43. Liberty Throughout the Land
43. Liberty Throughout the Land
“President Blaine’s paramount objective was securing the approval and ratification of the proposed thirteenth amendment, which would abolish slavery in the United States. After Seward was able to strike a death blow against slavery during the Civil War by banning slavery in the territories, it had grown weaker and weaker. Five southern states had passed constitutional amendments gradually abolishing slavery, and the Red Delta massacres had inflamed northern opinion against it. Shortly after his inauguration, Blaine called a special session of Congress for the purpose of drafting such an amendment.
In crafting such an amendment, first its proponents had to consolidate their various visions into a single proposal that was moderate enough to secure ratification. Initial drafts written by radicals such as Minnesota Congressman James Hinds [1] called for an immediate end to slavery without compensation, and guaranteed citizenship to all Americans regardless of race. However, backroom discussions with moderate Whigs and northern Democrats revealed that such an amendment would assuredly fail to even be approved by Congress, let alone ratified by the requisite 27 states. Instead, many Whigs united behind the draft written by Senator James Wilson of Iowa, which proposed that slavery be abolished over a 10-year period, with “just compensation” paid to each slaveholder.
As slavery was increasingly untenable, most northern Democrats emerged strongly in support of Wilson’s proposal, while they resisted the “radicalism” of Hinds’s version. While Whig Congressman Samuel Randall called Hinds a “race agitator,” New York Senator Samuel Tilden expressed his opinion that blacks were “not ready for the burden of citizenship and civic duty.” Hinds and his fellow radicals, on the other hand, criticized Wilson’s draft as a “half measure.” They were right, but as Wilson, himself a strong supporter of equal rights, explained, “even tiny steps forward still count as stepping forward – we must take what we can get and not abandon the fight because it cannot be won in a single blow.”
Still, intraparty negotiations dragged on throughout May and June. Finally, President Blaine and Speaker Garfield, who had kept themselves removed from negotiations, felt compelled to intervene. Blaine met personally with Hinds and implored him to “put aside [his] grievances” to secure the compromise. Garfield, meanwhile, alternately met with other radicals to persuade them to support the Wilson draft and threatened to remove them from top committees. Blaine’s occasional rival Roscoe Conkling, a strong supporter of abolition and king of New York patronage, was enlisted to use the promise of patronage positions to get northern Democrats on board. He was even given tacit approval to bribe the most recalcitrant ones.
Finally, through this combination of persuasion, bribery, and threats, Blaine, Garfield, and Conkling assembled enough of a House majority to guarantee the Wilson amendment’s passage. On July 6th, the House voted 207-88 to approve the 13th amendment, and the Senate was to vote the next week. Ahead of the vote, Senators Tilden and du Pont [2] announced their support for the amendment, but Blaine, Conkling, and William Mahone estimated that they were still two votes shy. With every northern Senator [3] aligned in support, the focus fell on Thomas Bramlette of Kentucky [4] and Joseph W. McClurg of Missouri [5]. Bramlette was a conservative Whig who believed slavery was in a “terminal decline” but was worried that the Kentucky state house would deny him reelection. McClurg, a moderate Democrat, had similar fears. Blaine promised to appoint Bramlette to the next Supreme Court opening should he lose reelection, while promising McClurg to provide federal funds for a plethora of Missouri canals and railroads that McClurg could sell to his allies back home.
With these final two votes secured, the stage was set for the Senate vote on July 14th. Every Senator from a confederate state voted against, while every Senator from a northern state voted in favor. The outcome was determined by the upper south, with six Senators from those five states voting in favor, and four voting against. Just one Senator changing his vote would have defeated the amendment. As it was, the 13th amendment was approved by the Senate by the barest of majorities: 48-24, exactly two thirds of the chamber. Now, the amendment went to the states for ratification, where 27 of the 36 states were required.
…Illinois was the first state to ratify the 13th amendment, doing so on September 5th, 1882. The next day, Rhode Island and Michigan followed suit and by the end of October, every northern state had voted for ratification. It hinged upon Delaware, Maryland, Virginia, Kentucky, Missouri, and either Tennessee or North Carolina to ratify the amendment. Delaware was the first southern state to ratify, doing so on February 9th, 1883. Virginia did so a week later, after a heavy lobbying campaign from Governor Riddleberger. Missouri, Maryland, and Kentucky all ratified the amendment on the same day, February 23rd. Just a single slave state was needed to ratify the amendment for it to be added to the constitution.
