Lee of the Union: A Tale of Things That Never Were

Ladies and gentlemen, presenting my masterpiece "Lee of the Union Timeline," originally posted on OtherTimelines.com before the series of unfortunate events. I will post decade by decade for easier viewing. Some additions have been made to make up for gaps in the original. Some corrections have been made for my errors in spelling, grammar, and later entries that turned out to contradict earlier entries. And I have made comments to explain where this Timeline (hereafter abbreviated as "TTL") differs from real life (hereafter abbreviated as "RL") in events that might not be familiar to most of you.

Lee of the Union: A Tale of Things That Never Were (OTL Timeline 1217, named "Lee of the Union," begins here.)

1861 March 7: Believing that civil war is about to break out between the United States of America (the Union or "The North") and the Confederate States of America (the Confederacy or "The South"), U.S. President Abraham Lincoln offers General Robert E. Lee command of all Union military forces. "Your country needs you," Lincoln tells him. "I know you love your State of Virginia, but if the seceding States win, it will be in a cause of slavery and treason. Being a Virginian won't be worth very much then. You are an American first, and a Virginian second, and you can do best by Virginia by being loyal to America." After careful consideration, Lee accepts. (In real life, Lee sided with the Confederacy, with disastrous results.)

April 12: Confederate troops fire on Fort Sumter, South Carolina, and capture it. The civil war between America's North and South has begun.

July 21: General Robert E. Lee and his Army of the Potomac routs the Confederate Army of Northern Virginia and General Pierre Beauregard at Bull Run in Manassas, Virginia. (In RL, Lee led the Confederates to victory at this battle.)

August 14: General Robert E. Lee and his Army of the Potomac make an easy capture of the Confederate capital of Richmond, Virginia.

August 16: The Slavery Rebellion (as it will come to be called) is over before it can burst into full-scale civil war. General Robert E. Lee accepts the surrenders of Confederate President Jefferson Davis, on behalf of the Confederate government, and General Joseph Johnston, on behalf of the Confederate armies. Davis and Johnston both accept President Abraham Lincoln's offer of amnesty for all rebelling soldiers. Lee had hoped to get General Thomas J. Jackson to be the official military signer, but Jackson wouldn't do it. "Speaking to General Jackson is like speaking to a stone wall," Lee remarks, and for the rest of his life, the stubborn general is known as Stonewall Jackson.

September 1: General Robert E. Lee, de facto governor of all Confederate States until provisional governments can be set up, announces that any further rebellion on the part of the former Confederate States will be met with severe reprisals, but compliance with the Constitution of the United States will mean leniency. (In RL, this would happen, but not until 1865.)

September 19: A Constitutional Amendment prohibiting slavery in all States, including all those that had once been Confederate States, is presented to the Congress.

November 6: The Republican-controlled Illinois legislature appoints Ulysses S. Grant, a Colonel in the recent Slavery Rebellion, to the U.S. Senate seat vacated by the death of Senator Stephen A. Douglas, the 1860 Democratic Presidential nominee. (In RL, Grant would briefly serve as Secretary of War, but would never be elected to anything until he was nomianted for President in 1868.)

1862 January 17: The last major rebel band surrenders, as Nathan Bedford Forrest, knowing that further resistance is futile, hands his sword to General William Tecumseh Sherman.

December 24: The greatest Christmas present in American history is delivered as the 13th Amendment to the Constitution, prohibiting slavery, is ratified. It will take effect on January 1, 1863. By this time, the provisional legislatures of the former Confederate States of Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, North Carolina, Tennessee, Texas and Virginia have pledged their loyalty to the Constitution of the United States and have been readmitted to the Union, rejoining California, Connecticut, Delaware, Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Kentucky, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, Missouri, Nebraska, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New York, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Oregon, Rhode Island, Vermont and Wisconsin. Alabama, Mississippi and South Carolina remain holdouts. (The Amendment is ratified three years sooner than in RL.)

