So, what if Lincoln had not changed his vice-president but still won re-election, and still been assasinated? How would president Hannibal Hamlin fared, in comparison to Andrew Johnson?
Turtledove wrote a great short story about this entitled Must and Shall. Basically, the Radical Republicans makes sure that the South stays under military occupation and Southern whites are denied the right to vote well into the twentieth century.
well, Hamlin the Radical Republican would've been less conciliatory towards the South than Johnson, as a Tennesee loyalist was- perhaps he would've pushed thru Radical Reconstruction to a much greater extent so's that blacks would've been in fact much better off instead of allowing Jim Crow to rule ?
MIght Hamlin had implemented "40 Acres and a Mule". That might have destroyed the economic basis of the old Southern elite and produced a rather succesful class of reliable Republican voters- who would not be as easily disenfranchised as Freeman were in OTL
Radical Reconstruction did not intend for either a permanent military occupation nor denial of the vote to the white's (the latter is especially something never intended nor executed. The Southerner Whites could vote; they simply had to pledge loyalty to the United States and I believe not be a former member of the Confederate officials or senior leaders, which disenfranchised only a few thousand).Turtledove wrote a great short story about this entitled Must and Shall. Basically, the Radical Republicans makes sure that the South stays under military occupation and Southern whites are denied the right to vote well into the twentieth century.
Radical Reconstruction did not intend for either a permanent military occupation nor denial of the vote to the white's (the latter is especially something never intended nor executed. The Southerner Whites could vote; they simply had to pledge loyalty to the United States and I believe not be a former member of the Confederate officials or senior leaders, which disenfranchised only a few thousand).
Well the POD is that Lincoln is sniped by Confederate soldiers while observing a battle, as opposed to a nutty actor. Therefore, the Union is infinitely more revanchist and harsh against the defeated Confederacy.
Even so, I would say that it's seriously ASB that no whites would be allowed to vote in the South at all. The north was just as thoroughly racist as the South at the time (look up some of Horatio Seymour's campaign songs...), and even with that sort of POD, I doubt they'd substitute blacks getting to vote for whites getting to vote at all. At best, with a Hamlin presidency, you have earlier civil rights and a destruction of the planter aristocracy. The latter might bring into the GOP the poor whites who hated the planters as well, now that I think about it.