Wild Southern Scenes by J. B. Jones, Esq.
September 2019
Imagine someone wrote a novel about the American Civil War before it ever happened—before the election of the anti-slavery Republican Party’s first president, Abraham Lincoln; before the secession of the Southern states; before the outbreak of hostilities. While fiction can never carry the weight of carefully researched work by professional historians, intangibles like moods, fears, prejudices, etc., can arguably be better expressed by the novelist, who is not bound by the strictures of documentation and the disputation of dry facts. What was on people’s minds as they watched the schism between slave and non-slave states widen, as the rhetoric grew more and more bitter, and as the notion of secession gradually entered the national debate as a serious option? Those are questions answered for the reader by Wild Southern Scenes, A Tale of Disunion! and Border War! which was published originally in 1859, a full year before South Carolina began the secession of the Southern states into the Confederacy.
This novel offers a fascinating glimpse into what people were thinking and imagining as one of the greatest and most tragic wars in human history inexorably approached. One might call it an alternative history of the Civil War—a history from a different dimension—The Man in the High Castle a century earlier.
This novel offers a fascinating glimpse into what people were thinking and imagining as one of the greatest and most tragic wars in human history inexorably approached. One might call it an alternative history of the Civil War—a history from a different dimension—The Man in the High Castle a century earlier.