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 1945 and features dozens of fictional characters, some of them analogues of real people.
(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 Second Great War, which he began 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.
(HFR, GW:B-AE:VO)
Hosea Blackford was first introduced in HFR in a train ride across the northern Great Plains at 1881, while talking with former US President Abraham Lincoln, 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 (S-New York), developing a romantic relationship. They ultimately married despite religious and political differences (Hosea was Protestant while Flora was Jewish). They would later have a son named Joshua.
In 1920, he was asked by presidential candidate Upton Sinclair to be the Socialist Party nominee to be the Vice President. The Socialists defeated Democratic incumbent Theodore Roosevelt, who was running for a third term. Sinclair and 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 with Hiram Johnson as his running mate while the Democratics nominated Calvin Coolidge of Massachusetts. Blackford defeated Coolidge by a small margin and became the 30th president after finally taking Pennsylvania and New Jersey. The Socialists also carried New York, Ohio, Indiana, Wisconsin, Colorado, and California. The Democrats were able to capture all six of the New England states (including Coolidge's home and birth states of Massachusetts and Vermont), Kentucky, Houston, Kansas, Montana, Idaho, and Nevada. It was a closer race than the 1924 election had been, but Coolidge ultimately conceded to Blackford over the telephone. While conceding, Coolidge predicted that the bull market could not last and that a dramatic crash was certain. Blackford naively dismissed Coolidge's predictions believing that the Socialists had enacted adequate safety measures.
However, history proved Coolidge right as an economic panic and subsequent stock market crash came in late 1929. The crash and depression were largely blamed on Blackford. Shantytowns of unemployed people in the United States become known as Blackfordburghs 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 Japanese 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. However, Coolidge never got to become the 31st president. He died on January 5, 1933 (the same date as he died in real life) of a heart attack, less than a month before he could be inaugurated president on February 1. This resulted in Coolidge's running mate Herbert Hoover becoming the 31st president, instead.
After Hoover became president, Blackford 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, shortly after Alfred E. Smith succeeded Hoover as President. Incumbent President Smith, and both Sinclair and Hoover, who were the only living former US Presidents, served as Blackford's pallbearers.
(AE:CCH-SA:ID)
Joshua Blackford was the son of President of the United States Hosea Blackford and Congresswoman Flora Blackford. He lived most of his life in Philadelphia.
He was born in 1925. During the Second Great War, he was conscripted into the US Army shortly after his 18th birthday in 1943. His mother immediately offered to find a way to disqualify him from conscription despite her support of the war; she had refused to do the same thing for her brother (Joshua's uncle), David Hamburger, during the Great War, which she did not support. Blackford refused his mother's offer and joined the Army. In the fall of 1943, he was still in training when General Irving Morrell's forces entered Georgia. Despite the success of Morrell's offensive, Blackford was sent into combat. He was injured in 1944, losing the middle finger of his left hand. He was taken to a military hospital in Thayer, Missouri.
(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 alike. 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 his old sometime-nemesis-sometime-ally Cincinnatus Driver, whom he did not trust.
(Viewpoint character, GW:AF-SA:ID)
Sam Carsten was a member of a 5-inch (130 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 in the 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 Josephus 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 which had been brutalized by CSA invasions. After the war ended, he was promoted to lieutenant commander, and assigned to patrol the occupied CSA 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.
(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.
(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 was 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 US 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 Theodore 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 two assassination attempts by a Canadian farmer named Arthur McGregor, who was ultimately killed by his intended target, Custer was forced by the new President Upton Sinclair to retire, and Dowling became army-commandant of Salt Lake City with the rank of colonel.
Following the 1929 assassination of Utah 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 Al Smith and Jake 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 an army 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 George Patton. He has an ironic sense of humor and is a close ally of Irving Morrell.
(Viewpoint character, GW:AF-SA:ID)
Born in Covington, Kentucky, CSA, Cincinnatus, who like most CSA Blacks, had no surname, 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 Confederates, black Marxists, and U.S. forces in Kentucky. Luther Bliss, head of the United States's new Kentucky State Police, detained him on suspicion of espionage but was freed after a personal intervention by US President Theodore Roosevelt.
Following the Great War, when Kentucky became part of the USA, and its Blacks were allowed to take surnames, Cincinnatus chose the name Driver after his profession and moved to Des Moines, Iowa, where he set up business as a hauler. In the mid 1920s, he was briefly lured back to Kentucky by Luther Bliss and once again imprisoned without charge for several months, but this time was 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 (his one-time nemesis, now something of a grudging ally), Driver followed the Army into Tennessee and Georgia, enthusiastically seeing the reactions of Confederates who saw a black man carrying a weapon. After the war, Driver returned to Covington one last time, saddened to see that all his friends had apparently been killed in the recent genocide, except for two men whom he suspected of "selling out" all the other Blacks, before returning home to Des Moines to see his daughter, Amanda, get married.
(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 appeared in stage plays and movies and recorded an anti-Confederate number, "Featherston's Follies." They are noted for wearing beards dyed in many different colors.
