Eric Flint, 1812 and 1824

I've just finished reading Flint's 1824, having read 1812 last year. They're fascinating books. Quick plot summary: Flint, an efficient writer of potboiling SF & Fantasy, sets up an alternate history where (first book) Sam Houston (of Tennessee and Texas), a regiment of black soldiers, and a Genius Scots-Irish Radical Sergeant named Patrick Driscoll (the deus ex machina and apparent stand-in for the author's political views) become heroes in the War of 1812, persuade the Cherokee, Creeks, etc. to migrate of their own free will to Arkansas and Oklahoma a decade ahead of schedule (so as to allow them to survive unbroken), and set up a black Haiti/Sparta as a refuge for slaves in Arkansas proper. In 1824, (second book,) independent Arkansas has provoked the racial tensions of the Civil War to reach the boiling point a generation earlier; first Southern freebooters, then the US Army, are thwacked by the black Arkansan army; President Henry Clay (!) and Secretary of War John Calhoun, and the Deep South are humiliated and politically isolated, while Andrew Jackson and John Quincy Adams gussy up a Democratic-Republican Party uniting New England, the Mid-Atlantic, and the Upper South in a program devoted to gradual emancipation of the slaves.

Why do I find these fascinating? They are briskly written, keeps the anachronisms generally confined to modern-sounding dialogue, and, as political fantasy/romances go, rather sophisticated. (Flint knows Cherokees owned slaves, say, and that a black-Indian alliance in Arkansas would be rather uneasy.) (But he thinks that Florida was already a state in 1824, doesn't wedge in an alternate history to make that a fictional fact, and even makes Florida play a role in his 1824 election! Bad Flint!) But what gets me is that these are Jim Webb alternate histories--intensely concerned with the Scots-Irish and their role in American history. Flint pounds the Scots-Irish theme again and again--Sam Houston is Scots-Irish, Andrew Jackson is Scots-Irish, so is X, Y, and Z character from American history, the choices they make are the choices of the Scots-Irish ethne. The book is a fantasy about how to get to a more racially-tolerant alternate America -- and the role of the Scots-Irish is crucial. That is, Flint emphasizes the radical potential of the Scots-Irish--his deus ex machina Patrick Driscoll was a United Irishman in 1798, he pounds us with Andrew Jackson's Scots-Irish populism--and, sotto voce, is terribly, anguishedly aware that the Scots-Irish annealed themselves politically with the South, slavery, and racism, and is trying to figure out an alternate history that severs the Scots-Irish from that tie. He can do so with a fair bit of historical backing--Scots-Irish and Indians did intermarry a lot, and Sam Houston's biography, of which I was not entirely aware before, does make him a natural figure to cast in this fantasia. (He really did live with the Cherokee, briefly married a Cherokee lady, etc.) I agree with Flint about the importance of the Scots-Irish as the cutting sword of both America against the Indians, and of the South against blacks--see, Obama, Appalachian resistance to voting for--and of their crucial role in Democratic populism, though I would weight the historical possibilities for racial radicalism for the Scots-Irish a bit lower than he does. But I agree that he is right to see the Scots-Irish as the hinge of American history. Flint, by the by, is a labor-union activist according to his bio; from internal clues in his books, I suspect him to be of mixed German and Scots-Irish heritage.

A critique, then. Flint's alternate history is lacking precisely because he shares the point of view of his radical Scots-Irish protagonists. For one thing, his sense of economics is lacking--of the actual attraction of capitalism and moneyed politics, that would attract ordinary people to vote for them. He dislikes (non Scots-Irish) Southerners as much because they are rich as because they are slaveholders--indeed, in a move that Toni Morrison pre-exploded in Beloved, he posits Scots-Irish smallholders as more paternally kind to their slaves than plantation slaveowners. Lord knows the Jacksonian coalition was powerful enough in America, but he overstates its attractions, and does not quite understand why one might oppose it. Then, too, his black Arkansas Sparta survives on--oh, I have to say this--voodoo economics, some happy state-entwined capitalism that underpins its army in the initial clashes with the US. This is ludicrous--and it reminds the reader of the unmentioned ghost in the book, Haiti, the real revolutionary black state, which combined political independence and economic disaster, whose miserable history provides a large hint of what any sort of black Sparta in Arkansas really would have ended up like. Flint's own Jacksonian economics subtly distorts the plausibility of the book.

