Horatio Seymour beats Grant

What if Democratic candidate Horatio Seymour won the 1868 election against Ulysees S Grant? Would Reconstruction end earlier and would the US make even less progress on civil rights? What do you think?
 

Japhy

Banned
Not only would Reconstruction end earlier, but it would end in blood as the Union was restored, in the words of the Democrats from 1860 on wards "As it was".

Seymour ran as a Pre-New Departure Democrat. Pretty much a man calling for the rollback of the Union to a point where the Slave Power would be installed into power in the south and something as close as possible to Serfdom would be dropped onto the Freedmen of the South.

Its not simply a matter of "Reconstruction wrapping up earlier" mind you, we're talking about something much worse coming to power, with the Solid South having the same leaders who took it out of the Union once more, and a federal interest in ending the rights of Freedmen and seeking the repeal of the Reconstruction Amendments that were already passed.
 
What would the result be? I'm not knowledgeable on the subject but if someone made a TL on this I'd be happy to read it:).
 
Is it at all likely that there'd be enough Democrats in Congress for Seymour to advance this agenda? If not, there may be limits to what he can actually accomplish.
 
Its not simply a matter of "Reconstruction wrapping up earlier" mind you, we're talking about something much worse coming to power, with the Solid South having the same leaders who took it out of the Union once more, and a federal interest in ending the rights of Freedmen and seeking the repeal of the Reconstruction Amendments that were already passed.

The Fifteenth Amendment hadn't yet been passed. It got through Congress in Feb 1869 after Grant had been elected. After a Republican defeat it is unlikely to pass and even less likely to be ratified.
 

Anaxagoras

Banned
Seymour ran as a Pre-New Departure Democrat. Pretty much a man calling for the rollback of the Union to a point where the Slave Power would be installed into power in the south and something as close as possible to Serfdom would be dropped onto the Freedmen of the South.

That's pretty much what happened anyway.
 
That's pretty much what happened anyway.

In my opinion, we would have gotten the return to the status quo sooner under Seymour, but without the South having the chip on its shoulder it did OTL. I think, while in the short term it's a worse situation for freedmen than OTL, over the long term things may be better. Populists who wanted to unite the Southern whites and blacks may have been more successful without the Southern elite scaring everybody with the specter of those evil carpet bagging Unionists.
 
In my opinion, we would have gotten the return to the status quo sooner under Seymour, but without the South having the chip on its shoulder it did OTL. I think, while in the short term it's a worse situation for freedmen than OTL, over the long term things may be better. Populists who wanted to unite the Southern whites and blacks may have been more successful without the Southern elite scaring everybody with the specter of those evil carpet bagging Unionists.


Except that Blacks wouldn't have the vote.

The Dems didn't acknowledge the legitimacy of the State governments elected in 1867/8 under the Reconstruction Acts. Seymour would almost certainly have ordered the military governors to hold new elections using the old whites-only voters rolls, or to just reinstate the governments chosen under Presidential Reconstruction.

This could have produced a serious political gridlock, since the Senate had a top-heavy Republican majority, and might have refused to seat Senators chosen by the lily-white governments. If a Democratic HoR was in the meantime accepting them, this would make government extremely difficult, to say the least.
 
Except that Blacks wouldn't have the vote.

The Dems didn't acknowledge the legitimacy of the State governments elected in 1867/8 under the Reconstruction Acts. Seymour would almost certainly have ordered the military governors to hold new elections using the old whites-only voters rolls, or to just reinstate the governments chosen under Presidential Reconstruction.

This could have produced a serious political gridlock, since the Senate had a top-heavy Republican majority, and might have refused to seat Senators chosen by the lily-white governments. If a Democratic HoR was in the meantime accepting them, this would make government extremely difficult, to say the least.

That is a good point....though in OTL I think it was the narrowness of the win that compelled the drive for the amendment, so a loss may spur the lame duck Republicans to make it happen right there and then. Even if such a measure fails, then I could see the Populists or even the Socialists convincing poor whites to empower blacks in the war against the Southern elite holding them down...instead of the prevailing whites stick together to fight the Union.

Though, a more cynical guess would be to suggest that Freedmen get the right to vote right around when women do ITTL. So in that situation everything is really terrible until the 1920's when things start being better than OTL, maybe.
 
Not only would Reconstruction end earlier, but it would end in blood as the Union was restored, in the words of the Democrats from 1860 on wards "As it was".

Seymour ran as a Pre-New Departure Democrat. Pretty much a man calling for the rollback of the Union to a point where the Slave Power would be installed into power in the south and something as close as possible to Serfdom would be dropped onto the Freedmen of the South.

Its not simply a matter of "Reconstruction wrapping up earlier" mind you, we're talking about something much worse coming to power, with the Solid South having the same leaders who took it out of the Union once more, and a federal interest in ending the rights of Freedmen and seeking the repeal of the Reconstruction Amendments that were already passed.

Holy shiz. Suddenly I'm even more appreciative of Grant than I was before.
 
Holy shiz. Suddenly I'm even more appreciative of Grant than I was before.

