Shade Trees

A review of 'Democracy: An American Novel' by Henry Adams

Note: The following review was originally published at Amazon.co.uk on 14th. July 2018.   Link to original review: https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/customer-reviews/R2PUFPQQGAMUN5?ref=pf_ov_at_pdctrvw_srp

Madeleine Lightfoot Lee, a listless widow from New York, decides to go to Washington, D.C. and stay with her sister, Sybil Ross, because she wants to understand American democracy: “...good or bad, and to drink it down to the dregs….” She and Sybil befriend several individuals who join their genteel little salon, all of them interesting if under-developed characters, and all prominent in federal politics or in some way connected to it. The three main protagonists, John Carrington, Sybil and Mrs Lee seem to be composites of the author himself. Carrington, a mixture of Virginian nobility, pragmatic idealism and a melancholy, world-weary cynicism, is a good foil for Mrs Lee’s medley of gaiety, naivety, righteousness and penetrating intelligence, while Sybil possesses great loyalty and strength of character. Mrs Lee’s friendship with a certain Senator Ratcliffe forms the main theme of the story. She thinks that powerful men control things, seems drawn to Senator Ratcliffe, even if he is “dreadfully senatorial”, and seeks him out as he seems to provide a promising opening into the mysterious world she is seeking to comprehend. The two hit it off.

It seems a little uncouth to characterise the fictional Ratcliffe as a villain, or villain entirely. Perhaps it would be more accurate to style him as a tragical antagonist, whose pragmatic morality contrasts starkly with the honourable Mr Carrington, and marks him out as a caitiff and blackguard worthy of rejection. As such, Adams’ roman-à-clef appears to serve as a monitory, but it may be more complex than that. Try as I might, I struggle to accept the wayward Senator as an inimical bête noire. In truth, Mrs Lee’s situation with Ratcliffe leaves her on the horns of a dilemma: it is the eternal moral philosophical tension between ends and means. Can scruples prevent us from doing good? Is there a ‘common good’ that is above ordinary mundane morality and that can justify wrong-doing? Certainly, Senator Ratcliffe attempts to justify himself on the basis of higher civic virtues. Certainly, Mrs Lee urges on Ratcliffe that he should act according to the “public good”, but one suspects that the two have very different ideas about what that means. For Ratcliffe, it is about the ends more than the means. Mrs Lee seems more rigid and idealistic in the matter, and when regarding Ratcliffe, makes a naïve but hopeful comparison with the great antebellum senator, Daniel Webster. But even John F. Kennedy would have rejected Mrs Lee’s version of political courage: in his Profiles in Courage, Kennedy acknowledges the necessity of a transcendent public good. Borrowing from Kennedy’s portrait of Ratcliffe’s doppelgänger, Daniel Webster, we might say that Ratcliffe has proverbially come to Washington not as a Man From The Prairies, but as an American: “…to make alive and supreme the latent sense of oneness, of Union…”, as Kennedy refers to Webster. Certainly, Webster’s example teaches us that the different virtues – courage, discipline, morality, honesty, integrity - can come into conflict and even apparently noble individuals can struggle with this mightily. Carrington faces that quandary.

