Member Review If The South Had Won The War

NH Civil War Gal

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ECW welcomes guest author Jim Morgan


“A Southern Republic will be worse than a rope of sand with South Carolina at its head – arrogant, self-willed and dictatorial as she is.” –Former North Carolina Attorney General, Bartholomew F. Moore, December, 1860



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I’ve always enjoyed exploring alternative history. I see it as a kind of time travel, something which involves both knowing history and stretching our imaginations a bit.


This past Fourth of July, I spent some time thinking about MacKinlay Kantor’s delightful little 1961 book, If the South Had Won the Civil War. The book, though obviously fiction, is written as if it were a history text. It even includes footnotes from made-up sources. It’s very short and a tad superficial though that’s fine. Kantor clearly was having fun as he wrote it.


The story begins with Grant being accidentally killed in a riding accident in 1863, Lee winning at Gettysburg, and the Confederacy gaining its independence. Washington, DC is ceded to the victorious Confederacy and becomes Washington, DD (District of Dixie). The Union capital is moved to Columbus, Ohio. Texas then secedes from the Confederacy......

Even during the war, the strains of states’ rights were felt as North Carolina refused to issue thousands of surplus uniforms to the ragged Army of Northern Virginia, retaining them instead for use only by its own troops (interestingly, many of them were used 80 years later to clothe German POWs at Salisbury, North Carolina during World War II, Confederate gray replacing “feldgrau”). Georgia’s irascible Governor Joseph Brown constantly blustered about taking his state’s troops out of the Confederate army altogether because he did not like the way that Jefferson Davis was running the war. The fault lines were already there.


An independent Confederacy probably would not have lasted ten years if only because South Carolina, being South Carolina, would quickly have found a reason, real or imagined, to grouse about the government in Richmond and then would have walked out.
 
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