LaFantasie speculates
If Lee had refused to surrender
could the South have won the war?

“The facts of history cannot be changed,” Glenn LaFantasie states.

But, what would have happened if Robert E. Lee had not surrendered to U.S. Grant at Appomattox?

Although the Confederacy would have survived, probably through guerilla warfare, the nation would be exactly where it is now, the Western Kentucky Civil War authority surmises.

In an article that appears on the Internet, LaFantasie offers his “counteraction contrivance” based on his years of study and writing about the War Between the States. Although his speculation about a different outcome involves many different twists and turns, the WKU professor and director of the Institute for Civil War Studies, maintains that the nation would be following the same track that it has since 1952.L

ee’s junior officers pressed him to refuse Grant’s surrender terms and keep the war going through guerilla activity, Lafantasie points out. If Lee had agreed, it’s possible that “many of his fellow Confederates might have kept on fighting, perhaps resisting Union forces by taking refuge in the broad band of Appalachian mountains that extend from Virginia to Georgia."

LaFantasie notes that the guerilla tactics of such Confederate irregulars as John Hunt Morgan and John Singleton Mosby would have been followed. Also, shelter might have been found for Jefferson Davis and the Confederate government in, perhaps, the Great Smoky Mountains.

“By waging insurgent warfare, the Confederacy conceivably might have survived,” Glenn suggests. “If this insurgency kept up the fighting, the war between North and South could have been prolonged perhaps for years, perhaps for decades. In such an insurgent war, the advantage – as we saw in Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan – would have been held by the Confederates.

“To win such a war, all the insurgent Southerners had to do was take as many Yankee lives as they could in lightning raids and hang on long enough to cause war-weariness among the Union citizenry. If the struggle went on between North and South for a protracted period, the North might easily have become discouraged with the war effort and the people of the Union might have possibly acknowledged defeat by declaring a ‘victory’ over the Confederacy and pulling its troops out of the South.”

What would have happened next?

“In 1881, after 20 years of an unproductive, costly and fruitless war against the Confederate insurgency, the Union formally recognizes the Confederate States of America,” LaFantasie states. “The Southern leadership moves from its mountain bastions and reestablishes the Confederate government and the nation’s capital in Richmond, Va.

“The Confederate national government then reasserts its governance over the 11 states that seceded from the Union, and, before the year ends, Kentucky joins the Confederate States of America, noting its refusal to ratify the 13th Amendment (prohibiting slavery) 16 years earlier.”

Over the next decade, New Mexico and Arizona join the Confederacy and, in 1900, Utah and Nevada join. In 1912, Oklahoma becomes a Confederate state and, in 1925, West Virginia is admitted to the CSA.

Meanwhile, throughout the South, slave rebellions rock the nation and whites become more aware that total mastery (over the Blacks) is an elusive goal, LaFantasie allows. When World War I erupts, the CSA declares its neutrality as it can’t afford to send troops to fight overseas and requires its military to quell slave rebellions and control white vigilante and mob violence.

By 1929, LaFantasie continues, the Southern economy falters as competition from Egypt and India makes greater inroads in a worldwide textile industry. Widespread poverty cripples the CSA and leads to political unrest and riots throughout the region. The Wall Street crash worsens the Confederate economy as Northern investment in cotton futures lessens.

Glenn notes that the onslaught of a worldwide depression causes extreme economic and political crisis in the South and more citizens, plunged into extreme poverty, call for the eradication of slavery as whites clamor for jobs held by slaves. Louisiana’s Huey Long leads a movement for emancipation, which passes the Confederate Congress in 1937. The next year sees slavery outlawed in the South.

The Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941 results in a military alliance between the USA and CSA and a joint declaration of war against Japan and Germany. And when the war is won, the United States and Confederate States began exploring the possibility of reuniting the two countries. That happens, LaFantasie says, in 1946 as the CSA agrees to give up its independent status to enable its states to be readmitted to the Union.

Two years later, President Harry Truman orders the desegregation of the U.S. military and, in 1952, Northerners and Southerners enthusiastically elect Republican Dwight D. Eisenhower and Richard Nixon as president and vice president, respectively, of the reconstituted United States.

Then, in 1954, the U.S. Supreme Court declares segregation unconstitutional in the Brown vs. Board of Education issue.

LaFantasie admits his analysis will result in the cry, “That’s not fair!” as he has the nation following the same track after 1952 that it actually took. He confesses that he has “rigged the game.”

“You can’t change history,” he maintains,  “no matter how many times history buffs play counterfactual parlor games or politicians try to alter it by dictating what should be in textbooks or by wishing they could take back something they’ve said that’s now plastered all over the Internet.

“In my counterfactual history of the Civil War and its aftermath, I’ve manipulated facts and events so that everything would lead us precisely and purposely to where we already are. Maybe that’s because for all my flights of fancy, I can’t stop being a historian. In my less-than-fertile imagination, the United States ends up precisely where it’s supposed to be, with the American people standing exactly where we are now, for better or for worse.

“And having reached this place, we are as confused as we’ve ever been about what we’re supposed to do next.”

(Editor’s Note:  To read all of Glenn LaFantasie’s article, go to www.salon.com)