NOVEL NEXT Chapter LXXII – Let your literacy shine before men.
53rd of Summer, 5859
Rogers’ Plantation, Outskirts of Casamonu / Azdavay
Tensions were quite high everywhere in Casamonu, for reasons not as of yet related to the hostile takeover in Azdavay. Such high tensions called for becoming higher than the tension to escape it, which meant that business was going well for Sir Rogers’ tobacco plantation. To meet this demand the already strict production quotas had been made even stricter, sleep time had been reduced from 6 hours to 4, and new slaves had been bought from nearby plantations that had gone bankrupt from the raids.
Sir Rogers himself had been saved from bankruptcy thanks to the sudden increase in the average level of stress in the region. He was having a whiff from his pipe; not from his own supply of course, he was a rich enough man that he could afford a mix of tobacco imported overseas and “poppies” imported from the North. This man of high status was reaching new highs as he burnt away his not-so-hard-earned cash in his pipe of dreams. Not that he had a shortage of money to burn; a man like him could convert all his money to banknotes, use the banknotes as toilet paper every day, and still live a comfortable life for the rest of his existence on the temporal realm. It was a life free of worry except for the times when his slave barracks happened to burn down. Other than that, Sir Rogers could kick up his heels and relax.
However, his relaxation was cut short by a worrying matter, that being that the plant matter in his pipe had all burnt up. No matter however, for Sir Rogers could call up some more. He rung a bell on his desk to call one of his servants. Then he rang it again. And again. One more time for good measure. Was he just so high that time seemed to be moving so slowly? A couple minutes had already passed by now and nobody had knocked on his door to help. Quite the odd thing for a man who had a couple servants serving him.
“Hello? Anyone?” Sir Rogers still had enough of his mind working to sense something was wrong. He struggled to get up his chair and wobbled to the nearby window, where he found the plantation to be devoid of any workers. It was morning, the prime time for work. He’d have to punish whoever had let the slaves laze around. Then he turned back, almost collapsed onto the floor as even this simple action of turning around was enough to overload his clouded mind, and waddled towards a door leading to a corridor. Waddle and waddle he did, for a very long time, until his jittery hands finally made contact with the doorknob. It clicked open, the door swung open, and Sir Rogers finally lost his balance and found himself on the floor when he tried to hold on to the accelerating door. The noise made by his body crashing on to the floor was great, so great that it prompted some footsteps to begin approaching him. He was ready to chew out whoever would come into his sights first, though that whoever turned out to be very unexpected.
“Is that him?” It was a bloke clad in a gambeson, carrying a spear, leading a group of half-naked slaves carrying agricultural tools.
“Hey! Where have you been all this time?” shouted Sir Rogers. He shook his fist around, furious and unserved. “Get me something to smoke, damn you!” His attempts at getting off the ground failed due to his lack of balance.
The slaves didn’t seem to be too willing to oblige however, and they slowly approached their master instead. The guy in the gambeson opened his mouth to stop them, before taking a pause and changing his mind. “Eh, he’s going to be executed anyways. Do what you want with him."
53rd of Summer, 5859
Azdavay, County of Casamonu
The former mayor’s office in Azdavay had turned into a jungle of paper-shifting quill-dancing bureaucracy overnight. A couple more of the well-read members of Azdavay had joined the mayor’s office after the two men of the cloth upon hearing (thanks to Brown letting the preacher go back to the Adventurer’s Guild to recruit more) the excellent pay offered by their new visitors, not to mention that getting on the good sides of their new “overlords” seemed to be a good deal for them. Brown had his own place at the table, with a large sheet of paper where he transcribed the mayor’s records into Latin script.
“Lady Lily of Azdavay, two slaves. Lives in the 14th Street.” shouted Vaiz, the only one in Brown’s party who knew how to read and write thanks to having been educated as a clergyman.
“Sir Ford of Azdavay, one slave in his household. House is on Flower Street.” declared the desktop preacher whom had taken quite a liking to the money now sitting comfortably in his pockets.
“Sir Rogers of Azdavay, seventeen slaves and three overseers employed in his plantation. Plantation is situated on the road to Casamonu.” cried out one of the receptionists at the Adventurer’s Guild.
“We just got Sir Rogers; you can cross him out.” replied Ayomide from outside the room. She was out of breath due to having been running to-and-fro all day. “I haven’t heard from anyone else in a while. I think we’ve almost gotten everyone who’s in the records, well, anyone who has not escaped.”
