Reconstruction Alternatives and Counterfactuals
10:10 PM. April 14, 1865. Ford's Theater, Washington, D.C. President and Mrs. Lincoln are in attendance. Major Henry Rathbone with his fiancée Clara Harris, a young friend of Mrs. Lincoln, has accompanied the President and First Lady to see Our American Cousin, a popular comedy about a rustic American (Asa Trenchard) among English aristocrats. Act III, Scene II.
| Mrs. Mountchessington: | I am aware, Mr. Trenchard, you are not used to the manners of good society, and that, alone, will excuse the impertinence of which you have been guilty. |
| Asa Trenchard: | Don't know the manners of good society, eh? Well, I guess I know enough to turn you inside out, old gal—you sockdologizing old man-trap. (The audience erupts in laughter.) |
At that moment, John Wilkes Booth opens the door to the box where the presidential party is sitting. He points a “Philadelphia Derringer” at the back of the President's head. Rathbone turns, sees the weapon and, acting quickly, hits Booth's arm. The tiny pistol discharges but misses its mark. A brief struggle ensues and Rathbone is seriously wounded when Booth draws a dagger from his belt and stabs him in the arm. But Lincoln, still strong despite the rapid aging so evident in his last photograph, grabs Booth in a bear hug from behind, throws the would-be assassin to the floor and sits on him until others drag him away. The President is safe. Mary Lincoln has fainted. The next day a front-page column in The New York Times begins:
Attempted Assassination of Lincoln
President Still Alive
The Act of a Desperate Rebel
That afternoon, Lincoln tells Secretary of War Edwin M. Stanton one of his “stories”—something about a Sangamon county farmer who tried to put an old, swayback nag out of its misery but misses and shoots himself in the foot. He laughs at his own joke; Stanton is not amused.
We know, of course, that Lincoln was murdered by John Wilkes Booth. But it did not have to come out that way: “What if Lincoln had lived?” Answering the question brings us into the realm of alternative or counterfactual history. Consider three approaches to answering the question. The first is to dismiss it. In a famous essay entitled What Is History? British historian E.H. Carr, who had very strong opinions about what historians should do and not do, argued that “historians in practice do not assume that events are inevitable before they have taken place. They frequently discuss alternative courses available to the actors in the story on the assumption that the option was open.” And, “as a historian,” he states, he is “perfectly prepared to do without” the “inevitable,” the “unavoidable,” the “inescapable” or the “ineluctable.” Certainly, “life would be drabber” without alternatives. “But,” he concludes, “let us leave them to poets and metaphysicians.”1 The second approach is limited only by the imagination of a poet, a metaphysician, or in the case of Harry Turtledove, a novelist. In The Guns of the South, he provides a fantastic alternative to the outcome of the American Civil War.2 The cover illustrates the book's conceit: It shows General Robert E. Lee holding a twentieth-century Russian-made assault rifle—an AK-47. The South wins the Civil War when white South Africans, intent on changing the course of world history in favor of white supremacy, invent a time machine that allows the government to transport a team of military advisors from 2014 back in time to 1863 and the battlefield at Gettysburg. Robert E. Lee is the hero of the novel and he, in the complex “history” in the novel, is actually instrumental in freeing the slaves after the war. Lincoln survives the war, but surrenders himself to Lee. As fascinating as this premise might be, this is the realm of science fiction, “clever curiosities and flights of imagination,” not the realm of the possible.3 The third approach to alternative or counterfactual history, what we examine in this chapter, is implicit in the historical craft and is limited to speculation or the imagination within “the horizon of possibility.” André Maurois, the French novelist, biographer, and historian, argued that “There is no privileged past”; rather, “There is an infinitude of Pasts, all equally as valid … At each and every instant of Time, however brief you suppose it, the line of events forks like a stem of a tree putting forth twin branches.”4 In other words, the third approach is a principled argument against causal determinism.5 In this case, the question (“What if Lincoln had lived?”) requires no science-fiction time machine to answer and, despite what E. H. Carr says, is inherent in the historian's craft. Regarding Lincoln's assassination and the history of Reconstruction, for example, historian Ward M. McAfee states that “In the crafting of historical literature, facts rarely speak for themselves. Conjecture often shapes written history at least as much as hard evidence.”6
Consider historian Roger L. Ransom's The Confederate States of America: What Might Have Been (2005). Written as a counterfactual history of the rebel states, it cites real sources and includes all the paraphernalia of legitimate historical investiga-tion—a discussion of the historiography of the Civil War and postwar years, endnotes, and an extensive bibliography. Nothing is all that fantastic here; Ransom describes what happened as well as what might have happened. He is writing serious history and takes “What if?” seriously as well. In his story, Lincoln is defeated for reelection in 1864 by a Democrat—Horatio Seymour. Lincoln lives but is out of power and slavery lives on too until its demise in 1880. Ransom deepens our understanding of what really happened during the Civil War and postwar years by asking legitimate questions about choices that Americans faced at the time. So, what if Lincoln had lived either because Booth missed his shot or because of some other twist of fate?
