A review of 'The Guns of the South: A Novel' by Harry Turtledove
Note: The following review was originally published at Amazon.co.uk on 24th. June 2018. Link to original review: https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/customer-reviews/R233VDZRN6WFFO?ref=pf_ov_at_pdctrvw_srp
It is winter 1864. The setting is the field headquarters of the Army of Northern Virginia, the main military force of the Confederate States Army. The story opens during a lull in the fighting. The Confederacy is facing probable defeat at the hands of the Union. The Army’s commander, General Robert E. Lee, is despondently penning a letter to his president, Jefferson Davis, about some military matter. Hearing an unusual report from a gun, he makes enquiries and discovers that the Army has been approached by a strange man with an out-of-place accent, one Andries Rhoodie, part of a mysterious foreign group called the ‘AWB’. Rhoodie implies that the letters AWB stand for America Will Break. It develops they can offer the Confederacy’s military a weapon far ahead of its time, an AK-47 rifle that can be mass-produced. The AK-47 is a fully-automatic rifle, quite an advance on the primitive forerunner of the machine gun, the Gatling, that was available at the time (in fact used by the Union), thus offering the promise of a major advantage to the South come resumption of fighting in the Spring. The opportunity is seized and the AK-47 is soon adopted as the tactical weapon of choice for the Confederacy. This changes the outcome of the whole War. The novel tells in parallel the dramas, decisions and adventures of, respectively, General Lee and an ordinary Confederate soldier from Nash County, North Carolina, one Nate Caudell, a first sergeant in the 47th. Regiment of the North Carolina Infantry, who along with his fellow soldiers, is one of the first to make use of the AK-47 in battle. Once out of butternut, Caudell goes back to his teaching.
I enjoyed this novel. It does go a little slow initially and you have to be patient: but the story picks up greatly near the halfway point. Civil War aficionados will love it, as will people from the American South, especially Virginia: there are so many geographic references, battlefields, landmarks, towns and settlements, and lots of colourful military characters and other actual historical personalities get a mention. I would not say that the depiction of the South is especially rich or detailed, but it is competent, and though I am no expert on the archaic South, Turtledove seems to get the verbal Southernisms right. I love the way the author uses actual historical figures in the story. The true nature of Robert E. Lee is an historical controversy all by itself. Here, Turtledove cleverly uses the humanism of Lee as a literary axiom for bringing out the subtleties and complexities of the Confederacy, its prominent figures and their multi-layered loyalties. Whether accurately or not, Lee is portrayed as a man who is less than enthused about slavery, and evidently balks at the mistreatment of blacks, but he is loyal to a fault for the South nonetheless - on the principle of constitutional freedom, though perhaps also because of his attachment to Virginia. Lee is presented almost as the embodiment of the South’s noble aristocracy and its Cavalier values; a fit noble aristocrat who goes on constitutional walks while batting away probing questions from local reporters; he is also an old general haunted by the memory of Pickett’s Charge, a tactical mistake at Gettysburg that he sees as his own blunder. Lee thinks of himself as Cavalier and not fanatical, and disdains the fanaticism of the AWB. But Lee himself is, in his own way, quite fanatical when it comes to upholding his honour and pursuing what he sees as the right course, based on a sense of integrity. Which type of fanaticism will win out? Will the AWB’s fanaticism eventually prove to be their undoing? You will have to read the novel to find out.
An interesting area for debate is Lee’s views on slavery. Although not an enthusiastic slaver, Lee was a slave-owner at different times in his life and he held out some benefits for blacks in the institution. It is also clear from the historical record, and hinted in this novel, that Lee regarded whites as superior to blacks. In truth, Lee’s perspective on slavery fell into the humane more than the human category. He saw slavery as a necessary institution for black Africans transposed to the Americas; at the same time, he extended manumission to them and other support, but that is very far from a demonstration of opposition to, or even dislike of, slavery. Turtledove’s well-varnished muta-historical depiction of Lee gives a slightly different impression and is arguably inaccurate. In his depiction of Lee, has Turtledove fallen for the so-called Lost Cause arguments that were used to justify Jim Crow? Or is he just memorialising the Southern mentality as part of the interior rationalisations of this novel? The author seems to use Lee as a device through which to interpret the moral necessity of emancipation as a fulfilment of honour: Lee observes, for one thing, that if black soldiers can fight as well as whites, then there would seem to be no moral basis for allowing that blacks are the inferior of whites. But Turtledove’s ‘modernist’ Lee is a myth and out-of-time. Turtledove is attempting to reverse Lee’s character and figuratively de-situate him from the South. Instead of upholding the ‘humane’ but “peculiar” institution in comparison to the wage-slavery of industrial-modernism, Turtledove’s Lee chooses the human path. Even so, the idea of Lee as both a public and private abolitionist, while a historical mutation, would not be entirely implausible given the run of a Southern victory; still, it must be emphasised, this ‘modernist’ Lee is a myth.