Yep. Grant's presidency may not have been pretty, but it did a lot of shit that needed doing. And just as Grant frequently doesn't get credit for being one of the finer military minds operating in the Civil War, he doesn't get credit it for any of it. Thank you, Southern propaganda mills. Your mission to smear one of our most amazing men because he was mean to you has been accomplished. :mad:
 
Yep. Grant's presidency may not have been pretty, but it did a lot of shit that needed doing. And just as Grant frequently doesn't get credit for being one of the finer military minds operating in the Civil War, he doesn't get credit it for any of it. Thank you, Southern propaganda mills. Your mission to smear one of our most amazing men because he was mean to you has been accomplished. :mad:


Like a lot of historical figures, he paid the penalty for living too long.

Had he caught a chill and died in the Winter of 1872/3, just after defeating Greeley, his standing would be far higher. At that point Reconstruction still seemed to be succeeding reasonably well, and its subsequent failure would be blamed on his successors.

It's like Harding and Hoover. If they'd been assassinated on the way to their inaugurations, they'd both be on Mount Rushmore.
 
What if Democratic candidate Horatio Seymour won the 1868 election against Ulysees S Grant? Would Reconstruction end earlier and would the US make even less progress on civil rights? What do you think?

The reason that this is a very unlikely scenario is that even if Seymour (or some other Democratic candidate) swept all the close northern states, the Republicans in Congress could still have assured a Grant victory by disallowing the disputed electoral votes of Georgia. See my post at https://groups.google.com/d/msg/soc.history.what-if/bUuhXVD9fFk/MAfkyeBPVBwJ
 

Japhy

Banned
In my opinion, we would have gotten the return to the status quo sooner under Seymour, but without the South having the chip on its shoulder it did OTL. I think, while in the short term it's a worse situation for freedmen than OTL, over the long term things may be better. Populists who wanted to unite the Southern whites and blacks may have been more successful without the Southern elite scaring everybody with the specter of those evil carpet bagging Unionists.

If you think that it was the Grant years that "put a chip on the South's shoulder" you need to reread your history. Violence and murder were already ascendant before Grant took office.

what the Grant years did was buy the Freedmen of the South a period of time, lasting up to the 1890's where they were able to maintain their rights to various degrees, the final collapse not happening until the final collapse of political opposition in the South after 1896. What a Seymour victory entails because, again this is Pre-"New Departure" is not an acceptance of this status quo of voting rights under pressure that Tilden would have accepted, it is calling for a complete rollback, the defeat of the 15th Amendment before the states and a concentrated effort to repeal the 14th at least.

To imagine that violence and Jim Crow would vanish in the face of a government in Washington seeking to repeal Black Citizenship, can only come from a complete misunderstanding of the Civil War and Reconstruction. The key fact is that there was no status quo to go back to. What came after Reconstruction was something new and oppressive but not an inevitable "return". The goal of the 1868 Democrats was to do precisely that.
 
Yep. Grant's presidency may not have been pretty, but it did a lot of shit that needed doing. And just as Grant frequently doesn't get credit for being one of the finer military minds operating in the Civil War, he doesn't get credit it for any of it. Thank you, Southern propaganda mills. Your mission to smear one of our most amazing men because he was mean to you has been accomplished. :mad:

Yes, Grant does get screwed by history. Sure there was corruption in his administration but he wasn't personally involved and after the ACW political corruption may have been at an all time high. This is when Tammany Hall happened after all. To expect Grant to have a totally clean government when many, if not most, state and local governments were corrupt is unreasonable.
 
If you think that it was the Grant years that "put a chip on the South's shoulder" you need to reread your history. Violence and murder were already ascendant before Grant took office.

what the Grant years did was buy the Freedmen of the South a period of time, lasting up to the 1890's where they were able to maintain their rights to various degrees, the final collapse not happening until the final collapse of political opposition in the South after 1896. What a Seymour victory entails because, again this is Pre-"New Departure" is not an acceptance of this status quo of voting rights under pressure that Tilden would have accepted, it is calling for a complete rollback, the defeat of the 15th Amendment before the states and a concentrated effort to repeal the 14th at least.

To imagine that violence and Jim Crow would vanish in the face of a government in Washington seeking to repeal Black Citizenship, can only come from a complete misunderstanding of the Civil War and Reconstruction. The key fact is that there was no status quo to go back to. What came after Reconstruction was something new and oppressive but not an inevitable "return". The goal of the 1868 Democrats was to do precisely that.

It would have been even worse than Jim Crow. The Black Codes that were passed down South would remain in effect. Basically Blacks would remain slaves with the only exception that their wife and children couldn't be sold. For example, as bad as sharecropping was Blacks had to fight for even THAT as what the planters actually wanted was even WORSE.:eek::eek::eek:
 
If you think that it was the Grant years that "put a chip on the South's shoulder" you need to reread your history. Violence and murder were already ascendant before Grant took office.


Indeed it always had been a pretty violent region.

While Huckleberry Finn is of course fiction, its author had lived through the era he described, and I gather feuds like that of the Grangerfords and Shepherdsons were not uncommon, with even young boys being fair game. My impression was that the levels of violence during Reconstruction were higher than normal - but not that much higher.
 
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