★★★☆☆ Disliked for a dumb reason...

Lincoln's Dreams

Connie Willis

...that eventually turned out to be a good reason. Connie Willis is a highly variable author. I don't just mean that her best works are much better than her worst. That's true of any prolific author. What I mean is that even those who love Willis feel very differently about her works. Lincoln's Dreams is one of Willis' most famous and loved books, and has won an award or two.

I however, disliked it the first time I read it, for a stupid reason. It's a novel about the American Civil War, told in a very clever way that I enjoyed. However, it presents a positive view of Confederate general Robert E Lee and a very negative view of Confederate general James Longstreet. Not long before Lincoln's Dreams I had read The Killer Angels, an excellent historical novel in which Longstreet is portrayed positively, and I didn't like Willis' negative portrayal. Now, I did not at that time have any good reason to trust Michael Shaara more than Willis. It was just that I had encountered The Killer Angels first.

This is just a bias of mine: that I tend to like the first version of anything I see or hear better than later ones. (For instance, Tommy James and the Shondells' Crimson and Clover, as opposed to the cover by Joan Jett and the Blackhearts, which I eventually came to love more.)

Eventually, I learned more about the whole Longstreet/Lee controversy. Most Confederate veterans of the War believed that they had been defeated by "might, not right", that they fought in a just cause (white supremacy) and were overall more noble and righteous than the godless, evil Republican abolitionists. This is called "Lost Cause" ideology. Lost Cause propagandists elevated Lee to sainthood. I was taught in school that Lee was a noble, kindly man, and a military genius. (He was not.) The Lost Cause propagandists had a little problem: if Lee was so wonderful, how did he lose to the Union generals, whom they portrayed as bumbling incompetents? Well, of course, Lee was betrayed. Longstreet, who accepted defeat and became a staunch Republican after the war, was a handy person on whom to pin the treachery. (See Longstreet: The Confederate General Who Defied the South for a more balanced view.)

My current view, then, is that I landed on the right conclusion for the wrong reason. Shaara's positive portrayal of Longstreet was more accurate and fair than Willis'. Willis allowed herself to be used as a Useful Idiot for Lost Cause propaganda.

Lincoln's Dreams is still an excellent piece of story-telling. But I wouldn't recommend it -- its distortion of history is intolerable, in my opinion.

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