WartImE rECOnStrUCtIOn Quiz

PDF page 794: decided to put the slaves to work for the Union cause once the war broke out. For the remainder of the war, these “contrabands of war,” as Butler called them, continued to flock to Union lines. At first, the Lincoln administration allowed individual commanders to determine how to handle the runaway slaves. As the war progressed, it became necessary for the government to

PDF page 794: 17.2.1 lincoln and restoration AsAbrahamLincolnapproachedtheinterrelatedquestionsofemancipation and reconstruction, he needed to balance the Union’s political and military goals. In other words, Lincoln had to pursue a policy on emancipation that would not drive the Border States toward secession. So initially, he supported gradual compensated emancipation in the Border States. If successful, the plan would serve as a model for reconciling the rebelling states to the Union. Lincoln believed voluntary acceptance of emancipation would have better long-term results than a forced arrangement. In 1862, the president sent Congress a measure to enact his proposal, but most Republican members

PDF page 795: In spite of these concerns, Lincoln increasingly saw emancipation as a military necessity. By freeing the slaves in the rebelling states, which he considered still part of the union, he hoped to undermine their ability to wage war. In July 1862, he raised the issue with his cabinet. According to Gideon Wells, the secretary of the navy, the president moved toward blanket emancipation because of the Union’s military defeats and the failure of his plans for compensated emancipation in the Border States. While the cabinet initially split over his proposal, the president decided in favor of the move and announced the Emancipation Proclamation in September 1862, which was scheduled to take effect on January 1, 1863 unless the southern states ended their rebellion. Not only did Lincoln’s decision effectively make the abolition of slavery a war aim, but it also raised questions about how occupied territories would implement emancipation and return to the

PDF page 795: decided the time had come to outline a policy for restoration. On December 8, 1863, Abraham Lincoln issued the “Proclamation of Amnesty and Reconstruction” and then explained the initiative in his annual message to Congress. In the proclamation, the president offered southerners who participated in the rebellion a “full pardon...with restoration of all rights of property, except as to slaves” if they would “take...an oath, and thenceforward keep and maintain said oath.” He did exclude from amnesty all persons who served in “the so-called Confederate government” as well as those who served as high-ranking officers in the Confederate military. Furthermore, once ten percent of the number of voters in the 1860 presidential election took the oath, a state could establish a government, which the Union would recognize “as the true government of the state.” Finally, he noted only Congress could decide whether to seat new members from the loyal governments. In his annual message, Lincoln suggested his plan followed the Constitution’s provisions on presidential pardons. To quell

PDF page 795: decided the time had come to outline a policy for restoration. On December 8, 1863, Abraham Lincoln issued the “Proclamation of Amnesty and Reconstruction” and then explained the initiative in his annual message to Congress. In the proclamation, the president offered southerners who participated in the rebellion a “full pardon...with restoration of all rights of property, except as to slaves” if they would “take...an oath, and thenceforward keep and maintain said oath.” He did exclude from amnesty all persons who served in “the so-called Confederate government” as well as those who served as high-ranking officers in the Confederate military. Furthermore, once ten percent of the number of voters in the 1860 presidential election took the oath, a state could establish a government, which the Union would recognize “as the true government of the state.” Finally, he noted only Congress could decide whether to seat new members from the loyal governments. In his annual message, Lincoln suggested his plan followed the Constitution’s provisions on presidential pardons. To quell

PDF page 796: Proclamation. Lincoln based the Ten Percent Plan on the principle that the “so-called Confederate” states had never really left the Union. As historian James McPherson noted, for Lincoln “the task of reconstruction was one of restoration rather than revolution.” He designed the plan to shorten the war, not to launch major social and political changes in the South. The president proposed moderate, some even said lenient, terms in order to encourage enough southerners to declare their fidelity to the Union. If he imposed draconian terms or promoted black rights, lukewarm secessionists would never declare their loyalty. Additionally, any policy needed to respect the states’ authority to determine the civil and political rights of their residents because they had never left the Union. Therefore, under the proclamation, loyal southern states had to accept the end of slavery, but they could set the pace at which it happened. The president also thought state action on slavery, as opposed to federal action, would help avoid questions about the constitutionality of the Emancipation Proclamation as it related to reconstruction. Lincoln hoped the procedures he set forth during the war would provide a model for the postwar era, but nothing quite turned out as planned since the Border States seemed reluctant to adopt emancipation and

