It's a curious question, isn't it? Exactly
the kind of thing I love to explore, a tipping point in history! Next April
we'll come across the 150th anniversary of President Lincoln's
assassination, and this same question is sure to be asked and evaluated by anyone
who ever cracked open an American history book. All too often we hear the easy
answer. If Lincoln had lived then the period after the Civil War would have
been easier, more peaceful. Lincoln would have handled Reconstruction better,
so the argument goes. The South would have emerged from the devastation of war
earlier with Lincoln at the helm. But the truth, I believe, is far more
nuanced—everything with history is.
 |
The first known photograph of Lincoln after clinching the Presidency
|
Too many of us look back on Lincoln's
presidency and the time period leading up to and after the Civil War with
distortion of our modern time. How many times have you heard that hindsight is
20/20? The trouble is, hindsight also gets more entrenched the further away you
get from the actual events, the more time and memory fade all the little
details. It's easy to forget just how unpopular old Abe Lincoln was in the last
year of his presidency. He was re-elected in 1864, after putting Senator Andrew
Johnson on the ticket to build a larger coalition in countering the Radical
Republicans—the elements of his own political party who actively sought retribution
from the South for their secession. Lincoln even had to fight for the
nomination of his party that year, by stacking the party convention with
delegates who owed him their jobs! It
wasn't until just before the general election in Sept 1864 that several Union
victories pushed Abe ahead in the polls and secured his second term. How soon
we forget...the man we all know as the greatest American President was
universally reviled by his party, by the South, even by abolitionists who saw
the Emancipation Proclamation as a hollow document. (An excellent review of
this is given by Larry Tag at the Civil War Trust.)
And so in 1865 we had an ominous backdrop to
our nation, one where the course of history could have flown in almost any
direction. The nation was torn apart, reconstruction had barely started, draft
riots took place up north, factory workers threatened action if a flood of
newly freed slaves made their way north to compete for their jobs, and the War
still simmered. Even when General Lee handed his sword to General Ulysses S.
Grant at Appomattox Courthouse, uncertainty lingered over the country. A large
number of Confederate soldiers in the Army of General Joe Johnston were still
at the fight, and Jefferson Davis, the President of the Confederacy, was on the
loose and encouraging Johnston to disband his men and fight on in guerilla
warfare.
 |
General Joe Johnston
|
That was exactly what Lincoln had long
worried over, that the War would linger, drag for years as a burning brush fire
marring the country from progress. If General Johnston wanted, he could easily have
formed an insurgency the likes of which our nation fought in Iraq, or
Afghanistan—small groups of men harassing the countryside and the occupying
Northern Armies for years to come. Johnston had nearly 90,000 men at his
command, more than enough to extend the fight indefinitely. What Lincoln needed
was a clear defeat of the Confederacy, an end to the War that everyone could
point to and agree upon. But before he could see that day he took a night out
with his wife to catch a play. He never saw the country fully reunited.
Two days later, on April 17th
1865, Johnston met with Union General William Tecumseh Sherman, the man who had
cut a path of destruction across the South. At that first meeting Sherman
handed Johnston a telegraph that told of Lincoln's death. The southern general
knew what it meant. He had a decision to make and little time to barter.
Lincoln had instructed his generals to go easy on the surrendering armies, to
help them back into the fold of the nation. And Johnston argued for this kind
of treatment, for a surrender that went beyond pure military terms. In an
effort to ease the reconciliation, Sherman relented and agreed to political
concessions, such as reinstating state governments and releasing arms to state militias. But officials in Washington rejected the terms of the deal. They
found the details too lenient, especially after the death of the President.
Revenge was setting in and Lincoln was becoming the Northern martyr. On April
26th 1865, Johnston accepted surrender on purely military terms. By
doing so he directly disobeyed orders from Jefferson Davis, who wished the
struggle to continue. Johnston knew revenge would come swift from the
North—revenge for a fallen President no matter how unpopular he had been.
So we’re left pondering. What would have
happened is Lincoln lived? Would Johnston have surrendered? Maybe not. Maybe
his men would have blended back into the fabric of the South, dropping their
uniforms but taking their rifles and their powder. An insurgency would have
erupted, plaguing the nation for years if not decades. Booth never knew the
blow he dealt for the Southern cause. Lincoln’s death was a short-term symbolic
victory for the dying Confederacy, but ultimately it’s final undoing. And
Lincoln may have known, even predicted his own death as the last impediment for
the nation to heal. He had dreams and premonitions of his own death, dreams he
documented. His friend and confidant, Ward Hill Lamon, claimed that Lincoln
dreamt of "the subdued sobs of mourners". During
the dream Lincoln asked a soldier who had died. The soldier said, “The
President. He was killed by an assassin." That dream was on April 4th
1865. Just 10 days later he paid the ultimate price.
We’ll never know exactly what might have
happened if Lincoln had a real bodyguard. But my bet is that the simple answer,
the ideal image we have of Old Abe guiding the nation through its time of
healing, is just too easy to accept. History is too nuanced, too complex to let us off the hook so easily.
What would America have looked like if
Lincoln lived? No one knows…
