406 Chapter 15 Reconstruction and the South
“committed suicide” and should be treated like
“conquered provinces.” Lincoln believed the issue a
“pernicious abstraction” and tried to ignore it.
The process of readmission began in 1862,
when Lincoln reappointed provisional governors for
those parts of the South that had been occupied by
federal troops. On December 8, 1863, he issued a
proclamation setting forth a general policy. With
the exception of high Confederate officials and a
few other special groups, all Southerners could rein-
state themselves as United States citizens by taking
a simple loyalty oath. When, in any state, a number
equal to 10 percent of those voting in the 1860
election had taken this oath, they could set up a
state government. Under thisTen Percent Plan,
such governments had to be republican in form,
must recognize the “permanent freedom” of the
slaves, and must provide for black education. The
plan, however, did not require that blacks be given
the right to vote.
The Ten Percent Plan reflected Lincoln’s lack of
vindictiveness and his political wisdom. He realized
that any government based on such a small minority
of the population would be, as he put it, merely “a
tangible nucleus which the remainder... may rally
around as fast as it can,” a sort of puppet regime, like
the paper government established in those sections of
Virginia under federal control.^1 The regimes estab-
lished under this plan in Tennessee, Louisiana, and
Arkansas bore, in the president’s mind, the same rela-
tion to finally reconstructed states that an egg bears
to a chicken. “We shall sooner have the fowl by hatch-
ing it than by smashing it,” he remarked. He knew
that eventually representatives of the southern states
would again be sitting in Congress, and he wished to
lay the groundwork for a strong Republican party in
the section. Yet he realized that Congress had no
intention of seating representatives from the “10 per-
cent” states at once.
The Radicals in Congress disliked the Ten Percent
Plan, partly because of its moderation and partly
because it enabled Lincoln to determine Union policy
toward the recaptured regions. In July 1864 they
passed theWade-Davis bill, which provided for con-
stitutional conventions only after a majority of the
others in a southern state had taken a loyalty oath.
Confederate officials and anyone who had “voluntar-
ily borne arms against the United States” were barred
from voting in the election or serving at the conven-
tion. Besides prohibiting slavery, the new state consti-
tutions would have to repudiate Confederate debts.
Lincoln disposed of the Wade-Davis bill with a pocket
veto and that’s where matters stood when Andrew
Johnson became president following the assassination.
Lincoln had picked Johnson for a running mate
in 1864 because he was a border-state Unionist
Democrat and something of a hero as a result of his
courageous service as military governor of Tennessee.
His political strength came from the poor whites and
yeomen farmers of eastern Tennessee, and he was
fond of extolling the common man and attacking
“stuck-up aristocrats.”
Thaddeus Stevens called Johnson a “rank dem-
agogue” and a “damned scoundrel,” and it is true
that Johnson was a masterful rabble-rouser. But few
men of his generation labored so consistently on
behalf of small farmers. Free homesteads, public
education, absolute social equality—such were his
objectives. The father of communism, Karl Marx, a
close observer of American affairs at this time,
wrote approvingly of Johnson’s “deadly hatred of
the oligarchy.”
Johnson was a Democrat, but because of his
record and his reassuring penchant for excoriating
southern aristocrats, the Republicans in Congress
were ready to cooperate with him. “Johnson, we
have faith in you,” said Senator Ben Wade, author of
the Wade-Davis bill, the day after Lincoln’s death.
“By the gods, there will be no trouble now in run-
ning the government!”
Johnson’s reply, “Treason must be made infa-
mous,” delighted the Radicals, but the president
proved temperamentally unable to work with them.
Like Randolph of Roanoke, his antithesis intellectu-
ally and socially, opposition was his specialty; he soon
alienated every powerful Republican in Washington.
Radical Republicanslistened to Johnson’s dia-
tribes against secessionists and the great planters and
assumed that he was anti-southern. Nothing could
have been further from the truth. He had great
respect for states’ rights and he shared most of his
poor white Tennessee constituents’ contempt of
blacks. “Damn the negroes, I am fighting these trai-
torous aristocrats, their masters,” he told a friend dur-
ing the war. “I wish to God,” he said on another
occasion, “every head of a family in the United States
had one slave to take the drudgery and menial service
off his family.”
The new president did not want to injure or humil-
iate all white Southerners. He issued an amnesty procla-
mation only slightly more rigorous than Lincoln’s. It(^1) By approving the separation of the western counties that had
refused to secede, this government had provided a legal pretext for
the creation of West Virginia in 1863.