May 1891. On the second Saturday of every June, the Confederate States of America celebrates Secession Day, the Southron victory of Third Manassas. Traditionally small children gather in circles on that long-silent battefield and join hands in circles and run around, letting go of each other's hands when the music stops and all the children fall to the ground. Symbolically, it is a good presentation of history.  When the War of the Great Secession ended in Ben Butler's defeat, the States of the Confederacy lost the motivation for concerted action and each State , giggling, minded its own business. Contrary to precedents in the United States and the United Kingdom, no cross-country political party developed in the CSA. (Though Jefferson Davis tried to launch the Confederal Party to present a common presidential ticket in all the States. Robert E. Lee's refusal to be a candidate doomed that effort.) Instead, multiple candidates ran for the presidential office and each gathered  electoral votes from one to four states. No candidate winning an electoral majority, the outgoing Confederate  House of Representatives chose the next President from among the top three finishers in the election. 1861   Jefferson Davis Mississippi .  Note 1. 1867   John C. Breckinridge Kentucky. Note 2.   1873   James Longstreet Georgia.     Note 3. 1879   Jubal Early Virginia            Note 4. 1885   Joseph Johnston Virginia   Note 5. Note 1. There was no popular vote in the 1861 election, wherein electors chosen by State legislatures ratified the Provisional President Jefferson Davis as the first President of the Confederacy. Note 2.  John C. Breckingridge won 34% of the popular vote and the electoral votes of Kentucky, Mississippi, West Tennessee, West Missouri and Louisiana. Breckingridge was elected president on the third ballot in the House, voting by States. Other candidates were James Longstreet (20% PV),  Louis Wigfall (14% PV),  Jubal Early (10% PV) and Joseph Brown (10% PV), and 12% PV scattered among six other candidates. Note 3. James Longstreet won 25% of the popular vote and the electoral votes of Georgia, Florida, South Carolina, North Carolina and West Missouri. Longstreet was elected President on the first ballot in the House. Other candidates were Jubal Early (19% PV) Leroy Walker (15% PV), Alexander Stephens (11% PV), and 30% scattered among seven other candidates. Note 4. Jubal Early won  29% of the popular vote and the electoral vote of Virginia, Maryland, North Carolina, West Tennessee, Kentucky and Cuba. Early was elected President on the first ballot in the House. Other candidates were John Bell Hood of Texas (20% PV),  Harry Foote (18% PV), Cole Younger (11% PV) and 22% PV scattered among ten candidates.   Note 5. Joseph Johnston  won 36% of the popular vote and the electoral votes of Delaware, Maryland, Virginia, West Tennessee, Kentucky, South Carolina, North Carolina and Cuba. Johnston was elected President on the first ballot in the House. Other candidates were Augustus Hill Garland (27% PV), John Bell Hood (18% PV),  D.H. Maury (14% PV), Frank James (4% PV),  and J. Johnston Pettigrew (1% PV). The last success of the Confederacy was the purchase of Cuba from Spain, a debt that has still not been  settled by the South. Of more immediate worry to the CSA is a boll weevil infestation that has been devastating to the cotton production that is the country's export mainstay. The sagging economy encouraged the growth to other States of the Good Samaritan Party. The GSP is _base_d in West Missouri and its most famous spokesman is Congressman Cole Younger from that State. Favoring small farmers and businesses, the GSP denounces mainstream politicians co-operation with Yankee robber barons and promote the notion of state-owned railroads.  Note 6 The Rebel Party, strong in Texas and Louisiana, is  identified with John Bell Hood, CS Senator, a famous fighting general in the War of the Great Secession who promotes opium poppies as a cash crop for the Southwest. The great difference between the RP and the Calhoun Party of South Carolina is that the Rebels espouse tolerance of Catholics while the Calhounites believe Roman Catholics should not be allowed to migrate to the CSA The Ku Klux Klan, which spread  from the border states to the deeper South, is another nativist party. Their uniformed marching society, in white robes and steepled hats, are frequently features of parades and festivals throughout the South. Note 7. The depopulation of Negroes in the States that border the United States is a serious concern. After the Great Secession, the border that slaves had to reach to be free went far south, from the St Lawrence to the Ohio River.  The Rebel Party and the Calhoun Party made the Confederate Congress rancorous with demands to stop Negroes from crossing the border, but no fortifications are permitted on that frontier persuant to the Lincoln-Davis Executive Agreeement and, besides, the Ku Klux Klan and the Confederate Commonwealth Party Congressional delegations never backed appropriations for a such a project. Maryland, Delaware and Virginia emancipated slaves, but added codicils to their laws expelling the free Negroes from their territory.  