re: #449 Dark_Falcon

A lot of historians have written about how Lee could have won the Gettysburg campaign. Newt was exploring that. I also think he wanted to write an alternative history of the Civil War were the draconian methods used to finally defeat the south are not needed.

Alternative history is interesting. Any number of people think about what-if’s. One such alternative history had the civil war ending after McClellan’s victory in the Peninsular campaign—-and there was no spate of amendments, no emancipation proclamation, none of that. Slavery was simply confined to its quarters, so to speak, and abolition had to wait until some time around WW1.

Many things that have happened could just as easily have happened differently. Some things had a certain inevitability to them. Moving the pieces back to where they stood in 1861 and replaying the game in simulation helps us understand how much of that part of history was inevitable, and how much, contingent.

The fact that the war departed from Napoleonic tradition and went into extra innings could have served as a harbinger of the course WW1 would take, though no one seems to have understood the implications of the trenches and wire obstacles around Petersburg at the end. Politically, the long struggle gave the Republicans time and courage to pass Homestead Act, Morrill Act, Abolition, various key amendments, and more. We cleaned house and laid a foundation for a better future. Things worked out better than if the South had won, or if it had lost in a way that kicked the can down the road.

There have been other hinges of fate. In WW2, the Germans might have won the Battle of Britain and gone on to conquer the British isles. In the other direction, a plot to assassinate Hitler early in the war might have succeeded.

The U.S. might have lost at Midway.

The moral of the story is that alternative-history fiction helps illuminate the fact that we cannot take too much comfort from having got lucky in the past. Such luck must not be mistaken for destiny. We can get unlucky.