Presidents make decisions that shape this country for generations to come. Our decision to enter WWII when it did surely effected us in ways we might still see today. What type of decisions that Lincoln likely would have made that we would still be able to see. What would be different today? If i woke up in a world where he was never killed would I be able to notice?
This looks like more of a Great Debates question to me, so I’ll move it over there.
I’d say he wouldn’t be on a coin, if he wasn’t assassinated.
The reason he’s so loved is due, in no small part, to the guilt that the nation felt for hating him so much while he was alive.
Reconstruction of the South would probably have been much smoother and without much of the problems. This might have made racial integration easier because economic and political conditions would have been better. Lincoln’s assassination probably added to his legacy but he’d still be considered one of the greatest presidents.
The war was over, so anything else he would have done would have been day-to-day presidenting. And I don’t believe a lot changed due to his death. So I’d venture to guess that outside of his fame, little would have changed in any meaningful way.
For one thing, he might have had a larger hand in the operations of the Freedmen’s Bureau, which was established only six weeks before his assassination and might have taken measures to make sure it operated far better than it did.
He would have been out of office in 1877 but he might have had some strong opinions about the Hayes-Tilden compromise. Maybe enough to break with the Republicans and form a third party? I don’t know. But I don’t believe he would have liked it at all.
You think? I’m pretty sure that Lincoln wouldn’t have gone along with some of the ideas of the Radical Republicans. He may have found himself in the same situation that Johnson did.
Or a second possibility would have been a compromise between he and the Radical Republicans and there would not have been a 14th or 15th amendment at the time.
I don’t think there would have been any changes to the amendments–they were important to Lincoln. After the 1864 election Lincoln had what amounted to a powerful mandate and for the next year or two had the upper hand. Even Radicals like Charles Sumner were bowing to the inevitable.
Almost to the end of his life, Lincoln was a “colonizationist” – wanting to deport all African-Americans, freeborn and slaveborn, to some new homeland in Africa or Latin America. He believed blacks were too different from whites to be equals in the same democracy, but that blacks could have a perfectly good democracy in a country all their own. Almost to the end of his life; he dropped the idea for various reasons, one of which was General McClellan’s report that if all American naval and merchant vessels were tasked with deporting the black population, they still could not do so “one half so fast as Negro children will be born here.” From What Lincoln Believed, by Michael Lind.
In his biography of Lincoln, David Donald says that one of the factors that changed Lincoln’s mind was the bravery and competence of black soldiers in the Union army.
I don’t recall any quote where Lincoln favored suffrage for black men, or equal rights for blacks. He just found the idea of enslavement to be abhorrent.
In the Lincoln-Douglas debates he affirmed his support for laws against miscegenation, against blacks serving on juries, and though the idea that blacks the mental equal of whites to be “obviously untrue”.
What he was against was the spread of chattel slavery. The idea that blacks were somehow sub-human and shouldn’t be able to enjoy freedom. He thought, as **BrianGlutton **stated, that blacks couldn’t achieve that end in a society with whites.
I can’t see how Lincoln would have agreed with the 14th and 15th amendments, the various Civil Rights Acts, the General of the Army Act, the Tenure of Office Act, etc.
Both jtgain and Brainglutton are outmsarting themselves. Lincoln, like all politicians, said a lot of things in public, and was privately different some of the time. And what is true is that he was never certain of a lot of things, even to the end of his life. He dropped colonization in privte long before public, and he began to believe - not espouse, but really believe - in fundamental black equality. He took everything in baby steps because the situation was already so complex. No less a source than Frederick Douglas himself said that Lincoln was the only man, black or white, who ever in his entire life looked at Douglas and saw him without bias, preconception, or prejudgment. Douglas had, before that meeting, been something of a mild opponent of Lincoln’s. AFterward, he never looked at Lincoln the same and began to see the pressures on a man who was, almost literally, at the center of the nation’s pressure cooker.
Of course it is all up for debate, but do you believe that after Lincoln said “With malice toward none, and charity for all” he would have proceeded with military rule of the south like the Rad Republicans did?
I guess if you say that all of his public statements were just political bullshit, then maybe that is the case, but I take Lincoln at his word and can’t imagine him descending on the south with both barrels like Sumner and his ilk…
With Lincoln no longer wearing the mantel of “war president”, I suspect the fire-eaters in Congress would have treated him about like they treated Andrew Johnson. (Weren’t Johnson’s reconstruction ideas rather “Lincolnesque”?)
(And if you really want to muddy the speculation: would he have lived long enough to finish his term? He wasn’t the healthiest of critters.)
Nope, not even close. I enjoy debunking this myth whenever I have the opportunity. From the last time, history what if: Lincoln not assassinated:
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.
Had he lived, I believe that Lincoln would have sided with the Republicans in Congress in supporting the Fourteenth Amendment, and, when legislatures elected by Southern whites rejected it, in supporting biracial suffrage. With a united President and Congress in Washington, it’s possible that Southern whites would have been more hesitant to resort to violence in the elections of 1868, which would have gotten Reconstruction off to a better start.
Beyond that, though, we would have needed a better president than Grant.
Lincoln died at the perfect moment to ensure his historical reputation. If he had lived he would have become involved in the huge controversy over Reconstruction and would have had to pick sides - and whichever side he didn’t pick would have vilified him. But with his death, both sides claimed Lincoln as one of their own.
What alternative was there to military rule? Lincoln, perhaps, might have ended it sooner.