Credit should be given to New York Governor Horatio Seymour for immediately seeing through Lincoln’s 10-percent plan of “reconstruction” of the United States, that is, creating loyal States out of conquered provinces. Even the Radical Republicans saw that Lincoln’s plan would only increase executive power while restricting their predatory raids on Southern property.
Lincoln’s Rotten Borough Political Device
“From the night of the October 1863 elections in Ohio and Pennsylvania, Lincoln kept his eyes glued on the coming contest. Two days later he was back in the War Department discussing political prospects.
The first development in the campaign was a Presidential proclamation of amnesty and reconstruction for the Southern States. On December 8 Lincoln announced that any person in the South – with the exception of high-ranking civil and military officers of the Confederacy – might be granted amnesty if he took an oath of allegiance to the United States. Moreover, whenever ten percent of the population of any State had taken the oath, they might hold elections and establish a State government, which the President would recognize.
The political implications of the proclamation were immediately evident to both Radical Republicans and Democrats. Horatio Seymour of New York perceived it as a new assault on popular liberties. In his January message to the legislature, he pointed out that the arbitrary military power of the federal government was growing steadily. Moreover, every measure to pervert the war into a war against private property and personal rights at the South had been paralleled by claims to exercise military power at the North.
He enumerated them: there was the emancipation proclamation for the South, and the suspension of habeas corpus at the North; the Confiscation Act for the South, and arrests, imprisonment and banishment for Northern citizens; the claim to destroy political organizations in the South, and the armed interference in Northern elections.
These acts against Northern liberties had been justified as necessary, but the government had given up no powers when the emergency had passed. In fact, “more prerogatives are asserted in the hour of triumph than were claimed as a necessity in days of disaster and danger.” The doctrine of Southern degradation, explained the Governor, “is a doctrine of Northern bankruptcy . . . it is a measure for lasting despotism over one-third of our country, which will be the basis for military despotism over the whole land.”
As for Lincoln’s reconstruction program, Seymour saw it as a political device. The minority of one-tenth in reconstructed States would be kept in power by the North’s arms and treasure. There would be no motive, prophesied the Governor, to draw the remaining population into the fold; instead, “there will be every inducement of power, of gain, and of ambition, to perpetuate the condition of affairs.”
Moreover, it would be to the interest of the national administration to continue this system of government. Nine controlled States in the South with 70,000 voting population would balance in the House of Representatives and in the electoral college one half the population of the United States. Fourteen hundred men in Florida would balance New York in the Senate.
Thus, the nine States mentioned in Lincoln’s proclamation, together with Pierpont’s [western] Virginia would constitute a system of rotten boroughs that would govern the nation.”
(Lincoln and the War Governors. William B. Hesseltine. Alfred A. Knopf, 1955. Pp.-350-353)