If Abraham Lincoln was not assasinated

the 13th, 14th and 15th Amendments get pushed through 1865-1867 rather than 1865-1870, likely Reconstruction would be more intense, the last speech (which likely got him killed) Lincoln spoke in clear terms about blacks voting likely we don't have an anti-black back lash in the south, the freedmen-Carpetbagger-Scalawag coalition in the south isn't overthrown by the "Redeemers" and the coalition controls the south till at lest the 1890s
 
Well, Lincoln's plan for Reconsruction, though it hardened over time, was quite modest compared ot the one acually passed-that was the Radical Republican plan, which Lincln quarreled with in his life and was passed after his martyrdom. Definately an earlier 15th Amendment, in time to elect a Republican in 1868. As said, the coaliion may, with luck, last longer, and secure a freer South.
 
Well, Lincoln's plan for Reconsruction, though it hardened over time, was quite modest compared ot the one acually passed-that was the Radical Republican plan, which Lincln quarreled with in his life and was passed after his martyrdom. Definately an earlier 15th Amendment, in time to elect a Republican in 1868. As said, the coaliion may, with luck, last longer, and secure a freer South.


Actually there might not be a separate 15th Amendment. Its provisions might be included in something like the proposed 14th one put forward by Senator William M Stewart of Nevada, and online at

http://www.nevadaobserver.com/Readi...niscences of William M. Stewart 03 (1908).htm

Stewart's proposal combined the OTL Fifteenth Amendment and most of the Fourteenth, with two crucial changes. OTL's Section 3 was replaced by a section granting full amnesty, and revoking all "pains, penalties and disabilities" for participation in the Rebellion. At the same time, it laid down that qualifications (ie literacy tests, etc) for new voters must apply without distinction of "race, color or previous condition of servitude" but that existing voters could be exempted from them.

The effect of this would be to keep the initial Black electorate too small to threaten white supremacy, but allow it to grow over time - rather in line with Lincoln's final speech, which contemplated enfranchisement of some, but not all, of the Freedmen. Without the traumas of the assassination and the battle with Andrew Johnson, Congress would probably have bought into it.

How it would have worked is another matter. I suspect the South would have found some way to cheat, and it would still be the mid-20C before southern Blacks really got the vote; but it would achieve, with a good deal less acrimony, everything that OTL's Civil War Amendments did, by putting the legal machinery in place against the day when public opinion was ready to take Black rights seriously.
 
Its funny, because for all the ACW timelines there are, it seems none ever focus on what if Lincoln after a successful ACW survives.
 
This seems to be one of the basic "What If's". With many of those basic "What If's" it seems, ironically, never to get answered too well. I'm not sure why, though. Perhaps there isn't enough information. I just don't know.

The big issue here is Reconstruction. Lincoln's plan was certainly more lenient. However, one must take into account that I believe that plan was from 1863, and Lincoln did change quite a bit over his presidency to a more protective and friendly opinion of blacks. There was a sort of social contract between North and South in a lenient reconstruction; we get you back into the Union quickly and all is forgiven, and you given blacks in your region equality and protect that. The problem being that, if I recall correctly, the Southern aristocracy saw fit to reassert its power and the South did its damnedest to prevent black equality through every means possible. So while a more lenient reconstruction could avoid harsh backlash which would create Jim Crow, it could also create close to the same thing from the get go.
Something else I recall is Lincoln wanting to educate the slaves before giving them voting rights or something of that nature.
 
I think the post-war South would have been a far less acrimonious place in terms of North-South relations, race relations, etc... due to Lincoln's far less punitive Reconstruction being implemented over the Radical plan.
 
If Abraham Lincoln had not been assassinated I think Reconstruction would have been far kinder to The South than in our timeline. Lincoln wanted to in his words bind the wounds, he wanted both sides to put the war and its ill feelings behind us and move on together as one nation.

I think Lincoln's assassination caused Northerners to have a lot more anger toward The South. That would not have been there had Lincoln not been assassinated.

One headache even Lincoln would have had were the Radical Republicans in Congress whe were out to punish The South. There would have been some clash of wills between President Lincoln and Radical Republicans in Congress.

