Title
The Rewritten War
Alternate Histories of the American Civil War
By Renee de Groot
Supervised by Dr. George Blaustein
Thesis Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree of
Master of Arts
in the
History: American Studies Program
Faculty of Humanities
University of Amsterdam
22 August 2016
Declaration
I declare that I have read the UvA regulations regarding fraud and plagiarism, and that the following thesis is my original work.
Renee de Groot August 22, 2016
Abstract
The American Civil War (1861-1865) has provided food for counterfactual speculation for historians, journalists, critics, and writers of all stripes for over a century. What if the
Confederacy had won? What if the South had abolished slavery? What if Lincoln had lived? What if…? This thesis offers an anatomy of Civil War alternate history as a distinct though eclectic cultural form. It takes apart the most interesting manifestations and reassembles them to show four intriguing functions of this form: as a platform for challenges to narratives of Civil War memory, for counterintuitive socio-economic criticism, for intricate reflections on history writing and on historical consciousness. It shows the many paradoxes that rule Civil War alternate history: its insularity and global outlook, its essential un-creativity, its ability to attract strange bedfellows and to prod the boundaries between fact and fiction. Most importantly, this thesis demonstrates the marriage of sophistication and banality that characterizes this form that is ultimately the domain of history’s winners.
Dedication voor SB en TG
Contents
Introduction: Roads not Taken 1
Chapter I – Divided We Stand: Challenges to Memory 28
Chapter II – Who Ain’t a Slave?: The Peculiar Afterlives of an Institution 50
Chapter III – History is not a Spectator Sport! : The Scholar, the Revisionist 70
and the Time Machine Chapter IV – A Dream within a Dream: The Unburden of Alternate History 88
Conclusion: The Winner Takes it All 112
Bibliography 116
Appendix: Full List of Civil War Alternate Histories 124
Abbreviations
AH Alternate history
CWAH Civil War alternate history
CWM Civil War Memory
POD Point of divergence
***
Introduction
2 I Introduction
Counterfactual writings on the Civil War go back to the early 1900s. Second to World War II, the Civil War is the most popular subject of American alternate history writing. Nearly 150 considerations of alternative Civil Wars have appeared in a range of forms, moods and contexts (see the appendix affixed to this thesis for a full list.) Their variety is such that beyond relating to the American Civil War, these documents resist easy classification. Most of these sources have also not been studied extensively. Some of the better known Civil War alternate histories have been analyzed as documents of popular memory or as successful examples of alternate history as a genre of science-fiction. As far as I am aware, there has been no effort to date to study Civil War alternate history as a self-contained form. Because the subject is largely unchartered territory, this thesis has more than one point to make: it is an anatomy of Civil War alternate history that makes several arguments about the form as an expression of the legacy of the Civil War in popular memory.
This introduction is divided up into two lopsided parts: in the first, I situate this project in the scholarly discourse on Civil War memory to position Civil War alternate histories as a way of bringing out shades of complexity in the memory of the Civil War that in the current
framework have not been fully recognized. The second part is a survey of Civil War alternate history by way of a makeshift categorization, intended to introduce and intrigue before being swiftly replaced by the more apt but less apparent anatomy that is the main body and objective of this thesis. I aim to enumerate the main conventions, preoccupations and characteristics of CWAH in order to provide a handle on this mass of documents, before diving into some of the more specific harmonies and tendencies in the main body of the thesis.
II Civil War Memory
There is, to this day, a curious ambiguity in the way American society looks back on its Civil War. In a seeming contradiction to the adage that history is written by the victors, the popular memory of the war that stills looms large in the American imagination contains a curious sympathy with the losing side even as it condemns that side’s reasons for entering the conflict. Historians have often explained this ambiguity by saying that while the North won the war, the South won the peace. The tradition of historians and writers commenting on this process of ‘winning the peace’ goes back at least to neo-Abolitionist Albion Tourgée’s 1884 text An Appeal
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to Caesar, in which he observed and described it as it was happening.1 Over the last few decades, after it received an impetus from the vogue in memory studies, the interest in the legacy of the Civil War has become a field of historical inquiry onto itself. While Civil War Memory as a field is some way from reaching agreement on the development of Civil War memory from
Appomattox to the present, it is characterized by an interpretive framework created by scholars which is so stratified it can obscure even as it illuminates.2
Civil War Memory is predicated on a postmodern understanding of memory as being everything but a passive act: public or collective memory is actively constructed, enacted, appropriated, negotiated, co-opted, adjusted, and manipulated in an endless process of collective meaning-making. The groups or individuals involved in this performance of memory are
invariably motivated by some mood or feature of their own time, and thus public memory is not only constantly in flux, but more importantly always reveals something about its time and place. Moreover, at any given time there will be different groups advancing competing interpretations of a shared past, leading to conflicts over historical meaning that reveal the cultural
preoccupations of a period. The history of Civil War memory, unsurprisingly, considering the war’s immense importance in US history, is the tug-of-war between competing factions and discourses, the meeting of which has presented fertile ground to cultural historians.
Historians have identified four traditions of ascribing meaning to the war that alternately suffuse personal and collective remembrance through popular culture and political rhetoric. Associated with the warring sections are the Lost Cause of the white South, which holds that the war was a dispute over state’s rights in which the South was in the right, and the unionist cause of the North, which sees the war as a fight to preserve the Union and its promise of democracy. On a national level, there is the reconciliationist cause, which casts the war as a tragic but honorable ‘brother’s war,’ and implicitly advocates forgetting the cause of the war to hasten national reconciliation, and the emancipationist cause of African-Americans and
neo-Abolitionists, which insists on the centrality of slavery to the war. Scholarly interest in the Lost Cause predates the rise of Civil War Memory as a field by several decades, going back at least to the 1940s. Most major Civil War Memory scholarship has focused on the struggle between
1 Albion W. Tourgée, An Appeal to Caesar (New York: Fords, Howard & Hulbert, 1884).
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reconciliationist sentiments and the emancipationist legacy in American society, and the political consequences thereof.
Rather than observe this struggle from a scholarly distance, however, Civil War Memory historians have always actively positioned themselves as both observers and participants in this process. I have been struck by how often the field gestures to contemporary American politics— usually to do with racial strife or foreign intervention—to stress the importance of a correct understanding of the war’s causes and consequences. As many scholars have noted, so long as America does not resolve lingering racial inequality, there will be contesting legacies of the Civil War. While surveying the field of Civil War Memory currently and its precursors going back to the 1950s and 1960s (not coincidentally a time when Civil War memory was particularly politically charged) it becomes clear that these observers were and are themselves heavily influenced—in some cases even biased—by the tradition holding sway in their own time. The current field of Civil War Memory is strongly informed by our emancipationist understanding of the war, which has been gaining ground steadily since World War II. Meanwhile, the American public opinion is still more divided over the causes and meaning of the war, and historians often display a concern with this dissonance in the rationale, tone, and argument of their work.3
David W. Blight’s 2001 Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory, as the pioneering work and benchmark of Civil War Memory, exemplifies this paradoxical combination of an easy command of the field’s approach to memory coupled with a deep unease with its cultural impact. Race and Reunion chronicles the history of public debate over the causes and meaning of the war from before it was even properly won through to the war’s semicentennial in 1915. Blight’s standard conclusion is that Southern and Northern whites fashioned a memory of the war as a fratricial conflict that united the nation in common valor. This consensus located the cause of the war in a dispute over states’ rights, saw Reconstruction as an unfair humiliation of the South, and, most tragically, left the legacy of slavery and racial strife unresolved. While chronicling the ironies, contradictions, intersections, and evolutions of Civil War memory, Blight casts the contention between them as essentially the political and cultural war between healing and justice, and concludes that the first came at the cost of the second.
