It's not History, it's HBO

Surprised? If someone had made this claim six months ago, considering how many historically-based dramas HBO produced over the last two decades, I'd have thrown my collection of Wikipedia historical references straight into their digital faces.

Outstanding series like "Rome", "Deadwood", and "Carnivale" are testament to the fidelity HBO has paid to the historical landscapes of their period dramas. The popular method of telling these historical pieces through the eyes of ordinary people that an audience can relate to is nowhere better executed than on HBO. The artistic pinnacle of this approach, "Conspiracy," the plot by the Third Reich to eliminate all Europe of Jews, and one of their earliest efforts in the genre, did much to establish HBO as a premier studio. Even their smash hit, "Game of Thrones," a fantasy like no other, has its inspirations and character roots in the real history of the 30 Years War in medieval England, where Yorks (Starks) and Lannisters (Lancasters) fought over the throne for generations, culminating in Richard III's defeat on the Bosworth field. Also known as the War of the Roses, Game of Thrones pays homage to this historical title by designating one family, House Tyrell, as Highgarden, and using a rose in its coat of arms. The fidelity that showrunners, David Benioff and D.B. Weiss, have shown to George RR Martin's use of history is a point of pride and a real contribution to the quality of their programming.

So, given the vast stretch of HBO's programming history and its commitment to grounding historical fiction in real facts and events, further extrapolating from that grounding, it strikes me as hilariously absurd that the studio would green-light the fantasy project to end them all: the Confederacy wins the Civil War and what would that sort of America be like?

Are you kidding me? What would it be like to have a modern slave-holding nation geographically surrounded by what should have been the greatest defender of human rights in history but is probably more likely to become a greedy, grasping, corporate state without the moral standing of the defrocked clergy? That's the suspension of disbelief we are expected to start with? There are so many invalid and incomprehensible assumptions underlying this idea that it is easy to know where to begin and I will number those reasons in short order. However, let's backtrack a bit and ask ourselves one question. Who gains by this idea? What is the real purpose here and who benefits?

The defeat of the starving, crumbling, ill-clad, ill-equipped and shrinking armies of the Confederacy in late Spring, 1864, by the vastly, and I mean, vastly, superior forces of the Union was as inevitable - from the first shot fired - as night follows day. The South never had a chance to win that war. I don't care which alternative reality Benioff and Weiss think they've traveled to, it not only didn't happen; it couldn't have happened. The Union had more men, materials, money and moral justification. Just as importantly, the South didn't have the Will to win it, either. The only way they could have won the war was to do the very thing they couldn't do: give up slavery entirely and forever. They might then have hoped for the recognition and assistance of foreign powers, notably Britain and France. Not making this impossible decision forced England and France to do exactly as they did: ignore the South's pleas for recognition and help or its clumsy efforts at pressuring Europe by withholding cotton form their markets. Ironically, withholding their cotton actually helped the textile industry in England by propping up prices on existing surpluses and allowing the industry to to establish new sources in Egypt. On the other hand, not withholding cotton would have rendered their diplomacy toothless and easily dismissed.

These impossible obstacles and contradictions preclude a believable premise in how the South wins the Civil War. Or are we to be presented with a fait accompli, and accept from the outset that the North turned tail and ran after one or two defeats? Or was this disunion presumed to have been accomplished by the defeat of Abraham Lincoln in the 1860 election, another impossibility given the demographic divisions of the opposing Democrats and the inclusion of a third candidate exploiting those divisions? Or was Lincoln to have been assassinated early in his term and succeeded by whom - the Vice President, Hannibal Hamlin of Maine, an even stronger opponent of slavery than Lincoln, himself? And let's not forget another underlying division that the North could not have tolerated: the blocking of the free flow of goods up and down the Mississippi River, the lifeblood of the Northwest to New Orleans and world markets. The political will in the North to remain united rested entirely upon that economic fact of life. The Mississippi must remain free to navigate from North to South and back. Any other possibility was something the states of the Upper Midwest were unacceptable and would be resisted to the last, as indeed they were. They saw the abolition of slavery the same way Lincoln did in 1863, as a military necessity to weaken the South. Logic then applied itself, as it always will, and convinced those Northerners that abolition was not enough. Never mind its moral objections, the western Union armies began to deal with freed slaves before armies in the East did. They put them to work and used their labors to support the troops. When that worked the conclusion dawned upon commanders that Black soldiers could fight for their freedom as well as for Union. Inevitably, at least some White soldiers began to fight for both objectives, too, and thereby change their understanding and appreciation for ex-slaves. This is how the weight of history works: it was set on a particular path years before and it impetus is to achieve its purpose. History flows like the Mississippi. You may alter one bend in its course, dam up some shallows in another but the river will always find its way to the Sea.

