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Lincoln's Reconstruction Plan

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The key issue of the campaign of 1864 was how to bring back the south into the Union. After the Civil War, Lincoln did not want to punish the south. He believed it wouldn’t accomplish anything and would slow the nation’s healing. He proposed a plan called the Ten Percent Plan, which stated that if ten percent of voters in a state had taken an oath of loyalty to the Union, they were to be offered amnesty and were able to form a new state government. Then, the state would have to adopt a new constitution that banned slavery. Consequently, three states built a new government under Lincoln’s plan. However, Congress refused to seat their senators and representatives because some members thought his plan went too easy on the south. These members …show more content…

Although he was a Southerner, Johnson had supported the Union during the Civil War. President Johnson relatively went in a different direction than his predecessor. He, like Lincoln, wanted to reunite the North and South after the war ended. Lincoln’s plan to reconstruct the South was based on forgiveness. But, Johnson had his own ideas about rebuilding the South. His Reconstruction plan gave amnesty to most Southerners who swore loyalty to the Union. However, high-ranking Confederates could only receive pardons by appealing to the president. This part of his plan was meant to humiliate Confederate leaders. His plan also required that Southern states outlaw slavery before they could rejoin the Union as well as ratify the Thirteenth Amendment. The Thirteenth Amendment abolished slavery from the United States. Although Johnson opposed slavery, he did not support equal rights for African-Americans. "White men alone must manage the South," he stated. President Johnson 's plan was mostly successful because all former Confederate states except Texas had set up new governments because of his plan by the end of 1865. These newly reformed states were now ready to rejoin the

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Congress has the best plan for the U.S. Reconstruction. The plan Congress made gives freedmen the right to vote. It recognizes freedmen 's rights as well. Congress’s plan lets the Southerns keep their property but doesn’t reimburse them for all of their lost and damaged property. The plan uses military law and governors.

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This week I was going to bring Abraham Lincoln 's plan for reconstruction to the table. It is said that Lincoln started to plan for reconstruction post war. The plan was to address three key areas for concern. First the proclamation allowed full pardon and restoration of any property to anyone who was considered a rebellion or a member of the confederate army with exception of the highest officials and leaders (which is interesting). It also allowed for a state government to be formed once ten percent of the population took an oath of allegiance to the United States, and it encouraged the southern states to deal with slaves in such a way that it would not compromise their freedom.

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Next, the Presidential Reconstruction plan did not support Blacks, even with slavery abolished, they were believed to

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Abraham Lincoln’s vs Andrew Johnson’s Reconstruction Plan Lincoln shared the uncommon belief that the confederate states could still be part of the union and that the cause of the rebellion was only a few within the states which lead him to begin the reconstruction in December of 1863. This resulted in plans with lenient guidelines and although they were challenged by Wade-Davis Bill, Lincoln still rejected his ideas and kept his policies in place. Lincoln also allowed land to be given the newly freed slave or homeless white by distributing the land that had been confiscated from former land owners however this fell through once Johnson took office. After Lincoln’s death when Johnson was elected many things started to turn away from giving blacks equal rights and resulted in many things such a black codes which kept newly freed slaves from having the same rights as whites. When Lincoln first acted after the civil war, he offered policies that would allow the confederate slaves to become part of the union again and would allow a pardon for those states.

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The Civil War has ended and now we need to reunite the states. The Johnson plan was the best plan because of various reasons. One of the reasons is because they had to ratify the 13 amendments. The thirteenth amendment was to slavery. Abolishing slavery is good because that means everyone has freedom, and freedom is what all African-Americans want.

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Lincoln is still portrayed similarly in some aspects, such as his willingness to pardon the Confederates in order to create loyal governments. He also tolerated variations on Reconstruction. It is also important to note that Lincoln was not looking for a social revolution in which African Americans would be given full voting rights. However, Lincoln differed from Johnson in that Lincoln was broad-minded, willing to change his mind and cooperate with others, and would have let his ideas progress positively during Reconstruction, whereas Johnson was obstinate, racist, and unable to hear criticisms. Congress eventually became tired of Johnson’s refusal to cooperate and implemented their own plans for Reconstruction, which included passing the Civil Rights Act of 1866 (all were equal before the law), the Fourteenth Amendment (equality was now in the Constitution), and the Reconstruction Acts of 1867 and 1868 (the South had new governments, and for the first time in American history, black males could vote).

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Our Reconstruction Plan differed from the original plan by making two-thirds of the southern states’ population take an oath of allegiance to the Union, rather than the ten percent that the old plan required. This makes it harder for southern states to be readmitted into the Union. The 10% Plan made it too easy for the South to rejoin the Union and gain political power once more. After being readmitted into the Union, southern political power rose drastically. This resulted in the South having more control over the former Confederate land, leaving black people to be controlled and taken advantage of due to the fact that their government was racist.

