Grant Shot at Ford's Theater

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The Grant Assassination
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    • Sean McKnight

    Sean McKnight

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    On the evening of April 14th, 1865 President Lincoln and the First Lady attended the play Our American Cousin, just five days after Robert E. Lee’s surrender at Appomattox. Also in attendance was General Ulysses S. Grant, who went ahead with his plan to join the President despite a desire to visit his children in New Jersey.

    At 10:14 pm, John Wilkes Booth entered the back of the Presidential box, and as he prepared to draw his gun Booth was spotted by Grant who tackles the assassin to the floor. In the struggle, Grant was shot in the chest while grappling for Booth's derringer. As Booth attempted to flee he was captured by Major Henry Rathbone. General Grant was then taken across the street to the Petersen House where doctor Charles Leale, Charles Sabin Taft, and Albert Freeman Africanus King, Lincoln pronounced Grant dead several hours later.

    After being flogged by Union Army officers for several hours, Booth confessed to being a member of the Knights of the Golden Circle and revealed the identities of Lewis Powell (who was assigned to kill Secretary of State William H. Seward at his home), George Atzerodt (who was to kill Vice President Andrew Johnson at the Kirkwood Hotel), and David E. Herold as fellow conspirators.

    The Assassination of General Grant, and the discovery of Booth's ties to the Confederacy shocked the nation, and forced Lincoln to reassess his plans for Reconstruction. Secretary of War Edward M. Stanton and Attorney General James Speed pushed Lincoln to broaden the scope of the trial of the conspirators. Lincoln ultimately decided to try Booth and his associates in a civilian court, but ordered Secretary of Stanton to proceed with rounding up Confederate leaders for arrest and trial for high treason. On September 30th, 1865 the Fort McNair Trials began, and over the course of 13 months the military tribunal found guilty and hanged most of the Confederate leadership, including Robert E. Lee and Jefferson Davis. While the trial was being carried out, a separate legal battle was brought before the courts by southern lawyers seeking to save their leaders from the gallows, hoping that by establishing the legality of secession, the Confederate leadership could then not be convicted. The court ultimately ruled that Secession was unconstitutional.

    The execution of the Confederate leaders, and Lincoln's decision to uphold General Sherman's Special Field Orders No. 15, gave rise to militant groups like the Ku Klux Klan, which attempted to raid patrols of occupying Union troops, capture arms, and ultimately restart the war. Lincoln leaned heavily on his Commanding General of the Army,
    William Tecumseh Sherman to stamp out the "Lost Cause" movement, and those close to the President remark on the weariness at which he approached each day, and relied more and more on Sherman. Just three years after leaving office Abraham Lincoln died of a stroke at the age of 63.

    Shortly after the Inauguration Day celebrations of 1869, a group of neo-confederate troops attempted to take control of a US Army armor in Texas shortly before its readmission to the Union. The failed attack on Tyler Arsenal ultimately spelled the end for the Neo-Confederate movement, as it prompted Congress to push through the Third Enforcement Act which empowered President Salmon P. Chase to suspend the writ of habeas corpus to combat Neo-Confederate and white supremacy organizations.
     
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    • Reconstruction
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    • Sean McKnight

    Sean McKnight

    President Salmon P. Chase and the Republican Congress would spend much of the early 1870s pushing Industrial Reconstruction. The Chase administration incentivized Southerners by making low-rate government backed business loans available to states that had met their Reconstruction requirements. Once more, these loans were to be given out regardless of race, leading to many of the new black farmers being on equal footing with their white neighbors.

    Chase's policies gave rise to a short economic boom, but after his death in 1873, the country would enter a constitutional crisis and the worst Depression yet seen. Vice President Schuyler Colfax declined to serve another term as Chase's Vice President, leading to Senator Henry Wilson receiving the Republican Party's nomination for Chase's Running mate. As Chase had died before being sworn in in 1873, it was unclear who would succeed the President, as Colfax was the sitting VP. Ultimately the Supreme Court held that Vice President Elect Henry Wilson would ascend to the Presidency, while the US Senate returned the Vice Presidency to Schuyler Colfax who agreed to serve for another two years. However, in 1875, President Henry Wilson died from a stroke, which elevated Colfax to the Presidency, and forced Congress to draft the 16th amendment, establishing the formal succession of the President and procedures for removing an incapacitated executive from office.

