The Spirt of Mortal: Lincoln Lives On

Maybe you could have black militia's armed with surplus Civil War Rifles, like in the TL We Will Have Peace.

There were Black militias OTL. I presume that they had rifles, though offhand I don't know the source. But it didn't really matter. With a million or so Confederate veterans in the South, the other side had virtually unlimited manpower to call upon.


Getting back to Mr Lincoln, I suspect he'd have gone for something along the lines of Senator William Stewart's 1866 proposal. Stewart (a Nevada Republican) wanted something along the lines of Horace Greeley's "universal amnesty and impartial suffrage". Franchise laws must be colour blind, with any literacy or other tests applying equally to blacks and whites alike. This pill would be sugared by a total and unconditional amnesty, so that all treason trials, confiscations or disfranchisements would be wiped off the agenda. Iirc, Alexander H Stephens and other prominent Southerners were favourable to the idea, but it got swept away in the grudge match between Congress and Andrew Johnson. Since Lincoln would almost certainly not get into such a fight, I could see something like this going through.
 
II. Lincoln, as a Republican partisan, would seek to win over white Southerners to the party. (Johnson, a Democrat, did the opposite.) Almost certainly he would block the "Conservative Reconstruction" of OTL 1865-1866, which brought ex-Confederates to power and enacted draconian "Black Codes".

I think you mean the opposite. How could Lincoln win over white Southerners by stopping the black codes and ex-confederates from holding office?

By proffering Federal patronage of various kinds. By appointing friendly Southerners to Federal posts in the South, as marshals, judges, customs collectors, etc. These would be ex-Whigs, southern Unionists, explicily repentant Confederates, anti-CSA Southerners (by the end of the war, a lot of white Southerners were openly resisting CSA taxes and conscription), any sort of moderate. The South was no monolith.

Also, Federal "pork"; there was at least some Federal support for physical reconstruction in the South, and that could be directed to people and areas that aligned toward the Republican Party. Don't forget the ex-Whig factor. The Whig program (popular in much of the South) included "internal improvements".

As to blocking the "Conservative Reconstruction" and "Black Codes": Johnson gave the hard-line ex-Confederate and Democrat element in the South carte blanche. That allowed them to establish political dominance and position themselves as defenders of white supremacy. Lincoln would deny them that dominance, and also they would not deliver the explicit white-supremist laws. Some whites would be annoyed by the absence of those laws, but most would not care much, as long []i[de facto[/i] white supremacy continued, even if less complete.

There was a power vacuum in 1865; Johnson filled it with Democrats. Lincoln would have filled it with everyone else.
 
There was a power vacuum in 1865; Johnson filled it with Democrats. Lincoln would have filled it with everyone else.

Would it really matter who filled it or with whom?

Whatever either of them does can only last as long as it takes the South to get its breath back after 1865 and for the army to shrink back to peacetime levels and so become too small to police the South. After that the local whites fill it with whatever they feel like filling it with - and we know what that was.
 
By proffering Federal patronage of various kinds. By appointing friendly Southerners to Federal posts in the South, as marshals, judges, customs collectors, etc. These would be ex-Whigs, southern Unionists, explicily repentant Confederates, anti-CSA Southerners (by the end of the war, a lot of white Southerners were openly resisting CSA taxes and conscription), any sort of moderate. The South was no monolith.

Trouble is, while such elements as these might indeed flirt with the Republicans (some did OTL), there is no guarantee that they will stay Republican.

Even in the North, there was a marked tendency for former Democrats, like Trumbull, Chase and even eventually Butler, to drift back to their old party, once slavery and secession were no longer issues. And such a trend is likely to be a good deal stronger in the South, where, even ignoring the War (!!), the Republicans' support for high tariffs will go down like a lead balloon. And the GOP is most unlikely to modify its tariff policy to attract Southerners.

And even prewar, the Democrats were generally stronger in the South than Whigs, save for the odd blip like 1840. So even if they all become Republicans, that still leaves them a minority party in the South. In theory, they could seek the votes of enfranchised Blacks, but given the racial attitudes of the day, each black vote gained is likely to be offset by the loss of two white ones - maybe more.
 

Saphroneth

Banned
I have to say, I think I expect Lincoln's legacy to be a lot more controversial in this timeline.

Not necessarily because of anything he does - the man's certainly smart and caring enough to do great good, though there may be certain questions about his suspension of civil liberties in order to fight the war (as real as they were understandable)... but because, by living longer, he has time to have his legacy evaluated in a more nuanced way. He went out on a high note, and dying dramatically in office tends to lionize a president.
 
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