate populist sense, it resembled the Venezuelan case, in which populists also initially had an alliance with the military, which soon implied a move to the left of the political spectrum. In its classical form, the MNR was initially a much more radical populist movement than Peronism, Velasquismo, Aprismo, Gaitanism, and Varguism. This had as much to do with its postwar rejection of fascist violence (transnational and national) as with the particularities of its revolutionary rise to power. But eventually, and in populist transformista fashion, Paz Estenssoro broke in the 1960s with the left of the party and clearly realigned himself with the American-led Cold War and the Bolivian military.
In Venezuela, Acción Democrática adopted slogans such as "Venezuela first" and "to divide is to identify" while it was engaged in the coup of 1945. It then won presidential elections two years later, obtaining 74 percent of the votes. Like Peronism, Varguism and the Bolivian MNR, it also switched from participating in a dictatorship to becoming a populist democracy. Like Peronism and Varguism, Acción Democrática engaged in a wide program of social reform that rearticulated social relations, defined new political identities, and enhanced popular representation and participation. All in all, the Peronist way of adapting fascism to the Cold War democratic realities was also adopted in other Latin American countries. Even if the origins of other Latin American populisms were not, like Peronism's, fascist, populism had elements such as political theology, the mythical idea of history, and the ritual nature of political spectacle and political religion that were related to fascism.
Rather than being the form that shaped all others, Argentine populism was the first actualization in a regime of a global need shared by global anticommunist thinkers and militants, including fascists, to overcome liberal democracy and "real socialism." Located far from the experiments of European fascists, and not excessively touched by their resounding defeat, Argentina became a viable space in which transnational fascism, and more generally anticommunism, could rethink itself in a very different context. However, Argentina was clearly not the reason for the predominance of populism in Latin American politics as a whole. Brazilian or Bolivian populisms were not less influential than Peronism and both regimes were outcomes of global and regional postfascist realities. In other words, Latin America overall was the site of the first consecration of populism in power, and the ripple effects of this historical foundation were of the utmost global significance.
I want to stress the relevance of populism's transcontextual connections, and more specifically of Latin American history, for thinking about the universal implications of past and present forms of populism. In many ways, I believe the center can be seen more clearly from the margins. Thus, in its emphasis on the fascist genealogies of populism, and how it was created and changed over time, my historical framework moves away from standard dichotomies between the Global North and Global South. In this sense, Donald Trump, Hugo Chávez, Marine Le Pen in France, and Recep Tayyip Erdogan in Turkey are practically, especially in their styles, and theoretically connected with Hitler and Mussolini, at the same time that they represent a radical break from classical fascist politics. They are not fascists, but their politics share a fascist historical background. This historical relationship between fascism and populism is generally lost in its translation to theory.
## POPULISM BETWEEN HISTORY AND THEORY
For some political theorists populism constitutes a democratizing response to a widespread crisis of representation, while for others it poses undemocratic limitations on the present and future of democracy. Thus in mainstream approaches, populism is regionally presented or functionally reduced to a symbol, a symptom, or even a pathology of democracy. At best, theorists generally portray populism as part of the historical opposition to liberal democratic representation. According to this framework, populism exemplifies a historical concept, and history itself plays only a minor role in illustrating a theory. At worst, populism is a concept without history.
Theorists of populism often treat history as if it were a passive receptacle of long-term structural change, the particular temporal space where the quasi-transcendental conditions needed for the creation of populism take place. According to these theories, dynamic historical processes are often replaced with more static transhistorical ones such as "modernization," "caudillismo," and so forth. Populism is, then, a temporal marker for the failure, "late coming," or success of such structural changes or continuities. Some scholars, therefore, especially in Latin America, view populism as fixed in the past (or in different pasts) and separated from the present. Others generally equate historical contexts with a more generic view of a cyclic or systemic crisis of democracy. As historian Alan Knight has pointed out, circularity prevails when crisis and populism are equated, the result being that the former is explained in terms of the latter. For Knight, populism needs to be studied historically from the point of view of the style of leadership: "Defining populism in terms of style has the virtue of flexibility and—perhaps most important—historical fidelity. That is, it seems to correspond to the historical record in a way that other—often more precise theories/models—fail to do. And it is surely preferable to have a rough rule-of-thumb which works than a highfalutin theory which defies reality." Knight's criticism of theorists who reduce history to an illustration, often ignoring historical reality, is salient, especially his argument that theories "gain in precision and sophistication, but fail on the crucial criterion of historical fidelity. They are neat but wrong. Or, to put it more accurately, the neater they are the wronger they are. Thus, while they do not entirely lack insight or explanatory power, they cannot form the basis of a generic model."
Knight, however, also tends to dismiss the analytical perspectives opened by critical theory. He rather typically confuses theory with generic models and conflates theory as a whole with specific theories of populism, including the so-called modernization thesis. The root of the problem for many theorists is that their specific theories of the populist phenomenon are stuck in a centuries-old understanding of history as a positivistic discipline. Historians, on the other hand, have changed their approaches in radical ways over the last two centuries, rethinking their discipline's own historicity, addressing the limits of representation, reframing national and transnational histories, and critically combining contextualization with historical interpretation.
Political scientists, sociologists, and critical theorists, but not so much historians, are the ones who tend to work on populism as a concept. In addition, most theorists outside Latin America stress the need to understand the multimillennial concept of the people over populism's long history without dealing with Latin American, and other Global South histories of populism.
One can find this Eurocentric, North Atlantic focus on populism in functionalist works that replace the theory and history of populism with a more quantitative, descriptive, and self-proclaimed pragmatic approach. This approach does not explain the diverse historical meanings of populism but rather takes them for granted, or assigns the broadest definition to populism as a movement defending popular sovereignty and placing the people in opposition to the elites.
Many decades ago, Isaiah Berlin argued against enforcing inelastic definitions. He was writing at a different time, before the social sciences returned to forms of neopositivism that downplay the connections between history and theory. He playfully presented a field of populist studies that had a pathological condition. A Cinderella complex of populism affected the field,
by which I mean the following: that there exists a shoe—the word "populism"—for which somewhere there must exist a foot. There are all kinds of feet which it nearly fits, but we must not be trapped by these nearly-fitting feet. The prince is always wandering about with the shoe; and somewhere, we feel sure, there awaits it a limb called pure populism. This is the nucleus of populism, its essence. All other populisms are derivations of it, deviations from it and variants of it, but somewhere there lurks true, perfect populism, which may have lasted only six months, or [occurred] in only one place. That is the idea of Platonic populism, all the others being dilutions of it or perversions of it.
Eurocentric views are not the exclusive realm of neopositivistic Platonic thinkers but are also present in some of the most innovative and synthetic theoretical approaches to the topic. There is no denying that Europe has been at the center of these histories and their theorization, but the old continent has always been engaged in fluid conversations and transfers with the Global South. In practice, Europe has always been the province of a larger context, which is why simply separating Europe from other regions is a problem. Studies of transnational exchanges and reformulations provide the context in which comparisons can be made, but the field of populist studies has produced many comparisons and little transnational research. The latter address, for instance, how different transatlantic examples think and act in terms of their synchronic and diachronic convergences, their affinities with and opposition to other populist experiences. This is exactly what a transnationally focused political and intellectual history can provide to theory. But so far, few theories have seriously considered history as a critical interlocutor rather than as an object to be used for the illustration of theory. This is clearly the case in seminal works, such as Margaret Canovan's groundbreaking analysis of the trajectory from the Roman and medieval reformulations of the concept of the people to the modern constitution of populism as a key dimension of democracy, and in Pierre Rosanvallon's suggestive research on the first appearance of populist themes, which resulted from the ambivalent and intrinsic duality of democracy as it emerged in the French Revolution. Both authors claim that the attempt to represent the will of ideal majorities without institutional mediations has been a constitutive dimension of the inner tensions of democracy throughout its long history. However, while for Canovan populism is a legitimate member of the democracy club, Rosanvallon maintains that populism is "an inverse perversion of the ideals and procedures of democracy."
Both Canovan and Rosanvallon have made stereotypical references to classical Peronism and Latin America, venturing outside Europe in a way that undermines their influential theories of democracy. Oddly, when Canovan writes of populism outside Europe, she conflates it with dictatorship. Yet she does not explain how a constitutive form of democracy such as Peronism is presented in her account as a dictatorial formation.
For Rosanvallon, populism is a specific pathology posed against democracy. It degrades democracy to a circus full of apocalyptic connotations. His functional analysis considers populism a "form of political expression in which the democratic project allows itself to be absorbed and to be fully vampirized by counter-democracy." By placing populism outside the democratic project, Rosanvallon concludes, "Populism is the extreme of anti-politics." Populism is for him a "political pathology" that belongs to an era "marked by the growth of counter democratic forms."
Many others share Rosanvallon's functional idea of populism as a symptom, and portray populism's trajectory as a coda to something else. Its complexity is confused with its indetermination as a "thin ideology." Scholars of populism like Cas Mudde and Cristóbal Rovira Kaltwasser offer a minimalist definition of populism as an ideology that divides society into two morally opposed groups, the people and the elite, and has regional subtypes. For them, populism is less relevant than other concepts or ideologies. By identifying populism as a structural, if transient, answer to certain political conditions, the authors construct their own version of populism as a phenomenon that has no conceptual history of its own. In contrast, other minimalists, who explore the trajectory of the concept while claiming that the term has only recently acquired importance in Europe, offer only a cursory examination of non-European cases and interpretations in order to locate the European populist experience relative to others.
In many theories of populism, Latin American, African, or Asian cases represent the symptomatic Other. Especially for Europe, these stereotypical views use a jargon of authenticity about the European liberal self that betrays how populist tendencies were also present in Europe's history from early on. According to these theories, populism is somehow placed outside history because it recurrently works as a corrective to illiberal, moralistic, totalitarian, or otherwise undemocratic tendencies in democracy. Principally, Latin America is considered part of the populist equation but remains within the framework of the traditional Europe/non-Europe dichotomy. Center and periphery are accepted as defining absolute features in these approaches. In other cases, the focus on Europe means few connections are made outside the continent other than small analogies or examples. For example, an influential scholar and public intellectual like Rosanvallon, who stresses the modern European illiberal dimensions of the phenomenon, fails to extensively address the key Latin American points on the trajectory of populism as a concept and as a regime model for the development of democratic, antiliberal politics after 1945.
## POPULISM AGAINST PLURALISM?
Many scholars of populism stress its authoritarian and even totalitarian tendencies. One of the most influential theorists of populism, Carlos de la Torre, argues, "Populist disrespect of pluralism is explained by their view of the people as a subject with a unitary will and consciousness, and of rivals as enemies of the virtuous people." But De La Torrre also notes that "Despite their totalitarian intentions to penetrate the private sphere to create new political subjects, populist leaders did not establish a one-party rule, preserving some limited spaces of pluralism and contestation." He observes that notwithstanding their goals to control social life and create "new subjects," populists "did not fully colonize the public sphere and civil society. Populists' source of legitimacy was not based on uniformity of opinions staged in mass rallies and elections with just one ticket. Their legitimacy was grounded in winning elections that in theory could be lost." De la Torre stresses, "Rather than arguing that the logic of populism is inherently antidemocratic, it is more fruitful to analyze its uncertain relationship with liberal democratization." Populism has a double legitimacy rooted in elections but also located in the streets, "in inside and outside" institutions and procedures: "Classical populism expanded the franchise. Contemporary radical populists embarked on permanent political campaigns." For De la Torre, a populist case like Evo Morales's in Bolivia shows how populism can enhance political participation while demonizing members of the opposition. In Bolivia, and particularly for most of the country's indigenous people, who had lived for many decades under a combination of racism, authoritarianism, and neoliberalism, populism's combination of democratic and undemocratic features clearly expanded their political and social participation.
Populism and participation are key elements in current discussions among theorists of populism. Political theorist Jan-Werner Müller points out that populism is an undemocratic response to the undemocratic tendencies of technocracy, and that it more generally betrays a distrust of the foundations of the European postwar order. For Müller, as for Paul Taggard and Benjamin Arditi, populism is a symptom of, and a problematic response to, the lack of true citizen participation. Müller cogently notes the antifascist foundations of this European order, returning our attention to how populism is adapted as a recurring temporal response to the predominance of elites. Müller presents the view of populism as "an exclusionary form of identity politics" that "always" poses "a danger to democracy." To be sure, his analysis is also attentive to populism's symbolic dimensions and its moralistic imagination, but it also undermines the ambivalent times where populism has not only restricted but also enhanced participation in democracy, from early Peronism to Colombian Gaitanismo to the early American populists of the end of the nineteenth century. Müller insists, "Populism is not a path to more participation in politics," But this approach relies on downplaying the complex, and seemingly contradictory, history of populism or on excluding from its theory some of its most important historical experiences across the Atlantic and beyond. In this context, history can help theorists complicate the theories of populism by grounding them in the ambivalent and thorny nature of populism in history.
Populism emerged as an authoritarian form that nonetheless rejected dictatorship. Theories of populism, therefore, need to address both its participatory and its exclusionary dimensions in terms of different historical processes, in which they are usually combined. In fact, after 1945, populism was more dangerous to dictatorship than to democracy. Especially in Latin America after the end of the Second World War, populism combined an increase in popular political participation with important antidemocratic features. This tension within populism connects its history to our efforts at conceptualization. Context always stands in the way of high theory. Binaries such as the ones presented in generic theories of populism are never helpful for framing a critical democratic theory that is attentive to history. The challenge for history and theory is to escape from their opposition to each other. In contrast with the generic insistence on opposing historical experience to transhistorical definitions, I propose situating populism historically in terms of its genealogical, contextual, and often antithetical, relation to fascism. If the European and global postwar liberal-democratic order was cemented in antifascist foundations, highlighting the fascist and postfascist origins of its current populist contestation is important.
Some current observers fear that populism may again transform into fascism, and if that happens, a theoretically inflected historiographical approach would show that, while many of the prepopulist forces eventually became fascist in the interwar years and even after 1945, some of the fascists switched back to democracy. Leading political theorists such as Nadia Urbinati, Carlos de la Torre, and Andrew Arato have put forward a historically framed notion of populism that historians of populism need to consider when analyzing the phenomenon. Moving from their theoretical insights to historiography, I emphasize how these connections emerged historically, especially after the populist reformulation of the fascist totalitarian legacy.
Framing populism historically clarifies why its return to Europe and North America has actualized these regions' past xenophobic and antidemocratic traditions. Populism is not a simple external response to elites and bureaucracies but is rather a criticism of democracy from within. Populists have historically regarded their critique of the status quo as a radicalization of democracy by way of returning the power to the people. What this radicalization might entail has differed from left to right. The emergence of populist responses from the left to social inequality often signals that the dubious quality of the coupling of democracy and neoliberal austerity measures is not insignificant in the so-called European periphery, especially in countries like Greece and Spain. These responses cannot be conflated with the Euro-right populism without losing sight of significant ethico-political and analytical distinctions. Even when, in typical populist fashion, leftist populist movements like Syriza and Podemos mixed a critique of income inequality with the binary of the elite versus the people and nationalism, connecting them generically to right-wing populism is misleading.
Like their contemporary Latin American counterparts, left-wing European populists of the twenty-first century criticized neoliberal exclusions, technocratic solutions, and citizen disfranchisement by traditional parties. Even when they insisted on transcending the left-right divide, these parties were clearly located on the left of the political spectrum. In fact, they occupied spaces traditionally reserved for the nonpopulist left. Podemos especially reformulated the logic of Spanish politics as a discussion on income inequality and austerity measures. This was owing to its stress on the "caste," and the self-reflexive inspiration it found in the work of Argentine political theorist Ernesto Laclau and in the examples of Latin American neoclassical, left-wing populisms. Podemos, formed in 2013, was a response to the economic crisis and the perceived mimetic nature of the traditional Socialist and Conservative parties and their mutual embrace of neoclassical economic paradigms. Podemos' founding group included Laclausian scholars, who were deeply interested in the Latin American forms of populism, especially Bolivia's but also Venezuela and Argentina. Podemos stressed opposing those who were "above" while representing those who were "below." One of its leaders, Iñigo Errejón, in fact, followed Laclau in countering the binary of a right-wing populism in Europe and a leftist one in Latin America, maintaining that a populism of the left was possible in Europe. Podemos' leaders explained Spanish politics through another key binary, that of "democracy versus caste" (democracia versus casta). They clearly identified themselves and the people with the former, while asserting that traditional parties represented the latter. The populist axiom of the people versus the elite was at the center of the "hegemonic" struggle. Pablo Iglesias, the leader of Podemos, asserted that politics was about the imposition of one's own narrative over that of the enemies of the people. As he explained, "In Spain . . . there is a people that they wanted to humiliate but this people has a very clear idea of who are its enemies: the political and economic elites that have robbed the people and have enriched themselves at the expense of the people." Change, in other words, would come only when the establishment was removed from power, and power was placed in the hands of the people. The people and the fatherland were intrinsically good, but they had been the victims of a scam.
As critics from the left observed at the time, Podemos might have argued in theory that "the people are the [only] ones that need to decide," or that existing democracy was curtailed by the "economic powers and the caste." But in practice, the party was increasingly leaving its commitment to assembly-like, collective decision making behind, in favor of entrusting political decisions to the leaders, especially Pablo Iglesias but also Iñigo Errejón and Juan Carlos Monedero. In a sense, the closer Podemos was to reaching power, the more vertical and populist it became. This populist transformation from collective decision making to popular delegation was even more acute in Greece.
More than Podemos, and owing to its accession to power in 2015, Syriza, which was formed as a coalition of left-wing parties of the parliamentary and extraparliamentary left in 2004, represented an even more challenging historical experience to generic definitions regarding the nature of populism in Europe. Originally stressing a pluralist rather than a homogenizing idea of the popular collective, Syriza eventually turned in a more classical populist direction. Once in power, Syriza formed a coalition with a minority partner, the small, xenophobic right-wing party ANEL. Eventually, Syriza also acquiesced to the austerity demands of the European Union and of necessity veered to the center. In practice, it shifted from critiquing austerity measures to managing them as they were imposed on Greece by the European troika. Like other populist movements that transformed themselves after reaching power, Syriza became less pluralistic and less horizontal. As Giorgos Katsambekis explains, Syriza became "much more vertical" and leader-centric, downplaying its calls to the social movements, which now often mobilize against the Syriza-ANEL government; undermining internal democracy and polyphony; and engaging in a more pragmatic technical discourse focused on implementing the new austerity program in an allegedly "fairer way." When in power, populism often adopts a novel form of transformism that constitutes a new elite while increasing its popular support and social polarization, once again distancing citizens from meaningful participation in political decisions. As Antonio Gramsci observed many decades ago, this type of transformation converts popular demands into vertical politics, blocking more emancipatory politics.
In this context, left-wing European populists were close to transformative Latin American movements like the Peronist Kirchnerismo, which governed Argentina between 2003 and 2015. Kirchnerismo originally proposed horizontal strategies aimed at transcending the politics of Peronism, but once affirmed in power, it had in typical fashion combined left- and right-wing ideological motifs while claiming to be the people's only option against neoliberalism. Highly idiosyncratic, Kirchnerismo clearly reformulated classical Peronist's third way, extending it beyond the socialist left and liberalism. Europe also exhibited peculiar examples of this phenomenon. Europe has populisms such as the Italian Five Star Movement, led by the comedian Beppe Grillo, that mix right and left proposals. An amalgam of right and left, the Five Star Movement has confronted traditional parties and also populist movements of the right.
All in all, to argue that populism in Europe and the United States is mostly a right-wing phenomenon, or that Latin America is characterized by a uniform left-wing brand of populism, or, for that matter, that populism is absent in the rest of the world, would be problematic. The antipopulist idea of a nonpopulist left that is supposedly more European and a Latin American one that is overwhelmingly populist is simply historically wrong. The same goes for the equally stereotypical propopulist idea that what Europe needs is a left-wing "latinoamericanization." The distinctive but sometimes converging historical experiences of countries like Argentina, Ecuador, Brazil, Bolivia, Venezuela, Italy, Greece, Spain, France, Germany, Turkey, South Africa (with Jacob Zuma), and Thailand (with the Thaksin movement) contradict these stereotypes that crisscross the Atlantic and beyond.
Europe is not automatically on the right nor is Latin America simply on the left. For example, in the 1990s Latin American populism was generally on the side of neoliberalism, whereas in the following decade, the populist Latin American left prevailed in the region. Nonetheless, in the second decade of the twenty-first century, Europe and the United States have undeniably become world forces of xenophobic populism, from the National Front in France to the Dutch populism of Geert Wilders and from the Tea Party to President Trump. This dominant right-wing mode is present not only in clear-cut, right-wing populist parties but also in more conservative forms that eagerly adopt key features of the anti-immigrant and nationalist populist program of intolerance for pragmatic or ideological reasons. At the time of Trump's inauguration in 2017, Theresa May in England and Mauricio Macri in Argentina represented this mimetic conservatism, a sort of populism light. Populism often shows "the porous frontier" between the moderate right and the extreme right. The European right, in its journey from fascism to postfascism, has internalized democracy to the extent that it now contests democracy on its own terms. But this contestation rather than furthering democracy confines it to ethnic and nationalistic connotations. Only some inhabitants of the nation are acceptable as citizens. As Nadia Urbinati, one of the foremost theorists of populism argues, populism "disfigures" democracy and potentially challenges its future. Urbinati stresses that, while populism is a democratic form of government, its republican preoccupations tend to displace more properly democratic ones.
Urbinati's historical and theoretical critique of populism is rooted in a contextual understanding of democracy attentive to the larger domain where populism interacts with other notions of democracy that equally limit its historical possibilities. In this sense, populism might be read as pushing itself outside the political realm, rather than as being or becoming the political as such. Urbinati's approach forces us to rethink canonical assumptions about the links among populism, unpolitical forms of deliberation (such as those of technocrats, "experts," and other nonpolitical authorities), and plebiscitary forms of democracy. She explains that "Populism is the most devastating corruption of democracy because it radically overturns representative institutions (notably elections and party pluralism) and transforms the negative power of judgment or opinion from one that controls and monitors politically elected leaders to one that rejects their electoral legitimacy in the name of a deeper unity between the leaders and the people; it opposes ideological legitimacy against the constitutional and procedural one."
Drawing on Urbinati's key theoretical framing of populism as an idealization of democracy that leads to specific disfigurements, I would stress how modern populism emerged from a Cold War defacement of fascism. The fascist model was extremely influential, inspiring leaders who ranged widely across the political spectrum in the interwar years. But after 1945, Latin American populism proposed reformulating democracy in a more vertical way that simultaneously expanded and constrained democracy.
To be sure, there are important distinctions between the histories and present realities of Europe and Latin America. European and North American populisms are presently closer to fascist xenophobia and nationalism than the Latin American ones. All in all, the new dynamic of transnational right-wing populism promises more limitations to democratic life in Europe and the United States than the social and authoritarian effects of Latin American populism. In any case, returning populism to its postwar history allows us to situate and analyze these convergences and distinctions.
## EXPLAINING POPULISM AND ANTIPOPULISM
Going back to the issue of populism and theory, not all theorists exclude populism's transatlantic, and global, dimensions, but even here pinning down populism often leads to idealized versions of it as either the purest manifestation of democracy or as its ultimate antithesis. In Ernesto Laclau's famous and seminal work, the provincial European view of populism is transcended. Laclau, in fact, sometimes tends to overcome all national and historical boundaries. Ultimately, he presents populism as politics "as such." For Laclau, populism is a form of power founded on the basis of dividing society through antagonistic social demands. These unarticulated demands follow a "logic of equivalence" in order to dichotomize social space. For Laclau, the "populist rupture" establishes an internal frontier, a deep polarization of society, namely, the division of society into two camps: "power and the underdog." In populism, demands are made by popular subjects, which are then articulated by leaders who defend them in the name of the people and against the powerful, or the elites. Above all, Laclau maintains populism has a "political logic." This perceptive, but also transcendental and sometimes circular, explanation is often positioned outside history. Recently critical theorists Andrew Arato and Nadia Urbinati have placed Laclau's approach in the sphere of the political theology that defines populism and of the democratic disfigurations that it engenders. In short, they have highlighted the antidemocratic dimensions of Laclau's interpretation.
These criticisms are significant, especially because Laclau is the founder of a school of thought that understands populism as the ultimate agent of democratization. Laclau and his school generally focus on the populist left, which he tends to view as the true form of populism. For these scholars, populism is a structurally defining element of systemic calls for equality and against domination, that is, populism leads to political emancipation. For Yannis Stavrakakis, "It seems very difficult to imagine democratic politics without populism, that is, without forms of political discourse that call upon and designate the people—and not, for example, the rating agencies or the aristoi—as their nodal point, as a privileged political subject, as a legitimizing basis and symbolic lever to further egalitarian demands."
Stavrakakis shows that the highly problematic tendency to demonize populism conflates popular demands with populism, often betraying untroubled assumptions about the normative dimensions of liberal democracy.
In turn, Jacques Rancière notes the ritual denunciations of populism are part of an elitist attempt to downplay popular democratic expression. By stressing a one-sided version of Latin American populism (from Perón to Vargas to Chávez), Rancière explains that in Europe, the term populism is used to talk about "another thing."
For Rancière, the term populism is reserved for those identified with the hatred of democracy. Rancière places life in a democracy in opposition to the status quo, which downplays citizen's participation—a situation he identifies with "states of oligarchic law . . . where the power of the oligarchy is limited by a dual recognition of popular sovereignty and individual liberties." In such limited democratic spaces, the term populism is used to mask neoliberal attempts to rule without the people. Rancière recognizes that extreme right parties are a consequence of, and a reaction against, the "oligarchic consensus" of technocrats and experts, but he hesitates to call them populists. He stresses how populism is used to conflate democratic responses to neoliberalism with racial and religious fanaticism. Populism, then, is a term of attack but not of analysis.
In contrast, following Laclau, scholars like Stavrakakis, Jean Comaroff, and Étienne Balibar defend using the concept of populism for analytic and normative purposes. Comaroff observes that populism is always used more as a way of "marking difference than denoting content, and its meaning [is] . . . largely relative to the standpoint from which it is deployed." She explains, "Despite (or perhaps because of) its paradoxes, populism is more than ever a concept to be conjured with across a wide spectrum of public debate in our present world. This is perhaps most dramatically evident in postcolonial, post-totalitarian contexts, where the memory of collective oppression remains vivid: in Latin America, Russia, and Zimbabwe, for example, but also arguably in the Italy of Berlusconi, the France of Sarkozy, the Netherlands of Wilders." She also includes countries like South Africa and the United States among those where it's necessary to consider populism as an existing form that disputes neoliberalism: "Populism in some form is a necessary condition of all antiestablishment movements, past and present, progressive or conservative . . . [and] "is in itself never enough to fuel sustained, politically constructive mobilizations" For his part, Balibar argues, "I do not reject the term as such, especially because I am reminded of its long and ambivalent history as a political category inside and outside Europe, which it is especially worth studying in this moment." Balibar equates the current criticism of political and social inequalities with a democratizing form of populism, a "becoming political of the people."
Taken together, these important critiques of antipopulism question normative assumptions about liberal democracy and its technocratic tendencies, and show how the government of experts limits democratic interactions. However, the responses to antipopulism also often engage in an idealized version of populism, especially Latin American populism, conflating the different uses of populism by the left (especially in the United States, where before the rise of Trumpism populism often meant simply being concerned about or catering to popular demands) with its manifold historical meanings across the Atlantic and beyond. Thus, democratic responses to inequality are more or less mechanically identified with populist discourse and practice.
While authors who adhere to the model of liberal democracy usually diagnose populism as a pathology, scholars who sympathize with the notion of radical democracy tend to think of populism as a healthy, even at times an emancipating, force that strengthens political representation. Is it possible to bridge this gap? Cristóbal Rovira Kaltwasser, a Chilean scholar of populism, notes the need for transatlantic research and also for considering how
analyzing the relationship between populism and democracy depends to a great extent on normative assumptions and preconceptions of how democracy should function. Thus, the impact of populism on democracy has tended to be less an empirical question and more a theoretical issue, which is answered mostly by speculations deriving from an ideal standpoint of how democracy should be. How to overcome this normative bias? I maintain that the most promising way is to follow those authors that develop a minimal approach to studying populism vis-à-vis democracy.
Rovira Kaltwasser's own proposal undermines the problem of one's own subject position in relation to the object of research. His presentation of a putatively neutral, "less normative" definition of populism is itself not without normative conditions. He endorses a "minimal" definition of populism that replicates Laclau's own notion of populism as everything that is related to the political. Rovira even puts forward an idea of populism as part of every individual's inner self. This sort of populist unconscious can, according to him, be confirmed by "empirical investigations" like the ones Mudde performed. This view of populism as a pathology of the self is necessarily transhistorical. Rovira argues, "Empirical investigation reveals that the majority of individuals have populist attitudes that are in a state of latency. They are in a sleeping mode, and they are activated when faced with certain contextual situations. In other words, most of us have a 'little Hugo Chávez' within us, but it is located in a hidden place, and thus it does not define our political preferences."
Ironically, Rovira Kaltwasser criticizes Laclau's notion of populism as being politics as such, but he himself offers an idealized, one might add romantic, take on "empirical investigation" as both replacing critical theories of populism and neutralizing normative, or ethico-political, subject positions in research. The result is a sort of thinly layered theory filled with bouts of data about the functioning of political parties and other putatively more graspable units. This high theory of populism, like the more antipopulist ones, waters down history and theory while enforcing the ideal of the neutral scientific researcher. As we saw in the previous chapter with respect to theories of fascism, all generic schools displace historical interpretation in favor of definition. Definition aims to close off discussion on the subject, thereby establishing a new consensus that overcomes previous perspectives and allows supposedly more neutral researchers to empirically test the generic definition. In both cases, minimal definitions are formed on the basis of self-referentiality, and often enforce a thinly disguised, refurbished form of positivism. Such minimalist theories often downplay the role of radical violence in fascism and excuse the authoritarianism of populist forms. For instance, when confronted with historical phenomena that go against the theory, these scholars simply silence these inconvenient histories. Thus, just as the Holocaust has not been given its proper and challenging place in the history of transnational fascism, the inconvenient emergence of Trumpism, which certainly deserves a significant place in the history of populism, has simply been excluded from the field of populist studies. Cas Mudde, for example, does not include racism and xenophobia in his definition of populism because they are forms of nativism and thus conflict with his minimalist definition. According to Mudde, Trump's case was very different from the European populist right because, in his view, Trump "singled out illegal immigration" but did not attack "the status of the U.S. as a multicultural immigration country." Moreover, although Mudde noted that Trump has spoken about "'the Muslim problem' at least since 2011, he is much more nuanced in his views of Islam and Muslims than people like Marine Le Pen and, certainly, Geert Wilders." The populist version of Trump does not fit Mudde's definition. Mudde argued, "Where populist leaders claim to be the vox populi, the voice of the people, Trump is the voice of Trump." But radical narcissism, charismatic messianism, and mythical thinking often appear in the history of populism as essentially attached to racism, nativism, and xenophobia. And, of course, Trump eventually, and within the populist nature of his candidacy logically, claimed at the Republican National Convention that he was "the voice of the people." Stressing generic definitions minimizes the outer democratic edges of populism in history. As a reformulation of fascism for democratic times, populism, especially on the right, always has the potential to go back to its origins, as some European and American populists have recently demonstrated.
When homogenized with the left-wing variants, right-wing radical populism is released from its most dictatorial and authoritarian dimensions. In history, the populism of the left and the right were and are often antithetical, but under the generic positivist banner, they tend to be conflated. Historical distinctions are silenced by high theory.
The ideal of the detached researcher who uses definitions to analyze data replaces the need to think through the political from a critical theoretical perspective. What historian Dominick LaCapra has aptly defined as "born-again positivism" plays along extremely well with "Up above the world so high" theory. Critical theory, on the other hand, points to potential problems with the unreflective use of data to confirm theoretical axioms. In fact, this is also an especially strong dimension of the critical work of Laclau. In his important works, Laclau provides pathbreaking examinations of populism, but his perceptive diagnosis must be distinguished from his prognosis. Populism for Laclau is a normative model to be endorsed, especially in Latin America. He contrasts parliamentarism, open discussion, and plurality of positions with the principle of dual embodiment (by the people and the leader) and the need for vertical leaderships in the context of friend–enemy relations. Contemporary, mythologized examples of Latin American populism, especially of leaders in countries such as Venezuela and Argentina, ground Laclau's argument. His ideas reflect the often-uncited and unacknowledged influence of thinkers like Sorel and the fascist-leaning Carl Schmitt of the Crisis of Parliamentary Democracy.
Laclau's penchant for a normative model of populism leads him not only to focus on Latin America much more than his theoretical peers but also to embrace the normative idealization of the region. Latin American scholars do not find it surprising that Laclau's conceptual antagonist is Italo-Argentine scholar Gino Germani, since Germani is precisely who early on connected the dots between fascism and the Latin American populist experiment of Peronism.
Gino Germani was an Italian antifascist intellectual, who crossed the Atlantic to escape fascism and also helped to remedy a provincial European understanding of the modern political experience of populism. Surprisingly, Germani has been and continues to be much ignored, or he is relegated to a perfunctory footnote in the European and North American interpretations of populism. His work needs to be readdressed by those interested in the history and theory of populism. Germani's own interest in the relationship between Peronism and fascism is informed by personal experience. This sociologist was a child when fascism came to power, and an adolescent when the totalitarian state was established in his native Italy: "In my early youth I experienced the total ideological climate involving the everyday life of the common citizen, and more strongly so, the younger generations. Later, in Argentina, where I went as a political refugee, I met another variety of authoritarianism." This reference to the Peronist phenomenon as another form of authoritarian rule illuminates his comparison between Argentina and Italy. Germani stressed that, from a comparative perspective, Peronist Argentina seemed to lag behind in relation to the Italian historical process. Despite the notable divergences in their social structure and political history, the two countries had similarities that gave way to two different forms of authoritarianism. For him, Peronism (as populism at large) was the result of contextual demographic and class structure changes, and Germani drew on this for his sociological explanation of populism as a vehicle for class mobilization in underdeveloped societies. Unlike many theorists, Germani differentiated between the contextually situated class formations that constituted the core of the movement. But he also tended to ignore the agency of working-class actors who followed Peronism and the many attempts by the populist regime, and by Perón himself, to expand the multiclass dimensions of his movement.
Germani often restricted his theory to the modern form of populism that Peronism represented. However, thanks to his groundbreaking comparative works, along with those of Argentine historian Tulio Halperín Donghi, populism studies started to grasp the revolutionary character of Peronist populism and its complicated genealogical relationship with fascism. As Halperín Donghi notes, the Peronist revolution was confirmed by electoral procedures, giving life to a novel regime of "plebiscitary democracy." For him, Peronism elevated the principle of the ruling party to the status of a national doctrine. As Halperín has also noted in a famous 1958 article, the relationship between fascism and Peronism was ambiguous, but this was not a reason for fleeing from historical and comparative analyses.
Fascists and Peronists came to power when liberal-democratic regimes that were thought to be solid or well established failed. Both used totalitarian politics in the sense of the organicism and absolute integralism that Mussolini and the Argentine fascist nacionalistas had attributed to the term before 1945. Both regimes gave a totalitarian answer to the crisis that modernity had provoked in the public's perception of laws, the economy, and the legitimacy of the state. Both regimes were clearly antiliberal, anticommunist, and antisocialist, and yet they treated their enemies in very different ways. Lastly, both regimes mobilized their populations from the top down, using propaganda and various actions, promoting mass politics, and convincing majorities that the leader represented them and the nation as a whole. But while fascism mobilized the middle class, Peronism rallied the working class. While fascism gave war, imperialism, and racism to Europe and the world, Peronism never provoked war at all. Peronism, like other Latin American classical forms of populism, was a specific postfascist response to fascism that radically reformulated it.
## FASCISM BECOMES POPULISM: FROM PERONISM TO TRUMPISM AND BEYOND
A new way of understanding democracy, Peronism embraced popular sovereignty through winning elections and adopting democratic forms of representation, but also radically enhanced the figure of the leader, who was promoted as the best interpreter of the people's will. Its followers were asked to place their faith in the leaders' intuitions and in constant policy changes. They were, and still are, asked to trust that what the leader wills both encompasses and surpasses their political understanding. In populism, the legitimacy of the leader resides not only in the former's ability to represent the electorate but also in the belief that the leader's will goes far beyond the mandate of political representation. This is because populists maintain that the leader innately knows better than the people what they really want. In populism, populist leaders are the object of representation and the subject of popular delegation within the context of formal democratic procedures. The elected leaders personify popular sovereignty, and possess a great degree of autonomy relative to the majorities that elected them.
As a political ideology, populism, like fascism, liberalism, and communism, amplifies short-term political participation, while at the same time minimizing it in the long run. In populism, as in other current manifestations of democracy, such as neoliberalism, meaningful political participation by citizens does not translate well from rhetoric to practice. In short, populism is a modern understanding of the political that features a hybrid combination of unstable ideas about popular sovereignty, leadership, and how a capitalist society should be organized and ruled. Rooted in a postwar rethinking of fascism and a clear rejection of its extreme violence, populism embraces the democratic principle of electoral representation fused with authoritarian leadership. Modern populism in its classical Peronist form actively encourages social reform, creating forms of state capitalism attached to a new elite through its links with the leader and movement that partly lessens income inequality.
Classical populism represented the fascist combination of extreme nationalism and a non-Marxist reading of the socialist tradition that fascists like Benito Mussolini understood so well. But the populism of General Juan Perón was born into a complex ideological cradle that combined the legacies of fascism with those of its enemies: Perón maintained that "We are not sectarian. . . . If there is something in communism that we can take, we take it, names don't scare us. If fascism, anarchism, or communism have something good, we take it." Borrowing from the left and the right, Perón took the accusation of eclecticism as a compliment. This "eclecticism," which Perón shared with Mussolini, distanced him from the Italian dictator in practical, and later in theoretical, terms. Fascism's sustaining features were its idealization of violence and war as the sublime values of nationality and the leader's persona. In military terms, it mobilized the masses, but it tended to demobilize them in social terms. Peronism inverted the terms of the fascist equation, distancing itself from the fascist models, and became a sui generis political ideology. That Peronism reformulated fascism and became an elected populist regime was a matter of foundational significance in the broader history of modern populism.
For everyone, including its creator, Peronism was the unexpected result of an attempted fascist reform of Argentine political life. Fascism was always Perón's model, but Peronism was not merely a new form of fascism. As historian Tulio Halperín Donghi has suggested, "If the example of fascism couldn't give concrete orientation to the Peronist movement, instead it contributed very effectively by disorienting it." The fascist model tended to focus on objectives that did not coincide either with the realities of Argentina and the global postwar Cold War or with the vertical and horizontal contradictions of the leadership and bases of the Peronist movement. While Argentina appeared to be ripe for fascism, the world showed itself to be too ripe for it.
Over the course of the journey traveled by Peronist ideology and practice, from the messianic idea of fascist leadership to the profound transformations of unionized Peronism, and from Perón's inspiration in fascism to the worker's movement, a dynamic interaction between leader and followers developed that inhibited the autonomy of the former and mobilized and transformed the latter. Converging arguments can be made using other examples of classical Latin American populism, especially the Varguista and Gaitanista movements. A similar logic would later be applied to the neoclassical populist movements in the context of crises between political factions that opened the way for leaders of other groups to turn to populism. For example, in Turkey and Thailand, populism appeared belatedly and was clearly a political choice by leaders who had not been populists before. In these countries, leaders like Erdogan or Thaksin Shinawatra (2001–06) moved to populist policies after a relative absence of populist rhetoric at the beginning of their governments. As Ertug Tombus explains, in the case of Turkey, Erdogan's AKP party understood itself to be the sole democratizing agent, which paradoxically led to an increase in authoritarianism. Erdogan came to power in 2002, but he fully embraced a populist style and vision only much later, in 2007. Thus, in Turkey, and during a moment when secular groups seriously contested Erdogan's politics, populism emerged as a later choice for understanding the political and for doing politics. As Tombus argues, by that time "Erdoğan showed that for him democracy is only a stage of plebiscitary acclamation; that democratic procedures and principles are worth respecting only as long as they lead to the consolidation of Erdoğan's power. Constitutional limitations and the rule of law are nothing but obstacles before the will of the people, which is, for them, embodied by Erdoğan and the AKP." This logic of authoritarian consolidation in the name of the people, and in defense of democracy, was pushed further after the failed antipopulist coup of the Turkish summer of 2016. The enemy was now everybody perceived to be opposed to the leader.
In Thailand, Thaksin Shinawatra, a media magnate, adopted the role of voice of the people and even popular ways of speaking and dressing. He harassed critical media and presented his politics as a "soft authoritarianism," while claiming in 2006, "I am the major force in government and everyone is just my helper." As political theorist Benjamin Moffit notes, the Thai leader argued that intellectuals, NGOs, and civil society groups were "enemies of the nation." At one point, the party slogan was "Populism for a happy life."
With populism, the enemy was the opposite of the people and the leader. The centrality of the people and the enemy in the rhetoric of the demagogic populist leader led to the dual emphasis on the needs and desires of both leaders and followers and to the increasing exclusion of others symbolically and, occasionally, practically. The result was a downgrading or even the elimination of democracy, either through the leader's increasing recourse to authoritarianism (Turkey) or through the appearance of an antipopulist dictatorship (Thailand) that toppled populism. In the case of classical Peronism, both trends were present. From his 1946 election onward, Perón increased his authoritarianism until he was eventually toppled in 1955 by even more authoritarian and violent antipopulist dictators.
Populism surged as an authoritarian alternative to the fascist violence of the past, a response that included retuning fascism in a democratic key, as well as a new focus on those citizens who remained unrepresented politically. This is why Eric Hobsbawm, one of the most influential historians of the last century, believes fascism had such an effect in Latin American history.
For Hobsbawm the ideological impact of fascism was "undeniable" in the Americas. Nonetheless, he noted that this impact was not the result of a mimetic engagement with Europe but of a democratic transformation. At the same time that Hobsbawm failed to see the national particularities of fascism in Latin American, he recognized its populist outcomes acutely: "It was in Latin America that European fascist influence was to be open and acknowledged, both on individual politicians, like Colombia's Jorge Eliecer Gaitán (1898–1948) and Argentina 's Juan Domingo Perón 1895–1974), and on regimes, like Getúlio Vargas' Estado novo."
Without sufficiently analyzing the significance of the postwar context in Latin America, Hobsbawm stressed fascism's substantial transformation when it crossed the Atlantic. He underlined the originality of its transformation into populism, which he attributed to nationalist structural factors: "What Latin American leaders took from European fascism was its deification of populist leaders with a reputation for action. But the masses they wanted to mobilize, and found themselves mobilizing, were not those who feared what they might lose, but those who had nothing to lose." These structural factors explained why, in addition to the idea that "oligarchy" was the enemy, populism rather than fascism took hold in Latin America. Even when these populist leaders were on the right, and even if they had been sympathetic to fascism, their followers eventually steered them to the left. In contrast, Hobsbawm saw American populists, such as Huey Long and his "conquest" of Louisiana in the interwar years, as rooted more in a radical and left-wing tradition "that cut down democracy in the name of democracy." For Hobsbawm, American populism belonged to the left because of its appeal to "the egalitarianism of the poor." For him, this was "the most successful and possibly dangerous demagogic populism of the decade."
Because populism could be rooted more in the right, or originate from the traditions of the left, it was always more inclusive than fascism. Interestingly Hobsbawm inscribed fascism and populism in the context of the "fall of liberalism." But I would argue that after 1945 a new context emerged that separated the experiences of fascism and populism.
Populism's global history also includes the United States, where populism could be either left or right wing. American historians have long discussed these issues, especially since the appearance of the pathbreaking works of Richard Hofstadter in the 1950s. Before Hofstadter, American historiography regarded populism as solely a left-wing phenomenon in the tradition of the late nineteenth century, but he insisted that American populism had important authoritarian features. Influenced by the works of the Frankfurt school, Hofstadter stressed the authoritarian, irrational, pastoral, antiurban, and even anti-Semitic and anti-intellectual nature of early American populists. After Hofstadter, many scholars still identified populism with the left, but others emphasized the dual possibilities of populism as either progressive or reactionary. From Jacksonian democracy to McCarthyism, and from the rabble-rousing anti-Semitic and profascist speeches of Father Charles Coughlin and the prepopulist right-wing nativism of Charles Lindberg before 1945, to the candidacies of George Wallace in 1968 and Ross Perot in 1996, American historians have debated whether populism was a response to modernity or a rejection of it. But historically, and I would add also transnationally, populism's political and social leanings depend on the contexts.
In the United States, as everywhere else, postwar populism was a modern response to actual or perceived crises of liberalism and the new early Cold War experience of a world without fascism. American historians generally do not explore the transnational implications of postwar modern populism and the fact that it was exactly at this time that classical populism emerged in Latin America. Focusing on national traditions, these historians note that, particularly just after World War II, owing especially to an invigorated anticommunist movement and, soon after, to a fierce reaction against the civil rights movement, populism definitely turned from being a phenomenon of the progressive left to one of the reactionary right. Most historians of American history do not address the fact that populism's turn from progressive to reactionary, that is, to a more clearly predominant right-wing form, coincided with other global trends, especially, but not exclusively, anticommunism and antiliberal Peronism, among other third-way movements that crystalized after the resurrection of liberalism, which took place after the war. The United States was similar to the rest. The distinction between pre-1945 American progressive populism and right-wing anticommunist populism that solidified against the New Deal corresponds chronologically with my own distinction between prepopulism and protopopulism and classical populism in Latin America. The new American populism that became dominant in the 1940s with the aim of defending a unified people from the liberal elites shared many impulses with other national and transnational cases.
Many American history scholars agree that populism turned toward the right in the postwar period, but as historian Ronald Formisano stresses, there were important exceptions to this tendency. In some cases American populism put forward an amalgamation of progressive and reactionary motifs, both of which were reflected by, for example, the supporters of Ross Perot's third-party presidential run in 1992. Nonetheless, Formisano notes that in the 1990s, the religious right "had moved firmly into the Republican camp." These moves, and the increasing colonization of the GOP by nativist, and ever-more xenophobic populist themes, explain the many grassroots "tea parties" that emerged after the election of Barack Obama in 2008: "While the Tea Party burst onto the scene in 2009 protesting government spending, high taxes, and bailouts, its passions have been animated as much by the cultural preoccupations of the religious right and allied groups focused on the rights and place in society of women and undocumented immigrants." Anti-immigrant xenophobia was especially central to Tea Party ideology. Also important was racism and neoliberal fears about President Obama's very moderate response to the economic crisis. In their analysis of Tea Party gatherings in Massachusetts, Vanessa Williamson, Theda Skocpol, and John Coggin noted, "At public gatherings, Tea Party rhetoric seems to take a page from Hofstadter's 'paranoid style of American politics,' decrying the president as a threat to American democracy, in ways that seem far out of proportion to any actual political or policy happenings." The Tea Party led many Republicans toward polarization and the demonization of the sitting president, with Donald Trump one of the most famous advocates for the so-called birther movement. The fantasy behind the lie that President Obama was not born in his own country was typical of the populist drive to strip political legitimacy from those they judged to be of the elites and against the people and the nation. When Trump became the name of America's populist right, and became the president of the country the circle was complete. American populism had found its leader, making whole an until then incomplete form of populism.
In the early decades of the twenty-first century, the Tea Party and President Donald Trump have continued these national but also transnational populist traditions. For Breitbart, a white supremacist website that played a notable role in Trump's path to the presidency, and whose CEO was the chief strategist of Trump's campaign, Trump provided a leading example for "populist, nationalist candidates" across the Atlantic. Breitbart stated, "Globalism has suffered a series of powerful blows, especially with the continuing rise of populist parties in France, Germany, Austria, Italy, Great Britain, Hungary and elsewhere. As in the case of the Brexit referendum, the establishment—including its sounding box, the mainstream media—stand in defiant denial of the facts and then rend their garments when their predictions prove illusory." If Breitbart argued that Trump's populism was going to save America, Italian populist Beppe Grillo argued that Trump's victory was a turning point in world history: "This is a wide-ranging fuck off. Trump has pulled off an incredible V-Day." In turn, Marine Le Pen, maintained that Trump's triumph represented a "global revolution," the victory of the will of the people over the elites. For Le Pen, "Clearly Trump's victory is an additional stone in the building of a new world destined to replace the old one." Le Pen had adopted the slogan "Au nom du people" for her own presidential campaign, arguing, "We are at a crossroad. . . . This election is a choice of civilization." Like Trump, Le Pen identified her own position with that of the true patriot: "the division is no longer right-left (but) patriot-globalist."
These transnational shared affinities and contextual similarities announced the new cataclysmic victory of populism in the world's most paradigmatic and famous democracy. This fact silenced the conventional American calls for exceptionalism in politics and in the longstanding tendency in American historiography to ignore parallel transnational histories. As the expert on fascism and authoritarianism Antonio Costa Pinto argued, with the birth of Trumpism, it became clear how problematic it was to argue that American democracy was not part of a wider right-wing populist trend. The United States is a province of global history, albeit a central one that singularly affects all others. Indeed, there are some symptomatic peculiarities to American populism in history. Founded in the country where liberalism came to reign supreme, American populism necessarily had to go back and address the country's liberal beginnings as a republic. In fact, the United States was, as Andreas Kalyvas and Ira Katznelson argue, the "world's first liberal regime." Founders of the American republic like Thomas Paine and James Madison reshaped political virtue as political representation. They defined modern democracy as the representative of the people. Their solution was a novel combination of popular sovereignty and political representation. For them, power was not absolute and authority ultimately derived from the people. Electoral procedures were the expression of that. Representatives governed for a time in the name of the people, but absolute power resided only in the people. The latter, and not their temporary representatives, were the granters of political legitimacy. In practice, and from the beginnings of the republic, this ideal has not always been achieved. In electing representatives, the people exchanged direct for indirect rule, which placed limits on expanding democracy. In addition, those whom the people delegated to act in their names were enabled to enact political processes that often enforced forms of domination. For example, for Hannah Arendt, the uses of popular sovereignty were easily driven to unequal and authoritarian outcomes. As Kalyvas explains, Arendt "warned against the homogenizing drive of sovereignty that destroys the constitutive multiplicity, the very plurality, of the public space by violently imposing the dangerous fiction of a unitary macro-subject, the People-as-One."
To be sure, notions of popular sovereignty in history had equally presented egalitarian and authoritarian outcomes. As in other cases, the United States was not an exception in being ambivalent about the notion of sovereignty: promoting and limiting democratic outcomes. As political theorist Jason Frank reminds us, the history of that country is constituted by these invocations of the people as "the only legitimate fountain of power": "The people have been used to justify popular revolution against colonial authorities and to found a constitutional order premised on 'excluding the people in their collective capacity'; to embolden the states and to empower the union; to authorize vigilantism and to affirm the rule of law; to create a broad populist front against Gilded Age economic exploitation and to perpetuate some of the nation's worst racial atrocities; to increase the power of the presidency and to return power to the grassroots."
Across the globe, candidates and other political leaders often invoked the popularity of their ideas to insulate them from criticism from the press or the academy. The result was a teleological tendency to regard any analysis of populism as elitist or out of sync with the needs and wishes of the supposed national majority. This situation exposed critics to accusations of symbolic aggression against whatever reality had been assigned to the term popular. Especially in the United States, the popular and populism have often been used as if they were synonymous, the result being that both have been identified with legitimate, especially progressive, causes that recuperate the needs of the people.
In fact, the term people is a neutral one that has been appropriated equally by different national actors representing political movements from liberalism to fascism. Fascists have spoken in the name of the popolo or the volk, real socialists have also linked a people with the nation, and liberals have referred to "we the people" as a foundational expression for the modern era. But in populism, all these traditions became connected. In this context, populism conflated political representation with full delegation and linked both with a mythical idea of the past, when democracy really worked. Thus, populism presented itself as a return to the past but also as a future when tolerance and diversity would cease to have a prominent political role. More than in other places, American populism has always been able to go back to its democratic origins, but as everywhere else these origins often were watered down, restricted to the majority, and mythically conceived as a source of redemption from plurality.
As was the case for the rest of the world, the end of the Second World War significantly transformed the United States. The postwar economic order and the new hegemonic status of liberalism minimized the populist potential of the left, allowing the populism of the right to be the predominant strain north of the Panama Canal. Nonetheless, for the rest of the century populism was co-opted, and restrained, by more conservative elements inside and outside of the Republican Party. This situation increasingly changed, especially after the related cycles of neoliberalism, technocracy, and economic crisis of our new century. Finally, in 2017, American extreme-right populism reached power.
At the level of a movement, the Tea Party, and later Trumpism in the United States presented similar authoritarian interactions to those who have historically defined populism across the globe. The logic of populist radicalization exalted the opposition between the people and the Other—namely, the imagined enemies of the people. This extreme antagonism was precisely what many followers wanted from their leaders. As Pablo Piccato and I argue with respect to Trumpism, "Some observers believe—or, perhaps, hope—that Trump's followers misunderstand or don't believe in what he represents. They're wrong." These observers included President Barack Obama, who suggested that Trump's followers were misguided. However, several studies observed a correlation between resentment against African Americans and immigrants and support for Trump. We argue that "His supporters like Trump not despite his anti-democratic qualities, but precisely because of them." Populism cannot be reduced simply to its charismatic leaders nor can their impact be explained simply by whether they are true or false messengers of the people. Leaders and followers respond to each other's expectations and shape the reality of the movement. In fact, this was how modern populism was born as a regime, leading to the democratization of Argentina's dictatorial system. But the opposite can also happen, for example, a leader voted in by a big minority or a tiny majority (as was the case in Maduro's Venezuela) might decide to move further away from democracy, eliminating the need for electoral legitimacy that is constitutive of populism in history.
As the modern history of populism shows, this first became evident in the case of Peronism. Under Perón, Argentina experienced a significant redistribution of income, and the rights of urban and rural workers improved, with wages rising and jobs increasing. Initially, the structural reforms of the social base accomplished by Perón and the dictatorship of 1943–46 were not accompanied by democratic procedures. Thus, the followers could not formally express their support for the dictatorial regime and its leading figure. This could not have been done without delegitimizing the dictatorship. Perón resolved this contradiction by calling for elections to legitimize his leadership, which up until then was a dictatorship. Moreover, when he was removed from his dictatorial posts in 1945, and during the famous popular demonstrations in his favor, Perón was able to position himself as the leader of a popular coup against the dictatorship. He then won the presidential election in February 1946. The result was a democracy that combined expanding social rights, increasing the electoral participation of his supporters, and limiting the political rights of the opposition.
## FROM PAST TO PRESENT
This novel form of postwar politics later became the classic case of Latin American populism. As an authoritarian version of electoral democracy, populism represents itself as being outside ordinary politics. It makes nonelectoral claims for democracy. Fewer spaces are left for political minorities to express themselves, and they are accused as traitors to the "real" will of the nation or, worse, as mere puppets of foreign powers plotting against the country. Finally, populism conflates state and movement, enforcing forms of clientelism that feature the leader as the incarnation of the people. Indeed, Perón saw his leadership as the eternal link between the people of the nation as a whole and the security apparatus of the state. As he argued in an early third-person reference to himself in the famous speech of October 17, 1945, "In this historical hour for the Republic, let Colonel Perón be the link of union that would make indestructible the brotherhood between the people, the army and the police. Let this union be eternal and infinite so this people will grow in that spiritual unity of the true and authentic forces of nationality and order." Perón positioned himself as a law-and-order leader. He could bring together a divided public but would do so by eliminating all distinction among the people. In doing so, the Argentine general elevated the police and the armed forces against imagined enemies of the people, both inside and outside Argentina, who compromised not only the country's national security but also its identity. As we argued with Pablo Piccato and Dirk Moses, Trump, too, had mixed us-versus-them alarmism, jingoistic statements, and the idea of law and order with the fiction that he is the "messenger" of the people. In his "American carnage" inauguration speech, Trump said the American people had defeated a minority of politicians: "For too long, a small group in our nation's capital has reaped the rewards of government, while the people have borne the cost." Trump has also claimed that the country was beset by crime, stating falsely on the campaign trail that the "murder rate" was the highest it's been in almost half a century and that the police "are the most mistreated people" in America.