Questions about the consequences of Lincoln's death, in fact, were asked in 1865 by people North and South and afterwards by a variety of commentators and historians. Southerners, for their part, reacted to the news of Lincoln's death in various ways. Many rejoiced. Others kept their opinions to themselves if they lived in areas occupied by Union troops or made a show of mourning to avoid Yankee vengeance. Others were concerned that the death of Lincoln was not a good thing for the South. In Galveston, Texas, William Pitt Ballinger, a prominent attorney, wrote: “The future I confess looks to me all gloom and darkness, Lincoln was a kindly man … Lincoln would have been content to restore the Union and anxious to conciliate and reconcile the South …”7. In other words, Ballinger believed that the postwar years would have been different with Lincoln “unmurdered.” He was not the only one who speculated on an alternative history and postulated a postwar American free of the oppression and corruption of the Reconstruction years in line with the Lost Cause myths of the Civil War and its aftermath. If only Lincoln had lived. As Ward McAfee puts it regarding Lincoln's last days in office, the issue of counterfactual history in the case of Lincoln and Reconstruction “cannot be avoided.”8 Here are two alternatives regarding the Reconstruction years: (1) Lincoln lives and continues a moderate policy of “restoration” of loyal state governments in the South without “reconstruction,” ensuring only the future loyalty of the ex-rebels and emancipation; or (2) Lincoln lives but moves closer to the Radicals through a policy of genuine reconstruction in response to the South's dogged determination to restore the old social and political order at the expense of true Southern unionists and the rights of the freedmen. It is the former interpretation that has dominated the narrative of Reconstruction.
The image of Lincoln the Merciful, who, if he had lived, would have enforced no hard or vengeful peace has been the subject of both Hollywood films and historical speculation. It is also central to the myth of the Lost Cause. But the assertion of Lincoln's greatness and magnanimity, as president and beyond that as a near deity, took some time to come into focus. Melvyn Stokes, in his detailed analysis of The Birth of a Nation, quotes historian Eric P. Goldman on the immediate aftermath of Lincoln's assassination: “Although the subject [at the time of his death] of a great deal of immediate sentimentality, [he] did not become the unassailable Abraham Lincoln of the schoolbooks until two decades after his murder.” Stokes indicates that the “towering genius” and humanitarian came into existence in the 1880s and 1890s, first with the 1890 publication of the ten-volume Abraham Lincoln: A History by John G. Nicolay and John Hay, which had been serialized in The Century magazine in the 1880s. In contrast, in 1889 Lincoln's former law partner William Henry Herndon (with Jesse William Weik) had published a critical and debunking view of Lincoln (Herndon's Lincoln: the True Story of a Great Life … The History and Personal Recollections of Abraham Lincoln by William Henry Herndon). By the time of publication of the book, however, the attack on the “now-expanding” Lincoln myth did not attract many readers, and his book was either reviled, or perhaps worse, ignored.
Moreover, the work on Lincoln by Ida M. Tarbell, starting in November, 1897 in McClure's Magazine went a long way toward solidifying the heroic image of Lincoln. Where Herndon had portrayed Lincoln as a Westerner, “plain, frank, and at times crude, Tarbell had presented him as a great man not so much despite his background as because of it. In essence Tarbell created a folk myth of Lincoln as the conscious descendent of generations of pioneers.”9 Thus, through the efforts of Tarbell and many others, the popular image of Lincoln that we now take for granted came into being.
By historical coincidence, the consequences of which no one could have foreseen or even imagined, as the Lincoln image took shape in print in the last half of the 1890s, a new and even more powerful tool for not only creating images but also spreading them far beyond what print could achieve emerged, namely the invention of the movies. Out of the many portrayals of Lincoln that began almost immediately in movies, the most common was the “humane and merciful Lincoln,”10 the epitome of which is a scene in The Birth of a Nation (a description of this scene will appear later in this chapter).
Bruce Chadwick, in his invaluable The Reel Civil War: Mythmaking in American Film, indicates that Lincoln “has appeared as a least a minor character in more than 150 films and another 50 made-for-television movies or television specials or series—more than any other American figure.”11 Chadwick also estimates that there have been 500 silent and over 200 sound films that deal with the Civil War.
