Would Lincoln Allow the South to Rejoin if They Kept Slavery?

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SOYUZsovets

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I have an essay to do, the question is, "In 1865, if the South had asked to rejoin the Union without ending slavery, do you think Lincoln would have agreed?"

Most people seem to believe that he wouldn't allow them to, but others argue lincoln would allow them to since lincoln was power hungry.

So what does the intelligent community of yahoo think?
 
If you do a search and read the Confederate constitution it called for the end of slavery over an extended period of time. There were also Africans in the south who owned slaves as well as American Indians.

There were times that the North was turning against the war and were thus turning against him. He would have agreed to less stringent terms when this was happening. He after all was more concerned with saving the Union than he was with ending Slavery.
 
In 1865? No. The South had already been militarily defeated at that point and would have been negotiating from weakness. In the early years of the war, it would have been a much different story as his goal first and foremost had been keeping the Union together (only trying to stop the spread of slavery to the territories rather than ban it in the South).

Public opinion in the North had also turned pretty far against slave owners in the South, and it would have been politically untenable for Lincoln to have been any more leniant than he was. Personally, I think he (and definitely Johnson) let the South off too easily--we should have expropriated their land and given it to their slaves; both a decent reimbursement for a lifetime of unpaid labor and oppression and punishment for their treason against the United States.
 
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