American History Hit - What If Lincoln Hadn't Been Shot?

Episode Date: August 18, 2025

It's the biggest 'What if?' in American history: What if Lincoln hadn't been shot? The assassination could so easily have failed and things went so wrong in the aftermath (looking at you Andrew Johnson). Could Reconstruction have looked different with Abraham Lincoln at the helm?Don's guest is friend of the pod Aaron Sheehan-Dean, professor of history at Louisiana State University.Edited by Tim Arstall, produced by Freddy Chick. The Senior Producer was Charlotte Long.Sign up to History Hit for hundreds of hours of original documentaries, with a new release every week and ad-free podcasts. Sign up at https://www.historyhit.com/subscribe.  You can take part in our listener survey here.All music from Epidemic Sounds.American History Hit is a History Hit podcast. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Want to explore even more history? Sign up to History Hit, where you will discover history from around the world. From the American Revolution to prehistoric Scotland, there is plenty to discover. With your subscription, you'll unlock hundreds of hours of exclusive documentaries with a brand new release every week, exploring everything from the ancient world to World War II. Just visit historyhit.com slash subscribe to bring the past alive. Abraham Lincoln used to joke that his bed was one of the few places in the White House he could find peace, although he would always check underneath at night in case a particularly persistent senator was hiding there.

As darkness fell on the night of April 14, 1865, that bed lay empty. Lincoln and his wife Mary were on the town, attending a performance at Ford's Theater. At some point, though, a White House guard entered the room. carrying in his arms the Lincoln's youngest son, Tad. Tad was a fitful sleeper, often ended up in his father's bed. On this night, Tad was settled down, tucked in, and left there to fall asleep, safe in the knowledge that his father, President Abraham Lincoln, would soon come home. We all know the truth of what happened next, that deeper darkness, the country, would be plunged into that night. But what if it hadn't happened? What if Abe and Mary had simply returned and found their boy asleep, as so often happened,

with Abe trundling him into his lanky arms and carrying him back to his room? Such a poignant parental act, but suggestive of so much more. If Lincoln had come home, would the United States still have gone through the nightmare years of reconstruction? Could Lincoln have found a way to truly heal the nation? or were the divisive issues beyond even his persuasive powers to put back together a people so broken apart? Hello, it's Don Wildman here. Glad you were listening to American History Hit. Thanks for joining us. Where the Civil War is concerned, questions abound and counterfactuals are intriguing. What if the South hadn't seceded? What if Robert E. Lee had fought for the Union?

What if Confederates had occupied D.C.? On this series, we've asked a few of those very prickly questions, please consult the archive. But there is one coulda-wooda that's especially poignant and painful. What if Abraham Lincoln hadn't been shot? What if on the night of April 14, 1865, he and his wife, Mary, had attended the theater, enjoyed the play, been applauded by the grateful gathering, and simply returned to the White House and gone to bed? What if on April 15th, Lincoln awoke to begin the work reconstructing the nation he had saved from its own demise. It hurts the heart to consider the spared life of a great man, never mind how our ruptured nation might have been healed in the hands of a leader more determined, more capable of, well,

let's consider the options. In the very capable hands of Professor Aaron Sheehan Dean of Louisiana State University, who specializes in the issues of Civil War reconstruction. Aaron has been with us before on American history yet four times, including two of our episodes in the Confederacy series. Welcome back, sir. It is a pleasure and a privilege as always. Thanks, Don. I'm happy to be here. Counterfactuals are tricky. I know this. Historians don't love them. But this one, I think, stands out because Lincoln is killed at such a pivotal watershed moment with so much in the balance for the nation. And so much still ahead. Lincoln had only just been reelected, November 1864, six months before. His inauguration, his famous second inaugural address, all that, and he was about

to serve his second term to 1869. But that's not how it happens. Instead, Vice President Andrew Johnson becomes president, and general consensus is he makes a mess of it all. So let's get started. April 14th is the day of the assassination. Lee's surrender at Appomattock happened less than a week before on April 9th. People are still uplifted in this moment, victory, enthralled. So what are, What can we suppose in Lincoln's mind are the overarching questions he must now address? So he has to figure out how to bring southern states back into their regular relationship with the federal government, which is what he had been trying to accomplish from the very beginning of the war. And so things are highly irregular. Lincoln is still somebody that is sort of fundamentally, I'm reluctant to say conservative, but he believes in the process.

So he wants to get those states reconstructed. Louisiana had already offered a reconstructed government that was more or less accepted into the union. They're not actually representative Congress at that point, but they are kind of recognized by the Lincoln administration. And so he needs to do some kind of structural housekeeping. And then there's the question of, do you pardon people, do you prosecute people? They're going to be executions. None of those issues had even really begun to be considered. I mean, they were certainly thinking about them.

But as you say, the timing between Lee's surrender, at the point of Lincoln's execution, remember, there's still, in fact, a Confederate army in the field. Joseph Johnson's army in North Carolina is being confined by Sherman but had not yet officially surrendered. That doesn't happen until much later in April, the 26th. And there are, in fact, Confederate forces farther west and there are Confederates at sea. So there's a lot still to be determined at this point. You mentioned something that was really a surprise to me as I reviewed the subject, and that was the fate of Louisiana, which is where you teach, which is a fascinating, unique story in the Civil War people don't understand. I'd suggest the last question or the other question, what will happen to four million formerly enslaved people? It's got to be on his mind, right? Yeah, I mean, in fact, Lincoln's last public address, which comes really that night before he goes to the theater, maybe the 12th, in any event, his last public address, which happens in an impromptu fashion from the,

balcony of the White House in which he begins talking about this, and he actually says, proposes a kind of limited black male enfranchisement. Black men, as he says in the Louisiana context, especially those former soldiers and the highly intelligent, we should consider enfranchising them. And part of what we don't quite know, but there's a sort of reasonably valid suspicion that John Wilkes Booth, who assassinations Lincoln is actually in the audience when Lincoln says that and he says, that's the last straw. If what we're moving to was a world in which black men can vote alongside white men, we have to kill Lincoln and also part of the assassination plot involved an attack on the Secretary of State, William Henry Seward. There were other false starts on other cabinet members, but the intention was really to completely disrail the U.S. government and try to forestall these massive social changes that are coming. So how to bring the Confederate states back in, how to really deal with the fate of four million enslaved souls,