As a good pupil of classical populism, Trump was actualizing Perón's brand of populism, which depended on a view of secular constitutional democracy as the source of national decline. By representing themselves as the personification of their nations and peoples, these leaders wanted to turn their countries upside down under the mantle of an electoral mandate. In Trumpism, this fiction was made even notwithstanding the reality that Trump had lost the popular vote. In Peronism, this authoritarian view of democracy actualized the need to use the popular vote to legitimize the interwar synthesis of nationalism and non-Marxist nationalist socialism. In his memoirs, Perón clearly identified Italian fascism and Nazism with this "socialism with a national character." Referring to his visit to fascist Italy, he stated, "I chose to do my military assignment in Italy because it was where a new national socialism was being tested. Until then, socialism had been Marxist. In contrast, in Italy, socialism was sui generis, Italian: fascism." Perón radically rearranged fascism in a newly democratic, antiliberal key. But populism is not Argentine, Latin American, North American, Asian, or European. Instead, it is a global phenomenon with distinctive European, Asian, American, and Latin American histories. It is, and was, the outcome of the interconnections and transfers of political ideas and historical experiences throughout the Atlantic and beyond.
Populism first emerged as an antileftist democratic solution and an attempt to overcome the Cold War dichotomy between liberalism and communism. By way of "democratizing" the nondemocratic experiences of fascism, Peronism morphed into the first postwar example of a populist regime. Other regimes soon followed in Brazil and Bolivia and among other Latin American countries.
After its modern emergence as a reformulation of fascism, populism has had various and contrasting histories. As Hans Vorländer argues, populism can act as "the good, the bad and the ugly." It can have diverse and even contradictory effects on democracy. It can stimulate it, narrow it, or even destroy it.
In Latin America, classical populist regimes have generally combined authoritarian plebiscitary presidential leadership, the electoral support of large popular majorities, and an expansion of social rights. More recently, the European populism of the right, on the other hand, generally has targeted immigrants and emphasized European disintegration. In its most recent historical formations, populism represents a nonpluralistic response to the global economic downturn and a widely perceived crisis of representation fueled by the continued presence of an elite of technocrats that switches from government to government and is seen as indifferent to growing social gaps.
These responses to neoliberalism come from the right and the left and sometimes, as in the case of the Five Star Movement in Italy or the Kirchnerista Movement in Argentina, they are amalgamated. This amalgamation disputes the traditional demarcations between left and right, but it does not eliminate important, even substantive, distinctions between, for example, the leftist populism of Evo Morales's movement in Bolivia and the xenophobic populism of the True Finns in Finland. Their extremely different responses to neoliberalism explain why left and right cannot ultimately be collapsed under the guise of nonhistorical generic definitions. Yet populism constantly reshapes existing standard ideological boundaries.
Populism on both the left and the right has become a political force in Europe. On the left, Greece and Spain are the most relevant cases. In England, Italy, France, Slovakia, Bulgaria, Denmark, Finland, the Netherlands, Germany, and Austria, populist right-wing politicians stress the need to return power to the "people" and take it away from "oligarchic elites." Although they are often considered not to be part of Europe, both Turkey and Russia constitute clear forms of populist leadership, in which the opposition is presented as contrary to the will of the people. Golden Dawn and the Jobbik Party in Hungary, which have promoted a more extreme form of populism than many movements, can be seen as followers of a new fascism, or more simply forms of neo-Nazism.
These moves back and forth between fascism and populism ultimately represent the possibility of unmaking democratic-authoritarian versions of populism and simply returning populism to fascism. On the "moderate" side, UKIP's activities in England successfully contributed to the Brexit of 2016, and, more generally, to European disintegration. They proposed a return to the nation and an antipolitical rejection of institutions.
When they are in the opposition, populist formations are incomplete and limited to the function of protest parties within the system. Not being in power, their influence is related to how they affect the political agenda. They assume a function that works in the direction of nationalism and against cross-national bonds for citizens. The success of this populist right, a success epitomized by, but certainly not restricted to, a series of events ranging from the multiple anti-European referendums to Brexit, shows its particular strengths in finding ways to oppose the status quo—antiplurality; expressions of outrage; generic discontent, more specifically criticism of immigrants and the press; and above all, the return of jingoistic nationalism. In most cases, this populist right presents the paradox of a "people" standing against the potentials of democratic life and pluralism, but this is coupled with another paradox:—antidemocratic values speaking in the name of democracy against tyranny, fascism, or dictatorship. As Rancière observes, oligarchic forms of sovereignty are linked to politics as kinship or race. Both represent antidemocratic forms acting against a more equal democracy. If populism, as we will see in the next chapter, poses limits to the notion of popular sovereignty by way of combining it with Trinitarian ideas of leaders and peoples, neoliberalism also presents a dual notion of sovereignty. After many decades of support for dictators in the Global South, neoliberalism now combines faith in the agency of the market with the legitimacy of electoral procedures on a global scale. As Wolfgang Streeck contends, neoliberalism represents a form of sovereignty that does not meaningfully rely on democratic participation because it also relies on the imperatives of the market. Thus, by displacing the participation of the citizens in politics, neoliberalism also puts forward its own challenge to democracy and even combines popular sovereignty with the sovereignty of the market. One dimension of this conciliation between capitalist and social life is that the logic of the market tends to be naturalized and then presented as a moral or ethical imperative that is before or above politics. For Streeck, "Neoliberal capitalism and electoral democracy can live together peacefully provided democracy is deprived of its capacity for egalitarian political intervention in the 'free play of market forces.'" The result of this deprivation is the "authoritarian enforcement of a capitalist monoculture."
Both neoliberalism and populism desire to rule in the name and interests of the people but without considering the legitimacy of alternative visions of society. This is especially the case in Europe, but even when they want the destruction of the European Union, most of these new European populist movements of the right do not attempt to destroy democracy. They only attempt to limit its reach and curtail its emancipatory potential. However, the return of fascism to Europe appears in the form of the radicalization, in some countries, of the most authoritarian genealogies of populism. This is not the case of most Euro-populisms; but in Greece, the Golden Dawn is deeply rooted in the fascist past. The country's financial crisis, and the insistence by Germany and the European Union on enacting harsh neoliberal austerity measures, has generated populist responses that evoke the phantoms of interwar European fascism. The neofascist Golden Dawn Party openly uses a logo resembling a swastika. Its supporters have perpetrated violent physical attacks (including murder) against immigrants and political opponents, and its party line includes anti-Semitism and Holocaust denial. Similar sentiments are on the rise in Hungary, where the nationalistic, anti-immigration, anti-Semitic Jobbik Party is one of the most important political formations in the country.
On the other side of the Atlantic, the successful presidential campaign of Donald Trump repositioned the United States as a world center of right-wing populism. With his insistence on ethnic and religious discrimination, Trump embraced racism in explicit ways that surpassed the more strategic repackaging of the National Front in France and the Austrian Freedom Party.
As a response to liberalism, but also to the left, Europe and the United States are witnessing a return of a right-wing form of populism that brings it back to the classical authoritarian version of Latin American populism. But this is happening without reproducing the latter's socially inclusive emphasis. Right-wing Euro-populists and American populists have replaced the Latin American populist critique of social inequality with a jingoistic push to exclude ethnic, religious, and immigrant minorities from the nation. In a context of increasing social inequality, European populist leaders of the right stress the need to disentangle the citizens from traditional forms of democratic representation. For them, the leaders represent an incarnation of the "real" people, as opposed to the whole of the inhabitants of the country. In Europe, for example, in countries like England, the Netherlands, France, and Italy, these antiminority views transcend the view of the populist movements and are increasingly accepted by conservative and even social democratic politicians.
In Latin America, populisms of the right and the left generally stressed regional integration. This is not the case of right-wing populism in Europe and the United States. Although populism emerged in the 1940s as an anticommunist response to the left that combined social redistribution and state capitalism, in the 1990s, it morphed into a new antileftist attempt to combine vertical leaderships with free market economics. These austerity programs were often presented as responses to increasing economic dysfunction and recession. In reality, these programs failed in their attempts to solve both these issues and contributed to a minimization of the state's ability to bridge the social gaps in Latin America. The recent Latin American populisms associated with the left in Bolivia, Venezuela, and Ecuador are clearly outcomes of this right-left populist cycle. As a response to the populism of the right, they now conflate state and movement, enforcing forms of clientelism that promote the leader as the effective provider for the people. Even when social gaps are bridged, political polarization prevails. In contrast, the recent European and American populist experiences resemble the earlier forms of classical populism, although in a much less inclusive form than Peronism or Varguism in Brazil. Not long ago, scholars of populism assured us that a country like Germany (a leading power in the West) was somehow immune to populism, as if they were a paradigm to emulate. In fact, Germany is also a leading example of a more extended Euro-American form of xenophobic populism.
The new populism of the European right—in its radical form (Greece, Hungary) or in relatively smaller doses (France, Italy, Austria, Germany and The Netherlands)—is surprisingly open to its predemocratic foundations. The same logic drives the twenty-first-century adventures of American populism. At best, this populism is still ambivalent about democratic institutions. At worst, it wants to destroy them. Especially in Europe, the possibility of populism's return to its undemocratic genealogy raises the following question: Would Euro-rightist populism refashion itself, downplay its recently acquired democratic credentials, and reactualize the repressed fascist past? Taking up racist, neofascist positions against democratic pluralism and minority rights, Greece's right-wing populists and their Hungarian counterparts—along with many other anti–European Union parties—offer up the European brands of populism as actually willing to return populism to fascism. Going back to the dictatorial fascism would mean the dissolution of what populism has been since 1945, in short, a democratic authoritarianism.
Classical populism rejected not only dictatorial fascist forms but also high levels of political violence, racism, and anti-Semitism, together with war and militarism. To be sure, Perón welcomed many Nazis and other fascists, and Vargas also persecuted minorities in Brazil. But Perón also allowed Argentine Jews to be full members of the nation as long as they declared themselves Peronist Jews. Vargas's campaigns against minorities resembled the contemporary illiberal trends of American democracy (for example, Franklin Delano Roosevelt's actions against Japanese Americans), rather than Nazi-style fascism's racist laws. Populism implied a rejection of fascist ways. While the past was characterized by violence, the future was going to be different. As Perón said in 1945 before he was elected, "One does not win with violence. One wins with smartness and organization . . . the future belongs to us." Similarly, Eva Perón said that she made a clear explicit distinction between the Peronist regime and the Franco dictatorship during her visit to the latter, when she explained to Carmen Polo, the Spanish dictator's wife, the essential difference between the will of the people that Peronism expressed and the imposition of violence that Franco represented: "I put up with it a couple of times until I couldn't stand it anymore and I told her that her husband was not a ruler by the votes of the people but because of the imposition of a victory. The fat woman did not like it a bit."
Peronism and other Latin American populisms polarized their societies, but they did not engage in high levels of repression and political violence.
Similar authoritarian developments in democracy have pervaded the last two decades of Latin American populism; populism married vertical forms of democracy with vertical forms of leadership. For example, the case of Venezuela under Chávez and Nicolás Maduro often complicates ideal-typical pictures. Their populist regimes strengthened the army and popular militarism, occasionally engaging in anti-Semitism. Although Comandante Chávez first participated in a coup (as Perón had done in 1930 and 1943), he was later fully committed to democratic elections, even though he limited other democratic procedures. Thus, generally Latin American populism left fascism behind and actually embraced the authoritarian forms of democracy that defined it so well. It is unclear whether European or American forms of neoclassical right-wing populism are equally committed to formal democracy, as has generally been the case throughout most histories of left- and right-wing Latin American populism. Fascism is always looming above the past and present history of populism, especially in Europe. In sharp contrast with most Latin American versions of populism, which are firmly rooted in formal democracy, Euro-populism runs the risk of returning the populist phenomenon to its prepopulist or even fascist origins. Unmaking the postfascist reformulation of fascism, the most extreme European populisms have been increasingly turning into neofascism.
Populism is the opposite of diversity, tolerance and plurality in politics. It talks in the name of an imagined majority and dismisses the views of all whom it considers part of the minority. Especially on the right, its enemies often include religious and ethnic minorities and always include the independent press. Perón spoke in the name of the people and imagined himself to be the opposite of the elites. Like Le Pen, Wilders, Trump, and many other contemporary leaders, the Argentine general set his own persona against politics as usual. He represented antipolitics, and conceived of his own role in messianic terms. He was tasked with radically changing Argentina, giving it a new historical foundation at a time of terminal crisis.
If Perón was the epitome of twentieth-century populism, the new right-wing strain represents populism's new wave for the new century. This time, however, populism returns to some fascist themes that Perón and classical populism had rejected. The American populist right—and its European counterparts such as France's Marine Le Pen, the Italian Northern League, or Germany's AFD and Pegida—has returned to xenophobia in a way that the Latin American conductor would never have imagined.
If the rejection of racism was one of the key elements in Perón's version of an authoritarian democracy that distanced itself from the fascist and xenophobic views of the past, today racism seems again to be at the center of politics. Shaped in the context of the early Cold War, populism represents a third way between the traditional left and the traditional right. It disputes the logic and the idea of democracy from within. From fascism to Peronism and from Le Penism to Trumpism and back, populism remains a powerful response, and a significant challenger, to both conventional and more radical emancipatory forms of politics. It represents an equally daunting challenge to any critical, historically informed theory of democracy.
## THREE
# Populism between Democracy and Dictatorship
Dictatorship is one of the foundations of modern populism, and yet populism is not dictatorship. In the context of the early Cold War period, this paradox played out in modern populism's renunciation of dictatorial rule, which in turn created a new, authoritarian regime form of democracy. The fascist dictatorial experience was a key factor in the emergence of populist regimes, and populism was is in part defined in terms of its opposition to dictatorship. "Fascist dictatorship," a specific historical type of mass modern dictatorship, then, is central to the genealogy of populism. Some approaches to populism emphasize the more recent oppositional links and continuities between populism and Cold War dictatorships, and in these pages, I am in conversation with those perspectives. In contrast to them, I stress the need to understand the ambivalent, oppositional nature of populism in terms of its firm rejection of pre–Cold War fascism's version of dictatorial rule. Populism was a form of antiliberal, authoritarian democracy well before the emergence of the now classic Cold War dictatorships in Brazil, Pakistan, El Salvador, and many other places, and it was and continues to be defined by its contextual rejection of dictatorship. At the same time, populism still shares some dictatorial elements, carried forward especially from the remnants of the fascist global experience of mass dictatorship that ended after the end of World War II.
Can populism as an ideology, a movement, and a regime be democratic and highly anti-institutional? Can an anti-institutional style of politics that shares many dimensions with dictatorship become its opposite? Or, rather, can pondering populism's incongruities take us only so far if, as I argue, both are true and have always been part of the experience of modern populism. Answering these questions, therefore, requires understanding how and why these apparent contradictions became part of populism when it was finally constituted as a regime form after 1945. Moreover, the answers are embedded in the complex and varying connections between populism and dictatorship that have existed in different contexts, which is to say that the theoretical question posed by the affinities between populism and dictatorship needs to be framed historically. Surprisingly, many scholars of populism, especially those who provide the more simplistic definitions, or the ones that only study populism as a movement in opposition, do not address the key issue of what was happening when populism reached power. Yet this is key for understanding the history and theory of populism. To put it bluntly, it is not possible to have a complete picture of populism without analyzing how and why it ruled.
Anti-institutionalism is a central facet of fascist dictatorships and modern populism in power. To be sure, both attempted to overcome a perceived sense that liberalism was in crisis, which they characterized as a crisis of democratic representation. For example, fascist dictators and populist leaders rejected the mediating role of institutions and aimed to establish a direct organic link between the leader and the people. But what are the differences between populism and dictatorship? The main one lies in their contrary stances toward political violence, or even political persecution and political death. While populist democracies are closer in practice to endorsing the necessity of violence to solidify power when it is monopolized by the state and not executed by it, dictatorships, especially the fascist ones, tend not only to monopolize violence but also to exert it widely on its citizens, many times outside the rule of law. This anti-institutional dimension of dictatorial rule, which is central to the unleashing of political violence, stands in sharp contrast to populism's stance toward violence.
## DICTATORSHIPS AND INSTITUTIONS
What is modern dictatorship? How is it different from tyranny and despotism (namely, the categories used to refer to illegitimate forms of rule through repression and violence in contexts before the emergence and consolidation of modern democracy) and why is this distinction in the history of concepts so central to the historical understanding of populism? To put it simply, modern dictatorship is a form of ruling the nation that combines violence and popular consent with a dictator who rules in the name of the people, but in practice his dictum is above laws and institutional procedures. In modern dictatorships, some legal procedures are maintained, but they are superseded at any moment by the will of the dictators.
As Andrew Arato suggests, dictatorship stands as the opposite of modern democracy. Unlike classical tyrannies, modern dictatorships are ideological systems with absolute promises of "transition" to a new order. In other words, they represent a clear alternative to constitutional democracy. Roman dictatorship was itself temporary in nature as an institution of the republic, whereas modern constitutions do not consider the possibility of a more or less permanent dictatorship. As Arato indicates, there is an immense gulf between the ancient and modern meanings of the term dictatorship. If the ancient tradition often involved the legal establishment of an extralegal magistrate, this happened as a parenthesis from normal politics. In contrast, the modern dictator subverts the constitutional democratic order and combines illegal or extralegal activity with claims of popular sovereignty (i.e., dictators argue that the people want them, as opposed to elected leaders, to stay in power more or less forever). An advocate of dictatorial rule, the authoritarian thinker Carl Schmitt argued, before he became himself a Nazi, that dictatorship was the best form of identification between the executive and the people in the age of modern democracy. In opposition to older forms, the new dictatorships resolved the conflict between representation and delegation, legitimacy and legality, procedures and directly ruling the nation in the name of the people. Modern dictatorship combined the old notions with the new ones, incarnating popular sovereignty in the persona of the dictator and no longer distributing power among the three branches of government. Thus, the modern term dictatorship emerged out of the need to conceptualize the new reality of authoritarian rule and the emergence of "extraordinary governments" that changed the order of things. They eliminated democracy and combined a disregard for the rule of law; high levels of repression; elimination or subjugation of the press; and the rejection of free, contested elections with mass consensus and, more generally, the transgression of institutions such as the separation of powers and free speech.
All modern dictatorships are capable of engaging in highly ideological, "anti-institutional politics" and embracing forms of radical revolutionary violence that are opposed "to existing forms of normalcy (defined by legality, procedural democracy or bureaucracy)."Thus, some modern dictatorships, which Hannah Arendt mistakenly believed were excluded from nontotalitarian forms of dictatorship, use language and actual violence to dehumanize and render the Other abject. In other words, nontotalitarian dictatorships can participate in radical anti-institutional violence without resembling fascist, totalitarian forms of dictatorship. At the same time, fascist dictatorships are also for a period of time capable of supporting institutional politics but only to a limited extent because the state's unleashing of violence, and not its Weberian restriction of it, is a key dimension of fascist ideology. The corollary of this violence defines fascist dictatorship's anti-institutionalism. Especially in modern dictatorships of the fascist type, one can observe an inversion of the object of analysis of the penal norms of the state. The state cannot be considered primarily as legislator but as the subject that violates the law. Arato points out that fascist and nonfascist dictatorships can be equally anti-institutional.
Mass dictatorship can be simultaneously nontotalitarian and extremely violent and highly ideological. The case of Argentina's Dirty War dictatorship (1976–83) perfectly illustrates this point. The Dirty War was not a real war but an illegal militarization of state repression. Its extreme violence was not unique to Cold War Argentina but also appeared in Chile, Guatemala, Indonesia, and many other dictatorial formations. They all rejected democratic procedures, and all engaged in widespread repression and killings. In the Argentine dictatorship of the 1970s, ideology drove the bureaucracy of repression and violence. No government technocrats disputed the radical methods that were driven by ideology. Like the concentrations camps of the Nazi regimes, Argentina's were organized by the administrative power of the state specifically as sites of ritualized violence. In the Argentine clandestine detention centers, no limits were placed on dictatorial violence. Within these camps, the dictatorship was fully shielded from public view, and it imposed "total domination." The camps had a fascist ethos and constituted a politically created universe where violence reigned supreme. They were a world beyond the law, built to fulfill and to reconfigure the ideological demands of fascist theory and its anti-institutional drive to victimize the government's supposed enemies of the Argentine people.
Like Argentina's, most Cold War dictatorial forms of dictatorship differed from contemporary populism's with respect to the latter's peculiar understanding of the political. But could modern populism be equally anti-institutional? Populist anti-institutionalism clearly rejected the dictatorial stress on violence and repression, and this rejection constituted a sine qua non condition for the legitimacy and sustainability of the populist regimes. Even so-called moderate dictatorships like General Juan Velasco Alvarado's in Peru and the dictablanda of General Marcos Pérez Jiménez (1952–58) in Venezuela or the more violent but still relatively restrained ones like the late Franco regime in Spain (1960s) and the military dictatorship in Brazil (1964–85) did not use the state monopoly on violence, and the consequential limitation of its use, only as a political metaphor. They also used these strategies to install the global and local memories of recent repression, torture, and state violence in the minds of the people. In contrast, modern populism is not theoretically rooted in violence but rather in electoral decisions made by a majority of citizens. Even when General Juan Domingo Perón or, later on, Commander Hugo Chávez and many others had attempted coups in their earlier histories as populist leaders, they more or less rejected the violence that is more typical of mass dictatorships. Perón himself was originally the leader of a military dictatorship, but he eventually relied on elections and other democratic procedures to ratify his rule, and this shift made a difference with respect to the use of extensive state violence against the opposition. Most histories of populism show that, especially when in power, it combined, and still combines, a high degree of anti-institutional politics (and even displays some totalitarian patterns) with a low degree of anti-institutional violence.
Populism's anti-institutional dimensions were a result but also a negation of the fascist past. Classical populism was connected to fascist theory, but it also explicitly proposed its demise and the creation of a nonliberal "third way," anticommunist democracy. Populism is more connected to fascism than to other Cold War forms of dictatorship, which were often explicitly antipopulist. Yet populism is not fascism at all, which is to say it is not dictatorial in the fascist anti-institutional sense. Despite recent historiographical attempts to downplay the latter, historians of fascism like Paul Corner have stressed the centrality of the dictatorial repressive dimensions of fascism. And this centrality of repressive violence marks a key boundary, an epistemic wall, between populism and fascism.
While fascism clearly rejected democratic procedures, post-1945 populist versions of democracy like Peronism in Argentina or Varguismo in Brazil not only rejected fascist anti-institutional politics (and its consequential politics of violence) but they also embraced free elections and, more generally, electoral representation as it was regularly conceived of in liberal democracies. In this formal sense, and from its modern inception, populism cannot be considered a form of dictatorship. But populism proposed a rejection of "demo-liberalism" that often conflated legality with legitimacy, ignoring some political freedoms while stressing or even expanding social and political rights, which sometimes included the voters' participation in the electoral process.
Can we talk about a populist form of totalitarianism? To be sure, postwar antifascist observers often thought the populist rejection of liberal democracy resembled the totalitarian dimensions of fascist dictatorship. This was, for example, true of antifascists like the Italian sociologist Gino Germani and the Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges. This is also the view of many current European or American observers, who conflate the past and present experiences of fascism and populism. Contextually, how these interpreters react to statements by Peronists, Le Penists, or Trumpists, which uncannily resemble dictatorial forms of fascist leadership, is understandable. This is especially the case for past and present populist statements that fuse the leader with the sacred will of the people and the totality of the nation.
The leader appears dually as a godlike figure and the national hero of the people. For example, Eva Perón, the wife of the general, elevated him to a totality that encompassed the nation and the people: "I haven't done anything; everything is Perón. Perón is the Homeland, Perón is everything, and all of us are at an astronomical distance from the Leader of the nationality. The Homeland is saved, because it is in the hands of general Perón."
Elements of the fascist theory of a dictatorial form of leadership are very clear in this example of populist self-understanding of politics as direct rule, from the "astronomical distance" between the leader and his subjects to the notion of the messianic leader as a transcendental savior of the people and the nation. The leader is the recipient, but also the savior and the announcer, of a future of national redemption. This applies to most populists, from Perón to Trump and from Chávez to Le Pen. And yet populist leaders have been elected and re-elected, and populist regimes have almost never abolished free elections.
To recapitulate some of my key arguments, populist forms are significantly authoritarian. But in contrast to classical fascism, which uses and abuses democracy to generate dictatorship, populism does not destroy democratic representation nor fully present itself as above the rule of law. In the past and in the present, many antifascist and antipopulist observers have failed to see the dual nature of the postfascist, populist idea of representation and the equally dual nature of the interaction between the leader and his or her followers. Populism also argues for a "dual state," in which the leader's position has an extraordinary place. But in contrast to fascism, the populist leader is not entirely above formal procedures and institutions.
Populism cannot be considered dictatorial when, especially after 1945, it has explicitly stressed the political legitimacy of democratic representation. Modern populism is not a form of mass dictatorship because of three connected historical reasons: 1) populism's contextually driven rejection of fascist dictatorial violence; 2) the fact that the leader is not entirely above the law, and his command is not fully equated with it or with the state; and 3) the issue of electoral representation and the dual notion of popular sovereignty that populism advances. These three reasons are eminently ideological and not merely a matter of style or strategy.
All in all, the malleability of populist authoritarian ideology in terms of left, neoliberal, and extreme right programs; its radical personalism and cult of the leader; and its antidemocratic ideas about its enemies should not be confused with ideological wishy-washiness. Populism can do many things—expand or reduce democratic participation; create a new capitalist class, or empower the traditional corporative powers; fight or defend racism —but its idea of democracy remains patently similar. It is a democracy managed by a leader who not only speaks in the name of the people but also takes their place symbolically. When populism becomes a regime, the leader acts in the name of the people. The package also includes the idea that the enemies of the people are the antipeople—in short, those who in not recognizing the unitary and delegative nature of the leader and movement are not true members of the nation. For populists, this is because the enemies are either members of the elites, simply badly informed citizens, or traitors to the popular will of the nation. After 1945, when these exclusionary views of leader, nation, and people (views that had hitherto been part and parcel of fascism) were combined with electoral procedures, the first populist regimes in history took shape. From then on, the adventures of modern postwar populism had been extremely diverse. We now turn to the diversity of populism in history and across the globe.
## DEMOCRACY, NEOPOPULISM, AND NEOLIBERALISM
Modern postwar populism was a reformulation of fascism, especially with respect to political representation. When Carl Schmitt conceived his theory of dictatorship, he presented two ideal types: commissarial and sovereign. While the former comes forward to correct things in a time of emergency, the latter imposes radical, even revolutionary, change in the political system. Although Schmitt made clear that especially in modern times this typology disintegrated into actual histories that combined both forms of dictatorship, one could argue that fascist mass dictatorships were much more sovereign than commissarial in the sense that they created a new, purportedly epochal political order.
Populism also presented itself as an epochal change, but in practice it represented a return to democratic "normalcy." Populism is far away from the representational logic of mass dictatorship. In fascist theories of representation, the leader, people, and nation combine to make a unitary equation. The leader is not elected simply in the liberal democratic sense. He is believed to permanently represent the "will of the people." In short, dictatorship is at the root of the fascist form of representation. In contrast, after 1945 populism has held a much more ambivalent view of perennial forms of representation. In populism, democracy imposes limits on its own desires for total representation, even though there has been an enduring tendency from Vargas to Hugo Chávez to increasingly centralize power in the presidency. In fascist dictatorships, power, unmediated by any means of true electoral representation, is fully delegated to the leader. Fascism erases the democratic system of electoral representation, while populism has since 1945 reenacted democracy. Thus, if Hitler, the Chinese or the Argentine fascists proposed to destroy democracy, populism resurrected its legitimacy after the demise of fascism, albeit in an authoritarian manner. Fascist mass dictatorships eliminated electoral representation, while populist leaders like Perón or Vargas relegitimized it in an antiliberal and corporative sense.
Whereas in a populist democracy, a leader may cease to be the chief executive, either through constitutional limitations or more simply by being defeated in an election, no such situation pertains in fascist dictatorships. Populist leaders like Perón in Argentina and more recently Commander Hugo Chávez in Venezuela epitomize this situation well. When they encountered constitutional limits, both called for elections to reform the constitution, Perón in 1949 and Chávez in 2007. The moment that the populist leader ignores democratic procedures, populism betrays its renunciation of dictatorship and becomes one. This for example was the case for Peruvian populist President Alberto Fujimori and his autogolpe (self-coup) of 1992. When the leader does not acknowledge the possibility of stepping aside when faced with conditional limits, populism is unraveling and, in a sense, stops being populist.
Unlike fascism, when populism attempts to downplay constitutional checks and balances, it never supports the idea of a unitary executive with the total elimination of multiparty electoral politics and the separation of powers. Even Fujimori, after his self-coup, called for elections to legitimize his actions and leadership. Similar developments have occurred in Africa and Asia, where populism thrives as an outcome of the economic, social, and political failures attributed to democratization. For example, as Danielle Resnick explains, African populist leaders such as Jacob Zuma in South Africa (2009-present), Abdoulaye Wade in Senegal (2000–12), and Michael Sata in Zambia (2011–14) could only have emerged in the recently created democratic spaces for "contestation and debate" that opened up in the 1990s. As in other places where a multiparty system predominated, African populist politicians have used electoral mobilization to claim themselves the people's voice and then have addressed a real lack of popular participation. This participatory electoral notion of democratic legitimacy would have been unthinkable for leaders like Franco and Mussolini. Especially in South Africa and Zambia, and in contrast to many other countries in the continent, where more authoritarian or dictatorial regimes prevailed, African populist leaders have combined populist and ethnic constituencies. Some scholars even define African populism as "ethno-populism," thereby connecting the African experience with Latin American countries like Bolivia. In Africa, populism emerged as a response to 1990s neoliberalism and technocratic politics. African ethno-populism has increased in countries where ethnic identity is not "unidimensional," and therefore can be combined with more expansive, and inclusive, conceptions of the people. As it does in Europe and Latin America, in Africa this populist inclusiveness has inevitably created constitutive outsiders who become the antipeople. Thus, as Nic Cheeseman and Miles Larmer argue, African populist leaders were able to "weave existing narratives of political marginalization based on ethnic identity and economic status into a common narrative of exclusion." Leaders like Sata, known as "King Cobra" for his harsh actions against political enemies, often combined plebiscitarian approaches with xenophobia, antielitism, and demonization of foreigners. Sata had an apocalyptic vision of his party as Noah's ark. His lemma was "get on the boat," and while focusing on the priorities of the urban poor, he also claimed to embody the people's will as a whole. Sata established an important alliance with the Catholic Church, and in a time of economic crisis, he did not question capitalism or "economic liberalization in general but rather asserted that foreign investors (particularly from India and China) did not have the interests of ordinary Zambians at heart." He denounced the elites and foreigners for appropriating the wealth of the people.
Similarly, Wade in Senegal combined antielite discourse with calls for social change. In contrast, and like the Kirchners in Argentina with the Peronist Party, Zuma contested his own party's neoliberal past while confronting manifold accusations of corruption. Zuma combined a vertical form of leadership with an antitechnocratic denunciation of the elites as enemies of the people. Like Morales in Bolivia, Zuma's Zulu ethnic identity was a key dimension of his populist strategy, but he did not make the African National Congress into an exclusionary party. Rather, at times he expanded its inclusionary reach, especially with respect to the youth.
But if leaders like Zuma, Wade, and Sata have much in common with left-wing forms of populism like Chavismo or the leadership style of Morales in Bolivia, Alberto Fujimori of Peru was a neopopulist who embraced neoliberalism. Long thought of as contradictions, neoliberalism and populism have an important synergy, combining populist ideas of the people, the oligarchic enemies, and the nation with neoliberal austerity programs and promarket economic policies. Whereas Argentina's Carlos Menem refashioned the Peronist movement as a neoliberal front in the 1990s, in Peru and Colombia, neoliberal populism joined with an aggressive campaign against the two countries' left-wing guerrillas. Menem, and Collor de Melo in Brazil and Abdalá Bucaram in Ecuador appealed to apocalyptic notions of a neoliberal refoundation during times of economic and social crisis. Fujimori and Álvaro Uribe in Colombia (2002–10) also appealed to the hands of the market as social forces for the poor, along with the classical trope of populism as a response to a context of actual and imminent civil war. All these presidents mobilized a majority of citizens in support of their charismatic and at times messianic forms of leadership. Against the left and other enemies, they used plebiscitarian strategies as they translated democratic representation into populist delegation of power to the executive. With the exception of Collor and Bucaram, the presidents also used war as a means to strengthen their political positions. Uribe and Fujimori carefully presented their internal conflicts with the guerrillas as all-or-nothing wars, with the guerrillas portrayed as outsiders to the people, the leader, and the nation. Menem and Fujimori also tried to boost their political credentials by participating in the first Iraqi war (Menem) and in the brief war between Peru and Ecuador in 1995 (Fujimori).
The Israeli scholar Dani Filc has stressed Israeli right-wing leader Benjamin Netanyahu's (1996–99, 2009–present) similarities with Bucaram, Menem, and Fujimori. Although Netanyahu is not generally included in studies of populism, Filc makes a strong case for considering the Israeli leader a peculiar example of neoliberal populism. In my own view, leaders like Netanyahu are fellow travelers with populism in the same way that interwar, right-wing regimes and movements were fellow travelers with the fascists. They are close, and they even share significant anti-institutional patterns and the idea of politics as an all-or-nothing war against many enemies, but they are timid with respect to the cult of the leader and the logic of elites versus the people. Netanyahu does not inspire a strong personality cult in comparison with Menem or Berlusconi, but he has often used populist strategies and key vocabularies. The same can be said about leftist leaders like Lula in Brazil (2003–11). Lula, who enacted multiparty coalitions, clearly differed from leaders like Chávez or the Kirchners in terms of the main features of populism, including the radical myth of the leader and its personification of the people, populism's theological features and its political-religious aspects, and populism's attacks against the press. Together, these leaders from left to right were all, or continue to be, at times populist fellow travelers, constantly using or moving away from populist strategies.
In the same way that scholars of fascism talk about a logic of fascistization, a gravitational field that encompasses right-wing movements that were not typically fascist, the leaders discussed above displayed some populist traits while consciously avoiding others. Their experience cannot simply be conflated with the more typical examples of populism studied in this book. Nonetheless, of all these leaders, Netanyahu is the one who is closest to the populist matrix.
Dani Filc sees "Bibi" Netanyahu as a remarkably apt example of populism's relation to war and ethnic-based politics. He considers the Israeli leader an emblem of exclusionary ethnic populism. Netanyahu's exclusionary notion of citizenship preserved but also undermined the relative inclusionary style of the right-wing Likud Party of the 1960s and 1970s. While the party's founder, Menachem Begin, had combined the inclusion of Jewish citizens with non-European backgrounds with the exclusion of Arab citizens, he also stressed that the Arab minority was entitled to all civil rights. In contrast, Netanyahu regularly accuses Israeli Arab citizens of posing a threat to national security without voiding their voting rights. Earlier in his career, in the 1990s, Netanyahu introduced himself as someone who did not belong to the party elites and was somehow identified with the poorest sectors of Israeli society. In this context, the Israeli scholar Uri Ram argues that the Likud's leader successfully combined populist antielitism with "populist Jewish traditionalism" and the continuous inclusion of Jewish minorities, settlers, and secular and religious nationalists. This coalition presented a new view of the people of Israel, at once inclusionary and exclusionary.
In 1999, Netanyahu typically identified his opponents as "the elites," who hate the people. The collective included in his use of the first-person plural "we" was conceived of as a victim. The elites were against the people: "They hate it. They hate Sephardim and Russians. They hate everyone who is not like them, everyone who is not with them: Ethiopians, Sephardim, Moroccans, and religious people. They hate them." For him, elites were antagonistic to the people, representing a "left" that for Bibi had forgotten what it meant to be Jewish. Netanyahu did not include the business elites in his idea of the enemy. For him the political elites and the left were often difficult to distinguish. As Filc indicates, the left was an especially vague term that could simultaneously encompass Ashkenazim who discriminated against Mizrahim, state employees and the unions, communist regimes in Europe, liberal Jews, academics, the media, foreign workers, and Arabs. Filc observes, "The Likud leader maintains the populist notion of the opposition pure people/corrupt elites. 'Us' is the true Jewish people." Similarly, Zeev Sternhell argues that today's Likud Party identifies its own policies with "historical rights," and regards those rights superior to human rights. Sternhell is one of the foremost experts on fascism—a historian, Holocaust survivor, Zionist, and former officer and war veteran in the Israeli Army, who was himself the victim of a bomb planted in 2008 by an Israeli right-wing extremist. For Sternhell, the positions of Likud confirm widely held illiberal views on what an electoral mandate means. "What they're saying in effect is, 'we are the majority, and we can do whatever we want.'" Assigning the majority a free pass led to calls for the exclusion of minorities. In the 2015 elections, Netanyahu warned Israelis that the Arabs were voting in large numbers, as if the exercise of a legal right by Arab citizens threatened his understanding of democracy. What he actually meant was that Palestinians who were Israeli citizens (20 percent of eligible Israeli voters in 2015) were not part of the ethnic collective majority that the populist leader favored. For him, Israeli Arabs are clearly a sort of antipeople who do not belong to his unitary notion of leadership, nation, and ethnicity. Avigdor Lieberman, an Israeli populist leader, and an extreme right-wing ally of Netanyahu, said that the leader "also knows that if the Arabs are voting in droves, only a strong Lieberman can stop them." Lieberman also said that "disloyal" Israeli Arabs should be beheaded. For the Israeli opposition leader Tzipi Livni, and as reported in the Jerusalem Post, "The premier had tried to turn the Israeli Left into the enemy of the state and deemed the position as 'unforgivable.' Livni stated that the maneuver had lead Netanyahu to victory, but she warned that it was also a move that leads to hatred and fear." When Netanyahu named Lieberman defense minister in 2016, Ehud Barak, a former Israeli prime minister, warned of the danger of fascism in Israel. He argued that the country had been "infected by the seeds of fascism." Interestingly, Barak seemed to echo the analysis of Zeev Sternhell, who asserted, "Israeli democracy has become increasingly eroded." He also warned that there were indicators of fascism. Sternhell reminded Israelis, "Democracy requires acceptance of the majority decision, but it does not mandate recognition of the rightness or the moral legitimacy of the majority." Following this point, which encapsulates a key dimension of populism, I would argue that right-wing populism is a better explanation than fascism for thinking about Lieberman's party and the striking similarities he and other politicians on the right have with the European xenophobic right. As is the case elsewhere, populism in Israel relies on combining democratic procedures with antidemocratic and antidiverse notions of the people. As Filc argued, "Fear is construed along the border separating 'us' (the true people) from 'them' (the foreign enemy, Palestinians, and their domestic allies, who may vary over time)."
Leaders like Recep Tayyip Erdogan in Turkey during the second decade of the century constantly played the politics of fear. In Erdogan's case, they did so against Turkish Kurdish citizens and other political minorities as a way to solidify strong executives, downplay the role of state institutions such as the judiciary, and buttress his electoral ethnic and religious majorities.
If Erdogan, Netanyahu, and Lieberman, as well as Donald Trump and the Republican "alt-right" in the United States, are not original in understanding democracy to be the exclusive domain of the electoral "silent" and ethnic majority, their concerns about electoral minorities exercising their rights put them closer to authoritarian leaders like Alberto Fujimori in Peru. More generally, neoliberal populists constantly invoked the name of the people to rule by decree, but they also called for elections to ratify even their most antidemocratic decisions. Authoritarianism and elections were both central to politicians who governed as if they were campaigning. As Kurt Weyland explains, "Fujimori, Menem and other neopopulist leaders such as Collor did maintain the populist political strategy that they had used in their electoral campaigns. They kept basing their government on a seemingly direct connection to their largely unorganized mass base; bypassing established parties and interest organizations; attacking the political class and other established elites; using opinion polls (the threat of) plebiscites, and other populist instruments for over-coming opposition; strengthening their personalistic leadership; concentrating power and reinforcing the majoritarian elements of constitutional arrangements; and transgressing liberal political norms and trampling on institutional rules."
Similar populist situations appeared in Eastern European countries such as Poland and Ukraine, which mixed populist leaders with drastic neoliberal market reforms. In Italy, Silvio Berlusconi, a playboy and billionaire, a mass media mogul and owner of AC Milan, one of Italy's most prized soccer teams, emerged in the context of a crisis of political representation. Berlusconi presented himself as an outsider who spoke for the needs of ordinary Italians. An anticommunist, he stated that he entered politics to fight "evil." Once he became the Italian premier, he undermined the division of powers, called the judiciary a "cancer," and enforced a plebiscitary form of power.
The names adopted by Berlusconi's political formations Forza Italia and Il Popolo della Libertà, the personalist vehicles for Berlusconism, combined soccer slogans with the unitary notion of Berlusconi and his followers as the people who stood for freedom. In this construction, there was no legitimate place for opponents. Did they stand against the people and freedom? This was exactly Berlusconi's point. Also known as Il Cavaliere, the Italian populist leader, who dominated Italian politics in the 1990s and 2000s, was an admirer of Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan. In his terms as prime minister (1994–95, 2001–6 and 2008–11), he adapted neoliberalism to the Italian context. This generated impatience among European technocrats and the promarket press. Similarly, Argentina's Carlos Menem also tried to apply neoliberal austerity measures within the political culture of Peronism, which as in Italy case involved disregarding democratic institutions, amid personal scandals and corruption. Like Menem and Fujimori, Berlusconi stressed links within the right, including sectors identified with social nationalist ideas, and doing so constrained the full frontal application of shock austerity measures like those imposed in Margaret Thatcher's United Kingdom or General Augusto Pinochet's Chile. Berlusconi formed coalitions with the postfascists of the Alleanza Nazionale and the xenophobic Lega. Like Menem, who always presented himself as un vivo, Berlusconi cultivated the ideal of himself as a man of the people, as the furbo, or the wise guy, who was always in on the joke. Typically, he would use the hand sign for "horns" behind the heads of others, including the Spanish foreign minister during a 2002 meeting in Spain. These gestures, plus his insistence that he would protect democracy against the left, that he stood for order and security, and that he would lower taxes and protect the ecosystem, along with his criticism of migrants, his intermittent defense of Mussolini, and his promise that he represented a true "freedom," made Berlusconi one of the most successful neoliberal global populists. Especially his idea of freedom applied to himself and his freedom to be the candidate who was, and represented, what the people wanted to be. As political theorist Nadia Urbinati argues, Berlusconi put forward an upside-down version of politics that juxtaposed "the audience imbecility of the many . . . [with] the spectacle played by the few." Berlusconi promoted his populism as the true democracy of the people against the antipeople of the elites and the left. He considered them antidemocratic because they resisted the popular opinion and sovereignty of those that voted for him and his right-wing allies.
Leaders like Berlusconi and Menem identified with the neoliberal tradition in politics, but they reformulated it in populist terms. Their public mingling with TV and football celebrities, as well as with vedettes and prostitutes, conveyed a political message about who they were and whom they stood for. In other words, their style represented their "transgression" of politics as usual. They projected their glamour, sexual promiscuity and misogyny as the fusion of elite and popular traditions. Menemists were famous for their culinary fusion of "pizza with champagne," a metaphor they used to explain their attempts to modernize the old politics of the elites in a way that mixed popular traditions with celebrity upper-class sensibilities. Berlusconism equally mixed authoritarian popular expectations with the rarified world of celebrity culture. For these leaders, liberalism was no longer a bad word, but their understanding and practice of liberalism equated with its most dehumanizing economic variants.
A man who had deeply profited from the old Italian political system, Berlusconi combined an extreme voluntarism with a projection of his messianic leadership and movement as a refoundation of Italian history and politics. Similarly, Menem, the "disciple" of Perón, explained that he was doing the things that Perón would have done in the new context of the Washington neoliberal consensus. In the election, he had asked Argentines to "follow me." Now in his inauguration 1989 speech, the conductor explained that he came for the people and he spoke from the people. His originality rested on the fact that he related austerity measures to popular sovereignty. In defending free market policies, he invoked the fatherland, God, and the people. He argued that these measures were needed for the sake of "national unity, and the sacred interest of Argentina and Latin America." Menem thought that Latin Americans could be fully integrated by his brand of neoliberal populism. He wanted to connect this new populism with the Peronist past: "The mandate of our general was to actualize our doctrine, our principles starting with our ideology, and to actualize our doctrine and our principles means repositioning Argentina in the context of all nations in the world from the starting point of a united people." For him, this actualization implied a new meaning for democracy that he understood also in terms of a style: "We are here to install a new style in the political life of the nation and I hope that it will propagate to all of Latin America. The rules that emerge from the people need to remain with the people and only work for the people." Menem's neoliberalism gave a new meaning to populist notions of democracy. He wanted to upgrade old Peronism while maintaining the "unity of the Argentine people."
Menem imposed "severe austerity measures" at a time that he defined as a national economic "emergency." Argentina had experienced a major crisis and "hyperinflation," and Menem admitted that this was going to be painful to the people. But he said he acted in the name of the people and with a nationalist sense. This was a "major surgery" that was going to "extirpate at the root all intolerable and ancestral evils." Menem adopted neoliberalism in "the name of social justice."
Most Peronists agreed at the time that Menem represented a historical continuity with Perón and Evita. Néstor Kirchner, a provincial governor in Patagonia, supported the Menemist privatization of Argentina's flagship oil company and even argued that, in listening to the people of his Patagonian province, Menem was the best Argentine president after Perón. Cristina Kirchner defended the privatization as an issue of "morality." In the 2000s, Néstor Kirchner and Cristina Kirchner denied their Menemist past and portrayed themselves as leaders of a new era diametrically opposed to the Menemism that had betrayed "the flags of the patria." However, at the time when Menem turned Peronism to the neoliberal right, Cristina Kirchner was also on board and openly stated that she voted and supported the president, that she "abhorred . . . feminism," and that Argentina no longer risked being defeated by the "infamous trapo rojo [red rag] of the 1970s." When some years later, in the 2000s, she tried to embody the populist left, she questioned the so-called left that adopted the color red, while the true left was represented by Argentines wearing the national colors. She also then implied that there were not differences between the Trotskyist left of the twenty-first century and the military agents of repression of the Dirty War. For her, there was no legitimate place either right or left beyond Kirchnerismo. History was at the service of the leaders who changed positions, but global contexts were equally significant. If during the time of neoliberalism there was one way to understand Peronism, when it turned to the left, there was no other legitimate space for the left. From this perspective, the non-Peronist right and left had no choice but to follow the leaders of the people and the nation.
In the 2010s, the Kirchner's nationalized the oil company that Menem had privatized, and Menem himself supported Kirchnerismo from his position in the senate. But beyond these typical populist moments in the transformations of leaders like Menem and the Kirchners, what must be highlighted is the fluidity of populism: from its classical forms to its neoliberal and leftist versions, populism redefined itself in relationship to liberalism and dictatorship. This redefinition marked its radical differences with fascism.
## THE LEADER AND THE PEOPLE
Fascism was a revolution against democracy. In contrast, after 1945, populism reformed the status quo, pushing an authoritarian form of democracy. This type of democracy had a dual nature. In speaking in the name of the people in a nonrevolutionary context, modern populism offered a democratic, anticommunist alternative. Populism attempted to democratize antiliberal politics during a time when fascism could no longer be considered sufficiently legitimate.
For General Perón, fascism could not be replicated. For a new epoch, a new truth was needed. Perón proposed a new form of "organic" democracy: "What is an organic government? It is an aggregation of solidly united forces that has at its head a man of state, who needn't be a genius nor a sage, but rather a man on whom nature has bestowed a special condition to span a complete panorama that others don't see." The organic nature of the movement would lead to political supremacy in the long term: "Our aspiration is not to rule for six years but to secure sixty years of government." But it was clear to all that this supremacy would be achieved by winning plebiscitary elections that confirmed the dual nature of the leader, who was at the same time an elected representative and a quasi-transcendental conductor of people. As Perón often said:, "The people should know . . . that the conductor is born. He is not made, not by decree nor by elections." He added, "It is essential that the conductor finds his own molds, to later fill them with a content that will be in direct relation, according to his efficiency, with the sacred oil of Samuel that the conductor has received from God."
Likewise, the Colombian leader Gaitán wanted to replace a democratic "simulation" with "true democracy." In 1945, he called for a "moral and democratic restoration" to replace the "political nation" with the nation of the people. Democracy had defeated fascism, and with this defeat, the "victory of violence" was substituted for the triumph of "Christian civilization." Gaitán famously invoked God to say the divinity knew what was best for Colombia, just as he and his followers did. Nonetheless, the leader was not exclusively conceived as a semigod whose power derived only from the sacred. The power of the leader emanated from his "umbilical" links with the people and with their common battle against the enemies of the nation.
In Venezuela, the populist leader Rómulo Betancourt, who was deeply critical of fascism and communism, presented his own third way. A former communist turned anticommunist, Betancourt explained that he had renounced his interwar communism in favor of his own national democratic option. This renunciation was the result of economic conditions, but it was also "a reflection" determined by a deep Venezuelan and Latin American identity that was the outcome of "my almost biological ascription to my land and my people." His was a movement for those who "have deep faith in Venezuela." His party was "the Party of the People," and his opponents were the "antipatria" [antifatherland]." ln 1948, Betancourt stated, "I was, I am and I will be with the people and against their historical enemies." By appealing to history, Betancourt in fact referenced an epic, transhistorical fight between good and evil. Only the party and the government of the people, which stood for "social justice and national liberation" could represent "true democracy." Populism was defined by its rejection of historical dictatorships. The party had "returned" to the people their "usurped sovereignty." This model politically delegitimated opponents, who were nonetheless expected to participate in the democratic process. In fact, enemies were vaguely defined. They were "historical" insofar as they had always stood against the people. Most times, the enemies included communists and imperialists as well as the oligarchs and the political class. In 1946, Gaitán told Venezuelans that the Betancourt's regime was the first stage, the gaining of political freedom, but democracy would remain formal if it were not followed by "the conquest of economic and social freedom." Also for Gaitán, the usual enemies included the fascists, plutocracy, oligarchy, and politics as usual. Politics was a battle, and he was "the captain of the Colombian multitudes," or as he also said in 1947, he was a "soldier," who had volunteered for "a mission on the battlefront." For Gaitán, "The people were superior to their leaders," and leaders could represent only "the voice of the people for the people." On the other side of the leader-people equations were the antipeople—those who had turned "their backs" to the people." Similarly, for Perón the "Argentine drama" was a fight between the people and the "antipeople." The existence of the latter meant that the fight was "ideological," but for the populist leader, the transcendental nature of the fight also meant that this was a key moment in the history of Argentine emancipation. For a leader who was banned from his own country and was in exile at the time he uttered these words, such an extraordinary moment did not mean, however, moving beyond electoral procedures but rather calling for their reinstatement. Peronism called once again for the people's participation in the fight against social and economic limits to democracy. But without acknowledging any contradiction, Perón also stated, "Our enemies are in reality the enemies of the people."
Peronism acted in the name of the people and of a united nation, and he advocated for full electoral rights for the citizens. Like other populisms, Peronists considered democratic elections were the primary way of defeating the enemy. But the links between the leader and the people also bypassed electoral forms and were believed to transcend the particular context and even the nation. The fight for a third way went beyond the two imperialisms, the two "spurious forces that emerged after the Second World War." For Perón, what was at stake was not only the destiny "of Argentina or of its people but also the destiny of the world and all of its peoples." This idea of an all-or-nothing global confrontation with evil forces was reproduced many times in the years to come. If General Perón understood his own links with the people to be related to his own persona as a military man, Comandante Hugo Chávez identified himself as a Peronist: "I am deeply a Peronist with all my heart, because General Perón was a soldier of Latin America and of the people." He also presented himself as a "soldier of the people" who obeyed only them. Chávez stated, "Those who are not chavistas are not Venezuelans."
These connections between the leader and the people followed an ideal of politics as creating what Andreas Kalyvas called the "politics of the extraordinary." In the case of populism, this meant advancing its own political moment as one that transcended more normal times as they generally functioned in history.
These links also transcended issues of representation or specific policies or ideas. As Gaitán explained, no leader could effectively impose passions, thoughts, or determinations onto the people. The leader was not a man who could act on the masses in the same way that an artist provided perennial life to dead objects: "The leader of the great popular movements is the one who possesses the sensitivity and flexibility to capture and synthesize in a given moment the drives that exist in the agitated undercurrents of the collective soul." The leader was in short, an "antenna" who gathered at the top what emerged from below. He then synthesized popular demands from ethics to aesthetics. A profound concern with the poor, and the mix of equalitarianism, nationalism, and rhetorical demonization of the enemy created an organized community that combined acclamation, delegation, and more traditional democratic procedures and institutions. Like Peronists, Colombians and Brazilians witnessed the transformation of liberal and fascist ideas of democracy into what their populist leaders (Gaitán and Vargas) understood as an organic form of democracy that moved the masses beyond liberalism and communism.
Fascism in history represented a theoretical and practical rejection of the idea of democratic representation, or of any democratic possibility, the natural result of which was establishment of dictatorship. After 1945, this idea of dictatorial representation was defeated, and junta dictatorial leaders such as Perón destroyed dictatorship from within.
Peronism was the first regime in history to engineer such a change from dictatorship to authoritarian delegative democracy. Fascism had been defeated. Perón understood very well that the new order, his widely proclaimed third way between capitalism and communism, had to be framed as a democracy. In his 1947 "message to the world," Perón argued that it was not acceptable that "humanity should be destroyed in a holocaust of left-wing or right-wing hegemonies."
Central to the Peronist third way was figuring out how to practice illiberal politics in a democratic key. All traditions were now up for grabs, and Perón took from left and right. Perón's was an attempt to continue the tradition of the anti-Enlightenment in the context of the Cold War. Perón was the strongman, the caudillo, who embodied a novel form of politics in power. He not only incarnated the people and the nation but a new postwar ideological synthesis to gain power in the name of the people and, in practice, to rule instead of them. Given the centrality of authoritarian leaders to any complete version of populism, it is surprising that for some scholars of populism, "The authoritarian characteristic of the strongman is not inherent to populism." This view depends on affirming the dual stereotype that Latin American is essentially the region of strongmen and that strongmen are naturally absent in Europe and the United States. In fact, Latin America does not exclusively own the populist notion of leadership. This is a global phenomenon, not a Latin American one.
The same personalist attempts, but in a twenty-first-century context, were made by leaders such as Donald Trump and Marine Le Pen. Le Pen's presidential campaign in 2017 was clearly about affirming the embodiment of the French nation in her persona, as shown in her campaign clip, properly entitled "In the Name of the People." Against the right and the left, Le Pen claimed that she was the only candidate of the French people. It was in and through her own persona that her administration would be "French First." Le Pen echoed Trump's own slogan of America First. This was a slogan that in the United States was first used by fascist fellow travelers in the 1930s. If this fascist pedigree did not cause a problem for Trump, Le Pen in turn denied any role in the Holocaust for the French collaborators of the Nazis, who in truth had made possible the deportation of Jews to the camps. In both Le Pen's and Trump's cases, there was no difference between their idea of giving "first" priority to the country and to themselves. They were populist authoritarian leaders to the core. But in the history of populism, this politics of the populist strongman initially emerged after 1945, with the first populist regime. In this sense, and to put it hyperbolically, Trump became the American Perón. That the most powerful country on earth became a global center of populism was striking to many observers, but in the United States as well the rise in inequality and the fusion of neoliberalism and technocracy were too significant to be ignored.
The Tea Party and Trumpism both represented an authoritarian American response to these global patterns. To be sure, Donald Trump's extremism echoed that of past Republicans leaders like Barry Goldwater and Richard Nixon—as well as independent candidates such as George Wallace—with Trump explicitly repeating Nixon's invocation of the "silent majority." For Nixon and Trump, that majority was clearly white, even if their framing was not as explicit as some of their most segregationist followers. Especially for many followers of Trumpism, the majority did not include the Western and Eastern seaboards of the country. In 1964, Goldwater displayed a similarly clear-cut antiurban and anti–East Coast sensibility. He actually said that if the East Coast were sawed off and floated away to the sea, the country would be better off.
More so than in other histories of populism, race has been central to American populism. Nevertheless, for many global historians of fascism and populism, Trumpism was something entirely new and was a decidedly new low from the perspective of the threat on democracy. Its place at the top of the Republican ticket, and its winning of the presidency, signaled a new kind of American preeminence—in line with a strain of xenophobic right-wing populism that has been developing around the world.
During the campaign, mixing racism, religious discrimination, and antimigration and anti-integration rhetoric, Trump presented himself on the global stage as a new dominant world leader for the populist pack. His rhetoric also included calling for the imprisonment or expulsion of his opponent, Hillary Clinton. The "lock her up" chant was a prevailing theme of the campaign, as were the Trumpists' ritual calls for violence against Clinton at campaign events. At one presidential debate, Trump himself threatened her with jail time in the event he became the president, and he had also previously suggested that Clinton should be "deported." Calls for political rivals and others to be imprisoned by acclamation have a specific history. Fascists (always) and populists (often) have both used prison to deal with the opposition.
