Preface
dcharles
Banned
Preface
Years ago, I started work on a novel, The Devil and Harvey Hill, that told the story of a Confederate victory from the eyes of four historical characters: Robert Smalls, Confederate General D.H. Hill, OTL spy and probable Lincoln conspirator Sara Slater, and an obscure carpenter and free Creole of color, Joseph Joly.
In a variety of ways, I bit off more than I could chew with The Devil and Harvey Hill. For one, I think that doing a story like that--dark, epic, terrifying--was beyond my capabilities as a storyteller and a writer at the time. It may always be. I could never stop researching, never stop rewriting. It was also psychologically taxing to write. A novel requires that the writer inhabit the headspace of a character in a supremely intimate way, and that was a story of bad people doing terrible things out of choice and good people doing terrible things out of necessity. It was dark, and especially in the years of the timeline I was trying to novelize, extraordinarily hopeless.
Off and on (mostly off, let's be honest), I worked on it for several years. At some point I realized that I was spinning my wheels, and I moved onto other things. I'm glad I did. Writing different things made me a stronger writer. However, I'm not sure that anything a person works on for so long ever really stays buried. It hasn't, at least for me.
I don't know that I'll ever return to that novel specifically. If I do, it'll be an a radically different form. But the desire to explore a Confederate victory never left me. While it is the most well-trodden of Alternate History scenarios, there are good reasons for that. The Confederacy was the first state to be founded specifically and primarily on the principles of ideological racism, an ideological position which dominated Western thought, conservatively, for a century and a half. While the defeat of the Confederacy certainly did not spell the defeat of racism as an ideology, in the long march of history, it represents a crucial inflection point. To draw a metaphor that's quite on the nose, the defeat of the Confederates wasn't the Gettysburg in the battle against racism, but it might very well have been the Sharpsburg.
Which leads me to something I've been circling. On balance, no good can come of a Confederate victory. Even in the optimistic scenarios where the US reconquers the CS in twenty years, any sort of realistic accounting of such a conflict entails a bloodbath the likes of which have never been seen in North America. Even for someone like me, who is on the political left, and who reckons it highly possible that there would be a twentieth century socialist successor state to the CS, the human cost to get there is almost inconceivable. In other words, the Confederacy, in conception and execution, was a crime against humanity. There is no scenario in which extending the lifespan of the Confederate States of America does not presuppose the extension of a monstrous crime spree upon the human race.
And so, while this is not a dystopian story in the sense that I'm gleefully heaping misery on the human race, it is a story of the bad thing.
One of the reasons I've decided to dust this old story off is because I haven't seen something that looks at the Confederacy in quite this way in some time. Maybe not ever. It seems that the current spirit of the genre is to imagine the Confederacy as a banana republic analogue, politically and economically. While I acknowledge that this is a possibility, I don't think it's the most likely one. So often, the Confederacy is measured against the United States. This is natural and logical in the context of history--the United States was blessedly, the only foe the Confederacy got to tangle with. But if the Confederates had won the war, they would have been one nation among many. In numerous respects, they measured up quite strongly. The white literacy rate and standard of living were both very high, they were making money hand over fist, and even in metrics where the Confederacy has been maligned, such as miles of railroad track and manufacturing capacity, they measure up internationally. For example, the South's 9500 miles (15288 km) of railroads in 1860 might have been less than the UK or the US, but it was more than France, Italy, Russia, or anywhere else. While the South's manufacturing capacity in 1860 was far less than the North's, it was average internationally. I did the math on it several years back, and IIRC, the South's manufacturing in 1860 put it in the neighborhood of Austria-Hungary or Italy. Although we don't have good numbers on it, it is a certainty that the South had a far, far greater manufacturing capacity in 1863 than they did in 1860.
That wartime transformation was both sought after and welcomed. The probusiness, promanufacturing ethos of the New South was really, a continuation and modification of a movement that began in the 1850s. JDB DeBow and William Gregg were merely the most famous spokesmen for antebellum industrialization. They were hardly alone. The lagging of Southern industry was a widely recognized issue before the war, and the need for it became a veritable tenet of Confederate nationalism. Reconstruction, the devastation from the war, the economic and demographic dislocation caused by emancipation, and the emergency created in the minds of the ruling class by the threat to white supremacy--that was the anomaly. If that 15-20 year interregnum is averted, I see no reason for the turn towards industrialization to wane. To the contrary.
As that might imply, this will not be the moonshine and tobacco juice take on the Confederacy that I see a lot of these days. Those aren't always bad stories, this just isn't one of them. It will also not be the kind of moonlight and magnolias, Golden Circle fantasy that I see too much of on Reddit. Those are almost always bad stories, and the people who write them don't have a great track record either. Instead, what I aim to show here is the picture of a CSA, eagerly embracing the hardware of modernity while rejecting the freedoms it suggests, barreling towards the twentieth century, creating capitalism in the image of Forrest and Anderson, Duke and Hughes. In many ways, I would expect the Confederacy to have many proto-fascist characteristics--militaristic and illiberal, but also ruthlessly modernist, and somewhat self-consciously creating a new society.
Because of what I want to focus on here, I'm skipping the Civil War entirely. Of course, war makes fortunes, and the leaders and generals of the war will play a huge role in the following decades, so many wartime events will be referenced obliquely and explicitly. When I was writing The Devil and Harvey Hill, the war was all gamed out, so if you've got any questions about it, you can hit me up on the thread or in a dm. Chances are, I've got the answer, but the details of Jackson's Bluegrass Campaign aren't the most relevant thing for our story here. The Confederacy winning isn't the most likely outcome--I put it somewhere between 1/5 and 2/7. They've got to land a lot of bell-ringers and a thunderous liver shot to win the war, and they're jumping up a weight class to do it. In this timeline, suffice it to say they do. Here, we're concentrating on the world that comes after.
The title comes from Henry Grady's line--"the South has nothing for which to apologize"--delivered in the maliciously delusional "New South Speech," given to a New York audience in 1886. It's well worth a look for anyone who hasn't already read it, and a reread for anyone who has.
Anyway, that's enough god-damned preface.
*The original image comes from Jules-Alexandre Grun, painted in 1902.
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