pp61-74

first published in Steam Engine Time 2, November 2001

I

History changes in thousands of ways every moment of every day. Most changes are small, but occasionally we can see one moment around which the whole fate of the world has hinged. Some chance has briefly interfered with the vast agenda of history, some decision was not made, some unlikely action was taken, and as a result things are perhaps better than they might have been, perhaps worse, but clearly different.

Writers are fascinated by such turning points, and so are historians (especially military historians, since the unpredictable confusions of battle provide a perfect arena for such workings of chance and human error). They return to them constantly, exploring the might-have-beens that such changes expose. It is an endeavour that brings together science fiction writers and historians, though their efforts may not be quite as similar as they appear on the surface.

The terms ‘alternate history’ and ‘counterfactual’ have tended to be used indiscriminately, but in this article I intend to use them to signify two very different types of work. Novelists are primarily interested in exploring the consequences of change. They want a reasonably realistic turning point from which they can construct a new history, then set their ‘alternate histories’ some way after the moment at which history diverged from the path we are familiar with. Thus, in one admittedly extreme example of the sub-genre, Pavane, Keith Roberts might take as his turning point a Spanish victory in the Armada of 1588, but his novel explores the consequent world in the 1960s. Historians, however, tend to be primarily interested in the process of change. They want to examine in detail how and why history took the path it did and how easily it might have been deflected. Such counterfactuals are almost invariably set around the moment of change, employ no character who was not in the historical record, and refer to the consequential history that flows from this moment of change, if at all, as an afterthought.

Nevertheless, novelists and historians alike tend to turn again and again to the same few hinge moments. The First World War, for example, devastating as it was for the history of the Twentieth Century, has attracted very few counterfactual examinations. For the historian, after the first few weeks it offered little in the way of decisive moments that might have radically affected the outcome; for the novelist, it offers no realistic turning point from which to build a dramatically different history. The result of the Second World War, in contrast, hung in dramatic balance on many an occasion and might easily have gone either way, giving historians considerable ground for investigation; while the adversaries had such different aims in fighting the war, and the world resulting from it might have been so different, that it has sparked a whole library of alternate histories. After the Second World War, the event that has generated most alternate histories and counterfactuals has been the American Civil War. There are many reasons for this. The workings of chance seem to have played a major rôle in the outcome of an inordinate number of battles; the war produced an extraordinary number of romantic or tragic heroes, such as Robert E. Lee and Abraham Lincoln, who inevitably attract the attention of novelists; and the issue of slavery made that war instrumental in establishing the moral shape of the post-war world. In this essay I want to look at what both these forms of imaginative literature, the alternate history and the counterfactual, tell us about what happened and what might have been.

Of course, the most radical alternative history of the Civil War is to imagine that it never actually took place.

II

In the early hours of 4th July 1859 a tall, white-haired man as old as the century rode into the small Virginia town of Harpers Ferry with 19 companions, including several of his sons and a 39-year-old black woman who had once been a slave in Maryland. The old man was John Brown, a charismatic figure with a bloody history who believed he had a divine mission to bring God’s righteous wrath upon the perpetrators of the sin of slavery. The black woman was Harriet Tubman, who had helped mastermind the underground railways that spirited hundreds of escaped slaves to the safety of Canada, and who provided the strategic genius that John Brown lacked. Their target in Harpers Ferry was the Federal arsenal, and capturing it easily they had the arms they needed to foment a slave rebellion and establish a new land for the escaped slaves in the mountains of Virginia and Maryland.

That, at least, was John Brown’s plan, and in Fire on the Mountain, Terry Bisson imagines that it all worked out this way. From such beginnings a very different history develops, for there is no Civil War and in place of the putative Confederacy a Black Utopia is created in the Southern States. The story of Brown’s successful raid, told through the memoirs of Dr Abraham, who was at the time a young slave caught up in the rebellion, forms only one strand of Bisson’s novel. The most dramatic strand, certainly, but not really the most interesting. That honour lies with the story of Yasmin Martin Odinga, Abraham’s great-granddaughter, and her daughter Harriet, as they cross this new land to donate Abraham’s memoirs to the Harpers Ferry museum while at the same time coming to terms with the death of Yasmin’s husband on the Pan-African space expedition to Mars. This gives us a fascinating glimpse of a rich, peaceful nation that has risen to become a leading force in a new world grouping of black nations – the contrast with Churchill’s English-speaking Union (which we’ll come to later) is worth noting: the victor in whatever mid-century conflict actually occurs is clearly destined to be a leading world player in the next century.

