If Lincoln had not died

[Thomas Thorne]

In creating the myth of the "soft" Lincoln approach toward Reconstruction, people conflated the merciful Lincoln toward individuals with how he would have treated states and society.

After the demise of Reconstruction, the white North and South made an informal "treaty" in which they agreed that Slavery and Secession were wrong but that subordination of Blacks particularly in the South was at worst an embarrassment that would be remedied at some safe distant time.

A radical Republican Abraham Lincoln would have been too embarrassing to this consensus. Therefore Andrew Johnson's policies on Reconstruction became Lincoln's policies on Reconstruction. It is amazing how many believed that Lincoln would have suffered the same fate as Johnson. The most grotesque outlier of this belief was the theory that Edwin Stanton led a conspiracy to kill Abraham Lincoln to facilitate a radical Republican takeover of Reconstruction.

An additional cement to the theory of the soft Lincoln Reconstruction was the Liberal and Radical Left's growing disenchantment with the fruits of the Industrial Revolution. The triumph of the Republican Party facilitated the growth of modern industrial society and prejudiced many adherents of this theory against Reconstruction. They regarded it as merely a smokescreen for rapacious capitalists. The Lloyd Lewis article-happily brought to us by Rob Wick-was a genteel version of this. Charles Beard and the Communist writer Matthew Josephson of "The Robber Barons" and "The Politicos" were among the leading writers of this school.
Tom