The Guns of the South: Difference between revisions

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Winter of 1863. The Army of Northern Virginia is in winter quarters at Orange Court House, trying to deal with its massive supply problems, when, one day, General Lee is approached by a strange man with a strange name, Andries Rhoodie. Rhoodie wishes to show the General a new breech-loading repeating rifle, with an unmatched rate of fire, which he claims to be able to deliver in almost endless quantities. He calls his weapon an AK-47...

* [[The Apartheid Era]]. The AWB hope to prolong this by turning the CSA into a superpower so South Africa isn't alone in racism.

* [[Badass Bookworm]]: Henry Pleasants. Two engineering degrees and a Lt.Col. commission {{spoiler|in both the Union and Confederate armies, by the end of the book}}

* [[Badass Teacher]]: Nate Caudell, though he would definitely not consider himself as such.

* [[Bad Future]]: The AWB claim to come from this.

* [[Even Evil Has Standards]]: The book analyses the difference between conservative racism (people are racist because that's the way it's always been) and reactionary racism (people actively move against other races to prevent race-mixing). This is demonstrated in early chapters where one of Caudell's squadmates says that if he owned slaves, he'd want a Rivington man as an overseer, but quickly recants when he sees how harshly they treat blacks, remarking that their attitude would either cause a lot of runaways or an outright revolt.

** This is also the reason given for Gen. Forrest's [[Heel Face Turn]] at the end of the book. He even says that if he'd known what the AWB were ''really'' planning, he'd have dropped out of the race and voted for Lee. And when you're too violently racist for the real-life founder of the Ku Klux Klan, that's saying something.

* [[Face Heel Turn]]: Nathan Bedford Forrest runs for President against Robert E. Lee after the latter talks about freeing the slaves and speaks poorly of the Rivington men. After Lee wins the election, however, Forrest turns again and comes to concede in person, saying that while he may disagree with Lee's politics, he doesn't want them to remain personal enemies.

* [[Fatal Flaw]]: For the Rivington men, their fanaticism means they are completely inflexible, which is what starts driving Confederates away from them. Even the rank-and-file soldiers, who themselves have little use for blacks, get put off when they see how harshly the AWB treats slaves. When Rhoodie tries to horrify Lee by telling him that there are blacks in the British Parliament, Lee asks how they can be blamed if they were properly elected, which gets Rhoodie red in the face and halfway to starting a fight before Lee calms him down. Later on after receiving ''The Picture History of the Civil War'', Lee compares Rhoodie to John Brown, which [[Berserk Button|REALLY sets him off]].

* [[Graceful Loser]]: After Lee wins the 1867 elections, Forrest goes to his house to personally concede—a deliberate contrast to their first meeting, also at Lee's house, where their disagreement over slavery lead to Lee asking Forrest to leave. Forrest says that he still disagrees with Lee politically, but not personally and he wants to make sure that Lee understands this; Lee is more than happy in this regard, since he doesn't like the idea of personal enemies.

* [[Hoist by His Own Petard]]/[[Karmic Death]]: {{spoiler|Andres Rhoodie is killed when one of his slaves stabs him in the throat with a broken bottle. The Confederates ignore the law and let him go, having learned how horribly Rhoodie (and indeed most of AWB) treated their slaves; one soldier even remarks "Reckon the son of a bitch had it coming."}}

* [[More Dakka]]: The very first scene of the book. And the cover. And, well, the whole premise....

* [[My Friends and Zoidberg]]: The Confederates repeatedly refer to the Federal commissioners as "Our honored guests, and Gen. Butler." They feel they are [[Justified]] in doing so, given their reactions to some of Butler's actions during the war.

* [[Only Known by Their Nickname]]: The only times Nathaniel Caudell's full name is used is when he musters out of the army, and when he goes to vote. When in uniform, he's Sergeant Caudell, when teaching he's Mr. Caudell, and otherwise everyone calls him Nate.

* [[Our Time Travel Is Different]]: The time machine used is a square platform, a few square meters in size, that travels forwards and backwards exactly 150 years. It dematerialises travellers in much the same way as the transporter in ''[[Star Trek]]''.

* [[Politically-Incorrect Villain]]: The Rivington men just have "evil racist scum" written all over them.

** The Afrikaner Weerstandsbewegin is a real-life ultra-nationalist white supremacist movement in South Africa with a history of terrorist activities. The only fictional element Turtledove introduced to the AWB was giving them a time machine.

* [[San Dimas Time]]: Justified. The time machine only works over a period of 150 years; AWB stole it in 2014, so they could only go back to 1864 and no earlier, meaning that events like Gettysburg still happened.

* [[Schizo-Tech]]: ''The Guns of the South'' gets this on purpose.

* [[Shaming the Mob]]: One of Lee's most effective weapons against the Rivington men is [[Time Travel Tense Trouble|future historical documents]] that show how negatively the modern world views the South because of slavery, shattering the notion held by many slavery proponents that they would be [[Vindicated by History]].

** Happens more literally in one scene where a mob, egged on by a Rivington man, attempts to lynch a free black blacksmith for allegedly trying to 'take work away from white men' by charging lower prices (even though if he charged identical prices, he would potetnailly face lynching for 'thinking he was as good as a white man'). Lee comes upon the incident and [["The Reason You Suck" Speech|gives the men holy hell]], defusing the situation, though the Rivington men later try to use [[Manipulative Editing]] to make Lee look bad.

*** In that same scene Lee also points out the practical reasons for not supporting such behavior.

* [[Shown Their Work]]: Very much so, as Turtledove is quite the expert on the [[American Civil War]]. An appendix describes the history of the real 47th North Carolina Infantry, and the contemporary characters are mostly drawn from real people.

** Not to mention the fact that he calculated out the election results in the United States of the novel (1864; just after losing the Second American Revolution), and that of the Confederacy in 1867. ''And'' explains how he calculated it, state-by-state.

[[Category:Alternate History Literature]]

[[Category:The Guns of the South]]