Not that it happened like this. Tubman was ill and could not accompany Brown, the raid was postponed repeatedly and did not happen until 16th October. Brown and his companions quickly seized the arsenal and took around 60 hostages, including the grandson of George Washington. But the raid ran out of steam. No slaves rose in revolt. Local militia surrounded the defensive positions Brown had taken up, and the next day were reinforced by a company of US Marines led by Colonel Robert E. Lee. (Surprisingly, perhaps, no-one has contemplated what might have happened if Lee had been killed at Harpers Ferry, though a Civil War without the iconic figure of Lee might have been less fascinating.) In the end, Brown surrendered and, after a peremptory trial, was executed on 2nd December 1859.

Clearly, the Black Utopia and the contrast it presents to what actually happened is what really interests Bisson. But attractive as such an outcome might be, it’s not very likely that Brown’s raid would have succeeded under any circumstances. Nearly 30 years earlier, in August 1831, a black slave named Nat Turner led the bloodiest slave revolt in American history (in the same year that Fire on the Mountain came out, Bisson published a biography of Turner). Turner was eventually defeated and hanged, but Southern whites were left with the conviction that their slaves might at any moment rise up against them. The same conviction must have held sway among abolitionists, for Brown seems to have fondly imagined that simply turning up in Harpers Ferry would be sufficient to light the fire of rebellion. He seems to have done nothing to prepare the slaves for this uprising. Even the redoubtable Harriet Tubman is unlikely to have compensated for Brown’s lack of any leadership qualities, especially since the army (officered mostly by Southerners and under a lacklustre but pro-Southern administration) would inevitably have been called on to quash what would at best have been an ill-disciplined, ill-armed and ill-led army.

Attractive as Bisson’s optimistic vision might be, therefore, it is probable that Brown’s raid could have had no other outcome than to increase the distrust between North and South which would, a year later, see the Democratic Party hopelessly split and Lincoln elected president. A growing number of Southern states chose to secede, then, during the dying days of Buchanan’s indolent presidency, a crisis was manufactured at Fort Sumter in the harbour at Charleston, South Carolina. No alternate historian has imagined a different spark to light the fire of Civil War, perhaps because the occasion itself made no difference: if it had not been Sumter there were tinderboxes aplenty lying around.

III

In the tenth anniversary issue of MHQ: The Quarterly Journal of Military History, historians were asked for the most important might-have-beens of military history, and their answers have been expanded into the volume What If? This collection of counterfactuals considers a number of turning points during the Civil War, examined by two of the finest of contemporary Civil War historians, Stephen W. Sears and James M. McPherson. The earliest, suggested by Sears in ‘A Confederate Cannae and Other Scenarios’, happened in the first major battle of the war, Manassas. Troops on both sides were untried, the Union had the better of things at first and either side might have broken, but at a crucial point Confederate General Thomas Jackson held his Virginians, earning his nickname, ‘Stonewall’, and ensuring that the South won. But what might have happened if the bullet that nicked Jackson during this battle had actually killed him? Where the demoralised Union troops had the formidable defences of Washington to retreat behind, the Confederates had no such defensive positions in their rear. Had they been the ones to break and run, the rout would probably have been far more cataclysmic. For a start, since Jefferson Davies had ridden out the day before to observe the battle, there is a good chance that he would have been captured. The North seems to have been in a far better position to withstand a defeat at this stage in the War than the South, and the likelihood is that a defeat at Bull Run would have impelled the Confederacy to seek terms, leaving Lincoln with practically a full presidential term in which to find a solution to the slavery problem from a far stronger position than the North had ever enjoyed before.

