I’m willing to concede a lot when it comes to historical fiction – as long as the research is minimally competent (looking at you, Conn Iggulden), I don’t mind people taking dramatic license. And at the end of the day, what harm can it do?
But the American Civil War is different, because of the way the historical memory of the conflict has and is being used as a weapon in modern American politics, and where historical memory and the historical profession have had significant impacts on the rights of African-Americans, the strength or weakness of Federal efforts to protect those rights, and the growth of Neo-Confederate and other white nationalist groups.
David Blight’s Race and Reunion is a critical text here – better than anyone else, he showed how ex-Confederates rewrote history (both literal textbooks as well as historical fiction in various media) to push a narrative that the Civil War had not been fought for slavery, that Reconstruction had been an illegitimate punishment of southern whites that had backfired because black people were incapable of self-government. This narrative, legitimized in the academy by the Dunning School at Columbia University, was influential in getting northern whites to accept Jim Crow and the disenfranchisement of black voters as “progress.”
And Gary Gallagher’s Causes Won, Lost, and Forgotten and Bruce Chadwick’s The Reel Civil War pushed this argument further by turning the focus to film and other popular media. The films Birth of a Nation and Gone With the Wind are probably the most famous examples of the Lost Cause on the silver screen, but they’re not the only ones.
Indeed, running throughout the western genre is the trope of the ex-Confederate soldier who never owned any slaves and fought for non-political reasons, who turns outlaw because of evil Union soldiers who did horrible things to his wife and kids: it’s there in Clint Eastwood’s work (The Outlaw Josey Wales), any film about Jesse James, AMC’s Hell on Wheels, and it won’t go away. By contrast, the number of films where the protagonist is a Union veteran are can almost be counted on the fingers of one head.
So I have zero damn patience for the Starbuck Chronicles’ shenanigans – a protagonist who fights for the Confederacy but not because of slavery, noble southerners who are friends with their slaves, evil Boston abolitionists, etc. Yes, Cornwell is British and probably doesn’t know any better, but the failure to do the research that would have pointed out the implications of his narrative is inexcusable.
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