What If? 2 : More What If? : Eminent Historians Imagine What Might Have Been 9780330487252, 0330487256, 9780399147951, 0399147950

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Eminent Historians

Imagine What Might

ESSAYS BY

Ma

EDITED

m

MJ El H^^H

H^l COWLEY l^n

Have Been

-m

JAMES BRADLEY CALEB CARR,

THOMAS FLEMING,

ROBERT

JOHNLUKACS, i

GEOFFREY

C WARD and

,

fl

others

U.S.A. %2H:)5 Canada $41 '»''

"The book of the year for any history lover." —Kirkus Reviews on What

History comes alive

in this

new volume

on the vital turning points in our itage.

With What

»v»^

Ij?'''

of essays

common

her-

Robert Cowley has

lj?'''2,

gathered another group of imaginative essays,

worthy sequel to What Ifp^"\ one of the most admired history books of the past few seasons. a

no surer way

to feel the

danger or the

There

is

good

fortune of our collective past than to

contemplate those moments when the world's future

hung

in

Our

the balance.

torians speculate here

on some

ing crossroads and the ways in

might have been changed

brightest his-

of these intrigu-

which our

for the better

lives

—or

the worse.

The

twenty-five

never-before-published

essays range across the

span of history.

full

Hanson imagines

Victor Davis

a

drastically

development of Western philosophy if Socrates had died on the battlefield at Delium

altered

in

424 BC. Writing about an early death-at-

the-stake of Martin Luther, Geoffrey Parker

describes ramifications that might have

in-

cluded a divided Reformation movement, a strengthened Catholic leadership, and no Euro-

pean setdements

in

the Americas. John Lukacs

proposes that Theodore Roosevelt might have if he brokered an earlier end to World War 1

had been renominated Geoffrey C. Roosevelt's

Ward reminds

us of Franklin D.

good fortune on numerous occa-

sions, including his

bulletin 1933.

be

—

for president in 1912.

If

escape from an

assassin's

FDR had not evaded his would

assassin, Vice-President

might have scrapped the

John Nance Ga Deal and ma

New

[Continued on hack

0110

or

rt^

/«4

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;P

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''11

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T

CO

WHAT

IF?"

2

i

OTHER VOLUMES EDITED With M)' Face

to the

No End What

If?''':

Enemy:

BY

ROBERT COWLEY

Perspectives

on

Save Victory: Perspectives on

The World's Foremost

Imagine

the Civil

WWII

Military Historians

What Might Have Been

Experience of War

The Reader's Companion

War

to Military

(with Geoffrey Parker)

History

Essays by

James Bradley

Caleb Carr

Thomas Fleming

John Lukacs

Geoffrey

C.

Ward

AND Others

Edited by

ROBERT COWLEY

WHAT

IF?"

2

EMINENT HISTORIANS IMAGINE WHAT MIGHT HAVE BEEN

G.

P.

PUTNAM'S SONS New

York

WHAT IF?

a trademark of

is

G.

American

Historical Publications, Inc.

Putnam's Sons

P.

Puhlishen Since 1838

member

a

of

Penguin Putnam

Inc.

375 Hudson Street

New Copyright

© 2001

NY

York,

American

10014

Historical Publications, Inc.

All rights reserved. This book, or parts thereof,

may not

be reproduced in any form without permission. Published simultaneously in Canada

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Puhlication Data

What

if?

essays

/

2

:

eminent historians imagine what might have been

by James Bradley

.

.

[et al.]

.

p.

Contents: Socrates dies at Delium, 424 Pilate spares Jesus/Carlos

Chinese discovery of the stake,

M. N.

New

1521/Geoffrey Parker

Eiie

b.c. /Victor

— Repulse

cm.

Charles

If

left

If

— The Great War torpedoed /Robert

L.

Cook,

Jr.

a nose/Josiah

Ober

— Pontius — The

1066/CeceIia Holland

— Martin Luther burns

at the

—

Lincoln had not freed the slaves/Tom Wicker

—

Home

France turns the other cheek, July 1870/Alistair

1912/John Lukacs

F.

14,

Whitehall, August 1641/Theodore K. Rabb

—

Napoleon's invasion of North America/Thomas Fleming

—

October

at Hastings,

had not

I

— Not by

Davis Hanson

World, 15th century /Theodore

—

:

edited by Robert Cowley,

;

The

O'Connell

Election of Theodore Roosevelt,

— No Finland Station/George

Feifer

— The luck of Franklin Delano Roosevelt/Geoffrey C. Ward — The War of 1938/Williamson Murray — Prime Minister Halifax /Andrew Roberts — The boys who saved 1942/James Bradley — Enigma XII uncracked /David Kahn — the Holocaust /Robert Katz — VE Day —November — No bomb: no end/Richard Frank — The 1944/Caleb Carr — The Fuhrer the dock/Roger Presidency of Henry Wallace/James Chace — A of three congressmen, 1948/Lance Morrow — What Australia,

protests

Pius

11,

in

B.

Spiller

tale

Pizarro

had not found potatoes

in

if

Peru?/William H. McNeill.

ISBN 0-399' 14795-0 1.

Imaginary wars and II.

Title:

What

battles.

if? 2.

III.

D25.5.W44

2.

Imaginary

histories.

1.

Title:

WTiat

if?

two.

Bradley, James, date. IV. Cowley, Robert.

2001034919

2001

355.4'8— dc21

Printed in the United States of America 1

3

This book

Book

5

is

7

9

printed

10

on

8

6

4

2

acid-free paper.

@

design by Michelle McMillian

Map and picture research Maps

by Sabine Russ

© 200J Jeffrey L.

Endpapers: Detail ofBayeux Tapestry, Musee de Copyright Erich Lessing

/

Ward la Tapisserie,

Art Resource, NY.

Bayeux, FrarKe.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I

wish to express

my special thanks to Byron HolUnshead and

Sabine Russ at American Historical Publications, and to

David Highfill

at

Putnam,

for their assistance in all aspects of

the development of this book.

R.C.

CONTENTS

List of

Maps

& Illustrations

Introduction by Robert

Socrates Dies at Delium, 424 B.C.

The consequences of a

Not by

a

Nose

t

*

xiii

Cowley

Victor Davis

xv

Hanson

1

single battle casualty

Josiah

Ober

23

The triumph of Antony and Cleopatra

at

Acrium, 31 B.C.

CarloslsA.N .Eire

Pontius Pilate Spares Jesus

48

Christianity without the Crucifixion

Repulse at Hastings, October 14, 1066

Cecelia Holland

68

William does not conquer England

The Chinese Discovery 15th Century

What

is

Bums

New World, R Coo/c, Jr.

of the

Theodore

the expeditions of

Martin Luther

"O God,

*

at the Stake,

Luther dead?"

85

a eunuch admiral might have

1521

^

led to

Geoffrey Parker

105

If

Charles

I

Had Not

As a

starter,

Left Whitehall,

TheodcyreK.Rabb

August 1641

no English

civil

120

war

Napoleon's Invasion of North America

Aedes aegypti

If

Lincoln The

takes a holiday,

Had Not

Tom

Freed the Slaves

inevitable results of no

Thomas Fleming

The

needless

war with

Wicker

Home

Alistair

Brokering an earlier end

to

World War

The Great War Torpedoed ^ that could

have

JohnLukacs

Robert L. O'Connell

won

the

war for Germany

195 in

1915

The War

210

of Franklin Delano Roosevelt

Seven might-not-have-beens on

road

-

Geoffrey

C

.

to

sway Hitler

Prime Minister Halifax

*>

at

Ward

236

to the presidency

Williamson Murray

of 1938

Chamberlain fails

the

181

I

George Feifer No Finland Station A Russian Revolution without Lenin?

The Luck

165

Prussia

Election of Theodore Roosevelt, 1912

The weapon

152

Emancipation Proclamation

France Turns the Other Cheek, July 1870 ^ The

134

1802

255

Munich

Andrew

Roberts

279

Great Britain makes peace with Germany, 1940

The Boys

Who Saved Australia,

1942

James Bradley

291

Small events can have large results

Enigma Uncracked The

David Kahn

Allies fail to break the

German

Pius XII Protests the Holocaust

Could

the

305

cipher machine

*

Robert Katz

wartime pope have prevented

the Final Solution?

317

VE Day—November

11,

1944

*

Caleb Carr

333

The unleashing of Patton and Montgomery

The

Fiihrer in the

Dock

Roger

344

Spiller

A speculation on the banality of evil No Bomb: No End

The Operation Olympic

The

366

Richard B. Frank disaster,

Japan 1945

Presidency of Henry Wallace

If FDR had not dumped his

*

James Chace

vice president in

A Tale of Three Congressmen,

1948

1

382

944

Lance Morrow

404

America without Nixon, Johnson, and Kennedy

What

If

Pizarro

Had Not Found

Potatoes in Peru?

The humble

*

William H. McNeill

roots of history

413

4 11

LIST

OF MAPS & ILLUSTRATIONS MAPS

7

Boeotia and Attica, 424

B.C.;

and Ancient Greece

and The

28

The

Battle of Actium, 31 b.c;

72

The

Battle of Hastings, October 1066

90-9

Ming Voyages

of Exploration,

138

The New New France

259

Hitler's Invasion of

295

Pacific Theater, 1942;

337

The End

371

The

1

Roman Empire,

5th Century

Czechoslovakia, October 1938

and Eastern

of the European War,

New Guinea,

Autumn 1944

Invasion of Japan, 1945-46

ILLUSTRATIONS page

26-27

Actium: Empire Lost, Empire Established

53

The Decision That Made

76

Hastings: Futures in the Balance

109

Portrait of a Survivor

127

Charles

156

A Cause Not Lost

171

Unnecessary Adversaries

I:

A Study in Stubbornness

185

The

21

The God That Almost

25

A Reluctant Leader?

Bull

a Religion

Moose Candidate Failed

1942

31 B.C.

283

Prime Ministers in Waiting

309

The

Perfect

320

The

Fatal

348

Last

Hurrah

386

Wallace Takes a Back Seat

417

Harvesting History

Machine

Choice

K:v>.sc^.^s^>^N:^^>'^c^^'^^^^^' BOEOTIA AND ATTICA,

424 424

^

b.c.

B.C.

iNJ^^t-Qv^t-Qv^t^QV*

Aegean Sea

'^^^ Euhoean Sea

Thebes

•

BOEOTI A ---'>^^s^--^^-C^^^^^

OSIAH OBER

NOT

A NOSE

BY

The triumph of Antony and Cleopatra

To what

at

Actium, 31 B.C.

extent does love exert a role in counterfactual history?

dismiss that as

a purely Gallic question. Indeed, ]osiah Ober notes here,

queen Cleopatra had possessed a might have been changed."

Mark Antony, one

Would

less

Egyptian

comely nose, "the whole face of

the earth

unpleasing looks have kept the soldier-politician

of the most powerful

heart to her, thus taking the

first steps

a consequence, the elevation of the

Was

fully

men

on

first

in the

known

world, from losing his

the path to defeat at

emperor of Rome,

Actium and,

his rival

as

Octavian

love the culprit?

To Pascal (and earlier, Shakespeare) would

the

if the

seventeenth-century French philosopher Blaise Pascal opined that

Augustus?

Some would

know human

,

the

answer couldn't be

clearer.

vanity has but to consider the causes

love," Pascal wrote in his Pensees.

The causes of an

and

"He who effects

of

infatuation might be trifling

but the effects could be fearful, moving "earth, princes, armies, the whole world." Pascal was no doubt being hard on love, as well as on

such concerns have

made

for

an enduring

Cleopatra, apparently, was no beauty.

sand ships?

No

matter. She had other

tale

Was

of

Antony and Cleopatra, but

human

this the

more fetching

folly.

Why

not say

it?

nose that launched a thouattributes.

According

to the

Greek bio^apher Plutarch, who wrote within a century of Actium, "Her beauty (as

it is

reported)

was not so

passing, as unmatchable as other

such as upon present view did enamor

pany and conversation

that

a

man

men

women, nor

yet

with her; but so sweet was her com-

could not possibly but be taken." Cleopatra

23

WHAT was captivating

in

IF?

2

another respect. Sex in the ancient world had

as golf does in ours. In the ornate tents, barges,

mighty, deals were

Lack of

was

virtue

made and

own

its

its

practical uses,

and bed chambers of the high and

alliances, political

and

dynastic, were cemented:

reward, and Cleopatra was for

much

of her

life

a

winner.

No

Actium?

No

gilt-edged suicides?

Ober

considers

With Antony and Cleopatra securely enthroned and

some of

their

the alternatives.

progeny guaranteed a

future, their capital, Alexandria, might have been the other eternal city of the

world. ber,

The whole evolving nature of religion would have been

Actium was fought

JOSIAH OBER, University,

is

in 3

1

different:

remem-

B.C., at the threshold of the Christian era.

the chairman of the Department of Classics at Princeton

the author of The Anatomy of Error: Ancient Military Disasters

and Their Lessons for

Modem

Strategists

(with Barry S. Strauss), The Athe-

nian Revolution, and Political Dissent in Democratic Athens.

24

ON

A BARREN HILL OH the wcstem

coast of Greece, above the site

of the ancient city of Nicopolis ("Victory City") and

five

some seventy-

kilometers by sea southeast of the popular Greek island of Corfu, there

stands a unique and seldom-visited ancient

monument. The monument

On

takes the form of a low parapet, well built of massive stone blocks. face of the wall the occasional visitor

struck by the deep

who

stumbles upon this place

sawn-off ends of great oared warships;

accommodate the

when

the

monument was

the wall bristled with delicately arched and highly decorated stems. This

The

is

wall

monument

a

is

intact

still

wooden

ship

to a great naval victory.

Roman, dating

to the age of the

ships that were mutilated to create this

Antony. The monument was

built

emperor Augustus. The

monument once belonged

to

Mark

by Antony's one-time partner, brother-

man

in-law,

and

later to

be called Augustus Caesar, the

rival for the role of chief

gustus erected this

is

and peculiar cuttings. Careful work by archaeologists has

that the cuttings were specifically designed to

shown

the

in the

first

Roman

empire: Octavian,

emperor of Rome. Octavian Au-

monument and founded

the city of Nicopolis as lasting

memorials to his most important naval victory, the Battle of Actium (31 B.C.),

at

which Antony

Cleopatra VII of Egypt

—along

—was

with Antony's

decisively defeated.

ally

and

lover,

Queen

Actium richly deserves

its

reputation as one of the turning-point battles of Western history.

Actium was not the

mans on Greek had served

soil.

As

first

important battle fought between armies of Ro-

part of the

Roman

as unwilling host to several

province of Macedonia, Greece

sanguinary clashes between

citizen-armies, led by ferociously ambitious

Roman

Roman

politician-generals.

Greece had the unhappy distinction of marking the boundary between the western

Roman

Empire, centered in Italy and extending to Spain, and the

eastern

Roman

Empire, which extended well into Anatolia (modern

25

WHAT

IF?

2

''^{.^

'''r^v'

ACTIUM: EMPIRE LOST, EMPIRE ESTABLISHED The

Italian Renaissance artist

Neroccio de Landi did

this

where Octavian (who would soon proclaim himself

Turkey) and as

far east as Syria.

fanciful tempera of the Battle

the

ofActium,

Emperor Caesar Augustus) defeated

Cornelius Sulla had consolidated his posi-

tion by victories in Greece in the mid-SOs B.C. before returning to Italy to

smash the supporters of Marius. Then

Pompey at

Julius

Caesar had crushed his

rival,

the Great, at Thessalian Pharsalus, in northeastern Greece. Next,

Macedonian

Philippi,

Octavian and Antony,

at that

time

still allies,

had

eliminated the threat posed by Julius Caesar's assassins, the "Liberators," Brutus and Cassius. But

Actium was the

At Actium, Octavian

defeated his

proceed with his master plan:

No

finale.

last serious rival

and so could

finally

longer would the aristocratic Senate

dominate an ancient republic; rather the Senate would now be a rubber stamp

for a

which

true

new

imperial form of government, a

power would be vested

man. Actium

also spelled the

(if still

kingdom

somewhat

in all but

in

covertly) in a single

end of 300 years of Macedonian

independent Egypt. After the battle, Octavian pursued

26

name

rule over

an

Antony and

Not by a Nose

Antony and (Neroccio de'

his ally

and

lover, the

Egyptian queen Cleopatra.

Landi, 1447-1500, and workshop, The

Battle of Actium.

North Carolina Museum of Art, Raleigh, Gift of the Samuel H. Kress

Foundation)

Cleopatra to Egypt.

than accepting the

When

Cleopatra committed suicide by asp bite rather

fate of passively

marching

rade, the last of the great Hellenistic trol

of the

Roman

Roman

state. Or,

more

in Octavian's triumphal pa-

Greek kingdoms passed into the con-

precisely, into the private estate of the

emperor.

With Octavian's

victory at Actium, the

Roman

conquest of the eastern

Mediterranean was complete, and the long reign of the

was inaugurated

—

(Caligula, Nero).

noted

all,

Octavian, for

generals of his day.

navy to Actium.

for

ever since, historians have speculated: Must

for his military talents;

skillful

emperors

good (Claudius, Marcus Aurelius) and

for

And

gone that way? After

Roman

How

are

all his political

it

ill

have

acumen, was not

whereas Mark Antony was among the most

Antony brought

we

a vast

army and an imposing

to account for Octavian's victory in this

epoch-making confrontation? What factor might have tipped the

27

scales of

.

WHAT

IF?

2

.S^n^^^*Qv«.^C^? THE BATTLE OF ACTIUM

31

B.C.

»^.*

''% 7 K"i

'

^

/

Ionian Sea

'/((>

f

OCTAVIAN'S

"\

CAMP

D "^^^

Nicopolis

N

'^

C

^

^^

FORTS

Qu\j oj hmbcacxa

/-^v-\ ANTONY'S '-' BASE CAMP

^-'.. ,V'

10

Miles

— H— ——

1

1—

H

1

h

-,

,;^

'

'

10

Kilometers

'^x

-^J^ '•%

_

.

^'"''^

^

^

r

• ,,

't

^..^'

by the Father, maybe.

So much accomplished. So

little

he'd have to einpt>

Betrayed bv Judas once upon a

totally. But. this.

time. Yes. that was awKil. but easier to

He knew

all.

comprehend. Betrayed by

That

is

not so

eas>'

It is

then that he

and. as ever, he

sufters a

own

accomplished.

He thinks of his visitor that morning. He can't wait to see that now a great -grandmother,

his

to understand.

is

Uttlc girl.

eager to embrace the children.

massive stroke, alone in hts room, alone with

the Father, and the Spint he

is

alwa>'s talking

about too, the Spirit he so

desperately wants to see take over the world.

'*My God.

My God. why ha\'e you tbrsaken me.*"

Jesus dies within

head.

two minutes,

his blood spilled, hnally. inside his

No one is there to see him die. or hold his hand.

tle girl

It is

own

John and the

lit-

turned great-grandmother w4\o hnd the corpse. "Oh. Kx^k. he's

asleep." saN-s the old wx>man.

Jeste receives a humble, discreet burial, as

No one.

however, will be able to hnd his body alter

ishes tirom the grave, m>-stenously.

stealing

who

John and

witnessed the burial will speak up later,

buried.

It \-an-

his disciples are accused of properl)-.

it

Those

in their defense.

though, some will claim to have seen him alive.

will spread like wildtire.

Most who claim

known

The

him

are in

world. In

Rome

to have seen

Palestine, but reports will later surface all over the Itself;

it is

and hiding the body, but they claim they buned

Three days rumors

he had requested manv times.

m Colonia .'\gnppina. on the Rhine River, in Toletum. m Iberia; in

Athens; in Carthage; in Edessa; in Seleucia. near ancient Babylon; in Nubia; far. far

away

in Varanasi.

farther away, walking

on the banks oi the Ganges

River,

on the Wan-Li Cha'ng-Ch'eng, the

and even

so-called Great

Wall of the Middle Kingdom. All of the reported sightings say that the if

he s

And. oddest thing of

all,

urrected Jesus looks as

res-

thirt>'-three years old again.

no one dares

to claim that they have a relic

taken tirom his body.

Rash forward, about 230

years.

The Emperor Constantine

is

seated

on

his

impenal throne, taking part in the dedication of a new synagogue and

63

WHAT

IF?

2

shrine to the Apostle John, whose hody has been brought to stantine

is

about to make his conversion

dergo baptism, the

rite

official.

o( initiation into the

become one of the Chosen Ones,

as

soon

He

Rome. Con-

almost ready to un-

is

New Covenant. He

as Passover rolls

about to

is

around, in a cou-

ple of months.

This

a remarkable synagogue that Constantine has built, the grandest

is

building in

right here in

and

all

of

all

Rome. Imagine, having the body of the Apostle John,

Rome. Imagine

the pilgrims that will flock to this shrine,

all

the miracles that will take place there. Imagine

will spill over to the

Rome, and was

emperor who

there at

its

new

capital city out east,

a

to those

dumb

consecration.

on the

for

site

idea that was, in the

Greek

the honor that

brought the body to

built the shrine,

Constantine congratulates himself

What

all

having decided not to build that

of that fishing village, Byzantium.

first

place.

Good

thing he didn't listen

advisers.

Constantine has put imperial muscle to work in unifying lowers of Jesus. All of those wrangling sects. for the religion of the state.

much. Calling ideas

all

he ever had

Unseemly

is

prophet of

all

Too many of them. Too untidy

Chosen People

for the

all

on

his

own. They came up with a

time. His

baptized one of the

New Covenant

Chosen

and transform the earth

those Jews of Moses.

They

Chosen Ones

meal, which

is

life.

him who

to

will

Yahweh, but they despise still

follow the

who proclaim him

which the Scriptures

New

64

rituals

also ap-

and those of anyone who has led

at least

are read.

Law to be

Passover

on the Sabbath. The council has

have

some

redeem

Covenanters think of them-

and the celebration of the

relics of Jesus

is

great-

make anyone who

have been resurrected. The central

to

celebrated weekly,

Every synagogue

pulpit from

New

since they worship

are baptism,

proved the veneration of the a holy

These

also despise those followers of Jesus

him

of beliefs and de-

yet to come, at

is

don't accept the teachings of Jesus and

the Messiah, and believe of the

list

promises to

The Messiah

People.

for good.

Chosen Ones,

who

to disagree so

been proclaimed a prophet. The

point in the future. Jesus has helped pave the way for

selves as God's

of the fol-

of the chief rabbis together at Milan was one of the best

fined the Truth for all time. Jesus has est

all

one

relic

enshrined under the

Pontius Pilate Spares ]esus

Now closing

that

all

down

of this has been defined, Constantine's troops can get busy

the synagogues of all those

fined at Milan.

Now

who don't

Tmth

believe the

same

all of his subjects will share the

faith,

one, just like the Prophet and Teacher Jesus, and the Father. troops can descend Jesus

upon those few misguided

Now his

ing Jesus into the

Son

any attention

refuse to pay

and following Moses wiped

of God.

instead.

troops can

little

also

go

Now

as

his

believe that fools, turn-

after those

Jews

at all to Jesus. Retrogrades, ignoring Jesus

Now

all

who

those

off the face of the earth, for the glor>' oi

Chosen People and

A

still

was the Messiah, and that he rose from the dead. Deluded

who

the

who

souls

as de-

and be

believe falsely can be

God and

the well-being of

their empire.

persecution should take care of

all

who

those

believe

what

is

wrong.

With

the emperors residing at

mains strong and vibrant in

Rome, the western

every' way,

and the

half oi the empire re-

Roman

cities

of Western

Europe grow and flourish undiminished by attacks from Germanic

The German Danube and

barbarians are held back east of the Rhine and north of the

are gradually civilized by the missionaries that the

perors send across the border.

and the Celts of Ireland. as ever too, so the

The

The same happens with

Roman em-

the Scots and Picts,

eastern half of the empire remains as strong

empire remains intact

armies of the prophet all

tribes.

for a

few more centuries, until the

Mohammed wrestle away much

of the

Near East and

of North Africa.

Centuries after Constantine,

Roman

civilization

European continent, including those client

dominates

states of the

all

of the

former barbarians

that were outside the Constantinian borders of the empire, as far north as

the Urals. All of these people profess belief in the Jews.

Anyone who

rabbis,

of the ancient

doesn't agree with the orthodox religion defined by the

and approved by the

states of northern

One God

Roman

state,

is

persecuted, even in the client

Roman Empire

and eastern Europe. The evolution of the

into a loose federation of nation states takes centuries, but

complete by the year 1700

after the birth of Jesus.

An

As

more or

less

evolved form of Latin

remains the lingua franca of the entire continent, thanks to rituals of the state religion.

is

its

use in

all

the

to those lands discovered across the Atlantic

65

WHAT Ocean by be

too.

verted to the

Conquered

Roman

becomes ever

bit,

religion, all the

year 1400. Missionaries East

by

bit

make

stronger.

2

Norsemen

the client state of the

Roman

IF?

their

in the

ninth century, they will

those two continents will be con-

way down

way

Around 1250,

and contact with the

Australia and

who have

discovered and colonized by the Chinese,

by the

to Tierra del Fuego,

to Asia too,

New

Zealand are

learned a few lessons

from the discoveries o{ the Norsemen. But

that

all

is

woken up and found of the

itself

New Covenant

of Milan.

Meanwhile the whole world has

in the distant future.

Chosen, or so

becoming ever more

seems.

Chosen Ones, members

revealed to Jesus by God, according to the Council

Even those barbarian

ginning to accept the

it

new

tribes

religion

civilized

and

north of the empire's borders are be-

from Palestine and Rome, and they are

docile.

The

old gods are dying

fast.

The

old elite families of Rome continue to cling to the old religion, and the simple people

mix the old with the new, but there

is

no denying the

fact that

the world has been transformed.

The temples

to the old gods are vanishing quickly.

turned over to the worship of the Jesus,

and the narratives that

attention by learned

and

women

men

tell

of his

life,

are

now

being given the same

are flocking to the desert to live lives of prayer

and

old, cruel

gone the way of wild

Some

Men

self-denial,

Jewish sect that had spawned John the Bap-

and influenced Jesus himself. Gladiators are a thing of the

most of the

sayings of

as the writings of the greatest philosophers.

just like the Essenes of old, the tist,

Many have been

One Jewish God, Yahweh. The

games of the arena. Crucifixions? Forget

past, as are it.

They've

orgies.

are very, very

unhappy about the sexual

new religion.

ethics of this

Will anyone ever be able to have any fun again?

As Constantine watches

the long, intricate consecration

ders the reconstruction of the temple in Jerusalem.

Should he do so nice,

and

it

it

at all?

Should he do

This new Synagogue of John the Apostle in

has cost so

enough that he has

ritual,

much

to build. Isn't this

also brought to

Rome

enough

66

it

soon?

Rome

now?

Isn't

is

it

the bed in which Jesus died, and

the clothes he was wearing that final morning, along with surviving wardrobe, and those coffers

for

he pon-

full

all

of his meager

of his hair and nail clippings?

Pontius Pilate Spares Jesus

And what all

about that most precious reUc of

all,

the golden flask containing

women who

the tears that Jesus ever shed, so lovingly collected by the

followed

him around

all

the time? Isn't

all

o{ this

enough

for

he give in to the nearly endless requests he receives from

known world and

now? Should

Constantine imagines what honor would devolve upon him rebuild the temple.

maybe

surpass

him

The Temple move

around the

all

rebuild the temple?

He

could go

down

in history as another

if

he were to

Solomon, or

in fame.

of Constantine?

sounds so good. Maybe he should also

It

the capital of the empire from

shouldn't the temple be rebuilt at

Rome to Jerusalem? Or,

Rome

better yet,

instead of Jerusalem?

why

Rome: the

New Jerusalem? He should ask his advisers. He should ask the chief rabbis too. And he should check with his wife, first. Maybe she's had a dream?

67

,

HS^*»^^^*'»"^C>^*"C>''''"^^'^Q^**^^ $

CECELIA HOLLAND

REPULSE AT HASTINGS, OCTOBER

1066

14,

William does not conquer England

Hastings

may come down

1066 and All That is

no

getting

around

mainly in the form of delicious

to us

trivializations like

(the "All That'' being the rest of British history).

The

battle

was one of

D day

come

to

the date:

Saratoga, Gettysburg, and

mind

—

those encounters

that,

But

—

there

Salamis,

by determining futures

truly deserves to be called decisive. Hastings, in spite of (or perhaps because of)

the

mythic overlays of the victors history, has the quality of good

fiction, replete

with the confrontation of two dominating protagonists Here were two determined .

opponents, Harold Godwinson, ter

of months, and

the

from him: William

who had

occupied the English throne for a mat-

man who came from across

the Bastard,

the

Channel

duke of Normandy, known

Conqueror. Not just a straightforward brawl

in the typical

to

wrest the crown

to posterity as the

medieval manner,

Hastings was one of those rare struggles in which different styles of war-making face off: the defense -minded English infantry taking

favored on the Continent (it

was, a

Norman

—

on

the cavalry

shock

tactics

although William also relied on archers and infantry

knight later said, "a strange kind of battle'')

.

Add

to that

an-

other quality of a well-made plot, suspense, with an outcome that didn't become clear until the very end.

There was more, evident field in

now

as

it

was not a millennium ago. At

October 1066, Cecelia Holland points out, two

one that emerged victorious would dominate not just those of the Continent as well.

England

rival worlds collided.

The

the next English centuries but

at the time belonged to

68

that battle-

a Scandinavian-

Repulse at Hastings, October 14, 1066

centered sphere of influence that extended from the Viking fortress towns of Russia to the precarious settlements

ofVinland on

from Newfoundland as far south world that William represented.

as

He

Maine) too

the .

North American coast (roughly

Opposed was

Franco-Roman

the

was descended from Vikings, though

forebears had been settled for a couple of centuries in the country at the the Seine

Warriors with a knack for the

.

political

main chance

,

Norynans

the

(from Normanni, Northmen) would carve out principalities as far away as

and

the

Holy Land. England, with

harbors,

was

North or

the South.

What

if

its

growing population,

the potential cornerstone for

Norman

arrows had not

killed

English infantry had stood firm behind

tumn afternoon had

left

its

its

Harold and

shields,

and

waning

them, and not William, masters of the

sequel of the battle have been played out, not that

December

its

What

light

field?

in

Italy

fine

either by the

his brothers?

the

and

grain,

a Europe dominated

his

mouth of

if

the

of an au-

Would

the

Westminister

Cathedral, where William was crowned king of England, but at a later date in the

woodlands of America?

CECELIA HOLLAND, one novelists,

is

of our most acclaimed and respected historical

the author oi more than twenty books.

69

IN

THE NIGHT wotd Came down

and

his

Duke William

was mid-October, with day-

and William wasted none of

it.

At once he roused himself he put on

his

were ready to

in-

to get ready. In his hurry, in the dark,

hauberk backward, which several of the

men around him

bad omen.

William brushed the matter few days

army was

It

men and began

terpret as a

that the English

the road from London.

approaching light precious,

to

earlier,

when he

first

—

off

as

set foot in

he had dismissed England and

his stumbling, a

fell flat

on

his face. "I

have seized England with both hands," he cried then, turning foul into William had been working for years toward

this day, plotting

fair.

and schem-

ing and arranging. Yet not even he could have guessed that the battle he

was about to

fight

would become one of the most famous

in history, or that

the victory would decide the fate of Europe for centuries.

With

his officers,

most o{ them friends or kinsmen, William heard Mass

and took Communion. He hung

sacred relics around his neck.

banner that the pope had consecrated breeze,

and

him fluttered out on

for

in the cool gray of the English

dawn William

The

blue

the day's

led his army,

first

some

7,000 men, out to meet Harold Godwinson and his army, to settle the issue

between them. This issue was the crown oi England. William's claim to the throne was specious at best, but he could take advantage of the circumstances. After centuries of struggle against the

decimated.

Now

Danes and Norse, England's leadership was

the Danes and Norse had momentarily lost their grip and

the

kingdom was

ripe for the taking.

sor,

who had died

late in 1065,

had

The

left

English king, Edward the Confes-

no son

to succeed him;

and Edward's

mother had been Norman, William's great-aunt Emma. William had even been able to extort oaths and promises of support from Edward's chief man.

70

Repulse at Hastings, October 14, 1066

Harold Godwinson himself, the most powerful

came

years before Harold

The problem with

When

old saintly

luckily into

all this effort

Edward

Harold Godwinson,

earl in

England,

when some

William s hands in France.

was that the English crown was

elective.

died, the kingdom's council of elders turned to

whom

they

knew and who was

half Saxon, anyway,

if

not of the house of great Alfred, and made him king. William proclaimed

—hence the

Harold a usurper and an oathbreaker

banner

On

—and now the Norman duke was coming

relics

and the blessed

what he wanted.

to get

the day o{ the Battle o( Hastings, William of Normandy was thirty-

nine, a big, hot-tempered, shrewd,

wooed

terrifying childhood,

whole duchy

what was

at the

and vigorous

man who had

survived a

by roughing her up, and mastered his

his wife

point o{ a sword. For his purposes he had assembled

for the times

an enormous

had been fighting under

force. Besides his

his leadership for years,

own Normans, who

he had contingents of

knights and infantry from Brittany, Belgium, and France, even from as far

who

as Italy, including a corps of archers,

marched

inland. After

led the

them heavier armed

army down the road

as

it

foot soldiers tramped along,

wearing helmets and hauberks, the thigh-length mail coats the knights

also

wore, and carrying spears and swords. In the back of the army, with his knights,

where he could see everything before him, William himself rode

beneath the blue banner.

When the fighting started, William did not hold back and direct the tion from a distance, like a

and took blows he

won

reached

its

Before site,

like the rest of his

or lost by the

Now he

and

modern

his

crest,

general.

William charged and struck

men. In the end,

power of his own

as

it

had been

all his life,

right arm.

army climbed the road up

a long hill.

As

his

first

ranks

they looked out and saw the English.

them the road

fell

away to

cross a narrow,

marshy

the land rose again into a treeless ridge, flanked

swamp and

ac-

forest.

As

William's army

came up over the

on

valley.

Oppo-

either side by

first hill,

they could

see the English in a mass pushing up through the forest onto the long

height of that treeless ridge.

The

road ran on across the valley, up that ridge, and on to London,

71

WHAT

IF? 2

72

Repulse at Hastings, October 14, 1066

England's heart.

If

William could take London, he could claim to hold the

kingdom of England. But now,

across the height of the ridge,

where the

road crossed, the English were building a wall of shields and bodies, to keep

William of Normandy out.

There were thousands of these English, including a core of Harold Godwinson's

own war

band, his housecarls, bound to

him by

com-

a personal

mitment, and fighting under his gilded and jeweled banner, whose

figure

was a fighting man. Harold's two warrior brothers were part of this war band, and with the rest of these experienced, well-trained, and well-

equipped soldiers formed the center of the shield wall.

Most of the other Englishmen were fyrd, or militia,

peasants, farmers

and herdsmen, the

of the kingdom, bound by long tradition to arm themselves

and answer Harold's summons

for a set length of time,

around a month. They

could fight well, but they were untrained and not battle hardened and

many had

only a stick or a club to fight with.

Harold's army was stout and brave, but one-dimensional, without cavalry or archers.

The

housecarls carried

tall shields, axes,

and

spears, but

bows; although they rode to the battlefield, they dismounted to limited

what they could do. Yet on

good enough. position,

The

This

day what they could do seemed

On the crest of this hill King Harold had chosen an excellent

making the most of his

English army was a tough

force they

this

fight.

no

had faced

in less

strengths. outfit.

William's was the second invading

than four weeks. Halfway through the previous

September, Harald Hardraada, the king oi Norway, had landed with a

siz-

able force in the north, near York, to take up again the endless Norse project of harrying England. Harold

Godwinson had gathered

and marched up to meet him, picking up contingents of the Harald Hardraada

famous warriors to

Norway.

in

He had

— the hard-counsel, or

ruthless

his housecarls

fyrd as

—was one of the most

Christendom, a veteran of battles from Constantinople with him his personal war band and several other

free-

when

a lo-

lance contingents of warriors, plus some rebellious English, and cal

he went.

army came out to challenge him, Hardraada's force made short work of

them. Overconfident, Hardraada sent most of his

73

men back to his ships and

WHAT

IF? 2

waited around at Stamford Bridge to receive the homage and hostages of

him

the city of York, which had prudently gone over to

at once.

Harold Godwinson and his Saxon army got to Stamford Bridge before the homage.

When

They caught the Norse king by

also.

came up

the rest of his army

Now, ranged up

winson and

across the

and annihilated him.

London road on Telham

This day the sun was high on the

Harold crushed

in support, too late,

army were ready

his English

surprise

for

hills

it

Harold God-

Hill,

Duke William.

With

of southern England.

blasts

of horns, William's army advanced across the narrow valley toward the ridge;

swamp on

the

left

and

forest

on the

right kept

them from

Harold's position. William sent his archers up the slope

first,

to

flanking

shower the

English with arrows; shooting uphill and against the massive shield wall, the archers had

moved

and they

little effect,

back

fell

forward. Behind them, William's

heavier infantry

as the

mounted knights spurred

their

horses to a gallop.

From the

shield wall

came the

roars

and screams of the English. Taking

advantage of the height of their position, they threw spears and axes and stones fixed to chunks of

wood onto

the approaching Normans.

The

in-

fantry faltered under this hail. William, in the center, charged his knights

up into the hard fighting

—

his

men chopping with swords,

of interlinked shields held against them.

Crowded

together, fighting

ening din, the left,

Norman

suddenly, his

men

Wails of despair

Norman ner,

had

army.

hand

hand and

duke's whole

The

line

English yielded nothing.

uphill,

army began

surrounded by a deaf-

to waver.

turned around and ran away,

rose.

down

Then, on the

the

hill.

disorderly rout spread rapidly throughout the

Even William,

to fall back,

to

The

hurling and jab-

The massive

bing with spears crashing their horses into the shield wall.

in the center of the line

under his blue ban-

and suddenly, he was down.

In the confusion the rumor flew from

mouth

to

mouth

that the duke was

dead. In a wild panic the

Norman army

valley, scattering across

and on the height above them, some of the En-

glish

it,

broke ranks and rushed

fled

away down the

hill into

the

after.

But William was not dead. His horse had been

killed,

but he

comman-

deered another, bounded into the saddle, pulled off his helmet, and gal-

74

Repulse at Hastings, October 14, 1066

loped along the scattered fleeing ranks of his army, shouting, "Look at me! I

am

alive,

and

1

will

be the victor, with God's help!"

men began

Seeing him, the panicking

William gathered them tack

the faltering Normans saw join

it.