3 Gaines M. Foster, “Civil War Sesquicentennial: The Lost Cause,” Civil War Book Review, no. Fall 2013 (2013),
http://www.cwbr.com/civilwarbookreview/index.php?q=5590&field=ID&browse=yes&record=full&searching=yes &Submit=Search. Accessed May 16, 2016.
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But while Race and Reunion is a record of the marginalization of what has come to be regarded as the true legacy of the war, it also strikes a deeper note of criticism. In its sympathies, the book is a lament for “the tragedy as well as the course not taken in Civil War memory” and Blight does not shy away from passing judgement:4
Not out of overt conspiracy, not by subterfuge alone, did white supremacist memory combine with reconciliation to dominate how most Americans viewed the war. This result emerged from the process of history itself, from all the ways that public and private memories evolve. Thus the [1913] Gettysburg reunion took place as a national ritual in which the ghost of slavery, the very questions of cause and consequences, might be exorcised once and for all—and an epic conflict among whites elevated into national mythology. That mythology was the product of fifty years of cultural evolution, of the growth and erosion of memories in response to events and social tensions. But it also grew in carefully cultivated soil, the harvest of human choices made by powerful leaders and ordinary folk.
Collective memories are the source of group self-definition, but they are never solely the result of unthinking decisions.5
If Blight shows a postmodern understanding of cultural memory as mobile, he does not relish its fickleness. “Only fools forget the causes of war,” he quotes Tourgée at the start of the book’s epilogue, to which we might affix Blight’s own implied warning that only fools discount the power of groups or individuals looking to distort public memory for their own political gain.6 To Blight, too much is at stake to approach the uses and abuses of history with a sense of
playfulness: the deferment of justice and all it entailed for freedmen and their descendants needs to be addressed, not to mention an implicit call to vigilance delivered to guard against present and future misuses of the past. Blight’s later work has remained expressly political and over the last few years he has frequently written about Civil War memory on popular fora outside the academy.
Blight’s work stands in the tradition of other scholars who have shared his concern with the dissonance between scholarly and public memories of the Civil War and their political outgrowths. In the 1960s, Robert Penn Warren and Edmund Wilson wrote thoughtfully for their understanding of the war amidst the banality of the 1960s centennial celebrations that managed
4 David W. Blight, Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of
Harvard University Press, 2001). 365.
5 Blight, Race and Reunion, 389-90.
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to ignore the thriving Civil Rights Movement.7 More recently, Gary W. Gallagher, a conventional Civil War historian, has turned his attention to popular culture to show how distortion of the unionist cause leads to a dangerous lack of understanding of Northern motivations in fighting the war.8
Even scholars looking at popular memory through a less politically-engaged lens cannot avoid positioning themselves on this issue. Caroline E. Janney’s Remembering the Civil War:
Reunion and the Limits of Reconciliation (2013) is the most robust entry in a line of oppositional
works to Blight. The book opens with a clear statement of dissent: “contrary to popular notions […] reinforced by much of the scholarly literature on Civil War memory, reconciliation was never the predominant memory of the war among its participants.”9 The strength of Janney’s argument lies in its lack of an onus to discredit Blight’s evidence. In nuancing Blight’s argument, Janney shows that the extent to which a white Southern and Northern public were able to forge a mutually agreeable view of the war has been overstated, but the most deplored part of this
process, the fact that black civil rights were ignored, remains where it was.
If Blight’s call to the reader and historian is for vigilance, Janney implicitly argues for a detached view and an appreciation for nuance and complexity. She extends this appreciation to her use of evidence, a constant effort to break down binaries, and her treatment of her
protagonists. Blight’s heroes are African-American spokespersons like Frederick Douglass and W.E.B. Du Bois, as well as white neo-abolitions like Tourgée, who preserved the
emancipationist legacy of the Civil War and continued to insist that the war was fought over and for something beyond the battlefield, even as the national culture around them increasingly harmonized over a forgetting of the war’s true cause. In Janney’s book, while there are
sympathetic voices, the overall tone is measured and distanced. Almost indulgently, she observes that “humans are inherently complicated, contradictory, and conflicted, untroubled by logical inconsistencies and amazingly capable of compartmentalization.” Blight’s argument essentially
7 Robert Penn Warren, The Legacy of the Civil War: Meditations on the Centennial (New York: Random House,
1961), Edmund Wilson, Patriotic Gore: Studies in the Literature of the American Civil War (New York: Oxford University Press, 1966). See also Blight’s treatment of Warren and Wilson in David W. Blight, American Oracle:
The Civil War in the Civil Rights Era (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2011) and
Robert J. Cook, Troubled Commemoration: The American Civil War Centennial, 1961-1965 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2007).
8 Gary W. Gallagher, Causes Won, Lost, and Forgotten: How Hollywood & Popular Art Shape What We Know
about the Civil War (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2008).
9 Caroline E. Janney, Remembering the Civil War: Reunion and the Limits of Reconciliation, 1st ed. (Chapel Hill:
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convicts white supremacist Confederates of subterfuge and Northern unionists of willful forgetfulness at Blight’s heroes’ expense. This is a narrative that allows for villains and heroes, into which Janney brings some measure of redemption even as she swears of binaries of good and bad. Her conclusion is that of an impartial observer: “it seems likely that for decades and perhaps generations to come, Americans will continue to grapple with questions of the war’s memory, of what to commemorate and what to condemn.” However impartial this appears to be, even Janney betrays a hint of Blight’s anxiety in her closing paragraphs, where she observes that while historians today widely agree on the cause of the war, the American public tends still to be more divided.10
This juxtaposition of Blight and Janney in argument and approach illustrates some of the central concerns of Civil War Memory as a field. The two books cover much the same ground, chronicle roughly the same span of time, and even in their argument do not differ from each other radically. But their approaches represent two opposing theories of historical scholarship, especially on topics that resonate in the historian’s own time. Since these works fall within the field of American Studies, the difference between them is also more broadly reminiscent of two traditions of studying American history and culture. The first sees it as its tragically noble task to find connections between prevailing cultural moods and political power, and to warn of negative trends. The second relishes in the rich complexity of cultural mobility, but largely abstains from making moral judgements. Placed in dialog with one another, Blight and Janney impress any cultural historian working the same field of history with the imperative to determine their own theory of scholarship, and to display a consciousness of their corresponding role in their own work.
