Characters in the Southern Victory series
Encyclopedia
The Southern Victory Series is a series of alternate history novels written by Harry Turtledove
. The point of divergence
involves Confederate States of America
winning the American Civil War
and becoming an independent nation. The series covers events from 1862 to 1944 and features dozens of fictional characters, some of them analogues of real people.
John Abell is a General Staff officer. He served on the U.S. Army General Staff from the Great War, when he was a major, to the 1941 War, when he began that war as a colonel. Abell disliked many of the tactics and operations proposed by Irving Morrell, but the two men shared a hatred of the Confederacy and a wary respect for each other's abilities. Abell is typically portrayed as an excellent soldier in his role as a General Staff officer, but is an occasional antagonist to Irving Morrell and Abner Dowling, both field officers, as their approaches to war differ radically. However, Abell and Dowling make common cause with regard to Daniel MacArthur's debacle in northern Virginia. Dowling and Abell even appear to become friends (to the extent that either man has friends), both men sharing an ironic sense of humor and low regard for MacArthur.
During the war, Abell was promoted twice: first to brigadier general, then to major general. After the war ended, it was his duty to inform General Abner Dowling of the possibility that Dowling retire.
Hosea Blackford was first introduced in a train ride across the northern Great Plains at 1881, while talking with former President Abraham Lincoln
, in this world a founder of American Socialism
whose disciple the earnest young Blackford considers himself to be. Blackford re-entered the series in GW:B when, as a Congressman in the House of Representatives for the Socialist Party (representing Dakota), he became friendly with freshman Congresswoman Flora Hamburger (representing New York), developing a romantic relationship. They ultimately married despite religious and political differences.
In 1920, he was asked by Upton Sinclair
to be the Socialist party nominee to be the Vice President. The Socialists won the 1920 election, defeating Democrat Teddy Roosevelt. Upton Sinclair and Hosea Blackford were re-elected in 1924. Blackford described the job as being a "$12,000 a year hatrack."
In 1928 Blackford became the Socialist Party nominee for President and defeated Calvin Coolidge
by a small margin. However, the economic panic and subsequent crash in mid-1929 was largely blamed on Blackford. Shantytowns of unemployed people in the United States become known as Blackfordburghs (see: Hooverville
), in honor of the failure of the Blackford Presidency. In response he tried passing make-work legislation, but nothing helped. The fact that the Democrat-controlled Congress defeated most of those make-work bills did not help matters much.
Things were made even worse for Blackford in 1932 when the USS Remembrance caught a disguised Japan
ese ship supplying weapons to Canada
's resistance. The Japanese responded by sneak attacking Los Angeles. This destroyed Blackford's hopes of reelection, and began the Pacific War.
Blackford was easily defeated by Calvin Coolidge for the Presidential spot in 1932. He retired to Dakota, and then returned to New York and Philadelphia with his wife, Flora, when she was elected to Congress in 1934 after a six-year absence. He died in 1937. He and Flora had one son, Joshua.
Luther Bliss was a Kentuckian who sided with the occupying US forces during the Great War. He became head of the Kentucky State Police and was instrumental in persuading a rump legislature to petition for re-entry into the United States. During the years before the war, Bliss used his power effectively and ruthlessly to crack down on black Marxists and Confederate saboteurs. He left when Kentucky voted to rejoin the Confederate States, but returned to Covington
during the 1941 war to coordinate sabotage missions against Confederate armed forces. In 1943, with US forces approaching the Ohio River
, he was in conference with Intelligence officers to coordinate a rising behind the Confederate lines and help the US invasion. At the end of the war, Bliss was still present in Covington, where he had one final run-in with Cincinnatus Driver, whom he did not trust.
Sam Carsten was a member of a 5 inches (127 mm) gun crew on the battleship USS Dakota during the Great War. He was also a member of a landing party that overran the British coastal defenses at Pearl Harbor, Sandwich Islands
, as well as serving in the Battle of the Three Navies.
Falling into conversation with a friendly surfing Hawaiian native while on leave, Carsten suspected him of being a British spy and reported the encounter to his superior officers. Upon investigation, his suspicions were confirmed, which led to the Hawaiian's arrest and execution, and resulted in Carsten's promotion for his initiative. After the war, he was transferred to the aircraft carrier USS Remembrance, where he served as a gun captain during the suppression of a pro-British rebellion in Ulster
.
Carsten was selected for Officer Candidate School and was commissioned in 1924. He served as a damage-control officer aboard the Remembrance during the Pacific War, until its sinking during the American defeat off Midway
in 1941.
Carsten was then appointed commanding officer of the destroyer escort
USS Josephus Daniels, which served in several actions in the Atlantic, including transporting U.S. Marine Corps
raiders to capture a working Confederate coastal Y-range (radar) station
, as well as intercepting British attempts to land arms to the Canadian resistance in Newfoundland. After these successful missions, the Daniels was chosen to run guns to rebels in Confederate Cuba
by disguising her as a Confederate warship. The ship later takes part in a large naval battle in the Atlantic between the U.S. Navy and combined British and French naval forces, followed by a mission to smuggle arms into British-occupied Ireland.
During the final stages of the war, Carsten and the Daniels play a major role in the mid-ocean transfer of vital German superbomb research into American hands, and helped in the liberation of Haiti. After the war ended, he was promoted to lieutenant commander, and assigned to patrol the former Confederate east coast. Near the end of Settling Accounts: In at the Death
it is implied that he has developed melanoma
due to decades of his fair skin being exposed to the sun, as he absentmindedly picks a bleeding mole on the back of his left hand.
Terry DeFrancis was a colonel in the US Army in 1943, specializing in aircraft. He was assigned to General Dowling's Eleventh Army in west Texas to support the drive on Camp Determination. He was very young to be a full colonel, and still very young when promoted to commander of the 11th Army after Dowling departed to attack Richmond again. Much as DeFrancis's use of fighter-bombers and heavy bombers proves key to providing Dowling the edge over the Confederates in west Texas, now the recreated US state of Houston.
DeFrancis is analogous to Curtis LeMay
.
Abner Dowling was a major in the US Army in 1914, serving as Lieutenant General George Custer's adjutant. Physically overweight, Dowling was the butt of many of Custer's jokes, and his rather-good judgment on military matters overlooked or denounced as "stupid" by the 75-year old war hero, who used his First Army as a commander would use the obsolete cavalry: charge straight at the target and full steam ahead. Dowling recognized that strategy as costly and inefficient, but could only influence Custer indirectly.
After three years of brutal advancing through western Kentucky and into northern Tennessee, First Army stood in front of Nashville. Custer, following the advice of Colonel Irving Morrell, began to mass his armor, contrary to War Department doctrine. Dowling was coerced by Custer into faking reports to the War Department about how the general was allocating his armor and between them they convinced the General Staff and President Roosevelt to believe these reports. Custer went on to win the USA's first major victory of the Great War: the Barrel Roll Offensive. The First Army then captured Nashville and was planning a march on Murfreesboro when the Confederates asked for an armistice.
Following the end of the Great War, Dowling was promoted to lieutenant colonel, and Custer to full general. After spending time in the War Department offices, Custer and Dowling were transferred to Winnipeg
, Manitoba, which had been set up by the victorious Americans as the capital of Occupied Canada. Custer became governor-general, while Dowling typed his reports. Following several assassination attempts by a Canadian farmer named Arthur McGregor, Custer was forced to retire, and Dowling became army-commandant of Salt Lake City with the rank of colonel.
Following the assassination of Governor-general John Pershing, Dowling became the military governor. After several more years, military rule in the state was lifted and Dowling was reassigned once more. As his experience in Utah was unique among most of his peers, Dowling became the head of US military forces fighting Freedom Party rebels in Kentucky. After the Richmond Agreement of June 1940 between Presidents Smith and Featherston, a plebiscite took place and Kentucky voted for a return to the Confederacy. With war clouds between North and South looming, the now-brigadier general became commander of the Army of Ohio, in charge of defending the Midwest.
On June 22, 1941, the Confederates invaded Ohio with barrels and troops. Being unsupplied and unsupported by the War Department, the Army of Ohio was rolled back as the Confederates blitzed to Sandusky, Ohio
, on the south shore of Lake Erie, cutting the USA in half. Dowling was blamed for the disaster, but with War Department assistance, he appeared before the Congressional Committee on the Joint Conduct of the War, and pointed out the budget cuts of the Sinclair and Blackford Administrations as a significant cause of the U.S. defeat. Instead of being cashiered in disgrace, he was placed under the command of Daniel MacArthur, who led an inept counterattack in Northern Virginia
. Dowling managed to prevent George Patton, from striking MacArthur's rear, saving the Rappahannock front from destruction as MacArthur pushed south.
1942 found Brigadier General Dowling being promoted to Major General, then being put charge of the 11th Army headquartered in Clovis, New Mexico
. The 11th Army began an offensive into West Texas to coincide with the U.S. counter-attack around Pittsburgh. Shortly after the fighting in Pittsburgh ended, Dowling and his army learned of the existence of Camp Determination through photographic evidence. This struck a nerve in Dowling, who then used whatever resources he could to advance through Texas and get to the camp. By the time Dowling could seize Amarillo
and Snyder
, the Confederates destroyed the camp and most of the evidence that was there. This did not stop Dowling from forcing prominent local citizens from touring the mass graves of several hundred thousand black victims of Featherston.
After the invasion of Texas was halted by limited resources and the vast amounts of empty land, Dowling was sent to command a division in the final attack on Virginia. In 1944, after the war ended, Dowling was approached by Major General John Abell and it was made clear that Dowling must retire to make room for younger officers. Abell noted that Dowling's work significantly changed the moral nature of the war from merely a defense of the United States to a moral crusade against Featherston and his ideology.
Dowling is portrayed as an excellent officer who is often forced to work with limited resources and relegated to sideshow fronts and operations, and as such his results tend to be less than spectacular or decisive. Despite these limitations, (most the result of an unfortunate tendency to speak his mind) he almost always achieves his objectives and enjoys the professional respect of the fearsome Confederate General Patton. He has an ironic sense of humor and is a close ally of Irving Morrell.
Born in Covington, Confederate Kentucky, Cincinnatus worked as a delivery driver before the Great War. When Covington was overrun by U.S. forces, Cincinnatus found himself working for Lieutenant Straubing as a military driver, but also being a pawn in the intelligence game between Confederate, black Marxist and U.S. forces in Kentucky.
Following the Great War, Cincinnatus took the surname "Driver" (blacks in the Confederacy were not allowed surnames) and moved to Des Moines, Iowa, where he set up business as a hauler. He was briefly lured back to Kentucky by Luther Bliss and imprisoned without charge for several months by the Kentucky State Police head, but freed due to the legal efforts of attorney Clarence Darrow
.
Driver returned to Kentucky in late 1940 to see to a family crisis, but was trapped behind the international border when the Confederates reoccupied the state. He and his father, Seneca Driver, were exchanged in 1942 and he returned to Des Moines, where he volunteered as a civilian auxiliary driver for the U.S. Army, this time being allowed to carry a weapon. After a brief interlude assisting in the planning of underground operations in Covington, Kentucky, with Bliss, Driver followed the Army into Tennessee and Georgia, enthusiastically seeing the reactions of Confederates to seeing a black man carry a weapon. After the war, Driver returned to Covington one last time before returning home to Des Moines to see his daughter, Amanda, get married.
The Engels Brothers are a comedy group and common cultural icon. The Engels brothers apparently served in the Great War in the trenches, and then became a vaudeville act in the United States. They have appeared in movies and recorded an anti-Confederate number, "Featherston's Follies."
The Engels Brothers are a homage of Harry Turtledove to the Marx Brothers
, who named them after the long-time companion of Karl Marx
, Friedrich Engels
.
George Enos was a fisherman from Boston, Massachusetts, on the F/V Ripple when the Great War began. He continued to fish until the Ripple was captured by a Confederate commerce raider, the CSS Swamp Fox, and was interned in North Carolina until exchanged. Enos joined the U.S. Navy shortly afterward to avoid conscription in the Army and to fight the Confederacy. He served on a Q-boat which sank a Confederate submarine, and in 1916 was transferred to the USS Punishment, a river monitor which fought on the Mississippi and Cumberland Rivers, until it was destroyed. Enos was not aboard at the time. He was then transferred to the destroyer USS Ericsson, which was sunk illegally after the U.S.-C.S. armistice of 1917 by the CSS Bonefish, captained by Confederate Roger Kimball.
George Enos Jr. was born in 1910 and was only 7 years old when his father, George Enos (q.v.), was killed when the USS Ericsson was torpedoed the day after the U.S.-C.S. armistice. He became a fisherman, married Connie McGillicuddy, and joined the U.S. Navy during the 1941 War, seeing action around the Sandwich Islands aboard the destroyer USS Townsend.
In 1943, the Townsend was sunk near Baja California in a direct hit by Confederate divebomber. Enos survived and was transferred to the Josephus Daniels, under the command of Sam Carsten. In 1944, Enos was transferred again, this time to the USS Oregon. With the intervention of Joe Kennedy, Enos was able to obtain his release from the Navy after the Second Great War concluded, after which he returned home to Boston.
Sylvia Enos, born in 1886, was the wife and widow of George Enos. After his death in 1917, she struggled to support her two children. In 1923, thanks to complex developments in Confederate politics surrounding resistance to the Freedom Party, she learned the identity of the Confederate naval officer who killed her husband on the USS Ericsson, Roger Kimball. Sylvia traveled to South Carolina and killed Kimball, then surrendered to authorities. She was spared legal retribution through the intervention of Anne Colleton, a political rival and estranged lover of Kimball's.
Following her return, she became a heroine. Local Democratic Party boss Joseph P. Kennedy exploited her fame for political uses and also tried and failed to seduce her. She ghost-wrote a book entitled I Sank Roger Kimball along with a frustrated writer named Ernie
. Against the advice of her son, she began a romantic and sexual affair with Ernie, who had been wounded in his genitalia during the Great War. She was frightened by Ernie's dark mood swings but resisted her son's advice to break off the affair. This ultimately proved fatal when, in a very black melancholy, Ernie accidentally shot and killed Sylvia, then killed himself in remorse.
Armstrong Grimes (named after George Armstrong Custer) is the son of Merle Grimes and Edna Grimes and the grandson of Nellie Semphroch. He grew up in Washington, D.C. He graduated from high school in 1940 and then spent the next year of his life looking for work with little success, until he was conscripted into the U.S. Army in 1941. His basic training facility was attacked on the first day of the war as part of Operation Blackbeard, at which point he was awarded the rank of Private First Class. He took part in the initial, unsuccessful defense of Ohio under General Abner Dowling. When Sandusky fell, marking the conclusion of that operation, he was transferred to Utah, which had recently erupted into a Mormon uprising. There he befriended Yossel Reisen Jr., the nephew of Flora Hamburger. In Utah he was involved in both heavy fighting and terrorist attacks, eventually attaining the rank of sergeant. After the Mormons surrendered in 1943, Grimes was transferred to Canada, where he was wounded. After recovery, he was sent to Tennessee to take part in the U.S. push into Georgia. Grimes ended the war in Alabama, and remained there as part of the U.S. occupying force in the state.
Flora Hamburger is the wife of President Hosea Blackford and a major political figure in her own right.
At the beginning of the series she is a Socialist Party grassroots activist and agitator in a working-class Jewish neighborhood of New York, a member of the party's left-wing who is opposed to the leadership's decision to vote credits for the just-started war. In 1916, Hamburger takes the quite daring decision to contest the race for the area's Congressional seat and wins, becoming one of just two women in the House of Representatives. On arrival in Philadelphia, the de-facto capital, she is welcomed by the experienced and far older Congressman Hosea Blackford, member of the party's more moderate wing from the Mid-West. They develop a romantic relationship and finally marry.
Hamburger refuses an offer by General Leonard Wood to have her brother, David Hamburger, transferred out of the front line because her Socialist principles forbid her from accepting special favors; later, David loses a leg in battle.
She is often called the "Conscience of the Congress." She opposed the repression of the Mormons of Utah, for example, and she vainly tries to draw the attention of U.S. public opinion to the plight of Blacks
in the Confederacy, even before the rise of Jake Featherston
. During the 1930s, although her earlier belief in the inevitable revolution of the proletariat
has been tempered somewhat by age and experience, she is seen as the only member of Congress who really seems to care about the revival of the CSA and the rise of the Freedom Party.
An independently active First Lady, she refuses to be sidelined after her husband was defeated in the 1932 election, fell to ill health, and died in 1937, leaving her with one son, Joshua. She quickly resumes her old seat and her Congressional career in 1934. In 1941, she noticed a peculiar budget item appropriating a large amount of money for a secret project in western Washington State. She used this to strike a deal with President Al Smith
which forced the president to publicly condemn the Confederate atrocities against Southern blacks.
Throughout 1942 and 1943, Blackford found herself agreeing more with Democratic Senator Taft of Ohio about taking a hard line towards the war and towards the Mormon rebellion in Utah. Her son was drafted into the Army in 1943, and she felt some guilt after he was wounded in the closing days of the war.
Blackford was among the members of Congress to tour the site of the superbomb attack on Philadelphia in 1944. She spent much of the postwar 1944 campaigning for her re-election to Congress (which she won) and for Charles La Follete's election bid (which he lost). She gave a speech in Congress expressing thanks to the black guerilla Cassius for killing Jake Featherston, and was present at the inauguration of Tom Dewey in 1945.
Hal Jacobs was a cobbler in Washington, D.C., during the Great War. He was an agent for the spy ring for the U.S. run by Bill Reach, with Nellie Semphroch a fellow agent who reported to him. Jacobs was awarded the Distinguished Service Medal for his actions, despite being a civilian, by President Theodore Roosevelt in 1921. He married Nellie after the Great War, and died of lung cancer in 1933. He and Nellie Semphroch had a daughter, Clara.
Lieutenant Boris Lavochkin was assigned as a platoon leader to the infantry company Chester Martin served in as first sergeant. He was an aggressive, violent man who enjoyed leading raids across the lines and attacking both civilians and military targets in South Carolina. At times, he threatened his own men with violence if they did not cooperate, and he had to be threatened himself from leading a raid into Charleston when the unit was halted to allow a nuclear attack on the city.
During World War I
MacArthur became the youngest division commander in the history of the US Army and a newspaper hero. This achievement was overshadowed somewhat by his serving under First Army commander George Custer, also a publicity-conscious personality who ensured that MacArthur did not win any major victories. MacArthur was eclipsed still further when Lieutenant-Colonel Irving Morrell succeeded in using innovative tactics and barrels to break the Confederate lines in early 1917.
MacArthur spent the 1930s as commandant of the new US state of Houston. Despite his best efforts he never entirely stopped the flow of Freedom Party men and weapons from Texas, but open rioting and revolt was ruthlessly crushed wherever it occurred. After Houston's return to the CSA and the subsequent outbreak of war in 1941, MacArthur was assigned to lead the US offensive in Virginia. The assault on northern Virginia failed in its objective of seizing Richmond, though MacArthur did succeed in crossing the Rappahannock. Heavy casualties on both sides and a failed Confederate counter-attack out of the Appalachians resulted in stalemate by Christmas. MacArthur was still confident of victory, even colluding with Rear Admiral William Halsey, Jr.
about the scheme of landing troops at the mouth of the James River and advancing on Richmond from the rear. His subordinate Abner Dowling managed to prevent this, leaving northern Virginia as of February 1942 in stalemate.
MacArthur launched two direct assaults into the heavily defended Confederate line at Fredericksburg, losing thousands of US soldiers to Confederate guns positioned on Marye's Heights above the town. The general was criticized heavily by the Joint Committee on the Conduct of the War, by Brigadier General Dowling, and by the press for his actions. In 1944, General MacArthur finally succeeded in his drive into Richmond, after the Confederacy was exhausted and forced to fight on several fronts. He victoriously led an attack capturing most of Virginia. General Abner Dowling served as a commander under MacArthur in this phase.
MacArthur was known for the plainness of his uniform, and his trademark cigarette in a holder
. He is analogous to Douglas MacArthur
but some reviewers have mistakenly named him after his historic counterpart.
Born in Philadelphia but proud of his Greek heritage, Mantarakis was a private in the U.S. Army serving in the West with Gordon McSweeney during the early part of the Great War. He rose to sergeant in fighting against the Mormon rebels in 1915 up until the Mormons' surrender and Utah's placement under martial law (which would last until 1937). Mantarakis was killed during a U.S. invasion of Baja California
in 1916.
Martin was the son of Stephen Douglas Martin and a steelworker in Toledo, Ohio. He served on the Roanoke (southwestern Virginia) front during the Great War and received a commendation for saving the life of President Theodore Roosevelt. In 1917, as a sergeant, he briefly served as a company commander of B Company, 91st Infantry Regiment, taking part in the Remembrance Day offensive. After the war, Martin returned to his civilian job in Toledo, Ohio, as a steelworker. He became a Socialist Party member and union organizer
, taking part in strikes and fighting company police and strikebreakers, as well as the police, during the 1920s.
Martin married Rita Habicht, who had lost her first husband in the Great War, in 1926; their son, Carl, was born in 1936. The Depression of 1929 saw Martin lose his job; he and his wife went to Southern California, where he began in construction work and became a union official. When the 1941 war started, Martin returned to the Army and served as a first sergeant
in the infantry, fighting in Ohio and taking part in the successful counterattack against Confederate forces there. He is shown fighting at the front lines throughout Kentucky and Tennessee and eventually ends up commanding a platoon.
Throughout 1944, Martin was part of the drive to Savannah, and participated in the burning of Hardeeville, South Carolina
and the murder of all its citizens. He was saved from being in Charleston when it was destroyed by a superbomb when his unit was ordered to halt several miles from the city. After the war ended, Martin was able to obtain his release from the Army and returned to Los Angeles, where he resumed negotiating labor contracts.
McSweeney was a U.S. Army soldier who served in Utah and Baja California with Paul Mantarakis, and later in Arkansas during the Great War. A conservative Presbyterian
, McSweeney saw himself as the instrument of God and he saw the enemy, whether they were Mormon, Mexican, or Confederates, as persons to be slaughtered without pity or mercy. He would use flamethrower
s on enemy bunkers, for example, but also used them on trench
patrols. McSweeney was as hard on his own soldiers as he was on himself and the enemy; despite this, his fighting skills were highly respected by his platoon and the Army as a whole. He was commissioned while serving in Arkansas, and won two Medals of Honor
during the Great War, the second awarded for destroying a Confederate river gunboat single-handedly. McSweeney was killed by shellfire during the last days of the Great War.
Born in late 1891, Irving Morrell was accepted and graduated from the West Point
. At the outbreak of World War I he was a captain on the southwest border. Leading his company against a Confederate farmhouse in Sonora
in September 1914, Morrell was severely wounded in the thigh, and would permanently suffer from a slight limp. While in the hospital he and a doctor jointly proposed the idea of metal helmets after a conversation concerning head wounds.
Upon recovery in 1915, Morrell was dispatched to eastern Kentucky, where his aggressive tactics resulted in a posting to the General Staff. Morrell's star rose still further that year when President Theodore Roosevelt
, after an informal talk about the ongoing Mormon uprising in Utah, 'persuaded' the War Department to adopt Morrell's more imaginative plans. When the Mormons stalled the resulting US advance by doing the unexpected, General Leonard Wood
protected the young officer by sending him to British Columbia
to cut Canada's Pacific coast off from the interior. Morrell spent most of 1916 doing that, earning praise from observers Eduard Dietl
of Austria-Hungary
and Heinz Guderian
of Germany
.
In the final year of the war Morrell's innovative use of barrels
ensured the seizure of Nashville, and the subsequent rupture of Confederate lines. Soon, General Custer's
and Morrell's doctrine of massed barrel attacks was in use along every eastern front in North America. When the war ended, Morrell was a Colonel, a national hero, and was given his choice of assignments. He decided to head Barrel Works in Ft. Leavenworth, Kansas, and initially made great strides in designing the next generation of barrels. While stationed in Leavenworth, Morrell met Agnes Hill, a widow who lost her husband early in the Great War. They married in 1921, and their daughter, Mildred, was born in 1925.
The cost-cutting of Upton Sinclair
's Socialist administration ensured that Barrel Works was closed down in 1923. His subsequent posting to Philadelphia lasted only two years, with his outspoken criticism of America's foreign policy resulting in a transfer to occupation duty in Kamloops, British Columbia. The next seven years proved largely uneventful, with Morrell handling a sullen but acquiescent region. He received a visit in 1926 from now-Lieutenant-Colonel Guderian, along with an unnamed German sergeant who had strong anti-semitic views.
With the outbreak of the Pacific War in 1932, Morrell found himself back at Barrel Works, though he was soon transferred to occupation duty in Houston, his wife and daughter remained at Fort Leavenworth, as Morrell didn't want to risk their lives in the hostile state. With the plebiscite of 1940 came Houston's return to the CSA, and Morrell was assigned as barrel commander in Ohio under Brigadier General Abner Dowling, Custer's former adjutant.
When Confederate Operation Blackbeard was launched on June 22, 1941 Morrell found himself in an unenviable position. Despite his best efforts, the prewar shortage of soldiers and barrels ensured that General George Patton's armor succeeded in reaching Sandusky on Lake Erie by late August. With the United States cut in half, Morrell found his attempts to throw the Confederates back frustrated not only by CS sabotage in eastern Ohio but the War Department's focus on northern Virginia.
In January, 1942, Morrell was badly wounded by a Confederate would-be assassin, which ironically served to bring him to his own superiors' attention as to just how skilled and dangerous a commander the CSA viewed him to be. Upon recovery and a promotion to Brigadier General, he commanded the US forces in Ohio and Pennsylvania during Operation Coalscuttle
. His victory at Pittsburgh in early 1943 was the beginning of the end for the CSA.
Morrell planned an assault on Kentucky and Tennessee. Knowing that the Confederates were familiar with the details of the 1917 attack, he used deception to concentrate Confederate forces around Covington, but struck further west in a massive amphibious assault across the Ohio River in the summer of 1943. He drove past Bowling Green and moved into east Tennessee towards Chattanooga. In August, an airborne assault on Lookout Mountain and Missionary Ridge prevented Chattanooga from becoming a Confederate Pittsburgh. Morrell's troops then moved towards Atlanta, the industrial heart of the Confederacy. Morrell succeeded in taking Atlanta, and proceeded to head towards Savannah, cutting the Confederacy in two. This action was similar to Sherman's March to the Sea
in the American Civil War
. Morrell witnessed the superbomb attack on Philadelphia, during which drops of radioactive liquid came into contact with his skin, which he wisely chose to scrub off as quickly as possible.
On July 14, 1944, Morrell arrived in Pineville, North Carolina to accept the surrender of the Confederate States from President Don Partridge. When the U.S. moved into the former Confederacy to occupy it, Morrell was made military governor of Virginia, the Carolinas, Georgia, and Florida. As military governor, Morrell made it clear that any attempt to rebel against the United States would result in the use of force; in addition, any attempt to stir up mob action against returned black concentration camp survivors would also be met by force. Morrell supervised the production of a pamphlet, Equality, which stated the U.S. position of total legal equality between black and white ex-Confederates, including marriage if both parties wanted it. This pamphlet was produced throughout the former Confederacy.