Leaving aside the arguments of slavery as sin, there are also arguments of moral momentum to be made. America was born of ideals, clothed and protected in documents that are sanctified by sacrifice and struggle. And while America was born incomplete of its ideals, it was not stillborn because of them. America lives and grows and struggles to justify its potential and promise. It fails more often than not but it does not always fail nor does it give up the struggle for long. As a historical imperative the extinction of slavery was inevitable because of those documents. Those promises that shape our government and its protections are not wholly fulfilled, even now, but they cannot be ignored forever. They insist upon their acceptance and fulfillment and will not be denied. America speaks for justice, haltingly, perhaps, but insistently. That insistence is what the South could not abide and why they chose to break America's promise to itself. Secession was an attempt at political suicide to justify a moral failing. That failing is what denied the South the strength to last out the North because it closed off from them the only choices that could have helped them win and those choices were in complete contradiction to the stated purpose of secession, itself. It was the destiny of the South to lose because they attempted to deny the nation's essence.

I am near finished casting stones. There is broken glass to wound US for many more years. Why should art contribute to more suffering if art can actually offer a balm? Rather than construct an impossibility why not explore an earlier time in American history between the country's two births - the Revolution and Civil War - when slavery was in danger of dying on its own? In the North, slavery began to disappear almost with establishment of the government because forces of industrialization and capital were producing extraordinary wealth and innovation. Contrary to popular perceptions, there was a brief period in the South when these promptings of economic transformation were provoking some questions in the agrarian South. Of course, those forces in the North that were widely embraced were bitterly opposed by large segments of the aristocratic South, whose wealth was rooted in land and not in capital. But it was not opposed by the entire the South. There were those in the merchant and craftsman classes who could most benefit from forges shaping iron and the arrival of trains to transport goods and people who urged a greater acceptance of northern progress and its application to the South's way of life. Why cling, they asked, to an economic model that was disappearing everywhere else in the world, especially since a more attractive alternative was making itself available, even to a society built upon farm labor?

Questions like these raised real opportunities for the South to shape itself into a modern society and harmonize itself with forces already transforming its neighboring states to the North. Of course, such a movement in this direction would have awakened forces tied to the past, to a slave holding economy and way of life leading the South to its own internal civil strife and war, which it actually experienced 100 years later. Had this reckoning come during the first half of the 19th century, the bloody carnage of the Civil War and subsequent, tragic struggle for civil rights over the following 100+ years may not have occurred, at all. The issue would have been faced and dealt with. Were it not for the invention and use of the cotton gin - a northern invention, ironically - the struggle to fulfill America's ideals might have been fought within the South, rather than by the South. The struggle for freedom and civil rights, however, was only delayed not abandoned. Change for the South might have been easier and less given to fantasies of returning to an idealized world that never existed had it been embraced voluntarily instead of forced upon it because of it obstinate refusal to accept the inevitable.

Here is a story, I think, plausible, entertaining and historically supported. It is not the fantastic wish fulfillment of current supporters of race and class distinctions that plagued our country for too long. There is a large minority of sympathizers in this country for a society divided by privilege and race that gains great encouragement from a show based upon the premise that the South could have won the Civil War. It is a baseless belief, of course; we all know that. Hell, even they know it. The belief is what sustains them: the belief that the color of one's skin is a ticket to superiority and rank, that merit nor work do not matter. You were born white and right or black and pitiful. And, that attitude extends to other minorities. Why stop at the inferiority of Blacks? Brown people from wherever they hail are also subject to this shared view of what a society can be, even should be. This is the same attitude that led to South African Apartheid, European colonialism, and Nazi Germany. Why contribute to that deluded, destructive world view when there is another story that can be told? A story grounded in history, supported by plausibility and flowing to an end already appointed? I am arguing for evolution here - not the biological change of mutations but the conscious multiple decisions and sacrifices that have always told the story of Mankind's struggle to realize their own humanity.