How Could the Confederacy Win the Civil War?
That was the question I had to answer for the backstory to Hurt Stoker. I had two answers, as I had played The Civil War, one of the best designed war games ever, about a dozen times. Victory belonged to the Confederacy only twice: once when Grant going against Forest, took a bullet in Georgia and another time when Stonewall Jackson in 1863, not Jubal Early showing up late in 1864, took Washington D.C.
For the novel, I had a time traveler go back to Chancellorsville and warn Stonewall Jackson not to go a scouting down the road where he would be shot to death by his own men. The warning was delivered by Uncle Ben Samson, a negro slave whose descendants would be reviled by their fellows for having sprung from the loins of “The man, who saved the man, who saved the South.” The tale is told from the point of view of Ben Samson’s inheritor, a certain Whiff Gleason, former Negro League short stop and successful carnival operator.
Winning a close war over a more powerful Northern neighbor does invite a second war. That war would be won by the best general ever to serve in North America, Nathan Bedford Forest. You see, the defense was becoming more deadly and offense more likely to get mired, as would come to a head in WWI, a muddy bloodbath prefigured by the 9-month siege of Petersberg, Virginia in 1864. With Jackson as President and Forest as commander of the army of Tennessee, the second war would go the South’s way as well, particularly with Comanche, Sioux and British help.
The CSA would lag behind the north, in science and engineering. However, without Southern men to man the ranks of the Yankee war machine in The Great War and later in The Atomic War, the U.S., while dominating its southern neighbor economically and corrupting it with its media, would not have the capacity to prevail against Germany and Japan. And with all of the Pacific Coast in Union hands, Japan would be the enemy of the Union and the ally of the Confederacy.
The CSA thinkers dreamed of colonizing Central America, Mexico and South America as vast plantations. Indeed, General Joe Shelby fought in Mexico after winning the last battle of the Civil War at Brownsville, and CSA veterans did move to Brazil. By 2013, the CSA in Hurt Stoker is economically depressed, being media colonized by the north, poisoned by Union drugs, infiltrated by the Pinkertons, and in possession of only one colony, the Tijuana enclave. The world of Hurt Stoker sees a CSA on the brink of annexation by the Union.
But in the earlier setting for Rebel Knell, the most politically incorrect thing I will ever write as fiction, the second great war, what would come to be called The Atomic War after the Union nukes Germany and Japan, the Union and CSA refrain from fighting a third disastrous war on their home soil. Instead, as the Union hunts Jap ducks in its Pacific pond, and escorts supply convoys to Great Britain, the best infantry in the world, the CSA Legion, all Confederate volunteers in the war on Yankee-financed Communism, serves with the Waffen SS in Operation Barbarossa. On the tip of the spear of Army Group South as they race past Mycop into the Caucasus, are an amalgamated command of Texas Rangers, Tennessee Militia, CSA Marines, and NBA [Negro Bond Association] soldiers sworn to battle communism in the very nest that spawned it.
I’m really hoping to find a graphic of an NBA Confederate trooper, waving the Stars and Bars over the Soviet Tractor Works in Stalingrad with a swastika on his sleeve and a string of Soviet ears hanging from his neck.
You know what, there is no sense in writing part 3 for the setting. Just read Hurt Stoker if you are interested. In the meantime—do you know a cheap graphic artist?
