If Lincoln had not died

[Liz Rosenthal]

Sorry. I didn't mean to ignite a firestorm.

But it may be a little tricky discussing certain aspects of Lincoln's beliefs and presidency if we have to keep mum on more recent events. I'll try, though.

[Rob Wick]

As one who doesn't watch Fox or MSNBC (on its best day, television news is vacuous and trite) I have to agree with Nancy. Much of what we face today has its roots in the Civil War era and Lincoln and I'm not going to shy away from making a point when I feel it's necessary. That said, I also believe in debating with civility. Basically, if I'm treated with respect I'll respond in kind. So far, I really haven't seen anyone get out of bounds.

Best
Rob

[Jim Garrett]

I'm usually not a big fan or "what if" questions because they usually lead down blind alleys, however for such an inoxous question, it sure is a dandy!

[RJNorton]

One of the many folks who wrote me yesterday said that, "Roger, did you know that current political discussions have led to the demise of many a board. You really need to close that one thread now before that happens." I only have experience with a handful of boards, but I do know the demise of ALO's Mailbag was due to vehement arguing among members that simply made the Snellers not want to deal with it anymore. They closed the board because of the stress it caused in their lives. Although nothing like that happened, I worried (rightly or wrongly) the potential was there (as Joe noted yesterday).

The purpose here is to offer folks another version of the defunct ALO Mailbag. Many of our members were also members there and may recall the final days as the Snellers decided to shut down the forum for good. I do not want the same thing to happen here. So let's get back on the original topic.

David Mearns wrote of Lincoln, "If he belongs to the ages it is because he belonged to his own age, his own fellows, his own environment ... if we would honor him, recognize and understand him we must return to his [age]."

So I am hoping we can get back on topic: "If Lincoln Had Not Died"

[BettyO]

Thanks so much for having faith in us Roger and reopening the thread....

[Bill Richter]

I missed a few entries here as we drifted onto race and the South and the rest of the nation today. I believe that Kate asked if I thought Lincoln was a less than adequate man as president. I do. I admit to being totally unreconstructed and maintain that the United States as created by the founders, died Dec. 20, 1860. We now live in the US created by Lincoln and amended by the New Deal and the Progressives. The Constitution is a "living document" that has become totally irrelevant, a process began by Lincoln and advanced by Woodrow Wilson, Theodore Roosevelt, FDR, LBJ, and perfected under Barrack Obama. But that is not the point in this thread.

I would direct those of you (probably most of you) who have not read the first chapter of my book, Sic Semper Tyrannis, to do it. It is actually on the topic we are interested here, Lincoln. It gives the contrary notion that Lincoln is our greatest president.

My arguments are not unique or new and may have been obscured by the title of this thread, If Lincoln Had Not Died. The rest of Sic Semper is why I think Booth killed Lincoln and devolves from the Southern Theory about the extraterritoriality of slavery once in the US Constitution as Art IV, Sec 2, Clause 3, now removed by the 13th Amendment. This, however, is another step off the thread's theme, which I understood to be what Lincoln might have done in Reconstruction to make it different.

I stand by what I said above, was it post #16? To talk about the nation and race nowadays or my view on Lincoln during the war is different. I still contend that we do not know Lincoln's mind, but that he was ever flexible, willing to consider Radical Republican plans (particularly the Wade-Davis Bill of 1864), and that he was (unlike Andrew Johnson) a Republican, but he had no firm plan as to what he would have done in Reconstruction, but that his plan given in his Annual Message to Congress of December 1862 (calling for a 50 year program of gradual freedom and apprenticeship) was more in line with what Alexander Stephens said Lincoln told him aboard the River Queen in 1865--once freed the blacks were to "root, hog, or die."

But Lincoln had already gone beyond that to the 10% Plan, the Emancipation Proclamation, and the 13th Amendment. I believe that Lincoln would have supported the renewal of the Freedmen's Bureau, the Civil Rights Act of 1866, possibly the 14th Amendment and probably the Fifteenth Amendment, although more as laws than as constitutional amendments. And I base that on his Civil War record of rule by executive proclamation and his april 11, 1865 speech off the White House balcony. Rather than react to Congress as did Johnson, Lincoln would have guided Congress into approving his concept of Reconstruction--whatever that turned out to be.

[RJNorton]

When I was teaching my course did not include Reconstruction. The last time I had a class that included Reconstruction was in 1964. My knowledge is certainly limited.

But, I thought I would include a statement by Dr. Mark E. Neely, Jr.

"No myth has a stronger hold on the popular mind than the assertion that John Wilkes Booth's bullet killed the best friend the South ever had. Yet the mildness of Lincoln's plans for Reconstruction may well have been a lure to get a warring people back. What he would have done in peacetime remains unknown."

[Linda Anderson]

There were many deaths that were directly attributed to Lincoln's assassination and who knows how many other people suffered or died as a result from it.

Thomas Goodrich writes about the immediate aftermath in The Darkest Dawn.

"By midnight, it seemed to many as though the entire population of Washington was in the streets, boiling and surging about aimlessly. ..Fueling the panic, of course, was the want of reliable information...

"Not only were Lincoln, Seward, and their entire families reportedly butchered, but as the rumors gained momentum, all the president's cabinet had been slaughtered as well...

"Understandably, many individuals were paralyzed with fear. 'We saw a colored man,' said a reporter, 'blanched with terror and trembling in every limb, his teeth chattering like one with the ague.' The frightened black was not alone, as the journalist admitted: 'The hair on my head stood up.' Others became perfectly unhinged. Overcome with excitement and fear, an army captain went 'raving mad' and was placed under arrest by a lieutenant...

"On the streets and in hotels, huge mobs brandishing pistols vowed to kill on the spot every rebel that fell into their hands. According to one soldier, patrols darting about the city were not only encouraged but ordered to shoot down any who now displayed even a trace of disloyalty...