The Confederate Court system is plugged with arguments over the State's ability to tamper with slavery. On one hand, States are explicitly able to be free soil, yet be full members of the CSA. On the other hand, all States are constitutionally obligated to recognize transit and sojourn so a slave owner resident in a slave State gets to keep his Negroes slaves in any State of the Confederacy. In the last presidential election, J. Johnston Pettigrew got one in every hundred votes (no electoral votes) for his new party, the Reunion Party.  Pettigrew argues that the Great Secession taught the North not to meddle in Southern domestic affairs. Now that the North knows that, a reunion with the Yankees would boost Southron prosperity, guarantee a white and English-speaking population majority, and make the recombined America a voice to be listened to by foreign powers. Note 6.  The Rebel Party and the Calhoun Party hold that the Good Samaritan Party has ideas that came from a German Jew who lived in London and so the GSP is defamed as atheistic and darwinian. Congressman Younger said  the Samaritans draw their platform from the Holy Bible. Note 7.  The Ku Klux Klan does not burn crosses as part of their rituals. That anachronism was created in the 20th century by Southerners in an ATL where the South lost the Great Secession, and a new Klan was formed sixty years after the original one dissolved. The new Klanb was more cinematic, as befits a group inspired by a motion picture.

LETTER FROM DIXIE CONT'D In 1883, some young adventurers from the Confederacy brought together a Legion of roughly a thousand men and tried to conquer Central America as William Walker had tried four decades earlier. Their expedition was repulsed from Nicaraguan cities with relative ease. The would be conquerors paid with their lives for their failure to accurately estimate the defensive capacity of the Latins two generations after Walker's brief heyday. The British and the Yankees sided with the Nicaraguans and other Central Americans, and the escapees and the expedition's dependents were brought to Texas ports by British and Union hulls.   Coincidentially perhaps, the first notice of boll weevil infestation was printed in 1884, the year the Nicaragua Legion reached home. Among the goods shipped that year to Texas were several thousand  bales from Nicaragua and it was surmised later that weevils had hitched a ride to Texas amid that cotton. As the weevil was already in Mexico and speeding up the Gulf Coast at a hundred miles every  year, it would have been in Texas in five or so years anyhow, even if no filibustering had ever happened. But the Nicaragua Expedition accelerated the blight's spread, and in only six years, the weevils were at the borders of Alabama. In the western Confederacy, the heart of the Rebel Party, there was a cotton catastrophe of at least $750,000,000 CSD [$300 million USD] when hundreds of thousands of square miles  failed to make a cotton crop. Though rational thinkers figured out that the weevils were a national calamity of Biblical proportions that could not be blamed on President Joe Johnston,  many citizens were hardly rational as millions lost their possessions over six years of hard times, and criticized Johnson for failing to ease their distress.  Note 7. Since foodstocks and livestock were not destroyed by the weevil, the South did not experience famine but half of every disposable dollar was missing from circulation. The Good Samaritan Party made in roads into Klan and Rebel States, doubling their delegation in the House of Representatives and electing  Cole Younger Speaker of the House, in coalition with the Klan and the Confederate Commonwealth Parties. To the consternation  of the Kingdom of Spain, a cash strapped Confederacy reluctantly suspended its payments for Cuba in Johnston's third year as President.  There was also a slave uprising that year in South Carolina which was only quelled after 10,000 white volunteers spent months smashing the revolt.   The old rebel spirit still flared, as when Johnston flatly refused a Yankee offer to buy Arizona territory, a strip of desert south of New Mexico that ran from Texas to (Union) California. The seventy million in gold offered would have serviced the remainder of  the Spanish debt but Johnston said no, and Congress passed resolutions backing the President, 90% aye in the House, and only one dissenting Senator in the CS Senate. Note 7.  In our history, the bugs were spotted around Brownville, Texas, in 1891 and had spread to the borders of Texas by 1896. Either cotton farmers were bust in 1896 or they dreaded the onslaught of the pest. I figured that something would arise  out of the Southron infatuation with the possibility of more slave soil by conquest, and that something was an acceleration of the boll weevil's arrivale in the Cotton Belt.  