Another question was Lincoln's health. It is believed he had Marfan's Syndrome, he definately had some health problems and there is some question even if he had not been assassinated whether he would have lived long enough to serve out his second term.

I also think if Lincoln had lived race relations and Civil Rights would have come more quickly and more gently than in our timeline. One reason Civil Rights was so explosive an issue int the 1950's and early 60's is it was like The North again telling The South what's what, bringing up the issues that led to The Civil War all over again less that a century later.

I think Reconstruction and Civil Rights would have been very different had Lincoln lived. There have been times this topic was discussed on this forum in years past.
 
The big issue here is Reconstruction. Lincoln's plan was certainly more lenient. However, one must take into account that I believe that plan was from 1863, and Lincoln did change quite a bit over his presidency to a more protective and friendly opinion of blacks. There was a sort of social contract between North and South in a lenient reconstruction; we get you back into the Union quickly and all is forgiven, and you given blacks in your region equality and protect that. The problem being that, if I recall correctly, the Southern aristocracy saw fit to reassert its power and the South did its damnedest to prevent black equality through every means possible.


Why single out the aristocracy?

When they started to lose their grip in the 1890s and early 1900s, and the poorer whites took over, treatment of the Blacks if anything got even worse.



So while a more lenient reconstruction could avoid harsh backlash which would create Jim Crow, it could also create close to the same thing from the get go. Something else I recall is Lincoln wanting to educate the slaves before giving them voting rights or something of that nature.

Basic trouble. The Southern Whites care, deeply, about keeping the Blacks in their place. Northern whites don't, by and large, care all that much about helping them out of it - or at least it isn't a high priority.

With all due respect to Mr Lincoln, I don't see how keeping him around removes that basic problem.
 
Why single out the aristocracy?
The aristocracy were by and large the ones who controlled things in the South.

Basic trouble. The Southern Whites care, deeply, about keeping the Blacks in their place. Northern whites don't, by and large, care all that much about helping them out of it - or at least it isn't a high priority.

With all due respect to Mr Lincoln, I don't see how keeping him around removes that basic problem.
It's not just about that basic problem where it concerns social opinion of black equality, but what is done in addressing it. Radical Reconstruction helped black equality, but alienated Southern whites and drew backlash which angrily reasserted inequality and worse; then again, from what I can recall when the lenient plan was in action during early reconstruction, Southerners started slipping the chains back on again anyway. So to get reconstruction to work, a political tight rope needs to be walked between those two extremes which Lincoln, having evolved over the course of the war, seeing the South not live up to its end of the bargain (equality of the South with the rest of the Union in exchange for equality of blacks with whites), not being as brash as Johnson (and thus alienating Congress) and ever the statesmen, may be able to walk. But what he would actually do is something I don't know.

You can't force morality on a people's soul. You can't change people's minds forcibly. But, taking a lesson from Civil Rights about a century later, that wasn't the point; it was that even if they didn't like blacks and didn't view them as equals, they were still going to treat them equally because of the law of the land which was going to be enforced. That's not impossible given what happened in the 1950's and 60's.
 
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The aristocracy were by and large the ones who controlled things in the South.

No doubt, but what of it?

When they lost power to the poorer whites, that did nothing whatsoever for the Blacks. If anything they got treated worse. So weakening the aristocracy won't help on that point - or at least there's no obvious reason why it should.


You can't force morality on a people's soul. You can't change people's minds forcibly. But, taking a lesson from Civil Rights about a century later, that wasn't the point; it was that even if they didn't like blacks and didn't view them as equals, they were still going to treat them equally because of the law of the land which was going to be enforced. That's not impossible given what happened in the 1950's and 60's.

Prohibition was the law of the land too. It failed just the same.

Saying "It's the law of the land" counts for nothing unless the will to enforce it exists - and in the 19C (and half of the 20C) it did not. Even a President as powerful as FDR never thought the issue worth raising.

In the second half of the 20C it did exist - because the Cold War made the Southern racial setup an intolerable handicap in competing with the Commies for Third World support. Add to that the breakdown of the old economic system due to mechanisation of agriculture - the South didn't need cotton-pickers like it used to - and the fact that since the Great Depression, the states, and especially poorer ones like those in the South, had become increasingly reliant on Federal contracts and suchlike. Their Governors might occasionally grandstand it in schoolhouse doors, but that was little more than a small child throwing a tantrum. The Southern States were economically dependant on Uncle Sam, and could not defy him in any serious way.

