Lincoln’s Assassination and the Battle for America

On April 14, 1865, Good Friday of that year, one of the greatest tragedies of American history occurred in Ford’s Theater. A crazed Confederate sympathizer, infuriated at Republican President Abraham Lincoln’s indication of support for black civil rights, assassinated the president.

It is always difficult to speculate on what “might have been,” but I think we can say with certainty that, had Lincoln not died, the history of America would have been very different. Lincoln, who was increasingly concerned at the plight of former slaves, was determined to maintain the union yet eager to extend the hand of charity to former traitors. Instead of that great man, Democrat Vice President Andrew Johnson oversaw Reconstruction. Johnson, one of the most rabidly racist men to plague the White House, sabotaged Reconstruction with his poisonous and short-sighted policies. In many ways, the bullet that killed Lincoln was a bullet right through America’s heart.

Lincoln, though increasingly convinced of the necessity of full civil rights (as the Constitution’s framers originally intended), partly due to his friendship with former slave Frederick Douglass, understood that progress could be slow at first. But there were many Confederates/Democrats who wanted no progress at all and who were determined to enslave and oppress black Americans through laws even if they could not do so anymore with chains and whips. John Wilkes Booth, the actor, racist, and Confederate sympathizer who played the main role in a group conspiracy to assassinate the president, was one such. From the Indiana State Museum:

Lincoln’s support for Black rights proved fatal

Soon after the war ended, Lincoln gave a speech that argued for Black men and veterans to have the right to vote. John Wilkes Booth was in the audience. Enraged that Lincoln supported Black citizenship, Booth vowed, ‘That is the last speech he will ever make.’ Booth shot Lincoln three days later.

It proved a major blow both to reunification of a divided nation and to civil rights. Johnson, like so many Democrats (remember Democrats started the Civil War after Republican Lincoln’s election), had little interest in addressing the root causes of the national divide, since he was part of the problem. Fortunately the great and highly underappreciated Republican U.S. Grant later made civil rights the key goal of his presidency, but the damage had been done, and it was hard to fight the disastrous trend already begun by Grant’s predecessor.

The Civil War never really ended. The Democrats merely shifted the fighting from the battlefield to the halls of Congress, using laws and thuggish domestic terrorists instead of rifles and armies. The Republicans and later some Democrats wanted to pretend the conflict was over. Still today many Americans of various political persuasions ignore or deny egregious Confederate and Democrat war crimes and terrorism. They either falsely whitewash the Confederacy or falsely label all white Americans as equally racist, equally to blame.

John Wilkes Booth would despise Antifa, yet Antifa is only the newest manifestation of the leftist hatred and violence festering in the midst of America ever since the Civil War. The spoken rhetoric might have changed somewhat, but the tactics and goals are the same. Thanks to modern leftists, America is as divided now as at the time of the Civil War, and the exact same political party is to blame.

The decision is up to us whether we will finish the work Lincoln had perforce to leave undone. Lincoln dreamed of an America where North and South were again united, where both Democrats and Republicans loved this nation, where black and white Americans were equal and free.