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This comment on Timothy Burke's article "On Confederate Counterfactuals" describes a story (presumably a novel) the user read about 40 years ago:

[...] the very first Confederate counterfactual I read in the 1970s. Of course I can’t remember the title or author at this remove, but one of its conceits was that the Confederacy couldn’t hold itself together, because states just kept seceding. Florida was an independent republic, for example, and it catered to tourists from the Union.

What story is this?

DukeZhou
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BESW
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  • If the source conflated Florida with Louisiana, it could be Love in the Ruins, by Walker Percy. It's not much to go on. – Ralph Crown Jul 27 '17 at 01:53
  • I think I'll put a bounty on this question. That article went viral; if we can answer the question then we could probably get some traffic and attention. –  Jul 27 '17 at 04:34

1 Answers1

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The book is likely the 1970 book A More Perfect Union: A Novel by Robert Stapp.

Unfortunately my evidence for this is an Amazon review comment in which Greg E states:

As an alternate history (AH) novel it fails to cross the plausibility threshold, as a piece of escapist literature that sums up the zeitgeist of the '70s... it's there. I read this an AH novel and came away disappointed. Yes, there were some curious things added: I, for one, enjoyed the idea of Florida as a breakaway republic from the Confederacy to be a tourist trap and spy haven. But the rest... this Confederacy is a socialist apartheid faux-South Africa, which gets points for originality, but doesn't quite pull it off.

Thank you to Gareth Rees for providing a link to an online copy at Internet Archive where the section about Florida begins at page 173.

Spagirl
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