Blessed are the Peacemaker​s: A Shattered Nation Novella

Guest post Jeffrey Evan Brooks.

Most alternate history stories dealing with the American Civil War focus on specific military events.  We like to focus on the nitty-gritty details of individual battles, imagining what might have happened if John Reynolds had been just a little late on the first day at Gettysburg, if Benjamin Cheatham had blocked the Columbia Pike at Spring Hill, or any number of other counterfactual scenarios.  These questions are a great deal of fun. They also serve to remind us just how easily history could have been very different.

In most Civil War alternate history fiction, the story ends when the fighting ends. Less common are counterfactual tales that explore how the world would have been different in the aftermath of a different outcome to the conflict.  Once the bullets stop flying and the long-term “butterflies” need to be considered, constructing an imaginary alternate history becomes much more difficult.  In these stories, the end of the war marks the beginning, rather than the conclusion, of the real story.  If we envision the Civil War ending differently, usually with an independent Confederacy, we have to stretch our imaginations to cover another century-and-a-half.  We have to ask ourselves what an independent Confederacy would have meant for slavery and long-term race relations, the balance of power on the global stage, and daily life in both North and South.  What would have been the postwar relationship between the Union and the Confederacy?  How would the Confederate and Union economies be different than they were historically?  If one really puts his mind to it, one could even try to imagine how music, art, and literature would be different.

When I wrote Shattered Nation: An Alternate History Novel of the American Civil War, I knew I wanted to take the story beyond the end of the war and explore what an independent Confederacy would have meant for the subsequent history of both America and the wider world.  That exercise in imagination started last month, when I published Blessed are the Peacemakers: A Shattered Nation Novella.

Had the Confederacy succeeded in establishing its independence, it makes sense to assume that the war would have ended in the traditional manner: a peace conference between representatives of the two governments.  Blessed are the Peacemakers brings readers to that conference, which takes place on neutral ground in Canada.  Readers watch events unfold through the eyes of John C. Breckinridge, former Vice President of the United States and successful Southern general, who is now serving as a Confederate delegate to the peace talks.

In my opinion, there were only two realistic possibilities for a Southern victory in the American Civil War. The first was a better showing by the Confederacy in 1861-62, leading to European recognition of the Confederacy.  The other would be outlasting the Union and inflicting such heavy losses upon it that a “peace through exhaustion” occurs in 1864, with Lincoln being ousted from the White House by Northern voters. Shattered Nation explores the latter scenario, the point of divergence being Joseph Johnston remaining in command of the Army of Tennessee and winning a tremendous victory over Sherman at the Battle of Peachtree Creek.

This is a critical point, for a Confederate victory scenario in 1864 is vastly different than a Confederate victory scenario in 1862.  Most important of all is the fact that the Emancipation Proclamation took effect on January 1, 1863, making the abolition of slavery a Union war aim and beginning the process of freeing huge numbers of slaves.  By mid-1864, hundreds of thousands of slaves had been set free and many thousands had joined the Union army.  Aside from slavery, the two years between 1862 and 1864 saw greater centralization of authority in Richmond at the expense of the Confederate state governments, a greater harshness and brutality introduced into the war on both sides, and a realization that America as it had been could never be restored, no matter who won the war.  Keeping this in mind was crucial in framing the attitudes of the characters who made up the convention delegates.

As I began writing, I asked myself what the most divisive issues at such a peace conference would be. Some were obvious.  How would the armies disengage?  Where would the border between the two nations lie? Since, in the Shattered Nation timeline, the Confederate victory takes place after the Emancipation Proclamation has been enacted, how would the delegates approach the subject of the thousands upon thousands of slaves freed by it?

As I wrote, issues that would have seemed minor and technical from the perspective of history, but which would have been vitally important to the participants at the time, kept popping into my head.  Some occurred to me while following news of the Scottish independence referendum campaign in the United Kingdom, which can be viewed as a test case for two countries splitting apart.  Others popped into my head simply by doing thought experiments.  If I was a Union or Confederate peace delegate sitting at that table, what would I have demanded and expected to get?  I also bounced ideas off of my fellow posters in the discussion forum at AlternateHistory.com, getting lots of very useful feedback.

As part of my research, I began pouring over the text of treaties from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The idea then occurred to me to write out an actual treaty, which could be included at the end of the novella as an appendix to the story.  It was a fun experience, though I imagine most people would find it boring. Such is the quirky life of the history-obsessed.

I was excited to write John C. Breckinridge as a character.  I deliberately left him out of Shattered Nation (aside from a very brief cameo near the end), because I wanted to use him as a major character in later writings.  I have always felt that he is one of the least appreciated figures of American Civil War.  He played a crucial role in the political events before 1861 and he became one of the outstanding generals on either side who had had no prewar military training.  As a Kentuckian, he had a unique ability to see the war from the perspective of each side.  Few men encapsulate the American Civil War, in all its tragedy and drama, as well as John C. Breckinridge.  We’ll be seeing more of him in future Shattered Nation books.

Blessed are the Peacemakers is intended to serve as a bridge between Shattered Nation and its sequel, House of the Proud, which is about a third of the way to completion and which I hope to publish in 2015. I’m excited about the future course the Shattered Nation series will be taking.  I am doing preliminary research and outlining for future novels that will take the alternate timeline up to the 1960s, as well as some that take place during the Civil War in regions other than Georgia.  There will also be more novellas like Blessed are the Peacemakers, including one that explores the postwar life of Abraham Lincoln.

