How Did The Lincoln Lose His Vision After The Secession Crisis

Ms. Baal 05/01/2024 The unthinkable had occurred. On election day 1876, the Democratic governor of New York, Samuel Tilden, led by over 200,000 votes and was the presumed winner of the electoral college (“US election of 1876”). However, he would never be President. This contested election was followed by a month-long period of uncertainty that plunged the country, especially the Republican Party, into turmoil. Only twenty years after the party’s founding, it was up to them to decide and define who they were. Was this the party of the laborers, the party fighting for equality and justice for people of color, or was this the party that had succumbed to the interests of business, the party that used popular ideals to win votes, yet abandoned them
Lincoln would see his vision through, as after his presidential election in 1860, he focused on building a new wartime economy based around regular people as opposed to Eastern Bankers (Richardson). The beginning of his presidency brought the secession crisis, yet from this came the defining of this new political party and the rebirth of the American government. Early in 1861, the Republican House passed a fresh round of tariffs and taxes on the people and the states. The most important was the first federal income tax of three percent on those who made $800 a year or more. These policies made evident that this party was committed to distributing the balance of taxes more equally, understood the benefits of, and was willing to expand the power of a stronger federal government based on broader class interests rather than a group of rich men. Lincoln furthered his support for the lower classes with measures like the Homestead Act, the creation of the Department of Agriculture, and the Morrill Land Grant Act. The Homestead Act specifically gave citizens or immigrants 160 acres of western land once they had lived on it for five years (Richardson,
These actions underscored the ideological strength of the Radical Republicans in control of Congress, who continued Lincoln’s belief that American prosperity depended on a strong national government safeguarding equality. However, as early as 1865, some within the party began suggesting that using coercion wasn’t necessary to get the South to recognize the rights of Free Blacks (Ahern). Yet, the emergence of the first Black Codes, limiting personal and political rights, in states like South Carolina and Mississippi, showed the necessity of intervention to prevent people of color from returning to subjugation. On the other hand, the Radical Republican Party’s tight grip on power in some of the Southern States left them vulnerable to attack as being too tough on whites. In Missouri, a border state that was home to numerous Ex-confederates, Radicals removed political and voting rights from all the Ex-Confederates in an attempt to protect their state’s constitution from racism