Chadwick shows that “humane and merciful Lincoln” is, in many cases, also a “doddering old man,” with Lincoln constantly weeping and seen praying for the end of the war (and not only that but also frequently seen wearing a shawl like some aged grandmother). The “real” Lincoln, the masterful politician, is nowhere to be seen. On this issue, Chadwick is worth quoting at length:
In film after film, from the early years of the silents through made for television films of the 1990s, Lincoln was routinely seen as a gentle giant, a towering emancipator in black suit, shawl and stovepipe hat: Father Abraham. In most, he was seen pardoning Northern and Southern soldiers, being kind to children, urging reconciliation in meetings in parlors, walking slowly towards some heavenly light up ahead and, quite often, being murdered in Ford's Theatre. America was spoon-fed a combination father-favorite uncle, beloved minister-schoolteacher, a loving religious Lincoln, a political figure who embodied the best of humankind, a soothing figure somehow removed from both space and time, the universal President … He was the single greatest catalyst in reunion movies, and the myths created about him on the screen were the strongest evidence and best examples of the power of celluloid mythmakers.12
The image(s) of Lincoln as “catalyst” for “reunion” is a key concept, epitomized in The Birth of a Nation by Lincoln's plan not to treat the South as a conquered enemy when the war ends. He rejects Austin Stoneman's (Thaddeus Stevens, a Radical Republican and the powerful chair of the House Ways and Means Committee) demand for punishment and declares, via title card, that he will deal with the seceded states “as though they had never been away.”13 Later, after Lincoln has been assassinated, Dr. Cameron (a courtly Southern patriarch) cries out: “Our best friend is gone. What is to become of us now?” The comments by Lincoln himself and by Dr. Cameron in The Birth of a Nation rehearse the theme, especially in the South, of Lincoln as the soul of reunion. As Chadwick notes:
The Lincoln legend grew in the South, too. Lincoln's death in 1865 brought on [a hard] Reconstruction and with it a certain feeling in Dixie that if Lincoln had lived, his Reconstruction plan, softer on the South would have helped reunite the nation. In death, Lincoln, reviled in the South throughout the war, surprisingly became an acceptable Southern hero of sorts.
And this “redesigned” Lincoln “was the next logical step in the reconstruction of Civil War history.”14 The “redesigned” Lincoln was a surprising aspect of the “Lost Cause” mythology, part of the disastrous and pernicious distortion of Civil War history. Part of Griffith's sentimentality towards Lincoln perhaps also stemmed from the fact that in 1898, as a young actor, “Griffith scored a personal triumph with his depiction of Abraham Lincoln in William Haworth's play The Ensign.”15
As Stokes and Chadwick indicate, Lincoln was depicted in silent films almost from the very beginning of narrative cinema. Stokes mentions films such as The Reprieve (1908), Abraham Lincoln's Clemency (1910), One Flag at Last (1911), When Lincoln Was President (1913), and The Songbird of the North (1913) as depicting the “humane and merciful” Lincoln. Stokes observes:
Maybe the most fanciful of all these films was The Toll of War (1913), in which Lincoln freed a Southern girl sentenced to death for spying against the North. After her release, she saw the assassination of Lincoln at Ford's Theatre. The President was carried to her nearby room and died in her bed while she knelt beside him in prayer.16
The description of Lincoln as “the Great Heart” of course comes from The Birth of a Nation, although, as Stokes points out:
The first overt mention of the war comes with the first tableau in the film: a facsimile of Lincoln signing the first call for 75,000 volunteers … In reality, of course, the first act in the conflict had been the Confederate firing on Fort Sumter on April 12, 1861. To have mentioned this, however, would have made it clear that the South, far from being a victim, was the real aggressor in the conflict.17
In essence, Lincoln, driven by the “irrational” abolitionists such as Austin Stoneman, seals the fate of the South which embodied, as an early title card puts it, the “quaint life that is no more.” Nevertheless, by also depicting Lincoln as weeping and praying as he signs the proclamation, the image of the “humane and merciful” Lincoln comes into being.
