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 has run from 1862-1942, and is likely to continue after the 1940s.

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, State of Sequoyah, Sonora, 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 traditional 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.

1914: 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 quickly learned 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.

Hoping to emulate General Lee, the Confederate Army of Northern Virginia launched a massive invasion of the Maryland and Pennsylvania in August, targeting the northern capital of Philadelphia. The ANV quickly overran the old capital of Washington, D.C. and pushed on through Maryland.

The US Army took a different approach, and ordered First Army under Lieutenant General George Custer and Second Army under Major General John Pershing to cross the Ohio River and invade Kentucky. Although Confederate resistance was high, especially from river gunboats modeled after the original Monitor, they succeeded and established a bridgehead on the southern bank.

The US also launched attacks on the British ally of Canada, specifically in Manitoba, Ontario, and Quebec. Perhaps the most successful maneuver during these early stages was the US Navy's capture of the British base at Pearl Harbor in the Sandwich Islands in a surprise attack.

1915: Stalemate

Most of these offensives soon stalled, however; the US armies found it difficult to push south, and the ANV was slowed by the 1914-15 winter and the invasion of Pennsylvania ground to a halt at the Susquehanna River, only a few dozen miles from Philadelphia. From that high-water mark, US forces slowly pushed them back into Maryland.

Although the US forces easily conquered the southern bank of the St. Lawrence River, crossing it proved another matter. The geography of the Niagara Peninsula soon bottlenecked the invading army, and though Winnipeg, Manitoba, a major rail junction, lay relatively close to the US border, the War Department allocated too few troops to capture it. A US invasion of Sonora, intended to capture the Confederacy's sole Pacific port of Guaymas also failed. A young army captain named Irving Morrell was wounded in this venture, and spent much of the next six months in Tucson, New Mexico recuperating.

Trench warfare became ubiquitous as each side dug in for protection from machine-gun fire. Troops huddled in these trenches as heavy artillery in their rear pounded the enemy lines night and day. They dreaded the order of "Over the top!" which meant that they would have to leave the safety of their lines to charge into no-man's land, in the hope of capturing the enemy trenches on the other side. Far from the quick, glorious conquest that each side had imagined, the Great War became a long, bloody stalemate.

Early in 1915, another front was opened when the Mormons of Utah seceded from the US and declared themselves the independent nation of Deseret. Mormon relations with the rest of the country had been hostile since the Utah War of the 1850s and the brief uprising during the Second Mexican War, and they believed that the distracted US government would be unable to subdue them. They were wrong; Utah sat on one of the major transcontinental rail lines, and President Roosevelt stated that the US would not tolerate unlawful rebellion. The Mormon rebellion raged until late 1916, when it was finally crushed and Salt Lake City captured.

In the autumn of 1915, with the armies of the Confederacy locked in mortal combat with those of the USA along the border regions, the CSA's blacks rose up in revolt. Bitter over their treatment by the whites, and fueled by rhetoric of Marxism and the teachings of Abraham Lincoln, the blacks declared Red revolution in several areas across the CSA and established "socialist republics," while massacaring whites and obtaining justice against their former white masters and overlords. These rebellions were gradually crushed by 1917, although white justice mellowed out a bit as thoughts were preoccupied with winning the war. White revenge would come later.

1916: Slaughter

Taking advantage of the Confederacy's plight, the US First and Second Armies completed the conquest of Kentucky and marched into Tennessee, while the CS Army of Northern Virginia was pushed south toward Washington. In mid-spring of 1916, a new armored technical advance called the "barrel"(Called a tank by the British) was introduced to combat for the first time by US forces operating in the Roanoke Valley. In Tennessee, General Custer transformed his tactics for cavalry into a doctrine for the new barrels, but the War Department would hear none of it. When Custer's summer offensive opened that summer, tens of thousands of US soldiers were lost attacking Confederate lines, and the new barrels broke down in the hilly terrain, not being used the way Custer thought they should be.

The lack of British and Empire troops in Canada meant that the USA, while initially held back by the Canadians, would slowly advance toward their triple objectives of Banff, Toronto, and Winnipeg. At sea, the great Battle of the Three Navies between the USA one one side, and UK and Japan on the other, prevented the Ententle from recapturing the Sandwich Islands. With the Central Pacific safely in US hands, a US Navy flotila made its way south toward the Cape of South America and the Atlantic on the other side, with the intent of cutting off Argentine grain and beef shipments to the UK.

