As I understand it, John Wilkes Booth’s (and his co-conspirator’s) plan was to kill President Lincoln, Vice President Andrew Johnson, General Ulysses S. Grant, and Secretary of State William H. Seward. As we all know, the only fatality was the President.
Would it had made any practical difference if all four of them had been assassinated instead of just Lincoln?
Palin might have ended up being Canada’s problem.
The war had ended before the assassination with Lee’s surrender. Although individual units kept fighting, those were standard mop-up procedures that anyone could lead, and lesser generals handled those.
The politics of retaliation would have been different and undoubtedly more severe. Those would have repercussions in all sorts of ways. But for the purposes of your question I think the answer is pretty much no practical differences, but many social and political ones.
:eek::eek::eek:
Not really, since she is a native of Idaho.
And this discussion really doesn’t belong here. My apologies to the mods for perpetuating it; I merely wanted to battle minor ignorance.
I know nothing of his politics, but the new president would have been Lafayette Foster (R-CT).
Good point cckerberos. That would have made some difference, but it’s hard to know how different things would have been under President Foster…
Possibly reconstruction would have proceeded more smoothly than it did. Whether “smoothly” means “fairly” or not is another question. Foster didn’t have all of Johnson’s baggage, was Republican, probably held attitudes in line with the Republican congress, and probably would not have been impeached on trumped up charges.
Foster would have only been President for less than a year. In 1865, succession was still covered by the Presidential Succession Act of 1792. This stated that if the President and Vice President died in office, the President pro tempore of the Senate would be the acting President but a special election would be held to elect a new President and Vice President.
Maybe, but I get the impression that Foster may still have had a hard time with the Radical Republicans. He was a member of the Opposition Party from 1854 to 1860, only joining the Republicans afterwards. The Oppositionists were apparently held a compromise position between the Republicans and the Democrats. He was also defeated in the 1866 Senate election by another Republican. This suggests to me that he was likely a moderate that did not have a lot of support within the Republican Party.
[Moderator Note]
Let’s avoid political jabs in GQ. No warning issued.
Colibri
General Questions Moderator
PS. Even if Palin hadn’t been born in Idaho, if Seward hadn’t been around to make the purchase Alaska might have stayed Russian (not Canadian).
It seems that Foster lost a primary fight in 1866 and later became a Democrat. It seems that he wasn’t keen on the Radical Republican Reconstruction policy. He may have been impeached like Johnson..
Edit: Or what was already said two hours ago. 
I’ve often wondered if Lincoln might have been impeached had he lived.
Foster was indeed a moderate Republican, and he was defeated by the radical Ferry in the Connecticut legislature in 1866. But, the differences between moderates and radicals, in this time frame, were as nothing compared to the chasm that opened up between both factions and President Johnson.
During the Thirty-Ninth (1865-67) Congress, both moderates and radicals agreed on the basic Reconstruction program: passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1866, continuation of the Freedmen’s Bureau, no Southern representation without ratification of the 14th Amendment, and when the Southern states refused to ratify, biracial suffrage under the Reconstruction Acts of 1867. Foster (along with almost all Republicans) supported all of these measures; Johnson vociferously opposed them.
Of course, as Nemo notes, by law there would have been a new presidential election in November 1865. Passions, I dare say, would have been rather inflamed in the aftermath of a triple-assassination. I can’t even speculate as to the results.
One further curiosity: by law whomever was elected in 1865 would have been entitled to a four-year term, and Presidential and Congressional elections would have been permanently out of sync.
No. Lincoln had built up a big stockload of political good will with the general public; he had won the war and any attempt at impeaching him with anything other than a gun billowing smoke would have been so unpopular that getting a majority for impeachment in the House would have been impossible.
Johnson didn’t have that good will, and was not particularly liked by others in the government.
I hope that it is not too much of a hijack, but I wonder if that was Constitutional. If I’m Foster, I am arguing that Congress has the power to declare which officer shall “act as President” but they can’t be setting new election dates.
The Constitution granted Congress the power “to provide for the case of Removal, Death, Resignation, or Inability, both of the President and Vice President, declaring what Officer shall then act as President . . . until the Disability be removed, or a President shall be elected”.
This could be taken either as authorizing Congress to provide for a new election, or to provide who shall act as President until the next regularly scheduled election. Either interpretation, IMO, would be reasonable. Congress in 1792 chose the former.
Once a new President was elected, the Constitution provided that he “hold his Office during the term of four Years”. This was taken to require that any new election would restart the clock.
You do have to wonder how well the radical republicans would have accepted Lincoln’s apparent policy to go easy on the South.
After a quadruple assassination, the Senate’s president pro tempore might well have gone bananas.
Can you imagine the general temper of the North at that point?
Historically speaking, there was already a desire to grind the South into the ground.
If ALL of their primary leaders had been assassinated by a Southerner can you imagine how horrible Reconstruction would have been for the southern states?
It was pretty amazingly bad as it was, but imagine if a quadrupal assassination had succeeded?
I guess, as an Atlantan, that I am very happy that the Union didn’t have nuclear bombs, or airstrike capability to firebomb everything from Richmond to Savannah.