All people alive during the American Civil War would experience different lives after the turning point of the loss to the Union of Colonel Phillip Sheridan on December 31, 1862, at the Battle of Muphreesboro. In this alternate time line, the Union forces there were not able to retreat, but were taken captive. Soon afterwards, most of the Union forces in Tennessee had withdrawn to Kentucky.
This page is a gateway to the biographies of people, mostly presidents of the two Americas, as their lives would have changed.
Presidents of the United States[]
Abraham Lincoln was the last president of the united nation founded by Virginians and New England patriots. Events leading to his election as president had caused political descent in the states which resulted in an official secession of several southern states. Reacting to this as an act of rebellion, Lincoln had asked for and got a declaration of war. Failing to secure the loyalty of Virginia, the remaining United States were locked in a war that lasted for most of his two terms. After a propaganda campaign to defeat a popular General in the 1864, he was to live in seclusion for fear of Confederate assassins rumored to be in the Washington. In 1865, he saw the CSA hold its boundaries secure and sue for armistice after his failed attempt to "slash and burn" the farmland of the deep south.
After the ceasefire, Lincoln worked with the generals in his army to secure border cities to assure a peaceful transition and rebuilding of his beloved Union. He worked to assure that the Republican Party would hold office in what were certain to be tumultuous years ahead. Having successfully abolished slavery within the United States, Lincoln began a campaign to abolish what he saw as another great evil -- the manufacture and distribution of alcoholic beverage. The hero of the western campaign, and one time head of the whole Union Army, General U.S. Grant, was opposed to this campaign, painting it as an attack on free enterprise and civil liberties.
In March of 1869, Lincoln left office, turning over the reins of a much smaller nation to Ulysses Grant. He was a broken man, in failing health, and with very few friends. The New York Temperance League, with whom he had worked for the later part of his presidency, promised him and his family a place to stay in New York City, where he died in June 19, 1881, of what was called "consumption" (a form of cancer, according to forensic experts of today) at the age of 72.
Other Persons in the United States[]
Andrew Johnson, being from Tennessee, would have been a "foreigner" in the white house after the cease fire. Factions from both the CS and the US attempted to remove him from office. After an attempt on his life by a disgruntled Tennessan on November 21, 1867, Johnson remained out of sight for months. His lack of activity, though, did not keep his enemies in the US Senate from accusing him of being soft on the CS. This was trumped up as treason, and articles of impeachment were drawn up. As Congress debated, but before the House was able to impeach him, Johnson resigned the office, leaving Washington on March 5, 1868 for retirement in Maine.
Presidents of the Confederate States[]
Jefferson Davis would have finally finished a full term in elected office. As president during the whole active war, he personally oversaw the defense of the new homeland. The bill of armistice was to his dying day the highlight of his life. Though he would occasionally advise later presidents (all of whom had served under him as commander-in-chief), he would mostly travel and write after leaving office.
Woodrow Wilson, born in Virginia in 1856, and growing up in Augusta Georgia, his life would be much the same until he returned to the University of Virginia instead of Princeton University to study history and political science. He would go on to other prestigious schools across the Confederate States. In our time line he would have studied and built his career in schools in what in this time line would be considered off limits to anyone hopeful of a political career. Instead of becoming professor and president of Princeton he would hold the same positions at the university of Virgina.
Hugo Black, of Missouri, would first serve as the twelfth president of the CSA before going on to become Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of the CSA. As in our time line, he would be a textualist when it came to the CS Constitution. For this reason, full civil rights of black Confederates was not possible until after his death in 1971.
James F. Byrnes, of South Carolina, served as president during most of World War Two. The supreme court, lead by former president Hugo Black, ruled against special laws that had been passed Congress to allow him to remain in office until the end of the war. Before being elected president, he served as a member of the House of Representatives from the state of South Carolina (1911–1925) and as a Senator (1931–1938). After the war, he would be appointed to the very court that had ruled against him.
Harry S. Truman, of Missouri, would take the reigns of government from James F. Byrnes of South Carolina in the midst of debate for extending the former's tenure until the end of World War II. Truman would host US president Henry A. Wallace on Thanksgiving Day, 1947, to sign an accord in which the US finally concedes "defeat" and officially recognizes the CS.
