Below The Beltway

James Atticus Bowden and I don’t see entirely eye-to-eye when it comes to the Civil War and the Confederacy, but he hits the nail on the head with this statement:

Did Radical Republican Occupation of the South (1865-1877) serve as the model for the Bush Republican Occupation of Iraq? Of course not. As much as SecDef Donald Rumsfeld screwed things up in Iraq, and the President didn’t know better to stop him, it’s a very different occupation. Interesting to see the same words - Republican and Occupation juxtaposed.

Yet, the inept, venal and punitive Reconstruction was remarkable in how bad it was. The theft was phenomenal, but the economic hardships pale to what was done to the culture. Reconstruction delayed integration and better race relations by ninety years. How could the North have screwed it up so badly?

(…)

As Virginian DJ McGuire wrote so well, the Yankees fought to preserve the union. Like the states had no right to secede and were never independent, foreign states. Yet, the Radical Republicans took precisely the opposite definition – that the Southern states had ceased to be states of the Union and had to be reconstituted and readmitted like foreign territories acquired by the USA (Northwest Territory, Louisiana Purchase, Texas, accessions from Spain and Mexico). Furthermore, the U.S. Congress set about disenfranchising enough Whites to allow Blacks, carpetbaggers and scalawags to make an electoral majority that would vote Republican.

The irony of treating the South like conquered territory rather than as brothers of an inviolable, eternal Union was lost on the dead in blue and gray.

The problem, and the reason things went so terribly wrong, I think, lies in the fact that the one man who could have held off the Radical Republicans from pursuing a vindictive Reconstruction policy was assassinated on April 14, 1865.

Prior to his death, and as the Union armies in the West chased the Confederate Armies out of states like Louisiana and Tennessee, Lincoln had advocated and pursued a far more moderate Reconstruction policy:

During the Civil War, Republican leaders agreed that slavery and the Slave Power had to be permanently destroyed, and that all forms of Confederate nationalism had to be suppressed. Moderates said this could be easily accomplished as soon as Confederate armies surrendered and the Southern states repealed secession and ratified the 13th Amendment—all of which happened by September 1865.

President Abraham Lincoln was the leader of the moderate Republicans and wanted to speed up Reconstruction and reunite the nation as painlessly and as quickly as possible. Lincoln formally began Reconstruction in late 1863 with his Ten percent plan, which went into operation in several states but which Radicals opposed. Lincoln pocket vetoed the Radical plan, the Wade-Davis Bill of 1864, which was much more strict than the Ten-Percent Plan. The opposing faction of Radical Republicans were skeptical of Southern intentions and demanded more stringent federal action. Congressman Thaddeus Stevens and Senator Charles Sumner led the Radical Republicans.

Radical Republican Charles Sumner argued that secession had destroyed statehood alone but the Constitution still extended its authority and its protection over individuals, as in the territories. Thaddeus Stevens and his followers viewed secession as having left the states in a status like newly conquered territory.

Under the Ten Percent Plan, a state could be readmitted to the Union when ten percent of it’s eligible voters from the 1860 Presidential Election had taken an oath of allegiance to the U.S. and pledged to abide by emancipation. The Wade-Davis Bill, on the other hand, required at least 50% of the voters in a state to agree to the oath before the state could be readmitted.

Lincoln’s death left the Presidency in the hands of Andrew Johnson, a Democrat and, worse yet for the Radical Republicans, a Southerner. With the war over, he had no political constituency in the North that he could depend upon — neither the Republicans nor the Democrats wanted him — and he was thus easy prey for the majority Radical Republicans in Congress, who ultimately but unsuccessfully tried to removed him from office in 1868.

By 1866, though, Congress had wrested control of the Reconstruction process and the era of Radical Reconstruction began, with the disastrous impact that James points out. Even the Radicals, however, gave in to politics eventually and traded Reconstruction for the Presidency in 1877.

Thus we are left with one of the great “what-if’s” of American history.

How might Reconstruction have been different if Abraham Lincoln had not died that April day ? Arguably, it would have gone a lot better than it did after 1866 because Lincoln, unlike Johnson, would have had both the prestige of the leader who guided the nation through four years of a horrible war, and he would have had the political skills that had gotten him to the Presidency and through that war in the first place. Johnson possessed none of those qualities, and was thus, as I said, an easy opponent for the Radicals to defeat. It wouldn’t have been so easy with Old Abe, I think.

Whatever the outcome might have been, I can’t think that it would have been worse than the way history actually turned out.