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THE AMERICAN FOUNDING
What If Lincoln Had Lived?
Allen C. Guelzo
Henry R. Luce Professor of the Civil War Era
Gettysburg College
T
he round, lead .41-calibre bullet which John
Wilkes Booth fired into the head of Abraham
Lincoln on the night of April 14, 1865, was the
most lethal gunshot in American history. Only five
days before, the main field army of the Southern
Confederacy had surrendered at Appomattox Court
House, and the four dreary years of civil war between
North and South were yielding to a spring of national
rebirth. In the streets of New York, George Templeton
Strong watched as “men embraced and hugged each
other,” even “kissed each other, retreated into doorways
to dry their eyes and came out again to flourish their
hats and hurrah.”1 In Philadelphia, the rejoicing had
seemed like “New Year’s Eve, Christmas Eve, and
Fourth of July all combined,” while in Washington a
city-wide “illumination” took place—lamps, candle,
and gas jets were turned on, while the War Department
building was covered with racks of glowing fireworks
that spelled out PEACE.2 In Charleston, South
Carolina, where the war had begun four years before
at Fort Sumter, Henry Ward Beecher presided at a flagraising ceremony over the ruins of the fort. “Rebellion
has perished,” exulted the most famous preacher in
the Union. But, taking his cue from Lincoln’s urging
a month before to have “malice toward none, charity
for all,” Beecher warned against indulging “aimless
vengeance” toward the defeated Confederacy. “Let
us pray for the quick coming of reconciliation
and happiness under this common flag.”3 But now,
the man to whom everyone looked for guidance
in reconstructing the nation in “reconciliation
and happiness” was dead, even before the victory
illuminations had burned themselves out.
Allen C. Guelzo is the Henry R. Luce Professor
of the Civil War Era and Director of the Civil War Era
Studies Program at Gettysburg College. He holds a
Ph.D. in history from the University of Pennsylvania.
His scholarly interests center on American intellectual
history—philosophy, religion, ethics and politics—
between 1750 and 1865. His books include Lincoln’s
Emancipation Proclamation: The End of Slavery in
America and Abraham Lincoln: Redeemer President,
which was the co-winner of the Lincoln Prize for 2000.
He has written for The Washington Post, the Los Angeles
Times, and the Wall Street Journal.
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What If Lincoln Had Lived? Allen C. Guelzo
The result was a successful but costly war followed
by a botched and even more costly reconstruction.
Lincoln’s vice president, Andrew Johnson, took the
presidential oath within hours of Lincoln’s death. But
Johnson had none of Lincoln’s political skills, much
less Lincoln’s convictions about justice and equality for
the four million slaves whom the Civil War had freed.
“Damn the Negroes,” Johnson told one Tennessee
correspondent, “I am fighting these traitorous
aristocrats, their masters,” and even Johnson’s private
secretary, William G. Moore, admitted that Johnson
“exhibited a morbid distress and feeling against the
negroes.”4 A Tennessean who had remained loyal to
the Union, Johnson saw his mission only in terms of
punishing the Confederate elites whom he despised;
he had no similar animosity toward the larger body
of poor whites (whom he described as “poor, quiet,
unoffending, harmless”) and no grief for the freed
slaves, much less a desire to “force the right of suffrage
out of the hands of the white people and into the
hands of negroes.” All that was needed to reconstruct
the Union, Johnson believed, “was for Congress
to admit loyal representatives” from the defeated
Confederate states to Congress and get on with the
business of the country where it had been disrupted
in 1861.5 Not surprisingly, defeated Southerners
turned at once from despairing submission to
arrogant defiance. When “day after day went by
without bringing the disasters and inflictions which
had been vaguely anticipated,” and “they found that
the control of everything was to be again put in
their hands . . . they became insolent . . . drunk with
power, ruling and abusing every loyal man, white
and black.”6 Christopher Memminger, the former
Confederate secretary of the Treasury, put it more
simply: Johnson “held up before us the hope of a
‘white man’s government,’ and this led us to set aside
negro suffrage. . . . It was natural that we should
yield to our old prejudices.”7 By the time Johnson left
office in 1869, the pace of reconstruction was already
faltering, and Johnson had become so despised that he
had barely survived an impeachment. The victorious
North sank down into “reconstruction fatigue,” while
the former Confederates simply substituted Jim Crow
for slavery.