The Engels Brothers are analogous to the Marx Brothers, and are named after the long-time writing partner of Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels.
(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 Roger Kimball.
(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 Sr., was killed when the USS Ericsson was illegally torpedoed on the day after the U.S.-C.S. armistice. The tragedy of the Enos family acquired notoriety after Junior's mother Sylvia struck down the murderer and was acquitted for justifiable homicide in 1923. Junior became a fisherman like his father before him, married Connie McGillicuddy, and joined the U.S. Navy in 1941 to avoid conscription into the Army, seeing action in the Sandwich Islands, which were being threatened by the Japanese, 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 USS Josephus Daniels , under the command of Sam Carsten, whom he recognized from a chance encounter in his childhood. In 1944, Enos was transferred again, this time to the USS Oregon . With the intervention of Joseph P. Kennedy Sr., an admirer of Sylvia Enos, Enos Jr. was able to obtain his release from the navy after the Second Great War concluded, after which he returned home to Boston.
(Viewpiont character, GW:AF-AE:VO)
Sylvia Enos, born in 1886, was the wife and widow of Boston fisherman and U.S. Navy man George Enos Senior. 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 Navy officer who illegally killed her husband on the USS Ericsson , Roger Kimball. Sylvia traveled to South Carolina and killed Kimball, then surrendered to authorities. She was spared prosecution through the intervention of Anne Colleton, a political rival and ex-lover of Kimball.
Following her return, she became a heroine. Boston Democrat 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. [1] Against the advice of her son George Enos Junior, 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 one day in 1939 when, in a very black melancholy, Ernie accidentally shot and killed Sylvia, during his own suicide.
(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.
(Viewpoint character, GW:AF-SA:ID)
Flora Hamburger is the wife of US President Hosea Blackford and a major political figure in her own right.
At the beginning of the series she is a Socialist grassroots activist and agitator in a working-class Jewish neighborhood of New York City, 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 United States 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 State of Dakota. 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 Hanford, Washington. 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 Robert A. 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 (though not seriously) in the closing days of the war.
Blackford was among the members of Congress to tour the site of the superbomb attack on the outskirts of Philadelphia in 1944. She spent much of the postwar 1944 campaigning for her re-election to Congress (which she won) and for Charles W. La Follete's election bid (which he lost). She gave a speech in Congress expressing thanks to the black guerrilla Cassius Madison for killing Jake Featherston, and was present at the inauguration of Thomas E. Dewey on February 1, 1945.
(SA:ID)
General Ironhewer of the United States Army, accepted the surrender of Confederate General George Patton in Birmingham, Alabama the closing days of the Second Great War in July 1944. Ironhewer was a long-faced bald man. Ironhewer's name is a literal translation of the German Eisenhower, and his brief description suggests a similarity to the real life U.S. General Dwight D. Eisenhower.
(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.
(AE:VO - SA:ID)
The fourth Socialist President of the United States, Charles W. La Follette was elected Vice President of the United States in 1936 and served from 1937 until the death of President Al Smith in 1942. LaFollete also promised to keep the agreement between his office and Flora Blackford on the African-American holocaust in return for her keeping quiet about the atomic bomb project in western Washington State.
After the U.S. made significant progress in 1943, invading Kentucky, Tennessee, and capturing Camp Determination, La Follette demanded Jake Featherston's surrender. Featherston responded by firing two rockets into Philadelphia.
As the war was drawing to a close, La Follete issued an executive order barring discrimination in the armed forces on the basis of race. He also pledged to introduce civil rights legislation into Congress to protect all blacks under U.S. jurisdiction.
Though he led the U.S. to victory in 1944, La Follette was defeated by Thomas E. Dewey and his running mate Harry S. Truman in the Presidential election later that year. This might be intended to parallel the real world defeat of Winston Churchill at the close of World War II by Clement Attlee in 1945.
Readers have long debated this character's connection to the historical La Follette family of Wisconsin. In May 2018, Turtledove settled the matter by explaining that Charles W. is a fictional son of Robert M. La Follette, Sr., and is primarily modeled on Robert M. La Follette, Jr., much in the way that Daniel MacArthur is a fictional analog of Douglas MacArthur. [2]
(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, and apparently had no sense of conscience or remorse. 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, South Carolina when the unit was halted to allow a nuclear bomb attack on the city.
(GW:WH-GW:B, AE:VO-SA:DE, SE:ID)
During the Great War Daniel 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 Texas and 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, similar to the main timeline Douglas MacArthur. Turtledove has explained that Douglas' birth was prevented in this timeline due to his parents being from opposing nations, so his fictitious half-brother Daniel took his place. [3]
(Viewpoint character, GW:AF-GW:WH)
Born in Philadelphia but proud of his Greek heritage, Chef Paul Mantarakis was conscripted as a private in the U.S. Army, serving in the West with Gordon McSweeney during the early part of the Great War. There was some friction between the two when the fanatically Presbyterian McSweeney, an outspoken religious bigot who railed particularly against Roman Catholicism, mistook Mantarakis' Greek Orthodox prayer for a Latin liturgy. Ultimately, everyone in the unit learned to take McSweeney's phobia in stride and not let it harm their working relationship, and McSweeney acknowledged that Mantarakis was a steadfast comrade in arms, although he distrusted his religion. Mantarakis 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, and McSweeney took up his "viewpoint slot" in the story.