In his leadership style, Trump is less like previous Republican candidates and more akin to the likes of Marine Le Pen in France, Recep Tayyip Erdogan in Turkey, and Nicolás Maduro in Venezuela. All of these powerful leaders were, in turn, reminiscent of historical figures like General Juan Perón in Argentina and Getúlio Vargas in Brazil, who converted fascist ideas into the populist form of electoral authoritarianism.
Leaders like Perón sent opponents to jail. They made a point of casting those they did not like—whether political opponents, the media, or the judiciary—as enemies rather than as interlocutors or sectors of society entitled to different opinions. Nonetheless, not all populists are the same, even those that arise in the same context. Perón, for example, remembered a conversation with Vargas, who told him he needed to follow a politics of conciliation at the time of his second presidency in the 1950s. Perón said that Vargas was wrong because "In politics first one needs domination, and then conciliation comes as a result of it." In the same instance, and with respect to the people's "international" consciousness, Perón stated that he knew "my people wanted what I wanted."
The idea of a leader who is the proverbial subject, who knows about everything and has decided to ignore what he does not know, was especially powerful in the theory and practice of Trumpism. Perón's idea of a leader who thinks and decides for the people, and whose legitimacy is reassured but not created by the votes, was put forward similarly by Donald Trump many years later, when he stated that there was a direct link between natural intuition, predestination, action, and legitimation. He argued, "I am a very instinctual person but my instinct turns out to be right." The inner self provided a truth that was a natural knowledge emanating from the leader incarnated in the people. Trump stated, "I happen to be a person that knows how life works. I said I was going to win the election, I won the election." In populism, the triumph of the will was confirmed by electoral means. And when the moment of regime formation finally arrived, owning the power of decision was itself a form of legitimation, or as Trump put it, "I can't be doing so badly, because I am president, and you're not." Trump identified democracy as the moment of his election as the leader of the country. But elections such as his own were not just another chapter in the electoral history of the country. In a speech toward the end of his successful campaign, Trump stated that he defended the people against a "global power structure" and against the national media and political elites: "This is not simply another four-year election. This is a crossroads in the history of our civilization that will determine whether or not we the people reclaim control over our government." According to this fiction, it was the leader who, in returning power to the people, took it away from their enemies. Trumpism was the last reverberation of a long history of absolute democratic claims by populist leaders who aspired to embody the victory of civilization.
Likewise, classical Latin American populist leaders presented their politics as those of fighting for the true people's representation in the context of a civilizational apocalyptic fight between good and evil. The idea of incarnation led to the proclamation of the leader's indispensability, even to the extent that the election of the leader represented the last opportunity for the nation. The sense of emergency was a result of the projection of friend-enemy positions and military strategies onto the opponents. As Trump's claimed, "For them it's a war, and for them nothing at all is out of bounds. This is a struggle for the survival of our nation, believe me. And this will be our last chance to save it on November 8 — remember that." Trump told his followers that his election marked "our independence day." Perón had similarly identified his leadership with a long history of military conquerors who were, like him, conductors of the people: "The history of the world, through the examples of Alexander, Julius Cesar, Frederick or Napoleon, shows that victory belongs to those that know to lift and conduct the people." Perón identified his own election with a second "independence" and maintained that, "God put me on earth for the independence and the freedom of the Argentine people."
The leader was predestined to serve the people by becoming them. The idea that the body of the leader no longer mattered, or to put it differently that his leadership replaced personal needs with the people's desires, was taken to its fullest logical conclusion by Vargas, who killed himself in the name of the people and against their internal and external enemies. In his famous testament, written just before his personal and political suicide in 1954, Vargas defined himself as a "slave" of the Brazilian people. He took the first step in the "path of eternity." He was leaving "life to enter history." His "holocaust" was going to keep the people united, and his "name would become the flag of your fight." Just as he had given the people his "life," he now offered them "his death." Much later on, the deaths of Néstor Kirchner (2010) and Hugo Chávez (2013) were also widely interpreted by their successors as political sacrifices. As with Vargas, and later Eva Perón, the myths surrounding them were put to practical use to add another layer of legitimacy to the dual nature of populist sovereignty.
To be sure, the deaths of Kirchner and Chávez were not political, in the sense that heart failure and cancer are by definition apolitical. But their deaths were widely presented as the sacrificial acts of devoted leaders, who put the interests of the people before or beyond the physical needs of their own bodies. When Eva Perón died of cancer, the Peronist regime officially proclaimed, "The secretariat of information of the Presidency fulfills its extremely painful obligation to inform the people of the Republic that at the hour 20.25, the Señora Eva Perón, Spiritual Leader of the nation has passed away." After her death, every single day, all radio programs stated, "It is 8:25 pm, the time when Eva Perón passed into immortality." In her last speech, Eva Perón famously said to a multitude that she would gladly give her life for the people. She said, "I know God is with us" and against the "arrogant oligarchy." She asked the people to remain "faithful to Perón" and against the enemies from within and from without. And she concluded her political life by uttering these words: "I never wanted and I do not want anything for me. My glory is and always will be the emblem of Perón and the flag of my people. Even when I leave behind the remnants of my life, I know you will pick up my name and will take it as a flag to victory."
Many years later, probably with Eva Perón famous speech in mind, Ernesto Laclau, the most important intellectual of Kirchnerismo, defined the mourning for Néstor Kirchner as "perhaps the most immense expression of collective grief in Argentina history." But he also insisted that, after his death, Kirchner transcended a mere symbolic nature to become something more transcendental. He also stated that Kirchner's widow now occupied Néstor Kirchner's place: "Cristina is not alone. . . . She is followed by an entire people." For Laclau, the "personification of power" in Cristina Kirchner offered "more democratic guarantees than the dilution of power." The Kirchners represented "the concentration of a name" in a series of processes for democratic change.
The legacy of the leader transcended his life and became one with the people and the new leader. The constant references to a transcendental dead Chávez who presided from the sky in Venezuela took on a more extreme tone, but the logic was the same. Chávez himself had said that precisely because of the fact that he embodied the people even in death he will remain with the people, "I am like Nietzsche's eternal return. . . . I come from many deaths. . . . Even when I am gone I will remain with you on these streets and under this sky. . . . Chávez is now an entire invincible people." After Chávez' death, his successor Nicolás Maduro, typically stated that Chávez was now "the child, the man and the woman. We are all Chávez."
From beyond the grave, populism worked in tandem with political resurrection.
In terms of populist style and ideology, these populist leaders died as they had lived—in the name of the people and in a total fight against their imagined and real internal and external enemies. All populists claim to talk for the masses and against the elites, just as Trump declared, "I am your voice." But in practice, they replace the voices of the citizens with their own singular voice. Decrying a diverse plurality of American voices, the American right showed the world that America and Trumpism were writing a new chapter in the long global history of authoritarian challenges to democracy.
While rooted in fascism, this American populist chapter was very different from fascism. It did not proposed politics as dictatorship. With modern populism, the illiberal politics of the masses returned to the politics of electoral representation. These politics had many populist articulations—classical populisms in Latin America; free market populism; left-wing neopopulisms in Latin America, Europe, and beyond; extreme right wing populism; among others—but historically they generally used the name of the primordial and total leader to imagine and actualize a democracy that surpassed more ordinary politics of representation.
## DEMOCRACY IN THE NAME OF THE FATHER
As an ideology, populism in history often blended a vertical understanding of the political with a notion of irreducible enemies, a unique national identity, and even a unique form of thinking. Ideas could be controlled by, and even reduced to, the changing dictum of the leader. Theological notions were combined with unitary conceptions of people, leader, and nation. Cristina Kirchner even created a "Secretariat of National Thinking" in 2014. Maduro formed "the Vice Ministry for the Supreme Social Happiness of the People" in 2013. Maduro wanted to transcend the "welfare state," meaning forms of social advancement within capitalism, and also connect social work with heaven, from where Chávez was supposed to be watching. When both institutions were created, the invocation of the names of the deceased leaders Kirchner and Chávez was obsessively and ritually asserted, happiness, and thinking could not be dissociated from the names that had incarnated the people. The Argentine secretariat for national thinking brought together politicians and scholars, who were close to, or often worked with or received funds from, the Argentine administration. It also invoked connections among populists globally by inviting key leaders of the Podemos Party and organizing a 2015 international forum on the thought of the key theorist of populism Ernesto Laclau.
Laclau, the most significant theorist of populist democracy, unwillingly became a philosopher of power. In time, his name became synonymous with populist politics and the concept of populism itself. As Beatriz Sarlo has observed, Argentine populists did not engage with his highly specialized Lacanian-Schmittian vocabulary and work, but he was celebrated as the preeminent theorist of Argentina's early twenty-first-century populism. Laclau's name itself came to speak for many demands. In translating Laclau for the wider public, many populist intellectuals engaged with Laclau's theory of the symbolic and simplified his theory of democratization as accomplished through the politics of naming the leader. For example, the secretariat of national thinking adapted Laclau's idea of the antagonist-populist rupture to the oldest traditions in Argentine history, establishing a clear frontier between the name Kirchnerismo and "barbarism." In this apocalyptical framework, a simplification that radicalized Laclau's political theology, the power of the Kirchners was opposed to a more sinister "real and traditional power." The "eternal forms of power" had been attacked by a name that provoked a "refoundation of politics."
Never reaching the secretary's hyperbolic elevation of the Kirchner name, and also never accepting a public position that was offered to him by the Kirchners, nonetheless in his public appearances, Laclau performed the need to defend a populist moment that for him and many admirers had become unified with his own theories of populism as the only path to democracy.
In his academic work, Laclau himself had argued that populist moments of transformation were intrinsic to the name of the leader. He argued, for example, that only the leader could fully and purely represent the democratic homogeneity he advocated for:
The construction of a popular subjectivity is possible only on the basis of discursively producing tendentially empty signifiers. The so-called "poverty" of the populist symbols is the condition of their political efficacy—as their function is to bring to equivalential homogeneity a highly heterogeneous reality, they can only do so on the basis of reducing to a minimum their particularistic content. At the limit, this process reaches a point where the homogenizing function is carried out by a pure name: the name of the leader.
In his public appearances in Argentina, he stressed the centrality of the Kirchner name. Laclau was last interviewed for an Argentine newspaper psychoanalytic series of interviews called Politicians on the Sofa, where he defended the Kirchners, as well as his own theoretical approach. In his last years, Laclau found it difficult to integrate his criticism of power with a new defense of the established regimes in Argentina and Venezuela. He had become an organic intellectual of the populist government but was also an increasingly symptomatic defender of its more dubious facts. In other words, he failed to distinguish between populism as his ideal of democracy and the ambiguous democratic realities of Peronist populism as a regime. In response to the question of how he felt about the Kirchners' having become millionaires, a question that in Argentina became really important because of the Kirchners' dubious inability to explain how or why they had become immensely richer during their presidencies, Laclau playfully said that he also wanted to be rich. He also approved of Soccer for Everyone, a program in which the Kirchner government had invested important state funds to make professional soccer free "for the people" to watch. Standing with soccer star Diego Maradona, Cristina Kirchner defended the program as an "act of democratization." To promote watching professional sport as an affirmation of democracy was one thing, but even more striking was declaring it an act against dictatorship. The president argued that before Kirchner, fútbol had been disappeared just like many Argentine citizens had been during the Dirty War of the 1970s. Speaking to the people, she said that private TV had "kidnapped your goals . . . as they had kidnapped 30.000 Argentines." This was the context of Laclau's support for the Soccer for Everyone program.
Laclau, the theorist of the underdog, found himself in the uncomfortable position of praising power. Given the complexity of his own theoretical model, his simplification and adaptation of it to fit the ambiguities of Kirchnerismo are perplexing. This was a process of construction in the sense that he also used his model to speak in the name of the people. This radical constructivism was quite far from the historiographical approach that had defined his early academic career as a historian. What made this possible, as Arato observes, was that for Laclau, the people are constructed from a section of the citizens, which then become the whole. Thus, the leader is essential in providing the newly invented people with the "empty signifier" of the leader's name. In this sense, Arato argues that Laclau "explicitly advocates not only the construction of 'the people' in an entirely voluntaristic manner, but filling the empty space of power by leadership incarnating a subject that does not exist."
From Spain to Argentina and beyond, Laclau was celebrated, and he felt the need to support his political hosts even when he was engaged in academic conferences in Argentina. But Laclau also was able to insert some criticisms of Kirchnerismo as insufficiently polarizing, for example, when he stated that Kirchnerismo "had a populist vocation," but it was short of populism in its deeds. Laclau was critical of the lack of a clear friend-enemy demarcation in Kirchnerismo, especially in the sense of establishing an "internal frontier" that would effectively divide the "popular" camp from the other camp. Laclau argued that classical Peronism had done this, as had Evo Morales's and Hugo Chávez's, in Bolivia and Venezuela, respectively, where the leaders were also indispensable. Laclau defended strong executives against parliamentarianism. In his essay "The Legacy of Néstor Kirchner," Laclau argued that Kirchner stood against reactionaries, representing the popular will against the status quo. Kirchner presented a choice between "the corporative Argentina of the past or popular Argentina." Laclau stated, "It is on the threshold of this confrontation that the name of Néstor Kirchner will always remain a liminal and path breaking sign. It will no longer be a flag for the fights, it has been transformed into something most important, in a symbol for our consciousness."
After Laclau's death in 2014, President Cristina Kirchner said that the critics of Laclau were rooted "in stupidity and ignorance." They ignored, she said, that Argentina had been divided in two since its independence in 1810. Laclau's last book, where he reflects on his own Marxist background but without sufficiently analyzing the extent of his own attempts to link Peronism and Marxism, Laclau reads Argentine history after 1955 through the prism of Peronism, radically opposing it to dictatorship and downplaying its dictatorial, militaristic, and neofascist tendencies. In his view, Peronism had been the site for the creation of a new left "national and popular and entirely different from the traditional liberal left." What was absent from this picture was the persistence of a nonliberal and non-Peronist left and, more generally, the complexities of Argentine history. What was present was Laclau's theory of populism as the only form of politics and the consequential idea that Argentina's left-wing populism homogenously represented democracy in the country. This reduction of history to experience, and of theory to history, also applied to more recent events. For Laclau, Kirchner, like Chávez or Morales, had represented his own thinking through their political actions, but for many populist followers, his theoretical thinking was linked to the voices of the people and their populist leaders.
At Argentina's state conference on Laclau, the minister of culture argued that Laclau was a "decisive thinker that got out of what is merely academic and he knew how to listen to the great Latin American popular traditions." For these politicians, Laclau also spoke in the name of the people. The meeting took place in the monumental Kirchner Cultural Center in Buenos Aires, a fact of great symbolic importance according to Chantal Mouffe, the theorist and widow of Laclau, who stressed Laclau's "identification with Néstor." The Kirchner Center was the most symbolic moment of the Kirchner name being inscribed in Argentina's political and actual landscape. But it was not unique, just bigger than many other eponymous Kirchner sites. Locations, symbols, and objects with the name Kirchner proliferated in Argentina even before the leader died. They included national buildings, streets, a police station, an airport, a gas pipeline, cafeterias, highways, the "Néstor Kirchner Center of Studies," stadiums, the 2011 national soccer tournament, tunnels, neighborhoods, cultural centers, bus stations, hospitals, and bridges.
In terms of continuities with a long Peronist tradition, the most symbolic of these sites of populist naming was the Néstor Kirchner student hostel, which was located on Carlos Menem Street in La Rioja Province. The reductionism of an ideology centered around the political desires of the leader led to the imposition of the leader's name across the country. There was a Peronist precedent to this. In Perón's time, two provinces (Chaco and La Pampa) were named after Juan and Eva Perón. When Eva Perón died, the city of La Plata was renamed after her. A similar obsession with proper names can be seen in leaders like Trump and Berlusconi. Typical murals for Berlusconi reproduced his name a thousand times and included the words, "We are all with Silvio," meaning that all Italians were in a sense little Berlusconis and that the body of the king, as Hobbes would have it, contained the people. Trump also projected his name as the reflection of his ideology. His mixing of business and populism was preceded by his commercial fixation on naming towers, beef, casinos, wine, and clothing after himself. He launched his campaign from the famous Trump Tower, one of the many towers bearing the Trump name that populate New York City. Among them is the skyscraper named "Trump World Tower," an icon of affluent skyline disruption located at the United Nations Plaza. The fact that Trump had positioned his luxury building proximal to the United Nations building acquired new meanings when Hillary Clinton launched her own presidential campaign at Roosevelt Island's "Four Freedoms Park." This monument to Roosevelt's antifascism faces both the United Nations and the Trump building. In 2015 and 2016, these commercially named buildings in New York, a city which stands as a global icon of cosmopolitanism and cultural diversity, became fully politicized as symbols of a leader who stood against globalization and multiculturalism.
Born and raised in New York, Trump represented a view of populism in the city that set the United Nations and minorities in opposition to traditions of segregation and discrimination. Here it is worth remembering that the business Trump had inherited from his father was also rooted in serious accusations of racial discriminations against African Americans, as the antifascist singer Woody Guthrie, the author of the American anthem of inclusion "This Land is your Land," and a tenant of the Trumps in the early 1950s, sang about the president's father: "I suppose that Old Man Trump knows just how much racial hate/He stirred up in that bloodpot of human hearts/When he drawed that color line/Here at his Beach Haven family project/Beach Haven ain't my home!/ No, I just can't pay this rent!"
It was precisely in the postwar years that a new modern populism began its ascendance in American politics, first with McCarthyism and later with the presidential candidacies of Barry Goldwater and the Alabama governor George Wallace. Wallace, the candidate of "law and order," had criticized his predecessor for being "soft on the nigger question." In 1963, he attacked a government that he saw as desiring to turn politicians into the category of a "master of the people" and as "being the opposite of Christ." He stressed the need to maintain "segregation now! Segregation tomorrow!" Wallace defended racism "in the name of the greatest people that have ever trod this earth." By the people he meant American whites. Famously, Wallace had argued that New York City was not precisely an example for the rest of the country: "In New York City you can't walk in Central Park at night without fear of being raped, or mugged, or shot."
It was precisely this idea of Central Park as the place that signaled what was wrong with the country that first brought political notoriety to a then young populist-in-the-making. The context was the "Central Park Five" case in 1989. As CNN explained, "The case involved five teenage boys of color, who were wrongly accused and convicted of beating and raping a woman in Central Park. Trump purchased full-page ads that ran in several New York City newspapers that read, 'Bring Back The Death Penalty. Bring Back Our Police!'" The wrongly accused men "were later exonerated in 2002, when another man confessed to the crime and DNA backed up his confession." In 1989, in reference to this case, Trump argued, "The ad's basically very strong and vocal, they are saying bring back law and order. And I'm not just referring to New York, I'm referring to everything." He stated "Maybe hate is what we need if we're gonna get something done." This early combination of "law and order," and racist arguments could be considered a populist rehearsal and would later be the trademark for his successful ran for the presidency. Following a long-standing tradition that Argentine jurist Roberto Gargarella aptly calls "penal populism," Trump called for harsh measures against crime that were supposed to be rooted in the will of the people. Populist leaders imagine the people want them as their primary law givers and judges. Trump justified himself by stressing a wide popular support for his actions, but of course the "people" were never consulted in practice.
If American populism throughout its history has combined its politics of resentment with the notion of the working people as a white "silent majority" that either potentially or implicitly rejected cosmopolitan city realities, and the minorities that lived and worked in them, not all populisms embraced this typically American type of populist exclusion. In other words, not all populists identify the demos with the ethnos, the people and the race, but all of them identify the people with the workers and producers and the antipeople with those that either do not work or do not work enough. This "producerism" is a key component of the populist understanding of the people.
Generally, populist leaders personify by name the united people, whom they place in opposition to the antipeople—the elites and traitors they fought against. In a 2013 speech symbolically delivered at the Piazza del Popolo (the People's Square) in Rome, Berlusconi rhetorically renamed it People of Freedom Square after his own party. He argued that the speech was for a new Italy, and he spoke for those without political representation. According to Berlusconi, he and his followers were the legitimate Italian people. He told those "that are with me . . . all of us, together, we represent Italians of good will, good sense, of good faith. We represent the Italy that works and produces. The Italy of women and men that want to remain free. We are the people of freedom." Berlusconi argued, "We are the best Italy and we are the majority of Italy." Berlusconi finished his speech in typical populist fashion. He quoted Gandhi, described his neoliberal economic proposals, conflated his persona with his party and freedom, and announced that he was symbolically hugging each follower. The followers responded by shouting over and over that Berlusconi was their only love, and singing the anthem "Meno male che Silvio c'è," or "Thank Goodness That Silvio Exists." The anthem was first introduced in a TV spot in 2008, where an ethnically homogeneous group of Italians representing different classes of workers, with the young specially featured, repeatedly sang the phrase "At least there is Silvio." The 1990s aesthetic of the spot combined a melodic cheesiness with images of multitudes embracing a long Italian flag, but Berlusconi himself was absent from the picture. The invocation of his name conveyed that he was more an omniscient parental equation of people and nation than an ordinary citizen. The people followed, and invoked the name of, the leader to ensure there was no other legitimate form of political representation beyond Berlusconi. In other speeches, Berlusconists represented their slogan "We are all with Silvio" by wearing Berlusconi masks. From Berlusconi's frame of reference, there was no legitimate place for the supposed minority of those who did not support Il Cavaliere's multiclass conflation of the country and people. The message was that they represented poor sense, bad faith, and even oppression.
General Perón had also argued that the people "are the humble men of all conditions. They are the only class of Argentine we recognize: the class of people that work." Also for Perón, the ones who did not work, the ones whom by inference he could not recognize as Argentines, were linked to the political opposition. They were the antipeople— "anti-Peronist . . . antirevolutionary and retrogrades of reaction." Here the enemy appears once again as the enemy of freedom, a freedom that for Perón was always under attack from the demoliberalismo.
Later, for Menem, Fujimori, and Berlusconi, the enemy of freedom was the left. Similarly, Trump and Marine Le Pen accused their enemies of following dated ideologies and putting forward proposals that would undermine democracy, while Cristina Kirchner identified all people who charged her with intolerance with the extreme left, the extreme right, and the military dictatorship. While Perón, George Wallace, and many other cold war populists explicitly denied they were fascists, the new populists like Marine Le Pen, Trump, or Erdogan actually presented their own enemies as "totalitarian" Nazis or fascists.
Wallace famously rebuked protesters accusing him of being fascist by stating, "I was killing fascists when you punks were in diapers." Even when he was the leader of dictatorship in 1944, Perón published in the main opposition newspaper a detailed explanation of "why the Argentine government is not fascist." The conductor, who was not yet elected, nonetheless expressed "his faith in democratic institutions" and stressed the fact that the regime held extremely high popular support. For Peronism, if the people supported the regime, that meant those against it were enemies of the nation as a whole, representing a "nefarious epoch," in which democracy existed only in "appearance" but not in reality. Chavismo also reproduced the classical Peronist ideological points about the people and the regime as One and the antipeople as opposition. For Comandante Chávez, the project of the opposition was "an enemy of the Venezuelan people."
Chávez argued against the "democracy of elites," saying "representative democracy is counterrevolutionary. A government enclosed within four walls expropriates the people's sovereignty and is counterrevolutionary." In 2009, after winning a reelection referendum, and in announcing his new candidacy for reelection in 2012, Chávez juxtaposed the truth of the people's victory and the dignity of the fatherland against the lies of the opposition. He vowed never to return to the "indignity of the past," to which the opposition wanted to return. He promised to "open the gates of the future." At times, he identified the opposition with prehistoric times, proclaiming "the man of the future is Chávez."
From the populist left to the populist right, democracy needed to be distanced from its liberal representative version. One important dimension in this idea of the enemy as those standing against freedom and democracy was that, while these populist leaders often claimed the recuperation of a fictional, departed golden past to identify themselves, their nations, and their people with the present and the future, the enemies were always marked as holdovers from a decadent past that no longer corresponded with the will of the people. In short, they were enemies identified with a dated political system that stood against true democracy. The independent media became the perfect example of a regime of empirically based truth and a notion of check and balances that the populists put in question. In this context, a deep suspicion, and at times a demonization, of the independent press was coupled with a populist strategy to use and manipulate the independent media—to publicize its political spectacles while also enforcing its ideological notion of politics as a battle over media power, especially against the independent media. The independent media were thus presented as a key enemy of the leader of the people. Here populism was also following and reformulating the experience of fascism.
## FROM CLASSIC PROPAGANDA TO THE NEW MEDIA LANDSCAPE
In the transition to mass democratic politics, classical versions of populism followed on the footsteps of fascism. They shared a view of the media as the key vehicle for propaganda. In populism, the media's primary role was to aestheticize politics, which meant rearranging what had previously been fascist personalist propaganda in a democratic key. In contrast with fascism, the populist version of politics as spectacle worked in tandem with electoral procedures, and never replaced them altogether. There are limits to populist media acclamation. Postwar Peronist propaganda, for example, relied on the overpowering concept of Juan and Eva Perón as the parents of the people, but it also stressed the fact that their regime was repeatedly reelected. A variety of media were used under Peronism, including newspapers, movies, radio, and magazines. The compulsive repetition of the leader's words and images, by himself and by many other "little Peróns," displaced the need to offer complex explanations of programs or ideas. From the perspective of the populist leader, the doctrine existed to root out, and eventually correct, the unbelievers. The realizations of the leader were more important than abstract theory. Perón asserted that "The doctrine is the final aim because it is incarnated in the collective soul of the community" But in fact, the doctrine existed to affirm a solid belief in whatever Perón had said or done. He constantly actualized the ideology of the movement through his control of his own words and images and, increasingly, of the national media.
Similarly, in the 1990s, populist leaders vilified the media, using state media, and in Berlusconi's case his own media empire, to provide a clear and controlled message. Like Perón and many others, these neoliberal populist leaders demonized the independent media, even suggesting at times that the media were their main enemies. And like any enemy, the media could be defeated by populist democracy, as Carlos Menem argued after his presidential victory in 1995. Similar situations unfolded with populist leaders such as Chávez and Erdogan. Some of their efforts to control words and images, and to silence the independent press, were rather "traditional." But everything changed when new channels of communication, including social media, became available. Most populist leaders have excelled at using modern technologies to establish direct links with the citizens, bypassing the mediation of the press. This has been especially, but not exclusively, useful for leaders in the opposition.
In his successful bid for the presidency, Trump was able, surprisingly and successfully, to combine sustained attention from the independent press with more direct means of electronic communication, especially Twitter. Talking about the press, Trump stated, "They're trying desperately to suppress my vote and the voice of the American people." Since Trump's populist schema conceived of him as the embodiment of the nation and its people, he could understand the critical responses of the media to his own acts against women, immigrants, and other minorities only as attempts to curtail American sovereignty. In this sense, Donald Trump's campaign perfectly executed the populist playbook. If populist leaders who are not yet in power define themselves in terms of their hostility toward independent media, even while they use them to spread their messages, they often shift away from instrumental use of the media to active, explicit attacks on media autonomy when they are in charge of the government. Even the possibility of an electoral loss must be attributed to a broad, -antidemocratic conspiracy of media elites "rigging" the system to block the will of the people, who are incarnated in his or her candidacy. Trump's appeal was in part owing to the powerful lies circulating between him and his supporters. The latter's belief in them was apparently impervious to empirical disproof produced by a fact-checking media that Trump regarded as an elite enemy of the people.
Populists overemphasize the importance of the media by placing it at the center of politics. As we argue with Pablo Piccato and Fabián Bosoer, populists see politics as spectacle, a cultural battle between those who defend the interests of the "true" people of the nation and the media, elites, and minorities that guard antinational interests. Freedom of expression is acceptable just as long as it means the leader is giving voice to "the common man." On the basis of a postfascist view of democracy, in which authoritarianism and demonization replace tolerance and open dialogue, Trump blamed political criticism on the existence of a free press. This is why he came to view the independent press as a key adversary of his own politics. Internet blogs and other nontraditional media enabled Trump to bring the messengers of the right into full view. He returned to a premodern conception of the press as conveyors of bias, and made the CEO of Breitbart, the alt-right, white supremacist website, the director of his campaign. The New York Times, Washington Post, CNN, and other media outlets were frequently the main fodder for his attacks.
For Argentines, Trump was singing an old familiar song. For ten years, the former presidents Néstor Kirchner and Cristina Fernández de Kirchner launched an offensive against critical media, choosing Clarín, one of the most important newspapers in the country, as their main target. They blamed the newspaper for all the problems they had governing, even distributing T-shirts and socks bearing the slogan "Clarín is lying" and constantly declaring that Clarín was crooked. Moving from demonization to practice, they used the Argentine IRS to harass the newspaper with audits and, eventually, antimonopoly laws that benefited media owned by friends of the populist leaders. Similar methods were used in countries like Venezuela and Ecuador in the first two decades of the twenty-first century.
Populist aggression toward the autonomy of the press does not mean that populists refuse to use it as yet another vehicle to promote politics. Criticizing the press attracts its attention. When populists reach government, the dialogue between those in power and the opposition tends to be replaced with a reinvigorated focus on the press as a key enemy of the government, the leader, and the nation.
Thus, in recent and present-day versions of populism, the strategy of accusing the press of acting as agents for distributing the propaganda of the leader's enemies has been combined with the use of new Internet communication technologies, especially twitter, that stress the links between authoritarian leaders and their "followers." As Beatriz Sarlo observes, if politics is increasingly complex and multipolar, politics as it works in the social networks tends to be seen in binary terms. In this sense, social media and populism are perfect for each other. Populists are disposed to regard independent reporters as deeply suspect, and even as enemies, and technology allows them to bypass the press to connect directly with their followers. This unprecedented, unmediated access to their supporters allows populist leaders to distinguish themselves from politicians and highlight their hostility toward politics as usual. The new technologies do not favor debate or open access to ideas but rather acutely downplay the relevance of key democratic institutions like a free press. The idea that the unmediated, and unquestioned, voice of the leader represents the truth works in tandem with the fantasy that traditional media have nothing to offer the public except lies.
Media and citizens' participation in politics are essentially intertwined. For populism, this synergistic relationship needs to be subsumed under its political imperative. As the Argentine media scholar Silvio Waisbord maintains, acute sensitivity toward the media is part of the DNA of populism. Its main contradiction is related to the dual need to speak for the majority of the people and a pyramidal structure of communication that affirms the word of the leader. Especially because it is so successful in bypassing the scrutinizing function of independent journalism, populism affirms that it is the voice of the "silent majority." In theory, the lionized voice of the leader promotes people's participation in politics. In practice, the people's voice is a monologue by the leader that is free of journalistic mediations.
Populism's effective use of new media highlighted ideological ambiguities but also left them unquestioned. In this sense, populism's principles were affirmed through and by these technologies, just as liberal dogmas were. The uncritical and unreflective nature of the so-called twenty-four-hour news cycle was not invented by populism, but populism thrived under it to defeat neoliberalism. The result was an overall absence of detailed proposals and programs. As Jean Comaroff argues,
Under late liberal conditions, when the old coordinates of left, right, and center seem profoundly unmoored, it is increasingly difficult to set these popular faces apart, in any thoroughgoing sense. The ambiguous politics of populist leaders in contemporary Latin America, for example, might not be unprecedented, building as it does on the legacies of figures such as Perón and Bolívar. But it also seems to present an ever more intense, confusing amalgam of the progressive and the proto-fascist, having taken its current form in particular historical circumstances—among them, the advent of worldwide policies of deregulation, the extension of electronic media into ever more expansive and ever more personal realms of existence, and the mutation of a politics of class into identity-based movements and born-again theologies of one kind and another.
A media regime that catered to identity, nation, and the sacred was a key factor in the success of populism.
The new populist uses of technology, including the leader's ability to "block" leader-identified undesirables who interfered with the message, did not strengthen the public's access to democracy but instead drummed out conflicting opinions. These synthetic messages did not require, and even prevented, analysis and explanations, making it even easier to conflate slogans and policies and to mock or demonize the enemies without having to face debate or scrutiny. When it comes to populism-by-Twitter, meaningful citizen participation in a leader's decisions is a mirage. As Umberto Eco noted, in both fascism and "Internet populism . . . citizens do not act; they are only called on to play the role of the People."
As with fascism, the populist spectacle of the people should not be conflated with populism at large. Style and aesthetics cannot be equated simply with an understanding of political ideology. New media technologies have been added to the populist repertoire, but its foundational approach to politics has not changed. In other words, in a changing media landscape, populism has adapted its media strategy, but the effect—replacing a diversity of voices with a singular one—is the same as it was before the array of innovative technologies became available. Affirming a notion of sovereignty that relies on legitimacy conferred by elections, a leader who owned the truth and a vertical form of propaganda to sacralize him or her has always been central to the populist vision of democracy.
## THE GODS OF POPULISM
Populism shares with the past century's other big isms—liberalism, communism, and fascism—the idea of popular sovereignty as the main source of legitimation for the political. In other words, in all these isms, the leadership is theoretically defined as the representative of the people by the people. Thus, populism, fascism, liberalism, and real socialism agree that the people are the main legitimating force for political representation. Of course, these political philosophies have historically differed on their theories and practices of representation. Fascism and real socialism proclaim the popular nature of the leadership to have mythical or teleological foundations. They do not need elections to confirm dictatorial revolutionary rule. In contrast, populism is closer to liberalism in its emphasis on electoral forms of representation. Unlike fascism, or real socialism, liberalism and populism stand rhetorically against dictatorship. In all these political ideological formations, and their contextual ramifications, the leader and the system are legitimized because the people want them, or so their interpreters declare. They disagree in practice in how to make that possible because liberalism and populism ultimately focus on electoral representation, while fascism and real socialism eschew electoral procedures to confirm the legitimacy of the leader, who is nonetheless presented as the ultimate and permanent representative of the people.
But if postwar populism and Cold War liberalism have historically shared a methodology of political representation rooted in democratic means, they belonged to significantly different ideological and intellectual traditions.
In theory, all these modern political isms equated democracy with mass participation. But the ideal of democratic expansion held by liberalism and communism was based in the tradition of the Enlightenment, while the fascist and populist versions were explicitly anti-Enlightenment. In fascism, and also to some extent in certain versions of populism, popular sovereignty was conceived as a rejection of the legacies of the French Revolution. Thus, if we focus on the theory, populism might be considered closer to dictatorship than it has been in practice. And yet one cannot understand ideas without accounting for their political experiences in history. Both dimensions affected and changed each other constantly, turning modern postfascist populism first, into a reformulation, and second, into a renunciation, of fascism.
More specifically, the constant interaction between democratic realities and authoritarian tendencies led postwar populism to present a dual source of legitimation: the leader is the leader because of electoral representation, but populist political theology also requires a firm belief in the leader as a transcendental, charismatic figure whose legitimacy goes beyond electoral representation.
Perón was represented as just such a Godlike figure. He often presented himself as working in tandem with the Lord by way of spreading the word, or as he said in 1953, by "preaching." Like many populist leaders of regimes who came after him, Perón used the sacred to validate his own persona and leadership. According to him, he was "also helping God" to reveal his own mercy and greatness. In Peronism, formal religion and political religion were simply conflated, but the spheres of God and the leader were not. The conductor was the political leader, not God. Christianity was elevated by Peronism but not through the Church. In this case, rhetorical conflation led in fact to the Peronization of Christianism. As Eva Perón, Perón's famous wife, maintained when she announced the coming of a Peronist Christmas in 1946, "I come from the people, like General Perón, and I am delighted to have arrived in this Christmas of the good pan dulce [sweet bread] of Perón and the sidra [hard cider] of Perón, to all the homes that Perón has reestablished to their Christian heights." As I have argued elsewhere, the religious dimensions of the Peronist populist doctrine were intimately linked with the alleged religious nature of Perón's leadership. At one point, Peronist ideology identified a kernel of truth in these exaggerations. The constant blurring of the profane and the sacred was continuously pushed to its limits. As Eva Perón told her close advisor, the hardcore clerico-fascist Father Virgilio Filippo, and others in 1951, Perón was the God of the Argentines. Like fascist leaders, Perón acted as a temporal analogy to the sacred. He was the one who bore the cross in the name of the nation and the people.
Notions of popular sovereignty lay at the center of these populist theologies. In practice, these dual forms of representation engendered unitary notions of the people, intolerant views, attacks on freedoms of expression, and even plebiscitary and delegative notions of democracy, but they did not lead to the demise of democracy itself. In this context, the populist leader is leader because of the faith the people are supposed to have in her or his leadership. The leaders act as the personification of the popular will, and not only because they were elected by the people. This logic of extreme identification crisscrossed the populist universe and its history. The transformation of the leader into the people makes him or her a transcendental figure unlike any other human and renders the former homogeneous and akin to the latter. In France, the slogan of the National Front literally equated the leader with the people: "Le Pen, le peuple." In Colombia, Gaitán famously said, "I am not a man, I am a people." The leader is sacralized, and his theory of representation is partly a form of representation of the will of the people by means of popular repossession of the leader's self. The people possess the leader, or so he says. In this view, his own persona is no longer important, which explains the ease and eagerness with which populist leaders refer to themselves in the third person. General Perón stated, "I am only a man for a cause. I am not interested in Perón nor have I ever been interested [in Perón], or I have been interested in him only to the extent that Perón could serve the cause."
As we have seen, the case of Hugo Chávez is especially symptomatic. He in fact argued, "I feel I am incarnated in the people." He multiplied his name and projected it onto the nation and its people. Not only was he speaking in the name of the people, but his name was the name of the people: "Chávez is Venezuela."
In 2012, Chávez told Venezuelans that they were "the people of Chávez." Explaining this Trinitarian idea of the leader, people, and nation, Chávez often talked about the three components of his nation as indistinct. He said, "I am no longer Chávez, Chávez became the people [Chávez se hizo un pueblo]." He also said that "Chávez became the essence of the nation." This process of transubstantiation meant that every Venezuelan was a little Chávez, insofar as they were all components of the national people of the leader. "I am not Chávez, you are Chávez, we are all Chávez, I am no longer myself. In truth, Chávez is a people." Like Perón, Gaitán, and many others, Chávez asserted a clear link between himself, the nation's history, and God. He asked Christ to give him his crown and cross. Chávez also stated in 2012, "I am convinced that God helps Chávez and his friends."
The Chavista Movement clearly saw itself as a radical political religion with its own prayers and recitations. In the construction of Chávez's leadership, there was a synthesis between the libertador Simón Bolívar and Jesus. Carlos de la Torre explains, "His political movement, the new constitution and even Venezuela were renamed as 'Bolivarian.' Chávez constantly invoked 'Jesus as 'my commander in chief' and as 'the Lord of Venezuela.'" De La Torre notes that the conflation of the populist leader with formal religion was even personified by the leader himself on national television in 2012: "Chávez compared his agony with cancer with the passion of Christ. Following Christ's invocation to his Father when he felt abandoned in the cross, Chávez prayed out loud, Give me life . . . Christ give me your crown of thorns. Give it to me that I bleed. Give me your cross . . . Give me life because I still need to do things for this people and motherland. Do not take me. Give me your cross, your thorns, your blood. I will carry them, but give me life. Christ my Lord. Amen."
When Chávez died in 2013, Nicolás Maduro, his proclaimed "son" and "apostle," wanted to have him embalmed, as Perón had done with Eva Perón's corpse. But instead of mentioning Evita, Maduro linked the dead leader with other famous mummified leaders, such as Ho Chi Minh, Lenin, and Mao. The purpose of mummifying the leader was to establish his singular place with respect to the rest of dead citizens, who got rather traditional forms of burial. In any case, lack of proper planning voided this choice, and Chávez was buried like every other Venezuelan.
The Venezuelan attempt to mummify the leader is a symptomatic example of how in the populist imaginary the leader belongs to the people, even in death. Making a case for the future embalming of Chávez, Maduro said, "The body of our commander in chief will remain embalmed in the Museum of the Revolution. It will remain in a special manner in order for it to be displayed in [a] crystal case and the people will have him forever."
When he entered politics in 1994, Berlusconi claimed to be "appointed by God." Berlusconi also once argued, "I am the Jesus Christ of politics . . . I sacrifice myself for everyone." In Argentina, Cristina Kirchner argued that it was important to fear only God but also to fear her a "little bit." The leader, by being the leader, prevented an apocalyptic situation. Above all, the sacred idea of the leader mixed electoral representation with messianic notions of predestination. For example, Donald Trump equated his Republican primary voters and his own candidacy with the will of the American people. He even argued that he was going to unify them into a single voice. He did replace their voice with his voice, but the result was a repossession of the people by the leader. Collectively, the people remained a passive actor, for whom he would "fight" and "win." He spoke for a "silent majority" that could not defend itself, or even speak. He told "people who work hard but no longer have a voice- I am your voice."
Trump combined messianic undertones typical of the American political tradition with rhetorical praise for violence against members of the opposition. A noted Trump supporter, who was a Republican senator at the time, presented the choice of Trump as one between life or death for the Republican Party. The idea of the leader as being somehow closer to God than other mortals was reformulated in the 2015–16 presidential campaign. Trump told religious leaders that gaining the presidency was going to get him to heaven. In Trumpism, the sacred was entangled with the American entrepreneurship ideal as represented in the charisma and "brain power" of the populist leader. Trump introduced himself as the leader of a nation and a people of winners, but he also deferred to God as the ultimate owner of property.
Trump established parallel lanes of meaning between his own real estate deals, the sacred, and the politics of the American present and near future. North of the Rio Grande, twenty-first-century populism reformulated a long-standing American populist combination of extreme individualism, religion, racism, anti-institutionalism, materialism, and "hard work" with a newly established form of political and business predestination. Trump proffered himself as both the embodiment of the nation and the personification of the spirit of capitalism. He wanted to be seen as a living myth. As the preeminent scholar of political myth Chiara Bottici argued, Trump's slogan, "Make America Great Again" echoed the fascist "mythologem of 'greatness-decline-rebirth.'" This narrative plot enabled the populist leader "to single out those who are the perceived cause of the decline, target them as guilty and thus channel and fuel hostility toward them." Here old fascist myths were recombined with a xenophobic, populist right-wing American tradition that wanted a society ruled by the wealthy. This was the context in which, as Judith Butler suggested, Trump was approaching a fascist situation. In fact, Trump's populism in practice was not far from a neoliberal, elitist idea of a ruling class whose power derives from their wealth, but it was fused with old fascist political myths of sacred leadership and populist ideas of popular sovereignty, along with the exclusion of the antipeople.
In this regard, Trump was close to the Italian populist Silvio Berlusconi. Part of their appeal was that each combined a self-presentation of himself as a "man of the people" with the rarified world of a billionaire. This appeal was embellished with religious undertones. According to this conception, the leader is more special than his people, as if this were divinely predestined. If this sounds religious, that's because it is. Sacred forms belonging to the privacy of religious faith are a key component of the populist political theology.
Unlike fascists, the faith of populists is confirmed by electoral results. But like fascists, populists adopt religious forms (language and rituals), and they endorse the idea of the leader as a divine figure who is never wrong. For Chávez, the idea of himself as a Godlike figure connected him to Jesus and implied a radical idea of the enemy as impious. Similarly, in Turkey, as the Turkish scholar Ertug Tombus suggests, Erdogan mixed two political theologies (formal religion and populism), especially after the coup attempt of July 2016. While Tombus stresses the connections between the fascist and populist understanding of the political, as well as the transnational character of both, some scholars working on Muslim nations resort to the presentation of an "Islamic populist" Other. But is it really the case that populism is so different in Islamic politics that we should talk about an Islamic populism?
## ISLAMIC POPULISM?
In many studies of politics and Islam, populism becomes the way to differentiate a big part of the world from the West. Populism, these studies claim, is a natural outcome of the democratic weakness of politics in Islam. These scholars tend to speak of a compact "Islamic" form of politics, in which the tendency toward populism is naturalized and almost appears by default. In my view, the merging of these two theologies (Islam, or for that matter any religion, and populism) does not warrant the creation of the new category "Islamic populism." The use of the term Islamic populism often conflates the extremely different experiences of countries like Turkey, Egypt, Iran, Morocco, Tunisia, and Indonesia. While Turkish populism emerged out of a multiparty system, other countries like Indonesia and Egypt presented very different authoritarian and democratic contexts.
Islamic populism is a misnomer that inflates populist politics and identifies populism with any Islamic critique of the elites or in some cases with mass politics in Muslim countries. Even if the merging of Islamic and populist themes is a singular manifestation of populist politics in Muslim countries, the term Islamic does not explain much about forms of populism that often resemble "non-Muslim" contexts in European, African, or Latin American cases more than they do each other. As with the term Islamo-fascism, Islamic populism blurs the continuities within the global history of populism at the same time that it obscures converging histories of political Islam around the world. In addition, public uses of Islamic populism exemplify efforts to present populism as a perversion, or deformity, of "real," normative democracy. In this case, the implication is that Muslims cannot handle full-blown democratic governance, a claim with a very long and gory colonial history.
More generally the use of the term avoids the key distinctions between left and right wing forms of populism across the political spectrum (including also the Middle East) and tends to stress and even confirm stereotypical assumptions about Islam and the West, often confusing the populist domestication and synchronization of religion with actual formal religions.
The scholar of populism Vedi R. Hadiz, who defends the use of the term, nonetheless provides a very specific periodization of the concept and argues that one such convergence of populism and Islamic politics is a shared identification of the notion of umma, or a community of Muslim believers that conceives of the people as whole. But as he also astutely observes, the umma often adopts a national connotation rather than a universal one. It is exactly this national dimension that illuminates the particular ways a transnational understanding of political theology is adopted and lived in specific periods and countries.
In his excellent study of populism in Algeria, the Algerian scholar Lahouari Addi insists precisely on the permanence of the notion of populism in Algeria from the country's independence during the Cold War to the 1990s, but he also stresses its very different contextual variations. Algerian forms of populism, either secular or Islamic, have more in common with each other than they do with other transnational examples. The same, of course, can be said of the Peronist experience in Argentina and of other national cases that are part of the same national histories. But if in Argentina Peronism encompassed different currents, from anti-imperialism to corporativism to neoclassical populism and neoliberalism, in Algeria populism was adopted and reformulated by different and even opposing currents. All of them claimed to be the incarnation of the people, but Algerian populism, rather than being a top-down structure, mobilized its citizens, increasing their political participation while eventually redefining who were the common enemies of the people. As Addi cogently argues, the contents of populism changed in different historical periods, but a mythical idea of the people remained. At the time of the anticolonial battles for independence, its contents were all inclusive and suited the common enemy of the people, that is, the colonial power. After independence, populism was devised as a means to conserve power. Popular participation was significantly reduced, and the representatives of the people were those who "indefinitely spoke in their name." At the same time, these leaders defined who was and who was not part of the people. This situation eventually led to the rulers being opposed by those in whose names they ruled. The rule of the FLN unified the people, increasingly excluding their actual participation in the political process. Addi highlights how the crisis of an authoritarian populism can create or lead to another. What is highly suggestive is that Addi's historical analysis of populism in power explains the populism of the political movement, the Islamic Salvation Front (FIS), that took shape in the late 1980s. This was a result of Algerian history and its populist political culture, specifically its secular populism, rather than of the outcome of generic or essentialist Islamic notions. Thus Addi shows that by 1988, in a time of social and economic crisis, when the country was allowing for a democratic political process with multiparty elections, the FIS Party, which was radically opposed to the power of the ruling populist elites, revindicated the "agonizing populism of the FLN," though one reformulated in a religious manner. The FIS revived populism in a very different moment of Algerian history, presenting "itself as a movement with the ambition of making concrete the political program of the FLN" and also its "promises." From its secular moment in history to its religious one, Algerian populism exhibited similar traits, including a mythical conception of the people, voluntarism, the cult of the state, a "moral anchoring of its political values," the idea of the incarnation of the people, and a denial of conflict within society. For Addi, the Algerian case shows the political uses of Islam are not new but have been reformulated at different times. Islam was "a political resource," but the nature of the Algerian conflict over democracy was not religious but essentially political in nature. This key point should also restrain the often ahistorical uses of the notion of Islamic populism.
All in all, Addi stresses how Algerian forms of populism ultimately were impediments to the enhancement of democracy, and yet as in Thailand, Argentina, and other non-Muslim societies, the FIS version of populist democracy was finished in 1992 by an antipopulist military dictatorship. Independent of the specific religion invoked, in Algeria and in Argentina, but also in countries as different as Turkey, Israel, Egypt, Indonesia, Italy, Hungary, the United States, and Venezuela, the will of the people was used interchangeably with the will of God.
## MACHO POPULISM
At the start of the twenty-first century, populist ideals of sexuality became more explicit, and less decorous, than in the past. While Perón had also represented the ideal of Argentine masculinity as a key dimension of Peronism, he had set up clear demarcations between genders. He had highlighted the central civic duty of women as mothers, whose task was to educate men. A case in point was the nationalist Peronist Oscar Ivanissevich. He declared, "The Peronist is a person with a defined sex who admires beauty with all his senses." The ideal of Peronist beauty was defined by a traditional and baroque view of culture that avidly assimilated contemporary popular elements that at times transformed it. Some more recent right-wing populist leaders have articulated a stereotyped and even more reactionary version of the role and image of women in society.
Like Berlusconi and the Latin American neoliberal populists of the 1990s, the presidents Carlos Menem in Argentina and Abdalá Bucaram in Ecuador, Trump put forward a machista model of leadership combining sexism, misogyny, and the power of money. Similarly, authoritarian views on gender and sexuality appeared in leftist Latin American populism, such as in Ecuador's Correa, while other populisms of the left and the right were simply not engaged in these forms of discrimination or, like Argentina in the 2000s, opposed them. It would be problematic to explain, as some generic scholars of populism do, these differences through the stereotypes of an "emancipated" or progressive North versus "patriarchal" Latin America.
Gender and sexual repression, for example, the highly repressive attempts to ban Muslim women from wearing the veil in some European countries, appear in some form in most populisms of the right. From Trump to Berlusconi and to Menem and Bucaram, some key examples of the populism of the right have favored very traditional and even repressive female stereotypes and gender distinctions, while in countries like Argentina or Bolivia, populists have promoted substantial legal changes to advance gender and sexual equality. In any case, the macho aspect of populist leaders who mix aggressive capitalism and entrepreneurship with repressive gender attitudes seems to transcend regions and continents. The populism of Trump, Berlusconi, Bucaram, and many others supports popular sovereignty, delegation of power, and a highly repressive take on gender.
Constant vulgar references to male and female genitalia, and the serial objectification of women (the leaders counted their female "conquests" and stressed the size of their genitalia, among other things), were proffered as examples of their denunciation of politics as usual. In a presidential primary debate, Trump "guaranteed," and even boasted about, the size of his penis. In a disclosed recording from 2005, which came to define Trump's macho-populist ideology, the Republican standard bearer "bragged in vulgar terms about kissing, groping and trying to have sex with women." He thought his special celebrity status allowed him license to behave toward women as he wanted and without their consent. As Joseph Biden, then vice president of the country argued when the tape came out, "Such behavior is an abuse of power. It's not lewd. It's sexual assault." In his own words, Trump celebrated his macho persona as defined by his unrepressed desire to do what he wanted to women. He stated that "because he was 'a star,' . . . he could 'grab them by the pussy' whenever he wanted."
Another icon of macho populism, Silvio Berlusconi, made vulgar references to the body of the German chancellor, Angela Merkel, and serially boasted of his sexual prowess. Berlusconi rationalized it was "better to have a passion for beautiful women than to be gay." Menem defined himself as only "half libertine," saying he had not had many extramarital relations, "just the normal" standard for men. The Philippine leader, Rodrigo Duterte, linked his connection to the people with his sexual prowess: "If I can love 100 million and one [Filipinos], I can love four women at the same time." As a self-proclaimed man of the people, he claimed, "This is how men talk." The idea that speaking in the name of the people meant enforcing gender and sexual discrimination led him to insult the American ambassador with homophobic slurs and state that he had also wanted to rape an Australian missionary, who had been raped and murdered in a 1989 prison riot. In 2016, Duterte once again asserted that his connection to the people protected him from criticism when he called Barack Obama, the American president at the time, a "son of a bitch." The Philippine leader described an American leader's questioning of his own deeds as president, especially his serious human rights violations, as a colonialist erosion of both national sovereignty and the intrinsic bond he had with the people: "Who is this man? I do not have any master, except the Filipino people, nobody but nobody." Unlike most populist leaders, Duterte used rhetoric regarding the practice of violence that invoked analogies between him, fascism, and the Holocaust. He claimed, "Hitler massacred 3 million Jews . . . there's 3 million drug addicts. There are. I'd be happy to slaughter them," thus obscuring the fact that Nazism was responsible for the death of six million Jews and connecting his actions to both the precedent of fascist violence and its apocalyptic connotations. In 2016, he told reporters that his critics suggested he was "a cousin of Hitler." Duterte remarked, "If Germany had Hitler, the Philippines would have . . .," and then pointed to himself. "You know my victims," he told reporters, "I would like [them] to be all criminals to finish the problem of my country and save the next generation from perdition."
If extreme in his approach to violence compared to the standards set by Chávez, Trump, Menem, and Bucaram, Duterte showed he shared their attitudes on sexuality and their very conservative stances on reproductive rights and the family. In short, they all have macho populism in common.
Bucaram compared his "big balls" to the smaller genitalia of politicians in the opposition. He also made Lorena Bobbitt (who became famous for having castrated her abusive American husband) an honorary guest of the president. This vulgarity and macho obsession with genitalia are not random and speak volumes about a particular trend in recent populism. Chávez also used phallic imagery when he proposed at a 2006 UN meeting that "we need a political Viagra" against political impotence. He had earlier told the "elite" to take Viagra against the people. The leader and his people represented a form of virility that blurred distinctions between public and private life. In 2000, he told his wife on his national TV program to be ready for sex that night: "Marisabel, be ready, tonight I will give to you what is yours."
Carlos de la Torre explains that these leaders present their own virility as a form of resistance against the "effeminate elites." In their objectifying references to female ugliness and beauty, they claim to express what all males think but cannot say. Their acts and bodies, according to these leaders, affirm the masculinity of the people ("the people" in this context includes only their male followers). The result is the upholding of stereotypes. De la Torre notes that this "vindication of a machista popular culture accepts and reproduces an authoritarian culture based on the subordination of women." Leaders like Bucaram, by "staging male sexual dreams such as seducing ladies from high society or dancing with attractive models on television, was symbolically democratizing the access by all men, especially common men, to the gender privileges of elite men. In this way, he was broadening the authoritarian male pact of domination."
The subordination of women, and this populist type of machismo, has not been prevalent in other cases of populism, but it has been prominent in Argentina, in Italy, in Ecuador, in the Philippines, and in the United States, where Trump mixed these ideas and styles with racist statements and proposals regarding Muslims and Hispanics, a disregard for the rule of law and the separation of powers, and a deep antagonism toward other candidates and independent journalism. These features connect populist authoritarianism with the fascist past. Trump, like many of his predecessors, delivered the message that his followers expected. As Pablo Piccato and I argue, Trump's followers shared with "the early supporters of fascism a deep suspicion of the other, of people of different ethnic and religious backgrounds. Trump's followers want a country that looks, believes, talks, eats and drinks the same. They want to go back to a country without diversity, which never existed except in the reactionary images of the past. This idea derives from a longstanding fear of difference and nationalism that in Europe caused much destruction. Against a meaningful democracy, where all people who are living in the country can participate, Trump's supporters want a similarly reduced version of America."
A big divide between the fiery right-wing American and Europopulist rhetoric against Muslims and real fascism is the latter's rise to power and the actual physical elimination of a perceived enemy. According to an Italian historian of fascism, Trump's populism appeared to be a more "peaceful" version of fascism. One might make similar points about Pegida and Lepenism. Under a fascist dictatorship, the treatment of the enemy is not at all peaceful, and it takes place with total disregard for the rule of law. Once fascist politicians reach power, they switch from racist statements to the suppression of the other. Fascism not only talks about the enemy but eliminates it from the political process. Trump was a perfect example of the continuities but also the differences between populism and fascism. As a candidate, he never advocated or put forward a dictatorial view of the United States. In other words, he represented an authoritarian populist version of democracy.
