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.
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.
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.
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.
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.![]()
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?
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.
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.![]()
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.
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.