In one scene in The Birth of a Nation, Ben Cameron, “the Little Colonel” and the epitome of the Confederate Cavalier, lies in a union hospital recovering from his wounds. On the battle-field, his courage, of course, had been magnificent; he even had time to pause and offer water to a badly wounded Union soldier, an act that provoked cheers from both Southern and Northern troops. A title card reveals that a “secret influence” has declared Cameron to be a guerrilla and thus must be hanged. Cameron's mother and Elsie Stoneman, who are both visiting him, decide their only hope is Abraham Lincoln. Cameron's mother declares, “We will ask mercy from the Great Heart.” Looking old, weary, and on the verge of tears (again), Lincoln pardons Cameron and his mother returns to the hospital to tell him, “Mr. Lincoln has given back your life to me.”
Shortly thereafter Lee surrenders at Appomattox. A title card declares that Lee's surrender means “the end of state sovereignty.” A dispirited and shabby Ben Cameron returns to what's left of his home and family. Meanwhile Radicals demand that Lincoln hang the Southern leaders and treat the Southern states as conquered provinces. Lincoln, as mentioned above, declares he will deal with the South as if it had never been away. No wonder, then, that Dr. Cameron, as also mentioned above, declares after Lincoln is assassinated: “Our best friend is gone. What is to become of us now?” One curious feature of Griffith's Lincoln, however, as Robert Lang notes, is his strangely “androgynous” quality, as Lincoln “combines masculine and feminine qualities. He is a bearded man, but he is sensitive to his own feelings and those of others. He is ready to make war on the South, but he cries after signing the proclamation calling for volunteers. He angrily dismisses the man speaking to him before his meeting with Elsie and Mrs. Cameron, but finally gives in to the emotional persuasions of the Little Colonel's mother to save her son's life. In the last moments before he is shot, Lincoln draws a shawl around his shoulders, perhaps symbolizing his awareness of the chill of his impending death … As a gesture, however … it is “coded culturally as feminine.” In The Birth of a Nation, Lincoln is both a father and mother to his people.18
The pernicious legacy of The Birth of a Nation paved the way, twenty years later, for the “benevolently” racist The Littlest Rebel (1935), which brought another visit to Lincoln by two petitioners seeking a pardon from “the Great Heart.” But here Ben Cameron (“little Colonel”) has been replaced by the “littlest rebel” in the person of seven-year-old Shirley Temple, the greatest child star in film history. She is “Virgie” (Virginia), daughter of yet another Cavalier gentleman of the old South. He goes to war but sneaks back from time to time, through Union lines, to visit Virgie and his wife. But before he leaves, the movie comments on whether slavery is the cause of the Civil War. In line with the part of the Lost Cause myth that no one, except meddling abolitionists, caused the war, certainly no one in the South, this exchange takes place between Virgie and “Uncle Billy” as her father prepares to march off to war:
| Uncle Billy: | No one knows why there will be a war. There's a man up north who wants to free the slaves. |
| Virgie: | What does that mean? |
| Uncle Billy: | I don't know myself. |
His last visit corresponds to the death of his wife and, with the help of a sympathetic Union officer (who even lends the father his uniform), he tries to make it through the lines to get Virgie safely to Richmond. They are caught, however, and both he and the Union officer are sentenced to death. Yet another sympathetic Union officer—Virgie's charm and shining personality overwhelm everyone who meets her—gives Virgie and her devoted (former) slave “Uncle Billy” enough money (she and “Uncle Billy” haven't quite made enough with their song-and-dance fundraiser renditions of “Polly Wolly Doodle”) to travel to Washington where “the Great Heart” appears to have very little to do except listen to pleas for clemency. Lincoln welcomes them into his office, even shaking hands with “Uncle Billy,” who reacts in amazement. He sits at his desk, puts Virgie on his lap, peels an apple which he shares with her and, after a brief exchange where Virgie's charm makes his heart even greater, issues a pardon to both her father and the Union officer. In the last scene, at the prison, just before the two men are released, Virgie and “Uncle Billy” sing and dance “Polly Wolly Doodle” for a combined audience of appreciative Union guards and Confederate prisoners.
Chadwick concludes:
World War I ended the first era of Civil War movies and World War II ended the second, and the Lincoln movies as well. The sixteenth president quickly disappeared from the nation's movie screens when World War II began. Whatever romantic notions about the Civil War and Lincoln film had conjured up prior to 1941 were immediately washed away by the grim reality of the latest war.19
Lincoln continued to make occasional appearances in films of the 1940s and beyond. In 1930, D.W. Griffith himself directed Abraham Lincoln, which he hoped would be a masterpiece but came out as something much less. Young Mr. Lincoln (1939) and Abe Lincoln in Illinois (1940) were far more critically successful. After 1940, the depiction of Lincoln in film (and later television) declined into random minor appearances. One exception was the five-part program Mr. Lincoln (1952/53) presented on the Omnibus television series. The actor who played Lincoln—Royal Dano—later became the voice of Lincoln in the Disneyland and Disneyworld audio-animatronic Lincoln in the “Great Moments with Mr. Lincoln” and in the Hall of Presidents. In the 2005 mock documentary C.S.A.: The Confederate States of America, which posits a south victorious in the Civil War, Lincoln flees Washington but is captured in blackface make-up.