The Englishmen

formation; the

and brought them around into

swiftly

on the English streaming

to slow, to hold their ground.

after

them down the

duke leading

their

down

spilling

this

All across the

either side, broke

on the

the entire English army charged

them

Normans

when

after the fleeing

Norman

Had

men fled

away, they could

them from

regrouping, and

William's

back, prevented

battle.

into the sea. In fact only the untrained fyrd had charged

from the height

into

above.

hill

Harold Godwinson had missed his best chance to win the

harried

them

them out piecemeal, while Harold Godwinson and

the bulk of his army stayed

well have swept the

field,

charge and swung to

the steep slope had lost their tight

Normans rode them down from

fragments, and wiped

hill.

new

a counterat-

down

army. In the center of the line,

the housecarls stayed put.

no one ordered them

Possibly they did not attack because ter,

under the banner

of the fighting

man, where the

to.

In the cen-

initial fighting

had

been heaviest, where William and Harold had fought, Harold's two brothers

now

lay dead, killed in that

this leadership that

clash. Perhaps

first terrific

it

was the

loss of

held the housecarls back. Whatever the reason, Harold

now William

remained where he was, and

brought his

men under

control

and turned toward the shield wall again.

"Then an unusual kind of combat ensued," and

in the ground, putting

up with the

For the rest o( the day, the

assault."

good conclusion, he staged another such

first

attack had

retreat,

the hill each time to be hacked up

of

men and

men. The

fight

horses; the carcasses

at Harold's

come

to such a

perhaps two, luring the

when

on them. The day wore grimly on. The ground was ies

and the other rooted

Norman duke poked and probed

shield wall. Since the disorderly flight of the

down

William of Poitiers, "one

in a variety of movements,

side attacking in bursts

English

says

the

Normans turned

scattered with the bod-

began to get in the way of the fighting

looked like a standoff.

The

English were bleeding steadily,

but so were the Normans, and Harold's housecarls stayed solid in the cen-

75

WHAT

IF?

2

«n«'aiMrti

65

~Sh

HASTINGS: FUTURES

IN

THE BALANCE

The Ba}ieux Tapestry

depicts the events surrounding the Battle of Hastings in

William, the duke of

Normandy,

William's

mor

commanders

(left)

the

"the

Conqueror." In

the section

1066, which earned

shown

here,

one of

wields a club to prevent the flight of Norman cavalrymen, after a ru-

has circulated that William has been killed in the battle against King Harold's English troops.

(Section of the Bayeux Tapestry, ca. 1080. Musee de

ter

name

la

Tapisserie, Bayeux, France.

Giraudon/Art Resource, NY)

behind their interlocked shields and held the

don.

One

hill

and the road to Lon-

of the longest battles in medieval history was

on with no

resolution.

Night was coming.

One way

grinding

still

or another,

it

had to

end soon.

Hastings was more than a struggle between two determined men. battlefield in

momentum

October 1066, two

rival

worlds collided, and, going

actually favored not William of

Normandy

At

that

in,

the

but Harold God-

winson.

England

in

1066 was part of the great northern community that

in-

cluded Norway and Sweden, Novgorod and Kiev in Russia, Denmark, Iceland, the Faeroes, Scotland

and the Orkneys, Greenland, Vinland the Good,

and even Spitsbergen, above the Arctic

76

Circle.

Northern kings and adven-

Repulse at Hastings, October 14, 1066

turers

had been taking England apart

for centuries,

and the English

resist-

ance had shaped the kingdom of Alfred the Great into a realm facing north. This northern attachment was deep and strong. Norse kings ruled York for generations; ings,

and some

fifty

years before the Battle of Hast-

Canute the Great, king of Denmark, overran the whole of England,

was crowned

its

king,

and ruled

terpiece of an empire stretching

it

successfully for twenty years as the cen-

all

around the North Sea.

England was saturated with Danish culture. lived

under Danish

law.

Many

they spoke English. Harold this

A good deal of England still

people spoke the Danish tongue as

Godwinson himself was

in the

power vacuum

much

as

symbol incarnate of

a

wedding of Northerner and English. Godwine, his

prominence under Canute, ile

had

father,

had

risen to

by the death and ex-

left

woman,

of the English royal house, and had married a Danish

so

Harold

was half Dane. In many ways Harold's brief rule was a continuation of Canute's as

much as the Saxon kingship. The housecarls who held the ridge

against William of

Normandy were an innovation

of Canute's, a war band

formed on the Danish model.

The bonds between England and far

beyond the

political.

the Northern sphere of influence went

Anglo-Saxon weekdays were

Tir's

day and Thor's day, not Mercury's day and Mars' day as ing France, a country under a long

and heavy

Roman

it

day and Woden's

was in neighbor-

influence. Beowulf,

the great classic of old English, written in Northumbria, portrays a world straight out of the Eddas, the traditional

and darkness and

grief.

The

North Sea

little at-

Godwinson had been crowned by an

who was under an anathema from Rome. The

tied to the vital

telling of warriors

English church, while Christian, paid

tention to the pope; Harold

bishop

Norse poetry

English

trade routes: English goods

went

in

Norse and

Danish hulls across the North Sea to Danish and Swedish trading

The

English spoke a Germanic language, heavily salted

words, not the Latin-based language of France,

Italy,

now

arch-

economy was

cities.

with Danish

and Spain. From

the perspective of 1066, England belonged more to Scandinavia than to the southern,

Franco-Roman world

across the stormy

Channel.

This Scandinavian-centered northern economic empire reached the apex oi

its

energy and power around this time.

77

At mid-eleventh century

V/HAT the long ships were

still

IF?

visiting Vinland,

2

even

if

the Norse and Danes had

not been able to establish a permanent colony there, and their trade routes

Sweden, reached

to the east, through

the way to Constantinople.

all

In 862, the Viking Rurik built the Baltic stronghold of Novgorod; his

successor Oleg conquered Kiev; and in the tenth century great fleets of

dragon ships sailed the Black Sea, headed

The tremen-

for Constantinople.

dous natural defenses of the World City daunted them, but they came back, to trade

and to hire

their swords out to the Byzantine army. Harald

Hardraada himself fought Saracens general George Maniakes.

in Sicily

Thus Viking

under the legendary Byzantine

trading outposts at

Kiev gave Greater Scandinavia access to the

Novgorod and

East, to the Silk

Road, and

thus to the whole of Asia.

No one man ever ruled this vast complex, although many tried. The first fierce

boom

of the north, with

practical ingenuity,

its

individualism,

legalistic mind-set, its

was in many ways an equal opportunity employment, a

rapidly expanding mosaic of free farms

and independent earldoms and petty

cities.

The

century before Hastings had produced a hand-

ambitious kings,

who

in

kingdoms, a few ful of

its

1066 were

still

struggling to get

one crown. For a few decades Canute had ruled the core of

Denmark and Norway nections back through

it all

this empire,

—from England. Harald Hardraada, with Sweden

to the Russian cities, clearly

under

his con-

had the same

project in mind.

But in the next few centuries the Northern empire retreated. The physical

circumstances changed: After a

mate in the North Sea grew

down

settlers

ground

all

had grazed

year round.

cattle in

land, eventually lost Greenland, itself

subsided and shrank back to

Byzantine emperors, ranks,

around 1000

Northern land

Greenland,

The Northerners gave up

of energy that had flung

steadily Slavic

spell

a.d., the cli-

steadily worse. Drift ice floated remorselessly

across the sea-lanes linking the

Viking

more

warm

now

posts.

the

Where once

snow

lay

on the

the effort to colonize Vin-

and even nearly Iceland,

as the

huge burst

out of every fjord and every vik for 300 years its

homeland. Novgorod and Kiev became

than Scandinavian; even the Varangian guard of the

named

for the

Russian Vikings

became mostly made up of Englishmen. 78

who had

first filled its

Repulse at Hastings, October 14, 1066

If its

North had kept

the

grain,

and

its

its

on England, with

grip

its

growing population,

southern, open harbors, might they not have been able to

sustain the effort?

Then

have

built

homes

them

the changing climate might have driven

expand, not contract. Searching for better land, better in Vinland, spread their colonies

lives,

down

to

they might

that coast, and

linked the whole, Vinland, Greenland, with sea-lanes south of the danger of

come on

Following the coast of Vinland southward they would have

ice.

good harbors, better farmland, the best worth confronting the native peoples huge technological edge

as the later

—

fishing in the Atlantic

or, better,

since they

Spanish and English

—

prizes

had no such

—coming

to terms

with them.

Thus, with England as the cornerstone of a sprawling Northern empire,

on the western edge of the At-

the European migration to the Continent lantic could

have begun much

earlier

would the Northerners have

ciety

Much

o{ the colonization of the

than

it

actually did.

built there?

Not,

What kind of so-

surely, a

kingdom.

North Atlantic Rim was done by Danes

and Norse fleeing from the oppressions of greedy brutal kings. The Northern colonies in Vinland and beyond would most likely have been, at least at

republics, like Iceland, ruled

first,

bly. If

Harold Godwinson had

won

through an Althing, or general assem-

the Battle of Hastings, a republic of Eu-

ropeans could have appeared on the western continent 500 years before

1776

—without

And

a revolution.

without the destruction of the native peoples.

Danes enjoyed a

slight technological

edge over the native tribes they en-

They would have had

countered, but hardly a decisive one.

some modus vivendi with the

tribes

The Norse and

they found in the

New

to

work out

World, and in

one nation, perhaps, the Mohawk, they would have met a people much themselves

—

like

enterprising, agressive, with a certain inclination to popular

government. Perhaps a blended culture might have arisen in the dark forests

and

lakes of the

New World

—a Viking-Mohawk

republic, the west-

ernmost edge of the Empire of the North. Perhaps at some point one dynasty would have taken

Northern community under a

single crown.

quiltwork of settlements, farms,

and

jarls,

79

More

little

all this

broad

likely the great sprawling

kings and republics would

WHAT

IF?

have formed a commonwealth, allowing ativity at

law and government.

TT-ie

2

for the Northerners' practical cre-

whole community would be bound

to-

gether by the vital energy of trade, and everywhere the Norse and Danes

would encounter other peoples, challenges,

ideas to fertilize their contin-

ued growth. Snorri Sturlusson could write sagas about the wars with the

Mohawk.

Buffalo robes and tobacco might

and Chinese tea might sail

on the Great

half Norse.

find

its

way

sell briskly in

to the Mississippi.

Constantinople,

Dragon

ships might

Lakes, seeking a passage west, carrying crews half native,

What

they charted might have found

its

way eventually

into a

Chinese map.

Such ing

a power, connecting the

down through

North Atlantic and

Baltic

Russia to the eastern Mediterranean

presented a formidable challenge to the rest of Europe.

Sea and reach-

itself,

would have

Compared with

this

Greater Scandinavia, this Northern empire, fueled by a huge trading com-

munity stretching across half the world and

whole hub of Asian Latin Europe, in

trade, Latin fact,

was

vasions had battered the

at

Constantinople into the

Europe in 1066 had

its

little

tied at

little

to offer.

nadir. Centuries of ruinous wars

and

continent into shocked fragments.

in-

The

popes were struggling to assert some kind of political control over the West-

em

emperor and the rash of

the ox-cart

economy

rope, France a

not look like

it

kings; but the territory

England was in

minor power. So

in

fact the richest

was lawless and

kingdom of Eu-

mid-eleventh century, Latin Europe did

was maturing into

the counterassault still

slow.

little

much

of anything.

on the Moslem world, were

The

great Crusades,

thirty years away; farther

in the future lay the magnificent creative outpouring o{ the twelfth

century, the

Gothic bloom of the High Middle Ages.

That splendid

future might

have never happened. The talent that

raised

Chartres and founded the University of Paris could very well have gone to embellish courts in Oslo and their creative juices.

London and

The German

Kiev, draining France

and

states already shared culture

Italy of

and

lan-

guage with the Scandinavians, and their connection with the Latin world

was always uneasy, always complicated by the interest

would

easily

illusion o{ the empire.

swing north, toward that great

80

Their

lifeline of trade, that fa-

Repulse at Hastings, October 14, 1066

miliar

way of

away from Rome. The pieces of the old Mediterranean

life,

world could have become mere

won

Harold Godwinson had

satellites of

the Empire of the North.

If

that October day in 1066, England might

have been the keystone of another civilization

entirely.

But Harold Godwinson was up against a different breed of Viking.

William of Normandy was descended from Rollo, or Rolf, or Rou, a

who

Norse adventurer

in the tenth century seized the broad rolling lands

around the mouth of the River Seine. The king of France, making a virtue of reality, granted

him

the

title

of duke and gave

his wife. In return, Rollo kept other

from try.

The duchy came

Paris.

men

Rolf's

French princess

a

for

marauders out of the Seine and away

to be called

married local

him

Normandy, the Northman's coun-

women and

produced a hybrid

strain, the

Normans. These Normans were tough, hardy, good politicians.

They fought

and everywhere they Italy in

all

fighters,

and above

kingdom

built states.

Norman

freebooters, drifting

Norman

in Europe.

country of his

throve, with courts

own

it

down

to

into the most

Crusaders built the principalities of

Antioch and Edessa. After the Battle of Manzikert, tried to build a

cunning

over Europe, in Anatolia, in the Holy Land,

the eleventh century, conquered Sicily, and turned

efficient

all,

a

Norman mercenary

in eastern Turkey.

and laws and active dukes who did

Normandy

justice

itself

and kept the

peace.

In 1026 or close to

it

wading in a stream and

mand

this

peasant

the then duke's teenage brother Robert saw a fell

girl to

in love.

girl

Being of noble blood he could com-

him, and he did. TTieir son was

bom

in 1027 or

1028, in his father's castle, but grew up in the house of his mother's father,

the tanner Fulbert, in Falaise, where perhaps he acquired the earthy

ner that distinguished still

him

all

his

life.

Soon

after

William was bom, Robert,

barely twenty, succeeded his brother as duke of

He became known as Robert the

man-

Normandy.

Magnificent, and Robert the Devil.

never married, and when, seven or eight years

mandy, he abruptly decided to go on crusade sented his court with William as his heir.

81

as

after

He

becoming duke of Nor-

penance

for his sins,

he pre-

WHAT "He

made old.

but he will grow," Robert

is little,

Then Robert

mand no

fell

is

alleged to have said,

rode away on crusade and never into anarchy.

A boy

peace. Every castle was an

boy duke.

2

and he

homage and accept him. The boy was seven

his nobles swear

The duchy

IF?

duke could do no

armed

fort,

years

came back. justice

and com-

most of them hostile to the

He grew up under a succession of guardians, men as rough and vi-

olent as his enemies. Four of these guardians in succession were murdered,

one before young William's

him

eyes; a courtier

wretched hovels of the village while his enemies

off to hide in the

hunted him through the

castle

with swords in their hands.

He grew up strong,

Yet the boy throve.

grabbed the child and hustled

blunt, wily,

and

him

nineteen, half his vassals rose against the duchy. William

down the

made

with

sober, gifted

the two chief medieval virtues: iron piety and a strong arm.

When he

was

in favor of another claimant to

this revolt into the

fulcrum of his career; he put

by force of arms, killed or drove out the worst of the nobles,

rising

subdued the others, and had the whole country firmly under his control by the time he was twenty-two. Almost immediately, he cast his eyes gland, where his cousin

Edward the Confessor was

Edward favored Normans.

And

he was

on En-

king.

childless.

The only

heir

left

to

the great line of Alfred was living in Hungary. William began laying the

groundwork

He

claim to the English crown.

visited England.

throne. tany,

for a

When

He

got Edward to

make him

a vague promise o{ the

Harold Godwinson was shipwrecked

off the coast of Brit-

William went in person to rescue him from the predatory

bullied

him

into taking

locals

and

an oath of allegiance. After Harold had sworn what

he assumed was a personal oath, standing before what seemed a plain

altar,

William whipped back the cloth to reveal a huge collection of relics, making the oath, at least in William's eyes, inviolate.

At

last

the old king died, giving

him

his chance.

When

winson was elected king, William got the pope to consecrate bless his banner, ising

them land

and then he sent out a general in

England

—

if

idle.

call for fighting

on the Channel

William spent the months

82

and

men, prom-

they won. His reputation, and their

greed, brought thousands to assemble

There they stayed,

Harold Godhis cause

own

coast. after

Edward's death

Repulse at Hastings, October 14, 1066

feverishly building

and commandeering boats, gathering over 600, enough But the wind blew foul

to transport his army.

them

crossing.

that summer, preventing

treacherous Channel

William fumed and prayed, his army grumbled, the summer wore

into autumn.

on

all

much less making the

even from leaving harbor,

What would

come

later

to be

blazed enigmatically across the sky. Everybody great deed to be done, the

rise

and

fall

known

knew

as Halley's

Comet some

that portended

of kings. But the wind augured oth-

erwise.

William resolved to move his

fleet

where he could catch a west wind

for

and

army up the

his

England. This

little

coast, to a point

voyage along the

coast was hazardous enough; several boats were wrecked, and a few

drowned. fasts.

Still

He had

the wind blew from the south. William ordered prayers and

all

the relics he could find paraded along the seashore.

the wind relented, swung around,

and

his little fleet

a few days

battlefield,

daylight was fading.

The duke

of

last

Normandy

of Harold Godwinson's approach.

William was looking

He was

tered with bodies of men still

filled his sails.

At

bobbed away over the Channel. He had only been there

when word reached him

Now, on the

men

failure square in the face.

The

running out of time. Above the long slope,

and

lit-

Harold Godwinson and his shield wall

horses,

held the height, his great gaudy banner furling and unfurling above

him. Everything,

came down

the scheming and plotting and politics and blood,

all

to one

final charge.

William had been resting and saving his archers since their round of fighting.

He

volleys, lifting their

bows high so that the arrows would

Under the cover

shield wall.

hill

one

Floods of arrows rained

last

fall

straight

down

of these arrows, William flung his

time.

down on

the English. Suddenly Harold

son staggered back, clutching at an arrow in his eye. way, and

useless

brought them up again and ordered them to shoot in

on the

whole army up the

first

Norman horsemen poured

The

Godwin-

shield wall gave

through, hacking and hewing at the

English as they went. Harold went down, and the English broke. Their lord

was dead, the day was

lost,

and they began to

flee into

the forest. William

pursued them into the night, but except for a few pockets of defiance, En-

83

WHAT glish resistance to

him was

over.

IF?

The road

2

to

London was open.

On Christ-

mas Day 1066, William of Normandy was crowned king of England

in

Westminster.

Few

come

battles in all o( history

of those bloody hours

have been

on October

as decisive as Hastings.

14, 1066,

The

out-

was to wrench England

from the northern axis of Scandinavia and the North Sea around to a profound involvement with the Southern, Latin world. Henceforth the

Northern world waned, and the Latin world blossomed into the glory of the

High Middle Ages and the Renaissance. Hastings deserves

its

reputation as

the greatest battle in English history, and a major turning point in the history of the world.

84

THEODORE

COOK,

F.

JR.

THE CHINESE DISCOVERY OF THE

NEW WORLD, What

15TH

CENTURY

the expeditions of a

eunuch

admiral might have led to

We

do not think of China as a nation of seamen explorers

,

probed distant oceans, and for the most part that assumption was, however, one brief interval in

history, early in the

its

adventurers is

correct.

Ming dynasty

who

There

at the be-

ginning of the fifteenth century, when China was the preeminent maritime power in the world.

of the reign

These were

known

the years

when

ships,"

which were up

largest

wooden

cipal

to

400

many

feet long

as

size, strength,

was

his lack

one-fifth as long,

soldier in the civil

Madagascar and

Persian Gulf and the

Theodore

F.

Cook,

Jr.

He

led

war

37,000 men: His

giant ''treasure

flag-

The

prin-

a mere eighty-five figure

the

Columbus s feet.)

named Zheng He a man ,

of

that brought

the eastern coast of Africa

writes, he

the

eunuch admi-

Zhu Di

to the throne.

seven expeditions into the Indian

Red Sea; some of his ,

emperor

dispatched armadas of

A confidante of the emperor,

Between 1405 and 1433, Zheng basin, reaching

the

and personal magnetism, whose most enduring charac-

of manhood.

had first served as a

—

and over 150 wide, may have been

Ming naval commander was a shadowy

teristic

—

ships ever built. (B)) comparison, Christopher

Santa Maria, was

imposing

ral

Ming emperor Zhu Di

as Yongle, or "Perpetual Happiness''

several hundred vessels that carried as

ship, the

the

ships

may

have

Ocean

and venturing into

the

visited Australia.

As

"must rate as one of the monumental figures

in

any Age of Exploration."

The

first

emperors of the dynasty that would rule China for almost three cen-

85

WHAT turies

(1368-1644) were

establish

activists,

a Chinese presence (and

But increasingly

the

Ming

Zhu Di

palace built by

many

rough-hewn warriors, and

their

claim to legitimacy) far beyond

The

real

some hardly ventured

was banned. Enemies of Zheng But how much would

He

had

—

if

power fell

its

He

his

changed

if

high walls dur-

to

and

its

contact with

shipbuilding itself

Ming emperors had

the

not

continue the great effort that Zheng

the ships, the navigational technology, civilization to parts of the

Americas —which would

Columbus. Would

its

to restrict

off; later,

to

to

and

the expe-

world that the West

happen.

not have been

have been discovered by a Chinese admiral, a successor fore

borders.

accounts of his voyages.

would soon dominate. That domination did not have ceivable that the

outside

utmost

even burned

history have

influence

their

were called

had decided instead

China had

initiated?

rience to bring

they

its

to a retinue of palace-bound civil ad-

of them eunuchs, who did

the rest of the world. First the expeditions

turned inward

builders eager to

rulers retreated into the Forbidden City, the imperial

in Beijing;

ing their entire lifetimes. ministrators,

IF? 2

known

It is

not incon-

—might

as such

Zheng He, decades

be-

historians talk about the Rise of the East?

THEODORE

E COOK,

University of

New

Jersey

JR.,

is

professor of history at William Paterson

and an authority on the history of Asia. He

with Haruko Taya Cook, the author o{ Japan

86

at

War:

An Oral History.

is,

—

THE

"Age of Discovery,"

the "Era of Exploration," the "epoch of

European Expansion and Colonialism," have introduced generations of students to the seafaring exploits of navigators, who, from about 1450 to

1600,

first set

out onto the Western Sea

then traversed nearly

fifty

all

—the

Ocean

great Atlantic

—and

the oceans of the world. Yet in the previous half-century,

years before the Portuguese caravels sent out by

Henry the Nav-

on the Atlantic

coast of Africa going south, and

three-quarters of a century before Vasco da

Gama finally reached Calicut in

igator crossed the equator

own

India in 1498, Chinese fleets were poised at the edge of their seas

on the other

side of Africa.

economic, cultural,

political,

Europeans seemed to regard forces, sent forth

Ready

to spread

Chinese

civilization

and moral values bound together as

explored

—

into

what

their realm of exploitation, Chinese naval

by the Ming emperor himself, had the capability of thrust-

ing themselves into the maelstrom of the history of

Western European

his-

tory as never before.

In the former port of Changle in Fujian Province,

em coast,

a tablet was erected in 1432 by

on China's southeast-

Zheng He, China's "Admiral of

the Western Sea" that evoked a view of the wider world seldom associated

with the Middle Kingdom:

We

have traversed more than one hundred thousand

li

of

immense

waterscapes and have beheld in the ocean huge waves like mountains rising sky high,

and we have

set eyes

hidden in a blue transparency of

on barbarian regions

traversing those savage waves as

a

lic

thoroughfare.

star,

away

light vapors, while our sails, loftily

unfurled like clouds day and night, continued their course as]

far

87

if

we were

[as

rapidly

treading a pub-

WHAT

IF?

2

Raised to commemorate the seven great expeditions the admiral had organized and led out to the edges of the Indian 1405, the tablet

is

as

much a monument

Ocean Basin beginning

in

to the spirit of adventure, the thrill

of ocean sailing, and the experience of a generation of Chinese seamen

who

shared their admiral's

home

as

it

lands far from their Chinese

thrill at visiting

was a personal proclamation. In many ways,

it

was to serve

epitaph both to the admiral himself and to China's great age of before the admiral himself died, the dynasty that had sent

implementing a policy that would

call

back his

diplomatic, trade, and cultural relations he had

fleets,

him

as

an

Even

sail.

forth was

undo the web of

woven over almost

three

decades, and, by the time of the arrival of Europeans in numbers in the waters of

the Indian Ocean, literally reduce his magnificent sea charts and

shipbuilding techniques to ashes.

Yet need

it

have been so?

What

Zheng He (1371-1433) must

Age

rate as

China had discovered Europe?

one of the monumental

figures in

any

of Exploration. His origins and personal history were surely as convo-

and exceptional

luted

as the biographies of a

Gama, Christopher Columbus, reer

if

or Ferdinand Magellan. Moreover, his cathird

Ming em-

Di, the "Yongle" (or "Perpetual Happiness") Emperor,

who ruled

was tightly intertwined with the

peror,

Zhu

Bartholomeu Dias, Vasco da

China from 1402

to 1424.

rise to

The emperor

power of the

entrusted to

Zheng He the

critical

mission of leading what became seven stupendous maritime expeditions

between 1405 and 1433. These voyages took him and the name of China into

what

is

today called the South China Sea, through the Strait o{

Malacca, and past the kingdoms that sought to trade on their geographical control what they saw as "the navel of the world." into the

bled cities o( its

He was

to sail

Bay of Bengal, to Ceylon, up the Malibar Coast of India

Cochin and

Calicut, to the aptly

named Arabian Sea

ancient sea route linking India to Mesopotamia and Arabia

Red

beyond

to the fa-

—

—with

into the

Sea, and by land even unto Mecca. Elements of the fleets sailed

down

the coast of East Africa, past Zanzibar, perhaps as far as Mozambique and

Madagascar. There

is

some evidence

that elements of Chinese fleets

88

may

The Chinese Discovery of

the

New

World,

1

5th Century

even have touched the northern coasts of Australia

after calling at the

eastern extremes of the Spice Islands.

The

of his youth

more

difficult. Stories

to be

an extraordinary

Yunnan

in southwest

Khan

by Kublai der a old

in

rise to

China

1253 to

Mongol prince

all

on the

agree

less

auspicious or

essentials of

what was

power. Born in the land-bound province o{ to

'54,

Muslim parents and ruled

in this region

Zheng He was ten

sent to subjugate the region for

Ming emperor, completed another

conquered

Yuan dynasty province un-

as a

until the fall of that dynasty,

when General Fu Youde,

first

have been

future admiral's origins could hardly

years

China by the

of his tasks by gathering a

number

of boys to be sent to the court for service as eunuchs, a class of public

ser-

vant most highly prized by the Chinese court. Selected for his alertness and courage by the general himself and marked a "candidate of exceptional qualities," after

(which

enduring the excruciating agony of castration by knife

traditionally

removed both penis and

testicles),

the boy was as-

signed to the retinue of one of the emperor's sons, the Prince of Di's title

during his father's reign), at the capital of Nanjing. Trained for

military service, largely because of his height, powerful build,

presence,

Zheng He

China and

Zhu

Yan (Zhu

nephew and making himself emperor

to create

frontier of

war that culminated with his patron,

of the most trusted associates of the

nuch was chosen

and imposing

on maneuvers along the northern

later in battles of the civil

Di, deposing his

As one

served

and lead a Ming

new Son

fleet,

midable naval forces engaged in the southern

in 1402.

of Heaven, the eu-

augmenting already

seas. It likely

for-

seemed a wise

diplomatic gesture to dispatch a Muslim Believer rather than an Infidel as plenipotentiary in sea-lanes then dominated by

Arab merchant

sailors

and

to the many countries that were Muslim-ruled. Naval experience was ap-

parently less important than loyalty, although strated organizational skills

and leadership

an "awesome physical presence," must choice. For a

unusual in

eunuch

Ming

to

command

abilities;

also

a fleet, or

times. Indeed major

Zheng He soon demon-

have

army

what was described justified the

emperor's

for that matter,

commands were

as

was not

often entrusted to

such men. Yet both Zheng He's success and his closeness to his sovereign

were eventually to provoke great jealousy and resentment.

89

WHAT

IF?

2

MING VOYAGES ^F EXPLORATION.

•^**C^*-C^'

15th

l^^l Voyages

I

of

CENTURY

"Cv^-

Zheng He ( 1402-34)

Gama

1492-99)

l^-^l

Vasco da

1^

Magellan and del Cano voyages (1519-22)

1^-

>>|

•

Possible

.

voyages

Ming voyages

(

of exploration

I

W

V*^

EiJ^SPE PoRTLCiAL

,

Asia

s?M^

TlBET

Baghdad •

i^Jy

A,

Persia I

Hormuz

^~

^

Nanjing

^

Nepal Assam

Ming Chi N/

Mecca —-^/\,p Jedda

—^

Ryukyu Islands

*''V/NsL'l.^

V aC Oci

Africa

A,

Australia-

>:^:^Cope of Good Hope

Antarctica -»«"\.>.»V'S^^^>*4'A^>.»tf^

90

I

The Chinese Discovery of

V

the

New

World,

5th Century

1

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91

WHAT Why

the expeditions were ordered

IF?

2

less

is

immediately obvious than the

choice of their commander. Their significance must be understood within the broader context of Ming history.

Zhu Di became the Yongle Emperor

Zhu

age forty-two, taking over leadership o{ the dynasty that his father,

Yuanzhang, the

Hongwu Emperor

(r.

1368-1398), had founded.

at

The Great

Progenitor of the Dynasty, as the founder was styled, had led a successful military rebellion nasty, in 1368.

and then military overthrow of the Yuan, or Mongol dy-

A poor peasant who restored native Chinese to the imperial

palace by ousting the Mongols and their entourage of Central Asian non-

Chinese the

officials

Mongol

now

and Chinese sycophants willing to serve

bureaucratic hierarchy, the

held in the National

Museum

of

China

tary

was

The long and

bitter battles against the

campaigns throughout China and at the center of these

Zhu

Di's usurpation of

bottom of

in Taipei, captures his coarse

features with his jutting chin, his explosive energy,

lence.

at the

Hongwu Emperor's official portrait, and potential

Mongols had entailed

peripheral regions, and

its

for vio-

mili-

Zhu Di

campaigns once he attained his majority.

power from

his

nephew, and his Shakespearean

ambition and simultaneous self-doubts about the morality of his

acts,

has

long fascinated students of what has been called the "Second Founding of the Ming." Using as pretext "the defilement of his father's inviolable tutions"

and proclaiming that

it

was "his duty to rescue the dynasty from

the evil ministers exerting undue influence to

on

a

young

ruler,"

have sought to equal or surpass the achievements of his

Although the former emperor probably perished his palace

on

July 13, 1402,

insti-

when Zhu

in the

Di's armies

Zhu Di seems

illustrious father.

fire

that destroyed

stormed Nanjing, his

death could not be confirmed absolutely. Fearing that supporters of his

nephew might

find allies in areas outside the control of the Imperial

Gov-

ernment, whether among Mongols yearning for revenge, in the nether reaches to the south, or even across the seas, the Yongle Emperor appears to

have decided to make that

his reign

he was now the legitimate

known throughout

ruler of China.

Asia, to demonstrate

Moreover, he determined to

invite their rulers to visit his court to offer tribute. His dispatching of fleets

under Admiral Zheng

He was an

essential part of this mission.

92

The Chinese Discovery of

What

o( Sail? Indeed, judging from the

perceived even today, casual historians of the era that

China

in the

first

it

really

among

way China seems

may be

to be

surprised to learn

years of the fifteenth century was arguably the

world's preeminent maritime power.

perors were

Was

like?

China could have threatened the coming European domina-

Age

tion of the

World, I5th Century

Ming China look

did these "fleets" sent out by

possible that

New

the

At

the

command

of the

Ming em-

the largest and best-equipped fleets the world had yet

known.

No more He

comprehensive description of the expeditions lead by Zheng

exists in English

than Louise Levathes's

When China Ruled

Treasure Fleet of the Dragon Throne, 1405-1433.

Not only

the Seas:

did her

The

book

bring this extraordinary period in Chinese history to the attention of the

wider scholarly and popular world, but her peerless description of the eu-

nuch

admiral's world helped rescue from obscurity the grand maritime tra-

dition of China.

China's

gantic armadas, tication.

would have seemed

fleets

composed of myriad

The hardy

to the

Europeans of their day to be

vessels of

undreamt-of size and sophis-

caravels of the Portuguese or Spanish that

epic voyages of the last years of the fifteenth century

and

size

Zheng He

sailed

capabilities by

many

number

as

many

horse ships, capable of carrying horses both from

back in the tribute

trade.

He had

fleet,

and

of the other ships in the

with an array of vessels specializing in

peditions that would sometimes

made the

would have been

dwarfed by the great "treasure ships" at the heart of the Ming passed in

gi-

as

fleets.

the needs of ex-

all

37,000 men.

China

sur-

He had

for his forces or

supply and provision vessels, freshwater

transport ships especially designed for missions in little-known seas near arid lands.

He

also

had

at his

command

a formidable fleet of

including "floating fortresses," armed with suited for

bombardment of

substantial land army,

running flags,

and

combat

ships

cannon and other weapons

well

recalcitrant enemies, troop transports for his

smaller, faster vessels capable of

down pirates. They were

warding off and

coordinated at sea by a complex system o{

drums, gongs, and lanterns, intended to allow the ships to remain in

93

WHAT

IF?

communication with one another, and

2

to relay vital information about

navigational or other dangers easily and reliably. In 1402, the Yongle fleet to

mada

Emperor ordered

dominate the Indian Ocean. By 1420

Of

floating fortresses

and perhaps

precise size

ships, for

had become an imperial

ar-

the combat ships, some 400 were large oceangoing

and shape,

which seem

debate

fleets

it

consisting of about 3,800 ships, 1,350 of which were major vessels ca-

pable of combat.

The

his admiral to begin assembling a

among

to

as

many

as

250 were giant "treasure

as well as rigging

have had

as

many

as

and alignment of sails of these

nine masts, has long been a topic

students of naval architecture.

contain vessels larger in

size

Not only

Ming

did the

than any wooden ships ever

they were extraordinarily seaworthy.

ships."

built,

They were equipped with the

but

latest

technology available, including magnetic compasses, stempost rudders, de-

maps and

tailed

compartmentation belowdecks, and staggered

charts,

masts, so placed as to better capture the wind, with sails of the strongest

cloth available. In

Some da

displaced

Gama

1

size,

the ships dwarfed their European counterparts.

,500 tons, five times the displacement of the ships Vasco

sailed to India.

Whole provinces were the minds and

skills

mobilized to build these ships.

The

of the technological cream of the state.

effort

engaged

More than 400

households of carpenters, sail-makers, and shipwrights were transferred

from the maritime regions to the shipyard

between 20,000 and 30,000

specialists

nexus of shipbuilding expertise. for the at

normal boats and one

Two

for the

at Longjiang,

and thus perhaps

were brought together in one great

—one

shipyards were run at Nanjing

huge "treasure

ships."

The dockyards

Longjiang included seven dry docks, most capable of handling ships 90

to 120 feet in width, with

accommodate

two extra-large ones, 210

feet wide, that could

hulls the size of the treasure ships at the heart of the fleet.

While Western

historians often claim that

knowledge o{ wind and sea

currents in the fifteenth century was considerably

more advanced

in the

West, thanks to the Portuguese and Dutch, the great caveat must be to add "in the waters they knew." For the Chinese, the regular

monsoons of the

dian and Southeast Asian waters, the extensive experience of their

In-

own

countrymen, and the myriad merchants calling in Chinese ports helped

94

The Chinese Discovery of

make

the charts used by

New

World,

1

5th Century

Zheng He marvels of simphcity and

Few have survived

plication.

the

practical ap-

to the present day, of course, but they report-

edly allowed the admiral to calculate a course accounting for wind, tide, currents,

and expected weather, from any major port to any objective,

reli-

able to within hours.

the period from 1405 to 1433. Zheng

The voyages themselves spanned

He began

by making a base

the Indian Ocean.

From

Hormuz and down the force

at

Malacca, from which he could operate into

there he traveled to Ceylon, Siam, Bengal,

east coast of Africa.

He

we would

to

forged alliances and used

where necessary. The treasures brought back

supposedly sacred animals

on

to

China included quilin,

call giraffes, zebras,

and other exotic

African beasts. These were precisely the kind of signs from nature, the "auspicious animals," that the tradition of Chinese dynastic cycles forecast

would appear

On

the

to indicate Heaven's sanction of a ruler's virtue.

first

voyage, from 1405 to 1407, for example, Zheng He's fleet

consisted of 317 ships accompanied by almost 28,000 these vessels were

mammoth, nine-masted

armed

troops.

Many of

treasure ships with four decks ca-

pable of accommodating 500 or more passengers, as well as massive stores of cargo.

Measuring up to 124 meters (408

feet) long

and 51 meters (166

feet)

wide, these treasure ships were by far the largest marine craft the world had

ever seen. 1411),

On

the

first

Zheng He took

three voyages (1405-1407, 1407-1409, and 1409his fleet to Southeast Asia, India,

and Ceylon. The

fourth expedition (1413-1415), went to the Persian Gulf and Arabia, and later expeditions

ventured

down the east African coast,

calling at ports as far

south as Malindi in modern Kenya. Throughout his travels, Zheng ally

dispensed

gifts

of Chinese

silk,

porcelain,

He

liber-

and other goods. In return he

received rich and unusual presents from his hosts, including the animals that ended their days in the

Ming

imperial zoo.

ions paid respect to the local deities

Zheng He and

his

compan-

and customs they encountered, and

in

Ceylon they erected a monument honoring Buddha, Allah, and Vishnu, a kind of interfaith Rosetta Stone. Zheng

He

generally sought to attain his

goals through diplomacy. But a contemporary reported that

walked

like a tiger

Zheng He

and did not shrink from violence when he considered

necessary to impress foreign peoples with China's military might.

95

He

it

ruth-

WHAT lessly

\¥!

2

who had long plagued Chinese and Southeast Asian

suppressed pirates

waters, intervened in a civil disturbance to establish his authority in Ceylon,

and made displays of military force when in

local officials threatened his fleet

Arabia and East Africa. These seven expeditions established a Chinese

Ocean

presence and reputation throughout the Indian

from his fourth voyage, Zheng traveled to

China and paid

ever, the voyages

and

began to

scale of the next

At just initial

the

He

brought envoys from thirty states

Ming court.

their respect at the

lose central support,

two were substantially

moment when Zheng He's

assignment,

when China's

historians

came

to

Thereafter,

and hence the

fleets

seem

to

have achieved their

Ocean

Mahon

re-

basin, the expedi-

many

have expressed the idea that with the shipbuilding and naviga-

met Henry the Navigator

in his Portuguese

home

Chinese could have

port. Instead, they ap-

parently turned away from exploration, resuming what Michael called "their traditional inward focus."