There is also the riddle of Lincoln – who spoke of fine, inflexible principles, such as liberty, but at the same time did support slavery; was a racist by today’s standards; wanted to deport and resettle emancipated blacks in Africa; fought the War savagely and abused his constitutional powers in the process; and, would take revenge on the South and on white Southerners in the aftermath of a Union victory. I’m not convinced Lincoln was opposed to slavery on any principle. It was more that he regarded it as outmoded and would have preferred to remove blacks from the United States altogether. Whatever is the case, Lincoln is an important character in this novel, albeit peripheral, and shares scenes with Lee. Indeed, you might say this is a novel about iconism and iconoclasm. Lincoln becomes the veritable iconoclast in this alternate timeline, but you could say he is an inimical iconoclast even in the real history, just not as derided as Lee. He becomes the Devil in this novel, but in the real timeline, Lincoln was the Devil anyway, yet a redeemable figure in the eyes of Northerners, blacks and ‘progressive’ Southerners. Lincoln is unusual in that his legacy is black or white, a little like Nixon, Truman, FDR and perhaps even Wilson. These presidents are normally given a Manichean treatment, seen as either good or bad, depending on your point-of-view, and are re-invented from time-to-time in revisionist histories that attempt to rehabilitate them for one side or the other. Lincoln is rejected entirely by neo-Confederate Southerners but not fully claimed by Northerners and ‘progressives’. Yet Lincoln was a statesman - not just a politician, but a transcendent figure who stood for the entire nation. Why is he not more respected, even by the descendants of the defeated South? Is there a meaningful operative separation of the roles of politician and transcendent statesman? This is something that Lee seems to agonise over as his relationship with Lincoln as his political experience develops. Lincoln and Lee in this novel are statesmen and sought to transcend their own national politics and bring about what they believed to be the common good, but Lincoln was also very political. Lee, an aristocrat, perhaps fits the role of statesman better than Lincoln, but is that because he is an aristocrat living in a social and financial bubble? Lee has largely assumed his station in life rather than earned it, but he still has had to prove himself. He has still had it tough, yet his background as a sort of American nobleman rather than grafter does colour not just his affectations but his political sensibility: like the provincial grafter Lincoln, he sees a higher purpose, but unlike Lincoln he wants to get there in the right way. Hence he declines the offer of a Union command and instead fights for the Confederacy in defence of constitutional liberalism.
Lee also rails against sectionalism (as did Lincoln). Lee is the South’s Lincoln, you might say. But is sectionalism wrong? A definition of it is preoccupation with selfish or parochial concerns at the expense of the general well-being, but slave owning interests and those who support them are looking after what they think is the common good. Even Lee is eventually forced to become a ‘politician’ and exercise all the familiar tricks, using “deception and misdirection” to do (what he sees as) good. Much of these dilemmas are about the inevitable psychology of leaders and leadership. We have an image in our minds of leaders as tough, strong and imposing individuals, but often the true leader is somebody who is gifted with detachment and can look at the world with disinterest from above. Most of the major characters in this novel, are, in their own way, leaders and consequently quite lonely and set apart, or above, ordinary people. Caudell, as a first sergeant, is a petty leader. Like Lee, he is a proverbial Odd Man who meta-analyses everything around him. He sees that slavery is morally flawed. Caudell is the General Lee in his own micro-environment. Lincoln, too, seems like a loner in the way he is portrayed here. “Uneasy lies the head that wears a crown" - Shakespeare's play Henry IV, Part 2. Leadership can be lonely. Lincoln, in dark austere suit and stovepipe hat, tall and thin, cuts an almost Christ-like figure, or Satan-like. He embodies a morality unto himself, the hallmark of a personage, but this comes at a price: he speaks above and perhaps past the ordinary man and is misunderstood. He does not necessarily command universal affection, but he is respected. It is interesting that Lee commands automatic respect among the ordinary Confederate soldiers – almost like a lodestone. Could men like Andries Rhoodie, and another AWB man, Benny Lang, command such respect? On the face of it, their leadership style is blunt, inhumane and rather cruel. Does effective leadership require humanity, morals and mutual respect, or can it just be based on fear and discipline? President Davis seems concerned by Lee as a potential political threat and offers him the presidency once his own term has expired. This implies that Davis may not be able to count on Lee’s loyalty during his term and so wants to pre-empt and neutralise the political threat he represents, and perhaps also control him once he assumes the presidency in his place. We associate loyalty with noble virtue, but is loyalty always a good trait? One imagines that loyalty could be a burden for an independent spirit like Lee who values other selfless virtues. Invoking Shakespeare’s Caesarean play Act 5, Scene 5, Lee was “…the noblest Roman of them all…”. Maybe that’s harsh. Lee is not Brutus exactly, more a would-be Brutus. He embodies the silent legitimacy of established generations-old interests that view the world in a detached manner. Not preoccupied with day-to-day politics like Davis, he has a disinterested air about him and even dislikes politics, seeing it as a necessary evil or grudging duty. Thus, he is classically aristocratic. But in developing into a statesman and honing a sense of virtù to augment and refine his virtue, Lee has to relegate his loyalty to the original values of the Confederacy and even work against its essential constitutional provisions in order to do what he considers to be both the right thing to do and what is in the longer term interests of the Confederacy itself. As such, he is betraying the Confederacy and his own political and social friends in order (as he sees it) to save them and the Confederacy.