Tennessee Johnson (1942) is about Lincoln's Vice President, Andrew Johnson, suddenly elevated to become the 17th President as a result of Lincoln's murder. Directed by Hollywood veteran William Dieterle and written by the quartet of Milton Ginzberg, Alvin Meyers, John Balderston, and Wells Root, it features Van Heflin as Johnson, Ruth Hussy as his wife—Eliza McCardle Johnson—and Lionel Barrymore as Johnson's nemesis Thaddeus Stevens. The film follows Johnson from his youth as an illiterate drifter to his impeachment trial in the Senate. By being generous, one could describe the film as “somewhat historically inaccurate,” especially the film's climatic scene where Johnson enters the Senate chamber, near the end of the trial, to deliver a stirring speech in his own defense. One could point out that Johnson never appeared in the Senate chamber to defend himself, that in fact he was represented throughout by legal counsel. But even generosity has its limits; historical inaccuracies abound. The film begins with a crawl announcing that in 1867 a law was passed making the firing of cabinet members unconstitutional. Since the film reveals that Johnson opposed that law, the crawl concludes by “vindicating” Johnson with a statement that the Supreme Court overturned the law in 1926.
The film begins in 1830 when Johnson—a runaway from being bound to a tailor in “Carolina”—decides to settle in Tennessee and support himself mending clothes. Admitting that he can't read, he asks the town librarian (who will obviously become his wife) to teach him. He quickly educates himself in law and politics and sees himself as the voice of the property-less “white trash” as he calls himself and is persuaded to take up the cause of voting rights for the common man. Everything in the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and the Bill of Rights applies to him and his kind, he declares. They are “the people.” Of course, the propertied classes close ranks against such talk. The local sheriff makes it clear: “the man who owns the country should run it.”
Despite violence directed against Johnson and his supporters, he refuses to answer with violence, maintaining his beliefs in “laws” and “rights.” Not surprisingly, in all these events—in ante-bellum Tennessee!—not a single African American is seen in any capacity, slave or free. Once Johnson's integrity and nobility have been established, the film simply leaps ahead to 1860. Johnson is now a pro-Union Democratic senator from Tennessee. When Jefferson Davis calls on all Southern senators to leave the Union, Johnson refuses and is branded a “traitor” by the secessionist Senators. Johnson serves in the Union army and “saves” Nashville from a Confederate Army takeover. The 1864 convention initiates the later conflicts between Johnson and Stevens. Lincoln opposes Stevens' party plank that the South must be punished after the war. Johnson agrees, favoring reconciliation (the magic world finally surfaces). Despite their intense disagreement, Stevens does not oppose Lincoln selecting Johnson as his running mate in the election. At the inauguration, a very ill Johnson makes a speech but appears to be drunk. Despite widespread condemnation and ridicule, Lincoln writes Johnson a letter of support asking Johnson to help “patch up the torn garment of our nation.”
As the war ends, John Wilkes Booth tries to visit Johnson who, meanwhile, tells his wife that the war's end will “start an era of good feeling.” As Johnson speaks to a crowd, quoting Lincoln on “binding up the nation's wounds,” Lincoln is assassinated. The new President now sees himself in the “lonesomest job in the world” constantly asking himself, “what would Lincoln have done?” and groaning, “I am not fit to follow him.”
Johnson is immediately challenged by Thaddeus Stevens and the vengeance-crazed Radical Republicans who no longer have the brilliant and humane Lincoln to keep them in check. A delegation tells Johnson to “treat the South as an outside conquered nation,” demanding that each “colored man” be given forty acres and a mule. Johnson rejects the idea, claiming that Lincoln had asserted that the Southern states were “never” out of the Union. Stevens and his crew storm off while threatening impeachment. And impeachment eventually comes. Johnson, who claims that he was carrying out Lincoln's plan for reconciliation and reunification, repeatedly clashes with the angry and frustrated Radicals. Johnson fires a cabinet member in violation of the “law” (Tenure of Office Act) passed by the Radicals. Johnson declares he will “pardon” all “former masters” and restore citizenship to all who fought for the “lost cause” of the Confederacy. Stevens argues that every rebel snake in the South will crawl into the daylight; that Johnson is starting a “new civil war”; and that Johnson apparently has no sympathy for the four million former slaves. One could say—ironically, if the irony of all this was not so tragic—that Stevens was absolutely right as to what would be the consequences of Johnson's idea of reconciliation. Johnson argues that he wants “all races” to live together peacefully; that Stevens's ideas would make slaves of whites; and that Stevens has the drive of a “great fanatic.” Thus the film makes clear who is to be regarded as right and who wrong in this titanic argument.
