The North won the war but lose Reconstruction
The North won the civil war due abundant resources and the military leadership of President Lincoln and General Ulysses S. Grant but lose Reconstruction due to the loss of President Lincoln, political and economic problems, and racism. The military leadership of President Lincoln and General Ulysses S. Grant had a huge effect on the war. Lincoln appointed generals to command his troops. He used his political knowledge to guide the war, for example, his stand on slavery so that the Border States wouldn’t join the confederacy but in 1863, he issued the Emancipation Proclamation which declared that all slaves in the Confederate States would be free. While General Ulysses S. Grant led the Union
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The north won the war, so it was time to reconstruct the south. President Lincoln had been working out his ideas on Reconstruction as early as 1862, once Louisiana and Tennessee were in the hands of his military. On December 8, 1863, Lincoln announced his specific plan for Reconstruction. It was known as the 10 Percent plan, it allowed a former confederate state back into the Union once a group of men equal to one-tenth of the state’s population that voted in 1860 swore an oath of allegiance to the Union and promised to uphold the Emancipation Proclamation. Many radical republicans weren’t too happy with Lincoln’s plan, they thought that his plan made it too easy for confederate states to reenter the Union and it did not do enough to protect the freedom of ex-slaves. Also, they assumed that he, as the president, had the right to decide which states would be readmitted to the Union and which would not, whereas the radicals believe that this right belonged to Congress. In the summer of 1864, Rep. Henry Winter Davis and Sen. Benjamin Wade presented a bill that places the control of Reconstruction with Congress, and made it far more difficult for Southern states to reenter the Union. No former Confederate officials would be allowed to vote and some provisions protecting the rights of African Americans were included. The North wanted equal right for all former slaves but they didn’t really know how to achieve it after the war, it wasn’t as easy as they thought it would be. I think they didn’t really understand freedom exactly meant. Congress passed the 13th Amendment, guaranteeing that no human beings would ever again be bought and sold as property in the United States but many things were left unsaid like were these former slaves citizens and did they have the right to vote. The law gave them freedom but what did freedom consist of for the former