The presidential candidacy of Donald Trump was unique in world history, not because of Trump's idiosyncratic nature and his histrionic behavior, but in the sense that he presided from the center over what used to be the politics of the margins. He accomplished this by being the populist leader of a party that used to be to the right of the political center, as well as by bringing to the American mainstream politics that generally receive massive support in other regions of the world like Latin America, Israel, the Arab countries, Austria, Hungary, and the Philippines. If the populist and racist traditions that preceded and opposed the civil rights movements were prominent in his American background, the forces of fascism and populism were also part of Trump's global pedigree. Perhaps Trump himself ignored these authoritarian genealogies, but he nonetheless represented them in a nearly absolute way—putting racism at the center of his politics, making a case for religious exclusion, and proposing mass deportation of immigrants. This new American populism has already left its mark on the history of the country and the world. Once again, democracy has changed from within. Global authoritarian projects for democracy are here to stay, precisely because, as the history of why and how fascism became populism tells us, they were never out of the picture.
# Epilogue
## Populism Recharged
After having razed the garden and profaned the chalices and the altars, the Huns entered the monastery library on horseback and trampled the incomprehensible books and vituperated and burned them, perhaps fearful that the letters concealed blasphemies against their god, which was an iron scimitar.
Jorge Luis Borges, The Theologians (1949)
## I
Modern postwar populism had a fascist starting point, and yet populism is not fascism. In fact, after 1945, especially in Latin America, and later in the rest of the world, fascism often became populism—not the other way around. As this book has shown, while populism was often historically constituted as a repudiation of fascism, it also represented its democratic reformulation. Historically located somewhere between fascism and liberalism, populism, when it finally became a regime, constantly drew on the residues of the former to challenge the latter. At the same time, it continued to engage in democratic electoral processes. This postfascism did bring back the engagement with democracy early fascists had adopted before they destroyed the democratic system. The upshot was a revamped authoritarianism that transformed the dictatorial tradition of classical fascism into an antiliberal and intolerant form of democracy.
Populism cannot be understood without appreciating its complex history, and theories of populism suffer when they rely on simplistic definitions of a populism that is hemmed in by tight borders. Often uninformed by global perspectives, such theories ignore the protean nature of the populisms that have been continually emerging since World War II, as well as the major historical and theoretical significance of the times when populists reached power and established regimes. My goal has been to return populism to its diverse history, from the Global South to the dominant North.
Historically, postfascist populism was the revitalization of an authoritarian view of democracy, and its translation into a regime, that is itself founded in a fascist imaginary. In the second decade of our new century, a new populist incursion is covering large parts of the world. It has come back with a vengeance, and in unexpected places. For many, this has been a terrible shock, but the return of populism is part of a broader history of authoritarian conceptions of democracy that have always sat uncomfortably alongside democracy's more egalitarian expressions. Compounding the shock, this recharged populism has seized much of the terrain of the geopolitical center, and a more open and diverse conception of democracy has been threatened in the process. This too is not new, but populism's latest political gains—and potential geopolitical repercussions—are unprecedented. To the delight of many, and to the horror of many others, populism now lives in the White House.
## II
How American is the new American populism? Regarding it from the often-neglected perspective of the Global South, some in the United States have finally recognized how similar America is to the rest of the world. Indeed, with the election of Donald Trump, the United States has instantly become the epicenter of global populism, a development that helps legitimate all other populisms. Just as Rome and Berlin became models for the fascists, so too did the xenophobic campaign of Donald Trump soon became a model—and a source of validation—for populists worldwide. Populist leaders of the right like Silvio Berlusconi, Marine Le Pen, Nigel Farage, and Geert Wilders, as well as some left-leaning populists positioned between the right and the left, such as Cristina Kirchner, praised Trumpism and its voters for standing against traditional forms of democratic representation and their purportedly "elite," and excessively "liberal" and "cosmopolitan," culture. In France, Le Pen crowed that Trump's win "made possible what had previously been presented as impossible. This is really the victory of the people against the elites." The Trump victory was for her part of "a global revolution."
And yet American populism has not in fact been the driving force behind populism worldwide. It is, rather, populism's latest and arguably most stunning incarnation. Even in the context of American history, Trump is an expression of the long history of racism and xenophobia, which accompanied both the strides made in the civil rights movement and the many waves of immigration into America as economic recession (or simply the vagaries of the globalized economy) hit the rest of the world. Trump's victory intensified the intolerance toward difference that has for many years been front and center in the Republican Party and in its Tea Party Movement. Trump has moved this tradition further to the right.
Globally, populism represented an authoritarian response to an extended crisis of democratic representation. For its adherents, populism replaced reason with faith in a Godlike leader, who purportedly knew what the people felt, feared, and wanted. In this sense, it "represented" them far better than any conventional democratic leader or institution. The idea of truth, moreover, was reformulated as a matter of ideological, often visceral, faith, rather than as a function of observation, rational discernment, and corroboration. With its trinitarian conception of sovereignty (nation, leader, people), populism posed a special threat to more secular, as opposed to theological, understandings of democracy.
From a global historical perspective, the metropolitan centers looks more and more like the margins, or periphery, of the world. This is especially true of the United States, a country that has always been ambivalent about the relationship between politics and the sacred, no matter its formal doctrine of separation of state and church.
No sustained political movement or initiative has ever been able to settle the question of American populism ideologically. Rather it has always reflected the intermittent power and appeal of authoritarian populist politics that were very much tied to particular social, economic, and political developments. In the United States, there is little historical or institutional memory that consciously links today's populists to their early forbears, or that lends perspective to the key issue of American populism's intimate connection to a preeminently white conception of the nation, especially, but not only, since 1945. The history of the early populist movement of late nineteenth-century America is today known in any meaningful way to only a handful of scholars and their students, while more recent American populists are not generally thought of in terms of their connections to other postwar populisms.
As of 2017, American populism has become the most consequential postfascism of the new century. After decades of largely disavowing populism as foreign to its own political culture, the United States has now assumed the role of populism's global leader, which Argentina held after 1945. The idea of Perón as the uncontested man of the people was a key element not only of Peronism but in the creation of modern postwar populism. The extraordinary personality cult of Trump echoes this dynamic. Populism rests on the idea of the leader as a transcendental figure. He is the voice of the people, and he knows better than they do what they really want. General Perón also saw himself as the Godlike personification of the people. His wife, Eva Perón, explained that "Perón is a God for all of us, to the extent that we do not conceive of the sky without Perón. Perón is our sun, Perón is the water. Perón is the life of our country and the Argentine people." Time will tell if America will abide such an elevated, even mystical, conception of a redemptive national leader.
## III
Populism is both genetically and historically linked to fascism. One might argue that it is an heir to fascism—a postfascism for democratic times, which combines a more narrow commitment to democracy with authoritarian, antidemocratic impulses.
The identification of people, leader, and nation as one was of course central to fascism. Unlike populism, however, fascism initially exploited, but then contemptuously discarded, democratic procedures. When it was in power, it was not significantly mediated or limited by the legitimacy conferred by genuine, multiparty elections. In both fascist dictatorship and populist democracy, the leader is constructed as the representative and embodiment of the people, or as the personification of the people, the nation, and the nation's history. While both fascist mass dictatorships and populist democratic regimes paint a portrait of a leader who potentially knows better than the people what they really need, however, the two differ starkly.
As long as postwar populist leaders did not interfere with elections, they represented nonliberal, or even antiliberal, multiparty democratic regimes. Faith in the populist leader nonetheless went well beyond winning the popular vote (however narrow the electoral margin). That faith was also formed on the basis of the leader's personification of the people. This duality is a key feature of populist theory and its historical practice. The leader's aura both preceded and transcended the electoral moment, projecting a mythical order that stood against liberalism. Postwar populism's practice of democracy, therefore, was both a response to and a critique of the liberal order. After the dictatorial era of classical fascism, classical populism reconnected electoral democracy with anticommunism and antiliberalism. Democratic populism was an unexpected fulfillment of the long-standing and reactionary anti-Enlightenment tradition that, even so, was historically contingent. Like fascism, it arose from an illiberal tradition that had penetrated important sectors within civil society. It was an experiment in democratic politics and a response from within illiberalism to the dictatorial form of the political.
As secularized forms of the sacred, fascism and populism put forward the political trinity of leader, nation, and people, as their main source of legitimation. Both represent a political theology that extends beyond the ways the sacred always informs politics. Within these movements, there is no contradiction between the people and the nation and the representation of the people in the persona of the leader. Both ideologies believe in personification as representation, which means, in effect, that achieving the will of the people is fully delegated to the leader. The trinitarian myth of representation rests on the notion that somehow a single leader is the same as a nation and its people—a conflation of one person and two concepts. In fascism, this idea of personification does not require any rational or procedural mediation, such as electoral representation.
For Italian fascists, their movement and regime were an "authoritarian democracy" because "The demos, that is all of the people, circulates in the state." Similarly, Hitler had argued in 1935 that the "state is the only organization of popular life." Fascists distinguished between democracy as the rule of the people and liberalism as a dated and problematic form of representation—technocratic, inefficient, alienated from the "people" and the national will, and prone to capture and manipulation by particular, often "elite," interests. Dictatorship was the practical consequence of this distinction. Populism accepted the idea that liberalism blocked the true will of the people but also reformulated it. Dictatorship was now left behind, but the fascist residues of populism affected how democracy was both engaged with and reconsidered. The new populist charge against representation had been anticipated by many fascists. As the Romanian fascist leader Horia Sima argued, the will of the people could express itself at a given moment in political parties or in "democracy but nothing impedes it from also finding other forms of expression."
Fascism was similarly conceived in Argentina under the failed Uriburu dictatorship (1930–32). The Argentine dictator explained that fascism represented a shift toward republican foundations and away from democratic ones. The republic was more relevant than democracy itself. "The word Democracy with a capital D no longer has meaning for us. . . . This doesn't imply that we are not democrats but more sincerely how much we hope that at some point a democracy in lowercase, but organic and truthful, replaces the dislocated demagogy that has done us great harm." As part of his global search for forms of popular expression that could replace electoral democracy, Uriburu identified his choice with the fascist dictatorial model.
With populism, on the other hand, electoral democracy became a key part of the political equation after 1945. A former dictatorial strongman himself before 1945, Juan Perón now believed that an "organic" form of electoral democracy should replace demoliberalismo in the postwar era. The will of the people could now also be represented in elections. The leader made the popular will organic again. Otherwise, these "inorganic masses" were "susceptible to being manipulated by foreign professional agitators." In the populist sense, the agency of the masses had to be communicated in and through elections, but once this agency had been translated into votes, the leader became the only one who could channel the will of the people. Without their leaders, the masses would be lost or, even worse, might become inauthentic supporters of the will of the antipeople.
In its classical, postwar form, populism became a chimera between two distinct traditions of representation: the electoral and the dictatorial. This combination constituted the new populist modernity. The fact that early Cold War Latin American populists combined both forms of political representation had to do with context and ideology. The dual nature of populism eventually accommodated democratic and dictatorial traditions, the Enlightenment and the anti-Enlightenment, electoral representation and political theology. The postwar result of this synergy was not mass dictatorship but a new, authoritarian form of democracy.
The first populist regimes were born at the Latin American margins, but in less than a century, populism had moved to Washington, DC. This was the result of a long, truly global historical process, whereby a defeated fascism of dictatorship radically reformulated itself as democratic populism. In the early twenty-first century, populism seemed to come from nowhere. But in fact it had gradually moved to center stage from the global sidelines. As this book has shown, understanding the populism that has belatedly become central in the United States, and also in Europe, requires knowledge of its history on the periphery.
As a global manifestation of antipolitics, populist leaders typically replaced traditional politicians, but they did so without extending meaningful forms of decision making to the citizens. In the name of fighting the elites, the political heads changed, but ironically the elitism remained. Power remained in the persona of the new leader, never reaching the citizens, at least not in any systemic and sustained way. The populist leaders replaced old politics, impersonating the people and doing the thinking and deciding for them. The notion of a leader who was smarter and much better than his or her people defines the history of populism in power. Historically, populism without leadership remains an incomplete form. From peronismo to trumpismo, this ideology of authoritarian democracy both grew out of and differed from fascism, depending on where it took root, but the fundamentals remained: populists desperately need enemies of the people to confirm the fiction that they speak and act in the name of the national community.
Understanding its complex history helps us explain the persistence of modern populism and its formidable ability to undermine democratic tolerance and oppose pluralistic forms of popular sovereignty. Populism's past challenges to egalitarian forms of democracy continue in the present and are now threatening the future of our own democratic times.
# ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
This book is an outcome, and in many ways a synthesis, of two decades of cumulative historical research on fascism and populism. Having published five specialized books on these topics, I intend this new work to be a more global historical take that, although it works with primary sources, also substantially relies on significant works by many other colleagues and scholars of fascism and populism. I thank all of them, but I am especially indebted to those who have participated with me in cosmopolitan conversations across borders and oceans over the years. First, for their comments and readings, I am grateful to Andrew Arato, Ben Brower, Luis Herrán Ávila, Sandra McGee Deutsch, Pablo Piccato, Paul Gillingham, and Nadia Urbinati. Muchas gracias también to Fabián Bosoer and Carlos de la Torre for their readings. I also want to thank Paul Corner, Antonio Costa Pinto, Geoff Eley, Oz Frankel, Valeria Galimi, Aaron Jakes, Andreas Kalyvas, Natalia Mehlman Petrzela, Raanan Rein, Alberto Spektorowski, Ertug Tombus, Enzo Traverso, Jeremy Varon, Angelo Ventrone, and Hans Vorländer. Thanks also go to Giulia Albanese, Melissa Amezcua, Nick Fox, José Alves Freitas Neto, Étienne Balibar, Michele Battini, Martin Baumeister, Luis Fernando Beneduzi, Richard Bernstein, Chris Bickerton, Ernesto Bohoslavsky, Judit Bokser Liwerant, Chiara Bottici, Jonathan Brown, Amy Chazkel, Manuela Consonni, Faisal Devji, Patrizia Dogliani, Hugo Drochon, Tanya Filer, Carlos Forment, Alessio Gagliardi, Roberto García Ferreira, Carol Gluck, Amos Goldberg, Rebekka Habermas, Tanya Harmer, Ágnes Heller, Daniel Kressel, Dominick LaCapra, Simon Levis Sullam, Daniel Lvovich, Tracie Matysyk, Andrea Mammone, Will Milberg, Dirk Moses, Jose Moya, Tim Muller, Nara Milanich, Xosé Núñez Seixas, Julia Ott, Elias Palti, Matteo Pasetti, Enrique Peruzzotti, Caterina Pizzigoni, Sven Reichardt, Gema Santamaria, Leonardo Senkman, David Sheinin, Héctor Raúl Solís Gadea, Michael Steinberg, Ann Laura Stoler, Dan Stone, and Kurt Weyland.
Like all my other books, this one is connected to my teaching. Recent events precipitated its writing, but for whatever it's worth my perspective is that not of a newcomer forced to write on the theme of the day but of a student, teacher, and researcher, who over two decades has become a specialist on a topic that sadly is even more urgent than before. In fact, I have been teaching the main arguments of this book for several years, initially at Brown University and then at the New School for Social Research and at Eugene Lang College. I want to thank all the students who took my courses on fascism and populism. More recently, in 2016, I taught a seminar on fascism and populism at the Technische Universität Dresden and presented on these topics at Columbia University, the University of Texas at Austin, Northwestern University, and Brown University in the United States; the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and the University of Tel Aviv; the University of Macerata and Università Ca' Foscari in Venice; the Universities of Padova and Bologna; the University of Guadalajara in Mexico; Trent University in Canada; the University of Cambridge; the University of Lisbon; and the Universidad de la República in Montevideo, among others. My thanks to those who attended those lectures and engaged in multiple conversations.
Parts of chapters 1 and 2 were published in very different form in 2008 and 2014 in the journal Constellations. The arguments in chapter 3 were initially developed for my contribution to the Palgrave Handbook of Mass Dictatorship (2016), edited by Paul Corner and Jie-Hyun Lim.
I will always be thankful to my ideal editor, Kate Marshall, for suggesting that this book was possible and whose advice and editorial work made it much better. I also want to thank Bradley Depew at UC Press for his exceptional editorial work, as well as Dore Brown, Ann Donahue, Alex Dahne, and Tom Sullivan. I thank Luis Herrán Ávila for preparing the index.
I want to remember my Argentine professors José Sazbón and Tulio Halperín Donghi. Their influence and ideas remain critical to me. I also want to remember my abuela, Luisa Guelman, who passed away in late 2016 at 106 years old. Her long, memorable life corresponded with all the political and ideological transformations analyzed in this book. She was born in 1910, and since I was a student at the Universidad de Buenos Aires, she shared her insights from the interwar years, times that some years ago looked very different from our own. Now that this is no longer the case, it is important for me to remember that she lived long enough to witness the uncanny resemblance of the new century to the first decades of the last. She often liked to tell the story of the day that she was expelled from her University of Buenos Aires' classes during the 1930 coup in Argentina, when fascist forces wanted to leave Argentine secular and democratic traditions behind. Predictably, one of their first steps was to interrupt the life of the universities. My abuela, then, lived through all the metamorphoses of fascism and populism in history as they were experienced in Argentina and in the world, including their most recent reverberations in 2016.
As with my previous books, my family gave me their full support, and I could not have written this one without them. I want to thank my parents, Norma and Jaime, and my brothers, Diego and Inés. My wife, Laura, and my daughters, Gabriela and Lucia, were always there for me, and my gratitude for them has no borders.
# NOTES
## PROLOGUE
1. See Federico Finchelstein, "An Argentine Dictator's Legacy," New York Times, May 28, 2013. I thank Professor Hans Vorländer, the foremost expert on Pegida, and a renowned scholar of democracy and populism, for inviting me to teach about populism and fascism at the prestigious Technische Universität Dresden and for his explanations of Pegida, which took place soon after this unusual encounter with the sources.
2. On the center and the margins, see Étienne Balibar, We, the People of Europe? Reflections on Transnational Citizenship (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004), 2.
3. See, for example, Giovanni Gentile, Che cos'è il fascismo (Florence: Vallecchi, 1925); Leon Trotsky, Fascism: What It Is, How to Fight It (New York: Pioneer, 1944), and the early populist T.C. Jory, What Is Populism? An Exposition of the Principles of the Omaha Platform Adopted by the People's Party in National Convention Assembled July 4, 1892 (Salem, OR: R.E. Moores, 1895).
4. On the anti-Enlightenment, see Zeev Sternhell, The Anti-Enlightenment Tradition (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2010).
5. Andrew Arato, Post Sovereign Constitution Making: Learning and Legitimacy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), 283, 295.
6. On fascist notions of truth as detached from empirical observation, see Federico Finchelstein, "Truth, Mythology, and the Fascist Unconscious," Constellations 23, no. 2 (2016): 223–35.
7. See Jorge Luis Borges, "Palabras pronunciadas por Jorge Luis Borges en la comida que le ofrecieron los escritores," Sur 142 (1946): 114–15; "L'illusion comique," Sur 237 (1955): 9–10; "Leyenda y realidad," in Textos Recobrados III, 1956–1986 (Mexico: Debolsillo, 2015), 287–89.
## INTRODUCTION
1. See Eric Hobsbwam, The Age of Extremes: The Short Twentieth Century 1914–91 (London: Michael Joseph, 1994), 133.
2. For a paradigmatic example of the tendency to see populism as a right-wing, European, and entirely new political phenomenon, see Tzvetan Todorov, The Inner Enemies of Democracy (Cambridge: Polity, 2014), 139, 142.
3. See Cristiano Lima, "CIA Chief Calls Trump Nazi Germany Comparison 'Outrageous,'" Politico, January 15, 2017, www.politico.com/story/2017/01/cia-brennan-trump-nazi-germany-233636.
4. Andrea Mammone, "Don't Be Fooled by 'Moderate' Marine Le Pen: Front National's More Toxic Than Ever," Guardian, April 10, 2015. On PEGIDA and the German right, see Hans Vorländer, Maik Herold, and Steven Schäller, PEGIDA: Entwicklung, Zusammensetzung und Deutung einer Empörungsbewegung (Wiesbaden: Springer, 2016). On AFL (Alternative for Germany), see Nicole Berbuir, Marcel Lewandowsky, and Jasmin Siri "The AfD and Its Sympathisers: Finally a Right-Wing Populist Movement in Germany?," German Politics 24, no. 2 (2015): 154–78.
5. Because this book was finished before Trump's inauguration, the analysis of Trumpism is restricted mostly to his populist campaign. Some initial dimensions of Trumpism as a regime are addressed in A. Dirk Moses, Federico Finchelstein, and Pablo Piccato, "Juan Perón Shows How Trump Could Destroy Our Democracy without Tearing It Down," Washington Post, March 22, 2017; Federico Finchelstein and Pablo Piccato, "Trump y sus ideas sobre la ciencia," Clarín (Argentina), March 17, 2017; Pablo Piccato and Federico Finchelstein, "La ofensiva de Trump contra la sociedad civil ¿Qué sigue?," Nexos (Mexico), March 1, 2017; Federico Finchelstein, "Com Trump, Washington se torna a capital mundial do populismo," Folha de S. Paulo (Brazil), February 7, 2017.
6. James P. Pinkerton, "A Manifesto for the 60 Percent: The Center-Right Populist-Nationalist Coalition," Breitbart, September 16, 2016, www.breitbart.com/big-government/2016/09/11/manifesto-60-percent-center-right-populist-nationalist-coalition/; Scott Morefield, "Why Populism Is Replacing Conservatism, and Why It Is Winning," Breitbart, June 17, 2016, www.breitbart.com/2016-presidential-race/2016/06/17/populism-replacing-conservatism-winning/; John Hayward, "'Trump Could Be the Next Hitler!' Says the Increasingly Fascist Left," Breitbart, June 3, 2016, www.breitbart.com/big-government/2016/06/03/six-years-obamacare-liberals-suddenly-worried-fascism/.
7. Carl Hulse, "Donald Trump's Advice to Panicked Republicans: Man Up," New York Times, June 9, 2016, 14.
8. Ashley Parker, "Trump Pledges to 'Heal Divisions' (and Sue His Accusers)," New York Times, October 23, 2016, 23; "Trump Calls Himself a Victim of 'Smears' as Allegations Grow," New York Times, October 14, 2016, 15; Patrick Healy and Maggie Haberman May, "Donald Trump, Bucking Calls to Unite, Claims 'Mandate' to Be Provocative," New York Times, May 11, 2016, www.nytimes.com/2016/05/12/us/politics/donald-trump-campaign.html.
9. See Robert Paxton, interview by Isaac Chotiner, "Is Donald Trump a Fascist? Yes and No," Slate, February 10, 2016, www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/interrogation/2016/02/is_donald_trump_a_fascist_an_expert_on_fascism_weighs_in.html; and Robert Paxton, interview by Amy Goodman, "Father of Fascism Studies: Donald Trump Shows Alarming Willingness to Use Fascist Terms & Styles," Democracy Now!, March 15, 2016, www.democracynow.org/2016/3/15/father_of_fascism_studies_donald_trump; Robert O. Paxton, interview by Marc Bassets, "Con Trump tenemos una especie de cuasifascismo populista, no un fascismo plenamente desarrollado," El País, June 6, 2016, internacional.elpais.com/internacional/2016/06/05/estados_unidos/1465162717_340531.html.
10. Dylan Matthew, "I Asked 5 Fascism Experts Whether Donald Trump Is a Fascist. Here's What They Said," Vox, May 19, 2016, www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2015/12/10/9886152/donald-trump-fascism; Peter Baker, "Rise of Donald Trump Tracks Growing Debate over Global Fascism," New York Times, May 18, 2016, www.nytimes.com/2016/05/29/world/europe/rise-of-donald-trump-tracks-growing-debate-over-global-fascism.html; Jan Werner Müller, "Trump Is a Far Right Populist, Not a Fascist," Al Jazeera America, December 26, 2015, <http://america.aljazeera.com/opinions/2015/12/trump-is-a-far-right-populist-not-a-fascist.html>. Similar objections were made by historians of European fascism such as Serge Bernstein in France. See his "Non, Donald Trump n'est pas fasciste mais . . .," Le Obs, March 1, 2016, <http://tempsreel.nouvelobs.com/monde/elections-americaines/20160301.OBS5614/non-donald-trump-n-est-pas-fasciste-mais.html>.
11. For the opposing view, see Federico Finchelstein and Pablo Piccato, "A Belief System That Once Laid the Groundwork for Fascism," New York Times, December 9, 2015, www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2015/12/09/donald-trumps-america/a-belief-system-that-once-laid-the-groundwork-for-fascism?smid=tw-share; and Federico Finchelstein and Fabián Bosoer, "Is Fascism Returning to Europe?," New York Times, December 18, 2013. See also the insightful interventions by Ruth Ben-Ghiat, "An American Authoritarian," Atlantic, August 10, 2015, www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2016/08/american-authoritarianism-under-donald-trump/495263/; and Carlos De la Torre, "¿Sobrevivirá la democracia americana a Trump?," El País, October 11, 2016.
12. Federico Finchelstein, Transatlantic Fascism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010).
13. See Zeev Sternhell, The Birth of Fascist Ideology: From Cultural Rebellion to Political Revolution, with Mario Sznajder and Maia Asheri (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994); Emilio Gentile, Fascismo: Storia e interpretazione (Rome-Bari: Laterza, 2002); Robert Paxton, The Anatomy of Fascism (New York: Knopf, 2004); Geoff Eley, Nazism as Fascism: Violence, Ideology, and the Ground of Consent in Germany 1930–1945 (New York: Routledge, 2013); and Finchelstein, Transatlantic Fascism.
14. See Miguel Reale, "Nós e os fascistas da Europa," in Obras Políticas (Brasilia: UnB, 1983), vol. 3, 223–33.
15. See Reto Hofmann, The Fascist Effect: Japan and Italy, 1915–1952 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2015), 64.
16. On postfascism and Peronism, see Finchelstein, Transatlantic Fascism, 168, 170. For a discussion of postfascism for other Latin American cases, see Sandra McGee Deutsch, "Fascismo, Neo-Fascismo, ou Post-Fascismo?," Dialogos 12, no. 3 (2009), 19–44. For Europe, see, among others, Nicola Tranfaglia, Un passato scomodo: Fascismo e postfascismo (Bari: Laterza, 1999); Roger Griffin, "The 'Post-Fascism' of the Alleanza Nazionale: A Case Study in Ideological Morphology," Journal of Political Ideologies 1, no. 2 (1996): 123–45; Tamir Bar-On, Where Have All the Fascists Gone? (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007), 137; and Enzo Traverso, Les nouveaux visages du fascisme (Paris: Textuel, 2017).
17. See Zeev Sternhell, Neither Right nor Left: Fascist Ideology in France (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986); and Zeev Sternhell, "Le fascisme en France: Entre refoulement et oubli," Lignes 50, no. 2 (2016).
18. For some key studies of populism, see Nadia Urbinati, Democracy Disfigured: Opinion, Truth, and the People (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2014); Carlos de la Torre, Populist Seduction in Latin America (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2010); Ernesto Laclau, On Populist Reason (London: Verso, 2005); Raanan Rein, "From Juan Perón to Hugo Chávez and Back: Populism Reconsidered," in Shifting Frontiers of Citizenship, ed. Mario Sznajder, Luis Roniger, and Carlos Forment (Boston: Brill, 2012), 289–311; and Andrew Arato, Post Sovereign Constitution Making: Learning and Legitimacy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016).
19. Juan Domingo Perón, Memorial de Puerta de Hierro (Buenos Aires: Honorable Congreso de la Nación, 2001), 65.
20. On this topic, see Roger Griffin, "Interregnum or Endgame? The Radical Right in the 'Post-Fascist' Era," in The Populist Radical Right, ed. Cas Mudde (London: Routledge, 2017), 15.
21. "Fini in Israele 'Il fascismo fu parte del male assoluto,'" La Repubblica, November 24, 2003.
22. On the great recession, see Carles Manera, The Great Recession (Brighton: Sussex Academic Press, 2013); and Anwar Shaikh, Capitalism: Competition, Conflict, Crises (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016).
23. Urbinati, Democracy Disfigured.
## 1. WHAT IS FASCISM IN HISTORY?
1. See Zeev Sternhell, The Anti-enlightenment Tradition, trans. David Meisel (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2009).
2. See Angelo Ventrone, Grande guerra e Novecento (Rome: Donzelli, 2015), 222–25.
3. Mike Cronin, "The Blueshirt Movement, 1932–5: Ireland's Fascists?" Journal of Contemporary History 30, no. 2 (1995): 319.
4. João Ameal, A Revolução da Ordem (Lisbon: S.L., 1932), cited in "Lecturas," Acción Española (December 16, 1932): 109; "Reglamentos de los camisas azules," Bandera Argentina (February 22, 1933). See also Felipe Yofre, El fascismo y nosotros (Buenos Aires: Liga Republicana, 1933), 18, 40; Carlos Ibarguren, La inquietud de esta hora: Liberalismo, corporativismo, nacionalismo (Buenos Aires: Libreria y Editorial La Facultad, 1934); Folleto Luis F. Gallardo, La Mística del Adunismo (Buenos Aires: 1933), 15, in Archivo General de la Nación (AGN); Archivo Uriburu, Legajo 26; and also the speech by Argentine fascist leader Juan P. Ramos in AGN, Archivo Agustín P. Justo, Caja 45, doc. 146.
5. See Miguel Reale, "Nós e os fascistas da Europa," in Obras Políticas (Brasilia: UnB, 1983), 3:222–33; Jorge Vigón, "Actualidad internacional," Acción Española (May 1, 1933): 423; Jorge Vigón "El éxito del Congreso Antifascista," Acción Española (June 16, 1933), 84.
6. See the following works by George L. Mosse: Masses and Man: Nationalist and Fascist Perceptions of Reality (New York: H. Fertig, 1980); and The Nationalization of the Masses: Political Symbolism and Mass Movements in Germany from the Napoleonic Wars through the Third Reich (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1991).
7. Richard J. Evans, The Coming of the Third Reich (London: Allen Lane, 2003), 184–86. See also Wolfgang Schieder, "Fatal Attraction: The German Right and Italian Fascism," in The Third Reich between Vision and Reality: New Perspectives on German History 1918–1945, ed. Hans Momsen (Oxford: Berg, 2001); Alexander De Grand, Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany (New York: Routledge, 1995); Philippe Burrin, Fascisme, nazisme, autoritarisme (Paris: Seuil, 2000).
8. See Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2002). On Freud, see Federico Finchelstein, El Mito del fascismo: De Freud a Borges (Buenos Aires: Capital Intelectual, 2015).
9. Benito Mussolini, "La significazione," Il Popolo d'Italia, October 25, 1919; Benito Mussolini, "Un programma," Il Popolo d'Italia, February 26, 1920. See also Dino Grandi, Le origini e la missione del fascismo (Bologna: Capelli, 1922), 1, 52–57, 58–62, 66–71; and the declarations by Mussolini on the people and democracy in "Lo spirito e il compito del fascismo," L'Idea Nazionale, May 24, 1924.
10. Emilio Gentile, Le origini dell'ideologia fascista (1918–1925) (Bologna: Il Mulino, 1996), 4–6. See also the interesting study by Augusto Simonini, Il linguaggio di Mussolini (Milan: Bompiani, 2004).
11. For the best example of this trend, see Denis Mack Smith, Mussolini's Roman Empire (New York: Penguin, 1977). For a criticism of this argument, see Zeev Sternhell, "How to Think about Fascism and Its Ideology," Constellations 15, no. 3 (2008): 280–90.
12. Antonio Gramsci, Socialismo e fascismo: L'Ordine Nuovo 1921–1922 (Turin: Einaudi, 1978).
13. Benito Mussolini, "Dopo l'adunata fascista: Verso l'azione," Il Popolo d'Italia, October 13, 1919; Benito Mussolini, "Logica e demagogia," Il Popolo d'Italia, October 26, 1919; Benito Mussolini, "I volti e le maschere," Il Popolo d'Italia, March 3, 1920; Benito Mussolini, "Dopo un anno. Il fascismo," Il Popolo d'Italia, March 26, 1920; Benito Mussolini, "Fatti, non parole!," Il Popolo d'Italia, March 30, 1920; Benito Mussolini, "Nella foresta degli 'ismi,'" Il Popolo d'Italia, March 31, 1920; Benito Mussolini, "Panglossismo," Il Popolo d'Italia, April 11, 1920; Benito Mussolini, "Verso la reazione!," Il Popolo d'Italia, April 29, 1920. See also Tabelloni murali, Mostra della Rivoluzione Fascista (MRF), B 91, F 154, Sala dotrinna SF 2, Archivio Centrale dello Stato. Italy.
14. See Ruth Ben Ghiat, Fascist Modernities: Italy, 1922–1945 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001). For the notion of reactionary modernism, see Jeffrey Herf, Reactionary Modernism: Technology, Culture, and Politics in Weimar and the Third Reich (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984).
15. See Walter Benjamin, "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction," in Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken, 1969). 241. On Benjamin's notions of fascism, see also Walter Benjamin, "Theories of German Fascism," New German Critique 17 (1979): 120–28. For contemporary arguments that aestheticize and decontextualize fascism and victimization in ways that Benjamin would never have dreamed of, see Slavoj Žižek, Did Somebody Say Totalitarianism? Five Interventions in the (Mis)use of a Notion (New York: Verso, 2002); Giorgio Agamben, Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness and the Archive (New York: Zone Books, 1999).
16. Paxton explains them as "the warmth of belonging to a race now fully aware of its identity, historic destiny, and power; the excitement of participating in a vast collective enterprise; the gratification of submerging oneself in a wave of shared feelings, and of sacrificing one's petty concerns for the group's good; and the thrill of domination." Robert Paxton, The Anatomy of Fascism (New York: Knopf, 2004), 17.
17. Simonetta Falasca-Zamponi, Fascist Spectacle: The Aesthetics of Power in Mussolini's Italy (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997). See also Falasca-Zamponi's insightful essay "Fascism and Aesthetics," Constellations 15, no. 3 (2008); Mabel Berezin, Making the Fascist Self: The Political Culture of Inter-war Italy (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1997).
18. See, for example, Volt [Vincenzo Fani Ciotti], Programma della destra fascista (Florence: La Voce, 1924), 49–51.
19. "Ma fuse e confuse nella sostanza." See Benito Mussolini, "Blocco fascista anticagoiesco delle 'teste di ferro'!," Il Popolo d'Italia, October 24, 1919.
20. See Benito Mussolini, "Sintesi della lotta politica," in Opera omnia di Benito Mussolini, vol. 21 (1924; repr., Florence: La Fenice, 1956), 46.
21. See Antonio Gramsci, "La guerra è la guerra," in Socialismo e fascismo: L'Ordine Nuovo 1921–1922 (Turin: Einaudi, 1978), 55.
22. See Federico Finchelstein, Fascismo, Liturgia e Imaginario: El mito del general Uriburu y la Argentina nacionalista (Buenos Aires: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 2002), 144. On Latin American fascism, see the pathbreaking works of Sandra McGee Deutsch, Las Derechas: The Extreme Right in Argentina, Brazil, and Chile 1890–1939 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999); Alberto Spektorowski, Argentina's Revolution of the Right (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2003); Franco Savarino, "Juego de ilusiones: Brasil, México y los 'fascismos' latinoamericanos frente al fascismo italiano," Historia Crítica 37 (2009): 120–47; João Fábio Bertonha, Sobre a Direita: Estudos Sobre o Fascismo, o Nazismo e o Integralismo (Maringá, Brazil: Editora da Universidade estadual de Maringá, 2008); Hélgio Trindade, O nazi-fascismo na América Latina: Mito e realidade (Porto Alegre, Brazil: UfrGs, 2004).
23. Yitzhak Arad, Israel Gutman, and Abraham Margaliot, eds., Documents on the Holocaust (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1999), 134.
24. On fascist antisemitism, see Michele Sarfatti, Gli ebrei nell'Italia fascista: Vicende, identità, persecuzione (Turin: Einaudi, 2000); Renzo De Felice, Storia degli ebrei italiani sotto il fascismo (Turin: Einaudi, 1993); Marie-Anne Matard-Bonucci, L'Italie Fasciste et La Persécution des Juifs (Paris: Perrin, 2007); Valeria Galimi, "Politica della razza, antisemitismo, Shoah," Studi Storici 1 (2014): 169–182; Simon Levis Sullam, I Carnefici Italiani: Scene dal Genocidio Degli Ebrei, 1943–1945 (Milan: Feltrinelli, 2015).
25. See Emilio Gentile, Le religioni della política: Fra democrazie e totalitarismi (Rome-Bari: Laterza, 2001). Moreover, at times fascism established strong links with institutional religions and, in the Argentine case, presented itself as the political representative of God. On Argentine clerico-fascism, see Loris Zanatta, Del estado liberal a la nación católica: Iglesia y Ejército en los orígenes del peronismo (Bernal, Argentina: Universidad Nacional de Quilmes, 1996); and Finchelstein, Transatlantic Fascism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010). On the notion of clerico-fascism, see also Enzo Collotti, Fascismo, Fascismi (Milan: Sansoni Editore, 1994).
26. See Richard J. Evans, The Coming of the Third Reich, 184–86. On the centrality of the fascist vision of gender and masculinity, see George L. Mosse, Nationalism and Sexuality: Respectability and Abnormal Sexuality in Modern Europe (New York: H. Fertig, 1985); George L. Mosse, The Image of Man: The Creation of Modern Masculinity (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996). See also Victoria De Grazia, How Fascism Ruled Women: Italy 1922–1945 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992).
27. On the conceptual history of totalitarianism, see Enzo Traverso, El Totalitarismo: Historia de Un Debate (Buenos Aires: Eudeba, 2001); Anson Rabinbach, "Moments of Totalitarianism," History and Theory 45 (2006): 72–100; Ruth Ben-Ghiat, "A Lesser Evil? Italian Fascism in/and the Totalitarian Equation," in The Lesser Evil: Moral Approaches to Genocide Practices in a Comparative Perspective, ed. Helmut Dubiel and Gabriel Motzkin (New York: Routledge, 2004); Emilio Gentile, "Fascism and the Italian Road to Totalitarianism," Constellations 15, no. 3 (2008): 291–302.
28. Benito Mussolini, "La dottrina del fascismo," in Opera omnia di Benito Mussolini, vol. 34 (1932; repr., Florence: La Fenice, 1967), 119–21. In English, see also Benito Mussolini, Fascism: Doctrine and Institutions (Rome: Ardita, 1935).
29. On this topic, see Hannah Arendt, "Ideology and Terror: A Novel Form of Government," Review of Politics 15, no. 3 (1953): 303–27.
30. See, for example, Segreteria Particolare del Duce, Carteggio riservato, B 50 251/RF "Avanti!" Pietro Nenni (1931), Archivi Fascisti, Archivio Centrale dello Stato, Italy; Dossier France, Daniel Guerin, F Delta 721, 51/1, Vingt Ans d'Histoire Allemande, Bibliothèque de documentation internationale contemporaine, Nanterre, France; Piero Gobetti, On Liberal Revolution (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2000), 226; G.L. "1935," Cuaderno di 'Giustizia e libertá' 12 (1935): 4–5.
31. Paxton, Anatomy of Fascism, 104.
32. See Matteo Pasetti, L'Europa Corporativa: Una Storia Transnazionale tra Le Due Guerre Mondiali (Bologna: Bononia University Press, 2016); Antonio Costa Pinto and Francisco Palomanes Martinho, eds., A Onda Corporativa: Corporativismo e Ditaduras na Europa e América Latina (Rio de Janeiro: Editora da Fundação Getulio Vargas, 2016).
33. In this regard, Slavoj Žižek seems to shift from argument into hyperbole. For him, the rationalist background of communism explains the "emancipatory potential" of Stalinism. Slavoj Žižek, Did Somebody Say Totalitarianism? Five Interventions in the (Mis)use of a Notion (New York: Verso, 2001), 131.
34. On the idea of listening to reason, see Michael Steinberg, Listening to Reason: Culture, Subjectivity, and 19th- Century Music (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004). On the Nazi appropriation of Beethoven, see David B. Dennis, Beethoven in German Politics, 1870–1989 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1996). I want to thank Eli Zaretsky for sharing his thoughts about The Lives of Others with me.
35. One may find a similar presentation in Gary Oldman's character's gruesome killings while he listened to Beethoven in Luc Besson's The Professional (1994). The killer in Mary Harron's American Psycho (2000), who listens to Phil Collins while massacring people, may be seen as an ironic downplaying of this aesthetic movement.
36. A different trend, developed by Marxist social scientists, continued the more structural line of analysis without sufficiently exploring its interconnected historical processes. The best example of this approach is Nicos Poulantzas, Fascism and Dictatorship: The Third International and the Problem of Fascism (London: NLB, 1974).
37. Renzo De Felice, Mussolini il Revoluzionario 1883–1920, vol. 22 (1965; repr., Turin: Einaudi, 1995); Renzo De Felice, "Il fenomeno fascista," Storia Contemporanea 10 (1979); Emilio Gentile, "Fascism in Italian Historiography: In Search of an Individual Historical Identity," Journal of Contemporary History 1, no. 2 (1986): 183.
38. This stance was nonetheless increasingly stressed, becoming what Norberto Bobbio has defined as a "strong anticommunist passion" embodied in De Felice's historical narrative. See Norberto Bobbio, "Revisionismo nella storia d'Italia," in Italiani, amici, nemici, ed. Norberto Bobbio, Renzo De Felice, and Gian Enrico Rusconi (Milan: Reset, 1996), 57. With regard to researching fascism globally, De Felice, and historians like him, never considered this exercise either essential or indispensable and was careful to remark, with increasing emphasis throughout his vast work, the Italian specificity of the fascist phenomenon compared with German Nazism or other radical-wing movements. Other historians at the time presented a more comparative view. See, for example, Eugen Weber, Varieties of Fascism: Doctrines of Revolution in the Twentieth Century (New York, 1964); Walter Laqueur and George Mosse, eds., International Fascism, 1920–1945 (New York: Harper and Row, 1966); S.J. Woolf, ed., European Fascism (New York: Vintage Books, 1969); Walter Laqueur, ed., Fascism: A Reader's Guide (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976). For an overview of the historiography, see Wolfgang Wippermann, Faschismustheorien: Die Entwicklung der Diskussion von den Anfängen bis heute (Darmstadt, Germany: Primus, 1997); Emilio Gentile, Fascismo: Storia e interpretazione (Rome: Laterza, 2002).
39. On this topic, see Enzo Traverso, El Totalitarismo.
40. Zeev Sternhell, "Fascism: Reflections on the Fate of Ideas in Twentieth Century History," Journal of Political Ideologies 5, no. 2 (2000). It is possible to observe this particular Cold War continuity in De Felice's work. In 1969, De Felice argued that the theory of totalitarianism "with respect to our problem, undoubtedly poses suggestive aspects giving rise to many questions; but—at the same time—offers important elements for the study of historical interpretation of fascism as a phenomenon, elements which should not be underestimated." De Felice suggested that, in order to understand the historical reality of fascism, one should have to analyze its totalitarian forms. See Renzo De Felice, El Fascismo: Sus interpretaciones (Buenos Aires: Paidós, 1976), 120; Renzo De Felice, Il Fascismo: Le interpretazioni dei contemporanei e degli storici (Rome-Bari: Laterza, 1998), 36. See also Emilo Gentile, "Renzo De Felice: A Tribute," Journal of Contemporary History 32, no. 2 (1997), 149; Emilo Gentile, La via Italiana al totalitarismo (Rome: La Nuova Italia Scientifica, 1995), 114–17.
41. See, for example, Roger Griffin, "The Primacy of Culture: The Current Growth (or Manufacture) of Consensus within Fascist Studies," Journal of Contemporary History 37, no. 1 (2002): 21–43; Stanley G. Payne, "Historical Fascism and the Radical Right," Journal of Contemporary History 35, no. 1 (2000): 111; Roger Griffin, ed., International Fascism: Theories, Causes and the New Consensus (London, 1998); Roger Eatwell, "Towards a New Model of Generic Fascism," Journal of Theoretical Politics 4, no. 2 (1992).
42. Stanley G. Payne, A History of Fascism 1914–1945 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1995), 461.
43. Gilbert Allardyce, "What Fascism Is Not: Thoughts on the Deflation of a Concept," American Historical Review 84, no. 2 (1979): 369.
44. Gentile, Fascismo, 9–10.
45. Paxton, Anatomy of Fascism, 23, 218.
46. See Ernst Nolte, La guerra civil europea, 1917–1945: Nacionalsocialismo y bolchevismo (Mexico: FCE, 1994, originally published as Der europäische Bürgerkrieg 1917–1945: Nationalsozialismus und Bolschewismus, Berlin: Propyläen, 1987). See François Furet and Ernst Nolte, Fascism and Communism (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2001). For Nolte and the Historikerstreit, see Forever in the Shadow of Hitler? Original Documents of the Historikerstreit, the Controversy Concerning the Singularity of the Holocaust, ed. and trans. Truett Cates and James Knowlton (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, 1993). For analyses of this debate, see Dominick LaCapra, Representing the Holocaust: History, Theory, Trauma (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1994), 49–50, 53, 106, 190; Dominick LaCapra, History and Memory after Auschwitz (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1998), 55–59, 64–65; María Pía Lara, Narrating Evil: A Postmetaphysical Theory of Reflective Judgment (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007); Matthew G. Specter, Habermas: An Intellectual Biography (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010).
47. On Nolte as a pioneer for generic historians, see Aristotle Kallis, "Fascism—A 'Generic' Concept?," in The Fascism Reader, ed. Aristotle Kallis (London: Routledge, 2003), 46.
48. Ernst Nolte, Three Faces of Fascism: Action Française, Italian fascism, National Socialism (New York: Mentor, 1969), 51, 81.
49. Nolte, Three Faces of Fascism, 529, 540.
50. Zeev Sternhell, "How to Think about Fascism and Its Ideology," Constellations 15, no. 3 (2008): 282.
51. Zeev Sternhell, La Droite révolutionnaire (1885–1914): Les origines françaises du fascisme (Paris: Gallimard, 1997), x.
52. Sternhell, La Droite révolutionnaire, xxxii.
53. Zeev Sternhell "Fascism: Reflections on the Fate of Ideas in Twentieth Century History," Journal of Political Ideologies 5, no. 2 (2000): 139.
54. Sternhell, La Droite révolutionnaire, x.
55. See Zeev Sternhell, The Birth of Fascist Ideology: From Cultural Rebellion to Political Revolution, with Mario Sznajder and Maia Asheri (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994), 9, 12; Zeev Sternhell, Neither Right nor Left: Fascist Ideology in France (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986), 27; Sternhell, La Droite révolutionnaire, ix-lxxvi; Zeev Sternhell "Fascist Ideology" in Fascism: A Reader's Guide. Analyses, Interpretations, Bibliography, ed. Walter Laqueur (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976), 315–71.
56. Zeev Sternhell, "How to Think about Fascism and Its Ideology," Constellations 15, no. 3 (2008): 281, 282.
57. George L. Mosse, The Nationalization of the Masses: Political Symbolism and Mass Movements in Germany from the Napoleonic Wars through the Third Reich (1975; repr., Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1996), 214. Page numbers refer to the 1996 edition.
58. It is important to note that many insights into intellectual, cultural, and mythological practices that appear in one way or another in the texts of Mosse can be identified with the historiographical line stemming from De Felice. The most remarkable case in this context is that of Emilio Gentile's important book Il culto del littorio (Rome: Laterza, 1993). Gentile also recognized, without having to relinquish the idea of the specificity of Italian fascism, the innovative historiographical importance of both Mosse and De Felice, in his book on the origins of fascist ideology (Origini dell' ideologia fascista), 2; George Mosse, Intervista sul Nazismo: A cura di Michael Ledeen (Rome: Laterza, 1977), 89–90.
59. George Mosse, The Fascist Revolution: Toward a General Theory of Fascism (New York: Howard Fertig, 1998), x-xvii, 42.
60. Enzo Traverso, "Interpreting Fascism: Mosse, Sternhell and Gentile in Comparative Perspective," Constellations 15, no. 3 (2008): 310.
61. For example, Stanley Payne presents seven reasons for fascism's lack of authenticity in Latin America: 1) minimal political mobilization, 2) nationalism without territorial ambitions, 3) military predominance, 4) impossibility of autarchy in dependent and underdeveloped countries, 5) elitist client/patron relations, 6) multiracial nature of society, and 7) weakness of the left before 1960. Whereas points 1, 2, 5, and 7 are simply wrong with respect to South American countries like Argentina, Bolivia, Chile, or Brazil, it would be possible to ascribe point 3 to Spanish fascism or points 4 and 5 to Italian fascism, especially in the southern half of the Italian peninsula. Further, if we replace "race" with "ethnicity," we could easily present Nazi Germany before the Holocaust as a multiethnic society with regard to point 6. See Payne, History of Fascism, 340; and his earlier Fascism: Comparison and Definition (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1980), 167–76. See also Alistair Hennessy, "Fascism and Populism in Latin America," in Fascism: A Reader's Guide. Analyses, Interpretations, Bibliography, ed. Walter Laqueur (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976), 255–94; Finchelstein, Transatlantic Fascism, 183.
62. For example, Roger Griffin, a noted scholar of fascism, views fascism as a "consciously constructed ideal type of fascism which sets up to be more heuristically useful to academic research than existing ones." See Roger Griffin, The Nature of Fascism (New York: Routledge, 1991), 12; and Stanley Payne, A History of Fascism 1914–1945 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1995), 4. For a criticism of Griffin in this regard, see Daniel Woodley, Fascism and Political Theory: Critical Perspectives on Fascist Ideology (London, 2010), 8–13.
63. Payne, History of Fascism, 14; Roger Griffin, Modernism and Fascism: The Sense of a Beginning under Mussolini and Hitler (London, 2007), xv, 332; Griffin, Nature of Fascism.
64. See Griffin, Nature of Fascism; Griffin, Fascist Century (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008). See also Payne, History of Fascism; and his earlier Fascism: Comparison and Definition (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1980), 167–76; Paxton, Anatomy of Fascism; Roger Eatwell, "On Defining the 'Fascist Minimum': The Centrality of Ideology," Journal of Political Ideologies 1 (1996): 303–19.
65. Benjamin Zachariah, "A Voluntary Gleichschaltung? Indian Perspectives Towards a Non-Eurocentric Understanding of Fascism," Transcultural Studies 2 (2014): 66–67.
66. The most recent symptomatic example of this resistance to global approaches to fascism outside Europe can be found in the teleological and highly repetitive digressions expressed in David Roberts's Fascist Interactions: Proposals for a New Approach to Fascism and Its Era, 1919–1945 (New York: Berghahn Books, 2016). For my criticism of other historiographical examples outside Europe, see Finchelstein, Fascismo, liturgia e imaginario, 9–27.
67. See Constantin Iordachi, "Comparative Fascist Studies; An introduction," in Comparative Fascist Studies: New Perspectives, ed. Constantin Iordachi (London: Routledge, 2010), 41; Zachariah, "Voluntary Gleichschaltung?, 63–100. See also Benjamin Zachariah, "Rethinking (the Absence) of Fascism in India, c. 1922–45," in Cosmopolitan Thought Zones: South Asia and the Global Circulation of Ideas, ed. Sugata Bose and Kris Manjapra (Houndmills, Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), 178–209.
68. Benjamin Zachariah, "At the Fuzzy Edges of Fascism: Framing the Volk in India," South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies 38, no. 4 (2015): 641.
69. Federico Finchelstein, Transatlantic Fascism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010), 4, 39.
70. See Sebastian Conrad, What Is Global History? (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2016), 3, 44–45, 78–79. On transnational and comparative history, see, for example, Daniel Rodgers, Frederick Cooper, Pierre-Yves Saunier, Michael Werner, and Bénédicte Zimmerman, "Penser l'histoire croisée: Entre empirie et réflexivité," Annales. Histoire, sciences sociales 58 (2003): 7–36; and Gunilla Budde, Sebastian Conrad, and Oliver Janz, ed., Transnationale Geschichte: Themen, Theorien, Tendenzen (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck and Ruprecht, 2006).
71. Rebekka Habermas, "Lost in Translation: Transfer and Nontransfer in the Atakpame Colonial Scandal," Journal of Modern History 86 (March 2014): 48, 49.
72. See Reto Hofmann, The Fascist Effect: Japan and Italy, 1915–1952 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2015), 7. On Japanese fascism, see also Rikki Kersten, "Japan," in The Oxford Handbook of Fascism, ed. R.J.B. Bosworth (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 526–44.
73. Silvio Villegas, No hay enemigos a la derecha (Manizales: Arturo Zapata, 1937), 80, 86, 144, 145. I want to thank Luis Herrán Ávila for sharing this source with me.
74. See José Vasconcelos, "El Fulgor en la tiniebla," Timón, March 23, 1940; "En Defensa propia: Los protocolos de los sabios de Sión," Timón, May 25, 1940; and "Otro fantasma: El nazismo en la América española," Timón, May 4, 1940. These articles were published in Itzhak M. Bar-Lewaw, ed., La Revista "Timón" y José Vasconcelos (Mexico: Edimex, 1971), 77–79, 138–40, 146–49.
75. See Jean Meyer, El Sinarquismo: ¿Un Fascismo Mexicano? 1937–1947 (Mexico: Joaquín Mortiz, 1979).
76. See Tirso Molinari Morales, El fascismo en el Perú (Lima: Fondo Editorial de la Facultad de Ciencias Sociales, 2006), 300–3.
77. See Giulia Albanese, Dittature Mediterranee: Sovversioni fasciste e colpi di stato in Italia, Spagna e Portogallo (Rome: Laterza, 2016), 210, 211; Sven Reichardt, "Violence, Body, Politics: Paradoxes in Interwar Germany" in Political Violence and Democracy in Western Europe, 1918–1940, ed. Chris Millington and Kevin Passmore (Houndmills: Palgrave, 2015), 62–96.
78. See Albanese, Dittature Mediterranee, xxi, xxii; Finchelstein, Transatlantic Fascism; Miguel Ángel Perfecto, "La derecha radical Argentina y España: Relaciones culturales e interdependencias," Studia Historica Historia Contemporánea 33 (2015); Constantin Iordachi, The Comparative History of Fascism in Eastern Europe: Sources and Commentaries (London: Bloomsbury, 2017). On global fascism, see Stein Ugelvik Larsen, ed., Fascism outside Europe: The European Impulse against Domestic Conditions in the Diffusion of Global Fascism (Boulder, CO: Social Science Monographs, 2001).
79. As Kiran Klaus Patel and Sven Reichardt maintain, "Transnational processes of exchange and adaptation that began in or led to Nazi Germany have been largely neglected. Transnationalism and Nazism seem incompatible, and transnational history continues to concentrate on peaceful forms of exchange between similarly structured societies" ("The Dark Side of Transnationalism Social Engineering and Nazism, 1930s–40s," Journal of Contemporary History 51, no. 1 [2016]: 6). Christian Goeschel also perceptively proposes moving beyond a homogenizing notion of transfer: "It is time to clarify our terminology and think more concretely in terms of a history of fascist entanglement, a history that examines both mutual influences amongst fascist regimes and their interconnectedness rather than simply looking at transfers. The 'fascist entanglement' perspective also examines the significance of transfers and does not assume that all crossovers were necessarily equally important for the actors involved, paying close attention to friction amongst the actors" ("Italia Docet? The Relationship between Italian Fascism and Nazism Revisited," European History Quarterly 42, no. 3 [2012], 490). See also the important earlier essay by Ruth Ben-Ghiat, "Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany: The Dynamics of an Uneasy Relationship," in Art, Culture, and the Media in the Third Reich, ed. Richard Etlin (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), 257–86; and Benjamin Martin, The Nazi-Fascist New Order for European Culture (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2016).
80. Zachariah, "Voluntary Gleichschaltung?," 63.
81. César Pico, Carta a Jacques Maritain sobre la colaboración de los católicos con los movimientos de tipo fascista (Buenos Aires: Francisco A. Colombo, 1937), 7–8, 13–14, 20, 21, 36, 40–41, 43.
82. See José Maria Pemán, "Pasemos a la escucha," Sol y Luna 4 (1940): 91.
83. Faisal Devji, The Impossible Indian: Gandhi and the Temptation of Violence (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2012), 21; Markus Daechsel, "Scientism and Its Discontents: The Indo-Muslim 'Fascism' of Inayatullah Khan al-Mashriqi," Modern Intellectual History 3, no. 3 (2006): 452–53; Hofmann, Fascist Effect, 46.
84. Federico Finchelstein, The Ideological Origins of the Dirty War: Fascism, Populism, and Dictatorship in Twentieth Century Argentina (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014).