Would it have been different if Booth’s bullet had
missed? Having guided the nation through a wartime
valley of shadows, could Lincoln have found (as he
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once described it) “some practical system by which the
two races could gradually live themselves out of their
old relation to each other, and both come out better
prepared for the new”?
************
Lincoln never laid out a final, definitive plan
for reconstruction. In fact, there was some question
whether he had any business laying out such plans,
since Congress was not shy about asserting its
jurisdiction over any reconstruction process, and the
one brief outline for reconstruction that he issued
in 1863 was bitterly criticized for trampling on what
Congress claimed as a legislative-branch function.
(Lincoln just as irritably disagreed, and vetoed a
Congressional alternative when it was passed in
1864.) The word “reconstruction” had actually been
on people’s lips since 1861, although at the outset,
“reconstruction” described what would have to happen
Would it have been different if Booth’s bullet
had missed? Having guided the nation through
a wartime valley of shadows, could Lincoln
have found “some practical system by which
the two races could gradually live themselves
out of their old relation to each other, and
both come out better prepared for the new”?
as a result of appeasing the South. To “reconstruct” the
Union at that time would have meant, at the very least,
a string of constitutional amendments which gave
permanent security to slavery (and to the recovery
of fugitives from the free states), and at the worst
would have required a national convention to rewrite
the Constitution entirely.8 Lincoln, however, never
entertained any such notions of appeasement; and
once past the initial waves of Southern state secessions
and the outbreak of civil war, he began to speak of
“reconstruction” as a process of subduing the South and
returning its states to federal authority.
He tinkered in the first place with the idea of
imposing temporary military governments in the
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What If Lincoln Had Lived? Allen C. Guelzo
Southern territory reclaimed by early Union victories
in 1862—western Tennessee, lower Louisiana, the
eastern coastal region of North Carolina—which
would hold elections, sponsor elections, and resume
sending representatives to Congress. But these military
governments—with Andrew Johnson appointed
military governor in Tennessee, Edward Stanly in
North Carolina, John Phelps in Arkansas—had a
spotty record, and Congress balked at receiving the
representatives elected under their aegis.
Lincoln then turned to encouraging Southern
Unionists in occupied territory to begin forming
their own governments, calling state conventions
to write slavery out of their state conventions and
electing more rounds of representatives. He set
the bar for these loyalist governments as low as he
dared: In December, 1863, he issued a reconstruction
proclamation which allowed reclaimed Southern
states to form new governments based on as little
as 10% of the 1860 population taking a loyalty oath.
But these experiments did not shine any brighter.
In Louisiana, the loyalist state convention ignored
Lincoln’s nudge in 1864 that they begin extending
the vote to “some of the colored people . . . as,
for instance, the very intelligent, and especially
those who have fought gallantly in our ranks.”9
And, predictably, Congress refused to seat the
representatives Louisiana elected.
In his last public speech on April 11, 1865, Lincoln
hinted broadly that he had “some new announcement”
to make “to the people of the South” about
reconstruction, which would include voting rights for
the freedmen. “I would myself prefer that it were now
conferred on the very intelligent,” he said, “and on
those who serve our cause as soldiers.”10 But Lincoln
had nothing more specific than that to offer as yet; in
fact, he was trying as hard as he could not to be too
specific. “So great peculiarities pertain to each state,”
he warned, “and such important and sudden changes
occur in the same state; and, withal, so new and
unprecedented is the whole case, that no exclusive, and
inflexible plan can safely be prescribed as to details and
colatterals. Such exclusive, and inflexible plan, would
surely become a new entanglement.”11
This vagueness was partly a political habit of
Lincoln’s: He had learned in politics that laying down
one’s cards too early was an invitation to be outbid.
