Abraham Lincoln in his Times Chapter 22 Union, Tragedy, and Legacy Part 5

Abraham Lincoln in his Times Chapter 22 Union, Tragedy, and Legacy Part 5

AFTERMATH AND LEGACY What did John Wilkes Booth hope to gain through his murderous plot? We get a clue from a conversation he had with John Coyle, a bookkeeper at the anti-Lincoln  National Intelligencer , on the morning of his crime. He asked Coyle what would happen if Lincoln was killed. Coyle told him Andrew Johnson would then become president. And how about if Johnson was killed as well? Coyle said vaguely that Americans would be left with “anarchy or whatever Constitution provides.” 97  Louis Weichmann, a War Department clerk who knew Booth and later wrote a book about the assassination, was horrified by the thought of what would have happened had Booth and his cohorts succeeded in killing Lincoln, Johnson, Seward, and Grant. According to the Constitution’s line of succession, the presidency would go to the president pro tempore of the Senate, Lafayette Foster of Connecticut, until a new president was chosen under the due forms of law. Weichmann stated that this was all that “would ha…