Was Abraham Lincoln inclined to punish the Confederacy for the Civil War?
As he looked toward the Civil War's end, President Abraham Lincoln was disposed to be lenient to the former Confederate states. As he declared in his Second Inaugural Address in 1865, he was eager to "bind up the nation's wounds," and to restore the Confederate states to the Union as quickly as possible. Lincoln's plan was to admit the states of the Confederacy back into the Union when ten percent of the citizens swore an oath of allegiance to the United States.
Many Republicans in Congress believed that Lincoln's plan was too lenient, and they passed the Wade-Davis bill. This law would have required fifty percent of voters to swear allegiance for a Confederate state to rejoin the Union, but Lincoln vetoed the legislation. In April 1865, only days after General Lee's surrender, Lincoln was assassinated, leading to one of American history's great "What if...?" questions. Had Lincoln survived, would he have adhered to his policy of leniency toward the Confederacy? Would he have fared better than his successor, Andrew Johnson?