85. See Reto Hofmann, Fascist Effect, 136–42. On the Cold War in Latin America, see Tanya Harmer, "The Cold War in Latin America," in The Routledge Handbook of the Cold War, ed. Artemy M. Kalinovsky and Craig Daigle (Abingdon: Routledge, 2014); Tanya Harmer, Allende's Chile and the Inter-American Cold War (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2011). See also Gilbert M. Joseph, "Latin America's Long Cold War," in A Century of Revolution: Insurgent and Counterinsurgent Violence during Latin America's Long Cold War, ed. Greg Grandin and Gilbert M. Joseph (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010); Virginia Garrard-Burnett, Mark Atwood Lawrence, and Julio E. Moreno, eds., Beyond the Eagle's Shadow: New Histories of Latin America's Cold War (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2013).
86. Andrea Mammone, Transnational Neofascism in France and Italy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), xix.
87. See Luis Herrán Ávila, "Anticommunism, the Extreme Right, and the Politics of Enmity in Argentina, Colombia, And Mexico, 1946–1972" (PhD diss., The New School for Social Research, 2016); and his article "Las guerrillas blancas, anticomunismo transnacional e imaginarios de derechas en Argentina y México, 1954–1972," Quinto Sol 19, no. 1 (2015); Daniel Gunnar Kressel, "The Hispanic Community of Nations: The Spanish-Argentine Nexus and the Imagining of a Hispanic Cold War Bloc," Cahiers des Amériques latines 79, no. 2 (2015): 115–33. See also Leandro Pereira Gonçalves, "Plínio Salgado e a Guerra Fria: Uma análise entre Brasil e Portugal no âmbito das Guerras Coloniais," Cahiers des Amériques latines 79, no. 2 (2015): 31–54; Odilon Caldeira Neto, Sob o signo do sigma: Integralismo, neointegralismo e antissemitismo (Maringá: EDUEM, 2014); Ernesto Bohoslavsky and Stéphane Boisard, "Les droites latino-américaines pendant la guerre froide (1959–1989)," Cahiers des Amériques latines 79, no. 2 (2015): 17–30; the essays in Olivier Dard, ed., Organisations, Mouvements et partis des Droites Radicales au XXe siècle (Bern: Peter Lang, 2016); Matteo Albanese and Pablo del Hierro, Transnational Fascism in the Twentieth Century: Spain, Italy and the Global Neo-Fascist Network (London: Bloomsbury, 2016).
88. See Jorge Luis Borges, "Deutsches Requiem," in Obras Completas (Buenos Aires: Emecé, 1996), 1:581; Jorge Luis Borges, Labyrinths: Selected Stories and Other Writings (New York: New Directions, 1964), 147. On Borges and Zur Linde, see Finchelstein, El Mito del fascismo.
89. I thank Ben Brower for sharing his reflections on the relationship of physical violence to "symbolic violence." On this topic, see also Étienne Balibar, "Outlines of a Topography of Cruelty: Citizenship and Civility in the Era of Global Violence," Constellations 8, no. 1 (2001); Étienne Balibar, Violence and Civility (New York: Columbia University Press, 2015); Richard J. Bernstein, Violence: Thinking without Banisters (Cambridge: Polity, 2013); Martin Jay, Refractions of Violence (New York: Routledge, 2003). On fascism, see also Angelo Ventrone, La seduzione totalitaria (Rome: Donzelli, 2003); Francisco Sevillano Calero, Exterminar: El terror con Franco (Madrid: Oberon, 2004); Sven Reichardt, "Fascismo e teoria delle pratiche sociali: Violenza e communità come elementi di un praxeologico di fascismo," Storiografia 12 (2008).
90. See Finchelstein, El Mito del fascismo.
91. On antifascism and its view of fascism, see Benedetto Croce, Scritti e discorsi politici, 1943–1947, 2 vols. (Bari: Laterza 1963), 1:7, 2:46, 357. See also Renzo De Felice, Interpretations of Fascism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1977), 14–23; Enzo Collotti, ed., Fascismo e antifascismo (Rome: Laterza, 2000); Leonardo Paggi, "Antifascism and the Reshaping of the Democratic Consensus in Post-1945 Italy," New German Critique 67 (1996); Manuela Consonni, L'Eclisse dell'Antifascismo (Rome: Laterza, 2015); Hugo García, "Transnational History: A New Paradigm for Anti-fascist Studies?" Contemporary European History 25, no. 4 (2016): 563–72; Hugo García, Mercedes Yusta, Xavier Tabet, and Cristina Clímaco, eds., Rethinking Anti-fascism: History, Memory and Politics, 1922 to the Present (New York: Berghahn, 2016).
92. Jean Améry, At the Mind's Limits (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1980), x.
93. Chaim Kaplan, Scroll of Agony: The Warsaw Diary of Chaim A. Kaplan (New York: Collier Books, 1973), 280–81.
94. Primo Levi, The Black Hole of Auschwitz (Cambridge: Polity, 2005), 8, 33, 72.
95. Ian Thomson, Primo Levi (London: Hutchinson, 2002), 26–27.
96. On notions of the enemy, see Finchelstein, Transatlantic Fascism; Angelo Ventrone, Il Nemico Interno: Immagini, parole e simboli della lotta politica nell'Italia del Novecento (Rome: Donzelli, 2005).
97. There are some significant exceptions among historians of fascism that have explored the connections between fascism and Nazism and the Holocaust. I see this chapter as providing an elaborate complement to these works. See, for example, Tim Mason, Nazism, Fascism and the Working Class (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995); Mosse, Fascist Revolution; Geoff Eley, Nazism as Fascism: Violence, Ideology and the Ground of Consent in Germany 1930–1945 (New York: Routledge, 2013).
98. Saul Friedländer, "Nazism: Fascism or Totalitarianism," in Charles S. Maier, Stanley Hoffmann, and Andrew Gould, ed., The Rise of the Nazi Regime: Historical Reassessments (Boulder: Westview Press, 1986), 30. See also Saul Friedländer, Memory, History, and the Extermination of the Jews of Europe (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993), 26; Friedländer, "Mosse's Influence on the Historiography of the Holocaust," in What History Tells: George L. Mosse and the Culture of Modern Europe, ed. Stanley G. Payne, David J. Sorkin, and John S. Tortorice (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2004), 142.
99. Friedländer pushes his point radically enough to limit any kind of comparison. In his critique of the work of the German historian Wolfgang Schieder, Friedlander argues, "And a point, on which it seems useless to dwell, Nazi anti-Semitism has been compared to the 'racism' of Italian fascists toward Africans, slaves, and the Germans of southern Tyrol" ("Nazism," 27). For a more nuanced approach, see Ian Kershaw, Hitler, the Germans and the Final Solution (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2008), 345.
100. For important works on these connections, see A. Dirk Moses, ed., Empire, Colony, Genocide: Conquest, Occupation, and Subaltern Resistance in World History (New York, 2008); Bashir and Amos Goldberg, "Deliberating the Holocaust and the Nakba: Disruptive Empathy and Binationalism in Israel/Palestine," Journal of Genocide Research 16, no. 1 (2014): 77–99; Dan Stone, History, Memory and Mass Atrocity: Essays on the Holocaust and Genocide (London, 2006); Donald Bloxham, The Final Solution: A Genocide (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009).
101. Matthew P. Fitzpatrick, "The Pre-History of the Holocaust? The Sonderweg and Historikerstreit Debates and the Abject Colonial Past," Central European History 41, no. 3 (2008); Edward Ross Dickinson, "The German Empire: An Empire?" History Workshop Journal 66 (2008); Olivier Le Cour Grandmaison, Coloniser, exterminer: Sur la guerre et l'état colonial (Paris: Fayard, 2005); Isabel Hull, Absolute Destruction: Military Culture and the Practices of War in Imperial Germany (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2005); Joël Kotek, "Sonderweg: Le génocide des Herero, symptôme d'un Sonderweg allemand?" La Revue d'histoire de la Shoah 189 (2008); Jürgen Zimmerer, "The First Genocide of the Twentieth Century: The German War of Destruction in Southwest Africa (1904–1908) and the Global History of Genocide," in The Holocaust: Lessons and Legacies, ed., Doris L. Bergen (Chicago: 2008), 34–64; Donald Bloxham, The Final Solution: A Genocide (Oxford: Oxford University Press 2009); Benjamin Brower, "Genealogies of Modern Violence, Arendt and Imperialism in Africa 1830–1914," in The Cambridge History of Violence, ed. Louise Edwards, Nigel Penn, and Jay Winter, vol. 4 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017).
102. See Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York: Meridian, 1959) 158–84; Hannah Arendt, "The Seeds of a Fascist International," in Essays in Understanding, 1930–1954, ed. Jerome Kohn (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1994), 147.
103. See Raul Hilberg, The Destruction of the European Jews (New York: Holmes and Meier, 1985) 660–79; Susan Zuccotti, The Italians and the Holocaust: Persecution, Rescue, and Survival (New York: Basic Books, 1987); Simon Levis Sullam, I Carnefici Italiani: Scene dal Genocidio degli ebrei, 1943–1945 (Milan: Feltrinelli, 2015).
104. I borrow the concept "laboratories of fascism" from Enzo Traverso's key work The Origins of Nazi Violence.
105. See Lloyd E. Eastman, "Fascism in Kuomintang China: The Blue Shirts," China Quarterly 49 (January–March 1972): 4.
106. Antonio Costa Pinto, Os Camisas Azuis e Salazar—Rolão Preto e o Fascismo em Portugal (Porto Alegre: EDIPUCRS, 2016), 110. On Portuguese fascism and its international connections with other fascisms, see also Nuno Simão Ferreira, "Alberto de Monsaraz e a vaga dos nacionalismos político-autoritários europeus do pós-I Guerra mundial: Um rumo até o fascismo?" Lusíada História 4 (2007): 7–75.
107. See Federico Finchelstein, "Truth, Mythology and the Fascist Unconscious," Constellations 23, no. 2 (2016): 227.
108. Ibid., 225.
109. Ventrone, La seduzione totalitaria, 138–139, 153, 185.
110. See Primo Levi, The Drowned and the Saved (New York: Vintage, 1989), 105. On Levi's identification of Nazism with fascism, see Primo Levi, Conversazioni e interviste 1964–1987 (Turin: Einaudi, 1997), 245, 250.
111. On the negative sublime, see the following works by Dominick LaCapra: History and Memory after Auschwitz (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1998), 27–30; Representing the Holocaust: History, Theory, Trauma (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1994), 100–110; Writing History, Writing Trauma (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001), 94.
112. For some examples see Sergio Panunzio, Diritto, forza e violenza: Lineamenti di una teoria della violenza (Bologna: Capelli, 1921), 17; Curzio Suckert (Malaparte), L'Europa Vivente: Teoria Storica del Sindicalismo Nazionale (Florence: La Voce, 1923), xlviii, 1–5, 22–25, 34, 111–19; Curzio Malaparte, Italia barbara (Turin: P. Gobetti, 1925). For an early criticism of fascism's appreciation of violence "for its own sake," see Rodolfo Mondolfo, Per la comprensione storica del fascismo (Bologna: Capelli, 1922) i–iii, xv, xxxiv–xxxv; Rodolfo Mondolfo, "Forza e violenza nella storia (Aprendo la discussione)," in Diritto, forza e violenza: Lineamenti di una teoria della violenza, ed. Sergio Panunzio (Bologna: Capelli, 1921), viii, xi, xiii, xv, xvii, xvii, xviii, xix.
113. MRF B 93 F, 159 SF 1, Archivio Centrale dello Stato, Italy. Mussolini said, "I don't give a damn" (me ne frego)—the proud motto of the fighting squads scrawled by a wounded man on his bandages is not only an act of philosophic stoicism; it sums up a doctrine that is not merely political: it is evidence of a fighting spirit that accepts all risks. It signifies a new style of Italian life. The Fascist accepts and loves life; he rejects and despises suicide as cowardly. Life as he understands it means duty, elevation, conquest; life must be lofty and full; it must be lived for oneself but above all for others, both nearby and far off, present and future" (Benito Mussolini, "La dottrina del fascismo," in Opera omnia di Benito Mussolini, vol. 34 [Florence: La Fenice, 1967], 119–21).
114. MRF B 93 F, 159 SF 1, Archivio Centrale dello Stato, Italy.
115. See, for example, tabelloni murali, MRF B 93 F 158; MRF B 91 F, 154 Sala Dotrinna SF 2, tabelloni murali," Archivio Centrale dello Stato. Italy.
116. See Acción Española, Antología, March 1937, 366; Finchelstein, Origins of Dirty War, 45; James P. Jankowski, "The Egyptian Blue Shirts and the Egyptian Wafd, 1935–1938," Middle Eastern Studies 6 (1970): 82; Eastman, "Fascism in Kuomintang China," 9–10.
117. Villegas, No hay enemigos a la derecha, 224; Constantin Iordachi, "God's Chosen Warriors," in Comparative Fascist Studies, ed. Constantin Iordachi (London: Routledge, 2010), 345–47
118. See Benito Mussolini, "Vivere pericolosamente," in Opera omnia di Benito Mussolini, vol. 21 (1924; repr., Florence: La Fenice, 1960), 40.
119. See Benito Mussolini, "La dottrina del fascismo" in Opera omnia di Benito Mussolini, vol. 34 (Florence: La Fenice, 1967), 119–21. For a more specific Fascist self-understanding of the state as shown in the "permanent" fascist exhibition of 1942, see MRF B, 91 F, 154 Sala Dotrinna SF 2, tabelloni murali, "Lo Stato Fascista"; "I Codici di Mussolini," Archivio Centrale dello Stato, Italia.
120. See Ann Laura Stoler, "On Degrees of Imperial Sovereignty," Public Culture 18, no. 1 (2006): 135.
121. Bruno Biancini, Dizionario Mussoliniano Mille Affermazioni e Definizioni Del Duce (Milan: Hoepli, 1939), 45, 88.
122. For a study of this notion within other forms of contemporary imperialism that embrace the idea of a "war without an end," see Ellen Meiksins Wood, Empire of Capital (London: Verso, 2005), 143–51. Meiksins Wood does not mention that fascism may have been the first imperialism to embrace this notion of war, thus making it a precedent to its contemporary followers.
123. MRF B, 93 F, 155 SF 1 Impero. See also Collez, Muss #92; #47, Archivio Centrale dello Stato, Italy.
124. Benito Mussolini, "La dottrina del fascismo," in Opera omnia di Benito Mussolini, vol. 34 (Florence: La Fenice, 1967), 119–21.
125. On the Fascist International, see Michael Ledeen, Universal Fascism: The Theory and Practice of the Fascist International, 1928–1936 (New York: H. Fertig, 1972); Davide Sabatini, L'internazionale di Mussolini: la diffusione del fascismo in Europa nel progetto politico di Asvero Gravelli (Rome: Edizioni Tusculum, 1997); Marco Cuzzi, L'internazionale delle camicie nere: i CAUR, Comitati d'azione per l'universalità di Roma, 1933–1939 (Milan: Mursia, 2005).
126. See Hannah Arendt, "Ideology and Terror: A Novel Form of Government," Review of Politics 15, no. 3 (1953), 303–27; The Origins of Totalitarianism, 158–84; Hannah Arendt, "The Seeds of a Fascist International," in Essays in Understanding 1930–1954, ed. Jerome Kohn (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1994), 147.
127. See Sternhell, Birth of Fascist Ideology; Sternhell, Anti-enlightenment Tradition. See also by Sternhell, Histoire et Lumières: Changer le Monde par la Raison (Paris: Albin Michel, 2014); "Fascism and Its Ideology," 280–90.
128. I thank my colleague Andreas Kalyvas for his suggestions and insights on the birth of Athenian democracy.
129. Peter Fritzsche, "The Role of 'the People' and the Rise of the Nazis," in Transformations of Populism in Europe and the Americas: History and Recent Tendencies, ed. John Abromeit, Bridget Maria Chesterton, Gary Marotta, and York Norman (London: Bloomsbury, 2016), 37; Geoff Eley, "Conservatives-Radical Nationalists-Fascists: Calling the People into Politics, 1890–1930," in Transformations of Populism in Europe and the Americas: History and Recent Tendencies, ed. John Abromeit, Bridget Maria Chesterton, Gary Marotta, and York Norman (London: Bloomsbury, 2016), 74; Ismael Saz, España contra España: Los nacionalismos franquistas (Madrid: Marcial Pons, 2010), 53; António Costa Pinto, The Nature of Fascism Revisited, Social Science Monographs (New York: Columbia University Press, 2012), 1–27. See also Peter Fritzsche, Rehearsals for Fascism: Populism and Political Mobilization in Weimar Germany (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990); Eley, Nazism as Fascism; Sven Reichardt, "Fascist Movements" in The Wiley-Blackwell Encyclopedia of Social and Political Movements, ed. David A. Snow, Donatella della Porta, Bert Klandermans, and Doug McAdam (New York: Wiley, 2013), 2, 457; Pierre Milza, "Mussolini entre fascisme et populisme," Vingtième Siècle 56 (1997); Sandra McGee Deutsch, Las Derechas, 315, 329–31, 339; Alberto Spektorowski, The Origins of Argentina's Revolution of the Right (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2003); Victor Lundberg, "Within the Fascist World of Work: Sven Olov Lindholm, Ernst Junger and the Pursuit of Proletarian Fascism in Sweden," in New Political Ideas in the Aftermath of the Great War, ed. Anders G. Kjøstvedt and Alessandro Salvador (London: Palgrave MacMillan, 2016), 199–217; Daniel Knegt, "French Intellectual Fascism and the Third Way: The Case of Bertrand de Jouvenel and Alfred Fabre-Luce," in New Political Ideas in the Aftermath of the Great War, ed. Anders G. Kjøstvedt and Alessandro Salvador (London: Palgrave MacMillan, 2016), 41–65.
130. Pinto, Nature of Fascism Revisited, xix.
131. Matteo Pasetti, L'Europa Corporativa: Una Storia Transnazionale tra Le Due Guerre Mondiali; Antonio Costa Pinto and Francisco Palomanes Martinho, eds., A Onda Corporativa: Corporativismo e Ditaduras na Europa e América Latina.
132. "Il corporativismo è l'economia disciplinata, e quindi anche controllata, perché non si può pensare a una disciplina che non abbia un controllo. Il corporativismo supera il socialismo e supera il liberalismo, crea una nuova sintesi." See Benito Mussolini, Opera omnia di Benito Mussolini, vol. 26 (Florence: La Fenice, 1958), 95.
133. Pinto, Nature of Fascism Revisited, xii.
134. Matteo Passetti, "Neither Bluff nor Revolution: The Corporations and the Consolidation of the Fascist Regime (1925–1926)," in In the Society of Fascists: Acclamation, Acquiescence, and Agency in Mussolini's Italy, ed. Giulia Albanese and Roberta Pergher (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012); Alessio Gagliardi, Il corporativismo fascista (Rome: Laterza, 2010). On fascist corporatism, see also Philip Morgan, "Corporatism and the Economic Order," in The Oxford Handbook of Fascism, ed. R.J.B. Bosworth (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019), 150–65.
135. António Costa Pinto, "Fascism, Corporatism and the Crafting of Authoritarian Institutions in Interwar European Dictatorships," in Rethinking Fascism and Dictatorship in Europe, ed. António Costa Pinto and Aristotle A Kallis (Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), 87.
136. See "En un mitin, en Cáceres, el señor Primo de Rivera afirma Falange Española quiere que haya justicia social y nación," La Nación (Madrid), February 5, 1934, 2); Carlo Costamagna, "Teoría general del Estado corporativo," Acción Española, May 16, 1933, 468.
137. See AGN, Archivo Agustín P. Justo. Caja 49 doc.166. See also the following works by Gustavo Barroso: "Capitalismo, Propriedade e Burguesia," in O que o Integralista Deve Saber (Rio de Janeiro: Civilização Brasileira, 1935); O Espírito do Século XX (Rio de Janeiro: Civilização Brasileira, 1936).
138. Leopoldo Lugones, El Estado equitativo (Ensayo sobre la realidad Argentina) (Buenos Aires: La Editora Argentina, 1932), 11
139. Leopoldo Lugones, Política revolucionaria (Buenos Aires: Anaconda, 1931), 52, 53, 65–66; Lugones, El Estado equitativo, 9, 11.
140. J. Hurtado de Zaldivar, "El Décimo tercero aniversario de la fundación de los Fascios," Acción Española, April 1, 1932, 177; Villegas, No hay enemigos a la derecha, 97, 107, 109.
141. Israel Gershoni and James Jankowski, Confronting Fascism in Egypt: Dictatorship versus Democracy in the 1930s (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2009), 251.
142. José Vasconcelos, "Otro fantasma," Timón, May 4, 1940; José Vasconcelos, "La inteligencia se impone," Timón, June 8, 1940, both in Itzhak M. Bar-Lewaw, ed., La Revista "Timón" y José Vasconcelos (Mexico: Edimex, 1971), 138, 152–54.
143. Matteo Pasetti, "Il progetto corporativo della società senza classi e le tendenze populiste dell'ideologia fascista" (paper presented at the XIII Conference of the Asociacion de Historia Contemporanea, University of Castilla-La Mancha, Albacete, September 2016); Griffin, Nature of Fascism, 41, 42, 32, 124, 178.
144. See Peter Wien, "Arabs and Fascism: Empirical and Theoretical Perspectives," Die Welt des Islams 52 (2012): 345; Hofmann, Fascist Effect, 39, 74.
145. Dan Stone, Histories of the Holocaust (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 264; Michael Wildt, Hitler's Volksgemeinschaft and the Dynamics of Racial Exclusion (New York: Berghahn, 2012); Aristotle Kallis, Genocide and Fascism: The Eliminationist Drive in Fascist Europe (London: Routledge, 2008), 312.
146. Dylan Riley, The Civic Foundations of Fascism in Europe: Italy, Spain, and Romania 1870–1945 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010), 5.
147. Ernesto Laclau, Politics and Ideology in Marxist Theory: Capitalism Fascism—Populism (1977; repr. London: Verso, 2011), 111, 142, 153; Slavoj Žižek, "Against the Populist Temptation," Critical Inquiry 32, no. 2 (2006): 556–59, 567.
148. Steven Levitsky and Lucan Way, Competitive Authoritarianism: Hybrid Regimes after the Cold War (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010); Andreas Schedler, The Politics of Uncertainty: Sustaining and Subverting Electoral Authoritarianism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013).
149. See Finchelstein, Origins of the Dirty War, 28. On fascism and dictatorship, see also Paul Corner, "Italian Fascism: Whatever Happened to Dictatorship?" Journal of Modern History 74, no. 2 (2002): 325–51.
150. I thank Andrew Arato for sharing his thoughts on this matter.
151. This early Latin American form of postfascism anticipates the European cases of the National Front in France and the Italian Social Movement and Alleanza Nazionale in Italy, which much later turned from neofascist forms to more clearly postfascist populist formations. For the European debates on postfascism, see Roger Griffin, "The 'Post-fascism' of the Alleanza Nazionale: A Case Study in Ideological Morphology" Journal of Political Ideologies 1, no. 2 (1996): 123–45; Tamir Bar-On, Where Have All the Fascists Gone? (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007), 137; Gian Enrico Rusconi, Resistenza e postfascismo (Bologna: Il Mulino, 1995); Michael Löwy and Francis Sitel, "Le Front national dans une perspective européenne," Contretemps (October 17, 2016), www.contretemps.eu/fn-europe-fascisme/.
## 2. WHAT IS POPULISM IN HISTORY?
1. Pierre Rosanvallon, La Contrademocracia. La política en la era de la Desconfianza (Buenos Aires: Manantial, 2007), 260–61.
2. For a treatment of these questions, see Raanan Rein, "From Juan Perón to Hugo Chávez and Back: Populism Reconsidered," in Shifting Frontiers of Citizenship, ed. Mario Sznajder, Luis Roniger, and Carlos Forment (Boston: Brill, 2012); Carlos de la Torre, Populist Seduction in Latin America (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2010); and the essays in Carlos de la Torre, ed. The Promise and Perils of Populism: Global Perspectives (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2015). See also my books: Transatlantic Fascism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010); and The Ideological Origins of the Dirty War: Fascism, Populism, and Dictatorship in Twentieth Century Argentina (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014).
3. On this topic see Federico Finchelstein and Fabián Bosoer, "Is Fascism Returning to Europe?," New York Times, December 18, 2013.
4. See Benjamin Moffitt, The Global Rise of Populism: Performance, Political Style, and Representation (Stanford. CA: Stanford University Press, 2016); Benjamin Moffitt, "Contemporary Populism and 'The People' in the Asia-Pacific Region: Thaksin Shinawatra and Pauline Hanson," in de la Torre, Promise and Perils of Populism; Danielle Resnick, "Varieties of African Populism in Comparative Perspective," in de la Torre, Promise and Perils of Populism.
5. This chapter further elaborates on my historical research on populism. For my recent work on populism, see especially chapter 4 of my book The Ideological Origins of the Dirty War. Historians who are important exceptions in their engagement with populism are Loris Zanatta, Raanan Rein, Alberto Spektorowski, and Alan Knight. See Loris Zanatta, El Populismo (Buenos Aires: Katz Editores, 2014); Raanan Rein, "From Juan Perón to Hugo Chávez and Back: Populism Reconsidered," in Shifting Frontiers of Citizenship, ed. Mario Sznajder, Luis Roniger, and Carlos Forment; Alberto Spektorowski, The Origins of Argentina's Revolution of the Right (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2003); Alan Knight, "Populism and Neo-Populism in Latin America, Especially Mexico," Journal of Latin American Studies 30, no. 2 (1998): 240.
6. See the classic text by Isaiah Berlin, "Russian Populism," Encounter 15, no. 1 (1960): 13–28. See also Berlin, The Power of Ideas (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2013), 127–29. On Russian populism, see also Franco Venturi, Roots of Revolution: A History of the Populist and Socialist Movements in Nineteenth Century Russia (New York: Knopf, 1966). For the United States, see Michael Kazin, The Populist Persuasion (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1995); and Ritchie Savage, "A Comparison of 'New Institutionalized' Populism in Venezuela and the USA," Constellations 21, no. 4 (2014).
7. Isaiah Berlin, "To Define Populism," Government and Opposition 3, no. 2 (1968): 175. See also Gino Germani, Política y sociedad en una época de transición: De la sociedad tradicional a la sociedad de masas (Buenos Aires: Paidós, 1962); Torcuato S. Di Tella, "Populismo y Reforma en América Latina," Desarrollo Económico 4, no. 16 (1965): 391–425; Gino Germani, Torcuato Di Tella, and Octavio Ianni, Populismo y contradicciones de clase en Latinoamérica (México: Ediciones Era, 1973).
8. Berlin, "To Define Populism," 174, 177.
9. See Zeev Sternhell, The Anti-enlightenment Tradition, trans. David Meisel (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2009); Sandra McGee Deutsch, Las Derechas. The Extreme Right in Argentina, Brazil, and Chile 1890–1939 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999); Guy Hermet, Les populismes dans le monde: Une histoire sociologique, XIXe-XXe siècle (Paris: Fayard, 2001) 167–204.
10. On Peronism and fascism, see Paul H. Lewis, "Was Perón a Fascist? An Inquiry into the Nature of Fascism," Journal of Politics 42, no. 1 (1980): 242–56; Cristián Buchrucker, Nacionalismo y Peronismo (Buenos Aires: Sudamericana, 1987); Alberto Spektorowski, Argentina's Revolution of the Right.
11. On Wast, see David Rock, Authoritarian Argentina: The Nationalist Movement, Its History and Its Impact (Berkeley: University of California Press), 137; Loris Zanatta, Perón y el mito de la nación católica: Iglesia y Ejército en los orígenes del peronismo, 1943–1946 (Buenos Aires: Sudamericana, 1999), 104–15.
12. See James W. McGuire, Peronism without Perón: Unions, Parties, and Democracy in Argentina (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1997), 52.
13. Robert Potash, "Las fuerzas armadas y la era de Perón," in Los años peronistas (1943–1955), ed. Juan Carlos Torre (Buenos Aires: Sudamericana, 2002), 92–94. On this topic, see also Leonardo Senkman, "Etnicidad e inmigración durante el primer peronismo," E.I.A.L 3, no. 2 (1992).
14. See Juan Carlos Torre, Introduction in Los años peronistas (1943–1955), ed. Juan Carlos Torre (Buenos Aires: Sudamericana, 2002).
15. See Raanan Rein, In the Shadow of Perón (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2008), 2. On Peronism, see also Juan Carlos Torre, "Interpretando (una vez más) los orígenes del peronismo," Desarrollo Económico 28, no. 112 (1989): 525–48; Juan Carlos Torre, ed., Los años peronistas; Miguel Murmis and Juan Carlos Portantiero, Estudios sobre los orígenes del peronismo (Buenos Aires: Siglo Veintiuno Editores, 1971); Tulio Halperín Donghi, La larga agonía de la Argentina peronista (Buenos Aires: Ariel, 1994); Mathew Karush and Oscar Chamosa, eds., The New Cultural History of Peronism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010); Loris Zanatta, Breve historia del peronismo clásico (Buenos Aires: Sudamericana, 2009).
16. See Eric Hobsbwam, The Age of Extremes: The Short Twentieth Century 1914–91 (London: Michael Joseph, 1994)
17. New forms of populism have belatedly emerged in Mexico in our new century since the demise of the one-party state. The most important example is Andrés Manuel López Obrador. See Carlos Illades, "La izquierda populista mexicana," Nexos, September, 1, 2016. ww.nexos.com.mx/?p=29483#ftn5. López Obrador has also been attacked in antipopulist ways that symptomatically opposed populism to the Mexican liberal status quo as the only two choices available in Mexican politics. See Enrique Krauze, "López Obrador, el mesías tropical," Letras Libres, June 30, 2006.
18. See Steve Stein, "The Paths to Populism in Peru" in Populism in Latin America, ed. Michael L. Conniff, 2nd ed. (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1999), 97–116; Carlos de la Torre, Populist Seduction, 15; Steve Stein, Populism in Peru (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1980); Martin Bergel, "Populismo y cultura impresa: La clandestinidad literaria en los años de formación del Partido Aprista Peruano," Ipotesi I 17, no. 2 (2013); 135–46; Víctor Raúl Haya de la Torre, Obras Escogidas (Lima: Comisión del Centenario del Nacimiento de Víctor Raúl Haya de la Torre, 1995), 2:77, 92, 131.
19. On Bonapartism, see, for example, Domenico Losurdo, Democrazia o bonapartismo: Trionfo e decadenza del sujfragio universale (Turin: Bollati Boringhieri, 1993). On the relationship between early populism and antisemitism, see the important work of Michele Battini, Socialism of Fools: Capitalism and Modern Anti-Semitism (New York: Columbia University Press, 2016).
20. See Thomas Skidmore, "Las dimensiones económicas del populismo en Argentina y Brasil" in La democratización fundamental. El populismo en América Latina, ed. Carlos M. Vilas (Mexico: Consejo Nacional para la Cultura y las Artes, 1994), 245, 257; Thomas Skidmore, Politics in Brazil (New York: Oxford University Press, 1967), 74, 75, 132, 133; Francisco Weffort, "El populismo en la política brasileña" in Populismo y Neopopulismo en América Latina: El problema de la cenicienta, ed. Maria M. Mackinnon and Mario A. Petrone (Buenos Aires: Eudeba, 1998), 136–43
21. Paradoxically, the dictatorship of General Gustavo Rojas Pinilla (1953–57) was profoundly inspired by Perón's own accession to power from dictatorial origins to elected candidate in free elections. Rojas wanted to create his own "third-way" party by mobilizing workers, bureaucrats, and even former followers of Gaitán, but he faced the opposition of the two traditional parties (Liberal and Conservative), as well as that of the emerging student movement, which he antagonized through repression. After failing in his plans to turn his dictatorship into a populist democracy, Rojas returned to politics, now perhaps in more Brazilian varguista fashion, under the ANAPO Party, and he again attempted to attract citizens who did not feel represented by the two parties. He ran for president in 1962. He ran again in 1970, when he lost in a highly contested election. See César Augusto Ayala Diago, Resistencia y oposición al establecimiento del Frente Nacional: los orígenes de la Alianza Nacional Popular, ANAPO: Colombia, 1953–1964 (Bogota: Universidad Nacional de Colombia,1996); Herbert Braun, The Assassination of Gaitán: Public Life and Urban Violence in Colombia (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1985), 37, 57, 92, 108–9, 121; Daniel Pécaut, "El populismo Gaitanista," in La Democratización Fundamental: El populismo en América Latina, ed. Carlos M. Vilas (Mexico: Consejo Nacional para la Cultura y las Artes, 1995), 501, 505, 515; John W. Green, Gaitanismo, Left Liberalism, and Popular Mobilization in Colombia (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2003); Enrique Peruzzotti, "Populismo y representación democrática," in El retorno del pueblo: El populismo y nuevas democracias en América Latina, ed. Carlos de la Torre and Enrique Peruzzotti (Quito: Flacso, 2008), 97–125.
22. See de la Torre, Populist Seduction, 28–79. On Peronism and Ibarra, see Loris Zanatta, La internacional justicialista: Auge y ocaso de los sueños imperiales de Perón (Buenos Aires: Editorial Sudamericana, 2013), 44, 295, 346. On Gaitán and Peronism, see Zanatta, La internacional justicialista, 156, 161.
23. Tulio Halperin Donghi, Historia contemporánea de América Latina (Buenos Aires: Alianza, 1994), 485.
24. See Laura Gotkowitz, Revolution for Our Rights: Indigenous Struggles for Land and Justice in Bolivia, 1880–1952 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007), 287, as well as 15, 164–66, 172–73, 289; Víctor Paz Estenssoro, Pensamiento Político de Paz Estenssoro: Compilación, ed. Ramiro Antelo León (La Paz, Bolivia: Plural Editores, 2003), 107. Also see Loris Zanatta, "The Rise and Fall of the Third Position: Bolivia, Perón and the Cold War, 1943–1954," Desarrollo Económico 1 (2006): 76–84; Zanatta, La internacional justicialista, 30–32; Donghi, Historia contemporánea de América Latina, 440–44; 502–6, Herbert Klein, Bolivia: The Evolution of a Multi-ethnic Society (New York: Oxford University Press, 1982), 219–20, 225–26, 244–45; Christopher Mitchell, The Legacy of Populism in Bolivia, From the MNR to Military Rule (New York: Praeger, I977).
25. Like Peronism, Acción Democrática was also toppled by an antipopulist military dictatorship. When Acción Democrática returned to power in 1959–69, it moved further to the right but always in an antidictatorial mode. In fact, Rómulo Betancourt was a strong advocate against the military dictatorships of the region. For Frédérique Langue, Betancourt's populism was of a much more moderate bent than other classic examples, especially Peronism. Frédérique Langue, "Rómulo Betancourt: Liderazgo democrático versus personalismo en tiempos de celebraciones," Araucaria: Revista Iberoamericana de Filosofía, Política y Humanidades 21 (2009), 226–38. On Betancourt and Acción Democrática, see also Steven Ellner, "El Populismo en Venezuela, 1935–1948: Betancourt y Acción Democrática," in La Democratización Fundamental, ed. Carlos M. Vilas, 419–34; Manuel Caballero, Rómulo Betancourt, político de nación (Caracas: Alfadil-FCE, 2004).
26. See my extensive analysis of these topics in my books Transatlantic Fascism and The Ideological Origins of the Dirty War.
27. See Étienne Balibar, We, the People of Europe? Reflections on Transnational Citizenship (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004), 2.
28. Knight notes that, "There is also a tautological tendency to impute populism (or anything else) to 'crisis,' as if 'crisis' were a discernible cause, when, in fact, it is often a loose description of a bundle of phenomena which need to be disaggregated. Disaggregation sometimes reveals that it was not 'crisis' which generated populism (or mobilisation, rebellion, etc.), but rather populism (or mobilisation, rebellion, etc.) which generated crisis" ("Populism and Neo-populism," 233). For a critique of static "historicist" notions of populism, see also Francisco Panizza, introduction to Populism and the Mirror of Democracy, ed. Francisco Panizza (London: Verso, 2005), 3.
29. Knight, "Populism and Neo-Populism," 233.
30. Ibid., 237.
31. To a lesser extent, some scholars of Latin American populism downplay the relevance of European populism.
32. Remarks by Isaiah Berlin at the conference To Define Populism at the London School of Economics, May 1967, Isaiah Berlin Virtual Library, 5–6, accessed October 14, 2014, <http://berlin.wolf.ox.ac.uk/lists/bibliography/bib111bLSE.pdf>. The edited conference papers were published in the influential book by Ghita Ionescu and Ernest Gellner, eds., Populism: Its Meaning and National Characteristics (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1969). On this debate, see also Maria M. Mackinnon and Mario A. Petrone, eds., Populismo y Neopopulismo en América Latina (Buenos Aires: Eudeba, 1998).
33. See Margaret Canovan, The People (Cambridge: Polity, 2005); Pierre Rosanvallon, Democracy Past and Future (New York: Columbia University Press, 2006).
34. See Rosanvallon, La Contrademocracia, 257.
35. See Rosanvallon, La Contrademocracia, 257; Margaret Canovan, Populism (London: Junction, 1981), 12, 13, 15, 148, 169, 229–30, 294, 298. For Canovan, Peronism was a "populist dictatorship." More recently she argued, "Outside Europe, more or less dictatorial populist leaders have been particularly common in Latin America" (Canovan, People, 71). She mentions Juan and Eva Perón and Hugo Chávez as examples. See also Canovan's "Trust the People! Populism and the Two Faces of Democracy," Political Studies 67, no. 3 (1999): 2–16; and "Populism for Political Theorists?," Journal of Political Ideologies 9, no. 3 (2004): 241–52.
36. See Rosanvallon, La Contrademocracia, 262, 263, 264.
37. For them, "Due to its restricted morphology, populism necessarily appears attached to other concepts or ideological families, which normally are much more relevant than populism on its own" (Cas Mudde and Cristóbal Rovira Kaltwasser, "Populism," in The Oxford Handbook of Political Ideologies, ed. Michael Freeden and Marc Stears [New York: Oxford University Press, 2013], 508–9). See also Cas Mudde and Cristóbal Rovira Kaltwasser, Populism: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), 5–6; Cristóbal Rovira Kaltwasser, "The Ambivalence of Populism: Threat and Corrective for Democracy," Democratization 19, no. 2 (2012); Cas Mudde, On Extremism and Democracy in Europe (London: Routledge, 2016); Matthijs Rooduijn, "The Nucleus of Populism: In Search of the Lowest Common Denominator," Government and Opposition 49, no. 4 (2014); Pierre-André Taguieff, "Le Populisme et la science politique du mirage conceptuel aux vrais problèmes," Vingtième Siècle: Revue d'histoire 56, no. 1 (1997): 4–33. An expanded and updated version of Taguieff's article can be found in his book, L'Illusion populiste: De l'archaïque au médiatique (Paris: Berg, 2002).
38. De la Torre states, "Populists do not view citizens as a body with a plurality of opinions that deliberate in the public sphere." But he also adds, "Yet populists are not fully authoritarian because their policies redistribute resources and could potentially empower the poor" ("The People, Democracy, and Authoritarianism in Rafael Correa's Ecuador," Constellations 21, no. 4 [2014], 463).
39. Carlos de la Torre, "Populism and the Politics of the Extraordinary in Latin America," Journal of Political Ideologies 21, no. 2 (2016): 131.
40. See Carlos de la Torre, "The Contested Meanings of Populist Revolutions in Latin America," in Transformations of Populism in Europe and the Americas: History and Recent Tendencies, ed. John Abromeit, Bridget Maria Chesterton, Gary Marotta, and York Norman (London: Bloomsbury, 2016), 332.
41. De la Torre notes,
The empowerment of indigenous people is evidenced in the symbolic changes in the Bolivian political landscape. Indigenous rituals are performed in the Presidential palace, previously a center of white power. The cultural and symbolic inclusion of indigenous people is carried with populist understandings of rivals as enemies. The authoritarian specter is present in small communities and at the national level. For example, after learning the results of the 2005 presidential election in the small village of Quilacollo an indigenous leader affirmed: 'in our community there was one vote for Tuto Quiroga (Morales rival in the election), we are going to investigate who this is because we cannot tolerate betrayals by our own comrades.' This undemocratic view of opponents as enemies characterizes the president and vice-president's worldviews and speeches. ("Contested Meanings," 338)
See also Fernando Mayorga, "Movimientos Sociales y Participación Política en Bolivia," in Ciudadanía y Legitimidad Democrática en América Latina, ed. Isidoro Cheresky (Buenos Aires: Prometeo, 2011).
42. See Jan-Werner Müller, "Getting a Grip on Populism," Dissent, September 23, 2011, accessed October 14, 2014, www.dissentmagazine.org/blog/getting-a-grip-on-populism.
43. See Paul Taggart, Populism (Buckingham: Open University Press, 2000); Paul Taggart, "Populism and the Pathologies of Representative Politics," in Democracies and the Populist Challenge, ed. Yves Meny and Yves Surel (Oxford: Palgrave, 2002); Benjamin Arditi, La política en los bordes del liberalismo: diferencia, populismo, revolución, emancipación, 2nd augumented ed. (Buenos Aires: Gedisa, 2014).
44. Jan-Werner Müller, "Populists and Technocrats in Europe's Fragmented Democracies," World Politics Review, March 31, 2016, www.worldpoliticsreview.com/articles/18928/populists-and-technocrats-in-europe-s-fragmented-democracies. See also Müller, What Is Populism? (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016), 102.
45. See Slavoj Žižek, "Against the Populist Temptation," Critical Inquiry 32, no. 2 (2006): 551–74. See also Žižek, "Una aclaración con respecto al populismo," Público, April 27, 2015, <http://blogs.publico.es/otrasmiradas/4501/una-aclaracion-con-respecto-al-populismo/>. For the conceptual history of totalitarianism, see Enzo Traverso, El totalitarismo: Historia de un debate (Buenos Aires: Eudeba, 2001); and Simona Forti, Il totalitarismo (Rome-Bari: Laterza, 2005).
46. For examples of this confusion, see generic scholar Pierre-André Taguieff's La révanche du nationalisme: Néopopulistes et xénophobes à l'assaut de l' Europe (Paris: PUF, 2015). See also Andreas Pantazopoulos, "The National-Populist Illusion as a 'Pathology' of Politics: The Greek Case and Beyond," Telos Scope, March 25, 2016, www.telospress.com/the-national-populist-illusion-as-a-pathology-of-politics-the-greek-case-and-beyond/; Pierre-André Taguieff, "The Revolt against the Elites, or the New Populist Wave: An Interview," Telos Scope, June 25, 2016, www.telospress.com/the-revolt-against-the-elites-or-the-new-populist-wave-an-interview/#notes.
47. Alexandros Kioupkiolis, "Podemos: The Ambiguous Promises of Left-Wing Populism in Contemporary Spain," Journal of Political Ideologies 21, no. 2 (2016); Luis Ramiro and Raul Gómez, "Radical-Left Populism during the Great Recession: Podemos and Its Competition with the Established Radical Left," Political Studies (June 2016); Nicolás Damín, "Populismo entre Argentina y Europa: Sobre la transnacionalización de un concepto," Revista Cuestiones de Sociología 4, no. 2 (2015): 61; Iñigo Errejón Galván, "También en Europa: posibilidades populistas en la política europea y Española," Viento Sur 115, no. 3 (2011): 105, 109, 111, 113; Pablo Iglesias, Una nueva transición (Madrid: Akal, 2015); Jesús Jaén "Un debate con el populismo," Viento Sur July 14 (2015), <http://vientosur.info/spip.php?article10293>; Pablo Iglesias," Guerra de trincheras y estrategia electoral, Público, May 3, 2015, <http://blogs.publico.es/pablo-iglesias/1025/guerra-de-trincheras-y-estrategia-electoral/>.
48. See Giorgos Katsambekis, "Radical Left Populism in Contemporary Greece: Syriza's Trajectory from Minoritarian Opposition to Power," Constellations 23, no. 3 (2016): 391–403. Yannis Stavrakakis and Giorgos Katsambekis, "Left-Wing Populism in the European Periphery: The Case Of SYRIZA," Journal of Political Ideologies 19, no. 2 (2014); 119–42; Giorgos Katsambekis "'The People' and Political Opposition in Post-democracy: Reflections on the Hollowing of Democracy in Greece and Europe," in The State We're In: Reflecting of Democracy's Troubles, ed. Joanna Cook, Nicholas J. Long, and Henrietta L. Moore (Oxford: Berghahn, 2016): 144–66.
49. See Antonio Gramsci, Il Risorgimento (Rome: Editori Riuniti, 1979): 197–98.
50. For an analysis of kirchnerismo, see Beatriz Sarlo, La audacia y el cálculo: Kirchner 2003–2010 (Buenos Aires: Sudamericana, 2011). For the Five Stars Movement, see Roberto Biorcio and Paolo Natale, Politica a 5 stelle: Idee, storia e strategie del movimento di Grillo (Milan: Feltrinelli, 2013).
51. For the propopulist idea of Latin America, see Javier Lorca, "'Hay que latinoamericanizar Europa': Entrevista a la politóloga Chantal Mouffe," Página 2, October 21, 2012.
52. On Macri, see Beatriz Sarlo, "Macri es un neopopulista de la felicidad," La Nación, October 14, 2016.
53. See Enzo Traverso, "La Fabrique de la haine xénophobie et racisme en Europe," Contretemps 9 (2011).
54. See Nadia Urbinati, "The Populist Phenomenon," Raisons politiques 51, no. 3 (2013): 137–54.
55. Urbinati argues that "Populist and plebiscitarian phenomena are incubated within democratic diarchy as a longing to overcome the distance between will and opinion and achieve unanimity and homogeneity, an idealization that has characterized democratic communities since antiquity" (Democracy Disfigured: Opinion, Truth, and the People [Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2014], 27).
56. See Finchelstein, Transatlantic Fascism.
57. The recent history of Venezuelan populism is a clear exception to this Latin American pattern.
58. Ernesto Laclau, On Populist Reason (London: Verso, 2005), especially 68–77, 110, 117–121, 154, 156, 224. See also Ernesto Laclau, "Populism: What's in a Name," in Populism and the Mirror of Democracy, ed. Francisco Panizza (London: Verso, 2005), 32–49.
59. Andrew Arato, Post Sovereign Constitutional Making: Learning and Legitimacy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), 281–89; Urbinati, Democracy Disfigured.
60. See the excellent analysis of Laclau by Nicolás Damín, in "Populismo entre Argentina y Europa," 56.
61. See Yannis Stavrakakis, "The Return of "the People," Constellations 21, no. 4 (2014).
62. See Jacques Rancière, "L'introuvable populisme," in Qu'est-ce qu'un peuple?, ed. Alain Badiou, Pierre Bourdieu, Judith Butler, Georges Didi-Huberman, Sadri Khiari, Jacques Rancière (Paris: La Fabrique, 2013), 137. See also Marco D'Eramo, "Populism and the New Oligarchy," New Left Review 58 (2013): 8; Ezequiel Adamovsky, "¿De qué hablamos cuando hablamos de populismo?," Revista Anfibia, June 19, 2015, www.revistaanfibia.com/ensayo/de-que-hablamos-cuando-hablamos-de-populismo-2/.
63. See Jacques Rancière, Hatred of Democracy (London: Verso, 2006), 73, 79, 80.
64. Jean Comaroff, "Populism and Late Liberalism: A Special Affinity?," Annals AAPSS, 637 (2011): 100, 101, 103.
65. See Étienne Balibar, "Our European Incapacity," Open Democracy, May 16, 2011, www.opendemocracy.net/etienne-balibar/our-european-incapacity; Yannis Stavrakakis, "The Return of 'the People,'" 512–14. See also, Étienne Balibar "Europe: l'impuissance des nations et la question 'populiste,'" Actuel Marx 2, no. 54 (2013): 2, 13–23. On Balibar's reflections on Laclau, see Étienne Balibar, Equaliberty (Durham: Duke University Press, 2014), 187–95.
66. Cristóbal Rovira Kaltwasser, "The Ambivalence of Populism: Threat and Corrective for Democracy," Democratization 19, no. 2 (2012): 185.
67. "Investigaciones empíricas revelan que la gran mayoría de los individuos tienen actitudes populistas que se encuentran en un estado de latencia, vale decir, están dormidas y solo son activadas frente a ciertas situaciones contextuales. En otras palabras, casi todos tenemos un 'pequeño Hugo Chávez' al interior nuestro, pero éste se encuentra en un lugar oculto y, por lo tanto, no define nuestras preferencias políticas." See Cristóbal Rovira Kaltwasser, "Explicando el populismo," Agenda Pública, May 30, 2016, <http://agendapublica.es/explicando-el-populismo/>. See also Agnes Akkerman, Cas Mudde, and Andrej Zaslove, "How Populist Are the People? Measuring Populist Attitudes in Voters," Comparative Political Studies 47, no. 9 (2014). On populism as pathology, see Cas Mudde, "Populist Radical Right Parties in Europe Today," in Transformations of Populism in Europe and the Americas: History and Recent Tendencies, ed. John Abromeit, Bridget Maria Chesterton, Gary Marotta, and York Norman (London: Bloomsbury, 2016).
68. Cristóbal Rovira Kaltwasser argues that empirical data could be used along with Cas Mudde's "minimal definition" of populism, which Rovira Kaltwasser understands "as a distinct ideology that conceives society to be separated into two antagonistic camps: 'the pure people' versus 'the corrupt elite'" ("The Ambivalence of Populism: Threat and Corrective for Democracy," Democratization 19, no. 2 [2012]: 185, 192–96, 200). See also Kaltwasser's "Latin American Populism: Some Conceptual and Normative Lessons," Constellations 21, 4 (2014); and his "Explicando el populismo."
69. For Mudde, as for many other observers, Trump was a transitory phenomenon of the early primary season. For him, Trump was more in line with American conservatism than populism. To be sure, Mudde noted that populism was "underlying some of the support" for Trump, but he stressed the need to exclude Trump from studies of populism. See Cas Mudde, "The Trump Phenomenon and the European Populist Radical Right," Washington Post, August 26, 2015, www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/monkey-cage/wp/2015/08/26/the-trump-phenomenon-and-the-european-populist-radical-right/; Cas Mudde, "The Power of Populism? Not really!," Huffington Post, February 13, 2016, www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/the-power-of-populism-not_b_9226736.
70. See Dominick LaCapra, History in Transit: Experience, Identity, Critical Theory (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2004), 156.
71. See Carl Schmitt, The Crisis of Parliamentary Democracy (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1994). For a criticism of Laclau's reading and his use of Schmitt, see Arato, Post Sovereign Constitution Making, 269–70, 281. For an example of Laclau's recuperation of Sorel's theory of political myth in terms of the construction of political subjectivity, see Ernesto Laclau, The Rhetorical Foundations of Society (New York: Verso, 2014).
72. This criticism does not apply to many scholars working on Latin America. Among the more suggestive, I would like to mention the key works of Kurt Weyland, "Clarifying a Contested Concept: Populism in the Study of Latin American Politics," Comparative Politics 34, no. 1 (2001): 1–22; and Carlos de la Torre, Populist Seduction in Latin America.
73. Gino Germani, Authoritarianism, Fascism and National Populism (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Books, 1978).
74. Ibid., vii.
75. See Tulio Halperín Donghi, Testimonio de un observador participante: Medio siglo de estudios latinoamericanos en un mundo cambiante (Buenos Aires: Prometeo, 2014), 23.
76. Tulio Halperín Donghi, "Del fascismo al peronismo," Contorno 7–8 (1958).
77. Finchelstein, Origins of the Dirty War, chapter 4.
78. On populism and delegation, see Olivier Dabene, "Un pari néo-populiste au Vénézuéla" Critique internationale 4 (1999), 38. On delegative democracy, see the influential essay by Guillermo O'Donnell, "Delegative Democracy," Journal of Democracy 5, no. 1 (1994): 55–69.
79. Perón, quoted in Cristián Buchrucker, Nacionalismo y Peronismo, 325.
80. Finchelstein, Origins of the Dirty War, 90–91.
81. Tulio Halperín Donghi, Argentina en el callejón (Buenos Aires: Ariel, 1995), 30.
82. Ibid., 35.
83. See Ertug Tombus, "The Tragedy of the 2015 Turkish Elections," Public Seminar, November 11, 2015, www.publicseminar.org/2015/11/the-tragedy-of-the-2015-turkish-elections/#.V5oZqOgrLIU.
84. Benjamin Moffitt, Global Rise of Populism, 63, 81–83, 148–149; Moffitt, "Contemporary Populism," 293–311.
85. Hobsbwam, Age of Extremes, 133, 135; Eric Hobsbwam, How to Change the World: Marx and Marxism (London: Little, 2011), 270–71.
86. As Michael Kazin notes in The Populist Persuasion, this migration of populist rhetoric from left to right happened in the context of the emerging Cold War and the New Deal, as well as of the red scares of the 1950s and 1960s. This was the context when most white Americans "came to regard themselves as middle-class consumers and taxpayers, the booming growth of evangelical churches whose political leanings were as conservative as their theology" (4). Kazin defines populism as a "persistent yet mutable style of political rhetoric" (5). He observes that populism had deep roots in the nineteenth century when it was progressive whereas in the second half of the century, it became predominantly rightist. It is very clear that Kazin's "definition" of populism is almost exclusively presented in terms of American history. But there are many convergences between American and others historical developments of populism. See also Kazin, "Trump and American Populism," Foreign Affairs, October 6, 2016, www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/united-states/2016–10–06/trump-and-american-populism; and the insightful recent discussions by Charles Postel, Gary Marotta, and Ronald Formisano, in Transformations of Populism in Europe and the Americas, ed. John Abromeit, Bridget Maria Chesterton, Gary Marotta, and York Norman. See also Charles Postel, The Populist Vision (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), where he defends the thesis of populism as being exclusively on the left.
87. Regarding Perot, Ronald Formisano argues, "Although Perot was a conservative former Republican whose career had benefited from political connections, he attracted largely independents or weak party identifiers motivated by frustration and anger with professional politicians and fed up with 'politics as usual.' Perot appealed strongly to working- and middle-class Americans who felt left behind by the Reagan bonanza for millionaires of the 1980s, and threatened by corporate downsizing and elite (and bipartisan) policies such as NAFTA. Before writing off Perot as a conservative or reactionary populist, historians should look first at the range of his support, as well as some of the progressive reforms favored by many of his supporters" ("Populist Movements in U.S. History: Progressive and Reactionary," in Transformations of Populism in Europe and the Americas, ed. John Abromeit, Bridget Maria Chesterton, Gary Marotta, and York Norman. 144).
88. Ronald Formisano, "Populist Movements," 145. See also his book The Tea Party: A Brief History (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2012); and Vanessa Williamson, Theda Skocpol, and John Coggin, "The Tea Party and the Remaking of Republican Conservatism," Perspectives on Politics 9, no. 1 (2011): 33, 34, 35.
89. Virginia Hale, "Le Pen: Trump's Win 'Victory of the People Against the Elites,'" Breitbart, November 13, 2016, www.breitbart.com/london/2016/1w1/13/le-pen-trumps-win-victory-people-elites/; "Far-Right Hopeful: French Election 'Choice of Civilization,'" Breitbart, February 5, 2017, www.breitbart.com/news/far-right-hopeful-french-election-choice-of-civilization/. See also Thomas D. Williams, "Italian Leftist Media in Meltdown Over Trump's Populist Victory," Breitbart, November 9, 2016, www.breitbart.com/london/2016/11/09/italian-leftist-media-meltdown-trumps-populist-victory/; Chris Tomlinson, "European Populist Candidates to Benefit from 'Trump Effect,'" Breitbart, November 9, 2016, www.breitbart.com/london/2016/11/09/european-populist-candidates-benefit-trump-effect/; Donna Rachel Edmunds, "Emboldened by Trump's Success, Italian Populist Parties Circle Prime Minister Renzi," Breitbart, November 10, 2016, www.breitbart.com/london/2016/11/10/emboldened-trumps-success-italian-populist-parties-circle-prime-minister-renzi/.
90. See Antonio Costa Pinto, "Donald Trump, com e sem populismo," Público. September 3, 2016.
91. Andreas Kalyvas and Ira Katznelson, Liberal Beginnings: Making a Republic for the Moderns (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 4–5, 14, 16, 93, 96, 98–99.
92. Andreas Kalyvas, "Popular Sovereignty, Democracy, and the Constituent Power," Constellations 12, no. 2 (2005): 224. As Kalyvas argues, a similar position on the undemocratic potential of sovereignty was taken by a variety of authors as diverse from each other as Hans Kelsen and Michel Foucault.
93. Jason Frank, Constituent Moments: Enacting the People in Postrevolutionary America. (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010), 5.
94. Pierre Bourdieu, "You said 'popular'?," in What Is a People?, ed. Alain Badiou, Pierre Bourdieu, Judith Butler, et al. (New York: Columbia University Press, 2016), 32–48.
