Since We Are Playing The "What If " Game? Re : Reconstruction

[thucythucy]

20. Lincoln's version of reconstruction

would have included radical land reform. That's where "forty acres and a mule" comes from. His idea was to seize the massive estates of the slave-owning oligarchy, and divide the land among newly emancipated slaves and poor whites. This would have given poor whites a vested interest in reconstruction, and would, Lincoln hoped, eventually ween them from their self-defeating allegiance to the racist oligarchy. Lincoln was determined, by 1865, not just to win the war and end slavery, but to remake the entire social and economic structure of the south. Had he lived, the subsequent history of this country might have been very different.

The first thing Andrew Johnson did, on assuming the presidency after Lincoln's murder by a white supremacist, was to issue an executive order removing control of "abandoned" lands from the Freedmen's Bureau (the Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned Lands) and issue a blanket pardon giving the oligarchy back its land.

Read James McPherson's "Battle Cry of Freedom" and David Blight's "Race and Reunion" for good takes on this. BTW, McPherson's book contains the best refuting of the whole "the war wasn't really about slavery" blather I've ever read. His chapter on the racist hysteria that followed Lincoln's election in 1860 is amazing, and generally unacknowledged by other (American) historians.