History takes an unexpected turn when the protagonist Hodge Backmaker, a historian, decides to travel back in time to witness the moment when the South won the war.

Although Lee tried to establish a benevolent national policy, and was able to free the slaves, his anti-imperialistic desires were thwarted by a Congress with increasingly imperialistic ambitions, which sent forces to invade Mexico and expanded southward in Latin America.

Tensions grew between the CSA and the Germans up until the 1950s, and people around the world lived under constant threat of impending war, with the defenseless United States certain to be the battleground.

Steam-powered "minibiles" and dirigibles are the primary powered means of transportation in wealthier nations; most people still ride horses for short distances or take trains for longer trips.

All communication is done by letter or telegraphs, which by this point had become a fixture in all prosperous homes in much the way that telephones had in reality, and all children learned to understand telegraphy at an early age until the act became as common and as natural as reading.

Otherwise, only successful landowners and the few lucky winners of the highly popular national lottery are able to rise above the semi-destitute lives of average citizens; most able-bodied adults are reduced to "indenting" themselves to businesspeople in exchange for the meager economic security that such affords.

The U.S. military is practically nonexistent (apparently a provision of the 1864 treaty), with foreign powers frequently deploying troops unopposed across the U.S. in regions where their nationals have been attacked—a common occurrence, as many rural areas are poorly governed and lawlessness is rampant in them; highwaymen are a constant threat to the few travelers.

After being robbed of his few possessions, he comes into contact with the "Grand Army", a nationalistic organization working to restore the United States to its former glory through acts of sabotage and terrorism.

Hodge leaves New York in 1944 for rural Pennsylvania, where his aspiration of becoming a historian, specializing in the war between North and South, becomes a reality when he is invited to join a co-operative society named Haggershaven.

Many secondary characters with their own subplots are introduced during this part of the story, including some of the last few Asian-Americans alive (after a series of horrifying pogroms against their kind throughout North America) and a mysterious Spanish refugee woman who forms a love triangle with Hodge and Barbara.

In Hodge's timeline, Haggerwells' men held the hill so that the Confederates won the Battle of Gettysburg, paving the way for their victory over the Union in Philadelphia a year later; in the resultant timeline (our own), Union Colonel Strong Vincent's 83rd Pennsylvania Infantry and Colonel Joshua Chamberlain's 20th Maine Volunteer Infantry Regiment occupy the hill early on and successfully repel Confederate advances.

An "editorial note" following the story relates how one Frederick Winter Thammis had found Hodge's diary while remodeling his house in 1953, the year the real life book came out.

[10] The theme of the Confederacy winning the Civil War and becoming an independent state was not a new one, as Winston Churchill's segment of If It Had Happened Otherwise and Murray Leinster's Sidewise in Time had toyed with the idea in the 1930s.

MacKinlay Kantor's magazine serial novella If the South Had Won the Civil War (1960, published in book form 1961) and Harry Turtledove's The Guns of the South (1992) also include the plot element of Robert E. Lee succeeding Jefferson Davis as President of a victorious Confederacy (Kantor's book also has Lee win at Gettysburg, while Turtledove's has him aided by time travelers the year after losing the battle).

Turtledove later depicted a very different version of Confederate independence in the Southern Victory series of 11 books which begins with Lee winning the war almost 9 months before the Battle of Gettysburg would have taken place, making the questions of Pickett's Charge, Little Round Top, etc., irrelevant.

[11] Boucher and McComas praised the expansion for including "a thoroughly justified increase in background detail and depth of characterization"[12] The novel was originally published in 1953 by Ballantine Books and Farrar, Straus & Young.