By Ella Starkman-Hynes, Louis Leonard Tucker Alumni Fellow, PhD Candidate at Yale University 

A strange thought occurred to me on the first day of my research fellowship at the Massachusetts Historical Society: most of the scholars around me are probably looking for evidence of things that happened. I might be the only person looking for evidence of things that didn’t.

My dissertation, “A Different Kind of Mirror: Alternate Histories in Civil War Memory,” examines the role of counterfactuals (also known as alternate histories or what-ifs) in constructing memory of the American Civil War from the late 19th century through the present day. In short, it is a comprehensive survey of Civil War memory, told through all the Civil Wars that never happened.

The challenging part of looking for counterfactuals in the archive is that you never quite know where you’re going to find them. In my first few days at the MHS, I spent a lot of time looking through various family papers waiting for what-ifs that never materialized.

Before too long, however, I began to find the kind of large-scale reimagining of the Civil War and its consequences that I had been seeking. Most excitingly, I began to find patterns of counterfactual thinking that appeared across multiple people’s recollections of the war. I found a fascinating counterfactual in Captain John P. Reynolds’ unpublished Civil War reminiscences. Writing in 1893, Reynolds speculated that Richmond, the capital of the Confederacy, could have been taken in 1862. But, he mused, “the peace that followed would undoubtedly have respected slavery as a condition, and this political cancer … would have recovered from the ‘operation’ to still menace the institutions of a great free republic.”

Excerpt from John P. Reynolds Civil War reminiscences, ca. 1897, Massachusetts Historical Society.

I found a similar counterfactual in the unpublished Civil War recollections of Brigadier General Oliver Edwards. Edwards argued that countless unnecessary deaths occurred because President Lincoln could not find the right person to command the Union Army. And yet, it had to be this way — “the God of Battles would not give us any victory that would end the war until the extinction of slavery was certain to be the result.” This use of counterfactual thinking to comprehend the Civil War’s meaning was exactly the type of thing I had hoped to find in the archive, and I was thrilled to see this mode of thinking in Reynolds’ and Edwards’ reminiscences.

Excerpt from Oliver Edwards, “My Recollections of The Civil War,” Clarence Ransom Edwards papers, Massachusetts Historical Society.

I also found some intriguing counterfactuals in the E.W. Kinsley G.A.R. Post Records, a source base which MHS Reference Librarian Dan Hinchen recommended to me. In a newspaper clipping from 1895, I found a record of a speech given by General Nelson Miles in which he asserts that imaginatively inverting the Civil War’s outcome is the only way to “comprehend the magnitude” of the Civil War’s cause. If the North had lost the war, he asserted, “the world could then have said that after nearly 100 years of experiment under the most favorable circumstances  … republican institutions had been tried and had utterly failed on the Continent of America; despotic government, and with it human slavery, would have been the fate of man for an indefinite period of time.”

Printed photograph of General Nelson A. Miles. Grand Army of the Republic, E. W. Kinsley Post No. 113 (Boston, Mass.) records, Carton 2, Massachusetts Historical Society.

Although historians have been somewhat wary of drawing scholarly conclusions from counterfactuals, this reticence comes at a cost. Gavriel Rosenfeld, a pioneering scholar of counterfactuals, has noted the importance of this genre for memory studies: “Speculative accounts about the past, he writes, “are driven by many of the same psychological forces that determine how the past takes shape in remembrance. Biases, fears and wishes, the desire to avoid guilt, the quest for vindication — these and other related sentiments all influence how people remember how it ‘really’ was.” What-ifs, although unconventional sources, can thus add a great deal to our understanding of how Civil War memory has evolved — or failed to evolve — over the course of the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

Works Referenced:

Gavriel Rosenfeld, “Why Do We Ask ‘What If?’ Reflections on the Function of Alternate History.” History and Theory 41, no. 4 (2002): 90–103. http://www.jstor.org/stable/3590670. 93.