Union breaks it's promise at the end of the Civil War

Not Lincoln, not Andy Johnson, not Lafayette Foster.

Agreed. They would all need to die and the succession go over to the Speaker of the House. And the OTL speaker needs to die too. And then anyone with pragmatism in the cabinet needs to die too. Actually, the degree of people who need to die too in order to fulfill the requirement to have the North leadership do the OP's request means there is a crisis (like a cholera outbreak in DC) going on or the Lord really has inconvenient timing with his thunderbolts.
 
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Agreed. They would all need to die and the succession go over to the Speaker of the House.


Except that there wasn't one in April 1865. The old HoR had expired in March, and the new one didn't meet to choose a Speaker until December.

Not sure what they'd do in that situation. The best I can come up with is for someone to "discover" a message from the late POTUS summoning Congress into session, backdating it to when the POTUS was still alive, and forging his signature on it. Not very satisfactory, but needs must.
 
Yeah. Human stupidity always exists, though in this case for that to happen, you'd need to remove most of the union leaders at the time

Yeah... I don't see any other way the North does what the OP wants. Stupid humans is easy. Getting the specific OTL leaders to be stupid is hard, so they need to die to make it possible
 
Under Lincoln's plan, only political office holders, like Jefferson Davis, and people who mistreated Union POWs were to be prosecuted. I honestly can't see even a very aggressive president, such as Benjamin Butler, going further than this.
 

RousseauX

Donor
My really hot take is that Confederate guerrilla war forever was always really really overrated as a possibility, by 1865 or so the confederacy had lost 1/3 of its male population which was the same proportion nazi germany lost by 1945. The union had decisively physiologically broken the southern will to resist.

Are they really gonna give a shit if the union hangs bobby lee? Enough to risk getting killed again to get back at the yankees? The idea that confederate generals like lee were worshiped by 100% of all southerners during the war was mostly a myth constructed out of the lost cause and the southern historical society. I have my doubts.
 

Manman

Banned
You do know they were American citizens right? As much as people want to have revenge fantasies the USA wanted the war to be over and not end with a pissed out south, that may I remind you was to be welcomed back into the USA and become citizens again.

If you do this you can be sure that whatever griviances the south will have will be much worse than our world.
 
Here's my take. Booths plot is wildly more successful. The new president goes off the deep end and orders the arrest of R E Lee etc on capital crimes. He also annouces a program of repression/revenge against the South. On hearing this Grant and Sherman ask for volunteers from the AotP to march on Washington to restore the government. Grant winds up as president after accepting a call from Congress. Irregular? Sure it is but its going to take the political equivilant of an asteriod impact to achieve the OP scenario IMO
 
Even Skippy the ASB would have a hard time with that. Also when Lincoln was assassinated, the AoP had not been demobilized yet.
 
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