YMMV / The Guns of the South

• Complete Monster: Andries Rhoodie is the leader of the South African Neo-Nazi group AWB who seeks to create a permanent bastion of white supremacy in the world. To this end he steals a time machine and travels back to 1864, arming the Confederacy with AK-47s to help them win The American Civil War. After this plan succeeds, Rhoodie and his group buy hundreds of black slaves, promptly torturing, starving, and raping them out of sheer racial hatred. When Robert E. Lee becomes Confederate President on a platform of gradual emancipation for slaves, Rhoodie sends a team of commandos to kill him and the entire Confederate government, culminating in a massacre in which dozens of bystanders, including Lee's infirm wife, are killed. With the Confederacy having turned against them, Rhoodie has his group wage a war that gets thousands of Confederate soldiers killed out of spite.
• Fandom Rivalry: Within Turtledove's own fandom as this work is a direct contrast in its portrayal of the Confederacy to Timeline-191 where the CSA is much closer to the Nazis than the more romanticized romantic version here. Some have even suggested that Turtledove wrote the latter as some Self-Deprecation to this novel.
• Funny Moments:
  • A Confederate chemist at the Tredegar Ironworks figures out that the active ingredient in some of the Rivington Men's future explosives is nitroglycerine... which is also the active ingredient in the heart disease treatment tablets they've been giving to Lee. Lee is briefly convinced they're attempting to assassinate him by feeding him explosives.
  • Andries Rhoodie's reaction when Lee and the other Confederate officers react matter-of-factly to the MRE and freeze-dried coffee that he shares with them; in particular, Lee's thoughts when he reads the "Made in USA" label on the Folger's coffee packet that he should have been able to figure that out for himself without looking.
  • Black Comedy: After the end of the war, Lee watches passersby in Richmond, self-satisfied that the genteel Southern way of life has been saved. Another part of that "way of life" immediately intrudes in the form of a lynch mob.
• Genius Bonus:
  • Several lines of dialog spoken by the historical characters are things they actually said or wrote, just in different contexts; only a historian or Civil War scholar could get them all. As one example, Robert E. Lee says "Let the tents be struck" (a paraphrase of his actual quote: "Strike the tent") after the war ends in both reality and Turtledove's novel, the only difference being that in the former he lost and in the latter he won.
  • Another one from Lee when discussing future military advances with Rhoodie: "It is well that war is so terrible, or we should get too fond of it."
  • In one scene, Lee calls for his aide by saying "Mr. Marshall, come quickly, I need you"; this is (supposedly) the first phrase ever transmitted via telephone (except of course for the proper name; Alexander Graham Bell's assistant was named Watson).
  • If you follow South African politics at all, then The Reveal of who the Rivington men are won't be nearly as much of a shock and the information is served on the silver platter in the very first chapter.
  • The final war reparations the Confederacy manages to negotiate in the peace deal is the estimated value of the Reconstruction, at least by the 1980s sources.
  • Henry Pleasants is introduced quite early on, identified by his rank, unit he served prior and his job as a railroad and mining engineer. Good luck connecting him with his most famous exploit as a casual reader, since it didn't happen in-universe. Yet.
• Heartwarming Moments: Abraham Lincoln sending Lee a telegram of condolence after his wife is killed in the AWB's attack on his inauguration.
  • Lee's interactions with his family throughout the book. Of especial note; the tender interlude (including lovemaking passionate enough for Lee to have to take some nitroglycerine to calm his heart rate) with Mary before he leaves for Kentucky and Missouri, and the exchange between him and his son Custis where they discuss the Rivington men's efforts to blackmail Confederate politicians.
  • The wedding of Nate and Mollie at the end of the book, full stop.
  • The scene in which Lee frees Julia, the last remaining slave belonging to the Lee family.
  • Nate's return home to his beloved Nash County, North Carolina, at the end of the war, even if he did have to walk home after missing the stagecoach.
  • The sequence in which Nate teaches math to Israel, the former slave, so that Israel will be able to earn extra money by keeping books for Henry Pleasants. It's a key moment in the development of Nate's attitudes toward blacks.
• Hilarious in Hindsight:
  • The secret room in the AWB's Richmond office building predominately features a lot of chrome.
  • The fact that, in our timeline, the AWB men initially come from a time when the President of the United States is a black man (who, incidentally, is a direct descendant of Confederate President Davis) makes their actions seem much funnier and more desperate.
• Moment of Awesome:
  • When Robert E. Lee (having acquired an up-time textbook) realizes that the Rivington men do not represent the mainstream of views on race in the future, and he delivers what to Rhoodie must be the ultimate insult: "You and your men are as out of place in your time as John Brown was in mine."
  • The Confederates defeat a machine gun by tunneling under it and blowing it up (the Battle of the Crater in reverse, thanks to the presence of an ex-Union officer who was a key instigator of the scheme in the original timeline).
• Moral Event Horizon:
  • The AWB crosses this in the eyes of the Confederacy when they attack Lee's inauguration with Uzis in an attempt to kill him, spraying bullets all over the place and killing countless civilians, including Lee's wife Mary and his vice president. As noted in the main page, this atrocity turns into a prime example of Nice Job Fixing It, Villain, as the wave of anger sweeping the country turns the entire CSA - including Nathan Bedford Forrest, Lee's defeated election rival and the most prominent pro-slavery figure in the country - against the AWB and makes them determined to suppress them once and for all.
  • This is also a case of Reality Is Unrealistic, because the Confederates are outraged that anyone would try to assassinate a president in such a way and sure that none of their own people would do such a thing, not knowing that in the original timeline John Wilkes Booth would have done just that to Lincoln (although Booth acted without the sanction of the Confederate government and there were no innocents killed there. To be fair that would be hard using a single-shot pistol like Booth did. The assassination also was denounced by the real Lee and Jefferson Davis). And that's the point: assassinating a president is bad enough, but it's the deliberate killing of large numbers of innocent civilians in the process that sends the attack clear over into Moral Event Horizon territory. In fact, Lee already did know from the Picture History of the Civil War that Lincoln had been assassinated, and this very thought flies through his mind during the Richmond Massacre.
• Tear Jerker:
  • The moment when Lee discovers the body of his wife Mary, who has just been murdered by the AWB men in the Richmond Massacre. Whatever one thinks of Lee or the cause he fought for, NO ONE deserves to have that happen to them. He reproaches himself mentally for having asked that she be brought up to the inauguration stand, even though she'd have been in grave danger no matter where she'd been situated.
  • Poor Georgie Ballentine. He'd stayed with the 47th North Carolina when his master deserted, and become so trusted and esteemed that he was given an AK-47 of his own - only to have it taken away when Benny Lang saw it and flew into an obscenity-laced rage. Even the white soldiers of the company that Ballentine worked for as a cook think he was unjustly treated, and make sure that he gets a decent funeral and burial when he runs away afterward and is tracked down and killed.