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Robert E. Lee, whose primary loyalty is to Virginia and who personally disapproves of slavery, has no difficulty in accepting Lincoln's offer to assume command of the Union Armies. After several months of a massive build-up of forces to create the Union Army of Southern Virginia, Lee embarks on a lightning campaign deep into the Carolinas,

culminating at April 1862 with the capture of Charleston in a combined attack from the land and sea, causing enormous jubilation in the north and dismay in the south. Northern conservatives want to use the victory in order to just restore the Union as it was before the war, including the slavery. But the quick string of victories produces in the North a jingoistic wave with demands to "make the Southerners pay for starting the war" voiced loudly by Horace Greeley of the influential New York Tribune. The argument "Slavery caused this war, and if slavery is not gotten rid   of it will lead to the next war and the one after" gets a currency beyond the traditional ranks of the Abolitionists. Lincoln draws up peace terms which Lee, having declared a three-month truce, transmits from Charleston to the Confederate leaders: a return to the Union with slavery to be phased out gradually within twenty years and with generous compensation to slave owners.

In a series of private meetings, Lee discloses that Lincoln is under strong pressure from the Abolitionist wing of the Republican Party. Should the war continue, Lincoln may be driven to declare immediate emancipation of all slaves without compensations. He, Lee, would personally disapprove of "such a precipitate step and the terrible upheaval it would cause" - but as a military man he would remain bound by his oath to the Union.

The Confederate Congress and Cabinet are torn down the middle - unable to stomach the thought of returning to the Union, yet aware of their inferior military situation - and decline to give any clear answer. At the end of the truce, Lee moves deep into Georgia - taking scrupulous care not to damage private property and to maintain slavery in the plantations falling under his army's control (to the bitter disappointment of the slaves, who expected the Union Army to set them free ) - but demonstrating his ability to defeat any Southern army sent against him and to move at will through Confederate territory.

In November 1862 Lee, with his army approaching Atlanta, secretly transmits to the Confederate leaders the text of the Emancipation Proclamation already approved by Lincoln's cabinet but not yet enacted, together with the warning that time is running out for them to accept the previous generous offer. After a furious night-long debate in the Confederate cabinet, President Jefferson Davis resigns. Vice President Alexander Stephens assumes the Confederate presidency and accepts Lincoln's original terms. Lincoln agrees to shelve the draft Emancipation Proclamation, whose existence is not published. Via Lee's mediation, Lincoln also agrees to grant Stephens several face-saving concessions: extension of the time until the definite end of slavery to thirty years and increase of the compensations to the slave owners. Moreover, though not explicitly mentioned in writing, Lincoln accepts a series of administrative arrangements to ensure that even after  emancipation blacks will remain in practice tied to the big plantations "so as not to disrupt the production of cotton". To offset a particularly bitter pill for the Southerners, the need to amend the constitution and allow the Federal Government to regulate slavery; Lincoln offers another amendment allowing the Southern states to maintain a regional organization within the Union.

By the end of 1863, the agreement is ratified by the legislatures of all Southern states, despite bitter disputes and the threat of several states - particularly those far from the front - to continue secession on their own. Lee - having both a brilliant generalship and a an enormously stronger army - had gotten an intimidating reputation for invincibility. Even in Texas - the only Southern state which actually tries to offer armed resistance - the Rangers capitulate soon after the entry of Lee's enormous army into their territory.

Abraham Lincoln and Alexander Stephens renew their personal friendship and political alliance (in OTL they worked together in 1848 to get Zachary Taylor elected president) and embark on an extensive tour of joint public appearances in both North and South to whip up public support for the Agreement. They face similar difficulties - Stepehens with die-hard secessionists, Lincoln with the breakaway Radical Republicans and Abolitionists. As both the Republican and the Democratic parties split, Stephens and Lincoln unite their respective wings of these parties into the National Reconciliation Party, united by the program of implementing the Agreement against the opposition of intransigents on both sides. As well as Stepehens' followers in the South, the new party draws many of the Northern Democrats.

Lincoln, with Stepehens as his running mate, wins the 1864 elections by a large majority against a splintered and discouraged opposition and with many die-hard Southern secessionists altogether boycotting the polls. But in early 1865 Lincoln is assassinated by The Sons of John Brown, a radical group which regards him as a traitor; Stephens survives a simultaneous assassination attempt and becomes President of the United States. He rejects pressures from the South to denounce the Agreement, carefully establishing the legal and administrative machinery for gradually ending slavery. While taking firm repressive steps against the radical Abolitionist groups implicated in the Lincoln Assassination, he tries to mollify the broader public supporters of Abolitionism.