    Schuyler Colfax entered office as the most unwilling President in US history, and under perhaps the worst circumstances of any President. Marred by a corruption scandal just a few months prior to taking office after the death of not one, but two of his predecessors, and entering office at the outbreak of the Long Depression, Colfax had to work constantly to rally his party to taking swift action to provide economic relief. Colfax relied heavily on Treasury Secretary John Sherman for policy advice, while leveraging his connections in Congress to pass legislation. Despite a rough start, Colfax would prove to be an able administrator, balancing the need for a strong national currency with the responsibilities of Reconstruction, despite calls from conservative Republicans to end the practice in the face of the depression.

    In the South, the government backed loans went from being a minor incentive to one of the region's few sources of economic security, and states pushed to accelerate reconstruction to gain access to financial assistance. By the time Colfax had left office in 1881, the industrial revolution was in full swing in the South. The Colfax administration's success led to James G. Blaine winning one of the biggest landslides in electoral history, while the Democrats failed to regain ground in Congress.

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    • The People' Party
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    • Sean McKnight

    Sean McKnight

    By the end of the 1870s Midwestern farmers formed the Grange Movement to pressure state governments to establish fair railroad rates and warehouse charges. The government backed low rate loans and strong currency that defined the Colfax administration had inadvertently created the conditions for railroads to move in quickly and monopolize warehouse infrastructure in the South, which in turn led to southern farmers allying with their northern counterparts to form the Farmers' Alliance. The short term goal of which was to extend the scope of the Chase administration's loans to allow farmers to use grain stored in government warehouses as collateral to gain access to new loans, thereby allowing them to not be beholden to tycoons and banks who had benefited the most from the Chase loans.

    By 1892 the Farmers' Alliance grew to form a new political party, as the Democrats had largely lost their political relevance outside of northeastern cities. The People's Party or Populists as they were often called, held their first convention in 1892 in Omaha and ran Congressman James B. Weaver as their candidate against John Sherman and the Republicans who by this point had enjoyed 32 years of control of the White House and Congress. Sherman did not take Weaver's campaign seriously, and did not really campaign, but Weaver managed to narrowly beat Sherman as the first Populist elected in the country's history. Weaver's victory all but killed the Democrats' chances of survival, and by 1900 the party had dissolved.

    Despite Weaver's surprise victory his Presidency was not particularly successful, as the Populists could not control the House and Senate without a coalition with Democrats, who seldom backed the Populists' proposals, particularly Weaver's more progressive proposals such as government ownership of the railroads. Weaver's administration also didn't have much luck beyond offering temporary relief to the Panic of 1892 and would be faced with another recession in 1895 that ultimately doomed his Presidency. Despite these failures, Weaver did secure his place in history as the President who formally brought Reconstruction to an end in 1896 with the readmission of Texas to the Union, despite the Republicans retaking control of the House in the midterms of 1894. Weaver would be defeated by Ohio Governor William McKinley in the 1896 elections, but his party would endure, winning back control of the House in 1904 and the Presidency the same year with the election of Clarence Darrow.
     
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    • The Progressive Era
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    • Sean McKnight

    Sean McKnight

    Weaver's Presidency, for all its failings, is generally considered the beginning of the Progressive Era. During this period the country experienced a wave of social reform and social upheaval as a generation of activists pushed new policies to deal with the inequities that had emerged at the close of the industrial revolution. Both the Republicans and the Populists had progressive wings, and leadership over the movement seesawed between the two parties from election to the next.

    In the South, progressive politics met resistance from a new generation of black business owners and leaders who had finally come to enjoy a degree of economic parity with their white neighbors. Southern progressives tended to gravitate more towards social reforms espoused more by the Republicans rather than the more radical economic reforms pushed by many Populist politicians. One of the harshest critics of the Populist party of this era was Tuskegee University Founder Booker T. Washington, who by his death in 1915 had seen his university flourish with the endowments from its first generation of graduates. Harvard professor W.E.B. Dubious had a more nuanced attitude to Populist party "Penny Progressives" as they were often known, arguing the merits of many of the Party's proposed economic reforms (particularly government ownership of railroads and public banking), but criticizing the party's often dismissal or even contempt for issues facing black voters.