The novel itself and the author’s historical note at the end demonstrate a sophisticated understanding of the Civil War. This is not surprising given that Turtledove has a doctorate in Byzantine history and he is known to research his novels thoroughly. Although Turtledove is Jewish and anti-white, he does not entirely fall into the same flawed understanding that other writers sometimes have. He understands that the Civil War was not just about race and slavery. Turtledove doesn’t really go into what caused the Civil War, which is just as well as the causes were complex and would require their own dissertation. For one thing, what caused the Civil War is not necessarily the same thing as why the War itself was fought. More important than the preservation of slavery were constitutional differences. In a true sense, the American Civil War was the Second American Revolution. The Confederates, believing in states’ rights, were trying to re-capture the original spirit of pre-Constitutional America: a confederation of independent nations, rather than the centralised federation that America was becoming as it industrialised. The Unionists, while not rejecting of states’ rights, held to a much more centralised interpretation of federalism. A lot of people think it was a war over whether the South should be allowed to continue with slavery, but it was more complex than that. Much of it was down to political and financial intrigues arising from the country’s Western expansion. Although the new Western territories did not promise much potential for slavery, due to the poorer quality of land, what helped kick things off was the political imbalance that would result in the South’s favour if the West was allowed to be notionally pro-slavery.
The best alternate histories are muta-historical rather than counter-historical, and I like the way that Turtledove achieves this quality in his writing, changing the destinies of specific historical personalities in line with the alternate logic of the new timeline. Turtledove only presents an alternative timeline in regard to a surface narrative. In reality his novel is his commentary on what really happened in consequence of the Confederacy’s bitter defeat. As the author alludes, slavery wasn’t really (or at least, not entirely) about profit, rather it was an institution embedded in Southern culture. True, slavery was at different times a very profitable institution – for instance, it was re-instituted in the Province of Georgia, having previously been abolished, because it was considered profitable. But by the Civil War, it was becoming unprofitable and burdensome. Slaves, who were not vested in production, were inefficient, unproductive and required huge sunk investment – see, for instance, the famous study by John Elliott Cairnes. It is also difficult to see how such an economy, in which slave-holding was a major element, could be innovative. I agree with the author that slavery was not just wrong, but wrong-headed. In reality, even before the Civil War began, slavery was becoming economically outmoded for the South and retrograding its culture, preventing innovation and stifling profit – and it would have ultimately put the Confederacy itself at risk, either through a slaves’ revolt of some kind or simply due to the lack of capital and poor economic development it caused. Lee’s reformist approach to slavery that we see in the novel is, in a convoluted sort of way, exactly what happened. Even in discussions within the leadership circle of the Confederacy in this novel, only a weak justification can be offered for slavery. In one scene, President Davis expounds on a mudsill rationalisation, characteristic of the Confederate mindset and that amounts to whataboutery: modernist-industrial societies have wage slavery, so the logic goes, thus Southern agrarian slavery is justified. There were those within the real Confederacy who had the vision and imagination to recognise the flaws of slavery as an institution – for instance: Confederate general officer, Patrick Cleburne, described antebellum slavery as a “peculiar institution” that left the Confederacy vulnerable; he wanted to emancipate Southern blacks so that they could fight in the Army. That plan in itself revealed the flaw in the thinking behind Southern slavery. Blacks were seen as a resource, to be used by whites as they saw fit. It had not been considered that by arming blacks to fight in the War, the basis would be laid for armed rebellion against the white slaveocracy. Slavery sowed the seeds of its own demise and even with a Southern victory, would surely have been reformed out of existence. Probably it was only the North’s economic measures against the South that helped to entrench it and keep it going for longer than it did, even in the face of foreign powers refusing to recognise the Confederate States in the main due to its slavery. Nevertheless, I think the author is right that disputes over slavery, even the very existence of slavery, would have formed the basis of the political culture of a victorious South.
Excellent though this novel is, I think it is marred from becoming a great work by the author bringing his own preening moral and political outlook into it. It’s preachy, and it would have been better just to let the story tell itself. For one thing, Turtledove’s depiction of ordinary Southern white men is very racist and templated. He sets up Nate Caudwell as the counterpoint, a literate and educated man, and a teacher, as well as a Confederate soldier, who ‘enlightens’ the other ‘ignorant’ and illiterate Confederate soldiers. People like Turtledove reveal their own peculiar brand of latent racism when they cast black slaves as passive victims of slavery or the white Confederate soldiers as simple-minded bigots. For another, Turtledove’s depiction of the Afrikaans men is, arguably, also racist in itself. It’s certainly crude and based around stereotypes. In the end, brilliant author though he is, Turtledove is just another leftist Jew seeking to tie down Gulliver. The AWB men are portrayed as demonic almost entirely. Lee comes to the conclusion that Andries Rhoodie has been lying to him about what Lincoln would do if the North won, but are Rhoodie’s warnings really lies or do they have their root in Lee’s rather generous assessment of Lincoln and his tendency towards acting nobly rather than putting interests first? History is about interpretation and mostly secondary sources. What we know now about the South and its motivations is largely dependent on interpretation of it by historians. It’s rare that people will go to primary sources, and also quite rare that people will pay due respect to the politicised voices of the South. The provincial South is also now being deinstitutionalised and disprivileged in the American South itself, replaced with a more cosmopolitan vision influenced by commerce. But is our understanding of Southern history and the Civil War correct? This novel certainly adopts the politically-correct view. That said, the deeper question this novel asks is valid: What is the price that must be paid for a society that we want? The South was a white utopia, but this came at the moral and ethical price of slavery. Do we turn our eyes blind to injustice against the scapegoat, and even against our neighbours, so that norms are maintained? The author is suggesting that the Confederacy was underpinned by a sort of Satanic pact of hyper-normalcy, in which injustice sat