President Abraham Lincoln's Ten Percent Plan For Reconstruction In The United States

President Abraham Lincoln believed it was the job of the president to take control and impose his authority in order to reunite the nation and preserve the union, and he regarded every measure needed to achieve that as lawful1. Thus said, he devised a plan for Reconstruction that would help get the South readmitted into the union as soon as possible. It was called the Ten Percent plan because it only required ten percent of the voters in each state to take an oath of loyalty to the union in order to establish state governments. Louisiana, Arkansas, and Tennessee reestablished state governments in accordance to the Ten Percent Plan in 1864. Despite this the Radical Republicans thought that the plan was too lenient and they feared the Southern aristocracy would come back into power. In response to the Ten Percent plan the Radical Republicans came up with the Wade-Davis Bill. …show more content…
When a majority (not Lincoln's 10 percent) of the white males of the state pledged their allegiance to the convention, whose delegates were to be elected by those who would swear (through the so-called Ironclad oath) that they had never borne arms against the United States-another departure from Lincoln's plan. The new state constitutions would have to abolish slavery, disenfranchise Confederate civil and military leaders, and repudiate debts accumulated by the state governments during the war. After a state had met these conditions, Congress would readmit it to the Union. Like the President's proposal, the Wade-Davis Bill left up to the states the question of political rights for blacks. (Brinkley 2012,