American Civil War alternate histories are alternate history fiction that focuses on the Civil War ending differently or not occurring. The American Civil War is a popular point of divergence in English-language alternate history fiction. The most common variants detail the victory and survival of the Confederate States. Less common variants include a Union victory under different circumstances from actual history, resulting in a different postwar situation; black Americanslaves freeing themselves by revolt without waiting for Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation; a direct British and/or French intervention in the war; the survival of Lincoln during John Wilkes Booth's assassination attempt; a retelling of historical events with fantasy elements inserted; the Civil War never breaking out and a peaceful compromise being reached; and secret history tales. The point of divergence in such a story can be a "natural, realistic" event, such as one general making a different decision, or one sentry detecting an enemy invasion unlike in reality. It can also be an "unnatural" fantasy/science fiction plot device such as time travel, which usually takes the form of someone bringing modern weapons or hindsight knowledge into the past. Still another related variant is a scenario of a Civil War that breaks out at a different time from 1861 and under different circumstances (such as the North, rather than the South, seceding from the Union).
Depictions of the later development of a victorious Confederacy vary considerably from one another, especially on two major interrelated issues: the independent Confederacy's treatment of its black population and its relations with the rump United States in the North.
Scenarios
The South wins the Civil War, and slavery still exists as of the time of the story. Examples include the 2004 mockumentaryC.S.A.: The Confederate States of America, where the United States is annexed by the Confederate States and slavery continues. In Ben Winters' Underground Airlines, slavery has remained legal in the "Hard Four" (Alabama, Louisiana, Mississippi and a unified Carolina) and slaves are controlled by electronic device implanted in their spines. Its name evokes the Underground Railroad in relations to its setting. The novel attracted praise for exploring racism through the alternate-history mechanism.
In Hallie Marshall: A True Daughter of the South (1900) by Frank Williams, the earliest known Civil War alternate history, the Confederacy won by mobilizing black slaves to its army, their participation turning the tide at Gettysburg. Thirty years later, the independent Confederacy is full of happy, well-treated black slaves feeling perfectly content under the benevolent, paternalistic planters, comparing favorably with the rump United States, which is torn by a brutal class struggle, with nominally free factory workers protesting inhumane working conditions or starving in unemployment. In Gray Victory, set in the immediate aftermath of the war, the Confederacy is faced with both subversion by Northern Abolitionists and the increasing organization and assertiveness of Black Southerners, and the story gives the clear impression that no matter who wins, the end of slavery is inevitable.
Slavery ends in the South in name only, or minorities are oppressed into low socio-economic parts of society, such as in The Guns of the South. Freeing the slaves is attributed to Robert E. Lee, who becomes the second Confederate President. It is logical to assume that his prestige would have run high and made him a plausible candidate to succeed Jefferson Davis, but the position he would have taken regarding slavery is the subject of some debate. However, ending slavery would not necessarily provide equality for Black Southerners, and Bring the Jubilee has blacks, despite Lee's grand gesture, remaining disenfranchised into the 20th century, as are people from Latin America, who are annexed by the Confederacy. The rump United States is completely broken down by its defeat and becomes an impoverished and backward country while the Confederacy goes on to annex everything to its south as far as Tierra del Fuego (except the Republic of Haiti) and become a major world power. In Harry Turtledove's Southern Victory series, it is President James Longstreet who abolished slavery as a prerequisite for retaining British and French support for the Confederacy in the Second Mexican War, but blacks remain an underclass that is very oppressed and discriminated against, denied basic civil rights, and are not even allowed to have surnames. In later volumes of the series, the blacks rise in a brutal armed revolt, called the Red Rebellion, during the Great War, which leads to a Holocaust-like genocide.
A more optimistic result in The Guns of the South and several other works has both nations settle down and have reasonably good neighborly relations within a few years of the war's end and, in some cases, agree to reunite as one nation after 50 or 100 years of being apart. If the South Had Won the Civil War by MacKinlay Kantor has reunification come later: in the 20th century, the United States, the Confederate States and Texas, which seceded from the CS, become economically integrated and in both World Wars all fight against Germany as close allies. After the Second World War, all three feel threatened by Soviet missile bases and armored brigades in Alaska, which was never purchased from Russia. They announce formal reunification in 1961, on the precise centennial of Fort Sumter. Conversely, a GURPS game setting book presents a 1993 in which the US and the CS still watch each other warily across an armed border that stretches to the Pacific.
