October 3, 2007
Alternate Civil Wars Posted by Fredric Smoler at 09:55 AM EST Brisbane, Australia, is 14 hours ahead of the city in which I live, so getting up this morning to participate in a discussion on an Australian radio program meant a phone call at an early hour. But the topic, a question of alternate history, fascinates me, and the particular question—what would have happened had the United States lost the Civil War, and the Confederacy established itself—is one of the two hardiest counterfactuals in the canon of alternate history (the other is a victorious Hitler), so I was eager to see how Australian academics and radio hosts think about it. It turned out that the Australian historian thought that one effect would probably be a weaker and distinctly more isolationist United States. In the real world, where the United States is currently both hegemonic and interventionist, it is easy to see the fascination of an alternate historical path in which the United States is a backwater. But is an independent Confederacy really a plausible first step on such a path? A few months ago I blogged about the conclusion of Harry Turtledove’s 11-volume series of novels on a victorious Confederacy, and in November of 2005 I published an essay on this website on what was at that point the whole of the Turtledove cycle. Turtledove, as far as I know the best-selling American author of alternate history, offers a vividly imagined alternative to the view that a successful Confederacy would have meant the United States playing less of a role in world affairs. Turtledove assumes that the Confederacy would have won its independence because of British and French intervention, at least to block the United States’s naval blockade of the Confederacy. Since the blockade was a crucial part of the Anaconda Plan that in real history did finally strangle the rebellion, British and French intervention does seem a likely part of any Confederate victory. It is Turtledove’s great insight that this would have plausibly entailed the swift entry of both the United States and the Confederacy into the European balance of power, soon to change because of the rise of the newly unified German empire. In Turtledove’s world, the Confederacy becomes an Entente ally, the United States in reaction a German ally, and when the First World War breaks out, it extends to this continent. Trench warfare sets in, and the United States slowly and gruelingly conquers Canada and is eventually successful against the C.S.A., taking Kentucky, Oklahoma and part of Texas. Defeat radicalizes the C.S.A., which over the next two decades becomes a state reminiscent of Nazi Germany, and when the Second World War breaks out, it, too, extends to this hemisphere, and ends with the final conquest of the C.S.A. The Australian academic seemed to think that the rump United States left after a Confederate victory would have had the relative power of Canada. That seems a bad guess. The current United States is five times as populous as Britain or France, and if, as seems extremely likely, the rump U.S.A. would have continued to industrialize and to have had around three times the population of the C.S.A., a fully-mobilized rump-U.S.A. would still have dwarfed the military power of any other belligerent during the First World War. A world in which the United States was actively engaged in international politics before 1890 would certainly have been very different from either real history or history as imagined on today’s radio program. It is Turtledove’s insight that the Allies might well have lost both world wars with the United States divided, but that the European powers that might have succumbed to fascism in such a world would not necessarily have been the ones who were so infected in the actual world. The phone connection to Australia was shaky, and they dropped me from the show after 20 minutes, so I never got to hear whether the Australians thought the C.S.A. would have abolished slavery on its own. In Turtledove’s world, that is what happens, and a lot of alternate Civil War histories assume the same thing. I’m not so sure. The academic work that won William Fogel a Nobel Prize demonstrated that American slavery was increasingly profitable. Bruce Catton reviewed that work for American Heritage, and I later interviewed William Fogel for the magazine on a different subject. Since slavery was profitable, maybe it would have continued. Had it done so on the eve of the European conquest of most of the world, the example of successful race-based slavery in an apparently modern society (the C.S.A.) might have made European imperialism even uglier. One of the greatest works of alternate history, S. M. Stirling’s Draka trilogy, anatomizes an illiberal and deeply racist modern society with what is in effect slave-manned industry. How plausible was such a future? There is evidence on both sides, and Stirling’s trilogy caused some bitter disputes. A lot of people want to imagine that an irresistible course of history doomed the C.S.A. and slavery. There is a good chance that Grant and Sherman were the ones who accomplished that, and that they could have failed, with very, very bad consequences. So I certainly wish that phone line to Brisbane had held up—I’d love to know where the Australians think that alternate path could have ended.
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