Across the country, there is a wide range of opinions, of course. The Confederates argue for continuation of a Confederacy with slavery still intact. How does that work for them? It is really a kind of last gasp. And you see this among Lee's officers as he's marching west. Richmond is abandoned April 1st or second, and his army begins its movement. I mean, his informal surrender to Grant happens on April 9th. And he has officers urging Lee to release his men and urge them.

to adopt a kind of guerrilla war, to try to keep resistance intact. And Lee, who is very much a social conservative and knows the kind of social chaos that will be unleashed from a true guerrilla war in which you have trained American U.S. forces pursuing irregulars with no compulsion to respect the laws of war, that will sort of destroy Southern society fully. And Lee says, no, I'm going to formally surrender, and all men will be bound by that. if any of you officers want to leave, you can. I mean, none really do at that point. There are still some guerrillas active. But I think for the ruling Southern elite, there was a recognition that the goals of the Confederacy, that is an autonomous independent Confederacy with slaveholding intact, had failed. And so there was a kind of recalibration to thinking about the ways of maintaining some of that, home rule and if not slavery, then a kind of virulent white supremacy. in now a reunited United States. And again, there's as much ambiguity around how Confederates or

ex-Confederates imagine this post-war world to be as there is for Lincoln and U.S. commanders. The seas are planted for many things that actually unfold. Another aspect of this is the radical Republicans in the North who are insisting on three items, complete emancipation of slaves. Plantation land redistribution, many people don't realize this, that land reform was a major part of their platform and their idea. And of course, the Confederate states to be governed as territories of the North for a time. These radical Republicans, and I guess we should define that term for some people, saw this phase of time lasting how long, do you think? Well, a lot of them haven't yet even formulated those ideas quite as clearly as you put them, I would say. There are some,

I mean, really a handful. Certainly someone like Charles Sumner, who's really the leader of radical Republicans in the Senate is envisioning a state of a kind of liminal period in which states will have to be reorganized in some fundamental way. And that part of the Constitution they lean on is the Constitution's guarantee that all citizens are entitled to a Republican form of government, lowercase are. And they understand that slavery prohibited that and certainly war upset that. And that if you're going to have a post-war South that won't simply return to rebellion in five or ten years, you need to reorganize the social and economic order. You need to really break the backbone of that slaveholding elite

that drove the South to secession in the first place. And there are ways to do that structurally, as you say, with the organization of Southern states. There are also ways to do that through the redistribution of landholding. Even among radical Republicans, there is a strong distaste for property redistribution. This is one of the sort of cardinal elements of the American Revolution

and of the kind of American ideology such as it is that's developing in the pre-Civil War United States. So Thaddea Stevens, a leader of radical Republicans in the House, does in 1865 propose the redistribution, the reallocation of land either confiscated from slaveholders or soon to be confiscated. And he's talking about millions of square acres of land to formally enslave people and the poor whites who had generally not had the opportunity, nearly 50 percent of who, are landless. They don't own land, their own land in the pre-war South, and he wants a massive redistribution. That's a very hard sell. This becomes one of the major sticking points of reconstruction as it actually goes out, which is that there is no land redistribution, not to cut the story short,

but that never happens. The 13th Amendment, to return to your first point on sort of the fate of previously enslaved people, the 13th Amendment had been adopted in January. It has not yet been ratified by states. That's a sort of condition of re-entry. The final full legal abolition of slavery only finally comes with the adoption of the 13th Amendment, which is December of 1865. So we're in this weird liminal state where slavery has been effectively ended in most of the Confederate states, but not, for instance, in the Union state of Kentucky, which does not endorse the 13th Amendment. It is forced on them by the ratification of the 13th Amendment, which, as I say, happens long after the supposed end of the Civil War and the end of slavery. So our

sort of easy timeline is in fact much less accurate, as it turns out, than the actual timeline that's happening. But you're right that those three issues are the big ones. So you get the sense right off the bat here, as we discussed this, how much is in play, you know, at this moment in April when Lincoln is shot. So had he not been shot, you see how much he was going to have to work through where, you know, on his, I guess, left wing, he's got the radical Republicans who are wanting to rip this thing out by the root, you know, everything that caused this secession and the war that followed and start over with a clean slate all across the South, whereas Lincoln, ironically, perhaps, is the moderate. He's the one who's saying, whoa, whoa, whoa, you know,

this has to be all taken in stride and we have to figure this out for everybody, not just us. And that's the situation, right? Yeah, and I think Lincoln had begun the war and sewered as well as Secretary of State with a misguided assumption that most white Southerners, the majority of them, were actually unionist at heart. And that was proved painfully inaccurate. The vast majority of white Southerners pledged themselves to the Confederacy. But with the theoretical return to normalcy, you see, I think, Lincoln is beginning to return to that idea that we need to treat these people as fellow Americans.

