WI: Lincoln and Johnson both die?

[Major Major]

I considered that situation (*koff* *koff*)

https://www.alternatehistory.com/forum/threads/in-new-rome.284570/

Right now I am adapting it into a novel, but I'm not well and it's hard going (I just got to the part where the USCT burned down three Boer villages because of the death of an officer . . . it's complicated).

 

[Mikestone8]

So we see that while states certainly could be frank about forbidding people to vote either for being black or for having been slaves or even for having any known slave ancestors unto the tenth generation, if we have no 15th Amendment, in doing so they would be giving the Republican controlled Congress an open and shut case for slashing back their Congressional representation accordingly. Also do not forget (or you might not have been acquainted with this Constitutional commonplace, being British I see) that a state's Presidential electoral votes also depend on Congressional seats; each seat removed reduces their EV by one vote, the total, a minimum of three, being equal to the number of representatives plus the standard two Senators per state.

I am perfectly aware of all this.

Indeed, it is one of history's little jokes that the principal effect of Radical Reconstruction (except in the *very* long term) was to allow the White South to get the best of both worlds. Sec 2 of the 14th Amendment - which could have been enforced far more easily than the 15th - was never enforced, presumably because it was seen as having been superseded by the 15th. However, since the 15th was unenforceable, the practical effect of this was to enable them to keep their increased Congressional (and hence Electoral College) representation while still effectively denying their Blacks the vote. So, arguably, they had cause to thank Stevens, Sumner et al for saving them from a false step.

I suspect, however, that in practice it wouldn't have been quite as "all or nothing" as that. Literacy or other tests could have been rigged in such a way as to disfranchise perhaps half the Black population of LA, MS and SC, thus opening the way for some reduction in their representation, but less drastic. In other Southern States it would have sufficed to disfranchise a smaller proportion than that. After all, outright disfranchisement mostly waited for the turn of the century. Before that, most Southern States were ready to let Blacks go on voting in elections, just so long as they didn't do so in sufficient numbers as to actually win. I think you are underestimating just how much low cunning the South was capable of.

 

[sloreck]

The reality is that for most federal elections (President, Representatives), even if ALL of the black men voted it would still only represent a relatively small bump for the Republicans. In someplace like South Carolina, you could theoretically see >50% of the Representatives being black. The key thing is state and local officials. It is the state legislature that draws the house districts for federal representation (as well as state legislatures) and even in a place like South Carolina some creative Gerrymandering can severely limit the number of black Representatives. With restriction of franchise and Gerrymandering you end with with state legislatures where the Republican/black representation is rendered impotent. Don't forget that at this point in time Senators are elected by the state legislatures, so if the Democrats/whites control the state legislature you won't see any black senators. Furthermore, on the even more local level by restricting the franchise you prevents blacks from becoming sheriffs, judges, mayors, city cou8ncilmen etc so that the day to day life of the freed African-Americans has no relief.

While reducing the electoral vote percentage of the south by 5-10% is not completely inconsequential, the reality is that if 25-26% of the electoral vote is going to be Democrat, that means that if the Democrats get 30% of the electoral votes in states outside of the "solid south" they win.

 

[Shevek23]

I think you are underestimating just how much low cunning the South was capable of.

This is why I write such long posts; I like to nail down every possibility. It was my intention as writing it to stress how in fact Jim Crow was allowed to bypass both amendments--and via draconian and grossly biased justice practices use the 13th Amendment loophole for involuntary servitude as a punishment for crime largely evade that one too--which plays neatly into disfranchisement exempt from the 14th amendment representation discount process too since that amendment also says denial of franchise for crime is OK. Rereading your posts it could be read as meaning "better for the South in the long run (and hence the nation)" in that paradoxically, without the grandiose attempt to sweepingly impose universal franchise in one fell but evadable swoop, the grassroots process of fighting the suffrage battles back and forth in the context of the 14th Amendment alone might have concretely led to more tenacious AA enfranchisement--maybe a lot less in the Reconstruction heyday, but the fraction winning it then don't ever lose it and it just expands gradually instead of Jim Crow shoving all Reconstruction gains back. Possibly this is what you meant.