1863 July 4: Mississippi becomes the last of the former Confederate States of America to be readmitted to the Union. Alabama and South Carolina had been readmitted earlier in the year. Upon hearing the news, General Robert E. Lee submits his resignation of commission to President Abraham Lincoln, who accepts it. (This is the RL date of the Battle of Vicksburg, in Mississippi, and just after the Battle of Gettysburg. Combined, this made a Union victory all but certain.) 1864 June 21: With the Union saved, slavery banned by the 13th Amendment, ratification soon to come of the 14th and 15th Amendments, guaranteeing Negro citizenship and voting rights, and a bill to protect Indian lands on its way to passage by Congress, President Abraham Lincoln announces he will not be a candidate for re-election.

November 2: General Robert E. Lee, the leader of the Army that squashed the Slavery Rebellion, is elected the 17th President of the United States. The Democratic Party had united behind the Virginian who may, for all anybody knows, have saved the country from a prolonged, disastrous civil war. He defeats the Republican nominee, Secretary of the Treasury Salmon P. Chase of Ohio. Lee's Vice President is Andrew Johnson of Tennessee, the only Senator from one of the seceding States who did not resign his seat and stayed loyal to the Union.

November 11: The city of Atlanta, having returned to the Union with the rest of the State of Georgia in 1862, rests quietly. William Tecumseh Sherman, Robert E. Lee's replacement as General-in-Chief of American armed forces, spends most of the day in his Washington office, smoking cigars, drinking brandy and going through volumes of paperwork. He is burning with boredom.

1865 March 3: On his last full day in office, President Abraham Lincoln signs the Indian Territories Act of 1865, establishing permanent Indian homelands in the Northern Plains (Dakota Territory), in the Southern Plains (Oklahoma Territory), and in the Southwest (Arizona Territory), while amending the Homestead Act of 1862 to allow only those non-Indians already living there, and their descendants, to stay, and no new ones to be admitted without the permission of the Territorial governments. Each Territory, or each State developed within these territories, will have a U.S. Army fort within its borders, in order to protect the established white settlers in the event of Indian obrogation of the ITA, though Lincoln signs an Executive Order proscribing great punishment for soldiers who go too far. Indian tribes will be permitted to remain or resettle there, with their own people eligible to run for election to Territorial legislatures, Governorships and non-voting representatives in Congress, so that if and when their legislatures vote in favor of Statehood, they will be admitted with their own people governing them, representing them and voting for their interests in Congress. Lincoln receives support from the former Confederate States, many of whom are willing to pay to have their remaining Native Americans moved to the new Territories.

March 4: Robert Edward Lee is sworn in as President of the United States. In his Inaugural Address, he quotes Benjamin Franklin in order to express brotherhood with the now-restored Southern States: "We must all hang together, or, surely, we shall all hang separately." It is a suggestion that the North will not only show lenience toward the former rebels, but also has a responsibility to help the South rebuild.

March 8: Former President Abraham Lincoln returns to his home town of Springfield, Illinois. "I have never been happier than to have the shackles of governing thrown off," he says, "and to return to the highest office a man can hold, that of private citizen in the town he calls home." Even his wife, Mary Todd Lincoln, has seen a sense of depression fade from her.

March 18: President Robert E. Lee makes a tour of the Southern States. Among his stops is in Augusta, Georgia, where an eight-year-old boy named Thomas Woodrow Wilson hears him speak on the need for Southerners to help themselves by building up their own institutions, so that they may compete with the North in more positive ways. (In RL, the future President Wilson saw Confederate President Jefferson Davis taken through his home town on a carriage, in chains as a prisoner.)

April 14: President Robert E. Lee is shot and killed at Ford's Theater in Washington by John Wilkes Booth, an actor who considered Lee a traitor to Virginia. Lee was 58, and had been in office only 41 days, the least in history except for William Henry Harrison in 1841. He is the first President to be assassinated. Booth is captured at the scene, and will be executed. Vice President Andrew Johnson becomes the 18th President of the United States, as the nation goes into deep mourning over President Lee.