So you had asked about sort of what are Lincoln's ideas. And you can see those actually here in Louisiana in 1864 and 65 when the state is being reconstructed, when a reconstruction government led by a military governor that Lincoln appoints Michael Hahn redrafts a state constitution. And this is under Lincoln's terms. And there's probably the closest difference between radical reconstruction and what Lincoln envisions is that the radicals in Congress pass in 1863, actually what's called the Wade Davis bill, Henry Winter Davis, and there's a Senate sort of co-sponsor of this Benjamin Wade in the Senate and Henry Winter Davis in the House. That puts a very high bar for re-entry. And it really makes it impossible for the

southern states to immediately return to recognition within the U.S. And Lincoln pocket vetoes that bill to the frustration of many. That is, he doesn't sign up before the end of the congressional term. So it's a kind of silent, quiet veto. And instead, he proposes and implements what is called Lincoln's 10% plan. That is, if 10% of the voters in the 1860 presidential election will take a loyalty oath to the United States, they can then reconstruct. their state government. And for radicals, 10% is far too low a bar to qualify to do this. But for

Lincoln's vision, this is probably as good as we're going to get that we can expect only 10% of the white men who voted most for secession in 1860 to return to the union. That's the kind of beginning of this. Wow, that's a cynical view, isn't it? It is. And those are the terms under which Louisiana is being reconstructed. It is very unsatisfying to the radicals, but it provides him with and entering wedge to kind of say to Virginia and North Carolina, we will give you generous terms. This will be a way in which you can return without rubbing your faces and defeat that we will recognize these states. There's a whole bunch of cultural questions that have to do with really the humiliation of military defeat at the hands of an enemy that white Southerners thought was inferior. Those are sort of issues that factor in here as well.

But that 10% plan is really kind of Lincoln's vision. How much did Lee know about this when he decided to surrender? He is certainly aware of that. And I think most white southern elites understood that Lincoln's assassination was a terrible thing for them. If you look at the popular sort of attitudes, there's lots of jubilation and celebration among everyday white southerners that Lincoln has been assassinated. There's a famous diarist here in Baton Rouge, actually Sarah Morgan, who leaves a brilliant diary, a young woman. And she's thrilled, really celebrates Lincoln's murder. But for Lee and others, they recognized that Lincoln was already thinking about a post-war world in a much more generous way than the radicals were.

And they understood what Lincoln's assassination would do to public opinion in the North, which was to turn it, as you said, at the end of the war, there's celebration in the North, there's great relief. Lincoln's assassination turns that public attitude to bitterness and anger. That is, white northerners are looking south the first time they go to church. Lincoln's assassinate on a Friday. That's Good Friday. They go into Easter services with ministers trying to counsel them on the grief that they must be feeling after Lincoln's murder and then how to think now about what a post-war world looks like with this kind of ugly, you know, vengeful retribution that the South has taken. Jefferson Davis is blamed. And so what had been a relatively generous attitude, you can think of Lincoln's second inaugural that you mentioned with malice toward none with charity for all. That for men, for men, many northerners that's sort of wiped away by northerners by his assassination. So let's go back to the history at hand here. Very important factor at this moment is that Congress is out of session. You've already mentioned this from March 1865, which is around Lincoln's inauguration.

So he comes in to office for his still to happen second term. And they're out of session until 1865 December. So for the rest of that year, the immediate actions will all be taken by the executive. It's down to President Lincoln or, you know, what happens instead. that's one thing to keep in mind. Second is the actions of emancipation are incomplete. Lincoln and the Congress, minus, of course, the seceded states, passed the 13th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. January 1865, we mentioned this already. I'm going over this again. It officially abolished the institution of slavery, but it won't be ratified by the states until December of that year. Okay. So the abolition of slavery hasn't been constitutionally ratified at this time in April. Those are two incredibly important moments there, or at least incredibly important points to keep in mind. So let's talk about Andrew Johnson, who at this time is the vice president. A complicated fellow couldn't be more different than Lincoln. Why is he even in that office? So he was a unionist. He's a white southern unionist. Those are hard to come by.

He had been a political leader in Tennessee, very much a man of the common people. He actually is illiterate until he's married and his wife teaches him to read. He is a kind of diehard, committed Democrat, but during the war, he is a loyal man. And so he becomes military governor of Tennessee, and he has identified early on as somebody who, they don't have a huge amount of faith in him as a kind of thinker, but he represents politically a very important constituency, which is you are sort of safe, that is white Southerners. You know, look, we have someone. Lincoln's vice president in his first term is Hannibal Hamlin, a man from Maine. So the idea of switching those out in the 1864 election is very much appealing, trying to appeal to white Southerners and to reflect the kind of moderation

in Lincoln's administration. But as you say, Johnson kind of constitutionally unfit for the presidency, and he's the only one in charge in D.C. This is the old 19th century schedule. So Congress is out of session. Most historians refer to this first period running really until March of 1867 as presidential reconstruction. Johnson is given the first opportunity, and he adopts a tremendously lenient position towards southern states. And it's really in that decision that the radicals then surge forward and begin imposing laws and restrictions on Johnson that yield eventually in March of 1867, the Reconstruction Acts then signal really the second phase of reconstruction, which is congressional reconstruction. And there's a whole separate history that evolves out of that, and we can skim through

that. But as you say, Johnson is really the one in charge, and he is, to the surprise of many because he had talked about hanging traders during the Civil War, but then almost as soon as he becomes president, he adopts this tremendously lenient position towards the white southern elite that led secession in war. He's a contrarian, argumentative guy, probably self-medicates whatever that stress is with a lot of drink, we find out later on. He has, as you say, poor white southern upbringing, worked as an indentured servant for a time as a youngster, has a deep resentment towards privilege. That's really important in understanding Johnson. Also, deeply racist, even by the standards of the day. His feelings about slavery come from this mixed bag of both

