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Originally Posted by August
But Lincoln was assassinated only 6 days after Lee surrendered at Appromattox so he can hardly be blamed for the failures of Reconstruction. There is just no comparison with Wilson who actually did have a chance to lead in the post war era.
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Ture enough, but that still buys him nothing in my eyes. Lincoln was privvy to enough acts of brutality in occupied areas during the war that I have no difficulty believing that he would have done nothing to soften the reconstruction afterwards. The sentiment that the South needed to be punished was very strong at the time, and if he was the shrewd politician everyone says he was, it would have been politically unwise to attempt a gentle reconciliation.
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Originally Posted by Sailor Steve
What could he have done? The seceeded before he took office. He had been in office less than a month when the shooting began. While I do believe he was incredibly shrewd in maneuvering the South into firing first, I also believe that by that point the economics were a moot point. His goal was to preserve the Union, and that could no longer be done with political manipulation. If there was no war, there would be no reunion (at least not immediately), and he almost certainly believed that the nation would not survive as two separate countries. Sooner or later the Southern coalition would start to fail (as it did when the Confederate Congress instituted a draft and States started talking about secession from the Confederacy), and at that point the British and the French would be more than glad to 'befriend' them.
The whole 'American Experiment' was still pretty much that at the time. For Lincoln, failure could possibly mean the failure of the whole thing. Possibly not true, but I believe that was foremost in his mind.
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Very good points,as usual Steve. I admit that I hadn't really considered things from that perspective. My economic instinct tells me that something could have been done to peacefully bring the South back into the fold, but I'll have to think about that one and do some more reading before I can decide one way or the other.