IV

Alas, things did not turn out this way, and the War settled down to curious stalemate for the rest of the year. Towards the end of the year, two Confederate agents, Mason and Slidell, bound respectively for England and France, slipped out of the country the Federal blockade. In Havana, on Friday 8th November, they boarded the British mail ship Trent, but later that day the Trent was stopped by the Union ship San Jacinto in the Bahamas Passage and the two Confederate agents were illegally taken as prisoners. Thus began the gravest international incident faced by Lincoln. The British came within an ace of declaring war, and actually sent 11,000 troops to reinforce their existing garrison in Canada. Eleven thousand troops would have made little difference against the hundreds of thousands already engaged in the Civil War, but a second front coupled with the international recognition and arming of the Confederacy that would have inevitably resulted would have presented the Union with a major and possibly insoluble problem.

Strangely, only Harry Harrison has explored the alternate history possibilities offered by this incident, in Stars and Stripes Forever  and its sequel Stars and Stripes in Peril, and he has chosen to ignore the realistic prospects of the Union fighting two enemies. Instead, refusing the obvious course of a joint operation by Britain and the Confederacy, he has Britain launch an ill-judged attack against what turns out to be a Confederate position, and rather than have them admit the error (for such things do indeed happen in war), Harrison assumes that the British would unilaterally declare war on the Confederacy instead. Out of this farrago of nonsense, the possibilities of the scenario are thrown away in favour of an instant rapprochement between Union and Confederacy in which historical likelihood is ignored and the silliness escalates until by the second volume the re-United States invades Ireland.

What actually happened was that Lincoln quietly released Mason and Slidell and apologised to Britain, and the War went on much as before.

V

As the winter of 1861-62 came to an end, McClellan’s Army of the Potomac had been vastly reinforced, resupplied, trained and disciplined. In the spring, McClellan sailed his entire army down to the point of the James peninsula and – after a delay during which Confederate General Magruder marched his tiny force in a huge circle in and out of woodland so that the Federals became convinced they were opposed by a far larger force than they actually were – set out to march towards Richmond, actually coming within the sound of Richmond’s church bells. At Fair Oaks, on the last day of May, the Confederate commander, Joseph E. Johnston, was wounded and command passed to Robert E. Lee. (An interesting counterfactual proposition: what if Johnston had not been wounded? Could McClellan have won?) Lee’s record to this date had not been distinguished, but he quickly proved his worth in late June when he faced McClellan in a series of battles known as the Seven Days. Strictly speaking, McClellan won most of these battles, but he was nevertheless forced to withdraw steadily. On the sixth day, at White Oak Swamp, Confederates under General James Longstreet came within an ace of splitting the Union army, and would have done so had Stonewall Jackson pressed an attack upon the Union rear guard. Instead Jackson, exhausted after his brilliant campaign in the Shenandoah Valley, had fallen asleep under a tree and the attack was not pressed. McClellan withdrew his forces intact to Malvern Hill and lived to fight another day.

Sears imagines what might have happened if Jackson had done the sensible thing the day before to ensure that he was mentally and physically fit for the battle at White Oak Swamp. Assuming McClellan’s army had indeed been split in two and destroyed piecemeal, it would have been devastating for the Union cause. Nothing but an inadequate force under John Pope stood between Lee and Washington. The result would almost certainly have been a Confederate victory. Unfortunately, the day before had been a Sunday and Jackson was a religious fanatic who followed a very strict regime every Sunday of his life; the sleep he needed would have meant abandoning that habit, and Jackson was never going to do that. So McClellan kept his army intact, and though Lee was able to achieve a stunning victory over Pope at the Second Battle of Manassas, there was still a viable Union army to take into account when Lee decided that now was the time to carry the war to the North.

VI

Now occurs one of the most intriguing incidents in the whole war, and a gift to every alternate historian. On the morning of 13th September an Indiana corporal, Barton W. Mitchell, discovered a bulky package lying in a field of clover. The package contained three cigars which were wrapped in a copy of Lee’s Special Order No. 191, which detailed his strategic plans for the coming campaign, including the fact that he was going to split his forces. The Orders made their way up the Union chain of command (the cigars disappeared from history) and if the Union commander had been anyone other than McClellan they would have presented a unique opportunity to destroy the Confederate army. McClellan, however, hesitated, and when the Battle of Antietam was finally joined, Lee was in a position to concentrate most of his forces for what would be the bloodiest day in American history. Even though he handled the battle with an ineptitude that was unusual even for him, McClellan still had the edge and was able to claim victory.