April 16: An open letter to the American people from former President Lincoln appears in most of the nation's newspapers. It pays tribute to the assassinated President Robert E. Lee, offers his assistance to new President Andrew Johnson, and suggests calm to both a North angry over the assassination and a South that is about evenly divided over whether assassin John Wilkes Booth was justified. "With malice toward none," Lincoln writes, "with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in, to bind up the nation's wounds, to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations." Lincoln's words do much to repair the breach that still exists between North and South, and many Republican activists want him to run for President again in 1868. He will have none of it: "I have done my duty, and there are many in the Party who are up to the great task that will be before the next President, regardless of whether Mr. Johnson succeeds." (Lincoln's words above are from his RL Second Inaugural address.)

1866 January 1: With a regiment of the 7th Cavalry, commanded by Lieutenant Colonel George A. Custer, standing guard, a Chief of the Lakota Sioux takes office as Territorial Governor of Dakota Territory. He takes office, and takes a Christian name along with his Indian name: "I, Joseph Sitting Bull, do solemnly swear..."

July 4: The Upper Peninsula of Michigan has its Statehood as the State of Hiawatha ratified by Congress. It becomes the 37th State of the Union. (In RL, this split has never happened, although there is a Timeline on OTL.com about it, "Yooper Revolution." I added it so that I could end up with 50 States even with the Indian Territories Act making North and South Dakota one State and Arizona and New Mexico one State.)

1867 July 1: The British North America act is ratified, giving Canada limited independence from Great Britain. John A. Macdonald is named the first Prime Minister. Also on this day, The University of Western Virginia is founded in Morgantown, Virginia. (In RL, several Counties split from Virginia in 1863 to form the Union State of West Virginia. In TTL, that never happened, so the school we know as "WVU" is, here, "UWV.")

1868 November 4: Senator William H. Seward of New York, who had been Secretary of State under President Lincoln, is elected the 19th President of the United States, defeating his State's Governor, Horatio Seymour. Senator Ulysses S. Grant of Illinois is elected Vice President.

1869 March 11: General Nathan Bedford Forrest, with several U.S. soldiers behind him, shuts down the Ku Klux Klan, a "social organization" that he himself had founded, as a way to celebrate Southern pride and Christian ideals. They had gone too far, terrorizing black people and Jews. "That war is over," he says. "The South will rise again, but, first, we must deserve to." (Forrest did quit the Klan, but did nothing to stop it. He should have.)
 
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Japhy

Banned
Wow Mike, nice. Why don't you write something thats not one giant block of text and then I'll give you a more detailed review. This is giving me a headache reading the way its formatted.
 
It's my timeline, if you don't like it: make your own timeline!

Someone's gonna do this, and we'll have a scenario like in "$pringfield" where the Pimply-Faced Teen is struck by Bart's successful casino.

"Boy, he sure showed me!"
 

Japhy

Banned
You are aware, from the very start, that Lee was not at the battle of First Manassas/Bull Run? Also at the time of the battle the Union Army was the Army of Virginia and the Confederate force was the Army of the Potomac.
 
You are aware, from the very start, that Lee was not at the battle of First Manassas/Bull Run? Also at the time of the battle the Union Army was the Army of Virginia and the Confederate force was the Army of the Potomac.

Considering that Lee was in command of all Virginia forces, saying he had no hand in the battle is like saying George C. Marshall had nothing to do with D-Day. My footnote may have been an exaggeration based on a lack of familiarity, but that hardly makes it untrue.
 

mowque

Banned
Would an abolishment of slavery be so automatic? What is the reasoning behind it exactly? Complete prohibition? Seems a tad extreme to me.
 
Hey, I read this over on the other forum when I was bored.
It was pretty good, but for a little bit of advice, don't take criticism so badly.;)
 
It's my timeline, if you don't like it: make your own timeline!

A dismissive snark? If you don't agree, WYODTL!

Mike, I see you only have 4 posts, and that you are therefore a NOOB. So here is some friendly advice. The reasons why one posts one's timeline on a board like this one are...

1) to receive constructive criticism which might help you to improve it.

2) to engage in debate with other board members over various points of the timeline.

If you expect to post something and just sit back and enjoy the kudos and adulation, well, I'm afraid you're going to be disappointed. It NEVER happens that way.

And believe it or not, some of the people around here DO know more than you do. If you listen to them, you might even learn something and become a better writer. I know I have.
 