The

analytical

most Western scholars has been a negative

They

not?" approach. in

and

has pointed out,

tional technology evident in the treasure ships, the

plicit

how-

momentum

culture was drawing the attention

an end. As Emily

who

curtailed.

spect of rulers and traders throughout the Indian tions suddenly

basin. Returning

ask

why

such investigations

"wrong," that the decision

didn't is

Wood

historical comparison, a

China develop

has

methodology used by

as the

West

"why

did? Im-

the assumption that something went

made by China's

leaders could not

have been

a

reasoned choice made by open-minded men, but was instead one rooted in a cultural uniqueness, reflecting a lack of some vital emotional or

ingredient that subsequent "Western" success in the

would demonstrate. These arguments

some of the main reasons advanced

we look beyond

As Zhu Di

to ask

will

for

first

economic

age of imperialism

not be refought here, but instead

them need

to be

touched on before

what might have been.

settled into his imperial role, the

prestige-building missions

seemed

need

for expensive overseas

to diminish; their fabulous

expense was

seen increasingly to be drawing off resources needed to meet challenges to security closer to

home.

Mongols became more

When challenges on the northern border from the

serious,

ice after the fifth expedition,

Zhu Di ordered

a reduction in the sea serv-

from 1416 to 1419. There was a

96

single,

much

The Chinese Discovery of

the

smaller sixth expedition in 1421, but

dedication of the

new Forbidden City

constructed northern capital. cious quilin.

emperor interpreted

cial

World,

1

Zheng He came back in Peking, the

early for the

Yongle Emperor's

it

as

an

omen: Had

ill

a substantial

Now

old and sick,

when

palace.

The

his policies put the world out of

number of taxes

burden on the people and temporarily suspended

Treasure Fleet.

re-

admiral presided over a parade o( auspi-

which severely damaged the new

fire,

He manumitted

four while

5th Century

Disaster struck soon after the dedication, however,

lightning caused a great

balance?

The

New

Zhu Di died

to reduce the finan-

future voyages of the

1424

in

at the age of sixty-

on campaign.

His successor was his studious elder son

emperor began plans to reverse many of heavy taxation

for military

Zhu Gaozhi.

No warrior, the new

his father's policies including the

campaigns and public projects. However, Zhu

Gaozhi died (perhaps of heart

failure,

perhaps from poison) after only

nine months as emperor, and was succeeded in turn by Zhu Zhanji (age twenty-six) in 1426. rior,

The

fifth

Ming emperor was

a

combination of his war-

spendthrift grandfather and his scholarly, fiscally conservative father;

his reign

was a time of peace, prosperity, and good government.

sioned Zheng

He

to accomplish a seventh

in 1430, for increased prestige

and

Yet in the mid- 1430s, the altogether.

nuchs

who

final treasure ship

and restoration of the

perhaps the largest expedition, with 27,500

men and perhaps 300

Ming emperors decided

to

expensive expeditions would go to better use

if

have blamed

riod for a decline in

He and

forces urgently

new

effort

to the

military

needed financial sup-

of science and technology.

on command, China's awesome maritime

the eu-

devoted to agriculture.

the introspective culture of the later

many branches

ships.

committed

Moreover, during the 1420s and '30s the Mongols mounted a

port. Scholars

was

end the expeditions

supported the voyages, argued that resources

and land

expedition

tribute trade. This

Confucian ministers, who mistrusted Zheng

threat from the northwest,

He commis-

Ming

pe-

Launched

was also shut down from

the center. In 1436 an imperial decree forbade the construction of

new

seagoing ships; the large shipyards consequently deteriorated and naval

personnel were reassigned.

The

ability to

maintain the oceangoing ships

disintegrated and zealous officials seeking to assure that the expeditions

97

WHAT

IF? 2

would never be repeated destroyed even the records of the fabulous neys.

Zheng He himself died

By 1474 the by 1503

just a

fleet

was down to one-third of

tenth of

its

jour-

in 1433, apparently during his last voyage.

peak

size

its size

remained. In 1500,

offense for a Chinese to go to sea in a ship with

out special permission. Later,

in early

officials

it

Ming

became

times;

a capital

more than two masts with-

were authorized to destroy the larger

Private merchants and shipwrights fled the maritime

classes of ships.

provinces and the harsh punishments for engaging in international trade,

some

work along the Grand Canal, and many others establishing

finding

themselves in the overseas Chinese communities throughout Southeast

Asia that had

first

become

a major feature of the region in the early years of

the Ming. Moreover, a suspicion that those engaged in the coastal trade

were in contact with non-Chinese beyond the reach of central authority

and had a penchant

for

smuggling led them to forbid coastal people from

plying their trades legally. This led in turn to an explosion o( piracy along

the

China

coasts,

with Taiwan

as a

major center of

activity.

This develop-

ment, often blamed on "Japanese pirates" (who were mostly of Chinese gin) resulted in the population of whole districts being relocated

the coast both to "starve the pirates" and to shut as to destroy the nautical skills

What had once been

needed to engage

down in

away from

smuggling, as well

it.

a great fleet operating in response to the Imperial

Will had disappeared and become such a minor factor in regional that in 1515 a Portuguese envoy archly remarked that IPortuguese] Governor of India coast."

.

.

.

"With ten

affairs

ships the

could take the whole of the

China

Quite a condemnation!

Need

What

ori-

if,

it

have been so?

instead of curtailing the great overseas expeditions as

return of the

last

of

Zheng He's missions

it

did

in 1433, China's rulers

upon the

had instead

rededicated themselves to bringing to the world beyond eastern and southern

Asia the news of China's glorious civilization and extending to yet-unvisited places the benefits o{ association with the

nese World Order?

What

if

Ming

Imperial Court and the Chi-

the Chinese emperor, instead of following the

advice of his Confucian counselors and

98

fiscal

conservatives to abandon what

The Chinese Discovery of

the

New

World, I5th Century

they saw as reckless and unprecedented maritime activity had instead

lowed

it

to continue, or

even expanded the

effort?

What

if,

al-

rather than yield-

ing to a call to return to the "natural course" o{ Chinese history through a

xenophobic looking inward, China's universal acceptance with

its

potential rewards as well as

kind of world might have resulted had the

Imagine a Chinese last

fleet,

Ming

fleets

risk of inviting

its

hazards?

East Africa expeditions, but

still

down

around the Cape of

Good Hope,

What

not been reined in?

substantially smaller perhaps than

ing a reconnaissance

Zheng He's

dwarfing those of the Portuguese, mak-

the coasts of South Africa below Mozambique, into the Atlantic

have been seen from China's perspective Certainly, there was

had run the

rulers

as a

—what would

surely

second "Great Western Sea."

little to hold their attention in this barren stretch of

coast,

though the ostrich and other animals that hailed from the area would

surely

have been welcome additions to the imperial menagerie. But, was

there

enough

to provide incentive for

an expedition of discovery, taking a

Chinese squadron up the western coast of Africa to Guinea or the Portuguese Atlantic islands before the Portuguese arrived in force? Perhaps there would have been just

with a Chinese

fleet

enough

—even

to carry

a smallish

them

one

—

into contact. Confronted

that

had

allies

along the Angolan, Congolese, and West African coasts,

and

clients

would the Por-

tuguese have continued to see this route to the East as desirable ? It is

of course hard to envision the

Chinese

fleets as

Roman

Catholic Church accepting

anything but one more instrument of the Devil sent to

torment Christendom. With the Turks ascendant in the Eastern Mediterranean, the Arabs

nant in

still

powerful in North Africa (though no longer domi-

Iberia), a significant, sustained pressure

from the south by yet

another alien force could hardly have seemed anything more than another test

by

God of the Catholic faith.

to prevent

it

Fort Elmina

in the

Yet what could the Portuguese have done

middle of the 1400s? Historically, Portugal only

on the Gold Coast of West Africa

in 1482.

One

fortified

almost certain

outcome of a Chinese appearance on the Cape of Good Hope or the waters of the Atlantic would have been a greatly solidified Chinese position

within the Indian

Ocean

basin and a consequent sharp check

on

Por-

tuguese expansion. Might not the worst horrors of the Atlantic slave trade

99

WHAT

IF? 2

been aborted by a halt to Portuguese expansion along the African coast

at

this early date?

The

Iberian princes,

still

somewhat unsteady on

well have been even less inclined to back historically. Instead of

an East Africa

their

own

thrones,

may

"mad adventures" than they were

ruthlessly exploited by the Portuguese

as they established their first footholds in

Angola on the western coast and

then in Mozambique on the eastern coast of Africa, Chinese-influenced African kingdoms, perhaps buoyed up in their ability to

been able to face the Portuguese down or tance. Rather than

call

on

resist,

might have

their "overlord" for assis-

European exploitation of many areas

in the East

from

bases in Goa, Malaya, and Singapore, and the East Indies, Chinese control

of the Strait o{ Malacca, even indirectly via a system tributary states re-

warded

for their obligations to the

tremendous

asset to

Dragon Throne, would have been

any Ming emperor, and a formidable obstacle to

a

inter-

loping European adventurers in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries.

A Chinese presence in Ceylon and the Indian coasts, besides further

enriching the remarkable cultural diversity of those lands, could well have

made

local rulers less easily intimidated

fied outposts

and

less willing to

and depots the Portuguese established

as a

accept the

forti-

means o( asserting

their control over routes of trade. Simultaneously, there exists a distinct possibility that the course of

Middle Eastern history might have been

tered by a continued Chinese presence in the

Red Sea near Egypt and

al-

in

the Persian Gulf.

The westward

explorations could have had a reverse effect.

and client merchants had been able

to trade

and

sell

If

Chinese

goods in Africa and

the West, that Iberian navigators would one day acquire only by sailing

halfway around the world, China

itself

might have been transformed. Had

the constraints and controls of state enterprise been loosened, the divi-

dends could have been enormous. The revenue potential of trade with a world seeking the products of Chinese industry and creativity might have brought about something

Anyone contemplating

like a

mercantile revolution.

the might-have-beens of this scenario must engage

in the delightful fantasy of a

Chinese discovery of America and a pre-

100

The Chinese Discovery of

Columbian contact with Certainly

ity?

its

hlew World,

the

How

peoples.

5th Century

1

far-fetched was such a possibil-

could not have happened until the Chinese had firmly es-

it

tablished themselves along the western coast of Africa. Lacking concrete

knowledge of a land mass to the west, they would not have had the incentive to brave the devilish currents of the

South Atlantic. Moreover, the ex-

tensive logistical train that China's approach to naval expeditions

required would not have been suited to a perilous

far

known. But once the

entire bulge of

in close contact with

more

likely.

Chinese

fleets

into the un-

West Africa had been incorporated

into a Chinese system, probes in the direction of the

tinent would have been

jump

had thus

One might

South American con-

imagine a European world

along the maritime frontier of Africa

forced into a grand strategic defensive in these waters just as

it

was in the

eastern Mediterranean against the Turks, Europe would have had to leave

exploration to the Chinese intruders.

An

intriguing alternative to the western Africa-to-Brazil route of Chi-

nese maritime expansion might have been a grand trans-Pacific expedition.

This would most likely have utilized the northern route, sailing past the Ryukyus, calling at a the

North

now still hospitable Japan, and then setting

Pacific to the Aleutians

and Alaska. From

there,

would have continued down what Europeans would come dian shore to California

out across

an expedition

to call the

—and beyond. The Chinese could

surely

Cana-

have used

the trans-Pacific route at lower latitudes, the same one that Magellan's ex-

pedition would

first

cross-Pacific route

direction was

exploit in 1521; but, as the Spanish found, while the

from Mexico to the Philippines was

much more

vast expanses of

problematic due to the unreliable currents and

empty ocean.

become known

Either route to what would

brought peoples of

all

in

exchange

as the

races of the world under

cal chieftains offering to accept the

lord

reliable, the reverse

for

the

Ming Son

Americas might have

Chinese influence, with of

Heaven

lo-

as distant over-

wonders of Chinese goods and Chinese

recognition. Radically altered diplomatic, cultural, and military exchanges

profoundly altering the history of conquest and exploitation that was the fate of the

Americas,

all raise

course of development.

intriguing possibilities for "Latin" America's

Would

the "pre-Columbian" [pre-Zheng He] king-

lOl

WHAT doms have been wiped out by the

2

diseases of the

had Chinese been the

relentlessness

IF?

visitors?

troduced the horses, guns, and metallurgy,

all

Old World with the same

Would

the Chinese have in-

of which, in the

first

third of

the sixteenth century, might have helped the Aztecs and the Incas keep the

Spanish

at bay?

Or would

the Spanish and their militant Catholicism have

prevailed, only later in the century?

Would smallpox

have tipped the

still

historical balance?

We can be relatively sure that whatever the possibilities for the Chinese beyond Africa, the continuation of maritime and diplomatic Indian

Ocean

basin could have had a great impact

on the development of

the world along very different lines than the European

have come century.

efforts in the

Age

of Discovery

we

to accept as the natural course of world history in the sixteenth

The Chinese

minded, to be

sure.

attitude toward the outside world was hardly open-

Since ancient times, China's imperial rulers had not

conceived of their state

among many

others

—but

as a small part of a larger as the core of

whole

—one nation own

world civilization, and their

place as the "Middle Kingdom," the natural order of Heaven. Chinese rule,

when

it

occurred in such bordering lands as Korea or Vietnam, or even Ti-

bet, could

never be described as benign.

Nevertheless, the purveyors of Confucian civilization

were

be

likely to

less

on the world

stage

inclined to enslavement of entire peoples than their

Iberian brethren and Chinese were not as likely to attempt to cleanse ancient, but

force

newly discovered,

on them

direct rulers.

civilizations of their essential features

and

alternative gods as they installed foreign conquerors as their

How

different the world

brought the Old World to

might have been had the Chinese

the New for the

first

time.

A VISION AT THE GOLDEN GATE As

the

envoy passes through

the

the heart of the great coastal city

Grand

Portal of the

Outer Palace

that dominates

ofTongjing (Eastern Capital) a splendid square ,

suddenly stretches before him, broken in the distance only by a mountain of gilded steps rising

up beneath a canopy roof of brilliant crimson

the earth. That, he has

been informed,

is

102

where

that

seems

to float

above

now

treads

the carpeted path he

,

The Chinese Discovery of

will take

him.

It is

the

New

the

World,

Hall of Reception where he

resentative of the Celestial

Government assigned

ing off to his right, astride the rocky

isle

that rises

is

1

5th Century

to present himself to the rep-

him

to receive

from

the bay,

is

Loom-

day.

this

the

Temple of

Eastern Heavens, reserved for prayers by the emperor himself should he ever

the

visit this

part of his world-spanning realm, fust visible beyond are

crowned

by billows of fog that appear poised to

the bay.

The envoy can

see the grand harbor below,

of many -masted ships riding at anchor,

est

pour down and its

brown

close the

hills,

mouth of

waters covered with a for-

sails furled, their brilliant

banners flap-

ping in the wind. escorting official assigned to the envoy boasts that Tongjings Square of

The

Eastern Peace, with

pound of

how

it

Son of Heaven

the

in Beijing itself, but his

swallows up the thousands of attendants in

cannot begin

to

fill its

com-

high walls, rivals even the mighty Forbidden City

its

own

eyes widen as he sees

their silks

They are armed with weapons of

all description,

who

of myriad colors

vastness. Ranks of soldiers stand arrayed

in polished armor.

strange knives at their belts,

shining as they catch the sun, while a special cadre of uniformed

men

touch fire to

gleaming barrels and flame and deafening noise belch forth in salute as each delegation arrives

—no matter whether

large in size like the bejeweled

cession that has proceeded the envoy, said to have in

number, humbly clad amongst

all this

come from

grandeur as

is

ground seem

beasts with godlike riders high above the

and jingling pro-

the envoy's party.

line the entire

This

is,

soldiers

path to the distant pavilion draped in imperial yellow stand

blocks of scholarly civil servants in their academic robes,

a mark both of

Huge

either impervious to the

booming, or are held in check by firm hands and gentle words. Behind the

who

few

the far south, or

and

the order

the

formed

into regular lines,

grandeur of the occasion.

after all, the first time that the

newly arrived governor of the East, an

Imperial prince, fourth son of His Majesty, will be receiving visitors from the

many

lands

and peoples

ritual supplication

the

that

span

this

continent.

and bows of submission

symbols of investiture

He will allow

seems

little

to

make

before he issues, in his fathers

to their chieftains, lords,

and

kings.

emitted by reed instruments, punctuated by the screech across

them

their

name,

A numbing drone

made by bows

pulled

boxes by a virtual army of musicians and the clash of metal disks,

to delight the

Chinese as

then, at last, as the

much

envoy makes

as

his

it

causes the envoy's teeth to clinch.

way along 103

And

the appointed path, he finds

WHAT

IF? 2

men whose

himself quite near to small clusters of strange

common world

They must be

in this land:

—even

further

away than

his

home

faces are of colors not

ambassadors from far reaches of

the

—

the

now

here to witness the ceremonies

under way. It is

a life-changing moment for

he will receive, he

and the

the envoy. In addition to the

magnanimous Chinese

ney that

this lies

throne.

He

ahead on

his

people by

well pleased that he has been able to

is

his return. Starting

from

who have never known

its

the Eastern

furies, he will

out at the Golden Gate on the Great

Ocean, have

mighty mountains, and buffalo-filled plains

Confederacy. His people have finally agreed

now

bestowed upon

part of his role as emissary, yet remains anxious about the long jour-

that offers shelter

world,

symbols of office

with the bejeweled badges of honor

will be entrusted

the keys to the chests of the treasure that will be

complete

Bay

knows he

counting

among

its

to

called ''Pacific" only by those

return across the broad desert,

to his forest

to

friends, allies,

home

bond themselves

and

in the Iroquois

to the

wider

Ming

subjects, all the nations

Mexican kingdoms of

and

communities from the Incas in far-off Peru,

to the

Aztecs and

by the benevolent influence of the

their

former

rivals, since reconciled

Great Son of Heaven.

104

the

GEOFFREY PARKER

MARTIN LUTHER BURNS AT THE STAKE, ''O

The event

God,

is

1521

Luther dead?''

that has long signaled the birth of Protestantism

is

Martin Luther's

ing of his Ninety -five Theses to a door of the Wittenberg castle church

ber 31, 1517, All Hallow's Eve.

documents.

The

The

theses themselves

thirty-four-year-old professor

monk, argued that indulgences, paper pope that sinners would not have given to those

who

dramatic, though

it

simply

made a

to

s

act,

of theology,

pious donation. "Nailed"

with the Church.

Once

name

of the

may

be a bit over-

pound and rap of tradition; we is

probably more in the

which was, as Geoffrey Parker notes, this

an Augusdnian

spend Eternity in Purgatory, should not be

has long been invested with the

ing a public debate." Luther at

on Octo-

were hardly revolutionary

certificates guaranteeing in the

are dealing with a powerful symbol here. ''Posted"

Luther

nail-

''the

spirit

of

normal way of request-

point had not the least intention of breaking

copies of the theses were printed

up and

circulated,

how-

ever, a controversy whose repercussions might have remained merely local be-

came widespread and

made Luther a

their

celebrity,

author a figure of sudden notoriety. The printing press

one of the

first that

media created. Indeed,

been no such invention, could there have been a Luther?

B}' the

without a mass-produced Bible available to ordinary individujils tantism

itself

have existed?

As

he put

it,

every

man

could

,

if

there

had

same token, could Protes-

now become

his

own

priest.

Martin Luther was always blessed by good upright

on a

pile

luck.

He

of burning fagots, bound to a stake.

105

died in bed, not standing

What

if

death by

fire

had

.

WHAT been

his fate

when

he

was hauled

IF?

2

before the Diet of Worms in 1521

recant views that had already led to his excommunication?

Protestantism have taken

if

it

had lacked

and

Rome

the breathing space that

history

vacuum

the leadership

created by

needed?

it,

,

The development of the

To understand

we need

GEOFFREY PARKER

is

his

his

have given the Catholic Church

And what

different directions might the

New World might have

the great schism

been affected as well.

the stature of this rude, arrogant, yet frequently

simply to contemplate

Could

have even existed? Would

of sixteenth-century Western Europe have taken without

of religion?

to

What forms would

the magnetizing force of a Luther?

Protestantism, except as a scattering of dissenters death,

and asked

charming man,

absence

the Andreas Dorpalen Professor of History at

Ohio

State University and the author of such works as The Dutch Revolt, Philip U,

The

Military Revolution,

recently The

Grand

The Spanish Armada (with Colin Martin), and most

Strategy of Philip U.

of T/ie Reader's Companion

He

is

to Military History.

106

(with Robert Cowley) editor

ABOUT led

ers

FOUR o'clock OR

the afternoon of April 17, 1521, the ush-

Martin Luther, looking drawn and

pale,

Emperor

before

the V and the German Rhine. On a table in the center of the episcopal hall, next to the great RoDiet, meeting in the city of

Charles

a pile of Luther's books

manesque cathedral, stood

Worms on

A

and pamphlets.

spokesman asked him two questions: Would he acknowledge the authorship of these books? that he

alizing

And, would he recant

all

or parts of

would have no chance to

state

The next day

twenty-four hours for reflection.

he again entered the crowded episcopal

hall,

at

now

his

about

them? Luther,

re-

views, requested six in the

evening

illuminated by hundreds

of candles. Facing the emperor, the princes, and the prelates, Luther deliv-

ered in a high clear voice a ten-minute speech in

repeated in Latin.

had

still

When he

had

finished, the

German, which he

later

spokesman objected that he

not given a simple answer as to whether he would recant or not.

Luther paused and then replied defiantly:

Since then Your Serene Majesty and Your Lordships seek a simple answer, I

1

am

will give

in this

manner, neither horned nor toothed. Unless

convinced by the testimony of the Scriptures or by clear reason

do not

(for

1

well

known

1

it

trust either in the

pope or

in councils alone, since

it is

that they have often erred and contradicted themselves),

am bound by the Scriptures have quoted and my conscience. 1

not do otherwise. Here

1

Pandemonium now broke cited, rose to his feet

stand,

I

can-

may God help me, amen.

loose in the hall.

The emperor, angry and

and declared that he had had enough of such

talk.

ex-

The

meeting broke up in chaos. For a moment, Luther's fate hung in the balance: some Catholic zealots

107

WHAT wanted

to seize

him and shouted

IF?

2

"into the fire"

V respected

heretics. Nevertheless, Charles

—the

traditional fate of

the safe conduct he had given

Luther to attend the diet and even allowed him a few days of further cussion with theologians. Luther

sooner was he outside the

city,

left

Worms

bushed him and he abruptly disappeared.

man artist Albrecht Diirer wrote will

now

a free

man on

April 26.

however, than a group of masked

On

No

men am-

hearing the news, the Ger-

"O God,

in his diary:

dis-

is

Who

Luther dead?

explain the Gospel to us as clearly as he used to do?"

We now know (as Diirer did not)

that the "kidnappers" were the soldiers

of Luther's patron. Elector Frederick of Saxony, and that they took

one of Frederick's

secret to

castles.

in

There he grew a beard and spent one

year disguised as a knight, "Sir George," while he worked his literary labors: a

him

on the

greatest of

German translation of the New Testament. By the

time

Luther died in 1546, his vigorous, melodious version had appeared in 253 editions

and formed the

basis for several other vernacular translations.

Thus William Tyndale's English Bible (and sion, into

The

which much of

passed) stems directly from Luther's version.

it

reformer returned to Wittenberg in 1522 where, until his death

twenty-four years

his preaching, teaching,

later,

Lutheran church with some But what

him

therefore the Authorized Ver-

if,

five million

in April 1521, Charles

to disregard Luther's safe conduct,

keep faith with heretics"?

A

and writing shaped a

members around the world

V

had

listened to those

on the grounds

century before, another

that

who

today.

urged

"One does not

critic of

the papacy,

Jan Hus from Bohemia, had also received an Imperial promise of safety to

come from Prague

dishonored.

and then

to

Germany and defend

The emperor who

led a series of military

issued

it

his views, but

watched him

bum

it

had been

at the stake

campaigns to exterminate his followers in

Bohemia.

Martin Luther,

bom

in

Saxony

to a

mining

family, attended primary

grammar schools away from home. He took

and

his bachelor's degree at the

University of Erfurt in 1501 and his master's the following year, at age nineteen. In 1505, after a bolt of lightning almost killed him,

108

he became an Au-

Martin Luther Burns

at the Stake,

1521

PORTRAIT OF A SURVIVOR

A rebel in middle age: Martin Luther

in this

Strong

will

and

intelligence are captured

(Lucas Cranach the Elder, 1472-1553, Marrin Luther. SEF/Art Resource,

gustinian

monk,

on

the face of

contemporary etching.

in gratitude for his survival.

NY)

But he continued to study the-

ology in his monk's cell and obtained his doctorate in 1512.

moved at the

mons

to Wittenberg,

new

university,

where he began

to lecture

on the Bible

Then he

to students

founded by Frederick of Saxony, and to deliver

to the citizens as preacher in the

ser-

town church.

Luther always saw teaching and preaching as crucial, and he continued to

do both throughout his

life.

He

also wrote to be heard as well as to be

109

WHAT read, always addressing himself to

IF?

"my

2

readers

and hearers." "The voice

should be the soul of the word," he wrote. "Letters are dead words, speech is

living words."

as

He

devoted great attention to finding the right words and,

he wrote, spoke the sentences aloud to himself until the

stresses, pauses,

cadences, and the sequence of vowels and consonants sounded just right.

One

of the mourners at the reformer's funeral paid tribute to his great lin-

when he claimed

guistic gifts

These communication thority

on any

that "Luther taught us to speak."

skills

would have made Luther a formidable au-

subject, but gradually

issue for Christians: sin

and

he focused on a particularly important

salvation.

How

close reading of the Bible suggested that

would not

suffice:

can the sinner be saved? His

good works and insincere penance

only complete faith in Christ could assure salvation. In

1517, Luther became concerned that a practice by some of his fellow priests,

fering

members of the Dominican Order, was leading Christians

them

a false security.

They toured Christendom

astray, of-

distributing indul-

gences that promised the living and the dead, in the pope's name, remission of ecclesiastical penalties, and o{ time in purgatory, in return for a contri-

bution toward the cost of rebuilding the basilica of St. Peter's in Rome. Al-

though the

local authorities forbade the

Dominicans

to offer indulgences in

Wittenberg, they did so nearby, and members of Luther's congregation

town

left

to acquire them.

When

his

sermons

Luther presented a cisms

fell

failed to halt the exodus,

on October

set of ninety-five objections to the practice.

under three heads. Most attacked the Dominicans'

31, 1517,

His

criti-

failure to re-

quire any penance or inner contrition before issuing their indulgences;

others argued that the Gospels provided everything a Christian needed to

know to

for salvation; a

make room

few claimed that those

for indulgences

—even

if

who

stifled

the

granted by the pope

Word

of

God

—were the en-

emies of Christ. Luther posted his Ninety-five Theses on the door of a local church, the normal way of requesting a public debate at the time. sent

them with

them all

to

a cover note to his ecclesiastical superior,

Rome, and he mailed

copies to

some

friends,

who

who

He

also

forwarded

published them

over Germany.

This provided Luther's

first

taste of

llO

widespread popularity, and he

rel-

Martin Luther Burns

ished

it

—

all

at the Stake,

the while professing that he had nothing to do with

mystery to me," he noted (with a trace of smugness),

my

so than so

many

cans

other writings

places."

who

1521

The

—

or indeed those of other professors

is

a

—spread

to

and enmity. The Domini-

theses also provoked envy

distributed the indulgences noted a

"It

it.

"how my Theses, more

fall

and com-

in revenues

plained to the pope about Luther's criticisms; so in the summer of 1518 he received a

summons

to

Rome

Political calculations

time.

When

the papal

now

to explain his objections.

rescued Luther, for the

summons

first

Germany,

arrived in

but not the

last

Emperor

its ruler.

Maximilian of Habsburg, urgently desired to have his grandson Charles recognized as his successor. those

who would make

He

therefore

met

money

Augsburg with

the choice: seven Imperial Electors, including Fred-

erick of Saxony, Luther's suzerain. Frederick,

of

at the city of

who had advanced

sums

large

to the emperor in the past, asked Maximilian to allow Luther to

address the pope's concerns in Augsburg instead of

Rome. Grateful and

anxious for Frederick's vote, Maximilian agreed.

Why did Frederick care? He

met Luther

face-to-face only

—and the two men never exchanged

Diet of

Worms

elector,

however, possessed unusual

piety. In his

a

chased, others he exchanged for pictures by Lucas

and a few

his agents stole.

—

at the

spoken word. The

youth he had undertaken a

pilgrimage to Jerusalem and afterward began to collect

painter),

once

By 1520,

relics.

Some he

Cranach

(his

his collection

pur-

Court

exceeded

19,000 items, ranging from some milk from the Virgin Mary's breast, some straw from the stable at Bethlehem, a piece of the burning bush, and

some

soot from the fiery furnace, to articles of merely local appeal like the beaker

used by St. Elizabeth of Marburg, a medieval tire

collection

came out on

in return for pious prayers

display, the total

German

saint.

When

the en-

time remitted from purgatory

approached two million

collection, the largest in the world, in the castle

years. Frederick

church

at

kept his

Wittenberg

very spot where Luther had posted his Ninety-five Theses

—the

—and he paid

eighty-three resident priests to celebrate almost 10,000 masses annually his behalf.

These were precisely the

on

sort of "false" religious practices that

Luther abhorred and against which he would preach. In 1518, however, these differences lay in the future and Frederick sought to protect Luther,

III

WHAT

IF?

2

apparently out of a sense of "fair play" and, perhaps, because he did not

own "star professors" disgraced. He

wish to see one of his

provided overt protection against those

him

but also gave

who

therefore not only

sought Luther's destruction,

covert advice through his legal experts.

Unfortunately for Luther, the senior papal representative at Augsburg

was Cardinal Cajetan, general of the Dominican Order give

way on the

men

debated.

issue of indulgences.

The

—

man unlikely to

a

For four days in October 1518 the two

cardinal pointed out that several popes had proclaimed

the efficacy of indulgences, forcing Luther to reply that "the pope

above, but under the word of

month,

God" and could

therefore

err.

The

is

not

following

Cajetan 's direction, the pope issued a decree ordering that

at

everyone should obey his teaching on indulgences. This pushed Luther one step further toward

ment and announced port for before

it."

in January

assertions, "although

its

He

an open confrontation with Rome. 1519 I

that, since

will

it

not reject

no

offered

it,

I

read the docu-

will

not

it)

bow down

That same month, Maximilian died and Germany lacked any

secular authority capable of keeping the "monk's quarrel" (as

ered

biblical sup-

many

consid-

within bounds.

Luther had intended his Ninety-five Theses to provoke a scholarly debate,

and a prominent German theologian, John Eck, duly challenged him.

In July 1519, the two

met

in

an open forum

at Leipzig in

cited the teaching of the Greek Orthodox Church, which

indulgences; Eck pointed out that Jan

who had

fied Luther,

what he found. "Up

to

now

Jan Hus without knowing realizing

it."

But Hus had

Hus died

a heretic.

horri-

Now he

Bohemian reformer and was amazed

have held and espoused

I

it,"

condemned

Hus had done the same. This

previously accepted that

started to read the writings of the

Saxony. Luther also

he told a

criticized far

friend.

"We

all

at

the teachings of

are all Hussites without

more than indulgences: he had de-

nied the power of the popes and exalted the authority o{ the Bible. Luther realized that

I

am

in

he would have to do the same and wrote,

deep turmoil since

true Antichrist

whom

I

early in 1520:

can hardly doubt that the pope

is

everyone has been expecting. Everything

112

the fits

Martin Luther Burns

together too well

—

his

life,

at the Stake,

what he

his deeds,

1521

says

and what he

demands.

This proved too

much

for

some of

Luther's supporters

and they now

abandoned him. For many Germans, "Hussite" was equivalent "priest-hater." In England,

one of the few countries outside Bohemia where

Hussite views had gained a following, King

demning Luther and

his Hussite leanings

Henry the accolade "Defender of the

Henry Vlll wrote

Faith," a title

still

thirty of

with combined sales of 300,000 copies. tian Nobility of

on

came

Germany Regarding

not intend to do

instantly recognized

say:

the

so), sold

This

is

Rome

One

of them. Address

of hereti-

by the

Luther'"

Church

2,000 copies in

it, if

—and

his

to the

Chris-

Improvement of Christendom, which (since the

five days.

—when he authored an anonymous

no doubt that "anyone who reads must

to

them, printed in 400 editions,

princes and magistrates to reform the

clearly did

list

tracts that set out his beliefs in detail and,

end of 1520, he had published over

called

treasured by English

by Luther during the Leipzig debate.

now published

Luther

a tract con-

(which led the pope to confer on

monarchs). More ominous, John Eck sent a detailed cal views uttered

to "rebel" or

he has seen

His

pope

style be-

tract

he had

my pen and my thoughts,

books flooded the market. The other

outstanding writer of the day, Erasmus of Rotterdam, complained huffily that one could hardly find a

book

in

Germany

that was not either written

by Luther or about Luther.

The tone

o{ the debate also

became

sharper. In his Address, Luther

claimed that, whether Hus was a heretic or not, he had been unjustly executed because heretics should be refuted with arguments and not with

He

also argued that "the

fire.

prime concern" of Christians

should be to live sincerely in faith and in accordance with Holy Scripture. For Christian faith

and

life

can

tolerable laws of the pope. In fact, faith

easily exist

without the

cannot properly

in-

exist unless

there are fewer of these Romanist laws, or unless they are abolished all

together.

113

WHAT

IF?

2

and understood by any-

Luther's tracts stressed that the Bible could be read

one without any need "Every

man

his

is

for a

own

church hierarchy

—

or,

in his

memorable phrase,

priest." Eck, for his part, secured a papal

decree in

June 1520 that attributed forty-one separate doctrinal "errors" to Luther, ordered not. Six

him

and threatened him with excommunication

to recant,

months

if

he did

Luther responded with a theatrical gesture: he cere-

later,

monially burnt a copy of the decree and, for good measure, threw a copy of the canon law into the flames as well. "As they would do to me, so

them," he wrote.

The

I

do to

following month, the pope excommunicated Luther

and called on Charles

V,

now

emperor, to outlaw him.

Charles could not oblige. In July 1519, just as Luther and Eck began their debate, the electors

met

to

choose a successor to Maximilian. They

considered three candidates: Maximilian's grandson Charles of Habsburg,

King Francis

I

of France, and Frederick of Saxony. Frederick refused to

stand and threw his weight behind Charles, In return, however, the

out a legal hearing.

At

who was

new emperor promised not Frederick's insistence,

elected unanimously.

to outlaw

anyone with-

he therefore agreed to allow

Luther to attend the Diet of Worms, scheduled to meet early in 1521, albeit in the expectation that the

excommunicate would simply

recant.

By then, however, the execution of Luther could no longer have lenced the growing chorus of open prolific writings

and

won numerous

of Christianity. But he was

Germany to

followers and, by 1521, Albrecht

was not alone in regarding Luther

new kind

the Catholic Church. Luther's

his dramatic personal appearances all over

defend his views had Diirer

critics of

si-

as the

most

gifted

exponent of a

no longer the only one. Wittenberg

experienced a religious revolution even without Luther. Under the leadership of another university professor and priest, Andreas Bodenstein Karlstadt, radical preachers dispensed

wine, to the laity (the

communion

in

Roman Church allowed only bread),

church images, monks

left

their monasteries,

and

von

both kinds, bread and

priests

crowds smashed

began to marry.

Radical prophets warned that the end of the world approached and called for social justice. Far to the south, the chief

in Switzerland,

defiance of

preacher of the city of Zurich

Huldrych Zwingli, noted with approval

Rome

in his diary Luther's

and, in 1519, persuaded the city magistrates to ban in-

114

Martin Luther Burns

dulgences.

The next

he wished, and

all

year,

1521

at the Stake,

he received permission to preach "the gospel"

as

other clergy in Zurich followed his lead. While Luther

hid in Frederick's castle, others advanced his cause.

What, then, Church? Once tion.

On

if

Charles

V had tried to burn all these critics of the Roman

again, by 1521

it

Even Hus's teachings

late for effective persecu-

become too popular

—spread only by word of mouth and

until the invention of printing his

was probably too

the one hand, Luther's ideas had

to suppress.

in manuscripts

with movable type in the 1450s

—survived

martyrdom. Repeated attempts to invade his native Bohemia and erad-

The

icate his followers failed ignominiously:

which Luther regarded

Printing,

as

Hussites fought back and won.

"God's highest and ultimate

grace, by

which He would have

sible for

any German government to destroy

made

his gospel carried forward,"

copies of

all

works. Moreover, they had by then spread beyond Germany. thirty

Lutheran

glish.

On

tracts

had appeared

in

Dutch

the other hand, experience would

translation,

show

all

it

gift

of

impos-

of Luther's

By 1530, some

and three

in

En-

that killing Protestants

did not eradicate their beliefs. In 1523, Charles ordered two Netherlands

monks jure

to be burnt because they upheld Luther's teaching

—the

at least

first

Lutheran martyrs anywhere

—and

and refused to ab-

in the course of his reign

2,000 more Netherlanders perished for their

beliefs.

Nevertheless, Lutheranism (as well as the other persecuted Protestant creeds) continued to thrive in the

Low Countries.

on Zurich by her Catholic neighbors

attack

in 153

In Switzerland, an armed 1

resulted in the death of

Zwingli in battle, but his faith lived on and even spread to other cantons. Finally, in

Germany, the

of believers

relentless persecution of the Anabaptists, groups

who separated from both the Lutheran and Zwinglian camps

in

1522-23, failed to extinguish them. Their faith survived and their descendants (Mennonites and others) today bers in

some

number more than one million mem-

sixty countries worldwide.

There

is

no reason

to suppose that

even intense and protracted persecution would have extinguished Lutheranism

either.

In any case, three political considerations precluded effective enforce-

ment of

Charles's decree of outlawry. First, the king of France, rankled by

his failure to secure the Imperial title,

115

concluded a

series of alliances

with

WHAT

IF? 2

Charles's enemies and prepared to declare war. tion reached the emperor in

him funds with which

vote

Rumors of

a hostile coali-

Worms, and he begged the Imperial Diet

to organize a coherent defense.

one of the

to antagonize Frederick of Saxony,

It

to

made no sense

richest rulers, by outlawing

Luther before approval of the taxes. Charles therefore issued his edict of outlawry in erick

had

Ottoman

May left

1521

—

a

month

Worms. Second, on the

sultan, Suleiman,

—only when

Fred-

empire's eastern flank, a

new

after Luther's defiance

advanced up the Danube and captured Bel-

grade after only three weeks' siege. This opened the plain of Hungary and, beyond, the Habsburgs' patrimonial lands, to Turkish raids. In 1529,

army

Suleiman and

his

fensive up the

Danube

laid siege to

Vienna. Time

after time, a

(or the fear of one) led Charles to agree to tolerate

Lutheranism in the Empire in return

for

Lutheran taxes and troops to de-

fend Austria. In 1529, Luther composed his most famous hymn, Fortress ter

is

Turkish of-

our God," for the Saxon troops

who marched

to save

"A Mighty Vienna

Charles had granted a further period of toleration. Third, and

the emperor spent

little

af-

finally,

of his reign in Germany. After the Diet of Worms,

he decided to go to Spain in order to supervise the suppression of a major popular rebellion (the comuneros), and the enmity of France kept for the

next seven years.