And it was partly a matter of temperament, since
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Lincoln was an exceedingly private man who resisted
any great amount of self-disclosure. Leonard Swett,
who had practiced law with Lincoln in Illinois and
understood the man better than almost anyone else,
hoped that no one imagined they could second-guess
Lincoln. “From the commencement of his life to
its close,” Swett wrote in 1866, “he arrived at all his
conclusions from his own reflections, and when his
opinion was once formed he never had any doubt but
what it was right.” David Davis, who had been the
judge of Lincoln’s judicial circuit in Illinois and whom
Lincoln had appointed to the Supreme Court in 1862,
reflected: “I Know the man so well: he was the most
reticent—Secretive man I Ever Saw—or Expect to
See.”12 And Lincoln’s law partner of fourteen years,
William Herndon, agreed: Lincoln was a man of
“profound policies, deep prudences, etc., was retired,
contemplative, abstract” and “about as shrewd a
man as this world ever had,” a man “of quite infinite
silences and was thoroughly and deeply secretive,
uncommunicative, and closeminded as to his plans,
wishes, hopes, and fears.”13 There can hardly be a
greater example of raw historical presumption than
the certain prediction of what Lincoln might have
done had he lived to direct reconstruction as he had
the civil war.
Still, there is no question that I am asked more
often than what if Lincoln had lived? And in the
largest sense, that may also be the most nagging whatif in all of American history, since it seems plain that
the nation stood at a more momentous crossroads in
1865 than any other it had come to since 1787, and
the decisions made then, like those of Frost’s chooser
in the “yellow wood,” have “made all the difference.”
No matter what we may think of the pointlessness of
what-ifs, this is one which not even the most hardheaded skeptic can resist. And especially during this
week—the sesquicentennial of Lincoln’s assassination
and death—we may, perhaps, give ourselves a
temporary dispensation to let the question float up
before us. What if Lincoln had lived? What would he
have done differently, or more wisely, than Andrew
Johnson; and what better kind of America might we
be living in as a result?
I will confess to being one of those historical hardheads, and usually have to protest that it’s hard enough
to get agreement on what did happen in the past
without speculating on what didn’t. But I will suggest
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What If Lincoln Had Lived? Allen C. Guelzo
today that the evidence points us toward four paths to
reconstruction Lincoln might well have adopted.
Voting rights. Only the most cynical will believe
that Lincoln’s life-long protestations that he had
“always hated slavery” were nothing but dishonest
rhetoric. But in the 1850s, Lincoln had no effective
answer to the follow-on question: what shall we do
with the slaves once we’ve freed them? Northerners
who opposed slavery also, generally, hated black
people, which is why so many anti-slavery activists
promoted the idea of colonizing freed slaves out of
the United States. Agreeing to deport the freed slaves
would make the suggestion of freeing them politically
palatable. “My first impulse,” Lincoln said in 1854,
“would be to free all the slaves, and send them to
Liberia, to their own native land.”14 Except, of course,
for the logistical improbability of such a deportation:
“If they were all landed there in a day, they would all
perish in the next ten days; and there are not surplus
If there was an emotional guiding-star
in Lincoln’s life, it was loyalty, and that
admiration of loyalty in the black soldier
more than anything else which persuaded
Lincoln that there was no real alternative,
especially for those blacks who had worn the
Union blue, but to reward that service with
full civil rights—voting rights, especially.
