Fusion politics?
The rule of minority groups gaining political power in return for wartime service seems the simplest delta; if the equivalent of the USCTs are organized earlier than historically 1861-62, rather than 1862-63, there is a strong possibility that could translate to deeper political alliances among veterans postwar, which really is the key voting demographic for at least the 1870s and 1880s...
Best,
The problem with that is that even OTL, African-Americans, not just those who eventually wound up in Union uniforms, did plenty to further the Union cause. And I suspect that at least some Union vets remembered that and were duly grateful. But they voted back home up north, and the Africans lived in the South, where they failed (for the most part, with the exceptions Jonathan has noted) to sustain white allies, whether under a Republican or any other party banner. The only form in which the solidarity of veterans of the same war
on the same side came into play was precisely in Northern support for sustaining the Reconstruction intervention, which was easy to portray as them artificially propping up votes for their own party.
Now if more Southern whites (and you yourself have just recently given us the example of Sam Houston and other Unionist Texans) had as it were fought shoulder to shoulder with Africans, perhaps then the veteran bond between them would have been effective in the South where it was needed? But again, in OTL there were quite a lot of southern whites who opposed secession to various degrees, with the entire eventual state of West Virginia being one spectacular example. Yet again this fact goes down the memory hole, flushed away by "Lost Cause" propaganda that redefines all Southern whites as Confederate patriots by sheer birthright--with any mention of any who disagreed effectively lynched away as "scalawags" alongside northern "carpetbaggers." Why did the anti-secessionists allow themselves to be trapped into the choice of either rebranding themselves as retroactive secessionists, or accepting a badge of shame that was good for one each hanging? Given that this was the choice, it is clear why they chose the former, putting up a Battle Flag and learning to whistle "Dixie"--but why and how were they forced to kowtow to the champions of the side that lost, and brought ruin on their homeland with their misguided failure?
What happened was a historical make-over, an Orwellian bit of rewriting history so effective that a century and more hence, as my Wisconsin-born father remarked, "these southerners are prouder of losing the Civil War than we northerners ever were of winning it!" The righteousness of the Lost Cause and the unworthiness of African-Americans to share in the status of American citizenship were mendaciously inscribed not just on the Southern character but on the USA as a whole. But how did we get from the ground truths of 1865 to there? The Redeemer myth that Reconstruction overreached and that the former slaves were unfit material for citizenship will not hold up under serious historical scrutiny, though the fabric of lies may weave in some threads of truth--that there was regional polarization between North and South for instance, that even the southerners who were on the right side of the Civil War but without the "excuse" of being black felt themselves still losers insofar as the northern gaze did not distinguish between rebel and staunch Unionist, for instance.
So in order to head off the nadir of race relations of the 1920s and the Wilson Administration before that, and maintain African-American status at some higher average (presumably a hard pilgrimage with ups and downs, not a flat level) we need to unweave this web of lies somehow, prevent this veil from being thrown over the national eyes in the first place, or anyway leave more gaping holes in it. As Jonathan says, there were places where African-Americans had some ground to stand on; what would it take to keep some of those, and to extend them? Given just a few bastions, could the African side of the story contend against Redeemer mythology? Would there be Southern whites to stand beside them and speak yet another side of truth? Could the historical consensus dominating the 20th century be something more representative of the complexities of the actual Civil War era?
Certainly if we could rely on the bond of veterans of the same war on the same side coming into play, I'd expect staunch defense of Southern Africans by prominent Union officers in the 1880s--and these guys ran the Federal Government. But having chosen to withdraw armed force in 1877, all they could do would be to write stirring words, and perhaps render some pointed judgements in Federal Courts. (Which is why Plessy V Fergesson (sp?) is such a disappointment). I believe many Union vets, and other supporters of either the Union cause or Abolition, did write eloquent and heart-felt words, and did lobby Republican and perhaps Democratic administrations, Federal and state and even local level, to give consideration to this and that issue, this and that individual candidate for an appointment. They did have some influence on the mindsets of Federal and other judges. But clearly there would be places and situations where their words fell on deaf ears, with other considerations overruling them or minds solidly made up against them. Again, it would be helpful, relative to OTL, if the lobby of respected Southern whites making these appeals would have been larger. I would guess it was not an empty set OTL, but even an otherwise solidly respectable white Southerner would be sticking their neck out dangerously to say some things any Northerner could say pretty safely, so I would guess that the terror against African-Americans themselves was effectively extended to silence whites as well.
