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“Sir Winston’s Gettysburg essay…

...is a fantasy which transcends all my objections to exploring the what-ifs and might-have-beens in that great war.” —Shelby Foote

“If Lee Had Not Won the Battle of Gettysburg” first appeared in Scribner’s Magazine, December 1930 (Cohen C344). It resurfaced a year later in a collection of alternate histories, If It had Happened Otherwise (Cohen B43). Its last appearance, in 1975, was in The Collected Essays of Sir Winston Churchill, (Cohen 286). A copy is available by email for personal use but not for reproduction. —RML

Paul Alkon on Churchill at Gettysburg

Dr. Paul A. Alkon was Bing Professor Emeritus of English and American Literature at the University of Southern California. His appreciation of Churchill’s Gettysburg alternative history is the best I’ve read. It is excerpted below from Paul’s book, Winston Churchill’s Imagination, by kind permission of Ellen Alkon. To this I added brief excerpts (italics) from Churchill’s actual 1930 essay.

1930: Gettysburg imagined

“Once a great victory is won it dominates not only the future but the past…. Still it may amuse an idle hour [if] we meditate for a spell upon the debt we owe to those Confederate soldiers who by a deathless feat of arms broke the Union front at Gettysburg and laid open a fair future to the world.”¹

Experience in battle on four continents gave Churchill a horror of war. He also gained an ability to imagine alternate scenarios. It is shocking to realize that the worst possible outcome after the First World War came to be, just two decades later. Contemplating the causes of that war, Churchill with his historic imagination conjured up a scenario which might have prevented it—in 1863.

“If Lee Had Not Won the Battle of Gettysburg,” is Churchill’s only freestanding speculation about a different historical outcome. It is a classic of the genre “alternative history” in science fiction. Some historians refer to it—often suspiciously—as “counterfactual history.”

Churchill presents his story as written in a world where Lee did win the Battle of Gettysburg. As a consequence the South won the American Civil War. Implausibly from our viewpoint, we are told that Lee’s victory precipitated a sequence of events leading to the abolition of slavery, closer links among the English-Speaking Peoples, avoidance of the First World War, and the prospect of a United States of Europe led by Kaiser Wilhelm II.

1863: Lee the Emancipator

“If Lee after his triumphal entry into Washington had merely been the soldier, his achievements would have ended on the battlefield. It was his august declaration that the victorious Confederacy would pursue no policy towards the African negroes which was not in harmony with the moral conceptions of Western Europe, that opened the high roads along which we are now marching so prosperously.”*

As the story unfolds, Lee’s army marches victoriously to Washington, Lincoln’s government having fled to New York. Here Churchill must explain how Lee acquired plenary authority. Churchill deftly explains that Gettysburg threw Confederate President Jefferson Davis “irresistibly, indeed almost unconsciously, into the shade.” There is a grain of reality here, for Lee had warned Davis that slavery was the unacceptable wrong that would doom their cause. The North began the war fighting against Secession, Churchill explains. But “the moral issue of slavery had first sustained and then dominated the political quarrel.”

1905: The “English-Speaking Association”

Given the North’s preponderance of wealth and industry, losing at Gettysburg would not have daunted Abraham Lincoln. But in Churchill’s vision, “Lee’s declaration abolishing slavery…undermined the obduracy of the Northern States:

“Lincoln no longer rejected the Southern appeal for independence. ‘If,’ he declared…‘our brothers in the South are willing faithfully to cleanse this continent of negro slavery, and if they will dwell beside us in goodwill as an independent but friendly nation, it would not be right to prolong the slaughter on the question of sovereignty alone’…. The Treaty of Harper’s Ferry, which was signed between the Union and Confederate States on 6 September 1863, embodied the two, fundamental propositions: that the South was independent, and the slaves were free.”* 

The United and Confederate States of America, riven after Gettysburg, thus become permanent republics. They live peaceably side by side—both armed to the teeth—through 1905. When war scares erupt in Europe, they join with Great Britain to form the “English-Speaking Association.” The signatories are President Theodore Roosevelt, Prime Minister Arthur Balfour, and Woodrow Wilson, “the enlightened Virginian chief of the Southern Republic.” Not a decade later, the “E.S.A.” forestalls world catastrophe.

1914: “Saved! Saved! Saved!”

