Reconstruction Realized

Impeached for what? He had done nothing that wasn't perfectly within his legal rights.

And if they couldn't get a conviction after thirty months of bitter conflict, they certainly won't at an earlier date.
He was only not impeached by one vote and I think that was because the Radicals had more clearly separated themselves from everyone else so no one wanted to elevate them to the presidency.

Plus the seven dissenting Republicans all went on to join Grant’s campaign. Wade as POTUS could’ve made Grant’s run DOA so they had political motive.

OTL’s impeachment mainly revolved around removing Stanton in defiance of a Congressional Law.

If AJ was more lax early on - reinstating various Confederates to state gov positions - then maybe one could argue for treason (collaborating w/ Confederate Rebels).
 
Weren't Lincoln's plans for Reconstruction fairly lenient? Not sure how his plans would have looked had he survived, but I don't think he was of the same mind as say Thaddeus Stevens.
 
He was only not impeached by one vote and I think that was because the Radicals had more clearly separated themselves from everyone else so no one wanted to elevate them to the presidency.


More accurately, some swing votes were unwilling to elevate Wade to the Presidency. Had Seward or Grant been next in line (or had Foster still been President of the Senate) then Johnson would have been out on his ear. But there were some who "will never kill me to make thee king".


Plus the seven dissenting Republicans all went on to join Grant’s campaign. Wade as POTUS could’ve made Grant’s run DOA so they had political motive.

Sorry I don't follow. No accidental President had ever been nominated for a term in his own right, much less elected, and none would be until 1904. Grant would still have been nominated even had Wade been interim President. As the nation's Number One hero, he'd have would be an assured winner, so he would have brushed Wade aside without even breathing hard.

Keep in mind that a double vacancy would trigger an election in Nov 1866, at which point Wade would only have been Acting POTUS for a year at most. His appeal would have been negligible compared to Grant's.
 
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Who has the power to reconvene it? The Constitution gives that power only to the POTUS. . .
This is what I really like about AH. Two different persons can look at the same or similar set of facts, and come to very differing conclusions. :)

Yes, there is a part in Article 2 that the president can call Congress into session. But in no way does it say that this is the only way Congress can meet in an unexpected session. And if Congress can't call itself, in my universe that really makes it a junior varsity, little brother branch of government, and I don't think that was the intent of the founders.
 
Keep in mind that a double vacancy would trigger an election in Nov 1866, at which point Wade would only have been Acting POTUS for a year at most. His appeal would have been negligible compared to Grant's.
Ah, that’s right - Presidential Succession Act of 1792 was still in effect. You are correct.
 
. . . Personally Geography I
like Andrew Johnson as much as you do- in
other words, not very much! Thaddeus
Stevens, as he so often did, put it best. When a Johnson defender called him a self-
made man Stevens shot back: “Glad to hear
it, for it relieves God Almighty of a heavy responsibility."*

*- Quoted in Fawn Brodie, THADDEUS STEVENS: SCOURGE OF THE SOUTH, p. 326 of the 1966,
Norton paperbacks edition. First published in 1959. There are a # of Stevens biographies but this
one, despite its age, is the best by a mile. Is quite informative not only re Stevens, but also on
Civil War politics, Reconstruction, & the impeachment of Andrew Johnson.
Andrew Johnson could have been a "war Democrat" and a pretty middle-of-the-road kind of guy, but such was not the case.

And even though the Civil War was fought first and foremost to preserve the Union, the issue of slavery ran through it from the beginning and once Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation on Sept. 22, 1862, to take effect on Jan. 1, 1863 (but sadly not for the border states, not even with compensation), ending slavery became one of the major issues.

I just wish a few more members of Congress had taken the view, that if we're going to do it, by God, we're going to do it right, and grant the persons newly freed a fair shake at success, and since they do in fact have the same rights as everyone else, make a real effort to see that these rights are respected.
 
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ever been nominated for a term in his own right, much less elected, and none would be until 1904. Grant would still have been nominated even had Wade been interim President. As the nation's Number One hero, he'd have would be an assured winner, so he would have brushed Wade aside without even breathing hard.
I suppose more accurately would Grant be willing to run if someone other than Johnson was already secured in office?
 
