Southern Reconstruction Plans - Essay Example

?Reconstruction Plans The basic idea behind southern reconstruction was to integrate the South back into the Union, while rebuilding the economy and providing political and sociological frameworks for the new society. Lincoln's plan included a 10 percent idea, where a state could rejoin the Union once 10 percent of the voters in the state pledged an oath of allegiance to the United States. These voters would then have the ability to elect new representatives and form a government. Under this deal, everyone in the South, with the exception of high-ranking military officials, would receive pardons for their crimes. Lincoln promised these people private property rights, although they could not use slaves on this property. Many view this as a method of ending the war, rather than rebuilding the South, since so many issues were not touched upon thoroughly. This failure to set up long term goals definitely cost the country in the future. Johnson, on the other hand, wanted to limit the federal government's role in rebuilding the South and instead wanted to give the states the power to rebuild themselves. He believed in strong state governments, rather than federal policies that would blanket the entire area. At the same time, Johnson wanted to rebuild the South in a hurry, which also avoided any long-term goals. A major issue was that Johnson pardoned countless landowners who had been major advocates of the Confederate army and did not provide any protection for former slaves. This prevented blacks from becoming equal members of society, since the landowners were able to use their wealth to gain political power in the South. Congress then made three Constitutional amendments that were aimed at helping the reconstruction effort. These amendments abolished slavery, granted American citizenship to everyone born within the country and provided civil rights for these individuals. Later on, the 15th Amendment made it illegal to deny an individual’s right to vote based on skin color or race, although this did not give anyone the right to vote. This means that the states would still have control over their own elections and could still prohibit certain individuals from voting. Many blacks were prohibited from voting, which eliminated the chance of African-Americans gaining any political power. In hindsight, many different things could have been done to maximize the reconstruction effort. For starters, Lincoln needed to gain more support in the South before his policies could have a lasting effect on society. Lincoln’s short-term goal was to quickly unite the country, but he did not look at the long-term picture as much as he should have. By only asking 10 percent of voters in a state to pledge allegiance to the country, he was leaving a great deal of dissention to work against him later. The majority of the people in those states did not even want to rejoin the Union, which made working with them very difficult. In order to properly build the South, Lincoln needed to gain public support in the region before bringing those states into the Union. The first goal of the president at that time should have been a public relations effort to gain support throughout the South, in an effort to convince these states that joining the Union was the best course of action. To test this popularity, he could hold a referendum in the States asking if the voters want to join. This might have taken 10-15 years, but it could have created a more stable South in the end. In addition, there is no reason to believe that just because someone takes an oath, that the person would be loyal. Voting numbers would be a much better gauge than an individual pledging allegiance to a country that he may or may not believe in. Johnson’s ideologies created many problems in the South because he wanted the federal government to wash its hands of the problem. At that time, the South needed strong central leadership because its economy was in such bad shape. Assuming that Lincoln’s plan had already gone through and the Southern states had been forced into the Union, a leader in Johnson’s situation should have taken a more hand’s on approach. Johnson’s long-term goals were to provide the states with more power, but he tried to achieve these goals too quickly. Johnson should not have given pardons to individuals who supported the Confederate cause, since many of these individuals held all of the wealth in the South. By giving up this power, Johnson prolonged the poverty that was running rampant in the South, since the only people who had money left were able to control politics. If Johnson had appointed leaders from his own party to run these states until a proper democracy could be implemented, he might have been able to avoid some of these problems. Congress’s major mistake was not granting enough rights to freed slaves. By allowing the states to govern themselves, Congress provided these locations with the ability to discriminate. Even though discrimination was technically illegal, loopholes were provided that allowed the lawmakers to control elections. The white elite in the South then used these loopholes to prevent blacks from taking an active role in politics. A better idea would be to grant concrete rights to these individuals, rather than wording the Constitutional amendments that were made in an open-ended manner. This was a time where freed slaves needed protection and Congress failed to provide it. Looking back at this period of history, it is easy to see where lawmakers went wrong. More government involvement was needed because too many policies were left up to the interpretation of the states, which were governed by supporters of the Confederacy. This would be like the United States leaving Afghanistan and allowing the Taliban to regain its power immediately. In order for the South to become a better place to live, the federal government should have looked at the long-term effects, rather than the short-term reconstruction. If the long-term goal was to include African-Americans in the voting and political process, specific laws needed to be made at a federal level protecting those rights. From an economic standpoint, minimum wage and working environment laws should have been implemented to prevent the elite farmers in the South from gaining all of the power. Perhaps a form of affirmative action would have sped up the equalization process in the South during those years. Although African-Americans had been freed, they were not given a fair chance to succeed in society because of the lack of specific laws protecting their rights. Over the past 150 years, we have seen these issues come up repeatedly and they do not appear to be going away anytime soon. Read More