In Southern Victory, the US and the CS develop into hereditary enemies that go to war again every decade or two, spend the rest of the time preparing for new war, and become entangled in webs of worldwide military alliances. Southern Victory has both drawn into the Great War. They open an American front of trench warfare that is every bit as terrible as the one in Europe, and a generation later go to war yet again with the Confederacy developing a murderous tyranny similar to Nazi Germany. Conversely, the 1914 of "A Hard Day for Mother", in Alternate Generals 1 by William R. Forstchen, sees an amicable treaty of reconciliation and voluntary reunification between the two nations.
Britannia's Fist (trilogy) by Peter Tsouras. Britain and France enter the War in 1863 when British-built warships enter the Confederate Navy, instead of being seized by British forces before they could service, as really happened.
Dirk Pitt series: Volume 11: Sahara by Clive Cussler. The series's recurring MacGuffin in which the heroes discover an astounding secret history, involves the Lincoln assassination in this one. It is a brief side plot that is only tenuously related to the main adventure and is completely left out of the film adaptation of the novel.
1862 by Robert Conroy. After the Trent Affair, the United Kingdom joins the Civil War on the side of the Confederacy.
Fire on the Mountain by Terry Bisson. Instead of a Civil War breaking out between North and South, there is a massive successful slave revolt in the Deep South, with blacks creating their own separate nation called "Nova Africa," which leads to Socialist revolutions in France, the United States, Ireland, and Russia.
Gettysburg: An Alternate History by Peter Tsouras. A counterfactual account of a Confederate victory at The Battle of Gettysburg
A Rebel in Time by Harry Harrison. A racist army officer goes back in time to bring about a Confederate victory.
Russian Amerika by Stoney Compton. The backstory is only vaguely defined, but the point of divergence seems to be a Confederate victory in the 1860s.
Shattered Nation: An Alternate History of the American Civil War (trilogy) by Jeffrey Evan Brooks. The series focuses on the Confederacy winning its independence in 1864 by achieving victory at the Battle of Atlanta, thanks to a telegram that keeps Joseph E. Johnston as general of the Army of Tennessee.
The Stars and Stripes trilogy (Stars and Stripes Forever [1998], Stars and Stripes In Peril [2000], and Stars and Stripes Triumphant [2002]) by Harry Harrison. The Trent affair and the premature death of Prince Albert, the husband of Queen Victoria, elicit a war between the Union and Britain, eventually seeing America reunited under one government.
TimeRiders: volume 4: The Eternal War (2011) by Alex Scarrow. Britain enters the American Civil War on the side of the Confederacy, turning the war into an unending stalemate.
In Underground Airlines, by Ben H. Winters (2016). President-elect Lincoln is assassinated in 1861, and a version of the Crittenden Compromise is adopted preventing the Civil War from occurring. Slavery thus continues in four southern states (the "Hard Four" comprising Alabama, Louisiana, Mississippi, and a united Carolina) to the present. The title refers to the secret network assisting escaping slaves, updated from the Underground Railroad. The protagonist is a black US Marshal who is forced to work tracking down runaway slaves.
David Mason's The Shores of Tomorrow, diverges from our history long before 1861. Developments in the late 18th Century lead to a technologically backward US becoming totally and permanently dominated by the slave-holding South, a situation lasting until the 1940s, when a series of Northern rebellions breaks out - a major rebel leader being Admiral Franklin Roosevelt, who was killed in the Battle of Long Island Sound. His sacrifice was not in vain, eventually the Northern secessionists win and establish three Free Republics, leaving the slave-holders with only a narrow strip of Mexican Gulf shore.
Short stories
Alternate Generals, volume 1, contains three US Civil War-related stories:
"How the South Preserved the Union" by Ralph Roberts. It focuses on the Northeast seceding from the Union as the "New England Confederacy" after David Rice Atchison ascends to the presidency following President Zachary Taylor and Vice President Millard Fillmore's deaths in a carriage accident shortly into their terms. A Southern-dominated United States fights the New Englanders for two years resulting in a Union victory, with the New England states readmitted and President Stephen A. Douglas passing the Civil Rights Act of 1861, which abolishes slavery and grants freedmen the right to vote.
"Lincoln's Charge" by Bill Fawcett focuses on Douglas becoming President of the United States. In both Roberts' and Chalker's entries, the North seek to secede from the Southern-dominated Union.
Dixie Victorious: An Alternate History of the Civil War by Peter G. Tsouras. The anthology of various Civil War/Confederate victory has ten alternate history scenarios, written by various authors.
"Hell on Earth" by Andrew Uffindell focuses on an Anglo-French intervention on the side of the Confederates against the Union after Albert of Saxe-Coburg dies in a carriage incident before he could handle the Trent Affair. It worsens with the wounding of Thomas Fairfax and the death of two British citizens as well as a successful St. Albans Raid in 1861 and a harsh ultimatum to the Lincoln administration.
