Incident at an Antique Store

[LincolnToddFan]

[I am posing this in a non-confrontational manner (I hope) because I have asked this question numerous times to Lincoln students and experts alike and never get a clear answer: Do you (anyone) feel that Reconstruction would have been totally different under Lincoln's leadership? Did he have the political strength and savvy to hold the Radicals at bay once the war was over?

Lincoln's legend-makers appear to be certain that his death sealed the fate of Southerners when it came to overcoming the economic as well as social upheavals that the war had brought. I'm not so sure - and I say that mainly because of human nature]//quote

Hi Laurie,

I am the furthest from an expert or legendmaker as you will ever find on this board. But if Lincoln was able to outmaneuver the Radicals and hold them at bay during the war over the issue of immediate emancipation for the slaves, why do you doubt he would have been as successful dealing with them after the war? By the time of Appomattox, AL's stock had risen dramatically among the electorate and the press. He had been vindicated by victory. The Copperheads were held in wide contempt. He was more respected and revered than ever...and more influential.

In almost any other nation on earth, the leaders of the Confederacy would have faced military tribunals and summary executions after Appomattox. AL had already gone on record as saying he would have no part of it.

I don't agree with much of what Lerone Bennett writes about Abraham Lincoln in his controversial "Forced Into Glory" but one thing he wrote does resonate...Abraham Lincoln's Reconstruction was going to be a Reconstruction "of the White man, by the White man, and for White man." In other words, it would have been a Reconstruction policy that the South could have lived with.

In a policy that had put him on a direct collision course with Radical Sen. Charles Sumner of Massachusetts, AL was in favor of putting the governments of the former Confederate states back into the hands of the hands of the same people who ran them before the rebellion as long as they took an oath of loyalty to the Federal government. They were going to be having a huge say in how much actual freedom the freedmen were to have in the post war South.(Lincoln's Last Months// William C. Harris)

And we all know what that meant.

I do believe the freedmen would not have been as massively betrayed under Lincoln as they were under the subsequent Johnson and Hayes Administrations....but in the long run they were the group that was going to suffer the biggest letdown, even under the relatively benign Reconstruction policies of AL.

I agree 100% with David Lockmiller...the South has John Wilkes Booth to thank for the (admittedly harsh) Reconstruction that was imposed upon them.