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Well, suffice to sat as I think others basically have, Robert.E.Lee in command of the AoTP does not an automatic Union victory make. Not trying to be overly mean or critcial mind you.
 
With revisions made:

Lee of the Union: A Tale of Things That Never Were

1861


(OTL Timeline 1217, named "Lee of the Union," begins here.)

March 7: Believing that civil war is about to break out between the United States of America (the Union or "The North") and the Confederate States of America (the Confederacy or "The South"), U.S. President Abraham Lincoln offers General Robert E. Lee command of all Union military forces. "Your country needs you," Lincoln tells him. "I know you love your State of Virginia, but if the seceding States win, it will be in a cause of slavery and treason. Being a Virginian won't be worth very much then. You are an American first, and a Virginian second, and you can do best by Virginia by being loyal to America." After careful consideration, Lee accepts. (In real life, Lee sided with the Confederacy, with disastrous results.)

April 12: Confederate troops fire on Fort Sumter, South Carolina, and capture it. The civil war between America's North and South has begun.

July 21: General Robert E. Lee and his Army of the Potomac routs the Confederate Army of Northern Virginia and Generals Pierre Beauregard and Joseph Johnston at Bull Run in Manassas, Virginia. (In RL, Beauregard and Johnston led the Confederates to victory at this battle, over Union General Irvin McDowell.)

August 14: General Robert E. Lee and his Army of the Potomac make an easy capture of the Confederate capital of Richmond, Virginia.

August 16: The Slavery Rebellion (as it will come to be called) is over before it can burst into full-scale civil war. General Robert E. Lee accepts the surrenders of Confederate President Jefferson Davis, on behalf of the Confederate government, and General Joseph Johnston, on behalf of the Confederate armies. Davis and Johnston both accept President Abraham Lincoln's offer of amnesty for all rebelling soldiers. Lee had hoped to get General Thomas J. Jackson to be the official military signer, but Jackson wouldn't do it. "Speaking to General Jackson is like speaking to a stone wall," Lee remarks, and for the rest of his life, the stubborn general is known as Stonewall Jackson.

September 1: General Robert E. Lee, de facto governor of all Confederate States until provisional governments can be set up, announces that any further rebellion on the part of the former Confederate States will be met with severe reprisals, but compliance with the Constitution of the United States will mean leniency. (In RL, this would happen, but not until 1865.)

September 19: A Constitutional Amendment prohibiting slavery in all States, including all those that had once been Confederate States, is presented to the Congress.

November 6: The Republican-controlled Illinois legislature appoints Ulysses S. Grant, a Colonel in the recent Slavery Rebellion, to the U.S. Senate seat vacated by the death of Senator Stephen A. Douglas, the 1860 Democratic Presidential nominee. (In RL, Grant would briefly serve as Secretary of War, but would never be elected to anything until he was nomianted for President in 1868.)

1862

January 17: The last major rebel band surrenders, as Nathan Bedford Forrest, knowing that further resistance is futile, hands his sword to General William Tecumseh Sherman.

December 24: The greatest Christmas present in American history is delivered as the 13th Amendment to the Constitution, prohibiting slavery, is ratified. It will take effect on January 1, 1863. By this time, the provisional legislatures of the former Confederate States of Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, North Carolina, Tennessee, Texas and Virginia have pledged their loyalty to the Constitution of the United States and have been readmitted to the Union, rejoining California, Connecticut, Delaware, Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Kentucky, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, Missouri, Nebraska, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New York, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Oregon, Rhode Island, Vermont and Wisconsin. Alabama, Mississippi and South Carolina remain holdouts. (The Amendment is ratified three years sooner than in RL.)

1863

July 4: Mississippi becomes the last of the former Confederate States of America to be readmitted to the Union. Alabama and South Carolina had been readmitted earlier in the year. Upon hearing the news, General Robert E. Lee submits his resignation of commission to President Abraham Lincoln, who accepts it. (This is the RL date of the Battle of Vicksburg, in Mississippi, and just after the Battle of Gettysburg. Combined, this made a Union victory all but certain.)