PDF page 796: Although the Border States never left the Union, they still underwent a process of reconstruction during the war. The Lincoln administration encouraged Delaware, Kentucky, Maryland, and Missouri to adopt a policy of gradual compensated emancipation, which it hoped to use as a model for restoring the states in rebellion. Delaware and Kentucky firmly resisted the pressure to abolish slavery. However, discussions about emancipation led to significant political changes in Maryland and Missouri. There, whites excluded from power in the antebellum era made their voice heard. They managed to increase their own political power in the new state constitutions, but they did little to change the political status of the freedmen. Two factors seemed to make the difference between the move toward and the resistance to emancipation. At the beginning of the Civil War, federal troops moved into both Maryland and Missouri to help secure the loyalty of the population. The presence of those troops helped to undermine slavery, which caused

PDF page 798: restoration policy. After Confederate forces withdrew from Tennessee in 1862, the president appointed Andrew Johnson as the military governor and instructed him to establish a new government. While Johnson convinced Lincoln to exempt Tennessee from the Emancipation Proclamation, the issue still divided the state. Some people renewed their commitment to slavery, and others became more vocal in their opposition to it. Johnson eventually sided with those who wanted to abolish slavery, and he took action to undermine the conservatives by expanding on the loyalty oath outlined in the Ten Percent

PDF page 801: the payment of wages suggested a move toward free labor. However, military commanders occasionally allowed blacks to farm abandoned land independently. The best known of these experiments happened at Davis Bend on the Mississippi River, the former plantations of Jefferson Davis and his brother Joseph. Prior to the war, the Davis brothers developed a model slave community based on the ideas of British socialist Robert Owen where the slaves had a good deal of control over their own lives. Nevertheless, when the war forced Joseph Davis to abandon the plantation, his slaves refused to accompany him. Instead, they transitioned their experiences with utopian self-government into a successful self-run commercial enterprise. General Ulysses S. Grant instructed John Eaton Jr., the commander in the area, to lease the land to the freedmen. In November 1863, Eaton began distributing the land and instilling free labor principles among the residents. By 1865, under the leadership of former slave Benjamin Montgomery, Davis Bend produced 2,000 bales of cotton and made a profit of $160,000, suggesting to some observers that, given a chance, the freedmen and their families

PDF page 801: and make it our own. Several days after that meeting, Sherman released Special Field Order No. 15, which set aside confiscated land south of Charleston, running thirty miles in from the Atlantic coast and totaling about 400,000 acres, for the settlement of the freedpeople in forty-acre plots. Sherman later indicated he would distribute some of the army’s old mules to any freedpeople who cared

PDF page 802: Republicans wanted reconstruction to do more than just end slavery. The Radicals thought the federal government should have a greater say in the process of reconstruction. They wanted to ensure real Unionists controlled the process and to somewhat protect the rights of the freedpeople. To justify more federal control, Senator Charles Sumner of Massachusetts contended that when the southern states seceded they committed “state suicide.” Therefore, they had to apply for readmission to the Union, and only Congress had the right to set the terms. Concerns about Louisiana, where the control of genuine Unionists seemed slim and the rights of the freedpeople seemed tenuous, prompted Radical Republicans in Congress to introduce an alternate approach to reconstruction that would forestall any

PDF page 802: decisions until after the war ended. In mid-1864, Congress considered numerous plans on how to improve Lincoln’s approach to restoration. They finally settled on a measure sponsored by Senator Benjamin (Ben) Wade of Ohio and Representative Henry Winter Davis of Maryland. The proposed Wade-Davis bill required fifty percent of voters to declare their loyalty before reconstruction could begin. The first step in the process would be the drafting a new constitution that abolished slavery, barred Confederates from voting and serving in the new government, and repudiated the Confederate government’s debt. Only voters who could swear an “iron-clad” oath of past and future loyalty could vote for delegates to the constitutional convention. The bill also contained provisions for federal courts to enforce the maintenance of the freedpeople’s liberty. Congress would only readmit the reconstructed states to the Union