My oneshot of
Guns of the South, 100 years later
What A Difference A Century Makes
It’s 1964, and across the Confederate States of America there are widespread celebrations to mark how it’s been a hundred years, now, since the Confederacy won its miraculous eleventh-hour victory in the Second American Revolution, brought on by the Bravery and Valorous Conduct of Southern Patriots and the development and miraculous large-scale introduction of the “repeater” (known for whatever reason as the AK-47) amongst the Confederate Army. That’s the public narrative, anyhow; amongst the Confederacy’s elite and oftentimes secretive caste of landholders, industrialists, politicians, and scientists, the refrain is altered to reflect the truth of the matter: a hundred years ago, now, since the Rivington Men came from the future and saved an otherwise doomed cause. It was far simpler, of course, for Southern Pride to insist that it was the down-home ingenuity of a few devoted patriots in North Carolina which had saved the day than to spout fantastical stories about time-travelling Dutchmen from the future which might get one sent to a sanatorium.
No matter what one’s view of history, though, the facts are that after the Richmond Massacre, the Confederate Party of Marse Robert governed through his Administration and that of his successor, P.G.T. Beauregard, overseeing the bulk of the reforms which largely guaranteed the Confederacy as a viable nation-state. Without a doubt, the most important of all was the successful conclusion of the Manumission Act of 1868 [1] and the beginning of the gradual process of freedom-through-indenture which continued until 1893.
Within the Confederate government, of course, the original contingent of Congressmen and government figures who toured the Richmond headquarters of America Will Break remained aware of the reality of their situation, and formed something of a secret society to guard the secrets of the Rivington Men while imparting the Pact of Silence unto the new blood of Congress over the succeeding years. Despite a few leaks in the initial years, and perhaps due to the abrupt ways in which many of these were plugged [2], the Pact ensured that, even when States Rights Gist led the Patriots to victory in the election of 1879 and took a significantly harder stance on foreign and domestic affairs while eschewing many of the “strong central government” policies which enabled the Pact’s success, the Silence remained.
And in the world which arose from 1864, silence ensured the solidarity needed to maintain stability. To the north, even with the thaw in relations after Horatio Seymour’s re-election, the increasingly aggressive, militant bent of the Union was cause for concern. As well as the essentially unprovoked invasion of the Canadas in late 1866, and the Mexican Intervention of 1870 [3], the rough-and-ready reverse engineering of the AK-47 and its distribution to American forces (as the modified Colt Repeating Rifle, Model 1866) was disturbing evidence that the Pact of Silence could only do so much to prevent the dissemination of the advanced knowledge and technology held by the Confederacy. An entire army’s worth of repeaters, an increasingly-steady supply of ammunition, and the knowledge to put both to use would all ensure that the Confederate States could ward off all comers for at least a decade – but what then?
As it turned out, the Pact was able to organise, with the assistance of the Rivington Men, a loose timetable for the research, reverse-engineering, development, and production of the myriad other technologies AWB had brought with them. “Release upon Requirement” became the unofficial lodestone of the Pact’s policy, with the 1877 “Albie” [4] Repeating Light Carbine (a proto-Uzi) and the 1880 “Forrest” [5] Machine-Gun (M2 Machine Gun) coming into widespread use during the Cuban Intervention of 1883, when the Spanish were driven from the Western Hemisphere and the Confederacy’s main satellite state was established.
Cuba aside, the Confederacy remained essentially isolationist, focusing on internal improvements – particularly railroads, telegraphs, and ongoing electrification projects with the aid of a truly vast quantity of 2014-A [6] material on generation, wiring, and transmission [7]. This was rather successful despite interstate barriers to commerce and investment dictated by the Confederate Constitution, with the “necessary evil” of central government putting its weight behind the electrification of the South helping spread wires outwards from coal-fired stations in Kentucky to growing urban industrial complexes in Virginia, North Carolina, and Tennessee. Accompanied by the sounds of wailing and gnashing of teeth of Good Ol’ Boys who lamented the Death of Southron Plantation Heritage in favour of Soulless Yankee Industrialism, it got results: the Second Industrial Revolution, spreading from the CSA’s state-owned enterprises [8], ushered in a new era of prosperity, as Confederate manufactures found eager customers in Europe and the North. And despite export restrictions on strategic goods, by the late 1880s most of the revolutionary advances in electronics, wireless telegraphy or “radio,” and chemical engineering were at least theorised in the rest of the Western world.