He was

in

no position

him there

to enforce his decree of out-

lawry (or any other measure) in Germany.

Would

Luther's death in 1521 have

changed anything? Undoubtedly. To

begin with, we would lack his powerful translation of the Bible, as well as

most of

his 3,100 other publications,

which take up over 60,000 printed

pages in the standard edition of his works. This would have weakened the

Reformation in two distinct ways.

First,

the very popularity of Luther's

works helped to harmonize the different dialects spoken in Germany. The first

Basel edition of his

usual later

Saxon terms

German New Testament

for the benefit of

works to popularize Luther's

southern

style,

included a glossary of un-

German

readers.

Without

the need for such aids might have

continued, complicating the spread of anti-Catholic ideas. Second, and

more obviously, without Luther's commanding

116

authority, the various cen-

Martin Luther Burns

ters

at the Stake,

1521

of anti-Catholic sentiment would have developed in isolation. Instead

of a relatively unified Lutheran bloc in northern

Germany and Scandi-

own

navia, there would have been a patchwork of states, each with their creed. Perhaps a divided (or, rather, a

more divided) Reformation would

have proved unable to withstand a Catholic counteroffensive once Charles eventually

made peace with

The impact

the French and the Turks.

of the Peasants'

War

of 1524-25, the greatest popular up-

rising in

Europe between the rebellions of the 1350s and the French rev-

olution,

would certainly have been

southern

Germany took many

ings of Luther still

different.

As

it

was, the peasants of

of their grievances straight from the teach-

and Zwingli, and several of their leaders had been (and a few

were) his followers. Luther used his enormous authority both to

dis-

tance the Reformation cause from the rebellion and to legitimize the brutal repression of the peasants. His most influential tract

the bloodthirsty

title

commanded "everyone who openly,

with

subject,

can, to smite, slay and stab them, secretly or

remembering that nothing can be more poisonous, hurtful or

than a rebel." Without his

ish

on the

Against the Murdering and Thieving Hordes of Peasants,

firm, shrill voice, the peasant

would have become more radical

—

and perhaps more popular

devil-

movement

—

discredit-

ing the cause of reform irreparably.

Predicting the impact of Luther's martyrdom at

Worms beyond

the

1520s becomes more hazardous. Let us consider, for example, the impact of a

weaker Reformation camp on the Catholic Church. Perhaps burning

Luther, and intimidating (though not eliminating) his supporters,

have

lulled the

papacy back into complacency, leading

few isolated Protestant enclaves just as

it

had written

Probably, then, later reformers (such as

divided Europe with

and

less

abrasive

new

calls for reform.

it

to write off the

off Hussite

John Calvin) would

Bohemia. still

have

Conversely, however, a weaker

Reformed movement might have proved

Catholic Church to accommodate.

would

Many

easier for the

sincere Christians, including

Charles V, wished to end the schism and compelled Catholic and Protestant leaders to attend several meetings to resolve their differences. All of

them

failed, in part

because of Luther's intransigence. Without him, per-

117

WHAT

IF?

2

haps papal negotiators could have reached an agreement with

at least

of the Protestant leaders, healing the schism and reuniting

all

some

Western

Christians under papal authority.

Without the great divide between Protestant and Catholic, history of sixteenth-century ent:

no

religious wars,

certainly the

Western Europe would have been very

no Dutch Revolt, no Thirty

differ-

War. The forces

Years'

of a united Christendom might have held back the Turks at Belgrade or Budapest; the united forces o{ Charles V's subjects might

Habsburg hegemony in Europe, precluding by other Europeans. So

know

just possibly:

No

all

have established

settlements in the Americas

no United

Luther,

we

States as

it.

Luther might well have relished that extreme connection. As with the thunderbolt that narrowly missed him, he believed that the fate of his cause as well as his personal future rested solely in

jauntily told the Diet of

"If this

is

not be able to overthrow

will

perial estates are

my work

if

of the Apostles:

the counsel of men, this work will be overthrown;

God, you

that

God's hands. In April 1521, he

Worms, quoting the Acts

will perish of

its

welcome is

it."

if it is

The emperor and

to write that to the pope in

Rome!

of

the imI

know

not from God, within three years, or even two,

own

it

accord.

A year later, as he rode back to Wittenberg to resume his duties as teacher and preacher, he erick

felt

vindicated and empowered.

At Worms,

Elector Fred-

had found Luther "much too bold," but he had seen nothing

yet. In

1522, his persistent carping persuaded Frederick to pack up his collection of

relics,

and

later that year the elector

and

his entourage appeared at the

Imperial Diet wearing a Lutheran slogan ("The word of ever")

on

God

their clothes. In 1524, the emperor's sister Isabel

tenberg to hear Luther preach and publicly took

communion

endures

went in

to

for-

Wit-

both kinds.

Before he died in 1525, Frederick also received both wine and bread at

communion,

a clear sign of his personal break with

That same

year,

Rome.

Luther abandoned his monastic habit and married a

Ih

Martin Luther Burns

at the Stake,

1521

nun, and shortly afterward he began to celebrate October 31, the day he

had published his Ninety-five Theses, with a special

toast. In his last years,

he drank the toast out of one of the few surviving relics from Elector Frederick's collection

— the beaker of

victory not only over the

the prelates

St. Elizabeth of

pope but

who had once

sat in

judgment upon him

Man"

offers

—symbolizing

also over the emperor, the princes,

In 1546, he died serenely in his bed in the

two years before. His career

Marburg

at the

his

and

Diet of Worms.

town where he was

bom

sixty-

one of the best defenses of the "Great

theory of history: that a single individual can decisively influence the

course of human Luther, but

it

affairs.

There might

would have taken a

still

have been a Reformation without

totally different form.

119

^s^»N^-•^'C^•'-'0-•>-0'^>^^'^s^^'-=^^^

THEODORE

CHARLES

F

HAD NOT LEFT WHITEHALL, AUGUST 1641

I

As a

starter,

no English

"Charles J," Theodore K. Rahb remarks, that the personality

1

649)

the English civil

,

that

war

perfect exemplar of the truism

historical figure

(who reigned from 1625

can

at

home

singing

But

(and

was not

this

But more than

the

U

was a king who

the fairer ones to bed)

ways (and

to the

democracy as we know them," Rabb

By

the

end

of the next century,

—

its

.

It

powers apparently

.

rub shoulders with

When

his successor,

Catholic Church)

political parties

ments could actually be voted out of

universal suffrage

liked to

monarchy had changed.

supreme, and rudimentary

gland.

horses

monarchy of Charles, and would never

the authoritarian

some of

to take

tried to revert to the old

"

in

changed nothing and everythmg. Cromwell's short-lived republican

be again. His son Charles jects

was beheaded

hymns and breeding

experiment died with him and the monarchy was restored, intact.

alter the course of

until he

war probably never would have happened and Oliver

Cromwell would have remained was a war

civil

"is the

and actions of a major

events." Without Charles

RABB

K.

An

he

"The

sub-

fames U,

was sent packing.

elected Parliament

were beginning

office.

,

his

to take

was now

form. Govern-

basic elements of electoral

writes, "gathered inexorable force in

a truer democracy,

not just the rule of the landed classes

embodying

En-

the ideal of

—would emerge

in the

rebellious British colonies across the Atlantic.

None Charles

of

1.

frontation

this

might have happened had

Since

was

it

was against

inevitable.

it

his beliefs to

not been for the devious obstinacy of

compromise with Parliament, a con-

But as Rabb observes,

120

there

was one

scenario, not at

If

all

Charles

Had Not

1

Left Whitehall,

improbable, that might have changed everything.

scourge of seventeenth-century Europe

headed north just

to deal

his

with the usually fatal disease.

week—and had become a

sumed a considerably

K.

hinged on the recurring

August 1641

What

is

if

Charles had delayed

victim himself?

different shape,

RABB

,

Charles

later, in

The

and not

his trip

down

by just a

future, our past, might have as-

necessarily a democratic one.

a professor of history at Princeton University

Modem

I

a house

Whitehall Palace, the inhabitants came

the author or editor of such notable works as The for Stability in Early

It

the plague. In

with rebellious subjects in Scotland. Six days

one hundred yards from

THEODORE

—

August 1641

New History,

The

and

Struggle

Europe, Climate and History, Renaissance Lives,

and Jacobean Gentlemen. He was the principal claimed and Emmy-nominated

PBS

historical adviser for the ac-

television series Renaissance.

121

AMONG

THE WARS,

military campaigns,

can change the face o{ a continent, nizing.

Though

civil

and individual

battles that

wars are often the most ago-

the landscapes they alter tend to be only within specific

countries, the intensity of the conflicts

and the transformations that they

bring about can have long-term consequences that extend far beyond national borders. In the twentieth century, for instance, the effects of internal strife

were not restricted to Russia, Spain, China, or Vietnam, to name but

And

four of the most brutal instances. turies,

of

America

in the 1770s or France in the 1790s.

The importance easily they could

the same can be said, in earlier cen-

of these struggles

only enhanced

is

one considers how

What kind of world would we Ho Chi Minh, Washington, or the

have come out otherwise.

have inherited had Lenin, Franco, Mao, Third Estate

if

lost their assaults

one moment when

their

on the

existing order?

movements could have

into very different directions.

And

war seems not to have shifted many

Each had more than

collapsed, sending history

the argument holds even

when

a civil

landmarks, as appears to have been the

case with the upheavals that shook England in the 1640s and '50s.

Although armies were

either

on the march

or trying to dissuade resist-

ance for most o{ the period from 1640 to 1660 in England, they seemed to leave

little

mark.

The persistence

of political structures had been notable in

the wake of previous English civil wars, such as the Wars of the Roses that

had raged some 150 years and

earlier,

'50s appeared to follow the

few years had ceased to

exist,

and

at first sight the events of the

1640s

same pattern. The monarchy, which

returned in 1660 with just about

all

for a

of

its

powers intact. Both the House of Lords and the Anglican Church, which

had been abolished, were

restored; traditional

powers in the counties were

resumed by the landed country gentry; and Parliament once again was both

122

If

Charles

summoned and

I

Had Not

dissolved at the

Left Whitehall,

command

and practices had been reformed, but

August 1641

A

of the king.

common

few legal rights

law and the power of prece-

dent were not significantly more authoritative than before. gious dissenters, in the 1630s.

reli-

on the whole, much more comfortable than they had been

And

the

many unprecedented

surface as the established order dissolved rights for all

Nor were

men

to the wish for

ideas that

—from

had bubbled

to the

a belief in equal political

complete freedom of the press

—seemed

to

evaporate after 1660, their later influence impossible to predict. Behind the outward show, however, there had been a fundamental shift in political culture, reversing the drift

toward authoritarianism that Charles

had

1

represented.

During the

civil

wars that outcome could not have been predicted, be-

cause the voices of hope for a

new

future, represented notably

by the poet

John Milton, were often drowned out by the despair of those who regarded the disintegration of England's traditional institutions as a prelude to anarchy, redeemable only by a

determined sovereign.

Among

Thomas Hobbes, whose

most acute observer was probably

the

latter,

Leviathan

the

may

well be the most powerful response to civil war ever written. Deeply dis-

him

turbed by the chaos that had forced terpiece in 1651, just

two years

into exile,

after the

he published

his

mas-

execution of King Charles

I.

Writing in the context of profound and unprecedented social uncertainty,

Hobbes sought

to define a political system that

purpose the assurance of stability for

would have

all its citizens.

The only

as

its

prime

logical possi-

he concluded, was an all-powerful sovereign, dedicated to the main-

bility,

tenance of order and capable of imposing his will without restraint.

Given the spread of absolutist doctrines and the Europe in

where spirit

which Hobbes wrote

his exile

had taken him

—

practices through

much

of

certainly in the France of Louis XIV,

—

his conclusions

seemed to capture the

of his times. There was a relentless single-mindedness and a devastat-

ing finality in his dismissal of alternatives,

popular (though hugely influential) in his

no doubt

that most of his contemporaries

which made

own

his views less

lifetime, but there

would have taken

than

could be

his side

if

faced

with a choice between the might of centralized authority and the chaos of

123

WHAT

IF? 2

Hobbes may have written amid

resistance to that authority.

crisis,

but his

rethinking of the purpose of government has remained fundamental to political

theory ever since.

Yet

was not a Leviathan-like king

it

Stuart dynasty had learned

how

and Charles Is son Charles his subjects.

Where

The

dire could be the effects of arbitrary rule,

had been remote and

with the people of London.

thusiastically

returned to power in 1660.

was determined to retain the affections of

II

his father

who

He went

he mingled en-

aloof,

Hyde

riding in

Park; he

frequented the theater; and the most famous diarist of the age, Samuel Pepys, reported that he was swept along so far by the crowd that gathered

when

the king was opening a

new

session of Parliament that

found himself at Charles's elbow, reading along livered.

Such mingling, and the

it

have been inconceivable under the autocratic Charles

Channel

What

speech was de-

as the royal

political relationships

he eventually

implied, would I

or across the

in Louis XIV's France. this

changed atmosphere

reflected,

however, was something more

profound than clever public relations or a warm personality.

It

was the

re-

alization that, for all the apparent continuities, the country's political cul-

ture is

had been fundamentally altered by the experience of civil

true that disabilities

war. Thus,

were again imposed on dissenters from the

Anglican Church. They were excluded from the universities and public fice;

forbidden to

come too

close to the capital,

London; and made

ciently uncomfortable that, as in the 1630s, a nonconformist like

Penn sought

better prospects in the

New

it

official

of-

suffi-

William

World. But they were not

hounded, directly persecuted, or prevented from observing their own forms of worship.

A

de facto tolerance was extended, and

growing community of Jews, for centuries,

but

the formal legal

who had been

who now began

system.

embraced even a

forbidden to settle in England

to return in

some numbers even though

prohibition had not been repealed.

This unwritten acceptance of litical

it

new

conditions also transformed the po-

So deep was the reaction

to the bloodshed

and upheaval of

the midcentury that the English were determined to avoid such confrontation again.

The

troubles

had wracked the Continent,

124

too,

where the Thirty

If

Years' flict

Charles

War had

I

Had Not

devastated Germany, and where rebellions and open con-

had broken out from Portugal

John Locke, was

observer,

means could be found and contention, tion in Europe,

August 1641

Left Whitehall,

all

to Russia.

typical,

if

The

reaction o{ another acute

exaggerated, in that he hoped

to avoid repeating the "perpetual foundation of

those flames that have

made such havoc and

all

war

desola-

and have not been quenched but with the blood of so many

millions."

When,

therefore, Charles IPs brother

and

successor,

ted Catholic, sought to reintroduce that hated

James

and feared

commit-

a

II,

religion into his

realm in the 1680s, he was removed from the throne in a bloodless coup,

known

engineered by the leaders of English society, and

ever since as the

Glorious Revolution. There was no need for battle or civil war, though

had James decided

possible that,

to stand

and

fight rather

than

it is

flee to

France, his legitimacy might have enabled him, perhaps with compromise, to retain his crown. That, however,

main

casualty

is

another "what

if?,"

and one whose

would have been the disappearance from the romance of his-

tory of the valiant

and hopeless Jacobite movement, which sought

for

decades to restore James and his descendants to the throne. In the event,

James did

flee,

and

the English polity

his very surrender

mistakably supreme, and no

landed classes

This in

it

was an indication of how completely

had changed since the 1630s: Parliament was now un-

monarch could

flout

its

wishes or those of the

represented.

new outlook found

John Locke himself. In

its

champion and

its

most

his Second Treatise of Civil

influential

before the Glorious Revolution, but not published until the

William that, as

III,

was

safely

on the throne, Locke defined the

known

developed by his followers, has come to be

exponent

Government, written

new

king,

political outlook as liberalism.

He

was deeply influenced by Hobbes's theories, but he softened their implications so as to justify the establishment of a regime that, rather

than exer-

cising total control, took care (as did the English

government of

not to ignore the concerns of

Where Hobbes had

its

leading citizens.

scribed the State of Nature before the invention of liant

and original

and cruelty of

intellectual construct

man

into a war of

all

—

as hellish,

against

125

all,

government

his day)

—

de-

a bril-

shaped by the greed

leaving

life

"nasty, poor,

WHAT brutish,

and

up so

protect

When

as to

government was created,

it

was

in fear so as to

one another. Hobbes, determined to minimize

sistance to authority, reserved just life.

therefore,

meet peoples' needs, not established

subjects from

its

2

Locke argued that human reason was already operating

short,"

in the State of Nature.

willingly set

IF?

one

re-

right to the individual: protection of

Locke, speaking for the self-assured landed gentry, expanded those

rights to include

From then

not only

life

but also liberty and property.

on, the basic elements of electoral democracy as

them gathered inexorable

force in England.

parties with distinct agendas

tested elections that forced

ment of the population events in the capital.

By

1

700, nationwide political

were beginning to organize; there were con-

governments out of office; and a

electorate was

still

small, but the assumptions

about the nature of politics had changed dramatically in half a century.

is

more than

little

And the momentum continued as the mother of Parliaments

spawned countless imitators over the next 300 This

significant seg-

influence the direction of

felt itself entitled to

The

we know

a central story of

modem history,

years.

and

it is

one of the

crucial rea-

sons that the West has had so powerful an influence on the rest of the world. But

it

could so easily have turned out differently.

democratic idea, which has

its

have flowered anyway. Other

have appeared. But

this

theorists, practices,

and

may be

that the

would eventually

traditions could well

was the particular road that opened up, and one

needs only a modicum of imagination to see how, in could have turned into a dead end. For

change that even

It

roots in ancient Greece,

civil

its

earliest days,

it

wars are times of such rapid

a slight shift in circumstances

can have momentous

results.

Charles

1

is

the perfect exemplar of the truism that the personality and ac-

tions of a major historical figure can alter the course of events. Possibly because, as a

young man, he had stayed

at the

Spanish court for a number of

months, and had been able to watch an absolute monarch exercise

command

total

of people and policy, Charles as king developed a haughty and

dismissive view of the rights of his subjects. His reign began with four years

of struggle with Parliament, at the

end of which the House of 126

Commons

If

Charles

I

Had Not

CHARLES Charles

I

I:

Left Whitehall,

A STUDY

IN

August 164

STUBBORNNESS

of England, the foremost art collector of the seventeenth century,

posed on horseback for

this portrait

by one of his favorite painters, Anthony

Dyck. For Charles, compromise was never an option, and he would English

civil

war (and

(Anthony Van Dyck, 1599-1641,

even sought to challenge point, in 1629, years

his

head)

.

But what

Portrait of Charles

I.

if

Van

lose the

he had been out of the picture?

Louvre, Pans. Aiinari/Art Resource,

NY)

his ancient right to dissolve the session.

he decided he had had enough, and

for the

At

that

next eleven

he ruled without Parliament. Distant and disdainful, he became a

127

WHAT deeply unpopular figure, and

when

IF?

2

his authoritarian policies drove his

Scottish suhjects to revolt, the carefully constructed facade of imperturbable majesty collapsed around him.

Unable

to finance

an army to repel the Scots without parliamentary

was forced to

ation, Charles

recall the

assembly in 1640, but the

tax-

Commons,

organized by a determined member of the landed gentry, John Pym, made

demands Charles could not countenance, and he quickly dissolved what

came

to be

known as

the Short Parliament.

he was forced to give way again and to

As

the

summon

crisis

deepened, though,

the so-called Long Parlia-

ment, which gained the right not to be dismissed without

and was

to

sit

until 1653.

Most of the

Church

It

was

its

own

and

radical changes in the law, in political structures,

that the

approval

assembly that led the revolution.

this

in the

members of the Long Parliament decreed did not long sur-

vive the revolution. But the shock they delivered to the country's system of

government was never forgotten,

on the monarchy on the

itself.

an

especially since the climax was

assault

Constantly deceived by a king who, despite defeat

battlefield, regarded

himself as bound by no promises or agreements,

the parliamentarians finally lost

all

patience.

Oliver Cromwell, called Charles "a

man

The commander of their army,

of blood" for the deviousness and

the plots that scuttled every compromise and repeatedly forced a renewal of the fighting. Finally, in January 1649, the king was executed after a

whose

By

legality

he refused to recognize, and England became a republic.

this time,

many

membered had come

of the revolutionary ideas for which the period to the surface,

universal male suffrage

more than two

trial

—

centuries, but

ern democratic practice.

most notably a demand

a proposal that

theory of Hobbes's Leviathan.

re-

for virtually

was not to be implemented

which has come

And

is

to be seen as a pillar of

for

mod-

the execution also inspired the counter-

As

for the structure of

government

itself,

the

major assault on tradition (the destruction of the authority of the Church of England, the aristocracy, and the

none of the many experiments

monarchy

tried

itself)

had taken

over the next decade

left

place,

a

and

mark on

England's polity. But might the intensifying conflict of the 1640s have been

avoided? Could things have turned out otherwise, and

consequences have been?

128

if

so,

what would the

Charles

If

One

I

scenario requires

Had Not

Left Whitehall,

no more than

August 164

a slight adjustment in the incidence

Nobody

of the great scourge of seventeenth-century Europe, the plague.

was

immune

break and

to

to

its

when

flee

from an out-

hope that one escaped before the contagion spread to one's

own home. That 1641,

The

dread assault.

only recourse was to

indeed what happened, for example, in August oi

is

had reached

Charles's relations with his subjects

a perilous

moment. the armed threat from Scotland intensifying, the king

With for the

London

left

north to face his rebellious subjects on August 10. Just six days later

As

plague was discovered in a house in Westminster, near parliament.

Edward Nicholas, reported

Charles's adviser, soon to be secretary of state, in October, the

more hotheaded members of the Commons "wished rather

that they should

Mr.

Pym

ion."

sit

will find

here at Westminster and die here together, but

1

believe

few (besides those of his juncto [faction]) of that opin-

The caution was only

natural, but the proximity of the outbreak to

the person of the king himself bears emphasizing. Charles's splendid Whitehall palace was but a few yards from

where par-

liament sat in Westminster. Tourists today flock to the palace's one remain-

House

in Whitehall.

Its

ceiling, painted by Rubens, was commissioned by Charles to glorify his

fa-

ing building, Inigo Jones's magnificent Banqueting

ther,

and

in a

supreme irony

it

was to be outside

this

house that the royal

scaffold

was to be erected in January of 1649. For most

the site

is

convenient stop, because

a

hundred yards away

to the south,

is

tourists these days,

end of Whitehall, perhaps a

at the

Parliament Square. That was the

triv-

ial

distance that would have separated Charles from the plague had he

for

Scotland It

just

one week

later.

happened that the plague of 1641 was

a

minor outbreak. In 1636

had been quite serious, and the worst casualties of the century were to in 1665.

But the pestilence of 1641 could

easily

have been

merely luck, and perhaps the weather, that restrained

know what

its

effects

could have been.

diary for 1665 to get a sense of died,

and

as

he traveled the

left

its

One

ravages.

virulence.

it

was

And we

has but to read Samuel Pepys's

Many who were

streets of London,

129

its

far worse;

it

come

close to Pepys

he encountered regularly the

WHAT stricken, covered in sores,

and

IF? 2

corpses.

He was

alternately fearful

signed as he recorded what was "every day sadder and sadder news." culated that in one

midst of

all

it

healthy that a

week some 10,000 had died

he decided to draw up his

man cannot depend upon

and

re-

He cal-

of the plague, and in the

will,

"the town growing so un-

living

two days to an end." That

—on one occasion finding he could escape the stench of death only by chewing tobacco— was, he admitted, pure His he made

through

it

that

luck.

any hint of a symptom, such

terror at every report of illness or at

as a

headache, was well-founded; only the stoicism he managed to muster in the

most dreadful of the seventeenth century's scourges was unusual.

face o{ this

clear that,

It is

had the king succumbed

dren would probably have died susceptible to plague once

it

as well,

in the

summer

of 1641, his chil-

because the young were especially

had entered a home.

And

the eradication of

the immediate Stuart dynasty would have had incalculable consequences.

For the heir would have been Charles's

who

forties,

in 1613

had married

become one of the

saddest spectacles in the Europe of the day.

six years after Elizabeth's

its

When,

just

staunchly Catholic Habsburg

to take over the throne. Despite warnings

common

The

result

new

had been

total disaster. Before

rank, Frederick and his supporters

burgs and their

ally.

all his

had accepted the

especially large because

have it

And

for Frederick

Moun-

may have been merely one

dotted their history, but the defeat

signaled the final suppression of their re-

unorthodoxy and placed them under Habsburg domination

years.

offer.

had been crushed by the Habs-

For the Czechs, this

in a series of subjugations that

friends

he had enjoyed even a year in

Catholic Bavaria, at the Battle of the White

tain, just outside Prague.

loomed

from

cause with rebels, the impulsive

Frederick, excited at the prospect of a royal crown,

more

mid-

wedding, the kingdom of Bohemia, which was

was foolhardy to make

it

ligious

in her

the rebels had turned to her husband, the leading Calvinist prince in

Germany,

his

now

Frederick, the elector of the Palatinate, a

heavily Protestant, had revolted against

that

Elizabeth,

on the banks of the Rhine. This unfortunate couple had

rich principality

rulers,

sister,

and

his family

ingly referred to as the "Winter" king

it

and queen

130

for

300

was a catastrophe. Mockthereafter,

he and

his wife

If

had

Charles

Had Not

I

to flee Prague ignominiously. Moreover, as

the Habsburg Holy

Roman

emperor,

who was

August 1641

punishment

for his treason,

his overlord, stripped

him

of

title as

one of the seven electors of the em-

(who elected each new emperor)

to Bavaria; allowed Spain's Catholic

the Palatinate; transferred his pire

Left Whitehall,

army

to

The

occupy

and forced him into

his lands;

exile.

years that followed were utterly miserable.

From

his refuge in the

Netherlands, Frederick became a rallying point for the Protestant

ance to the Habsburgs, but to no practical ble to end the Thirty Years'

War

effect.

became

resist-

Indeed,

it

when

compromise was

in the 1640s only

a

possi-

allowing his family to return to the Palatinate and their

finally reached,

electorate, while at the

same time allowing Bavaria

keep a newly created

to

eighth electorate. By then the Winter king was long gone: he had died during a surreptitious visit to the Palatinate in 1632,

been unknown ever ile

since.

and

His widow, Elizabeth, was

his grave site has

left

to bring

up in ex-

the survivors of the twenty children the couple had produced in just un-

der twenty years of marriage.

That she had come through twenty thirty years,

made

day. Pregnancies

childbirths,

and was

to live another

Elizabeth an extraordinary figure in the Europe of her

were highly dangerous in an age of easy infection and

effective medicine,

and

it

a successful conclusion.

in-

was almost unheard o{ to bring twenty of them to

That, in addition, she was able to shoulder the

huge burden of a fatherless family makes her one of the more remarkable

women Charles exile

of the century. 1.

And

She had

the sympathetic

assistance for a few years from her brother,

Dutch who were her hosts ensured

was comfortable. Most important, she became a symbol

tants, especially

that her

for all Protes-

her English countrymen, of persecution by the Catholic

leaders of Europe. Indeed,

one of the accusations leveled

at

her father and

brother by their more strident subjects was that they had betrayed not only the Protestant cause, but family duty, by doing nothing to restore Elizabeth to her lands

This was the if

and

titles.

woman who would have

that August plague

had erupted

inherited the English throne in 1641

just a

131

week

earlier,

spread one hundred

WHAT

IF?

2

yards to Whitehall Palace, and carried off Charles

would have reigned

who was

Ludwig,

it

twenty-one more

his family.

line

on

actually arrived (with

She

and her oldest son, Karl

years,

would have

to regain the Palatinate electorate in 1648,

German

brought a

for

and

1

to the English throne half a century earlier than

George

and the Hanoverians, whose

I

title

was to

descend from Elizabeth's youngest daughter, Sophia). Elizabeth's most

mous

who fought

child, her third son, Rupert, a soldier

War and

later in

But her most unusual daughter, also Elizabeth,

How

Germany, would probably have

might things have been

led

would have been a heroine to the very

There

is

little in

her

life

the same

life.

war seems almost

civil

summer of

Parliament's power was secured by the

I.

much

however, for Elizabeth and for

different,

England? That there would have been no

Charles

who was

and the abbess of a community of pious Lutheran

a friend of Descartes in

in the Thirty Years'

Charles Ps army, would doubtless have been a major figure

in English society.

women

fa-

rebels

1641, and the

who were

certain.

new queen

so suspicious of

would have encour-

to suggest that she

aged the schemes and the confrontations that drew her brother into the fatal

war with

his subjects.

The compromises

that required so

much

shed-

ding of blood might well have been achieved in peace. In particular, because of her Calvinist background, and her

Netherlands

—that

"staple of sects

many

years in the tolerant

and mint of schism

.

.

.

where not one so

strange /Opinion but finds credit and exchange," in the words of the poet

Andrew Marvell

—Elizabeth would almost

open and expansive

religious settlement

certainly

have supported a more

than the one that was reached in

the 1660s. It

is

possible that the

more conservative elements

would have remained opposed even have been reached in the

and in the absence of warfare

would have

filled his

man, happy on

it

is

shoes as a political leader.

would have remained,

Other

months of 1641. They resented Pym

Charles that autumn made

as Nicholas's letter to live long,

last

as

he had been

his estates

in English society

moderate settlement that could

to the

clear.

But

more

to

Cromwell

likely that

he

until 1640, a retiring country gentle-

and in the practice of his Puritan

radicals in Parliament

Pym was not

implausible that It is far

deeply,

might

132

still

beliefs.

have caused trouble, but with-

-

If

Charles

I

Had Not

August 1641

Left Whitehall,

out a civil war their influence would have been minimized.

The

voices o{

the dispossessed would have remained unheard, and the heritage of such ideas as universal

male suffrage or freedom o{ the press (which Milton was

soon to advocate) would have had to await their

first

champions, perhaps

for more than a century. That neither Hobbes nor Locke would have

the need to write about politics

The concept

dom

as

is

felt

perhaps the most dramatic change of all.

of the state, the definition of authority, and the quest for free-

we know them today would have developed more

bly in entirely different forms.

One hundred

fifty

slowly and possi-

years later, the absence of

the precedent of a people trying and executing their king might also have affected the course of the

revolutionary tradition of

French Revolution, not to mention the entire

modem

Europe.

The

fact that

England had not

gone through the trauma, though, might have removed the restraint that helped make her a mere spectator during subsequent revolutionary upheavals.

Sometimes, however,

it is

the small detail that

the contingencies that shape our ends.

With

dissenting faiths quietly accepted, there

is

especially telling about

Elizabeth

on the throne, and

would have been no need

William Penn to emigrate to America. There might

United

States, but there

sylvania.

Move

would certainly have been no

a plague just

one week

tle

hillocks

and the

large ranges that

shift

have been a

state

named Penn-

it

travel

no more

the contours of both the

determine

133

still

and have

earlier,

than a hundred yards northward, and you

for

history's

wayward path.

lit-

THOMAS FLEMING

NAPOLEON'S INVASION

OF NORTH AMERICA Aedes aegypti

As we have

takes

a holiday, 1802

seen in Theodore K. Rahb's essay about Charles

history's great leveler, literally,

and epidemics,

have been responsible for more than

I,

disease

can be

those accidental force multipliers,

their share

of turning points

—and

might-

have-beens as well. You think of the mysterious plague that decimated an

conquering Assyrian army in front of Jerusalem in72l B.C., a decisive in the religious history of the world;

Athens (and

killed Pericles himself)

,

the flulike illness that

the Inca.

The

list

pened, had broken out at a

There may be no

better

low fever epidemic that

tribes

could go on.

ravaged Periclean

example of the

and brought doum two empires,

What

slightly different

largely

moment

helping to destroy Athenian power; or the

smallpox that wasted Native American

Aztec and

all-

if

these epidemics

time or in a form

effect of disease

wiped out a French army

on

less

the

had never hapsevere?

history than the yel-

in Haiti in

1

802 and pre-

sented the young United States, just twenty years after the Revolutionary War,

with a matchless opening chase, the

868,000 square

to the

West. That was of course the Louisiana Pur-

miles of the lands west of the Mississippi that

Jefferson's representatives in

France picked up for a bargain price of $15 million,

or approximately four cents an acre.

hemmed

in

Thomas

No

longer

would

by the Mississippi River and British Canada.

trading city for the trans -Appalachian states

westward movement (and with

it,

and

the

United States be

New

Orleans, the key

territories,

would be

ours.

The

a half century of rancorous dispute over the

spread of slavery) could begin.

134

I

Napoleons Invasion of North America But Thomas Fleming asks us that

would have been altogether impossible

that carries yellow fever.

ond

New

slavery

was banned have

Thomas

Jefferson

vuithout

the alternatives,

Aedes

affected the United States?

is

and ones

aegypti, the mosquito

How would a Louisiana

New Orleans —

THOMAS FLEMING

some of

Would a French-led Caribbean-American

France, have taken shape?

have sought refuge in

of

to consider

empire, a sec-

Territory in which

Might Napoleon himself

with a Waterloo in the bayous as the result?

a historian

whose many books include biographies

and Benjamin Franklin; an account of the American

Revolution, Liberty!; Duel: Alexander Hamilton, Aaron Burr, and the Future of America;

and

the

War

and most

recently,

Within World

War

The

New Dealers

IL

135

War: Franklin D. Roosevelt

EVERYONE

AGREES THAT

the 1803 Louisiana Purchase was the great

triumph of President Thomas the

man from

Jefferson's administration. In

one

stroke,

of the United States.

Few

realize

Monticello doubled the

size

the so-called "greatest real estate deal in history" also solved one of the

most unnerving problems: the

president's

tionary French army in tainly

New

Orleans

—

a presence that

have changed the course of American

Even fewer know that the solution Jefferson's

triumph

—was

would almost

Aedes aegypti

—and the

largely the product not of clever

—the mosquito in

diplomacy or glo-

known

and army camps, Aedes

to

nineteenth century, no one had any idea that

this

trig-

South America, and

the Caribbean,

tropical Africa, with death rates as high as 85 percent.

sect

origin of

that produces yellow fever. Breed-

ing in pools of stagnant water in cities, towns,

gered devastating epidemics

cer-

history.

to this nightmare

rious feats of arms, but of the existence of a tiny female creature scientists as

Revolu-

possibility of a biracial

At

the turn of the

seemingly harmless in-

was the source of such woe.

When Jefferson

became president

his long love affair with the

in 1800,

he was

French Revolution

—

a

still

in the throes of

romance

so intense,

he

once declared he would have gladly seen the entire world depopulated rather than permit "that cause" to

fail.

This ideological fervor enabled

ferson to dismiss the blood-soaked orgy of violence into

upheaval collapsed leadership o{

—and

its

which the

Jef-

historic

evolution into a virtual tyranny under the

Napoleon Bonaparte. The new president was equally

blithe

about the nasty undeclared war the United States had fought with France during the

last

two years of President John Adams's administration,

which French warships and

American shipping Also ready

privateers

—the equivalent of $600 million

for diplomatic revision in Jefferson's

136

in

had destroyed $12 million worth of in

modem money.

White House was Amer-

Napoleon's Invasion of North America

ica's

relationship with the republic that

known variously as Hispaniola and

had been established on the

Saint Domingue.

Then as now

it

island

was

di-

vided into a French-speaking western third (the future republic of Haiti)

and a Spanish-speaking eastern two-thirds (the future Dominican Republic),

with a range of mountains

as a

geographical barrier between them.

Spain had ceded the Spanish part of the island to France in 1795. For

American merchants, Saint Domingue 's wealthy upper

class

were prime

customers. In 1790, before the French Revolution exploded, U.S. exports to the island, mostly food

and lumber, amounted to $3 million, second only

to the $6.9 million that the

United States shipped to England. Small won-

der that the island was considered the ultimate prize in the numerous wars the great powers fought in the Caribbean.

Revolution's cry of liberty, equality, and fraternity had

The French

reached Saint Domingue early in the

1

790s.

The

precarious social mixture

of royal officials, rich Creole planters, middle-class storekeepers, and crafts-

men and free whose

slaves,

mulattoes was sitting on a potential volcano oi^OOfiOO black toil

on the

sugar plantations

lucrative overseas possession. In 1793,

Revolutionary France States for a decade.

—

made

the island France's most

war erupted between England and

a conflict that roiled the politics of the

The two embryo

parties, the Jeffersonian

United

Republicans,

forerunners of today's Democrats, and Alexander Hamilton's Federalists,

forerunners of the Republicans, took opposite sides.

The

British

and

their allies

made very

little

headway against the French

Revolutionary armies on land. But overseas, the British jor advantage.

British Years' trol

amphibious

War

( 1

fleet

proved a ma-

Island after island of France's Caribbean empire assaults,

754-61 ). In

an

Paris,

to

fell

they had mastered during the Seven

art

meanwhile, the radical Jacobins seized con-

of the French National Assembly. In 1794 they issued a declaration

freeing all the slaves in France's overseas dominions.

vated only partly by a belief in universal trigger

The French

also

moti-

hoped

to

massive slave revolts in Jamaica and other English colonies and in

the United States. clared

liberty.

The move was

By that time President George Washington had de-

America neutral

in the global

war

toward England.

137

—with

a distinct

Hamiltonian

tilt

WHAT

138

IF?

2

Napoleon's Invasion of North America

When

news of the Jacobin decree reached Saint Domingue,

a civil

war

of unbelievable ferocity exploded, with massacres of whites by blacks and

compounded by the invasion of a

vice versa,

British army.

Out

of the tur-

moil emerged a charismatic black leader, Toussaint L'Ouverture, a figure

who

terrified slave

trol

of the

owners in the American South. The Federalists in con-

American government took

Adams and his secretary

of state,

a different view. President

Timothy Pickering, saw L'Ouverture

John as

an

opportunity to frustrate British and French imperialism in the Caribbean

and maintain America's lucrative trade with Saint Domingue. They shipped L'Ouverture 's army supplies and ammunition and at Alexander Hamilton's suggestion, sent his

boyhood

the island's major port. trusted friend

American

fleet

quite saying

it,

and

friend

Cap

adviser.

Edward Stevens, born on

St.

Croix, to

Fran9ois,

where he became L'Ouverture's

The Adams

administration even ordered the

in the Caribbean to show the

flag at

Cap

Francois.

Without

they urged L'Ouverture to declare independence.

Secretary of State Pickering performed masterfully in this delicate diplo-

macy, persuading jittery South Carolina Federalist slave owners to back

him

Congress by producing evidence that the French government's

in

representative in Saint

Domingue,

a

demagogic Jacobin named Theodore

Hedouville, had urged L'Ouverture to invade British Jamaica and the

American South

to

foment slave uprisings

there.

But the black leader had

refused to pursue this racist foreign policy.

Backed by American diplomacy and firepower, L'Ouverture routed the British

army and became the de facto

ruler of Saint

Domingue. His troops

quickly conquered the Spanish part of the island as well.

Through Ed-

ward Stevens and Timothy Pickering, Alexander Hamilton was invited to advise the black leader stincts, life

Hamilton

—and

also

on

a constitution. True to his authoritarian in-

told L'Ouverture to appoint himself governor general for

enroll every able-bodied

man

in the militia.

added to the government's structure, but

it

An

assembly was

had no power to

initiate

legislation.

