WI: Lincoln Lived?

This is a common thought experiment, but seemingly not too commonly brought up here.

As we know, Lincoln was assassinated in 1865. After a bloody Civil War, the nation had been reunited, and peace and normality could once again return to the land, with the slaves freed, and the South to be returned to the fold through reconstruction. However, Lincoln was not to oversee this period of peace and reconciliation as he was murdered.

But what if it had been different? What if Lincoln had been guarded that night, and Booth thwarted like the rest of his conspirators?
 

Anaxagoras

Banned
Lincoln would not have been able to have the military reality of the war as a tool to keep the coalition of Radical Republicans, Moderate Republicans, and War Democrats together. While I think that Reconstruction would have been less harsh than it was IOTL (with big implications for race relations in the South), it certainly would not have been nearly as mild as Lincoln wanted it to be.

Today, Lincoln would be remembered as a good president, but not the greatest president of all time.
 
What might actually be a more interesting question: What would have happened if he had lived on with fairly severe brain damage from the assassination attempt? No provisions for declaring a president incapacitated back then, and his term had a long ways to go--just a few months short of a full term. If you really wanted to mess things up, have periods of lucidity mixed with long periods of screwed up or incapacitated thought.

If he had avoided assassination altogether he would have faced a set of dilemmas. The people who had run the deep south pre-Civil War weren't willing to give up that rule, and while some of them were ruined permanently by the war, others recovered financially to some extent and they were dead set on using black labor cheaply. Any federal administration was going to have to either accept them regaining power or fight it for decades, until there was a stable black middle class in place in the south, capable of defending itself both physically and politically. Given the racism in both north and south, that probably wasn't in the cards.
 
What might actually be a more interesting question: What would have happened if he had lived on with fairly severe brain damage from the assassination attempt? No provisions for declaring a president incapacitated back then, and his term had a long ways to go--just a few months short of a full term. If you really wanted to mess things up, have periods of lucidity mixed with long periods of screwed up or incapacitated thought.
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I think his cabinet would've been sharp enough to notice any lapses indicating shortcomings in Lincoln's mental faculties. From there, you'd get a power struggle between Stanton and Johnson, both of whom hated each others guts, iirc, and who both also would've wanted to seize as much power as they could in the event of a vacuum.
 

Wolfpaw

Banned
I think his cabinet would've been sharp enough to notice any lapses indicating shortcomings in Lincoln's mental faculties. From there, you'd get a power struggle between Stanton and Johnson, both of whom hated each others guts, iirc, and who both also would've wanted to seize as much power as they could in the event of a vacuum.
Not Johnson. This was the time when VPs were still well-paid hatrack and rarely attended Cabinet meetings. If anything it'll be a struggle between Stanton and Seward.
 
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