WI: Lincoln not killed?

I don't know how often this is discussed, but I'm curious. How might things have turned out if Lincoln hadn't been killed by Booth, either that he survived the assassination attempt somehow, or if say Booth had chickened out in the end. Would it have had any major lasting effect on things, assuming someone else didn't try to do the same thing?


...and now I'm having the image in my head of Lincoln bumping into Booth earlier that day, somehow recognizing him as the actor he was, and saying he'd always wanted to see him perform, said comment ending up being what makes Booth decide to abandon the plan.*



*I could swear that I remember reading something about Lincoln expressing a desire to see him perform.
 
There's an interesting book about Lincoln's planned Reconstruction policies: William C. Harris, _With Charity for All: Lincoln and the Restoration of the Union_ (University Press of Kentucky 1997). In the last chapter, he goes into explicitly counterfactual history: what if Lincoln hadn't been shot?

He concludes that while Lincoln favored relatively lenient terms for Southern whites, and was not about to impose black suffrage as a condition for re-entry into the Union, nevertheless there was a difference between the policies Lincoln would have followed and those Andrew Johnson followed in OTL (p. 269):

"[Lincoln's] exalted standing with southern Unionists and his experience in dealing with them to achieve his purposes (for example, the dramatic acceptance of emancipation by many formerly proslavery Unionists) would have produced changes in the South different from those that occurred under Johnson's adminstration. Lincoln...would have paid closer attention than Johnson to the postwar plight of the freed blacks and white Unionists. His influence on the side of bona fide freedom for blacks would have prevented the kind of racially discriminatory laws, or Black Codes, enacted by several of the Southern state governments after the war--laws that Johnson implicitly endorsed...Though Lincoln had demonstrated his willingness to let bygones be bygones, he would have made clear his opposition to an early return of rebel leaders to political power, a position he had expressed during the war. Such a stance would have prevented the rash pardoning that occurred under Johnson during the summer and fall of 1865, arousing the Republican majority in Congress against the new President." Harris thinks it is inconceivable that Lincoln would have shown Johnson's lack of leadership, which he blames for such outrages against blacks and white Unionists as the New Orleans riot of 1866.

I think Harris puts too much emphasis on Lincoln's plans during the war, and not enough on how stubborn southern resistance to black rights might have "radicalized" Lincoln after the war, as it did many previously "moderate" Republicans. He does at least mention the possibility on p. 275:

"nforeseeable contingencies, such as terror campaigns to undermine black freedom and loyal control, might have compelled him to adjust his Southern policy to meet new realities." It should be noted that Lincoln by 1865 had no objection to black suffrage--he stated that he wished the Louisiana government had permitted some blacks (e.g., those who could meet educational requirements or had served in the Union army) to vote. At that stage, however, he was not ready to *insist* on it. I think it is quite conceivable that Southern resistance to black rights would eventually have driven him to such an insistence.

There would of course be no impeachment in any event--Johnson was totally out of touch with Northern public opinion, and drove radical and conservative Republicans together into opposition to him. That would never have happened with Lincoln.
 

katchen

Banned
Lincoln's true idea of freeing the slaves amounted to finding them a homeland to which they could be deported from the United States altogether. Lincoln believed (rightly, as it turned out) that the only way African-Americans could KEEP their freedom was to leave the US to avoid re-enslavement by other names and means. Obviously, the latter is what happened OTL.
Had Lincoln lived (and not been impeached--there is a very well written AH novel entitled "The Impeachment of Abraham Lincoln"---it is likely that Lincoln would have continued to pursue the idea of persuading the British to grant African -Americans a homeland or homelands in British Guiana and/or British Honduras. And if the British refused to go along with the idea, I suspect that Lincoln would have used the French occupation of Mexico as an excuse for war, not the threat of war, and following kicking the French out of Mexico, detached Yucatan (and perhaps Chiapas) from Mexico to serve as a homeland for deported African-Americans--and started his own "trail of tears" deportation of African-Americans. After all, Yucatan is only 500 miles away from New Orleans and Mobile and Galveston.
 
Lincoln's true idea of freeing the slaves amounted to finding them a homeland to which they could be deported from the United States altogether.
Lincoln had come around to rejecting that scheme by the time of the Emancipation Proclamation. He would probably be further radicalized during Reconstruction, like most Republicans were.
 

katchen

Banned
Lincoln could easily come back to that idea once he sees how Southerners are trying, as Lincoln feared, to re-enslave African Americans. And as much as African-Americans feel a part of these United States, in the 1860s, facing on one hand, the opposition of northerners to African-Americans living in their communities and on the other hand, the determination of Southern whites to reduce African-Americans to serfdom if not re-enslaved on trumped up charges like vagrancy, I suspect African-Americans would grudgingly accept re-settlement in Yucatan as well.
It would be the French adventure in Mexico that would make it all feasible once again. Juarez's elected government (and eventually Porfirio Diaz) would be re-established with American help. But Yucatan was always a detached appendage of Mexico (it didn't have a railroad to the rest of Mexico until the 1950s OTL) and the US has needs too, and if African Americans are not to be re-enslaved, they need a homeland separate from Southern whites and indeed, eventually an independent nation. And Yucatan (including Campeche and Quintana Roo and perhaps the Guatemalan Peten), once the rainforest is brought under control, is just the right size--and a worthy pound of flesh from Mexico for liberating it.
As for the South, after attempts at breaking up plantations fail, Southern plantations are likely to be run again--with contract Chinese labour. No Asian Exclusion Act in this TL!
 
I can't see Lincoln being happy with OTL's 14th Amendment.

In particular, I suspect he would have objected to Section 3, not merely as over-harsh but as an encroachment on the President's pardoning power. I can imagine him favouring a different Section 3, which restored full political rights to all, but required that any restrictions in the right to vote must apply to both races impartially. Istr that Senator Stewart of Nevada made such a proposal in 1866, but that it perished in the battle between Andrew Johnson and Congress.

(The POTUS of course has no veto on Constitutional Amendments, but I suspect Lincoln would have enough influence to block one that he disliked. The 14A passed the Senate 33-11, so he would only need four moderate Senators to switch sides).

One point though - even with full Black suffrage Reconstruction could easily have been even less radical than it was. As I understand it, many Whites boycotted the elections to the State Conventions of 1868, in the belief that Johnson could hold things up until the election, which they hoped that the Democrats would win and readmit them with no Black suffrage at all. With Lincoln instead of AJ, the first hope is absent, and if Lincoln has moved to supporting Black suffrage by 1866, the next election is still far away, so that Southern Whites may well be in a less defiant mood. So the Reconstruction Constitutions (absent the boycott) could have been a good deal more conservative than OTL's, probably excluding "paupers" and the illiterate, which would have been acceptable to many in the North, and quite possibly to Lincoln.
 
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