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Lincoln was against Reconstruction, so he was "sensitive" to the affect of war on the South.
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You are simplifying a very, very contentious historical point here Mavdog...
Because Old Abe was assasinated before any post-Civil War national process of healing and reconstitution could take place, we really don't know how Lincoln would have tackled the myriad problems of reconstruction. Whereas his 1863 reconstruction plan (rejected by congress) advocated the a very lenient process of reconstitution (barring former rebel leaders from political office, granting amnesty to citizens who swore loyalty to the Union, and allowing the formation of state governments once 1/10th of the state's population had sworn those oaths), this was a wartime measure that was principally intended to encourage the border states to break away from the deep-South core of the Confederacy, and help speed the end of the war.
Ever the pragmatist, the lenient terms advocated undere the 1/10th plan would have made a lot of sense to Lincoln in 1863, but things might have been much different in 1965 as Confederate hold-outs continued to fight in some areas, as some Southerners strongly resisted federal efforts to register Black voters, and as difficult issues of land reform caused simmering tensions to boil over throughout the conquered South.
Had Lincoln lived, it is highly likely that he would not have been vindictive in dealing with the South, but he certainly would not have failed to respond to the disorders that wracked parts of the South in the early years of reconstruction in a very firm, if not ruthless way (His suspension of habeus corpus and forcible suppression of the Maryland legislature in 1861 is a good example of just how ruthless Old Abe could be). He certainly would have responded much more harshly than the buffoon Andrew Jackson did to the manifest Southern flouting of federal dictates that marked the early years of reconstruction (before Charles Sumner, Thad Stevens, Lyman Trumbull and all of their other "radical republican" friends responded to these Southern outrages by politically destroying Johnson, and crushing the uncooperative South by instituting a draconian regime of military rule over the conquered states).
Anyway, I am rambling, but I will say that had Lincoln lived past 1864, it would be very, very hard to imagine that he would have subscribed to some kind of wishy-washy "sensitive" policy of weakly dealing with a conquered South just to be a nice humanitarian. If the South had cooperated with his federal mandates, I have no doubt that Lincoln would have effected a very benign reconstruction that would have seen the South reenter the Union as strong, unhumiliated partner states much earlier than actually transpired...
However, considering the many, many ways that much of the South worked to subvert and undermine federal authority in the short years before hard, federal military rule was established by Congress, I tend to think that as much a Lincoln might have wished otherwise, he would not have had the opportunity to "play nice" with the conquered South. My gut feeling is that Lincoln would have responded more wisely, but no less harshly, to Southern attempts to undermine federal rule after the end of the Civil War, and that in doing so he would have exhibited the kind of strong, pragmatic leadership that Cheney touched upon in the above cited speech...