With North Carolina’s rejection of the amendment, it all hinged on Tennessee, where President Blaine was mobilizing every resource that he had at his disposal to induce the state legislature to ratify…”
-From CHAINS BROKEN, CHAINS SHACKLED by Edward Northam, published 2011
“Tennessee was in the midst of a transition from an agrarian, plantation-based economy to one fueled by railroads, commerce, and mining. Eastern Tennessee became prosperous during the 1870s from expanded coal and iron mining, turning an already Whig-friendly region into a stronghold of the party, where Whig candidates routinely won elections with upwards of 60% of the vote. The rise of east Tennessee’s industrial economy pulled Nashville in the same direction, as railroads headed west from Chattanooga used Nashville to send ore to western markets, while goods headed east to Georgia or Alabama stopped at Nashville en route to Atlanta or Elyton [6].
Meanwhile, western Tennessee remained rooted in the old plantation economy. Nathan Bedford Forrest had made Memphis his slave trading headquarters, and eleven slaves were killed in the region during a spillover of the Red Delta massacres in 1879. The state was heavily divided between east and west, with Nashville and the center caught in the middle. Postmaster-General Leonidas C. Houk was, before entering President Blaine’s cabinet, a powerful Whig congressman from eastern Tennessee who dominated the state Whig party with his ally, Governor Jacob Thornburgh [7]. Thornburgh supported the 13th amendment but faced a Democratic-controlled state house. Within the Democratic majority, there existed divisions between conservative planters and modernizing businessmen from central Tennessee and Memphis. Blaine, Houk, and Thornburgh sought to exploit these divisions and force ratification through the state house.
Blaine authorized Houk to promise patronage positions and large sums of federal internal improvements money to state legislators if they voted for ratification, and Governor Thornburgh held dozens of meetings with lawmakers, urging them to support ratification. In mid-March, President Blaine undertook a speaking tour in support of the amendment through central Tennessee, with a stop at Memphis. While Blaine gave a speech in Memphis, the second son of a local planter pulled out a pistol and attempted to shoot him. Both shots missed, one grazing Congressman William Moore’s hat. Blaine continued his speech, closing by imploring the audience to “write [their] duly elected representative to the esteemed General Assembly of Tennessee and urge them” to vote for ratification.
The assassination attempt helped increase support for ratification within the legislature, and Thornburgh estimated that they had a bare majority to ratify the amendment with. Finally, after a lengthy battle, the state of Tennessee ratified the 13th amendment by a margin of just three votes on April 18th, 1883. Within ten years, every man, woman, and child still in bondage in the United States would be set free. But the struggle for equal rights was only just beginning…”
-From THE NEW SOUTH by Edgar Brent, published 1989
“The long-overdue emancipation of enslaved Americans was yet another instance of a half measure that merely pretended to solve the problem. Did every slave go free by the time 1893 rolled around? Yes, it was constitutionally mandated. But each slaver, each person who claimed the ‘right’ to own their fellow human beings, was paid by the government for giving up their so-called property. American taxpayers were put on the hook for bribing racists to part with their human chattel. This was, shamefully, necessary to secure the amendment’s ratification and I would rather evil men receive a small reward if there is a much greater good deed being accomplished at the same time.
The other problem with the 13th Amendment, the much more severe problem, is that it contains no protections for the newly freed people. James Hinds proposed enshrining their citizenship in the amendment, but he was shouted down by moderates in congress who were too preoccupied with expediency to concern themselves with human rights. We know that Blaine had authorized the dispensation of patronage jobs and even bribe money to win support for the amendment. If he had these resources at his disposal, why not use them to force through a more radical version? Blaine’s own memoirs mention that he preferred Hinds’s version, but that he, like many of his moderate allies, was obsessed with expediting the process and avoiding a long legislative battle. This is cowardice.
So, rather than fight hard and use underhanded tactics, Blaine and his allies put forward something that only addressed the surface level problem but didn’t even touch the deep roots of systemic racism in the United States. Then, when there was ample evidence that abolition wouldn’t be enough and that southern states would preserve a form of slavery in everything-but-name, Blaine and Garfield could have gotten something through congress, but they valued their congressional majorities more than human rights. The door was open for every slave state and quite a few free states to pass a slew of laws preventing black Americans from ever becoming truly free.”