"Frank Myers and his comrades were marching through the streets at the double-quick when a bystander was heard celebrating. Grabbing a musket from a private, an angry sergeant promptly ran over to the man and speared him with the bayonet. Not content with his bloody work, the enraged soldier again plunged the blade into his victim as he lay writhing on the ground."

Michael Kauffman has a good summation in American Brutus of the people harmed as a result of Booth's act.

"The list of Booth's victims is long and wide-ranging. It includes Frances and Fanny Seward, whose horrific experience contributed to their early deaths; Lucy Quesenberry, who was traumatized by her mother's arrest, and died soon after; Henry Rathbone, who was tormented by self-reproach, and his wife, Clara, whom he killed; the two soldiers who died in the President's funeral; the eighty-seven men who drowned while searching for Booth; and the countless others who were killed for rejoicing or for looking a little too much like the assassin. To those, we should add the victims of guilt by insinuation-the people Booth destroyed to keep his plot safe from detection."

[My Name Is Kate]

...I would direct those of you (probably most of you) who have not read the first chapter of my book, Sic Semper Tyrannis, to do it. It is actually on the topic we are interested here, Lincoln. It gives the contrary notion that Lincoln is our greatest president...

I have just finished reading as much of "Sic Semper Tyrannis" first chapter as I could find online. I'll obtain the book so I can finish reading it. (My head is spinning...)

[Gene C]

I have just finished reading as much of "Sic Semper Tyrannis" first chapter as I could find online. I'll obtain the book so I can finish reading it. (My head is spinning...)

Bill has that effect on people
(and that's a good thing)

[Thomas Thorne]

In creating the myth of the "soft" Lincoln approach toward Reconstruction, people conflated the merciful Lincoln toward individuals with how he would have treated states and society.

After the demise of Reconstruction, the white North and South made an informal "treaty" in which they agreed that Slavery and Secession were wrong but that subordination of Blacks particularly in the South was at worst an embarrassment that would be remedied at some safe distant time.

A radical Republican Abraham Lincoln would have been too embarrassing to this consensus. Therefore Andrew Johnson's policies on Reconstruction became Lincoln's policies on Reconstruction. It is amazing how many believed that Lincoln would have suffered the same fate as Johnson. The most grotesque outlier of this belief was the theory that Edwin Stanton led a conspiracy to kill Abraham Lincoln to facilitate a radical Republican takeover of Reconstruction.

An additional cement to the theory of the soft Lincoln Reconstruction was the Liberal and Radical Left's growing disenchantment with the fruits of the Industrial Revolution. The triumph of the Republican Party facilitated the growth of modern industrial society and prejudiced many adherents of this theory against Reconstruction. They regarded it as merely a smokescreen for rapacious capitalists. The Lloyd Lewis article-happily brought to us by Rob Wick-was a genteel version of this. Charles Beard and the Communist writer Matthew Josephson of "The Robber Barons" and "The Politicos" were among the leading writers of this school.
Tom

[My Name Is Kate]

It is amazing how many believed that Lincoln would have suffered the same fate as Johnson.

Do you (or anyone else) think a Lincoln-led Reconstruction would have been better for the country, or worse? Does anyone have any ideas what he might have done? Was he aware of the damage that he did, as far as respecting (disrespecting, actually) the Constitution, and the precedent it might set for future presidents? Or did he sort of muddle through his presidency and do whatever it took to obtain his goals of abolition and preserving the Union, rather than carefully planning it all in advance? Did he see himself as a sort of Messiah, or handpicked by God, or fated to lead the country through the Civil War and Reconstruction?

[Thomas Thorne]

See my post #32 on this thread. I think Lincoln might have successfully communicated to the South that the Black codes were unacceptable to the North. It was the Black codes that created the united Republican response which led to the Civil Rights Act,the 14th amendment and military reconstruction.
Tom

[Bill Richter]

Somehow we need to fit into all this Reconstruction discussion that Lincoln was an ex-Whig, and he considered Henry Clay and his American System, put forth by the Republican Platform of 1860 and mostly passed through Congress during the war, as his ideal. One of the things that was never passed was Clay's and others' notion that the race problem could best be solved by deporting all blacks back to Africa, or somewhere in the American West or perhaps in Latin America or the Caribbean, Several problems: most blacks did not wish to go elsewhere, blacks had fought for the Union to the tune of 180,000 and earned the right to stay in the new Union, and the black birth-rate allegedly meant that with American shipping available, there would never be an end to the problem. Several places were mentioned as possible homes for US blacks, southern Florida, west Texas, Isle d'Vache off the coast of Haiti, and a section of Panama, called Lincolnia by critics.

There is also the idea advanced by C. Vann Woodward, the dean of Southern Historians, who saw the real Republican goal of Reconstruction as making the South a heaven on earth for blacks. The North looked at the numbers of runaway slaves who came there before the Civil War and feared that free blacks would inundate the North to flee Southern white oppression. To make the South attractive and safe for the freed slaves, the North sent in the Army of Occupation, regulated wages and labor contracts, nullified the black codes (which were actually copied from US military regulations of blacks who had fled into Union lines during the war), and of course insisted they have the vote to protect their rights as American citizens. But many Reconstruction programs were applied to the South alone, northern states given a bye to discriminate as they pleased.

One wonders how much of this Lincoln would have endorsed or modified and how?

[Gene C]

I am currently reading a biography on Secretary of War Stanton. He continued to serve for a while after Linclon died. I am in the middle of reading about his involvement in reconstruction. What a political mess. It would have gone much better with Lincoln running things. Lincoln had planned for it, he had four years experience as president, a better negotiator, and was just an all around better person than Johnson.