The Guns Of The South

STORY

An Alternate History story set during the American Civil War , the story deals with a group of time-travelling '' Afrikaner Weerstandsbeweging '' members from 2014 who wish to alter the outcome of the Civil War and, as a result, insure the success of their own cause in the future.

The members of the AWB, headed by the stoic Andries Rhoodie, supply Robert E. Lee 's Army Of Northern Virginia with AK-47 s, foodstuffs, and small amounts of other supplies (including Nitroglycerine tablets for treating Lee's heart condition), hoping to bring about a Southern victory in the war. After numerous minor skirmishes and two major head-on battles with the Army Of The Potomac - including a major defeat for the Union Army at The Wilderness that sets the Union defeat in motion - the armed conflict comes to a head when Lee manages to assault and conquer Washington, D.C. , emphasising to Abraham Lincoln the futility of continued attempts to subdue the South.

With an armistice signed, signalling the end of armed conflict, Union troops are withdrawn from all Confederate states (except some territories with no clear political leaning) and General Lee arranges for future negotiations between the CSA and USA to determine the status of disputed territories. West Virginia , Maryland , and the Indian Territory are exchanged during those negotiations, with Kentucky and Missouri both holding state-wide votes to determine which nation they will join. After the completion of the negotiations, voting, and political conversation - during which a minor incident occurs where two members of the AWB are caught by Union pickets attempting to smuggle AK-47s into the disputed states - elections are held where Kentucky chooses to join the Confederacy while Missouri chooses to remain with the Union. General Lee returns to his duties in Virginia with the hope of finally settling down with his family, including his ailing wife, at their home, Arlington House ,for the remainder of their days.

Unfortunately, others are not so content to leave the General be and Jefferson Davis , president of the Confederacy, makes clear his wish that Lee be the next man to hold the position. The AWB, whose goal from the beginning had been to maintain the Confederacy as a bastion of Black oppression, feel that Lee is too soft on the question of Slavery and rally behind General Nathan Bedford Forrest , a member of the Confederate Cavalry , in the hopes of electing him to office. A slave trader himself, Forrest is believed to be the perfect man for the job of maintaining the standard of White Supremacy . The election is in deep contestation from the get go, both men heroes of the recent War and filled with charisma, but Lee emerges the victor despite the introduction of 20th and 21st Century campainging techniques - propaganda, muckraking, and even the use of forged evidence of candidate misconduct - by the AWB to bolster Forrest's one-note campaign to preserve slavery in the South. Interestingly enough, several of the states which voted for Forrest begin to call for secession from the Confederacy and the creation of their own nation. However, Forrest feels that such an action would be nothing short of petulance and conceded defeat, offering his personal service in the Confederate army if any states do attempt to secede.

Sadly, the AWB is no longer content to merely manipulate the nation from the sidelines and, at the presidential inauguration, several of its members attempt to assassinate Lee. They attack now-president Lee with Uzi s and Sniper Rifle s; Lee survives the attempt on his life by nothing more than pure luck, though his wife is killed along with several other figures in Confederate history, including Alexander Stephens and Jubal Early . The AWB forces stationed in Richmond are attacked, and after a fierce battle are finally defeated. Their headquarters contain many items from the 21st Century that we would currently take for granted - Honda gas-powered electrical generators, Fluorescent lighting, and a Macintosh computer - but most importantly contains dozens of historical texts that reveal not only the AWB's true intentions, but that they had twisted the historical facts so as to present the South's defeat as far worse than it actually was.

With Forrest in command, Lee orders the Confederate army against the remainder of the AWB. Unfortunately, the AWB have managed to secure control over the area around Rivington due to other elements of their advanced technology which they have not shared with Lee's men (including Mines , Howitzers , Walkie-talkie s and Flak Jacket s), and they manage to successfully repel all Confederate attempts to retake their territory. It is a Brilliant Strategy by Lt. Colonel Henry Pleasants , a former Union officer who remained in the South after he had been captured during the War, that finally allows the Confederates to breach the AWB perimeter. Discovering that many of the AWB had kept their slaves in deplorable conditions not unlike a Concentration Camp , the Confederate forces manage to overcome the AWB's superior technology through sheer numbers and determination. The AWB combatants are eventually defeated, and those who are unable to escape in their time machine are captured. Rhoodie surrenders, but is killed by one of his slaves in retaliation for his severe mistreatment.

The surviving AWB members are held in a Confederate prison under constant guard. While all face a sentence of death, proceedings are on indefinite stay so long as those willing to cooperate assist in bridging the gaps in the information presented in the historical texts and technological items recovered following the AWB's defeat. Although some gaps would prove almost impossible to fill due to numerous generations of technological advancements - 1870s technology would be far too immature to attempt to repair a 21st Century computer at the component level, for example - most of the AWB survivors agree to cooperate much in the same way Werner Von Braun 's team of German rocket scientists did with the US Army as part of Operation Paperclip .

After the capture of the AWB's Richmond offices, Lee presents before the Confederate leadership all the historical documents that the men from the future used to inform themselves of the events of the present time. With the view of hindsight, which is always 20/20, they see how the issue of slavery is almost universally reviled in the future and that, where they had hoped to be vindicated for their actions by their descendants, practically the entirety of the world viewed the Civil War and Southern Secession to be nothing more than a crime against humanity itself. With this new information, the book ends with the Congress of the Confederacy passing a bill for gradual emancipation of its entire slave population, the bill itself modelled after a proposed act of legislation in Brazil.

The story is told alternately from the third-person perspectives of General Lee himself and of First Sergeant Nate Caudell, an actual historical figure who served in the 47th North Carolina. This enables the reader to winess events from both "the top" and "the bottom", on the battlefield in the early part of the book and later in the civilian life of the post-war confederacy. The realities of the situation gradually reveal themselves as Lee learns more about his dubious allies, while Caudell also hears increasingly disturbing rumors about the situation at Rivington - with the concluding explosive confrontation with the AWB again seen alterantely from the two distinct viewpoints.

Turtledove used historical records of an actual Confederate Army unit, the 47th North Carolina, to flesh out his list of characters. All the characters in the book are mentioned with the actual ranks they held in the 47th - including Mollie Bean , who as a woman masqueraded as a male Confederate soldier for most of the War before being wounded and captured by Union forces - as well as their civilian employment if it is known.

The book won the John Esthen Cook Award for Southern Fiction in 1993.

Dr. Turtledove has an entire (unrelated) book series, known among fans as Timeline-191 , on an alternate history in which the Confederacy won the Civil War (though this time, not through ''deus ex machina'' intervention by time travel, but the Battle of Antietam resulting in Confederate victory).

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The Guns Of The South