recent reading, again

Guns of the South, by Harry Turtledove.

It's one of those alternate history things. Actually this is "MAN IN THE HIGH CASTLE" redux. This is pretty detailed on the historical accuracy...imagine what might have happened if someone had time-traveled from 2010 back to 1864 and given Gen Robert E Lee 100 thousand AK-47s and unlimited ammo. Would the south have won?

Damn right. Those guns, while not 2010 state of the art, were 100 years in advance of the standard single-shot manual-load rifles of the 1860s.

So I found this book offensive...not the part about the south winning...given the AK-47 premise, that was inevitable. This seemed overmuch like "how to write a book in 1992 in which you get to use all those words and ideas from 1864 that are clearly offensive now, like the infamous 'N-word'".

It of course opens with some history, although not enough of the history that you remember what the fight was really about, from both sides. This is more just about the battles (quite lopsided with the arrival of AK-47, which was superior to hand-loaded single-shot Enfields/etc in every way you can think of, and not manufacturable anywhere in the world at that time (the south had insufficient manufacturing to make weapons/etc as it was, so there really was no way they were going to win). The suppliers of these guns are some unhappy white folks from South Africa, who are so resentful of the black takeover there, that they think altering history will help them. They pay in gold, which has serious value, as opposed to Confederate money, which, as the saying goes, "wasn't worth the paper it was printed on".

The author clearly doesn't understand time-travel paradox well enough to explain that part. He also misses the relevant background history (Missouri compromise [1820], Dred Scott[1857], etc); it's not like that info is hard to come by.

He also mostly bypasses the "why" of confederate secession. It was, from the southern side, presented as "those people can't tell us what to do", and "the federal government cannot tell the states what [not] to do"...the one thing the federal government was trying to do was tell the southern states they couldn't allow/continue/expand slavery.

(look here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_events_leading_to_the_American_Civil_War, for the Wikipedia pages on this whole thing)

So: the south: "it's all about states' rights", the north: "it's all about slavery"

Really: it was both, of course. It was all about the right of southern states to sanction (and tax) the ownership of one human being by another.

Don't kid yourself, blacks weren't liked up north. They just weren't slaves.

So at the end of the book, the confederate government, now with Robert E Lee as president, learns how they have been manipulated by the South Africans, and learns a good bit about the future, decides that slavery must be eliminated. (That seems unlikely, to me, given that the elimination of slavery occurred because the South lost the fight. Dramatic military superiority would change the equation quite a bit--the military's strength is more or less untouchable.)

Like this is really somehow different from what the north had been arguing for some decades? "It's ok to eliminate slavery if WE decide to do it, not if THEY tell us to do it". So what happens when one of the southern states decides to secede from the confederacy? All the same arguments could be made over again ("we don't want some other states telling us what we can/can't do"). The southern states were not terribly unified amongst themselves; if you're willing to secede once, you're willing to do it again.

Author does cleverly manage to work in a variation of the infamous "battle of the crater" near the end. That was amusing...it's a little different, of course, because in the story the "civil war" is over by this time, so this battle is against the South Africans. Who, despite the radically superior technology (i.e., things more advanced than an AK-47), are numerically too small to win a war with any attrition. I actually thought this the best part of the book.

'twere better all around had no slaves ever been brought here. The real problem is that a lot of people are lazy enough want others to do their work.

Of course, the situation in the Confederacy wasn't nearly as simple as you were taught it in school. There were plenty of "Unionists" in the south who opposed the secession, and some actually fought against the South while living there.

And apparently there was something known as the "Twenty Negro Law" whereby one military-age male was exempted from serving in the Confederate Army for every twenty slaves owned on a plantation. Of course it was only the wealthier who owned slaves, and they tended to be those in state legislatures, too, and therefore could vote themselves these kinds of exemptions...resulting in the actual conscription being the poor, fighting for the rich, to preserve the rich folks' way of life of owning slaves. (see HERE, and HERE for the exact wording, which is a bit obtuse)