My reading of Sherman seems to be someone about as conservative as AJohnson when it comes to civil rights - it’s just that Sherman was a consummate professional who refused to delve into politics.
I think you're generally correct.
The Sea Islands: An Experiment in Land Redistribution

http://chnm.gmu.edu/courses/122/carr/seaframe.html

'Prior to any formal, governmental policy on reconstruction, General William T. Sherman created his own land redistribution policy. Sherman meet with Edwin Stanton, Lincoln's Secretary of War, and a delegation of twenty black leaders on January 12, 1865 to address the problems of the Freedmen. After hearing that what the Freedmen desired most was their own land, he issued Special Field Order #15. This order declared that the Sea Islands on the coast of South Carolina and Georgia would be reserved for Freedman. Under this order each family would be eligible for 40 acres of land for their own cultivation. . . '

' . . . It seems likely that Sherman's intention was simply to relieve his army of the thousands of Freedmen and women who had been following it since Sherman's invasion of Georgia. . . . Sherman would later claim that his order was a temporary measure and was not meant to give the Freedmen permanent possession of the land. . . '
So, it looks like the bureaucratic impulse, which can be a positive thing since you're trying to solve a practical problem.

I wish there hadn't been the last part in which Sherman claimed he never meant to give permanent possession of the land, but I guess that is how this chapter played out.
 
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This is what I really like about AH. Two different persons can look at the same or similar set of facts, and come to very differing conclusions. :)

Yes, there is a part in Article 2 that the president can call Congress into session. But in no way does it say that this is the only way Congress can meet in an unexpected session. And if Congress can't call itself, in my universe that really makes it a junior varsity, little brother branch of government, and I don't think that was the intent of the founders.

It can call itself. The Constitution empowers it to "By law appoint a different day" from the day specified in the Constitution. But it must pass a law to do so. If it had a right to convene itself at will, why were the words "by law" included?

Similarly, the 1886 Succession Act specified that should a Sec of State or other Cabinet Officer succeed to the Presidency, he must summon Congress by proclamation within twenty days. What need for a proclamation if Congress can assemble without one?

If your notion is correct, then why did no one explain this to President Chester Arthur? When he became POTUS, Congress was not sitting, and there was neither a President of the Senate nor a Speaker of the House. This created a frightfully dangerous situation, , since if anything happened to Arthur, there would be no legal successor, and no one with the power to summon Congress in order for one to be chosen. Arthur had to go through the performance of writing a proclamation summoning the Senate, but leaving it undated, so that in the event of his death someone could fill in a date and use it to call the Senate into Session. Clearly neither he nor his legal advisors supposed that either chamber would be able to meet before December without such a summons. Can you show me any legal ruling to the contrary?


I suppose more accurately would Grant be willing to run if someone other than Johnson was already secured in office?


Why should that make any difference? Why would Grant defer to an insignificant interim POTUS?

Winfield Scott didn't defer to Millard Fillmore in 1852, and Wade would be an even more trivial figure..
 
I think you're generally correct.

So, it looks like the bureaucratic impulse, which can be a positive thing since you're trying to solve a practical problem.

I wish there hadn't been the last part in which Sherman claimed he never meant to give permanent possession of the land, but I guess that is how this chapter played out.
You pretty much solved it yourself in the post. He was on the same page with Lincoln & Grant that utilizing freedmen as soldiers and encouraging them to escape the CSA was a matter of pure military expediency - it drained the Confederacy doubly fast as the slaves were maintaining plantations so that able bodied white men could join up with the Rebs. Take away the slaves and the plantation either dies (losing the CSA a food source) or the soldier goes AWOL back to their plantation (losing a soldier to the army).
 
More accurately, some swing votes were unwilling to elevate Wade to the Presidency. Had Seward or Grant been next in line (or had Foster still been President of the Senate) then Johnson would have been out on his ear. But there were some who "will never kill me to make thee king".
Do you have any good sources on Foster? He seems like a relative unknown, at least going off google. I have yet to explore any library based options, but would be interested in the material if you knew of any. If I had a clearer idea of Foster's general character I would probably default back to this old idea :

https://www.alternatehistory.com/forum/threads/radical-a-reconstruction-wi.423412/
 
Do you have any good sources on Foster? He seems like a relative unknown, at least going off google. I have yet to explore any library based options, but would be interested in the material if you knew of any. If I had a clearer idea of Foster's general character I would probably default back to this old idea :

https://www.alternatehistory.com/forum/threads/radical-a-reconstruction-wi.423412/

The only book about him that I know is a slim volume - Lafayette Foster, by Thomas Vogt and Dr Darla Shaw. It mentions that in the 1830s he defended a Quaker woman named Prudence Crandall, who was prosecuted for admitting three coloured children from out of State into her school. OTOH, after leaving the Senate he later became a Democrat, so he isn't likely to have been a Radical, and istr reading somewhere that he wasn't re-elected in 1866 because he was "too conservative". OTOH, as a two-term Senator he would probably be more realistic than Johnson as what Congress would or wouldn't accept.
 
