Brad DeLong's Semi-Daily Journal: A Weblog

Can I put in a plug here for John Birmingham's new alternate-worlds novel 'Weapons of Choice'? It has the hoary concept of a naval task force from 2020 suddenly thrown into the battle of Midway, but differentiates itself by spending most of its time on the issue of whether wartime Americans would have _agreed_ to allow themselves to be saved by a ship headed by a black lesbian atheist.

Indeed, if any states were going to leave the Union over Federal heavyhandedness, it would've been those Northern states forced to aid and abet slavery.

Sounds like this is just recycled "myth of the lost cause" nonsense.

It could also be argued that the point of the misrepresentations in those novels is indeed to sow an alternate version of reality in the memories of people.

Casual readers will just accept the premise that besides the INITIATING CHANGE, everything is based in historic fact.

And Gingrich has plausible deniability (VERY important for these guys), because "it's fiction".

And if you're interested in alternate realities regarding science, you can't miss out on this guy (with Plutonium references; he even changed his name to the element):
http://www.iw.net/~a_plutonium/

This one is also not bad: http://www.timecube.com/

It sounds like a clever parody of the accusations made against the "liberal academic establishment" by the types of Malkin et al, but I'm not so sure.

It might just be a real loon.

Can we flash forward to the present? You guys know what really pisses me off?

Texans brag about how their state constitution (or whatever) allows them to leave the U.S. anytime they want. (Debunked as an urban legend, but still flaunted.) The South still views the Confederate flag with pride -- to them, it's not a symbol of slavery, but of autonomy. Their fight to leave the Union is what made them a unique collective among the states. It's their identity.

Which is fine.

But HOW THE FUCK can they accuse "northern liberals" of being unpatriotic when they routinely flaunt blatant treason on a daily basis?! You can't be patriotic and pro-Confederate at the same time!!

If I'm going to read alternative histories about the Civil War, I'm going to stick with Harry Turtledove.

Mind you, Turtledove had an awfully favorable view of Robert E. Lee, too. I would tend to suspect that he has less of an axe to grind than Gringrich, of course.

It's a bit anachronistic to speak of a "Weimar South," but it's an important concept if you want to understand the mindset behind these books. According to orthodox Confederate history, the South lost because it was inherently more moral, more upright, and more chivalrous than the industrialized North. The "knights of the Confederacy" (what, you thought that was metaphor?) were, in the Orthodox Reading, the last stand of chivalry against technology. (The quasi-Nazi tract Imperium, beloved of the Rockford Institute and other racist groups, is the best source for understanding this viewpoint.)

As a Southerner myself with family on both sides of the Civil War, I'm well acquainted with the various evasions used by good people to justify their disturbing past. And I'm of the opinion that W.J. Cash's "Mind of the South," while as academically suspicious as the Orthdox Reading, is for me a better description of the Southern mind.

Gingrich, whatever his faults, is not a racist. So, if he wants to accept orthodox Confederate history, he has to mitigate the racism of the Peculiar Institution, which generally means minimizing the social and economic importance of slavery. (Misuse of the Fogel-Engerman hypotheses is a common indication of these attempts at historical revisionism.) Hence, we get an image of the South that lionizes a mythical nobility and ignores the real cruelty. This is fine in period romances and re-enactments of Antietam, but Gingrich is an academic. By now a soi disant academic perhaps, but someone who should hold himself and be held to a higher standard than a dilettante.

The comment about Lee and the tactical defensive at Gettysburg makes no sense. Lee's army was in a part of the country that could not resupply his troops over a long period of time. Any time, 300,000 or so drop in unexpected upon a small town they will run short of food very quickly. Whatever Lee did, he had to do it quickly, because of the time factor. It has never been clear exactly WTF Lee was doing in PA in the first place.

Bakho -

which is Brad's point about the tactical defenseive, exactly.

I remember leafing through a stash of Civil War letters a school-mate found in her great aunt's attic after she died. I was able to read that cursive script, so got invited to stand in front of the class for an hour and describe the life back in those days, as read in those letters.

It occurs to me we can never really know what life was like then, not now, with only 2-/12% or so of Americans living on the farm and maybe only 1/100th % of them living like the Amish, the way they lived back then in the 1860's. It was largely agrarian, proto-populist, one side of the river different from the other, clannish, mostly Sunday-go-to-meeting folks with not much over a 6th grade education, living near a town with a general store and livery stable. Insular.

