Population Reduction

The "Population Reduction" is an informal name for the mass murder of Black people carried out by the Confederate States under President Jake Featherston and the Freedom Party.

Background: Race Relations in the C.S.A.[]

The Confederate States from its beginning was a country built upon essentially racist principles with the War of Secession (1861-1862) having been fought in large part to preserve the institution of slavery. Although the slaves were manumitted after the Second Mexican War (1881-1882) as a condition of continued British and French support for the C.S.A., strict laws were put into place that ensured that the former slaves and their descendants would never be truly equal or free. Black people, roughly one third of the Confederate population, were kept at the bottom of the Confederate social hierarchy, and all other Confederates - whites, Hispanics or Native Americans in Sequoyah - had a vested interest in keeping that hierarchy.

The Great War and its Aftermath[]

While the C.S.A. was locked in titanic struggle with the United States during the Great War, Confederate Black people who had adopted Marxist principles launched the Red Rebellion. While the rebellion was crushed, Confederate whites were shaken by the sudden and fierce violence and organizational skills demonstrated by the people they'd sought to keep oppressed. The revolt had been a case of self-fulfilling prophecy; Confederate whites had convinced themselves that Black people could not be trusted, and oppressed them accordingly, but the oppression all but guaranteed that C.S. Black people would rise up in armed revolt.

Ironically, the dire situation of the Great War forced the C.S. to reconsider its stance on race. The disparity in manpower between the Confederacy and its larger northern foe forced the Confederates to open up combat roles in the army (as opposed to service as laborers) to Black men in exchange for full citizenship. Nonetheless, despite the widespread deployment of Black units to the front, the C.S.A. still lost the war.

Post-war and the Freedom Party: The Reduction Begins in Earnest[]

Jake Featherston rose to power in the wake of the Great War and the stock market crash of 1929, asserting that the Confederacy's defeat in the war and its continued problems could be traced to the 'treachery' of its Black residents. Upon his election in 1933, Featherston immediately began implementing a plan for killing every Black man, woman, and child within the country's borders.

The plan was informal, growing organically as the various Freedom Party leaders experimented with ways and means. Initially, throughout the 1930s, Black people were arrested as revolutionaries and interned in prison camps. Shortly before the outbreak of the Second Great War in June 1941, commandants of the now-overflowing camps began escorting 'surplus' prisoners to secluded locations and executing them by firing squad.

However, this proved inefficient, not only in terms of time and ammunition expended, but also due to many of the guards experiencing mental health problems from shooting helpless prisoners. When Leroy Blades, a guard at Camp Dependable, committed suicide by gassing himself in his car, Dependable's commandant Jefferson Pinkard adopted the use of gas to carry out multiple executions of the camp population by herding them into trucks and using the truck's redirected carbon monoxide exhaust to suffocate captive Black people in the sealed cargo bed.

Pinkard, already popular with Featherston, was given a new camp, Camp Determination. Located near Snyder, Texas, Determination was a paragon of efficient mass murder. Prisoners were packed into boxcars and moved in by train. The prisoners had little room to breathe, much less move, and were subject to dehydration in the sweltering car. Those prisoners who were not able to leave the train under their own power were shot immediately. The remainder were worked until they could do no more, all the while fed on minimal rations of food and water for continued survival. Special "bathhouses" (gas chambers) were built in which to execute thousands of prisoners at a time.

After Determination was captured by Abner Dowling in late 1943, a new death camp opened up near the city of Houston: Camp Humble. Among the new features implemented by Jefferson Pinkard were crematoriums and larger bathhouses.

While Determination was the first such camp exposed to the outside world there were several others throughout the Confederacy devoted solely to murdering Black people en masse. Indeed, even as the Confederacy was losing its war with the United States, Featherston insisted on allocating precious resources to continue the genocide.

The C.S. exported its methods when it overran Haiti, first eliminating only those who opposed the C.S. invasion, then moving on to the country's political leaders and finally killing those it could capture.

At first, the fragmentary and second-hand news of the killings stirred little outrage in the United States or the rest of the world. Other states such as the Ottoman Empire had carried out mass murder before and during the Second Great War with little to no repercussions, and the United States had long been indifferent to the plight of Black people in the C.S.A. However, when actual concrete evidence of Camp Determination and similar camps came to light in 1943, public opinion in the U.S.A. swung in support of ending the genocide and enacting justice upon its perpetrators.

The End[]

The murders ended in 1944, when the United States defeated and occupied the Confederacy. It was only then that the true extent of the horror was understood in the U.S. The U.S. government systematically rounded up the architects of population reductions, including Jefferson Pinkard, Saul Goldman and Ferdinand Koenig, tried them for crimes against humanity, and executed them. Featherston had already been shot to death by a freedom fighter whose family had perished in Camp Determination.

Those Black people who had survived found their legal status in the former Confederate society raised to that of equality with whites. However, this was at the instigation of the United States, and it was clear to most that should the U.S. ever leave, they'd be facing the wrath of white Confederates.

For the U.S., the mass murders were a sort of wake-up call, as many in the country were astonished at how easily the majority of Confederates went along with Featherston's program. The U.S. grew introspective, and came to view the reductions as a cautionary tale.

In contrast, the vast majority of Confederate whites were either quite pleased at the "success" of the program, or were at least indifferent to what had happened, with most simply viewing the victims as "just n----rs", and outraged at concern the U.S. showed. Some even taunted and mocked the U.S. by claiming that they had done the same things to Indians and Mormons. This comparison mostly rang hollow, as both groups had been brutally subdued rather than exterminated outright.

Death toll[]

As of 1945, no definite number of dead had been determined. Estimates ranged between six and ten million Black people having been murdered, with at least a million killed at Camp Determination alone.

Trivia[]

The term "population reduction" entered into everyday Confederate slang, particularly among Black people, such expressions as "I'll reduce your population" or "You'll get your population reduced" often being used as a threat or a challenge. When the Confederacy fell in 1944, Black auxiliaries working with the U.S. Army often taunted white Confederate POWs with the fate of "population reduction."

Literary Comment[]

The series never gives a formal name to this genocide. As "population reduction" is the most commonly given informal name in the series, the administrators of this wiki have used that title for convenience.