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.)