-From THE REAL HISTORY OF AMERICA by Thaddeus Flagg, published 2020
“News of the 13th amendment’s ratification was met with widespread celebration in the north, with triumphant newspaper editorials and impromptu street gatherings in more abolitionist areas. The Pennsylvanian Advocate, once owned by President Blaine, devoted its entire front page to declaring “SLAVE POWER BROKEN FOREVER” and covering in detail the amendment’s journey to ratification. Numerous northern politicians both Democrat and Whig gave interviews and speeches celebrating the outcome.
In a speech at the dedication of the Mount Vernon National Cemetery [8], President Blaine joined in the celebrations. “A great victory has been won for the cause of liberty. New inspiration has been given to the powers of self-help in both races, and the influence of this force will grow greater and bear richer fruit with the coming years. The work begun by General Washington and the multitudes of brave soldiers buried here over the generations has been advanced once more. The will of the nation, speaking with the voice of battle and through the amended constitution, has fulfilled the great promise of 1776 by proclaiming ‘liberty throughout the land to all the inhabitants thereof.’”
The south was decidedly less excited. Senator Wade Hampton III of South Carolina, long a proponent of white supremacy, called the 13th amendment “an affront to the natural order,” and accused President Blaine of “seeking to destroy the system so beneficial to the negro race, the system of slavery, and foment a slave insurrection like the one suppressed in 1879.” In Louisiana, Francis T. Nicholls, a congressman, was arrested by the National Guard for attempting to organize a secessionist militia. Some planters vowed never to free their slaves, with one declaring in a letter to the Southern Recorder that “they will have to send the whole of the army to my plantation if they want to steal my lawful property. This is a vile perversion of the constitution.”
Governor John M. Stone of Mississippi lamented the amendment but vowed that “we may be forced to adhere to the letter, but I will find every way to break its spirit.” Under Stone, the Mississippi legislature convened a constitutional convention that approved a host of new and restrictive amendments. Poll taxes and literacy tests were required for prospective voters, but exemptions were granted to all those eligible to vote before April 18th, the date of the amendment’s ratification, and all of their descendants. This conveniently excluded all of the soon-to-be-free blacks. Unemployment, debt, and petty crimes like theft were made felonies in a series of 1884 laws, but blacks almost always were the only ones charged with felonies. Felonies were also made punishable by penal labor, and these convict laborers could be leased out by the state to private businesses. A law was also passed allowing planters to hold each slave accountable for the cost of their food and shelter, effectively rendering most freedmen debtors. Stone was heralded by many of his southern peers as “the savior of the south” and many other southern states moved to follow the ‘Mississippi model.’
These efforts to undermine the 13th amendment did not go unnoticed in the north. President Blaine and Speaker Garfield met with Whig lawmakers to gauge their support for civil rights laws protecting the freedmen from discrimination. However, the Whig majorities in the House and Senate had been much reduced in the 1882 elections [9], and while a majority of the House was supportive of federal civil rights protections, any such bill was all but guaranteed to die in the Senate at the hands of Democrats and conservative Whigs. Blaine and Garfield decided that even attempting to pass such a law would sacrifice too many Whig congressmen and Senators, so they backed off from their efforts. The 13th amendment may have been ratified, but nothing had been done to stop southern elites from rushing to codify the previously de-facto white supremacy they had come to take for granted…”
-From SLAVER'S LEGACY: AMERICA'S RACIAL FAILINGS by Rachel Philips, published 2018
[1] Hinds, famous OTL for being elected to Congress from Arkansas and then assassinated in 1868 by the Klan, settled in Minnesota for a time. TTL, he stays there.
[2] Henry du Pont, OTL a commander in the Delaware state militia who rounded up supposedly pro-secession militiamen and leaders, including future Senator Thomas Bayard Sr.
[3] Pendleton was defeated in 1880, and first elected in 1874.
[4] Though he opposed many reconstruction measures, OTL Bramlette believed slavery was doomed and supported the 13th amendment.
[5] OTL, McClurg ended his career as a Radical Republican but up until just before the Emancipation Proclamation, he owned slaves.
[6] OTL Birmingham.
[7] OTL, the two fought a bitter primary battle for Congress. TTL, that doesn’t happen, and they become allies instead.
[8] TTL, Mount Vernon is preserved as a national cemetery, as Arlington isn’t confiscated because Virginia is a Union state.
