On the night Lincoln was assassinated, his bodyguard, a police officer named John Frederick Parker, left his post at the theater. While Parker was away, the president was assassinated by John Wilkes Booth.
Question: Consider the role of chance in history. How might Reconstruction been different if Lincoln had lived to oversee its implementation?
Answers
Answer:
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”?