Jack of Harts

The election of 1868 was effectively a war without name. Former Confederate leaders and officers could not vote, while the freed slaves were all but guaranteed to vote in overwhelming numbers for Union General Grant who had helped free them. No Confederates could run for office, so the political tables were balanced between the Republicans advocating permanent suffrage for all freedmen and the Northern Democrats campaigning for the right of States to make their own decisions on who could be allowed to vote. And three States, including Texas, had not yet been welcomed back into the Union, so they could not vote at all. Which in some ways was very good for Texas. They avoided the worst of the political violence that washed through the other Southern States as the Ku Klux Klan hunted down or assassinated thousands of Republicans, burned down churches, schools, and homes, and did everything they could to keep people from picking up a Republican ballot on election day. Grant won despite the campaign of voter suppression and pushed Radical Reconstruction into the Southern States straight to the hilt.