With him

driving energy, L'Ouverture invited whites and mulattoes to join

in restoring a

semblance of prosperity to Saint Domingue.

He banned

slavery forever but persuaded the former slaves to return to the sugarcane

139

WHAT work

fields to

he never

as draftees in the service of the state. Unfortunately,

trusted the slave-owning British

pendence.

IF? 2

He

and Americans enough

to declare inde-

retained a frequently expressed loyalty to Revolutionary

France, which had given his race their freedom.

When Napoleon Bonaparte seized power in Paris, months by Thomas verture was

Jefferson's electoral

doomed. In Washington, D.C., the new American president

urged the French charge that

followed within a few

triumph in 1800, Toussaint L'Ou-

America was eager

advised France to

Louis Pichon, to

d'affaires,

tell his

to help restore French rule in Saint

government

Domingue. He

make peace with England and send an army

to crush the

black rebels; "Nothing would be easier than to furnish your army and

with everything and to reduce Toussaint to starvation," Jefferson

fleet

said.

Historians debate whether this ruthless reversal of American policy was

rooted in Jefferson's eagerness to show his friendship for the

new

ruler of

France or in his fear of a slave republic that would communicate dangerous ideas about

South.

It

freedom and equality to the

American

restless blacks o{ the

was probably a mixture of both motives. Napoleon had not yet

made himself France's

ruler for

life.

Jefferson was

still

able to view

legitimate heir of the Revolution. In September 1800, Virginia

him

as a

had been

Richmond

badly shaken by the aborted rebellion of Gabriel Prosser, a blacksmith, and his brother Martin, an itinerant preacher.

The

Prossers,

both free blacks, had organized slaves

religious meetings, using the language of the

at funerals

and

secret

American Declaration of

In-

dependence and the French Declaration of the Rights of Man. The plan called for a

march on Richmond from nearby

state arsenal to equip a black army,

plantations, a seizure of the

and the massacre of

habitants except Methodists and Quakers,

the white in-

On

the

Richmond and

the

who opposed

night of the rebellion, a storm washed out the roads to

all

slavery.

would-be rebels scattered. Before they could reorganize, the secret leaked

and the Prossers and other

leaders were promptly executed. But sporadic

smaller slave revolts had continued to disturb the state for the next

two

years.

In Europe, Jefferson's election as president coincided with the exhaus-

140

Napoleon's Invasion of North America

two superpowers,

tion of the

negotiations began,

after eight years of global warfare.

Napoleon acted on

man army

1801, the First Consul shipped a 20,000

commanded by Jefferson or

anyone

Man

1801, the

his brother-in-law,

his reluctant

else, this

of Destiny, as

Spanish

ana to France.

Unknown

liked to be

immense

retroceding the as

called,

to

March

expedition had another purpose. In

had been given to Spain

It

Domingue,

to Saint

General Charles Leclerc.

Napoleon

ally into

As peace

November

Jefferson's invitation. In

had browbeaten

territory of Louisi-

compensation

for

her losses in

the Seven Years' War. In secret orders, Bonaparte told Leclerc to transfer the bulk of the army to

New

Orleans

as

soon

as

he restored French supremacy in Saint

Domingue, a task that Bonaparte estimated would take only for slavery.

Napoleon thought

it

six

weeks.

ought to be reimposed along with French

but he withheld judgment on that decision for the time being.

rule,

goal was the creation of a self-sufficient overseas empire. Louisiana

supply Saint

Domingue and the other French

islands

with food

need to buy from the Americans. The

prices, eliminating the

As

The

would

at cut-rate

islands

would

produce sugar, coffee, and cotton to swell France's depleted exchequer. Ships of other nations would be excluded from this lucrative business.

A

confident Leclerc arrived in

Cap

Francois in February 1802, and

promptly went to work on "the gilded Africans," ously called them.

and

his allies

The

size

more than

When

made L'Ouverture

much

too large to be the

Leclerc called

sea.

It

was

Paris, reaffirming France's theoretical sov-

on Henri Christophe, one of L'Ouverture 's

generals, to surrender the port city,

from land and

Napoleon contemptu-

of the French fleet and army

a little suspicious.

mere escort of a delegation from ereignty.

as

he declined. Leclerc promptly attacked

Christophe responded by burning Cap Fran9ois and

re-

treating into the country.

All-out war erupted throughout Saint Domingue. well for the French.

The Spanish section of the

with the help of the local population.

oncoming French coastal ports

and

Some

island

it

was quickly occupied

had captured

and was preparing an offensive into the

141

seemed to go

black garrisons surrendered to

brigades. In ten days Leclerc

forts

At first

all

the key

interior.

But

— WHAT

IF?

2

L'Ouverture remained beyond his grasp, and another black general, JeanJacques DessaUnes, rampaged through the countryside, slaughtering every

white person he found

An

—and any black who

tried to help

them.

attempt at negotiations failed and on February 18, 1802, Leclerc

launched an offensive against L'Ouverture 's interior stronghold, Gonaives.

Advancing through

both

in four columns, the

"fire

and bayonets"

French discovered they had to wade

for every foot of ground. Losses

sides but the aggressive attack paid off

a pacified Saint

On

several black generals

The French commander combined

switched sides and supported Leclerc. force with lavish promises o{

when

were heavy on

money and power

to those

who joined him

in

Domingue.

February 23, L'Ouverture ambushed a French force of 5,000

few miles from Gonaives. For a while the French teetered on

rout.

men

a

But their

commander. General Donatien de Rochambeau (son of the general who was George Washington's partner a

moment

blacks,

at

Yorktown) rescued the situation with

of bravado. Tossing his hat into the ranks of the

he shouted: "My comrades, you

will

oncoming

not leave your general's hat be-

hind!" The French infantry wheeled and soon had L'Ouverture 's the run.

The next day Gonaives went up

Leclerc was losing Also, for the

first

men

—

as

many

as

men on

in flames.

two thousand

time he noticed a strange

illness

in a single battle.

creeping through his

army. Soldiers weakened without warning; in a day they were too sick to walk.

Then came

black vomit, yellowing skin, convulsions, and death. But

the French commander, as determined and as ruthless as his imperious brother-in-law, pressed his offensive,

notably Henri Christophe

On May and

retire

1,

—switched

and soon other black generals

sides.

L'Ouverture agreed to peace terms.

He would

give up power

with a respectable bodyguard to a plantation in the

interior.

His

generals and officers would receive equivalent ranks in the French army,

which soon became 50 percent

black.

Why did Toussaint surrender? Probably because he learned that Napoleon had signed what seemed a Amiens. This superior

left

definitive treaty of peace with the British at

him and his black army at the mercy of Bonaparte's vastly

numbers and weaponry. The black leader capitulated, hoping

142

to

Napoleon's Invasion of North America

get the best possible deal

from Leclerc. L'Ouverture's second in command,

Dessalines, sullenly accepted similar terms

But the war was

on May

6.

from over. Guerrilla resistance continued to

far

flare

throughout the interior of the island. Moreover, Leclerc was confronting other problems beyond Saint Domingue's horizon. In the

same

first

months of 1802,

Jefferson

James Madison, learned that the French

American ambassador Saint

Domingue

in

a mere

Jefferson's love affair

station

his secretary of state,

now owned

London warned them way

and

Louisiana. Next, the

of Napoleon's plan to

on Leclerc 's voyage

to

New

make

Orleans.

with the French Revolution came to an abrupt end,

under the influence o( the cooler, more suspicious Madison and other ad-

Tench Coxe,

visers.

a Philadelphia

merchant who was heavily involved

the cotton business, warned that the United States could not "be too

in

much

on our guard against the consequences" o{ a French army in Louisiana.

When

General Leclerc proclaimed a blockade of the Saint Domingue's

rebel-held ports and asked eration, the

that left

him

Charge Louis Pichon to obtain American coop-

dismayed Frenchman encountered an American about-face speechless. Jefferson

and Madison informed him, presumably

with straight faces, that they would not be able to starve Toussaint's army after all.

The United

States did not

have the power to enforce an embargo

against

American merchants, who were making millions trading with the

blacks.

An agitated Pichon reported

that he found Jefferson "very reserved

and cold." Secretary of State

Madison

a posture of "neutrality"

if

told

Pichon the United States would adopt

war broke out between the French army and the

black rebels. That meant the French could seize

could catch them. But

it

also

American

ships

if

they

meant that the American government would

not give Leclerc 's army loans or credits to buy food and ammunition for his

men. The French did not have enough warships

to

clamp a meaningful

blockade on the island's thirteen ports and France was too ply

them with

A

testy Leclerc tried to force

Domingue

They

far

away

to sup-

food.

American merchants trading with Saint

to accept lower prices or promissory notes for their cargoes.

refused the notes,

knowing that France was more 143

or less bankrupt.

WHAT and preferred to

sell

IF?

their goods to the rebels.

an exclusively French tilt

affair. Profits,

Most merchants had deduced

make

or otherwise learned Napoleon's plan to

American

2

trade with Saint

Domingue

present and future, accentuated the

to the rebels.

Next came an uproar from

New

Orleans that had a huge impact on

Jef-

ferson's attitude

toward Leclerc's expedition. The Spanish,

of the port

suddenly announced they were revoking the "right of de-

city,

still

in control

posit,"

which George Washington's administration had negotiated

Under

this

in 1795.

agreement, Americans were entitled to export cotton, farm pro-

duce, and other items of trade through

New

Orleans.

When

the right was

revoked, an instant shout for war rose from the Western states, led by warrior politicians

such

as

Andrew Jackson

a half million dollars in goods

of Tennessee. Kentucky alone had

and crops on the Mississippi when the news

of the revocation arrived.

General Fiamilton warmly seconded

New York

Evening Post. In private

ferson confronted. Fie

this call for

letters

war in the pages of the

he gloated over the dilemma

had been elected deploring the

large

Jef-

army and navy

the Federalists had raised for the undeclared war with France and the taxes that supported the

new

and reduced the armed great embarrassment of

military establishment. Fie forces to a shadow.

how

to carry

When Jefferson tried to defuse

on

a

Now

had repealed the taxes

he was faced with "the

war without

taxes."

the situation by sending James

Monroe

to

France as an envoy extraordinary, Fiamilton, writing in the Evening Post

under the pseudonym

recommended going ship an

army

to

Pericles, ferociously attacked the

to

move. Fiamilton

war immediately, before the French had time to

New Orleans.

Fie called

on Jefferson

to triple the size of the

pathetic 3,000-man regular army and muster a 40,000-man standby force of militia.

The Navy should be strengthened and

England to "cooperate with us

Now

at a

negotiations opened with

*

moment's warning."

the whole country, instead of a few administration insiders,

the threat President Jefferson was confronting

knew

— and Fiamilton had used

it

to portray the president in the worst possible light. Unfortunately, the details

were essentially

true. Jefferson

had reduced the army and navy

144

to a

Napoleon's Invasion of North America

we now know, thanks

shadow. Worse,

to a

chance to explore French and

Spanish archives. Napoleon had on his secret service payroll

made

could have

Brigadier General James Wilkinson, the

American army, received allied

men who

his conquest of the Mississippi valley a simple matter.

with France).

commander

a secret annual stipend from

Known

to his Spanish handlers as

in chief of the

Madrid (currently

Agent

Wilkin-

13,

son had taken an oath swearing allegiance to Spain back in 1787. George

Rogers Clark, conqueror of the Northwest Territory in the Revolution, was

among allies

the distinguished

names on the French

secret service payroll.

Such

might well have enabled Napoleon to add the United States to Hol-

land and other nations of Europe that had

governments that obeyed orders from

become French

satellites,

with

Paris.

By now President Jefferson was a very troubled man. Doing a hitherto unthinkable foreign policy somersault, he talked of "marrying ourselves to the British fleet

and nation"

that the British vilified

them

to

keep Napoleon out of Louisiana.

would have been eager to do business with a

It is

unlikely

man who had

for the previous decade.

Fortunately for the disturbed president, that aforementioned character,

Aedes aegypti, was hard at work, decimating the French regiments. Noting Leclerc's

growing weakness, a watchful L'Ouverture began intriguing for a

comeback. But Leclerc was watching him too. Lured to a nearby plantation without his usual escort, the black leader was seized, thrown on a ship, and deported to France as a

common criminal.

in a freezing fortress in the Jura

There, Napoleon deposited him

Mountains, where L'Ouverture died a year

later.

At

this point

Bonaparte made a truly egregious blunder. Pressured by

refugee planters from Saint

Domingue and by numerous merchants

Havre and other French ports who had grown rich on the slave decided to reimpose slavery.

Domingue

When

word of

this decision

in

Le

trade,

he

reached Saint

in June 1802, the black masses rose in fury against the

and the black

soldiers allied

with them, triggering a

new

French

cycle of massacre

and countermassacre. General Leclerc was stunned by the ferocity of the blacks' resistance.

"They

die with incredible fanaticism

145

—they

laugh at

WHAT death;

it

is

the same with the

IF? 2

women," he

commander concluded he would have

said.

The

astonished French

to kill everyone

above the age of

twelve, a policy he proceeded to put into brutal practice.

Weakened by

a growing food shortage

and a lack of water

and

bottles

medical supplies, the French also found themselves fighting a losing battle with Aedes palling

aeg;ypti.

Whole

regiments died virtually en masse. Soon an ap-

60 percent of Leclerc's

the French

staff

was dead.

Finally,

on November

2,

1802,

commander himself succumbed.

American merchants continued rebels, shipping

their clandestine trade with the black

them guns and ammunition

as well as food.

The enraged

French threatened to send captured blacks to America, where they would

make good on

Hedouville's plan to spread slave revolts throughout the

Western Hemisphere.

A

grimly determined Napoleon poured in replace-

ments and ordered General Donatien de Rochambeau to continue the struggle.

Reinforced by 15,000 men, Rochambeau seemed on his way to restoring

French control of the ports, cutting off

island.

most of

He

drove black rebels from

their supply of guns

launching devastating attacks into the

all

the chief sea-

and ammunition, and began

interior.

But in Europe events were

The

unfolding that soon turned these victories into hollow triumphs. British decided that their

experiment with a purportedly peace-loving

Napoleon was not working. France was exhibiting the Mediterranean and elsewhere.

It

aggressive behavior in

soon became obvious to Napoleon

that the war for world supremacy was about to resume.

With

that near certainty in mind, the

plans for Louisiana. Without a ritory.

fleet,

Man

of Destiny rethought his

he would be unable to defend the

Pichon reported that the cancellation of the

right of deposit at

ter-

New

Orleans had turned American public opinion strongly against both France

and Spain. That aroused the specter of fighting a war with the Americans,

which he was unlikely

to win, especially

if

war with England resumed and

the British fleet interdicted support from France for Rochambeau's army.

Perhaps more important, Bonaparte needed

money

for his

war machine.

When Ambassador Robert to buy New Orleans and Florida, Napoleon suddenly asked him how much R. Livingston visited

him

in early 1803 seeking

146

i

Napoleon's Invasion of North America

he would be willing to pay

who

was soon joined by special envoy Monroe, President Jefferson.

By

July of 1803, they

North America

miles of

The amazed ambassador

for all of Louisiana.

for

could speak forcefully for

had bought 868,000 square

$15 million, and Jefferson was able to pro-

claim a tremendous political triumph over

Alexander Hamilton, who had

solemnly predicted Napoleon would never

sell

Napoleon continued the fears that

Louisiana.

struggle to subdue Saint

he might repudiate the Louisiana

deal.

Domingue

But the

—

stirring

moment news

of

the declaration of renewed war with England reached the Caribbean, the British

West

made Saint Domingue

Indies fleet

target

number one. The

navy bombarded the French-held seaports and smuggled guns and en-

royal

couragement to the

rebels.

A

desperate

Rochambeau

Louis Pichon the situation could be rescued only francs a

month

to

if

told

French charge

he received a million

buy food and weaponry. Jefferson declined to help and

American bankers were equally

cold. In

army reduced to 8,000 men, retreated

November

1803,

for a last stand in

Rochambeau,

Cap

Francois.

his

With

yellow fever continuing to ravage his ranks, he surrendered to a British fleet cruising offshore.

On January who had

1,

1804, the

new black ruler. General Jean-Jacques Dessalines,

long since switched back to the rebel side, proclaimed the island

independent of France and declared

it

would henceforth be known by

its

Carib-lndian name, Haiti. Taking a French tricolor, Dessalines tore the white

strip

from the

He proceeded

flag,

a graphic illustration of his regime's racial policy.

to massacre all the remaining whites

on the French

part of

the island. (The Spanish part of the island regained a precarious independ-

ence with the help of the British tion,

fleet.)

Under

Dessalines's personal direc-

white men, women, and children were hacked and shot to death.

was a blunder that sent Haiti careening into isolation for decades banished If

uine

all

It

—and

thoughts of emancipating slaves in the American South.

Napoleon had been

commitment

a true son of the

to universal

French Revolution, with a gen-

human rights,

instead of a Corsican military

genius with only minimal moral standards, he might well have succeeded in his original vision of using Saint

Domingue

lishment of a Caribbean- American empire.

147

as a first step

The key

toward the estab-

to his possible success

WHAT

IF? 2

was a genuine alliance with Toussaint L'Ouverture and his black legions. Philadelphia merchant

Tench Coxe knew whereof he spoke when he

de-

scribed Toussaint's soldiers as "military" with "habits of subordination" bro-

ken

forever.

A worried Coxe envisioned the possibility of a "large detachment of republican blacks [being sent] to Louisiana, accompanied by the sudden

emancipation of the blacks there." The

war on the American continent with the gruesome horrors of Haiti.

Out

result

might well have been a race

more than matched

barbarities that

of the turmoil might have arisen an

American warrior whose generalship matched L'Ouverture 's, and whose rocity

matched

Dessalines's

—Andrew Jackson. Almost

certainly,

ory would have meted out to the blacks the fate he inflicted

fe-

Old Hick-

on the Creek

Indian nation in 1814: extermination. If

Napoleon had established

in Louisiana

pressure

rific

a biracial colony of free blacks

and avoided war with the United

on the American South

States,

it

and whites

would have put

to begin a policy of gradual

ter-

eman-

cipation. President Jefferson was strongly in favor of this idea. Before

Gabriel's Rebellion,

would have freed 1800.

the

he had drawn up a slave children

all

Even after Gabriel

Prosser's

draft constitution for Virginia that

bom

in the state after

If

biracial nation

that

way

in-

to defuse black anger.

such a policy had prevailed, the United States would have been spared

the national nightmare

is still

known

as the Civil

War, with

might have emerged a hundred years

struggling to heal the spiritual

its

600,000 dead.

earlier

A

than the one

wounds of involuntary abolition

slavery's incalculable humiliations.

The to

31,

fears,

Man from Monticello continued to insist that gradual emancipation,

stead of guns and whips and patrols, was the best

and

December

attempted insurrection stoked white

grisly

make

events in Saint

this biracial

Domingue combined with

dream untenable

well as an idealist and he soon found himself under fellow Southerners to

make

Gabriel's Rebellion

in 1804. Jefferson

sure Haiti

was a politician

terrific

as

pressure from

remained isolated from the Ameri-

can South. His son-in-law, John W. Eppes, rose

in

Congress to declare that

U.S. merchants should have nothing to do with people of a race Americans

needed "to depress and keep down." Congress soon concurred and passed a

148

Napoleon's Invasion of North America

law prohibiting

all

trade with Haiti,

Timothy Pickering, now

tary of state

which

Jefferson signed.

Former

secre-

a U.S. senator from Massachusetts, at-

tacked this measure, claiming that the Haitians were only guilty of having "a skin not colored

Dessalines,

An

much more

even

our own."

like

wiser,

more moral policy and created

when he was

he might have

the

loyal colony of Louisiana,

fled

would have welcomed him

as

policy of closing

revoked, stirring

defeated in Europe and exiled

where the blacks of the French army

an apostle of emancipation. His white troops

would have been equally ready to

The Spanish

a biracial

westward from that island and found refuge in

to Elba,

warm feelings

rally to his standard.

New Orleans would have been long since

for

France up and

Napoleon's charisma would have

west.

Napoleon and

larger possibility swirls out of this historical kaleidoscope. If

Caribbean- American empire,

ley.

was, thanks to

complicated.

Napoleon had followed a

still

It

down the

Mississippi Val-

electrified the fighting

men

of the

hard for us to realize the fascination with which everyone

It is

re-

garded this larger-than-life figure. Newspapers reported his taste in food,

women, call to

clothes, horses, in rapt detail.

defend the rights of man

Combine

this

hypnotic effect with a

against Perfidious Albion and you have the

makings of a titanic confrontation.

The

British,

determined to hunt down the great predator,

as they

viewed

Bonaparte, would have dispatched a huge fleet and army in pursuit of final victory.

New

What might have happened? One can

Orleans in which

brigadiers.

Also in the upper ranks of

—Aaron

devotee of political power

With the French sippi Valley, there

easily envision a battle of

Andrew Jackson performed this force

as

one oi Napoleon's

might have been another

Burr.

firmly in control of

New Orleans and the

would have been no opportunity

lower Missis-

for Burr to

launch his

1806 scheme to detach the western states from the Union and conquer Mexico. That gambit depended on intimidating an enfeebled Spain. But Burr's hatred of less intense.

certainly

Thomas Jefferson and James Madison would have been no

With

his confederate.

would have thrown

General James Wilkinson,

in his lot with Bonaparte, Burr

who

almost

might well

have convinced Napoleon to launch a war of conquest to absorb Texas and

149

—

.

WHAT

IF? 2

New

Orleans, Spain would no

lure of filling his

exchequer with Mexico's

Mexico. By the time Napoleon arrived in longer have been an

ally.

The

gold and silver would have been

but

all

Wilkinson had something very tangible to

irresistible.

—

offer

Man

o{ the Southwest that would have enabled the

Mexico from But

first,

a half

Moreover, General

a collection of rare

of Destiny to invade

dozen possible routes.

there was the ultimate battle with the English.

How fitting, the

Americans (and even Bonaparte) might have thought, that clash should take place in the

The

flowered.

maps

British

New

this decisive

World, where the idea of

would have been driven by a variant on

here was a chance to stamp out once and for

all

the

liberty

first

this idea

American perversion

of that noble idea, British liberty, into the license of a rabble in arms to defy their lawful sovereign.

To command British

their forces in this revised battle of

New

Orleans, the

would not have sent any old general, picked out of the government's

hat, to finish off Bonaparte

their best

fighting

man

and the Americans. They would have chosen

—Arthur Wellesley,

the

on unfamiliar ground, without

Duke

of Wellington. Napoleon,

the massed cavalry that so often

shattered his foes at a battle's crucial moments, might have found himself at a severe disadvantage.

The Russian

debacle would have also shaken his

self-confidence

We

can be certain that the Iron Duke would not have committed the

blunders perpetrated by his impulsive brother-in-law. Major General Ed-

ward Pakenham, in the confrontation with General Jackson leans in January 1815.

against massed French

There would have been no

New

Or-

suicidal frontal assault

and American muskets. Wellington would have had

the advantage of an overwhelming British

puny squadron never gave him. With grasp, the British

at

fleet

—something Pakenham's

full

control of the Mississippi in his

commander would have

enfiladed the French- American

barricades from the river, forcing the defenders to fight in the

open against

his battle-tried veterans.

A

British victory, a

Waterloo of the bayous, would by no means have

been impossible or even improbable. Napoleon would have ended up on

Helena with

a steady diet of British arsenic, as

150

he did

St.

in factual history.

— Napoleon's Invasion of North America

George

Ill's

delighted ministers would have found themselves in control of

the city that dominated the

American heartland

—with

claim to possession of the entire province of Louisiana. gland, Senator Pickering

a force majeure

Up

in

New

En-

and other Yankees, disgusted by fourteen years of

Jeffersonian government, were discussing secession from the

Union. They

would have greeted the news o{ Wellington's triumph with gloats of grim satisfaction.

For a decade Pickering had been talking about negotiating a

New

En-

gland alliance with London, which would join the descendants of the Puritans with

Canada and the Maritime provinces

to create a nation capable of

eventually dominating the continent, reducing Jefferson and his slavocrats to a

humbled

minority.

would have been

The

destiny of

North America

far different, if this political

—and the world

realignment had come to pass

on Wellington's bayonets. Such

are the

amazing

possibilities

lutionary compulsion to feast

one of the world's deadliest

diseases.

creatures frustrated the dirtiest

Fourth of glass to

July,

Americans,

Aedes aegypti

as

negated by a tiny insect with an evo-

on humans' blood

With

—and

infect

them with

blind indifference, these buzzing

schemes and the noblest ambitions.

after toasting their heroes,

might well

one of the unsung heroines of the republic.

151

On the raise a

TOM WICKER

LINCOLN HAD

IF

NOT FREED THE SLAVES The

inevitable results of no

Emancipation Proclamation

Abraham

Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation of September 22, 1862, which

declared slaves "forever free ," "Lincoln's political artistry,"

mation

.

.

.

is

the

Tom

supreme moral moment of American

Wicker writes

here, "assured that the Procla-

would be seen as a justified war measure,

tarian deed."

When

he proposed

it

to his

history.

humani-

as well as a great

Cabinet that July, he argued that

the

taking of the moral high ground "was absolutely essential to the salvation of the

nation." closer to ates.

Though

the

North had won

Washington seemed

They had stopped

a heady triumph

the

at the

Union

to be

in the outskirts of their capital,

if

to

Richmond, won

was a

1

tactically

7

at

—

the

battle but

produced again and again. Lee

It

of

would

unchecked, might very well have ended in the cap-

the isolation of

Antietam

drawn

Army

invade Maryland and Pennsylvania.

Washington. Before he could issue

Proclamation, Lincoln badly needed a victory, any kind of victory.

on September

War

turning in favor of the Confeder-

Second Manassas, and now Robert E. Lee's

make a scythelike swing that, and

summer

that

Northern Virginia was preparing

ture of Baltimore

big victories in the West, the Civil

a

famous

bloodiest

strategic victory,

retired to Virginia,

buying precious time for Lincoln. Five days

day

in

What

American

a combination

his

he got

history

that the

—

war

ending the invasion threat and

later the president

made

his

an-

nouncement.

The Emancipation Proclamation was more than a

152

visionary document;

it

was

//

Lincoln

Had Not

Freed the Slaves

a strategically astute move, something too often forgotten. pear to

It

"made

the

war ap-

he a Northern crusade against slavery," Wicker writes, and from that

point on, the

European recognition

that the

Confederacy so desperately sought

would seem "an endorsement" of slavery. But what the illusion

if

the

moment

of victory (or

of one) had not come in time? In Wickers unhappy scenario,

it is

not

improbable that the proclamation would have gone unissued and the war would

have ended in a negotiated peace brokered by England and France. "Neither the

moral question of slavery nor the

political

question of secession would have been

resolved." Slavery might have survived for decades more.

consequences of an unresolved Civil

The counterfactual more

potentially

stakes of the

But beyond

War might have persisted into

slavery, the

our

own

time.

Emancipation Proclamation could not have been

damaging.

TOM WICKER

New York Times Washington bureau chief and a columnist for the newspaper. Among his many writings on the Civil War is is

a former

the novel Unto This Hour.

153

POLITICAL ANALYSTS,

SOCIOLOGISTS,

joumalists,

and historians

agree that the "race problem" remains a virulent, underlying issue in

American

and national.

politics, local

could

it

be otherwise?

When

memory of centuries of enslavement,

black citizens retain a virtually genetic

and when the

How

peonage, and

fight against racial segregation, share-crop

voteless second-class status barely triumphed less than a half-century ago.

When the "black ghetto" with its crime, poverty, lessness has

become

a

unemployment, and hope-

permanent feature of urban

life.

When even middle-

class blacks still suffer blatant discrimination in housing,

health care,

school and professional admissions, and a criminal justice system in which a black If

man

is

more than seven times

pathetic 137 years after free"

and 135 years

army

at

Abraham Lincoln

after

Robert

E.

white to go to prison.

successful

hostile those relations

might be had

no Emancipation Proclamation, no "Great Emancipator," no

war to end

slavery,

no

constitutional

legal validity to the equality of all

seems altogether

movement"

declared former slaves "forever

Lee surrendered the main Confederate

Appomattox, who can say how

there been

It

as likely as a

black-white relations in America remain so largely tense and unsym-

o{ the

likely, if

fifties

and

to give at least

Americans of whatever skin color?

such were the case, that the

sixties,

been more violent and more violently

coming

life

earlier or later,

resisted, that the

of black uprising that followed in the greatest

been even more destructive of

amendments

"civil rights

would have

"long hot summers"

American

cities

would have

and property, and that our vast

fortress

prisons, in addition to giving "the impression of institutions for segregating

the young black and Hispanic male underclass from society" (as the criminologist Norval Morris put sistance

even more

furious,

it)

would long ago have erupted in rage and

on both

sides,

than was demonstrated

at

re-

New

York's Attica Correctional Facility in 1971.

154

I

— If

Lincoln

Had Not

As for other vital developments the desegregation of the

armed

Freed the Slaves

Supreme Court's school

forces in 1949, the

desegregation ruling in 1954, or the

monumental post- World War whose

gration of blacks out of the South and into cities

were changed forever

—of these and other events

any certainty that they would not have happened did, or

and

American

is

my

as

and

can only be they did, or

mi-

11

futures

said with

when

they

war forced our greatest president to the most important act

Not

did not set out, however, to free the slaves by proclama-

that he favored

one of

derstanding.

human

bondage: "As

his precise formulations, "so

idea of democracy."

"He

Douglass, after a

moment

in

history.

Abraham Lincoln

said, in

it

faces

under the circumstances that actually prevailed, had not a savage

terrible

tion.

problem

in the nation's chronic racial

treated

Nor

me

man,"

visit in

would not be a

slave,"

he

would not be a master. This

did Lincoln lack

like a

White House

1

1

human sympathy and

un-

said the former slave Frederick

1863.

"He did not

me

let

feel for a

that there was any difference in the color of our skins."

That was

in

keeping with Lincoln's deep sense of

human

brotherhood.

But his attitude toward Douglass, an educated and accomplished black

man, did not connote a

belief in the genuine equality of

what Lincoln

of-

ten called "separate races." Blacks, "suffering the greatest wrong inflicted

on any people," he

told

an audience of free black

moved from being placed on an been

ill-treated

leaders, yet

equality" with whites.

"far re-

Not only had they

but a broader difference than exists between almost any

other two races" would always cause "a ban" even slavery

were

upon blacks

freed from

and treated well by white people.

When he became president of the United States vor emancipation

—

in 1861, Lincoln did fa-

but gradual and compensated. In his Cooper Union

speech of February 27, 1860, which greatly aided his presidential campaign,

he had quoted Thomas Jefferson

It is still

in our

power

portation, peaceably,

as

having

said:

to direct the process of emancipation

and

and de-

in such slow degrees, as that the evil will

wear off insensibly; and their places be,

155

pari passu, filled

up by

free

WHAT

IF? 2

A CAUSE NOT LOST This elaborately decorated version of

Abraham

Lincoln's

Emancipation

Proclamation appeared not long after the Union president's order became cial

on January

moment

of

1

U S.

,

1

863 Many regard .

history.

Had

it

the

offi-

Proclamation as the supreme moral

not been for a drawn battle, which Lincoln

treated as the victory he sought, the opportunity might have been missed. (Library of Congress)

white laborers.

human

If,

on the

But slavery was "forcing the Civil

contrary,

it

[slavery]

is

left to

force itself on,

nature must shudder at the prospect.

War

itself

began, and in his

on," even as Lincoln

first

years in office he

156

won

the presidency,

seemed

to be presid-

If

Lincoln

Had Not

ing over a losing military effort.

As

Freed the Slaves

late as his

annual message to Congress

of December 1862 (after the "preliminary" Emancipation Proclamation

been issued in September), the president proposed a constitutional states abolishing slavery before the year

ment providing that compensated

in U.S. bonds; that

any slave

earlier freed

1

had

amend-

900 would be

by presidential

proclamation should be permanently free and his or her former owners

compensated; and that Congress should have power to spend money for the colonization of blacks in a foreign land.

This proposal, subsumed in the freedom that followed Emancipation's effective date of January

1863, obviously

1,

came

to naught.

It

nevertheless

reflected Lincoln's oft-stated conviction that the Constitution gave neither

the president nor Congress the power to seize citizens' property, including slaveholders'

not

bondmen;

as well as his belief that

live together amicably. Blacks, therefore,

whites and blacks could

should be sent to Africa or

elsewhere to rule themselves. (Neither Lincoln nor anyone else proposed that whites should emigrate and leave the territory of the United States to blacks.) This attitude

toward black-white social and economic relations

was shared by most nineteenth-century white Americans (and a century

and

a half later

still

influences admissions, housing,

and criminal

justice

practices in a supposedly integrated nation).

Presidents are not kings, however, and events through the

teen months of Lincoln's presidency were driving tion. ("I

of Kentucky.)

him toward emancipa-

later

Not only were

wrote in a wartime letter to Albert G. Hodges aggressive abolitionists,

many

of

them

present.

European intervention on the

The war

believe that he

itself

had

side of the

Confederacy was ever-

was going badly enough that the president came to

to seek

some more dramatic means of waging

maintaining unity in the war

it,

while

effort.

On the other hand, an army faction around General George B. lan,

influ-

Republican members of Congress, urging him to take action; the

threat of

still

seven-

claim not to have controlled events but confess plainly that events

have controlled me," he

ential

first

and a substantial portion of Northern

McClel-

political opinion, resisted the

idea of "revolutionary" warfare, as well as punitive measures against the "erring sisters" of the South. Emancipation, Lincoln himself feared,

157

might

WHAT

IF?

2

shatter the tenuous federal unity in waging the war. states"

— Missouri,

loyal to the

(The four

Kentucky, Maryland, and Delaware

Union themselves sanctioned

—

vital "border

that remained

slavery, as did the District of Co-

lumbia. Abolition was a loud but not necessarily a majority sentiment in

the

Union

By

of the 1860s.)

July 13, 1862, with McClellan's

Army

of the

Potomac newly turned

back from the gates of Richmond, Lincoln told members of his Cabinet that he had "about

come

to the conclusion that

it

was a military

necessity,

we must

absolutely essential to the salvation of the nation, that

free the

slaves or be ourselves subdued."

on

In the 1864 letter to Hodges, he elaborated

When

[early in that year]

I

made

earnest,

his

view in 1862:

and successive appeals to

the border states to favor compensated emancipation,

I

believed the

indispensable necessity for military emancipation, and arming the

They declined

blacks would come, unless averted by that measure.

the proposition; and

I

was, in

my

best judgment, driven to the alter-

native of either surrendering the Union, and with tion, or of laying strong

it,

the Constitu-

hand upon the colored element.

1

chose the

latter.

On July a

first

22, 1862, Lincoln acted

draft of the preliminary

substantially

made

up,

he

said,

on

that choice and read to the Cabinet

Emancipation Proclamation. His mind was but he delayed publication on Secretary of

State William Seward's advice that the proclamation might seem a "cry of distress"

if

issued

on top of federal

military defeat in Virginia.

Even then, with the proclamation already waited for a Union military victory to make

it

drafted, but while Lincoln

public,

he told the nation

a masterfully phrased open letter to Horace Greeley, the editor of the

in

New 'J

York Tribune:

My paramount

I object in this struggle

either to save or to destroy slavery. freeing any slave

I

would do

it;

and

If

is

I

if I

158

to save the

Union and

could save the could save

it

is

not

Union without

by freeing

all

the

slaves

I

would do

others alone,

colored race,

what

1

I

forbear,

I

the Union.

I

will

Within skirts

it;

and

would

if

also

do I

that.

do

and

less

by freeing some and leaving

it

I

do about

I

slavery,

and the

helps to save the union, and

do not believe

I

whenever

shall

I

it

What

believe

forbear because

shall

Freed the Slaves

could save

I

do because I

hurts the cause,

more

Had Not

Lincoln

If

it

would help

am

doing

shall believe

doing

shall believe

do more whenever

I

to save

what

1

help the cause.

days,

still

another Union defeat,

of Washington

—the second

proclamation. "The bottom

is

time virtually on the out-

this

battle o{ Bull

Run

—again delayed the

out of the tub!" Lincoln lamented,

when he

heard the news. But he had been persuaded by Seward to wait until

war progress made the Emancipation Proclamation seem more

Union

effective,

and the president more in command. If

moment had never come,

such a

it's

at least

might never have issued the great document with Lee and the their

first

Army

conceivable that Lincoln

—and

of Northern Virginia

in the

moving

autumn of 1862, Maryland

into

in

invasion of the North, and another powerful Confederate army

marching into Kentucky toward the Ohio River, many in both North and

South doubted, with reason, that such a moment ever would If it

had not, owing

might well have ended fect, a

to a continuing Confederate victory trend, the in a negotiated peace.

That would have been,

Southern success, with slavery surviving much

as

it

Sumter. Something like Lincoln's proposed Constitutional

December 1862 eventually might have been adopted; ties in

arrive.

as

war

in ef-

was before Fort

Amendment

of

wartime animosi-

the states o{ the former Confederacy gave way to peacetime calcula-

tions of interest. History

and economics ultimately would have argued

for

compensated emancipation.

The subsequent different

We did

—

history of the nation, of course,

disastrously so.

can only speculate about

come

would have been quite

—

a

moment,

longed-for victory.

On

that,

however; because, in

at least, that

September

fact,

Lincoln could treat as

17, 1862,

159

the

if it

moment were the

within weeks of the Greeley

WHAT letter,

McClellan

—

IF?

2

and reluctantly restored to command

briefly

—fought

the Battle of Antietam (called Sharpsburg in the South) just well enough to stop Lee

and

McClellan was

his invading army.

fatally afflicted,

however,

with what Lincoln in a cutting phrase called a case of "the slows"; fortunately, the general ates escape

and

his

army

let

so,

un-

the mauled and ragged Confeder-

back to Virginia.

Ever the adept politician, Lincoln nevertheless seized even this flawed

moment. Five days

after

Antietam, the president called his Cabinet

gether again, read

them

them of the

proclamation he had read aloud a few weeks

told

draft

them he

a

humorous passage from Artemus Ward, reminded

did not wish their advice about "the

Then he

have determined

for myself."

time intending

for publication.

it

So the deed was done and pation was proclaimed

to-

after the

—hardly

a

earlier,

—

main matter

and

for that

I

read the proclamation again, this

long months of hesitation, emanci-

moment

too soon. In December at Fred-

ericksburg, Virginia, federal forces, then under

Ambrose Bumside,

suffered

probably the most devastating defeat of the war. Simultaneously, perhaps the most propitious military

moment

for British recognition of the

Confed-

eracy was at hand.

Such

a perhaps fatal (for the

Union) diplomatic

act

was prevented by

Lincoln's proclamation of September 22, 1862, to take effect

1863.