(Viewpoint character: GW:AF-SA:ID)
Chester Martin was the son of Stephen Douglas Martin and a steelworker in Toledo, Ohio. He served on the Roanoke, Virginia ("Big Lick") front during the Great War and received a commendation for saving the life of US President Theodore Roosevelt, in an analog of how Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. saved Abraham Lincoln in the 1864 of our timeline. 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 Los Angeles, 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, Georgia, and participated in the burning of Hardeeville, South Carolina and the murder of most of its citizens, instigated by Martin's much-younger superior, the psychopathic Lt. Boris Lavochkin. Martin briefly considered staging an accident to assassinate Lavochkin afterward, but never summoned the courage. He was saved from being in Charleston, SC when it was destroyed by a superbomb, when the foolhardy Lavochkin 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. He decided to keep his less-savory deeds a secret from his wife and son.
(GW:B-AE:BI)
Walter McKenna served as vice president under Democratic President Theodore Roosevelt from 1913 to 1921, which included the Great War. He was described as an "amiable non-entity who was almost as fat as Congressman William Howard Taft".
Originally elected vice president under Roosevelt in 1912 and reelected in 1916, he and Roosevelt were defeated in bid for a third term in the 1920 election by the Socialist ticket of Upton Sinclair and Hosea Blackford.
In The Great War: Breakthroughs , he is mistakenly referred to as Kennan.
(GW:AF-GW:WH; Viewpoint character, GW:WH-GW:B)
Gordon 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 was an outspoken religious bigot, particularly against Roman Catholicism, and saw himself as the instrument of God. He eschewed all reading material except for the Bible, regarding even basic newspapers as dirty, and his favorite song was "A Mighty Fortress is our God." Friction was caused between McSweeney and Mantarakis when the former mistook the latter's Greek Orthodox prayer for a Latin liturgy, but the Scot ultimately came to recognize the Grecian as a good brother in arms, even while distrusting his religion. McSweeney saw the enemy, whether they were Mormon, Mexican, or Confederates, as persons to be slaughtered without pity or mercy. He would use flamethrowers on enemy bunkers, for example, but also used them on trench patrols. McSweeney, a stickler for the smallest regulations, 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 the Medal of Honor twice 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.
(Viewpoint character, GW:AF-SA:ID)
Born in late 1891, Irving Morrell graduated from West Point. At the outbreak of the Great War 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 his 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. [3] 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 is a direct parallel between Irving Morrell and Erwin Rommel, as both fought in their respective First World War, and both started the Second World War as colonels and as leading proponents of armored warfare. This is acknowledged in the character's name: Irving is the Anglo version of Erwin, and Morrell is a near-anagram of Rommel.
(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 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 "Canucks".
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 continued to wage operations against Confederate civilians and Mexican troops across rural Georgia. However, an attempt to steal a plane - with which Spartacus wanted Moss to strafe the Confederates from the air while Moss himself hoped to use it to return to the US Army positions - led the band into an ambush in which it was 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 earlier Great War. Considered too old to be a fighter pilot anymore, he took up lawyering again, and was invited to Houston, Texas, part of a nominally restored independent republic, to defend concentration camp commandant Jefferson Davis Pinkard, because the man originally assigned to Pinkard's case was in bed with a broken leg. Although Moss made the best possible Sisyphean effort to defend the indefensible and save his client's life, Pinkard condemned himself by proudly and remorselessly bragging about his efficient "reduction of population," and therefore was found guilty of crimes against humanity and sentenced to death. The judge and prosecutors were moved by Moss' steadfast fortitude in his thankless task, and offered him a place on the Judge Advocate's staff. Moss accepted, and took up helping the surviving Southern blacks as his new cause.
(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 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.
(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.
Whatever his personality was before the war, Pound had become a bit psychopathic by the end of it, showing little remorse for any civilian casualties for which he was directly or indirectly responsible, and had no moral objections to the ever more brutal hostage policy of the US forces. During the postwar occupation, incoming US Vice President Harry Truman was shocked to hear Lt. Pound casually propose a strategy that sounded like the genocide of the CSA's white population. Truman vowed that he (Truman) would not become as bad as Jake Featherston. Pound figured that he (Pound) may very well have just killed his own chances for promotion, but did not care, because he loved his current job so much.
(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, which had become a republic separate from Canada. 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.
(GW:AF-GW:B)
William "Bill" Reach was a reporter for the Washington Evening Star before the Great War. Before that, although it is not clear, he 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 killed in self-defense by Nellie Semphroch when he attempted to rape her during the Confederate withdrawal from Washington in 1917.
(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.
(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 Theodore 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.
(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, using the name "Little Nell." 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 particular. 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 in 1917, 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 Edna's biological 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 mid 1930s. She died in 1937 of blood poisoning, not long after attending Alfred Emanuel Smith's presidential inauguration, her dying words being a confession of Bill Reach's death, though it is not clear if anyone ever believed her.
