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The Politics of Reconstruction 1863-1867

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This is a masterful analysis of the Reconstruction Act of 1867, its predecessor civil war legislation, and how all of it came into being. This legislation was some of the most influential and contentious ever passed by Congress. It essentially set about to punish the American South for secession and to ensure that the Republican Party gained a semi-permanent hegemony as a result of victory in the civil war.

Between 1863--when Lincoln announced the Emancipation Proclamation--and 1867--when Congress passed its most sweeping Reconstruction Act--the nation was reshaped through these actions. They proved the culmination of a series of laws and constitutional amendments that ended slavery and granted citizenship to former slaves, confiscated Confederate property, and set a strident set of requirements for readmission of the Southern states to the Union. To explore this period Donald employs sophisticated statistical analysis and finds that Republicans usually were radical in their perspectives when they could afford to be, and more moderate when their political base was weakest.

In essence, David Donald found that even if a northern congressman opposed slavery the mandate from his electoral jurisdiction controlled his ability to espouse antislavery ideals. "The more solid his support the more radical he often was" (pp. 6-7), Donald concluded. Consequently, men such as Thaddeus Stevens or Charles Sumner, both of whom had the avid support of their constituents, could dare to be radical.

On the other hand, in spite of his personal antipathy toward slavery, Abraham Lincoln was at first moderate in his public statements because he could not afford to compromise his questionable popular base of support as president. Lincoln recognized that his administration's ability to hold the nation together in the wake of Southern secession was dependent upon his walking a narrow path of acceptability to a coalition of factions with sometimes divergent beliefs about the slavery issue. Without sufficient support for his leadership his position as president would be undermined and he would never be able to accomplish anything worthwhile. In spite of personal desires, it was a question for Lincoln of first things first.

Accordingly, only when the tenor of the nation shifted did Lincoln act to abolish slavery by executive order. At a fundamental level this pragmatism represents the essence of American politics and David Donald acknowledges its central place in the history of the nation's political system.

I purchased this while doing some family history research just to get a feel for post civil war society and politics. A good read for any student of civil war history.