Asked to testify for the defense in the trial of Clarence Potter, Morrell magnanimously agreed, though it was Potter who tried to have Morrell assassinated in the early part of the war. Morrell's testimony, confirming the United States also used the "ruse of war" of having troops dressed in enemy uniform infiltrate behind the lines. It was probably Morrell's testimony which saves Potter's life and made it impossible for the court to sentence him to death for using the same "ruse" in the bombing of Philadelphia.
There are parallels between Morrell and Heinz Guderian
, in that both developed the warfare of armoured fighting vehicles not in a supporting role, but as a fighting force of their own. Both Guderian and Morrell faced the disinterrest of their general staff; unlike Guderian, Morrell's pledge remained unheared until the attack of the CSA.
Jonathan Moss grew up in a well-to-do Chicago family, and enlisted as a U.S. fighter pilot out of college. Flying on the southern Ontario front in the Great War, Moss established a strong relationship with a Canadian farmer named Laura Secord. Moss studied law at Northwestern University
near Chicago after the War, pining after Secord all the while, and moved to Berlin, Ontario in Occupied Canada to establish his career as an attorney in military occupation courts. He earned some fame as a defender of Canadians' rights, though Moss readily admitted this only meant he lost less often than most of his peers, as the legal system created by the occupiers was heavily weighted against the "Canuck
s".
By patient wooing Moss eventually won the love of Laura Secord and married her. However, marrying an American, even a liberal one, made her a traitor in the eyes of Canadian nationalists, and she was suspected of having betrayed the rebellion of 1924. Fascinated by the new fighter planes which he sees, Moss persuades the authorities to let him take up part-time flying for the United States armed forces. This act, widely publicized in the press, acts as the final trigger causing Mary McGregor Pomeroy to send a package bomb which kills Moss' wife and daughter. Full of anger and bitterness, Moss turned his back upon Canada and rejoined the U.S. Army as a full-time fighter pilot. When World War II erupted he fought for approximately a year on the Ohio and Virginia fronts, was shot down over Virginia, and sent to Andersonville, Georgia
as a POW. He escaped during a tornado along with Nick Cantarella, and the two joined a band of black guerrillas, led by Spartacus, fighting the Confederacy. Throughout 1942 and 1943, he and the black guerrilla band continue to wage operations against the Confederate civilian population and the Mexican forces across rural Georgia. However, an attempt to steal a plane - with which Spartacus wants Moss to strafe the Confederates from the air while Moss himself hopes to use it to return to the US Army positions - leads the band into an ambush in which it is badly mauled.
In 1944, Moss was rescued by advancing U.S. forces, and was able to return to flying near the end of the war. He finished the Second Great War with three kills, after having been an ace in the Great War. His next duty was to travel to Houston, Texas to act as a defense lawyer for Jefferson Pinkard. Despite Moss' best efforts, Pinkard was found guilty of crimes against humanity and sentenced to death. Moss was then offered a place on the Judge Advocate's staff, a position which he accepted, and has taken up helping the surviving Blacks as his new cause.
Leonard O'Doull, M.D., was a surgeon who served in the U.S. Army on the Quebec front in the Great War at a military hospital in Rivière-du-Loup. While stationed there, he met Nicole Galtier, the daughter of Lucien Galtier, upon whose land the hospital had been built. He married Nicole in 1917 and after the war he settled down to practice in Rivière-du-Loup in the Republic of Quebec. The marriage produced one son, Lucien O'Doull, named for his maternal grandfather.
In his time in Rivière-du-Loup, O'Doull developed a fondness for the Québécois people and culture, and became very close to his wife's family, especially his father-in-law. His French, fluent to start with, developed from "Parisian" into the quite distinct Québécois dialect.
When the Second Great War began, O'Doull was encouraged by US authorities to rejoin the US Army. Despite his having grown very comfortable in the Republic of Quebec, he found his loyalties remained with the nation of his birth and rejoined the Army's Medical Service, where he was given the rank of major. He was stationed on the Virginia front, where he befriended Granville McDougald, and was transferred to the city of Pittsburgh
when it was invaded by the Confederates. After the decisive U.S. victory in Pittsburgh, O'Doull found himself as a front line surgeon in an army rapidly advancing through Kentucky and Tennessee.
O'Doull remained with the Army through the end of the war, making lieutenant colonel, and the beginning of the occupation in Alabama; however, he was able to secure his discharge through the offices of the Québécois government and returned to private practice in Rivière-du-Loup.
Michael Pound was a U.S. Army sergeant who had fought in the First Great War. During the Second Great War, he served under Colonel Irving Morrell's command. After Morrell's wounding in 1941, Pound was transferred to another unit. He was rash, loud, and outspoken towards senior officers, but an effective mentor to junior officers who served with him. He saw action in Ohio, despite having a tank shot out from under him, and in the Battle of Pittsburgh as gunner in a U.S. barrel. Because of Pound's experience in barrel development, he was proficient at judging distance, a trait he used to destroy many Confederate barrels that otherwise would have been out of range in Pittsburgh. He received a battlefield commission in 1943.
As a lieutenant, Pound commanded a platoon of five barrels in the attacks through Kentucky and Tennessee. He used deception to seize a key bridge in Kentucky, enabling the U.S. advance to go faster than planned. Pound eventually took part in the charge into Alabama, where he was burned when his barrel was attacked. After recovery, he was sent to Tallahassee, Florida to take part in the U.S. occupation there, where he helped defuse boycotts of services imposed by Confederate businesses.
Lieutenant Colonel Jedediah Quigley, from New Hampshire, was the U.S. Army officer in charge of the military government of Rivière-du-Loup, Quebec, during the Great War. He seized land from Luicien Galtier to build a military hospital in 1915; however, he agreed to pay back rent to the Galtiers when Galtier's attitude became more positive toward the U.S. After the Great War, he became the U.S. military representative to the Government of Quebec. He returned to Quebec shortly after the outbreak of the 1941 War to persuade Leonard O'Doull to return to active duty as an Army doctor for U.S. forces fighting in Ohio. After the war, he appeared once more, in his seventies, to ask O'Doull to make a report on ways and means military medicine could be improved.
"Bill" Reach was a reporter for the Washington Evening Star before the Great War. Before that, although it is not clear, he is intimated that he was Nellie Semphroch's lover, maybe even her procurer, and perhaps the father of Edna Semphroch. He was in charge of the U.S. spy ring in Washington, D.C., to which Nellie Semphroch and Hal Jacobs reported. He was able to warn Jacobs and Semphroch of an artillery bombardment that killed Edna Semphroch's fiancé in 1916. He was finally killed by Nellie Semphroch when he attempted to rape her during the Confederate withdrawal from Washington.
Yossel Reisen Jr. is the nephew of Congresswoman Flora Blackford. He was born in 1915 during the Great War. Reisen never knew his father, who was killed in the war before he was born. By 1941, Reisen had been conscripted in the Army and served in the same regiment with Armstrong Grimes, taking part in fighting against the Mormon rebellion in Utah.
Edna Semphroch, along with her mother Nellie, ran a coffee shop in Washington, D.C., before, during, and after the Confederate occupation of the city from 1914 to 1917. She was unaware of her mother's activities as a U.S. spy, and in fact was ready to marry a Confederate officer, Lieutenant Nicholas H. Kincaid, when shellfire from a U.S. cannon hit the church on H Street where the wedding was to be held, killing him. Edna received the Order of Remembrance, Second Class, from President Roosevelt after the Great War for her "services to the U.S," though Nellie believed that she had done nothing to deserve it. She married Merle Grimes, a government clerk, after the war to avoid any possible scandal. She gave birth to a son, Armstrong Grimes, and a daughter, Annie Grimes.
Nellie Semphroch was born in the mid-1870s in Washington, D.C., and experienced the first Confederate bombardment of the city during the Second Mexican War. In 1881, German military observer Alfred von Schlieffen saw her walking along a road in Washington in between bombings and the subsequent evacuation of government personnel to Philadelphia. She apparently struggled as a young woman and supported herself as a prostitute. By 1914, however, she had managed to purchase a small restaurant in Washington, and was greatly concerned to hide her shady past from everybody else in general and from her daughter Edna in partiucular. The restaurant became a popular place for Confederate officers to eat, and Nellie found herself involved gathering intelligence for a U.S. spy ring run by Hal Jacobs, a cobbler, who also gathered information on Confederate forces. Near the end of the war, she killed Bill Reach, a US spymaster, when he tried to rape her. It would always haunt her when Hal Jacobs talked of him. It was also intimated that Bill Reach may have been Nellie's daughter's (Edna's) father.
Because her restaurant had been popular with the Confederates, she was initially arrested as a collaborator when the U.S. reoccupied the city in 1917. However, charges were dismissed and President Theodore Roosevelt awarded her with the Order of Remembrance, First Class. After the Great War, Semphroch married Jacobs and continued to run her coffee shop, catering to both Washingtonians and Confederate businessmen who remembered her place affectionately. She did not reveal her role as a U.S. spy until the late 1930s. She died in 1937 of blood poisoning, not long after attending Al Smith's presidential inauguration.
Reggie Bartlett was a pharmacist's assistant in Richmond, Virginia, when the Great War began in 1914. Shortly after being fired for skipping work to see Woodrow Wilson's declaration of war speech, he joined the Seventh Virginia Regiment of the Confederate Army, fast becoming a hardened veteran. He is captured by Chester Martin's unit but eventually escapes from captivity, together with submarine commander Ralph Briggs. He was severely wounded and captured again by U.S. forces and remained a prisoner of war hospital patient until the Armistice, there becoming friendly with a black Confederate POW who might have been a former Marxist rebel. Returning to Richmond, Bartlett saw the rise of the Freedom Party and actively opposed it, supporting instead the Radical Liberals. He was gunned down by Freedom Party stalwarts in 1925, whose posters he had torn down.
Cassius was the huntsman for the Marshlands Plantation in St. Matthews, South Carolina, owned by the Colleton family. He was also head of the Marxist underground in the area. When the Red Rebellion of 1915-16 broke out, Cassius became the leader of the Congaree Socialist Republic and was responsible for ordering the execution of many “enemies of the people,” both black and white. He escaped the crushing of the Republic in 1916 and with his female companion, Cherry, continued guerilla operations against the Confederacy, and in particular against Anne Colleton. Cassius was killed by Tom Colleton shortly after the Armistice of 1917.
Anne Colleton, in 1914, was the owner of the Marshlands Plantation of St. Matthews, South Carolina, a supporter of the arts, including Marcel Duchamp
, and a prominent political figure in the state. The Red rebellion of 1915 resulted in the loss of the mansion house at Marshlands, which was burned down by her chief hunter, Cassius, and the death of her brother, Jacob, who had been a soldier and was debilitated by gas. This started a personal vendetta between Colleton, whose political influence could raise the state militia, and Cassius and his female partner, Cherry, which lasted until Cassius was killed by her brother Tom shortly after the Armistice of 1917.
She was briefly involved in a romantic affair with Confederate Navy commander Roger Kimball during the Great War, but broke off the affair when Kimball became too involved in the Freedom Party. She was also intimately involved with Clarence Potter for a brief time, though their conflicting politics prevented them from establishing a long-term relationship.
During the period between the World Wars, Colleton became involved with the Freedom Party as a designer for mass-rallies, but stopped her support after a Freedom Party sniper killed President Wade Hampton V. However, as she realized that the Freedom Party was likely to win control of the nation, Colleton worked her way back into favor with Featherston. Colleton was killed in a U.S. bombing raid on Charleston, South Carolina, in the early days of the Second Great War while in the city on Freedom Party business.
Tom Colleton was the brother of Anne Colleton. He served as a Confederate infantry officer during the war of 1914-1917, reaching the rank of Lieutenant Colonel, but left the Army after the war ended. He, and his sister, using South Carolina militia, ended up hunting down the last remnants of the Congaree Socialist Republic, and he personally killed their leader Cassius. He was recalled to service in World War II, as a Lieutenant Colonel. He dislikes the Freedom Party but nevertheless goes out to fight in the Featherston-formented war, out of patriotism and hatred of the Yankees. Colleton's unit was involved in the invasion of Ohio and Pennsylvania, and was trapped in the Battle of Pittsburgh, where he was killed in late January 1943, just days before the Confederate pocket surrendered.
Jerry Dover was a frontline Great War veteran and the manager of Huntsman's Lodge in Augusta, Georgia and was Scipio's boss. He was known to protect his black workers from Freedom Party cleanouts, although this was more out of personal liking for Scipio and other workers, and for the benefit of the Lodge, than from any anti-racist sentiment on his part. Dover's attitude was rude to anyone who stood in the way of his doing his job and he let people know how he felt in richly profane language. Dover is first seen through Scipio's eyes, and becomes a viewpoint character in his own right.
In 1942, Dover signed up for the Quartermasters Corps as a major, and was called to active duty later that year. Dover was known to work his men "like niggers" according to observers. When his commander went missing in 1943, Dover organized the supplies of the Confederate Army in Kentucky, falling back to Tennessee and Georgia. He was promoted to lieutenant colonel and also received the Purple Heart for injuries sustained during a U.S. bombing raid.
Although married, Dover also had a female friend, who blackmailed him for money and military information. The fact that Dover reported the blackmail first and was good at his job saved him from being arrested by the Confederate intelligence. Dover was captured in Alabama and spent the rest of the war as a prisoner. Returning to Augusta, he was offered the position of managing the Huntsman's Lodge once more.
Anthony Dresser founded the Freedom Party in Richmond, Virginia
after the end of World War I
in 1917. The party consisted only of a few people and was only able to get fliers across war-ravaged Richmond because one of its members was a printer. Jake Featherston became interested in the party and soon became one of its members. Anthony Dresser tried giving a speech at a campaign for the Confederate Congress and was nearly laughed off the stage until Featherston stepped up. Featherston began blaming the blacks and war department for the CSA's loss in the war which struck a chord with many Confederates. Featherston began a speaking tour to raise support for the party, and soon became the Freedom Party's Head of Propaganda
.
With this new-found support for Featherston, Dresser became afraid for his position in the party and tried to have Featherston removed, stating Featherston had turned the party's message into one saying "Hang the generals and hang the niggers" and was giving people the wrong idea about the party. Though Dresser found some support amongst the rank-and-file Party members Featherston pointed out that he raised more than half of the party's funding and without him, the party would go back to being nothing. The motion to remove Featherston failed, and Featherston himself raised the motion to remove Dresser. The motion was carried out by a landslide and Featherston became head of the Freedom Party while Dresser faded into obscurity.
Dresser is an analog to Anton Drexler
, the founder of the Nazi Party.
Professor Henderson V. FitzBelmont was a physicist at Washington University in Lexington, Virginia. In 1941, he attempted to convince President Featherston to provide him with funding to begin work on an atomic bomb project. Featherston denied this request, and it wasn't until the next year when Confederate intelligence found that the United States was working on their own uranium enrichment project. Shortly after finding this out, Featherston gave permission to FitzBelmont to begin work on his project. Partly because of Featherston's initial refusal, the U.S. nuclear program had a clear advantage over the Confederate one, a fact that was made clear by FitzBelmont after his second meeting with the President. Nevertheless, due to FitzBelmont's brilliance and dedication, he and his team managed to produce a nuclear "superbomb" under constant heavy bombing by the US Air Force, and were able against all odds to be the first on the North American continent to produce a nuclear superbomb which was exploded at the outskirts of Philadelphia, with gruesome results. However, before they could produce a second one the Confederacy collapsed and Lexington was captured by the US Army.
After being thoroughly interrogated FitzBelmont hoped to be allowed to resume his academic career - telling his American captors that he was no longer a danger to them, since building a bomb dependent on the resources of major power which the defunct Confederacy would no longer put at his disposal. However, the Americans considered him a dangerous "bomb" in himself, since he could have been captured by a rival power seeking nuclear arms and placed his knowledge and ability at such a power's disposal. Therefore, he was one of the Confederates whose liquidation in a faked "accident" was ordered by General John Abell.
Saul Goldman is a high-ranking member of the Freedom Party. Goldman was the director of the first radio network in Richmond in the 1920s when Jake Featherston of the Freedom Party found him. Being the first politician to recognize radio's full potential, the Freedom Party leader uses Goldman's studio to broadcast speeches to the people of the Confederate States. Goldman isn't turned away by the repulsive nature of the Freedom Party; rather, he is glad the Party goes after blacks and not Jews, the way the Russians did in Poland
.
In time, Featherston is elected Confederate president, and he gives Goldman the post of Director of Communications (the head of the Freedom Party's propaganda). Goldman consolidates the media networks and publishing companies of the CSA into one ministry under the Freedom Party's direction, and imposes near-totalitarian control over what the Confederate people read and hear. While doing all this, Goldman remains a quiet, shy man, never becoming the balls-and-fists type of stalwart that the Freedom Party attracts in droves. Featherston gives him credit for being the one man in the Party that "had more brains than balls."
In 1944, Goldman flees Richmond with Featherston and other important Confederate officials, but is captured after Featherston is killed. Along with Ferdinand Koenig, Goldman is tried by the USA for crimes against humanity and executed - it being judged that systematically instilling racist
hatred of blacks in the Confederacy's population makes him a full accomplice in the Black Holocaust, even though he was not directly involved in the killings themselves.
Goldman is analogous to Joseph Goebbels
and is possibly modelled after Samuel Goldwyn
as well.
Wade Hampton V is a fictional descendant of Wade Hampton III
and a prominent member of the Whigs. In 1921, Hampton V ran for President of the CSA and won election over both Jake Featherston (Freedom) and Ainsworth Layne (Radical Liberals). His presidency came to a premature end in June 1922 when he was assassinated by Freedom Party member Grady Calkins at a Birmingham rally. Hampton became the first president in the history of either the Confederate States or United States to be assassinated. His vice-president Burton Mitchel III was sworn in as president afterwards to finish the remainder of his six-year team.
Lieutenant Commander Roger Kimball was a submarine commander in the Confederate States Navy during the Great War. He received a Confederate Navy Cross for sinking two US gunships during a raid in a Chesapeake Bay harbor. He later was given a promotion to Commander after another raid into New York harbor which ended with the sinking of two US Battleships. He resumed command of a submarine until receiving news of the Armistice in 1917, upon which he torpedoed the USS Ericsson after hostilities ended, killing, among others, Seaman George Enos.
Kimball was romantically involved with Anne Colleton in 1915. They resumed their relationship after the War, when both were involved in the Freedom Party's rise; however, Colleton broke off the relationship when the Party lost prestige following the assassination of Confederate President Wade Hampton V by a Freedom Party member. Shortly after their breakup, Kimball was shot and killed by Sylvia Enos, widow of George Enos.
Willy Knight was the first Vice-President of Jake Featherston's Confederate government. He was the head of Texas-based Redemption League, which held similar goals to the Freedom Party, before his group was swallowed up by the Freedom Party. Towards the crucial 1933 elections, Featherston decided to take Knight as his running mate so as to unite the White racist, anti-establishment vote. This aroused the anger of Koenig, Featherston's faithful lieutenant, leading to their only serious quarrel. Featherston, however, managed to convince Koenig that he was setting a trap for Knight, fobbing him off with a meaningless title, while Koening as "Attorney General" would create and head a fearsome secret police.
It took some years for Knight to understand the situation in which he was trapped, the full reality hitting him when Featherston got the Confederate Constitution amended so as to allow Presidents to serve more than one-term in office. This precipitated Knight's failed coup d'etat
in 1939, after which Knight was imprisoned in Louisiana's Camp Dependable, run by Jefferson Pinkard - being placed as the only White prisoner among hundreds of Black rebels. Presumably, Ferdinand Koenig and Featherston assumed that they could neatly get rid of Knight by putting him at the mercy of militant Blacks who hated Whites in general, and senior Freedom Party officials in particular. However, rather than being killed by his Black fellow-inmates, Knight won their grudging respect. After a long period in which Pinkard repeatedly reported to Richmond that Knight was still alive, and that the Blacks were showing no inclination to kill him, in 1941 Koening at last ordered Knight executed, an order which Pinkard duly implemented.
His name may be derived from the Willys-Knight
automobile.
The internal struggle in the Freedom Party has rough historic parallels with the Röhm-Putsch.
Ferdinand Koenig is a high-ranking member of the Freedom Party and the CSA's Attorney General. His character appears to have been inspired by both Heinrich Himmler
and Hermann Göring
.
Koenig began his career as Party secretary, where he was found by Jake Featherston and molded into his staunchest supporter. Twice he ran on the Freedom ticket as vice president, but allowed the spot to go to Willy Knight in 1933. Instead Featherston made Koenig attorney general of the Confederate States. Once in office, Koenig searched for ways to disband the Supreme Court and increase Featherston's power by arresting and executing members of the opposition parties.
As the 1940s dawned, Featherston decided that the time had come to begin "population reductions" (i.e.: killing off the Confederacy's blacks). Koenig was tasked with overseeing this program, for which he ordered a number of camps established in Louisiana. Shipments of Negroes commenced in 1940, composed of men from Confederate jails or those arrested at roadblocks in the towns. Before long places such as Camp Dependable, outside of Alexandria, Louisiana
, were filled to overflowing. Shortly before the outbreak of 1941 War, Koenig phoned Camp Dependable's commandant, Jefferson Pinkard, with the news that 2000 more blacks would arriving, along with an unspoken order to ensure there was sufficient room for them. Other camps received similar instructions, resulting in the first massacres. In early 1942, Koenig upped the ante. Entire portions of black districts in towns would be cleared out over the course of a single night.
Even as the situation of the war grew obviously worse, Koenig rarely wavered in his belief that Confederates will win the war as Featherston promised. Evidently, his blind devotion to Featherston and his cause prevented him from making rational decisions in the better interest of the nation. Under Featherston's orders, he diverted badly needed resources from the war effort into the extermination program, which he believes takes priority to winning the conflict. He authorizes the building of Camp Humble when Camp Determination is overrun by U.S. troops.
In 1944, Koenig fled Richmond with Featherston and other important Confederate officials, but was captured after Featherston was killed. Along with Saul Goldman, Koenig was tried by the USA for crimes against humanity and executed.
Named for the late huntsman at the Marshlands Plantation, Cassius is the son of Scipio and Bathsheba. As he grew up in Augusta's Terry district, he developed a sense to strike back at the white "ofays" who oppressed him and his family.
In early 1943, Cassius told his father that he would not be attending church one Sunday, which meant that he escaped a cleanout of the Terry which took his father, his mother, and his sister Antoinette. For a time after leaving the Terry, Cassius looked for whatever work he could find, eventually joining a resistance group led by Gracchus.
After US forces occupied the part of Georgia he was operating in, Cassius became an auxiliary for the US Army in Madison, Georgia
. While serving in this capacity in 1944, he came across Jake Featherston and other top Freedom officials walking down a road from Athens after their plane was shot down. Cassius shot Featherston several times, killing the President of the Confederate States, and taking the rest of the group prisoner. He became famous, given a cash reward and became a U.S. citizen, taking the last name of Madison after the town where he shot and killed Featherston. He attends the inauguration of Tom Dewey in February 1945 as a special guest.
Lulu Mattox is the personal secretary of Jake Featherston. She was hired by the Freedom party in the early 1920s to work for Featherston, though the Freedom Party leader had shown no interest in hiring a secretary. In later years, however, Featherston would credit Mattox for the Party's survival, especially after the anti-Freedom backlash resulting from the assassination of President Wade Hampton V, and was one of the few people whose feelings mattered to Featherston.
Mattox presented herself as an obstacle to people who wished to meet with Featherston, especially those who weren't close associates with him. During Featherston's presidency she took care of her boss, making sure he ate and got enough sleep between meetings and events. That helped endear her to Jake Featherston.
In 1944, she fled Virginia and North Carolina with her boss and several other Freedom Party officials. Attempting to flee South Carolina by plane, she was badly wounded when the group was shot down. She pleaded with Jake Featherston to shoot her before he makes his getaway, as she did not want to be taken by US forces and live the rest of her life in a world without Featherston. With great reluctance, her boss carried out her last wish, shooting her dead with his Colt .45.
Burton Mitchel was vice president of the CSA when Wade Hampton V was assassinated at a rally in 1922, only three months after his inauguration. Upon taking office, Mitchel asked U.S. President Upton Sinclair to repeal the reparations payments that had severely damaged the Confederate economy. In 1927, the C.S. Supreme Court ruled that Mitchel was eligible to run for a full six-year term, despite his serving more than four years of Hampton's term. He won election, but was burdened by the economic collapse in 1929, which left many Confederate citizens homeless; as a result, many people set up in "Mitcheltowns" across the CSA (these were called "Blackfordburghs" in the U.S.; both were analogs to Hooverville). He left office in 1934 as the Freedom Party's control over the CSA began. Michel is likely meant to be a fictional descendant of Charles B. Mitchel
, who served in the U.S. and C.S. Senates in the 1860s.
Donald Partridge was the Freedom Party's replacement for the slot of the vice-presidency after Willy Knight's attempted coup. He was chosen because Jake Featherston reckoned him a useless, harmless idiot, unlike the ambitious Knight. Partridge spent his time in the vice-presidency thinking of dumb farm-girl jokes to tell Featherston, or in the company of various ladies in hotels here and there, according to secret Freedom Party guard reports. He also spent most of his time promoting the war effort, traveling from city to city across the CSA making speeches and imploring the Confederates to fight on. After Featherston's death in 1944, Partridge became the 14th and last president of the CSA. He unconditionally surrendered to US forces, and as a result, the CSA was disbanded as a nation. Afterward, Partridge was taken prisoner by Morrell. Partridge is an analogue to Dan Quayle
, as seen with their similar names (cv. Quail
and Partridge
) and the image of Quayle in popular culture as a clueless buffoon.
An Alabama native, Jefferson Pinkard is a steel man at the Sloss Works in Birmingham
when the Great War
breaks out. Pinkard as originally introduced to the reader - before being traumatized
by the combination of war and personal crisis - is a highly sympathetic character. To begin with, he is not a racist, fully willing to accept a black co-worker and accord him the respect due to a skillful steel man in a dangerous and demanding job. (Even Jake Featherston
, who would later develop into a Hitler-like racist, does not initially display a noticeably higher level of anti-black racism than other Confederate characters).
The war affects Pinkard more fundamentally - and negatively - than many other characters in the series. Conscripted into the Confederate Army late in 1915, he and his friend, Sonora
n recruit Hipolito Rodriguez, receive their baptism by fire
when they go into combat against the "Red" rebels. Coming home on leave in 1917, he catches his wife Emily performing fellatio
on his best friend and next-door neighbor, Bedford Cunningham. That, combined with the Confederacy's defeat that year, leaves him a bitter and vengeful man. Although his wife betrayed him with a white man, in his mind the deep sense of personal betrayal by her seems to blend with the widespread feeling in the surrounding society that the Confederacy had been "betrayed" by the black rebels who "stabbed it in the back" and caused its defeat.