(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 President Woodrow Wilson's declaration of war speech, he joined the Seventh Virginia Regiment of the Confederate Army, fast becoming a hardened veteran. He was captured by Chester Martin's unit but eventually escaped 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 Rehoboam, a black Confederate POW who might have been a former Marxist rebel. Returning to Richmond and the pharmacy business, Bartlett saw the rise of Jake Featherston's Freedom Party and actively opposed it, supporting instead the Radical Liberals. He was gunned down by Freedom Party stalwarts in 1925 after he had torn down their posters.
(GW:AF-AE:BI)
Lieutenant Tom Brearley was a Confederate States Navy officer and was Roger Kimball's XO of the submarine CSS Bonefish throughout the Great War. Kimball considered him a comrade and a superb officer, but he immensely disliked his soft political philosophy.
On the day when Kimball torpedoed the USS Ericsson, just after the war between the USA and the CSA ended, Brearley was the only crew member of the Bonefish against Kimball's decision and thus refused to man his battle station to carry out the order. In return, Kimball threatened Brearley's life if he ever spoke of the war crime to anyone.
After the war, Brearley drifted like other veterans and kept Kimball's secret. But when he becomes horrified by the rise of the fanatical Freedom Party aided by Kimball's involvement, he decides to break his silence. He tries to convince Kimball's lover, Anne Colleton, to withdraw her support for the Freedom Party by telling her about Kimball's actions, but she coldly refuses to due to her hatred of the United States and threatens him as well, but Brearley is undeterred. With help from Reggie Bartlett, Brearley goes to the press and tells his story anonymously. Though the secret is out, not many people in the Confederacy care due to the Freedom Party's popularity, at least until President Hampton V's assassination. Though published anonymously, Brearley's identify is figured out and he is killed when his house is burned down by Freedom Party stalwarts with Brearley trapped inside.
His story reaches the United States and to Sylvia Enos, which allows her to finally learn the identity of the man who killed her husband, George Enos, who was aboard the Ericsson when it was sunk. When the US government does nothing to demand for Roger Kimball's extradition, she travels to South Carolina and kills him herself, finally exacting justice.
(SA:ID)
Clark Butler is a throwaway gag character from near the end of the series. His name is an amalgam of Clark Gable and Rhett Butler of Gone With the Wind fame. A local official in Georgia who is willing to collaborate with the victorious "Yankees" following the disbanding of the CSA, Butler is nevertheless shocked to learn that the new conquerors will enforce a racial equality law. General Morrell responds to Butler's discomfort by saying "Frankly, Butler, I don't give a damn," parodying the signature line of the eponymous Margaret Mitchell creation.
(AE:BI)
Grady Calkins was a Confederate veteran of the Great War, and member of the Birmingham, Alabama chapter of the Freedom Party. In 1922, he assassinated Confederate President Wade Hampton V. He was gunned down by the state militia after a brief shootout moments later. This act brought a temporary halt to the momentum the Freedom Party had built up throughout the 1920s, leaving the party in the political wilderness until the Great Depression and the 1933 election.
(SA:ID)
Jack Carter, owner of the Tarkas estate, was a Richmond, Virginia gentleman who protected his Black house staff from Jake Featherston's Second Great War genocide, in an analog of Schindler's List. At war's end, United States General Abner Dowling summoned Carter to congratulate him and recruit him as a collaborator, but Carter coldly refused all praise and offers of friendship. He insisted that he, a dyed in the wool Whig, only did it for his personal convenience and his fondness for the good old days of the CSA. He hated Featherston for overthrowing the Whigs and wasting useful Blacks, but hated the Yankees more because they were foreigners.
He is named for characters from Edgar Rice Burroughs's "Barsoom" series of novels: CSA Captain John Carter of Virginia and his friend the Martian chieftain Tars Tarkas.
(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 guerrilla operations against the CSA, and in particular against Anne Colleton. Cassius was killed by Anne's brother Tom shortly after the Armistice of 1917.
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, 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 mustard 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 Great Wars, Colleton became involved with the Freedom Party as a designer for mass-rallies, but stopped her support after a Freedom Party sniper killed Confederate 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 Jake Featherston. Colleton was killed, shortly after listening to a speech by Congressman Strom Thurmond (F-S.C.) in a 1941 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.
(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 disliked the Freedom Party but nevertheless went out to fight in Jake Featherston's 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.
(AE:CCH-SA:DE; Viewpoint character SA:G-SA:ID)
Jerry Dover was a frontline Great War veteran and the manager of the Huntsman's Lodge in Augusta, Georgia and was Xerxes' (Scipio's) boss. He was known to protect his black workers from Freedom Party cleanouts by sheltering them and their families in the Lodge overnight. This was more out of personal liking for Scipio and other workers, and for the benefit of the Lodge, rather than from any revolutionary feeling of racial enlightenment on his part. Dover was righteously 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, then becomes a viewpoint character in his own right.