But for those lost orders, it might all have been so different. James M. McPherson presents a very cogent counterfactual analysis in ‘If the Lost Order hadn’t been Lost’. Interestingly, he sees Lee reuniting his army and continuing north, shadowed by McClellan, who is reluctant to bring on a battle, until the two armies finally come together in a place where hills and ridges give Lee the perfect ground to concentrate his forces, Gettysburg. The resultant battle, a mirror image of the one that would actually be fought there a year later, results in the destruction of McClellan’s army. McPherson imagines McClellan himself being killed in a last ditch effort to rally his troops. Northern congressional elections that November sweep the Peace Democrats into office, and Britain (where William Gladstone declared that the South ‘have made an army; they are making, it appears, a navy; and they have made what is more than either, they have made a nation’) not only recognises the Confederacy but also forces the North to the negotiating table.

Harry Turtledove, in How Few Remain,  has an alternate historical take on much the same scenario (except for the nicety of the final battle being fought at Gettysburg). In this scenario, the post-War division of the country is unsatisfactory on both sides, finally prompting a second Civil War in the 1880s, with a young Theodore Roosevelt leading troops as pugnaciously as he did in real life and an old Abraham Lincoln touring the country to lecture on what seems suspiciously close to socialism. That Turtledove has extrapolated from Lincoln’s stated views and come so convincingly to this position is one of the most interesting things about a book that is, in the end, unsatisfactory. The second Civil War is inconclusive, and the novel as a whole seems to exist mostly to act as a curtain-raiser for his alternate version of the First World War begun with American Front (1998).

The lost orders alone were not the only significant counterfactual aspect of Antietam. McClellan’s slender victory was enough for Lincoln to issue, on 22nd September 1862, the Emancipation Proclamation, which dramatically changed the nature of the War. Despite the limitations of the Proclamation – it applied only to slaves in those territories where Lincoln’s writ did not actually reach – the Civil War was transformed, at a stroke, into a war to free the slaves. Lee had begun the Antietam campaign in the confident and probably correct belief that one more victory would be enough to win recognition from Britain and France. Now, it would be morally and politically impossible for Britain or France to come out in support of a slaveholding power against a nation striving to free the slaves. Outright military victory was now the only option open to the South.

VII

Not that military victory seemed out of the question. Despite a succession of generals replacing the hopeless McClellan, Lincoln was unable to find any who might achieve victory against the magical Lee. The closest came, as Sears suggests, at Chancellorsville in early May 1863. A new Union commander, ‘Fighting’ Joe Hooker, had tricked the Confederates with a feint at Fredericksburg, then had brought his army across the Rappahannock and was threatening Lee’s flank. Lee did what he always did in such circumstances: he split his force, sending Jackson on a wide flanking manoeuvre. Jackson’s advance was seen by Union pickets, and Sears imagines that Union communications behaved as they were meant to, that General O.O. Howard acted with unusual attention to detail, that General John Reynolds received the order which anchored his Corps on the right flank of the army. Had all happened as Hooker indeed expected, Chancellorsville could easily have turned into a Union victory. After this, Sears imagines Hooker sending Lee’s broken army reeling back to a series of bitter engagements all the way from Fredericksburg to Richmond, a sequence of events uncannily like those followed by Grant just a year later (while Grant himself performs the Sherman rôle out in the West), but with Hooker emerging as the national hero and future president, the War shortened by twelve months, a few hundred thousand men avoiding an untimely death, and the course of history not really all that much different.

But Hooker was never that lucky. Instead Howard was unprepared, there were gaps in the Union line, and Hooker himself was dazed when a cannonball struck his headquarters and was not in effective command for much of the battle. Only one thing spoiled the victory for Lee: Stonewall Jackson was killed by his own men after riding ahead of his lines during the night. This precipitated a reorganisation in the Army of Northern Virginia and the elevation of new generals who would be uncertain in their new commands when facing their greatest test barely two months later. For Chancellorsville didn’t just prompt Lincoln to put yet another general in command, this time the doughty George Meade, it also persuaded Lee that the time was ripe for another invasion of the North. The two armies shadowed each other on either side of the Blue Ridge Mountains (where John Brown had once dreamed of establishing his kingdom of freed slaves) until they emerged, almost by accident, to face each other at Gettysburg.

