WI: John Wilkes Booths' Plot Works In Full

What if all the targets selected by John Wilkes Booth for assassination April 14, 1865 were taken out not simply President Lincoln? Secretary Seward and Vice-President Johnson are both also successfully assassinated.
 
Senator Lafayette Foster becomes Acting President. Unless the law is changed, there will be a Presidential election in 1865, which will presumably elect Grant.

This means that subsequent Presidential elections will take place in odd-numbered years, so that all Congressional elections will be "off year" ones. Not sure what the long term effects of that would be.

Also, Foster will need to summon Congress, so that an HoR Speaker can be chosen to provide a legal successor should anything happen to him. So wrt Reconstruction he won't have as much freedom of action as Andrew Johnson initially had. Probably he orders Coloured war veterans and literate Blacks to be enrolled as voters, which in turn most likely satisfies enough Congressional Republicans to allow the South to be readmitted. So there probably won't be a 15th Amendment, and possibly not even a Fourteenth.
 
If John Wilkes Booth's plan had succeeded in full, there would have been no restraints on the revenge-minded North.

There might have been be a virtual sacking of the South's major cities and a much more draconian reconstruction, with the seceded states placed under indefinite martial law. We might even see the Vietnamization of the United States - a guerrilla insurgency by the Confederates, with most of the country controlled by the Union with small pockets of resistance scattered throughout the land.

Remember, Lincoln wanted the rebel states brought back into the Union as quickly as possible, and he had told his cabinet and generals he wanted no reprisals or vengeful actions taken against the rebels, and it's possible had he not been assassinated things might have worked out for the better.
No less than the ex-Confederate President Jefferson Davis said in an interview many years later:
"Next to the destruction of the Confederacy, the murder of Abraham Lincoln was the worst disaster ever to befall the South." In this, he was undoubtably correct.
 
If John Wilkes Booth's plan had succeeded in full, there would have been no restraints on the revenge-minded North.

There might have been be a virtual sacking of the South's major cities and a much more draconian reconstruction, with the seceded states placed under indefinite martial law. We might even see the Vietnamization of the United States - a guerrilla insurgency by the Confederates, with most of the country controlled by the Union with small pockets of resistance scattered throughout the land.

Remember, Lincoln wanted the rebel states brought back into the Union as quickly as possible, and he had told his cabinet and generals he wanted no reprisals or vengeful actions taken against the rebels, and it's possible had he not been assassinated things might have worked out for the better.
No less than the ex-Confederate President Jefferson Davis said in an interview many years later:
"Next to the destruction of the Confederacy, the murder of Abraham Lincoln was the worst disaster ever to befall the South." In this, he was undoubtably correct.

Vietnam had superpower support and a regular army(NVA) while the South would have neither. Lee was right, a guerrilla war at that point would soon devolve into straight banditry and lose support even from the locals.
 
A lot of the poor whites in the South were getting sick of the war by 1865. Parts of the South (Appalachia) were already fighting a guerilla war--against the South. I don't see a guerilla war popping up unless the North acts as cartoonishly evil as in Birth of a Nation. Back in reality, that doesn't leave you a good base for a guerilla war, probably not much bigger than the original Ku Klux Klan and associates.
 
Exactly, if that would do it. Guerrilla wars aren't really successful without great power backing and a standing army. Without that you are reduced to banditry and that tends to lose you support in a hurry.
 
If John Wilkes Booth's plan had succeeded in full, there would have been no restraints on the revenge-minded North.

There might have been be a virtual sacking of the South's major cities and a much more draconian reconstruction, with the seceded states placed under indefinite martial law. We might even see the Vietnamization of the United States - a guerrilla insurgency by the Confederates, with most of the country controlled by the Union with small pockets of resistance scattered throughout the land.

Remember, Lincoln wanted the rebel states brought back into the Union as quickly as possible, and he had told his cabinet and generals he wanted no reprisals or vengeful actions taken against the rebels, and it's possible had he not been assassinated things might have worked out for the better.
No less than the ex-Confederate President Jefferson Davis said in an interview many years later:
"Next to the destruction of the Confederacy, the murder of Abraham Lincoln was the worst disaster ever to befall the South." In this, he was undoubtably correct.


Not even remotely likely.

The assassination of Lincoln, OTL, raised an outburst of horror which could not have been noticeably increased by the death of a not very popular Vice-President[1]. As I've said before on this point, you can't wet a river.

Also, Senator Foster was quite conservative in his views (he later became a Democrat) and most unlikely to go in for such extreme measures. Nor is there any reason to expect Grant to do so when he takes over.

[1] There is also Seward's death, of course, but iirc, at first he was not expected to live. It was quite a while before it became clear that he would survive. So at first the assassination was even OTL seen as a double murder.
 