"Ships of Iron and Wills of Steel" by Wade G. Dudley focuses on a Union victory at the Battle of Hampton Roads and a Confederate counterblockade with resources properly-allocated to the Confederate Navy.
"What Will Our Country Say?" by David Keithly focuses on Lee not losing the famous Lost Orders during the Maryland Campaign.
"When the Bottom Fell Out" by Michael Hathaway focuses on a financial crisis and collapse of the Union economy in 1862, coupled with a Southern victory in Maryland.
"Confederate Black and Grey" by Tsouras focuses on the Confederacy accepting Patrick Cleburne's proposal to use black slaves and to free blacks in the Confederate Army as soldiers.
"Decision in the West" by Cyril M. Lagvanec focuses on the Trans-Mississippi Theater of the Civil War for the Confederacy in which there is a different depth of a sandbar, coupled with the disastrous Red River Campaign.
"East of Appomattox" (in Alternate Generals III) by Lee Allred. In the late 1860s, the CS sends Ambassador Lee to London to assure continued British recognition, and he finds unexpected challenges and even more unlikely allies.
"If Grant Had Been Drinking at Appomattox" by James Thurber. Inspired by the above book, the wrong man surrenders.
In "If President James Buchanan Had Enforced the Law," by Joseph Edgar Chamberlin, President Buchanan fully enforced federal law upon South Carolina's succession stopping the civil war.
If the South Had Been Allowed to Go by Ernest Crosby. Another early Civil War alternate history written in 1903.
"If the Lost Order Hadn't Been Lost: Robert E. Lee Humbles the Union, 1862" by James M. McPherson, first printed in What If? and reprinted in What Ifs? of American History, a scenario posited by McPherson that focuses on the Lost Order staying in Confederate hands, allowing the South to advance to Pennsylvania and to win an alternate version of the Battle of Gettysburg, resulting in the death of George B. McClellan and Braxton Bragg and Edmund Kirby Smith winning and taking over Kentucky during the Heartland Campaign. The decisive victory allows the Copperheads to win the 1862 legislative elections, coupled with Britain and France recognizing the new nation. Lincoln and his cabinet are thus forced to issue a proclamation to recognize the Confederacy as a sovereign, separate nation by New Year's Eve 1863.
"Hush My Mouth" by Suzette Haden Elgin, first printed in Alternative Histories: 11 Stories of the World as It Might Have Been (1986).
"All the Myriad Ways" by Larry Niven, with worlds of a CS victory being mentioned only briefly by the narrator in a list of alternate realities known in the story.
In David Mason's The Shores of Tomorrow, the slaveholding South dominates a technologically-backward US from its foundation until the 1940s, when a series of Northern rebellions leads to the creation of three Free Republics taking up the interior and leaving the Southrons with "a slave-holding, vice-ridden burned out piece of the coast."
The Wild Blue and the Gray by William Sanders. The Civil War alternate history is set during World War I in which the Confederate States joins the Allies.
In Scott Fitzgerald's story The Diamond as Big as the Ritz, a dynasty of Virginian landowners hole up in a distant mountain valley, keeping hundreds of Black slaves in perpetual bondage, concealing from them that slavery was abolished and telling them that Nathan Bedford Forrest had at last moment rallied the Confederate armies and achieved victory. Thus, Fitzgerald's story in effect posits a secret enclave of a victorious Confederacy persisting into the actual United States of the 1920's.
In Jerry Pournelle's story "New Washington", American-descended space colonists in the far future in effect re-enact the Civil War - only this time around, it is the planet New Washington, settled by Americans from the North, which rebels and tries to get free of the Franklin Confederacy, based on the planet Franklin which was settled by Southerners.
Film and television
The Time Tunnel, episodes 12 ("The Death Trap") and 25 ("The Death Merchant")
Dixie hex and counter board game by Simulations Publications Incorporated (SPI), the Union loses the Civil War and is trying to reclaim the Confederate States of America in the 1930s.
GURPS Alternate Earths (1996), a supplement of alternate realities published by Steve Jackson Games for the GURPS Third Edition, which includes the alternate world codenamed "Dixie" in which the North American continent circa 1985 is divided between the northern US and the southern CS along an extended Mason–Dixon line. An updated (current year: 1993) but truncated description of this world, now known as "Dixie-1", was included in the revised Fourth Edition version of the book (see history at GURPS Infinite Worlds#Dixie-1).
Victoria II, a grand strategy wargame by Paradox Interactive, offers an opportunity for the Confederacy to win the American Civil War and become a world power. It is also possible for a northern Free States of America, instead of the Confederates, to break away.