John Carrington is a statue of Virginian honour, but it is fair to say his actions are not morally-straight-forward. The author cleverly uses him to convey the angry but Stoic suffering of the Reconstruction-era South at a time when Washington and the North enjoyed the complacent prosperity of the Gilded Age. It may be added that Adams, chronic with mal du siècle, harboured an especial antipathy to the modernist Northern states and is clearly in some sympathy with the South - not its cause so much as its aesthetics. He draws Carrington sympathetically. Irrepressibly noble, at least in intent, Carrington in a way embodies the dual Arthurian archetype all-in-one, both the knight-errand seeking to protect Mrs Lee through noble intervention, and the black knight seeking to do good in the shadows, in his case through stratagem – a combination of stealth, gossip, snide, wit and slander, even trickery - rather than through direct confrontation with Ratcliffe. Can we therefore say that Carrington or Ratcliffe is more the man? Which? Ratcliffe may be corrupt, but he also has the virtue of being embarrassingly blunt and straight-forward about it, calling in aid nobility of motive; Carrington meanwhile obeys all the scruples of justice and honour, yet this draws him into tergiversation and evasion on account of his purity of conscience. Ratcliffe no doubt thinks he is doing good, whereas Carrington knows he is doing good, but which of them achieves good? And is achieving good what matters or is conduct more important? These thorny questions cause Mrs Lee to privately re-evaluate her fundamental motivations. What is the purpose of her coming to Washington? Is it romance and marriage? Is it learning? As a widow of independent means, she is free to continually seek newer and better experiences without the need to be tied down to a particular place. In New York, she had grown weary of the fruits of modernism: the monotony of the people and the brown-stoned houses. She journeys to Washington not just to discover politics but to escape New York – and escape Baltimore, Philadelphia, Boston, and for all anybody knows, several other cities. Adams had studied the writings of Karl Marx and was familiar with his theory of historical materialism, but Mrs Lee’s interest seems to be in penetrating the political mind rather than the political machine. She is not out to comprehend the forces of history so much as understand the men of history. Maybe she has not cognised that the federal city is a ‘machine’? Or perhaps she does, but she holds that to get to the root of a system, one has to understand its divisions and parts – including its individuals – rather than understand it as a separate whole? At any rate, this is not a metapolitical novel. Mrs Lee wants to understand what moves politicians, how they impose their will on others, rather than the forces that move societies. Thus, the mystification is precisely in the art of leadership itself.

That brings us to the matter of how the different elements of leadership come about. What are the individual drives of the will? Is it charisma? Intelligence? Physical presence? Sexual energy? An important subtext of this novel is a battle of the sexes. Mrs Lee, as a woman - though she may be weak and unimportant in the scheme of things - indisputably exercises a veto or ultimatum over Senator Ratcliffe: regardless of how powerful he may be, she can still reject him brutally and there is little he can do; and, she may do so in the seemingly-pleasant environs of her private rooms, where only hours before glasses clinked and polite conversation filled the air. Women, then, are like beasts of Nature: pretty to look at, occupying Edenic surroundings even, but possessing the imperative of a killer instinct, executed coldly and savagely. As such, this novel suggests that women are the reserve power in society. Men may occupy positions that appear to give them power, but it is the (as then) voteless, unenfranchised woman who can ultimately refuse a man, even the most powerful man. That being so, sex itself and relations between the sexes are a major force in society, if not examined very much. But is there a separate will-to-power, a will to overcome others, that the other driving factors aid? At root, what motivates politicians? Ratcliffe frankly confesses that the pleasure in politics is the holding of power. Does that mean all this talk of civic virtue is for naught? The problem with the ‘power for power’s sake’ thesis is that power only means something if it is power over others, yet we may well ask whether any of these politicians exercise much more than titular power. On the other hand, we often hear people involved in politics and public affairs talk of the need for ‘pragmatism’, as if they are concerned with what works, which implies that they have some power or say in the machinery of society, but the real lines of authority can be invisible and based on social influence - an area that women can be quite skilled in. That said, it would be too simplistic to liken politicians to automata who merely go round shaking hands. Their notional offices do come with ex officio influences.

