Chapter 13

We heard no more from the governor or the legislature. It was as if we had seceded from Georgia, and they couldn’t care less. It was probably a case of pure economics: our county was not rich enough to support much graft, so it was not worth what it would cost to bring us back into the fold.

Trouble would probably start only if other counties started emulating us. Unfortunately for us, we started to hear rumors of just that happening. Furthermore, Spain appeared to be interested in what we were doing, and we began to see Spanish “tourists” every once in a while. Dammit, I for one did not want any such foreign entanglements. All too soon, that could put us back to fighting a proxy war for European countries.

On the other hand, I was approached by France and Italy about licensing production of my gun design in those countries. Man, I was stuck here. I didn’t want any chance of the CSA getting repeating guns of my design, but they could buy them from Europe if manufacturing started there. If I didn’t license the gun manufacture there, the Europeans might well start making them anyway, and not paying me for the privilege. Dammit, what was I going to do?

I talked the problem over with several people, and finally decided to go along with licensing in Europe. Hell, we could all use the money. While I was about it, I started working on the idea of a machine gun. The Gatling gun had too many problems to be admired by me, but it had done its job in the few places that it had been employed. I was looking for a simpler design.

I wrote letters to the companies in France and Italy that had asked about a license to manufacture my gun. I also wrote letters to the governments of most of the European countries asking if they were interested in a manufacturing license. In those letters, I did mention that I had contacted other countries on the same subject and pointed out the potential problems if they were the only country without a repeating rifle.

I didn’t expect answers for as much as six months, but I was in no great hurry. The mail system of the time depended on sailing ships, and there was no way of knowing how long they would take to cross the Atlantic Ocean. I did not contact the governments of the CSA, the USA, or Mexico for what I figured were very good reasons.

Meanwhile, my work on a machine gun was progressing well. In fact, I had a workable system within six months if I could come up with a way to power the device. Of course, I wanted to use air as the propellant, but I was having trouble finding a way to provide power to the rest of the gun. I did not like the hand-crank of the Gatling Gun, but I was having trouble finding anything else that would do the job.

I finally came up with the idea of using the exhausted air after the bullet was fired to cock the gun and do the other things required. Dammit, that just was not going to work. There was not enough expelled air for all of the jobs. If I were going to use air to operate the gun, I was going to need a separate reservoir. That also meant two air pumps, since the rate of air usage was so high for a machine gun firing 200 or so rounds per minute.

There was no way around it as far as I could see. My machine gun was going to require a crew of four at a minimum and six to be reliable. There would be a shooter, a loader, two pump operators, the gun captain, and a spare man to relieve a pump operator when he got tired. Hell, that was what a cannon needed. Was my machine gun really practical? In any case, more work was needed before a prototype was built.

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I had finally reached the point at which I could not do all of the jobs facing me. I hated to do it because it was like cutting one of my children loose, but I finally had to teach other people how to convert an Enfield into a Stellinski S-1. Most of the men in Albany had full-time jobs, so I had to hire women as my workers. I was met with a lot of ridicule from men when my idea first became public, but the women liked it. I broke the job down into small segments and taught each woman how to do her segment. When I finished, they were producing a gun that I was proud of, and that was what was important to me.

The idea of hiring women worked out well because it was a way for widows to make a living wage without resorting to prostitution, which was the only alternative for most of them. Before long, we were turning out five guns per week, and easily keeping up with my commitments to the “outlaw” gangs and hunters, etc. who wanted an S-1. Just to be on the safe side, we kept producing S-1 rifles even when we had advanced to producing 10 rifles per week and did not have that many customers. I had a feeling that the additional rifles would be needed before long.

I also set up a small manufacturing facility for minie balls. I figured that my rifles had to have something to shoot without having to depend on what we could steal from the CSA Army or the militia.

These months of summer saw a significant rise in the number of slave and serf rebellions on plantations in our county. Normally, we did nothing to instigate the rebellion, but we supported every one the moment that we heard that it had started. David led a squad of horsemen who rode as fast as possible to the plantation where the rebellion was taking place. They usually handed out two or three guns and made sure that the slaves and serfs who wanted to were able to leave the plantation safely.

David’s group did not instigate the gunfire, but they had no reluctance to join in if it was going on when they arrived. Usually, but not always, it was the plantation owners who were doing the shooting, but these were almost always muzzle-loading weapons, often shotguns, and the rebels had time to charge between shots. The rebels usually had only home made clubs and a few kitchen knives. Nevertheless, the rebels usually won unless the rebels simply ran away before the fight was over.

The usual end of the fight was several dead plantation owners. The women were as bad as the men, and they often had to endure rapes. David and his men usually did nothing to interfere with that.

By the time the summer was over, there were few plantations operating under the old routine. Many of the workers on the plantations had come into Albany, but a majority had stayed on the plantation to operate their own farms. The result was that Dougherty County was essentially self-sustaining. The farmers were trading their produce to hunters for meat and trading in Albany for the other things they needed.

By the end of the winter, most of the farmers were amazed at how much better their lives had been during the last few months. Some of these people visited relatives in neighboring counties and were spreading the word about how things were done in Dougherty County. Other aristocracy in adjacent counties were beginning to worry and wanted the state government to do something about us.

Most of our information was coming through the Indians who were still doing the menial jobs and were generally ignored when the aristocrats were talking to each other. Of course the Indians were too stupid to understand what the gentility was talking about, so there was no need to keep anything from them. The interesting thing was that we paid for this information with respect for the informants, and that was something they never got at home.

The result of all of this information was that we knew we were headed for trouble; we just did not have an exact date for it. However, we were smart enough to know that when the trouble came, it would be in the form of guns held by trained troops. Dammit, we had to prepare to fight if we were not going to become slaves again, or even worse.

Like me, a number of our older men had been in the Confederate Army during the War, so we had some training in the military arts. None of us had been of a very high rank, but that was probably to our good. We managed to have a number of infantry sergeants who had been in combat, so we had the basis for a training cadre, if we could just get ourselves organized.