It’s easy to start a war, but damn hard to end it, believed the Duke of Wellington, who fought in his lifetime like no one else. And even more so the civil war. Until now, the American Civil War was known to Russian readers largely from the melodrama Gone with the Wind by M. Mitchell. Naturally, the brilliant science fiction writer Harry Harrison, who this time decided to experiment not with the future, but with the past, came up with a fundamentally different historical picture, because, based on real facts, he allowed himself an innocent prank - he slightly corrected the biography of one single person , - and the river of history flowed along a different channel.