this feeling about black people, but also the Southern elite who are using them for their own advantage. It's quite a lot of chemistry going on there. He is a tremendously complicated figure, and you're right, I mean, it's important and we'll return to this, that he is bitterly opposed to really any opportunities for the freed people that is formally enslaved black southerners to have a fair shake at being a part of a new post-war world. What's odd, as you said, he is tremendously as a congressman and as a man in the antebellum south, tremendously resentful of the power of planters and the power of the slaveholding elite. The irony is that those people then after the war, that is in 1865, in April, May, June,

have to come to him on bended knee and ask for pardons. And one of his first acts as president is to begin giving thousands of pardons to people that even mainstream Republicans thought, we need to slow down on this. These are people who led a rebellion against the United States, many of whom had served in either the military or the government and had taken an oath before God to defend and uphold the Constitution and then led a war against it. So there's sort of no plainer definition of treason

than to make war against the United States. And it's not still quite clear to historians what goes on in Johnson's mind when these former enemies are coming to him in this very humiliating way, seeking pardons that he begins granting those pardons. And he grants thousands over that summer of 1865. Famously a line outside the White House. People waiting for their moment. And those men then set about, because they have been theoretically returned to U.S. citizenship, organizing, reorganizing the southern

states. So there are elections in southern states in late 1865. And they do the thing that you would imagine, which is they elect the politicians. As it turns out, the politicians are the people who led secession in Civil War. So, for instance, Alexander Stevens, the vice president of the Confederacy, is reelected as senator from Georgia in late 1865. And if you're a mainstream Republican, this seems absolutely insane that the people who led secession and civil war, are they going to be allowed back into the United States government? And the analogy that I used for students for a long time was the response during the U.S. war in Iraq to the resurgence of the Bath Party. The Bath Party was the dominant party in Iraq. You know, Saddam Hussein's sons were leaders of the

Bath Party. And I would say to my students, can you imagine the U.S. reconstructing in Iraqi government after that war and allowing those men to take seats in a new Iraqi parliament? That would make absolutely no sense. And yet that's what happens, right? And that's what happened. And so that's when Congress begins to say, we're going to apply breaks to this process, that Johnson is reconstructing these states with no requirement other than they ratify the 13th Amendment. And those states also adopt what are called black codes, which are changes to southern state law to recognize emancipation, but in the process, begin rebuilding a form of slavery. And Johnson says, that's all fine with me. And that's sort of the first real road bump in late 1865, in which Congress begins pushing back. Yeah. The key point to remember about Johnson in my book is that he is a firm Jacksonian, Andrew Jacksonian Democrat in that he believes in state power versus federal.

But he's been serving, so to speak, a president who has only unlearned that through his presidency. He's increased the executive power, which we hear about even today. You know, Lincoln's actions as president have increased the executive. That tipping point is what we find as soon as Johnson assumes power. And he becomes a died in the wool Democrat again. And I think, yeah, I mean, a key part of this, as you just suggested, is that Johnson in some ways holds to his values, of state power as opposed to federal, and an unshakable sort of way,

he also holds to his racism. And what we understand now about Lincoln and Eric Foner's great book on the fiery trial and Lincoln's presidency identifies is that Lincoln changed during the course of the war. Lincoln did not begin imagining

black citizenship or black voting. I mean, Lincoln had the presence of mind to understand a good leader has to respond to the changes that are happening in your society. it is a surprise, I think, to him that in that last speech, and in his sort of messages to Louisiana before this when they are reconstructing their state, that black male citizenship, at least for former soldiers and other people, is something that we should begin considering. I mean, one of the key things that's lost with Lincoln's assassination is not just a more nimble thinker and a more effective communicator, but somebody who was alert to the necessity of change itself. Andrew Johnson is not.

And he sort of puts his stake in the ground and sticks to it all the way into 1867, by which point he has basically been made irrelevant as a constitutional figure by Congress. They have hemmed him in with so many laws. And so the great tragedy, in my view, is that you miss the opportunity for dynamism. And this is, of course, as we talked about at the beginning, that the sort of operative condition of reconstruction is that it is uncertain what's going to happen. and it's hard to know to go back to the big meta question here about what would have happened had Lincoln lived. It's hard to know that Lincoln's policies with regard to Louisiana would have necessarily worked in 1867. The White South is tremendously truculent and resistant to the changes that the war had brought, emancipation foremost among them. But what we do know is that Lincoln would have been dynamic in his response, that he would have tried things.

And if they had failed, he would have sort of pivoted and he would have talked to people and he would have made jokes. And he would have sought creative solutions. And Johnson never does that. He would have made some pretty good speeches, I think. The interesting thing historically is that Johnson, by the end of this period of time we're talking about to 1867, is loathed by everyone, both North and South. He's done, you know, the Civil Rights Act and all the rest of that's coming on in 1866. He vetoed that, angering all the radical Republicans. they have to override him with the first congressional override ever done.

All of that is happening on that side. And then, of course, he's supporting abolition and all that, which goes into it for the South. So he is stuck in between. He's probably taken some pretty hard drinking to take care of that. Johnson has, I would say, some defenders among elite white Southerners. But you're right. I mean, part of the political dynamic here is that he alienates the mainstream northern Republicans, the moderates, the people who don't support property redistribution,

and even many of the conservatives who then move left, that as they move towards the radicals, in 1866, the renewal of the Freedmen's Bureau is one of the important measures, the Civil Rights Act, the first federal Civil Rights Act ever adopted, as you mentioned, adopted in 1866, a very modest act, I mean, hardly anything by today's standards, but that guaranteed at least a bare minimum of civil rights, property ownership, the right to marry and have that marriage recognized, the right to participate in court. These are the rights under the 1866 Civil Rights Act, and Johnson won't tolerate those, both because of a commitment to his vision of federalism and also because he does not see a place for black people in the postwar South. And that veto leaves even mainstream Republicans with nothing to do but move to support an override of the veto and an increasingly robust federal reconstruction, which most of them did not support.

mainstream northern Republicans want a fast reconstruction and a cheap reconstruction. The war has already consumed billions of dollars in resources. People are exhausted and they want that reconstruction, whatever that term means, to happen as quickly as possible. And it's Johnson's resistance and, of course, the resistance of white Southerners behind him. The Ku Klux Klan is organized in 1866 and violence against those few black people who sort of make their presence in southern life, public life. known, that all leads white northerners to endorse a much stronger and ultimately longer and more expensive and more robust reconstruction. All of that is quite uncertain in 6566, but as I say, it's Johnson's truculence and white southerners that sort of push the politics to the left.