And not just in the South! I've gleaned from the reminiscences of science fiction writers of the "Golden Age"--I daresay most of it from the loquacious Isaac Asimov, but also from others I think (like say Fred Pohl, even more active as an editor than his solid record as an author, or Harlan Ellison, writing about much later decades) how Street and Smith, owner of
Astounding Magazine, had its corporate policies censoring the stories accepted for publication, and an assistant editor, a woman, who would simply review all of them and strike out sections that ran afoul of it. Street and Smith was a New York city house, but hoped to market its magazines on racks in every state of the Union, and so included on the "no-no" list would be anything referring to race that might be controversial--anywhere in the USA, including Dixie of course. So the safe thing for an author aspiring to be accepted into
Astounding would be to avoid identifying any character as an African-American at all, and if they were so noncomformist as to make an issue of racial equality--their story once suitably censored would become unreadable, probably unsalvageable by any feat of creative editing and rewriting, once the "offensive" material was whited out. Had the famous editor John W. Campbell been a paragon of racial progressivism and a maverick on the racist consensus of the 1930s, he still would have had to enforce this code; as a matter of fact he was famous or rather infamous among his largely nonconformist, out-group pool of authors for his staunch personal conservatism on these matters. (Some would credit him with open-mindedness about the source of a story, as long as the story was "good" by his standards--it was possible to be a top tier contributor in his stable and avoid systematic or even casual white supremacism. Asimov discussed how he did it (inventing a human-only Galaxy for instance, avoiding the invidious matter of human supremacism--or not, in the case of a couple stories he sold to Campbell that did involve a multi-species Galaxy--where humans of course do turn out to be quite special.
) Ellison on the other hand would respond to Campbell's famous "I'd buy a story from Adolf Hitler if it were good" by remarking "Especially Hitler! But not me, baby!"
This little anecdote about a niche market illustrates a much larger and obvious point; white supremacy in the 20th century USA went far beyond government policy or even local mores to censor and channel thought in very broad spheres. How then to prevent this glacial Thulian monolith from covering the whole American landscape in a uniform blanket of white?
Well, Jonathan himself has offered up an ATL, Malê Rising, wherein (as a side story, a patch in a global quilt) the USA develops a multipolar political system (without, at first anyway, the benefit of any electoral reforms to empower third parties, still in a winner-take all system). If third parties can rely on their electorate to remain staunch on the platform issues that distinguish them from the leading two, and have the ability to contend for winning elections in limited regions, then if their national scale votes rarely have any chance of winning say the Presidency, but can deny the two frontrunner traditional parties a solid majority, it can become customary for one or the other to horsetrade with the smaller parties for support for their candidate in return for solid considerations--which can involve appointing members of the smaller parties to the Cabinet or other appointive positions, or adopting policy planks not generally favored (but obviously not violently opposed either) by their own ranks. Thus, even in a winner-take all race, if such trades are sanctioned by custom and known to yield satisfactory progress for the smaller constituency, then even if they have no hope of seeing their own candidate personally take an office, they can still regard their vote for the small party as effective.
It would be most helpful to the standing of such an Nth party to have some members in Congress of course, in the case of a Presidential election that fails to yield a solid majority in the Electoral College, since Congress decides such races and if Congress itself has no single party with a complete majority, the Nth party members in Congress personally might swing a race.
Similarly, even a minority in state legislatures might be decisive, giving that party leverage in national races as well, if it prevents one of the dominant parties from having a full majority, or even merely blocks the way to a supermajority in cases where that is required constitutionally.
At state house or Congressional levels, a small but persistent Nth party presence can lead to judicial appointments as well, after which the justices may rise in rank on merits perceived by the dominant partisans who do the appointing generally-or owe the Nth party yet another favor. Justices from an Nth party background can inject new considerations into common law that will influence decisions made by judges from more popular parties.
Success in electing a handful of state governors, or mayors of significant cities, helps raise the credibility of Nth party compromise candidates for executive positions.
Now how long this kind of thing can remain stable probably depends on just what positions the spectrum of dominant parties takes. It may be that the system comes to depend on Nth party candidates who represent peculiar but important constituencies and points of view, so that it becomes traditional for certain parties to hold certain Cabinet positions for instance.
But it would be of great help to stabilize a multi-party system to go over to more positively representative systems than winner take all/first past the post systems. And if third, fourth and fifth parties are "here to stay" on the national scale, the first and second parties begin to develop an interest in proportional representation as well, so electoral reform to lock in a multi-party spectrum would be favored--
after alternate platforms claw their way onstage without being able to kill off the leading two completely.
