A Zombie's History of the United States (14 page)

In 1861 Blackburn was invited to speak at a 4th of July celebration in New York. Here he shocked the audience when he delivered his famous July 4th speech:

What, to the American dead man, is your 4th of July? To him, your celebration is a sham; your boasted liberty, an unholy license; your national greatness, swelling vanity; your sound of rejoicing are empty and heartless; your denunciation of tyrants brass fronted impudence; your shout of liberty and equality, hollow mockery; your prayers and hymns, your sermons and thanks-givings, with all your religious parade and solemnity, are to him, mere fraud—a thin veil to cover up crimes which would disgrace a nation of savages. Other nations respect, even honor their dead. In America we force them to drag plows and carts, like a mere beast. There is not a nation on the Earth guilty of practices more shocking and sacrilegious than are the people of the United States at this very hour.

This speech got Blackburn invited to the White House by newly elected President Abraham Lincoln, to discuss what might be done about the “problem of the dead,” as Lincoln had referred to it. Blackburn and Lincoln formed a friendship during this meeting, which ultimately would prove disastrous for the president. Through Blackburn’s persistence, Marron Ross’s de-animation plan found its way into the Emancipation Proclamation.

During the Reconstruction era following the end of the Civil War, Blackburn moved to Washington, D.C., where he supported the presidential campaign of Ulysses S. Grant. He succeeded in getting President Grant to appoint a Termination Commission to ensure that planta tion owners were “releasing” (i.e., de-animating) their zombie slaves and not just literally releasing them, which many did as a shameful act of sour grapes. In 1869, he published
Carrie Me Home, Brother, Brother
(“Carrie” is defined in the next section), a work of fiction about a Confederate general who becomes a hybrid, full of satirical social commentary, which became a best seller. In 1872, Blackburn became the first revealed hybrid to run for president of the United States, when he received the nomination for the Being Rights Party (he lost).

THE FIRST ZOMBIE PRESIDENT?

A popular rumor in both the North and the South was that President Abraham Lincoln was a hybrid. Twisted facts, urban legends, and flat-out lies of Lincoln devouring enemies back in Illinois circulated in newspapers.

Many took his friendship with John Blackburn and support for the zombie abolitionist cause as clear evidence. Lincoln, maybe unwisely, chose not to dignify such gossip with a direct denial. Though when accused of “dead loving for sake of itself” by the journalistic powerhouse, Horace Greeley, Lincoln responded in a letter:

If I could save the Union without freeing any undead I would do it, and if I could save it by freeing all the undead I would do it; and if I could save it by freeing some and leaving others to lurch about in servitude I would also do that. What I do about undead slavery, and the undead race, I do because I believe it helps to save the Union.

Most of Lincoln’s enemies who propagated the hybrid rumor were doing so purely for political reasons (anyone who had ever seen Lincoln eat human food knew he was not a hybrid), but many fervently believed it to be true.

John Wilkes Booth, a popular actor of the time, was just such a fervent believer. He believed that Lincoln, in league with John Blackburn, planned to free all the zombie slaves and then, using his hybrid “powers” (some believed hybrids possessed the power to mentally control zombies), would overthrow human civilization, turning humans into little more than cattle. Knowing that this monster needed to be stopped, on April 14, 1865, while Lincoln was attending a performance of
Our American Cousin
, Booth shot Lincoln in the back of the head. Then, jumping from Lincoln’s balcony, Booth shouted in Latin, “
Sic semper victus mortuus
” to the shocked audience—roughly, “Thus always to the living dead.”

Unfortunately, Blackburn’s story was to have a tragic ending. On April 19, 1874, for reasons unknown, Blackburn—who had been subsisting on donated human blood for decades—experienced a lapse and devoured his second wife, Eva. Though he again defended himself in court, this jury was not hung and Blackburn ended his life burnt to a crisp on the courthouse’s execution pyre. Blackburn’s tragic turn effectively destroyed all the good will he had engendered for the hybrid cause over his years of animation. More and more hybrids had been revealing themselves after the end of the Civil War. Now those who were not seized and terminated by mobs went into hiding again.

The Dead Regiments

If undead will make good soldiers our whole theory of their slavery is wrong.

—Howell Cobb, founding member of the Confederate States of America, 1861

The American Civil War officially kicked off on April 12, 1861, when Confederate President Jefferson Davis sent troops to seize control of Fort Sumter, a Union base located in the now-seceded Confederate territory of South Carolina. Northerners rallied behind Lincoln’s call to arms to preserve the Union. African Americans were allowed to take up arms and fight for their freedom. Many hybrids, supported by John Blackburn, felt they should be given the same right.

On July 17, 1862, Congress passed two acts allowing the enlistment of hybrids, but official enrollment occurred only after the Emancipation Proclamation was issued in September. The number of hybrids outing themselves increased drastically as hybrid men sought to enlist. Approximately 50,000 hybrids, comprising forty-five units, ended up serving in the Union Army.

Political cartoon from the
Georgia Morning Daily
, July 2, 1861. During Lincoln’s presidency, many Southerners embraced the popular rumor that he was a zombie hybrid.

