What if Lincoln Had Lived?
Point of Divergence
297 views
At about a quarter past ten on the evening of 14 April 1865, the chair
outside the presidential box at Ford's Theatre was empty. The Washington
policeman assigned to sit in it had left his post at some point during the
second act. Nobody stopped the man who came up the stairs behind him.
This video changes that one detail and follows what comes after.
The assassination is usually told as one man with a pistol. It was a plan
with three targets. Lewis Powell forced his way into William Seward's
house the same night and stabbed him in his sickbed. George Atzerodt was
assigned to the Vice President, took a room in Johnson's hotel, and spent
the evening drinking instead. Two thirds of the plot failed.
What Lincoln would have done with four more years is not the answer most
people expect. He was a lenient man on the southern question. He had
killed a harder Reconstruction plan with a pocket veto less than a year
earlier, and his own Ten Percent Plan asked almost nothing of the states
that had left. The difference between him and Andrew Johnson was not
policy direction. It was that Lincoln commanded the Republican party and
Johnson had no party at all.
Covered in this video: the state of the country in the week after
Appomattox, how thin presidential protection actually was in 1865, the Ten
Percent Plan and the Wade-Davis pocket veto, the speech of 11 April on
limited black suffrage with Booth standing in the crowd, Sherman's field
order and the forty acres, Johnson's summer of pardons and the Black
Codes, the vetoes and the overrides, the impeachment that failed by one
vote, and a step by step alternate timeline running to the end of
Reconstruction.
The video also puts the strongest objection to its own scenario. Lincoln
dead was more useful to the cause than Lincoln alive, because the
martyrdom is part of why the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments passed at
all. And the forces that ended Reconstruction in 1877 had very little to
do with who sat in the White House in 1866.
#alternatehistory #whatif #lincoln #reconstruction #americanhistory
1 Comments
What if Lincoln Had Lived?
Point of Divergence
297 views
At about a quarter past ten on the evening of 14 April 1865, the chair
outside the presidential box at Ford's Theatre was empty. The Washington
policeman assigned to sit in it had left his post at some point during the
second act. Nobody stopped the man who came up the stairs behind him.
This video changes that one detail and follows what comes after.
The assassination is usually told as one man with a pistol. It was a plan
with three targets. Lewis Powell forced his way into William Seward's
house the same night and stabbed him in his sickbed. George Atzerodt was
assigned to the Vice President, took a room in Johnson's hotel, and spent
the evening drinking instead. Two thirds of the plot failed.
What Lincoln would have done with four more years is not the answer most
people expect. He was a lenient man on the southern question. He had
killed a harder Reconstruction plan with a pocket veto less than a year
earlier, and his own Ten Percent Plan asked almost nothing of the states
that had left. The difference between him and Andrew Johnson was not
policy direction. It was that Lincoln commanded the Republican party and
Johnson had no party at all.
Covered in this video: the state of the country in the week after
Appomattox, how thin presidential protection actually was in 1865, the Ten
Percent Plan and the Wade-Davis pocket veto, the speech of 11 April on
limited black suffrage with Booth standing in the crowd, Sherman's field
order and the forty acres, Johnson's summer of pardons and the Black
Codes, the vetoes and the overrides, the impeachment that failed by one
vote, and a step by step alternate timeline running to the end of
Reconstruction.
The video also puts the strongest objection to its own scenario. Lincoln
dead was more useful to the cause than Lincoln alive, because the
martyrdom is part of why the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments passed at
all. And the forces that ended Reconstruction in 1877 had very little to
do with who sat in the White House in 1866.
#alternatehistory #whatif #lincoln #reconstruction #americanhistory
been disciplined for sleeping on duty, and he was still the one they
detailed to the president.
So: was Lincoln's instinct for mercy the right one, or the fatal one? A
gentle peace reunites the country faster. A hard one costs southern
loyalty for a generation and might buy the freed people land and a vote
they can keep. Pick one and say what you would pay for it.