shipping and surplus money enough in the world
to carry them there in many times ten days.” The
alternative would then have to be “Free them all,
and make them politically and socially our equals”—
something which “my own feelings will not admit
of . . . and if mine would, we well know that those
of the great mass of white people will not.” So even
though Republicans understood that colonization
was “a damn humbug,” they also knew that “it will
take with the people.”15 As president, Lincoln hoped
that he could sugar-coat the emancipation pill by
recruiting prominent Northern blacks to lead a
voluntary exodus. But he got no takers, and the
one colonization experiment he sponsored in 1864
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at Île-à-Vache, off the south coast of Haiti, fizzled
ignominiously. After that, said Lincoln’s secretary
John Hay, “the President has sloughed off that idea of
colonization” as a “hideous & barbarous humbug.”16
It was not just the failure of Île-à-Vache which
triggered the sloughing-off; it was also the recruitment
through the preceding year of thousands of black
soldiers for the Union armies. If there was an
emotional guiding-star in Lincoln’s life, it was loyalty,
and that admiration of loyalty in the black soldier
more than anything else which persuaded Lincoln that
there was no real alternative, especially for those blacks
who had worn the Union blue, but to reward that
service with full civil rights—voting rights, especially.
“Why should they do any thing for us, if we will do
nothing for them?” Lincoln asked in a public statement
in September, 1863. “If they stake their lives for us,
they must be prompted by the strongest motive—even
the promise of freedom. And the promise being made,
must be kept.”17 By January of 1864, Lincoln had come
to see this as a condition of any peace-terms with the
Confederacy. If the Confederates wanted amnesty,
Lincoln could not “avoid exacting in return universal
suffrage, or, at least, suffrage on the basis of intelligence
and military service.”18
But there was also a practical political motive
that argued in favor of promoting black voting rights.
Once the war was over and the Southern states
re-absorbed into the Union, they would of course
elect representatives and senators to send back to
Washington. But if the freed slaves were excluded
from the vote, then, even after the most prominent
Confederates were banned from holding public office,
Southerners would still likely vote only for the same
species of white Democrats who had demanded
secession in the first place. What was worse, before
the war the Southern states had been restricted from
counting more than three-fifths of their slaves for
determining the number of representatives from
their states; with the end of slavery, these same white
Southerners could now claim authority to count
five-fifths of their black populations, still without
giving them any say in the voting process. The result
would be not only a return of revanchist whites to
Congress but more of them than ever before. Only
the voting power of the newly freed slaves could
offset the political dominance of unbowed whites
in the South. The freedman would then (promised
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What If Lincoln Had Lived? Allen C. Guelzo
Frederick Douglass) “raise up a party in the Southern
States among the poor,” and establish a long-term
Republican political hegemony in the formerly
Democratic South.19 “Give the negro the elective
franchise,” said Douglass, “and you at once . . . wheel
the Southern States into line with national interests
and national objects.”20
Had Lincoln lived, both his own sense of fairness
and the political needs of his own administration
would have made black voting rights an imperative
they never were for Andrew Johnson.
Economic integration. Economic independence
is what gives heft to political aspiration, something
Lincoln understood from his own struggle to rise
from poverty. Even before he gave any indication of
embracing black civil rights, Lincoln thought black
economic rights would be the most important factor
in promoting the “practical system by which the two
races could gradually live themselves out of their old
relation to each other.” In his debates with Stephen A.
