Deadline Hollywood has reported that Amazon is developing an alternate history series that seems an awful lot like a response to the controversial show being developed at HBO, ”Confederate,” even though it is said to have been in development for a year. The series is called “Black America,” and it envisions a slightly different outcome to the American Civil War.
The scenario for ‘Black America’
The scenario for the in-development series is that during Reconstruction, the American government granted the newly freed slaves the southern states of Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama to form their own nation.
The country of New Colonia, as it is styled, has a contentious relationship with the United States over the next 150 years, with “military incursions, assassinations, regime change, coups, etc.” However, after a 20-year peace between the all black country and the United States, New Colonia has become an economic super power and the rest of America is going into decline.
A reality check
Clearly, the series has been designed as a revenge fantasy for the Black Lives Matter crowd. It is as if the suits at Amazon sat down at a meeting and accepted the challenge of coming up with a more absurd basis for a TV series than Hulu’s “The Handmaid’s Tale.”
The Civil War had the happy outcome of having ended the practice of chattel slavery in the United States.
However, the war was fought primarily to prevent the southern states from seceding from the Union, an effort that took the lives of almost 700,000 Americans. It, therefore, defies common sense that the American government would sanction the secession of three states of the Union, for which a large amount of blood and treasure had been spilled, to become a separate black nation.
In any case, no one in Washington would give up the strategic port of New Orleans, which would have been part of New Colonia.
The logistics of carving out a new country for the newly freed slaves would have been mind-numbing. Presumably, the white inhabitants of the new country would be ethnically cleansed, a sort of replay of the Trail of Tears.
If there is anything that would cause the defeated Confederate soldiers to start waging a full-scale guerilla war, it would have been this policy. Indeed, only the pleadings of such men as Robert E. Lee prevented the south from becoming a bloody battleground for the next generation or so.
Newly freed slaves living elsewhere in the former Confederacy would be forced to move to New Colonia whether they wished to or not. What would be done with free blacks, especially those who lived in the northern states, who might prefer to remain Americans is unknown. Presumably, if the idea was to separate the races, they would go as well.
How will the show be received?
One suspects that the same people who have been triggered by HBO’s “Confederate” will be enthusiastic about “Black America,” despite the fact that it is just as racially fraught, albeit in a different direction. So, Amazon will get an audience and free publicity from the inevitable controversy.
