POD: Sometime in 1887, a bomb planted by an anarchist goes off at a Cabinet meeting and kills President Cleveland and every member of the Cabinet except Secretary of the Interior Lucius Quintus Cincinnatus Lamar II. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lucius_Quintus_Cincinnatus_Lamar_II (There is of course no Vice-President, Thomas Hendricks having died in 1885.) Under the Presidential Succession Act of 1886 (which took the President Pro Tempore of the Senate and Speaker of the House out of the line of succession, and put the Cabinet members, in specified order, in it) Lamar "shall act as President until...a President shall be elected." http://en.wikisource.org/w…/Presidential_Succession_Act_1886 So the US has its first (and last?) ex-Confederate Chief Executive... (And yes, even if Lamar is seriously injured, a lot of Yankees are going to find his survival suspicious.)