VIII

Spread across the first three days of July, Gettysburg was the greatest battle of the Civil War. It was here that the Confederate dream died, and the Lost Cause was born. Yet it was an accidental battle, unplanned by the generals on either side; and throughout the three days there were so many incidents that seemed to owe more to chance than anything else, so many occasions where a minute either side might have changed the outcome,  so many opportunities seized or thrown away by an instant’s decision or indecision. What if J.E.B. Stuart had brought his cavalry and his intelligence to Lee a day earlier? What if Ewell had seized Culp’s Hill when Lee wanted? What if Lee had listened to Longstreet’s suggestion that they move between Meade and Washington? What if Warren hadn’t noticed that Little Round Top was undefended, or Chamberlain hadn’t ordered his unlikely bayonet charge when his men were out of ammunition? What if Ulric Dahlgren hadn’t seized those Confederate papers that told Meade exactly what he was facing? Above all, what if Pickett’s Charge had consolidated its breakthrough and the iconic ‘high water mark of the Confederacy’ hadn’t been repulsed? Gettysburg is a battle that inevitably raises all of these and many other questions, which is why it has proved such a magnet to alternate historians and counterfactualists: there is so much ammunition for them here.

Peter G. Tsouras provides a counterfactual examination of all these questions and more in his book-length study Gettysburg: An Alternate History . Strangely, those changes that happen early in the battle – Stuart’s arrival, Ewell’s assault on Culp’s Hill which is first delayed then repulsed, Longstreet’s march around the Round Tops, which becomes bogged down when part of his force is withdrawn to deal with Sickles’s advance into the Devil’s Den – result in little overall difference in the character of the battle. One cannot help but question whether such major changes would have had such little result, or whether the alternate history has not been subtly massaged to allow all the counterfactual possibilities from the entire three days of the battle to be brought into one consistent account. Certainly, all is still in place to permit the romantic and iconic climax of Pickett’s Charge. The result, strangely, is a Union victory still. Though Tsouras mauls the Union army badly and brings it close to defeat several times he seems to be suggesting that nothing Lee or Longstreet might have done could have affected the eventual outcome. It is said that in military colleges around the world, whenever the Battle of Waterloo is replayed it invariably results in a victory for Napoleon. For most alternate historians, Gettysburg is a similar instance: all the opportunities missed were missed by Lee and his underlings, all the opportunities seized were seized by the Union. If there is to be any change in the roll of the dice, therefore, it is going to come out favouring the Confederacy – why undertake the exercise of changing history if you are not actually going to change history (a question we might well ask of George Alec Effinger shortly)? And just as, in our world, Gettysburg was a decisive victory that virtually guaranteed an eventual Union win, so, for everyone except Tsouras, a counterfactual Gettysburg remains equally decisive and results in the Confederates winning the war.

Of course, few alternate historians, or even other counterfactualists, deem it necessary to throw in quite so many turning points. Sir Winston Churchill’s curious essay-story, ‘If Lee had not Won the Battle of Gettysburg’, seems to occupy ground midway between counterfactual and alternate history. Here, briefly, we learn that Warren failed to reinforce the Round Tops in time, fatally weakening the Union line so that Pickett’s Charge was effectively unopposed. The battle itself, however, is over in moments in Churchill’s account, though he spends a little bit more time on the peace. Churchill shrewdly presents a Lee who is, through circumstance, in a far more powerful position than any Confederate politician, and uses that position to unilaterally end slavery. This is shrewd for two reasons: in person, Lee was at best ambivalent about slavery and in the last months of the war outraged his political masters by proposing that slaves should be freed in order to recruit blacks into the Confederate army, so this is indeed the sort of thing he might do (we’ll see shortly that Harry Turtledove follows the same sort of logic in The Guns of the South); and, in the wake of the Emancipation Proclamation, some such gesture would have been necessary if the Confederacy was not to have been considered a pariah among nations. Nevertheless, it is unlikely to have worked because many of the most powerful Southern politicians were so adamant in their opposition to abolition that certain states actually came close to seceding from the Confederacy late in the war because Jefferson Davis was making half-hearted comments about compromise, and they would easily have been able to overturn Lee’s declaration. Still, if we allow this conceit, we find that Churchill’s work is actually very little about the effects of these events upon America, but rather how they changed British political history: the great Tory Prime Minister Disraeli becomes a leader of the radicals, the great radical Gladstone becomes the leader of the Conservatives.

