If Lincoln had not died

[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.