Everyone remembers the perilous days of 1914, Churchill writes. The murder of the Austrian Archduke precipitated general mobilization. It was “the most dangerous conjunction which Europe has ever known. It seemed that nothing could avert a war which might well have become Armageddon itself.” Desultory firing had already broken out when the English-Speaking Association

“…tendered its friendly offices to all the mobilized Powers, counselling them to halt their armies within ten miles of their own frontiers, and to seek a solution of their differences by peaceful discussion. The memorable document added ‘that failing a peaceful outcome the Association must deem itself ipso facto at war with any Power in either combination whose troops invaded the territory of its neighbour.’ Although this suave yet menacing communication was received with indignation in many quarters, it in fact secured for Europe the breathing space which was so desperately required.”*

The French Republic, the Emperor Franz Joseph and Czar Nicholas quickly acceded to the E.S.A.’s “friendly offices.” The German Kaiser was the last to agree. Some say Wilhelm was determined on war regardless. Others insist he uttered “a scream of joy and fell exhausted into a chair, exclaiming, ‘Saved! Saved! Saved!’”

Our world as dystopian and improbable

Churchill’s imaginary resident of this imaginary world speculates in vintage prose about what dreadful events Lee’s victory prevented. Had the Union triumphed, armies of carpetbaggers might have descended to exploit the newly freed slaves. The South, simmering in resentment, might have invoked racial oppression. Benjamin Disraeli, that Liberal reformer, might have become a Tory! “The sabres of Jeb Stuart’s cavalry and the bayonets of Pickett’s division” turned William Gladstone from a Liberal to a “revivified Conservative.” (In reality, of course, Disraeli was the Tory, Gladstone the Liberal.) Churchill waxes lyrical in his fantasy:

“Once the perils of 1914 had been successfully averted and the disarmament of Europe had been brought into harmony with that already effected by the E.S.A., the idea of a ‘United States of Europe’ was bound to occur continually. The glittering spectacle of the great English-Speaking combination, its assured safety, its boundless power, the rapidity with which wealth was created and widely distributed within its bounds, the sense of buoyancy and hope which seemed to pervade the entire populations; all this pointed to European eyes a moral which none but the dullest could ignore.”*

The reader sees from a surprisingly utopian perspective, our own world as both dystopian and implausible. So the narrator mentions Jan Bloch’s once-famous book, The Future of War, which predicted with what proved remarkably accurate military detail the devastation that would attend war between major European states. But Bloch insisted that such a war would never happen.²

But Churchill asks: Suppose it had? A prostrate Europe might have descended into depression, unemployment, Bolshevism and fascism. Why, today in Britain the income tax might even be 25%! (In actuality, as we sadly know, all those things happened.)

1932: Implausible reality

The brilliance of Churchill’s essay also lies in his decision to shift its narrative viewpoint. We readers must not only consider the consequences of a Confederate victory—including the absence of the First World War. We must also imagine how inconceivable our world might seem if things had worked out differently.

“Whether the Emperor Wilhelm II will be successful in carrying the project of European unity forward by another important stage at the forthcoming Pan-European Conference at Berlin in 1932 is still a matter of prophecy. Should he achieve his purpose he will have raised himself to a dazzling pinnacle of fame and honour…and no one will be more pleased than the members of the E.S.A. to witness the gradual formation of another great area of tranquility and cooperation like that in which we ourselves have learned to dwell….”*

Churchill’s political imagination also allows him to portray dramatically different outcomes of a situation. So he invokes the implausibility of what actually happened—the gigantic slaughter of the Civil War and First World War. This foreshadows the rhetoric which in 1940 rallied his country by inviting contemplation of a Nazi victory. Too many dismissed such a thought. But Churchill knew a Hitler triumph would plunge the world “into the abyss of a new Dark Age.”

That chilling thought acquires much of its power by inviting imagination of one possible future: An alternative, feudal period, and technological development more accelerated than anything during the medieval era.

“Broad, sunlit uplands”

In June 1940, Churchill invited Britons to think of the worst possible outcome of Britain’s fight against Hitler’s Germany—not as a unique situation, incomparable with anything that had gone before, but also an alternative past wrenched out of time. He then invokes the more desirable outcome: “If we can stand up to him, all Europe may be free and the life of the world may move forward into broad, sunlit uplands.”³ Churchill’s skill as an alternative historian notably enhanced the rhetoric that he so famously mobilized for war.

“If this prize should fall to his Imperial Majesty, he may perhaps reflect how easily his career might have been wrecked in 1914 by the outbreak of a war which might have cost him his throne, and have laid his country in the dust. If today he occupies in old age the most splendid situation in Europe, let him not forget that he might well have found himself eating the bitter bread of exile, a dethroned sovereign and a broken man loaded with unutterable reproach. And this, we repeat, might well have been his fate, if Lee had not won the Battle of Gettysburg.”*

Endnotes

¹ Winston S. Churchill, “If Lee Had Not Won the Battle of Gettysburg,” in Michael Wolff, ed., The Collected Essays of Sir Winston Churchill, 4 vols. (London: Library of Imperial History, 1975), IV Churchill at Large, 73. All subsequent italicized excerpts (*) are from this edition, pages 73-84.

