What follows is how I frame a novella to get it out of my head and let it sit while finishing ongoing books.

Dust Cover

In March, of 1941, Confederate States of America, General George S. Patton and seven troops of Confederate soldiers, sailors, marines, militia, rangers and marshals, set sail from Cuba to Brest aboard Kriegsmarine U-Boats in order to take part in Operation Barbarossa in a joint Third Reich-CSA crusade against World Communism.

By November of 1942, with Moscow, Leningrad and Stalingrad in ruins and Stalin retreating to the Urals, Army Group South under Von Paulis is directed to make the final push to the oil-rich Caspian, with Patton and his CSA Expeditionary Force in the lead. Rebel Knell is the story of the Drive on Baku from the view of General Patton, General Nathan Bedford Forest II, Colonel Jim Thorpe, Major “Dad” Joiner of the Texas Rangers, Captain and “HNC” Jesse Owens, Lieutenant Young Stribbling, Sergeant Brandon “Brand” Stoker and Private Clyde Chestnut Barrow, CSA Marines Disciplinary Company.

 

An Alternative History of the Confederate States of America

Article 1

The Capitol Campaign of 1863

July 1: Lee Demonstrates against the outworks at Washington D.C. while Jackson crosses the Potomac by night.

July 2: Meade moves south from Hanover to stop Jackson from cutting supply to D.C.

July 3: Jackson and Meade clash at Sykesville. Meade is slain and his beaten force falls back on Baltimore, where it is pursued and remains besieged by Early’s command.

July 4: Grant takes Vicksburg.

July 5: Lincoln refuses to evacuate The Capitol.

July 6: Lee bombards The Capitol, and is gravely wounded by counter-battery fire.

July 7: Jackson launches a night attack and achieves total surprise. Before the morning of the 8th Lee’s vengeful army, under Longstreet, has breached the outworks as Jackson’s command rampages across the city.

July 8: Lincoln is brought before Jackson, who demands The President repeal the Emancipation Proclamation. Lincoln refuses, and is hanged. The Union garrison is paroled to Philadelphia along with the remaining members of Congress. The cabinet and Vice President are jailed.

-Marsden Wills, Eight Days in July: The Fate of Lee and Lincoln, from the back matter, Detroit Free Press, Second Edition, 1997

…

Article 2

-July 3, 1863, Battle of Sykesville, Negro private Ben Samson takes a bullet for Stonewall Jackson, saving The Man Who Saved the South a second time, and assuring a victory for the four-term CSA president.

-April 1869, The Army of Tennessee, Under Nathan Bedford Forest, reclaims Kentucky and West Virginia in The Second War of Northern Aggression.

1873, General Joe Shelby, establishes the CSA Protectorate of Mexico.

1874, Nathan Bedford Forest annexes Cuba, Haiti and Puerto Rico with British naval support.

1876, CSA Marine Corps is founded as the Haitian, Cuban, Puerto Rican, Matamoros, Tijuana and Shipborne Penal Regiments

1880, Nathan Bedford Forest succeeds Stonewall Jackson as third president of the CSA

1891, The Pinkerton Affair and the Ghost Dancer Rising results in the ceding of the territories of Arizona and New Mexico to the CSA.

1898, Negro Bond Act emancipates the slaves and establishes a separate and parallel legal system, administered by the Negro Bond Association, or NBA, with judicial, advisory and police arms of service.

1903, Mexico is released from Protectorate status and admitted to the CSA Commonwealth, the CSA to maintain the Matamoros and Tijuana Enclaves.

1911, British-Panama Canal is completed with CSA aid in the annexation of Columbian territory.

1935, The Pacific War, or Japanese War, results in the successful defense of the Panama Canal by CSA Marines and NBA Marshalls [there policing the negro convict labor battalion] commanded by Nathan Bedford Forest II, against Japanese Imperial Marines and Pinkerton instigators. The CSA President rewards the NBA with a limited military commission and takes on an NBA detachment as his person honor guard.

1936, NBA Panama War Hero, and Alabama Negro, Captain of Marshalls, Jesse Owns, is congratulated on his victory by Adolph Hitler at the Berlin Summer Olympics.

1936, CSA and the Third Reich make a defensive military alliance and sign an open trade agreement.

1937, CSA recognized Japanese possession of Peru and enter into a defensive alliance against the rapacious and ever oil-hungry Union looming on our northern border and bedeviling the poor Japs in their paper-built homelands.

“With World Communism on the rise and genteel birthrates down, how can decent Confederate gentlemen opine that our worthy Negroes be barred from the good fight? Why, the storied CSA Marine Corp, a rabble of savage white-trash scoundrels, who make the French Foreign Legion look like a model of Christian charity, unfit to return to Fair Dixie, are sent hither and yon and hog the limelight what should be reserved for decent law-abiding men, irrespective of race! What has the Southland come to when criminals must fight our every war?”

-Marry Luo Joyce, from the Appendix of The Case for Negro Military Service, in the Confederate Conscience, April, 7, 1938

Author’s Notes

Miss Joyce’s campaign would result in the 13th Amendment to the Negro Bond Act, 1939, as well as a Congressional Resolution authorizing NBA military deployment. For other statutory extracts from the Negro Bond Act of 1898 and later legislation see the chapter endnotes in the novel Hurt Stoker.

 

“Dem Rooskies headin’ fo da high grass!”

-Marshal Talbot Mays, witnessing HNC Jesse Owens chasing a retreating Soviet T-34 tank with a satchel charge during the encirclement of Stalingrad, July, 1942

 

Dedicated to Max, grandfather of a good friend, who saw the Caucuses in 1942.

RIP

 

Contents

An Alternative History of the Confederate States of America 3

Author’s Notes 7

 

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