Lincoln would have pushed for full voting rights for freed blacks, according to Guelzo, by giving them financial help to settle new lands out West through the Freedmen’s Bureau. Landowners were considered citizens with voting rights, even though southern legislators did their best to throw obstacles in their way, like literacy tests and poll taxes. Lincoln’s successor Andrew Johnson tried to veto the Freedmen’s Bureau and it expired in 1872.

Guelzo believes Lincoln would have encouraged blacks to move out of the South into the vast expanses of the West where they could start anew as landowners, railroad workers and settlers.

“It would have been a perfectly logical conclusion to look to the West to give blacks a second chance without southern whites around,” Guelzo said. “I could picture Lincoln at the driving of the Golden Spike in 1869 in Utah, and two black laborers flanking him.”