I’m currently watching the History Channels series of shows on Lincoln (Half the time with tears in my eyes. Yeah, I know its the History Channel but its pretty damn emotional for personal reasons). They are talking about Lincolns plans to ram through the vote for blacks. In fact, according to the History Channel historians this was the main reason he was killed…for threatening to enfranchise blacks and make them full citizens.
So…what would the US have been like had Lincoln not been killed? Would he have been able to get voting enfranchisement through? How would history had been different for the US had Booth been stopped? How would the post war years been in the South?
I didn’t see the History Channel special, but, according to What Lincoln Believed, by Michael Lind – http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0385507399/qid=1137471051/sr=8-1/ref=pd_bbs_1/104-6616613-9135915?n=507846&s=books&v=glance – Lincoln, almost to the end of his life, was committed to “colonization.” I.e., as soon as emancipation had been achieved he wanted all blacks – slave-born and freeborn – deported from the U.S. and resettled somewhere in Africa, Latin America or the Caribbean. This plan was ultimately discarded as impractical. (General McClellan studied the problem and concluded that utilizing the entire naval and merchant-marine resources of the U.S. could not ship the blacks overseas “half so fast as Negro children will be born here.”) Lincoln did, at the end, consider enfranchising blacks – but not all of them; only the most intelligent and educated, plus those who had fought in the U.S. Army. Lincoln, like most white Americans of his time, really believed blacks to be innately intellectually inferior to whites, and did not believe the two races could ever live in the same society as equals.
OTOH – Lincoln’s assassination led to the presidency of Andrew Johnson, a man far more racist and conservative than Lincoln himself. We owe the racially-egalitarian policies of Reconstruction to the Radical Republicans in Congress, not to Lincoln or Johnson (whom they impeached and almost convicted). Lincoln favored the readmission of the Southern states to the Union as soon as possible and on minimal conditions. If he had lived, perhaps he (with his enormous personal prestige) and the Radical Republicans could have worked out a compromise arrangement that would have brought the blacks some limited way along the path to full social equality without inspiring so much bitterness and resentment among Southern whites.
Ummm… he did. Blacks had the vote for a number of years after the war, and there were black congressmen and governors. Jim Crow didn’t set in until the 1870s.
I think it would have been much the same – a short period of reconstruction, then a loss of interest by the northerners.
I just heard an ad for this show on the radio, and it was just about the most awful ad I’ve ever heard. They were playing up the troubles he faced in his personal life, including depression, which came across as horribly condescending, then finished it up with, “He fought two wars. One of them was in his head.” I pictured Lincoln talking to his assembled generals. “Alright, gentlemen, we have defeated the Confederacy. Now, what are we going to do about these Venusians?”
Political conditions changed so rapidly after Lincoln’s death that it’s hard to extrapolate how he would have responded from his behavior during his life.
Lincoln oversaw reconstruction within four states (VA, AR, TN, and LA) while he lived. And it’s true, he supported readmitting these states with only minimal conditions and limited (if any) black suffrage.
However, the War was still on at the time, and the only white people willing to participate had either been Unionists throughout, or very lukewarm supporters of the Confederacy. They didn’t represent the Southern white population as a whole. Lincoln naively thought that they did, but they didn’t.
After the war, die-hard Confederates returned home and resumed participation in Southern elections. The turnabout was dramatic. The legislatures and constitutional conventions they elected were much more hostile toward African Americans, much more attached to the memory of slavery, and much less disposed to compromise with Yankees than any (Unionist) wartime legislature had been. They enacted draconian “black codes” which all but perpetuated slavery under different names.
Confronted with this new reality, Andrew Johnson thought it was just swell. Congress thought it was just awful and responded with the Fourteenth Amendment and the Reconstruction Acts of 1867, which enfranchised former slaves throughout the South.