But frankly I read what you wrote as a plain endorsement of the dominant culture assumption, as history was rewritten by Causers and white supremacists, exemplified by the narrative of DW Griffith's Birth of a Nation, that the USA is basically a white man's country, that the national as well as sectional interest involves prioritizing the interests of the privileged first because in this generally hierarchical world view, elites shall always rule and the rest of us just live to serve in the world they generously or meanly, wisely or foolishly, fashion with their inevitable and natural power. In American context this means de facto white supremacy whatever the fashionability of explicit racism as an ideology; "whites" being first overall the majority, second in possession of a disproportionate share of economic and cultural capital; for others to prosper they must be suitably deferential and pleasing and I read your repeated remarks as a prophecy that African Americans actually getting and keeping the vote would be impossible and therefore striving seriously for it, bad.

I think otherwise. I think it was in the cards in the Reconstruction era to permanently deal in African Americans as regular players in American democracy on the same basis as say American Roman Catholics were eventually normalized. It might have been tactically smarter to just stop with the 14th and 13th Amendments, maybe.

Heck in his inspiring and humane Malê Rising TL Jonathan Edelstein left the freedmen with a surviving Lincoln and no Reconstruction Amendments whatsoever (or maybe just the 13th, I'd have to reread it) and no sustained Federal Reconstruction regime stretching into the latter part of the 1870s either. Reconstruction, insofar as it was a Federal project, was finished before Lincoln's second term ended. OTOH, the state of South Carolina had been taken early by Union power with the heavy assistance of organized self-liberating slave insurgency which ruled on the ground afterward and postwar, took over the SC government with black majority rule. SC never looks back and can defend itself from being terrorized into doing so; AA populations in North Carolina also enjoyed a certain detente. Lacking the paper defenses of OTL African American and their allies fought for civil rights in a long hard slog on the ground, winning results comparable to OTL 1960s by the 1920s.

But the question for this thread is what is the outcome of removing Andrew Johnson, and I think it would be basically good. It is possible for Reconstruction to implode as ingloriously as OTL or even worse, but the more important factor is the resolve of leadership. Johnson occupying the White House frittered away crucial years with inconclusive policy and forced the Radicals later to compensate for damage that a different President would avoid in the first place. With the Radicals having a place at the table and I believe the right on their side, I think we can assume results no worse than OTL overall and quite possibly measurably or even radically much better.

I am defining "good" from a point of view of American mass democracy and the fuller integration of the positive potentials of our humanistic optimism of course, not that of elites disdainful of the masses in any case.
---
Meanwhile if you think it did not occur to me that Jim Crow sophistry and ruthlessness would be just as bad without the 15th Amendment as with it, you missed my whole essential point. Which is that the documents don't matter nearly as much as the will, intentions and resolve of the US governmental leadership in this crucial years. True friends of the formerly repressed classes of the south--who were not all black by any means--could, working with them in good faith, leave the states, or enough of them to serve as bastions for the eventual saving of the others anyway, on a basis of solid and self-perpetuating universal suffrage democracy. Enough such friend of the people states in the South, and the subterfuges of the others in denying democracy would first of all be shown as no inevitable outcome of the mere presence of African Americans in great numbers, second the populist Southern states would cooperate with progressive or merely justice oriented interest in the north to put the Jim Crow states in the dock, and at least exact the ruling that what they were doing was undemocratic and also wrong even if the leverage might be lacking to actually compel change for some time. I think the basic dynamic would be for the Jim Crow states to stumble one by one into more radical democracy and once purged of Bourbon style leadership by its own process, never relapse at least not to the extent of suppressing the effective vote of the majority ever again. Eventually the holdout hellholes would be glaringly out of step as such and dealt with on a Federal level, with the support and probably useful advice or even under the major leadership of other Southern states.

It is a matter of whether the Republicans, to be concrete, had any intention of making Lincoln's brave and resounding words at Gettysburg live or not. They were a spectrum of different people; some did, some did not. If we assume the radioactive decay of the inspiring new party with its powerful mandate based on a superior integration of American values into the the poisoned lead of a party of the plutocracy in the Gilded Age was inevitable, then there was a short window of time in which the "golden" aspects of Republicanism, the high idealism rooted in a view that held this to be the proper heritage of all common humanity, might have accomplished the alchemy of laying a sustainable basis for mass and universal democracy in the Southern states before the two parties returned to the sordid business as usual. That is what I would put some hope in, not some proper alchemical formula for the right paper reforms, in this case.

Whereas the repeated apparent hostility your quotes seemed to plainly express against the feasibility or relevance of AA franchise struck me as a product of understandings shaped entirely by that crass system.

 

[Shevek23]

The reality is that for most federal elections (President, Representatives), even if ALL of the black men voted it would still only represent a relatively small bump for the Republicans. In someplace like South Carolina, you could theoretically see >50% of the Representatives being black.

