To All,
From the book, Did Lincoln Own Slaves?; And Other Frequently Asked Questions About Abraham Lincoln, by Gerald J. Prokopowicz, Chapter Eleven, Martyr, pg. 234-236:
"Would Lincoln have been able to prevent the Radical Republicans from inflictin Reconstruction on the South after the war?
This question embodies the most pernicious myth in American history.
It began with the ex-Confederates who promoted the idea that they had fought for a noble "Lost Cause." It gained professional respectability around 1900 when it appeared in the works of Columbia University professor William A. Dunning and the many students he trained. It grabbed the imagination of white Americans when it appeared on screen in the first blockbuster hit movie, D. W. Griffith's Birth of a Nation (1915), praised by President (and historian) Woodrow Wilson as history "written with lightning." It solidified its hold on national memory with the enormous popularity of Margaret Mitchell's novel Gone With The Wind (1936), as well as its 1939 film version.
The myth is that Reconstruction was a national tragedy in which vindictive Radical Republicans forced their evil will upon the innocent and helpless South, until finally brave white Southerners "redeemed" their states from the clutches of greedy carpetbaggers, craven scalawags, and their hapless dupes, the former slaves. Lincoln's successor, Andrew Jhonson, bravely tried to follow Lincoln's generous and conciliatory policies, but alas, he was impeached for his efforts. If only Lincoln had lived!
In fact, Johnson's policies were nothing like Lincoln's. Lincoln had said of the leaders of the defunct Confederacy that "no one need expect that he would take any part in hanging or killing these men, even the worst of them," but it is inconceivable that he would have granted wholesale pardons to ex-Confederate military and civil officeholders, as Johnson did, allowing them to vote, run for office, and defeat Southern Republicans at the polls. Johnson welcomed the reestablishment of the overwhelmingly Democratic antebellum power structure in the South. At the very least, Lincoln as a Republican would not have made the destruction of his own party in the South a policy goal.
So what would Lincoln have done?
That's a good question, and one that Lincoln himself probably could not have answered in 1865.
He was a pragmatist who made a point of not having fixed policies. During the war, Lincoln viewed the reconstruction of Southern states as a series of unique cases, just as he treated the border states individually at the start of the war. In regard to the reconstruction of Louisiana, Lincoln in his last public speech (April 11, 1865) said of the proposed new state constitution, "It is also unsatisfactory to some that the elective franchise is not given to the colored man. I would myself prefer that it were now conferred on the very intelligent, and on those who serve our cause as soldiers." It seems likely that he would have looked favorably on experiments in black suffrage had any of the reconstructed states been willing to undertake them, if not out of a desire to create a modern multicultural society (which few in the 19th century could even imagine), then as a means of strengthening the position of Southern Republicans.
In contrast Andrew Johnson firmly opposed black voting in any form and was overridden by Congress and the states, which ratified the Fourteenth (civil rights) Amendment in 1868 and the Fifteenth (voting rights) Amendment in 1870. It was enforcement of these laws, more than anything else, that constituted the "oppression" of which the white South complained so bitterly in the Reconstruction myth. Had the author of the Emancipation Proclamation lived, it seems likely that he, too, would have "oppressed' the white South by insisting that black Southerners be allowed to participate in the political system."
Sincerely,
Unionblue
__________________
"The American people and the Government at Washington may refuse to recognize it for a time but the inexorable logic of events will force it upon them in the end; that the war now being waged in this land is a war for and against slavery." Frederick Douglass
"Loyalty to our ancestors does not include loyalty to their mistakes." George Santayana
Last edited by unionblue; 06-28-2008 at 03:49 AM.
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