    Washington and Dubois concerns were only addressed by one Populist candidate in this period, then Illinois Senator Clarence Darrow. Darrow had been a longtime progressive activist, first as a lawyer and then after his entry into politics in the 1890s. His campaign in 1904 sought to bring in African American support through an aggressive campaign to include more African Americans in the People's Party, a tall order especially after the Republican controlled Senate voted to confirm Blanche Bruce as the country's first black Vice President in 1901. Darrow had the good fortune however, for more conservative Republicans staging a political coup at the convention in Chicago, and nominating Ohio Governor William Howard Taft, who was believed by many to be a closeted white supremacist. This rumor would haunt Taft as he worked to bridge the gap between his party's conservative and progressive wings. At one point Taft's overtures to the progressives led to House Majority Whip Joseph Gurney Cannon summoning the candidate to speak to a group of conservative members of the House to assure them of his support for them in his cabinet. At this meeting Taft was reported by a congressional page that Taft promised to not hire any black Republicans to fill federal vacancies. The meeting came to be known as the "Cannon Ball" and is widely attributed to Taft and Cannon's defeats in the 1904 elections.

    Republicans would spend the next four years working to repair the damage done by the Taft campaign, with Indiana Senator Charles W. Fairbanks leading the charge to purge the party of some of its more bigoted members of the conservative faction. Meanwhile the Darrow administration worked to breakup the massive Trusts that had come to dominate the American economy. Darrow however, would meet the same fate as Weaver, and in early 1908 the country would enter another economic crisis that would cost him re-election. In his last days in office, Darrow worked tirelessly to save the economy from ruin and managed to just barely push through the National Rail Act that created the country's first National Railroad Company.

    Darrow would be succeeded by the last, and possibly greatest President of the Progressive era: Theodore Roosevelt. Roosevelt had come within a hair's breadth of the Presidency a decade before, just barely losing the Vice Presidency under McKinley to John D. Long. Having run on a campaign of New Nationalism, Roosevelt pushed through some of the most consequential reforms of the progressive era, establishing the 8-hour workday, national-minimum wage laws, the aiding the passage of the Universal Suffrage Amendment, and farm relief. These reforms are often historical footnotes for the Roosevelt administration as the First World War (1912-1915) came to dominate his administration's second term. As the war came to bookend the Progressive era, Roosevelt's final reforms would be the passage of the Income Tax amendment, and completing the desegregation of the US military via executive order.

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    • Wendell

    Interesting effort. I'm not sure that the 1870's situation makes sense, but I'm interested in seeing where this goes.
     
    Jupiter's Auroras

    Jupiter's Auroras

    Sean McKnight said:
    Weaver's Presidency, for all its failings, is generally considered the beginning of the Progressive Era. During this period the country experienced a wave of social reform and social upheaval as a generation of activists pushed new policies to deal with the inequities that had emerged at the close of the industrial revolution. Both the Republicans and the Populists had progressive wings, and leadership over the movement seesawed between the two parties from election to the next.

    In the South, progressive politics met resistance from a new generation of black business owners and leaders who had finally come to enjoy a degree of economic parity with their white neighbors. Southern progressives tended to gravitate more towards social reforms espoused more by the Republicans rather than the more radical economic reforms pushed by many Populist politicians. One of the harshest critics of the Populist party of this era was Tuskegee University Founder Booker T. Washington, who by his death in 1915 had seen his university flourish with the endowments from its first generation of graduates. Harvard professor W.E.B. Dubious had a more nuanced attitude to Populist party "Penny Progressives" as they were often known, arguing the merits of many of the Party's proposed economic reforms (particularly government ownership of railroads and public banking), but criticizing the party's often dismissal or even contempt for issues facing black voters.

