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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.

Oh, wow, another literary maven! Shall we REALLY get off topic here? :-D

I can't agree with you about Hawthorne & Melville (as it happens, I studied them and their writings extensively in college.) Melville was indeed an odd bird, but there was a lot of insanity in his family -- his father and one of his sons died insane, and another son had some sort of neurological illness . . . I don't think his relationship with Hawthorne was as you suggest. Hawthorne I think recognized Melville's genius, but there was a severing of their relationship that MAY have been due to Hawthorne recoiling from Melville's intensity . . . but I think that's probably as far as it went. I don't know much about Melville's wife, although they lived with her family. Hawthorne was deeply in love with Sophia Peabody, and their marriage was a very happy one. So I don't really see it.

But I don't think any of the Transcendentalists had much of a connection with reality. New England was a hothouse of the sort of ethereal, scholarly folks who skated along on family largesse and do-nothing government posts. The outrageous Brook Farm experiment was just typical of their lack of ability to deal with the "real world." Hawthorne at least had the sense to get out, and wrote a very amusing roman a clef about it, in which all the leading Brook Farmites are easily recognizable. I agree by and large with Rudyard Kipling's assessment of New England in "Something of Myself." Pretty scathing indictment (fortunately he didn't spend any time in the South! :-) )

I would like to know on what you base your conclusion that Reconstruction under Lincoln in essence would have been no different.

I gave you my rational above. Reconstruction was a direct reaction to what the southern states did after the war, especially their attempt to re-establish slavery. Why do you think they would have acted any differently if Lincoln were still president?