Winning the Civil War - and other speculative fictions

By D. G. Martin
Posted Tuesday, November 13, 2007

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Chapel Hill, NC - What if the South had won the Civil War? What kind of country would we live in now?

White Southerners, often the “unreconstructed” ones, have dreamed about the reversal of their “Lost Cause” defeat and speculated that things might have been much different, maybe even much better, if the “War of Northern Aggression” had turned out differently.

If there were a serious conference entitled “Speculation on the South” that examined “fiction and non-fiction that conjectured on what would have happened if the South had won the Civil War,” you might expect a crowd of those unreconstructed ones to attend and dream together about the lost glory.

If one of the featured speakers was the co-author with Newt Gingrich of “Gettysburg,” a book that has Lee’s army winning this critical battle, you might think this conference would be full of “rebel yells.”

Well, the truth is, first, there was a “Speculation on the South” conference last week. But, second, there were no rebel yells. The conference organizer, the Institute of African American Research, a part of UNC-Chapel Hill, aimed the conference offerings at a much different audience. Adherents of the Lost Cause would have felt very much out of place.

They might be stirred by the description of victory in “Gettysburg.” But as Gingrich’s co-author, William R. Forstchen, an associate professor at Montreat College, explained, that group would be very disappointed in the ultimate fictional result constructed by Gingrich and Forstchen. In their final volume, Lee loses big time to Grant, and the war ends even earlier that it did in real history.

There was no way the South could have won the war, Forstchen argued at the conference. It was a contest between two nations, one of which was industrialized, the other pre-industrial. The South’s capital investments were in slaves; the North put its resources in more efficient railroads and machinery. The railroads delivered the North’s troops speedily from one part of the country to the other quickly, giving it an important tactical and strategic advantage. The North’s machinery not only gave it advantages in weaponry. The mechanization of factory production and agriculture meant that legions of men could be diverted from these occupations to the battlefield without a serious decline in production.

Another author, science fiction writer Terry Bisson, took the conference in another direction. The question, he asserted, should not be “What if the South had won?” The so-called losers (white Southerners) actually turned out to be the winners because they preserved their social system of white dominance. So, Bisson said, the question should be “What if the South had not won?” In a fictional work, “Fire on the Mountain” Bisson describes a loss for the South, one that might have occurred if John Brown’s 1859 raid on Harper’s Ferry turned out differently and led to a successful slave revolt. In this speculative fiction, Bisson suggests that an all-Black country called “Nova Africa” could have been established in the Deep South. The entire world, wrote Bisson, would have been totally different.

In its look at speculative alternatives to Civil War history, the conference examined an alternate vision for “Gone with the Wind,” a book of fiction that has framed the way generations of Americans have looked at Southern plantation life and the Civil War. Alice Randall, author of “The Wind Done Gone,” described how her version of plantation life told from the perspective of Scarlett’s enslaved half-sister, though fiction, provides an account of plantation life, including the horrors of slavery, which “Gone With the Wind” concealed.

The conference’s speculation was not limited to alternative endings of the Civil War.

Focusing on Albion Tourgee, a post-Civil War “carpetbagger” who moved to North Carolina, the conference attendees asked, “What would have been different if Reconstruction had lasted 30 years and the boundaries of the Southern states and their social and political systems had been thoroughly transformed, as proposed by Tourgee?”

You might be asking now, should a serious conference concern itself with speculation? I found that examining carefully what might have happened can be a very productive way to understand the reasons things happened as they actually did.
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D.G. Martin is the host of UNC-TV’s North Carolina Bookwatch, which airs Fridays at 9:30 p.m. and Sundays at 5 p.m. www.unctv.org/ncbookwatch/. Check his blog and view prior programs at www.unctv.org/ncbookwatch/

This week’s (November 16, 18) guest is UNC Chapel Hill Professor emeritus William Powell, editor of the “Encyclopedia of North Carolina.”