A House United: America in the Civil War and Beyond

DensleyBlair: Indeed you can never stress just how harmful Johnson was in turning Reconstruction into a painful farce not only his own actions but radicalising Republicans (I'm sure many were simply looking for the excuse). Lincoln is much more adept than Johnson but we're not out of the wood's yet.

The KKK do have an in-game event jumping up militancy (actually forgot to add the event image to the update). I'll get into general Dixie unrest more in the next update as they react to the Enforcement Act. Could the Klan act in D.C.? Not specifically, its safe to say most were ordinary men, mainly veterans with an axe to grind locally who had little interest in a grand strategy or even their own leaders. The First Klan though obviously much more violent do remind me a bit of the EDL!

Sigsmund: Cheers

Sandino: You'll have to wait and see...

Zorro: Remember we're less than 3 years past a rebellion that saw the South curb-stomped. Reactionary revolts don't tend to focus on logic though do they?

Dr. Gonzo: Thanks. Yes there is still a rocky road ahead and remember once Lincoln goes, many of those Radical Congressmen will still be there.

99KingHigh: I thought so too

Seelmeister: Thanks I hope you catch up and stick around.


DensleyBlair: Thank you its a real honour you felt this AAR worthy so early into its run or at all. And a big thank you to all the readers who have encouraged it along the way.

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Right I'm brewing the in-game notes and research. Update hopefully this time tomorrow.

Nathan Madien said:

I'm glad the war is over. I'm really enjoying how you're imagining Lincoln's handling of Reconstruction, Jape. This is a marvelous AAR and it absolutely deserves to be honored.



Best Sentence Ever! :happy:

Click to expand...

Ha ha, why thank you.

Sorry for the delay folks, just finished the update it'll be up in a little while.

The Enforcement Act was an excellent riposte to white supremacist intransigence at the state level. With the 1866 mid-terms fast approaching, even the most stubborn Southern politicians were keen to avoid military rule and get their men back to Congress. In February Virginia and Mississippi were finally allowed to hold their state conventions, ratifying the Fourteenth Amendment with solid majorities born no doubt out of resignation. The ‘Rejecter’ states soon followed; Arkansas in March and North Carolina in April. Georgia, the epicentre of resistance and violence finally bowed as well in June, the convention in Atlanta heavily policed by Federal troops. The Act did nothing however for popular feeling in the South. Lincoln, though never loved in the region (save eastern Tennessee and northern Texas) had gained some respect for his opposition to the Radicals and his hands-off approach. Six states had reconstructed of their own accord. Enforcement shattered this image and brought back the caricature of the tyrant. The theoretical threat of martial law offended many but it was the secondary element of Enforcement, that of suspension of habeas corpus to hunt secret societies, that truly struck a nerve. Inaccurately dubbed the ‘Klan Act’, this part of the legislation was put into force extensively throughout the South. By 1868 over one hundred counties had been investigated. U.S. Marshals and the rapidly diminishing Federal garrisons could only cover so much ground, particularly as the vigilante groups could count on public silence, as often through intimidation as support.

In some states, primarily those with New Whig governments, the Federal authorities took on local help in the form of regulators. Effectively hired posses, they helped track groups like the Klan, sometimes to arrest other times simply to attack. In Alabama, Governor Patton looked the other way as Marshals quietly employed the Anti-Ku Klux in this manner. Across the north of the state, as Federal authorities made arrests by day, the AKK terrorised by night, assassinating and burning as they went. In Texas regulators acted of their own accord, bringing hogtied Klansmen to Army outposts or simply hanging them. This counter-insurgency strategy was hardly universal and certainly not official but it proved effective. By 1868 the Ku Klux Klan was effectively dead. Other less flamboyant groups still persisted however. Spontaneous lynchings of freedmen and intimidation of their white allies only grew in number as the mid-term elections approached. Unwilling to tempt the Enforcement Act, public efforts turned from riots to demonstrations. In Louisiana the Southern Cross threw away their hoods and began marching in force through the streets of New Orleans and Biloxi. In the Carolinas the respectable Honourable Veterans Association with planter backing took over numerous newspapers decrying the scalawags and Lincoln, effectively becoming the activist arm of the Democratic Party in the region.