With the help of Lee, now his Secretary of War, Stepehens succeeds in convincing the legislatures of Virginia, Maryland, Delaware and Missouri - which, in reward for having remained in the Union, were given the option of keeping slavery indefinitely in their territory - to voluntarily join in its gradual elimination. (Kentucky remains the last holdout, which until the mid-1870's sticks to unlimited slavery.)

President Stephens also sponsors a bill to ameliorate slavery for the time it would still exist, forbidding cruel punishments and the breaking up of slave families. On its passage into law, Stepehens gets an emotional public letter of thanks from Harriet Beecher Stowe, an event regarded as the death cry of the now isolated and discredited Radical Abolitionism.

For all his concessions, Stepehens draws a firm line at any idea of political rights to the released slaves. Under the Lincoln-Stepehens Compromise, which remains a basic ingredient of US politics for decades, blacks in the entire United States - except for a few New England states - remain a disenfranchised minority until well into the Twentieth Century.

In 1893, the freeing of the last remaining slaves is celebrated in big National Holiday. Afterwards, the issue of the blacks is pushed off the mainstream agenda, with only marginal groups taking up the issue of their civil rights - until America gets a very sharp awakening in the 1920's: mounting pressures build up and lead to a black uprising bursting out in both North and South, far more violent than anything in OTL's Twentieth Century history of the United States.

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Point of divergence: in January 1861 President-Elect Lincoln tells some friends at his home in Springfield, Illinois an anecdote about having visited New Orleans in his youth and having been deeply shocked to witness a slave auction, and mentions how he had at the time told his companions "By God, boys, let's get away from this. If ever I get a chance to hit this this thing, slavery, I'll hit it hard". Lincoln certainly does not intend the story for publication, but a reporter for an Illinois paper hears it from an incautious participant in the conversation with Lincoln and within days it becomes headline news all over the United States. (In OTL, it was published in 1888 by Herndon, Lincoln's long-time law partner.) Despite Lincoln's frantic denials, it is generally taken as a statement of the President-Elect's intentions, greatly increasing the passion of secessionist agitation in all Slave States. In Maryland, secessionists are emboldened to form a militia and seize Federal arsenals, with the almost-open collusion of officials in the outgoing Buchanan Administration.

Despite many warnings, Lincoln is determined to go to Washington for his inauguration, but yields to his advisers to the extent of travelling by ship from Philadelphia, rather than crossing the turbulent state. He tries to strike a very conciliatory note in his Inauguration Speech, but this is taken badly in the South,as "lies trying to cover up the truth which he had blurted out to his friends". Within weeks, Maryland secedes - followed by Delaware and Kentucky. Finding their position in Washington intenable, Lincoln and his cabinet flee the city, establishing a temporary capital in New York. Jefferson Davis is installed in the White House, welcomed by much of the city's Southern-leaning High Society.

During 1861 and 1862 the war goes badly for the North - with Lee's Army of North Maryland repeatedly striking into Pennsylvania and New Jersey, several times threatening Philadelphia and New York and beaten back with great difficulty and loss.

Public opinion turns increasingly against the war, and President Lincoln's defiant speeches on Saving the Union are met with growing scepticism and a widespread feeling that the Union is already irretrievably lost - since, far from recapturing the Southern territory, the Union Army seems unable to put an end to the continuing threat to the heartland of the North. This is reflected in a defeatist position taken by the fickle Horace Greeley, originally a key Lincoln supporter.  Lincoln has to choose between two sharp alternatives: giving up the war and recognizing the Southern Confederacy, or relying on the only faction determined to fight on - the Abolitionists. In any case, from the start of the war Lincoln - with no Slave States except Missouri left in the Union to be appeased - was closer to the Abolitionists than in OTL. Lincoln takes his decision by approving Fremont's initiative of freeing the slaves at Fremont's command in the West, followed by a surprise appointment of Fremont as Secretary of War. Lincoln's turn towards the Abolitionists precipitates a series of riots and Copperhead revolts at various locations in the North, culminating with the assassination of Lincoln and most of his cabinet members in a well-organized conspiracy as they meet at New York in February 1863.

The assassination backfires, making Lincoln a martyr and turning public opinion against  the assassins and their political millieu. Fremont, who had been on a visit to the front during the assassination and who wields effective power on behalf of the severely-wounded President Hamlin, moves swiftly to crush the centres of resistance: declaring martial law in large parts of the North, severely restricting the activities of the Democratic Party in these areas and arresting the leaders of the party's pro-Southern faction, and playing the final card by calling upon the slaves in the South to revolt.

While the North remains polarized, Fremont does manage to raise some new, highly-motivated armies, marching to battle under the new song "Old Abe's Body...". Also, thousands of enthusiatic European revolutionaries of all kinds are taking ship to to the United staters to participate in what they regard as a War of Liberation, among them Garibaldi at the head a of a large contingent of his Red Shirts fresh from the fight for the Unification of Italy.