The magnitude of the loss has not been exaggerated and is taken from OTL history.   THE MEMOIRS OF SAM CLEMONS. In the winter of 1891,  Joseph Johnston became the first Confederate President to travel to Yankeeland while in office. The President went as a mourner to the funeral of his old rival, General William T. Sherman, that February. US President Garfield, standing alongside the President, who stood bareheaded despite a cold drizzle, advised Johnston to put on his hat. The President replied:   If I were in his place and he was standing in mine, he would not put on his hat. Joseph Johnston did catch  cold and that worsened into a lung infection. By the middle of the month, doctors and Cabinet officers sought me out and informed me that I would likely have to assume the Presidency. Once every other day, I visited the invalid on his deathbed but I never found him conscious. Joseph Johnston, fifth Confederate President, died in office on Saturday. March 21, 1891, at eleven that night. I was sitting in the Capitol Building having been waiting there since noon that day on notices that the President would pass away any minute. I had dozed off in the rocking chair I kept in the Vice President's Office when I woke up on hearding loud footfalls in the outisde hall. It was a Congressional delegation, bearing the news that the President had died at 11 PM.   He will be very happy to be back with his wife, I commented, telling the truth. He missed her very, very much. Chief Justice Lucius Quintus Cinninatus Lamar had a Bible and asked if I wanted it open to any particular verse. With all the forewarning I had, I was ready to answer: Psalm 127. Is this it?  Except that the Lord build the house, the labor is in vain, and except that the Lord builds the city, the watchman waketh but in vain. My wife gripped my arm and my son and daughters clustered close by. Cole Younger, my fellow Missourian and competitor, smiled and gave me a thumb's up. And I repeated the oath of office, sentence by sentence. I, Samuel Langhorne Clemons,

It would be interesting to describe this alternate Samuel Clemens. Does he have no major PODs before the U.S. Civil War? Does he and his brother still form a short lived Confederate unit in northern Missouri, and then move west to Virginia City Nevada near the start of the U.S. Civil War, when his brother gets appointed to be a secretary to the Territorial governor of Nevada at that time? Does Abraham Lincoln still become the governor of Oregon Territory in 1850 when he is appointed by Zachary Taylor to the position and die of old age there in 1892?

... the Lincoln-Davis Executive Agreeement and, besides, ... Does Abraham Lincoln still become the governor of Oregon Territory in 1850 when he is appointed by Zachary Taylor to the position and die of old age there in 1892? Forget the last paragraph.  I reread your original post and noted your reference to the Agreement.

MEMOIRS OF SAM CLEMENS I knew that I had not been Joe Johnston's first choice to be Vice President. Johnston had hoped for an interparty alliance with a fellow General, John Bell Hood of Texas and the Rebel Party. But Hood had no interest in the Vice Presidency and Joe Johnston certainly was uninterested in being Hood's Vice President. Johnston was planning to recruit one of his relatives by marriage as Vice President,  but Johnston's  pick was caught swindling the city he misgoverned. And Johnston's third choice, South Carolina's Wade Hampton III, who is very moderate for a Calhounite, had his leg broken by a mule and was infirm from the resulting amputation. So Johnston's choice fell to me. I was the Governor of West Missouri for a year and a half when the banks were not foreclosing, the rain was ample without any floods, and the legislature drowsy without the Good Samaritans, Younger and James, raising hell (because both of them were in Richmond, agitiating on the confederal level). I understand you have no real experience of the War, said General Johnston to me. It was the next to the last night of the convention and I skimmed the truth just a little bit.   I fought for the South on a short term enlistment. ( I figured the General did not want to have a deserter as a running mate). Then I headed West to attempt to bring Nevada into the Confederacy. General Johnston nodded somberly.   The Yankees treated you very cruelly. Actually, the Nevada mobs were as kindly and gentle as any mob could have been to us   damn rebels when they got news that Butler had lost them the war at the Third Battle of Manassas. We kept our clothes, escaped an application of tar and feathers, and were sent east as fast as stages could take us there.  But for nearly  thirty years the plight of the Nevada exiles have been taught in classrooms through out the Confederacy. That is why the Confederate Commonwealth Party nominated Johnston & Clemens, putting me in line for the Presidency I had just inherited.   