What would Presidential Reconstruction under President Lincoln have looked like? Popular history seems to portray him as a magnanimous victor who would have reunited the nation (unlike the Radical Republicans) and pursued civil rights for free blacks (unlike Andrew Johnson). However, these two objectives were, as I understand, mutually exclusive. Even getting the Southern states to accept the 13th Amendment was hard (I mean, the war was fought because the South explicitly wanted to preserve slavery), so I don’t see how the federal government could advance rights for freedmen without alienating former Confederates. Furthermore, wasn’t Lincoln’s initial plan for Reconstruction similar to Johnson’s (minus the inferiority complex)?