If Lincoln had not died

[Bill Richter]

I admit to writing Sic Semper, but I believe that we need to go beyond it as it is really, except for the first chapter, limited by the end of the war.

What was Lincoln's Reconstruction plan? Historians like to speculate that Lincoln was the South's best friend and Booth did the nation a great disservice in killing him. Following the Come Retribution story, Rick Smith and I believe that Booth was a Confederate agent and killed Lincoln as a military action (Lincoln was commander in chief) to save the Confederacy (Lee surrendered only his own army, not the South). Rick Stelnick believes that it was really a plot by certain northern economic interests, the so-called New York Connection. Gutteridge and Neff in Dark Union follow a similar thesis, but see it as more wide-spread, related to the cotton trade.

Lincoln's Reconstruction plan was first put out in some depth by William Hessletine, in a book by that title, and has been expanded on by Harold Hyman, With Malice toward Some. Both of these men se Lincoln as the South's best friend, but Hyman points out that he was not totally a friend of the South as Andrew Johnson allegedly was.

Most interesting on Lincoln after the war is Lerone Bennett, Jr., who relates that Lincoln's first reconstruction plan was to free the slaves in a gradual apprentice program that would have lasted to 1912. He also sees the 100 day delay in issuing the Emancipation Proclamation (Sept 1862 to Jany 1863) as a desperate attempt to get the South to end the war before Lincoln would be forced to free slaves to put the North in a better light overseas. And of course many have pointed out that the EP freed no or few slaves as he had little power in the Confederacy and exemptions were made in any territory held by the Union Army (the Border States, Va, Ark, Tenn, La, and along select areas of the Atlantic Coast. This is why Lincoln, primarily using William H Seward to construct the Congressional coalition, got the 13th Amendment going. Both Lincoln and Johnson made it a key to further Reconstruction in the South.

But Lincoln might not have stopped there as did Johnson. He was willing as he stated many times, not to force anyone to use his wartime 10% policy. Indeed he was already indicating to Congress and the Radical Republicans that he would accept the Wade-Davis plan especially if Congress would accept Louisiana under the 10% plan. He also was willing to accept a Negro vote, of at least the educated and those who served as soldiers. Most of that is in the April 11 speech, his last publicly delivered one, and in the cabinet meeting before he was shot. This was his argument with Stanton at that time, I believe.

What Lincoln had going for him was that he was Republican (not a war Democrat as was Johnson) and the leader of the winning Union war effort. He was before the war an aggressive attacker of "excessive" Southern influence in the US government, usually called the Slave Power Conspiracy (You can look all these terms up in my Historical Dictionary of the Old South, new edition due in March). This a theme that is emphasized in vol 1 of Michael Burlingame's 2 vol Lincoln bio. So Lincoln would have been gentle as long as the defeated Confederacy was responsive, but willing to change his approach at any time events called for it. This is what drove both Republicans, Democrats, and the vanquished South nuts. One could not pin Lincoln down. His policy was to have no policy, I believe that he said something like that once, didn't he?

I refer you all to William and Jane Pease, Politics, Principle and Prejudice (I think--I am pulling all of this off the top of my head), and David Donald, the Politics of Reconstruction. Using these and probably other books I have long since forgotten (my apologies, it has been 35+ years since I taught college and I am admittedly rusty), I used to construct a bar of political factions and then put Lincoln, Seward, Johnson, etc., under that bar with their concepts of what Am. politics should look like after the war. These fluctuations explained what everyone wanted and caused the variances in Reconstruction policy.

All we can say about Lincoln accurately, was that he was a vey good politician and Johnson was not. Lincoln would probably have come to agree with Congressional Reconstruction, but he would never have been impeached, despite he recent, very good novel (but that emphasizes his wartime policies). Remember he was the first Yankee to be elected to 2 terms in office in Am Hist, and the Republicans were not about to do him irreputable harm, no matter their disagreements. I do not think that Lincoln's image or myth would have suffered, no matter what his policy became.