ewd politician, had no clear "ideological" master plan for dealing with the South in the wake of the Civil War. He had endorsed extending the vote to at least some of the recently freed blacks, but had established no master plan for settling the racial, social, or economic questions left by the collapse of the Confederacy. After he was assassinated, the one group with a clear plan as to what Reconstruction should mean and where it should go were the "Radical Republicans."
This group derived from prewar Abolitionists. Their opposition to slavery did not arise in a vacuum, or from purely moral principles (though these played their part in energizing the cause); nor were they primarily concerned with justice for black people. Indeed, some Abolitionists were intensely racist.4 The pol
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