When they came the Congressional elections proved chaotic. In the South the issue of Reconstruction was not just a political matter but a practical one. The Fourteenth Amendment had enfranchised millions of black and white Americans for the first time, vastly increasing the electoral roll. There were ‘irregularities’ across the board. Slander, bribery, administrative corruption and intimidation came from all quarters. In Georgia Democratic candidates’ names were marked with the symbol of the Republican Party, Abraham Lincoln, fooling possibly thousands of illiterate voters [1]. Ballots ran out in numerous places, while in New Orleans several hundred ballot boxes suspiciously fell into the river. In Virginia long-dead citizens came back to register. Despite the problems, violence for the most part was avoided. The Democrats secured the majority of southern seats. This was no real shock but much to the President’s annoyance many state Independents had, in light of popular opposition to Enforcement, taken up the Democratic mantle if only in name. It seemed hopes the New Whig alliance would expand to the federal level had been illusory. In Virginia however the Conservative Party, effectively New Whigs without the baggage, did win two seats [2]. The Republicans themselves did respectably in some areas, including with the election of John Willis Menard of Louisiana, the first African-American Congressman [3]. In the North meanwhile the Democrats managed only modest gains, leaving the Republican with a strong overall majority.

Although the troubles of the South were far from over, the mid-terms were a watershed. They had finally seen the rebel states brought back into the fold and peace, of a kind, won. The last two years of Lincoln’s term were to see economics and foreign policy take greater focus. By 1867 the wartime recession that had hit the United States was well and truly gone. Northern industry had, charged with supplying the world’s first total war effort, rebounded admirably and since Pensacola only expanded further. Protected behind high tariff walls, the European powers looked on with fear and wonder. Immigrants in their tens and soon hundreds of thousands flocked to the ‘Land of Opportunity’, providing the fuel for America’s tremendous economic expansion. The South, though many didn’t like to admit it, gained from the carpetbaggers as new factories, bridges, canals and railways were built across the region en masse, binding the Union with steel. The Midwest had begun to makes it mark with new industrial cities like Chicago, Detroit and St. Louis expanding massively during the post-war era. Others had taken a different tack and ridden west to conquer the frontier. Lincoln’s two terms saw little actual conflict between Native Americans and the US government outside the prism of the Civil War however the sudden explosion in post-war pioneers combined with policies like freedmen settlement in Oklahoma would set the stage for the major Indian Wars of the 1870s.


In terms of foreign affairs Secretary of State Seward’s assassination not only neatly divides the period, between war and peace, Seward and Clay but indirectly caused the administration one of its greatest embarrassments. Secretary Clay prior to his appointment had been the ambassador to Russia. Though at home considered something of a fire breather, in St. Petersburg he had charmed the liberal Tsar Alexander II and brought their two nations closer together. As relations blossomed Seward and Clay had slowly laid the ground work for the purchase of Alaska. However the assassination had thrown these plans up in the air. Clay returned to Washington in early 1864 just as the showdown between Lincoln and Congress had begun. As part of the negotiations with the Radicals, the President, never above a little graft to grease the wheels, had handed the ambassadorship in Russia to Henry A. Smythe, a New York party man with experience in international trade [4]. Smythe promptly set about embarrassing himself at the Imperial court, drinking, womanising and having the foggiest clue about diplomacy. During the summer of 1864, Poland erupted in revolution prompting a brutal crackdown. Smythe in his brutal manner chastised the Russians as barbarous, proclaiming Americans would do no such thing. The insult and the irony taken, the Tsar officially exiled Smythe from the Russian Empire. His tenure had lasted nine weeks.

