1/18/2024 0 Comments Oath of loyalty reconstructionSeward survived and lived another seven years, serving in Andrew Johnson’s cabinet.".With malice toward none, with charity for all" -Abraham Lincoln, Second Inaugural Address, March 4, 1865 The same night Booth shot Lincoln, Lewis Paine entered the home of Secretary of State William Henry Seward and slashed his throat. John Wilkes Booth formed a conspiracy with others who planned to kill three officers in Lincoln’s cabinet. Federal soldiers found him two weeks later in a tobacco barn near Bowling Green, Virginia, where, upon his refusal to surrender, he was shot to death. Despite this he managed to escape the theater on horseback. The family continues to work to have the conviction overturned to this day.Īfter shooting Lincoln and struggling with a Union officer, Booth jumped from the box onto the stage, breaking his leg in the fall. Mudd had not been a member of the armed services, they could not file suit against the Army. Court of Appeals dismissed the petition, saying that since Dr. In the 1930s his grandson began lobbying presidents and Congress to clear his grandfather’s name, and in 1992, he filed a petition with the Army. Though President Johnson pardoned Mudd, his conviction still stands. Mudd’s conviction helped renew a once popular saying: “His name is Mudd”. Though Mudd professed to know nothing of Booth’s plot to kill President Lincoln, a military tribunal later convicted him as a conspirator in the assassination. Lincoln pocket-vetoed the Wade-Davis Bill by simply ignoring it, He refused to sign the bill.Īfter fleeing Ford’s Theater, John Wilkes Booth stopped by Dr. Anyone who supported the Confederacy financially would lose their entire investment. Under the Wade-Davis bill, southern states had to repudiate their debts, which meant that bonds purchased to support the Confederacy would not be paid back and contractors who supplied goods would not be paid. Congress passed the Wade-Davis Bill, requiring that a majority of white male citizens declare their allegiance and that only those who could take an oath of their past loyalty-the iron-clad oath-could vote or serve in the state constitutional conventions. They insisted that African Americans become voters, assuming that they would join the Republican Party and strengthen the party of emancipation (after freedmen received the vote this assumption was proven correct).Ĭongress insisted that it was responsible for Reconstruction, not the President. They could see in Lincoln’s plan no restructuring of southern society or punishment for treason. The Republican representative from Pennsylvania, Thaddeus Stevens, and his cohort, Senator Charles Sumner of Massachusetts, objected to Lincoln’s plan as too soft on a region that had committed, in their minds, political suicide. Even most of Lincoln’s own party believed that the Ten Percent Plan was too lenient on southerners.īy this point, many northerners wanted to exact a degree of revenge on the South, not make their re-entry into the United States easier. Because Lincoln created the plan during the war, he considered it a part of the war effort and it was meant to offer southerners an easy point of reconciliation. What were the shortcomings in Lincoln’s plan? Lincoln made no mention of the slaves or what he proposed to do with or for the freed slaves after the war. He wanted to encourage the states to stop fighting and rejoin the Union, and he hoped that the simplicity and kindness of his plan would bring an early end to the war. Lincoln insisted that the new state constitutions end slavery, but he offered the freedpeople no protection of rights or hope of voting. The rest of the population, despite the fact that they might have fought in the war or supported the Confederacy, would be granted pardons. In his plan only a few Confederate military officers and office holders-for example generals, cabinet officers, and Confederate President Jefferson Davis-would be excluded from pardons. He proposed that 10 percent of those who had voted in 1860 take an oath of allegiance to the United States, after which they could elect officials, send representatives to Congress, and form state governments. That idea became known as the Ten Percent Plan and it allowed for a great deal of leniency with the southern states. Photograph of Abraham Lincoln during the war
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