I doubt they gave much thought to slavery as a concept, other than to buy and sell labor when needed to, like any other farm animal they had, if they could find a way to scrape up the cash.
Imagine endless 90,000,000 acres of Mississippi River bottomland, dirt roads, wide open fields, like that. Probably the grasshoppers did more talking than people, sunup rolling into sundown.

I remember a description in one letter about a bunch of fellows coming through the valley and eating all the chickens and milk. The writer's only derogative was calling them "seshish", by which I guess she was pro-Yank and they Reb's. She didn't seem to mind them eating everything, other than being a little peeved about it.

Can you imagine the SWAT response today?

Things were taken a lot more literately then and trusted by word-of-mouth up and down the holler. And time went a lot slower between the news of something, and anything of consequence happening.

I just don't think anyone can get inside that headspace today. It would probably be a good idea to read Walt Whitman from cover to cover, and then browse Walden Pond as you're going back to the chronicles, trying to make sense of it.

I sure don't think anyone has a real good idea of what was really going on back then, only about where the battles were, and what the big city papers up north had to say about it.

That's pretty thin soup for such a rich history, so Gingrich probably has just as much right to picture it his way, as the cast-in-stone version.

Harry, try reading the Lincoln-Douglas debates and then tell us that people didn't care about slavery. Be sure to look up the size of the crowds (enormous) and pay attention to the frequent commentary, heckling, etc. from the audience.

Judging by voting rates and the sophistication of popular debate the population in the 1860s was a good deal more politically engaged than we are today.

Harry Possue, we can take the point even further. Back in 1830 or 1840, there was hardly a "South" to be found outside the states along the Atlantic coast. Yes, there were plantations with slaves hither and yon, but this was hardly the basis for a proto-national solidarity. In retrospect, the contrast between the old eastern states and the young western states looks downright schizophrenic: as a community, for example, Alabama was two hundred years younger than Virginia. It was full of people milling around, speculating on all manner of things--a "gold rush" east of the Mississippi. Then as now, it was scorned by Virginia and Massachusetts alike as a cultural absurdity. And its role in the Civil War was downright sketchy: one county just north of where I live actually seceded from the secession and declared itself "the free state of Winston County". This is hardly the stuff of solidarity! Things would change, of course, with the war and the reconstruction, but the first mistake of historians is to ignore what went on beforehand (I like the argument that the old south had to make a war in order to keep the young south in line). In matters of this sort, Gingrich is one and the same with historians he aims to refute.

That's what I get for writing an entirely quick and dirty placeholder post. I write jillions of, of course, brilliant and hilarious posts, and this is the one you link to, Brad. Dearie me.

I confess upfront that I've committed the sin of commenting when I've not yet read these Gingrich books. So I'm prepared to believe your specific criticisms, Brad, you being a good reporter and all. I'll have to look back at the TNR piece to see if these were *their* criticisms, however. Because a lot of folks are (understandably) knee-jerk on assuming that alternative-history is wishful-history. Here's what I said last time to the usually extremely sagacious Mark Kleiman:
http://amygdalagf.blogspot.com/2004/04/revealed-writing-alternative-history.html

There is nothing new to Southerners playing with the facts.

Jefferson Davis – Before he War
Speech, February 1861

Secession was an act of self-defense against the incoming Lincoln administration, whose policies of excluding slavery from the territories would make “property in slaves so insecure as to be comparatively worthless, ... thereby annihilating in effect property worth thousands of millions of dollars.”

Jefferson Davis, Constitutionalist: His Letters, Papers, and Speeches, edited by Dunbar Roland, ten volumes (Mississippi Department of Archives and History, 1923), Vol. 5, p. 72.

Jefferson Davis – After the War

The South fought solely for “the inalienable right of a people to change their government ... to withdraw from a Union into which they had, as sovereign communities, voluntarily entered.” The “existence of African servitude was in no wise the cause of the conflict, but only an incident.”

Jefferson Davis, The Rise and Fall of the Confederate Government, (DaCapo Press, 1990), Vol 1, pp 67 and 156.

"I doubt they gave much thought to slavery as a concept, other than to buy and sell labor when needed to, like any other farm animal they had, if they could find a way to scrape up the cash."

