Belle Slaughter- The Complete Series by Tony Masero

Author:Tony Masero [Masero, Tony]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781647343040
Publisher: Wolfpack Publishing
Published: 2020-03-11T04:00:00+00:00

Sweet Dean had come south to Colfax County, a small canton situated on the borderland between Virginia and North Carolina, full of the prospect of self-improvement.

His mission was initiated by The Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned Lands, commonly called the Freedmen’s Bureau, an organization founded after the surrender in the earlier April, when General Lee’s depleted thirty-mile defensive battle line in Virginia finally conceded they were worn out and used up and the only remaining and undeniable course of action was a cessation of the bloody conflict.

Sad to say, for many it hadn’t ended with the surrender, it took time for all the committed combatants across the great country to finally give up the struggle. Various actions, battles and skirmishes continued throughout the intervening months and it wasn’t until a year had passed, in the August of 1866, that the official ending of the Civil War was announced by the new and lackluster president, Andrew Johnson. By then little remained of the majesty and proud standing that had once sustained the secessionist states.

But there were plenty of avaricious vultures like Sweet Dean waiting on the sidelines eager and keen to pick over the bones of the beaten and impoverished South. The battered Confederacy had little left standing after the years of war, its infrastructure demolished and trade ruined, farmlands burnt and wasted. Banks and insurance agencies bankrupted and Confederate currency worthless.

With such decline, property could be bought for a song with so many of the owners either lost in the fighting or barely surviving the aftermath in hunger and starvation. The great ‘King Cotton’ who had once ruled the land so absolutely in the past was now dethroned and impoverished by all the years of naval blockade and destructive war.

Sweet Dean Pye, who was not a sweet man at all, had more secretive objectives. He arrived into these vulnerable lands with motives that were not driven by any particular penchant for charitable kindness. He was more like some subversive species of parasite that arrives in the hot darkness of a Southern night and siphons off the blood of its sleeping victim with an anaesthetizing drop of apparent harmlessness in return for the theft.

He was a round figured fellow, with a partiality for checkered vests, beaver skin top hats and flouncy diamond stick-pinned silk ties. He wore bushy side-whiskers on an outwardly red-cheeked and avuncular face that bore a ready hail-fellow-well-met smile and an eager handshake for all who crossed his path. He was a backslapping politician in the making and fat he may have appeared but his bulk was hard and not the sort that rolled and wobbled. An energetic man, the Bureau had approved his desire as agent to offer food and medical care and preach a missionary message to educate the poor blacks now they were free. Along with this charitable work he was enabled to administer justice and to manage abandoned and confiscated property. This was all mandated under ordinance of the War Department and it

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