4. How did the Great War for Empire change the relationship between England and its American colonies?
Reconstruction among the south refers to the point in time which the United States was attempting to establish a relationship between the union and the rebels. The Union had won the civil war, so the next step was to begin to mend the broken relationship between the north and the south. Though historians cannot agree on when it began, there is merit in saying that it started before the end of the Civil War. After victory, had been solidified for the Union, attention of President Lincoln turned towards reconstruction.
First, phase one the presidential reconstruction was very complex due to the fact that it was carried out by two very divergent presidents and lacked unification. On one hand we had Abraham Lincoln 's plan which consisted of reconstructing and unifying the nation again. The way he wanted to accomplish this was by making ten percent of qualified voter take the loyalty oath to the union in order to organize the state government. In addition, his plan gave African Americans very significant right as he wanted the state constitution to abolish slavery. This was latter achieved in 1865
The President I have have chosen is Andrew Johnson. He was the 17th President of the United States serving from 1865-1869. He started out as a vice president when president Abraham Lincoln was assassinated. After that someone had to be elected the new president. Andrew Johnson was chosen. He was apart of the democratic party. During his presidency, some of choices were a success and others were failures. He served many roles as the president but not all of them when well.
To a greater extent, slavery was the greatest cause of the outbreak of the civil war in 1860. Disputes of slavery caused economic and political troubles between the northern and southern states leading up to the civil war. The fact the the northern and southern states were different in almost every way caused them to turn out like completely different territories, one of their greatest differences was the fact that most southern states economy relied on hard labour, agricultural jobs like tobacco in Maryland, and cotton in Virginia; this caused their economy to be more based on the labour of slaves than the more developed territories in the north (Harrold), who after this time was starting to not need the slave labour in their territories because after early 1800’s, the industrial revolution had been spreading to America, and the country developed very quickly. But in this expansion, only the north states were getting the effect of the industrial revolution, meaning the north would not need slave
Lincoln shared the uncommon belief that the confederate states could still be part of the union and that the cause of the rebellion was only a few within the states which lead him to begin the reconstruction in December of 1863. This resulted in plans with lenient guidelines and although they were challenged by Wade-Davis Bill, Lincoln still rejected his ideas and kept his policies in place. Lincoln also allowed land to be given the newly freed slave or homeless white by distributing the land that had been confiscated from former land owners however this fell through once Johnson took office. After Lincoln’s death when Johnson was elected many things started to turn away from giving blacks equal rights and resulted in many things such a black codes which kept newly freed slaves from having the same rights as whites.
President Abraham Lincoln’s plan of reconstruction was referred to as the Ten Percent Plan. It offered the rebels a full pardon and also restoration of their full rights as citizens if they pledged to accept the abolition of slavery and swore allegiance to the United States. When the number of loyal citizens equaled ten percent of the votes cast during the election of 1860, then they could form a new state government and constitution. Lincoln required new constitutions to band slavery, exclude high ranking Confederate officials to take part in the new state government, and held the right of congress to decide whether any members sent to congress would be allowed to serve. Congress felt the plan was not harsh enough, so congress passed the Wade-Davis
This had an impact on the Reconstruction period because if Lee wouldn’t have surrendered, the reconstruction period may have not been able to start until later on.
STOP! Drop everything you’re doing and think! Why did the Southern states secede from the Union? Was it because of the South’s desire to be their own government or did they just do it for no good reason. The Northern States and the Southern States have always been different. The Northern States were against slavery and the Southern States were not. Slavery was such a big issue back then because for the South that was their way of living and how they made money. For the North, they viewed it as an immoral thing and that there shouldn’t be slavery in the U.S. Other factors beside slavery caused the South to leave which lead to the Civil War. The Southern States seceded from the Union because of slavery, political issues, and economic differences.
The southern whites who worked around the Presidents moderate plan of Reconstruction did so in a manner that would be frowned upon today. The Southern whites had been guaranteed charity from Lincoln. “With his [Lincoln’s] enormous prestige as commander of the victorious North and as victor in the 1864 election, he was able to promise freedom to the Negro, charity to the southern white, security to the North” (page 3). An example of how Congress worked around Johnson’s disliked program of Reconstruction was passing through bills for him to sign. Johnson vetoed them and as a result Congress over ruled him and passed them anyway. This is illustrated by Donald, “Andrew Johnson became a cipher in the White House, futilely4 disapproving bills which were promptly passed over his veto” (page 10). This sole action of vetoing the bills led to the Congress wanting to take away power from the President which they essentially did. Due to the fact that they could pass bills they were slowly and slightly removing power from the Executive
I believe that the results of Reconstruction have been mixed and i believe that the economy is a problem that needs to be fixed. By not dictating who can have what job based on their race Reconstruction can meet its goal of creating equality for all.
In 1863, both President Lincoln and a group of legislators were working on plans for reconstruction. The President was working on his reconstruction policy, at the same time Congressman Davis and Senator Wade were presenting a bill to congress. Even though the desired outcome would have been the same, and there were similarities, there were a number of differences between the two. Some of these differences caused the President to veto Wade-Davis. President Lincoln was looking to get reconstruction going even before the war was officially won. Lincoln thought that the beginning of reconstruction would help speed the war effort and bring it to a close sooner. Wade and Davis would have preferred to delay and wait for the war to end and for the South to be completely beaten with pre-secession institutions gone and needing to be rebuilt.
This week I was going to bring Abraham Lincoln 's plan for reconstruction to the table. It is said that Lincoln started to plan for reconstruction post war. The plan was to address three key areas for concern. First the proclamation allowed full pardon and restoration of any property to anyone who was considered a rebellion or a member of the confederate army with exception of the highest officials and leaders (which is interesting). It also allowed for a state government to be formed once ten percent of the population took an oath of allegiance to the United States, and it encouraged the southern states to deal with slaves in such a way that it would not compromise their freedom. The republicans thought that Lincoln’s plan was too easy for
Andrew Johnson had only been vice-president for 42 days when he became president. He seemed supportive of the penal measures against the Confederates in the past, believing that they were to blame for the Civil War. However, Johnson was even more lenient to the Confederates even pardoning leaders and members. He was constantly clashing with the Radicals in the Congress solely on the status of the freed slaves and whites in the South. Many former Confederates were in denial to accepting both social changes and political domination by former slaves. The planter elite were afraid of their lost land, but were assured by Johnson that land redistribution from the planters to the freed slaves did not happen. He ordered that confiscated or abandoned lands controlled by the Freedmen's Bureau would not be redistributed to the free slaves but to be returned to pardoned
Reconstruction of the south encompassed three major political initiatives: restoration of the Union, transformation of southern society, and enactment of progressive legislation favoring the rights of freed slaves. President Abraham Lincoln’s Proclamation of Amnesty and Reconstruction—issued in 1863, two years before the war even ended—mapped out the first of these initiatives, his Ten-Percent Plan. Under the plan, each southern state would be readmitted to the Union after 10 percent of its voting population had pledged future loyalty to the United States, and all Confederates except high-ranking government and military officials would be pardoned. After Lincoln was assassinated in 1865, President Andrew Johnson adopted the Ten-Percent Plan and pardoned thousands of Confederate officials. Radical Republicans in Congress, however, called for harsher measures, demanding a