I think that wherever there is slavery, it pervades the society because of the continuous level of violence and threat needed to maintain control. Perhaps a lot of it is "unconscious", but it there everywhere.

My alternative history of the Civil War has a backwards grandfather clause, with slaveowners, Confederate soldiers, and their descendents losing voting rights for all time (like the descendants of slaves), and their children sent to government schools (like Native Americans) for indoctrination. Now that's wishful!

Well, maybe the **gradual and selective** restoration of rights starting about 1930-1940 might have been OK. I'm not hard-line.

The slaveholder mentality is the glue that holds the Republican coalition together.

Whatever the occasional strains among the plutocrats, the professional Christians, and the goodoleboys, their strongest belief is that *some* segments of the population--define it later--ought to be privileged above the law, and some other segments ought to be deprived of the protection of the law. In other words, rights a'n't for everybody, any more than responsibilities are.

"Lee's army was in a part of the country that could not resupply his troops over a long period of time. Any time, 300,000 or so drop in unexpected upon a small town they will run short of food very quickly. Whatever Lee did, he had to do it quickly, because of the time factor. It has never been clear exactly WTF Lee was doing in PA in the first place"

First of all, you overstate the size of Lee's army by roughly a factor of 5.

Pennslyvania was certainly capable of supporting Lee's army, just as Grant's army was able to subsist in Mississippi, or Sherman's army in Georgia.

Logistics in fact formed a big part of Lee's reason for invading the north--it was greatly to the advantage of the Confederacy to have the armies sorage Pennsylvania rather than northern Virginia.

z: "my alternative history of the Civil War has a backwards grandfather clause, with slaveowners, Confederate soldiers, and their descendents losing voting rights for all time (like the descendants of slaves), and their children sent to government schools (like Native Americans) for indoctrination. Now that's wishful!"

That's pretty good! Mine simply consists of reconstruction not ending for another thirty-forty years, long enough for blacks to thoroughly institutionalize higher political and economic status.

Z, dn: Harry Turtledove (who else!) has written a version of that story, where a strong Reconstruction policy is continued well into the 20th century. Keeping machine-gun toting federal troops in New Orleans has, in his mind, unfavorable consequences for politics and freedom here up north as well.

rea wrote:

"Pennslyvania was certainly capable of supporting Lee's army, just as Grant's army was able to subsist in Mississippi, or Sherman's army in Georgia."

True, but only so long as they kept moving. Once Lee was confronted in close quarters by the Army of the Potomac, he was compelled to concentrate his army and was no longer able to forage. He needed to attack, to drive off the Union army, or to move off himself, which would give the impression of retreating.

Well, zizka, thanks for wanting to yank MY vote!

My great-great-great grandfather was a confederate cavalry officer, along with his brothers. He fought for his state, not the Confederacy, and when they made a separate peace he went home. Unfortunately there wasn't any home to go back to, so he and his brothers went out west to mine gold.

He married into the family of an Abolitionist minister who was so die-hard he seceded from the Quakers because they were lightweights who just talked but didn't get anything done, and ran an underground railroad station.

Thirty-plus years ago, their descendents, writing about the town they founded, were *proud* that they had been a place of racial harmony in the 1800s.

So, when are you going to suggest yanking the votes of the descendents of Yankees who were perfectly okay with slavery as long as they didn't have to think about it - who bear no less share in the blame for the practice, the war, and the hell of "Reconstruction" which followed it? Who sent back escaped slaves, who approved the Dred Scott decision?

What about the Northerners who were fine with Jim Crow, and the lawmakers like those in Massachussets who made the marriage law designed to prevent mixed-race marriages now used against gay couples? The bigots in Cleveland and Detroit and all the other cities where there never was slavery, yet they shoot black people anyway, and give them bad water and worse schools.

Are you volunteering to give up *your* vote, too?

Because *that* would only be fair, now.

Grant is correct.

OK My number of 300,000 is a bit high, but if one counts all the visitors to Gettysburg that had to eat, effectives plus everyone else, then the two sides had over 200,000 between them. That is still enough to eat out the countryside in a few weeks. Grant invested Vicksburg for a couple of months, but his troops only lived off the land while on the move. Grant's troops at Vicksburg were supplied by the Mississippi River through a port at Millikin's Bend. The Confederate attempt to lift the seige included an attack on the port to disrupt the supply line and resulted in the murder of black Union soldiers.

