Virtually every historian, amateur or professional, has asked the question — What if ? What if Hannibal had not made it across the Alps ?
What if Germany had won the Battle of Britain ?
What if the South had won the Civil War ?
That’s the question Harry Turtledove tries to answer in The Guns of The South.
The book begins in the winter camp of the Army of Northern Virginia. Robert E. Lee, only months from the defeat at Gettysburg, ponders yet another spring and summer of confrontation with the North when he is approached by a man offering him an unparallelled advantage in the war — weaponry from the 20th Century in the form of the AK-47. As it turns out, this man is the leader of a group of South African whites who have traveled back in time to 1864 in an effort to change the course of history and create in the Confederate States of America a power center for the white race into the 21st Century.
The course of a Civil War changed by automatic weaponry is predictable. Instead of winning the Battle of the Wilderness, the Army of the Potomac suffers a horrible defeat at the hands of the Lee’s men and begins a retreat back to Washington that never succeeds.
The first half of the book ends with the Confederate Army on the lawn of the White House as General Lee accepts the surrender of Abraham Lincoln. The description of battles that never took place — in Bealton, Virginia and Rockville, Maryland — is gripping and the vision created by the description of Lincoln and Lee standing on the White House Lawn amidst a sea of Confederate Gray made me wish the book had been made into a movie.
The second half of the book is where the interesting things happen. The South has won its independence and now, the question is, what will it do with it ? Reflected primarily through the character of Robert E. Lee and First Sgt. Nate Caudell, Turtledove paints a picture of a Confederacy not entirely at ease with the institution that sets it apart from its Northern neighbor — slavery. As Lee begins his path toward the Presidency of the Confederacy, he begins to question whether slavery should continue and comes to a conclusion that puts him at odds with the foreign benefactors who gave the South the means to achieve its independence.
Ultimately, this book tries to answer the question of what the Civil War was really about. Was it about state’s rights and federalism as modern-day Southern partisans would claim, or was it really about slavery and the domination of one race of men by another ? I’m not sure I agree that an independent South would have given up slavery as easily as the author suggests, but he presents a compelling case.
On some level, though, I found this book disappointing. It wasn’t true alternate history. It was history manipulated by the deus ex machina of time traveling South African racists. I would much rather see a story that took history has it actually occurred and simply changed the outcome of one event. That, apparently, is what How Few Remain and the books that follow it is about. That is a story I look forward to seeing unfold.
Technorati Tag: Harry Turtledove
[...] It started with his alternate history Civil War novel The Guns Of The South. Almost exclusively, though, its been the books in the Timeline-191 universe. That’s one reason I looked forward to reading In The Presence Of Mine Enemies, because I was interested in seeing what Turtledove was like when he wasn’t writing about the Civil War and American history. [...]