Stolengood

Banned
I don't see a guerilla war popping up unless the North acts as cartoonishly evil as in Birth of a Nation.
The North wasn't depicted as "cartoonishly evil" in that film, surprisingly enough -- no, that was left to the film's Thaddeus Stevens expy and every single black character during the film's second half. Unbelievably, rancidly racist and cartoonish.

Gone with the Wind, on the other hand, DID present the North as "cartoonishly evil", if only to further glorify the antebellum and postbellum South. (Yes, I REALLY don't like either of those films' politics.)
 
One really delicious thought.

OTL, some of the Radicals viewed Lincoln's death as a blessing in disguise. Andrew Johnson had been fulminating against "treason" and declaring that "traitors must be impoverished", leading them to believe that he would be with them in supporting stern measures against the South.

OTL, of course, they were soon undeceived, but TTL this never happens. So could we get Thaddeus Stevens grieving over what a tragedy Johnson's death was, and armies of WIers writing threads about how much more successful Reconstruction would have been "if only" Johnson had survived? <g>
 
One really delicious thought.

OTL, some of the Radicals viewed Lincoln's death as a blessing in disguise. Andrew Johnson had been fulminating against "treason" and declaring that "traitors must be impoverished", leading them to believe that he would be with them in supporting stern measures against the South.

OTL, of course, they were soon undeceived, but TTL this never happens. So could we get Thaddeus Stevens grieving over what a tragedy Johnson's death was, and armies of WIers writing threads about how much more successful Reconstruction would have been "if only" Johnson had survived? <g>

You are quite correct at that, a lot of them thought Johnson would really beat up on the "planter aristocracy".
 
Not even remotely likely.

The assassination of Lincoln, OTL, raised an outburst of horror which could not have been noticeably increased by the death of a not very popular Vice-President[1]. As I've said before on this point, you can't wet a river.

Also, Senator Foster was quite conservative in his views (he later became a Democrat) and most unlikely to go in for such extreme measures. Nor is there any reason to expect Grant to do so when he takes over.

[1] There is also Seward's death, of course, but iirc, at first he was not expected to live. It was quite a while before it became clear that he would survive. So at first the assassination was even OTL seen as a double murder.
Yeah, but once evidence emerges that a Confederate Agent, who was "Acting on his own behalf" just killed the POTUS, VPOTUS, and SecWar....

No dice. The North is not going to buy "Oh, we didn't tell him to do that! We just funded him and were planning on kidnapping the POTUS" as a reasonable excuse.
 
Yeah, but once evidence emerges that a Confederate Agent, who was "Acting on his own behalf" just killed the POTUS, VPOTUS, and SecWar....

No dice. The North is not going to buy "Oh, we didn't tell him to do that! We just funded him and were planning on kidnapping the POTUS" as a reasonable excuse.


Sorry I don't follow.

Why should the deaths of Johnson and Seward (in addition to Lincoln) make such a "discovery" any more probable than the OTL death of Lincoln and near-death of Seward?
 
Why should the deaths of Johnson and Seward (in addition to Lincoln) make such a "discovery" any more probable than the OTL death of Lincoln and near-death of Seward?
Once is an accident, twice a coincidence, three times is enemy action.

3 VIPs being hit on the same night by "former" Confed agents? The public won't buy it.
 
Once is an accident, twice a coincidence, three times is enemy action.

3 VIPs being hit on the same night by "former" Confed agents? The public won't buy it.

Why would three have more impact than two? Everybody knew they'd gone after Seward a well as Lincoln. And it was soon learned that another man had gonne after Johnson, albeit unsuccessfully. So what's different from OTL? Lincoln's death will totally eclipse any others.
 
Why would three have more impact than two? Everybody knew they'd gone after Seward a well as Lincoln. And it was soon learned that another man had gonne after Johnson, albeit unsuccessfully. So what's different from OTL? Lincoln's death will totally eclipse any others.
The top three tiers of the US Goverment all getting hit on the same night, roughly the same time, all by former Confed agents after their surrender?

Why wouldn't it? And the idiot who went after Johnson doesn't even count, he was barely in the hotel at most.
 
The top three tiers of the US Goverment all getting hit on the same night, roughly the same time, all by former Confed agents after their surrender?

Why wouldn't it? And the idiot who went after Johnson doesn't even count, he was barely in the hotel at most.

He counted enough to be hanged along with the rest.

Within days of the assassination, everyone knew perfectly well that there been an attempt to decapitate the government. If all three succeed, that just means that they know it (at most) a day or two sooner.

And as already observed, the killing of Lincoln caused a colossal outpouring of grief and anger. Yet even this did not produce the violent reaction against the South that you apparently contemplate. Indeed both Grant and Sherman actively discouraged any such response. That being so, the simultaneous deaths of two [1] relatively minor figures will hardly bring it about.


[1] Three, if the death of Frederick Seward (the Assistant Secretary of State, killed OTL while defending his father against Lewis Payne's attack) is not butterflied away.
 
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