[9] 177-152 in the House, 41-31 in the Senate.
“President Blaine’s paramount objective was securing the approval and ratification of the proposed thirteenth amendment, which would abolish slavery in the United States. After Seward was able to strike a death blow against slavery during the Civil War by banning slavery in the territories, it had grown weaker and weaker. Five southern states had passed constitutional amendments gradually abolishing slavery, and the Red Delta massacres had inflamed northern opinion against it. Shortly after his inauguration, Blaine called a special session of Congress for the purpose of drafting such an amendment.
In crafting such an amendment, first its proponents had to consolidate their various visions into a single proposal that was moderate enough to secure ratification. Initial drafts written by radicals such as Minnesota Congressman James Hinds [1] called for an immediate end to slavery without compensation, and guaranteed citizenship to all Americans regardless of race. However, backroom discussions with moderate Whigs and northern Democrats revealed that such an amendment would assuredly fail to even be approved by Congress, let alone ratified by the requisite 27 states. Instead, many Whigs united behind the draft written by Senator James Wilson of Iowa, which proposed that slavery be abolished over a 10-year period, with “just compensation” paid to each slaveholder.
As slavery was increasingly untenable, most northern Democrats emerged strongly in support of Wilson’s proposal, while they resisted the “radicalism” of Hinds’s version. While Whig Congressman Samuel Randall called Hinds a “race agitator,” New York Senator Samuel Tilden expressed his opinion that blacks were “not ready for the burden of citizenship and civic duty.” Hinds and his fellow radicals, on the other hand, criticized Wilson’s draft as a “half measure.” They were right, but as Wilson, himself a strong supporter of equal rights, explained, “even tiny steps forward still count as stepping forward – we must take what we can get and not abandon the fight because it cannot be won in a single blow.”
Still, intraparty negotiations dragged on throughout May and June. Finally, President Blaine and Speaker Garfield, who had kept themselves removed from negotiations, felt compelled to intervene. Blaine met personally with Hinds and implored him to “put aside [his] grievances” to secure the compromise. Garfield, meanwhile, alternately met with other radicals to persuade them to support the Wilson draft and threatened to remove them from top committees. Blaine’s occasional rival Roscoe Conkling, a strong supporter of abolition and king of New York patronage, was enlisted to use the promise of patronage positions to get northern Democrats on board. He was even given tacit approval to bribe the most recalcitrant ones.
Finally, through this combination of persuasion, bribery, and threats, Blaine, Garfield, and Conkling assembled enough of a House majority to guarantee the Wilson amendment’s passage. On July 6th, the House voted 207-88 to approve the 13th amendment, and the Senate was to vote the next week. Ahead of the vote, Senators Tilden and du Pont [2] announced their support for the amendment, but Blaine, Conkling, and William Mahone estimated that they were still two votes shy. With every northern Senator [3] aligned in support, the focus fell on Thomas Bramlette of Kentucky [4] and Joseph W. McClurg of Missouri [5]. Bramlette was a conservative Whig who believed slavery was in a “terminal decline” but was worried that the Kentucky state house would deny him reelection. McClurg, a moderate Democrat, had similar fears. Blaine promised to appoint Bramlette to the next Supreme Court opening should he lose reelection, while promising McClurg to provide federal funds for a plethora of Missouri canals and railroads that McClurg could sell to his allies back home.
With these final two votes secured, the stage was set for the Senate vote on July 14th. Every Senator from a confederate state voted against, while every Senator from a northern state voted in favor. The outcome was determined by the upper south, with six Senators from those five states voting in favor, and four voting against. Just one Senator changing his vote would have defeated the amendment. As it was, the 13th amendment was approved by the Senate by the barest of majorities: 48-24, exactly two thirds of the chamber. Now, the amendment went to the states for ratification, where 27 of the 36 states were required.
…Illinois was the first state to ratify the 13th amendment, doing so on September 5th, 1882. The next day, Rhode Island and Michigan followed suit and by the end of October, every northern state had voted for ratification. It hinged upon Delaware, Maryland, Virginia, Kentucky, Missouri, and either Tennessee or North Carolina to ratify the amendment. Delaware was the first southern state to ratify, doing so on February 9th, 1883. Virginia did so a week later, after a heavy lobbying campaign from Governor Riddleberger. Missouri, Maryland, and Kentucky all ratified the amendment on the same day, February 23rd. Just a single slave state was needed to ratify the amendment for it to be added to the constitution.