In tandem with other important works in the field—including Nina Silber’s 1993
Romance of Reunion and John R. Neff’s 2005 Honoring the Civil War Dead—, Blight and
Janney have described the history of Civil War memory in the fifty years following Appomattox with recognition of the complexities, paradoxes, and ironies of reconciliation.11 The same cannot be said for the period after the 1910s and leading up to the present. While scholarship on this period exists, it is sporadic and less ambitious both in terms of time covered, breadth of research,
10 Janney, Remembering the Civil War, 223, 325, 325.
11 Nina Silber, The Romance of Reunion: Northerners and the South, 1865-1900 (Chapel Hill: University of North
Carolina Press, 1993), John R Neff, Honoring the Civil War Dead: Commemoration and the Problem of
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and argument. Important work on popular culture and remembrance after WWI has been done by Jim Cullen, Frank Gallagher, David B. Sachsman, Robert J. Cook, and others.12 This work is more narrowly focused on popular culture and often lacks an overarching argument about the development of Civil War memory. Additionally, some scholars have suggested that the four traditions I have described that have guided and to some extent stalemated the study of Civil War memory during the 1865-1915 period translate imperfectly to the post-WWII era.13
III Civil War Alternate History
In this thesis, I analyze a selection of eleven Civil War alternate histories. I chose these eleven because all are, for one reason or another, complex or compelling. In chronological order they are F. P. Williams’ Hallie Marshall, a True Daughter of the South (1900), Winston S.
Churchill’s essay “If Lee Had Not Won the Battle of Gettysburg” (1931), Ward Moore’s Bring
the Jubilee (1953), MacKinlay Kantor’s If the South Had Won the Civil War (1961), John Jakes’ Black in Time (1970), Terry Bisson’s Fire on the Mountain (1988), Harry Turtledove’s The Guns of the South: A Novel of the Civil War (1992), Daniel Myers’ The Second Favorite Son (2004),
Kevin Willmott’s mockumentary C.S.A.: The Confederate States of America (2004), Gardner R. Dozois’ story “Counterfactual” (2006) and Ben H. Winters, Underground Airlines (2016). This selection includes the oldest and the newest CWAHs, at least one from most decades in between, and some of the best-known CWAHs as well as some of the most obscure. These last ones are included because even if they failed to reach an audience, they are equally valuable for my purpose.
The premise that informs the structure and argument of this thesis is that the
ideological—that is, either the ‘usable past’ four-narrative framework of Civil War Memory or the approach common in scholarship on alternate history (I will elaborate on this)—is not the way into these documents. Both these approaches link the political undertones of these texts to their audience response in order to measure how its narrative resonates in its own time. This
12 For a sampling see Jim Cullen, The Civil War in Popular Culture: A Reusable Past (Washington; London:
Smithsonian Institution Press, 1995), David B Sachsman, Roy Morris, and S. Kittrell Rushing, Memory and Myth:
The Civil War in Fiction and Film from Uncle Tom’s Cabin to Cold Mountain (West Lafayette, Indiana: Purdue UP,
2007), Alice Fahs and Joan Waugh, The Memory of the Civil War in American Culture (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004).
13 Thomas J. Brown, “Causes Won, Lost, and Forgotten: How Hollywood and Popular Art Shape What We Know
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approach would underappreciate literary merit and the agency of writer and reader, but most importantly in this case, it would fail to get at the specificity of alternate history as a form. Civil War alternate histories, most markedly the eleven that I have selected to illustrate my argument, are so self-aware, so contrary, and so irreverent that to treat them primarily as containers of subliminal narrative is to miss their full meaning as experiments in historical memory and consciousness. While these preoccupations are not shared between all CWAHs, as may be evident from my using a small selection, they are nevertheless not incidental: they arise naturally from the premise of allohistory.
This does not mean that I treat these documents as so deft and deliberate that they are impervious to critical reading. Alternate histories can no more be entirely divorced from their context or their author’s influences than any other product of human make. In fact, because AH lends itself easily to social, cultural, or historical commentary, the danger lurks of prioritizing substance over style. Many CWAHs, including some of my sources, are self-conscious to the extremes of preachiness or flippancy. Instead of ignoring these aspects, my approach allows me to recognize some of these CWAHs as unsuccessful or ideologically empty in a more meaningful way than if reception were the a priori yardstick for both. Furthermore, if we discount cultural resonance as an indicator of importance, then taking obscure or ‘failed’ CWAHs is justified as means to find the extremities and conventions of the form. I include them, therefore, because the point of this thesis is not to extract an ideological Zeitgeist from an unwieldy bunch of cultural documents, but to examine what this form takes from how we conceive of history, and what it gives back.
What is Civil War Alternate History?
Civil War alternate history is a strange and somewhat arbitrary form. This is partly because alternate history is a strange and somewhat arbitrary form. As a genre, principle, form or mode, it goes by the terms alternate, alternative, virtual, speculative, counterfactual history, and
allohistory, each of which has different connotations.14 Counterfactuality as a transdisciplinary phenomenon has received attention from scholars from many fields, including historiography
14 The terms ‘alternative’ and ‘alternate’ are often used for those forms of counterfactuality closest to literature.
Alternate history functions in constant reference to a historical reality thus I use the term ‘alternate’ rather than ‘alternative’ history to emphasize that the way the form relates to established history is reciprocal rather than exclusionary.
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and literary studies but also psychology, linguistics, and cognitive science.15 It has been characterized as skeptical, disruptive, conservative, paradoxical, ancient, modern, postmodern, creative, uncreative, subversive, pseudo-subversive, and bourgeois. It might be a genre, a principle, a mode, a game, a system, a model, a simulation, an imitation, an instrument, a
laboratory, a world view, a kind of therapy, or shamanism. In this thesis, I will refer to Civil War alternate history as a cultural form in order to encompass all documents that belong under its denominator.
The best-known manifestations of alternate history straddle the boundary of history and literature. Both of those fields regard it with a mixture of disdain—because it produces
documents deemed unsophisticated and contrary to deeply-held convictions of what those fields are about—and intrigue, because the way alternate history relates to them invites contemplations of fact and fiction that get at the most basic questions about history and literature. Scholars have used theories of alternate history to discuss the possibility of historical truth and the validity of ideas about determinism, cause and effect, individual agency, chaos and contingency in the course of history.16 Alternate history has been cast as a celebration of postmodern ideas about the multiplicity and narrativity of historical consciousness, and has been linked to the idea of ‘the end of history.’1718 It has also been used in arguments against ‘the postmodern challenge’
15 See Dorothee Birke, Michael Butter, and Tilmann Köppe, eds., Counterfactual Thinking, Counterfactual Writing
(Berlin; Boston: De Gruyter, 2011) for a recent overview of approaches towards counterfactual thinking from many different disciplines, though with an emphasis on historiography and literary studies.
16 See Niall Ferguson’s introduction to the 1999 defense of counterfactual historiography Virtual History, which
seeks to claim a sanitized version of counterfactual history as a historiographical tool. Niall Ferguson, “Introduction: Virtual History: Towards a ‘Chaotic’ Theory of the Past,” in Virtual History : Alternatives and Counterfactuals, ed. Niall Ferguson (New York: Basic Books, 1999). When it comes to this interest in counterfactual thinking,
historiography is in some sense playing catch up due to its long antagonism towards counterfactuality, which coats many considerations of counterfactual history in a defensive wariness. Some scholars have argued for
counterfactuals as methodological tools to add to our understanding of historical facts. These historians justify these thought experiments for the insight they can give us into what did happen. Others have validated speculation as inherent to historiography by demonstrating how historians already rely on implied hypotheticals to ascribe importance to events or episodes. See for example Johannes Bulhof, “What If? Modality and History,” History and
Theory History and Theory 38, no. 2 (1999): 145–68., and Georg Christoph Berger Waldenegg, “What-If?