    Washington and Dubois concerns were only addressed by one Populist candidate in this period, then Illinois Senator Clarence Darrow. Darrow had been a longtime progressive activist, first as a lawyer and then after his entry into politics in the 1890s. His campaign in 1904 sought to bring in African American support through an aggressive campaign to include more African Americans in the People's Party, a tall order especially after the Republican controlled Senate voted to confirm Blanche Bruce as the country's first black Vice President in 1901. Darrow had the good fortune however, for more conservative Republicans staging a political coup at the convention in Chicago, and nominating Ohio Governor William Howard Taft, who was believed by many to be a closeted white supremacist. This rumor would haunt Taft as he worked to bridge the gap between his party's conservative and progressive wings. At one point Taft's overtures to the progressives led to House Majority Whip Joseph Gurney Cannon summoning the candidate to speak to a group of conservative members of the House to assure them of his support for them in his cabinet. At this meeting Taft was reported by a congressional page that Taft promised to not hire any black Republicans to fill federal vacancies. The meeting came to be known as the "Cannon Ball" and is widely attributed to Taft and Cannon's defeats in the 1904 elections.

    Republicans would spend the next four years working to repair the damage done by the Taft campaign, with Indiana Senator Charles W. Fairbanks leading the charge to purge the party of some of its more bigoted members of the conservative faction. Meanwhile the Darrow administration worked to breakup the massive Trusts that had come to dominate the American economy. Darrow however, would meet the same fate as Weaver, and in early 1908 the country would enter another economic crisis that would cost him re-election. In his last days in office, Darrow worked tirelessly to save the economy from ruin and managed to just barely push through the National Rail Act that created the country's first National Railroad Company.

    Darrow would be succeeded by the last, and possibly greatest President of the Progressive era: Theodore Roosevelt. Roosevelt had come within a hair's breadth of the Presidency a decade before, just barely losing the Vice Presidency under McKinley to John D. Long. Having run on a campaign of New Nationalism, Roosevelt pushed through some of the most consequential reforms of the progressive era, establishing the 8-hour workday, national-minimum wage laws, the aiding the passage of the Universal Suffrage Amendment, and farm relief. These reforms are often historical footnotes for the Roosevelt administration as the First World War (1912-1915) came to dominate his administration's second term. As the war came to bookend the Progressive era, Roosevelt's final reforms would be the passage of the Income Tax amendment, and completing the desegregation of the US military via executive order.

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    Click to expand...
    Does Roosevelt die on September 14, 1916 in this timeline?
     
    United Electric
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    • Sean McKnight

    Sean McKnight

    UE_Logo.png
    United Electric Company (UE) is an American multinational conglomerate incorporated in New York City and headquartered in Boston. As of 2018, the company operates through the following segments: aviation, communications, electrical power, digital industry, additive manufacturing, venture capital and finance, wireless inrastructure and lighting.

    In 2019, UE ranked by the New Orleans Stock Exchange as the 21st-largest firm in the United States by gross revenue. In 2011, UE was ranked by the Bureau of Corporate Statistics as the 14th-most profitable company but has since very severely underperformed the market (by about 75%) as its profitability collapsed. Two employees of UE—
    Nikola Tesla (1932) and Lonnie Johnson (1981)—have been awarded the Nobel Prize.

    History
    Formation
    In 1884 inventor and patent draftsman Lewis Latimer left exploitative employ of Thomas Edison to found Latimer Electric Light Company. The primary financing for the company came after Latimer sued Edison for patent theft for the lightbulb in 1887; Latimer had created the lightbulb while under the employ of Edison, but as there had been no written agreement between Edison and Latimer pertaining to the assignment of intellectual property, the Supreme Court ruled that Latimer was the rightful inventor of the lightbulb. Latimer v. Edison (1887) made Latimer a household name, and attracked many Edison employees to Latimer's company.

    In 1892 Nikola Tesla, another former Edison employee, delivered Latimer Electric the first working example of a Radio. Latimer awarded Tesla an $80,000 bonus that year (about $2.2 Million in 2019), and founded Latimer-Tesla Radio Company, giving Tesla carte blanche to experiment. By the turn of the century Latimer and Tesla were owner or part owner of a half dozen subsidaries, backed primarily by C. J. Walker, and the Westinghouse family.

