Figure 1. Major events of the Reconstruction era.

Restoring the Union

The end of the Civil War saw the beginning of the Reconstruction era, when former rebel Southern states were integrated back into the Union. Reconstruction became a tumultuous journey as formerly enslaved freedmen and White southern males hoped to obtain the kind of freedom they wanted. These two groups believed in two different realities, which made freedom hard to define, and led to a tug of war between both groups. President Lincoln moved quickly to achieve the war’s ultimate goal: reunification of the country. He proposed a generous and non-punitive plan to return the former Confederate states speedily to the United States, but some Republicans in Congress protested, considering the president’s plan too lenient to the rebel states that had torn the country apart. The greatest flaw of Lincoln’s plan, according to this view, was that it appeared to forgive traitors instead of guaranteeing civil rights to former slaves. President Lincoln oversaw the passage of the Thirteenth Amendment abolishing slavery, but he did not live to see its ratification.

The President’s Plan: The Ten Percent Plan

From the outset of the rebellion in 1861, Lincoln’s overriding goal had been to bring the Southern states quickly back into the fold in order to restore the Union. In early December 1863, the president began the process of reunification by unveiling a three-part proposal known as the ten percent plan that outlined how the states would return. The ten percent plan gave a general pardon to all Southerners except high-ranking Confederate government and military leaders, required 10 percent of the 1860 voting population in the former rebel states to take a binding oath of future allegiance to the United States and the emancipation of enslaved people, and declared that once those voters took those oaths, the restored Confederate states would draft new state constitutions.

Figure 2. Thomas Le Mere took this albumen silver print (a) of Abraham Lincoln in April 1863. Le Mere thought a standing pose of Lincoln would be popular. In this political cartoon from 1865 (b), Lincoln and his vice president, Andrew Johnson, endeavor to sew together the torn pieces of the Union.

Lincoln hoped that the leniency of the plan—90% of the 1860 voters did not have to swear allegiance to the Union or to emancipation—would bring about a quick and long-anticipated resolution and make emancipation more acceptable everywhere. It should be noted that in this plan, voters would be White males age 21 years old and older. During the Civil War, the South lost 268,000 of these men, which of course could have a significant impact on the voting for this plan. This approach appealed to some in the Republican Party, which wanted to put the nation on a speedy course toward reconciliation. However, the proposal instantly drew fire from a larger faction of Republicans in Congress who did not want to deal moderately with the South.

There were three factions of the Republican Party at this time: the Radical Republicans, the Moderate Republicans, and the Conservative Republicans. The members of Congress known as Radical Republicans wanted to remake the South and punish the rebels. Radical Republicans insisted on harsh terms for the defeated Confederacy and protection for former slaves, going far beyond what the president proposed. They also believed that the slaves’ legal rights should be protected, the Southern leaders should be punished and disenfranchised, the land of the wealthy should be distributed to the Blacks, and that Blacks should obtain suffrage. Conservative Republicans believed in the abolition of slavery but did not believe in imposing punishment on rebellious Southerners and were not as concerned with equality. Moderate Republicans fell between these two groups.

Ironclad Oath

In February 1864, two of the Radical Republicans, Ohio senator Benjamin Wade and Maryland representative Henry Winter Davis, countered Lincoln’s proposal with one of their own. Among other stipulations, the Wade-Davis Bill called for a majority of voters and government officials in Confederate states to take an oath, called the Ironclad Oath, swearing that they had never supported the Confederacy or made war against the United States. Those who could not or would not take the oath would be unable to take part in the future political life of the South. The Wade-Davis Bill required that 50 percent of a state’s White males take a loyalty oath to be readmitted to the Union, instead of Lincoln’s proposed 10%. For this reason, the Wade-Davis bill is also known as the “50 Percent Plan.”

Congress assented to the Wade-Davis Bill, and it went to Lincoln for his signature. The president refused to sign, using the pocket veto (that is, taking no action after Congress adjourns) to kill the bill. Lincoln understood that no Southern state would have met the criteria of the Wade-Davis Bill, and its passage would simply have delayed the reconstruction of the South.

Try It

The Thirteenth Amendment

Initially proposed as a war aim, Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation committed the United States to the abolition of slavery. However, the proclamation freed only enslaved people in areas of rebellion and left more than seven hundred thousand in bondage in Delaware, Kentucky, Maryland, and Missouri as well as in Union-occupied areas of Louisiana, Tennessee, and Virginia.