In 1942, Dover signed up for the Quartermaster 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. At the end of the war, he was one of the first CSA officers to be released from prison, due to a good word from Cassius Madison (slayer of Jake Featherston), whose life had once been saved by Dover when the latter had allowed him to shelter overnight at the restaurant. Returning to Augusta, Dover resumed managing the Huntsman's Lodge, and had a brief encounter with the woman who had blackmailed him, and who turned out to be working for the Yankees, as he had suspected.
(AE:BI)
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, and 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 [ citation needed ], the founder of the Nazi Party which was then hijacked by Adolf Hitler.
(Viewpoint character, GW:AF-SA:ID)
(SA:RE-SA:ID)
Professor Henderson V. FitzBelmont was a physicist at Washington University in Lexington, Virginia. In 1941, he attempted to convince President Jake 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 were 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 was 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, placing his knowledge and ability at such a power's disposal. For this reason, General John Abell says that FitzBelmont, and certain other Confederates, may have to be liquidated in staged automobile accidents, but no results of this plan are ever revealed, leaving FitzBelmont's ultimate fate to the reader's imagination.
Analogous to Robert Oppenheimer
(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, Virginia 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 1933, 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 U.S. for crimes against humanity and hanged - 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 modeled after Samuel Goldwyn as well, with an obvious irony that an alternate Nazi analog is Jewish.[ citation needed ]
(AE:BI)
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, Alabama, 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 term.
His assassination shares many similarities with the historical Beer Hall Putsch.
(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 knowingly 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 in 1923 by Sylvia Enos, widow of George Enos.
(GW:AF-GW:B)
Nicholas H. Kincaid was a lieutenant in the Confederate Army during the Great War. He was stationed in Washington, DC.. He became romantically and sexually involved with Edna Semphroch (despite her mother's best efforts). The two were engaged to be married, but their wedding was interrupted when the United States Army began its campaign to retake the city in 1917. Kincaid was killed in the opening bombardment by being decapitated by a gun shell.
(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, and was then absorbed into it. 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 Ferdinand 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 a second 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 summarily 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.
(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 and Hermann Göring.[ citation needed ] It is interesting that he is one of the few Confederates in this series with a German name, as the Germans are theoretically "good guys" (allied with the USA), and the Nazis never exist. The name Koenig means King.
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 War in 1941, 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 believed takes priority to winning the conflict. He authorized the building of Camp Humble when Camp Determination was overrun by U.S. troops.
In 1944, Koenig fled Richmond with Featherston and other important Confederate officials, but was captured after Featherston was killed. Koenig was among the Confederate officials put on trial for crimes against humanity. Found guilty, he was hanged together with Saul Goldman.
(AE:BI)
Ainsworth Layne was the Radical Liberal Party candidate for the President of the Confederate States in the 1921 election. While he was defeated by Whig Party candidate Wade Hampton V, the final polling suggested that his loss was at least in part because of the candidacy of Freedom Party candidate Jake Featherston.
Layne was earnest in his desire to reconcile with both the United States and with the colored residents of the CSA, unpopular positions immediately after the Great War. During the campaign, Featherston made much of the fact that Layne was Harvard-educated, and during one speech, accused Layne of wanting to bring the Confederacy back into the United States.
Like the Whigs, Layne and the rest of the members of the Radical Liberal Party were often subjected to violence by the Freedom Party. During a speech in Charleston, South Carolina, Layne's supporters were set upon by Freedom Party Stalwarts led by Roger Kimball. Shots were fired, and Kimball had to prevent a Stalwart from shooting Layne.
(AE:CCH)
Samuel Longstreet was a Whig Senator from Virginia. The grandson of former general and President James Longstreet, Samuel himself was the Whig nominee for the presidency in 1933. He and his running-mate Hugo Black were defeated by the Freedom Party's Jake Featherston. This defeat made Longstreet the first Whig candidate to lose a Presidential election in Confederate history.
(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 (also called Xerxes) and Bathsheba, and brother of Antoinette. As he grew up in Augusta, Georgia'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, mother, and sister to Camp Determination in Texas and their eventual deaths. 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 making sure the tyrant was dead, 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 attended the inauguration of US President Thomas E. Dewey on February 1, 1945 as a special guest.
There may be symbolism in his name, as Gaius Cassius Longinus, often known simply as Cassius, was one of the assassins of another larger-than-life head of state, Julius Caesar.
(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 Confederate 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.
The character has some characteristics in common with Eva Braun (although there is no sexual relationship with the boss in this case), and her name recalls controversial Georgia politician Lester Maddox.
(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 five years of Hampton's term. He won the election (erroneously reported as having won re-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 United States; both were analogs to Hoovervilles [ citation needed ]). 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.
(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, with his presidency lasting only a week. He unconditionally surrendered to US forces, and as a result, the CSA was disbanded as a nation. Afterward, Partridge was taken prisoner by Morrell, but presumably was released after a short time, as he had only been a figurehead who did not take part in the genocide. Partridge is a caricature of Dan Quayle, as seen with their similar names (cv. Quail and Partridge) and the image of Quayle in popular culture as a clueless buffoon.