    In 1889, Drexel, Walker & Co., a company founded by C. J. Walker and Anthony J. Drexel, financed Latimer and Tesla's research and helped merge their companies under one corporation to form Latimer-Tesla United Electric Company, which was incorporated in New York on April 24, 1901. The new company also acquired Sprague Electric Railway & Motor Company in the same year. In 1913, the company would aquire Edison Electric from their former employer, and would once again reogranize to become the United Electric Company. Latimer-Tesla Radio in many ways survies to this day as the American Radio Corporation (ARC), a subsidicary created shortly after the aquisition of Edison Electric.

    Public company
    In 1896, the immediate predecessor of UE, Latimer-Tesla United Electric, was one of the original 12 companies listed on the newly formed Dow Jones Industrial Average, where it, and later as UE, remained a part of the index for 122 years. In that time UE has absorbed into its business numerous other companies and would-be competitors, and would routinely come under scrutiny from the Department of Business and Industry for anti-trust violations.

    Electrical Infrastructure
    UE's early history was defined by a war of infrastructure known as the Current Wars, where Latimer Electric and Edison Electric campaigned and lobbied to make their in-house current standards the national standard in the US. Latimer aggressively pushed Tesla's Alternating Current (AC), while Edison clung to Direct Current (DC). Ultimately, UE won out, and for all practical purposes that victory was the death knell for Edison Electric. From that point on, UE was the principal supplier of electrial substations, outlets, and other basic infrastucture in the United States. During the 1910s, UE pursued its most ambitious infrastructure project, the World Wireless System, a concept put forth by Tesla to provide wireless power and radio communications to the entire planet. However by 1920, UE quietly ended funding for the project, as Tesla's research team were unable to achieve practical wireless power transfer beyond a few thousand feet, and Tesla would later be forced to take a sabatical as he grew ever more obsessive in the face of the project's failures. Despite this failure, the research at the Wardenclyffe site did yield useful technologies for long range radio transmission, many of which were used to aid the Entente during World War I.
     
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  • Index
    • Abraham Lincoln
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    • Sean McKnight

    Sean McKnight

    Abraham Lincoln (February 12, 1809 – April 15, 1872) was an American statesman and lawyer who served as the 16th president of the United States (1861–1869). Lincoln led the nation through its greatest moral, constitutional, and political crisis in the American Civil War. He succeeded in preserving the Union, abolishing slavery, bolstering the federal government, and modernizing the U.S. economy.

    Lincoln's election in 1860 on an anti-slavery (but not abolitionist) platform led to pro-slavery elements in the South successfully pushing all white governments of the Southern states to secede from the union. To secure its independence and preserve the institution of slavery, the new Confederate States fired on Fort Sumter, a U.S. fort in the South, and Lincoln called up forces to suppress the rebellion and restore the Union. Lincoln managed the array of factions in Congress and his own White House by exploiting their mutual enmity, distributing political patronage, and through his masterful use of oratory to rally the people to his cause. His Gettysburg Address became a historic clarion call for nationalism, republicanism, equal rights, liberty, and democracy. Lincoln scrutinized the strategy and tactics in the war effort, including the selection of generals and the naval blockade of the South's trade. He suspended habeas corpus, and he averted British intervention by defusing the Trent Affair. He engineered the end to slavery with his Emancipation Proclamation and his order that the Army protect escaped slaves. He also encouraged border states to outlaw slavery, and promoted the Thirteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution, which outlawed slavery across the country.

    Lincoln originally sought to reconcile the war-torn nation by exonerating the secessionists. However, after Confederate sympathizer John Wilkes Booth's assassination attempt on his life led to the death of General Ulysses S. Grant, Lincoln was forced to re-evaluate his plans for reconstruction. The death of Grant and the threat against his own life deeply affected Lincoln; he conceded to Radical Republicans demands for harsher punishments for Confederate leaders and organized the Fort McNair Trials which led to the execution of most high ranking Confederates. Following the execution of confederate leaders, and with minor uprisings in the South looking to restart the Civil War, Lincoln empowered Commanding General William Tecumseh Sherman to use any means necessary to keep the peace in the South. The early days of Reconstruction took a toll on Lincoln's health, and his second term saw greater delegation to the members of his cabinet and General Sherman. The one exception to this was Vice President Andrew Johnson, who increasingly was seen as a southern sympathizer.