On the Maryland front, the state was cleared of Confederate soldiers save for those holding the US de facto capital. In Tennesee that autumn, more attacks toward Nashville gained the USA nothing but a possible Democratic loss at the polls, with the possiblity that a Socialist President would seek peace with the CSA and throw away all that had been gained with blood. Save for a local attack on the Roanoke Front that pushed the USA out of western Virginia, the Confederates stayed on the defensive that autumn and attempted to drain the USA dry, hoping to sicken the US population of war.

Nevertheless, for all the machinations of the Socialist Party, and those of the Confederates, Theodore Roosevelt was re-elected. In Richmond, the hopes of President Gabriel Semmes and his Cabinet were dashed. The USA had another four years to crush the CSA, and the Confederates were already running out of white men to fight. A bill was passed authorizing the training and arming of bodies of Negro troops who would serve in the lines, with civil rights to be given after the war.

1917: Breakthroughs

General Custer secretly develops a scheme to quickly end the war in the USA's favor, using a massed-barrel (tank) formation that is forbidden by War Department staffers. Disguising his true intentions to all but Lieutenant Morrell and his own adjutant, Major Abner Dowling, and lying about it to the president, Custer launches his Barrel Roll Offensive on Remembrance Day--April 22, 1917, and quickly breaks through the Confederate trench lines north of the Tennessee capital. The Southerners withdraw to a line centered on Nashville, where Custer hits them again three weeks later by outflanking the city using a plan concocted by Morrell. Nashville falls--despite the best efforts of the newly formed CS Colored Troops to stave off Custer's barrels--and the state capitol becomes First Army headquarters. From there, in July, Custer attacks in the direction of Murfreesboro, and near Nolensville receives a Confederate request for a local armistice. President Roosevelt assents, and peace on the North American front comes to Tennessee a week before the rest of the US-CS frontline.

On the same day that the Barrel Roll Offensive began in Tennessee, the US Army in northern Virginia attacks southward toward Manassas at the same time as US troops enter occupied Washington DC. The de jure US capital is recaptured after several days of intense street fighting, which levels most of the city and its famous landmarks. In northern Virginia, US attack after US attack forces the CS Army of Northern Virginia to retreat south. In battles at Round Hill, Centreville, and Bull Run creek, rear-guard actions led by a few battered batteries of the First Richmond Howitzers prevent the complete destruction of Robert E. Lee's fabled army, but it is obvious that the war is on the verge of being lost--a notion that does not bode well with several Confederate soldiers, who reckoned that the war was as good as won only months before.

In Canada, Custer's methods are used to break through the Anglo-Canadian lines south of Winnipeg, Manitoba, and the provincial capital is captured in late May. The same strategy is used by US forces battling its way into Toronto, Ontario, the fall of which precipitates a British Empire request for a cease-fire with the USA on all land fronts. The armistice is granted in early June, and, with US-German naval operations cutting off Great Britain from supply, the United Kingdom sues for peace later that summer--the last opponent of the Quadruple Alliance still in the War, for the European members of the Entente had already capitulated, and the CSA already thrown in the sponge.

The Confederate States of America started sending peace feelers to Philadelphia as early as the fall of Nashville, but Theodore Roosevelt refuses to grant a cease-fire until he is certain the the CSA is severely hammered elsewhere. The last hammers on the Confederate Army comes in late July, when fighting reaches the town of Fredericksburg, Virginia, which was only fifty or so miles from the Confederate States capital. With a cease-fire already in effect in Tennessee, and fighting out west in Texas and Sequoyah sputtering down, the CSA agrees to a general armistice on land and at sea. For the first time since August 1914, the guns fell silent in North America.

At sea, however, the CSS Bonefish, led by a Confederate Navy man named Roger Kimball, carries out a sneak attack on the USS Ericsson even though he was fully aware of the end of the war. For the longest time after the war, both North and South were led to believe that the ship's destruction was a work of the British Navy, as the war between the USA and the British Empire at sea had not yet ended.