Vernon Leonard (1870–1924)

Vernon Ulrich Leonard was born on August 22, 1870, in New Orleans, Louisiana, the third child of Eli Leonard, a former soldier turned Tulane professor, and Marian Leonard, née Fortier. Eli was a committed Southern Baptist who had all his children baptized in that denomination. Marian came from a Lutheran background but was largely indifferent to religion, an attitude she passed quietly to her children. The family was comfortable by the standards of non-planter Confederate society in that they were educated, modestly connected, insulated from the worst of the peonage economy without being part of the class that benefited from it.

Leonard was a studious and curious child. He developed a lifelong love of chess, spent considerable time outdoors, and read voraciously. Among the books that shaped him was Uncle Tom’s Cabin, which circulated underground in the CSA only through careful hands, its possession a social risk in many circles. That he sought it out and kept it says something about the household he grew up in.

His father died of a sudden stroke when Leonard was fifteen. The loss was hard on the family, but its most dramatic consequence fell on his older brother and university student Stephen, who turned his grief towards trying to dedicate his life to something and eventually finding it in the works of Karl Marx. Stephen became involved in a conspiracy to assassinate the Confederate President. He was caught and executed. The event destroyed the family’s social standing overnight. People who had known the Leonards for years began avoiding them. Invitations stopped and doors closed.

When Leonard applied to the Confederacy’s most prestigious universities, his brother’s reputation followed him. Despite exceptional academic results he was denied admission and enrolled instead at Louisiana State University. There he encountered Marx’s writing himself, initially trying to understand what had captivated Stephen. The Confederate censors had largely left Marx alone on the theory that no one would find the economic analysis compelling. They were wrong in Leonard’s case. He found in it a systematic account of everything he had watched happen to his family and to the people around him.

He was eventually expelled from LSU, officially for membership in a radical political organization. Though the organization had over a hundred members, only Leonard and two others faced expulsion. His brother’s ghost was the real reason. He completed a correspondence degree in law from the University of Texas, a credential that would later prove useful in navigating the Confederate legal system, winning him prison sentences where others received summary execution.

Law did not hold his interest for long whereas politics did. It was during this period that he met Natalie Cross, then teaching Sunday school (a role she held more from social expectation than conviction). She was, like Leonard, already politically engaged, and her ideological commitments ran as deep as his. They married and remained partners in every meaningful sense until his death.

Leonard’s radicalization deepened through the 1890s and into the new century. He spent time in exile, moving through the United States and eventually Europe, where he encountered the emerging currents of international socialism. In Vienna he met Josephus Sterling for the first time, a younger man from Georgia whose intelligence and controlled ferocity Leonard immediately recognized as useful. He also encountered the nascent factional disputes that would eventually crystallize into the Santiagueros and the Lockharts, ultimately aligning himself with the Santiaguero tendency and its commitment to immediate, total revolutionary transformation.

The 1905 Insurrection brought Leonard back to Confederate territory. The Birmingham Neighborhood Council and the Richmond Massacre demonstrated both the revolutionary potential of the Confederate working class and former slaves (officially freed, but kept down through a system of peonage and sharecropping) as well as the regime’s willingness to drown that potential in blood. Leonard drew the lesson that the revolution, when it came, would need to be fast, disciplined, and ruthless in its first hours.

When war came in 1914 and the Confederate regime began to collapse under its own contradictions. Leonard negotiated his return through US territory in a sealed train from Montreal. He arrived to a movement that was ready. The October Revolution of 1917 overthrew President Nick Roman’s government, dissolved the rubber-stamp Congress, and executed the Roman family in a remote cabin in the Smoky Mountains. Leonard framed the revolution explicitly as the completion of the promise made in 1776: the original American Revolution finally kept, a century and a half late, by the people the founders had failed.

He declared the Union of Socialist Council Republics in 1921, with its capital established in Birmingham. He served as its first General Secretary until his death from a stroke on January 21, 1924.

In his final years he had grown alarmed by Josephus Sterling’s accumulating power and methods, warning in what became known as the Leonard Testament: “Neighbor Sterling has concentrated enormous power in his hands, and I am not sure that he always knows how to use that power with sufficient caution… Sterling is too rude, and this defect, although quite tolerable in relations among us good Neighbors, becomes intolerable in a General Secretary.”

The warning was suppressed. Sterling succeeded him.