Counterfactuality and History,” in Counterfactual Thinking, Counterfactual Writing, ed. Dorothee Birke, Michael Butter, and Tilmann Köppe (Berlin; Boston: De Gruyter, 2011), 130–49.
17 See seminal work by Karen Hellekson, Gavriel Rosenfeld and Edgar V. McKnight for scholars who have
predicated their theories of alternate history on postmodern and poststructuralist ideas about fiction and history, often based in Hayden White’s notion of ‘metahistory.’ Karen Hellekson, The Alternate History: Refiguring
Historical Time (Kent, Ohio: Kent State University Press, 2001), Edgar V. McKnight, “Alternative History: The
Development of a Literary Genre” (Ph. D. Dissertation, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 1994), and Gavriel Rosenfeld, The World Hitler Never Made: Alternate History and the Memory of Nazism (Cambridge; New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005).
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including the ideological determinism of critical theory and historical relativism.19 Questions like these, while they underpin the intellectual foundation of this topic, are beyond the scope of this thesis. Nevertheless, they are worth gesturing to partly because I will skirt many of them in this introduction as I delineate my subject matter and partly because they show that in alternate history profundity and silliness go hand in hand.
Alternate history is often considered a subgenre of science-fiction literature, but this association does not do justice to the long pedigree of counterfactuality in Western thought.20 Uchronia, the online allohistory database, claims the earliest alternate history novels and stories appeared during the 1830s and 1840s, but the earliest CWAH was published in 1900 so we can state that Civil War alternate history is a 20th-century phenomenon.21 Since then the history of CWAH has often exemplified the development of alternate history in general. J.C. Squire's 1931 anthology If It Had Happened Otherwise conveyed respectability on the practice and paved the way for other serious alternate histories. It also includes an early CWAH written by Winston S. Churchill which I will deal with in this thesis. In the 1950s and 1960s, CWAHs written by Ward Moore and MacKinley Kantor (both of which will return in this thesis) popularized the genre. In recent decades, the acknowledged master of modern fictional AH, Harry Turtledove, has written many works that deal with the Civil War.
During the 1990s, alternate history as a genre of science-fiction proliferated and entered the cultural mainstream, which brought with it a large number of CWAHs as well. This
explosion of CWAHs during the 1990s is the result of the confluence of this rise of alternate history as genre-writing and a wave of popular interest in the Civil War that had been building since the 1970s and came to a head with the broadcasting of Ken Burns’ epic 11-hour
documentary The Civil War (1990). The post-WWII popular culture surrounding the Civil War is still heavily influenced by the reconciliationist celebration of the war as a ‘romance of reunion’
18 Gavriel Rosenfeld, The World Hitler Never Made: Alternate History and the Memory of Nazism (Cambridge; New
York: Cambridge University Press, 2005). 6.
19 See Roman Katsman’s polemical but illuminating theory of alternate history, which takes aim at the scholars
mentioned above. Roman Katsman, Literature, History, Choice: The Principle of Alternative History in Literature
(S.Y. Agnon, The City with All That Is Therein) (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2013).
20 See Ferguson for the use of counterfactual thinking in Western philosophy and history, and Katsman for the
history of ‘alternativeness’ as a principle in ancient myth, Judeo-Christian writing and folk tales, as well as the argument that alternative history in its modern form rests on the joint pillars of the Enlightenment and Romanticism.
21 The first allohistorical novel, according to Uchronia, is probably Geoffroy-Château's Napoléon et la Conquête du
Monde, 1812-1823: Histoire de la Monarchie Universelle (1836) and the earliest allohistorical short story is
Nathaniel Hawthorne's "P.'s Correspondence" (1845). Robert B. Schmunk, “Uchronia: Oldest Alternate Histories,”
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but it has had to make room for the increased recognition of the emancipationist legacy that came with developing attitudes about race. As will become apparent in this thesis, many Civil War alternate histories written since the 1970s are in obvious dialog with this process of negotiation between race and reunion in mainstream Civil War popular culture. In keeping with the
paradoxical descriptions of alternate history as both subversive and conservative, CWAH can easily serve as both an affirmation and crosscurrent to this mainstream of Civil War memory narratives. On occasion the two exist in such close contact that they are included in the same writer’s oeuvre.
So how do we define a Civil War alternate history as an object of study? We could decide that a CWAH is characterized by having a point of divergence (the moment in history it chooses for its jumping-off point) that falls between April 12, 1861 and May 9, 1865. But this would exclude those alternate histories that change the war by tweaking the course of history leading up to it, such as J.E. Chamberlin’s 1907 essay “If Abraham Lincoln’s Father Had Moved
Southward, Not Northward,” which is the CWAH with the earliest point of divergence.22 It would also exclude the ones that prevent the war from happening, or that have it happen in a radically different form. In Terry Bisson’s 1988 novel Fire on the Mountain, John Brown’s 1859 raid on Harpers Ferry succeeds in igniting a slave insurrection across the South and the failed war of Southern independence becomes the successful war of black independence (I return to Bisson in chapter one of this thesis.)23 Nor is the setting always indicative: the point of
divergence is not necessarily the point of departure, and some Civil War alternate histories are set decades or centuries after their POD, (and to complicate matters further, neither of these points have to fall within the 1861-1865 period.) Moreover, this definition leaves unclear the status of more ‘serious’ or speculative writings that technically do not have a point of
divergence, but simply suggest how multiple alternate outcomes could have happened and played out, such as Revisioning the Civil War: Historians on Counter-Factual Scenarios.24
I define a Civil War alternate history as a text or cultural document in the broadest sense that has for a purpose to entertain a counterfactual question related to the Civil War, usually as a way of reflecting on the meaning of the war to American or world history (though this purpose
22 Joseph Edgar Chamberlin, “If Abraham Lincoln’s Father Had Moved Southward, Not Northward,” in The Ifs of
History (Philadelphia: H. Altemus Company, 1907), 150–159.
23 Terry Bisson, Fire on the Mountain, Originally published 1988 (Oakland: PM Press, 2009).
24 James C. Bresnahan, Revisioning the Civil War: Historians on Counter-Factual Scenarios (Jefferson, N.C.:
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might be implicit or unintentional.) This definition deliberately transcends the common
association of alternate history as a historiographical tool or as a sub-genre of science fiction. It therefore includes the handful of CWAHs written before alternate history became a genre along with science-fiction in the 1950s. This definition is also deliberately democratic; it sees the conjectures of scholars, politicians, journalists, novelists, genre-writers, editors, humorists, game-creators and others as expressions of the same mixture of a preoccupation with the Civil War’s importance to American history and society, and a universal attraction to the question ‘what if…’25
Finally, this definition acknowledges that many CWAHs are in fact set-ups for alternate histories of the Reconstruction period. The most notable examples of this are the many stories and novels in which Lincoln’s assassination either fails or never happens at all. This divergence would not have materially changed the outcome of the war but would have an effect on the shape and evaluation of Reconstruction, which is itself a powerful determining factor to interpretations of the war.26
How ‘serious’ can CWAH be?
