St. Andrew's Day
and Churchill's birthday.
St. Andrew is an industrious saint. He is the patron saint of Scotland, Russia, and Romania, among others. Traditions abound about St Andrew’s Day and St. Andrew’s Eve in various European folk customs. The St. Andrew’s cross, or saltire, is heavily represented in heraldric and military symbolism throughout Christendom. St. Andrew, I think, has punched above his weight in the formation of our (genuinely) diverse cultural imaginations.
Churchill, of course, has fallen out of favor lately, with both liberals and conservatives. Nevertheless, Churchill has occupied a not-insignificant portion of my life, as the subject of a long-forgotten dissertation, and in honor of St Andrew and his cross, I thought I would share a fragment of said dissertation about my favorite Churchill essay: If Lee Had Not Won The Battle of Gettysburg. This essay proves (to me, at least) that Churchill’s particular genius lies in seeing how history might have been otherwise—which allows a statesman to imagine how the future might also become other than what we, in our malaise, have grown to accept. Churchill and Enoch Powell have that in common; queue my favorite Powell quote: “The supreme function of statesmanship is to provide against preventable evils.”
Enjoy this slightly edited fragment, pulled from a larger argument about Churchill’s methods of writing history.
Churchill’s Counterfactual History
Churchill’s historical philosophy involves the principle that history could have been otherwise, given the free will and decisions of leaders and statesmen. To illustrate this principle, it is helpful to examine a practice that he often utilized in his writing: speculative or counterfactual history. Counterfactual history is conjecturing about what did not happen, or what might have happened, in order to understand what did happen. There are a multitude of counterfactuals, large and small, throughout Churchill’s writings and histories. The Gathering Storm is rife with them; after all, in the Preface, Churchill recalls how he told President Roosevelt that he thought World War II should have been named “The Unnecessary War.” Throughout the book Churchill considers it just as important to show how the war could have been avoided as it is to explain how it came to pass. The two go hand in hand. The final line of his Preface contains an expression of his “hope” that his Histories of the Second World War will allow a new generation to “ponder the past…and thus govern, in accordance with the needs and glory of man, the awful unfolding scene of the future.” His histories are meant to tell the story of the past in order to influence those who might have a hand in guiding the future. They are guides to human nature and politics for future statesmen and women. In another statement in The Gathering Storm, Churchill repeats these sentiments: “There can hardly have been a war more easy to prevent than this second Armageddon.” And, he insists, the causes that brought it on could occur again, if vigilance is lacking on the part of the great powers: “They have only to repeat the same well-meaning, short-sighted behavior towards the new problems which in singular resemblance confront us today to bring about a third convulsion from which none may live to tell the tale.” Churchill does Thucydides one better; he does not insist that his history is a useful possession for all time, but rather begs the reader to understand the absolute necessity of knowing the histories of the Great Wars in order to prevent yet another cataclysmic war, which now, armed with nuclear capability, might threaten to destroy the human race entirely.
Churchill’s penchant for imaginative historical counterfactuals is rarely seen more clearly than in two relatively little-known essays: “If Lee Had Not Won the Battle of Gettysburg,” and “The Dream.” Neither of these essays fits the typical example of counterfactual history, but both are radical examples of the way that Churchill teaches through the lessons of history. They are extreme ways of showing how the world might have been different. Churchill creates this effect by altering perspectives so that history can be viewed through an unfamiliar lens. In “If Lee Had Not Won The Battle of Gettysburg,” the premise of the essay is that Lee did indeed win the Battle of Gettysburg, from whence Churchill speculates about what follies and terrors might have befallen the world if he had not. It also provides evidence that Churchill indeed believed that the outcomes of battles and wars, conducted and influenced by the men and women in control of major aspects of those events, have a defining impact on the chain of historical events in the life of a nation or even a civilization. As the opening lines of the essay read:
The quaint conceit of imagining what would have happened if some important or unimportant event had settled itself differently has become so fashionable that I am encouraged to enter upon an absurd speculation. What would have happened if Lee had not won the Battle of Gettysburg?