I'm rambling on about mulitparty options because I suspect that part of what happened to African-Americans OTL was becoming captive to the Republican Party. As Jonathan has reminded us, this was not always the case, but it certainly was generally; they had no place in the Democratic Party (and no reason of sentiment to want to be there) and so the Republicans could take their vote for granted, where and when they could vote at all. Where they could not--the Republicans stood no chance of victory anyway, and so the disenfranchisement of a large block that however would never form a majority in such districts made no practical difference. Where they could vote, it was generally because they lived in a Republican majority area anyway where their votes were superfluous. As long as Reconstruction enforced African-American voter rights, Republicans could win Southern seats, but when the Federal troops were expelled and state after state was purged by open terror, they found that due to the greater Northern and Western populations, they still generally controlled Congress and the Presidency even while writing off the entire "Solid South." Due to Congressional customs of awarding influential committee positions to members with the greatest seniority, the minority (generally) status of the Democrats in House and Senate was increasingly offset as the one-party dictatorship in the South resulted in returning the same Representatives and Senators for session after session, for lifetime careers spanning decades, and gave power out of proportion to numbers to the Democratic Party as a whole.
Now, if a few African-American districts could defy terror and remain stubbornly on the Federal scene continually, despite disfranchisement in many regions and a culture with powerful currents running against them, they would clearly change the dynamic a bit. If the organizations returning them to Federal elected office were neither the Republican nor Democratic parties, then from time to time they might occupy the "kingmaker" swing positions that would tend to underscore their credibility and relevance generally. In such a position, if we assume implacable hostility from the Democrats as a whole due to the dominance of the Southern wing within it, they will be rendering service only to Republicans. Therefore the Republicans, even though they cannot be certain of gaining votes for their own party, will be motivated not just by sentiment or high-mindedness or the depreciating bond of Civil War loyalties, but ongoing political self-interest to support the basis of these bastions existing at all. The more so if they are in fact staunchly Republican, or liable to swing back and forth between a third party and Republicans. A Republican/African-Party coalition may be helpless, given the state of current Constitutional law, to impose equal electoral freedom in the majority of Southern states, but able to reinforce the foundations of the maverick bastion regions, where presumably African-Americans might not control just the Federal seats but also local administration and legislation.
There are several states in the South with a clear African-American majority; it is no accident OTL that these states also have been bywords for racist reaction and the worst extremes of white supremacy. But given the opportunity afforded by Reconstruction to assert genuine majority rule, it does not seem insanely ASB to postulate that at least some of them, if only perhaps one, manages to retain complete universal manhood suffrage and thus, insofar as African-Americans have reason to feel backed into a corner and the need to close ranks against implacable white supremacy, become a one-party solid bastion themselves. This is probably not the most healthy position for the lone champions of African-American citizenship to occupy, but it may do well for at any rate maintaining a respectable dissent to the Redeemer/Lost Causer gospel. If their example suffices to guide other African-American majorities to effectively fight for their local dignity, and perhaps some experiments in cross-racial coalitions are also encouraged and supported, then we might be on the way to a stable multi-party dynamic, which can break up complacent power monopolies across the board and make more of the governing elected offices truly competitive.
And it would be from this effective though partial representation of minorities that a dynamic for a more positively representative electoral machinery gets traction, and underwrites the ability of obscure minority positions to get a chance at a small but existing voice and place within the majority-dominated governing machinery.
A lot of these small Nth parties will be cranks and worse of course! We'd have to rely on the good sense of electorates to sort out those who have something useful to add from those who don't, and to limit the spread of influence of the latter by letting them trip themselves up with their own words and deeds.
If there is true equality of representation of African-American interest, they will not generally have much traction on matters that don't line up with the interest of some white group or other. But if we assume the common humanity of all US citizens, by and large issues of importance to some AAs will be shared by others. And of course on the other hand if AAs basic status as equal citizens is assured, then they will cease to form a solid, uniform bloc and become divided along the same lines as their fellow citizens of all colors; the AA bastions may remain decided by African votes, but will cease to be single-party monoliths and join the fluid back-and-forth of general US policy debates, as other interests take precedence over the settled matter of racial dignity.
I trust I don't have to spell out that I don't think OTL US society has securely progressed that far even yet, despite two terms of an African-American President, and this is why I find most African Americans who can vote are still "captive" to one party, though the party has changed.
Could it go faster in an ATL? I devoutly hope so, and Jonathan has given us one example of how it could go. The partisan stuff i've talked about here is only a minor part of the process in Malê Rising; a lot of other stuff, much of it violent, had to happen in that ATL as well as OTL.
I think Jonathan is fishing for more ways, in the hope some of them might prove more peaceful as well as faster and more thorough!
I'd like to learn about them too.
