What if Lincoln had died at Gettysburg when he went there to deliver the Gettysburg Address? Perhaps in some mundane way like tripping on the steps getting off the train and hitting his head.
Let’s assume that this is not some Harry Turtledove alternate history where the Confederacy wins the war. The Address was more than five months after the battle it commemorated. The Union had already split the Confederacy by controlling entire length of the Mississippi River.
An eventual Union victory was already quite likely by this point.
… European investors gave the Confederacy approximately a 42 percent chance of victory prior to the battle of Gettysburg/Vicksburg. News of the severity of the two rebel defeats led to a sell-off in Confederate bonds. By the end of 1863, the probability of a Southern victory fell to about 15 percent.
How might American history have been different if Abraham Lincoln had been succeeded by Hannibal Hamlin in 1863 rather than by Andrew Johnson in 1865?
…how differently the nation's history might have developed if Lincoln had been succeeded by Hamlin, who favored a Radical Reconstruction of the South, rather than by Johnson, who opposed it.
How might Reconstruction have been completely different? Might the Jim Crow era have never happened? Or might Hamlin have been no more than a transitional figure with a new President winning in 1864?
Rewrite history in the comments below!
Public domain photograph of Abraham Lincoln at Gettysburg. Photographer unknown, possibly David Bachrach or Mathew Brady.