Once a great victory is won it dominates not only the future but the past. All the chains of consequence clink out as if they never could stop. The hopes that were shattered, the passions that were quelled, the sacrifices that were ineffectual are all swept out of the land of reality. Still it may amuse an idle hour, and perhaps serve as a corrective to undue complacency, if at this moment in the twentieth century—so rich in assurance and prosperity, so calm and buoyant—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.
In the essay, Churchill explains how Pickett’s Charge succeeded, how the Confederate States won their independence, and the ripple effect that the victory had on European politics. He recalls Lincoln’s grace “in the hour of fatal defeat.” He also speculates on what might have happened if Pickett’s Charge had failed. The essay is a brain-teaser; a counterfactual within a counterfactual. At moments highly ironic, and at others deeply serious, it is a work of historical fiction, but one meant to instruct.
Churchill insists that a mere military victory on its own is not enough to change the history of the world. Rather, victories on the battlefield must be combined with astute statesmanship in the political sphere in order to win a prolonged military conflict. In Churchill’s fictional history, Lee’s victory at Gettysburg is the beginning of his emergence as “a statesman.” Lee is given political authority by the government of the Confederate states, and after his march of triumph into the capital of Washington, he decrees that the African slaves of the South will be liberated, though not placed on terms of political equality. After this, a treaty is signed between the victorious Confederacy and the British Empire. Thus, in a stroke, the fictional Lee’s abolition of slavery essentially ends all further resistance on the Northern side; it has no hope against the might of the British Navy. But the military force of this treaty is only part of Lee’s political success: the moral victory is no less important. Both might and justice go together in this achievement.
But none of these formidable events in the sphere of arms and material force would have daunted the resolution of President Lincoln, or weakened the fidelity of the Northern States and armies. It was Lee’s declaration abolishing slavery which by a single master-stroke gained the Confederacy an all-powerful ally and spread a moral paralysis far and wide through the ranks of their enemies. The North were waging war against Secession, but as the struggle had proceeded, the moral issue of slavery had first sustained and then dominated the political quarrel. Now that the moral issue was withdrawn, now that the noble cause which inspired the Union armies and the Governments behind them was gained, there was nothing left but a war of reconquest to be waged under circumstances infinitely more difficult and anxious than those which had already led to so much disappointment and defeat.
Here was the South victorious, reinvigorated, reinforced, offering of her own free will to make a more complete abolition of the servile status on the American continent than even Lincoln had himself seen fit to demand. Was the war to continue against what soon must be heavy odds merely to assert the domination of one set of English-speaking people over another; was blood to flow indefinitely in an ever-broadening stream to gratify national pride or martial revenge?
Once the moral cause for war was removed from the Northern Army, it shattered their military resolve. For the Southern side, is not through arms alone, but with the help of political strategy and enlightened leadership that that war was able to be won, sparing further bloodshed. It is difficult not to imagine that Churchill is thinking here of how the First World War might have been won at the Dardanelles, had the military and political leadership collaborated with the same view in mind; that is, if political strategy and military strategy had been coordinated, aiming at the same goal of peace. Had this occurred, two more years of senseless bloodshed might have been avoided.
The effects of the fictional Southern victory are felt in English politics, with the ascent of Lord Gladstone as a Tory leader, in a revitalized Conservative party (in this version of history, Gladstone never becomes a Liberal). Disraeli, on the other hand, an advocate of the Northern cause, becomes a leader of the “democratic and radical forces of the nation,” leaving the Conservative party. Because of Lee’s victory, Disraeli comes to be known as “The People’s Dizzy.” Churchill’s final word on these events is highly ironic: “We may, however, note, by the way, that if Lee had not won the Battle of Gettysburg, Gladstone would not have become the greatest of Conservative Empire and Commonwealth builders, nor would Disraeli have been the idol of the toiling masses. Such is Fate. But we cannot occupy ourselves too long upon the fortunes of individuals.” Of course, the fortunes of individuals are precisely the occupation of this essay.