Only in South Carolina and Mississippi were the African Americans the majority--but they were a pretty large majority in SC! Over 60 percent. If their voting were as large a share of population as the whites, everything you say about the power of the state government would boomerang right around to make white people and Democrats the ones shut out of power in South Carolina!

Furthermore everything you write here is premised on the assumption that all whites are irrevocably opposed to all blacks and vice versa, that it is a zero sum game. That is the narrative the Redeemers wished to push, that the Causer mythology much beloved by such people as Woodrow Wilson generations later peddled. But the historic facts do not bear it out very well! Now in South Carolina that might have been more the way of things, but in general in the South I think enough common grounds between certain substantial sectors of "whites" and the majority of African Americans could have been the basis of a self-sustaining political alliance which over time would soften and dissolve much of the social repulsion that would make the alliance initially a bit awkward. In fact I suspect we drastically underestimate the potential for positive embrace between some white and some black people offsetting those repelling norms even before crass self interest calculations come into play.

...the reality is that if 25-26% of the electoral vote is going to be Democrat, that means that if the Democrats get 30% of the electoral votes in states outside of the "solid south" they win.

Isn't it interesting then that OTL, where there was no discount of Southern Congressional delegations nor EV whatsoever so the figures are starker still against the Republicans, in fact it was the latter party that held the upper hand; just two Presidents serving two terms each for a grand total of 8 years of Democratic presidencies existed between 1860 and 1933, a lifetime. And the election of Woodrow Wilson in 1912 was something of a fluke caused by a severe feud within the Republican party, or the Republicans would have held in that year too, and thus probably in 1916 as well.

So you explain why the Democrats did not rule this era and Republicans did? There was a window of opportunity arguably for the Solid South tipping the balance in unfair favor of Democrats, after the political revolution of the Depression/New Deal set up a brand new system--but plainly FDR's landslide victories were the outcome of solid and honest majorities outside the South, and by the time he was dead and contests subsided to more normal rules, Harry Truman faced this very region organizing against him, successfully capturing some EV--and still won in 1948 with a solid EV majority despite this erosion, and a solid popular vote plurality. Then the Republicans returned, in the popular form of Dwight Eisenhower, and the Solid South began to erode as even some states below the Mason-Dixon line cast their EV for him. When the Democrats came back, it was when Lyndon Johnson was willing and able to whack Jim Crow some mortal blows--racism survives, suppression of votes of people of color is a thing, but by and large, everyone has the right to vote nowadays and the special advantage you point so direly to as naturally falling to the white supremacists is now gone, or anyway has a different form and a different regional bastion.

My notions that Reconstruction was not doomed to fall as short of its goals as it did OTL meanwhile is based on the idea that successful populist governments in the South would naturally and normally be factions mixing black and white partisans, not a simple race divide. By race divide, African Americans lose of course. The key point is that true democrats would not see African Americans as alien others but as part of the working class and as entitled to a fair place at the table as anyone, and more than some who get it.

 

[Mikestone8]

Whereas the repeated apparent hostility your quotes seemed to plainly express against the feasibility or relevance of AA franchise struck me as a product of understandings shaped entirely by that crass system.

They are shaped by the fact that as late as Nov 1864, 44% of *Northern* voters cast their ballots for a party which was willing to let the South keep *slavery* itself (never mind about suffrage) if they would simply return to the Union, and that in 1867/8 electorates in Northern states were still rejecting Black suffrage. It's also significant that the Republicans didn't put the 15A to the vote until the lame-duck session of 1869, after the presidential election was safely out of the way. They knew what a hot potato this was.

It is all very well to dislike Andrew Johnson. Who doesn't these days? He wasn't a particularly nice man. But I don't see how removing him changes things in any fundamental way. There will still be some willingness to prevent the more blatant forms of re-enslavement (until the North has had a few years to get bored with the subject) and to prevent prominent ex-Rebs from just retaining power as though nothing had ever happened (until ditto) and without his encouragement the South may indeed be more compliant - for a year or two. But then what? White Southerners are bound to "get their breath back" sooner or later, after which things are little different from OTL, as the North rapidly loses interest. Note that it was a *Republican* Congress which in 1872 lifted most of the political disqualifications imposed on former Rebs by Section 3 of the 14A - and also that several Southern states had already been "redeemed" in spite of these restrictions.

As to Populism, it might indeed have fared better w/o Black suffrage, as the Bourbons cannot raise the bogeyman of "negro rule". But in that situation would the Populists have any incentive to raise the issue? After all, the Progressives never did.