Johnson is impeached by a vengeful House and the Senate trial begins. In a truly revealing moment when the filmmakers apparently could not see what was right in front of them, Stevens, now very ill and unable to walk, is carried into the Senate chamber by two young African Americans.
In his own defense, although contrary to the actual trial, Johnson enters the Senate where he is met by boos and jeers; even the Chief Justice, presiding at the trial, has difficulty restoring order. Stevens is certain that Johnson will make another “drunken” speech and ensure his conviction and removal from the presidency. Johnson reads Lincoln's earlier letter, supporting him against the charges of being drunk. He claims that his impeachment is not for any “crimes” but for “reaching out” to the South. He points at the twenty empty desks in the Senate chamber and asks why haven't the twenty Southern senators who once occupied them been restored to their positions. He accuses Stevens and his followers of continuing the war. While those desks remain empty, he proclaims, there is no Union and throws in a warning about “foreign” threats to the country if reconciliation fails.
At the vote, Senator Huyler, a “sure” vote against Johnson first faints and then votes “not guilty.” Johnson, reconciliation, the Union, the myth of the “Lost Cause” all survive. Of course, the four million recently freed slaves from the story disappear at the end of Reconstruction and the onset of Jim Crow.
The film ends with Grant's presidency. Johnson has been returned to the Senate by the voters of Tennessee. He is now applauded by all as he speaks of the vacant desks no longer vacant, of the fact that the South is back in the Union. This is what Abraham Lincoln lived, fought, and died for, the Union of these states, one and inseparable, now and forever. Thus the myths lived on in 1942, unchallenged and overpowering. The United States was now at war with Germany, Italy, and Japan. The idea of a “united” and reconciled country could accept no historical “truth” about the meaning of reunion opposing the seventy years of entrenched distortions.
In 1935, Lloyd Lewis—journalist, raconteur, biographer of Grant and Sherman, and Lincoln scholar—speculated in a speech at the University of Chicago on “the course of American life” if Lincoln had lived. He asked his audience to “suppose, if you will, that Mr. Lincoln had not been murdered at all, and had lived out his allotted span of life—or at least his second term in the Presidency.” Would Honest Abe have gone down to defeat, into impeachment, and political disgrace like Andrew Johnson? Would Lincoln, like Johnson, have failed to carry out “something sensible, tolerant, and fair to the conquered South”? Would Lincoln “unmurdered” have failed as Johnson failed? Johnson, according to the traditional view of Reconstruction, had been “crucified” by vindictive Radical Republicans intent on black rule and on punishing the South for the crime of secession. But President Johnson was too honest, too decent to support such actions. Rather than administer an unjust peace he went down “to exhausted political defeat.” Lincoln was also too kind, too forgiving. Thus, it was better that Lincoln was assassinated—his reputation still intact. “Lincoln died just in time,” the traditionalists said. Such was the commonly accepted historical view of Lincoln and Reconstruction when Lewis spoke. Lincoln was too good hearted to face down the Radicals. This is also the image of Lincoln in The Birth of a Nation: “the Great Heart.” Ridiculous, Lewis stated. This was folk memory of the “religio-romantic” sort. While Johnson was “obtuse, stubborn, and blundering,” Lincoln was “resourceful, sagacious, and diplomatic.” He was a skilled politician of the highest order. We have, Lewis said, overestimated the “goodness of his heart” and underestimated Lincoln's shrewdness. Lincoln was no sentimental fool. Consider Lincoln's performance during the war. Are you telling me, Lewis asked, that a man who proved “more than a match for Jefferson Davis and Robert E. Lee … could not have hoped to match himself against Charles Sumner, Thad Stevens, and Ben Wade …”? Lincoln was a political actor of great talent and postwar politics dominated the second act of the drama of the Civil War. Lincoln had outsmarted the South militarily and politically. He had maneuvered the South into firing the first shot, convinced the slave owners of the Border States to support the Union, and prevented Great Britain from intervening in the conflict. Topping this, Lincoln had been reelected to the presidency, had freed the slaves, and had saved the Union. War was the hard part. Peace by comparison would be easy.
