How Few Remain
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How Few Remain is a 1998 alternate history novel by Harry Turtledove. It is part of the timeline-191 saga. It received the Sidewise Award for Alternate History that year.
Story
The point of divergence is 1862, the American Civil War. In our timeline, a Confederate messenger lost Robert E. Lee's General Order detailing his plans for the Battle of Antietam. The orders were soon found by Federal soldiers, and using them George McClellan was able to defeat the Army of Northern Virginia.
In Turtledove's novel, the orders are never lost, and McClellan is caught by surprise. Lee forces him into battle on the banks of the Susquehanna River in Pennsylvania and destroys the Army of the Potomac in the battle of Camp Hill. Lee goes on to capture Philadelphia, earning the Confederate States of America diplomatic recognition from Great Britain and France and winning the war.
In 1881, James G. Blaine has ridden a platform of anti-Confederatism into the White House. Both American nations are sanctioning Indian raids into the other's territory, and the international tension boils over when Confederate President James Longstreet, desiring a Pacific coast, purchases the provinces of Sonora and Chihuahua from Mexico (which is still ruled by Maximillian). Blaine uses the "coerced" purchase as a casus belli, and what will later become known as the Second Mexican War erupts.
Characters
The novel is narrated from the point of view of several historical figures.
- Thomas J. Jackson, old "Stonewall," General-in-Chief of the Confederate Army, is ready and eager to strike at the Yankees once more.
- General J.E.B. Stuart defends the new Confederate territories from the Yankees and the Apaches
- Colonel George A. Custer, a frustrated Yankee cavalryman, serves on the Great Plains.
- Theodore Roosevelt is a wealthy, patriotic young Montana rancher
- Frederick Douglass, a former slave and a fiery orator, observes the Union forces at war
- Colonel Alfred von Schlieffen serves as the German military attache to the U.S.
- Samuel Clemens is a sharp-witted newpaper editor in San Francisco.
- Former President Abraham Lincoln, influenced by the writings of Karl Marx, has become an orator struggling to keep the Republican Party united in the cause of the working man, against the Democratic Party and Big Business. And if the Republicans are unable to meet the challenge, he'll find someone who can.
Timeline-191
The novel is followed by the Great War, American Empire, and Settling Accounts trilogies.