² Ivan (Jan) Bloch, The Future of War in Its Technical, Economic and Political Relations: Is War Now Impossible?, trans. R.C. Long (Boston: Ginn, 1899). abridged edition, also 1899.

³ “Their Finest Hour,” House of Commons, 18 June 1940, in Winston S. Churchill, Blood, Sweat, and Tears (New York: Putnam, 1941), 314.

I’d like to know if you can shed light on Churchill’s use of the word “wizard” for radar scientists and engineers (as in Their Finest Hour, Book 2, Chapter 4 “The Wizard War”)?  He first used the term in publication in that book in 1949; is there any indication of his use of the word, to describe what the RAF called “boffins”, during the early days of the war itself?

“Wizard” is of course a grand old Middle English word, and Churchill would have preferred that to the newfangled “boffin.”  But I wonder if his known affection for the 1939 movie The Wizard of Oz might have led to his choice of term?  I have not seen anyone other than Churchill, prior to 1949, use the term to describe the scientists and engineers who developed British radar. —Dr. Larrie D. Ferreiro

A: Probably not

“Wizard” is bruited about in the literature, but Churchill didn’t often use it. By far his most frequent use applied to David Lloyd George, “the Welsh Wizard.”

I can find no instance of WSC using the word in his published works, except in 1949 as Dr. Ferreiro mentions. However, “Wizard War” was a common expression, at least postwar. Paul Alkon, in Winston Churchill’s Imagination, writes (156):

…such phrases as “Wizard War” and “The Romance of Design” are telling clues to the fact that the possibilities of modern science stirred his vivid imagination no less than his powerful intellect. Imaginative engagement with science was one of Churchill’s fundamental traits.

“Wizard” in the literature

There are only a handful of other occurrences, though amusing….

Young Winston, writing King Edward VII from East Africa in 1908, mentioned “sleeping sickness. It is like an old time wizard’s curse.”

In September 1943, General Maitland “Jumbo” Wilson successfully captured the Greek island of Kos. It earned him a nickname (not necessarily by WSC): “the Wizard of Kos.”

At the death of Roosevelt in April 1945, WSC allegedly mused to his staff that millions loved or hated FDR “as a wizard who gets things done. I’ll be hated. But I’m composed about it. It requires no resignation on my part. I am sure it took none for Franklin.”  —From Jack Fishman, My Darling Clementine, 258. (N.B.: the Churchills’ daughter Mary didn’t  take much stock in this writer.)

Dr. Ferreiro is right that the famous Judy Garland film and its songs were among his favorites. Martin Gilbert writes that after the 1945 election Churchill held a farewell dinner at Chequers for the American Ambassador, Gil Winant…

…his tenacious ally of the previous four years. Mary Churchill recalled that among the songs they sang was “We’re Off to See the Wizard” which, after much gloom earlier in the evening, had “a cheering effect.”

_____

Note: WSC did keep a kind of personal wizard. See “Frederick Lindemann, Churchill’s Eminence Grise?“

In four essays in his 1932 book Thoughts and Adventures (taken from earlier writings), Churchill contemplated the future. He identified future trends which would affect the evolution of democracy, constitutional government, and the evolution of society. Those essays were remarkably prescient. Moreover, they offer reflections upon issues as prominent today as they were eight decades ago. Excerpted from the Hillsdale College Churchill Project. To read the complete article click here.

“The relevance of the life of Winston Churchill to our time is apparent in the newspaper any day,” writes Hillsdale College President Dr. Larry Arnn. “It is not so much that the great world wars and the Cold War shaped the future, although they did. The problem of rule, say the old philosophers, is fundamental. If this is our problem, then Churchill is a man to study.”

“Mass Effects in Modern Life,” 1931

Many an advance in science, technology and communication, Churchill argued, “suppresses the individual achievement.” He deplored the rise of the collective at the expense of the individual.

The newspapers do a lot of thinking for us, Churchill wrote. Substitute “media” for “newspapers” and he could be speaking today. He worried about superficiality. True, media provides “a tremendous educating process. But it is an education which passes in at one ear and out at the other. It is an education at once universal and superficial.” Such a process, taken to its ultimate ends, would produce “standardized citizens, all equipped with regulation opinions, prejudices and sentiments, according to their class or party.”

“Consistency in Politics,” 1927

Here Churchill discusses political conduct—something that concerns, or should concern, us today. Consistency is a virtue, he declared—but the key to consistency amid changing circumstances “is to change with them while preserving the same dominating purpose.” In part here, as John Grigg wrote, Churchill was “explaining away his own falls from grace. [He] had learned from bitter experience that there are limits beyond which no minister, however talented, energetic, or masterful, dare ignore his officials’ advice.”