That's the loaded gun. That is the sort of intellectual view of what's going on here. There's so much at hand when Lincoln and Mary Todd Lincoln go to the theater. That's all the stuff that's all in the mix. So when we come back, let's talk about Lincoln's view of how this would unfold the day after that play. Now, prior to April 1865, had Lincoln publicly articulated his positions on Reconstruction, say, in the presidential campaign, how much did he prepare the public for his plan? I would say not very much. He is speaking in generalities. Reunion is the paramount goal. So there is a widespread expectation that white Southerners will return to being Americans, that the southern states will sort of, resume their normal function. That is, they will be sending congressmen and senators who will be

part of the U.S. Congress, that they will have their own state governments, that they will not be governed by military law or military governors, as many of them were, certainly as the U.S. occupation moves into southern and to Confederate territory. Military governors are established. Occupation regimes are established. All of that needs to disappear. Even the military figures, people like William becomes a Sherman, don't see military government as compatible. with American democracy. But the mechanisms for that, the timing for that, are quite uncertain. And so widespread expectation among mainstream white northerners is that that process should be able to happen reasonably quickly. If we defeat the Confederacy on the battlefield,

white southerners will assimilate that defeat quickly, recognize they lost and return, and not return to the pre-war United States. Certainly the end of slavery, presages a very new era, but also they are not yet imagining the kind of transformed landscape that will come from reconstruction, black male voting, and, you know, even in the interim, the collapse of state boundaries and the creation of reconstruction districts. Those things are not yet in the sighting. 1863, I was surprised. I've forgotten about this, a proclamation of amnesty and reconstruction. Talk to me about that moment, because that's quite a while before, you know, we know we're going to win this war. It is, but Lincoln is thinking about how he can

in the war as quickly as possible. And he has always hoped that if he could sort of carve some of the Confederate South away, somehow lure them back to the Union that it would basically erode white southern faith in the Confederacy. And so that Reconstruction government in Louisiana is intended to be assigned to other southern states that if they lay down their arms, they will receive what are at the moment reasonably generous terms, certainly more generous than what emerged in 1865, 66. But really, there are efforts at reconstruction made from 1861 along the sea islands of South Carolina and Georgia when the U.S. Army captures Port Royal Sound. Today's Hilton Head, these are sort of resort islands today.

But there are very, very wealthy white southerners there, most of whom flee the sea islands and move to their winter homes in Colombia or upcountry in South Carolina. And there are tens of thousands of previously enslaved people who are left there. And the union government begins a process of on-the-ground reconstruction. There are missionaries who come from the North that are trying to teach literacy to previously enslaved people and their efforts to rebuild the economy under the auspices of free labor. So there are Northerners that are thinking about reconstruction really from the beginning of the war. And Lincoln's proclamation of amnesty and reconstruction.

And 63, late in the year, is intended to provide some framework for that. And that's really where the 10% plan, Lincoln's. 10% plant, as it comes to be called, was grounded in that. These days, you'd have think tanks figuring this out. You'd have the Brookings Institute operating. Everybody would be issuing out these things. All of that was happening in the rooms of Congress. And of course, at the White House, right?

That's basically where this was all being fought out. Yeah, I mean, what's importantly missing is a Pentagon. That's a creation of the post-World War II United States. And as you say, a network of think tanks, Rand, Brookings, and others. Right. I mean, all through sort of the Vietnam War, for instance, the Rand Corporation, was fundamental to, in a very close relationship with Pentagon. This is, of course, where McNamara and other people sort of get their experience. And there are a lot of awful things that come out

of that. By the other hand, there are people whose only job is to think through the process of transferring from military to civilian rule and back and forth. And all of that is really in the 19th century decentralized. The army is tremendously decentralized. Each of its departments is operating really on its own and issuing their own kinds of orders. I mean, one of the examples of this is William Tecumseh Sherman. After his victorious march to the sea, he reaches Savannah. This is January of 1865, and one of the first things that he does is meet with local black leaders. There's maybe 24 local black leaders, ministers and others, business people who come and meet with him. He is beginning reconstruction on his own, and he issues Special Field Order number 15, which sets aside 10,000 acres of territory, basically from Savannah all the way south to Jacksonville, Florida. that will be, and this is land that had been evacuated in that 1861 dispersal. And so the federal government claims ownership, and they give it to nearly 10,000 black families that move into that space. And Sherman envisions this as the beginning of a kind of resettlement,

some sort of move towards free labor. He issues what he calls possessory title, which tragically turns out not to have any meaning in property law. Andrew Johnson undoes that order. But you can see in 1865, Sherman himself, and as I say, sort of decentralized all on his own, just issuing this order where we will move towards some kind of a postwar scenario in which black people own their own, farm, and do their own are responsible for themselves, which is what they want and what, in fact, most of the White North wants as well. And as I say, one of Johnson's first acts is to basically invalidate all of those titles that were issued.