alongside justice, unfreedom existed alongside freedom, in other words a society fit for whites in which the white man was supreme. Yet the author’s view is that that can only lead to unfreedom and injustice for all. This is the typical liberal view, in which freedom is a construction of the individual. The opposite reactionary view would be that freedom depends on and is a construction of community. Which is the right approach? One way to tackle this would be to ask: Do all societies, including liberal-democracies, have such ghosts and scapegoats? We can see that they do. In a very real sense, the author’s type of humanitarianism can lead only to a chimeric Panglossia. The real questions remain unanswered, and perhaps a place to begin would be with a fuller understanding of slavery. This is where Turtledove’s myopia overrides his historical sophistication in that he paints slavery as a cruel institution and the AWB men as evil abusers of the slaves. Moreover, he disingenuously transplants the cruel-minded AWB men into the mid-19th. century and purports that they are a representation of slaveholding, ignoring that the AWB men’s perception of slavery may be more the result of Turtledove’s own distortions and similar misrepresentations of the relevant era from others. As such, Turtledove’s novel embodies in itself a self-conscious anachronism. Certainly, slavery was an appalling institution through contemporary eyes, but that does not imply cruelty. If slaves were the animate property of slave-owners, this implies custodianship. Slaves had to be looked-after by their owners. Arguably, the author’s jaundiced perspective is the corollary of neo-Confederalist whitewashing of abuses. Were slaves really treated as badly on the whole as the author depicts, or is mistreatment being exaggerated here, through the medium of the AWB men? The author makes a lot of the fact, as he claims, that blacks were banned from reading and literacy in some Confederate states. I don’t know if this is the case, but if true, it’s not in itself cruel. Most of them would not have had an interest in or need for literacy. Another problem arises with the author’s political-philosophical perspective. The Civil Rights era was in effect a replaying of the Civil War drama and its North-South antagonisms, but underpinning it are important philosophical differences. There is the difference over what is considered freedom. The Left believe that freedom depends on equality. The Right believes that freedom depends on inequality. The equality/freedom dichotomy has to be examined in context. In context, Jim Crow ‘separate but equal’ accommodations produced superior results for blacks compared to post-Civil Rights Act integration. Anybody who doubts this should look at Detroit – once a major industrial hub, now a metropolitan slum.
Has the secessionist South been vindicated by these modern problems? Perhaps, but equally this can lead to the wrong conclusions, in particular favourable but ill-conceived evaluations of the Confederacy. Certainly the South has been romanticised. Some white nationalist go further. They sympathise or associate themselves spiritually and politically with the Confederacy and even want to see its latter-day revival and restoration. Can such positions be valid in view of actual history? I would argue they cannot. First, they represent the converse of Turtledove’s flawed moral historiography: the Confederacy was inimically deontological. There was never a Southern white telos. Confederate statesmen would have done whatever was necessary to uphold state interests, including the slaveholding interests; it was never about slavery, it was about power and political economy. Today’s American white nationalists are, if anything, inheritors of the North rather than the South. With the South, there is no continuation. For one thing, the South regarded black Africans as a resource, in much same way that blacks were regarded under the pseudo-apartness of South Africa. For another, one cannot help but observe the irony that it was the Southern plantation owners who brought black Africans to America, not primarily the Northern interests, and it is no coincidence that during the antebellum, Northern cities tended to be demographically more white than in the South. It was actually the institution of slavery and the South that brought black Africans to America, and it was the South’s obstinate refusal to reform slavery away that did the damage.
Did the Northern victory in the Civil War put off what was inevitable: a coming-apart of the American settlement? Will America break? This would seem to be the logical consequence of a multi-racial society, but perhaps a better way of formulating the question to help us understand things would be: ‘Must America break?’ America’s eventual dissolution seems inevitable and probably was predictable to the pre-Actonite liberals who founded the country and drafted the Constitution. Thus we have to consider whether there is any way of preventing it, and indeed whether prevention is more desirable than the destructive cure. Below the surface in American politics, the basic cleave is still discernible between those who would fight for a true Jeffersonian constitutional republic and those who essentially believe the federal government should impose common values and run people’s lives. We see a replaying of this conflict in different ways: for instance, between ‘conservatives’ and so-called ‘progressives’, to the extent that there is even physical, institutional and geographic separation of the two groups - not least because ‘conservative’ and ‘progressive’ are more often than not considered to be racially-charged euphemisms, even if this is not normally spelled-out explicitly. The Northern solution of ‘soft’ apartheid has proved to be more enduring than its ‘hard’ counterpart, Jim Crow. America, a massive country, allows for this possibility, but as the collapse of Jim Crow showed, indeed as the Civil War itself proved, segregation and separation are not sustainable. Perhaps another civil war is indeed on the way?
Those thoughts aside, how to rate this novel? It’s well-written, parts are excellently-written, with good human touches – such as scenes involving Lee’s family. Lee is drawn whole, and the author is very humane in that sense. What puts me in a slight quandary is the structural weakness of the plot. To take one obvious point: the Confederates wouldn’t just wait for the new rifles to appear, and if Rhoodie can make one prototype rifle work, then he is clearly not a bragger. That being the case, Lee would want to know all the hows, whys and wheres of the rifle’s mass production, in order to ensure security of supply and to make sure that Rhoodie wasn’t supplying the same weapons to the North. There is also no explanation for Rhoodie’s appearance. Would a strange man obviously carrying what plainly is a weapon be allowed anywhere near the generals in a Confederate Army camp? Another thing is that there is no explanation of the time travel technology and how this came about. That in turn leaves a question mark over whether such a weapon as the AK-47 could be fabricated in the mid-19th. century – something the whole plot hangs on. But that’s a mere technicality that we can pass over. Then there’s Turtledove’s obvious politics, which put me off, but this novel grew on me and my eventual conclusion is that, on this evidence, Turtledove is brilliant. I will have to read his other books.