The author’s scathing critique of Ratcliffian practical morality is perhaps a little naïve, even banal. Being good is not necessarily the same as, or correlates with, doing good. Possibly only dangerous men can do good. Cowardly men tend to wrap themselves up in platitudes and passive attributes and ne’er achieve anything worthwhile, yet may be perceived as good men for it. John Carrington had been a rebel and had killed in the name of the Confederacy, yet he is presumably respected for this, even by former enemies. It’s clear that moral flexibility is needed. In that vein, I find Mrs Lee’s Manichean moral sense a little disappointing for the purposes of this novel. It may be the best way to look at things for the character’s own purposes – certainly, she must realise that life as a prominent political wife would be a quagmire of compromises and secrets - but as a medium through which to understand power, her attitude has its limitations, and could be regarded as an abrogation of responsibility, even somewhat cowardly. The world has lots of ‘Mrs Lees’ in it who snipe and sneer at politicians from their comfortable salons (which nowadays are electronic), issuing divine bolts of judgement based on a guileless understanding of virtue. None of them would have warranted a place among Kennedy’s noble gallery of hagiographies. This woman tells us that she wants to see inside and touch the machinery of American democracy, yet she is appalled at what she finds, giving credence to Nicolas de Chamfort: “One would risk being disgusted if one saw politics, justice, and one’s dinner in the making.” Democracy is a mystery to her, as all her other frivolous experiences have been - it is a superstition, an astrological fancy, to be exhausted then discarded before moving on to another sensation. Her butterfly journeys and trips around the American cosmos have instilled in her no learning, only deepened the mysteries of life while adding to her journals. Naturally we are appalled at Ratcliffe’s consistent pass on scruple, yet perhaps we also instinctively pall at Mrs Lee’s dreary self-righteousness, sensing that if Ratcliffe is the Fallen Man in this novel, he at least fulfils the dictum of Ecclesiastes 3:1–8; he at least represents America’s moral cosmos in full colour - both its beauty and brave passion - whereas Mrs Lee only had the potential but never the heart or sinew to do so. In that sense, Ratcliffe is Adams’ ironical anti-hero, Calvary is for him, if perhaps the author did not realise this himself. Only the acknowledged sinner can repent.

Maybe I am being a little harsh on Adams. He was a cynical realist about politicians and politics: he understood that the moral foundations of the American Republic were dubious, but this perhaps caused him to move too far in the other direction. Like most good cynics - especially the greatest one, Diogenes - Adams’ unrealistic evaluations of his fellow Man arise from a Quixotic sort of moral idealism. In fact, Adams hated Washington’s public men: among his quoted comments about them: “If a Congressman is a hog, what is a Senator?” Adams conveys his brutal realism in the form of subtle surrealism, rather in the style of Le Sang des bêtes. The put-downs, the fights, the petty wars, the arguments, the rivalries - even actual violence - do not take place on some battlefield or on the floor of Congress or from a bully pulpit, or even in a courtroom; it all happens in or around a quiet ladies’ drawing room in civic Washington, and rather like a parallax, as such we see the object of our attention much more keenly, if incongruently. Yet it is clear that Adams has retained his faith in democracy and his hope for it, but it was a sceptic’s faith. The scepticism probably began with his extensive studies of the début du siècle presidencies: Adams had famously historicised Jefferson as the farmer-philosopher president who had to set-aside provincial virtue to advance his statecraft.

Is Adams right to have faith and hope in democracy? Interestingly, in contrast to modern times, the tradition of American political thought is Platonic. The original American political vision was anti-political, and even anti-Hobbesian: it held that government is the people. Lincoln’s Biblical aphorism at Gettysburg was very un-American, in fact an elegy for republican government: the encapsulation of the very Hobbesian tyranny of moral-democratic sovereignty that the rebel Founding Fathers (with the exception of Hamilton) had sought to upturn. The Republic was to be replaced with ‘democracy’, its Virginian heroes like Robert E. Lee and the fictional Mr Carrington were to be replaced by the Silas P. Ratcliffes of this world: in actual history, men like Daniel Webster, Thaddeus Stevens, say, or Andrew Johnson. Gulliver was to be pulled down by the Lilliputians – finally. The backdrop to this new paradigm was a shift in political-economy, from pre-industrial to industrial society, from the organic ethno-democracy of the Old Republic to the beginnings of mass enfranchisement and mass democracy. With these changes came the psychological afflictions of a mass society: the mal du siècle and the sense of alienation, not just in the way posited by Marx, but also experienced and observed as a separation of ruler from ruled, as a growing sense of political and social complexity, and with this, the kind of compartmentalisation of social issues that is required in an industrial society but that makes responsive democracy impossible. In such a climate, it no longer seems possible for rulers to act in the interests of people, still less The People; instead, they must calculate and reckon on a utilitarian basis what is good for all, or as many people as possible. Thus we see a shift in the nature of virtù, the values that sustain the political community, and in the conflicting moral sensibilities of Ratcliffe and Carrington, we see vestiges of the dichotomy. Carrington is holding to the virtù of the original Republic, with which he would have seen a continuation in the Confederacy, for which he fought. Carrington’s civic credo is reaction, order, tradition, hierarchy and republican aristocracy, and is anti-democratic. His mores and customaries are honour, duelling, chivalry and ma parole d'honneur. The common good is defined and pursued by society’s best men, who are landed and ecologically tied to the country as if it were their own flesh and blood. To them, slavery was a paternalistic and humane institution.