Military technology remained the pars pro toto of the Second Industrial Revolution, of course, and as the Confederate usage of the repeater begat American adoption, so too did American use of repeaters to maximise its numerical advantages over the British lead to a European arms race to devise indigenously-produced repeaters, flapjacks (flak jackets), Albies, flamethrowers, and land torpedoes. Compounding the already-unstable mixture of empires and nationalisms in Europe after Prussian troops armed with rudimentary repeaters were able to scatter French forces and do unto Nappy what Uncle Sam did to Max [9], the Turkish War (1879-82) saw skirmishes between Russian and Ottoman forces degrade into a protracted ground campaign involving continental Europe’s Great Powers in a large-scale proxy war between the Franco-Russo-Austro-Hungarian-Italo-Greek bloc and the Ottomans propped up halfheartedly by a Britain desperately struggling to maintain the balance of power. After the Fall of Constantinople and the Treaty of Vienna, it seemed like the Continent would be at peace, and be able to turn to Africa and Asia for new avenues of rivalry rather than kill each other willy-nilly. Then the Confederates invented the airplane, the Hungarians got a hold of several thousand repeaters and flamethrowers of their own from some careless soul, and the British began handing the Central Asian rebels repeaters to tilt the table a little in the Great Game. [10]
Since the turn of the century, things have simmered down, if slightly and fitfully. A few wars and a schizophrenically unbalanced pace of technological development have shuffled the pieces far from where they would have been in the Would-Have-Been.
The Confederate States of 1964 are a radically different place to what they were a century ago, or even to what they were in 1964-A. The government-operated system of engineering and technical colleges across the country are among the world’s finest, with three generations of emphasis on research, innovation, and development helping it maintain its position at the cutting edge of science and technology. The CSA is regarded with the sort of awe reserved for Japan IOTL, with its ostensible use of protectionism, balanced government regulation, and technological investment enabling it to attain one of the world’s highest standards of living without passing through the excesses of the North’s long period of robber baron capitalism or Europe’s lost decade just finished.
Behind the scenes, knowledge transcribed from Rivington textbooks and historical tomes and a complete volume of the Encyclopaedia Britannica has long since made its way into the scientific mainstream: a rudimentary nuclear reactor was constructed in the Great Smoky Mountains in the mid 1910s, a turboprop fighter plane comparable to Timeline-Alpha’s P-51 Mustang was in the skies over west Texas by 1908, automobiles have been plying Confederate roads since 1886 (though they’ve taken off far faster up North since 1891) and are currently forty years ahead of OTL, as are consumer electronics. Handheld longevoxes (telephones) known as minivoxes are common, as are ‘toshes (PCs, named for a contraction of the name of the Macintosh computers brought with the Rivington Men), kinnies (TVs, from kinetikona, a contraction of the Greek for ‘moving picture’), and radios. A minivox with a built-in music player has recently been developed in the Confederacy, and is already leading oldsters to complain of how those Punk Kids Don’t Pay Attention Anymore. Plus ça change.
There has been considerably more effort put into industrialisation in the South ITTL, ostensibly under the aegis of Making Sure Uncle Sam Keeps On His Side Of The Fence but quietly guided behind the scenes by the Pact of Silence as it maintains the sacred mission of taking the CSA into the Broad Sunlit Uplands of the Future. And if a few eggs should have to broken to make sure that omelette gets made, well…it’s nothing Bobby Lee wouldn’t’a done. And it’s not a
bad omelette: blacks are treated so far better than in 1964-A as to make 1964-P seem like Heaven itself, with no Reconstruction meaning that there was no need for the formalised structures of racism and thus the battle for voting rights was slightly less nightmarish. Indeed, black votes were welcomed by some former slaveowners soon after Manumission, as they pledged their votes to their landlord’s estate in return for a form of debt-peonage. This system was outlawed in most of the CSA around 1920, as the demand for black labour in the burgeoning factories of the cities (the early invention of air conditioning helped white population growth, but
someone had to do the dangerous work) led to an undermining of the peonage system amid a slightly less frenetic urbanisation. Oh, the Negro population isn’t
equal, of course; fewer than one-eighth of Representatives are black (there have been two black women in Congress, both in the roaring 1930s), and the first black Senator was only elected in 1931 in Louisiana – but progress is progress. Schools and public buildings were integrated under President Stennis in 1942, with blacks admitted to (a very few extremely liberal) colleges as early as the 1890s.