How would Lincoln have responded? I like to think he would have been closer to Congress than Johnson, but of course we can never know. The process of Reconstruction might have had a happier ending if it had been launched by a united federal government without Johnson’s shameful executive interference.
Do bear in mind that according to some historians, Mary Todd Lincoln was not as out of touch as often portrayed. Many of the accounts of her supposed derangement stem from one particular person who simply loathed her and would go to any lengths to besmirch her reputation.
William Herndon, Lincoln’s friend, law partner, and biographer. He and Mary hated each other. And, to a lesser extent, John Hay, Lincoln’s secretary. He didn’t really like her either.
Mary Todd Lincoln was a very unhappy woman, but in terms of mental illness, it was more of a “manic depressive” sort of thing than a “Venusians are invading” sort of thing. She’d get hysterical, have migraines, alternatively lash out at and become overly protective of Abraham, accuse him of cheating on her, drag him to spiritualists to try to get in touch with their dead son, and so on, but it was all mood disorder. She never was reported as having halucinations, or delusions (except maybe the cheating and the spiritualists).
Well, according to the History Channel show I saw at least, Lincolns mental abberations (or whatever) mostly seemed to consist of deep depression and overly active emphathy. Not surprising when they start going through the list of all the folks who died that were close to him…and when they start going through the grim escallating list of casualties from the various battles that also deeply effected him. Having your children die while you watch, helpless, is also something that is bound to unbalance even the best of us.
The only other thing that they mentioned that could be considered a mental problem is (according to the HC) that he might have had a death wish…or at least a martyer complex. He expected to die while still in office…and according to them he might have actually looked forward to it.
Is there any truth to the rumor that Lincoln gave Mary Todd syphilis (contracted either from cheating or from premarital adventures), and that it drove her (but not him) mad?
Well, here’s what we know…the evidence for that hypothesis:
Herndon claimed that Lincoln told him that Lincoln was afraid that Lincoln had caught syphillis from a girl…this was before Lincoln married
In the 1850s, Lincoln took pills called “blue mass”, the active ingredient of which was mercury. Mercury was considered a treatment for syphillis at the time. Of course, mercury was also considered a treatment for depression and insommnia, both of which we know Lincoln suffered from.
In her later years, Mary Todd suffered from spinal degeneration and derangement that some people have said were symptoms of tertiary syphillis.
I generally agree, but I’d go even further. I think Lincoln had grown tremendously in his understanding of blacks’ place in American society by 1865. His meetings with Frederick Douglass and black clergymen, his strong support for the 13th Amendment, and his response to blacks in Richmond, Va. greeting him as a savior, all show that he was not the same man he was when he first moved into the White House.
Lincoln surely would’ve handled Reconstruction far better than the far less politically-skilled Johnson, and as the popular, winning CINC of the Civil War, he would’ve pretty much gotten his way with Congress. When he saw ex-Confederate state legislators trying to impose Jim Crow laws, he would have done everything he could to stop them. Lincoln’s policy of “let 'em up easy” doesn’t mean that he’d turn a blind eye to blatant injustice within the former Confederate states.
Reconstruction was basically a classic lose-lose situation - you had two sides with mutually contradictory agendas. Favor either side and the other will hate you. Try to compromise between them and both will hate you. Andrew Johnson was the unfortunate man who got stuck with the job but nobody else, including Lincoln, could have found a solution that satisfied everyone. So if Lincoln had lived he’d probably still be admired for winning the war but his reputation would be diminished by his post-war years in office.
There’s no doubt in my mind that Lincoln would have gotten along better with Congress on the issue of Reconstruction than Johnson did. There still would have been major disagreements, mostly over whether Reconstruction was an executive or legislative duty, and also because Lincoln was probably more lenient than the Congressional Republicans. Just look at the controversy over the Wade-Davis act veto.
That being said, Lincoln would have been in a better position to get his Reconstruction plan passed than Johnson was. Lincoln was a popular war president with four years experience under his belt, and he had a generally good relationship with Congress.
