If Only: The Confederacy and Churchill’s English Speaking Association

 

Churchill wrote in 1931 that JEB Stuart was the key to victory in early July, 1863 at Gettysburg. Had Stuart crashed into the rear of the enemy army at the time of Pettigrew’s Charge, (This was essentially Lee's plan, but was stymied) a full rout would have ensued and the South gaining its independence. Churchill imagined a Southern victory at Gettysburg as the beginning of a great alliance of English-speaking countries that would spread wealth and prosperity in the world.  He wrote derisively about what might have followed a Northern victory: “Let us only think what would have happened supposing the liberation of slaves had been followed by some idiotic assertion of racial equality, and even attempts to graft white institutions upon the simple, docile, gifted African race belonging to a much earlier chapter of human history.
Bernhard Thuersam, www.Circa1865.com   The Great American Political Divide

The Confederacy and Churchill’s English Speaking Association

“In 1932, with reparations and war debts frozen and the world in the depths of the Depression, the writer J.C. Squire published an entertaining (though now largely forgotten) collection of what he called “lapses into imaginary history.” Three of his eleven contributors chose to rewrite history in such a way as to “avoid” the First World War.

Andres Maurois did it by imagining away the French Revolution. As his omniscient “Archangel” explains, the imaginary world after a century and a half of Bourbon rule in France “is divided a bit differently. The United States did not break away from England, but so vast have they grown that they now dominate the British Empire . . . The Imperial Parliament sits in Kansas City . . . the capital of . . . the United States of Europe . . . in Vienna.” There has been no “war of 1914 – 1918.”

Winston Churchill entertained a similar fantasy by assuming a Confederate victory at Gettysburg and the subsequent emergence in 1905 of an “English Speaking Association” of Britain, the Confederacy and the Northern United States:

“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 [English Speaking Association], the idea of “An 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 entire populations; all this pointed to European eyes a moral which none but the dullest could ignore.”

(The Pity of War, Explaining World War One, Niall Ferguson, Basic Books, 1999, pg. 457)