Disunion follows the Civil War as it unfolded.

Shortly before noon on April 3, 1865, a telegraph operator on duty at the War Department in Washington, D.C., received an electrifying message over the wires. “Here is the first message for you in four years from Richmond,” it read.

Leaping up from his seat, the operator ran to an open window and cried out, “Richmond has fallen!” The news spread swiftly, and, as one observer later remembered, “Almost by magic, the streets were crowded with hosts of people, talking, laughing, hurrahing, and shouting in the fullness of their joy.”

Fewer people were more relieved at the news than President Abraham Lincoln. The crushing strains of wartime leadership had left him exhausted and despondent. With the end of the war in sight, and Lincoln decided to celebrate the moment with a tour of the rebel capital the following day, April 4.

With the approach of peace, the daunting task of reconstructing the shattered South weighed on Lincoln’s mind more than ever. The South had borne the brunt of the fighting, which had killed 289,000 Southern men, laid the South’s cities in ruins, devastated its economy and left its citizens destitute.

Since the debate over reconstruction policy began in 1863, Lincoln had steadfastly clung to mercy for the South as the north star for his postwar agenda. The trip to Richmond offered the president his first chance to see his guiding principle put into action.

Almost by accident, Lincoln’s arrival had none of the trappings of a victorious leader surveying his vanquished foe. As the gunboat Malvern ferried the president up the James River towards the Richmond docks, a vast litter of sunken ships, dead horses and floating ordnance blocked its way. Lincoln and his landing party switched to the captain’s barge towed by a small tug, but the tugboat ran aground. In the end, the president of the United States had to make his triumphant entry into the fallen enemy capital in a humble rowboat manned by a dozen sailors. The captain’s launch had to thread its way to the docks between a number of floating, unexploded naval torpedoes, some close enough to touch.

Once the party set foot on land, they were mobbed by jubilant crowds of African-American slaves, some of whom kneeled knelt down to kiss Lincoln’s feet and the hem of his trousers. “Don’t kneel to me,” Lincoln rebuked them. “That is not right. You must kneel to God only, and thank Him for the liberty you will afterward enjoy.”

Setting out through the streets, the president, his aides and nervous bodyguards soon arrived at the former mansion of Confederate President Jefferson Davis, now the headquarters of Richmond’s new military governor, Gen. Godfrey Weitzel (evacuated by Davis only days before). After a quick tour of the mansion, Lincoln at last entered President Davis’ s office, sinking down into one of Davis’s easy chairs. It was the “supreme moment,” one spectator remembered.

President Lincoln could have been forgiven for exulting or even gloating over the fallen enemy. Instead, he simply asked for a glass of water. After an informal meeting with local Confederate leaders, Lincoln and Weitzel took a carriage ride through the city.

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During their ride, Weitzel raised a delicate issue with the president: How was he to handle local residents, former officials and rebel troops in the conquered city? Lincoln declined to dictate specifics to Weitzel, but instead told him, “If I were in your place I’d let ‘’em up easy, let ‘’em up easy.”

Lincoln’s answer was fully consonant in spirit with the path to rehabilitation he had laid out for rebels two years earlier in his “10 Percent Plan,” which allowed Southern states to reapply for statehood once 10 percent of its 1860 population embraced emancipation and swore loyalty oaths to the United States government. Such individuals would receive pardons and restoration of property. He rejected the idea of political persecution or punishment of top rebel leaders, one promoted by several prominent members of Congress, which had adjourned just before Lincoln’s Richmond visit. In a discussion of reconstruction with his cabinet officers on April 14, 1865, after his return to Washington, Lincoln asserted: “Enough lives have been sacrificed. We must extinguish our resentments if we expect harmony and union,” a war-weary sentiment he had repeated over and over during the last weeks of his life.

At that same cabinet meeting, according to Secretary of War Edwin Stanton, the president, declared it “providential that this great rebellion was crushed just as Congress had adjourned,” as he and the cabinet were more likely to “accomplish more without them than with them” as regarded reconstruction. “There were men in Congress who, if their motives were good, were nevertheless impracticable, and who possessed feelings of hate and vindictiveness in which he did not sympathize and could not participate.”

Lincoln was referring to congressional Radical Republicans. Their reconstruction policy demanded punishment for the Southern rebels, and a blocking of the Southern slave-owning class from regaining power, as they thought would surely happen with the implementation of Lincoln’s plan. Furthermore, Radicals saw reconstruction as a revolution that, as the Radical standard-bearer Rep. Thaddeus Stevens put it, must “revolutionize Southern institutions, habits and manners. The foundation of their institutions … must be broken up and relaid, or all our blood and treasure have been spent in vain.”

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Lincoln had blocked the Radicals’ attempt in 1864 to legislate a far more restrictive reconstruction regime through the Wade-Davis bill, which limited pardons to Southerners with no record of service in the Confederate government or army. Only the president’s assassination on April 14, 1865 — a true calamity for the South, no less than for the North — opened the way for the Radicals to assert control over the postwar rebuilding process.

Without Lincoln’s benevolent guiding hand at the helm, the Radicals managed to impose on the South military rule and barred former Confederates from power. In 1868 the Radicals even made a vain attempt to impeach President Andrew Johnson.

We will never know how the reconstruction of the South might have played out had Lincoln lived. Without him, there was no consensus on rebuilding the South in Congress. Over time the old prewar Democratic leadership managed to come back to power by creating a segregated society at the expense of the newly emancipated slaves, bequeathing to coming generations a legacy of bitter social and political conflict that would endure long after the Civil War generation was gone.

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Kevin Morrow is a freelance writer.