Of course, the question is, would that be a good thing? I’d make the argument (although I don’t have the time to make it now) that the Congressional Reconstruction plan was better than either Lincoln or Johnson’s plans, and that both Lincoln and Johnson’s plans didn’t go far enough in reforming southern society.
I don’t disagree with any of this. However one element not touched on was that Stevens and the other Radical Republicans were in a power grab/turf war that spun totally out of control. That is what drove the impeachment and not, ultimately that there were GIANT ideological differences (although there clearly were - more serious policy rather than ideological differences I’d say).
Ultimately the big irritant was who ran reconstruction : The President or Congress? Add to than there was serious talk that Consitutionally Johnson simply had one vote as a Cabinet member and was not an actual “President” and you can see how there was bound to be a throw down on this. Had Lincoln lived this power struggle would not have been an issue - or would have unfolded radically (heheh) differently.
FTR Johnson always believed he was implementing Lincoln’s Plan and the truth is that I haven’t seen compelling evidence that discredits that idea.
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Radical Republicans led by Congressman Thaddeus Stevens of Pennsylvania. Lincoln himself had clashed with this faction of his party when in 1863 he issued a formal proclamation for reconstruction that included a general amnesty given to all who would take an oath of loyalty to the United States and pledge to obey all federal laws pertaining to slavery; a temporary exclusion pf Confederate officials and military leaders from the process; and allowing Southern states to establish new governments and elect representatives to Congress when one-tenth of the number of the state’s voters who had participated in the 1860 election had taken the loyalty oath. In his last public speech on April 11, 1865, two days before his assassination on April 14, Lincoln also extensively defended his views on reconstruction, particularly the criticism he had received for his willingness to accept the re-entry of Louisiana into the Union when 12,000 of its citizens had agreed to a loyalty oath but without its legislature enacting any guarantee of voting rights for freed slaves.
While Congress was out of session in 1865, Johnson began to implement his own reconstruction program largely modeled on that suggested by Lincoln in 1863.
Johnson carried on Lincoln’s plans in only one respect–he supported the readmission of Southern states without requiring that they enfranchise blacks. Unlike Lincoln, however, he continued to support this policy in the face of mounting evidence that its consequences would be catastrophic.
In every other respect, Lincoln and Johnson behaved very differently. Lincoln supported the Freedmen’s Bureau, which was struggling desperately to establish school and health facilities for former slaves, and signed the bill creating the Bureau into law. Johnson denounced the Bureau as a welfare handout, vetoed the bill for its continuation after the war, and harassed and transferred its agents.
Lincoln supported at least limited land reform in the South. He supported General Sherman’s field order allowing former slaves to rent 40-acre parcels on seized and abandoned plantations, with options to buy after three years. Johnson ordered all such land immediately returned to its former owners, even when they had been high-ranking Confederate officials.
On a personal level, African Americans such as Frederick Douglass who spoke with Lincoln reported that he treated them with courtesy and respect and took their views seriously. The few black people with whom Andrew Johnson condescended to speak reported him as sullen and obviously uncomfortable.
It’s inconceivable that Lincoln would have sent a state paper to Congress, as Johnson did in December 1867, stating that black people possess less “capacity for government than any other race of people . . . (W)herever they have been left to their own devices, they have shown a constant tendency to relapse into barbarism.”
Johnson persisted in opposing black suffrage even after whites-only legislatures enacted draconian “black codes” which would have made freedom a joke. The provisions of these codes have to be read to be believed. They were far worse than the later “Jim Crow” laws. I find it hard to believe that Lincoln would have continued to oppose black suffrage in the face of such obstinacy.
Thanks Freddy I din’t realize all that. I was thinking along the lines of readmission, the terms for Southern States and of the confederate soldiers and citizens, where Johnson and Lincoln were the same and differed with Congress.
I didn’t know that about sufferage/black rights ect. and I stand corrected