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The South and Congress's Reconstruction Policy, 1866–67
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 16 January 2009
Extract
If the Civil War had erupted in 1861 because the two sections had failed to produce a formula capable of reconciling their many differences, then it would not be inaccurate to assert that in 1865, four years later, that long-sought basis of settlement was even more remote and unlikely. Yet the search for mutually acceptable terms of agreement continued. As practitioners of the art of negotiation and reconciling differences, Reconstruction politicians on both sides aimed at reunion and talked of compromise. One hundred years later, many revisionist historians also assumed that compromise solutions were available after the war. Somehow both politicians and historians manifested a conventional response in presuming that bargain and negotiation leading to settlement were applicable and meaningful approaches to the problem of reconstruction. Yet perhaps the underlying reality was such that this traditional political approach was likely to be ineffective and quite inappropriate. Perhaps the interests and attitudes of the groups in power within each section were irreconcilable short of the capitulation or extinction of one of them. In that case political realism would have required that attempts to conciliate, moderate or compromise should be rejected, and other methods of achieving political goals tried and experimented with.
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- Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1971
References
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3 In addition to the two separate initiatives mentioned above there were also other indicators of a restlessness in some quarters in the South. The Mobile Register, the Memphis Bulletin and the Selma Times broke ranks and followed the lead of the Northern Democratic Chicago Times by advocating Southern implementation of a qualified Negro suffrage. Also the well-worn formula of universal amnesty and universal suffrage was reconsidered as a possible method of reconciliation; a suggestion of Horace Greeley's, it had been out of consideration since the early months of 1866, when Congress rejected it during its initial deliberations to produce a counter to the President's programme.
1 Chase saw Andrew Johnson previously in November and suggested he urge the South to ratify the amendment or, failing that, that he modify sections II and III of it so as to substitute universal suffrage and universal amnesty.
2 The sequence of events in this initial attempt can be followed very well in a series of letters to and from Swayne located in the Chase MSS at the Library of Congress.
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