On the whole, Churchill is comfortable with the idea of a Southern victory. He imagines that with two roughly equal powers in America neither would assume the economic dominance that the USA achieved during the latter part of the Nineteenth Century, so Britain remains top dog. Alternate historians on the whole, however, tend not to be so optimistic. One otherwise fairly insignificant story, ‘A Place to Stand’ by William H. Keith, Jr., will serve as an exemplar. A traveller from the future persuades his younger self, a frightened new recruit to an Alabama regiment, that he has a chance to change the course of the battle and guarantee a Confederate victory by shooting the commander of the 20th Maine, Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain, at a vital moment during the assault on Little Round Top, and by so doing prevent all the wrongs of Reconstruction. The youth does so, the battle is won, and the time traveller returns to reveal that the consequences of changing history are far, far worse than Reconstruction, for it sets the scene for other secessions until the former USA is thoroughly Balkanised ‘… and mankind will stand at the dizzying precipice of century upon century of unrelenting, unforgiving war, a new Dark Age of death and blood and utter barbarism.’ (p51).

Few would go that far, but in general alternate historians see a Southern victory as undoubtedly a bad thing, as it is for instance in the finest of all alternate history novels, Ward Moore’s Bring the Jubilee. Moore begins as Churchill did by plunging us straight into a world in which the Confederacy had won at Gettysburg, but the rough parity between the new nations that seems to lie behind Churchill’s vision is not present here. On the model of Germany after the First World War, the North has been saddled with crippling reparations which have ruined the economy. Moreover a whistlestop tour of the North’s post-war political history demonstrates how this bleak economic situation might have been further exacerbated:

The postwar inflation entered the galloping stage during the Vallandigham Administration, became dizzying in the time of President Seymour and precipitated the food riots of 1873 and ’74. It was only after the election of President Butler … that money and property became stable. (p14)

Vallandigham was Clement L. Vallandigham, a Northern Democrat devoted to the Southern cause who was briefly imprisoned and then exiled for his activities among what were called the Copperheads, those who worked underground in the North to engineer a Southern victory at any cost. Seymour was Horatio Seymour, the Democrat Governor of New York who supported the war but opposed most of the measures Lincoln introduced in order to pursue it, such as the draft and the Emancipation Proclamation. Butler was General Benjamin Butler, a Democrat politician who supported the war and became an incompetent general; after Lincoln, he was probably the most hated man in the South following his role as military governor in New Orleans. In a defeated North, these are not only probable presidents, but by what they represent they provide a telling portrait of the country, moving from initial slavish submission to the South to a wily independence.

Political and economic decline have been matched by a social collapse. In the 1930s and 40s, when the novel is set, life in the USA is portrayed as largely rural, with isolated communities and a dependence still on the horse and the blacksmith. The common attitudes are a reflection of the perceived values of the dominant South, with an antipathy towards blacks and abolitionists that matches that expressed during the New York City draft riots of mid-July 1863, and in many Northern industrial centres after emancipation. It is notable, for instance, that the only significant black character in the book is Rene Enfandin, the Consul for Haiti, indicating that any measure of racial equality can exist only outside the Americas. The first part of the novel tells of the odyssey of Hodgins Backmaker (who does, indeed, make the world back to what it should have been) through the underworld of the North, allowing him to meet Confederate agents, underground agitators, foreign observers and those who are quite content with their lot. The kaleidoscopic impressions they convey tell us a lot about the world, though Moore tells us most through subtle remarks that mean more the more we know about American politics during the early years of the century:

From the first it was apparent the unpredictable electorate preferred Dewey to Lewis. State after state, hitherto staunchly Populist, turned to the Whigs for the first time since William Hale Thompson defeated President Thomas R. Marshall back in 1920 and again Alfred E. Smith in 1924. (p57)

But the novel is also a quest: Hodge’s quest for education in a world without the resources or the interest to provide it for any other than the rich. As an auto-didact, he is eventually taken up by a curious establishment that seems to be part college, part commune, and here by chance a time machine is invented. Hodge, the historian, of course travels back to witness the key moment in the War of Southron Independence – and finds himself accidentally delaying by a few precious moments the Southern advance upon Little Round Top. The rest was our history.

