Killing Force concludes the Nation of Laws trilogy, a saga recounting the Scott family’s rise from ambitious frontier settlers in the new state of Tennessee, to prosperous slave-holding planters, to officials serving at the highest levels of state and federal governments. Whose influence from the third generation will prevail in the national drama set in motion by Tennessee’s petition to secede from the Union? Will Jerald’s insistence on the rule of law prevent a war but destroy the Union legally? Will his brother Lee’s sense of adventure and manifest destiny compel him into battle, and, if so, for which side? Does their brilliant former slave Gamaliel have a plan to destroy both the Union and the Confederacy, or rather to remake them in his blind image?
In a nation of laws, not men, these questions should be answered through civil discourse and jurisprudence in the Supreme Court, rather than in brutal warfare on the battlefield. Why did the United States and the Confederate States of America chose war in 1861? And what would happen if the question were presented anew in the 2020’s? Jackson S. Riddle’s “extraordinary idea” challenges the Nation to understand its true history and to endeavor in the future to find a lawful and peaceful resolution to its constitutional debates.
Could the Supreme Court have resolved the secession crisis and prevented the sacrifice of over 600,000 American lives? Or did the deficiencies in the Constitution and the men who drafted it doom the Nation to a brutal civil war?
Jackson S. Riddle’s historical fiction trilogy climaxes in a battlefield confrontation between warring branches of the federal government. Is the law of the Nation “irrevocably fixed” by the decisions of the judicial branch? Or is President Lincoln correct that by submitting to the opinions of the Supreme Court “the people will have ceased to be their own rulers, having to that extent practically resigned their Government into the hands of that eminent tribunal”?
In Born Blind and A Potter’s Vessel, the legislative and judicial branches dueled in their constitutional roles of making law and saying what the law is. In Killing Force, the Nation’s new president seizes the power of those branches, purportedly to fulfill his oath “to preserve, protect and defend the Constitution”.
In his final effort to uphold the rule of law, idealistic lawyer Jerald Scott asks the Supreme Court to compel a peaceful resolution to the dispute between the states, now comprising two nations. But does either the U.S.A. or the C.S.A. even want a peaceful resolution?
Killing Force depicts what should have happened in the United States in 1861 and presents a cautionary tale for what could happen in the Nation’s future.
JACKSON S. RIDDLE 