The present paper is focused on the issues of Reconstruction that took place in the USA after the Civil War and different approaches different government bodies took to it. At the beginning of beginning of analyzing Restoration plans it is necessary to define what in fact Restoration was – what it was caused by and what it was necessary for.
Restoration was a measure taken by the government after the devastating war between the North and the South that caused the splitting of the nation, huge losses of manpower, resources, destroyed infrastructure etc. The country was lying in ruins, people were either killed on the battlefields or starved to death because of lack of resources the war absorbed from the nation.
Reconstruction encompassed three major initiatives: restoration of the Union, transformation of southern society, and enactment of progressive legislation favoring the rights of freed slaves (Reconstruction).
The President of the United States at that time was Abraham Lincoln who stipulated the main points that had to be taken into consideration in the course of the Restoration process. The main issue he was focused at was the restoration of political stability within the country – the reasons for the war, as everyone knows, were complex and included much political incongruence between the regions of the country. So there was a clear necessity to unite the nation again under homogeneous government, pursuing a homogeneous goal in the state’s functioning.
In the course of implementation of Restoration in the state’s policy there appeared a discrepancy in opinions between the President and the Congress – Lincoln adopted his ten-percent plan that consisted in re-including the rebellious states into the United States in exchange of the expression of loyalty towards the US by 10% of the state’s electorate (Restoration). Lincoln realized that there should be some loyalty towards the defeated states in order not to cause strong resistance, so he was for softer measures.
The Congress, on the contrary, insisted on increasing the percentage of people who had to express their loyalty up to 50% stating that only this way the country would be able to ensure its security from a potential threat of a new war:
The Radicals therefore attempted to reshape the South by enfranchising blacks, putting Unionist and pro-Republican governments in southern legislatures, and punishing southern planter elites, whom many politicians held responsible for the Civil War (Reconstruction).
However, the point in which both the President and the Congress achieved full consensus was the need for the Southern states to abolish slavery and to ensure the provision of civil rights to black people, seeing the future of progress and democracy in this measure. A set of laws were adopted in order to fix the abolition of slavery constitutionally, to ensure the provision and protection of the fundamental human rights to blacks and to protect them against discrimination (Reconstruction).
From the point of view of efficiency it seems that the Congress’s plan is more successful in the provision of safety and stability within the nation because of the overall moods in the South that were not soothed by the victory of the North and only forced the states to obey, but did not bring the change in the Southerners’ moral perception of blacks and their place in the American society. However, Lincoln’s loyalty ensured that there would be no protest within the Southern states in response to such indisputably radical demands, thus ensuring the peaceful solution to the conflict that still existed between the South and the North. Thus, the plan of Lincoln seems more successful and appropriate for the time of the Reconstruction when the moods were still hostile and the risk to unleash another conflict existed.
Works Cited
Reconstruction, 2009. Web.