And there's nearly 40,000 black people that are then expelled from that land. and the white property owners return and reclaim it. We did an episode just a few weeks ago on Juneteenth, where you have a military man taking independent action himself, making a proclamation out of that, different kind of situation. When Lincoln sits down for that play, what is his state of mind? You know, this man who has got to be exhausted. How clear has he been for himself, do you think, on what he's about to do?

It's very hard for us to know that question. I think that Lincoln is, as you say, exhausted and perhaps relieved and probably too generous in imagining that his relief is shared by white Southerners as well, who are willing to actually return under the auspices of the United States that they have fought bitterly against for four years. I think that Lincoln is underestimating the degree of white antipathy, that is, white southern antipathy to the United States. His second inaugural address famously ends in those sort of elegiac tones, he is calling on white northerners to be generous and also calling on white southerners

to be realistic about recognizing the changed situation. Slavery is dead. It will never come back. And we need, as he says, to rebuild a union. We have all been punished by this terrible war, right? famously in that address, he says, you know, if all the wealth piled by the bondsman's

250 years of unrequited toil, the lash shall be drawn with the sword. But white northerners had died in greater numbers than white southerners the Civil War. There are more union casualties than Confederate. So everyone is being punished. Let us now recognize that and move forward in a United States without slavery. My own sense is that Lincoln is probably too optimistic about the degree to which white Southerners would be willing to accept that settlement and to move back into regular relations with the United States

in this post-war world. So if Lincoln doesn't die, what's the best case of The best case scenario is that white Southerners sort of respect the opportunity that he's offering, charity for all and malice toward none, and they acknowledge emancipation. The fundamental sticking point is who do they elect to be the next generation of southern leaders? It's hard to imagine them electing anyone other than the people that they did, the Alexander Stevens's and the Howell Cobbs, that is, the leaders of Southern leaders. session and the Confederacy. And it's hard to imagine Lincoln either as the mainstream Republicans do, accepting those people back into Congress. Now, that's not Lincoln's choice. Congress governs who is seated. But the question is whether Lincoln would have put the brakes on in that

liminal state before Congress itself comes back. And I think that Lincoln would have certainly seen through, for instance, in the Black codes, there are famously, these are adopted by Southern States in late 1865. There are apprenticeship. laws that are enacted in which the kind of presumption is that white leaders in counties through the county court or Justice of the Peace will be able to apprentice out younger freed people back to their masters, that slavery and name will continue. And there are all sorts of restrictions put on opportunities for black adults to earn living, to live free lives. And it's hard to imagine that Lincoln would have looked at that and not seen slavery by another name

and wouldn't have objected to those. The question is whether he has the kind of constitutional authority to kind of put those in place without imposing military rule, which maybe Lincoln would have done. Yeah, exactly. His whole game, I think, in his mind, if I may be so bold, is to pull that middle ground. He knows he's been doing this for five years now. He knows how hard this balance is. And he knows those radical Republicans well. and he feels probably more than people give him credit for,

this feeling of what the South must be going through, this empathy for their loss of treasure in lives. The question is, and I think it's obvious that he will deal with it differently, but how will he deal with the same pressures as Andrew Johnson does? He's got a much more complicated and nuanced mind and a capacity to communicate ideas than Johnson obviously does. I think Johnson's speaking tour that year that he takes that tour to defend his veto captures who he really is.

Yes, famously, John's. is trying to defend his veto of the Civil Rights Act and the Freedmen's Bureau, and he's intemperate and perhaps drunk and embarrassing, even to the Democrats in the North and white Southerners. It's a sort of extended train wreck, a kind of slow motion train wreck across the North,

which, as I say, pushes many Northerners to the left on this. And Lincoln is enormously more sophisticated, a thinker and much more effective as a communicator. The kind of problem to get over is the White South. And that's where it's hard to imagine in some respects. I mean, the glimbing,

answer to the question of what would have happened if Lincoln survived is we would think much less of Lincoln. And I say that only partially glibly because being forced to reckon with the actual mechanics of reconstruction would have tarnished Lincoln's image. He dies a martyr. He is the final martyr to the Union cause. As I say, it was Easter Sunday. Right. He's killed on Good Friday. And on that Easter Sunday, when Northern Christians are returning to their churches and their ministers are literally in tears in many cases, trying to reckon with the scale of this last final awful betrayal. After years of talking about Kane and Abel

and reading the Bible in terms of its relevance for how to understand the nature, the evil that was the rebellion of the Civil War, to have Lincoln kill, you know, and you can think of Whitman despairing, oh, Captain, my Captain, you know, he writes almost immediately his famous poem, lauding Lincoln as the captain who has steered the ship

of state to safety and then to be killed after you reach port. And Whitman is a good index on here when Lilacs last and Doryard Bloom for those listeners that haven't read that recently. That's a slightly later poem, I think May of 1865. Whitman had seen Lincoln in the streets of D.C. in the early mornings, he never talked to him, but he would see him out walking, wrapped in his shawl, consumed by melancholy. That's how Whitman viewed him. He said, this is a person who feels the weight of the war, and he didn't want to bother him. He thought he needs to be alone right now if Lincoln would go out in the early, early morning and walk. And so that sorrow and that grief that Lincoln feels is palpable at the moment of his death.