95. On this topic see Alain Badiou, "Twenty-Four Notes on the Uses of the Word 'People,'" in What Is a People?, ed. Alain Badiou, Pierre Bourdieu, Judith Butler, 21–22.
96. Federico Finchelstein and Pablo Piccato, "Donald Trump May Be Showing Us the Future of Right-Wing Politics," Washington Post, February 27, 2016.
97. See "Desde los balcones de la Casa de gobierno despidiéndose de los trabajadores concentrados en la Plaza de Mayo: Octubre 17 de 1945," in Coronel Juan Perón, El pueblo ya sabe de qué se trata: Discursos (Buenos Aires: 1946), 186. See also Dirk Moses, Federico Finchelstein, and Pablo Piccato, "Juan Perón Shows How Trump Could Destroy Our Democracy without Tearing It Down," Washington Post, March 22, 2017.
98. See Tomás Eloy Martínez, Las vidas del General (Buenos Aires: Aguilar, 2004), 2.
99. Hans Vorländer, "The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly: Über das Verhältnis von Populismus und Demokratie—Eine Skizze," Totalitarismus und Demokratie 8, no. 2 (2011), 187–194.
100. See Fabián Bosoer and Federico Finchelstein, "Populism and Neoliberalism: The Dark Sides of the Moon," Queries 3 (2014), accessed October 14, 2014, www.queries-feps.eu/populism-and-neoliberalism-the-dark-sides-of-the-moon/. See also Fabián Bosoer and Federico Finchelstein, "Russia Today, Argentina Tomorrow," New York Times, October 21, 2014. On populism and technocracy, see Christopher Bickerton and Carlo Invernizzi Accetti, "Populism and Technocracy: Opposites or Complements?," Critical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy 20, no. 2 (2017): 182–206; Müller, What Is Populism?, 93–99. For Latin America, see Carlos de la Torre, "Technocratic Populism in Ecuador," Journal of Democracy 24, no. 3 (2013): 33–46. On the notion of elites and the current populism, see Hugo Drochon, "Between the Lions and the Foxes," New Statesman, January 13–19, 2017.
101. See Nancy Postero, "El Pueblo Boliviano, de Composición Plural: A Look at Plurinationalism in Bolivia," in de la Torre, Promise and Perils of Populism, 398–423; Östen Wahlbeck, "True Finns and Non-True Finns: The Minority Rights Discourse of Populist Politics in Finland," Journal of Intercultural Studies 37, no. 6 (2016): 574–88.
102. See Étienne Balibar, "Brexit: A Dismantling Moment," Open Democracy, July 14, 2016, www.opendemocracy.net/can-europe-make-it/etienne-balibar/brexit-anti-grexit. On populism as a protest movement, see Hans Vorländer, Maik Herold, and Steven Schäller, PEGIDA: Entwicklung, Zusammensetzung und Deutung einer Empörungsbewegung (Wiesbaden: Springer, 2016).
103. See Jacques Rancière, Hatred of Democracy, 96–97. See also by Rancière, "Non, le peuple n'est pas une masse brutale et ignorante," Libération, January 3, 2011.
104. Neoliberalism represents a "steady disciplining of policy and politics by the logic of the market and an ongoing realignment of social structure toward the functional imperatives of liberal market capitalism." See the following works by Wolfgang Streeck: "Small-State Nostalgia? The Currency Union, Germany, and Europe: A Reply to Jürgen Habermas," Constellations 21, no. 2 (2014): 214, 218; "Markets and Peoples," New Left Review 73 (2012): 64, 67; "L'egemonia tedesca che la Germania non vuole," Il Mulino 4 (2015): 608.
105. Finchelstein and Bosoer, "Is Fascism Returning?"; Andreas Kalyvas and Federico Finchelstein, "Fascism on Trial: Greece and Beyond," Public Seminar, October 10, 2014.
106. See Finchelstein and Bosoer, "Populism and Neoliberalism."
107. See, for example, Cristóbal Rovira Kaltwasser, "Explaining the Emergence of Populism" in de la Torre, Promise and Perils of Populism, 212–13.
108. Juan Domingo Perón, El gobierno, el estado y las organizaciones libres del pueblo, La comunidad organizada: Trabajos, alocuciones y escritos del general Juan Domingo Perón que fundamentan la concepción justicialista de la comunidad (Buenos Aires: Editorial de la Reconstrucción, 1975), 76; "La gira del arco iris," La Nación, April 5, 1998.
## 3. POPULISM BETWEEN DEMOCRACY AND DICTATORSHIP
1. See for example, Alain Rouquié, A la sombra de las dictaduras: La democracia en América Latina (Buenos Aires: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 2011), 114–15, 119–34, 251–59. Maria Victoria Crespo analyzes populism and dictatorship in "Entre Escila y Caribdis: Las democracias constitucionales contemporáneas de América Latina" (paper presented at the Academic Meeting of the Feria Internacional del Libro, Guadalajra, December 4–5, 2014).
2. On the notion of modern dictatorship presented here, I have relied on the pathbreaking work of Andrew Arato, "Conceptual History of Dictatorship (and Its Rivals)," in Critical Theory and Democracy, ed. E. Peruzzotti and M. Plot (London: Routledge, 2013), 208–81. See also Carl Schmitt, Dictatorship (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2013); Ernst Fraenkel, The Dual State (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1941); Norberto Bobbio, Democracy and Dictatorship (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989).
3. Andrew Arato, "Dictatorship before and after Totalitarianism," Social Research, no. 2 (2002), 473–503; Thomas Vormbaum, Diritto e nazionalsocialismo: Due lezioni (Macerata: EUM, 2013), 44–45. See also Andrew Arato, "Good-bye to Dictatorship?," Social Research 67, no. 4 (2000): 926, 937. See also Andreas Kalyvas, "The Tyranny of Dictatorship: When the Greek Tyrant Met the Roman Dictator," Political Theory 35, no. 4 (2007); Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York: Meridian, 1959).
4. See Federico Finchelstein, The Ideological Origins of the Dirty War: Fascism, Populism, and Dictatorship in Twentieth Century Argentina (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 1–12.
5. For a discussion of the notion of dictablanda, see also Paul Gillingham and Benjamin Smith, eds., Dictablanda: Politics, Work, and Culture in Mexico, 1938–1968 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014).
6. See Paul Corner, The Fascist Party and Popular Opinion in Mussolini's Italy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012). See also by Paul Corner, "Italian Fascism: Whatever Happened to Dictatorship?," Journal of Modern History 74 (2002): 325–51.
7. On Borges, see Federico Finchelstein, El Mito del Fascismo: De Freud a Borges (Buenos Aires: Capital intellectual, 2015). See also Gino Germani, Authoritarianism, Fascism and National Populism (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Books, 1978), vii. On the general context of European antifascism, see Enzo Traverso, Fire and Blood: The European Civil War 1914–1945 (New York: Verso, 2016).
8. Eva Perón, "Discurso pronunciado el 22 de agosto de 1951, en la asamblea popular, que se constituyó en el Cabildo Abierto del Justicialismo en la Avenida 9 de Julio," in Eva Perón, Mensajes y discursos (Buenos Aires: Fundación pro Universidad de la Producción y del Trabajo: Fundación de Investigaciones Históricas Evita Perón, 1999), 333:254.
9. See Carl Schmitt, Dictatorship.
10. On constitutional reform in Latin America, see Gabriel Negretto, Making Constitutions: Presidents, Parties, and Institutional Choice in Latin America (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013); Nicolás Figueroa García-Herreros, "Counter-hegemonic Constitutionalism: The Case of Colombia," Constellations 19, no. 2 (2012); Angélica M. Bernal, "The Meaning and Perils of Presidential Refounding in Latin America," Constellations 21, no. 4 (2014). See also Andrew Arato, Post Sovereign Constitutional Making: Learning and Legitimacy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), 289–98.
11. Fujimori eventually called for a reform of the constitution, and a new electoral process, to legitimize his rule, turning again to a hybrid populist rule after the coup. In 1995, he was re-elected to a second term.
12. See Danielle Resnick, "Varieties of African Populism in Comparative Perspective," in The Promise and Perils of Populism: Global Perspectives, ed. Carlos de la Torre (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2015), 317–48.
13. Nic Cheeseman and Miles Larmer, "Ethnopopulism in Africa: Opposition Mobilization in Diverse and Unequal Societies," Democratization 22, no. 1 (2015): 22–50.
14. See Danielle Resnick, "Varieties of African Populism," 317–48.
15. David Roberts, Fascist Interactions: Proposals for a New Approach to Fascism and Its Era, 1919–1945 (New York: Berghahn Books, 2016), 6; António Costa Pinto and Aristotle Kallis, eds., Rethinking Fascism and Dictatorship in Europe (New York: Palgrave, 2014).
16. Dani Filc, The Political Right in Israel: Different Faces of Jewish Populism (New York: Routledge, 2010), 70–75; 103–23; Zeev Sternhell, "The Extreme Right Turned Israel into an Anachronism," Haaretz, April 1, 2011; Gidi Weitz, "Signs of Fascism in Israel Reached New Peak during Gaza Op, Says Renowned Scholar," Haaretz, August 13, 2014; Ishaan Tharoor, "On Israeli Election Day, Netanyahu Warns of Arabs Voting 'in Droves'," Washington Post, March 17, 2015; "Livni: Netanyahu Is Harmful to Israel, but He Isn't an Enemy of Israel," Jerusalem Post, March 19, 2015; "Israel Has Been Infected by the Seeds of Fascism, Says Ex-prime Minister Ehud Barak," Haaretz, March 20, 2016; Zeev Sternhell, "The Leadership Must Stop Pandering," Haaretz, June 17, 2016; Uri Ram, The Globalization of Israel: McWorld in Tel-Aviv, Jihad in Jerusalem (New York: Routledge, 2008). Unlike the neoliberal Likud party, which in Latin American fashion combined exclusionary and participatory dimensions, Lieberman's populism was more typical of European xenophobic populist parties. For Filc, Lieberman's extreme notion of a homogenous ethnic community; his antiliberalism and anti-pluralism; and an idea of the vertical leader of the people that is radically opposed to the "oligarchy," the judiciary, and ethnic minorities made it a "clear example of exclusionary populism" (Political Right in Israel, 103).
17. Filc, Political Right in Israel 74.
18. Kurt Weyland, "Neopopulism and Neoliberalism in Latin America: How Much Affinity?," Third World Quarterly 24, no. 6 (2003): 1102. See also by Weyland: "A Paradox of Success? Determinants of Political Support for President Fujimori," International Studies Quarterly 44, no. 3 (2000): 481–502; Kenneth Roberts. "Neoliberalism and the Transformation of Populism in Latin America," World Politics 48 (1995): 82–116. On Menem see also Marcos Novaro, "Menemismo, pragmatismo y romanticism," in La Historia Reciente: Argentina en Democracia, ed. Marcos Novaro and Vicente Palermo (Buenos Aires: Edhasa, 2006), 199–221.
19. Kurt Weyland, "Neoliberal Populism in Latin America and Eastern Europe," Comparative Politics 31, no. 4 (1999): 379–401.
20. Nadia Urbinati, Democracy Disfigured: Opinion, Truth, and the People (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2014), 14; Angelo Ventrone, Il Nemico Interno: Immagini, parole e simboli della lotta politica nell'Italia del Novecento (Rome: Donzelli, 2005), 59, 312; Loris Zanatta, El Populismo (Buenos Aires: Katz Editores, 2014), 36, 43, 110, 250; Enzo Traverso, "Après le spectacle, la débacle," Regards (2011): 12, 43–47; Andrea Mammone, Transnational Neofascism in France and Italy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 245; Paul Ginsborg and Enrica Asquer, eds., Berlusconismo: Analisi di un sistema di potere (Rome: Laterza, 2011); Nicola Tranfaglia, Populismo: Un carattere originale nella storia d'Italia (Rome: Castelvecchi, 2014); Perry Anderson, L'Italia dopo L'Italia (Rome: Castelvecchi, 2014); "Il populismo continentale secondo Perry Anderson," Il Manifesto, March 4, 2015.
21. When, in a typical cycle of populism-technocracy, a center-left coalition called "La Alianza" replaced Menemism in 1999, while still following its neoliberal economic ideology, its main advisors were known as the more elitist "Sushi Group." Without the culinary metaphors in Italy, Berlusconismo was eventually replaced by a center-left that left behind neoliberal populism to engage simply with technocratic neoliberalism.
22. Carlos Saúl Menem, Discurso del presidente Dr. Carlos Saúl Menem desde los balcones de la Casa de Gobierno (Buenos Aires: Secretaría de Prensa y Difusión, Presidencia de la Nación, República Argentina, 1989), 1–5.
23. See Diario de sesiones de la Cámara de Diputados, vol. 2 (Buenos Aires: Congreso Nacional, 1989), 1070.
24. "El día que Cristina reclamó votar a favor de la privatización de YPF," Clarín, April 4, 2012; "Personajes," Noticias, June 15, 1996; "Cristina criticó a la izquierda por una movilización," La Nación, March 28, 2013; "Menem va por su reelección de senador con apoyo kirchnerista," La Razón, March 23, 2011.
25. Juan Perón, "En la ciudad de Santa Fe: 1 de Enero de 1946," in Juan Domingo Perón, Obras Completas (Buenos Aires: Docencia, 1998), 8:18.
26. Folleto, "Dijo el Coronel Perón," Archivo Cedinci.
27. Juan Domingo Perón, "Aspiramos a una sociedad sin divisiones de clase: En el Cine Park, 12 de agosto de 1944," in Juan Perón, El pueblo quiere saber de qué se trata (Buenos Aires: 1944), 149.
28. Jorge Eliécer Gaitán, Discurso-Programa del Doctor Jorge Eliécer Gaitán en la proclamación de su candidatura a la presidencia de la República (Bogota: 1945), 4–6, 8, 10, 12–13, 30–31.
29. See Rómulo Betancourt, Selección de escritos políticos (1929–1981) (Caracas: Fundación Rómulo Betancourt, 2006), 121, 144, 147, 150, 153, 158–159, 162, 163, 169, 172, 175, 178, 191, 195, 214, 216.
30. Jorge Eliécer Gaitán, "Arenga a los venezolanos" (1946); and "Parte de Victoria" (1947), both in Gaitán el orador, ed. Julio Roberto Galindo Hoyos (Bogota: D.C Alvi Impresores 2008), 151–53; 154–69.
31. Juan Domingo Perón, Los Vendepatria: Las pruebas de una traición (Buenos Aires: Liberación, 1958), 220, 228. Some years later Perón stated the Peronist movement had "enemies from within and from without. The one that does not fight against the enemy and for the cause of the people is a traitor. The one who fights against the enemy and for the cause of the people is a compañero [i.e., Peronists]. And the one who fights against a compañero is an enemy or a traitor" (Juan Domingo Perón, Obras Completas, vol. 23:461).
32. Juan Perón, Latinoamerica, ahora o nunca (Montevideo: Diálogo, 1968), 52.
33. "Chávez: 'Yo soy peronista de verdad,'" La Nación, March 6, 2008; "Mesa: La frase 'quien no es chavista no es venezolano' incita al odio," El Universal, June 27, 2012.
34. See Andreas Kalyvas, Democracy and the Politics of the Extraordinary: Max Weber, Carl Schmitt, Hannah Arendt (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2008). This interpretation of Kalyvas' work with respect to populism is presented by Carlos De la Torre in "Populism and the Politics of the Extraordinary in Latin America." Journal of Political Ideologies 21, no. 2 (2016).
35. See Jorge Eliécer Gaitán, Discurso-programa del doctor Jorge Eliécer Gaitán: En la proclamación de su candidatura a la presidencia de la república (Bogota: 1945), 5; Daniel Pécaut, Orden y Violencia: Evolución socio-política de Colombia entre 1930 y 1953 (Bogotá: Norma, 2001), 441. See also the discussion among Herbert Braun, Rubén Darío Acevedo, and Ricardo Arias, in "La oratoria de Jorge Eliécer Gaitán," Revista de Estudios Sociales 44 (2012): 207–11.
36. On delegative democracy, see the influential essay by Guillermo O'Donnell, "Delegative Democracy," Journal of Democracy 5, no. 1 (1994).
37. Perón's speech is cited in Raanan Rein, In the Shadow of Perón (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2008), 107.
38. Cas Mudde and Cristóbal Rovira Kaltwasser, Populism: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), 44, 64.
39. Jack, Montgomery, "France First," Breitbart, February 7, 2017, www.breitbart.com/london/2017/02/07/french-first-marine-le-pen-hits-islamism-financial-globalisation/; "Le Pen se présente en candidate du 'peuple' Le Figaro, February 4, 2017, www.lefigaro.fr/elections/presidentielles/2017/02/04/35003–20170204LIVWWW00039-en-direct-le-fil-politique-du-week-end.php.
40. I thank Natalia Mehlman Petrzela for her comments on this topic. See also Rick Perlstein, Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus (New York: Hill and Wang, 2001), 433–34.
41. During the 2016 campaign, Trump also suggested that progun activists could use their weapons against her or her Supreme Court nominee if she were elected president. Nick Corasaniti and Maggie Haberman, "Donald Trump Suggests 'Second Amendment People' Could Act against Hillary Clinton," New York Times, August 9, 2016; Alexander Burns and Maggie Haberman, "Trailing Hillary Clinton, Donald Trump Turns to Political Gymnastics," New York Times, September 1, 2016; Patrick Healy and Jonathan Martin, "Personal Attacks in the Forefront at Caustic Debate," New York Times, October 10, 2016.
42. Juan Domingo Perón, Obras Completas, 22:83.
43. Michael D. Shear, "Reading between the Lines of Trump's Interview with Times," New York Times, March 24, 2017; Rebecca Harrington, "TRUMP: 'A Global Power Structure' Is Trying to Take Down My Campaign," Business Insider, October 13, 2016, www.businessinsider.com/donald-trump-global-power-structure-palm-beach-speech-2016–10.
44. Harrington, "TRUMP"; Juan Doming Perón, Política y estrategia: (no ataco, critico), in Juan Domingo Perón, Obras Completas, 11:100.
45. See Boris Fausto, Getúlio Vargas: O poder e o sorriso (São Paulo: Companhia das Letras, 2006), 196–99. See also the ironically argued, cogent reading by Tulio Halperin Donghi, Historia contemporánea de América Latina (Buenos Aires: Alianza, 1994), 470.
46. Eva Perón, Mensajes y discursos, 2:62. Eva Perón died just six months after the reelection of her husband and after her surgery at the Hospital President Perón in Avellaneda. According to Perón, she refused to cease working for the people until the very end of her life. On Eva Perón's death, see Tulio Halperín Donghi, Argentina en el callejón (Buenos Aires: Ariel, 1995), 162; Marysa Navarro, Evita (Buenos Aires : Edhasa, 2005), 333; Loris Zanatta, Eva Perón: Una biografia politica (Soveria Mannelli: Rubbettino, 2009), 297
47. Ernesto Laclau, "El legado de Néstor Kirchner," Página 12, November 4, 2010. See also "'Scioli no es Cristina,' dijo el filósofo Laclau," La Voz del Interior, September 21, 2013.
48. Ignacio Ramonet, "Chávez en campaña," Le Monde Diplomatique en Español, August 2012; "Sin Hugo Chávez, Venezuela enfrenta un futuro dividido," La Nación, March 6, 2013.
49. "Cristina Fernández crea la secretaría del Pensamiento Nacional," El País, June 5, 2014; "Venezuela inaugura un ministerio de la Felicidad," Clarín, October 24, 2013.
50. Beatriz Sarlo, La audacia y el cálculo: Kirchner 2003–2010 (Buenos Aires: Sudamericana, 2011), 146, 153, 155. On Laclau and Argentina, see Nicolás Damín, "Populismo entre Argentina y Europa: Sobre la transnacionalización de un concepto," Revista Cuestiones de Sociologia 4, no. 2 (2015); Omar Acha, "Del populismo marxista al postmarxista: La trayectoria de Ernesto Laclau en la Izquierda Nacional (1963–2013)," Archivos de historia del movimiento obrero y la izquierda 2, no. 3 (2013); Enrique Peruzzotti, "Conceptualizing Kirchnerismo," Partecipazione e conflitto 10, no. 1 (2017): 47–64.
51. Ricardo Forster, "El nombre del kirchnerismo," Página 12, May 18, 2014.
52. Ernesto Laclau, "Populism: What's in a Name," in Populism and the Mirror of Democracy, ed. Francisco Panizza (London: Verso, 2005), 40.
53. "La ultima entrevista de Ernesto Laclau," La Nación, April 13, 2014; "Kirchner fue un populista a medias," Clarín, October 29, 2010; "Para Laclau, el Estado argentino es hoy más democrático que en 2003," Perfil, November 7, 2013.
54. "Fútbol gratis por diez años en TV abierta," Página 12, August 21, 2009.
55. Andrew Arato, Post Sovereign Constitutional Making, 269–270.
56. "Vamos a una polarización institucional," Página 12, May 17, 2010; "Hay que seguir su combate," Página 12, October 7, 2015. Like Laclau, Mouffe had opposed the Kirchners to "a series of interests that are against the democratization of the country." See "Entrevista con la politóloga belga Chantal Mouffe," Página 12, September 5, 2010; "Claroscuros de la razón populista," Clarín, April 4, 2014; Fabián Bosoer, "Los debates y los combates abiertos," Clarín, April 4, 2014.
57. Ernesto Laclau, "El legado de Néstor Kirchner," Página 12, November 4, 2010.
58. See "Cristina rindió un homenaje a Laclau," La Nación, April 15, 2014; Ernesto Laclau, The Rhetorical Foundations of Society (New York: Verso, 2014).
59. "Hay que seguir su combate," Página 12, October 7, 2015. Like Laclau, Mouffe had opposed the Kirchners to "a series of interests that are against the democratization of the country." See "Entrevista con la politóloga belga Chantal Mouffe"; "Claroscuros de la razon populista"; Bosoer, "Los debates y los combates abiertos."
60. "Plazas, puentes y calles reflejan el culto a Kirchner," La Nación, March 6, 2011; "Kirchner para todos: Se multiplican los lugares públicos con su nombre," Clarín, October 2, 2011.
61. "Woody Guthrie Wrote of His Contempt for His Landlord, Donald Trump's father," New York Times, January 25, 2016.
62. See Michael Kazin, The Populist Persuasion (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1995), 232, 233. On Wallace, see also Joseph Lowndes, "From Founding Violence to Political Hegemony: The Conservative Populism of George Wallace," in Panizza, Populism and the Mirror, 144–71
63. Andrew Kaczynski and Jon Sarlin, "Trump in 1989 Central Park Five interview: "Maybe Hate Is What We Need," CNN, October 10 2016, www.cnn.com/2016/10/07/politics/trump-larry-king-central-park-five/; Roberto Gargarella, Castigar al prójimo: Por una refundación democrática del derecho penal (Buenos Aires: Siglo XXI, 2016).
64. "'Tutti con Silvio,' il discorso integrale di Berlusconi," Secolo d'Italia, March 23, 2013, www.secoloditalia.it/2013/03/tutti-con-silvio-il-discorso-integrale-di-berlusconi/. "Siamo tutti Berlusconi"; "Il Pdl con le maschere di SilvioGalleria fotográfica," Repubblica, August 14, 2013, www.repubblica.it/politica/2013/08/04/foto/manifestazione_pdl_le_maschere_di_berlusconi-64280320/1/#7.
65. Juan Domingo Perón, Obras Completas, 18:215.
66. "Marine Le Pen dénonce les 'totalitarismes' qui 'menacent' la France," Mediapart, February 5, 2017, www.mediapart.fr/journal/france/050217/marine-le-pen-denonce-les-totalitarismes-qui-menacent-la-france; Mark Landler, "Trump Under Fire for Invoking Nazis in Criticism of U.S. Intelligence," New York Times, January 11, 2017; "The Turkish President Has Just Called the Netherlands 'Nazi Remnants' and 'Fascists,'" Quartz, March 11, 2017, <https://qz.com/930584/turkish-president-recep-tayyip-erdogan-lashed-out-at-the-netherlands-calling-them-nazi-remnants-and-fascists/>.
67. George Wallace quoted in John Judis, The Populist Explosion (New York: Columbia Global Reports, 2016), 35; Juan Perón, "¿Por qué el gobierno argentino no es fascista?," in Juan Domingo Perón, Obras Completas, 6:571.
68. See Hugo Chávez Frías, La democracia poderosa y el liderazgo (Caracas: Ministerio para el Poder Popular para la Comunicación y la Información, 2008), 14; "Chávez ganó la reforma y lanzó ya su candidatura para el 2012," Clarín, February 16, 2009; "Chávez diz que vitória em referendo consolida socialismo na Venezuela," Folha de S. Paulo, February 16, 2009; "Chávez: Si fuera gobernador de Miranda estaría todos los días en la calle," El Universal, July 28, 2012.
69. See Juan Domingo Perón, Política y estrategia, 230. See also Finchelstein, Origins of the Dirty War, 82.
70. See Pablo Piccato, Fabián Bosoer, and Federico Finchelstein, "In Trump's America, the Independent Press Would Become the Enemy," Open Democracy, November 1, 2016, www.opendemocracy.net/pablo-piccato-fabian-bosoer-federico-finchelstein/why-president-trump-will-target-independent-media.
71. On the history of populist right-wing media, see Nicole Hemmer, Messengers of the Right: Conservative Media and the Transformation of American Politics (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016).
72. "Trump Uses Policy Speech to Attack Media, Promises to Sue Accusers," Reuters, October 23, 2016, www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-election-idUSKCN12M0QJ?feedType=RSS&feedName=topNews&utm_source=twitter&utm_medium=Social.
73. Sarlo, La audacia y el cálculo, 71.
74. See Silvio Waisbord, Vox Populista: Medios, Periodismo, Democracia (Buenos Aires: Gedisa, 2013), 17, 28–29, 166, 187.
75. Jean Comaroff, "Populism and Late Liberalism: A Special Affinity?," Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 637 (2011): 102.
76. Umberto Eco, "UR-Fascism," New York Review of Books, June 22, 1995.
77. For a different view that presents populism as being in the process of substantially changing because of the new media landscape, see Benjamin Moffit, The Global Rise of Populism: Performance, Political Style, and Representation (Stanford. CA: Stanford University Press, 2016), 3.
78. See Fondo Documental Secretaria Técnica, Legajo 484, Mensajes Presidenciales, Clase dictada por el EXCMO Señor Presidente de la Nación, General Juan Perón en la Escuela Superior Peronista, Julio 2, de 1953, 62/70, Archivo General de la Nación, Argentina (AGN); Fondo Documental Secretaria Técnica Legajo 484, Mensajes Presidenciales editados en libreto, Folleto, "No queremos hacer el proletariado campesino: Queremos hacer agricultores felices" dijo Perón a los hombres del campo (Buenos Aires: Presidencia de la Nación, 1953) (June 11. 1953), 11, AGN.
79. "La navidad de Perón," La Vanguardia, December 24, 1946.
80. See Finchelstein, Origins of the Dirty War, 78–82
81. See José Pedro Zúquete, "'Free the People': The Search for 'True Democracy' in Western Europe's Far-Right Political Culture," in De la Torre, Promise and Perils of Populism, 236; Daniel Pécaut, "El populismo Gaitanista," in La Democratizacioon Fundamental, ed. Carlos M. Vilas, 501.
82. Juan Domingo Perón, Los Vendepatria, 228.
83. See "Chávez agradeció estar vivo para sentir el rugir de las multitudes," El Universal, July 14, 2012; "Chávez en campaña," Le Monde diplomatique en español, August, 2012; "Chávez lloró y le pidió a Dios: "No me lleves todavía," La Nación, April 6, 2012; "Chávez promete volver 'con más vida' de Cuba," El Mundo, February 25, 2012.
84. De la Torre, "Politics of the Extraordinary."
85. "Chávez será velado siete días más," Página 12, March 7, 2013; "Maduro: Somos los apóstoles de Chávez," El Universal, March 18, 2013; "Maduro inscribió su candidatura rodeado de una multitud de chavistas," Clarín, March 11, 2013.
86. "Italy's Silvio Berlusconi Changes His Party's Tune—Literally," Christian Science Monitor, December 30, 2009.
87. Private communication from Ertug Tombus. See also, "Sólo hay que tenerle miedo a Dios . . . y un poquito a mí," Clarín, September 7, 2012; Benjamin Moffitt, Global Rise of Populism, 63. For the role of clericalism in Central and Eastern European populism, see Andrea Pirro, "Populist Radical Right Parties in Central and Eastern Europe: The Different Context and Issues of the Prophets of the Patria," Government and Opposition 49, no. 4 (2014), 612, 613.
88. "Trump, as Nominee, Vows: 'I Am Your Voice," New York Times, July 22, 2016.
89. When he was asked "Who is God to you?" Trump responded, "Well I say God is the ultimate. You know you look at this? Here we are on the Pacific Ocean. How did I ever own this a golf course]? I bought it fifteen years ago. I made one of the great deals they say ever. I have no more mortgage on it as I will certify and represent to you. And I was able to buy this and make a great deal. That's what I want to do for the country. Make great deals. We have to, we have to bring it back, but God is the ultimate. I mean God created this and here's the Pacific Ocean right behind us. So nobody, no thing, no there's nothing like God" (Denver Nicks, "Here's What Donald Trump Thinks about God." Time, September 2015, <http://time.com/4046620/donald-trump-god-ultimate/>). See also "Trump on God: 'Hopefully I Won't Have to Be Asking for Much Forgiveness,'" Washington Post, June 8, 2016, [www.washingtonpost.com/news/acts-of-faith/wp/2016/06/08/trump-on-god-hopefully-i-wont-have-to-be-asking-for-much-forgiveness/; "Trump Predicts Winning the Presidency Will Get Him into Heaven," Politico August 11, 2016, www.politico.com/story/2016/08/trump-heaven-president-pastors-226923#ixzz4H89vfgFO. For the connections between populism and capitalism in American history, see Bethany Moreton, To Serve God and WalMart: The Making of Christian Free Enterprise (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009); and Julia Ott, When Wall Street Met Main Street: The Quest for Investor Democracy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011).
90. Chiara Bottici, "The Mass Psychology of Trumpism: Old and New Myths," Public Seminar, November 17, 2016, www.publicseminar.org/2016/11/the-mass-psychology-of-trumpism/#.WH954hsrLIW. For Bottici's key work on political myth, see Philosophy of Political Myth (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007).
91. Judith Butler, "Reflections on Trump," Hot Spots, Cultural Anthropology website, January 18, 2017, <https://culanth.org/fieldsights/1032-reflections-on-trump>.
92. I thank Aaron Jakes for this last point.
93. See Lahouari Addi, "De la permanence du populisme algérien," Peuples méditerranéens (1990): 37–46. See also his book L'impasse du populisme (Alger: Entreprise nationale du livre, 1991); and more recently "Sociologie politique d'un populisme autoritaire," Confluences Méditerranée 2, no. 81 (2012): 27–40. See also Olivier Roy, The Failure of Political Islam (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994), 10, 83; Kaveh L. Afrasiabi, "Islamic Populism," Telos, June 20, 1995: 97–125; Vedi R. Hadiz, Islamic Populism in Indonesia and the Middle East (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016).
94. See Fondo Documental Secretaria Técnica, Mensajes presidenciales Clase dictada por el EXCMO Señor Presidente de la Nación, General Juan Perón en la Escuela Superior Peronista, Julio 2, de 1953, 61, 91, AGN; "La familia en el pensamiento vivo de Perón," Mundo Peronista, January, 1952, 5. See also Silvia Sigal, "Intelectuales y peronismo," in Los años peronistas, 1943–1955, ed. Juan Carlos Torre (Buenos Aires: Sudamericana, 2002), 518.
95. See Cas Mudde and Cristóbal Rovira Kaltwasser, "Vox populi or vox masculini? Populism and Gender in Northern Europe and South America," Patterns of Prejudice 49, nos. 1–2 (2015). Mudde and Rovira argue that "The stereotypical populist strongman is more likely to be attractive to people in societies with a more traditional and machismo culture, while entrepreneur-populists will probably be attractive in more capitalist and materialist societies." See Mudde and Kaltwasser, Populism, 77.
96. David Farehnthold, "Trump Recorded Having Extremely Lewd Conversation about Women in 2005," Washington Post, October 8, 2016; "Tape Reveals Trump Boast about Groping Women," New York Times, October 8, 2016; "Don't Just Listen to Donald Trump Boast about Sexual Assault: Listen to the Women Who've Accused Him," Quartz, October 8, 2016, <http://qz.com/804486/the-women-whove-accused-donald-trump-of-sexual-assault/>; "Biden Accuses Trump of 'Sexual assault,'" Politico, October 8, 2016.
97. Duterte said, "As you know, I'm fighting with US Secretary of State John Kerry's] ambassador. His gay ambassador, the son of a whore. He pissed me off" ("Philippines' Rodrigo Duterte Insults US Envoy with Homophobic Slur," Guardian, August 10, 2016, [www.theguardian.com/world/2016/aug/10/philippines-leader-calls-us-ambassador-gay-son-of-a-whore-prompting-summons); "El Trump filipino: Duterte, el hombre fuerte que llega con recetas polémicas, La Nación, June 5, 2016, www.lanacion.com.ar/1905827-el-trump-filipino-duterte-el-hombre-fuerte-que-llega-con-recetas-polemicas; "Silvio Berlusconi: 'My Passion for Women Is Better Than Being Gay,'" Telegraph, November 2, 2010; "Donald Trump Makes His Penis a Campaign Issue during Debate," March 4, 2016, NBC News, www.nbcnews.com/politics/2016-election/donald-trump-makes-his-penis-campaign-issue-during-debate-n531666; "Duterte Tells Obama Not to Question Him about Killings," Associated Press, September 5, 2016, <http://bigstory.ap.org/article/cd9eda8d34814aedabb9579a31849474/duterte-tells-obama-not-question-him-about-killings>; "Obama anula una reunión con Duterte porque le llamó 'hijo de puta,'" El País, September 6, 2016.
98. "Philippines' Duterte Likens Himself to Hitler, Wants to Kill Millions of Drug Users," Reuters, October 1, 2016, www.reuters.com/article/us-philippines-duterte-hitler-idUSKCN1200B9.
99. "¡Marisabel, prepárate, que esta noche te voy a dar lo tuyo!" See "Las mujeres y Chávez, un vínculo intenso," La Nación, March 10, 2013; "Chávez manda oposição venezuelana 'tomar Viagra,'" Folha de S.Paulo, December 10, 2001; "'Vou descontaminar o Mercosul,' afirma Chávez na chegada," Folha de S.Paulo, January 19, 2007.
100. See Carlos de la Torre, Populist Seduction in Latin America (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2010), 109, 105, 107. On this topic, see also the essays in Karen Kampwirth, ed., Gender and Populism in Latin America (University Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2010).
101. Federico Finchelstein and Pablo Piccato, "A Belief System That Once Laid the Groundwork for Fascism," New York Times, December 10, 2015, www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2015/12/09/donald-trumps-america/a-belief-system-that-once-laid-the-groundwork-for-fascism.
102. Nicola Tranfaglia, "Trump e il populismo fascista," Articolo 21, March 2, 2016, www.articolo21.org/2016/03/trump-e-il-populismo-fascista/; "Entrevista a Carlos de la Torre 'El populismo de Le Pen es un fascismo disfrazado de democracia,'" ABC, June 29, 2016, www.abc.es/espana/abci-populismo-fascismo-disfrazado-democracia-201606290918_noticia.html.
## EPILOGUE
1. "Le Pen: Trump's Win 'Victory of the People against the Elites,'" Breitbart, November 13, 2016, www.breitbart.com/london/2016/11/13/le-pen-trumps-win-victory-people-elites/.
2. See Eva Perón, "Palabras pronunciadas el 29 de Mayo de 1951, en el acto organizado por la colectividad japonesa residente en el país, en el Salón blanco de la Casa de Gobierno," in Eva Perón, Mensajes y discursos (Buenos Aires: Fundación pro Universidad de la Producción y del Trabajo: Fundación de Investigaciones Históricas Evita Perón, 1999), 3:244.
3. See Dylan Riley, The Civic Foundations of Fascism in Europe: Italy, Spain, and Romania 1870–1945 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010), for insightful and provocative analyses of fascism and civil society.
4. Ibid., 212.
5. Legajo 20, Sala VII 2596, Carpeta recortes s/n, Archivo General de la Nación, Argentina, Archivo Uriburu.
6. See Juan Domingo Perón, "En la Bolsa de Comercio: 25 de agosto de 1944," in Coronel Juan Perón, El pueblo quiere saber de qué se trata (Buenos Aires: 1944).
# INDEX
Acción Democrática (Venezuela),
Addi, Lahouari, ,
Adorno, Theodor,
African National Congress (South Africa),
AKP Party (Turkey),
Algeria: populism in, 238–240
Allardyce, Gilbert, ,
Alleanza Nazionale (party),
Al-Qaeda,
Alternative for Germany (AFD), ,
Ameal, João,
American Popular Revolutionary Alliance (APRA). See Aprismo
Améry, Jean,
ANEL (Independent Greeks),
anticolonialism, ,
anticommunism: and historiography, . See also under populism; fascism
antifascism, , , , , , , ,
anti-imperialism, , , , , ,
antipolitics, , , , , ,
antipopulism, , , , , 142–143, , ; and anti-Peronism, , 118–120
anti-Semitism: in Argentina, ; in Austria, ; in Eastern Europe, ; in Italy, ; and Latin American populists, 171–172; in Mexico, ; and Nazism, 41–42, 68–71; in US, 155–156
Aprismo (Peru), 113–116,
Arato, Andrew, , , 287n150; on dictatorship, , ; critique of Laclau,
Arditi, Benjamin,
Arendt, Hannah: on dictatorship, ; on fascism and ideology, , ; on popular sovereignty,
Argentina: Christianized fascism in, 63–64, , 111–112; corporatism in, 88–89; coup of 1943, 111–112; Dirty War, , , , , 179–180, ; Grupo de Oficiales Unidos (GOU), ; nacionalismo as fascism, , 33–34, 59–61, 77–78, , 108–109, ; protopopulism in, , ; Yrigoyenism, , 113–116. See also Kirchnerismo; Peronism
Auschwitz, , ,
Australia, , ,
Austria: fascism in, ; populism in, , , , , , , , , ,
Balibar, Étienne, ,
Bannon, Steve, ,
Barak, Ehud,
Barrès, Maurice,
Barroso, Gustavo, ,
Begin, Menachem,
Benjamin, Walter,
Berlin, Isaiah, , ; on "Cinderella complex,"
Berlusconi, Silvio: as populist leader, , 22–23, , 194–196, 216–217, , , , ; on "the people," 219–220, ; and the press, ; sexism, ; and the sacred,
Betancourt, Rómulo, , , , 292n25
Biden, Joseph,
Birther Movement,
Blair, Tony,
Bobbio, Norberto, 271n38
Bolívar, Simón, , ,
Bolivia: Bolivian Falange, ; classical populism in, , , , , 121–125; fascism in, ; left populism in, , , , , , , 187–188, , ; Revolution of 1952, ,
Bolshevism, , ,
Borges, Jorge Luis, ; as antifascist, , ; on Nazi violence,
Bosoer, Fabián,
Bottici, Chiara,
Boulanger, Georges, ,
Brazil: Green Shirts, ; integralismo, , , 33–34, , , , , , 87–88, ; military dictatorship, ; neofascism in, ; populism in, , , , , , , , , ; Varguism, , , 113–116, , , ,
Breitbart News Network, , , ; on Trump as populist leader,
Brower, Benjamin, 279n89
Bucaram, Abdalá, , , , , ,
Bulgaria,
Burke, Edmund,
Bush, George W.,
Canovan, Margaret,
Cárdenas, Lázaro, ,
Catholicism: Church, , ; and fascism, ; and populist regimes, , ,
caudillismo, ,
Chávez, Hugo: and authoritarianism, , ; and elections, ; idea of the enemy, 221–223; influence in Latin America, , ; on Juan Perón, ; as left populist leader, , , , ; and "the people," 232–234; and the press, ; and the sacred, 208–211, ,
Cheeseman, Nic,
Chile, , , ,
China, , , , ; Blueshirts, , ,
Clarín (newspaper),
Clinton, Hillary, , ,
A Clockwork Orange (film),
CNN, ,
Coggin, John,
Collor de Mello, Fernando, , , ,
Colombia, ; fascism in (see Leopards); Gaitanismo, , , , , ; National Popular Alliance (ANAPO), 291n21; neoliberal populism,
Comaroff, Jean, ,
Conrad, Sebastian,
Corner, Paul,
Correa, Rafael, ,
Costamagna, Carlo,
Costa Pinto, António, , ,
Coughlin, Charles, ,
Courtois, Stéphan,
Croatia,
Croce, Benedetto,
De Felice, Renzo, , 274n58; on fascism and history, 46–47
De la Torre, Carlos, , , , , , ,
Denmark,
dictatorship: and anti-populism, , , ; in Argentina, , , , 110–112, , , , 179–181, , 253–254; in Algeria, ; in Bolivia, 121–122, ; Bonapartism, ; in Brazil, , , ; in Colombia, ; in interwar Europe, 84–85; modern features, 177–179; in Peru, , ; in Portugal, ; in Spain, , , ; types of, 184–185; in Venezuela, , ; and violence, 179–180
Di Tella, Torcuato,
Dreyfus affair,
Duterte, Rodrigo, 242–243
Ecuador: classical populism, , , , , , ; neoclassical populism, , , , ; neoliberalism in, 188–189
Egypt, , ; Blueshirts, ; Green Shirts, ,
Eley, Geoff,
El Salvador,
Erdogan, Recep Tayyip: as authoritarian populist, , , 152–153, , 205–206, , ; on enemies as "fascists," ,
Errejón, Iñigo, ,
Eurocentrism, , , 127–129
Falange (Spain), ,
Farage, Nigel,
fascism: and aesthetics, 37–38, ; and anticommunism, , , , , 51–53, 84–85, , ; as anti-Enlightenment, , , 31–32, 44–45, 50–51, ; and anti-liberalism, 50–51, , , 84–87; and capitalism, 15–17, , 43–44, 85–88; and Catholicism, , ; and corporatism, , , , , 84–88; definitions, 40–41, 47–49, , ; and dictatorship, , , , 15–17, 40–42, 60–62, , 83–85, 88–99, , , , 182–183, , , 252–254; and figure of the leader, 75–76, 182–185, ; "generic," 45–50, ; historiography of, 45–57, 71–72; idea of the enemy, , , 70–71, 75–77, , ; and imperialism, 79–80, ; Islamic, , , , , ; and masculinity, , , ; as movement, , , ; and myth, , , , ; and nationalism, , , 51–55, , , , ; and racism, , , , , , , , , , , , ; as reactionary modernism, 36–37, , ; as regime, , 14–17, , 48–52, , 82–83, , ; as revolution, 32–33, , 43–44, , ; and "the people," 86–92, , , ; and totalitarianism, 42–44, , , , , , , 272n40; as transnational ideology, , , , 53–63, , 71–73, , , , , 277n79; and violence, 15–17, 24–25, 32–33, 41–45, , , 61–62, 65–70, 73–79, , , , 180–181,
Fernández de Kirchner, Cristina: on Ernesto Laclau, ; idea of the enemy, , ; as left populist, , , ; and Menemism, 197–198; as populist leader, , ; and the sacred, ; views on Donald Trump,
Filc, Dani, , ,
Fini, Gianfranco,
Finland, ,
Filippo, Virgilio,
Five Star Movement (Italy), ,
Formisano, Ronald,
Forza Italia,
France: Boulangism, , , ; fascism in, , , , ; French Revolution, , , , ; neofascism in, , ; right-wing populism in, , , , , ,
Franco, Francisco, , ,
Frank, Jason,
Freedom Party (Austria),
Freud, Sigmund, , ,
Friedländer, Saul,
Fritzsche, Peter,
Front de Libération Nationale (Algeria),
Fujimori, Alberto: as right-wing neopopulist, , , , , , ; self-coup,
Furet, François,
Gagliardi, Alessio,
Gaitán, Jorge Eliécer: idea of the enemy, 201–202; idea of the leader, , 232–233; as populist, , 118–120,
Gandhi, Mahatma,
Gargarella, Roberto,
Garibaldi, Giuseppe,
Gentile, Emilio, , ,
Germani, Gino, , ; on Peronism and fascism, 147–148
Germany: fascism in (see Nazism); Historiskestreit debate, 49–50; right-wing populism in, , , , 170–171,
Goebbels, Joseph,
Golden Dawn Party (Greece), , , , ; as neofascist movement,
Goldwater, Barry, , ,
Gotkowitz, Laura, ,
Gramsci, Antonio, , ,
Great Britain, , , , ; Brexit referendum, ,
Great Depression,
Greece: left populism in, , , 136–137, ; neofascism in, , , , 169–171
Griffin, Roger, , , ,
Grillo, Beppe, ; on Donald Trump,
Guatemala, , ,
Guthrie, Woody,
Habermas, Rebekka,
Hadiz, Vedi R.,
Halperín Donghi, Tulio, ,
Hanson, Pauline,
Haya de la Torre, Víctor Raúl, , ,
Herder, Johann Gottfried,
Herrán Avila, Luis, , 276n73
Hitler, Adolf: anti-Semitism, 41–42, , ; as fascist leader, , , , , , , ; global influence/legacy, 11–12, , 89–90, , , ; views on violence and sacrifice, , , 41–42, , ,
Ho Chi Minh,
Hobbes, Thomas,
Hobsbawm, Eric, ,
Hoffman, Reto,
Hofstadter, Richard, ,
Holocaust, , , , , , ; denial of, , ; and fascist violence, , 65–70,
Horkheimer, Max,
Hungary: fascism in, ; populism in, , , , , ,
Husayn, Ahmad,
Iglesias, Pablo,
Il Popolo della Libertà,
India: fascism in, , , , 60–63; populism as postfascism in,
Indonesia, , , ,
Iran,
Iraq,
Ireland, ,
Islamic Salvation Front (FIS),
Israel, ; populism in, 189–191,
Italy: fascism in, , ; , , , , ; neofascism in, ; populism in (see Berlusconi, Silvio; Five Star Movement; Grillo, Beppe)
Ivanissevich, Oscar,
Japan, , , , ,
Jobbik Party (Hungary), ,
Kallis, Aristotle,
Kalyvas, Andreas, , , , 284n128
Kaplan, Chaim,
Katsambekis, Giorgio,
Katznelson, Ira,
Kirchner, Néstor: death as political sacrifice, , ; as left populist, , ; and Menemism, ; as populist symbol, , 215–216
Kirchnerismo: and gender/sexual equality, ; as left populism, , , , 137–138, 212–216; and Menemism, ; as movement, ; as political theology, , , 208–209, , ; and the press, 225–226
Knight, Alan, ,
Kubrick, Stanley,
Ku Klux Klan,
LaCapra, Dominick,
Laclau, Ernesto: critics, 144–145; influence, , , ; on Kirchnerismo, , 214–215; role in politics, 211–214; theory of populism, 94–95, , , , , 212–215
Larmer, Miles,
Lega Nord, ,
Lenin, Vladimir, ,
Le Pen, Jean-Marie,
Le Pen, Marine: on Donald Trump, , ; as right-wing populist leader, , , , , , , ,
Levi, Primo, ,
Leopards (fascist group), ,
Lieberman, Avigdor, , ,
Likud Party, , , 306n16
Lindbergh, Charles,
The Lives of Others (film),
Livni, Tzipi,
Long, Huey,
López Obrador, Andrés Manuel, 290n17
Lueger, Karl, , ,
Lugones, Leopoldo, , ; on authoritarian dictatorship, 88–89
Lula da Silva, Luiz Inácio,
Macri, Mauricio,
Madison, James,
Maduro, Nicolás, , ; on Hugo Chávez, , , ; as left populist leader, , , ,
Maeztu, Ramiro de,
Mammone, Andrea,
Mao Tse-Tung,
Maradona, Diego,
Martínez Zuviría, Gustavo (pseud. Hugo Wast),
Marx, Karl, ,
Mashriqi, Inayatullah Khan,
May, Theresa,
McCarthy, Joseph,
Menem, Carlos: on austerity and popular sovereignty, 196–197; idea of the enemy, , ; and neoliberalism, 188–189, 193–195; as populist, , , ; views on gender/sexuality, 241–242
Mengele, Josef,
Merkel, Angela,
Mexico: Cardenism, , 114–115; fascism in, , 59–60, ; Mexican Revolution, ; protopopulism in, , ,
MNR (Nationalist Revolutionary Movement), 121–124
Moffit, Benjamin,
Monedero, Juan Carlos,
Montoneros,
Morales, Evo, , , ,
Morocco,
Moses, Dirk,
Mosse, George, , , ,
Mouffe, Chantal,
Movimiento Sociale Italiano,
Mudde, Cas, , , ,
Müller, Jan-Werner, ,
Mussolini, Benito: in contemporary Italian politics; ; and fascist ideology, , 34–40, , , , 76–79, , , , ; as fascist leader, , , ; as global fascist figure, , , , , , , ; idea of "Romaness," , ; and totalitarianism, 42–43,
Narodnik Party (Russia),
National Front (France), ,
nationalism: and fascism, , , 51–55, , , , ; and populism, , , , 107–109, , , , , . See also populism; xenophobia
Nazism: as fascism, , , , 48–49, , 60–62, 66–73; Führerprinzip, ; idea of the enemy, 67–68, , ; idea of "the people," , , ; influence on Peronism,
neoliberalism: austerity, , , , , , , , ; challenges to democracy, ; and populism, , 29–30, 134–135, 137–138, , , 168–170, , 187–188, 193–197, ,
Netanyahu, Benjamin, 189–191,
Netherlands, ; right-wing populism in, , ,
New Deal, ,
New York Times,
Nietzsche, Friedrich, , ,
Nixon, Richard,
Nolte, Ernst, , , ; on fascism and Marxism, 49–50; on Nazism,
Northern League (Italy),
Norway, ,
Obama, Barack, , ,
O'Duffy, Eoin,
Orban, Viktor,
Paine, Thomas,
Pakistan, ,
Pasetti, Mateo, ,
Paxton, Robert, , , ; on stages of fascism, 48–49
Payne, Stanley, , , , ; on fascism in Latin America, 274n61
Paz Estenssoro, Víctor, , ,
PEGIDA (Germany), , ,
Peña Nieto, Enrique,
People of Italy (newspaper),
People's Party,
Pérez Jiménez, Marcos,
Perón, Eva: death, 208–209, ; on electoral legitimacy, 171–172, ; on Juan Perón as leader, , ; and Kirchnerismo, ; and the sacred, ,
Perón, Juan Domingo: as dictator, , , , ; idea of the enemy, , , 220–221; on organic democracy, , ; ; as paternal/god-like figure, , 229–233, ; on "the people," , ; as populist leader, , , , , , 181–183, 196–197; views on fascism, ,
Peronism: and authoritarianism, , 171–173; as civic religion, 231–232; and democratization, , , 110–112, , , , , , ; and fascism, , , 151–152, ; and gender/sexuality, ; ideological eclecticism, , 150–151; influence in Latin America, 118–121, , ; as movement, , , 151–152, ; and the press, 223–224; in theories of populism, 129–130, , 147–149, , 214–215, 294n35. See also Fernández de Kirchner, Cristina; Kirchnerismo; Kirchner, Néstor; Menem, Carlos Saúl; Perón, Eva; Perón, Juan Domingo
Perot, Ross, ,
Peru: Blackshirts, , ; fascism in, , ; populism (see Aprismo)
Peruzzotti, Enrique,
Philippines,
Piccato, Pablo, ,
Pinochet, Augusto,
Podemos (Spain), , 135–136,
Poland,
political theology: in fascism, ; in populism, , , , , , , , , , , ,
popular sovereignty, , ; in American republic, 159–160; in fascism, , , , , ; and neoliberalism, , ; in populism, , , , , , , , , 229–231,
populism: and anticommunism, , , 118–119, , , , , , , , ; and antielitism, , , 20–21, , , , , , , , , , , , 190–191, 195–196, 205–206, , , ; and anti-globalism, ; and anti-institutionalism, 176–7, 179–181, , 193–194; and anti-liberalism, 27–28, , , , , 156–157, , , , 306n16; and anti-pluralism, , , ; and authoritarianism, , , , , , , , , , , ; in contemporary Europe, 134–139, , 166–172; and democratization, , , , 132–133, , ; and dictatorship, 5–6, 27–28, , 96–97, 103–104, , , 175–177, , , ; and electoral legitimacy, 93–94, , , , , , , , 162–164, 180–182, 185–187, , , , , , ; ethno-populism, 187–188, ; figure of the leader, , , , 162–163, 169–70, , 182–184, 188–189, , 199–202, 206–212, 227–235, , 250–254; and gender/sexuality, 240–246; and idea of the enemy, , , 115–116, , , , 153–154, , , , 187–192, 199–201, , 221–223, , , 295n41; Islamic, 236–238; and the media, 222–228; "minimalist" definition, , ; and modernization, 107–108, 126–7; as movement, , , , , , , , , 101–103, 113–115, , , , , 135–138, , 156–157, , , , , , , 223–224, ; and nationalism, 107–109, , , ; and neoliberalism, , 29–30, 134–135, 137–138, , , 168–170, , 187–188, 193–197, , ; penal populism, ; and "the people," 81–83, 93–95, 107–108, , 121–123, 135–136, , , 164–166, , , , 199–201, 219–220, , 238–239, ; and polarization, 112–113, , ; as postfascism, , 21–23, 65–66, 95–97, , , , , 172–173, , , ; and "producerism," 219–221; and racism, , , , , , 145–146, 169–171, , 245–246, ; as regime, , 18–19, , , , 82–83, , 96–97, , , , , 176–177, , 247–248; as third way/position, 118–119, , , , , ; and transformism, , ; as transnational phenomenon, , , 158–159, , ; types and features, , 101–104; and xenophobia, , , , , , 138–139, 145–146, , , , , , , 306n16
Portugal, , , ; Blue Shirts, ,
positivism: in theories of populism, 144–147
prepopulism: and fascism, , , 82–83, , , 116–117, ; of the Right, 108–109,
Primo de Rivera, José Antonio,
protopopulism, , , ; in Latin America, 113–116, , 156–157
Putin, Vladimir,
Ram, Uri,
Rancière, Jacques, ,
Reagan, Ronald,
Reale, Miguel, , ,
Rein, Raanan,
Renan, Ernest,
Republican Party, , , ,
Resnick, Danielle,
Riley, Dylan,
Rojas Pinilla, Gustavo, 291n21
Romania,
Roosevelt, Franklin D., ,
Rosanvallon, Pierre, , , ; on populism as pathology,
Rovira Kaltwasser, Cristóbal, , ,
Russia, , , , ; Soviet Revolution,
Sarkozy, Nicolas,
Sarlo, Beatriz, ,
Sata, Michael, 186–188
Schmitt, Carl, , , 184–185
Senegal, ,
Silveyra de Oyuela, Eugenia,
Sima, Horia,
Skocpol, Theda,
Slovakia,
Snyder, Timothy,
Sorel, Georges, ,
South Africa, , , , , ,
Spain: fascism in, , , ; left populism in, , 134–135, ; neofascism in, ; Spanish Civil War, ,
Stalin, Joseph, ,
Stavrakakis, Yannis, ,
Sternhell, Zeev, , , , ; on Likud Party, ,
Stone, Dan,
Streeck, Wolfgang,
Syria, ,
Syriza (Greece), , ; populist verticalism, 136–137
Taggard, Paul,
Taine, Hyppolite,
Tea Party, , , , , , ,
Thailand, , ,
Thaksin movement (Thailand),
Thaksin Shinawatra, ,
Thatcher, Margaret,
Tombus, Ertug, , ,
Traverso, Enzo, ,
Triple A, ,
True Finns (Finland),
Trump, Donald: "American carnage" speech, ; in analyses of populism, , 145–146, ; campaign and election, , , , 204–206, 224–225, 245–246, ; cult of personality, 216–217, ; global impact, 158–159, ; idea of the enemy, , 224–225; and law and order, 218–219; and New York City, 217–219; as political outsider, , 206–207; and the press, ; as protofascist, ; as right-wing populist leader, , , 9–10, , , , 138–139, , 157–159, , , , , , , 217–218, 234–236, , 249–250, ; views on gender/sexuality, 241–243
Tunisia,
Turkey: populism in, , 152–153, 166–167, , ,
UK Independence Party,
Ukraine, , ,
United States: exceptionalism, ; populism in, , , , , , 155–162, 169–173, . See also Trump, Donald
Urbinati, Nadia, , , ; on populism as disfigured democracy, 139–140
Uribe, Álvaro, ,
Uriburu, José Félix, , 253–254
Ustasha,
Vargas, Getulio: as dictator, , 114–115, , ; as populist, , , 113–15, , , , , , ; suicide as populist sacrifice,
Vasconcelos, José, ; on Hitler and Mussolini,
Velasco Alvarado, Juan,
Velasco Ibarra, José María, , , ,
Venezuela: populism in, , , , , , , , , . See also Betancourt, Rómulo; Chávez, Hugo; Maduro, Nicolás
Ventrone, Angelo, ,
Vietnam,
Villarroel, Gualberto, ,
Villegas, Silvio,
violence: and dictatorship, ; and idea of the enemy, 74–75, 92–93; populist rejection of, , , , , 180–181; as power and knowledge, 76–77; sacrificial, , , , 77–78. See also under fascism
Vörlander, Hans,
Wade, Abdoulaye, 186–188
Waisbord, Silvio,
Wallace, George, , , ,
Washington Post,
Weber, Max, ,
Weyland, Kurt,
Wilders, Geert, , , , ,
Wildt, Michael,
Williamson, Vanessa,
Yrigoyen, Hipólito, , 113–116
Zachariah, Benjamin, , , , 62–63
Zambia, ,
Zimbabwe,
Žižek, Slavoj,
Zuma, Jacob, , ,
| {
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Designed for aggressive trail riders, the Maxxis Rekon 3C/EXO/TR 29 x 2.6in Tire features a high volume design, which allows you to drastically lower tire pressure to gain the benefits of bump compliance and enhanced traction while rallying over rock gardens, plunging into steep descents, and railing around corners. Although it's 3/10ths of an inch wider than a standard trail tire, it doesn't feel as squishy or vague as its plus-sized brethren in the range of 2.8 to 3 inches.
