For many years Reconstruction historiography was the story of lost opportunity. Yes, there was the rather predictable retelling of scholarly and semischolarly understandings of the conflict from the beginning of the twentieth century, usually starting with a recapitulation of the Dunning School (I suspect that I am one of the few historians of my generation or younger who has actually read William A. Dunning’s own writings), passing through the revisionism of the 1960s, and then into something called postrevisionism; at the same time historians went from politically-grounded studies of policy and law at the federal and state level to other perspectives. Yes, there was always the telling of the evolution of the image of the stereotype of the carpetbagger, the scalawag, and the freedpeople; the switching of white and black hats between Andrew Johnson and the Radical Republicans; the eternal “what if Lincoln had lived?” query; and so on. Somewhat concealed by all this drama was the development of a richer picture of postwar politics at the state and national level, with a renewed awareness of the role of terrorism as well as the part played by politics and race in the North.
Behind all this was a series of counterfactual questions, each designed to suggest that Reconstruction need not have turned out the way it did. These basically become questions about federal policy and policymakers. Few people actually ponder what might have happened if the assumptions of Thaddeus Stevens and Charles Sumner about a prolonged federal supervision of the Southern states came to pass, in part because we now have a better understanding of the role that the Radicals played (and did not play) in framing Reconstruction policy. Rather, the questions boil down to two issues: what if Lincoln had lived? what if the political revolution wrought by emancipation had been accompanied by an economic revolution involving the confiscation of plantation holdings and the redistribution of that land among the former slaves?
We don’t know what would have happened had Lincoln lived. That may seem obvious to observe, but the fact of the matter is that at war’s end Lincoln’s own thoughts were turning toward framing a policy appropriate for postwar circumstances (it is underappreciated by many scholars that Lincoln’s wartime approach to reconstruction was just that–a wartime approach, shaped at least as much by the necessity of defeating the Confederacy as by any plan of establishing the foundation for a postwar reconstruction). Most people who speculate on what might have happened had Lincoln lived tend to project their own sense of the matter upon the sixteenth president. Surely Lincoln would have opposed the resurgence of terrorism in the postwar South, but he would have enjoyed a better relationship with a Republican-controlled Congress than did his successor, with the result that the dynamics of the legislative process would have been quite different. If one sees Republican legislation in 1866 and 1867 as partly a reaction to the policies of President Andrew Johnson, then one would have to assume that such legislation would have been different with Lincoln as president. How different remains a matter for discussion, but in the end it’s all speculation.
The other powerful counterfactual has to do with the confiscation and redistribution of plantation landholdings. This would have stripped large landholders of their economic power while empowering newly-freed blacks, establishing a far more solid basis for a lasting reconstruction with blacks in a better position. Maybe. After all, one does not become a successful farmer simply because one owns land. Absent seeds, tools, and other farming necessities, mere possession of land could have gone only so far (which is why the cry was for forty acres and a mule, not just forty acres). Moreover, possession of the land does not guarantee the marketing of produce necessary to go beyond subsistence farming. Given the lack of capital in the South, that could have been a challenge. Nor is it clear that whites would have played a role in that marketing as middlemen or consumers. There are different forms of economic coercion, after all. Given the adverse farming conditions that existed for a few years after slavery, many of these farms might have soon fallen by the wayside. Finally, the possession of land in itself would not have protected the freedpeople from violence and terrorism. It’s one thing to argue that land ownership was necessary: it’s another to claim that it was sufficient.
Considering these two counterfactuals reminds us of the most important reason Reconstruction turned out as it did: President Andrew Johnson. As lamentable as most people find Lincoln’s passing, what made it so important was the identity of his successor. Johnson had no interest in the welfare of the freedpeople; he considered Reconstruction to be no more that the restoration of white-dominated civil government, setting aside a few high-ranking former Confederates. He never took a stand against terrorism, because he was sympathetic with its goals. His pardon and amnesty policy, along with his successful veto of the first postwar Freedmen’s Bureau bill in February 1866, terminated whatever real chance there was for confiscation and redistribution. His everpresent threat of a veto forced Republicans to steer a more moderate course to obtain veto-proof majorities in support of legislative initiatives; his obstruction of the execution of the laws and the implementation of legislation meant that congressional Republicans spend a great deal of energy in seeking to tie his hands instead of considering what they wanted to do concerning emancipation and reconstruction. By the time Ulysses S. Grant took over as president, the die was cast: whatever the Republicans had wanted to do, four years of battling had foreclosed certain alternatives and left Grant in a very difficult position with only a few options going forward.
Historians have argued about Reconstruction policy for decades, pointing fingers at all sorts of reasons as to why it failed (I prefer to bypass that particular approach, because the question is always “failed for whom?”). However, even with all that hindsight, they have been unable to construct a plausible historical alternative that secures both sectional reconciliation and racial justice/equality. The problem is simple. Whatever Lincoln may have done had he lived, it is extremely doubtful that he would have proceeded as did his successor; it is how his successor proceeded that makes his death such a turning point. With Johnson in the White House, confiscation and redistribution simply don’t happen: don’t even waste your time pondering that counterfactual, as so many people do.
The general outlines of the course of Reconstruction were established on April 15, 1865, at 7:22 AM, with the death of Abraham Lincoln. The bullet fired by John Wilkes Booth proved fatal for many people, and his act remains the most important political assassination in American history, which should give pause to those hoping to cast the assassination and its aftermath in some sort of dramatic, adventuresome, and romantic glow. The failure of a Booth co-conspirator, George Atzerodt, to fulfill his assignment to kill Andrew Johnson proved just as critical to what followed, because it ensured who would replace Lincoln as president.