Fugitives of Time: Sequel to Emperors of Time Read Online Free

he
continued to thumb through the book to see if maybe he had just missed it.
    Meanwhile, Rose was at the bookshelf.  Tim figured she
must have been looking for a book with more specifics on the time period around
the Civil War, because she came back with a book called, Nineteenth Century
America .  The volume was thick and looked to Tim like it would have
made for some pretty dry reading, even for someone who loved history as much as
he did.  But it would surely mention the Kansas-Nebraska Act if it went
through.
    Rose spent a minute going through the book as Tim looked at
the bookshelf, trying to find another book that might be helpful.  Julie
and Billy, meanwhile, talked about how lucky it was that they were with people
who actually understood these history books so that they didn’t have to.
    Finally, Rose spoke up.  “All right, here it is. 
There was debate in the Senate about a bill that would have allowed
self-determination in Kansas.  I’m pretty sure that this is the bill that
would have been the Kansas-Nebraska Act if it passed.  But it didn’t.”
    “Does it say why?” Tim asked, giving up his search for
another useful book and sitting back down on the floor next to the others.
    “Yeah, so get this,” said Rose, as Tim leaned forward and
Billy yawned.  “There was a new compromise instead, called the Kansas
Compromise.”
    “Okay,” said Tim, filing this new bit of historical information. 
“Tell me more.”
    “All right, here’s the rundown:  Kansas enters as a
free state, like it was supposed to, but any future state added to the Union
would have a choice of whether to enter as a slave or free-state.”
    “So they gave the North what it wanted in this single
instance on the assumption that they could get other states in the
future.  But weren’t most places that would later become states further
north than Kansas anyway?” Tim asked.
    “In our timeline, yes,” Rose said.  “This book points
out that this compromise was the foundation for adding Cuba and the four states
south of Texas as slave states over the next decades.”
    “Four states south of Texas?  Wow. So maybe it was
implicit in the negotiations that there would be a more hawkish foreign policy?”
Tim asked.
    “Could be.  It might not even have been implicit. 
I mean, it makes sense that less than a decade after the Mexican-American War,
the party of Pierce, the War’s hero, would do something to get another swing at
Mexico.”
    “And all this made the Civil War not happen?” asked Julie,
who seemed to be trying both to redirect the conversation to get it back on
track and to actually understand what Rose was talking about.
    “It made it so it didn’t happen in 1861, anyway,” Rose said,
as she paged through the book a bit more.  Soon, she found a heading that
caught her attention, and summarized what was underneath it.  “In 1890,
the country was extra-unified after a second Mexican-American War.  This
one was caused by Mexico’s president declaring war on the United States. 
That doesn’t sound like something that would have happened in our timeline,
even without the Kansas-Nebraska Act.  But it could’ve been something else
that the Emperors caused in this timeline.”
    “All right,” Billy said, impatiently.  “So we’re pretty
confident that this Kansas Compromise happening instead of the Kansas-Nebraska
Act is what made it so the Civil War didn’t happen?”
    “Yeah, has to be,” Tim said.  “The bill was debated in
the Senate, under the same president who presided over the Kansas-Nebraska act
in our timeline, Pierce.”
    Rose brought the conversation back to the second Mexican
War.  “It makes sense that the Emperors would want a second
Mexican-American War.  It seems like their overall goal is to make the
United States strong as early as possible. Taking another swing at Mexico would
have been a relatively easy way to do that in the mid-nineteenth century.”
    Tim returned to his