Douglas, Lincoln insisted that even if the black man
“is not my equal in many respects,” nevertheless, “in
the right to eat the bread, without leave of anybody
else, which his own hand earns, he is my equal and the
equal of Judge Douglas, and the equal of every living
man.”21 Two years later, Lincoln said, “I want every
man to have the chance—and I believe a black man is
entitled to it—in which he can better his condition.”22
But in Lincoln’s world, economic opportunity
was tied overwhelmingly to the ownership of land,
and the newly freed slaves owned none. The means
for redressing this imbalance lay close at hand in the
Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen and Abandoned Lands
(known simply as the “Freedmen’s Bureau”) which
was launched on March 3, 1865, with a mandate to
claim land which had been abandoned by plantation
owners, or which had been forfeited by non-payment
of taxes during the war, and divide it up in fortyacre plots for ex-slaves to farm as their own. This
re-distribution (like that of Tory property after the
Revolution) was limited to lands which had been
abandoned by their owners, or to lands confiscated
as civil punishment from the Confederate leadership
(e.g., Robert E. Lee’s Arlington). And Lincoln, in
his career as an attorney for the Illinois Central
Railroad, had no qualms about evicting squatters
and occupiers from lands which the railroad claimed
and proposed turning into roadways. “In equal right,
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better is the condition of him in possession,” he
wrote in a legal opinion in 1856, and if the lands had
been vacated by slaveowners, there was no one better
to put in ownership than the ex-slaves who had once
worked them.23
The difference here between Lincoln and Andrew
Johnson is stark. Johnson could not imagine a world
in which ownership-in-fact had any appeal against
ownership-in-law, even if the law had now been
circumscribed by abandonment and treason. The
plea of the freed slaves—“Our wives, our children,
our husbands has been sold over and over again to
Lincoln said, “I want every man to have the
chance—and I believe a black man is entitled
to it—in which he can better his condition.”
But in Lincoln’s world, economic opportunity
was tied overwhelmingly to the ownership of
land, and the newly freed slaves owned none.
purchase the lands we now locates upon . . . And den
didn’t we clear the land, and raise de crops of corn,
of cotton, of rice, of sugar, of everything. . . . for that
reason we have a divine right to the land”—made no
impression on Johnson whatsoever.24 When he issued
a reconstruction plan on May 29, 1865, Johnson
offered amnesty “to all persons who have, directly
or indirectly, participated in the existing rebellion,”
except for a small class of Confederate leaders, “with
restoration of all rights of property, except as to
slaves.”25 At its peak in 1865, the Freedmen’s Bureau
was administering titles to slightly less than 1 million
acres of abandoned or confiscated lands. Even though
this represented only 0.2% of land in the Southern
states, Johnson nevertheless ordered its return to its
former owners. This allowed the newly reconstituted
Southern state legislatures to pass “Black Codes”
that sharply circumscribed blacks’ economic liberty,
effectively pulling the economic rug from under the
freed slaves and throwing them onto the untender
mercies of their former owners as agricultural
workers, sharecroppers, and menials.
Western development. The Civil War actually
sprang from the dispute of free and slave states over
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What If Lincoln Had Lived? Allen C. Guelzo
the future of the western territories, and Lincoln
regarded the West as an integral part of reconstruction.
He signed homestead legislation that opened huge
tracts of public land to private ownership, and he
pledged government support to a transcontinental
railroad which would carry the harvests of those
homesteads to world markets. On the very day of his
assassination, Lincoln promised Speaker of the House
Schuyler Colfax that he planned “to point” Union
veterans “to the gold and silver that waits for them in
the West.”26
Turning the freedmen’s gaze westward as well
would accomplish the same goal as the Freedmen’s
Bureau. The Homestead Act of May 20, 1862, allowed
virtually anyone to lay claim to over 270 million
acres of publicly owned land in 30 states, provided
that they were 21 years of age and that they pledged
to settle the land for five years, and it went into
effect on January 1, 1863, the same day that Lincoln
signed the Emancipation Proclamation. For Union
army veterans, the residency requirement was only
one year. But when the Freedmen’s Bureau’s director,
the evangelical abolitionist General Oliver Otis
Howard, pressed to open public lands in Florida,
Mississippi, and Arkansas for the resettlement of
blacks, Johnson blocked it. A second endeavor
to create what amounted to a domestic form of
colonization emerged out of Congress in 1866 with
the Southern Homestead Act, which opened 46
million acres of public land in Florida, Alabama,
Louisiana, Mississippi, and Arkansas to black
veterans and white Southern loyalists; but only about
6,000 claims were actually filed. Land ownership by
blacks lagged far, far behind that of whites in the
post-war decades, and only a determined push by
the federal government in privatizing land in the
West for the freed slaves could have changed that.27
From Johnson, nothing of that sort could have been
expected (he signed the Southern Homestead Act but
did nothing to implement it); from Lincoln, it would
not be too hard to imagine Lincoln, had he lived,
presiding at the ceremonies at Promontory Summit,
Utah, in 1869, driving the golden spike that united
the transcontinental railroad, a maul-bearing black
Westerner on either side.