A century before, the government had none of those levers. All it had was a small army, which could hang around in the South, making (from the Southern pov) a nuisance of itself, until northern voters got fed up and it was recalled. That remains true whoever is in the White House, and pretty much whatever he does.

Reverting to Mr Lincoln, keep in mind that whatever his sympathy for the Freedmen, his top priority is and always has been restoring the Union, which primarily means reconciling the defeated Southern Whites to it. Black rights, at the end of the day, can only be the second priority, not the first. How did Frederick Douglass put it? "You whites are Lincoln's children. We negroes can be, at best, his stepchildren". Douglass was surely right.
 
No doubt, but what of it?

When they lost power to the poorer whites, that did nothing whatsoever for the Blacks. If anything they got treated worse. So weakening the aristocracy won't help on that point - or at least there's no obvious reason why it should.




Prohibition was the law of the land too. It failed just the same.

Saying "It's the law of the land" counts for nothing unless the will to enforce it exists - and in the 19C (and half of the 20C) it did not. Even a President as powerful as FDR never thought the issue worth raising.

In the second half of the 20C it did exist - because the Cold War made the Southern racial setup an intolerable handicap in competing with the Commies for Third World support. Add to that the breakdown of the old economic system due to mechanisation of agriculture - the South didn't need cotton-pickers like it used to - and the fact that since the Great Depression, the states, and especially poorer ones like those in the South, had become increasingly reliant on Federal contracts and suchlike. Their Governors might occasionally grandstand it in schoolhouse doors, but that was little more than a small child throwing a tantrum. The Southern States were economically dependant on Uncle Sam, and could not defy him in any serious way.

A century before, the government had none of those levers. All it had was a small army, which could hang around in the South, making (from the Southern pov) a nuisance of itself, until northern voters got fed up and it was recalled. That remains true whoever is in the White House, and pretty much whatever he does.

Reverting to Mr Lincoln, keep in mind that whatever his sympathy for the Freedmen, his top priority is and always has been restoring the Union, which primarily means reconciling the defeated Southern Whites to it. Black rights, at the end of the day, can only be the second priority, not the first. How did Frederick Douglass put it? "You whites are Lincoln's children. We negroes can be, at best, his stepchildren". Douglass was surely right.


With respect to obeying the law of the land: One of the really scary scenes in Arthur Haley's novel "Hotel" is where the protagonist is in deep, DEEP trouble for renting a hotel room to a black man DESPITE the fact that it was not only the MORAL thing to do, but the LEGAL one. It (basically) takes deus ex machina to keep him from being fired. NB: he was to be fired for OBEYING THE LAW!

My mind just totally boggled at that scene.
 
With respect to obeying the law of the land: One of the really scary scenes in Arthur Haley's novel "Hotel" is where the protagonist is in deep, DEEP trouble for renting a hotel room to a black man DESPITE the fact that it was not only the MORAL thing to do, but the LEGAL one. It (basically) takes deus ex machina to keep him from being fired. NB: he was to be fired for OBEYING THE LAW!

My mind just totally boggled at that scene.


Could I also recommend the Gregory Peck movie Gentleman's Agreement?

Made in 1947, it's a vivid portrayal of what it was like to be Jewish in mid 20C America, with all sorts of restrictions on one's employment prospects, and exclusion from various hotels or restaurants, and even from living in entire neighbourhoods - in some ways a lot like Jim Crow. And this despite Jews having full legal right to vote, hold office etc - everything, in fact, that Blacks would have got from a "successful" Reconstruction.

There had even been a token Jew on the Supreme Court for the past thirty years or so, but it made little difference to those lower down the ladder. Custom was far stronger than law.
 
A lighter Reconstruction might lessen Southern hostility to the North somewhat, but a lot die-hard Confederates won't care - those bloody Yanks destroyed our Cause and that's that. There's still probably gonna be a lot of anti-Black sentiment in the South.

Marc A

P.S. Don't know much about the Civil War and postwar era, so what I posted was basically speculation based on not-so-solid proofs
 
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