Questions About John Brown

[Wild Bill]

OK, Laurie, I will pass on a bit of hearsay from my old mentor at LSU, T. Harry Williams.

He believed that Lincoln was angling for a deal with Radical Republicans in Congress in which they would endorse his wartime Reconstruction efforts in Louisiana, Arkansas, maybe Tennessee and perhaps Virginia already accomplished under the Ten Percent Plan and in exchange Lincoln would endorse a more severe Reconstruction of the rest of the South under something akin to the Wade-Davis Plan.

He bases his suppositions under his Wade-Davis pocket veto comments and the April 11, 1865 speech where he asks whether it would not be better of save the e.g. of his wartime Reconstruction rather than crush it. Other than that, your speaker who was to talk on Lincoln's Reconstruction ideas was correct to drop the subject as impossible to fathom--probably because Lincoln, as with so much, had no real plan.