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Lincoln thought that the beginning of reconstruction would help speed the war effort and bring it to a close sooner. Wade and Davis would have preferred to delay and wait for the war to end and for the South to be completely beaten with pre-secession institutions gone and needing to be rebuilt. There were a number of concepts that both Lincoln’s 10 percent plan and the Wade-Davis bill had in common. In 1863, with Union victory apparently on the horizon Lincoln “announces a policy for the reconstruction of recanting Confederates”, “Whereas it is now desired by some persons heretofore engaged in said rebellion to resume their

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Before Abraham Lincoln was shot and killed by John Wilkes Booth on April 14, 1865, he had a plan for the Reconstruction of the South. Lincoln called his plan the Ten Percent Plan. Under the Ten Percent Plan, when ten percent of the voters of a state took an oath of loyalty to the Union, the state could form a government and create a new constitution that made slavery illegal. Under Lincoln’s plan, Louisiana, Arkansas, and Tennessee set up governments. If Lincoln had lived, I believe that there would have been different changes in America.

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Reconstruction of the south encompassed three major political initiatives: restoration of the Union, transformation of southern society, and enactment of progressive legislation favoring the rights of freed slaves. President Abraham Lincoln’s Proclamation of Amnesty and Reconstruction—issued in 1863, two years before the war even ended—mapped out the first of these initiatives, his Ten-Percent Plan. Under the plan, each southern state would be readmitted to the Union after 10 percent of its voting population had pledged future loyalty to the United States, and all Confederates except high-ranking government and military officials would be pardoned. After Lincoln was assassinated in 1865, President Andrew Johnson adopted the Ten-Percent Plan and pardoned thousands of Confederate officials. Radical Republicans in Congress, however, called for harsher measures, demanding a

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He also wanted to keep slavery but also keep the union together. Andrew Johnson was a man that tried to persuade things to go his way for the benefit for himself. It was hard for him to pick a side because he was a democrat in a nation of republicans. Johnson was also chief diplomat.

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861 Words | 4 Pages

Throughout the era of Reconstruction, President Andrew Johnson and Congress clashed in their views and policies, which can be seen in the way that they responded to one another’s actions. In May of 1865, President Johnson outlined his plan for reuniting the nation. This consisted of Johnson issuing a series of proclamations, one of which offered a pardon to nearly all of the white southerners, with the requirement that they had to take an oath of allegiance to the Union. In addition to this, the proclamations appointed provisional governors and ordered them to call state conventions to establish loyal governments in the South, elected by whites alone.

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The Reconstruction era of 1865 was an attempted unify the states of the United States of America after the Civil War. This proved to be terribly difficult and contentious process. The three main issues the federal government had to deal with included how to deal with states as they re-joined the Union, how Southern whites should be treated, and how to deal with the freed slaves. Furthermore, President Lincoln’s reconstruction plan included that states never truly seceded from the Union as this was not legally possible, and therefore they should not necessarily be punished. The plan had two major provisions: Pardons of Southerners who participated in the war if the took an oath of allegiance to the United States and Readmission of a state if 10% of white voters in that state took

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Eric Foner, contributor to Encyclopedia Britannica and author of many books, describes the Reconstruction as a time in “which attempts were made to redress the inequities of slavery and its political, social, and economic legacy and to solve the problems arising from the readmission to the Union of the 11 states that had seceded at or before the outbreak of war” (Foner). Due to the secession of southern states, President Lincoln tried to weaken their abilities by issuing the Ten Percent Plan, which was when “one-tenth of a state’s prewar voters took an oath of loyalty, they could establish a new state government… the plan was an attempt to weaken the Confederacy rather than a blueprint for the postwar South” (Foner). This, then allowed the government to ensure that the states would not try to secede again, even if they wanted to. It guaranteed that the states would remain a part of the Union, leaving fewer and fewer states in the Confederacy as more voters took this oath. Later on, President Johnson granted state governments the ability to manage their own affairs, which often resulted in southern slaves “enacting the black codes, laws that required African Americans to sign yearly labour contracts and in other ways sought to limit the freedmen’s economic

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Soon after the war was over, President Abraham Lincoln introduced his reconstruction plan to reunite the nation, and have it function the way it used to. On December 1863, President Lincoln issued his Proclamation of Amnesty and Reconstruction; it offered “full pardon” and the restoration of property to white Southerners. However, the prerequisites to receive full pardon include swearing an oath of allegiance to the United States and its laws; the only people excluded from the offer were Prominent Confederate military and civil leaders. On December 8, 1865, President Lincoln announced the terms of another reconstructive plan, known as “Lincoln’s Ten-Percent

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