Sherman foraged his soldiers over a swath at least 60 miles wide. Sherman could spread his troops because there was no opposing army to challenge him.

Slavery is one of those institutions that is difficult to end. Ending slavery meant the black population would be free and no longer under control. The Southern Planatation economy that was so dependent upon black slave labor lived in constant fear that their slaves would revolt Haitian style. Slavery as an institution trapped both the slaves and the non-slaves where all lived in fear- a truly evil and indefensible system. One consequence of the Civil War is enough men (both white and black) were under arms and could prevent violent revolt and retribution.

Gary Farber:

"I confess upfront that I've committed the sin of commenting when I've not yet read these Gingrich books."

Thank God. I was thinking, "Damn! I haven't ever actually read The Canterbury Tales straight through, and there are people who have time to read novels by NEWT GINGRICH?"

What kind of hilarious accident has to happen for a person to read a novel by Newt Gingrich? Trapped in an elevator for a week and a half with a flashlight and a stack of remaindered books, and no way to kill yourself? Is Newt Gingrich the only thing prison libraries stock now? Lose a bet? What?

Before getting indignant bellatrys should reflect that his ancestors and their friends yanked the votes of the former slaves for about 100 years, and are continuing, to, let us be polite, do so with their cute little ballot security gigs.

How's this for a compromise:

Slaveowners Yes
Confederate Soldiers No

That way, Bellatrys gets to keep his vote.

Can't we all just get along?

Two of the most moving experiences I ever had was one, standing in the capitol in Richmond, where Robert E. Lee accepted command of the southern army after turning down command of the northern army. The other was Appomattox. This is the most peaceful, calming place on earth. Something in the air lets you know that something remarkable happened here. I must admit that the site of the Battle of the Crater is impressive as well.

Special case-by-case deals could be made for the descendants of Quaker abolitionists, etc.

My suggestion was meant to be parallel to things that actually did happen in the other direction, as Eli R. pointed out.

Why the devil do you all assume I'm male? Don't you know your Latin construction?

The point is, you're all willing to yank the vote from people you think are "unfit" by virtue not of their own actions but of their parentage - but if you were honest, you'd realize that ALL humanity is thus unfit. Including yourselves.

And no, if you're going to start endorsing genetic purity tests for enfranchisment, then we CANNOT all get along.

The last time this country did that, it was called "Jim Crow." Relatives of mine rode buses and marched on DC about that.

There are even worse parallels. Look over in what used to be Yugoslavia, for examples of what your theory looks like, when you carry it to logical conclusions.

Hmm, I guess it is real convenient for people to forget Art 1, Sec 9 of the confederate constitution which includes:
NO bill of attainder, ex post facto law, or LAW DENYING OR IMPAIRING THE RIGHT OF PROPERTY IN NEGRO SLAVES SHALL BE PASSED. (emphasis mine)

If slavery was not that important, why would there be a clause in their constitution specifically preventing folks from outlawing it?

Right-wing, left-wing - mirror images of self-congratulatory blindness and hypocrisy.

(but it's okay, 'cause *we're* the good guys...)

Sheesh.

A data point on the average ante bellum (and some contemporary) Southerner's attitudes toward slaves.

I can remember a neighbor, born in the mid-late 1860s complaining bitterly, in the '50s, about the hardships visited on his parents when they lost their slaves. I suspect his comments echoed those of his parents - he wasn't born before slavery ended - but still.... 90 years after the fact.

I throw myself on the mercy of the court, m'lud, and ask that the addendum to my post be read and considered before I am sentenced. Mercy, m'lud! Mercy!

(So, Brad, the key to getting a link from you is to say something stupid, eh? Well, I can do *that*!)

Do I win a prize for being the first to note your allusion to Asimov's The Gods Themselves (a science fiction novel in which Pu-186 actually did play a critical role)? Nice irony. (And Asimov's best novel, in my humble opinion.)

There has been a consistent, long-term effort by descendents of Confederates to hide the fact that secession was motivated by a desire to keep and protect the institution of slavery.

This position will not stand up to serious examination.

Slavery and its place in the laws of the Union was the burning issue of the 2nd quarter of the 19th century, and one of the chief issues before that.

The idea that people could not be aware of the controversy -- baloney. OK, there might have been a few. However, you could not be a serious politician without being aware of it.