This essay illustrates the differences between principle and action. Examples abound today. There is energy production, Putin’s Russia, the economic challenge of Asia, the European Union’s attempt to replace traditional nation-states, trade relationships amidst subsidized or nationalized industries, the growing role of the State in the economy. Say an official comes out for tariffs, but later exempts certain countries out of friendship or negotiation. If he maintains the same dominating purpose—in this case free and fair trade—he is, or may be, adapting to circumstances.

Churchill could have been thinking of opinion polls when he added: “The stimulus of a vast concentration of public support is almost irresistible in its potency.” Are not ideas that contribute to the growth of the collective dangerous to liberal democracy?

A statesman, he concluded, “should always try to do what he believes is best in the long view for his country, and he should not be dissuaded from so acting by having to divorce himself from a great body of doctrine to which he formerly sincerely adhered.”

“Shall We All Commit Suicide?,” 1924

This essay forecasts the hope and danger of a future nuclear age. Written fifteen years before Einstein sent his famous letter to Roosevelt, warning of implications of splitting the atom, Churchill’s message thunders to us across the years. We face the specter of nuclear weapons in the hands of people we think might actually use them:

May there not be methods of using explosive energy incomparably more intense than anything heretofore discovered? Might not a bomb no bigger than an orange be found to possess a secret power to destroy a whole block of buildings—nay, to concentrate the force of a thousand tons of cordite and blast a township at a stroke?

Mankind, Churchill continues,

has never been in this position before. Without having improved appreciably in virtue or enjoying wiser guidance, it has got into its hands for the first time the tools by which it can unfailingly accomplish its own extermination….Death stands at attention, obedient, expectant, ready to serve, ready to shear away the peoples en masse; ready, if called on, to pulverize, without hope of repair, what is left of civilization. He awaits only the word of command. He awaits it from a frail, bewildered being, long his victim, now—for one occasion only—his Master.

 “Fifty Years Hence,” 1931

Churchill anticipated the effects of science and communication—biotechnology, cell phones, television, air travel, the digital age of instant information. They were “projects undreamed of by past generations.” They represented “forces terrific and devastating…comforts, activities, amenities, pleasures.” Juxtaposed with them is the unchanging nature of man:

Certain it is that while men are gathering knowledge and power with ever-increasing and measureless speed, their virtues and their wisdom have not shown any notable improvement as the centuries have rolled. The brain of modern man does not differ in essentials from that of the human beings who fought and loved here millions of years ago. The nature of man has remained hitherto practically unchanged. Under sufficient stress—starvation, terror, warlike passion, or even cold intellectual frenzy—the modern man we know so well will do the most terrible deeds, and his modern woman will back him up.

Can humans change their nature sufficiently to prosper in a future world where pleasures and dangers crowd in upon them? Governments, Churchill writes, in lines that seem apposite now,

drift along the line of least resistance, taking short views, paying their way with sops and doles, and smoothing their path with pleasant-sounding platitudes. Never was there less continuity or design in their affairs, and yet towards them are coming swiftly changes which will revolutionize for good or ill not only the whole economic structure of the world but the social habits and moral outlook of every family.

Thoughts for today

Again this is remindful of a later time. Critics say we are replacing the moral compass of religion with a kind of secular humanism. Vague internationalism, an urge simply to do right, is weak without a moral underpinning. Churchill fears such developments. It was vital, he writes, “that the moral philosophy and spiritual conceptions of men and nations should hold their own amid these formidable scientific evolutions.” It would be better, in his view, even to call a halt to material progress, “than to be mastered by our own apparatus and the forces which it directs.”

Today’s challenges are not the same as those of Churchill’s era. It is foolish, wrote Professor Paul Alkon, to believe our times are simply a replay of his. Churchill’s lasting value lies in his approach. Not precisely to what he did, but to the broad principles that motivated him. He lived by these concepts: liberty, individuality, courage, magnanimity. They are precepts of his country and its relatives across the seas. Combined, he saw them as a force for good.

Further Reading

“Three Aspects of Modern Life That Kept Winston Churchill Up at Night,” by Bre Payton in The Federalist. This is review of the latest installment of Dr. Arnn’s “Winston Churchill and Statesmanship” course, which you may take free online: click here.

Churchill’s Trial: Winston Churchill and the Salvation of Free Government, by Dr. Larry P. Arnn, is a scholarly exposition of these and other Churchill thoughts on the future of constitutional democracy.

Thoughts and Adventures by Winston S. Churchill. “It is like being invited to dinner at Chartwell… The soup was limpid, the champagne flowed, the pudding had a theme, and Churchill held forth in vivid conversation.”