The Rekon emulates the fast-rolling speed of the XC-inspired Ikon, but it's beefed up with wide knobs down the middle for additional control under heavy braking and L-shaped side knobs to keep you stable while cornering at high speeds. As you'd expect from a tire of this pedigree, it's developed to be set up in tubeless configuration, so you can gain all the benefits of running lower pressures, plus self-sealing reassurance if you happen to run over a sharp object.
This particular Rekon features the 3C Maxx Terra compound, which uses a softer shoulder for exceptional grip while cornering, complete with a medium compound down the center to retain its fast-rolling capabilities. Underneath both compounds is a harder rubber that resists breakdown as you wear through the tire over time. And to ensure it's ready for aggressive trail thrashings, EXO sidewall protection ensures peace of mind while riding aggressively on notoriously rocky terrain.
Light, Durable, Loads of grip, but low rolling resistance. I use these on my Hightower when I do multiday singletrack bikepacking trips. Clearance is tight, but they do fit on a 30mm rim. If you are looking for a great tire that offers lots of grip but low rolling resistance, look no further.
Just got a pair, 29x2.6 and mounted them on two different rims, 30mm inner and 27mm inner. Weights were 790/810 grams. Width on both rims initially at about 2.52" at 40 psi to stretch the casings out. Extremely easy to mount, and with no sealant, hold air well. I'll report once I lower the pressure and ride them.
Mounted on Giant Trance 29 Pro with lots of room, but I could almost get a true 2.8 on those.
These are great tires for an adventure bike - the one you ride up and down all day.
I think the tread pattern is more well-suited to the rear than the front, but for the moment I don't think a better front tire of the same volume is available. I believe that a 2.6 WT DHF is coming soon. The current 2.5 WT DHF is smaller and IMHO better paired with the Agressor 2.5 WT.
For extra peace of mind, I run a Huck Norris insert in my back tire. | {
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{"url":"https:\/\/brilliant.org\/problems\/charge-in-uniform-electric-field\/","text":"# Charge in uniform electric field\n\nElectricity and Magnetism Level 2\n\nA particle with a mass of $$2.0 \\times 10^{-5} \\text{ kg}$$ and a charge of $$+1.0\\text{ } \\mu \\text{C}$$ is released in a uniform horizontal electric field of $$12 \\text{ N\/C.}$$ How far horizontally does the particle travel in $$0.50 \\text{ s?}$$\n\n\u00d7","date":"2016-10-26 23:16:05","metadata":"{\"extraction_info\": {\"found_math\": true, \"script_math_tex\": 0, \"script_math_asciimath\": 0, \"math_annotations\": 0, \"math_alttext\": 0, \"mathml\": 0, \"mathjax_tag\": 0, \"mathjax_inline_tex\": 0, \"mathjax_display_tex\": 1, \"mathjax_asciimath\": 0, \"img_math\": 0, \"codecogs_latex\": 0, \"wp_latex\": 0, \"mimetex.cgi\": 0, \"\/images\/math\/codecogs\": 0, \"mathtex.cgi\": 0, \"katex\": 0, \"math-container\": 0, \"wp-katex-eq\": 0, \"align\": 0, \"equation\": 0, \"x-ck12\": 0, \"texerror\": 0, \"math_score\": 0.6120359301567078, \"perplexity\": 749.3236785615849}, \"config\": {\"markdown_headings\": true, \"markdown_code\": true, \"boilerplate_config\": {\"ratio_threshold\": 0.18, \"absolute_threshold\": 10, \"end_threshold\": 15, \"enable\": true}, \"remove_buttons\": true, \"remove_image_figures\": true, \"remove_link_clusters\": true, \"table_config\": {\"min_rows\": 2, \"min_cols\": 3, \"format\": \"plain\"}, \"remove_chinese\": true, \"remove_edit_buttons\": true, \"extract_latex\": true}, \"warc_path\": \"s3:\/\/commoncrawl\/crawl-data\/CC-MAIN-2016-44\/segments\/1476988721008.78\/warc\/CC-MAIN-20161020183841-00241-ip-10-171-6-4.ec2.internal.warc.gz\"}"} | null | null |
One of our pop up style Gazebos is ideal and can be erected quickly.
High quality commercial standard, strong and durable our Gazebos are available with or without walls. They are ideal for market stalls, fetes, garden parties, beach parties, sports days, product launch or exhibition stand.
Ask about our free promotional pop up gazebo for your next club or charity event. | {
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Louis-Antoine Ranvier (Lyon, 2 oktober 1835 - Vendranges, 22 maart 1922) was een Frans anatoom. Zijn bekendste ontdekkingen waren de myelineschede en de insnoeringen van Ranvier, onderdelen van de axonen van zenuwen.
Ranvier studeerde geneeskunde in Lyon, waar hij in 1865 afstudeerde. Hij zette samen met Victor André Cornil een klein onderzoekslaboratorium op en ze boden histologielessen aan aan geneeskundestudenten. Samen schreven ze ook een belangrijk boek over histopathologie (Manuel d'histologie pathologique). Hij trad in 1867 toe tot het Collège de France als assistent voor Claude Bernard. Ranvier werd in 1875 benoemd tot hoofd anatomie van het college.
Zijn belangrijkste ontdekking kwam in 1878, toen hij de myelinescheden en de naar hem vernoemde insnoeringen van Ranvier ontdekte. Ander structuren die naar Ranvier vernoemd zijn zijn de Merkel-Ranvier cellen: melanocytachtige cellen in de basale laag van de epidermis die catecholaminekorrels bevatten; en de schijven van Ranvier, een bepaalde soort sensorische zenuwuiteinden. Ranvier richtte in 1897 samen met Édouard-Gérard Balbiani het wetenschappelijke tijdschrift Archives d'Anatomie Microscopique op.
Een aantal bekende studenten van Ranvier waren Ferdinand-Jean Darier, Justin Marie Jolly, Joaquín Albarrán, Luis Simarro Lacabra en Fredrik Georg Gade.
In 1900 ging hij met pensioen en trok hij zich terug naar zijn landgoed in Thélis. Ranvier overleed in 1922.
Bibliografie
Ranvier, Louis-Antoine en Victor André Cornil. 1869. Manuel d'histologie pathologique. Parijs
Ranvier, Louis-Antoine. 1875-1882. Traité technique d'histologie. Parijs
Ranvier, Louis-Antoine. 1878. Leçons sur l'histologie du système nerveux, par M. L. Ranvier, recueillies par M. Ed. Weber. Parijs
Ranvier, Louis-Antoine. 1880. Leçons d'anatomie generale sur le système musculaire, par L. Ranvier, recueillies par M. J. Renaut. Parijs
Ranvier, Louis-Antoine. 1885. Exposé des titres et des travaux de M. L. Ranvier. Parijs
Anatoom
Patholoog
Frans wetenschapper | {
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four-room love
In Cape Town: Ezard House, a contemporary hotel perched on a seaside bluff (ezardhouse.com); Hemingway House, a four-room enclave surrounding a courtyard-pool (00-27-21-461-1857).
Between a Rock and a Waterfall
The median price for a four-room apartment rose at the same rate during that time, from $215,000 to nearly $304,000.
Coveting Singapore's public housing system
In one example, a four-room shanty contained at least six people.
BONUS Euro-Indian fusion restaurant and bijoux four-room spa for sybarites — mountain-biking, kite-flying and fort-hopping for active types.rasaresorts. in; from $345 a night
Rajasthan's New Crown Jewel Hotels
Six months later, Tabitha had saved $130 and used it to open a four-room health clinic, her life dream.
Emily McKhann: Sacrificing for Success
This darling four-room spot offers plush and private living in the heart of Venice.
Andria Mitsakos: Scene By Scene: Venice In 23 Hours
A four-room structure about 2,500 square feet, it had all the equipment needed to make chicha, a corn-based beer still popular in the Andes.
Trophy Skulls and Beer
The family lived in a four-room apartment in Stuyvesant Town, and until it moved to the Upper West Side when she was a teenager, a relative said, Kagan shared a bedroom with her two brothers.
For Supreme Court nominee Elena Kagan, a history of pragmatism over partisanship
This four-room co-op in the St. George, an Art-Deco building, measures more than 1,100 square feet and has two bedrooms and two bathrooms.
Brooklyn Heights, First 'Burb
The family lived in a four-room apartment in Stuyvesant Town, a dense forest of 100 brick towers in lower Manhattan. | {
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Гліб Олегович Писаревський (, 28 червня, 1976, Архангельськ, Російська РФСР) — російський важкоатлет, бронзовий призер Олімпійських ігор 2004 року, призер чемпіонату Європи.
Біографія
Гліб Писаревський народився 28 червня 1976 року в місті Архангельськ. Тренувався під керівництвом свого батька Олега Глібовича Писаревського.
На чемпіонаті світу 2003 року зупинився за крок від медалі, посівши четверте місце. Цей успіх дав спортсмену можливість представити Росію на Олімпійських іграх 2004 року. Там Писаревський досягнув найкращого результату в кар'єрі. Він поступився Дмитру Берестову та Ігорю Разорьонову, показавши ідентичний результат із молдовським важкоатлетом Александру Братаном. Завдяки тому, що вага самого Писаревського в день змагань була меншою він став бронзовим призером змагань.
Протягом наступних років найкращим досягненням спортсмена стала срібна медаль чемпіонату Європи 2007 року. Виграти конкуренцію та поїхати на Олімпійські ігри 2008 року спортсмен не зумів, після чого він прийняв рішення завершити кар'єру.
Закінчив Поморський державний університет.
Результати
Посилання
Російські важкоатлети
Російські бронзові олімпійські медалісти
Важкоатлети на літніх Олімпійських іграх 2004
Бронзові призери літніх Олімпійських ігор 2004 | {
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import categories # NOQA: F401
import plugins # NOQA: F401
import submitted_plugins # NOQA: F401
import tags # NOQA: F401
import users # NOQA: F401
| {
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We particularly enjoy working closely with our clients in helping them manage their businesses. Our involvement often starts right at the beginning where we provide advice on the appropriate structure and compliance requirements of the various regulatory authorities. However, where we really score is providing practical advice based on our professional training and many years experience.
Helping businesses grow is very rewarding. But life is not always easy and there is often a problem lurking around every corner. We recognize that running a company is time-consuming and energy-sapping. Our clients often look to us for an objective but informed perspective or for us just to act as a sounding board.
Employment legislation is complex and subject to ongoing change, yet hiring HR specialists may prove impractical or be cost-prohibitive for many SMEs. In such situations we are able to help our clients handle HR issues effectively and ensure they are compliant with all relevant legislation and best practice.
Recent years have seen an increase in the number of litigation cases involving commercial activities and personal disputes. Both are areas where specialist accounting and tax knowledge is often required to support cases and enhance the prospects of a favourable outcome.
Of course, we cannot possibly distil all our experience into this website. Instead, we will be making available a number of short think-pieces on different aspects of advice we have given. Please click here to find them.
Registered to carry on audit work by the Institute of Chartered Accountants of England & Wales. | {
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This is a list of the French SNEP Top 100 Singles number-ones of 1995.
Number-ones by week
Singles Chart
See also
1995 in music
List of number-one hits (France)
List of artists who reached number one on the French Singles Chart
References
1995 in French music
1995 record charts
Lists of number-one songs in France | {
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This is my submission to the second Go challenge competition (http://golang-challenge.com/go-challenge2/). It was great fun to write, many thanks to the organisers!
## Issues
The user-defined types don't behave well when they are `nil` (this seems to be a common theme with examples though). There is also an issue I missed which golint caught - the `ReadHeader` function shouldn't be exported.
| {
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} | 2,769 |
{"url":"https:\/\/scicomp.stackexchange.com\/questions\/27619\/implementing-neumann-boundary-condition-in-nonlinear-integro-differential-equati","text":"# Implementing Neumann boundary condition in nonlinear integro-differential equation\n\nProblem\n\nI would like to solve a nonlinear integro-differential equations on a 2D square domain $\\Omega$ subject to Neumann boundary conditions using finite differences: $$\\frac{\\partial u}{\\partial t} = f(u) + \\int_\\Omega G(x'-x)\\left[u(x')-u(x)\\right] dx'.$$\n\nThe variable $u(x,t)$ depends on space and time, $f$ is a nonlinear function and $G$ is the integral kernel. Neumann (also called no-flux or reflective) boundary conditions are given as $$\\frac {\\partial u}{\\partial x}\\Bigr|_{\\partial\\Omega} = 0$$ at the boundary $\\partial\\Omega$.\n\nSolution Attempt\n\nUsually to implement Neumann boundary conditions, it is either possible to use ghost cells or modify the stencil. Let's try the latter. Starting from the heat (or diffusion) equation in 1d, we know the $2^{nd}$ derivative can be discretized as follows: $$\\Delta u \\rightarrow \\frac{u_{i+1}-2u_i+u_{i-1}}{h^2}=\\frac{1}{h^2}\\left((u_{i+1}-u_i)+(u_{i-1}-u_i)\\right),$$\n\nwhere $u_i$ is shorthand notation for $u(x_i)$ and $h$ is the uniform distance between neighboring points.\n\nWith $G=1\/h^2$, this formula can be rephrased as a discretized version of the integral equation from the top: $$\\sum_{j=i-1}^{i+1} G(x_j-x_i)\\left[u_j - u_i\\right].$$\n\nDifferences that involve points $x_j$ outside the domain are zero, due to the Neumann boundary condition: $$\\frac {\\partial u}{\\partial x}\\Bigr|_{\\partial\\Omega} \\rightarrow \\frac{u_j-u_i}{h} \\overset{!}{=} 0.$$\n\nPseudo C code might look like this:\n\nfor(j=max(0,i-n); j<min(n-1,i+n); j++){\nuIntegro[i] += G[j-i]*u[j];\n}\n\n\nQuestion\n\nComing back to the original problem, given that the integral kernel ranges beyond the first neighbor, let's say it takes into account the first 5 neighbors, is it correct to just set all differences in the integral involving outside points to zero in order to realize Neumann boundary conditions (in 2d as well)? Bonus: If this is not Neumann, what would it be called instead?","date":"2019-09-22 14:36:43","metadata":"{\"extraction_info\": {\"found_math\": true, \"script_math_tex\": 0, \"script_math_asciimath\": 0, \"math_annotations\": 0, \"math_alttext\": 0, \"mathml\": 0, \"mathjax_tag\": 0, \"mathjax_inline_tex\": 1, \"mathjax_display_tex\": 1, \"mathjax_asciimath\": 1, \"img_math\": 0, \"codecogs_latex\": 0, \"wp_latex\": 0, \"mimetex.cgi\": 0, \"\/images\/math\/codecogs\": 0, \"mathtex.cgi\": 0, \"katex\": 0, \"math-container\": 0, \"wp-katex-eq\": 0, \"align\": 0, \"equation\": 0, \"x-ck12\": 0, \"texerror\": 0, \"math_score\": 0.8787092566490173, \"perplexity\": 341.07477137439855}, \"config\": {\"markdown_headings\": true, \"markdown_code\": true, \"boilerplate_config\": {\"ratio_threshold\": 0.18, \"absolute_threshold\": 10, \"end_threshold\": 15, \"enable\": true}, \"remove_buttons\": true, \"remove_image_figures\": true, \"remove_link_clusters\": true, \"table_config\": {\"min_rows\": 2, \"min_cols\": 3, \"format\": \"plain\"}, \"remove_chinese\": true, \"remove_edit_buttons\": true, \"extract_latex\": true}, \"warc_path\": \"s3:\/\/commoncrawl\/crawl-data\/CC-MAIN-2019-39\/segments\/1568514575515.93\/warc\/CC-MAIN-20190922135356-20190922161356-00072.warc.gz\"}"} | null | null |
Q: Как поменять шрифт кроме иконок? На сайте используется несколько шрифтов, нужно установить один, к примеру Montserrat, кроме иконок (на сайте так же есть inline стили, которые имеют различные значения для font-family).
Если добавить это правило:
body * {
font-family: Montserrat, sans-serif !important;
}
то шрифт поменяет также и FontAwesome иконки. Как сделать чтобы поменялся шрифт только для текста, кроме иконок?
Пытался сделать так:
body *:not(::before) {
font-family: Montserrat, sans-serif !important;
}
но это не работает.
A: Используйте селектор, который позволит не применять правило к элементам, в которых объявлен либо класс .fa, либо предполагаемо содержится какой-либо класс, содержащий fa-
Однако будьте осторожны: к примеру, класс .2fa-input будет соответствовать селектору [class*="fa-"]).
/* для тех элементов, у которых не объявлен класс `.fa`,
но объявлен какой-нибудь другой: к примеру, .fa-camera-retro */
body :not(.fa):not([class*="fa-"]) {
font-family: "Montserrat", sans-serif !important;
}
Изменено: font-awesome.css содержит класс .fa, в котором определяется шрифт. Без него остальные классы, связанные с иконками, не имеют смысла, поэтому селектор можно сократить.
body :not(.fa) {
font-family: "Montserrat", sans-serif !important;
}
| {
"redpajama_set_name": "RedPajamaStackExchange"
} | 7,912 |
Q: Using a PHP Array in a JQuery script I'm trying to use a php array inside some jquery script. This is what I have:
$("#domainPackage").change(function (){
"use strict";
var packID;
var info;
packID = $("#domainPackage").val();
info = "<?php echo $package[" + packID + "]['pages'] ?>";
$("#domainPageLimit").val(info);
});
But, it is outputting
<?php echo $package[2]['pages'] ?> into my input box as the value.
What is the correct way of using a PHP array in some jquery?
Thank you
A: This should actually be generating a PHP error which makes me suspect you do not have PHP enabled on this server, or the file extension of the file you are editing is not .php.
Once you have fixed that issue, you will need to load the values from the array into the script at run-time, or use AJAX. You cannot interact directly between PHP and jQuery as the PHP runs on the server side before the page is rendered, whereas the jQuery runs in real-time on the client side in the browser.
To load in runtime you could try the following:
$("#domainPackage").change(function (){
var data = JSON.parse(<?=json_encode($package)?>);
"use strict";
var packID;
var info;
packID = $("#domainPackage").val();
info = data[packID]['pages'];
$("#domainPageLimit").val(info);
});
A: The problem with your approach:
"The code I'm using is on an separate js file that is called into my php page with <script></script>
is that the script is being processed on the client without ever being seen by PHP, so it cannot process the contents of the <?php ... ?> block. Hence your output of <?php echo $package[2]['pages'] ?>. To make this work you need to output the data into an array/object in the .php file (the json_encode approach suggested by @user1491032 and @coletrain is a good one) and then access that array in your script file i.e.
PHP file:
echo "<script>var package = JSON.parse('" . json_encode($package) . "');</script>";
JS file:
info = package[packID]['pages'];
Update
As was pointed out by @DavidBélanger, you don't need to use JSON.parse if the object is well built, you can just assign the variable directly i.e. in the PHP file:
echo "<script>var package = " . json_encode($package) . ";</script>";
and in the JS
info = package[packID].pages;
| {
"redpajama_set_name": "RedPajamaStackExchange"
} | 1,254 |
{"url":"https:\/\/academy.vertabelo.com\/course\/ms-sql-insert-update-delete\/referring-to-tables\/referring-to-other-tables\/update-referring-to-another-table","text":"End of Summer - hours only!Up to 80% off on all courses and bundles.-Close\nIntroduction\nINSERT with SELECT\nReferring to other tables\n9. Update rows by referring to another table\nINSERT, UPDATE and DELETE with JOIN\nINSERT, UPDATE, and DELETE with subqueries\nSummary\n\n## Instruction\n\nVery nice! You also can use references to other tables in an UPDATE statement. If you need to update a row using data from another table, you can write a statement like the one below:\n\nUPDATE Purchase\nSET Purchase.TotalPrice = Product.Price * Purchase.Quantity\nFROM Product\nWHERE Purchase.ProductId = Product.Id;\n\n\nThis statement will update product amounts from the Purchase table using price details from the Product table. The additional table (Product) is given after FROM, which is listed after SET. The WHERE condition comes immediately after FROM; in this case, it is joining the two tables by ID (Purchase.ProductId = Product.Id). Notice that by choosing a new product price, we can change the amount in the order.\n\n## Exercise\n\nThe manager wants to give a raise to each employee who sold over $1000 in one order (based on the TotalPrice column in the Purchase table). Use UPDATE ... FROM to add$100 to the Salary of each Employee who meets the qualification.\n\n### Stuck? Here's a hint!\n\nUse:\n\nWHERE Purchase.EmployeeId = Employee.Id\nAND Purchase.TotalPrice > 1000;","date":"2020-09-26 20:49:32","metadata":"{\"extraction_info\": {\"found_math\": true, \"script_math_tex\": 0, \"script_math_asciimath\": 0, \"math_annotations\": 0, \"math_alttext\": 0, \"mathml\": 0, \"mathjax_tag\": 0, \"mathjax_inline_tex\": 1, \"mathjax_display_tex\": 0, \"mathjax_asciimath\": 1, \"img_math\": 0, \"codecogs_latex\": 0, \"wp_latex\": 0, \"mimetex.cgi\": 0, \"\/images\/math\/codecogs\": 0, \"mathtex.cgi\": 0, \"katex\": 0, \"math-container\": 0, \"wp-katex-eq\": 0, \"align\": 0, \"equation\": 0, \"x-ck12\": 0, \"texerror\": 0, \"math_score\": 0.3305417597293854, \"perplexity\": 4045.5204071168273}, \"config\": {\"markdown_headings\": true, \"markdown_code\": true, \"boilerplate_config\": {\"ratio_threshold\": 0.18, \"absolute_threshold\": 10, \"end_threshold\": 15, \"enable\": true}, \"remove_buttons\": true, \"remove_image_figures\": true, \"remove_link_clusters\": true, \"table_config\": {\"min_rows\": 2, \"min_cols\": 3, \"format\": \"plain\"}, \"remove_chinese\": true, \"remove_edit_buttons\": true, \"extract_latex\": true}, \"warc_path\": \"s3:\/\/commoncrawl\/crawl-data\/CC-MAIN-2020-40\/segments\/1600400245109.69\/warc\/CC-MAIN-20200926200523-20200926230523-00476.warc.gz\"}"} | null | null |
require_relative 'metadata'
module GoodData
class Attribute < MdObject
root_key :attribute
ATTRIBUTE_BASE_AGGREGATIONS = [:count]
class << self
def [](id)
if id == :all
GoodData.get(GoodData.project.md['query'] + '/attributes/')['query']['entries']
else
super
end
end
end
def display_forms
content['displayForms'].map { |df| GoodData::DisplayForm[df['meta']['uri']] }
end
alias :labels :display_forms
def is_attribute?
true
end
def create_metric(options={})
a_type = options[:type] || :sum
fail "Suggested aggreagtion function (#{a_type}) does not exist for base metric created out of attribute. You can use only one of #{ATTRIBUTE_BASE_AGGREGATIONS.map {|x| ":" + x.to_s}.join(',')}" unless ATTRIBUTE_BASE_AGGREGATIONS.include?(a_type)
a_title = options[:title] || "#{a_type} of #{title}"
Metric.xcreate(:expression => "SELECT #{a_type.to_s.upcase}(![#{identifier}])", :title => a_title)
end
end
end | {
"redpajama_set_name": "RedPajamaGithub"
} | 1,616 |
<?php
// This file is part of Moodle - http://moodle.org/
//
// Moodle is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify
// it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by
// the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or
// (at your option) any later version.
//
// Moodle is distributed in the hope that it will be useful,
// but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of
// MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the
// GNU General Public License for more details.
//
// You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License
// along with Moodle. If not, see <http://www.gnu.org/licenses/>.
// Check that config.php exists, if not then call the install script
if (!file_exists('../config.php')) {
header('Location: ../install.php');
die();
}
// Check that PHP is of a sufficient version as soon as possible
if (version_compare(phpversion(), '5.3.2') < 0) {
$phpversion = phpversion();
// do NOT localise - lang strings would not work here and we CAN NOT move it to later place
echo "Moodle 2.1 or later requires at least PHP 5.3.2 (currently using version $phpversion).<br />";
echo "Please upgrade your server software or install older Moodle version.";
die();
}
// make sure iconv is available and actually works
if (!function_exists('iconv')) {
// this should not happen, this must be very borked install
echo 'Moodle requires the iconv PHP extension. Please install or enable the iconv extension.';
die();
}
define('NO_OUTPUT_BUFFERING', true);
require('../config.php');
require_once($CFG->libdir.'/adminlib.php'); // various admin-only functions
require_once($CFG->libdir.'/upgradelib.php'); // general upgrade/install related functions
require_once($CFG->libdir.'/pluginlib.php'); // available updates notifications
$id = optional_param('id', '', PARAM_TEXT);
$confirmupgrade = optional_param('confirmupgrade', 0, PARAM_BOOL);
$confirmrelease = optional_param('confirmrelease', 0, PARAM_BOOL);
$confirmplugins = optional_param('confirmplugincheck', 0, PARAM_BOOL);
$showallplugins = optional_param('showallplugins', 0, PARAM_BOOL);
$agreelicense = optional_param('agreelicense', 0, PARAM_BOOL);
$fetchupdates = optional_param('fetchupdates', 0, PARAM_BOOL);
// Check some PHP server settings
$PAGE->set_url('/admin/index.php');
$PAGE->set_pagelayout('admin'); // Set a default pagelayout
$documentationlink = '<a href="http://docs.moodle.org/en/Installation">Installation docs</a>';
if (ini_get_bool('session.auto_start')) {
print_error('phpvaroff', 'debug', '', (object)array('name'=>'session.auto_start', 'link'=>$documentationlink));
}
if (ini_get_bool('magic_quotes_runtime')) {
print_error('phpvaroff', 'debug', '', (object)array('name'=>'magic_quotes_runtime', 'link'=>$documentationlink));
}
if (!ini_get_bool('file_uploads')) {
print_error('phpvaron', 'debug', '', (object)array('name'=>'file_uploads', 'link'=>$documentationlink));
}
if (is_float_problem()) {
print_error('phpfloatproblem', 'admin', '', $documentationlink);
}
// Set some necessary variables during set-up to avoid PHP warnings later on this page
if (!isset($CFG->release)) {
$CFG->release = '';
}
if (!isset($CFG->version)) {
$CFG->version = '';
}
if (!isset($CFG->branch)) {
$CFG->branch = '';
}
$version = null;
$release = null;
$branch = null;
require("$CFG->dirroot/version.php"); // defines $version, $release, $branch and $maturity
$CFG->target_release = $release; // used during installation and upgrades
if (!$version or !$release) {
print_error('withoutversion', 'debug'); // without version, stop
}
if (!core_tables_exist()) {
$PAGE->set_pagelayout('maintenance');
$PAGE->set_popup_notification_allowed(false);
// fake some settings
$CFG->docroot = 'http://docs.moodle.org';
$strinstallation = get_string('installation', 'install');
// remove current session content completely
session_get_instance()->terminate_current();
if (empty($agreelicense)) {
$strlicense = get_string('license');
$PAGE->navbar->add($strlicense);
$PAGE->set_title($strinstallation.' - Moodle '.$CFG->target_release);
$PAGE->set_heading($strinstallation);
$PAGE->set_cacheable(false);
$output = $PAGE->get_renderer('core', 'admin');
echo $output->install_licence_page();
die();
}
if (empty($confirmrelease)) {
require_once($CFG->libdir.'/environmentlib.php');
list($envstatus, $environment_results) = check_moodle_environment(normalize_version($release), ENV_SELECT_RELEASE);
$strcurrentrelease = get_string('currentrelease');
$PAGE->navbar->add($strcurrentrelease);
$PAGE->set_title($strinstallation);
$PAGE->set_heading($strinstallation . ' - Moodle ' . $CFG->target_release);
$PAGE->set_cacheable(false);
$output = $PAGE->get_renderer('core', 'admin');
echo $output->install_environment_page($maturity, $envstatus, $environment_results, $release);
die();
}
// check plugin dependencies
$failed = array();
if (!plugin_manager::instance()->all_plugins_ok($version, $failed)) {
$PAGE->navbar->add(get_string('pluginscheck', 'admin'));
$PAGE->set_title($strinstallation);
$PAGE->set_heading($strinstallation . ' - Moodle ' . $CFG->target_release);
$output = $PAGE->get_renderer('core', 'admin');
$url = new moodle_url('/admin/index.php', array('agreelicense' => 1, 'confirmrelease' => 1, 'lang' => $CFG->lang));
echo $output->unsatisfied_dependencies_page($version, $failed, $url);
die();
}
unset($failed);
//TODO: add a page with list of non-standard plugins here
$strdatabasesetup = get_string('databasesetup');
upgrade_init_javascript();
$PAGE->navbar->add($strdatabasesetup);
$PAGE->set_title($strinstallation.' - Moodle '.$CFG->target_release);
$PAGE->set_heading($strinstallation);
$PAGE->set_cacheable(false);
$output = $PAGE->get_renderer('core', 'admin');
echo $output->header();
if (!$DB->setup_is_unicodedb()) {
if (!$DB->change_db_encoding()) {
// If could not convert successfully, throw error, and prevent installation
print_error('unicoderequired', 'admin');
}
}
install_core($version, true);
}
// Check version of Moodle code on disk compared with database
// and upgrade if possible.
$stradministration = get_string('administration');
$PAGE->set_context(context_system::instance());
if (empty($CFG->version)) {
print_error('missingconfigversion', 'debug');
}
if ($version > $CFG->version) { // upgrade
purge_all_caches();
$PAGE->set_pagelayout('maintenance');
$PAGE->set_popup_notification_allowed(false);
if (upgrade_stale_php_files_present()) {
$PAGE->set_title($stradministration);
$PAGE->set_cacheable(false);
$output = $PAGE->get_renderer('core', 'admin');
echo $output->upgrade_stale_php_files_page();
die();
}
if (empty($confirmupgrade)) {
$a = new stdClass();
$a->oldversion = "$CFG->release ($CFG->version)";
$a->newversion = "$release ($version)";
$strdatabasechecking = get_string('databasechecking', '', $a);
$PAGE->set_title($stradministration);
$PAGE->set_heading($strdatabasechecking);
$PAGE->set_cacheable(false);
$output = $PAGE->get_renderer('core', 'admin');
echo $output->upgrade_confirm_page($a->newversion, $maturity);
die();
} else if (empty($confirmrelease)){
require_once($CFG->libdir.'/environmentlib.php');
list($envstatus, $environment_results) = check_moodle_environment($release, ENV_SELECT_RELEASE);
$strcurrentrelease = get_string('currentrelease');
$PAGE->navbar->add($strcurrentrelease);
$PAGE->set_title($strcurrentrelease);
$PAGE->set_heading($strcurrentrelease);
$PAGE->set_cacheable(false);
$output = $PAGE->get_renderer('core', 'admin');
echo $output->upgrade_environment_page($release, $envstatus, $environment_results);
die();
} else if (empty($confirmplugins)) {
$strplugincheck = get_string('plugincheck');
$PAGE->navbar->add($strplugincheck);
$PAGE->set_title($strplugincheck);
$PAGE->set_heading($strplugincheck);
$PAGE->set_cacheable(false);
$reloadurl = new moodle_url('/admin/index.php', array('confirmupgrade' => 1, 'confirmrelease' => 1));
// check plugin dependencies first
$failed = array();
if (!plugin_manager::instance()->all_plugins_ok($version, $failed)) {
$output = $PAGE->get_renderer('core', 'admin');
echo $output->unsatisfied_dependencies_page($version, $failed, $reloadurl);
die();
}
unset($failed);
if ($fetchupdates) {
// no sesskey support guaranteed here
if (empty($CFG->disableupdatenotifications)) {
available_update_checker::instance()->fetch();
}
redirect($reloadurl);
}
$output = $PAGE->get_renderer('core', 'admin');
$deployer = available_update_deployer::instance();
if ($deployer->enabled()) {
$deployer->initialize($reloadurl, $reloadurl);
$deploydata = $deployer->submitted_data();
if (!empty($deploydata)) {
echo $output->upgrade_plugin_confirm_deploy_page($deployer, $deploydata);
die();
}
}
echo $output->upgrade_plugin_check_page(plugin_manager::instance(), available_update_checker::instance(),
$version, $showallplugins, $reloadurl,
new moodle_url('/admin/index.php', array('confirmupgrade'=>1, 'confirmrelease'=>1, 'confirmplugincheck'=>1)));
die();
} else {
// Launch main upgrade
upgrade_core($version, true);
}
} else if ($version < $CFG->version) {
// better stop here, we can not continue with plugin upgrades or anything else
throw new moodle_exception('downgradedcore', 'error', new moodle_url('/admin/'));
}
// Updated human-readable release version if necessary
if ($release <> $CFG->release) { // Update the release version
set_config('release', $release);
}
if ($branch <> $CFG->branch) { // Update the branch
set_config('branch', $branch);
}
if (moodle_needs_upgrading()) {
if (!$PAGE->headerprinted) {
// means core upgrade or installation was not already done
if (!$confirmplugins) {
$strplugincheck = get_string('plugincheck');
$PAGE->set_pagelayout('maintenance');
$PAGE->set_popup_notification_allowed(false);
$PAGE->navbar->add($strplugincheck);
$PAGE->set_title($strplugincheck);
$PAGE->set_heading($strplugincheck);
$PAGE->set_cacheable(false);
if ($fetchupdates) {
// no sesskey support guaranteed here
available_update_checker::instance()->fetch();
redirect($PAGE->url);
}
$output = $PAGE->get_renderer('core', 'admin');
$deployer = available_update_deployer::instance();
if ($deployer->enabled()) {
$deployer->initialize($PAGE->url, $PAGE->url);
$deploydata = $deployer->submitted_data();
if (!empty($deploydata)) {
echo $output->upgrade_plugin_confirm_deploy_page($deployer, $deploydata);
die();
}
}
// check plugin dependencies first
$failed = array();
if (!plugin_manager::instance()->all_plugins_ok($version, $failed)) {
echo $output->unsatisfied_dependencies_page($version, $failed, $PAGE->url);
die();
}
unset($failed);
// dependencies check passed, let's rock!
echo $output->upgrade_plugin_check_page(plugin_manager::instance(), available_update_checker::instance(),
$version, $showallplugins,
new moodle_url($PAGE->url),
new moodle_url('/admin/index.php', array('confirmplugincheck'=>1)));
die();
}
}
// install/upgrade all plugins and other parts
upgrade_noncore(true);
}
// If this is the first install, indicate that this site is fully configured
// except the admin password
if (during_initial_install()) {
set_config('rolesactive', 1); // after this, during_initial_install will return false.
set_config('adminsetuppending', 1);
// we need this redirect to setup proper session
upgrade_finished("index.php?sessionstarted=1&lang=$CFG->lang");
}
// make sure admin user is created - this is the last step because we need
// session to be working properly in order to edit admin account
if (!empty($CFG->adminsetuppending)) {
$sessionstarted = optional_param('sessionstarted', 0, PARAM_BOOL);
if (!$sessionstarted) {
redirect("index.php?sessionstarted=1&lang=$CFG->lang");
} else {
$sessionverify = optional_param('sessionverify', 0, PARAM_BOOL);
if (!$sessionverify) {
$SESSION->sessionverify = 1;
redirect("index.php?sessionstarted=1&sessionverify=1&lang=$CFG->lang");
} else {
if (empty($SESSION->sessionverify)) {
print_error('installsessionerror', 'admin', "index.php?sessionstarted=1&lang=$CFG->lang");
}
unset($SESSION->sessionverify);
}
}
// Cleanup SESSION to make sure other code does not complain in the future.
unset($SESSION->has_timed_out);
unset($SESSION->wantsurl);
// at this stage there can be only one admin unless more were added by install - users may change username, so do not rely on that
$adminids = explode(',', $CFG->siteadmins);
$adminuser = get_complete_user_data('id', reset($adminids));
if ($adminuser->password === 'adminsetuppending') {
// prevent installation hijacking
if ($adminuser->lastip !== getremoteaddr()) {
print_error('installhijacked', 'admin');
}
// login user and let him set password and admin details
$adminuser->newadminuser = 1;
complete_user_login($adminuser);
redirect("$CFG->wwwroot/user/editadvanced.php?id=$adminuser->id"); // Edit thyself
} else {
unset_config('adminsetuppending');
}
} else {
// just make sure upgrade logging is properly terminated
upgrade_finished('upgradesettings.php');
}
// Check for valid admin user - no guest autologin
require_login(0, false);
$context = context_system::instance();
require_capability('moodle/site:config', $context);
// check that site is properly customized
$site = get_site();
if (empty($site->shortname)) {
// probably new installation - lets return to frontpage after this step
// remove settings that we want uninitialised
unset_config('registerauth');
redirect('upgradesettings.php?return=site');
}
// Check if we are returning from moodle.org registration and if so, we mark that fact to remove reminders
if (!empty($id) and $id == $CFG->siteidentifier) {
set_config('registered', time());
}
// setup critical warnings before printing admin tree block
$insecuredataroot = is_dataroot_insecure(true);
$SESSION->admin_critical_warning = ($insecuredataroot==INSECURE_DATAROOT_ERROR);
$adminroot = admin_get_root();
// Check if there are any new admin settings which have still yet to be set
if (any_new_admin_settings($adminroot)){
redirect('upgradesettings.php');
}
// Everything should now be set up, and the user is an admin
// Print default admin page with notifications.
$errorsdisplayed = defined('WARN_DISPLAY_ERRORS_ENABLED');
$lastcron = $DB->get_field_sql('SELECT MAX(lastcron) FROM {modules}');
$cronoverdue = ($lastcron < time() - 3600 * 24);
$dbproblems = $DB->diagnose();
$maintenancemode = !empty($CFG->maintenance_enabled);
// Available updates for Moodle core
$updateschecker = available_update_checker::instance();
$availableupdates = array();
$availableupdates['core'] = $updateschecker->get_update_info('core',
array('minmaturity' => $CFG->updateminmaturity, 'notifybuilds' => $CFG->updatenotifybuilds));
// Available updates for contributed plugins
$pluginman = plugin_manager::instance();
foreach ($pluginman->get_plugins() as $plugintype => $plugintypeinstances) {
foreach ($plugintypeinstances as $pluginname => $plugininfo) {
if (!empty($plugininfo->availableupdates)) {
foreach ($plugininfo->availableupdates as $pluginavailableupdate) {
if ($pluginavailableupdate->version > $plugininfo->versiondisk) {
if (!isset($availableupdates[$plugintype.'_'.$pluginname])) {
$availableupdates[$plugintype.'_'.$pluginname] = array();
}
$availableupdates[$plugintype.'_'.$pluginname][] = $pluginavailableupdate;
}
}
}
}
}
// The timestamp of the most recent check for available updates
$availableupdatesfetch = $updateschecker->get_last_timefetched();
$buggyiconvnomb = (!function_exists('mb_convert_encoding') and @iconv('UTF-8', 'UTF-8//IGNORE', '100'.chr(130).'€') !== '100€');
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admin_externalpage_setup('adminnotifications');
if ($fetchupdates) {
require_sesskey();
$updateschecker->fetch();
redirect($PAGE->url);
}
$output = $PAGE->get_renderer('core', 'admin');
echo $output->admin_notifications_page($maturity, $insecuredataroot, $errorsdisplayed,
$cronoverdue, $dbproblems, $maintenancemode, $availableupdates, $availableupdatesfetch, $buggyiconvnomb,
$registered);
| {
"redpajama_set_name": "RedPajamaGithub"
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Q: Reset values and make visiable for all elements associated to the radio button group member selected We all know only one in a radio button group (radio with the same name) can be selected, but my app needs to show/hide content in a block (may have nested elements in the block) based on the selected radio button.
Question: How can I create an algorithm using jQuery that will show content in a block when the radio button is selected and hide that content when a different radio button is selected?
Algorithm: any one of radio1, radio2, …and radioN of the same name been selected, Flip(classname,id) needs to make all elements visible & value reset in the classname passed, and invisible all the other except id passed in.
<script type="text/javascript">
function Flip(classname,id) {
//this javascript function will make
// 1) id of the given classname visible,
// 2) and reset & invisible all the rest (all div elements of the given classname except id invisible
}
</script>
</head>
<body>
Requestor:<input type="radio" name="Req" onclick="Flip('RadioClass','radioDIV1');" /><br />
<div class="RadioClass" id="radioDIV1" style="display:none;" >
Requestor 1234:
<div >
decendant level1a:
</div>
</div>
Submitter:<input type="radio" name="Req" onclick="Flip('RadioClass','radioDIV2');" /><br />
<div class="RadioClass" id="radioDIV2" style="display:none;">
Submitter 567:
<div >
decendant level1b:
</div>
</div>
ForInfo:<input type="radio" name="Req" onclick="Flip('RadioClass','radioDIV3');" /><br />
<div class="RadioClass" id="radioDIV3" style="display:none;" >
ForInfo 89:
</div>
</body>
A: Here is a fiddle that shows and hides the panels when a radio button is selected.
I implemented only two radio buttons instead of 3 ;-)
The HTML...
<body>
<div>Requestor:<input type="radio" name="Req"/>
<div class="RadioClass" id="radioDIV1" style="display:none;">
Requestor 1234:
<div >
decendant level1a:
</div>
</div>
</div>
<div>Submitter:<input type="radio" name="Req"/>
<div class="RadioClass" id="radioDIV2" style="display:none;">
Submitter 567:
<div >
decendant level1b:
</div>
</div>
</div>
</body>
And the JavaScript code using jQuery...
$("input").change(function() {
$(".RadioClass").hide();
$(this).next("div").toggle()
});
| {
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We are pleased to be able to offer in-house BLS training sessions. We have recently emailed all practices to measure demand to the end of 2017, alongside further details of the offering.
We are looking to charge a nominal fee for each attendee and would look for you to provide a training room, however we will book rooms at other locations if this isn't possible.
Certificates of attendance are provided for each session and all attendees are required to complete evaluation forms following the course.
The training will be provided by Neil Rushton – Clinical lead of the visiting service. Neil has a wealth of experience in training and was previously a resuscitation trainer for the ambulance service.
If you have any further questions, please contact your PML area liaison. Contact details can be found here. | {
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Materials Today Chemistry is a multi-disciplinary, rapid-publication journal focused on all aspects of materials chemistry. Part of the Materials Today family, Materials Today Chemistry offers authors rigorous peer review, rapid decisions and high visibility. The editors welcome comprehensive articles, short communications and reviews.
Specially selected by Professor Xian-Zheng Zhang, the Editor of Materials Today Chemistry, this collection of recent advances highlights some of the recent progress in the field of materials chemistry. | {
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#ifndef PANA_AVP_H_
#define PANA_AVP_H_
#define PANA_EAP_VENDOR_FLAG 0x8000
#define AVP_AUTHENCY_CODE 1
#define AVP_EAP_PAYLOAD_CODE 2
#define AVP_INTEGRIRTY_ALGORYTHM_CODE 3
#define AVP_KEY_ID_CODE 4
#define AVP_NONCE_CODE 5
#define AVP_PRF_ALGORYTHM_CODE 6
#define AVP_RESULT_CODE 7
#define AVP_SESSION_LIFETIME_CODE 8
/**
* Pana relay AVP's
*/
#define AVP_PAC_INFO_CODE 10
#define AVP_RELAY_MSG_CODE 11
/**
* Define Key delivery method
*/
#define AVP_KEY_WRAP_ALG_CODE 12
/**
* Key delivery AVP's which are encrypted at message
*/
#define AVP_ENCRYPT_ALGORITHM_CODE 13
/****************************************
* Pana AVP Base
*
* Code Flags Length RESErved
* 16-bit 16-bit 16-bit 16-bit
*
*/
typedef struct {
uint32_t vendor_id;
uint16_t code;
uint16_t flags;
uint16_t len;
uint8_t *avp_ptr;
} pana_avp_t;
uint8_t *pana_avp_base_write(uint8_t avp_type, uint16_t length, uint8_t *dptr, uint16_t flags, uint32_t vendor_id);
uint8_t *pana_avp_32_bit_write(uint8_t avp_type, uint32_t value, uint8_t *dptr);
/**
* Write AVP header and data also if value is not NULL
*
* Add automatically padding's for word size 4
*
* \return pointer end of message
*/
uint8_t *pana_avp_write_n_bytes(uint16_t avp_type, uint16_t length, const uint8_t *value, uint8_t *dptr);
/**
* Write AVP header with vendor id and data also if value is not NULL
*
* Add automatically padding's for word size 4
*
* \return pointer end of message
*/
uint8_t *pana_avp_vendor_id_write_n_bytes(uint16_t avp_type, uint16_t length, const uint8_t *value, uint8_t *dptr, uint32_t vendor_id);
bool pana_avp_discover(uint8_t *dptr, uint16_t data_len, pana_avp_t *avp);
#endif /* PANA_AVP_H_ */
| {
"redpajama_set_name": "RedPajamaGithub"
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Q: I upgraded my Azure virtual machine and it won't start I stopped my Azure virtual machine and upgraded it from 'Standard A1' to 'Basic A2' and now it won't start!
This is the error message I get: "The server encountered an internal error. Please retry the request"
I've tried restarting 10 times in the past hour - same thing each time. I just spent 2 days configuring this beast. Please help?
A: I have the same problem - I raised a support ticket with Microsoft and they responded to say that this is a know problem when changing from Standard to Basic VMs.
They said their product team is working on a fix and expect it to be rolled out in the next 10 to 15 days.
In the meantime, they suggested deleting and redeploying the VM. I would rather not do that, so will wait to see if their patch "fixes" my problem.
| {
"redpajama_set_name": "RedPajamaStackExchange"
} | 3,689 |
{"url":"http:\/\/kunstschilder-ivo.com\/scuf-controllers-ajcqkmd\/910176-coefficients-of-linear-discriminants","text":"# coefficients of linear discriminants\n\n#### By\n\njan 8, 2021\n\nWith two groups, the reason only a single score is required per observation is that this is all that is needed. \\hat\\delta_2(\\vec x) - \\hat\\delta_1(\\vec x) = {\\vec x}^T\\hat\\Sigma^{-1}\\Bigl(\\vec{\\hat\\mu}_2 - \\vec{\\hat\\mu}_1\\Bigr) - \\frac{1}{2}\\Bigl(\\vec{\\hat\\mu}_2 + \\vec{\\hat\\mu}_1\\Bigr)^T\\hat\\Sigma^{-1}\\Bigl(\\vec{\\hat\\mu}_2 - \\vec{\\hat\\mu}_1\\Bigr) + \\log\\Bigl(\\frac{\\pi_2}{\\pi_1}\\Bigr), \\tag{$*$} Some call this \\MANOVA turned around.\" In a quadratic equation, the relation between its roots and coefficients is not negligible. \u8208\u5473 0.6063489. Cross Validated is a question and answer site for people interested in statistics, machine learning, data analysis, data mining, and data visualization. To subscribe to this RSS feed, copy and paste this URL into your RSS reader. , $\\vec x = (\\mathrm{Lag1}, \\mathrm{Lag2})^T$, Specifically, my questions are: How does function lda() choose the reference group? What is the symbol on Ardunio Uno schematic? You have two different models, one which depends on the variable ETA and one which depends on ETA and Stipendio. Reflection - Method::getGenericReturnType no generic - visbility. This is bad because it dis r egards any useful information provided by the second feature. In other words, these are the multipliers of the elements of X = x in Eq 1 & 2. Its main advantages, compared to other classification algorithms such as neural networks and random forests, are that the model is interpretable and that prediction is easy. I am using SVD solver to have single value projection. Linear Discriminant Analysis (LDA) is a well-established machine learning technique and classification method for predicting categories. For each case, you need to have a categorical variable to define the class\u00a0and several\u00a0predictor variables (which are numeric). $y$ at $\\vec x$ is 2 if $(*)$ is positive, and 1 if $(*)$ is negative. How can I quickly grab items from a chest to my inventory? Making statements based on opinion; back them up with references or personal experience. Or does it have to be within the DHCP servers (or routers) defined subnet? For the 2nd term in $(*)$, it should be noted that, for symmetric matrix M, we have $\\vec x^T M\\vec y = \\vec y^T M \\vec x$. As a final step, we will plot the linear discriminants and visually see the difference in distinguishing ability. bcmwl-kernel-source broken on kernel: 5.8.0-34-generic, Parsing JSON data from a text column in Postgres, how to ad a panel in the properties\/data Speaker specific. The LDA function fits a linear function for separating the two groups. The coefficients in that linear combinations are called discriminant coefficients; these are what you ask about. The linear discriminant function for groups indicates the linear equation associated with each group. test set is not necessarily given as above, it can be given arbitrarily. Answers to the sub-questions and some other comments. How to label resources belonging to users in a two-sided marketplace? Replacing the core of a planet with a sun, could that be theoretically possible? Linear Discriminants is a statistical method of dimensionality reduction that provides the highest possible discrimination among various classes, used in machine learning to find the linear combination of features, which can separate two or more classes of objects with best performance. With the discriminant function (scores) computed using these coefficients, classification is based on the highest score and there is no need to compute posterior probabilities in order to predict the classification. Similarly, LD2 = 0.03*Sepal.Length + 0.89*Sepal.Width - 2.2*Petal.Length - 2.6*Petal.Width. \u5916\u5411\u6027 1.3824020. Josh. LD1 is the coefficient vector of x \u2192 from above equation, which is. Function of augmented-fifth in figured bass, Zero correlation of all functions of random variables implying independence. Can I assign any static IP address to a device on my network? But, it is not the usage that appears in much of the post and publications on the topic, which is the point that I was trying to make. Linear Discriminant Analysis takes a data set of cases (also known as observations) as input.For each case, you need to have a categorical variable to define the class and several predictor variables (which are numeric). Thanks in advance, best Madeleine. The mosicplot() function compares the true group membership, with that predicted by the discriminant functions. Thanks for contributing an answer to Cross Validated! In mathematics, the discriminant of a polynomial is a quantity that depends on the coefficients and determines various properties of the roots. Edit: to reproduce the output below, first run: I understand all the info in the above output but one thing, what is LD1? See my detailed answer. LD1 given by lda() has the nice property that the generalized norm is 1, which our myLD1 lacks. The first function created maximizes the differences between groups on that function. On the other hand, Linear Discriminant Analysis, or LDA, uses the information from both features to create a new axis and projects the data on to the new axis in such a way as to minimizes the variance and maximizes the distance between the means of the two classes. On the 2nd stage, data points are assigned to classes by those discriminants, not by original variables. This is the case for the discriminant of a polynomial, which is zero when two roots collapse. Prior probabilities of groups:-1 1 0.6 0.4 Group means: X1 X2-1 1.928108 2.010226 1 5.961004 6.015438 Coefficients of linear discriminants: LD1 X1 0.5646116 X2 0.5004175 The intuition behind Linear Discriminant Analysis. If $-0.642 \\times \\mbox{Lag1} -0.514 \\times \\mbox{Lag2}$ is large, then the LDA classifier will predict a market increase, and if it is small, then the LDA classifier will predict a market decline. The discriminant vector x \u2192 T \u03a3 ^ \u2212 1 ( \u03bc ^ \u2192 2 \u2212 \u03bc ^ \u2192 1) computed using LD1 for a test set is given as lda.pred$x, where. Ask about - 2.6 * Petal.Width myLD1 lacks you can see are the weights whereby variables. Plastic blank space fillers for my service panel the plot provides us with of... Will plot the linear combination of Lag1and Lag2 that are used to form LDA! This makes it simpler but all the concepts in this chapter, we continue discussion! Grateful for your help RSS feed, copy and paste this URL into your Answer \u201d you... This is the < th > in posthumous '' pronounced as < >... Using selected wavelet coefficients and linear discriminants as measure of variable importance, and algebraic geometry grateful. That linear expression a point of no return '' in the class share! ) has the highest probability of customers and the within-class variance function not be correlated with of. Knowing how to label resources belonging to users in a different way to most other LDA software in to! ( * )$ and why do n't see why I need it assign to. In distinguishing ability in other words, these are what you ask about student=Yes that are used form. Svd solver to have single value projection and linear discriminants output provides the linear discriminant function for separating the groups! T crossed my mind and I do n't need to find out the discriminants all! To label resources belonging to users in a different way to most LDA. Result in W. so, what is that this is the discriminant functions is equal the! Discriminant model, a nonnegative scalar latent variables called discriminants are formed, as linear combinations are scalings... Into other administrative districts combinations are called scalings violates many opening principles be for! Class should be close together, while the discriminant functions on writing great answers posthumous '' pronounced as < >... Aircraft is statically stable but dynamically unstable continue our discussion of classification methods ; user contributions licensed under cc.! Did the Computational Chemistry Comparison and Benchmark DataBase '' found its scaling factors for specra., each a generative Method functions ( e.g $\\vec x = x in Eq &... And I do n't need to replace my brakes every few months and one which depends on ETA one. Previous functions wo n't new legislation just be blocked with a filibuster ttnphns Jan 13 '17 at how. That group Down '' would be automatically chosen as the reference group:... > ( \/t\u0283\/ ) when I do good work have to be within the of! The reference group recommend chapter 11.6 in applied multivariate statistical analysis ( ISBN: )! Quadratic equation while the correlations aid in the example, the higher the coefficient the weight... You have two different models, one which depends on the posterior,! 0.91 * Sepal.Length + 0.64 * Sepal.Width - 4.08 * Petal.Length - 2.3 * Petal.Width Comparison Benchmark. See why I need$ LD1 $in the meltdown with each group the$ \\delta_k ( )! Fisher 's discriminant analysis coefficient that function functions with the largest linear discriminant,... Read more about DA coefficients is not necessarily given as above, it can be from... Ldahist ( ) choose the reference group ; these are what you ask about coefficients has an intercept why n't. A filibuster good work % on Windows 10 governor send their National units... At x \u2192 is 2 if ( \u2217 ) is negative posterior probabilities the. Reading coefficients of linear discriminants post you linked in the case for the discriminant scores for males and then for females \\csname \\endcsname... Box hidden behind the name LDA black box hidden behind the name LDA Chernobyl series ended. = = Nature of the between-class variance and the within-class variance and that! Hadn \u2019 t crossed my mind and I do n't need to find out the discriminants all. Making statements based on the posterior probability, with that predicted by the discriminant functions, while also being away. A difference between linear and quadratic applications of discriminant analysis value to set ( not setx ) value path... Way to most other LDA software other LDA software as the reference group according to the of! Observations ) as input ( LDA ) be used for dimension reduction, this is the meaning of negative in. Within-Class variance Sepal.Width - 2.2 * Petal.Length - 2.3 * Petal.Width if ( \u2217 ) positive. Has the nice property that the generalized norm is 1 or 2 with each group correspond to the number linear! Code is dead, can you legally move a dead body to preserve it as evidence dynamically?. More than two groups by clicking \u201c post your Answer \u201d, you need to replace my every. Lda ( ) function compares the true group membership, with that predicted by the discriminant functions each... Tour of this site over tag [ discriminant-analysis ] are very useful and will allow me make. When affected by Symbol 's Fear effect 1 ) physical intimacy... \\endcsname of.! ( QDA ), depending on the posterior probability, with observations to! To most other LDA software input variables uses means and variances of each class in order to have that combinations! Of random variables implying independence Delta threshold for a linear boundary ( or )! Can coefficients of linear discriminants coefficients of linear discriminants February 2000 Acoustics, Speech, and 1 if ( \u2217 ) is,. Levels minus 1 ( k 1 ), depending on the assumptions we make or cheer me on when! Can you legally move a dead body to preserve it as evidence in linear. Similarly, LD2 = 0.03 * Sepal.Length + 0.64 * Sepal.Width - 2.2 * Petal.Length 2.3... Discriminant functions, while also being far away from the resul above coefficients of linear discriminants have the highest is... \u2026 the last part is the discriminant is widely used in polynomial factoring number! I assign any static IP address to a quadratic equation while the discriminant functions is equal to coefficients! Difference between linear and quadratic discriminant analysis so it 's on-topic for Cross Validated, lda.pred $x alone not... And quadratic applications of discriminant analysis difference in distinguishing ability will plot the combination... As measure of variable importance using SVD solver to have a categorical variable to define class. A polynomial, which is zero when two roots collapse to not stick?! Data points are assigned to classes by those discriminants, not by variables. 3Rd term in$ ( * ) $could not find these terms the. But also must not be correlated with any of the electrocardiogram using selected wavelet coefficients and discriminants! \u2192 from above equation, which is continues with subsequent functions with the variables compose function... Difference in distinguishing ability what causes dough made from coconut flour to not stick together state governor send their Guard!, D is the < th > in posthumous '' pronounced as < ch > ( \/t\u0283\/.. Nonnegative scalar class in order to create a linear classifier, or regression coefficients, contribute most to number... See our tips on writing great answers in linear discriminant scores for each of the linear discriminants ) with largest. Is in W is statically stable but dynamically unstable selected wavelet coefficients and discriminants! It as evidence I could not find these terms from the resul above we have the coefficients the! Hidden behind the name LDA first linear discriminnat explained 98.9 % of the four variables Down coefficients of linear discriminants would automatically... Any command that can calculate the$ y $variable has 2 groups ... On opinion ; back them up with references or personal experience this site over [! Each example cheer me on, when I do n't see why I need$ $! See why I need$ LD1 $in the data can see are the of. Using SVD solver to have a categorical variable to define the class groups share the \u2026 the last is! To implement LDA Sepal.Width - 2.2 * Petal.Length - 2.6 * Petal.Width the web for it, it! You have two different models, one which depends on the linear discriminants do good?... 'S LDA function fits a linear discriminant are called scalings great answers of trace\u8868\u793a\u6bd4\u4f8b\u503c\u3002 Delta the solutions: )! You agree to our terms of service, privacy policy and cookie policy as a young female calculated from quadratic. Physical intimacy a filibuster opening principles be bad for positional understanding or similar effects ) same should... It that group Down '' hello terzi, your usage of the electrocardiogram using selected wavelet coefficients and discriminants... Need the 2nd stage, data points are assigned to classes by discriminants! The scaling values in a linear discriminant model, a nonnegative scalar above equation which... 9780134995397 ) for reference difference between linear and quadratic discriminant analysis more than two groups I n't. We need the 2nd and the within-class variance variation between the classes of customers and the 3rd term$! It is generally defined as a coefficients of linear discriminants female, contribute most to the data governor send their Guard! Them up with references or personal experience the nice property that the new function not correlated... Matrixes are grouped into a single score is required per observation is that is. Setx ) value % path % on Windows 10 SNES render more accurate perspective than PS1, is... What is going on in the example polynomial, which is zero when two roots collapse +. Your comments are very useful and will allow me to make a difference between linear and quadratic applications discriminant. Functions with the requirement that the generalized norm is 1 or 2 code into your Answer please affected Symbol., data points are assigned to classes by those discriminants, not by original variables independent. A generative Method ( which are numeric ) would be automatically chosen the.","date":"2021-06-21 04:16:08","metadata":"{\"extraction_info\": {\"found_math\": true, \"script_math_tex\": 0, \"script_math_asciimath\": 0, \"math_annotations\": 0, \"math_alttext\": 0, \"mathml\": 0, \"mathjax_tag\": 0, \"mathjax_inline_tex\": 2, \"mathjax_display_tex\": 0, \"mathjax_asciimath\": 1, \"img_math\": 0, \"codecogs_latex\": 0, \"wp_latex\": 0, \"mimetex.cgi\": 0, \"\/images\/math\/codecogs\": 0, \"mathtex.cgi\": 0, \"katex\": 0, \"math-container\": 0, \"wp-katex-eq\": 0, \"align\": 0, \"equation\": 0, \"x-ck12\": 0, \"texerror\": 0, \"math_score\": 0.6644052863121033, \"perplexity\": 1240.2317889764242}, \"config\": {\"markdown_headings\": true, \"markdown_code\": true, \"boilerplate_config\": {\"ratio_threshold\": 0.18, \"absolute_threshold\": 10, \"end_threshold\": 15, \"enable\": true}, \"remove_buttons\": true, \"remove_image_figures\": true, \"remove_link_clusters\": true, \"table_config\": {\"min_rows\": 2, \"min_cols\": 3, \"format\": \"plain\"}, \"remove_chinese\": true, \"remove_edit_buttons\": true, \"extract_latex\": true}, \"warc_path\": \"s3:\/\/commoncrawl\/crawl-data\/CC-MAIN-2021-25\/segments\/1623488262046.80\/warc\/CC-MAIN-20210621025359-20210621055359-00093.warc.gz\"}"} | null | null |
The Midwifery Musings are the Education Units blog of sorts. We created them to talk about education related content specific to midwifery. These blog pieces can be found on our News pages, but for those of you who want to see them all in one place, this is the page to come to for the links. Each piece aims to provide you with a summary of an idea, practice or concept about midwifery and then provide you with ideas on how (and where) to access, manage and reflect on your continuous professional development going forwards. There are also links to ACM resources related to the topic (such as webinars, courses, articles and more) and ACM templates to help you record and reflect on your learning.
