Jack of Harts

When the Federal government began arresting those related to the previous Presidential administration and charging them with a multitude of crimes, Virginia’s central law enforcement agencies cooperated in every way they could. The mountainous counties of western Virginia were not so amenable to what they called a federal witch-hunt, and obstructed where they could. They declared themselves sanctuary counties and refused to share information with the Feds. They hid politicians or smuggled them out to safer States that did not cooperate with the Feds. The Feds responded by arresting those county Sheriffs and administrators who stood against them in public. That sent resistance against their arrests into less public methods. “Sic semper tyrannis” became the most common tag on the streets. It was the Virginia motto that meant, “Thus always to Tyrants.”

Vice-President John Jefferson Freemon returned to his western Virginia home to a heroes’ welcome. His friends and family loved him. The long-term patients he had cared for in his doctor’s practice loved him. Those who had donated or taken part in his campaigns for decades loved him. He was the most popular person in Lexington, even before the new President sent the FBI to arrest him and his family on charges of armed insurrection. They arrested or investigated anyone with any connection to Freemon, and denied Freemon’s attorney the ability to speak with his client. The FBI even convinced Virginia to disbar him, and then arrested him on charges of passing Freemon’s messages to other insurrectionists. Combined with the attempted arrest of President Lopez in Texas, the obvious persecution of political rivals simply made Freemon even more popular in western Virginia and beyond.

The States that make up the Confederation of Dixie were always a breed apart from the other American States. Many of them seceded during the First Civil War. The richest families of that Old South had been the pinnacle of a society built on slavery, and they fought to the very end to protect their way of life. That society had faded away in the two centuries following its defeat, and the South that rose again during the Second Civil War was an entirely different civilization. It was built on the greatest concentration of industrialized capacity in America, and home to First World education systems that had graduated generations of educated citizens. They didn’t secede when the Federal government went mad. They simply refused to follow the mad orders, and that was enough to earn the ire of those who still thought they ruled America.