During the postwar years he finds solace in the Freedom Party, becoming a regular attendee at Birmingham chapter meetings and joining other Freedom Party stalwarts in disrupting their opponents' rallies. At his steel works job he shocks the black fellow-worker with whom he was previously friendly by hurling the Freedom Party greeting at him - a watershed moment where Pinkard sets out on an ominous road.
Devotion to the party would pay dividends in later years, but costs him his marriage: though he tries to forget his wife's adultery, his increasing distance leads to her being unfaithful once more. Catching Emily in the act, Pinkard throws her out into the street. Between the divorce
and the Freedom Party's decline after Wade Hampton V's assassination, Pinkard decides to fight for the Imperialist side in the Mexican Civil War (our timeline's analog to the Spanish Civil War
.)
Pinkard's stint in Mexico turns out to be a blessing to his personal fortunes. He finds himself almost by accident running a prisoner of war camp, an experience which proves to be a turning point in his life. In this initial venture into the business of guarding prisoners, Pinkard actually tries to be humane, being appalled by the cruelty of the Imperialists to their captives. This proves, however, a step down a slippery slope which is described in detail from book to book in the series. After the Business Collapse
, Pinkard, who had resumed his job at the Sloss Works, is laid off. The Freedom Party quickly sets him up with a new occupation as a prison guard, and when the first camps for political prisoners are set up, Pinkard is offered a job as an assistant camp commandant at a Mississippi
facility, and subsequently the head commandant at Louisiana
's "Camp Dependable".
Pinkard at first is in charge of detaining white political prisoner
s, especially the followers of Louisiana governor Huey Long
, who is assassinated by Featherston. After Vice President Willy Knight attempts to assassinate Featherston, Knight becomes Pinkard's most notable prisoner. Soon many suspected black rebels are imprisoned as well.
Gradually, a shift is made from detaining black rebels, or those suspected of being such, to detaining blacks solely on the basis of their race. More and more blacks are sent to the camp, and the government fails to supply food rations to feed them all. When Pinkard complains, he gets a phone call directly from Ferdinand Koenig (who under the innocuous title of "Attorney General" actually heads the analog of the S.S.
), who informs him that no extra food is forthcoming, and hints that a solution is available - "reducing the population" by taking black prisoners to deserted areas and having firing squads
shoot them. That is the final watershed, which once crossed makes Pinkard a mass murder
er. Soon, he is not only obeying orders, but gives much "creative thought" to the improvement of the killing methods.
The executions, where the killers must look their victims in the face, are too much for many guards (which is what happened in the actual early Nazi killings, as noted in the minutes of the Wannsee Conference
). A guard named Chick Blades kills himself by venting carbon monoxide
into his car, giving Pinkard the idea to put blacks in trucks and gas them while simply driving to the burial sites, avoiding the need for the killer to actually witness what he is perpetrating. This is used to great effect, leading to his promotion to Brigade Leader (equivalent to a brigadier general
in the army.)
Pinkard is eventually ordered to have Willy Knight shot, which he does. He marries Edith Blades (Chick Blades' widow) and moves to a camp being built to his specifications near Snyder, Texas
: Camp Determination, an analog of Auschwitz. When Pinkard comes up with an even more efficient way to "reduce the population", i.e. gas chamber
s disguised as bath houses
, he is promoted to the rank of Group Leader (equivalent to a major general
in the army.)
Unlike at Auschwitz, the camp's victims are not cremated
but buried in mass grave
s dug by bulldozers in the Texas prairie
. This becomes of crucial importance when it becomes clear that U.S. forces are closing in to capture Camp Determination. Pinkard arranges to destroy as much evidence as possible, including blowing up the gas chambers and destroying records. However, he does not succeed in hiding the mass graves, which are found by the U.S. Army, exhumed and presented to the whole world.
Pinkard, however, succeeds in moving the killing operation and setting up Camp Humble in east Texas, near the town of the same name
, with the killing facilities further "improved" with the addition of crematoriums. However, these prove to be poorly designed, and the mayor
of Humble, originally enthusiastic about the presence of the camp (because of the economic opportunities it provides and the "population reduction" going on there), later bitterly complains about the townspeople smelling the fumes from the malfunctioning crematoriums and seeing the bits of incompletely burned corpses floating down onto the town.
The last year of the war proves disastrous for Pinkard, despite the birth of his son Raymond. In 1944, the state of Texas secedes
from the Confederacy, declaring itself an independent republic, and surrenders to the United States. One of the terms of surrender is the arrest of all persons involved in the death camps. Pinkard's wife has just given birth to his son, Raymond, and he is unwilling to leave them. The camp commandant is soon taken into custody by the U.S. Army. He is placed on trial, where, despite the best efforts of his attorney, Jonathan Moss, Pinkard is found guilty of crimes against humanity
for his role in the reduction of the black population of the Confederate States. In early 1945, Pinkard is executed by hanging
.
Pinkard has many parallels with Rudolf Lang, the protagonist of Death Is My Trade
by the French author Robert Merle
, who in turn is derived from Auschwitz commander Rudolf Höss.
Clarence Potter, along with Tom Colleton, is an analogue of the Wehrmacht
officers who despised Hitler but faithfully served Germany. Potter in particular appears to be based on Wilhelm Canaris
,but his role in the failed attempt on Featherston's life bears striking resemblances to Erwin Rommel
's role in the July 20 Plot
.
Potter was from Richmond, Virginia, and seems to have come from a middle-class background. Before the Great War, he attended Yale
, leaving him with a permanent half-Yankee accent that sometimes earned him suspicious looks from other Confederates. Potter's time there also gave him a greater understanding of the USA than most of his compatriots.
During the Great War Potter was a CSA Army major assigned to Army of Northern Virginia intelligence. It was in 1915 that his path first crossed with that of Jake Featherston, then an artillery sergeant. When attempting to dig out Marxist Negro cells within the army, Featherston mentioned his suspicions about his commanding officer's body servant Pompey. That CO was Jeb Stuart III, son of General Jeb Stuart, Jr., a mighty power in Richmond and the man who quashed the investigation.
Unfortunately for all involved, Pompey was revealed to be a leader in the Red Rebellion of 1915-16. Disgraced, Jeb III threw his life away in combat and neither Potter nor Featherston ever saw a promotion for the rest of the war. The latter turned into a bitter, vengeful man; Potter was the only officer he had any respect for, though not that much. The two men both hung tight while the rest of the Army of Northern Virginia fell to pieces during the summer of 1917, and shared a whiskey when the cease-fire went into effect.
Their uneasy relationship fell apart after the war. Featherston moved to Richmond and began his rise within the Freedom Party. Potter, discharged from the army, made his living as a private detective while becoming increasingly involved in Whig Party activities. During the postwar years he and ex-submariner Roger Kimball attempted to get hold of Featherston once the former sergeant became a public figure. His half-hearted intentions of influencing Featherston were dashed when the Freedom Party leader sent a dismissive telegram in reply. Kimball became one of Featherston's right-hand men until his death in 1923; Potter sought to contain the damage by working with the Whigs, including briefly with Anne Colleton. He had little success, as his fellow party members remained mired in anachronistic thinking and procedures.
After Featherston became president in 1934, Potter believed that it was only a matter of time before he found himself in a camp for political prisoners. Instead, he resolved to rid the Confederacy of what he was convinced was a leader who would bring ruin upon his country. Potter traveled to Richmond for the 1936 Olympics and took a seat in the swimming stadium, intending to kill Featherston. Fate intervened when a black frankfurter seller with the same idea pulled out a submachine gun and sprayed bullets around so recklessly Potter had to shoot him in self-defense.
With Potter an overnight hero, Featherston (having his own suspicions about Potter's true intentions that day) decided that rather than dispose of him, the former Whig would be a greater asset elsewhere. Despite his aversion for the Freedom Party, Potter's patriotic sentiments won out, and he duly accepted a colonel's commission and a posting to Intelligence.
An outsider in Confederate Intelligence (being neither part of the old guard nor a fanatical Freedom Party supporter), Potter nonetheless distinguished himself in the years before the 1941 War. He was the first to seriously consider not just what Confederate agents could do to the US but also the havoc that American spies could wring within the Confederacy. When Featherston read Potter's conclusions, he promoted his old enemy to Brigadier General and allowed Potter to manage operations against the US.
Prior to Operation Blackbeard in June 1941, Potter and his agents were instrumental in keeping the US off-guard while ascertaining American strength and doctrine. Though Featherston acted too rashly for Potter's comfort (he was convinced that had his advice been acted on the invasion would have been a strategic as well as tactical surprise) Potter's competent organization of pro-Confederate saboteurs helped George Patton's army reach Lake Erie by August. Further sabotage prevented the American barrel (tank) commander Irving Morrell from doing any serious damage to the Confederate corridor for the rest of the year.
After Operation Blackbeard's initial success, Potter concentrated upon ferreting out spies within the Confederacy and keeping Generals Nathan Bedford Forrest III
and Patton appraised of US movements in northern Virginia. After the disastrous Confederate defeat at Pittsburgh, Potter joins with General Forrest and other Confederate officers in a possible plot to overthrow Jake Featherston.
This plot did not come to pass in 1943. The Richmond ghetto rebelled in April, forcing Potter and other staff officers to take part in its suppression. Following that, Potter oversaw an attempt to knock out the U.S. nuclear program at Hanford, Washington. This failed. Because of the need for manpower in the summer of 1943, he was given command of a brigade under General Patton's army. There, Potter infuriated the Confederate commander in much the same way he infuriated President Featherston: by telling the truth as he saw it. Potter was present at the U.S. airborne assault on Missionary Ridge
and Lookout Mountain
in August 1943, and was relieved of his command later that year.
At this time Potter decided to abandon his involvement in the plot against Featherston, judging that the US would not budge from their demand for "unconditional surrender", whoever headed the Confederacy, and that the charismatic Featherston—however much Potter despised him—was the only leader capable of continuing the war and possibly snatching victory from the jaws of the impending defeat. The defection of Potter, with his skill at undercover operations, doomed the far more inept conspirators under Nathan Bedford Forrest III to failure and slow death by torture.
Potter was placed in charge of sneaking a Confederate superbomb into the U.S. He did this by disguising a C.S. truck in U.S. colors and insignia, and he even wore a U.S. uniform. The superbomb was set off in Philadelphia, causing horrific bloodshed by the direct explosion and indirect effect of radioactivity. Afterwards, Potter was able to escape back to the C.S. Subsequently, he fled Virginia with Featherston and other Confederate officials, and was with them when a plane carrying them crashed in Georgia.
After Featherston was killed, Potter was arrested and charged with violating the laws on war stemming from use of U.S. uniforms during his superbomb attack on Philadelphia. However, Irving Morrel—whose assassination Potter had tried to arrange in earlier stages of the war, and who reaped the glory of being the U.S.'s chief savior—showed magnanimity by appearing as a defense witness at Potter's court-martial and stating clearly that the U.S. had done the same by using U.S. soldiers in Confederate uniforms to launch attacks. Thanks mainly to Morrel, Potter was found not guilty and released.
He settled in Richmond (with the assistance of the U.S. government, which wanted to keep him under surveillance). Upon his release, Potter began writing his memoirs, entitled How I Blew Up Philadelphia.
After having resettled in Richmond, Potter encounters an embittered young soldier whose words are similar to those of Jake Featherston's in the aftermath of the Great War. Potter decides to act this time, and advises the man to abandon his hatred and get on with his life.
Robert Quinn was a Freedom Party organizer in Baroyeca, Sonora
. Though a white English-speaker, Quinn spoke Spanish fluently and was sensitive to the Hispanic culture of Baroyeca. He was also successful as an advocate for public works projects in the region. The combination of these two factors made Quinn an effective recruiter, and the Freedom Party became Baroyeca's dominant political organization during his time there, easily toppling the Radical Liberal organizations that dominated politics there and whose power was based on the traditional political patronage wielded by the rich land owners, against which Quinn mobilized a grassroots movement of poorer peasants.
One native of Baroyeca who found Quinn's advocacy of the Freedom Party convincing was farmer and Great War veteran Hipolito Rodriguez. During the Second Great War, Quinn convinced Rodriguez to join the Freedom Party Guards and ultimately to take part in the Black Holocaust at Camp Determination, an assignment which later caused Rodriguez to commit suicide.
In 1943, Quinn left Baroyeca and joined the Confederate Army, a clear sign that the C.S. Army was beginning to grow shorthanded given his age and status in the Freedom organization. He returned to Sonora after the war was over and began talking of starting an uprising against the U.S. occupation. He was prevented from doing so by Jorge Rodriguez (son of Hipolito), who wrote an anonymous letter to U.S. authorities detailing Quinn's Freedom Party connections. Jorge Rodriguez thought that resistance against the US was bound to fail. Quinn was subsequently arrested for his connections.
Stephen Ramsay was a cavalry corporal in the Confederate Army serving in Sequoyah at the beginning of the Great War. He was part of a raid into Kansas in August 1914 to concentrate on railroad sabotage. Ramsay was next assigned to the Creek Nation Army of the Five Civilized Tribes as an officer/advisor, attaining the rank of captain in the army by 1915.
Though Ramsay's army managed to hold off a U.S. advance, falling back towards Okmulgee in the process, the Creeks ordered the army to try to retake all U.S. positions in Sequoyah later in the year. After his commanding officer Hiram Lincoln was killed, Ramsay took command of the offensive, but only for a very brief time; he was killed by machine-gun fire while charging a United States trench only minutes after Lincoln's death.
The fact Ramsay is only in the book for a short time, and has no 'follow on' character to take up his viewpoint slot, indicates that Turtledove created him simply to demonstrate how cavalry and old fashioned tactics and soldiers had no place in modern war.
Ramsay is initially introduced (at least in the Audiobook) as "Colonel Ramsay".
Hipolito Rodriguez was a farmer from Baroyeca, Sonora, which in the Southern Victory Series is part of the Confederate States. His first combat action was against Negro rebels in South Carolina in 1915, after which Rodriguez served with Jefferson Pinkard on the West Texas front of the Great War. Upon demobilization, he returned to his farm in the far western CSA.
In the 1920s, upon meeting Robert Quinn, a Freedom Party organizer, Rodriguez joined the Freedom Party and became a strong supporter, including taking part in actions against Radical Liberal landowners who discouraged voting for Featherston and who hitherto dominated the formerly-Mexican parts of the Confederacy. This amounted to a kind of social revolution by the poorer peasants, roughly equivalent to our history's Mexican Revolution
though here manipulated by the Freedom party for its own ends. He was among those who rallied in support of Featherston's continued presidency in 1939 (supporting the overturning of the law that a Confederate president could only serve one six-year term), and enrolled his sons in the Freedom Youth Corps; when the war began, they would go into the Army.
The loyalty of Rodriguez and other Mexican stalwarts seems amply rewarded when Featherstone's party embarks on fast modernization and development of the backward Spanish-speaking states, especially manifested in connecting all houses to electricity - a hitherto undreamed-of luxury for the Mexican peasantry. This is not without its own dangers, however, and Rodriguez is electrocuted nearly to death by his carelessness with his new frigidaire. Despite the lingering, debilitating effects of Rodriguez's electrocution, Quinn convinced him to join the Confederate Veterans' Brigades, a Freedom Party paramilitary organization. After training, Rodriguez was sent to Camp Determination, where he was reunited with Jefferson Pinkard, his friend from the Great War.
Up to that point, Rodriguez was depicted as a sympathetic and fairly decent character. While he takes at face value the party's anti-Black demagoguery (and like Saul Goldman, figures pragmatically that it is better for him and his that this hatred is not directed at Mexican "greasers") this had hitherto no direct implications as there were no actual Blacks living anywhere near his home. This abruptly changes with his becoming a guard in the extermination camp, accepting the role after an initial shock at first witnessing the killing of Blacks, and soon actively participating in the killing and even taking various grisly initiatives. In this he goes much faster down the road of his friend Pinkard, who also started out as a fairly decent person and took decades to become a ruthless mass killer.
Some of the camp's white guards looked down on Rodriguez because of his race and his personal connection to the commandant. But his chance remark concerning the use of poison to remove pests from the guards' quarters led Pinkard to think up the idea of gas chambers to kill the camp's prisoners en masse. This action led to Rodriguez' promotion to Troop Leader (the Freedom Party Guards' equivalent to sergeant).
Despite little outward evidence of his faith, Rodriguez thought of himself as a very religious man. At first, he was able to reconcile his duty and his faith by not viewing the prisoners as human beings. But he became sympathetic to a woman prisoner named Bathsheba (Scipio/Xerxes' wife), and this sympathy awakened feelings of remorse and guilt. Suddenly burdened by the deaths of thousands of people by his actions, Rodriguez calls upon the Holy Virgin
, but concluding that even She could not cleanse his hands from "the oceans of blood" staining them, he turns his submachinegun upon himself.
This last act is not so much derived from religion (the Church frowns upon suicide) as from Rodriguez's personal code of honour. His stricken wife, who knew him well, would later write to her son that he could only have killed himself in order to atone for a wrong which could not be atoned for otherwise - which is precisely the truth, though his grieving family members, not having shared his change of heart about the Blacks, do not realise that this was indeed the specific terrible wrong he sought to atone for.
Jorge Rodriguez is one of three sons of Hipolito Rodriguez; Miguel and Pedro were the others. In the 1930s, he served in the Freedom Youth Corps, and later in the Second Great War. By 1943, he was part of the Army of Northern Virginia until transfer to Tennessee in the failed defense of that state.
He was also part of the failed defense of Atlanta and the rest of Georgia until he was transferred by sea from Savannah to Beaufort, South Carolina. During this period, he was promoted to corporal and ended up commanding a platoon. Moving to Virginia, he fought until captured by U.S. forces near Appomattox, Virginia. He spent the rest of the war in a POW camp.
He returned to Bayoreca, Sonora after the war ended, and took over management of the Rodriguez family farm. Feeling that the Confederacy was decisively defeated and that further acts of resistance would merely bring ruthless retaliation upon the townspeople, Rodriguez anonymously denounced Freedom Party organizer Robert Quinn to U.S. occupation authorities to save his older brother Pedro from being involved in a resistance which he felt would be futile.
Scipio (no last name) (1873–1943), known as "Kip" to some, was, in 1915, the butler of Anne Colleton. He was born a slave, before the manumission following the Second Mexican War. Scipio was highly educated and was able to speak with a "white" accent as well as the local Black accent (Congaree). He found himself drawn by the chief hunter Cassius into the Red Rebellion of 1915 as a member of the cell controlling Marshlands, and was forced to serve as a "revolutionary judge" of the Congaree Socialist Republic and as an intermediary with Confederate forces.
When the rebellion was crushed, Scipio escaped from South Carolina into Augusta, Georgia, where he assumed the name "Xerxes" and over the years worked as a waiter at several restaurants: first that of Jerry Oglethorpe, then Erasmus, a prosperous black, and finally under Jerry Dover at the prestigious Huntsmans' Lodge.
At one point, Anne Colleton (who had blamed Scipio for much of the destruction at her beloved Marshlands Plantation) found that Scipio worked at the Huntsmans' Lodge. She came to arrest him, but Scipio wasn't working at the time. Jerry Dover, who didn't want to lose such a talented employee, convinced Anne that this wasn't the Xerxes (Scipio) that she wanted by showing her paperwork that proved a man named Xerxes had been working there for many years. (There had actually been another Xerxes that had worked at the Huntsmans' Lodge years before, so the paperwork checked out for Scipio's sake.)
Scipio/Xerxes married Bathsheba and had two children (one named Cassius). He found himself trapped behind the barbed wire the Confederates established around the Terry
, Augusta's Black district. Eventually, in early 1943 a Freedom Party roundup of Augusta's Blacks caught him and his family (save only for his son Cassius, who was elsewhere), and deported them west.
Scipio, Bathsheba, and his daughter Antoinette were sent to Camp Determination, where he was separated from his family and sent to Barracks 27 in the men's section of the camp. He later died in the gas chambers.
That was the most likely fate of a black sent to this camp, as of a Jew sent to our history's Nazi death camp; nevertheless, the death of Scipio, who had been a viewpoint character along so many books, catches the reader (and Scipio) by surprise - coming immediately after he had a falsely hopeful encounter with the guard Hipolito Rodriguez who brought him a message from his wife and daughter, but after that was among the guards who led Scipio and many others to his death. This would later start the feeling of remorse which would lead Rodriguez to take his own life - but Scipio would not know anything of that. Nor would he know his son Cassius later killed Jake Featherston. Bathsheba and Antoinette were presumably killed with the rest of the prisoners when the camp was abandoned in mid-1943.
Gabriel Semmes was a prominent Whig politician during the Great War, and is possibly intended to be the grandson of Raphael Semmes
. From 1910 to 1916, he served as Woodrow Wilson
's vice-president. In the 1915 presidential election, he easily defeated Doroteo Arango, the Radical Liberal candidate from Chihuahua. However, Semmes' term was marred by the Confederacy's defeat in the Great War and the subsequent loss of territory to the United States. In the aftermath of the Red Rebellion, Semmes proposed a bill to the Confederate Congress to allow black soldiers to fight in the war; this was done as a result of a shortage of available white conscripts. Semmes left office in 1922 disgraced after the C.S. loss and humiliation in the war.
General James Ewell Brown (Jeb) Stuart Jr. is a fictionalized character in this series. Stuart entered combat in 1881 as a lieutenant of infantry in the Army of Kentucky, which was charged with the defense of the state it was named for. When the US Army of the Ohio under the command of General Orlando Wilcox invaded Kentucky at Louisville, Stuart and his company distinguished themselves under fire when they held and repulsed Wilcox's flanking move. In the middle of the fighting, Stuart saved his company when its commander was wounded, and became a war hero just like his father, who was serving in Mexico. Right after the battle, Stuart personally met the Confederate Army chief, General Thomas J. "Stonewall" Jackson.
For the next thirty years, Jeb Stuart, Jr. rapidly advanced through the ranks, rising to the top of the chain of command by virtue of his glory in 1881 and through the magic of his family's name, which would prove thicker than merit in the caste-world of the Confederacy. When the world went to war in 1914, Stuart was in charge of the War Department. He unleashed the Army of Northern Virginia north through Washington DC, Maryland, and southern Maryland in a move aimed at capturing Philadelphia, the de-facto capital of the United States.
In 1915, as the Army of Northern Virginia stood on the Susquehanna river, disturbing reports filtered from the front to the War Department of a nature endangering the safety of the entire CSA. Many cells of Marxist black laborers had been uncovered in the various armies, one such cell including Pompey, the manservant of Stuart's son, Captain Jeb Stuart III of Battery C, First Richmond Howitzers. The accusation there had been made by one of Stuart's sergeants in Battery C, Jake Featherston, and passed on to the top by a major from Intelligence named Clarence Potter.
Jeb Stuart, Jr. didn't wish to upset his son by having the manservant, Pompey, taken away for detention. He ordered the affair hushed up, not believing that Pompey was even capable of plotting rebellion or anything seditious. When the Red Rebellion of 1915-16 broke out in autumn of 1915, Pompey disappeared with the other rebels. Jeb Stuart III was now under a cloud, and when Pompey was captured and brought back to the captain for confirmation of identity, any chances of his being promoted went down the drain. Jeb Stuart III died in combat not long after the affair, recklessly attacking the enemy with the intent of being killed. Jeb Stuart, Jr. punished Sergeant Featherston and Major Potter for their parts in the controversy by blocking their promotions. Potter got over his situation; Featherston was enraged and began the descent into madness that would blaze through the world in future years.
Despite the Confederacy's defeat, Stuart remained the head of the postwar Confederate Army. Though often singled out by Featherston as the example of the nepotism and conservatism which had crippled the CS Army during the war, Stuart remained silent until 1923. When President Wade Hampton V's assassination seemed sure to consign the Freedom Party to the dustbin of history, Stuart personally met with Featherston for the first time. He quietly but smugly informed Featherston that he had come to say goodbye, as he believed that the Freedom Party would no longer be a force in Confederate politics. While it did not consume his outer appearance, it seemed he deeply regretted his actions that allowed the Red Rebellion to occur. He believed that the death of his son was a result of his mistake.
Stuart's confidence proved misplaced. Featherston did recover from the 1923 debacle, and eleven years later was sworn in as the Confederacy's President.
Despite his campaign promises, Featherston walked softly around the army for the first two years of his presidency. But in the aftermath of a failed assassination attempt at the 1936 Richmond Olympics, Featherston's popularity was such that he felt the time had come to shake up the CS Army's leadership. He called Stuart into his office and gloatingly reminded him of their last meeting before asking for his resignation. The icy civility of both men swiftly gave way to abuse; when Stuart labeled Featherston 'white trash' the enraged president threatened to charge the general with treason for his part in facilitating the Red rebellion, as well as exposing his son's involvement with protecting the Marxist Pompey. A shaken Stuart promptly resigned.
Shortly afterward news of the Pompey Affair went out over the Confederate wireless and cinema.
Son of General Jeb Stuart, Jr., and the commanding officer of Battery C in the First Richmond Howitzers, Army of Northern Virginia, Jeb Stuart III was a young man when he was promoted to captain and given command of Battery C, which helped explain his cockiness and self-assured stance on whatever situation arose. When his manservant, a black man named Pompey, came under investigation for possible connections to the Confederate Marxist underground, Stuart was convinced of his servant's innocence. He asked his father, the head of the CSA War Department, to cancel the investigation, never finding out that it was one of his own sergeants, Jake Featherston, who tipped off Army Intelligence about Pompey.
When the black Marxists finally rose up in revolt in the autumn of 1915, Pompey was discovered to be the leader of one of the cells in the Army, which included Featherston's gun handlers Nero and Perseus, among others. Pompey was captured and was later, we assume, executed (we never hear of his actual fate), but before the sentence was carried out Major Clarence Potter, who had led the earlier investigation, chastised Captain Stuart for his mistake. Shortly thereafter, during a U.S. Army breakthrough on that front in Maryland, Stuart ordered Sergeant Featherston to unlimber his gun and fight the U.S. soldiers to their last breath. He was shot and killed immediately afterward, having openly exposed his body to the enemy marksmen; he intended to die in a blaze of glory to atone for ignoring the signs of black rebellion. For their roles in the controversy, both Sergeant Featherston and Major Potter were punished by Captain Stuart's father, being blacklisted from further promotion in the Confederate States Army.
It was the events surrounding Jeb Stuart III and Pompey that sparked Jake Featherston's intense racism and contempt for the Confederate aristocracy, leading to his involvement in the newly-formed Freedom Party and his rise to power.
Before the Great War, Apicius (no last name) was the proprietor of The Kentucky Smoke House, a barbecue restaurant in Covington, Kentucky, which was patronized by both the white and black community. He was also the head of the Marxist underground in Covington, and thus was involved in a three-way fight between the Marxists, the Confederate underground (led by Tom Kennedy), and the Kentucky State Police led by Luther Bliss.