The Emancipation Proclamation precluded

pean intervention because

it

made

against slavery (however tardily

on January

1,

the possibility of Euro-

the war appear to be a Northern crusade

and reluctantly conducted).

If

a foreign

nation had recognized and supported the Confederacy after emancipation, that nation's action would have been seen throughout the world as an en-

dorsement of chattel

slavery.

Despite his earlier doubts about the constitutionality of compelled abolition,

Lincoln

proclamation

justified his

the emergency powers of the president

turned out to be.

Not only

home and

war measure

falling

human freedom;

it

it

undermined the Confeder-

military fronts with slave unrest, labor depletion,

tary desertion, causing

within

a powerful war measure

did emancipation prevent foreign intervention

by proclaiming a crusade for ate

as a

—and

many

and

mili-

rebel soldiers to recognize that they were

160

— //

risking their lives

poor man's

On

Lincoln

and

Had Not

Freed the Slaves

their famiUes' well-being in "a rich man's

war but a

fight."

the federal side, emancipation provided spiritual support for the

who was beginning

cause o{ "Father Abraham,"

moral leader.

It

also tapped a

to be seen as a symbolic

new and welcome

source o{

manpower

180,000 black troops serving in federal ranks by the end of the war in 1865.

The document made Lincoln his

"the Great Emancipator" and ensured that

death would bring him the martyrdom and reverence he

day,

everywhere in the world

Rightly

so; for

— including the

accorded

is

states of the old

to-

Confederacy.

not only was the concept of emancipation morally and

strategically powerful; but Lincoln's political artistry assured that the procla-

mation

really

would be seen

as a justified

war measure,

as well as a great

hu-

manitarian deed. His timing, in the wake of Antietam, gave the document plausibility. It signaled

legally

it

the end of slavery everywhere in the nation, though

freed slaves only in states

against the

Union

—not

stance) where Lincoln

in

and parts of

states

then in rebellion

any place (the District of Columbia,

had the immediate power

Thus, whatever divisive effect a

less

considered,

less

well-timed procla-

mation might have had in the North was minimized. Even gressional elections of 1862, the

The

for in-

to strike off their bonds.

so, in

Democrats made substantial

the con-

gains.

excess of the North's manpower, industrial strength, and military

might over those of the Confederacy, together with stronger Northern political institutions

eventual

Union

and Southern dissension, might well have brought

victory,

even without emancipation, even

after

European

intervention.

That argument, however, overlooks the

real possibility that

continued

Confederate military success, even in defense, might have sapped Northern morale, destroyed Lincoln's political support, and brought about his defeat in

1864 (when George B. McClellan was his Democratic opponent). In the

long hindsight of history,

it

seems

likely that the

Northern public,

tiring of

on apparently unwinnable war, would have forced a negotiated peace at

some point

before those underlying

Northern advantages could have had

their likely effect.

Aside from what would have happened in the war

161

itself had

not Lincoln

WHAT freed the slaves as

and when he

IF? 2

did, the

postwar and contemporary conse-

What

would have happened had the na-

quences are almost incalculable.

tion failed even in a great war to win the freedom of the black

and

women of the

peace

left

its

masters in their former

power?

seats of

A

And had a compromise

wartime and antebellum South?

the "peculiar institution" in place and

bondmen

few likelihoods, approaching certainties, can be suggested: Slavery

would have continued

for a

time in the old Confederate and border

states,

though the increasing pressures of world opinion and of an

inefficient

wasteful labor system eventually would have brought about

its

ably gradually, and with compensation, as Lincoln and

many

end

and

—prob-

other leaders

of goodwill once had envisioned, but to which the South had preferred war.

Had gress,

eleven undefeated Southern states returned to the Union, to Con-

and to American

politics,

neither the thirteenth

Amendment,

abol-

ishing slavery, the fourteenth, guaranteeing equal protection of the laws,

nor the

fifteenth, establishing the right to vote to persons of color

former slaves, would have been added to the Constitution

—

at least

and to not for

decades, perhaps never.

The

so-called "reconstruction" of the Southern states that actually did

take place after the historical Confederate defeat would not have been nec-

an undefeated (counterhistorical) South. Freed

essary or tolerated by

Southern blacks would not have enjoyed the temporary

political

and other

forms of power some gained in the "reconstruction" years after the war. Resentful

Southern whites therefore would not have

the original, terrorist

Ku Klux Klan

—with

its

felt it

necessary to form

hateful echoes into the

present. If

ity

these events, taken together, had not happened, the decades of hostil-

between Southern whites and blacks (repressed but

that had

its

origins in the post-Civil

War

years,

real,

and the

on both

sides)

racial repression

and segregation to which whites soon resorted, might have been avoided, or at least softened.

So might the long

religiously Democratic,

called "two-thirds rule"

years in

which

a "solid South" voted

dominated Congress, and controlled

—

—with the

so-

party presidential nominations.

These would have been

paltry gains

162

compared

to other, inevitable de-

//

velopments.

Had

Lincoln

Had Not

Freed the Slaves

gradual and compensated emancipation ultimately pre-

—perhaps by the end of the nineteenth-century, Lincoln had proDecember 1862 — the system of "sharecropping" by which the posed as

vailed

in

white South mamtained virtual peonage, and the "separate but equal" rule of law that enforced racial segregation,

way

—

later,

perhaps, but otherwise about as

These were responses not so much end of slavery. They by the

rest

no doubt would have evolved any-

also

of the nation

it

to the

actually did.

end of the Civil War

were effective Southern

—

to maintain white

efforts

as to the

—mostly winked

supremacy even

at

after defeat in

war and military emancipation. There's no reason to suppose that the white

South would not have devised the same or equally clever means, or worse, to continue white supremacy,

nomic

pressure

The

to gradual

it is

having consented

—under eco-

economic, and social freedom

—no matter

—would have been resented and feared by whites

(as in

today), and would have demanded perhaps even more

sponses from the fearful. at least

after

and compensated emancipation.

fact oi black political,

how achieved ways

—

even

Even

as

it

many

forceful re-

was, between 1882 and 1900 there were

100 lynchings of blacks a

year,

African-Americans had been lynched.

and by 1968 more than 3,500

And

there's certainly

no reason

to

suppose that other Americans would have protested anymore strongly than, historically, they did

—

at least until

themselves, as in the actual civil rights

No

Emancipation Proclamation?

viving the Civil

resisting blacks

movement.

A compromise peace with slavery sur-

War? The nation would have been tenuously and unhap-

pily reunited in those circumstances, but

vanquished

prompted by

—only

in

not on the basis of victor and

an apparent stalemate in which both

sides

had

achieved their essential war aims: continued slavery for the Confederacy, a restored

Union

for the

government

at

Washington.

Neither the moral question of slavery nor the political question of secession

would have been resolved. Gradual and compensated emancipation

might have drained some of the urgency from the former, but the strained theory of a right of secession might well have remained troublesome even

today

—

far

more

so than in actual contemporary circumstances,

casional secession threats sound

more than a

J

63

little

empty (owing

when

oc-

precisely

— WHAT to that

Union

victory in 1865 to

IF?

2

which the Emancipation Proclamation

contributed so heavily).

Of all

the consequences of a

less salutary

no compelled emancipation, no Union the knowledge of the

1

2 percent of

forebears were not freed from

generation "touched by

course of events in the 1860s

victory

— the worst might well be

Americans who

are black that their

bondage by crusade, by the willingness of a

fire" to sacrifice its lives

and

futures,

by the great-

ness of a leader martyred not least for his proclamation of brotherhood. Instead they would live with the knowledge that the forces of bondage and

oppression had prevailed

—perhaps

far into

the twentieth century,

if

not

permanently. If

black Americans could not take at least small satisfaction in what, in

historical fact, did

have

in a nation to

had

that

happen more than

freedom

which

failed, in its itself,

for themselves,

their race

a century ago,

what

faith could they

was borne in chains? In a "democracy"

most fundamental

test,

to strike off those chains? In

so long denied their ancestors, so boldly

and belatedly won

from a reluctant and grudging majority?

In winning freedom for slaves more than a century ago, however, the nation finally accepted freedom for itself

—though not without

protest. In

is-

suing the great proclamation, Lincoln responded not just to the pressures of his era but

—

as

if

and on into the

to a vision future.

compelling in 1862, the

Union war

is

His

—

to the needs of later times, into the present

war measure," taken

"justified

even more

effort as desired

vital to

—

but,

Americans

today.

more importantly,

it

for reasons so

It

strengthened

began the "un-

finished work" that Lincoln was to define at Gettysburg: a

"new

freedom" in a nation "conceived in liberty" but not yet devoted to For white and black alike, that

remaining before

is still

us."

164

what he termed

it

—"the

birth of it.

great task

ALISTAIR HORNE

FRANCE TURNS THE OTHER CHEEK, JULY The

The

unification of

Germany injantmry 1871

of the twentieth.

Its

Cold War) and

all

,

war with Prussia

needless

War, was a central event of

manner of attending

horrors,

may have been bound

curred without especially dire consequences through the unexpected humiliation of France

a kind of

at the

,

the nineteenth century;

end of the Franco-Prussian it

would be

poisoned fruit produced three world conflicts

Holocaust. Unification

terness,

1870

historical oil spill.

demands, was

which

left

it

Bad Ems, and

was

at

war with Prussia and

The cause of

the

its

]uly

taint of bitvisit to the

the kings refusal to

the inconspicuous beginning of

as the

was a perceived affront

French emperor, could not afford

could have oc-

a spreading

the Prussian chancellor, sent out hardly

armed confrontation. But

count the

but was achieved prematurely

The somewhat doctored account of the meeting, known Otto von Bismarck,

—and

The French ambassadors

Prussian king William, taking the waters at give in to his provocative

(if you

to ignore:

one

the Stalinist purges to the

happen

to

—

,

from

the defining

two days

that

later,

Ems

a

crisis.

telegram, that

seemed a pretext for

Napoleon

III,

the

on July 15, France

client states.

Franco-Prussian

War may

have been feckless and French

preparation to fight chaotic, their strategy inviting disaster; yet the odds were not totally against

France.

of professional soldiers

and a

Its

,

army, though outnumbered, was based on a

who

primitive but effective

those of the Prussians.

The

relied

on weapons

—

notably a breech-loading

hand-cranked machine gun —

early battles

that

were close (in one,

165

solid core

the

rifle

were superior French

to

inflicted

.

WHAT 8,000 lowed

most

army

brilliant

proud

of, the

1870 was

reduced

to be

campaigns ever waged encirclement

By

surrender.

its

of all,

Europe, one Islapoleon

I

1871

its

,

would have been

population had been

and not Prussian

the rest of the world, the

its

military

What

if

the

growing

did

artillery led

most

potentially

in overconfidence

happen brings us inevitably

won

French had

and had forced a stalemate? Would

victor

al-

Paris soon followed Sedan. For Prussia,

rats: starvation

But for France and

fought Prussia a few years earlier.)

a

French emperor

once but three times, something of a military

held together without the quick-drying

as a quid pro

the ailing

though one that would not be sprung for another generation, was

The lamentable record of what

did,

in

ofMetz and

zoo animals and

a unified Germany, with

have happened.

But

the time the capital fell in January

to eating

lethal trap

.

trapped at Sedan and was forced to surrender. In one of the

the year of the trap, not

tour deforce.

to

IF? 2

casualties in less than twenty minutes) his

.

in

what might

those early battles, as they nearly

German

the various

have

principalities

cement of victory? (Some, remember, had

What

if

France had acquiesced

quo for German concessions and a peace

—a peace

to

in

to unification

which neither

side

was

which Alsace and Lorraine would have remained French?

How different would Germany have been without a fatal dependency on the myth of an all-conquering military? How different, too, would the world have been without a century of antagonism between France and

There

Home

is,

of course, another, simpler scenario the simplest of all, which Alistair ,

suggests in the chapter that follows

done nothing, the

that he might

been removed; and no World

and

U.

Homes

logically

ALISTAIR HORNE, enteen books.

He

A a

War 1

War

counterfactual

reasoned.

—namely,

have ignored the bait of the

predominant cause for World

War

Germany?

1

may

—

that

Ems

Napoleon could have

telegram. In which case,

the loss of Alsace-Lorraine

would have meant no take

Hitler,

a fanciful turn but

hint: In this case, the

medium

Cambridge University

has been awarded the British

is

have

and no World

the facts are closely

really

Litt D.,

—would

was

the message.

the author of sev-

CBE, and has been made

a

Chevalier o{ the French Legion d'Fionneur for his historical writings,

which include The and i

the

ofGbry: Verdun 1916; The

Commune, 1870-L, and How Far from

8 i 5 Fie .

Price

is

Austerlitz?

currently completing Seven Ages of Paris

166

Fall of Paris:

The

Siege

Napoleon 1805-

—

June 1870,

IN

the newly appointed British Foreign Secretary, Lord

Granville, gazed out with satisfaction

with reason

—

on the world scene and claimed

that he could not discern "a cloud in the sky." In

perience he had never

Emperor Napoleon

known

Ill's

all

his ex-

"so great a lull in foreign affairs." In Paris,

prime minister, Emile

Ollivier,

echoed Granville

by declaring that "at no period has the maintenance of peace seemed better assured." Indeed,

peace seemed to be in the

air

everywhere. Over Eu-

rope as a whole such a spring of content had not been seen for

As summer developed, however,

it

became a particularly

many

years.

trying one; in fact

one of the hottest in memory. From several parts of France there were ports o{ drought, with the peasants praying for rain

horses because of the shortage of fodder; but then, there for cavalry

when

zon? Nevertheless,

it

so,

who

no

in July

when tempers

threat of war

on the

hori-

fateful

sum-

frayed.

1870 could have predicted that within a matter of

weeks the emperor of France, Napoleon refuge in England; that Paris

III,

would be deposed and seeking

would be besieged and within a few months

starved into surrender, while proud France herself lay prostrate for

selling

what urgent need was

was the kind of summer, not unlike those

mers of 1914 and 1939,

Even

there was absolutely

and the army

re-

and suing

peace with Bismarck's Prussians; and that the whole balance of power

that

had regulated Europe so meticulously since Waterloo

in 1815

would be

fundamentally altered?

At it

the beginning of July 1870, a small cloud passed across the sun

—but

seemed only a very small cloud. For the past two years the throne of

Spain had been vacant, following the deposing of the unsatisfactory Isabella.

One

of the possible candidates was a

of Hohenzollem-Sigmaringen.

and

his brother Charles

He was

German

Queen

princeling, Leopold

a good Catholic, father of a family,

had recently accepted the crown of Romania with167

— WHAT out anyone objecting.

The

IF?

idea of the

2

Hohenzollem Candidacy had

nated in Spain; Leopold's kinsman, King William it

—but only with considerable reluctance—but regarded

ily

matter.

When

of having

German

princes

up in alarm.

Paris rose

it,

as purely a

it

on the Pyrenees

It

was the thought

frontier as well as the Rhine;

though historians could have reminded French statesmen the Spanish throne with a Bourbon prince

less

kind of hegemony was almost exactly what Louis

to impose

on Europe. in France, egged

by

that,

filling

than two centuries previ-

ously, this

So violent was the storm

fam-

Otto von Bismarck, however,

his bombastic chancellor,

picked up the ball and ran with

origi-

of Pnjssia, had agreed to

1

XIV had sought

on by inflammatory

articles in

the Paris press, that the Fiohenzollern Candidacy was promptly withdrawn. Relieved, Lord Granville chided the French government for resorting to

such strong language, and the British press returned to themes of Queen Victoria dispensing prizes in to

mount

dangerously.

Windsor Park. But the

Napoleon

III

was a

furor in Paris continued

and

tired

sick

man, with a

large

stone growing in his bladder, and certainly not the match of his illustrious uncle. His foreign policies had been thwarted at every turn, against

coming up

two of the most adroit and dangerous statesmen of the nineteenth

century: Bismarck in Prussia, and

Cavour

in Italy.

In nearly two decades of absolute rule, as one

minds from the

loss of their essential liberties.

prosperity to France. This jority of

Frenchmen

way of

Napoleon had brought huge

had become an acceptable

—though only

temporarily.

Baron Fiaussmann, he had remodeled

Paris.

from 3,685 kilometres to 17,924, so that

diverting French

The all

substitute for the

Under

his

famous

building expanded as

all

Prefect,

railway network increased

of a sudden the Riviera

formerly the haunt of only a few eccentric English at Cannes Parisian resort. Telegraph lines radiated out

ma-

—became

a

over the country, and ship-

never before. Mighty banking concerns

like the

Credit Lyonnais and the Credit Foncier were established, the latter especially

designed to stimulate the vast

new

building programme. ''Enrichissez-

vous' (Get rich) was the slogan of the era, and a

had

arisen. Yet at the

widened

new wealthy

bourgeoisie

same time the gap between rich and urban poor had

drastically. In Paris there

was menacing discontent,

168

at times

with

— France Turns

echoes of 1789; worse cause la

oO

the

Other Cheek, July 1870

and more dangerously, despite (or perhaps be-

still,

his attempts at liberalization,

France was bored with Napoleon

III

France s'ennuyait.

As at many other times

in

French

hotheads clamored

history,

emperor needed such a suc-

traction of a successful adventure abroad. If the cess,

no one was pushing him harder than

Eugenie,

who

for the dis-

his

Spanish-born empress,

took the opportunity to remind her husband of Prussia's

which was widely regarded

lightning victory over Austria in 1868,

hu-

as a

miliation to French foreign policy. Pointing to their heir, the Prince Imperial,

she declared dramatically: "This child will never reign unless

we

repair

the misfortunes of Sadowa."

Meanwhile, France's heavy-handed foreign

secretary, the

mont, held a personal grudge against Bismarck

him (not unreasonably)

as "the stupidest

man

for

having once described

in Europe,"

gan to adopt a plaintive, hectoring tone toward Prussia. that the

HohenzoUem Candidacy had been

humbled

for her presumption. Accordingly,

It

and he now bewas not enough

retracted, Prussia

Gramont

Count Vincent Benedetti,

bassador in Berlin,

Due de Gra-

had

to be

sent the French

am-

to badger the king at

Bad

Ems, where he was taking the waters. Benedetti was received with the greatest courtesy by

German

fellow

King William, who had no

rulers) for war, observing that the unification of

would be "the task of

Wilhelm

Kaiser

II,

my

grandson," not

who would

to wait

Germany

into

who was

two generations, and who calculated that

would provide the

essential mortar required to

ing, rather loose structure

of the

a

be most carefully selected, so

among allies.

as to cast

the other nations of Europe

—but

him he

then he must jump up and catch

With

the French

now

at

World War

in

no way

1.)

deter-

war with France exist-

into a unified nation belli

would have

France in an unfavorable light

also with Prussia's

As he once remarked, "A statesman has not

ever in the events around

Germany

cement together the

German federation

dominated, of course, by his native Prussia. But the casus to

his

(That grandson would be

his.

lead a united

This was, however, not the view of Bismarck,

mined

more than

desire (any

to

make

own German history, but

if

hears the sweep of the mantle of God, its

hem."

bent on pressing for diplomatic victories, Bis-

169

WHAT

IF? 2

marck, twisting the knife in the wound, saw his chance. Irritated by Benedetti's

importuning

at

Bad Ems, the benign old king refused

to give a guar-

antee that the Hohenzollern Candidacy would never arise again, and declined a request for a further audience.

A telegram giving an account of

the interview was duly dispatched to Bismarck in Berlin. Bismarck saw "the

mantle of God"; without actually fudging the

text, as

he has often been ac-

cused of doing, he sharpened the tone of the dispatch before passing the Berlin press

As

to

—and the world.

edited by Bismarck,

it

stated that the king

ceive the French Ambassador again, and sent to

de-camp that

it

his Majesty

had "decided not to

him through

tell

had nothing further

to

re-

the aide-

communicate

to the

Ambassador."

Even with Bismarck's

editing, certainly

when compared with

matic language that was to prevail during the Cold of the twentieth century, the famous constituted a casus

War

Ems Telegram

the diplo-

in the second half

hardly seems to have

But Bismarck had his ear well tuned to the pre-

belli.

vailing tone in Paris. Frenzied crowds surged through the streets shouting

"A

Berlin!

"

commander

In one of the rashest claims in in chief.

all

military history, the French

Marshal Leboeuf, encouraged the hawks with his

ish declaration that the

army was "ready down

fool-

to the last gaiter-button."

(Wits remarked that this was largely true, as there were no gaiters in stock anyway.) Now, on receipt of Bismarck's telegram, urged on by his empress

and Gramont,

fired

by the ever

shriller Paris press,

Napoleon

took the

III

plunge.

On

July 15, France declared

Napoleon

I's

war

—

in a state of exhilaration, recalling

repeated successes beyond the Rhine, and expecting a repeat

performance. But, through Bismarck's cunning, she found herself at once

branded

as a frivolous aggressor.

"The Liberal Empire goes precisely

how

to

As

the Illustrated London

declared,

war on a mere point of etiquette," and

opinion, in America as in Europe, saw the

the severe judgment of a leading British expert

War, Sir Michael Howard: "Thus by pidity,

News

a tragic

was

conflict. In

on the Franco- Prussian

combination of

and ignorance France blundered into war with the

170

new

this

ill-luck, stu-

greatest military

i

France Turns

the

Other Cheek, July 1870

UNNECESSARY ADVERSARIES The Franco-Prussian War may have been an avoidable confrontation, but shape the history of the world. Here, a dejected Napoleon

III

of France

it

vuas

(left),

one

that

would

captured with

his

entire army at the battle of Sedan on September 2, 1870, meets with the victorious Prussian chancellor,

Leopold von Bismarck.

(Hulton/Archive)

power that Europe had yet seen, without

in a

bad cause, with her army unready and

allies."

In sharp contrast, the Prussian miUtary perbly equipped and led, mobilization, Bismarck

of force of 1,183,000

incompetence.

On

and well tested

and

his

machine was superbly

in battle.

German allies were

men. For France, military

September

1,

a sick

ready, su-

Within eighteen days of able to field an unheard

disaster followed

and defeated Napoleon

on III

dered to King William of Prussia at the head of his army in Sedan. fourth, a

stunned Paris greeted the news

ture of delight. leries

As

first

all

surren-

On

the

with horror, then with a mix-

the empress fled to England, the

Palace where they found

military

mob

invaded the Tui-

the pathetic signs of an unintended

171

WHAT departure; a toy sword half-drawn floor,

and on a table some

bits

on

IF? 2

empty jewel

a bed,

on the

cases strewn

The end

of bread and a half-eaten egg.

of the

empire was proclaimed, and a new republic formed in the Hotel de

Ville.

Momentarily there reigned an atmosphere of unrestrained carnival;

it

a sparkingly sunny day,

out in

Sunday

its

no blood had been

best to celebrate the

had. Automatically

it

Not

home and so.

was assumed on the

savage civil war as the

street that

—the

it

turned

had ever

—now that the emwould

victorious Prussians

Commune

lay ahead, followed

Under Bismarck's harsh

richest provinces, Alsace

Forty-four years after the

by an even more

de Paris took over. By the summer of

1871 peace returned. But France was in financial ruins;

and

now

leave France alone.

A bitter four-month siege

in physical ruin.

all Paris

most joyous revolution

peror and his bellicose regime were gone return

shed, and

was

much of proud

terms, France lost

two of its

Paris

fairest

and Lorraine. The nation would never forget.

Ems Telegram, France would go

to

war to regain

them, bringing the whole world with her into a new catastrophe. The

whole world equilibrium would be fundamentally even more

terrible

1870 was

bom

all

From the moment

terrible,

necessary world wars. Unnecessary, that

and

is, if

Could

it

or, better,

Ems

—worse than

in the

if

the

conveniently overlooked in

have been otherwise? Well, yes

it

terrible

somehow war between

and France could have been avoided that summer;

—

at

the evils of our twentieth century, which

would scourge our planet with two

never been sent

and a second,

world war would be fought before some semblance of the

pre- 1870 Europe could be rediscovered. torrid July of

altered,

—un-

Prussia

Ems Telegram had Paris.

could, and this

is

one way a

peaceful outcome might have happened. In June 1870, debilitating

ing

it

Napoleon

—stone

III is

miraculously cured of the enormous

in his bladder by a brilliant

out of his system.

He

is still

—and

young English doctor,

pass-

only sixty-two, and suddenly seems quite

rejuvenated. Apart from his trust in medicine, at various times in his career

he had sought advice from a greatly acclaimed Parisian

medium, Allan Kardec (To

this

—

his real

occultiste,

name, Hippolyte Leon Denizard

or

Rivail.

day you can find Kardec's Stonehenge-like grave in famous Pere

172

— France Turns the Other Cheek, July 1870

Lachaise cemetery [section 44],

kept heaped with the flowers of fans

still

apparently hoping to transfer to themselves his psychic powers. Supposedly his

darkened bronze

fetishist; as

the guidebook will

Ems Telegram

year before the years of

medium

like

And

life.

if it

you, a certain part of the body shines

tell

thanks to the caresses of

brightly,

more

exudes a special appeal for the sexual

effigy also

sterile

—but

for

women. Kardec died

will give

him

a few

could have been another

it

him.)

So, cured of his disabling physical malady, to Kardec's Paris

Napoleon

apartment to seek his help in the

with Prussia. Could he, for instance, uncle.

we

our purposes

wasn't Kardec,

in 1869, the

summon up

goes off secretly

111

that was brewing

crisis

the spirit of his illustrious

Napoleon the Great, and ask him what he would do under the

cir-

cumstances? Accordingly, in a darkened room, the medium's table begins to

heave and

All of a sudden the

levitate.

ence; then a violent coup de pied dans

air

is

filled

him

propels the emperor across the room, throwing

seemed

to confirm a popular joke

nents of Bonapartism.)

much

with an imposing pres-

deniere [kick in the rear] suddenly

le

flat

on

his face. (This

realized by Parisian wits

A voice out of the ether,

and oppo-

with a strongly Corsican

accent, fulminates:

"You than

fool, tus es imbecile! You're getting 1

did.

Why

everything wrong. Even worse

don't you call up that slimy old Talleyrand? He's a

horrible old rascal, 'shit in a silk-stocking,'

only

I

had

listened to

1

once called him

him and gone for peace,

Treaty of Tilsit in 1807,

1

—but

if

instead of war, after the

would never have had to face Wellington

at

Waterloo."

The

bruised

nephew goes away and

thinks about

Kardec the following day. "Get Talleyrand,

et tout

it,

then returns to

de suiter

A smooth, oily

voice comes across the firmament:

"Yes,

Sa Majeste, your uncle

listened to me,

forced

me

is

absolutely correct. Alas,

you wouldn't be in

to resign after Tilsit."

175

this

kind of mess

if

only he had

now

—but he

— WHAT what should

"So,

him

do with that tiresome

bully,

Bismarck?"

Garmont. Bismarck was being too kind when he

"First of all, sack

called

I

IF? 2

'the stupidest

man

in Europe.'

Then

foreign policy by ourselves.

You and

I

can run French

replace Benedetti in Berlin."

"By whom?" "Well, what about that annoying hack, the opposition leader

Adolphe Thiers? I know used to

say,

he's

caused you a

bring the troublemakers

in,

lot of trouble

don't

let

them

—but

fester outside.

He's quite sympathetic to the Prussians, at least they think

canny

what

all,

is

He's a

Bismarck but an overweight Kraut bully?

he's got plenty o{ other

you must get

so.

Bismarck in knots, wrong foot

politician, he'd be able to tie

him. After

always

I

problems

at

home on

his agenda. But,

And first,

rid of the hard-liners."

"What about

the empress?"

"Well, Majeste, really she's your problem."

The emperor,

always keen on the ladies and

still

the beautiful Italian countess of Castiglione (to

422,000'pearl necklace, plus Fr 50,000 a

Eugenie

ration.

lapsed

is

frigid,

when opening

with a hankering after

whom

he once gave a

month pin money),

has an inspi'

but there were rumors that her virtue had once

the Suez Canal in 1869, just the previous year,

when

she had fallen for the sexy khedive of Egypt. He, Louis-Napoleon, could

speak to his lawyers in the morning. After magical Josephine and gotten away with

all,

had divorced the

his uncle

it.

Talleyrand continues:

"Above

mean

all,

bin that telegram of Bismarck's. Ignore

a thing, or at least don't let

your uncle's time "I

ways

Remember what

surtout point de zele ['not too

know," says the emperor, II

it.

ruefully,

"and

much

listen to

me

.

.

.

So,

it

doesn't

used to say in

zeal']."

but the Imperatrice

what next?"

"Reconvene my Congress of Vienna, which to save France

—

my favorite motto was al-

ne faut rien brusquer ['never rush things'],

would never

I

it

I

put together in 1814

—and Europe—when your uncle was sent 174

to Elba.

I

— France Turns the Other Cheek, July 1870

did give Europe

of peace

don't want to boast, but

it

and, with

the delegates had a devilish good time in Vi-

all

enna while

those

it

balls,

lasted.

As

his agenda, all sorts of

months,

talking, for

Bismarck's got a lot of other things

say,

I

problems

at

home

then

possible;

if

fifty-five years

—keep him momentum— and

to distract

he'll lose

on

him

be the end of him.

that'll

"Remember what Wellington used voire oncle

comes

—

a conqueror

is

cannonball,

like a

end of

to rest, that's the

to say about you, Sa Majeste,

That

it.

it

has to go on; once

it

nice, cozy old king of Prussia,

William, hates and fears Bismarck and his policies and would love to get rid of him.

"That's

all

So wrong

foot Bismarck."

wonderful advice. Monsieur Talleyrand;

as a

man

of

peace, you really should have been a bishop."

"But

1

was, Majeste,

I

was.

." .

.

Talleyrand disappears, leaving behind an aroma of snuff, incense, and

expensive perfume. Emperor Napoleon

returns to the Tuileries Palace,

III

determined to take Talleyrand's helpful advice. greatly strengthened

by an urgent dispatch

London, pressing France to do nothing fect

when

July 14. His

just arrived

drastic.

hand

is

from Granville in

This has a considerable

ef-

read out to the imperial ministers meeting in Council. Precari-

ously the "doves" in the

government seem

Under Louis-Napoleon's shelved.

It is

to

have gained the ascendancy.

pressure rash thoughts about mobilization are

That evening he summons

to the Tuileries

first

Thiers, the opposi-

tion leader (and his principal political opponent), together with Thiers 's

leading left-wing followers. port his

new

He urges them to take a bipartisan line and sup-

drive for peace.

Thiers and his team agree

—provided

Emile OUivier, will tow the livier,

Remember

line.

Talleyrand, he exhorts them!

Louis-Napoleon's prime minister,

Next the emperor

calls in OUivier.

a forty-five-year-old lawyer with a Republican background,

Ol-

had only

been brought in that January to herald a new "Liberal Empire," and one of his first acts, as a

cessive

ting

man of peace and moderation, had been to cut France's ex-

burden of arms expenditure. Over the past weeks he had been

on the

fence, uncomfortably, as regards the

175

HohenzoUern

sit-

crisis,

WHAT

IF?

2

inclined toward conciliation but buffeted by the hawkish head of the army,

Marshal Leboeuf, and Louis-Napoleon's sabre-rattling empress. Now, with the emperor's

new

—and

surprising

—change of

heart, together with the

promised support of Thiers, his former Republican off the fence

and join the "Peace

That night

in the Tuileries,

ally,

he

is

happy to climb

Party."

Louis-Napoleon has a furious row with the

bellicose Imperatrice. Recalling their passionate tryst in a grotto of Cairo's

Gezira Palace of the previous

was a monarch

makes her

word

—

day, July 15, in the

rises to

hawks with

she reckons that there, in Egypt, at

Louis-Napoleon makes

plans, while

The next

fall,

who would obey her whims; and

Corps

richer than

least,

too.

She

his.

Legislatif,

denounce war. "Do you want

Napo,

Thiers

—

as

good

as his

Europe," he challenges the

all

forceful eloquence, "to say that although the substance of the

quarrel was settled, you have decided to pour out torrents of blood over a

mere matter of form?" Thiers

is

followed by Ollivier,

responsibility of

war

who

—

declaring that he cannot accept the

''d'un coeur leger''

("with a confident heart")

—wins

over the Assembly with his proposal to launch an international appeal to a

Congress of Powers.

The

crisis

of 1870

is

over.

from Marseilles. Napoleon juvenated vigor

—sends

III

heaves a sigh of relief, and

is

restored.

Berliri'

Gramont

the provinces, in voluntary exile. Benedetti, by

re-

have been shot or lib-

retires to his estates in

now the former ambassador

given the Latin American desk in the Quai d'Orsay, where he

writes minutes (which

Napoleon

newly

Prime Minister Ollivier and his

erally inclined supporters are triumphant.

is

in his

few days. There are anti-Prussian demonstra-

few troublemakers shouting "A

sent to Devil's Island, calm

to Berlin,

—

a note to his old love.

Paris remains tense for a tions, but after a

Empress Eugenie takes the next available boat

III

no one

reads)

on

conflict

between Bolivia and Peru.

persuades the Great Powers to convene a

new Congress of Vi-

enna, which he leads with distinction. In London, Foreign Secretary Granville heads for Scotland and the grouse, delighted that once more the skies are truly cloudless.

176

France Turns the Other Cheek, July 1870

Henceforth Britain, and Queen Victoria,

will

do anything

for Louis-

Napoleon's new, prudent France (she, anyway, remembered how, on a

had found the emperor more

to Paris in the '50s, she

man

since poor Albert).

The whole world

headed statesmanship; leaders suddenly

There

As

is

no

I.

Bismarck

is

any

attractive than

impressed by France's cool-

recall the aggressiveness of Freder-

than the successive ravaging of Germany by Louis

ick the Great, rather

and Napoleon

is

visit

no longer the

flavor of the

XIV

month anywhere.

war.

clever old Talleyrand predicted, the

new Congress of Vienna drags on

—

totally

wrong

to appear before the world as a blustering bully,

and a

into 1872.

Bismarck has been humiliated,

footed and

made

if

not routed

threat to the concert of nations. In Berlin the doves prevail; the king,

who

had certainly never wanted to be promoted to kaiser of a united Germany, returns to a quiet in a rare

life

Potsdam, growing grapes in the conservatories built

moment between

Moltke's huge army spent

at

is

wars by his ancestor, Frederick the Great.

progressively stood

on education and

roads.

down, so that more money can be

The 50 percent

of Germans

who

are

Roman

Catholic rejoice that the march toward domination by Protestant Prussia,

which once seemingly inexorable,

is

now

halted.

Once Bismarck had

his

impetus over the HohenzoUern Candidacy removed, like Wellington's cannonball, he and his policies are rendered pointless. Again, as Talleyrand

he had plenty on

predicted,

cupy his mind. Like

As soon

as

his

all bullies,

—and problems—

agenda

once

resisted,

he

at

to oc-

collapses.

he decently can, good King William "drops the

unheeded resentment, the "Iron Chancellor"

home

pilot"; full of

retires to his estates at Varzin,

resuming his voracious diet of eleven hard-boiled eggs for breakfast, plus plates loaded with Reinfeld

forgotten

man, Bismarck

ham, goose with

dies in

olives,

and Varzin wild

boar.

A

1898 of gluttony (exacerbated by acute

constipation) and disappointment. In the meantime, Catholic Bavaria has formed a customs union with

its

neighbor, Catholic Austria, thereby providing a powerful counterweight to Prussia in the

German-speaking world. In the west, the discovery of vast

deposits of iron in Alsace-Lorraine (which, of course, continue to belong to

177

WHAT

IF? 2

France) and coal in the neighboring Rhineland Ruhr led to a transfrontier

Common Market. This is

coal-and'Steel pool, the beginnings of a European strongly backed by U.S. commercial interests, to overall

European

and contributing massively one of the main causes

prosperity, thereby eradicating

of war.

And what power

in

1868

Having on

America

of

for

in all this?

General Ulysses

S.

Grant comes

to

two terms, on a campaign slogan of "Let us have peace."

his conscience the deaths of

more men

tween the States than any other general, he

is

in the recent

War

be-

so appalled by the prospects

of a similar carnage in Europe that, renouncing the strictures of the Founding Father,

George Washington, he commits the United States

far-reaching role in European in 1870, Elihu B.

Washburne,

affairs. is

The

brilliant

to playing a

U.S. ambassador in Paris

appointed secretary of state, and under his

guidance the United States assumes a leading influence in the gress of Vienna.

Under the Washburne

Plan, there

is

new Con-

widespread economic

cooperation between the United States and Europe, with Washington ing troops in case of

an outside threat

—

offer-

from an expansive,

for instance,

czarist Russia.

U.S. forces and mediation are indeed very nearly needed in 1898,

when

a serious conflict breaks out in Africa between Britain and a new, powerful

France, called by historians the Fashoda Incident

ment

against the British forces

however, war

At Ill's

is

on the Nile

the same time, Britain finds a

Prussia,

now

all

the

way

at Fashoda.

across Africa, running

Thanks

new

ally in

up

to U.S. interven-

the shape of King Frederick

feeling distinctly inferior to the

Victoria's daughter,

British.

He

new

France. Married to

"Dear Vicky," Frederick had always been pro-

inherited the throne from his father, William

stead of dying after a few all

mo-

once more averted.

Queen

by

ugliest

since 1870. Pushing the claims of their rival empires, French troops

under General Marchand, marching

tion,

—Europe's

months from cancer of the

I

in 1888,

and

(in-

throat, possibly caused

the stress of the Franco-Prussian War), lives to a ripe and fulfilling old

age of eighty-three. Casting aside Bismarck's that his

map

silly

of Africa lay in Europe, under the

178

(and dangerous) notion

Cute

Fritz [b.

1831] as he

France Turns

was nicknamed, Prussia

some

Other Cheek, July 1870

now happy

is

to accept, in return for her support,

Empire south of the Sahara. As contemporary

tidbits of the British

historians note,

the

enUghtened and benevolent coloniaUsm

ues into the twenty-first century

—much

in Africa contin-

to the benefit of the residents.

To gain him administrative experience, and quiet the

aggressive im-

pulses of a troubled heir born sadly with a withered arm, Frederick sends

the prospective cally

"Little Willie"

of

Wilhelm

to

German South- West

by the English, takes over in Berlin

commanding an army

cle,

II

Africa

—where

tragi-

he succumbs to malaria. Frederick's fun-loving grandson, nicknamed

Edward

VII, Berlin

at

Verdun

becomes the

In France, the heir of Napoleon

no need

in 1916.

— instead his un-

Eastern Europe.

the beloved "Prince Imperial," having

army to get

to seek refuge in England, does not join the British

by Zulu spears; instead he becomes a studious young nique,

II

Under him, emulating

gai Paris of

III,

Wilhelm

as

dim but peace-loving and succeeding

man

killed

at the Polytech-

his father in the Tuileries in

1875, but with most of his hereditary powers shorn by Republican politicians.

