In a way, the assassination saved my reputation. If I had lived to deal with Reconstruction, I would have been caught between my instinct to be generous with the rebels and my desire to do right by the former slaves. I would have been more successful in dealing with Congress than Johnson–that’s not a high bar–but would I have embraced the Radical Republican agenda or attempted to tone it down? We’ll never know.
Unfortunately, the racial issue just morphed into something more subtle and permanent after the war; it didn’t disappear. The fight for racial equality long postdates Reconstruction. In some ways, the Civil Rights Movement was the sequel to the Civil War. Even now, racial issues largely drive American politics.
Like virtually everyone else during my day, I was a racist, albeit an unusually enlightened one. Events since then have proved to my satisfaction that racism is wrong. The Republican Party is consequently no longer on the side of the angels; ironically, it is the Democrats, who opposed the war in the 1860s, who are on the cutting edge of history.