He adopted the surname "Wood" when blacks were allowed to take surnames in 1916 during the short period of U.S. rule, because "you can't make good barbecue without good wood." His sons continued to run the barbecue and the Marxist underground during the Second Great War. However, Cincinnatus Driver, revisiting Covington in 1944, was unable to find any of the Woods.
Arthur McGregor owned a farm in southern Manitoba near the town of Rosenfield. The town was occupied by United States forces early in the Great War. When his 15-year-old son, Alexander, was arrested and then shot by the U.S. Army for sabotage (based on only circumstantial evidence), McGregor began a secret campaign of bombing American institutions.
He remained undetected for years, but his luck ran out in the 1920s when he attempted to kill General George Armstrong Custer with a bomb. Alone amongst US officers, Custer strongly suspected McGregor was a bomber (despite no evidence having being found to convict him). Custer noticed McGregor in the crowd during Custer's retirement parade. When McGregor threw a bomb at Custer, Custer caught the bomb and threw it back at McGregor, killing him instantly.
McGregor had a daughter named Mary, who later married Mort Pomeroy. She continued in her father's footsteps, secretly making bombs to keep the American occupiers off guard.
Mary McGregor was the daughter of Arthur McGregor, the prominent Anti-American Canadian nationalist. Mary continued her father's legacy after his accidental death in 1923. She planted a bomb in Rosenfeld's general store, then sent a mail bomb which killed Laura Moss and Dorothy Moss. She was arrested by American soldiers at her childhood home outside of Rosenfeld in 1942 and executed by firing squad after refusing to ask for mercy - in effect consciously and deliberately making herself a martyr for the cause, though the Americans were reluctant to execute a woman (especially, the mother of a young child) and were trying to offer her a way out.
Though not explicitly mentioned, since after her death there is no Canadian viewpoint character left, her proud stance and widely-publicised martyrdom might have helped to set off the uprising in Canada, mentioned soon afterwards.
She had married Mort Pomeroy, the owner of a Rosenfeld diner, in the 1930s and had one son, Alexander Arthur ("Alec") Pomeroy (named for his uncle and grandfather).
Alec Pomeroy is the son of Mort and Mary Pomeroy. He was named for his late uncle Alexander and his late grandfather Arthur MacGregor. Born in 1936, he was only six years old when his mother was executed by U.S. firing squads after a series of bombings. Earlier, Mort Pomeroy - though by no means liking the occupying Yankees - was not a white-hot patriot, striving to make the best of the situation (with a considerable economic success), and trying (this without success) to dissaude Mary from her bombing campaign against the Americans. As evident from the fact that in 1943 Pomeroy's Diner was the point of most persistent resistance to the American forces invading Rosefeld, the execution of his beloved wife pushed Mort to extreme militancy and resistance until death. The six-year old Alexander was the lone survivor of the U.S. assault on the diner turned stronghold. He lost a joint on his pinky, which was bandaged by Armstrong Grimes; though Grimes acted kind towards him and gave him a candy bar, Alec who just lost his father was ungrateful towards him and the other U.S. soldiers. His ingratitude was ignored.
Laura Secord was a Canadian farmer descended from (and named for) the Canadian patriot
of the War of 1812
. She lived in Berlin, Ontario, and lost her first husband, a Canadian Pilot, during the Great War. After the war ended, she established an antagonistic but oddly strong relationship with an American pilot named Jonathan Moss, who moved to the town (now a part of Occupied Canada) to establish his career as an attorney in military occupation courts - a decision taken, to a considerable degree, by Moss' love for her and determination to win her, as well as by Moss' guilty feeling about his acts during the war and his feeling that the Canadians were "getting a raw deal". Eventually, the two got married and had a daughter, Dorothy.
Laura and her daughter were killed (while Jonathan was at work) by a mail bomb sent to them by Mary MacGregor Pomeroy, who saw Laura Moss as a traitor to their country.
Lucien Galtier was a farmer in Rivière-du-Loup, Quebec, which was occupied by U.S. forces early in the Great War. Although not expressing overt hostility to the U.S. occupation, the occupiers decided to confiscate part of his land to build a military hospital. After his daughter, Nicole, married Leonard O'Doull, one of the USA Army surgeons, the U.S. military government and the government of the Republic of Quebec decided Galtier was friendly, and he was compensated for the land and paid back rent. The Republic of Quebec later bought the land the hospital was built on for a large sum. That money, combined with the rent he had received, made him one of the wealthier farmers in the area.
His wife died of cancer a few years after the war ended, and he died of a heart attack while "enjoying the company" of his new lady-friend, Eloise Granche, a few months before the 1941 war began. His son, Charles, inherited the farm.
The careers of Galtier and of Arthur McGregor are evidently intended as a kind of symmetrical pair. Both start off in very similar circumstances, as hard-working Canadian farmers who both resent the American occuption but (to start with) neither opposing it head-on. However, the circumstance of Galtier's daughter falling in love with an American and marrying him, while MacGregor's son was unjustly executed by the Americans, draws the two in diametriaclly opposite directions.
Father Pascal Talon was a Catholic priest in Rivière-du-Loup. An opportunist as well as a man of the cloth, he supported the Americans early in the occupation, assisting U.S. Army Major Jedediah Quigley with the pacification of his area by delivering pro-American sermons to his congregation. He was made Bishop in 1916 when his church in Rivière-du-Loup became the seat of a diocese. This coincided with the establishment of the Republic of Quebec and may be evidence of cooperation between the Holy See
and the Central Powers
.
In 1926 Bishop Pascal found himself at the center of a scandal when it was revealed that he had taken a mistress and had fathered twins with her. He was very abruptly defrocked. As a layman, he married the mother of his twins and moved his family to Quebec City to begin a new life. As Lucien Galtier noted, Pascal served God and himself at the same time.
Francisco José II is Emperor of Mexico in the 1940s, and as such, analogous to the role of minor Axis allies in our timeline, particularly Benito Mussolini
of Italy
, and, in the case of the Battle of Pittsburgh (analog to our timeline's Battle of Stalingrad
), Ion Antonescu
of Romania
. He is a descendant of the House of Habsburg
, his name being a Hispanization of "Franz Josef
". Ironically, he finds himself a minor partner in the Entente fighting against his ancestral Austria-Hungary
.
During World War II, he sent his three best army divisions to assist the Confederate States in Operation Coalscuttle in Pennsylvania. These forces were annihilated in General Morrell's counterattack, which led to the destruction of the Confederate army in Pittsburgh. Afterwards, Confederate Secretary of State George Herbert Walker
'persuaded' him to provide five more divisions for use as 'internal security' against Negro marauders.
Not much is known about the Emperor personally. He was one of the few Entente heads of state to remain as such after the war without being killed (as Charles XI of France and Jake Featherston of the C.S. were) or overthrown (as Winston Churchill was).
Harry Turtledove
Harry Norman Turtledove is an American novelist, who has produced works in several genres including alternate history, historical fiction, fantasy and science fiction.- Life :...
. The point of divergence
Point of divergence
In discussion of counterfactual history, a divergence point , also referred to as a departure point or point of divergence , is a historical event with two possible postulated outcomes...
involves Confederate States of America
Confederate States of America
The Confederate States of America was a government set up from 1861 to 1865 by 11 Southern slave states of the United States of America that had declared their secession from the U.S...
winning the American Civil War
American Civil War
The American Civil War was a civil war fought in the United States of America. In response to the election of Abraham Lincoln as President of the United States, 11 southern slave states declared their secession from the United States and formed the Confederate States of America ; the other 25...
and becoming an independent nation. The series covers events from 1862 to 1944 and features dozens of fictional characters, some of them analogues of real people.
Books in the series
- How Few RemainHow Few RemainHow Few Remain is a 1997 alternate history novel by Harry Turtledove. It is the first part of the Southern Victory Series saga, which depicts a world in which the Confederacy won the American Civil War. The book received the Sidewise Award for Alternate History in 1997, and was also nominated for...
(1997) - HFR - The Great War: American FrontThe Great War: American FrontThe Great War: American Front is the first alternate history novel in the Great War trilogy by Harry Turtledove. It is part II of Turtledove's Southern Victory Series of novels. It takes the Southern Victory Series from 1914 to 1915.-Plot summary:...
(1998) - GW:AF - The Great War: Walk in HellThe Great War: Walk in HellThe Great war: Walk in Hell is the second book in the Great War series of alternate history books by Harry Turtledove. It is also part of the Southern Victory Series series...
(1999) - GW:WH - The Great War: BreakthroughsThe Great War: BreakthroughsThe Great War: Breakthroughs is the third and final installment of the Great War trilogy in the Southern Victory Series of alternate history novels by Harry Turtledove. It takes the Southern Victory Series to 1917.-Plot summary:...
(2000) - GW:B - American Empire: Blood and IronAmerican Empire: Blood and IronAmerican Empire: Blood and Iron is the first book of the American Empire trilogy of alternate history fiction novels by Harry Turtledove. It is a sequel to the novel How Few Remain and the Great War trilogy, and is part of the Southern Victory Series.Blood and Iron covers events directly following...
(2001) - AE:BI - American Empire: The Center Cannot HoldAmerican Empire: The Center Cannot HoldAmerican Empire: The Center Cannot Hold is the second book in the American Empire series by Harry Turtledove. It takes place during the period of the Roaring Twenties and the Great Depression...
(2002) - AE:CCH - American Empire: The Victorious OppositionAmerican Empire: The Victorious OppositionAmerican Empire: The Victorious Opposition is the third and final book in the American Empire alternate history series by Harry Turtledove, and the seventh in the Southern Victory Series of books.-Plot summary:...
(2003) - AE:VO - Settling Accounts: Return EngagementSettling Accounts: Return EngagementReturn Engagement is the first book of Harry Turtledove's Settling Accounts series of alternate history novels. It is an analogy of World War II being waged on American soil between the United States and the Confederate States....
(2004) - SA:RE - Settling Accounts: Drive to the EastSettling Accounts: Drive to the EastDrive to the East is the second book in Harry Turtledove's Settling Accounts series of alternate history novels. It is set in an analog of World War II in North America, fought between the United States and Confederate States. It was released in August 2005. It follows Return Engagement and...
(2005) - SA:DE - Settling Accounts: The GrappleSettling Accounts: The GrappleSettling Accounts: The Grapple by Harry Turtledove is the third book in the Settling Accounts tetralogy, an alternate history setting of World War II in North America. It is part of the Southern Victory Series, which supposes that the Confederate States of America won the American Civil War. It...
(2006) - SA:G - Settling Accounts: In at the DeathSettling Accounts: In at the DeathSettling Accounts: In at the Death is the last novel of the Settling Accounts tetralogy that presents an alternate history of World War II that was released July 27, 2007. It brings to a conclusion the multi-series compilation by author Harry Turtledove, a series sometimes referred to as Southern...
(2007) - SA:ID
Abell, John
(GW:AF-SA:ID)John Abell is a General Staff officer. He served on the U.S. Army General Staff from the Great War, when he was a major, to the 1941 War, when he began that war as a colonel. Abell disliked many of the tactics and operations proposed by Irving Morrell, but the two men shared a hatred of the Confederacy and a wary respect for each other's abilities. Abell is typically portrayed as an excellent soldier in his role as a General Staff officer, but is an occasional antagonist to Irving Morrell and Abner Dowling, both field officers, as their approaches to war differ radically. However, Abell and Dowling make common cause with regard to Daniel MacArthur's debacle in northern Virginia. Dowling and Abell even appear to become friends (to the extent that either man has friends), both men sharing an ironic sense of humor and low regard for MacArthur.
During the war, Abell was promoted twice: first to brigadier general, then to major general. After the war ended, it was his duty to inform General Abner Dowling of the possibility that Dowling retire.
Blackford, Hosea
(HFR, GW:B-AE:VO)Hosea Blackford was first introduced in a train ride across the northern Great Plains at 1881, while talking with former President Abraham Lincoln
Abraham Lincoln
Abraham Lincoln was the 16th President of the United States, serving from March 1861 until his assassination in April 1865. He successfully led his country through a great constitutional, military and moral crisis – the American Civil War – preserving the Union, while ending slavery, and...
, in this world a founder of American Socialism
Socialism
Socialism is an economic system characterized by social ownership of the means of production and cooperative management of the economy; or a political philosophy advocating such a system. "Social ownership" may refer to any one of, or a combination of, the following: cooperative enterprises,...
whose disciple the earnest young Blackford considers himself to be. Blackford re-entered the series in GW:B when, as a Congressman in the House of Representatives for the Socialist Party (representing Dakota), he became friendly with freshman Congresswoman Flora Hamburger (representing New York), developing a romantic relationship. They ultimately married despite religious and political differences.
In 1920, he was asked by Upton Sinclair
Upton Sinclair
Upton Beall Sinclair Jr. , was an American author who wrote close to one hundred books in many genres. He achieved popularity in the first half of the twentieth century, acquiring particular fame for his classic muckraking novel, The Jungle . It exposed conditions in the U.S...
to be the Socialist party nominee to be the Vice President. The Socialists won the 1920 election, defeating Democrat Teddy Roosevelt. Upton Sinclair and Hosea Blackford were re-elected in 1924. Blackford described the job as being a "$12,000 a year hatrack."
In 1928 Blackford became the Socialist Party nominee for President and defeated Calvin Coolidge
Calvin Coolidge
John Calvin Coolidge, Jr. was the 30th President of the United States . A Republican lawyer from Vermont, Coolidge worked his way up the ladder of Massachusetts state politics, eventually becoming governor of that state...
by a small margin. However, the economic panic and subsequent crash in mid-1929 was largely blamed on Blackford. Shantytowns of unemployed people in the United States become known as Blackfordburghs (see: Hooverville
Hooverville
A 'Hooverville' was the popular name for shanty towns built by homeless people during the Great Depression. They were named after the President of the United States at the time, Herbert Hoover, because he allegedly let the nation slide into depression...
), in honor of the failure of the Blackford Presidency. In response he tried passing make-work legislation, but nothing helped. The fact that the Democrat-controlled Congress defeated most of those make-work bills did not help matters much.
Things were made even worse for Blackford in 1932 when the USS Remembrance caught a disguised Japan
Japan
Japan is an island nation in East Asia. Located in the Pacific Ocean, it lies to the east of the Sea of Japan, China, North Korea, South Korea and Russia, stretching from the Sea of Okhotsk in the north to the East China Sea and Taiwan in the south...
ese ship supplying weapons to Canada
Canada
Canada is a North American country consisting of ten provinces and three territories. Located in the northern part of the continent, it extends from the Atlantic Ocean in the east to the Pacific Ocean in the west, and northward into the Arctic Ocean...
's resistance. The Japanese responded by sneak attacking Los Angeles. This destroyed Blackford's hopes of reelection, and began the Pacific War.
Blackford was easily defeated by Calvin Coolidge for the Presidential spot in 1932. He retired to Dakota, and then returned to New York and Philadelphia with his wife, Flora, when she was elected to Congress in 1934 after a six-year absence. He died in 1937. He and Flora had one son, Joshua.
Bliss, Luther
(GW:WH-GW:B, AE:CCH, SA:RE, SA:G-SA:ID)Luther Bliss was a Kentuckian who sided with the occupying US forces during the Great War. He became head of the Kentucky State Police and was instrumental in persuading a rump legislature to petition for re-entry into the United States. During the years before the war, Bliss used his power effectively and ruthlessly to crack down on black Marxists and Confederate saboteurs. He left when Kentucky voted to rejoin the Confederate States, but returned to Covington
Covington, Kentucky
-Demographics:As of the census of 2000, there were 43,370 people, 18,257 households, and 10,132 families residing in the city. The population density was 3,301.3 people per square mile . There were 20,448 housing units at an average density of 1,556.5 per square mile...
during the 1941 war to coordinate sabotage missions against Confederate armed forces. In 1943, with US forces approaching the Ohio River
Ohio River
The Ohio River is the largest tributary, by volume, of the Mississippi River. At the confluence, the Ohio is even bigger than the Mississippi and, thus, is hydrologically the main stream of the whole river system, including the Allegheny River further upstream...
, he was in conference with Intelligence officers to coordinate a rising behind the Confederate lines and help the US invasion. At the end of the war, Bliss was still present in Covington, where he had one final run-in with Cincinnatus Driver, whom he did not trust.
Carsten, Sam
(Viewpoint character, GW:AF-SA:ID)Sam Carsten was a member of a 5 inches (127 mm) gun crew on the battleship USS Dakota during the Great War. He was also a member of a landing party that overran the British coastal defenses at Pearl Harbor, Sandwich Islands
Hawaii
Hawaii is the newest of the 50 U.S. states , and is the only U.S. state made up entirely of islands. It is the northernmost island group in Polynesia, occupying most of an archipelago in the central Pacific Ocean, southwest of the continental United States, southeast of Japan, and northeast of...
, as well as serving in the Battle of the Three Navies.
Falling into conversation with a friendly surfing Hawaiian native while on leave, Carsten suspected him of being a British spy and reported the encounter to his superior officers. Upon investigation, his suspicions were confirmed, which led to the Hawaiian's arrest and execution, and resulted in Carsten's promotion for his initiative. After the war, he was transferred to the aircraft carrier USS Remembrance, where he served as a gun captain during the suppression of a pro-British rebellion in Ulster
Ulster
Ulster is one of the four provinces of Ireland, located in the north of the island. In ancient Ireland, it was one of the fifths ruled by a "king of over-kings" . Following the Norman invasion of Ireland, the ancient kingdoms were shired into a number of counties for administrative and judicial...
.
Carsten was selected for Officer Candidate School and was commissioned in 1924. He served as a damage-control officer aboard the Remembrance during the Pacific War, until its sinking during the American defeat off Midway
Midway Atoll
Midway Atoll is a atoll in the North Pacific Ocean, near the northwestern end of the Hawaiian archipelago, about one-third of the way between Honolulu, Hawaii, and Tokyo, Japan. Unique among the Hawaiian islands, Midway observes UTC-11 , eleven hours behind Coordinated Universal Time and one hour...
in 1941.
Carsten was then appointed commanding officer of the destroyer escort
Destroyer escort
A destroyer escort is the classification for a smaller, lightly armed warship designed to be used to escort convoys of merchant marine ships, primarily of the United States Merchant Marine in World War II. It is employed primarily for anti-submarine warfare, but also provides some protection...
USS Josephus Daniels, which served in several actions in the Atlantic, including transporting U.S. Marine Corps
United States Marine Corps
The United States Marine Corps is a branch of the United States Armed Forces responsible for providing power projection from the sea, using the mobility of the United States Navy to deliver combined-arms task forces rapidly. It is one of seven uniformed services of the United States...
raiders to capture a working Confederate coastal Y-range (radar) station
Radar
Radar is an object-detection system which uses radio waves to determine the range, altitude, direction, or speed of objects. It can be used to detect aircraft, ships, spacecraft, guided missiles, motor vehicles, weather formations, and terrain. The radar dish or antenna transmits pulses of radio...
, as well as intercepting British attempts to land arms to the Canadian resistance in Newfoundland. After these successful missions, the Daniels was chosen to run guns to rebels in Confederate Cuba
Cuba
The Republic of Cuba is an island nation in the Caribbean. The nation of Cuba consists of the main island of Cuba, the Isla de la Juventud, and several archipelagos. Havana is the largest city in Cuba and the country's capital. Santiago de Cuba is the second largest city...
by disguising her as a Confederate warship. The ship later takes part in a large naval battle in the Atlantic between the U.S. Navy and combined British and French naval forces, followed by a mission to smuggle arms into British-occupied Ireland.
During the final stages of the war, Carsten and the Daniels play a major role in the mid-ocean transfer of vital German superbomb research into American hands, and helped in the liberation of Haiti. After the war ended, he was promoted to lieutenant commander, and assigned to patrol the former Confederate east coast. Near the end of Settling Accounts: In at the Death
Settling Accounts: In at the Death
Settling Accounts: In at the Death is the last novel of the Settling Accounts tetralogy that presents an alternate history of World War II that was released July 27, 2007. It brings to a conclusion the multi-series compilation by author Harry Turtledove, a series sometimes referred to as Southern...
it is implied that he has developed melanoma
Melanoma
Melanoma is a malignant tumor of melanocytes. Melanocytes are cells that produce the dark pigment, melanin, which is responsible for the color of skin. They predominantly occur in skin, but are also found in other parts of the body, including the bowel and the eye...
due to decades of his fair skin being exposed to the sun, as he absentmindedly picks a bleeding mole on the back of his left hand.
DeFrancis, Terry
(SA:G-ID)Terry DeFrancis was a colonel in the US Army in 1943, specializing in aircraft. He was assigned to General Dowling's Eleventh Army in west Texas to support the drive on Camp Determination. He was very young to be a full colonel, and still very young when promoted to commander of the 11th Army after Dowling departed to attack Richmond again. Much as DeFrancis's use of fighter-bombers and heavy bombers proves key to providing Dowling the edge over the Confederates in west Texas, now the recreated US state of Houston.
DeFrancis is analogous to Curtis LeMay
Curtis LeMay
Curtis Emerson LeMay was a general in the United States Air Force and the vice presidential running mate of American Independent Party candidate George Wallace in 1968....
.
Dowling, Abner
(Viewpoint character, GW:AF-SA:ID)Abner Dowling was a major in the US Army in 1914, serving as Lieutenant General George Custer's adjutant. Physically overweight, Dowling was the butt of many of Custer's jokes, and his rather-good judgment on military matters overlooked or denounced as "stupid" by the 75-year old war hero, who used his First Army as a commander would use the obsolete cavalry: charge straight at the target and full steam ahead. Dowling recognized that strategy as costly and inefficient, but could only influence Custer indirectly.
After three years of brutal advancing through western Kentucky and into northern Tennessee, First Army stood in front of Nashville. Custer, following the advice of Colonel Irving Morrell, began to mass his armor, contrary to War Department doctrine. Dowling was coerced by Custer into faking reports to the War Department about how the general was allocating his armor and between them they convinced the General Staff and President Roosevelt to believe these reports. Custer went on to win the USA's first major victory of the Great War: the Barrel Roll Offensive. The First Army then captured Nashville and was planning a march on Murfreesboro when the Confederates asked for an armistice.
Following the end of the Great War, Dowling was promoted to lieutenant colonel, and Custer to full general. After spending time in the War Department offices, Custer and Dowling were transferred to Winnipeg
Winnipeg
Winnipeg is the capital and largest city of Manitoba, Canada, and is the primary municipality of the Winnipeg Capital Region, with more than half of Manitoba's population. It is located near the longitudinal centre of North America, at the confluence of the Red and Assiniboine Rivers .The name...
, Manitoba, which had been set up by the victorious Americans as the capital of Occupied Canada. Custer became governor-general, while Dowling typed his reports. Following several assassination attempts by a Canadian farmer named Arthur McGregor, Custer was forced to retire, and Dowling became army-commandant of Salt Lake City with the rank of colonel.
Following the assassination of Governor-general John Pershing, Dowling became the military governor. After several more years, military rule in the state was lifted and Dowling was reassigned once more. As his experience in Utah was unique among most of his peers, Dowling became the head of US military forces fighting Freedom Party rebels in Kentucky. After the Richmond Agreement of June 1940 between Presidents Smith and Featherston, a plebiscite took place and Kentucky voted for a return to the Confederacy. With war clouds between North and South looming, the now-brigadier general became commander of the Army of Ohio, in charge of defending the Midwest.
On June 22, 1941, the Confederates invaded Ohio with barrels and troops. Being unsupplied and unsupported by the War Department, the Army of Ohio was rolled back as the Confederates blitzed to Sandusky, Ohio
Sandusky, Ohio
Sandusky is a city in the U.S. state of Ohio and the county seat of Erie County. It is located in northern Ohio and is situated on the shores of Lake Erie, almost exactly half-way between Toledo to the west and Cleveland to the east....
, on the south shore of Lake Erie, cutting the USA in half. Dowling was blamed for the disaster, but with War Department assistance, he appeared before the Congressional Committee on the Joint Conduct of the War, and pointed out the budget cuts of the Sinclair and Blackford Administrations as a significant cause of the U.S. defeat. Instead of being cashiered in disgrace, he was placed under the command of Daniel MacArthur, who led an inept counterattack in Northern Virginia
Northern Virginia
Northern Virginia consists of several counties and independent cities in the Commonwealth of Virginia, in a widespread region generally radiating southerly and westward from Washington, D.C...
. Dowling managed to prevent George Patton, from striking MacArthur's rear, saving the Rappahannock front from destruction as MacArthur pushed south.
1942 found Brigadier General Dowling being promoted to Major General, then being put charge of the 11th Army headquartered in Clovis, New Mexico
Clovis, New Mexico
Clovis is the county seat of Curry County, New Mexico, United States. Its population was 32,667 at the 2000 census; according to 2010 Census Bureau estimates, the population had risen to 37,775....
. The 11th Army began an offensive into West Texas to coincide with the U.S. counter-attack around Pittsburgh. Shortly after the fighting in Pittsburgh ended, Dowling and his army learned of the existence of Camp Determination through photographic evidence. This struck a nerve in Dowling, who then used whatever resources he could to advance through Texas and get to the camp. By the time Dowling could seize Amarillo
Amarillo, Texas
Amarillo is the 14th-largest city, by population, in the state of Texas, the largest in the Texas Panhandle, and the seat of Potter County. A portion of the city extends into Randall County. The population was 190,695 at the 2010 census...
and Snyder
Snyder, Texas
Snyder is a city in and the county seat of Scurry County, Texas, United States. The population was 10,653 at the 2010 census. It is located on Deep Creek, a minor tributary of the Colorado River of Texas. Snyder is approximately 150 km southeast of Lubbock.Located in Snyder is the Scurry County...
, the Confederates destroyed the camp and most of the evidence that was there. This did not stop Dowling from forcing prominent local citizens from touring the mass graves of several hundred thousand black victims of Featherston.
After the invasion of Texas was halted by limited resources and the vast amounts of empty land, Dowling was sent to command a division in the final attack on Virginia. In 1944, after the war ended, Dowling was approached by Major General John Abell and it was made clear that Dowling must retire to make room for younger officers. Abell noted that Dowling's work significantly changed the moral nature of the war from merely a defense of the United States to a moral crusade against Featherston and his ideology.
Dowling is portrayed as an excellent officer who is often forced to work with limited resources and relegated to sideshow fronts and operations, and as such his results tend to be less than spectacular or decisive. Despite these limitations, (most the result of an unfortunate tendency to speak his mind) he almost always achieves his objectives and enjoys the professional respect of the fearsome Confederate General Patton. He has an ironic sense of humor and is a close ally of Irving Morrell.
Driver, Cincinnatus
(Viewpoint character, GW:AF-SA:ID)Born in Covington, Confederate Kentucky, Cincinnatus worked as a delivery driver before the Great War. When Covington was overrun by U.S. forces, Cincinnatus found himself working for Lieutenant Straubing as a military driver, but also being a pawn in the intelligence game between Confederate, black Marxist and U.S. forces in Kentucky.