IX

In his alternate history travesty, Stars and Stripes Forever, Harry Harrison has P.T. Beauregard and William Tecumseh Sherman agreeing to re-unite the Confederate and Union armies against the common enemy at Shiloh. With that slight exception, all the alternate histories and counterfactuals examined so far have taken the Eastern Theatre as their stage. While all these twists and turns in history were taking place, Ulysses S. Grant was winning a series of solid victories at Forts Henry and Donaldson, at Shiloh, and most spectacularly at Vicksburg (whose Confederate defenders surrendered the day after the victory at Gettysburg); Nathan Bedford Forest was causing havoc in the rear of Union lines and earning a reputation as perhaps the most brilliant of all cavalry commanders in the war; Admiral David Glasgow Farragut was damning the torpedoes at Mobile Bay as the Union navy took a stranglehold on the Confederacy. All of this was dramatic enough, but there was a sense that events moved by forces other than mere chance. Grant and his successor in the West, Sherman, may have made the eventual Union victory inevitable, but in the main the turning points of the war just did not happen here.

Sears examines one possible turning point in the West. In August 1863, as his battered army was recovering from the mauling it had received at Gettysburg, Lee was offered command of the Army of Tennessee. In a brilliant campaign, Federal General Rosecrans had manoeuvred the Confederates out of Tennessee and on to Chattanooga without once having to fight a major battle. Lee would have replaced Confederate General Bragg, but he refused, and instead Longstreet was despatched West in a subsidiary role to Bragg. Longstreet arrived just in time to play a major part in the spectacular Confederate victory at Chickamauga (the only significant Confederate victory in the West), but Bragg didn’t follow up his victory. Grant replaced Rosecrans, broke the siege of Chattanooga, then defeated Bragg’s army in a battle noted for the spontaneous and overwhelmingly successful Union advance up Missionary Ridge.

What, Sears asks, if Lee had agreed to go West? Lee would not have failed to follow up the victory at Chickamauga, so Chattanooga would have quickly fallen and the Confederacy would have extended into strategically and politically important Tennessee once more. But Lee would not have been allowed to stay long in the West, he was too important in the East, and Grant would have been quickly able to recover any Confederate gains. The net result, therefore, would have been no real difference, which seems to be a common feature of any Western counterfactual (see George Alec Effinger’s Look Away), which probably explains why so many alternate historians have concentrated on the East.

X

After Ward Moore’s Bring the Jubilee, the finest Civil War alternate history is undoubtedly Harry Turtledove’s The Guns of the South, and like its predecessor it combines alternate history with time travel. By this point – May 1864 – Grant has been promoted to the newly re-created rank of Lieutenant General and has been placed in command of all the Union armies. Lee knows that, while he might delay Grant, he has little real hope now of winning. Into this milieu arrive a group of time-travelling white South Africans bearing AK-47s as a gift for the Confederate Army. They have chosen this late point in the war as one that will give them the greatest leverage in achieving their aims: the establishment of a powerful slave-owning state. Neither Lee nor the Confederate Army is in a position to look a gift horse in the mouth, and when Grant finally does march his army across the Rappahannock and into the Wilderness he finds an enemy with an unbeatable advantage. (Almost incidentally, the AK-47s rid the Civil War of one of its most terrible moments: the Battle of the Wilderness was fought in dense woodland that was bone dry, and sparks from the muskets used by both sides set the undergrowth alight. Hundreds of wounded caught between the lines burned to death that night.)

