WI Garfield lives!

Garfield's death in OTL spurred civil service reform. But even an unsuccessful attempt on his life would be enough to do this.

Whether Garfield would seek a second term in 1884 and if so whether he would win are hard to say--Gilded Age presidential elections were often *extremely* close, depending on a few thousand votes in New York.
 
Garfield had expressed a good deal of concern over the denial of black voting rights he witnessed in Louisiana in 1876. Seeing as how the Federal government could step in to protect citizens' right to vote, I think Garfield may have been more concerned about this than the ambivalent Mr. Arthur.

Plus, would Garfield have vetoed the Chinese Exclusion Act?
 
I don't think Garfield would have vetoed the Chinese Exclusion Act. Remember that in his acceptance leter to the Republican national convention in 1880, Garfield had written that Chinese immigration was "too much like an importation to be welcomed without restriction; too much like an invasion to be looked upon without solicitude." https://books.google.com/books?id=x8OggvKjZSgC&pg=PA200 He explicitly said that if negotiations with China failed to resolve the problem, Congress would have to act to restrict immigration.

Moreover, the forged "Morey letter" was an issue in the 1880 campaign. http://historynewsnetwork.org/article/8061 Garfield as president could not afford to do anything that might seem to vindicate the Democrats who claimed the letter was genuine.

True, the West Coast states where the Chinese issue was hottest did not have very many electoral votes, but nobody could be sure in advance that they might not be decisive in a close election. And even in other areas of the country, fear of the Chinese was real, if less intense.

As for the freedmen, all the Republican presidents of the late nineteenth century expressed sympathy with them--but it is questionable what was politically feasible to help them. There was certainly no widespread northern support for bringing back Reconstruction-style military intervention.
 
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