The year is 1862. The month is September. The Army of Northern Virginia has just defeated the Army of the Potomac for the second time at Bull Run in Manassas, Virginia. Now, Robert E. Lee has decided to take the fight across the Mason-Dixon Line. The Army of Northern Virginia crosses into Maryland, threatening Washington and Pennsylvania. Just outside Frederick, Maryland, a private from Indiana discovers an envelope containing three cigars wrapped in a piece of paper lying in the grass. History doesn’t record what happened with the cigars, but the paper they were wrapped in contained Robert E. Lee’s General Order 191 — which recorded the deployment of the elements of the Army of Northern Virginia and allowed the usually ineffective George McClellan to force a battle at Antietam Creek near Hagerstown, Maryland. Lee’s Army was divided and McClellan was able to win a victory that allowed Abraham Lincoln to issue the Emancipation Proclamation, which changed the character of the Civil War.
This is where Harry Turtledove’s How Few Remain begins. What if Lee’s order had not been found ? What if Lee had been able to advance further into Pennsylvania and force a battle on more favorable terms……..and won ? In such a world, the Emancipation Proclamation would never have been issued, and England and France arguably would have forced the United States to recognize the independence of their southern neighbor.
Turtledove writes of a world 20 years after the secession of the southern states. The CSA is now its own nation and the USA is still bitter over its defeat. Abraham Lincoln, defeated in the election of 1864, roams the country speaking words that make him sound like Karl Marx. His Republican Party has been out of power for 20 years, until the election of 1880 places James G. Blaine into the White House — albeit a White House within distance of Confederate artillery The CSA, meanwhile, has cultivated relationships with Great Britain and France and negotiated the purchases of two Pacific provinces from the Empire of Mexico. It is this expansion of the CSA that provokes a second Civil War between the CSA and USA and sets the events of the book in motion.
The book itself is a fascinating march through a history that never was, but seems like it could have been. Samuel Clemens is a staunchly anti-war newspaper editor in San Francisco who watches his city get shelled by the Royal Navy and invaded by the Royal Marines. Frederick Douglas is a newspaper columnist who has spent 20 year in despair over the plight of his fellow Negroes in the CSA, and becomes witness to a battle that thankfully never took place on American soil. And, as noted, Abraham Lincoln becomes a socialist rabble rouser. In between, there are substantial appearances by George Armstrong Custer, Theodore Roosevelt, and even Geronimo. Throughout the book, Turtledove weaves a compelling tale of a history that might have been but for a Confederate courier who mistakenly dropped some very important pieces of paper.
All in all, this was an absolutlely compelling read. Even more so than Turtledove’s other alternate vision of the Civil War, The Guns of the South, which I wrote about in August.
Technorati Tag: Harry Turtledove, Book Reviews