As the newly-inaugurated President, the tough-talking Liberal [11] ex-Governor of Alabama George Wallace III [12] presides over the Centenary Celebrations for the Second American Revolution with Vice-President “J.R.” Thurmond (John Jr.) [13], there remains a figure in the shadows. Even if the Pact of Silence hasn’t been able to predict the actions of countries or leaders since it dropped the ball on the Turkish War, its genesis amongst the foremost military, political, and scientific minds of a generation meant it proved surprisingly easy to encourage the rise of “good men” (at first those historically “destined for greatness,” later those who were “promising,” and lately on occasion just those the Pact likes); it proved similarly easy to silence those who were indiscreet or imprudent in giving out information [refer note 2].
The net effect is a country somewhat like the Truman Show, with a booming economy and a mostly-happy population in a democracy moving on up in the world under a series of excellent political leaders which nonetheless feels strangely…off.
The United States of 1964 is arguably even further estranged from its 1964-A self. Even though the fit of imperial overcompensation fizzled out around the turn of the century, the last anti-black pogrom was sometime in the 1890s, and the Monroe Crusade was fulfilled over forty years ago with the Malvinas Reclamation, Washington [14] has sought to maintain a position of strength against any and all possible invaders or foes. The ever-present undercurrent of inadequacy permeating American political culture after the humiliation of 1864 has often sat uneasily alongside the constitutional democracy in which it seeks to outperform the Confederates as part of the ongoing competition to be Best America – for instance, although the Canadian population was treated equally under US law and given a clear path to statehood, mass population transfers were a preferred means of pacification. All in all, American history is peppered with far more shameful, shady, or just downright violent moments than IOTL, even if it has – gradually – become a more tolerant, accepting society (DISCLAIMER: Dependent upon Best America Contest season). The impending election – fingers crossed – of a new generation of political leaders this November promises to secure the transition away from the militarism of the past as those under 35 prove uninterested in sacrificing a little freedom for a little security. There’s money to be made, after all, and not all of it is in armaments.
South America is a gringo’s playground. Those states not aligned with the Confederacy in the CCB or “Golden Circle” alliance system (Cuba, Colombia, and Brazil) are generally subject to varying degrees of extensive interference from Washington. Mexico is under a mutually inoffensive democracy (more or less), as is Nicaragua thanks to the importance of keeping the Canal open to both states’ traffic.
Across the Atlantic, Britain is a country humbled, embarrassed, and kicked in the crotch. The loss of Canada in the War of 1867 was followed all too quickly by its abject failure to rouse the Sick Man of Europe from his deathbed. The Monroe Crusade shut London out of the Western Hemisphere with extreme prejudice, causing it to adopt a redoubled focus on preserving the sacrosanct India route. However, the unpredictable nature of technological advances (Richmond – or rather, the Pact – tending to use these to advance its own foreign policy goals), combined with a number of restive natives, made it increasingly difficult to maintain the Empire – Indian independence was unsurprising, nor was the steady erosion of its industrial edge as the Union, Confederacy, and Germany began overtaking and outstripping British industry. Now, Britain stands on Europe’s periphery, clinging to its alliances with Japan, Australia, and South Africa.