Ratcliffe, in contrast, represents the virtù of mass democracy, with which slavery was an irreconcilable evil, and the relevant values are wrapped up in capitalism, industrialism, modernity, meritocracy and democracy; society is ruled by elective tyrants whose artifacts are the contract, the statute and the ballot box, and who define the common good according to the needs of capital, a class not necessarily tied to the country, seeking support and ratification from the individuated masses. Senator Ratcliffe, one of these elective tyrants and a possible future president of the United States, is meant to be what this novel describes as one of the “shade trees”: an impactful and consequential figure, perhaps with Svengali qualities. The president in this novel, for his part, is perceived to be quite an honest man of humble stock – one of Nature’s noblemen – this perception relating chiefly to his background as a stone-cutter. Perhaps there is something in the link between honesty and humility of occupation or vocation, but it is difficult to see what it is. We assume that the stone-cutter makes an ‘honest living’ because there is little scope for him to lie in going about a job that is based on fixing and repairing stone structures, but his job is not the sum of his character. True, a statesman can be as honest as a stone-cutter, but the problem is that a stone-cutter can be as honest as a statesman. We may also ask, is the honesty of this Nazarene-like figure much good to anybody in his chosen field? Adams seems to want to make the Socratean link between knowledge and virtue, and would have us believe that Ratcliffe is more a Lilliputian than a Brobdingnagian in this respect, but maybe it is the other way round? The Plain Man is only operative in the Wabash. In Washington, D.C. he is more vulnerable to the wiles of seasoned Capitol Men. On his home turf, he is an independent man, in the federal jungle he is prey to manipulation and control by cleverer men like Ratcliffe who can appeal to his less base attributes: the pride and vanity that took him from the Wabash to seek ‘greatness’ and immortality. Indeed, through his novel, Adams suggests to us that what Mrs Lee - a figurative Gulliver - found in Washington City was a race of Lilliputians: mean, back-stabbing, conniving and corrupt. The obvious flaw with this view is that, moral Lilliputians the Washingtonian statesmen may be, but some of them nevertheless cast long shadows.

Has democracy civilised us? It has not turned us against barbaric practices. We still associate greatness with war and even today our politicians are responsible for the deaths and maiming of many thousands under the aegis of the nation-state’s moral privilege to carry out violence. Is Plato right to see democracy as degraded? Are we better for it? The Founding Fathers perhaps knew or intuited that the political system they created would eventually deteriorate into a democracy, and so they put in place various checks and balances in the system in order to slow and counter this decline, but these measures were insufficient. The decline into ‘democratic tyranny’ that began in the 19th. century was perhaps borne out of what Adams through this novel calls “late 19th. century cynicism”. The works of Darwin, Marx, Nietzsche and Tolstoy, among others, that revived the spirit of Antisthenes, were the culmination of a materialistic and scientific movement that had begun with the Enlightenment. Man was instilled with a mechanistic understanding of existence, making people less inclined towards reverence and hereditary rule. This marked an irradicable shift in consciousness. We find in this novel that Mrs Lee accepts Darwinism and argues with Ratcliffe about it, asserting that humans are evolved from monkeys. Interestingly, Ratcliffe - a church-goer - is unconvincingly sceptical and mocks the idea. Which view represents progress? The monkey view or that of the churchman? Perhaps there is something feminine and regressive about Darwinism: maybe it reflects the instinctive yearning for the vestigial and the primitive and a longing to return to it. Ratcliffe believes in the higher cause, which requires that we uphold the specialness of Man and allow him to make his own decisions, ordained by Faith; whereas Mrs Lee is implying that we are just animals and genetic vessels in the end and presumably a large part of our behaviour is governed by base drives. Yet it is Ratcliffe who acts more in keeping with the Darwinian idea, while Mrs Lee upholds the idées reçues. Ratcliffe’s approach to Washington is something akin to honouring Survival of the Fittest – in order to survive politically, he is prepared to do whatever gets him ahead in his chosen environment. Mrs Lee is left with a choice: she either has to adopt Ratcliffian morality, or she must adapt in a different way - by pursuing her own niche within the same environment or fleeing.

