What is your best one-word description of President Abraham Lincoln's character?

[David Lockmiller]

(10-08-2023 01:56 PM)RJNorton Wrote:  David, What if Lincoln had not been assassinated and lived to lead the nation during Reconstruction? Do you think you would feel exactly the same about Lincoln had he lived through two full terms? Thank you, David.

Yes, I would feel exactly the same. Lincoln always did the best he could under all circumstances. Sometimes, there are no good choices from which to choose.

Previously, I expressed my opinion that if the Congress and the cabinet had followed Lincoln's recommendation that the slave owners of the South should be compensated for their lost property in the form of slaves, things might have been quite different. Cotton was still "King as a cash crop" and the world's demand remained great for that commodity. But there was no money now in the South to hire black laborers emancipated by Lincoln's Proclamation. What evolved were the black laws where poor blacks were arrested for violation of local vagrancy laws and then hired out to plantation owners and others businesses for the costs of their being jailed and supervised in their labors (just another form of alternative slavery).

President Lincoln may have been able to persuade and convince Congress to expend the millions of dollars for this previously rejected purpose, and increasing the national debt, to revive permanently the economy in the South in a fair manner. [When we talk now about the National Debt, we are talking about it in terms of trillions of dollars.] Now, we have all of the automobile and other manufacturing plants in the South, with blacks and whites both paid the same hourly wages. It could have started with the cotton economy and evolved fairly thereafter to the same end . . . if President Lincoln had lived.

But this nation lived through the alternatives forced upon it: black laws, Jim Crow, KKK, and mass black migration to the North for factory jobs.

I thought of something additional: As a condition of funding, President Lincoln might have imposed the additional legislative condition that the individual plantation owner must provide suitable family housing for the former slaves and offer quality public education to the children (and the adults who want to learn in the evenings).