| Many Congressional Republicans believe that the 10 Percent Plan is too lenient since it does nothing to end the economic and political power of the planter class or protect the civil rights of ex-slaves. They also feel that the president has overstepped his authority by issuing a plan for reconstruction without consulting Congress. Congressional Republicans outline their plan for reconstructing the union. The Wade-Davis Bill requires each state to abolish slavery, repudiate their acts of secession, and refuse to honor wartime debts. It also stipulates that a majority, rather than 10 percent, of voters in 1860 take an oath of allegiance before a state can be reorganized. Finally, it specifies that anyone who wants to vote in a constitutional convention in a former Confederate state must swear that he never voluntarily supported the Confederacy. Lincoln refuses to sign the Wade-Davis Bill because, he wrote, he is not ready "to be inflexibly committed to any single plan of restoration." Page 2Printable Version
Based on a novel by a Baptist preacher named Thomas Dixon, the film painted Reconstruction, the period following the Civil War, as a time when vengeful former slaves, opportunistic white scalawags, and corrupt Yankee carpetbaggers plundered and oppressed the former Confederacy until respectable white Southerners rose up and restored order. A "scalawag" was a southern white who supported the Republican Party; a "carpetbagger" was a northern-born Republican who had migrated to the South. The film depicted a vindictive northern Congressman (modeled on the Pennsylvania Republican Thaddeus Stevens)and a power-hungry mulatto eager to marry the Congressman's daughter. The film's hero is an aristocratic Confederate veteran who joins the Ku Klux Klan and at the film's climax rescues the woman from armed freedmen. President Woodrow Wilson reportedly described the film as "history written with lightning." During the 20th century, far more Americans probably learned about Reconstruction from Hollywood rather than from history books or lectures. Films like Birth of a Nation and Gone With the Wind depicted Reconstruction as a misguided attempt to overturn the South's "natural" order by giving political power former slaves. Even though the Confederacy lost the Civil War, it succeeded, in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, in winning the ideological war that determined how Americans viewed the Civil War era. For much of the 20th century, the dominant view of Reconstruction, repeated in many high school and college textbooks, was that it was a period of "bayonet rule," during which vindictive northern carpetbaggers and their white and black puppets engaged in an orgy of corruption and misrule. According to this view, a courageous President Johnson, seeking to carry out Lincoln's policy of reconciliation, was confronted by a hostile Congress trying to punish the defeated South. In recent years, this interpretation of Reconstruction has been thoroughly dismantled. It is now clear that Reconstruction was a failed, but admirable, attempt to adjust to the realities of emancipation: To guarantee the civil and political rights of former slaves and forge a more just society out of the ruins of slavery. President Johnson's reconstruction policy, far from being a continuation of Lincoln's, was steadfastly opposed to protecting the rights of African Americans. Reconstruction was the most daring experiment in American history. It represented an attempt to transform the institutions and patterns of social relations of the Old South. It gave black Americans in the South their first taste of political power. Out of Reconstruction came constitutional amendments that extended citizenship and voting rights to African Americans. This era also witnessed the federal government's first efforts to create social welfare programs. In the end, Reconstruction failed to establish a less racially divided society. Its failure doomed the South to decades of relative economic underdevelopment and ensured that the South would be dominated by a single political party. It also left the entire country with the unfinished task of achieving full economic and political equality for the descendants of slaves. Copyright 2021 Digital History
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This article needs additional citations for verification. (April 2017) This article includes a list of general references, but it lacks sufficient corresponding inline citations. (April 2017) The ten percent plan, formally the Proclamation of Amnesty and Reconstruction (13 Stat. 737), was a United States presidential proclamation issued on December 8, 1863, by United States President Abraham Lincoln, during the American Civil War. By this point in the war (nearly three years in), the Union Army had pushed the Confederate Army out of several regions of the South, and some Confederate states were ready to have their governments rebuilt. Lincoln's plan established a process through which this postwar reconstruction could come about.
A component of President Lincoln's plans for the postwar reconstruction of the South, this proclamation decreed that a state in rebellion against the U.S. federal government could be reintegrated into the Union when 10% of the 1860 vote count from that state had taken an oath of allegiance to the U.S. and pledged to abide by Emancipation. Voters could then elect delegates to draft revised state constitutions and establish new state governments.[1] All Southerners except for high-ranking Confederate army officers and government officials would be granted a full pardon. Lincoln guaranteed Southerners that he would protect their private property, though not their slaves.[2] By 1864, Louisiana, Tennessee, and Arkansas had established fully functioning Unionist governments.
This policy was meant to shorten the war by offering a moderate peace plan. It was also intended to further his emancipation policy by insisting that the new governments abolish slavery.
Congress reacted sharply to this proclamation of Lincoln's plan. Most moderate Republicans in Congress supported the president's proposal for Reconstruction because they wanted to bring a swift end to the war, but other Republicans feared that the planter aristocracy would be restored and the blacks would be forced back into slavery. Lincoln's reconstructive policy toward the South was lenient because he wanted to popularize his Emancipation Proclamation. Lincoln feared that compelling enforcement of the proclamation could lead to the defeat of the Republican Party in the election of 1864, and that popular Democrats could overturn his proclamation.
The Radical Republicans opposed Lincoln's plan, as they thought it too lenient toward the South. Radical Republicans believed that Lincoln's plan for Reconstruction was not harsh enough because, from their point of view, the South was guilty of starting the war and deserved to be punished as such. Radical Republicans hoped to control the Reconstruction process, transform Southern society, disband the planter aristocracy, redistribute land, develop industry, and guarantee civil liberties for former slaves. Although the Radical Republicans were the minority party in Congress, they managed to sway many moderates in the postwar years and came to dominate Congress in later sessions. In the summer of 1864, the Radical Republicans passed a new bill to oppose the plan, known as the Wade–Davis Bill. These radicals believed that Lincoln's plan was too lenient, and this new bill would make readmission into the Union more difficult. The Bill stated that for a state to be readmitted, the majority of the state would have to take a loyalty oath, not just ten percent. Lincoln later pocket-vetoed this new bill.[1]
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What was Abraham Lincolns plan for readmitting the Confederate states into the Union?
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