While my wife ate her eggs and hominy breakfast, I had ham, coffee, buteer and toast. Laura had her newspaper while I had thin ledger books to read.  The one this morning was illustrated with some drawings of ironbirds dropping shell shaped turds on a city being devastated by explosives. That is what the War Department thinks is looking ahead. Sam, the newspaper is suggesting that we put up a statue to General Johnston as least as big as the one standing for General Lee.   Have they ever paid fully for that one?  The Confederacy was notorious for buying now and paying than than we had agreed to pay. Sam, Laura said tartly. We owe the dear old President a lot. Oh, yes, I agreed.  The War Department report quoted engineers and bankers to the effect that we could build ironbirds in Richmond, Charleston, Atlanta and Vulcan, Alabama,  that could fly a hundred miles at 40 miles every hour!  I did not like it that they could guarantee nothing but that each plane would cost $10,000 at a minimum. That mad Russian, Alexander Feodorich Mozhaisky, invented the steam powered glider only in 1884 and then it flew only fifty yards. Every day since then, every country is trying to make the ironbird into a potent killing machine. Laura insisted to me that the appropriations for the Confederate White House needed to be doubled, at the very least. Mrs. Blaine put in Tiffany gates and bulb lighting in the Yankee White Hiouse, my wife told me, and a water closet for each bedroom and two baths per floor. I'll see about it, I said, promising nothing definitely. I rode in the presidential coach and four to downtown Richmond. In Washington City, which the Lincoln Davis Executive Agreement kept in Yankee hands despite being wholly surrounded by Southron land, the business buildings of government  were adjacent to the Yankee White House. But my Presidential offices were blocks away.  Another one of those things that happened without planning. On the top and fifth floor of the Confederate Office Building, the Cob, my Cabinet waited for me around a wide round table of dark, very polished wood. We could see our ebony reflections in the wood.  Most of them were members of the Confederate Commonwealth but Lawrence Sullivan Ross of Agriculture and Attorney General William Yates Atkinson were Klansmen. I invited them to take their seats. To my right, and then around the table, were Mississippi's John Marshall Stone, Secretary of State; Samuel McEnery of Louisiana, Secretary of War; the Attorney General and the Secretary of Agriculture and the Secretary of the Navy and Simon Bolivar Buckner, Secretary of the Treasury. THe last time I saw Buckner he was stuffed like a sausage into a General's uniform that ought to have been let out some inches. Buckner was an amusing sidelight on the big funeral that we gave Johnston. McEnery briefed us on commotions in Cuba. The politics surrounding that acquisition left us with a large national debt and  a supposed State where most people spoke Spanish.  Besides aiding and abetting fugitive slaves, the typical Cubano would break windows and block streets on the drop of a hat. I had spoken to, and liked, Joseph Marti, the first island born Congressman. Marti was completely fluent in English and so participated fully in the CS House of Representatives. He also had run and won on the Confederate Commonwealth Party,   Why is it that Cingressman Marti thinks that our soldiers over reacted because they heard a steam whisltle go off at a factor? Congressman Marti is a sympathizer with the Black Republican independence movement, McEnery said.   President Johnston agreed that policy for Cuba gets made in Richmond but not in Havana. Isn't that contrary to the Confederate philosophy of  government, Mr. Attorney General? Thay are not quite White, said Atkinson, and our little brown Cuban cousins need to learn English before they expect us to fully recognize them as a part of the Confederacy. Ross announced that the boll weevil was on the island of Cuba, and that indications were that no cotton would make it to market from Cuba this year.   Agriculture department estimates are  that  Alabama cotton will be devastated next year, and the restoration of the  Cotton South  is not in sight in the foreseeble future Your Excellency, I do not know what to do, Ross admitted. This is the worst panic since the origin of the Confederacy. Buckner of Kentucky and the Treasury said that tax collection had dropped along with the other entertainment the confederal government provides for us.   It  was bad enough when we were forced to suspend our payments in specie because our reserve vaults had run empty. But now we have been estranged from European bankers. and I cannot see how we can wait till Europe reconsiders us creditworthy.   We lived with paper money before, I said. So did France. We can survive a return to that status. Buckner was appalled. He did not want the Treasury to mint copper and certainly never wanted Confederate currency to be paper rectangles again.   