In general, human soldiers and officers believed that hybrids lacked the courage to fight well, and feared they might turn on their fellow human soldiers at any moment, so the hybrids were segregated into their own division. By April 1863, thirteen “Dead Regiments” were in the field and ready for service. On May 27, 1863, at the battle of Port Hudson, Louisiana, the hybrid soldiers bravely advanced over open ground in the face of heavy artillery fire. Although the attack failed, the hybrid soldiers proved their courage and impressive ability to withstand damage. Unfortunately the hybrids’ durability kept them at the front lines to serve as fodder for Confederate fire, the Union commanders quite unconcerned with whether or not they survived. Most commanders felt that the hybrids could serve a useful purpose during battles, and if they all ceased to be animated by the end of the conflict, good riddance.

The human soldiers, both Union and Confederate, began referring to the Dead Regiments as Carrion soldiers (as in the decaying flesh of dead animals), or just Carries, for short. The nickname caught on for hybrids in general, regardless if they served in an army or not. Some hybrids found it offensive, while others, like John Blackburn, embraced the term happily. “I suspect many of my brethren do not have much in the way of humor,” Blackburn said.

Hybrid soldiers participated in every major campaign from 1864 to 1865 except Sherman’s invasion of Georgia. On April 12, 1864, Confederate Gen. Nathan Bedford Forrest led 2,500 men against the Union-held Fort Pillow, in Tennessee, which was occupied by 25 hybrid and 552 human soldiers. After putting up a brief and unsuccessful defense, the Union forces surrendered. Forrest’s men took the humans captive, but terminated all the hybrids. When word of the event spread throughout the Union Army, the Dead Regiments adopted the battle cry of, “Remember Fort Pillow!”

It was very uncommon for the Confederates to take hybrids prisoner. As hybrids need human flesh or blood to sustain themselves, their commanding officers looked the other way and allowed the hybrids to devour gravely injured Confederate soldiers on the battlefields. This was a necessary action to prevent the hybrids from accidentally turning on fellow Union soldiers, especially out on the battlefields, where the smell of human carnage would whip the hybrids into a frenzied flesh-lust.

In January 1864, Confederate Gen. Patrick Cleburne proposed using hybrid slaves as soldiers, since the Union was having such success with the Carries. Cleburne recommended offering enslaved hybrids their freedom if they fought and survived, and even proposed that the army try and find a way to utilize all their zombies as well, but Jefferson Davis refused to even consider Cleburne’s proposal. The concept did not die, however. By the end of 1864, the South was clearly losing the war, and some believed that only by releasing their zombies onto the battlefield could defeat be averted. On March 13, the Confederate Congress passed General Order 13b, and President Davis signed the order into law. Only a handful of hybrid regiments could be established before the war ended shortly thereafter. None ever saw combat.

A Nation Re-Animated

That’s a good thing; that’s a damn good thing.

We can use that to keep the Carries in their place… the ground.

—Ex-Confederate Gen. Nathan Bedford Forrest, upon learning of the Ku Klux Klan, 1867

Following the end of the Civil War, there was a steep rise in violence and hatred directed toward revealed hybrids in the South. Embittered veterans of the Confederate Army founded the first incarnation of the Ku Klux Klan in 1865 in Pulaski, Tennessee. The organization’s name came from the Greek word for circle,
kyklos
, denoting their aim to return to the way things had been. The Klan worked tirelessly to curb the education, economic advancement, voting rights, and right to keep and bear arms of hybrids. Their use of terror tactics and violence toward hybrids, as well as blacks and Republican leaders (both black, white, and hybrid), made them a polarizing force. In 1870, a federal grand jury proclaimed that the Klan was a “terrorist organization,” and the following year, President Grant signed the Ku Klux Klan Act, which allowed Klan members to be tried in federal courts.

The Klan dwindled and died (until its resurgence in the 20th century), but things got worse for the hybrids in the 1870s. The backlash toward Carries that followed John Blackburn’s disgrace saw the enactment of Jim Crow laws. The origin of the term Jim Crow came from stage comedy. Jim Crow was a popular character created and performed by the comedic human actor Roman L. Hardy in the 1840s and ’50s. Crow was a caricature of a hybrid, playing on Carrie stereotypes. Jim was dimwitted, slow, and constantly complaining about his hunger to eat people, always giving in and attacking someone by the end of the sketch. He was called Jim Crow because there were always crows (usually puppets) trying to pick at him, thinking him a corpse.

African Americans became tangled up in Jim Crow laws because of the popular misconception at the time that blacks more easily contracted zombism and the hybrid contagion. This stereotype likely traces its root to the awful practice of slave owners intentionally zombinating their African slaves. Many whites believed that almost all blacks were in fact Carries. Public facilities quickly became segregated. Even when the hybrids were pushed back into hiding, the segregation and misconceptions toward blacks stayed in place.

The 1880s were a major turning point for human Americans relationship with zombies and hybrids. Several localized initiatives, along with President Chester A. Arthur’s Zombie Removal Act of 1883, built into a nationwide effort that became known as the Second Cleanse, or the Great Cleanse II. The First Cleanse, or Harron’s War, sought to push zombies off of American land, but America now stretched from “sea to shining sea.” The thick hordes of zombies out West had been a deadly nuisance to the brave humans attempting to populate the areas. For humans, it had become clear that they would never be completely safe until zombies were gone. Like rats, they bred, and the only way to stop them from returning was to completely wipe them out.

The might of the U.S. Army, aided by local militias, and in some places, Indians, cut a pitiless swath across the country, de-animating zombies wherever they were found. Hybrids it would seem were doomed to be lumped in with the zombies. Now even the boldest of hybrids did not reveal themselves, not even as a political statement. And so it would remain—for almost a hundred years.