Bulter's radical reconstruction- what happens to US parties

In the weeks after Lincoln's murder the Congress elected in 1864 might well be in a radical mood and inclinded t0 support a radical President if he recalled it


Depends what you mean by "Radical".

If you mean willing to give Freedmen the vote without a literacy test, then maybe. But anything more than that is fantasy.

Imho, this word "Radical" can be very misleading. Most of the so called "Radical" republicans were plain simple 19th Century Liberals, ie the last people likely to go in for mass property confiscation or other vengeful measures. Note that Jefferson Davis was set free in 1867, when the Radicals were at the height of their ascendancy. Some Republicans were willing to temporarily disfranchise Rebs, but there was no appetite for treason trials.

Note also that even in the immediate aftermath of the assassination, General Grant firmly set his face against the arrest of Lee and other Confederate generals. If he can keep calm, so probably can most of Congress.
 
Anyway, Butler was wilier than that. Most likely he uses the threat of confiscation to secure the co-operation of planters in passing impartial suffrage laws, and preventing any Black Codes, etc. They still get pardoned in the end, but he drives a harder bargain than Johnson, and the pardons aren't issued until their stses have adopted acceptable constitutioins.

Exactly. Butler was a poor military commander, but a canny politician.
 
Exactly. Butler was a poor military commander, but a canny politician.


And he'd have one thing going for him.

The Confederates themselves had built him up into the ultimate bogeyman, the embodiment of all that was evil about the **** Yankees.

So any threats he made would be believed. Expect the Southern State governments to be much better behaved after six months under him than after a similar period under the obliging Johnson. Whether they stay well-behaved after he leaves the stage is of course another matter, but Reconstruction will get off to a deceptively easy start.
 
The key point is that the old Southern governments would NOT be reinstated as they were under Johnson


Which is all very interesting, short term, but doesn't make a blind bit of difference in the long run.

You can play about changing Presidents and tinkering with Presidential Reconstruction until the cows come home, but at the end of the day one basic fact always remains. The Union Army is demobilising back to peacetime levels, which means it will soon be too small to police the South in any effective way. Iirc by the mid 70s it was down to about 27,000 men, most of whom were needed out west, and only about 3,000 were available for occupation duties in Dixie. OTOH there were probably well over half a million Confederate veterans around, and even deducting those who came home badly maimed or sick, there'll still be several hundred thousand - too many to execute and too many to ignore.

So in the end any Southern regime, in order to be stable, has to be one the ex-Rebs feel they can live with. Unless you know some way of getting Congress to pay for an army of wartime dimensions, long after the war is over, then what can be done for the Freedmen is going to be pretty limited. In particular I feel very sorry for any Negro who tries to sit on land belonging to Cunnel Yancey or Marse Buford. I really wouldn't want to insure his life.

Andrew Johnson was personally unloveable and showed bad judgement in the short run, but on a slightly longer view he was more realistic than his opponents.
 
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