Napoleon's expression was like that of a man who had gone hungry for three days, only to watch an entire table of delicacies vanish into thin air before his very eyes.
He was practically roaring. "What the hell happened in The South? Damn it, weren't the people there all growing Cotton?"
The Governor's assistant jumped, replying somewhat nervously, "You haven't heard? General Jourdan freed a large number of slaves in South Carolina, and nearly all the plantations there have stopped work..."
Napoleon had been on a long-range dash the entire time and truly knew nothing of events in the east. He froze for a moment. "General Jourdan? Wasn't he still assembling troops in Mobile?"
"That was a month and a half ago," the assistant said. "General Jourdan received reinforcements from Saint-Domingue, swiftly launched a surprise attack on Pensacola, and then won all the way through. In less than a month, he had already occupied Long Bay."
Long Bay was already at the northernmost edge of South Carolina.
Napoleon narrowed his eyes. Even marching without rest, the journey from Pensacola to Long Bay would take a month. In other words, while he had drawn nearly all American forces to the west, Jourdan had seized the chance to rack up merits in the southeast!
That bastard!
Still puzzled, he asked, "But in such a short time, The South couldn't have descended into chaos badly enough to force Jefferson into a ceasefire, could it?" The Governor's assistant smiled. "In fact, General Jourdan stopped at Long Bay.
"It was the freed Black slaves who gathered together and sparked the uprising.
"Well, you know there were many free Blacks in Florida's army. They may very well have secretly supplied some weapons to the rebels. In barely twenty days, large-scale slave uprisings broke out in Georgia,