Prisoners of inconsistency

TFSmith's determination to turn the Union into a racial utopia is seen in a frankly ridiculous scenario in Chapter 9, part 1. This manages to blend all the problems with the story, from bias to historical misunderstandings, into a single throwaway line.


In this, an attempt to sign a prisoner agreement founders on 'on the U.S. insistence the rebels sign on to treat men of African ancestry as prisoners of war, not slaves, which the rebels had refused outright'. Historically, attempts to sign the cartel started in February 1862 and concluded on 22 July 1862. However, there are clearly no black troops in service as of July 1862, as we learn from the following exchange :

“There are other ways to get men, Monty,” Seward offered.
“Colored troops? Indians? We’ll lose as many white volunteers from the Border states-“ Blair began.

In fact, we are told specifically in chapter 10 part 2 that black troops are raised under the auspices of the Emancipation Proclamation in August. Though we know that this is wrong, the Union still only gained the legal powers to use black soldiers in July 1862.

Nothing better encapsulates the air of unreality in the timeline than the fact that the Union throws away six months of diplomatic engagement for the purpose of virtue-signalling over the status of coloured troops - troops which they not only have not raised, but do not have the legal authority to raise. It is as if the British rejected a prisoner exchange cartel on the grounds that the Union could not guarantee halal food for their regiments from the Indian subcontinent, despite having no intention to use them in the conflict.

We have only to look at how much the Union cared historically to see that this is ridiculous. Although the Confederates refused to treat black soldiers the same in December 1862, Lincoln only suspended the arrangements until July 1863. Yet here they refuse to even enter the agreement, because they are so solicitous for the treatment of troops they do not yet have and cannot have.


In fact, a more realistic scenario would have been for the British to refuse. Unlike the Union, they have black soldiers, both in the immediate warzone and elsewhere, as indeed they did in 1837. Some of these troops were the descendants of escaped slaves, but others were escaped slaves themselves. Moreover, the Fugitive Slave Law was still in operation- it would not be repealed until 1864- and many of the escaped slaves who had come to Canada to put themselves beyond its operation would naturally fear being re-enslaved and handed back to their former owners. This fear was not totally unfounded: as of the Trent War, the Union was returning fugitive slaves to their loyal owners. 

The US had past form with trying to recapture slaves who had fled to the British: they had done so both in the American War of Independence and in 1812. Moreover,  only a year before the outbreak of war, the state of Missouri had tried to have an escaped slave by the name of John Anderson extradited from Canada to try him for the murder of a farmer during his escape. When a lower Canadian court allowed the extradition procedure, the court of Queen's Bench in Westminster issued a writ of habeas corpus to protect his liberty- a step which provoked a minor crisis, as the Canadians protested against British interference in their affairs.

It is fascinating to contrast the British willingness simultaneously to provoke both an international crisis with the United States and a constitutional crisis with Canada in the interests of a single slave who had killed a white man with Lincoln's pathetic statement in this very chapter that 'Slavery is permitted under the Constitution, and we can’t do anything about that without the permission of Congress…and the border states are not willing to do anything on their own'. Nevertheless, it shows that the British might have had a genuine fear that the Union might try to re-enslave black Canadian prisoners, against which they might well have insisted on protection.

However, these more abstract points pale in comparison to other problems: problems which are so fundamental that they are hard to spot. The Union did not open negotiations over a prisoner cartel with the Confederacy because it disliked the prospect of legitimising what it saw as a rebellion. Now, it is forcing the British to treat the Confederacy as an equal. What happened to the Confederacy not being a state worthy of international recognition? If Napoleon III had his historical pro-Confederate stance, which is erased from Burnished Rows of Steel by authorial fiat, and was motivated to recognise the South, the Union would have absolutely no way of preventing him doing so as a direct result of their own actions in this prisoner cartel.
 There is a second fundamental problem with this simple statement. Why does the Union even want to force the British and the Confederacy to work together? When has it ever been advantageous to bind an opposing coalition more closely together instead of playing divide and rule? What this suggests is fascinating: it seems TFSmith understands that the British weren't actually interested in supporting slavery, despite his claims: that they would have had no interest in setting up a permanent rival to the Union, any more than the US attacked Canada in the interests of establishing Napoleon as dictator of Europe.