Fire on the Mountain (Bisson novel)
ISBN 1-60486-087-1 | |
Fire on the Mountain is a 1988 novel by the American author
Plot
The difference from actual history starts with the participation of Harriet Tubman in Brown's uprising in 1859; her sound tactical and strategic advice helps Brown avoid mistakes which in real history led to his downfall. As a result, instead of the American Civil War, the U.S. faces a full-scale slave revolt throughout the South helped by a handful of white sympathizers and various European revolutionaries such as Giuseppe Garibaldi, and an invasion by Mexico, which seeks to regain the territory it lost in 1848.
After a great deal of bloody fighting and an increasing dissatisfaction in the North which is required to send troops to fight the rebellious slaves, the blacks succeed in emancipating themselves and create a republic in the Deep South, led by Tubman and Frederick Douglass. (Brown himself did not survive to see the victory of what he started.) Abraham Lincoln – a Whig politician who never got to be President – tries to start a war to bring back the secessionist black states into the Union, but he fails and is himself killed in that war. Blacks remember him as their archenemy.
Later, the black state (named "
The book has two levels. The overt plot takes place in 1959, in a
Reception
David Pringle rated Fire on the Mountain three stars out of four and described the novel as "a skilful evocation of an unlikely alternate history".[1]
See also
Source
- James R. Knight, John Brown - History and Myth, pp 87–94[full citation needed]
References
- ISBN 0-88687-537-4.