[Strict9]

THE most influential American ever to live. Actors cause trouble today, and he caused so much trouble back then. Lincoln had a plan to move a certain group to Liberia but Mr. Booth ended that. You have to wonder how different things would be had Booth never been born. Just a thought experiment.

[pburiak]

We should have picked our own cotton in the first place and turned those ships around.

[Mathews]

I never realized how popular JWB was. I guess his equivalent today would be Casey Affleck or Stephen Baldwin. Known and popular, but not as much as the older brother.

[BroJoeK]

Strict9: "Lincoln had a plan to move a certain group to Liberia but Mr. Booth ended that.
You have to wonder how different things would be had Booth never been born.
Just a thought experiment."

Yeah, well... not quite...

According to Union Major General Benjamin F. Butler's 1892 memoir, on April 11, 1865, just days before Lincoln's assassination, Butler met with Lincoln to discuss "colonizing" 150,000 black Union soldiers to Panama.
They would be hired to dig a canal and could be joined by their families.

According to Butler, Lincoln saw such a plan as accomplishing at least three goals:

Building the Panama Canal 1904-1914:

1. Providing employment for former Union Colored Troops.

2. Building a canal across Panama which Lincoln saw as strategically important.

3. Reducing potential racial tensions between now freed former Union Colored soldiers and whites.

Butler is the only source for such a report, and I think its fanciful because, among other reasons, immediately after meeting with Butler, Lincoln gave his final speech calling for full citizenship for freed slaves, the speech John Wilkes Booth claimed inspired his assassination of Lincoln.

Finally, I've seen no evidence to suggest that, in fact, former Union Colored Troops suffered more than other former slaves after the war.
Indeed, they may well have enjoyed better lives after the war than their non-serving black neighbors.

By the way, when the US built the Panama Canal -- 1904-1914 -- it took 56,000 employees, 2/3 of whom were black West Indians, 1/4 were local Hispanic Panamanians, and the balance American & European white technicians & supervisors.
Could Americans have built the canal in the late 1860s and 1870s?
Well, they did have rail mounted steam shovels then, so the real problem would have been diseases, which nobody in the 1860s understood.

For example, when the French tried to build the Panama Canal during the 1880s, they lost about half the 40,000 workers hired to build it, to diseases like malaria and yellow fever.
So, if Lincoln had sent 150,000 former Union Colored troops to Panama and half died from disease, that would still leave them with more workers than either the French or Americans used 20 & 40 years later.

Building the Suez Canal during the 1860s: