Cincinnatus Won't Return

Japhy

Banned
Authors Note: This is not my first timeline attempt here on the site. But this time with extra badgering from Maverick and positive feedback from people such as Wendell, Joe Bonkers, Glass Onion and Thomas, I intend to carry this one though to the end. What else is there to say, oh, I know I might be pushing it with the POD but this is during the Civil War where 6000 men die n one hour at Cold Harbor, in the grand scheme of things adding a half dozen more is a drop in the bucket compared to what came before April and what will come after in ttl. Comments, Critiques, and other Thoughts are more then welcome.
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Cincinnatus Won't Return
by Japhy

(From: The National Archives of the United States)

The Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution of the United States

Passed by Congress: August 7th 1866.

Ratified by the States: January 9th 1867.

Section I. In the case of the removal of the President from office or of his death or resignation, the Vice President shall assume the office of President.

Section II. Whenever there is a vacancy in the office of the Vice President, the President shall nominate a Vice President who shall take office upon confirmation by a majority vote of both Houses of Congress.

Section III. In the case of the removal, death, or resignation of both the President and Vice President, the President of the Senate pro tempore shall assume the office of the President. In the event that there is no President of the Senate, the Speaker of the House of Representatives shall assume the office of the President.

Section IV. In the case of the removal of both the President and Vice President, and the event that there is no President of the Senate or Speaker of the House of Representatives, the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court shall assume the office of President. In the case that there is not presently a Chief Justice, the most senior Associate Justice of the Supreme Court shall assume the office of President.

Section V. In the case that Sections I, III, and IV cannot be enacted the office of the President shall be assumed by the head of the most senior executive department until the Senate shall, from its membership nominate a President who shall take office upon confirmation by a majority vote of both Houses of Congress.


(From: Stanton: Lincoln’s Warlord by Gavin D. Elwood. Price Publishinghouse. 1984)

“Stanton by all accounts reacted swiftly to the events known to history as the Good Friday Murders. As soon as he and his naval department counterpart Gideon Welles arrived at the Petersen House, it was he whom assumed unofficially the role of leader of the nation. Mrs. Lincoln was taken, screaming from the side of her husband on his order. Doctors, various army generals were gathered. Messages were dispatched once to various men of the government and army. And it was there, in the small boardinghouses parlor that the enormity of the evening’s events reached him.

As the doctors waited for the President to pass away, word came from other quarters. The messenger sent to the Lafayette Park found the most senior cabinet member, Secretary of State William Seward and his son shot by a gunmen in their own home. At Kirkwood House, Vice President Andrew Johnson was found in his own quarters, having been stabbed repeatedly with his throat slit. President pro tempore Lafayette Foster was killed when what had been presumed to be a burglar had broken down his door and fought him in his front hall with a knife. The Speaker of the House, Schuyler Colfax was also killed in front of his own family as he concluded late night preparations for their planned trip to California in the morning.

Stanton and Welles recognized as soon as they received word of Seward’s death that there could be no other alternative but conspiracy. The Secretary of War sent orders out placing the capital under martial law. Troops of the garrison and marines ordered out by Welles set out in search of the President’s assassin, identified already as John Wilkes Booth. Nearby Regimental Officers were ordered to find any and all members of Senate and the House and the Supreme Court and deliver them under protective guard to Congress. Various officers of the Army were ordered to make it to the Petersen House at once. All army units from the garrison forts of Maine and San Diego to regiments operating in Florida and Texas were ordered to be alerted to look for Booth or any other men suspected.

At 7:22 on the morning of the 15th as the Nation awoke to discover the horror of the previous night, President Lincoln passed away, surrounded by Stanton, Welles, Attorney General James Speed, Secretary of the Treasury Hugh McCulloch, Army Chief of Staff Henry Halleck, General Montgomery C. Meigs, Governor of Illinois Richard J. Oglesby, and his eldest son Robert. Not present in the room, nor in Washington itself, was one man that Stanton was most keen to have present. But Lieutenant General Ulysses S. Grant had left on an Evening Train to see his children in New Jersey, having declined with his wife an invitation to join the Lincoln’s at the fatal play.”

(From: The Memoirs of Ulysses S. Grant. 1873.)

“On our arrival in Philadelphia that evening Mrs. Grant and I were met by an entire company of army troops who had been dispatched by the Secretary of War to meet us. It was a young Volunteer Captain who waiting on the platform with a dozen or so enlisted men informed me of the terrible news from Washington. News of the assassinations shook me greatly, especially that of President Lincoln, a man whom I had every confidence in assuring that our Republic would truly be able to move past our national tragedy. The loss of he, and some of the wisest men our Republic had ever produced filled with both anger and fear. It was only a sense of duty that allowed me to maintain clarity at the nightmarish moment.

As we were so close to Camden, only a ferry and short train ride away, I was for moving on to collect the children before returning to the nation’s capital. But this hour long trip to retrieve them was not something which my new bodyguard of Pennsylvania Volunteers would allow. Their orders came from the Secretary of War himself, whom for all purposes had assumed the leadership of the nation, I was to return to Washington as quickly as possible by special train. Understanding the needs of the Republic in peril were too great to abandon at such a moment, I instead convinced the young Captain on the platform to send a platoon of his men with Mrs Grant over to New Jersey and to escort her and my children back to Washington as soon as they could. I along with the rest of the unit would board the train waiting for me on the other platform. With only a brief kiss to my wife and assurance that we would see each other soon, with the green and scared young men of my bodyguard I turned back to Washington and rode towards a crisis far deeper than I ever would have believed.”

(From: A Struggle For American History by Clark Wavell. Lighthouse Books. Sixth Edition. 2006.)

“Historians have long called the period after the death of Lincoln an ‘American Interregnum’, a term that has defined our interpretation of the post-assassinations period. Since it was coined in the 1880’s it has served to preserve the American ideal from the precedents it set and to lessen the historical value of the regime that followed the passing of the Emergency Government Act. It serves as a bastion between the American Republic of ourselves and Lincoln against the dark era of dictatorship. Without the era that was the Emergency Government the ideals of America are safe and untainted in the whitewashed history of the nation. It would be far too hard to explain to our children that America has always been great without this protection. While so many of the issues that we have studied here can be ignored or apologized for by the historical establishment, the Emergency Government I not so easy to brush under the rug as the long history of the slave trade or America’s imperialist Manifest Destiny. Therefor the only option to keep America a greater nation then all others whom have slipped into the rule of the autocrat, is to downplay the Emergency Government, to make t insignificant and to rewrite the very events that defined it, to move positives backwards or forwards to civil government and to take the unpleasant and push it deep into the back of our historical consciousness[…]

It is important to note at this stage that the historical editing of the ‘interregnum is not limited to the two what would have been the remainder of Lincoln’s term. If one looks at the news reports of Appomattox mere days before the Good Friday murders, a reader today would be shocked at the praise of men like Stanton, Grant, and Sherman, the common criticisms of Lincoln, McClellan, and Chase, the absolute failure to see that just because the war was ending in Virginia and the Carolinas, that it was not over in far off Alabama, Mississippi and Texas. This shock is due, entirely to the editing of the Civil War to minimize all aspects as to what was then the unknown future."

(From: Traitor’s Flight: The Duel Odysseys of the Booth Conspirators and the Confederate Cabinet 1865 by Truman E.D. Kline. Price Publishinghouse. 1993.)

“Of the Five Assassins George Atzerodt was the first to be captured. On the morning of April 15th a mixed force of US Army Regulars, Washington DC Police, and Deputy US Marshalls bashed down the door of a small rented room and dragged out in chains the German-born assassin.

Atzerodt’s cowardice had doomed him, he had required many drinks in the Kirkwood House bar before he had gone up the flights of stairs to the Vice Presidents room. As he slowly found the courage to murder in his drinks he talked to the bartender asking the whereabouts of the Vice-President. Eventually, about the same time that Booth was climbing the stairs to the Presidential Box at Ford’s Theater, Atzerodt finally left the bar and climbed the stairs. Originally he had a revolver to do the deed but instead that had been given to Powell, who was using it with a solider and murderers skill at the Seward’s Lafayette Park residence.

