Thoughts?

[Wild Bill]

I have written a paper on what might have happened if Lincoln had lived through his second term. I essentially find that little would have changed in Reconstruction before 1869. Lincoln would have eventually ceded the final Reconstruction to Congress, without the venom of impeachment and the fight between Johnson and Congress, because he essentially agreed with Congress' strict Military Reconstruction objectives. The refusal of the South to agree to being reconstructed at all would have guaranteed this, as did the massive Republican victory in the by-election of 1866 (which only took place in the North as the South had not regained the right to vote yet). Lincoln would never has agreed to such Southern intransigence, nor would he have gone against the Republican electoral victory. The Whig antecedents of the Republican party which centered on congressional supremacy over the other branches of government, which was their main quarrel with Lincoln during the Civil War, would have helped greatly in this.