Word: stampp
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...broad terms, Stampp sees both men acting in consonance with the political convictions they held before they rose to power. Lincoln, the Whig, was always a Unionist, never an integrationist. Before the war he had opposed slavery, but he had wanted to colonize the slaves in Africa rather than to liberate them in America. He never conceived of Negroes as equal, fully capable participants in American society. His greatest concern after the war was indeed to bind up the nation's wounds through clemency for the South. he also intended to revive Whig strength by restoring the political prominence...
Andrew Johnson, argues Stampp, was a class-conscious Jacksonian. He nourished the self-made man's hate of the aristocratic planter class. This gave him a superficial bond of allegiance to the Radicals. But Johnson wished to thrust the poor Southern whites upward, and cared not a whit for the Negroes. When Johnson's aim became clear, many Republicans thought they had been betrayed and turned against him. Johnson's difficulties with the Congress multiplied when, through his ineptness, the planter class, not the yoemanry, gained ascendence in the Southern states. The aristocrats proceeded to enact the Black Codes, stripping...
...Negro's lot would have been only slightly improved under Lincoln or Johnson, was it still inevitable that he would profit little from Reconstruction? In discussing the program of the Radicals, Stampp answers, No, well, maybe. To a small core of Republicans the war would not be won without social and political revolution in the South. Their goal was to reverse the Black Codes passed under Johnson, establish military government, and give the Negro civil and political rights. But when the Union armies departed, as ultimately they had to, the Negro would not be able to maintain his newly acquired...
...Thus, Stampp contends, the crucial issues in the Radicals' plan were land reform and a controversial experiment in social engineering, the Freedman's Bureau. Land reform would give the Negro economic resources, and the Freedman's Bureau would cultivate a spirit of self-sufficiency. But reform was defeated and the Bureau proved short-lived. Nonetheless it is doubtful that even these measures could have prevented the subjugation of the freed slaves. Stampp does not convince me that when the influence of the Federal government was gone, the Negroes, whatever their gains economically and educationally, could have sustained themselves. The inevitable...
...Still, Stampp is not of the might-have-been school. He wants to reorient our view toward a crucial and misunderstood era in history. And he succeeds. For he persuasively demonstrates that the pains of Reconstruction were only a symptom, not a cause, of the American dilemma, that the Radical Republicans were the precursors both of modern liberals and of Gilded Age politicos...