And I think, you know, his martyrdom has put him in a kind of unique class in American politics. There are other presidents assassinated, Garfield, McKinley, that we're not, we don't, we don't valorize in this way. Well, the context of the assassination has everything to do with it. And the fact that Lincoln then doesn't have to actually get into the nitty-gritty. of bringing the South back and how you would deal with a White South, Lincoln is going to be compelled to use military force to keep the army in southern cities in order to prevent the reimposition of a kind of slavery by another name as is signaled by these black codes in late 1865. You wonder if there would ever have been a general president grant. Would he have had a campaign

to run if Lincoln was leaving office, I suppose, in 1870? Yeah, it's a possibility. the election would have been in 1868, what the platform looks like and the need for someone who is both a military leader, because by 1868, you're in the middle of congressional reconstruction and you want somebody who is willing to exert power and force. And whether that's necessary, as you say, is actually a known. All of the remaining Republican presidents elected all the way through to McKinley had been Union soldiers in the Civil War or Union General Officers. Reconstruction sets the course of American politics for the next three decades. And so this question is actually fundamental, not just 1865, 66, but to the nature of what American politics looks like, that is, white northerners want the security in some respects of somebody who has shown a sacrifice and is willing to use, has been in the past, at least

willing to use force. Grant famously sends the U.S. Army to fight the Ku Klux Klan in the backcountry of South Carolina in 1871. And if Reconstruction doesn't happen as it did, that is, with a Congressional Reconstruction Act of 1867, that collapses state boundaries temporarily, establishes military districts, puts military governors in charge. If that hadn't happened, then the whole future of politics looks different. And it might not have happened if congressional Republicans hadn't been pushed so far to the left because of Johnson's truculence. There's no question that Lincoln would have pushed back against some of what Johnson accepted. I'm going to amend that best case scenarios a little bit.

And I think personally, total speculation, Lincoln would not have shied away from being the bad guy. I mean, at least in some people's minds. I think that struggle that we're talking about and all the stuff that would have untarnished his image would have been okay for Lincoln. I think he was willing to go into the trenches to figure this out for real. I think he goes back to being a lawyer and figuring this out all the least. of the stuff. And I think he would have been personally fine with not being as sainted the way we have done as a result of the assassination. Well, I think you're right. He didn't expect to be sainted. And he certainly, at the end of the Civil War, radicals had been beating him up for four

years. Conservatives loathed him, you know, I mean, he was sort of widely adored by the American populace for his humility, for his humble rise to the presidency, for his ability to communicate. But politically, he had a lot of enemies. That's why he's barely re-nominated in 1864. And as he imagines, maybe he wouldn't even get re-elected in 1864. So you're right, he doesn't expect that. And the question of whether and how he's willing to apply serious, both political and perhaps military force, to achieve a real settlement of the problems is the kind of key open question.

And I think your reference to Lincoln as a lawyer is a very important thing. One of the points that Greg Downs, the historian, has made, is that the state of war legally actually continues, really until 1871. He makes this in a book called After Appomattox. And congressional thinkers were aware of this, as Lincoln as a lawyer would have been aware of it, that it is not until the full reincorporation of those southern states. There isn't a peace declaration like you have at the end of World War II or World War I. The question of how you end wars constitutionally is always a problem in American life. We start them with the declaration of war. Congress passes it. Those declarations are

are never repealed by Congress, you get a peace treaty that might sort of in the public's mind end it. But the question of a legal state of war, which provides tremendous latitude for administrations to enact measures they would not ordinarily be able to enact, that continues. There's a great book called War Time by Mary Dudziak. She's a legal scholar at Emory looking at the flexibility of American law in the war on terror. That is, the wars really from 2000. one and three in Iraq and Afghanistan and Iraq and what that did to American law with things like the Patriot Act, which is passed constitutionally. There is a kind of dynamism that war allows with regard to the law.

And Lincoln is well aware of this. He suspended habeas corpus in a way that was perhaps unconstitutional because the permission to do that is given in Article 1, that is the part of the Constitution that is the part of the Constitution, that's Article 2 of the Constitution. Congress comes back and ratifies. They say, no, his imposition of military law, suspension of habeas corpus was legal. But Lincoln knows that a state of war allows some elasticity. West Virginia is allowed to become a state in a, let's admit it, a very irregular fashion. We'll get angry comments from West Virginians. But I lived in West Virginia, you know, for two years. And the Constitution is very clear.

You have to have the consent of a state to break a state apart. Virginia, it was a reconstructed, the way. Wheeling government of Virginia that authorized the breakup of the state of Virginia. As Lincoln well knew, the majority of the state of Virginia was not at all acquiescent to the creation of the state of West Virginia. But he wanted a union state. He wanted a southern state. They wanted more Republicans in the Senate.

So they got West Virginia. So the question is, to what extent would he be willing to take advantage of that elasticity to actually impose measures on southern states that are not visible in April of 1865, but would have become necessary by September, October, November of 1865. Well, you'd have no Johnson presidency, that's for sure. That man never arises to where he becomes part of our discussion. You have a softer landing for the South with Lincoln in place, I think. Lots of conditions, obviously, but he wants to welcome the Southern states back in more swiftly.

So that's where the 10% comes in. Loyalty Oates. You get the ratification of the 13th Amendment as a result of that. bargaining, I suppose, it happens. And then there's some basic protections for freed slaves, but perhaps not in the way that happens as a result of his departure. And I think most fundamentally here, what doesn't necessarily follow is the 14th Amendment, which is so central to American law today. Our sort of constitutional order is hardly visible without it. I mean, in our debates, our current debates over birthright citizenship. Those are grounded in the language,

the opening language of the 14th Amendment, which declares that anyone born or naturalized, in the United States as a citizen of the country and of the state where they reside. That was not the law before this. And of course, that's necessary because Dred Scott had said, the Dred Scott decision of 1857 had said, black people can never be citizens and were never citizens. It contravened a lot of state law. It was a bad decision and a lot of people recognize that, but it still requires a constitutional amendment or a new Supreme Court decision to overrule it. But the 14th Amendment has enormous ramifications for every part of American law. And that only came because of Johnson's resistance and the way in which congressional Republicans move left