The only book about him that I know is a slim volume - Lafayette Foster, by Thomas Vogt and Dr Darla Shaw. It mentions that in the 1830s he defended a Quaker woman named Prudence Crandall, who was prosecuted for admitting three coloured children from out of State into her school. OTOH, after leaving the Senate he later became a Democrat, so he isn't likely to have been a Radical, and istr reading somewhere that he wasn't re-elected in 1866 because he was "too conservative". OTOH, as a two-term Senator he wa0ould probably be more realistic than Johnson as what Congress would or wouldn't accept.
I was just looking up the same book. Vogt is a descendant of Foster and has passed away. Shaw is still alive and an English teacher it appears, so I may reach out to find if she has any kind of primary sources left over - I know Foster also appears in some collections of letters to Lincoln.

Some of the other stuff I read (from here, actually) :
Recycling an old soc.history.what-if post of mine:

***


As for Foster, I agree that he would become President--there have been some
arguments that there was *no* President Pro Tempore at the time of Lincoln's
assassination but I think
http://groups.google.com/group/soc.history.what-if/msg/97299d9990719f4e
answers them convincingly. As to his own politics, he was originally a Whig
who was elected Senator from Connecticut in 1855 by a coalition dominated by
Whigs (but also including Free Soilers and Prohibitionists). When he became
a Republican, he seems to have had the reputation of being a rather
conservative one. Eric Foner, for example, in his *Free Soil, Free Labor,
Free Men: The Ideology of the Republican Party before the Civil War* refers
to him as "the conservative senator from Connecticut", yet Foner also notes
that Foster wrote in 1856 that he viewed that year's election as the last
opportunity of the North "to save our liberties"--language similar to that
used by radicals like Joshua Giddings.
http://books.google.com/books?id=HUqJPUyS83AC&pg=PA102

In *The Limits of Sovereignty: Property Confiscation in the Union and the
Confederacy during the Civil War,* Daniel W. Hamilton writes that on the
confiscation issue "Wisconsin Senator Timothy Howe and Connecticut Senators
Lafayette Foster and James Dixon straddled the fence between the moderate and
conservative camps."
http://books.google.com/books?id=lt9Nu91V-fwC&pg=PA320

Lyman Trumbull, by contrast, was a "radical" on this issue--given Trumbull's
later conservatism, this helps illustrate that the question of whether a
given Republican was "conservative", "moderate", or "radical" varied from
time to time and from issue to issue. Nevertheless, it does seem safe to say
that whether considered a moderate or a conservative Republican, Foster was
no radical. If in 1856 he expressed apocalyptic views about the dangers of
the Slave Power to northern liberties, that simply shows how widespread such
views were in *all* wings of the newly organized Republican Party. (And
quite understandably so, in view of the repeal of the Missouri Compromise,
the Ostend Manifesto, the violence in Kansas, the assault on Charles Sumner--
and a little later on, the Dred Scott decision. It was easy enough for some
twentieth century historians--especially the "revisionists" like Avery Craven
who flourished between the two world wars--to say that Republicans
overreacted to these events, that it was an oversimplification to regard them
as all part of a Slave Power conspiracy, etc. Even if this were true, the
point is how these events looked to many Northerners *at that time*.) Of
course to Andrew Johnson, *any* Republican who did not favor his own program
of readmission of the southern states with just about no questions asked was
a "radical." By that standard, only the handful of Johnson Republicans, like
Doolittle of Wisconsin, were not "radicals." All in all, though, "moderate"
or "moderate conservative" seems about the best way to describe Foster.
See
http://www.abrahamlincolnsclassroom.org/Library/newsletter.asp?ID=53&CRLI=133
for an interesting evaluation of the differences between Foster and his
colleague James Dixon: "Much less aggressive than Dixon was Lafayette
Foster, a former Whig from Norwich who was elected to the Senate in 1855, He
lacked Dixon's killer instinct for patronage and seldom stood up to Dixon,
even when he disagreed with him..".

BTW, we had some discussion here of whether Foster would serve out Lincoln's
entire second term, or whether a special election would be held, as the
Succession Act of 1792 seemed to require. See the already-cited post at
http://groups.google.com/group/soc.history.what-if/msg/97299d9990719f4e If
there were indeed a special election in 1865, whom would the Republicans
nominate? I am reasonably sure it would not be Foster, who would be viewed
as an accidental "caretaker" chief executive. Do we get Grant three years
earlier than in OTL? See
http://groups.google.com/group/soc.history.what-if/msg/ad3f23aea6090166 and
the subsequent posts in that thread.