I’m giving this five stars. It’s an ‘A’ grade novel, but strictly an A-minus. What could have been a very good or even great work is marred by the author’s politically-correct views. There is a first-rate alternate history to be written – probably as a series of novels - that would convey to a younger, more right-leaning, generation the subtleties of the American Civil War. This novel, though in its own way brilliant, isn’t it.
I enjoyed this novel. It does go a little slow initially and you have to be patient: but the story picks up greatly near the halfway point. Civil War aficionados will love it, as will people from the American South, especially Virginia: there are so many geographic references, battlefields, landmarks, towns and settlements, and lots of colourful military characters and other actual historical personalities get a mention. I would not say that the depiction of the South is especially rich or detailed, but it is competent, and though I am no expert on the archaic South, Turtledove seems to get the verbal Southernisms right. I love the way the author uses actual historical figures in the story. The true nature of Robert E. Lee is an historical controversy all by itself. Here, Turtledove cleverly uses the humanism of Lee as a literary axiom for bringing out the subtleties and complexities of the Confederacy, its prominent figures and their multi-layered loyalties. Whether accurately or not, Lee is portrayed as a man who is less than enthused about slavery, and evidently balks at the mistreatment of blacks, but he is loyal to a fault for the South nonetheless - on the principle of constitutional freedom, though perhaps also because of his attachment to Virginia. Lee is presented almost as the embodiment of the South’s noble aristocracy and its Cavalier values; a fit noble aristocrat who goes on constitutional walks while batting away probing questions from local reporters; he is also an old general haunted by the memory of Pickett’s Charge, a tactical mistake at Gettysburg that he sees as his own blunder. Lee thinks of himself as Cavalier and not fanatical, and disdains the fanaticism of the AWB. But Lee himself is, in his own way, quite fanatical when it comes to upholding his honour and pursuing what he sees as the right course, based on a sense of integrity. Which type of fanaticism will win out? Will the AWB’s fanaticism eventually prove to be their undoing? You will have to read the novel to find out.
An interesting area for debate is Lee’s views on slavery. Although not an enthusiastic slaver, Lee was a slave-owner at different times in his life and he held out some benefits for blacks in the institution. It is also clear from the historical record, and hinted in this novel, that Lee regarded whites as superior to blacks. In truth, Lee’s perspective on slavery fell into the humane more than the human category. He saw slavery as a necessary institution for black Africans transposed to the Americas; at the same time, he extended manumission to them and other support, but that is very far from a demonstration of opposition to, or even dislike of, slavery. Turtledove’s well-varnished muta-historical depiction of Lee gives a slightly different impression and is arguably inaccurate. In his depiction of Lee, has Turtledove fallen for the so-called Lost Cause arguments that were used to justify Jim Crow? Or is he just memorialising the Southern mentality as part of the interior rationalisations of this novel? The author seems to use Lee as a device through which to interpret the moral necessity of emancipation as a fulfilment of honour: Lee observes, for one thing, that if black soldiers can fight as well as whites, then there would seem to be no moral basis for allowing that blacks are the inferior of whites. But Turtledove’s ‘modernist’ Lee is a myth and out-of-time. Turtledove is attempting to reverse Lee’s character and figuratively de-situate him from the South. Instead of upholding the ‘humane’ but “peculiar” institution in comparison to the wage-slavery of industrial-modernism, Turtledove’s Lee chooses the human path. Even so, the idea of Lee as both a public and private abolitionist, while a historical mutation, would not be entirely implausible given the run of a Southern victory; still, it must be emphasised, this ‘modernist’ Lee is a myth.
There is also the riddle of Lincoln – who spoke of fine, inflexible principles, such as liberty, but at the same time did support slavery; was a racist by today’s standards; wanted to deport and resettle emancipated blacks in Africa; fought the War savagely and abused his constitutional powers in the process; and, would take revenge on the South and on white Southerners in the aftermath of a Union victory. I’m not convinced Lincoln was opposed to slavery on any principle. It was more that he regarded it as outmoded and would have preferred to remove blacks from the United States altogether. Whatever is the case, Lincoln is an important character in this novel, albeit peripheral, and shares scenes with Lee. Indeed, you might say this is a novel about iconism and iconoclasm. Lincoln becomes the veritable iconoclast in this alternate timeline, but you could say he is an inimical iconoclast even in the real history, just not as derided as Lee. He becomes the Devil in this novel, but in the real timeline, Lincoln was the Devil anyway, yet a redeemable figure in the eyes of Northerners, blacks and ‘progressive’ Southerners. Lincoln is unusual in that his legacy is black or white, a little like Nixon, Truman, FDR and perhaps even Wilson. These presidents are normally given a Manichean treatment, seen as either good or bad, depending on your point-of-view, and are re-invented from time-to-time in revisionist histories that attempt to rehabilitate them for one side or the other. Lincoln is rejected entirely by neo-Confederate Southerners but not fully claimed by Northerners and ‘progressives’. Yet Lincoln was a statesman - not just a politician, but a transcendent figure who stood for the entire nation. Why is he not more respected, even by the descendants of the defeated South? Is there a meaningful operative separation of the roles of politician and transcendent statesman? This is something that Lee seems to agonise over as his relationship with Lincoln as his political experience develops. Lincoln and Lee in this novel are statesmen and sought to transcend their own national politics and bring about what they believed to be the common good, but Lincoln was also very political. Lee, an aristocrat, perhaps fits the role of statesman better than Lincoln, but is that because he is an aristocrat living in a social and financial bubble? Lee has largely assumed his station in life rather than earned it, but he still has had to prove himself. He has still had it tough, yet his background as a sort of American nobleman rather than grafter does colour not just his affectations but his political sensibility: like the provincial grafter Lincoln, he sees a higher purpose, but unlike Lincoln he wants to get there in the right way. Hence he declines the offer of a Union command and instead fights for the Confederacy in defence of constitutional liberalism.
