April brings a trinity of the most important Civil War dates.
On April 12, 1861, the Confederate battery at Charleston, S.C. fired upon the Union's Fort Sumter, beginning the bloody war. Four years later, on April 14, President Lincoln was assassinated, five days after Robert E. Lee surrendered to U.S. Grant at Appomattox.
The Confederacy fought on for a few more months from Louisiana, but Lee's surrender on April 9 essentially ended the war.
Easter came late in 1865; it was the evening of Good Friday when actor John Wilkes Booth strode into Lincoln's box at Washington's Ford Theater and fired a bullet into the president's brain. Lincoln died the next morning in a rooming house across 10th Street.
History is full of contingencies. If the Confederacy hadn't attacked Fort Sumter, another compromise between the North and slave-owning South might have been reached. But the war was inevitable and would have begun elsewhere.
If Lee had chosen to continue fighting a guerrilla campaign, could the Confederacy have reached a peace agreement and won independence? Such a desperate attempt could not have lasted long. The South still would have been defeated.
The most intriguing counter-factual narrative is what would have happened if Lincoln had lived to complete his second term. That might have changed the course of Reconstruction, but Lincoln's survival would not have prevented the return of white supremacy to the South. The Hayes-Tilden Compromise that ended Reconstruction occurred in 1877, long after Lincoln would have held power.
If Lincoln had lived, he likely would have written his memoirs, which I imagine would have been a masterpiece like the war memoirs Grant completed before dying of cancer in 1885. Lincoln's incomparable literary genius would have shone on every page.
We'll never know. What's certain is that those three days in April changed the course of American history.
Comments