Then, a lack of understanding of American nationalism. Flint's book turns among other things on the idea that America would have granted actual independence to the Arkansas-Oklahoma Confederacy, including with coastline on the Mississippi. I think there is approximately zero chance that any American government would have granted more than the usual sovereignty granted to Indian nations to any land occupied by the United States--which, since 1803, most certainly included Arkansas and Oklahoma. (The exact border with Spain/Mexico was settled later, but the US certainly recognized no other sovereignty in the area.) Flint relies on the sort of Whig opposition to the Mexican War as appearing against an American Conquest of Arkansas--which could never have occurred, because Arkansas would never have been sovereign. Nor does he quite give full weight to American nationalism, expansionist and Manifest Destinyish, which would have boggled at recoiling from any large part of the continent. This expansionism obviously was intertwined with race feeling--but not identical to it. I don't see his hero Andy Jackson, at any rate, ever bending on American expansion to the Pacific.

Third, the role of the Scots-Irish. Flint knows how deeply the Scots-Irish were entwined with slavery--it's the point of the book--but he doesn't quite address it honestly. Every radical is always explicitly identified as Scots-Irish, but his two great bugaboos--John Calhoun and the Georgia militia--are not so identified, when the former was all Scots-Irish, and the latter I rather think considerably so. The savagery towards Indians and blacks Flint so hates really is very closely identified with the Scots-Irish in history, from their first migration to North America. He can't quite face it--can't quite say that Jackson vs. Calhoun is a Scots-Irish civil war, (or perhaps just an American one, which would somewhat nullify his emphasis on Scots-Irish ethnicity,) and just how many of the Scots-Irish, even in his alternate history, are the Baddies. Good guys Scots-Irish, bad guys largely unidentified White Americans? Doesn't quite work.

Then, hovering behind the scenes, is Abraham Lincoln and the Republican Party. In essence, Flint is trying to move the Civil War up a generation and have the North and Upper South led by Andy Jackson, with the Federalists as the minor support. But this role, after all, was played in reality by Lincoln and the Republicans--but with the New Englanders and the wealthy in the cockpit, and the populist & border & Scots-Irish types the weaker members of the coalition, not least because most such were rebels & Democrats. Flint is reassembling the actual Republican coalition under Jacksonian leadership--and not mentioning how close his alternate is to the reality, because this might involve recognizing precisely how many of the virtues he praises were, and are, encompassed by the Republican party. There is an anxious silence about Lincoln and Republicans.

There is also, of course, a critique of modern Democrats too. Flint loves the Scots-Irish not least for their fighting fury--he's also fond of that terrifying, terrorist abolitionist, John Brown--and any such account must, by implication, critique those modern Democrats who aren't Scots-Irish, loathe the Scots-Irish, and despise the very fighting fury Flint loves. Flint hates rich bastards, he hates racists, and he thinks you need fighting Scots-Irish to do a proper job on them.

I share with Flint an appreciation of the fighting fury of the Scots-Irish. But I also note with concern that he shares it--that the author, to a disturbing extent, enjoys unleashing their violence on the people he dislikes--Southerners above all. It's a murder fantasy, among other things--indeed, the sort of murder fantasy that presumably inspired the real Scots-Irish as they went out to kill an Indian or a black, just with a different target. It's a fantasy that involves a rending and a lessening of the United States--a terrible virtue, Scots-Irish and Puritan, that prefers a civil war to a foreign war, that thinks so little of fellow citizens and fellow Americans that it thinks the best solution to their evil to be their slaughter in large numbers, that purifies in blood. It is indeed Jacksonian--and a reminder that Republicanism was good in part because it softened that Puritan and Scots-Irish impulse, that it did not pursue a terrible justice wholeheartedly, that it followed Lincoln rather than Jackson, a man who felt sorrow for the deaths he caused, as Jackson could not have and Flint would not. This needs to be remembered.

And Flint's vision, if idiosyncratic, is part of the modern Left's. The hatred he displays toward his fictional villains, for their evil, is not unlike the hatred the modern Left feels towards--well, many Americans, presumably including me. I want America to be dangerous to evildoers abroad--Flint wants America to be dangerous to evildoers at home. Those of us whom he would think of as evil should be aware of just how terrible a Flint, in power, could be.

He's Scots-Irish, don't you know.