Lincoln’s Imperialistic Reconstruction of the South

The North did not abandon the battle for Reconstruction. The goal of Reconstruction was to reunify the South to the federal government and to deny the political rights of all Southern men (since the right to vote for all women was already denied), who had fought against them during the War of Northern Aggression. Once their goals were met, they promptly left the South to pursue their Republican Party agenda of imperialism.

On April 12, 1865, General Robert E. Lee surrendered the Army of Northern Virginia to General Ulysses S. Grant at Appomattox Court House, Virginia. The War for Southern Independence was officially over. The ragged and exhausted Confederate soldiers would start their long journeys back to their war-torn homes and starving families. The war was over and it was time for the victors to claim their prize, rewrite history, and to commence with the Reconstruction.

First and foremost, Abraham Lincoln’s goal in fighting the war was clarified to Horace Greely when he said, “My paramount object in this struggle is to save the Union, and is not either to save or destroy slavery.”¹ In order to “save the Union” to the extent that Lincoln desired, he choose to destroy slavery. “If I could save the Union without freeing any slave I would do it, and if I could save it by freeing all the slaves I would do it; and if I could save it by freeing some and leaving others alone I would also do that.”² Reconstruction was just an extension of his ultimate goal, “to preserve the Union.”

To be readmitted to the Union, each Southern State, which had legally seceded from the federal government in 1861, needed “10 percent of the number of [their] state’s citizens eligible to vote in 1860 [to swear] an oath of allegiance to the Union.”³ This was known as Lincoln’s 10 Percent Plan. Since all women, white or black, were ineligible to vote and the Northern government would restrict all Confederate men who had fought against the Union and central government not to vote, the North freed hundreds of thousands of previously unregistered voters—the slaves. If Lincoln’s “10 Percent Plan” was going to work, he had no choice but to free the slaves.

Good to his word, Abraham Lincoln and the Republican Party did what they needed to “preserve the Union,” by freeing all the slaves with the 13th Amendment. Part of the readmission requirements for the Confederate States was to ratify the amendment. Now with the black males free from their chains of slavery, the North set out to quickly register them for the Republican vote. These “Union Leagues” registering the ex-slaves would take tax payer’s money from the citizens of all political parties to only register only Republican voters.⁴ In true political fashion, these federal agents promised the ex-slaves many things, “including the property of white Southerners;” but the ex-slaves would be forced to register only for the Republican Party, and no other.⁵ Clearly, during the Reconstruction period, a vote opposing the Republican Party would only lead to punishment for both the white or black man.  

The federal agents in the war-torn South would focus their energies most on voter registration, over the other necessities of life. There would be others who came to the South to help the ex-slaves integrate into society, like missionaries, abolitionists, and other freedmen; however, “the primary concern of the Party of Lincoln was to get these ex-slaves registered to vote Republican, not to educate them, feed them, or help them find employment.”⁶ The purpose of Reconstruction was intended to strengthen the central government and its power, not civil rights.

If the war was for civil rights or social equality, then the North should have extended the right to vote to everyone, to include women white or black, but they did not. “Voters in Ohio, Michigan, Minnesota, and Kansas refused to extend the right to vote to blacks in 1867 and 1868.”⁷ It would not be until 1920 that women would be given the right to vote in America. The North simply wanted 10 percent of the population to vote their Southern State back into the Union as quickly as possible, so that they could push forward with their imperialistic agenda. The Republican Party was not in the South to help race relations, but did more to create a divide between the white and black races.

The educational programs provided by the federal government and the teaching of the Northerner’s view (or revisionist history) created the hostile racial tensions in the South. One Yankee myth was that the war was fought due to Southern reluctance to free their slaves; and that this reluctance motivated the North to invade the South for humanitarian reasons. The educated Southerner knew that slavery was dying gradually and would soon end in the South as it had in other nations before the War Between the States. Jefferson Davis commented on this fallacy by saying:

War was not necessary to the abolition of slavery. Years before the agitation began at the North and the menacing acts to the institution, there was a growing feeling all over the South for its abolition. But the abolitionists of the North, both by publications and speech, cemented the South and crushed the feeling in favor of emancipation. Slavery could have been blotted out without the sacrifice of brave men and without the strain which revolution always makes upon established forms of government. I see it stated that I uttered the sentiment, or indorsed it, that “slavery is the corner stone of the Confederacy.” That is not my utterance.”⁸

The North had to justify their war of imperialism and invasion into the sovereign Southern States. If Southerners were not indoctrinated to believe that they were at fault and sinners of an immoral act, they might attempt to stop the North from committing their political plundering of their States. Not only had the North won the war to preserve the Union, after the war they had a wonderful opportunity to mold Southern state Constitution’s through their rule of puppet military governments. The seeds of modern day waste, fraud, and abuse of public funds and resources can be traced back to the Republican operations in the South during this period. Their first plundering came in the form of expanded budgets of the state and local governments.⁹ These acts would steal money right out of the tax payer’s pockets.

