The Reconstruction process began years before Confederate defeat. In fact, President Lincoln took steps to prepare for Reconstruction as early as 1862. In that year, Lincoln proclaimed emancipation for bondsmen and -women in the District of Columbia and, after issuing his Preliminary Emancipation Proclamation in September 1862, on January 1, 1863, he issued the Final Emancipation Proclamation. This order only freed blacks then in Confederate-held territory, but nonetheless signified a radical first step in the experiment that became Reconstruction, suggesting civil and political equality for people of color and allowing blacks into the military to fight alongside white soldiers. By war’s end, roughly 200,000 black soldiers and sailors wore the Union blue. Historian Eric Foner notes that African-Americans who served in the army and navy during the Civil War composed a leadership class during Reconstruction. They held at least 129 public offices in the postwar years.20

Foner also observes that the Final Emancipation Proclamation created a turning point in the course of the Civil War, but it did not immediately address the divisive question of Reconstruction. Rather, the Proclamation created more problems, as it ensured that after the war, the political social structure of the South would be fundamentally and dramatically altered forever. The questions thus raised included who would mandate the changes in Southern society and what shape they would take. What would be the role of blacks in Southern society once they became freedmen?

Lincoln took the first step in reconstructing the Union when, on December 8, 1863, he issued the Proclamation of Amnesty and Reconstruction. He declared that insurgents who agreed to swear an oath of loyalty to the U.S. Constitution and who would accept emancipation would receive full pardons. Once ten percent of a rebellious state’s 1860 electorate had agreed to these terms and took the oath, Lincoln specified, the state could reenter the U.S. after reestablishing a republican government. This offer of amnesty excluded certain classes of individuals, including Confederate military officers, high government officials, and members of the U.S. government or military who had resigned their posts to aid the slaveholders’ rebellion. Lincoln proposed a conservative Reconstruction plan, hopeful that it would attract moderate former Southern Whigs and make the process of restoration occur smoothly. The president purposely avoided the question of black suffrage in his so-called Ten Percent Plan, hoping that allowing Southern Whigs to oversee the process of transitioning from a slave economy to a free-labor economy would serve as a viable concession to Southern Unionists. Although the provisions of Lincoln’s Proclamation of Amnesty never came to pass, it set a precedent that the Executive branch of government, not the Legislative branch, would regulate and direct the Reconstruction process.

The Radical Republicans, the wing of the president’s party that had shunned compromise with the Confederates before secession and that pressed for emancipation following Fort Sumter, considered Lincoln’s Ten Percent Plan too accommodating and lenient. Determined to reorganize the South and implement black equality, in July 1864 two leading Radicals, Senator Benjamin F. Wade of Ohio and Representative Henry Winter Davis of Maryland, passed a congressional bill as an alternate to the president’s Ten Percent Plan.

Under the terms of the Wade-Davis Bill, Reconstruction and the reintegration of the rebellious states into the Union required that once hostilities ceased in a state, a majority (not ten percent) of the state’s citizens take a loyalty oath. Those persons who could attest to past and future loyalty to the Union could then elect a convention to amend their state constitutions to abolish slavery, disfranchise Confederate military officers, and declare their state’s war debt invalid. Lincoln, determined to lead the Reconstruction process and to provide a smooth transition for willing former Confederate states to rejoin the Union, pocket vetoed the Wade-Davis plan on July 8, 1864. He hoped that the restoration (including the abolition of slavery) of Union governments in Louisiana and Arkansas under his Ten Percent Plan would establish a model for reconstructing the remaining Confederate states, and also that a Constitutional amendment would end slavery permanently. Lincoln’s veto exacerbated the growing rift between Congressional Radicals and the president. Responding to his pocket veto, on August 5, 1864, Wade and Davis published a manifesto in the New York Tribune, condemning Lincoln for overstepping his authority regarding Reconstruction. Wade and Davis insisted that Reconstruction was the province of the Legislative branch, a concern solely within the scope of congressional authority. They implored the president to execute and obey, not make laws. Yet, as Foner notes, “Despite the harsh language of the Wade-Davis Manifesto, these events did not signal an irreparable breach between Lincoln and the Radical Republicans. The points of unity among Republicans, especially their commitment to winning the war and rendering emancipation unassailable, were far greater than their differences.”21

In assessing the rival wartime Reconstruction plans, historian James M. McPherson notes that in reality, among the Rebel states only Tennessee could have met the prerequisites set by Wade and Davis. According to McPherson, “The real purpose of the Wade-Davis bill was to postpone Reconstruction until the war was won. Lincoln, by contrast, wanted to initiate Reconstruction immediately in order to convert lukewarm Confederates into Unionists as a means of winning the war.”22