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By Root 1819 0

could establish a new state government. Voting qualifications from before the war would apply, excluding blacks from the franchise. The new state constitution must abolish slavery and provide for the education of the freedpeople, but it could also adopt temporary measures regarding the freedpeople “consistent…with their present condition as a laboring, landless, and homeless class.” This, Lincoln observed, would limit the “confusion and destitution” resulting from a “total revolution of labor.” The new governments would be entitled to representation in Washington, although Lincoln took care to note that each house of Congress possessed the right to judge the qualifications of its own members. As for the border states to which Reconstruction did not apply since they remained in the Union, Lincoln declared that he remained committed to the plan he had “so earnestly urged upon this subject”—gradual, compensated emancipation.49

Clearly, Lincoln did not envision Reconstruction as embodying a social and political revolution beyond the abolition of slavery. His approach recognized the traditional power of the states to determine the civil and political rights of their inhabitants. He had always believed in the existence of a considerable body of Unionist whites and reluctant secessionists in the Confederacy and assumed that they would step forward to accept his terms. This militated in favor of leniency and against any pressure for black rights in the reconstructed South. Black suffrage would alienate such men, while the invitation to regulate the transition from slave to free labor, Lincoln explained, would make them “more ready” to accept his terms.

Lincoln’s Ten Percent Plan would soon arouse considerable opposition from the Radicals. But when it was announced, as the Chicago Tribune observed, “all shades of opinion among loyal men” endorsed it. The conservative Republican press called the plan “the best that has yet been proposed.” It praised Lincoln for avoiding “abstract dogmas” like state suicide or the reversion of states to territories. While Lincoln eschewed their reckless race-mongering, the Blairs expressed approval since Lincoln had endorsed “our speciality”: state control over “local law”—law, that is, regulating blacks. Radicals, however, also praised the plan, since it recognized that the states were not in their traditional constitutional position. “If the old state is still a state in the Union,” Orestes Brownson asked, how could the president authorize one-tenth of the voters to establish a new government? Noting the praise Lincoln received from both wings of his party, the New York Herald quipped, “The art of riding two horses is not confined to the circus.”50

With the fate of emancipation still in some ways in the balance, the “pivotal point of the whole message,” the journalist Whitelaw Reid wrote, was its treatment of slavery. Charles Sumner was thrilled. “He makes emancipation the corner-stone of reconstruction,” he wrote, “and I am ready to accept any system which promises this result.” Because in this respect it rejected the position of conservative Republicans, one Boston newspaper declared that the message announced Lincoln’s “conversion to the radical programme.” Before Lincoln sent his message to Congress, Secretary of the Treasury Chase urged him, unsuccessfully, to drop the allusions to apprenticeship (which he considered “virtual reenslavement”) and a possible court ruling revoking the proclamation, and to modify it to allow “loyal citizens” to vote. But black suffrage had not yet become a major public issue. More important to most Radicals was that the idea of restoring the prewar Union—a Union with slavery—was dead.51

It would be a mistake to see Lincoln’s message as announcing a blueprint for Reconstruction from which he was determined never to deviate. The reporter Noah Brooks, who spoke regularly with the president, described the program as an outline, not a “finality.” Indeed, he wrote, “it is obvious that we are at sea in this whole matter of Reconstruction.” Rather than a design for