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The lead .41-calibre bullet with which John Wilkes Booth shot President Abraham Lincoln on the night of April 14, 1865, was the most lethal gunshot in American history. Only five days earlier, the main field army of the Southern Confederacy had surrendered at Appomattox Court House, and the four dreary years of civil war were yielding to a spring of national rebirth. But by then, the man to whom everyone looked for guidance in reconstructing the nation was dead.
The result was a costly but successful 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 4 million slaves freed after the Civil War. The defeated Confederates gained a second wind from Johnson’s follies, and by the time he left office in 1869, reconstruction was already faltering. The victorious North sank 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 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 specific plan for reconstruction. Still, if he had lived, all the evidence points us toward four paths to reconstruction which he would likely have adopted:
Voting rights: If the Confederates wanted amnesty, Lincoln, as he wrote in January 1864, could not “avoid exacting in return universal suffrage, or, at least, suffrage on the basis of intelligence and military service.” Even if the Confederates balked at trading amnesty for voting rights, there was still no practical alternative to black voting rights, since only the voting power of the newly freed slaves could offset the political dominance of unbowed whites in the South.
Economic integration: Economic independence gives heft to political aspiration, something Lincoln understood from his own struggle to rise from poverty. “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,” Lincoln said in 1860. But in Lincoln’s world, economic opportunity was tied to the ownership of land, and the newly freed slaves owned none. Lincoln’s means for redressing this imbalance was the Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen and Abandoned Lands, known as the Freedmen’s Bureau. It was launched in March 1865 with a mandate to claim land that had been abandoned by plantation owners — or land that had been forfeited by non-payment of taxes during the war — and divide it in 40-acre plots for former slaves to farm as their own.
Cleaning the Confederate slate: Lincoln was not exaggerating, in his second inaugural address, when he spoke of his hope of malice toward none and charity for all after the war. He had no wish to hunt down the Confederacy’s leaders after the war ended, but he also had no wish to stop them leaving. “Frighten them out of the country,” he said, “open the gates, let down the bars … scare them off.” This would clear the way for a new leadership in the South, a leadership of Unionist white Americans and their natural allies, the freed slaves, which in turn would establish a “practical system by which the two races could gradually live themselves out of their old relation.”
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