The "What ifs" of History

 

New York : E. Anthony [ca. 1846] In February 1861 the lieutenant colonel in command of the 2nd U.S. Calvary Regiment stationed at Fort Mason, Texas received orders to report to General-in-Chief Winfield Scott in Washington D.C. for reassignment. When the officer's stagecoach stopped over in San Antonio, he was accosted by three secessionist army commis-sioners.  Texas sided with the south, but as there had been no formal declaration of war, the policy was to allow federal soldiers to march out of the state unimpeded.   The commissioners announced that the U.S. garrison at San Antonio had already left, and that the city was under Confederate control. The lieutenant colonel must declare himself in favor of the Confederacy, or the commissioners would detain him as a prisoner of war. The officer drew himself to attention and proudly stated that he was not a Texan, but a Virginian, and that he would decide for himself which side to take. His brave comportment must have cowed the commissioners, because they chose not to press the issue.  He continued his journey eastward. When he arrived in Washington D.C., General Scott offered the man the top field-command position in the Union Army.  The lieutenant colonel declined, choosing allegiance to his state over his country. Had those commissioners in San Antonio imprisoned that lieutenant colonel, the Civil War would have been a very different.  That lieutenant colonel was Robert E. Lee, and his decision to align himself with the south profoundly affected the course of American history. What if Robert E. Lee had moldered in a Confederate POW Camp for the entire period of the Civil War?   Such 'what ifs' are the fodder of alternative histories, those works of fiction in which events play out differently than actually happened.  In these novels, the South wins the war, or slaves revolt on their own and now fight both North and South, or Europe intercedes for one side or the other.  The stream of history jumps its course and nothing is as we know it. But not all 'what ifs' are in the realm of alternative history.   What if you woke one day to find an enemy army camped on your property? What if your house became a field hospital for one side, then the other?  What if your crops were trampled, your animals slaughtered and your fields littered with bloated corpses?  These were some of the questions I asked myself when I was writing The Bent Reed, my historical novel set in Gettysburg. I found the answers in journals, memoirs and newspaper articles from the period, and in secondary sources that quoted the personal remembrances of people who had lived through the battle.  I then created a fictitious family plunked their farm down right where armies would collide.  I made them suffer through many circumstances that had happened to real people. The stream of history stayed in its channel and ran its course, even if it flowed over rocks that I had imagined into place. Historical novels help readers put themselves into the swirling events of history. By reading them, we begin to ask our own 'what ifs.'   What if I were present at the Battle of Gettysburg?  How would I have reacted to the violence or its aftermath?  What lessons can I learn from those who have gone before me? The answers not only help us understand the past, but help us to proceed into the future.

La passione remane

 

My mother gave me the necklace I am wearing today.  It is one of my favorite pieces of jewelry.  The necklace is a chain with gray pearls.  In the middle is a pendant that has a remnant of Roman glass surrounded by a silver frame on which is written Dopo il sogno la passione impressa remante. The words are in Italian and are taken from Canto XXXIII of the Paradiso section of Dante’s Divine Comedy.   Roughly translated (which is the best I can do in Italian) it says After the dream is over, the impression of passion remains. Dante is talking about a vision of heaven and the brilliant light of God’s presence, but I think the same statement can be used to describe what happens to someone who reads and connects well with historical fiction.   A good piece of historical fiction brings with it the passion of a long-ago time and it lingers in the reader’s psyche like an impassioned memory.  The first time I remember having a memorable encounter with an historical novel was in the fourth grade, when I picked up Black Jack, by Leon Garfield.  Set in 1750, it tells the story of Bartholomew (Tully) Dorking, an apprentice who is charged with watching after the coffin of a hanged man for a Tyburn widow, the term for a woman who claims the bodies of hanged vagrants, then sells them to surgeons for experimentation.  However, this hanged man isn’t dead.  Black Jack has cheated death by ramming a length of pipe down his gullet.  Once Tully pulls the pipe from the swarthy giant’s throat, the two embark on a journey that involves the seamiest parts of old London, a bizarre traveling circus, and the rescue of a girl from a private madhouse where forgotten lunatics are chained in empty rooms.  I hadn’t read this book in 40 years when I found myself telling a friend about it during a long walk.  I realized that imagery from the book was still floating around in my head, and I could still describe the plot in vivid detail. Later, I wondered how much I remembered and how much was just an impression of what I’d read so very long ago.  Rereading the novel, I found that whole pages jumped from my memory as if I had just read them.  The lush cadence of the language and the richness of Garfield’s vocabulary came back to me.  And the plot!  Events followed each other masterfully, in a way that was not predictable, yet always foreshadowed.   I agree with Lloyd Alexander, another of the favorite authors of my childhood, that Leon Garfield was “unmatched for sheer, exciting storytelling." However, as much as I remembered, what I had forgotten surprised me.  It wasn’t the vocabulary or the plot or the lovely flow of words that I’d forgotten, but details.  For instance, a meteor shower I remembered vividly, and recalled every August when the Perseid Meteor shower came around, was actually the Northern Lights.  I wonder: did my mind choose to forget that the Northern Lights were in my story because I have never seen them?  Is this my mind’s way of making the story more relevant to me? dopo il libro, l'impressione di passione rimane