In 1978, a paperback version of What If Booth's Bullet Had Killed Lincoln? was published. In Fern Bryant Fadness dystopian world, the process in U.S. history known as Reconstruction goes awry. When both the Confederacy and slavery were destroyed, attempts to resolve the issues of the American Civil War are largely reversed by Lincoln's heirs. In this dramatic short story the Civil Rights movement is delayed by forty years to the 1960s, and Jesse Jackson never gains the White House.