if not the single worst day, in American history.
Had Lincoln lived Reconstruction and the years after the Civil War would have been entirely different.
Lincoln was growing closer to the Progressive Republican program for Reconstruction. This included the seizure of the great plantation estates of rebel leaders and a broad program of land reform that would have benefited both recently freed slaves and poor whites. Lincoln especially wanted to include landless whites--even if they had fought for the Confederacy--as a way of giving them an incentive to support the new regime in the south. He also wanted suffrage immediately extended to Black men who had fought for the Union, and insisted this be included in the constitutions of re-admitted rebel states. He may well have evolved over time to insist on universal male Black suffrage, but we'll never know.
Andrew Johnson, by contrast, immediately pre-empted the possibility of land reform, and opposed most everything Progressive Republicans wanted by way of Reconstruction. He was entirely sympathetic to the south's white ruling class, and did everything he could to protect their interests. The result was Jim Crow and literally setting back the movement for Black civil rights for a century.
This is precisely what Booth--an avowed white supremacist--intended. His motivation for the murder was racism, pure and simple, something that historically has been glossed over in accounts of the assassination.
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