As he stepped up to the Vice President’s room and knocked he pulled out his six inch bowie knife. He was heard to knock again and say he had urgent news for the Vice President. With that the door opened and quickly was heard to close again. Having forced the Vice President back and slammed the door behind him, the German sloppily went about his attack. Unarmed the former Brigadier General and Governor of Tennessee had little chance. He would be stabbed 7 times before he collapsed, wounds on his hands indicate even then he tried to fight back before Atzerodt awkwardly cut his windpipe and left the Vice President to die on the floor. Quickly shuffling down the stairs and out the door, Atzerodt dropped his blade on the street and he thought, vanished into the night.

The Bartender when informed of the murder only a few floors above him at once told police of the German man who had asked him about the Vice President. His description was enough that police were quickly able to determine the identity of their most likely suspect in the murder. And thus the next morning, only a few minutes after the President had died on the other side of the city, they raided Atzerodt’s boarding house. The man was so drunk that he had forgotten his plan to sleep in a different rented hotel room, and was in fact so drunk that he had failed to dispose of the bloodstained clothing he had worn the night before…”

(From: In the Mountains, In the Swamps, and In Texas: The Last year of the Civil War by S.D. Carpenter. National Historic Institute Press. 1957.)

“With the Surrender of Lee’s Army at Appomattox Confederate forces under Arms had taken a Major Blow. The only force still operating in Virginia was that of the 43rd Virginia Cavalry under John S Mosby. Virginia formerly the leader of the Confederacy was finally redeemed to the Union[…]

Joseph E Johnson and the combined forces under his command, roughly the remains of the Army of Tennessee with additional units that had joined for the fight though the Carolinas, were in positions around Greensboro North Carolina, which was in the days to follow host the Confederate Cabinet and President Davis. As Johnson would tell his Commander-in-Chief when they met to talk, he viewed the war was over and stubbornly held is ground, indicating that he would seek terms with Major General William T Sherman. Davis and his cabinet would depart, bound for Cuba and then the Trans-Mississippi shortly thereafter. In the days between April 15th and April 26th Johnson would struggle not only to come to terms with Sherman, a discussion that was as much political as it was military, but the constant battle of feeding the men he cared so much about. When news arrived from Sherman of what was going on in Washington, Johnson faced opposition from numerous commanders who refused to surrender to the new Government in Washington[…]

Two days following the assassinations in Washington, on Easter Sunday, former Speaker of the United and Confederate States House of Representatives and Governor of Georgia Howell Cobb, now a Confederate Major General and 3,000 men engaged a Union Raiding party outside of Columbus, Georgia. The last major engagement in Georgia before the start of the Skirmishers’ Season, by evening the Confederate line would collapse[…]

As Cobb spoke in the evening, planning a fall back across the one remaining bridge with the commander of his reserve brigade, General Winslow, a lucky Union artillery round exploded between then, killing not only themselves but 3 other men around them including Colonel John Pemberton. The disorganized Confederate force shattered with the loss of its two leading commanders either surrendering or attempting to flee into the city. By the next morning Columbus was firmly in Union hands[…]

Easter Sunday for 1865 had brought the Union Duel victories at West Point and Columbus, in a war with dozens of Waterloo-sized battles they seemed insignificant but it is worth noting that with them some of the last organized Confederate units in the East were lost as a result. Union Generals seeing this would parole most of their captives, only setting them on the path to further encounters further west. Meanwhile the forces of Mosby, Taylor, Forrest, and those deserting from General Johnson’s encampment would continue to ride and fight in a war many were considering finished east of the wide Mississippi.”

(From: The American Historic Dictionary. Library of Congress. 2001.)

Mugwump: From the Natick word mugumquomp (War-leader, Person of Importance, and Kingpin). First used in late 1865 to describe supporters of the Emergency Government Acts and the Martial Regime that was in place by political and absentationist opposition. Would be used by the most hard-line supporters of the Temporary Government as a political badge. (See: MUGWUMP PARTIES). Has seen varied use following the end of the Martial Period, generally as a political slur.
 
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