We must remember that Survival of the Fittest does not necessarily equate to Survival of The Best. Nature imposes an objective standard on what would otherwise be subjectivity. Democracy may well represent the deterioration of civics that the Founding Fathers anticipated, but it is nevertheless a triumph of Cynicism in its purest form – not a demonstration that Darwin was wrong, but an affirmation of his ideas. As such, people like Ratcliffe impose a disconcerting realisation on the observant. Whether intended or not, this novel shows us the inadequacies of the Little People’s moral outlook. Still more depressing is the realisation that there is no apocalyptic justice for the dark, profane Brobdingnagians, who are winners, and no ultimate redemption for the Quixotic Lilliputians, who are losers. There will be no ever-increasing advancement to a summit of light, only ‘progress’ in an evolutionary sense. The whig historians are wrong. In its palingenesis, American society has reached a mass-democratic phase in which political power is titular and appointments are the outcome of vapid popularity contests. The enfranchised population is shallow and steeped in commercial views, taught to regard old and new as ‘things’ to be switched and discarded on whims of convenience.

The old/new contrast between tradition and expediency is most evident in this novel during a visit by the social party to the old, dilapidated estate of General Robert E. Lee. With its dark emptiness and references to stylised pots, white marble, and machined plasterwork, the scene is an attractive nod to the emerging Southern Gothic literature movement, and also a sad reminder for Carrington of the reality of defeat. If war really is an extension of politics by other means, Carrington has seen the principle in action. All around him - physically and spiritually, in his own life and in the lives of his family - are the grim reminders of defeat. It is one thing to be conquered by a stronger force, but the point is that the South is forced also to change: politically, socially and culturally. The old thing must be abandoned for the new thing, as a sign of the conqueror’s permanent victory. Robert Lee’s run-down estate is not a manufactured monumental to celebrate a mythical history, like the tombs and icons of Washington City, but a genuine knife to the gut: a monument from the Old Time, left by the New to rot visibly into irrelevancy. Thus, Von Clausewitz’s maxim is reversed: politics becomes an extension of war by other means, in which parties that cannot overthrow the state by force seek to control or upturn it by intrigue. Men like Lincoln and the fictional Ratcliffe thrive in such coy environments, notwithstanding that they may sometimes be titular war leaders. The defeat of the South confirmed the mastery of the Lincoln-type managerial politician: revolutionary war against the state (as opposed to war inter nation-states, a different thing) could not be waged any more by violent means, instead stratagem would govern public affairs. Still the animal-nature is there, beneath the thin surface of civilisation. Yet we are also civilised and even appear to have a facility for civilisation. How can that be? Perhaps civilisation came about as a way of minimising suffering, this being in everyone’s rational self-interest. Maybe physically and morally weak men like Lincoln and the fictitious Ratcliffe somehow connived civilisation into existence, or perhaps civilisation weakened men genetically and they are the result, so that civilisation is devolving us? Taking us back to those Darwinian monkeys, even? Yet to Darwin, and anybody understanding of evolutionary theory, this would be ‘progress’, entirely consistent with Nature’s needs and purposes (if the clumsy formulation will be excused).