(Viewpoint character, GW:AF-SA:ID)
An Alabama native, Jefferson Pinkard is a steelworker 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, Sonoran recruit Hipolito Rodriguez, receive their baptism by fire when they go into combat against the "Red" rebels. Home on leave in 1917, he catches his wife Emily performing fellatio on his best friend and next-door neighbor, Bedford Cunningham, a crippled veteran. 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 starts down 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 (similar to our timeline's 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 prisoners, especially the followers of Louisiana governor Huey Long, who is assassinated by Featherston's men. 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," 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 murderer. Soon, he is not only obeying orders (and soon loses any sense of remorse), 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 Leroy "Chick" Blades kills himself by venting carbon monoxide into his car, giving Pinkard the idea to put the disposable prisoners in trucks (telling them that they are being relocated to another prison) 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, this timeline's analog of Auschwitz. When Pinkard comes up with an even more efficient way to "reduce the population", i.e. gas chambers 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 graves dug by bulldozers in the Texas Panhandle 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 crematoria. 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 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 Sisyphean efforts of his defense attorney, Jonathan Moss, Pinkard condemns himself by proudly and remorselessly bragging about his efficiency in "taking care" of the Black "problem," and is found guilty of crimes against humanity for his role in the slaughter 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.
(GW:AF-AE:BI, Viewpoint character AE:CCH-SA:ID)
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 Jake 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 United States than most of his compatriots.
During the Great War Potter was a CS Army major assigned to Army of Northern Virginia intelligence. It was in 1915 that his path first crossed with that of Jake Featherston, 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 Yankee 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 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 apprised 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.
This band of high-ranking castaways wandered too close to a US encampment, resulting in Featherston's death at the hands of a teenage sentry named Cassius, and the capture of the others. 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 USA'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.
(AE:CCH-SA:RE, SA:G-SA:ID)
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.
(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".
(GW:WH-GW:B, Viewpoint character AE:CCH-SA:G)
Hipolito Rodriguez was a farmer from Baroyeca, Sonora, which was part of the Confederate States since 1881. 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 Jake 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 limited a Confederate President to one six-year term), and enrolled his sons in the Hitler Youth-like Freedom Youth Corps; when the war began, they would go into the CS Army.
The loyalty of Rodriguez and other Hispanic 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 Sonoran 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 Jeff 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 Hispanic "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 concluded that even she could not cleanse his hands from "the oceans of blood" staining them, and became certain he was damned. He then shot himself dead with his submachine gun.
This last act is not so much derived from religion (the Catholic 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 epiphany about the Blacks, do not realise that this was indeed the specific terrible wrong he sought to atone for.
(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.
(Viewpoint character, GW:AF-SA:G)
Scipio (no last name), known as "Kip" to some, was, in 1915, the butler of Anne Colleton. He was born a slave around 1873, before the manumission following the Second Mexican War. Scipio was highly educated and was able to switch on a moment's notice between speaking with a "white" accent and with 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 Huntsman's 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 Huntsman's 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 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 Lodge years before, so the paperwork checked out for Scipio's sake.)
Scipio/Xerxes married Bathsheba and had two children: Cassius and Antoinette. He found himself trapped behind the barbed wire the Confederates established around the Terry, Augusta's Black district. Jerry Dover protected his employees and their families from deportation when he could (out of personal likes and desire for restaurant efficiency, rather than from a revolutionary racial sympathy), but was then drafted into the army, thus removing Scipio's protection. Eventually, in early 1943 a Freedom Party roundup of Augusta's Blacks caught him and his family while attending church (save Cassius, who was elsewhere), and deported them west.
Scipio, Bathsheba, and 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 camps; nevertheless, the death of Scipio, who had been a prominent viewpoint character for 8 previous books, is especially traumatizing to the reader, despite being obvious for a page or two before it actually happens. Scipio has always been the consummate survivor, being able to talk, sneak or threaten his way out of the tightest worst-case scenarios against all probability, but now his luck has run out. Making it even crueler is that it comes immediately after he has a falsely hopeful encounter with the guard Hipolito Rodriguez who brought him a message from his wife and daughter, but then was among the guards who led Scipio and many others to their deaths.
(GW:AF-AE:BI)
Gabriel Semmes was a prominent Whig politician during the Great War, and is possibly a fictitious 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 and became the tenth president. 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.
(HFR)
Lieutenant Colonel Steinfeldt was second in command of the Third Virginia Regiment, positioned south and west of St. Matthews during the Siege of Louisville. When the Army of Ohio made its second crossing in an attempted to outflank the Army of Kentucky while it was busy in the city of Louisville, Colonel Tinker's regimental headquarters came under heavy attack. The headquarters was hit by artillery fire and Steinfelft was killed along with Tinker.
(HFR, AE:BI, AE:VO)
General James Ewell Brown (Jeb) Stuart Jr. is a fictionalized character in this series. There was a real JEB Stuart Jr. but he was born in 1860, and this character is said to have been born in 1864; it is unknown whether this was a gaffe on Turtledove's part, or a deliberate plot point.
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 the invasion of New 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 and 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.
(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.