Lewis, however, was still in the traditionalists' camp when it came to interpreting “Black Reconstruction.” The South, he asserted, was willing to meet Lincoln halfway and Southerners were convinced that Lincoln would not impose black rule over white people. Lincoln was essentially conservative and looked to conservative white Southerners to restore the South to the Union: They knew Lincoln as the hope of the South.
As for the Radical Republicans, they were only a faction within the Republican Party, their political base limited to reformist New England and New York. Lincoln had only to rally the agrarian West, Northern farmers, and the legions of still serving Union soldiers and their discharged comrades. The Army, he asserted, was loyal to their old Commander in Chief. Further, their commanding generals were mostly Democrats who opposed “Negro rule.” The Army would be the critical swing vote in the state and Congressional elections of 1865 and 1866. The Radical Republicans could not hold against such an alliance. As the head of a true “Union Party,” Lincoln would have insisted on a conservative restoration of the South led by Southern planters and supported by conservative Northern allies. And Lincoln, “unmurdered,” guided the nation until 1868: a wise, conservative, hero of the masses. No carpetbaggers. No scalawags. No black rule. The nation was “happier.” Such was Lloyd Lewis's alternative history.20 There are, however, other theories, other counterfactual speculations.
This much we know for sure. Lincoln believed that the majority of the Southern people were Unionist at heart and that secession had been brought on by disloyal men who misled the mass of common men in the South who were essentially loyal. He hoped that Southern loyalists could effect a quick reunion with limited black suffrage. Lincoln's plan of reconstruction, however, faced strong opposition from the Radical Republicans. This Lincoln could not ignore. Also, Lincoln did not see the Radicals as enemies; he could work with them. They opposed a mere restoration of the Southern states without real reform and a strong commitment to black rights. In fact, Lincoln by 1865 had moved, or evolved, in his position on black rights and the need to take a harder line with the South. He could work with the Radicals. Lewis was right in this—the President was master of politics and expert at manipulating his political opponents— but wrong perhaps as to how he would have used those talents.
So, consider these alternatives offered by today's Civil War historians: “It was once assumed,” historian George Rable says, “that Lincoln, had he lived, would have taken a much more conservative course toward Reconstruction than the path favored by the Radicals and many moderate Republicans.” Lincoln was conservative but, he contends, Lincoln “would not have broken with the Republicans as Johnson did.” Craig Symonds, for his part, judges that
Lincoln knew how far he could go and where he could not go. Lincoln believed blacks should have citizenship and the right to vote. He knew how far and how fast he could go. Lincoln would have pursued the goals of the Radicals with a velvet glove.
But this assumes that the South would have cooperated with Lincoln.
For his part, Gerald Prokopowicz offers this counterfactual: It was Lincoln's assassination alone “that made him into a national icon.” If he had lived “we would have no Lincoln Memorial, no Lincoln penny, no Lincoln on Mont Rushmore.” He reminds us that this president “was controversial and in some quarters very unpopular …”21 Mark Grimsley, also believes that Lincoln would have had a very difficult time with Reconstruction despite his remarkable political skills. The only way Reconstruction could be a success was to ensure black rights, including the unrestricted right to vote. But white Southerners were consistently and violently opposed to this. Also, consider this: Even if Lincoln had sided fully with the Radical agenda he would have failed to force a lasting Radical Reconstruction when you take into account the sullen, hostile white population in the Southern states. Lincoln underestimated Unionist feelings in the South. In the South race always trumped unionism. Lincoln's plan of Reconstruction was essentially a plan for Southerners to reconstruct themselves. Today we know how Reconstruction turned out after fifteen years of political opposition and violent resistance in the states of the former Confederacy.
It is inconceivable that Lincoln would have made the political mistakes that Andrew Johnson made; but that does not mean that Lincoln's policies, tentative and largely unformed in 1865, would have worked. Counterfactual or alternative history requires that the alternative story have a large measure of plausibility. By 1877, after years of political and violent resistance, reactionary Southern insurgents were in control of the South. The South may have lost the war but it is not an exaggeration to say that the South won Reconstruction. Even under “the Great Heart,” it would have taken a Second Reconstruction a hundred years later to begin meaningful social, political, and economic change in the states of the former Confederacy. What was the possibility that had Lincoln lived Reconstruction would have turned out differently?
