Don’t You Wish It Was True?

John Fogarty’s latest album, Revival, begins with a wistful ballad whose lyrics run like this:

I dreamed I walked in heaven just the other night
There was so much beauty so much light . . .

An angel took my hand
Said you don’t have to hurry
Got all the time in the world don’t worry . . .

But if tomorrow everybody was your friend
Anyone could take you in
No matter what or where you’d been
But if tomorrow everybody had enough
The world wasn’t quite so rough . . .

He said the worlds gonna change and it’s startin’ today
There’ll be no more armies no more hate . . .

And all the little children would live happily
Ther’d be singin’ and laughter and sweet harmony . . .

But if tomorrow everybody under the sun
Who’s happy just to live as one
No borders or battles to be won
But if tomorrow everybody was your friend
Happiness would never end
Lord Don’t you wish it was true

It’s fun to speculate about what the world would look like if this or that seemingly small event had not happened or, alternatively, happened differently. Today, the world wonders what things might have been like if Benazir Bhutto had survived to lead Pakistan. Don’t you wish it was true? (Not if you’re Ralph Peters.) But speculatin’s fun anyway.

History offers tantalizing what ifs, but no mulligans or do-overs.

What if, on the afternoon of November 9, 1620, Master Jones of the Mayflower had carried his Pilgrim passengers south to the Hudson River (their original destination) instead of north around Cape Cod? There would have been no Plymouth Colony, no meeting between Miles Standish (who, by most accounts, was a brutal thug) and Massasoit and, probably, no King Philip’s War. The relationship between English settlers and “local indigenous peoples” (they usually just call themselves “Indians”) may have been entirely different.

What if, roughly 200 years later, on July 2, 1863, Confederate General John Bell Hood had disobeyed his orders at Gettysburg and, instead of charging stupidly — if courageously — straight up the rocks surrounding Devil’s Den, had gone “to the right” and rolled up the Union flank as he almost certainly could have?

In 1864, Abraham Lincoln was locked in a close re-election campaign, desperate for a major military victory to win enough votes to stay in office. Few school kids nowadays learn that it was only a month or two before the election that Lincoln’s electoral fortunes began looking up, starting with Sherman’s torching of Atlanta. Before Atlanta fell, the odds were heavily against Lincoln winning a second term. If he didn’t win, the Democrats were poised sue for peace with the Confederacy.

What if, in that situation, Jefferson Davis had left the siege-tamer Gen. Johnston in charge of the Atlanta’s defense instead of replacing him with the hard-charging-guts-and-glory Gen. Hood? I once helped a colleague run an EMBA simulation of the battle of Atlanta. The conclusion of the simulation: If Johnston had stayed in charge, Atlanta would have weathered Sherman’s siege, Lincoln would have lost the election, and today there would be (at least) two separate countries occupying the territory of the United States. Eventually, the South would have abandoned slavery on its own, but it may have happened more gradually. We weren’t the first to speculate on this question.

There is, however, another “what if” scenario involving the Civil War that few commentators have pursued. My first post ended with the suggestion that if Joseph Smith had escaped martyrdom in 1844 and had won the presidency (not as farfetched as some may think) there may have never been a Civil War. What if? A key element of Smith’s campaign platform was a plan to buy the freedom of the slaves in the South by selling public lands in the western territories. Lord, don’t you wish it was true?

The fate of millions often turns on what seem at the time, to ordinary people leading their ordinary lives, unseen or utterly insignificant developments. In a future post, I’ll tease out what might have been, in 1844, and what it may tell us about the 2008 presidential election. I’ll also take a shot at Heidi’s comment about why it would never have made sense for George or Mitt Romney to publicly challenge the now-abolished ban on blacks holding the priesthood and dismember Jason L. Riley’s article, one smelly piece at a time.