In Churchill’s story, by 1905, the South has conquered most of Mexico, and the Northern states have become essentially an armed camp. Tensions around the world are high, but especially between the old rivals on the American continent. However, in this story, at the “decisive moment,” civilization is saved by transatlantic diplomacy and statesmanship. President Theodore Roosevelt and Prime Minister Arthur Balfour, “two diverse personalities which together embodied all the qualities necessary alike for profound negotiation and for supreme decision,” arrange the “Covenant of the English-Speaking Association.” This covenant included common citizenship between citizens of Great Britain and the United States, reunifying not only the North and South, but America and England once more. All existing political arrangements remained the same, and no national particularity was challenged. “It was, in fact, a moral and psychological rather than political reaction. Hundreds of millions of people suddenly adopted a new point of view. Without prejudice to their existing loyalties and sentiments, they gave birth in themselves to a new higher loyalty and a wider sentiment.” Thus it was that when The Great War dawned in 1914, the united English-Speaking Peoples were ready to face it together. When the German army received word of the English-Speaking Association’s intention to go to war if it would not pause for a diplomatic summit, the German forces halted at the borders of France. And the war never came. The essay ends by contemplating the great fame and glory that Emperor Wilhelm may be about to receive at the Pan-European Conference of 1932, when he proposes his plan for European Unity.
We see in this brief essay from 1930 an outline of Churchill’s over-arching principles and hopes for the future of international relations in the West: an association of the English-Speaking peoples, eventually joined by a Pan-European Association, which he would later refer to as “the United States of Europe.” This plan, outlined most clearly in his address at Fulton Missouri, and his Zurich Speech, remained his constant best hope for peace in the West until the end of his career.
“The Dream” was written in 1947, and published only posthumously. In it, Winston Churchill is painting a portrait of Lord Randolph Churchill alone in his studio, when the same long-dead patriarch suddenly appears to him. In the ensuing conversation, Churchill gently tells his aristocratic father, product of a by-gone era, some of the events of the past 50 years, never revealing his own role in those events. In “The Dream,” Churchill’s character artfully conceals from and reveals to his father facts of history, leaving the reader to guess why. The counterfactual elements of the story are in Lord Randolph Churchill’s questions and responses, allowing the reader to see the present state of the world through the eyes of an aristocratic English parliamentarian who died in 1895. The reader witnesses Lord Randolph’s shock that England in its present state has both a Socialist government and a Monarchy, but as he grows to learn more facts of the present age, he appears content that the primary institutions of English politics have survived. Winston Churchill says, “I am sorry, Papa…I like the glitter of the past.” To which his father responds, “What does the form matter if the facts remain?” On the question of female suffrage, Winston tells Randolph, “It did not turn out as badly as I thought.”
As his father grasps the bare political facts, he remarks to Winston, “You must be living in a very happy age. A Golden Age, it seems.” But Randolph, as yet, knows nothing about the horror of the two World Wars that he has missed. Almost as an aside, Winston mentions a war. His father is startled: “Has there been a war?” His son replies, “We have had nothing else but wars since democracy took charge…Wars and rumours of war ever since you died.” For Winston Churchill, his father’s death marks the dawn of the democratic age in England. His son first tells Randolph of the Boer War (“England should never have done that,” Randolph scolds), but the historical tale is once again sidetracked by a discussion of democracy and the House of Commons. Winston insists that he has always been a strong supporter of the House of Commons, and remains so. His father agrees. They discuss more personal matters: marriage and children. Satisfied with Winston’s family life, Randolph asks for further information about England’s wars. Winston responds, “They were the wars of nations, caused by demagogues and tyrants.” As he explains how England won all of its wars and made its enemies surrender unconditionally, Randolph remarks, “No one should be made to do that. Great people forget sufferings, but not humiliations.” Randolph is sanguine to learn that the United States is the leading world power, but dismayed by the news that India and Burma have been lost to the Empire. Russia’s new despotism is mentioned, as are Germany and France, about which Winston emphatically states: “Their only hope is to rise together.” But finally Randolph learns the death toll of the two wars, and the fact that, as Churchill tells him, “Europe is a ruin.” Shaken, Randolph pauses before remarking that he is glad he did not live to see it, but that he is pleasantly surprised at how much Winston knows about these affairs. “When I hear you talk,” he says, “I really wonder you didn’t go into politics. You might have done a lot to help. You might even have made a name for yourself.” With that, he smiles at his son and vanishes. The dream ends.