1864

June 21: With the Union saved, slavery banned by the 13th Amendment, ratification soon to come of the 14th and 15th Amendments, guaranteeing Negro citizenship and voting rights, and a bill to protect Indian lands on its way to passage by Congress, President Abraham Lincoln announces he will not be a candidate for re-election.

November 2: General Robert E. Lee, the leader of the Army that squashed the Slavery Rebellion, is elected the 17th President of the United States. The Democratic Party had united behind the Virginian who may, for all anybody knows, have saved the country from a prolonged, disastrous civil war. He defeats the Republican nominee, Secretary of the Treasury Salmon P. Chase of Ohio. Lee's Vice President is Governor Joel Parker of New Jersey, who had commanded the New Jersey militia during the Slavery Rebellion. (I needed a Northerner to balance the ticket with the Virginian Lee. Parker had been a Major General in the war and a State Assemblyman, County Prosecutor and Presidential Elector before it. He served as Governor 1863-66 and 1871-74, and went on to serve on the State Supreme Court.)

November 11: The city of Atlanta, having returned to the Union with the rest of the State of Georgia in 1862, rests quietly. William Tecumseh Sherman, Robert E. Lee's replacement as General-in-Chief of American armed forces, spends most of the day in his Washington office, smoking cigars, drinking brandy and going through volumes of paperwork. He is burning with boredom.

1865

March 3: On his last full day in office, President Abraham Lincoln signs the Indian Territories Act of 1865, establishing permanent Indian homelands in the Northern Plains (Dakota Territory), in the Southern Plains (Oklahoma Territory), and in the Southwest (Arizona Territory), while amending the Homestead Act of 1862 to allow only those non-Indians already living there, and their descendants, to stay, and no new ones to be admitted without the permission of the Territorial governments. Each Territory, or each State developed within these territories, will have a U.S. Army fort within its borders, in order to protect the established white settlers in the event of Indian obrogation of the ITA, though Lincoln signs an Executive Order proscribing great punishment for soldiers who go too far. Indian tribes will be permitted to remain or resettle there, with their own people eligible to run for election to Territorial legislatures, Governorships and non-voting representatives in Congress, so that if and when their legislatures vote in favor of Statehood, they will be admitted with their own people governing them, representing them and voting for their interests in Congress. Lincoln receives support from the former Confederate States, many of whom are willing to pay to have their remaining Native Americans moved to the new Territories.

March 4: Robert Edward Lee is sworn in as President of the United States. In his Inaugural Address, he quotes Benjamin Franklin in order to express brotherhood with the now-restored Southern States: "We must all hang together, or, surely, we shall all hang separately." It is a suggestion that the North will not only show lenience toward the former rebels, but also has a responsibility to help the South rebuild.

March 8: Former President Abraham Lincoln returns to his home town of Springfield, Illinois. "I have never been happier than to have the shackles of governing thrown off," he says, "and to return to the highest office a man can hold, that of private citizen in the town he calls home." Even his wife, Mary Todd Lincoln, has seen a sense of depression fade from her.

March 18: President Robert E. Lee makes a tour of the Southern States. Among his stops is in Augusta, Georgia, where an eight-year-old boy named Thomas Woodrow Wilson hears him speak on the need for Southerners to help themselves by building up their own institutions, so that they may compete with the North in more positive ways. (In RL, the future President Wilson saw Confederate President Jefferson Davis taken through his home town on a carriage, in chains as a prisoner.)

April 14: President Robert E. Lee is shot and killed at Ford's Theater in Washington by John Wilkes Booth, an actor who considered Lee a traitor to Virginia. Lee was 58, and had been in office only 41 days, the least in history except for William Henry Harrison in 1841. He is the first President to be assassinated. Booth is captured at the scene, and will be executed. Vice President Joel Parker becomes the 18th President of the United States, the first from New Jersey. The nation goes into deep mourning over President Lee.

