Worlds of Freedom Design Journal #6
Wars for Freedom
From its christening, the preservation of liberty infused Freedom City to a degree matched by few other places. Having known only oppression elsewhere, the settlement’s Puritan and Dutch founders conceived of it as a place where they might live and worship as they chose. This independent spirit abided through the American Revolution and the War Between the States. During those trying times, the people of Freedom willingly gave their lives and fortunes for liberty’s sake.
Just as those two bloody struggles ultimately defined what freedom in America really meant, devout patriotism became synonymous with Freedom and its residents. These moments in history also gave rise to the city’s other defining characteristic: larger than life heroes with extraordinary abilities.
You Say You Want a Revolution
Like many of their fellow colonists, the people of Freedom weren’t happy when the faraway King George III and the British Parliament began to limit the political and economic freedoms they’d gotten accustomed to. While some Freedonians just grumbled about it, others engaged in what would become a time-honored tradition of American political protest: they boozed up and rioted.
When simple drunken and disorderly morphed into the American Revolutionary War in 1775, most Freedonians were ready and eager to do their part to help the colonies win their independence. The only thing stopping them was the intimidating presence of a thousand-strong British garrison, backed by the guns of the Royal Navy squadron blockading the harbor. With the colonies now in open rebellion, the redcoats and their capable and ruthless commander, General Michael Ripper, were authorized to do whatever was necessary to keep Freedom pacified.
A thousand bayonets seemed more than enough to do the job, and thus, General Ripper and his men could have hardly imagined their efforts would ultimately fail. In 1779, the beaten and broken redcoats withdrew from Freedom, never to return. Their humiliating rout was attributable to the sacrifices of many brave souls, but three stood out as particularly crucial. The first was Major Joseph Clark of the Continental Army, one of the most brilliant and unconventional military leaders ever to don a uniform. Much credit is also due the masked, mysterious Minuteman and Lady Liberty, the very first of Freedom City’s colorfully costumed heroes.
The Late Unpleasantness
Minus the king hating that united them during the Revolution, Americans grew increasingly polarized in the following decades over how their liberties were to be defined. To Northern abolitionists, slavery was like a giant asterisk on all America’s promises of freedom, while Southern slave-owners defended their right to own property, including other human beings. Some urged the federal government to help its needy citizens, while others fretted over who’d get stuck with the bill. Despite all the debate, matters were ultimately settled with bullets during “the Late Unpleasantness,” better known as the American Civil War.
True to its name and heritage, Freedom City was an abolitionist stronghold, even as the heavily agricultural western area remained largely pro-slavery. The “peculiar institution” was officially banned in the city, and slave-owners learned quickly a visit to Freedom could cost them their teeth as well as their human property.
Despite its strongly abolitionist sentiment, Freedom’s loyalties were divided when the War broke out. Half the city, outraged by the slaveholding South’s treason, rushed to defend the Union. The other half questioned what the Union had done for Freedom lately, and what right it had to kill Southerners who’d democratically voted to leave it. The anti-Unionists had no love for slavery, but the federal government’s broken promises to dredge the silting Centery Narrows and resuscitate the city’s economy made them angry and bitter.
Support for the Union grew in Freedom over time, particularly after the Emancipation Proclamation transformed the War to Save the Union into the War to End Slavery. Despite this, smart city travelers knew how to sing “Dixie” and “The Battle Hymn of the Republic” with equal fervor, as well as what neighborhoods favored each tune, right up until the surrender at Appomattox.
Divided Liberties
When freedom is greatly threatened, the Spirit of Liberty has endowed young women with superhuman abilities to aid in the fight against tyranny. The Spirit is naturally intertwined with the free and democratic United States, and she was acutely traumatized when the country divided over competing notions of liberty during its Civil War.
Mirroring America’s split, the Spirit fractured into warring halves, both of which imbued a champion with their power. On the Union side, her surrogate was called Columbia, after the female embodiment of America itself. Her Confederate counterpart was known simply as “The Southern Belle.”
Columbia’s spiritual host was seventeen-year-old college student Amelia Connover of New York, a dedicated suffragette, abolitionist, nativist, and temperance activist. These attitudes made her a perfect match for the Spirit’s “Yankee” fraction, dedicated to liberating others from perceived vices (whether they wanted to be or not) by any means necessary.
While Columbia was one of the most powerful fighting for the Union, Amelia and her divided Spirit were of limited effectiveness. Though Columbia manifested as an adult, Amelia remained saddled with a young student’s responsibilities, and had to juggle her masked heroine life with exams, chaperones, student activities, and a bevy of young gentleman callers. Even as Columbia, she frequently busied herself with busting up saloons, hectoring immigrants to “become real Americans,” and other activities unrelated to winning the war.
The Southern Belle was Mary Prescott Hamner, wife of an Alabama Congressman. She embodied much of the good about the antebellum South with her cultured charm and grace, and she had a willingness to give all she had for the states’ rights to govern themselves as they saw fit. On the other hand, she was absolutely committed to maintaining the wealth and privilege of the Southern aristocracy, including the slavery it was built upon. Like Columbia, the Southern Belle was of limited benefit to her country’s cause, as advancing herself on the Richmond social scene and overseeing her plantation remained higher priorities than waging war. Anything less would go against her—and her half of the Spirit’s–conception of freedom as radical autonomy.
Despite nearly killing each other during the war, both Amelia and Mary survived and returned to their mundane states when the Spirit reunited in 1865. Unable to find a man who could cope with her crusading, Amelia died a spinster, succumbing to heart failure while protesting the Spanish-American War. Her claims of having once been the Spirit of Liberty itself blended seamlessly into her rhetoric during the remainder of her life. Mary lived out her days in the ruins of her plantation, unable to cope with the bitter truths of Reconstruction. She died an indignant and eccentric widow, unmourned by the people whose Lost Cause she once embodied.
