He owns a musket and a flask carried by soldiers in the US Civil War and has journeyed five times to Gettysburg to explore the conflict's most iconic battlefield.
But this enthusiast for all things Civil War is not one of the legions of Americans who remain passionate over their country's 1861-1865 bloodletting. He is Australia's ambassador to the United States, Kim Beazley.
Despite coming from an ocean away, Beazley has for years made a hobby out of his study of the Civil War and is watching avidly as the United States marks 150 years since the first shots were fired at Fort Sumter.
Beazley, Australia's former opposition leader, believes that the Civil War not only left in indelible mark on the United States but deeply impacted the course of the world.
"The capacity of the United States to do anything at all in global politics depended entirely on the outcome of that war," Beazley told AFP at his office in the Australian embassy, where he keeps on the shelf a reprint of the 1865 New York Times front-page reporting the South's surrender at Appomattox.
Beazley enjoys the what-ifs of history. In his view, had the South triumphed, the United States would never have fulfilled its "Manifest Destiny" concept of expansion across North America -- and would not have become the Pacific Ocean power it is today.
"If the North had lost, this would have become a brawling continent with probably one of the most backward governments on earth -- a mid-19th-century slave state," Beazley said.
An independent Confederate States of America would likely have caused instability in Mexico and the Caribbean, while the weakened United States of America may have clashed with Canada, Beazley said.
Texas, in turn, may have reasserted independence, leading to a three-way conflict among the USA, CSA and Texas Republic to control what is now the southwestern United States, Beazley said.
The end result, he said, would have been the absence of the United States in Asia, including when Japan became militarist -- if Japan still took that turn.
"The America that emerged useful to the world was what stood between us and the Japanese empire's attacks on the European empires," Beazley said.
Japan attacked US naval forces at Pearl Harbor in 1941. Japan also attacked Australia during World War II, including a submarine raid on Sydney Harbour, but never attempted a full-scale invasion.
However, had the North not triumphed in the Civil War nearly a century earlier, Japan may well have overrun Australia, Beazley said.
"The Japanese would not have been victorious," Beazley said. "The Russians and British eventually would have got there."
But the war would have lasted far longer, meaning "a lot of the Japanese conquests probably would have been maintained and Australia's position would have been powerless," he said.
Despite the distance, a number of Australians served on both sides of the Civil War. Defying the United States, authorities allowed a Confederate ship, the CSS Shenandoah, to dock in Melbourne in 1865 for repairs and supplies.
In more recent times, Australia has been one of the foreign countries with the most scholarship on the US Civil War. Beazley traced the interest to a debate decades ago on whether Australia should be neutral in global affairs or ally closely with the United States.
Beazley, a centrist within the left-leaning Labor Party which is now in power, said that Australians examined "what made America great."
For Beazley, one particular case of greatness was Abraham Lincoln, the Civil War president who faced vociferous criticism even within the North and struggled personally with depression.
"US presidents are pleasingly free of self-pity, but insofar as they indulge it, there is no president in my lifetime -- and that includes Richard Nixon -- who has been the object of the loathing that Lincoln was," Beazley said.
Noting that Lincoln is now lionized, Beazley said: "He is, just simply, the greatest there ever was."
Beazley expects his excitement to build in the next few years. If he is still ambassador, he is debating whether to go to Pennsylvania for the sesquicentennial of the Battle of Gettysburg in July 2013.
But to make a point -- and mindful of the crowds -- Beazley may also head south to Vicksburg, the scene of a nearly simultaneous siege in which the Confederacy lost command of the Mississippi River.
"Gettysburg will probably be unapproachable," Beazley said. And at Vicksburg, "arguably what happened there was more decisive on the outcome of the Civil War."
Copyright 2011 AFP American Edition
