The story deals with a group of time traveling members of the Afrikaner Weerstandsbeweging (AWB) from an imagined 21st-century South Africa, who supply Robert E. Lee's Army of Northern Virginia with AK-47s and other advanced technology, medicine and intelligence.

Afterwards, however, the AWB members discover that their ideas for the Confederate States and Lee's are not one and the same as they believed and the general and the men of the South have a violent falling out with the white supremacists from the future.

The men, who call their organization "America Will Break" (or "AWB"), establish a base in Rivington in Nash County, North Carolina, along with offices in the Confederate capital of Richmond, Virginia.

Lee is told that President Abraham Lincoln will act as a vicious tyrant during his second term and that his successor, Thaddeus Stevens, will continue his work to ensure that blacks will become the dominant political faction in the former Confederacy, as they outnumber whites in many areas.

At the same time, the Union defeat in the war results in a four-way split in the 1864 presidential election, with Lincoln losing to New York Governor Horatio Seymour.

After the election is decided, the Union reluctantly agrees to pay $90 million in gold (more than $1.4 billion in 2019) as reparations; the Confederacy, in turn, gives up any claim to Maryland and West Virginia.

Lee, already dubious about slavery and respectful of the courage of the United States Colored Troops during the war, becomes convinced that continuing to enslave blacks is both morally wrong and ultimately impracticable.

Soon after the election, Lee receives a history book that was stolen from the Rivington men by a former Confederate soldier, which covers the Civil War and the original outcome that was supposed to happen without the AWB's intervention.

Lee enters the stronghold to find more technological marvels (such as fluorescent light bulbs and air conditioning), books that document the increasing marginalization of racism from 1865 into the 21st century, and the efforts made to improve race relations.

Lee shows the books to the Confederate Congress, in the hope that the future's nearly universal condemnation of slavery and racism will convince them to vote for his plan for gradual abolition.