JTLE: Lincoln Lives

How else was emancipation to have any practical meaning?

I'm not absolutely sure what that means.

As of 1860, there were eighteen states which had either abolished slavery or never had it. Of these, only six (five New England states plus NY) allowed any Blacks to vote [1]. Does this mean that the abolition/exclusion of slavery from the other twelve was somehow "without practical meaning"? Very few people would have seen it that way at the time.


We saw OTL what happened when the reformers both north and south threw up their hands;

Isn't that putting it the wrong way round? Surely it was more a case of the reformers throwing up their hands because of what had happened, rather than vice versa. Like the British after Yorktown, they "threw up their hands" because they had lost, and had no realistic hope of reversing the defeat.



why do you think, once Lincoln realized the need for imminent emancipation, he so quickly came around to supporting expanding the franchise?

For much the same sort of reason that the Framers of the Constitution sedulously avoided using the word "slave", always going for "other persons" or the like. The institution existed, but in writing their document many of them tried to look forward to a day when it wouldn't.

In the same way, Lincoln knew that there was no near term prospect of Blacks being accepted as the political equals of whites, but he wanted to leave the door "open a crack", so that if/when public opinion had moved far enough, there would be a precedent to invoke.


[1] Seven if we count Ohio, whose definition of "white" as less than 50% black let in some mulattoes who would have counted as "negroes" in most states. NY allowed Blacks to vote if they had $250 worth of property, a condition not required of whites.
 
I'm not absolutely sure what that means

It means that without some mechanism to preserve their own rights in place, the former slaves were vulnerable to effective re-enslavement, as we saw OTL with the adaptation of vagrancy laws, black codes, and such.

As to northern states which denied the vote, well yes, but remember that a number of those states essentially banned black people from living there at all (or, in the case of Illinois, literally).

As to willingness of Southern whites to accept this, remember that the population at this time was far from unified in opposing (at least unconditionally) black civil rights -- including a number of former Confederates leaders. To be clear, I wouldn't call this so much a "thirst for justice" as a desire for the South to adapt and to preserve a true peace -- nonetheless, their opponents called them "scalawags" and, OTL, they lost the struggle. They didn't have to, though...
 
BBTW, Mike, I also love your LIncolnesque humor - I've got some ideas, too, including his using Lee as a go-between once Virginia falls. He says (it's mentioned in IBIE, in fact) something like, "There are people in my government who would prefer that I shoot you, as no doubt you have heard people instruct you to do. So, it appears our choices are to either shoot each other, or for me to enlist you in trying to bring the rebels back into the fold as quickly as possible, for the slower we are, the more the radicals will want their way."

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Lincoln's lines about not needing a daguerotype of the grandmother, and also about the Southern attitude toward women, are great. it seems to me he grew more liberal about such things as his term went on, though I don't think he ever would have been Radical, he was very pragmatic, and would probably expect others to be that way, too.


I had a lot of fun putting words into Lincoln's mouth.

That's one reason I feel rather annoyed with myself for forgetting about Booth's co-conspirators. Had I remembered, I'd have had him commuting the death sentences, and granting a couple of full pardons to Mary Surratt and Samuel Mudd. I could then have arranged for him to meet the good doctor, and say something like. "Lucky for you that your friends did not succeed. Had they done, your name really would be Mud".
 
Very nice. I love the idea of Lincoln sitting down with Brigham Young.

Their backgrounds weren't too far apart. President Young was a farm boy, and spent much of his early life in log cabins, though his were in Vermont and upstate NY, not Kentucky. They could have exchanged a lot of reminiscences.
 
All replies much appreciated :D

A lot of the intellectual drive behind eugenic and racial darwinism came from outside the United States and wasn't very influenced by events in the US. But I can see two different possibilities: if blacks face less de jure discrimination, and the long terms economic and cultural debilities caused by slavery aren't recognized, then racialism and eugenic thinking may get a boost.

On the other hand, a longer continued presence of blacks with political power will tend to make racially-based eugenics less respectable in the United States, because it will piss off powerful politicians.

Does this effectively butterfly away anything potentially like the Nazi racial policies in Europe in the 20th Century?
 
All replies much appreciated :D
Does this effectively butterfly away anything potentially like the Nazi racial policies in Europe in the 20th Century?


The way the existence of a sizeable Polish vote in the US caused them to stop regarding Slavs as inferior?:D


Thinking about it, an even better parallel might be the Jews. Afaik, they had full civil and political equality virtually from the start. They certainly had by the Civil War period, as the career of Judah P Benjamin illustrates. Yet this had no impact whatever on antisemitism in Europe.

In fact, it had little immediate impact even on antisemitism in the US itself. I don’t know if you’ve ever seen the Gregory Peck film, Gentleman’s Agreement, but if not I would urge you too. It’s a real eye-opener. Apart from the well-known Jewish Quota in the "better" schools and colleges, many hotels, restaurants and even entire neighbourhoods were "restricted" so that a Jew could not get service or accommodation. And this in the second half of the 20C!

There was, in fact, a kind of "Jim Crow" for Jews, despite the fact that in law they had full civil and political rights, and even, for the past generation, a token Jew on the Supreme Court, as well as several in Congress. Everything, in fact, that Blacks could have hoped for in the event of a successful Reconstruction, and what Blacks in the North ostensibly did have. Yet "on the ground floor" none of it made a blind bit of difference. If the Constitution said one thing, and firmly established social custom another, then custom trumped law.

Going from the sublime to the ridiculous, the Prohibitionists were to make a similar discovery in the 1920s [1]. No offence, but I feel you are way overrating the effect of paper legal rights. If the Jews, better educated and with a higher per capita income, had to put up with all this, then I can’t really see Blacks doing any better.

 
[1] The Republican Party again, though with some Democratic support in the South. Was it something they drank?
 
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All replies much appreciated :D



Does this effectively butterfly away anything potentially like the Nazi racial policies in Europe in the 20th Century?

I'm with Mikestone85. Lets face it, until well into the 20th Century, the United States was considered to be, with some justice, an intellectual backwater. The intellectual strain of thought that started with Galton and moved from there isn't going to be much affected by developments in the United States. In fact, if this Alt-US is more given to racial toleration or even the dread "miscegenation" than in OTL, it might give racialist thinking the added cachet of anti-americanism.
 
 
[1] The Republican Party again, though with some Democratic support in the South. Was it something they drank?

The GOP was the party of evangelical activism, simple as that. That's the common factor behind prohibition agitation and abolition agitation.
 
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