The self-defeating nature of the AWB is subtly foreshadowed in the slave auction, where they use their abundant wealth to corner the slave market, running up the prices and making it impossible for locals to afford slaves. This comes to undermine the cause of slavery, since people who don’t have slaves are less willing to stand up for it when Lee runs on a platform of gradual, compensated emancipation. It also seriously damages the earlier goodwill that the Southerners had held toward the Rivington men; Raeford Liles, Nate Caudell's storekeeper friend, had been at that auction but found that the AWB men had driven the prices way above what he could ever possibly afford. He has to hire a free black man instead, and bears a serious grudge against the Rivington men for the rest of the book (so much so that their mere presence at the Forrest rally in Nashville is almost enough to cause Liles to stop supporting Forrest; if other Southern voters soured on Forrest for the same reason, it may have been a factor in his losing the election to Lee).
Slavery is already effectively dead in many parts of the South, especially the areas that the Union was able to hold from beginning to end such as the North Carolina coast (as Liles comments during one conversation with Nate). While Forrest was able to suppress the remnants of the black regiments raised by the Union in the Mississippi Delta, there are, overall, now just too many free blacks for the South's whites to be able to force back into bondage without risking the complete collapse of the country. George Lewis lampshades this during his speech to the Lee rally, where he points out that slavery is fast becoming a lot more trouble to maintain than it's worth, and the repression that would be necessary to keep it going would very likely cause massive rebellions across the Confederacy, and that Lee's plan of gradual and compensated emancipation is far better for the nation in the long run.
The shallow worldview of the AWB is also foreshadowed at the beginning of the novel when Rhoodie is taken aback by Lee's lack of surprise at MREs. Had Rhoodie and his crew done their homework, it is possible they would've also offered Lee not only better weapons but more food and water. Their failure to plan for the South's logistical problems also shows how they failed to capture the actual worldview of the Southern whites.
Isn't it peculiar that nobody - not even General Lee, when Andries Rhoodie told him that he and his compatriots hailed from South Africa, let alone Hyman Goldfarb, who had lived in Aachen until the events of 1848, and had had extensive business dealings in the Netherlands and was fluent enough in Dutch to make sense of the Afrikaans of the AWB's book, though he complained about it as being "Dutch as if the devil had spelled it" - made the connection with the Boers/Afrikaners? In the mid-1860's, two of the best-known events in Afrikaner history, the Battle of Blood River and the Great Trek, were already several decades in the past, and a well-educated, savvy person like General Lee ought to have been able to figure out from where they came from (of course, it does turn his thought "Dutchmen they are" when he hears the accents of Rhoodie's friends into an example of Hilarious in Hindsight). In fairness though, South Africa wasn't very well known then to Americans (or even called that, since it was divided into different British colonies, Boer republics and black African kingdoms).
While Rhoodie told Lee he was from the future, he never said he was from South Africa. The CSA only found this out after the AWB rebelled and the Confederates seized their offices and library in Richmond.
There was a state called the South African Republic that had existed since 1852. Not sure how well known it would have been in 1860s America.
Capetown was - and still is - one of the world's finest natural harbors, and was a key stop, in those days before the construction of the Suez Canal, for ships traveling between Europe and India/Eastern Asia. There had to have been a sizable number of Confederates (including Robert E. Lee's own brother Sydney Smith Lee, a well-traveled naval officer serving in both the Federal and Confederate navies, see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sydney_Smith_Lee) who had, either as sailors or businessmen, visited the city and its hinterlands at one time or another, and been able to figure out where Rhoodie and his friends came from, even if they didn't know the full truth about their origins. Robert Lee mentions his brother at one point, so it really IS strange that he never appears to have discussed the Rivington men with him.
Despite being fierce Afrikaner ultranationalists that maintain a base of support for years in the Confederacy, at no point do the men of AWB try to reach out to the Boers in South Africa even though their detailed knowledge of future history and technology would secure the Boers for decades against British encroachment.