Following the Great War, Cincinnatus took the surname "Driver" (blacks in the Confederacy were not allowed surnames) and moved to Des Moines, Iowa, where he set up business as a hauler. He was briefly lured back to Kentucky by Luther Bliss and imprisoned without charge for several months by the Kentucky State Police head, but freed due to the legal efforts of attorney Clarence Darrow
Clarence Darrow
Clarence Seward Darrow was an American lawyer and leading member of the American Civil Liberties Union, best known for defending teenage thrill killers Leopold and Loeb in their trial for murdering 14-year-old Robert "Bobby" Franks and defending John T...
.
Driver returned to Kentucky in late 1940 to see to a family crisis, but was trapped behind the international border when the Confederates reoccupied the state. He and his father, Seneca Driver, were exchanged in 1942 and he returned to Des Moines, where he volunteered as a civilian auxiliary driver for the U.S. Army, this time being allowed to carry a weapon. After a brief interlude assisting in the planning of underground operations in Covington, Kentucky, with Bliss, Driver followed the Army into Tennessee and Georgia, enthusiastically seeing the reactions of Confederates to seeing a black man carry a weapon. After the war, Driver returned to Covington one last time before returning home to Des Moines to see his daughter, Amanda, get married.
Engels Brothers
(AE:CCH, SA:RE-SA:ID)The Engels Brothers are a comedy group and common cultural icon. The Engels brothers apparently served in the Great War in the trenches, and then became a vaudeville act in the United States. They have appeared in movies and recorded an anti-Confederate number, "Featherston's Follies."
The Engels Brothers are a homage of Harry Turtledove to the Marx Brothers
Marx Brothers
The Marx Brothers were an American family comedy act, originally from New York City, that enjoyed success in Vaudeville, Broadway, and motion pictures from the early 1900s to around 1950...
, who named them after the long-time companion of Karl Marx
Karl Marx
Karl Heinrich Marx was a German philosopher, economist, sociologist, historian, journalist, and revolutionary socialist. His ideas played a significant role in the development of social science and the socialist political movement...
, Friedrich Engels
Friedrich Engels
Friedrich Engels was a German industrialist, social scientist, author, political theorist, philosopher, and father of Marxist theory, alongside Karl Marx. In 1845 he published The Condition of the Working Class in England, based on personal observations and research...
.
Enos, George
(Viewpoint character GW:AF-GW:B)George Enos was a fisherman from Boston, Massachusetts, on the F/V Ripple when the Great War began. He continued to fish until the Ripple was captured by a Confederate commerce raider, the CSS Swamp Fox, and was interned in North Carolina until exchanged. Enos joined the U.S. Navy shortly afterward to avoid conscription in the Army and to fight the Confederacy. He served on a Q-boat which sank a Confederate submarine, and in 1916 was transferred to the USS Punishment, a river monitor which fought on the Mississippi and Cumberland Rivers, until it was destroyed. Enos was not aboard at the time. He was then transferred to the destroyer USS Ericsson, which was sunk illegally after the U.S.-C.S. armistice of 1917 by the CSS Bonefish, captained by Confederate Roger Kimball.
Enos, George Jr.
(GW:AF-AE:VO; Viewpoint character AE:VO-SA:ID)George Enos Jr. was born in 1910 and was only 7 years old when his father, George Enos (q.v.), was killed when the USS Ericsson was torpedoed the day after the U.S.-C.S. armistice. He became a fisherman, married Connie McGillicuddy, and joined the U.S. Navy during the 1941 War, seeing action around the Sandwich Islands aboard the destroyer USS Townsend.
In 1943, the Townsend was sunk near Baja California in a direct hit by Confederate divebomber. Enos survived and was transferred to the Josephus Daniels, under the command of Sam Carsten. In 1944, Enos was transferred again, this time to the USS Oregon. With the intervention of Joe Kennedy, Enos was able to obtain his release from the Navy after the Second Great War concluded, after which he returned home to Boston.
Enos, Sylvia
(Viewpiont character, GW:AF-AE:VO)Sylvia Enos, born in 1886, was the wife and widow of George Enos. After his death in 1917, she struggled to support her two children. In 1923, thanks to complex developments in Confederate politics surrounding resistance to the Freedom Party, she learned the identity of the Confederate naval officer who killed her husband on the USS Ericsson, Roger Kimball. Sylvia traveled to South Carolina and killed Kimball, then surrendered to authorities. She was spared legal retribution through the intervention of Anne Colleton, a political rival and estranged lover of Kimball's.
Following her return, she became a heroine. Local Democratic Party boss Joseph P. Kennedy exploited her fame for political uses and also tried and failed to seduce her. She ghost-wrote a book entitled I Sank Roger Kimball along with a frustrated writer named Ernie
Ernest Hemingway
Ernest Miller Hemingway was an American author and journalist. His economic and understated style had a strong influence on 20th-century fiction, while his life of adventure and his public image influenced later generations. Hemingway produced most of his work between the mid-1920s and the...
. Against the advice of her son, she began a romantic and sexual affair with Ernie, who had been wounded in his genitalia during the Great War. She was frightened by Ernie's dark mood swings but resisted her son's advice to break off the affair. This ultimately proved fatal when, in a very black melancholy, Ernie accidentally shot and killed Sylvia, then killed himself in remorse.
Grimes, Armstrong
(AE:BI-AE:VO; Viewpoint character AE:VO-SA:ID)Armstrong Grimes (named after George Armstrong Custer) is the son of Merle Grimes and Edna Grimes and the grandson of Nellie Semphroch. He grew up in Washington, D.C. He graduated from high school in 1940 and then spent the next year of his life looking for work with little success, until he was conscripted into the U.S. Army in 1941. His basic training facility was attacked on the first day of the war as part of Operation Blackbeard, at which point he was awarded the rank of Private First Class. He took part in the initial, unsuccessful defense of Ohio under General Abner Dowling. When Sandusky fell, marking the conclusion of that operation, he was transferred to Utah, which had recently erupted into a Mormon uprising. There he befriended Yossel Reisen Jr., the nephew of Flora Hamburger. In Utah he was involved in both heavy fighting and terrorist attacks, eventually attaining the rank of sergeant. After the Mormons surrendered in 1943, Grimes was transferred to Canada, where he was wounded. After recovery, he was sent to Tennessee to take part in the U.S. push into Georgia. Grimes ended the war in Alabama, and remained there as part of the U.S. occupying force in the state.
Hamburger, Flora (Blackford)
(Viewpoint character, GW:AF-SA:ID)Flora Hamburger is the wife of President Hosea Blackford and a major political figure in her own right.
At the beginning of the series she is a Socialist Party grassroots activist and agitator in a working-class Jewish neighborhood of New York, a member of the party's left-wing who is opposed to the leadership's decision to vote credits for the just-started war. In 1916, Hamburger takes the quite daring decision to contest the race for the area's Congressional seat and wins, becoming one of just two women in the House of Representatives. On arrival in Philadelphia, the de-facto capital, she is welcomed by the experienced and far older Congressman Hosea Blackford, member of the party's more moderate wing from the Mid-West. They develop a romantic relationship and finally marry.
Hamburger refuses an offer by General Leonard Wood to have her brother, David Hamburger, transferred out of the front line because her Socialist principles forbid her from accepting special favors; later, David loses a leg in battle.
She is often called the "Conscience of the Congress." She opposed the repression of the Mormons of Utah, for example, and she vainly tries to draw the attention of U.S. public opinion to the plight of Blacks
Black people
The term black people is used in systems of racial classification for humans of a dark skinned phenotype, relative to other racial groups.Different societies apply different criteria regarding who is classified as "black", and often social variables such as class, socio-economic status also plays a...
in the Confederacy, even before the rise of Jake Featherston
Jake Featherston
Jacob "Jake" Featherston is a fictional character inthe Southern Victory Series novel series by Harry Turtledove. He is the fictional timeline's equivalent of Adolf Hitler.-Character introduction:...
. During the 1930s, although her earlier belief in the inevitable revolution of the proletariat
Proletariat
The proletariat is a term used to identify a lower social class, usually the working class; a member of such a class is proletarian...
has been tempered somewhat by age and experience, she is seen as the only member of Congress who really seems to care about the revival of the CSA and the rise of the Freedom Party.
An independently active First Lady, she refuses to be sidelined after her husband was defeated in the 1932 election, fell to ill health, and died in 1937, leaving her with one son, Joshua. She quickly resumes her old seat and her Congressional career in 1934. In 1941, she noticed a peculiar budget item appropriating a large amount of money for a secret project in western Washington State. She used this to strike a deal with President Al Smith
Al Smith
Alfred Emanuel Smith. , known in private and public life as Al Smith, was an American statesman who was elected the 42nd Governor of New York three times, and was the Democratic U.S. presidential candidate in 1928...
which forced the president to publicly condemn the Confederate atrocities against Southern blacks.
Throughout 1942 and 1943, Blackford found herself agreeing more with Democratic Senator Taft of Ohio about taking a hard line towards the war and towards the Mormon rebellion in Utah. Her son was drafted into the Army in 1943, and she felt some guilt after he was wounded in the closing days of the war.
Blackford was among the members of Congress to tour the site of the superbomb attack on Philadelphia in 1944. She spent much of the postwar 1944 campaigning for her re-election to Congress (which she won) and for Charles La Follete's election bid (which he lost). She gave a speech in Congress expressing thanks to the black guerilla Cassius for killing Jake Featherston, and was present at the inauguration of Tom Dewey in 1945.
Jacobs, Hal
(GW:AF-AE:CCH)Hal Jacobs was a cobbler in Washington, D.C., during the Great War. He was an agent for the spy ring for the U.S. run by Bill Reach, with Nellie Semphroch a fellow agent who reported to him. Jacobs was awarded the Distinguished Service Medal for his actions, despite being a civilian, by President Theodore Roosevelt in 1921. He married Nellie after the Great War, and died of lung cancer in 1933. He and Nellie Semphroch had a daughter, Clara.
Lavochkin, Boris
(SA:G - SA:ID)Lieutenant Boris Lavochkin was assigned as a platoon leader to the infantry company Chester Martin served in as first sergeant. He was an aggressive, violent man who enjoyed leading raids across the lines and attacking both civilians and military targets in South Carolina. At times, he threatened his own men with violence if they did not cooperate, and he had to be threatened himself from leading a raid into Charleston when the unit was halted to allow a nuclear attack on the city.
MacArthur, Daniel
(GW:WH-GW:B, AE:VO-SA:DE, SE:ID)During World War I
World War I
World War I , which was predominantly called the World War or the Great War from its occurrence until 1939, and the First World War or World War I thereafter, was a major war centred in Europe that began on 28 July 1914 and lasted until 11 November 1918...
MacArthur became the youngest division commander in the history of the US Army and a newspaper hero. This achievement was overshadowed somewhat by his serving under First Army commander George Custer, also a publicity-conscious personality who ensured that MacArthur did not win any major victories. MacArthur was eclipsed still further when Lieutenant-Colonel Irving Morrell succeeded in using innovative tactics and barrels to break the Confederate lines in early 1917.
MacArthur spent the 1930s as commandant of the new US state of Houston. Despite his best efforts he never entirely stopped the flow of Freedom Party men and weapons from Texas, but open rioting and revolt was ruthlessly crushed wherever it occurred. After Houston's return to the CSA and the subsequent outbreak of war in 1941, MacArthur was assigned to lead the US offensive in Virginia. The assault on northern Virginia failed in its objective of seizing Richmond, though MacArthur did succeed in crossing the Rappahannock. Heavy casualties on both sides and a failed Confederate counter-attack out of the Appalachians resulted in stalemate by Christmas. MacArthur was still confident of victory, even colluding with Rear Admiral William Halsey, Jr.
William Halsey, Jr.
Fleet Admiral William Frederick Halsey, Jr., United States Navy, , was a U.S. Naval officer. He commanded the South Pacific Area during the early stages of the Pacific War against Japan...
about the scheme of landing troops at the mouth of the James River and advancing on Richmond from the rear. His subordinate Abner Dowling managed to prevent this, leaving northern Virginia as of February 1942 in stalemate.
MacArthur launched two direct assaults into the heavily defended Confederate line at Fredericksburg, losing thousands of US soldiers to Confederate guns positioned on Marye's Heights above the town. The general was criticized heavily by the Joint Committee on the Conduct of the War, by Brigadier General Dowling, and by the press for his actions. In 1944, General MacArthur finally succeeded in his drive into Richmond, after the Confederacy was exhausted and forced to fight on several fronts. He victoriously led an attack capturing most of Virginia. General Abner Dowling served as a commander under MacArthur in this phase.
MacArthur was known for the plainness of his uniform, and his trademark cigarette in a holder
Cigarette holder
A cigarette holder is a fashion accessory, a slender tube in which a cigarette is held for smoking. Most frequently made of silver, jade or bakelite , cigarette holders were considered an essential part of ladies' fashion from the mid-1910s through the early-1970s, and are still widely popular...
. He is analogous to Douglas MacArthur
Douglas MacArthur
General of the Army Douglas MacArthur was an American general and field marshal of the Philippine Army. He was a Chief of Staff of the United States Army during the 1930s and played a prominent role in the Pacific theater during World War II. He received the Medal of Honor for his service in the...
but some reviewers have mistakenly named him after his historic counterpart.
Mantarakis, Paul
(Viewpoint character, GW:AF-GW:WH)Born in Philadelphia but proud of his Greek heritage, Mantarakis was a private in the U.S. Army serving in the West with Gordon McSweeney during the early part of the Great War. He rose to sergeant in fighting against the Mormon rebels in 1915 up until the Mormons' surrender and Utah's placement under martial law (which would last until 1937). Mantarakis was killed during a U.S. invasion of Baja California
Baja California
Baja California officially Estado Libre y Soberano de Baja California is one of the 31 states which, with the Federal District, comprise the 32 Federal Entities of Mexico. It is both the northernmost and westernmost state of Mexico. Before becoming a state in 1953, the area was known as the North...
in 1916.
Martin, Chester
(Viewpoint character: GW:AF-SA:ID)Martin was the son of Stephen Douglas Martin and a steelworker in Toledo, Ohio. He served on the Roanoke (southwestern Virginia) front during the Great War and received a commendation for saving the life of President Theodore Roosevelt. In 1917, as a sergeant, he briefly served as a company commander of B Company, 91st Infantry Regiment, taking part in the Remembrance Day offensive. After the war, Martin returned to his civilian job in Toledo, Ohio, as a steelworker. He became a Socialist Party member and union organizer
Union organizer
A union organizer is a specific type of trade union member or an appointed union official. A majority of unions appoint rather than elect their organizers....
, taking part in strikes and fighting company police and strikebreakers, as well as the police, during the 1920s.
Martin married Rita Habicht, who had lost her first husband in the Great War, in 1926; their son, Carl, was born in 1936. The Depression of 1929 saw Martin lose his job; he and his wife went to Southern California, where he began in construction work and became a union official. When the 1941 war started, Martin returned to the Army and served as a first sergeant
First Sergeant
First sergeant is the name of a military rank used in many countries, typically a senior non-commissioned officer.-Singapore:First Sergeant is a Specialist in the Singapore Armed Forces. First Sergeants are the most senior of the junior Specialists, ranking above Second Sergeants, and below Staff...
in the infantry, fighting in Ohio and taking part in the successful counterattack against Confederate forces there. He is shown fighting at the front lines throughout Kentucky and Tennessee and eventually ends up commanding a platoon.
Throughout 1944, Martin was part of the drive to Savannah, and participated in the burning of Hardeeville, South Carolina
Hardeeville, South Carolina
Hardeeville is a city in Jasper County, South Carolina, United States. The population was 2,952 at the 2010 census, a 64 percent increase from its recorded population of 1,793 from the 2000 Census...
and the murder of all its citizens. He was saved from being in Charleston when it was destroyed by a superbomb when his unit was ordered to halt several miles from the city. After the war ended, Martin was able to obtain his release from the Army and returned to Los Angeles, where he resumed negotiating labor contracts.
McSweeney, Gordon
(GW:AF-GW:WH; Viewpoint character, GW:WH-GW:B)McSweeney was a U.S. Army soldier who served in Utah and Baja California with Paul Mantarakis, and later in Arkansas during the Great War. A conservative Presbyterian
Presbyterianism
Presbyterianism refers to a number of Christian churches adhering to the Calvinist theological tradition within Protestantism, which are organized according to a characteristic Presbyterian polity. Presbyterian theology typically emphasizes the sovereignty of God, the authority of the Scriptures,...
, McSweeney saw himself as the instrument of God and he saw the enemy, whether they were Mormon, Mexican, or Confederates, as persons to be slaughtered without pity or mercy. He would use flamethrower
Flamethrower
A flamethrower is a mechanical device designed to project a long controllable stream of fire.Some flamethrowers project a stream of ignited flammable liquid; some project a long gas flame. Most military flamethrowers use liquids, but commercial flamethrowers tend to use high-pressure propane and...
s on enemy bunkers, for example, but also used them on trench
Trench warfare
Trench warfare is a form of occupied fighting lines, consisting largely of trenches, in which troops are largely immune to the enemy's small arms fire and are substantially sheltered from artillery...
patrols. McSweeney was as hard on his own soldiers as he was on himself and the enemy; despite this, his fighting skills were highly respected by his platoon and the Army as a whole. He was commissioned while serving in Arkansas, and won two Medals of Honor
Medal of Honor
The Medal of Honor is the highest military decoration awarded by the United States government. It is bestowed by the President, in the name of Congress, upon members of the United States Armed Forces who distinguish themselves through "conspicuous gallantry and intrepidity at the risk of his or her...
during the Great War, the second awarded for destroying a Confederate river gunboat single-handedly. McSweeney was killed by shellfire during the last days of the Great War.
Morrell, Irving
(Viewpoint character, GW:AF-SA:ID)Born in late 1891, Irving Morrell was accepted and graduated from the West Point
United States Military Academy
The United States Military Academy at West Point is a four-year coeducational federal service academy located at West Point, New York. The academy sits on scenic high ground overlooking the Hudson River, north of New York City...
. At the outbreak of World War I he was a captain on the southwest border. Leading his company against a Confederate farmhouse in Sonora
Sonora
Sonora officially Estado Libre y Soberano de Sonora is one of the 31 states which, with the Federal District, comprise the 32 Federal Entities of Mexico. It is divided into 72 municipalities; the capital city is Hermosillo....
in September 1914, Morrell was severely wounded in the thigh, and would permanently suffer from a slight limp. While in the hospital he and a doctor jointly proposed the idea of metal helmets after a conversation concerning head wounds.
Upon recovery in 1915, Morrell was dispatched to eastern Kentucky, where his aggressive tactics resulted in a posting to the General Staff. Morrell's star rose still further that year when President Theodore Roosevelt
Theodore Roosevelt
Theodore "Teddy" Roosevelt was the 26th President of the United States . He is noted for his exuberant personality, range of interests and achievements, and his leadership of the Progressive Movement, as well as his "cowboy" persona and robust masculinity...
, after an informal talk about the ongoing Mormon uprising in Utah, 'persuaded' the War Department to adopt Morrell's more imaginative plans. When the Mormons stalled the resulting US advance by doing the unexpected, General Leonard Wood
Leonard Wood
Leonard Wood was a physician who served as the Chief of Staff of the United States Army, Military Governor of Cuba and Governor General of the Philippines. Early in his military career, he received the Medal of Honor. Wood also holds officer service #2 in the Regular Army...
protected the young officer by sending him to British Columbia
British Columbia
British Columbia is the westernmost of Canada's provinces and is known for its natural beauty, as reflected in its Latin motto, Splendor sine occasu . Its name was chosen by Queen Victoria in 1858...
to cut Canada's Pacific coast off from the interior. Morrell spent most of 1916 doing that, earning praise from observers Eduard Dietl
Eduard Dietl
Eduard Dietl was a German general of World War II. He was born in Bad Aibling, Bavaria. He was also a recipient of the Knight's Cross of the Iron Cross with Oak Leaves and Swords...
of Austria-Hungary
Austria-Hungary
Austria-Hungary , more formally known as the Kingdoms and Lands Represented in the Imperial Council and the Lands of the Holy Hungarian Crown of Saint Stephen, was a constitutional monarchic union between the crowns of the Austrian Empire and the Kingdom of Hungary in...
and Heinz Guderian
Heinz Guderian
Heinz Wilhelm Guderian was a German general during World War II. He was a pioneer in the development of armored warfare, and was the leading proponent of tanks and mechanization in the Wehrmacht . Germany's panzer forces were raised and organized under his direction as Chief of Mobile Forces...
of Germany
Germany
Germany , officially the Federal Republic of Germany , is a federal parliamentary republic in Europe. The country consists of 16 states while the capital and largest city is Berlin. Germany covers an area of 357,021 km2 and has a largely temperate seasonal climate...
.
In the final year of the war Morrell's innovative use of barrels
Tank
A tank is a tracked, armoured fighting vehicle designed for front-line combat which combines operational mobility, tactical offensive, and defensive capabilities...
ensured the seizure of Nashville, and the subsequent rupture of Confederate lines. Soon, General Custer's
George Armstrong Custer
George Armstrong Custer was a United States Army officer and cavalry commander in the American Civil War and the Indian Wars. Raised in Michigan and Ohio, Custer was admitted to West Point in 1858, where he graduated last in his class...
and Morrell's doctrine of massed barrel attacks was in use along every eastern front in North America. When the war ended, Morrell was a Colonel, a national hero, and was given his choice of assignments. He decided to head Barrel Works in Ft. Leavenworth, Kansas, and initially made great strides in designing the next generation of barrels. While stationed in Leavenworth, Morrell met Agnes Hill, a widow who lost her husband early in the Great War. They married in 1921, and their daughter, Mildred, was born in 1925.
The cost-cutting of Upton Sinclair
Upton Sinclair
Upton Beall Sinclair Jr. , was an American author who wrote close to one hundred books in many genres. He achieved popularity in the first half of the twentieth century, acquiring particular fame for his classic muckraking novel, The Jungle . It exposed conditions in the U.S...
's Socialist administration ensured that Barrel Works was closed down in 1923. His subsequent posting to Philadelphia lasted only two years, with his outspoken criticism of America's foreign policy resulting in a transfer to occupation duty in Kamloops, British Columbia. The next seven years proved largely uneventful, with Morrell handling a sullen but acquiescent region. He received a visit in 1926 from now-Lieutenant-Colonel Guderian, along with an unnamed German sergeant who had strong anti-semitic views.
With the outbreak of the Pacific War in 1932, Morrell found himself back at Barrel Works, though he was soon transferred to occupation duty in Houston, his wife and daughter remained at Fort Leavenworth, as Morrell didn't want to risk their lives in the hostile state. With the plebiscite of 1940 came Houston's return to the CSA, and Morrell was assigned as barrel commander in Ohio under Brigadier General Abner Dowling, Custer's former adjutant.
When Confederate Operation Blackbeard was launched on June 22, 1941 Morrell found himself in an unenviable position. Despite his best efforts, the prewar shortage of soldiers and barrels ensured that General George Patton's armor succeeded in reaching Sandusky on Lake Erie by late August. With the United States cut in half, Morrell found his attempts to throw the Confederates back frustrated not only by CS sabotage in eastern Ohio but the War Department's focus on northern Virginia.
In January, 1942, Morrell was badly wounded by a Confederate would-be assassin, which ironically served to bring him to his own superiors' attention as to just how skilled and dangerous a commander the CSA viewed him to be. Upon recovery and a promotion to Brigadier General, he commanded the US forces in Ohio and Pennsylvania during Operation Coalscuttle
Settling Accounts: Drive to the East
Drive to the East is the second book in Harry Turtledove's Settling Accounts series of alternate history novels. It is set in an analog of World War II in North America, fought between the United States and Confederate States. It was released in August 2005. It follows Return Engagement and...
. His victory at Pittsburgh in early 1943 was the beginning of the end for the CSA.
Morrell planned an assault on Kentucky and Tennessee. Knowing that the Confederates were familiar with the details of the 1917 attack, he used deception to concentrate Confederate forces around Covington, but struck further west in a massive amphibious assault across the Ohio River in the summer of 1943. He drove past Bowling Green and moved into east Tennessee towards Chattanooga. In August, an airborne assault on Lookout Mountain and Missionary Ridge prevented Chattanooga from becoming a Confederate Pittsburgh. Morrell's troops then moved towards Atlanta, the industrial heart of the Confederacy. Morrell succeeded in taking Atlanta, and proceeded to head towards Savannah, cutting the Confederacy in two. This action was similar to Sherman's March to the Sea
Sherman's March to the Sea
Sherman's March to the Sea is the name commonly given to the Savannah Campaign conducted around Georgia from November 15, 1864 to December 21, 1864 by Maj. Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman of the Union Army in the American Civil War...
in the American Civil War
American Civil War
The American Civil War was a civil war fought in the United States of America. In response to the election of Abraham Lincoln as President of the United States, 11 southern slave states declared their secession from the United States and formed the Confederate States of America ; the other 25...
. Morrell witnessed the superbomb attack on Philadelphia, during which drops of radioactive liquid came into contact with his skin, which he wisely chose to scrub off as quickly as possible.
On July 14, 1944, Morrell arrived in Pineville, North Carolina to accept the surrender of the Confederate States from President Don Partridge. When the U.S. moved into the former Confederacy to occupy it, Morrell was made military governor of Virginia, the Carolinas, Georgia, and Florida. As military governor, Morrell made it clear that any attempt to rebel against the United States would result in the use of force; in addition, any attempt to stir up mob action against returned black concentration camp survivors would also be met by force. Morrell supervised the production of a pamphlet, Equality, which stated the U.S. position of total legal equality between black and white ex-Confederates, including marriage if both parties wanted it. This pamphlet was produced throughout the former Confederacy.
Asked to testify for the defense in the trial of Clarence Potter, Morrell magnanimously agreed, though it was Potter who tried to have Morrell assassinated in the early part of the war. Morrell's testimony, confirming the United States also used the "ruse of war" of having troops dressed in enemy uniform infiltrate behind the lines. It was probably Morrell's testimony which saves Potter's life and made it impossible for the court to sentence him to death for using the same "ruse" in the bombing of Philadelphia.
There are parallels between Morrell and Heinz Guderian
Heinz Guderian
Heinz Wilhelm Guderian was a German general during World War II. He was a pioneer in the development of armored warfare, and was the leading proponent of tanks and mechanization in the Wehrmacht . Germany's panzer forces were raised and organized under his direction as Chief of Mobile Forces...
, in that both developed the warfare of armoured fighting vehicles not in a supporting role, but as a fighting force of their own. Both Guderian and Morrell faced the disinterrest of their general staff; unlike Guderian, Morrell's pledge remained unheared until the attack of the CSA.