The boll weevil has wrecked the countryside and paper money will do the same damage to the citiies. You will need a majority vote of each House of Congress to gain authority to order the printing of fiat money, stated Atkinson, short of breath and red of face.   Otherwise you violate Jubal Early's Sound Dollar Act.   Another problem is the siide in chattel prices where the weevils infest cotton fields. Without normal cotton output, four in every five slaves are now redundent, with nothing useful to do. Slave value is down to sixty cents on last year's dollar, Secretary of State John M. Stone chimed in. The squeeze out West is unending and horrendous. Are the Yankees still offering seventy five million gold dollars for Arizona? I asked. Buckner grew ever redder. Congress angrily repudiated that cheeky request. Confederate territory is not for sale: it was gained for the South at far too high a price to ever be sold for mere Yankee gold. More in sorrow than anger, Ross said that slave owners would rather eat their Negroes if that was the only way they could avoid emancipating them.  And the Attorney General took a book off the shelf and read from the Cornerstone Speech of Alexander Stephens, who had said in deathless prose that the Confederacy rested upon the principle of white supremacy and Negro inferiority. With those responses, I dropped the subject of trading the desert we could not develop on our own for a payment that could satisfy the Cuba debt. Politics is the art of the possible. The Mormons of Utah appear to be following their Prophet, Woodruff, and are obeying his Manifesto against plural marriage, said McEnery of the religious cult that dominated the land north of the US territory of New Mexico. On September 22, 1890, the Mormons decreed that men would no longer be permitted more than a single wife. I sighed and said nothing. Johnston's Cabinet did not want to hear from the new President that he would have humored the immoral infidels and guaranteed them multiple wives if Utah left the USA and joined the CSA. But the Bible thumpers of the South would never okay immorality, not even if Utah was a land of gold and diamonds. As the meeting broke up, Secretary  Ross asked me if I minded if he retired from his post. I've already given up a lot, Your Excellency. There is, or rather was, a small school in Texas called the Agricultural and Mechanical College, and I would have saved it, I think, if I had not been preoccupied with my position at Agriculture. Well, the Agrimcultural and Mechanical College of Texas is gone now, sunk in bankruptcy, its campus sold out in individual lots. I said I was sorry to hear about that little school. But I did not think the farmers of the South would understand why their champion left them in the lurch. I asked Little Sull to stay on,
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MEMOIRS OF SAM CLEMENS On the day before the visit of Old Emperor Max of Mexico to Richmond,  I was introduced to Mr. John Wilkes Booth, the chief of the Confederate Secret Service,  by Secretary of State John Marshall Stone. Originally, Booth had been a spy and a smuggler back during the Great Secession, obtaining opium and other pain killing medicines from Europe and sending the precious commodity to the South in carriages and saddlebags. Booth went where he pleased in the North,  using his career as an actor as a rationale for moving about that country. Back when Judah Benjamin was Jeff Davis' Secretary of State, before the Confederate Supreme Court was established,  Benjamin himself had recruited Booth as a spy for his Southern homeland More lucky than Nathan Hale, the American spy of the Revolution,  the enemy was defeated before they found out about Booth, and JWB remained as the principal intelligence officer of the CSA. When I met him, Booth had temples and a moustache of silver, though the top of his head was dark and thick, so much so I assumed it was a wig. His chair was pulled close to my desk and he showed me photograph of what I took to be a railroad. Then I saw the rails went steeply down a mountainside and I realized it was a jump ramp for an ironbird. The Yankees are at work on an ironbird bigger than any ever built.  It will be bigger and wider than a sleeper carriage, and may be able to carry a hundred men, or drop more than one bomb, each weighinga ton or more. I asked if the giant ironbird had flown yet.  Stone interupted and said that the Yanks had worked on their project for more than two years. President Johnston did not authorize me to disclose the secret to you, Your Excellency. We are keeping our knowledge of the Terror very close to our chest. That is the name of the giant ironbird? Yes, Booth answered me,  The boss of the project was an engineer named Robur, and that man thought that his invention was going to fly, sail on water and submerge under water if it had to. I looked at the plans of the machine that Booth's people had stolen from New York State. I asked if our own expert