As in most alternate histories, the real interest in The Guns of the South lies in what happens after the Union and Confederacy have agreed peace terms, but in this instance, unusually, the concentration is upon what happens in the victorious South rather than the defeated North. In one aspect, Turtledove’s vision is close to Ward Moore’s, for in the Northern election of November 1864 he has Lincoln defeated by Horatio Seymour, with Clement Vallandigham as his Vice President. In the main, however, Turtledove’s view of the post-war world is much closer to Churchill’s (if we omit Churchill’s concentration on the details of British politics). Although we only see the North obliquely, we do know that, unlike Ward Moore, Turtledove has not assumed that the North is saddled with crippling reparations. Hence, despite a pro-South government, there is no reason to suggest that the North’s industrial capacity would be damaged and we end up with the suggestion, much like Churchill’s and unlike Turtledove’s own later notions in How Few Remain, of two powers of roughly equal status. Moreover, Turtledove’s reading of Lee’s character is much like Churchill’s: a clear-headed, practical man who saw the ending of slavery as the only way forward for his country. When Lee is elected President after Davis (and if the South really had won, it is difficult to imagine any circumstances in which this might not have happened, unless Lee’s health got in the way – he had a couple of heart attacks during the War, one in the lead-up to Gettysburg, and died in 1870), this inevitably brings him into conflict with the South Africans (who are backed by Nathan Bedford Forest, and, since Forest was the founder and first Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan, this is a very likely pairing). The advantage of The Guns of the South being a time travel story rather than a pure alternate history is not just that it initiates the change, but it allows Lee to discover what really happened, allowing histories to be compared within the novel and also teaching Lee about the Crater, which gives him the idea for one of the tactics he employs in his war to recover his country.

XI

At such a late stage in the war, only the deus ex machina of ahistorical weapons such as the AK-47s allows Turtledove to change history enough for the South to win. By now, though it still has nearly a year to run, the course of the war is clear and it would take something drastic to shift it from its inevitable end. If the great turning-point battles of Antietam and Gettysburg have attracted most alternate histories and counterfactuals, the brutal blood-letting of Grant’s Virginia Campaign doesn’t seem to offer any other outcome. In a curious novella, Look Away, George Alec Effinger presents one of the very rare alternate histories set in the Western Theatre. In this world the European Powers have united to create a peacekeeping force on the model of the United Nations, and we see their blue-topped wagons in action at Sherman’s siege of Atlanta, but as with their present-day equivalents, these peacekeepers are helpless, Atlanta falls, Sherman marches to the sea, and nothing changes.  It is virtually unheard of for an alternate history to change nothing, but it is perhaps a tacit admission by Effinger that at this late stage and in that theatre nothing could change.

There is, too, a last counterfactual flourish from Sears, who wonders if Lincoln might have lost the November 1864 election. In choosing George McClellan as their candidate, the Democrats had given themselves a good chance, which they immediately threw away with an anti-war platform that even McClellan could not support. Nevertheless, only a string of Union victories, most notably Sherman’s capture of Atlanta, threw things decisively Lincoln’s way. If, however, the Democrats had adopted a moderate pro-war platform, Sears suggests, they might well have carried the day, even after Sherman’s victory. But if McClellan did find himself in the White House come March 1865, with the pro-war policy that took him there he would have done no different from Lincoln, and the war would have ended much as it indeed did.

And so, whether Lincoln or McClellan held the reins of power, Sherman would complete his march through Georgia, then cut a destructive swathe through the Carolinas. Grant, meanwhile, would quietly force Lee to keep spreading his ever-depleting forces along ever-longer lines around Petersburg. Something had to give, on 1st April, 1865 Lee’s flank finally collapsed, on 3rd April Richmond was abandoned, and Grant set out in pursuit of the remnants of Lee’s army. On Saturday 8th April, Grant had a dreadful headache when a messenger arrived under a flag of truce bearing Lee’s offer to surrender. The headache disappeared instantly. The two generals met the next day in the parlour of Wilbur MacLean, who had moved to the little town of Appomattox Court House in 1861 to escape the war, after the battle of Bull Run had been fought, as he put it, in his back yard.

However, the war cannot be allowed to end without one final alternate historical delight. James Thurber wrote ‘If Grant had been Drinking at Appomattox’ as a direct response to Churchill’s piece. In this brief but typically hilarious tale he imagines that Grant, a notorious hard drinker, was rather the worse for wear when he met Lee at Appomattox Court House. After a rambling discussion, during which Grant mistakes Lee for the poet Robert Browning, he is finally reminded of the surrender:

‘Oh sure, sure,’ said Grant. He took another drink. ‘All right,’ he said ‘Here we go.’ Slowly, sadly, he unbuckled his sword. Then he handed it to toe astonished Lee. ‘There you are, General,’ said Grant. ‘We dam’ near licked you. If I’d been feeling better we would of licked you.’ (p173)