Meanwhile, in 1889, a boy, called Adolf,

town of Braunau, painting, but

is

born in the small Austrian

to the lower-middle-class Hitler family.

nobody buys

his pictures; called

He

takes up

up into the Austro-Bavarian

army, he manages to avoid the inconclusive border skirmishes that ensue after the assassination of

an archduke

in Sarajevo. In Berlin, the Prussians

view with some pleasure the discomfort of their

rivals to the south; in St.

Petersburg, the czar rattles his sword, but a few brisk dispatches from Presi-

dent Teddy Roosevelt (reelected in 1912, he defeats an ineffectual Princeton professor Organization fice to

named Wilson), and

(NATO)

keep the

lid

the newly formed North Atlantic Treaty

—nothing quite

on the

involved in local politics,

kettle. isn't

as

rude as the

He

dies,

elected as he

unknown and unmourned,

of apoplexy while

on

is

suf-

too far-out right wing and

no time

in the

for that

kind of non-

arms of his mistress, Eva,

a trip to Berlin in the spring of 1945. His dreadful

paintings are eventually bought up by London's Tate a lot of other junk;

—

Returning to Braunau, young Adolf gets

anti-Semitic; prosperous Austro-Bavaria has sense.

Ems Telegram

which

is

why we remember

179

the

Modern

name

—along with

of Hitler.

WHAT

So there

is

IF? 2

—and no Holocaust. Such

no Great War, no Second World War

notional events were indeed utilized in a far-fetched, prophetic novel from the imagination of a little-known English science-fiction writer called

H. G. Wells. But the

critics

panned the excessive fantasy that the peace-

loving Americans could conceivably wipe out two cities in smiling Japan

with bombs made from a handful of atoms. his fevered imagination,

way-out

had

It

was recalled that Wells, with

also previously written a

book that was equally

—about the world being invaded by men from Mars; hence

his

novel, 1945 and All That, was dismissed as just too fantastical by a tranquil

twentieth century, which had

come

to regard itself evolving as

an exten^

sion of the "perfectible" eighteenth.

A

lovely.

Arcadian dream perhaps; and possibly

account the inbuilt aggressiveness and greed of the

one day wreck our planet. But impossible? No! All to get overexcited about the

Ems Telegram?

it

takes too

little

into

human race, which will

this

from France's

refusal

Why not? Great events

so of-

ten have tiny beginnings; and think of Ulysses' famous speech in Troilus and Cressida:

.

.

.

untune one

string,

And, hark! what discord In mere oppugnancy.

.

.

follows;

each new thing meets

.

180

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Switzerland

i-^^

/

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ROGER SPILLER

THE FUHRER IN THE DOCK A speculation on the banality of evil

The "what

ifs?"

of the Second World

dim than most would imagine, was

,

in fact, very

much in

War in Europe go beyond the possibility,

the balance until the

autumn

broke through at El Alamein and Hitler squandered ter that

943

,

war

in his favor. If the Allies

which the Americans

for the Allies,

Carr has argued,

the

was

and by

and Hurtgen

the

his brief

the British

,

Af-

invade the Continent in

might have been a

to

an end

to

win

in the

the

war? As Caleb

autumn

of

1

944 with ,

thousand of lives and the prevention of the Cold War.

the dreary winter of

It

1945, after Arnhem, the Battle of the Bulge,

Forest, setbacks that should never have happened, the question

and final year of

Roger

to

empire. Thereafter the question becomes:

most expeditious way

turned to what should be done with teenth

942 when

his legions at Stalingrad.

had attempted

war could have come

the saving of hundreds of didn't,

1

originally pressed for, the result

and

disaster that saved Hitler

What,

of

only an Allied miscalculation of Stalingrad-like proportions could have

tipped the 1

less

won. The Western war

that Hitler might have

Spiller

the

Germany and

its

Nazi leadership

in the thir-

Thousand-Year Reich?

reminds us here that powerful Allied voices spoke in favor of a

Carthaginian solution: the complete dismemberment of German industry and the reduction of the country to a permanently impoverished agricultural republic.

There would be summary Hitler, the

man who

be at the top of the

field executions

had started and

list.

of the Nazi leaders, military and

led the

The assumption was

344

civil.

National Socialist revolution, would that he

would be taken

alive

(though

The Fuhrer

Hitler had already

prepared

announced

commit

to

suicide

coward). Curiously,

who

took the most

unlike the to the

it

was

to his intimates in the Berlin

No

trials

executions without public

U.S.

Kansas.

all:

What

fairs

is

if

Hitler had lived? ''Hitler," Spiller kill

himself after

all.

Change noth-

the George C. Marshall Professor of Military History

Army Command and General

He

And

and one changes everything."

ROGER SPILLER at the

trials first.

of 1937, they should not be rigged. That brings us

intriguing question of

this

hunker that he was

Stalin, the greatest killer of the twentieth century,

writes, ''could have just as easily decided not to

ing else but

Dock

worst came: unlike Lenin, he was not a physical

legalistic line:

Moscow purge

most

if

in the

Staff College, Fort Leavenworth,

has written and lectured widely on contemporary military

af-

and military history in governmental, academic, and public venues.

Spiller

was the editor of the three-volume Dictionary of American Military

Biography and Combined lished

work

is

Arms

in

Action Since 1939. His most recent pub-

Sharp Comers: Urban Operations at Century's End.

345

APRIL

20,

1945:

Fifty feet

under the ruined

Hitler marks his birthday, his fifty-sixth.

Allied

air raids

It

still

live in the

glittering chancellery, the Reichskanzlerei, has

No

below ground,

Naturally,

last

three

wreckage. Hitler's

been pounded into a smol-

warren of bombproof rooms and

hall-

as the Fiihrerbunker.

many

well-wishers

such an important occasion intimates are

Adolf

last.

birthday parties there. So a small affair has been arranged

in the claustrophobic

ways that serves

city of Berlin,

be his

have hit Berlin more than eighty times in the

months. Miraculously, some Berliners

dering hulk.

will

still

now

who would have been find

it

happily present for

difficult to attend.

within reach, however. Reichsmarschall

can be coaxed from his country estate

this

one

last time.

Most of Hitler's

Hermann Goring Foreign Minister

Joachim von Ribbentropp and Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels only a bunker away.

The minister for armament and war production, Albert

Speer, has a dangerous this meeting.

commute, but he

will

go to some trouble to attend

He feels he must tell his fiihrer personally that he will disobey

his orders: the so-called

Nero

Directives

—

to

deny the enemy any

victory by laying the entire Reich to waste. Reichsfiihrer Heinrich plotting a separate peace with the

ler

is

he

will

come

are

into the city too.

Western Allies

at the

fruits

of

Himm-

moment, but

A few more, some of the lesser lights of the

fading Reich, contribute their presence to the grimy air below: Martin Bor-

mann, who coming Youth,

in the ever-more confined

Hitler's indispensable

who

sees in the

atmosphere of the bunker,

is

fast be-

man; Artur Axmann, the head of the Hitler

coming

battle for Berlin a great opportunity for his

armed children. Admiral Karl Donitz and Generals Wilhelm Keitel and Alfred Jodl are in attendance, along with several Berlin area commanders

thrown

in for

good measure.

A few days earlier, Eva Braun, Hitler's mistress.

346

The Fuhrer

in the

Dock She seemed an

arrived without notice to take up residence in the bunker.

omen. But of what?

As

the air raids continued, as the AlUed armies fought their way toward

the heart of the Reich from virtually every direction, those

wondered when he would

with Hitler anxiously to quit the city.

He had been heard

to say that

birthday, transfer his headquarters to his

and carry on the war from rival cast a

new and

that Hitler

meant

its

mountain

dreadful light

Perhaps Hitler knows by now. casion he

is

fastness.

on everyone's

brutally realistic.

He

The war

is

Eva Braun's dramatic

Could

And what would happen

lost,

so everything

is

lost.

its

people, of himself.

him, or that the

Then he

German

its

cultural

itself

His poi-

the

people are worthy of his great

demanding. "Afterward," he muses, "you rue the

But in these

whom

final

cities are to

will

go

down

tical

Burning the

cities

ploy to deny the

is

not a

enemy any

tacit

and de-

in ruin,

He was

later that "by ordinary standards

judged insane." Hitler occasionally dreams that victory ter all.

fact that you've

be burned.

days Hitler lives in several worlds.

Lord Tedder would write

has defeated

suf-

ficiently

Even abandoned

total

Perhaps he has not been

German

servedly so.

then?

He wonders whether

people have failed him.

been so kind." Then he decides, no. All

be

and material wealth,

imagines that the war

ideals.

ar-

it

On oc-

and out o{ reality.

sonous worldview tolerates no half measures: success or oblivion, victory or utter destruction of his nation,

his

at Obersalzberg,

speculations.

sliding in

is

was time

it

he would leave Berlin on

Alpine redoubt

to stay to the bitter end?

who remained

finally see that

a

man

of

would be

may not be

lost af-

admission of defeat, but a clever tac-

possible advantage. Shattered armies

can

be reconstituted for the final apocalyptic battles on the approaches to Berlin. Seized

by imaginings of a rejuvenated Wehrmacht, Hitler

visits

the front lines for the last time in

March

Ninth Army's headquarters, then

in the castle at Freienwalde. There, the

1945, venturing as far east as the

generals and staff officers saw a stooped old face

who

occasionally, with

an

effort,

man

with gray hair and sunken

ventured a confident smile. Hitler's

old headquarters in East Prussia, at Rastenburg, was the site of the most

promising assassination attempt against him, one attempt of forty-two in

347

WHAT

IF?

2

LAST HURRAH In April

1

945 Adolf

Hitler Youth. to

,

It

was

swallow the Nazi

Hitler emerged

his last

from

photograph.

capital, he

bunker

his Berlin

On

the final

would commit

to

award medals

to

members of the

day of the month, as Soviet armies prepared

suicide.

(Hulton/Archive)

all,

by Richard Overy's count. Since the

historians

bomb exploded on

have been tempted to see the explosion

July 20, 1944,

as the cause of Hitler's

mental and physical decline. But neither the danger of assassination nor the

bomb were

catalysts of his deterioration.

correspondence between wartime cal health, but

humans do not

Hitler's physicians

was, thriving

stresses

One would

and a

leader's

expect a certain

mental and physi-

react so literally to dramatic events.

One

of

thought that until 1940 Hitler looked younger than he

on the

and 1943, he began

stresses

and

to catch

strains of his

up with

his age.

megalomania. Between 1940

Even

his

most admiring

fol-

lowers began to see signs of physical and mental decline. Joseph Goebbels

rhapsodized that Hitler's face was that "of an Atlas, bearing the whole

world on his shoulders."

348

The Fuhrer By 1943, the quack who served

Dock

in the

one of

as

Hitler's attending physicians,

Theodore Morell, was administering injections of twenty-eight different drugs. Well before the berg, his

and

downward

bomb exploded

shook so much

stoop and shuffle as he walked.

as to

Some

be useless to him.

of those

all

too

ever,

left

arm

He began

who saw him most

thought he might have Parkinson's disease, but these symptoms

monly

Rasten-

at

had begun. His extremities trembled. His

slide

leg occasionally

brew made up of

a

as

to

often

com-

described could just as easily have been hysterical paralysis of a type

common among soldiers

in the

Great War.

that Hitler's physicians were of

is

They contributed importantly

no help

What

to him.

is

quite clear,

how-

Quite the opposite.

to their patient's miseries.

By the spring of

1944, Dr. Morell had developed the practice of simply giving Hitler's aides

and servants bulk supplies of pills

—

Dr. Koester's Antigas Pills

a mixture of strychnine and belladonna, to be taken

demanded. Hitler

is

whenever the patient

How one might gauge the effect of these minor poisonings upon

a nice question.

upon

fluence

—containing

Too many other

his behavior at the time.

these actually contributed to his

factors

must be allowed their

One cannot

command

in-

imagine that any of

of self or state during the final

days of the war.

After the Soviet

commencement

Union

—

quarters at Rastenburg.

forced

him

to

of Operation Barbarossa

Hitler spent less time in Berlin and

abandon East

Ziegenberg near Bad

Prussia

once and

Neuheim

exception of his

for all

to his

to Berlin.

Western Headquarters

Ardennes that collapsed into the

By mid-January, he was back

visit to

and return

to lend his strategic genius to the direc-

tion of the Christmas offensive in the Battle of the Bulge.

in his head-

By the end of November 1944, Russian advances

Toward the middle of December, he ventured at

—the invasion of the

more time

in Berlin,

and with the

the Ninth Army's headquarters, there he would

remain.

The less,

fiihrer's

bunker

at

Rastenberg had been no palace;

it

bomb

air-

him not

to re-

of July 20. But the bunker in Berlin was even

more

dank, certainly cheerless. Even Hitler's doctors advised

turn after the

was dark,

confining than the one in Rastenberg.

It

was

hardly a place designed for re-

cuperation. By February 1945, Hitler's doctors were adding to the

349

list

of his

WHAT symptoms an this

inability to concentrate

IF? 2

and a certain forgetfulness

merely indifference? By then, time had turned

—

or was

out in the

itself inside

bunker. Daily military conferences began very late in the evening and usually

were not finished before

six in the

morning. Afterward, Hitler "with

shaking legs and quivering hand," stood to dictate instructions to his secretaries self

and

aides.

That done, he would collapse on

at all."

Axmann professed

"will

power and determination"

scription of Hitler at the time

who saw

Officer,"

a Hitler

virtually did not talk

who

all

the same.

comes

to us

to the conference

and

Axmann thought he exuded

A

much

less

worshipful de-

from an "elderly General Staff

"dragged himself about painfully and clum-

throwing his torso forward and dragging his

room

"He

to being shocked by his leader's appearance

manner. Hitler seemed to be in his dotage, yet

ing

and engorge him-

with his favorite foods, chocolate and cake. During these gastronomic

performances, one of his secretaries remembered,

sily,

a sofa

room

of the bunker

legs after .

.

.

him from

saliva dripped

his liv-

from the

comers of his mouth."

That

no hope eral

day's military conference

—

Hitler's birthday

at all that Berlin could escape destruction

Hans

Krebs,

who

conference

—

offered

by the Red Army. Gen-

delivered the briefing, told Hitler that the capital

would be completely surrounded within a few days within a few hours. Only a few Military units depicted

on

at most, or at worst,

Wehrmacht and SS formations maps were

Hitler's situation

ghosts of their originals. Hitler imagined

them

as

up to

little

full

survived.

more than

strength and

combat power. He began directing movements and concentrations of these

phantom

units, creating a

gossamer defense against the Red invaders. All

these units he placed under the Steiner, sive its

and

in Hitler's mind,

if

was bom, another phantom

command nowhere flitting

of

else,

SS Obergruppenfiihrer

Felix

the so-called Steiner Offen-

through a mind that was

fast losing

intellectual cohesion.

Swinging back and forth between

nounced that he would remain

lucidity

in Berlin after

all,

himself and his entourage to the Obersalzberg. that the

coming

tal defeat,"

and near-stupor, Hitler anthat he would not

He

told

battle for Berlin "presented the only

one of his adjutants

chance to prevent

although precisely how, Hitler could not then

350

remove

say.

to-

With Gen-

The

Word

next to

of the

me and then

in Berlin

city.

garbage, mail deliveries its

gates.

long as the

shall shoot myself."

On that day,

On

all

all

Reich administrative agencies

for good. Shops, streetcars, subways, police,

and elsewhere closed

Zoo closed

I

"I shall fight as

intentions was not long in spreading beyond the

fiihrer's

bunker, throughout the

Dock

was more forthright:

eral Alfred Jodl, Hitler faithful fight

Fiihrer in the

quit

even the pretense of operating. The Berlin

April 20, the office of the

commandant

Himmler found

issued 2,000 permits to leave the city.

of Berlin

reasons not to visit

the Fuhrerbunker again. Reichsmarschall Goring discovered "extremely ur-

gent tasks in South Germany," and decamped hurriedly from his estate with a truck

convoy

full

of loot.

Those who stayed behind with Hitler watch a man

for the cataclysmic battle will

The

falling inexorably into a self-dug grave.

outside formed the perfect

accompaniment

to the

Gotterddmmerung in the Fuhrerbunker. "There want," Hitler cried out: "the end, the end!"

military situation

atmosphere of Hitlerian

is

He

only one thing was, in

Hugh

I

still

Trevor-

Roper's memorable phrase, like "some cannibal god, rejoicing in the ruin of his

own

temples."

He would

not have to wait long:

On

the morning of

April 2 1 Soviet artillery began bombarding the outskirts of the ,

Of course

it

was the Red

Army

that

had aimed

itself

city.

most deliberately

at

the Nazi capital. Stalin had feigned indifference to the fate of Berlin, going so far as to tell General Eisenhower that the city gic importance." In truth, Stalin believed

had

no such

"lost its

former strate-

thing: Berlin

was to be

where the Red Army's war would end. Eisenhower had agreed with Stalin that Berlin was "nothing but a geographical location" of military significance. Characteristically, Stalin

duplicitous as he himself was, fense committee, "the

little

assumed Eisenhower was

and on the following day Stalin

little allies

remaining as

told his de-

intend to get to Berlin ahead of the

Red

Army."

A race for Berlin had thus begun, but only the Red Army would be running

it.

Stalin set his

two most experienced generals, Georgy Zhukov and

Ivan Konev, against one another to see

who

could whip his soldiers faster

through the crumbling resistance put up by the Wehrmacht and the SS. By early April,

Zhukov

is

slightly closer

than Konev. Zhukov has amassed four

351

WHAT field

IF? 2

armies and two tank armies at the Kustrin bridgehead on the Oder

River. For each kilometer of his front lines,

Zhukov has placed 250

artillery

pieces virtually wheel to wheel. Eleven thousand of these wait to be fired at Berlin. Konev's forces

to the south.

more than

were equally strong and lay alongside Zhukov's,

Combined, the Soviet armies driving

for Berlin

just

numbered

a million soldiers, happily anticipating revenge. "Berlin for us

was an object of such ardent diers to general,

desire,"

wanted to see

[it

wrote Konev, "that everyone, from

with

own

his]

eyes, to capture

it

sol-

by force

of arms."

The question of which of the ing been

more

Allied armies was going to take Berlin hav-

or less settled in the Soviets' favor, there naturally arose the

question of what to do with the city and

its

inhabitants once captured. In-

would be swept up

evitably, high-ranking Nazis

—perhaps even

the European war

in the last great battle of

Fiitler himself.

On

this latter question.

Allied policy had yet to take shape. In the meantime. Allied opinions

dif-

fered wonderfully.

Churchill had considered what eventually was to be done with Axis leaders as early as the

summer

of 1941,

when he was heard

Hitler and his cronies might be exiled to

Napoleon's old prison

after

some remote

to

wonder

island. St.

if

Helena,

Waterloo, would not do, however; Churchill

"would not so desecrate" the place by putting Nazis on

The most

it.

ex-

treme punishment, he thought, should be meted out to Mussolini: that "bogus

mimic of Ancient Rome" should be "strangled

Roman

fashion." Naturally, such opinions

like Vercingetorix in old

would grow even

less

forgiving

over the course of the war. Axis leaders were storing up credits for beastliness at a

D day,

pace that quickly outran any impulse of Allied mercy. After

Eisenhower

bers of the

startled

Lord Halifax one day by arguing that

German General

Staff,

all

mem-

the Gestapo, and any Nazi above the

rank of major should be executed. By the spring of 1945, Churchill and the Foreign Office were of one mind: summary

field

executions for the highest-

ranking Axis leaders.

Although Churchill distinguished between the Germany, most of sevelt

his

Hitlerites

and the

rest of

countrymen did not. Nor did the Americans. Roo-

most certainly did not absolve the German people of responsibility

352

The

for

Nazism. More than once,

The president also agreed,

Henry Morgenthau, who form

FDR

suggested mass castration of the Ger-

safely over, so as to forestall a resurgence of mili-

mans once the war was tarism.

Dock

Fiihrer in the

at least at

first,

with his treasury secretary,

had a plan to de-industrialize

Germany and

into a permanently impoverished agricultural republic.

it

trans-

These were

the provisions that seemed to attract the most attention, but Morgenthau also

made recommendations

Churchill's line.

Once

identities confirmed,

military firing squads.

of war criminals

all

The American genthau's plan.

At

a

with war criminals that followed

for dealing

list

of Axis "archcriminals" was drawn up and

Morgenthau 's plan

One

estimate at the time held that

across Europe

Henry Stimson, was

war's end.

Mor-

horrified by

President Roosevelt was attracted to the severity of

the plan, but Stimson would not hear of

becoming of a

many thousands

would be rounded up by

secretary of war, first,

called for their field execution by

truly great nation,

it.

The Morgenthau Plan was un-

Stimson argued. The Allies had

sacrificed

their lives and treasure in defense of the highest moral purposes. Those sacrifices

must not be disgraced by the imposition of a Carthaginian peace.

Crude vengeance should make way law and

justice.

Only

a trial

for higher principles of international

by an international tribunal could be accept-

able under these circumstances, Stimson insisted. retary

And

in this

opinion Sec-

Stimson could count on the support of none other than Joseph

Stalin himself, as Churchill would discover.

On a trip

to

Moscow

in

Octo-

ber 1944, Churchill had broached this subject with Stalin, and to his surprise

found the Soviet leader taking "an unexpectedly ultrarespectable

line." Stalin

would not budge on the question, Churchill

sevelt. Stalin said "there

must be no executions without

world would say they were afraid to able Stalin trial for

Hitler could not have

made

trial,

know

Roo-

otherwise the

them." Confronted by an immov-

and a wavering Roosevelt, Churchill gave in

the leading Nazis.

tainly did

try

later told

to the idea of a

'

known

of Churchill's concession.

He

almost cer-

of the Declaration of St. James, an official pronouncement

three years earlier in

London by

representatives from the nine Euro-

pean governments-in-exile. Constituting themselves

as the

"Inter-AUied

Commission on the Punishment of War Crimes," the conferees foreswore 353

WHAT summary

IF? 2

enemy war

retributions against

criminals,

and instead demanded

"the punishment, through the channel of organized justice, of those guilty

The

of or responsible for these crimes."

come around

leading Allies would eventually

European War bled to a

to this position as the

The

close.

made

James's declaration of high-minded legal purpose could hardly have

any impression on a dictator who had so thoroughly subverted tion's legal system.

beyond the pale of any the

summer

law.

On the eve

"We have

much

so

must win," he told Goebbels. Four years most humane

fate Hitler

Moscow Zoo"

later,

was clear to

it

for,

for the edification of the

By the afternoon and evening of April

the bunker,

an international

He refused, he

Hitler were disappearing one by one. all

At

all

na-

passed a

to answer for already that

might have hoped

temptuous of any such prospect.

own

his party

of Germany's invasion of Russia in

of 1941, Hitler confessed his feeling that they had

moral point of no return.

in the

his

Anyway, Hitler had long thought himself and

St.

trial

we

was the

but he was in fact con-

said, to

become "an

exhibit

enemy's "hysterical masses."

22, such prospects as

were

left to

the daily military conference in

present that the Steiner Offensive would

never materialize. By then, every Wehrmacht formation in the path of the

Red Army was

either disintegrating

along the roads to Berlin. Virtually of Zhukov's artillery. fled

The

city

thumps now discernible

on the spot all

or falling back in confusion

of Berlin itself was

was being drenched in

now within range

artillery fire, its

muf-

in the Fiihrerbunker. Every notion of retriev-

ing the disastrous military situation, of fending off the enemy's advance into the capital, of

heroic resistance, reports

still

somehow

all

wresting the initiative from the Russians, of

these possibilities were rendered impossible by the few

being transmitted from the wreckage of the once-proud, seem-

ingly irresistible

Wehrmacht.

Hitler listened sullenly as the reports were briefed to him. All of a sud-

den, casting off any pretense of composure, he unleashed a storm of hysterical ravings.

No

one was worthy of

his regard. All about

incompetent, corrupt, traitorous weaklings.

went on

for

who knows how

energy, any reserve of hope.

him were

And so his fit of denunciations

long, draining all those present of self-regard,

The

historian

worthy of a Wagnerian opera: "He shook his

354

Joachim Fest depicts a scene fists

furiously while

he spoke.

The Fuhrer

down his

tears ran

of his

life,

Dock

in the

cheeks; and as always in the disastrous disenchantments

everything collapsed along with the one hysterically magnified

expectation. This was the end, he said.

alone remains.

He would meet

He

could no longer go on. Death

death here in the

some present thought Hitler had completely

violent,

His outburst was so

city."

On the

lost his senses.

day after this near-psychotic episode, a corps commander had been ordered to report to the fenses.

command

bunker to receive the hopeless

General Karl Weidling, was dismayed to see his fuhrer

hind a table strewn with maps, his face puffy "with feverish tried to stand up,

noticed to

I

stantly trembling.

.

.

.

With

my horror

noticed that

when

knee swinging

Hitler sat

like a

down

we had not met

to Hitler,

before." Weidling

knew them, what he

did

Two

re-

the stairs

Himmler had entered

insensible.

on top of one another,

even darker shadow over the denizens of the bunker,

Unknown

me and

faster."

know would have rendered him completely

down

When he

again, "his left leg kept moving, the

pendulum, only

ports in particular, tumbling

eyes.

he shook hands with

Hitler was frenzied by the state of affairs as he

not then

sitting be-

that his hands and legs were con-

a distorted smile

asked in a hardly audible voice whether

If

of Berlin's de-

if

cast

an

that was possible.

into secret negotiations with

Sweden's Count Bemadotte for a separate peace with the Western Allies.

Himmler was even

anything,

less in

touch with

senting himself to Bemadotte as "the only sane ler

was

at the

same time considering how

religious sect that

had been brought

course, the Allies were in

ditional surrender,

no mood

than his

man left

leader. Pre-

in Europe,"

to colonize the

Himm-

Ukraine with

to his attention by his masseur.

to entertain

announced by Reuters news

to be in a discussion with Ritter

peared with the report.

Von Greim

a

0{

any alternative to uncon-

and Himmler's negotiations went nowhere, except,

in the evening of April 28, to be

happened

reality

If

late

service. Hitler

von Greim when

a valet ap-

reported that his fuhrer turned purple.

This news was followed the next day by reports that Mussolini and his mistress

had been taken prisoner by

Italian partisans

and summarily exe-

cuted in the small town of Mezzagra. TTieir bodies had been taken to Milan

and hanged by the heels in a garage on the wreaked

its

Piazzale Loreto,

vengeance on the corpses. Hearing

355

this

where a

mob

news. Hitler began

WHAT

IF?

2

preparing for his suicide, a final contribution to the shrieked out for the

German

Armageddon he had

He

nation that had so disappointed him.

would show them, those "petty bourgeois reactionaries" who thought they

had defeated him. Without him, Germany would be

leaderless, carrion to

be picked over by the wretched Allies.

Most accounts given by those present who survived bunker agree

this final

day in the

having spent most of the evening of April 29 writing his

that,

"Political Testament," Hitler retired to his

receive occasional visitors from

among

rooms with Eva Braun, there to

the dwindling population of the

bunker. Sometime in the middle of the afternoon of April 30, Hitler and

Braun took lowing his

last

to the surface,

own

Braun used poison. Hitler used a

pistol. Fol-

wishes, several of Hitler's underlings carried the

two bodies

their

lives.

where they were incinerated in the ruins of the chancellery

garden, and where the Russians discovered the remains several days

So did Hitler take

his

own

life,

by his

later.

own hand and of his own volition?

No doubt he was hysterical, but he was not deranged. Neither madness, nor the approach of the

enemy then

less

than half a mile away in the Tier-

garten, nor entreaties from Goebbels or his other courtiers, compelled

Hitler to take this course of action.

drive

him toward

Nor

self-destruction. This

did the deeper impulses of culture

was not an act o{ seppuku.

He

did

not aim to retrieve his honor or ennoble his death in any way. His suicide

was an act of spite. sued orders to himself from

kill

He

killed himself in the

Germany

itself.

He meant

who

spirit in

which he had

is-

to punish history by absenting

it.

Goebbels followed his master not long least

same

will stay

after.

"There must be someone

at

with him unconditionally until death," Goebbels wrote

in a codicil to the political testament Hitler

had

left

behind. After a half-

hearted attempt to negotiate with the Russians, Goebbels destroyed himself,

his wife,

and

their five children. Heinrich Himmler's dalliance with

the role of peacemaker

came

to a similar end,

and he

days of Hitler and Goebbels. Goring, of course, was

taken prisoner and stand

Bormann,

after Hitler the

trial at

killed himself within still

alive,

soon to be

Nuremberg. The whereabouts of Martin

most powerful politician

356

in

Germany, were un-

The Fuhrer

known. He was believed Fiihrerbunker at the

last

in the

have been

to

Dock

killed while trying to escape the

minute, but no body was found there.

Uncertainties about Hitler's fate were not assuaged entirely.

When

his

death was announced over the radio by Admiral Canaris, Marshal Zhukov thought, "So that's the end of the bastard.

him

Too bad

it

was impossible to take

The

alive." Stalin did not believe Hitler was dead.

Soviet historian

Dmitri Volkogonov depicts a Stalin intensely interested in the fate of his mortal enemy. "Stalin's triumph would be complete

he could take the

if

Nazi leader alive and have him tried by an international tribunal," Vol-

kogonov

writes.

Even though

sian troops, Stalin seems to have specialists.

When

ing that Hitler was Stalin was by to fly about,

been unwilling to

Stalin arrived at

American

ence, he startled the

remains had been discovered by Rus-

Hitler's

still alive,

no means alone

Potsdam

trust his

own

forensic

in July for the Allied confer-

secretary of state James Byrnes by suggest-

hiding somewhere beyond Germany.

in his suspicion.

And

Rumors of escape continued

not only about Hitler, but about Bormann too. The Nuremberg

prosecutors then preparing charges against the Nazi

elite,

not

dent that Hitler was dead, just in case added Hitler's

name

to the

at all confilist

of de-

fendants.

All of which brings us to an uncomfortable, even unwelcome question. If

Hitler

had chosen

to live,

tions tiresome.

Some

to be cautious.

One may

what then? Historians usually

speculation might be in order, they

go too

far

say,

but one ought

too quickly, slide into fantasy. Besides,

simply finding out what did happen sible.

find these ques-

is

hard enough, sometimes

just

impos-

Why add to the confusions history already throws in our way? Protests

of this sort, against the variant that has

come

to be called "alternative" or

"counterfactual" history, might best be seen as reactions to intellectual

shock

—reactions that cannot bear the weight of much argument.

For, in

one

sense, alternative history

is

history.

The confluence

of human

action creates contingencies and uncertainties that often do not yield an authoritative version of process, event, or person. torian

would

prefer to think,

which of several versions of the

one

is

story

More

often than any his-

reduced to educated guessing about

one ought to accept

357

as credible. In the

— WHAT end one must decide even not only the living of

it

if

there

is

IF? 2

chance of deciding

a

but the writing of

which a certain tolerance

it

too

—

is

a

badly. History

chancy business

in

comes

in

for the calculation o( probabilities

handy. In practice, historians exercise restraint bordering

on abstinence when

they encounter an opportunity to calculate alternatives. Their calculations

show

up, quarklike, as the merest

shadow of a regret that events

in a certain

case did not turn out differently. Others are a bit bolder, registering disap-

proval or rendering judgments. Thucydides cast his History of nesian

War

Athens.

as a tragedy

And he

leaves

no doubt about what he thought of the second-rate

demagogues who succeeded standard just

is

Pelopon-

the

because he grieved over the death of Periclean

set up, against

and led Athens to

Pericles

which successors

are

made

A

ruin.

to struggle

one of any number of puzzles the historian may pose

kind of

—

this

is

for the reader. In-

common

deed, the practice of hypothetical, or alternative calculation

is

one might even argue that the doing of history without

well nigh im-

possible.

As

it is

the editor of the present volume has written,

so

"'What

if

the

is

historian's favorite secret question.'"

The

obverse of history in Hitler's particular case, therefore,

is

not at

all

hard to imagine credibly. Reacting to precisely the same circumstances, acting

have

upon the very same stew of perception and decided not to

just as easily

kill

but this and one changes everything. trol

himself after

One

delusion, Hitler could

all.

Change nothing

else

might impose a measure of con-

over any alternative scenario by asking no more of inventiveness than

one might ask of a prediction. to see in April 1945?

How far ahead might one justifiably attempt

Whatever one answers, one should go no

farther than

that.

In April 1945,

some very

real

and very important questions about the

ture awaited answers. Statesmen, policy makers,

had

to guess about

did guess.

what would happen

soldiers the

world over

most uncertain world. But they

We know, for instance, that there was no agreement between the

Allies over

how

to treat the leaders of the defeated Reich, save that they

would not be shot out of hand. gent

in a

and

fu-

moment

the leading Nazis

What

that

who were 358

meant was that

for the contin-

within reach were to be scooped

The Fuhrer

in the

Dock

up and interned. Once the Allies agreed on questions of international law and jurisprudence, there remained the business of setting the actual machinery in place, and

all

regnum with

and daughter

his wife

some

of this required

time.

in the safety

Goring spent

and

this inter-

relatively comfortable

custody of the Western Allies. Those taken by the Russians were neither so safe

nor comfortable.

So

if

we may imagine

we can

Berlin,

painted for

us.

see

now

one who survived the

a living Hitler,

battle of

that a good deal of this canvas has already been

We know

that at 12:50 in the afternoon of

May

2,

General

Karl Weidling's chief of staff and several other official representatives flew a white flag at the

Potsdam Bridge, that they were escorted promptly to

General Chuikov's headquarters, and that an armistice was arranged forthwith.

We

also

know

that at about the

same time Russian troops took the

Reichskanzlerei and, after some confusion, finally discovered the Fiihrer-

bunker

itself.

alive,

still

We can easily envision a resigned, even an indifferent Hitler,

having ordered General Weidling to seek a

Hitler might

ceasefire.

have harbored a fantasy of a negotiated peace, but of

still

course he had nothing

left

with which to strike any sort of bargain.

also see without fear of contradiction that the Russians

been

in a

mood

Perhaps

We can

would not have

especially conducive to negotiation, having lost nearly

100,000 casualties in the Berlin campaign alone. No, Hitler would have

been hustled

off to see

one of the Russian commanders, Zhukov or Chuikov.

Immediately, a signal confirming his capture would have gone out to Stalin,

and then,

to the rest of the world. In all likelihood, the prisoner Hitler

would have been on But,

his

way

we have now reached

Before going further,

we

—

precisely

Moscow

before the day was out.

the outer limits of a reasonably safe scenario.

are forced to consider a less plausible, certainly a

How

less attractive, alternative.

suicide

to

likely

was

what many suspected

it

that Hitler chose escape over

at the time?

Here, our answers

need not be so speculative; we have testimony of just what was required to

make good such an escape only

just.

Escape was possible, but

In the chaotic final hours of the war, several small groups took

their chances outside, in a fire.

at this point in time.

The chances

wrecked

city engulfed

by

artillery

and small arms

of success were minuscule. In the aftermath of Hitler's

359

WHAT and Goebbels's

suicides,

an

ill-assorted

party officials, including Hitler's get out through the

New

own

2

bunch of

and

soldiers, secretaries,

Bormann,

secretary Martin

tried to

Chancellery exits and into the city with the aim

way northwest of the

of working their

IF?

city.

All were killed or captured. Bor-

mann's body was not found. But the fortunes of battle favored others. Major Willi Johannmeier, Hitler's

to Field

army adjutant, was chosen

to carry a

copy of Hitler's

final

testament

Marshal Schoerner, the newly appointed commander in chief of

the Wehrmacht.

Two other petty functionaries, Wilhelm Zander and Heinz

Lorenz, drew similar missions. This party was rounded out by the addition of a fortunate corporal

named Hummerich, presumably

assigned to assist

Major Johannmeier. Johannmeier, an experienced and resourceful was detailed to lead the group to the safety of German about to be tested.

around the Pichelsdorf.

had

to go.

The

were

skills

column,

at the

Zoo

station,

and

at

Pichelsdorf sector was where Johannmeier and his party

At noon on

the garage exits

His

Russians had established three battle lines in a ring

city center, at the Victory

The

lines.

soldier,

April 29, the four

on Hermann Goring

men

Strasse

left

the chancellery through

and struck westward, through

the Tiergarten toward Pichelsdorf, at the northernmost reach of the large city lake, the Havel.

By four or

five in

the afternoon, having spent the

several hours evading Russians, the party arrived in this sector.

was in German hands

for the

moment, defended by

The

last

sector

a battalion of Hitler

Youth awaiting reinforcements. Johannmeier and company rested

until dark

and then took small boats

out onto the lake, making southward for another pocket of defense on the

western shore, at Wannsee. There, Johannmeier managed to get a radio

sig-

nal off to Admiral Donitz, asking for evacuation by seaplane. After resting in a

bunker

for

most of the

day, the small group set off for a small island, the

Pfaueninsel, where they would await their rescue by Donitz's seaplane.

In the meantime, another group of bunker refugees arrived.

morning of April leave.

29, just as

Johannmeier and

his party

On

the

were preparing to

Major Baron Freytag von Loringhoven, Rittmeister Gerhardt Boldt,

and a lieutenant colonel named Weiss asked and received permission tempt an escape and join General Wenck's imaginary army of

360

to at-

relief.

The

J

The Fuhrer

in the

Dock

next day, April 30, they would follow the same but even more dangerous route west as Johannmeier's group.

The

blocks now, already at the Air Ministry. ring

on the Pichelsdorf sector

out already

when

at the

Russians were as close as a few

And

they had nearly closed the

Havel. Freytag and his group had set

they were joined by Colonel Nicolaus von Below, Hitler's

Luftwaffe adjutant. Below seems to have been the

bunker before Hitler

one to leave the

last

killed himself.

All of these fugitives collected for a time on the lake, awaiting the vation of the seaplane. the heavy

enemy

A seaplane did materialize eventually, but owing to

fire, its

away before taking on

pilot

chose between discretion and valor and flew

Now

his passengers.

all

were

to be taken prisoner later.

down

past

Johannmeier and

Johannmeier simply continued

family

home

tament did

their

own if

only

their

way

to get away,

his group

worked

de-

Potsdam and Brandenburg and crossed the Elbe near Magde-

burg. Posing as foreign workers, they passed through later.

left to

By ones and twos most of the escapees managed

vices.

sal-

in Westphalia.

in a glass

Axmann,

law school at

jar.

There

Zander made

his journey all the

in the

lines a

his escape

good

all

the

few days

way back

garden he buried Hitler's

the chief of the Hitler Youth. Nicolaus

Bonn

enemy

way

to his

last tes-

to Bavaria, as

von Below enrolled

in

University. His studies were to be interrupted by the

Allied authorities.

All of these

men

cally resourceful ficulties

is

were considerably younger, healthier, and more physi-

than

Hitler.

The

an alternative that

vision of Hitler negotiating

is

all

these dif-

defeated by Hitler's psychological and

physical states, neither of which, singly or in combination, conduced to the

demands of such

a choice.

By

this time. Hitler simply did

physical or mental vigor necessary even to attempt an escape,

not have the

much less

ac-

tually succeed in one.

