DBWI Baltimore Plot fails

The Baltimore Plot is the name the newspapers used to describe the assassination of president-elect Abraham Lincoln on his way to Washington, D.C. Several people with Confederate sympathies ambushed Lincoln's motor coach on February 23, 1861, and killed the president-elect. Some say it was Lincoln's stubborn insistence on sticking to the whistle-stop tour schedule on his way to the nation's capital that led to the assassination.

I wonder if Lincoln could have prevented the Confederate victory after the French intervened on behalf of the CSA. After the Battle of Gettysburg, the USA just didn't have the stomach to continue fighting, so they agreed to let the South go, losing Maryland and the nation's capital in the process. Of course, the USA built a new capital on the shore of Lake Michigan after the Chicago Fire of 1871, requisitioning the land on the old north side of Chicago for cheap.

If Lincoln had lived, could the Union have kept the southern states and ended slavery before its actual demise in the 1930s? What about the U.S. expansion at the turn of the 20th century, with the Union adding Cuba as a territory and eventually a state?

Of course, if the Confederacy doesn't survive, that averts the disastrous Confederate Civil War of the 1980s, where the peripheral former Mexican and Central American territories joined with a swath of blacks and revolted against the Montgomery government. I've heard that Lincoln wanted to establish a free black nation in Africa for freed slaves, so there wouldn't be very many black folks to revolt or even rise up if Lincoln lived.
 
It's hard to say. It all depends how well of a diplomat or, in case that failed, a military strategist he was. I can see him trying diplomacy, but something tells me the CSA wouldn't have had any of it. As for military strategy... The man was smart, however, he lacked the experience of his Confederate counterpart, Jefferson Davis, himself an officer of rank. Could he have taken advantage of the Union's strenght the way Hamlin failed to do? Maybe. But it is a hard sell.

Either way, had it not been for that, Mexico might have had a better chance at throwing off the French and avoid losing more northern lands to the slavers as the Conservatives traded them in exchange for aid in capturing Benito Juarez...

Though again, it would have also butterflied away the Mexican renaissance a few years later, where Maximilian, enraged at how the Conservatives acted behind his back to cede land to the Confederates, openly acquited Benito Juarez and made Porfirio Diaz the new Chancellor, swiftly opening a congress and calling out to elections for a new Prime Minister, resulting in Juarez himself elected. A short civil war later, the trio of Maximilian, Juarez and Diaz would rapidly modernize Mexico and prepare them for the inevitable war in the 1880's, where Mexico smashed the Confederates and retook all the land up to Texas.

Another interesting butterfly would be in terms of the German states. You think a display of centralized Federalism, plus a humilliated France, might have an effect on accelerating and solidifying their Unification?
 
It all depends on how a President Lincoln would handle the War Between the States compared to President Hamlin. His single term in Congress, where he opposed the Mexican War on ethical grounds, would point toward his letting the South split off more peacefully - which might go a long way toward easing tensions between the two American nations. However, his strong Unionist rhetoric would hint otherwise. I can't see him calling out the militia mere days after his inauguration like President Hamlin; he'd be a lot less hasty than that and probably at least try diplomacy... but the Confederacy would reject anything he could say just like they rejected the OTL offer of the Corwin Amendment, and I can't guess what might happen after that.
 
I wonder if the question about presidential succession would ever be answered. Yes, Hamlin took the reins, but they were quick to point out that nothing in the Constitution provided for the death of a president-elect. Certainly Congress wouldn't have pushed rough the obvious rule patch amendment in 1861 making VP succession law and codifying succession after the VP. I wonder what number amendment it would be instead of 13.
 
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