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Review: Guns of the South

Part of the problem is that the Confederacy was invoked a lot during the civil rights movements (when a lot of statues go up and state flags get the stars-and-bars on), and a lot of people in the South decided to make the Confederacy - a thing that existed for a mere four years and lost - into a big symbol of the South. Which then sticks, because you've told generations of people who grew up hearing that Their Heritage Is The Confederacy while the exact reason why ("yankees telling us to let [racial slur] near our daughters").

It's similar to empires being the heritage of chunks of Europe, except the empires lasted a long time and during them there was art, science, exploration, social movements, fashions, colourful historical figures etc, the sort of things countries do take pride in as being part of their heritage even if it objectively happened cheek-in-jowl with bestial acts. And the Confederacy has none of that, because it couldn't, because it existed for solely four years and lost and it lost under the ideology of "landowners want slaves". It's like trying to claim Vichy is the key part of French cultural heritage and actually there was some great nuance going on.
 
Not sure if I've ever even seen GOTS on the shelves in the UK - there are a few Turtledove books I could only find in the US or Canada. (Same with How Few Remain, though the other TL-191 books did arrive here).

I found my copy in a charity bookshop here, so there was clearly some copies <grin>. It's probable it came from Forbidden Planet (the Edinburgh branch was quite book-heavy at the time; now, the books are gone) or Transreal Fiction, a small and specialised SF/Fan bookshop near Central Library. I don't think i've ever had any trouble getting copies - there was, IIRC, a copy in the library of much of Turtledove's work, although lesser-known US authors tended to struggle. The David Weber and John Ringo collections were very slap-dash; I recall the library purchased quite a few copies of 1945, which may have been on account of Gingrich or Baen offering a bulk deal because of how that book crashed and burnt. (Timing wise, probably the former.)

I think the issue is that a lot of people just don't like to see their grandparents called genocidaires, even when (I would say especially if) they were, in fact, genocidaires.

I always had the impression that 'my grandparents fought for states rights' sounded a hell of a lot better than 'my grandparents fought to keep the slaves in bondage' and certainly better than 'my grandparents were suckers who fought to keep the slaves in bondage, thus condemning the CSA to decades of economic stagnation which would screw them as much as the slaves.' It's always difficult to accept that one's relatives were not nice people (particularly when their crimes are used to delegitimize your opinions).

That said, I don't see the CSA abandoning slavery all that quickly. Slavery was very important to the South's economy - the majority of slaves belonged to the ruling class and they had no interest in giving up their property or allowing non-slave-related economic development. Obviously, the CSA wasn't wholly a slave/plantation economy, but it lagged a long way behind the USA and would probably have had major problems in either a post-war crash industrialization or trying to keep things unchanging as long as possible. There were other sources of cotton, which were developed at least partly in response to the war; the CSA would have trouble keeping a steady income even without the costs of a victorious war of independence. By GOTS, Sherman had done one hell of a lot of damage and that would have made recovery much harder.

There's also the problem of a fragmented political system. Quite a few states would refuse to go along with the federal government - they might even see it as an outright betrayal - and there might well be smaller civil wars, as states try to withdraw from the CSA.

It would not be easy to free the slaves without major disruptions. I don't think Lee could do it.

Chris
 
Last night I saw the third "why are there former Confederate vampires in these older vampire stories by Americans where the Civil War is a major historical event and half the states of the time were in the Confederacy" talk online in this very year, making it extra weird that about thirty years ago you could have actual real Confederates as protagonists in a alternate-history story and sell mainstream and for most of its life that wasn't seen as too controversial. A big change in attitudes
 
I think if the CSA does get a peace where it survuves, it's on the road to economic collapse. Keep in mind that the slave economy in large part was sustained by Northern financial institutions.
 
Last night I saw the third "why are there former Confederate vampires in these older vampire stories by Americans where the Civil War is a major historical event and half the states of the time were in the Confederacy" talk online in this very year, making it extra weird that about thirty years ago you could have actual real Confederates as protagonists in a alternate-history story and sell mainstream and for most of its life that wasn't seen as too controversial. A big change in attitudes
In the pilot of Lovecraft Country, the main character mentions being a fan of Edgar Rice Burroughs, but it absolutely is not lost on him that John Carter is a former Confederate officer.
 
I think it would be interesting to redo Guns of the South but from the perspective of Lee's slaves. Because to them the differences between the AWB and the Confederates are entirely academic. One is a bunch of thugs that torture and murder black people, and the other is a bunch of thugs that torture and murder black people but have a gentlemanly veneer while doing it. It would be a good way to deconstruct the Lost Causerism at the heart of the book.

That would be a pretty cool idea.

Chris
 
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