President Lincoln’s reconstruction is important because it seeks to slowly devolve the old planter politics of the South by offering amnesty to any southerner that would take an oath to the Constitution of the United States. The Proclamation of Amnesty and Reconstruction of 1863 allowed for a smaller margin of Republican Party adherents in Southern politics, which made it possible for a 10% margin to enter politics through presidential authority. This presidential decree allowed for certain individuals in the South to prove their loyalty to the United by taking an oath to the Union. In this oath, Lincoln declared the potential freedom to those Southerners that rejected their loyalty to the Confederacy: “Which shall recognize and …show more content…
these oaths of loyalty would certainly provide a major incentive for defeated southerners to redeem themselves, and to allow themselves the possibility of rebuilding their lives. More so, Lincoln offers this amnesty as a political appeal to expand the Republican Party in the South, and to build an ideological base in which to prevent slavery from ever arising again. Certainly, president Lincoln shows great compassion by allowing Southerners to regain their loyalty to the Union and end the age-old political divisions that had caused the Civil War in the first place. The second portion of granting amnesty to former military personnel and citizens in the South defines how Lincoln then pardoned certain individuals to show a political transition of Union power: