A short history of lone nuts shooting US presidents.

[nyquil_man]

41. Certainly.

After Lincoln, the Presidency was effectively crippled for more than a generation. Congress dominated policy-making. But that could be just as easily attributed to Andrew Johnson's impeachment and the inability of either party (at the presidential level, at least) to build a majority coalition as it could to the aftereffects of Lincoln's murder.

There's also the issue of Reconstruction. With Lincoln in office, the policy might have been more uniform, consistent, and effective. That assumes, though, that Lincoln would have been able to maintain the same level of persuasive power in a post-war United States as he had during the war.

I'm not sure it's the best approach to consider these events in hindsight and attribute a kind of superhuman prescience to those who initiate them. We can't predict what will happen in 2014, let alone 2016 or 2018, and it would be difficult for any of us to act in a way which would ensure that our preferred vision for the future of the country would happen exactly as we desire it.