The Smythe Affair was a blow to US-Russian relations and the Democrats certainly made a meal of it but the fallout was yet to be realised. On April 4th 1866, Alexander II was shot by the revolutionary Dmitry Karakozov [5]. Following his death his son and arch-reactionary Alexander III took to the throne. Having been present during some of Smythe’s less impressive moments and taking a dim view of the liberal United States in general, he effectively closed the Alaska negotiations out of spite. The State Department had worked on the plan for almost a decade and though never a headline grabber the newspapers quickly jumped on ‘Clay’s Folly’. Eventually the artic colony was tossed away in 1874 to the British, a concession in a Central Asian border treaty [6]. Clay was to regain his standing however over the issue of Cuba. Following the violent restoration of the Carlist monarchy in 1861, the Spanish colonial authorities had cracked down on Cuban freedoms. High taxes, martial law and a censored press all led to growing unrest on the island, particularly amongst the eastern landowner elite who had been supplanted wholesale by the peninsulares [7]. The regime of Carlos VI had quickly lost popularity in Spain itself due to similar heavy-handedness and in late 1866 revolts broke out in Madrid and Barcelona, plunging the nation once more into civil war.


In January 1867 Manuel de Cespedes, one of Cuba’s wealthiest sugar barons, saw the time was right. Freeing his slaves and calling on them to join him he publicly read his nationalist manifesto in the town of Yara. The ‘Cry of Yara’ spread like lightning across the island and soon thousands took up arms in the name of independence. In the United States Cespedes’ republican and abolitionist goals stirred the hearts of many. The New York Journal proclaimed him ‘Cuba’s Washington’. Secretary Clay, a firm believer in self-determination for Europe’s American colonies, was particularly moved. He and like minded politicians established the Cuban-American Friendship Society, through which money and munitions flowed to the rebels. He also supported Cespedes through the government, denouncing Spanish barbarism and declaring the uprising in line with the Monroe Doctrine, granting the United States the right to intervene. In truth however the US Navy was a shambles, her most modern ships meant only for brown water service while the Army had returned to its pre-1861 footing. The support of the Friendship Society combined with the deteriorating position in Spain was very real. In March 1868 Cespedes and his men marched into Havana and proclaimed the Cuban Republic. Several weeks later King Carlos fled across the Pyrenees, leading the revolutionaries in Madrid to proclaim a republic of their own.

The new Spanish government was no more interested in a free Cuba than its predecessor however. Hearing word of preparations to retake the island, Clay acted quickly. Persuading Lincoln, he travelled to Havana and signed a treaty of protection with the now President Cespedes. Clay was quickly followed by a squadron of ironclads as warning to Spain. President Iglesia in Madrid was furious but dared not plunge his shattered nation into a transatlantic war. In February 1869, his last act as Lincoln’s Secretary of State, Clay would oversee the Treaty of Boston, recognising Cuban independence and protecting Spanish interests on the island as well as a US guarantee to Spanish rule in Puerto Rico. Though Washington denied Cespedes’ request for annexation of his island, in time it would see massive American investment and influence, binding the two nations together. The establishment of a free soil republic on the island most coveted by the old slave power imperialists of the 1850s was a fitting end to the administration. The Presidency had shattered Lincoln, the stress of war and reconstruction had turned him grey. On March 4th 1869, as his successor took the presidential oath, his wife Mary claimed to have seen him ‘lifted’, the weight of his task finally over.


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[1] This happened during the shambles that was the 1876 presidential election IOTL. I thought since Reconstruction is mellow ITTL, the Democrats might go for a (comparatively) subtle approach.
[2] OTL
[3] He was elected in 1868 IOTL
[4] People seem to forget Lincoln was a premier politician during the height of political corruption in American history. He didn’t dominate purely through determination and folksy rhetoric.
[5] Karakozov was a real nihilist revolutionary but was defeated when a peasant hatter knocked his elbow (possibly accidentally) as he fired.
[6] This is my convoluted excuse for why I never got Alaska. In-game I accidentally backed Poland during her uprising which saw my relations with Russia plummet. The Alaska Purchase event never popped up as I tried desperately to mend bridges. Then around 1874 I look up and the Brits have got it yet there was no war, does Britain have an Alaska Purchase event? Or maybe in my cack-handed modding I handed the event over to the UK?
[7] Spanish-born colonists.