Who says they haven't given the Boers a few 'presents' off-screen? As seen from the shelves of books on South African history discovered in the AWB's Richmond base, the Rivington men certainly knew about the "South African Republic" mentioned above, and once the Union blockade was lifted after the end of the war and normal sea traffic in and out of Southern ports resumed, it would have been a trivial exercise for them, with their huge stocks of gold, to hire ships to go to Capetown, from whence they could make their way to their ancestors.
Considering all the items that the AWB men have given the Confederates of their own accord, not to mention that Rivington is an important stop on the railroad south from Richmond, plus the burning curiosity so many Southerners had about their strange benefactors, the Rivington men ought to have anticipated that their books would eventually leak out, as well. They might have been able to keep their main library under lock and key in their Richmond base, but they really should have taken stricter measures to ensure that their personal libraries were kept safe from prying eyes Mollie Bean comes upon the crucial piece of evidence that exposes Rhoodie's lies about the future, The American Heritage Picture History of the Civil War, while curiously browsing Benny Lang's shelves during a visit to his house.
Where are the Rivington women (not to mention children)? We know that there were a lot of single men among the AWB who went back to 1864 (hence their availing themselves of the services of Rivington's prostitutes, including Mollie Bean), but logic dictates that at least some of the Afrikaners would have brought their wives and children back with them as well and set them up in Rivington, where access to modern technology including advanced medicine and effective sanitation was to be had. The more devout Afrikaner Calvinists, such as Andries Rhoodie himself, would probably not have used the services of prostitutes, ergo, unless they wanted to remain celibate, they must have brought their families along.
On that note, given the fact that Ripple-Effect-Proof Memory is in effect here for everything up to and including text books, why did the AWB take the risk of taking repeated trips using the time machine? To start, Adolf Hitler wouldn't be born for decades as of their target date, meaning they were risking, among other things, the National Socialist Party never getting a global profile in the first place.
As noted above, there is a good possibility that the AWB was able to transport "modern" (read: 20th and 21st-century) weapons to their ancestral relatives after the end of the Civil War. That means that the Boers would not only have been able to suppress and enslave the local Africans far more easily, but also stand a good chance (assuming the UK hadn't also developed such weapons in the interim) of holding the British off when they came to try to absorb the Boers into their expanding empire. The Draka, anyone? On the other hand, since by the end of the novel they knew the whole story of the AWB men, including who they were and where they came from originally, the Confederates might well have dropped a few carefully-phrased warnings into British ears that might have caused London to take more decisive action, earlier on, to prevent the Boers from becoming a threat...
In Real Life they did hold the British off when they came to try to absorb the Boers into their expanding empire. The First Boer War in 1881 ended in the British being repelled with minimal effort, and the Second Boer War in the 1900s took two years because the Boers did, in fact, have superior weaponry and were only defeated because the British started burning all their crops and using concentration camps. This hypothetical scenario wouldn't make much difference to their ability to fight the British.
After the AWB's bases both in Richmond and Rivington itself were captured by the Confederates, the CSA came into possession of a huge quantity of books which would have described, at least in outline and likely also in detail, just about every aspect of life and technology over the next 150 years. This is a key point of the discussion between Lee and Lang at the end of the book; the Confederacy needs the services of the surviving Rivington men to make sense of what the books relate. The possibility exists, at the end of the novel, for the Confederacy to make huge leaps forward in medicine (it's now known, for example, that nitroglycerin is an effective treatment for the symptoms of heart disease), communications, transportation (including air travel and eventually space travel), food preparation and preservation, sanitation, and other key aspects of modern life, which will inevitably make their way out to the rest of the world too. To cite one of the most striking examples, while the Confederates don't know how to build computers or the technology needed to build them, they DO now know that these devices exist and, assuming the manuals go into enough detail, how they can be built once the tech base allows it. On the other hand, it also implies that far more unpleasant things like chemical and nuclear weapons could be developed much earlier, assuming that the needed technology also is constructed, than in our own history.
that had existed since 1852. Not sure how well known it would have been in 1860s America.