The most obvious method of categorizing Civil War alternate histories is by how ‘serious’ they are. This usually leads back to the profession of the author. The hand-wringing counterfactuals of historians are usually framed by introductions that self-consciously defend counterfactual
questions as valuable historiographical thought experiments. Their imaginative premise is
checked by rigid conditions and standards like plausibility, logic and a point of divergence that is
25 While my definition is democratic, I do not mean to suggest that all CWAHs are created equal, and in fact my
definition excludes some of them. For instance, Cherie Priest, Boneshaker (New York: Tor, 2009), the celebrated steampunk novel, uses the Civil War as its point of divergence but goes on to create a universe and plot so far removed from the war or American history that it is useless for my purpose.
26 This is clear enough from the subtitle to Arthur Goodman, If Booth Had Missed: A Drama of the Reconstruction
Period (New York: S. French, 1932), the only CWAH play. Many AHs portray milder or non-existent processes of
Reconstruction as preferable, but the opposite is also possible: in Oscar Lewis, The Lost Years: A Biographical
Fantasy (New York: Knopf, 1951), Lincoln’s mild vision backfires, while in Lois Tilton, “A Just and Lasting
Peace,” The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, November 1991., Reconstruction is harsher after Lincoln is killed by Jesse James. Lincoln-lives allohistories like Lloyd Lewis, “If Lincoln Had Lived,” in If Lincoln Had Lived:
Addresses, ed. M. Llewellyn Raney (Chicago, Ill.: University of Chicago Press, 1935), 16–35. and T.J. Turner, Lincoln’s Bodyguard: A Novel (Longboat Key, FL: Oceanview Publishing, 2015) are the ones with the latest point
of divergence. They also count among their ranks the only CWAH children’s book; Barbara Brenner and Steve Madsen, Saving the President: What If Lincoln Had Lived? (New York: J. Messner, 1987).
14
sufficiently weighty: the length of Cleopatra’s nose emphatically is not.27 Since war provides many plausible but stirring pivotal moments for speculations, military historians have been especially drawn to alternative history. Robert Cowley has edited three collections of essays in the What If? Series, which are made up of counterfactuals by military historians, including several interesting ones of the Civil War.28 I should say that this affinity also explains why some of the Civil War alternate histories written by historians, including James McPherson’s “If the Lost Order Hadn’t Been Lost” and the trilogy of novels co-written by William R. Forstchen and Newt Gingrich (who has a PhD in European history), are basically experiments in military strategy or battlefield luck, and do not offer much in the way of compelling changes to long-term social or cultural history.29 They essentially spend their time on the ‘how’ of alternate history, when it is actually the ‘what (if)’ question that is most interesting. ‘Professional’ allohistories are a mixed bag: a more interesting example is The Confederate States of America: What Might
Have Been, by economic historian Roger Ransom, which analyzes how the Confederacy might
have fared as an independent nation.30
After the counterfactuals of historians, there are the writings of journalists, politicians and cultural critics, which are equally serious but less concerned with where they stand in relation to Cleopatra’s nose. They include the most clearly political and presentist CWAHs: “If the South Had Been Allowed to Go” (1903) is an indictment of American imperialism and political
27 The emphasis on logic sometimes sounds piqued when real history is not as logical, and the counterfactual
becomes a way of correcting history, as in James M McPherson, “If the Lost Order Hadn’t Been Lost: Robert E. Lee Humbles the Union, 1862,” in What If? : The World’s Foremost Military Historians Imagine What Might Have Been (New York: Putnam, 1999). Historians have also undertaken allohistory from an explicit corrective motivation emphasizing the historian’s authority and supposed animosity towards alternative history: James Marten’s “Do Not Embrace Them Too Hastily” is an analysis of a fictional allohistory, published in a book that collects these pairings and frames them as battles between historians and alternate history writers. James Marten, “Do Not Embrace Them Too Hastily,” in History Revisited: The Great Battles: Eminent Historians Take On the Great Works of Alternative
History, ed. J. David Markham and Michael D Resnick (Dallas: BenBella Books, 2008).
28 Thomas Fleming, “The Northwest Conspiracy” and Victor Davis Hanson, “Lew Wallace and the Ghosts of the
Shunpike,” in What Ifs? Of American History: Eminent Historians Imagine What Might Have Been, ed. Antony Beevor and Robert Cowley (New York: G.P. Putnam’s, 2003), James M McPherson, “If the Lost Order Hadn’t Been Lost: Robert E. Lee Humbles the Union, 1862” and Stephen W. Sears, “A Confederate Cannae and Other
Scenarios : How the Civil War Might Have Turned out Differently,” in What If? : The World’s Foremost Military
Historians Imagine What Might Have Been (New York: Putnam, 1999).
29 Newt Gingrich, William R Forstchen, and Albert S Hanser, Gettysburg: A Novel of the Civil War (New York: St.
Martin’s Press, 2003).; Newt Gingrich, William R Forstchen, and Albert S Hanser, Grant Comes East: A Novel of
the Civil War (New York: Thomas Dunne Books/St. Martin’s Press, 2004).; Newt Gingrich and William R
Forstchen, Never Call Retreat: Lee and Grant: The Final Victory (St. Martin’s Press, 2005).
30 Roger L Ransom, The Confederate States of America: What Might Have Been (New York: W.W. Norton & Co.,
15
corruption, written by a New York Progressive reformer.31 J. E. Chamberlin’s essays all end on expressions of gratitude for the way history turned out, making him one of the few CWAH authors who entertain their speculations only to bask in contentment with their own present.32
Tom Wicker has written a very short CWAH appreciating the nobility of Lee in curtailing
Southern rancor and preventing a protracted guerilla-war, entitled “Vietnam in America, 1865”33 The Spanish-American war returns in many of these, as it does in Blight’s and other narratives of Civil War memory, as a triumphant moment of Blue-Gray reconciliation, either symbolically or diplomatically. In later CWAHs, the Cold War figures in the background: in A More Perfect
Union, written in 1971 and set in 1981, the nuclear threat to the US is posed by a hostile
Confederacy.34
Most CWAHs, as indeed most AHs, fall into a third category which I will refer to as ‘fictional’ alternate histories. It is often suggested that all literature is in fact alternate history because both are basically non-factual. While this assertion opens a large can of worms about the meaning of fiction and the essence of literature, I want to make the distinction that the basic un-realness of fiction exists in a self-contained realm of its own, while that of alternate history is always tethered to, and indeed cannot function without, a perceived reality. Fictional alternate histories come closest to literature because while their effect still derives largely from their relationship to established history, they are presented as stories set within a self-contained world which is not explicitly acknowledged to be related to the reader’s reality except through
implication. As such, they often resemble historical fiction because they have narrators who are distinct from their authors. Often, they also invent their own characters to develop within the context of history. These literary qualities set them apart from ‘non-fictional’ counterfactuals like those of historians and journalists which clearly acknowledge themselves as being
counterfactuals: They are more likely to announce themselves as counterfactuals by including
31 Ernest Crosby, “If the South Had Been Allowed to Go,” The North American Review 177, no. 6 (December 1,
1903): 867–871.