Moss, Jonathan
(Viewpoint character, GW:AF-SA:ID)Jonathan Moss grew up in a well-to-do Chicago family, and enlisted as a U.S. fighter pilot out of college. Flying on the southern Ontario front in the Great War, Moss established a strong relationship with a Canadian farmer named Laura Secord. Moss studied law at Northwestern University
Northwestern University
Northwestern University is a private research university in Evanston and Chicago, Illinois, USA. Northwestern has eleven undergraduate, graduate, and professional schools offering 124 undergraduate degrees and 145 graduate and professional degrees....
near Chicago after the War, pining after Secord all the while, and moved to Berlin, Ontario in Occupied Canada to establish his career as an attorney in military occupation courts. He earned some fame as a defender of Canadians' rights, though Moss readily admitted this only meant he lost less often than most of his peers, as the legal system created by the occupiers was heavily weighted against the "Canuck
Canuck
"Canuck" is a slang term for Canadians. Its origins are uncertain.-History:The term appears to have been coined in the 19th century, although its etymology is unclear, it usually referred to those who worked in a forest, usually cultivating wood....
s".
By patient wooing Moss eventually won the love of Laura Secord and married her. However, marrying an American, even a liberal one, made her a traitor in the eyes of Canadian nationalists, and she was suspected of having betrayed the rebellion of 1924. Fascinated by the new fighter planes which he sees, Moss persuades the authorities to let him take up part-time flying for the United States armed forces. This act, widely publicized in the press, acts as the final trigger causing Mary McGregor Pomeroy to send a package bomb which kills Moss' wife and daughter. Full of anger and bitterness, Moss turned his back upon Canada and rejoined the U.S. Army as a full-time fighter pilot. When World War II erupted he fought for approximately a year on the Ohio and Virginia fronts, was shot down over Virginia, and sent to Andersonville, Georgia
Andersonville, Georgia
Andersonville is a city in Sumter County, Georgia, United States. The population was 331 at the 2000 census . It is located in the southwest part of the state, about southwest of Macon, Georgia on the Central of Georgia railroad...
as a POW. He escaped during a tornado along with Nick Cantarella, and the two joined a band of black guerrillas, led by Spartacus, fighting the Confederacy. Throughout 1942 and 1943, he and the black guerrilla band continue to wage operations against the Confederate civilian population and the Mexican forces across rural Georgia. However, an attempt to steal a plane - with which Spartacus wants Moss to strafe the Confederates from the air while Moss himself hopes to use it to return to the US Army positions - leads the band into an ambush in which it is badly mauled.
In 1944, Moss was rescued by advancing U.S. forces, and was able to return to flying near the end of the war. He finished the Second Great War with three kills, after having been an ace in the Great War. His next duty was to travel to Houston, Texas to act as a defense lawyer for Jefferson Pinkard. Despite Moss' best efforts, Pinkard was found guilty of crimes against humanity and sentenced to death. Moss was then offered a place on the Judge Advocate's staff, a position which he accepted, and has taken up helping the surviving Blacks as his new cause.
O'Doull, Leonard
(GW:WH-AE:VO, Viewpoint character AE:VO-SA:ID)Leonard O'Doull, M.D., was a surgeon who served in the U.S. Army on the Quebec front in the Great War at a military hospital in Rivière-du-Loup. While stationed there, he met Nicole Galtier, the daughter of Lucien Galtier, upon whose land the hospital had been built. He married Nicole in 1917 and after the war he settled down to practice in Rivière-du-Loup in the Republic of Quebec. The marriage produced one son, Lucien O'Doull, named for his maternal grandfather.
In his time in Rivière-du-Loup, O'Doull developed a fondness for the Québécois people and culture, and became very close to his wife's family, especially his father-in-law. His French, fluent to start with, developed from "Parisian" into the quite distinct Québécois dialect.
When the Second Great War began, O'Doull was encouraged by US authorities to rejoin the US Army. Despite his having grown very comfortable in the Republic of Quebec, he found his loyalties remained with the nation of his birth and rejoined the Army's Medical Service, where he was given the rank of major. He was stationed on the Virginia front, where he befriended Granville McDougald, and was transferred to the city of Pittsburgh
Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania
Pittsburgh is the second-largest city in the US Commonwealth of Pennsylvania and the county seat of Allegheny County. Regionally, it anchors the largest urban area of Appalachia and the Ohio River Valley, and nationally, it is the 22nd-largest urban area in the United States...
when it was invaded by the Confederates. After the decisive U.S. victory in Pittsburgh, O'Doull found himself as a front line surgeon in an army rapidly advancing through Kentucky and Tennessee.
O'Doull remained with the Army through the end of the war, making lieutenant colonel, and the beginning of the occupation in Alabama; however, he was able to secure his discharge through the offices of the Québécois government and returned to private practice in Rivière-du-Loup.
Pound, Michael
(AE:BI-SA:RE; Viewpoint character SA:DE-SA:ID)Michael Pound was a U.S. Army sergeant who had fought in the First Great War. During the Second Great War, he served under Colonel Irving Morrell's command. After Morrell's wounding in 1941, Pound was transferred to another unit. He was rash, loud, and outspoken towards senior officers, but an effective mentor to junior officers who served with him. He saw action in Ohio, despite having a tank shot out from under him, and in the Battle of Pittsburgh as gunner in a U.S. barrel. Because of Pound's experience in barrel development, he was proficient at judging distance, a trait he used to destroy many Confederate barrels that otherwise would have been out of range in Pittsburgh. He received a battlefield commission in 1943.
As a lieutenant, Pound commanded a platoon of five barrels in the attacks through Kentucky and Tennessee. He used deception to seize a key bridge in Kentucky, enabling the U.S. advance to go faster than planned. Pound eventually took part in the charge into Alabama, where he was burned when his barrel was attacked. After recovery, he was sent to Tallahassee, Florida to take part in the U.S. occupation there, where he helped defuse boycotts of services imposed by Confederate businesses.
Quigley, Jedediah
(GW:AF-AE:BI, SA:RE, SA:ID)Lieutenant Colonel Jedediah Quigley, from New Hampshire, was the U.S. Army officer in charge of the military government of Rivière-du-Loup, Quebec, during the Great War. He seized land from Luicien Galtier to build a military hospital in 1915; however, he agreed to pay back rent to the Galtiers when Galtier's attitude became more positive toward the U.S. After the Great War, he became the U.S. military representative to the Government of Quebec. He returned to Quebec shortly after the outbreak of the 1941 War to persuade Leonard O'Doull to return to active duty as an Army doctor for U.S. forces fighting in Ohio. After the war, he appeared once more, in his seventies, to ask O'Doull to make a report on ways and means military medicine could be improved.
Reach, William
(GW:AF-GW:B)"Bill" Reach was a reporter for the Washington Evening Star before the Great War. Before that, although it is not clear, he is intimated that he was Nellie Semphroch's lover, maybe even her procurer, and perhaps the father of Edna Semphroch. He was in charge of the U.S. spy ring in Washington, D.C., to which Nellie Semphroch and Hal Jacobs reported. He was able to warn Jacobs and Semphroch of an artillery bombardment that killed Edna Semphroch's fiancé in 1916. He was finally killed by Nellie Semphroch when he attempted to rape her during the Confederate withdrawal from Washington.
Reisen, Yossel Jr.
(GW:WH-AE:BI, AE:VO-SA:G)Yossel Reisen Jr. is the nephew of Congresswoman Flora Blackford. He was born in 1915 during the Great War. Reisen never knew his father, who was killed in the war before he was born. By 1941, Reisen had been conscripted in the Army and served in the same regiment with Armstrong Grimes, taking part in fighting against the Mormon rebellion in Utah.
Semphroch, Edna (Grimes)
(GW:AF-AE:VO, SA:G)Edna Semphroch, along with her mother Nellie, ran a coffee shop in Washington, D.C., before, during, and after the Confederate occupation of the city from 1914 to 1917. She was unaware of her mother's activities as a U.S. spy, and in fact was ready to marry a Confederate officer, Lieutenant Nicholas H. Kincaid, when shellfire from a U.S. cannon hit the church on H Street where the wedding was to be held, killing him. Edna received the Order of Remembrance, Second Class, from President Roosevelt after the Great War for her "services to the U.S," though Nellie believed that she had done nothing to deserve it. She married Merle Grimes, a government clerk, after the war to avoid any possible scandal. She gave birth to a son, Armstrong Grimes, and a daughter, Annie Grimes.
Semphroch, Nellie (Jacobs)
(HFR, Viewpoint character, GW:AF-AE:VO)Nellie Semphroch was born in the mid-1870s in Washington, D.C., and experienced the first Confederate bombardment of the city during the Second Mexican War. In 1881, German military observer Alfred von Schlieffen saw her walking along a road in Washington in between bombings and the subsequent evacuation of government personnel to Philadelphia. She apparently struggled as a young woman and supported herself as a prostitute. By 1914, however, she had managed to purchase a small restaurant in Washington, and was greatly concerned to hide her shady past from everybody else in general and from her daughter Edna in partiucular. The restaurant became a popular place for Confederate officers to eat, and Nellie found herself involved gathering intelligence for a U.S. spy ring run by Hal Jacobs, a cobbler, who also gathered information on Confederate forces. Near the end of the war, she killed Bill Reach, a US spymaster, when he tried to rape her. It would always haunt her when Hal Jacobs talked of him. It was also intimated that Bill Reach may have been Nellie's daughter's (Edna's) father.
Because her restaurant had been popular with the Confederates, she was initially arrested as a collaborator when the U.S. reoccupied the city in 1917. However, charges were dismissed and President Theodore Roosevelt awarded her with the Order of Remembrance, First Class. After the Great War, Semphroch married Jacobs and continued to run her coffee shop, catering to both Washingtonians and Confederate businessmen who remembered her place affectionately. She did not reveal her role as a U.S. spy until the late 1930s. She died in 1937 of blood poisoning, not long after attending Al Smith's presidential inauguration.
Bartlett, Reginald
(Viewpoint character, GW:AF-AE:CCH)Reggie Bartlett was a pharmacist's assistant in Richmond, Virginia, when the Great War began in 1914. Shortly after being fired for skipping work to see Woodrow Wilson's declaration of war speech, he joined the Seventh Virginia Regiment of the Confederate Army, fast becoming a hardened veteran. He is captured by Chester Martin's unit but eventually escapes from captivity, together with submarine commander Ralph Briggs. He was severely wounded and captured again by U.S. forces and remained a prisoner of war hospital patient until the Armistice, there becoming friendly with a black Confederate POW who might have been a former Marxist rebel. Returning to Richmond, Bartlett saw the rise of the Freedom Party and actively opposed it, supporting instead the Radical Liberals. He was gunned down by Freedom Party stalwarts in 1925, whose posters he had torn down.
Cassius
(GW:AF-GW:B)Cassius was the huntsman for the Marshlands Plantation in St. Matthews, South Carolina, owned by the Colleton family. He was also head of the Marxist underground in the area. When the Red Rebellion of 1915-16 broke out, Cassius became the leader of the Congaree Socialist Republic and was responsible for ordering the execution of many “enemies of the people,” both black and white. He escaped the crushing of the Republic in 1916 and with his female companion, Cherry, continued guerilla operations against the Confederacy, and in particular against Anne Colleton. Cassius was killed by Tom Colleton shortly after the Armistice of 1917.
Colleton, Anne
(Viewpoint character, GW:AF-SA:RE)Anne Colleton, in 1914, was the owner of the Marshlands Plantation of St. Matthews, South Carolina, a supporter of the arts, including Marcel Duchamp
Marcel Duchamp
Marcel Duchamp was a French artist whose work is most often associated with the Dadaist and Surrealist movements. Considered by some to be one of the most important artists of the 20th century, Duchamp's output influenced the development of post-World War I Western art...
, and a prominent political figure in the state. The Red rebellion of 1915 resulted in the loss of the mansion house at Marshlands, which was burned down by her chief hunter, Cassius, and the death of her brother, Jacob, who had been a soldier and was debilitated by gas. This started a personal vendetta between Colleton, whose political influence could raise the state militia, and Cassius and his female partner, Cherry, which lasted until Cassius was killed by her brother Tom shortly after the Armistice of 1917.
She was briefly involved in a romantic affair with Confederate Navy commander Roger Kimball during the Great War, but broke off the affair when Kimball became too involved in the Freedom Party. She was also intimately involved with Clarence Potter for a brief time, though their conflicting politics prevented them from establishing a long-term relationship.
During the period between the World Wars, Colleton became involved with the Freedom Party as a designer for mass-rallies, but stopped her support after a Freedom Party sniper killed President Wade Hampton V. However, as she realized that the Freedom Party was likely to win control of the nation, Colleton worked her way back into favor with Featherston. Colleton was killed in a U.S. bombing raid on Charleston, South Carolina, in the early days of the Second Great War while in the city on Freedom Party business.
Colleton, Tom
(GW:AF-SA:RE, Viewpoint character SA:RE-SA:DE)Tom Colleton was the brother of Anne Colleton. He served as a Confederate infantry officer during the war of 1914-1917, reaching the rank of Lieutenant Colonel, but left the Army after the war ended. He, and his sister, using South Carolina militia, ended up hunting down the last remnants of the Congaree Socialist Republic, and he personally killed their leader Cassius. He was recalled to service in World War II, as a Lieutenant Colonel. He dislikes the Freedom Party but nevertheless goes out to fight in the Featherston-formented war, out of patriotism and hatred of the Yankees. Colleton's unit was involved in the invasion of Ohio and Pennsylvania, and was trapped in the Battle of Pittsburgh, where he was killed in late January 1943, just days before the Confederate pocket surrendered.
Dover, Jerry
(AE:CCH-SA:DE; Viewpoint character SA:G-SA:ID)Jerry Dover was a frontline Great War veteran and the manager of Huntsman's Lodge in Augusta, Georgia and was Scipio's boss. He was known to protect his black workers from Freedom Party cleanouts, although this was more out of personal liking for Scipio and other workers, and for the benefit of the Lodge, than from any anti-racist sentiment on his part. Dover's attitude was rude to anyone who stood in the way of his doing his job and he let people know how he felt in richly profane language. Dover is first seen through Scipio's eyes, and becomes a viewpoint character in his own right.
In 1942, Dover signed up for the Quartermasters Corps as a major, and was called to active duty later that year. Dover was known to work his men "like niggers" according to observers. When his commander went missing in 1943, Dover organized the supplies of the Confederate Army in Kentucky, falling back to Tennessee and Georgia. He was promoted to lieutenant colonel and also received the Purple Heart for injuries sustained during a U.S. bombing raid.
Although married, Dover also had a female friend, who blackmailed him for money and military information. The fact that Dover reported the blackmail first and was good at his job saved him from being arrested by the Confederate intelligence. Dover was captured in Alabama and spent the rest of the war as a prisoner. Returning to Augusta, he was offered the position of managing the Huntsman's Lodge once more.
Dresser, Anthony
(AE:BI)Anthony Dresser founded the Freedom Party in Richmond, Virginia
Richmond, Virginia
Richmond is the capital of the Commonwealth of Virginia, in the United States. It is an independent city and not part of any county. Richmond is the center of the Richmond Metropolitan Statistical Area and the Greater Richmond area...
after the end of World War I
World War I
World War I , which was predominantly called the World War or the Great War from its occurrence until 1939, and the First World War or World War I thereafter, was a major war centred in Europe that began on 28 July 1914 and lasted until 11 November 1918...
in 1917. The party consisted only of a few people and was only able to get fliers across war-ravaged Richmond because one of its members was a printer. Jake Featherston became interested in the party and soon became one of its members. Anthony Dresser tried giving a speech at a campaign for the Confederate Congress and was nearly laughed off the stage until Featherston stepped up. Featherston began blaming the blacks and war department for the CSA's loss in the war which struck a chord with many Confederates. Featherston began a speaking tour to raise support for the party, and soon became the Freedom Party's Head of Propaganda
Propaganda
Propaganda is a form of communication that is aimed at influencing the attitude of a community toward some cause or position so as to benefit oneself or one's group....
.
With this new-found support for Featherston, Dresser became afraid for his position in the party and tried to have Featherston removed, stating Featherston had turned the party's message into one saying "Hang the generals and hang the niggers" and was giving people the wrong idea about the party. Though Dresser found some support amongst the rank-and-file Party members Featherston pointed out that he raised more than half of the party's funding and without him, the party would go back to being nothing. The motion to remove Featherston failed, and Featherston himself raised the motion to remove Dresser. The motion was carried out by a landslide and Featherston became head of the Freedom Party while Dresser faded into obscurity.
Dresser is an analog to Anton Drexler
Anton Drexler
Anton Drexler was a German right-wing political leader of the 1920s, known for being Adolf Hitler's mentor during his early days in politics.-Biography:...
, the founder of the Nazi Party.
FitzBelmont, Henderson V.
(SA:RE-SA:ID)Professor Henderson V. FitzBelmont was a physicist at Washington University in Lexington, Virginia. In 1941, he attempted to convince President Featherston to provide him with funding to begin work on an atomic bomb project. Featherston denied this request, and it wasn't until the next year when Confederate intelligence found that the United States was working on their own uranium enrichment project. Shortly after finding this out, Featherston gave permission to FitzBelmont to begin work on his project. Partly because of Featherston's initial refusal, the U.S. nuclear program had a clear advantage over the Confederate one, a fact that was made clear by FitzBelmont after his second meeting with the President. Nevertheless, due to FitzBelmont's brilliance and dedication, he and his team managed to produce a nuclear "superbomb" under constant heavy bombing by the US Air Force, and were able against all odds to be the first on the North American continent to produce a nuclear superbomb which was exploded at the outskirts of Philadelphia, with gruesome results. However, before they could produce a second one the Confederacy collapsed and Lexington was captured by the US Army.
After being thoroughly interrogated FitzBelmont hoped to be allowed to resume his academic career - telling his American captors that he was no longer a danger to them, since building a bomb dependent on the resources of major power which the defunct Confederacy would no longer put at his disposal. However, the Americans considered him a dangerous "bomb" in himself, since he could have been captured by a rival power seeking nuclear arms and placed his knowledge and ability at such a power's disposal. Therefore, he was one of the Confederates whose liquidation in a faked "accident" was ordered by General John Abell.
Goldman, Saul
(AE:CCH-SA:ID)Saul Goldman is a high-ranking member of the Freedom Party. Goldman was the director of the first radio network in Richmond in the 1920s when Jake Featherston of the Freedom Party found him. Being the first politician to recognize radio's full potential, the Freedom Party leader uses Goldman's studio to broadcast speeches to the people of the Confederate States. Goldman isn't turned away by the repulsive nature of the Freedom Party; rather, he is glad the Party goes after blacks and not Jews, the way the Russians did in Poland
Poland
Poland , officially the Republic of Poland , is a country in Central Europe bordered by Germany to the west; the Czech Republic and Slovakia to the south; Ukraine, Belarus and Lithuania to the east; and the Baltic Sea and Kaliningrad Oblast, a Russian exclave, to the north...
.
In time, Featherston is elected Confederate president, and he gives Goldman the post of Director of Communications (the head of the Freedom Party's propaganda). Goldman consolidates the media networks and publishing companies of the CSA into one ministry under the Freedom Party's direction, and imposes near-totalitarian control over what the Confederate people read and hear. While doing all this, Goldman remains a quiet, shy man, never becoming the balls-and-fists type of stalwart that the Freedom Party attracts in droves. Featherston gives him credit for being the one man in the Party that "had more brains than balls."
In 1944, Goldman flees Richmond with Featherston and other important Confederate officials, but is captured after Featherston is killed. Along with Ferdinand Koenig, Goldman is tried by the USA for crimes against humanity and executed - it being judged that systematically instilling racist
Racism
Racism is the belief that inherent different traits in human racial groups justify discrimination. In the modern English language, the term "racism" is used predominantly as a pejorative epithet. It is applied especially to the practice or advocacy of racial discrimination of a pernicious nature...
hatred of blacks in the Confederacy's population makes him a full accomplice in the Black Holocaust, even though he was not directly involved in the killings themselves.
Goldman is analogous to Joseph Goebbels
Joseph Goebbels
Paul Joseph Goebbels was a German politician and Reich Minister of Propaganda in Nazi Germany from 1933 to 1945. As one of Adolf Hitler's closest associates and most devout followers, he was known for his zealous oratory and anti-Semitism...
and is possibly modelled after Samuel Goldwyn
Samuel Goldwyn
Samuel Goldwyn was an American film producer, and founding contributor executive of several motion picture studios.-Biography:...
as well.
Hampton, Wade V
(AE:BI)Wade Hampton V is a fictional descendant of Wade Hampton III
Wade Hampton III
Wade Hampton III was a Confederate cavalry leader during the American Civil War and afterward a politician from South Carolina, serving as its 77th Governor and as a U.S...
and a prominent member of the Whigs. In 1921, Hampton V ran for President of the CSA and won election over both Jake Featherston (Freedom) and Ainsworth Layne (Radical Liberals). His presidency came to a premature end in June 1922 when he was assassinated by Freedom Party member Grady Calkins at a Birmingham rally. Hampton became the first president in the history of either the Confederate States or United States to be assassinated. His vice-president Burton Mitchel III was sworn in as president afterwards to finish the remainder of his six-year team.
Kimball, Roger
(GW:AF, Viewpoint character, GW:WH-AE:BI)Lieutenant Commander Roger Kimball was a submarine commander in the Confederate States Navy during the Great War. He received a Confederate Navy Cross for sinking two US gunships during a raid in a Chesapeake Bay harbor. He later was given a promotion to Commander after another raid into New York harbor which ended with the sinking of two US Battleships. He resumed command of a submarine until receiving news of the Armistice in 1917, upon which he torpedoed the USS Ericsson after hostilities ended, killing, among others, Seaman George Enos.
Kimball was romantically involved with Anne Colleton in 1915. They resumed their relationship after the War, when both were involved in the Freedom Party's rise; however, Colleton broke off the relationship when the Party lost prestige following the assassination of Confederate President Wade Hampton V by a Freedom Party member. Shortly after their breakup, Kimball was shot and killed by Sylvia Enos, widow of George Enos.
Knight, Willy
(AE:BI-SA:RE)Willy Knight was the first Vice-President of Jake Featherston's Confederate government. He was the head of Texas-based Redemption League, which held similar goals to the Freedom Party, before his group was swallowed up by the Freedom Party. Towards the crucial 1933 elections, Featherston decided to take Knight as his running mate so as to unite the White racist, anti-establishment vote. This aroused the anger of Koenig, Featherston's faithful lieutenant, leading to their only serious quarrel. Featherston, however, managed to convince Koenig that he was setting a trap for Knight, fobbing him off with a meaningless title, while Koening as "Attorney General" would create and head a fearsome secret police.
It took some years for Knight to understand the situation in which he was trapped, the full reality hitting him when Featherston got the Confederate Constitution amended so as to allow Presidents to serve more than one-term in office. This precipitated Knight's failed coup d'etat
Coup d'état
A coup d'état state, literally: strike/blow of state)—also known as a coup, putsch, and overthrow—is the sudden, extrajudicial deposition of a government, usually by a small group of the existing state establishment—typically the military—to replace the deposed government with another body; either...
in 1939, after which Knight was imprisoned in Louisiana's Camp Dependable, run by Jefferson Pinkard - being placed as the only White prisoner among hundreds of Black rebels. Presumably, Ferdinand Koenig and Featherston assumed that they could neatly get rid of Knight by putting him at the mercy of militant Blacks who hated Whites in general, and senior Freedom Party officials in particular. However, rather than being killed by his Black fellow-inmates, Knight won their grudging respect. After a long period in which Pinkard repeatedly reported to Richmond that Knight was still alive, and that the Blacks were showing no inclination to kill him, in 1941 Koening at last ordered Knight executed, an order which Pinkard duly implemented.
His name may be derived from the Willys-Knight
Willys-Knight
Willys-Knight is an automobile that was produced between 1914 and 1933 by the Willys-Overland Company of Toledo, Ohio.John North Willys purchased the Edwards Motor Car Company of Long Island, New York, in 1913, moving the operation to Elyria, Ohio, where Willys owned the plant that had previously...
automobile.
The internal struggle in the Freedom Party has rough historic parallels with the Röhm-Putsch.
Koenig, Ferdinand
(AE:BI-SA:ID)Ferdinand Koenig is a high-ranking member of the Freedom Party and the CSA's Attorney General. His character appears to have been inspired by both Heinrich Himmler
Heinrich Himmler
Heinrich Luitpold Himmler was Reichsführer of the SS, a military commander, and a leading member of the Nazi Party. As Chief of the German Police and the Minister of the Interior from 1943, Himmler oversaw all internal and external police and security forces, including the Gestapo...
and Hermann Göring
Hermann Göring
Hermann Wilhelm Göring, was a German politician, military leader, and a leading member of the Nazi Party. He was a veteran of World War I as an ace fighter pilot, and a recipient of the coveted Pour le Mérite, also known as "The Blue Max"...
.
Koenig began his career as Party secretary, where he was found by Jake Featherston and molded into his staunchest supporter. Twice he ran on the Freedom ticket as vice president, but allowed the spot to go to Willy Knight in 1933. Instead Featherston made Koenig attorney general of the Confederate States. Once in office, Koenig searched for ways to disband the Supreme Court and increase Featherston's power by arresting and executing members of the opposition parties.
As the 1940s dawned, Featherston decided that the time had come to begin "population reductions" (i.e.: killing off the Confederacy's blacks). Koenig was tasked with overseeing this program, for which he ordered a number of camps established in Louisiana. Shipments of Negroes commenced in 1940, composed of men from Confederate jails or those arrested at roadblocks in the towns. Before long places such as Camp Dependable, outside of Alexandria, Louisiana
Alexandria, Louisiana
Alexandria is a city in and the parish seat of Rapides Parish, Louisiana, United States. It lies on the south bank of the Red River in almost the exact geographic center of the state. It is the principal city of the Alexandria metropolitan area which encompasses all of Rapides and Grant parishes....
, were filled to overflowing. Shortly before the outbreak of 1941 War, Koenig phoned Camp Dependable's commandant, Jefferson Pinkard, with the news that 2000 more blacks would arriving, along with an unspoken order to ensure there was sufficient room for them. Other camps received similar instructions, resulting in the first massacres. In early 1942, Koenig upped the ante. Entire portions of black districts in towns would be cleared out over the course of a single night.
Even as the situation of the war grew obviously worse, Koenig rarely wavered in his belief that Confederates will win the war as Featherston promised. Evidently, his blind devotion to Featherston and his cause prevented him from making rational decisions in the better interest of the nation. Under Featherston's orders, he diverted badly needed resources from the war effort into the extermination program, which he believes takes priority to winning the conflict. He authorizes the building of Camp Humble when Camp Determination is overrun by U.S. troops.
In 1944, Koenig fled Richmond with Featherston and other important Confederate officials, but was captured after Featherston was killed. Along with Saul Goldman, Koenig was tried by the USA for crimes against humanity and executed.
Madison, Cassius
(AE:CCH-SA:DE; Viewpoint character SA:G-SA:ID)Named for the late huntsman at the Marshlands Plantation, Cassius is the son of Scipio and Bathsheba. As he grew up in Augusta's Terry district, he developed a sense to strike back at the white "ofays" who oppressed him and his family.