I’m quite proud of Blessed are the Peacemakers and hope that the alternate history community enjoys it. Now, on to the next book!

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Jeffrey Evan Brooks is the author of Shattered Nation: An Alternate History Novel of the American Civil War.

Shattered Nation: An Alternate History Novel of the American Civil War

Guest post by Jeffrey Brooks.

Excepting perhaps only the Second World War, no event history has generated as much counterfactual speculation as the American Civil War. As we are now moving through the sesquicentennial of the conflict, with battlefields overrun by tourists and reenactors, it's no surprise that alternate historians are yet again focusing on the struggle that tore America apart one hundred and fifty years ago.

Some of the more common points of divergence have been the springboard for successful alternate historical writing. Harry Turtledove created perhaps the most profitable AH series ever written out of the question of what might have happened had Robert E. Lee's Special Order 191 had not been lost during the Maryland Campaign of 1862. More recently, R. E. Thomas has written an interesting and entertaining novel imagining what might have been had Stonewall Jackson not died of the wounds he received at the Battle of Chancellorsville. Many books have focused on how history might have been different had the Confederates won the Battle of Gettysburg or Britain entered the war as a result of the Trent Affair.

My novel - Shattered Nation: An Alternate History Novel of the American Civil War - tackles another popular Civil War point of divergence in imagining a scenario in which Jefferson Davis does not replace Joe Johnston as the commander of the Army of Tennessee during the Atlanta Campaign of 1864.

The considerable majority of Civil War alternate history writing focuses on points of divergence during the first half of the war (i.e. up to the summer of 1863). Conventional wisdom maintains that the South had no chance whatsoever to win the war once they had been defeated at Gettysburg and Vicksburg, if indeed they ever had a chance to win the war at all. I disagree, maintaining that the South's chances for victory were as good, if not better, in 1864 than they had been in 1863. Once the possibility of foreign intervention had been ended by the Emancipation Proclamation, the South had only one way to achieve victory: wear down the North's will to continue the war and persuade them to quit. That, in turn, could only happen in the Northern people kicked the Lincoln administration out and voted in an administration that would make peace. 1864, unlike 1863, was an election year.

In retrospect, we can see that the Confederate armies were melting away from attrition, which would lead to a Southern military collapse in 1865. Yet it must be stressed that this was far from obvious at the time. In 1864, the Army of Northern Virginia was holding the Army of the Potomac at bay and inflicting enormous casualties upon it. Fiascoes like Cold Harbor and the Crater were exposing incompetence in the Northern armies. Jubal Early drove Union forces out of the Shenandoah Valley, came close to capturing Washington itself, and sent a major Union city up in flames. Union attempts to gain control of Florida and Louisiana had ended in disaster and Nathan Bedford Forrest remained undefeated in Mississippi. Morale on the Northern home front was plummeting and, in August, Lincoln himself stated that he was likely to be defeated by the Democratic nominee, George McClellan, in the upcoming election.

It was the capture of Atlanta by William Tecumseh Sherman in early September that turned the tide of the war and, more importantly, the tide of public opinion. That victory, in turn, was made possible because Davis replaced Johnston with the more aggressive John Bell Hood, who proceeded to fight and lose three major battles against Sherman in little more than a week. The South lost more than ten thousand men at a moment when it needed every man it could get. After a month of siege and maneuver, Hood was chased out Atlanta. Lincoln had the military victory he needed to rally public opinion back to his side and coast to a comfortable electoral victory two months later.

Could Johnston have succeeded where Hood had failed? This question has been controversial since the moment Johnston was relieved and it sparked a bitter postwar feud between rival partisans of the two generals, which was as much a dispute between Johnston and Davis and between Johnston and Hood. Some maintain that Johnston, a much more cautious and meticulous commander than Hood, would have avoided the heavy losses Hood sustained and thereby held Atlanta beyond the November election. Others assert that Johnston was too reluctant to fight and would have abandoned Atlanta rather than see his army put at risk.

Some have maintained that, even had the Confederates held Atlanta and had McClellan won the 1864 election, it would not have mattered. After all, McClellan was a War Democrat who repudiated the "peace plank" of the Democratic National Platform immediately after becoming the nominee. But it's worth pointing out that McClellan pledged to continue the war only after he received the news that Atlanta had fallen; had Sherman been defeated and had Atlanta remained in Confederate hands, he might have sung a different tune. Moreover, as the historian Albert Castel points out, the political pressure from the Copperheads to implement a ceasefire with the South would be hard for McClellan to resist and it would have been more or less impossible to resume the war when negotiations had failed (and they would have failed). Even worse for the North, Republicans not not feel that the war was worth fighting under a McClellan administration, since the emancipation of slavery would probably have been dropped as a Union war aim.

Could Johnston have defeated Sherman and held Atlanta? Could a Democratic victory in the 1864 election have lead to Confederate independence? Those are the questions my novel seeks to explore and I hope it represents a worthwhile contribution to alternate history literature.

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Jeffrey Evan Brooks graduated from Texas State University with a double B.A. in history and political science and an M.A. in history. He currently lives in Manor, TX, just outside Austin. In addition to writing, he teaches life skills to students with special needs at Anderson High School in Austin. His website is www.jeffreyevanbrooks.com and he can be reached at jeff at jeffreyevanbrooks dot com.