(HFR)
Colonel Tinker was the commanding officer of the Third Virginia during the Second Mexican War, positioned south and west of St. Matthews during the Siege of Louisville. When the Army of Ohio made its second crossing in an attempt outflank the Army of Kentucky while it was busy in the city of Louisville, Colonel Tinker regiment came under heavy attack. His headquarters was hit by artillery fire and he got killed.
(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." He died in 1925, and his son Lucullus 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, and surmised that Lucullus had been killed by Featherston's brutal policies.
(Viewpoint character, GW:AF-AE:BI)
Arthur McGregor owned a farm in southern Manitoba near the town of Rosenfeld. 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 been 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.
(GW:AF-AE:BI, Viewpoint character AE:CCH-SA:DE)
Mary McGregor was the daughter of Arthur McGregor, the prominent Anti-American Canadian nationalist. She had married Mort Pomeroy, the owner of a Rosenfeld, Manitoba diner, in the 1930s and had one son, Alexander Arthur ("Alec") Pomeroy (named for his uncle and grandfather).
Mary continued her father's legacy after his accidental death in 1923, by carrying out a series of bombings. Among other attacks, she planted a bomb in Rosenfeld's general store, and 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 was caught with explosives. She was tried on terrorism and weapons-related charges and sentenced to death. Reluctant to execute a woman (especially the mother of a young child), she was urged to plead for mercy, thus in effect being offered a way out. However, she refused and tried to stop her lawyer from appealing, consciously and deliberately making herself a martyr for the cause. As a result, appeals by her lawyer proved unsuccessful, and she was executed by firing squad.
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.
(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 dissuade 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 Rosenfeld, the execution of his beloved wife pushed Mort to extreme militancy and resistance until his own death at Yankee hands. 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 pinkie, 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.
(GW:B-AE:VO)
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 soldier, 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.
(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 U.S. Army surgeons, the U.S. military government and the government of the new Republic of Quebec decided that 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 occupation 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 diametrically opposite directions.
(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 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 and a political career with the intent to make Quebec more like the United States. As Lucien Galtier noted, Pascal served God and himself at the same time.
(HFR)
Maximilian II had served as the Emperor of Mexico since at least 1880. He maintained the close ties between his country and France. In 1881, with his nation desperate for money, Maximilian II decided to sell the Mexican states of Chihuahua and Sonora to the Confederate States, which would cause the Second Mexican War with the United States. The following year, the war ended with a Confederate and allied victory and the US was forced to recognize Chihuahua and Sonora as Confederate territory.
Francisco José I served as the Emperor of Mexico after Maximilian II. During his reign as emperor, he saw Mexico enter the Great War on the side of the Entente Powers with the Confederate States, the United Kingdom, France, and Russia. Despite the Entente Powers losing the war, Mexico did not lose any territory to the Central Powers.
(AE:CCH-VO)
Maximilian III served as the Emperor of Mexico after Francisco I. During his reign as emperor during the late 1910s and early 1920s, anti-Habsburg Revolutionaries sought to remove him from the throne and sparked the Mexican Civil War in 1917. The Revolutionaries were supported by the United States while the Monarchs were supported by the Confederate States. The civil war ended with a Monarch victory in 1925 and Maximilian's throne was safe. He served as the emperor until at least 1942 and saw the beginning of the Second Great War and Mexico join the Entente Powers once again.
(SA:RE-SA:ID)
Francisco José II is Emperor of Mexico in the 1940s (successor of Maximilian III), and as such, analogous to the role of minor Axis leaders 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 the Second Great War, 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, Jake Featherston of the CSA, and (possibly) Michael II of Russia were) or voted out of office (as Winston Churchill was).
It is also unclear what genetic stock the series' fictitious Mexican emperors come from. The only real monarchs of that Empire - Maximilian and Carlota - are generally regarded by historians as having been an infertile couple. The historical Maximilian indicated that he planned to adopt Agustín de Iturbide y Green and Salvador de Iturbide y Marzán, the grandsons of Agustín I, as his heirs.
(AE:CCH-AE:VO, SA:ID)
King Charles XI was put in power by the Action Française movement in post-Great War France. After the overthrow of the French Third Republic around 1930, Charles XI took the movement's position to reclaim Alsace-Lorraine from Germany. When Kaiser Wilhelm II died on 4 June 1941, Charles XI formally demanded the return of Alsace-Lorraine. After Wilhelm's successor Wilhelm III denied this request, France, supported by the United Kingdom and the Confederate States, declared war on Germany, and the Second Great War began. Charles XI was killed in the superbomb attack on Paris in 1944 and was succeeded by King Louis XIX, who made an armistice with Germany.
There was formerly a popular consensus that Charles XI is historical politician Charles Maurras. In a tweet in 2020, Turtledove flatly denied this.
(SA:ID) King Louis XIX became the King of France in 1944 after Charles XI was killed in the German superbomb attack that destroyed most of Paris. He initially announced France's intention to continue to fight Germany, but ultimately accepted capitulation.
