[x]

Most white Americans, North or South, in the 19th century didn't want to live together with Blacks as equals. But that's not an excuse for slavery or de facto segregation.

So much of what goes on in these threads is about guilt or innocence, purity and impurity. These are a reflection of our own attitudes and weren't questions at the time. The debate at the time wasn't about political correctness or purity or innocence, but about practical measures. By our own standards, virtually everybody was wrong about race, but some were more wrong than others and some courses or options were better or worse than others.

Our own concerns about racial equality shouldn't be simplistically projected back on the 1850s and 1860s. At that time the issue was above all slavery, and the question for Whites wasn't whether or not to love or respect Blacks, but whether or not to free the slaves.

[AnAmericanMother]

To turn aside from a discussion of Radical Republicans to accuse a couple of other posters of thinking a nut like Wilkes Booth is a "hero" -- that's ad hominem. He wasn't even really a Southerner, his parents left England because his dad was shacking up with his mom and abandoned his wife. He just happened to be born in Maryland. (It's the transplants that cause the most trouble, IMHO. Adalbert Volck the cartoonist fled Germany one jump ahead of the law and wound up drawing the most vitriolic anti-Yankee cartoons ever seen, including some very nasty caricatures of Lincoln. HE lived in Maryland, too. (What the heck IS it about Maryland? Never mind, I know, it's Debatable Land.))

The idea that, just because Lincoln is disliked by many, that there can't be anybody worse than Lincoln, is not borne out by the facts. I would like to know on what you base your conclusion that Reconstruction under Lincoln in essence would have been no different. I don't think there are very many historians who would agree with THAT assessment. Woodrow Wilson certainly didn't, and he was a whole lot closer to the issue than you or I.