-
Epilogue: What If
- Southern Illinois University Press
- Chapter
- Additional Information
143 Epilogue What If One of American history’s great “what-ifs” involves the question of how postwar reconstruction—and much that followed from it, including the tortured history of race relations—might have been different had Lincoln not been struck down by an assassin’s bullet. Although speculation is not ordinarily the historian’s task, scholars have examined Lincoln’s wartime reconstruction measures in order to hypothesize on what he might have done after the war. Because postwar reconstruction was so disastrous under Andrew Johnson, speculation on how Lincoln might have guided the nation through this period has had a decidedly firm hold on the American imagination. Given how integral the consequences of emancipation were to postwar reconstruction, how central race relations have been to American history, and how large Lincoln looms in the nation’s psyche, it is understandable that Lincoln’s views on race and their implications for reconstruction have attracted so much attention. Scholars have focused in particular on whether Lincoln would have supported legal and political equality as essential components of postwar reconstruction. In doing so, some have noted the paradox that it was Johnson’s very racism and intransigence—in restoring southern antebellum and former Confederate leaders to power and refusing to adjust his policy when they denied black people basic civil rights—that compelled Republicans to adopt equality before 144 | epilogue the law and black suffrage. The implication is that a more moderately tempered and presumably more conservative Lincoln would not have provoked the political crisis that eventuated in “Radical Reconstruction,” the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments to the US Constitution, and a host of other measures that spawned decades of southern white resentment. This line of reasoning has some merit. However, the various issues that resulted from Confederate defeat and the abolition of slavery—defining black civil rights; determining representation in Congress with elimination of the “three-fifths” clause; imposing political proscriptions on former Confederate leaders; invalidating the Confederate debt and guaranteeing the federal one; prohibiting compensation to former slaveholders for the loss of their slave property; and, ultimately, guaranteeing black voting rights—would have been unavoidable even under Lincoln. These issues probably would have caused some conflict between Lincoln and congressional Republicans (and Congress in general), but the dictates of party and nation would have compelled them to find a workable solution. Moreover, taking into account the evolution of Lincoln’s racial views over the course of the war, it does not require a particularly bold leap of historical imagination to envision Lincoln requiring—as a condition of the postwar settlement—a program of equality before the law and black suffrage very similar to the one Republicans eventually implemented in place of Johnson’s policy and in response to white southern resistance . Lincoln’s racial views thus remain central to an alternative history of postwar reconstruction or of American race relations. Hypothetically, had Lincoln and congressional Republicans been able to craft a program of equality before the law and universal (not limited) black suffrage, backed by the full power of the federal government and presented to the former Confederate states soon after the end of the war as a fundamental condition of readmission, the course of American history might have been very different. As the experience of Radical Reconstruction would show, such a program would have had broad ramifications for remaking southern society, extending not only to voting and office holding but also to the shaping and implementing of the law and public policy in myriad ways affecting [3.238.233.189] Project MUSE (2024-03-28 23:19 GMT) what if | 145 everyday life. In short, substantive black access to political power and to the mechanisms of the state would have profoundly altered the course of postwar reconstruction. Initiated at the time of Confederate defeat by a president and Congress working in unison—instead of two years later by a president and Congress at loggerheads—such a program might have had a chance of success. Assessing how Lincoln would have responded to continued southern white resistance and violence moves yet further into the realm of speculation, but the historical record shows that he would not have remained wedded to a policy that did not work. Pondering history’s what-ifs can be fruitful, and speculation on these matters marks the intersecting of Americans’ obsession with race and their infatuation with Lincoln. Even though generations of Americans have fixated on the implications of Lincoln’s racial views for the nation’s history...