Cleaning the Confederate slate. Lincoln was
not exaggerating, in his second inaugural address,
when he spoke of his hope of malice toward none
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and charity for all at the close of the war. He had no
wish to hunt down the Confederacy’s leaders as the
war ended. He confessed that he was “opposed to
hanging; that he did not love to kill his fellow men;
that if the world had no butchers but him, he guessed
the world would go bloodless.” But he also had no
wish to stop them leaving for exile. “Frighten them
out of the country,” he said, “open the gates, let down
the bars, scare them off.” When he was asked whether
federal authorities should seek the extradition of
Jacob Thompson, a Confederate cabinet secretary
who had fled to Canada, Lincoln only said, “Well, I
rather guess not. When you have an elephant on hand,
and he wants to run away, better let him run.”28 This
would clear the way for a new leadership in the South,
a leadership of Unionist whites and their natural
allies, the freed slaves.
The eventual restoration of white supremacy
in the former Confederacy is a reminder
that, even if Lincoln had lived to finish
out his second term, and put an active
presidential shoulder to black voting rights,
to black economic integration, to black
involvement in western expansion, and to the
wiping-clean of the old white Confederate
leadership, the results might not have been
hugely different from what they were.
Andrew Johnson’s pardon policies, however,
were another matter. Alexander Stephens, former
Confederate vice president and now pardoned by
Johnson, was elected by the Georgia legislature to
the Senate. Herschel V. Johnson, who had sat in
the Confederate Congress, was elected to the other
Georgia Senate seat. In the House of Representatives,
Cullen Battle, until recently a Confederate general,
showed up to represent Alabama. William T.
Wofford, who commanded a Confederate brigade at
Gettysburg, was there for Georgia. Two of Virginia’s
eight representatives had been members of the
state secession convention in 1861. Predictably, this
attempted restoration of white power was attended
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by an upsurge of mob violence against the freed
slaves. “You have doubtless heard a great deal of
the Reconstructed South, of their acceptance of the
results of the war,” wrote a Freedmen’s Bureau agent
in South Carolina. “This may all be true, but if a
man . . . had the list of Negroes murdered in a single
county in this most loyal and Christian state, he
would think it a strange way of demonstrating his
kindly feelings toward them.”29
Appalled at the barefaced arrogance of electing
to Congress men who had only months before been
trying to destroy the government, Republicans in
Congress refused to seat the former rebels and instead
passed legislation which returned the Southern states
to military occupation. But they did so (a) at the
price of a fearful political contest with Johnson which
allowed disgruntled Southerners to realize that they
could play the ends off against the middle to their
advantage and (b) by resorting to the cumbersome
mechanism of amending the Constitution, not once
but twice (in the 14th and 15th Amendments) to prevent
a repeat of the same white restoration in the South.
And even then, the restoration happened anyway.