In early 1943, Cassius told his father that he would not be attending church one Sunday, which meant that he escaped a cleanout of the Terry which took his father, his mother, and his sister Antoinette. For a time after leaving the Terry, Cassius looked for whatever work he could find, eventually joining a resistance group led by Gracchus.
After US forces occupied the part of Georgia he was operating in, Cassius became an auxiliary for the US Army in Madison, Georgia
Madison, Georgia
Madison is a city in Morgan County, Georgia, United States. The population was 3,636 at the 2000 census. The city is the county seat of Morgan County....
. While serving in this capacity in 1944, he came across Jake Featherston and other top Freedom officials walking down a road from Athens after their plane was shot down. Cassius shot Featherston several times, killing the President of the Confederate States, and taking the rest of the group prisoner. He became famous, given a cash reward and became a U.S. citizen, taking the last name of Madison after the town where he shot and killed Featherston. He attends the inauguration of Tom Dewey in February 1945 as a special guest.
Mattox, Lulu
(AE:BI-SA:ID)Lulu Mattox is the personal secretary of Jake Featherston. She was hired by the Freedom party in the early 1920s to work for Featherston, though the Freedom Party leader had shown no interest in hiring a secretary. In later years, however, Featherston would credit Mattox for the Party's survival, especially after the anti-Freedom backlash resulting from the assassination of President Wade Hampton V, and was one of the few people whose feelings mattered to Featherston.
Mattox presented herself as an obstacle to people who wished to meet with Featherston, especially those who weren't close associates with him. During Featherston's presidency she took care of her boss, making sure he ate and got enough sleep between meetings and events. That helped endear her to Jake Featherston.
In 1944, she fled Virginia and North Carolina with her boss and several other Freedom Party officials. Attempting to flee South Carolina by plane, she was badly wounded when the group was shot down. She pleaded with Jake Featherston to shoot her before he makes his getaway, as she did not want to be taken by US forces and live the rest of her life in a world without Featherston. With great reluctance, her boss carried out her last wish, shooting her dead with his Colt .45.
Mitchel, Burton
(AE:BI-AE:CCH)Burton Mitchel was vice president of the CSA when Wade Hampton V was assassinated at a rally in 1922, only three months after his inauguration. Upon taking office, Mitchel asked U.S. President Upton Sinclair to repeal the reparations payments that had severely damaged the Confederate economy. In 1927, the C.S. Supreme Court ruled that Mitchel was eligible to run for a full six-year term, despite his serving more than four years of Hampton's term. He won election, but was burdened by the economic collapse in 1929, which left many Confederate citizens homeless; as a result, many people set up in "Mitcheltowns" across the CSA (these were called "Blackfordburghs" in the U.S.; both were analogs to Hooverville). He left office in 1934 as the Freedom Party's control over the CSA began. Michel is likely meant to be a fictional descendant of Charles B. Mitchel
Charles B. Mitchel
Charles Burton Mitchel was a Democratic Party politician from Arkansas who represented the state in the U.S...
, who served in the U.S. and C.S. Senates in the 1860s.
Partridge, Donald
(AE:VO-SA:ID)Donald Partridge was the Freedom Party's replacement for the slot of the vice-presidency after Willy Knight's attempted coup. He was chosen because Jake Featherston reckoned him a useless, harmless idiot, unlike the ambitious Knight. Partridge spent his time in the vice-presidency thinking of dumb farm-girl jokes to tell Featherston, or in the company of various ladies in hotels here and there, according to secret Freedom Party guard reports. He also spent most of his time promoting the war effort, traveling from city to city across the CSA making speeches and imploring the Confederates to fight on. After Featherston's death in 1944, Partridge became the 14th and last president of the CSA. He unconditionally surrendered to US forces, and as a result, the CSA was disbanded as a nation. Afterward, Partridge was taken prisoner by Morrell. Partridge is an analogue to Dan Quayle
Dan Quayle
James Danforth "Dan" Quayle served as the 44th Vice President of the United States, serving with President George H. W. Bush . He served as a U.S. Representative and U.S. Senator from the state of Indiana....
, as seen with their similar names (cv. Quail
Quail
Quail is a collective name for several genera of mid-sized birds generally considered in the order Galliformes. Old World quail are found in the family Phasianidae, while New World quail are found in the family Odontophoridae...
and Partridge
Partridge
Partridges are birds in the pheasant family, Phasianidae. They are a non-migratory Old World group.These are medium-sized birds, intermediate between the larger pheasants and the smaller quails. Partridges are native to Europe, Asia, Africa, and the Middle East...
) and the image of Quayle in popular culture as a clueless buffoon.
Pinkard, Jefferson Davis
(Viewpoint character, GW:AF-SA:ID)An Alabama native, Jefferson Pinkard is a steel man at the Sloss Works in Birmingham
Birmingham
Birmingham is a city and metropolitan borough in the West Midlands of England. It is the most populous British city outside the capital London, with a population of 1,036,900 , and lies at the heart of the West Midlands conurbation, the second most populous urban area in the United Kingdom with a...
when the Great War
World War I
World War I , which was predominantly called the World War or the Great War from its occurrence until 1939, and the First World War or World War I thereafter, was a major war centred in Europe that began on 28 July 1914 and lasted until 11 November 1918...
breaks out. Pinkard as originally introduced to the reader - before being traumatized
Psychological trauma
Psychological trauma is a type of damage to the psyche that occurs as a result of a traumatic event...
by the combination of war and personal crisis - is a highly sympathetic character. To begin with, he is not a racist, fully willing to accept a black co-worker and accord him the respect due to a skillful steel man in a dangerous and demanding job. (Even Jake Featherston
Jake Featherston
Jacob "Jake" Featherston is a fictional character inthe Southern Victory Series novel series by Harry Turtledove. He is the fictional timeline's equivalent of Adolf Hitler.-Character introduction:...
, who would later develop into a Hitler-like racist, does not initially display a noticeably higher level of anti-black racism than other Confederate characters).
The war affects Pinkard more fundamentally - and negatively - than many other characters in the series. Conscripted into the Confederate Army late in 1915, he and his friend, Sonora
Sonora
Sonora officially Estado Libre y Soberano de Sonora is one of the 31 states which, with the Federal District, comprise the 32 Federal Entities of Mexico. It is divided into 72 municipalities; the capital city is Hermosillo....
n recruit Hipolito Rodriguez, receive their baptism by fire
Baptism by fire
The phrase baptism by fire or baptism of fire, known in English since 1822, is a translation of the French phrase baptême du feu and is a reference to a soldier's first experience under fire in battle....
when they go into combat against the "Red" rebels. Coming home on leave in 1917, he catches his wife Emily performing fellatio
Fellatio
Fellatio is an act of oral stimulation of a male's penis by a sexual partner. It involves the stimulation of the penis by the use of the mouth, tongue, or throat. The person who performs fellatio can be referred to as the giving partner, and the other person is the receiving partner...
on his best friend and next-door neighbor, Bedford Cunningham. That, combined with the Confederacy's defeat that year, leaves him a bitter and vengeful man. Although his wife betrayed him with a white man, in his mind the deep sense of personal betrayal by her seems to blend with the widespread feeling in the surrounding society that the Confederacy had been "betrayed" by the black rebels who "stabbed it in the back" and caused its defeat.
During the postwar years he finds solace in the Freedom Party, becoming a regular attendee at Birmingham chapter meetings and joining other Freedom Party stalwarts in disrupting their opponents' rallies. At his steel works job he shocks the black fellow-worker with whom he was previously friendly by hurling the Freedom Party greeting at him - a watershed moment where Pinkard sets out on an ominous road.
Devotion to the party would pay dividends in later years, but costs him his marriage: though he tries to forget his wife's adultery, his increasing distance leads to her being unfaithful once more. Catching Emily in the act, Pinkard throws her out into the street. Between the divorce
Divorce
Divorce is the final termination of a marital union, canceling the legal duties and responsibilities of marriage and dissolving the bonds of matrimony between the parties...
and the Freedom Party's decline after Wade Hampton V's assassination, Pinkard decides to fight for the Imperialist side in the Mexican Civil War (our timeline's analog to the Spanish Civil War
Spanish Civil War
The Spanish Civil WarAlso known as The Crusade among Nationalists, the Fourth Carlist War among Carlists, and The Rebellion or Uprising among Republicans. was a major conflict fought in Spain from 17 July 1936 to 1 April 1939...
.)
Pinkard's stint in Mexico turns out to be a blessing to his personal fortunes. He finds himself almost by accident running a prisoner of war camp, an experience which proves to be a turning point in his life. In this initial venture into the business of guarding prisoners, Pinkard actually tries to be humane, being appalled by the cruelty of the Imperialists to their captives. This proves, however, a step down a slippery slope which is described in detail from book to book in the series. After the Business Collapse
Great Depression
The Great Depression was a severe worldwide economic depression in the decade preceding World War II. The timing of the Great Depression varied across nations, but in most countries it started in about 1929 and lasted until the late 1930s or early 1940s...
, Pinkard, who had resumed his job at the Sloss Works, is laid off. The Freedom Party quickly sets him up with a new occupation as a prison guard, and when the first camps for political prisoners are set up, Pinkard is offered a job as an assistant camp commandant at a Mississippi
Mississippi
Mississippi is a U.S. state located in the Southern United States. Jackson is the state capital and largest city. The name of the state derives from the Mississippi River, which flows along its western boundary, whose name comes from the Ojibwe word misi-ziibi...
facility, and subsequently the head commandant at Louisiana
Louisiana
Louisiana is a state located in the southern region of the United States of America. Its capital is Baton Rouge and largest city is New Orleans. Louisiana is the only state in the U.S. with political subdivisions termed parishes, which are local governments equivalent to counties...
's "Camp Dependable".
Pinkard at first is in charge of detaining white political prisoner
Political prisoner
According to the Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English, a political prisoner is ‘someone who is in prison because they have opposed or criticized the government of their own country’....
s, especially the followers of Louisiana governor Huey Long
Huey Long
Huey Pierce Long, Jr. , nicknamed The Kingfish, served as the 40th Governor of Louisiana from 1928–1932 and as a U.S. Senator from 1932 to 1935. A Democrat, he was noted for his radical populist policies. Though a backer of Franklin D...
, who is assassinated by Featherston. After Vice President Willy Knight attempts to assassinate Featherston, Knight becomes Pinkard's most notable prisoner. Soon many suspected black rebels are imprisoned as well.
Gradually, a shift is made from detaining black rebels, or those suspected of being such, to detaining blacks solely on the basis of their race. More and more blacks are sent to the camp, and the government fails to supply food rations to feed them all. When Pinkard complains, he gets a phone call directly from Ferdinand Koenig (who under the innocuous title of "Attorney General" actually heads the analog of the S.S.
Schutzstaffel
The Schutzstaffel |Sig runes]]) was a major paramilitary organization under Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party. Built upon the Nazi ideology, the SS under Heinrich Himmler's command was responsible for many of the crimes against humanity during World War II...
), who informs him that no extra food is forthcoming, and hints that a solution is available - "reducing the population" by taking black prisoners to deserted areas and having firing squads
Execution by firing squad
Execution by firing squad, sometimes called fusillading , is a method of capital punishment, particularly common in the military and in times of war.Execution by shooting is a fairly old practice...
shoot them. That is the final watershed, which once crossed makes Pinkard a mass murder
Mass murder
Mass murder is the act of murdering a large number of people , typically at the same time or over a relatively short period of time. According to the FBI, mass murder is defined as four or more murders occurring during a particular event with no cooling-off period between the murders...
er. Soon, he is not only obeying orders, but gives much "creative thought" to the improvement of the killing methods.
The executions, where the killers must look their victims in the face, are too much for many guards (which is what happened in the actual early Nazi killings, as noted in the minutes of the Wannsee Conference
Wannsee Conference
The Wannsee Conference was a meeting of senior officials of the Nazi German regime, held in the Berlin suburb of Wannsee on 20 January 1942. The purpose of the conference was to inform administrative leaders of Departments responsible for various policies relating to Jews, that Reinhard Heydrich...
). A guard named Chick Blades kills himself by venting carbon monoxide
Carbon monoxide
Carbon monoxide , also called carbonous oxide, is a colorless, odorless, and tasteless gas that is slightly lighter than air. It is highly toxic to humans and animals in higher quantities, although it is also produced in normal animal metabolism in low quantities, and is thought to have some normal...
into his car, giving Pinkard the idea to put blacks in trucks and gas them while simply driving to the burial sites, avoiding the need for the killer to actually witness what he is perpetrating. This is used to great effect, leading to his promotion to Brigade Leader (equivalent to a brigadier general
Brigadier General
Brigadier general is a senior rank in the armed forces. It is the lowest ranking general officer in some countries, usually sitting between the ranks of colonel and major general. When appointed to a field command, a brigadier general is typically in command of a brigade consisting of around 4,000...
in the army.)
Pinkard is eventually ordered to have Willy Knight shot, which he does. He marries Edith Blades (Chick Blades' widow) and moves to a camp being built to his specifications near Snyder, Texas
Snyder, Texas
Snyder is a city in and the county seat of Scurry County, Texas, United States. The population was 10,653 at the 2010 census. It is located on Deep Creek, a minor tributary of the Colorado River of Texas. Snyder is approximately 150 km southeast of Lubbock.Located in Snyder is the Scurry County...
: Camp Determination, an analog of Auschwitz. When Pinkard comes up with an even more efficient way to "reduce the population", i.e. gas chamber
Gas chamber
A gas chamber is an apparatus for killing humans or animals with gas, consisting of a sealed chamber into which a poisonous or asphyxiant gas is introduced. The most commonly used poisonous agent is hydrogen cyanide; carbon dioxide and carbon monoxide have also been used...
s disguised as bath houses
Public bathing
Public baths originated from a communal need for cleanliness. The term public may confuse some people, as some types of public baths are restricted depending on membership, gender, religious affiliation, or other reasons. As societies have changed, public baths have been replaced as private bathing...
, he is promoted to the rank of Group Leader (equivalent to a major general
Major General
Major general or major-general is a military rank used in many countries. It is derived from the older rank of sergeant major general. A major general is a high-ranking officer, normally subordinate to the rank of lieutenant general and senior to the ranks of brigadier and brigadier general...
in the army.)
Unlike at Auschwitz, the camp's victims are not cremated
Cremation
Cremation is the process of reducing bodies to basic chemical compounds such as gasses and bone fragments. This is accomplished through high-temperature burning, vaporization and oxidation....
but buried in mass grave
Mass grave
A mass grave is a grave containing multiple number of human corpses, which may or may not be identified prior to burial. There is no strict definition of the minimum number of bodies required to constitute a mass grave, although the United Nations defines a mass grave as a burial site which...
s dug by bulldozers in the Texas prairie
Prairie
Prairies are considered part of the temperate grasslands, savannas, and shrublands biome by ecologists, based on similar temperate climates, moderate rainfall, and grasses, herbs, and shrubs, rather than trees, as the dominant vegetation type...
. This becomes of crucial importance when it becomes clear that U.S. forces are closing in to capture Camp Determination. Pinkard arranges to destroy as much evidence as possible, including blowing up the gas chambers and destroying records. However, he does not succeed in hiding the mass graves, which are found by the U.S. Army, exhumed and presented to the whole world.
Pinkard, however, succeeds in moving the killing operation and setting up Camp Humble in east Texas, near the town of the same name
Humble, Texas
Humble is a city in Harris County, Texas within the Houston–Sugar Land–Baytown metropolitan area.As of the 2000 census, the city population was 14,579. The city shares a zip code with the small Houston neighborhood of Bordersville, although people who live in Bordersville still have Humble...
, with the killing facilities further "improved" with the addition of crematoriums. However, these prove to be poorly designed, and the mayor
Mayor
In many countries, a Mayor is the highest ranking officer in the municipal government of a town or a large urban city....
of Humble, originally enthusiastic about the presence of the camp (because of the economic opportunities it provides and the "population reduction" going on there), later bitterly complains about the townspeople smelling the fumes from the malfunctioning crematoriums and seeing the bits of incompletely burned corpses floating down onto the town.
The last year of the war proves disastrous for Pinkard, despite the birth of his son Raymond. In 1944, the state of Texas secedes
Secession
Secession is the act of withdrawing from an organization, union, or especially a political entity. Threats of secession also can be a strategy for achieving more limited goals.-Secession theory:...
from the Confederacy, declaring itself an independent republic, and surrenders to the United States. One of the terms of surrender is the arrest of all persons involved in the death camps. Pinkard's wife has just given birth to his son, Raymond, and he is unwilling to leave them. The camp commandant is soon taken into custody by the U.S. Army. He is placed on trial, where, despite the best efforts of his attorney, Jonathan Moss, Pinkard is found guilty of crimes against humanity
Crime against humanity
Crimes against humanity, as defined by the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court Explanatory Memorandum, "are particularly odious offenses in that they constitute a serious attack on human dignity or grave humiliation or a degradation of one or more human beings...
for his role in the reduction of the black population of the Confederate States. In early 1945, Pinkard is executed by hanging
Hanging
Hanging is the lethal suspension of a person by a ligature. The Oxford English Dictionary states that hanging in this sense is "specifically to put to death by suspension by the neck", though it formerly also referred to crucifixion and death by impalement in which the body would remain...
.
Pinkard has many parallels with Rudolf Lang, the protagonist of Death Is My Trade
Death Is My Trade
Death Is My Trade is a 1952 French fictionalized biographical novel by Robert Merle. The protagonist, Rudolf Lang, was closely based on the real Rudolf Höß, commandant of the concentration camp Auschwitz.-Summary:...
by the French author Robert Merle
Robert Merle
Robert Merle was a French novelist.-Biography:Born in Tébessa in French Algeria, he moved to France in 1918. A professor of English Literature at several universities, during World War II Merle was conscripted in the French army and assigned as an interpreter to the British Expeditionary Force...
, who in turn is derived from Auschwitz commander Rudolf Höss.
Potter, Clarence
(GW:AF-AE:BI, Viewpoint character AE:CCH-SA:ID)Clarence Potter, along with Tom Colleton, is an analogue of the Wehrmacht
Wehrmacht
The Wehrmacht – from , to defend and , the might/power) were the unified armed forces of Nazi Germany from 1935 to 1945. It consisted of the Heer , the Kriegsmarine and the Luftwaffe .-Origin and use of the term:...
officers who despised Hitler but faithfully served Germany. Potter in particular appears to be based on Wilhelm Canaris
Wilhelm Canaris
Wilhelm Franz Canaris was a German admiral, head of the Abwehr, the German military intelligence service, from 1935 to 1944 and member of the German Resistance.- Early life and World War I :...
,but his role in the failed attempt on Featherston's life bears striking resemblances to Erwin Rommel
Erwin Rommel
Erwin Johannes Eugen Rommel , popularly known as the Desert Fox , was a German Field Marshal of World War II. He won the respect of both his own troops and the enemies he fought....
's role in the July 20 Plot
July 20 Plot
On 20 July 1944, an attempt was made to assassinate Adolf Hitler, Führer of the Third Reich, inside his Wolf's Lair field headquarters near Rastenburg, East Prussia. The plot was the culmination of the efforts of several groups in the German Resistance to overthrow the Nazi-led German government...
.
Potter was from Richmond, Virginia, and seems to have come from a middle-class background. Before the Great War, he attended Yale
YALE
RapidMiner, formerly YALE , is an environment for machine learning, data mining, text mining, predictive analytics, and business analytics. It is used for research, education, training, rapid prototyping, application development, and industrial applications...
, leaving him with a permanent half-Yankee accent that sometimes earned him suspicious looks from other Confederates. Potter's time there also gave him a greater understanding of the USA than most of his compatriots.
During the Great War Potter was a CSA Army major assigned to Army of Northern Virginia intelligence. It was in 1915 that his path first crossed with that of Jake Featherston, then an artillery sergeant. When attempting to dig out Marxist Negro cells within the army, Featherston mentioned his suspicions about his commanding officer's body servant Pompey. That CO was Jeb Stuart III, son of General Jeb Stuart, Jr., a mighty power in Richmond and the man who quashed the investigation.
Unfortunately for all involved, Pompey was revealed to be a leader in the Red Rebellion of 1915-16. Disgraced, Jeb III threw his life away in combat and neither Potter nor Featherston ever saw a promotion for the rest of the war. The latter turned into a bitter, vengeful man; Potter was the only officer he had any respect for, though not that much. The two men both hung tight while the rest of the Army of Northern Virginia fell to pieces during the summer of 1917, and shared a whiskey when the cease-fire went into effect.
Their uneasy relationship fell apart after the war. Featherston moved to Richmond and began his rise within the Freedom Party. Potter, discharged from the army, made his living as a private detective while becoming increasingly involved in Whig Party activities. During the postwar years he and ex-submariner Roger Kimball attempted to get hold of Featherston once the former sergeant became a public figure. His half-hearted intentions of influencing Featherston were dashed when the Freedom Party leader sent a dismissive telegram in reply. Kimball became one of Featherston's right-hand men until his death in 1923; Potter sought to contain the damage by working with the Whigs, including briefly with Anne Colleton. He had little success, as his fellow party members remained mired in anachronistic thinking and procedures.
After Featherston became president in 1934, Potter believed that it was only a matter of time before he found himself in a camp for political prisoners. Instead, he resolved to rid the Confederacy of what he was convinced was a leader who would bring ruin upon his country. Potter traveled to Richmond for the 1936 Olympics and took a seat in the swimming stadium, intending to kill Featherston. Fate intervened when a black frankfurter seller with the same idea pulled out a submachine gun and sprayed bullets around so recklessly Potter had to shoot him in self-defense.
With Potter an overnight hero, Featherston (having his own suspicions about Potter's true intentions that day) decided that rather than dispose of him, the former Whig would be a greater asset elsewhere. Despite his aversion for the Freedom Party, Potter's patriotic sentiments won out, and he duly accepted a colonel's commission and a posting to Intelligence.
An outsider in Confederate Intelligence (being neither part of the old guard nor a fanatical Freedom Party supporter), Potter nonetheless distinguished himself in the years before the 1941 War. He was the first to seriously consider not just what Confederate agents could do to the US but also the havoc that American spies could wring within the Confederacy. When Featherston read Potter's conclusions, he promoted his old enemy to Brigadier General and allowed Potter to manage operations against the US.
Prior to Operation Blackbeard in June 1941, Potter and his agents were instrumental in keeping the US off-guard while ascertaining American strength and doctrine. Though Featherston acted too rashly for Potter's comfort (he was convinced that had his advice been acted on the invasion would have been a strategic as well as tactical surprise) Potter's competent organization of pro-Confederate saboteurs helped George Patton's army reach Lake Erie by August. Further sabotage prevented the American barrel (tank) commander Irving Morrell from doing any serious damage to the Confederate corridor for the rest of the year.
After Operation Blackbeard's initial success, Potter concentrated upon ferreting out spies within the Confederacy and keeping Generals Nathan Bedford Forrest III
Nathan Bedford Forrest III
Nathan Bedford Forrest III was a Brigadier General of the United States Army Air Forces, and a great-grandson of Confederate General Nathan Bedford Forrest....
and Patton appraised of US movements in northern Virginia. After the disastrous Confederate defeat at Pittsburgh, Potter joins with General Forrest and other Confederate officers in a possible plot to overthrow Jake Featherston.
This plot did not come to pass in 1943. The Richmond ghetto rebelled in April, forcing Potter and other staff officers to take part in its suppression. Following that, Potter oversaw an attempt to knock out the U.S. nuclear program at Hanford, Washington. This failed. Because of the need for manpower in the summer of 1943, he was given command of a brigade under General Patton's army. There, Potter infuriated the Confederate commander in much the same way he infuriated President Featherston: by telling the truth as he saw it. Potter was present at the U.S. airborne assault on Missionary Ridge
Missionary Ridge
Missionary Ridge is a geographic feature in Chattanooga, Tennessee, site of the Battle of Missionary Ridge, a battle in the American Civil War, fought on November 25, 1863. Union forces under Maj. Gens. Ulysses S. Grant, William T. Sherman, and George H...
and Lookout Mountain
Lookout Mountain
thumb|right|See seven statesLookout Mountain is located at the northwest corner of the U.S. state of Georgia, the northeast corner of Alabama, and along the southern border of Tennessee at Chattanooga. Lookout Mountain, along with Sand Mountain to the northwest, makes up a large portion of the...
in August 1943, and was relieved of his command later that year.
At this time Potter decided to abandon his involvement in the plot against Featherston, judging that the US would not budge from their demand for "unconditional surrender", whoever headed the Confederacy, and that the charismatic Featherston—however much Potter despised him—was the only leader capable of continuing the war and possibly snatching victory from the jaws of the impending defeat. The defection of Potter, with his skill at undercover operations, doomed the far more inept conspirators under Nathan Bedford Forrest III to failure and slow death by torture.
Potter was placed in charge of sneaking a Confederate superbomb into the U.S. He did this by disguising a C.S. truck in U.S. colors and insignia, and he even wore a U.S. uniform. The superbomb was set off in Philadelphia, causing horrific bloodshed by the direct explosion and indirect effect of radioactivity. Afterwards, Potter was able to escape back to the C.S. Subsequently, he fled Virginia with Featherston and other Confederate officials, and was with them when a plane carrying them crashed in Georgia.
After Featherston was killed, Potter was arrested and charged with violating the laws on war stemming from use of U.S. uniforms during his superbomb attack on Philadelphia. However, Irving Morrel—whose assassination Potter had tried to arrange in earlier stages of the war, and who reaped the glory of being the U.S.'s chief savior—showed magnanimity by appearing as a defense witness at Potter's court-martial and stating clearly that the U.S. had done the same by using U.S. soldiers in Confederate uniforms to launch attacks. Thanks mainly to Morrel, Potter was found not guilty and released.
He settled in Richmond (with the assistance of the U.S. government, which wanted to keep him under surveillance). Upon his release, Potter began writing his memoirs, entitled How I Blew Up Philadelphia.
After having resettled in Richmond, Potter encounters an embittered young soldier whose words are similar to those of Jake Featherston's in the aftermath of the Great War. Potter decides to act this time, and advises the man to abandon his hatred and get on with his life.
Quinn, Robert
(AE:CCH-SA:RE, SA:G-SA:ID)Robert Quinn was a Freedom Party organizer in Baroyeca, Sonora
Sonora
Sonora officially Estado Libre y Soberano de Sonora is one of the 31 states which, with the Federal District, comprise the 32 Federal Entities of Mexico. It is divided into 72 municipalities; the capital city is Hermosillo....
. Though a white English-speaker, Quinn spoke Spanish fluently and was sensitive to the Hispanic culture of Baroyeca. He was also successful as an advocate for public works projects in the region. The combination of these two factors made Quinn an effective recruiter, and the Freedom Party became Baroyeca's dominant political organization during his time there, easily toppling the Radical Liberal organizations that dominated politics there and whose power was based on the traditional political patronage wielded by the rich land owners, against which Quinn mobilized a grassroots movement of poorer peasants.
