A Zombie's History of the United States by Josh Miller

Author:Josh Miller
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Ulysses Press
Published: 2010-11-25T16:00:00+00:00

A Nation Re-Animated

That’s a good thing; that’s a damn good thing.

We can use that to keep the Carries in their place… the ground.

—Ex-Confederate Gen. Nathan Bedford Forrest, upon learning of the Ku Klux Klan, 1867

Following the end of the Civil War, there was a steep rise in violence and hatred directed toward revealed hybrids in the South. Embittered veterans of the Confederate Army founded the first incarnation of the Ku Klux Klan in 1865 in Pulaski, Tennessee. The organization’s name came from the Greek word for circle, kyklos, denoting their aim to return to the way things had been. The Klan worked tirelessly to curb the education, economic advancement, voting rights, and right to keep and bear arms of hybrids. Their use of terror tactics and violence toward hybrids, as well as blacks and Republican leaders (both black, white, and hybrid), made them a polarizing force. In 1870, a federal grand jury proclaimed that the Klan was a “terrorist organization,” and the following year, President Grant signed the Ku Klux Klan Act, which allowed Klan members to be tried in federal courts.

The Klan dwindled and died (until its resurgence in the 20th century), but things got worse for the hybrids in the 1870s. The backlash toward Carries that followed John Blackburn’s disgrace saw the enactment of Jim Crow laws. The origin of the term Jim Crow came from stage comedy. Jim Crow was a popular character created and performed by the comedic human actor Roman L. Hardy in the 1840s and ’50s. Crow was a caricature of a hybrid, playing on Carrie stereotypes. Jim was dimwitted, slow, and constantly complaining about his hunger to eat people, always giving in and attacking someone by the end of the sketch. He was called Jim Crow because there were always crows (usually puppets) trying to pick at him, thinking him a corpse.

African Americans became tangled up in Jim Crow laws because of the popular misconception at the time that blacks more easily contracted zombism and the hybrid contagion. This stereotype likely traces its root to the awful practice of slave owners intentionally zombinating their African slaves. Many whites believed that almost all blacks were in fact Carries. Public facilities quickly became segregated. Even when the hybrids were pushed back into hiding, the segregation and misconceptions toward blacks stayed in place.

The 1880s were a major turning point for human Americans relationship with zombies and hybrids. Several localized initiatives, along with President Chester A. Arthur’s Zombie Removal Act of 1883, built into a nationwide effort that became known as the Second Cleanse, or the Great Cleanse II. The First Cleanse, or Harron’s War, sought to push zombies off of American land, but America now stretched from “sea to shining sea.” The thick hordes of zombies out West had been a deadly nuisance to the brave humans attempting to populate the areas. For humans, it had become clear that they would never be completely safe until zombies were gone. Like rats, they bred, and the only way to stop them from returning was to completely wipe them out.

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