and begin to think about establishing a whole new category of protection for citizenship in federal law that had not been present before the Civil War. This is part of where what-ifs really open up and they actually help us understand the changes that did happen. The 14th Amendment we view as a sort of unbreakable part of American law, President Trump's idea that he can invalidate birthright citizenship with an executive order notwithstanding, most Americans today view that concept and all of the 14th Amendment as sort of an essential part of our inevitable part of the constitutional order. But in fact, history reveals it to be not inevitable, but in fact contingent, that the shape that the 14th Amendment assumed came out of the fights that we've been talking about, about,

it comes out of the uncertainty and the ambiguities of how to restore southern states and also protect the rights of black southerners as they are now coming to be citizens of the United States. Well, it was his opinion that suffrage among the population should be educated black men and veterans, I suppose, right? And so he might have chosen a more gradual path towards this, which I can't even begin to be, you know, speculate on the effects of that. But it certainly would be different than what happened as a result. I would say that's Lincoln sort of take one. And he announces that, as for those who previously served in the ranks and the very intelligent. But you can imagine because if you paid attention to Lincoln's

ability and willingness to change during the war, that he would have then perhaps moved to simply full manhood suffrage, that is universal manhood suffrage. The pre-war United States is mostly universal white manhood suffrage. Black men in southern states cannot vote, and they can't even vote in many northern states. And so you might then get universal manhood suffrage, which would actually enfranchise more men in the north, black men in the north, then have. even under the 14th Amendment, the 14th Amendment in its adopted form included a section dedicated to enfranchising black men. It changes apportionment. It basically undoes the three-fifths compromise contingent on states' willingness to enfranchise black men. It's a way to force

white southern states to enfranchise black men or else they will lose the three-fifths representation that they had under the pre-war United States Constitution. But it really doesn't force northern states to do that because black men were such a small part of the population that they could ignore them, that is, they could refuse to enfranchise them, and they would suffer relatively little ill effects, which is why the 15th Amendment was necessary. The 15th Amendment simply guarantees black male suffrage. And if the 14th Amendment had actually done that, you wouldn't have needed a 15th Amendment. But the 14th Amendment is a kind of half measure that is in its sections related to enfranchisement, that is, to the vote and to suffrage. It is really a

half measure. This final point I want to make, everything is speculative, obviously that we're talking about here, but it's about his political skill and his communication gifts and how that might have led to a better management of the southern resentment towards these measures and the northern fatigue with construction. If you have someone like Lincoln who's able to sort of keep a perspective and head above water, that person naturally has that greater moral authority and maybe popularity even. In any case, it would have been a sustained support for reconstruction than what happened. Yes, I guess I would like to be optimistic that Lincoln's skills as a politician, which are perennially underrated, he is tremendously effective. You can think of Doris Kearns-Goodwin's book,

Team of Rivals, Lincoln's ability to bring a cabinet together that's composed of actually quite conservative Democrats and quite radical Republicans, and he keeps them all in sort of tension through the war, that he might have been able to accomplish something similar in rebuilding the United States. I have to admit that I'm ultimately skeptical that he could have pulled that off without the more powerful and sort of what we would think of as heavy-handed techniques that are ultimately deployed by Congress, which, as I say, would have both reduced Lincoln's stature and our kind of pantheon, and it would have had all sorts of untold implications for the future course of American history. We would certainly have benefited,

there's no question, from Lincoln in the presidency, then Johnson in the presidency. I think there's still pretty widespread recognition among historians that Johnson's management was disastrous from beginning to end. So Lincoln's would have been better his ability to communicate the fact that he has genuine relationships with many white Southerners. People like Alexander Stevens, the vice president of the Confederacy, they had been reasonably close peers as Whigs in the pre-war Congress. They served together and they were communicating up until nearly the moment of the start of the war by letter. So could he have leveraged those relationships in a way to help elite southerners see a necessity of submitting, perhaps,

but the resistance that white southerners manifest to the real consequences of the war, emancipation and a recognition of federal supremacy would have been generated in any event. And I think Lincoln would have found it, even with his political skills, would have found it quite difficult to manage them. Bringing these two realms together

was inevitably going to be gnarly. And it resulted in war at first, but a lot of what we are still dealing with today. This is a very, very powerful counterfactual, but I think it comes out to being, you know, what happened was inevitable one way or the other, depending on no matter who was in charge. And we live in a nation that is still riven

by a lot of what was considered, acted upon, and reconciled or not back in those days. It's incredible. The challenge is inevitable. The difficulty of figuring out how to end slavery, how to make black citizens full citizens, citizens in the United States, as you say, this is a problem that we continue to struggle with, the balance of federal and state authority.

I mean, what I tend to tell my students is that if we identify the fundamental problems that generate the war, slavery, the balance of federal and state authority and the kind of degree of cultural attachment to the nation, the civil war doesn't actually solve those problems. It changes them. It alters the terms on which America then continues fighting them about the role of race in the United States, the role of federal power, and the meaning of the United States as an entity as a kind of cultural community of people. The Civil War creates the modern shape of those problems. It solves the pre-war shape of those problems. It ends slavery.

It establishes federal supremacy, but it does not solve them in the sense that Americans continue to wrestle with the right balance. between federal and state authority. And as I say, the nature of race and a democracy. I think there's one more episode in you, Aaron, and it's the factual about Louisiana, which I think is a fascinating story that we need to cover. Aaron Sheandine is a professor of history at LSU and has written or edited numerous works on the American Civil War, including these, the calculus of violence, how Americans fought the Civil War, why the Confederates fought.

And this one, the invaluable companion to the Civil War volumes one and two, which needs to be on the shelf of anyone who cares about this. subject. Thank you so much. Aaron. We'll see you again soon, I hope. Thanks, Don. Appreciate it. Thanks for listening to this episode of American History Hit. As you've made it this far, why not like and follow us wherever you get your podcasts? American History Hit, a podcast from History Hit.