32 Joseph Edgar Chamberlin, “If Abraham Lincoln’s Father Had Moved Southward, Not Northward”, “If President
James Buchanan Had Enforced the Law in November, 1860”, “If the Confederates Had Marched on Washington after Bull Run”, “If the Confederate States Had Purchased the East India Company’s Fleet in 1861,” in The Ifs of
History (Philadelphia: H. Altemus Company, 1907).
33 Tom Wicker, “Vietnam in America, 1865,” in What If? : The World’s Foremost Military Historians Imagine What
Might Have Been (New York: Putnam, 1999).
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conditionals like ‘if’, ‘would’, ‘might’, etc., in their titles, and their narrators are usually understood to be the author.35
The dual nature of fictional AH allows it to play with literary conventions. Its basic premise, the point of divergence, is in some sense a reversed deus ex machina used as an integral part instead of a flaw. It is a randomly inserted change to the supposed logic of a (hi)story which is used not to resolve the story in a cheap way but instead to engender the plot. The premise of AH also reverses an important element of historical fiction, which it obviously resembles. That form, by its nature, often contains dramatic irony because the reasonably-informed reader is able to anticipate the historic upheavals that the characters will be swept up in. This creates a sense of individuals as pawns in a predestined course of history. A similar thing happens in biography (as a form of history) where the form signals to the reader that the main character will become exceptional in some way. In contrast with both history and historical fiction, fictional alternate history sets itself apart by reclaiming the possibility of non-ironic suspense because the historical course of events is unknown to the reader. Instead, it offers a different, more transcending, sense of omniscience: the reader knows the fate the characters and their world escaped or missed out on, often by a hair’s breadth, and thus gains a feeling of understanding or even authority over not just the fate of the characters but the forces of history. This feeling can just as easily be taken away again, as we will see in this thesis.
For an example of the way fictional alternate history plays with the conventions of history in literature, take the author’s note in Daniel Myers’ 2004 CWAH The Second Favorite
Son:
As a reminder to the serious students of history, and to the not-so-serious students who should be preparing for their American History final exam by reading their textbook: The Second Favorite Son is a work of fiction. […] As a writer of fiction, I have exercised my right to take a few liberties with historical fact purely for the purposes of creating a slightly altered world for my characters to inhabit. The Confederate States of America, for example, does not exist and has not since 1865.36
35 While many authors of fictional alternate histories are professional science-fiction writers, the author’s
background is more complicated in this category. For instance, Harry Turtledove, the most prolific American alternate history writer and author of possibly the best-known CWAH; The Guns of the South, has a PhD in history and The Impeachment of Abraham Lincoln was written by a Yale law professor. Harry Turtledove, The Guns of the
South: A Novel of the Civil War (New York: Ballantine Books, 1992), Stephen L. Carter, The Impeachment of Abraham Lincoln (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2012).
17
It is amusing enough that Myers pretends his reader should be informed of this minor alteration lest they come away from the novel believing the Confederacy won the Battle of Gettysburg. More interesting is that Myers places his radical reversal of American history on par with the kind of liberty someone writing a dramatized historical novel or biography might take to throw together two individuals who never met, or to put someone in a situation they were not and could not have been, purely for narrative appeal. This joke introduces the idea that minor instances of artistic license are not materially different from the altered pivotal moments that form the basis for alternate history, making all period drama alternate history technically, or at least potentially. All that distinguishes their moments of divergence are the consequences of those moments, and the purpose they serve to the story being told, both of which are subject to the author’s whims.
Myer’s artistic license, much as he claims, does little but create the conditions for parts of his story, and apart from the author’s note, The Second Favorite Son is in no danger of inspiring intellectual engagement. ‘Don’t look for either plausibility or profundity here,’ Myers seems to say; ‘I am in the business of telling a good story.’ Myers’ note, flippant as it is, prods the parameters of alternate history as a form: if a change—however major—to history is made with no goal more sophisticated or profound than entertainment, what still distinguishes it from other forms of dramatized history? The difference between alternate history and narrative history is only the importance our understanding of our past attaches to the moments they stretch and bend for our consideration or amusement.
Who writes CWAH and why?
The emphasis on authors begs the question: who writes Civil War alternate history and from what motivation? One function of alternate history is the expression of a ‘victim complex’ that drives the desire to “explain, justify and excuse” the supposed ‘errors’ of history.37 As such, it is also “a kind of therapy for trauma through the use of directed narrative imagination.”38 This would lead us to assume that in the case of the Civil War, alternate history would be written by Southern authors or those with Southern sympathies as an expression for Lost Cause-bitterness or a vehicle for revenge fantasies. This presumption is quickly checked by the reality that there are precious few Southern CWAHs, and the ones that exist are indistinguishable from others: “If
37 Katsman, Literature, History, Choice, 51. 38 Ibid., 35.
18
the South Had Won the War” by Virginius Darbey is respectfully subdued in tone, and in judgement it is not that different from H.L. Mencken’s “The Calamity of Appomattox”, both of which were published in Mencken’s The American Mercury during the 1930s.39
While we might reasonably expect alternate history to be the refuge of history’s losers, within Civil War alternate history there is a dearth of escapist fantasies of vindication,
revisionism or revenge. In fact, after perusing alternate history though primary and secondary sources for many months now, the only bona fide revenge fantasy alternate history I have ever encountered is Quentin Tarantino’s 2009 Inglourious Basterds. That film, sublime though it is, does not go into how Hitler’s earlier death would have changed the course of World War II and global history because revenge as a motivation derives its strength from its simplicity. As we will see, most alternate history is animated by something more complicated.
Just as the crop of Southern CWAHs is disappointing, so there are few international (non-American but preferably non-Anglophone) alternate histories of the Civil War. One of the best known CWAHs, Winston S. Churchill’s “If Lee Had Not Won the Battle of Gettysburg”, which approaches the Battle of Gettysburg as a moment of global importance, is a rare bird.40 A
paradox of CWAH is that even if a common strain in CWAHs is to imagine profound changes in international history as a result of a different Civil War (affecting all the major wars of the 20th -century) even countries where alternate history is relatively popular (Great Britain and Germany, most notably) are unperturbed. The notion of a formative war changing the influence of the world’s foremost superpower on the rest of the globe is not far-fetched, but internationally the Civil War is nevertheless not considered. Civil War alternate history, barring the major exception of Churchill, is an introspectively American phenomenon. Specifically, it is dominated by white male authors from the American Upper East coast and the Mid-West. The importance of this fact for the content and characteristics of Civil War alternate history will return in my main argument about CWAH, which is that it is the domain of history’s winners.
39 Virginius Dabney, “If the South Had Won the War,” The American Mercury, October 1936, 199–205. and H.L.
Mencken, “The Calamity of Appomattox,” The American Mercury, September 1930.
40 Winston S. Churchill, “If Lee Had Not Won the Battle of Gettysburg,” in If It Had Happened Otherwise. Lapses
19 What does CWAH look like?
This section identifies three dyads of conventions that rule the typical form and content of Civil War alternate history: fantasy and nightmare, race and reunion, research and creativity.
