WI: Peace Dem wins in 1864, Atlanta and Savanna, and Columbia still fall.

[Lost the game]

Let's say that the Tennessee Campaign takes longer than OTL, and so the Siege of Atlanta begins a few weeks later than OTL. Consequently the Democrats nominate a Peace Dem like George Pendleton for the top of the ticket and then go on to narrowly win the election. However, only two days later Atlanta falls and Sherman begins a delayed March to the Sea. Atlanta and Savanna still fall and the day before Inauguration day Columbia surrenders to the Union forces.

What happens next? Lincoln has become the man who lost the election but won the war- to confuse things even more, let's say the lack of a coherent Democratic message and clear progress in the months following the Presidential election mean the Republicans keep their majorities in Congress.

How does a Peace Dem handle the fact that the country intends to make peace with has been split in thrain and most of their major cities are occupied by the Union? Would I be wrong in assuming that if someone like Pendleton or another Peace Dem wanted to make peace with the Confederacy and reward victory with defeat, so to speak, that he'd be facing a potential coup d'etat? What does it mean for the Presidency as a whole if victory comes despite the President's wishes, if Congress and the Union generals conspire to lock him out of the process altogether?

 

[NolanFoster]

A coup needs the military or a faction within the military to be a political actor in its own right. That state of affairs has never really existed in the US. Even when there was some tiny, noticeable amount of elite appetite for a coup, during the FDR administration, the officer that was approached to lead it not only refused, but turned against the plotters and nothing ever had an opportunity to take shape. You'd need a major institutional crisis to create such a divide between the government and the military. Your scenario would be one way to create it.

Before even being inaugurated, Pendleton's position would be undermined by a Republican whisper campaign to the effect that he wanted to throw away the victory and the union. It would be like the opposite of the Nixon in China effect. If a liberal had won in 1968 and gone on to open relations with China, the backlash from the right would have polarized politics to a crippling degree. He would almost have had to prolong the Vietnam war beyond what Nixon did, because every negotiation, every deescalation of the war would have been met with political attacks that the hawks wouldn't have directed at their own man in power doing the same things. With the war all but won, and the fate of the union at stake, you can imagine the size and fury of opposition to such a president.

Either Pendleton gives in and simply finishes the war, or expect even more conflict between the president and congress than what happened IOTL under Andrew Johnson. If he follows through on his copperhead policies, then I could see conspiracies start to take shape.

 

[Mikestone8]

Pendleton finishes the war, but may recognise the Confederate State governments once their members have sworn allegiance. If the terms of surrender are similar to those of the Sherman-Johnston "armistice", then these governments will still have their weapons. Makes a heck of a difference to Reconstruction.

Assuming a Democratic HoR has been voted in with Pendleton, it will presumably seat Southern representatives. But the Senate will still be Republican and may disagree. How would that deadlock be resolved?

 

[mianfei]

Assuming a Democratic HoR has been voted in with Pendleton, it will presumably seat Southern representatives. But the Senate will still be Republican and may disagree. How would that deadlock be resolved?

Maybe we might have seen as a compromise, ironically, the policy the Republicans campaigned upon originally in 1856 and 1860: that slavery would be retained where it existed but rigidly, even constitutionally, kept out of all the territories and future states.

When slavery would have been abolished where it existed is another question. Most likely, race relations would have continued to deteriorate, and northern and southern states would have continued to intensify the “sundown” laws against the mere presence of free blacks that had began in the decades before the war. I have often thought that, if slavery had been retained in its pre-existing forms into the late 1890s, the rest of the world would have viewed the Spanish-American War as a war against American slavery, as I note here, and thus the Spanish would have many allies. Such could make the Spanish-American War into a lengthy, and even major conflict – with potentially large-scale opposition in the Yankee and Scandinavian-American areas of the North and West and in Appalachian mountain counties of the South and Border.

If the US did lose an international war against a large foreign alliance, it would be interesting to see what the future of the Deep South – where I have imagined such a war would have been at least largely fought – would have been. Would it have been ceded from the US, or made independent under black control à la Haiti, or simply forced to abolish slavery and extreme legal restrictions against blacks (the elimination of which would certainly have angered almost all people in the North)?

 

[dartingfog]

A coup needs the military or a faction within the military to be a political actor in its own right. That state of affairs has never really existed in the US. Even when there was some tiny, noticeable amount of elite appetite for a coup, during the FDR administration, the officer that was approached to lead it not only refused, but turned against the plotters and nothing ever had an opportunity to take shape. You'd need a major institutional crisis to create such a divide between the government and the military. Your scenario would be one way to create it.

But isn't this what happened during the Civil War? If it hadn't been for most of the officer corps siding with the Confederacy, I don't see how a civil war could have even started.

 

[NolanFoster]

But isn't this what happened during the Civil War? If it hadn't been for most of the officer corps siding with the Confederacy, I don't see how a civil war could have even started.

There was no concerted action, especially towards a coup. The standing army at this time was fairly small. All of these men acted as individuals - one is reminded of Lee's resignation after being offered a command by Lincoln. You have to keep in mind the secessionists believed everything they were doing was perfectly legal and constitutional.

Compare the attitudes of officers in the US at this time with the networks of right-wing officers who deposed left-leaning governments in many South American countries during the Cold War (and on the other side, the left-wing factions of officers lead by Velasco in Peru and Chavez in Venezuela), the cliques of nationalists who deposed monarchies in Libya, Egypt, and Iraq, and the groups of officers within the South Vietnamese military who played musical chairs with each other.

Marching on Washington and taking power would have been quintessentially illegitimate. You'd need a president to make himself equally illegitimate to set it in motion. As long as the "legal" option of secession is available, the Lee attitude is going to be the path of least resistance, and all of these southern officers are going to resign to serve their states. That kind of constitutional restraint, even by would-be secessionists and seditionists, is one of the main things that set the US apart from any country in Latin America as a stable democracy. The emergence of the military as an alternate power base is exactly why the people who wrote the US constitution feared a standing army. It's also why Stalin gutted his officer corps.