Abraham Lincoln arguably died at the best possible moment. He had won the re-election in 1864 and had his Presidency vindicated. He had enacted the Emancipation Proclamation. He had succeeded in seeing the United States through to the end of the war.
But what did he have to look forward to? The wartime sense of unity was ended and Lincoln was already facing dissent from both the Radicals who wanted to harshly and indefinitely punish the South and the Conservatives who wanted to essentially pretend the war had never happened. There wasn’t much room for compromise between the two sides.
Lincoln’s successor, Andrew Johnson, ended up basically getting mauled by the conflict. Of course, Lincoln had advantages Johnson did not. He had the prestige of being elected President and of having led the nation through the war. Lincoln was also a much more skilled politician than Johnson.
But would that have been enough? Was there some unseen solution that would have enabled Lincoln to please, or at least pacify, both sides? Or would Lincoln, like Johnson, have become enmeshed in the Reconstruction controversy and left office in 1868 with his reputation dimished?
Lincoln certainly wouldn’t have gotten into the kind of trouble that led to Johnson’s impeachment, that’s for damn sure. I think that Lincoln would have been able to work out a compromise, between the factions because he had led the Union through the crisis of the Civil War.
Then he would have written his memoris which would have sold 2.6 million copies and retired to work the land out in California.
I don’t think the Radical Republicans would quite as radical, or quite as powerful without Lincoln’s assassination by cowardly Southern sympathizer.
The Radical Republicans would not have been able to invoke the martyred Honest Abe against a living President Linclon, as they would be against Andrew Johnson.
A live President Lincon would have lessened the polarization of what came to be the product of his assassination.
Not to mention having his picture on the penny and the five-dollar bill – plus having a luxury car, a set of children’s miniature building logs, and a city in Nebraska all named after him.
I’ll go along with those statements. For a guide, read Lincoln’s Second Inaugural Address, calling for “malice toward none and charity for all”, “binding our wounds” and so forth. He would have been able to use his moral and institutional authority to restrain the punitive-minded factions and lead a genuine Reconstruction, with his Southern Democratic VP as a quasi-ambassador. We’d be grateful that the poison of that period had dissipated so many generations earlier.
I know this is pure speculation, but I have read stories about him possibly having some condition (Marfan’s?) that would have kept him from living very long anyway.
Well, I think that Johnson tried to enact Lincoln’s post-War unifying plans (10% plan, etc), but was blocked by the Republicans. A lot of the Republicans, though, didn’t like Johnson because he was from one of the states in secession and he was a Dem, so maybe Lincoln would have been more effective than Johnson.
but hey, there is a Johnson City. And johnson is perhaps the best appendage we have. plus, there are Johnsonville Brats (bratwurst); all the rage for fat, drunken Wisconsinites.