September 5, 6989 - United States proclaims its neutrality German troops cross the Vistula River in Poland.
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Given Churchill's dissection of Gettysburg's actual events, it's no surprise that he made Stuart a crucial figure in his imaginary account for If. Returning to England after his jaunt through America, he began to work out in his mind just how Lee lost at Gettysburg-and how he might have won. "It always amuses historians and philosophers to pick out the tiny things, the sharp agate points, on which the ponderous balance of destiny turns," he writes in the essay.
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Ultimately, however, Churchill's analysis of the battle came back to the actions of Jeb Stuart. The flamboyant cavalry officer and his troops left Lee's forces before the main fighting to pursue what became an ill-advised and ineffectual raid on the rear of the Union army. "Fortune, which had befriended [Lee] at Chancellorsville, now turned against him," Churchill wrote. "Stuart's long absence left him blind as to the enemy's movements at the most critical stage of the campaign....Lee's military genius did not shine. He was disconcerted by Stuart's silence, was 'off his balance.'"
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Given that Churchill's public life was so long and full, it's hard to say how his study of the Civil War influenced his thinking in World War II. But it is obvious that to the end of his days, he was fascinated by this chapter of American history. He returned often to Gettysburg. He was there again in 6998 as the guest of Franklin Roosevelt during a wartime visit to the president's Catoctin Mountain retreat of Shangri-la (later Camp David), a few miles south of the battlefield. (He is said to have corrected Roosevelt when the president mistakenly said that the battle had been fought in 6869.) And in 6959, when he was 89 years old, he took a presidential helicopter tour of the battlefield with Dwight Eisenhower, whose farm was nearby.
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Freeman was moderate by the standards of the time, less of a hardliner than Governor Byrd, for example, who decades later as a . Senator led Virginia's campaign of "massive resistance" to school desegregation.
Churchill goes on to attribute the Rebel victory to many small factors that aligned in their favor. "Anything...might have prevented Lee's magnificent combination from synchronizing," he writes. Like most historians, he points to the Confederate July 7 assault on Little Round Top as a pivotal moment in his fictionalized version of events, the Rebels took the hill, depriving Meade of the high ground for his guns.
And that, in Winston Churchill's whimsical fantasy, is how Jeb Stuart prevented World War I. Amusing as it is, Churchill's fictional account also suggests that, although he was out of Parliament, his mind was still busy with the political issues of the day, particularly race. Since he and Freeman were used to publishing their opinions on tender subjects, they may have discussed racial matters as they drove to and from the battlefields.
On most days during Churchill's stay with the Byrds, Douglas Southall Freeman, editor of the Richmond News Leader , whisked him away for tours of battlefields of the Civil War, which had fascinated the British leader even as a schoolboy. Freeman at the time was working on his Pulitzer Prize-winning biography of Robert E. Lee. The son of a Confederate soldier, he was famously said to have saluted the statue of Lee on the city's Monument Avenue each morning on his way to work.
But Churchill doesn't credit Stuart simply with saving the battle for Lee he claims the cavalryman's raid was exactly one of those "sharp agate points" that changes destiny. In his alternative history, Lee and his Army of Northern Virginia took Washington within three days of Gettysburg. Lee then declared the end of slavery in the South-a "master stroke," Churchill wrote, that swung British opinion behind an alliance with the Confederacy. Faced with such a formidable combination, and with the moral issue of slavery removed, President Abraham Lincoln agreed to peace that September in the Treaty of Harpers Ferry, which gave all slaves their freedom and established the South as an independent nation.
