Had things gone according to plan, Andrew Johnson would have been assassinated on the same night as Abraham Lincoln. The man assigned to kill him, George Atzerodt, got cold feet and decided to get drunk instead OTL. If he had gone through it then by the law at the time Lincoln would have been succeeded by the President pro tempore of the Senate, Lafayette S. Foster. How would a Foster presidency have been different from OTL's Johnson?
WI: Andrew Johnson assassinated along with Lincoln?
- Thread starter Kablob
- Start date
According to the Presidential Succession Act at the time, Foster would only be President for a short while as election would have to be held in December of that year. I doubt Foster would be nominated by the Republican Party, so a Foster Presidency doesn't likely mean much beyond being caretaker for a while.
Who would they nominate then? I imagine it would be someone more agreeable on radical reconstruction than Johnson was, and I doubt whoever the Republicans nominated would lose.
Seward, maybe. I'd doubt that Grant can get ready with machine connections in time.
Well they might pass on Seward, seeing as how he did sort of just get stabbed.
I meant for the emergency election in December, he could very well have recovered by then.
He'd probably be President outright, but would just serve until the special election.
As for who would get nominated, probably Seward; he'll probably win too.
Don't see why that would be a problem.
And after all, if they don't nominate Grant, more than likely the Democrats will, and I can't see the GOP leadership risking that.
That would require Grant accepting the Democratic nomination; which I would say is ASB.
Why?
Grant wasn't particularly committed to the Republicans in 1865; he became so over time as he grew increasingly unhappy with Andrew Johnson's policies - which won't have happened TTL. And his only presidential vote so far has been for Buchanan in 1856, so he is presumably a Democrat insofar as he's anything politically. And he's probably wily enough to keep his options open just in case the Republicans get any silly ideas about nominating anyone else.
This doesn't sound like less of a disaster at all. A president who supports Johnson's policies but is significantly less personally abrasive potentially means no Radical Reconstruction. So no 14th and 15th Amendments, no Reconstruction governments in the South. As messy as Reconstruction was, Johnson's intransigence had a lot of beneficial effects, the main one being that it allowed the Radicals to take over the government for a few years and actually push through some really important stuff.
Ah, true. I think what I really meant was that the actual Presidency would have been less of a disaster, insofar as he wouldn't have been impeached, but yeah the later effects would have been really messy.
I doubt that after the war he'd be anything other then an ardent Republican, he was loyal to Lincoln and the administration and I doubt he'd betray them for the Democrats; who were against all of his own political ideals.
Not particularly ardent that I know of. He was probably leaning that way, but if they spurned him he might reconsider.
Anyway, whatever his private preference, why should he not keep options open just in case the Republicans were dopey enough to pass him by?
Well, I don't believe Grant had presidential aspirations had that point anyway; but I can't say for sure.