This is an article that was in the Cincinnati Enquirer on May 20,2007 which posed the the question as to what would have been different if Lincoln had survived the assasination attempt.

Had Lincoln survived, what would be different?

Abraham Lincoln might have survived being shot if today’s medical technology had existed in 1865.

Given that scenario, the question is whether Lincoln would have recovered well enough to return to office, a doctor and a historian said Friday at an annual University of Maryland School of Medicine conference on the deaths of historic figures.

While the conference has traditionally re-examined the deaths of historic figures to determine if the diagnosis of the time was correct, this year’s event asks if Lincoln could have been saved and what impact that would have had.

Dr. Thomas Scalea, the physician in chief at the University of Maryland’s Shock Trauma Center, said brain injuries are unpredictable but Lincoln would have stood a good chance of surviving.

“He probably would have been left with substantial disability, but you never really know,” the surgeon told the conference.

Lincoln died within 10 hours of being shot in the head at Ford’s Theatre on April 14, 1865.

If modern methods could have saved the 16th president, he may have also retained his cognitive abilities because the fatal shot did not damage the frontal lobes of Lincoln’s brain, which are responsible for language, emotion and problem solving, Scalea said.

However, Lincoln would have faced months of recovery before he could have returned to office, and whether he would have been able to communicate is unclear, the surgeon said.

If Lincoln had survived and “could reason and somehow get his thoughts across, the United States certainly would have been a better and more just nation, especially on matters of race, and in a far quicker fashion,” said U.S. presidential historian Steven Lee Carson.

I am not sure if that is true.  I wonder if the Radical Republicans would still have used the tactics they used on Johnson to get their version of Reconstruction pushed through.  They may have had more of a fight if Lincoln had not been shot, but I think there still would have been a cry from the RR for punishment to the defeated.

I don't think Lincoln would have done much that could have made things better for the former slaves but I do think he would have made reconstruction easier on the south.

Now that might have speeded up the implementation of civil rights for the former slaves a little faster.

Presidents with disabilities...that's an interesting concept.  Although I know FDR had one.  Can anyone think of others?

Sorry Tom, not meaning to stray from your post.

We wouldn't have anything to "what if" about! Hindsight is always 20/20, and, a matter of someone's opinion. I'll stick to the history, thank you very much.

I look at these sort of things with a skeptical eye and agree that hindsight gives one perfect vision.  Thus, we can only surmise what may or may not have happened had Lincoln survived.

I tend to agree that he still would have had the political machine to contend with that perhaps would not have afforded a more rapid integration of the former slaves into everyday society.  Reconstruction probably would have gone easier and quicker in light of the track record (again, there's that hindsight" of Andrew Johnson.

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Ken Cornett wrote : Presidents with disabilities...that's an interesting concept.  Although I know FDR had one.  Can anyone think of others? Sorry Tom, not meaning to stray from your post.

No problem Ken.  It is an interesting thought.  The difficulty is the secrecy which surrounds the presidency.  I just finished volume I of Bennets America: The Last Best Hope.  Grover Cleveland was diagnose with cancer of the jaw which was kept secret due to "...the panic of 1893."  He boarded a yacht in the NY East river for surgery and had part of his jaw removed and returned without the public knowing it.

It’s a bit out of the era this hobby normally looks at, but the election of 1875 is said to have ended reconstruction.  Here lately, I have been reading some on the 1875 election.  It was referred to as the “Redemption Election.“  What an innocuous name for such murderous brutality.  It was orchestrated mayhem, political generals as state governors, (at least in Mississippi it was.  Governor Ames was Ben Butler’s son-in-law, ) and a Grant administration that did not take action to curtail rampant illegal activity.  It was an ugly, ugly time in Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, and Florida.  Other deep south states were bad, but not like these.  Unless I have misread something, no one was ever convicted of any wrong doing.