Lee also rails against sectionalism (as did Lincoln). Lee is the South’s Lincoln, you might say. But is sectionalism wrong? A definition of it is preoccupation with selfish or parochial concerns at the expense of the general well-being, but slave owning interests and those who support them are looking after what they think is the common good. Even Lee is eventually forced to become a ‘politician’ and exercise all the familiar tricks, using “deception and misdirection” to do (what he sees as) good. Much of these dilemmas are about the inevitable psychology of leaders and leadership. We have an image in our minds of leaders as tough, strong and imposing individuals, but often the true leader is somebody who is gifted with detachment and can look at the world with disinterest from above. Most of the major characters in this novel, are, in their own way, leaders and consequently quite lonely and set apart, or above, ordinary people. Caudell, as a first sergeant, is a petty leader. Like Lee, he is a proverbial Odd Man who meta-analyses everything around him. He sees that slavery is morally flawed. Caudell is the General Lee in his own micro-environment. Lincoln, too, seems like a loner in the way he is portrayed here. “Uneasy lies the head that wears a crown" - Shakespeare's play Henry IV, Part 2. Leadership can be lonely. Lincoln, in dark austere suit and stovepipe hat, tall and thin, cuts an almost Christ-like figure, or Satan-like. He embodies a morality unto himself, the hallmark of a personage, but this comes at a price: he speaks above and perhaps past the ordinary man and is misunderstood. He does not necessarily command universal affection, but he is respected. It is interesting that Lee commands automatic respect among the ordinary Confederate soldiers – almost like a lodestone. Could men like Andries Rhoodie, and another AWB man, Benny Lang, command such respect? On the face of it, their leadership style is blunt, inhumane and rather cruel. Does effective leadership require humanity, morals and mutual respect, or can it just be based on fear and discipline? President Davis seems concerned by Lee as a potential political threat and offers him the presidency once his own term has expired. This implies that Davis may not be able to count on Lee’s loyalty during his term and so wants to pre-empt and neutralise the political threat he represents, and perhaps also control him once he assumes the presidency in his place. We associate loyalty with noble virtue, but is loyalty always a good trait? One imagines that loyalty could be a burden for an independent spirit like Lee who values other selfless virtues. Invoking Shakespeare’s Caesarean play Act 5, Scene 5, Lee was “…the noblest Roman of them all…”. Maybe that’s harsh. Lee is not Brutus exactly, more a would-be Brutus. He embodies the silent legitimacy of established generations-old interests that view the world in a detached manner. Not preoccupied with day-to-day politics like Davis, he has a disinterested air about him and even dislikes politics, seeing it as a necessary evil or grudging duty. Thus, he is classically aristocratic. But in developing into a statesman and honing a sense of virtù to augment and refine his virtue, Lee has to relegate his loyalty to the original values of the Confederacy and even work against its essential constitutional provisions in order to do what he considers to be both the right thing to do and what is in the longer term interests of the Confederacy itself. As such, he is betraying the Confederacy and his own political and social friends in order (as he sees it) to save them and the Confederacy.
The novel itself and the author’s historical note at the end demonstrate a sophisticated understanding of the Civil War. This is not surprising given that Turtledove has a doctorate in Byzantine history and he is known to research his novels thoroughly. Although Turtledove is Jewish and anti-white, he does not entirely fall into the same flawed understanding that other writers sometimes have. He understands that the Civil War was not just about race and slavery. Turtledove doesn’t really go into what caused the Civil War, which is just as well as the causes were complex and would require their own dissertation. For one thing, what caused the Civil War is not necessarily the same thing as why the War itself was fought. More important than the preservation of slavery were constitutional differences. In a true sense, the American Civil War was the Second American Revolution. The Confederates, believing in states’ rights, were trying to re-capture the original spirit of pre-Constitutional America: a confederation of independent nations, rather than the centralised federation that America was becoming as it industrialised. The Unionists, while not rejecting of states’ rights, held to a much more centralised interpretation of federalism. A lot of people think it was a war over whether the South should be allowed to continue with slavery, but it was more complex than that. Much of it was down to political and financial intrigues arising from the country’s Western expansion. Although the new Western territories did not promise much potential for slavery, due to the poorer quality of land, what helped kick things off was the political imbalance that would result in the South’s favour if the West was allowed to be notionally pro-slavery.
