To: Grand Old Partisan
The notion that President Lincoln and the Radicals were enemies is a fiction concocted by Democrat historians.Then explain Lincoln's words about the hate and vindictiveness toward the South of some in Congress. Why did Lincoln want governments formed before Congress reconvened?
From American History 102 (Stanley K. Schultz, Professor of History, William P. Tishler, Producer) at the University of Wisconsin (History 102).
Both Lincoln and Johnson had foreseen that the Congress would have the right to deny southern legislators seats in the United States Senate or House of Representatives, under the clause of the Constitution that says: "Each house shall be the judge of the qualifications of its own members." This denial came to pass when, under the leadership of Thaddeus Stevens of Pennsylvania, those Congressmen who sought to punish the south refused to seat its duly elected Senators and Representatives. Then, within the next few months, the Congress proceeded to work out a plan of southern reconstruction quite different from the one Lincoln had started and Johnson had continued.
Here is another (When Republicans were Radical).
Composed mainly of pre-war abolitionists, the Radical Republicans wanted to punish the South for the horrors of slavery and for four years of civil war. They were led in the House by Thaddeus Stevens and George W. Julian and in the Senate men like Charles Sumner, Benjamin F. Wade, and Zachariah Chandler provided leadership. They had strongly disagreed with Lincolns program for Reconstruction maintaining it was much too lenient.In December 1863, Abraham Lincoln had drafted a program designed to reconstruct the South. Known as the Ten Percent plan, it offered a pardon to all Southerners (except Confederate leaders) who took a loyalty oath. When ten percent of that states voters had taken the oath, they could establish a new state government. The Radicals strongly opposed this plan and drafted their own course of action, the Wade-Davis bill. This bill, which was vetoed by Lincoln, proposed to delay the formation of new Southern governments until a majority of voters had taken the oath, and equal rights for former slaves must accompany the Souths re-admission to the Union.
Looks like you disagree with Lincoln.
To: rustbucket
1) The Radical Republicans were not hateful or vindictive toward "the South" -- they wanted nothing more than the kind of democratizing, human rights, free enterprise social transformation the USA carried out in Nazi Germany after WWII. Your Democrat buddy Andrew Johnson was the one who had been clamoring for executions.
2) Your mention of Congress "intervening" attests to your distain for democracy. Since when is Congress "intervening" by exercising its legislative function? I bet you would have loved it if President Clinton had prevented Congress from "intervening" in his running the country.
3) Lincoln did indeed want to overseee Reconstruction without congressional input, but such arogation of power was completely unprecendented in U.S. history. Lincoln doing things himself would have made Stanton's miliatary government approach even easier to carry out.
3) Not allowing rebels to sit in Congress, even before Reconstruction had been completed was not "punishing the South." For example, what if all those southern Senators, who just months before had been shooting U.S. troops, had prevented military appropriations from being passed, ensuring the success of another Confederate rebellion? No, patriotic congressmen were not as stupid as you would have liked them to have been.
4) The Wade-Davis bill was passed almost unanimously by Republicans in Congress; labelling the will of Congress and of the Republican Party as a Radical scheme is a lie.
5) The other sourse you cite states: "a faction of Johnsons own party, the Republicans" thus discrediting the author and you for citing her as an authority. Though elected as Lincoln's 1864 running mate, Andrew Johnson was a D-E-M-O-C-R-A-T.
There's no point in continuing this discussion further particularly when you feel free to make thing up and cite ignornnt people. We're done.
963 posted on
12/04/2003 6:55:05 AM PST by
Grand Old Partisan
(You can read about my history of the GOP at www.republicanbasics.com)
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