C.S.A.: The Confederate States of America

Director Kevin Willmott’s faux documentary C.S.A.: The Confederate States of America (2004) considers what might have happened had the South won the Civil War. A parody in ways of the Ken Burns Civil War documentary, complete with a wise, avuncular Shelby Foote-type commentator, the film uses actual and fabricated film clips, interviews, photographs, and narratives to tell its story. Historical figures such as Lincoln, Jefferson Davis, Harriet Tubman, Walt Whitman are interspersed with figures invented for the documentary. (The actual footage is taken out of context, understandably). The film is presented as a BBC documentary about Confederate history, suppressed in America until the public demands to see it. It is periodically interrupted by commercials that make the effect of a documentary shown on American television more convincing.

According to the documentary, the tide turned for the South in the Civil War when Confederate Secretary of State Judah P. Benjamin successfully negotiates with the British and French governments to bring their armies into the war on the Confederate side. As a result, the South wins the Battle of Gettysburg, takes Washington, sacks and burns Northern cities such as Boston and New York, and wins the war. Lincoln flees for his life with the assistance of Harriet Tubman, but they are captured before they can enter Canada. Lincoln is imprisoned and later exiled to Canada while Tubman is hanged. Jefferson Davis becomes the revered senior leader and conscience of the nation.

In this film, the Confederate victory leads the new government to mandate the institution of slavery throughout the United States. Northerners who do not purchase slaves are required to pay high taxes. Anyone who has black blood is legislatively declared a slave. Chinese workers in the West are enslaved by their employers, with government approval. Congress declares that America is a Christian nation, and non-Christians are expelled, except for a small number of Jewish Americans allowed to live on a “reservation” in Long Island. The Confederate America becomes a nation built on racial purity and white supremacy, and the notion many Southerners held before the Civil War that slavery was a benign and civilizing institution becomes widely accepted.

According to Willmott, American history would have developed in ways that are both different from and parallel to actual history. The Confederate States seek to expand into the South American continent. They win the war against Native Americans, who are essentially wiped out. American leaders and Adolf Hitler become allies, and the American nation does not enter the Second World War against Germany as a result. There is a war with Japan. Instead of a Cold War with the Soviet Union (hardly mentioned in the film), hostilities develop with Canada, where many former slaves and abolitionists settle. The C.S.A. erects a “cotton curtain” to prevent border crossing between Canada and the Confederacy, and abolitionist terrorist groups in Canada carry out attacks on the C.S.A. states.

In the 1950s and 1960s, sentiment arises in favor of emancipation, and when John F. Kennedy is elected as a Republican President in 1961, he seems likely to emancipate slaves, but he is assassinated. After a period of unrest and upheaval, most advocates for emancipation and for social change are imprisoned or exiled, and the Confederate nation settles back into stability and complacency.

As this summary suggests, C.S.A.: The Confederate States of America offers a detailed and imaginative series of speculations as to what might have happened had the South won the Civil War. Some of the speculations seem likely and reasonable; others do not. One of Wilmott’s major objectives is to argue that although there would have been major differences in American history, many of the same developments would have occurred as well. A brief set of messages shown at the end of the film make clear that many of the products featured in the commercials that occur throughout the film—products with racist brand names like “Sambo”—are in fact the actual brand names of products sold in the United States until well into the 20^th century. Some names still in use, Willmott notes—Uncle Ben and Aunt Jemimah—are camouflaged slave names. His point is that racism, concepts of racial supremacy and racial difference, are engrained in American culture.

In an interview included on the DVD of this film, Willmott states that one of his purposes in the film was to show how history would not have changed. He says that the South was “allowed not to change” after the end of the war—that the rest of the nation changed around it. Such a notion is at the least debatable and in fact is perversely wrongheaded.

Virtually all the actors in the film are unknown. This enhances the authenticity. The film employs a number of well done commercials and interviews—one is an interview with an elderly Lincoln in 1905 (it stretches one’s credulity to believe that Lincoln would have lived to the age of 96 and still been able to speak coherently). Another is a recreation of a D. W. Griffith short feature about the hunt for Lincoln following his flight from Washington. A parody of the Fox television show “Cops” is called “Runaway” and follows Confederate police as they seek to capture escaped slaves.

The low-budget nature of the film also imposes limitations. Many of the episodes or scenes in the film come across as Saturday Night Live sketches, played for laughs (largely based on racist jokes), and the film becomes repetitious and redundant in its continued insistence on the pervasive role of slavery and racism in American society under the C.S.A.

In fact, the film’s emphasis on slavery and racism—as crucial as these issues are in any version of American history—is myopic. According to Willmott, had the C.S.A. won the war and replaced the United States government, it would have devoted all its energies and resources in subsequent years to defending slavery, much as the American South did prior to the Civil War. In Willmott’s version of history, slavery becomes the main product that America markets to the rest of the world. This speculative view is plausible, but it has its flaws. It does not allow for the possibility of progress, change, evolution. Would the C.S.A. never have abolished slavery, especially after the advent of industrial farming equipment made the functions of field slaves unnecessary? The film actually denies the economic context of slavery, insisting instead that in the C.S.A. slavery was an institution necessary to the concept of racial purity. Slavery was a complex phenomenon. It can’t be oversimplified or reduced down to a few platitudes. Would social movements that succeeded in abolishing slavery never have arisen?

One point Willmott seems to be making is that although the Civil War in real American history did abolish slavery, race and issues of racial purity continued to play a crucial role in the national culture. In the DVD interview, he notes that Hurricane Katrina revealed the fact that poverty-stricken people are “invisible” in our culture. He suggests, with good reason, that the nation depends on the invisibility of the poor and on economic disparities that empower some and not others. But his film does not reflect these nuances.

To a certain extent, Willmott’s film also assumes that world history would have developed only in response to the power of the C.S.A. Communism does not arise in the film, and the C.S.A. has no apparent adversarial relationship with the Soviet Union.

Ultimately, Wilmott’s documentary comes across as a one-note effort. It makes some good and undeniably valid points. But it is also frequently shallow and superficial. Willmott receives plaudits for the originality of his efforts in this film, but not for the accuracy or acuity of his cultural and historical commentaries, though some of them do hit the mark.

Philip Roth’s The Plot against America gives a far more credible (up to a point) alternative history of America based on the idea that Charles Lindbergh runs for president, defeats Roosevelt, and institutes changes that take America to the far right—the nation does not enter WWII and adopts measures that seem aimed towards interning Jews and other minorities. Finally, even Roth cannot carry this speculative scenario through to a conclusion and instead has Lindberg disappear while flying his plane, so that sanity and order are restored to the American nation through what amounts to a deus ex machina device.

Early in the 1960s, the Saturday Evening Post featured a story entitled “If the South Had Won the Civil War,” by MacKinlay Cantor. C.S.A.: The Confederate States of America reminded me of Cantor's story, though Willmott’s film is more inventive and creative in its portrayal of alternative history. It also has a sense of humor and wit, though as suggested above these extend only so far before they become repetitive. My recollection is that in the Saturday Evening Post alternative history the Confederate nation does finally abolish slavery.