With North Carolina’s rejection of the amendment, it all hinged on Tennessee, where President Blaine was mobilizing every resource that he had at his disposal to induce the state legislature to ratify…”
-From CHAINS BROKEN, CHAINS SHACKLED by Edward Northam, published 2011
“Tennessee was in the midst of a transition from an agrarian, plantation-based economy to one fueled by railroads, commerce, and mining. Eastern Tennessee became prosperous during the 1870s from expanded coal and iron mining, turning an already Whig-friendly region into a stronghold of the party, where Whig candidates routinely won elections with upwards of 60% of the vote. The rise of east Tennessee’s industrial economy pulled Nashville in the same direction, as railroads headed west from Chattanooga used Nashville to send ore to western markets, while goods headed east to Georgia or Alabama stopped at Nashville en route to Atlanta or Elyton [6].
Meanwhile, western Tennessee remained rooted in the old plantation economy. Nathan Bedford Forrest had made Memphis his slave trading headquarters, and eleven slaves were killed in the region during a spillover of the Red Delta massacres in 1879. The state was heavily divided between east and west, with Nashville and the center caught in the middle. Postmaster-General Leonidas C. Houk was, before entering President Blaine’s cabinet, a powerful Whig congressman from eastern Tennessee who dominated the state Whig party with his ally, Governor Jacob Thornburgh [7]. Thornburgh supported the 13th amendment but faced a Democratic-controlled state house. Within the Democratic majority, there existed divisions between conservative planters and modernizing businessmen from central Tennessee and Memphis. Blaine, Houk, and Thornburgh sought to exploit these divisions and force ratification through the state house.
Blaine authorized Houk to promise patronage positions and large sums of federal internal improvements money to state legislators if they voted for ratification, and Governor Thornburgh held dozens of meetings with lawmakers, urging them to support ratification. In mid-March, President Blaine undertook a speaking tour in support of the amendment through central Tennessee, with a stop at Memphis. While Blaine gave a speech in Memphis, the second son of a local planter pulled out a pistol and attempted to shoot him. Both shots missed, one grazing Congressman William Moore’s hat. Blaine continued his speech, closing by imploring the audience to “write [their] duly elected representative to the esteemed General Assembly of Tennessee and urge them” to vote for ratification.
The assassination attempt helped increase support for ratification within the legislature, and Thornburgh estimated that they had a bare majority to ratify the amendment with. Finally, after a lengthy battle, the state of Tennessee ratified the 13th amendment by a margin of just three votes on April 18th, 1883. Within ten years, every man, woman, and child still in bondage in the United States would be set free. But the struggle for equal rights was only just beginning…”
-From THE NEW SOUTH by Edgar Brent, published 1989
“The long-overdue emancipation of enslaved Americans was yet another instance of a half measure that merely pretended to solve the problem. Did every slave go free by the time 1893 rolled around? Yes, it was constitutionally mandated. But each slaver, each person who claimed the ‘right’ to own their fellow human beings, was paid by the government for giving up their so-called property. American taxpayers were put on the hook for bribing racists to part with their human chattel. This was, shamefully, necessary to secure the amendment’s ratification and I would rather evil men receive a small reward if there is a much greater good deed being accomplished at the same time.
The other problem with the 13th Amendment, the much more severe problem, is that it contains no protections for the newly freed people. James Hinds proposed enshrining their citizenship in the amendment, but he was shouted down by moderates in congress who were too preoccupied with expediency to concern themselves with human rights. We know that Blaine had authorized the dispensation of patronage jobs and even bribe money to win support for the amendment. If he had these resources at his disposal, why not use them to force through a more radical version? Blaine’s own memoirs mention that he preferred Hinds’s version, but that he, like many of his moderate allies, was obsessed with expediting the process and avoiding a long legislative battle. This is cowardice.
So, rather than fight hard and use underhanded tactics, Blaine and his allies put forward something that only addressed the surface level problem but didn’t even touch the deep roots of systemic racism in the United States. Then, when there was ample evidence that abolition wouldn’t be enough and that southern states would preserve a form of slavery in everything-but-name, Blaine and Garfield could have gotten something through congress, but they valued their congressional majorities more than human rights. The door was open for every slave state and quite a few free states to pass a slew of laws preventing black Americans from ever becoming truly free.”
