Reply #14: The Lincoln Assassination

[Art_from_Ark]

Here's how it works:
1) Use Lincoln's platform (maintaining the union, ending slavery) to advance your own agenda (subjugating the South, which had been a pain ever since the Constitution was ratified)
2) Once Lincoln achieves his goals, have him bumped off.
3)Convince a Southern sympathizer of questionable sanity that Lincoln is a bad man. Even offer to pay him money to bump Lincoln off.
4) Once the dirty deed is done, go on an extensive manhunt for the triggerman. Conveniently track him (or someone reported to be him) down to a barn and burn it to remove all evidence.
5) Track down all people associated with triggerman as quickly as possible.
6) Take the unprecedented step of holding a military trial overseen by kangaroos approved by the likely mastermind, Secretary of War Edwin Stanton.
7) Just to make sure none of the accused can spill the beans on the mastermind, keep them hooded during the trial, and make sure to find all of them guilty.
8) Execute them as soon as possible, and Joe Whiskeyglass will be satisfied that justice was served.
9) Make life miserable for Lincoln's successor, who tries to be conciliatory toward a defeated South.
10) Install your own man, a war hero, in the White House after Lincoln's successor is too crippled to even consider running again.
11) Subjugate the South and start the Gilded Age.