Southern Victory

Timeline-191 is a fan name given to a series of Harry Turtledove alternate history novels.

TL-191 includes the novel How Few Remain, and the Great War, American Empire, and Settling Accounts trilogies.

It is named after Robert E. Lee's Special Order No. 191, detailing the Army of Northern Virginia's invasion of the Union in September 1862 during the American Civil War. In reality the orders were lost and recovered by a Union soldier, allowing General George B. McClellan to surprise Lee and force the Battle of Antietam.

How Few Remain

In Tl-191 the orders are never lost, and McClellan is caught by surprise. Lee forces him into battle on the banks of the Susquehanna River in Pennsylvania and destroys the Army of the Potomac in the battle of Camp Hill. Lee goes on to capture Philadelphia, earning the Confederate States of America diplomatic recognition from Great Britain and France and winning the war.

Abraham Lincoln and the Republican Party go down to defeat in the 1864 elections, and do not elect another president until 1880. James Blaine is a hard-liner who almost immediately precipitates a war against the Confederate States over the "coerced' purchase of the Mexican provinces of Sonora and Chihuahua.

Due largely to spectactular leadership from Confederate general Thomas Jackson against his counterpart William Rosecrans and the assistance of Great Britain and France, the United States is once again defeated and the Republicans turned out in the 1882 elections. In return for British and French assistance, Confederate President James Longstreet is obliged to propose the manumission of the country's slaves, which proceeds throughout the 1880s.

A single battle in the Montana Territory against the British produces two American heroes who will become rivals for another forty years: General George Armstrong Custer and Theodore Roosevelt colonel of the Unauthorized Regiment.

Witnessing the collapse of the Republican Party, Abraham Lincoln, now an orator, makes common cause with American socialists and leads the left wing of the Republicans into this new party.

Great War

The Road to War

For the next thirty years, the Democratic Party dominates the politics of the United States. The Socialists eventually displace the Republicans as the opposition party, and the GOP devolves into a small regional party of the Midwest. The United States economy and military are reformed along Prussian lines: peacetime conscription and a naval buildup are begun, and resources such as coal, kerosene, and food products are subject to rationing. Large trusts hold untrammeled power over the economy, with government ecnouragement, and labor rights are largely ignored. The US eventually formally allies with the German Empire and joins the Quadruple Alliance.

A racial caste system similar to apartheid has been instituted in the CS, where Negroes are free, but are second-class citizens who cannot vote or even move freely about the country. Under the weight of this oppression the socialist theories of Karl Marx have taken hold among southern Negroes. White politics, meanwhile, is dominated by the Whigs, a conservative, mostly upper-class party, opposed by the Radical Liberals, a small opposition party which is popular in the fringes of the Confederacy, such as in Louisiana, SequoyahSonora, Chihuahua, and the state of Cuba.

Relations between the two American nations have been tense since the Second Mexican War of 1881-1882. The Confederates have joined their traiditional allies Britain and France alongside the Russian Empire in the Quadruple Entente. Incidents such as border raids and the Anglo-Confederate proposal for a Nicaragua Canal have nearly brought the two to war at many times. But when the spark for war comes, it is not in America but in the distant Austro-Hungarian Empire.

Declaration & Invasion

The Empire's Crown Prince Franz Ferdinand and his family were killed by a terrorist bomb while touring the town of Sarajevo in June 1914 . The Austrian government that a Serb group was responsible, and accused the government of nearby Serbia of colluding with the terrorists. The Russian Tsar Nicholas II backed Serbia, and German Kaiser Wilhelm II backed Austria-Hungary, and the major powers of each system mobilized their militaries, effectively signifyng their intent to go to war. The Great War began in August 1914, initially pitting Britain, France, and Russia against Germany and Austria-Hungary.

Across the Atlantic, Democratic President Theodore Roosevelt ordered the US military to mobilize in late July, following Germany's lead. In response Confederate President Woodrow Wilson ordered the Confederate military to do the same, and fighting soon broke out on their common border and on the high seas. The two countries officially declared war in early August; Wilson's speech, given in a tightly-packed public square of Richmond, Virginia decorated with statues of southern war heroes George Washington and Albert Sidney Johnston, became particularly famous.