As the Civil War drags to a close, the President's thoughts move to the reconstruction, and the urgent need to replace his Emancipation Proclamation, a war measure, with an amendment definitively freeing the former slaves. Time constraints, the difficulty of passing the Amendment in the Secession States, and the competing radical and conservative factions in the Republican party, lead him to embark on a risky strategy of secretly summoning Confederate representatives to Washington while simultaneously having his political operatives covertly approach lame duck Democrats with promises of federal positions in return for support in the House for the Thirteenth Amendment. | As the Civil War drags to a close, the President's thoughts move to the reconstruction, and the urgent need to replace his Emancipation Proclamation, a war measure, with an amendment definitively freeing the former slaves. Time constraints, the difficulty of passing the Amendment in the Secession States, and the competing radical and conservative factions in the Republican party, lead him to embark on a risky strategy of secretly summoning Confederate representatives to Washington while simultaneously having his political operatives covertly approach lame duck Democrats with promises of federal positions in return for support in the House for the Thirteenth Amendment. |