Lincoln assassinated at Fort McNair

Blair152

Banned
There's an AH story about this too and I can't think of the title. However,
the program Investigating History, did an investigation of it. A Confederate
sniper, from a distance of 800-1000 yards, could have taken the shot. What
if Lincoln was assassinated at Fort McNair while watching the defense of Washington?
 
There's an AH story about this too and I can't think of the title. However,
the program Investigating History, did an investigation of it. A Confederate
sniper, from a distance of 800-1000 yards, could have taken the shot. What
if Lincoln was assassinated at Fort McNair while watching the defense of Washington?

Being killed while on the front lines of a battle, as Lincoln was at that time, would not have been an assassination.
 
The Union wouldn't see it that way.

Well, anyone with any sense would. The damn fool was STANDING ON TOP OF THE PARAPET OF THE FORT until a nearby officer saw him and pulled him off of it. By the way, said officer also called him a damn fool. :p

Anyone taking a shot at him from 800-1000 yards away wouldn't have been able to tell who they were aiming at. They would have just been aiming at the damn fool standing on top of the parapet instead of behind it.

Would the Union propaganda machine have played it up as an assassination? Maybe. That doesn't make it one, though.
 
turtledove

I remember reading the short story this was based off of. I am pretty certain it was Turtledove as part of an alternate history anthology. In the short story he is shot and they look at it as an assassination, and treat the South a lot more aggressively.

Then it jumps to modern times and the South is to the US like Ireland is to the UK. It is an occupied territory that hates the North. It follows a detective who is looking for possible weapons shipments from the Nazis to partisans in the south.

Not a bad short story. Probably a lot of holes in it, but that tends to be the nature of short stories, they tend to be less about the facts.
 
Its from I believe the 1st What If book. I liked the story too. The story goes Hannibal Hamlin took over and became a thrall to the Bulter Republicans.
 
Its from I believe the 1st What If book. I liked the story too. The story goes Hannibal Hamlin took over and became a thrall to the Bulter Republicans.


Well, Hamlin certainly takes over, and very likely gets an elected term.

This (by eliminating the Andrew Johnson Presidency) changes some of the early phases of Reconstruction, but probably not much in the long run. Basically, Southern whites cared in a big way about Radical Reconstruction, while most northerners, once the war had been over a few years, were busy getting on with their own lives and just wanted the problem to go away. The easiest way to get that was to give in, so they soon did. Reshuffling Presidents probably makes little difference to the outcome, only to how you get there.
 
In OTL the 'radical reconstuction' happened after a brief period when the old ruling class was allowed to take back Southern state governments.

If Radial Reconstuction, especially freemen's voting rights had happened from the start things might have been different. Especially if there had been some serious effort at land redistribution.

I gather that Hamlyn was quite radical. I have no idea how good of a politician he was.

If there had been an intelligent pitch to the non slaveholder white class the number of people admited to 'really' supporting slavery and sessession might have been of the same order as the number of West Germans who acknowlegd'really' supporting the Nazis in 1965.

I see the Democratic party ceasing to exist and the movements the Populist and progressive movement eventually becoming the second party - or pushing conservatives out of the Republican party and forcing them to be a separate conservative party
 

Blair152

Banned
Well, anyone with any sense would. The damn fool was STANDING ON TOP OF THE PARAPET OF THE FORT until a nearby officer saw him and pulled him off of it. By the way, said officer also called him a damn fool. :p

Anyone taking a shot at him from 800-1000 yards away wouldn't have been able to tell who they were aiming at. They would have just been aiming at the damn fool standing on top of the parapet instead of behind it.

Would the Union propaganda machine have played it up as an assassination? Maybe. That doesn't make it one, though.
The program that I was referencing yesterday, Unsolved History, said that
Lincoln probably brought the assassination attempts down on himself because he'd supposedly ordered the kidnapping, or assassination, of Jefferson Davis. The Confederates wanted revenge. They wanted his authorization to assassinate Lincoln, but Jefferson Davis refused, saying that it was against the laws of war.
 
Blair152, I doubt the show has any credibility. Further, by this point the last thing Lincoln would have wanted would have been Davis dead and the more sensible Stephens taking over the CSA.

Ironically Lincoln was quite the fatalist and his fear was not of being killed but of being taken hostage and held for concessions to the CSA, such as a mass prisoner release.
 
In OTL the 'radical reconstuction' happened after a brief period when the old ruling class was allowed to take back Southern state governments.

If Radial Reconstuction, especially freemen's voting rights had happened from the start things might have been different. Especially if there had been some serious effort at land redistribution.


I'm not sure what you mean by "land redistribution".