The expenses of the governments were largely increased; offices were multiplied in all departments; salaries were made more worthy of the now regenerated and progressive commonwealths; costly enterprises were undertaken….The result of all this was promptly seen in an expansion of state debts and an increase of taxation that to the property-owning class were appalling and ruinous.¹⁰

One example of their destructive programs of consumption can be seen in the Louisiana legislature. While the limited government-minded Jeffersonians were running the state legislature before the war, it would only cost the tax payers about $100,000 a year to run; however, after the war, the Republicans managed to raise the costs over $1 million, “because of lavish spending on lunches, alcohol, women’s apparel, and even coffins.”¹¹

 

 

At this time, no taxpayer was safe from Northern plunder, especially the taxes on property rights. Property taxes were increased to incredible amounts, so that the taxman could confiscate Southern landowner’s property for “unpaid taxes” with ease.¹² This would make it easy for the government to secure properties to push forward with their internal improvement projects to build roads, canals, and railroads.

The Republican Party would institute government subsidies that would benefit the corporations and lead to the same “internal improvement” projects that were outlawed by Southern state Constitutions before the war. Ruinous mismanagement of government funds for internal improvement projects like those that had failed in the 1830s throughout the nation, would indebt the South further. Railroad subsides alone would generate tremendous debt for the ex-Confederate states in the sum of $132 million.¹³ Naturally, these projects would be mismanaged and would be subject to waste, fraud, and abuse of tax payer’s money.

To further perpetuate misinformation and the Yankee myths that they were right in their actions during the Reconstruction period, they would destroy freedom of speech and the 1st Amendment. Just as the Adams Administration destroyed the people’s rights to free speech with the Sedition Act of 1798, the Republican Party would resurrect a similar measure designed to prohibit “any false, scandalous, and malicious writing against the federal government”¹⁴ or its operations in South. The Republicans would subsidize newspapers to promote their corrupt system and censor the truth from the public.¹⁵ Republican newspaper monopolies would surface in many towns throughout the South, which would in effect be an extension “Lincoln’s policy of censoring or shutting down opposition newspapers in the North during the war.”¹⁶  

With no Confederate army or white voters available to oppose the corporate welfare programs, government expansions, increased budgets, and tyrannical rule of the federal government in the South, these programs and laws would be easily enforced. By the 1870s, the North had molded the Southern States into their own image by removing their laws against corporate welfare programs and to abolish slavery (to free up the vote). The South had been forced back into the Union; and through propaganda and brain washing, the falsehood that a state had no right to secede from the Union had been solidified into the minds of rising generation of Southerners. They had been indoctrinated to believe that the war was their fault; and that the war would not have occurred, if it was not for their immoral acts of slavery. Southerners were enslaved to the federal government through massive debt. The deteriorating race relations were a result of Republican policies to preserve the Union; thus, once their mission to reunify the nation was complete, the Reconstruction ended and they left the South. There was no abandonment of the Reconstruction policies or programs, the mission was simply over.

The modern student of American history, who reads the Republican Party’s propaganda from the Reconstruction period justifying their actions for the war and subsequent clean up in the South, will easily mistake the Republican Party’s departure from the South without ensuring racial equality as an abandonment of the Reconstruction. The North did not care about the ex-slave, but simply used them as pawns to guarantee their votes, in order to reconstruct the South in their own image. The North had to suppress the vote of the white ex-Confederates to be successful. The federal government has maintained this façade through control of the national education program and the media. The corruption and plundering that befell the South after the war, which was aided by the ex-slave’s votes and their manipulation, would be the factor that generated Southern hostility towards the black race.¹⁷ “Had the Republican Party not been so determined to recruit the ex-slaves as political pawns in its crusade to loot the taxpayers of the South, the Ku Klux Klan might never even have come into existence.”¹⁸

Notes

1.       Crocker III, H. W. "The Politically Incorrect Guide to the Civil War." 6-7. Washington D.C.: Regnery Publishing, Inc., 2008.

2.       Ibid.

3.       Texas Politics, Reconstruction and the Civil War Amendments: Readmission Requirements. n.d. http://www.laits.utexas.edu/txp_media/html/cons/features/0206_01/slide2.html (accessed November 19, 2013).

4.       DiLorenzo, Thomas J. "The Real Lincoln." 209. New York: Three Rivers Press, 2002.

5.       Ibid.

6.       Ibid.

7.       Ibid, p. 210.

8.       Kennedy, James Ronald and Kennedy, Walter Donald. "Was Jefferson Davis Right?" 141. Gretna: Pelican Publishing Company, Inc., 1998.

9.       DiLorenzo, The Real Lincoln, p. 211.

10.   Ibid, p. 212.

11.   Ibid, pg. 215-216.

12.   Ibid, p. 216.

13.   Ibid, p. 213.

14.   Maxfield, M. Richard. "The Real Thomas Jefferson." 198. Washington D.C.: National Center for Constitutional Studies, 1983.

15.   DiLorenzo, The Real Lincoln, p. 217.

16.   Ibid.

17.   Ibid, p. 218.

18.   Ibid.