Europe went through several decades of uncertainty, with OTLs fluid alliance period of the 1870-90s stretching on until Germany’s incorporation of Austro-Bohemia saw Berlin assert dominance over the Continent. The French grumbled for a good long while until the realisation that nobody was going to ally with them against the Colossus of Europe – and the sticks and carrots of free trade – brought them in from the cold in the late 1950s. This has been rather good overall; even counting the Turkish War, Europe hasn’t seen anything comparable to the industrial devastation of the World Wars, and the continent is, as with most of the rest of the world, somewhat richer than OTL. Russia had a somewhat more considered reform process, with the occasional period of regression but no revolution; while it crouches menacingly on Europe’s periphery and there are seasonal dick-waving contests in the skies over the Baltic or Hungary, there’s rather more concern over the state of investments in trans-Siberian oil and gas pipelines. Communism has failed to take off as Marx or Lenin might’ve intended IOTL (possibly thanks to agents of the Confederacy’s secret Special Intelligence Division), with the left dominated instead by agrarian-socialist movements in rural areas and a more extensive, militant, and effective union movement in the cities and primary industries.
Africa wasn’t even close to the centre of attention, and has remained even more safely on the periphery of international affairs than IOTL. While colonial outposts were established and expanded, the smaller proportion of resources allocated to them meant that even when the Scramble for Africa did eventually occur, it took place through a great many more local intermediaries like British-backed Zanzibar, the confederal monarchy of French-aligned Soudan, and American satellite Liberia. Such states, and others like the Arab-ruled kingdoms of the Congo basin, began racking up legitimacy and independence which, with the economic recession of the 1940s-50s, has led decolonisation to begin in earnest. Garangange (OTL Katanga) is a major wheeler-dealer, Soudan is setting itself up as the economic epicentre of West Africa (with mixed results, not least motivating the former British colonies to form their own community, with blackjack and/or hookers), and Bobangi-Tschad is a fun mix of Eritrea, North Korea, and the Central African Republic.
Asia is a mixed bag. India’s independence was a protracted process of give-and-take where Britain eventually departed peacefully (after some bowel-shaking standoffs), China skirted around the fringes of collapse (a moderate-intensity civil war which saw the western peripheries spin off and a Republican regime consolidate in Nanking), Japan (although its modernisation project went a little less successfully than OTL) now stands alongside ally Korea (which also modernised to a commendable extent) in the shadow of a looming Russia as Radical Populists threaten stability on the streets of Tokyo, and Siam is a regional powerhouse comparable to OTL Indonesia (military dictatorship and all).
Finally, the Arab world. If any damnfool thing is to kick off, it’ll probably be here, be it over Jerusalem or the Canal or shipping rights in the Red Sea or some enterprising fellows getting a hold of some uranium and settling a couple of scores...Until then, the region is bifurcated between the Arab Union (Rashidi Arabia, Hejaz, Mesopotamia, and *Syria) on one side and the Cairo Pact on the other (Egypt, Numidia, and Yemen), with Palestine stuck in the middle as a gigantic Tangier. Iran and Turkey have picked themselves back up to the level of middle powers, and are trying to break into the Middle Eastern geopolitical game with little success due to ethno-nationalistic divides – already, Turkey is seeing a few stirrings of student protest in Halep and Mosul, but nothing that can’t be disappeared. After all, it’s worked for the Confederates for a century now.
In a clapboard house tucked in the armpit of Appalachia, a dozen men from all corners of the Confederacy meet to discuss their findings. They communicate by signals and codes too esoteric for even the Pact to break, avoiding public utilities like the Post Office and the Tube (an early TTL Internet) [15] in favour of friends of friends of friends speaking innocuous phrases to one another, dropping notes behind random trees in city parks or beneath rocks on hunting trips, or disseminated to cell leaders in far-flung lands and back again. The Kuklos fancy themselves a resistance movement, even if they haven’t actually resisted anything yet. Yet. The meeting in Appalachia is the third of its kind in ninety years, as the leaders meet to discuss what to do with information which has recently come into their possession about experiments being conducted in a facility in the limestone caverns of Arkansas. Time travel has been theorised since a Confederate scientist published his General Theory of Relativity in 1903 [16] but never proven. If these documents are correct, Richmond has been perverting the course of nature and risking the very building blocks of history itself. Maybe if they release the information to another government, says the Station Head for Georgia, Richmond will be forced to come clean. No matter what they decide, they have no idea how wrong they are. Yes, the Pact has been disappearing a lot of money over the last forty years for some project in Arkansas, but it hasn’t succeeded in going
backwards in time, not exactly.