One native of Baroyeca who found Quinn's advocacy of the Freedom Party convincing was farmer and Great War veteran Hipolito Rodriguez. During the Second Great War, Quinn convinced Rodriguez to join the Freedom Party Guards and ultimately to take part in the Black Holocaust at Camp Determination, an assignment which later caused Rodriguez to commit suicide.
In 1943, Quinn left Baroyeca and joined the Confederate Army, a clear sign that the C.S. Army was beginning to grow shorthanded given his age and status in the Freedom organization. He returned to Sonora after the war was over and began talking of starting an uprising against the U.S. occupation. He was prevented from doing so by Jorge Rodriguez (son of Hipolito), who wrote an anonymous letter to U.S. authorities detailing Quinn's Freedom Party connections. Jorge Rodriguez thought that resistance against the US was bound to fail. Quinn was subsequently arrested for his connections.
Ramsay, Stephen
(Viewpoint character GW:AF)Stephen Ramsay was a cavalry corporal in the Confederate Army serving in Sequoyah at the beginning of the Great War. He was part of a raid into Kansas in August 1914 to concentrate on railroad sabotage. Ramsay was next assigned to the Creek Nation Army of the Five Civilized Tribes as an officer/advisor, attaining the rank of captain in the army by 1915.
Though Ramsay's army managed to hold off a U.S. advance, falling back towards Okmulgee in the process, the Creeks ordered the army to try to retake all U.S. positions in Sequoyah later in the year. After his commanding officer Hiram Lincoln was killed, Ramsay took command of the offensive, but only for a very brief time; he was killed by machine-gun fire while charging a United States trench only minutes after Lincoln's death.
The fact Ramsay is only in the book for a short time, and has no 'follow on' character to take up his viewpoint slot, indicates that Turtledove created him simply to demonstrate how cavalry and old fashioned tactics and soldiers had no place in modern war.
Ramsay is initially introduced (at least in the Audiobook) as "Colonel Ramsay".
Rodriguez, Hipolito
(GW:WH-GW:B, Viewpoint character AE:CCH-SA:G)Hipolito Rodriguez was a farmer from Baroyeca, Sonora, which in the Southern Victory Series is part of the Confederate States. His first combat action was against Negro rebels in South Carolina in 1915, after which Rodriguez served with Jefferson Pinkard on the West Texas front of the Great War. Upon demobilization, he returned to his farm in the far western CSA.
In the 1920s, upon meeting Robert Quinn, a Freedom Party organizer, Rodriguez joined the Freedom Party and became a strong supporter, including taking part in actions against Radical Liberal landowners who discouraged voting for Featherston and who hitherto dominated the formerly-Mexican parts of the Confederacy. This amounted to a kind of social revolution by the poorer peasants, roughly equivalent to our history's Mexican Revolution
Mexican Revolution
The Mexican Revolution was a major armed struggle that started in 1910, with an uprising led by Francisco I. Madero against longtime autocrat Porfirio Díaz. The Revolution was characterized by several socialist, liberal, anarchist, populist, and agrarianist movements. Over time the Revolution...
though here manipulated by the Freedom party for its own ends. He was among those who rallied in support of Featherston's continued presidency in 1939 (supporting the overturning of the law that a Confederate president could only serve one six-year term), and enrolled his sons in the Freedom Youth Corps; when the war began, they would go into the Army.
The loyalty of Rodriguez and other Mexican stalwarts seems amply rewarded when Featherstone's party embarks on fast modernization and development of the backward Spanish-speaking states, especially manifested in connecting all houses to electricity - a hitherto undreamed-of luxury for the Mexican peasantry. This is not without its own dangers, however, and Rodriguez is electrocuted nearly to death by his carelessness with his new frigidaire. Despite the lingering, debilitating effects of Rodriguez's electrocution, Quinn convinced him to join the Confederate Veterans' Brigades, a Freedom Party paramilitary organization. After training, Rodriguez was sent to Camp Determination, where he was reunited with Jefferson Pinkard, his friend from the Great War.
Up to that point, Rodriguez was depicted as a sympathetic and fairly decent character. While he takes at face value the party's anti-Black demagoguery (and like Saul Goldman, figures pragmatically that it is better for him and his that this hatred is not directed at Mexican "greasers") this had hitherto no direct implications as there were no actual Blacks living anywhere near his home. This abruptly changes with his becoming a guard in the extermination camp, accepting the role after an initial shock at first witnessing the killing of Blacks, and soon actively participating in the killing and even taking various grisly initiatives. In this he goes much faster down the road of his friend Pinkard, who also started out as a fairly decent person and took decades to become a ruthless mass killer.
Some of the camp's white guards looked down on Rodriguez because of his race and his personal connection to the commandant. But his chance remark concerning the use of poison to remove pests from the guards' quarters led Pinkard to think up the idea of gas chambers to kill the camp's prisoners en masse. This action led to Rodriguez' promotion to Troop Leader (the Freedom Party Guards' equivalent to sergeant).
Despite little outward evidence of his faith, Rodriguez thought of himself as a very religious man. At first, he was able to reconcile his duty and his faith by not viewing the prisoners as human beings. But he became sympathetic to a woman prisoner named Bathsheba (Scipio/Xerxes' wife), and this sympathy awakened feelings of remorse and guilt. Suddenly burdened by the deaths of thousands of people by his actions, Rodriguez calls upon the Holy Virgin
Holy Virgin
"Holy Virgin" is the first single from the album 21st Century by German trance group Groove Coverage. It's based on the song Fata Morgana by EAV.-Remix list:#"Holy Virgin" – 3:50#"Holy Virgin" – 3:28...
, but concluding that even She could not cleanse his hands from "the oceans of blood" staining them, he turns his submachinegun upon himself.
This last act is not so much derived from religion (the Church frowns upon suicide) as from Rodriguez's personal code of honour. His stricken wife, who knew him well, would later write to her son that he could only have killed himself in order to atone for a wrong which could not be atoned for otherwise - which is precisely the truth, though his grieving family members, not having shared his change of heart about the Blacks, do not realise that this was indeed the specific terrible wrong he sought to atone for.
Rodriguez, Jorge
(AE:CCH-AE:VO; Viewpoint character SA:G-SA:ID)Jorge Rodriguez is one of three sons of Hipolito Rodriguez; Miguel and Pedro were the others. In the 1930s, he served in the Freedom Youth Corps, and later in the Second Great War. By 1943, he was part of the Army of Northern Virginia until transfer to Tennessee in the failed defense of that state.
He was also part of the failed defense of Atlanta and the rest of Georgia until he was transferred by sea from Savannah to Beaufort, South Carolina. During this period, he was promoted to corporal and ended up commanding a platoon. Moving to Virginia, he fought until captured by U.S. forces near Appomattox, Virginia. He spent the rest of the war in a POW camp.
He returned to Bayoreca, Sonora after the war ended, and took over management of the Rodriguez family farm. Feeling that the Confederacy was decisively defeated and that further acts of resistance would merely bring ruthless retaliation upon the townspeople, Rodriguez anonymously denounced Freedom Party organizer Robert Quinn to U.S. occupation authorities to save his older brother Pedro from being involved in a resistance which he felt would be futile.
Scipio ("Xerxes")
(Viewpoint character, GW:AF-SA:G)Scipio (no last name) (1873–1943), known as "Kip" to some, was, in 1915, the butler of Anne Colleton. He was born a slave, before the manumission following the Second Mexican War. Scipio was highly educated and was able to speak with a "white" accent as well as the local Black accent (Congaree). He found himself drawn by the chief hunter Cassius into the Red Rebellion of 1915 as a member of the cell controlling Marshlands, and was forced to serve as a "revolutionary judge" of the Congaree Socialist Republic and as an intermediary with Confederate forces.
When the rebellion was crushed, Scipio escaped from South Carolina into Augusta, Georgia, where he assumed the name "Xerxes" and over the years worked as a waiter at several restaurants: first that of Jerry Oglethorpe, then Erasmus, a prosperous black, and finally under Jerry Dover at the prestigious Huntsmans' Lodge.
At one point, Anne Colleton (who had blamed Scipio for much of the destruction at her beloved Marshlands Plantation) found that Scipio worked at the Huntsmans' Lodge. She came to arrest him, but Scipio wasn't working at the time. Jerry Dover, who didn't want to lose such a talented employee, convinced Anne that this wasn't the Xerxes (Scipio) that she wanted by showing her paperwork that proved a man named Xerxes had been working there for many years. (There had actually been another Xerxes that had worked at the Huntsmans' Lodge years before, so the paperwork checked out for Scipio's sake.)
Scipio/Xerxes married Bathsheba and had two children (one named Cassius). He found himself trapped behind the barbed wire the Confederates established around the Terry
Ghetto
A ghetto is a section of a city predominantly occupied by a group who live there, especially because of social, economic, or legal issues.The term was originally used in Venice to describe the area where Jews were compelled to live. The term now refers to an overcrowded urban area often associated...
, Augusta's Black district. Eventually, in early 1943 a Freedom Party roundup of Augusta's Blacks caught him and his family (save only for his son Cassius, who was elsewhere), and deported them west.
Scipio, Bathsheba, and his daughter Antoinette were sent to Camp Determination, where he was separated from his family and sent to Barracks 27 in the men's section of the camp. He later died in the gas chambers.
That was the most likely fate of a black sent to this camp, as of a Jew sent to our history's Nazi death camp; nevertheless, the death of Scipio, who had been a viewpoint character along so many books, catches the reader (and Scipio) by surprise - coming immediately after he had a falsely hopeful encounter with the guard Hipolito Rodriguez who brought him a message from his wife and daughter, but after that was among the guards who led Scipio and many others to his death. This would later start the feeling of remorse which would lead Rodriguez to take his own life - but Scipio would not know anything of that. Nor would he know his son Cassius later killed Jake Featherston. Bathsheba and Antoinette were presumably killed with the rest of the prisoners when the camp was abandoned in mid-1943.
Semmes, Gabriel
(GW:AF-AE:BI)Gabriel Semmes was a prominent Whig politician during the Great War, and is possibly intended to be the grandson of Raphael Semmes
Raphael Semmes
For other uses, see Semmes .Raphael Semmes was an officer in the United States Navy from 1826 - 1860 and the Confederate States Navy from 1860 - 1865. During the American Civil War he was captain of the famous commerce raider CSS Alabama, taking a record sixty-nine prizes...
. From 1910 to 1916, he served as Woodrow Wilson
Woodrow Wilson
Thomas Woodrow Wilson was the 28th President of the United States, from 1913 to 1921. A leader of the Progressive Movement, he served as President of Princeton University from 1902 to 1910, and then as the Governor of New Jersey from 1911 to 1913...
's vice-president. In the 1915 presidential election, he easily defeated Doroteo Arango, the Radical Liberal candidate from Chihuahua. However, Semmes' term was marred by the Confederacy's defeat in the Great War and the subsequent loss of territory to the United States. In the aftermath of the Red Rebellion, Semmes proposed a bill to the Confederate Congress to allow black soldiers to fight in the war; this was done as a result of a shortage of available white conscripts. Semmes left office in 1922 disgraced after the C.S. loss and humiliation in the war.
Stuart, Jeb Jr.
(HFR, AE:BI, AE:VO)General James Ewell Brown (Jeb) Stuart Jr. is a fictionalized character in this series. Stuart entered combat in 1881 as a lieutenant of infantry in the Army of Kentucky, which was charged with the defense of the state it was named for. When the US Army of the Ohio under the command of General Orlando Wilcox invaded Kentucky at Louisville, Stuart and his company distinguished themselves under fire when they held and repulsed Wilcox's flanking move. In the middle of the fighting, Stuart saved his company when its commander was wounded, and became a war hero just like his father, who was serving in Mexico. Right after the battle, Stuart personally met the Confederate Army chief, General Thomas J. "Stonewall" Jackson.
For the next thirty years, Jeb Stuart, Jr. rapidly advanced through the ranks, rising to the top of the chain of command by virtue of his glory in 1881 and through the magic of his family's name, which would prove thicker than merit in the caste-world of the Confederacy. When the world went to war in 1914, Stuart was in charge of the War Department. He unleashed the Army of Northern Virginia north through Washington DC, Maryland, and southern Maryland in a move aimed at capturing Philadelphia, the de-facto capital of the United States.
In 1915, as the Army of Northern Virginia stood on the Susquehanna river, disturbing reports filtered from the front to the War Department of a nature endangering the safety of the entire CSA. Many cells of Marxist black laborers had been uncovered in the various armies, one such cell including Pompey, the manservant of Stuart's son, Captain Jeb Stuart III of Battery C, First Richmond Howitzers. The accusation there had been made by one of Stuart's sergeants in Battery C, Jake Featherston, and passed on to the top by a major from Intelligence named Clarence Potter.
Jeb Stuart, Jr. didn't wish to upset his son by having the manservant, Pompey, taken away for detention. He ordered the affair hushed up, not believing that Pompey was even capable of plotting rebellion or anything seditious. When the Red Rebellion of 1915-16 broke out in autumn of 1915, Pompey disappeared with the other rebels. Jeb Stuart III was now under a cloud, and when Pompey was captured and brought back to the captain for confirmation of identity, any chances of his being promoted went down the drain. Jeb Stuart III died in combat not long after the affair, recklessly attacking the enemy with the intent of being killed. Jeb Stuart, Jr. punished Sergeant Featherston and Major Potter for their parts in the controversy by blocking their promotions. Potter got over his situation; Featherston was enraged and began the descent into madness that would blaze through the world in future years.
Despite the Confederacy's defeat, Stuart remained the head of the postwar Confederate Army. Though often singled out by Featherston as the example of the nepotism and conservatism which had crippled the CS Army during the war, Stuart remained silent until 1923. When President Wade Hampton V's assassination seemed sure to consign the Freedom Party to the dustbin of history, Stuart personally met with Featherston for the first time. He quietly but smugly informed Featherston that he had come to say goodbye, as he believed that the Freedom Party would no longer be a force in Confederate politics. While it did not consume his outer appearance, it seemed he deeply regretted his actions that allowed the Red Rebellion to occur. He believed that the death of his son was a result of his mistake.
Stuart's confidence proved misplaced. Featherston did recover from the 1923 debacle, and eleven years later was sworn in as the Confederacy's President.
Despite his campaign promises, Featherston walked softly around the army for the first two years of his presidency. But in the aftermath of a failed assassination attempt at the 1936 Richmond Olympics, Featherston's popularity was such that he felt the time had come to shake up the CS Army's leadership. He called Stuart into his office and gloatingly reminded him of their last meeting before asking for his resignation. The icy civility of both men swiftly gave way to abuse; when Stuart labeled Featherston 'white trash' the enraged president threatened to charge the general with treason for his part in facilitating the Red rebellion, as well as exposing his son's involvement with protecting the Marxist Pompey. A shaken Stuart promptly resigned.
Shortly afterward news of the Pompey Affair went out over the Confederate wireless and cinema.
Stuart, Jeb III
(GW:AF-GW:WH)Son of General Jeb Stuart, Jr., and the commanding officer of Battery C in the First Richmond Howitzers, Army of Northern Virginia, Jeb Stuart III was a young man when he was promoted to captain and given command of Battery C, which helped explain his cockiness and self-assured stance on whatever situation arose. When his manservant, a black man named Pompey, came under investigation for possible connections to the Confederate Marxist underground, Stuart was convinced of his servant's innocence. He asked his father, the head of the CSA War Department, to cancel the investigation, never finding out that it was one of his own sergeants, Jake Featherston, who tipped off Army Intelligence about Pompey.
When the black Marxists finally rose up in revolt in the autumn of 1915, Pompey was discovered to be the leader of one of the cells in the Army, which included Featherston's gun handlers Nero and Perseus, among others. Pompey was captured and was later, we assume, executed (we never hear of his actual fate), but before the sentence was carried out Major Clarence Potter, who had led the earlier investigation, chastised Captain Stuart for his mistake. Shortly thereafter, during a U.S. Army breakthrough on that front in Maryland, Stuart ordered Sergeant Featherston to unlimber his gun and fight the U.S. soldiers to their last breath. He was shot and killed immediately afterward, having openly exposed his body to the enemy marksmen; he intended to die in a blaze of glory to atone for ignoring the signs of black rebellion. For their roles in the controversy, both Sergeant Featherston and Major Potter were punished by Captain Stuart's father, being blacklisted from further promotion in the Confederate States Army.
It was the events surrounding Jeb Stuart III and Pompey that sparked Jake Featherston's intense racism and contempt for the Confederate aristocracy, leading to his involvement in the newly-formed Freedom Party and his rise to power.
Wood, Apicius
(GW:AF-GW:B)Before the Great War, Apicius (no last name) was the proprietor of The Kentucky Smoke House, a barbecue restaurant in Covington, Kentucky, which was patronized by both the white and black community. He was also the head of the Marxist underground in Covington, and thus was involved in a three-way fight between the Marxists, the Confederate underground (led by Tom Kennedy), and the Kentucky State Police led by Luther Bliss.
He adopted the surname "Wood" when blacks were allowed to take surnames in 1916 during the short period of U.S. rule, because "you can't make good barbecue without good wood." His sons continued to run the barbecue and the Marxist underground during the Second Great War. However, Cincinnatus Driver, revisiting Covington in 1944, was unable to find any of the Woods.
McGregor, Arthur
(Viewpoint character, GW:AF-AE:BI)Arthur McGregor owned a farm in southern Manitoba near the town of Rosenfield. The town was occupied by United States forces early in the Great War. When his 15-year-old son, Alexander, was arrested and then shot by the U.S. Army for sabotage (based on only circumstantial evidence), McGregor began a secret campaign of bombing American institutions.
He remained undetected for years, but his luck ran out in the 1920s when he attempted to kill General George Armstrong Custer with a bomb. Alone amongst US officers, Custer strongly suspected McGregor was a bomber (despite no evidence having being found to convict him). Custer noticed McGregor in the crowd during Custer's retirement parade. When McGregor threw a bomb at Custer, Custer caught the bomb and threw it back at McGregor, killing him instantly.
McGregor had a daughter named Mary, who later married Mort Pomeroy. She continued in her father's footsteps, secretly making bombs to keep the American occupiers off guard.
McGregor, Mary (Pomeroy)
(GW:AF-AE:BI, Viewpoint character AE:CCH-SA:DE)Mary McGregor was the daughter of Arthur McGregor, the prominent Anti-American Canadian nationalist. Mary continued her father's legacy after his accidental death in 1923. She planted a bomb in Rosenfeld's general store, then sent a mail bomb which killed Laura Moss and Dorothy Moss. She was arrested by American soldiers at her childhood home outside of Rosenfeld in 1942 and executed by firing squad after refusing to ask for mercy - in effect consciously and deliberately making herself a martyr for the cause, though the Americans were reluctant to execute a woman (especially, the mother of a young child) and were trying to offer her a way out.
Though not explicitly mentioned, since after her death there is no Canadian viewpoint character left, her proud stance and widely-publicised martyrdom might have helped to set off the uprising in Canada, mentioned soon afterwards.
She had married Mort Pomeroy, the owner of a Rosenfeld diner, in the 1930s and had one son, Alexander Arthur ("Alec") Pomeroy (named for his uncle and grandfather).
Pomeroy, Alexander Arthur
(AE:VO-SA:G)Alec Pomeroy is the son of Mort and Mary Pomeroy. He was named for his late uncle Alexander and his late grandfather Arthur MacGregor. Born in 1936, he was only six years old when his mother was executed by U.S. firing squads after a series of bombings. Earlier, Mort Pomeroy - though by no means liking the occupying Yankees - was not a white-hot patriot, striving to make the best of the situation (with a considerable economic success), and trying (this without success) to dissaude Mary from her bombing campaign against the Americans. As evident from the fact that in 1943 Pomeroy's Diner was the point of most persistent resistance to the American forces invading Rosefeld, the execution of his beloved wife pushed Mort to extreme militancy and resistance until death. The six-year old Alexander was the lone survivor of the U.S. assault on the diner turned stronghold. He lost a joint on his pinky, which was bandaged by Armstrong Grimes; though Grimes acted kind towards him and gave him a candy bar, Alec who just lost his father was ungrateful towards him and the other U.S. soldiers. His ingratitude was ignored.
Secord, Laura (Moss)
(GW:B-AE:VO)Laura Secord was a Canadian farmer descended from (and named for) the Canadian patriot
Laura Secord
Laura Ingersoll Secord was a Canadian heroine of the War of 1812. She is known for warning British forces of an impending American attack that led to the British victory at the Battle of Beaver Dams.-Early life:...
of the War of 1812
War of 1812
The War of 1812 was a military conflict fought between the forces of the United States of America and those of the British Empire. The Americans declared war in 1812 for several reasons, including trade restrictions because of Britain's ongoing war with France, impressment of American merchant...
. She lived in Berlin, Ontario, and lost her first husband, a Canadian Pilot, during the Great War. After the war ended, she established an antagonistic but oddly strong relationship with an American pilot named Jonathan Moss, who moved to the town (now a part of Occupied Canada) to establish his career as an attorney in military occupation courts - a decision taken, to a considerable degree, by Moss' love for her and determination to win her, as well as by Moss' guilty feeling about his acts during the war and his feeling that the Canadians were "getting a raw deal". Eventually, the two got married and had a daughter, Dorothy.
Laura and her daughter were killed (while Jonathan was at work) by a mail bomb sent to them by Mary MacGregor Pomeroy, who saw Laura Moss as a traitor to their country.
Galtier, Lucien
(Viewpoint character GW:AF-AE:VO)Lucien Galtier was a farmer in Rivière-du-Loup, Quebec, which was occupied by U.S. forces early in the Great War. Although not expressing overt hostility to the U.S. occupation, the occupiers decided to confiscate part of his land to build a military hospital. After his daughter, Nicole, married Leonard O'Doull, one of the USA Army surgeons, the U.S. military government and the government of the Republic of Quebec decided Galtier was friendly, and he was compensated for the land and paid back rent. The Republic of Quebec later bought the land the hospital was built on for a large sum. That money, combined with the rent he had received, made him one of the wealthier farmers in the area.
His wife died of cancer a few years after the war ended, and he died of a heart attack while "enjoying the company" of his new lady-friend, Eloise Granche, a few months before the 1941 war began. His son, Charles, inherited the farm.
The careers of Galtier and of Arthur McGregor are evidently intended as a kind of symmetrical pair. Both start off in very similar circumstances, as hard-working Canadian farmers who both resent the American occuption but (to start with) neither opposing it head-on. However, the circumstance of Galtier's daughter falling in love with an American and marrying him, while MacGregor's son was unjustly executed by the Americans, draws the two in diametriaclly opposite directions.
Talon, Pascal
(GW:AF-AE:CCH)Father Pascal Talon was a Catholic priest in Rivière-du-Loup. An opportunist as well as a man of the cloth, he supported the Americans early in the occupation, assisting U.S. Army Major Jedediah Quigley with the pacification of his area by delivering pro-American sermons to his congregation. He was made Bishop in 1916 when his church in Rivière-du-Loup became the seat of a diocese. This coincided with the establishment of the Republic of Quebec and may be evidence of cooperation between the Holy See
Holy See
The Holy See is the episcopal jurisdiction of the Catholic Church in Rome, in which its Bishop is commonly known as the Pope. It is the preeminent episcopal see of the Catholic Church, forming the central government of the Church. As such, diplomatically, and in other spheres the Holy See acts and...
and the Central Powers
Central Powers
The Central Powers were one of the two warring factions in World War I , composed of the German Empire, the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the Ottoman Empire, and the Kingdom of Bulgaria...
.
In 1926 Bishop Pascal found himself at the center of a scandal when it was revealed that he had taken a mistress and had fathered twins with her. He was very abruptly defrocked. As a layman, he married the mother of his twins and moved his family to Quebec City to begin a new life. As Lucien Galtier noted, Pascal served God and himself at the same time.
Francisco José II
(SA:RE-SA:ID)Francisco José II is Emperor of Mexico in the 1940s, and as such, analogous to the role of minor Axis allies in our timeline, particularly Benito Mussolini
Benito Mussolini
Benito Amilcare Andrea Mussolini was an Italian politician who led the National Fascist Party and is credited with being one of the key figures in the creation of Fascism....
of Italy
Kingdom of Italy (1861–1946)
The Kingdom of Italy was a state forged in 1861 by the unification of Italy under the influence of the Kingdom of Sardinia, which was its legal predecessor state...
, and, in the case of the Battle of Pittsburgh (analog to our timeline's Battle of Stalingrad
Battle of Stalingrad
The Battle of Stalingrad was a major battle of World War II in which Nazi Germany and its allies fought the Soviet Union for control of the city of Stalingrad in southwestern Russia. The battle took place between 23 August 1942 and 2 February 1943...
), Ion Antonescu
Ion Antonescu
Ion Victor Antonescu was a Romanian soldier, authoritarian politician and convicted war criminal. The Prime Minister and Conducător during most of World War II, he presided over two successive wartime dictatorships...
of Romania
Romania
Romania is a country located at the crossroads of Central and Southeastern Europe, on the Lower Danube, within and outside the Carpathian arch, bordering on the Black Sea...
. He is a descendant of the House of Habsburg
Habsburg
The House of Habsburg , also found as Hapsburg, and also known as House of Austria is one of the most important royal houses of Europe and is best known for being an origin of all of the formally elected Holy Roman Emperors between 1438 and 1740, as well as rulers of the Austrian Empire and...
, his name being a Hispanization of "Franz Josef
Franz Josef
Franz Josef or Franz Joseph is a given name.People known solely by the name:* Franz Joseph I of Austria , Emperor of Austria, Apostolic King of Hungary and King of Bohemia...
". Ironically, he finds himself a minor partner in the Entente fighting against his ancestral Austria-Hungary
Austria-Hungary
Austria-Hungary , more formally known as the Kingdoms and Lands Represented in the Imperial Council and the Lands of the Holy Hungarian Crown of Saint Stephen, was a constitutional monarchic union between the crowns of the Austrian Empire and the Kingdom of Hungary in...
.
During World War II, he sent his three best army divisions to assist the Confederate States in Operation Coalscuttle in Pennsylvania. These forces were annihilated in General Morrell's counterattack, which led to the destruction of the Confederate army in Pittsburgh. Afterwards, Confederate Secretary of State George Herbert Walker
George Herbert Walker
George Herbert Walker was a wealthy American banker and businessman. His daughter Dorothy married Prescott Bush, making him a grandfather of former President George H. W. Bush and a great-grandfather of former President George W. Bush.-Life and career:Born in St...
'persuaded' him to provide five more divisions for use as 'internal security' against Negro marauders.
Not much is known about the Emperor personally. He was one of the few Entente heads of state to remain as such after the war without being killed (as Charles XI of France and Jake Featherston of the C.S. were) or overthrown (as Winston Churchill was).
See also
- Southern Victory Series
- Historical characters in the Southern Victory Series
- Institutions in the Southern Victory Series