Critic's Corner

Tweaking Clio’s Nose: Ward Moore’s Bring the Jubilee

By Stephen Davis · Originally published July 2019 · p. 14

I think I learned the word funky from Rockford (James Garner) back in the ‘70s. Well, something definitely funky is going on when one reads the first sentence of Ward Moore’s novel, Bring the Jubilee: “Although I am writing this in the year 1877, I was not born until 1921.” Ward Moore (1903–1978) was an American science fiction writer who, with Bring the Jubilee

(1952), turned to the genre of alternate history. I mentioned his book two years ago when I wrote in this space about fictional renditions of Confederates’ victory at Gettysburg. As you may recall, the counterfactual bookshelf offers quite a few scenarios. Pickett’s Charge cracks the Yankee line wide open (Winston Churchill, 1930). Stuart stays with Lee and the battle never happens (Otto Eisenschiml and E. B. Long, 1948). Ewell boldly takes Culp’s and Cemetery Hills (MacKinlay Kantor, 1960). Lee takes a defensive position and Meade launches disastrous attacks (Mark Nesbitt, 1980; Newt Gingrich and William R. Fortschen, 2003). In Moore’s “What if?” the key to Lee’s victory at Gettysburg is the Confederate seizure of the Round Tops following their rout of the Union I and XI Corps on July 1. They bring artillery up the commanding heights that, on the second day, supports the Southern infantry’s savage attacks on Meade’s army. With Pickett’s charge on July 3, “the disorganized Federals were given the final killing blow in their vitals.” The protagonist in Bring the Jubilee is Hodgins McCormick Backmaker, the grandson of a Union Civil War veteran. On the very first page of the novel Backmaker refers to Lee’s victory, the Army of the Potomac’s “Great Retreat to Philadelphia,” and the fall of Washington. The Union’s western forces bristled at the idea of surrender, but after they were defeated at Chattanooga, the Lincoln government sued for peace and formally recognized Southern independence. Military counterfactualism in itself can be fun, but so can imagining America in the years after Confederate victory (as we learned in MacKinlay Kantor’s If the South Had Won the Civil War). In Moore’s novel, the North American map was redrawn when Maryland, Delaware, and Missouri were included in the Confederate States. Dixie generously gave away western Virginia, but negotiators drew the Confederacy’s borders westward from Kansas to California, incorporating the southern reaches of that vast territory into the nascent nation. As would occur in the Treaty of Versailles, the Peace of Richmond imposed a huge reparations bill upon the defeated North. Disgusted Northern voters threw the Republicans out, so Democratic presidents Clement Vallandigham and Horatio Seymour had to contend with the weakened U.S. economy. Rampant inflation made even life’s necessities unaffordable for most people; food riots broke out in Northern cities during 1873– 74. Things got so bad in the U.S. that for thousands of men and women, the only way to escape poverty was to sell themselves as indentured servants. To resurrect a two-party system in U.S. politics, the Whigs experienced a rebirth; in 1876 Benjamin F. Butler was elected the first Whig president since Zachary Taylor. He remained hobbled, though, by the widespread economic slump that had no end; the enormous reparations payments to the South had to be paid annually and in gold. Hodgins Backmaker, as a lad in the 1920s and ‘30s, recalled how his parents talked bitterly of how the War of Southron Independence “still, nearly seventy years later, blighted what was left of the United States.” The North’s bleak economy even affected U.S. population numbers. Many people left the country; foreigners ceased to come, as northern America was no longer a “land of opportunity.” Unable to support large families, most Northerners married late in life, often raising only one child. U.S. economic woes extended in every direction. While the Confederate States, like other prosperous nations (e.g., the German Union) had plenty of automotive cars (“minibiles”), they were rare in the North. Transcontinental railroads offered another index: the Confederacy had seven, British America one, and the United States zero. As for educational and cultural benchmarks, Confederate and European universities towered over decaying Northern institutions like Harvard and Yale. Together with England, the Confederacy also led the western world in book publishing. In 1938 the largest Northern city, New York, had a mere 1.5 million people, much smaller in size than Confederate metropolises such as Washington (grown so large as to now take in Baltimore), St. Louis, and Leesburg (formerly Mexico City). C.S. president Robert E. Lee, who succeeded Jefferson Davis, had opposed the Confederate conquest of Mexico, but he had bowed to a determined Congress before dying in office in the 1870s. Confederate colonialism also extended into South America, so that ca. 1944–52 the Confederacy had 50 million citizens and 250 million subjects. After the war the Confederacy also emancipated its slaves, but did not give them citizens’ rights, including the vote, the same status imposed upon Latinos after annexation of Mexico. Eventually full rights of citizenship were granted only to the posterity of citizens in the Confederacy as of July 1, 1864. In the North, blacks fared little better and in an economy of scarce resources, were encouraged to emigrate. Many moved westward to places like Idaho and Montana, where unconquered Sioux and Nez Perce Indians still roamed. Such is the world as described by Hodgins Backmaker after Robert E. Lee won the battle of Gettysburg. …or maybe not. I won’t divulge the surprise ending of Ward Moore’s delightful novel. I’ll just say that it’s a trip.

P.S. Clio is the Greek muse of history. Moore terms her the

“most enigmatic of the muses.” That we can totally rewrite history in novels—and articles like this—makes the point. Note Ward Moore, Bring the Jubilee was originally published in 1952 by Farrar, Straus and Young, New York. A paperback edition was printed in 1997 by Ballantine Publishing Group, New York. Stephen Davis’ article, “Simply Criminal,” on the battle of Pickett’s Mill, appears in the May 2019 issue of America’s Civil War. Civil War News of January 2019 also carried Steve’s article about an incident of that battle—how Union soldiers complained that all the bugling from Willich’s brigade alerted Confederates of their march to Pickett’s Mill. He and Bill Hendrick are working on a book on the Atlanta Daily intelligencer, leading wartime newspaper in the city.