As a history teacher, I have often thought about this. First of all, his assassination led to his deification in the people’s minds. (To a lesser extent, the same thing happened to JFK). Although Lincoln had huge power to fight the war as Commander-in-Chief, I believe that Congress was not going to be willing to cede that power when it came to rebuilding the country in the aftermath of the war. I think he and Congress would have had lots of fights over Reconstruction and he would have lost some or many of them. And that would have diminished his reputation the the history books. I do not think his stated idea to pretty much forgive and forget “the late unpleasantness” would have been accepted by Congress.
And then there is this line from the article...
“Also, it could have had large implications in politics, as it would have changed the existing three-fifths rule, where slaves were counted as three-fifths of a person. With universal suffrage, that requirement would be eliminated and could have led to a “long term Republican hegemony” in the South.”
Suffrage didn’t eliminate the three-fifths rule—emancipation did. There was Republican hegemony in the South as long as whites were not allowed to vote. Whites not being allowed to vote wasn’t Lincoln’s plan, it was Congress’s.
I believe Lincoln sent a signal in his instructions to Grant to “...let ‘em up easy”, with regard to Lee’s surrender.
Though we’ll never know what that really meant.
I do believe however, that Lincoln would have come back to a fuller sense of the Constitution after having trashed so much of it during the War.
But again, that’s merely my belief.