Unwanted Facts: Facts that Most Books on the Lincoln Assassination Ignore

[mikegriffith1]

(11-30-2018 07:01 PM)Steve Wrote:  It's unfortunately unknowable how Lincoln would've approached Reconstruction policy.

Huh? He laid out his Reconstruction policy several times. You might want to read Welles' article. It's available online:

https://archive.org/details/lincolnjohnsonth00well

(11-30-2018 07:01 PM)Steve Wrote:  Although, he did seem to favor giving voting rights and educating former slaves. On those issues he seems closer to the Radical Republicans than Pres. Johnson was.

Lincoln was nowhere near the Radicals on black suffrage in the South. He wanted suffrage limited to educated blacks and those who had served in the Army, and even then he made it clear that this matter should be left up to the reconstructed states. Again, you might want to read Welles' article, because Welles discusses this issue.

There are several other good sources on this, but Welles' article is available online. Another good online source is Albert Mordell's compilation Civil War Reconstruction: Selected Essays By Gideon Welles:

https://archive.org/stream/gideonwelles0...p_djvu.txt

Yet another good online source is Dr. Richard Current's long article "Lincoln's Plan for Reconstruction":

https://www.americanheritage.com/content...nstruction

(11-30-2018 07:01 PM)Steve Wrote:  But whatever Lincoln's Reconstruction policy would've been, it would likely have evolved in response to events in the South. I find it hard to believe that Lincoln would've approved of the 1865-1866 "Black Codes" and their broad vagrancy laws that allowed them to arrest former slaves for minor offenses and sentence them to involuntary labor which Pres. Johnson didn't seem to have a problem with.

One, Lincoln made it clear that he would leave such matters up to the reconstructed states.

Two, those black codes, as many scholars have detailed, were patterned after Northern black codes. I agree that some of the black codes were too harsh, but even the worst ones were similar to the ones in Indiana and Illinois. If you doubt this, you might start your research by reading Dr. C. Vann Woodward's famous study The Strange Career of Jim Crow:

https://www.amazon.com/Strange-Career-Ji...0195146905

Finally, someone asked for evidence that the 86 pages were removed after the War Department got the diary. Anyone who asks this question and who claims they have read the 1977 FBI report either did not really read the FBI report or did not understand it. The report details the intricate editing, cutting, and reconstituting that was done to the diary to remove the 86 pages. This would have required many hours of work and access to the needed materials. If someone has a scenario for how Conger or Lafayette Baker had the time and materials to do this editing between the time Conger said he "found" the diary and the time Baker turned it over to Stanton, I'd like to hear it.