Intially, Fremont's call for a slave revolt is answered only by the blacks in the areas near Union-held territory, and fails to significantly change the strategic situation. However, at the John Brown Academy in the Union-held Sea Islands, off the South Carolina coast, the most talented of the escaped slaves from all over the South come together with veteran Abolitionists from the North, to train and make meticulous plans for a more widespread insurrection.

After routes for smuggling arms into the South are prepared, simultaneous slave revolts break out at more than twenty locations in February 1864, on the anniversary of Lincon's Assassination - forcing the Confederacy to abruptly recall Lee from his continuing attacks into the North and place him in charge of putting down the revolts. In May 1864, Lee is killed in a chance ambush at the back country of North Carolina, by a band of blacks who had no idea at whom they were shooting. Despite savage retaliations taken by the furious Southerners, Lee's death is a big morale blow to them and a correspondingly big boost to the North.

With the Union Armies going on the offensive, the Confederate Command attempts to shift the bulk of its armies back to the Northern Front - but with the Southern papers emphasizing and greatly exaggerating the "Slave Atrocities," many Confederate soldiers desert to join the militias fighting the rebellious slaves in their home states. Fremont now feels confident enough of public support to lift martial law in the North and remove the restrictions over the Democratic Party, which prepares forlornly to elections which it is bound to lose. In January 1865 the Union Army recaptures Washington nearly bloodlessly, in time for President Fremont to have his inauguration there. In any case, in the last months of its Washington soujourn Jefferson Davis' government had been in only very partial control of the Southern territory.

Though it was the Union which instigated the slave revolts and supplied the weapons for them, it also has little control over their development - particularly since many of the original cadres trained at the Sea Islands were killed in the initial stages. The revolts take many divergent courses according to local conditions. Some plantations are seized with the land divided among the former slaves and used for subsistance agriculture; in some places where idealistic and literate black leaders are in control, attempts are made to set up farmers' cooperatives, keep plantations a single unit and keep cotton production going with the black workers hoping to share in the profit; but in other places, this idea is perverted by ruthless blacks leaders seizing mansions and proceeding to exploit their brethren... In some of the areas left under white control, blacks are massacred or altogether driven out; in others, planters free their slaves and offer them tempting conditions in return for staying on; in some places, these diverging policies cause fighting among different white factions, bringing out the latent hostility between the planter aristocracy and the poor whites.

By the end of 1865, there are practically no regular Confederate armies in the field, but it takes the Union two more bloody years to take any semblence of control over the territory, broken up into a patchwork of white and black militias with scores of local civil wars raging all over. The general policy is for Union forces, upon their arrival, to accept the status quo which they find and restrict themselves to preventing new outbreaks - but there are many exceptions and personal intepretations by individual Union commanders. Some of these tend to side with planters who try to regain their seized property, while others seek to put down the white militias, many of which still sport Confederate flags and insignias. Even after the official end of the war in July 1867, the Federal Government is obliged to keep the South heavily garrisoned until well into the Twentieth Century. It is a highly unpleasant duty, with violent outbreaks occuring frequently and both whites and blacks accusing the U.S. Army of bias and of favoring the other side. Already in 1868 it is so unpopular as to make it impossible for Fremont to seriously consider running for a second term. And in the following decades, the South becomes the graveyard of many political and military careers - sometimes literally.

(In 1877 George Armstong Custer, Military Governor of Arkansas, gets killed being trapped in a cross-fire between two feuding militias in the hills). Under this continuing burden, there is an increased support for the Northern Isolationists - advocating "bringing the boys home and letting the crazy blacks and whites kill each other." However, by the 1890's there is a gradual economic recovery in the South, partially due to the emergence of an industrious black middle class whose access to economic power is guaranteed by the ability to appeal at need to the help of a local black militia. Civic institutions are gradually rebuilt, with some of the militias disarming and becoming politcal organizations; others are transformed into organised crime gangs, whose operations spread into the north. Much as many whites would have liked to, they find it impossible to introduce discriminatory laws or practices, for fear of provoking a general black revolt.

In 1911, The Reconciliation Conference is held in Memphis, Tennessee, at the joint initiative of prominent white and black clergymen, who together petition the Federal Government to remove its troops from the South. This is sucessfully carried out by 1913. Despite many dire predictions, most white and black Southerners do manage to get along reasonably well - even if this is due mainly to exhaustion after decades of conflict. And the United States, still recovering from the long ordeal, is in no state to enter the First World War - which ends in 1919 with a German victory.

Martin Luther King, Jr., grows up in a country in which blacks are not conspiciously discriminated against, and becomes a rather conservative mainstream poilitician...