Question of the Week: What if Nathaniel Banks was Lincoln’s VP?
Hypothetical thinking time: Abraham Lincoln picks Nathaniel Banks as his running mate in the 1864 election. How might that impact future events?
Hypothetical thinking time: Abraham Lincoln picks Nathaniel Banks as his running mate in the 1864 election. How might that impact future events?
In order to answer this hypothetical question, is it assumed President Abraham Lincoln would still be assassinated at Ford’s theater and Nathaniel P. Banks would be the US President during Reconstruction?
All I know about Banks is that he was a prewar speaker of the house and was a generally unsuccessful Union general. I would also bet good money that he would have been a far better president than Andrew Johnson.
During his time administrating Louisiana, Banks got one of the first cracks at Reconstruction policy. While there, he did adopt some policies to support the newly freed African Americans, but also believed in the necessity of incorporating white Southerners (even formerly rebellious ones) into his policies for them to succeed. This almost necessarily, of course, impeded on any effort to secure the rights and freedom of the formerly enslaved. During his service as a Reconstruction-era representative, meanwhile, he was noted a generally moderate Republican, although one who was willing to adopt the Radical party line when necessary. All of this to say, Banks was a wily political chameleon and frequently a deft operator. Assuming Lincoln is still assassinated and Banks becomes president, he certainly handles Reconstruction better than Johnson, although friction still likely arises between himself and the Radicals in Congress. He likely is more open and supportive of the rights of the newly freed, but his cooperation with the formerly rebellious is certain to drive a wedge between him and Congress. In the end, Reconstruction’s efforts to empower African Americans almost certainly still fail, but given the realities of the time, that is hardly avoidable. Even Lincoln himself would have struggled to make it succeed.
Had Nathaniel Banks succeeded Lincoln in 1865 rather than Andrew Johnson, the bitter constitutional warfare of “Congressional Reconstruction” likely never occurs. As a former Republican Speaker and moderate pragmatist, Banks would have collaborated with Capitol Hill to sign the Civil Rights Act and the Freedmen’s Bureau bills, bypassing the veto battles, military occupation, and impeachment drama that defined Johnson’s tenure.
Yet this harmonious executive-legislative compromise almost certainly would have yielded a far more conservative settlement—reintegrating the Southern states under transitional, contract-labor systems while deferring genuine Black political equality for generations. Ironically, the nation was arguably better served by Johnson’s intransigent racism, which backfired so spectacularly that it unified Northern moderates behind the Radicals.
By forcing Congress to bypass the White House, Johnson’s obstruction catalyzed the transformative breakthroughs of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments, guaranteeing birthright citizenship, equal protection under the law, and universal male suffrage as permanent constitutional law.