The best alternate histories are muta-historical rather than counter-historical, and I like the way that Turtledove achieves this quality in his writing, changing the destinies of specific historical personalities in line with the alternate logic of the new timeline. Turtledove only presents an alternative timeline in regard to a surface narrative. In reality his novel is his commentary on what really happened in consequence of the Confederacy’s bitter defeat. As the author alludes, slavery wasn’t really (or at least, not entirely) about profit, rather it was an institution embedded in Southern culture. True, slavery was at different times a very profitable institution – for instance, it was re-instituted in the Province of Georgia, having previously been abolished, because it was considered profitable. But by the Civil War, it was becoming unprofitable and burdensome. Slaves, who were not vested in production, were inefficient, unproductive and required huge sunk investment – see, for instance, the famous study by John Elliott Cairnes. It is also difficult to see how such an economy, in which slave-holding was a major element, could be innovative. I agree with the author that slavery was not just wrong, but wrong-headed. In reality, even before the Civil War began, slavery was becoming economically outmoded for the South and retrograding its culture, preventing innovation and stifling profit – and it would have ultimately put the Confederacy itself at risk, either through a slaves’ revolt of some kind or simply due to the lack of capital and poor economic development it caused. Lee’s reformist approach to slavery that we see in the novel is, in a convoluted sort of way, exactly what happened. Even in discussions within the leadership circle of the Confederacy in this novel, only a weak justification can be offered for slavery. In one scene, President Davis expounds on a mudsill rationalisation, characteristic of the Confederate mindset and that amounts to whataboutery: modernist-industrial societies have wage slavery, so the logic goes, thus Southern agrarian slavery is justified. There were those within the real Confederacy who had the vision and imagination to recognise the flaws of slavery as an institution – for instance: Confederate general officer, Patrick Cleburne, described antebellum slavery as a “peculiar institution” that left the Confederacy vulnerable; he wanted to emancipate Southern blacks so that they could fight in the Army. That plan in itself revealed the flaw in the thinking behind Southern slavery. Blacks were seen as a resource, to be used by whites as they saw fit. It had not been considered that by arming blacks to fight in the War, the basis would be laid for armed rebellion against the white slaveocracy. Slavery sowed the seeds of its own demise and even with a Southern victory, would surely have been reformed out of existence. Probably it was only the North’s economic measures against the South that helped to entrench it and keep it going for longer than it did, even in the face of foreign powers refusing to recognise the Confederate States in the main due to its slavery. Nevertheless, I think the author is right that disputes over slavery, even the very existence of slavery, would have formed the basis of the political culture of a victorious South.
Excellent though this novel is, I think it is marred from becoming a great work by the author bringing his own preening moral and political outlook into it. It’s preachy, and it would have been better just to let the story tell itself. For one thing, Turtledove’s depiction of ordinary Southern white men is very racist and templated. He sets up Nate Caudwell as the counterpoint, a literate and educated man, and a teacher, as well as a Confederate soldier, who ‘enlightens’ the other ‘ignorant’ and illiterate Confederate soldiers. People like Turtledove reveal their own peculiar brand of latent racism when they cast black slaves as passive victims of slavery or the white Confederate soldiers as simple-minded bigots. For another, Turtledove’s depiction of the Afrikaans men is, arguably, also racist in itself. It’s certainly crude and based around stereotypes. In the end, brilliant author though he is, Turtledove is just another leftist Jew seeking to tie down Gulliver. The AWB men are portrayed as demonic almost entirely. Lee comes to the conclusion that Andries Rhoodie has been lying to him about what Lincoln would do if the North won, but are Rhoodie’s warnings really lies or do they have their root in Lee’s rather generous assessment of Lincoln and his tendency towards acting nobly rather than putting interests first? History is about interpretation and mostly secondary sources. What we know now about the South and its motivations is largely dependent on interpretation of it by historians. It’s rare that people will go to primary sources, and also quite rare that people will pay due respect to the politicised voices of the South. The provincial South is also now being deinstitutionalised and disprivileged in the American South itself, replaced with a more cosmopolitan vision influenced by commerce. But is our understanding of Southern history and the Civil War correct? This novel certainly adopts the politically-correct view. That said, the deeper question this novel asks is valid: What is the price that must be paid for a society that we want? The South was a white utopia, but this came at the moral and ethical price of slavery. Do we turn our eyes blind to injustice against the scapegoat, and even against our neighbours, so that norms are maintained? The author is suggesting that the Confederacy was underpinned by a sort of Satanic pact of hyper-normalcy, in which injustice sat alongside justice, unfreedom existed alongside freedom, in other words a society fit for whites in which the white man was supreme. Yet the author’s view is that that can only lead to unfreedom and injustice for all. This is the typical liberal view, in which freedom is a construction of the individual. The opposite reactionary view would be that freedom depends on and is a construction of community. Which is the right approach? One way to tackle this would be to ask: Do all societies, including liberal-democracies, have such ghosts and scapegoats? We can see that they do. In a very real sense, the author’s type of humanitarianism can lead only to a chimeric Panglossia. The real questions remain unanswered, and perhaps a place to begin would be with a fuller understanding of slavery. This is where Turtledove’s myopia overrides his historical sophistication in that he paints slavery as a cruel institution and the AWB men as evil abusers of the slaves. Moreover, he disingenuously transplants the cruel-minded AWB men into the mid-19th. century and purports that they are a representation of slaveholding, ignoring that the AWB men’s perception of slavery may be more the result of Turtledove’s own distortions and similar misrepresentations of the relevant era from others. As such, Turtledove’s novel embodies in itself a self-conscious anachronism. Certainly, slavery was an appalling institution through contemporary eyes, but that does not imply cruelty. If slaves were the animate property of slave-owners, this implies custodianship. Slaves had to be looked-after by their owners. Arguably, the author’s jaundiced perspective is the corollary of neo-Confederalist whitewashing of abuses. Were slaves really treated as badly on the whole as the author depicts, or is mistreatment being exaggerated here, through the medium of the AWB men? The author makes a lot of the fact, as he claims, that blacks were banned from reading and literacy in some Confederate states. I don’t know if this is the case, but if true, it’s not in itself cruel. Most of them would not have had an interest in or need for literacy. Another problem arises with the author’s political-philosophical perspective. The Civil Rights era was in effect a replaying of the Civil War drama and its North-South antagonisms, but underpinning it are important philosophical differences. There is the difference over what is considered freedom. The Left believe that freedom depends on equality. The Right believes that freedom depends on inequality. The equality/freedom dichotomy has to be examined in context. In context, Jim Crow ‘separate but equal’ accommodations produced superior results for blacks compared to post-Civil Rights Act integration. Anybody who doubts this should look at Detroit – once a major industrial hub, now a metropolitan slum.
