WI: Abraham Lincoln Lives Through Second Term

I wonder if Lincoln would've been accused of not doing enough about civil rights after leaving office. It'll be yeah he freed the slaves and was a nice man but he didn't do enough or anything to prevent Jim Crow laws in the South.
 
If Lincoln lives to finish out his term, we first need to establish why the assassination plot does not succeed or does not happen. However, in terms of an enduring legacy, I think we see progress on civil rights begin more slowly, but without the subsequent reversal over the decades following Reconstruction in our timeline.
 
I wonder if Lincoln would've been accused of not doing enough about civil rights after leaving office. It'll be yeah he freed the slaves and was a nice man but he didn't do enough or anything to prevent Jim Crow laws in the South.

Entirely possible. Either he "betrays" the Freedmen or he takes the OTL path of Radical Reconstruction and meets much the same failure.

Like FDR eighty years later, he was removed from the stage at the ideal moment for his historical reputation. Living longer could only have been an anticlimax of one kind or another.
 
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