alternatehistory.com

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.
Top