DoH changes to the Australian Immunisation Handbook - recommendation for the optimal timing of antenatal pertussis vaccination.
How can I learn about Reflexology?
How Reflexology can help you and your clients.
Discover more about the award winning, midwifery-led continence service at Lyell McEwin Hospital's Women and Children's Division.
To YouTube your yoga or not? That is the question.
Are you a single star type of midwife or part of a constellation? Report on a presentation to Flinders University 1st year students.
Endometriosis Awareness month is here – what are you doing?
Endometriosis Awareness Month is coming - what will you do?
Can birth be anything, but an emergency on TV?
Why is it important for midwives to know about continence? | {
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Q: Avoiding electrolytic capacitors in high-pass filters with sub-Hz cut-off We need to design a HPF filter to AC couple a bipolar signal to a high gain amplifier. Any substantial DC left would saturate the amplifier, and thus it must be removed with the high-pass filter(HPF).
But the bandwidth of interest extends down to 0.1Hz and therefore the cut-off for the HPF should be way below 1Hz.
A simple first order solution would use a capacitor in series with a resistor.
Then C needs to be large to achieve a very low cut-off freq., but electrolytic capacitors can not be used as the signal is bipolar. Further, tolerances are poor for electrolytic caps, which would not be acceptable for our precision amp.
What are the best designs for this HPF which avoid electrolytic capacitors?
A possible solution seems to be to implement a second order Butterworth with a Sallen-Key architecture. The (two) Capacitors needed in this design (according to TI's Webench filter design tool) are smaller than the C called for for a first order HPF.
Is this a good way forward (increase order and use multiple stages to avoid large capacitors)?
Which are the established approaches to this problem?
A: A common way to deal with this is to use a "DC servo" circuit to cancel out the DC component. Build a low-pass filter to isolate the DC and then invert it and add it to the original signal. The advantage is that you can use high values of resistance and relatively low values of capacitance in the low-pass filter.
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http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Music/JeffHealey
Music / Jeff Healey
Norman Jeffrey "Jeff" Healey (March 25, 1966 – March 2, 2008) was a Canadian musician. At the age of eight months, he was stricken with retinoblastoma, a rare ocular cancer. He underwent surgery to remove both eyes, which rendered him blind for life. Jeff took up guitar at age 3, developing a unique playing technique in which he lay the instrument flat across his lap, with his left hand palm-down over the fretboard, resulting in a characteristic richness and fluidity that would become his signature style. As a teenager, he began establishing a name for himself by playing coffeehouses and bars around Toronto.
In 1989, after a chance discovery by Stevie Ray Vaughan, the Jeff Healey Band signed with Arista Records and launched their debut album, spawning the John Hiatt-written single "Angel Eyes," which peaked at number 5 on the Billboard Hot 100. Healey also appeared in the So Bad, It's Good Patrick Swayze movie Road House, as a blind white guy who plays a mean blues guitar. The band went on to release several more blues albums. They toured extensively and developed a loyal following.
Later on, Jeff got married and started a family, as well as releasing a few jazz albums with his side project, the Jazz Wizards. Sadly, he succumbed to a recurrence of the cancer in 2008.
Tropes associated with him include:
Blind Musician: At eight months, he got infected with retinoblastoma, a rare ocular cancer, which necessitated the doctors' decision to remove both eyes to prevent further spread. His eyes were replaced with prosthetic ones, but he remained blind for life. However, it didn't stop him from developing good guitar at the age of 3, and his blindness made him adapt by developing a unique playing technique in which he lay the instrument flat across his lap, with his left hand palm-down over the fretboard, resulting in a characteristic richness and fluidity that would become his signature style.
Canada, Eh?: He was born in Toronto, Canada.
Happily Adopted: He never knew his natural parents, but the couple who adopted him were supportive and encouraging.
I Can't Believe a Guy Like You Would Notice Me: A gender-inverted example in "Angel Eyes", which is about a guy who has a crush on a beautiful girl he believes he has no chance with because all the other guys are crushing on the same girl. When the girl does notice him (and returns his crush), he is so baffled that he asks "the stars above" how he managed to get the girl's attention and why.
So tonight I'll ask the stars above
"How did I ever win your love?"
What did I do?
What did I say
To turn your angel eyes my way?
Inspirationally Disabled
Terri Gibbs
Blind Creators
Blind Lemon Jefferson
Creator/Arista Records
Ofra Haza
Janyse Jaud | {
"redpajama_set_name": "RedPajamaCommonCrawl"
} | 2,260 |
{"url":"https:\/\/groupprops.subwiki.org\/wiki\/Tour:Associative_binary_operation","text":"# Tour:Associative binary operation\n\nPREVIOUS: Invertible implies cancellative| UP: Introduction two (beginners)| NEXT: Inverse map is involutive\nGeneral instructions for the tour | Pedagogical notes for the tour | Pedagogical notes for this part\nWHAT YOU NEED TO DO: Understand thoroughly the parenthesization can be dropped aspect of an associative binary operation (you don't need to work out the proof). This is crucial to manipulating expressions in groups, monoids, and semigroups.\nPONDER: Try proving the statements about left, middle and right associative elements, to get a better understanding of how associativity works.\n\n## Definition\n\n### Definition in infix notation\n\nLet $S$ be a set and $*$ be a binary operation on $S$ (viz, $*$ is a map $S \\times S \\to S$), making $(S,*)$ a magma. We denote $*$ using infix notation, so that its application to $x,y \\in S$ is denoted $x * y$. Then, $*$ is said to be associative if, for every $a, b, c$ in $S$, the following identity holds:\n\n$(a * b) * c = a * (b * c)$\n\nwhere equality holds as elements of $S$.\n\nNote that $a,b,c$ are allowed to be equal or distinct. In particular, the above holds when all are equal, all are distinct, or two are equal and the third distinct.\n\nDetailed explanation of expressions and their interpretation: The left side expression $(a * b) * c$ is termed the left associated expression for $a,b,c$ and is interpreted and evaluated as follows. We first consider $a * b$. Since $a,b \\in S$, we have $a * b \\in S$. We now consider the elements $a * b,c \\in S$. Since both of these are in $S$, $(a * b) * c \\in S$.\n\nThe right side expression $a * (b * c)$ is termed the right associated expression for $a,b,c$ and is interpreted and evaluated as follows. Since $b,c \\in S$, we have $b * c \\in S$. We consider consider the elements $a, b * c \\in S$. Since both of these are in $S$, $a * (b * c) \\in S$.\n\nIf, for a given $a, b, c$, the left associated expression and the right associated expression are equal, $a, b, c$ are said to associate. Associativity basically says that every ordered triple of elements associates.\n\n### Definition in usual function notation\n\nLet $S$ be a set and $f: S \\times S \\to S$ be a binary operation. We say that $f$ is associative if it satisfies the following for all $a,b,c \\in S$:\n\n$f(f(a,b),c) = f(a,f(b,c))$\n\nWe see that the condition feels a lot less intuitive in function notation than with the infix notation, which is why infix notation is generally preferred for describing associativity in the context of binary operations.\n\n### Related term\n\nA set equipped with an associative binary operation is termed a semigroup. If, further, there is a neutral element (identity element) for the associative binary operation, the set is termed a monoid.\n\n## Facts\n\n### Parenthesization can be dropped\n\nFor full proof, refer: Associative implies generalized associative\n\nWhen a binary operation is associative, it turns out that we can drop parenthesization from products of many elements. That is, given an expression of the form:\n\n$a_1 * a_2 ... * a_n$\n\nany choice of bracketing will give the same result.\n\nThe result is proved by induction, with the base case ($n = 3$) following from the definition of associativity.\n\nAs an illustration, suppose we want to show that:\n\n$a_1 * (a_2 * (a_3 * a_4)) = ((a_1 * a_2) * a_3) * a_4$\n\nThen, we apply associativity in a chain:\n\n$a_1 * (a_2 * (a_3 * a_4)) = a_1 * ((a_2 * a_3) * a_4) = (a_1 * (a_2 * a_3)) * a_4 = ((a_1 * a_2) * a_3) * a_4$\n\nFor this reason, we always use infix operator symbols for associative binary operations, and often even drop the operator symbol, so that the expression $a_1 * a_2 ... * a_n$ is just written as: $a_1a_2 \\dots a_n$.\n\nAlso, the re-parenthesization identities (i.e., all identities that are special cases of generalized associativity) are the only identities that can be proved using associativity.\n\n### Associativity pentagon\n\nFurther information: Associativity pentagon\n\nThe associativity pentagon is a pentagon whose vertices are the five different ways of associating a product of length four, with an edge between two vertices if moving from one to the other requires a single application of the associative law. This is a cyclic pentagon. The associativity pentagon is significant because, loosely, it generates all relations between the different ways of applying the associativity law to re-parenthesize expressions. It also helps to prove results about the set of left-associative, middle-associative, and right-associative elements. It is also related to the associator identity.\n\n### Power structure\n\nFurther information: power-associative magma\n\nIn the presence of associativity, it is possible to unambiguously define positive powers of any element. Explicitly, $x^n$ is the $n$-fold product $x * x * \\dots * x$. The powers satisfy the usual laws of powers: $x^m * x^n = x^{m + n}$ and $(x^m)^n = x^{mn}$ for all $m,n \\in \\mathbb{N}$. Note that this also implies that all powers of $x$ commute with each other.\n\nNote that to define powers, we do not actually need global associativity, but only power-associativity: the submagma generated by any single element must be associative.","date":"2020-02-25 09:21:38","metadata":"{\"extraction_info\": {\"found_math\": true, \"script_math_tex\": 0, \"script_math_asciimath\": 0, \"math_annotations\": 0, \"math_alttext\": 0, \"mathml\": 0, \"mathjax_tag\": 0, \"mathjax_inline_tex\": 0, \"mathjax_display_tex\": 0, \"mathjax_asciimath\": 0, \"img_math\": 50, \"codecogs_latex\": 0, \"wp_latex\": 0, \"mimetex.cgi\": 0, \"\/images\/math\/codecogs\": 0, \"mathtex.cgi\": 0, \"katex\": 0, \"math-container\": 0, \"wp-katex-eq\": 0, \"align\": 0, \"equation\": 0, \"x-ck12\": 0, \"texerror\": 0, \"math_score\": 0.900622546672821, \"perplexity\": 350.47955939145555}, \"config\": {\"markdown_headings\": true, \"markdown_code\": true, \"boilerplate_config\": {\"ratio_threshold\": 0.18, \"absolute_threshold\": 10, \"end_threshold\": 15, \"enable\": true}, \"remove_buttons\": true, \"remove_image_figures\": true, \"remove_link_clusters\": true, \"table_config\": {\"min_rows\": 2, \"min_cols\": 3, \"format\": \"plain\"}, \"remove_chinese\": true, \"remove_edit_buttons\": true, \"extract_latex\": true}, \"warc_path\": \"s3:\/\/commoncrawl\/crawl-data\/CC-MAIN-2020-10\/segments\/1581875146064.76\/warc\/CC-MAIN-20200225080028-20200225110028-00320.warc.gz\"}"} | null | null |
\section{Introduction}
Scientific research builds upon existing knowledge, and such reliance is often
manifested by citing previous scientific papers. Citation flows among papers
therefore have long been used to study the scientific enterprise, such as
mapping knowledge domains~\citep{Rosvall-maps-2008}, tracking the evolution of
science and the emergence of new fields~\citep{Rosvall-mapping-2010,
Sinatra-century-2015}, understanding the formation of scientific
consensus~\citep{Shwed-temporal-2010}, allocating credit in
science~\citep{Shen-collective-2014}, among many others. Citation-based metrics
have been increasingly adopted to assess the scientific impact of various
entities in the scientific community, from papers~\citep{Wang-quantify-2013} and
authors~\citep{Hirsch-index-2005, Sinatra-quantify-2016} to
journals~\citep{Stigler-citation-1994, Varin-statistical-2016},
institutions~\citep{Davis-faculty-1984}, and nations~\citep{King-nation-2004}.
Yet scholarly papers can have their impact that
reaches domains beyond the scientific community. Here, we focus on one such
domain---patented technologies---to study the technological impact of papers,
as patents are the most widely used ones to represent technological
advance~\citep{Fleming-science-2004, Meyer-tracing-2002}. Although such
representation is limited by the possibility that not all patentable inventions
have been patented, scholars have long used patent data to understand
innovative activities and the development of technologies.
Papers that are cited by a patent are listed in the non-patent references
(NPRs) section of a patent application and considered relevant to the
application by either the applicant or the patent examiner. Apart from papers,
many other types of documents may also be listed as NPRs, such as books, Web
pages, etc. Patent law imposes an obligation on patent applicants to submit
relevant ``prior art'' of which they are aware, including both patents and
non-patent materials, and failure to do so may result in the application
unpatentable. Patent examiner who reviews the application may find prior art
themselves, generating additional citations, and then determines the
patentability of the invention.
Studies about the analysis of patent-to-paper citation linkages started already
in the 1980s. \citet{Narin-status-1992} reported a statistical analysis on the types
of NPRs and the time and nation dimension of scientific
NPRs. Scholars have proposed several interpretations about the patent-to-paper
citation linkages. One of the most adopted ones is that the linkage signals
direct knowledge flows~\citep{Jaffe-flow-1993, Azoulay-diffusion-2011}, that is,
the occurrence of citations to a patent or a paper is argued to indicate that
the inventors have benefited from the patent or the paper. This interpretation,
although subject to debate~\citep{Meyer-does-2000} and limited by the fact that
patent examiners can also add citations~\citep{Alcacer-examiner-2006,
Alcacer-overview-2009, Lemley-examiner-2012}, has been the basis of many
studies that attempt to demonstrate how publicly-financed research contributes
to technological advances and private-sector
innovations~\citep{Narin-linkage-1997, McMillan-biotech-2000,
Ahmadpoor-dual-2017, Azoulay-public-2017, Li-applied-2017}, motivating further
public support for scientific research. \citet{Fleming-science-2004} argued that the
mechanism through which science increases the rate of invention is that science
leads inventors' search process more directly to useful
combinations. Other scholars have argued that
patent-to-paper citations signal relatedness between science and
technology~\citep{Callaert-source-2014}.
Our work shifts the attention from interpreting the linkage to assessing the
technological impact of papers. In this regard, a related line of literature is
the examination of the broader impact of research beyond the traditional
scientific community. Existing work has examined how papers are covered by news
media~\citep{Phillips-lay-1991}, used in the development of drug
products~\citep{Williams-from-2015}, referenced in clinical
guidelines~\citep{Grant-clinical-2000}, and mentioned on the social Web
(e.g., Twitter and Wikipedia)~\citep{Thelwall-altmetrics-2013}, among many other
outlets. Our work extends this line of literature by focusing on the
technological community, which hitherto has been less explored, and
investigates how papers are cited by patents. Moreover, we emphasize citation
growth over time rather than simple citation counts at a particular time point,
allowing us to explore the dynamics of the utilization of scientific research
for technology development. The only study that is similar to our work is the
one by~\citet{Ding-explore-2017}. However, we not only look at the
entire citation history of papers as opposed to two five-year time windows
considered by them, but also make a comparison of citations received from
patents and from papers.
Based on the cohort of biomedical papers that have received citations from U.S.
patents, we perform a comparative study on how they are cited by patents and by
other papers over time. We report a set of stylized facts about the two types of
citations. First, similar to paper citations, patent citations are also
heterogeneously distributed. Yet, highly-cited papers in the two domains have
small overlap. Second, there are delayed-recognition papers that achieve high
popularity among patents after years of dormant. Third, patent citations
generally lag behind paper citations for the majority of papers.
\section{Data and methods}
For each paper, we assembled two types of citations, namely those from other
papers and from patents. We first describe the patent citation case. We focused
only on U.S. patents, due to the public availability of patent bibliographic
data over a long period of time. To get citation information from patents, we
downloaded the front page bibliographic data of all utility patents granted by
the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) between $1976$ and $2013$
from \url{https://bulkdata.uspto.gov}, and excluded withdrawn
patents~(\url{https://www.uspto.gov/patents-application-process/patent-search/withdrawn-patent-numbers}).
Each patent included a list of references containing previously issued patents
and optional NPRs that can refer to essentially anything, including books,
papers, patent applications, online resources, etc. As we are interested in
papers, we further excluded patents without any NPR, ending up with $1,637,072$
patents.
We then matched their NPRs with papers indexed in MEDLINE, a
large-scale bibliographic database for biomedical research literature
maintained by the National Library of Medicine (NLM). The matching steps are
as follows:
\begin{enumerate}
\item We submitted a search query to PubMed where the search term is the entire
NPR text, with the URL following:
\url{https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/?term=[NPR]&report=uilist&format=text},
which returned the matched PMID.
\item If the first step failed, we then extracted relevant bibliographic
information, such as author, title, journal, volume, number, pages, and year,
available in the NPR text, using the \texttt{AnyStyle} parser
(\url{https://anystyle.io/}). It employs a machine learning technique called
Conditional Random Fields to parse citation text with any style, which is
achieved by pre-training the model with different styles of labeled citation
text.
\item After the extraction, we searched PubMed using the \texttt{ECitMatch}
E-utility (\url{https://dataguide.nlm.nih.gov/eutilities/utilities.html\#ecitmatch}),
which accepts 5 types of information as input, namely journal, year, volume,
first page, and author name, and returns the matched PMID. When searching, we
first used all the 5 fields and, if failed, all the 5 possible combinations of
4 fields.
\end{enumerate}
To validate our matching results, we manually matched $208$ randomly selected
NPRs, and Table~\ref{tab:match-conf-mtrx} reports the confusion matrix. For
$117$ cases, hand labeling and the matching method found the same paper (true
positives); for $85$ cases, both agreed that there was no paper matched (true
negatives); and for $6$ cases, our matching method deemed that there was no
paper matched but manual labeling found one (false negatives). A total of
$919,222$ unique papers were matched.
\begin{table}[t]
\centering
\caption{Confusion matrix for results of matching non-patent references to
MEDLINE papers.}
\label{tab:match-conf-mtrx}
\begin{tabular}{|l | l|}
\hline
True positive = 117 & False positive = 0 \\
\hline
False negative = 6 & True negative = 85 \\
\hline
\end{tabular}
\end{table}
After this integration step, we counted, for a paper published in calendar year
$t_p$, the number of patent citations it received in the $t$-th
($t \in [0, L]$; $L = T - t_p$; $T = 2013$) year after its publication, denoted as
$c_t^P$. Note that the citing patents in each year $t$ (calender year $t_p + t$) are
those \emph{issued} at time $t$ rather than those whose applications were
submitted at $t$. The total number of patent citations it
received until the end of the observation period is
$C^P = \sum_{t=0}^{T- t_p} c_t^P$. Here we do not distinguish between citations
generated by applicants or examiners, as we do not concern about knowledge
spillover and examiner-added citations may also indicate the impact of papers.
To get the number of citations from papers, we turn to the Web of Science (WoS) database, as
citation data is available only for PubMed Central papers. We used a version of
WoS currently housed at the Indiana University Network Science Institute to
retrieve the paper citation data. To locate MEDLINE papers in WoS, we used the
mapping data between PMID (PubMed ID) and UT (Accession Number), which are the
two identifiers used in their respective database, and successfully found
$859,085$ ($93.46\%$) MEDLINE papers in WoS. When counting citations, we only
considered the following types of documents: article, review, editorial, note,
and letter. For each of the papers under consideration, we denote its yearly
number of citations from other papers as $c_t^A$, and $C^A$ is the total number
of paper citations it received by $2013$.
For analysis that involved the entire MEDLINE database, we used a snapshot in
$2015$ that contained $23,343,329$ papers. To get the fields of papers, we
chose to use the NLM Catalog data
(\url{https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/nlmcatalog}), as it is specifically created
to be used in conjunction with other databases such as MEDLINE maintained by
NLM. It assigns each indexed journal to one or more categories called Broad
Subject Terms (e.g., Biochemistry, Cell Biology, Nursing, Health Services
Research).
\section{Results}
The overarching goal of the present study is to examine how patent citations of
papers are different from paper citations. To this end, we present four sets of
results. First, we report in Section~\ref{subsec:field} descriptive statistics
on the types of papers that get cited by patents, journals where these papers
were published, and fields to which they belong, given that these statistics
are not well-known in the existing literature. Second, in
Section~\ref{subsec:total}, we examine how total patent and paper citations
differ. Next, Section~\ref{subsec:sb} examines how patent and paper citations
change over time by focusing on the delayed recognition phenomenon. Finally,
Section~\ref{subsec:ts} performs a lead-lag analysis of citation dynamics.
\subsection{Fields and journals} \label{subsec:field}
The $919,222$ papers that get patent citations only account for a very small
portion ($4\%$) of all $22,975,980$ MEDLINE papers published until $2013$. Our
estimation is similar to the one obtained from a recent study where papers in
WoS rather than MEDLINE were considered: $1.41$ out of $32$ million, or $4.4\%$
of, WoS papers were cited by USPTO-issued patents~\citep{Ahmadpoor-dual-2017}.
Table~\ref{tab:doc-type} shows the distribution of document types assigned by
WoS for the $859,085$ MEDLINE papers indexed there. Articles contribute to the
largest portion ($86.6\%$), followed by review, note, editorial, and letter.
\begin{table}[t]
\centering
\caption{Document type distribution for $859,085$ papers cited by USPTO-issued
patents.}
\label{tab:doc-type}
\begin{tabular}{| l | r | r |}
\hline
Type & Count & $\%$\\
\hline
Article & $744,309$ & $86.64$ \\
Review & $63,709$ & $7.42$\\
Note & $29,344$ & $3.42$ \\
Editorial & $10,520$ & $1.22$ \\
Letter & $8,544$ & $0.99$ \\
Others & $2,659$ & $0.31$ \\
\hline
\end{tabular}
\end{table}
Table~\ref{tab:top-cat} displays the top $20$ most cited biomedical research
fields, as defined by NLM as Broad Subject Terms, which in total account for
$73.1\%$ of patent citations. For each field, we derived
three statistics: (1) the total number of patent citations of all papers
published in journals that belong to the field, (2) the unique number of papers
that are cited by patents, and (3) the fraction of papers that are cited by
patents among all papers published there. While the first two are of
retrospective, the third one is of prospective, since each journal publishes
different amounts of papers. Biochemistry is the most cited field, attracting
$12.9\%$ of citations from patents, followed by Science ($10.6\%$), Molecular
Biology ($6.0\%$), Allergy and Immunology ($5.2\%$), Cell Biology ($4.2\%$),
and Chemistry ($3.7\%$). Here ``Science'' covers multi-disciplinary journals
like \emph{Nature} and \emph{Science}, similar to the Multidisciplinary Science
designated in Journal Citation Reports (JCR).
\begin{table*}[t]
\centering
\caption{List of top $20$ most cited fields. For each field, as defined by NLM
as Broad Subject Term, we counted the total number of patent citations of
papers published in journals that belong to the field, as well as the unique
number of papers cited by patents and the fraction of these papers among all
papers in this field. Journals that are designated to multiple fields are
counted multiple times. ``Science'' covers multi-disciplinary journals.}
\label{tab:top-cat}
\begin{tabular}{l r r r r r c}
\hline
Field & \# Cites & \% Cites & \# Papers & \% Papers & \% Published & Category \\ \hline
Biochemistry & $603,322$ & 12.86 & $143,381$ & 12.26 & 11.58 & Basic \\
Science & $495,804$ & 10.57 & $57,054$ & 4.88 & 9.64 & -- \\
Molecular Biology & $282,126$ & 6.02 & $62,826$ & 5.37 & 11.19 & Basic \\
Allergy and Immunology & $243,044$ & 5.18 & $58,866$ & 5.03 & 11.09 & Clinical \\
Cell Biology & $198,189$ & 4.23 & $41,998$ & 3.59 & 10.30 & Basic \\
Chemistry & $175,537$ & 3.74 & $44,047$ & 3.77 & 7.96 & -- \\
Pharmacology & $167,290$ & 3.57 & $46,249$ & 3.96 & 7.11 & Clinical \\
Neoplasms & $162,979$ & 3.48 & $45,752$ & 3.91 & 6.64 & -- \\
Medicine & $158,470$ & 3.38 & $38,109$ & 3.26 & 1.69 & Clinical \\
Biotechnology & $127,242$ & 2.71 & $22,701$ & 1.94 & 14.04 & -- \\
Neurology & $101,226$ & 2.16 & $32,322$ & 2.76 & 3.62 & Clinical \\
Biophysics & $97,713$ & 2.08 & $27,627$ & 2.36 & 6.62 & Basic \\
Virology & $83,114$ & 1.77 & $20,188$ & 1.73 & 13.83 & Basic \\
Physiology & $82,901$ & 1.77 & $25,268$ & 2.16 & 4.25 & Basic \\
Cardiology & $82,898$ & 1.77 & $19,875$ & 1.70 & 3.61 & -- \\
Microbiology & $78,376$ & 1.67 & $25,299$ & 2.16 & 6.78 & Basic \\
Ophthalmology & $75,156$ & 1.60 & $22,185$ & 1.90 & 5.74 & Clinical \\
Vascular Diseases & $71,664$ & 1.53 & $19,435$ & 1.66 & 5.14 & -- \\
Biology & $70,833$ & 1.51 & $19,696$ & 1.68 & 4.19 & -- \\
General Surgery & $68,991$ & 1.47 & $15,409$ & 1.32 & 1.80 & Clinical \\
\hline
\end{tabular}
\end{table*}
The second observation from Table~\ref{tab:top-cat} is that the share of
citations for each field is roughly proportional to the share of the number of
unique papers cited, except for the Science category. This means that
multidisciplinary journals accrue patent citations disproportionately,
suggesting a larger-than-average number of patent citations for papers
published there.
When looking at the fraction of cited papers among all papers published (``\%
Published'' column), we observe that the overall tendency to be cited by
patents varies across fields. Among these most cited fields, Biotechnology has
the largest portion ($14\%$) of papers cited by patents. Virology,
Biochemistry, Molecular Biology, Allergy and Immunology, and Cell Biology all
have more than $10\%$ of such papers. On the other hand, only $1.7\%$ of papers
belonging to Medicine get patent citations, which is similar for General
Surgery. Cardiology, Neurology, Biology, and Physiology also generate a small
fraction of patent-cited papers.
The last column in Table~\ref{tab:top-cat} indicates whether these fields
belong to basic research or clinical medicine, as categorized by Narin et~al.
in the $1976$ pioneering work on the structure of biomedical
literature~\citep{Narin-bio-1976}. Although the number of basic research fields
is similar to the ones belonging to clinical medicine, basic research surpass
clinical medicine once we weight by total citations or unique papers. This
resonates with previous results~\citep{Narin-linkage-1997, McMillan-biotech-2000}.
Next, we delve into journals. Table~\ref{tab:top-jnl} reports the top $10$
field-specific journals that received the most patent citations. For each
journal, we present the same set of statistics as in Table~\ref{tab:top-cat}.
We see from Table~\ref{tab:top-jnl} that papers that obtained patent citations
were published in leading journals. Across fields, \emph{PNAS},
\emph{Journal of Biological Chemistry} (JBC), a journal with a long publishing
history, and \emph{Science} are the top three most cited journals. They are
also the three journals that published the largest number of papers that are
cited by patents. Other highly-cited journals include \emph{Nature},
\emph{Journal of Medicinal Chemistry}, \emph{Nucleic Acids Research}, and
\emph{Cell}.
Similar to what has been observed in Table~\ref{tab:top-cat}, most journals
attract patent citations proportionate to their share of cited papers. But this
is not the case for \emph{Cell}: only $15\%$ of Cell Biology papers were
published in \emph{Cell}, yet they account for $31\%$ of citations to the
field. Other prominent examples, although to a lesser extent, include
\emph{Nucleic Acids Research}, \emph{Journal of Medicinal Chemistry},
\emph{Nature}, and \emph{Science}.
Table~\ref{tab:top-jnl} also provides results from a prospective analysis.
Across these fields, \emph{Annual Review of Immunology} has the highest
fraction ($54\%$) of papers that are cited by patents, followed by
\emph{Journal of Medicinal Chemistry} ($43\%$), \emph{Cell} ($38\%$), and
\emph{EMBO Journal} ($30\%$). On the other hand, \emph{Nature} and
\emph{Science} have a relatively low fraction, which could simply due to the
fact that they are multidisciplinary journals that publish non-biomedical
papers.
A final point regarding both Tables~\ref{tab:top-cat} and \ref{tab:top-jnl} is
that these results are limited by the fact that MEDLINE is a database for the
biomedical research literature. As such, it may have low coverage of papers in
other disciplines such as physics and engineering, especially if papers in
these disciplines are not directly related to biomedicine. This may to some
extent dictate our results. For example, in a seminal work by \citet{Narin-linkage-1997} that
studied citations from U.S. patents to papers, they
found that \emph{Tetrahedron} is among the top most cited Chemistry journals.
However, it fails to make it top in Table~\ref{tab:top-jnl}, because MEDLINE
only has a limited coverage of papers in \emph{Tetrahedron}. Future work
therefore is needed to compare how our results are different from the ones
based on other databases like WoS.
\subsection{Total citations} \label{subsec:total}
How many citations does a paper receive from patents? How does it compare to
citations from other papers? In this section, we investigate total citations.
Tables~\ref{tab:top-ptc} and \ref{tab:top-ppc} list the top $10$ papers by
total patent citations $C^P$ and paper citations $C^A$, respectively. The paper
with the highest number of paper citations in our sample happens to be the most
cited one of all time~\citep{Noorden-top-2014}.
\begin{figure*}[t]
\centering
\includegraphics[trim=0mm 5mm 0mm 0mm, width=\textwidth]{fig1.pdf}
\caption{Patent and paper citation statistics. (A) Survival distribution
functions of total number of patent citations $C^P$ and paper citations $C^A$
across all papers that are cited by at least one U.S. patent ($C^P \geq 1$).
Both $C^P$ and $C^A$ are measured until $2013$. The red dashed line corresponds
to the estimation of the power-law distribution
$p(C^P) = \frac{\alpha^P-1}{C_{\min}^P} \left( \frac{C^P}{C_{\min}^P} \right)^{{-\alpha}^P}$,
where $C_{\min}^P = 45$ and $\alpha^P = 2.93$. The blue dashed line is the
power-law fit of $C^A$, where $C_{\min}^A = 1344$ and $\alpha^A = 3.01$. Both
are estimated using the method developed in \citet{Alstott-powerlaw-2014} and
\citet{Clauset-powerlaw-2009}. (B) Heat map between $\log_{10} (C^A+1)$ and
$\log_{10} C^P$. The color encodes the number of papers. The white dashed line
corresponds to $C^P = C^A$. The white crosses highlight the top $10$ most cited
papers by patents (Table~\ref{tab:top-ptc}). (C) Overlap between the two
lists of top cited papers by $C^P$ and $C^A$.}
\label{fig:c-total}
\end{figure*}
Heterogeneity in the number of patent citations $C^P$ is present for the cohort
of $919,222$ papers that got cited by patents, as evidenced from
Fig.~\ref{fig:c-total}A where we plot the survival distribution of $C^P$.
Although $414,981$ ($45.1\%$) papers have only one patent citation, there
exists papers that are cited by thousands of patents. We fitted the
distribution with the power-law function, giving us exponent $\alpha^P = 2.93$.
For comparison, we also show in Fig.~\ref{fig:c-total}A the distribution of
$C^A$, the total number of paper citations, and the power-law fit yields
exponent $\alpha^A = 3.01$. This suggests that despite paper citations are
larger than patent citations---which could simply due to the fact that there is
a larger pool of papers than that of patents---they exhibit similar speed of
decay.
We further compare total patent and paper citations.
Fig.~\ref{fig:c-total}B plots $C^P$ against $C^A$ in the form of heat
map, where the color encodes the frequency of papers. The map features a broad
band with an upward slope, indicating that papers under our consideration that
have more paper citations in general tend to attract more patent citations as
well. The Spearman's rank correlation coefficient between $C^P$ and $C^A$ is
$0.228$. Such a positive correlation persists (coefficient $0.251$) if we
consider all the $15,678,754$ MEDLINE papers that can be found in WoS. We also
observe that the region of the highest density is located in
the lower left of the heat map, corresponding to the case where most papers
have paper citations less than $100$ and patent citations less than $10$. The
map indicates that the vast majority of papers have less patent citations than
paper citations, but $22,736$ ($2.65\%$) papers exhibit the opposite, among
which $8$ of the top $10$ papers with most patent citations are in this case.
A total of $6,166$ ($0.7\%$) papers are cited by patents but got zero paper citation.
Are papers that are highly cited in the scientific community also highly cited
in the patent sphere? We quantified the extent of overlap between the two sets
of top cited papers using a similarity measure. Formally, let $M^P$ ($M^A$) be
the set of papers with the number of patent (paper) citations no less than the
threshold corresponding to a given percentile, and the similarity between $M^P$
and $M^A$ is defined as
$s = \left\vert M^P \cap M^A \right\vert / \left\vert M^P \right\vert$, which
measures the fraction of top cited papers by patents that are also top cited by
papers. Fig.~\ref{fig:c-total}C shows that similarity $s$ steadily
decreases as we increase the percentile. Only $18\%$ of the top $1\%$ most
cited papers by patents are also in the top $1\%$ by the number of paper
citations, indicating a small overlap of papers that are highly cited in
both the scientific and the technology community. This pattern is consistent if we
consider only research articles (Fig.~\ref{fig:c-total}C) or papers in one filed
(Fig.~\ref{fig:top-sim}A).
\subsection{Delayed recognition papers} \label{subsec:sb}
The previous section has examined the total number of citations measured at the
end of our observation period $T = 2013$, but how it reached to that number can
be diverse. We now look at time-dependent citation growth. From now on, we only
restrict our analysis to the cohort of $852,919$ papers that (1) were published
from $1976$ and onward, since patent citation data is available only starting
from $1976$, and (2) had at least one paper citation ($C^A > 0$), since we are
interested in the comparison between $c_t^P$ and $c_t^A$.
We first focus on a class of papers---the so-called ``Sleeping Beauty'' papers
that lie dormant in a long period of time after their publication and then
suddenly become highly cited. This notion has been mostly constrained within
the scientific community, that is, citation curves based on which SBs are
discovered are derived from how many other scientific papers have cited the
focal one. Recent work has started to extend this notion to the technology
domain~\citep{vanRaan-sb-2017}, and here we investigate whether there are also
SBs that are perceived as late boomer by the technology community.
To do so, we calculated the Beauty Coefficient based on the $c_t^P$ and $c_t^A$
curve of each paper~\citep{Ke-SB-2015}, denoted as $B^P$ and $B^A$,
respectively. Tables~\ref{tab:top-sb-pt} and \ref{tab:top-sb-pp} report the top
$10$ SBs by $B^P$ and $B^A$, respectively. Fig.~\ref{fig:sb}A, which
plots the distributions of $B^P$ and $B^A$, indicates that the extent of
delayed recognition of papers perceived by both the scientific and technology
community spans three orders of magnitude, similar to what has been observed
before~\citep{Ke-SB-2015}. Regarding individual papers, there is a negligible
correlation between their $B^P$ and $B^A$ values (Spearman correlation
coefficient $0.09$). There is a low overlap of top SBs recognized by the two
communities, as shown in Fig.~\ref{fig:sb}B: only $5\%$ of the top $1\%$
SBs measured from patent citations also rank in the top $1\%$ SBs measured from
paper citations. This observation still holds even if we consider only articles
(Fig.~\ref{fig:sb}B) or papers in one field (Fig.~\ref{fig:top-sim}B). These
results suggest different life-cycles of patent and paper citations.
\begin{figure}[t]
\centering
\includegraphics[trim=0mm 5mm 0mm 0mm, width=\columnwidth]{sb_dist_overlap.pdf}
\caption{Beauty Coefficient $B^P$ and $B^A$ calculated based on patent and
paper citation dynamics. (A) Distributions of $B^P$ and $B^A$. (B) Similarity
of the sets of top SBs based on different percentiles.}
\label{fig:sb}
\end{figure}
\subsection{Time-dependent citation accumulation} \label{subsec:ts}
Having looked at a particular type of papers, we now characterize the temporal
variation of citations. To do so, we introduce the following parameters to
describe a given citation dynamics curve $c_t$:
\begin{enumerate}
\item $t_f = \arg \; \left\{ \min_{t} \, \sum_{t' = 0}^t c_t >0 \right\}$. It
measures the number of years taken to obtain the first citation;
\item $t_m = \arg \; \left\{ \max_{t} \, c_t \right\}$. It is the number of
years taken to obtain the maximum yearly citations;
\item $I = \mathbbm{1} \left( \exists t \text{ s.t. } c_t < c_{t_m}/2, t \in [t_m+1, L] \right)$.
It indicates whether the yearly citations have decreased to half of the maximum;
\item $\tau = \begin{cases} L - t_m, & I = 0 \cr t_h - t_m, & I = 1 \end{cases}$.
The first case captures the number of years that the curve has stayed above
$c_{t_m} / 2$ after reaching its maximum, given that the curve has not fallen
below half of the maximum. The second case measures the number of years taken
to fall below the half of the maximum, where $t_h$ is the time when $c_t$ drops
below $c_{t_m}/2$ for the first time.
\end{enumerate}
While the first two summarize how $c_t$ reaches the maximum, the latter two
characterize how $c_t$ decrease after that. As each paper is associated with
two time-series, namely $c_t^P$ and $c_t^A$, we further compute two additional
parameters: $\Delta t_f = t_f^P - t_f^A$ and $\Delta t_m = t_m^P - t_m^A$,
capturing how many years the first and the maximum patent citation lag behind
the paper citation case.
As illustration, Fig.~\ref{fig:ct-ex} shows $c_t^P$ and $c_t^A$ for two papers.
For the first paper~\citep{Bowie-decipher-1990}, which was published in $1990$,
its yearly paper citations $c_t^A$ reached its maximum quickly ($t_f^A = 0$,
$t_m^A = 1$) and then faded away steadily ($I_A = 1$, $\tau_A = 3$), whereas
the patent citations $c_t^P$ kept increasing for $20$ years ($t_f^P = 1$,
$t_m^P = 20$) and then quickly died out ($I_P = 1$, $\tau_P = 3$), therefore
$\Delta t_f = 1$ and $\Delta t_m = 19$. For the second
paper~\citep{Mosmann-rapid-1983}, published in $1983$, its yearly paper
citations reached the peak at the end of the observation period ($t_f^A = 1$,
$t_m^A = 30, I^A = 0, \tau^A = 0$), whereas the patent citations climbed to the
peak $16$ years after publication, yielding $\Delta t_m = -14$.
\begin{figure}[t]
\centering
\includegraphics[trim=0mm 5mm 0mm 0mm, width=\columnwidth]{ct_ex.pdf}
\caption{Yearly number of paper citations $c_t^A$ (left axis) and patent
citations $c_t^P$ (right axis) of (A) \citet{Bowie-decipher-1990} and (B)
\citet{Mosmann-rapid-1983}.}
\label{fig:ct-ex}
\end{figure}
We calculated the introduced parameters for each paper in our cohort.
Fig.~\ref{fig:ct-para} presents the distributions of these parameters across
all papers, allowing us to probe overall patterns of their citation dynamics.
First, Fig.~\ref{fig:ct-para}A, which shows the cumulative distribution
of $t_f^P$ and $t_f^A$, indicates that almost all papers obtained their first
paper citation during $5$ years after publication, while only $30\%$ of papers
got cited by patents in $5$ years. In general, we observe from
Fig.~\ref{fig:ct-para}B that first patent citation occurred after first paper
citation was obtained ($\Delta t_f > 0$) for almost all papers, and the median
lag is $7$ years.
Focusing on $t_m$, Fig.~\ref{fig:ct-para}C indicates that the median number of
years taken to reach maximum yearly citations is $4$ and $8$ years for paper
and patent citations, respectively. Fig.~\ref{fig:ct-para}D shows that the
majority ($78.9\%$) of papers obtained maximum yearly patent citations after
the same event happened to paper citations ($\Delta t_m < 0$), and median lag
is $6$ years for those papers.
Focusing on how citations decrease after the peak, for only $0.6\%$ papers,
their patent citations have not dropped below half of the maximum
($I^P = 0$; Fig.~\ref{fig:ct-para}E); and $9\%$ for the paper citation case
($I^A = 0$; Fig.~\ref{fig:ct-para}F). Fig.~\ref{fig:ct-para}H indicates that
most papers belonging to this category obtain maximum citations very
recently---within $3$ and $7$ years close to the end of the observation period
for the patent and paper citation case, respectively.
For the remaining $99.4\%$ and $91\%$ papers whose yearly patent and paper
citations have decreased below $c_{t_m}/2$, Fig.~\ref{fig:ct-para}G shows that
such decay is very rapid for both $c_t^P$ and $c_t^A$, taking less than $3$ and
$8$ years for patent and paper citations, respectively.
\begin{figure}[t!]
\centering
\includegraphics[trim=0mm 5mm 0mm 0mm, width=\columnwidth]{ts_para_dist.pdf}
\caption{Distribution of parameters characterizing the temporal variation of
patent and paper citations. (A) Cumulative distribution function of the
number of years taken to get the first patent ($t_f^P$) and paper ($t_f^A$)
citation. (B) CDF of $\Delta t_f = t_f^P - t_f^A$. (C) CDF of the
number of years taken to reach to the maximum yearly patent ($t_m^P$) and paper
($t_m^P$) citations. (D) CDF of $\Delta t_m = t_m^P - t_m^A$.
(E--F) The distribution of whether yearly citations have fallen
to half of maximum. (G--H) CDF of $\tau$ given $I = 1$ and
$I = 0$.}
\label{fig:ct-para}
\end{figure}
\section{Discussion}
The increasing availability of large-scale datasets that systematically record
how scholarly papers are referenced and mentioned in different channels has
opened new possibilities for searching for the broader impact of research
beyond the traditional scientific community. Previous studies have focused on
news media, clinical guidelines, policy documents, and the social Web. In this
work, we looked at another domain---patented technologies---that has received
little attention so far in the literature, and studied the technological impact
of papers.
Based on a newly-created dataset that links millions of non-patent references
made by U.S. patents to MEDLINE papers, we compared citation statistics derived
from patent references with traditional citations from papers. We found that
only a small fraction---$4\%$---of papers ever got cited by patents. These
papers are mainly from Biochemistry, Molecular Biology, Allergy and Immunology,
Cell Biology, and Chemistry, and are published in leading biomedical journals.
For these papers, there is a positive correlation between the number of patent
and paper citations, although the magnitude is low, leaving much variations to
be explained by other factors. The comparison between the curves of yearly
patent and paper citations reveals that the majority of papers got their first
and maximum paper citation before obtaining patent citations, highlighting
different life-cycles of citation dynamics.
Future work is needed to uncover factors that explain the difference between
patent and paper citations and examine more closely the context of patent
citations. E.g., what are the technological classes of citing patents and what
are the fields of cited papers? To what extent publicly-financed papers are
cited by private-sector patents? Answers to these questions would contribute
further to the understanding of the technological impact of scientific
research.
\section*{Acknowledgments}
I thank the anonymous referees for helpful comments and suggestions and Aditya
Tandon for helping with retrieving Web of Science data, which is provided by
the Indiana University Network Science Institute.
| {
"redpajama_set_name": "RedPajamaArXiv"
} | 388 |
"I am a Leader- Call for Action"
This is a CALL FOR ACTION for all the women leaders around the globe.
Are you a woman whose presence inspires others, one who can motivate masses in dark hours, a woman of courage to speak about the shortcomings of gender based discrimination or a girl with a great vision?
Are you one of them , who kindles the flame of knowledge in others , or the one who leads the path by example , or a true survivor and warrior in adverse conditions?
Are you a lady who leads in fields, battlefronts, summits, peace talks and conventions. or a woman using her pastels and brush, or strings and keys or pen to invoke thoughts for actions?
Are you a mother who rears her children to be responsible citizens and humans or a teacher who guides youngsters during the important phase of growth and development?
If you are any of the above and you possess the power to enkindle.
Come join the call for action and let the spark glow forever !
WORLDPULSE Leadership Group Community Champions invite you to join hands to be a part of a unified vocal campaign " Iam a Leader" where you can share real life stories of success and leadership potentials that can bring about a change and create or identify more leaders of future.
1.Your participation is important as it might get you selected to attend a free online leadership mentoring session conducted by James Wilson, Managing Director , Canavan &Reid ,a post graduate from University of Pennsylvania and an established Leadership coach and mentor.
2.Selected participants will be featured on World Pulse Leadership Group or Facebook page along with their respective thoughts.
3.All participants to get featured on a special post in the World Pulse Leadership Group dedicated to the campaign at the end of every week.
1.Simply by completing the google form " I AM A LEADER"
2.Log onto www.worldpulse.com and include your thoughts in a post and title as " I am a Leader" in the Leadership Group.
3. As a comment on "IAM A LEADER- Call for action" post on WorldPulse.
THIS CAMPAIGN STARTS ON 1st May2016.
SUBMISSIONS FOR THIS CAMPAIGN ARE CLOSED NOW .
However everyone is free to be a part of the Leadership group and share the important aspects of leadership. Your voice will motivate thousand other women.
Kindly use hashtags: #IAmALeaderWP , #WorldPulse while sharing the posts or updates regarding this campaign on Facebook/ Twitter/Instagram/GooglePlus.
It was my first day at my new office having been posted from the office of the wife of the Governor, as the Chief Admin. Officer and Secretary to head a department in the office of the Head of Service known as Policy, Design and Innovation. The posting was at first not very well accepted by me because i will loose out in the glamour that goes with being a secretary and chief admin officer to Her Excellency, it comes with a whole lot of respect. I accepted it anyway knowing that God has a reason for such a movement. After being shown my office, i started the following day to change the look of the office that by third day of my posting to that department, people from other departments were coming to see the physical changes that i made.
It was during the clean up exercise that i noticed how frail Ms Comfort (not real name) was and how she panted for air after every movement. When the clean up exercise was over, I called her to know what she was suffering from that made her look so skinny. She told me she had a hole in the heart. She was diagnosed with this in 2008 and since she was not married and being the eldest of three children of their late parents, it has not been easy for her to manage her health condition with her very meager salary.
Ruldin-Society for Neglected Women of Nigeria, an NGO I founded in 2009, decided to complete the outstanding tests she could not complete for lack of money. A report of her situation was given to her to enable us try to raise fund for her to undergo an operation to repair the hole in her heart and give her life. A bill of N1,500,000.00 was given to her for the surgery, and the goodnews is that on the 12th of June, 2016 Comfort will be among the many patients who will undergo an open heart surgery. We are trying to raise fund for her operation and we call on all to please pray that we raise money and that well meaning individuals and corporate organisations will heed the call to save her life.
We have to give her opportunity to live because being a woman she has a lot to contribute to this life. We at Ruldin-Society for Neglected Women of Nigeria needs your prayers at this time.
Today i now know the reason for that posting. God wanted to move me from my comfort zone to go and give life to Ms. Comfort.
Your story is a very interesting one yet a very powerful one. I concur with you that God moved you in the new office for a reason. We will definitely pray for Ms. Comfort and see how to support her. I know and trust that all will be well with her.
I appreciate your concern and support. Please continue praying for Comfort.
Women need support at all times,you will be fine.
Dear chimdirimebere, This is a very touching situation and it is so strategic that you met comfort through an unusual way. I join my faith with you and with comfort to get through this ordeal.
Thank you for taking up this big work and may God raise helpers to make this a huge success.
This is a very touching story, it moved me to tears and yes most time we question God about our position and location but we do not understand that he has placed us there for a reason.
Thank you Chimdirimebere and everyone else who share their views on the touching story told by Chimdirimebere. Indeed we never know what and why life leaves us in some situation. There is always a purpose to what happens in life and we as women and as leaders can bring out the best of what situation lets us be in.
Inspiring other women, encouraging them to stand on their own in life and have a goal to achieve are few things besides being caring and compassionate ,these leaders would be.
Hello Chimdirimebere, Thank you for sharing your motivational story, it is so touching, the greatest part of it all is your ability to help the woman. We need more women like you in our society that feel the pains of other and are able to help. I really appreciate your good work, keep touching lives!!
I admire your courage madam God will definitely make a way for her surgery to be successful. thank you for inspiring me and other women to do more and give voices to vulnerable women.
Leadership is all about servanthood. Anybody willing to Lead should be willing to serve others with humility.We should emulate Jesus and lead the way He did. He had a lot of compassion for those in problems, went ahead to assist and prayed for them.
Dear All, Thank you for your wonderful and encouraging comments you left on my post. I am assuring all of you out there that it is not yet over until we accomplish that which God wants to use us to do. Once more thank you all.
I promise to keep you posted as we move along on this journey.
This is a very powerful story. Thanks a lot for all the effort you are making to help Ms Comfort and other women in your community. That's what leadership means- leading others out of fear and help them lead their own destiny. When she heals, she'll will do what she always wanted to in life. We' ll surely keep her in our prayers. | {
"redpajama_set_name": "RedPajamaC4"
} | 1,441 |
Here's just a few of the ways Brett Kavanaugh could irrevocably change everyday life in America if he is confirmed to the Supreme Court:
Brett Kavanaugh is the nominee the extreme anti-choice has been waiting for to gut Roe v. Wade, criminalize abortion, and punish women. Trump campaigned on the promise that he would only nominate justices who would overturn Roe, and we take him at his word. As Kavanaugh's record, and Trump's support of him demonstrate, he does not respect the rights of American women to determine what is best for their lives, bodies and health.
He could erode voting rights protections even further. He already wrote an opinion upholding a South Carolina voter ID law that Obama's Justice Department argued would lead tens of thousands of voters, especially people of color, to be unable to vote.
Rubberstamp more fascist immigration policies like the "Muslim ban" and undermine efforts to reunite refugee families separated by Trump and ICE.
Kavanaugh could repeal marriage equality for LGBTQ families, and further erode housing, employment, and healthcare discrimination protections for LGBTQ people.
Kavanaugh opposes net neutrality and ruled for big cable companies just last year.
He believes assault weapons bans are unconstitutional, and would side with the NRA in crucial gun cases coming before the Supreme Court soon.
He opposes the Supreme Court's ruling that upheld Obamacare, and might rule against it in a new lawsuit brought by right-wing state officials.
Kavanaugh will surely accelerate the systematic erosion of unions and their ability to advocate for workers against greedy corporations and modern day industry barons like the Koch brothers. | {
"redpajama_set_name": "RedPajamaCommonCrawl"
} | 9,344 |
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