As I understand it, about 10,000 freedmen held plots of abandoned land, which they lost when Andrew Johnson restored it to its former owners. They might have been allowed to keep it under Hamlin, but even so, out of a total of four million these additional landowners would have been far too few to make much impact on the overall situation. If you are talking about wholesale confiscation, that was never even close to happening. Thaddeus Stevens talked about it occasionally, but nothing of the sort came anywhere near passing either house of Congress, and I've certainly heard no suggestion that Hamlin ever advocated it

I gather that Hamlyn was quite radical. I have no idea how good of a politician he was.

About average for the time, from what I can gather. One of his grumbles was that as VP he couldn't do as many favours for his friends as he could in the Senate, which sounds as if the Presidency might have had similar pitfalls for him as for Grant.

If there had been an intelligent pitch to the non slaveholder white class the number of people admited to 'really' supporting slavery and sessession might have been of the same order as the number of West Germans who acknowlegd'really' supporting the Nazis in 1965.

Like what, exactly?

The West Germans didn't abjure Nazism because of anything the Western Powers did (unless just not being as horrible as Stalin counts as "doing" something). They did so because of 80 Soviet divisions on the Elbe, against whom they desperately needed Western protection. They sucked up to Uncle Sam because the only alternative was Uncle Joe. There was no equivalent situation in the America of 1865. All the White South needed to do was "wait it out" while carefully refraining from any attempt to reverse the basic Northern war aims of reunion and abolition of chattel slavery, and before long the North would get bored with it all and leave them to their own devices. There was no "worse" on hand to make them keep tight hold of a northern nurse.

I see the Democratic party ceasing to exist and the movements the Populist and progressive movement eventually becoming the second party - or pushing conservatives out of the Republican party and forcing them to be a separate conservative party

Why should it cease to exist?

From 1896 to 1910 and again through the 1920s it seemed doomed to permanent minority status, but never came anywhere near disappearing. Democrats just assumed that if they waited long enough, the Republican Party would run into trouble - as indeed it did. Why would it be any different in the 1860s or 70s?
 
Land redistribution would be the result of a decision to confiscate land rather than hang people who had made war on the United States (treason by the definition in the US Constitution) It might also have been linked to exiling say 15 000 previous prominent people from the slaveocracy

The Democrats could have ceased to exist because they would be unable to win in large parts of the South if everyone could vote.
 
Land redistribution would be the result of a decision to confiscate land rather than hang people who had made war on the United States (treason by the definition in the US Constitution) It might also have been linked to exiling say 15 000 previous prominent people from the slaveocracy

Please can you give a cite for when any attempt was ever made (or even seriously contemplated) to confiscate property or exile anyone, and in particular for any occasion when Hamlin proposed or supported any such measure?

As far as hanging is concerned, forget it. One thing we do know about Hamlin is that he was a lifelong opponent of the death penalty, right from his first arrival in the Maine Legislature in 1835. It took him fifty years to win his point, but he lived just long enough to see Maine finally abolish capital punishment in the 1880s. There is no knowing far he would have taken this as President, ie whether Henry Wirz or the assassins of Abraham Lincoln would have got life imprisonment instead of death, but certainly no one else would have been in any danger of execution.

Nor, I repeat, have I ever heard anything to indicate that he favoured property confiscation. If you have, please tell us.




The Democrats could have ceased to exist because they would be unable to win in large parts of the South if everyone could vote.

Why should that cause them to cease to exist? Even OTL, they managed to win only four presidential elections between 1860 and 1928, yet they never came anywhere near disappearing. Why should winning slightly fewer races cause them to?

In any case, you would never get a South where "everybody could vote", since it would require a far greater effort than most people in the North were prepared to make. By 1876, the US Army was down to 27,000 men, of whom only about 3,000 could be spared for duty in the South. So, unless northern voters develop a sudden willingness to pay extra taxes to maintain a larger army than the US needs in peacetime, the means to suppress the KKK et al simply do not exist and can't be made to exist - regardless of who is President. As Mrs Rutherford B Hayes asked a critic of her husband's Southern policy "What was Mr Hayes to do? He had no army". An exaggeration, but not by much.
 
It wasn't Fort McNair, which is down on the tip of a peninsula on the southern part of the District, but Fort Stevens; if the Confederates had gotten down to McNair, being shot would have been the least of Lincoln's worries at that point, I daresay. And the officer who yelled at Lincoln to get down was, IIRC, the young Oliver Wendell Holmes.
 
"Must and Shall" Spoiler Alert

The story was "Must and Shall." It's in "Counting Up, Counting Down."

President Lincoln is killed by a Confederate bullet, Hamlin does become President, and all leading to no Radical Recontruction but extreme venegence. All Confederate leadership military and civilian hanged, including state level, basically the southern states threated as conquered terroritory (i.e. all whites stripped of citizenship).
 
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