Louis Antoine, Duke of Angoulême had technically reigned as King Louis XIX of France on 2 August 1830, albeit for a mere twenty minutes. The correct name of the monarch should be Louis XX, although not all monarchists accept the Louis XIX of 1830 as a true king.
(GW:B)
Dom Pedro IV is the Emperor of Brazil during the Great War. Through most of the war, he keeps his country neutral, although both sides actively court him. In 1917, when it is clear that the Central Powers have the upper-hand, Dom Pedro IV declares war on the Entente. Brazil's entry into the war bottles up Argentina and cuts off a valuable supply line to the United Kingdom, which helps to accelerate the Entente's capitulation.
The Great War is an alternate history trilogy novel by Harry Turtledove, which follows How Few Remain. It is part of Turtledove's Southern Victory series of novels. This trilogy is an alternative imaginary scenario of World War I, between 1914 and 1917, as a result of the Confederate States' victory over the United States in 1862.
The American Empire series is a trilogy of alternate history novels by Harry Turtledove. It follows How Few Remain and the Great War trilogy, and is part of the Southern Victory Series. It takes the Southern Victory Series Earth from 1917 to 1941.
The Settling Accounts tetralogy is an alternate history setting of World War II by Harry Turtledove in North America, presupposing that the Confederate States of America won the American Civil War. It is part of the Southern Victory Series, following How Few Remain and trilogies Great War and American Empire. It takes the Southern Victory Series world from 1941 to 1944.
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 known as the Second Great War in North America, fought between the United States and Confederate States. It was released in August 2005. It follows Return Engagement and precedes The Grapple in the tetralogy. It takes the Southern Victory Earth from 1942 to 1943.
Return Engagement is the first book of Harry Turtledove's Settling Accounts series of alternate history novels. An analogy of World War II known as the Second Great War is being waged on American soil between the United States and the Confederate States.
The Southern Victory series and Timeline-191 are fan names given to a series of eleven alternate history novels by author Harry Turtledove, beginning with How Few Remain (1997) and published over a decade. The period addressed in the series begins during the Civil War and spans nine decades, up to the mid-1940s. In the series, the Confederate States defeats the United States of America in 1862, thereby making good its attempt at secession and becoming an independent nation. Subsequent books are built on imagining events based on this alternate timeline.
Jacob "Jake" Featherston is a fictional character in the Southern Victory Series novel series by Harry Turtledove. He is Timeline-191's equivalent of Adolf Hitler. A Southerner with ambition, Featherston was determined to not just reclaim territory lost by the Confederate States of America during the Great War but also get revenge on two groups: the United States of America and Negro Southerners, His actions resulted not only in genocide toward the black population but also in the destruction of the Confederacy after the Second Great War.
The Great War: American Front is the first alternate history novel in the Great War trilogy by Harry Turtledove. It is the second part of Turtledove's Southern Victory series of novels. It takes the Southern Victory Series from 1914 to 1915.
American 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.
American Empire: The Center Cannot Hold is the second book in the American Empire alternate history series by Harry Turtledove. It takes place during the period of the Roaring Twenties and the Great Depression. During this era in Turtledove's Southern Victory world, the Confederate States of America, stretching from Sonora to Virginia, is led by Whigs while the United States of America is controlled by Socialists.
Richard William "Dick" Dowling was an artillery officer of the Confederate States Army who achieved distinction as commander at the battle of Sabine Pass (1863), the most one-sided Confederate victory during the American Civil War. It is considered the "Thermopylae of the Confederacy" and prevented Texas from being conquered by the Union. For his actions, Dowling received the "thanks of Congress", Davis Guards Medal, Southern Cross of Honor, and Confederate Medal of Honor. Over a dozen other memorials have also been dedicated in his honor.
The Southern Victory Series is a fan name given to a series of Harry Turtledove alternate history novels.
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 1945 and features dozens of characters, some of whom were historical figures.
Settling Accounts: The Grapple by Harry Turtledove is the third book in the Settling Accounts tetralogy, an alternate history setting of World War II known as the Second Great War in North America. It is part of the Southern Victory, which supposes that the Confederate States of America won the American Civil War. It takes place in the Southern Victory Series Earth in 1943.
Settling Accounts: In at the Death is the last novel of the Settling Accounts tetralogy that presents an alternate history of World War II known as the Second Great War 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 Victory. It takes the Southern Victory Series Earth from 1943 to 1945.
American 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.
Winfield Scott Featherston "Old Swet" was an antebellum two-term U.S. Representative from Mississippi and a brigadier general in the Confederate States Army during the American Civil War. He was later a state politician and a circuit court judge.
The general officers of the Confederate States Army (CSA) were the senior military leaders of the Confederacy during the American Civil War of 1861–1865. They were often former officers from the United States Army prior to the Civil War, while others were given the rank based on merit or when necessity demanded. Most Confederate generals needed confirmation from the Confederate Congress, much like prospective generals in the modern U.S. armed forces.
The Confederate States of America (1861-1865) only had one president, who was Jefferson Davis. In various American Civil War alternate histories where the Confederacy won the American Civil War and continued its existence, various people have served in the office of the presidency of the Confederacy.
