Anticipations of the Future

One of the more curious oddities of the year 1860 was the publication of a novel entitled Anticipations of the Future: To Serve as Lessons for the Present Time. Although his name was omitted from the volume, the author was Edmund Ruffin, a Virginia planter who was a noted fire eater, the political activists who favored southern independence.

Anticipation of the Future is composed excerpts of letters written by an Englishman in the United States for publication in the Times of London over the years 1864 to 1870. As the book opens, William H. Seward has just been elected as the seventeenth president of the United States to succeed Abraham Lincoln, who was elected in 1860. President Lincoln was credited generally with a wise and just administration of the nation’s government, although the narrator ascribes this to the president’s advisers rather than the president himself.

The Republican majority in Congress passed a homestead act that gave to all comers the ownership of 160 acres of land in the territories. This encouraged a flood of immigrants, and their numbers justified the admission of new states to the union that further swelled the Republican majority.

With the inauguration of President Seward, several trends that started under President Lincoln became more pronounced. Federal appointments went to Republican abolitionists, and non-southerners were appointed to federal offices in southern states. The pay of federal officers was increased, and spending for improving transportation – often prevented in the past by Democratic majorities and presidential vetoes – rose to new heights and was directed to northern states. The narrator notes that such activities were hard to criticize because of precedents established by previous Democratic administrations.

Southern officers were purged from the army and the navy. Federal officers became active proponents of abolition and encouraging slaves to abandon their owners, and federal facilities, such as army posts, became places of refuge for fugitive slaves.

The southerners, powerless in the national government, argued about the wisdom of secession but resolved to wait for an “overt act” that would justify their actions. In 1867 the legislatures of several large or populous northern states went into secret session and then simultaneously announced that they were dividing themselves into two separate states – increasing the number of northern states to the point where, once they were admitted to the union, they could amend the Constitution at will.

By early January 1868 six states in the deep south had seceded and formed their own national government. Other slave states such as Virginia remained in the union but assumed an attitude of armed neutrality – specifically, Virginia passed a law that prohibited the passage of armed forces across its territories. When the federal government surreptitiously attempted to evade this prohibition, hostilities broke out, and the invaders were driven out by the Virginia patriots. Ultimately all the slave states joined the southern confederation.

The federal government imposed a blockade that proved ineffective; invading federal armies were repulsed with heavy losses; and John Brown-like armies of abolitionists (including William Lloyd Garrison) sent to incite servile rebellion in the south were captured and hanged.

The economic dislocation caused by secession disrupted business in the north and led to widespread unemployment in northern cities, and the prolonged destitution sparked urban riots – New York City was substantially destroyed by the fires that broke out during the riots there. The loss of revenues from the tariff, combined with the profligate spending of the Republican Congress, bankrupted the federal government.

Eventually the combatants declared a truce. By 1870 the truce remained in place, and although the terms of an amicable peace treaty had not been worked out, commercial relations between the two American nations were being restored.

The principal difficulties for an author projecting a future history are two. Seen from the vantage point of the present, projections of the future, however logical and grounded in fact, often seem fanciful. Then again, when the passage of time turns the future into the past, the course of actual events is often far more outlandish than anything the author might have imagined.

Mr. Ruffin committed suicide shortly after the end of the Civil War.