-From THE REAL HISTORY OF AMERICA by Thaddeus Flagg, published 2020
“News of the 13th amendment’s ratification was met with widespread celebration in the north, with triumphant newspaper editorials and impromptu street gatherings in more abolitionist areas. The Pennsylvanian Advocate, once owned by President Blaine, devoted its entire front page to declaring “SLAVE POWER BROKEN FOREVER” and covering in detail the amendment’s journey to ratification. Numerous northern politicians both Democrat and Whig gave interviews and speeches celebrating the outcome.
In a speech at the dedication of the Mount Vernon National Cemetery [8], President Blaine joined in the celebrations. “A great victory has been won for the cause of liberty. New inspiration has been given to the powers of self-help in both races, and the influence of this force will grow greater and bear richer fruit with the coming years. The work begun by General Washington and the multitudes of brave soldiers buried here over the generations has been advanced once more. The will of the nation, speaking with the voice of battle and through the amended constitution, has fulfilled the great promise of 1776 by proclaiming ‘liberty throughout the land to all the inhabitants thereof.’”
The south was decidedly less excited. Senator Wade Hampton III of South Carolina, long a proponent of white supremacy, called the 13th amendment “an affront to the natural order,” and accused President Blaine of “seeking to destroy the system so beneficial to the negro race, the system of slavery, and foment a slave insurrection like the one suppressed in 1879.” In Louisiana, Francis T. Nicholls, a congressman, was arrested by the National Guard for attempting to organize a secessionist militia. Some planters vowed never to free their slaves, with one declaring in a letter to the Southern Recorder that “they will have to send the whole of the army to my plantation if they want to steal my lawful property. This is a vile perversion of the constitution.”
Governor John M. Stone of Mississippi lamented the amendment but vowed that “we may be forced to adhere to the letter, but I will find every way to break its spirit.” Under Stone, the Mississippi legislature convened a constitutional convention that approved a host of new and restrictive amendments. Poll taxes and literacy tests were required for prospective voters, but exemptions were granted to all those eligible to vote before April 18th, the date of the amendment’s ratification, and all of their descendants. This conveniently excluded all of the soon-to-be-free blacks. Unemployment, debt, and petty crimes like theft were made felonies in a series of 1884 laws, but blacks almost always were the only ones charged with felonies. Felonies were also made punishable by penal labor, and these convict laborers could be leased out by the state to private businesses. A law was also passed allowing planters to hold each slave accountable for the cost of their food and shelter, effectively rendering most freedmen debtors. Stone was heralded by many of his southern peers as “the savior of the south” and many other southern states moved to follow the ‘Mississippi model.’
These efforts to undermine the 13th amendment did not go unnoticed in the north. President Blaine and Speaker Garfield met with Whig lawmakers to gauge their support for civil rights laws protecting the freedmen from discrimination. However, the Whig majorities in the House and Senate had been much reduced in the 1882 elections [9], and while a majority of the House was supportive of federal civil rights protections, any such bill was all but guaranteed to die in the Senate at the hands of Democrats and conservative Whigs. Blaine and Garfield decided that even attempting to pass such a law would sacrifice too many Whig congressmen and Senators, so they backed off from their efforts. The 13th amendment may have been ratified, but nothing had been done to stop southern elites from rushing to codify the previously de-facto white supremacy they had come to take for granted…”
-From SLAVER'S LEGACY: AMERICA'S RACIAL FAILINGS by Rachel Philips, published 2018
[1] Hinds, famous OTL for being elected to Congress from Arkansas and then assassinated in 1868 by the Klan, settled in Minnesota for a time. TTL, he stays there.
[2] Henry du Pont, OTL a commander in the Delaware state militia who rounded up supposedly pro-secession militiamen and leaders, including future Senator Thomas Bayard Sr.
[3] Pendleton was defeated in 1880, and first elected in 1874.
[4] Though he opposed many reconstruction measures, OTL Bramlette believed slavery was doomed and supported the 13th amendment.
[5] OTL, McClurg ended his career as a Radical Republican but up until just before the Emancipation Proclamation, he owned slaves.
[6] OTL Birmingham.
[7] OTL, the two fought a bitter primary battle for Congress. TTL, that doesn’t happen, and they become allies instead.
[8] TTL, Mount Vernon is preserved as a national cemetery, as Arlington isn’t confiscated because Virginia is a Union state.
[9] 177-152 in the House, 41-31 in the Senate.
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