************
The eventual restoration of white supremacy in
the former Confederacy is a reminder that, even if
Lincoln had lived to finish out his second term, and
put an active presidential shoulder to black voting
rights, to black economic integration, to black
involvement in western expansion, and to the wipingclean of the old white Confederate leadership, the
results might not have been hugely different from
what they were. Lincoln would still have faced stiff
opposition. Northern whites hated slavery, but they
also disliked blacks. And they hated Lincoln, wrote
one New Yorker, “for emancipating the negroes,
fearing that we shall employ them, & reduce the
wages.”30 Consequently, northern states routinely
ratified the 13th Amendment, abolishing slavery, but
just as routinely turned back state ballot initiatives
on black voting rights. “It is a misfortune not to be
lightly considered,” complained the North American
Review in 1866, “that Connecticut and Wisconsin,
by their recent votes denying the right of suffrage to
their black denizens, should have shown that a large
section of the Northern people is yet very imperfectly
instructed as to the true nature of the principles
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upon which our institutions are founded.”31 Worse
than merely “imperfectly instructed,” New York
voters took the state legislature that ratified the 15th
Amendment, swept the Republican majority away,
and installed a Democratic majority which promptly
attempted to rescind the ratification.32 The eventual
return of Southern representatives to Congress,
which sooner-or-later would have occurred even if
the most die-hard Confederates had been weededout, would still further dilute the Congressional
majorities with which Lincoln had worked during
the war, and if Northern Democrats were able to
scramble back to their feet, Lincoln would face much
heavier opposition going for reconstruction policies
than he had for wartime policies.
Similarly, Lincoln could scarcely have guaranteed
the operation of any “practical system” of racial
reunion without an ongoing military presence in the
South to enforce it. “Any man of Northern opinions
must use much circumspection of language” while
touring the South, wrote Sidney Andrews, who did
in fact tour the defeated Confederacy for the Atlantic
Monthly in 1865. “In many counties of South Carolina
and Georgia, the life of an avowed Northern radical
would hardly be worth a straw but for the presence
of the military.”33 Yet, Americans were chronically
unwilling, in times of peace, to foot large military
budgets, and the soldiers themselves were mostly
civilians-in-uniform who wanted nothing more than
to go home at war’s end.
Above all, Lincoln would have occupied the
Executive Mansion only until 1869, which is not a
long time to implement the vast programs his version
of reconstruction would have required. He might
have, like Franklin Roosevelt in 1940, have been
persuaded to seek an unprecedented third term;
but the yardsticks for measuring that possibility are
even reedier than the ones I have been using here.
Moreover, his successor would surely have been
(as Johnson’s was) Ulysses Grant, and Grant had
problems of his own.
In the end, not even Abraham Lincoln might
have been able to bulldoze his way to a triumphant
“mission accomplished.” It is difficult to see how he
could have avoided military occupation, how he
could have secured the black vote with anything less
than the constitutional amendments that were in fact
adopted as the 14th and 15th Amendments, or how he
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could have dealt with the re-emergence of a crosssectional Democratic opposition. And yet, it is hard
to imagine how we could have done worse. “Had Mr.
Lincoln lived,” said Frederick Douglass in December,
1865, “the negro of the South would have more than
a hope of enfranchisement and no rebels would hold
the reins of government in any one of the rebellious
states.” This was because Lincoln was “a humane man,
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an honorable man, and at heart an anti-slavery man”
who “looked to the principles of liberty and justice, for
the peace, security, happiness and prosperity of his
country.”34 Perhaps. One hundred and fifty years later,
we are still struggling to live up to that expectation. •
This text is based on a speech that was originally delivered on
April 17, 2015, at the Kirby Center.
1.
Strong, in Phillip S. Paludan, A People’s Contest: The Union and Civil
War, 1861-1865 (New York: Harper & Row, 1989), 392.
2.
Martha Hodes, Mourning Lincoln (New Haven: Yale University Press,
2015), 28; Terry Alford, Fortune’s Fool: The Life of John Wilkes Booth
(New York: Oxford University Press, 2015), 258.
3.
Beecher, Oration at the Raising of “The Old Flag” at Sumter
(Manchester: Alexander Ireland & Co., 1865), 12, 17.
21.Lincoln, Collected Works, 3:16.
4.
Stephen V. Ash, Middle Tennessee Society Transformed, 1860-1870: War
and Peace in the Upper South (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University
Press, 1988), 107.
