I wanted to get the next update out before I left for DC tomorrow, so here it is. Not sure how satisfied with it I am and I welcome suggestions to improve it.
Part Sixty-Nine: Rolling Back the Rights
The Battle for Capitol Hill:
While Lee was a fairly effective leader and handled the machinations of Congress well to get his legislative goals passed, Burnside was far less effective at dealing with Congress. Part of the difficulty that President Burnside had with Congress came from his antagonization of Speaker of the House James G. Blaine. Blaine wanted to repeal some of the more radical policies regarding the South and civil rights that had been passed by the Fremont and Lee administrations. Blaine was also a supporter of some of the proposals that the growing Nativist contingent in Congress made. This political antagonism developed into a personal dislike between the two men, which greatly hindered Burnside's influence in the House of Representatives.
President Burnside also had difficulties ensuring that the laws that the administration passed continued to be enforced. The best example of this was the struggle to enforce the Civil Rights Act of 1877. Passed by Congress during Lee's term and signed by Burnside as one of his first acts as President, the Civil Rights Act of 1877 set out to enforce the implication of the Fox v. Bennett decision and uphold the rights of people who were American citizens by birth. However, Burnside also did not take much confidence in himself to his presidency, continuously doubting in private whether he was fir for the job. Because of this, he kept many of Lee's Cabinet appointments who were ineffective at their positions, such as Attorney General Edwards Pierpont. Pierpont and others failed to adequately enforce the federal legislation and it became the duty of the states to uphold the 1877 Civil Rights Act.
Lax Americana:
Burnside was also ineffective at ensuring that the United States government's policies were upheld by the states. Under Burnside's administration, some Southern states found ways to go around the civil rights acts that had been proposed during the Fremont and Lee administrations. Burnside did not make maintaining these policies a priority during his time in office and the policies gradually fell by the wayside. In Georgia and Mississippi, laws were passed mandating literacy tests for a person to be able to vote. These laws impeded many free blacks as well as poor, rural whites from voting.
Burnside attempted to pass laws through Congress and through executive orders which would ban the practices of literacy tests, poll taxes, and other methods of disenfranchising poor Southern voters. But under Burnside's administration, the policies were not enforced in the Southern states and the orders would be reversed in the next decade. As the Democratic Party returned to political office in many Southern states after the initial Republican gains right after the National War, the more lax approach of these politicians to enforcing the civil rights acts passed in Washington led to a gradual disenfranchisement of thousands in those states.
There will also probably be a lot more dialects and regions where immigrants' languages are still commonly used.