April 16: An open letter to the American people from former President Lincoln appears in most of the nation's newspapers. It pays tribute to the assassinated President Robert E. Lee, offers his assistance to new President Joel Parker (despite intense criticism from Parker over the last four years), and suggests calm to both a North angry over the assassination and a South that is about evenly divided over whether assassin John Wilkes Booth was justified. "With malice toward none," Lincoln writes, "with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in, to bind up the nation's wounds, to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations." Lincoln's words do much to repair the breach that still exists between North and South, and many Republican activists want him to run for President again in 1868. He will have none of it: "I have done my duty, and there are many in the Party who are up to the great task that will be before the next President, regardless of whether Mr. Parker succeeds." (Lincoln's words above are from his RL Second Inaugural address.)

1866

January 1: With a regiment of the 7th Cavalry, commanded by Lieutenant Colonel George A. Custer, standing guard, a Chief of the Lakota Sioux takes office as Territorial Governor of Dakota Territory. He takes office, and takes a Christian name along with his Indian name: "I, Joseph Sitting Bull, do solemnly swear..."

July 4: The Upper Peninsula of Michigan has its Statehood as the State of Hiawatha ratified by Congress. It becomes the 37th State of the Union. (In RL, this split has never happened, although there is a Timeline about it, "Yooper Revolution." I added it so that I could end up with 50 States even with the Indian Territories Act making North and South Dakota one State and Arizona and New Mexico one State.)

1867

July 1: The British North America act is ratified, giving Canada limited independence from Great Britain. John A. Macdonald is named the first Prime Minister. Also on this day, The University of Western Virginia is founded in Morgantown, Virginia. (In RL, several Counties split from Virginia in 1863 to form the Union State of West Virginia. In TTL, that never happened, so the school we know as "WVU" is, here, "UWV.")

1868

November 4: Senator William H. Seward of New York, who had been Secretary of State under President Lincoln, is elected the 19th President of the United States, defeating his State's Governor, Horatio Seymour. Senator Ulysses S. Grant of Illinois is elected Vice President.

1869

March 11: General Nathan Bedford Forrest, with several U.S. soldiers behind him, shuts down the Ku Klux Klan, a "social organization" that he himself was among the founding members, as a way to celebrate Southern pride and Christian ideals. They had gone too far, terrorizing black people and Jews. "That war is over," he says. "The South will rise again, but, first, we must deserve to." (Forrest did quit the Klan, but did nothing to stop it. He should have.)

1870

April 2: Nearly a year after the first transcontinental railroad links the New York and San Francisco areas, a second is built. J.E.B. Stuart, a former U.S. Army General, raised the necessary funds to get a line built from Norfolk, Virginia to Los Angeles, California. A northern transcontinental route, from New York to Chicago to Seattle, will open in 1892. (It would take until roughly that time for the battered South to have its own transcontinental railroad.)

1871

November 7: With great reluctance, former President Abraham Lincoln is elected Mayor of Chicago. Activists with both the Republican and Democratic Parties insisted that, with his name and moral authority, he was the only man in the State of Illinois who could lead the rebuilding effort after the fire that burned down two-thirds of the city a month ago. (Of course, in RL Lincoln had been dead for six years.)

1872

October 16: President William Henry Seward, a candidate for re-election, dies at his home in Auburn, New York. He was 71, the oldest President in the nation's history thus far. Vice President Ulysses S. Grant becomes the 20th President. It is too late to replace Seward on Presidential election ballots with Grant, but Congress passes a bill providing for all Electoral Votes won by a deceased candidate for President to pass to his nominee for Vice President. This will force Congress, in 1873, to pass the 16th Amendment to the Constitution, requiring not only the preceding, but also a requirement that every person who qualifies to run as a candidate for President on any ballot to also nominate a candidate for Vice President. (TTL's 16th Amendment became RL's 25th Amendment in 1967. Seward actually did die on the day in question. No President has ever died during a re-election campaign.)

November 6: President William H. Seward and Vice President Ulysses S. Grant -- as they are listed on ballots -- are re-elected, though Seward has been dead and Grant President for 19 days. The Democrats had nominated Governor Benjamin Harvey Hill of Georgia, a former Confederate Senator who had been a healing figure after swearing an oath of loyalty to the Union.

1873

November 5: William Henry "Rooney" Lee, 36-year-old son of former President Robert E. Lee, is elected Governor of Virginia. (The younger General Lee was elected to the Virginia Senate and the U.S. House.)

