Following on from the
anniversary of the Gettysburg Address, I chased down this alternate
history novel I'd been meaning to read for a while. There's a long
and distinguished tradition of alternate Civil War books; when I was
a kid I read MacKinlay Kantor's If The South Had Won The Civil
War—Grant dies in a horse fall just after Vicksburg, the South wins
at Gettysburg, and the two separate nations become three when Texas
seceeds from the Confederacy. Lee, as President of the Confederacy,
frees the slaves, and eventually the US is reunited. I read Ward
Moore's time-travel novel, Bring The Jubilee, in which the Union,
again having lost at Gettysburg, is weakened and much industrial
progress never happens (except, of course, for time travel). Harry
Turtledove has approached the question from both angles; I've read
his time-travel version, Guns Of The South, in which South Africans
travel back in time to supply the Confederacy with automatic weapons
to ensure a slave nation persists.
Robert Conroy's 1862 is
a straight-forward alternate history, in which the blowback from the
Union's seizing of the British mail packet Trent, carrying two
Confederate ambassadors, grows into a declaration of war against the
US, helped by an aggressive Lord Palmerston and a nebulous 'promise'
from Jefferson Davis that the South would abandon slavery.
Conroy's take on the
ensuing conflict is ingenious, helped by Lincoln and Winfield Scott
recognising early the unique abilities of Ulysses Grant. How
realistic this is, given the political troubles Lincoln faced, as set
out in T. Harry Williams' Lincoln And His Generals. Grant's ambiguous
standing within the regular army, is another interesting question,
but there is no doubt it makes a huge difference. Grant leads a force
against Canada, while the Union forces are able to hold back Lee's
Army of Northern Virginia, and the judicious use of snipers has
disastrous results for the Confederacy. Thus, the British entry,
rather than speed up a Confederate victory, has unexpected results.
Some of this depends on
a relative and surprising degree of inaction from Davis and Lee, in
effect the opposite of his take on Lincoln. One might wonder whether
the Confederate plan would have been so passive when joined by their
British allies. But Conroy has thought out his alternate scenario
well, and it is for the most part convincing. Even his story
framework—because you need a relatively neutral (and usually
fictional) character through whom the story can be told—works well:
Col. Nathan Hunter winds up in the exact centre of the Union
decisions, and at the fronts when it matters, without the reader
feeling he's been manipulated excessively.
Where the novel is let
down is in the writing, which is rarely more than utilitarian, and
sometimes lapses into a general sort of anachronism. It's not so much
the modernity of Nathan's love-interest, which doesn't actually seem
that much out of place—though the introduction of a lascivious
French ambassador's wife helps lubricate the narrative—but the tone
of conversation, rather less formal than we might have thought. But
that is secondary, because Conroy's concern is with background and
facts, and he takes great pains with the details. Once the book gets
going, it proceeds at great pace, and is an extertaining diversion,
and one of the best of the war's alternate histories.
1862 by Robert Conroy
Ballantine, 2006, $7.99
ISBN 0345482379
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