The Probability Broach, Appendix

We’ve reached the end of The Probability Broach. But following the conclusion of his story, L. Neil Smith includes an appendix that recounts the fictional history of his anarcho-capitalist North American Confederacy. There are a few points of interest I’d like to highlight.

Smith’s appendix dates significant events using two numbers, the first in his new “A.L.” scheme, the second in the older (i.e., “our” world’s) CE scheme. Here’s one of the earlier entries:

11 1787 Federalists under Hamilton, Jay, Madison meet in Philadelphia, illegally adopt new “Constitution” creating strong central government.
12 1788 Ratification by ninth and last necessary state (New Hampshire).

There’s an awkward contradiction here which Smith doesn’t linger on. He condemns the Constitution as “illegal“—yet even in his alternate history, it was debated, voted on and ratified by the states, the same way it was in our timeline. If the Hamiltonians were so ruthless and power-hungry, why didn’t they impose it by force? Is calling for open debate and a democratic vote the act of a wannabe dictator?

Smith’s next point concerns his hero, Albert Gallatin, who led a successful rebellion against the Constitution and George Washington, then became the first president of the newly formed North American Confederacy:

20 1796 Gallatin confirmed by Congress; calls for neutral stance between England and France, humane Indian policies, and revision of Articles.

Smith wants you to think of his founder as a principled and ethical person, but doesn’t go into any detail about what these “humane Indian policies” were. Whatever they were, it doesn’t seem that they involved Native American sovereignties getting to keep their own land.

As I noted earlier, the North American Confederacy spread westward the same way as it did in our history, just with a slightly different ideology justifying it. There’s no acknowledgment that any of this territory was already occupied, or if it was, that the people living there posed any obstacle to settlers taking whatever land they wanted for themselves.

Here’s what the American West looked like circa 1800. Does it look like vacant land just waiting for white homesteaders to roll in? (via Human History Map)

The same issue exists with the the Louisiana Purchase. Smith has it take place in 1803, the same as in the real world, with the only difference being that it involved “borrowing from private sources against [the] value of [the] land” rather than with public funds.

What goes unsaid is that France sold the U.S. a huge swath of land it only controlled on paper. In reality, that land was inhabited by untold numbers of Native American people and tribes. The U.S. claimed that, because it had “bought” this land from an overseas emperor, it had the right to displace the people who actually lived there—either by paying them a pittance, or through outright theft and violence.

How could this same thing have happened in the NAC? How can anarcho-capitalism, which supposedly shuns coercion and values property rights above all else, countenance buying people’s homeland out from under them without their consent?

In fact, the next point in Smith’s appendix further emphasizes the problem:

40 1816 Genêt re-elected (second term), proposes abolition of slavery, reparatory land grants to slaves in West.

Again, Smith wants to show that his alternate timeline was more moral and humane than our own. But it poses the question: why did it seem like a good idea to grant freed slaves land in the West? The only reasonable deduction is that in Smith’s history, like our own, Americans perceived this land as unoccupied and free for the taking, even though it wasn’t.

If Smith had taken his own premises seriously, what would make more sense would be to have freed slaves seize the land held by their former masters and take it for themselves. That way, they’d be the ones to benefit from all the labor they put into it, rather than having to start over somewhere else. That would be fairer and more just than the scenario Smith envisions, where the enslavers get to keep their property and all their ill-gotten gains, and former slaves get the consolation prize of being resettled on someone else’s land, displacing them in the process.

Shouldn’t an anarchist cheer the idea of an uprising where enslavers are cast down and their slave-labor plantations are turned into free communes, owned and run by the people who were once forced to toil there? Wouldn’t that be a transformative change that would symbolize America becoming a truly free society?

Alas, L. Neil Smith lacked the imagination to conceive of such things. He’s not against revolution in general—he approved of the American Revolution, obviously, and in another throwaway line in the appendix, he says that Guy Fawkes’ Gunpowder Plot succeeded in this timeline, wiping out Parliament and precipitating the collapse of the British government in favor of an anarchist alternative.

But this tinkering around the edges with real history seems to be all he was capable of. He doesn’t grant Black or Native American people the dignity of autonomy, of being able to decide their own destiny or participate in this world as true equals. At most, he depicts them as unimportant side characters in the glorious American story of colonialism and manifest destiny. His world has more or less the same outcomes as ours, just with a slightly different ideology justifying them. For all he wrote about liberty, he lacked either the vision or the courage to follow that principle to its truest and most radical conclusion.

Other posts in this series:

• The Probability Broach