1874

September 1: Virginia native Woodrow Wilson, remembering the March 18, 1865 "Southern institutions" speech of President Robert E. Lee in Augusta, Georgia, for which he was present, enters the University of Virginia. (He actually attended Princeton.)

1875

May 20: In the case of Minor v. Happersett, the U.S. Supreme Court votes 4-3 in favor of granting all American citizens age 21 and over the right to vote, regardless of gender or race. The plaintiffs had asserted this right under the 14th Amendment of the Constitution, saying that citizenship guarantees the right to register to vote. Despite fierce opposition from Chief Justice Morrison R. Waite, the Court stands with those seeking the right to vote. (The Court ruled against women, necessitating the 19th Amendment.)

July 4: President Ulysses S. Grant signs the Voting Rights Act of 1875, proscribing enforcement of the right to vote under Minor v. Happersett. (There was a Civil Rights Act of 1875, but it proved worthless without a government with the moral courage to enforce it. If Grant wouldn't do it, who would? It would take until JFK's proposal and LBJ's signing to give something like that teeth.)

1876

June 24: Lieutenant Colonel George A. Custer, commanding the 7th Cavalry in the Dakota Territory, is shot and killed by a Lakota Sioux Chief named Crazy Horse. Upon his arrest, Crazy Horse denounces Territorial Governor Joseph Sitting Bull: "He is a traitor to all that the red man stands for!" (This is the day of the Battle of the Little Big Horn, and Sitting Bull was on the same side as Crazy Horse.)

November 7: Governor Samuel J. Tilden of New York is elected the 21st President of the United States. The first Northern Democrat to hold the office since James Buchanan 16 years earlier, he defeats the incumbent Republican Ulysses S. Grant, whose term had been marked by the malfeasance of many of his appointees, marking one of America's most honest and decent Presidents as one of its most incompetent. The election is close, however, and Grant came closer than any other "accidental President" yet had to winning the office in his own right. Indeed, John Tyler, Millard Fillmore and Andrew Johnson had not even been renominated. (Tilden actually beat Governor Rutherford B. Hayes of Ohio in both the popular vote and the Electoral Vote, but was denied the Presidency due to flat-out fraud.)

1877

July 4: The Indian Territory of Dakota is admitted to the Union as the 39th State. Joseph Sitting Bull is sworn in for his first four-year term as Governor, having previously served six two-year terms as Territorial Governor. (North and South Dakota were admitted as separate States on the same day in 1890.)

September 5: Chief Crazy Horse, Lakota Sioux assassin of Lt. Col. George Custer, is executed at Fort Robinson, Nebraska. (This doesn't change, although the reason for his execution does.)

1878

May 31: Woodrow Wilson graduates from the University of Virginia.

July 4: The Indian Territory of Oklahoma is admitted to the Union as the 40th State. Its first Governor is Joseph Pierce, formerly known as Chief Joseph of the Nez Perce. (It wouldn't gain Statehood until 1907.)

1879

October 21: In front of a group that includes President Samuel J. Tilden, Thomas Edison demonstrates his incandescent lamp at his laboratory in the Menlo Park section of Raritan Township, Middlesex County, New Jersey. The town will be renamed Edison Township in his memory in 1954. (Tilden wasn't there. Neither was RL President Hayes.)
 
My snark was directed towards the block of text, not the timeline itself. Which, regardless of its plausibility or quality, seems to have had a lot of work put into it, and should be recognized as such and lauded for it.
 
Hopeful(maybe it's my current state of drowsiness)? We're reading the same timeline, right? I get vibes of unrealistic utopian fantasy that ignores basic historical facts of the era...
 
Hopeful(maybe it's my current state of drowsiness)? We're reading the same timeline, right? I get vibes of unrealistic utopian fantasy that ignores basic historical facts of the era...

Take it from someone who has read it. This is a great utopian fantasy. I would also like to see the more realistic TLs like Kennedy Runs Later and This is Richard Nixon with the Evening News. Of course, i look forward to Mike´s new creations.
 
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