Dwight D. Eisenhower, born in Texas during the administration of P.G.T Beauregard, never moved to Kansas as in our time line. Instead, he grew up in Oklahoma. Since West Point Military Academy is deep into Union territory, Eisenhower graduated from the premier military school in the CS - Virginia Military Institute. From there he would go on to become a regular general (5-star) in leading the CS forces in Europe during the Second World War. As a result of operations in the closing days of that war, the CS was able to "rescue" German rocket scientists who would later help the North American Allies (CS-US-Canada) in their efforts in what became known as the "Space Race" with the USSR.
As president, he pushed for troops to be sent to help the UN hold on to South Korea, but the CS Congress would not go along. When the US president asked for assistance in the mounting tensions in French Indochina, again, the CS Congress stood in the way. Both Korea and Vietnam would fall to the Communists.
Other Persons in the Confederate States[]
- General Robert Edward Lee, formerly a Colonel in the US Army, would be offered command by President Abraham Lincoln at the onset of hostilities. Even after Virginia's original refusal to secede, President Jefferson Davis had offered his fellow Virginian the same post in the new Confederate Army. It came down to what the government of the Virginia would decide. When Virginia seceded, Lee went with his home state. After five grueling years of war, a ceasefire left Lee free to retire from almost forty years of military service. However, Vice President Stephens, the presumptive presidential candidate for the Democratic party, chose him to be his running mate. They won in a landslide.
- Wernher von Braun was a German rocket pioneer who invented and developed missiles for Nazi Germany in World War II. His weapons were a devastatingly effective delivery system for high explosives, capable of speeds far in excess of the airplanes used in the Blitzkrieg attacks over London. However, at war's end, he and his team (including his brother Magnus) were prize prisoners to whichever of the Allies that got to them first. The C.S. military intelligence got there first. General Eisenhower himself had directed the search, and they were taken into custody May 2, 1945. Von Braun would take on a false persona and work for the C.S. military at Fort Bliss, Texas, and Huntsville, Alabama. He would become instrumental in helping the C.S. lead the way in North America's space program that would eventually put a man on the moon, and countless satellites into earth orbit.
- Leroy Gordon Cooper, Jr., also known as "Gordo" Cooper, (March 6, 1927 – October 4, 2004) was an engineer and Confederate astronaut. Cooper was one of the seven original astronauts in Project Mercury, the first manned space effort in America. He flew the longest spaceflight of the Mercury project, was the first American to sleep in orbit, and was the last American to launch alone into Earth orbit and conduct an entire solo orbital mission.
- Born in Sequoyah, and growing up in Kentucky, Cooper was the only Confederate in the elite "Mercury 7," the original astronauts in the first phase of manned space flight program of the North American Space Agency (NASA). In this historic day-and-a-half mission (May 15, 1963), Cooper had to manually take over what had been until then an automated vehicle. Using a wrist watch and visual sightings of the earth's horizon, he successfully executed a re-entry into earth's orbit. He would go on to fly in NASA's two-manned Gemini program, but would not fly in the lunar landing program due to disagreements he had with NASA administrators.
- Alan LaVern Bean (born March 15, 1932) was a Confederate astronaut, becoming the first person to walk on the moon at the age of thirty-seven years in July 1969. He would personally brief CS president George Wallace, along with former president Strom Thurmond then chairman of the Senate Committee on Aerospace Programs. Thurmond was proud that a Confederate had been able to fulfill the joint directive he and US president John F. Kennedy had made in 1961.
- Bean would go on to be commander of the second manned North American Skylab mission (July-September 1973), and then serve as head of the Astronaut Candidate Operations and Training Group after his retirement from the Air Force. Later still, he would leave the space program to become an artist, transforming his memories into unique paintings using artifacts and souvenirs from space.
- Michael King, Jr. was the son of Rev. Michael King, pastor of Ebenezer Baptist Church of Atlanta, Georgia. In our time line Rev. King would change his name, along with that of his son, to "Martin Luther King" after a visit to Hitler's Germany in 1934. In this time line, due to much stricter segregation (or apartheid), such trips by blacks were not possible. King, Sr., would still be an activist, followed by his son, but the impact would not be as great and the names would not be changed. Mike King, Jr., would leave the C.S. in 1948, at the age of 19 to live and go to school in Pennsylvania and Boston. He would return to the C.S. to pastor at Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery, Alabama, in 1954. He would be in the middle of the civil rights movement along with his father for the next fourteen years before his death at the hands of an unknown assassin in Memphis, Tennessee, in 1968.