Page:Cambridge Modern History Volume 7.djvu/657

 1863-s] Theories of Reconstruction. 625 opinion between the successive Presidents, Lincoln and Johnson, on one side and the majority of the Northern political leaders on the other, as to the objects to be aimed at in the reconstruction of the South, and the proper means for carrying it out. When the war closed, three lines of policy were advocated, each, as was inevitable, claiming to be based on the only true interpretation of the Constitution. Those who, like Lincoln and Johnson, held the extreme view on the side of leniency, maintained that secession had no legal effect beyond incapacitating those persons participating in it from performing their constitutional duties ; that this incapacity could be removed by executive pardon ; and that, so soon as this was accom- plished, State governments could be re-established, and could resume the normal functions of States in a Federation. The extreme view, urged on the other side by Sumner and Stevens, was that secession had had the effect of destroying the Southern States, so that Congress could do whatever it pleased with the territory formerly occupied by them. A third and intermediate view was adopted by the majority of Republican leaders. Those who held it maintained that secession had not destroyed the statehood of the Southern commonwealths, but had caused them to forfeit their rights as States under the Constitution ; and that it appertained to Congress in its discretion to restore these rights under the clause of the Constitution guaranteeing to the States a republican form of government. Constitutional theory was framed, as usual, in accordance with the temperament and desires of the persons who proclaimed it. Lincoln, a man of magnanimous character, believed that a policy of amnesty, with a prompt return to civil government, would be far more likely to secure co-operation from the defeated insurgents than a con- tinuance of war methods. Accordingly, in his proclamation of December, 1863, he offered amnesty, on condition of taking an oath to support the Constitution and all laws or proclamations concerning Emancipation, to all persons except those who had held high office under the Confederacy or who by leaving the Federal service to join the South had already violated an oath to support the Constitution. As soon as the oath should have been taken by a number of persons in any State equal to one-tenth of the voters of 1860, a new government might be formed ; and, in accordance with Lincoln's plans, new governments were set up in Virginia, Tennessee, Louisiana, and Arkansas. After the assassination of Lincoln, his policy was continued by his successor, Andrew Johnson, an honest, self-educated Union Democrat of Tennessee, with much crude ability, but without tact or refinement, and cursed by an ungovernable temper. Having begun his term with a violent denunciation of "rebels" as traitors who ought to be hanged, he surprised all parties by adhering closely to Lincoln's plans. On May 29, 1865, he issued a new procla- mation, resembling Lincoln's in all essentials, but excluding a larger c. M. H. vii. en. xx. 40