Very, very interesting. So you have a US heading towards religious type of government, a new Confederacy, which is really intolerant. An interesting world.
You have a Confederacy which fights and acts ....welll...like Ireland! Which is not surprising considering that the people of the Confederacy are mostly Scots-Irish. Have you ever read James Webb['s book "Born Fighting" about the Scots-Irish, Mumby? It's excellent.
Create a long term guerrilla war like the 19th Century Irish Risings that forces the African-Americans out of the South and what you have left when the North finally throws in the towel looks an awful lot like Eamon de Valera's 1922 Irish Free State. Backward, agrarian, religiously oriented. Yep. Scots-Irish-Celtic all right.
Seems like having the assassination of Johnson go through would help remove one of the most public if loyal Southerners in the United States government. Any chance of seeing some conspiracy on Jews because of Judah Benjamin, a repeat of the attempt to burn down New York's most heavily populated buildings, or dare I say it, the smallpox plot?
Abraham Lincoln is often mistakenly placed by ignorant foreigners into the category of the Founding Fathers [...]
Famously, Lincoln narrowly avoided an assassination attempt in 1865, deciding not to go to Ford's Theatre after having a chilling dream about his own death. John Wilkes Booth was arrested for disorderly conduct after firing a gun on discovering Lincoln was not where he expected to be. He was imprisoned after admitting to plotting Lincoln's death, as were his co-conspirators. After this, Lincoln began a journey into spiritualism believing that he had been warned by unknowable powers who in his eyes had helped save the Union [...] He spoke of a Second Revolution, of using the emergency powers he had been granted during the Civil War to reforge America. In a way, he was more energetic in this period than he had ever been before. He was thin before, but his Republican allies regularly commented on his frighteningly skeletal appearance.
[...] His attempts at Reconstruction were only partly successful, and his more radical plans were openly condemned by members of his own party. He passed a law inaugurating the Roving Marshals or as he called them 'The Knights of the Republic' [...] From 1867 to 1868, Lincoln cracked down hard on the guerrillas [...] By 1868, his radical ideas had thoroughly annoyed his own party, and upset the American people [...]
After 1868, Lincoln's health improved, he wrote a book entitled The Second Founding setting out his vision of a more centralised United States, governed by a devotion to God, and a more interventionist approach both domestically and internationally. He called for an extension of America's Manifest Destiny to internal growth of the Republic through extending the hand of pensions, and benefits payments, as well as industrial reform. The book would inspire a new generation of American politicians who would in time found the Christian Republican Party.
I like your timeline very much, but I wanted to ask about one aspect of it and why you developed it this way.
It's very dramatically powerful, but I'm not sure Lincoln would jeopardize his moral standing and political capital so soon after the war. During it, I know he suspended habeus corpus in Maryland, but I think that even in his most profound moments of despair, he would know when to stop pushing the Constitution to its limits. Maybe if he was shot at by Booth but hit in the shoulder or another non-vital area?
This part I can see happening, however. It seems like this would be perceived as his most clearly positive achievement ITTL while his presidency and attempts to keep the Union together might be seen as more negative and tyrannical, even if he had good intentions.
Aside from my main query, your timeline is very plausible, and I'd be interested to see it continue.
A Confederate "Ireland"? Well, that was interesting. I know you've ended the TL there, but if you were to continue the TL into the 20th century, what would the CSD's relations with the rest of the world be like?
Might make for an interesting flag. Confederate stars and bars in a red St. Andrews Cross on a field of kelly green with an Irish golden harp in either the upper middle or lower middle.I had ideas, which I somewhat aluded to about hostility to immigrants in New York, and about Irish-Americans fleeing to the South, and essentially working to build a free Ireland across the see within Dixie. I honestly hadn't thought about how the Jews would be affected.