“Not that there should be too many high-society people, especially in a small town.” To Brown, Azdavay felt like a small American village rather than something that deserved to be called a town. He wrote another line on the translated record before continuing “We aren’t working on those records just to find the blue-blooded enslaver of men. Getting rid of them was just the first step of the plan.”
“The first step? How many steps are there?” asked Ayomide standing under the doorframe.
“As many as we need, young lady. Only our Heavenly Father can predict the future.”
You could have just said ‘I don’t know’, thought Ayomide. No matter, she liked the part where she got to apprehend the high and noble men of the realm. Old John Brown was all about “not taking revenge” and “only fighting for what was right”, but Ayomide wasn’t. So were her comrades-in-arms.
Brown continued working on transcribing the records, his eyes focused only on the numbers upon numbers. He wasn’t an accountant, far from it, but he wanted to have a general idea on how society in Gemeinplatz worked in the first place. A 19th century man like him only had a vague outline of pre-modern society through Shakespearean plays, semi-truthful biographies of the great men of the past and the fantastical accounts of the Bible. Perhaps it’d even be correct to say that his level of (or lack of) knowledge wasn’t too far off from a 21st century person who only knows of the Medieval Ages through pop culture.
As for the numbers themselves, they were surprising. Brown had left the world before industrialization and mechanization got crazy, the old man hadn’t lived to see commercially produced electric light bulbs, but even by the mid-19th century agricultural production had increased considerably and Brown himself was quite involved with agriculture considering he had lived on the frontier. Traction engines, threshing machines, artificial fertilizer… All the people of Gemeinplatz had were oxen, scythes and manure.
Most of the grain was consumed by the peasants themselves while the excess was taxed away (yields for cash crops was similarly low, though those yields had recently gotten exceptionally lower due to old John Brown). This low yield meant that there was little surplus for urban centers, which meant that the urban population in Gemeinplatz was quite low compared to what Brown was used to. In the case of Azdavay, it had more than ten thousand peasants on record (not all of them recorded individually, only as households to be taxed) for an urban population that barely surpassed a thousand.
This was a big, and unsurmountable problem for John Brown.
There was no way for him to get an agricultural revolution going without an industrial revolution, and getting an industrial revolution going was a bit tricky to say the least. It was certainly not Brown’s expertise. Unless the Lord was to come down and reveal to him the secrets to constructing a usable steel engine with Medieval metallurgy, which wasn’t a thing that God was known to do, then Brown had no luck getting that going (not to mention the fact that an industrial revolution takes more than just making steam engines). Lacking the common isekai protagonist powers of pulling inventions out of his breeches, Brown only had one option: try to reorganize the already existing agriculture as best as he could, make sure that the peasants were getting their fair share instead of being lorded over like slaves along with making sure that there were no slaves in the process.
The old man’s head was already beginning to hurt thinking about all this; old John Brown hadn’t actually gotten to the part where he had to administer territory. He was a rebel, an abolitionist, not a politician. He made up his mind to delegate all this business to someone he could trust as soon as possible.
For now, however, there was business that was way more immediate. Brown turned to Ayomide, who was still catching her breath under the doorframe. “Have we captured everybody we needed?”
“Mmh?” Ayomide jolted up from her half-asleep state. “Oh, the big men? We couldn’t find some of them, they probably made a run for it, but we got most of them and freed their slaves. A bunch of the slaves agreed to come to Azdavay with us, but some of them wanted to stay in the plantations.”
Brown was surprised by the brief report. “Stay?”
“Yeah, one of them told me that they want to keep working there. Something about ‘this is all we’ve known in our lives; we’ll keep this place ourselves and sell the crops’.” Ayomide shrugged, making a few grumbles of disapproval. “Actually, now that the owners are going to be dead, who’ll own the land?”
This simple question from Ayomide caused the entire room to pause and go silent. While the question seemed innocent enough at the surface, it was one which questioned Gemeinplatz society at its core. People loved to listen in when Brown ranted about the lords, but there was also the question of who would replace these lords. Lords didn’t exist just for the sake of it: they were the owners and managers of the lands that the peasants and slaves worked on. If not them, who?
Brown and Tubman knew the answer, though both sufficed by looking at each other and nodding. They already had collected the data needed to redistribute all this land. “Young lady, be patient. First, we have to rid ourselves of these lords permanently.”