Possibly this novel is a disguised Gothic work. The scene at General Lee’s dilapidated plantation provides us with a window into the deeper primal and transgressive forces that lie at the heart of American history and that are rarely discussed in the mainstream. Like all modern nations, the United States is built on genocide, mass killing and suffering. In the novel, General Lee’s mansion is now a sad shell around which citizens and antiquaries can mosey at leisure, whereas once it was the seat of a great general and Southern hero. Meanwhile, on the horizon, below the purple haze, is the centre of federal power that has supplanted men like Lee in every possible sense, a designed political city that will resist its own redundancy – to the death, if need be. We are meant to accept this New Thing as the one legitimate thing until it becomes the Old Thing, replaced by a new New Thing. No questions must be asked or need be. The smiling, reassuring faces on the news, and the respectable robed judges with their learned voices and sophistic tomes, all derive their legitimacy from the most appalling acts of inhumanity and all maintain it on the basis of ultimately threatening similarly-inhumane acts against anybody who should challenge them. Adams’ novel is telling us the story: it’s the horror and darkness at the heart of a political dream: someone somewhere imposed his will on others. Violence and barbarism, then, are components of a sustainable civilisation, not inimical to it. Culture is only one of the trinity. Now the monuments to violence and barbarism are tourist attractions or subject-matter for hobbyists delving into conspiratorial musings that do not seem to rise much above the level of gossip and paranoia. Perhaps in a sense that is the point. We are not meant to understand, we are mere ideologically-infused tourists, honouring the Old, maybe weeping at its feet. Perhaps that is how tourism began? In the distant past, before the advent of industry, few people moved from place-to-place or would have seen the need as all of their needs were fulfilled in their locality. Presumably there were not tourists after the American Revolutionary War, or the English War of the Roses, say, seeking out artefacts and battlefields as a way of ‘touching history’? At the beginning of the post-industrial era (from the 1850s onwards in England), middle-class people suddenly found themselves with leisure time and decided that they would honour the Old Time and the Old Ways, or they just wanted to touch history as a way of experiencing meaning and tangibility in an otherwise alienated existence. Thus, tourism invented history. Before there were tourists, there were historians, but they were not self-consciously concerned with writing history as history, they were simply codifiers of folklore. It is our era that is self-consciously historical, because we have become reflective beings: the ultimate Cynics. We now reflect on our history as history, and the history of history, and the history of ourselves as a species, and we even self-consciously create history and memorialise it and then go round visiting the memorials. We have moved beyond our localities and ceased to be parochial.

Having begun to understand our place in the world and our folklores as systems (what we call history and ideology), we have also become conscious of the one thing at the centre of all life: suffering as suffering. The signature of an empathetic being is a wish to see suffering minimised. Civilisation is the penultimate palliative, Heaven (or death, if you are atheist) being the ultimate conclusion of suffering. Suffering, then, leads to love or at least the end. For the believer, morality is thus an inescapable paradox: if love is with God alone and we must strive for our end by following Christ’s Way and repenting all sins so that we can stand clean before God, how can one be insensible to a society that practices mass killing in the open under dubious rationalisations of freedom, liberty, equality and justice, and affects to elect, promote and respect the people who do this as law-givers? Both Jesus and Tolstoy had the answer, but few practising Christians embrace their teachings in any serious sense. At the very least, the believer must experience chronic daily mortification. It seems that this so-called Christian ‘morality’ is in rags, and perhaps the real theme of this novel is how such a civilisation – maybe any civilisation - is unsustainable and must inevitably turn in on itself, even kill itself. Why and how might that happen? I would suggest the core problem is the nihilism that superstitious dogma such as Christianity inculcates in self-reflective, self-conscious beings who are aware of history as history and can ‘see themselves’. It is a problem that is not soluble democratically – arguably, democracy in the modern sense even part-causes the dissonance - yet these ruminations are not above mundane politicians. Their type stridently avow that they will create their own City of God on Earth - except for Ratcliffe. Like most corrupt men, he is too honest to submit to such fancies, even in front of the public. Ever the moral-political evangelist, his touch of idiosyncracy is that he believes that purifying government is pointless before a nation of reprobates - he will not even entertain the notion. Yet he is a churchman who disavows a large sector of science and no doubt he may say that all that matters is our place in the City of God. Morality then becomes a mundane and dispensable concern. For Ratcliffe, there is no New Jerusalem, only a distant City that the clean and undefective may enter on conclusion of their lives, or at the Reckoning. There are no standards to be had. All are sinners. All that matters is that we should acknowledge and repent our sins. Ratcliffe creditably does so, only to continue sinning, presumably to repent later at the feet of the Old, weeping there if he has to. This exposes Christianity’s ironical nihilism, which Mrs Lee surmises, causing her to reject Ratcliffe’s City entirely.

America Will Break

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.