Steven Spielberg's film Lincoln (2012) has the president convincing Radical Republican Thaddeus Stevens that he must control his radicalism so as not to alienate conservatives and moderates in the House of Representatives whose votes were necessary to move forward on the passage of a thirteenth amendment outlawing slavery. This is Spielberg's version of “the Great Heart.” Film critic Anthony Lane, writing in the New Yorker magazine, observed:
We have a John Williams score (for the film) all plaintive piano solos and sobbing horns, that could have been composed thirty years ago. In the same vein, our first sight of Lincoln is from behind, the radiance of his fame being too much to contemplate head on, and we even get a foolish coda, with our hero manifested like an angel through a flickering candle flame.22
Later, in a private conversation with Stevens in the movie, it is clear that Lincoln wants forgiveness toward the South and a go-slow policy regarding Reconstruction:
The dialogue is fictional; no one recorded this private conversation between Lincoln and Stevens. Nevertheless, the screenwriter, Tony Kushner, imagined what they said based on the idea that Lincoln wanted a merciful ending to the war. He, of course, is not alone in believing that had “the Great Heart” continued to beat, the story of Reconstruction would have turned out differently—not only Lincoln unmurdered but the Southern people unpunished.
So, what would have happened if Lincoln had lived? In his speech on Reconstruction on April 11, 1865, three days before that tragic evening at the theater, Lincoln stated that he was open to compromise on Reconstruction policy and conscious of the difficulties of putting the pieces of the nation back together again: “We simply must begin with, and mold [policy] from, disorganized and discordant elements.” He understood that the cooperation of Southern white people was the key element in Reconstruction—what he defined as the “re-inauguration of the national authority …” His was a “practical” plan open to revision and compromise. “It may be my duty to make some new announcement to the people of the South,” he said regarding Reconstruction.23 But Lincoln himself had doubts that his own scheme to restore the Union would work and to the degree that the federal government could intervene in the Southern states. “We can't take to running state governments in all of these southern states,” he conceded during a cabinet meeting in 1865. “Their people must do that, although I recon at first, they may do it badly.” Indeed, they did do it badly. And Congress, in the face of Johnson's intransigency and the obstinacy of the ex-Confederates, took full control of the process out of the president's hands. They instituted a “radical” Reconstruction that was, in truth, a hard but not oppressive plan to reform the South. Lincoln, had he lived and in concert with the Radicals, may very well have done the same. It is inconceivable that having led the nation in a bloody war to preserve the Union and, yes, to free the slaves, he would have allowed all that work to be undermined by the former Confederates. It is true that there are many examples of Lincoln's humanity and mercy. Spielberg again:
Lincoln
Now, here's a sixteen year old boy. They're going
to hang him …
(Hay startles awake, then settles. He's used to this. Lincoln reads a little further.)
He was with the 15th Indiana Calvary near Beaufort,
seems he lamed his horse to avoid battle.
I don't think even Stanton would complain if I pardoned him? You think Stanton would complain?
(Nicolay stirs in the next bed.)
John Hay
Ummm … I don't know, sir, I don't know who you're,
uh … What time is it?
Lincoln
It's three forty in the morning.
John Nicolay (waking up)
Don't … let him pardon any more deserters …
(Nicolay's asleep again.)
John Hay
Mr. Stanton thinks you pardon too many. He's generally apoplectic on the subject—
Lincoln
He oughtn't to have done that, crippled his horse, that was cruel, but you don't just hang a sixteen year old boy for that—
John Hay
Ask the horse what he thinks.
Lincoln
—for cruelty. There'd be no sixteen year old boys left.
(A beat, then:)
Grant wants me to bring the secesh delegates to Washington.
John Hay
So … There are secesh delegates?
Lincoln (scribbling a note, signing the petition)
He was afraid, that's all it was. I don't care to hang a boy for being frightened, either. What good would it do him?
(He signs the pardon. Then he gives Hay's leg a few hard thwacks and a squeeze. It hurts a little. Hay winces.)
Lincoln did pardon many soldiers accused of desertion and other crimes. This was no fiction. He called them “leg cases.” Yet, he could be a hard man when necessary. Remember, this is the commander in chief who allowed some 267 military executions. Although 303 Santee Sioux were sentenced to death in the Minnesota uprising of 1862, this was the president who authorized, after some hesitation, the hanging of 38 of the insurgents—a mass execution. Thus, Lincoln was not afraid to make hard decisions or impose hard policy. Clearly, it is inconceivable that he would have simply stood by while ex-Confederates wrested control of the postwar South away from either the Congress or the president. Whether he would have been successful in the long run is debatable. Certainly, his influence on events would have waned as he approached the end of his second term in 1868. It is unclear what Lincoln would have done if he had lived. What is clear is that the myth of Lincoln's lost, tempered version of reconstruction has lived on in popular memory.