Radical! A Reconstruction WI

[loneranger]

POD: On April 15, 1865, John Wilkes Booth shoots and kills President Abraham Lincoln at Ford's Theater. George Atzerodt shoots and kills Vice President Andrew Johnson at the Kirkwood House.

Under the Presidential Succession Act of 1792, President pro tempore Senator Lafayette Foster is then sworn in as the new President of the United States, and an election is set for December of 1865. Lafayette Foster decides not to run in said election, but Ulysses S. Grant (who is in D.C. at the time of the assassinations) decides to run for President and begins touring across the United States in preparation. Here's an excerpt from his wiki page where he apparently did this IOTL:

At the war's end, Grant remained commander of the army, with duties that included enforcement of Reconstruction in the former Confederate states and supervision of Indian wars on the western Plains.[204] Grant secured a house for his family in Georgetown Heights in 1865, but instructed Elihu Washburne that for political purposes his legal residence remained in Galena, Illinois.[205]That same year, Grant spoke at Cooper Union in New York, where the New York Times reported that "... the entranced and bewildered multitude trembled with extraordinary delight." Further travels that summer took the Grants to Albany, New York, back to Galena, and throughout Illinois and Ohio, with enthusiastic receptions.[206]

He was apparently immensely popular at the time. I know there's a lot of questions around getting him to being sworn in as President by March of 1866, but frankly I'm a bit more interested in how his Presidency starting three years earlier and the pushing ahead of Radical Reconstruction would look.

Cheers!

 

[Mikestone8]

It may be already largely sorted by the time Grant takes office.

If anything happens to Foster, he has no legal sucessor, so he's likely to recall Congress in order to remove that danger.

If so the Civil Rights and Freedmens Bureau Bills are probably passed almost a year earlier, and Foster is most unlikely to veto them as Johnson did. There may also be something like the 14th Amendment, though TTL the Black Codes won't have happened yet, nor will the South have yet elected all those prominent Rebs to Congresss, so the punitive third Section may not be included.

If it's known from the start that ratification of this Amendment, as well as the 13th, is a requirement for readmission, the South may well comply, in which case Congress in its turn may readmit them w/o feeling the need to pick up the hot potato of Black suffrage.