    When Lincoln left office in March 1869, his health had noticeably deteriorated, and he avoided public appearances. He died at home on April 15, 1872. Evaluations of his presidency among historians and the general public place Lincoln as one of the country's greatest Presidents, after George Washington and William L. Dawson, but has also been subject to substantial criticism.
     
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    • United States Gendarmerie
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    • Sean McKnight

    Sean McKnight

    US Military Police Seal.png
    The United States Gendarmerie is the domestic law enforcement branch of the United States military placed under the jurisdiction of the Justice Department. Its area of responsibility includes smaller towns, rural and suburban areas, while civilian law enforcement agencies are largely exclusive to cities. Because of its military status, the Gendarmerie also fulfills a range of military and defense missions. The Gendarmes have a cybercrime division. The force has a strength of more than 100,000 personnel, as of 2019. The Gendarmerie has come into confrontation with state and local governments over the years, as the agency is required to enforce Federal Laws and adhere to the Constitution above often unconstitutional state laws.

    History
    Early Years
    The Gendarmerie is the direct descendant of the United States Marshals, an institution that lasted from the ratification of the constitution until Reconstruction, and to a lesser extent the short-lived Secret Service, which was created in 1865 to combat a wave of counterfeiting in the United States. During the 1870s the US Army's occupation of the former states of the Confederacy was forcing the War Department to take on civilian law enforcement responsibilities that the Army was never designed for, and as a result numerous neo-Confederate groups were able to continue operating despite various powers given to the military to contain them. In 1878 on the advice of former Minister to France Elihu B. Washburne, then Senator James G. Blaine introduced the Posse Comitatus Act to create a military branch purely for civilian law enforcement. Opposition to the act came largely from the remnant Democratic party and conservative anti-Reconstruction Republicans, but was ultimately passed and signed by President Schuyler Colfax, establishing the United States Gendarmerie under the Justice Department. The first Chief of Staff of the Gendarmerie was Allan Pinkerton.

    The early days of the Gendarmerie saw the service routinely come into conflict with the US Army, despite General William T. Sherman's initial support for the agency. General Allan Pinkerton secured the reputation of the Gendarmerie through the creation of its investigating arm, the National Intelligence Service (NIS), which successfully identified neo-Confederate terrorist groups, most famously leading to the arrest of the membership of the White League. By 1881 the Gendarmerie had subsumed all responsibilities of Reconstruction previously given to the US Army. By the time Texas was readmitted to the Union in 1896, the Gendarms had largely shifted to a primarily civil law enforcement roll held by the US Marshals and to a lesser extent the Secret Service.

    20th Century
    The 20th Century saw the Gendarms engage in occasional clashes with local governments in the Interior with large populations of former southern rebels who had left during the Great Migration, peaking with the Valentine Rising of 1914 where over 50,000 Gendarms assisted by the US Army were deployed to put down a neo-Confederate uprising that began in Arizona.

    After the First World War, the Gendarms played a major role in the Wilson-Bayou Affair, wherein a secret society of the Ku Klux Klan was uncovered in the city of New Orleans that had attempted to stage a terrorist attack against Republican presidential candidate Charles Curtis. The resultant discovery of membership records revealed former Washington University chancellor, and People's Party candidate Woodrow Wilson was a grand wizard of the KKK. Wilson's arrest shortly before he was expected to receive his party's nomination would be the most high profile political arrest of the 20th Century.

    Contrary to popular perception, the Gendarms did not play a major roll in Patton's Rebellion (1940-1942). While initially the Gendarms were deployed to put down riots and civil unrest following the 1940 elections, they were relieved by National Guard units almost immediately after Brigadier General Patton launched his assault on Fort
    Fort Leavenworth. It was only after the bulk of the rebels had been put down that the Gendarms were sent in to occupy the interior once again. However, many Gendarms did transfer to the Army and remained even through the end of the war where they played a critical roll in Denazification.
     

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