From The Ashes: America Reborn

William W. Johnstone

I would like to thank John Holms and Louis Malcangi

for painstaking work on the text

and the maps in this book.

This country, with its institutions, belongs to the people who inhabit it. Whenever they shall grow weary of the existing government, they can exercise their constitutional right of amending it, or their revolutionary right to dismember or overthrow it.

–Abraham Lincoln

CONTENTS

Author’s Note:
About the Book

Part One:
 
The Ashes Series:

Including Conversations with Ben Raines, the story line, and maps of the journeys for each book

One

Book #1 Out of the Ashes

Two

Book #2 Fire in the Ashes

Three

Book #3 Anarchy in the Ashes

Four

Book #4 Blood in the Ashes

Five

Book #5 Alone in the Ashes

Six

Book #6 Wind in the Ashes

Seven

Book #7 Smoke from the Ashes

Eight

Book #8 Danger in the Ashes

Nine

Book #9 Valor in the Ashes

 
Ten

Book #10 Trapped in the Ashes

 
Eleven

Book #11 Death in the Ashes

Twelve

Book #12 Survival in the Ashes

Thirteen

Book #13 Fury in the Ashes

Fourteen

Book #14 Courage in the Ashes

Fifteen

Book #15 Terror in the Ashes

Sixteen

Book #16 Vengeance in the Ashes

Seventeen

Book #17 Battle in the Ashes

Eighteen

Book #18 Flames from the Ashes

Nineteen

Book #19 Treason in the Ashes

Twenty

Book #20 D-Day in the Ashes

Twenty-One

Book #21 Betrayal in the Ashes

Twenty-Two

Book #22 Chaos in the Ashes

Twenty-Three

Book #23 Slaughter in the Ashes

Twenty-Four

Book #24 Judgment in the Ashes

Part Two:
 
The Wit and Wisdom of Ben Raines

Part Three:
 
The Tri-States Manifesto

Appendix
:
Weapons, Armaments, Land Vehicles, and Military Aircraft Appearing in the Ashes series

AUTHOR’S NOTE
 

This book is about an alternate form of government that has become known as the Tri-States way. The concept came from a novel of mine published back in 1983 titled
Out of the Ashes.
That novel gave birth to one of the longest-running and most controversial political/action series in publishing history: the Ashes series. The Ashes series grows in popularity with each book as readers begin to see that this form of government is a workable system, a system based as much on common sense as on written law.

Many believe, as do I, that eventually America will become so diverse, so splintered in its thinking, that the country will break apart and become three or four separate nations within a nation, working together in areas of trade while each maintains its independence and its own system of government and laws. One of those nations will surely adopt the Tri-States form of rule. Thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands of people in the United States, would welcome the chance to try it now, for they are as disgusted with this nation’s drift away from the original meaning of the Constitution as I am.

This book will explain how the Tri-States, or the SUSA, the Southern United States of America, as it is now called in the Ashes books, came to be and the bending and shaping and refining it has undergone over the years.

Whatever reaction
From the Ashes: America Reborn
will evoke (and it will evoke many emotions within the reader), it will persuade that reader to give serious thought to how this nation has turned its back and walked away from the desires and wishes of decent, law-abiding American citizens.

PART ONE

The Ashes Series

ONE

“That’s one of my favorite quotes by Lincoln,” Ben Raines said, returning the sheet of paper to me. “I’m glad you opened the interview with it.”

WWJ: So Lincoln is one of your favorite presidents?

Ben Raines: Lincoln was a good man put in a hard bind. He didn’t want a civil war and at the time the war started, he was in negotiations with the leaders of the South to avert it. Lincoln was a politician who knew the value of compromise; unlike those assholes in Washington just before the Great War and the recent splitting up of the Union into countries within a country.

Ben Raines is not a difficult man to interview, but he is an uncommonly blunt one. Unlike most (if not all) politicians, Ben Raines does not dance around with words. He says exactly what’s on his mind. I find it very refreshing.

WWJ: So you admit to being a politician?

Ben Raines: I guess I’m somewhat of a politician. I’ve had to be over the years. At least when the movement was just getting started.

WWJ: But you’ve said many times that you dislike politicians.

Ben Raines: I dislike a certain
type
of politician. Especially those who attempt to try to please all the people all the time.

WWJ: You said the movement a few seconds ago. It was your movement; your idea?

Ben Raines: I coined the phrase Tri-States. The people started the movement. It came out of a book I wrote a few years before the Great War. The book was titled
Out of the Ashes.
It created quite a stir.

WWJ: Did the book get you in trouble with the government?

Ben Raines: Not at first. It was the books that followed that got the liberals, the left-wingers in Washington all upset.

WWJ: Why?

Ben Raines: Because the Tri-States philosophy calls for a government whose laws are based on common sense. Liberals don’t have any common sense. They can’t think for themselves. They depend on the government to do their thinking for them . . .

WWJ: Oh, come on, Mr. Raines. That’s a bit extreme, isn’t it?

Ben Raines: No. Not at all. Study the liberal doctrine, compare it to a very conservative one, do it fairly, and judge for yourself.

WWJ: Go on.

Ben Raines: A conservative political agenda, which the Tri-States philosophy certainly is, for the most part, allows—really, demands—that to a very large degree, the individual take responsibility for his or her own destiny.

WWJ: As opposed to? . . .

Ben Raines: As opposed to society being blamed for the individual’s mistakes and failures. Which is horse crap.

WWJ: Many people say the Tri-States philosophy is a complicated one.

Ben Raines: Quite the contrary, it’s very simple. But one has to have at least a modicum of common sense to understand it.

WWJ: Give me one example. We’ll come back to it often, I’m sure. But give me one example.

Ben Raines: Well, there are many. For instance, here, any adults with valid I.D.s can walk into any drugstore and buy antibiotics over the counter. Sign their name, pay for the merchandise, and leave. If they go home and swallow the whole bottle and drop dead, that’s their fault. They accept total responsibility when they sign their name in the pharmaceutical book. The drugstore can’t be sued, the clerk can’t be sued, the company who manufactured the drug can’t be sued. The individuals were not forced to purchase the drug. They were adults. They did so of their own free will. Manifest destiny.

WWJ: Manifest destiny?

Ben Raines: That is correct.

WWJ: Let’s go back a few years, back before the revolution, back before the Great War. Did you ever dream that your—and it is your—political philosophy would come to be a reality?

Ben Raines: Truthfully, yes, I did. But I didn’t think it would come to be in my lifetime. Rumblings of a second revolution had been building for years before the Great War . . .

WWJ: Rumblings the government never took seriously.

Ben Raines: Not until it was too late. However, there were a few members of Congress, to be fair, on both sides of the aisle, who saw the writing on the wall, so to speak. They did make a few halfhearted attempts to reason with their colleagues on the hill; to warn them that trouble was brewing throughout the land. Most just brushed off the warnings as nonsense.

WWJ: What was the mood of the nation just before the Great War?

Ben Raines: Every human emotion ranging from quiet dissatisfaction with their government to boiling hatred. Little pockets of resistance were forming everywhere. People were arming themselves; buying ammunition by the case. Government agents were running all over the country, infiltrating, or attempting to infiltrate every group they could find. And killing people.

I left that last sentence alone for the moment.

WWJ: I only have vague memories of the Great War and practically no memories at all of the internal struggle before everything collapsed. Newspaper and magazine accounts have been destroyed or turned to dust . . .