23.Lincoln, Collected Works, 6:337.
5.
Hans L. Trefousse, Andrew Johnson: A Biography (New York: W.W.
Norton, 1989), 279-80.
6.
Col. J.W. Shaffer to Lyman Trumbull (December 25, 1865), in Horace
White, The Life of Lyman Trumbull (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin, 1913),
242-43.
26. Richard C. Willis, “Colorado Territory,” in Ralph Y. McGinnis &
Calvin N. Smith, eds., Abraham Lincoln and the Western Territories
(Chicago: Nelson-Hall, 1994), 66.
7.
Speeches, Correspondence and Political Papers of Carl Schurz, ed. F.
Bancroft (New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1913), 1:283, 2:256.
8.
Louis Masur, Lincoln’s Last Speech: Wartime Reconstruction and the
Crisis of Reunion (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015), 13-15.
9.
Lincoln, in Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln, ed R.P. Basler (New
Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1953), 7:243.
27. Michael L. Lanza, “‘One of the Most Appreciated Labors of the
Bureau’: The Freedmen’s Bureau and the Southern Homestead Act,”
in Paul A. Cimbala & Randall M. Miller, eds., The Freedmen’s Bureau
and Reconstruction: Reconsiderations (New York: Fordham University
Press, 1999), 67, 86.
10.Lincoln, Collected Works, 8:403.
11.Lincoln, Collected Works, 8:400-401.
19. “Interview with Delegation of Blacks” (February 7, 1866), in The
Papers of Andrew Johnson: Volume 10, February-July 1866, ed. P.H.
Bergeron (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1992), 48.
20. Douglass, “An Appeal to Congress for Impartial Suffrage,” Atlantic
Monthly 19 (January 1867), 116.
22.Lincoln, Collected Works, 4:24.
24. David W. Blight, Frederick Douglass’ Civil War: Keeping Faith in Jubilee
(Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1989), 201.
25. The Papers of Andrew Johnson: May-August 1865, 129.
28. Don & Virginia Fehrenbacher, eds., Recollected Words of Abraham
Lincoln (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1996), 131, 132, 486.
29. Richard Current, Those Terrible Carpetbaggers (New York: Oxford
University Press, 1988), 45.
12. Rodney O. Davis & Douglas L. Wilson, eds., Herndon’s Informants:
Letters, Interviews, and Statements about Abraham Lincoln (Urbana, IL:
University of Illinois Press, 1998), 166, 348.
30.Hodes, Mourning Lincoln, 84.
13. Emanuel Hertz, ed., Hidden Lincoln: From the Letters and Papers of
William H. Herndon (New York: Viking, 1938), 88.
32. LaWanda and John H. Cox, “Negro Suffrage and Republican Politics:
The Problem of Motivation in Reconstruction Historiography,” in
Reconstruction: An Anthology of Revisionist Writings, ed. K.M. Stampp
& L.F. Litwack (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1969),
159-165.
14.Lincoln, Collected Works, 3:15.
15. Phillip S. Paludan, The Presidency of Abraham Lincoln (Lawrence:
University of Kansas Press, 1994), 132.
16. Hay, diary entry for July 3, 1864, in Inside Lincoln’s White House: The
Complete Civil War Diary of John Hay, eds. Michael Burlingame &
John R. Turner Ettlinger (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University
Press, 1997), 217.
17.Lincoln, Collected Works, 6:409.
18.Lincoln, Collected Works, 7:101.
31. “The President’s Message,” North American Review 102 (January 1866),
253.
33. Sidney Andrews, “Three Months Among the Reconstructionists,”
Atlantic Monthly 17 (February 1866), 238.
34. Joseph R. Fornieri, “Lincoln on Black Citizenship,” in
Constitutionalism in the Approach and Aftermath of the Civil War, eds.
P.D. Moreno & J.G. O’Neill (New York: Fordham University Press,
2013), 80.
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