Jefferson Pinkard

Jefferson Pinkard is a major character in Harry Turtledoves "Timeline 191" or "Southern Victory" series, in which the Confederacy won the American Civil War. Pinkard was a steelworker working at the Sloss Foundry in Birmingham Alabama when the Great War began in 1914. Because of his important position to the war effort, Pinkard was not drafted into the army until 1915, at which point he was deployed first against a black communist uprising and then against the US Army in west Texas.

During the war, Pinkard's wife, Emily cheated on him with a co-worker. This drove Pinkard to resent the black rebels for forcing him to be deployed against them in the war, and thus separating him from his wife. This was the beginning of Pinkards intense racism that eventually led to his involvment in the black "population reductions" of the Second Great War.

After the war, the Confederacy was subjected to military limitations and economically crippling reparations, similar to the real-world Treaty of Versailles. In this turbulent climate, the Confederate Freedom Party formed, which advocated disregarding the treaty, military buildup, and vengeance against the North. Pinkard was drawn to the Freedom Party, which his wife vehemently opposed, leading to arguments, physical violence, and culminating in rape. Shortly afterwards, Emily divorced Jefferson.

Sometime after his divorce, Pinkard changed his career to that of a prison guard. After Jake Featherston was elected president in 1933, Pinkard was placed in charge of Camp Dependible, a prison camp in Louisiana for political prisoners. Over time, the proportion of blacks among the political prisoner increased, until the prison was filled entirely with supposed black rebels.

As the camps filled beyond capacity, Pinkard was ordered by Confederate vice president Ferdinand Koenig to "reduce the population". Pinkard did this by sending randomly selected groups of prisoners into a nearby swamp and executing them by firing squad. Not long after the population reductions began, Camp Dependable and other prison camps were used to imprison all blacks in the Confederacy, including women and children. These groups were all subject to population reductions, driving Leroy Blades, a guard morally opposed to Pinkard's actions to commit suicide by gassing himself using the exhaust from his own car.

This inspired Pinkard to design trucks with modified exhaust systems, designed to pipe the exhaust into the cargo bay and gas the people inside. With this new, more efficient method, population reductions increased and Pinkard was promoted.

Pinkard was later placed in charge of Camp Dependable near Snyder, Texas, where further increased the efficiency of the Confederate genocide by using false showers filled with hydrogen cyanide gas to kills thousands at once. As the Second Great War with the US progressed, US bombers attacked rail lines feeding into the camps, reducing the number of victims delivered, and US forces advanced on and eventually overran Camp Dependable.

Pinkard was evacuated and send to Camp Humble, near Houston, where the genocidal operations continued, with the addition of a crematoria to dispose of the bodies more efficiently than the mass graves used previously. The camp continued until the defeat of the Confederates in the Second Great War. After the end of the war, the US charged Pinkard with crimes against humanity, which he was convicted of and executed by hanging.