The Confiscation Acts and the Emancipation Proclamation

Congress passed several laws between 1861 and 1863 that aided the growing movement toward emancipation. Despite his concerns that premature attempts at emancipation would weaken his support and entail the loss of crucial border states, Lincoln signed these acts into law. The first of these laws to be implemented was the First Confiscation Act of August 1861, which authorized the confiscation of any Confederate property, including slaves, by Union forces. In March 1862, Congress approved a law enacting an additional article of war, which forbade Union Army officers from returning fugitive slaves to their owners. The following month, Congress declared that the federal government would compensate slave owners who freed their slaves. Moderate Republicans accepted Lincoln’s plan for gradual, compensated emancipation, which was put into effect in the District of Columbia.

In June 1862, Congress passed a law enacting emancipation in the federal territories, and in July, passed the Second Confiscation Act, which contained provisions intended to liberate slaves held by rebels. The latter act also declared that any Confederate official, military or civilian, who did not surrender within 60 days of the act’s passage would have his enslaved laborers freed.

In order to increase public support for emancipation, Lincoln strategically chose to associate the Emancipation Proclamation with the Union victory at the Battle of Antietam in September 1862. On September 22 of that year, Lincoln issued a preliminary proclamation that he would order the emancipation of all slaves within all Confederate states that did not return to Union control by January 1, 1863. When none of the states returned to the Union by that date, Lincoln honored his proclamation, and the order immediately took effect.

Despite the Confiscation Acts and the 1863 Emancipation Proclamation, the legal status of enslaved people and the institution of slavery remained unresolved. Since these were wartime acts, once the war was over, these people could be put back into bondage. To deal with the remaining uncertainties, the Republican Party made the abolition of slavery a top priority by including the issue in its 1864 party platform. The platform read: “That as slavery was the cause, and now constitutes the strength of this Rebellion, and as it must be, always and everywhere, hostile to the principles of Republican Government, justice and the National safety demand its utter and complete extirpation from the soil of the Republic; and that, while we uphold and maintain the acts and proclamations by which the Government, in its own defense, has aimed a deathblow at this gigantic evil, we are in favor, furthermore, of such an amendment to the Constitution, to be made by the people in conformity with its provisions, as shall terminate and forever prohibit the existence of Slavery within the limits of the jurisdiction of the United States.” The platform left no doubt about the intention to abolish slavery.

The president, along with the Radical Republicans, made good on this campaign promise in 1864 and 1865. A proposed constitutional amendment passed the Senate in April 1864, and the House of Representatives concurred in January 1865. The first amendment added to the Constitution since 1804, it overturned a centuries-old practice by permanently abolishing slavery. The Thirteenth Amendment legally abolished slavery “except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted.” Section Two of the amendment granted Congress the “power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation.” State ratification followed, and by the end of the year (December 1865) the requisite three-fourths of the states had approved the amendment, and four million people were forever free from the slavery that had existed in North America for 250 years.

Figure 3. In The Assassination of President Lincoln (1865), by Currier and Ives, John Wilkes Booth shoots Lincoln in the back of the head as he sits in the theater box with his wife, Mary Todd Lincoln, and their guests, Major Henry R. Rathbone and Clara Harris.

President Lincoln never saw the final ratification of the Thirteenth Amendment. On April 14, 1865, the Confederate supporter and well-known actor John Wilkes Booth shot Lincoln while he was attending a play, Our American Cousin, at Ford’s Theater in Washington. The president died the next day. Booth had steadfastly defended the Confederacy and White supremacy, and his act was part of a larger conspiracy to eliminate the heads of the Union government and keep the Confederate fight going. One of Booth’s associates stabbed and wounded Secretary of State William Seward the night of the assassination. Another associate abandoned the planned assassination of Vice President Andrew Johnson at the last moment. Although Booth initially escaped capture, Union troops shot and killed him on April 26, 1865, in a Maryland barn. Eight other conspirators were convicted by a military tribunal for participating in the conspiracy, and four were hanged. Lincoln’s death earned him immediate martyrdom, and hysteria spread throughout the North. To many Northerners, the assassination suggested an even greater conspiracy than what was revealed, masterminded by the unrepentant leaders of the defeated Confederacy. Militant Republicans would use and exploit this fear relentlessly in the ensuing months.