In lieu of the more explicit political or social commentary of other categories, fictional CWAHs offer cultural commentary by falling into one of two categories: fantasies, which critique the present by contrasting it with an ideal or preferable alternative, or nightmares, which express contentment with our reality because, as the title of one alternate history suggests, “we could do worse.”4142 These categories can be extended to include non-fictional alternate histories, especially the politically-charged ones. Of the CWAHs I have already mentioned, Wicker’s is a nightmare because it is thankful that Lee prevented a guerilla war, Crosby’s is a fantasy because it believes the Civil War was the first imperial US war, Mencken’s is a fantasy because it imagines Southern aristocratic values could have saved the United States from political and corporate corruption, etc.
Most interesting are the CWAHs that, in addition to possessing a presentist sensibility, ponder certain important historiographical questions about the meaning of the Civil War. The two most common questions to speculate on in CWAHs are what happens to slavery, and what happens to sectional relations after the war. All of these stories are in effect alternate visions of race and reunion—or if we translate them to their war-time equivalents; slavery and sovereignty. Whether they appear to be alternate histories of Reconstruction (like the Lincoln-lives point of departure), World War I (Churchill), socialism (Bisson), US imperialism (Crosby), or Manifest Destiny (“Look Away” by Steven Utley, and others) all Civil War alternate histories are in essence forced, one way or another, to resolve the same basic struggle between justice and reconciliation that Blight writes about.43
CWAHs that are mainly concerned with sovereignty usually imagine what happens to an independent Confederacy and/or the rump USA after the war. Many CWAHs offer intriguing possibilities of CSA-USA relations, and the two nations’ place in world history. In Harry
41 Gregory Benford, “We Could Do Worse,” Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine, April 1989. The story
imagines President Nixon managing to give the presidency to Senator McCarthy, who turns America into a police state.
42 I take these categories from Rosenfeld, but they have been described by many other scholars of alternate history.
Gavriel Rosenfeld, “Why Do We Ask ‘What If?’ Reflections on the Function of Alternate History,” History and
Theory 41, no. 4 (December 1, 2002): 90–103.
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Turtledove’s How Few Remain, expansion of the Confederacy prompts a second war between the former sections.44 Borders shift all over the continent, with scenarios like Texas reclaiming its independence in 1878 (in Kantor’s novel) or the Confederacy expanding into Mexico. Some alternatives are clearly too good not to use, as Turtledove acknowledges when he notes that he, Churchill, and Kantor, have all imagined Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson being presidents of the two nations during the same period.45
But the most important war-time and postbellum questions every CWAH faces are the fate of slavery and the meaning of race. Even a cursory glance over CWAHs reveals an
abundance of alternate visions of rebellion, underground railroads, emancipation, slave-soldiers, reconstruction, and segregation. Writers use their freedom to subvert and invent moments of black militancy, victimhood, and heroism. Fire on the Mountain has already been mentioned: it imagines John Brown’s rebellion ending in the foundation of a black republic in the heart of the Deep South, called ‘Nova Africa’ and led by Harriet Tubman and Frederick Douglass. Nova Africa flouts Werner Sombart’s famous quagmire by turning socialist and spearheading a utopian global future.46 “The Arrival of Truth” shows slaves on a plantation awaiting deliverance, not from the Great Emancipator but from Sojourner Truth who recruits slaves for a rebellion.47 Many of these ideas suggest that alternate history is used as a cross-current to mainstream Civil War memory. Take the 1989 film Glory, which offers a picture of black heroism assimilated into unionist and emancipationist ideals, and put it next to the story “Custer’s Last Jump”, published three years prior, in which the Union refuses black soldiers, or “Confederate Black and Gray”, which enlists slaves in the Confederate army.48 Suzette Haden, who is known for introducing linguistics into science-fiction and has written a self-help book on verbal self-defense, wrote “Hush My Mouth”, in which former slaves refuse to speak English until another common
44 Harry Turtledove, How Few Remain: A Novel of the Second War Between the States (New York: Ballantine
Books, 1997).
45 Harry Turtledove, “Introduction,” in If the South Had Won the Civil War, by MacKinlay Kantor, Originally
published 1961 (New York: Forge, 2001), 5-10.
46 Werner Sombart, Warum gibt es in den Vereinigten Staaten keinen Sozialismus? (Tübingen: J.C.B. Mohr (Paul
Siebeck), 1906).
47 Kristine Kathryn Rusch, “The Arrival of Truth,” in Alternate Warriors, ed. Michael D Resnick (New York: Tor,
1993).
48 Steven Utley and Howard Waldrop, “Custer’s Last Jump,” in Alternative Histories: Eleven Stories of the World as
It Might Have Been, ed. Charles G Waugh and Martin Harry Greenberg (New York: Garland Pub., 1986).; Peter
Tsouras, “Confederate Black and Gray: A Revolution in the Minds of Men,” in Dixie Victorious: An Alternate
21
language for African-Americans is found.49 These ideas are energizing, but it is worth repeating that writers of Civil War alternate histories are overwhelmingly white and male.
Equally intriguing are CWAHs that imagine a different trajectory from slavery to segregation and beyond. Many early CWAHs lament the coming of the war from a belief in gradualism; the politically moderate idea that gradual integration would have prevented bloodshed. Gradualist alternate histories like Crosby’s and Dabney’s took it for granted that slavery was doomed to disappear and the war made the situation worse than it needed to be. Contemporary CWAHs question this premise. In Terraplane (1988), slavery is finally abolished by Theodore Roosevelt in 1905.50 In the 2004 mockumentary C.S.A.: The Confederate States of
America, slavery continues to exist into the present resulting in a parallel present that has online
slave auctions. The newest CWAH is Underground Airlines, in which the war is never fought and slavery still exists in four states (I deal with Underground Airlines in chapter one.)51 These recent cynical CWAHs are the result of a modern preoccupation with the emancipationist legacy, which has made Southern victory CWAHs more dystopian than they used to be.
***
Alternate history is the confluence of history and literature because its premise requires and values the combination of research and creativity.52 Take Harry Turtledove’s The Guns of the
South, one of the most popular and well-known Civil War alternate histories, which I deal with
in more depth in chapter one. At 500 pages, the novel is a testament to the animating principle of alternate history that it attempts to bring the past to life through historical detail. Turtledove meticulously renders the 1860s for his reader, from the daily life of the 47th North Carolina regiment that is at the heart of his novel (one Confederate soldier carries with him a frying pan, letters from his mother, a blanket, a pocket Testament, a couple of reading primers, a second pair of socks, a toothbrush, and rations of corn bread and salt pork) to the breakfasting habits of Ulysses S. Grant (“[he] drank cup after cup of black coffee, sliced up a cucumber, dipped the
49 Suzette Haden Elgin, “Hush My Mouth,” in Alternative Histories: Eleven Stories of the World as It Might Have
Been, ed. Charles G Waugh and Martin Harry Greenberg (New York: Garland Pub., 1986).
