The Rewritten War Alternate Histories of the American Civil War

Title The Rewritten War Alternate Histories of the American Civil War By Renee de Groot Supervised by Dr. George Blaustein Thesis Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Master of Arts in the History: American Studies Program Faculty of Humanities University of Amsterdam 22 August 2016 Declaration I declare that I have read the UvA regulations regarding fraud and plagiarism, and that the following thesis is my original work. Renee de Groot August 22, 2016 Abstract The American Civil War (1861-1865) has provided food for counterfactual speculation for historians, journalists, critics, and writers of all stripes for over a century. What if the Confederacy had won? What if the South had abolished slavery? What if Lincoln had lived? What if…? This thesis offers an anatomy of Civil War alternate history as a distinct though eclectic cultural form. It takes apart the most interesting manifestations and reassembles them to show four intriguing functions of this form: as a platform for challenges to narratives of Civil War memory, for counterintuitive socio-economic criticism, for intricate reflections on history writing and on historical consciousness. It shows the many paradoxes that rule Civil War alternate history: its insularity and global outlook, its essential un-creativity, its ability to attract strange bedfellows and to prod the boundaries between fact and fiction. Most importantly, this thesis demonstrates the marriage of sophistication and banality that characterizes this form that is ultimately the domain of history’s winners. Dedication voor SB en TG Contents Introduction: Roads not Taken 1 Chapter I – Divided We Stand: Challenges to Memory 28 Chapter II – Who Ain’t a Slave?: The Peculiar Afterlives of an Institution 50 Chapter III – History is not a Spectator Sport! : The Scholar, the Revisionist 70 and the Time Machine Chapter IV – A Dream within a Dream: The Unburden of Alternate History 88 Conclusion: The Winner Takes it All 112 Bibliography 116 Appendix: Full List of Civil War Alternate Histories 124 Acknowledgements 135 Abbreviations AH Alternate history CWAH Civil War alternate history CWM Civil War Memory POD Point of divergence *** Introduction Roads not Taken I Introduction Counterfactual writings on the Civil War go back to the early 1900s. Second to World War II, the Civil War is the most popular subject of American alternate history writing. Nearly 150 considerations of alternative Civil Wars have appeared in a range of forms, moods and contexts (see the appendix affixed to this thesis for a full list.) Their variety is such that beyond relating to the American Civil War, these documents resist easy classification. Most of these sources have also not been studied extensively. Some of the better known Civil War alternate histories have been analyzed as documents of popular memory or as successful examples of alternate history as a genre of science-fiction. As far as I am aware, there has been no effort to date to study Civil War alternate history as a self-contained form. Because the subject is largely unchartered territory, this thesis has more than one point to make: it is an anatomy of Civil War alternate history that makes several arguments about the form as an expression of the legacy of the Civil War in popular memory. This introduction is divided up into two lopsided parts: in the first, I situate this project in the scholarly discourse on Civil War memory to position Civil War alternate histories as a way of bringing out shades of complexity in the memory of the Civil War that in the current framework have not been fully recognized. The second part is a survey of Civil War alternate history by way of a makeshift categorization, intended to introduce and intrigue before being swiftly replaced by the more apt but less apparent anatomy that is the main body and objective of this thesis. I aim to enumerate the main conventions, preoccupations and characteristics of CWAH in order to provide a handle on this mass of documents, before diving into some of the more specific harmonies and tendencies in the main body of the thesis. II Civil War Memory There is, to this day, a curious ambiguity in the way American society looks back on its Civil War. In a seeming contradiction to the adage that history is written by the victors, the popular memory of the war that stills looms large in the American imagination contains a curious sympathy with the losing side even as it condemns that side’s reasons for entering the conflict. Historians have often explained this ambiguity by saying that while the North won the war, the South won the peace. The tradition of historians and writers commenting on this process of ‘winning the peace’ goes back at least to neo-Abolitionist Albion Tourgée’s 1884 text An Appeal 2 to Caesar, in which he observed and described it as it was happening.1 Over the last few decades, after it received an impetus from the vogue in memory studies, the interest in the legacy of the Civil War has become a field of historical inquiry onto itself. While Civil War Memory as a field is some way from reaching agreement on the development of Civil War memory from Appomattox to the present, it is characterized by an interpretive framework created by scholars which is so stratified it can obscure even as it illuminates.2 Civil War Memory is predicated on a postmodern understanding of memory as being everything but a passive act: public or collective memory is actively constructed, enacted, appropriated, negotiated, co-opted, adjusted, and manipulated in an endless process of collective meaning-making. The groups or individuals involved in this performance of memory are invariably motivated by some mood or feature of their own time, and thus public memory is not only constantly in flux, but more importantly always reveals something about its time and place. Moreover, at any given time there will be different groups advancing competing interpretations of a shared past, leading to conflicts over historical meaning that reveal the cultural preoccupations of a period. The history of Civil War memory, unsurprisingly, considering the war’s immense importance in US history, is the tug-of-war between competing factions and discourses, the meeting of which has presented fertile ground to cultural historians. Historians have identified four traditions of ascribing meaning to the war that alternately suffuse personal and collective remembrance through popular culture and political rhetoric. Associated with the warring sections are the Lost Cause of the white South, which holds that the war was a dispute over state’s rights in which the South was in the right, and the unionist cause of the North, which sees the war as a fight to preserve the Union and its promise of democracy. On a national level, there is the reconciliationist cause, which casts the war as a tragic but honorable ‘brother’s war,’ and implicitly advocates forgetting the cause of the war to hasten national reconciliation, and the emancipationist cause of African-Americans and neo- Abolitionists, which insists on the centrality of slavery to the war. Scholarly interest in the Lost Cause predates the rise of Civil War Memory as a field by several decades, going back at least to the 1940s. Most major Civil War Memory scholarship has focused on the struggle between 1 Albion W. Tourgée, An Appeal to Caesar (New York: Fords, Howard & Hulbert, 1884). 2 I use capitalization to distinguish between Civil War memory itself and Civil War Memory as a field. 3 reconciliationist sentiments and the emancipationist legacy in American society, and the political consequences thereof. Rather than observe this struggle from a scholarly distance, however, Civil War Memory historians have always actively positioned themselves as both observers and participants in this process. I have been struck by how often the field gestures to contemporary American politics— usually to do with racial strife or foreign intervention—to stress the importance of a correct understanding of the war’s causes and consequences. As many scholars have noted, so long as America does not resolve lingering racial inequality, there will be contesting legacies of the Civil War. While surveying the field of Civil War Memory currently and its precursors going back to the 1950s and 1960s (not coincidentally a time when Civil War memory was particularly politically charged) it becomes clear that these observers were and are themselves heavily influenced—in some cases even biased—by the tradition holding sway in their own time. The current field of Civil War Memory is strongly informed by our emancipationist understanding of the war, which has been gaining ground steadily since World War II. Meanwhile, the American public opinion is still more divided over the causes and meaning of the war, and historians often display a concern with this dissonance in the rationale, tone, and argument of their work.3 David W. Blight’s 2001 Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory, as the pioneering work and benchmark of Civil War Memory, exemplifies this paradoxical combination of an easy command of the field’s approach to memory coupled with a deep unease with its cultural impact. Race and Reunion chronicles the history of public debate over the causes and meaning of the war from before it was even properly won through to the war’s semicentennial in 1915. Blight’s standard conclusion is that Southern and Northern whites fashioned a memory of the war as a fratricial conflict that united the nation in common valor. This consensus located the cause of the war in a dispute over states’ rights, saw Reconstruction as an unfair humiliation of the South, and, most tragically, left the legacy of slavery and racial strife unresolved.

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