Somewhere in
an Arkansas in 1964, a man with worn shoes and rumpled working-man’s clothes and a peculiarly white smile walks into a coffee shop and picks up a newspaper, pausing thoughtfully as he looks at the headline article. So, the Rivington Men were right: there
are places where the Revolution failed. His brow furrows briefly. Goldwater and Johnson, those names ring a bell. The epiphany hits as the waitress brings his coffee and pancakes, and he covers his surprise as his mind scrambles to gain purchase.
Project Columbus has been a success. They’ve found it. The question is what the Pact will do next.
[1] Officially, the Legislation Regulating the Labor of Certain Inhabitants of the Confederate States, but that’s rather a mouthful.
[2] “Yes, a tragic accident for Representative Smith; imagine the poor luck of falling backwards onto that rail spike, right in the path of the Atlanta Express! To say nothing of Representative Jones, who accidentally violently tore out his throat while shaving. The Lord does work in mysterious ways.”
[3] After devouring Canada in its short, glorious war, the US decided on deposing Emperor Maximilian as a chaser. Still, he escaped with his life ITTL, so…yay?
[4] From “Albert Gallatin Brown,” being short and unassuming, but a fiery defender of the South at close-quarters. Most of the first generation of Confederate weapons adapted from future technology are indeed named this painfully patriotically.
[5] Large and imposing at first sight and even more unbelievably deadly when riled, even and especially at long-range.
[6] For “2014-Alpha,” referring to the “original” status of the 2014 from which the Rivington Men came and opposed to the “[DATE]-Prime” used in Pact documents referring to Timeline-Alpha. For instance, a futures forecast comparing developments ITTL as opposed to IOTL would refer to 1964-A and 1964-P. One of the Rivington Men was a Star Trek fan, apparently.
[7] Turtledove couldn’t possibly have anticipated Wikipedia in 1992, of course, but that didn’t stop Rhoodie and his boys from bringing back several dozen gigabytes of very useful information from 2014-A. However, in the long term and without the equipment Benny Lang needed to maintain the AWB computers, the hard sources of information proved far more useful. There’s only so much copying-and-pasting you can do, after all, before the hard drives go kaput.
[8] Meaning Richmond, not the individual states. State governments and investors were of course welcome to put their cash into shares, but the knowledge monopoly of the Pact of Silence and the national security aspect attached to several advanced industries meant the federal government maintained its 51% holdings well into the twentieth century.
[9] The Franco-Prussian War was largely on-time ITTL, butterflies not having flapped sufficiently to prevent Napoleon III’s tremendous hubris from inviting a Prussian bitchslapping.
[10] Russian numbers – more men, more repeaters (eventually), and more ammunition – won out in the end, but Austrian numbers didn’t. The Danube War was unpleasant.
[11] Formed from the merger of the Confederate, Patriot, and Liberal Parties in the face of the growing electoral dominance of the Populist-Labor Party. ITTL, ‘conservative’ refers to British-type one-nation Toryism, ‘liberal’ is related to economic liberalism without any particular social connotations (tends conservative in the CSA, cf. OTL Australia), and ‘populist’ refers to generally socially liberal and economically leftist politics.
[12] The Pact are simply baffled at how this guy turned up, despite all the logics of chaos theory.
[13] Yes…and no. Not the mind-boggling racist of OTL; oh, he’s still racist, but it’s closer to Buford T. Justice-comic-racism.
[14] Washington remains the de jure capital, and has been pretty consistently used for regular government business since 1864. Philadelphia is home to a number of backup government facilities and minor departments, and continuity-of-government facilities pepper the Rocky Mountain states.
[15] The Tube is more of a regulated intranet than an internet, with extensive government (read: Pact) oversight/interference.
[16] Hey, it ain’t plagiarism if the fella doesn’t exist! Nor if the guy publishing it isn’t aware it wasn’t actually his idea but rather that the pieces were left for him to find.
