Had Lincoln lived — had John Wilkes Booth not avenged the Southern defeat in the Civil War by fatally shooting the 16th president on April 14, 1865 — there’s a good chance that the nation today would be in better shape, with fewer social and racial divisions and more congeniality along political lines. We will never know, of course. I’m indulging in wishful thinking here.

Lincoln was 56 years old. Had he left Ford’s Theater unscathed — had he been allowed to finish his second term, had he served a third and possibly a fourth term — he would have had ample time to apply his extraordinary skills to “binding up the nation’s wounds.” (This assumes Lincoln did not suffer from Marfan syndrome, as has been speculated, and could have lived into his 70s.) He would have made rebuilding the South a national priority. He would have found a way to make Reconstruction a sustainable success rather than an abject failure that paved the way for the Ku Klux Klan and Black Codes. And, if that had happened, it might not have taken Congress another 100 years to pass the Civil Rights Act. More Americans might have accepted the racial diversity of our nation rather than fight it or dismiss it with scorn. I think about these things at this time of year — “when lilacs last in the dooryard bloomed” — and when I wander through Green Mount Cemetery and see the Booth family plot and the unmarked grave that visitors assume to be JWB’s. They leave pennies, with Lincoln’s image, on the white headstone, a symbolic way of giving Lincoln the last word. The what-ifs of history are endlessly fascinating and frustrating to contemplate — Lincoln’s more than any.

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Published by Dan Rodricks

Dan Rodricks is a former long-time columnist for The Baltimore Sun, winner of numerous national and regional journalism awards, a radio and TV personality, podcaster and fly angler. His narrative memoir, "Father's Day Creek," was published in May 2019 by Apprentice House at Loyola University Maryland.

4 thoughts on “One April evening 160 years ago, John Wilkes Booth denied the country a better rebirth”

  1. Dan, What a country could have become instead of the KKK White Male Supremacists that govern today.

    I am aware that the United States President is suffering from profound mental challenges. His ability to perceive, value or tell the truth is 0.. his anger is legendary. His ability to receive criticism or rebuke from judges and jury’s is 0. The Press, Sinclair and Fox treat him as if he was normal.

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  2. I guess I take a bit more pessimistic view. I think that Lincoln would certainly have done a better job of reconstruction than Johnson did, but I think much the same outcome would have occurred. The war was fought (as most wars are) on the backs of the dirt farmers, those whose own existence was an every day battle against misfortune. Those people had little use for slavery one way or another as, while they weren’t exactly slaves themselves, they were never going to be in a position to own slaves, so slavery, in many ways, was a non-issue for them. They had been led to believe by the plantation owners and others whose economic well being relied on a ready supply of slaves in order to make a profit that they, the dirt farmers and others who barely scraped by, were somehow superior to those of color. The slave owners had a vested interest in maintaining slavery as a status quo and eventually would have led the former Confederate states to where they were in the 20th century because without slavery the Southern states would not be able to continue at quite the level of economic prosperity that had before the Civil War.

    We see many parallels today with those of great economic power and resources controlling (or at least trying to control) the direction of the country.

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  4. I followed your links, the one on Marfam syndrome, the one to your 2020 column that included Walt Whitman’s poem, and enjoyed the journey. Your dream of what our world would have been like if Lincoln had lived, if he didn’t have Marfam, if he could have healed the country. The country never really healed, did it? The current president is, in a way, the product of those wealthy southerners who never quite agreed with the loss they suffered.

    I’m working on the June issue of Prime Time and am including a weekend trip in town – the Reginald F. Lewis Museum, The Star Spangled Banner Flag House, The Jewish Museum, and lunch at Attman’s. I may have to include Fort McHenry. These journeys into the past are, in their own way, safe.

    I hope you and your family had a good Easter. m.

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