Southern Victory

Historians believe their find helped General George B. McClellan of the Army of the Potomac prepare for his confrontation with Lee, and contributed to the Union's eventual victory at the Battle of Antietam.

The Union, despite its advantage in manpower and resources, lacks competent leadership, and struggles to take Confederate territory while also facing a revolt in Utah.

Over the rest of the decade, manumission of slaves is nominally implemented throughout the Confederacy—easing relations with Britain and France, which had both abolished slavery much earlier—although the black population continues to live in apartheid-like conditions.

Industrialized warfare and the absence of European intervention favors the Union side, and much of the Confederate officer corps is made up of heirs of great 19th-century generals with no particular talent of their own.

An invasion of Maryland and Pennsylvania overruns Washington, D.C., but is unable to take Baltimore, while the Union launches attacks on Sonora and Canada, along with the capture of the British Sandwich Islands.

As winter falls, a stalemate settles in across trench lines in Kentucky, Pennsylvania, Virginia, Manitoba, Southern Ontario, and the St. Lawrence River.

The following year sees breakthroughs in Tennessee and Quebec using Custer's massed barrel tactics, while a simultaneous advance in Virginia recaptures a devastated Washington.

With the ranks of his party swelled by popular unrest, Featherston finally becomes President in 1934, and sets about establishing control over the government, the police force, and the expanding army.

Elsewhere in the world, the Great War results in independence for Quebec and Ireland, as well as other concessions by Britain; Canada falls under harsh U.S. rule while Germany sets up puppet states in Belgium, Poland, and Ukraine.

On June 22, 1941, Featherston launches his surprise invasion of the U.S. Against Union expectations, Confederate forces under George Patton drive into Ohio under cover of massive bombing raids, cutting U.S. industry off from its raw materials, but the front soon stalls there and in Virginia.

With both Russia and Austria-Hungary facing ethnic uprisings, the German Army is able to win at Kyiv and threaten Petrograd, as well as retake the Low Countries.

Having won the race for a nuclear weapon, Germany destroys Petrograd with an atomic bomb; as more belligerents acquire the technology, the list of cities targeted grows to include Philadelphia, Newport News, Charleston, Paris, Hamburg, London, Norwich, and Brighton.

In 1945, new President Thomas E. Dewey pledges to reintegrate the southern states into the Union and to continue the alliance with Germany, while suppressing the development of nuclear weapons by their enemies France, Japan, and Russia.

Reviewer Lionel Ward notes that although the series "ends in an apparent happy ending", "integrating the Confederate territories into the United States would be an impossible mission"—"an open-ended military occupation of a very large sullen population, which would inevitably burst into rebellion sooner or later(...) A far more reasonable policy, never even considered, would have been to revive the Confederate Whig Party under US auspices and make a pragmatic agreement with a rehabilitated Confederacy".

Ward concludes:[6] The series ends with the US holding by the tail not one tiger but two [The Confederate territories and Canada, occupied since 1917], plus a big aggressive wildcat [The Mormons in Utah].

Map of the world with the participants in The Great War in the Southern Victory history. The " Entente " (sometimes referred to as "The Allies") are depicted in green, the " Central Powers " in orange, and neutral countries in grey.
World map showing participants in the "Second Great War". The Entente are depicted in brown, the C.S. in red, the Central Powers in blue, the Japanese Empire in yellow, the Chinese Empire in green, and neutral countries in grey.