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Underground > Books, Criticism & Writing >

Civil War Alternate History?

04:40 / 27.07.05

Im writing an alternate history of the American Civil War--or rather of America in general, around the Civil War--does anybody know of a novel speculating on American History as it would have been if our Civil War never happened? Or if the South had won?

07:04 / 27.07.05

If you're interested in alternate history - especially the civil war - Harry Turtledove is worth checking out. He's not the best writer but his stuff is very readable. He's a very prolific author and has written loads of civil war based alternate histories. I think Harry Harrison did a 3 part series as well.

13:30 / 27.07.05

Newt Gingrich has written a couple of these, I think.

I dunno—am I the only one who finds Civil War alternate history, as a genre, to be be... kinda icky?

I mean, there are plenty of what-if-the-Nazis-had-won-WWII books, too, but it's never (in mainstream SF, anyway) presented as a positive thing. Whereas in a disproportionate number of alternate-Civil-War novels, there seems to be this nostalgic underpinning, less a "What if..." than an "If only..."

They always seem to end up romanticizing the Confederacy in a way that, say, Fatherland doesn't romanticize the Nazis.

Then again, there are a lot of people living in this timeline who romanticize the Confederacy, too—which has never made any sense to me, either.

15:55 / 27.07.05

Come on South and say that, Yankee-boy.

Here's a collection of 10 scholarly essays by historians dreaming up ways the South may well have risen and stayed up.

Not novels, but there are links on that Amazon page to other sources.

From the top user review, as well:

I recently asked a friend of mine, another Civil War buff (and a Southerner of Confederate heritage, like myself), if he had read this book. No, he allowed, he'd heard of it but was turned off by the prospect of reading something that celebrated secession and the defense of slavery that we both see as having been the core values of the Confederacy.

That sensibility is understandable, but if you are reticent about buying or reading some Southern nationalist fantasy that presents Confederate victory and independence as the desirable outcome of the Civil War, you need not fear "Dixie Victorious."

The anthology's editor posits an unlikely alternate history in which the South frees the slaves and arms them (freedom for fighting). This actually happened, apparently, only a month or so before Lee surrendered. The editor takes a look at what might have been had they put that policy into effect before it was too late.

17:36 / 27.07.05

I'd be even more interested to see an alternate history that saw neither sides win in the civil war and it ending instead with some kind of uneasy truce. Two seperate (and rival) states of America would have radically altered the course of the 20th century. It is difficult not to see both sides in the great war looking to recruit these two americas to fight in their war - would the result merely have been to reopen the US civil war as part of a wider WWI conflict? I'm just throwing out ideas here...

17:41 / 27.07.05

I think "uneasy truce" constitutes a Southern victory, sleaze. All they wanted was to form their own country, not conquer Pennsylvania. And since the South had all the raw materials and the North had all the factories, some kind of truce would have been inevitable.

Phex: Dorset Doom

18:24 / 27.07.05

I remember one called 'The Guns of the South', which had a South African Neo-Nazi go back in time to give thousands of AK-47s to the Confederates. It's on Amazon here

00:01 / 28.07.05

Eww, yeah, saying how great it would be if the South had won is pretty icky. In mine, Lincoln dies very early, and Mary Todd Lincoln is an evil sorceress who fights the Civil War Weekend-at-Bernie's-style. But I figure if I paint Lincoln as a horrific, supernatural terror, it makes the same point as saying that the South was wrong, doesn't it? I mean, because it's patently not true...

...wild west bodice rippings! Besitality! Sorcery! Dismemberment! A horror-Western sensorium! Nobody steal my idea (you know, the one that's been done 4 billion times before)

(Blood Meridian is my favorite book.)