50 Jack Womack, Terraplane: A Novel (New York: Weidenfeld & Nicholson, 1988).
51 Ben H. Winters, Underground Airlines (New York: Cornerstone Digital (Penguin Random House), 2016). 52 Katsman, 33.
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slices into vinegar, and ate them one after another, methodically, until they were all gone.”53 When a delegation of historical figures (Alexander Stephens, Judah Benjamin and Robert E. Lee for the Confederacy, versus Edwin Stanton, William H. Seward and Benjamin Butler for the Union) negotiate Northern surrender and the fate of the border states and territories after the war, Turtledove deals with the same political questions that journalists and historians deal with in their counterfactuals. But none of them do so in more vivid detail and with such care to bring to life his historical actors, so that their motivations as characters may add to the reader’s historical insight. Passages like these in The Guns of the South are why James M. McPherson has called the book “not simply great entertainment; it is also a serious and successful effort to come to grips with the central issues of the war.”54 It is this celebration of historical detail that makes AH as a genre so appealing to history buffs, and that makes it appear inconsequential or tedious to many others.55
Because they originate in a celebration of historical accuracy, fictional alternate histories, even if they feature unrealistically advanced technology and science like The Guns of the South, are still subject to demands of historical accuracy. In Turtledove’s novel, the Confederacy procures a supply of AK-47s from a time travelling group of South Africans. Turtledove
recounts with the same level of care and nuance a 1864 Confederate blacksmith’s efforts to trace the origin of the strange new weapon his side has been given and to replicate it with the
technology at his disposal in his own time. In the scene where Turtledove describes Grant’s unusual breakfast, the Union General is staying at an inn in Kentucky with General Lee from where they will oversee that state’s democratic election that will decide which of the two nations it will join—Union or Confederacy. That the same care is applied to the counterfactual elements of the story illustrates that the difference between allo-history and a-history is the deliberation behind the anachronism. Turtledove himself acknowledges this difference when he explains that the idea for the novel germinated in a fellow novelist’s complaint that the covert art for her new
53 Turtledove, The Guns of the South, 301.
54 James M. McPherson, qtd. in Harry Turtledove, The Guns of the South, back cover.
55 Alternate history in its typical form owes something to realism, especially, in the case of Civil War alternate
history, to the grim renderings of war of Stephen Crane’s Red Badge of Courage or Erich Remarque’s All Quiet on
the Western Front. The meticulous plotting of the average soldier’s experience in The Guns of the South appeals to
the same fanatic devotion to realism evident in Civil War reenactments that strive to make every aspect of their roleplay historically accurate. See Tony Horwitz, Confederates in the Attic: Dispatches from the Unfinished Civil
23
novel was “as anachronistic as Robert E. Lee holding an UZI.”56 Turtledove gives The Guns of
the South an explicit historical goal in the ‘historical notes’ he appends to the novel where he
places his portrayal of Lee in dialog with that of Thomas Connelly’s scholarly work The Marble
Man, which he calls “revisionist.”57 He also uses this appendix to explain the alternative results of the presidential election of 1864 (which Lincoln loses to Horatio Seymour.) “While The Guns
of the South is, of course, a work of fiction in every respect,” he explains that these invented
details have value because they “do reflect the confused political situation that would surely have existed in a United States that lost the Civil War.”58
Turtledove is a historian whose work lent a popularity to alternate history that helped it attract the attention of other historians. Some of these, like Niall Ferguson, would argue that Turtledove’s counterfactual (‘what if the Confederacy had AK-47s?’) is too ridiculous to result in any historical insight because it is utterly implausible. Nevertheless, the outlandish and improbable counterfactuals that Ferguson dismisses out of hand (he explains that “no sensible person wishes to know what would have happened in 1848 if the entire population of Paris had suddenly sprouted wings, as this is not a plausible scenario”) are judged by alternate history fans just as strictly—if not more strictly—than more plausible ones, because the challenge to
Turtledove and other authors is to recreate the past so faithfully that it can sustain the momentary insertion of the fantastical or absurd.59 To their authors and readers, these ludicrous historical
fantasies aspire to a form of historical truth that closely resembles the insight Ferguson hopes to find in counterfactual history, namely to grasp the dynamics of a time and place so fully that that any difference in the chain of cause and effect can be absorbed and accounted for, whether it is the wing flap of a butterfly or a Parisian. That fictional alternate histories introduce a kink in the chain that is often contrived or implausible heightens the sense that it is its consequences and not the POD itself that are the real measure of an alternate history.
The potential for absurdity in alternate history means that the genre’s second element— creativity—is in some sense unchecked. In practice, however, its creativity is determined by the derivate relationship it has to historical fact. Alternate history works from a reservoir of
56 Harry Turtledove, “Acknowledgements,” in The Guns of the South: A Novel of the Civil War (New York:
Ballantine Books, 1992), 557.
57 Harry Turtledove, “Historical Notes,” in The Guns of the South: A Novel of the Civil War (New York: Ballantine
Books, 1992), 559-61. 559.
58 Ibid., 561.
24
knowledge shared between writer and reader. In the case of CWAH, the history of the Civil War and its aftermath presents a catalog of recurring concepts, ideas, and images, large and small, including the abiding existence of slavery, the failure of Reconstruction, men in white masks holding burning crosses, etc., as well as narratives about a number of towering figures; Lee, Lincoln, Tubman, Brown, Douglass, etc. Taken as the stuff of alternate history, these ideas and figures become motifs that recur again and again in unexpected forms. Take for example, the famous story of Henry ‘Box’ Brown who mailed himself to freedom in a box in 1849. It is the kind of story that finds its way into alternate histories in altered form: In Ben H. Winters’
Underground Airlines, a FedEx employee is sent to prison after the body of a slave is found “in a
crate in a Cincinnati FedEx routing center, never delivered, substantially decayed.”60
The canon of the Civil War is a treasure trove of compelling ideas, images, figures, tropes and themes, well-established and free for the taking. In the story “If Grant had been drinking at Appomattox”, James Thurber needs only a few strokes to evoke the defeated party: “General Lee, dignified against the blue of the April sky, magnificent in his dress uniform, stood for a moment framed in the doorway.”61 In Thurber’s alternate history, the point of divergence is so slight that it can hardly even be called an alternate history: Grant is so drunk he thinks he has lost the war, and offers a confused Lee his sword with the words “If I'd been feeling better we would of licked you.”62 The change is slight and the story short, but the principles of alternate history
are at work here: Lee and Grant function as recognizable elements thrown for a loop. The best part of alternate history—the answer to ‘what if…?’—Thurber leaves to the audience’s own creativity.
In theory, Civil War alternate history could make a radical break with established events and chart an entirely new course of history, but out of nearly 150 CWAHS, I have found only a single one that seems to do this. For all their ingenuity, many CWAHs have a way of righting history even as they upset it. In Newt Gingrich’s “Civil War” trilogy, the Confederate win at Gettysburg turns out to be a Pyrrhic victory, illustrating that Northern superior force and resources were always going to decide the war in the North’s favor. In many alternate histories Texas secedes from the Confederacy, which I suspect has less to do with the likelihood of that
60 Winters, Underground Airlines, 41.
61 James Thurber, “If Grant Had Been Drinking at Appomattox,” Originally published in New Yorker, (December 6,
1930), http://www.shortstories.co.in/if-grant-had-been-drinking-at-appomattox/. Accessed August 20, 2016.
