(Acting) President Lucius Lamar

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.)
 
We get Wilson's actions in segregating everything that isn't in the Feceral Government 26 years early, for one thing. Given Cleveland's dominance of the Democrats and Bryan being only in his late 20s it means he's probably nominated by the Democrats in 1888, but the GOP likely wins becasue lamar seems like he'd be so steeped in rhetoric as to make the standard citizens of the day uncomfortableeven if they did tend to be pretty racist yet. To say nothing of immigrants - by his one quote on the supremacy of Saxons, he might really rile up a lot of them and cause them to go Republican; they would definitely bring this up. Depending on who the anarchist was, in fact, it's possible there could be talk of limiting immigration as a whole.

It wouldn't cause people to suddenly want Reconstruction again, but there might be some more short-term sympathy for the plights of the Freedmen and blacks in general. And, it's even possible they would dump him at the Convention if they thought he had little chance of winning, though as noted, I don't know who wins instead.

That all being said, the period was, as I heard someone describe it once, a very robust period when not a lot of major changes would occur unless something really drastic happened, and in this case, even with something really drastic happening, I don't know if there are huge long-term implications. It's probably a Republican in '88, a Democrat in '92 despite the loss of Cleveland because the economy was poor (NY Governor David B. Hill seems quite plausible), and GOP in 1896.
 
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