But, as the

eminent

know, "Myths are not idence." Immediately

British historian

like truths;

Hugh Trevor-Roper

has reason to

they are the triumph of credulity over ev-

upon the conclusion of the

war, Trevor-Roper

was

given access to Allied intelligence and prisoner interrogation reports for the purpose of disentangling the confusions of Hitler's plication, his ultimate fate.

last days,

and, by im-

Behind Trevor- Roper's assignment were the

361

ru-

WHAT mors that swept Europe the rumors said.

in the

He had gone

summer of ground

to

Or perhaps he had made

dle East.

IF?

2

1945: Hitler had escaped after

Or he was

in Bavaria.

in the

for the Baltic coast, there to

all,

Mid-

be rescued

by submarine and deposited among sympathizers somewhere in South America. These rumors did not merely enthuse the the

American

secretary of state at the

ing that Hitler was, in fact, alive

and

gullible. Stalin startled

Potsdam Conference

in July

by argu-

in hiding. Allied prosecutors

drawing

up charges against the leading Nazis took due care to see that Adolf Hitler was indicted,

if

only in absentia.

But no, given even the unlikely event of survival,

must be to Moscow

it

that he goes. However, this most plausible of alternatives leads us to an im-

portant question straightaway. Does he stay there to stand

shipped off to Nuremberg for the main proceedings? to locate their

war crimes

trials

trial,

Allies

or

is

he

had agreed

there because most of the principal defen-

dants had been captured by the Anglo-Americans. a few for the very

The

The

Russians held only

good reason that the leading Nazis did

their best to flee

westward, the least immediately dangerous direction, they thought. But

one adds Hitler

to Russia's haul of Nazi leaders, the advantage

so certain.

The

Russians were not particularly

where the

trial

would

be, so long as there

have been so obliging

Would

if

is

no way

to

on the question of

they had held Hitler in the Lubyanka Prison?

know

servative speculation takes

From

for certain. So,

trial in

one

Moscow?

sees,

even the most con-

one into the shadows of uncertainty quite soon.

this point on, history will insist that

we

grant more and

sake of the argument," knowing very well that while history plicable

mon

it is

sense

is

often irrational.

no

not quite

was one. Would the Russians

they have insisted upon a grand show

There

difficult

is

if

When dealing with the past,

more is

"for the

usually ex-

the test of com-

test at all.

However, we can be sure enough that a living Hitler would have posed considerable problems for the Allies, assuming he would have been

moved

to Nuremberg. Most immediately, the question was whether he would have

been in a condition to stand

trial?

Wherever he was imprisoned he would

have been treated correctly but certainly not put Hitler and fascism on

trial,

lavishly. Stalin

had hoped

and when the Anglo-Americans

2>(i2

to

finally

The Fuhrer

Dock

in the

A damaged

agreed on the principle of an international tribunal, so did they. or deranged Hitler would have been

no longer

in

command of his own

less suitable for

time, his

own diet,

and well beyond the clutches of the malign

the event. In prison, or his

own

medicines,

Dr. Morell, Hitler's physical

health might well have improved. Most of the Nuremberg defendants fared well enough.

The

prison regime even improved the dissolute and rotund

Goring.

He had been weaned from

his addiction to drugs

pounds.

Had Goring not committed

suicide

would have gone

to the gallows a healthier

Imagining Hitler's mental atic

one who seemed so predisposed

at large.

As we have

seen,

at Rastenburg,

first

part in the unsuccessful

served

no doubt

prison, the

Of course,

in Berlin

Hitler was

having served a few months in 1923

Munich Beer Hall

al-

for his

putsch. This earlier sentence,

event he might have forgotten

him

the op-

that every sen-

how

to

behave in

American Army commandant. Colonel Burton C. Andrus,

would have been present rules of

even when he

and then back

on Mein Kampf. But even criminals know

different. In the

is

could not hold

in the presence of admiring wardens, afforded

portunity to work

tence

life,

problem-

less

is

itself,

to bury himself

toward the end. Hitler was downright troglodytic. ready familiar with prison

of his execution, he

once he was captured,

state,

lost eighty

man.

than one might think. Confinement, in and of

terrors for

was

on the day

and

to reacquaint him.

Andrus imposed very

confinement upon his charges: only one

letter per

strict

week, one walk

per day, no conversations with fellow prisoners except at lunch, and rations in precisely the

same amounts provided

during that severe winter of defeat.

twenty years but write and ation.

done

talk.

to the

German

What had

Hitler

refugee population

done

Denied a freedom of movement, of associ-

Colonel Andrus would have cast his severe eye over a

little else

for the past

man who had

but talk and write for the past twenty-five years and

allowed neither.

The chances

for

now was

another Mein Kampf would have been

very small indeed. If this strictly

mind,

it

regimented environment did not improve Hitler's state of

would not have mattered

in the end.

Rudolf Hess, whose cele-

brated flight to Britain in 1941 had shaken Hitler like few other events, arrived in

Nuremberg from

his

wartime confinement

363

as a barely functional

WHAT amnesiac.

He had moments

he was detached from first,

suspecting

him

IF?

of lucidity punctuated by long spells in

reality

and barely responsive

he was barely competent he was rest

which

to social interaction.

and were

of his

even though

sufficiently so to stand trial.

in Berlin's

life

satisfied that

Spandau

Prison.

Hess would

Another defendant,

the virulent anti-Semitic propagandist Julius Streicher, scored so low

IQ

tests that

he was examined further by

psychiatrists.

he heard the charges against him.

If

we

on his

A third defendant,

German Labor Front, managed

Robert Ley, leader of the after

At

of an elaborate malingering, the Allies subjected Hess

to extensive psychiatric examinations

spend the

2

to

commit

suicide

require further evidence that

the Allies were disinclined to forgive, postpone, or otherwise soften their

prosecution of enemy leaders call that

Japan s wartime

on any grounds whatsoever, we need only

leader,

botched suicide attempt.

He ended up

in Tokyo's

Sugamo

Prison

all

same, and at the end of the gallows. Hitler could have expected no

were he to have stood

re-

Hideki Tojo, shot himself in the chest in a the less,

trial.

Allied officials charged with conducting the International Military Tribunal's business at

One

nights.

somehow

of

Nuremberg had any number o{ worries

them was whether one

turn the

trial to his

or

advantage.

it

more of the defendants would

More than merely convincing the

tribunal that they were not guilty, but by

was

to disturb their

some means of guile or

rhetoric,

within the power of these once mighty and feared defendants to

emerge from the ordeal was groundless. The

as

heroes or national martyrs? In the event, this fear

justices

on the

tribunal exercised strict control over

mug and

scowl and rustle in his

chair to indicate his reaction to testimony, but

no more. The white-

courtroom behavior. Goring was able to

helmeted military policemen

just

behind the defendant's box would have

removed any unruly defendant from the

decorum been

violated.

The behavior

cluded, was, like their persons, rather

of

court's presence, all

had the

court's

the defendants, Goring's in-

more confined than

in ordinary cir-

cumstances. Even the most extravagant personality, like the nail that came out too

far,

would be hammered down. Doubtless, Hitler himself, the most

extravagant of these personalities, would have responded along the same lines.

364

The

We

Fiihrer in the

Dock

must return, then, to Hitler himself. Exposed, yet confined

dock day

after day, Hitler,

in the

Goring, and the other defendants personified the

banality of evil. "There had been quite a metamorphosis," William L.

Shirer remembered. "Attired in rather shabby clothes, slumped in their seats fidgeting nervously, they old.

They seemed

no longer resembled the arrogant

mana

to be a drab assortment of mediocrities." Hitler's

would have faded to blandness, as witnesses, until

leaders of

he was made

if

scrubbed by each of the prosecution's

finally to disappear. In the early

morning

hours of October 16, 1946, the death sentences for ten oi the twenty-one

convicted defendants at the Nuremberg Trials were carried out. Goring,

who was fore,

to

have gone to the gallows

first,

had

killed himself the night be-

perhaps with the aid of a sympathetic guard. Hitler might have man-

aged to do the same to avoid what he had cried out

for,

das Ende, das Endel

In the end, our alternative scenario would have given Hitler a year and a half more of ferred,

who

life. If

a history would not give

him

the

life

he no doubt pre-

was a great deal more than he had allowed the pathetic millions

it

died because he lived.

One would

think humankind would be

all

too

ready to consign Hitler to his well-deserved fate, but as Trevor-Roper has

'The form of a myth

reminded

us,

there

minimum

a

is

is

indeed externally conditioned by

of evidence with which

it

must comply,

but once lip-service has been paid to that undeniable

mind

is

free to indulge

its

if it is

facts;

to live;

minimum, the human

infinite capacity for self-deception.

.

.

.

When we

consider upon what ludicrous evidence the most preposterous beliefs have

been

easily,

and by millions, entertained, we may well hesitate before pro-

nouncing anything incredible."

The

scenarios imagined here, though barely plausible, are

more than

enough to disturb one's quiet moments with a glimmer of anxiety. At any one moment an infinitude of contingencies await History's choice. History finally chooses ate to the case. But

What

if

Hitler

had

we

say, yes,

When

that must be fitting or right or appropri-

humankind has seen History make bad choices

lived,

what if History had been wrong once more?

365

too.

Ks:s..s;:v.>S^s^,S>..s;^..s;;v.cs:y..s:v

RICHARD

B.

FRANK

NO BOMB: NO END The Operation Olympic disaster,

Nearly

six

Did ending

what happen—and ones —may did

lucky

those

blind us to

war

the

tween 100,000 and 200,000

itary historian

Harry S Truman s decision has

who

in the Pacific justify the obliteration of be-

lives at

Hiroshima and Nagasaki? The horror of

who were wiped a question

United States had chosen not

"what

945

the debate over the morality of

hardly dimmed.

resulted

1

decades have passed since the United States dropped two atomic bombs

on Japan, but

the

Japan

to

out in the

that has

been too seldom asked:

drop the bombs? Richard B. Frank

ifs?"

may

is

were the

What

if

one mil-

has examined in detail the plausible scenarios that would have

from not pursuing an atomic conclusion. In

American

first instants

this

case, as he

makes

clear,

give us a better understanding of the unpleasant choices facing

military planners in the

the scientific director of the

summer of 1945. As J. Robert Oppenheimer,

Manhattan

Project, later put

it,

"We

didn't

know

beans about the military situation in Japan." If the

out?

bombs had not been dropped, how much

Could Operation Olympic,

ernmost home fleet ever its

island,

the projected

longer

November

Kyushu, have succeeded?

would Japan have held I

Or would

invasion of the souththe greatest invasion

assembled have run into disaster costly beyond the wildest estimates of

planners

—

or the recent revisionist historians?

bomb, such as a naval blockade or tem? Then there was the true, deck, the Soviet Union.

if

What about

alternatives to the

the destruction of Japans transportation sys-

unrecognized, wild card in the counterfactual

What would have been 366

the effect of a

Soviet invasion of

I

No Bomb: No End Japan? Would,

postwar Japan have been in worse shape

ironically,

had not been dropped but more,

lives

have been

hostilities

had continued? Would

tory,

B.

the

bombs

many, indeed

lost?

In Frank's view, speed was of the essence.

RICHARD

just as

if

FRANK

is

The war had

to

end when

it

did.

the author o{ two notable works of military his-

Guadalcanal: The Definitive Account of the Landmark Campaign and

Downfall: The

End

of the Japanese Empire.

367

DECISION TO

THE

greatest ers

view

it,

and most enduring controversy of the words of Secretary of

in the

abhorrent choice."

taken a more

nation of the

Its

impassioned

humane and

or were not used.

summer

lash Japan with nuclear

Which

if

Pacific

War Henry

critics

wiser path

weapons stands War.

Its

as the

defend-

Stimson, as the "least

argue that history would have

nuclear weapons were not available

of these views

is

correct requires a careful exami-

not the fantasies, about the forces steering events in the

facts,

of 1945.

There can be no meaningful expeditions down the channels history did not follow without itarists

first

comprehending the

realities of power in Japan.

held the destiny of Imperial Japan in a rigid

legal veto

grip.

They

Mil-

possessed a

over the formation, or continuation, of governments. Bolstering

this formality

was the implicit threat of their arms, and a history of

Between 1921 and 1944, some

terror.

sixty-four spasms of right-wing political vi-

cowed

olence, including the murder of two prime ministers, thoroughly

those few individuals franchised to participate in any fashion in shaping the nation's fate.

In Japan's misshapen political structure, only eight individuals exercised

An

any meaningful power of decision.

Council

for the Direction of the

authority, but only

shorthand for

this

if its

War

members achieved unanimity. The contemporary

body was the "Big

Foreign Minister Togo Shigenori,

Six":

War

Minister Yonai Mitsumasa, Chief of the jiro,

and Chief of the Navy General

civilian. ficers.

inner cabinet called the Supreme

constituted ultimate governmental

Suzuki was a retired

fleet

Prime Minister Suzuki Kantaro,

Minister

Anami

Army General

Staff Toyoda

Korechika,

Soemu. Only Togo was

admiral and the rest were serving

The remaining two men who wielded

368

Navy

Staff Umezu Yoshi-

real authority

a

flag of-

were the em-

— No Bomb: No End peror and his intimate adviser, Keeper of the Privy Seal Kido Koichi. Kido's

power

lay in his ability to

sway the emperor, and the emperor's power de-

pended upon the compliance of the government and the armed

forces to

his orders.

To

this day,

no pre-Hiroshima document has been produced from Japan

demonstrating that any one of these eight

men

ever contemplated a termi-

nation of the war on any terms that could, or should, have been acceptable

United States and her

to the

their thinking illustrates just

gust

9.

On

allies.

how

What

history does

document about

intransigent they remained as late as

the day the second atomic

bomb

struck Nagasaki

—and

Au-

follow-

ing three years of almost unrelenting defeats, the destruction of Japan's

shipping tion

lifelines,

—the Big Six

the incineration of sixty for the

first

cities,

and Soviet interven-

time seriously discussed, and agreed on, a set

of terms for ending the war. Three

members were prepared

to surrender

if

Japan received a guarantee that she could retain the Imperial system. But the other three insisted

on

a trio of additional terms: Japan's right to repa-

triate

her servicemen; Japan's authority to conduct "so called war crimes

trials"

only in Japanese forums; and,

no Allied occupation of Japan.

finally,

Since the Big Six could only act in unanimity, these conditions denomi-

nated Japan's position.

And what of the

emperor? The Japanese

—with American complicity

took pains postwar to depict an image of Hirohito as a "symbol emperor"

who reigned but did not rule. He was projected

as a

man who desired peace,

but was barred from imposing his will until an extraordinary impasse in

Japanese political structure

—permitted him

surrender

—the deadlock of the Big Six over the terms

for

to intervene in the "Sacred Decision" to halt

the war.

The emperor

himself confessed that he actually shared the core convic-

tions of the Big Six at least until June 1945,

and he never moved decisively

away from that stance. This explains why these

men

failed to

move

to

end

the war and points to what their response would have been in the absence of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Plainly stated, they believed, and with good reason, that Japan

still

possessed an excellent chance to obtain a negotiated

369

WHAT

IF? 2

peace that would maintain the old order in Japan

—

in

which they would be

dominant. In the

first

months of 1945, Japan's

three

egy they called Ketsu

Go

military leaders forged a strat-

(Operation Decisive) to obtain the political bar-

gaining chips to terminate the war in a

manner they could

abide.

They

were confident that no amount of blockade and bombardment, even cost the lives of millions of their countrymen, could

compel them

if it

to yield.

Moreover, they believed an impatient American populace would propel their antagonist to avoid a protracted siege swiftly.

and attempt to end the war

That dictated an invasion of the Japanese homeland.

Japanese strategists next examined the tional habits.

The United

ponderance of

map

in light of

From the

summer

fall

on an

huge pre-

and thus dictated that the

area within range of land-based fighter aircraft.

positions the Japanese expected their

of 1945, the nearest bases would be

opponent

than the B-29s that were already bombing the home flyers

to hold by the

Okinawa and Iwo

nawa, but not Iwo Jima, could support thousands of tactical

nawa, American

its

strength to bear in support of an invasion. Land-based

air

aircraft constituted the majority of U.S. air assets

invasion must

American opera-

States could be expected to bring

Jima. Oki-

aircraft,

islands.

smaller

From Oki-

could reach Kyushu and parts of Shikoku.

0{ these

two, Kyushu offered the better set of potential air and sea bases from which to cal

mount an and

attack

industrial

Kyushu

on the obvious supreme objective

hub of Japan.

easily revealed to

American invasion sion, but the

sites.

Japanese commanders three of the four chosen

Thus, the Japanese anticipated not only an inva-

two most probable invasion

and

areas, the sites

sequence of the two

on Kyushu.

a firm grasp of the strategic essentials, Japan

sive mobilization program.

embarked on a mas-

By midsummer there would be

thirty-four brigades mustering 2.9 million

strict

politi-

A simple scan of the topographical map of

probable invasions, and the exact landing

With

—Tokyo, the

men

in the

sixty divisions

homeland.

A

conservation program, plus the conversion of the aviation training

establishment into kamikaze units, yielded the Japanese over 10,000 craft, half suicide planes, to

confront the invasion. These forces were

rayed with primary emphasis

air-

ar-

on defending southern Kyushu and Tokyo. 370

I

hJo

Bomb: No End

THE INVASION OF JAPAN,

1945-46

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UoA' e*4 Mi4ao4

HARVESTING HISTORY What would

the

world be

like

without the potato? The question

is

hardly a

whimsical one: for the past five centuries, the humble tuber has played a considerable role in history. In the artist

drawing above, made by a Spanish colonial

around 1565, native farmers of the Andes, where

harvest the calorie-rich foodstuff that the Spanish called (Felipe

Guaman Poma,

the potato originated,

chuno.

Inca harvesting potatoes, from El Primer Nueva Coronica y Buen Gobiemo, ca. 1565.

Royal Library, Copenhagen, Denmark. Nick Saunders/Barbara Heller Photo Library, London/Art Resource,

417

NY)

WHAT constructed in kind,

llic earliest civilizations.

IF?

2

Rents and taxes, whether in money or

continued to effect the same transfer of grain from farmers to

and managers and

rulers

urban dependents throughout subsequent millen-

their

nia of civilized history, and did so until quite recently,

when market

ex-

changes between urban and rural dwellers began to dominate the same process.

In their raw form, urban folk could not depend

on

collecting perishable

potatoes from their producers, largely because, since they do not need to be

dug from the ground until

it is

time to eat them, potato gardeners escaped

the problem of having to protect stores of valuable food. Grain farmers, on the contrary, were radically vulnerable to armed marauders since ripe grain

had

to be harvested

find

and carry away. Civilized rent and tax

and

and stocks of harvested grain were easy to

stored,

collectors,

who

took only part of

the harvest, might or might not be able to protect rural dwellers from raids.

But

it

was clearly better

ful rulers

for grain farmers to share the harvest

and landlords who had a

could to protect those

clear

who produced

and

with power-

direct interest in doing all they

upon which everyone

the grain

de-

pended. Hence grain farming and civilization went together from the time civilizations arose.

Nonetheless, in their original

Andean

principal food of the Inca empire and

peculiar climate of the South

serve potatoes by exposing

its

American

them

tropical location, temperatures

habitat, potatoes did

predecessors.

altiplano

made

to the dry night air

become the

That was because the it

possible to pre-

when, despite

sometimes went below

Peru's

freezing. Shriveled,

freeze-dried potatoes, called chuno by the Spaniards, were fully equivalent

to grain since chuno could be stored for years without loss of nutritional value.

Hence Inca

supply chuno to

tax collectors could and did require potato gardeners to

official

storehouses just as they required maize-growers at

lower altitudes to hand over com; and

officials

could then issue food from

such warehouses to maintain the soldiers, public works laborers, and

household servants, administrators, and Inca government and civilization what

it

priests

who combined

to

all

the

make

was.

In 1532 the Spaniards took over this administrative system and after 1545 used

it

to supply chuno to scores of thousands of conscripted silver

418

What miners

at Potosi.

If

Pizarro

Their

Had Not Found

efforts, in turn,

Potatoes in Peru?

produced a freshet of silver that

sus-

tained Spanish imperial power in Europe and the Americas and, in the course of the following century, inflated prices around the world. Rapidly rising prices, in turn, upset older lized societies

everywhere. Thus

economic and

social relationships in civi-

was that between 1545 and about 1650,

it

potatoes, processed into chuno, fueled an unprecedented scale of silver

mining lifting

in Peru, provoking

worldwide economic and social upheaval, while

Spanish military power to new heights in Western Europe.

understood what was happening at the time;

chuno

—

sible.

Yet

But

so, surely,

this initial

one

did anyone credit

still less

a nasty, unpalatable food in Europeans' eyes

No

—with making

it

pos-

was.

it

impact on the world's history was only a prelude to what

the same plant did

when

transferred to

European

soil.

How

got there

it

is

unrecorded; but plain enough since Spanish ships that entered the Pacific

had

up on food

to stock

were not available, so tatoes for

for their return voyages. Familiar

sailors

most of their

South America could

on the way home had which was

calories,

supply.

We

also

know

all

to rely

European cereals

on maize and po-

that the Pacific coast of

for sure that

on returning

to

Spain, sailors carried specimens ashore, and some apparently thought

enough of the new foods

to try planting them.

Most

parts of

Spain were too

dry for potatoes; but Atlantic winds brought enough moisture to the Basque

country along Spain's northwest coast for them to thrive there. Accordingly, within a few decades of Pizarro 's conquest, potatoes took root in Basque country, and Basque fishermen soon began to stock their fishing boats with potatoes

foundland.

It

when

setting out for the

Grand Banks

off

New-

was they who introduced the crop to the west coast of Ireland,

where they habitually came ashore voyages. Exactly

when

for rest

and recuperation on

potatoes began to flourish

known, but by 1650 the crop was

sufficiently

most province of Connaught to become a

on

Irish soil

their return

remains un-

widespread in the western-

lifesaver for the Irish people after

their defeat by Cromwell's soldiers (1649-52).

As

a result,

when

the English government undertook to solve

its

Irish

problem by distributing confiscated lands in Leinster and Munster among disbanded veterans while crowding the surviving natives of these provinces

419

WHAT into

Connaught, the defeated

potatoes

on small patches of

Irish

land,

IF?

found

2

possible to survive by planting

it

and supplementing

this

new food with

milk from cattle that had long been the principal basis of the

omy.

Irish soil

enough

grass for a

over to raise a

pig.

cow

However monotonous

among

from the time Cromwell's

English

settlers,

an entire

sufficed to feed

tained rapid population growth lation

Irish

econ-

and climate were such that a single acre of potatoes and

it

family, with

may seem

enough

left

to us, this diet sus-

a conspicuously healthy Irish popu-

compelled them to accept

soldiers

it.

by contrast, ate bread and cheese and were entirely un-

willing to change their habits,

even though wheat often

the Irish climate and rye and oats yielded far

less

failed to ripen in

per acre and cost more to

harvest and process into bread than did potatoes, which had only to be dug

from the ground and thrown into a pot of boiling water to be ready table.

This meant that the

glish,

and when Cromwell's veterans found that the

Irish

could live

far

for the

more cheaply than the Enstyle of grain

farming

with which they were familiar in England did not produce satisfactory sults in

the moister, cooler Irish climate, they sold out to land-jobbers,

soon found that raising beef cattle was the only

income from the

feasible

way

re-

who

to wring cash

land.

These upstart landowners needed hired hands quickly discovered that Irish

and

to tend their herds

laborers were experienced herdsmen—-and

dirt

cheap, only needing access to an acre for potatoes and enough grass for a cow.

As

a result,

and despite the intentions of the English government.

Catholic Irish laborers and their novel subsistence style of potato cultiva-

more expensive bread-eating English

tion displaced far

most

all

of rural Ireland.

Thanks

laborers from al-

to the potato, therefore, the majority of

the population of Ireland remained

Irish,

except in Ulster, where an earlier

rebellion against the English had led to the settlement of Protestant Scots

on conflated lands

after 1607. Scottish farming, featuring oats rather

wheat, was readily transferable to Irish

known

soil;

than

and since the potato was un-

in Ulster until early in the eighteenth century, the Scots-Irish suc-

cessfully displaced the Irish in

social results that

Then,

still

most of that province, with

command

political

and

headlines today.

in the nineteenth century,

when

420

faster

and

larger steamships be-

What

If

gan to traverse the

Pizarro

seas,

Had Not Found

Potatoes in Peru?

they inadvertently introduced a South American

fungus into Europe that, under wet, cool conditions, proved lethal to the potatoes that by then had established themselves throughout Ireland and across

most of the north European

plain.

The summers

of 1845 and 1846

were unusually cool and wet in Western Europe, and the resultant

failure of

potato harvests brought stark famine to Ireland and serious food shortages

elsewhere in northern Europe. In Ireland, more than a million people died of starvation and of infections induced by hunger; while millions of others

emigrated during and in the aftermath of the famine.

The

resulting Irish di-

aspora altered the social landscapes of the United States, Great Britain,

Canada, Australia, and elsewhere. This, perhaps, counts changing consequence of potato cultivation, and of an

as a

Irish

second world-

way of life

that

was dangerously dependent on that single crop. Nonetheless, the principal impact of potatoes on tory

was

felt

on the Continent

backpedaling to the time the ocean.

As we

saw,

Anonymous

most of Spain Italy,

sailors

pressed Italian peasants found

caped taxation since

rather than in Ireland. This story requires

when Spanish sailors first carried

did well in the Po valley of in 1535.

modem European his-

city folk

itself

the tubers across

was inhospitable, but potatoes

which became part of the Spanish empire

must have carried them there, and hard-

them valuable had no use

—not

least

because they

new food

for the

at

es-

Potato

first.

gardens then spread northward very rapidly, from Italy across the Alps into

Franche-Comte, the Rhinelands, and the Low Countries before the end of the sixteenth century.

Potatoes followed this path to the north European plain because

it

was

here that local peasants were regularly exposed to military requisitioning by

detachments of Spanish

soldiers

marching along the so-called "Spanish

Road." That, in turn, was because,

when Dutch

rebels inaugurated eighty

years of on-again, off- again warfare against Philip

II

of Spain and his heirs

(1568-1648), their naval superiority made the sea unsafe for Spanish shipping.

The Spanish government was

armies in the

Low

therefore compelled to reinforce

Countries by shipping troops to northern

they marched northward to the theater of war.

Italy,

its

whence

From time immemorial, Eu-

ropean armies had lived off the land when on the march, since limitations

421

WHAT on transport made

impossible for

it

Spanish soldiers en route to the villages along the way,

IF? 2

them

Low

to

do otherwise. Accordingly,

Countries requisitioned grain from

and did so year

after year.

Under

these circum-

stances, peasants quickly discovered that potatoes were a lifesaver.

Simply

by leaving them in the ground until wanted for food, they could be sure of

having something

to eat

left

even

off all available stores of grain.

after military foraging parties

had

carried

We can only assume that word of mouth and

harsh experience combined to spread news of the lifesaving capabilities of the

new crop from

from

Italy left

no

village to village, for the spread of potatoes

trace in

contemporary records

as far as

northward

anyone knows.

Eventually, the existence of potatoes along the "Spanish

who

Road" did

come

to learned attention,

name

into Carolus Clusius painted a watercolor of a potato plant he

when,

in 1588, a botanist

Latinized his

had

discovered growing in a garden near Mons, Belgium. Clusius subsequently

published the watercolor in his book Rariorum plantarum

historia

(Antwerp,

1601) along with a description of what he called "Papas Peruanorum," together with a brief account of what he had discovered about the plant. correctly reported that

em

Italy,

This

is

where

the

first

it

had come from Peru and was "common"

was valued both

it

as

animal fodder and

written record of the existence of potatoes

as

He

in north-

human

food.

on the continent

of Europe yet discovered, and a thoroughly believable, but incomplete, description of failed to

where the plant

understand

ready to adopt the

why

new

initially flourished.

To be

sure, Clusius quite

grain farmers along the Spanish

crop,

Road were

and he knew nothing about Basque

so

fisher-

mens' potato gardens. Their existence can safely be surmised, however,

from the provable

fact that Irish potatoes derived

from Spain and not from

Francis Drake's subsequent introduction of a different strain of potatoes into England in 1580. toes

An English botanist promptly took note of the pota-

Drake brought back from

his

but though John Gerard chose to

famous circumnavigation of the globe,

make

a large

woodcut of the new plant

into the frontispiece of his Herhall, or General Historie of Plantes (London,

1597), thereby antedating Clusius's published notice of potatoes by four years,

Gerard erroneously named the new plant "potatoes of Virginia,"

422

What

Had Not Found

If Pizarro

Potatoes in Peru?

thereby introducing an error into English learning that lingered through

most of the nineteenth century. Until the eighteenth century, potatoes remained only a garden crop,

whether

in

Basque country, Ireland, northern

jacent areas.

Italy,

the Rhinelands, or ad-

Most European grain farmers cultivated

and custom required everyone

to plant the

open

strips in

same crop

fields,

in adjacent strips so

that subsequent routines of harvesting, gleaning, and plowing could pro-

ceed on schedule. This meant that

open

fields.

Nonetheless, as

we

new crops could not ordinarily enter the

just saw,

between 1560 and 1700 the spread

of comparatively small potato gardens cushioned the customary demo-

graphic destructiveness of military requisitioning in some of Europe's most

fought-over regions. This was significant, for as the increased, rural death by starvation in the

War

during the Thirty Years'

remembered because

this

was the

last

of European armies

wake of marching

came more and more widespread and reached

many

size

soldiers be-

a devastating climax in

(1618-48).

Its

horrors were long

time a prolonged war was fought in

northern Europe before potatoes became generally available to ral starvation

even

after grain stocks

Ger-

had

all

forestall ru-

been carried away by foraging

soldiers.

That, in turn, became possible because, after 1750, the spread of potatoes across

European landscapes ceased to depend on the

literate peasants, relying solely officials

intervened and set out,

on word of mouth. first

initiative of

Instead,

il-

government

only in Prussia, to propagate potatoes

with the deliberate purpose of safeguarding rural taxpayers from wartime famine. This got started

when

the youthful Prussian king, Frederick the

Great, campaigning in the Rhinelands during the cession (1740-48), noticed

how

War of the Austrian Suc-

potatoes permitted peasants to survive

military requisitioning. Accordingly, in

1

744 he decided to introduce the

crop to Prussia, ordering local administrators to distribute free seed potatoes with instructions

on how

to raise them.

Frederick's initiative paid off

handsomely during the Seven

Years'

War

(1756-63) when Prussian peasants endured repeated invasions by Austrian, Russian,

and French armies without

423

suffering serious famine. Sur-

WHAT vival of the Prussian state

and army against apparently overwhelming odds

depended on the new and surprising

much

as

it

did

on

Frederick's

sudden change of

famous

resilience of the Prussian peasantry as victories, British subsidies,

sides. It follows that

would certainly have been very in Prussian fields

IF? 2

the subsequent history of

Germany

War. But there

Years'

how the victorious forces of France,

Russia might have redirected

Russia's

different without the presence of potatoes

and gardens during the Seven

point in speculating about

and

German

affairs, forestalling

is

Austria,

no

and

Bismarck's unifi-

cation of Germany under Prussian leadership in 1870 almost for sure. Instead, during the

Seven

War

Years'

the secret of Prussia's ability to

withstand repeated invasions became obvious to the attacking armies, and

when peace set

returned the French, Austrian, and Russian governments

out to imitate the Prussians by propagating potatoes

peasants as a matter of official policy.

The French

among

led the way,

their

all

own

due partly to

the efforts of an army doctor, Antoine Parmentier, who, having encountered potatoes in Prussia, spent the rest of his tional value

entitled

and how best to grow them.

Examen chymique

des

occasion, official efforts to

pommes

investigating their nutri-

published his results in a book

des terres (Paris 1774).

make potatoes acceptable

Marie Antoinette to advertise the ball

He

life

And on one

in France induced

by appearing at a court

plant's virtues

wearing a coiffeur of potato flowers. Austrian and Russian

forts to

catch up with Prussia also produced relatively rapid

inertia

and the

restraints of

open

remained mostly a garden crop

field cultivation

in that part of

meant

official ef-

results,

though

that potatoes

Europe until the 1820s

and 1830s.

By then,

in France, the

Low Countries, and Germany,

ken through garden fences and become a

field crop,

panding the quantity of calories available to

thereby enormously ex-

fuel the efforts of rapidly

growing populations. To understand the magnitude of

remember

potatoes had bro-

this effect

one must

that traditional grain farming in Europe required leaving fields

fallow every second or third year. This was needed to clear fields of weeds

by plowing the fallow in summer before weed seeds had formed. In potato gardens hoeing by hand was the only way to remove weeds, so from a hu-

man

point of view potato

fields

required far

424

more summer labor than did

What grain,

If Pizarro

Had Not Found

which was too thickly sown

not therefore become a major

for

field

Potatoes in Peru!

hoeing to be possible. Potatoes could

crop unless enough labor to hoe the

ground they occupied could be found. But, for reasons

still

disputed

among demographers, Europe along with

the rest of the civilized world began to experience sustained population

growth

after

about 1750.

Where

pied, the resulting spurt of

and lowered standards of

agricultural land

human numbers meant

living.

was already

fully

occu-

smaller family holdings

Peasant revolts, which began to trouble

the Chinese imperial government in the 1770s, registered this unhappy

cir-

cumstance in China. But across northern Europe, potatoes were available to invade the fallow grain fields,

and

governmental policy stood

official

ready to forward the process. Food supplies multiplied accordingly, so that

growing numbers of well-fed northern Europeans became available to tensify agricultural, industrial, military,

The

and other forms of organized

in-

effort.

rapid surge of northern European nations to world dominion in the

nineteenth century depended on this serendipity. It is

easy to understand

how

the availability of extensive fallow fields

lowed a very powerful feedback loop to establish after 1750.

Simply by planting potatoes on the

itself in

fallow, a

al-

northern Europe

new and enormous

supply of food could be produced without the slightest reduction of traditional grain harvests!

What

a bonanza! Instead of the customary fallowing,

a third to a half of Europe's cultivated fields could be planted with potatoes (or other

row

crops, such as turnips

and sugar

and

beets),

as long as the

growing plants were hoed by hand once or twice in early summer, weeds

were very effectually controlled. Hence potato grain next year, entirely as usual, while

no-longer fallow,

field.

new row

could be planted with

crops took over another,

Extra labor was essential for this intensification of

European farming; but potatoes, yielding

number

fields

as

they did two to four times the

of calories per acre that grain fields did, were instantly available to

feed the growing numbers needed for their cultivation.

On top of that,

left-

over potatoes remained for animal fodder and for conversion into vodka,

which, in

fact,

became

a very important source of revenue for the Russian

government.

Under

these circumstances, once potatoes

425

became a

field crop,

popula-

WHAT

IF?

2

tion could and did rise far above older ceilings, and potatoes, being cheap,

became the pean

principal food of the poorer classes throughout the north Euro-

way from northern France and the Low Countries

plain, all the

through Germany and Poland into Russia. Bread was never displaced en-

happened among the

tirely as

(1845-47),

when

Irish, so

the impact of the famine years

potatoes failed almost everywhere, was correspondingly

diminished on the European Continent (and in England), though the "hungry forties" were long

The dryer

remembered by those who

suffered through them.

when

potato blight required damp, cool conditions to prosper; and

summers returned

to

Europe

after 1847, the blight

disappeared. But every so often, cool, wet

summer

ciently prolonged, allowed the fungus to resume

when protective chemical

its

diminished or even

weather,

when

suffi-

ravages until the 1880s,

sprays were introduced. Shortly before chemical

sprays (and artificial fertilizers)

began to

alter

European

agriculture, the in-

vention of horse-drawn shufflers reduced or eliminated the need for hoeing potatoes and other row crops, thus releasing a host of rural laborers for industrial

employment

in the

mines and

factories that

began to sprout near

Europe's coal fields while also provoking massive emigration overseas and

eastward into Siberia as well.

The

effect, therefore, of deliberate official

patronage of potato

culti-

vation, pioneered by Frederick the Great in 1744, turned out to be very

considerable. First of

all,

potatoes quickly became a field crop and an

increasingly important source of

human food throughout

northern Europe.

Consequently, the intensified warfare attendant on the French Revolution

and Napoleon's subsequent career (1793-1815) became bearable

for

Eu-

rope's rural populations thanks largely to the food reserves their potato gar-

dens and

fields

provided for them. Otherwise European governments could

not possibly have mobilized millions of soldiers while continuing to feed their armies in the field in traditional fashion by ruthlessly requisitioning

grain and animals from local villagers. But instead o{ provoking death and disaster sified

on an even

greater scale than that of the Thirty Years' War, inten-

warfare between 1793 and 1815 wrought only minimal

damage

to Eu-

ropean rural populations.

Then

as potatoes

continued their expansion into once-fallowed grain

426

What and

fields,

as

If

Had Not Found

Pizarro

hand hoeing ceased

began to empty

while

still

to be necessary, the

out. Millions of migrants

and mines and provided other

Potatoes in Peru?

European countryside

began to labor

services in rapidly

in

new

factories

expanding urban centers,

The swarm-

others emigrated overseas and eastward into Siberia.

ing of European peoples in the nineteenth century was indeed remarkable;

not

because of the extraordinary fact that

least

first

within Europe

itself

and

then overseas and in Siberia, Europeans found empty land to provide their

swarming population with adequate, indeed abundant, food. Elimination of fallowing did the trick across northern Europe here potatoes played the lead Siberia,

it

just seen.

and

Overseas and in

and the disruption of older ecological balances by

for furs

civi-

civilized de-

and a few other commodities that disrupted indigenous American, Australian, and other overseas landscapes,

societies in Siberian,

opening the way

for

European settlement. Military conquest merely sealed

European emigrants' success miliar

we have

was destruction of indigenous populations by exposure to

lized diseases

mand

role, as

itself,

European crops and

in supplanting older inhabitants

agricultural

methods proved

wherever

viable.

The

fa-

result-

ing cultural and political transformations of the Americas, Australia, and parts of Siberia

were drastic indeed, and citizens of the United States and

of Russia are today the most conspicuous heirs of this process.

Without the extra food potato

fields

provided, the swarming of north

European populations could not have occurred. Maize but

less

course

prominent part in southern Europe; but that

much

else entered into Europe's rise

world dominion; but sential for fueling the

it is

also played a similar is

another

story.

Of

and recent withdrawal from

surely safe to say that potatoes

from Peru were

es-

swarming human biomass that sustained Europe's im-

perial ventures. Potatoes thus powerfully affected the general course of

world history since 1750. Silver and gold glittered, inconspicuous and unnoticed at

first,

all right,

nevertheless were

but potatoes,

more important,

since they altered the course of human history in far-reaching ways, so repeatedly, from the time Pizarro

So what

if

Pizarro

it

would

encountered and disdained them.

had not found potatoes

radically different for sure,

different

first

and did

in Peru ?

Our world would be

even though no one can say exactly how very

be.

427

355.48 WHAT eminent What if? II historians imagine what :

I'inued

'

/