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By Root 1717 0

the postwar South, the Ten Percent Plan, in the words of the Philadelphia Inquirer, was “a war measure,” a strategy to encourage southern Unionism and make emancipation secure. Denying participation to both blacks and the disloyal majority of whites, the governments established under Lincoln’s proclamation would clearly lack full legitimacy. The New York World called these governments inverted pyramids in which a few thousand voters would determine the destiny of entire states. Fourteen hundred men, it pointed out, could establish a government in Florida and send two senators to Washington. Lincoln offered no explanation of how he had arrived at the 10 percent figure, although it clearly suggested a desire to organize new governments quickly. But in strictly military terms, for 10 percent of the voters of 1860 to pledge loyalty to the Union and detach their state from the Confederacy would constitute a significant victory. The adoption of state constitutions that abolished slavery, moreover, would counteract doubts about the legal foundations of emancipation and its fate if Democrats captured the presidency in 1864. As a military order, the Emancipation Proclamation could be rescinded by a future president. It was impossible, Lincoln reminded Andrew Johnson, to know “who is next to occupy the position I now hold, nor what he will do.”52

The decision to establish loyal governments that abolished slavery had unanticipated consequences, producing serious divisions among southern Unionists and allowing long-excluded groups to demand a share of political power. In both the border states and the Confederate South, Lincoln had to navigate complex political factionalism while promoting the goal of state-enacted emancipation. In doing so, he would allow Reconstruction in some states to diverge in significant ways from the Ten Percent Plan. Despite his stated preference for gradualism, he ended up supporting those who favored immediate emancipation. By the end of the war, with Lincoln’s strong backing, slavery had been abolished by state action in the border states of Maryland, Missouri, and West Virginia, and in occupied Arkansas, Louisiana, Tennessee, and Virginia. The willingness to abolish slavery, however, did not necessarily imply a willingness on the part of southern Unionists to grant former slaves equality before the law or recognize them as members of the postwar body politic.

III

THE BORDER STATES that remained unaffected by the Emancipation Proclamation and Ten Percent Plan were the first to reveal the consequences of tying Reconstruction to abolition. As the editor of the New York Times, Henry J. Raymond, observed in a speech in Delaware in November 1863, the presence of the Union army had already made “abolition a practical question of local politics” there. But the results varied dramatically from state to state. Delaware and Kentucky remained under the control of conservative Unionists who clung to the dying body of slavery. “Kentucky loyalty,” observed Jesse W. Fell, Lincoln’s longtime friend from Illinois, “means loyalty to slavery.” Even though the recruitment of black soldiers undermined slavery in these two states, it survived as a legal institution until the ratification of the Thirteenth Amendment in December 1865.53

Elsewhere in the border, by contrast, new groups came to power eager to overthrow slavery and revolutionize state politics. West Virginia, which had entered the Union in 1863 committed to gradual abolition, decreed immediate emancipation by statute early in 1865. But instead of enfranchising African-Americans (a tiny percentage of the state’s population), Republicans sought to retain their hold on power by requiring voters to take an oath of past loyalty to the Union, thus disqualifying thousands of Confederate sympathizers. The same pattern held true in the other border and Upper South states that abolished slavery.54

In 1864, emancipation came to Maryland, a state divided between plantation counties that dominated the government thanks to a gerrymandered legislature, and a large region of