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

Altered states

Dr Alex Goodall, lecturer in American history at Edinburgh University, sizes up a new slavery satire.

Aug  4 2006

Counterfactual exercises help emphasise the element of contingency in history, but they're very different beasts to history, and 'CSA: The Confederate States of America' – Kevin Willmott's 'mockumentary' about an America in which the slave-owning South won the Civil War – illustrates why the two shouldn't be confused.

There are problems with the plausibility of this alternative world and problems caused by his need to resonate with the audience. In the end, though, it's missing the point to pick too many holes for its lack of fidelity to 'history'; its goal is to get viewers, particularly American viewers, to think about slavery, when slavery is something people don't normally think about, and question the values that underpin their society, when those values are often assumed to be exclusively progressive and enlightened.

That said, let me pick some holes. I don't like the film's implication that a United States of Slavery would be eerily similar to a United States of Freedom. A racist society is profoundly different to a slave-owning one. By the 1860s, the North, while still racist, was deeply committed to the idea of free labour. Punitive sanctions imposed by a victorious South would not have been sufficient to restore slavery to the North, as the film supposes. Slavery had never been especially prevalent in the North; its growth in the nineteenth century was deeply tied into the Southern economy.

A United States that persisted with slavery would never have been able to conquer the world as it did in the twentieth century. The roots of US dominance today are its technological and manufacturing achievements, its tremendous military power and its enormous industrial capacity. None of this could have developed in a slave-owning America, because all of it was predicated upon organising society in larger and better educated groups. Slavery was kept under control in the South in large part because slaves were kept away from each other.

Unlike the massive plantations of the Caribbean, where thousands worked together and rebellions were far more common, US slave-owners usually held smaller numbers of slaves and monitored them closely, claiming them as part of their 'family'. Putting slaves into the enormous factories of the North, or teaching black people to read and write so they could operate complex machinery, would have been impossible without risking rebellion and revolution. No free labour, no QVC (or rather 'Slave Shopping Network').

This points to my biggest gripe about the messages 'CSA' gives out, which is that it gives virtually no space to the actions of black people themselves. The implicit assumption is that without the victorious forces of the Union Army, black people would have remained slaves, their resistance limited to basically harmless terrorist actions launched from Canada. It's an outdated belief that black people needed white people to free them; a Southern victory would have shown that it is not true. Slavery in the South may have persisted for years, even decades, but it would have ended eventually because people, profoundly and ardently, need to be free.

Be that as it may, I'm not sure the point of the film is to present a convincing alternative world. Its goal is to make us think differently about the world we do live in, and what bits of it stem from our society's past sins. That's why the mock advertisements of casually racist products – Sambo Axle Grease, Darky Toothpaste – that actually existed are probably the most shocking parts of the film. These are the points where the distant world of slavery is tied, directly and immediately, to our own. You think slavery is a different world? 'Just ask Aunt Jemima and Uncle Ben,' the end caption suggests. With African-Americans still consistently underperforming at schools, overrepresented in prisons and less likely to get well-paid jobs or have stable, happy home lives, the residue of slavery is still with America.

In this sense it is the little similarities rather than the big differences that are most striking: Willmott recreates the controversial TV show 'Cops' as 'Runaway', with slave-catchers pursuing fugitives, by doing little more than changing the logo (white officers still chase black criminals, who still get carted away in orange jump suits). I found myself particularly struck by the brief reference to 'Tom and Jerry'. I remember this cartoon fondly from my childhood, and find my nostalgia difficult to reconcile with the fact, underlined here, that one of its few humans was a black mammy who would chase good-for-nothin’ Tom out of the kitchen while trying to do her chores for the white people.

'CSA' is not looking to show us what an America with slavery would 'really' be like. It's saying that, even without slavery, Americans can't ignore its legacy. To remind us that it is not enough to call it 'past history' and be done with it is more than enough for one film.

'CSA: The Confederate States of America' is out today.