the Great Exodus

The Great Exodus

by Mable L. Smith
Commonwealth Historian, Department of Lived Sovereignty — Port Jubilee, Year 148 A.F.

I. Prologue — The Shattering

The Fracture did not arrive as thunder.
It came as a closing of doors.

When the Union bargained away Reconstruction, it traded the lives of millions for one more quiet transfer of power. The Compromise of 1877 seated Rutherford B. Hayes in the presidency and pulled the last federal troops from the South. The states called it redemption. History calls it surrender.

Without federal oversight, the former Confederacy no longer needed euphemism. “Convict leasing” and “sharecropping” gave way to the word they had wanted all along: slavery — reborn, state-sanctioned, and renamed as civic order. The whip returned, the patrols rode again, and the auction blocks reopened.

Those who could read the pattern saw what was coming. They began to leave before the borders hardened. That first wave became the beginning of what would later be known as the Great Exodus — a movement not of ideology but of survival.

This account follows four of them:

Maria Rosa Villafuerta, born and rooted in the northern lands that would become New Alaska.
Morgan Sinclair, an engineer who left Boston as the republic began to unravel.
Ernesto Valeria, who traveled north with farmers and craftsmen escaping the reborn Confederacy.
Niema True, young and pregnant, moving with the fragment bands that crossed the mountains by night.

The Exodus began long before the borders shifted.
These lives mark its early paths.

II. The Ironwood Route — The Forrester Corridor

The Ironwood Route began as rumor and became a network.
Its first signalmen worked out of the printshops and pulpits of Boston, where Malcolm Forrester and his kin still kept the old abolitionist ledgers. Their presses printed sermons by day and route codes by night.

From Boston, lines radiated north and west — through Halifax, across the Maritimes, down into the cold edges of the new world where the Commonwealth would one day stand. Every ledger entry read like prayer and map combined: a name, a location, and the word safe.

Morgan Sinclair followed that corridor years later, carrying nothing but his books, his grief, and the conviction that law could be rebuilt from care. The Ironwood Range would rise at its terminus — a living proof that freedom could have architecture.

III. The Western Corridor — Ernesto’s Trail

Far south and west, another current moved. It followed the wagon roads that once served the cattle drives and border militias. When the Fracture began, those same routes ferried families instead of herds.

Ernesto Valeria came north out of Texas with a convoy of farmers, mechanics, and former soldiers who refused to pledge allegiance to the reborn Confederacy. They brought seed grain, tools, and the knowledge of irrigation across deserts. Where Morgan built with law, Ernesto built with land.

The two caravans met in the shadow of the Alaska Range, their wagons crossing like chords resolving. From that junction, the Commonwealth drew its twin pulse — principle and soil.

IV. The Southern Ascent — Zuri Greene’s Call

Zuri Greene was already teaching by then, in the free schools that dotted the Appalachian valleys. She saw what the loss of Reconstruction meant before most. When the teachers were driven out and the schools burned, she stayed long enough to gather what the flames left behind — children, papers, and resolve.

Her letters from that era survive in fragments, inked on the backs of sermon sheets:

“If we cannot keep the promise of freedom, we can still keep each other.”

She moved steadily north, teaching wherever she stopped. By the time she reached the frontier settlements that would become Port Jubilee, she had already drafted the framework for the civic schools that anchored the early Commonwealth. Hers was the first name entered in the Charter’s register of educators.

V. The Fragment Bands — Niema’s March

Niema True was born free, but not far enough west for it to matter.
Her family farmed on the Alliance side of the Kentucky border, only a few miles from Confederate patrol lines. When the raids began, the Alliance governors looked away. They called it stabilization. It was theft — human and deliberate.

She was sixteen when they came through her town. They carried papers naming her “requisitioned labor.” She never saw her parents again. At eighteen she was as married as a slave could be, and her husband was dead — killed for speaking out. When the overseer came for her, she struck him down with a stone and fled into the night, pregnant and barefoot, the blood still warm on her hands.

In the foothills she found others moving west — families, widows, teachers — none with maps, only direction. They became known as the fragment bands, caravans of the displaced heading toward the Pacific Freehold and Cascadia. They built no camps; they did not dare stop.

Niema gave birth within weeks of reaching Port Jubilee. She named the child Amara, meaning the one who will not die.

“I buried everything but her,” Niema later wrote, “and called what was left freedom.”

She found work first as a laundress, then a nurse, then a teacher under Zuri Greene’s wing. By the time the Charter was written, she had become its conscience. Her clause — On the Sovereign Child — was carved from the memory of the night she ran.

VI. The High Road — Jonas’s Sky

When the ground had finally steadied, Jonas refused to stay on it.

A Ceniza engineer, he watched his dirigible prototype seized to transport prisoners south. He followed it to the field, saw the cages, and turned his life inside out. That night he stole the second ship and flew north through smoke and searchlights, carrying refugees and one battered weather chart.

That flight became the first run of the High Road — airships retrofitted for rescue. At first they smuggled the hunted across closed borders; later they carried mail, medicine, and finally trade. Jonas’s mark — a winged root — still graces the hull of every Commonwealth vessel.

“If they can come this far on foot,” he said, “we can meet them halfway in the air.”

He lifted the Ironwood Route into the sky, and the world rose with it.

VII. Epilogue — The Proof of Living

Freedom came to us in increments — rooted by Villafuerta, imagined by Sinclair, built by Valeria, endured by True, and carried by Jonas.
The Commonwealth was not founded once; it is founded every time someone crosses a line and refuses to go back.

The records call it the Great Exodus.
In truth, it never ended.
It only learned new directions.

I am the daughter of the Smiths of Jubilee — craftsmen and record-keepers who came north in the later waves of the Exodus — and a descendant, through my mother’s line, of Francesca Louise Sinclair of Ironwood. From her, generations down, came the Charter page my grandmother kept folded in her skirts. From my father’s people came the habit of keeping things mended and in order. Between them, I was raised to believe that memory is a form of work.

— Mable L. Smith
Commonwealth Historian, Department of Lived Sovereignty
Port Jubilee, New Alaska — Year 148 A.F.