(As Mike Stone pointed out, even a caretaker Foster administration could have
important consequences. For one thing, he might avoid Johnson's rash pardons
of 1865--if only because he might simply feel that he was in too weak a
political position to embark on such a course.)

Confirms your suggestion that Foster might've been on the conservative end of Republicans. I suppose the other hope is that perhaps he would view his situation as tenuous enough to call an early session of Congress shortly after Lincoln's assassination and more or less act as a rubber stamp of Congressional Reconstruction until the newly scheduled election in Dec. '65 - kinda merging some of @GeographyDude's ideas.

From there, like I said Grant kinda seems like he was forged in opposition to Johnson. I might be more inclined to see one of Lincoln's rivals make a bid to unite moderate & Radicals under a familiar face : peg the Dems as being collaborateurs in the recent civil war (and not re-integrating the south until after the late '65 election) and I think pretty much anyone with an R next to their name could win.

Solely based on the Chernow book (granted, seeing things from Grant's perspective here) it seems like the biggest name left in the cabinet was Stanton who was far as I know was a radical. Butler was brought up earlier as well - I would note that he and Grant had some bad blood. IIRC Butler was a political appointee general who got sacked after Grant got enough power & Lincoln secured re-election. Even if Grant didn't run, he might very well have something to say about Butler running - and with Grant's stature at the time that would pretty much kill Butler's chances on the spot.
 
Despite the quotes above, Lafayette Foster voted aye on the 13th & 14th amendments, the Civil Rights Act of 1866, and the 1866 bill to extend the Freeman's Bureau. Whatever his personal leanings, he voted in step with Radicals, it seemed. If he was elevated to the Presidency, is it possible that he would be replaced by Orrin Ferry (who succeeded him IOTL?). Ferry was decidedly against Civil Rights and favored amnesty for Confederates, so he strikes me as a Conservative at best.

With that one switch, that would leave us with 20 Radicals (people who voted for 4 out of the 4 bills above), 9 moderates leaning radical (voted for 3 / 4 bills above) which alone would be enough to reach the 26 votes necessary for a simple majority (at least in 1865 before any new states or readmittances) to pass more or less anything on the Radical agenda.

Of course, this means while the Radicals hold the single largest bloc in Congress, it's not enough to get anything done without bringing at least half of the moderates leaning radical on board.

As swing votes, these would be the men who would need convincing for any early Congressional Reconstruction :

Richard Yates of Illinois
James W. Grimes of Iowa
James H. Lane of Kansas
B. Gratz Brown of Missouri
William M. Stewart of Nevada
James W. Nye of Nevada
Aaron H. Cragin of New Hampshire
Ira Harris of New York
George H. Williams of Oregon
 
Despite the quotes above, Lafayette Foster voted aye on the 13th & 14th amendments, the Civil Rights Act of 1866, and the 1866 bill to extend the Freeman's Bureau. Whatever his personal leanings, he voted in step with Radicals, it seemed.

As did most Republicans on those particular measures. Note that none of these required the South to give Freedmen the vote, though the Amendment tried to encourage it by threatening to reduce their Congressional representation. [1]

In short, "Congressional Reconstruction" is a distinctly elastic term. A Congress which gets its own way in 1865 is likely to be far less radical than two years later, when even moderate Republicans had been "radicalised" by the long struggle with Andrew Johnson.


[1] It is one of history's little ironies that (in the medium term) the main beneficiaries from Radical Reconstruction were the White supremacists of the South. Had they averted it by accepting the 14th Amendment, they could have left their Blacks voteless, but at the cost of a drop in their Congressional (and hence Electoral College) representation - probably enough to give the Republicans an uncontested win in 1876 and (butterflies permitting) 1916. The Reps would also have controlled the HoR for more of the 1880s than they did OTL. In the event they never attempted to enforce this provision, presumably because they saw it as having been superseded by the 15th Amendment, and to fall back on it would have amounted to a confession that the latter was unenforceable. But, since he 15A was in fact unenforceable, this left the South free to disfranchise its Blacks without any loss of representation, thus giving it the best of both worlds. I sometimes feel that the Muse of History has a rather twisted sense of humour.
 
If anyone is interested in Lafayette Foster, I am working to get some primary sources on him from his hometown. I could PM whatever I discover to those interested.
 
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