What if president lincoln was not assassinated

Each month BBC History Revealed asks a historical expert for their take on what might have happened if a key moment in the past had turned out differently. Lincoln succumbed to his wounds just days after the American Civil War effectively ended — but had Wilkes Booth not killed him, the president would have seen out his second term rebuilding the nation.

Politically savvy, willing to compromise and evolving in his views — not to mention popular and respected — Lincoln was the right man to help steer the United States out of war and into the Reconstruction era : the process of readmitting the seceded states and finding a place for around four million former slaves.

With Lincoln, though, they would have been better finessed. However, Lincoln likely would have keenly supported former Confederate states being delayed readmission to the Union until they adhered to a basic programme of, at the very least, adopting the 13th Amendment the abolition of slavery and other essential points, such as the redistribution of property to freed people. Lincoln would have looked to literally rebuild the nation, too, with a concerted push for infrastructure improvements.

That would have decapitated the old southern leadership. A second-term President Lincoln would have also faced challenges, according to Joseph Glatthaar, history professor at the University of North Carolina, such as the beginning of wars between Native Americans and settlers on the new frontier, as well as a post-war depression.

Usually in aftermath of the war you have an economic downturn, that might have affected his reputation. Instead of a lame duck Lincoln, the South and the North kept a fragile peace together under Andrew Johnson, who historians consider one of America's worst presidents. Lincoln consistently ranks as number one. Originally published on Discovery News. And what would have happened in the special presidential election of November ? The Republican Party was already split between its Radical and Moderate wings.

General Grant may have run for president as a compromise candidate, but other prominent Republicans included Seward, Colfax, Thaddeus Stevens, and Benjamin Wade. The Democrats were also divided and had been badly beaten in the presidential campaign.

Pendleton, the vice presidential nominee. General Winfield Scott Hancock had presidential ambitions in later years, and he had personally supervised the executions in the Lincoln assassination case. Benjamin Wade replaced Foster as Senate president pro tempore in and nearly became acting President in when President Johnson avoided removal from office by one vote in a Senate trial.

Ironically, it was Johnson's intransigence that pushed moderates toward the Radical position, resulting in the Reconstruction Acts. Had Lincoln and Congress reached an agreement in , universal black male suffrage would not have followed, at least not immediately. Would a more moderate Reconstruction, backed by a united Republican Party and overseen by Lincoln, have sunk deeper, more permanent roots than the more radical plan eventually implemented? No one, of course, can say. The vast majority of white southerners, supported vociferously by the Democratic Party of the North, were deeply opposed to any equality for the former slaves.

Johnson encouraged them to resist the implementation of congressional measures, helping to set the stage for the wave of terror by the Ku Klux Klan and kindred groups that did much to undermine Reconstruction. Perhaps, confronted by a united Republican Party and a president willing to enforce the law, white southerners would have accepted the basic rights of the former slaves.

In that case, the nation might have been spared the long nightmare of disenfranchisement, segregation, and racial violence that followed the end of Reconstruction. Or perhaps even a more moderate Reconstruction would have aroused violent opposition, and Lincoln would have faced the alternative that in fact eventually faced Congress—moving forward to full black suffrage and a federal commitment to protect blacks' rights as citizens, or relegating the freed people to quasi citizenship under the domination of their former masters.

It is impossible to say what choice Lincoln would have made under those circumstances. All we do know is that his assassination brought to the White House a man unable to rise to the demands of one of the most challenging moments in our nation's history. Please support this year tradition of trusted historical writing and the volunteers that sustain it with a donation to American Heritage.

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