Has the secessionist South been vindicated by these modern problems? Perhaps, but equally this can lead to the wrong conclusions, in particular favourable but ill-conceived evaluations of the Confederacy. Certainly the South has been romanticised. Some white nationalist go further. They sympathise or associate themselves spiritually and politically with the Confederacy and even want to see its latter-day revival and restoration. Can such positions be valid in view of actual history? I would argue they cannot. First, they represent the converse of Turtledove’s flawed moral historiography: the Confederacy was inimically deontological. There was never a Southern white telos. Confederate statesmen would have done whatever was necessary to uphold state interests, including the slaveholding interests; it was never about slavery, it was about power and political economy. Today’s American white nationalists are, if anything, inheritors of the North rather than the South. With the South, there is no continuation. For one thing, the South regarded black Africans as a resource, in much same way that blacks were regarded under the pseudo-apartness of South Africa. For another, one cannot help but observe the irony that it was the Southern plantation owners who brought black Africans to America, not primarily the Northern interests, and it is no coincidence that during the antebellum, Northern cities tended to be demographically more white than in the South. It was actually the institution of slavery and the South that brought black Africans to America, and it was the South’s obstinate refusal to reform slavery away that did the damage.
Did the Northern victory in the Civil War put off what was inevitable: a coming-apart of the American settlement? Will America break? This would seem to be the logical consequence of a multi-racial society, but perhaps a better way of formulating the question to help us understand things would be: ‘Must America break?’ America’s eventual dissolution seems inevitable and probably was predictable to the pre-Actonite liberals who founded the country and drafted the Constitution. Thus we have to consider whether there is any way of preventing it, and indeed whether prevention is more desirable than the destructive cure. Below the surface in American politics, the basic cleave is still discernible between those who would fight for a true Jeffersonian constitutional republic and those who essentially believe the federal government should impose common values and run people’s lives. We see a replaying of this conflict in different ways: for instance, between ‘conservatives’ and so-called ‘progressives’, to the extent that there is even physical, institutional and geographic separation of the two groups - not least because ‘conservative’ and ‘progressive’ are more often than not considered to be racially-charged euphemisms, even if this is not normally spelled-out explicitly. The Northern solution of ‘soft’ apartheid has proved to be more enduring than its ‘hard’ counterpart, Jim Crow. America, a massive country, allows for this possibility, but as the collapse of Jim Crow showed, indeed as the Civil War itself proved, segregation and separation are not sustainable. Perhaps another civil war is indeed on the way?
Those thoughts aside, how to rate this novel? It’s well-written, parts are excellently-written, with good human touches – such as scenes involving Lee’s family. Lee is drawn whole, and the author is very humane in that sense. What puts me in a slight quandary is the structural weakness of the plot. To take one obvious point: the Confederates wouldn’t just wait for the new rifles to appear, and if Rhoodie can make one prototype rifle work, then he is clearly not a bragger. That being the case, Lee would want to know all the hows, whys and wheres of the rifle’s mass production, in order to ensure security of supply and to make sure that Rhoodie wasn’t supplying the same weapons to the North. There is also no explanation for Rhoodie’s appearance. Would a strange man obviously carrying what plainly is a weapon be allowed anywhere near the generals in a Confederate Army camp? Another thing is that there is no explanation of the time travel technology and how this came about. That in turn leaves a question mark over whether such a weapon as the AK-47 could be fabricated in the mid-19th. century – something the whole plot hangs on. But that’s a mere technicality that we can pass over. Then there’s Turtledove’s obvious politics, which put me off, but this novel grew on me and my eventual conclusion is that, on this evidence, Turtledove is brilliant. I will have to read his other books.
I’m giving this five stars. It’s an ‘A’ grade novel, but strictly an A-minus. What could have been a very good or even great work is marred by the author’s politically-correct views. There is a first-rate alternate history to be written – probably as a series of novels - that would convey to a younger, more right-leaning, generation the subtleties of the American Civil War. This novel, though in its own way brilliant, isn’t it.
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