If Lincoln had not died

[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?