Today I'd like to go on a bit in honor of Mr. Lincoln's birthday. It is 206 years since he was born, and he left a mark on this land that people still note. He certainly was one of the strongest willed individuals to be inaugurated, and it was this strength that we, the American nation can be thankful for. Without his strength things would have been greatly different.
Let's play what if here. Suppose he hadn't won the election. Suppose Stephen Douglas had. The war would not have taken place because the Southern states would not have seceded, at least not at that time. Slavery would have continued, but a certain section of the country would have been up in arms about that. The New England states were the center of abolitionist feeling at that time. Maybe they would have chosen to secede instead of the Deep South. Perhaps they could have persuaded some Middle Atlantic states to join them. Imagine Robert E. Lee leading the Federal army north to a decisive battle, perhaps at a small county seat in Pennsylvania called Gettysburg.
Suppose the South seceded with a weaker willed president after the 1860s. This president, perhaps fed up with the whining that passed for southern demands, lets them go without a fight. Now the southerners have what they want-a nation of their own where slavery is constitutionally protected. In my opinion, their economy would have collapsed. Other nations which had fought slavery would have shunned them. The British were developing their own cotton sources and would not have needed King Cotton from the South. Perhaps an exodus from the Confederacy to the United States would have occurred. How the United States would have faced this is unknown, but I'm betting they wouldn't have been happy about it.
Suppose Lincoln hadn't gone to the theater that fateful night. How would things have been different? Reconstruction certainly would have been different. He would have been stricter than Andrew Johnson and more lenient than the Radical Republicans. Things might have gone more smoothly. Of course, they might have gone to Hell in a handbasket, too. That's the fun thing about what if. Ya never know.
Another thing I have learned over the years is that Lincoln's politics concerning the working man might have been a bit different than everyone assumes. Harry Turtledove, in his mammoth eleven volume alternate history of the United States between 1862 and 1945, presents Lincoln as a Socialist, and claims that if you read Lincoln's writings you will see his socialist leanings. Why, you may ask, didn't he do anything that looks socialist during his presidency? Well, during virtually his entire presidency he was fighting a war. At its end he was killed. We will never know what a peacetime Lincoln presidency would have been like.
That's about it right now. All I can say is Happy Birthday Abe. We needed you, and Thank God we had you.
I do think it is interesting to play What If......What if the newly elected president was assassinated during his Whistle Stop tour? He received threats and opted to change his route if in the event something happened, but what if he didn't? What if he carried through and the nation lost this great man before he even started? I don't know that I want to really think about that.
ReplyDeleteI do think that if Lincoln were not nominated or if he was killed prior to the end of the Civil War, the nation would have re-united at one point and we would have seen an end to slavery. I guess it may not have been at the conclusion of the war, especially if the south won the war.
I am however glad that Lincoln won and am grateful for him and his brilliant mind - and his ability to encourage people to come together, even in the most trying of times.
I do find it interesting and eerie that he faced an assassination threat at the start of his presidency, wondered if he did the right thing by not following through on his original plan of the Whistle Stop tour and in the end, was still killed because he was not liked.