Recycling an old soc.history.what-if post of mine:
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As for Foster, I agree that he would become President--there have been some
arguments that there was *no* President Pro Tempore at the time of Lincoln's
assassination but I think
http://groups.google.com/group/soc.history.what-if/msg/97299d9990719f4e
answers them convincingly. As to his own politics, he was originally a Whig
who was elected Senator from Connecticut in 1855 by a coalition dominated by
Whigs (but also including Free Soilers and Prohibitionists). When he became
a Republican, he seems to have had the reputation of being a rather
conservative one. Eric Foner, for example, in his *Free Soil, Free Labor,
Free Men: The Ideology of the Republican Party before the Civil War* refers
to him as "the conservative senator from Connecticut", yet Foner also notes
that Foster wrote in 1856 that he viewed that year's election as the last
opportunity of the North "to save our liberties"--language similar to that
used by radicals like Joshua Giddings.
http://books.google.com/books?id=HUqJPUyS83AC&pg=PA102
In *The Limits of Sovereignty: Property Confiscation in the Union and the
Confederacy during the Civil War,* Daniel W. Hamilton writes that on the
confiscation issue "Wisconsin Senator Timothy Howe and Connecticut Senators
Lafayette Foster and James Dixon straddled the fence between the moderate and
conservative camps."
http://books.google.com/books?id=lt9Nu91V-fwC&pg=PA320
Lyman Trumbull, by contrast, was a "radical" on this issue--given Trumbull's
later conservatism, this helps illustrate that the question of whether a
given Republican was "conservative", "moderate", or "radical" varied from
time to time and from issue to issue. Nevertheless, it does seem safe to say
that whether considered a moderate or a conservative Republican, Foster was
no radical. If in 1856 he expressed apocalyptic views about the dangers of
the Slave Power to northern liberties, that simply shows how widespread such
views were in *all* wings of the newly organized Republican Party. (And
quite understandably so, in view of the repeal of the Missouri Compromise,
the Ostend Manifesto, the violence in Kansas, the assault on Charles Sumner--
and a little later on, the Dred Scott decision. It was easy enough for some
twentieth century historians--especially the "revisionists" like Avery Craven
who flourished between the two world wars--to say that Republicans
overreacted to these events, that it was an oversimplification to regard them
as all part of a Slave Power conspiracy, etc. Even if this were true, the
point is how these events looked to many Northerners *at that time*.) Of
course to Andrew Johnson, *any* Republican who did not favor his own program
of readmission of the southern states with just about no questions asked was
a "radical." By that standard, only the handful of Johnson Republicans, like
Doolittle of Wisconsin, were not "radicals." All in all, though, "moderate"
or "moderate conservative" seems about the best way to describe Foster.
See
http://www.abrahamlincolnsclassroom.org/Library/newsletter.asp?ID=53&CRLI=133
for an interesting evaluation of the differences between Foster and his
colleague James Dixon: "Much less aggressive than Dixon was Lafayette
Foster, a former Whig from Norwich who was elected to the Senate in 1855, He
lacked Dixon's killer instinct for patronage and seldom stood up to Dixon,
even when he disagreed with him..".
BTW, we had some discussion here of whether Foster would serve out Lincoln's
entire second term, or whether a special election would be held, as the
Succession Act of 1792 seemed to require. See the already-cited post at
http://groups.google.com/group/soc.history.what-if/msg/97299d9990719f4e If
there were indeed a special election in 1865, whom would the Republicans
nominate? I am reasonably sure it would not be Foster, who would be viewed
as an accidental "caretaker" chief executive. Do we get Grant three years
earlier than in OTL? See
http://groups.google.com/group/soc.history.what-if/msg/ad3f23aea6090166 and
the subsequent posts in that thread.
(As Mike Stone pointed out, even a caretaker Foster administration could have
important consequences. For one thing, he might avoid Johnson's rash pardons
of 1865--if only because he might simply feel that he was in too weak a
political position to embark on such a course.)